ABC./Randy Holmes As part of his continued work in the fight against HIV and AIDS, Elton John will be delivering the Diana, Princess of Wales Lecture on HIV next month. The lecture was established by the United Kingdom's National AIDS Trust in 1999 as a tribute to Princess Diana, who was a patron of the organization before her death in 1997. This year, the lecture is being given in partnership with the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Elton will deliver the speech in front of an audience of politicians, health workers, journalists, civil society leaders, celebrities and people living with HIV. In it, he'll lay out a vision for an AIDS-free future, as well as reflect on his friendship with Princess Diana. "I am delighted to be able to deliver this lecture and to remember the enormous contribution Diana, Princess of Wales made to this cause," Elton says in a statement. He adds, "In the quarter century since the Elton John AIDS Foundation was established, the global AIDS fight has changed beyond recognition. Yet tolerance and courage has never been more important in the fight to create an AIDS-free generation and make the world a more accepting place for those living with HIV." The lecture will take place on June 8 in London. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Medicated Personal Care Products Market 2018; renowned players like - Personal Care, TWASA, KPH Cosmos, etc. Outlook to 2027 Market Research Future https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1008 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/1008 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/1008 Medicated Personal Care Products Market 2018 Research Report implements an exhaustive study on Market Research Future. This Report Cover Key Market Driver, market size, growth rate, opportunities, market Dynamics and Overall Analysis. And also cover the other information such as Medicated Personal Care Products market trends, Prominent players, chapter-wise Description followed by various user perceptions and Forecast till 2027.Medicated Personal Care Products Market - SynopsisVarious medical companies are working hard to mollify the rising demand for ingredients and medicines that go into personal care products for the skin, hair, oral care, and various other applications. As a large, rapidly growing and increasingly diversified market, product components denote special challenges for medical manufacturing companies. Growing consumer incomes and changing lifestyles influence the global Medicated personal care products industry. Furthermore, the market is driven by an increasing middle class in the East, and growing elderly population in the West, and new opportunities such as halal beauty, mens grooming, and bio-based skin care.The market is forecasted to demonstrate a double growth by 2017. The Global Medicated personal care products market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20.30% during assessment period of 2017-2027.Moreover, adding to the growth of the market, better standard of living along with growing disposable income of the working middle-class population in developing countries of Asia-Pacific including China, India, and Malaysia is expected to influence the growth of this market. Rising on-going R&D with technological breakthroughs in the area of processing and cost-effective products were major factors responsible for expanding industry growth over the past decade and the upcoming trend will continue further in the coming years.Avail Premium Sample copy @Medicated Personal Care Products Market - Top Vendors:Personal Care (US) , TWASA (India), KPH Cosmos Pvt. Ltd (India), Edana, Johnson & Johnson (US), LOreal (Paris), DCC Health and Beauty Solutions LTD (UK). are some of the prominent players at the forefront of competition in the Global Medicated personal care products Market and are profiled in MRFR Analysis.Medicated Personal Care Products Market - SegmentationGlobal Medicated personal care products market has been segmented on the basis of types which consist of Antiperspirant, Deodorant, Oral Care, Body Powders, Hand Sanitizers, Feminine Care and others. On the basis of beauty which includes oils, shampoos, moisturizers, gels, oils, soaps and others.Medicated Personal Care Products Market - Regional AnalysisGlobal Medicated personal care products market is segmented on the basis of geographies or regions which mainly includes Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. Americas is dominating the global market for Medicated personal care products with more than 40% share of the total market in 2016. The major factors influencing the growth of the market include due to increasing use of medical personal care products, increasing spending over cosmetic products, growing aging population, and various others.Asia-Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing market in coming future. The nations in the Asia represent to a portion of the biggest and high potential markets for export growth for the U.S. Individual Care and Cosmetics businesses. Containing more than 20% of U.S. worldwide exports in the sector, the Asian nations offer the business more than 3 billion potential consumers in the fastest growing global markets. This base incorporates customers in developed markets for U.S. products, for example, Japan, Australia and South Korea, which together represented more than $1 billion in U.S. individual care and cosmetics export trades in 2015 to China, which at an estimated USD 500 to USD 600 million in U.S. exports that same year, is anticipated to become the largest global market for cosmetics in the next two to three years agents.What's more, the nations incorporated into the Asia Personal Care and Cosmetics Guide give access to some of the most highest potential future marketsincluding the developing white collar class in nations crossing from Indonesia to Vietnam to Malaysia. These purchasers seek to the quality and refinement for which U.S. products are known. As of now these business sectors source the vast majority of their fundamental individual care products from mass market U.S. organizations including Procter and Bet, Johnson and Johnson and Colgate-Palmolive. Progressively these consumers are moving past the basics to premium skin and hair care and also color cosmetics opening opening the way to a wide variety of U.S. based beauty care products exporters.The Middle East & Africa holds the least share of the global market due to limited availability of biotechnology facilities. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait are expected to drive the Middle East & African market. Whereas, the African region is expected to witness a moderate growth.Get Illustrious Discount @TOC of Global Medicated Personal Care Products Market Research Report - Forecast to 2027:1 Report Prologue2 Market Introduction2.1 Introduction2.2 Scope Of Study2.3 Research Objective2.4 Assumptions & Limitations2.4.1 Assumptions2.4.2 Limitations3 Research Methodology3.1 Research Process3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary Research4 Market Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.2 Restraints5 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 Analysis6. Global Medicated Personal Care Market By Type.TOC CONTINUEDGet Customized Report, Speak to Analyst @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 Lipase Market Opportunities, Demand and Forecasts, (2017-2026) https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-5619 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-5619 www.futuremarketinsights.com Growing prevalence of celiac disease and obesity has led to an upsurge in demand for lipase globally. In addition, surge in demand for production of detergents will continue to impact the global market growth of lipase. Future Market Insights states that the global market of lipase is projected to reflect a CAGR of 7.8% over the forecast period, 2017-2026.Factors Fuelling Growth of the Global MarketGrowth of the global lipase market is mainly bound to various micro-economic and macro-economic factors. Surge in consumption of the food products that are rich in carbohydrate and fatty food items has led to surge in health diseases such as abdominal discomfort, indigestion and bloating. In order to inhibit prevalence of these health diseases has led to surge in demand for lipase in the global market. In addition, increasing prevalence of high triglyceride, obesity and cholesterol will continue to impact the global market growth of lipase positively. World Health Organization in its recent report stated that 39% of adults aged 18 years and above reported overweight in 2016 whereas 13% were obese. As lipase breaks the fats into fatty acid and glycerol, possibilities of weight gains and obesity is reduced. The global market of lipase is projected to gain momentum bound to such factors during the forecast period.Request for sample Report:Attributed to various industrial and health benefits, lipase continues to witness significant demand in various industries such as food industry, detergent industry and dairy industry. As application of lipase enhances the shelf life, texture and flavor of the food products, manufacturers are increasing using lipase during the food production process. In addition, increasing demand for hydrolyzing milk fat for the production of various dairy items will continue to rev up sales of lipase in the global market. Lipase continues to find application in coffee whiteners and cheese dairy products. Increasing application of lipase in coffee whitener offers creamy flavor and buttery texture in the toffees and caramel. Such factors are likely to impact the global market growth of lipase significantly throughout 2026.Besides application in the dairy industry, lipase continues to witness robust demand in the detergent industry. Surge in need to remove the fatty residues and cleaning clogged drains has led to a surge in demand for lipase during the production of house cleaning products. Attributed to features that help in eradicating the fatty residue, manufacturers in the detergent industry are mainly looking for range of lipases including proteases and amylases. Application of these lipases will enable the manufacturers to offer cleaning products with improved efficiency. Further, the detergent industry, which is controlled by the European Commission continues to represent a leading end use sector for enzyme consumption. Increasing apprehensions related to the persisting contamination of the detergent chemicals in the ground water and environment along with various other health issues has raised speculations about the biodegradability of the product. Such factors continue to encourage application of the enzymes along with the surge in demand for the green cleaning detergents.Sales to Remain High in the Food IndustryRapid advancements in the emerging enzyme technology has led to surge in demand for microbial lipase globally. By source type, the microbial source segment is projected to represent a significant growth in terms of revenue, representing more than US$ 300 Mn by 2026-end. On the contrary, the animal source type segment is projected to reflect the highest CAGR through 2026.On the basis of application, the food segment is projected to generate highest revenues, accounting for less than US$ 100 Mn by 2017-end. However, the animal feed application segment is projected to reflect a robust CAGR during the forecast period. Based on forms, the liquid segment is projected to represent a robust revenue growth, representing more than US$ 200 Mn by 2026-end. On the other hand, the powder form segment is projected to witness the fastest growth in the global market of lipase throughout 2026.Visit For Table of Contents:Market PlayersMajor players in the global market of lipase are Koninklijke DSM N.V., Novozymes A/S, Amano Enzymes Inc., Hansen Holdings A/S, E. I. Du Pont De Nemours and Company, Associated British Foods PLC, Clerici-Sacco Group, Advanced Enzymes, Enzyme Development Corporation and Renco New Zealand.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature.CONTACT:FUTURE MARKET INSIGHTS616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Evolution of Next-Generation Cyber Security Solutions and Integrated Security Solutions are the Major Factors of Growing Global IT Security Spending Market https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/it-security-spending-market https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/it-security-spending-market/report-sample https://www.psmarketresearch.com The increasing market of mobile and web platform, evolution of next-generation cyber security solutions, and need of integrated security solutions are some of the growth opportunities, which contribute towards the global IT security spending market in the forecast period.Explore Full Report Description At:Information technology (IT) security is used to safeguard data and information of multi-user or single user networks. It protects information and data from unofficial access and fraudulent modification. Spending on IT security refers to the measures taken to monitor, detect, report, and counter threats. IT security spending involves the expenses sustained by the government organizations and enterprises to secure their network, systems, and data. It also includes costs incurred while safeguarding computers, communications, along with information and data. IT security spending is a long-term investment to protect and save critical data.The global IT security spending can be segmented, on the basis of security type, solution, service, vertical, and region. The IT security types include network security, content security, wireless security, endpoint security, application security, and cloud security. Content security spending is driven by encryption and data-loss prevention (DLP) solutions, owing to the growing need for protecting corporate data. On the basis of services, the global IT security spending market can be segmented into consulting, risk & threat assessment, design & integration, managed security services, and training & education. Based upon solutions, the IT security spending can be categorized as identity & access management, risk & compliance management, encryption, unified threat management, data loss prevention, firewall, antivirus & antimalware, or intrusion prevention system (IPS) or intrusion detection system (IDS), security information and event management (SIEM), distributed denial of service (DDoS), disaster recovery, whitelisting and mitigation. Security management investment is gaining significance in medium-sized businesses, due to the necessity of having greater visibility through an increasingly diverse infrastructure. In addition, the industry verticals can be divided into aerospace, government; BFSI; telecommunication, defense, and intelligence, healthcare; retail; manufacturing; and others.Download Free Report Sample At:Some of the major competitors in the global IT security market are Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., Palo Alto Networks, EMC Corporation, Fortinet, Inc, McAfee, Inc, Juniper Networks, Inc., Symantec Corporation, and Trend Micro Incorporated.About P&S Market ResearchP&S Market Research is a global market research and consulting company. We provide market research reports, industry reports; business intelligence and research based consulting services across a range of industries.With the help of our professional corporate relations with various companies, our market research offers the most accurate market forecasting. Our analysts and consultants interact with leading companies of the concerned domain to substantiate every single data presented in our publication. Our research assists our client in identifying new and different windows of opportunity and frame informed and customized strategies for expansion in different regions.Contact:P&S Market Research347, 5th Ave. #1402New York City, NY 10016Toll-free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada)Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.comWeb: Sustainable Palm Oil Market Dynamics, Segments, Size and Demand, 2016-2026 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-1374 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-1374 www.futuremarketinsights.com Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil extracted from the reddish pulp of the oil palms. Sustainable Palm oil is naturally reddish in color because it has the component of high beta carotene. Sustainable palm oil means the palm oil which is manufactured under the guidance and rule of the Roundtable on sustainable palm oil (RSPO). To produce certified sustainable palm oil, manufactures has to follow the environmental and social criteria set by RSPO. It can also be kept in the room temperature. Palm oil also contains very little cholesterol. It is also used in products where animal fats are not accepted for the religion issues. It has been noticed that the palm oil is used in several industries to make the ultimate product. Those industries are also growing. So the demand of the palm oil will be more. So the market will expand very fast in the stipulated period of time.Request for sample Report:Global Sustainable palm oil Market Dynamics:-The market of sustainable palm oil market is anticipated to be driven by the various used of the product in a different way. It has a great cooking properties, even it can be used in the high temperature. Its smooth and creamy texture and having no smell make it a perfect ingredient for many recipes like it is used in the bakery (specially for biscuits). It has a natural perspective effect which helps the longevity of the food byresisting the oxidation that spoils them. It is also the highest producing vegetable oil crop which makes it very efficient. It needs less land required by other oil crops to produce same quantity of oil. It makes this cheaper than the other oil in the market. Sustainable palm oil is also used in the cosmetic industry. Sustainable Palm oil ingredients are used in the skin care products, make up products. Due to have the rules and regulations of RSPO the producers are not able to destroy the environment and wild life. It keeps the social interest towards sustainable palm oil production and the conflict cannot be created between the communities and workers. Palm oil is available as an ingredients such as palm kernel oil, palm kernel stearin, palm kernel olein, partially hydrogenated palm oil, asorbyl palmitate, Palmate, Sodium Laureth Sulphate etc. Palm oil used as a frying fat for many food items, as a shortening in bakery products.Global Sustainable Palm oil Market Segmentation:Sustainable palm oil market can be segmented on the basis of application of the palm oil such as food, soap and detergents, pet food and cosmetics. Then food also can be sub segmented such as bakery, ice cream & other frozen desserts, confectionery products and margarine. Palm oil market also can be segmented on the basis of types of the palm oil availability in the market such as palm kernel oil, red palm oil, fractional palm oil, white palm oil.Global Sustainable palm oil Market: Regional Outlook:Geographically, the global palm oil industry can be divided by major regions which include North America, Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa. Indonesia and Malaysia captured the highest market share in terms of the production of palm oil. Other production countries are Thailand, Columbia, Nigeria and Ecuador. China got the first position in terms of consumption of palm oil followed by EU, India, Indonesia and United States. Malaysia was the highest exporter of palm oil.Visit For Table of Contents:Global sustainable palm oil Market Players:The major players identified across the value chain of global sustainable palm oil market include New Britain palm oil limited, Golden agri resources limited, IOI corporation Berhad, Wilmer international limited, Cargill, SIPEF group Belgium, Kulim berhad, Sime Darby plantation sendirian Berhad, Hap seng Plantation Holdings Berhad, Kuala lampur kepong Berhad.and United Plantation BerhadABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature.CONTACT:FUTURE MARKET INSIGHTS616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Distributed Generation Market to Reach a Valuation of Over US$ 35 Bn by 2025, Finds a New Study MRRSE https://www.mrrse.com/sample/4651 https://www.mrrse.com/distributed-generation-market https://www.mrrse.com/ A new research study titled, Distributed Generation Market Global Industry, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 2025 has been added to the comprehensive research repository of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE). According to the study, the global distributed generation market is likely to grow at over 8% CAGR and reach a valuation of over US$ 35 Bn by the end of the forecast period.Get Free Sample Report @The research study highlights the key factors that are impacting the growth of the market. An analysis of these factors has been carried out in various regions around the world. According to the report, Asia Pacific has emerged as an attractive market for distributed generation around the globe. The market in Asia Pacific is concentrated in China, as the country is working towards ambitious infrastructure programs to boost growth. Focus on increasing distributed generation installed capacity, and increase in industrial activity are the other key factors driving the growth of the market in China.The growth in distributed generation market is not only limited to China, but many developing countries such as India and the ASEAN bloc are also emerging as key markets. It is highly likely that manufacturers will get a steady stream of opportunities in these markets. The focus on having a comprehensive and robust distributed generation market is growing among governments and policy experts, and this is likely to provide an impetus to growth during the assessment period.The market in Asia Pacific is also growing on account of increasing emphasis on boosting renewable energy sector in the region. The increasing cost of off-grid electricity generation is growing, owing to which governments in Asia Pacific are also focusing on developing renewable sources of energy. Transmitting the electricity generated from renewable sources of energy to far off places is likely to provide an impetus to growth during the assessment period.Browse Complete Report with TOC @In a bid to offer key insights on the distributed generation market, the report has segmented the market on the basis of technology, application, end-users, and region. The key technologies discussed in the research study include solar photovoltaic, wind turbine, micro turbines, fuel cells, reciprocating engines, and CHP. The key application segments in the distributed generation market include on-grid and off-grid. The research study also offers in-depth analysis on the end-user segment in the market. According to the research study, the key segments include residential, commercial, industrial, and buildings and institutions.Some of the leading players in the market include Enercon, Sharp Corporation, Rolls-Royce Power Systems, E.ON. Alstom S.A., SE, Caterpillar Power Plants, Fuel Cell Energy, Doosan Fuel Cell America, Bloom Energy, Siemens Energy, Ballard Power Systems, Capstone Turbine Corporation, General Electrical Power, Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems Americas, Inc., and OPRA Turbines BVAbout MRRSEMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of market intelligence reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.ContactState Tower90, State Street Suite 700Albany, NY 12207 (United States)Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite: Stem Cell Reconstructive Market Global Size 2018; Increasing Demand for the Better Treatment Upsurges the Growth at a CAGR of 22.6% by 2023 Market Research Future https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/993 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/993 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/993 Stem Cell Reconstructive Market 2018 Research Report implements an exhaustive study on Market Research Future. This Report Cover Key Market Driver, market size, growth rate, opportunities, market Dynamics and Overall Analysis. And also cover the other information such as Stem Cell Reconstructive market trends, Prominent players, chapter-wise Description followed by various user perceptions and Forecast till 2027.Stem Cell Reconstructive Market - SynopsisThe global stem cell reconstructive market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22.6% during the forecast period. Stem cell is an unspecialized cell, capable of perpetuating itself through cell division and have the potential to produce differentiated cells with specialized functions. Stem cells are used in the treatment of different diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and others. Stem cells treatment have proven to be the better treatment for the diseases. According to International Diabetes Federation (2016), 420 million adult population was suffering from diabetes worldwide. Simultaneously, the rising patient population has increased the demand for the new treatments, which, in turn, drive the market. Furthermore, developing technology, increasing healthcare expenditure, and government support have contributed to the growth of the market. However, higher cost of the treatment may hinder the growth of the market.Avail Premium Sample copy @Stem Cell Reconstructive Market - Top Vendors:Baxter (US), Cytori Therapeutics Inc. (U.S), Eleveflow (France), Mesoblast Ltd. (Australia), NuVasive Inc. (US), Osiris Therapeutics, Inc. (US), Micronit Microfluidics (Netherlands), TAKARA BIO INC.(Japan), Tigenix (Belgium), Cynata (Australia), Celyad (Belgium), Capricor Therapeutics (Canada), Astellas Pharma US, Inc. (US), Pfizer Inc. (US), StemCells Inc (US), STEMCELL Technologies Inc. (US), Caladrius (US).Stem Cell Reconstructive Market - SegmentationThe global stem cell reconstructive market is segmented into sources, cell types, applications, and end users. On the basis of sources, the market is classified into allogeneic, autologous, syngeneic, and others. Autologous is further segmented into bone marrow, adipose tissue, and blood. On the basis of cell types the, market is segmented into embryonic stem cell and adult stem cell. On the basis of applications, the market is categorized into cancer, diabetes, traumatic skin defect, severe, burn and others. On the basis of end users, the market is segmented into the hospital, research institutes, and others.Stem Cell Reconstructive Market - Regional AnalysisAmerica dominates the global stem cell reconstructive market. According to American Diabetic Association (2012), 29 million Americans were suffering from diabetes, this increasing patient population and continuously developing technologies have stimulated the growth of this market in America. Europe accounts for the second largest market, which is followed by Asia Pacific. Germany and the UK accounts the major share in the Europe market owing to well-developed technology and healthcare sector. Asia Pacific is a growing market and Japan is the major contributor. The Middle East & Africa accounts for the lowest market share in the global stem cell reconstructive market due to limited development in the healthcare sector.The major key player in the global stem cell reconstructive market: Baxter (US), Cytori Therapeutics Inc. (U.S), Eleveflow (France), Mesoblast Ltd. (Australia), NuVasive Inc. (US), Osiris Therapeutics, Inc. (US), Micronit Microfluidics (Netherlands), TAKARA BIO INC.(Japan), Tigenix (Belgium), Cynata (Australia), Celyad (Belgium), Capricor Therapeutics (Canada), Astellas Pharma US, Inc. (US), Pfizer Inc. (US), StemCells Inc (US), STEMCELL Technologies Inc. (US), Caladrius (US).The global stem cell reconstructive market is a developing market with the huge opportunities. The prominent players in the market have adopted various strategies to increase their market such as new product launches, product innovation, and research and development. Some manufacturers have adopted merger, and acquisition as one of their developmental strategies to sustain in the competitive environment of the market.Baxter, a Fortune 500 healthcare company, headquartered in the US. Baxter initiated phase III adult stem cell clinical trial for chronic cardiac condition. A company is focusing of the development of the new products and investing a huge sum in research and development.Get Illustrious Discount @TOC of Global Stem Cell Reconstructive Market Research Report - Forecast to 20231 INTRODUCTION1.1 DEFINITION1.2 SCOPE OF STUDY1.2.1 RESEARCH OBJECTIVE1.2.2 ASSUMPTIONS & LIMITATIONS1.2.2.1 ASSUMPTIONS1.2.2.2 LIMITATIONS1.3 MARKET STRUCTURE2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY2.1 RESEARCH PROCESS:2.2 PRIMARY RESEARCH2.3 SECONDARY RESEARCH:3 MARKET DYNAMICS3.1 DRIVERS3.2 RESTRAINTS3.3 OPPORTUNITIES3.4 MACROECONOMIC INDICATORS4 MARKET FACTOR ANALYSIS4.1 PORTERS FIVE FORCES MODEL4.2 BARGAINING POWER OF SUPPLIERS4.3 BARGAINING POWER OF BUYERS4.4 THREAT OF NEW ENTRANTS4.5 THREAT OF SUBSTITUTES4.6 INTENSITY OF RIVALRY5. GLOBAL STEM CELL RECONSTRUCTIVE MARKET, BY SOURCES.TOC CONTINUEDGet Customized Report, Speak to Analyst @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 10 year visa, 100% business ownership: UAE`s Wind of Change https://www.property-blog-dubai.com/single-post/UAE-Reforms-Property-Investment-to-benefit www.property-blog-dubai.com On the 20th. of May 2018, the UAE government announced major legislatory reforms which will have profound impact on Dubai`s property market specifically as well as the UAE as a destination for foreign direct investment (FDI) as a whole.The new laws, anticipated to come into force by the end of 2018, will provide for visa to be granted to highly skilled professionals for up to ten years to as well as to allow 100% business ownership everywhere in the UAE for non-nationals.While the latter step had been anticipated for quite some time, the visa reforms were unforeseen to date and are likely to yield substantial demand effects for Dubai`s economy as a whole and its property sector in particular.To date, the majority of expats consider their stay in the UAE to be just one of several episodes within their working life. Such modern nomads hardly develop emotional ties to the country of interim residence and its customs and traditions and move on once the local economic conditions worsen or better opportunities arise elsewhere.In light of this lacking sense of belonging, the UAE leaders have understood that retaining greater parts of a so far highly transient expat community is key to a host of desirable effects among which are the accumulation of knowledge and capital. Speaking of which, expats living in the UAE have remitted 164.3bn AED (44.8bn USD) to their home countries in 2017. Granting a longer-term perspective to foreign residents will help retain parts of the inherently mobile workforce in the country and their funds invested in the local economy.It is likely that Singapore, notably sharing many socio-economic similarities with the UAE and having risen into the top ranks of the Global Innovation Index (also) by liberalising its immigration laws, most likely inspired the UAE`s present leap of faith.At least for the segment of the highly skilled the reforms will lead to a de-facto uncoupling of the right of residency and employment. This in turn will greatly reduce the in- and outflows of foreign residents in the course of economic cycles, thereby considerably reducing the economical cost associated with such fluctuations.The full article further covers the impact on Dubai`s property market and investment environment, as well as socio-economic factors and is accessible under the following link:The author`s blog property-blog-dubai.com covers subjects related to Dubai`s property market and its trends and influences from an institutional investor`s perspective.The author has been actively engaged in the Dubai property market since 2005 and advises institutional investors pertaining to their overall investment strategy, ongoing asset management as well as the initiation and execution of property transactions.Property-blog-dubai.comChristian AtzertBusiness Center 4, Floor 8Ras Al Khaimah Free Trade ZoneTel: 00971-56-7786475Web:Mail: author@property-blog-dubai.com Fusion Informatics Partners with Rescott, LLC. USA to deliver High End Development Solutions to your door step. Fusion Informatics Partner With Rescott http://www.fusioninformatics.com https://youtu.be/j__j-WM3VjI Clients now have access to IOT, smart device, machine learning and AI development solutions at Indian rates and expertise, and American support.Ahmedabad, India, 29th May 2018 Fusion Informatics, an 18 year old ISO -9001 certified and Quality Mark Award winning software development company based in India, has reached an agreement with Rescott, LLC Technologies, a 22 year old technology firm located in Indianapolis Indiana, to provide high end development solutions such as enterprise mobility, Blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, AI Bots, IOT and cloud-based application development.Mr. Ashesh Shah, CEO of Fusion Informatics, states, "Since 2000, Fusion has delivered over 5000 assignments with over 1000 mobile apps, and has cornerstone clients like, HP, United, Bosch, and Lenovo. Rescott, LLC has been supporting clients worldwide since 1996 with application and web development and digital marketing."Mr. Ashesh continued,. "The exciting thing about this alliance is that we can now offer clients access to high end solutions with a state based presence and support with our partner Rescott, LLC"Rescott originally started business in 1996 as a PC, notebook and server manufacturer. Rescott started their software development and digital marketing division in 2001 and began serving clients like Alibaba, RCA and Cha-Cha Search.About Fusion InformaticsFusion Informatics is an 18 years old ISO-9001:2008 certified and Quality Mark award winning software development company with global offices in India (Bangalore, Ahmedabad), UAE and USA. Company Works on Enterprise Mobility, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, AI Bots, IOT and Cloud App Development. Fusion has delivered 5000+ assignments with 1000+ Mobile Apps, with cornerstone clients like, HP, United, Bosch, and Lenovo.About Rescott, LLC TechnologiesRescott, LLC, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, was originally a PC, notebook and server manufacturer in the mid 1990s, Rescott started their software development and digital marketing division in 2001 and began serving clients like Alibaba, RCA and Cha-Cha Search.Visitto see how Fusion is helping enterprises move to the next level, and start-ups build themselves with innovative, world-class AI, Mobility, IoT, Cloud Solutions.Corporate Video:Media Contact:Sreenivasulu TDigital Marketing LeadFusion Informaticssales@fusioninformatics.comFor more information, contact:Fusion InformaticsBangalore, India: +91 63610 54076Indianapolis, USA: +1-317-886-1776San Francisco, USA: +1 -424- 235-7391 Students of InnovED Global bagged top score in West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination InnovED Global https://innovedglobal.com/ 30 May, Kolkata (Press Release) - Avinandan Bose and Dedipya Ray bagged perfect score in West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination. Both were students of Edupace Academy Classroom program and were using InnovED Global online test series for online preparation. They thanked Edupace academy and InnovED Global for providing study material and teaching the techniques required to achieve high scores.Unlike previous years, where a predictable list of schools provided toppers, this year the story was different. Both the students did not belong to the schools providing the toppers.The reasons behind both the students getting the top ranks were a lot of dedication and use of complex algorithm provided by InnovED Global to predict the paper.With the help of complex algorithm artificial intelligence, the test paper can be predicted, and the test can be made accordingly such that almost every relevant topic is covered.Last year, InnovED Global produced All India JEE Advanced Mathematics topper who scored 122 out of 122 in Mathematics.West Bengal Joint Entrance ExaminationWest Bengal Joint Entrance Examination or the WBJEE is a state-government controlled centralized test, conducted by the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examinations Board (WBJEEB) for admission to many private and governmental medical and engineering institutions in West Bengal. The test is conducted after the 12th grade for admission to Graduation (bachelors) courses.The Board is empowered to conduct common, combined, competitive, entrance examinations for admission to the undergraduate professional and vocational courses in any College or in any University in the State of West Bengal.Features of InnovED Global test SeriesInnovED Global test series has various essential features needed by the students. Mobile & Tablet responsive. Now prepare anytime, anywhere without the need to download any mobile application. InnovED Global test series is made such that questions resize according to the electronic device student is using. Every changing and New Content every year. Whereas most of the test series in India uses same content every year, InnovED Global stands itself out from others by providing new content every year, which is prepared by studying previous year exams question pattern. Focuses on Self-assessment. Instead of comparing students with one another, InnovED Global focuses its analytics on self-assessment. Relevant questions. Instead of bombarding students with a set of questions, InnovED Global test series chooses only the relevant and best questions for the student. Parent involvement. InnovED Global test series specially prepared Parent Module so that parents can see their children reports easily.With its ranker's level content and robust software InnovED Global aims for more rankers in various examinations.Talking about the commitments of InnovED Global, The platform is continuously evolving to meet the challenges and innovation of the future while maintaining a tradition of excellence, and accessibility.InnovED Global is founded by Rohit Singh, an IIT Delhi Alumnus, with the mission to provide exam preparation platform to the masses. InnovED Global started in September 2016 in association with EduPace Academy to provide online test platform to the students.In the pilot run, InnovED Global was used by 78 students, out of which 40 got selected in various engineering exams including IIT JEE and WB JEE. Not only that, All India IIT Advance Maths topper was one of the students among these 78 students.Rohit SinghContact Email Id: rohit@innovedglobal.comContact Number: 07021966405Address: IA 185, Ground Floor, Sector 3, Salt lake, Kolkata, WestBengal, India 700097 Orthopedic Devices Market in Japan Will Reach At CAGR Of 4.12% Between 2017-2021 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/1476066 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/enquiry/1476066 http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ "The Latest Research Report Orthopedic Devices Market in Japan 2017-2021 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"Orthopedics is a branch of medicine that deals with deformities in bone structure, injuries, and disorders of the skeleton and associated structures such as the ligaments and tendons. Orthopedic devices and implants treat injuries and deformities using spinal surgery, joint replacement or reconstruction, and trauma fixation. Joint replacement surgeries are commonly performed in the hip, elbow, knee, wrist, ankle, shoulder, and fingers. Orthopedic implants are usually made from titanium and stainless steel alloy. They are often coated with plastic due to its properties such as resistance to corrosion, rigidity, fracture toughness, stiffness, long fatigue life, and biocompatibility.Technavios analysts forecast the orthopedic devices market in Japan to grow at a CAGR of 4.12% during the period 2017-2021.Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the orthopedic devices market in Japan for 2017-2021. 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.Get Sample Copy of this report @Technavio's report, Orthopedic Devices Market in Japan 2017-2021, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendorsDePuy SynthesMedtronicSmith & NephewStrykerZimmer BiometOther prominent vendorsAcumedArthrexArthrosurfaceB. Braun MelsungenBerkeley Advanced BiomaterialsBioplateFoot and Ankle FixationIntegra LifeSciences CorporationKelyniam GlobalMicroPort Scientific Corporation.NuVasiveOrthofix HoldingsOsteoMedOsteoSymbionicsMarket driverRapidly growing aging population with orthopedic disordersFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challengeRisks and complications associated with orthopedic devicesFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trendTechnological advancesFor a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this reportWhat will the market size be in 2021 and what will the growth rate be?What are the key market trends?What is driving this market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in this market space?You can request one free hour of our analysts time when you purchase this market report. Details are provided within the report.Send An Enquiry Request @Table of ContentsPART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARYPART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORTPART 03: RESEARCH METHODOLOGYPART 04: INTRODUCTIONOverviewPART 05: MARKET LANDSCAPEMarket overviewFive forces analysisPART 06: SEGMENTATION BY APPLICATIONOverviewComparison by application areaSpineTrauma and extremitiesKneeHipSports injuriesCMFMarket opportunity by applicationPART 07: SEGMENTATION BY PRODUCTOverviewComparison by productOrthopedic implantsOrthobiologicsMarket opportunity by productPART 08: SEGMENTATION BY END-USERHospitalsASCsSpecialty orthopedic centersPART 09: DECISION FRAMEWORKPART 10: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGESMarket driversMarket challengesPART 11: MARKET TRENDSTechnological advancesIntroduction of robot-assisted surgical proceduresIncreasing demand for biodegradable orthopedic implantsPART 12: VENDOR LANDSCAPECompetitive scenarioKey newsM&APART 13: VENDOR ANALYSISDePuy SynthesMedtronicSmith & NephewStrykerZimmer BiometOther prominent vendorsAbout 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 The sweetest Ramadan you have ever dreamed Typany Keyboard Ramadan is all about family, love, and forgiveness. Regarding the fasting in the month of Ramadan, it surely develops in a person the real spirit of social belonging, of unity and brotherhood, and of equality before God. It makes you rethink the importance of your life and learn to appreciate the surroundings. And above all, it helps us to cultivate the sincere love. We learn to appreciate and do it of deep love for the sake of god.Typany is always devoted to advancing the typing experience for our dearest users. Because of that, we developed this new feature during the sacred month exclusively for you.Whenever you look through the colorful themes in our App and find the exact one that you love, with just a single click, you can set the theme for your wallpaper. If you still havent tried out our wonderful themes now, its definitely the right time to download our App and enjoy the best typing experience on your mobile phone! We provide different categories of themes to fit the needs of our global users, ranging from religion to art, movies to celebrities even horror and games in order to allow them to choose freely.See that as a treat for Ramadan! We will always be there to listen to your voice!ABOUT TYPANYTypany Keyboard App is powered by Sogou, well known in China for its language input method, universally employed by Chinese users. Sogou has been developing smartphone software since 2006. Its Keyboard App, Typany Keyboard, has harnessed AI technology to provide a performance edge and improved customer experience. Typanys mission is to team with users to bring the smartest, most diverse, time-saving solution to billions more people worldwide.PRESS INQUIRIES AND CONTACT DETAILSContact: Yami Sun, Product Marketing ManagerAddress: Typany Keyboard, 9th Floor, Sohu.com Internet Plaza, No.1 Park, Zhongguancun East Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100084, PRCWebsite: typany.com/Email: typany_press@sogou-inc.com Learning Management System (LMS) Market 2018 by Global Leaders: SAP SE, Edmodo, Blackboard, Xerox, Oracle, Cornerstone On demand, D2L, Saba Software https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1858 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/learning-management-system-market-1858 Market Research Future published a research report on Learning Management System Market Research Report- Global Forecast 2023 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Learning Management System Introduction & ImportanceLearning management system is commonly referred to as LMS which is its abbreviation. At its heart, it is a software that was formed with a purpose to ease the load off the teachers & instructors who impart education. It can help them to administer, document, monitor, report and deliver educational courses or training programs. In the past, the teachers had to do all of these things by themselves and it used to get tiresome after a certain point. But with LMS, they can now heave a sigh of relief. In the past few years, this software has made a name for itself in the education industry. Thanks to this fact, the global Learning Management System Market is getting impetus.Learning management system has the ability to handle the delivery and follow up of the educational content. Apart from that it can also manage various other procedures like online course administration, tracking, student administration and inspection of a students work. And there are some distinct LMSs that can also assess whether or not a student is meeting his or her academic goals.On the whole, this software is a big hit in the education sector and holds great future potential.Get Sample of Report @Key Players for learning Management System Market:Some of the major players in Global learning management system Market includes Edmodo (California), Blackboard, Inc. (U.S.), IBM corporation (U.S.), SAP SE (Germany), Xerox corporation (U.S.), Oracle Corporation (U.S.), McGraw-Hill Education (U.S.), Cornerstone On demand, Inc. (U.S.), D2L Corporation (Canada), and Saba Software, Inc. (U.S.) among others.Market ScenarioAt present, the education sector is undergoing a phase of technological reformation. Due to this, it can be confidently assumed that the global learning management system will register significant growth in the forthcoming years. During the forecast period of 2016-2022, the revenue for this market is estimated to double. In terms of CAGR, the market is anticipated to tread forward at the rate of 22%.There are a number of growth propellers that work collectively to bring about success and development for the market. E-learning industry is growing by leaps and bounds these days. Many schools and universities have included it as a part of their mode of teaching. This is one of the major reasons that drives the growth of the market. The increasing prevalence of cloud computing and higher demand for affordable training solutions further leads to development of the market.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:Jan 21, 2016: Blackboard, Inc. had announced for deploying its flagship learning management system and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). With this announcement, the company is offering Learn Software-as-a-Service Plus and Blackboard Learn Software-as-a-Service Advantage for the higher education institutions in the United States. The company is availing the learning management system along with zero-downtime upgrades, higher quality through continuous delivery, new services innovation, and increased scalability.July 13, 2016 - McGraw-Hill Education has announced learning platform with canvas learning management system that makes teaching and learning easier for educators and students. With this platform, it would be easier for the companies to connect with the student digitally and deliver the content and adaptive learning to them. This will improve the learning experience for all students.September 29, 2016 : Expii, Inc. and Edmodo went into the strategic agreement for providing personalised interactive learning to the students and free application that offers personalized learning recommendations. By this agreement, the companies are making content accessible to the users for their learning experience.Market SegmentationThe worldwide learning management system market has been segregated into four equal divisions. They can be listed as services, applications, geographies and deployment methods.When it comes to services, the industry is further sub-segmented into content management, administration, communication & collaboration and performance management.On account of applications, the market is bifurcated into academics and corporate.Geographically, the market is spread across various areas of the world like North America, Asia Pacific Europe and Rest of the World. Out of these North America has an edge over the other regions and holds the largest market share. It is because the individuals in this area are more knowledgeable and open to accepting this concept. Europe comes second after North America. Asia Pacific is growing rapidly and is expected to override other countries in the coming years.Lastly, based on deployment methods the market has divided into on premise and cloud.Get Complete Report @InnovationsThe global learning management market has witnessed many important innovations over the years. Just recently, an LMS software that is compatible with mobile devices was recently. This is one innovation that has stood out and proved its worth. Many organizations have started choosing this software over the traditional one owing to its ease of use and convenience.Learning Management System Market: Regional AnalysisLearning management system global market is expected to be dominated by North America with the largest market share due to increasing awareness and growing adoption of learning management system by organizations in the region, and therefore accounting for a huge economy by 2022. Learning Management System Market in Asia-Pacific market is expected to grow at a considerable rate of CAGR. The learning management system market growth is driven due to increasing demand by organization for cost-effective learning system to train their employees which would give better return on investment in the future.About Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Media Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Mobile Encryption Technology Market - Advanced technologies, Global Forecast and Winning Imperatives 2018-2025 https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1618146 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-mobile-encryption-technology-market-professional-survey-report-2018-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/global-mobile-encryption-technology-market-professional-survey-report-2018-report.html https://marketinfo247.wordpress.com/ Albany, NY, 30th May : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of "Global Mobile Encryption Technology Market Professional Survey Report 2018" globally.This report studies Mobile Encryption Technology 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.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringMcAfee(Intel Corporation)BlackberryT-Systems InternationalESETSophosSymantec CorpCheck Point Software TechnologiesDellIBMMobileironBeiJing Zhiyou Wang'an Tech. Co. LtdCSG,Inc.Hewlett Packard EnterpriseProofpointSilent CircleAdeya SAOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoDisk EncryptionFile/Folder EncryptionCommunication EncryptionCloud EncryptionOtherBy Application, the market can be split intoBFSIHealthcare & RetailGovernment and Public SectorTelecommunications and ITOtherView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @By Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaTable of Contents1 Industry Overview of Mobile Encryption Technology1.1 Definition and Specifications of Mobile Encryption Technology1.1.1 Definition of Mobile Encryption Technology1.1.2 Specifications of Mobile Encryption Technology1.2 Classification of Mobile Encryption Technology1.2.1 Disk Encryption1.2.2 File/Folder Encryption1.2.3 Communication Encryption1.2.4 Cloud Encryption1.2.5 Other1.3 Applications of Mobile Encryption Technology1.3.1 BFSI1.3.2 Healthcare & Retail1.3.3 Government and Public Sector1.3.4 Telecommunications and IT1.3.5 Other1.4 Market Segment by Regions1.4.1 North America1.4.2 China1.4.3 Europe1.4.4 Southeast Asia1.4.5 Japan1.4.6 India2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Mobile Encryption Technology2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Mobile Encryption Technology2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Mobile Encryption Technology2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Mobile Encryption TechnologyBrowse Report @3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Mobile Encryption Technology3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Mobile Encryption Technology Major Manufacturers in 20173.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Mobile Encryption Technology Major Manufacturers in 20173.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Mobile Encryption Technology Major Manufacturers in 20173.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Mobile Encryption Technology Major Manufacturers in 2017ResearchMoz 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.Mr. Nachiket Ghumare,ResearchMoz,90 State Street, Albany NY, United States,Tel: +1-518-621-2074,USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948,Email: sales@researchmoz.us,Follow me on : Digital Signage Device: Know The Key Growth Drivers Developments and Innovations 2025 https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1732214&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/report/global-digital-signage-device-sales-market-report-2018.htm/toc http://www.qyresearchreports.com Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Digital Signage Device Sales Market Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.The research report elucidates on the worldwide market for Digital Signage Device. It offers complete and important research information implied for utilization of both set up and new market players. At the beginning, the report offers an outline of the market and afterward proceeds onward to examine the elements advancing or testing it development. To do as such, the report thinks about both large scale and miniaturized scale basics. It likewise packs in canny expectation for the market for Digital Signage Device for the up and coming a long time in the wake of driving industry specialists and considering in different factual points of interest.The major players covered in this reportSamsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (South Korea)LG Display Co., Ltd. (South Korea)NEC Display Solutions, Ltd. (Japan)Sharp Corporation (Japan)Planar Systems, Inc. (US)Sony Corporation (Japan)AU Optronics Corporation (Taiwan)Panasonic Corporation (Japan)Adflow Networks (Canada)Omnivex Corporation (Canada)Fill the form for an exclusive sample of this report @The regional scope of the study is as follows:North AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaIndiaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndonesiaSingaporeOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoKiosksMenu BoardsBillboardsSign BoardsOn 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, includingRetailCorporateHealthcareTable of ContentsGlobal Digital Signage Device Sales Market Report 20181 Digital Signage Device Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Digital Signage Device1.2 Classification of Digital Signage Device by Product Category1.2.1 Global Digital Signage Device Market Size (Sales) Comparison by Type (2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Digital Signage Device Market Size (Sales) Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 2017Access the Report and full TOC @2 Global Digital Signage Device Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and Application2.1 Global Digital Signage Device Market Competition by Players/Suppliers2.1.1 Global Digital Signage Device Sales and Market Share of Key Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Digital Signage Device Revenue and Share by Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Digital Signage Device (Volume and Value) by Type2.2.1 Global Digital Signage Device Sales and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.2.2 Global Digital Signage Device Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.3 Global Digital Signage Device (Volume and Value) by Region2.3.1 Global Digital Signage Device Sales and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.3.2 Global Digital Signage Device Revenue and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.4 Global Digital Signage Device (Volume) by Application3 United States Digital Signage Device (Volume, Value and Sales Price)3.1 United States Digital Signage Device Sales and Value (2013-2018)3.1.1 United States Digital Signage Device Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.2 United States Digital Signage Device Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)About Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com Retail Point of sale Terminal Market explores vigorous size by 2024 https://bit.ly/2k3W9R0 https://bit.ly/2m1gWWh https://bit.ly/2kAXSQb https://www.gminsights.com http://algosonline.com/news "Global Retail Point of sale Terminal Market is expected to exceed USD 40 billion by 2024. This growth is accredited to the escalating demand for cashless transactions to facilitate payments. Cashless economies are highly prominent in the Asia Pacific and the Europe region, predominantly due to the usage of alternative forms of money such as payment cards. The present-day movement towards cashless transactions is expected to eradicate the disadvantages and inconveniences of cash based dealings. Retail POS terminals offer high durability and reliability in comparison to their conventional counterparts such as cash registers, and hence witnessing large scale adoption in both small and medium sized stores which will augment the Retail Point of sale Terminal Market growth.Request for a sample of this research report @The security concerns associated with the data privacy will inhibit the Retail Point of sale Terminal Market growth over the forecast timeline. This is due to the concern regarding the cyber-attacks such as the DDoS. Moreover, the high cost associated with the implementation of these systems and the investments required for the widescale adoption poses a significant challenge for the retailers. Furthermore, the threats related to skimming and malware while making transactions will challenge the industry growth.The mPOS terminal segment is projected to grow significantly in the Retail Point of sale Terminal Market over the coming years owing to the ability of provide secure transactions in out-of-store environments. It is widely used in tradeshows, events and flea markets to enable the rapid movement of the customers through the checkout lines.Browse key industry insights spread across 229 pages with 248 market data tables & 99 figures & charts from the report, Retail (Point of Sale) POS Terminals Market Size By Product (Mobile, Fixed), By Component (Software, Hardware, Services [Professional Services, Support & Maintenance, Training]), By Application (Department Stores, Supermarkets/Hypermarkets, Warehouse, Convenience Stores, Discount Stores, Specialty Stores), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico), Application Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2017 2024 in detail along with the table of contents:The software component is anticipated to witness growth opportunities in the Retail Point of sale Terminal Market due to the advantages offered by them in terms of monitoring the consumer behavior and their buying trends. These functionalities help the retailers in enhancing the customer experience and boost sales. In addition, integration of technologies such as IoT protect customers from fraudulent transactions.The retail sector is getting more organized across the world, which will provide impetus for the hypermarkets and supermarkets segment growth over the next few years. This is due to the development of customized POS terminals by the vendors to offer real time dashboard options, user profiles for different users. Such functionalities enable the clients to streamline the workflow, thereby boosting sales and profits. This will provide growth opportunities to the Retail Point of sale Terminal Market.Make an Inquiry for purchasing this report @The Asia Pacific region is expected to witness high growth in the Retail Point of sale Terminal Market owing to the evolution of retail sector in countries such as India and China. The demonetization effect in India has caused the customers towards cashless transactions and the convenience offered by it. The manufacturers in the region are actively focusing on launching devices QR Code enabled which will further escalate the demand.Key players participating in the Retail Point of sale Terminal Market comprise VeriFone Systems, Ingenico SA, NEC Corporation, NCR Corporation, and PAX Technology. The industry is characterized by the demand for technologically advance devices which offers functionalities such as recording information of repeat customers, payroll data and inventory management.About Global Market InsightsGlobal Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog: Key Insights of Global Air Cargo Market Covering Prime Factors and Competitive Outlook till 2025 Market Research Report Search Engine https://www.mrrse.com/sample/4096 https://www.mrrse.com/air-cargo-market https://www.mrrse.com/ The air cargo 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 services playing a key role in Air Cargo 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 air cargo markets growth throughout the above mentioned forecast period in terms of revenue (in US$ Mn), across different geographies, including Asia Pacific, South America, North America, Europe, and Middle East & Africa (MEA).Ask for Sample Copy @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 air cargo market, globally. Moreover, the report provides an overview of the various strategies of key players present in the market. Market definition and introduction chapter helps in understanding different trends and services of air cargo along with their types and services which are included in the report.Global Air Cargo Market: SegmentationThe report segments the global air cargo market on the basis of type into air freight, and air mail. The market is further segmented into express and regular by services. By end-use, the market has been classified into consumer electronics, retail, third party logistics, food and beverages, pharmaceuticals & healthcare and others. By destination, the market has been segmented into domestic, and International. Thus, the report provides in-depth cross-segment analysis of the air cargo market and classifies it into various levels, thereby providing valuable insights at the macro as well as micro levels.Global Air Cargo Market: Regional SegmentationOn the basis of country, North American market is divided into The U.S., Canada and Mexico. Similarly, Europe market is divided into Germany U.K., France, and Rest of Europe. Asia Pacific has been segmented into China, Japan, Australia, and Rest of Asia Pacific. Middle East and Africa covers the G.C.C., South Africa and Rest of Middle East and Africa. Similarly, South America region includes Brazil, and Rest of South America. This report provides all the essential information required to understand the air cargo and its types and services. Also, the report provides insights related to the services and different end-users according to the various geographical regions mentioned above. These policies and regulations are directly or indirectly influencing the air cargo market. Furthermore, Porters Five Forces analysis explains the factors which are currently affecting the air cargo market. This report also provides the value chain analysis for the air cargo which explains the participants of the value chain.Global Air Cargo Market: Competitive LandscapeThe report also highlights the competitive landscape of the air cargo market, thereby positioning all the major players according to their geographic presence and recent key developments. The comprehensive air cargo 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 air cargo markets growth.Cathay Pacific Cargo, FedEx Express, UPS Airlines, DHL Aviation, Korean Air Caro, Lufthansa Cargo, China Airlines Cargo, Singapore Airlines Cargo, Emirates SkyCargo, Cargolux are some of the major players operating within the global air cargo market profiled in this study. 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.Explore Full Report Description with TOC @Air Cargo MarketBy ComponentAir FreightAir MailBy serviceExpressRegularBy End-userConsumer ElectronicsRetailThird Party LogisticsFood and beveragesPharmaceuticals and healthcareOthersBy DestinationDomesticInternationalBy GeographyNorth AmericaCanadaMexicoEuropeGermanyThe U.K.FranceRest of EuropeAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaRest of Asia PacificMiddle East and Africa (MEA)GCCSouth AfricaRest of MEASouth AmericaBrazilRest of South AmericaAbout 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 12207(United State)United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559(CANADA)Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite: North America Aerospace Materials Industry : Market Insights, Development, Research and Forecast to 2023 https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1629951 https://www.researchmoz.us/north-america-aerospace-materials-market-by-manufacturers-countries-type-and-application-forecast-to-2023-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/north-america-aerospace-materials-market-by-manufacturers-countries-type-and-application-forecast-to-2023-report.html https://marketinfo247.wordpress.com/ Albany, NY, 30th May : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of "North America Aerospace Materials Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023" globally.This report studies the Aerospace Materials market, Aerospace materials are materials, frequently metal alloys, that have either been developed for, or have come to prominence through, their use for aerospace purposes.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Aerospace Materials in North America market, especially in United States, Canada and Mexico. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, countries, type and application.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversAlcoaRio Tinto AlcanKaiser AluminumAlerisRusalConstelliumAMI MetalsArcelor MittalNippon Steel & Sumitomo MetalNucor CorporationBaosteel GroupThyssenkrupp AerospaceKobe SteelMaterionVSMPO-AVISMAToho TitaniumBaoTiPrecision Castparts CorporationAperamVDMCarpenterAMGATI MetalsToray IndustriesCytec Solvay GroupTeijin LimitedHexcelTenCateMarket Segment by Countries, coveringAluminium AlloysSteel AlloysTitanium AlloysSuper AlloysComposite MaterialsOthersView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Market Segment by Type, coversCommercial AircraftMilitary AircraftMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoCommercial AircraftMilitary AircraftThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the North America Aerospace Materials market.Chapter 1, to describe Aerospace Materials Introduction, product type and application, market overview, market analysis by countries, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the manufacturers of Aerospace Materials, with profile, main business, news, sales, price, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with profile, main business, news, sales, price, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the North America market by countries, covering United States, Canada and Mexico, with sales, revenue and market share of Aerospace Materials, for each country, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5 and 6, to show the market by type and application, with sales, price, revenue, market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the segment market in United States, Canada and Mexico, by manufacturers, type and application, with sales, price, revenue and market share by manufacturers, types and applications;Chapter 10, Aerospace Materials market forecast, by countries, type and application, with sales, price and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 11, to analyze the manufacturing cost, key raw materials and manufacturing process etc.Chapter 12, to analyze the industrial chain, sourcing strategy and downstream end users (buyers);Browse Report @Chapter 13, to describe sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers etc.Chapter 14 and 15, to describe Aerospace Materials Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data sourceResearchMoz 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.Mr. Nachiket Ghumare,ResearchMoz,90 State Street, Albany NY, United States,Tel: +1-518-621-2074,USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948,Email: sales@researchmoz.us,Follow me on : Software Engineering Market 2018 Global Leaders: Synopsys, Autodesk, PTC, Ansys, MSC Software, Dassault Systemes, Bentley Systems, Carlson Software, Siemens PLM Software https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2180 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/software-engineering-market-2180 Market Research Future published a research report on Software Engineering Market Research Report- Forecast 2022 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2022.Market HighlightsSoftware Engineering provides software tool that is used to achieve accuracy in designing of products and components of an organization. Software Engineering are widely adopted by several end users which includes aerospace & defence, automotive, banking, telecommunication, oil & gas, healthcare, others. The Software Engineering allows end-users to develop prototypes of their products on computer before the commencement of the production. They also help architects, engineers, and design professionals draft industry-specific products that enhance the overall product development.The market growth is attributed by the wide demand of integrated solution for designing of engineering system. Further, the Software Engineering Market is basically driven by the increasing adoption of automation across given end-use industries. The rising demand for lowering errors, to reduce the operational cost by minimizing the scrap, is driving the growth of engineering software market. There is potential rise of Software Engineering technology opportunities in the chemical industry and oil and gas industry due to the increasing demand for process analytical solutions in these industries. Moreover, the presence of Software Engineering on cloud is expected to boost the demand for engineering software over the coming years.The global Software Engineering market is expected to grow at CAGR of ~15% and estimated to reach at market size of US ~$50 billion by the end of forecast period.Get Sample of Report @Key PlayersThe major players operating in the market of Software Engineering are - Autodesk, Inc.(U.S.), Bentley Systems, Inc. (U.S.), Dassault Systemes S.A (France)., IBM Corporation (U.S.), Geometric Ltd. (India), Siemens PLM Software, Inc.(U.S.), SAP SE (Germany), Synopsys, Inc. (U.S.), PTC, Inc.(U.S.), Ansys, Inc. (U.S.), and MSC Software Corporation (U.S.), and othersSegments:Software Engineering Market is segmented into type, application and end user. By Type it is consists of Computer aided designing (CAD), Computer aided engineering (CAM), Computer aided manufacturing (CAE), Architecture, engineering & construction (AEC), and electronic design automation (EDA). Application comprises of Automation design, Plant Design, Product Design, 3D Modelling, Others and End-User includes Aerospace & Defence, Automotive, Banking, Telecommunication, Oil & Gas, Healthcare, and Others.Key Findings By Software Type: Computer-Aided Designing (CAD) is dominating the market of Software Engineering by software type and has reached USD 5,758.65 Million in the year 2017 and is also expected to grow at a fastest CAGR of 13.28%. By Application: Automation Design is dominating the market of Software Engineering by application and has reached USD 6,076.05 Million in the year 2017. 3D Modelling is the fastest growing at a 13.09% CAGR. By End-User: Automotive is dominating the market of Software Engineering by end-user and has reached USD 5,164.26 Million in the year 2017. However, Aerospace & Defense is the fastest growing at 12.45% CAGR during the forecasted period.Regional Analysis:The regional analysis of software engineering market is being studied for region such as Asia pacific, North America, Europe and Rest of the World. Asia pacific is expected to show potential growth. Emerging economies of Asia Pacific, such India, China, and Japan are major contributors in terms of technology for the growth of the software engineering market. The rising demand for automation solutions in these geographies is expected to grow the market over the forecast period. Moreover, in the gulf countries the software engineering market finds potential growth opportunities in the oil and gas industry for designing of automated systems for the industry.Get Complete Report @Intended Audience Computer Software Developer Embedded Software Engineer IT Software Engineer Government Mobile Based Financial Service Providers And Distributors Research Institutes & UniversitiesTABLE OF CONTENTS1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY2 MARKET DYNAMICS2.1 Market Growth Factors2.1.1 Increasing Demand For Automation2.1.2 Massive Penetration Of Building Information Modeling (BIM)2.2 Restraints2.2.1 Piracy Issues2.2.2 Lack Of Skilled Personnel2.3 Market Opportunities2.3.1 Rising Demand For 3D Modelling2.4 Supply Chain Analysis2.5 Porters Five Forces Analysis3 GLOBAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING MARKET, BY SOFTWARE TYPE3.1 Introduction3.2 Sub-Segment3.2.1 Computer-Aided Designing (CAD)3.2.2 Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM)3.2.3 Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE)3.2.4 Architecture, Engineering And Construction (AEC)3.2.5 Electronic Design Automation (EDA)ContinuedAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by Components, Application, Technologies and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Media Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Magnesium Oxide Market - What's New Trending For 2018 - 2023? https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3202810-global-magnesium-oxide-market-research-report-forecast-to-2023 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3202810-global-magnesium-oxide-market-research-report-forecast-to-2023 www.linkedin.com/company/4828928 https://twitter.com/WiseGuyReports https://www.facebook.com/Wiseguyreports-1009007869213183/?fref=ts Market Synopsis of the Global Magnesium Oxides MarketThe global magnesium oxide market witnessed augmenting growth in 2016 and is projected to show the same trend during the forecast period. Asia Pacific and North America are the major regions that dominated the global market. Asia Pacific was the potential leader closely followed by North America and Europe. As per the analysis, the global magnesium oxide market was valued at USD 3,934.5 million in 2016 and is projected to reach USD 5,376.5 million by 2023. The global market, as a whole, is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5.34% in terms of value and 5.07% in volume terms.GET SAMPLE REPORT @Developing industrial sector coupled with the growing investment in public and private infrastructural development is considered as the primary factor driving the growth of the global magnesium oxide market. Moreover, the growing demand for agricultural products across the globe is also positively contributing to the market demand for magnesium oxide. However, the presence of substitutes such as graphite and silicon carbide is a major restraint in the growth of the market.In terms of the product, the dead-burned magnesia (DBM) is the leading segment across the globe and is projected to acquire a market share of over 70% during the forecast period, whereas the caustic calcined magnesia (CCM) is anticipated to be the fastest growing segment with a CAGR of over 5%.Regional AnalysisThe global magnesium oxides market is spanned across five major regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa. As of 2016, Asia Pacific is the most promising regional market for magnesium oxide with a major contribution from China, Japan, and India. The region is anticipated to acquire the largest shares in terms of both value and volume during the given period. The North American market is mainly driven by the U.S. and Canada. The U.S dominated the North American market with a major market share in 2016 and is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 4.40% whereas the Canadian market is projected to exhibit a higher CAGR of 4.80%. The growing demand from the developed industries such as glass, ceramics, and iron & steel among others is majorly contributing to this growth.SegmentationThe magnesium oxide market is segmented on the basis of product type, application, and region. On the basis of the type, the market is segmented into DMB, CCM, and FM. The market on the basis of the application is segmented into refractory, agriculture, chemical intermediates, construction, and others. The market on the basis of the refractory is further segmented into steel, ceramics, glass, and others. On the basis of the agricultural, the market is further segmented into fertilizers and animal feed. The agricultural segment is further segmented into fertilizer and animal feed.Key PlayersSome of the key players operating in the global magnesium oxide market are RHI Magnesita N.V.(Austria), Martin Marietta (U.S.), Grecian Magnesite S.A. (Greece), PremierMagnesia LLC (U.S.), Ube Industries Ltd (Japan), Kumas Magnesite Industry Inc (Turkey), Xinyang Mineral Group (India), ICL (Israel), SMZ, a.s. Jelsava (Slovakia), Tateho Chemicals Industries Co. (Japan), and Baymag Inc ( Canada), among others.Key Findings Global magnesium oxide market was valued at 10998.8 Kilo tons in 2017 and is anticipated to grow at an expanding CAGR Asia Pacific emerged as the global leader in this market and has acquired 59% of the global share, expanding at a dynamic CAGR of 5.60% As per the analysis, China was the most promising country-level market and has generated largest revenuse of USD 1691 million On the basis of the application, a refractory segment dominated the global market in 2016, with significant market shares and expanding at the highest CAGR of 5.17. Similarly, product segment has been dominated by DBM segment Asia Pacific is expected to be the highly focused market for key industry participant over the assessment years. Increasing industrial investment, industrial automation and industrial expansion have increased the importance of this region among the industry playersTable of Content: Key Points1 Report Prologue2 Scope of the Report3 Market Insights4. Research Methodology5 Market Dynamics6 Impact Analysis7 Global Magnesium Oxide, By Type8 Global Magnesium Oxide Market, By ApplicationContinuedACCESS REPORT @Get in touch:LinkedIn:Twitter:Facebook:Wise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Care Management Solutions Market: Identifies the Key Drivers of Growth, Demand and Challenges of the Key Industry Players https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/care-management-solutions-market https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/care-management-solutions-market/report-sample https://www.psmarketresearch.com/send-enquiry?enquiry-url=care-management-solutions-market https://www.psmarketresearch.com The growth of global care management solutions market is led by growing geriatric population, increasing demand for quality of care and increasing government initiatives to promote patient-centric care, increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, advancing IT and big data capabilities and growing medical tourism. Initiatives to move the burden of threat from healthcare payers to providers and need to reduce healthcare cost are further expected to boost the demand of these solutions.Access Detailed Report Summary:Increasing prevalence of chronic diseases is driving the growth of the global care management solutions market due to increasing demand for quality of care. The prevalence of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, stroke and respiratory disease, are increasing due to the alteration in lifestyle and lack of access to preventive care. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 117 million people in the U.S. had one or more chronic health conditions in 2012.Request to Get the Sample Pages at:Geographically, North America has been the largest market for care management solution, owing to growing geriatric population, developed healthcare infrastructure and shift of risk burden from payers to provider in the region. The U.S. contributed largest revenue to the North American as well as global care management solutions market. The increasing initiatives to improve the quality of service delivery, and increasing prevalence of chronic diseases are the key growth driving factor for the U.S. care management solutions market. Globally, the care management solutions market is expected to witness the fastest growth in Asia-Pacific during the forecast period. The highest growth in the region is attributed to improving healthcare infrastructure, increasing awareness of care management solution, increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, and growing geriatric population in the region.Make Enquiry Before Buying the Report:The key players operating in the global market are Allscripts Healthcare solutions Inc., Cerner Corporation, Epic Corporation, Inc., Wellentive Inc., I2I System Inc, and IBM Corporation.About P&S Market ResearchP&S Market Research is a global market research and consulting company. We provide market research reports, industry reports, business intelligence and research-based consulting services across a range of industries.With the help of our professional corporate relations with various companies, our market research offers the most accurate market forecasting. Our analysts and consultants interact with leading companies of the concerned domain to substantiate every single data presented in our publication. Our research assists our client in identifying new and different windows of opportunity and frame informed and customized strategies for expansion in different regions.Contact:P&S Market Research347, 5th Ave. #1402New York City, NY - 10016Toll-free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada)Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.comWeb: Embedded Security Product: Market 2018 Segmented by Manufacturers (Infineon, STMicroelectronics, NXP, Gemalto, Microchip, Samsung, Texas Instruments) and Forecasts to 2025 Qy Research Groups https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/request-sample/706888 https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/send-an-enquiry/706888 https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/check-discount/706888 Embedded Security Product Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the Embedded Security Product industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global Embedded Security Product market with detailed market segmentation by product/application and geography. The global Embedded Security Product market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Embedded Security Product players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.Embedded Security Product Market Players: Infineon (Germany) STMicroelectronics (Switzerland) NXP (Netherlands) Gemalto (Netherlands) Microchip (US) Samsung (South Korea) Texas Instruments (US) IDEMIA (France) Renesas (Japan) Inside Secure (France)Get Sample Copy of This Report Now @On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, and market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into Secure Element and Embedded SIM Trusted Platform Module Hardware Security ModuleBy Application, the market can be split into Wearables Smartphones and Tablets Automotive Smart Identity Cards OthersMajor regions are as follows: North America Europe China Japan India Southeast Asia Other regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)The report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global Embedded Security Product market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall Embedded Security Product 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 @Also, key Embedded Security Product 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 Embedded Security Product 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 @Contact Us:Call: +1-888-236-2744Email: sales@qyresearchgroups.comAbout Us:QY 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. Mobile Wallet Market 2018 Global Leaders Analysis: American Express, MasterCard Incorporated, Visa, Samsung Electronics, Sprint, First Data, Blackberry, AT&T https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2059 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/mobile-wallet-market-2059 Market Research Future published a research report on Mobile Wallet Market Research Report - Global Forecast to 2022 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2022.Market HighlightsSmartphone industry has seen the tremendous growth in the last couple of year and expected to grow significantly in coming years. The countries like India, China and U.S. are some of the major countries which holds more than 40-50% of the share of the mobile market. Advancement of the mobile technology and increasing the trend of the online payment among the current generation are driving the Mobile Wallet Market. Over the next couple of the year online payment will be take over the tradition payment due to the government initiation for cashless economy and the growing awareness about the mobile wallet for the money transaction.NFC transaction is a new trend of the mobile wallet technology is expected to capture the market. NFC transaction have various benefit over traditional payments such as convenience, versatility and safety. Mobile wallet stores all the needed information of the credit and debit card which are necessary for the transaction. Even in case of the mobile phone is stolen intruder cant access the information as it is protected by the password and other security. NFC is adapted in all situations such as banking, movie pass purchase, transit passes and others. These are the benefit which are makes it suitable in wide range of industries.Get Sample of Report @With the advancement in technology, mobile wallet are used to track down of all the transaction necessary such as prescriptions, medicines purchase, doctors and book appointments in health care sector. Hospitals can track down the patients information of every visits, prescribed medicines can be recommended. Mobile wallet helps to manage all the transaction between doctor and patients. Hence, adoption of the mobile wallet in the health care system is expected to boost the market.The global mobile wallet market is expected to grow at CAGR of 40% and estimated to reach at market size of US ~$5 billion by the end of forecast period.Key PlayersThe major players operating in the market of mobile wallet are- American Express (U.S.), Apple Inc. (U.S.), AT&T INC.(U.S.), Blackberry Ltd. (Canada), First Data Corporation (U.S.), Google Inc. (U.S.), Sprint Corporation (U.S.), Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (South Korea), MasterCard Incorporated (U.S.), and Visa Inc (U.S.) among others.Segments:The Mobile Wallet market has been segmented on the basis of- By Mode of Payment - Remote Payment and NFC among others. By Application e-commerce, Ticketing, Mobile Coupon, Mobile Transfer, Micropayment among others.Market Research Future Analysis:In current market scenario, Asia-Pacific is dominating the market of mobile wallet. Growing LTE technology in the Asian countries and growing smartphone user are some of the major factor driving the market. Emerging countries such China, India and Japan which also holds more than 30% of global population are aggressively adopting the mobile wallet technology. Various feature such as easy accessibility to bank, easy payments and transfer among others are giving boost to the market. NFC technology is already present in North America. A study shows that more than 75% of the major retailer in Canada accepts contactless transaction and expected to increase in future. This shows that the market of Mobile Wallet in North America is growing. U.K. and Germany are few of the countries which has already initiated the cash-less economy initiative and in future it is expected that mobile wallet will be used as primary mode of payment.Get complete Report @Intended Audience: Software developers Mobile app Developers Banking Service Providers Software Developers Software Distributors Government Mobile based financial service providers and distributors Research Institutes & UniversitiesTABLE OF CONTENTS1 MARKET INTRODUCTION1.1 INTRODUCTION1.2 SCOPE OF STUDY1.2.1 RESEARCH OBJECTIVE1.2.2 ASSUMPTIONS1.2.3 LIMITATIONS1.3 MARKET STRUCTURE:1.3.1 GLOBAL MOBILE WALLET MARKET: BY MODE OF PAYMENT1.3.2 GLOBAL MOBILE WALLET MARKET: BY APPLICATION1.3.3 GLOBAL MOBILE WALLET MARKET: BY REGION2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY2.1 RESEARCH TYPE2.2 PRIMARY RESEARCHPT2.3 SECONDARY RESEARCH2.4 FORECAST MODEL2.4.1 MARKET DATA COLLECTION, ANALYSIS & FORECAST2.4.2 MARKET SIZE ESTIMATION2.4.3 MARKET CRACKDOWN & DATA TRIANGULATION3 MARKET DYNAMICS3.1 INTRODUCTION3.2 MARKET DRIVERS3.3 MARKET CHALLENGES3.4 MARKET OPPORTUNITIESContinuedAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by Components, Application, Technologies and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Media Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Mitochondrial Myopathy Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Analysis Information https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2826912-global-mitochondrial-myopathy-diagnosis-treatment-market-analysis-forecast-2017-to https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2826912-global-mitochondrial-myopathy-diagnosis-treatment-market-analysis-forecast-2017-to www.linkedin.com/company/4828928 https://twitter.com/WiseGuyReports https://www.facebook.com/Wiseguyreports-1009007869213183/?fref=ts Mitochondrial Myopathies are the diseases that affect a specific part of the cells in the body. Specifically, mitochondrial diseases affect the mitochondria, which is the tiny energy factories found inside almost all our cells. The symptoms of Mitochondrial Myopathies are breathing issues, heart related issues, kidney problems, gastrointestinal problems or diabetes. It is a rare mutational disease and at present there is no concrete treatment available in the market for disease. However, there are few tests that help to diagnosis Mitochondrial Myopathies, are available in the market, which are the only saving grace for the global mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment market at present.GET SAMPLE REPORT @The total mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment market is expected to reach USD 33.6 million by 2020 at a CAGR of 9.82% during the forecast period.The global mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment market by types is segmented into mitochondrial encephalomyopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke, progressive external ophthalmoplegia, myoclonic epilepsy with ragged red fibres, mitochondrial neurogastrointestinal encephalopathy syndrome, kearnssayre syndrome, mitochondrial dna depletion syndrome, pearson syndrome, leigh syndrome, and neuropathy, ataxia, and retinitis pigmentosa. Mitochondrial Encephalomyopathy, Lactic Acidosis, and Stroke segment is expected to command the largest market share of 17.1% in 2016 and is expected to reach USD 5.8 million by the end of 2020. This market is growing at a CAGR of 10.08% by the end of the forecast period 2017-2020.On the basis of diagnostic test the global mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment market is segmented into genetic tests, muscle biopsy, and biochemical test. Genetic test segment is expected to command the largest market share of around 75% in 2016. This market is expected to reach USD 25.6 million in 2020 from USD 15.3 million in 2016, this market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.11% during the forecast period 2017-2020.On the basis of therapy, the global mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment market is segmented into supportive therapy and targeted therapy. Supportive therapy segment is expected to hold the 100% market share in 2016. Targeted therapy is projected to be the second-largest market in the coming future. This market is expected to reach USD 33.6 million in 2020 from USD 20.4 million in 2016, this market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.82% during the forecast period 2017-2020.On the basis of region, the global mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment market is segmented into Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East & Africa. Americas region is expected to command a largest market share of 44% in 2016. This market is expected to reach USD 15 million in 2020 from USD 9 million in 2016, this market is growing at a CAGR of 10.8% during the forecast period 2017-2020.Key PlayersThe leading market players in the global mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment market include AbbVie Inc (U.S.), Centogene AG (Germany), GeneDx (U.S.), Ixchel Pharma, Khondrion BV (The Netherlands), Mitobridge, Inc. (U.S.), NeuroVive Pharmaceutical AB (Sweden), Reata Pharmaceuticals Inc. (U.S.), Stealth Biotherapeutics (U.S.), and others.Study objectives To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast of the various segments and sub-segments of the global mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment market To provide insights about factors influencing and affecting the market growth To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to countries To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments based on products, applications, and regions for the global mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment market. To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, and comprehensively analysing their market share, core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market To provide economic factors that influences the global mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment market To provide detailed analysis of the value chain and supply chain of the global mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment marketTarget Audience Global Mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis & treatment solutions, manufacturers & suppliers Research and development (R&D) companies Hospitals and clinics Academic institutes and universitiesKey Findings The mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis and treatment global market and is expected to reach USD 33.6 million by 2020 Mitochondrial encephalomyopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke segment is expected to command the largest market share of around 17.1% in 2016. Americas region is expected to command a largest market share of 44% in 2016 and is expected to reach 15 million by the end of forecast periodTable of Content: Key Points1 Introduction 92 Research Methodology 123 Market Dynamics 144 Market Factor Analysis 195 Global Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market, By Type 316 Global Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market, By Diagnostic Test 36ContinuedACCESS REPORT @Get in touch:LinkedIn:Twitter:Facebook:Wise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Signaling System 7 (SS7) Market 2017 by Global Leaders: Dialogic, Huawei Technologies, Mitel Networks, Oracle, NetNumber, Tieto Oyj, Sonus Networks, Ericsson AB https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4153 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/ss7-market-4153 Market Research Future published a research report on Signaling System 7 (SS7) Market Research Report- Global Forecast 2023 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Signaling System 7 Market - OverviewSignaling system 7 (SS7) are a set of telephony signaling protocols which are the base for setting up almost all of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) telephone calls around the world. SS7 usually sets up and breaks down telephone calls but can also be utilized for services like number translation, short messaging service and a number other mass market services.SS7 protocol was developed initially in 1975 and is typically used by telecoms to verify when the subscriber is roaming and then respectively allows transfer of information.According to a report published by Market Research Future, The global Signaling System 7 Market is set to grow at USD 685.3 million by the end of year 2023 with 2.93% CAGR during forecast period 2017-2023.SS7 makes use of out of band signaling as earlier the signaling in trunks used to occur on the same channel. In SS7 signaling happens on entirely different channels other than the voice channels.SS7 being a high speed communication protocol allows high value call related services to be created. Services such as call waiting, call forwarding, voice mail etc. are all part of call management service offered.Get Sample of Report @The factors for the growth of the market for SS7 are the high volume of handsets that exist in the market which mostly rely on the SS7 protocol, most of the users in the market also own more than 1 hand set and more importantly the use of handsets has percolated in almost all strata of the population. The SS7 will grow over the coming year and will be an irreplaceable element of operator networks worldwide. The reliability factor of SS7 is one of the most important reason for its growth and demand in such competitive market. Another reason for the growth of SS7 is SMS marketing which has become a part and parcel of marketing plans of many companies. Unpredictability of IP networks also only further goes on to contribute to the popularity of a SS7 network. The factors hindering growth of SS7 are roaming complexity, lack of network security, loopholes in SS7 that enable carrier interoperability are a cause for security concern in the event of a hack.Key PlayersThe prominent players in the market of SS7 market are Dialogic Inc (U.S.), Ericsson AB (Sweden), Sonus Networks, Inc (U.S.), Tieto Oyj (Finland), NetNumber, Inc (U.S.), Oracle Corporation (U.S.), Mitel Networks (Canada) and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd (China) among others.Latest Industry News:16th October 2017 SureVoIP, which specializes in using the internet to deliver telecoms ie VOIP has enhanced its software offering with a focus on integration with other systems. The business recently announced it had achieved the integration with Signalling System No.7 (SS7) telephony following an intensive 18-month process.Regional AnalysisThe SS7 Signaling Transfer Point market globally is divided into four major regions such as Europe, America, Asia-Pacific and Middle East & Africa. The SS7 Signaling Transfer Point sector was assessed to be worth USD 654.7 million in the year 2016. The North American market had garnered the biggest market portion with USD 249.6 million in 2016. The Asian market region offers a vast growth potential for SS7 Signaling Transfer Point owing to the rapid technological progress and existence of a great number of industries. The Asian countries are likely to register the highest CAGR of 3.75 per cent over the forecast period which is from 2016 to 2022, due to rising demand in investments and technology by numerous network operators in the area.Industry SegmentsThe Signaling System 7 sector is categorized in to 3 main aspects which includes the basis of application, type and region. Segmentation by Application: Includes Medical and Healthcare, Industrial, IT and Telecom, Oil & Gas, Chemical, Aerospace and Defense. Segmentation by Types: Includes Bridge Link, Access Link, Cross Link, Diagonal Link, Fully Associated Link and Extended Link. Segmentation by Regions: Includes geographical regions such as North America, APAC, Europe and Rest of the World.Competitive AnalysisThe trend for diversification in the industry has enabled the competitors to access the profitable circumstances accessible in this market are being applied by candidates who are trying to increase their market coverage by focused development which can encourage the expansion of this business sector. The merchandise are also being diversified to large extent to keep up with the robust pace of technological discoveries. The companies are trying to create and capture economic value together in an appropriate manner. This has raised the possibilities for the approaching growth period significantly. This consequence has further proven to be fruitful for companies so they can fix target that can uphold their commercial enterprise's liquidity to take the most active decisions in terms of strategy execution and designing.Get Complete Report @Intended Audience Manufacturers and Suppliers Distributors SS7 Technology Solution Providers Research firms Consultancy firms Semiconductor Manufacturing Companies Stakeholders End-user sectors Technology InvestorsAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Media Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Parental Control Software Market 2018 by Global Leaders: IwantSoft, Mobicip, Webroot, McAfee, Avanquest, Bitdefender, Verizon, CyberPatrol https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4551 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/parental-control-software-market-4551 Market Research Future published a research report on Parental Control Software Market Research Report - Global Forecast 2023 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Parental Control Software Market DynamicsIn the last few years, the usage of internet has increased dramatically. Due to the hike in the number of internet users, the global market for parental control software has gained impetus. According to the report published by MRFR (Market Research Future), this market will register significant growth over the forecast period of 2017-2023.The children of this age use many internet-assisted devices and this is one of the major growth contributors for this market. In a nutshell, parental control software is an advanced content filtering system that has been devised to allow parents to keep a track of what their childrens watch online. The major purpose of this software is to protect young kids from cybercrimes, violent games, internet addiction and cyberbullying.The current generation is tech-savvy, owing to this it can be confidently asserted that the global parental control software market will progress tremendously in the forthcoming years. Figuratively, it is expected to generate a revenue of around USD 9.50 billion. During the projection period, the CAGR for the market will be 9.50%.Get Sample of Report @Unlimited access to the internet has led to many negative consequences. This can be categorized as one of the chief growth drivers for the market. Children do not completely understand the depth of internet usage and furthermore, they cannot differentiate certain sites like adults while surfing the internet. Hence, parents resort to using this software to save their children from falling prey to online predators.Additional factors like increased usage of smartphones, rise in the number cybercrime activities across the globe and higher awareness regarding computer and internet amongst the younger generation further work in the favor of the market.Although, the market may come across a tiny restraint in the form of shortage of information regarding parental control software. However, as the business expands the market will cope with this issue.Industry News22nd March, 2018 A recent update for the industry has come in from Australia. A mobile company named Alcatel just announced that henceforth all its devices will include a dedicated parental control software called Family Zone. It is basically a cloud-based ecosystem that enables parents to regularize the internet and device access for their little ones.Key Players:The key players in the global Parental Control Software Market include- McAfee (U.S.), Avanquest (France), Bitdefender (Balkans), Verizon (U.S.), CyberPatrol (England), IwantSoft (UK), SaferKid (California), Net Nanny (U.S.), Norton (U.S.), Webroot (U.S.) and Mobicip (U.S.) among others.SegmentsFor the purpose of this study, Market Research Future has segmented the market of Parental Control Software into device type, platform, applications and region.By Device Type Digital Television Services Computer and Video Games MobileBy Platform Android IOS Windows OthersBy Applications Residential Educational Institutes OthersBy RegionNorth America U S. Canada MexicoEurope UK France Germany Rest of EuropeAsia-Pacific China Japan India Rest Of Asia PacificRegional AnalysisThe market for parental control software has been successful in making its mark all across the globe. Some of the major areas can be listed as North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and Rest of the World.Out of all these regions North America accounts for the largest share of the market and sits at the top. The major cause for its expansion in this region is the presence of prominent players in this field. Countries like Canada and Mexico bring in the maximum amount of business for the market. Additionally, this region is also witnessing major technological advancements and is more accepting of smart gadgets.Apart from this region, Asia Pacific is another area that the market has high hopes of. It will tread forward at an unprecedented rate with an encouraging CAGR during the forecast period.Get Complete Report @Intended Audience Operating system providers Training center Schools Manufacturers Operating system providers Software Developers Sensor providersAbout 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 Saudi Arabia Industrial Refrigeration Systems Market Analysis, Trends, Revenue, Growth Opportunities, Competitive Analysis, Size, Share and Demand 2023 https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/saudi-arabia-industrial-refrigeration-systems-market/report-sample https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/saudi-arabia-industrial-refrigeration-systems-market www.psmarketresearch.com Industrial refrigeration systems market is gaining traction in Saudi Arabia as they are extensively used to maintain quality and taste of the food products till it reaches the end-users. The market size in the study represents the revenue generated through various equipment such as industrial racks, industrial compressors, industrial heat exchangers, and industrial evaporators. On the basis of coolant type, market for CO2 based refrigeration systems is projected to witness fastest growth during 2018-2023. The regional industrial refrigeration systems market in food & beverages is expected to witness the fastest growth during the forecast period on account of increasing consumption of meat and poultry based products as they require temperature control throughout the food supply chain.Request free sample copy of this research report @Saudi Arabia is one of the worlds largest markets in terms of food imports, and it receives huge quantity of perishable food items that require refrigeration to keep the eatables fresh for consumption purpose. Due to high temperature throughout the year, the country imports major chunk of edible meat to fulfill its domestic demand which requires refrigeration processes. Industrial refrigeration systems market is witnessing a steady growth and is gaining adoption in making effective cold chains for food & beverages. Food items such as dairy, seafood, and beverages require temperature control to transport them to distant location, and refrigeration allows manufacturers and suppliers to maintain quality of production in a cost-effective manner.The significant rise in food processing industry, along with surging demand for cold-chains is projected to drive growth for industrial refrigeration systems market in coming years. Owing to the support from Saudi Arabia government in the form of subsidies, food processing industry is adopting different refrigeration equipment to keep the food items fresh for a longer period of time.Growing adoption of natural refrigerant to increase the life of perishable food items is one of the major factors driving the growth of industrial refrigeration systems market. The government has made stringent regulations towards the use of fluorochemicals as a refrigerant. The technology has changed in recent years from F gas to natural refrigerant. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and the U.S are using ammonia as an industrial refrigerant to reach energy efficiency with minimal effect on environment.Surge in cold chains is another major factor driving the growth for industrial refrigeration systems market in the Saudi Arabia. Cold chain systems are crucial for the growth of global trade in perishable products for the availability of food and health supplies, globally. In Saudi Arabia, cold chains are designed to meet the growing demand from businesses, consumers and regulators.Explore report description @The market is growing at a notable pace, which leads to a moderate intensity of rivalry. Key market players such as Johnson Control Inc., Daikin Industries Ltd., Danfoss A/S, Evapco, Inc., Alfa Laval, CGS, Saudi Salajah, Emerson Electric, Awal Gulf Manufacturing Co., and BITZER. seek to gain market share through continuous innovations in refrigeration technology.About P&S Market ResearchP&S Market Research is a global market research and consulting company. We provide market research reports, industry reports, business intelligence and research based consulting services across a range of industries.With the help of our professional corporate relations with various companies, our market research offers the most accurate market forecasting. Our analysts and consultants interact with leading companies of the concerned domain to substantiate every single data presented in our publication. Our research assists our client in identifying new and different windows of opportunity and frame informed and customized strategies for expansion in different regions.Contact:P&S Market Research347, 5th Ave. #1402New York City, NY - 10016Toll-free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada)Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.comWeb: Endovascular Aneurysm Repair Market is expected US$ 3.8 Billion by 2024 https://www.renub.com/endovascular-aneurysm-repair-market-p.php https://www.renub.com/contactus.php www.renub.com Access full Research:Get Free Customization in This ReportEndovascular Aneurysm Repair Market is expected to surpass US$ 3.8 Billion by the end of year 2024. Endovascular aneurysm repair (or endovascular aortic repair) (EVAR) is a type of endovascular surgery used to treat pathology of the aorta. In this medical procedure Stent graft is placed inside an Aorta without removing any tissue from patients Aorta as its required in open aortic surgery. Endovascular Aneurysm Repair is more popular than open-abdominal surgery as its less invasive and patient recovery time is faster. In Endovascular Aneurysm Repair Stent graft is used in three types Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA), Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm (TAA), Thoracoabdominal Aortic Aneurysm (TAAA). This report exclusively covers endovascular aneurysm repair via different products of stent graft.The main factors that reinforce stent graft market growth are increasing prevalence of cardiac diseases & Hyper Tension, Growing Geriatric population, unhealthy lifestyle, alcohol consumption and smoking. High Medical Cost, Lack of reimbursement policies and increasing out of pocket expenditure can hinder the market growth of Endovascular Aneurysm Repair Market.Request a free sample copy of the report:Renub Research latest study report Endovascular Aneurysm Repair Market, Patient Numbers, Global Analysis by Stent Graft (Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA), Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm (TAA), Thoracoabdominal Aortic Aneurysm (TAAA) Region (BRICs, Europe, North America, United States), End-User (Hospital, Ambulatory Surgery Center) Companies (Lombard Medical Inc., Medtronics, Endologix Inc., Terumo Corporation, LeMaitre Vascular) provides a detailed and comprehensive insight of the Global Stent Graft Market.Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm controls the Endovascular Aneurysm Repair MarketThe report covers the market and Patient numbers for three types of surgery Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA), Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm (TAA), Thoracoabdominal Aortic Aneurysm (TAAA). Out of all these three types Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) is the market leader.By Region Market ShareUnited States is losing its market share year on year on Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) market. But, BRIC (excluding China) Europe, China market is growing year on year. In the case of Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm (TAA) and Thoracoabdominal Aortic Aneurysm (TAAA) North America market share is growing. In the case of products Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) controls the Endovascular Aneurysm Repair market.Endovascular Surgery (Endovascular Aneurysm Repair) - Stent Graft Market & Patients Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm (TAA) Thoracoabdominal Aortic Aneurysm (TAAA)By Region - Abdominal Aortic Stent Graft Market & Patients BRICs (Excluding China) China European Union North America United States Rest of North AmericaBy Region - Thoracic Aortic Stent Graft Market & Patients Europe North America Rest of WorldBy Region - Thoracoabdominal Aortic Stent Graft Market & Patients Europe North America Rest of WorldScope of the Report Global Stent Graft Market: We have segmented the market into three parts by Product which are AAA, TAA and TAAA. Global Stent Graft Patients: We have computed number of patient that is treated by stent graft products which are AAA, TAA and TAAA. Stent Graft Market and Patients - by Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA), Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm (TAA), Thoracoabdominal Aortic Aneurysm (TAAA): We have calculated the treated vascular graft patients & markte by Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm and also computed the future projection of patient as well as market and the core factors that driven the AAA stent graft Market. Key Growth Drivers & Challenges: It studies the multi-dimensional factors which help to grow global Vascular Graft Market. We have also mentioned key factors that will hinder the market growth. Key Players Analysis: We have covered five key players and their overview of the company and their business strategies.Contact UsRajat GuptaSr. Marketing ManagerEmail: info@renub.comPhone: +1-678-302-0700Web:Renub Research is a leading Market Research and Information Analysis Company with centers at Noida India and Roswell USA. We have long-term experience especially in international Business-to-Business Researches, Surveys, Business and Consulting. Throughout the years we have acquired expertise in most market sectors, including Information Technology (IT), Telecoms, Life Sciences, Medical & Pharmaceuticals, Financial Services (Banking, Insurance, Reinsurance, M&A, etc.), Energy, Chemicals, Automotive, Retail, FMCG, Consumer Goods, Logistics, Governmental, Social, and Others.Our core team is comprised of an experienced people holding graduate, post graduate and Ph.D. degrees in Finance, Marketing, Human Resource, Bio-Technology, Medicine, Information Technology, Environmental Science and many more. Our research help make the business decisions: on strategy, organization, operations, technology, mergers & acquisitions etc. We support many blue chip companies by providing them findings and perspectives across a wide range of markets. Our research reports offer a blend of information insight, analysis and forecasting that is essential in today's ultra-competitive markets.225 Kristie Ln, Roswell, GA 30076, United States Elesa stainless steel industrial components for exceptionally robust service Elesa stainless steel industrial components for exceptionally robust service www.elesa.com www.twitter.com/ElesaUK https://www.elesa.com/en/elesab2bstoreuk Where the going gets tough then Elesa turns to stainless steel for their industrial components, with an extensive selection of items that parallels their steel and reinforced polyamide products. The Elesa stainless options provide extra tough in-service performance that one would expect of premium stainless steel construction.Good examples of the Elesa stainless steel approach include their MTC-S Latch Clamps with safety stop which are particularly suitable for equipment and applications with strong vibration stresses where it is required to assure the holding of the clamp engagement against accidental opening. The clamp opening is obtained by actuating the button to disengage the safety device, thus it is possible to operate with the control lever.Their LMR levelling feet in AISI 304 and AISI 303 with rubber base provide high strength support where corrosion is a concern.Spoked handwheels GN 949 in cast stainless and DVC series vibration damping bushes for mounting of rotating/vibrating machines or equipment isolation are further exemplars of the Elesa philosophy to produce high quality components for the full breadth of industry.Further information regarding Elesa products may be found at:or follow them on twitter:Elesa is a supplier of a wide range of standard metal and plastic machine parts to the mechanical engineering industry.A natural appreciation of quality design and ergonomic research; a business culture firmly focused on product quality; the recognition of its brands as guarantees of quality and reliability, the continuous attention to clients needs and a fast and careful service have made Elesa a reference point for designers and builders. More than 40,000 product codes, 180 patents and 38 international design awards produced with systems certified to ISO 9001, ISO14001 and ISO18001 all supported by a worldwide branch and distribution network offering localised stock and technical support.Elesa (UK) Ltd26 Moorlands EstateMetheringhamLincolnshireLN4 3HXTel: 01526 322670email: sales@elesa.co.ukPress contact: Daniel Hodson Ready for Sky at the Canton Fair 2018 On April 15-19, 2018 the Ready for Sky company presented the remote control technology of household appliances at the 123 exhibition-fair Canton Fair 2018, which took place in the largest exhibition space of China in Pazhou.Exhibition participants, representatives of big and small export and import companies, discovered how the Ready for Sky technology (control from the smartphone) can be integrated in a wide range of smart appliances: the smart multicooker SkyCooker, kettle SkyKettle, irons SkyIron. The Ready for Sky representatives proposed to the visitors to test the possibility of remote control technology at 15 company partners stands.The Ready for Sky technology aroused great interest among household appliances manufacturers and buyers. They were attracted not only by the ease of integration into the final product, but also by future development of the R4S applications and platform, which already counts more than 650 000 users.. In the nearest future, the Ready for Sky company plans to integrate food ordering services in R4S application. The company is also working with the leading voice systems, such as Google Assistant, Apple HomeKit and Alexa Amazon and is developing its own voice assistant, SkyCentre.In 2018 the Ready for Sky platform becomes open for developers and manufacturers of household appliances. Within the framework of the Canton Fair 2018 the company received several thousands of potential partners contacts. The company has already started the negotiations on smart solution integration in the devices and connection to the Ready for Sky platform.The Chinese exhibition-fair of export and import goods (Canton Fair) is the largest trade fair in China, which has been held since 1957. Each time nearly 200 000 people visit the fair.Ready for Sky - an international company, a manufacturer of smart appliances and a hardware platform developer specializing in integration of smart technologies into a wide range of devices.Our mission is to upgrade and modernize products from different manufacturers and to provide support from concept formation stage to product design.Ready for Sky (R4S) develops intelligent and convenient hardware and software which allow users to control their devices simply and easily from around the globe using their smartphone or tablet.R4S app is a unique innovation of the Ready for Sky company, which enables user to control the unlimited number of devices from different brands through a single application.One of the major advantages of the smart home household appliances on the Ready for Sky technology is that they technically never go out of date.Ready for Sky LLP4 Lorong 19 Geylang #06-01, Singapore, 388489Catherine Canestrier, PR managermarketing@readyforsky.com Plant Growth Chambers Market Report 2017, Trends, Analysis, Share, Estimates and Forecasts to 2022. http://www.strategymrc.com/report/plant-growth-chambers-market http://www.strategymrc.com/report/plant-growth-chambers-market According to Stratistics MRC, the Global Plant Growth Chambers Market accounted for $399.6 million in 2017 and is expected to reach $687.4 million by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 6.2%. Rise in demand for food, rising global population, and technological advancements in biological engineering are the factors favouring the market growth. However, short purchase cycle is hampering the market growth. Moreover, growing trend of sustainable agriculture provides opportunity for the market growth over the forecast period.For More, Please Visit:Based on Function, plant growth segment is projected to increase due to demand from agriculture products and prevention from fungal or bacterial contamination. Plant Growth Chamber, designed for botanical and agricultural research applications including seed germination studies, plant pathology, plant tissue culture studies and plant genetic research. Plant growth chambers are designed to produce environmental conditions (humidity and temperature) that maximize plant growth.Based on Applications, short plants segment is dominated the market owing to increase area of small plants by incorporating a multi-tier shelf design, regular control of temperature and it has a various features such as low light are driving the market growth.By Geography, North America dominated the market revenue during the forecast period owing to the presence of major companies and declining arable land area, impact of drought conditions, and the growth in the usage of plant growth chambers in academic research. Europe is anticipated to grow at the highest CAGR due to, increase in the usage of plant, growing demand chambers in academic research organizations, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries and dry climatic conditions are fuelling market growth.Some of the key players in the Global Plant Growth Chambers market are Aralab, Hettich Benelux B.V., Freezers India, Brs Bvba, Darwin Chambers, Thermo Fisher, Conviron, Caron, Percival Scientific, Binder Gmbh, Weiss Technik and Saveer Biotech Limited.Functions Covered: Environmental Optimization Tissue Culture Seed Germination Plant GrowthEquipments Covered: Walk-In Reach-InEnd Users Covered: Academic Research Clinical ResearchApplications Covered: Tall Plants Short Plants Other ApplicationsRegions Covered:North AmericaUSCanadaMexicoEuropeGermanyUKItalyFranceSpainRest of EuropeAsia PacificJapanChinaIndiaAustraliaNew ZealandSouth KoreaRest of Asia PacificSouth AmericaArgentinaBrazilChileRest of South AmericaMiddle East & AfricaSaudi ArabiaUAEQatarSouth AfricaRest of Middle East & AfricaWhat our report offers:- Market share assessments for the regional and country level segments- Market share analysis of the top industry players- Strategic recommendations for the new entrants- Market forecasts for a minimum of 9 years of all the mentioned segments, sub segments and the regional markets- Market Trends (Drivers, Constraints, Opportunities, Threats, Challenges, Investment Opportunities, and recommendations)- Strategic recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations- Competitive landscaping mapping the key common trends- Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent developments- Supply chain trends mapping the latest technological advancementsFor More, Please Visit:We offer wide spectrum of research and consulting services with in-depth knowledge of different industries. We are known for customized research services, consulting services and Full Time Equivalent (FTE) services in the research world. We explore the market trends and draw our insights with valid assessments and analytical views. We use advanced techniques and tools among the quantitative and qualitative methodologies to identify the market trends. Our research reports and publications are routed to help our clients to design their business models and enhance their business growth in the competitive market scenario. We have a strong team with hand-picked consultants including project managers, implementers, industry experts, researchers, research evaluators and analysts with years of experience in delivering the complex projects.STRATISTICS MRC17049 King James Way, Gaithersburg,MD, 20877, USA Luxury SUV Market Future Outlook to 2025: Lincoln, Volkswagen, Lincoln, Volkswagen, Bentley https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1797346&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/report/global-luxury-suv-market-research-report-2018.htm/toc http://www.qyresearchreports.com Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global Luxury SUV Market Research Report 2018 to its huge collection of research reports.In this report, the global Luxury SUV 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 Luxury SUV market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingAudiBMWTeslaToyotaVolvoDaimlerJaguar Land RoverAcuraAlfa RomeoMaseratiPorscheGMCInfinitiLamborghiniGet PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @The study of market segmentations that has been offered with the publication that explores some of the most significant categories of the world Luxury SUV market is deemed significant for the growth of industry participants. Segments that have been analyzed in the publication could be related to product, end use, application, and geography.A group of experienced analysts who have prepared the said report delves deep into the various factors that hinder or fuel the world market for Luxury SUV. It also discovers and mentions the important trends that are emerging in the said market. Cashing in on all of these market data and statistics that have been garnered so far, it has come up with the best course of action for all the stake holders of the market.Table of ContentsGlobal Luxury SUV Market Research Report 20181 Luxury SUV Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Luxury SUV1.2 Luxury SUV Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Luxury SUV Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Luxury SUV Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Full-size Luxury SUVs1.2.4 Mid-size Luxury SUVs1.3 Global Luxury SUV Segment by Application1.3.1 Luxury SUV Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Household1.3.3 Commercial2 Global Luxury SUV Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Luxury SUV Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Luxury SUV Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Luxury SUV Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Luxury SUV Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Luxury SUV Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)3 Global Luxury SUV Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Luxury SUV Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Luxury SUV Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com Global GaN Power Devices Market Research Report 2018 ; Development, Analysis and Overview 2025 https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1617196 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-gan-power-devices-market-research-report-2018-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/global-gan-power-devices-market-research-report-2018-report.html http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketreserch1.blogspot.com Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global GaN Power Devices Market Research Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.In this report, the global GaN Power Devices 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 GaN Power Devices in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Global GaN Power Devices market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingFujitsuToshibaKoninklijke PhilipsTexas InstrumentsEPIGANNTT Advanced TechnologyRF Micro DevicesCree IncorporatedAixtronInternational Quantum Epitaxy (IQE)Mitsubishi ChemicalAZZURO SemiconductorsOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into600VOtherOn 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, includingServer and other IT equipmentsHigh-efficiency and stable power suppliesRapidly expanding HEV/EV devicesView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Table of ContentsGlobal GaN Power Devices Market Research Report 20181 GaN Power Devices Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of GaN Power Devices1.2 GaN Power Devices Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global GaN Power Devices Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global GaN Power Devices Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 600V1.2.4 Other1.3 Global GaN Power Devices Segment by Application1.3.1 GaN Power Devices Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Server and other IT equipments1.3.3 High-efficiency and stable power supplies1.3.4 Rapidly expanding HEV/EV devices1.4 Global GaN Power Devices Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global GaN Power Devices Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2013-2025)2 Global GaN Power Devices Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global GaN Power Devices Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global GaN Power Devices Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global GaN Power Devices Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global GaN Power Devices Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global GaN Power Devices Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers GaN Power Devices Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 GaN Power Devices Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 GaN Power Devices Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 GaN Power Devices Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, ExpansionBrowse Report @3 Global GaN Power Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global GaN Power Devices Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global GaN Power Devices Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global GaN Power Devices Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global GaN Power Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 North America GaN Power Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.6 Europe GaN Power Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.7 China GaN Power Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)4 Global GaN Power Devices Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)4.1 Global GaN Power Devices Consumption by Region (2013-2018)4.2 North America GaN Power Devices Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.3 Europe GaN Power Devices Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.4 China GaN Power Devices Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.5 Japan GaN Power Devices Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on Blogger at: Next Generation Wireless Communication Market by Product, System Type, Installation Type, Vertical & Geography - Global Forecast to 2027 - Research and Markets https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1148 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/next-generation-wireless-communication-market-1148 Global Next Generation Wireless Communication Market Information, by Technology (Wireless LAN, 3G, 4G LTE, 5G), by Application (Consumer Electronics, Telecommunication, Aerospace & Defence, Retail, Automotive, Healthcare) - Forecast 2016-2027Market Scenario:Next generation wireless communication is an advance module of current communication. Wireless communication is an option to eliminate the traditional deployment system where so many wires and systems were required. Next Generation Wireless Communication Market can help to exchange the data with very high speed reduce the time of exchange.Currently. This market has been valued at US HIGH billion which is expected to grow at US HIGH billion by the end of forecasted period. It has been estimated that next generation wireless communication market will register CAGR of HIGH during the forecasted period.Key players: AT&T (U.S.) Huawei (China) Cisco Systems (U.S.) IBM Corporation (U.S.) NEC (Japan) Intel Corporation (U.S.) Netgear Inc. (U.S.) Ericsson (U.S.) ZTE Corporation (China) Qualcomm (U.S.)Get Sample Report @Market Segmentation:Segmentation by Technology: Wireless LAN, Digital TV broadcasting, WiMAX, 3G, 4G LTE, 5G, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth among others.Segmentation by Application: Consumer Electronics, Telecommunication, Aerospace & Defence, Retail, Automotive, Healthcare, and Industrial.Regional Analysis:North America is dominating the market of next generation wireless communication due to the advantage of technological advancement. Countries like US and Canada which falls under the umbrella of developed countries, are leading in the world in terms of technology. Currently, North America holds HIGH of market share which has been valued at US HIGH billion in the year 2015. Europe stands as second biggest market for next generation wireless communication which holds HIGH of market share. Asia-Pacific has emerged as fastest growing market with the CAGR of HIGH. High development of Asia countries is the key factors for the market of next generation wireless communication in Asia-Pacific.Industry News: AT&T has invested more than US $1.3 billion in the wireless and wired network during 2013 to 2015 in St. Louis. In January 2016, Huawei and Cable & Wireless Communications Plc's announced the successful trial of fastest copper-based broadband which reach speed up to 500mbps.The report also covers the brief analysis of Geographical Region includes:Americas North America US CanadaEurope Western Europe Germany France Italy Spain U.K Rest of Western Europe Eastern EuropeAsia Pacific Asia China India Japan South Korea Rest of Asia PacificGet Complete Report @The Middle East & Africa:The report for Global Next Generation Wireless Communication Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario, which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.Study Objective of Next Generation Wireless Communication Market To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast of the various segments and sub-segments of the Global Next Generation Wireless Communication Market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To analyze the Next Generation Wireless Communication 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, Asia, 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 technology, by application and sub-segments. To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market To track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Global NextAbout 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 FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +91 841 198 5042Mail: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Market in Global Industry : Growth, Trends and Application 2025 - Semtec, Neocortec, Qorvo https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1618328 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-internet-of-things-iot-controllers-market-professional-survey-report-2018-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/global-internet-of-things-iot-controllers-market-professional-survey-report-2018-report.html http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketreserch1.blogspot.com Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Market Professional Survey Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers 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, coveringNXP Semiconductor (Freescale)Cypress SemiconductorMicrochip (Atmel)SemtecNeocortecQorvoSilicon LaboratoriesTexas InstrumentsMarvellARMSTMicroelectronicsInfineon TechnologiesTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoWi-Fi IoT ControllersBluetooth IoT ControllersZigBee IoT ControllersOtherBy Application, the market can be split intoHome ApplianceHVAC MonitoringFire/Gas/Leak DetectionRomote ControlsOtherBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Table of ContentsGlobal Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Market Professional Survey Report 20181 Industry Overview of Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers1.1 Definition and Specifications of Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers1.1.1 Definition of Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers1.1.2 Specifications of Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers1.2 Classification of Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers1.2.1 Wi-Fi IoT Controllers1.2.2 Bluetooth IoT Controllers1.2.3 ZigBee IoT Controllers1.2.4 Other1.3 Applications of Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers1.3.1 Home Appliance1.3.2 HVAC Monitoring1.3.3 Fire/Gas/Leak Detection2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Internet of Things (IoT) ControllersBrowse Report @3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Major Manufacturers in 20173.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Major Manufacturers in 20173.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Major Manufacturers in 20173.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Major Manufacturers in 20174 Global Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Overall Market Overview4.1 2013-2018E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2013-2018E Global Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2017 Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)4.3 Sales Analysis4.3.1 2013-2018E Global Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Sales and Growth Rate Analysis4.3.2 2017 Internet of Things (IoT) Controllers Sales Analysis (Company Segment)4.4 Sales Price AnalysisAbout 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: Bioinformatics Market 2018 with Prestigious Players Agilent Technologies, Illumina, Inc., QIAGEN N. V, And Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., Dassault Systemes, QIAGEN and others Forecast to 2022 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2265 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/2265 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/2265 Bioinformatics Market Information, by Application (genomics, chemoinformatics, drug design, transcriptomics, molecular phylogenetics, proteomics, metabolomics and others), by Technology and Services (data warehousing, sequence analysis, sequence manipulation and others), by Sector (medical bioinformatics, animal bioinformatics, agriculture bioinformatics and others) - Forecast to 2022Globally the market for bioinformatics is growing steadily and has a bright future, this market expected to grow at the rate of about 19.8% till 2022 and this has started since 2016.KEY PLAYERS FOR BIOINFORMATICS MARKETAgilent Technologies,Illumina, Inc.,QIAGEN N. V,And Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.,Dassault Systemes,QIAGEN and othersGet PDF Sample of This Report @MARKET SCENARIO FOR BIOINFORMATICS MARKETBioinformatics is the use of information technology in the field of biotechnology for the purpose of data storage, data warehousing and analyzing the DNA sequences. In bioinformatics technology knowledge about various branches is required which includes biology, mathematics, computer science, laws of physics & chemistry along with it most importantly sound knowledge about information technology is required to analyze biotechnological data.GLOBAL BIOINFORMATICS MARKET - REGIONAL ANALYSISOn the regional backgrounds the Americas leads the global market for bioinformatics owing to growing biotechnology sector, increasing healthcare expenditures and presence of the developed technologies within the region. Following, the same trends Europe is second in the market. The Asia Pacific region is the fastest growing region due to the developing economies like India and China which are increasing their healthcare expenditures in the biotechnology sector. According to the Indian Brand Equity Foundation, in 2017, the Indian biotech industry held about 2% share of the global biotech industry and is expected to be valued USD 11.6 billion in 2017. Moreover, the government invested USD 5 billion to develop human capital, infrastructure and research initiatives. Middle East and Africa have the least market share, especially due to the presence of poor economies within the African region. On the hand, Middle East leads the regional market due to the presence of developed economies like Kuwait, Qatar, and others within the region.SEGMENTS FOR BIOINFORMATICS MARKETBioinformatics market has been segmented on the basis of application which comprises of genomics, chemoinformatics, drug design, transcriptomics, molecular phylogenetics, proteomics, metabolomics, DNA sequences and others. On the basis of services and technology the market is segmented into data warehousing, sequence analysis, sequence manipulation and others. On the basis of sector the market is divided into medical bioinformatics, animal bioinformatics, agriculture bioinformatics and others.Get Discount on This Premium Report@BRIEF TOC FOR BIOINFORMATICS MARKETCHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION1.1 DEFINITION1.2 SCOPE OF STUDY1.2.1 RESEARCH OBJECTIVE1.2.2 ASSUMPTIONS & LIMITATIONS1.2.2.1 ASSUMPTIONS1.2.2.2 LIMITATIONS1.3 MARKET STRUCTURECHAPTER 2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY2.1 RESEARCH PROCESS:2.2 PRIMARY RESEARCH2.3 SECONDARY RESEARCHCHAPTER 3. MARKET DYNAMICS3.1 DRIVERS3.2 RESTRAINTS3.3 OPPORTUNITIES3.4 MACROECONOMIC INDICATORSCHAPTER 4. MARKET FACTOR ANALYSIS4.1 PORTERS FIVE FORCES MODEL4.2 BARGAINING POWER OF SUPPLIERS4.3 BARGAINING POWER OF BUYERS4.4 THREAT OF NEW ENTRANTS4.5 THREAT OF SUBSTITUTES4.6 INTENSITY OF RIVALRYCHAPTER 5. GLOBAL BIOINFORMATICS MARKET, BY APPLICATION5.1 GENOMICS5.2 CHEMOINFORMATICS5.3 DRUG DESIGN5.4 TRANSCRIPTOMICS5.5 MOLECULAR PHYLOGENETICS5.6 PROTEOMICS5.7 METABOLOMICS5.8 DNA SEQUENCES5.9 OTHERSLIST OF TABLESTABLE 1 GLOBAL BIOINFORMATICS MARKET, BY APPLICATION, 2013-2022 (USD MILLION)TABLE 2 GLOBAL BIOINFORMATICS MARKET, BY TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICES, 2013-2022 (USD MILLION)TABLE 3 GLOBAL BIOINFORMATICS MARKET, BY SECTOR, 2013-2022 (USD MILLION)TABLE 4 GLOBAL BIOINFORMATICS MARKET, BY REGION, 2013-2022 (USD MILLION)LIST OF FIGURESFIGURE 1 RESEARCH PROCESSFIGURE 2 PORTERS FIVE FORCES MODELFIGURE 3 GLOBAL BIOINFORMATICS MARKET, BY APPLICATIONFIGURE 4 GLOBAL BIOINFORMATICS MARKET, BY TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICESFIGURE 5 GLOBAL BIOINFORMATICS MARKET, BY SECTORFIGURE 6 GLOBAL BIOINFORMATICS MARKET, BY REGIONFIGURE 7 GLOBAL BIOINFORMATICS MARKET: COMPANY SHARE ANALYSIS, 2015 (%)TOC CONTINUED.Ask to Expert Inquire @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 - 411028 Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Global Diode Lasers Market 2018 Share, Trend, Segmentation and Forecast to 2025 Global Diode Lasers Industry https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3189030-global-diode-lasers-market-research-report-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3189030-global-diode-lasers-market-research-report-2018 https://www.linkedin.com/company/wise-guy-research-consultants-pvt-ltd-?trk=biz-companies-cym Global Diode Lasers IndustryNew Study on 2018-2025 Diode Lasers Market Global Key Player, Demand, Growth, Opportunities and Analysis Forecast added to Wise Guy Reports DatabaseThis report studies the global Diode Lasers market status and forecast, categorizes the global Diode Lasers 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 major manufacturers covered in this reportLIMO Lissotschenko Mikrooptik GmbHChangchun New Industries OptoelectronicsJDSUPhotonTec Berlin GmbHSacher LasertechnikDILASIPG Photonics Corporation...Try Sample Report @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 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 intoVisible LaserFar Infrared LaserDynamic Single Mode LaserOn 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, includingLaser CommunicationPrintRadarOtherThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global Diode Lasers capacity, production, value, consumption, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025);Focuses on the key Diode Lasers 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 Diode Lasers 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 StakeholdersDiode Lasers ManufacturersDiode Lasers Distributors/Traders/WholesalersDiode Lasers 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 Diode Lasers market, by end-use.Detailed analysis and profiles of additional market players.Some points from table of content:Global Diode Lasers Market Research Report 20181 Diode Lasers Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Diode Lasers1.2 Diode Lasers Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Diode Lasers Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Diode Lasers Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Visible Laser1.2.4 Far Infrared Laser1.2.5 Dynamic Single Mode Laser1.3 Global Diode Lasers Segment by Application1.3.1 Diode Lasers Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Laser Communication1.3.3 Print1.3.4 Radar1.3.5 Other1.4 Global Diode Lasers Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Diode Lasers 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 Diode Lasers (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Diode Lasers Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Diode Lasers Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)For Detailed Reading Please visit WiseGuy Reports @2 Global Diode Lasers Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Diode Lasers Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Diode Lasers Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Diode Lasers Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Diode Lasers Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Diode Lasers Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Diode Lasers Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Diode Lasers Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Diode Lasers Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Diode Lasers Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion3 Global Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global Diode Lasers Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global Diode Lasers Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global Diode Lasers Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 North America Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.6 Europe Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.7 China Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.8 Japan Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)4 Global Diode Lasers Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)4.1 Global Diode Lasers Consumption by Region (2013-2018)4.2 North America Diode Lasers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.3 Europe Diode Lasers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.4 China Diode Lasers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.5 Japan Diode Lasers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)5 Global Diode Lasers Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type5.1 Global Diode Lasers Production and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.2 Global Diode Lasers Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.3 Global Diode Lasers Price by Type (2013-2018)5.4 Global Diode Lasers Production Growth by Type (2013-2018)6 Global Diode Lasers Market Analysis by Application6.1 Global Diode Lasers Consumption and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)6.2 Global Diode Lasers Consumption Growth Rate by Application (2013-2018)6.3 Market Drivers and Opportunities6.3.1 Potential Applications6.3.2 Emerging Markets/Countries7 Global Diode Lasers Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 LIMO Lissotschenko Mikrooptik GmbH7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Diode Lasers Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 LIMO Lissotschenko Mikrooptik GmbH Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Changchun New Industries Optoelectronics7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Diode Lasers Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 Changchun New Industries Optoelectronics Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 JDSU7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Diode Lasers Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 JDSU Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.4 PhotonTec Berlin GmbH7.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.4.2 Diode Lasers Product Category, Application and Specification7.4.2.1 Product A7.4.2.2 Product B7.4.3 PhotonTec Berlin GmbH Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.5 Sacher Lasertechnik7.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.5.2 Diode Lasers Product Category, Application and Specification7.5.2.1 Product A7.5.2.2 Product B7.5.3 Sacher Lasertechnik Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.6 DILAS7.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.6.2 Diode Lasers Product Category, Application and Specification7.6.2.1 Product A7.6.2.2 Product B7.6.3 DILAS Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.6.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.7 IPG Photonics Corporation7.7.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.7.2 Diode Lasers Product Category, Application and Specification7.7.2.1 Product A7.7.2.2 Product B7.7.3 IPG Photonics Corporation Diode Lasers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.7.4 Main Business/Business Overview...8 Diode Lasers Manufacturing Cost Analysis8.1 Diode Lasers Key Raw Materials Analysis8.1.1 Key Raw Materials8.1.2 Price Trend of Key Raw Materials8.1.3 Key Suppliers of Raw Materials8.1.4 Market Concentration Rate of Raw Materials8.2 Proportion of Manufacturing Cost Structure8.2.1 Raw Materials8.2.2 Labor Cost8.2.3 Manufacturing Expenses8.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Diode LasersContinued.For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comAbout UsWise 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 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.Contact Us:Norah Trent+1 646 845 9349 / +44 208 133 9349Follow on LinkedIn: Router Market Will Touch a New Level in Upcoming Year : Netgear, Asus, TP-Link, Google https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1805076&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/report/2018-2025-router-report-on-global-and-united-states-market-status-and-forecast-by-players-types-and-applications.htm/toc http://www.qyresearchreports.com Qyresearchreports include new market research report 2018-2025 Router Report on Global and United States Market, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications to its huge collection of research reports.The global Router market is valued at XX million USD in 2017 and is expected to reach XX million USD by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.The major players in global and United States market, includingLinksysNetgearAsusTP-LinkGoogleTRENDnetPortalSynologyGet PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @The market share analysis of the topnotch market players that are operating in the international Router market has been offered in the said market research report so as to assist the readers to gain a deep understanding of their status and position in the industry as a whole. Making use of the analysis, companies could plan their powerful and effective strategies that would strengthen their position in the market.Readers have been anticipated to explore the probable opportunities in different regions of the world market for Router with the assistance of regional analysis as provided in the publication. Each of the regions has been carefully researched by the analysts.Table of Contents2018-2025 Router Report on Global and United States Market, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications1 Methodology and Data Source1.1 Methodology/Research Approach1.1.1 Research Programs/Design1.1.2 Market Size Estimation1.1.3 Market Breakdown and Data Triangulation1.2 Data Source1.2.1 Secondary Sources1.2.2 Primary Sources1.3 Disclaimer2 Router Market Overview2.1 Router Product Overview2.2 Router Market Segment by Type2.2.1 Wired Router2.2.2 Wireless Router2.2.3 Virtual Router2.3 Global Router Product Segment by Type2.3.1 Global Router Sales (K Units) and Growth (%) by Type (2013, 2017 and 2025)2.3.2 Global Router Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Type (2013-2018)3 Router Application/End Users3.1 Router Segment by Application/End Users3.1.1 Home Use3.1.2 Office Use3.1.3 Industrial Use3.2 Global Router Product Segment by Application3.2.1 Global Router Sales (K Units) and CGAR (%) by Application (2013, 2017 and 2025)3.2.2 Global Router Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Application (2013-2018)4 Router Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1 Global Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1.1 Global Router Market Size and CAGR by Regions (2013, 2017 and 2025)4.2 Global Router Sales and Revenue by Regions4.2.1 Global Router Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Regions (2013-2018)4.2.2 Global Router Revenue (Million USD) and Market Share (%) by Regions (2013-2018)4.2.3 Global Router Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%)(2013-2018)Read Complete Table of Content @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 Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market By Services,Assets Type,Solutions,End-Users,Applications,Regions Forecasts to 2022 Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Industry https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3203625-global-testing-inspection-and-certification-tic-market-report-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3203625-global-testing-inspection-and-certification-tic-market-report-2018 WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market By Services,Assets Type,Solutions,End-Users,Applications,Regions Forecasts to 2022.The Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) industry has also suffered a certain impact, but still maintained a relatively optimistic growth, the past four years, Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) market size to maintain the average annual growth rate of 5.26% from 158420 million $ in 2014 to 184770 million $ in 2017, The analysts believe that in the next few years, Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) market size will be further expanded, we expect that by 2022, The market size of the Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) will reach 236600 million $.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comThis Report covers the manufacturers data, including: shipment, price, revenue, gross profit, interview record, business distribution etc., these data help the consumer know about the competitors better. This report also covers all the regions and countries of the world, which shows a regional development status, including market size, volume and value, as well as price data.Besides, the report also covers segment data, including: type segment, industry segment, channel segment etc. cover different segment market size, both volume and value. Also cover different industries clients information, which is very important for the manufacturers.Sections:-Section 1: FreeDefinitionSection (2 3): 1200 USDManufacturer DetailSgsBureau VeritasIntertekDekraEurofins ScientificTuv SudDnv GlTuv RheinlandApplusAlsTuv NordLloydS RegisterMistrasElement Materials TechnologyUlSection 4: 900 USDRegion SegmentationNorth America Country (United States, Canada)South AmericaAsia Country (China, Japan, India, Korea)Europe Country (Germany, UK, France, Italy)Other Country (Middle East, Africa, GCC)Continued..Report Details @Table Of Contents Major Key PointsSection 1 Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Product DefinitionSection 2 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Manufacturer Share and Market Overview2.1 Global Manufacturer Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Shipments2.2 Global Manufacturer Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Revenue2.3 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market OverviewSection 3 Manufacturer Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Introduction3.1 Sgs Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Introduction3.1.1 Sgs Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Shipments, Price, Revenue and Gross profit 2014-20173.1.2 Sgs Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Distribution by Region3.1.3 Sgs Interview Record3.1.4 Sgs Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Profile3.1.5 Sgs Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Product Specification3.2 Bureau Veritas Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Introduction3.2.1 Bureau Veritas Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Shipments, Price, Revenue and Gross profit 2014-20173.2.2 Bureau Veritas Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Distribution by Region3.2.3 Interview Record3.2.4 Bureau Veritas Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Overview3.2.5 Bureau Veritas Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Product Specification3.3 Intertek Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Introduction3.3.1 Intertek Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Shipments, Price, Revenue and Gross profit 2014-20173.3.2 Intertek Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Distribution by Region3.3.3 Interview Record3.3.4 Intertek Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Overview3.3.5 Intertek Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Product Specification3.4 Dekra Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Introduction3.5 Eurofins Scientific Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business Introduction3.6 Tuv Sud Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Business IntroductionSection 4 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Region Level)4.1 North America Country4.1.1 United States Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.1.2 Canada Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.2 South America Country4.2.1 South America Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.3 Asia Country4.3.1 China Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.3.2 Japan Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.3.3 India Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.3.4 Korea Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.4 Europe Country4.4.1 Germany Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.4.2 UK Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.4.3 France Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.4.4 Italy Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.4.5 Europe Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.5 Other Country and Region4.5.1 Middle East Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.5.2 Africa Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.5.3 GCC Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.6 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Region Level) Analysis 2014-20174.7 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Region Level) AnalysisSection 5 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Product Type Level)5.1 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Product Type Level) Market Size 2014-20175.2 Different Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Product Type Price 2014-20175.3 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Product Type Level) AnalysisSection 6 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Industry Level)6.1 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Industry Level) Market Size 2014-20176.2 Different Industry Price 2014-20176.3 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Industry Level) AnalysisSection 7 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Channel Level)7.1 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Channel Level) Sales Volume and Share 2014-20177.2 Global Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) Market Segmentation (Channel Level) AnalysisContinued..For 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. Water Filtration Systems 2013 Global Market Key Players GE, 3M, Culligan, Pentair, Brita, EcoWater, quasana, Honerwell, Watts, Toray, Midea, Qinyuan - Analysis and Forecast to 2023 Water Filtration Systems , Water Filtration Systems Market, Water Filtration Systems Market Growth, Presses Release, Water Filtrat https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3023348-water-filtration-systems-global-market-status-and-trend-report-2013-2023 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3023348-water-filtration-systems-global-market-status-and-trend-report-2013-2023 http://www.wiseguyreports.com Description :Water Filtration Systems-Global Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023 offers a comprehensive analysis on Water Filtration Systems industry, standing on the readers perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information. Key questions answered by this report include:Worldwide and Regional Market Size of Water Filtration Systems 2013-2017, and development forecast 2018-2023Main manufacturers/suppliers of Water Filtration Systems worldwide, with company and product introduction, position in the Water Filtration Systems marketMarket status and development trend of Water Filtration Systems by types and applicationsCost and profit status of Water Filtration Systems, and marketing statusMarket growth drivers and challengesRequest For sample Report @The report segments the global Water Filtration Systems market as:Global Water Filtration Systems Market: Regional Segment Analysis (Regional Production Volume, Consumption Volume, Revenue and Growth Rate 2013-2023):North AmericaEuropeChinaJapanRest APACLatin AmericaGlobal Water Filtration Systems Market: Type Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume, Average Price, Revenue, Market Share and Trend 2013-2023):Whole-House Water Filtration SystemsPoint-of-Use Water Filtration SystemsGlobal Water Filtration Systems Market: Application Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume and Market Share 2013-2023; Downstream Customers and Market Analysis)IndustrialMunicipalHousehold Water TreatmentGlobal Water Filtration Systems Market: Manufacturers Segment Analysis (Company and Product introduction, Water Filtration Systems Sales Volume, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin):GE3MCulliganPentairBritaEcoWaterquasanaHonerwellWattsTorayMideaQinyuanGreeHaierJoyoungRoyalstarComplete Report Details @Table Of Content :Chapter 1 Overview of Water Filtration Systems1.1 Definition of Water Filtration Systems in This Report1.2 Commercial Types of Water Filtration Systems1.2.1 Whole-House Water Filtration Systems1.2.2 Point-of-Use Water Filtration Systems1.3 Downstream Application of Water Filtration Systems1.3.1 Industrial1.3.2 Municipal1.3.3 Household Water Treatment1.4 Development History of Water Filtration Systems1.5 Market Status and Trend of Water Filtration Systems 2013-20231.5.1 Global Water Filtration Systems Market Status and Trend 2013-20231.5.2 Regional Water Filtration Systems Market Status and Trend 2013-2023Chapter 2 Global Market Status and Forecast by Regions2.1 Market Development of Water Filtration Systems 2013-20172.2 Production Market of Water Filtration Systems by Regions2.2.1 Production Volume of Water Filtration Systems by Regions2.2.2 Production Value of Water Filtration Systems by Regions2.3 Demand Market of Water Filtration Systems by Regions2.4 Production and Demand Status of Water Filtration Systems by Regions2.4.1 Production and Demand Status of Water Filtration Systems by Regions 2013-20172.4.2 Import and Export Status of Water Filtration Systems by Regions 2013-2017Chapter 3 Global Market Status and Forecast by Types3.1 Production Volume of Water Filtration Systems by Types3.2 Production Value of Water Filtration Systems by Types3.3 Market Forecast of Water Filtration Systems by TypesChapter 4 Global Market Status and Forecast by Downstream Industry4.1 Demand Volume of Water Filtration Systems by Downstream Industry4.2 Market Forecast of Water Filtration Systems by Downstream IndustryChapter 5 Market Driving Factor Analysis of Water Filtration Systems5.1 Global Economy Situation and Trend Overview5.2 Water Filtration Systems Downstream Industry Situation and Trend OverviewChapter 6 Water Filtration Systems Market Competition Status by Major Manufacturers6.1 Production Volume of Water Filtration Systems by Major Manufacturers6.2 Production Value of Water Filtration Systems by Major Manufacturers6.3 Basic Information of Water Filtration Systems by Major Manufacturers6.3.1 Headquarters Location and Established Time of Water Filtration Systems Major Manufacturer6.3.2 Employees and Revenue Level of Water Filtration Systems Major Manufacturer6.4 Market Competition News and Trend6.4.1 Merger, Consolidation or Acquisition News6.4.2 Investment or Disinvestment News6.4.3 New Product Development and LaunchChapter 7 Water Filtration Systems Major Manufacturers Introduction and Market Data7.1 GE7.1.1 Company profile7.1.2 Representative Water Filtration Systems Product7.1.3 Water Filtration Systems Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin of GE7.2 3M7.2.1 Company profile7.2.2 Representative Water Filtration Systems Product7.2.3 Water Filtration Systems Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin of 3M7.3 Culligan7.3.1 Company profile7.3.2 Representative Water Filtration Systems Product7.3.3 Water Filtration Systems Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin of Culligan7.4 Pentair7.4.1 Company profile7.4.2 Representative Water Filtration Systems Product7.4.3 Water Filtration Systems Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin of Pentair7.5 Brita7.5.1 Company profile7.5.2 Representative Water Filtration Systems Product7.5.3 Water Filtration Systems Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin of BritaContinued.CONTACT US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe.Office No.528,Amanora Chambers,Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar,Pune-411028. Child Insurance: Market 2018 Global Analysis By Key Players AXA, Nippon Life Insurance, American Intl. Group, Aviva, Assicurazioni Generali, Cardinal Health, State Farm Insurance, Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Qy Research Groups https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/request-sample/962757 https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/send-an-enquiry/962757 https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/check-discount/962757 Child Insurance Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the Child Insurance industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global Child Insurance market with detailed market segmentation by product/application and geography. The global Child Insurance market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Child Insurance players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.Child Insurance Market Players: AXA Nippon Life Insurance American Intl. Group Aviva Assicurazioni Generali Cardinal Health State Farm Insurance Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Munich Re Group Zurich Financial Services Prudential Asahi Mutual Life Insurance Sumitomo Life Insurance MetLife Allstate Aegon Prudential Financial New York Life Insurance Meiji Life Insurance Aetna TIAA-CREF Mitsui Mutual Life Insurance Royal & Sun Alliance Swiss Reinsurance CNP Assurances CPIC PingAn Mass. Mutual Life Ins. CignaGet Sample Copy of This Report Now @Market segment by Application, Child Insurance can be split into Home Hospital School OtherMajor 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 Child Insurance market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall Child Insurance 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 @Also, key Child Insurance 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 Child Insurance 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 @Contact Us:Call: +1-888-236-2744Email: sales@qyresearchgroups.comAbout Us:QY 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. Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) Market Qualitative Insights on Growth 2025 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=B&rep_id=108 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=T&rep_id=108 https://www.tmrresearch.com/methyltriethoxysilane-market Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) Market: OverviewMethyltriethoxysilane is considered as an organic compound of silicon, which belongs to the organosilicon compound class. Methyltriethoxysilane is manufactured at an industrial scale from ethanol and trimethylsilyl chloride. The increasing use of methyltriethoxysilane is anticipated to encourage the growth of the overall market in the next few years. The key players operating in the global methyltriethoxysilane market are emphasizing on the expansion of the application base, which is likely to fuel the markets growth in the coming years.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Among the regional segments, the developing economies in the methyltriethoxysilane market are projected to grow at a substantial rate in the coming years. The high pace of industrialization and the increasing construction activities are estimated to accelerate the growth of the overall market. The rising use of methyltriethoxysilane as water repellants, sealants, stabilizing and coupling agents in the chemical industry is one of the major factors anticipated to supplement the markets growth in the near future. The high performing characteristics offered by methyltriethoxysilane is likely to contribute significantly towards the development of the overall market in the next few years.Furthermore, several new entrants are anticipated to enter the global methyltriethoxysilane market and enhance the competitive scenario of the market in the near future. Advancements in technology and the expansion of the product portfolio, thanks to the rising research and development activities are estimated to encourage the growth of the global methyltriethoxysilane market. These players are predicted to focus on emerging economies, which are expected to help them in enhancing their market presence and attain a leading position across the globe.Request TOC of the Report @Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) Market: General OutlineMethyltriethoxysilane (MTES) (CH3Si(OCH2CH3)3 ) is an organic compound of silicon, belonging to a class of organosilicon compounds known as silanes, which are saturated hydrosilicones and are generally stable due to their high saturation. Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) appears to be a colorless, clear, free flowing liquid, and readily hydrolyzes when mixed with water. The hydrolysis of methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) increases in basic solutions and reduces in acidic solutions. It is produced at an industrial scale from trimethylsilyl chloride and ethanol. It has a stable tetrahedral molecular structure, with a low flashpoint that readily catches fire at temperatures beyond 23 to 25 degrees Celsius. Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) is usually supplied at purity levels higher than 98% in the market, and is classified as a toxic chemical and may cause harm when exposed.Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) Market: Inclusive InsightsSilane compounds are commonly used as sealants, water repellents, coupling and stabilizing agents in the chemical industry. Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) is primarily used as a cross-linking agent for curing of silicone rubber polymers at room temperature, and is also used as coupling agents for glass fibers and silicon oxide. It also acts as a strengthening agent, while treating and coating of plastic materials, and is widely used in polymer industry. The stability of methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) comes in handy for sol-gel systems, and acts as a chain protecting agent against water and polymerizing agents.Due to its high performing characteristics, silianes are predominantly used in the polymer industry for manufacturing polysiloxanes. It can be applied as sealants for caulking, used for insulating and sealing in construction industry, and act as semiconductors for electronics among others. The market is therefore expected to grow in the coming years. Demand growth is expected to be driven primarily with the increase of end use industries of methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) including construction, polymer, and electronic industries. The market growth is likely to be affected by the availability of substitutes and toxicity of the chemical. On the other hand, the prospective market opportunity is set to increase with new application of polymer manufacture and electronic products among others.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) Market: Regional AnalysisPolymer, construction, and electronics industries are the end users of methyltriethoxysilane (MTES), and due to its high demand in Asia Pacific, the region accounts for growing number of consumers. Industrial economies namely, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand are the main consumers of methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) for its usage in the manufacture of various plastics and coating materials.Two of the fastest growing industrial economies of Asia, China and India are the rapidly growing market for polymer industry, and in turn is responsible for driving the demand for methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) and other silanes. Cheap labor availability, land, and comparatively lenient norms and regulations against chemicals, have led several market players to establish their production facilities in Asia. The demand is high for methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) in North America due to its heavy usage in chemical industry, requirement of coatings for plastics and sealants for construction industry, making the region another key market for methyltriethoxysilane (MTES). In due course of time, the demand for methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) is likely to rise in Brazil, South Africa, and the Middle East.Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) Market: Key Market PlayersThe key players of the marmethyltriethoxysilane (MTES) market are: Alfa Aesar (Johnson Matthey Group Company), Asia Silicones Association Ltd., BRB International BV, and Wynca Chemicals AG.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.Contact:TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.com Fiber Optic Test Equipment (FOTE) Market Industry Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1361143 https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=1361143 https://www.researchmoz.us/fiber-optic-test-equipment-fote-market-global-industry-analysis-size-share-growth-trends-and-forecast-2016-2024-report.html http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketreserch1.blogspot.com Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Fiber Optic Test Equipment (FOTE) Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024" to its huge collection of research reports.Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE) are used for the function of cleaning and inspection operation. Moreover, they also help with the troubleshooting and comprises of testers such as certification testers, advanced optical time-domain reflectometers (OTDR) testers and verification testers. These testers are used across various industry verticals such as oil and gas, defense and military and telecom among others. The transfer of data is very critical as far as business operations are concerned. It is useful in the designing, building and development of business strategies. The loss of signal is inevitable when a signal is sent through optical fibers. There might be some losses in the transmission as a result of the coupling of output signals and input signals. Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE) are very effective to characterize and measure the physical attributes of light, which is a very important aspect in the fiber optic networks.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The need for higher bandwidth is expected to rise in the near future and coupled with the growing demand for FTTH, the market for Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE) is expected to grow significantly over the forecast period from 2016 to 2024. Moreover the emergence of newer technologies and next generation networks is also expected to impact the growth of the Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE) maket positively. Furthermore, fiber optic communication systems have brought a revolution in the telecommunication industry and are expected to be the future of the telecom and network.The development of broadband infrastructure across various countries is driving the growth of the Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE) market. Another important factor contributing to the growth of the Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE) market is the growing demand for faster and high performance data transfers. The transfer of data through fiber optic is considered to be more cost effective. The use of digital technologies is on the rise and in particular high-definition electronic products require a greater bandwidth in case of both upstream and downstream applications. The expansion in the deployment of FTTX is further expected to fuel the demand for Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE). A growing number of multimedia and business services in this regard is contributing to the growth of the market.Make An Enquiry @Despite the various benefits associated the Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE), there are few challenges which is hampering the growth of the market. The lack of skilled technicians is one of main restraints impacting the growth of the market. It is important for the technicians to keep pace with the ever changing technologies. Moreover, high maintenance costs coupled with high initial investment are other restraints existing in the Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE) market.As per trends it has been observed that, the various vendors of test equipments are in an intense completion to keep the price of their product low and at the same time enhance the performance of product. Moreover, the vendors are also focusing on providing technical support and specialized customer service to stay ahead in the competition.The Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE) market on the basis of product can be segmented into; OSA, DWDM, OTDR, OLS, OPM, OLTS AND RFTS.Browse Report @On the basis of end user, the Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE) market can be categorized into; oil & gas, cable television, telecom and broadband, private data network and military and aerospace among others.Geographically, the Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE) market can be segmented into five regions, namely, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa and Latin America.Some of the key players operating in the Fiber Optic Test Equipments (FOTE) market are Anritsu, Agilent Technologies, Fluke, EXFO, JDS Uniphase, Corning, Keysight Technologies, Tektronix, Kingfisher International, okogawa Electric Corporation and Exfiber Optical Technologies among others.About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on Blogger at: Structural Core Market by Manufacturers,Types,Regions and Applications Research Report Forecast to 2022 Structural Core 2018 Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3203597-global-structural-core-market-report-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3203597-global-structural-core-market-report-2018 WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On Structural Core Market by Manufacturers,Types,Regions and Applications Research Report Forecast to 2022.The Structural Core industry has also suffered a certain impact, but still maintained a relatively optimistic growth, the past four years, Structural Core market size to maintain the average annual growth rate of 8.81% from 1180 million $ in 2014 to 1520 million $ in 2017, The analysts believe that in the next few years, Structural Core market size will be further expanded, we expect that by 2022, The market size of the Structural Core will reach 2320 million $.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comThis Report covers the manufacturers data, including: shipment, price, revenue, gross profit, interview record, business distribution etc., these data help the consumer know about the competitors better. This report also covers all the regions and countries of the world, which shows a regional development status, including market size, volume and value, as well as price data.Besides, the report also covers segment data, including: type segment, industry segment, channel segment etc. cover different segment market size, both volume and value. Also cover different industries clients information, which is very important for the manufacturers.Sections:-Section 1: FreeDefinitionSection (2 3): 1200 USDManufacturer DetailDiab GroupEvonik IndustriesGurit HoldingSchweiter TechnologiesHexcel CorporationArmacell InternationalChangzhou Tiansheng New Materials Co. Ltd.The Gill CorporationEuro-CompositesPlascoreSabicBasfCoreliteCore CompositesI-Core CompositesAcp CompositesCarbon Core CorpMatrix Composite Materials CompanyHonicel GroupHoneyliteContinued..Report Details @Table Of Contents Major Key PointsSection 1 Structural Core Product DefinitionSection 2 Global Structural Core Market Manufacturer Share and Market Overview2.1 Global Manufacturer Structural Core Shipments2.2 Global Manufacturer Structural Core Business Revenue2.3 Global Structural Core Market OverviewSection 3 Manufacturer Structural Core Business Introduction3.1 Diab Group Structural Core Business Introduction3.1.1 Diab Group Structural Core Shipments, Price, Revenue and Gross profit 2014-20173.1.2 Diab Group Structural Core Business Distribution by Region3.1.3 Diab Group Interview Record3.1.4 Diab Group Structural Core Business Profile3.1.5 Diab Group Structural Core Product Specification3.2 Evonik Industries Structural Core Business Introduction3.2.1 Evonik Industries Structural Core Shipments, Price, Revenue and Gross profit 2014-20173.2.2 Evonik Industries Structural Core Business Distribution by Region3.2.3 Interview Record3.2.4 Evonik Industries Structural Core Business Overview3.2.5 Evonik Industries Structural Core Product Specification3.3 Gurit Holding Structural Core Business Introduction3.3.1 Gurit Holding Structural Core Shipments, Price, Revenue and Gross profit 2014-20173.3.2 Gurit Holding Structural Core Business Distribution by Region3.3.3 Interview Record3.3.4 Gurit Holding Structural Core Business Overview3.3.5 Gurit Holding Structural Core Product Specification3.4 Schweiter Technologies Structural Core Business Introduction3.5 Hexcel Corporation Structural Core Business Introduction3.6 Armacell International Structural Core Business IntroductionSection 4 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Region Level)4.1 North America Country4.1.1 United States Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.1.2 Canada Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.2 South America Country4.2.1 South America Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.3 Asia Country4.3.1 China Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.3.2 Japan Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.3.3 India Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.3.4 Korea Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.4 Europe Country4.4.1 Germany Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.4.2 UK Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.4.3 France Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.4.4 Italy Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.4.5 Europe Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.5 Other Country and Region4.5.1 Middle East Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.5.2 Africa Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.5.3 GCC Structural Core Market Size and Price Analysis 2014-20174.6 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Region Level) Analysis 2014-20174.7 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Region Level) AnalysisSection 5 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Product Type Level)5.1 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Product Type Level) Market Size 2014-20175.2 Different Structural Core Product Type Price 2014-20175.3 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Product Type Level) AnalysisSection 6 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Industry Level)6.1 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Industry Level) Market Size 2014-20176.2 Different Industry Price 2014-20176.3 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Industry Level) AnalysisSection 7 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Channel Level)7.1 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Channel Level) Sales Volume and Share 2014-20177.2 Global Structural Core Market Segmentation (Channel Level) AnalysisContinued..For 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. Global Spirulina Market 2018 Key Players: Cyanotech Corporation, DIC Lifetech Co., Ltd., Chr. Hansen Holding A/S, GNC Holdings, Inc. and DDW Colour. Spirulina Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3204434-global-spirulina-market-by-geography-north-america-asia https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3204434-global-spirulina-market-by-geography-north-america-asia Spirulina Market:WiseGuyReports.com adds Spirulina Market 2018 Global Analysis, Growth, Trends and Opportunities Research Report Forecasting to 2024reports to its database.Executive SummarySpirulina is a natural blue-green colored micro-algae. It is one of the oldest life forms on Earth, with existence over millions of years. Naturally growing Spirulina is generally found in high alkaline lakes. It has been endowed with ability to withstand harsh climatic conditions, and gets temporarily dormant in the case of unfavorable weather conditions. It is a super food enriched with vitamins, proteins, antioxidants and other nutrients. It is powerhouse of protein with content of 50-70% by weight. As a result of this, Spirulina has gained considerable popularity in human health food industry as nutritional supplement, natural food colorant, fertilized and as animal feed supplement. In addition to this, various new application areas of Spirulina have been gradually emerging, such as use in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, biofuel, etc.Global Spirulina market has been growing at a meteoric rate owing to its use as natural food colorant, growing affinity for super foods, demand for alternative plant protein, prevalence of malnutrition, government initiatives pertaining to production of Spirulina and use in animal husbandry. However, factors restraining growth of the industry includes high dependence of Spirulina on climatic conditions, lower stability of food color and need to adhere to food color regulation.The report Global Spirulina Market (By Geography: North America, Asia Pacific & Europe) Market Outlook 2024 provides information on the current scenario, detailed market outlook of the global Spirulina market with detailed analysis of regions such as North America, Asia Pacific (China, Japan & India) & European market. Future forecasts of Spirulina market overall and across various sub-segments till 2024 is provided in the report. Furthermore, major industry players have been prudently analysed in the competitive landscape section of the report in order to provide key comparative insights.Major industry players operating in the global Spirulina market include Cyanotech Corporation, DIC Lifetech Co., Ltd., Chr. Hansen Holding A/S, GNC Holdings, Inc. and DDW Colour. These players are profiled herein based on attributes such as business overview, product segments and financial analysis. It also compiles performance comparison of aforementioned companies and other leading companies in the segment based on various parameters in the competitive landscape section. In totality, the report provides detailed market analysis, with relevant forecasted data supported by key market dynamics. This information will be helpful in evaluating opportunities in global Spirulina market.Request Sample Report @Table of Contents1. Executive Summary2. Research Methodology3. Spirulina Market3.1 Overview3.1.1 Biochemical Composition3.1.2 Benefits of Spirulina3.2 Applications of Spirulina3.3 Production Process4. Market Analysis4.1 Market Sizing4.1.1 Market Size by Value (Actual & Forecasted)4.1.2 Market Size by Volume (Actual & Forecasted)4.2 Market Share Analysis4.2.1 Market Share by Composition4.2.2 Market Share by Product Form4.2.3 Market Share by Application4.2.5 Market Share by Sales Channel4.2.6 Market Share by Region5. Regional Analysis5.1 North America5.1.1 Market Size by Value (Actual & Forecasted)5.2 Asia Pacific5.2.1 Market Size by Value (Actual & Forecasted)5.2.2 China5.2.3 Japan5.2.4 India5.3 Europe5.3.1 Market Size by Value (Actual & Forecasted)6. Market Dynamics6.1 Industry Trends & Development6.1.1 Biofuel Production using Spirulina6.1.2 Spirulina Production Using Photo Bio Reactors (PBR)6.1.4 Used as Nutraceutical Ingredient6.1.5 Algae Bioplastics6.2 Growth Drivers6.2.1 High Demand for Natural Food Colors6.2.2 Growing Affinity for Superfoods6.2.3 Demand for Alternative Plant Protein6.2.4 Prevalence of Malnutrition6.2.5 Government Impetus6.2.7 Use in Animal Husbandry6.3 Challenges6.3.1 Dependent on Climatic Conditions6.3.2 Lower Stability of Color6.3.3 Adhere to Food Color Regulation7. Competitive Landscape8. Company Profiles8.1 Cyanotech Corporation8.2 DIC Lifetech Co., Ltd.8.3 Chr. Hansen Holding A/S8.4 GNC Holdings, Inc.8.5 DDW ColourContinuousFor 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 Cutting Equipment, Accessories, and Consumables Market Upcoming Global Challenges 2025 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=B&rep_id=49 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=T&rep_id=49 https://www.tmrresearch.com/cutting-equipment-accessories-consumables-market Global Cutting Equipment, Accessories, and Consumables Market: SnapshotThe global cutting equipment, accessories, and consumables market is being majorly boosted by demand in Asia Pacific and from end-use sectors such as residential, commercial, institutional, infrastructure, industrial, and marine.Among the different types of consumables, the shielding gases and oxy-fuel gases currently dominate the market and are forecasted to gain maximum market share in the near future owing to increasing demand for argon gas by the industries to meet the demand.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The various types of technologies leveraged in the market are carbon arc cutting, oxy-fuel cutting, plasma cutting, laser cutting, and water jet cutting. Powered by robust demand from developing economies such as India and China, the plasma cutting technology is anticipated to record maximum growth rate. It will likely be trailed by the laser cutting segment.From a geographical perspective, Asia Pacific spearheads the global market for cutting equipment, accessories, and consumables and is projected to witness healthy growth in the near future as well. This is mainly on account of its large population base and growing demands for better residential, commercial, institutional, and infrastructure spaces.Illinois Tool Works Inc., Colfax Corporation., Lincoln Electric Company, Air Liquide, and the Linde group are to name a few key players in the global market for cutting equipment, accessories, and consumables. Other prominent companies operating in the market are Muller, GCE holding AB, Messer group, Matheson tri-gas Inc., Fronius international GMBH, and Bug-O, Gentec. Currently astute companies are trying to come with cost-effective technologies to outsmart one another and capture greater market share.Global Cutting Equipment, Accessories, and Consumables Market: General OutlineCutting equipment are at the backbone of any manufacturing industry, and the related accessories and consumables are frequently required in order to maintain consistent production. Some of the common cutting equipment are handheld and mechanized plasma cutters, high definition plasma cutters, CNC plasma cutting tables, retrofit solutions, pipe and tube cutting machines, structural steel fabrication, shape cutting controllers, and plasma torch consumables. Due to the rising population across the world, which is not only escalating the demand from manufacturing industry but also encouraging the set-up of new production outlets and in turn fueling the demand for cutting equipment, accessories, and consumables.Request TOC of the Report @This report on global cutting equipment, accessories, and consumables market is a comprehensive analysis of all the factors that are expected to influence the growth rate during the forecast period of 2017 to 2025. The report segments this market by technology, equipment, accessories and consumables, and geography. By technology, the market can be divided into carbon arc cutting, plasma cutting, laser cutting, oxy-fuel cutting, and water jet cutting. Bu equipment, the market is segmented into manual cutting equipment and mechanized cutting equipment. The segment of manual cutting equipment is further sub-segmented into oxy-fuel cutting, plasma cutting, gouging, portable cutting and, air or fuel torches. The segment of mechanized cutting equipment can be sub-segmented into oxy-fuel, plasma cutting, cutting tables, and cutting machines. By accessories, the market is divided into gas regulators, gas filters, gas flow meters, gas manifolds, gas panels, check valves, flow controllers, and gas cabinets. By consumables, the market is segmented into shielding gases and oxy-fuel gases.Global Cutting Equipment, Accessories, and Consumables Market: Trends and ProspectsThe credits the growing demand from the end-use industries such as commercial, residential, institutional, infrastructure, and marine are the prominent factor fueling the demand in global cutting equipment, accessories, and consumables market. Moreover, rapid industrialization, especially in the emerging economies in Asia Pacific such as India and China, is enticing players in this market to stretch their production capacity and meet the demand. The report anticipates consumables such as shielding gases and oxy-fuel gases to gain maximum traction over the period of next few years, due to the rising demand for argon gas by the industries. Also, plasma cutting as a technology is projected for robust growth rate, particularly from China and India, which are ranked as the first and second most lucrative country-wise market in the global cutting equipment, accessories, and consumables market.Global Cutting Equipment, Accessories, and Consumables Market: Key RegionsGeographically, the report studies the regional markets of North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and rest of the world, and rates Asia Pacific as the most lucrative market due to its vast population. The developed region of North America is rated as the second most prominent region.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Colfax Corporation., Lincoln Electric Company, Illinois Tool Works Inc., Air Liquide, and the Linde group are identified as the key players in the global cutting equipment, accessories, and consumables market. Other prominent players in this market identified by the report include GCE holding AB, Messer group, Fronius international GMBH, Matheson tri-gas Inc., Bug-O, Gentec, and Muller.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 Salad Dressing Market Analysis 2018 (By Segment, Key Players and Applications) and Forecasts to 2025 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3189061-global-salad-dressing-market-research-report-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3189061-global-salad-dressing-market-research-report-2018 https://www.linkedin.com/company/wise-guy-research-consultants-pvt-ltd-?trk=biz-companies-cym Global Salad Dressing IndustryNew Study on 2018-2025 Salad Dressing Market Global Key Player, Demand, Growth, Opportunities and Analysis Forecast added to Wise Guy Reports DatabaseThis report studies the global Salad Dressing market status and forecast, categorizes the global Salad Dressing market size (value & volume) by key players, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top players in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, and Middle East & Africa.The major manufacturers covered in this reportUnileverKraftKewpieMcCormickNestleEssenEfkoAjinomotoNMZhKSolproKENKO MayonnaiseCloroxKensSabormexKuhneYbarraTry Sample Report @Geographically, this report studies the key regions, focuses on product sales, value, market share and growth opportunity in these regions, coveringNorth AmericaEuropeAsia-PacificSouth AmericaMiddle East & AfricaThe 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 intoKetchupMustardMayonnaiseBBQ SauceOthersOn 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, includingDaily UseFood IndustryThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global Salad Dressing sales, value, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025).Focuses on the key Salad Dressing manufacturers, to study the sales, value, market share and development plans in future.Focuses on the global key manufacturers, to define, describe and analyze the market competition landscape, SWOT analysis.To define, describe and forecast the market by type, application and region.To analyze the global and key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.To identify significant trends and factors driving or inhibiting the market growth.To analyze the opportunities in the market for stakeholders by identifying the high growth segments.To strategically analyze each submarket with respect to individual growth trend and their contribution to the marketTo analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the marketTo strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyze their growth strategies.In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of Salad Dressing 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 StakeholdersSalad Dressing ManufacturersSalad Dressing Distributors/Traders/WholesalersSalad Dressing 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 Salad Dressing market, by end-use.Detailed analysis and profiles of additional market players.Some points from table of content:Global Salad Dressing Market Research Report 20181 Salad Dressing Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Salad Dressing1.2 Salad Dressing Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Salad Dressing Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Salad Dressing Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Ketchup1.2.4 Mustard1.2.5 Mayonnaise1.2.6 BBQ Sauce1.2.7 Others1.3 Global Salad Dressing Segment by Application1.3.1 Salad Dressing Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Daily Use1.3.3 Food Industry1.4 Global Salad Dressing Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Salad Dressing 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 Asia-Pacific Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 South America Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.6 Middle East & Africa Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Salad Dressing (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Salad Dressing Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Salad Dressing Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)For Detailed Reading Please visit WiseGuy Reports @2 Global Salad Dressing Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Salad Dressing Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Salad Dressing Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Salad Dressing Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Salad Dressing Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Salad Dressing Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Salad Dressing Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Salad Dressing Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Salad Dressing Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Salad Dressing Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion3 Global Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global Salad Dressing Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global Salad Dressing Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global Salad Dressing Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 North America Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.6 Europe Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.7 Asia-Pacific Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.8 South America Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.9 Middle East & Africa Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)4 Global Salad Dressing Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)4.1 Global Salad Dressing Consumption by Region (2013-2018)4.2 North America Salad Dressing Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.3 Europe Salad Dressing Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.4 Asia-Pacific Salad Dressing Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.5 South America Salad Dressing Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.6 Middle East & Africa Salad Dressing Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)5 Global Salad Dressing Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type5.1 Global Salad Dressing Production and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.2 Global Salad Dressing Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.3 Global Salad Dressing Price by Type (2013-2018)5.4 Global Salad Dressing Production Growth by Type (2013-2018)6 Global Salad Dressing Market Analysis by Application6.1 Global Salad Dressing Consumption and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)6.2 Global Salad Dressing Consumption Growth Rate by Application (2013-2018)6.3 Market Drivers and Opportunities6.3.1 Potential Applications6.3.2 Emerging Markets/Countries7 Global Salad Dressing Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Unilever7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Salad Dressing Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 Unilever Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Kraft7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Salad Dressing Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 Kraft Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Kewpie7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Salad Dressing Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Kewpie Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.4 McCormick7.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.4.2 Salad Dressing Product Category, Application and Specification7.4.2.1 Product A7.4.2.2 Product B7.4.3 McCormick Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.5 Nestle7.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.5.2 Salad Dressing Product Category, Application and Specification7.5.2.1 Product A7.5.2.2 Product B7.5.3 Nestle Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.6 Essen7.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.6.2 Salad Dressing Product Category, Application and Specification7.6.2.1 Product A7.6.2.2 Product B7.6.3 Essen Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.6.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.7 Efko7.7.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.7.2 Salad Dressing Product Category, Application and Specification7.7.2.1 Product A7.7.2.2 Product B7.7.3 Efko Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.7.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.8 Ajinomoto7.8.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.8.2 Salad Dressing Product Category, Application and Specification7.8.2.1 Product A7.8.2.2 Product B7.8.3 Ajinomoto Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.8.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.9 NMZhK7.9.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.9.2 Salad Dressing Product Category, Application and Specification7.9.2.1 Product A7.9.2.2 Product B7.9.3 NMZhK Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.9.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.10 Solpro7.10.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.10.2 Salad Dressing Product Category, Application and Specification7.10.2.1 Product A7.10.2.2 Product B7.10.3 Solpro Salad Dressing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.10.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.11 KENKO Mayonnaise7.12 Clorox7.13 Kens7.14 Sabormex7.15 Kuhne7.16 Ybarra8 Salad Dressing Manufacturing Cost Analysis8.1 Salad Dressing Key Raw Materials Analysis8.1.1 Key Raw Materials8.1.2 Price Trend of Key Raw Materials8.1.3 Key Suppliers of Raw Materials8.1.4 Market Concentration Rate of Raw Materials8.2 Proportion of Manufacturing Cost Structure8.2.1 Raw Materials8.2.2 Labor Cost8.2.3 Manufacturing Expenses8.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Salad DressingContinued.For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comAbout UsWise 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 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.Contact Us:Norah Trent+1 646 845 9349 / +44 208 133 9349Follow on LinkedIn: Fermented Ingredients Market Progress at a sluggish pace 2025 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=B&rep_id=50 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=T&rep_id=50 https://www.tmrresearch.com/fermented-ingredients-market Global Fermented Ingredients Market: SnapshotFermentation, a process in which sugar is transformed into alcohol, acids, and gases, occurs in bacteria and yeast and also in oxygen-starved muscle cells. Fermentation is primarily carried out to procure a desirable chemical product by cultivating microorganisms and it usually takes place in anaerobic conditions. Fermented ingredients find application in kick starting the process of fermentation in food and non-food products to obtain the requisite chemical product.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The global market for fermented ingredients is forecasted to grow at a good clip on account of the progress in bio-ethanol industry bioethanol fuel is increasingly supplanting petrol and is mainly manufactured by fermenting sugar. Other things fueling the market are growing awareness about food preservation, need to up the shelf life of products, and robust demand for antibiotics. Providing headwinds to the market, on the contrary, is the steep cost of raw materials.From a geographical standpoint, North America dominates the market and is predicted to gain share in the market steadily in the near future as well mainly on account of large sized end-use industries which results in huge consumption of fermented ingredients. However, on account of being a mature market, the growth rate may be slower than that of fast-expanding emerging economies in Asia Pacific and the Middle East and Africa. The latter are expected clock stellar growth in the upcoming years owing to increased demand for good quality food and beverage and personal care products, particularly from the densely populated and rapidly progressing nations of China and India.Global Fermented Ingredients Market: OverviewThe increasing efforts for eco-friendly production systems and the advantage of easy and convenient production of bioethanol which has a myriad of industrial applications are the primary factors driving the global fermented ingredients market. There has been a sharp rise in the demand for fermented ingredients from the food and beverage industry for several uses including food preservation and enhancing the shelf life of food products. The growth of the market will also be assisted by strong demand in different product segments such as amino acids, antibiotics, biogas, and vitamins.Request TOC of the Report @This research report provides a comprehensive outlook on the global fermented ingredients market by segmenting the overall market on the basis of various criteria including product, applications, and geography. Each segment has been methodically examined in terms of both revenue and volume. The report offers insights into the historic and current data pertaining to the market and uses it to estimate future trends. It uses Porters five force analysis and market attractiveness analysis to derive the competitive landscape of the market. It profiles key players of the market along with their business strategies, latest development, and contact information. It also presents a detailed description of the factors influencing the market and the extent to which they impact the growth.Global Fermented Ingredients Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe rapid growth of end-user industries such as food and beverages and pharmaceutical is providing a fillip to the global fermented ingredients market. The rising health consciousness among consumers is paving way for higher awareness regarding quality fermented food ingredients, thereby augmenting the market. Moreover, the growing demand for personal care products is fuelling the market. On the other hand, the erratic availability of quality raw materials is creating a bottleneck in the growth of the market. Furthermore, the high operating costs along with the high capital investment requirements for research and development activities are adversely affecting the profit margins of the players in the market.Global Fermented Ingredients Market: Regional SegmentationOn the basis of geography, the global fermented ingredients market can be fragmented into Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, and Rest of the World. Asia Pacific is expected to be a lucrative market throughout the forecast period, with countries with a high population such as India and China being major contributors. The increasing demand for high-quality personal care products and food is working in favor of the growth of the region. The growth of the North America region can be attributed to the flourishing growth of the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. However, due to the mature nature of the market in North America and Europe, these regions are likely to progress at a sluggish pace.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Fermented Ingredients Market: Competitive LandscapeThe global fermented ingredients market is characterized by moderate competitive rivalry. Some of the prominent players in the market are Ajinomoto Corporation Inc., Angel Yeast Co. Ltd., BASF SE, Cargill, Chr. Hansen A/S, Dohler Group, and E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. Mergers are acquisitions are among the commonly adopted strategies by key players to enhance their market shares.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 Virtual Classroom Market Key Players: BrainCert, SAP SE, Oracle Corporation by Forecast to 2023 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4065 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/virtual-classroom-market-4065 Market Scenario:The virtual classroom market is coming up with whole new innovation in experiencing the education and learning system. On the basis of regional analysis, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World. North America region is generating highest market share in the virtual classroom market owing to better network infrastructure, digitization and higher technology implementation. Digitization in North America is mainly due to the invention of advanced technology and economies benefitting from it.North America region is leading due to presence of major players from the region in the virtual classroom market. The implementation of virtual classroom solution by both small and medium enterprises is increasing rapidly, especially one into IT sector. The virtual classroom market is gaining demand as organization seek to improve their business growth by shifting from on-premise to cloud based. The initial low cost, saving amount spent on infrastructure, automatic software upgrading and seamless integration is driving the market of cloud based server virtualization market.Request a Sample Report @Major Key Players: BrainCert (U.S.) SAP SE (Germany) Docebo (Italy) Saba Software (U.S.) Skyprep (Canada) Oracle Corporation (U.S.) Edvance360 (U.S.) Brainier (U.S.) Bluevolt (U.S.) Canvas (U.S.)The Virtual Classroom Market is expected to grow at approximately USD 12 Billion by 2023, at 10% of CAGR between 2017 and 2023.Regional Analysis:Regional analysis for virtual classroom market is studied in different geographic regions as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of World. North America region is mainly dominating the market because of advanced technological implementation in learning methods and increasing number of students migrating to United States for pursuing higher education. The European region is also gaining growth because of increase demand of online education pursued by students. Asia-Pacific market is estimated to be one of the fastest growing market as it is continuously investing into research and development of virtual classroom market and growing adoption of virtual classroom solutions by enterprises in India is driving the market in the region.Increasing population, and growing IT landscape is boosting the market in the region. The region is witnessing high adoption of virtual classroom tools by enterprises. Developing countries such as India and China are adopting virtual classroom software at a large scale owing to increasing competitive advantage, growing IT sector and reduction in travel and human resource cost which is boosting the market in the region. The region is witnessing high growth in virtual classroom market due to growing technological advancement in cloud storage, virtual and mobile technologies.Intended Audience: Investors and consultants System Integrators Government Organizations Research/Consultancy firms Technology solution providers IT Solution Providers Educational InstitutesSegments:Virtual classroom market for segment on the basis of type, service, deployment, application and organization size.Virtual Classroom Market by Type: Teleconferencing World Wide Web Combination of Teleconferencing And World Wide WebVirtual Classroom Market by Service: Managed Service Professional ServiceVirtual Classroom Market by Deployment: Cloud On-PremiseVirtual Classroom Market by Application: Government Enterprise/Business Education Professional Services Healthcare IT & Telecommunication School & CollegeAccess Report Details @Virtual Classroom Market by Organization Size: Small and Medium Organization Large OrganizationTable of Contents1 Market Introduction1.1 Introduction1.2 Scope of Study1.2.1 Research Objective1.2.2 Assumptions1.2.3 Limitations1.3 Market StructureContinuedList of TablesTable 1 Virtual Classroom Market, By TypeTable 2 Virtual Classroom Market, By ServiceContinuedList of FiguresFigure 1 Research TypeFigure 2 Virtual Classroom Market: By Type (%)ContinuedAbout 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.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 524/528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System Market Size, Forecast and Growth Analysis by Type, Application and Region https://www.statsandreports.com/request-sample/15303-global-customer-relationship-management-crm-system-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025 https://www.statsandreports.com/report/15303-global-customer-relationship-management-crm-system-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025 https://www.statsandreports.com/placeorder?report=15303-global-customer-relationship-management-crm-system-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025&type=SingleUser www.statsnadnreports.com A recent published report on Global Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System Market highlights the major details and provides in-depth analysis of the market along with the future growth and prospects. The reports also offer important insights which helps the industry experts, product managers, CEOs, and business executives to draft their policies on various parameters including expansion, acquisition, new product launch as well as analysing and understanding the market trends and demands. The research report also identifies the key factors and challenges in the market.Get a free sample or customize the report @The Global Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System Market offers deep qualitative as well as qualitative insights from last five years to next five years along with the year-on-year market growth analysis. The study does not only offer insight about the global market but also provides deep analysis with respect to the market segments. The segments included in the report are- type, application and region. The type Strategic CRM, Operational CRM, Analytical CRM, Collaborative CRM, Other, application Small Business, Enterprise Business (for Large Enterprises)includes market size and forecast from 2013 to 2025 along with year-on-year growth analysis.Furthermore, the report also contains the qualitative analysis of the market through several chapters. Company profile, competitive product portfolio analysis, market share analysis along with the revenue and SWOT analysis are some of the major insights available in the study. Currently, the market is being driven by the major companies such as Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, Zoho, Hubspot, Act, Maximizer, Sage, Infusionsoft, Pipedrive, Apptivo, Salesboom, Base whereas new innovations and technology advancement is playing important role in bringing the small companies into the industry. There is also a huge competition between the vendors and suppliers of Global Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System Market which is playing crucial role in the final pricing.The report also provides key insights by geography where the major region includes United States, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India. Geographically, the report offers market size (USD million) and volume, market share, production, consumption along with import, export and supply. The historic year considered for this report is 2013 where it provides information all the way to 2025 considering the base year as 2018.Read detailed research report @Scope of Global Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System MarketThe report provides historic data from year 2013 through 2018 and forecast till 2025.The report offers competitive landscape of the market which includes key player analysis, market share of key players and product portfolio analysis.The Global Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System Market also offers quantitative and qualitative analysis of the different segment such as Type which includes Strategic CRM, Operational CRM, Analytical CRM, Collaborative CRM, Other, Application Small Business, Enterprise Business (for Large Enterprises)and Regions.The report also offers advice from the key industry people on how the market is growing and how companies can overcome from various challengesTable of Content of Global Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System MarketThe Global Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System Market Research Report offers deep insights about the market trends and forecast in more than 12 chapters which provides qualitative as well as quantitative analysis of the report.Chapter 1, 2 and 3 includes methodology & data sources, market overview and market analysis by application. The market overview chapter provides segment information by type including the revenue (million USD) and sales volume (K Units) along with market share and year-on-year growth analysis. Market analysis by application provides insights on the different application/end users of the Global Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System Market including the sales volume by sub application types.Chapter 4, 5 and 6 includes global market sales, revenue, price and growth rate analysis by regions, Market Competition by Players/Manufacturers which includes global market share, price by manufactures as well as sales and revenue by individual market players.ContinuedResearch MethodologyThe research report has been prepared by conducting various rounds of primary interviews with key management of several Tier-I and II companies. The primary research percentage of all of reports are above ~80% whereas ~20% of secondary research includes data from hoovers, factiva, one source avention and other government published records. Both top-down approach has been applied for the calculation of market size, volume, import and export and has been validated thoroughly.Buy this report @Thanks for reading the article. You can also get individual chapters or any particular segments.Stats and Reports is an India based research and consulting service provider specialized in offering wide range of business solutions to their clients including market research reports, primary and secondary research, demand forecasting services, focus group analysis and other services. We understand that how data is important in todays competitive environment and thus, we have collaborated with industrys leading research providers who works continuously to meet the ever growing demand for market research reports throughout the year.For more info log on toStats and ReportsMangaram Chamber, Office No - 16, Paud RoadSankalp Society, Kothrud, Pune, Maharashtra 411038Phone: +1 650-646-3808 or drop an email @ sales@statsandreports.com In-Flight Catering Market Excellent Growth Scope by Leading Key Players-UpperSky Catering, SAAC, SATS, Newrest Catering In-Flight Catering Market to 2023 https://www.htfmarketreport.com/sample-report/1181365-global-in-flight-catering-market-1 https://www.htfmarketreport.com/reports/1181365-global-in-flight-catering-market-1 https://www.htfmarketreport.com/enquiry-before-buy/1181365-global-in-flight-catering-market-1 https://www.htfmarketreport.com/buy-now?format=1&report=1181365 HTF MI broadcasted a new title Global In-Flight Catering Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025 with 105 pages and in-depth assessment including key market trends, upcoming technologies, industry drivers, challenges, regulatory policies, with key company profiles and strategies of players such as UpperSky Catering, SAAC Ltd., SATS, Newrest Catering, Journey Group Pls., LSG Sky Chefs, Gate Gourmet, Emirates Flight Catering, Flying Food Group, Do & Co, Air Gourmet, DNATA, Air Fayre, Abby's Aircraft Catering Service & Air Culinaire Worldwide. The research study provides forecasts for In-Flight Catering investments till 2022.Get Access to sample pages @This report studies the global In-Flight Catering market size, industry status and forecast, competition landscape and growth opportunity. This research report categorizes the global In-Flight Catering market by companies, region, type and end-use industry.Product Analysis:This Report provides a detailed study of given products. The report also provides comprehensive analysis of Key Trends & advance technologies. The Global In-Flight Catering (Thousands Units) and Revenue (Million USD) Market Split by Product Type such as Breakfast,, Starter & Platters, Desserts & BeveragesApplication Analysis:This report provides an advance approach to the market growth with a detailed analysis of the overall competitive scenario of the Global In-Flight Catering market. The market is segmented by Application such as Premium Service & Economic Service with historical and projected market share and compounded annual growth rate.Industry Growth:An in-depth study about key trends and emerging drivers with market characteristics, size and growth, segmentation, regional breakdowns, competitive landscape, shares, trend and strategies for In-Flight Catering market. The market is expected to estimate at XX million by 2023 growing at a CAGR of XX%.Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @Key Highlights of the Global In-Flight Catering Market : Market Share of players that includes UpperSky Catering, SAAC Ltd., SATS, Newrest Catering, Journey Group Pls., LSG Sky Chefs, Gate Gourmet, Emirates Flight Catering, Flying Food Group, Do & Co, Air Gourmet, DNATA, Air Fayre, Abby's Aircraft Catering Service & Air Culinaire Worldwide to better understand how deeply they have penetrated the market. Conceptual analysis of the In-Flight Catering Market products, application wise segmented study. Clear study and pin-point analysis for changing competitive dynamics Analysis of major regional segmentation on the basis of how the market is predicted to growKey questions answered in this comprehensive study Global In-Flight Catering Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025What will the market size be in 2023 and what will the growth rate be?What are the key market trends?What is driving Global In-Flight Catering Market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in Global In-Flight Catering Market space?What are the key market trends impacting the growth of the Global In-Flight Catering Market?What are the key outcomes of the five forces analysis of the Global In-Flight Catering Market?What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the Global In-Flight Catering market? Get in-depth details about factors influencing the market shares of the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia & India?Enquire for customization in Report @There are 15 Chapters to display the Global In-Flight Catering market.Chapter 1, to describe Definition, Specifications and Classification of Global In-Flight Catering, Applications of , 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, Segment Market Analysis (by Type) [Breakfast,, Starter & Platters, Desserts & Beverages];Chapter 7 and 8, to analyze the Change Management Software Segment Market Analysis (by Application [Premium Service & Economic Service]) Major Manufacturers Analysis;Chapter 9, Market Trend Analysis, Regional Market Trend, Market Trend by Product Type [Breakfast,, Starter & Platters, Desserts & Beverages], Market Trend by Application [Premium Service & Economic Service];Chapter 10, Regional Marketing Type Analysis, International Trade Type Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis;Chapter 11, to analyze the Consumers Analysis of Global In-Flight Catering by region, type and application;Chapter 12, to describe In-Flight Catering Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data source;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe In-Flight Catering sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.Buy this research report @Thanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia.HTF Market Report is a wholly owned brand of HTF market Intelligence Consulting Private Limited. HTF Market Report global research and market intelligence consulting organization is uniquely positioned to not only identify growth opportunities but to also empower and inspire you to create visionary growth strategies for futures, enabled by our extraordinary depth and breadth of thought leadership, research, tools, events and experience that assist you for making goals into a reality. Our understanding of the interplay between industry convergence, Mega Trends, technologies and market trends provides our clients with new business models and expansion opportunities. We are focused on identifying the Accurate Forecast in every industry we cover so our clients can reap the benefits of being early market entrants and can accomplish their Goals & Objectives.HTF Market Intelligence Consulting Private LimitedUnit No. 429, Parsonage Road Edison, NJNew Jersey USA 08837sales@htfmarketreport.com+1 (206) 317 1218 Plant Insurance: Market 2018 Global Analysis By Key Players PICC, Zurich (RCIS), Chubb, QBE, China United Property Insurance, American Financial Group, Prudential, XL Catlin, Everest Re Group Qy Research Groups https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/request-sample/962760 https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/send-an-enquiry/962760 https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/check-discount/962760 Plant Insurance Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the Plant Insurance industry with a focus on the global market trend. 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The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Plant Insurance players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.Plant Insurance Market Players: PICC Zurich (RCIS) Chubb QBE China United Property Insurance American Financial Group Prudential XL Catlin Everest Re Group Endurance Specialty CUNA Mutual Agriculture Insurance Company of India Tokio Marine CGB Diversified Services Farmers Mutual Hail Archer Daniels Midland New India Assurance ICICI LombardGet Sample Copy of This Report Now @Market segment by Application, Plant Insurance can be split into Crop/MPCI Crop/Hail Livestock OthersMajor 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 Plant Insurance market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall Plant Insurance 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 @Also, key Plant Insurance 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 Plant Insurance 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 @Contact Us:Call: +1-888-236-2744Email: sales@qyresearchgroups.comAbout Us:QY 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. Document Verification Software System: Checking Identity Documents with Peace of Mind New Delhi, India- 30-05-2018 Sagar Informatics's trusted Identity Verification Software as a Service connects to your product, app, or service to verify your customers' real world identities. With a simple ID scan and real-time selfie, Sagar Informatics lets you accurately and seamlessly knows and trusts your customer.Online Identity Verification Software ServiceFind out how you can optimize your customer acquisition processes through online channels and reduce identity fraud. Our multi-channel solution allows your customers to self-enroll online with their Smartphone, quickly and easily, anytime anywhere.ID Verification to apply for an e-visaIn order to verify the applicants identity online, Sagar Informatics proposes an online Customer ID Verification Software that automatically verifies electronic and physical security features of identity documents. 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The report aims to provide an overview of global Private health insurance market with detailed market segmentation by product/application and geography. The global Private health insurance market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Private health insurance players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.Private health insurance Market Players: Allianz AXA Nippon Life Insurance American Intl. Group Aviva Assicurazioni Generali Cardinal Health State Farm Insurance Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Munich Re Group Zurich Financial Services Prudential Asahi Mutual Life Insurance Sumitomo Life Insurance MetLife Allstate Aegon Prudential Financial New York Life Insurance Meiji Life Insurance Aetna TIAA-CREF Mitsui Mutual Life Insurance Royal & Sun Alliance Swiss ReinsuranceGet Sample Copy of This Report Now @Market segment by Application, Private health insurance can be split into 20~60 Years Old >60 Years OldMajor 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 Private health insurance market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall Private health insurance 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 @Also, key Private health insurance 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 Private health insurance 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 @Contact Us:Call: +1-888-236-2744Email: sales@qyresearchgroups.comAbout Us:QY 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. Brightcom Group aligns with GDPR compliance www.brightcomgroup.com www.lexicon.in The Brightcom Group, a global technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include Ad-tech, New Media and IoT based businesses across the globe, primarily in the digital eco-system, today announced its measures and readiness to the GDPR.The General Data Protection Regulation ('GDPR?), which takes effect this Friday, May 25, 2018, is data privacy and protection regulation defined and enforced by the European Union. The GDPR imposes new rules regarding the processing of Personal Data of data subjects' located in the EU. Key points about GDPR compliance are:Key points about GDPR compliance which Brightcom has already worked upon are respecting data privacy, gathering consent & keeping proof of it, securing the digital infrastructure and training and preparing the teams to handle the customer's data, as mandated by GDPR Regulations.'Brightcom is well aligned with the underlying philosophy of GDPR and we see this as a great opportunity for firms, which are socially responsible towards integrity of private data of consumers, to actually surge ahead in deploying solutions that matter. We have established robust access controls and profile management to ensure that processes are in place?, said Suresh Reddy, Chairman & CEO of the Brightcom Group.Brightcom Group was formerly known as LYCOS Internet Limited, NSE & BSE: 'LYCOS'.BRIGHTCOM GROUP CONSOLIDATES AD-TECH , NEW MEDIA AND IOT BASED BUSINESSES ACROSS THE GLOBE, PRIMARILY IN THE DIGITAL ECO-SYSTEM.Brightcom Media, enables businesses, agencies, and online publishers worldwide in meeting their digital marketing needs, serving 40 billion impressions every month. Clients include leading blue chip advertisers like Airtel, British Airways, Coca-Cola, Hyundai Motors, ICICI Bank, ITC, ING, Lenovo, LIC, Maruti Suzuki, MTV, P&G, Qatar Airways, Samsung, Viacom, Sony, Star India, Vodafone, Titan, and Unilever. Publishers include Facebook, LinkedIn, MSN, Yahoo! and Twitter. Brightcom works with agencies like Havas Digital, JWT, Mediacom, Mindshare, Neo@Ogilvy, Ogilvy One, OMD, Satchi&Satchi, TBWA, and ZenithOptiMedia.Brightcom consumer products division is focused on IoT. Our LIFE product is dedicated to the future of communication and information management in which everyday objects will be connected to the internet, also known as the 'Internet of Things? (IoT).Brightcom Group's renowned global presence, including in the US, Israel, Latin America ME, Western Europe and Asia Pacific regions, positions us at the forefront of the digital landscape, enabling us to support partners in their efforts to leverage and benefit from current global trends. We have the technological platform and human knowledge to do so.For more information please visitSaumika Bhattacharjee, ManagerLexicon Public Relations & Corporate Consultants (P) Ltd14 Community Centre, East of Kailash, New Delhi - 110065, IndiaPh: +91 11 4803 5550 Mobile: +91 99 7112 6385Email: saumika@lexicon.in, Web: Gaming Innovation Group use Perle Media Converters in new iGaming Cloud Data Center in Malta GIG use Perle Media Converters www.perle.com Online gaming operators are in fierce competition to dominate in a market that is forecast to hit $59.79 billion dollars by 2020*. Often, they will seek out solutions like Gaming Innovation Groups iGaming Cloud (iGC) to eliminate technological bottlenecks and significantly reduce costs and lead times.iGC is a cloud based client management platform offering a full range of services to iGaming operators like payment processing, support services, game management systems, player profiles and real-time data.The rapid growth of the iGC platform led them to build a new colocation data center in Malta using 10-Gigabit Ethernet over CAT6a throughout. However, when it came time to install equipment, they discovered network connectivity and conversion issues.Emanuele Lupo, Network Engineer for iGC, explains, "We receive IP Services over single mode fiber from our ISP to the data center. In addition, we have equipment using multimode fiber services. We needed a solution that could convert both single mode and multimode fiber to copper."To bridge this connectivity gap between the fiber and the 10GBase-T copper infrastructure of the new Data Center, iGC uses Perle 10G Managed Media Converters housed in a MCR1900 Modular Chassis System.Lupo comments, "The Perle Media Converters allow us to connect a combination of single mode and multimode equipment to 10GbE copper. We like the flexibility of having different modules in one Chassis."Find out more, read the iGaming Cloud Case Study on perle.comAbout Perle Systems -Perle Systems is a leading developer, manufacturer and vendor of high-reliability and richly featured connectivity and device networking products. These products are used to connect remote users reliably and securely to central servers for a wide variety of business applications. Product lines include Console Servers for Data Center Management, Terminal Servers, Device Servers, Remote Power Switches, Media Converters, Ethernet I/O, Serial Cards, Parallel Cards and Multimodem Cards. Perle distinguishes itself through extensive networking technology, depth of experience in major real-world network environments and long-term distribution and VAR channel relationships in major world markets. Perle has offices in 9 countries in North America, Europe and Asia and sells its products through distribution and OEM/ODE channels worldwide.erle Systems830 Fesslers Parkway, Suite 108Nashville, TN 37210Contact Person:Julie Mc DanielVP MarketingPhone: 1-800-46703753email: pr@perle.com Agricultural Enzymes Market to Make Great Impact in Near Future over 2020 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3304 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3304 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Agricultural enzymes are biological catalysts used extensively in agricultural based biotechnological processing, such as enzyme-assisted silage fermentation, processing of crops and crop residues, bio-processing of fibers, and production of many animal feed supplements. The technological advancement in the field of agricultural enzymes has boosted both the manufacturing capacity and application of agricultural enzyme such as invent of phytases (enhances the nutritional contents of the food grains) and silage fermentation.Growing demand of processed food, rising demand of renewable energy sources such as bio-fuel, coupled with cost-efficiency of agricultural enzymes has helped in its wide acceptance in agricultural sector.Request For Report Sample@Based on the various crop types the global enzymes market can be broadly categorized as cereals & grains, oilseeds & pulses, fruits & vegetables and others. On the basis of the various chemical properties of the enzymes the global agricultural enzyme market can be segmented in five broad categories namely, carbohydrates, proteases, lipases, polymerases & nucleases and othersGrowing demand of natural and organic food, coupled with rising awareness towards hazardous properties of pesticides and other chemicals used in agricultural have raised the demand of green and naturally sourced agrochemicals over the years. Moreover rising government concern over food and environment safety in the Asia Pacific and Latin America has led to many stringent regulations, such as integrated pest management (IPM). Such regulations are forcing the farmers of this region to adopt bio-based chemicals in place of their conventional chemical counterparts. This trend is expected to increase the demand of agricultural enzymes in coming years.North America is the largest market of agricultural enzyme attributed to growing agriculture industry and rising awareness towards organic forming. It is followed by Asia Pacific and Europe. Asia Pacific is the fasted growing market of agricultural enzymes where growth rate is expected in double digit attributed mainly to government initiatives towards integrated pest management (IPM) and increasing acceptance of genetically modified (GM) seeds by the farmers in this region.Request Report for TOC @Some of the leading global players operating in global agricultural enzymes market include, Novozymes A/S, Agrinos Inc., Agri Life., Stoller Usa Inc., Bioworks Inc., Syngenta Ag, Aries Agro Ltd., Greenmax Agro Tech., and Camson Bio Technologies Limited.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: System Integration Market Market to Expand with Significant CAGR by 2021 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/4709 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/4709 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com System integration (SI) enables to build computing systems for end users by combining hardware and software products from several vendors. By implementing systems integration, a company can acquire cheaper, pre-configured components of software. These small components of software help company to achieve key business goals. Otherwise the companies have to purchase customized, more expensive software; this may also require manufacturing of unique products or original programming.Creation of these information systems include designing and building a new customized applications or architecture, after building software components, they are integrated with the existing or new software and hardware packages and communication infrastructure. There are some system integrators such as SAP providing more specialized and specific applications.A sample of this report is available upon request @High investments in IT in last decade have created a huge demand for the system integration market. As the information technology developed the adoption and implementation of information technology system were high, this generated the distributed information system all over the industries and organization generating the demand for integration of the distributed systems. Thus high investment in distributed information technology system is the main driver for the system integration market. With this there are many emerging technologies supporting system integration market such as bid data and cloud. Cloud implementation and big data solutions implementation is the new trend in the information technology systems market. Thus companies are adopting the integration of their data with adoption of these technologies such as big data and cloud providing added advantages to the companies implementing it. Development in automation sector is driving system integration market, as adoption of system integration technologies is high in automation sector.High implementation cost and time required for the effective implementation of system integration is resulting into less adoption of system integration technologies. With this there are very less number of international standard protocols for the communication between two or more information technology sub-systems resulting into complexities for the system integrators. If the industry previously is using legacy systems then it results into increased complexities for system integration. For system integration the network infrastructure must be standard, thus lack of network infrastructure is resulting into deferred demand for the system integration market.System integration market is segmented on the basis of system integration service type, end-use industry and geography. On the basis of type the system integration market is broadly segmented into three major types namely infrastructure system integration services, application system integration services and business consulting services. Infrastructure system integration services are segmented into network management, data center management, building management, security and surveillance management, cloud based integration management and enterprise management. Application system integration services are segmented into data integration, unified communication, integrated social software, application integration and others. Further business consulting services are segmented into business process integration, business transformation and application lifecycle management.System integration market is segmented on the basis of end-user industry into banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), defense, healthcare, telecommunication and IT, oil gas and energy, transportation, retail and others (pharmaceuticals, public sector, education and automotive). And on the basis of geography system integration market can be segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and rest of the world (RoW).Request Report for TOC @Some of the major players in system integration market are Accenture Plc., BAE Systems Plc., Capgemini S.A., Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), Fujitsu Limited, General Dynamics Corporation, Harris Corporation, IBM Corporation, Infosys Technologies, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Raytheon Company, Leidos Corporation, Tata Consultancy Service Limited and Wipro Limited. With this global players system integration market in Asia Pacific is dominated by local players, such as there are many local players in China and India dominating and holding the maximum market shares.Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Compact Track Loaders Market Size, Share, Forecast 2018 2025: Terex, JCB, Bobcat Company, Kubota, Takeuchi, CNH Industrial Compact Track Loaders Market https://www.marketexpertz.com/sample-enquiry-form/10604 https://www.marketexpertz.com/make-enquiry-form/10604 https://www.marketexpertz.com/checkout-form/10604 New Study on 2018 Market Research Report on Global Compact Track Loaders Market Industry, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications added to MarketExpertz.com database.The Study On key vendors in this Global Compact Track Loaders Market includes are John Deere, Caterpillar, Gehl Company, Terex, JCB, Bobcat Company, Kubota, Takeuchi, CNH Industrial, Mustang Mfg, IHI Construction Machinery limited, SUNWARD INTELLIGENT EQUIPMENT, Zhejiang Hero Time Machinery, Hangzhou Jinjiang Group.Get Free Access to Sample Copy [116 Pages] Compact Track Loaders Market@Comprehensive coverage of aspects such as market potential, size, share, and growth aims at creating an equation for profitability- whether stakeholders, business owners, and field marketing executives need to understand their market foothold and dynamics identify the white spaces or increase their yield. The broad scope of information on the current and future trends enable product owners to plan their growth such as the geography they should pursue and technology required for their success.MarketExpertz the latest market research report on Compact Track Loaders market, samples and measures quality data on the overall business environment for the forecast period 2018-2025. Comprehensive data on growing investment pockets evaluated in the report on Compact Track Loaders market are powered and backed by human answers.Major classifications are as follows: Tired Vertical Tracked VerticalMajor applications are as follows: Construction Agriculture Mining Road Construction Transporation Engineering ConstructionThe extensive assessment of real-time data on the business environment offers a more specialized view of threats and challenges companies are likely to face in the years to come. In addition, the unique expertise of the researchers behind the study in strategic growth consulting enables product owners identifies important definition, product classification, and application.Strong focus on financial competency, strengths, and weaknesses of the companies and recent acquisition and merger speaks a lot about the future adjacencies around the core business due to the ongoing development in the Compact Track Loaders market.Compact Track Loaders Market 116 pages, profiling 14+ companies analysis, More Inquiry on this Research@Key point form Table of Content8 Major Manufacturers Analysis of Compact Track Loaders8.1 John Deere8.1.1 Company Profile8.1.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.1.2.1 Product A8.1.2.2 Product B8.1.3 John Deere 2017 Compact Track Loaders Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.1.4 John Deere 2017 Compact Track Loaders Business Region Distribution Analysis8.2 Caterpillar8.2.1 Company Profile8.2.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.2.2.1 Product A8.2.2.2 Product B8.2.3 Caterpillar 2017 Compact Track Loaders Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.2.4 Caterpillar 2017 Compact Track Loaders Business Region Distribution Analysis8.3 Gehl Company8.3.1 Company Profile8.3.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.3.2.1 Product A8.3.2.2 Product B8.3.3 Gehl Company 2017 Compact Track Loaders Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.3.4 Gehl Company 2017 Compact Track Loaders Business Region Distribution Analysis8.4 Terex8.4.1 Company Profile8.4.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.4.2.1 Product A8.4.2.2 Product B8.4.3 Terex 2017 Compact Track Loaders Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.4.4 Terex 2017 Compact Track Loaders Business Region Distribution AnalysisContinueThe research provides answers to the following key questions:1. What will be the growth rate and the market size of the Compact Track Loaders industry for the forecast period 2018-2025?2. What are the major driving forces expected to impact the development of the Compact Track Loaders market across different regions?3. Who are the major driving forces expected to decide the fate of the industry worldwide?4. Who are the prominent market players making a mark in the Compact Track Loaders market with their winning strategies?5. Which industry trends are likely to shape the future of the industry during the forecast period 2018-2025?6. What are the key barriers and threats believed to hinder the development of the industry?7. What are the future opportunities in the Compact Track Loaders market?Direct Order Compact Track Loaders Market Research Report@About MarketExpertzPlanning to invest in market intelligence products or offerings on the web? Then marketexpertz has just the thing for you - reports from over 500 prominent publishers and updates on our collection daily to empower companies and individuals catch-up with the vital insights on industries operating across different geography, trends, share, size and growth rate. There's more to what we offer to our customers. With marketexpertz you have the choice to tap into the specialized services without any additional charges.Our in-house research specialists exhibit immense knowledge of not only the publisher but also the types of market intelligence studies in their respective business verticals.Contact Us-40 Wall St. 28th floor New York City,NY 10005 United Statessales@marketexpertz.com+1-800-819-3052 Global Railways Management System Market is Anticipated to Expand at a Healthy CAGR by 2025 https://www.researchtrades.com/request-sample/1540787 https://www.researchtrades.com/checkout/1540787 https://www.researchtrades.com/ This report studies the global Railways Management System market, analyzes and researches the Railways Management System development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia.Get detailed sample copy of updated Analysis @Scope of this Report:This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeHitachiCisco SystemsIBM Corporation.ABBThales S.A.General ElectricToshiba CorporationHuawei TechnologiesGAO RFIDAmadeus IT Group, S.AMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoOn-PremiseCloudMarket segment by Application, Railways Management System can be split intoTraffic ManagementOperation ManagementPower Supply ManagementInfrastructure ManagementOthersYou can order a single user copy at USD 3300 and Avail 15% Discount @Table of Content:1 Industry Overview of Railways Management System1.1 Railways Management System Market Overview1.1.1 Railways Management System Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Railways Management System 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 Railways Management System Market by Type1.3.1 On-Premise1.3.2 Cloud1.4 Railways Management System Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Traffic Management1.4.2 Operation Management1.4.3 Power Supply Management1.4.4 Infrastructure Management1.4.5 Others2 Global Railways Management System Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Railways Management System 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 Hitachi3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Railways Management System Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Cisco Systems3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Railways Management System Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 IBM Corporation.3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Railways Management System Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 ABB3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Railways Management System Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4.5 Recent DevelopmentsGet complete report analysis @report/global-railways-management-system-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025/15407873.5 Thales S.A.3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Railways Management System Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 General Electric3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Railways Management System Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6.5 Recent DevelopmentsContinue....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. China Integrated Circuit Industry: Bolstering Adoption of IC Products by End-use Industries to Boost Growth Albany, New York, May 21, 2018: As indicated https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1767051 https://www.marketresearchhub.com/report/research-report-on-china-integrated-circuit-industry-20182022-report.html As indicated by a new research report recently added to the repository of Market Research Hub (MRH), the integrated circuit industry in China will continue to gain bolstering support from the regional government in upcoming years. The report, titled China Integrated Circuit Industry, 2018-2022 predicts robust growth prospects for Chinas IC (integrated circuit) market over a four-year projection period, 2018-2022.China Integrated Circuit Industry: OverviewIntense government support that has been the backbone of IC market growth in China, is expected to continue in the course of next four years, according to recently conducted research on the Chinese IC industry. Chinas central government and several local governments have been encouraging the infrastructure development in IC industry through various favorable policies. This factor is eventually resulting in elevating fiscal revenue of the IC industry in China. Moreover, the Made in China 2025 strategy is in the pipeline, which is expected to catalyze upgrading and transformation of the industry in next few years. The Chinese IC industry, though performing below the global advanced level, is anticipated to continue robust growth post-joining the World Trade Organization (WTO). When compared to international brands, the chip manufacturing industry of China still lags behind by 1-2 generations in regards to advanced technology. Furthermore, Chinas IC design still has scope for improvement and also manufactures single products. Research indicates that it is necessary to chop off the technological gap between international mainstream companies and Chinas domestic brands on the packaging and testing front.Click here for Free Sample Report@China Integrated Circuit Industry: SegmentationIn addition to China being a top market for globally leading chip companies, research reveals that high-end integrated circuit products in Chinese industry are highly dependent on imports. Chinas rapid development post-penetration of industrial monitoring technology, smart logistics, smart cities, and smart homes has been boosting the sales of various types of sensors, eventually fueling the growth of IC industry within China. Robust adoption of automation by manufacturing industry are also identified to be uplifting the integrated circuit market in China. China has been and is foreseen to retain its position of worlds top producer and consumer of automobiles, in addition to being the largest base of manufacturing as well as outsourcing of electronics globally. The report implies that China will remain the largest consumer market for integrated circuits in the long run. Automotive electronics, IoT & communications equipment, and industrial automation are among the key end-user segments in integrated circuit industry, driving a majority of revenue. With PC production on a steep downfall worldwide, the market for smartphones is exploding since the past decade. To add to it, related industries such as IoT, cloud computing, and big data are witnessing exponential growth since the recent past. Constantly propelling demand from end-use industries will reportedly play a key role in Chinas integrated circuit industry in near future.Browse Full Report with TOC@China Integrated Circuit Industry: Key ProspectsThe report will also provide a few more insights on Chinas integrated circuit industry, including the economic and political environment influencing the industrys performance. The analysis of current and prospective demand and supply scenario, competitive landscape, IC import and export status, leading enterprises in Chinas IC industry, and key challenges and limitations that are expected to impact the performance of integrated circuit market in China.About Market Research HubMarket Research Hub (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports of different sector like ict research market and analysis. MRHs expansive collection of industry reports has been carefully curated to help key personnel and decision makers across industry verticals to clearly visualize their operating environment and take strategic steps.MRH functions as an integrated platform for the following products and services: Objective and sound market forecasts, qualitative and quantitative analysis, incisive insight into defining industry trends, and market share estimates. Our reputation lies in delivering value and world-class capabilities to our clients.Contact Us90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United StatesToll Free: 800-998-4852 (US-Canada)Email: press@marketresearchhub.com Camping Stove Market Report 2018: Rising Popularity of Camping as an Outdoor Recreation Activity to Trigger Demand for Camping Stove https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=T&rep_id=787 https://www.factmr.com/report/787/camping-stove-market https://www.factmr.com/checkout/787/S https://www.factmr.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/factmr Recently, a novel report developed using proven research methodologies at the headquarters of Fact. MR has identified various prominent factors and trends prompting market growth of camping stove market. The study is titled as Camping Stove Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking Global Review 2018 to 2028, which deeply analyses the global market trends, with historical data from 2017 and 2018, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) during the mentioned forecast of 2018-2028. For the benefit of the readers, the report concludes with a special focus on the detailed profiles of the major vendors in the global camping stove market.Request TOC of this Report-Rising Popularity of Camping as an Outdoor Recreation Activity to Trigger Demand for Camping StoveAs global participation in outdoor activities such as hiking and camping has increased, the economy of the outdoor recreation industry has improved over the past few years. The Outdoor Industry Associations (OIA) recently conducted a survey, which states that over US$ 887 billion are spent each year, on various outdoor recreation activities. As the popularity of outdoor recreations activities increases, demand for various camping gear or equipment such as camping stove is increasing across the globe. Each year, American consumers spend more than US$ 31 billion to purchase high-quality camping accessories such as camping stove, which is likely to support the expansion of camping stove market in the upcoming years.According to a survey conducted by the National Forest System (NFS) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), around 148 million people travel with a wide range of outdoor pursuits every year. More than 50% of the American population participates in various outdoor recreation activities such as hiking and camping, every year, and the number is likely to increase rapidly in the upcoming years. Increasing number of camping and hiking enthusiasts is boosting demand for camping stoves across the world. As the outdoor recreation industry has become economically stronger, various governments are making extraordinary efforts and investments to encourage consumers to participate in outdoor activities. Favorable government policies and increasing participation in camping and hiking is expected to contribute to the growth of the camping stove market.Camping Stove Manufacturers to Abide by Regulations and Globally Recognized StandardsThe manufacturing and distribution processes of all the other camping gear or equipment are regulated by government organizations. Similarly, manufacturers in the camping stove market have to comply with the regulations and international standards associated with camping stoves. In the UK, camping stoves are regulated under the UK health and safety legislative standards, which can impact the growth of the camping stove market in the region. Also, the key standards associated with the fuels used in camping stoves are relevant to the fire safety standards in the UK. Similarly, camping stoves manufactured and distributed in Europe must be CE certified and conform to the requirements of the European directive Gas Appliances Directive (GAD).Browse Report-Another regulation that can impact the expansion of the camping stove market is the Transport Security Administrations regulation on transporting the camping stove via airplane. Although it is permitted to carry camping stoves on a flight, emptying and cleaning the fuel container of camping stoves thoroughly is mandatory. The stringency of such various rules and regulations on camping stoves can impact their global sales and ultimately, the growth of the camping stove market in the upcoming years.Heat, Stability, and Convenience: Consumer Demands toDrive Camping Stove MarketCooking on a camping trip generates the need for a compact and highly efficient camping stove, which triggers the growth of the camping stove market. Consumers are looking for stable mountaineering stoves with higher heat output that are incredibly efficient as well. Manufacturers in the camping stoves market are introducing ultra-light, ultra-small, yet heat-efficient camping stoves to address the exact consumer needs. Consumers tend to pick lighter and more compact camping stoves over heavy and bulky car camping stoves, as they provide more stability and efficiency.In addition, the fuel efficiency of camping stoves remains an important factor that is influencing the purchasing decisions of consumers. They are critical of the fuel source of camping stoves while making a purchase, as it is directly associated with its price and impact on the environment. The consumers choice of fuel for camping stoves mainly depends on the duration of and the number of people on the camping trip. Furthermore, adjustable legs, simmer control, tabletop, and wind protection are among the popular features of camping stoves among consumers, which define the stability, efficiency, and convenience of using camping stoves. Manufacturers in the camping stoves market are keenly observing the changes in consumer demands and planning their upcoming manufacturing strategies for the future.In order to meet the consumer demand for environment-friendly camping stoves, market players are introducing electric camping stoves, which generate electricity by burning biofuels. Also, camping stoves that operate on the solar energy are likely to gain popularity in the camping stoves market in the upcoming years.Pre-book Global Camping Stove Market Forecast Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized Retail & Consumer Goods market 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.comWeb:Get More Industry Insights At: Rise in Micronutrient Deficiency in Soil to Fuel the Demand for Agriculture Micronutrients https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3825 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/3825 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Agriculture micronutrients have become important in agriculture production. They also play an important role in balancing the crop nutrition. Soil testing carried out in various countries have also found a deficiency of micronutrients in many soils. Factors such as high-yield crop demand, increasing use of chemical fertilizers, advancement in fertilizer technology result in reduction or removal of micronutrients. Different plants require different micronutrients, moreover, increased micronutrient deficiency in soil due to various climatic conditions, use of chemical fertilizers on a large scale is also leading to the growing demand for agriculture micronutrients.Hence, companies are offering micronutrients in the quantity required for crops and plants, because micronutrient in more than required quantity can damage the corp. Some of the most used and essential micronutrients are iron, copper, boron, manganese, and zinc. However, companies are also focusing on providing secondary micronutrients that can help in making other nutrients more effective. Many micronutrients act as the enzyme in order to enable plants to build protein and compounds.Request to Sample Report @According to the report by Persistence Market Research, the global agriculture micronutrients market is likely to witness strong growth during 2017-2024. By the end of the forecast period, the global market for agriculture micronutrients is estimated to exceed US$ 13,000 Million revenue.Agriculture Micronutrients to Find Largest Application in Soil during 2017-2024Based on the application, agriculture micronutrients are expected to find the largest application in soil. Towards 2024 end, the soil is estimated to bring in more than US$ 6,000 Million in terms of value.On the basis of product type, Zinc in both non-chelated and chelated form is expected to see the highest growth. Zinc in non-chelated form is projected to surpass US$ 4,500 Million revenue, while in the chelated form is estimated to reach close to US$ 600 Million in terms of revenue.Based on the crop type, cereals are likely to use agriculture micronutrients on a large scale. By 2024 end, cereals are projected to bring in more than US$ 4000 Million revenue. Meanwhile, agriculture micronutrients are also likely to be used in growing fruits, pulses, oilseeds, and vegetables.Asia Pacific to Emerge as the Largest Region in the Global Market for Agriculture MicronutrientsGeographically, Asia Pacific is expected to remain dominant in the global agriculture micronutrients market. By the end of 2024, Asia Pacific is projected to reach nearly US$ 5,800 Million revenue. Agricultural activities are carried on a large scale in Asia Pacific. Moreover, governments of different countries are also taking major steps to support farmers to produce better crops. One of the major factor contributing to the growth of micronutrients is that the natural availability of micronutrients in soil is declining, hence, the demand for micronutrients is increasing. In India, the increasing awareness towards the use of micronutrients, especially the deficiency of zinc is fueling the demand for micronutrients in the country.Request Report for TOC @Leading Companies in the Global Agriculture Micronutrients MarketADAMA Agricultural Solutions Ltd., Akzo Nobel N.V., Agrium Inc., BASF SE, Compass Minerals International Inc., Auriga Industries A/S, E. I. DUPONT DE NEMOURS AND COMPANY, and Bayer CropScience AG are some of the leading players in the global market for agriculture micronutrients.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: Future of Aircraft Tow Tractors Market 2018: Higher Consumer Preference for Air Travel to Augment Growth of Aircraft Tow Tractors https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=T&rep_id=784 https://www.factmr.com/report/784/aircraft-tow-tractors-market https://www.factmr.com/checkout/784/S https://www.factmr.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/factmr Recently, a novel report developed using proven research methodologies at the headquarters of Fact. MR has identified various prominent factors and trends prompting market growth of aircraft tow tractors market. The study is titled as Aircraft Tow Tractors Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking Global Review 2018 to 2028, which deeply analyses the global market trends, with historical data from 2017 and 2018, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) during the mentioned forecast of 2018-2028. For the benefit of the readers, the report concludes with a special focus on the detailed profiles of the major vendors in the global aircraft tow tractors market.Request TOC of this Report-Aircraft Tow Tractors A Strategic Move towards Saving Aviation FuelInitially airplanes travelled from airport gates towards runways using their own fuel. However, this became uneconomical as this kind of taxing, based on the size of aircrafts and distance, results in consumption of about one metric ton of fuel used in aircrafts. This led to the development of high powered, diesel-electric aircraft tow tractors that are attached to the nose wheel of the aircraft to pull the plane towards runways. As a result, the aircraft need not have to run on its engines during the process, consecutively saving aviation fuel. This is anticipated to fuel the adoption of aircraft tow tractors worldwide.Higher Consumer Preference for Air Travel to Augment Growth of Aircraft Tow TractorsAir travel continues to witness significant demand with increasing number of people opting for this mode of travel, be it business or leisure. According to International Air Transport Association (IATA), by 2036, around 7.8 billion passengers are expected to opt for air travel based on the 3.6 percent average CAGR that is being witnessed currently. However, this has a twofold impact, as increasing number of passengers has influenced higher production of aircrafts and at the same time, this is expected to pose challenges for the governments with respect to investments to meet the growing demand. Thus, the increasing number of airports and aircrafts have pushed the proliferation of aircraft tow tractors consecutively supporting the growth of the market during the period of assessment.Future of Aircraft Tow Tractors Looks Promising in Developed Counties, Despite Initial SluggishnessAfter a period of stagnation in 2016, aerospace sector is expected to witness steep growth. According to Oxford Economics, the industrial output of aerospace suppliers, especially in the United States, Japan and United Kingdom was sluggish in 2016 in value terms. However, in 2017, the output of aviation industry grew at a significant pace. For instance, a 2.9 percent growth in this sector was witnessed in Eurozone. Moreover, tis growth is expected to accelerate to 3.4 percent in2018 and anticipated to reach 3.5 percent in 2019. This has translated into increased expenditure on aircraft ground vehicles and equipment, and aircraft tow tractors are no exception.Browse Report-Hybrids Complementing Environmental SustainabilityEPA (Environment Protection Act) has laid various norms and regulations regarding the carbon dioxide emissions from all types of vehicles in order to promote environment safety. Considering this protocol, manufacturers of aircraft tow tractors have developed hybrid electric push back tractors that are a reliable and efficient alternative to heavy duty diesel aircraft tow tractors to move aircrafts after landing and before taking-off. Manufacturing of these tractors were initiated to meet commitments to reduce the CO2 emissions from both aircrafts and ground vehicles. With this, manufacturers started developing advanced hybrid options thus spurring the traction of hybrid aircraft tow tractors during the assessment period.High Demand for Safety and ReliabilityManufacturers of aircraft tow tractors are focusing on developing enhanced aircraft towing vehicles given the growing demand from aviation industry for higher safety and reliability aircraft tow tractors. Considering the fuel saving feature of aircraft tow tractors, key participants such as Siemens, Lufthansa LEOS, French TLD Group (a market leader in handling equipment used in airports), and Israel Aerospace Industries have been striving to develop environment friendly solutions that led to the development of aircraft tow tractors.For instance, JBT has developed AgileAir a diesel powered power cart for flight line and hangar support for military fighter aircrafts. It features computerized self diagnostics, enhanced power output options, reduced fuel consumption, enables ease in transportation and integrated bleed air and conditioned air combination.Likewise, Siemens has developed a new diesel-electric aircraft tow tractor that can be controlled from the cockpit of the aircraft. TaxiBots, Siemenss new innovation, saves fuel, extends maintenance intervals and eliminates noise. TaxiBots, owing to its enhanced efficiency has already been certified for Airbus 320 and this aircraft tow tractor is expected to safely pull around 70 percent of all the passenger plants across the globe. Moreover, aircraft tow tractors developed by Siemens feature powertrains that include electric motors, generators, converters and integration of software and electronics. Looking at the efficiency of TaxiBots, in 2017, the EASA (European Aviation Safety Agency) and FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) in the United States certified the tractor for Boeing 737. According to Lufthansa, at the Frankfurt Airport alone, these tractors facilitate saving of around 11,000 metric tons of aviation fuel each year. Such developments, in view of offering highly safe, durable, fuel efficient, fuel saving and reliable vehicles, are expected to boost the adoption of aircraft tractor vehicles in the coming years.The report on aircraft tow tractors market includes analysis on key participants, their business scenarios, product developments and overall company overview. Siemens, JBT Aero, TLD Group, Eagle Tugs and Fresia SpA are few of the major participants. In addition, the report also covers analysis on emerging players in the aircraft tow tractors market.Pre-book Global Aircraft Tow Tractors Market Forecast Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized automotive market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; 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.comWeb:Get More Industry Insights At: Gas Smoker Market Research Report 2018: Key Companies to Leverage Sense-Mate and OFT Technology for Quick, Simple and Convenient Cooking Solutions https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=T&rep_id=792 https://www.factmr.com/report/792/gas-smoker-market https://www.factmr.com/checkout/792/S https://www.factmr.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/factmr Recently, a novel report developed using proven research methodologies at the headquarters of Fact. MR has identified various prominent factors and trends prompting market growth of quaternium-15 market. The study is titled as Gas Smoker Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking Global Review 2018 to 2028, which deeply analyses the global market trends, with historical data from 2017 and 2018, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) during the mentioned forecast of 2018-2028. For the benefit of the readers, the report concludes with a special focus on the detailed profiles of the major vendors in the global quaternium-15 market.Request TOC of this Report-Manufacturers to Narrow their Focus on Developing Effective and Easy-to-Use Gas Smoker Systems to Improve Customer Touch PointChanging attitude and preferences of the customers have reflected significantly on the decisions of the leaders in the food industry and food equipment manufacturers. In addition, growing demand in the barbeque industry has led food equipment manufacturers to divert their investments towards developing innovative and novel cooking solutions for end-user industries such as food retail outlets, restaurants, and food companies. Leading companies in the barbeque industry prefer spending on effective food equipment such as gas smokers to deliver healthy meals and snacks to the customers.With the changing preferences and growing requirements of the health-conscious customers, food retailers, restaurants, and food firms are also focusing on revisiting the smoked flavors to offer novel experience to the customers taste buds. According to a recent customer survey conducted by Hearth, Patio, & Barbeque Association (HPBA), the barbeque industry has witnessed considerable progress in business in 2017. This trend is expected to continue over the coming years, which in turn is likely to reflect on the market growth of the gas smokers across countries.Incorporation of Smart Dripping Catch System & Smooth Operating Wood Chip Loading Features to Intensify DemandTo improve customer touch points, leading food firms, restaurants, and retail outlets are diverting their investments towards effective and innovative gas smokers. Major food equipment manufacturers are identifying requirements of the end-user industries and developing gas smokers that offer effective and novel cooking solutions. In addition, leading food equipment brands Smoke Hollow Grillers & Smokers are focusing on magnetizing customers by offering gas smokers that are equipped with Bluetooth technology that enables the end users to check the status of temperature ranges remotely.Also, major manufacturers such as Master built is concentrating on integrating innovative and novel features in the gas smokers. In order to offer enhanced customer experience, Master built is focusing on offering expanded cooking space equipped with a smooth operating wood chip loading system. In addition, the company has incorporated four cooking sections, a dripping catch system, and internal lighting to offer the potential customers with quick cleaning features and convenient operability.Browse Report-Key Companies to Leverage Sense-Mate and OFT Technology for Quick, Simple and Convenient Cooking SolutionsWith the rapid advancements in technology, leading manufacturers are narrowing their focus towards offering technologically-immersive experience while cooking. In order to offer accurate cooking solutions, prominent manufacturers such as Green Mountain Grills and Memphis Wood Fire Grills are focusing on integrating cutting-edge and innovative technological solutions in their products. For instance, Memphis Wood Fire Grills is mainly focused towards incorporating smart technological solutions such as advanced circulation system, which is responsible for speeding up the grilling process and eliminating hot spots while cooking. In addition, the manufacturing company is focusing on smart features such as even heat distribution system and effective pallet burn capabilities for quick, simple, and convenient cooking solutions.In addition, a prominent manufacturer Green Mountain Grills is focused towards offering an array of gas smokers equipped with the open flame technology. Incorporation of the open flame technology (OFT) detects and monitors the temperature conditions and speeds up the cooking process. Further, the company is concentrating on integrating sense-mate technology, which enables the end-users to constantly monitor the grill temperature through the thermal sensors. These smart features offer convenient and accurate cooking solutions to the end-users. With the incorporation of novel and smart technological solutions, leading companies are concentrating on improving their brand perception and customer touch points globally.Product Launch & Strategic Acquisition: Focus on Offering Intelligent Grilling, Smoking, and Frying Solutions to Craft Novel Growth OpportunitiesIn order to remain in the forefront of the competitive market, leading manufacturers in the barbeque industry are diverting their focus towards engaging in strategic acquisitions and novel product launches. For instance, prominent gas smoker manufacturer, Masterbuilt acquired Smoke Hollow Grillers & Smokers division of the Outdoor Leisure Products, Inc. Through this acquisition, the leading company has diverted its focus towards developing an array of novel and premium quality products and tools such as Outdoor Vertical Propane Gas Smoker.The companies are also focusing on directing their investments towards offering innovative features that enable the end-users to control the sensor and control, wood chip compatibility, temperature control, and enhanced cooking capacity for effective grilling, smoking, and frying process.In addition, a major manufacturing company, Lynx Grills Inc. is focusing on directing their investment towards developing effective and smart products such as Wood Smoking Sonoma Smoker. This gas smoker is equipped with innovative features such as intuitive LCD control panel as well as custom wood chip box, and built-in meat probe. As this gas smoker is equipped with intelligent technology such as Wi-Fi, the end users can conveniently adjust the cook time and temperature for enhanced accessibility and use.J&R Manufacturing, Smoke Hollow Smokers & Grills, Masterbuilt, Green Mountain Grills, and Memphis Wood Fire Grill are some of the leading market player identified in the global gas smoker market.Pre-book Global Gas Smoker Market Forecast Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized Retail & Consumer Goods market 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.comWeb:Get More Industry Insights At: Smart Grid Sensors Poised to Bring in US$ 1,447.3 Mn in Revenues by 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3962 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/3962 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com The global energy sector is transitioning into intelligent, efficient network of power supply, and smart grids are actively replacing conventional power grids across the world. The demand for smart grid sensors grows in parallel with surging adoption of smart grid technology. In todays day and age, detection and monitoring operations have helped save potential losses worth millions of dollars. Therefore, smart grid sensors are also expected to gain surplus demand in tomorrows energy industry. Persistence Market Researchs latest report on the global market for smart grid sensors projects that the market, which is presently valued at a little over US$ 128 Mn, will soar at a stellar CAGR of 30.3% to bring in US$ 1,447.3 Mn in revenues by the end of 2025.Key findings in the report exhibit that the global smart grid sensors market will have a steadfast growth during the assessment period, 2017-2025. In this period, the dynamic growth of the global smart grid sensor market will be impacted by several factors, among which following have an enduring influence:Request to Sample Report @Extreme Weather Conditions: Severe climate and harsh environment is disrupting the operational efficiency of smart grids, compelling the deployment of thermal sensors that can detect temperature differences and adapt to drastic weather changes, particularly in the US.Electricity Thefts: Rising incidence of electricity thefts in developing & underdeveloped regions is driving the adoption of smart grids. In Latin American countries, power authorities are monitoring such malpractices with help of sensors that identify faux power glitches.Proliferation of IoT: Internet of Things (IoT) is influencing the sales of smart grid sensors but remuneratively. Presently, utilities companies in Europe are looking to leverage IoT to improve development and operation of smart grids by connecting unique devices, which will end up creating an intelligent & self-sustained energy ecosystem.Request Report for TOC @Ineffectiveness of older power grids, increasing energy demands, and implementation of smart metering systems has also propelled the global demand for smart grid sensors. According to the report, titled Smart Grid Sensors Market: Global Industry Trend Analysis 2012 to 2016 and Forecast 20172025, rising concern regarding safety & security of smart grids, and high implementation costs of smart grid sensors is likely to impede the global markets growth, but to a certain extent.Based on the region, Latin Americas smart grid sensors market is projected to exhibit a relatively high growth, registering a robust CAGR of 36.1%. The demand for voltage/temperature sensors, in particular, is projected to remain high throughout the forecast period. The report estimates that in 2016, more than 40% of global smart grid sensor revenues were accounted by sales of voltage/temperature sensors.In terms of application, smart energy metering is expected to dominate with more than 40% share, while revenues amassed from other applications such as lead management, energy storage and renewable energy will be registering a speedy growth at 38.1% CAGR. The report also profiles key participants in the global smart grid sensors market, which include ABB Ltd., Aclara Technologies LLC, General Electric Company, Honeywell International Inc., Eaton, Toshiba Corporation, Networked Energy Services Corporation, QinetiQ Group PLC, Torino Power Solutions Inc., Sentient Energy, Inc., ARTECHE, Siemens AG, Ingenu Inc., GIPRO GmbH, GRID20/20 Inc.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Genomic Medicine Market to Witness Increase in Revenues 2026 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/11323 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11323 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com The National Human Genome Research Institute defines genomic medicine as "an emerging medical discipline that involves using genomic information about an individual as part of their clinical care (e.g., for diagnostic or therapeutic decision-making) and the health outcomes and policy implications of that clinical use." Genomic medicine is a type of precision medicine in which genomics, epigenomics and other related data is used to accurately aid in individual disease diagnosis. Genomic medicine has novel applications in the fields of oncology, pharmacology, rare and undiagnosed diseases, and infectious disease. Genomic medicine paves way for personalized medicine into clinics and has immense potential to reach the physicians and patients. Genomic medicine has been used for advanced sequencing in cancer pharmacogenomics, rare disorder diagnosis and for tracking of outbreaks of infectious diseases.Request for Table of Contents @Genomic Medicine Market: Drivers & RestraintsBacked by government investments in precision medicine initiatives such as a multimillion dollar investment by President Obama in January 2015 which aims to improve how to treat and prevent a disease by laying emphasis on its genetic makeup is expected to boost the market growth. Clinical validity and utility of genomic medicine tests is a major issue witnessed in the global market. Also, lack of awareness among healthcare professionals, sluggish adoption of genome medicine, fluctuating regulatory landscape are the factors which could hamper growth of the global genomic medicine market.Genomic Medicine Market: SegmentationThe global genomic medicine market is classified on the basis of application type, end use and region.Based on application, the global genomic medicine market is segmented into the following:OncologyCardiologyPediatricsEndocrinologyRespiratory MedicineRare Genetic DisordersInfectious DiseasesOther ApplicationsBased on end use, the global genomic medicine market is segmented into the following:HospitalsClinicsAcademic InstitutionsResearch InstitutionsGenomic Medicine Market: OverviewGenomic medicine is gaining momentum with expanding applications ranging from risk assessment and diagnosis in healthy individuals to genome-based treatment for patients with complicated disorders. Oncology is a major application of genomics medicine during cancer screening process as diagnostics for genetic and genomic markers. Oncology segment is expected to account for a major share in the global genomic medicine market. Genomic medicine is increasingly being used not only for research purpose but also in clinical applications. In clinical applications, genomic medicine will potentially enhance patient care.Genomic Medicine Market: Region wise OverviewGeographically, global Genomic Medicine market is classified into regions viz. North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan, Middle East and Africa (MEA). Owing to the presence of large number of academic as well as research institutions in the U.S. which are working on genomic medicine to discover next-generation genomic medicines, North America region is projected to lead the global genomic market in terms of value during the forecast period. Also, the presence of several universities offering educational programs coupled with opportunities in scientific research of genomic medicine in the North America and Europe is expected to have positive impact on the regional markets. The genomic medicine concept still in its nascent stage is yet to receive an impetus from the emerging market which are anticipated to hold smaller shares in the global market.Request a Sample Brochure of the Report @Genomic Medicine Market: Key PlayersThe key research institutes in global genomic medicine market are BioMed Central Ltd., Cleveland Clinic, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, The Manchester Centre for Genomic Medicine, Center for Genomic Medicine to name a few. The focus of the top players will be on the identification of effective drug candidates particularly in cancer treatment based on the molecular structure of tumors.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: Respiratory Gating System Market Foreseen to Grow exponentially over 2026 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/11350 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11350 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Respiratory gating systems are the non-invasive, video guided systems which are used to precisely target the tumor in lung, breasts or upper abdomen while positioning a radiation beam on tumor site. Tumors in lungs and upper abdominal portion displace every time patient breaths which makes the administration of radiation therapy difficult. Respiratory gating systems monitor the movement of target or tumor caused by respiratory movement, and guide physicians to correlate tumor position in connection with the respiratory cycle of the patient.The system records the wave pattern of the patients respiratory cycle and determines movement of tumor in correlation with wave pattern. The gating threshold is set according to wave pattern so that the radiation dose is administered when tumor is in desired position and the beam ids cut off when tumor displaces. Owing to decreased risk of exposure of vital organs such as heart and liver, respiratory gating systems ate rapidly getting adopted. Some of the available respiratory gating systems are Real-time Position Management System, AZ-733VI, Gated RapidArc etc.Request for Table of Contents @Respiratory Gating System Market: Drivers and RestraintsIncreasing worldwide incidence of lung cancer and breast cancer would result in growth of global market for respiratory gating system. According to data obtained from Cancer Research U.K., incidence of lung cancer in 2013 was as high as 79.3 per 100,000 population. Technological advancements such as launch of 4D visualization system, increased sensitivity of the system etc. are expected to boost the market during the forecast period 2016-2026. However, high cost of the therapy is the major restraint for the growth of global respiratory gating system market.Respiratory Gating System Market: SegmentationThe global market for respiratory gating system is classified on the basis of product type, end user and geography.Based on product type, the global respiratory gating system market has been segmented as follows:Respiratory Gating SystemsAccessoriesBased on end user, the global global respiratory gating system market has been segmented as follows:HospitalsAmbulatory Surgical CentersRespiratory Gating System Market: OverviewThe global respiratory gating system market is expected to expand at healthy CAGR owing to increasing adoption of the products across the world. Among end users, hospital end user segment is expected to account for maximum share due to requirement of advanced healthcare infrastructure.Respiratory Gating System Market: Region-wise OutlookGeographically, the global respiratory gating system market is classified into regions namely, North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa. Among all the regions, North America will continue to lead the global market for respiratory gating system market due to high purchasing power. Europe is expected to account for second largest share in global market primarily due to increasing number of radiation therapy procedures.Request a Sample Brochure of the Report @Respiratory Gating System Market: Key PlayersKey players operating in the global respiratory gating system market are Varian Medical Systems, Anzai Medical Co. Ltd., Standard Imaging Inc., Raditec Medical AG, General Electric Company, Siemens AG, Philips Healthcare, Toshiba Medical Systems.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Global Amoxicillin Sodium Market 2018 by Key Players, Type, Application and Region : TOKU-E, Abcam, Hayao Qyresearchreports https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1805337&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/report/global-amoxicillin-sodium-market-research-report-2018.htm/toc http://www.qyresearchreports.com Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Amoxicillin Sodium Market Research Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies the global Amoxicillin Sodium market status and forecast, categorizes the global Amoxicillin Sodium market size (value & volume) by key players, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top players in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, and Middle East & Africa.The research report on the global Amoxicillin Sodium market sheds light on the various factors driving it. It offers a comprehensive take on the historical achievements of the global market and compares it to the present-day market condition. This way it ensures a fair comparison of how far the market has come as a whole. To offer a deeper understanding, analysts have segmented the global market. The comparison between the segments further elucidates the components that have helped shape the global Amoxicillin Sodium market over the past few years. Such detailed description is thus a tool in the hands of the reader to make well-researched business decisions for achieving profitable objectives.Fill the form to get free report sample on this market @The major manufacturers covered in this reportTOKU-EAbcamAlfa AesarTULHayaoCSPCEli Lilly and CompanyMerckGeographically, this report studies the key regions, focuses on product sales, value, market share and growth opportunity in these regions, coveringNorth AmericaEuropeAsia-PacificSouth AmericaMiddle East & AfricaOn 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, includingHospital PharmacyRetail PharmacyOnline PharmacyKey StakeholdersAmoxicillin Sodium ManufacturersAmoxicillin Sodium Distributors/Traders/WholesalersAmoxicillin Sodium Subcomponent ManufacturersIndustry AssociationDownstream VendorsThe research report also includes an assessment of the competitive landscape. It includes an elaborate evaluation of the financial outlooks, research and development statuses, and business and marketing strategies of the key players. It also provides an understanding of the entry barriers to the new players and the challenges faced by the existing ones. The research report maintain an equanimity throughout with help useful research methodologies. Furthermore, it also gives the readers a chance to see the overall market objectively and make their individual inferences.The publication also answers questions pertaining to the market size and the size it is expected to gain by the end of the forecast period. Researchers have taken sincere efforts throughout the study to ensure no piece of information if left out and no aberrations occur.Access the Report and full TOC @Table of Contents1 Amoxicillin Sodium Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Amoxicillin Sodium1.2 Amoxicillin Sodium Segment by Type (Product Category)1.3 Global Amoxicillin Sodium Segment by Application1.4 Global Amoxicillin Sodium Market by Region (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Amoxicillin Sodium (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Amoxicillin Sodium Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Amoxicillin Sodium Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)2 Global Amoxicillin Sodium Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Amoxicillin Sodium Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Amoxicillin Sodium Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Amoxicillin Sodium Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Amoxicillin Sodium Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Amoxicillin Sodium Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Amoxicillin Sodium Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Amoxicillin Sodium Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 ManufacturersList of Tables and FiguresFigure Picture of Amoxicillin SodiumFigure Global Amoxicillin Sodium Production (K Units) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Types (Product Category) (2013-2025)Figure Global Amoxicillin Sodium Production Market Share by Types (Product Category) in 2017Figure Global Amoxicillin Sodium Market Size (Million USD), Comparison (K Units) and CAGR (%) by Regions (2013-2025)Figure North America Amoxicillin Sodium Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)Figure Europe Amoxicillin Sodium Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)Figure Asia-Pacific Amoxicillin Sodium Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)Figure South America Amoxicillin Sodium Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)About Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web: 3D Cardiac Mapping System Market Set to Witness an Uptick 2016 - 2026 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/11383 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11383 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Cardiac mapping is a technique in which the information from cardiac electrograms is gathered and displayed. Cardiac mapping is used to diagnose the heart rhythms especially in case of arrhythmia. The cardiac mapping procedure is usually done by inserting catheter into the heart chamber percutaneously and recording the electrograms sequentially, this is done in order to correlate the electrograms with cardiac anatomy. The new 3D cardiac mapping systems create the three dimensional model of any chamber of heart and can track exact location of the catheter. This allows movement of the catheters without using X-ray. They are designed to improve the resolution and gain prompt cardiac activation maps.Request for Table of Contents @3D Cardiac Mapping System Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe 3D cardiac mapping system market is anticipated to grow with a significant CAGR owing to the increase in number of patients with arrhythmia and other cardiac disorders, rising pressure to reduce diagnosis errors and increasing healthcare expenditure. The major factors driving the growth of 3D cardiac mapping systems is the precision and patient safety enabled by real-time monitoring.The increase in aging population who are more prone to chronic heart disorders will elevate the demand for the 3D cardiac mapping system. The increase in prevalence and diagnosis rate of cardiac illness is the major factors which is creating the demand for 3D cardiac mapping systems. The 3D cardiac mapping also help in reducing the time of diagnosis. The restraining factors for the 3D cardiac mapping system market are high cost of services and limited adoption rate of the systems.3D Cardiac Mapping System Market: SegmentationThe global 3D cardiac mapping system market are classified on the basis of technology, end use and geography.Based on the technology, the global 3D cardiac mapping system market is divided into following:Electroanatomical mappingBasket Catheter mappingReal-time positional management (Cardiac Pathways) EP systemBased on end user, the global 3D cardiac mapping system market is divided into following:HospitalsClinicsDiagnostic Centers3D Cardiac Mapping System Market: OverviewThe awareness of 3D cardiac mapping system is giving rise to the adoption of the systems. The elimination of errors in diagnosis helps the physician in providing better treatment and cure. The adoption rate of 3D cardiac mapping system by the hospitals is high as compared to that of independent clinics and is estimated to be the fastest growing segment. Electroanatomical mapping are used widely as it hold the potential to increase the safety, efficacy and efficiency of catheter. Real-time positional management (Cardiac Pathways) EP system contribute maximum share in the overall 3D cardiac mapping systems during the forecast period.3D Cardiac Mapping System Market: Regional OverviewOn the basis of geography, the global 3D cardiac mapping system market is segmented into seven key regions: North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan, and Middle East & Africa. North America contributes maximum share to the 3D cardiac mapping system market. European countries are expected to represent significant growth rates due to the growing healthcare practices. Amongst the Asian countries, India and China are more promising due to large population pool, increased prevalence of cardiac diseases, increasing awareness, rapid improvement in healthcare services with the saturation in the developed markets.Request a Sample Brochure of the Report @3D Cardiac Mapping System Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players in 3D cardiac mapping system market are Biosense Webster, Inc., St. Jude Medical and Boston Scientific Corporation, Inc. The companies are majorly focusing in the improvement of services provided to customers with the new techniques that provide the physicians in better and quick diagnosis.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Global Laser Processing Market 2018 | Eurolaser GmbH, Epilog Laser Inc., Prima Industrie S.p.A. Laser Processing https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1617258 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-laser-processing-market-research-report-2018-report.html/toc Press Release - 30 May2018Global Research and Development News --. ."Global Laser Processing Market Research Report 2018" with coming years Industries Trends, projections of Global Growth, Major key player and Case study, Review, Share, Size, Effect.' '-In this report, the global Laser Processing 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 Laser Processing in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndia. . Get Sample Report_' '-Global Laser Processing market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingTrumpf GmbH + Co. KGUniversal Laser Systems Inc.Amada Co. Ltd.Coherent Inc.IPG Photonics CorporationNewport CorporationRofin-Sinar Technologies Inc.Bystronic Laser AGEurolaser GmbHEpilog Laser Inc.Prima Industrie S.p.A.LaserStar Technologies CorporationJenoptik Laser GmbHHans Laser Technology Co. Ltd.-On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoGas LasersSolid-State LasersFiber LasersOther (Excimer, Semiconductor, Dye) Lasers-On the basis of the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate for each application, includingMaterial ProcessingLaser Marking and EngravingLaser Micro-Processing. . More Clear Details get Table of Contents_' 'Global Laser Processing Market Research Report 20181 Laser Processing Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Laser Processing1.2 Laser Processing Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Laser Processing Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Laser Processing Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Gas Lasers1.2.4 Solid-State Lasers1.2.5 Fiber Lasers1.2.6 Other (Excimer, Semiconductor, Dye) Lasers1.3 Global Laser Processing Segment by Application1.3.1 Laser Processing Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Material Processing1.3.3 Laser Marking and Engraving1.3.4 Laser Micro-Processing1.4 Global Laser Processing Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Laser Processing 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 Laser Processing (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Laser Processing Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Laser Processing Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)2 Global Laser Processing Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Laser Processing Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Laser Processing Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Laser Processing Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Laser Processing Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Laser Processing Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Laser Processing Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Laser Processing Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Laser Processing Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Laser Processing Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion3 Global Laser Processing Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global Laser Processing Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global Laser Processing Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global Laser Processing Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global Laser Processing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 North America Laser Processing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.6 Europe Laser Processing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.7 China Laser Processing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.8 Japan Laser Processing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.9 Southeast Asia Laser Processing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.10 India Laser Processing Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)4 Global Laser Processing Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)4.1 Global Laser Processing Consumption by Region (2013-2018)4.2 North America Laser Processing Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.3 Europe Laser Processing Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.4 China Laser Processing Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.5 Japan Laser Processing Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.6 Southeast Asia Laser Processing Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.7 India Laser Processing Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)5 Global Laser Processing Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type5.1 Global Laser Processing Production and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.2 Global Laser Processing Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.3 Global Laser Processing Price by Type (2013-2018)Continue.....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 Thymus Cancer Market to Witness an Outstanding Growth 2022 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/11431 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11431 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Thymus cancer or thyomas is a tumor formed on the outer surface of the thymus. Thymus is a small organ located in the upper chest under the breast bone and makes specific type of white blood cells which help the body fight infection. The tumor occurs at the rate of only 1.5 cases in million people each year in the United States thus being a rare type of cancer make up 1% of the total cancers. There are no prominent causes or risk factors for thymus cancer but show the symptoms like prolonged cough, fatigue and drooping of eye lids. About 30% of the people having thyoma also have a condition called myasthenia gravis which is an autoimmune disorder, people having thyoma tend to have some other related syndromes called as paraneoplastic syndromes. Thyoma may not cause aearly signs of symptoms and may be diagnosed during a chest x-ray or CT scan.Request Report for Table of Contents @WHO has developed a classification for thyomas by assigning different letters as Type A, Type AB, Type B1, Type B1, Type B2, Type B3,Type C, Type A being the rarest type. Most of the thyomas are diagnosed, staged and treated during the surgery. The advancements in cancer treatments and therapies can be the driving factors of this market. Being a rare type of cancer there no significant studies available where the risk factors and possible causes of thymus cancer which can be a drawback for the thymus cancer marketin terms of diagnosis. The proper approach towards thymus cancer can be the diagnosis and thus the people having syndrome are most likely to develop thymus cancer and thus must be looked after and treated before the tumor spreads beyond the thymus.With increasing base of thyoma patients, the Thymus Cancer market is expected to have sizeable growth opportunity during the forecast period (2016-2026). Companies are focusing on diagnosis treatments and also newer therapies to treat thymus cancer. With technological innovations and advance research there is immense potential in Thymus Cancer market.The global market for thymus cancer is segmented on basis of treatment and distribution channel:Segmentation by treatment of Thymus CancerSurgeryRadiation TherapyChemotherapyCarboplatin (Paraplatin)Cisplatin (Platinol)Ifosfamide (Ifex)OthersTargeted TherapySegmentation by distribution Channel of Thymus CancerHospitalsPharmaciesResearch OrganizationsPharmaceutical CompaniesOn the basis of region presence, Thymus Cancer market is segmented into five key regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa.Currently, North America dominates the global market for Thymus Cancer due to high prevalence rate of allergy cases owing to angioedema, followed by Europe. The rate of thymus cancer is comparatively low with respect to other regions. However factors such genetic mutation and relative conditions causing thyomas are also responsible for thymus cancer as observed by the researchers.Request a Sample Brochure of the Report @Some of the key market players in the manufacturing of the treatment products (antibiotics) for sinusitis includes Novartis International AG, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Baxter Healthcare Corporation, Pfizer Inc., Mylan N.V, Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC., Eli Lilly and Company, and Phyton Biotech LLC.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Hearing Aids Market Analysis to 2025: Top Companies like Zounds Hearin, Sonova, MED-EL, Cochlear Limited, Sivantos Pte Hearing Aids Market https://www.marketexpertz.com/sample-enquiry-form/11035 https://www.marketexpertz.com/make-enquiry-form/11035 https://www.marketexpertz.com/checkout-form/11035 Regional Analysis: The regions covered in the report are the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World (ROW). The Europe is set to be the leading region for the hearing aid devices market, followed by the Americas.The Study Paper On Follow Zounds Hearin(U.S.), SeboTek Hearing Systems, LLC (U.S.), Sivantos Pte(Singapore), GN Store Nord A/S (Denmark), Cochlear Limited (Australia), Sonova (Switzerland), MED-EL (Austria), William Demant Holding A/S (Denmark),...You Can Download Free Samples PDF Copy of Hearing Aids Market Browse Data Tables and Figures spread through 109 Pages and in-depth TOC in depth report and 08 company analyses @This study equips companies, stakeholders, field marketing executives and others to gather valuable insights pertaining to the market share, growth and size of the Hearing Aids industry for greater business gains. Unmatched statistical data on current and yesteryear trends included in the study aims at offering a paramount customer satisfaction.Besides, the report dives deep into various factors including import and export status, distribution channel, supply chain management, demand and supply and gross margin to help business owners, stakeholders and field market executives get a competitive edge. The important information associated with the product sales, growing investment pockets, total revenue generated and profit worldwide is presented through resources such charts, tables and info graphics.Scope of the Report:Extensive documentation of the market performance across demographics and forecast of expected returns for a stated period enables business evangelists to speculate investor decisions in the coming years. Further, organized effort to accumulate information about the market share of leading manufacturers coupled with their sales figures, production value and brand positioning reveals a lot about the industrys future potential. The study also offers data focussed on topics including result-oriented marketing strategies or tactics adopted by major manufacturers operating in the Hearing Aids industry.Get research details now! Make an enquiry for a fast response @On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, and market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into In the ear hearing aids (ITE) In the canal (ITC) Completely in the canal (CIC) Behind the ear (BTE) Receiver in canal (RIC)On the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, sales volume, market share and growth rate for each application, including Hospital Clinic OthersThis comprehensive survey presents an overview of various aspects associated with the business domain including but not limited to the definition, various application, and classification. Other important factors the assessment weighs upon are investment feasibility evaluation, expected return on an investment, import and export trends, demand, supply chain management and consumption analysis. What adds more credulity to the Hearing Aids study is the competitive market structure showcased intellectually through tables, charts, info graphics, images and similar resources. This unbiased evaluation not only benchmarks the performance of leading vendors and various applications such as Dams, Roads, Airports and Construction but also answers critical questions related to the factors responsible for the market share to grow up to 2025, the highest for the period 2018 2025.Key Point from TOC8 Major Manufacturers Analysis of Hearing Aids8.1 Zounds Hearin(U.S.)8.1.1 Company Profile8.1.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.1.2.1 Product A8.1.2.2 Product B8.1.3 Zounds Hearin(U.S.) 2017 Hearing Aids Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.1.4 Zounds Hearin(U.S.) 2017 Hearing Aids Business Region Distribution Analysis8.2 SeboTek Hearing Systems, LLC (U.S.)8.2.1 Company Profile8.2.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.2.2.1 Product A8.2.2.2 Product B8.2.3 SeboTek Hearing Systems, LLC (U.S.) 2017 Hearing Aids Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.2.4 SeboTek Hearing Systems, LLC (U.S.) 2017 Hearing Aids Business Region Distribution Analysis8.3 Sivantos Pte(Singapore)8.3.1 Company Profile8.3.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.3.2.1 Product A8.3.2.2 Product B8.3.3 Sivantos Pte(Singapore) 2017 Hearing Aids Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.3.4 Sivantos Pte(Singapore) 2017 Hearing Aids Business Region Distribution Analysis8.4 GN Store Nord A/S (Denmark)8.4.1 Company Profile8.4.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.4.2.1 Product A8.4.2.2 Product B8.4.3 GN Store Nord A/S (Denmark) 2017 Hearing Aids Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.4.4 GN Store Nord A/S (Denmark) 2017 Hearing Aids Business Region Distribution Analysis8.5 Cochlear Limited (Australia)8.5.1 Company Profile8.5.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.5.2.1 Product A8.5.2.2 Product B8.5.3 Cochlear Limited (Australia) 2017 Hearing Aids Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.5.4 Cochlear Limited (Australia) 2017 Hearing Aids Business Region Distribution AnalysisContinue..The Hearing Aids market research provides answers to the following key question- Who are the leading Hearing Aids players and what are their prospects over the forecast period?-How is the Hearing Aids market evolving?-Which trends and developments will prevail and how will these shifts be responded to?- How will political factors influence the regional Hearing Aids markets and submarkets?- What are the future prospects of the industry in the coming years?- Which factors are restricting the growth of the Hearing Aids market worldwide?Learn about This Report: You can purchase a single user copy @About usPlanning to invest in market intelligence products or offerings on the web? Then marketexpertz has just the thing for you - reports from over 500 prominent publishers and updates on our collection daily to empower companies and individuals catch-up with the vital insights on industries operating across different geography, trends, share, size and growth rate. There's more to what we offer to our customers. With marketexpertz you have the choice to tap into the specialized services without any additional charges.Our in-house research specialists exhibit immense knowledge of not only the publisher but also the types of market intelligence studies in their respective business verticals. They empower you to expand your search metrics, access a complete range of available studies, evaluate the scope and research techniques used to prepare the report all while you are making a purchase on our site. Not only do we keep you informed but we also aim at offering objective advisory services to ensure you are getting the best offer.Contact40 Wall St. 28th floorNew York City,NY 10005United Statessales@marketexpertz.com+1-800-819-3052 Christmas Decorations Global Market 2018: Key Players Glassor, Krebs, Festive Productions Ltd., Kurt Adler, Amscan https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3201159-global-christmas-decorations-market-research-report-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/enquiry/3201159-global-christmas-decorations-market-research-report-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/checkout?currency=one_user-USD&report_id=3201159 https://www.wiseguyreports.com Christmas Decorations IndustryDescriptionWiseguyreports.Com Adds Christmas Decorations -Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities and Analysis Of Top Key Player Forecast To 2023 To Its Research DatabaseGlobal Christmas Decorations market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingGlassorKrebsFestive Productions Ltd.Kurt AdlerAmscanBalsam BrandsBrite StarBarcanaCrab Pot TreesCrystal ValleyTree ClassicsHilltopRequest for Sample Report @Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Christmas Decorations 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 intoChristmas Trees (Real and Artificial)Christmas LightingsChristmas OrnamentsOthersOn 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, includingHome UseCommercial UseOthersLeave a Query @Table of ContentsGlobal Christmas Decorations Market Research Report 20181 Christmas Decorations Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Christmas Decorations1.2 Christmas Decorations Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Christmas Decorations Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Christmas Decorations Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Christmas Trees (Real and Artificial)1.2.4 Christmas Lightings1.2.5 Christmas Ornaments1.2.6 Others1.3 Global Christmas Decorations Segment by Application1.3.1 Christmas Decorations Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Home Use1.3.3 Commercial Use1.3.4 Others1.4 Global Christmas Decorations Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Christmas Decorations 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 Christmas Decorations (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Christmas Decorations Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Christmas Decorations Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)....7 Global Christmas Decorations Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Glassor7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Christmas Decorations Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 Glassor Christmas Decorations Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Krebs7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Christmas Decorations Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 Krebs Christmas Decorations Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Festive Productions Ltd.7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Christmas Decorations Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Festive Productions Ltd. Christmas Decorations Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.4 Kurt Adler7.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.4.2 Christmas Decorations Product Category, Application and Specification7.4.2.1 Product A7.4.2.2 Product B7.4.3 Kurt Adler Christmas Decorations Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.5 Amscan7.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.5.2 Christmas Decorations Product Category, Application and Specification7.5.2.1 Product A7.5.2.2 Product B7.5.3 Amscan Christmas Decorations Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.6 Balsam Brands7.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.6.2 Christmas Decorations Product Category, Application and Specification7.6.2.1 Product A7.6.2.2 Product B7.6.3 Balsam Brands Christmas Decorations Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.6.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.7 Brite Star7.7.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.7.2 Christmas Decorations Product Category, Application and Specification7.7.2.1 Product A7.7.2.2 Product B7.7.3 Brite Star Christmas Decorations Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.7.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.8 Barcana7.8.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.8.2 Christmas Decorations Product Category, Application and Specification7.8.2.1 Product A7.8.2.2 Product B7.8.3 Barcana Christmas Decorations Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.8.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.9 Crab Pot Trees7.9.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.9.2 Christmas Decorations Product Category, Application and Specification7.9.2.1 Product A7.9.2.2 Product B7.9.3 Crab Pot Trees Christmas Decorations Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.9.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.10 Crystal Valley7.10.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.10.2 Christmas Decorations Product Category, Application and Specification7.10.2.1 Product A7.10.2.2 Product B7.10.3 Crystal Valley Christmas Decorations Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.10.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.11 Tree Classics7.12 HilltopBuy Now @Continued...Contact Us: Sales@Wiseguyreports.Com Ph: +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 LtdPune 411028Maharashtra, GlobalPh: +91 841 198 5042 Multiple Award Winning Author Dr Nicole Announces No Charge Download Of Children's Book, 'Special Food For Sam', Book Dealing With Childhood Allergies Cover http://www.drnicolebook.com Multi-award winning children's book author Dr. Nicole has announced a no-charge download of 'Special Food for Sam'. The new picture book on allergies is one of eight new children's books in the Felix and Booboo series. The full series of books is available in both French and English. All of the books in the series can be used by educators and medical professionals to help kids understand that these types of conditions are normal and are not to be feared or avoided. The download is available in MOBI, ePUB and PDF versions at Payhip.In 'Special Food for Sam', Felix baked special cookies for Sam. His magical medical instruments helped him prevent the eggs, the nuts and the cow milk from jumping into the cookie dough. The book received a 5 star rating from Readers Favorite and is an ideal resource for parent and grandparents of children who suffer from allergies.The eight books in the Felix and Booboo series include:Amy Has a Rash - ChickenpoxLea Does Not Feel Well - GastroenteritisMaya Visits Her Doctor - VaccinationsMaya's Head Is Itching - LiceSpecial Food for Sam - AllergiesFelix Is Curious About His Body - The Human BodyLucas Has an Earache - OtitisCharles Hurt Himself Playing - Broken ArmIn the traditions of Walt Disney and Dr. Seuss, Dr. Nicole breathes life into inanimate objects and wildly entertaining characters that engage children in powerful ways. Through the parent/child interaction, her works develop a love for reading while helping children develop the most important skill of all - critical thinking. If a child can master the art of critical thinking, nearly everything else falls into place.Dr. Nicoles books have won a large number of international awards. A full listing of the awards can be found on her website.Most of Dr. Nicole's books have received highly favorable reviews. In a recent review for one of the books, Vernita Naylor, a reviewer for Readers' Favorite stated, "Children have a lot of questions and the books in the Felix and Booboo Series have the answers. To keep your child engaged in learning, Dr. Audet has posed questions for your child to help gauge their understanding of the subject, while giving advice to parents as well."Dr. Nicole also received recognition as one of Quebec's Top 10 Women by the Maman Dion Foundation. The Maman Dion foundation was founded by Therese Tanguay-Dion, known as Maman Dion, a television personality and the Celine Dions mother. The Maman Dion Foundation is an educational foundation that provides support to underprivileged children in the form of clothing, eyewear and school supplies.Dr. Nicole has sold over 150,000 books in her career. She is highly regarded for her work with childrens books and a health guide for families. Her goals are to create in children a love for reading and to create interaction and engagement.In addition to the no-charge download of 'Special Food for Sam' at Payhip, other no-charge copies of any of her books are available for University teachers, journalists and members of the media who provide email, website, mail address and phone number.Dr. Nicole is available for media interviews and can be reached using the information below. Journalists who wish to receive a copy of the books for review or might wish to schedule an interview can email info@drnicolebook.com. All of her English and bilingual works are available on Amazon, AuthorHouse, and other quality book retailers. Free coloring pages are available upon request by sending an email to the author. More information is available at her website.Dr. Nicole Audet holds a Master degree in medical education. She is a professional writer and an engaging speaker. She has worked in Clinical Practice (emergency, family doctor office, University of Montreal affiliated teacher and Lecturer in the Department of Pediatrics of McGill University). She has been the Editor in Chief of the French medical magazine 'Le Medecin du Quebec'. She has presented at many international, national and provincial medical congresses and has managed medical teaching clinics, medical magazines and medical research in computer science. Her books have received many international and national awards.PO Box 1613Supply NC 28462 Will Mobile Continuous Glucose Monitoring System Market Perceive Robust Expansion by 2024 ? https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11563 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/11563 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Glucose is a form of sugar that is absorbed through food and is utilized by the body for producing energy. The body produces insulin to regulate glucose in the blood, however when the production of insulin in the body is hampered the glucose level in the blood becomes unregulated causing diabetes. Globally it has been witnessed that the disease burden of diabetes has been increasing at an accelerated rate during the past few decades. According to the WHOs 2014 estimates, nearly 422 million people have diabetes. Diabetes increases the risk of causing several complications in the body like heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, slow healing of wounds causing sepsis and leg amputations, nerve damage and vision loss, due to these severe risks, diabetic patients are required to monitor their blood glucose levels regularly.The traditional glucose monitoring techniques usually are make use of small incision on the finger to remove blood for screening the glucose level however diabetic patients may suffer from fluctuating glucose levels throughout the day and may require to inject insulin as the level of glucose in the blood increases, this requires continuous blood glucose monitoring systems. Continuous blood glucose monitoring systems are generally made up of two key components: a sensor that is placed under the skin which monitor the glucose levels and a transmitter which sends the data to a display device which may be smart phones of personal computers. These systems enable the patients or doctors to access blood glucose data constantly and even remotely.The increasing incidence and prevalence rate of diabetes is mainly expected to boost the demand for continuous glucose monitoring systems. According to WHO the prevalence rate of diabetes has almost doubled in past few decades and is estimated to account up to nearly 8.5% of the global adult population. The increasing number of diabetic patients are expected to increase demand for continuous glucose monitoring systems. In recent years the internet and smartphone penetration has increased rapidly in the emerging countries like China, India and Latin American Countries, which is making it easier for the medical device manufacturers to introduce personal healthcare products based on the internet platform that can be easily accessed by the patients via smartphones.Request Sample Report @Technological developments like integration of smart watches into continuous glucose monitoring systems by companies like Apple, Inc. and others trying for the same is expected to increase the adoption rate of the continuous glucose monitoring systems and boost the overall demand for continuous glucose monitoring systems market. Moreover companies like Dexcom, Inc. are trying to manufacture products with capability of transmitting data to other devices and systems like integration of data into EMR (Electronic Medical Records) which is expected to significantly boost mobile continuous glucose monitoring system market. However the stringent regulatory policies like PMA (Premarket Approval) from FDA may decelerate the entry of new technology in the mobile continuous monitoring system market. Also the price of continuous glucose monitoring systems are comparatively higher than the conventional glucose monitoring devices which in turn is expected to hamper continuous glucose monitoring system market. Some other factors restraining the market growth are weak reimbursement policies, fierce competition among existing players and entry of several new players in the continuous mobile glucose monitoring system market.The mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market in segment into following typesBy Product TypeDeviceSensorTransmitterDisplaySoftwareMobile ApplicationsBy Distribution ChannelRetail PharmaciesOnline PharmaciesBy TechnologyInvasiveNon-invasive (Exfoliation)As the diabetic patient pool is increasing rapidly the mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market is expected to witness healthy CAGR over the forecast period.Geographically, mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market is segmented into five key regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC) and Middle East and Africa (MEA). Geographically North America and Europe are expected to be the leading markets for mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems. Several companies have established distribution network in the U.S. and Europe which is expected to boost the growth of mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market. Also the Medicare provides coverage for several mobile continuous glucose systems in the U.S. which in turn is expected to increase adoption rate of the continuous mobile monitoring systems.Asia Pacific is expected to be next promising market for the mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems due to high diabetic population and increasing per capita healthcare spending. China and India are some of the leading countries in prevalence rate of diabetes also companies gain operational leverage due to low labor and raw materials cost in these countries which is expected to significantly boost the mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market in this region.Request to Browse Full Table of Content, figure and Tables @Latin America is expected to be next key market after APAC due to due to increasing adoption rate of the mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems mainly due to strong promotional and distribution strategies of the manufacturers. MEA region is expected to follow up after Latin America due to increasing standards in healthcare and rising incidence of diabetes.Some key players in the mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market are Dexcom, Inc., Insulet Corporation, Abbott Laboratories Limited, Panasonic Healthcare Corporation, Echo Therapeutics, Inc., Medtronic, LifeScan, Inc. Roche Diagnostics, Tandem Diabetes Care, Inc. and GlySens Incorporated.ABOUT US:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.CONTACT:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Intra-operative 3D Navigation System Market Growth to be Fuelled by Advancements in Technology (2024) https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11608 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/11608 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Intraoperative care is a time period during operation in which patient is monitored, prepped, anesthetized and surgery is performed. Navigation system is the integral part of the surgery which enable surgeons with anatomical localization by means of imaging and computer technology along with accurate execution of surgical intervention with patients safety & comfort. Surgical navigation system helps in performing minimally invasive procedure by tracking the position of surgical device. It also considered as most reliable technology that render complications and risks during surgery and optimize the functioning of operation rooms.With increase in number of surgical procedures the demand for intraoperative navigation technology will also rise, which transform surgical procedures more precise and enhance economic value. 3D application simplifies the processing, image viewing and altering for navigation of surgical instrument and helps in improving favorable outcomes. Patients suffering from asymmetric deformities need 3D approach surgical navigation system. 3D navigation system helps in guiding neurosurgery procedures such as tumor resection, CSF management, biopsy and deep brain stimulation. The benefits of 3D navigation system are assimilate CT scans directly in the operation room & minimizing interruption, less chances of errors, actual placement can be compared directly with pre-operative target plan.Request Sample Report @Intra-operative 3D navigation system market are witnessing robust growth owing to technology improvement, better alignment, favorable patient outcome in surgery, accurate result, better visualization helps surgeons in real-time information of patients condition during surgery and aid in taking surgical decisions. Moreover, it also helps surgeons to perform more accurate procedure, less cumbersome, reduce complications and risk. However, deformities with device, decline in durability of systems over time, deformation of soft tissue with device, high cost of system, lack of reimbursement facility and chances of error with critical components of 3D navigation system impede the growth of intra-operative 3D navigation system market.Intra-operative 3D navigation system market is classified on the basis of product and end user.Based on product type, the intra-operative 3D navigation system market is segmented into the following:Neurosurgery Navigation SystemSpinal/ Trauma Surgery Navigation SystemOrthopedic Surgery Navigation SystemENT Navigation SystemBased on end user, the intra-operative 3D navigation system market is segmented into following:HospitalsAmbulatory Surgical CentersClinicsThe 3D navigation system has to perform the seamless fusion of medical imaging anatomy with real time tracking to improve patient outcomes. The demand for 3D navigation system in intra-operative care is rising due to increase in the complicated surgeries that need to be performed by surgeons even though ensuring the time duration, for that the navigation system helps them to perform more precise procedure. It also, help surgeons to make data which drive them to take decisions during surgery by integrating most advanced technologies and if the system is used at a broader scale it will be cost effect for hospitals. The intra-operative 3D navigation system has an advanced visualization technology enable for 2D, 3D viewing.Request to Browse Full Table of Content, figure and Tables @Depending on geographic region, intra-operative 3D navigation system market is segmented into five key regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa. North America held the largest revenue share in intra-operative 3D navigation system market followed by Europe and Asia Pacific owing to established healthcare infrastructure, technological advancements and majority of surgeries performed in these regions. The developing nations in Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa hold huge potential for growth in the Intra-operative 3D navigation system market due to increase in the demand for less invasive procedures, accessibility and medical tourism in these regions.Some of the key participating global players in intra-operative 3D navigation system market are Medtronic, DOTmed.com Inc., Brainlab AG, FIAGON GMBH, Zimmer Inc., Siemens Healthcare GmbH, Stryker, XION GmbH and B. Braun Melsungen AGABOUT US:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.CONTACT:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Global Roof Waterproofing Coating Market 2018 Key Players: Akzo Nobel N.V., DOW Chemical Company, PPG Industries, Inc., Sika AG, BASF SE. Roof Waterproofing Coating Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2742475-global-roof-waterproofing-coating-market-research-report-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2742475-global-roof-waterproofing-coating-market-research-report-2018 Roof Waterproofing Coating Market:WiseGuyReports.com adds Roof Waterproofing Coating Market 2018 Global Analysis, Growth, Trends and Opportunities Research Report Forecasting to 2025reports to its database.Executive SummaryThis report studies the global Roof Waterproofing Coating market status and forecast, categorizes the global Roof Waterproofing Coating 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 major manufacturers covered in this reportAkzo Nobel N.V.DOW Chemical CompanyPPG Industries, Inc.Sika AGBASF SENippon Paint Holdings Co., Ltd.RPM International Inc.Sherwin WilliamsWacker Chemie AGHempel A/SKansai Paint Co., Ltd.Tikkurila OYJNational Coatings CorporationGardner-Gibson, Inc.Anvil Paints & Coatings, Inc.Asian Paints LimitedGAFSK Kaken Co., Ltd.The Lubrizol CorporationSurface Chemists of Florida, Inc.Armor Coat Roof CoatingsDuro-Last, Inc.Johns ManvilleThe Karnak CorporationSR ProductsGeographically, 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)On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoBy TypeElastomericBituminousAcrylicEpoxySiliconeOthersBy SubstrateMetalAsphaltMembraneConcretePlasticOthersOn 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, includingResidentialCommercial BuildingOthersRequest Sample Report @The study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global Roof Waterproofing Coating capacity, production, value, consumption, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025);Focuses on the key Roof Waterproofing Coating 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 Roof Waterproofing Coating 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 StakeholdersRoof Waterproofing Coating ManufacturersRoof Waterproofing Coating Distributors/Traders/WholesalersRoof Waterproofing Coating 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 Roof Waterproofing Coating market, by end-use.Detailed analysis and profiles of additional market players.Table of ContentsGlobal Roof Waterproofing Coating Market Research Report 20181 Roof Waterproofing Coating Market Overview2 Global Roof Waterproofing Coating Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Roof Waterproofing Coating Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Roof Waterproofing Coating Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Roof Waterproofing Coating Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Roof Waterproofing Coating Market Analysis by Application7 Global Roof Waterproofing Coating Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Roof Waterproofing Coating Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Roof Waterproofing Coating Market Forecast (2018-2025)13 Research Findings and Conclusion14 AppendixContinuousFor 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 Heavy-Duty Connector Market Key Players 2025 - Amphenol Sine Systems, Weiland Electric, ITT Cannon, ODU, Lapp, Smiths Interconnect, Walther Electric Heavy-Duty Connector Market https://www.marketexpertz.com/sample-enquiry-form/11043 https://www.marketexpertz.com/checkout-form/11043 https://www.marketexpertz.com/industry-overview/heavy-duty-connector-market A recent study on the Heavy-Duty Connector market applies both primary and secondary research techniques to accumulate vital statistics about the competitive business landscape of the Heavy-Duty Connector market for the forecast period 2018 - 2025.Download Sample Copy of Heavy-Duty Connector Market spread across 110 PAGES, profiling 20 companies and supported with Tables & Figures is now available at @Scope of the Report:The research methodologies used for evaluating the Heavy-Duty Connector market are inventive and also provides enough evidence on the demand and supply status, production capability, import and export, supply chain management and investment feasibility.The investigative approach applied for the extensive analysis of the sale, gross margin and profit generated by the industry are presented through resources including tables, charts, and graphic images. Importantly, these resources can be easily integrated or used for preparing business or corporate presentations.Market Segment by manufacturers, the report covers the following companies:TE Connectivity, Pheonix Contact, Harting Technology, Weidmuller Interface, Molex, Amphenol Sine Systems, Weiland Electric, ITT Cannon, ODU, Lapp, Smiths Interconnect, Walther Electric, China Utility Electrical, Xiamen Wain Electrical, Bulgin, Ningbo Degson Electronics, Indo Electricals, Schaltbau, Ningbo Oukerui Connector, Weald ElectronicsMarket Segment on the basis of product, the report covers: By Material (Metal, Plastic) By Termination Style (Crimp, Screw, Others)Buy Heavy-Duty Connector Market Report @Market Segment on the basis of application, the report covers: Manufacturing Power Rail Oil & Gas Construction OthersThe market intelligence study for the Heavy-Duty Connector market further provides an inside-out overview of necessary aspects associated with the product classification, important definitions, major orders and other industry-centric parameters. An underlying part of the study also maps the important factors associated with the recent events such as mergers and acquisition, collaboration and new product launches.There are 16 Chapters to deeply display the Heavy-Duty Connector market.Chapter 1 covers the Heavy-Duty Connector Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2 talks about the top manufacturers and analyses their sales, revenue and pricing decisions for the duration 2018 and 2025;Chapter 3 displays the competitive nature of the market by discussing the competition among the top manufacturers. It dissects the market using sales, revenue and market share data for 2018 and 2025;Chapter 4, shows the global market by regions and the proportionate size of each market region based on sales, revenue and market share of Heavy-Duty Connector, for the period 2018- 2025;ContinueBrowse the full Report@About US:Planning to invest in market intelligence products or offerings on the web? Then marketexpertz has just the thing for you - reports from over 500 prominent publishers and updates on our collection daily to empower companies and individuals catch-up with the vital insights on industries operating across different geography, trends, share, size and growth rate. There's more to what we offer to our customers. With marketexpertz you have the choice to tap into the specialized services without any additional charges.Contact US:40 Wall St. 28th floor New York CityNY 10005 United Statessales@marketexpertz.com+1-800-819-3052 Matrix to participate in HITEC Houston, held at George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston, Texas, USA Matrix will be unveiling its recently launched eXtreme series of NVR (Network Video Recorder) at HITEC Houston.Matrix has been a consistent participant of the HITEC expos and will be participating at the Houston event this year as well. We will be unveiling our new eXtreme series of Network Video Recorder (NVRX) at the event. This NVR is equipped with 4K decoding capacity and characteristics like Cascading (up to 20 NVRs), Camera-wise Recording Retention and Database Level Integration. It also has plenty of other distinct features like High Resolution Recording, Playback, and Simultaneous Local and Remote Monitoring along with Storage Retention for Higher Number of Days. Moreover, these latest NVRs are also backed with an intelligent software that helps detect threats and send instant notifications for Real-time Security.All in all, these comprehensive, flexible, reliable, integrated NVRX provide a proficient, persistent and preventive security solution, suitable for enterprises and multi-location offices.Apart from this, Matrix will also be exhibiting our People Mobility Management solution for the hospitality segment. Our solution can help manage multiple branches from a single location, track and manage multiple shifts of employees and manage access within premises. Based on organization requirement, Matrix provides optimized shift planning, which enables admin schedule shifts to either an individual or a group of employees. Mobile being the next generation technology in terms of security, Matrix will display its Your Mobile is Your Identity solution. In Mobile based Access Control, user either scans the QR code through his/her mobile or just twists the mobile to get access using Bluetooth. A user can automatically mark attendance using GPS or Wi-Fi through mobile application. Additionally, to enhance the security, Matrix biometric solutions can be seamlessly integrated with any third party hardware such as Video Surveillance Solution, Magnetic Door Lock, Electronic Door Lock, Turnstile, etc. Witness cutting-edge Matrix biometric solutions at HITEC Houston.In the Telecom domain, we will be exhibiting ETERNITY NX and our Hospitality solution at the event. Our Hospitality solution helps enhance guest experience and services, make staff more productive and streamline back office or administrative processes.Visit Matrix at HITEC Houston, at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas, USA Booth No. 1613 from 18th June 2018 to 21st June 2018.Contact:Ashu Upa,Ashu.Upa@MatrixComSec.Com ,Tel: (800) 283-0539, Fax: 888 -717-7472About MatrixEstablished in 1991, Matrix is a leader in Telecom and Security solutions for modern businesses and enterprises. Matrix, an innovative, technology driven and customer focused organization, is committed to keep pace with the revolutions in the telecom and security industries. With more than 40% of its human resources dedicated to the development of new products, Matrix has launched cutting-edge products like IP-PBX, Universal Gateways, VoIP Gateways and Terminals, GSM Gateways, Access Control, Time-Attendance and Video Surveillance solutions. These solutions are feature-rich, reliable and conform to the international standards. Having global footprints in Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Africa through an extensive network of more than 1,000 channel partners, Matrix ensures that the products serve the needs of its customers faster and longer. Matrix has gained trust and admiration of customers representing the entire spectrum of industries. Matrix has won many international awards for its innovative products.Matrix Comsec 394, GIDC Makarpura, Vadodara-390010+91 0265 2630555Ph.: +91 93744 74302E-Mail: Customer.Care@MatrixComsec.com Lenses Market Report | Growth Projections & Advanced Technologies In World with Industry Forecast To 2023 Lenses Market https://www.htfmarketreport.com/sample-report/1183147-2018-2025-lenses-report-on-global-and-united-states-market https://www.htfmarketreport.com/reports/1183147-2018-2025-lenses-report-on-global-and-united-states-market https://www.htfmarketreport.com/enquiry-before-buy/1183147-2018-2025-lenses-report-on-global-and-united-states-market https://www.htfmarketreport.com/buy-now?format=1&report=1183147 HTF MI published a new industry research that focuses on Lenses market and delivers in-depth market analysis and future prospects of Global and United States Lenses market. The study covers significant data which makes the research document a handy resource for managers, analysts, industry experts and other key people get ready-to-access and self-analyzed study along with graphs and tables to help understand market trends, drivers and market challenges. The study is segmented by Application/ end users [Personal Use & Professional Use],and various important geographies like United States, North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America & Middle East and Africa].Get Access to sample pages @The research covers the current market size of the Global and United States Lenses market and its growth rates based on 5 year history data along with company profile of key players/manufacturers. The in-depth information by segments of Lenses market helps monitor future profitability & to make critical decisions for growth. The information on trends and developments, focuses on markets and materials, capacities, technologies, CAPEX cycle and the changing structure of the Global and United States Lenses Market.The study provides company profiling, product picture and specifications, sales, market share and contact information of key manufacturers of Global and United States Lenses Market, some of them listed here are Canon, Nikon, Lensball, KNGUVTH, Altura Photo, Panasonic, Yongnuo, Sony, Camera Lenses, Camera & Camcorder Lens Bundles & Camcorder Lenses. The market is growing at a very rapid pace and with rise in technological innovation, competition and M&A activities in the industry many local and regional vendors are offering specific application products for varied end-users. The new manufacturer entrants in the market are finding it hard to compete with the international vendors based on quality, reliability, and innovations in technology.Global and United States Lenses (Thousands Units) and Revenue (Million USD) Market Split by Product Type such as . Further the research study is segmented by Application such as Personal Use & Professional Use with historical and projected market share and compounded annual growth rate.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), and market share and growth rate of Lenses in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast), covering United States, North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America & Middle East and Africa and its Share (%) and CAGR for the forecasted period 2017 to 2022.Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @Following would be the Chapters to display the Global and United States Lenses market.Chapter 1, to describe Definition, Specifications and Classification of Lenses, Applications of Lenses, 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 Lenses, Capacity and Commercial Production Date, Manufacturing Plants Distribution, R&D Status and Technology Source, Raw Materials Sources Analysis;Chapter 4, to show the Overall Market Analysis, Capacity Analysis (Company Segment), Sales Analysis (Company Segment), Sales Price Analysis (Company Segment);Chapter 5 and 6, to show the Regional Market Analysis that includes United States, North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America & Middle East and Africa, Lenses Segment Market Analysis (by Type);Chapter 7 and 8, to analyze the Lenses Segment Market Analysis (by Application) Major Manufacturers Analysis of Lenses;Chapter 9, Market Trend Analysis, Regional Market Trend,Market Trend by Application [Personal Use & Professional Use];Chapter 10, Regional Marketing Type Analysis, International Trade Type Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis;Chapter 11, to analyze the Consumers Analysis of Global and United States Lenses;Chapter 12,13, 14 and 15, to describe Lenses sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.Enquire for customization in Report @What this Research Study Offers:Global and United States Lenses Market share assessments for the regional and country level segmentsMarket share analysis of the top industry playersStrategic recommendations for the new entrantsMarket forecasts for a minimum of 5 years of all the mentioned segments, sub segments and the regional marketsMarket Trends (Drivers, Constraints, Opportunities, Threats, Challenges, Investment Opportunities, and recommendations)Strategic recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimationsCompetitive landscaping mapping the key common trendsCompany profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent developmentsSupply chain trends mapping the latest technological advancementsBuy this research report @Reasons for Buying this ReportThis report provides pin-point analysis for changing competitive dynamicsIt provides a forward looking perspective on different factors driving or restraining market growthIt provides a six-year forecast assessed on the basis of how the market is predicted to growIt helps in understanding the key product segments and their futureIt provides pin point analysis of changing competition dynamics and keeps you ahead of competitorsIt helps in making informed business decisions by having complete insights of market and by making in-depth analysis of market segmentsThanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia.HTF Market Report is a wholly owned brand of HTF market Intelligence Consulting Private Limited. HTF Market Report global research and market intelligence consulting organization is uniquely positioned to not only identify growth opportunities but to also empower and inspire you to create visionary growth strategies for futures, enabled by our extraordinary depth and breadth of thought leadership, research, tools, events and experience that assist you for making goals into a reality. Our understanding of the interplay between industry convergence, Mega Trends, technologies and market trends provides our clients with new business models and expansion opportunities. We are focused on identifying the Accurate Forecast in every industry we cover so our clients can reap the benefits of being early market entrants and can accomplish their Goals & Objectives.Contact us :HTF Market Intelligence Consulting Private LimitedUnit No. 429, Parsonage Road Edison, NJNew Jersey USA 08837sales@htfmarketreport.com+1 (206) 317 1218 Global Corn Oil Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth factors, Top Key Players, Competitive Intelligence 2013 to 2017 and Forecast 2018 to 2024 Global Corn Oil Market https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/corn-oil-market/#ulp-4H8Z4LpNMLEuOnnx https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/corn-oil-market/#ulp-c654SbFYO64MsOhu https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/corn-oil-market/#ulp-14mlyhjMGhVjZqa3 https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/corn-oil-market/ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com Global Corn Oil Market: By Product Type (High Oleic, Middle Oleic, Low Oleic), By Application (Biodiesel, Soap Making, Food Services, Pharmaceutical, Others), and Geography - Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2013-2017 and Forecast 2018-2024Global corn oil market was valued at US $ XX Mn and expected to grow at XX% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) over 2018 to 2024.Market Outline: Corn Oil MarketCorn oil also known as the maize oil is extracted from the germ of corn. The germ is the part of the seed that is germinating. It is a type of edible oil used widely for cooking, in either refined form or unrefined form. Corn oils are cost-effective when compared with that of the other oils and is extremely nutritious. The unrefined form of the oil is healthy with an immense amount of phytochemicals. It tastes nutty with a tinge of corn.Market Dynamics: Corn Oil MarketOwing to its therapeutic properties, the corn oil is gaining popularity all across the globe. The health benefits associated with the corn oil such as lowering the cholesterol, improving the heart health, helps in lowering the blood pressure, and acts as the emollient for skin, are driving the consumers towards corn oil. The corn oil is also used as an alternative biodiesel which helps in to reduce carbon footprint, which is underpinning the growth of the corn oil market. Corn oil is also used as feedstock for biodiesel, is boosting the growth of the market. The growing demand for the corn oil as cooking oil owing to its health benefits are enhancing the growth of the corn oil market. However, the availability of alternative products is likely to hamper the growth of the corn oil market over the forecast period.A sample of this report is available upon request @Market Scope: Corn Oil MarketCorn oil market is segmented based on the product type, applicationBased on the product type, the market is segmented into the following:High OleicMiddle OleicLow OleicBased on the application, the market is segmented into the following:BiodieselSoap MakingFood ServicesPharmaceuticalOthersTo view TOC of this report is available upon request @Regional Analysis: Corn Oil MarketGeographically, global corn oil market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa. Europe corn oil market holds the largest share when compared with that of the other regional markets. Germany contributes the higher share in the Europe corn oil market. North America is the favorable market for corn oils in case of consumption. The United States region drives the corn oil market in this region. The Asia Pacific corn oil market is expected to show a rapid growth in the forecasted period owing to its rising demand in the food industry and rising use as cooking oil.Need more information about this report @Competition Assessment: Corn Oil MarketSome of the players in the global corn oil market include:Archer Daniels Midland Company (U.S)ConAgra Foods Inc. (U.S)FEC Solutions (India)GreenField Specialty Alcohols Inc. (U.S)Associated British Food plc (UK)Notable Market Developments: Corn Oil MarketIn June 2017, Pacific Ethanol has acquired Illinois Corn ProcessingGet access to full summary @About Precision Business InsightsPrecision Business Insights is one of the leading market research and business consulting firm, which follow a holistic approach to solve needs of the clients. We adopt and implement proven research methodologies to achieve better results. We help our clients by providing actionable insights and strategies to make better decisions. We provide consulting, syndicated and customised market research services based on our client needs.Contact to Precision Business Insights,Kemp House,152 160 City Road,London EC1V 2NXEmail: sales@precisionbusinessinsights.comToll Free (US): +1-866-598-1553Website @ Global Albumin Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth factors, Top Key Players, Competitive Intelligence 2013 to 2017 and Forecast 2018 to 2024 Global Albumin Market https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/albumin-market/#ulp-4H8Z4LpNMLEuOnnx https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/albumin-market/#ulp-c654SbFYO64MsOhu https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/albumin-market/#ulp-14mlyhjMGhVjZqa3 https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/albumin-market/ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com Global Albumin Market: By Type (Human Serum Albumin, Bovine Serum Albumin, and Recombinant Albumin), By Application (Drug Formulation and Vaccines, Life Sciences, Culture Media Ingredient, and Others), By Distribution Channel (Biopharmaceutical and Biotechnology Companies, Academic Research Institutes, and Others), and Geography - Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2013-2017 and Forecast 2018-2024Global albumin market was valued at US $ XX Mn in 2017 and expected to grow at 8.1% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) over 2018 to 2024Market Outline: Albumin MarketAlbumins belong to the family of globular proteins. All the proteins present in the albumin family are water-soluble and are moderately soluble in the concentrated salt solutions. When subjected to heat, undergo denaturation. The albumins contributes 50% to 60% of the blood plasma proteins. The most common of them are the serum albumins. The human serum albumin is the most abundant protein in human blood plasma.A sample of this report is available upon request @Market Dynamics: Albumin MarketIncrease in the prevalence of liver disease is the major driving factor for the growth of the albumin market. The increasing instances of conditions such as trauma and shock are anticipated to drive market revenue growth over the forecast period. Growing use of the albumin in the form of an excipient in the drug delivery and increasing acceptance of the drug among the healthcare fraternity is expected to enhance the growth of the albumin market over the forecast period. However, availability of alternative therapies, dearth of the plasma, and scarcity of the blood donors are likely to hinder the growth of the market over the forecast period.Market Scope: Albumin MarketAlbumin market is segmented based on the type, application, and distribution channelBased on the type, the market is segmented into the following:Human Serum AlbuminBovine Serum AlbuminRecombinant AlbuminBased on the application, the market is segmented into the following:Drug Formulation and VaccinesLife SciencesCulture Media IngredientOthersBased on the distribution channel, the market is segmented into the following:Biopharmaceutical and Biotechnology companiesAcademic research institutesOthersTo view TOC of this report is available upon request @Regional Analysis: Albumin MarketGeographically, global albumin market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific albumin market is growing due to increase in the demand for albumin. The increasing patient population requiring albumin is anticipated to drive the growth of the albumin market in this region. The increasing awareness among the patient pool is likely to enhance the growth of the albumin market in this region. Falling next to Asia Pacific are the regions of North America and Europe, which are expected to lose their share in the market owing to its preference for alternatives of albumin.Need more information about this report @Competition Assessment: Albumin MarketSome of the players in the global albumin market include:Thermo Fisher Scientific (U.S)MedxBio Pte. Ltd. (Singapore)China Biologic Products Inc. (China)CSL Behring LLC (U.S)Baxter International, Inc. (U.S)Novozymes A/S. (Denmark)Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma (Japan)Sigma-Aldrich Corporation (U.S)Octapharma AG (Switzerland)Notable Market Developments: Albumin MarketIn March 2016, CSL Behring has announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved IDELVION [Coagulation Factor IX (Recombinant), Albumin Fusion Protein], its novel, long-acting albumin fusion protein linking recombinant coagulation factor IX with recombinant albumin for the treatment of hemophilia B.Archer Daniels Midland Company (U.S)Get access to full summary @About Precision Business InsightsPrecision Business Insights is one of the leading market research and business consulting firm, which follow a holistic approach to solve needs of the clients. We adopt and implement proven research methodologies to achieve better results. We help our clients by providing actionable insights and strategies to make better decisions. We provide consulting, syndicated and customised market research services based on our client needs.Contact to Precision Business Insights,Kemp House,152 160 City Road,London EC1V 2NXEmail: sales@precisionbusinessinsights.comToll Free (US): +1-866-598-1553Website @ Thoracic Outlet Syndrome Market Global Market 2018-2023: Key Players - Abbott Laboratories, Bayer AG, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Daiichi Sankyo https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5548 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/thoracic-outlet-syndrome-market-5548 Market ScenarioThoracic outlet syndrome is a group of heterogeneous and disabling upper-extremity disorders that occur due to extrinsic compression of neurovascular structures between the clavicle and the first rib. There are three distinct types of thoracic outlet syndrome viz. neurogenic thoracic outlet syndrome, venous thoracic outlet syndrome, and arterial thoracic outlet syndrome. Neurogenic thoracic outlet syndrome is most common, i.e., it constitutes around 85%-90% of thoracic outlet syndrome cases. Venous thoracic outlet syndrome constitutes around 10%-15% of thoracic outlet syndrome cases, whereas arterial thoracic outlet syndrome is found in 2%-5% of thoracic outlet syndrome cases.Rising cases of trauma and car accidents are boosting the growth of the thoracic outlet syndrome market. Chest injury is one of the causes of thoracic outlet syndrome, and this comes about as a result of traffic accidents in which the collarbone is broken, and the upper ribs are injured. As per the World Health Organization (WHO) report, nearly 20-50 million people incur non-fatal injuries as a result of road traffic accidents.View Reports Sample @Other factors such as increasing cases of anatomical defects, high unmet needs of current treatment, and surge in the research and development expenditure, improvement in reimbursement policies are also expected to drive the growth of the market. According to a study published in the Current Issues in Pharmacy and Medical Sciences - De Gruyter journal in 2015, it is found that bone abnormality may be a potential cause of thoracic outlet syndrome. The most common bone abnormalities include irregularities of the clavicle (20%), the cervical rib (70% of cases), and in the different structures of the first rib (10%).Despite these drivers, there are some issues associated with thoracic outlet syndrome market. Lack of infrastructure in the middle and low-income countries and side effects associated with the drugs may hamper the growth of the market.It is estimated that thoracic outlet syndrome market is expected to grow at a CAGR 7.0% during the forecast period of 2017-2023.Intended AudienceHospitalsDiagnostic ClinicsResearch and Development (R&D) CompaniesGovernment Research InstituteAcademic Institutes and UniversitiesSegmentationThe thoracic outlet syndrome market is segmented on the basis of type, diagnosis, treatment, and end-user.On the basis of type, the market is segmented into neurogenic thoracic outlet syndrome, venous thoracic outlet syndrome, and arterial thoracic outlet syndrome.On the basis of diagnosis, the market is segmented into nerve conduction studies, vascular studies, chest X-ray, cervical spine X-rays, computed tomography (CT) scan, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and magnetic resonance imaging with angiography (MRA), arteriogram/venogram, and blood tests.On the basis of treatment, the market is segmented into surgery, medications, physical therapy, and others. The medications segment is further classified into muscle relaxant, thrombolytic medications, anticoagulant medications, and others.On the basis of end-user, the market is segmented into hospital & Clinics, diagnostic centers, academic and research institutes, drug pharmacies, and others.Regional AnalysisThe Americas dominate the thoracic outlet syndrome market owing to the rising awareness among people, and increasing healthcare expenditure. As per the facts suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), out of the total annual healthcare expenditure, 86% is for people with chronic health conditions in the United States.Europe holds the second position in the thoracic outlet syndrome market. It is expected that the support provided by government bodies for research & development and improvement in reimbursement policies in healthcare will drive the market in Europe.Asia Pacific is the fastest growing in thoracic outlet syndrome market, owing to a huge patient pool, developing healthcare technology, and rising healthcare expenditure in some countries within this region. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in the years 2015 to 2016, the total health expenditure was USD 170.4 billion, which is 3.6% higher than the expenditure of 201415.The Middle East & Africa has the lowest market for thoracic outlet syndrome due to lack of technical knowledge and poor medical facilities.Request Full Report @Key PlayersSome of key the players in the market are Abbott Laboratories, Bayer AG, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Daiichi Sankyo, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc., Mallinckrodt plc., Orient Pharma Co., Ltd., Par Sterile Products, LLC., Sanofi, SteriMax Inc., Upsher Smith Laboratories, Inc., Vertical Pharmaceuticals LLC, and others.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.Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India Point-of-Care Middleware Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth factors, Top Key Players, Competitive Intelligence 2013 to 2017 and Forecast 2018 to 2024 Point-of-Care Middleware Market https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/point-of-care-middleware-market/#ulp-4H8Z4LpNMLEuOnnx https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/point-of-care-middleware-market/#ulp-c654SbFYO64MsOhu https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/point-of-care-middleware-market/#ulp-14mlyhjMGhVjZqa3 https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/point-of-care-middleware-market/ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com Global Point-of-Care Middleware Market: By Deployment Type (Cloud Based/Web Based, On-Premise), By End User (Hospitals, Clinics, Diagnostic Centers, Others), and Geography Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2013 to 2017 and Forecast 2018 to 2024Global point-of-care middleware market was valued at US $ XX Mn and expected to grow at XX% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) over the 2018 to 2024Market Outline: Global Point-of-Care Middleware MarketMiddleware is the computer software, it makes the user friendly working environment on mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets.Market Dynamics: Global Point-of-Care Middleware MarketIncrease in demand for mobile devices, and software applications such as IoT and M2M are anticipated to drive the growth of global point-of-care middleware market. Moreover, shifting of enterprises towards the digital transformation, development of newer software and technologically advanced devices, availability of high bandwidth data services, and advantages with middleware software such as reducing the infrastructure cost are anticipated to fuel the global point-of-care middleware market. However, high cost of maintenance, lack of awareness about middleware in underdeveloped countries, and security problems with data storage are restraining the growth of global point-of-care middleware market.Free sample of this report is available upon request @Market Scope: Global Point-of-Care Middleware MarketGlobal point-of-care middleware market is segmented based on deployment type and end userBased on deployment type, market is segmented into the following: Cloud Based/Web Based On-PremiseBased on the end user, market is segmented into the following: Hospitals Clinics Diagnostic Centers OthersFree TOC of this report is available upon request @Regional Analysis: Global Point-of-Care Middleware MarketGeographically, global point-of-care middleware market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa. North America point-of-care middleware market is expected to grow due to rise in innovation in Internet of Things (IOT), adoption of automation trends in U.S., and shifting of healthcare sectors towards the cloud-based services are witnessed to fuel the market. Europe point-of-care middleware market is expected to grow over the forecast period due to adoption of technologically advanced devices and development of newer software and high awareness among the healthcare professionals are expected to bolster the market. However, Asia pacific point-of-care middleware market is expected to experience fastest growth due to government sectors are shifting towards digitalization in healthcare sectors majorly in Japan, China, and India.Ask Analyst for Full Information about this report @Competition Assessment: Global Point-of-Care Middleware MarketSome of the players in the global point-of-care middleware market include: Siemens Healthcare GmbH (Germany) Telcor (U.S.) Radiometer Medical ApS (Denmark) Orchard Software Corporation (U.S.) Alere, Inc. (U.S.) Sysmex Corporation (Japan)Notable Market Developments: Global Point-of-Care Middleware Market In November 2016, Siemens Healthineers acquired Conworx Technology GmbH to deliver open connectivity to more than 100 point-of-care instruments.Get access to full summary @About Precision Business InsightsPrecision Business Insights is one of the leading market research and business consulting firm, which follow a holistic approach to solve needs of the clients. We adopt and implement proven research methodologies to achieve better results. We help our clients by providing actionable insights and strategies to make better decisions. We provide consulting, syndicated and customised market research services based on our client needs.Contact to Precision Business Insights,Kemp House,152 160 City Road,London EC1V 2NXEmail: sales@precisionbusinessinsights.comToll Free (US):+1-866-598-1553Website @ Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) Drug Market Analysis by Regions, Challenges and Top Industry Experts Review | Global Future Prospects 2018 - 2025 Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market https://www.businessindustryreports.com/sample-request/81029 https://www.businessindustryreports.com/buy-now/81029/single https://www.businessindustryreports.com/check-discount/81029 Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market Research Report 2018 report provides the newest industry data and industry future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving Revenue growth and profitability. The industry report lists the leading competitors and provides the insights strategic industry Analysis of the key factors influencing the market.Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market Overview:The report spread across 111 pages is an overview of the Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market Research Report 2018. The Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market is projected to grow at a healthy growth rate from 2018 to 2025 according to new research. The study focuses on market trends, leading players, supply chain trends, technological innovations, key developments, and future strategies.Available Exclusive Sample Copy of this Report @This report studies the Global Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) Drug Market over the forecast period of 2018 to 2025. The Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market is expected to grow at an impressive Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from 2018 to 2025.According to the Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) Drug Market report, one of the key drivers for market growth will be increasing reimbursement benefits for AMD drugs. Medicare creates a national reimbursement rate depends on the average selling price of the drug. Medicare Part B (insurance) also covers specific diagnostic tests and treatment of conditions and diseases of the eye, including treatment with specific injected drugs.Wet Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) Drug Market is the most advanced type of Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market and is also referred to as sub-retinal neovascularization degeneration. In age-related wet macular degeneration, the membrane underlying the retina thickens and then breaks to leak blood and fluid. This leakage causes dysfunction and disruption of the retina, forming blind spots in central vision and can even lead to blindness.Purchase this report online with 111 Pages, List of Tables & Figures and in-depth Table of Contents on Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market Research Report 2018 @Major Key Players:1 Applied Genetic Technologies Corp2 Astellas Pharma Inc3 Benitec Biopharma Ltd4 Biokine Therapeutics Ltd5 Crinetics Pharmaceuticals Inc6 Critical Pharmaceuticals Ltd7 Daiichi Sankyo Company Ltd8 Diffusion Pharmaceuticals Inc. and More.On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into -1 Lucentis2 Eylea3 Avastin and OthersGeographically, this report studies the key regions, focuses on product sales, value, market share and growth opportunity in these regions, covering: North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America and Middle East & Africa.Grab Your Report at an Impressive Discount @This study answers to the below key questions:1 What will the market size be in 2025 and what will the growth rate be?2 What are the key market trends?3 What are the challenges to market growth?4 Who are the key players in this market?5 What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key players?In the end, this report covers data and information on capacity and production overview, production, market share analysis, sales overview, supply, sales, and shortage, import, export and consumption as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin of Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market.Major Points in Table of Contents:Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market Report 20181 Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market Overview2 Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market Analysis by Application7 Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Age Related Macular Degeneration Drug Market Forecast (2018-2025)13 Research Findings and Conclusion14 AppendixAbout usBusinessindustryReports.com is digital database of comprehensive market reports for global industries. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well-defined we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Media ContactBusiness Industry ReportsPune Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940 Future Scope of Feed Preservative Market | Top Key Players (Kemin, Nutreco NV, Impextraco NV, Biomin Holding GmbH, Perstorp Holding AB) | Global Business Outlook till 2025 Feed Preservative Market https://www.businessindustryreports.com/sample-request/81019 https://www.businessindustryreports.com/buy-now/81019/single https://www.businessindustryreports.com/check-discount/81019 Global Feed Preservative Market Research Report 2018 report provides the newest industry data and industry future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving Revenue growth and profitability. The industry report lists the leading competitors and provides the insights strategic industry Analysis of the key factors influencing the market.Global Feed Preservative Market Overview:The report spread across 108 pages is an overview of the Global Feed Preservative Market Research Report 2018. The Global Feed Preservative Market is projected to grow at a healthy growth rate from 2018 to 2025 according to new research. The study focuses on market trends, leading players, supply chain trends, technological innovations, key developments, and future strategies.Available Exclusive Sample Copy of this Report @The Global Feed Preservative Market is growing continuously and expected to grow healthy CAGR by Forecast year 2025. The Feed Preservative Market is driven by factors such as demand for convenience food products & foods with longer shelf-life, and the increased usage of natural preservatives in meat & poultry in North America and Europe. The high growth potential in the emerging markets and untapped regions provides new growth opportunities for market players.The Feed Premixes is projected to be the fastest-growing segment, on the basis of Feed Type, from 2018 to 2025, due to the increased need to sustain the quality of premix ingredients such as vitamins, minerals, and amino acids which are easily perishable and can deteriorate in the presence of light, heat, or air. The growing demand for feed premixes to maintain livestock health in turn would boost the usage of feed preservatives by manufacturers to maintain the premix quality.Regionally, the European region has been a dominant user of feed preservatives due to the highly regulated environment for feed production, especially in the Western European region. The feed preservatives market has been supported by the increasing focus of the European authorities on food safety concerns and livestock health.Purchase this report online with 108 Pages, List of Tables & Figures and in-depth Table of Contents on Global Feed Preservative Market Research Report 2018 @A complete analysis of the competitive landscape of the Global Feed Preservative Market is provided in the report. This section includes company profiles of market key players. The profiles include contact information, gross, capacity, product details of each firm, price, and cost. This report investigates new project feasibility with a purpose of enlightening new entrants about the possibilities in this market. In this report, thorough SWOT analysis & investment analysis is provided which forecasts imminent opportunities for the Feed Preservative Market players.Major Key Players:1 Kemin Industries, Inc. (U.S.)2 Nutreco N.V. (Netherlands)3 Impextraco NV (Belgium)4 Biomin Holding GmbH (Austria)5 Perstorp Holding AB (Sweden)On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into -1 Feed Acidifiers2 Mold Inhibitors3 Feed Antioxidants4 Anticaking AgentsGeographically, this report studies the top producers and consumers, focuses on product capacity, production, value, consumption, market share and growth opportunity in these key regions, covering: North America, Europe, China, Japan and Other Regions (India, Southeast Asia, Central & South America and Middle East & Africa).Grab Your Report at an Impressive Discount @What Information does this report contain?1 A detailed analysis of regulatory trends, drivers, industry pitfalls, challenges and growth opportunities for participants2 Which are the leading market products, applications & regions and how will they perform by 2025?3 What are the technologies & innovation trends, how will they evolve by 2025?4 Which companies lead the industry, how are they positioned in the market in terms of sustainability, competency, production capacity and strategic outlook?In the end, this report covers data and information on capacity and production overview, production, market share analysis, sales overview, supply, sales, and shortage, import, export and consumption as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin of Feed Preservative Market.Major Points in Table of Contents:Global Feed Preservative Market Report 20181 Feed Preservative Market Overview2 Global Feed Preservative Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Feed Preservative Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Feed Preservative Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Feed Preservative Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Feed Preservative Market Analysis by Application7 Global Feed Preservative Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Feed Preservative Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Feed Preservative Market Forecast (2018-2025)13 Research Findings and Conclusion14 AppendixAbout usBusinessindustryReports.com is digital database of comprehensive market reports for global industries. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well-defined we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Media ContactBusiness Industry ReportsPune Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940 A fire three months after the flood engulfed Vanport buildings that had been piled together. (Oregonian) Fire Capt. Robert O. English couldn't believe what he was seeing. "I ran back outside and saw Fire Station No. 3 floating down the street, the water pouring in, people running and screaming," he would write later. "I then looked up the street and saw the second wall of water coming down and whole units, buildings, floating toward me ... I was knocked down by a refrigerator that was floating by in the swift current." English, like everyone else in Vanport City on May 30, 1948, was ill-prepared for that wall of water. Before dawn on Memorial Day 70 years ago, as the swollen Columbia River heaved on the perimeter, local officials had delivered notices throughout the sprawling development north of downtown Portland. "Barring unforeseen developments," the notice said, "Vanport is safe." Those unforeseen developments developed within hours of the message's arrival under residents' doors. The makeshift railroad dike protecting the floodplain from Smith Lake cracked and then gave way shortly after 4 p.m. Water crashed down on the community, giving many residents just minutes to run for their lives. People formed human chains to help each other reach safety. But Vanport wasn't just flooded -- it was washed into oblivion, wiped from the map. Don't Edit Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser had built the unincorporated Vanport City, originally called "Kaiserville," during the early days of World War II to house the thousands of people who were pouring into Portland to work in his shipyards. The massive housing project was supposed to be temporary, but the flimsy buildings lived on after the war thanks to an ongoing dearth of affordable residences in the area -- especially for African-Americans, who were kept out of many Rose City neighborhoods through the discriminatory practice known as redlining. "The consensus of opinion seems to be," wrote the Oregon Journal in 1947, "... that as long as over 20,000 people can find no other place to go, Vanport will continue to operate whether Portland likes it or not." Don't Edit Mother Nature had other ideas. The Flood of '48, the result of an unusually wet winter followed by a warm spring, showcased the shortcomings of the region's services and planning -- and, of course, it made all of Vanport's residents suddenly homeless, highlighting the limited housing options for many of them in the area. It also helped create modern Portland. President Harry Truman toured the ruins of Vanport and declared that Congress would "pass a program under which these disastrous floods will never happen again." And the results of the deluge, both physical and social, led some Portlanders to take a hard look at their community and themselves -- and to start thinking in fresh ways about what the city needed to do to become a thriving, forward-looking metropolis. Vanport's demise started something new. Below, Vanport City by the numbers: Don't Edit Rodney Reed 72,000 Approximate number of workers who came to Portland during World War II to work in the shipyards. There wasn't nearly enough housing for them, leading to the creation of Vanport City. Don't Edit 42,000 Estimated number of workers and their families living in Vanport at the peak of its population during the war. Don't Edit Don't Edit Beth Nakamura/Photo courtesy Vanport Mosaic Festival 18,500 Approximate population of Vanport in May 1948, about 6,300 of whom were African-American. Don't Edit Vanport residents line up to vote during World War II. 9,942 Number of residential units built in Vanport in 1942-43. 484 row houses were later added in East Vanport. Don't Edit Vanport City in 1945. 6,000 Number of residential units Kaiser originally announced he would build on the Columbia River floodplain. Don't Edit Jantzen Beach Amusement Park partly under water during the 1948 Flood. 650 Blocks in Portland proper swamped by the 1948 flood. A city resident reportedly caught a 15-pound steelhead in downtown's Union Station. Don't Edit The dining room for shipyard executives during the war became Vanport College's bookstore. 648 Number of acres, in the low-lying area where Portland's Delta Park now is, that Kaiser turned into the city of Vanport. Don't Edit Don't Edit 100 Estimated cost, in millions of dollars, of damage caused by the Flood of '48. Don't Edit Vanport residents walk along North Denver Avenue to escape the flood. 31 Number of feet high that the Columbia River reached during the flood. This was more than 3 feet over the top of area levees. Don't Edit A street in Vanport. 27 The number of Kaiser ship orders the U.S. Navy canceled on August 15, 1945, after it was announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. Many Kaiser shipyard workers soon began to move out of Vanport City. Don't Edit The 1948 flood completely destroyed the city. 26 Cost, in millions of dollars, of building the Vanport housing project. Construction began in the fall of 1942, with the first residents moving in three months later. Don't Edit Portlanders mobilized within an hour of the dike breaking to provide food and other help for Vanport residents. 15 Number of feet Vanport sat below the levels of the Columbia River and Smith Lake. Don't Edit Don't Edit Vanport deputy sheriffs place the shrouded corpse of a 11-month-old girl on a mattress to await arrival of the coroner. 15 Confirmed deaths directly connected to the May 1948 Vanport deluge. Some survivors believe the real number is much higher. Don't Edit 12 Number of days after the levees broke when President Harry Truman arrived in Vanport to see the damage for himself. "It's just as bad as I thought it was," he said. "I wanted to take a look at it because then you know more about it." Don't Edit 10 Approximate height, in feet, of waves that crashed down on Vanport when the dikes gave way. Don't Edit 2 City population rank of Vanport at its wartime peak, behind only Portland in the state. Don't Edit -- Douglas Perry Don't Edit South Carolina Daughters of the American Revolution (right) have sought to bring the South Carolina Humanities Festival to Moncks Corner in 2020. Jay Bender is a retired University of South Carolina professor and media lawyer who represents the S.C. Press Association and its newspapers. The Midland County Department of Public Health (MCDPH) is encouraging Midland County residents to protect themselves from ticks this spring. Tick-borne diseases, particularly Lyme disease, are expanding across the state. Although ticks can spread multiple illnesses, Lyme disease is the most commonly reported tick-borne disease in Michigan. Lyme disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia Burgdorferi and is transmitted by the blacklegged/deer tick. The blacklegged tick is well-established in Michigan's western Upper and Lower Peninsulas. However, it is expanding into new areas across the Lower Peninsula. In 2017, there were more than 300 human cases of Lyme disease reported, and about two out of three cases reported exposure in Michigan. Lyme disease infected ticks have currently been identified in 34 of Michigan's 83 counties. Information about Lyme disease risk by county is available at Michigan.gov/lyme. The best way to protect against Lyme disease is to prevent ticks bites. If you find a tick attached to your body, promptly remove it. Monitor your health, and if you experience fever, rash, muscle or joint aches or other symptoms, consult with your medical provider. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported last week that diseases spread by mosquitoes, ticks and fleas tripled in the U.S. from 2004 to 2016. The report also concludes that Lyme disease is an increasing concern for Michigan. To read the full report, visit the CDC website. For protection against Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases follow these tips: Avoid tick-infested areas. Walk in the center of trails to avoid contact with overgrown grass, bushes and leaf litter at trail edges. Protect your pets too. Dogs and cats can come into contact with ticks outdoors and bring them into the home, so using tick prevention products on pets is also recommended. Use insect repellent. Apply repellent containing DEET (20-30 percent) or Picaridin on exposed skin. Treat clothes (especially pants, socks and shoes) with permethrin, which kills ticks on contact or buy clothes that are pre-treated. Do not use permethrin directly on skin. Always follow the manufacturer's instructions when applying repellents. Perform daily tick checks. Always check for ticks on yourself and your animals after being outdoors, even in your own yard. Inspect all body surfaces carefully, and remove attached ticks with tweezers. To remove a tick, grasp the tick firmly and as closely to the skin as possible. With a steady motion, pull the ticks body away from the skin. Cleanse the area with an antiseptic. Bathe or shower as soon as possible after coming indoors (preferably within two hours) to wash off and more easily find ticks that are crawling on you. Washing clothing in hot water and drying on high heat will kill ticks in clothing. Michigan citizens can submit ticks to Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) for identification and possible Lyme disease testing, free of charge by contacting the MCDHP. Residents can send electronic photos of ticks to the MDHHS for identification at MDHHS-Bugs@michigan.gov. For more information on how to submit you tick and/or photos, visit Michigan.gov/lyme. To contact the MCDHP, call: 989-832-6380 or visit: https://bit.ly/2L2FTNE. The Drug, Chemical & Associated Technologies Association (DCAT) has announced the winners of four scholarships presented at the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF) Special Awards Ceremony on May 17 in Pittsburgh. As a Special Awards Organization, DCAT awarded $3,000 to four student projects and contributed $3,000 to the ISEF Education Outreach that brought 2,500 local students, many from underserved communities and schools, to view the exhibits and participate in hands-on science activities. Daniel Zhang and Brandon Zhu, seniors at H.H. Dow High School in Midland, won for their project, Release of Active Pharmaceuticals Using Hyperbranched Polyesters. Their research was conducted during a summer internship at Michigan State University's St. Andrews facility in Midland. They studied the rate of release by hydrolysis of three APIs: naproxen, salicylic acid and hydrocortisone from hyperbranched polyesters (HBPEs) of different hydrophilic/hydrophobic balance and solubility. They found that altering the composition of the HBPE, significantly changed the release rate of the API, demonstrating that the HBPE platform can be used for sustained release of APIs and to control the rate of enzymatic release. Zhang and Zhu will both be attending the University of Michigan in the fall where they will study computer engineering and biochemistry, respectively. Intel ISEF is the world's largest international pre-college science competition. Each year, Intel ISEF brings together about 1,800 high school students from more than 75 countries, regions and territories to showcase their independent research and compete for an average of $5 million in total prizes. "This event brings together such a diverse group of accomplished young individuals," said Scott Price, Chairperson of DCAT's Science & Scholarship Committee and vice president of Sales at Ren-Pharm International Ltd. "The level of knowledge and enthusiasm these kids have for STEM fields is unbelievable and gives us all a strong sense that our future is in good hands." Prior to the event, DCAT's Science and Scholarship Committee evaluated hundreds of project abstracts to establish a target list to be judged at the fair. Price and Jennifer Lavanture, a committee volunteer and associate director of Business Development at Rhodes Pharmaceuticals, evaluated the science fair exhibits, interviewed the students, and determined the winners. As an ISEF alumni and grand award winner, Lavanture has first-hand knowledge of the benefits of participating in the event. "ISEF expands student's horizons. They meet committed, capable students from around the globe and are exposed to a broad range of ideas from both a theoretical and practical perspective. It is an experience that they will carry forward into their education and career. " Additional winners of the DCAT Award Scholarships at Intel ISEF 2018 include: Colette Benko, a senior at St. Mary's High School in Calgary, Alberta; Sasha Ronaghi, a sophomore at Sage Hill School in Newport Coast, California; and Fionn Ferreira, a junior at Schull Community College in Schull, County Cork, Ireland. Espresso Milano in downtown Midland, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. Cash Monet, who was crowned Miss Revelation in the first Miss Revelation Drag Pageant in Auburn. Jason LaFave, of Sanford, who was the overall winner of the Greater Midland Dow RunWalk. The winners of the Midland Civitan Club's seventh annual Bridge Tournament. Emma Heron, of Alma College, who won awards at the Business Professional of America National Leadership Conference. Northwood University's "Go MAD Day" leaders and volunteers for being chosen as the United Way Worldwide's Event of the Year. Affordable Housing Alliance, which celebrated its 20th anniversary. Frank Grotkowski, who celebrated his 90th birthday. Ilene Starks, who celebrated her 90th birthday. Bethany Schaefer and Kent VanSickle on their engagement. May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, which makes it the perfect time to add these entertaining audiobook performances to your daily routine. A note before we begin: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are not a monolith, and neither is this list. Included below are books for children and books for adults, memoirs and works of fiction, works from immigrants and works from writers whose families have been American for generations. This is not a list that has something for everyone; this is a list that is for everyone, in its entirety. Every one of these stories and performances are valuable for every American (and beyond). So get listening! Narrator: Lynn Chen Run time: 13 hours and 53 minutes Audible | Libro.fm | Overdrive With the film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians hitting theaters this August, now is the perfect time to listen to Lynn Chens hilarious audiobook narrative of the first book in Kevin Kwans Crazy Rich Asians trilogy (the second two installments, China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems are read with verve by Lydia Look). Crazy Rich Asians is just so fun, and Chen takes on every character, accent and linguistically extreme opportunity in Kwans sprawling Singapore and runs with it. Sure, its 14 hours longand youll enjoy every second. Narrator: Eddie Huang Run time: 7 hours and 55 minutes Audible | Libro.fm | Overdrive Audiobooks offer writers the opportunity to adapt aspects of their work with listening audiences in mind. This can be as minor as replacing the word reader with listener in prefaces or as major as replacing in-text images with engaging image descriptions (see: the Boov comics in The True Meaning of Smekday and the physics diagrams in Reality Is Not What It Seems). Eddie Huangs extremely blue memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, takes this possibility to an extreme, with him regularly breaking the narrative to joke with the audience, often laughing at the audacity of the details he included. I mean, the very first minute of audio is him calling out the listener directly (Its ya boy, Eddie!) and chatting at length about when (after Hurricane Sandy) and how (by walking great distances to the studios) he was recording the narration. Before he starts reading his favorite chapter, he tells you its his favorite chapter; when he reaches the single recipe he included in the book, he steps back to discuss the reasons behind how and why he included it. In my many years of listening to audiobooks, Ive never heard anyone treat the medium with such originality beforewhich, once youve listened to Huangs take on his first-generation Chinese-American upbringing and his frustration with the bullshit of American culture and how that led to his success with his first restaurant, will make perfect sense. If anyone was going to flip the audiobook script on its head, it would be Eddie Huang. Narrator: Ramon de Ocampo and Amielynn Abellera Run time: 5 hours and 17 minutes Audible | Libro.fm | Overdrive Erin Entrada Kellys Newbery Award-winning charmer, which spends one epic day with four middle schoolers and their resident bully, is a study in what inclusive storytelling can bring to the table. Ramon de Ocampo voices Virgil Salinas (and his lola, or grandmother) as well as the Tanaka sisters, whose perspectives are told in third person, while Amielynn Abellera takes on the first person narration of Valencia Somerset, who is deaf. Abellera reads Valencias innate bravery and cleverness into every phrase, making it easy to see how Virgil could have a crush on her, and de Ocampo treats all of his characters with careexcept for Virgils lola, whose gleeful recounting of child-eating Filipino folktales he relishes. In the end, both will make you want to hug your audioplayer. Narrator: Lulu Lam Run time: 7 hours and 32 minutes Audible | Libro.fm | Overdrive While Thanhha Lais first middle grade book about the bridge between Vietnam and America, Inside Out and Back Again, was a novel in verse (performed to poetic effect by Doan Ly), her second is a novel in prose. Listen, Slowly features a modern protagonist named Mai whose journey to honor her family runs the opposite direction of Has 1975 one in Inside Out. Narrator Lulu Lam imbues Mais voice with the perfect blend of Laguna Beach-meets-stilted-Vietnamese, effectively slipping between Americanized Vietnamese accents and native Vietnamese ones. With equal parts pre-teen melodrama and familial warmth, this is a performance youll want to share with your loved ones. Narrators: Soneela Nankani and Roxana Ortega Run time: 16 hours and 40 minutes Audible | Libro.fm | Overdrive Shanthi Sekarans Lucky Boy trains its focus on two extremes of American Otherness, tied together by a thread of brittle wanting. On one end, teenaged Solimar wants so desperately to escape her tiny Oaxacan town that she crosses the border illegally, ending up pregnant and undocumented in San Francisco. On the other end, thirtysomething Kavya from a privileged, established Indian American family wants for nothing except a baby. In a story in which both protagonists are standing in each others way, but neither one is wrong, you need strong narratorsdoubly so when those protagonists come from families whose first language is not Englishand Soneela Nankani and Roxana Ortega more than deliver. Nankanis reading of American-born Kavya is full of warmth and feeling, easily slipping into the pronunciation of both non-English words and the extended familys accents. Ortegas reading of Solimar, steeped in more extensive accents and Spanish, is grasping and hopeful all at once. Together, they construct an auditory landscape that reflects all that is possible and impossible about the American Dream. Narrator: Charmaine Craig Run time: 13 hours and 21 minutes Audible | Libro.fm | Overdrive Charmaine Craigs novel about the violent tumult of modern-day Burma is based on her mothers and grandparents lives, so its fitting that she reads it herself. Its also lucky, as she is a terrific voice performer who balances crisp pronunciation with dynamic feeling, transforming Miss Burma into a compelling audio experience. The Rohingya and their deadly plight are regularly in the news these days, but there arent many books in the American marketplace about Burma, Americas role in the ongoing conflict or the lives of the Karen, Karenni, Mon and Chin refugee groups who have fled from the country and settled en masse in the U.S. (many Karen, like George Thawmoo, in the Twin Cities). Let Craig, through Miss Burma, open the doors for you about this part of history. Narrators: Jenny Zhang, Greta Jung and various others Run time: 9 hours and 59 minutes Audible | Libro.fm | Overdrive Jenny Zhangs short story collection about the daughters of Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants in the 1990s isnt nice, but nice isnt the point. Read with an honest sourness by Zhang, Greta Jung and various others (in a frustrating detail endemic to audiobook packaging, the complete list is unavailable), Sour Heart is boldly clarifying. Shifting from bitten New York droning in the narrators heads to falsely cheerful patter to the fragments of Chinese floating through the characters lives, the performances embody the fraught tensions at the heart of not just immigrant experiences, but of the strangeness of being a girl in America. (Audio clip NSFW.) Narrator: Francois Chau Run time: 13 hours and 53 minutes Audible Viet Thanh Nguyens Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, The Sympathizer, tells the story of a Vietnamese expat community in 1975 Los Angeles through the eyes of a grizzled Captain sending spy reports back to the enemy Vietcong. Its the kind of book that brings the best, worst and sharpest aspects of the American experiment and the tug-of-war anguish of the Asian American experience out to play. As an audiobook, its entrancingthe gravel-bass vocals of narrator Francois Chau (SyFys The Expanse) give both the Captain and his Vietnamese and Los Angeles worlds a lived-in quality that lends vitality to already vibrant prose. And his crisp pronunciation of the Vietnamese and French sprinkled throughout the text adds an extra punch. Narrator: Ruth Ozeki Run time: 14 hours and 48 minutes Audible | Libro.fm | Overdrive A Tale for the Time Being, featuring an ethnically Japanese teenager (who has become a depressed nonbeing in Japan after growing up in California) and a Canadian novelist named Ruth Ozeki (who reads the teenagers diary), has so much heart that it will linger in your soul. Adding to the meta-ness of a story written by Ruth Ozeki and starring a different Ruth Ozeki is the fact that the audiobook narrator is also Ruth Ozeki. As her own avatar, Ozeki is a little spacey and very thoughtful; as teenaged Nao and Naos zen Buddhist grandmother, Ozeki is ingenuous and chipper, despite the suicidal thoughts that keep breaking through. The video below shows Ozeki recording the books first pages, but for an in-depth look at her approach to writing this book and portraying Japanese society with all its bold social horrors, turn to this Weekend Edition interview on NPR. Narrators: Sneha Mathan and Vikas Adam Run time: 10 hours and 45 minutes Audible | Libro.fm | Overdrive One of 2017s Young Adult hits, When Dimple Met Rishi is a feel-good summer romance thats perfect for road trips with friends. Told in alternating poinst-of-view, the story traces the half-arranged romance between ambitious web developer Dimple and her parents dream Ideal Indian Husband Rishi. And the novel is, refreshingly, free of any white gaze. Sneha Mathan balances Dimples pre-college voice with all the sincere enthusiasm and eye-rolling irritation anyone who has been a teenager will recognize, slipping in and out of Mammas slight accent with ease. Vikas Adam sinks effortlessly into every male character hes given, skillfully moving from role to role, age to age, brother to brother. As a bonus, both narrators have deep discographiesincluding The God of Small Things from Mathan and The Life of Pi from Adamso once youve fallen in love with them here, you can have another two (or four, or a dozen) listens lined up. BONUS: This audiobook is free through the end of today (May 31st) here. Alexis Gunderson is a TV critic and audiobibiliophile whose writing has appeared on Forever Young Adult, Screener and Birth.Movies.Death. Shell go 10 rounds fighting for teens and intelligently executed genre fare to be taken seriously by pop culture. She can be found @AlexisKG. Trump associated Democrats with the MS-13 gang, whom he referred to as animals, at a rally in Tennessee on Tuesday. The remarks came just as the congressional primaries heat up across the nation, through which Congress could potentially turn blue. Trumps main goal at the rally in Nashville was to campaign for GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who is currently in a close race with the Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen. This race could be pivotal in deciding control of the Senate, NPR notes. Obviously, the Trump administration is not predicating a good outcome in the race as Trump arrived in Nashville himself. His tactic for saving the Republican Congress? Directly connecting illegal immigrants, and Democrats, to the MS-13 gang. While its common for Trump to use fear as a campaign strategy, this speech was different. According to the New York Times, Trump stated They dont want the wall, they want open borders. Theyre more interested in taking care of criminals than they are in taking care of you. The criminals hes referring to are the MS-13 gang, whom he also called not human beings before he instilled the fear that they use glaring loopholes in our immigration laws in order to infiltrate our country and rape, murder and cut people up into little pieces. As the Times notes, the White House has repeatedly used victims of gang violence as a form of evidence that the U.S. needs stricter immigration laws, ultimately connecting the image of an illegal Hispanic immigrant to that of a violent gang member. Once Trump decided to get back on the topic of the campaign, he attacked Breseden by saying, Hes an absolute, total tool of Chuck Schumer, and of course the MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi. There we have it: a direct connection made to Democrats and the alleged not human beings MS-13. He went on to note that Breseden had donated money to Obama and crooked Hillarys campaign, upon which the crowd began to chant, Lock her up! Lock her up! Backlash from the Democrats came from both Schumer and Pelosi, who criticized Trump for the use of the word animals. The Times notes that Pelosi stated, You have to wonder, does he not believe in the spark of divinity, the dignity and worth of every person? The President of Mexico also stepped in and criticized Trumps comments in a tweet: President @realDonaldTrump: NO. Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever. Sincerely, Mexico (all of us). Enrique Pena Nieto (@EPN) May 30, 2018 Despite Trumps obvious fear that Blackburn may lose and ultimately cost the Republicans the Senate, he had major leverage in Tennessee due to his 26-point win in the state in the 2016 election. He spoke to the chanting crowd for a full hour of finger pointing, reducing people to animals and even taking a jab at John McCain, who is still fighting brain cancer. He stretched his arms out in front of an oversized American flag, amongst his chanting crowd, and it looked like 2016 all over again. Welcome to Meet a Competitive House Race, a Paste feature in which we highlightyou guessed ita competitive 2018 House race from somewhere in America. Between now and election day, well hopefully hit them all. You can see a full list of other House races weve profiled at the bottom of this page. Whats the deal with todays district? Where is it? This New York district is in the eastern portion of the state and includes counties such as Greene, Montgomery and Columbia. Larger cities located in this district include Hudson, Kingston, Mechanicville and Oneonta. The district is mountainous, containing the Catskills, and the Hudson river runs straight through the eastern half. Who the hell lives there? How do they vote? The district has a population of 698,185 spread out across 7,9387 miles. Its primarily white at 86 percent, followed by 6 percent Hispanic and 4.4 percent black. Their median household income is $59,619, which is a little less than that of all of New York, but a little higher than the U.S. as a whole. Only 13.5 percent of the population is in poverty, less than the U.S. as a whole, and only 6.7 percent is foreign-born. The district has an interesting voting history as a swing district. In past presidential elections, it voted to elect President Obama in 2008 and 2012 before a complete flip in 2016, when President Trump won the district by seven points. As for congressional elections, the district is filled with clumps of Republican counties interspersed with Democratic and pivot counties. In the past two congressional elections, 2014 and 2016, a Republican has won the district. Is Trump going to screw the Republican? Probably, as this district was loyal to Obama and cant be happy with Trumps term so far. Give me some more background The district completely reversed its previous liberal support of President Obama in 2016 when they voted for President Trump. After remaining loyal to Obama, this district cant approve of Trumps efforts to reverse so many of Obamas policies. Whats up with the Republican(s)? John Faso is the Republican incumbent, who won the seat in 2016 by 8 points. His campaign themes include fighting for returning veterans, defending the second amendment, reducing costly government programs, supplying jobs across upstate New York and strengthening the military as well as counter-terrorism capabilities. While in office, he has been assigned to the committees on transportation and infrastructure, agriculture and budget. A few of Trumps bills he has voted yes on are the Unborn Child Protection Act, No Sanctuary for Criminals Act and the American Health Care Act. None of these were a surprise based on his campaign platform, although these votes directly attacked policies put in place by President Obama, a president whom Fasos district voted into office. So far, Faso comes in second against his Democratic opponents in campaign contributions, with only $893,266. As the New York Times points out, New York is a key battleground as Democrats get ready to attack during this election season. What does that mean for Fasos newly attained seat in Congress? As The Times notes, he has been targeted by the Democratic Party; among them, he may have the largest bulls-eye on his back. Whats up with the Democrat(s)? The Primary elections are coming up on June 26 and there are two Democrats in the running, Pat Ryan and Antonio Delgado. Delgado, a Harvard Law School graduate, is leading the race in campaign contributions at $1,053,989. His website states the main themes of his campaign as creating jobs, improving public education, financing infrastructure growth, environmental policies and regulations to protect the district, making healthcare affordable, fighting for womens rights including the right to choose, making a sensible and compassionate immigration policy, and so on. Basically, he is against everything Trump and Faso stand for. Ryan is another top Democrat in the running for the primary election, and seems to have a fighting chance against Faso. Ryan comes in last with funding, as he has only raised $589,770 in campaign contributions. He is a military man who graduated from West Point and served two combat tours in Iraq before earning a masters degree from Georgetown. According to his website, his platform includes revitalizing the economy for the working class and small businesses, affordable healthcare, improving public education, support for veterans, helping the local environment, combating the opioid crisis and above all, keeping America safe. Ryan was a security studies graduate and his main focus is protecting America from ISIS, North Korea and Afghanistan. Overall, Ryan is obviously the middle ground between Faso, the strict conservative, and Delgado, the complete liberal. What do the polls say? As of now, the polls are determining a Democratic winner in the general election if Ryan is elected in the primaries. The polls show him beating Faso by a narrow margin, with Ryan at 43 percent and Faso at 41. If Delgado is elected in the primaries, the polls say Faso will most likely keep his seat in Congress. Whats weird about the district? This race will focus on healthcare due to Fasos history with Medicaid policy. As The Times notes, Faso was one of the architects of a plan that would have forced New York State to pick up the counties share of Medicaid financing. This legislation ultimately failed, but the voters in his district have not forgotten. Since both Democrats are pushing for affordable healthcare in their platforms, this topic will be precarious for even the toughest incumbent. Give me a prediction We place our bets on Ryan winning the seat and turning the district blue again. Faso has sucked up to Trump and undone too many of Obamas policies for the district, which once supported Obama, to be happy with him. The Democrats will most likely elect Ryan in the primary due to the numbers and his seemingly happy-medium platform, which is perfect for this toss-up district. Past Races California 10th: Jeff Denham vs. Michael Eggman or Josh Harder Nebraska 2nd: Don Bacon vs. Brad Ashford or Kara Eastman California 48th: Dana Rohrabacher, vs. some Democrat, eventually Florida 26th: Carlos Curbelo vs. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell Colorado 6th: Mike Coffman vs. Jason Crow Washington 8th: Dino Rossi vs. too many infighting Dems Iowa 1st: Rod Blum vs. Probably Abby Finkenauer East Jordan to debut new holiday event Mingle and Jingle in November news The new Lyrik fork is a lot different to the previous model. With the new DebonAir air spring the fork is a lot plusher and it handles even better across the small bumps whilst still ramping up really well for the bigger hits. Ive been super impressed with how good the new Lyrik RC2 rides. Sam Hill Dharmasoul is a two-piece band featuring drummer Kevin Clifford and guitarist Jonah Tolchin. The duo mixes a variety of American idioms, starting with New Orleans-style blues, funk and soul and stretching into a variety of dusty, dirty, gritty subgenres that come together under one giant mosaic tent. These influences are woven together seamlessly, handled with an authenticity and ease that sometimes recalls the eclecticism of the almighty Little Feat. Dharmasouls Lightning Kid is out June 1 and it spotlights these traits: Bless Your Children is an inspired slice of contemporary R&B which spotlights Tolchins visceral, imaginative guitar playing. Open Your Heart finds comfort in gospel and soul while Taste So Sweet is thick and bluesy, its musical setting appropriate to its carnal-minded lyrics. In the more rough-edged moments some will be tempted to draw comparisons between this outfit and the Black Keys, but Tolchin and Clifford carry a much more relaxed approach to their music, one based less on recapturing an idea of what American music is about and instead just letting it happen. (Dig the closing funkified jam Vulgar, a song so laid back it seems to fall right out of your speakers and drip onto the floor. It also seems guaranteed to be a highpoint of Dharmasouls acclaimed live shows.) Tolchin says, The songs on this record cover a spectrum of human experience. With Armored Hearts and Bless Your Children we delve into the shadows of human nature. On Chosen One we tell the Christ story from a different perspective, one that urges everyone to take responsibility for their beliefs and actions, to let your heart be your own savior.' Lightning Kid (the song and perhaps the album itself) is about, Someone who may live in each one of us. The fiery rebel that wont back down or take anyones bullshit. This personality type or archetype is the driving force of this record in a way. The kid-like orientation to have fun and get a little bit wild and experiment, paired with the lightning-bold energy that will rest at nothing to strike where it intends. Adds Clifford, We like to think that Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross could get down to this. Even though there is one obscene word on the record, they would find a way to accept it. We hope you enjoy! TOUR DATES May 31 Boot & Saddle Philadelphia, PA June 1 Princeton Record Exchange Princeton, NJ June 4 The Saint Asbury Park, NJ June 5 Petes Candy Store Brooklyn, NY June 6 SoFar Sounds New York, NY June 7 Methuselah Pittsfield, MA June 8 Preservation Hall Wellfleet, MA June 9 House Concert Boxborough, MA June 10 Dreamaway Lodge Becket, MA June 11 BBC Acoustic Lounge Plymouth, MA June 12 Nick-A-Nees Providence, RI June 14 Foam Burlington, VT June 15 High Mowing School Wilton, NH June 16 House Concert Cambridge, MA July 6 Hill Country BBQ New York, NY July 14 Shady Grove Festival Arden, DE July 27 Lompoc Cafe Bar Harbor, ME August 11 Hopewell Theatre Hopewell, NJ Independent thriller Concealed (2017) is filmmaker Shane T. Halls sophomore feature. The story follows struggling actor Max (Simon Lyndon), who returns to Sydney with his girlfriend Sallie (Nadia Townsend) for an audition. When Max awakens the next morning to find Sallie gone, a desperate search begins, and he seeks the help of childhood friend Richard (Paul Tassone). Whilst their frustrations with the police enquiry grow, the search for Sallie becomes increasingly perilous as the pair find themselves drawn into the shadows of the Australian underworld. The premise is a stark contrast to Halls debut Neophytes and Neon Lights (2001), set around an ensemble cast of five unemployed characters living in a world in which air travel has been replaced by teleportation. Yet the films are spatially connected, the city of Sydney a common stage in Halls creative vision. In conversation with PopMatters ahead of the UK Premiere screening, Hall discusses the shadow of Stanley Kubrick and the words of wisdom of Leonard Cohen. He also reflects on the need to respect the audience even as one misdirects them, embracing filmmaking as an adaptive process and the overarching ambitions for a films reception. Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment? Well, I guess film is the culmination of all the other art forms and it seems to be the predominant form of communication in todays world. Growing up I just had a love of film and thats what inspired me; great films by great filmmakers. So that was something I always wanted to do, and when I start to piece together an idea, it has always been around film. I started out as a writer and that lends itself quite easily to film. I began writing in television, but I do quite like that ability to culminate a story or idea over one and half or two hours. Filmmakers and actors have frequently expressed that their respective crafts are a never-ending learning curve. How do you compare the experiences of your first two films? Yeah, totally! Every time you set foot on the set or every time you write something new, with each of those experiences youre learning something that is completely different. What you hope for each time is that youre getting better and that youre increasing your budget. When I made my first film, we effectively shot it on 16mm and most of my budget went on stock processing and negative matching. By the time I came to make my second film, the RED camera had come out and we were able to shoot on digital, which essentially means that I wasnt having to put all of my budget into camera gear, stock negative matching and processing. We could start to put money into other areas of the production, which allows you a greater scope as a filmmaker. For me the greatest difference on a practical level between the two films was the entire shift in the way the films were not only made, but the potential distribution avenues. When I made my first film you had to shoot on film or there was absolutely no chance of getting theatrical distribution. By the time I came to make my second, there had been a digital revolution, as it were, in film, and effectively the means to theatrical distribution had vastly changed. So I guess thats the landscape changing, but on a personal level, every time youre standing on a film set for four weeks trying to make a feature film, its a battle; every day youre just trying to survive. Youre carrying this huge cast and crew with a budget, and trying to get them behind the vision that youve put down on paper. I often recall Peter Jackson saying how he felt Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) was perfect until that first shot was in the can. As storytellers, is there a discrepancy between what we envision versus the actuality of the work, which requires a compromise? And do you consider there to be a need to shed the irrationality of the pursuit of perfection for a more rational expectation? I dont think perfection is ever achievable and if you thought it was, then you wouldnt start. We all sort of live in the shadow of Kubrick, and if every time you set out you thought you were going to make 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), youd probably fail. I do have a little bit of that Leonard Cohen notion that its the crack that lets the light in; sometimes its the imperfections that bring the genius or the wonderful moment. If I strove for perfection, and I do, but its just that I dont think Im ever going to achieve it. So I allow for those little changes or imperfections because when you have to adapt or change, thats what makes you creative. I never think what I write is going to be what I film or what I will end up with in the edit room. They always say you make one film in the writing, one in the shooting, and one in the editing, and if you held to the fact that the perfection of your script was going to be the final product, then youd go a bit crazy. Im more open to embracing the changes of the process and trying to adapt that. When you start shooting and editing, every one of those creative professionals are going to hopefully bring something to the table that enriches what youre trying to do. So I guess I see it as more of a collaborative approach to improve on what Im trying to do. As long as Im giving creative professionals the freedom to be creative, its never going to be absolutely what I imagined on the page. Simon Lyndon as Max (courtesy of New Thought Productions) In what ways did the film differ from those initial intentions? The first change is that the title changed, and when I started writing I wanted to do the whole film from the lead characters point of view. It wasnt until I let go of that process that the script came alive. The second change was how it evolved through the casting. The script had some lighter moments in it and once Id cast Simon, I realised that some of those had to go because hes a pure method actor, and hes quite serious. And so casting him began to change the tone of the film. Theres an economy of storytelling present here in which you omit certain scenes. For example, when Max goes into the pawn shop. This is a type of scene the audience is familiar with, as it has been seen in any number of stories. The knowledge of the outcome is the only necessity, which is the act of you as a filmmaker using the audiences familiarity to help you construct the film and make those storytelling choices. As a filmmaker youre constantly making decisions about how much information you give the audience. If you give them too much they get bored; if you give them too little they get confused. Choosing which scenes to omit that another filmmaker might think are important its all a filmmaking decision. The script did have this whole sequence within that pawn shop, but when I was starting to pull it back I realised: Do we really need to see that? Is that an important beat or can the audience understand what is going to happen in here and then move on? If you look at Spielbergs Lincoln (2012), we wait the whole film for the assassination, and then we never get it. I always thought that was quite a brave filmmaking choice. I dont acquaint that scene to this, but its sometimes an omission that can be quite interesting for the audience because then they are having to piece together what might have happened. And sometimes what isnt seen or shown can be more powerful. Rarely do audiences enter a film without expectations, which can be cultivated by the various marketing materials, including the poster and trailers, or even the synopsis text. Personally I prefer to watch a film with little to next to no knowledge, presenting my mind as a blank canvas. When you have seen the marketing campaign, the poster and the trailer, everything, then it obviously gives you so much information about the tone of the film, what its going to be like and your expectations in regards to it. There are certain films that get a great context from that lead up, and I think if the trailer campaign for The Sixth Sense (1999) hadnt been what it was, the film might not have been because it gave such a context of misdirection. Personally I agree with you, as to your point that I would much rather know nothing about a film going in, and then be led by the filmmaker. I find it far more thrilling to not have any expectations. In regards to the conventions in Concealed, I wrote the script to essentially try to misdirect the audience a little bit, by making you look in one direction while Im trying to unravel something else. Joanne Priest as Jacky (courtesy of New Thought Productions) I recall a fellow student once remarking that a storyteller must play fair and not trick the audience. Whilst misdirection is acceptable, the clues or pointers have to be reasonably available. Listening to your point about intentionally misdirecting your audience, were you aware of playing fair and avoiding underhanded trickery? Yeah, thats exactly it; the balance I was talking about before. As a filmmaker you continually balance between giving the audience too much and not enough. In one of the early edits we had a voiceover on the last scene and there was a big discussion over whether that should stay or go, and if it stays then it probably makes it a much clearer ending for the audience. I quite like the debate and whenever we come out of screens theres a big conversation about what exactly happened at the end. I personally like those sorts of films that are not necessarily clear and allow the audiences to have an opinion or discussion around exactly what they believe happened. I just started to think: What would my favourite filmmakers do? Would they leave it as a more clear cut direct ending with a very clear answer, or would they leave it a little more opaque for the allowance of after film discussion? At the end of the day we came to the conclusion that it would be better to reach a point where audiences can discuss what they believe happened, rather than us telegraphing it for them. Speaking with Carol Morley for The Falling (2014), she explained: You take it 90 percent of the way, and it is the audience that finishes it. So the audience by bringing themselves: their experiences, opinions and everything else to a film is what completes it. If the audience are the ones that complete it, does it follow that there is a transfer in ownership? Each person that watches your film is going to take away something individual from it, and thats what you hope. Whilst you try to create a universal story that relates on a personal level, its your overarching hope. So yeah, in that respect, people that watch the film are going to take away hopefully the core messages and ideas of the film, but then they might find personal stories within that relate to them. And they will have an ownership over the film that someone else or I as the filmmaker will not have. To speak about themes, are you attentive to specific ones from the outset or is it a journey of discovery? If I dont have a premise; if I dont have a central question or theme Im trying to work it around, not only can I not write the film, but I cant make the film. When everything is falling from the sky in flames and Im trying to get this film through, I find the only thing you can ever hang your hat on and come back to is a premise the central idea or question that youre trying to get across to the audience. I find that if I dont have that, Im like a rudderless ship on a stormy ocean. It might be simpler, just that one central idea I will pull back to rather than a plural of themes. Photo of Shane T. Hall courtesy of New Thought Productions Interviewing filmmaker Christoph Behl he remarked to me: You are evolving, and after the film, you are not the same person as you were before. Do you perceive there to be a transformative aspect to the creative process, and should the experience of watching a film offer the audience a transformative experience? The process of making a film is years of your life, this thing that you live and breath. Im sure that when I die the things that I will look back from my deathbed are those films that Ive made and what they mean to me. If youre a filmmaker they are definitely one of the most important things in your life, so you have to be transformed by the end of each one of them because its such an all encompassing experience. I have almost died for both of my films; they pushed me to the absolute extremes. Youre intellectually drawn, emotionally spent and physically exhausted by the end of it. Youre trying to lead hundreds or sometimes a thousand people to coalesce around your vision, and its a pressure pot. You throw everything at that and so you cant come out the back end of it and not be a changed; not be a different person. As for the audience, yes you hope for those moments you have in the cinema that change who you are, that mean something to you, or give you a different reflection on what it means to be human. Or even if its just a smart, witty and fun film that really changes something within you or how you see cinema. All of those things can be transformative and Im still watching 2001 every time it comes to the cinema because it was such a transformative moment for me as a filmmaker. So you hope to be able to make those films; I dont think that many filmmakers do, but when they do, its magic. The UK Premiere screening of Concealed takes place at The Castle Cinema, East London on 1 June 2018 at 9pm, with further screenings 2-8 June. The showing on 8 June will feature a Q&A with director Shane T Hall. For more information click here. Aaron Turner (ISIS, Old Man Gloom) has worked multiple times with Finnish experimental rockers Circle. Through the various collaborations, excellent works of forward-thinking music have been produced, such as Enharmonic Intervals (For Paschen Organ). However, one of the strangest collaborations between the two is without doubt Split Cranium. It is not strange due to the adventurous outlook of the band, but rather because of its direct and straightforward style. Split Cranium was born from Turner and Jussi Lehtisalos admiration of punk and crust, and more specifically the Nordic d-beat scene, that featured extraordinary acts like Terveet Cadet and Anti Climex. And so Split Cranium came to be, and the bands self-titled debut album, featuring Jukka Kroger on drums and Samae Koskinen on bass, reveled in the chaos and anarchy of crust. Brutal and unyielding, the record was a fierce ride through Discharge-inspired grooves and Amebix-like structures. However, six years later the band returns and the vision for Split Cranium is extended further than its crust roots. This is a more complete version of the band now, featuring more prominent members of the experimental extreme music scene. Nate Newton (Doomriders, Converge), Faith Coloccia (Mamiffer) and Tomi Leppanen (Circle) join Turner and Lehtisalo to open the next chapter in the bands discography. While the crust ferocity is still retained and can be felt through the majority of the record, the punk aesthetic is not the sole factor molding the core of this work. The first definite steer for Split Cranium is their new found tendency to move towards a more ambient and experimental sound. Its not that the band will dive into long-form ambient tracks, but there is a strong sense of the atmospheric. The opening track kicks off in an almost Popol Vuh like fashion, introducing the keys that will play an important role in the album. Evil Hands then further explores the implementation of the keys within the main structures, something that is also apparent in Heavy Daughter, which makes excellent use of bell sounds to elevate the track further. Similarly, the album features a more enhanced influence of old-school 70s rock. There are moments where a creeping psychedelia comes forth, as is the case with The Age of Embitterment, creating a mesmerizing oasis within the d-beat blitzkrieg. The lead work of the record also owes a lot to that mentality, adapting the modus operandi of that era to its crust progression. Even the metallic spirit of Newtons Doomriders makes an appearance in a couple of instances, most emphatically in Wet Shadow. However, it is the experimental edge of all band members that makes this record a more well-rounded offering than Split Craniums debut. By applying noise and taking advantage of feedback the band creates mind-bending moments, as is the case with the second half of Ingurgitated Liquids. Whirling Dusk sees the band enhancing the animosity of the song structures by brilliantly injecting noise into them, while a full interlude, Pain of Innocence, is solely dedicated to noise. Regarding this album, Turner mentioned that Lehtisalo and himself wanted to try something different for their sophomore release, and move away from the straightforward sound of the debut album. The dichotomy that exists between the two, with Turner displaying an affinity for noise and dissonance while Lehtisalo generally prefers melody, creates a perfect contradiction in Im the Devil and Im OK. While the debut album was endearing in its simplicity, this release takes advantage of the line-ups full arsenal, and the result is that much more convincing. Tiny Fighters new video, Hollow Talk finds the duo working with fellow Stockholm artists, directors Alexandra and Silja-Marie Kentsdottir. The clip carries with it a certain Scandinavian chill while complimenting the tunes two-part structure. Recorded in Los Angeles with producer Daniel Reymer (Ben Frost, Foals, Girls Names), it moves from quiet and meditative to powerful and emotionally wrenching. This dramatic structure is a key component to Tiny Fighters songs which carry the listener on complex but never overwhelming journeys. The Kentsdottirs are renowned for their visionary videos in Sweden, which are unflinching in their approach. Tiny Fighter has struck upon a partnership with them here that one hopes may carry over into other visual adventures. Vocalist Therese Karlsson says, With this video our main aim was to craft a story which captured both the tense quietness of the songs start and the absolute chaos of the ending. The increasingly labored dancing, the strained expressions, all of these convey a sense that something is not quite right. It all finally explodes into a sonic crescendo as I storm out of the shoot, violently pushing through the hyper-stylized film set and out into the real world. Get the SC business stories that matter. Our newsletter catches you up with all the business stories that are shaping Charleston and South Carolina every Monday and Thursday at noon. Get ahead with us - it's free. Kalyn Oyer is a Charleston native who covers arts & entertainment and food & bev for The Post and Courier. She's a music festival & concert photographer and used to write about music for the Charleston City Paper, among other publications. Are two patties always better than one on a hamburger bun? Food editor and chief critic Eating all of the chicken livers just as fast as I can. 11 State St. was to be home to a pioneer of outdoor dining in Charleston, Union Street. The restaurant never got off the ground. Last week, Gov. Henry McMaster told the S.C. Transportation Infrastructure Bank to support extending Interstate 526 across Johns and James islands a move that provoked intense reactions from residents who have watched this soap opera of a project play out for years. In a series of Facebook comments, residents of West Ashley and Johns Island shared both excitement and horror at the notion the Mark Clark Expressway project may be revived from its bureaucratic coma. Construction has not begun yet supporters and opponents continue to clash in political and regulatory arenas. Meanwhile, the price tag has continued to climb up to $720 million at the most recent estimate. For some 526 supporters, McMaster's words gave them new hope. For others, they fell flat. "Had he said this at the beginning of a term, I might give him the chance," said Johns Island resident Eddie Dempsey. "Unfortunately, it's re-election time." McMaster faces four other GOP opponents in his June 12 primary race. Voters won't know the impact of his 526 comments by then, but they might on June 26 when the infrastructure Bank is scheduled to meet next. That's also the date of any primary runoff he's likely to be in. According to the latest proposal, the bank would cover roughly $558 million of the $720 million cost, while a combination of federal transportation dollars and Charleston County tax money would cover the rest. At a campaign event at a Columbia pregnancy crisis center Tuesday, McMaster discussed his request to the bank board. He pledged to back the project no matter what, but he said its future also depends on the cooperation of the county as well as the state. This month's unexpected closure of the Interstate 526 bridge across the Wando River brought into clear perspective the urgency of safe and reliable infrastructure, he said. Weve got to get that road built, he said. But South Carolina's governor can move the needle only so far. McMaster has only two of the seven appointees on the bank's board: He appointed Chairman John B. White of Spartanburg and Ernest Duncan of Aiken. The bank was created about 15 years ago as a way for the state to pay for large highway projects, such as the new Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge that the state Department of Transportation otherwise could not afford. The bank has a special stream of state taxes that it can borrow against, then dole out money for large highway projects. House Speaker Jay Lucas appointed House Majority Leader Gary Simrill, of Rock Hill, and recently retired Rep. Chip Limehouse, of Charleston to the board. Senate Pro Tempore Hugh Leatherman, of Florence, appointed himself to the board, as well as Sen. Joe Taylor, of Columbia. Finally, the seventh seat at the table is held by the chairman S.C. Department of Transportation Commission, currently Ben Davis of Greenville. While the odds could be stacked against McMaster based on his share of appointments, Limehouse has been among the project's strongest backers, and Simrill told The Post and Courier on Tuesday the I-526 extension is needed. "The question is what's the best way to pay for it," he said. "I'm hopeful for a positive outcome." Just a few weeks ago, the Bank appeared on the verge of voting against Charleston County's latest proposal for completing 526, also known as the Mark Clark Expressway. Then McMaster weighed in. Former state lawmaker Jimmy Bailey, who lives in West Ashley, was hopeful that the project will soon see new life. He noted the bank already has set aside roughly $558 million for it and said it cannot be re-purposed for other road projects. "I think Henrys right," he said. "Its time to get this thing done. Forget the politics." But the politics isn't going away. Also on the June 12 ballot is a Charleston County Council GOP primary battle between incumbent Joe Qualey, who has opposed I-526 at turns, and challenger Jenny Honeycutt, who supports it. Rich Thomas, a Johns Island resident and member of the Nix 526 group, said the political smoke and mirrors is as prevalent at the local level as it is the state level. The costs have ballooned over the last 10 years, he said. Its been the bumbling and incompetence of state and county elected representatives. If there in fact has been bumbling, when it might stop is anyone's guess. Seanna Adcox and Andy Shain contributed to this report. Columbia/Myrtle Beach Managing Editor Andy Shain runs The Post and Courier's newsrooms based in Columbia and Myrtle Beach. He was editor of Free Times and has been a reporter and editor for newspapers in Charlotte, Columbia and Myrtle Beach. In a ruling that affects Edisto River waters being diverted for farming, the S.C. Supreme Court has ruled the public has no vested right to claim water that hasn't flowed to it yet. File/Staff Hannah Alani is a reporter at The Post and Courier covering race, immigration and rural life across the Palmetto State. Before graduating from Indiana University and moving to Charleston in 2017, her byline appeared in The New York Times. David Slade is a senior Post and Courier reporter. His work has been honored nationally by Society of Professional Journalists, American Society of Newspaper Editors, Scripps foundation and others. Reach him at 843-937-5552 or dslade@postandcourier.com Oct. 10, 2021 marks the 110th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China (Taiwan). We are also celebrating the first year of reopeni Read more Increasing approval to Chagas disease treatment drugs is expected to drive growth of the global Chagas disease treatment market Chagas Disease Treatment PR-Inside.com: 2018-05-30 13:52:21 Press Information Coherent Market Insights 1001 4th Ave, #3200 Seattle, WA 98154 Mr.Shah CEO 2067016702 email https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ # 752 Words 1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154CEO2067016702 Global Chagas Disease Treatment Market, by Product Type (Benznidazole and Nifurtimox), by Distribution Channel (Hospitals, Retail Pharmacies, and Online Pharmacies), and by Region (North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa) was valued at US$ 5.67 Mn in 2016 and is projected to exhibit a CAGR of 7.3% over the forecast period (20172025), as highlighted in a new report published by Coherent Market Insights. Increasing approval for Chagas disease treatment drugs is expected to be a major factor driving growth of the Chagas disease treatment market.Request Sample Copy Of This Report: https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/934 For instance, in 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted approval to Chemo Group for its drug benznidazole indicated for the treatment of Chagas disease in patients aged 212 years. Currently, according to data published by Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2013, over 300,000 people are suffering from Trypanosoma cruzi infection in the U.S. Hence, approval of Chagas disease treatment drugs in such key regions is expected to drive growth of global Chagas disease treatment market in the near future.Browse 22 Market Data Tables and 21 Figures spread through 133 Pages and in-depth TOC on Chagas Disease Treatment Market Product Type (Benznidazole, and Nifurtimox), Distribution Channel (Hospitals, Retail Pharmacies, and Online Pharmacies) and by Region (North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa) - Global Forecast to 2025Increasing R&D activities by key players for gaining approval for novel Chagas disease treatment is also expected to drive growth of market. For instance, in 2016, Bayer AG launched phase 3 clinical study evaluating the efficacy and safety of its newly developed medication Nifurtimox, indicated for the treatment of Chagas disease in children of all age groups. 2016, researchers from Saint Louis University Center for Vaccine Development identified a potential new target for vaccines against Chagas disease. The development of such vaccine is expected to create an opportunity for key players to enter in this market. In 2016, Drugs for Neglected Diseases sponsored the clinical trial of Benznidazole in combination with E1224 (fosravuconazole) aiming to improve treatment for Chagas disease. The combination is in Phase 2 clinical trial. Furthermore, increasing launches of novel diagnostic methods such as rapid diagnostic test, and ELISA is expected to increase diagnosis rate for Chagas disease, which in turn is expected to increase demand for its treatment drugs. For instance, in 2016, InBios International, Inc. received 510K clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its Chagas Detect Plus Rapid Test Kit (CDP).Ask for customization: https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-customization/934 Key Takeaways of the global Chagas Disease Treatment Market:The global Chagas disease treatment market is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 7.3% over the forecast period (20172025), owing to increasing approval of Chagas disease treatment drugs in key regions. For instance in 2017, U.S. FDA approved benznidazole in the U.S. for treatment of Chagas diseaseNorth America is expected to witness highest growth over the forecast period. This is due to increasing approvals of treatment drugs for Chagas such as benznidazole in 2017, in the U.S. Benznidazole is the only FDA approved treatment indicated for the treatment of Chagas disease.Key players in the market are focusing on gaining approvals for novel Chagas disease treatment drugs. For instance, in 2016, Drugs for Neglected Diseases sponsored the clinical trial of Benznidazole in combination with E1224, with an objective to improve treatment for Chagas disease. The combination is in Phase 2 clinical trial.Various private and government organizations are taking initiatives to increase the awareness about Chagas disease and to increase its treatment rate. In April 2018, an international humanitarian organization, Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), launched a campaign to increase awareness about the diagnosis and treatment of Chagas disease among Latin American population.Major players operating in the Chagas disease treatment market include Nortec Quimica SA, Bayer AG, Laboratorio Elea Phoenix SA, Maprimed S.A., and Laboratorio Farmaceutico de Pernambuco S/A.To know the latest trends and insights prevalent in the Chagas Disease Treatment Market, click the link below: https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/market-insight/chagas-disease-treatment-market-934 About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@ coherentmarketinsights.com Visit our news Website: https://www.coherenttimes.org Increasing number of pediatric bone defects is expected to aid in growth of the distraction osteogenesis devices market Distraction Osteogenesis Devices PR-Inside.com: 2018-05-30 16:03:48 Press Information Coherent Market Insights 1001 4th Ave, #3200 Seattle, WA 98154 Mr.Shah CEO 2067016702 email https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ # 859 Words 1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154CEO2067016702 Global Distraction Osteogenesis Devices Market, by Device Type (Mandibular Distraction Devices, Palatal Distraction Devices, Alveolar Distraction Devices, Cranial Distraction Devices, LeFort Distraction Devices, and Others), by Placement (Internal Distractors and External Distractors), by End User (Hospitals, Orthopedic Clinics, and Others) and by Region (North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa) is estimated to be valued at US$ 219.1 Million in 2017 and is projected to exhibit a CAGR of 4.7% over the forecast period (20172025), as highlighted in a new report published by Coherent Market Insights. The distraction osteogenesis devices market is expected to gain significant traction, owing to rising number of initiatives undertaken by organizations to create awareness about the available procedures and the launch of innovative computer assisted software.Request Sample Copy Of This Report: https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/1172 Advancement in technology in distraction osteogenesis devices to augment growth of the marketKey players are focusing on research and development to introduce innovative products for enhancing patient satisfaction, procedure efficiency, and clinical outcomes, thus, increasing adoption of these technologically advanced devices leading to growth of the market. For instance, in October 2017, DePuy Synthes introduced MAXFRAME Multi-Axial Correction System, an external circular fixation device with a 3D planning software that helps improve accuracy of the deformity correction plan, which may reduce overall treatment time while improving procedural efficiency and reducing costs. The system is indicated for fracture fixation, limb lengthening, bone deformity correction in adults and children. Also, in 2013, DePuy Synthesa subsidiary of Johnson & Johnsonlaunched TRUMATCH CMF Solutions for facial reconstruction, orthognathic surgery, distraction, and cranial reconstruction. CMF solution offers integrated approach for virtual surgical planning and fabrication of individualized implants for patients undergoing complex maxillofacial reconstructive procedures, thereby cutting treatment times and lowering costs.Browse 36 Market Data Tables and 34 Figures spread through 183 Pages and in-depth TOC on Distraction Osteogenesis Devices Market- Global Forecast to 2025, by Device Type (Mandibular Distraction Devices, Palatal Distraction Devices, Alveolar Distraction Devices, Cranial Distraction Devices, LeFort Distraction Devices, and Others), by Placement (Internal Distractors and External Distractors), by End User (Hospitals, Orthopedic Clinics, and Others), and by Region (North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa)Distraction osteogenesis is an effective treatment option for correction of facial asymmetries and has successfully aided in rehabilitation of number of patients suffering from facial disfigurements. According to a study by researchers at Dalhousie University, 2012, the success rate in preventing tracheostomy was 91.3% in neonates and infants using mandibular distraction osteogenesis (MDO). The study also stated that MDO was proved to be highly efficient in alleviating upper airway obstruction in neonates, infants, and older children with Pierre Robin Sequence (PRS). Also, distraction osteogenesis eliminates the need for bone grafting by allowing surgeons with early intervention in pediatrics for speedy facial form and function restoration. This is expected to aid in growth of the market.Moreover, increasing number of collaborations between manufacturers and scientists to develop innovative devices is a major factor augmenting the market growth. For instance, Europe-based company, Surgi-Tec collaborated with researchers at Brussels University Hospital, to enhance its product portfolio in jaw and facial surgery. Also, in 2017, Titamed collaborated with Royal Belgium Society of Stomatology and Maxillofacial Surgery and MKA Wassland and conducted an event with the European Association for Cranio Maxillo- Facial Surgery Congress in April 2018, to promote and showcase its range of products to maxillofacial surgeons, thus enhancing sales of its products in the market.Ask for customization: https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-customization/1172 Key Takeaways of the Distraction Osteogenesis Devices Market:The global distraction osteogenesis devices market is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 4.7% over the forecast period, owing to rising number of initiatives undertaken by the organizations to promote awareness about distraction osteogenesis and increasing incidence of the facial deformitiesAmong device type, palatal distraction devices segment holds a dominant position in the distraction osteogenesis devices market, owing to availability of a wide range of these devices and increasing incidence of cleft lip and palate among children.Among placement, external distractors segment holds a dominant position in the distraction osteogenesis devices market, owing to fewer complications associated with external distractors and no requirement of undergoing second surgical procedure, which is mainly required in case of internal devices.Among end user, hospitals segment is expected to be dominant in the distraction osteogenesis devices market, over the forecast period, owing to tailored pediatric treatments offered by hospitals using 3-D imaging and advanced softwareSome of the major players operating in the global distraction osteogenesis devices market are Johnson & Johnson, Zimmer Biomet Holdings, Inc., Stryker Corporation, KLS Martin Group, Osteomed, Acumed LLC, and Titamed.To know the latest trends and insights prevalent in the distraction osteogenesis devices market, click the link below: https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/market-insight/distraction-osteogenesis-devices-market-1172 About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@ coherentmarketinsights.com Visit our news Website: https://www.coherenttimes.org PR-Inside.com: 2018-05-30 13:01:13 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 399 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for EVITRADE Health Systems Corp.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - EVITRADE Health Systems Corp. (CSE:EVA). has issued a press release with the following headline:EVITRADE Health Systems Latest Biotech LOI Positions It to Be a Force in the USD $30 Billion Plant-Based Pharmaceutical IndustryTo view this press release on the FSCwire website, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:If you would prefer, you can also view this press release as a PDF file, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:For more information on EVITRADE Health Systems Corp., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/EVITRADE Health Systems Corp.Source: EVITRADE Health Systems Corp. (CSE: EVA, OTCQB: AXHLF)Date: May 30, 2018Time: 7:00 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of EVITRADE Health Systems Corp. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.) PR-Inside.com: 2018-05-30 13:01:39 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 390 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for OneSoft Solutions Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Los Angeles, California (FSCWire) - OneSoft Solutions Inc. (OTCQB:OSSIF). has issued a press release with the following headline:OneSoft CEO Presenting at the 8th Annual LD Micro Invitational Investor ConferenceTo view this press release on the FSCwire website, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:If you would prefer, you can also view this press release as a PDF file, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:For more information on OneSoft Solutions Inc., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/OneSoft Solutions Inc.Source: OneSoft Solutions Inc. (OTCQB: OSSIF, TSX Venture: OSS, WKN: A119HD, ISIN: CA68276J1021)Date: May 30, 2018Time: 7:00 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of OneSoft Solutions Inc. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.) PR-Inside.com: 2018-05-30 13:00:50 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 390 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Theralase Technologies Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Toronto, Ontario (FSCWire) - Theralase Technologies Inc. (TSX Venture:TLT). has issued a press release with the following headline:Theralase Successfully Completes Phase Ib Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer Clinical StudyTo view this press release on the FSCwire website, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:If you would prefer, you can also view this press release as a PDF file, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:For more information on Theralase Technologies Inc., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/Theralase Technologies Inc.Source: Theralase Technologies Inc. (TSX Venture: TLT, OTCQX: TLTFF, FWB: TTX, WKN: A0DLB7, ISIN: CA88337V1004)Date: May 30, 2018Time: 7:00 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Theralase Technologies Inc. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.) Thousands of people across Greater Sydney region have been targeted by Mandarin-speaking fraudsters in a sophisticated phone scam demanding money under threats of violence, prompting Australian police to warn the Australian-Chinese community. The elaborate and ever-evolving ruse targeting vulnerable members of the Australian-Chinese community has already netted no less than five million dollars (3.75 million dollars), New South Wales police said on Wednesday. Linda Howlett, the police detective, told news conference in Parramatta, a large suburb west of Sydney, that the caller purported to be a government official. The essence of the scam is to convince the victim they are in trouble, but they can pay their way out of it. The call starts with a recorded message in English or Mandarin, and transfers to a person claiming to be from the Chinese embassy or consulate, who claims the victim, has been implicated in a crime. They also claim to the victims their identity has been stolen and could impact on their visa to stay in Australia or harm could come to their family back home. The scammers even instruct the victims to fake their own kidnapping so their family can be extorted into making payments on their behalf, Howlett said. He said one Sydney victim paid 1.9 million dollars to scammers and, in the past week, there have been three forced fake kidnappings. Chinas deputy consul-general in Sydney, Tong Xuejun, said earlier this month that over 1,000 cases had been reported since August 2017. We have confirmed about 40 cases that caused a loss. The total amount of money involved is about 10 million dollars, Tong noted. (dpa/NAN) President Muhammadu Buhari Wednesday in Abuja assured the new president of Sierra Leone, Julius Bio, of Nigerias support, as his work towards a stable and improved economy. Receiving the Sierra Leonean leader at the Presidential Villa, President Buhari congratulated Mr Bio on his successful elections and the transitions that ushered in a new government in the country. We will continually stand by you to ensure stability in your country. We believe security in the West Coast region, Africa and the world should be a collective concern, he said. Mr Buhari said Nigeria had for long provided security support for the country, especially during the 11 years of civil war, and would continue to assist the forces on the ground to ensure the peace and stability needed for development. President Buhari noted that he shared a lot in common with the Sierra Leonean president, which includes ruling the country as a former military general, contesting several elections as opposition and winning to face the challenges of security and an ailing economy. In his remarks, the president of Sierra Leone said his country remains grateful to Nigeria for the brotherly role it played in ensuring an end to protracted civil war in the country, and the successful political transitions since then. Mr Bio said he would work towards deepening the bilateral relations with Nigeria, and the strengthening of the regional bond, particularly in the areas of security and trade. The Association of Resident Doctors in Yobe State, on Wednesday issued a 21-day ultimatum to the state government, to address some issues they raised or they would embark on industrial action. Ali Mohammed, chairman of the association, stated this in a press conference in Damaturu. He said the doctors at a congress meeting noted with dismay the reduction in their salaries for the month of May, at a time when the government approved 100 per cent CONHESS salary structure for medical workers. The doctors demanded full implementation of allowances and automatic promotion of all the doctors. They also demanded for an upward review of residency package and deployment of more doctors to medical facilities in the state. The doctors are also seeking for the commencement of Housemanship and Residency in government hospitals and the deployment of more facilities to the emergency unit. The Joint Health Sector Unions (JOHESU) says it is considering suspending the ongoing strike by health workers which has crippled services at public hospitals across Nigeria. A report by Vanguard newspaper stated that the decision followed the intervention of the National Industrial Court (NIC), which offered to take over the mediation process between the striking workers and government. Confirming the development, National Vice Chairman of JOHESU, Ogbonna Chimela, Wednesday in a phone interview with PREMIUM TIMES, however, said the union was still consulting and considering when and how to suspend the strike. Yes, we are in the court in Abuja and the judge made some pronouncements but we are still consulting and considering the next move and when to suspend. You will get the final details soon, he said. About two weeks ago, the court ordered the workers to return to work within 24 hours. This followed an ex-parte motion filed by a non-governmental organisation. But the union which said it remained unmoved and was yet to be served with the order by Justice Babatunde Adejumo of the court, later confirmed receiving the order. JOHESU, a body of all other health workers except doctors, called the strike 43 days ago. The impasse has caused many deaths. Patients are passing through untold pains and their relatives are grumbling as federal, state and local government health institutions have been brought to their knees. There were meetings between the government and the union with the Ministers of Health and Labor, Isaac Adewole and Chris Ngige leading the negotiations. No common ground has been reached in these meetings, however, and members of JOHESU are accusing both officials of bias. In fact, they called for removal of Mr Adewole as health minister, labelling him the major barrier to the resolution of the strike. In Wednesdays ruling, the court mandated its mediation centre to take over the negotiation and reconciliation processes within the next 24 hours in the interest of the public. Responding, health ministrys spokesperson, Boade Akinola, said the ministry was yet to receive the ruling. We have not seen the ruling, when we do so, we will be able to respond but rest assured that the Ministry of Health always obey court orders, she told PREMIUM TIMES. Meanwhile, the leadership of JOHESU in Lagos on Wednesday suspended the industrial action in the state. Olatunji Tajudeen, the Lagos State JOHESU chairman who also confirmed the Industrial Court ruling, said government hospitals in the state had been directed to suspend the strike. The strike is today (Wednesday) suspended in Lagos State. This was approved by our national body and it will take effect immediately, he said. Mr Tajudeen said the suspension was because of the achievements and commitments made by the state governor to the plight of the health workers. The Anambra Government says it will sanction staff of the civil service who fail to report to office on May 30 in compliance with a sit at home order. IPOB, a separatist movement, seeks an independent Igbo country of Biafra. The Nigerian government last year secured a court order to formally declare IPOB a terror organisation. The group has called for a sit at home on Wednesday in the five South-east states to mark the declaration of Biafra by late Odumegwu Ojukwu who led the Igbos in a civil war between 1967 and 1970. IPOBs activities have, however, been condemned by many Igbos including political office holders. PREMIUM TIMES reported the earlier threat by the Ebonyi State Government that traders who obey the sit at home order will permanently forfeit their shops. In Abia, the police and the civil defence held a joint security operation on Tuesday to warn IPOB against the sit at home order. The Abia police said it would provide maximum security and advised workers and businesses to proceed with their work. The directive for Anambra workers to return to work after Tuesdays Democracy Day celebration was given in a circular from the office of the Head of Service in the state, Harry Uduh. The government asked permanent secretaries and heads of departments and agencies to monitor the situation and report accordingly. According to the memo, the Governor of Anambra has directed that work resumes on Wednesday, 30th May after the Public Holiday on 29th May. All public servants must therefore report to their duty posts on Wednesday and the rest of the week. Permanent Secretaries and Heads of Ministries, Department and Agencies should monitor and report compliance unfailingly. Please circulate to all your staff, it said. In a related development, C-Don Adinuba, the Commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment in Anambra, said the state government had not declared public holiday on May 30. Mr Adinuba, in a statement, therefore called on public servants therefore, to return to work. All Ndi Anambra are enjoined to freely engage in all their lawful businesses, without fear of molestation. Our state remains not only the safest but also the most peaceful and socially harmonious state in Nigeria, he said. Earlier on Tuesday, the police in Anambra vowed to deal with any IPOB members found. The attention of Anambra State Police Command has been drawn to a media publication that claims that no fewer than 2,000 members of outlawed indigenous people of Biafra (IPOB) took to the streets and roads of Onitsha in Anambra State on peaceful march to sensitise the public on the sit- at- home order it declared on May 30, police spokesperson Haruna Mohammed said. The publication is not only fictitious but also mischievously orchestrated by those elements who are not happy with the prevailing peace in the State which the Police and other Law enforcement agencies are working tirelessly to maintain. For the avoidance of doubt, the indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) is still a proscribed organisation hence all its activities remains illegal. The Commissioner of Police Anambra State Command CP Garba Baba Umar Psc once again enjoined all the good people of the State to disregard alleged calls by any group urging them to sit at home on the 30/5/2018 and go about their lawful businesses. Mr Mohammed said adequate security arrangements have been put in place by combined security forces in the state to proactively nip in the bud any threat emanating from such groups. Finally, the command will therefore not hesitate to deal decisively with and in accordance with the law any individual or groups under any guise that will disrupt public peace in the state. The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has awarded a medal to a Nigerian peacekeeper, Olufunmilayo Amodu, serving with the UN Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) for her outstanding service. The medal is an acknowledgement of the contribution of Nigeria to UN Peacekeeping Operations to ensure global peace and security. Mr Guterres also awarded a medal to appreciate the outstanding service of Mohammad Khan from Bangladesh, a military staff officer based at MINUSMA Force headquarters. The decoration was part of activities to honour the service and sacrifice of peacekeepers around the world to mark the 2018 International Day of UN Peacekeepers. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the UN will also honour three fallen Nigerian peacekeepers at the event on June 1, at the UN headquarters in New York. They are Lt. Col Ali Suleiman, who served with the UN Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Others are Warrant Officer Remmy Amakwe, who was deployed with the African UnionUnited Nations Mission in Darfur; and Kolawole Shogaolu, who served in a civilian capacity in the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali. Speaking after receiving the award, Ms Amodu said: The medal is very important. It symbolises what it is to be a peacekeeper at MINUSMA. Receiving it from the Secretary-General is a very unique privilege. The terrorists are not relenting in what they are doing. And obviously, we are not backing out in what we have come to do, she added, underscoring the worrying security situation in Mali. She further said: The UN is all about peace. And when there is peace, there is development. When there is peace, there is promotion of technology. When there is peace, every other thing works the way it should work. And for any person who would want to join MINUSMA, you should have at the back of your mind that when you are coming, it is to support the peace process. NAN reports that more than one million men and women have served under the UN flag, saving countless lives just as over 3,700 blue helmets have paid the ultimate price over the past seven decades. Troops with the mission have increasingly become the target of attacks. Meanwhile, Mr Guterres attended a ceremony at MINUSMAs base in Bamako where he paid tribute to fallen peacekeepers and laid a wreath at the memorial inside the camp, engraved with the names of those killed in the service of peace. Dear peacekeepers, you have demonstrated that you are capable of all forms of sacrifice. For many of your colleagues, this has meant the supreme sacrifice of giving their lives to protect the lives of Malian civilians. I want to thank you very much for this effort; these sacrifices, to pay tribute to you, and to say how proud I am to work with you. As peacekeepers, you are the foremost symbol of the United Nations itself, Mr Guterres said. Also, Mahamat Annadif, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Mali and Head of MINUSMA, said that honouring the fallen warms the hearts of their comrades and encourages us to continue to defend even more resolutely the values of the United Nations. Mr Guterres was accompanied on his visit to Mali by Under Secretary-General for Field Support, Atul Khare, Head of UN Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, and the Executive Director of UN Childrens Fund, Henrietta Fore. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres He was received at the airport by Malian President Ibrahim Keita. He was also scheduled to meet with Keita and other Malian officials as well as UN officials working in the country. UN has declared the north-west African country as the most dangerous place in the world to be a blue helmet as 21 troops and seven civilians serving with MINUSMA died in 2017. (NAN) The Code of Conduct Bureau has summoned a Permanent Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Power, Louis Edozien, to appear before it over allegations of graft against him. Mr Edozien is scheduled to appear before the Bureau at the conference room of the Federal Secretariat complex in Abuja on May 30, according to a copy of the invitation letter obtained by PREMIUM TIMES. The invitation is in response to a petition to the agency by Maryam Mohammed, a former General Manager at the Niger Delta Power Holding Company, against Mr Edozien on alleged grounds of lack of qualification to hold office and abuse of official powers by conflict of interest and participation in official corruption. Mr Edozien rose into the publics consciousness in 2016 after reports emerged that he was occupying the highest position in the Nigerian civil service without, apparently, having a National Youth Service Corps certificate, which is against the civil service rules. He did not respond to PREMIUM TIMES phone calls and text messages on Tuesday requesting for comments. A former director at the Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC), Mr Edozien was among 18 permanent secretaries appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari in November 2015. The president said at the time that he changed the tradition of subjecting permanent secretaries to written and oral tests before appointment but, instead, subjected them to a more rigorous selection process. A Sudden Sack According to Ms Mohammed, an erstwhile GM (Audit and Compliance) at NDPHC who authored the petition to the CCB, Mr Edozien (then Executive Director, Technical Services) and Anthony Muoneke (then Executive Director, Finance and Administration) were among the staff of the company who failed to provide their NYSC certificates during a company-wide audit. But while Mr Muoneke subsequently provided a verified NYSC certificate, Mr Edozien was unable to produce his NYSC certificate as he, apparently, never underwent the programme, she said. Mr Edozien was reportedly sacked by the company after the audit exercise carried out by Ms Mohammed. He was later appointed a permanent secretary in the Ministry of Power. Seven months after Mr Edoziens appointment by the president, Ms Mohammeds engagement at the NDPHC was terminated. I write to inform you that the President, Federal Republic of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR, has, in the exercise of his powers, approved your disengagement as the General Manager (Audit & Compliance) of the Niger Delta Power Holding Company Nigeria Limited with effect from Friday, 10th June, 2016, read a letter dated June 10, 2016, and signed by the then Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal. Consequently, you are to hand over the affairs of the Department to the most Senior Officer in the Department. No reason was given for the termination. Mr Buhari transmitted power to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and travelled to the United Kingdom on June 6, 2016, to treat a persistent ear infection. He returned to the country on June 19, 2016. It is unclear if the president approved the termination of Ms Mohammeds appointment at NDPHC before embarking on his medical leave. In a letter to Mr Osinbajo dated June 21, 2016, Ms Mohammed argued that there was no disciplinary reason or committee to which she had been subjected to and found guilty before dismissal and that she had never been found wanting or reprimanded during her years in the civil service. One week later, Ms Mohammed petitioned the president against her wrongful disengagement, claiming she was dismissed by persons who felt aggrieved with some decisions she took as GM Audit & Compliance. My disengagement was said to have been approved by you in exercise of your power as President, the petitioner wrote in the letter dated June 28, 2016. I received the said letter 17 days after my disengagement was announced in the media. According to Ms Mohammed, the SGF had announced the dissolution of the executive management of the NDPHC by the federal government and directed the managing director and all executive directors to hand over their positions immediately. Strangely and shockingly, the SGF also directed me to handover to the most senior officer in my department even though I am not a member of the dissolved Executive Management but a staff of the company of 24 years of unblemished career that rose to the position of General Manager through sheer hard work, commitment and dedication to duty. Curiously, there are 12 other General Managers of the same status as me that were allowed to remain in their positions, obviously because they are staff of the company and not members of the dissolved Executive Management. On October 25, 2016, the Attorney General of the Federation wrote to the presidents Chief of Staff informing him of Mr Buharis approval, during a meeting on October 12, 2016, for the reinstatement of Ms Mohammed. Ms Mohammed wrote another petition to the president on December 19, 2016, reminding him of the need to act expeditiously on the matter in the interest of justice and fairness. Mr Edozien is said to be a long-term associate of Abba Kyari, Mr Buharis Chief of Staff. Despite the presidents approval, PREMIUM TIMES learnt that Ms Mohammed is yet to be reinstated till date. Allegations of graft In her petition to the CCB dated April 9, Ms Mohammed argued that it is a grave anomaly for someone who was sacked for presenting a fake NYSC discharge certificate to be elevated to the position Permanent Secretary. The petition also accused Mr Edozien of a breach of public service rules by his regular involvement in transactions which pose a clear conflict of interest arising from his position as a permanent secretary. According to the petition, Mr Edozien is an interested party in Gigagas, an energy-sector company he is allegedly pushing to initiate technical and commercial discussions with potential drilling, gas processing and pipeline partners and contractors for accelerated delivery of the gas. The petition further accused the permanent secretary of concluding a deal with the American firm, General Electric, for the Afam 3 Power project, without any tender and side-stepping the governments due process. As evidence of the Perm Secs personal interest in this regard, as the GE transaction began to crash, the Perm Sec approached the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority and demanded that it become an investor in it by the immediate release of $34 million, a demand which was refused by the NSIA. In January, PREMIUM TIMES obtained a correspondence between Babatunde Fashola, the Minister of Power, Works, and Housing, and Mr Buhari in which the former alerted the president of a concession agreement in which key electricity transmission infrastructures belonging to Transmission Company of Nigeria were allegedly awarded to Alheri Engineering Company and Phase 3. Minister of Works, Power and Housing, Babatunde Raji Fashola According to the correspondence, the concession agreements were entered into under circumstances of conflict of interest because Phase 3 is owned and managed by one Stanley Jegede, a son-in-law to Cornelius Adebayo, who was the Minister of Communications when the company obtained the licence. Also, Joseph Makoju, a former managing director of NEPA who signed the agreement on behalf of TCN is now an executive officer in Dangote Group, the owners of Alheri Engineering Company. In her petition to the CCB, Ms Mohammed also said the conflict of interest extended to Mr Edozien whose wife, Ndidi, sits as a group executive in Dangote Group. This petition states that the only sure resolution for such a conflict is the resignation of one or both of the parties from the roles held at Dangote Group and at the Ministry of Power. The Nigerian Senate has dared a former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Attahiru Jega, to mention the names of committee chairmen who seek bribe at the National Assembly. The call followed a point of order raised by Isa Misau (APC, Bauchi Central). He had stood up to express disappointment at the comments of the former INEC boss. Mr Jega on Monday accused federal lawmakers of seeking bribes to carry out their constitutional duties. He said chairmen of committees in the National Assembly were more notorious for bribe taking antics. He made the accusation while delivering the years Democracy Day lecture at a gathering in Abuja. Those at the event included President Muhammadu Buhari; Senate President Bukola Saraki; Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara; and the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen. Mr Jega said he had spoken to quite a number of chief executives who complained of high demand for bribes from members of the National Assembly in the name of so-called oversight functions. Some chairmen of committees at the National Assembly are notorious for seeking for bribes, he said. The position of the former INEC Chairman confirms a story earlier published by PREMIUM TIMES in which some heads of government agencies complained of how National Assembly members were harassing them for bribe. Coming under order 43, Mr Misau described Mr Jegas comments as unfortunate. He said the statement is very weighty because the programme was televised live. The thing they need to understand is that these live programmes are watched around the world. And at the time he made that statement, I am a member of ECOWAS parliament and I after the lecture, I went to the parliament. Most of the parliamentarians, this was the question they were asking me, that what the Professor said, is it true or not? He further dared the former INEC boss to name the committee chairmen who sought bribes. I feel that not only Professor Jega but anybody that would make statements concerning the credibility of this Senate and the chairmen, I think you should be bold enough to mention the committee chairmen, especially when it is about fighting corruption in Nigeria. If we really want to fight corruption and want to help the government, he would not be making such statements without mentioning the committee chairmen and those who gave him that sort of information. I felt embarrassed. We need the professor to throw more light on what he made, he said. Reacting to this, Mr Saraki, said he was highly embarrassed by Mr Jegas statement as he too was at the programme. He said everyone is committed to fighting corruption and Mr Jegas comment does not help the fight against corruption. It is a slight to the integrity of some of us, where such a statement is made. If he has those kinds of evidences, he should bring it forward. Because to say that, is to suggest that every member of the National Assembly is part of this; even those who are not part of this are condoling this action which is far from the truth. I think the professor who is respected should come out and mention these kinds of members he is aware of. If he cant come out and name them then he should not make such branding statements. Going forward to all distinguished and respected Nigerians, in issues that have to do with the institutions and a parliament, if there are cases like this, we have always said that we are not going to cover up for anybody and future accusations, they should name them and see what the institution would do in trying to ensure that the necessary sanctions are taken, Mr Saraki said. The Senate has summoned the Comptroller-General of Nigerian Prisons, Jaafaru Ahmed, over alleged confinement of underage offenders and infants in the same prisons with adult prisoners. The summon was sequel to deliberation on a motion moved by Victor Umeh (APGA, Anambra Central). Mr Umeh had expressed worry that juvenile offenders are not being treated in accordance with the provisions of the Prisons Regulations Act and the Childs Right Act. By the provisions of the Prisons (Regulations) Act, offenders under sixteen {16) years of age and infants are not to be confined in the same prisons with adult offenders. Section 1 of the Childs Right Act also states that: In every action concerning a child, whether undertaken by an individual, public or private body, institutions or services, court of law, or administrative or legislative authority, the best interest of the child shall be the primary consideration. Mr Umeh stressed that the negative implication of keeping underage children in conventional prison is that they will mix up with adult inmates who are likely to influence them negatively. Correctional Homes and Childrens Homes are established for the purposes of remanding underage offenders and caring for children born within the prisons walls, respectively. The majority of these underage children opt to be tried in courts without any legal representation, following the advice of some over-zealous prosecutors, unaware of the dire consequences, he said. He further explained that separating the underage offenders from the regular prisons as prescribed by the law would go a long way in protecting their mental health and development. Contributing to the motion, Shehu Sani (APC, Kaduna Central), said the motion clearly narrated the state of the Nigerian prisons. As a former political prisoner, Ive had the unfortunate privilege of passing through not less than seven to eight prisons in Nigeria. If theres any intervention we can do as a government, is to provide facilities that will upgrade the existing prisons and makes it possible for them to accommodate juvenile when they find themselves there. The only thing that has changed in Nigerian prison system is the uniform and then the Black Maria that used to be under the custody of the police has been taken over by the prison service. But when you talk of the facilities, the workshops, the hospitals, the offices and even the detention cells are still colonial. We even need to upgrade their allowances and salaries, including the pensioners from the Nigerian Prison Service. This motion will go a long way if we take a proactive step to invite the necessary prison officials to come here and brief the Senate, he said. He also called on all parliamentarians to visit the prisons and intervene as well as see how they can be supported. The Senate thereafter, mandated the Committee on Interior to invite the Comptroller-General of Prisons to brief it on the state of prison inmates in Nigeria; and to investigate the confinement of underage offenders and infants with adults in our Prisons and report back within four weeks. It also urged the various security agencies that are involved in the arrest and detention of the juvenile, to ensure that they (the underage) are not incarcerated beyond 48 hours and when conviction is secured, ensure they are separated from the adults inmates. The Senate also resolved to call on the federal government to establish more Juvenile Remand/Correctional Homes and, Creches attached to all female Prisons across the nation and urged the Legal Aid Council to step up efforts to ensure that underage children are not prosecuted without legal representation in courts. The Nigerian Senate on Wednesday resolved to probe a sex-for-mark case at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. The institution was enmeshed in a scandal in April after a leaked phone recording exposed a lecturer seeking sex from a female student to pass her in an examination. In the audio, the lecturer, Richard Akindele, a professor, requested five days of sex from Monica Osagie, a masters student of the institution. Even though OAU has investigated the case and placed the professor on indefinite suspension, the Senate said more needed to be done to stem the trend. Presenting a motion on Wednesday, Biodun Olujimi (Ekiti-PDP) harped on the need to investigate the case and growing culture of sexual harassment in Nigerian institutions. Mrs Olujimi said an investigation by the lawmakers will ensure that the issue is not swept under the carpet like others. She expressed worry that the case is just one out of many sexual harassment bedevilling Nigerian higher institutions. The Senate is further worried that this is just one out of the many cases that have come to limelight within the past decade and it shows that the perversion is spreading across the country, with both the male and female genders as victims, especially in view of the poor prosecution and conviction numbers being turned out. She said, The Senate further notes that on a nearly daily basis our newspapers are awash with reports of rape and other sexual violence; and we must, as the peoples parliament, bring them succour and safety. The Senate observes that these acts damage our children in very significant ways. That it also portrays our country in bad light and are alien to both our cultural and religious orientation as a people. The Senate mandated its committees on Tertiary Institutions and Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters to carry-out a full scale investigation of the case of Monica Osagie and the OAU lecturer in order to ensure that there is transparency and accountability, and that satisfactory justice is done to the victim involved and our laws are further strengthened for effectiveness. It also urged the House of Representatives to move quickly to concur with the Senate bill on Sexual Harassment in Tertiary Educational Institutions (Prohibition) bill, which has been transmitted to the House as this will provide succour and a window of solace for victims of this kind of atrocities across the country in higher institutions of learning. The lawmakers rejected a prayer to invite the OAU authorities to explain the steps they had taken so far, on the argument that it would be handled by the committees. The Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Kayode Fayemi, formally announced his resignation from the federal cabinet on Wednesday with profound appreciation of President Muhammadu Buharis visionary leadership and prioritization of the mining sector. Mr. Fayemis resignation, which was approved by the President, is to enable him contest the July 14 Ekiti State Governorship election for which he is the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC). The Minister announced his resignation at a valedictory press briefing held at the Ministrys conference room. He also used the occasion to give accounts of his stewardship in the ministry which he headed for two and a half years, admitting that the sector has indeed met its set goals of increasing its contribution to the national GDP. The Nigerian Bureau of Statistics recently affirmed that the revenue from the mining sector has increased more than five folds from the inception of the administration. According to Mr. Fayemi, the support of the President greatly assisted in repositioning the mining sector for better performance, leading to remarkable growth recorded in the sector in the past two and a half years. Mr. Fayemi cited improved funding for the sector, better geological data, improvement in the ease of doing business, security of the mines as well as removal of legal encumbrances that gad crippled some national assets as some areas the ministry, under his leadership, had recorded huge success. Other achievements include stronger institutional capacity, enhanced capacity of staffs, improved infrastructure, better cooperative federalism, improvement in productivity, profitable collaboration with international development agencies. He said he was confident that the Minister of State, Abubakar Bawa Bwari, who will now take charge of the Ministry, would forge ahead with the various reforms and innovations that have helped to reposition the sector. Mr. Fayemi who lauded the support of the President said, owing to President Buharis understanding the Ministry was able to access N30billion intervention fund, which was the mining component of the National Resource Fund for the very first time since the creation of the ministry. President Muhammadu Buhari speaking He said a substantial part of the fund was being spent on exploration, in the bid to ensure adequate mineral data. He said: As part of the support we received from the Natural Resources Fund, the Ministry has finalized exploration initiatives totalling N15 billion allowing successful entities help with the exploration of priority minerals like Gold, Lead, Zinc, Rare earth metals to mention a few. We have initiated the establishment of the National Minerals Commission (NMC), which would harmonise the functions of the Cadastre Office and a number of key departments in the ministry, under a unified administrative structure for greater efficiency and effectiveness in sector governance. This has been approved by the FEC and passed 2nd reading at the National Assembly. We have reinvigorated our Mines Surveillance efforts, with the deployment of newly trained and empowered officers across the federation. Infrastructure required for the proper functioning of the minerals and mining ecosystem such as railroads, competitive financing systems, mine and asset security and related support services are being developed in concert with other government entities. For instance, as part of our efforts to de-risk the sector, we are in discussions with the Bank of Infrastructure, as part of a consortium, to attract private capital investments for critical mining infrastructure. In order to encourage beneficial participation of state governments in the mining sector, we have gotten approval for the implementation of the constitutionally guaranteed 13% derivation for mineral revenue to states, similar to the derivation that oil-producing states currently enjoy from the federation accounts. We have delivered on the objective of building a collaborative sector security framework by working extensively with state governments and relevant ministries to formalize and manage our artisanal miners, while also working with defence and security agencies to curb the actions of illegal mining in the country. We also recorded progress in resolving the legal issues around our legacy projects, particularly Ajaokuta. We have signed a Modified Concession Agreement (MCA) that has allowed for the commencement of the return of the entity to the Federal Government of Nigeria. We have in place a timeline of action which would see the legacy plant become operational in the near future. We are at this time concluding an audit process, further to which we would fully take over the plant. We are taking the most appropriate steps in our national interest to ensure Ajaokuta is finally put to work after several false starts in the past. On ALSCON, we have also made significant progress in our efforts to bring the Company back to life with the approval of the National Council on Privatisation that the company be given to UC Rusal with clear conditionalities for resuscitation. Development of IT integrated Automation and interactive Web portal for the MMSD to create One Stop Shop online interface for investors and other players in the sector to obtain data on a broad range of subjects about our jurisdiction, and process a number of key applications from anywhere in the world. Launched a N5 billion fund (made up of N2.5 billion by SMDF & a counterpart fund of N2.5 billion by Bank of Industry) to provide single digit interest loans to Artisanal and Small & Medium scale miners. It was a press briefing with an unusual outpouring of emotions, as the Minister of State, Mr. Bwari, and the Permanent Secretary poured encomium on the outgoing minister. Mr. Fayemi added, On one hand, I have a deep sense of pride about my contributions to the landmark achievements we have been able to achieve in the sector, and I am thus transitioning out with my head held high. On the other hand, I am overwhelmed by emotions as I bid goodbye to a sector that I, together with other patriots have invested a great deal of passionate and patriotic efforts over the past two years. Kayode Fayemi, Governor , Ekiti State My sincere thanks and appreciation goes to His Excellency Mr. President and His Excellency the Vice President for the visionary leadership and prioritization of the sector; as well as to my ministerial colleague, Hon. Abubakar Bawa Bwari Minister of State. I similarly acknowledge the support of the previous Permanent Secretaries in the ministry, Mr. Istifanus Fuktur and Mr. Mohammed Abbas, as well as the current Permanent Secretary, Dr. Abdulkadir Muazu, the entire Staff of the Ministry as well as all players and stakeholders in the industry. The Minister of State, Mr. Bwari, in an emotion-laded address at the event, described Mr. Fayemi as a patriot who was passionate about development of the sector. I would have wished he stayed much longer to conclude the assignment we started together, but I know he is on a rescue mission to Ekiti State. To him, the Ekiti election is more than just an election. It is a rescue mission. So, our loss (in the ministry) is Ekiti state gain. Mr. Bwari who described Mr. Fayemi as a friend and brother, said their relationship has transcended beyond being just colleagues. He is my brother, friend and mentor. If there is an opportunity in the future, I would love to work with you again. The Permanent Secretary, Muazu Abdulkadir, described Mr. Fayemi as an expert on policy matters, governance and development, from whom he had learnt a lot. Mr. Abdulkadir, who said he had an amazing time working with the Minister, said his intellect and energy he brought into his assignment are quite remarkable. Dr Fayemi is extremely passionate about the sector. The reforms he introduced in the sector has led to remarkable growth as reflected in the huge increase in contribution to the national GDP. As an expert in policy, governance and development, it is a serious task working with him. But he makes the job easier by his ability to proffer solutions to knotty issues. We shall miss his intellectualism and administrative acumen, Mr. Abdulkadir added. It was a festival of gratitude and jubilation at the event marking the 2018 Democracy Day celebration in Enugu State on Tuesday as Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi reassured people of the state of his administrations resolve to continue to put them first. Addressing the people of Enugu State at the colourful and well attended ceremony, Governor Ugwuanyi listed the numerous achievements his administration has recorded so far in all spheres of development to improve their living standard as the true heroes of democracy. The governors address was titled in A festival of gratitude. Mr. Ugwuanyi, who was overwhelmed by the large turnout of leaders and people of the state at the event , expressed gratitude to them, adding that it was also a day of gratitude to God Almighty from whom all blessings flow and whose ceaseless grace has continued to sustain and give us a lifting up in the midst of the current economic realities. The governor congratulated President Muhammadu Buhari, his deputy, Yemi Osinbajo; the leadership and members of the National Assembly; the Chief Justice of Nigeria and the entire judiciary; fellow governors, among others on the nations 19th Democracy Day celebration and third anniversary of the present administration. The governor stated that his administration has made tremendous progress in the past three years in spite of the challenges it was confronted with at inception in 2015 such as the huge debts profile of the State breathing down our necks, huge salary and pension arrears confronting us in the midst of economic crunch and very depleted revenues from the centre occasioned by the fall in oil revenues. Dedicating the successes recorded so far by his administration to God, Governor Ugwuanyi disclosed that the government also employed utmost determination, aggressive revenue drive and prudent management of available resources to render good governance in the state. He reassured residents of the state and teeming supporters that his administration will continue to honour God and run a focused, developmental and conscience-driven leadership, reaffirming his commitment to consolidate on rural development to enhance participatory democracy. Governor Ugwuanyi further stated that his administration in keeping with the constitution of the country has made frantic efforts towards the security and welfare of the people of the state, saying: To the glory of God, Enugu is now rated as one of the most peaceful and secure states across the Federation. We are most grateful to God, the good people of Enugu State, the church, and the security agencies for making this possible. According to the governor, we partnered and supported the security agencies to build their capacities to rise to the challenges of securing a modern society. We launched the Enugu State Security/Neigbourhood Watch Endowment Fund and provided support in the forms of vehicles and equipment to complement the efforts of the security agencies. On investment drive, Governor Ugwuanyi said the peace and security in Enugu State have transformed the State into a popular destination for investments and tourism, disclosing that the states Investment Summit,Oganiru Enugu, organized by his administration unveiled the potentials and economic opportunities in the state to the world. Both foreign and local investors keep coming, he said, adding that in addition to the ENPOWER Free Trade Zone, which was envisioned as a world class in-land technology, industrial, and business hub and licensed by the FG in December 2015, we have also set up the Lion Industrial Park, 9th Mile Corner, to create fresh economic and industrialization opportunities as promised in our inaugural address. On infrastructure, Governor Ugwuanyi stated that this administration is synonymous with rural development as the bulk of the infrastructural development efforts of the administration are in the rural areas and there is hardly any community in the state without one form of government presence or the other in the form of development projects. He added that the government conceptualized The One Community One Project (OCOP) with the sum of N10 million per community to make all the communities in the state the chief drivers of their infrastructural development priorities. This is already yielding fruits as not only have communities received the initial installment of N5 million, I have also had the honour and pleasure to commission some of the projects. The governor also disclosed that the five new Ultra Modern Fire Service stations his administration is constructing across the state, after 56 years such projects were built in the state, the Eastern Region, are nearing completion, with that of Ogrute in Igbo Eze North L.G.A completed and inaugurated in a record time. On education, he stated that the government has worked to restore confidence in public educational institutions and has embarked on massive renovation, rehabilitation, and re-equipment of primary and secondary school buildings to make them friendly and safe for learning. He equally stated that his administration has invested heavily in the recruitment of primary and secondary school teachers and has also regularized the appointment of volunteer teachers declaring that the employment of more teachers in the state continues because of the premium we place on this all-important sector. Gov. Ugwuanyi said that the government has paid close attention and carried out reforms at the states tertiary education, revealing that the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT) is set to hold its convocation for the first time in nearly 11 years. The governor maintained that his administration adopted a multi-strata empowerment approach that touches the lives of traders, market women, the youth, urban and rural dwellers alike, adding that it has remained consistent with its promise to pay civil servants on or before the 23rd of every month and pay the pensioners. He also added that through the recent launch of the Enugu Clean Team Project, 1,000 youths were gainfully employed to clean up the state, revealing that the State Executive Council has also approved the recruitment of an additional 1,000 youth for the Initiative, among other numerous achievements. As we embark on the fourth lap of this glorious and God-given tenure, rest assured that we will never let you down. With God ordering our steps, we will continue to put you first, fulfilling our promises, and ensuring that the common good remains our watchword. We will continue to deliver democracy dividends to you. We will also continue to count on your prayers, support, and cooperation as we build an Enugu State of our dreams. As you return to your various communities, take home this message of hope and assurance that together, we will get to the Promised Land as Enugu remains firmly in the hands of God, Gov. Ugwuanyi pledged. Other dignitaries at the event include the wife of the Governor, Monica Ugwuanyi; the Deputy President of the Senate, Ike Ekweremadu and other members of the National Assembly from the state; states Deputy Governor, Cecilia Ezeilo and other members of the State Executive Council; the Speaker of the State House of Assembly, Edward Ubosi and members of the State Assembly; the Chief Judge of the State, Ngozi Priscilla Emehelu, and the entire judicial arm of the state government; Heads of Security Agencies in the state; State Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Augustine Nnamani; President-General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo; Nnia Nwodo; former Deputy Governors of the State; all the leaders of the religious institutions in the state; revered traditional rulers as well as all the states major stakeholders of the state, among others. The EFCC on Wednesday, filed an amended 39-count charge before a Federal High Court Lagos, against a former governor of Abia State, Orji Kalu in an alleged N3.2 billion fraud. The EFCC had on October 31, 2016, preferred a 34-count charge bordering against Kalu and a former Commissioner for Finance in Abia, Ude Udeogo. A company, Slok Nig. Ltd, said to be owned by Mr Kalu, was also joined in the charge. The accused had pleaded not guilty to the charge, and were granted bails. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that at the last adjourned date on May 11, EFCC had closed its case, but had informed the court that it intended to file an amended charge against the accused, to reflect further evidences. The court had then adjourned the case, for the accused to open its defence. On Wednesday, when the case was called, the prosecutor Rotimi Jacobs, informed the court of an amended charge against the accused which he filed Wednesday morning, adding that the prosecution was also served with a no case submission by each of the accused. He said that he received the no case submission of first accused on May 28 at 5 p.m., while he received those of the second and third accused shortly before the court sat Wednesday morning. In response, first defence counsel, Awa Kalu, confirmed to the court that he had filed a no case submission on behalf of first accused but added that the accused had not been served with any amended charge by prosecution. Second and third defence counsel, Solo Akuma and K. C Nwofo, also informed the court that they had filed no case submissions on behalf of the second and third accused, which were served on the prosecution this morning. They also informed the court that neither the defence nor any of its legal team had seen or received copies of the said amended charge by prosecution. Specifically, Mr Akuma drew the courts attention to the provisions of sections 216 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, which he argued does not allow prosecution to amend a charge without leave of court. He said that the prosecution ought to have applied by way of motion on notice for amendment, which will afford the defence an opportunity to be heard, before the court exercises its discretion for or against the application. When the prosecution opted to serve the charge on defence counsel in court, first defence counsel (Kalu) objected to service, on the grounds that the charge ought to be served personally on the accused and not on his counsel. In his response, Mr Jacobs reminded the court that at the last adjourned date, before he closed the case for the prosecution, he had informed the court of the amended charge. He said that however, following gentlemen agreements between him and the defence, he had decided to close his case before bringing the amended charge. He told the court that the era of technicality was gone, and that by the decision of the Supreme Court, the prosecution was not bound to seek leave of court before amending a criminal charge. Mr Jacobs then sought for permission of the court, to serve the amended charge on the accused in the presence of the judge in the courtroom, since defence counsel had refused to take service. Justice Idris consequently held that in the light of the foregoing, the learned prosecutor was permitted to serve the accused with the amended charge in court. Messrs Kalu and Udeogo were then respectively handed the amended charge. Defence counsel then informed the court that they required ample time to study the amended charge, before taking any steps. Justice Idris adjourned the case until June 13 at noon, for hearing of both the no case submission and hearing on the amended charge. In the charge, the EFCC alleged that Mr Kalu and the others committed the offences from August 2001 to October 2005. The commission accused Mr Kalu of utilising his company (Slok Nig. Ltd.) to retain in the account of First Inland Bank, now First City Monument Bank, the sum of N200 million. The commission said that the sum formed part of funds illegally derived from the coffers of the Abia State Government. The commission also said that the accused retained, in different bank accounts, about N2.5 billion belonging to the Abia Government. The EFCC alleged that that the accused diverted about N3.2 billion from the coffers of Abia Government. The offences contravenes the provisions of sections 15(6), 16, and 21 of the Money Laundering (Prohibition) Act, 2005. It also contravenes the provisions of the Money Laundering Act of 1995 as amended by the amendment Act No.9 of 2002 and section 477 of the Criminal Code Act, Laws of the Federation, 1990. (NAN) The police in Enugu have arrested the leader and 20 members of the Biafran Zionists Movement. Benjamin Onwuka and his followers were arrested on Wednesday in Enugu metropolis. PREMIUM TIMES gathered that members on Wednesday morning marched towards the Enugu Government House, allegedly to hoist Biafran flags. Led by Mr Onwuka, who refers to himself as the president, the group which marched from the Bissala Road toward the Government House. But upon their arrival at the Government House gate, they were rounded up by security operatives, a security source said. A combined team of security operatives including the SSS and the police carried out the arrest. Confirming the arrest, the Enugu police spokesperson, Ebere Amaraizu said the 20 other members of the group were also arrested. The Enugu State command of the Nigeria Police Force through its operatives today nabbed the leader of Biafran Zionist Movement identified as one Bejamin Onwuka alongside with some of his members numbering about twenty one. Onwuka has been standing trial in the court of competent court of jurisdiction over his alleged role of murder, armed robbery and unlawful possession of firearms before he resurfaced today but fell into the hands of the eagle eyed security operatives of the command. He was nabbed within the Enugu metropolis alongside his members based on the intelligence information. Suspects are helping the operatives in their investigations. Mr Amaraizu said the sit-at-home called by pro-Biafra movements failed in the state. There were movement of vehicles, commuters and traders within and outside the metropolis contrary to the early threat and order of sit-at-home. Security operatives were seen at strategic places just as shops, media houses, markets and banks were open to the members of the public, he said. Two pro-Biafra movements, IPOB and MASSOB, called for the sit-at-home to mark the Biafra Declaration by late Odimegwu Ojukwu in 1967. PREMIUM TIMES earlier reported how the directive was complied with in some South-east states and ignored in others. For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME. Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest warscreating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire. Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever. Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation. View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union. Never before has a documentary assembled all the pieces of the globalists' dark agenda. Endgame's compelling look at past atrocities committed by those attempting to steer the future delivers information that the controlling media has meticulously censored for over 60 years. It fully reveals the elite's program to dominate the earth and carry out the wicked plan in all of human history. Endgame is not conspiracy theory, it is documented fact in the elite's own words. Mike Levine2 Contact Bob Wilson, Executive Director, MTGA ***@michigantrails.org Bob Wilson, Executive Director, MTGA End -- Old Town, Lansing, MI The Michigan Trails and Greenways Alliance is proud to support the recognition of philanthropist and trails advocate Mike Levine for his work on Lakelands Trail State Park as the Natural Resources Commission recently honored him by renaming the trail park the Mike Levine Lakelands Trail State Park. Key state and local officials will gather at the Pinckney Depot to celebrate Mike and his passion for trail building at a ceremony this morning."Mike Levine is an inventor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, Pinckney resident, and above all a tireless supporter of the Great Lake-to-Lake Trails Route #1 and Michigan trails movement in general," said Bob Wilson, Executive Director of the Michigan Trails and Greenways Alliance. "He has pledged his time, his passion and millions of dollars to expand and improve trails throughout the state.""While so many have focused on his philanthropic efforts and they are significant, I want to focus my thanks today for his role as a citizen steward who deeply believes in the vital role that trails play in making Michigan a better place to live, work and play," continued Wilson. "To me, Mike's real strength lies in this belief and the passion that he brings to trail building. If we had more people like Mike who could share their time and passion for making policy changes in Lansing, this state would be a far better place."Michigan Trails announced the creation of a new annual award that will commemorate the spirit of trail commitment that Mike has shown us all - The Michigan Trails Mike Levine Annual Trail Volunteer of the Year Award. Every year during trails week in September, Michigan Trails will recognize one individual in this state who has displayed the kind of passion and personal commitment to advancing trails in Michigan that Mike has shown us all.Wilson hopes others are inspired by Mike Levine's contribution to Michigan's trails and become more engaged citizen stewards. "This state is a far better place when we can enable and support the kind of citizen stewardship and citizen responsibility that Mike has demonstrated,"explained Wilson.The Michigan Trails and Greenways Alliance is the statewide voice for non-motorized trail users, helping people build, connect and promote trails for a healthier and more prosperous Michigan. For more information, visit us at www.michigantrails.org or find us on Facebook. Singapore and Slovenia both rank first, with Norway, Sweden and Finland rounding out the top five. Eight of the bottom 10 countries are in West and Central Africa, with Niger ranked last for the second year running. The U.S. ranks 36th, between Belarus and Russia, and well behind other developed nations, including the United Kingdom and Canada. "Most of the world's children are being robbed of their childhoods and their futures because they're living in poverty, growing up in warzones or experiencing discrimination for being girls," said Carolyn Miles, President & CEO of Save the Children. "While we're seeing some progress in many countries when it comes to childhood-disrupting events like early marriage, exclusion from education and poor health progress is not happening quickly enough for the world's most vulnerable children. Save the Children is committed to making sure every last child has the childhood and the future they deserve." To better understand the America's low country ranking, Save the Children also conducted a state-by-state analysis in its U.S. Complement, titled Growing Up Rural in America, finding that rural child poverty rates are higher than urban rates in more than 85 percent of U.S. states. Overall, one in four children in America's rural areas live in poverty, compared to one in five who live in urban areas. And five states Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina all have rural child poverty rates at or above 33 percent, meaning at least 1 in 3 rural children in these states are growing up in poverty. "Children in rural America are more likely to die in infancy, miss out on meals, become pregnant as teenagers and not attend college," said Mark Shriver, Save the Children's Senior Vice President for U.S. Programs & Advocacy. "Rural child poverty rates have been persistently high for at least three generations in the U.S. That's why Save the Children is working in the rural areas most crippled by poverty, helping children overcome the challenges they face because of where they live, so they can reach their full potential." The U.S. Complement ranks all 50 states on five childhood enders that cause children to miss out on childhood in America, including infant mortality rates, child homicide and suicide rates, adolescent birth rates, child food insecurity rates and rates of children not graduating high school on time. The state ranking finds childhood is most intact in New Jersey, followed by Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut; while childhood is most threatened in Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Alabama, respectively. The Many Faces of Exclusion also found that: More than one billion children live in countries plagued by poverty; 240 million in countries affected by conflict and fragility; and more than 575 million girls live in countries where gender bias is a serious issue. Almost 153 million children are living in 20 countries affected by all three threatsincluding South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan. Malnutrition, disease and inadequate healthcare kill over 20 times as many children in war zones as conflict-related violence. The incidence of child labor in countries affected by armed conflict is 77 percent higher than the global average. Conflict also makes girls more vulnerable to child marriage. Only four of 34 fragile or conflict-affected states with available data have achieved, or nearly achieved, universal primary education. The poorest girls have about three times as many births as the wealthiest. The U.S. Complement to the End of Childhood Report: Growing Up Rural in America found that: An estimated 14.1 million children live in poverty across America, at a rate of 19.5 percent: 23.5 percent of children in rural areas are impoverished, compared to 18.8 percent in urban areas; among the 41 U.S. counties with poverty rates of 50 percent or higher, 93 percent (38 out of 41) are rural. 10 of the 12 states with the highest rates of rural child poverty are in the Southeast, including particularly impoverished sub-regions Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta. Children growing up in rural areas are more affected than their urban peers to infant mortality, food insecurity, low education levels and teen pregnancy Infant mortality in rural counties was 20 percent higher than in large urban communities 90 percent of the counties with high child food insecurity rates are rural 4 out of 5 of "low education" counties in the U.S. are rural Teen birth rates in rural areas are over 60 percent higher than those found in urban areas Save the Children is calling on governments to ensure that no child dies from preventable or treatable causes or is subjected to extreme violence; is robbed of a future as a result of malnutrition, early or forced marriage, early pregnancy, or forced labor; and that they have access to a quality education. "Without urgent action, we'll never meet the promises made three years ago by every country at the United Nations to ensure every child is in school, protected, healthy and alive by 2030 governments can and must do more to give every child the best possible start in life," said Miles. To download and read the full report, visit www.EndofChildhood.org. Save the Children believes every child deserves a future. In the United States and around the world, we give children a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm. We do whatever it takes for children every day and in times of crisis transforming their lives and the future we share. Learn more at www.SavetheChildren.org. Media Contacts Sara Neumann, [email protected], (203) 209-6545 (M) Jeremy Soulliere, [email protected], (203) 295-5842 (M) SOURCE Save the Children Related Links http://www.savethechildren.org BASKING RIDGE, N.J., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Affinity Federal Credit Union (AFCU) has been ranked #19 in the "Large Company" category for this year's NJBiz "Best Places to Work" awards, marking the 13th consecutive year the Basking Ridge-based credit union has achieved this distinction. This recognition showcases Affinity's commitment to its employees and dedication to providing an outstanding work environment for every member of the institution's team. Factors for inclusion in NJBIZ's "Best Places to Work" list include the professional environment, work-life balance, and benefits packages provided by the selected organizations. This information is gathered through surveys completed by employees, as well as through policy questionnaires. "At Affinity, we're dedicated to our employees just as we are our members," said John T. Fenton, President and CEO of Affinity. "It's always a tremendous honor to be named a 'Best Place to Work.' Creating a welcoming and encouraging professional experience is critical to our success and goes a long way toward bolstering our support for members and our strong Community Connected." Affinity Federal Credit Union employees were honored to accept this award at the annual banquet held this year at iPlay America. About Affinity Federal Credit Union: When you become a member of Affinity Federal Credit Union, you belong to something better a community. With more than 20 branches, Affinity is the largest credit union headquartered in New Jersey, proudly serving the tri-state area and ranking in the top 2% of all credit unions in asset size1. With thousands of businesses, associations, clubs and individuals comprising the Affinity family, we are truly a community connected. Affinity members have access to a network of more than 5,000-shared branches and nearly 30,000 surcharge-free ATMs nationwide. As a member-owned, not-for-profit, full-service financial institution federally insured by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), Affinity's products and services are designed to fit member needs, all while offering great rates and fewer fees. From consumer and business banking to auto, real estate, education and personal loans, Affinity offers the right tools for its members' financial success. For more information, please visit affinityfcu.com and follow us on Facebook (AffinityFCU), Instagram (AffinityFCU) and Twitter (@AffinityFCU). 1Source: CUDATA.com SOURCE Affinity Federal Credit Union Related Links https://www.affinityfcu.com NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Researchers at Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine have developed the first screening tool to catch early signs of cognitive impairment that accounts for cultural, language and educational differences. According to new research published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, the Picture-Based Memory Impairment Screening (PMIS) can accurately detect cognitive decline in people regardless of their ethnic background or native language. The World Alzheimer Report estimates 28 million of the world's 36 million people with dementia are undiagnosed. The PMIS screening is a tool to reduce that number and increase equality in treatment. "The screening takes about 4 minutes but can give us so much information," said Rubina Malik, M.D., M.S., first author, co-director at Montefiore Einstein Center for the Aging Brain and assistant professor of Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "What's critically important is that this new screening tool can be used by primary care practices nationwide to help people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds receive the care they need faster." Early detection of cognitive impairment allows time for long term planning and promotes access to clinical trials and medications that may control symptoms. However, current screening methods are often not relevant for non-English speakers or people who lack a formal education. "People shouldn't fall through the cracks just because they grew up in a different country or didn't receive a formal education," said Joe Verghese, M.B.B.S., director, Montefiore Einstein Center for the Aging Brain, and developer of the PMIS. "With this new screening, our ethnically diverse community can get testing, referrals and support tailored to their backgrounds." The screening, which is offered at all Montefiore primary care sites, asks people to look at pictures of common items and recall them later in the appointment. It can be administered by nurses or patient technicians, making the screening especially suitable for busy practices. "PMIS gives us insights in real time without judgment," said Asif Ansari, M.D., regional medical director, Montefiore Medical Group. "The standard tests can be frustrating as they may be time consuming, lack cultural sensitivity or do not take literacy and education level into account. The in-person interaction is a gentle way to make a difference by offering empathy, further care and connections to community based organizations." To test the accuracy of the PMIS, it was given to 405 patients at Montefiore Einstein Center for the Aging Brain, one of ten New York State funded Centers of Excellence for Alzheimer's Disease. The results were measured against the standard tool, known as the Blessed Information Memory and Concentration test (BIMC). The PMIS test was more sensitive in detecting cognitive impairment in non-English speakers than the BIMC. About Montefiore Health System Montefiore Health System is one of New York's premier academic health systems and is a recognized leader in providing exceptional quality and personalized, accountable care to approximately three million people in communities across the Bronx, Westchester and the Hudson Valley. It is comprised of 11 hospitals, including the Children's Hospital at Montefiore, Burke Rehabilitation Hospital and close to 200 outpatient care sites. The advanced clinical and translational research at its medical school, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, directly informs patient care and improves outcomes. From the Montefiore-Einstein Centers of Excellence in cancer, cardiology and vascular care, pediatrics, and transplantation, to its preeminent school-based health program, Montefiore is a fully integrated healthcare delivery system providing coordinated, comprehensive care to patients and their families. For more information, please visit www.montefiore.org. Follow us on Twitter and view us on Facebook and YouTube. About the Montefiore Hudson Valley Center of Excellence for Alzheimer's Disease The Montefiore Hudson Valley Center of Excellence for Alzheimer's Disease (CEAD) combines the years of expertise and best-in-class practices of the Montefiore-Einstein Center for the Aging Brain (CAB); Burke Rehabilitation Hospital's Memory Evaluation and Treatment Service (METS); an expanding network of hospitals and physician groups in the Hudson Valley; and the research and training capabilities of Montefiore's Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The CEAD is one of ten Alzheimer's Disease Centers of Excellence supported in part by a grant from the New York State Department of Health in an ambitious program to: expand knowledge about Alzheimer's Disease and related dementias; improve access to screening, diagnosis and clinical trial opportunities for individuals; ensure that patients and their caregivers are referred to community-based support services; and conduct training programs in dementia diagnosis and care for physicians and health care professions students in all clinical disciplines. For more information, please visit www.montefiore.org/alzheimers-center. About Albert Einstein College of Medicine Albert Einstein College of Medicine, part of Montefiore, is one of the nation's premier centers for research, medical education and clinical investigation. During the 2017-2018 academic year, Einstein is home to 697 M.D. students, 181 Ph.D. students, 108 students in the combined M.D./Ph.D. program, and 265 postdoctoral research fellows. The College of Medicine has more than 1,900 full-time faculty members located on the main campus and at its clinical affiliates. In 2017, Einstein received more than $174 million in awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This includes the funding of major research centers at Einstein in aging, intellectual development disorders, diabetes, cancer, clinical and translational research, liver disease, and AIDS. Other areas where the College of Medicine is concentrating its efforts include developmental brain research, neuroscience, cardiac disease, and initiatives to reduce and eliminate ethnic and racial health disparities. Its partnership with Montefiore, the University Hospital and academic medical center for Einstein, advances clinical and translational research to accelerate the pace at which new discoveries become the treatments and therapies that benefit patients. Einstein runs one of the largest residency and fellowship training programs in the medical and dental professions in the United States through Montefiore and an affiliation network involving hospitals and medical centers in the Bronx, Brooklyn and on Long Island. For more information, please visit www.einstein.yu.edu, read our blog, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and view us on YouTube. SOURCE Montefiore Medical Center Related Links http://www.montefiore.org ITASCA, Ill., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ABCOMRENTS has partnered with the Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges of Chicago to donate large format displays to the institutions. The high-resolution displays will be used in educational and community settings to deliver programs and services. The donated equipment comes from ABCOMRENTS' stock of displays consisting primarily of commercial-grade LCDs from NEC Display Solutions. In many cases, table stands and wall mounts are included with the donation to support local educational initiatives. "We are very excited to bring this technology to Chicago Public Schools to help deliver program benefits. As technology changes, we are constantly updating our rental stock with the latest offerings, but that leaves us with perfectly good equipment on hand that can be repurposed for a greater cause. We started looking into alternative uses for this equipment and settled on supporting Chicago Public Schools. We're especially pleased with this option because it will benefit people of all ages," said Sonny Goyal, Managing Director at ABCOMRENTS (www.abcomrents.com). Chicago Public Schools plans to use the donated materials at their Parent University campuses, an innovative neighborhood-based program that uses a combination of in-person and online learning to help parents access educational opportunities that can drive success for the whole family. "This generous donation will provide students and parents with additional technology that will help the district facilitate workshops at Parent University campuses making high-quality programming more accessible to families across the city," said Hollie Ware-Jaye, Deputy-Chief Officer at CPS' Office of Family and Community Engagement in Education (FACE). Harry S Truman is one of seven City Colleges of Chicago, housing a diverse population of students, representing over 152 countries. Truman is in the Uptown area and takes pride in supporting a learning environment that is inclusive of all. "Through this generous donation from ABCOMRENTS, Truman will revitalize some of its classrooms to support a 21st Century learning environment. Additional monitors will allow professors to utilize a variety of digital media to assure the diverse needs of our students are addressed. These monitors will also be used to expand student learning spaces throughout our institution. By enhancing student work areas throughout our college, we can assure students have opportunities to work collaboratively and independently beyond the walls of their classrooms. This donation will enhance Truman's ability to support an inclusive learning environment and expand our reach for generations to come," explained Shawn L. Jackson, Ph.D., Interim President of Truman. ABCOMRENTS is a Chicago area-based technology rental company that supports the rental and staging industry. The company offers indoor and outdoor digital signage rentals, displays, video wall rentals, and IT solutions for businesses, user conferences, and exhibitors nationwide. Visit www.abcomrents.com to view current product offerings. About ABCOMRENTS: A Solutions-Focused Technology Rental Company that specializes in Interactive Technology, Digital Signage Solutions, Video Walls and IT/Computer Equipment to the Event Rental Industry. We provide all facets of technology to support trade shows, user conferences, product launches or any specialty event. We believe every client is a partner, working together to build a solution by bridging technology and people to ensure a flawless event. About NEC: NEC Display Solutions of America, Inc., a leading designer and provider of innovative displays, offers the widest range of products on the market, such as commercial- and professional-grade large-screen LCD displays, desktop LCD monitors, direct view LED displays, a diverse line of multimedia and digital cinema projectors, and integrated display solutions. Benefiting from the technologies of NEC Corporation and its own Research and Development, NEC produces leading-edge visual technology and customer-focused solutions for a wide variety of markets, including education, retail, transportation, broadcast, enterprise, healthcare, houses of worship, and many more. NEC is orchestrating a brighter world with the quality and reliability of its products and outstanding customer service. For additional information about NEC Display Solutions of America products, call (866) NEC-MORE, or visit the website at www.necdisplay.com. SOURCE ABCOMRENTS Related Links http://www.abcomrents.com VANCOUVER, Wash., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AbSci, a global leader in biomanufacturing technologies, today announced the completion of an over-subscribed $12 million Series C financing. As a part of the financing, AGC Biologics' President and CEO, Dr. Gustavo Mahler will join AbSci's Board of Directors. The financing will enable AbSci to expand its R&D and to scale up capacity in order to meet the growing demand from its large pharma and biosimilar partners. AbSci's breakthrough protein expression platform, SoluPro, has demonstrated the ability to accelerate biopharmaceutical discovery and development timelines as well as dramatically reduce biopharmaceutical manufacturing costs. "We are excited to have so much interest in this round. Having a strategic partner such as AGC Biologics opens a number of opportunities," said AbSci's Founder and CEO, Sean McClain. "Our system has achieved unparalleled productivities for a wide array of biopharmaceuticals, including insulin and other difficult to produce molecules, resulting in dramatic reductions to manufacturing COGS. We are eager to apply our novel approach to define a new standard for antibody production." SoluPro, a synthetic biology platform based on genetically engineered E. coli and plasmids, delivers industry-leading titers of complex proteins, ranging from full-length antibodies to insulin, with superior product quality. The new investment will support the expansion of AbSci's high-throughput capabilities, refine and deepen the range of its screening and discovery technologies, and advance the development of novel platform tools. Dr. Alan Herman, a member of AbSci's Scientific Advisory Board and CSO of Coherus Biosciences commented, "AbSci's SoluPro platform has the potential to cut years from development timelines, saving biopharma companies hundreds of millions of dollars and getting critical life-saving and life-altering biologicals to patients years earlier." "The level of investor interest in this financing is a testament to the truly exceptional team at AbSci, which continues to deliver breakthroughs in biopharmaceutical productivity, both in R&D and manufacturing," said Dr. Zach Jonasson, Chairman of AbSci's Board of Directors and Managing Partner of Phoenix Venture Partners. "The Series C financing will accelerate commercialization of the company's platform, including for full-length antibody and biosimilars production." About AbSci AbSci is a global leader in biomanufacturing technologies. The company's SoluProTM expression platform achieves ultra-high yields of soluble and active protein products and enables ultra-high efficiency purification processes. AbSci's unique approach accelerates drug discovery timelines, increases manufacturing efficiencies, and drastically reduces costs for the biopharmaceutical industry. For more information, please visit www.absci.com. About AGC and AGC Biologics AGC Asahi Glass (also called AGC, Registered Company name: Asahi Glass Co., Ltd., Headquarters: Tokyo, President & CEO: Takuya Shimamura) is the parent company of the AGC Group, a world-leading glass solution provider and supplier of flat, automotive and display glass, chemicals, ceramics and other high-tech materials and components. Based on more than a century of technical innovation, the AGC Group has developed a wide range of cutting-edge products. The AGC Group employs some 50,000 people worldwide and generates annual sales of approximately 1.5 trillion Japanese yen through business in about 30 countries. For more information, please visit www.agc.com. AGC Biologics is a leading global Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO), with a strong commitment to deliver the highest standard of service to our clients and partners. AGC Biologics is the product of the convergence and integration of AGC's Bioscience Division, Biomeva GmbH, and CMC Biologics. The company currently employs more than 850 employees worldwide. Our extensive network spans three continents, with cGMP-compliant facilities in Seattle, WA; Berkeley, CA; Copenhagen, Denmark; Heidelberg, Germany; Yokohama, Japan; and Chiba, Japan. Further information can be found at www.agcbio.com. SOURCE AbSci Related Links http://www.abscibio.com Virtual colonoscopy is an American Cancer Society- recommended screening exam for those at average risk for the disease. It is as accurate as standard colonoscopy in most people and is far less invasive. A CT scanner uses high-tech, low-dose X-rays to generate 3-D, moving images of the colon that doctors examine for polyps and signs of cancer. "Virtual colonoscopy does not require sedation. It is over in minutes. You can go back to daily activities and you don't need anyone to drive you home. This can appeal to the many Americans ages 4550 that the new American Cancer Colorectal Cancer Screening Guidelines recommend to be screened," said Judy Yee, MD, FACR, chair of the American College of Radiology Colon Cancer Committee. Thirty-seven states require insurance policies to cover virtual colonoscopy. Insurers who take part in federal exchanges are required by the Affordable Care Act to cover the exam without patient cost sharing. CIGNA, Aetna, UnitedHealthcare, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield and others cover the test irrespective of ACA requirements. "Insurers should recognize the new American Cancer Society Colorectal Cancer Screening Guidelines and provide full coverage for virtual colonoscopy and the other ACS-recommended screening exams for beneficiaries ages 45 and older," said Yee. Colorectal cancer deaths are declining, but shocking disparities remain. United States Latinos are more likely to die from the disease than those in many Central and South American countries. African Americans are far more likely to die from colorectal cancer than whites. Members of both groups are less likely to get screened. Their cancers are diagnosed at a later stage than whites. "Virtual colonoscopy can help increase screening in underserved areas and reduce racial and ethnic disparities in colorectal cancer outcomes, but only if Americans have covered-access to all ACS-recommended screening exams through private insurers and ultimately Medicare," said Yee. Find more information on virtual colonoscopy (CT colonography) in English and Spanish at RadiologyInfo.org/virtualct. SOURCE American College of Radiology Related Links http://www.acr.org BOTHELL, Wash., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AGC Biologics, a global leader in clinical and commercial manufacturing of therapeutic proteins, announced today the company will participate in the upcoming BIO International Convention in Boston, Mass. on June 4-7, 2018. Newly rebranded in January 2018, AGC Biologics is the product of the convergence and integration of Asahi Glass Company (AGC) Bioscience, Biomeva GmbH, and CMC Biologics. This will be the first BIO International Convention attended by AGC Biologics as a single, global CDMO with more than 55 years of combined industry experience. With an expanding network of cGMP facilities across the globe, and demonstrated proficiency with innovative technologies and solutions, the growing company has actively exhibited a proven commitment to meet the demands of the dynamic, fast-growing market. AGC Biologics' President and Chief Executive Officer, Gustavo Mahler, Ph.D., will deliver a talk at the BioProcess International Theater on Wednesday, June 6 at 2:00 pm. The presentation will be included in the track: Emerging Techniques, Technologies, and Strategies: Outsourcing/ Continuous Processing/Single-Use/Assays, and will focus on Emerging Technologies & Strategies to Accelerate Process Development and Time to Market. AGC Biologics will exhibit and host meetings at Booth #663 in the BioProcess Zone. "This year's BIO International Convention is a meaningful venue to exhibit and participate under our new name, AGC Biologics," said Bob Broeze, Chief Business Officer at AGC Biologics. "We look forward to meeting with our wide range of clients and industry colleagues, as well as fostering new connections and relationships, and further establishing AGC Biologics as an industry-leading CDMO with a significant and growing presence in the global marketplace." About AGC Biologics AGC Biologics is a leading global Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO), with a strong commitment to deliver the highest standard of service to our clients and partners. AGC Biologics is the product of the convergence and integration of Asahi Glass Company (AGC) Bioscience, Biomeva GmbH, and CMC Biologics. The company currently employs more than 850 employees worldwide. Our extensive network spans three continents, with cGMP-compliant facilities in Seattle, WA; Berkeley, CA; Copenhagen, Denmark; Heidelberg, Germany; Yokohama, Japan; and Chiba, Japan. AGC Biologics offers deep industry expertise and unique customized services for the scale-up and cGMP manufacture of protein-based therapeutics; from pre-clinical to commercial production, for mammalian and microbial. Our integrated service offerings include cell line development, bioprocess development, formulation, analytical testing, antibody drug development and conjugation, cell banking and storage, and protein expression including our proprietary CHEF1 Expression System for mammalian production. Further information can be found at www.agcbio.com AGC Biologics Media Contact Information: Ms. Kim Yang Director, Global Marketing and Communications Email: [email protected] Office: +1 425.415.5438 SOURCE AGC Biologics Related Links http://www.agcbio.com "For the past seven years Aimpad has been developing and perfecting technology that precisely measures the position of a mechanical keyboard switch to be used for smooth and accurate movement in PC games, traditionally not possible using a normal keyboard. We are ecstatic to align our focus, efforts, and technical resources with Cooler Master to bring evolutionary advances in PC gaming technology, " says Lance Madsen, Principal Engineer at Aimpad. The Cooler Master MK850, launching later this summer, is the world's first keyboard capable of measuring exactly how far down a Cherry MX mechanical key switch is pressed, providing an increased level of control over vehicles and game characters and an unparalleled competitive advantage. PR Contact Lance Madsen Principal Engineer [email protected] About Aimpad: Aimpad is a U.S. based technology provider focused on licensing new and innovative technologies to the PC gaming and professional markets. For more information on Aimpad, please visit aimpad.com or see demonstrations of the technology at http://youtube.com/aimpadamped. About Cooler Master: Cooler Master is a Taipei-based, global computer components and peripheral company with a 25-year track record in releasing innovative products that truly advance the industry. We are driven by a passion for the things that make building a PC such a unique, rewarding experience, and sustained by a vision that we can reinvent the way these machines are designed, made, and used. From our landmark release of the first ever aluminum PC case to our groundbreaking switch to the modular format, Cooler Master is committed to bringing our customers and fans the utmost in choice and control. For more information on Cooler Master, please visit www.coolermaster.com or follow us at http://www.facebook.com/coolermaster SOURCE Aimpad Related Links http://www.aimpad.com "To earn this award for 11 years is a fantastic tribute to our people, especially as we worked to integrate two airlines," said Alaska Airlines CEO Brad Tilden. "On behalf of the entire leadership team, I would like to thank all 23,400 Alaska and Horizon employees and our partners for their incredible dedication to our guests, and for consistently providing amazing, kind hearted service." The study is based on 11,508 responses. It measures the satisfaction of business and leisure travelers who flew a major North America carrier between April 2017 and March 2018. Alaska won among traditional airlines with an overall score of 775, up 10 points from 2017, and highest of any traditional airline across five categories, including aircraft; cost and fees; boarding/deplaning/baggage; flight crew; and check-in. Alaska Airlines improved its scores in every category compared to last year, with significant improvement in the aircraft category, which includes condition of the aircraft, comfort, leg room and storage. Over the last year, Alaska invested in updates to the guest experience including completing the rollout of Premium Class to Boeing 737-800, 900 and 900ER fleets. Guests flying Premium Class receive more legroom, early boarding, a complimentary snack and drinks. In the past year, Alaska Airlines also added 15 spacious, three-class cabin E175s to its fleet. The airline is constantly making investments in the guest experience with the addition of high speed satellite connectivity, more free movies and TV content, new First Class and main cabin menu items, new craft beers and local wines selections, and coming later this summer, a new lounge experience, which includes an on-site barista. "While awards are a great way to differentiate ourselves from others, our purpose remains creating an airline people love ranking number one in this study is a fantastic reminder that we are moving in the right direction," said Tilden. The J.D. Power ranking comes as the airline moves into its final stages of its integration with Virgin America. The integration is more than 75 percent complete after having moved to one airport brand, website, mobile app and call center in late April. Read the official J.D. Power release at www.jdpower.com. This year Alaska was also ranked the #1 airline in the U.S by the Points Guy, Best U.S. Airline by Money Magazine, Mileage Plan best by Flyer Talk and Top in Airline Quality Rating for the second year in a year in a row. Editor's note: Download new, high-definition b-roll and photos at https://newsroom.alaskaair.com/multimedia. Alaska Airlines and its regional partners fly 44 million guests a year to more than 115 destinations with an average of 1,200 daily flights across the United States and to Mexico, Canada and Costa Rica. With Alaska and Alaska Global Partners, guests can earn and redeem miles on flights to more than 900 destinations worldwide. Alaska Airlines ranked "Highest in Customer Satisfaction Among Traditional Carriers in North America" in the J.D. Power North America Airline Satisfaction Study for 11 consecutive years from 2008 to 2018. Learn about Alaska's award-winning service at newsroom.alaskaair.com and blog.alaskaair.com. Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air are subsidiaries of Alaska Air Group (NYSE: ALK). SOURCE Alaska Airlines Related Links http://www.alaskaair.com HONOLULU, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexander & Baldwin, Inc. (NYSE: ALEX) announced today that Chris Benjamin, president and chief executive officer, and James Mead, executive vice president and chief financial officer, will present at REITWeek 2018. The Company's presentation is scheduled for Tuesday, June 5, 2018 at 11 a.m. Eastern Time at the New York Hilton Midtown. The audio webcast may be accessed on the Company's website at www.alexanderbaldwin.com or https://reitstream.com/reitweek2018/alexander-baldwin-inc. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Statements in this release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by the relevant forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding possible or assumed future results of operations, business strategies, growth opportunities and competitive positions. Such forward-looking statements speak only as of the date the statements were made and are not guarantees of future performance. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that could cause actual results and the timing of certain events to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by the forward-looking statements. These factors include, but are not limited to, prevailing market conditions and other factors related to the Company's REIT status and the Company's business generally discussed in the Company's most recent Form 10-K, Form 10-Q and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The information in this release should be evaluated in light of these important risk factors. We do not undertake any obligation to update the Company's forward-looking statements. ABOUT ALEXANDER & BALDWIN Alexander & Baldwin, Inc. is Hawai`i's premier commercial real estate company and the state's foremost owner of grocery-anchored retail centers. With a portfolio of approximately 87,000 acres in Hawai`i, A&B is the state's fourth largest private landowner. A&B is a fully integrated real estate investment trust and owns, operates and manages 3.2 million square feet of primarily retail and industrial space in Hawai`i. A&B's interests extend beyond commercial real estate into diversified agriculture, renewable energy and land stewardship. A&B also is Hawai`i's largest construction materials company and paving contractor. Over its nearly 150-year history, A&B has evolved with the state's economy and played a lead role in the development of the agricultural, transportation, tourism, construction and real estate industries. Learn more about A&B at www.alexanderbaldwin.com. Contact: Suzy Hollinger 808-525-8422 [email protected] SOURCE Alexander & Baldwin, Inc. Related Links http://www.alexanderbaldwin.com PASADENA, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), an urban office REIT uniquely focused on collaborative life science, technology and agtech campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, today announced that its executive chairman and founder, Joel S. Marcus, is serving as a keynote speaker at the Research Triangle Regional Partnership's 2018 State of the Region event this afternoon in Raleigh, North Carolina. The event is expected to draw nearly 1,000 business and community leaders to assess the Triangle's attributes and address the challenges of making the cluster more competitive. This year's event will highlight how the cluster can facilitate economic growth and provide infrastructural improvements to prepare for more diversified expansion in the future. Mr. Marcus's remarks will focus on what it takes to build a vibrant life science, technology and agtech cluster. He will highlight Alexandria's successful execution of its urban cluster campus strategy across the top innovation clusters in the United States. Mr. Marcus will also discuss how Research Triangle Park compares to other key innovation clusters and the need for the region to urbanize to drive innovation and growth. "It is an honor to have been invited to speak to a group of key stakeholders invested in the future growth of the Research Triangle cluster," said Mr. Marcus. "With the Triangle's diverse mix of companies, renowned academic institutions, skilled talent and venture capital funding, the cluster has some of the key ingredients to enable innovative companies to grow. Now more than ever, it is critical for the Research Triangle Park to pursue its non-profit mission with a sense of urgency and to make investments toward urbanization that will catalyze the ecosystem." About Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), an S&P 500 company, is an urban office REIT uniquely focused on collaborative life science and technology campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, with a total market capitalization of $17.9 billion and an asset base in North America of 30.2 million SF as of March 31, 2018. The asset base in North America includes 20.8 million RSF of operating properties and 3.5 million RSF of development and redevelopment of new Class A properties currently undergoing construction and pre-construction activities with target delivery dates ranging from 2018 through 2020. Additionally, the asset base in North America includes 5.9 million SF of intermediate-term and future development projects, including 3.6 million SF of intermediate-term development projects. Founded in 1994, Alexandria pioneered this niche and has since established a significant market presence in key locations, including Greater Boston, San Francisco, New York City, San Diego, Seattle, Maryland and Research Triangle Park. Alexandria has a longstanding and proven track record of developing Class A properties clustered in urban life science and technology campuses that provide its innovative tenants with highly dynamic and collaborative environments that enhance their ability to successfully recruit and retain world-class talent and inspire productivity, efficiency, creativity and success. Alexandria also provides strategic capital to transformative life science and technology companies through its venture capital arm. We believe our unique business model and diligent underwriting ensure a high-quality and diverse tenant base that results in higher occupancy levels, longer lease terms, higher rental income, higher returns and greater long-term asset value. For additional information, please visit www.are.com. CONTACT: Sara Kabakoff, Senior Manager Corporate Communications, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc., (626) 788-5578 SOURCE Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. Related Links http://www.are.com Capitalizing on the global trend of 360-degree imaging, ASPEED unveiled at the event Cupola360, a spherical image processor specifically designed for 360-degree cameras, as well as the accompanying apps, which cemented the company as the pioneer and leader in state-of-the-art SoC system solutions. To further demonstrate the company's determination to dedicate itself to the market of spherical cameras, ASPEED has trademarked the name Cupola360 and its software product line, while applying for intellectual property protection of its 360-degree image-processing technologies. Targeting the Future Development on 360-Degree Imaging with the Industry-Leading Technology in Integration of Software and Hardware Systems The vigorous development on 360-degree imaging in recent years has generated practical applications of spherical cameras to various real-life scenarios such as vacations, family gatherings, and home-monitoring, in addition to creating virtual reality content and materials that add fun to people's lives. However, most 360-degree cameras currently available on the market require post-production of footage on a smartphone or computer, causing inconvenience to their users. ASPEED's outstanding SoC development capabilities have allowed the company to invest in the research and development of a 360-degree spherical image processor that in an industry first, features six big-pixel sensors for seamless in-camera image stitching, breaking the present limit of the traditional 360-degree cameras. Moreover, the exclusive Cupola360 spherical image processor provides the unprecedented function of real-time image stitching and affords users to access panoramic views in an instant, saving them the trouble of post-production on a computer. "There is no denying that in the future, people will relive precious moments in life via virtual reality consisting of 360-degree images," said Chris Lin, chairman and president of ASPEED. "Therefore, we believe that a spherical camera will soon become a must-have device in every household. ASPEED expects to surprise the public with Cupola360 spherical image processor, so that people can experience first-hand how snappy, convenient and useful a 360-degree camera is in their daily lives." The World's First Exclusive Six-Sensor 360-Degree Spherical Image Processor with Mobile Applications Cupola360, developed by ASPEED as the first-ever six-sensor 360-degree spherical image processor, features multiple functions and technologies tailor-made for spherical cameras. Six big-pixel sensors with wide-angle lenses greatly lessen the visual distortion caused by traditional circular and diagonal fisheye lenses. In-camera stitching provides real-time live streaming immediately after a video is shot, hence no post-production on a smartphone or computer is needed, and images and videos can be streamed live and shared online instantaneously. Cupola360 records and generates extreme-quality 360-degree images with an ultra-high 4K2K video resolution, ensuring optimal image clarity, whether it is used for low-light and night photography or to capture details in detail of panoramas. The 3D anti-shake function of Cupola360 compensates for unwanted movement of the camera and gives you sharp and stable quality without any blurring, even when you're running. Last but not least, ASPEED has at the same time released the Cupola360 App with many fun and varied features, soon including the face/object tracking function and the ability to recapture 360-degree videos and images. In fact, ASPEED has taken it one step further by creating another app so that users can search for 360-degree videos on social networks, setting up a shared cloud network for 360-degree photography, bringing a sense of immediacy and convenience to spherical camera users, hence achieving ASPEED's mission to build a 360-degree camera that meets a user's day-to-day needs. ASPEED Is Joining Forces with Industry Partners to Form a 360-Degree Camera Ecosystem Powered by Cupola360 With a strong foothold in the exclusive 360-degree spherical image processor, ASPEED has for the first time integrated software and hardware, also developing mobile applications. Offering to its customers a suite of technologies that include SoC, built-in software, hardware and supporting smartphone apps, ASPEED hopes to build a 360-degree camera ecosystem upon the integration of software and hardware systems, with the participation of industry partners. ASPEED's Cupola360 camera solutions will offer more diverse content and materials, providing users with opportunities to go back in time and live through life's wondrous moments again, or a chance to escape from reality, enjoying the fantastic hyperreality created by themselves and others in the world. Come to our booth at Computex Taipei 2018, June 5-9, to experience ASPEED's cutting-edge products (Booth No. L1032; 4F, Hall 1, Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center). For more detailed information, please visit Cupola360.com. Media Contact: Iris Chueh, +886-3-578-9568 #863, [email protected] About ASPEED Technology Inc. ASPEED Technology Inc. is a highly innovative fabless IC-design company founded in 2004 and headquartered in Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan. As a pioneer and leader of cutting-edge SoC system solutions with a focus on the niche markets of high-margin products, the company's specialties range from Server Management SoC solution, PC/AV extension solution, iCafe extension SoC solution for Internet Cafes, to the latest 360-degree spherical image processor. ASPEED has been dedicated to developing innovative technologies in order to quickly respond to customer needs, which has made the company a leading provider of innovative SoC system solutions as well as a reliable business partner. ASPEED is currently the world's No. 1 BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) chip provider, and has been honored as one of "Forbes Asia's 200 Best Under a Billion" companies in 2014 and 2015. In 2016, ASPEED acquired Broadcom's Emulex Pilot remote server management chip business. For more detailed information, please visit ASPEED website at www.ASPEEDTECH.com. SOURCE ASPEED Technology Inc. Related Links http://www.ASPEEDTECH.com DALLAS, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Allegiance Capital Corporation, a Dallas, Texas-based middle-market M&A investment bank, has been awarded the "M&A Deal of the Year" by D CEO, a regional magazine that covers emerging entrepreneurs, top CEOs, and a variety of topics affecting North Texas businesses. The fifth annual D CEO Mergers and Acquisitions Awards recognizes companies and dealmakers within its metropolitan area that were involved in some of the most outstanding business transactions. This year's M&A Deal of the Year award was presented to dealmaker Derek Woodworth, Managing Director at Allegiance Capital, for the sale of Healthy Natural, Inc. to Rosewood Private Investments. "I was honored to have been named a Finalist in a category filled with impressive dealmakers and peer investment banks in the region," said Woodworth. The transaction was a divestiture from RiceBran Technologies, which utilized the proceeds for growth capital while securing Healthy Natural jobs in the Dallas market. "The transaction was challenging due to an 80% customer concentration," Woodworth continued. "But, through our process, we were able to source the right strategic partner, Rosewood Investment Partners, a Dallas-based family office with a platform investment in the category." Connie Mahmood, Co-Founder of Allegiance Capital added, "I am very proud that Allegiance Capital and Derek Woodworth are being recognized for attaining the highest levels of achievement within the M&A community. Due to extremely favorable market conditions for sellers [of a business], the current environment for M&A professionals is very competitive. This award is a testament to the Allegiance Capital platform and our exceptional talent executing complex M&A transactions including sell-side mandates, financings, and buy-side acquisitions." About Allegiance Capital Corporation Allegiance Capital is an M&A investment bank that has been providing expert financial services to mid-sized, privately held companies since 1998. Its specialty is representing privately-owned companies with annual revenues between $20 million and $500 million. Its clients are business owners, partners, families and entrepreneurs who want to sell their company, transition to new management, or bring on a financial partner to grow their business. Founded 20 years ago and based in Dallas, TX, Allegiance Capital employs investment bankers who understand the challenges owners face in running their business and can explain Wall Street complexity in Main Street language. Allegiance also offers global reach through its membership in Globalscope Partners, an organization of international M&A Advisors. SOURCE Allegiance Capital Corporation Related Links http://www.allcapcorp.com MADISON, Wis., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alliant Energy's Wisconsin energy company has filed plans with the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSCW) to build a wind project that will lower energy costs for Wisconsin customers starting in 2020. The proposed project will be located in North Central Iowa, which has consistently strong wind resources. "We are providing our customers with more renewable energy that will keep rates competitive and help bolster economic development in our communities," said John Larsen, president of Alliant Energy. "Wind energy continues to play a major role in diversifying our energy mix and transitioning us to a clean energy future." Customers will benefit directly from fuel-free renewable energy that provides long-term cost stability. The cost to build new wind projects has decreased significantly over the last several years. This is largely the result of continued technological advancements that improve turbine efficiency. This project would add 150 megawatts of wind energy, enough to power an additional 70,000 homes. The company's Wisconsin customers already benefit from low-cost wind through Alliant Energy's ownership in three wind farms. Alliant Energy has entered into a contract with Invenergy to purchase the project after development is complete. Invenergy is the largest privately held renewable energy company in North America. A decision from the PSCW is expected in early 2019. If approved, construction is expected to start in summer 2019. This project will not affect the company's recently announced plans to keep base rates flat through 2020. Including this project, Alliant Energy plans to invest approximately $2 billion in cost-competitive wind energy across Iowa and Wisconsin by the end of 2020.These significant investments are helping the company achieve its target of reducing carbon dioxide by 40 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. Project facts Number of turbines: ~ 60 60 Nameplate capacity: 150 megawatts Location: Kossuth County, Iowa Alliant Energy Corporation's Wisconsin utility subsidiary, Wisconsin Power and Light Company (WPL), utilizes the trade name of Alliant Energy. The Wisconsin utility is based in Madison, Wis., and provides electric service to 470,000 retail customers and natural gas service to 190,000 retail customers across central and southern Wisconsin. The employees of Alliant Energy focus on delivering the energy solutions and exceptional service their customers and communities expect safely, efficiently and responsibly. Alliant Energy Corporation is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LNT and is a component of the S&P 500. For more information, visit alliantenergy.com. This press release includes forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements can be identified because they describe future wind generation construction plans and costs and include words such as "proposed," "expected," and "plans." Such statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those currently anticipated. Actual results could be affected by such factors as: state regulatory actions that delay or reject the proposed wind generation construction plans, or that include terms that make the future generation construction plans uneconomical; increased costs of equipment, commodities used in equipment, and real estate; unanticipated construction issues, delays or expenditures; failure of equipment and technology to perform as expected; current or future litigation, regulatory investigations, proceedings or inquiries that could impede the implementation of Alliant Energy's plans; political conditions in Alliant Energy's service territories; changes to Alliant Energy's access to capital markets; and economic conditions in Alliant Energy's service territory. These factors should be considered when evaluating the forward-looking statements and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. The forward-looking statements included herein are made as of the date hereof and Alliant Energy and Wisconsin Power and Light Company undertake no obligation to update publicly such statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. SOURCE Alliant Energy Corporation Related Links http://www.alliantenergy.com THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Amgen Foundation and Harvard University today announced plans to launch a free online science education platform uniquely designed to level the playing field for aspiring scientists. The LabXchange platform, which will launch with a focus in biology, will offer digital instruction and virtual lab experiences to high school and college students, enabling them to gain meaningful exposure to the scientific process. It will also include online networking focused on collaboration and mentoring. "There are many millions of students who, as a result of economic or geographic limitations, simply do not have access to one of the most central aspects of being a scientist, which is working in a laboratory," said Professor Robert Lue, principal investigator of LabXchange and professor of the Practice of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard. "LabXchange addresses this issue with a platform that integrates dynamic experimental simulations with background curriculum and social networking all created to more effectively expose students of varying backgrounds to the authentic and engaging experience of scientific discovery." As the founding sponsor, the Amgen Foundation has awarded $6.5 million in grant funding to Harvard University to develop, launch and grow the LabXchange platform for teachers and students globally. The Amgen Foundation will be engaged throughout the development of LabXchange, and Amgen scientists with industry experience will play key advisory roles to enhance the impact of the platform. LabXchange will be building prototypes and testing them with potential users beginning in the summer of 2018, and is expected to launch globally in 2019. "Advances in technology are not only having an incredible impact on how we develop and deliver innovative medicines to patients, but also in how we educate and inspire the next generation of scientists," said Robert A. Bradway, chairman and chief executive officer at Amgen. "By joining forces with Harvard, LabXchange's interactive educational platform will give students studying biology around the world access to a unique virtual lab experience for free, dramatically expanding the Amgen Foundation's reach in science education." For nearly three decades, the Amgen Foundation has supported science education in meaningful ways to inspire students around the world. The Amgen Biotech Experience has reached more than 600,000 high school students by empowering teachers to bring a biotechnology curriculum into their classrooms. The Amgen Scholars Program has reached thousands of undergraduate students, enabling them to participate in diverse, cutting-edge research opportunities at world-class institutions. As a free online platform focused on the lab experience, LabXchange will strengthen the breadth and depth of what the Amgen Foundation already offers to high school and college students. LabXchange will be built on the edX platform, which is presently used by over 35 million learners globally. The combination of high-quality content with the sharing capabilities of social networking will allow LabXchange to integrate knowledge-based preparation for lab research with the benefits of human-based mentoring and sharing. EdX, as the largest online learning platform in the world, is uniquely positioned to join with Harvard and the Amgen Foundation to address this need. "EdX is delighted to be a part of this groundbreaking initiative, which aligns completely with edX's mission to increase access to high-quality education for all learners, everywhere," said Anant Agarwal, chief executive officer at edX. "Working with Harvard and the Amgen Foundation will allow us to develop a platform that not only creates positive outcomes for learners looking to engage in the field of scientific research, but expands innovative online learning experiences that are flexible, personalized and adaptive on a global scale." LabXchange is inviting collaboration with high school teachers and undergraduate research mentors to provide feedback on prototypes, together with insights into the most effective content and forms of interactivity. For more information, visit www.LabXchange.org and follow @LabXchange on Twitter. About Amgen Foundation The Amgen Foundation seeks to advance excellence in science education to inspire the next generation of innovators, and invest in strengthening communities where Amgen staff members live and work. To date, the Foundation has donated nearly $300 million to local, regional, and international nonprofit organizations that impact society in inspiring and innovative ways. The Amgen Foundation brings the excitement of discovery to the scientists of tomorrow through several signature programs, including Amgen Scholars, Amgen Biotech Experience, and Amgen Teach. For more information, visit www.AmgenInspires.com and follow us on Twitter @AmgenFoundation. About Amgen Amgen is committed to unlocking the potential of biology for patients suffering from serious illnesses by discovering, developing, manufacturing and delivering innovative human therapeutics. This approach begins by using tools like advanced human genetics to unravel the complexities of disease and understand the fundamentals of human biology. Amgen focuses on areas of high unmet medical need and leverages its expertise to strive for solutions that improve health outcomes and dramatically improve people's lives. A biotechnology pioneer since 1980, Amgen has grown to be one of the world's leading independent biotechnology companies, has reached millions of patients around the world and is developing a pipeline of medicines with breakaway potential. For more information, visit www.amgen.com and follow us on www.twitter.com/amgen. About Harvard University Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders in many disciplines who make a difference globally. The University, which is based in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, has an enrollment of over 20,000 degree candidates, including undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Harvard has more than 360,000 alumni around the world. About edX EdX is a nonprofit, open-source learning destination offering online courses from more than 130 member institutions, composed of both leading global universities and colleges, and a diverse group of prominent organizations from around the world. Founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and based in Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., edX is focused on transforming online and classroom learning through groundbreaking methodologies, game-like educational experiences and cutting-edge research on an open-source platform. For more information, visit www.edX.org and follow us on Twitter @edXOnline. CONTACT: Amgen, Thousand Oaks Andrea Fassacesia, 805-905-2575 (media) Jennifer van der Borgt, 805-447-5597 (media) CONTACT: Harvard University, Cambridge Rachael Dane, 617-496-0106 (media) SOURCE Amgen Related Links http://www.AmgenInspires.com ALBANY, N.Y., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The New York State legislature is moving to consider legislation that would require infection preventionists (IPs) to be certified in infection prevention and control in order to practice in New York hospitals. Sponsored by Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther (D), and Senator Rich Funke (R) A.10671/S.8185 stipulates that IPs would be required to: Successfully pass an exam from a nationally recognized infection prevention and control accrediting organization; Provide evidence that he or she was employed as an IP for one year or more prior to the bill's passage; or, Be a student or intern performing the functions of an IP serving under direct supervision of an IP. An IP not meeting the certification requirements would have three years from the date of hire to obtain an infection prevention and control credential. "All patients deserve to have highly qualified personnel keeping them safe from infections," said 2018 APIC President Janet Haas, PhD, RN, CIC, FSHEA, FAPIC. "We commend New York for taking steps to ensure that IPs working in this state have demonstrated mastery of a fundamental core body of knowledge through certification in infection prevention and control." According to the CDC, approximately 1 in 25 hospitalized patients contract healthcare-associated infections. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that IPs who are certified in infection prevention and control achieve better outcomes for their patients. IPs are experts in identifying sources of infections and limiting their transmission in healthcare facilities. "I am proud to lead an effort that will enhance patient safety in New York hospitals by ensuring that infection preventionists have appropriate credentials," said Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther. "I hope other states follow this example." "Patients and families expect hospitals and their staff to provide the best level of care possible at all times and in all positions," said Senator Rich Funke. "Infection preventionists play a crucial role in a patient's recovery, so it seems only logical that they should be going through a proper certification process." ABOUT APIC APIC's mission is to create a safer world through prevention of infection. The association's more than 15,000 infection preventionist members direct infection prevention programs that save lives and improve the bottom line for hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Visit APIC online at www.apic.org. SOURCE Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) Related Links https://apic.org PRAGUE, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Arca Capital, one of the largest shareholders of AmTrust Financial Services, Inc., is urging fellow minority shareholders to vote against the proposed "going private" transaction of AmTrust Financial Services, Inc. at what it believes to be the absurdly low valuation of $13.50 per share. Among the numerous reasons cited by Arca Capital for opposing the transaction was the recent report from the highly respected firm, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), which stated that the transaction is against the interests of minority shareholders. "Given that the valuations implied by the merger are below where peers currently trade and below where AmTrust could reasonably trade as a standalone company in the long-terma standalone scenario seems to be a preferable alternative to the currently proposed transaction. Given these factors, a vote AGAINST the merger is warranted," states the report released on May 25th. Moreover, the report mirrored Arca Capital's concerns that the privatization is coming at a turnaround time for the company and thus, if approved, would allow the Zyskind/Karfunkel family to exclude minority shareholders from realizing future gains. "The buyer group eventually included the company's CEO, who would appear to know the company as well as anyone; if he is willing to buy at this price, does that not imply that the company's challenges are not so severe?" the report continues. Arca Capital, which owns approximately 2.4 percent of the outstanding shares, has been an outspoken advocate for fellow minority shareholders in the lead up to the June 4th vote. This advocacy has involved creating an organization, www.ProtectAmTrustInvestors.org, reaching out to relevant influencers, and even organizing demonstrations at AmTrust headquarters involving angry shareholders. "AmTrust is a fundamentally strong company that we believe is on the cusp of a major rebound in share price. We agree with the conclusions of Carl Icahn, a major shareholder in AmTrust, who believes that AmTrust Financial has a long term price target significantly in excess of the clearly insufficient price the Zyskind/Karfunkel family is offering," said Pavol Krupa, Chairman of Arca Capital. Arca Capital has also expressed substantial concerns that neither AmTrust CEO Barry Zyskind nor controlling board members George and Leah Karfunkel have appeared publicly to defend the transaction. "A basic internet search will reveal that the Zyskind/Karfunkel family prefers to operate clandestinely to avoid drawing attention to their dubious activities. If Barry Zyskind, George Karfunkel and Leah Karfunkel are so confident in the merits of their arguments for this transaction, they should make these arguments in public instead of in smoke-filled rooms filled with their crony supposedly 'independent' board members. We challenge them to appear on CNBC and answer questions from their shareholders," added Mr. Krupa. The Zyskind/Karfunkel family are currently defendants in a lawsuit filed by Carl Icahn, which accuses them of undervaluing AmTrust, attempting to manipulate the privatization vote by clandestinely setting the record date for April 5, 2018, and using the company's assets, including private jets, for personal purposes. Icahn, who currently owns approximately 9.4% of AmTrust's shares, filed the lawsuit on Monday May 21st in Delaware Chancery Court. Arca Capital previously issued a statement supporting the lawsuit and continues to demand greater transparency regarding potential share price manipulations and related-party transactions by AmTrust's management. Arca is advising fellow minority shareholders to adhere to the famous words of Carl Icahn, "A lot of people died fighting against tyranny. The least I can do is vote against it." About Arca Capital Arca Capital is a private investment group with a strong Central European exposure. It focuses on the development of its private equity activities oriented on energy, real estate, retail and service activities, as well as regulated activities focused on building and managing fund structures focusing on energy, real estate and financial services. Arca Capital also carries out projects with a so-called activist approach, with the goal of remedying and eliminating management actions that have a negative impact on companies, and with the goal of achieving significant positive change in strategy, financial structure or management. Assets under management over $1.7 billion USD. Contact Barbora Hanakova [email protected] Mob: +420 776 575 096 Tel: +420 224 231 813 SOURCE Arca Capital SAN RAMON, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Investors at Chevron Corporation's annual meeting will vote today on a shareholder resolution put forward by As You Sow and Arjuna Capital. The resolution asks Chevron to report to shareholders on how the company plans to transition its business model to successfully align with a decarbonizing energy market, while also taking a role in helping to limit the planet's warming to under two degrees Celsius. The requested plan would allow investors to better assess whether the Company is addressing the risks that climate change may pose to the company and shareholder value. "The heyday of fossil fuel-based energy is over as global energy markets race toward cleaner energy sources," said Danielle Fugere, president of As You Sow. "Recognizing the speed of technological innovation and regulatory change, shareholders today ask Chevron to plan for success by adopting a 2 degree-compatible business plan. The Company has a range of actions available to it, from reducing the amount and types of oil & gas it develops, to bringing renewables into its energy mix, to otherwise diversifying. Whatever it chooses, Chevron must take action to thrive in a decarbonizing economy. Companies like Repsol and Equinor (formerly Statoil) are already showing it is possible to do so, and we ask Chevron to rise to the occasion." "It's clear from Chevron's disclosures that it intends to burn through as many fossil fuels as possible, regardless of its impact on global temperatures," said Natasha Lamb, managing partner, Arjuna Capital. "A business-as-usual path is unsustainable and fraught with long-term investor value destruction. Chevron has the opportunity to take a different path, but the time to act is now, for the climate and investors." Despite support last year from proxy advisor Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and a 26% vote in favor of the proposal, ISS recommended this year that Chevron had adequately addressed climate risk in its recent climate risk report, and that its mainstream investors should leave decisions over the company's energy portfolio choices to management. For its socially responsible clients ISS supported voting in favor, noting Chevron's failure to provide details on a business plan or portfolio mix that would allow it to remain competitive under a 2 degree Celsius scenario. A similar measure was put before ExxonMobil for today's annual meeting in Dallas, but the company successfully silenced shareholders when it asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to block As You Sow and Arjuna Capital's "Low Carbon Business Model" resolution. As You Sow is a nonprofit organization that promotes environmental and social corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy, coalition building, and innovative legal strategies. See our resolutions here. Arjuna Capital is a registered investment advisor, specializing in sustainable and impact investing. www.arjuna-capital.com. SOURCE Arjuna Capital and As You Sow LA JOLLA, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Artelo Biosciences, Inc. (OTCQB: ARTL), a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of therapeutic treatments that modulate the endocannabinoid system, is pleased to announce that as of May 21, 2018, its shares began trading on the OTCQB under the symbol ARTL. "The trading of Artelo's shares on the OTCQB represents a significant strategic milestone that will help to enhance our visibility among the investor public," said Gregory D. Gorgas, chief executive officer of Artelo Biosciences. "We look forward to sharing additional milestones in the coming months." The OTCQB Venture Market offers early stage and developing companies the benefits of being publicly traded in the U.S. and streamlined market standards which enable listed companies to provide a strong baseline of transparency to inform and engage with U.S. investors. To be eligible, companies must be current in their reporting, meet a minimum bid price test and undergo an annual verification and management certification process. As a verified market with efficient access to U.S. investors, OTCQB helps companies build shareholder value with a goal of enhancing liquidity and achieving fair valuation. About Artelo Biosciences Artelo Biosciences, Inc. (OTCQB: ARTL) is a San Diego-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the development and commercialization of proprietary therapeutics targeting the endocannabinoid system. Artelo is rapidly advancing a portfolio of broadly applicable product candidates designed to address significant unmet needs in multiple diseases and conditions, including cancer, pain, and inflammation. Led by proven biopharmaceutical executives collaborating with highly respected researchers and technology experts, the company applies leading edge scientific, regulatory, and commercial discipline to develop high-impact therapies. More information is available at www.artelobio.com and Twitter: @ArteloBio. Forward Looking Statements: This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, as amended, including those relating to the Company's product development, clinical and regulatory timelines, market opportunity, competitive position, possible or assumed future results of operations, business strategies, potential growth opportunities and other statements that are predictive in nature. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections about the industry and markets in which we operate and management's current beliefs and assumptions. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking expressions, including, but not limited to, "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "believe," "estimate," "potential," "predict," "project," "should," "would" and similar expressions and the negatives of those terms. These statements relate to future events or our financial performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such factors include those set forth in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Prospective investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Contact: [email protected] SOURCE Artelo Biosciences, Inc. Related Links http://artelobio.com ROLLING MEADOWS, Ill., May 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. today announced the acquisition of Simi Valley, California-based Thomas Costello Insurance Agency, Inc. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Founded in 1990,Thomas Costello Insurance Agency is a retail property/casualty broker, and employee benefits consultant and broker, offering commercial and personal coverages to clients primarily across Southern California. Tom Costello and his associates will continue to operate from their current location under the direction of Scott Firestone, President of Gallagher's Southwest region retail property/casualty brokerage operations, and Norbert Chung, President of Gallagher's Western region employee benefits consulting and brokerage operations. "Costello expands our expertise and solidifies our presence as the largest broker in Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley," said J. Patrick Gallagher, Jr., Chairman, President and CEO. "I am very pleased to welcome Tom and his associates to our growing Gallagher family of professionals." Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (NYSE:AJG), a global insurance brokerage, risk management and consulting services firm, is headquartered in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. The company has operations in 33 countries and offers client service capabilities in more than 150 countries around the world through a network of correspondent brokers and consultants. Investors: Ray Iardella Media: Linda J. Collins VP Investor Relations VP Corporate Communications 630-285-3661/ [email protected] 630-285-4009/ [email protected] SOURCE Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Related Links http://www.ajg.com KNOXVILLE, Tenn., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AtWork Group, an award-winning national staffing franchise, hosted its annual franchise conference at the Crowne Plaza Downtown Knoxville in Knoxville, Tennessee, May 15-17. In addition to providing seminars, training, and various roundtable discussions, the franchise honored multiple franchisees for their commitment to success at the AtWork Awards Dinner. "Our annual conference is one of my favorite times of the year," said Jason Leverant, president and COO of AtWork Group. "With nearly 100 locations across the U.S., it's a chance for all AtWork franchisees to come together, to share knowledge, learn from each other, and to celebrate our successes." The AtWork Group Franchise Conference allowed all attending AtWork owners and employees to benefit from special training sessions, in-depth industry discussions, and vendor networking breaks. The keynote speakers were Susan Beth, a franchise industry veteran and current COO of NRD Capital, Bruce Hodes, author of the book "Front Line Heroes: Battling the Business Tsunami by Developing Performance Oriented Cultures," and Kathy Cuff, a Senior Consulting Partner for The Ken Blanchard Companies and co-author of the book "Legendary Service: The Key is to Care," a parable based on Blanchard's training program. The AtWork Awards Dinner, which was hosted at The Standard in downtown Knoxville's Arts District, recognized individual franchise locations for outstanding sales in the last year. Thirty-two franchise locations received Bronze Awards ($1 million to $2.5 million in sales), eighteen locations received Silver Awards ($2.5 million to $5 million in sales), three locations received Gold Awards ($5 million to $7.5 million in sales), and four locations were honored with Platinum Awards ($7.5 million to $10 million in sales). Ten locations received the Chairman's Award, which is the top revenue prize for franchise locations that generated more than $10 million in sales. They are the office locations in: Morristown, Tenn. Allentown, Pa. Jessup, Md. Bowling Green, Ky. Methuen, Mass. Aurora, Colo. Pooler, Ga. Reading, Pa. Kankakee, Ill. Salinas, Calif. The Rookie of the Year Award went to Daryl Ayers, owner of the Warren and Livonia, Michigan locations. The Rising Star Award went to Kelly Young, owner of the Las Vegas, Nevada location. Marty and David Luttrell from Rogersville, Tennessee, each received the AtWork for You Award, which honors those who best exemplify AtWork's mission and core values. Marija Sinishtaj from Warren, Michigan, received the Cruisin' & Crushin' It award, which honors the AtWork employee who most consistently performed above expectations. To learn more about franchise opportunities, visit atworkfranchise.com or call 888-553-1745. SOURCE AtWork Group Related Links https://www.atwork.com SAN DIEGO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Aya Healthcare, the largest privately held travel nurse staffing and healthcare workforce solutions provider in the country, acquired Locums Unlimited on May 20, 2018, a locum tenens staffing company located in San Diego, Calif. The company will operate as a subsidiary of Aya Healthcare. Locums Unlimited specializes in the nationwide placement of physicians in locum tenen and temp to perm jobs. The company brings over 25 years combined experience to the healthcare staffing community and offers top-of-the line providers to their clients. "We're excited to join Aya Healthcare," said Sigrid Boring, President of Locums Unlimited. "By joining forces with Aya, we'll be able to expand our clientele to make an even bigger impact in the industry." Aya has added a significant number of locums agencies through the Aya Partner Network recently, but the acquisition of Locums Unlimited will give it direct recruiting capacity to further deliver enhanced locums services to its facility clients. "In this ever-changing industry, it's critical that we evolve with the needs of our clients to provide them with the best value and experience," said Alan Braynin, President and CEO of Aya Healthcare. Aya also announced that locums services are now available through its Aya Connect platform the industry's most intuitive software platform to manage the procurement of contingent labor. "Our clients have been asking us to deliver locums through our Aya Connect platform, and now we can," added Braynin. Aya continues to experience rapid growth and has added over $200 million in new managed service contracts on Aya Connect over the last 12 months. With this new acquisition, locum tenens staffing will be added to Aya's already robust suite of healthcare staffing and workforce solutions offerings which include travel nurse, allied and per diem staffing, clinical services, MSP solutions and the Aya Connect platform. About Aya Healthcare Aya Healthcare is the largest privately held travel nurse staffing and healthcare workforce solutions provider in the country. The company continues to experience rapid growth as it reshapes the travel nurse staffing and healthcare workforce solutions segments. Aya creates exceptional experiences for their clinicians, their corporate employees and the healthcare facilities they serve. Aya's platform provides access to one of the largest sources of contract clinicians in the country, which improves efficiency, increases quality and reduces costs for healthcare systems. To learn more about Aya Healthcare, visit www.ayahealthcare.com. About Locums Unlimited Locums Unlimited brings over 25 years combined experience to the healthcare staffing community. The company offers top-of-the-line, professional providers to their group of qualified clients. Locums Unlimited takes a consultative, strategic approach to reach beyond simply recruiting to anticipate locum tenens solutions for their clients. Media Contact: Erin Stafford Director of Marketing Aya Healthcare [email protected] Mobile: 714.351.3849 SOURCE Aya Healthcare Related Links http://www.ayahealthcare.com SAN DIEGO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Bayer has committed $40,000 to the United Fresh Start Foundation, in support of their mission to increase children's access to fresh fruits and vegetables. As part of the partnership, Bayer is funding salad bars for eight schools in California and Idaho. A student at Barnett Elementary School in Ramona, California learns about cantaloupe during the melon taste-test. Students at Barnett Elementary School pose with the new salad bar funded by Bayer. Jennifer Maloney, Food Chain & Sustainability Manager at Bayer talks to fourth graders at Barnett Elementary School in Ramona, California. To promote this collaboration, and one of the new salad bars, the announcement was made during an assembly at Barnett Elementary in Ramona, California. At the school event, over 50 fourth grade students were introduced to their new salad bar and participated in a melon taste-test. Students tried several varieties of sweet melons and voted on their favorite. "The Ramona Unified School District's food service team has always done a fantastic job, and the replacement of a new salad bar will create even more excitement amongst our students to select fresh fruits and veggies every day," said Linda Marthis, Principal, Barnett Elementary School. "Our district has always had a commitment to serving fresh produce in our school lunch program," said Kati Harbor, Director of Food and Nutrition Services, Ramona Unified School District. "The new salad bar will highlight fresh produce and encourage children to make healthy choices from a greater variety of colorful options." Schools receiving salad bars from the Bayer-United Fresh Start Foundation collaboration, include: Barnett Elementary School, Ramona Unified School District ( Ramona, CA ) James Dukes Elementary School, Ramona Unified School District ( Ramona, CA ) Ellwood Elementary School, Goleta Union School District ( Goleta, CA ) Foothill Elementary School, Goleta Union School District ( Santa Barbara, CA ) Alameda Community Learning Center ( Alameda, CA ) Nea Community Learning Center ( Alameda, CA ) Blue Oak Charter School ( Chico, CA ) Barbara Morgan STEM Academy, West Ada School District ( Meridian, ID ) "Each day more than 30 million U.S. children participate in the National School Lunch Program, an in many communities, schools are the 'largest restaurant in town.' By providing children with access to a salad bar at school, they can easily choose from a variety of fresh produce every day, and find what they like best," said Jennifer Maloney, Food Chain and Sustainability Manager, Bayer. "A salad bar puts a focus on fresh fruits and veggies in the lunch line, and with our recent contributions, we hope children will go home and tell their parents, sparking a conversation about the importance of eating healthy and choosing more fresh fruits and veggies at every meal." Bayer serves as a member of the United Fresh Start Foundation's Community Outreach Committee, which among other roles, helps foster collaboration between the foundation, schools, and community-based non-profit organizations that are committed to providing children with access to fresh produce. "Thanks to companies like Bayer, the United Fresh Start Foundation is continuing to provide salad bars to schools, encouraging children to make healthier food choices every day," said Tom Stenzel, President & CEO, United Fresh Produce Association and President of the United Fresh Start Foundation. "We know kids like eating fresh fruits and veggies, and when given the opportunity to make their own selections from a school salad bar, they are learning to take what they want, and eat what they take. Salad bars empower kids to make their own healthy choices, introduce kids to new fresh options, and they are a simple intervention that makes it easy for kids to choose fresh produce at school." To coordinate the salad bar contributions, Bayer worked with the United Fresh Start Foundation, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the United Fresh Produce Association. As part of the foundation's partnership in the national Salad Bars to Schools initiative, they are working with the produce industry, non-profits and allied businesses to support salad bars to schools across the United States. To date, Salad Bars to Schools has helped facilitate the donation of salad bars to over 5,000 schools in all fifty states, benefitting 3 million children. Bayer's salad bar investment supports the national initiative. Current research indicates that the use of salad bars in schools promotes healthy food choices in school-aged children. With access to a salad bar, students are encouraged to try new items and are empowered to make their own healthy choices now, and in the future. The Salad Bars to Schools initiative aims to help school districts meet USDA school lunch nutrition standards, which require offering students a wide variety of colorful vegetable choices each week, and which promote a healthier lifestyle for students nationwide. Bayer's commitment to sustainability and agricultural education begins with the people it serves every day. This commitment extends to fighting food insecurity and encouraging healthier food choices for a happier and well-educated community. For additional information and background on Bayer and its other programs, please visit https://www.cropscience.bayer.us/Our-Commitment. Bayer is committed to bringing new technology and solutions for agriculture and non-agricultural uses. For questions concerning the availability and use of products, contact a local Bayer representative, or visit Crop Science, a division of Bayer, online at www.cropscience.bayer.us. Visit the Bayer Connect - Social Hub for social media, recent news, blog posts, videos and more from Crop Science, a division of Bayer. About Bayer Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the Life Science fields of health care and agriculture. Its products and services are designed to benefit people and improve their quality of life. At the same time, the Group aims to create value through innovation, growth and high earning power. Bayer is committed to the principles of sustainable development and to its social and ethical responsibilities as a corporate citizen. In fiscal 2017, the Group employed around 99,800 people and had sales of EUR 35.0 billion. Capital expenditures amounted to EUR 2.4 billion, R&D expenses to EUR 4.5 billion. For more information, go to www.bayer.us. About the United Fresh Start Foundation The United Fresh Start Foundation is a 501 (c)(3) not-for-profit organization focused exclusively on increasing children's access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Affiliated with the United Fresh Produce Association, the Foundation is committed to helping today's kids achieve the public health goal to make half their plate fruits and vegetables in order to live longer and healthier lives. The Foundation works to create an environment in which kids have easy access to high-quality, great-tasting and affordable fresh fruits and vegetables, whenever and wherever they are choosing snacks or a meal. More information at: www.unitedfreshstart.org. About Salad Bars to Schools Salad Bars to Schools is a public health campaign to increase salad bars in schools across the country so that every child has the choice of healthy fruits and vegetables every day at school. Salad Bars to Schools was first established to support former First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" initiative to end childhood obesity in a generation. For more information: www.saladbars2schools.org Contact : Bayer Media Hotline, 1-862-404-5118, or Carolyn Nagle Bayer U.S. Tel: (862) 404-5955 Email: [email protected] Jessica Biller Porter Novelli Tel: (916) 761-6035 Email: [email protected] Find more information at www.cropscience.bayer.us Andrew Marshall United Fresh Start Foundation (202) 303-3407 [email protected] Forward-Looking Statements This release may contain forward-looking statements based on current assumptions and forecasts made by Bayer Group or subgroup management. Various known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors could lead to material differences between the actual future results, financial situation, development or performance of the company and the estimates given here. These factors include those discussed in Bayer's public reports which are available on the Bayer website at www.bayer.com . The company assumes no liability whatsoever to update these forward-looking statements or to conform them to future events or developments. SOURCE Bayer Related Links http://www.bayer.us GLASGOW, Scotland, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- BDD Pharma today announced that it has signed an agreement to license OralogiK, its timed drug delivery technology, to Novartis Pharma AG for the development of a new product containing an undisclosed compound. The agreement includes an upfront payment, milestones and future royalties. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/698248/BDD_Pharma_Logo.jpg ) BDD's proprietary OralogiK technology enables the oral delivery of single, multi-dose or combination drugs at pre-determined times between one and 12 hours after administration to the patient. This is the first license secured by Glasgow based BDD Pharma, which already has several license options with pharmaceutical companies to develop and apply the OralogiK technology to new and existing drugs that would benefit from either delayed or phased delivery. BDD is uniquely placed to rapidly provide clinical data to pharma companies that have licensed OralogiK, using its gamma scintigraphic imaging and pharmacokinetic capabilities. Professor Howard Stevens, Executive Chairman of BDD, said: "This is a significant step for BDD; our OralogiK technology offers wide ranging possibilities for partners to develop new products with complex delivery patterns and to extend product ranges. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Novartis, aiming to bring the first OralogiK product to the market." The intellectual property surrounding the OralogiK proprietary technology is protected by key patents in the major markets worldwide. Notes to Editors About BDD BDD Pharma Ltd is a privately-owned drug delivery company specializing in the development of modified and controlled release oral formulations. BDD's OralogiK technology is a tablet-in-tablet drug delivery system providing timed release, sustained release and the opportunity for complex bi- and tri-phasic release of one or multiple drugs. The OralogiK technology is protected with granted patents in the US, EU and Japan. Supported by investment from Archangels and the Scottish Investment Bank, BDD has in house clinical trial capabilities for the conduct of gamma scintigraphic/ pharmacokinetic studies in humans. For more information visit http://www.bddpharma.com. Disclaimer This document includes forward-looking statements. These statements relate to the Company's future prospects, developments and business strategies. These forward-looking statements are identified by the use of terms and phrases such as "anticipate", "believe", "could", "estimate", "expect", "intend", "may", "plan", "predict", "project", "will" or the negative of those variations, or comparable expressions, including references to assumptions. These statements are contained in all sections of this document. The forward-looking statements in this document, including statements concerning future product development, marketing and commercialization, are based on current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by those statements. These forward-looking statements speak only as at the date of this document and the company assumes no obligation to update any information or forward-looking statement contained herein. SOURCE BDD Pharma "I chose to join Union Bank because it is one of the most recognized and respected brands in the marketplace with an unparalleled reputation for having the best team in the business," Blayne said. "I look forward to working with the team to grow our platform and product set to provide our brokers and their clients with additional options for their mortgage needs." Blayne comes to Union Bank from SunTrust Mortgage Corporation where she spent more than 20 years in several key leadership positions in wholesale and correspondent lending. Most recently, she was Senior Vice President, National Production Manager of the bank's Non-Delegated Correspondent Division, which she grew into a significant contributor to the SunTrust organization. "We have delivered strong growth within our mortgage portfolio which is now the sixth largest in the country and we are thrilled to welcome Blayne to Union Bank Home Loans," said Paul Appleton, Head of Union Bank Home Loans. "Her extensive sales leadership experience coupled with her stellar track record in business development, make her an important addition as we continue to expand our wholesale broker business." About MUFG Union Bank, N.A. As of March 31, 2018, MUFG Union Bank, N.A. operated 355 branches, comprised primarily of retail banking branches in the West Coast states, along with commercial branches in Texas, Illinois, New York and Georgia, as well as 21 PurePoint Financial Centers and one international office. We provide a wide spectrum of corporate, commercial and retail banking and wealth management solutions to meet the needs of customers. We also offer an extensive portfolio of value-added solutions for customers, including investment banking, personal and corporate trust, global custody, transaction banking, capital markets, and other services. With assets of $120.9 billion, as of March 31, 2018, MUFG Union Bank has strong capital reserves, credit ratings and capital ratios relative to peer banks. MUFG Union Bank is a proud member of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (NYSE: MUFG), one of the world's largest financial organizations with total assets of approximately 306.9 trillion (JPY) or $2.9 trillion (USD), as of March 31, 2018. The corporate headquarters (principal executive office) for MUFG Americas Holdings Corporation, which is the financial holding company, and MUFG Union Bank, is in New York City. The main banking office of MUFG Union Bank is in San Francisco, California. 1 Exchange rate of 1 USD=106.2 (JPY) as of March 30, 2018 SOURCE Union Bank Related Links http://www.unionbank.com ANN ARBOR, Mich., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- BlueWillow Biologics today announced the issuance of U.S. patent number 9,974,844 entitled "Cancer Vaccine Compositions And Methods Of Using The Same," to the University of Michigan under exclusive license to BlueWillow. The patent allows for the use of BlueWillow's NanoVax platform with tumor antigens, including neoantigens, to create novel therapeutic vaccines that have the potential to generate balanced and durable immune responses to treat existing cancers. "The awarding of this patent demonstrates that our NanoVax technology has potential in areas beyond infectious disease. We have a clear opportunity to leverage our innovative platform in the immuno-oncology space and are now actively exploring collaborations with experts in this field," said Dave Peralta, Chief Executive Officer of BlueWillow. "Cancer has a devasting impact on so many lives. On behalf of the employees at BlueWillow, we are thrilled to have an opportunity to play a role in fighting this terrible disease." BlueWillow's innovative vaccine platform is built on the company's patented NanoVax technology that employs a unique oil-in-water nanoemulsion adjuvant. When administered intranasally, BlueWillow vaccines elicit both systemic and mucosal immune responses, which could play an important role in treating mucosal cancers including tumors of the mouth, nose, throat and lung. Animal studies conducted at the University of Michigan have shown that intranasal vaccination with NanoVax technology reduces metastasis of colon cancer to the lung. Future studies are expected to incorporate both intranasal and intramuscular administration of vaccines built on the NanoVax platform. About BlueWillow BlueWillow Biologics is a privately-held biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, focused on developing and commercializing vaccines using its patented NanoVax technology platform. The technology employs a novel oil-in-water nanoemulsion adjuvant that is effective when administered via intranasal or intramuscular vaccination, and can elicit both mucosal and systemic immunity when applied intranasally. BlueWillow is currently developing intranasal vaccines for several respiratory and sexually transmitted infections, including RSV, pertussis, influenza, anthrax, prophylactic and therapeutic HSV-2 and chlamydia. Visit BlueWillow.com for details on the company's vaccine pipeline and studies completed to date. Contact: Levitate Mackenzie Mohr (260) 408-5383 [email protected] SOURCE BlueWillow Biologics Related Links http://www.BlueWillow.com PHOENIX, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alliance Residential Company is pleased to announce the promotion of Bradley Cribbins to President/Chief Executive Officer of Alliance's management division. With 25 years of industry experience, Cribbins joined the Alliance family in July 2007 as Managing Director of Asset Management for the Broadstone portfolio. He was later promoted to Senior Vice President of Operations, overseeing the Southwest and Mountain regions, and in 2012 was named Executive Vice President/Chief Operating Officer of the management division. In 2016, he became President/Chief Operating Officer and is now taking a well-deserved step to President/Chief Executive Officer of the management team. Prior to joining Alliance, Cribbins was the Vice President of Operations for a leading regional owner/manager in the Pacific Northwest. He also held a key leadership role in two start-up ventures providing technology services to the industry. "Throughout his career at Alliance, Brad has excelled in his focus to drive strategic leadership across the organization," said Bruce Ward, Chairman/CEO of Alliance. "This has produced innovative, forward-thinking teams who are doing things differently in the multifamily space to elevate the Alliance brand and drive our thoughtful, intentional growth." Under Cribbins' leadership, Alliance has consistently delivered strong asset performance for its owned assets and managed clients, and has led the team to many notable company-wide achievements. Within the past year, two major milestones were reached Alliance broke the 100,000 managed units mark, now sitting at more than 104,000 units under management nationwide, and made its way into the ranks of the top five largest management companies in the nation. As the company drives forward with its 2020 vision to reach 150,000 managed units, Cribbins will continue to challenge the teams to drive alignment, and focus on how talent and teamwork set the management company apart as an elite service provider. This will ensure Alliance continues to deliver exceptional performance and results portfolio-wide. To learn more about Alliance, visit www.allresco.com. About Alliance Residential Company Alliance is the fourth-largest multifamily manager and fourth most-active multifamily developer in the nation. As an integrated multifamily real estate company, Alliance is focused on the development, management, construction and acquisition of residential and mixed-use communities. Developer of the high-profile Broadstone communities, Alliance is headquartered in Phoenix with 35 regional offices throughout the West, Southwest, South-Central, Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. MEDIA CONTACT: Danielle Clark Director of Public Relations & Communications 602.522.5760 | [email protected] SOURCE Alliance Residential Company Related Links http://www.allresco.com PETALUMA, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Starting a business means being one's own boss. The appeal in that might be based on bad employment experiences featuring micromanaging supervisors or unforgiving company policies. While starting one's own business may alleviate those stresses, it comes with its own challenges. Brandon Frere, a successful entrepreneur and CEO of Frere Enterprises, admits that it can be difficult to be one's own boss but offers some advice for those seeking assistance. "Starting your own business takes a lot of work. You have to work as CEO, manager and employee," said Frere. "It can take some time to even know where to start, but establishing a plan can really help. Just make sure that you also build in time off to recuperate." Small business owners have a lot on their plates as they start a company with an idea and passion. Without a manager telling them what to do, when and in what order, it can be hard to get a startup going. Frere suggests first establishing a mission and goals for the business. That can help aspiring owners map out a plan to follow. With a roadmap in hand, small business owners can focus on their to-do list. Frere recommends that they treat themselves the way they would treat employees working for them. They should set reasonable but challenging expectations that they need to keep themselves accountable for reaching. They should follow workday standards they would expect their employees to adhere to, including regular breaks and weekends. Small business owners must motivate and support themselves, just like a good manager might. "Being your own boss also means being your own employee," said Brandon Frere. "You have to hold yourself to similar standards to those you hold your employees to. It can be very difficult, but you also have to avoid being too hard on yourself. I mean, you didn't quit the employee lifestyle to have another unforgiving boss, did you?" About Frere Enterprises 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 Images be-your-own-boss.jpg Be Your Own Boss Credit: PathDoc/Bigstock image2.png Related Links Frere Enterprises home page SOURCE Frere Enterprises Related Links https://frereenterprises.com By Brahma Chellaney When Nepal's new pro-China communist prime minister, Khadga Prasad Oli, shortly pays obeisance in Beijing, he will seek not only greater aid but also the establishment of "brotherly" relations between the Chinese and Nepalese communist parties. This year the number of communist-ruled countries in the world increased by one to six, with the landlocked Himalayan state of Nepal joining China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. Nepal's two main communist groups merged into one party on May 17, about three months after jointly coming to power. Nepal boasts the world's only democratically elected communist government. This development has revived a longstanding international question as to whether communism can reform itself to coexist with democracy. In Nepal, where communist China and democratic India are competing for influence, the answer will be affected by forces far beyond its borders. Globally, most communist parties gained power by violent means. The Soviet communist system lasted 74 years -- the longest any autocracy has survived in modern history -- after it was established following two violent revolutions in 1917 that ended Tsarist rule and brought the Bolsheviks and Vladimir Lenin to power. The Chinese Communist Party, in power for almost 69 years, has established a Leninist one-party state that appears set to surpass the Soviet longevity record. Communist rule in China was built with blood -- from the Red Army's march to victory, which cut a vast swath of death and destruction, to subsequent decades of fratricidal killings in political witch-hunts and other state-sponsored actions, including atrocities against Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians and the Tiananmen Square massacre of student-led demonstrators. Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" caused the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962 that left between 35 million to 45 million people dead. Despite such a gory history, the CCP still retains the reins of power. The Nepalese communists' peaceful ascension to power helps to obscure a violent past. Prime Minister Oli spent years in jail in the 1970s and 1980s, as a communist guerrilla, for waging war against the state. Nepal's 1990 establishment of multiparty democracy within the framework of a constitutional monarchy opened up legitimate political space for all groups, including the Maoists and Oli's Marxist-Leninist Party. The Maoists, influenced more by Mao's notion of peasant-based revolution than orthodox Marxism-Leninism, launched a bloody insurrection in 1996 with the aim of overthrowing the monarchy through a "people's revolution." A decade later, a peace accord ended a protracted war between Maoists and government forces. India -- governed at that time by a shaky coalition government, dependent on the support of local communists who had links with Nepalese communists -- engineered not only the peace but also the abolition of the constitutional monarchy. These developments paved the way for the Maoists and the Marxist-Leninist Party to share power with the Nepali Congress Party, dominant until then. In 2008, the Maoist chief was appointed prime minister, the first of a series of communists to head coalition governments. Severe political flux resulted in governments changing 10 times in the past decade, a period in which the two communist parties rapidly expanded their political base before sweeping the last national and state elections. Today, the Nepali Communist Party, which was formed last week when the two communist groups merged, casts a long, ominous shadow over the country's politics: It has almost two-thirds majority in Parliament and governments in six of the country's seven provinces. Such domination raises serious risks for Nepal's sputtering democratic transition, which has been buffeted by one crisis after another. There are portentous parallels with another country that came under communist sway through largely peaceful but uncommon means centered on a creeping approach exploiting democratic methods -- Czechoslovakia after World War II. Just as national elections in Czechoslovakia in 1946 resulted in leftist and communist parties securing significant representation in the new constituent assembly and then gradually dictating terms to President Eduard Benes, the 2007-initiated constituent assembly process in Nepal helped communists to gain power and leave their imprint on the new constitution that took effect in 2015. And just as U.S. missteps, including terminating a large loan to Czechoslovakia, triggered a backlash that boosted popular support for communists, Indian blunders helped empower communists in Nepal, undermining India's own close relations with that country. To gain political ground in the lead-up to the most recent elections, the Nepalese communists played the nationalist card, including whetting a deep-seated suspicion about India's intentions, in ways redolent of how the Czechoslovak communists whipped up anti-U.S. sentiment and drove out other coalition partners from the government. By 1948, the Czechoslovak communists gained full control of the government. No less important is the fact that, just as the Soviet Union aided the Czechoslovak communists' march to victory, China has helped out the Nepalese communists. China reportedly persuaded the divided communists to form a coalition before the Nepalese elections, helped fund their campaign, and midwifed last week's birth of a new unified communist party. When history is written, two blunders of India under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will stand out for irreparably damaging its long-term interests in Nepal -- helping to bring the Maoists to the center-stage of Nepalese politics; and instigating the ouster of that country's more than two-century-old monarchy, the central pillar of stability, continuity and national unity. The void from the monarchy's fall was largely filled by the communists. The paradox is that the Maoists secured the monarchy's overthrow not through their violent campaign but with the direct help of a country they considered their ideological foe. A double irony is that India remains plagued by its own Maoist scourge, unable to halt the rebels' periodic ambush-killing of police. A predominantly Hindu India helped turn a Hindu kingdom (indeed the world's only officially Hindu country) into a secular, communist-ruled, China-leaning state, seriously eroding its own traditional influence there. India and Nepal share one of the world's most-open borders that permits passport-free passage, and China's increasing footprint in Nepal carries major implications for India's internal security. More broadly, Nepal has emerged as a test case for whether democracy can survive under communist rule. Can communism become democratic? Or is there an inherent contradiction between communism and democracy? One cannot ignore the fundamental divergences: Democracy enshrines and enhances individual rights and freedoms, while communism erodes and smothers them. Democracy is pluralistic, whereas communism in practice tends to be authoritarian. Western hope that democracy would follow capitalism into communist states has been dashed. Fusing market capitalism with a one-party state, China has created its own model of authoritarian capitalism, which Vietnam and Laos have embraced and Cuba and North Korea are willing to adopt if the U.S. lifts sanctions against them. The CCP, as revealed by its 2013 circular known as "Document No. 9," views democracy as China's biggest threat. Against this background, can Nepal be an exception? It is too early to determine but initial signs are not encouraging. Oli has already started undermining the independence of Nepal's institutions and stacking them with his own loyalists. One of his first decisions in office was to replace key figures in many institutions, including those loosely linked with the government. The already weak judiciary is in no position to stand up to the one-party domination. If the assault on institutions continues, Nepal will be emulating the trajectory of how Czechoslovakia turned into a single-party state. Nepal's tenuous democracy has also come under pressure from ethnic fault lines that constitution-writing political machinations helped stoke. The new constitution reflects the will of the hill elites that have long dominated Nepal's power structure. Its enactment has fuelled discontent and unrest among the plains people, who inhabit the southern belt along the India frontier and feel discriminated against. Some of them wish to secede. Czechoslovakia survived dismemberment by the Nazis and 41 years of communist rule only to split under democracy. In Nepal, communist domination will likely increase southern alienation. Make no mistake: Nepal's very future is at stake. Brahma Chellaneyis a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning "Water: Asia's New Battleground." Source:- Nikkei Asian Review CHICAGO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Brilliant, an award-winning search, staffing and management resources firm specializing in accounting, finance and information technology, was named one of Chicago's Best and Brightest Companies to Work For in 2018 by the National Association for Business Resources (NABR). This marks the fifth consecutive year Brilliant has received the recognition. Each year companies throughout Chicago compete to be named one of Chicago's Best and Brightest Companies to Work For. Only companies that distinguish themselves as having the most innovative and thoughtful human resources approach can be bestowed this honor. "We are proud to be recognized for our employee engagement initiatives five years in a row," says Brilliant CEO Jeff Mariola. "Since our inception in 2009, we have strived to offer an innovative, empowering and inclusive work environment for our team members." He continues, "Our mission is to make people's lives better and that starts with our own colleagues. We believe that our culture and people are our competitive advantage and winning this award five years in a row is validation of that." Key measures evaluated by the NABR include Compensation, Benefits and Employee Solutions; Employee Enrichment, Engagement and Retention; Employee Education and Development; Recruitment, Selection and Orientation; Employee Achievement and Recognition; Communication and Shared Vision; Diversity and Inclusion; Work-Life Balance; Community Initiatives; Strategic Company Performance and the Best of the Best Small Business, Medium Business and Large Business. Over 800 companies participated in the competition. Brilliant and 168 other organizations were selected. On July 27, 2018, all winning companies will be honored during a luncheon and awards ceremony at the Drury Lane Conference Center in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois. Mariola and other Brilliant team members will be in attendance to accept the award. For more information, visit www.brilliantfs.com. About Brilliant | Connecting People and Opportunities Brilliant is an award-winning search, staffing and management resources firm specializing in accounting, finance and information technology for the greater Chicago and south Florida labor markets. The firm represents high-quality accounting, finance and information technology talent and matches them with hiring companies throughout various industries including manufacturing, distribution, health care, professional services, retail, legal, technology, real estate, nonprofit organizations, software and hospitality, among others. Many of Brilliant's team members include former hiring managers, and accounting and finance professionals from the Big 4 accounting firms, as well as other leading professionals in the industry. Since its inception in 2009, Brilliant has been recognized on many prestigious lists including being ranked No. 6 on Forbes' 2017 America's Best Professional Recruiting Firms and No. 25 on Forbes 2017 America's Best Executive Recruiting Firmsnot to mention Crain's Chicago Business Fast 50 for three straight years including No. 1 in 2015, Staffing Industry Analysts Fastest-Growing Staffing Firms in the United States for three straight years including No. 2 in 2015, Inavero's Best of Staffing Talent for North America three years in a row, Inc. 5000 for three straight years, Best Places to Work South Florida, 101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For for four straight years, and others. To learn more about Brilliant, visit www.brilliantfs.com, call 312.582.1800 or follow @BrilliantFS on social media. About the Best and Brightest Companies to Work For The Best and Brightest Companies to Work For is a program that provides the business community with the opportunity to gain recognition, showcase their best practices and demonstrate why they are an ideal place for employees to work. This national program celebrates those companies that are making better business, creating richer lives and building a stronger community as a whole. It is presented annually in several markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Houston, Milwaukee, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, in addition to a national program. Nominations are now being accepted. Visit www.thebestandbrightest.com to obtain an application. Media Contact: Laurie Vicente, Sr. Marketing Director, Brilliant, 312.582.1812 [email protected] SOURCE Brilliant Related Links http://www.brilliantfs.com WASHINGTON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today called on the Trump administration to drop a former leader of a designated anti-Muslim hate group from its National Security Council (NSC) staff. Fred Fleitz was named the NSC's executive secretary and chief of staff by White House National Security Adviser John Bolton. SEE: Bolton Installs Anti-Muslim Wingnut as NSC Chief of Staff http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/bolton-fred-fleitz-center-security-policy-nsc-chief-of-staff.html Fleitz, up until his NSC appointment, was sr. vice president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP). The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has identified CSP as a hate group that is "a conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement in the United States." Fleitz has in the past expressed "concern" about "enclaves of Muslim communities in Michigan and Minnesota." SEE: SPLC Designated Hate Groups: Center for Security Policy https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/center-security-policy CAIR's Islamophobia Monitor website states that CSP head Frank Gaffney is "a key propagandist and conspiracy theorist for the Islamophobia movement." CAIR Islamophobia Monitor: Center for Security Policy http://www.islamophobia.org/islamophobic-organizations/57-center-for-security-policy-csp.html "An individual who held a leadership position in a notorious hate group should not be placed in a policy-making post in the White House," said CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw. "We urge the Trump administration to drop Mr. Fleitz and to remove all other staffers who espouse bigoted views or back discriminatory and unconstitutional policies." McCaw noted that CAIR condemned Bolton's appointment as national security adviser, calling him "a notorious Islamophobe who as a history of ties to anti-Muslim extremists and organizations." SEE: CAIR Condemns Naming of Islamophobe John Bolton as White House National Security Adviser https://www.cair.com/cair_condemns_naming_of_islamophobe_john_bolton_as_white_house_national_security_adviser CAIR said it has witnessed an unprecedented spike in bigotry targeting American Muslims and members of other minority groups since the election of Donald Trump as president. The Washington-based civil rights organization has also repeatedly expressed concern about Islamophobic and racist Trump administration policies and appointments. SEE: CAIR Opposes Nominations of 'Islamophobe' Pompeo for Secretary of State, Haspel for CIA Director https://www.cair.com/cair_opposes_nominations_of_islamophobe_pompeo_for_secretary_of_state_torturer_haspel_for_cia_director Community members are being urged to report any bias incidents to police and to CAIR's Civil Rights Department at 202-742-6420 or by filing a report at: http://www.cair.com/report CAIR launched an app to share critical "know your rights" information and to simplify the process to report hate crimes and bias incidents. CAIR is urging American Muslims and members of other minority groups to download the app and utilize this resource to stay informed and empowered. For a quick download of CAIR's civil rights app, click here: http://www.cair.com/app CAIR is America's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims. Become a Fan of CAIR on Facebook www.facebook.com/CAIRNational Subscribe to CAIR's Email List http://tinyurl.com/cairsubscribe Subscribe to CAIR's Twitter Feed http://twitter.com/cairnational Subscribe to CAIR's YouTube Channel http://www.youtube.com/cairtv CONTACT: CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw, 202-742-6448, [email protected]; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, [email protected] SOURCE Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Related Links http://www.cair.com NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Capital Dynamics, an independent global asset manager, today announced the appointments of Matthew Bandini, Jonathan Barokas and Bryan Chen to its Private Credit team, effective immediately. These new hires reflect the firm's rapid expansion in this space. The team is led by the co-heads of Capital Dynamics' Private Credit business, Thomas Hall and Jens Ernberg. "Matthew, Jonathan and Bryan bring significant experience in sourcing and underwriting loans to lower middle market companies," said Jens Ernberg, managing director and co-head of Capital Dynamics' Private Credit business. "Their additions strengthen our deep bench of experienced investment professionals, positions us to successfully execute on our strategy and to significantly grow our private credit business." "Jens and I are pleased to welcome these additions to the team," added Thomas Hall, managing director and co-head of the Capital Dynamics Private Credit business. "Each brings a strong pedigree from established players in the private credit markets. Their joining is a testament to the strength of the Capital Dynamics brand in the private markets community and is a reflection of the large opportunity set that we enjoy by being part of a global asset management platform." Mr. Bandini, joining as a senior director, brings more than 15 years of corporate finance and middle market lending experience. Previously, Mr. Bandini was a managing director at Fifth Street Asset Management, where he led the origination, underwriting and portfolio management of more than USD 2 billion private equity-backed loan originations. Prior to that, Mr. Bandini worked in the Financial Sponsors coverage groups at GE Antares, Merrill Lynch and CIT, where he underwrote a variety of leveraged buyout and recapitalization transactions across all industries and capital structures. Mr. Barokas, joining as a senior associate, brings seven years of leveraged finance experience to the team. Most recently, Mr. Barokas worked in the Credit Group of Ares Management, where he was responsible for the evaluation of private credit investments. At Ares, Mr. Barokas worked across all major investment functions, including origination, transaction execution and portfolio management. Mr. Barokas started his career in the Financial Sponsors Group at Wells Fargo Securities where he completed investment banking transactions for private equity clients and their respective portfolio companies. Mr. Chen, joining as a senior associate, brings nearly eight years of private markets and investment banking experience. Most recently, Mr. Chen worked at 3i, a leading middle market private equity firm, where he focused on investment sourcing and initial diligence processes. Prior to that, Mr. Chen worked in investment banking on the mergers and acquisitions team at Lazard Freres. Previously, Mr. Chen was an analyst for two multi-strategy credit funds at Halcyon Asset Management and he began his career at GE Capital. About Capital Dynamics Capital Dynamics is an independent global asset management firm focusing on private assets including private equity, private credit, clean energy infrastructure and energy infrastructure credit. Capital Dynamics offers a wide range of products including primary funds of funds, secondaries, direct investments, co-investments, customized separate accounts as well as structured private equity solutions. The firm has more than USD 15 billion in assets under management and advisement. The firm was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. However, our history dates back to 1988 when the predecessor of Capital Dynamics commenced operations in Birmingham, UK (Westport Private Equity). Over the past eight years, Capital Dynamics has expanded beyond private equity offerings. The firm established a clean energy infrastructure platform in 2010 for direct investments in real assets within the renewable energy sector. In 2017, a private credit business was launched that leverages the firm's extensive general partner relationship network to originate and invest in private credit transactions for middle-market companies owned by private equity sponsors. In 2018, the company expanded its energy infrastructure business to include energy infrastructure credit. The investment management teams' Managing Directors and Directors average over 20 years of investing experience. We believe our experience and culture of innovation give us superior insight and help us deliver returns for our clients. We invest locally while operating globally from our New York, London, Zug, Tokyo, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Munich, Birmingham and Seoul offices. For enquiries, contact: Nicholas Rust Prosek Partners [email protected] T: +1 646 502 4520 M: +1 917 439 0307 Disclaimer Capital Dynamics comprises Capital Dynamics Holding AG and its affiliates. Capital Dynamics, Inc. is a registered investment advisor with the US Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"). Capital Dynamics Broker Dealer LLC. is a registered broker dealer registered with the SEC and is a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Capital Dynamics Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the United Kingdom. For residents of the UK, this information is only directed at persons who have professional experience in matters relating to investments or who are high net worth persons, as those terms are defined in the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. This press release is not an offer of securities for sale. Securities may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from registration. The information herein should not be considered investment advice and is not intended to substitute for the exercise of professional judgment. SOURCE Capital Dynamics Car-Ware has been providing industry-leading software support in the dealer management and automobile industry for over 15 years. The company services the financing, accounting, customer relationship management and inventory management needs of a nationwide roster of clients. The integration of the myPayrazr solution suite means dealers can now offer a wider range of innovative payment channels and greatly increase the payment options available to end-customers. Channels include Interactive Voice Response, online payment portals and recurring payment plans. Car-Ware clients also benefit from BillingTree merchant services to maintain compliance and best practices for secure payment acceptance. "Given the scope of Car-Ware solutions and the proven experience of BillingTree in auto finance, this partnership is a strong fit," said Mike Dooney, President & CEO of Car-Ware. "BillingTree solutions perfectly align with our focus on offering the latest digital tools to help dealers better manage their business. The in-built security means our customers can remain safe in the knowledge that the technology they are deploying is fully compliant with industry standards." "Payment technology is a key revenue driver in the auto finance industry, and customers are looking for more convenient ways to keep up with auto loan payments." said Jason Hiland, Director of Sales and Business Development, Financial Services, at BillingTree. "This strategic partnership provides automated, convenient and secure payment channels, putting both dealers and consumers in control when it comes to managing their finances." About Car-Ware Car-Ware Inc. was started in January 2008 and since that time we have integrations with several strategic partners in the industry. We provide Accounting, showroom traffic management and desking, Finance and Insurance, Buy Here Pay Here and Lease Here Pay Here, CRM, and Inventory management to the used automobile industry. The founders of Car-Ware have worked in the automotive DMS and banking industry for more than 15 years. About BillingTree BillingTree is the leading provider of integrated payments solutions to the Healthcare, ARM, Property Management, B2B, and Financial Services industry verticals. Through its technology-enabled suite of products and services, BillingTree enables organizations to increase efficiency and decrease the costs of payment processing while adhering to compliance regulations. Leveraging more than a decade of market experience, BillingTree is dedicated to growing payments with technology through an integrated omni-channel offering, suite of proprietary products and value-added services, and a company-wide focus on delivering extraordinary customer service. Contact: Contact: Dave Yohe Jamie Kightley VP of Marketing PR for BillingTree BillingTree IBA Tel: 602.443.5948 Tel: 561.228.1940 [email protected] [email protected] SOURCE BillingTree Related Links http://www.mybillingtree.com SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CellMax Life, a leading cancer diagnostics company enabling early cancer detection with affordable non-invasive blood tests, today announced it is commencing Zenith, a U.S. clinical study for its circulating tumor cell (CTC) blood test, which can transform the way colorectal cancer is detected, enabling diagnosis at its earliest, most treatable stages. To do this, the company is first initiating a study with leading U.S. medical centers including Stanford Medicine and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, Johns Hopkins and University of Southern California. This U.S. trial comes on the heels of an Asian trial, for which results were announced at the 2018 ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancer Symposium (ASCO GI) in January, which demonstrated that the test can detect colorectal cancer at an early stage with accuracy ranging from 84 to 88 percent. In this study, thousands of patients coming in for routine colorectal cancer screening via colonoscopy or stool tests will be offered CellMax Life's blood test. The results of the blood test will be compared to those from the colonoscopy and stool tests. "We plan to work closely with the FDA upfront to define the details of this study," said Atul Sharan, CEO of CellMax Life. "We will also pursue reimbursement for the test by submitting it through the Parallel Review Program for approval from the FDA and coverage determination by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The test requires just a single tube of blood and is at a price point of less than $200, which makes this a very practical solution for colorectal cancer screening." "Colorectal cancer is among the most preventable cancers when detected early. Yet, it is the second deadliest cancer in the United States partly because of lack of compliance. One in three eligible Americans have never been screened because current testing options like colonoscopies and stool-based tests are invasive or inconvenient, deterring people from getting screened," said Shai Friedland, M.D., Chief of Gastroenterology & Hepatology, VA Palo Alto Health Care System from the Stanford University School of Medicine, as well as lead principal investigator (PI) on this study. "After CellMax Life's blood test showed such impressive results at ASCO GI, we believe it can address the unmet need for a convenient, accurate and affordable test for early colorectal cancer detection. I expect physicians will adopt it as a first-line screening option for all patients, with colonoscopy as the confirmatory diagnostic for patients who are positive per the CellMax test." While testing for CTCs has been approved and validated by the FDA as a useful detection method for late stage metastatic cancer, there has not yet been a CTC technology with the sensitivity required for early cancer detection. CellMax Life's CMx ultra-sensitive CTC platform, which isolates rare CTCs present at a fraction of 1 to 10 CTCs in a background of one billion normal cells in pre-cancer and early stage cancer breaks this barrier. This platform has eight patents and is the only clinically proven CTC platform able to detect cancer early. "The ASCO GI results showed that the blood test can detect pre-cancerous lesions at a higher sensitivity than stool tests. This is significant because these lesions can be safely and easily removed with a follow-on colonoscopy. Also, unlike home stool tests, which in our experience are only completed by around 30 percent of patients that order the kit, this test can be easily integrated into a patient's annual physical exam, increasing compliance," said Ashish Nimgaonkar, M.D., a gastroenterologist, medical director at the Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design at Johns Hopkins University and one of the PIs on this study. "An affordable test with keen sensitivity for early cancer detection like the CTC blood test has the potential to transform cancer diagnostics," said Dr. Heinz-Josef Lenz, Medical Oncologist, Professor of Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine, USC. "The potential applications can go well beyond early detection to monitoring treatment efficacy and detect resistance to therapies, as well as for recurrence monitoring for 15 million Americans who have been diagnosed with cancer." About CellMax Life CellMax Life is a leading cancer diagnostics company whose mission is to transform how cancer is diagnosed and managed with globally affordable non-invasive tests for early cancer detection and management. CellMax Life's unique expertise in circulating tumor cells (CTC) and next generation sequencing (NGS) of DNA, as well as circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) has enabled it to offer highly effective precision medicine solutions for healthy people, as well as patients diagnosed with cancer. CellMax Life's tests include CellMax-DNA Hereditary Cancer Risk Test, CellMax-CRC Colorectal Cancer Screening Test, CellMax-Prostate Cancer Test, CellMax-LBx Liquid Biopsy for immunotherapy and targeted therapy selection and CellMax-PanCa Monitoring Test. All clinical testing is performed at CLIA and CAP accredited laboratories in Sunnyvale, California and Taipei, Taiwan. For additional information, please visit www.cellmaxlife.com. Antenna Group Michael Simmons (Media Contact) [email protected] 201-465-8030 SOURCE CellMax Life Related Links http://www.cellmaxlife.com ST. LOUIS, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Centene Corporation (NYSE: CNC) announced today it will present at the Goldman Sachs 39th Annual Global Healthcare Conference, to be held June 12-14, 2018, at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Centene is scheduled to present on Tuesday, June 12, 2018, at 8:40 a.m. Pacific Time. A simultaneous live audio webcast is also available at: https://cc.talkpoint.com/gold006/061218a_as/?entity=10_5KJL3YU. A webcast replay of the presentation will be available afterwards via the Company's website at www.centene.com under the Investors section. About Centene Corporation Centene Corporation, a Fortune 100 company, is a diversified, multi-national healthcare enterprise that provides a portfolio of services to government sponsored and commercial healthcare programs, focusing on under-insured and uninsured individuals. Many receive benefits provided under Medicaid, including the State Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), as well as Aged, Blind or Disabled (ABD), Foster Care and Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS), in addition to other state-sponsored programs, Medicare (including the Medicare prescription drug benefit commonly known as "Part D"), dual eligible programs and programs with the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Centene also provides healthcare services to groups and individuals delivered through commercial health plans. Centene operates local health plans and offers a range of health insurance solutions. It also contracts with other healthcare and commercial organizations to provide specialty services including behavioral health management, care management software, correctional healthcare services, dental benefits management, commercial programs, home-based primary care services, life and health management, vision benefits management, pharmacy benefits management, specialty pharmacy and telehealth services. Centene uses its investor relations website to publish important information about the Company, including information that may be deemed material to investors. Financial and other information about Centene is routinely posted and is accessible on Centene's investor relations website, http://www.centene.com/investors. SOURCE Centene Corporation Related Links http://www.centene.com SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Who: As a leader in innovative smart kitchen solutions, Chefling, represented by Co-Founder, Jeff Xie, will be participating in the panel discussion, "Infrastructure: Building Smart Kitchen Platforms" at the Smart Kitchen Summit Europe. What: The Smart Kitchen Summit Europe 2018 explores the future of food and cooking, and how smart kitchen innovators are reshaping the kitchen. During the "Infrastructure: Building Smart Kitchen Platforms" panel discussion, attendees will have a chance to learn about the ways in which Chefling is revolutionizing the smart kitchen, including: Innovative Cooking Technologies: Incorporating inventory organization, shopping list management intuitive recipe suggestion, as well as grocery expiration notifications into a single platform, Chefling serves up the best recipes based on what users already have in the kitchen, requiring little-to-no trips to the grocery store, and at no additional cost. Incorporating inventory organization, shopping list management intuitive recipe suggestion, as well as grocery expiration notifications into a single platform, Chefling serves up the best recipes based on what users already have in the kitchen, requiring little-to-no trips to the grocery store, and at no additional cost. Food AI Integration: Using voice-assistant technology to provide step-by-step cooking instructions or easily add items to the shopping list, the Chefling app seamlessly works with voice assistant devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, providing users with a complete hands-free experience and simplifying everyday tasks in the kitchen1. Alongside Chefling, Jeff Xie will be joined by Josh Sigel, COO of Innit and Ben Harris, CEO of Drop Kitchen. The panel discussion will be moderated by Michael Wolf, creator of the Smart Kitchen Summit and publisher of The Spoon. When: The event runs from Monday, June 11 to Tuesday, June 12, 2018. The "Infrastructure: Building Smart Kitchen Platforms" panel discussion takes place at 12:20 p.m. IST. Where: Guinness Storehouse, St James's Gate, Ushers, Dublin 8, Ireland Why: In today's growing IoT environments, Chefling understands the need for an integrated smart kitchen platform that cuts costs, simplifies user experience and caters specifically to the user. As a leader in innovative smart kitchen solutions, Chefling not only streamlines activities in the kitchen, but also redefines the way people meal plan, grocery shop and ultimately decide what's for dinner. The Chefling app is available now and can be downloaded for free on the App Store or Google Play. For more information, please visit www.chefling.net. About Chefling, Inc. Chefling, Inc. is headquartered in Silicon Valley, and provides users with the ultimate solution for the smart kitchen, delivering cost-savings, convenience and a personalized assistant. Chefling has developed the only smart kitchen app that incorporates inventory organization, intuitive recipe suggestion, shopping list management, and voice assistant integration into one platform to simplify the cooking experience. For more information, please visit www.chefling.net. 1Requires Internet connection. Controlling certain devices and features in your home requires a compatible smart device. Product and brand names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Walt & Company disclaims any and all rights in these marks. SOURCE Chefling, Inc. FORT MYERS, Fla., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Reported first quarter EPS of $0.23 per diluted share Announced new sales-driving initiatives Continued strong cash flow generation Chico's FAS, Inc. (NYSE: CHS) (the "Company") today announced its financial results for the fiscal 2018 first quarter ended May 5, 2018. For the thirteen weeks ended May 5, 2018 (the "first quarter"), the Company reported net income of $29.0 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, compared to net income of $33.6 million, or $0.26 per diluted share, for the thirteen weeks ended April 29, 2017 ("last year's first quarter"). "While we are pleased with the launch of our new sales-driving initiatives, first quarter customer traffic was challenging," said Shelley Broader, CEO and President of the Company. "We leveraged strong inventory management and targeted promotions, which resulted in an improvement in trends." "We are seeing initial success with our recently-launched ShopRunner partnership and we look forward to the ramp up of our brand offerings on Amazon.com and QVC." Ms. Broader continued, "Over the long-term, we expect these new channels will drive stronger customer traffic and sales. We remain confident in our future and our ability to deliver sustainable growth and value creation for shareholders." Business Highlights The Company continues to make progress on its strategic initiative to build new channels of growth and increase brand awareness. During the first quarter of 2018: The Company announced its collaboration with Amazon.com, Inc. to offer a select assortment of Chico's brand merchandise on Amazon.com. Soma, the Company's Intimate Apparel brand, debuted on the multi-platform retailer QVC on May 5 th during the "AM Style" broadcast. The brand's popular Vanishing collection sold out in minutes. during the "AM Style" broadcast. The brand's popular Vanishing collection sold out in minutes. The Company launched its partnership with ShopRunner, the free two-day shipping and seamless payment e-commerce network, at the end of March. All three of the Company's brands, Chico's, White House Black Market and Soma are available to ShopRunner's several million active members. Net Sales For the first quarter, net sales were $561.8 million compared to $583.7 million in last year's first quarter. This decrease of 3.8% primarily reflects a comparable sales decline of 5.9% and the impact of 41 net store closures since last year's first quarter, partially offset by the favorable impact of the calendar shift due to the 53rd week in fiscal 2017. The comparable sales decline was primarily driven by lower transaction count. Comparable Sales Thirteen Weeks Ended May 5, 2018 (1) April 29, 2017 Chico's (5.5)% (10.0)% White House Black Market (6.6)% (9.7)% Soma (5.8)% 0.2 % Total Company (5.9)% (8.7)% (1) Comparable sales for the first quarter have been adjusted to eliminate the impact of the calendar shift due to the 53rd week in fiscal 2017. Fiscal 2018 comparable sales represents sales for the thirteen weeks ended May 5, 2018 compared to sales for the thirteen weeks ended May 6, 2017. Gross Margin For the first quarter, gross margin was $226.9 million, or 40.4% of net sales, compared to $237.4 million, or 40.7% of net sales, in last year's first quarter. This 30 basis point decrease primarily reflects the initial implementation costs and launch of a new expedited shipping program, partially offset by a 70 basis point improvement in maintained margin. Selling, General and Administrative Expenses For the first quarter, selling, general and administrative expenses ("SG&A") were $186.4 million, or 33.2% of net sales, compared to $182.5 million, or 31.3% of net sales, for last year's first quarter. This increase of $3.9 million, or 2.1%, primarily reflects investments in first quarter marketing and technology. Income Tax Expense For the first quarter, the effective tax rate was 27.9% compared to 38.2% for last year's first quarter. The reduction in our effective tax rate for current year of 10.3% is primarily the result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 ("U.S. tax reform") which reduced the U.S. corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%. This reduction is partially offset by a 225 basis point increase related to excess tax benefits on the accounting for employee share-based awards. Cash and Marketable Securities At the end of the first quarter, cash and marketable securities totaled $254.7 million compared to $169.8 million at the end of the first quarter last year. This $85.0 million increase primarily reflects cash generated from operating activities. Inventories At the end of the first quarter, inventories totaled $253.8 million compared to $273.9 million at the end of the first quarter last year. This $20.1 million decrease, or 7.3%, primarily reflects our ability to align inventory levels with sales. Fiscal 2018 Second Quarter and Full-Year Outlook For second quarter fiscal 2018, the Company is anticipating a mid-to-high single digit decline in net sales and a low-to-mid single digit decline in consolidated comparable sales. The Company expects gross margin rate as a percentage of net sales to be approximately flat compared to second quarter fiscal 2017. The Company also anticipates SG&A expenses to be up slightly compared to second quarter fiscal 2017. For full-year fiscal 2018, the Company is anticipating a mid-single digit decline in net sales and a low-to-mid single digit decline in consolidated comparable sales. The Company expects gross margin rate expansion in the range of 50 to 75 basis points over fiscal 2017. The Company also anticipates SG&A expenses to be approximately flat compared to fiscal 2017. Given the early nature of the new sales-driving initiatives, we do not expect a material impact to the Company's fiscal 2018 financial results. The Company estimates a fiscal 2018 tax rate in the range of 26% to 28%. In addition, the Company anticipates 2018 capital expenditures to be $60 million to $70 million, primarily driven by store reinvestments and technology enhancements. ABOUT CHICO'S FAS, INC. The Company, through its brands Chico's, White House Black Market and Soma, is a leading omni-channel specialty retailer of women's private branded, sophisticated, casual-to-dressy clothing, intimates and complementary accessories. As of May 5, 2018, the Company operated 1,451 stores in the US and Canada and sold merchandise through 94 franchise locations in Mexico. The Company's merchandise is also available at www.chicos.com, www.chicosofftherack.com, www.whbm.com and www.soma.com as well as through third party channels. For more detailed information on Chico's FAS, Inc., please go to our corporate website at www.chicosfas.com. The information on our corporate website is not, and shall not be deemed to be, a part of this press release or incorporated into our federal securities law filings. SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT UNDER THE PRIVATE SECURITIES LITIGATION REFORM ACT OF 1995 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, which reflect our current views with respect to certain events that could have an effect on our future financial performance. These statements, including without limitation statements made in Ms. Broader's quotes and in the section entitled "Fiscal 2018 Second Quarter and Full-Year Outlook," relate to expectations concerning matters that are not historical fact and may include the words or phrases such as "will," "should," "expects," "believes," "anticipates," "plans," "intends," "estimates," "approximately," "our planning assumptions," "future outlook," and similar expressions. Except for historical information, matters discussed in such statements are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based largely on information currently available to our management and on our current expectations, assumptions, plans, estimates, judgments and projections about our business and our industry, and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from historical results or those currently anticipated. Although we believe our expectations are based on reasonable estimates and assumptions, we cannot guarantee their accuracy or our future performance, and there are a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, contingencies, and other factors (many of which are outside our control) that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Accordingly, there is no assurance that our expectations will, in fact, occur or that our estimates or assumptions will be correct, and we caution investors and all others not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, changes in the general economic and business environment, including the expected impact of U.S. tax reform; changes in the general or specialty retail or apparel industries; the availability of quality store sites; the ability to successfully execute and achieve the expected results of our business strategies, particular strategic initiatives, including sales initiatives and multi-channel strategies; customer traffic; our ability to leverage inventory management and targeted promotions; the successful integration of new members of our senior management team; changes in the political environment that create consumer uncertainty; significant changes to product import and distribution costs (such as unexpected consolidation in the freight carrier industry, and the ability to remain competitive with customer shipping terms and costs pertaining to product deliveries and returns); new or increased taxes or tariffs; significant shifts in consumer behavior; and those other factors described in Item 1A, "Risk Factors" and in the "Forward-Looking Statements" disclosure in Item 7. "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" of our latest annual report on Form 10-K and in Part II, Item 1A, "Risk Factors" and the "Forward-Looking Statements" disclosure in Part I, Item 2. "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operation" of our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and in other reports we file with or furnish to the Securities and Exchange Commission. There can be no assurance that the actual future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements will occur. All forward-looking statements that are made or attributable to us are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary notice. The Company does not undertake to publicly update or revise its forward-looking statements even if experience or future changes make it clear that projected results expressed or implied in such statements will not be realized. (Financial Tables Follow) Executive Contact: Julie Lorigan Vice President Investor Relations, Public Relations and Corporate Communications Chico's FAS, Inc. (239) 346-4199 Chico's FAS, Inc. 11215 Metro Parkway Fort Myers, Florida 33966 (239) 277-6200 Chico's FAS, Inc. and Subsidiaries Condensed Consolidated Statements of Income (Unaudited) (in thousands, except per share amounts) Thirteen Weeks Ended May 5, 2018 April 29, 2017 Amount % of Sales Amount % of Sales Net Sales: Chico's $ 300,936 53.6 % $ 310,127 53.1 % White House Black Market 182,648 32.5 193,332 33.1 Soma 78,231 13.9 80,269 13.8 Total Net Sales 561,815 100.0 583,728 100.0 Cost of goods sold 334,947 59.6 346,315 59.3 Gross Margin 226,868 40.4 237,413 40.7 Selling, general and administrative expenses 186,419 33.2 182,539 31.3 Income from Operations 40,449 7.2 54,874 9.4 Interest expense, net (245) 0.0 (455) (0.1) Income before Income Taxes 40,204 7.2 54,419 9.3 Income tax provision 11,200 2.0 20,800 3.5 Net Income $ 29,004 5.2 % $ 33,619 5.8 % Per Share Data: Net income per common share-basic $ 0.23 $ 0.26 Net income per common and common equivalent sharediluted $ 0.23 $ 0.26 Weighted average common shares outstandingbasic 125,277 126,050 Weighted average common and common equivalent shares outstandingdiluted 125,316 126,103 Dividends declared per share $ 0.1700 $ 0.1650 Chico's FAS, Inc. and Subsidiaries Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets (Unaudited) (in thousands) May 5, 2018 February 3, 2018 April 29, 2017 ASSETS Current Assets: Cash and cash equivalents $ 193,547 $ 160,071 $ 119,142 Marketable securities, at fair value 61,196 60,060 50,629 Inventories 253,777 233,726 273,878 Prepaid expenses and other current assets 53,494 60,668 46,900 Total Current Assets 562,014 514,525 490,549 Property and Equipment, net 407,569 421,038 460,845 Other Assets: Goodwill 96,774 96,774 96,774 Other intangible assets, net 38,930 38,930 38,930 Other assets, net 10,707 16,338 18,432 Total Other Assets 146,411 152,042 154,136 $ 1,115,994 $ 1,087,605 $ 1,105,530 LIABILITIES AND SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY Current Liabilities: Accounts payable $ 138,439 $ 118,253 $ 133,278 Current debt 15,000 15,000 15,000 Other current and deferred liabilities 145,893 133,715 149,151 Total Current Liabilities 299,332 266,968 297,429 Noncurrent Liabilities: Long-term debt 49,868 53,601 64,801 Deferred liabilities 99,330 103,282 115,543 Deferred taxes 6,560 7,372 14,613 Total Noncurrent Liabilities 155,758 164,255 194,957 Commitments and Contingencies Shareholders' Equity: Preferred stock Common stock 1,292 1,275 1,295 Additional paid-in capital 471,458 468,806 453,999 Treasury stock, at cost (413,465) (413,465) (395,585) Retained earnings 601,801 599,810 553,466 Accumulated other comprehensive loss (182) (44) (31) Total Shareholders' Equity 660,904 656,382 613,144 $ 1,115,994 $ 1,087,605 $ 1,105,530 Chico's FAS, Inc. and Subsidiaries Condensed Consolidated Cash Flow Statements (Unaudited) (in thousands) Thirteen Weeks Ended May 5, 2018 April 29, 2017 Cash Flows from Operating Activities: Net income $ 29,004 $ 33,619 Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash provided by operating activities: Depreciation and amortization 22,445 25,145 Loss on disposal and impairment of property and equipment 1,031 513 Deferred income taxes (838) 4,905 Share-based compensation expense 5,055 5,794 Deferred rent and lease credits (5,594) (4,358) Changes in assets and liabilities: Inventories (20,875) (41,516) Prepaid expenses and other current assets 12,270 5,955 Accounts payable 9,253 6,358 Accrued and other liabilities 10,143 (19,724) Net cash provided by operating activities 61,894 16,691 Cash Flows from Investing Activities: Purchases of marketable securities (9,123) (8,491) Proceeds from sale of marketable securities 7,965 8,259 Purchases of property and equipment, net (9,991) (9,531) Net cash used in investing activities (11,149) (9,763) Cash Flows from Financing Activities: Payments on borrowings (3,750) (5,000) Proceeds from issuance of common stock 605 1,062 Dividends paid (11,065) (10,862) Repurchase of common stock (9,498) Payments of tax withholdings related to share-based awards (2,991) (5,599) Net cash used in financing activities (17,201) (29,897) Effects of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents (68) (24) Net increase (decrease) in cash and cash equivalents 33,476 (22,993) Cash and Cash Equivalents, Beginning of period 160,071 142,135 Cash and Cash Equivalents, End of period $ 193,547 $ 119,142 Supplemental Detail on Net Income Per Share Calculation In accordance with accounting guidance, unvested share-based payment awards that include non-forfeitable rights to dividends, whether paid or unpaid, are considered participating securities. As a result, such awards are required to be included in the calculation of earnings per common share pursuant to the "two-class" method. For the Company, participating securities are comprised entirely of unvested restricted stock awards and performance-based restricted stock units ("PSUs") that have met their relevant performance criteria. Net income per share is determined using the two-class method when it is more dilutive than the treasury stock method. Basic net income per share is computed by dividing net income available to common shareholders by the weighted-average number of common shares outstanding during the period, including participating securities. Diluted net income per share reflects the dilutive effect of potential common shares from non-participating securities such as stock options, PSUs and restricted stock units. For the thirteen weeks ended May 5, 2018 and April 29, 2017, potential common shares were excluded from the computation of diluted EPS to the extent they were antidilutive. The following unaudited table sets forth the computation of basic and diluted net income per share shown on the face of the accompanying condensed consolidated statements of income (in thousands, except per share amounts): Thirteen Weeks Ended May 5, 2018 April 29, 2017 Numerator Net income $ 29,004 $ 33,619 Net income and dividends declared allocated to participating securities (714) (741) Net income available to common shareholders $ 28,290 $ 32,878 Denominator Weighted average common shares outstanding basic 125,277 126,050 Dilutive effect of non-participating securities 39 53 Weighted average common and common equivalent shares outstanding diluted 125,316 126,103 Net Income Per Share: Basic $ 0.23 $ 0.26 Diluted $ 0.23 $ 0.26 Chico's FAS, Inc. and Subsidiaries Store Count and Square Footage Thirteen Weeks Ended May 5, 2018 (Unaudited) February 3, 2018 New Stores Closures May 5, 2018 Store Count: Chico's frontline boutiques 568 (4) 564 Chico's outlets 120 120 Chico's Canada 4 4 WHBM frontline boutiques 404 (1) 403 WHBM outlets 69 69 WHBM Canada 6 6 Soma frontline boutiques 270 (4) 266 Soma outlets 19 19 Total Chico's FAS, Inc. 1,460 (9) 1,451 February 3, 2018 New Stores Closures Other changes in SSF May 5, 2018 Net Selling Square Footage (SSF): Chico's frontline boutiques 1,555,671 (11,458) (1,604) 1,542,609 Chico's outlets 302,088 302,088 Chico's Canada 9,695 9,695 WHBM frontline boutiques 939,606 (2,345) 670 937,931 WHBM outlets 143,963 143,963 WHBM Canada 14,891 14,891 Soma frontline boutiques 511,989 (7,335) 504,654 Soma outlets 35,541 35,541 Total Chico's FAS, Inc. 3,513,444 (21,138) (934) 3,491,372 As of May 5, 2018, the Company also sold merchandise through 94 international franchise locations. SOURCE Chico's FAS, Inc. Related Links http://www.chicos.com SOUDERTON, Pa., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CHL Systems is pleased to announce they are now an Authorized System Integrator (ASI) for FANUC America. FANUC is the global leader in automation for manufacturing. Their innovative robotic solutions are world renowned and offer superior performance. As a leading manufacturer and integrator for the past 60+ years, CHL Systems provides a unique level of expertise for primary and secondary material handling solutions for general foods, meat, poultry, baking, confectionery, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals. CHL Systems now becomes part of the FANUC Authorized System Integrator (ASI) Network for automation systems. The combination of reliable and intelligent robots, process expertise, and support services, will allow CHL Systems to offer its customers a seamless level of automation to their production lines. End users will see an increase in productivity, reduction in costs, increased profits, and a safer workplace environment. Both companies are excited about the possibilities this partnership provides. "FANUC is pleased to welcome CHL Systems to our network of Authorized System Integrators and the level of experience and expertise they offer material handling customers. It's a perfect combination of CHL Systems' expert system capabilities and FANUC's world-renowned robotic automation. We're really looking forward to working together to provide productivity-enhancing solutions to a wide range of customers," Dick Motley, director, Authorized System Integrators, FANUC America. "We look forward to collaborating with FANUC on future projects and leveraging their experience in the world of robotic automation. This new relationship further enhances the commitment we have to our core mission, which is to give life to intelligent ideas through superior engineering, effective technology, and highly skilled craftsmanship," Mike Giagnacova, Chief Operating Officer, CHL Systems. About FANUC AMERICA: FANUC America Corporation is a subsidiary of FANUC CORPORATION in Japan, and provides industry-leading robotics, CNC systems, and factory automation. FANUC's innovative technologies and proven expertise help manufacturers in the Americas maximize productivity, reliability and profitability. FANUC embraces a culture of "Service First" which means that customer service is our highest priority. We are committed to supplying our customers with parts and support for the life of their FANUC products. FANUC America is headquartered at 3900 W. Hamlin Road, Rochester Hills, MI 48309, and has facilities in: Atlanta; Boston; Charlotte; Chicago; Cincinnati; Cleveland; Houston; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; Montreal; Pine Brook, NJ; Pontiac, MI; San Francisco; Seattle; Toronto; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Sao Paulo, and Manaus, Brazil; and Aguascalientes, Monterrey, and Queretaro, Mexico. For more information, please call: 888-FANUC-US (888-326-8287) or visit our website: www.fanucamerica.com. Also, connect with us on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram. Contact: Cathy Powell, 248-377-7570 Public Relations & Communications Mgr. About CHL SYSTEMS: Established in 1957, CHL Systems provides process automation equipment and services for production facilities. Using extensive experience, developed from a multitude of industrial applications with unique production requirements, CHL Systems brings a practical and cost effective approach to integrating the most advanced technology and services to the world of production automation. As a customer driven organization, and an ISO 9001:2015 registered company, our first priority continues to be providing top quality products and services for every application. To find out more, please visit www.chlsystems.com. Also, connect on YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook. Contact: Jeff Bowman, 215-723-7284 Marketing Manager SOURCE CHL Systems Related Links http://www.chlsystems.com Mrs. Demos previously served as Vice President of AKT for over ten years where she gained extensive experience in real estate management. She has overseen financial analysis for major investment projects, worked to acquire requisite permits and entitlements, managed contracts, and guided the company's strategic planning process. "Chrysa has a proven track record of extraordinary success in our company and we are fortunate that she will lead our family group of companies into the next generation," said Angelo K. Tsakopoulos, the Founder and Chairman of AKT. "She has the vision, tenacity, integrity, and intellect to lead AKT, not only for the benefit of the family and its partners, but also for the benefit of our community and our state." Chrysa Demos said, "I am honored to lead AKT and I will always strive to uphold the very high standards of integrity that our founder, my father, Angelo K. Tsakopoulos, has instilled. We will continue to create projects that serve the needs of our neighbors, and partner with the public and private sectors so that our region continues to be a vibrant and dynamic community for all." ABOUT AKT AKT was founded by Angelo K. Tsakopoulos who completed his first subdivision in 1964 and has since become a civic fixture in Sacramento and national leader in real estate. AKT has developed over 60,000 homes and 30 million square feet of office space in Northern and Central California. AKT maintains a large commercial building portfolio and manages approximately 20,000 acres of farmland. ABOUT CHRYSA TSAKOPOULOS DEMOS Mrs. Demos is a graduate of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a Masters of Business Administration in Finance and Management. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. Mrs. Demos is active in numerous charitable endeavors, including the creation of the Pabna Association for General Education that created, built, and funded a primary school in a rural village in Bangladesh on the condition that girls be afforded equal enrollment opportunities. Mrs. Demos is also active in the UC Davis MIND Institute that studies autism and in the International Orthodox Christian Charities. She speaks Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Bengali and resides in Sacramento, California with her husband and two young boys. SOURCE AKT Investments Inc. Guwahati : As a part of Betrayal Day observed by All India Congress Committee (AICC) against Modi governments failure to control fuel price, Assam Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) on Tuesday took out a bicycle rally in Guwahati. Former Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, APCC president and Rajya Sabha MP Ripun Bora, party leaders, workers and supporters also took part in the protest rally. The Assam Pradesh Congress Committee reminded Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP's 2014 Lok Sabha election slogan 'Bahut hui mehangai ki maar, ab ki baar BJP ki sarkar'. The protest was led by APCC president Ripun Bora and over 1000 party workers participated in the protest rally. APCC president and MP Ripun Bora said that, Assam Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) today has took out a bicycle rally to protest against the Union governments failure to control fuel price. In past four years Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Union government is totally failed in all rounds of corner. So APCC has observed Vishwasghat Diwas (the day of betrayal) against four years of BJPs misrule, Ripun Bora said. On the other hand, former Assam Chief Minister and senior Congress leader Tarun Gogoi said that, prices of petrol and diesel rise every day. Crude oil price in international market has come down, but petrol-diesel price in India rises every day. People had voted him (Prime Minister Narendra Modi), but he betrayed the people of the country, Gogoi said. Chubb's New Masterpiece Cyber Protection designed to safeguard clients in an evolving cyber landscape WHITEHOUSE STATION, N.J., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Chubb has launched Masterpiece Cyber Protection to help keep clients safe in today's digital world. As a supplement to a Masterpiece Homeowners policy, Chubb's new Cyber coverage offers individuals and families in North America enhanced protections for cyberattacks that lead to extortion and ransomware, financial loss, cyberbullying, cyber disruption, and breach of privacy. Additionally, clients benefit from discounted access to third-party resources, with tools ranging from how to secure network and mobile devices to how to spot signs of online manipulation. Taken together, the policy is designed to help clients proactively protect themselves from cyber risks and minimize their loss if the unexpected happens. According to Chubb research, while the majority of Americans are concerned about being impacted by a cyber breach, only a small percentage are actually taking the right steps to protect themselves and their families. "While technology has enhanced our lives in countless ways, it also allows us to bring our work life home and our home life to work, thereby increasing our chances of falling victim to cyber crimes, which continue to occur at an alarming rate," said Michael Tanenbaum, Executive Vice President, Chubb's North America Cyber Practice. "Simply clicking on the wrong email or downloading a new app could put your personal data in the wrong hands. Personal cyber protection is no longer a 'nice to have,' but rather a 'must have.' Our new policy is designed with this need in mind and will provide clients with peace of mind knowing they are protected against cyber threats." Key benefits of a Chubb's Masterpiece Cyber Protection policy include: Protection against threats to release your personal information, holding your files for ransom, and destruction of your personal network; Protection provided against loss of account funds from a cyber attack and related expenses; Assistance dealing with online harassment from cyberbullying; Support dealing with cyberattacks that prohibit you from accessing your home, or attacks interrupting a small business you operate from your home; Aid in dealing with theft, loss or unauthorized access to personal data from a cyber attack; Assistance in resolving identity theft. Available to clients with a Masterpiece homeowners policy, the cyber policy is currently available in Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Michigan, Louisiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. It will be rolled out to additional states and in Canada throughout 2018 and into 2019 for all North American Masterpiece clients. About Chubb: Chubb is the world's largest publicly traded property and casualty insurance company, and the largest commercial insurer in the United States. With operations in 54 countries and territories, Chubb provides commercial and personal property and casualty insurance, personal accident and supplemental health insurance, reinsurance and life insurance to a diverse group of clients. As an underwriting company, we assess, assume and manage risk with insight and discipline. We service and pay our claims fairly and promptly. The company is also defined by its extensive product and service offerings, broad distribution capabilities, exceptional financial strength and local operations globally. Parent company Chubb Limited is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: CB) and is a component of the S&P 500 index. Chubb maintains executive offices in Zurich, New York, London and other locations, and employs approximately 31,000 people worldwide. Additional information can be found at: chubb.com. Chubb Insurance Company of Canada has offices in Toronto, Calgary, Montreal and Vancouver and provides its products and services through licensed insurance brokers across Canada. For additional information, visit: chubb.com/ca. About Chubb Cyber Chubb is a leader in insuring cyber risk. Combining industry-leading underwriting and expert third-party incident response services, Chubb offers policies that are tailored to the specific needs and risks of its clients to ensure they are ready with the tools and expertise necessary should a cyber incident occur. Moving swiftly to minimize data loss and moving rapidly to connect clients with the proper parties is only part of what Chubb delivers. Keeping an eye on the ever-evolving cyber security landscape, Chubb looks for ways to do more for its clients by offering cutting-edge products and holistic services to each and every client. SOURCE Chubb Related Links https://www2.chubb.com/us-en IRVING, Texas, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Cicis invites guests with culinary wanderlust to "Buffet the Italian Way" this summer with the launch of two new Italian-style Flatbread Pizzas, new Caesar Salad and the Italian Lemon Creme Bar, available for a limited time on its famous unlimited pizza, pasta, salad and dessert buffet. Buffet Italiano is the latest destination on the flavor expedition for Cicis fans, following the New York-style pizzas and dessert earlier this year. The most recent innovation across the entire buffet continues to emphasize the brand's focus on bringing guests fresh, high-quality menu items while focusing on value, variety and fun. Cicis' new Italian Flatbread Pizzas feature crispy flatbread crust brushed with garlic butter in the Italian tradition, and are available in Chicken Parmesan, with breaded, all-white meat chicken, and Bruschetta Flatbread, with seasoned tomatoes finished with basil and a balsamic glaze drizzle. New on the salad bar, Cicis Caesar Salad is tossed with rustic-cut seasoned croutons and shredded Parmesan and can be topped with new creamy Caesar dressing. For a sweet ending, the new Lemon Creme Bar features a flaky, buttery shortbread crust with a light, bright lemony cream cheese filling, a drizzle of sweet lemon glaze and a dusting of powdered sugar on top. "This summer, we're inviting guests on a flavor journey to Italy without ever leaving their hometown, to enjoy a taste of the good life, Italian Style," said Cicis Chief Marketing Officer Billie Jo Waara. "Our Buffet Italiano items bring the flavors of fresh herbs, savory garlic, ripe tomatoes and zesty lemons to our buffet for guests to savor and enjoy with family and friends all summer long." Cicis also plans to celebrate Buffet Italiano with guests on social media. From May 28 to June 30, fans will be encouraged to share how their families are living it up "Italian Style," for a chance to win free swag and cool prizes. One lucky winner will be featured on Cicis' social channels as well. About Cicis Founded in 1983, Irving, Texas-based Cicis invented the Unlimited Pizza Buffet concept, offering guests a wide variety of pizzas, including traditional crust and flatbreads, along with pastas, salads and desserts for dine-in, to-go and catering. With more than 430 restaurants in 32 states, Cicis has been ranked by Technomic as No. 1 in "most craveable pizza chains," and Entrepreneur recognized Cicis on its Franchise 500 list in 2015. For more information about Cicis, visit cicis.com or Facebook.com/cicis. For franchising information, contact Michael Iglesias at [email protected] or 972-745-9313 or visit franchise.cicis.com. Media Contact: Nikki Richardson or Alvin Jordan [email protected] or [email protected] 817-329-3257 SOURCE Cicis Related Links http://www.cicis.com NEW YORK, May 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CIT Group Inc. (NYSE: CIT) today announced that its Healthcare Finance business, part of the Commercial Finance division, has closed on a $15.3 million loan to finance the purchase of a San Diego, Calif., medical office building. The Coast Medical Center is a four-story medical office building located on nearly two acres, roughly 10 miles from downtown San Diego and less than a mile from two neighboring hospitals. Tenants offer a wide range of medical services, including surgery, urology, orthopedics and dentistry. The borrower is a joint venture between Kayne Anderson Real Estate and MB Real Estate. "CIT Healthcare Finance has backed several of our acquisitions in recent years by providing senior debt capital in support of our growing medical office portfolio," said Joe Magliochetti, senior vice president and managing director with MB Real Estate. "CIT is very proficient in healthcare real estate and has a specialized medical office financing program. Their combined healthcare and real estate expertise is evident in their very efficient underwriting process and ability to close in a timely fashion. We highly value this strategic relationship." "We are pleased to continue supporting Kayne Anderson and MB Real Estate with financing as they add to their growing portfolio of medical office buildings," said William Douglass, managing director and group head of CIT's Healthcare Finance business. "As more care shifts from inpatient to outpatient, investment in medical office buildings continues to increase and our Healthcare Finance team is well positioned with the experience and market knowledge to quickly evaluate and execute transactions for our clients," Douglass added. CIT's Healthcare Finance business provides comprehensive financing and banking solutions to middle market healthcare companies across the U.S. By using a client-focused and industry-centric model, Healthcare Finance can tailor its products and services to help clients meet their needs for growth capital. About CIT Founded in 1908, CIT (NYSE: CIT) is a financial holding company with approximately $50 billion in assets as of March 31, 2018. Its principal bank subsidiary, CIT Bank, N.A., (Member FDIC, Equal Housing Lender) has approximately $30 billion of deposits and more than $40 billion of assets. CIT provides financing, leasing, and advisory services principally to middle-market companies and small businesses across a wide variety of industries. It also offers products and services to consumers through its Internet bank franchise and a network of retail branches in Southern California, operating as OneWest Bank, a division of CIT Bank, N.A. For more information, visit cit.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. CIT MEDIA RELATIONS: John M. Moran 212-461-5507 [email protected] SOURCE CIT Group Inc. Related Links http://www.cit.com DENVER, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Chipotle Mexican Grill (NYSE: CMG) is offering a special, one day, buy-one-get-one (BOGO) offer on Tuesday, June 5 to celebrate nurses across the country and their relentless hard work and dedication to their patients. All nurses with a valid nursing license or ID can receive a free burrito, burrito bowl, salad or order of tacos with the purchase of an entree of equal or greater value. This promotion is valid at all Chipotle locations in the U.S. and Canada from restaurant open to close that day. "Nurses are some of the most selfless people and make such significant contributions to our society day in and day out," said Laurie Schalow, chief communications officer at Chipotle. "Every year, we want to make sure we do a little something to make them feel appreciated and ensure all that they do doesn't go unnoticed." The BOGO is valid for all types of nurses, including RN, NP, CRNA, CNS, CNM, LVN, CNA and local equivalents or analogues who present valid identification, such as their nursing license or hospital or medical office nursing ID. There is a limit of one free entree item per eligible nurse. Redemption requires the purchase of a qualifying entree item of equal or greater value and is subject to availability. This offer may not be combined with other offers, discounts or coupons. ABOUT CHIPOTLE Steve Ells, founder and executive chairman, started Chipotle with the idea that food served fast did not have to be a typical fast food experience. Today, Chipotle continues to offer a focused menu of burritos, tacos, burrito bowls, and salads made from fresh, high-quality raw ingredients, prepared using classic cooking methods and served in an interactive style allowing people to get exactly what they want. Chipotle seeks out extraordinary ingredients that are not only fresh, but that are raised responsibly, with respect for the animals, land, and people who produce them. Chipotle prepares its food using real, wholesome ingredients and without the use of added colors, flavors or other additives typically found in fast food. Chipotle opened with a single restaurant in Denver in 1993 and now operates more than 2,400 restaurants. For more information, visit Chipotle.com. SOURCE Chipotle Mexican Grill Related Links http://www.chipotle.com THOUSAND OAKS, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Demand for entry-level business digital skills has never been greater, with many employers expecting basic proficiency in Microsoft Office applications, as well as professional communication skills. California's community colleges are the perfect place for students of all ages and from all backgrounds to receive those skills and more than 100,000 do each year. However, many of those students take one or two courses then move on if they lose interest or life gets in the way. California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce Community college leaders hope to retain students through a new cohort approach to the Business Information Worker (BIW) certificate and a key community partnership with the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce (CHCC). The BIW program, part of the Information Communication Technologies (ICT)-Digital Media sector, is offered at 86 community colleges across the state. The program is intended for students who are new to the professional world, as well as adult learners who need to refine or enhance existing skills. "The Business Information Worker program is one of the best guided pathway options the community colleges offer those looking to enter the workforce and for stranded or adult workers who need to refresh their skills in a technologically changing world," said Steve Wright, ICT-Digital Media Sector Navigator. Wright established a partnership with CHCC director Julian Canete, who is an avid community college supporter. Canete said the BIW program is exactly what chamber members need and will work with local chamber offices to recruit and support student cohorts starting this fall. "CHCC member businesses need employees with skills taught in the Business Information Worker pathway," Canete said. "We want to put the 'community' back in community college by giving students the foundational skills they need to be quickly hired by local employers." The cohort approach is being piloted at eight community colleges this fall. Students will complete required courses together and receive additional support to stay on track with their coursework and prepare for job interviews once they complete the program. The goal is to increase retention by creating communities of students who share similar goals and having them learn from each other, along with learning from the instructors. The CHCC will encourage local chambers to arrange monthly activities for BIW cohorts, including job readiness workshops and business tours. The chambers will also provide financial support for textbooks and other materials whenever possible. The BIW program is split into two stages, each taking two semesters to complete. The first tier focuses on Microsoft Office and other foundational skills, while the second expands to cover topics like marketing, design and project management. "With stages that build upon each other, students can take foundational classes that allow them to get a job in less than six months and take more advanced classes while they advance at work," Wright said. Amity Perry, a business education instructor at Cuesta College, said she's looking forward to seeing the outcomes that the BIW cohort program will provide to its students. "The BIW cohort model represents an innovative approach to providing students with hands-on experience and career support to help them prepare for careers in the field of office technology," Perry said. For more information on the BIW program, visit https://ict-dm.net/biw About Doing What Matters for Jobs and the Economy Strong Workforce Program Doing What MATTERS for jobs and the economy is a four-pronged framework to respond to the call of our nation, state, and regions to close the skills gap. The four prongs are: Give Priority for Jobs and the Economy Make Room for Jobs and the Economy Promote Student Success Innovate for Jobs and the Economy. The goals of Doing What Matters for Jobs and the Economy are to supply in-demand skills for employers, create relevant career pathways and stackable credentials, promote student success, and get Californians into open jobs. About California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce The California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce (CHCC) is the premier and largest regional ethnic business organization in the nation, promoting the economic growth and development of Hispanic entrepreneurs and California's emerging businesses. Through its network of more than 65 Hispanic chambers and business associations throughout California, the CHCC represents the interest of more than 800,000 Hispanic business owners in California. For more information, visit www.cahcc.com. Contact: Steve Wright (805) 496-8583 [email protected] SOURCE ICT - Digital Media Related Links https://ict-dm.net CHICAGO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Congratulations go out to all those who participated in this momentous event, their families and all those who supported them. The North South Foundation is proud to recognize the 2018 first place winner, Venkat Ranjan 13, of California, second place winner Anoushka Buddhikot 13, and third place winner Vishal Sareddy 14. Anoushka Buddhikot, 2nd Prize Winner Vishal Sareddy, 3rd Prize Winner In the tradition of North South Foundation, every participant is a winner. The North South Foundation is excited and very proud to announce that 7 out of the top 10 places at the 2018 National Geographic Bee Finals were North South children. Once again, the strong effort of the children and the work of the members of this organization resulted in 11 out of 54 invitees for the finals this year contest having gained their experience through the efforts of the foundation. North South Foundation, (a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization) is a novel leader in providing opportunities to children of Indian origin to prepare for contests like Spelling Bee and Geographic Bee. Dr. Chitturi, who is the founder-president of the North South Foundation, said that Foundation is proud of all the North South children for their accomplishments, and congratulated them for their hard work and wished them success in all of their future endeavors. "These contests help children improve their knowledge and analytical skills and self-confidence and empower them to become better citizens for tomorrow," Dr. Chitturi said. The North South Foundation will continue to be there to work and help develop today's young minds into to tomorrow leaders of the world. Over 2.6 million students hailing from 10,000 schools across the US participated in the National Geographic Bee this year. The 2018 Finals took place on May 23 in Washington, DC with increasing excitement as seen during the oral rounds of the contest. The main purpose of this contest is to encourage further understanding of our planet. The knowledge so gained will in turn make children become better citizens of the world. Enhanced understanding of our planet empowers generation of meaningful solutions for a more sustainable future. About North South Foundation: Established in 1989 and entirely run by volunteers, North South Foundation's mission is to develop human resources. They accomplish this by giving scholarships to meritorious but needy students in India entering college, regardless of religion, gender, caste or creed. Further the organizations promote excellence in human endeavor by organizing educational contests for children in the United States; and help people achieve success by giving hope to those who may have none. The Foundation has awarded over 20,000 college scholarships in India so far. For more information, visit www.northsouth.org. Contact: Jatin V Mehta, Director of Media & Outreach 856-203-4548 / [email protected] SOURCE North South Foundation Related Links http://www.northsouth.org SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The California State Senate rejected secrecy about physician sexual assault and other doctor misconduct today when it voted 28-3 to support SB 1448 by Senator Jerry Hill (San Mateo) to require physicians disclose to their patients when they are on probation for causing patient harm. The California Medical Association opposed SB 1448 despite amendments taken by Senator Hill to narrow the bill to require disclosure only by physicians on probation for the most serious violations involving sexual misconduct, drug abuse, a criminal conviction or overprescribing that results in patient harm. "28 Senators had the courage today to stand up to the medical lobby and say #TimesUp for physician sexual assault. Today's vote says the California Senate will not stand for secrecy around sexual assault and other egregious doctor misconduct that causes patient harm," said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog. Doctors are required to tell their insurance company and the hospital or clinic where they work when their misconduct lands them on probation, but their patients are kept in the dark. Although California mandates that doctor disciplinary information be disclosed online, the requirement is meaningless to patients who don't know they should look, said Consumer Watchdog. "Californians are still reeling from the latest revelation that the University of Southern California chose to hide allegations from dozens, if not hundreds, of USC students that they were sexually assaulted by the school gynecologist, allowing him to continue practicing to assault other patients. It's shameful that doctors' lobbyists at the California Medical Association continue to oppose the basic transparency required by SB 1448. Patients have a right to know so they can make informed medical decisions and be able to protect themselves. We applaud the 28 Senators who backed SB 1448 for placing patient safety above protecting doctors," said Balber. The Senate Floor vote was 28-3. The 28 Senators who voted to lift the veil of secrecy and protect patients were Senators: Atkins, Beall, Bradford, Cannella, De Leon, Dodd, Galgiani, Glazer, Hernandez, Hertzberg, Hill, Hueso, Jackson, Lara, Leyva, McGuire, Mitchell, Monning, Morrell, Newman, Nguyen, Portantino, Roth, Skinner, Stern, Wieckowski, Wiener and Wilk. The 3 Senators who voted to preserve secrecy for dangerous doctors were: Anderson, Gaines and Vidak. Eight Senators did not vote: Allen, Bates, Berryhill, Fuller, Moorlach, Nielsen, Pan and Stone. An average of 600 doctors are on probation at any given time in California, for reasons ranging from sexual assault, to overprescribing narcotics to gross negligence that causes a patient death. SB 1448 would require disclosure of an estimated 100 cases or less per year. Read the Los Angeles Times editorial in support of the bill: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-doctors-probation-20180521-story.html Download Consumer Watchdog's letter of support for SB 1448: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2018-04/CWSB1448Support.pdf Earlier this year, patients who were assaulted by their physician testified in Sacramento. Karie H's doctor was sentenced to prison in April for sexually assaulting five patients. She testified: "I contacted the Medical Board after the incident and was told that at least two other women had filed complaints. But no action was taken. He was also on probation for other misconduct including overprescribing and gross negligence, but I was never told. If I had known I might not be a victim. So I ask you to support this bill and make sure patients have the information they need so they can make an informed decision. It would protect other patients from going through what I and too many other women went through at the hands of someone we should have been able to trust." Olympic gymnasts Jordyn Wieber and Jamie Dantzscher, former US national gymnastics team member Jeanette Antolin and star athlete Tiffany Thomas Lopez, who played softball for Michigan State University, also spoke in support of SB 1448 earlier this month. Their testimony in the case of Larry Nassar helped bring the disgraced doctor to justice. Ms. Wieber, a 2012 Olympic gold medalist, said on April 9: "My mom is a nurse and I was raised to respect and trust doctors we all are and almost every doctor deserves that trust. But when they don't, the results can be devastating. Not one state requires doctors on probation to give their patients noticeCalifornia can and should be the first." See the video of their press conference in support of the bill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S38X2-66rko&feature=youtu.be SOURCE Consumer Watchdog Related Links http://www.consumerwatchdog.org TUCSON, Ariz., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Now in its second year, World Cord Blood Day will unite cord blood experts from around the globe on November 15th, 2018 to educate parents, healthcare professionals and the public about the current uses of cord blood stem cells as well as ground-breaking research in this area of medicine. More than 35,000 cord blood transplants have been performed worldwide since 1988 to treat over 80 life-threatening diseases including sickle cell anemia, thalassemia, lymphoma and leukemia. In the emerging field of regenerative medicine, cord blood holds great promise in treating autism, cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, diabetes, stroke, spinal cord injury and more. Likewise, scientists are exploring cord blood's exciting potential in immunotherapy. Yet, cord blood is still thrown away as medical waste in the majority of births worldwide. World Cord Blood Day 2018 Cord Blood Education: Free on-line conference, local events worldwide and more. Organized by Save the Cord Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit, World Cord Blood Day 2018 is officially sponsored by Quick Specialized Healthcare Logistics, recognized leader in medical shipping and logistics. Inspiring Partners for this event include the Cord Blood Association, Be the Match (NMDP), World Marrow Donor Association (WMDA-Netcord), AABB and FACT. As Inspiring Partners, these organizations will provide industry and medical expertise. In addition to events worldwide, World Cord Blood Day will feature a free virtual conference. The program will include introductory presentations for the public as well as academic lectures specifically designed for health professionals, led by renowned researchers and transplant doctors. A vibrant social media campaign (#WCBD18 #WorldCordBloodDay) will help build awareness globally. "On November 15th, you can be a part of the global cord blood movement. Join us and use your voice to educate and expand cord blood awareness in your community," said Charis Ober, Executive Director of Save the Cord Foundation. "Quick has been helping save lives with global priority logistics services for cord blood, blood products, bone marrow and personalized medicine therapies since the industry's inception. Our 36 years of experience working with the life science community ensures product security, integrity and chain of custody. With the growing number of promising medical therapies currently under investigation and the encouraging results, it is clear that cord blood stem cells could change the landscape of human healthcare. As the industry logistics leader, we are proud to be the Official Sponsor of World Cord Blood Day 2018," said Dave Murphy, Executive VP of Quick's Life Science Division. Visit www.WorldCordBloodDay.org to learn how you can participate on-line or host an event locally in your community. World Cord Blood Day is a free event, open to the public. About Save the Cord Foundation Save the Cord Foundation (a 501c3 non-profit) was established to advance cord blood education. The Foundation provides non-commercial information to parents, health professionals and the public regarding methods for saving cord blood, as well as current applications using cord blood and the latest research. Learn more at www.SaveTheCordFoundation.org. About Quick Specialized Healthcare Logistics Quick is the trusted logistics leader serving the Healthcare and Life Science community for over 36 years. Quick safely transports human organs and tissue for transplant or research, blood, blood products, cord blood, bone marrow, medical devices and personalized medicine, 24/7/365. Quick's specially trained experts work with hospitals, laboratories, blood banks and medical processing centers, and utilize the safest routes to ensure integrity, temperature control and chain of custody throughout the transportation process. Learn more at www.quickhealthcare.aero. Media contact: Charis Ober [email protected] (520) 419-0269 SOURCE Save the Cord Foundation The Moutai delegation met with agencies of the NSW state government including the Legislative Assembly, as well as with the Consulate-General of China in Sydney. Deputy general manager of Moutai Group and chairman of Moutai's subsidiary Xijiu Zhang Deqin expressed his intention to explore collaborative opportunities and seek support from government agencies, businesses and overseas Chinese in Australia, laying a solid foundation for Moutai's global expansion. "We will push ahead with Moutai's global expansion, which also needs everyone's support across the board," Mr. Zhang said. The NSW government: Moutai is a major contributor to Sino-Australian friendship 11:30 am at the NSW Parliament. The Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council were well prepared for the arrival of the Moutai delegation. After completing what was on the agenda for that morning, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian met the Moutai delegation in the parliamentary chamber. "We are grateful for Moutai's visit. We look forward to not only expanding our business ties and cooperation, but also deepening the friendship and cooperation between the Chinese and Australian people," Premier Berejiklian said. "We wish Moutai's promotional event in Sydney great success." After the meeting, Ms Berejiklian presented the award that she had personally signed, naming Moutai as a China-Australia Friendship Meritorious Enterprise, to Mr. Zhang, saying, "Please extend my best wishes to the people in Guizhou." After giving a short introduction on the development of Moutai over the years to the attendees, Mr. Zhang expressed his gratitude for Ms. Berejiklian's enthusiastic support, "We are grateful for the honor you and the NSW government have bestowed on Moutai, and we also sincerely welcome you to visit Guizhou and particularly Moutai's facilities there." NSW Legislative Assembly member Dr. Geoff Lee prepared an authentic luncheon for the members of the Moutai delegation at the NSW Parliament House. Geoff Lee is half Chinese, with his forebears on his father's side having emigrated to Australia a century ago. Recalling his first visit to China in 1986, Dr. Lee said China has experienced dramatic changes in the ensuing decades. "Moutai, a well-known brand in China, has made significant contributions to the economic ties between China and Australia." "Your visit coincides with the ongoing Vivid Sydney," Dr. Lee said. "We welcome Moutai to seek further development in Australia and particularly Sydney." Australia's economy is closely related to China's development, and cooperation is critical to the economic development of the two countries. "I drank Moutai when I went to Harbin and Shanghai for a holiday during the Chinese New Year, and it was an unforgettable memory," he commented. According to local dealers, Moutai is quickly gaining popularity among the mainstream population in Sydney. During the luncheon, President of the NSW Legislative Council John Ajaka came to meet the guests from Moutai and learn the details of Moutai's promotional event in Sydney. He invited Mr. Zhang to his office and pointed to a cabinet containing many wine bottles, saying, "I have collected many wines from around the world. I've had Moutai and it's quite amazing." Chinese Consul General in Sydney: I look forward to Moutai making more friends in Australia and giving an overall introduction to Moutai culture 3:30 pm at the Consulate-General of China in Sydney. "Moutai, the national liquor brand of China, has made great contributions to China's friendly ties with other countries. At the Consulate-General, we know that Moutai is world-renowned," Chinese Consul General in Sydney Gu Xiaojie said in his opening speech when meeting the Moutai delegation. "Moutai's promotional event in Sydney is very meaningful and will become a major milestone in introducing the culture of Moutai to Australia." Mr. Gu said that Australia is a multicultural country and it will be helpful for Moutai to expand its global influence by opening the market here. "I hope Moutai can make more friends here and introduce the culture of Moutai to all walks of life." On behalf of Moutai Group chairman and general manager Li Baofang, Mr. Zhang gave an introduction on Moutai's developments and corporate social responsibilities to Chinese diplomats. "We aim to bring Chinese traditional culture to Australia by promoting the culture of Moutai here," Mr. Zhang said. "Moutai's tens of thousands of employees, including my predecessors, attach great importance to traditional culture, and cherish and are committed to carrying on the legacy of the traditional craftsmanship of our ancestors. I believe that the reverence for and dedication we have given to the preservation of the traditions are key to Moutai's success." Moutai is one of the companies with a long history that has done an excellent job at being an inheritor of Chinese civilization. "We have hundreds of thousands of tons of old liquor in stock. While adhering to strict quality systems and cultural inheritance, we also are continually developing our technical skills in a move to enhance overall quality," Mr. Zhang added. "With the economic development that has taken place in China over recent years, Moutai has become the world's number one liquor maker by market capitalization and the largest liquor company in China." "Moutai's determination in protecting and taking responsibility for Chinese traditional culture is commendable," Mr. Gu noted. "The Consulate-General of China in Sydney will fully assist Chinese companies in expanding globally and support the promotional efforts on behalf of Moutai Group in New South Wales." Economic and cultural exchanges can deepen the understanding between the people of two countries. Australia is home to more than one million overseas Chinese who form a hardworking and welcoming community that enjoys a good reputation locally, creating good conditions for close ties between the two countries. SOURCE Kweichow Moutai Co.,Ltd ROCHESTER, N.Y., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The growing aging population has given way to the $7.6 trillion 'Longevity Economy', spurring partnerships across several industries. To foster such collaboration, the d.health Summit will convene thought leaders across healthcare, finance, technology and policy on Wednesday, June 6 at the State Room in Boston, MA. One of the most acclaimed conferences on aging is meets in Boston, June 6, 2018. The fourth annual d.health Summit will bring together 250+ executives from tech, healthcare & policy to revolutionize aging. Learn more at www.dhealthsummit.org Now in its fourth year, the d.health Summit will be held in Boston, the birthplace of the American Revolution and ranked among the nation's best cities for successful aging. Boston made one of the earliest commitments to become an age-friendly city in an age-friendly state and blazes this trail under the leadership of d.health speaker Alice Bonner, Massachusetts' Secretary of Elder Affairs. Keynote speakers Dr. Christine Cassel, Presidential Chair and Visiting Professor at the University of California San Francisco, will share her insights on the power of the aging demographic and Dr. Troyen Brennan, Executive VP & Chief Medical Officer of CVS Health will discuss retail management of population health. "Policymakers, and to some degree economists, see a huge burden" in the aging of the Baby Boomers, says Dr. Cassel. "In fact, they ought to be seeing a huge opportunity. It's not a niche market. More collaboration among disciplines is really important, and d.health has been at the forefront of thinking about it in this way," says Dr. Cassel. d.health speakers include top leaders from AARP, Alliance for Connected Care, American Well, Call9, Cityblock, Flare Capital Partners, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Johns Hopkins, Longevity Venture Advisors, MIT AgeLab, National Association of Area Agencies on Aging, Partners HealthCare, Wall Street Journal, and WelbeHealth. A full list of sessions and topics is outlined in the d.health agenda. "It's really a constellation of the top thought leaders around," says Dr. Joseph Kvedar, d.health Advisory Board member and VP of Connected Health at Partners Healthcare in Boston, "It's so eclectic in a really positive way, and inevitably when you bring people like that together, new concepts and ideas fall out that wouldn't have if you hadn't brought them together." As a lead up to the 2018 d.health Summit, participants are invited to attend a pre-Summit event, Aging & Technology: An Intimate Conversation with Thought Leaders at Boston's Seaport Hotel from 3:00pm to 5:30pm on Tuesday, June 5. Hosted by Dr. Kvedar, and the Personal Connected Health Alliance, the event will focus on the latest insights, innovations and initiatives in healthy aging. For the second consecutive year, the Summit will be co-hosted by West Health, a nationally recognized nonprofit organization dedicated to enabling seniors to successfully age in place. West Health will host a closed pre-summit session on June 5 and deliver an interactive briefing at the d.health Summit to share learnings from the session with thought leaders in the broader d.health community. Visiting Nurse Association Health Group (VNA Health Group) will make a breaking news announcement at the Summit, unveiling a new partnership for the first time to the d.health audience and attending press. Scheduled for mid-day, the briefing will outline a pilot program that leverages technology to better serve home health care operators and meet the needs of the aging. The 2018 d.health Expo will showcase innovative products and technologies from across the nation. Exhibitors include OrCam, a pioneer in the field of artificial vision, Unaliwear, whose Kanega watch leverages artificial intelligence to offer predictive, pre-emptive support, and Rendever, a virtual reality platform specifically designed for the 65+ population. The d.health Summit 2018, organized by the University of Rochester, will take place on Wednesday, June 6, 8am 6pm at the State Room, (60 State Street, 33rd Floor, Boston, MA 02109). Visit the d.health Summit website for more information and follow on Twitter @dhealth2018 or #dhealth2018. About the d.health Summit Bringing together world-class healthcare leaders, entrepreneurs, technology pioneers, policymakers, financiers and forward thinkers, the fourth annual d. the health Summit will focus on high engagement and networking as attendees learn, share and evaluate transformative approaches and create new partnerships to revolutionize successful aging. Visit the d.health Summit website for more information and follow on Twitter @dhealth2018 or #dhealth2018. Registration Information To register, click here. Requests for complimentary press registration can be directed to Anna Stevenson. d.health Summit 2018 Sponsors Acadia Pharmaceuticals, Biogen, American Well, John A. Hartford Foundation, Pfizer, Simon Business School, and VNA Health Group. SOURCE University of Rochester Guwahati : Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman arrived at Dimapur while on her maiden visit to the Armys Spear Corps Zone in Nagaland. At Dimapur, the Union Defence Minister was briefed by Lieutenant General Gopal R, AVSM, SM, General Officer Commanding Spear Corps on the progress of operations of the Corps which include counter terrorist as well as border management operations on the Indo-Myanmar Border in the North East States. On May 30, Nirmala Sitharaman will depart for forward areas of Nagaland along the Indo-Myanmar Border. Kohima based Defence PRO Colonel Chiranjeet Konwer said that, the Defence Minister will undertake a detailed assessment of the Border Guarding operations undertaken by Spear Corps and interact with officers and troops of the Assam Rifles operating along the border so as to make a firsthand assessment of the security situation there. During this visit to the forward areas, the Defence Minister will also meet and interact with the local people at these locations. After having visited the forward areas, Nirmala Sitharaman will revert to Delhi in the evening on the same day. NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Anthony Scriffignano, senior vice president and chief data scientist at Dun & Bradstreet, was recognized today as the U.S. Chief Data Officer of the Year 2018 by the CDO Club, the world's largest community of C-suite digital and data leaders. Dr. Scriffignano was presented with the award today after his keynote, "Digital Disruption: Evolve Or Fade, The Choice Is Ours," at the 6th annual NYC CDO Summit, hosted in the Roone Arledge auditorium at Columbia University in New York City by CDO Club founder David Mathison. Anthony Scriffignano Scriffignano is an internationally recognized data expert who leads a team of data scientists at Dun & Bradstreet, which provides commercial data, analytics, and insights to companies of all sizes around the world. With an extensive background in linguistics and advanced algorithms, Scriffignano holds multiple patents worldwide. He recently briefed the U.S. National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee regarding reports to the President on Big Data Analytics and Emerging Technologies Strategic Vision. He has also delivered keynote addresses and served as a forum panelist at major industry and academic events globally. "Data is the lifeblood of the online economy, and organizations now require people in leadership positions who can balance business requirements while providing strict controls over user privacy and security," remarked David Mathison. "Dun & Bradstreet is one of the world's most trusted sources of data and analytics, and Anthony's thought leadership continues to provide innovative, sound counsel to businesses and organizations as they navigate data challenges in today's global marketplace. Therefore, I am delighted to name Dr. Anthony Scriffignano as the U.S. Chief Data Officer of the Year for 2018," said Mathison. "We are living in the age where we will either be overwhelmed by the amount of data and the pace of change, or where we will learn to ask new questions and derive new insights that lead us to far better uses of our increasingly valuable data assets. That choice is most certainly in our power," said Scriffignano. Scriffignano has more than 40 years of experience in multiple industries and enterprise domains, and currently serves as SVP and Chief Data Scientist at Dun & Bradstreet. Since 2002 he has held various positions, including leading Global Data Strategy and Data Technology Development. Prior to Dun & Bradstreet, he was Senior Manager at Deloitte Consulting, and held IT, Developer, and Analyst roles at Tower Cranes America and Harrison Alloys, and also taught as Adjunct Professor at Seton Hall University. Dr. Scriffignano earned his BA and MA in Computer Science from Montclair State University; MBA from Columbia University Business School; and Ph.D. in Leadership and Change from Antioch University. Last year, the CDO Club named Transport for London's CDO Lauren Sager Weinstein the U.K. Chief Data Officer of the Year 2017, and IBM's Dr. Inderpal Bhandari the U.S. Chief Data Officer of the Year 2017. In 2016, the CDO Club gave the first-ever U.S. Chief Data Officer of the Year award to Dr. D.J. Patil, former Chief Data Scientist at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the first-ever Australian Chief Data Officer of the Year award to Simon Bligh, CEO of illion ANZ, in 2016. In addition to the Chief Data Officer of the Year award, the CDO Club has also given the Chief Digital Officer of the Year award to a dozen leading executives in the U.S., U.K., the EU, Japan, and Australia since 2013. About Dun & Bradstreet Dun & Bradstreet grows the most valuable relationships in business. By uncovering truth and meaning from data, we connect our customers with the prospects, suppliers, clients and partners that matter most, and have since 1841. Nearly ninety percent of the Fortune 500, and companies of every size around the world, rely on our data, insights and analytics. For more about Dun & Bradstreet, visit DNB.com. Twitter: @DnBUS About the CDO Club The CDO Club is the world's largest community of C-suite digital and data leaders. Founded in 2011, its 5,000+ registered members receive access to breaking news, original research, career development support, and networking opportunities. For more information, visit: http://CDOClub.com. About the CDO Summit Since 2013, the CDO Summit has been addressing the challenges and opportunities arising from big data, the cloud, digital disruption, and social and mobile media. CDO Summit gatherings include the very best digital and data strategists and practitioners on Earth, speaking in intimate, collegial, and supportive environments designed to encourage networking, learning, and knowledge-sharing. For more information, visit CDOSummit.com . Media Contacts: Michelle Oster Communications Manager CDO Club Email: [email protected] Tel +1 516 488-1143 ext. 7 SOURCE CDO Club WOBURN, Massachusetts, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- EarlySense, the market leader in contact-free continuous monitoring solutions across the healthcare care continuum, announced today it has signed a deal for exclusive global rights to a new version of the eCART predictive analytics score tool developed by Dr. Dana Edelson, Executive Medical Director of Rescue Care at the University of Chicago and expert in prediction and prevention of hospital cardiac arrest. The new 'Lite' tool, unveiled at the 2018 ATS International Conference, will be integrated into EarlySense's products and is the first ever scientifically validated early warning score to use only heart rate, respiratory rate and patient age, making it ideal for use in conjunction with continuous monitoring sensors. "Risk scoring is a critically important tool but is currently limited to complex multi-parameter tests and lab systems found in EMR systems. Combining Dr. Edelson's approach with real time data enhances true deterioration detection," said Avner Halperin, Co-founder and CEO of EarlySense. "Dr. Edelson is a pioneer in predictive analytics for patient deterioration, and we are pleased to collaborate with her to bring state-of-the-art data analytics to hospitals, post-acute care facilities and homes. Making cutting-edge predictive analytics practical for every institutional bed and every home will save countless lives." Dr. Edelson's clinical predictive analytics tool, eCART, was designed to identify risk of health deteriorations and cardiac arrests based on over 30 clinical data points per patient. It was developed using a data set of nearly 300,000 cases. The eCART tool has already been proven to improve care in hospitals and help clinicians achieve better outcomes, including lower mortality rates. "By working with EarlySense to adapt this hospital-proven predictive clinical score to be used with a streamlined set of data points, including continuously collected heart and respiratory parameters collected from the EarlySense bed sensors, we may be able to extend the predictive clinical score beyond the confines of the hospital and into post-acute and home environments. This in turn enables earlier intervention and prevention of patient deterioration and adverse events," explained Dr. Edelson. "The evolution of eCART as a tool across the care continuum with nearly comparable predictive accuracy as the original solution, is representative of how innovation is changing the healthcare landscape today and expanding care beyond the walls of a hospital." Used by healthcare facilities around the world, EarlySense assists clinicians in early detection of patient deterioration through the real time collection of vital signs while patients lie in bed or sit in a chair. The company's FDA-cleared systems leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data analytics to provide actionable health insights and improve clinical outcomes while enhancing the patient experience through their passive collection approach. EarlySense solutions have been proven to help prevent adverse events, including code blues which are a result of cardiac or respiratory arrest, preventable ICU transfers, patient falls, pressure ulcers, and hospital readmissions. About EarlySense EarlySense is the global leader in contact-free, continuous monitoring solutions for the healthcare continuum. Used worldwide in hospitals, post-acute care facilities, and homes, EarlySense assists clinicians in early detection of patient deterioration. The solution has been proven to help prevent adverse events, including code blues which are a result of cardiac or respiratory arrest, preventable ICU transfers, patient falls, pressure ulcers, and hospital readmissions. EarlySense's FDA-cleared solutions leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data analytics to provide actionable health insights and improve clinical outcomes. The company has partnered with leading global technology companies including Samsung, Welch Allyn, iFit and Beurer. EarlySense is based in Ramat Gan, Israel and Woburn, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.earlysense.com. Follow EarlySense on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Media Contact: Ellie Hanson Finn Partners +1-929-222-8006 [email protected] SOURCE EarlySense CYPRESS, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Significant progress is being made in the fight against cancer, which has seen a 26 percent decrease in the death rate from 1991 to 2015. Despite this progress, 609,640 Americans are expected to die of cancer in 2018, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS). To support cancer research and to provide programs and services for those experiencing a cancer diagnosis, Earth Friendly Products, the maker of ECOS environmentally friendly cleaners, today announced a year-long partnership with ACS. A longtime supporter of ACS and its Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walks, Earth Friendly Products has committed $100,000 to ACS and created the "Go Green for Pink" campaign. From September 1 through October 31, 2018, Earth Friendly Products will contribute $1 to ACS breast cancer programs and research for every 100-ounce or larger bottle of ECOS laundry detergent sold. "We're so thrilled to expand our partnership with the American Cancer Society this year," says Kelly Vlahakis-Hanks, president and CEO of Earth Friendly Products. "Fighting to protect our health and the health of our planet has been the core of our mission for 50 years. We've all been affected by cancer in women in one way or another, whether it's a mother, sister, or friend. I lost my own mother to breast cancer several years ago, and I want to do everything I can to help improve women's health and well-being, including my health and the health of my daughter." "Earth Friendly Products has been a great supporter of ACS and the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walks for the past several years. They've raised thousands of dollars with the participation of employees from their four facilities across the U.S. The company's focus on people and the environment is a nice fit, and we value their support," says Jane Barnes, director of regional corporate relations for the American Cancer Society. "ACS has played a critical role in many breast cancer breakthroughs, and funds raised by Earth Friendly Products will help us to continue funding critical research and provide services for women experiencing a breast cancer diagnosis." In addition to its new $100,000 commitment, Earth Friendly Products is also supporting ACS Hope Lodge locations across the U.S. by providing ECOS laundry detergents and cleaners to the facilities. ACS Hope Lodge communities provide cancer patients and their caregivers a free place to stay when their best hope for effective treatment requires traveling away from home. The lodges provide nurturing, home-like environments and offer cancer resources and information. "We believe it's so important to use safer, plant-powered cleaners, especially in facilities where healing is the focus," says Vlahakis-Hanks. "We want patients to have the best possible environment for healing during their stay at Hope Lodge, and we're honored to donate our products to help make this possible." ECOS products can be purchased at selected retailers nationwide and at ecos.com. Donations can be made directly to the American Cancer Society at cancer.org/donate. ABOUT EARTH FRIENDLY PRODUCTS Family owned and operated since 1967, Earth Friendly Products is the maker of ECOS Laundry Detergent and over 200 other environmentally friendly products that are safer for people, pets and the planet. Made with plant-powered ingredients, ECOS cleaners are thoughtfully sourced, pH balanced, readily biodegradable, easily recyclable, and never tested on animals. Over 100 ECOS products have received the coveted U.S. EPA Safer Choice certification, which means that every ingredient is the safest in its class and that the product has proven superior performance. ECOS, Baby ECOS, ECOS for Pets! and ECOS Pro cleaners are available at major club and grocery retailers and natural foods stores throughout the U.S., in over 60 countries and online at ecos.com and babyecos.com. MEDIA CONTACT: Alyson Dutch [email protected] 310.456.7151 SOURCE Earth Friendly Products ST. LOUIS, May 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Financial-services firm Edward Jones and the Alzheimer's Association have received a North American award for their strategic alliance, formed just two years ago. The pair received a Gold Halo Award in the Best Health Initiative category at the Engage for Good Conference on May 24 in Chicago. The Halo Awards are North America's highest honor for corporate social initiatives and cause marketing and showcase successful consumer and employee engagement efforts. "We are extremely grateful and honored to share this prestigious award with the Alzheimer's Association," said John Beuerlein, the principal who leads the Edward Jones Older Adult Council. "We're proud that Edward Jones has a culture of caring that empowers and supports all of us to work together to make a difference in the communities where we live and work. The Halo Awards recognition demonstrates the power of that culture." In January 2016, Edward Jones entered an historic strategic alliance with the Alzheimer's Association committing $4.7 million over two years to enhance the Association's care and support programs, provide educational materials on brain health, and fund critical Alzheimer's research and grassroots awareness efforts. Edward Jones signed on as the first national presenting sponsor of Walk to End Alzheimer's and created the Edward Jones Alzheimer's Research Fund. The firm extended the alliance in 2017 to a five-year, $12.5 million commitment. In return, the Alzheimer's Association provides services, support and education on brain health and Alzheimer's to Edward Jones' clients and associates. "Over the past two years, the incredible efforts by Edward Jones have enabled the Alzheimer's Association to fund additional research and expand its outreach to help and support more families seeking information, support and guidance around this life-changing disease," said Donna McCullough, Chief Development Officer, Alzheimer's Association. "We look forward to the future and the progress we can achieve together." In 2017, Edward Jones associates participated in 569 walk events, creating more than 2,700 teams across the U.S. "Our associates have taken the cause of Walk to End Alzheimer's to heart, as this disease affects our families and our clients in ways that can be devastating," said Beuerlein. The Halo Award is the second feat for Edward Jones and the Alzheimer's Association in recent weeks. The duo joined forces to set a new GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS title for forming the largest human image of a brain. The record was set on April 28 when 1,202 people gathered in centerfield at Busch Stadium (Home of the St. Louis Cardinals) to form a multi-colored brain image. The different colors represented the different lobes in the brain. Alzheimer's disease is the nation's sixth-leading cause of death, and the only disease among the top 10 causes that cannot be prevented, cured or even slowed, according to the Alzheimer's Association. In the United States alone, more than 5 million people are living with the terminal brain disease, and this number is expected to skyrocket to nearly 14 million by 2050 unless effective treatments are found. About Edward Jones Edward Jones, a Fortune 500 company headquartered in St. Louis, provides financial services in the U.S. and through our affiliate in Canada. Every aspect of our business, from the investments we offer to the location of our branch offices, caters to individual investors. Our 16,000-plus financial advisors serve more than 7 million clients and care for more than $1 trillion in assets. Visit us at www.edwardjones.com . Our recruiting website is www.careers.edwardjones.com . Member SIPC. About the Alzheimer's Association The Alzheimer's Association is the leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimer's care, support and research. It is the largest nonprofit funder of Alzheimer's research. The Association's mission is to eliminate Alzheimer's disease through the advancement of research; to provide and enhance care and support for all affected; and to reduce the risk of dementia through the promotion of brain health. Its vision is a world without Alzheimer's. Visit www.alz.org or call 800-272-3900. SOURCE Edward Jones Related Links http://www.edwardjones.com WOODCLIFF LAKE, N.J., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Eisai Inc. announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted its supplemental New Drug Application (sNDA) for Priority Review for its antiepileptic drug FYCOMPA (perampanel) CIII for monotherapy and adjunctive use for the treatment of partial-onset seizures (POS) with or without secondarily generalized seizures in pediatric patients (ages 2 to less than 12 years). The submission also proposes a pediatric indication for adjunctive use for primary generalized tonic-clonic (PGTC) seizures in patients with epilepsy (ages 2 to less than 12 years). The sNDA application includes both the FYCOMPA tablet and oral suspension formulations. "The incidence of seizures in the pediatric age group has been steadily increasing in the U.S. where an estimated 470,000 children are living with epilepsy today. Approximately 30 percent of all patients have uncontrolled seizures, and it is crucial that we do whatever we can to help these patients achieve the ultimate goal of seizure freedom," said Trevor Resnick, MD, Pediatric Neurologist at Nicklaus Children's Hospital. "Approximately 71 percent of all people living with epilepsy miss at least one dose of their medication per month, and 45 percent of those missed doses result in a subsequent breakthrough seizure. FYCOMPA's long, 105 hour half-life may play an important role for patients who miss doses." FYCOMPA is currently approved as therapy (adjunctive and monotherapy uses) for POS with or without secondarily generalized seizures in patients with epilepsy 12 years of age and older, and as adjunctive therapy for PGTC seizures in patients with epilepsy 12 years of age and older. To date, more than 100,000 patients have been treated with FYCOMPA worldwide across all indications. "The FDA's Priority Review designation for this sNDA underscores the urgent need for more treatment options like FYCOMPA in the pediatric population," said Lynn Kramer, MD, Chief Clinical Officer and Chief Medical Officer, Neurology Business Group, Eisai. "We are committed to working with the FDA to bring forward more treatments for young patients to help physicians achieve seizure freedom, a critical goal in epilepsy care." Eisai is seeking approval to expand the pediatric use for FYCOMPA based on a 2018 Draft Guidance noting the FDA's current thinking regarding clinical development programs that can support extrapolation of the effectiveness of drugs approved for the treatment of POS in adults to pediatric patients 4 years of age and older. This determination was based on the similarity of POS in adults and in pediatric patients four years of age and older, and on an analysis of multiple antiepileptic drugs, conducted by the FDA, that demonstrated a similar exposure-response relationship in pediatric and adult patients with POS. In support of the extrapolation approach, the sNDA includes data from an ongoing global open-label, multicenter study (Study 311) with an extension phase that evaluated the safety, tolerability, and exposure-efficacy relationship of perampanel oral suspension when administered as an adjunctive therapy in children, ages 4 through 11, with inadequately controlled POS or PGTC seizures. The study enrolled 180 patients 149 with POS and 31 with PGTC seizures with an overall mean daily dose of 6 mg. The primary objective of Study 311 was safety and tolerability, evaluated based on incidence of treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAEs) and serious adverse events (SAEs), laboratory parameters, vital signs, and ECG parameters. Secondary endpoints included the efficacy of perampanel as measured by the median percent change per 28 days in seizure frequency, by the proportion of responders (25% , 50%, and 75%), and by the proportion of subjects who are seizure-free for POS, PGTC, and secondarily generalized tonic-clonic (SGTC) seizures as well as the effects of perampanel on cognition, behavior, visuomotor skills, and growth and development in children during short-term (23 weeks) and long-term (up to 52 weeks) treatment. The sNDA also includes data from an open-label pilot study (Study 232) with an extension phase to evaluate the pharmacokinetics, and to generate preliminary data on safety, tolerability, and efficacy of FYCOMPA oral suspension when given as an adjunctive therapy in pediatric subjects from 2 to less than 12 years of age with epilepsy. FYCOMPA, the first and only seizure medication that targets the AMPA receptor, was initially approved for adjunctive use in POS in 2012 and has treated over 100,000 patients worldwide in 55 countries across all indications. FYCOMPA was approved for adjunctive use in patients with PGTC seizures in 2015 and as monotherapy use for the treatment of POS in 2017. An oral suspension formulation was also approved in 2016. About Epilepsy Epilepsy is a medical condition that produces seizures affecting a variety of mental and physical functions. According to the Institute of Medicine, epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders, which affects about 3.4 million people in the United States, including 470,000 children. Partial-onset seizures are the most common type of seizure seen in people with epilepsy, accounting for 60 percent of all seizures. Generalized seizures account for approximately 40 percent of all epilepsy, with primary generalized tonic-clonic seizures being one of the most common and severe forms of generalized seizures. Poor antiepileptic drug adherence is the number one cause of breakthrough seizures, including convulsive seizures that can cause significant injury to patients. Uncontrolled seizures and breakthrough seizures including those stemming from poor treatment adherence increase a patient's risk for sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Additionally, breakthrough seizures also increase a patient's risk of accidents, falls, fractures or head injuries, emergency room (ER) visits, and hospitalization, as well as an associated increase in healthcare costs. About FYCOMPA FYCOMPA is a prescription medicine used in people with epilepsy aged 12 and older alone or with other medicines to treat partial-onset seizures with or without secondarily generalized seizures and with other medicines to treat primary generalized tonic-clonic seizures. FYCOMPA, a unique oral medication, is a selective, non-competitive AMPA (alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid) receptor antagonist. The precise mechanism by which FYCOMPA exerts its antiepileptic effects in humans is unknown. FYCOMPA has a long half-life of 105 hours with steady state reached in about 2 to 3 weeks. It has been demonstrated that because of the long 105 hour half-life of FYCOMPA a missed dose does not significantly impact plasma levels, a key risk factor for breakthrough seizures. FYCOMPA is supplied as 2 mg, 4 mg, 6 mg, 8 mg, 10 mg and 12 mg film-coated tablets, and in an oral suspension formulation. FYCOMPA has been designated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as a federally-controlled substance (CIII). Please visit www.FYCOMPA.com to learn more about the treatment. IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION WARNING: SERIOUS PSYCHIATRIC AND BEHAVIORAL REACTIONS Serious or life-threatening psychiatric and behavioral adverse reactions including aggression, hostility, irritability, anger, and homicidal ideation and threats have been reported in patients taking FYCOMPA These reactions occurred in patients with and without prior psychiatric history, prior aggressive behavior, or concomitant use of medications associated with hostility and aggression Advise patients and caregivers to contact a healthcare provider immediately if any of these reactions or changes in mood, behavior, or personality that are not typical for the patient are observed while taking FYCOMPA or after discontinuing FYCOMPA Closely monitor patients particularly during the titration period and at higher doses FYCOMPA should be reduced if these symptoms occur and should be discontinued immediately if symptoms are severe or are worsening SERIOUS PSYCHIATRIC AND BEHAVIORAL REACTIONS In the partial-onset seizures clinical trials, hostility- and aggression-related adverse reactions occurred in 12% and 20% of patients randomized to receive FYCOMPA at doses of 8 mg and 12 mg per day, respectively, compared to 6% of patients in the placebo group. These effects were dose-related and generally appeared within the first 6 weeks of treatment, although new events continued to be observed through more than 37 weeks. These effects in FYCOMPA-treated patients led to dose reduction, interruption, and discontinuation more frequently than placebo-treated patients. Homicidal ideation and/or threat have also been reported postmarketing in patients treated with FYCOMPA. The combination of alcohol and FYCOMPA significantly worsened mood and increased anger. Patients taking FYCOMPA should avoid the use of alcohol. Patients, their caregivers, and families should be informed that FYCOMPA may increase the risk of psychiatric events. Patients should be monitored during treatment and for at least one month after the last dose of FYCOMPA, and especially when taking higher doses and during the initial few weeks of drug therapy (titration period) or at other times of dose increases. Similar serious psychiatric and behavioral events were observed in the primary generalized tonic-clonic (PGTC) seizure clinical trial. SUICIDAL BEHAVIOR AND IDEATION Antiepileptic drugs (AEDs), including FYCOMPA, increase the risk of suicidal thoughts or behavior in patients. Anyone considering prescribing FYCOMPA or any other AED must balance the risk of suicidal thoughts or behavior with the risk of untreated illness. Epilepsy and many other illnesses for which AEDs are prescribed are themselves associated with morbidity and mortality and an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior. Patients, their caregivers, and families should be informed of the risk and advised to monitor and immediately report the emergence or worsening of depression, suicidal thoughts or behavior, thoughts about self-harm and/or any unusual changes in mood or behavior. Should suicidal thoughts and behavior emerge during treatment, consider whether the emergence of these symptoms in any given patient may be related to the illness being treated. DIZZINESS AND GAIT DISTURBANCE FYCOMPA caused dose-related increases in events related to dizziness and disturbance in gait or coordination. Dizziness and vertigo were reported in 35% and 47% of patients in the partial-onset seizure trials randomized to receive FYCOMPA at doses of 8 mg and 12 mg per day, respectively, compared to 10% of placebo-treated patients. Gait disturbance related events were reported in 12% and 16% of patients in the partial-onset seizure clinical trials randomized to receive FYCOMPA at doses of 8 mg and 12 mg per day, respectively, compared to 2% of placebo-treated patients. These adverse reactions occurred mostly during the titration phase. These adverse reactions were also observed in the PGTC seizure clinical trial. SOMNOLENCE AND FATIGUE FYCOMPA caused dose-dependent increases in somnolence and fatigue-related events. Somnolence was reported in 16% and 18% of patients in the partial-onset seizure trials randomized to receive FYCOMPA at doses of 8 mg and 12 mg per day, respectively, compared to 7% of placebo-treated patients. Fatigue-related events were reported in 12% and 15% of patients in the partial-onset seizure trials randomized to receive FYCOMPA at doses of 8 mg and 12 mg per day, respectively, compared to 5% of placebo-treated patients. These adverse reactions occurred mostly during the titration phase. These adverse reactions were also observed in the PGTC seizure clinical trial. Patients should be advised against engaging in hazardous activities requiring mental alertness, such as operating motor vehicles or dangerous machinery, until the effect of FYCOMPA is known. FALLS Falls were reported in 5% and 10% of patients in the partial-onset seizure clinical trials randomized to receive FYCOMPA at doses of 8 mg and 12 mg per day, respectively, compared to 3% of placebo-treated patients. Drug Reaction with Eosinophilia and Systemic Symptoms (DRESS) DRESS, also known as multiorgan hypersensitivity, has been reported in patients taking AEDs, including FYCOMPA. DRESS may be fatal or life-threatening. DRESS typically, although not exclusively, presents with fever, rash, lymphadenopathy, and/or facial swelling, in association with other organ system involvement. If signs or symptoms are present, immediately evaluate the patient and discontinue FYCOMPA if an alternative etiology for signs or symptoms cannot be established. WITHDRAWAL OF AEDs A gradual withdrawal is generally recommended with AEDs to minimize the potential of increased seizure frequency, but if withdrawal is a response to adverse events, prompt withdrawal can be considered. MOST COMMON ADVERSE REACTIONS The most common adverse reactions in patients receiving FYCOMPA (5% and 1% higher than placebo) include dizziness, somnolence, fatigue, irritability, falls, nausea, weight gain, vertigo, ataxia, headache, vomiting, contusion, abdominal pain, and anxiety. DRUG INTERACTIONS FYCOMPA may decrease the efficacy of contraceptives containing levonorgestrel. Plasma levels of FYCOMPA were decreased when administered with moderate and strong CYP3A4 inducers, including, carbamazepine, phenytoin, or oxcarbazepine. Multiple dosing of FYCOMPA 12 mg per day enhanced the effects of alcohol on vigilance and alertness, and increased levels of anger, confusion, and depression. These effects may also be seen when FYCOMPA is used in combination with other CNS depressants. PREGNANCY AND LACTATION Physicians are advised to recommend that pregnant patients taking FYCOMPA enroll in the North American Antiepileptic Drug (NAAED) Pregnancy Registry. Caution should be exercised when FYCOMPA is administered to pregnant or nursing women as there are no adequate data on the developmental risk associated with use in pregnant women, and no data on the presence of perampanel in human milk, the effects on the breastfed child, or the effects of the drug on milk production. HEPATIC AND RENAL IMPAIRMENT Use in patients with severe hepatic or severe renal impairment is not recommended. Dosage adjustments are recommended in patients with mild or moderate hepatic impairment. Use with caution in patients with moderate renal impairment. DRUG ABUSE AND DEPENDENCE FYCOMPA is a Schedule III controlled substance and has the potential to be abused and lead to drug dependence. Please see accompanying Full Prescribing Information for FYCOMPA (perampanel), including Boxed WARNING. About Eisai Inc. At Eisai Inc., human health care (hhc) is our goal. We give our first thoughts to patients and their families, and helping to increase the benefits health care provides. As the U.S. pharmaceutical subsidiary of Tokyo-based Eisai Co., Ltd., we have a passionate commitment to patient care that is the driving force behind our efforts to discover and develop innovative therapies to help address unmet medical needs. Eisai is a fully integrated pharmaceutical business that operates in two global business groups: oncology and neurology (dementia-related diseases and neurodegenerative diseases). Each group functions as an end-to-end global business with discovery, development, and marketing capabilities. Our U.S. headquarters, commercial and clinical development organizations are located in New Jersey; our discovery labs are in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania; and our global demand chain organization resides in Maryland and North Carolina. To learn more about Eisai Inc., please visit us at www.eisai.com/US. Contact: Media Inquiries Investor Inquiries Michele Randazzo Ivor Macleod Eisai Inc. Eisai Inc. 201-746-2979 201-746-2660 SOURCE Eisai Inc. Related Links http://www.eisai.com LONG BEACH, Calif., May 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Enshored is excited to announce the opening of a second operations center in Ortigas, Metro Manila, the Philippines, to match growing demand for Enshored's outsourced services. Enshored has signed a lease for over 8000 Sq Ft of space in the Raffles building on Garnet Road. The space will start coming online in early June 2018. Enshored reception layout Enshored moved into its current operating center in the JMT building in the summer of 2016, where over 5000 Sq Ft has been built out. Through the second half of 2017, it was clear that additional capacity was required and a number of new and existing buildings were assessed for their suitability. CEO Ian Jackson commented, "We've been really pleased with how well we've utilized our existing space, and wanted to add further capacity in Ortigas, where we find we can attract great talent to work with us. It was critical for us to find space that would allow us to further leverage our existing management team, so having two offices within walking distance of each other is fantastic. The Raffles building will allow us to rapidly scale out some of our fastest growing clients." Operations Director Miguel Enriquez added, "Of the buildings that we looked at, Raffles was clearly the best one for our current business expansion requirements. We are confident that we'll be able to improve our service delivery, as well as create some more breathing room in JMT. We were concerned we'd not be able to take on any additional large US clients, but now we've got plenty spare capacity for future growth." Growth at Enshored is coming from both existing as well as new clients. Headcount at the fast-growing company has been increasing rapidly, with overall headcount set to grow from 200 to 500 in 2018, after trebling in 2017. Long Beach, California-headquartered Enshored is a provider of outsourced business services to fast-growing tech-enabled businesses. Enshored has expertise across four verticals - customer support, back-office data processing, content moderation and sales support. Clients include everything from Chinese based unicorns to New York startups. Enshored is privately owned. If you would like more information please contact Enshored's head of media relations Lavinia Arances, at [email protected]. Related Files Press Release May 2018.pdf SOURCE Enshored LLC BOCA RATON, Fla., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Kathleen E. Brush, Ph.D., a business executive, strategy consultant and author, has donated more than $1.3 million to Florida Atlantic University's College of Business to establish the Kathleen Brush Program for Women in Leadership. Brush, who earned an M.B.A. from FAU in 1980, approached a few other universities with her idea to create a program for women in leadership, and they all expressed some degree of interest, she said, "but FAU was the only one that said we support gender equality in leadership, we want to be part of the solution." At lower levels of management, Brush said, women are almost at a point of parity with men, but at each successive level the gap grows wider. "When you get to the top, women are almost non-existent," said Brush, who has created three scholarships for the program. "In the Fortune 500 today, only 4.8 percent of CEOs are women." The Kathleen Brush Program for Women in Leadership will be launched as part of FAU's Executive Education offerings and will eventually be integrated into the College of Business' undergraduate and MBA programs. The program will feature a mentoring program and emphasize applying theory-to-practice and networking. Each cohort of students, Brush said, provides a great opportunity to develop a lasting network that helps one another move forward. Brush, who has been an executive with several companies, has been working as a global leadership, business and strategy consultant since 2009. A resident of Seattle, Brush will be actively involved in the program at FAU. The target market initially will be mid-career female executives, she said. Daniel Gropper, Ph.D., dean of FAU's College of Business, said the program will allow the university to expand on the leadership education it offers to all of its students. "The College of Business prepares students to become the business leaders of tomorrow," Gropper said. "We are thankful that one of our graduates, Kathleen Brush, has given us this opportunity, through her financial gift and the experience she has gained as a successful business leader in the tech industry, to design a program that will provide women with the education and the tools they need to reach the top of the corporate ladder." SOURCE Florida Atlantic University College of Business Related Links http://fau.edu EAST HANOVER, N.J., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Novartis announced today that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted the company's supplemental New Drug Application (sNDA) and granted Priority Review designation to Promacta (eltrombopag) in combination with standard immunosuppressive therapy (IST) for first-line treatment of severe aplastic anemia (SAA). Promacta, which is marketed as Revolade in most countries outside the US, is an oral thrombopoietin receptor agonist (TPO-RA) that is already approved for SAA in the refractory setting for patients who have had an insufficient response to IST. It is also approved for adults and children with chronic immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) for patients who are refractory to other treatments and for the treatment of thrombocytopenia in patients with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. "Promacta is a great example of our drive to develop innovative treatments in serious disease areas where few treatment options exist," said Samit Hirawat, MD, Head, Novartis Oncology Global Drug Development. "Thanks to the many individuals and organizations who have helped us to advance the development of this promising medicine. We will continue our work with the FDA to make Promacta available for this potential new indication as quickly as possible." The Priority Review for first-line SAA is based on Novartis' analysis of research sponsored by the Intramural Research Program of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and conducted under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). The study showed that more than half (52%) of treatment-naive SAA patients achieved complete response at six months when treated with Promacta concurrently with standard IST, which was an increase of 35% compared to those treated with the standard IST alone1. The overall response rate was 85% at six months2. Severe aplastic anemia is a rare, life-threatening, acquired blood disorder in which a patient's bone marrow fails to produce enough red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets3. As a result, people living with this serious disease may experience debilitating symptoms and complications, such as fatigue, trouble breathing, recurring infections and abnormal bruising or bleeding that can limit their daily activities4. Historically, SAA was nearly uniformly a fatal diagnosis due to infection or hemorrhage resulting from prolonged pancytopenia; untreated SAA can result in 80-90% mortality in 1-2 years5. The prevalence rates vary for aplastic anemia in the US, but it is believed that 500-1,000 new cases are diagnosed each year6. The standard treatment regimen for individuals unable to receive or not eligible candidates for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in the US for treatment-naive SAA is IST. With IST as first-line treatment, up to one-third of patients and approximately 40% of those unresponsive to IST die within 5 years of diagnosis7. According to FDA guidelines, treatments that receive Priority Review designation are those that address a serious or life threatening disease or condition and, if approved, would provide a significant improvement in treatment safety or efficacy. If a treatment is granted Priority Review designation, the goal of the FDA is to issue a decision within six months of application submission, rather than ten months for standard review. Promacta (eltrombopag) Eltrombopag, marketed as Promacta in the US and Revolade in countries outside the US, is approved in more than 100 countries worldwide for the treatment of thrombocytopenia in adult patients with chronic immune (idiopathic) thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) who have had an inadequate response or are intolerant to other treatments, approved in over 45 countries worldwide for the treatment of patients with severe aplastic anemia (SAA) who are refractory to other treatments, and also approved in more than 50 countries for the treatment of thrombocytopenia in patients with chronic hepatitis C to allow them to initiate and maintain interferon-based therapy. Promacta/Revolade is approved in the US and in the European Union for the treatment of thrombocytopenia in pediatric patients 1 year and older with chronic immune (idiopathic) thrombocytopenia (ITP) who have had an insufficient response to corticosteroids and immunoglobulins. Important Safety Information Promacta can cause serious side effects, including liver problems, abnormal liver function tests, high platelet counts and higher risk for blood clots, and new or worsened cataracts (a clouding of the lens in the eye). Promacta is not for treatment of people with a precancerous condition called myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). If you have MDS and receive Promacta, your MDS condition may worsen and become AML. If MDS worsens to become AML, you may die sooner from AML. For patients who have chronic hepatitis C virus and take Promacta with interferon and ribavirin treatment, Promacta may increase the risk of liver problems. Patients should tell a healthcare provider right away if they have any of these signs and symptoms of liver problems including yellowing of the skin or the whites of the eyes (jaundice), unusual darkening of the urine, unusual tiredness, right upper stomach area pain, confusion, swelling of the stomach area (abdomen). A healthcare provider will order blood tests to check the liver before starting Promacta and during Promacta treatment. In some cases, treatment with Promacta may need to be stopped due to changes in liver function tests. The risk of getting a blood clot is increased if the platelet count is too high during treatment with Promacta. The risk of getting a blood clot may also be increased during treatment with Promacta if platelet counts are normal or low. Some forms of blood clots, such as clots that travel to the lungs or that cause heart attacks or strokes can cause severe problems or death. A healthcare provider will check blood platelet counts, and change the dose of Promacta or stop Promacta, if platelet counts get too high. Patients should tell a healthcare provider right away if they have signs and symptoms of a blood clot in the leg, such as swelling, pain, or tenderness in the leg. People with chronic liver disease may be at risk for a type of blood clot in the stomach area. Patients should tell a healthcare provider right away if they have stomach area pain that may be a symptom of this type of blood clot. New or worsened cataracts have happened in people taking Promacta. A healthcare provider will check the patient's eyes before and during treatment with Promacta. Patients should tell a healthcare provider about any changes in eyesight while taking Promacta. Patients should tell a healthcare provider about all the medicines they take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. Promacta may affect the way certain medicines work. Certain medicines may keep Promacta from working correctly. Patients should take Promacta at least 2 hours before or 4 hours after taking products such as antacids used to treat stomach ulcers or heartburn and multivitamins or products that contain iron, calcium, aluminum, magnesium, selenium, and zinc, which may be found in mineral supplements. Patients should ask a healthcare provider if they are not sure if the medicine is one that is listed above. Patients should avoid situations and medications that may increase the risk of bleeding while taking Promacta. The most common side effects of Promacta when used to treat chronic ITP in adults are: nausea; diarrhea; upper respiratory tract infection (symptoms may include runny nose, stuffy nose, and sneezing); vomiting; muscle aches; urinary tract infection (symptoms may include frequent or urgent need to urinate, low fever in some people, pain or burning with urination); pain or swelling (inflammation) in the throat or mouth (oropharyngeal pain and pharyngitis); abnormal liver function tests; back pain; flu-like symptoms (influenza), including fever, headache, tiredness, cough, sore throat, and body aches; skin tingling, itching, or burning; and rash. The most common side effects of Promacta in children 1 year and older when used to treat chronic ITP are: upper respiratory tract infections (symptoms may include runny nose, stuffy nose, and sneezing); pain or swelling (inflammation) in the nose and throat (nasopharyngitis); cough; diarrhea; pyrexia; runny, stuffy nose (rhinitis); stomach (abdominal) pain; pain or swelling (inflammation) in the throat or mouth; toothache; abnormal liver function tests; rash; runny nose (rhinorrhea). The most common side effects when Promacta is used in combination with other medicines to treat chronic HCV are: low red blood cell count (anemia); fever; tiredness; headache; nausea; diarrhea; decreased appetite; flu-like symptoms (influenza), including fever, headache, tiredness, cough, sore throat, and body aches; feeling weak; trouble sleeping; cough; itching; chills; muscle aches; hair loss; and swelling in the ankles, feet, and legs. The most common side effects of Promacta when used to treat severe aplastic anemia are: nausea, feeling tired, cough, diarrhea, headache, pain in arms, legs, hands or feet, shortness of breath, fever, dizziness, pain in nose or throat, abdominal pain, bruising, muscle spasms, abnormal liver function tests, joint pain, and runny nose. Laboratory tests may show abnormal changes to the cells in bone marrow. Please see full US Prescribing Information, including Boxed WARNING and Medication Guide, for Promacta. Disclaimer This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by words such as "potential," "can," "will," "plan," "expect," "anticipate," "look forward," "believe," "committed," "investigational," "pipeline," "launch," or similar terms, or by express or implied discussions regarding potential marketing approvals, new indications or labeling for the investigational or approved products described in this press release, or regarding potential future revenues from such products. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations regarding future events, and are subject to significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. There can be no guarantee that the investigational or approved products described in this press release will be submitted or approved for sale or for any additional indications or labeling in any market, or at any particular time. Nor can there be any guarantee that such products will be commercially successful in the future. In particular, our expectations regarding such products could be affected by, among other things, the uncertainties inherent in research and development, including clinical trial results and additional analysis of existing clinical data; regulatory actions or delays or government regulation generally; global trends toward health care cost containment, including government, payor and general public pricing and reimbursement pressures; our ability to obtain or maintain proprietary intellectual property protection; the particular prescribing preferences of physicians and patients; general political and economic conditions; safety, quality or manufacturing issues; potential or actual data security and data privacy breaches, or disruptions of our information technology systems, and other risks and factors referred to in Novartis AG's current Form 20-F on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Novartis is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. About Novartis Located in East Hanover, NJ Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation is an affiliate of Novartis which provides innovative healthcare solutions that address the evolving needs of patients and societies. Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Novartis offers a diversified portfolio to best meet these needs: innovative medicines, cost-saving generic and biosimilar pharmaceuticals and eye care. Novartis has leading positions globally in each of these areas. In 2017, the Group achieved net sales of USD 49.1 billion, while R&D throughout the Group amounted to approximately USD 9.0 billion. Novartis Group companies employ approximately 124,000 full-time-equivalent associates. Novartis products are sold in approximately 155 countries around the world. For more information, please visit http://www.novartis.com/. Novartis is on Twitter. Sign up to follow @Novartis at http://twitter.com/novartis For Novartis multimedia content, please visit www.novartis.com/news/media-library For questions about the site or required registration, please contact [email protected] References Townsley DM et al. Eltrombopag added to standard immunosuppression for aplastic anemia. N Engl J Med 2017 Apr 20; 376:1540. Novartis Data on File. National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (2018). Aplastic Anemia. Available at: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/node/80148. Accessed January 18, 2018 . Townsley DM, Desmond R, Dunbar CE, et al. Pathophysiology and management of thrombocytopenia in bone marrow failure: possible clinical applications of TPO receptor agonists in aplastic anemia and myelodysplastic syndromes. Int J Hematology. 2013;98(1):48-55. Rosenfeld S et al. Antithymocyte globulin and cyclosporine for severe aplastic anemia: Association between hematologic response and long-term outcome. JAMA. 2003;289(9):11301135. doi:10.1001/jama.289.9.1130. National Organization for Rare Diseases (2018). Acquired Aplastic Anemia. Available at: https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/acquired-aplastic-anemia/. Accessed March 26, 2018 . Valdez JM, Scheinberg P, Nunez O, et al. Decreased infection-related mortality and improved survival in severe aplastic anemia in the past two decades. Clin Infect Dis. 2011; 52(6):726-735. Novartis Media Relations Central media line: +41 61 324 2200 E-mail: [email protected] Eric Althoff Novartis Global Media Relations +41 61 324 7999 (direct) +41 79 593 4202 (mobile) [email protected] Michael Billings Benign Hematology Communications +1 862 778 8656 (direct) +1 201 400 1854 (mobile) [email protected] Novartis Investor Relations Central investor relations line: +41 61 324 7944 E-mail: [email protected] Central North America Samir Shah +41 61 324 7944 Richard Pulik +1 212 830 2448 Pierre-Michel Bringer +41 61 324 1065 Cory Twining +1 212 830 2417 Thomas Hungerbuehler +41 61 324 8425 Isabella Zinck +41 61 324 7188 SOURCE Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation Related Links http://www.pharma.novartis.com Guwahati : A shocking incident has come to light that, 9 persons who injured in a road mishap stranded three days in a remote village in Mizoram where the basic medical facilities was not available for their first aid. The incident was took place between Ngampabung and Phulpui of Pherzawl district in Mizoram on May 24, when a Bolero vehicle fell down at least 300 metres from the landslide hit road into the forest, where nine persons injured in the accident had stranded for three days, where even the basic medical facilities was not available. According to the reports, one of the victims had a broken a broken ribs and injuries in the head and nose and another had a broken arm. The victims were identified as Vanlalnghak (driver of Ngampabung), Lalkulsang (Ngampabung), Laldawnglien (Ngampabung), Upa Lalumpui (Ngampabung), Rorelsang (Kangreng), Nehemia (Phulpui), Ringum (Ngampabung), Lalchawisang (Ngampabung) and Lalbiekthan (Ngampabung). Alleged that, the district administration had not taken any measures or help to transport the injured persons to the nearest hospital, which is in Jiribam, about 234 km from the remote village. The accident was happened at the area, when the injured persons on their way to Phulpui village to attend a funeral service. All the villagers of the remote area are very poor and they haven't able to manage any vehicle to transport the victims to Jiribam or Silchar. Meanwhile, reports said that, the administration of Vangai Sub-Division had rescued the injured persons from the remote village and provided basic medical facilities. When it comes to style and practicality, Fiberon Elements Railing delivers. The clean, contemporary lines and versatile black color complement any architecture. Premium powder-coated aluminum resists rust and reduces upkeep. Pre-welded post brackets and a pre-punched bottom rail speed installation. Smooth construction, with no visible welds or cuts, helps prevent injuries, while a 20-year warranty provides added peace of mind. "Fiberon Elements Railing was developed to address the growing consumer interest in aluminum railing," notes Fiberon Vice President of Marketing Shellie Sellards. "Elements Railing offers classic style, lasting durability, and a comfortable price point. And it's easy to install, making it a smart choice for both contractors and DIY homeowners." Currently, Fiberon Elements Railing is available in select markets on the east coast. To learn more, visit the friendly experts at the Lowe's Pro Desk or log on to lowes.com. About Fiberon Founded in 1997, Fiberon is a leading U.S. manufacturer of wood-alternative decking, railing, cladding, and fencing distributed worldwide. Fiberon products are available in a wide range of styles and price points, all providing the warmth and beauty of natural wood without the costly, time-consuming maintenance. Fiberon products are free of toxic chemicals and contain up to 94% recycled content. Recognized as an "Eco-leader" by Green Builder magazine, Fiberon is privately owned and maintains operations in North Carolina and Idaho. For more information, visit fiberondecking.com and follow Fiberon on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube. SOURCE Fiberon Related Links https://www.fiberondecking.com DALLAS, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Generational Equity, a leading mergers and acquisitions advisor for privately held businesses, is pleased to announce the sale of its client, Sturtevant Richmont of Carol Stream, Illinois, to Snap-on Incorporated of Kenosha, Wisconsin. The acquisition closed November 16, 2016. Sturtevant Richmont, founded in 1940, is a manufacturer of tools and testing devices. The company is a family-owned business, with six siblings sharing ownership. Sturtevant holds more than 70 torque-related patents and blazed a trail in the industry through development and innovation. The company became the first torque tool manufacturer to be ISO 17025 certified and ISO 9001 certified, among other firsts. Snap-on Incorporated, founded in 1920, is a leading global innovator, manufacturer and marketer of tools, equipment, diagnostics, repair information and systems solutions for professional users performing critical tasks. The S&P 500 company's solutions serve vehicle dealerships and repair centers, as well as customers in various industries including aviation and aerospace, agriculture, construction, government and military, mining, natural resources, power generation and technical education. Sturtevant Richmont will be part of the Snap-on's commercial & industrial group. The acquisition enhances and expands Snap-on's capabilities in providing solutions that address torque requirements, which are increasingly essential to critical mechanical performance. Generational Equity Managing Director Douglas Smith's team, headed by trusted affiliate Jerry Yocum with support from Generational Equity Vice Presidents Ryan Johnson and Musa Jagne, successfully closed the deal. About Generational Equity Generational Equity, DealForce, and Generational Capital Markets, member FINRA/SIPC, are part of the Generational Group, which is headquartered in Dallas and is one of the leading M&A advisory firms in North America. With over 250 professionals located throughout North America, the companies help business owners release the wealth of their business by providing merger, acquisition and strategic growth advisory services. Their four-step approach features exit planning education, business valuation, value enhancement strategies, and M&A transactional services. The M&A Advisor named the company the 2016 and 2017 Investment Banking Firm of the Year. For more, visit the https://www.genequityco.com/ or the Generational Equity press room. For more information: Carl Doerksen 972-232-1125 [email protected] SOURCE Generational Equity Related Links http://www.genequityco.com DUBLIN, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Gene Therapy - Technologies, Markets and Companies" report from Jain PharmaBiotech has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering Gene therapy technologies are described in detail including viral vectors, nonviral vectors and cell therapy with genetically modified vectors. Gene therapy is an excellent method of drug delivery and various routes of administration as well as targeted gene therapy are described. There is an introduction to technologies for gene suppression as well as molecular diagnostics to detect and monitor gene expression. Gene editing technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 and CAR-T cell therapies are also included Clinical applications of gene therapy are extensive and cover most systems and their disorders. Full chapters are devoted to genetic syndromes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, neurological disorders and viral infections with emphasis on AIDS. Applications of gene therapy in veterinary medicine, particularly for treating cats and dogs, are included. Research and development is in progress in both the academic and the industrial sectors. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the US is playing an important part. As of 2016, over 2050 clinical trials were completed, were ongoing or had been approved worldwide.A breakdown of these trials is shown according to the geographical areas and applications. The markets for gene therapy have been difficult to estimate as there only a few approved gene therapy products Gene therapy markets are estimated for the years 2017-2027. The estimates are based on epidemiology of diseases to be treated with gene therapy, the portion of those who will be eligible for these treatments, competing technologies and the technical developments anticipated in the next decades. In spite of some setbacks, the future for gene therapy is bright.The markets for DNA vaccines are calculated separately as only genetically modified vaccines and those using viral vectors are included in the gene therapy markets The voluminous literature on gene therapy was reviewed and selected 750 references are appended in the bibliography.The references are constantly updated. The text is supplemented with 78 tables and 25 figures. Profiles of 183 companies involved in developing gene therapy are presented along with 250 collaborations. There were only 44 companies involved in this area in 1995. In spite of some failures and mergers, the number of companies has increased more than 4-fold in 2 decades. These companies have been followed up since they were the topic of a book on gene therapy companies by the author of this report. Key Topics Covered: Part I: Technologies & Markets Executive Summary 1. Introduction 2. Gene Therapy Technologies 3. Clinical Applications of Gene Therapy 4. Gene Therapy of Genetic Disorders 5. Gene Therapy of Cancer 6. Gene Therapy of Neurological Disorders 7. Gene Therapy of Cardiovascular Disorders 8. Gene therapy of viral infections 9. Research, Development and Future of Gene Therapy 10. Regulatory, Safety, Ethical Patent Issues of Gene Therapy 11. Markets for Gene Therapy 12. References Part II: Companies 13. Companies involved in Gene Therapy For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/vpgc3t/global_gene?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 DUBLIN, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Helicopter Market 2018-2022" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The Global Helicopter Market to grow at a CAGR of 2.92% during the period 2018-2022. Global helicopter market 2018-2022, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the adoption of military and civil and commercial helicopters. Helicopters plays a significant role in modern-day aircraft fleets and are used in a range of applications. The primary reason for the increasing demand for helicopters is their unique features such as take-off and landing, the ability to hover, fly forward and backward, and laterally. According to the report, one driver influencing this market is the advancement in avionics leading to enhanced safety features. NASA developed an automatic ground collision avoidance system that constantly predicts the trajectory of the rotorcraft through the terrain profile. Such advancements ensure safe operation of rotorcraft. One trend affecting this market is development of 3D-printing soluble cores for rotorcraft blade prototyping tooling. For instance, in 2015, Automated Dynamics along with Stratasys developed cores for rotorcraft blade prototyping tooling. This process allows the application of different materials such as composites, metals, and polymers. Further, the report states that one challenge affecting this market is the barriers in adoption of new technology and equipment. The stringent regulatory norms formulated by government agencies and aviation authorities acts as barriers against the adoption of new technologies. Key vendors Airbus Bell Helicopter Textron Boeing Leonardo Lockheed Martin Russian Helicopters Key Topics Covered: PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT PART 03: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY PART 04: MARKET LANDSCAPE PART 05: MARKET SIZING 2017-2022 PART 06: FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS PART 07: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY APPLICATION Comparison by application Military Civil and commercial Market opportunity by application PART 08: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE PART 09: REGIONAL LANDSCAPE Regional comparison Key leading countries Market opportunity PART 10: DECISION FRAMEWORK PART 11: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES PART 12: MARKET TRENDS Development of 3D-printed soluble cores for rotorcraft blade prototype tooling Increasing digital helicopter condition-monitoring Preference for adopting integrated and web-architected cloud-based system Innovation and technological developments Penetration of ADS-B in commercial and civil rotorcraft industry Energy-efficient flight control system simulation PART 13: VENDOR LANDSCAPE PART 14: VENDOR ANALYSIS Vendors covered Vendor classification Market positioning of vendors For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/clffrs/global_helicopter?w=5 Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- About otoscopes Otoscopes are a medical device useful in assisting the physician in making a physical diagnosis of ear-related ailments such as infection, irritation, ear pain, ear discharge, and redness. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05402806 Technavio's analysts forecast the Global otoscopes market to grow at a CAGR of 4.02% during the period 2018-2022. Covered in this report The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the otoscopes market. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the sales of pocket otoscopes, full-size otoscopes, and video otoscopes, and end-users such as hospitals and ENT clinics. The market is divided into the following segments based on geography: Americas APAC EMEA Technavio's report, Global otoscopes market 2018-2022, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market. Key vendors American Diagnostic Corporation Firefly HEINE Optotechnik KIRCHNER & WILHELM Rudolf Riester Welch Allyn Market driver Growing need for diagnosing ear-related ailments coupled with older population For a full, detailed list, view our report Market challenge Intense competition coupled with pricing pressure For a full, detailed list, view our report Market trend Growing demand for LED otoscopes For a full, detailed list, view our report Key questions answered in this report What will the market size be in 2022 and what will the growth rate be? What are the key market trends? What is driving this market? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the key vendors in this market space? What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors? You can request one free hour of our analyst's time when you purchase this market report. Details are provided within the report. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05402806 About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 SOURCE Reportlinker Related Links http://www.reportlinker.com "This acquisition is aligned with our strategy to expand our geographic footprint and resources in key markets in the US and is highly complementary to our existing resources in Texas," said Dr. Hisham Mahmoud, Golder's Global President & CEO. "We have enjoyed a successful teaming and collaborative relationship working with PBW's leadership and people over the years, making PBW a natural fit." "We at PBW are very excited to join Golder," said Eric Pastor, President of PBW. "We have had the privilege of working with Golder on projects over the years and, through those projects, our teams have built a strong relationship based on mutual respect, a commitment to excellence, and alignment of cultures." PBW's core services include site investigation, remediation, and closure; environmental compliance and permitting support; and environmental engineering design. About Golder Renowned for technical excellence, Golder is a leading global specialized engineering and consulting firm with over a half century of successful service to its clients. Employee-owned, with 165 offices in 40 countries, Golder's professionals are driven by a passion to deliver results, offering unique specialized skills to address the ever-evolving challenges that earth, environment, and energy present to clients across the infrastructure, mining, oil & gas, manufacturing and power sectors. Golder is not just a place to work, it is a promise of a living, dynamic environment where people collaborate, innovate, excel, grow professionally, and build enduring relationships in a strong culture of ownership. About Pastor, Behling & Wheeler PBW is a Texas-based environmental consulting firm founded with the goal of providing technical expertise, strategic perspective, and a commitment to client satisfaction. It is an employee-focused company where staff members of all experience levels work as a team with PBW clients to identify and implement creative and practical approaches for resolving environmental issues. PBW has five office locations across the state Austin (Round Rock), Fort Worth, Houston, Texarkana, and Victoria. EFCG served as financial advisor for PBW on this transaction. For media inquiries: Wendy Stoveland Global Director of Communications [email protected] 1 (561) 277-0189 (office direct) 1 (914) 584-1603 (mobile) Or Tina Marano Global Director of Marketing [email protected] 1 (905) 567-6100 x2556 SOURCE Golder Associates Related Links http://www.golder.com WASHINGTON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-HISPANIC PR WIRE/ -- A captivating starry night at Acadia National Park is the grand prize winner of the 2017 Share the Experience photo contest, hosted by the National Park Foundation, the official nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. Captured by Manish Mamtani of Peabody, Massachusetts, this image will be featured on the annual National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass. View the complete collection of winning photos on the National Park Foundation's blog today. Experience the interactive Multichannel News Release here: https://www.multivu.com/players/English/7588557-national-park-foundation-share-the-experience-photo-contest/ This annual contest invites amateur photographers to submit their favorite views, moments, and adventures from America's national parks and public lands. The 2018 Share the Experience photo contest is now accepting entries through December 31. "The Share the Experience photo contest inspires people to explore the country's diverse public lands," said Will Shafroth, president of the National Park Foundation. "Once people discover these incredible treasures for themselves, the hope is that they'll be moved to also support them." The grand prize for the winning image is $10,000, followed by $5,000 and $3,000 for second and third place. Winners also receive outdoor gear provided by Celestron and Osprey Packs, hotel packages courtesy of Historic Hotels of America, and an annual National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass. "I have always been a great fan of America's national parks," said Manish Mamtani, who took the winning image while visiting Acadia National Park with his wife last summer. "I love the way beauty and wilderness is preserved in the parks. I always feel a close connection to nature in the national parks. My love for night sky is the reason I ventured into Astro-photography. Hiking in the night sky not only fulfills my appetite for adventure, but also makes me appreciate my existence among billions of galaxies, where our planet itself is no more than a tiny dot. Some of the national parks like Death Valley, Big Bend, Natural Bridges, Acadia and Arches provide the darkest night skies." A photograph by Kristy Burns from Livingston, Texas, of Fort Union National Monument took second place. Third place went to Dorrie Henderson of Lafayette, Indiana, for her photo of Coconino National Forest. Prizes are awarded for fan favorites and the following six category winners: Adventure and Outdoor Recreation Historical and Cultural Scenic, Seasons, and Landscapes Family, Friends, and Fun Wildlife Night Skies More than 16,000 photos were submitted to the contest, which ran from May 4, 2017, through December 31, 2017. The 2018 Share the Experience photo contest is hosted by the National Park Foundation in partnership with the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and Recreation.gov. Share the Experience is the official photo contest of America's national parks and federal recreational lands, showcasing the more than 500 million acres of federal lands and drawing entries from across the United States. For a full listing of prizing and rules, or to submit a photo, please visit www.sharetheexperience.org. You can also follow @GoParks on Instagram for photo inspiration. Share the Experience is a great example of the countless ways there are to #FindYourPark. Launched in March 2015, Find Your Park/Encuentra Tu Parque inspires people from all backgrounds to connect with, celebrate, and support America's national parks and community-based programs. #FindYourPark invites people to discover and share their own unique connections to the country's natural landscapes, vibrant culture, and rich history. ABOUT THE NATIONAL PARK FOUNDATION Celebrating 50 years, the National Park Foundation is the official charity of America's national parks and nonprofit partner to the National Park Service. Chartered by Congress in 1967, the National Park Foundation raises private funds to help PROTECT more than 84 million acres of national parks through critical conservation and preservation efforts, CONNECT all Americans with their incomparable natural landscapes, vibrant culture and rich history, and ENGAGE the next generation of park stewards. In 2016, commemorating the National Park Service's 100th anniversary, the Foundation launched The Centennial Campaign for America's National Parks, a comprehensive fundraising campaign to strengthen and enhance the future of these national treasures for the next hundred years. Find out more and become a part of the national park community at www.nationalparks.org. MEDIA CONTACT: Alanna Sobel 202-796-2538 [email protected] SOURCE National Park Foundation Related Links http://www.nationalparks.org A renowned global leader in Fin-Tech and Commerce, Mr. Chiarello has been at the forefront of banking, technology & innovation for more than 30 years. He has led product development and technology for three Fortune 500 companies, advised some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and is recognized around the world among the most prominent technology leaders in the industry. He has personally been recognized multiple times by Institutional Investor Magazine, Information Week, and was a NASSCOM CIO of the Year. Prior to his role at First Data, Mr. Chiarello was the Chief Information Officer at JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. Mr. Chiarello has been recognized by numerous organizations for his charitable efforts and is very active in the philanthropic community focused in the areas of Education and Cancer Research. His most recent acknowledgements include Humanitarian of the Year for Make-A-Wish Foundation, the Distinguished Leadership Award for the NY Hall of Science (NYSCI), Futures in Education, and Tuesdays Children. Additionally, he serves as an active partner to many nonprofits, including NPower, The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS), Kelly Cares and A Chance in Life. Mr. Chiarello was also inducted into the New Jersey Italian-American Hall of Fame in 2016. The annual Columbus Day Parade, the largest celebration of Italian-American heritage and culture in the United States, will take place on Monday, October 8, beginning at 11:30 a.m. As Grand Marshal, Mr. Chiarello will lead dozens of marching bands and floats and over 100 marching groups up the Fifth Avenue parade route, from 44th Street to 72nd Street. In naming Mr. Chiarello Grand Marshal, Columbus Citizens Foundation President Marian Pardo praised his success as a prominent Italian-American business leader and his contributions to philanthropy and community service. "Guy Chiarello is such an esteemed leader in the technology and commerce industries where he has been on the cutting edge for many years," Ms. Pardo said. "And his commitment to discovering and providing opportunities for the next generation of business leaders is truly commendable. The Foundation is honored to have him as our 2018 Grand Marshal." "I am thrilled to join the ranks of the distinguished Italian-Americans who have served in this role before me." Mr. Chiarello said. "I look forward to working with the Columbus Citizens Foundation in the months ahead to deliver a unifying event that the Italian-American community and the entire city of New York can enjoy." The Columbus Day Parade in New York City is organized annually by the Columbus Citizens Foundation. Previous Grand Marshals have included: Frank Sinatra; Sophia Loren; Joe DiMaggio; Justice Antonin Scalia; Lidia Bastianich; Maria Bartiromo; Joe Plumeri; Frank Bisignano and Leonard Riggio. ABOUT THE COLUMBUS CITIZENS FOUNDATION The Columbus Citizens Foundation is a non-profit organization in New York City committed to fostering an appreciation of Italian-American heritage and achievement. The Foundation, through a broad range of philanthropic and cultural activities, provides opportunities for advancement to deserving Italian-American students through various scholarship and grant programs. The Foundation organizes New York City's annual Columbus Celebration and Columbus Day Parade, which has celebrated Italian-American heritage on New York's Fifth Avenue since 1929. For more information, contact [email protected] CONTACT: Jefferson Wilson Director of Marketing & Communications Columbus Citizens Foundation Phone: (212) 249-9923 x242 Fax: (212) 737-4413 [email protected] SOURCE Columbus Citizens Foundation Related Links http://www.columbuscitizensfd.org ROHNERT PARK, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- About ten years after the height of the Great Recession, Americans may wonder if the U.S. has recovered. While unemployment rates have decreased, the stock market has improved, and employers have been adding jobs to the market, there is one lingering consequence that seems to be holding back Americans: student loans. Student debt can hold back the economy and individuals as borrowers have limited saving and spending capabilities thanks to their student loans. Ameritech Financial is a document preparation company that assists federal student loan borrowers with applications for income-driven repayment plans offered by the Department of Education. "It can feel like student loans are holding you hostage, and the same could be said about the local and national economies," said Tom Knickerbocker, Executive Vice President of Ameritech Financial. "For things like this, we recommend that borrowers examine their own situation and, if they are struggling, they might be eligible for help through a federal repayment program." Many students during the Great Recession went or returned to school to increase their chances of getting a good job. After all, a college degree is supposed to improve employment and earning prospects. However, because of many factors, those students relied heavily on student loans to fund that college education. And while tuition rose, and is still rising each year, student loan balances are on the rise, as well. Student loan borrowers are no strangers to increasing balances and monthly payments. Many delay important life decisions, such as saving for retirement or buying a house, because of their student loans. While recovering from the Great Recession is a national goal, individual borrowers may simply want to focus on their own financial health. Ameritech Financial suggests that they can do so through federal repayment plans. Federal income-driven repayment plans, for example, calculate payments on income and family size and can potentially reduce monthly payments of struggling borrowers. Any reduction in monthly payment can allow borrowers to focus on their other financial goals. Additionally, IDRs can end in the forgiveness of any remaining balance after 20 to 25 years of enrollment. "IDRs help a lot of federal student loan borrowers manage their loans and ease financial stress," said Knickerbocker. "At Ameritech Financial, we help borrowers understand and apply for income-driven federal programs so they can work toward a sort of recovery of their own." 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. Ameritech Financial Newsroom 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 Images have-we-recovered-from-the-great.jpg Have We Recovered From the Great Recession? Credit: karenroach/Bigstock image2.png Related Links Ameritech Financial home page Related Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRza8MbLvuM SOURCE Ameritech Financial Dato' Sri Baima Aose has been invited to take part in the Conference as a member of its International Steering Committee. Meanwhile, Datin Sri Dr. Irys Ng, Chair of HSDHG, as well as Mr. Miao, Gengshu, Vice Chair of HSDHG, former President of China Minmetals, former Chair of China Council of International Investment Promotion, will take the same position. The Water Decade for Action was initiated by President of Tajikistan and adopted by UN General Assembly's resolution. Its High-Level International Conference is co-organised by the UN and Tajikistan Government in the upcoming June of 2018, which will be supported by BAICF, WTUF and HSDHG. The International Steering Committee is formed from well-known politicians, scientists and international experts to support the National Organizing Committee in the successful preparation and holding of the Conference. One of its main objectives is to maximize the involvement of various stakeholders in the preparatory process, to take their interests into account in decision-making, and to ensure synergies with other events held within the framework of the International Decade. HSDHG will provide bottled water in the Conference and display its patented technology of Atmospheric Water Generation in the International Exhibition during the Conference. Moreover, the government of Tajikistan was invited by BAICF to co-organise the Sustainable Development Forum on Water Resources in Hong Kong this October. SOURCE Heaven Springs Dynasty Harvest Guwahati, May 30 : Assams Dibrugarh district police had arrested two persons for possessing demonetised currencies in the Upper Assam district today. According to the reports, based on intelligence input, a team of Dibrugarh district had launched an operation at Gabharupathar area in Dibrugarh town and arrested two persons. The police team had recovered old Rs 500, 1000 notes of Rs 42.32 lakh in possession from them. The arrested persons were identified as Gautam Sahani and Shrishti Hazarika. During the preliminary investigation, it is revealed that, the arrested persons had tried to change the old currencies with new currency notes in Arunachal Pradesh with the help of a racket. Police has started investigation into the matter and interrogated them to collect more information. NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- High Falls Extracts, LLC has announced their business and product launch at this week's Cannabis World Congress & Business Exposition (CWCBExpo) in New York City. High Falls Extracts hits the fast-growing legal cannabis market with high quality, natural Hemp extract products, which will be available at the High Falls Extracts booth (#450) at the CWCBExpo. High Falls Extracts -Products Rick Weissman, President of High Falls Extracts stated, "We are very excited to launch our new company and product line! High Falls Extracts and our sister company, High Falls Agriculture, are bringing together a team of experts from farming, finance, processing, digital and social media, marketing, quality compliance, and wellness. Our goal is to use best business practices to ensure we are always delivering the highest quality products to our valued customers." This new start-up is on a mission to set the highest standards for consumer products and professional operations in the industry. "Our quality system starts with testing each lot and making those reports available to our customers. In addition, our focus on compliance with marketing, regulatory and legal practices, will be an example of best practices in the industry," he added. The CWCBExpo is a leading forum for the industry and the public to interact with various participants looking to find their niche in the dynamic and growing Hemp and legal cannabis industry. Weissman also noted, "The CWCBExpo is the perfect event to launch High Falls Extracts. The number of acres of legal Hemp cultivation has grown dramatically over the last few years, supported by the growing awareness of the plant's wellness properties. The re-emergence of Hemp is bringing this natural medicine back into America's mainstream, and we are looking forward to being a part of the Hemp wellness revolution." The company's Hemp Oil supplements and extracts are made with whole plant, full-spectrum phytocannabinoids. This ensures that all of the wellness attributes of the natural Hemp plant are delivered in the products, and utilizes the full range of compounds (cannabinoids and terpenes), which have been shown to provide the greatest benefits (entourage effect). High Falls Extract products are made from 100% U.S. grown industrial Hemp, they are all natural, vegan, non-GMO, gluten-free and cruelty-free. Currently available products from High Falls Extracts include, Hemp Oil Tincture Drops, and Hemp Oil Softgels, with Topical Creams coming soon. ABOUT THE CANNABIS WORLD CONGRESS & BUSINESS EXPOSITION CWCBExpo is a business-to-business and a business-to-consumer event for the legalized cannabis industry and is held 3 times per year in the largest media, financial and business marketsNew York, Los Angeles and Boston. ABOUT HIGH FALLS EXTRACTS AND HIGH FALLS AGRICULTURE High Falls Extracts' sister company, High Falls Agriculture is licensed by the New York State Department of Agriculture to grow industrial Hemp with the purpose of producing wellness products, inclusive of cannabidiol (CBD), which will be marketed by High Falls Extracts. High Falls Agriculture has started to grow high CBD Hemp in beautiful Ulster County, about 2 hours north of New York City, and will integrate and control all phases of production starting with the first harvest in the fall of 2018. For more information, contact Sheila Doyle at 845-286-2121 or [email protected] or visit us at https://highfallsextracts.com/. SOURCE High Falls Extracts Related Links http://www.highfallsextracts.com SAN FRANCISCO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, announced today 16 organizations joined the project, bringing the total number of new members in 2018 to 67. A global collaboration hosted by The Linux Foundation, Hyperledger now includes more than 235 organizations. Hyperledger has gained significant traction as a multi-project, multi-stakeholder effort and includes 10 business blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. The fast growing membership base is helping fuel innovation and increasingly widespread adoption of enterprise blockchain. "As we just demonstrated at Consensus, the Hyperledger community is on the front lines of putting blockchain into production across numerous industries," said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. "From healthcare to banking to digital identity management, our members are developing both the use cases and the code for distributed ledgers that scale, connect and interoperate. The accelerating growth we are seeing shows the widening footprint of enterprise blockchain and increasing recognition of a community-based approach to advancing the technology and business models." Hyperledger aims to enable organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by creating enterprise-grade, open source distributed ledger frameworks and code bases. The latest general members to join the community are: BlackRidge Technology, Blockdaemon, Chengdu Chiwu Software Technologies, China Systems Holdings Limited, Evernym, Experian, iownit capital and markets, Inc., Kakaopay, Lucidity, PokitDok and Thinktecture AG. They join Deutsche Bank, which signed on earlier this month as a Premier member. Hyperledger supports an open community that values contributions and participation from various entities. As such, pre-approved non-profits, open source projects and government entities can join Hyperledger at no cost as associate members. Associate members joining this month include Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI), MIT Connection Science and National Institute of Telecommunications (Ministry of Digital Affairs Poland). New member quotes: BlackRidge Technology "BlackRidge is excited to join Hyperledger to collaborate and contribute in the area of securing enterprise blockchain services from advanced insider and cyber threats," said Mike Miracle, SVP Marketing and Strategy, BlackRidge Technology. "We have been working with Hyperledger member IBM and Marist College to research and test additional network security and cyber-attack protection for hybrid and cloud-based blockchain services based on Hyperledger Fabric. Joining Hyperledger provides us with access to additional technical and marketing resources to help accelerate our mission of extending an identity-based trust model to the underlying network and server infrastructure that implements blockchain services." Blockdaemon "Blockdaemon is handling the practical implications of deploying and managing any major blockchain networks on its ground-breaking decentralized infrastructure," said Konstantin Richter, CEO, Blockdaemon. "Simple 3-click deployments and developer tools make it the Heroku for blockchain. The goals of Hyperledger align very well with our vision, and we are excited to be working closely with this community to simplify the process of deploying nodes and creating scalable enterprise blockchain solutions." Chengdu Chiwu Software "We are very pleased to join the Hyperledger community," said Mr. Shang Yi, President, THI WU. "Blockchain is rising rapidly and changing the world. We are also rapidly absorbing, learning and growing. We are looking forward to collaborating with other members in this diverse community and contributing to Hyperledger." China Systems Holdings Limited "As a recognized leader in providing Trade Finance, Supply Chain Finance and Payments solutions for the financial industry, China Systems is delighted to join the growing Hyperledger community," said Chris Tseng, Chairman, China Systems. "This move complements and future-proofs our channel and messaging capabilities with financial networks, such as SWIFT, where Hyperledger has also been selected. Leveraging advanced technology such as DLT to drive business improvements is in China Systems' DNA. China Systems has been actively using Hyperledger in a number of business scenarios, and we find the technology fascinating and innovative in the same breath." Deutsche Bank "As a Premier member, we're hoping our expertise and global network will help advance open source distributed ledger technologies and allow us to better serve the complex needs of our clients, who look to us to improve their and their trade partners' financial endeavors," said Jon Pearson, Head of Deutsche Bank Labs United Kingdom and Ireland. Evernym "Since deciding to contribute the code that has come to be known as project Indy, we've held Hyperledger in very high regard," said Timothy Ruff, CEO, Evernym. "Its vital role in moving distributed ledger technology and its tremendous efficiencies and benefits into the enterprise cannot be overstated. This is our goal as well. As such, it's only natural for Evernym to officially join Hyperledger." Experian "We are thrilled to continue our ongoing support of Hyperledger's collaborative effort to create and advance cross-industry blockchain technologies," said Vijay Mehta, senior vice president, advanced technology group, Experian Consumer Information Services. "As part of our culture of innovation, we are constantly exploring new ideas to use the power of data to help people and businesses make better decisions." iownit capital and markets, Inc. "We are excited to join Hyperledger and become part of a growing community advancing the distributed ledger technology standards," said Rashad Kurbanov, CEO of iownit capital and markets, Inc. "iownit is building a next generation financial markets platform that leverages blockchain technology to radically simplify and streamline capital formation process. While still young, blockchain is a transformative technology that will reshape financial services industry, and we are proud to be at the forefront of this effort. We look forward to working with the Hyperledger community and making it stronger." Kakaopay "Kakaopay provides the most innovative online identification service in Korea by leveraging blockchain technology," said Hoya Na, Chief Technology Officer of Kakaopay. "We are excited to join Hyperledger and The Linux Foundation. This cutting-edge technology will empower us to introduce a new way to collaborate with customers and partners in payment services and financial businesses." Lucidity "The power of blockchain is the power to create trust and transparency in industries that desperately need both," said Sam Kim, Lucidity CEO. "It's a challenge that must be taken on collectively, as there are still technologies to build and standards to refine. That's why we're excited to be joining Hyperledger, a collaborative effort to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. Together with Hyperledger, we look forward to advancing the real-world applicability of blockchain technology." PokitDok "We are delighted to be a part of the Hyperledger and The Linux Foundation community," said Ted Tanner Jr., PokitDok Co-Founder and CTO. "Hyperledger is the reference for creating enterprise-grade blockchain systems and is proof positive that the network effect will prosper in years to come, with collaboration occurring within the open source industry." Thinktecture AG "We are excited to become members of Hyperledger and The Linux Foundation, to support the open source ecosystem, and to further extend our capabilities as a technology specialist for cross-platform, cloud and blockchain applications," said Ingo Rammer, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Thinktecture. "We provide tools and services to make permissioned blockchain networks easier to deploy, manage, and monitor. Given that Hyperledger Fabric is one of the most advanced open-source platforms for enterprise-grade blockchain networks, we have chosen it as one of the core supported technologies and look forward to working more closely with the Hyperledger projects to accelerate the adoption of distributed ledger technologies in different industries." About Hyperledger Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology. The Linux Foundation hosts Hyperledger under the foundation. To learn more, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/. Contact: Jessica Rampen The Linux Foundation/Hyperledger [email protected] 650.787.3548 SOURCE Hyperledger WALTHAM, Mass., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- InkHouse, an integrated public relations agency, today announced an expansion of its digital marketing practice with the hiring of Angela Trapasso, an accomplished marketing executive. "There used to be a direct and reliable link between media coverage and specific outcomes -- whether it's sales, downloads, fundraising or any other action you want an audience to take. But today, the lifecycle of a news story is hours at best, readership is more fragmented than ever, and consumers are overwhelmed," said Tina Cassidy, executive vice president and chief content officer at InkHouse. "Angela will ensure we are using every tool and creative approach possible as we expand our service offerings." InkHouse was conceived in 2007 from a belief that social media, content and media relations could not (and should not) be done in silos. Today, the digital media and PR silos also must dissolve. Customers, whether consumers or organizations, require single clicks to immediate actions. They don't peruse magazines and content -- that content must find them. And the old era that birthed Facebook and Twitter is coming to an end, ushering a new phase that is still to be determined, but must feature more user control and greater privacy. Angela will lead the InkHouse team dedicated to knowing where our industry will need to shift next. She brings more than ten years of experience defining and executing innovative earned media campaigns for digital public relations and search campaigns on behalf of a variety of startup and established brands across a wide range of industries. She is also an expert in influencer marketing campaigns, a key area in which InkHouse sees enormous opportunity for clients. Most recently, she served as vice president of brand strategy at Terakeet, an enterprise SEO and influencer marketing technology company. "As consumer behavior evolves alongside the rapidly changing media and digital landscape, we must evolve with it to ensure that our clients can drive leads directly from their PR success," Trapasso said. "This is especially important at a time when the buyer's journey is more complex than ever and a sale, download or action is one click away." About InkHouse: InkHouse is a PR firm that offers earned media, creative content and digital marketing. We were founded in 2007 and are one of the fastest growing agencies in the country. We believe that authenticity matters, words count and trust is earned. Find us in the real world in Boston, New York and San Francisco, and in the digital one at www.inkhouse.com. Media Inquiries: InkHouse 781-966-4100 [email protected] SOURCE InkHouse Related Links http://www.inkhouse.com SAN FRANCISCO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Invitae Corporation (NYSE: NVTA), one of the fastest growing genetics companies, today announced that Sean George, co-founder and chief executive officer of Invitae, will present at the William Blair 2018 Growth Stock Conference on Tuesday, June 12, 2018 at 4:10 p.m. Central / 5:10 p.m. Eastern / 2:10 p.m. Pacific in Chicago. A live webcast of the presentation may be accessed by visiting the investors section of the company's website at ir.invitae.com. A replay of the webcast will be available shortly after the conclusion of the presentation and will be archived on the company's website. About Invitae Invitae Corporation (NYSE: NVTA) is a genetics company whose mission is to bring comprehensive genetic information into mainstream medical practice to improve the quality of healthcare for billions of people. Invitae's goal is to aggregate most of the world's genetic tests into a single service with higher quality, faster turnaround time and lower prices. Contact: Laura D'Angelo [email protected] (628) 213-3369 SOURCE Invitae Corporation Related Links http://invitae.com SAN FRANCISCO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- James A. Lassart is recognized by Continental Who's Who as Top Attorney 2018 in the field of Law Enforcement in recognition of his role as an Attorney and Shareholder of Murphy, Pearson, Bradley and Feeney. A law enforcement defense organization servicing the Bay area, Murphy, Pearson, Bradley and Feeney has been established since 1978. Committed to providing eminent legal services at the fraction of the cost, the litigation legal malpractice specializes in employment litigation, fraud, defense of actions involving the Civil Rights Act, white collar cases and regulatory defense. Attributing their success to their high level of communication with their clients, the law firm is dedicated to handling their client's cases with integrity and dexterity. Having gathered over forty years of experience in the field of Law Enforcement under his belt, James A. Lassart is a retired Brigadier General in the United States Army Reserve. Serving twelve years as an Assistant District Attorney in San Francisco where he tried complex homicide cases, Lassart served five years with the United States Attorney's Office prosecuting organized crime. Throughout the course of his career, Lassart attained expertise within the areas of areas of Law Enforcement Defense Cases and White Collar Defense cases. Coordinator of the Northwest Region of The President's Organized Supervising operations in the Northwestern United States and Hawaii, Lassart has also served in multiple capacities as an Instructor at Hastings College of the Law Trial and Advocacy Clinic in San Francisco and a lecturer and panelist for the California Continuing Education of the Bar. Early in his career, Lassart attained his Juris Doctor degree at the University of San Francisco. In his previous years, Lassart attained his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Santa Clara University. In an effort to further advance his professional development, Lassart is an esteemed member of several organizations including the American Bar Association, American Board of Trial Advocates, Associate of Certified Fraud Examiners, Bar Association of San Francisco, US Department of Justice, American Bar Foundation, University of San Francisco Alumni Association, The District of Columbia Bar Association and New York Bar Association. A prominent scholar, Lassart co-authored a chapter of the CEB book on Criminal Law Procedure and Practice. In recognition of his professional achievements, Lassart was the recipient of the Peer-Review Rated AV Preeminent by Martindale-Hubbell and has been selected as a Northern California Super Lawyer every year from 2005-2017. For more information, please visit http://mpbf.com Contact: Katherine Green, 516-825-5634, [email protected] SOURCE Continental Who's Who Related Links http://www.continentalwhoswho.com NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Kiwi Energy announced today that they are extending their services to residents in the state of Ohio. Kiwi Energy is a certified retail electric and natural gas service provider dedicated to providing innovative energy and natural gas solutions. Backed by friendly and efficient customer service, Kiwi Energy currently operates in the state of New York and offers residents environmentally focused products. Kiwi Energy's "Kiwi Clean" plan ensures that 100% of a customer's electricity usage is matched with Green-e Certified Wind Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). The "Zero Gas" plan allows customers to reduce their environmental impact by certifying that 100% of their carbon emissions caused by gas usage is offset. "Zero Gas" is also approved by Verified Carbon Standard. These products meet the environmental and consumer protection standards set forth by the nonprofit Center for Resource Solutions. Much like in the current New York value offering, all customers will be eligible to participate in the Ecogold loyalty program, which allows customers to choose either Cash Back or Ecogold Rewards. Ecogold Rewards gift cards from popular retailers (as well as energy efficient products) and movie tickets may be redeemed online. A portion of the proceeds for every customer that enrolls with Kiwi Energy will also be donated to the Ecogold Environmental Fund. This is a private fund that was established to support and contribute to domestic and international non-profit organizations and environmentally friendly programs that align with the fund's values of sustainability, integrity, and environmental accountability. "We're extremely excited to make it easy for Ohio residents to make the right choices when it comes to their energy and gas usage. We understand that investing in a sustainable future is one of the most important decisions a customer can make, which is why, with our eco-conscious products, our new Ohio customers can rest assured that we're working hard on finding innovative ways for them to be more energy efficient and to reduce their footprint." -Richard Booth, President of Retail Operations, Kiwi Energy. About Green-e The Wind REC is Green-e Energy certified and Zero Gas is Green-e Climate certified. These products meet the environmental and consumer-protection standards set forth by the nonprofit Center for Resource Solutions. To learn more about Green-e and Verified Carbon Standard visit www.green-e.org and v-c-s.org. Media Contact: Nikki Clark Email: [email protected] Related Links Kiwi Energy SOURCE Kiwi Energy Related Links https://kiwienergy.us CHARLOTTE, N.C., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Tipperary Sales, d.b.a. La-Z-Boy Southeast, is recognized as No. 100 in Furniture Today's 35th annual "Top 100 U.S. Furniture Stores" exclusive list with annual sales of $44.9M. Furniture Today, known as the premier publication for the retail and manufacturing home furnishings landscape, compiles its 2018 list ranking furniture stores by 2017 sales of furniture, bedding and decorative accessories, including fabric and furniture protection, warranties and delivery. "We are extremely humbled to be listed alongside some of the industry's most excellent retail operations in Furniture Today's Top 100," says Martha Brown, president and CEO, Tipperary Sales. "We are a family owned and operated business deeply committed to our mission of creating customers for life through exceptional experiences. This requires bold leadership, innovative problem-solving and a sincere commitment to excellence. I couldn't be prouder of our entire company team who made this possible." With eight stores throughout the region (located in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina), La-Z-Boy Southeast offers customers an exceptional buying experience. The company's vigilant training creates a staff that are experts in the retail and interior design industry. Customers are offered the opportunity to engage with a professional, degreed interior designer for a complimentary design program that was created to take the fear out of furniture buying. And, with more than 900 fabrics and leathers for a wide-variety of both in-stock and custom styles, La-Z-Boy Southeast is equipped to meet customers' needs effectively. A helpful website and YouTube channel also assist customers with the pre-buying experience. "Learning to meet customers where they are in today's marketplace has been essential for our continued growth," added Lee Hopkins, vice president marketing, Tipperary Sales. "We aim to help our customers with the entire furniture buying experience and that means having a strong digital presence with helpful content, industry facts and insight into our products, special events, and community involvement. Based on client feedback and sales, our strategic investment in digital efforts has proved worthwhile." La-Z-Boy Southeast added two new retail locations in 2017 in Savannah, Ga. and Asheville, Nc. which also contributed to its overall growth. A strong focus on building well-trained teams in those areas was another major focus for the company throughout the calendar year. "We were pleased to add new locations to help better-serve our customers," continued Brown. "Anticipating the needs our buyer has and identifying solutions will be an ongoing focus as we aim to climb the Top 100 list in the future." About Tipperary Sales, Inc. Tipperary Sales, Inc., a family-owned company, founded in 1976, operates seven La-Z-Boy Galleries in the Southeast. La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries stores operated by Tipperary Sales, Inc. are located at 4205 Washington Rd. in Evans, Ga.; 150 Traders Way, Pooler, Ga.; 7035 Smith Corners Blvd. in Charlotte, Nc. 11515 Carolina Place Pkwy. in Pineville, Nc.; 4960 Centre Pointe Dr Suite 102, N. Charleston, Sc.; 5342 Sunset Boulevard in Lexington, Sc.; 1046 Woodruff Rd. in Greenville, Sc. For more information, please visit www.la-z-boy.com/southeast. About La-Z-Boy Headquartered in Monroe, MI, La-Z-Boy is one of the world's leading residential furniture producers. The company manufactures a full line of comfortable products for the living room and family room, including the company's world-famous recliners, reclining sofas and love seats, sleep sofas, modular furniture and leather upholstery, as well as stationary sofas, love seats and chairs. It is a division of La-Z-Boy Incorporated (NYSE: LZB), one of the world's leading residential furniture producers, marketing furniture for every room of the home. Live Life Comfortably. SM SOURCE La-Z-Boy Southeast IRVINE, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Laboratory for Advanced Medicine (LAM), a clinical-stage medical technology company developing innovative technologies for the early diagnosis and intervention of cancers, today announced the commercialization of its revolutionary, non-invasive and highly accurate IvyGene test. IvyGene is designed to detect DNA methylation patterns consistent with the presence of cancer and provide quantitative data about the presence of cancer at the time of testing. IvyGene uses a multi-target approach derived from advanced DNA sequencing methods to detect the methylation pattern of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in blood samples to confirm the presence of malignant cancer and provide measurable information about the disease. In contrast, other companies' genetic tests that investigate DNA mutations determine the propensity or probability of developing cancer over time. IvyGene is the first laboratory-developed test that uses a methylation-based approach to test for multiple types of cancer. To date, IvyGene has been validated to detect four cancers: breast, colon, liver and lung. The test is intended to be used in conjunction with other diagnostic and confirmatory tests, including mammograms, PET scans and biopsies. "LAM is one of the only liquid biopsy companies to recognize the superiority of the methylation-based approach for accurate, early detection of cancer," said Dr. Shu Li, LAM Chairman. "While other companies are only now starting to realize the merits of DNA methylation, LAM has the distinct advantage of having studied more than 40,000 patient samples in the lab over the last five years as part of our development process. With the commercialization of IvyGene, LAM benefits greatly from our first-mover advantage." Dr. Li continued, "Accurate, cost-effective and non-invasive testing for the presence of cancer is a major unmet medical need today. Consider that 41 percent of men and 38 percent of women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetimesand that nine in 10 patients whose cancer is diagnosed at Stage 1 or 2 survive for at least 10 years. Commercializing this groundbreaking test puts us one step closer toward achieving our mission of transforming the nature of a cancer diagnosis from a death sentence to a more manageable disease." To serve patients, LAM has expanded its existing corporate headquarters in Irvine, Calif. to include a 10,000-square-foot state-of-the art sequencing lab for R&D, as well as additional labs to assist in trial efforts with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In addition, LAM has opened a new office in Dallas to support its sales and marketing team, and to accommodate the influx of inquiries and orders for the IvyGene test. "The Dallas metropolitan area is an ideal location to have LAM forces on the ground after the city of Bedford, Texas provided IvyGene for its entire fire department earlier this year," added Adam Davis, LAM Strategy Manager. "We view this expansion as an opportunity to deepen our roots within the community, while simultaneously maximizing our ongoing growth efforts nationwide." For more information on the IvyGene test, visit https://www.ivygenelabs.com. About Laboratory for Advanced Medicine LAM is a clinical-stage medical technology company developing innovative, non-invasive, nontoxic technologies for the early diagnosis and intervention of cancers, possibly years before current technology can detect. LAM is dedicated to building and growing world-class technologies from the laboratory to the clinic. LAM operates scientifically, ethically and efficiently to bring these technologies into the mainstream. LAM is headquartered in the United States with offices in California, Texas and Indiana. LAM is a multi-national business with collaborations in both the U.S. and China, including leading scientists, physicians, research institutions and business leaders. LAM strives to combine the experience of these innovators and achievers to provide the most effective and safest diagnostic technologies to everyone. LAM has CLIA-registered and CAP-accredited laboratories, third-party laboratories and cGMP facilities all working toward the objective of bringing these first-class technologies into the medical community. About IvyGene The IvyGene technology is owned by the Laboratory for Advanced Medicine, Inc. The IvyGene test is a collection of blood tests, based on the IvyGene technology platform, for detecting the presence of cancer and quantification of cancer presence. IvyGene utilizes a multi-target approach derived from advanced DNA sequencing methods to detect the DNA methylation pattern of cell-free DNA in blood. The sequence, along with the ratio of unmethylated to methylated ctDNA, is consistent with cancer presence at the time of testing. LAM's IvyGene test detects DNA methylation patterns consistent with the presence of cancer and provides quantitative data about the presence of cancer at the time of testing. Other companies' genetic tests that investigate DNA mutations determine the propensity or probability of developing cancer over time. SOURCE Laboratory for Advanced Medicine Related Links https://www.lamoncogroup.com CHICAGO, May. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, 55Places.com announced the 100 most popular active adult communities for 2018. Topping the list this year is Latitude Margaritaville in Daytona Beach, Florida, followed by On Top of the World in Ocala, Florida and Sun City Hilton Head in Bluffton, South Carolina. To identify the most popular active adult communities in America for the past year, 55Places.com compiles various data points between May 2017 and April 2018, including unique pageviews, homebuyer inquiries, and community reviews. After Minto Communities and Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville Holdings announced in February 2017 that Latitude Margaritaville would be the first active adult community to be inspired by Buffett's music and lifestyle, interest skyrocketed quickly. No active adult community received more pageviews on 55Places.com during this timeframe and it received four times as many inquiries as any other community. Florida was well-represented on the list with four communities in the top ten and eight in the top twenty. The Villages, which topped this list every year between 2013 and 2017, slipped to No. 7 overall. Solivita in Kissimmee followed right behind at No. 8. The only other state to land two communities in the top ten was New Jersey, with No. 6 Holiday City at Silverton and No. 10 Holiday City at Berkeley, both in Toms River. According to 55Places.com data, approximately one out of every three potential buyers who inquired about Holiday City at Silverton ended up purchasing a home. 55Places.com's Most Popular Active Adult Communities for 2018: Latitude Margaritaville - Daytona Beach, FL On Top of the World - Ocala, FL Sun City Hilton Head - Bluffton, SC Sun City Texas - Georgetown, TX Brunswick Forest - Leland, NC Holiday City at Silverton - Toms River, NJ The Villages, FL Solivita - Kissimmee, FL Sun City Shadow Hills - Indio, CA Holiday City at Berkeley - Toms River, NJ The most popular active adult communities by state include Latitude Margaritaville (Florida), Holiday City at Silverton (New Jersey), Sun City (Arizona), Sun City Shadow Hills (California), Sun City Hilton Head (South Carolina), Brunswick Forest (North Carolina), Sun City Peachtree (Georgia), and Sun City Summerlin (Nevada). "This year's list of most popular communities is a testament to how much the active adult lifestyle is constantly changing," said 55Places.com Chief Executive Officer and Founder Bill Ness. "Latitude Margaritaville is embracing the tropical vibe and laidback lifestyle made famous by Jimmy Buffett, which is in line with the growing need of new communities to stand out from the crowd. Longstanding communities such as On Top of the World and The Villages continue to thrive thanks to a seemingly endless supply of amenities that meet the needs of their residents." You can view the full list of 100 most popular active adult communities and learn more about each of them on 55Places.com. About 55Places.com 55Places.com is the number one resource for anyone searching for information about active adult communities in the United States. Our website offers unbiased information and reviews of thousands of active adult communities. 55Places.com is the only source where you will find such a wealth of information including photos, videos, descriptions, floor plans, listings of homes for sale and reviews about nearly every 55+ and active adult community in the country. Media Contact: Sean Keeley 773-278-5500 ext. 209 [email protected] SOURCE 55places.com Related Links http://55Places.com WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND: New Zealand plans to slaughter about 150,000 cows as it tries to eradicate a strain of disease-causing bacteria from the national herd. Politicians and industry leaders announced the ambitious plan on Monday. They say it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and, if successful, would be the first time an infected country has eliminated Mycoplasma bovis. Farming is vital to the economy in New Zealand, whose isolation has helped protect it from some diseases which affect herds elsewhere. Last July, Mycoplasma bovis was found in the country for the first time. Found in Europe and the US, the bacteria can cause cows to develop mastitis, pneumonia, arthritis and other diseases. They are not considered a threat to food safety, but do cause production losses. Officials say they plan to kill all cows on any farms where the bacteria are found, even if some of the animals are healthy. They say many of the cows will be slaughtered at processing plants and used for beef, but some cows will have to be killed and buried on the farms or dumped in approved landfills. Officials have the legal authority to forcibly enter farms and kill animals even in cases where a farmer might resist, but they said they hope they dont have to use those powers. Katie Milne, the national president of the advocacy group Federated Farmers, said it was important to try to get rid of Mycoplasma bovis while there was still a chance. She said they would try to make sure affected farmers had all the support they needed, including adequate compensation. This is a tough time, and the pain and anguish theyre going to go through is really hideous, she said of the affected farmers. And we have to support them as neighbors, community members, farmers, friends. New Zealand is home to some 10 million cows, about double its human population. About two-thirds are dairy cows and the rest beef cattle. Milk products represent the countrys largest single export, and much of it is sold to China and used in infant formula. Mycoplasma bovis has so far been found on 38 farms throughout New Zealand, officials say, a number they expect to rise to at least 142 farms based on computer modeling. They say all the infections found so far can be traced back to a single farm, and that the bacteria likely arrived in New Zealand 18 months before they were first identified. Officials are still trying to figure out how the bacteria got into the country despite strict biosecurity controls. About 24,000 cows have already been killed in recent months and at least 128,000 more will have to be culled, most over the next year or two. The cost of the eradication program is estimated at 886 million New Zealand dollars ($616 million) over ten years. The government plans to pick up about two-thirds of the tab while farmers and the cattle industry will pay the rest. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she believes its still possible to eradicate Mycoplasma bovis. We dont know, in the long-term, what impact it could collectively have on an industry that is incredibly important to New Zealands economy, she said. So if we have an opportunity to be the country that eradicates this disease, then well take it. PHILADELPHIA, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- LBC Credit Partners ("LBC"), a leading provider of financing solutions to middle market companies, provided $41.0 million in senior secured credit facilities to support the acquisition of the aftermarket division of Cloyes Gear & Products, Inc. ("Cloyes") by Hidden Harbor Capital Partners. LBC served as Agent and Sole Lead Arranger for the senior secured credit facilities. Based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and founded in 1921, Cloyes is a global leader in the design, development, manufacturing, and distribution of timing drive systems and components for replacement applications in the automotive aftermarket and high-performance racing segment. Hidden Harbor Capital Partners is an operationally focused private equity firm specializing in control investments in lower middle market companies. About LBC Credit Partners LBC Credit Partners is a leading provider of middle market financing solutions including senior term, unitranche, second lien, junior secured and mezzanine debt and equity co-investments supporting sponsored and non-sponsored transactions. With over $3 billion* of capital commitments, LBC has made investments in companies located throughout North America across a wide range of industries and is committed to a long-term approach to debt investing. LBC is headquartered in Philadelphia, with offices in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. To learn more, visit www.lbccredit.com. *Information as December 31, 2017 MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa Rubano-Volansky Tel (724) 979-4293 Email: [email protected] SOURCE LBC Credit Partners Related Links http://www.lbccredit.com MESA, Ariz., May 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- As an OBGYN one of the most common office questions is the infamous "Is this safe in pregnancy?" From hair dye to caffeine, cold cuts to vaping, Obstetricians in the US must constantly be ready to give our opinions on food, medication, hygiene and beauty products for our pregnant patients. While I am usually ready to provide my instant canned responses to almost any question, I was intrigued earlier this year when a new question entered the mix that even I had not heard before. Three times so far this year, patients have asked me if Cocoa Butter was safe to apply during their pregnancy. I was very accustomed to the question "Will Cocoa Butter prevent stretch marks?" (Which it won't, by the way,) but up until this year I had never heard anyone even suggesting that the most common skin cream used in pregnancy could be harmful. As a result, I hit the books and sought out to be sure I had the best answer for my patients... To continue reading the full article visit: http://www.gregmarchandmd.com/will-cocoa-butter-cause-heart-defects-baby/ About Dr. Marchand: Dr. Marchand is recognized internationally as a pioneer in developing laparoscopic techniques, as well as an expert minimally invasive surgeon and teaching surgeon. Dr. Marchand is originally from Providence, RI, and is board certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology. Dr. Marchand was recently honored with a World Record for removing a 17cm Malignant tumor using a special laparoscopic cancer staging technique he invented. Dr. Marchand was also one half of the team that was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records(TM) for removing a seven pound uterus without needing to cut open the patient. Dr. Marchand was the first surgeon in Arizona to receive the "Master Surgeon" designation from the Surgical Review Corporation (formerly sponsored by AAGL.) Dr. Marchand is also currently one of only a few accredited Master Surgeons in Minimally Invasive Gynecology in the USA. In addition, Dr. Marchand is one of the few OBGYN's in the country to be a fellow of both ACOG (American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology) and ACS (American College of Surgeons.) When he is not in the operating room, Dr. Marchand enjoys low carb living and chasing around his five year old son, Sebastian. For further Information about Dr. Marchand's research and practice please visit www.GregMarchandMD.com, or call Marchand OBGYN at 480-999-0905. SOURCE Marchand OBGYN PLLC Related Links http://www.gregmarchandmd.com MENLO PARK, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, today announced the highly anticipated expansion of its award-winning Legal Analytics platform to cover trade secret litigation the platform's tenth practice area. The new module encompasses over 9,600 cases involving trade secret litigation pending in federal court since 2009, including those filed under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) of 2016. "Trade secret analytics has been among the most requested additions to Lex Machina's platform because, until now, finding and analyzing specific cases involving trade secret litigation has been extremely difficult, costly and time consuming," said Karl Harris, President and COO at Lex Machina. "The new trade secret litigation module gives attorneys access to the largest, most comprehensive and accurate dataset available for analyzing trade secret misappropriation cases." Prior to the DTSA, cases involving trade secrets were litigating a state or common law claim in federal court. This could only happen when the case also met the strict jurisdictional requirements for federal court: disputes involving diverse parties and an amount in controversy greater than $75,000, or disputes involving federal law. As a result, these cases were often combined with other types of cases e.g., patent, trademark, commercial, employment, etc. This combination with other claims made it difficult to locate trade secret misappropriation cases The module provides valuable data-driven insights and trends in cases alleging misappropriation of trade secrets under state law for cases open in U.S. district court from 2009 through present and for cases with DTSA claims since its enactment on May 11, 2016. It also illuminates the track records of opposing counsel and parties, the experience and behaviors of judges, plus case timing, resolutions, remedies, damages, injunctions and more. "Recent high-profile cases and shifts in American trade policies have propelled trade secret litigation into the spotlight," continued Harris. "With Legal Analytics, attorneys can now get instant answers to questions that can help them formulate winning strategies such as: Does this lawsuit have a reasonable chance for a temporary restraining order? What cases or types of cases have resulted in damages or an injunction? Or, what type of relief has this judge granted in the past for DTSA causes of action?" Challenges to trade secret analytics Because there are no Nature of Suit (NOS) codes for trade secrets cases in PACER, the database of district court case filings, Lex Machina had to train its natural language processing algorithms to search for specific trade secret-related terms, then data-mine millions of PACER documents to identify and tag relevant cases. Once tagged, Legal Analytics can now isolate trade secret misappropriation claims in commercial, employment or intellectual property cases. This enables attorneys to better filter and analyze the trade secrets elements of these combined cases and prepare winning legal strategies. In addition, Lex Machina interviewed senior litigators from top law firms and major corporations with expertise in trade secret misappropriation litigation and implemented their feedback on particular analytics requirements and use cases. With the launch of its trade secret module, Lex Machina has uncovered some interesting insights within the data including: The Central District of California sees the most trade secret cases (7%), followed by the Southern District of New York (5%) and the District of Illinois (5%). sees the most trade secret cases (7%), followed by the Southern District of (5%) and the District of (5%). Top law firms retained in trade secret cases include firms that specialize in labor and employment law, as many trade secret cases involve former employees. More than 1,350 cases with DTSA claims have been filed during the two years since it was enacted on May 11, 2016 ; only 11 of the 550+ currently active Article III district judges have evaluated DTSA claims on contested motions or presided over the issue at trial ; only 11 of the 550+ currently active Article III district judges have evaluated DTSA claims on contested motions or presided over the issue at trial 71% of trade secret cases that resolve at trial are won by claimants whereas 29% are won by claim defendants Webcast on Legal Analytics for Trade Secret Litigation For more information about Lex Machina's newest practice area, please register here (http://pages.lexmachina.com/Webcast_Trade-Secret-Launch_LP-banner.html) for the Legal Analytics for Trade Secret Litigation webcast (May 31, 11:00 PDT/2:00pm EDT). Lex Machina's Owen Byrd and Rachel Bailey will discuss trends and insights for Trade Secret litigation in federal court, and give viewers a peek into Lex Machina's new practice area capabilities. About Lex Machina Lex Machina's award-winning Legal Analytics platform is a new category of legal technology that fundamentally changes how companies and law firms compete in the business and practice of law. Delivered as Software-as a-Service, Lex Machina provides strategic insights on judges, lawyers, parties, and more, mined from millions of pages of legal information. This allows law firms and companies to predict the behaviors and outcomes that different legal strategies will produce, enabling them to win cases and close business. Legal Analytics was named "Best Legal Analytics" by readers of The Recorder in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and received the "Best New Product of the Year" award in 2015 from the American Association of Law Libraries. The company was named a "Legal A.I. Leader" by The National Law Journal in 2018. Based in Silicon Valley, Lex Machina is part of LexisNexis, a leading information provider and a pioneer in delivering trusted legal content and insights through innovative research and productivity solutions, supporting the needs of legal professionals at every step of their workflow. By harnessing the power of Big Data, LexisNexis provides legal professionals with essential information and insights derived from an unmatched collection of legal and news contentfueling productivity, confidence, and better outcomes. For more information, please visit www.lexmachina.com. SOURCE Lex Machina Related Links http://www.lexmachina.com VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc. (CSE: LDS), (OTCQX: LDSYF), (Frankfurt: LD6, WKN: A14XHT) ("LDS" or the "Company") announces that its affiliate, CSPA Group, Inc. ("CSPA"), has received a Letter of Intent (the "LOI") to purchase one thousand liters per month of extracted distillate from cannabis oil. The distillate produced under the LOI will not be in direct competition with any of the CSPA's products, and will allow CSPA to gradually build up its production volume to the required one thousand liters per month. In order to accommodate the production level required by the recent orders, the Adelanto facility is currently in the process of increasing its extraction capabilities to over 800 liters of extracted material per month. These equipment modifications are expected to be completed in the next three weeks. To accommodate the volume requirements anticipated under the LOI, the Company ordered additional equipment for installation within the Adelanto Facility. In addition to equipment modifications at the Adelanto facility, the Company plans to also expand the current square footage of the facility by approximately 2,400 sq. ft. CSPA Group intends to increase its production capability to over 3,000 liters of extracted material per month. Brad Eckenweiler, the CEO of LDS, stated, "These equipment and facility modifications are required to fulfill current orders, as well as anticipated future orders for extracted cannabis material from licensed white label manufacturers and wholesale market distributors. This LOI at wholesale prices represents between six and seven million dollars in revenue per month for CSPA Group." The Company believes that it is uniquely positioned in the market to be a significant wholesale/white label provider. The Company has the necessary extraction expertise and, with increased production capabilities, will be able to supply those wholesale or white label customers that are not in direct competition with the Company. The Company will continue to update its shareholders on its progress as information becomes available. About Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc. Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc. is a licensed, state-compliant, vertically integrated cannabis-related company. From our isogenic pollination nursery to our cutting edge, state-of-the-art production facility located in Southern California, LDS has become one of the most diverse, innovative and scientifically based cannabis companies throughout North America. The Company's technology produces infused strips (similar to breath strips) that are not only a safer, healthier option to smoking but also a new way to accurately meter the dosage and assure the purity of the product. From start to finish, the production process tests for quality and composition of all the ingredients used in each and every strip, resulting in a delivery system that is safe, consistent and effective. On behalf of the board of directors of Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc. Brad Eckenweiler CEO & Director FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT: [email protected] 1-866-347-5058 Cautionary Disclaimer Statement: The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release. Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. The Company cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to the Company's limited operating history and the need to comply with environmental and governmental regulations. In addition, marijuana remains a Schedule I drug under the United States Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Although Congress has prohibited the US Justice Department from spending federal funds to interfere with the implementation of state medical marijuana laws, this prohibition must be renewed each year to remain in effect. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information. SOURCE Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc. Related Links http://www.lifestyledeliverysystem.com INDIANAPOLIS, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) will attend the Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference on Wednesday, June 6, 2018. Joshua Smiley, senior vice president and Lilly's chief financial officer, will participate in a fireside chat at 11:00 a.m., Eastern Time. A live audio webcast will be available on the "Webcasts & Presentations" section of Lilly's Investor website at http://investor.lilly.com/events.cfm. A replay of the presentation will be available on this same website for approximately 90 days. About Eli Lilly and Company Lilly is a global healthcare leader that unites caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. We were founded more than a century ago by a man committed to creating high-quality medicines that meet real needs, and today we remain true to that mission in all our work. Across the globe, Lilly employees work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. To learn more about Lilly, please visit us at www.lilly.com and http://newsroom.lilly.com/social-channels. F-LLY SOURCE Eli Lilly and Company Related Links http://www.lilly.com WALTHAM, Mass., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lionbridge Technologies, Inc., one of the world's most trusted global digital communications platforms, today announced it has been named to Forbes America's Best Large Employers 2018 list. This list recognizes a variety of organizations across 25 different industries who received high scores in an anonymous employee survey evaluating organizations on workplace standards. In collaboration with analytics firm Statista, Forbes asked 30,000 American employees working for large firms or institutions (at least 1,000 employees) to rate their willingness to recommend their own companies. Survey participants were also consulted to rate their employers on work-related topics, such as working conditions, development and compensation. The scores were then analyzed to determine the best of the best. "We are extremely honored to be recognized by Forbes as an exceptional employer," said John Fennelly, CEO, Lionbridge. "At the heart of any successful company is its people. We take great pride in our incredibly diverse team and the relentless focus they have on helping our customers connect their brands with their communities. We strive to be an employer of choice and to make Lionbridge a place which talented people want to be a part of." The complete Forbes America's Best Large Employers 2018 list can be viewed on Forbes' website. To learn more about opportunities to join Lionbridge's collaborative team, please visit the "Careers" page. About Lionbridge Lionbridge enables more than 4,500 of the world's leading brands to increase global market share and drive deep engagement with their customers and communities. Our innovative cloud technology platform and our global crowd of more than 400,000 professional workers provide detail-critical business processes, including localization, digital marketing, and AI solutions, which ensure global brand consistency and relevancy. Based in Waltham, Mass., Lionbridge maintains solution centers in 27 countries. To learn more, visit www.lionbridge.com. Media Contact: Lauren Palazzo Text100 [email protected] +1-617-399-4909 SOURCE Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. Related Links http://www.lionbridge.com WASHINGTON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Q2 MetLife & U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index (Index) released today recorded an overall score of 68.7, up 2.4 points from the Q1 score of 66.3, driven in part by the strongest local economic outlook on record, a firmer hiring environment, and a stronger backdrop for investing. Two out of every three small business owners are optimistic about their company and the small business environment in the United States. Small business sentiment rose for the fifth consecutive quarter with a majority (62 percent) of small businesses expecting higher earnings and an increase in revenue one year from now. The increase was up one percentage point from last quarter. In Q2 2018, 18 percent of small businesses reported increasing staff over the past year, compared to 16 percent last quarter and 15 percent this time last year. Cash flow considerations have remained stable and strong, with more than three-quarters of small business owners (79 percent) feeling comfortable. "It's important to continue to break down barriers to growth and create an environment where all businesses can thrive," said Suzanne Clark, senior executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "Small business owners remain optimistic and by taking action to help alleviate some of their current obstacles and ensure opportunity, we will in turn further increase Main Street optimism." While small business owners are optimistic overall, there are some differences between male and female small business owners on some of the index indicators. The majority (64 percent) of male-owned businesses report good overall health, versus 51 percent of female-owned ones. Male business owners are also more confident when it comes to cash flow and their national economic outlook. Seventy percent of women-owned small businesses report being comfortable with their current cash flow, compared to 83 percent of male-owned small businesses. Conversely, women reported higher optimism than men in other indicators. Female-led small businesses are more optimistic about the year ahead than their male counterparts with 65 percent of woman-owned small businesses expecting higher revenue in the next 12 months compared to 61 percent of male-owned small businesses. Women also anticipate more hiring growth (36 percent) compared to men (30 percent) and a greater increase in investment (30 percent to 28 percent, respectively). "Our quarterly Small Business Index is all about tracking the sentiment of small business owners as well as discovering the challenges they face," said Jessica Moser, senior vice president, Small Business Solutions in MetLife's Group Benefits business. "With 60 million Americans working for small businesses across the country, we need to focus on solutions to support their growth and success." Overall, small business sentiment rose across all regions. The local economy continues to be the primary driver for the experiences of small businesses with 48 percent noting their local economic health as good, tied for the strongest mark since the Index began. As the U.S. economy continues its steady progress, the local business outlook appears to be strengthening with the Midwest and Northeast regions feeling the most buoyant about their prospects. Southern small business owners' confidence has softened from Q1 (19 points to 43 percent), but was still up from last year. About the Small Business Index The Index is part of a multiyear collaboration by MetLife and the U.S. Chamber to elevate the voice of America's small business owners and highlight the important role they play in the nation's economy. The initiative produces the quarterly MetLife & U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index; a nationwide event series, and the annual Dream Big Small Business Awards program, which celebrates the achievements of small businesses and honors their contributions to America's economic growth. Please visit www.SBIndex.us for the full results and methodology. About the U.S. Chamber of Commerce The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world's largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions, as well as state and local chambers and industry associations. For more information, visit www.uschamber.com. About MetLife MetLife, Inc. (NYSE: MET), through its subsidiaries and affiliates ("MetLife"), is one of the world's leading financial services companies, providing insurance, annuities, employee benefits and asset management to help its individual and institutional customers navigate their changing world. Founded in 1868, MetLife has operations in more than 40 countries and holds leading market positions in the United States, Japan, Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. For more information, visit www.metlife.com. www.uschamber.com @USChamber www.freeenterprise.com www.metlife.com/mysmallbusiness @metlife Contact: U.S. Chamber Bridgett Hebert (202) 463-5682 MetLife David Hammarstrom (212) 578-2736 SOURCE U.S. Chamber of Commerce; MetLife Related Links http://uschamber.com The popularity of canned wine continues to grow at an impressive rate according to Nielsen, canned wine's dollar growth surged 54 percent last year, the highest of any alternative wine packaging. Lila Wines stand out not just because of the colorful eye-catching packaging, but also because of the premium quality and light, fresh taste. All Lila Wines are also naturally gluten free, low in calories and carbs and contain no added sugar. Lila Bubbly Rose is a premium wine from the Veneto region of Italy that features a balance of bright notes of strawberries and passion fruit, refreshing bubbles and a crisp finish. Bubbly Rose joins the popular Lila Wines portfolio, which includes an Italian sparkling wine, a French rose, and an Italian Pinot Grigio. "Canned wine is one of the most innovative wine trends today, and we're excited to add another great varietal to our Lila Wines portfolio," said Kevin Mehra, CEO of Latitude Beverage Company. "Lila Bubbly Rose features the crisp freshness of a rose and the light effervescence of a sparkling wine, making it the perfect pairing for any summer celebration. Lila has been one of our most beloved brands since launching two years ago, and we anticipate Bubbly Rose will help the brand grow by 60-70 percent in 2018, exceeding last year's 55 percent growth." Latitude Beverage Company introduced Lila Wines in the spring of 2016. The brand is now available in more than 40 states across the U.S. and in over a dozen leading national grocery chains, including Publix, Wegmans, HEB, Meijer, Cost Plus World Market, Harris Teeter, Shaws, and more. Lila Wines, including the new Bubbly Rose, are sold in four-packs of 8.4oz cans with an MSRP of $11.99 For more information about Lila Wines or to purchase them online, visit www.LilaWines.com. Follow @LilaCannedWines on Facebook and @LilaWines on Twitter and Instagram. About Latitude Beverage Company Latitude Beverage Company is the innovative, Boston-based company behind a portfolio of national wine brands, including 90+ Cellars, Lila Wines, Mija Sangria, Iron Side Cellars, Places Wines and Magic Door. The company was founded in 2007 by Kevin Mehra who saw an opportunity to make high-end wine more accessible by purchasing oversupply from top wineries across the globe, bottling the wine under his own labels, and selling it to consumers often at a fraction of the original source price. This unique business model, based on the centuries old function of the negociant, became the foundation for 90+ Cellars. This same model has enabled Latitude Beverage Company to expand its portfolio with four additional labels, and the company is now recognized as one of the fastest growing wine companies in America. For more information, visit ninetypluscellars.com. Download images of Lila Wines here. Contact: Lindsay Karn, [email protected] SOURCE Lila Wines Related Links http://www.lilawines.com WESTON, Fla., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- BiologicTx, a BioMatrix specialty pharmacy, announced today the release of MatchGrid with Lab Tools, a brand new product integrating transplant tissue typing data with advanced analytical tools to promote more successful Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) programs. The software makes it easier to analyze lab data and allows users to track a single antibody, or groups of antibodies over time. MatchGrid with Lab Tools can: Quickly and effectively identify barriers to transplant while providing innovative solutions to optimize and promote successful transplants Investigate factors preventing patients and donors from matching Identify ideal candidates for desensitization treatment and provide virtual outcomes data Provide molecular matching tools identifying granular match possibilities, including both serologic and molecular data pools Recommend potential matches for investigation Display enhanced graphics, multiple data views and numerous filters useful for analyzing and monitoring desensitization treatment and optimizing matches "In comparison with the standard MatchGrid platform, MatchGrid with Lab Tools provides a deeper level of analysis by integrating in real-time with current and historical hospital lab data," Chief Technology Officer David Jacobs shares. "We are continuing to push the envelope with our digital platforms to provide the most effective tools for transplant optimization." MatchGrid with Lab Tools will be demonstrated at the upcoming American Transplant Congress June 2-6 in Seattle, Washington. Attendees will have the opportunity to receive live software demonstrations while meeting with MatchGrid programmers. For more information or to schedule a live demonstration contact: Nancy Duncan, BioMatrix Director of Kidney Paired Donation at [email protected]. About BiologicTx BiologicTx, a BioMatrix specialty pharmacy, was founded as the first solely focused infusion and pharmacy provider of biologic and oral transplant therapy management. BiologicTx integrates desensitization and immunosuppressive transplant services with advanced digital health technology to produce positive patient outcomes. For more information, visit us at www.biologictx.com. About BioMatrix Specialty Pharmacy BioMatrix Specialty Pharmacy offers comprehensive nationwide specialty pharmacy services and digital health technology solutions for a range of chronic health conditions. Our growing family of companies unites leaders in the specialty pharmacy industry to improve health and empower patients to experience a higher quality of life. The current BioMatrix family of companies includes: BiologicTx, Decillion Healthcare, Elwyn Pharmacy Group, Factor Support Network, Matrix Health, and Medex Biocare. Media Contact: Tara Marchese, Corporate Director of Marketing Telephone: 954-908-7636 Email: [email protected] SOURCE BiologicTx Related Links http://www.biologictx.com LAS VEGAS, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- WHAT: Min Suh, Founder and CEO of Assess+RE (www.assessre.com), a leading cloud-based provider of financial underwriting and analysis software for commercial real estate (CRE), will participate in two panel sessions within the Investment Management track at this year's 20th Annual Realcomm Conference. Both sessions will be moderated by Chuck Niswonger, President of NiceNets Consulting, LLC. The first session, titled "View from the Upstarts: (New Kids on the Block)," will consist of senior executives and Founders from the newest cloud-based startups within the CRE investment management industry. The panel members will discuss numerous topics, including: why new technologies are being adopted now within the CRE community, unique product capabilities and differentiation associated to each vendor's platform, and how young companies can get a foothold within a large industry vertical that is using only a small variety of software vendors today. The second session, titled "Automating Investment Management Routines and Business Processes," will cover the key drivers behind the efforts to automate and streamline portions of the financial modeling, valuation, and asset management processes. This session will enable the audience to examine several cloud-born solutions that are leading the next generation of software that is improving both human capital and net operating performance. WHY: While the CRE industry has grown to over $10 trillion, its growth has also been hampered by its inability to leverage new technologies such as big data analytics, data visualization, and financial metrics, which can be computed in the cloud. Min Suh will draw from his 15 years of experience as a private equity investment professional, adjunct professor at Columbia, and now as a software executive to share valuable insights into how technology, automation and innovation is ultimately changing the CRE industry landscape. WHEN: "View from the Upstarts: (New Kids on the Block)" Wednesday, June 6, 2018, 2:00 P.M. - 3:00 P.M., Yaletown 1 "Automating Investment Management Routines and Business Processes" Wednesday, June 6, 2018, 4:45 P.M. - 5:45 P.M., Yaletown 1 WHERE: The 20th Annual Realcomm Conference takes place June 6-7 in Las Vegas at The Cosmopolitan resort. ABOUT MIN SUH: Min Suh is the CEO and Founder of Assess+RE, a cloud-based financial computation and underwriting analysis SaaS platform. A former CRE investment professional with Louis Dreyfus, Suh spent 7 years as a finance professor at Columbia University's Masters in Real Estate Finance Program. Suh's previous experience in CRE includes having worked for a $2B private family office in Manhattan underwriting, valuation and investment oversight. About Assess+RE Assess+RE (www.assessre.com) is creating the next generation of cloud-based software for underwriting and valuation analysis within the Commercial Real Estate (CRE) market. Assess+RE seamlessly integrates property level assumptions for single assets or portfolios with 3rd party CRE data to provide a faster, more transparent, and easier way to analyze commercial real estate transactions. Built by industry domain experts and subject experts from Columbia University's real estate finance program, the Assess+RE platform provides user-friendly dashboards and reports for both equity and debt analysis which can be exported and shared with everyone in the CRE transaction value chain. Assess+RE provides the highest levels of data security and is accessible through any standard web browser, tablet, or mobile smartphone. Assess+RE is headquartered in NYC, with regional offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Contact: Michael Burke 415-989-9000 [email protected] SOURCE Assess+RE Related Links http://www.assessre.com SAN DIEGO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Medical Marijuana, Inc. (OTC: MJNA), the first-ever publicly traded cannabis company in the United States, announced today that the company applauds the United Nations World Health Organization's Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD) for focusing its 40th Annual Meeting on reviewing cannabis and cannabis-related substances next week. In November 2017, Medical Marijuana, Inc. subsidiary HempMeds President, Latin America Raul Elizalde spoke at the 39th Expert Committee on Drug Dependence meeting where he spoke about the therapeutic benefits of cannabidiol (CBD) and shared his story about how CBD helped his daughter Grace become seizure-free. "We're very excited for the World Health Organization and United Nations to make a final recommendation on CBD products after the findings revealed during this meeting," said Medical Marijuana, Inc. CEO Dr. Stuart Titus. "Though the WHO declared that initial evidence from human and animal studies 'shows that its use could have some therapeutic benefits', which is a very important distinction, we're optimistic that the WHO will soon declare that CBD should not be scheduled as a drug." Titus continued, "If this prestigious organization agrees that CBD should be sold as a nutritional supplement, it would open up many new opportunities for it to be sold in a variety of health and wellness retail locations around the world. Such a recommendation may influence a number of countries to review their regulations on CBD." The 40th meeting of the Expert Committee on Drug Dependence will be held in Geneva, Switzerland, June 4-7, 2018. Members of the committee, including many prestigious doctors, professors and researchers, will discuss and review the entire cannabis plant, cannabis resin, extracts and tinctures of cannabis, Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabidiol (THC) and isomers of THC. Areas of study will include the chemistry, pharmacology, toxicology and therapeutic use of these substances. For more information about this meeting, please visit http://www.who.int/medicines/access/controlled-substances/ecdd_40_meeting/en/. About Medical Marijuana, Inc. We are a company of firsts. Our mission is to be the premier cannabis and hemp industry innovators, leveraging our team of professionals to source, evaluate and purchase value-added companies and products, while allowing them to keep their integrity and entrepreneurial spirit. We strive to create awareness within our industry, develop environmentally-friendly, economically sustainable businesses, while increasing shareholder value. For details on Medical Marijuana, Inc.'s portfolio and investment companies, visit www.medicalmarijuanainc.com. To see Medical Marijuana, Inc.'s corporate video, click here. Shareholders and consumers are also encouraged to buy CBD oil and other products at Medical Marijuana, Inc.'s shop. FORWARD-LOOKING DISCLAIMER This press release may contain certain forward-looking statements and information, as defined within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and is subject to the Safe Harbor created by those sections. This material contains statements about expected future events and/or financial results that are forward-looking in nature and subject to risks and uncertainties. Such forward-looking statements by definition involve risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Medical Marijuana, Inc. to be materially different from the statements made herein. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION (FDA) DISCLOSURE These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA and are not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any disease. LEGAL DISCLOSURE Medical Marijuana, Inc. does not sell or distribute any products that are in violation of the United States Controlled Substances Act (US.CSA). These companies do grow, sell, and distribute hemp-based products and are involved with the federally legal distribution of medical marijuana-based products within certain international markets. Cannabidiol is a natural constituent of hemp oil. CONTACT: Public Relations Contact: Andrew Hard Chief Executive Officer CMW Media P. 858-264-6600 [email protected] www.cmwmedia.com SOURCE Medical Marijuana, Inc. Related Links http://medicalmarijuanainc.com One of 50 nominees in her category, Booth was named Chief Human Resources Officer of the Year for Nonprofit Organizations nationwideone of only a few health care leaders ever honored by the organization. Winners in other categories include executives from T-Mobile and Aflac. The Forum is part of HRO Today, a leading media company reaching over 180,000 decision makers. During her 27 years at MemorialCare, Booth has been instrumental in re-imagining people and culture initiatives, leadership performance, system integration, succession planning and benefits design. "We're proud of Lorraine's exceptional accomplishments in transforming our leadership and talent development," says Barry Arbuckle, PhD, MemorialCare President & CEO. "For example, through innovative leadership and pivotal organizational strategy, Lorraine spearheaded redesign of our management evaluation tools and process from an annual look-backward to a forward-focused process, resulting in more-timely feedback, goal management and mentorship." "Consistent with Lorraine's selfless leadership style, she acknowledged the work of our amazing human resource leaders across the system in her acceptance speech," adds Tammie Brailsford, MemorialCare Executive Vice President & COO. "Lorraine is passionate about building a highly engaged culture that is agile, innovative and creates a simply better experience for patients and colleagues." "I'm grateful and humbled by this recognition on behalf of MemorialCare and our employees, physicians and volunteers who provide compassionate, high quality care to communities we serve," says Booth, who helped MemorialCare achieve several consecutive Gallup Great Workplace global awards, Becker's Healthcare Top Places to Work and similar honors. MemorialCare, a nonprofit Southern California integrated delivery system and innovator in evidence-based medicine, has over 200 care locations; 15,000 employees, affiliated physicians and volunteers; top hospitalsLong Beach Medical Center, Miller Children's & Women's Hospital Long Beach, Community Medical Center, Orange Coast Medical Center and Saddleback Medical Center; award-winning physician groups MemorialCare Medical Group and Greater Newport Physicians; Seaside Health Plan; and convenient outpatient surgery, imaging, dialysis, urgent care, health and breast centers. Its many honors include Best U.S. Health Systems, Largest U.S. Children's Hospitals, Top 50 Hospitals, Top 50 Cardiovascular Hospitals, "A" Grades for Quality and Safety, and more. Visit www.memorialcare.org. SOURCE MemorialCare Related Links http://www.memorialcare.org NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the Mesothelioma Compensation Center, "Our top priority is to see to it that hydro-electric, public utility, water works, electrical utility, power plant, or any type of energy workers who have been diagnosed with mesothelioma receive the very best possible financial compensation. In many instances, this compensation could very easily exceed one million dollars. Our initiative is available on a nationwide basis and is aimed to deliver direct access to some of the nation's most skilled, experienced, and capable mesothelioma attorneys who have been helping people like this receive the very best possible mesothelioma compensation settlements, as we would like to discuss anytime at 800-714-0303." http://MesotheliomaCompensationCenter.Com Hydro Electric Generators Asbestos Warning Sign The specialist mesothelioma attorneys suggested by the Mesothelioma Compensation Center are more than happy to provide a free financial compensation evaluation for anyone with mesothelioma because of exposure to asbestos at a hydroelectric facility, power plant, public utility, an electrical utility, a gas company worker, or as an employee at a water works. These specific types of people with mesothelioma frequently receive financial compensation settlements for this rare cancer, caused by asbestos exposure, that exceed one million dollars. The only catch to receiving the best possible financial compensation is that it is vital power or energy workers be represented by some of the nations most skilled and experienced mesothelioma lawyers, as the group would like to explain anytime at 800-714-0303. We are passionate advocates for people with mesothelioma not a law firm." http://MesotheliomaCompensationCenter.Com Vital tips on how to hire the most qualified attorneys from the Mesothelioma Compensation Center for those recently been diagnosed with mesothelioma: "Mesothelioma compensation claims involving something as complex as a hydro-electric, coal fired power, or energy worker's exposure to asbestos requires significant-experience on the part of the lawyers if the diagnosed person expects to receive the very best compensation that could exceed one million dollars . . "Time is of the essence when it comes to hiring an attorney to assist with mesothelioma compensation. "Call us anytime at 800-714-0303 for the peace of mind in knowing that one of the nation's most qualified mesothelioma attorneys knows what the financial compensation settlement should be worth and knows how to get this result for their client." http://MesotheliomaCompensationCenter.Com For mapping of every type of power plant in the USA please review the following website: http://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapping-every-power-plant-in-the-united-states/. The Mesothelioma Compensation Center specializes in assisting specific types of people who have been diagnosed with mesothelioma. The Center's top priority is assisting US Navy Veterans, shipyard workers, oil refinery workers, public-utility workers, chemical plant workers, manufacturing workers, power plant workers, plumbers, welders, electricians, millwrights, pipefitters, boiler technicians, machinists, nuclear power plant workers, hydro-electric workers or oil and gas field production workers who have been diagnosed with this rare cancer caused by asbestos exposure. In most instances a diagnosed person with mesothelioma was exposed to asbestos in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. http://MesotheliomaCompensationCenter.Com According to the CDC the states indicated with the highest incidence of mesothelioma include Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Louisiana, Washington, and Oregon. However, a hydro-electric or power plant worker with mesothelioma could live in any state including California, New York, Florida, Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, or Alaska. http://MesotheliomaCompensationCenter.Com For more information about mesothelioma please refer to the National Institutes of Health's web site related to this rare form of cancer: https://www.cancer.gov/types/mesothelioma. Media Contact: Michael Thomas [email protected] 800-714-0303 SOURCE Mesothelioma Compensation Center LUXEMBOURG, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Millicom, a leading provider of cable and mobile services, has pledged its continuing support for UNICEF's work in Child Rights in Latin America through a renewed three-year collaboration agreement aimed at preventing violence and protecting children and teens in the region. This commitment builds on Millicom's existing partnership with UNICEF, which seeks to protect children's rights online and offline. The announcement was made during a press conference hosted by TIGO El Salvador with representatives from Millicom, UNICEF and TIGO's Latin American operations. As part of the agreement, Millicom will fund programs related to rights promotion, use of technology, and violence prevention against children and teens through its TIGO operations across its markets in the region. Through these programs UNICEF and Millicom will be able to create and improve helplines for children and teens; provide specialized technical support for this group; and detect and prevent digital criminal activity directed to children like sexting, grooming and cyber-bullying. Millicom will also continue to share its experience with UNICEF on its work to fully integrate Child Rights into its Corporate Responsibility strategy, moving beyond its existing Child Online Protection programs. Through this partnership both organizations expect to further help the telecommunications industry understand its impact on Child Rights. Commenting on the ongoing partnership, Rachel Samren, Millicom's EVP Chief External Affairs Officer said: "40 percent of the population in the Latin American markets where we operate are 0-19 years old. We are committed to work with UNICEF on protecting the rights of these children and teens in the long-term. That's why the renewed agreement goes beyond protection of children online and includes a focus on violence prevention. " "This agreement is an example of how the private sector can articulate sustainability strategies that center in childhood and youth", said Stefan Stefansson, responsible for UNICEF's Private Sector for Latin America and the Caribbean. "In a region that is becoming more digital, the online and offline prevention and protection of the most vulnerable ones who are usually the children and teens, have to be a priority for us. " CONTACT: For further information, please contact: Millicom Press: Vivian Kobeh, Corporate Communications Director +1-305-476-7352 / +1-305-302-2858 [email protected] UNICEF Press: Alfonso Fernandez Reca, UNICEF Latin America and the Caribbean + 507-3017373 / +507-69412277 [email protected] This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com http://news.cision.com/millicom-international-cellular/r/millicom-announces-continued-support-of-unicef-s-efforts-to-protect-children-s-rights-in-latin-ameri,c2535523 The following files are available for download: http://mb.cision.com/Main/950/2535523/851233.pdf Millicom announces continued support of UNICEFas efforts to protect childrenas rights in Latin America SOURCE Millicom International Cellular ROHNERT PARK, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- It seems that every week there's a new shocking story about student loans. Recently, the big story was about a borrower, Mike Meru, who owes more than a million dollars in student loan debt. While that may sound like a nightmare, that situation is very rare, and only about 101 people in the U.S. have loan balances that high. Ameritech Financial, a document preparation company that assists borrowers with federal repayment plan applications, reminds borrowers with high balances that they may benefit from income-driven repayment plans. Image credit: fizkes/Bigstock "A million-dollar balance might be a sign that the student debt problem is getting beyond control," said Tom Knickerbocker, executive vice president of Ameritech Financial. "But high balances are not typical of the average borrower. In fact, high balances usually just mean the borrower got an advanced degree that should also increase their earnings to offset the additional debt." Articles from earlier this year have described that many student loan borrowers with high balances are not making progress on their loans. However, such borrowers often have high debt because they obtained an advanced degree, and they are more likely to be current on their loans than those with low balances and no degree. Meru accumulated over $600,000 to get an advanced degree for orthodontia, which is one of the most expensive degree programs. Many high balance borrowers are taking advantage of federal income-driven repayment plans (IDRs) to reduce payments and extend repayment. After all, it can be extremely difficult to find employment at the beginning of a career that would allow a borrower to pay off mortgage-levels of debt in 10 years. For example, Meru has monthly payments of $1,589.97, which doesn't even cover all the interest that accrues each month. Federal IDRs calculate monthly payments on income and family size and can end in forgiveness after 20 to 25 years of enrollment. Borrowers in IDRs often have reduced payments that can ease financial stress and even allow them to work toward other financial goals that they would not be able to pursue otherwise, like saving to buy a house or building a retirement account. "High balances can be scary, but that's why federal repayment plans are so valuable," said Knickerbocker. "At Ameritech Financial, we help borrowers understand such programs in the context of their financial situation, and we help with application paperwork if they decide to pursue one of the IDR programs available through the Department of Education." 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. Ameritech Financial Newsroom 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 Images shock-at-high-student-loan-balance.jpg Shock at High Student Loan Balance Image credit: fizkes/Bigstock image2.png Related Links Ameritech Financial home page Related Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRza8MbLvuM SOURCE Ameritech Financial STERLING, Va., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Mvix, a leading provider of content-rich digital signage software solutions, will be exhibiting at InfoComm 2018, the largest audiovisual and integrated experience event in North America. InfoComm 2018 will take place June 2-8 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. At booth #N2976, Mvix will be showcasing XhibitSignage, their content-rich digital signage software. The digital signage software has been upgraded with a new UI and more content widgets, e.g., Slack, Rideshare (Uber & Lyft), Public transit, Interactive directories, In/Out Board, POS-integrated dispensary menus. Mvix will also be showcasing Mvix Flex, their new device-agnostic platform that enables the use of their digital signage software with third-party players like BrightSign. The software can also be used with: Chromebox Android devices (with OS 6.0 and above) LG SoC Signage Screens (with WebOS 3.0 and above) Mvix will also have a seat at the LG booth #C2546 to demo their integration with LG SoC signage screens. Back at the Mvix booth, the company will also be debuting their new Meeting Room Signs called Xhibit Spaces. The 15-inch digital signs have a fully customizable UX and they sync with Google Calendar, Office 365 and Exchange to allow users to pick a room and add a description of the meeting. The door signs, which can be controlled at the screens or remotely via a cloud CMS, also include a dashboard view of other rooms available in the building with the option to book them. Mvix will wrap up their InfoComm schedule at the Center Stage, where they'll present two case studies - Western Michigan University and Morey's Piers, Beachfront Water Parks and Hotels. The presentation will be on Thursday, June 7, at 10.30 a.m. and will showcase how the two clients used digital signage to test communication strategies and change audience behavior. "It's going to be a quite a busy week for us," said Mike Kilian, the Mvix senior director of business development. "With enterprise in mind, we're looking forward to showcasing our commercial-grade signage solutions designed to seamlessly integrate into businesses and to guarantee that customers will have a consistently maximized performance." Meet with Mvix at InfoComm 2018 To schedule an appointment with a representative from Mvix, please click here. About Mvix Mvix is a leading provider of content-rich digital signage software and solutions that connect brands with people. To date, the Mvix platform powers over 50,000 active screens for clients including Virginia Tech, NASA, Sodexo, Discovery Channel, TravelCenters of America and the University of Washington. The use cases include employee communication, wayfinding, emergency messaging and customer communications. For more information, visit www.mvixdigitalsignage.com. SOURCE Mvix Related Links http://www.mvixdigitalsignage.com BOSTON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- MVS Pet Care, the nation's first professional franchise network of house call veterinarians, is expanding its footprint throughout the northeast and southeast regions of the United States with six signed franchise agreements in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The announcement of the signed deals comes just three months after MVS Pet Care debuted its unique franchise opportunity. MVS, which stands for Mobile Veterinary Services, was created by a team of experienced business leaders who were inspired to eliminate the stress that pets and their families endure when traveling to the vet, to improve the quality and availability of pet care, and to enable veterinarians to focus on the delivery of medical care on their own terms. MVS's differentiated business model allows veterinarians to start their own lucrative house call practice, or to add mobile capabilities to an existing practice, with the support of an experienced corporate and house call veterinary team. MVS empowers veterinarians to focus on and personalize the delivery of pet care and determine their own hours, while gaining comprehensive support in the operation of their practices. The expansion into the new markets will be led by MVS Pet Care franchisees Ian Haywood and Emanuel Graves, who will operate two house call vans in each city by July 2018. Haywood and Graves are actively seeking licensed veterinarians to conduct the house calls. To learn the art of the veterinary house call, veterinarians will receive thorough, hands-on training with Dr. Jeremy Gransky, a DVM and MVS partner with a successful 13-year track record practicing house call veterinary medicine in the Boston area. The new MVS Pet Care franchises will offer general wellness care and vaccinations as well as illness and injury care in clients' homes. Trained MVS veterinarians will also provide complete end of life services, including hospice care and in-home euthanasia, with the hope of making a distressing experience as comfortable as possible for both the family and the pet. "Pets and their families in Boston have overwhelmingly embraced the house call concept operated by Dr. Gransky over the years," said MVS Pet Care CEO Todd Giatrelis. "Now, pets and their families throughout Atlanta, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh will have access to the highest quality veterinary care, right in the comfort of their own homes and this is just the start of it, three months in." Giatrelis noted that upon receiving their degrees, veterinarians have just two options work at a veterinary office where they are typically overworked or underpaid or open their own brick-and-mortar practice. MVS offers veterinarians an opportunity to get into business with significantly lower entry costs than acquiring or building a brick-and-mortar practice, providing them with training, back-office and scheduling support, software and access to unmatched pricing for equipment and supplies through partnerships with national pharmaceutical, diagnostic labs, pharmacy and supply companies. Most state laws require MVS Pet Care franchisees to be licensed veterinarians. In the 15 states that don't require veterinary licenses to own the franchise, MVS franchisees need to hire a licensed, registered veterinarian to conduct the in-home veterinary care. Veterinarians interested in the opportunity to work for the new territories in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh should contact Todd Giatrelis, CEO of MVS Pet Care at [email protected] or call 617-697-3534. MVS Pet Care has plans to expand in Florida, Nevada, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas and Oregon by the end of the year. About MVS Pet Care MVS Pet Care is a Boston-based national franchise network of professional house call veterinarians, dedicated to delivering quality and convenient veterinary care in the comfort of pets' homes. The company has a veterinarian-centered business model focused on delivering superior healthcare to pets and becoming a trusted provider for all of a pet's health needs. For more information on the MVS Pet Care franchise opportunity, visit www.mvspetcare.com/franchise or call -866-VET-2PET. For MVS Pet Care service inquiries visit www.mvspetcare.com. Media Contact: Ann Maher, Fishman Public Relations, 847-945-1300, [email protected] SOURCE MVS Pet Care Related Links https://mvspetcare.com WASHINGTON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A diverse cross-section of healthcare leaders today released recommendations to develop an efficient, sustainable system for accurate provider data. In its report, "An Industry Roadmap for Provider Data," the Provider Data Action Alliance, a group convened by CAQH, concluded that broad industry collaboration is needed to improve provider data. "Inaccurate provider data has long been a significant challenge for healthcare," said CAQH Executive Director Robin Thomashauer. "Individual providers, provider organizations, patients and health plans are all affected by this issue, and it requires a collaborative effort to achieve real change. This Roadmap lays the foundation for the actions required to move forward." Healthcare provider information required by payers and other users has hundreds of data elements such as education, medical specialty, license number, hospital privileges, practice location and hours, performance and quality measures, and whether the provider is accepting new patients. There are few authoritative, easily verified data sources for most of the information, much of which is self-reported. There are also no standard definitions for data elements and a lack of accountability between data producers and users to keep the data current. Although the industry spends more than $2 billion annuallyi to maintain provider data, access to high quality data remains elusive. Despite existing Federal and state regulations, available data often contains multiple errors or is incomplete. The resulting problems include patients who are unable to locate a provider because of inaccurate directories, health plans that cannot quickly identify sanctioned providers, and providers who have difficulty finding in-network providers for patient referrals or whose claims payments are incorrectly denied or delayed. The Roadmap details principles to guide the development of an industry solution, an overall vision for what the provider data ecosystem should look like and a three-phase plan to implement the vision. Specifically, the roadmap identified five major recommendations: Declare commitment to the vision: The industry must publicly commit to taking joint action to catalyze momentum and achieve industry alignment. The industry must publicly commit to taking joint action to catalyze momentum and achieve industry alignment. Form a not-for-profit, multi-stakeholder governance structure: To succeed, this endeavor requires governance by a diverse set of stakeholders capable of defining and shaping the necessary solution details. To succeed, this endeavor requires governance by a diverse set of stakeholders capable of defining and shaping the necessary solution details. Define an initial dataset and establish standards: Participating stakeholders should align on scope by defining the initial dataset on which to focus, as well as the standard against which to measure data quality. Participating stakeholders should align on scope by defining the initial dataset on which to focus, as well as the standard against which to measure data quality. Engage regulators and other essential groups to inform transformation: Educate regulators, accreditors and other stakeholders on the industry commitment so that, over time, any regulations and/or standards can be aligned with the industry solution. Educate regulators, accreditors and other stakeholders on the industry commitment so that, over time, any regulations and/or standards can be aligned with the industry solution. Begin to formally measure and share the impact of industry efforts: Establish measures for value, cost and overall data accuracy so that the results of the industry-led effort can be assessed. The Provider Data Action Alliance which includes over 20 participants representing industry stakeholders, including public and private payers, hospitals, provider groups, regulators, accreditors and health information exchanges -- contributed to the Roadmap over a nine-month period. Individuals from more than 100 organizations reviewed the recommendations. "We were pleased to be part of this effort and hopeful that the clearly articulated vision in the roadmap will result in real change in the way all segments of healthcare obtain and use provider data," said Ben Holliday, Director, Provider Data Management, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, and a participant in the Alliance. "It is time to finally solve this long-standing problem." Another Alliance participant, Michael Dowling, Chief Administrative Officer of CMO, Montefiore Care Management, which handles the credentialing for the Montefiore Health System employed and affiliated providers in New York City and the Hudson Valley, said, "We are delighted that this pressing issue is now closer to finally being addressed. Healthcare providers both individuals and organizations are eager to reduce the amount of time reporting their data, improve the accuracy of that information, and focus on patients instead of paperwork." Both Holliday and Dowling will be discussing the Roadmap at an industry briefing on June 21 during the upcoming AHIP Institute in San Diego. Provider data management and exchange has been a priority for CAQH for more than a decade. Over the past eighteen months, the organization developed a white paper on the issue and convened an industry-wide summit to inform the process, which resulted in a recommendation to create the Roadmap. As industry awareness grows, CAQH and the Alliance will solicit additional support for the Roadmap and determine the next steps required to achieve consistent, high-quality healthcare provider data for all stakeholders. Organizations and individuals interested in the issue can access the full Roadmap here, and sign up to receive updates on how they can become involved. About CAQH CAQH, a non-profit alliance, is the leader in creating shared solutions to streamline the business of healthcare. Through collaboration and innovation, CAQH accelerates the transformation of business processes, delivering value to providers, patients and health plans. Visit www.caqh.org and follow us on Twitter: @caqh. i Issue Brief: Administrative Provider Data. CAQH [Analysis completed by Booz & Co., now Strategy&, Inc.] (December 2011). SOURCE CAQH Related Links https://www.caqh.org/ AKRON, Ohio, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Herzing University today announced a new practical nursing diploma program at its Akron campus that will train students to become licensed practical nurses (LPNs), filling a significant workforce need in the region. Registration is open now for the 12-month program, which starts Sept. 5. Students will receive classroom instruction from experienced and supportive nursing leaders and will participate in hands-on learning in Herzing's nursing skills lab and simulation lab, as well as through required clinical experiences. Once the program is complete, students will be prepared to take the National Council Licensing Examination for Practical Nurses (NCLEX-PN). "The healthcare sector continues to be the top employer in Northeast Ohio, and our new LPN program makes it easier to get started in this growing field," said Herzing-Akron Campus President Bill Cassidy. "These new LPNs will help our healthcare partners address staffing needs at skilled nursing facilities, physician's offices and hospitals." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ohio is one of five states with the highest level of employment for licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses. Nationally, the organization predicts employment for LPNs to increase by as much as 12 percent through 2026. "It makes sense for us to continue to expand and invest in our nursing programs, especially as our population ages and health management needs amplify," Cassidy said. "We're excited to announce the opening of a new nursing simulation lab in 2019, which will help our students gain more hands-on training." Herzing's Akron campus has seen increased interest in both the new LPN program as well as its existing Associate of Applied Science in Nursing degree that trains students to become registered nurses (RNs). In fact, more than 90 percent of Herzing's Akron students passed the NCLEX-RN last year. Herzing's practical nursing curriculum is designed so that students who wish to advance their nursing education could enroll directly into the university's Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program. Students can choose between several flexible learning options and transfer up to 24 credits from the practical nursing diploma to other Herzing nursing programs. Herzing University also offers a variety of other nursing and healthcare specialties, including an online Master of Science in Nursing degree and post-graduate certificate programs. The Akron campus is at 1600 South Arlington St, 100. For more information, visit the campus during business hours or call 330-509-7482. For more important information about the educational debt, earnings, and completion rates of students who attended this program, please visit Herzing.edu/diploma-moa-ged.html. About Herzing University Herzing University is an accredited, private nonprofit institution with 10 campuses across seven states, a continuing education division and an online division. Founded in Milwaukee in 1965, more than 30,000 students have graduated from the University's career-focused and flexible master's, bachelor's, and associate degree, diploma and continuing education programs. Fields of study span nursing, healthcare, technology, business and public safety. From 2013 through 2018, U.S. News & World Report has continually recognized Herzing University as having some of the best online programs nationally. Herzing University is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission; www.hlcommission.org or (800) 621-7440. More information about Herzing University is available at www.herzing.edu. Contact: Candice Hudson 312-661-1050 [email protected] SOURCE Herzing University Related Links http://www.herzing.edu NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new study by UJA-Federation of New York finds that the executive director/administrator (ED/A) role is increasingly critical to helping synagogues manage mounting challenges to fiscal and operational stability. Yet, less than half of the nearly 2,000 synagogues nationwide have one in place. The Synagogue Executive Director: A Changing Role for Changing Times https://bit.ly/2LCN4gt is believed to be the first study of its kind to look at the role of the synagogue ED/A nationwide and across movements, including Conservative, Reconstructionist, Reform, Orthodox, and unaffiliated congregations. Overall, as of October 2017, just 950 individuals serve in paid ED/A roles which are often poorly defined and hampered by competing demands and a lack of clarity around function, governance, management, and leadership authority. In addition, ED/As are pressed to manage many of the key functions in the synagogue, including technology, facilities management, general operations, and administrative tasks. For many of these functions, the ED/A have not been adequately trained or lack experience. "The synagogue ED/A typically comes to the role with experience and a deep commitment to the Jewish community," says Adina Frydman, executive director, UJA-Federation of New York. "Most ED/As love what they do, but are often overwhelmed by the amount of work, competing demands, and complicated relationships with senior leadership as a result of confusion over their functional roles and authority." As a result of these challenges, many synagogues experience rapid and disruptive turnovers of ED/As that impact daily operations. Also, when facing tough economic times, many synagogues try to save money by downgrading the senior administrator position, hiring candidates with limited skills and experience at significantly lower salaries and limited benefits. As a result of these trends, many synagogues have significant operational and program needs that are not being addressed. The report recommends several proactive, cost-efficient steps that congregations can take to come to a more unified understanding of the evolving role of the ED/A. These include creating job descriptions that accurately reflect core functions and competencies and getting buy-in from all key players in advance. Also, investing in relevant professional training and support for the ED/A individuals should be a priority. "By its very existence, this study honors the significance of our profession. At the same time it identifies areas in which our professional organizations can focus their work, where we can do better, and where we clearly already excel. This study is another step towards helping our synagogues flourish and better support Jewish communities," said Susan Z. Kasper, executive director, Tiferet Bet Israel. "The challenges to the ED/A were consistent and clear. So, too, are strategies for addressing the problems and gaps, including realistic and transparent parameters for the ED/A role and professional development training and support. We hope the Jewish community will benefit from this assessment and the findings can help build stronger, thriving synagogues across North America," said Frydman. About UJA-Federation of New York For more than 100 years, UJA-Federation has brought New Yorkers together to solve some of the most pressing problems facing our community. Through UJA-Federation, more than 50,000 donors impact the issues that matter most to them, pooling their resources to care for Jews everywhere and New Yorkers of all backgrounds, respond to crises close to home and far away, and shape our Jewish future. Working with a network of hundreds of nonprofits, UJA-Federation extends its reach from New York to Israel to nearly 70 other countries around the world, touching 4.5 million people each year. For more information on how to donate or volunteer, please visit our website at www.ujafedny.org. SOURCE UJA-Federation of New York Related Links http://www.ujafedny.org At the recent seminar "Korea-Thailand 60 th Anniversary of Diplomatic Relations: Maekyung Thailand Forum", over 180 representatives from leading South Korea corporations and over a hundred representatives from Thai public and private sectors, led by Thailand Board of Investment (BOI), Ministry of Industry and Ministry of Digital Economy, were exchanging information and discussing investment opportunities between the two countries. "Plenty of opportunities are lying ahead for both countries," said Deputy Prime Minister Dr. Somkid Jatusripitak. "This is the right time for Thailand and South Korea to tighten their relationship and become trade partners considering improved economic development trend in Thailand, and many infrastructure project developments in the country. Thailand is transforming into an advanced economy driven by digital technology and we need help. South Korea has had great experience in turning its country into an advanced economy. We hope that Korea's expertise in technology, innovations, research and development is crucial to support this transformation. There is a lot that we can learn from South Korea. At the same time, there are plenty opportunities for South Korean investors to invest in development projects and advanced industries in Thailand." Mr. Paik Un-gyu, Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy of Korea, echoed this idea. He said at the seminar that the South Korea and Thailand have great opportunity to become trade partners. South Korea's strength in many industries identified as targeted industries by the Thai government, including automation, smart automotive, energy, digital technology, etc. can help Thailand to achieve its 4.0 goal. Mr. Kwon Pyung-oh, President and CEO of Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA), added that Korea has been making full-scale efforts to cooperate with ASEAN through its "New Southern Policy" while reducing its trade dependence on the US and China. In this respect, South Korea has shifted its focus to ASEAN. With Thailand being an economic and logistic hubs of ASEAN, South Korea views Thailand as an interesting investment destination. In an attempt to attract more investment, the Thai government has made a number of improvement both in terms of infrastructure and ease of doing business. In terms of infrastructure and investment magnets, the government has invested heavily in the construction of dual track and high speed train system, development of sea ports and airport on the eastern coasts, the development of the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) which will become a new investment and manufacturing hub of the region, and the promotion of human resource development to ensure sufficient skilled labor to meet the challenge of increasing demand. In terms of ease of doing business, many improvements have been achieved. Dr. Kobsak Pootrakul, Minister Attached to the Prime Minister's Office, explained, "In the past four years, the government has made significant improvement in four major areas. We have reformed the way the government works. We have tried to reduce legal limitations. We have simplified application process for permission and licenses. And, we have significantly improved the logistics system." He added that the government has successfully shortened time spent on new company registration process from 27 working days earlier to only four working days at the moment. The number of doing business manuals have been reduced from 700,000 issues to 60,000 manuals. The government has introduced "SMART VISA, which combines visa and work permit together, and significantly reduced the number of required document for SMART VISA application. Many outdated laws were amended to support new way of doing business. At the same time, digital infrastructure and related laws have been improved to ensure more convenient and efficient digital transaction and business process. In addition, Thailand Board of Investment has continuously improved its promotion incentives. The most recent improvement includes the extension of maximum tax holiday period from eight years to 13 years on investment projects in targeted industries, 50% corporate income tax reduction for up to five years (only in special investment promotion zones), exemption of import duties on materials for research and development purposes, etc. Thai government's efforts to transform the country into the digital economy has received warm welcome by attending Korean business people. The seminar also discussed investment opportunity in various industries, such as petrochemicals, aviation, transport and services. Mr. Kim Young-ju, CEO of Korean International Trade Association, said, "We appreciate the long-term relationship between Thailand and South Korea. Today, it's a good opportunity that we share our concerned with the Thai government and at the same time explore together more investment opportunities. A lot of Thais love Korean culture. We have seen more Korean language schools in Thailand. This mean good news to us. Now, we can expect more human resource exchange in the future and, of course, more business and mutual growth." For more information, please contact: Thailand Board of Investment Email: [email protected] Tel. +66 (0) 2 553 8111 Website: www.boi.go.th SOURCE Thailand Board of Investment (BOI) BELLEVUE, Wash., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- NextHome, Inc., the nation's fastest growing real estate franchise based in California, announced it has launched a leading marketing technology for all its agents: Marketing Automation powered by Imprev. The new service fully automates the creation of marketing content throughout the life of NextHome's listings, ensuring optimum marketing practices throughout the entire company and freeing up agents to focus on their clients. James Dwiggins, CEO of NextHome and industry thought leader James Dwiggins, CEO of NextHome and industry thought leader, has bold goals for the company and real estate overall. "We need to raise the bar in real estate. With the industry's lack of minimum standards and service level, more and more sellers are questioning the value of a REALTOR's role," he shared. The NextHome franchise has been rapidly expanding into new states since its inception in 2015, totaling 290 offices and over 2,400 agents year-to-date. The carefully-crafted, distinctive brand is a critical asset to the business, demanding a marketing solution that not only protects the brand's power, but also provides an easy way for agents to leverage that power in marketing. "At NextHome, we're passionate about empowering our agents to deliver tremendous value to their clients. That's why Imprev's Marketing Automation is such a natural fit for our brand," James continued. "With automation, agents have a repeatable way to deliver their marketing promise to clients without wasting precious hours on repetitive, manual tasks. Imprev understands how important it is to deliver a consistent brand and marketing experience to our clients at every point in the home-selling process, which ultimately makes our brand even more valuable to an agent's business." NextHome agents can now leverage the full suite of Imprev's services: Marketing Automation and the Design Center. After agents enter a new listing into NextHome's reporting system, Marketing Automation creates and delivers marketing content for that listing until it's sold. Content is tailored around four key events Just Listed, Open House, Price Reduced, and Just Sold making it easy for agents to use timely, relevant content to drive leads and engage with prospects. The service also constantly monitors each listing for changes; when a change occurs, all the automatically-created marketing materials are updated so they are always in sync with the listing and compliant with real estate advertising rules and regulations. Marketing materials for each key listing event can include flyers, postcards, single property websites, social media posts, emails, and more. Each piece is fully customized to NextHome's design requirements, ensuring the NextHome brand and the agent's brand is immediately apparent. The consistent materials not only make the agent look like a true marketing professional in front of clients, but also help protect and reinforce NextHome's brand across all marketing channels. In addition to Marketing Automation, NextHome already provides their agents with a branded Design Center powered by Imprev, which is a one-stop marketing shop for agents filled with an extensive library of additional custom content. It completes the full marketing cycle by offering agents simple ways to promote their brand and nurture clients outside of their listings. To give NextHome agents a seamless experience, the Design Center is closely integrated with NextHome's highly-adopted intranet. "The agent is a major conduit between consumers and the franchise or brokerage. Agents manage the client relationship from beginning to end, so it absolutely makes sense to support them with proven technology services that contribute to their success, especially when it comes to marketing," said Bill Yaman, President and Chief Revenue Officer of Imprev. "Empowering agents to fulfill a brand's promise and deliver an amazing experience results in happy, loyal clients and more future revenue for everyone." About NextHome NextHome, Inc. is an independently owned national franchisor with a focus on changing the way consumers work with local agents and shop for real estate online. It owns the NextHome and Realty World Northern California & Northern Nevada franchise networks with over 400 offices and more than 3,000 agents. The company closes over 14,000 transactions annually worth over $4.6B in volume. About Imprev Many of the most respected brands in real estate leverage Imprev's Automated Marketing Services to set themselves apart from their competition. With Imprev, brokerages automatically create and continually update fully-branded print, digital, and social media marketing packages for all their agents' listings, giving them a recruiting edge and driving unprecedented brand consistency. Launched in 2001 and constantly updated, the Imprev platform powers the marketing centers for hundreds of brokerages and franchises representing over 20 percent of real estate agents in North America including RE/MAX, Coldwell Banker, Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, Corcoran Group, NextHome, Realty World, and Hunt Real Estate, as well as Homes.com and MRIS. Discover more at www.imprev.com. News media contact: Kevin Hawkins, for Imprev, Inc. 206-866-1220 | [email protected] Related Images james-dwiggins-of-nexthome.jpg James Dwiggins of NextHome James Dwiggins, CEO of NextHome and industry thought leader nexthome-logo.jpg NextHome logo NextHome logo bill-yaman-of-imprev.jpg Bill Yaman of Imprev Bill Yaman, President and Chief Revenue Officer of Imprev imprev-logo.jpg Imprev logo Imprev logo Related Links NextHome Imprev Related Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoC3OCBdh5A SOURCE Imprev, Inc. Related Links https://imprev.com FELTON, California, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The global Operating Room Equipment Market size was valued at USD 26.24 billion in 2016 and is expected to reach USD 48.50 billion by 2025, at CAGR of 7.2%. Growing demand for improved medical facilities coupled with transition from conventional to state-of-the-art operation theaters is anticipated to escalate the operating room equipment market over the forecast period. Technological transformations, infrastructural development and high investments in the medical devices by hospital and healthcare centers are expected to spur the medical equipment demand over the forecast period. Development of hybrid operating rooms has prompted the installation of multi-purpose equipment, enabling automated results coupled with high operational efficiency, providing ample space for the introduction of high end equipment. High occurrence of medical disorders among geriatric population along with the prevalence life threatening diseases is anticipated to fuel advanced operating equipment demand. Availability of advanced surgical tools and high prevalence of chronic disorders or diseases is also anticipated to escalate product demand over the forecast period. Key challenge faced by the industry includes the high cost associated, which is expected to hamper introduction of these devices in hospitals. Lack of knowledge and skilled manpower required to handle complex devices is also expected to hinder market growth over the forecast period. Rise in number of high-end operating rooms accompanying advanced equipment along with increasing number of ASC (Ambulatory Surgical Center) is anticipated to substantially drive the level of innovation among manufacturers instigating them to provide latest technologies. Advanced and efficient operating tables, surgical booms, operating room integration systems, operating room lights, surgical headlights, surgical light sources and surgical imaging display forms an integral part of the new age hybrid theaters. Further, anesthesia equipment, electrosurgical generators, defibrillators, respiratory ventilators, endoscopy equipment, vital sign monitors, pneumatic tourniquet, infusion pumps, surgery microscopes, medical stainless steel, patient warmers, suction pumps, hospital stretchers, medical warmers, hospital stretchers, autoclaves & sterilizers, sequential compression devices and vaporizers & accessories contributes essential functionalities to an operating theater. Integration of non-surgical and surgical equipment in the hybrid operating rooms including patient monitoring, diagnostics and radiology among others coupled with imaging techniques such as MRI scanners, CT scanners and C- arm provides better ease and flexibility to the specialist to perform the task. Installation of hybrid operation rooms largely reduces the hustle of transferring a patient from the operation theater to the scanning center. This greatly automates the work efficiencies and results in better patient care, thereby adding to the business value. Browse 133 page research report with TOC on "Global Operating Room Equipment Market" at: https://www.millioninsights.com/industry-reports/operating-room-equipment-market Operating rooms presently require high-definition fixed imaging and video equipment, enabling information from all over the hospital at the surgeon's fingertip, and are expected to drive the industry demand over the forecast period. The industry is witnessing a growing trend towards installation of larger imaging systems. Operating rooms today are an economic engine for any medical facility, and accounts for more than 60% of the revenue. Further, hospitals often face an increasing drive for patient oriented effectiveness. Hospitals need to focus on creating value for the patient with the installation of state-of-the-art equipment with a combination of optimally trained medical expert. In addition, optimizing the operation environment helps enhance surgeon performance, and is thereby expected to drive the operating equipment market over the forecast period. Europe and North America are expected to emerge as the largest markets due to existence of well-established medical sector with the presence of technologically advanced medical systems. The regions are expected to witness significant growth due to the upgradation of technology with advanced automated systems and rise in number of hospitals. Evolving medical industry in the Asia Pacific region including India, Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea due to rise in population encourages the medical sector to install high-end medical facilities and technologies at low costs. Major players in the market include Steris Corporation, Hill-Rom Holding Inc., GE Healthcare, Phillips Healthcare, Stryker Corporation, Mizuho OSI, Getinge Group, Dragerwerk, Medtronic Inc, Eschmann Equipment, Karl Storz GmBH & Co. KG, Skytron, NDS Surgical Imaging, Berchtold Corporation, Trumpf GmBH + Co. KG, Creative Heath Tech Pvt. Ltd., Siemens Healthcare. Browse reports of similar category available with Million Insights: Operating Room Equipment Product Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) Anesthesia Devices Endoscopes Operating Room Tables Operating Room Lights Electrosurgical Devices Surgical Imaging Devices Patient Monitors Others Operating Room Equipment End-Use Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) Hospitals Ambulatory Surgical Centers Operating Room Equipment Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) - North America U.S. Canada - Europe Germany UK - Asia Pacific China Japan - Latin America Brazil Mexico - Middle East & Africa South Africa About Million Insights: Million Insights, is a distributor of market research reports, published by premium publishers only. We have a comprehensive market place, that will enable you to compare data points, before you make a purchase. Enabling informed buying, is our motto and we strive hard to ensure that our clients get to browse through multiple samples, prior to an investment. Service flexibility & the fastest response time are two pillars, on which our business model is founded. Our market research report store, includes in-depth reports, from across various industry verticals, such as healthcare, technology, chemicals, food & beverages, consumer goods, material science & automotive. Contact: Ryan Manuel Research Support Specialist, USA Million Insights Phone: +1-408-610-2300 Toll Free: 1-866-831-4085 Email: [email protected] Web: https://www.millioninsights.com/ SOURCE Million Insights CHICAGO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- OZ Architecture, an international design and branding firm, recently completed the interior design and brand of Fisk & Co., a new mussel and beer bar at the Kimpton Hotel Monaco Chicago. Opened on April 6 and spanning almost 3,000 sq. ft., OZ designed the space to pay homage to the building's former roots as D.B. Fisk & Company, a local millinery and hat manufacturer from the early 1900s. The food and beverage concept developed by Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants envisioned a Belgium-inspired mussel and beer bar. Inspired by the mussel as a vehicle to tell the story of Fisk & Co., which literally translates to 'fish,' OZ deconstructed the mussel concept, resulting in the image of a scruffy old sailor with a cat in his beard, which represents the crooked tradition and sense of humor in the space. After identifying the brand concept, the story of Fisk & Co. came to life with a blend of old and new infused with subtle nautical nods. "Through an aesthetic that incorporates the dynamic elements of a mussel from the colors and texture, to the places and people that harvest the mussel, the result is an off-kilter nod to Belgium dining experience that doesn't take itself too seriously," said Abigail Plonkey, Director of Brand Experience Design and Associate Principal at OZ Architecture. "Fisk & Co. guests may never make the connection to the concept or ever know the mussel drove the design, but our goal is to create places that evoke and enhance an experience with details that tell a story, down to the menus, coasters, signage and experiential touch points." About the dining spaces Upon arriving though the original revolving doors, diners are greeted under marquee lights, and a vintage metal cabinet that doubles as a host stand. The large communal bar anchors the space with scalloped tile that surrounds the base, complementing the original black and white hex tile. The back bar glows with an industrial tile that breathes life into the space, and guests sit comfortably in emerald leather tufted barstools. Coasters feature fishermen and a sense of humor, evoking spirit and personality from the brand. Moving into the dining room, which seats 78 and which includes an upper level called Brixton, a 20 ft. hand-woven rope wall installation by local Chicago artist Ricki Hill was created to harken back to the nautical roots of the concept. The rope wall brings a textural quality to the space that evokes a sense of discovery and adventure. Throughout the 300 sq. ft. Brixton dining space intricate design details unfold, including vintage lights, and rich mustard leather representing the silky color of the inside of a mussel. A high ceiling reveals a giant chandelier made of vintage bottles and artwork featuring mussels in their native environment. The full dining area can be reserved for private events, or Brixton can be rented for semi-private functions. Downstairs, a living room known as the Parlor - doubles as a private event and pre-function space. Adjacent to the kitchen, the space is comfortable with a large leather tufted sofa, antique rugs, lounge seating and kitchen counter view into the kitchen, surrounded by a custom wallcovering. Beyond the industrial doors lies the heart of the event space. What was formerly a dark room with boarded over the windows, is now a vibrant space where natural light pours in. Fisk & Co. boasts more than 1,500 square feet for private dining across three spaces including The Parlor, The Brixton and The Millinery. OZ is known for delivering creative restaurants that engage the senses and capture an experience, blurring the lines between space and brand. OZ is an integrated studio of interior designers, brand strategists, artists, craftsmen and problem solvers who rely on an intense discovery process researching and understanding the psychographic of the end user, a study of the local market and the building itself, the restaurant food and beverage concept vision, and the operational and functional requirements of the restaurant's space to transform each location into a unique and individual destination. This is second concept OZ has created for Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants. OZ also designed the heralded Henley, modern American brasserie adjacent to the Kimpton Aertson Hotel in Nashville. Images of Fisk & Co. are available for download at http://ozarch.com/fisk-co/. About OZ Architecture: Headquartered in the vibrant RiNo district of Denver, and with a studio in Boulder, OZ Architecture has been at the forefront of design since 1964. The OZ team includes over 165 architects, designers, strategists, and artists whose broad range of expertise and passions create a variety of project types on every continent. The firm is recognized for designing award-winning projects that make a positive and lasting contribution to the community. For more information, visit www.ozarch.com. SOURCE OZ Architecture Related Links http://www.ozarch.com DALLAS, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Paul Quinn College ("Paul Quinn"), one of the most innovative small colleges in America, today, announced a partnership with instructional design firm, iDesign, that will harness the potential of digital learning to make general education courses available, online. iDesign is building an initial set of courses to be launched this summer and will continue to develop additional courses each school year -- free of charge to Paul Quinn -- in an agreement structured to improve both access and affordability for students, 90% of whom are Pell Grant eligible. "This partnership reflects a belief in the transformative potential of technology to address issues of equity and access for students from under-resourced communities," says Michael J. Sorrell, Esq., President of Paul Quinn, who was recently named one of The World's 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune Magazine, alongside influential luminaries like Oprah Winfrey and Tim Cook. "Our relationship with iDesign will be a game-changer. It is about making it easier for working students across the country to gain the educational experiences necessary to create new pathways to economic opportunity, while balancing career and family priorities." Since 2015, Paul Quinn College has pioneered the "New Urban College Model," a version of higher education which adapts the Work College system to an urban environment while reducing student tuition and providing students with the ability to graduate with less than $10,000 of student loan debt. Paul Quinn is the first federally recognized Minority Serving Institution ("MSI") that is a Work College. It is also the first MSI in the Work College Consortium, and the first work college in Texas. The institution's partnership with iDesign will advance this approach, which emphasizes entrepreneurship and job opportunity, to give busy students the flexibility to earn a degree while gaining valuable work experience. "iDesign views Paul Quinn's approach--and thought leadership--as the most important work in the field of higher education today," said Paxton Riter, Chief Executive Officer of iDesign. "This is about doing our part to support their mission, by helping faculty to create learning experiences that can empower even more local students to thrive in school and in life." To learn more, please visit http://idesignedu.org/. About Paul Quinn College Paul Quinn College is a private, faith-based, four-year, liberal arts-inspired college that was founded on April 4, 1872 by a group of African Methodist Episcopal Church preachers in Austin, Texas. The school's original purpose was to educate freed slaves and their offspring. Today, we proudly educate students of all races and socio-economic classes under the banner of our institutional ethos, WE over Me. Our mission is to provide a quality, faith-based education that addresses the academic, social, and Christian development of students. About iDesign iDesign partners with colleges and universities to build, grow and support online and blended programs. We are passionate about helping faculty harness the potential of emerging technologies to design courses and degrees that make an impact, whether they are fully online, flipped, blended, adaptive, or competency-based. Our unbundled, fee-for-service model is rooted in a commitment to flexibility and institutional autonomy, while our analytics platform supports continuous improvement through rigorous measurement of student engagement and course quality. From statewide university systems to private colleges, our custom solutions pair instructional design with technologies to enable great teaching. For more information, please visit http://idesignedu.org/. SOURCE iDesign Related Links http://idesignedu.org "I am extremely humbled and honored to accept this award on behalf of the entire PenFed team: 2,500 employees who give more of themselves each and every day than they ever ask in return. I am personally energized to come to work each day because I work for PenFed and we live and lead by a simple philosophy: 'People Helping People,'" Schenck said. "If there is one thing I learned in life and as CEO, it is that driven, passionate people can really make a difference. Together as a team, they are unstoppable." The annual Business Philanthropy Summit, held at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial, was established to promote the businesses, nonprofits and government entities working together with residents of Alexandria to increase community wellbeing. PenFed supports citizens in the Washington metro area through the credit union and its philanthropic arm, the PenFed Foundation. Among the charitable donations PenFed Credit Union and the PenFed Foundation recently made are: $300,000 to Serve our Willing Warriors to provide respite for wounded warriors at a retreat in Haymarket, Virginia; $125,000 to the Kennedy Center to support free concerts for military families; $100,000 to DC Habitat for Humanity to provide affordable first-time homeownership for local veterans; $75,000 to the Alexandria-based Military Officers Association of America to train veterans in financial literacy; $15,000 to Bunker Labs in Alexandria to deliver educational programming for veteran entrepreneurs. Additionally, PenFed seized the opportunity to help build accessible homes for wounded warriors in the DC area through donations to the Gary Sinise Foundation and recently launched the Veteran Entrepreneur Investment Program (VEIP), an initiative designed to support veteran-owned startups. "James Schenck continues to set the example by selflessly serving others; first as a soldier serving our nation and now as a business leader serving our community. I can't think of a better example of Volunteerism and Philanthropy in business and I am thrilled that he is receiving this award at the 20th annual Volunteer Alexandria Business Philanthropy Summit. His work to expand the PenFed Foundation's scope and reach while promoting volunteerism has had significant positive impact and is inspiring," said Marcy Anderson, Founder and President, Federal Professional Solutions Inc., and Volunteer Alexandria Board member. Headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, the PenFed Foundation is a national nonprofit organization committed to helping members of the military community secure their financial future. Since 2001, the PenFed Foundation has provided more than $30 million in financial support to veterans, active duty service members, families and caregivers. Schenck volunteers his time as CEO of the PenFed Foundation without compensation and many other charities and business groups. He recently served as Chairman's Circle Sponsor of the USO's 75th Anniversary Gala, and chaired the Washington Business Hall of Fame campaign which raised $1.3 million for Junior Achievement. He also serves on the boards of the US Chamber of Commerce, National Symphony Orchestra, Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce, Northern Virginia Technology Council, Greater Washington Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and Carriage Services (NYSE: CSV). Schenck was elected National Credit Union Hero of the Year in 2017 in a nationwide vote conducted by Credit Union Magazine based on his embodiment of the credit union ethos of service, advocacy and commitment to community. A graduate of U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Harvard Business School, Schenck flew Blackhawk helicopters in Korea. He remains an active advocate on behalf of military and veterans' issues nationwide. In 2015, Schenck was selected by HillVets as one of the 100 most influential and impactful veterans in the United States. Schenck was honored to share the stage with Jen Walker of the Jen Walker Team who was named the Small Business Philanthropist of the Year. About PenFed Credit Union Established in 1935 as the War Department Credit Union, Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PenFed) is America's second-largest federal credit union, serving over 1.6 million members worldwide with $23 billion in assets. Our long-standing mission has been to provide superior financial services in a cost-effective manner, while being responsive to members' needs. PenFed Credit Union offers market-leading mortgages, automobile loans, credit cards, student loans, checking, certificates, and a wide range of other financial services with members' interests always in mind. PenFed Credit Union serves a diverse population, and no military service is required to join. PenFed Credit Union offers many paths to membership, including numerous employee groups and association affiliations. PenFed Credit Union is federally insured by the NCUA and is an equal housing lender. To learn more about PenFed Credit Union, visit PenFed.org, like us on Facebook and follow us @PenFed on Twitter. Interested in working for PenFed? Check us out on LinkedIn. We are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. SOURCE PenFed Credit Union Related Links http://www.PenFed.org KING OF PRUSSIA, Pa., May 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Genomind, which has been recognized and awarded for its unique personalized medicine platform, has entered into a partnership with Albertsons Companies, one of the largest food and drug retailers in the United States. This collaboration will allow pharmacy patients at select Albertsons, Jewel-Osco and Acme supermarkets to voluntarily receive free education about Genomind's Genecept Assay, the genetic test designed to help clinicians optimize treatment decisions for their patients dealing with mental health issues. The participating locations are: 21 Sav-On pharmacies at Albertsons in Boise, Idaho and nearby communities; and nearby communities; 5 Jewel-Osco pharmacies at Jewel-Osco in the Chicago area; and area; and 2 Sav-On pharmacies at Acme in the Philadelphia area. Both Genomind and Albertsons Companies are hopeful that the number of locations offering the service will increase over time. "We are excited to bring this opportunity to educate our patients about how genetic testing may be able to help them get better faster as they face mental health challenges. We have reviewed the Genecept Assay from Genomind and feel confident about how its platform can enable an individualized approach to treatment," says Albertsons Companies Senior Vice President of Pharmacy, Health & Wellness, Mark Panzer. At the select locations, specially trained pharmacists may decide to counsel a patient if they see a pattern of the patient having unsuccessful experiences with a medicine prescribed for depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder or other mental illnesses. For instance, up to half of all patients respond poorly to the first psychiatric medicine they try because everyone's body is different, partially based upon on their individual genetic makeup. The pharmacist, if the patient agrees, would then contact the treating clinician and suggest the Genecept Assay. The Assay identifies patient-specific genetic markers that indicate which treatments are likely to work as intended, have no effect or cause adverse effects. The pharmacist would be able to administer the test in a private area of the pharmacy; it involves collecting a small amount of saliva from the patient's mouth with a cheek swab. The pharmacist would review the results of the genetic test with the patient after it's returned from Genomind's CLIA-certified lab. The clinician also would receive the test and could use it to help guide treatment decisions. "We strongly embrace Albertsons Companies' mission to help people across the country live better lives, and we are honored to now be part of that effort," says Michael Koffler, President and CEO, Genomind. "Albertsons, Acme, Jewel-Osco and Sav-On are among the most established and respected pharmacies and pharmacists in the communities they serve. We are eager to bring Genomind's unique platform to their patients." The Genecept Assay covers more than 20 drug classes, 122 medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 18 clinically validated genes and 97 percent of medications used to treat depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, attention-deficit disorder and autism. It also offers comprehensive coverage of pain medications. Genecept has been shown in peer-reviewed published studies to improve patient outcomes and reduce overall medical costs; further details are available at https://genomind.com/clinical-evidence/. About Albertsons Companies Albertsons Companies is one of the largest food and drug retailers in the United States, with both a strong local presence and national scale. We operate stores across 35 states and the District of Columbia under 20 well-known banners including Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Shaw's, Acme, Tom Thumb, Randalls, United Supermarkets, Pavilions, Star Market, Haggen and Carrs, as well as meal kit company Plated based in New York City. Albertsons Companies is committed to helping people across the country live better lives by making a meaningful difference, neighborhood by neighborhood. In 2017 alone, along with the Albertsons Companies Foundation, the company gave nearly $300 million in food and financial support. These efforts helped millions of people in the areas of hunger relief, education, cancer research and treatment, programs for people with disabilities and veterans outreach. About Genomind Genomind is a unique personalized medicine platform that brings innovation to healthcare around the world. Genomind, comprised of pioneering scientists and thought leaders in brain health and genetics, delivers actionable insights to clinicians, healthcare partners and individuals in order to improve the quality of human life. Learn more at www.genomind.com. About the Genecept Assay The Genecept Assay is a genetic test designed to help clinicians optimize treatment decisions for their patients with mental illness. It identifies patient-specific genetic markers that indicate which treatments are likely to work as intended, have no effect or cause adverse effects. It is an easily administered cheek swab test that analyzes key genes that have been selected based on hundreds of studies showing that variations in these genes can inform treatment decisions. The Assay is used to guide treatment for a range of psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), autism, schizophrenia, chronic pain and substance abuse, and has been shown in peer-reviewed published studies to improve patient outcomes and reduce overall medical costs. Each Assay provides clinicians with an easy-to-read patient report and a complimentary psychopharmacogenomic consultation. Learn more at www.genomind.com. GENOMIND MEDIA CONTACTS: Kristina Habermann Vice President, Marketing and Corporate Communications Genomind 267-326-2166 [email protected] Adam Shapiro ASPR 202-427-3603 [email protected] ALBERTSONS MEDIA CONTACT: Chris Irmscher [email protected] 208-395-4029 SOURCE Genomind Related Links http://www.genomind.com AUSTIN, Texas, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Petros PACE Finance, LLC (petros-pace.com) announced today 20-year banking veteran Ben Elmquist has been named Vice President of Originations, strengthening its business development team in the Colorado area as the company continues to expand nationally. In his new role, Mr. Elmquist will join one of the national leaders in commercial real estate lending dedicated to C-PACE (Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy) financing. "We are thrilled to have Ben on board," said Petros CEO Mansoor Ghori. "The State of Colorado and the surrounding area is vital for the continued expansion of the C-PACE market. Ben's experience with financing solutions for businesses makes him a valuable asset to our businesses development in Colorado and to our growing team." Mr. Elmquist joins Petros from GDI Capital. As the founder of the company, Mr. Elmquist created the firm to facilitate real estate secured transactions with private capital and secured multiple lending sources to provide funding for CRE. Prior to his role at GDI, he worked at Bank of the West and Wells Fargo Bankworking as a CRE senior relationship manager in both roles. Ben is based in Denver, Colorado. Petros PACE Finance Austin-based Petros PACE Finance, LLC is a leading financier of long-term capital for C-PACE. The principals of Petros PACEMansoor Ghori, Jim Stanislaus, and Tommy Deavenporthave executive level and expertise in all critical aspects for C-PACE: Commercial lending, structured finance, debt fund management, and direct long-term relationships. Learn more at petros-pace.com. Media Contact: Natalie Groves Phone: 512-599 9042 SOURCE Petros PACE Finance, LLC Related Links http://www.petros-pace.com MOSCOW, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- During the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) Andrey Guryev, PhosAgro's CEO, President of the Russian Association of Fertilizer Producers (RAFP) and Vice President of the International Fertilizer Association (IFA) for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, took part in the Russia-France Business Dialogue panel discussion attended by the Russian and French Presidents Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron. The panel, focusing on issues of and prospects for bilateral cooperation, included speeches by representatives of the two nations' business communities, government bodies and civil society. Commenting on the Russia-France business dialogue in the domain of agriculture and application of mineral fertilizers, PhosAgro CEO and RAFP President, Andrey Guryev, noted: "The phosphate-based fertilizers produced in Russia (with PhosAgro leading the charge in the domestic market) are of exceptionally high quality and environmental purity. "While many manufacturers of fertilizers that are far less eco-friendly enjoy free access to the European market, Europe continues imposing a 6.5% customs duty on the pure products originating from Russia, with the European consumers being the ones who pay with their health and money for artificial restrictions on imports of the Russian clean fertilizers. "We are happy to see that Europe has recently launched a public discussion on the contamination of soils, agricultural products and foods with toxic heavy metals such as cadmium and arsenic. Indeed, today this is a global challenge to human health and preservation of the environment for the future generations. This topic is of particular significance to France, the leading agricultural producer in the EU and the largest importer of phosphate fertilizers. "France is uniquely positioned to lead the EU by example if it chooses to limit its use to eco-friendly phosphate fertilizers with a low content of harmful impurities. Russia will gladly help its long-term partner to put healthy food on the French tables by ramping up the volumes and expanding the range of exported green phosphate fertilizers. In its turn, France just needs to take charge when it comes to putting a cap on fertilizers with dangerous heavy metals and other impurities in Europe, as well as set in motion the cancellation of the EU's 6.5% duty on Russian imports of phosphate fertilizers," said Andrey Guryev, PhosAgro's CEO. Another important avenue for cooperation between Russia and France is the banking sector. Over the past few years, French banks have been actively providing financing for the Russian corporations and their foreign subsidiaries. PhosAgro has been a long-term partner of several French banks. For example, Societe Generale acted as PhosAgro's lender and lead arranger of a USD 250 m pre-export loan that the Company raised in June 2016 and has since fully repaid. The bank also worked with PhosAgro in 2017-2018 on its second and third Eurobond issues, of USD 500 m each. Andrey Guryev also spoke at the Russia-Japan Business Dialogue that took place at SPIEF. The two countries are expected to further their economic partnership when it comes to developing projects and fostering cooperation between Russian and Japanese businesses. The Russia-Japan Business Dialogue panel discussion at SPIEF 2018 was attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and touched on the achievements and current challenges in the relations between the two countries, as well as on new business opportunities and prospects. Vladimir Putin, said: "Japan is undoubtedly one of our key partners in the Asia-Pacific Region, but not just in Asia. We would like to take our relations to the global level. We took a keen interest in Japanese Prime Minister Abe's initiatives on developing Russian-Japanese relations in eight priority fields, and have already proposed an 80-project plan on its basis. Some of these projects have already kicked off." In his speech, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, said, "Together, Japanese and Russian companies can implement many projects that will greatly benefit our nations, I am sure of that. I have no doubt that it will lead us towards a bright future. I hope this business dialogue becomes a productive forum for a better tomorrow." Andrey Guryev, PhosAgro's CEO, shared the experience of long-standing cooperation between PhosAgro Group and Japan's industrial corporations and financial institutions. Russian and Japanese companies can use it in various aspects of their business, such as the implementation of state-of-the-art technology. "Our cooperation dates back 40 years, to the construction of the first large-scale ammonia plant in Cherepovets using the technologies of the Japanese Toyo Engineering Corporation," he said. "Five years ago, here at SPIEF, we signed a contract with an international consortium led by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for construction of a new, highly advanced ammonia plant, which produces 760 kt of the product that we use to manufacture fertilizers. The capital investments in the Cherepovets capacities (including the new ammonia plant) exceeded RUB 65 billion. "These funds were in part sourced using Japanese project financing, as we became perhaps the only Russian public company to attract a long-term loan of almost USD 500 million directly from JBIC and a consortium of Japanese banks. "Thanks to that, we were able to utilise some of the best technologies in the world to build the most advanced ammonia facility in Europe, which last year reached its design capacity." Praising the quality and effectiveness of cooperation with JBIC, PhosAgro's CEO Andrey Guryev said that for large-scale industrial projects to be implemented, there need to be more institutions like Japan's JBIC and Russia's RDIF. Shinzo Abe, Japan's Prime Minister, addressed the questions by the Russian business community and Andrey Guryev in particular on the Japanese government's plans regarding the most favoured nation status of Russia, expressing his gratitude to those who contributed to developing and strengthening the business ties between Russia and Japan and saying: "Our governments will continue fostering the business relationship between the two countries, (...) and we would like Japan's government to support Japanese enterprises. "The financial system is also very important. Last September, JBIC and the Russian Direct Investment Fund launched and committed USD 1 bn to a joint investment vehicle that has already invested in three projects. "In February 2018, JBIC collaborated with the Far East Investment and Export Agency and other organisations to establish a venture for developing and promoting investment projects. The company will provide support to the Japanese business when it comes to investing and selecting new projects. "Two years ago, Mr Putin and I agreed to expand economic cooperation between our countries. That decision, coupled with our willingness to work together, is opening new opportunities and has already yielded results in the last two years. "I hope we can explore new avenues for cooperation, and we are doing everything we can to make it possible. This will remain a priority for us, so that Japan and Russia could help each other grow and build a new society." Andrey Guryev also took part in televised debates organised by the RDIF and Rossiya 24, titled 'Investment Breakthrough: Infrastructure and Technology of the Future'. During the televised debates, participants noted that Russia has established an infrastructure that unites investments from leading sovereign funds from around the world and leading Russian companies. This makes it possible to combine best global expertise and practices with unique opportunities and progressive developments by Russian companies. One of the main issues discussed by the participants was the effect of investments in creating competitive advantages for companies in the Russian market and abroad. Over the past five years, PhosAgro has invested RUB 160 billion into its development using best available technologies. As a result, production volumes during this period increased by 40%, to a record 8.3 million tonnes, while labour productivity per employee increased by 2.5 times, which helped the Company win in a Vedomosti rating. For the last three years, PhosAgro has achieved annual growth in fertilizer output of 10%, with a similar trend for phosphate rock production. This year the Company plans to maintain the same pace of growth. Last year, PhosAgro completed a large-scale investment into the construction of new, high-tech production facilities. PhosAgro's new ammonia plant is currently the highest-capacity in Russia (760 thousand tonnes per year), as is the granulated urea line with a capacity of 500 thousand tonnes per year. Investments in the project exceeded RUB 65 billion. These will enable PhosAgro to continue to produce phosphate-based fertilizers that are naturally low in potentially-harmful impurities, helping to support national and global food security. The new production facilities will also create significant potential for increasing production capacity and improving the Company's self-sufficiency in key inputs. In the next two years, PhosAgro plans to invest at least RUB 50 billion, which will enable it to open three new production facilities (sulfuric acid, nitric acid and ammonium sulfate) at the production complex in Cherepovets by 2020, and to expand the capacity of the third apatite-nepheline beneficiation plant. PhosAgro is also considering options for the development of the production complex in Volkhov. PhosAgro CEO Andrey Guryev said: "At present, we are working on a long-term strategy for the development of PhosAgro until 2025, which will be aimed at further improving efficiency, strengthening the Company's positions in domestic and foreign markets, increasing shareholder value and profitability. "The Company, whose shares have traded on the London Stock Exchange and Moscow Exchange since 2011, last year conducted its second SPO in recent years. Shareholders successfully placed 4.5% of the shares of PhosAgro. RDIF together with five sovereign funds from China, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE participated in the SPO, as well as international investment funds from the UK, continental Europe and the United States. "The Company benefited significantly from the SPO with RDIF, increasing its free float to more than 25%, helping the liquidity of PhosAgro shares traded on the Moscow Exchange to grow 5-fold. The company's weighting in the MSCI Russia index also grew, while the geography and structure of its investors became more diversified, and the share price broke records. "RDIF has built an effective mechanism for attracting financing from foreign sovereign funds to the Russian equity market, and this contributed to high demand for PhosAgro shares. The order book for PhosAgro shares was fully subscribed within an hour, becoming oversubscribed thereafter. The volume of the transaction exceeded RUB 15 billion. "We also expanded the Board of Directors of PhosAgro to ten people from eight, and an absolute majority of those are independent directors. In addition, through our cooperation with RDIF, we have gained invaluable insight into communication with and decision making by sovereign funds. "I believe that RDIF provides a certain assurance of quality. Trust in Russia, inspired by this fund, is extremely unique." Responding to a question from the moderator about the possibility of an investment breakthrough, Andrey Guryev noted that "an investment breakthrough is not only possible and inevitable, but we have already entered this investment cycle, investing about USD 500 million annually into production development." About PhosAgro PhosAgro (http://www.phosagro.ru) is one of the world's leading vertically integrated phosphate-based fertilizer producers in terms of production volumes of phosphate-based fertilizers and high-grade phosphate rock with a P 2 O 5 content of not less than 39% (according to IFA, Fertecon and CRU). PhosAgro's main products include phosphate rock, over 35 grades of fertilizers, feed phosphates, ammonia, and sodium tripolyphosphate, which are used by customers in 100 countries spanning all of the world's inhabited continents. The Company's priority markets outside of Russia and the CIS are Latin America, Europe and Asia. PhosAgro's shares are traded on the Moscow Exchange, and global depositary receipts ("GDRs") for shares trade on the London Stock Exchange (under the ticker PHOR). Since 1 June 2016, the Company's GDRs have been included in the MSCI Russia and MSCI Emerging Markets indexes. SOURCE PhosAgro Ping An Tops Global Insurance Brands for the Third Consecutive Year HONG KONG and SHANGHAI, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- WPP, the world's largest communications services group, and Kantar Millward Brown have released the 2018 "BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands" list, in London. Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. ("Ping An" or the "Group", HKEx: 2318; SSE: 601318) has climbed 18 places to 43rd, becoming one of the top 50 global brands, and the brand value soared by 51% to USD26.1 billion. Ping An ranked third among the global financial services companies and ranked as the top brand in the global insurance sector for the third consecutive year. Ping An ranked 7th among all the listed Chinese enterprises. "BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands" is one of the world's largest and most prestigious brand valuation reports. The brand valuation adopts a unique research method in the industry to combine the interview results of more than three million consumers worldwide with the analysis of financial and operating performance of various companies (according to the Kantar Consumer Index and Bloomberg's financial data). The list featured, including Ping An, 14 Chinese brands, with brand value increasing 47% year-on-year, more than double the growth rate of the United States (23%). In addition, technology-related brands continue to dominate, and data-driven technologies such as artificial intelligence have enabled brands to rejuvenate. According to the report, brands in the Chinese financial services, including Ping An, benefited from spending by China's growing middle-class and the funding needs of government initiatives. "Consumers view Ping An, with its broad range of financial services, as 'Meaningfully Different', this is why Ping An is the No. 1 most valuable insurance brand," says the report. In addition, Ping An also outscores the average scores of insurance brands in each of its five components: Brand Purpose, Innovation, Communications, Experience, and Brand Love. Ping An established a two-pronged strategy of "finance + technology" in 2017. The strategy helped Ping An increase efficiency, reduce costs, improve experience, enhance risk prevention and improve its service quality through innovation of products, services and technology. It also helped the Group continue to apply mature innovative technologies in increasingly diversified scenarios, to generate core technologies for output and continuously expand its scope of services as well as obtain asset-light revenue. Since last year, with the core technologies of smart perception, AI, blockchain, cloud computing and security as the foundation, Ping An's subsidiaries have launched numerous technology innovation services, with three major scenarios including customers and users' health, travel and wealth. Leveraging Ping An's "Technological Innovation" and "Speed of Services", the Group provides users with smart services. For example, Ping An Property & Casualty debuted the "510 Ultra-speed On-Site City Inspection" and "One-click Arrangement" services in the global industry. A total of 95.4% on-site cases for auto insurance were handled within 10 minutes across the prefecture-level cities nationwide. Meanwhile, Ping An Life launched the "AI Customer Services" to intelligently identify customers and their needs, such as online applications for insurance claim settlements, insurance policy information confirmation and beneficiary changes, in order to effectively resolve the issues of slow authentication and settlement in traditional life insurance businesses. In 2017, Ping An's NPS (Net Promoter Score) increased by 28 pps to 36% when compared with its debut in 2014. Thanks to the improvement of service quality and the application of innovative technologies, Ping An has maintained a rapid and healthy development over the years. According to the 2017 annual results announcement, Ping An's net profit amounted to RMB 99.978 billion, an increase of 38.2% year-on-year; net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company was RMB 89.088 billion. As of 31 December 2017, Ping An's market capitalization ranked first in global insurance companies. Ping An commented, ranking as one of the top three global financial brands of BrandZ shows the recognition and encouragement by the organizers of the company's steady growth in brand value and performance, technological innovation strategy, continuous optimization of products and service quality. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the company. With the theme of "Embracing the Future with a Thankful Heart", Ping An has launched a number of activities to give back to society and customers. In the future, by seizing the opportunity of developments in smart technology, Ping An will continue to deepen the "finance + technology" and explore the strategic planning of "finance + ecosystem", leading its business transformation with technology, continue to optimize products and services experience, promote the steady growth of various businesses and make the lives of citizens better. Besides Ping An, the other Chinese enterprises listed in the Top 100 include Tencent (ranked 5th), Alibaba Group (ranked 9th), China Mobile (ranked 21st), ICBC (ranked 22nd), Moutai (ranked 34th), Baidu (ranked 41st), Huawei (ranked 48th), China Construction Bank (ranked 49th), JD (ranked 59th), Agricultural Bank of China (ranked 69th), China Life (ranked 79th), Bank of China (ranked 84th) and SF Express (ranked 90th). About Ping An As China's first joint stock insurance company, Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. ("Ping An") strives to become a world-leading technology-powered personal financial services group. Today, it is an integrated, compact, multi-functional financial services group with services that include insurance, banking, and investment. As of 31 March, 2018, the Group had over 173 million retail customers. At the end of March 2018, the Group's consolidated total assets reached RMB6.73 trillion. Ping An Life and Ping An Property & Casualty are both ranked as the second largest in China, and Ping An Annuity is the top-ranked in China in their respective areas by premium income. Its subsidiary Ping An Bank is China's first joint stock bank. The Company's key areas of business include investment, with subsidiaries such as Ping An Trust, Ping An Securities and Ping An Asset Management. Furthermore, Ping An strives to develop internet finance, including Lufax, Ping An Good Doctor, OneConnect and Ping An Healthcare Technology. It has achieved significant growth in both the scale and user base of internet finance. As of 31 March, 2018, the number of internet users of the Company reached 459 million. Ping An ranked 16th in Forbes' 2017 Global 2000, and it ranked 39th in Fortune Magazine's 2017 Global 500 Leading Companies. Ping An also ranked 43rd in 2018 WPP Millward Brown's BrandZTM Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands. For more information, please visit www.pingan.com.cn or http://t.sina.com.cn/pingan. SOURCE Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. Related Links http://www.pingan.com.cn Bio-Cannabis Product Pipeline Ready To Be Commercialized In Canada VANCOUVER, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Pivot Pharmaceuticals Inc. (CSE: PVOT /OTCQB: PVOTF / FRA: NPAT) ("Pivot" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has signed an exclusive Contract Manufacturing Agreement (the "Agreement") with Bio V Pharma Inc. ("BioV") to manufacture, label, package and supply Pivot's bio-cannabis product pipeline. BioV is a Quebec-based full-service manufacturer of pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products including vitamins, botanical products, food and veterinary supplements and specializes in capsules, tablets, liquids and semi-solids delivered in a variety of packaging formats. The BioV management team has over 40 years of experience in product development and manufacturing and will produce Pivot's entire bio-cannabis suite of products including BiPhasix topical creams and lotions, Thrudermic transdermal gels and lotions, Solmic 1% CBD oral solution, and "RTIC" Ready-to-Infuse-Cannabis Powder presented in capsules, single-use sachets and bulk packages. Pivot has engaged Cannabis Compliance Inc. ("CCI") to apply to Health Canada for a Dealer's License ("Dealer's License") under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act ("CDSA") and the Narcotic Control Regulations. Pivot's Dealer's License will be attached to the BioV facility in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Quebec, enabling the Company to perform research and development, process natural health products, store cannabis derivatives, as well as import and export cannabis oils, concentrates and approved derivatives. In addition, a DL will also allow the Company to formulate cannabis products in various dosage forms, strengths or package sizes to support future market research and product innovation opportunities. Dr. Patrick Frankham, Pivot's CEO, stated "We are excited to have chosen Bio V Pharma as our Canadian manufacturing partner at this important time in Pivot's history. Consumers and regulators will demand high-quality products that are manufactured in cGMP facilities by a knowledgeable and experienced team. BioV has a track record of supplying retail pharmacy chains, including Shoppers Drug Mart and London Drugs, with products meeting the highest quality standards. We continue to execute on our business plan to monetize our platform technologies by commercializing our suite of premium, science-based cannabis products in key markets." Pivot is currently in discussions with several Canadian Licensed Producers to secure supply of pharmaceutical-grade cannabis oils and isolates and expects to finalize a Supply Agreement shortly. Upon receipt of a Dealer's License from Health Canada, Pivot will be ready to market its differentiated portfolio of products to consumers in Canada and the EU. The Company remains on target to generate revenue in Q4 2018 from its operations in California, Canada and select EU countries. About Bio V Pharma Inc. Bio V Pharma is a Canadian based full-service manufacturer of pharmaceuticals and nutraceutical products including vitamins, botanical products, and food supplements. With over 40 years of experience in product development and manufacturing, Bio V currently services North America, Europe & the Middle East and is internationally recognized for quality & service, meeting the most stringent compliance and documentation requirements. For more information please visit www.biov.ca About Cannabis Compliance Inc. Cannabis Compliance Inc. offers risk mitigation, due diligence and regulatory compliance for commercial cannabis producers and resellers around the world. We focus in the global market, and provide our clients with trusted and comprehensive solutions. CCI has extensive expertise in regulatory compliance, cultivation/horticulture, security designs/tender, facility designs/build-outs, quality assurance programs, import & export, staff recruitment and financial planning. CCI exists to empower the future leaders in the global cannabis industry. For more information please visit www.cannabiscomplianceinc.com About Pivot Pharmaceuticals Inc. Pivot Pharmaceuticals Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company engaged in the development and commercialization of therapeutic pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals using innovative drug delivery platform technologies. Pivot's wholly-owned medical cannabis products division, Pivot Green Stream Health Solutions Inc. ("PGS" or "Pivot Green Stream"), conducts research, development and commercialization of cannabinoid-based nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals. Pivot's wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary, Pivot Naturals, LLC, based in Costa Mesa, California, will manufacture and supply finished powderized cannabis products such as food additives, capsules, bulk powder and stick packs to the California market. PGS has acquired worldwide rights to "RTIC" Ready-To-Infuse Cannabis oil-to-powder technology, BiPhasix Dermal Drug Delivery platform technology (topical), Solmic Solubilisation technology (oral) and Thrudermic Transdermal Nanotechnology (transdermal) for the delivery and commercialization of cannabinoid, cannabidiol (CBD), and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)-based products. For more information please visit www.PivotPharma.com Cautionary Statement Except for historical information contained herein, the matters set forth above may be forward-looking statements that involve certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those in the forward-looking statements. Words such as anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, intend, and similar expressions, as they relate to Pivot Pharmaceuticals Inc., Pivot Green Stream Health Solutions Inc., Pivot Naturals, LLC, Bio V Pharma Inc., or its management, identify forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on the current beliefs of management, as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to management. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements as a result of certain factors, such as the failure to meet the conditions imposed by the CSE or other securities regulators, the level of business and consumer spending, the amount of sales of Pivot's products, statements with respect to internal expectations, including with respect to the Dealer's License, the competitive environment within the industry, the ability of Pivot to continue to expand its operations, the level of costs incurred in connection with Pivot's expansion efforts, economic conditions in the industry, and the financial strength of Pivot's customers and suppliers. Pivot does not undertake any obligation to update such forward-looking statements. Investors are also directed to consider all other risks and uncertainties. SOURCE Pivot Pharmaceuticals Inc. DANIA BEACH, Fla., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Plum, the company that introduced the first appliance that automatically preserves, chills and serves wine by the glass, today announced a $10 million Series B financing, led by Las Olas Venture Capital. Based in Fort Lauderdale, Las Olas invests in early-stage startups with a primary focus on B2B technology companies solving complex coordination business problems. After paramount success during its presale consumer launch, Plum began expanding its mission to transform wine by the glass consumption to the hospitality space. The company began the rollout of its Plum for Hotels program in September, 2017. The program brings Plum's innovative, on-demand, in-room wine by the glass experience to guests in luxury hotel rooms. In addition to a new profit center for hotels, the program allows partners to bring a new level of personalization and ease to guests who want to enjoy a glass of wine at the end of a work day. The latest funding round will support Plum as it continues to expand its Plum for Hotels program throughout the U.S. Today, the company counts Four Seasons Hotel Silicon Valley at East Palo Alto, The Confidante Miami Beach, Waldorf Astoria Roosevelt New Orleans, among others, as Plum for Hotels partners. Plum anticipates rolling out across more than 50 hotels through the remainder of 2018. "We have been consistently impressed with Plum's unique value proposition for hoteliers, and David's ability to execute on that vision is second-to-none. Plum is a perfect example of our thesis of investing in great people and companies outside of core technology markets," said Mark Volchek, Founding Partner of Las Olas VC. "Las Olas has been a tremendous partner to Plum as we have grown following our launch and initial vision to transform the in-home wine by the glass experience," said David Koretz, founder and CEO of Plum. "Working with experienced operators that know how to rapidly scale businesses will be instrumental to our future growth." Las Olas participated in Plum's Series A funding round in June of 2017, along with Khosla Ventures. Las Olas Venture Capital and several notable angel investors across technology, wine and hospitality. Las Olas Venture Capital was represented in the transaction by Stanley "Stash" Jacobs, Jr. of Greenberg Traurig. For more information, please visit www.plum.wine. About Plum Plum is transforming how luxury consumers and hotel guests enjoy wine from the bottle to the glass. Plum's flagship product reflects our mission of delivering the perfect glass of wine on demand, every time preserved and at the ideal serving temperature. Plum, Inc. is headquartered in Dania Beach, Florida with offices in Palo Alto, California and Dongguan, China. www.plum.wine. About Las Olas Venture Capital Las Olas VC is a Florida-based early stage fund that invests in startups in a variety of industries. Las Olas VC's mission is to find outstanding entrepreneurs in non-obvious places and maximize their impact by connecting them to networks of capital, talent, and customers in well-established startup ecosystems. Dean Hatton, Esteban Reyes, Paul Tanner and Mark Volchek are the Founding Partners of Las Olas VC. For more information visit www.lasolasvc.com. Note: This is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities. Please contact Manager for additional information. SOURCE Plum Related Links http://www.plum.wine PITTSBURGH, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE: PNC) announced today that Chief Financial Officer Robert Q. Reilly will discuss business performance, strategy and banking in a moderated discussion format at 10:35 a.m. (ET) Wednesday, June 13 at the Morgan Stanley Financials Conference in New York City. The following will be accessible at www.pnc.com/investorevents: a link to the live webcast; related materials, including cautionary statements regarding forward-looking information, available prior to the start of the webcast; webcast replay available for 30 days. The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. is one of the largest diversified financial services institutions in the United States, organized around its customers and communities for strong relationships and local delivery of retail and business banking including a full range of lending products; specialized services for corporations and government entities, including corporate banking, real estate finance and asset-based lending; wealth management and asset management. For information about PNC, visit www.pnc.com. CONTACTS: MEDIA : PNC Media Relations (412) 762-4550 [email protected] INVESTORS: Bryan Gill (412) 768-4143 [email protected] SOURCE PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. Related Links www.pncgis.com SEATTLE, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Am Law 100 firm Polsinelli has expanded its West Coast footprint into Seattle with the opening of its 21st office. With plans for further expansion to come in Seattle, Polsinelli is pleased to announce the launch of its Seattle office. Joining the firm is an initial group of eight, including James Fredman III, Jane Pearson, Steve Kenyon, Jessica Andrade, Stephen Fisher, Kirsten Koester, Robert Mahler, and Adrienne McKelvey. The group brings a range of capabilities, including health care, government investigations, bankruptcy, and corporate and transactions. "We're pleased to announce our expansion to Seattle, where our emphasis on health care, technology, government investigations, and mid-market corporate practices fits well with the market. We plan on further growth in Seattle to serve clients in these and other areas," said Polsinelli Chairman and CEO Russ Welsh. "This is a talented group of attorneys with diverse skillsets who share our commitment to providing value and excellent client service." The Polsinelli Seattle office is located downtown in the Central Business District's 1000 Second Avenue high-rise, just blocks from the pier and the Pike Place Market. The new Seattle group includes: James Fredman III , Health Care Operations Practice Group. Fredman works with hospitals, academic medical centers, research institutes, public hospital districts, managed care organizations, medical technology companies, hospices, and other health care providers and payors on regulatory, transactional and operational matters. Fredman works with hospitals, academic medical centers, research institutes, public hospital districts, managed care organizations, medical technology companies, hospices, and other health care providers and payors on regulatory, transactional and operational matters. Jane Pearson , Bankruptcy & Financial Restructuring Practice Group. Pearson represents clients in commercial transactions, commercial litigation, commercial foreclosures, financial restructurings, workouts, corporate strategic planning, creditors' rights and bankruptcy, and has earned significant recognition for her bankruptcy work. Pearson represents clients in commercial transactions, commercial litigation, commercial foreclosures, financial restructurings, workouts, corporate strategic planning, creditors' rights and bankruptcy, and has earned significant recognition for her bankruptcy work. Steve Kenyon . Formerly CEO of a Seattle law firm, Kenyon will focus on acclimating Polsinelli to the Seattle market and assume leadership responsibilities of the new office. Formerly CEO of a law firm, Kenyon will focus on acclimating Polsinelli to the market and assume leadership responsibilities of the new office. Jessica Andrade , Government Investigations Practice Group. A former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Affirmative Civil Enforcement Unit in the Western District of Washington , Andrade uses her government background in her government investigations and enforcement proceedings practice, which also includes False Claims Act litigation and complex commercial litigation. A former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Affirmative Civil Enforcement Unit in the Western District of , Andrade uses her government background in her government investigations and enforcement proceedings practice, which also includes False Claims Act litigation and complex commercial litigation. Stephen Fisher , Corporate & Transactional Practice Group. From emerging companies to mature businesses, Fisher represents clients in a variety of industries including industrial design, software developers, hospitals, smartphone app developers, and engineering companies, bringing an array of business-critical services such as capital formation, mergers and acquisitions, financing, and the protection of technology assets. From emerging companies to mature businesses, Fisher represents clients in a variety of industries including industrial design, software developers, hospitals, smartphone app developers, and engineering companies, bringing an array of business-critical services such as capital formation, mergers and acquisitions, financing, and the protection of technology assets. Kirsten Koester , Corporate & Transactional Practice Group. Koester provides a broad range of transactional services to emerging and established companies with an emphasis on mergers and acquisitions, and has been involved in international transactions in Europe , Asia , and Canada . Koester provides a broad range of transactional services to emerging and established companies with an emphasis on mergers and acquisitions, and has been involved in international transactions in , , and . Robert Mahler , Government Investigations Practice Group. With more than 35 years of experience in white collar criminal defense, Mahler specializes in corporate internal investigations, regulatory defense and complex civil litigation. He has been recognized among The Best Lawyers in America since 2013, and this year was named as Seattle's Lawyer of the Year in White Collar Criminal Defense and Government Investigations. With more than 35 years of experience in white collar criminal defense, Mahler specializes in corporate internal investigations, regulatory defense and complex civil litigation. He has been recognized among since 2013, and this year was named as Lawyer of the Year in White Collar Criminal Defense and Government Investigations. Adrienne McKelvey , Government Investigations Practice Group. McKelvey represents clients in contract disputes, intellectual property litigation, white collar criminal cases, and other complex civil matters. "Our entire team is excited about this opportunity to launch Polsinelli's newest chapter in our hometown of Seattle, and to enhance the solid national reputation Polsinelli has established," Kenyon said. "We share Polsinelli's concentrated focus and commitment to putting client service first, and look forward to continuing to introduce Polsinelli's broad and deep practices to the Seattle market." Polsinelli's newest location increases the firm's momentum on the West Coast. In December, the firm expanded its Intellectual Property capabilities adding a group of five attorneys in its Silicon Valley office. The firm also has offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Entering his final year as CEO and Chairman, this expansion marks a significant milestone for Welsh, who has served as Polsinelli's leader for 20 years. Under Welsh's leadership, the firm has expanded its geographic footprint opening 19 new offices across the country. The firm's other offices include major locations in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York City, Phoenix, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, St. Louis, Washington, D.C., and Wilmington. About Polsinelli Polsinelli is an Am Law 100 firm with more than 825 attorneys in 21 offices. Ranked #24 for Client Service Excellence1 and #10 for best client relationships2 among 650 U.S. law firms, Polsinelli is also named among the top 30 best-known firms in the nation3 for the second consecutive year. The firm's attorneys provide value through practical legal counsel infused with business insight, and focus on health care, financial services, real estate, intellectual property, mid-market corporate, labor and employment, and business litigation. www.polsinelli.com | Polsinelli PC | In California, Polsinelli LLP 12018 BTI Client Service A-Team Report 22017 BTI Industry Power Rankings 32018 BTI Brand Elite CONTACT: Carrie Trent, [email protected] SOURCE Polsinelli Related Links http://www.polsinelli.com CHAPEL HILL, N.C., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Healthcare organizations increasingly find their names in the headlines. Unfortunately, it's not because of their groundbreaking medical research, but due to data breaches that expose the sensitive information of thousands of patients, according to Robert Lord, President and Co-founder of Protenus, a healthcare compliance analytics platform detecting inappropriate activity in electronic health record (EHR) systems. Lord, who is speaking as part of a roundtable discussion at the 14th North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance (NCHICA) AMC Privacy and Security Conference, will cover this topic, as well as the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare compliance, and strategies healthcare organizations can use to get ahead of the data breaches that are affecting healthcare. In the panel, "New Frontiers in Risk and Opportunity: A New Hope or A Dark Future?" Lord will analyze the latest trends and technologies transforming healthcare privacy and security, and discuss how artificial intelligence can detect privacy violations before they wreak havoc on healthcare organizations and patients alike. Speaking together with Carlos Cruz, the CIO of TriCity Medical Center and Michael Gregory, the CIO of Community Healthcare System, Lord will focus on new threats that are emerging from increasingly interconnected health data systems, as well as new technologies that replace reactive, manual processes, and allow health systems to proactively audit every access to health data, reducing the overall risk involved in data sharing. "On any given day, there are millions of accesses to patient data within a single hospital's EHR. Healthcare organizations simply don't have the resources to review all those accesses, but technology now exists that uses artificial intelligence to alert hospitals when there is a potential breach," said Lord. "My hope is that by highlighting opportunities for improvement in how we protect patient data, the healthcare industry can begin to implement solutions, and build trust with all the patients we serve." Current detection tools reactively respond to suspected breaches to patient data by relying on manual, labor-intensive audits. These tools lack the clinical context and user behavior analytics necessary to audit every access or proactively identify data breaches, especially when at least 41% of all health data breaches are attributable to healthcare organization insiders. NCHICA was created to improve the delivery, quality, accessibility, and efficiency of healthcare through the use of information technology. This community provides a neutral and engaging environment where members can gather to discuss common concerns in healthcare privacy and security. To register or learn more about the roundtable discussion, visit the NCHICA AMC website. Presentation details: New Frontiers in Risk and Opportunity: A New Hope or A Dark Future? June 11, 2018 2:45 - 4 p.m. About Protenus The Protenus healthcare compliance analytics platform uses artificial intelligence to audit every access to patient records for the nation's leading health systems. Providing healthcare leaders full insight into how health data is being used, and alerting privacy, security and compliance teams to inappropriate activity, Protenus helps our partner hospitals make decisions about how to better protect their data, their patients, and their institutions. Learn more at Protenus.com and follow us on Twitter @Protenus. Contact: Kira Caban Director, Public Relations [email protected] 410-913-0274 SOURCE Protenus Related Links https://www.protenus.com CLEVELAND, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Redwood Living, Inc. is officially unveiling its Orrville, Ohio neighborhood to the community this Friday. To celebrate the momentous event, Redwood will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 11:30 a.m., allowing community members and local businesses to experience the unique apartment homes firsthand. Known for offering single-story apartment homes, the innovative building and management company has added a new perk to the Orrville neighborhoodeach apartment will only share one wall with a neighbor. This new duplex design means every resident of the neighborhood can have a much-desired end unit, allowing each apartment to provide the feel of a freestanding home. Redwood is excited to offer Orrville residents an alternative to traditional apartment living, and looks forward to becoming a staple in the community. "We're proud to be able to serve the Orrville community with remarkable housing," states Redwood Regional Manager Cheryl Emond. "It's an honor to join local businesses with strong foundations, like the J.M. Smucker Company, and provide a place their employees can call home." The Orrville Redwood apartment neighborhood is located at 1999 Redwood Drive, walking distance from the local YMCA and just a short drive to all that downtown Orrville has to offer. For more information about Redwood, the Orrville neighborhood or its ribbon-cutting ceremony, please email [email protected] About Redwood Living, Inc. Redwood Living, Inc. (Redwood) is an innovative development and property management company with neighborhoods in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina and South Carolina. The company believes that the growth of the "renter-by-choice" population demands the response that Redwood provides. The success of this approach continues to be validated in new markets. Redwood is a company that believes in its mission, product and amazing people. It creates a simplified, relaxed lifestyle for residents, and offers a rewarding atmosphere for its employees. For more information, visit www.byredwood.com. SOURCE Redwood Living, Inc. Related Links http://www.byredwood.com BRUSSELS, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today the European Foundations Centre (EFC) opened its Annual Conference in Brussels, where Natalia Yemchenko, a member of the Supervisory Board of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation, and Roman Rubchenko, Director of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation, presented an album of photographs: "Donbass and Civilians". (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/697992/Rinat_Akhmetov_logo.jpg ) The EFC unites more than 500 philanthropic organisations in Europe. The topic of the 29th Conference (this year it is held as a part of the European Year of Culture) is "Culture Matters: connecting citizens, uniting communities". The event includes a series of exciting exhibitions, topical sessions and thought-provoking site visits. The speech of the Ukrainian delegation focussed on drawing the attention of the world community to one of the largest armed conflicts of the XXI century, which is taking place today in the heart of Europe. The photo book "Donbass and Civilians" was presented during the session "A matter of culture - Civil society and democratic dialogue in Central and Eastern Europe". The unique edition was published under the auspices of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation: "The book is about the war and the civilians of Donbass. 11 stories about the fate of the most unprotected people: the children, who were injured, and the old people, who were trapped in the frontline conflict zone. All these people have managed to survive thanks to the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation. The stories of the Civilians are so shocking, you cannot keep silent about them. We want more people to know about them to tell them the truth about the events in Donbass," said Natalia Yemchenko presenting the book. The UNO reports 4.4 million victims of the war in eastern Ukraine. Donbass is recognised as one of the most heavily mined places on the planet. The UNICEF reports that 220 thousand Donbass children are forced to attend schools in the war zone. "The children risk being wounded or killed every day, by land mine blasts or shells. They study in buildings with bullet holes in the walls and windows with sandbags, where bomb shelters are equipped in the basements, and fragments of shells lie in the school yards. The armed conflict in Ukraine has been waged now for more than four years. We cannot remain silent or pretend that it does not concern us. They say war has no face and no voice. It has - the voices of the Civilians, who suffer in Donbass. We want them to be heard in Europe and worldwide," declared Yemchenko. About The Rinat Akhmetov Foundation The Rinat Akhmetov Foundation is the largest charitable mission in Ukraine. It is the largest personal initiative in the east of the country. The Foundation has succeeded in saving more than a million civilians in the East of Ukraine since 2014. The largest programme of the Foundation is the Humanitarian Center, which has been helping the most vulnerable members of the population of Donetsk and Lugansk regions for more than four years. Approximately 12 million grocery sets have been given close to the line of contact, which help people survive. Over 750 settlements are served with this aid. Since February 28, 2017, the activity of the Humanitarian Center in the territories of Donbass not controlled by Ukraine has been blocked. 500 thousand people have been left without help. The Center continues to support the residents of the "gray zone" and internally displaced persons. Saving lives is the main task that Rinat Akhmetov has set for the Foundation. Media contact: James Wilson [email protected] +32496120786 SOURCE Rinat Akhmetov Foundation Humanitarian Aid Center BERKELEY, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Robin Healthcare, Inc., a health-technology company providing a smart assistant device that frees physicians to focus on the patient, today announced its launch from stealth mode with nationwide availability. The company has developed a HIPAA-compliant device that sits in the clinic room and elegantly leverages both human and artificial intelligence (A.I.) to consistently produce fully billable clinical notes addressing the biggest pain point for doctors today. Robin requires no special vocabulary or workflow changes from the physician to post documentation directly into the physician's electronic medical record (EMR). Robin has already completed documentation for tens of thousands of patient visits, allowing doctors to focus all their attention on the patient. "In an effort to help the doctor, too often technology has only gotten in the way, adding more tasks, more training, more unmet expectations," said Noah Auerhahn, Co-Founder and CEO, Robin Healthcare. "We've built Robin to help physicians without interrupting care. Our clinical background gives us an appreciation for the complexity and nuance of medicine while our technical experience recognizes where today's A.I. can be assistive without letting it get in the way of the physician providing care. Doctors don't need to wear anything or use special words; utilizing a blend of human and machine intelligence, Robin doesn't simply reduce physician note burden, it eliminates it. All the while, our A.I. is learning from each clinical encounter to become a more capable assistant to our providers." The modern-day practice of healthcare has become increasingly burdensome. The stats are bewildering. Physicians spend six hours a day on a computer. They have two hours of administrative tasks for every hour with patients. Not surprisingly, more than 50 percent of physicians today are experiencing burnout, the primary cause being documentation. The industry has thrown human beings at the problem with medical scribes and transcriptionists, as well as various types of software through EMRs and dictation via voice-to-text all to no avail. The documentation burden has only grown. While promising, voice assistants alone cannot yet replace a physician's clinical reasoning, and playing the wrong song is very different from prescribing the wrong medication. With a human in the loop, Robin today is training this cutting-edge A.I. while providing a HIPAA-compliant and easy-to-use device that allows physicians to seamlessly transition away from the computer and go back to practicing medicine. "The real promise of Robin is its ability to help the people who are at the center of healthcare delivery. Physicians are finally relieved of tedious work without clicking, typing or repetitive dictating; patients receive the undivided attention their care deserves; administrators get consistent, detailed and accurate clinical documentation for reporting and billing; and, everyone stands to benefit from the standardized clinical information Robin is developing at its core," said Denis A. Cortese, MD, Foundation Professor and Director, Healthcare Delivery and Policy Program, Arizona State University; Emeritus President and CEO, Mayo Clinic. Led by a team of repeat successful founders, Robin combines the deep clinical, industry and technical expertise required to solve this problem. Robin's CEO, Noah Auerhahn, previously founded technology and e-commerce company Extrabux, San Diego's fourth fastest-growing company when it was acquired by Ebates in 2013. Robin's President, Emilio Galan, previously founded HonestHealth, where he conducted health data analysis for the states of New York and California. He did clinical training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and has spent more than a decade working with large healthcare datasets. Robin's Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kathleen Myers, has practiced medicine for more than 20 years and founded Essia Health, a 600-person scribe company that was acquired by Scribe America in 2015. "Robin has been transformative. I've practiced through the rise of EMRs, the growing demands of documentation, and the proliferation of dictation and different note-taking services. These 'solutions' haven't really solved the problem and continue to get in the way of care," said Stephen J. Pinney, MD, Orthopedic surgeon, San Francisco Orthopedic Surgeons Medical Group. "With Robin, the device just sits on the table in my clinic rooms and I get to focus on my patients while Robin takes care of documentation without interrupting my practice. I'm happier and patients are getting better care all the things we thought technology would bring to the practice of medicine." "Robin has quickly spread across our practice as the physicians have seen the immediate relief from administrative work. Our physicians are happier, our patients love the uninterrupted care, and as a practice we get consistent, high-quality notes to expedite the billing process and maximize reimbursement. Robin should be the standard of modern day practice," said Karen Sollar, CEO, Webster Orthopedics and President, American Association of Orthopaedic Executives (AAOE). Robin has been operating in stealth since its founding in early 2017, offering its services exclusively in the Bay Area as it tuned the technology and prepared to scale its service with $3.5M Seed financing led by IA Ventures, Social Leverage and Meridian Street. Robin is now available nationwide for orthopedics and other surgical subspecialties, working toward a solution for every doctor across the country. How Robin Works Robin is placed in clinic rooms where it unobtrusively performs documentation based on the natural dialogue between the physician and patient. Clinical documentation is drafted without wake words, specialized vocabulary or dictation, or other workflow changes. Robin uses ambient Conversational Speech Recognition (CSR) with a robust quality assurance process by a trained workforce. Complete, fully billable clinical notes are submitted directly into the physicians' existing EMR where all they have to do is review and sign. Using military-grade encryption, all data are secured, and the service is completely compliant with HIPAA. About Robin Healthcare Based in Berkeley, CA and led by a team of repeat founders (e.g., Extrabux, Essia Health), Robin Healthcare combines deep clinical knowledge and technical expertise required to capture medicine's complexity, ensure the highest quality for patient care, and offer an affordable clinical documentation solution for every doctor. Robin's leadership team has clinical training at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Los Angeles, informatics and machine learning experience at Duke, and natural language processing training at UC Berkeley. Robin has assembled a world-class team of clinical, artificial intelligence and medical scribe industry experts to reinvent the practice of medicine. For more information, please visit www.robinhealthcare.com. SOURCE Robin Healthcare, Inc. Related Links http://www.robinhealthcare.com "It's important for people in Puerto Rico to know they are not forgotten, and that God loves them," said Samaritan's Purse President Franklin Graham . "We have been on the ground in Puerto Rico since the day Hurricane Maria hit, and we will continue to help them rebuild their lives." The organization also plans a much-needed solar energy project for 100 homes in Yabucoa, one of the hardest-hit areas on the island, where residents continue to be affected by intermittent power outages. Teams will begin installing solar units this summer. The solar project is the first of its kind for the relief group. The time-intensive installation process will provide enough electricity for a small home, including enough to power a refrigerator, which is critically important when electricity is not available because it allows residents to keep crucial prescription medications and temperature-sensitive food items from spoiling. MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES AND RESOURCES Remote or in-person interviews with disaster relief specialists in Puerto Rico Central and Southern Puerto Rico : rebuilding efforts with local churches and homes Yabucoa: solar energy project installation with disaster relief specialists in High-resolution, downloadable photos of work in Puerto Rico of work in Broadcast-quality, downloadable b-roll from Puerto Rico PUERTO RICO STATISTICS Samaritan's Purse Post-Maria Aid 1,900+ generator kits 75,000 tarps, helping households stay dry until permanent repairs can be made 34,000 grocery boxes, in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency 6,000+ solar lamps 24,000 Sawyer water filters 1,400,000 aqua tablets used to purify water Tens of thousands of buckets and jerry cans used to transport water 1,540 Bibles 3,100 people served by 67 free mobile medical clinics 756 helicopter trips to deliver tons of food, supplies and staff to remote or inaccessible areas In addition to 1,900 generator kits already distributed across the island, Samaritan's Purse in April shipped another 500 generator kits, which include a generator, oil, a gas can and solar lights. The kits are being distributed to vulnerable families in remote areas of central Puerto Rico that still do not have access to power. BACKGROUND: CARIBBEAN-WIDE RESPONSE CONTINUES Samaritan's Purse first deployed teams of disaster response specialists across a number of Caribbean islands in the immediate aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria to provide medical help and distribute food, emergency shelter materials, clean water, hygiene kits and solar lights to families in need. Over the subsequent weeks and months, the organization's DC-8 cargo jet made 44 round trips from North Carolina to the Caribbean, airlifting more than 1,000 tons of emergency relief supplies and key staff. With the conclusion of the emergency response phase, the organization is now shipping additional supplies on barges, with more than 2,000 tons of aid shipped by air and sea to the Caribbean so far. Many supplies have also been sourced locally. In addition to distributing relief supplies, the organization established 16 clean water points throughout the Caribbean that provided ongoing sources of clean water. Barbuda More than 53 homes have been repaired, with another 112 targeted for completion by the end of the year. Samaritan's Purse staff have completed repairs to one church and will work on five other churches that were significantly damaged. The organization also installed a reverse-osmosis plant that continues to provide safe water for families as they move back to the island. Dominica Samaritan's Purse staff plan to assist with an estimated 1,000 roof repairs. Over the next two to three years, the organization also plans to help rebuild some 30 churches and provide reconstruction support to approximately 825 people through home repair efforts. Samaritan's Purse, in partnership with the local utility, continues to truck clean water to communities in need. St. Martin Samaritan's Purse, the first relief organization to arrive after the hurricane with food, water and heavy-duty shelter materials, plans to repair 40 churches, restore 315 homes and provide 2,500 families with material assistance vouchers to purchase large appliances, lumber, windows, roofing supplies or other construction materials. About Samaritan's Purse Following Hurricanes Irma and Maria, Samaritan's Purse has helped more than 94,900 families in the Caribbean, which included disaster response efforts in Turks and Caicos, St. Martin, Puerto Rico, Dominica, and Antigua and Barbuda. Samaritan's Purse also helped more than 3,800 families impacted by the hurricanes in Texas and Florida. Contact: Scott Knuteson 770.317.0499 Jessica Brown 404.545.8944 Online Newsroom SOURCE Samaritans Purse Related Links https://www.samaritanspurse.org RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Jeddah Enforcement Court has ordered a Saudi gold mining company to pay over 10 million dollars (SAR 38 million) of financial dues to a Chinese mining company. The execution writ was based on an arbitral award issued by an international Chinese arbitration committee. The enforcement is based on Article 12 of the Enforcement Law. The Chinese company had filed a digital application to the Jeddah Enforcement Court for enforcing an arbitrator's judgment asserting its entitlement to a sum of 10,133,300 dollars (SAR 38,368.509). Subsequently the enforcement judge ordered the Saudi company to pay the amount within five working days as of notification date, or penalties stated in the Enforcement Law would be applied. Upon receipt of the enforcement notification, the Saudi company was quick to pay the dues. Last week, Saudi Ministry of Justice has announced that Saudi courts restored 3.4 billion dollars after implementing foreign rulings, confirming its commitment to advancing the performance and ranking of the judiciary system to reach the global standards. It has signed a number of agreements to enforce foreign rulings concerning individuals or corporations. SOURCE Saudi Ministry of Justice HERZOGENAURACH, Germany, May 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- For Schaeffler, responsible action has always been part of our self-image as a company. In the Sustainability Report for the business year 2017, the company provides transparent and comprehensible reporting according to the new reporting standards of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). In the theme of "Our aspiration," Schaeffler uses brief stories in its Sustainability Report 2017 to show how its employees are implementing and living sustainability. This reporting is centered on the focus topics of our Sustainability Strategy: responsibility in the supply chain, green products, commitment to climate protection, and diversity. "When it comes to sustainable development, we don't just want to follow standards but to set them," explains Corinna Schittenhelm, Chief Human Resources Officer and the member of the Executive Board responsible for sustainability. "Sustainability is a central aspect of our strategic, value-oriented approach and a key driver for the Schaeffler Group's future success." As in our first Sustainability Report, the ambitious nonfinancial goals and measures are illustrated in a Sustainability Roadmap, which is the central element of Schaeffler's integrated sustainability strategy. On this basis, a new structure was developed for the print report, and the accounting section and image section were separated. The information presented in the Sustainability Report goes beyond the reporting obligations according to the CSR Directive Implementation Law and underscores the company's aspiration to achieve sustainability work that is comprehensive, transparent, and pioneering. The Sustainability Report provides information on how Schaeffler is contributing to the sustainability goals of the Agenda 2030 of the United Nations. Overall, the company is contributing to meeting ten of these 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through its business activities. For the first time, the Sustainability Report of the Schaeffler Group is also available as an online version that combines its information about sustainability with clear and comprehensible interactive elements. Readers who are interested in more information can dive deeper into the world of sustainability with just one click. In addition, you can read up-to-date information about sustainability at Schaeffler on our website. About Schaeffler The Schaeffler Group is a global automotive and industrial supplier. Top quality, outstanding technology, and exceptionally innovative spirit form the basis for the continued success of the company. By delivering high-precision components and systems in engine, transmission, and chassis applications, as well as rolling and plain bearing solutions for a large number of industrial applications, the Schaeffler Group is already shaping "Mobility for tomorrow" to a significant degree. The technology company generated sales of approximately EUR 14 billion in 2017. With more than 90,000 employees, Schaeffler is one of the world's largest family companies and, with approximately 170 locations in over 50 countries, has a worldwide network of manufacturing locations, research and development facilities, and sales companies. SOURCE Schaeffler Related Links http://www.schaeffler-sustainability-report.com/2017 ANDOVER, Mass., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management and automation, today announced it ranked among the top three best places to work in Massachusetts, according to Forbes Magazine's 2018 list of Best Employers. Ranking the top 500 U.S. employers at large companies, non-profit institutions and U.S. divisions of multinationals with more than 5,000 employees, the America's Best Employers 2018 list is compiled from anonymous rankings by more than 30,000 employees in an independent survey. Schneider Electric joins a total of 21 companies in Massachusetts that made the list. "Schneider Electric employs more than 1,500 people in Massachusetts and this recognition is a representation of the contribution from these talented employees that make us a great place to work," said Annette Clayton, CEO and President, North America Operations, Schneider Electric. "We're committed to promoting a great work environment in all of our offices worldwide and strive to prioritize the well-being of our employees to continue our tradition of being ranked among the best global employers." Forbes partnered with research company Statista.com to conduct an anonymous survey of 30,000 American employees working for businesses with at least 1,000 employees. Participants were asked to rate how likely they'd be to recommend their employer to others. The final ranking is divided into two lists, ranking the top large companies with more than 5,000 U.S. employees, and another for the top midsize companies with 1,000 to 5,000 employees. To view the full America's Best Employers 2018 list, please visit: http://www.forbes.com/best-employers/. For more information about Schneider Electric, please visit: https://www.schneider-electric.us/en/. About Schneider Electric Schneider Electric is leading the Digital Transformation of Energy Management and Automation in Homes, Buildings, Data Centers, Infrastructure and Industries. With global presence in over 100 countries, Schneider is the undisputable leader in Power Management Medium Voltage, Low Voltage and Secure Power, and in Automation Systems. We provide integrated efficiency solutions, combining energy, automation and software. In our global Ecosystem, we collaborate with the largest Partner, Integrator and Developer Community on our Open Platform to deliver real-time control and operational efficiency. We believe that great people and partners make Schneider a great company and that our commitment to Innovation, Diversity and Sustainability ensures that Life Is On everywhere, for everyone and at every moment. www.schneider-electric.us Discover Life is On Follow us on: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Google Plus YouTube SETV Schneider Electric Blog Hashtags: #SchneiderElectric #EcoStruxure #IoT #LifeIsOn SOURCE Schneider Electric Related Links http://www.schneider-electric.us Senior Vice President and Chief Accountant, Raj Viswanathan, Named Acting CFO TORONTO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Scotiabank (TSX: BNS) today announced that Group Head and Chief Financial Officer, Sean McGuckin, will take a leave of absence to attend to an illness in his family. The Board of Directors has appointed Senior Vice President and Chief Accountant, Rajagopal (Raj) Viswanathan as Acting Chief Financial Officer, effective immediately. In addition, the Bank announced the following structural changes to the Finance team: Charles Emond , currently Managing Director and Co-Head, Global Investment Banking has been promoted to Executive Vice President, Finance reporting to Raj. , currently Managing Director and Co-Head, Global Investment Banking has been promoted to Executive Vice President, Finance reporting to Raj. Chadwick Westlake , currently Senior Vice President Structural Cost Transformation & Lean, will become Senior Vice President, Structural Cost Management & Canadian Banking Finance reporting to Raj. "Our thoughts are with Sean and his family at this time," said Brian Porter, President and CEO at Scotiabank. "During his absence, the Board and Management at Scotiabank have the utmost confidence in Raj Viswanathan to steward the Bank's financial, accounting and reporting needs." About Scotiabank Scotiabank is Canada's international bank and a leading financial services provider in North America, Latin America, the Caribbean and Central America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. We are dedicated to helping our 24 million customers become better off through a broad range of advice, products and services, including personal and commercial banking, wealth management and private banking, corporate and investment banking, and capital markets. With a team of more than 89,000 employees and assets of over $926 billion (as at April 30, 2018), Scotiabank trades on the Toronto (TSX: BNS) and New York Exchanges (NYSE: BNS). For more information, please visit www.scotiabank.com and follow us on Twitter @Scotiabank. SOURCE Scotiabank Related Links http://www.scotiabank.com William Drew, Group Editor of The World's 50 Best Restaurants, said: "SingleThread is the perfect example of a forward-thinking restaurant with a strong narrative at its heart, which serves world-class, meaningful food while keeping issues of sustainability at its core. SingleThread is a well-deserved winner of the Miele One To Watch Award." Selected by the 50 Best organisation and awarded to an establishment that is making an impact on the international gastronomic scene, the Miele One To Watch winner is seen as having the potential to rise into The World's 50 Best Restaurants list in the future. Priding themselves on the designers and artisans who help make up the SingleThread experience, the Connaughtons serve 11 courses of sustainably produced dishes, over 70% of which are produced at their farm, located between the Russian River and the historic San Lorenzo Ranch. Seasonal vegetables, fruit, herbs, flowers, honey, eggs, and olive oil are provided directly to the restaurant kitchen each day from the farm's greenhouse, fields, apiary and heirloom orchard. The SingleThread philosophy embraces 72 micro-seasons, which sees the restaurant cooking and serving only the ripest foods at specific moments in the year. SingleThread joins a stellar line-up of recent One To Watch award winners including Disfrutar in Barcelona (2017), Den in Tokyo (2016), Sepia in Sydney (2015), Saison in San Francisco (2014) and The Test Kitchen in Cape Town (2013). Results All announcements and results, including the 2018 list, are published online at www.theworlds50best.com. The awards ceremony itself is streamed live via www.finedininglovers.com and on the 50 Best Facebook page. The best way to follow the announcement of the list and individual awards is via our social media channels: Twitter : @TheWorlds50Best #Worlds50Best : @TheWorlds50Best #Worlds50Best Facebook : @50BestRestaurants : @50BestRestaurants Instagram : @TheWorlds50Best : @TheWorlds50Best YouTube: Worlds50Best SOURCE SingleThread SANTA MONICA, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Som Sleep announces the official launch of the Som Sleep Ambassador and Affiliate Program. The company released its first two products, NSF Certified for Sport ready-to-drink sleep supplements Som Sleep Original and Som Sleep Zero Sugar, in January of this year. "Our Ambassador and Affiliate program attracts top industry leaders who are genuinely passionate about Som Sleep," says John Shegerian, the company's Co-Founder and CEO. "Anyone with a unique voice can become a part of the Som movement. Whether you struggle with sleep-deprivation or want to feel more well-rested in the morning, you can take your sleep to the next level with Som and help others do the same." Individuals can now apply to join the Som Sleep Ambassador and Affiliate Program. Benefits of the program include joining Som on the journey to a better night's sleep, as well as: Product to giveaway to your audience Earning extra income Monetizing your blog, YouTube channel, and/or podcast The freedom to use your social channels (i.e. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter) to amplify earnings Once an applicant has been approved for the Som Sleep Ambassador and Affiliate Program, they will be given a unique affiliate link to share with their network and audience. The more an individual promotes Som Sleep, the higher their capacity to earn. Apply now to start earning today! Som has 50 ambassadors already on board. Som Sleep is an NSF Certified for Sport ready-to-drink sleep supplement available in both Original and Zero Sugar. The drug-free, non-habit forming formula is consumed 30 minutes before bed for better sleep. Som is available in a 4-pack, 12-pack, and 24-pack for both one-time purchase as well as recurring delivery online at www.getsom.com. Apply now to join the Som Sleep Affiliate Program, and find Som on social media @getsomsleep. Contact: For media inquiries, contact Lily Allyn Gordon at [email protected]. SOURCE Som Friends, Inc. Related Links http://www.getsom.com PARIS, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Taliance, a software and cloud provider for alternative asset managers, today announced the launch of The Lab, a series of apps designed to help clients work more efficiently. The Lab is now available for free to current clients. Each App is a file containing a fully downloadable model that allows companies to tackle a specific problem in the investment process and encourage innovation in investing. At launch Taliance is releasing three apps, WALT, CURRENCIES and WATERFALL. WALT (also known as WALE, WAULT or WALL) is used to calculate the risk of a property that is becoming vacant in a given year and is used to measure overall tenancy risks of a property with several units. WATERFALL is the method of splitting profits among partners in a transaction that allows for profits to follow an uneven distribution while CURRENCIES enables firms to manage different currencies for investments, including gathering and forecasting data on asset levels in local currencies or performing stress tests in a certain currency. "With the launch of The Lab, we are giving our clients some of the tools they need to make investment management decisions," said Taliance CEO and founder Guillaume Fiastre. "We serve as true partners to our clients, allowing them to focus on core investing decisions while we help mitigate the time they spend on technology and operations." Taliance will continue to add apps to The Lab based on client demand and in response to industry conditions. "We are building a community for our clients, so they can adapt and learn from each other. Taliance including The Lab will serve as a hub for innovation. We look forward to continuing conversations with our clients about what they need to complete their goals." Taliance recently relaunched the company's website, which includes a new community-based approach to user support. The portal includes thousands of articles and discussion threads where Taliance clients, partners and employees share solutions and ideas and contribute to the company's ongoing product roadmap. More information on The Lab, including how current customers can install apps, is available at Taliance.com. About Taliance Taliance Group provide cloud-based collaborative business modelling, forecasting and performance reporting solutions to alternative investment firms allowing them to better adapt, anticipate the future and make more informed decisions on the fly. It offers business solutions for alternative investment firms for real-time/dynamic forecasting, modelling scenarios, and other front/middle office analytics. Headquartered in Paris, the company has offices in London and New York and works with investment companies worldwide. Taliance.com PRESS CONTACTS: Cognito +1 646 395 6300 [email protected] SOURCE Taliance Related Links http://taliance.com HOUSTON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- TapJets, the private jet instant booking platform, has added Litecoin ($LTC) as an approved form of payment, giving customers yet another instant payment option to augment traditional credit card payments and bank transfers. This new offering allows TapJets' customers to instantly book private flights from their smartphones and head to the airport while the blockchain transaction is completed in the background. "We are excited to add Litecoin to the Bitcoin and Ethereum payment options we already accept," said Eugene Kesselman, CEO of TapJets. (@EugeneKesselman) "The Litecoin community is strong, and we are happy to work with the Litecoin Foundation to welcome them to our platform. Making it easier to use cryptocurrency in more places is what separates the leaders from followers. This is precisely what the #PayWithLitecoin movement is all about." "It's great to see that TapJets is now allowing their customers to pay with Litecoin," said Charlie Lee, Creator of Litecoin. (@SatoshiLite) "Its speed, liquidity, and ease of integration make it the perfect cryptocurrency for payments. It's also exciting to see how our community helped make this partnership happen." About TapJets: TapJets instant booking platform is the only platform in the world where you can book your private jet in less than one minute. With over 16,000 clients accessing the platform to book their flights and bid on Flight Auctions. TapJets TITAN platform provides Travel Agents with private jet booking capability and Plane Factor platform connects operators and pilots directly with their flying customers. For more information please visit www.tapjets.com. About the Litecoin Foundation: The Litecoin Foundation is a non-profit organization whose mission is to advance Litecoin for the good of society by developing and promoting state-of-the-art blockchain technologies. Registered in Singapore, the Foundation is comprised of fulltime and volunteer support from around the globe. For more information, visit www.litecoin-foundation.org. This press release was issued through 24-7PressRelease.com. For further information, visit http://www.24-7pressrelease.com. SOURCE TapJets Related Links http://www.tapjets.com ALBANY, New York, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a new market report published by Transparency Market Research, the global television broadcasting services market was valued at US$ 395.5Bn in 2016 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 6.9% from 2018 to 2026, reaching US$755.7 Bn by the end of the forecast period. According to the report, North America was the largest contributor in terms of revenue to the television broadcasting services market in 2016. This is primarily due to strong adoption of television broadcasting services such as cable television, satellite television, and IPTV across the region. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/664869/Transparency_Market_Research_Logo.jpg ) Increasing demand for high definition content and advertisement as a growing source of revenue are driving the global television broadcasting services market Increasing demand for high definition content and advertisement as a growing source of revenue are the major factors which are expected to fuel the growth of the television broadcasting services market across the globe. The television industry has shifted from provider-driven to consumer-driven. Moreover, emergence of quality standards along with the technological advancements in manufacturing of devices are contributing significantly in meeting rising consumer expectations. Demand for high-quality OTT televisions, such as HBO Go and others are increasing as consumers prefer to have high standard quality videos and content. According to Ericsson Mobility Report 2017, ownership of HD TVs has increased from around 75% in 2012 to almost 85% in 2017. Apart from this, companies are focusing on enhancing revenue through advertisements. Television serves as the most prominent source to reach a large audience and potential customers. Thus, adoption of television platforms by companies to improve their business operations is growing significantly due to its wide reach and increasing number of channels. This in turn is expected to drive the television broadcasting services market during the forecast period. Request a Brochure for Research Insights at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=13574 Television Broadcasting Services Market: Scope of the Report The global market for television broadcasting services is segmented on the basis of delivery platform, broadcaster type, revenue model, and geographic regions. On the basis of delivery platform, the market is segmented into digital terrestrial broadcast, satellite broadcast, cable television broadcasting, internet protocol television (IPTV), and over-the-top television (OTT). In 2017, the cable television broadcasting services segment accounted for the largest market share in terms of revenue of the global television broadcasting services market. Furthermore, demand for satellite television broadcasting service is also expected to gain major market share throughout the forecast period. On the basis of broadcaster type, the global television broadcasting services market is segmented into public and commercial. In 2017, public broadcasting segment accounted for the largest share of the market. Television broadcasting service providers are generating more revenue from the public sector. However, commercial broadcasting services segment is estimated to expand at a substantial rate over the forecast period. Furthermore, based on revenue model, the global television broadcasting services market is categorized into subscription and advertisement. Among them, the subscription segment is expected to grow at a significant rate. The growth of this segment is mainly driven by rising adoption of pay TV subscription and on-demand television services, which is consequently expected to fuel the growth of the subscription market during the forecast period. Advertisement segment is expected to have moderate growth during the forecast period. This is the result of digitization. Revenue from user subscription is expected to witness uptake during the forecast period. Request a PDF Sample at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=13574 Based on geography, the global television broadcasting services market is bifurcated into North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, South America, and Middle East & Africa. Among these regions, the market for television broadcasting services in North America is expected to hold its dominant position throughout the forecast period. However, Asia Pacific and Europe are also expected to contribute significant market share during the forecast period. Browse Press Release at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/television-broadcasting-market.htm Global Television Broadcasting Services Market: Competitive Dynamics Players in the television broadcasting services market are partnering with other technology companies in order to expand their market presence. Apart from partnerships, vendors are also improving their services in terms of content quality and converging the content of production and distribution in order to gain market share globally. The global television broadcasting services market includes different players such as A&E Television Networks, LLC, AT & T, Inc., British Broadcasting Corporation, CANAL+ GROUP, CBS Interactive, Channel Four Television Corporation, CenturyLink, Inc., 21st Century Fox, Comcast Corporation, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Heartland Media, LLC, RTL Group, Time Warner, Inc., Tivo Corporation, and Viacom International, Inc. Download Report TOC at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/report-toc/13574 The television broadcasting services market has been segmented as below: Market Segmentation: Global Television Broadcasting Services Market By Delivery Platform Digital Terrestrial Broadcast Satellite Broadcast Cable Television Broadcasting Services Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) Over-the-top Television (OTT) By Broadcaster Type Public Commercial By Revenue Model Subscription Pay-per View On-demand Advertisement Digital Interactive Broadcasting In addition, the report provides analysis of the television broadcasting services market with respect to the following geographic segments: North America The U.S. Canada Rest of North America Europe The U.K. Germany France Russia Rest of Europe Asia Pacific (APAC) China India Japan Australia Rest of Asia Pacific (APAC) Middle East & Africa (MEA) GCC South Africa Rest of MEA & (MEA) South America Brazil Rest of South America Popular Research Reports by TMR: Transport Stream Switching Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025 : https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/transport-stream-switching-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/transport-stream-switching-market.html Free-to-air (FTA) Service Market (Device - Satellite Television, Cable Television, Mobile TV, and Radio) - Europe and Middle East & Africa Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/emea-free-to-air-service-market.html About Us Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The company's exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information. TMR's data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports. Contact: Transparency Market Research State Tower, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany NY - 12207 United States Tel: +1-518-618-1030 USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453 Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Research Blog: http://www.techyounme.com/ SOURCE Transparency Market Research Temple Grange Partners will support and complement LexisNexis Risk Solutions information and analytics capabilities for global financial services clients, together providing comprehensive compliance solutions for information and analytics content, consultancy advisory, programme implementation and on-going support. Temple Grange Partners and LexisNexis Risk Solutions will work closely together to share expertise and resources, which will enhance the solutions being offered to financial services clients by both firms. The compliance function today is critical for many reasons. It has become a central repository of customer information in heavily siloed organizations and because of this reality, the opportunities for this function to become a growth driver is high. This current environment makes the Temple Grange and LexisNexis Risk Solutions alliance that much more important to the marketplace. Thomas C. Brown, Senior Vice President, U.S. Commercial Markets and Global Market Development, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, said: "According to the European edition of our True Cost of AML Compliance study, most organizations believe that streamlining or improving the efficiency of the KYC/customer due diligence processes is a priority. This efficiency can provide other departments a single view of a consumer and can positively influence the customer onboarding process. Efficiency is critical to compliance departments, which endure heavy operational workloads. "When a Chief Compliance Officer combines deep practitioner expertise with risk data and technology capabilities, the compliance function can achieve much-desired efficiencies. When efficiencies are achieved, compliance analysts' and managers' job satisfaction tend to increase significantly, reducing another compliance leadership struggle high-employee turnover. Efficiencies that only technology, combined with expertise, can yield enable the compliance function to evolve into a department that helps their companies grow." Eoin O'Shea, Chief Executive Officer of Temple Grange Partners, said: "This is an exciting milestone for Temple Grange Partners. While compliance as a discipline relies on seasoned and practitioner-based advice, technology and analytics has an important role to play in enhancing this. Temple Grange Partners shares LexisNexis Risk Solutions commitment to delivering insight and excellent service to clients, which we are confident will be strengthened by this alliance, as both Temple Grange Partners and LexisNexis Risk Solutions continue to develop the products and offerings that clients need in a world replete with uncertainty." Contacts Maitland +44 020 7379 5151 Jais Mehaji [email protected] LexisNexis Risk Solutions Jean Creech Avent Director, Public Relations [email protected] +1-770-862-7978 About Temple Grange Partners Founded in 2017 by Eoin O'Shea, former Global Chief Central Compliance Officer at Credit Suisse, and other senior industry practitioners, Temple Grange Partners is a practitioner-centred global compliance, risk and regulatory consultancy firm with offices in London, New York, and Hong Kong. For further information, please visit: http://www.templegrangepartners.com/ About LexisNexis Risk Solutions LexisNexis Risk Solutions harnesses the power of data and advanced analytics to provide insights that help businesses and governmental entities reduce risk and improve decisions to benefit people around the globe. We provide data and technology solutions for a wide range of industries including insurance, financial services, healthcare and government. Headquartered in metro Atlanta, Georgia, we have offices throughout the world and are part of RELX Group (LSE: REL/NYSE: RELX), a global provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries. RELX is a FTSE 100 company and is based in London. For more information, please visit www.risk.lexisnexis.com and www.relx.com. SOURCE LexisNexis Risk Solutions Related Links http://www.lexisnexis.com/risk Complimentary champagne or chilled juice upon check-in Bright and beautifully appointed lobby with panoramic views Complimentary continental breakfast 1,400-square-feet of indoor and outdoor meeting space Heated swimming pool with plush lounge chairs Fire pit and private cabanas Gourmet coffee and smoothie bar in the day and cocktail bar by night Known for inspiring individuality, the Ascend Hotel Collection is the first and largest global soft brand, by Choice Hotels International, featuring best-in-class unique, boutique and historic hotels and resorts. There are more than 200 Ascend Hotel Collection member hotels worldwide. The Cove Hotel participates in the award-winning Choice Privileges loyalty rewards program, rated no. 1 in USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Awards list for two consecutive years. Membership is free, offers fast rewards, instant perks, and exclusive member rates when booking direct at www.choicehotels.com. Members can earn and redeem points towards free nights, airline miles and more, while staying at any of Choice's global brand participating hotels, including the Ascend Hotel Collection, Cambria Hotels, Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites, Sleep Inn, Quality Inn, Clarion, MainStay Suites, Suburban Extended Stay Hotel, Econo Lodge, and Rodeway Inn. Ascend Hotel Collection: let the destination reach you. The Ascend Hotel Collection is a global portfolio of unique, boutique and historic independent hotels and resorts and is part of Choice Hotels International, one of the world's leading hotel companies. Recognized as the hotel industry's first "soft brand" concept, the Ascend Hotel Collection has more than 200 properties open and operating worldwide, including France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Turkey, Australia, Canada, Ecuador and the Caribbean region. Membership with the Ascend Hotel Collection enables distinctive, independent properties to gain a global presence while maintaining their local charm. For more information, visit www.choicehotels.com/Ascend. About Choice Hotels Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH) is one of the world's largest hotel companies. With over 6,800 hotels franchised in more than 40 countries and territories, Choice Hotels International represents more than 550,000 rooms around the globe and as of March 31, 2018, there are more than 900 hotels were in our development pipeline. Our company's Ascend Hotel Collection, Cambria Hotels, Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites, Sleep Inn, Quality, Clarion, MainStay Suites, Suburban Extended Stay Hotel, WoodSpring Suites, Econo Lodge, Rodeway Inn, and Vacation Rentals by Choice Hotels brands provide a spectrum of lodging choices to meet guests' needs. With more than 36 million members, our Choice Privileges rewards program enhances every trip a guest takes, with benefits ranging from every day rewards to exceptional experiences, starting right when they join. All hotels and vacation rentals are independently owned and operated. Visit us at www.choicehotels.com for more information. 2018 Choice Hotels International, Inc. All rights reserved. SOURCE Choice Hotels International, Inc. Related Links http://www.choicehotels.com This year, InnoVEX will feature 388 exhibitors from 21 countries and regions. Visitors can meet with startups from not only Taiwan, but also Canada, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, United States, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Poland, Spain, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Mexico, Sweden, Austria, Germany, and Saudi Arabia. InnoVEX will have exhibitions, forums, pitch contest, and matchmaking sessions to help accelerate startups' commercialization process and network with global buyers, investors, and manufacturers. Entering its third year, InnoVEX has become the most international startup platform in Taiwan as 40% are from overseas. The total number of exhibitors also grew by over 100 from last year's number. The number of visitors is expected to grow to over 18,000. InnoVEX official Sponsor: Pan German Motors Ltd. (BMW Taiwan Importer) InnoVEX is honored to announce Pan German Motors Ltd. (BMW Taiwan Importer) as the InnoVEX official sponsor. As the only luxury car brand that participates in InnoVEX this year, BMW is going to unveil the mobility of tomorrow to the public in Taiwan through holding the "BMW Future Mobility Forum" on June 6. Moreover, Dr. Mario Urbina Cazenave, BMW Lead UI/UX (User Experience and Interaction) Designer, will be invited to give a keynote speech on the theme of "BMW Future Vision: Autonomous, Connected, Electric, Shared". The new BMW i8 Roadster is also going to be displayed at the venue to showcase the cutting-edge technology of BMW. Pavilions organized by Nations, Governments, Accelerators, and Incubators to Join InnoVEX The top 5 industries that the exhibiting startups will bring are: IoT, AI, Health & Biotech, AR/VR, and Big Data & Cloud Services. In addition to the individual exhibitors, the pavilions are also part of the main highlights of InnoVEX. The principal pavilions are organized by: Taiwan Startup Springboard, Alibaba Taiwan Entrepreneurs Fund, Taiwan Tech Arena (TTA), XR-EXPRESS TW (National Development Council), Startup [email protected] Startup Terrace, Taoyuan City Government (TYC), Global Startup Talents @ Taipei (GSTPE), Industrial Development Bureau IoT Integration Service Center (IDB IISC), and many more including the 13 national pavilions from The Netherlands, France, EU, and other innovative countries. InnoVEX Forum: 3 Days, 6 Main Topics, Over 60 Speakers The InnoVEX Forum is a 3 day long event, where speakers from around the world are invited to share their insights on the current and future trends of the ICT industry. This year's InnoVEX forum will address: AI, Blockchain, Future Mobility, Gaming, Startup Ecosystem, Women Entrepreneurship, and more in the Center Stage which more than 60 speakers are expected to join. The AI forum will focus on its applications in IoT, Health/ Medicare, and fintech. The speakers are the leaders of the AI sector in IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and NVIDIA; also featuring AI experts from Appier, CTCI, GLORIA NCKU, Graphen Inc, Hyperform Consulting, ImmerVersion, Insilico Taiwan, NCCU, NTU, Quadrant.ai, and Taipei Medical University. The blockchain forum will have a keynote speech from IOTA Foundation; and a panel discussion featuring speakers from Bitmark, KKFARM, and Health2Sync. The Women Entrepreneurship forum will have Adriana Gascoigne, the CEO and Founder of Girls in Tech; Stephanie Tang, the Managing Director of Rookie Fund and 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Honoree; also speakers from KuoBrothers Corp, Shape Protype & Women in IoT, IoX Center of NTU, Noa's Mark, and Auterion. The speakers for the startup ecosystem topic will come from multiple backgrounds. From the VC side, there will be Anis Uzzaman, the CEO & General Partner of Fenox Venture Capital; Yuma Saito, the Founder & General Director of Deloitte Tohmatsu Venture Support; and Tom Vanhoutte, the Founder and Managing Partner of Imec.xpand; all three speakers will also be in the InnoVEX PITCH Contest judge panel. InnoVEX will also invite speakers from more VC firms, the media, accelerator, and incubators from Asia. InnoVEX PITCH Contest Prize Pool Reaches A Record High USD 350,000 The InnoVEX PITCH Contest was started to help startups with their commercialization process and increasing exposure. It also serves as a means for startups to network with investors, potential users, and future partners. This year, the prize pool of the InnoVEX PITCH Contest has hit a record high of USD 350,000 with prizes from both organizers and sponsors, including VCs, corporate, and government. The registration for the pitch contest has closed with over 40% overseas participants. The semifinalists will be announced on May 30, while the semifinal round will be conducted on June 7 on the Pi Stage. The final round will be on June 8 on the Center Stage. Matchmaking Sessions for Networking, Finding Partnerships, and Investments InnoVEX will also have matchmaking sessions on the Pi Stage as a way to help startups meet with VCs and corporate capitals. The matchmaking sessions are scheduled to take place on June 6 and June 8. There will also be a global startup demo on the Pi Stage on June 6 for startups to showcase their products and solutions featuring 10 teams from France and 8 teams from Poland. Everyone's invited to join InnoVEX 2018, COMPUTEX Exhibitors and Visitors can all join for free. Visitors can pre-register for their badge & pass on InnoVEX website (innovex.computex.biz). About COMPUTEX: COMPUTEX, the iconic B2B technology exhibition in Asia is organized by Taipei Computer Association (TCA) and Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA). This year's COMPUTEX will be held from June 5 through 9. As the main event for the Global Technology Ecosystem, COMPUTEX will focus on five major themes: AI, 5G, IoT, Gaming & VR and Blockchain. At the same time, two special exhibitions, InnoVEX -- the platform for tech startups and SmarTEX - which covers various smart IoT applications, will also be hosted during COMPUTEX. InnoVEX website: https://innovex.computex.biz/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/computexinnovex/ Twitter page: https://twitter.com/InnoVEX3 YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdbCU71Iqdejjb2HEZkrRqQ LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10536216/ Media members can also join our COMPUTEX media group where we post detailed early access information. Click here to join: https://www.facebook.com/groups/COMPUTEXMediaGroup/ SOURCE Taipei Computer Association (TCA) LONDON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The patient monitoring devices market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.7% during the forecast period. Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/5404291 The patient monitoring devices market is expected to reach USD 25.31 billion by 2023 from USD 19.14 billion in 2018, at a CAGR of 5.7%. The scope of the report includes patient monitoring devices used for the continuous monitoring, detection, and treatment of heart, blood, brain, lungs activities, and measurement of temperature and body weight. Factors such as the easy availability of wireless monitoring devices and the rising incidence of lifestyle and chronic diseases are expected to drive market growth during the forecast period. On the other hand, the risks associated with invasive monitoring devices are expected to challenge market growth to a certain extent in the coming years. Low-acuity monitors devices segment is expected to account for the largest share of the multi-parameter monitoring devices market in 2018 Based on product, the multi-parameter monitoring devices market is classified into low-acuity monitors, high-acuity monitors, and mid-acuity monitors.The low-acuity monitors segment is expected to account for the largest share of the market in 2018. The growth of this market is mainly driven by their advantages over single-parameter monitors and their low prices as compared to mid- and high-acuity monitors. Fetal monitors devices segment is expected to hold the largest share of the fetal and neonatal monitoring devices market in 2018 Based on product, the fetal and neonatal monitoring devices market is segmented into fetal monitoring devices and neonatal monitoring devices.The fetal monitoring devices segment is expected to account for the largest share of the market in 2018. The large share of this segment can be attributed to the rising awareness on fetal care across developing countries. Digital segment is expected to hold the largest share of the weight monitoring devices market in 2018 Based on type, the weight monitoring devices market is segmented into digital and analog.The digital segment accounted for the largest share of the market in 2018. The large share of this segment can be attributed to its advantages such as it provides body fat index, visceral fat level, skeletal muscle level, body mass index (BMI), and resting metabolism-using sensors. Additionally, these scales offer benefits of synchronizing data with Electronic Health Records (EHRs) at the physician's end using data transfer applications and software. North America is expected to account for the largest share of the market in 2018 On the basis of region, the patient monitoring devices market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia, and the RoW.North America is expected to account for the largest share of the patient monitoring devices market in 2018. The rising geriatric population, the presence of advanced healthcare infrastructure, and high healthcare expenditure are the major factors supporting the growth of the patient monitoring devices market in the region. Break-up profile of primaries: By Company Type- Tier 1-48%, Tier 2-31% and Tier 3-21% By Designation-C-level-26%, D-level-24% and Others-50% By Region-North America-29%, Europe-35%, Asia-21%, and RoW-15% Major key players in the patient monitoring devices market include Medtronic (Ireland), Natus Medical (US), Compumedics (Australia), Nihon Kohden (Japan), GE Healthcare (US), and Philips Healthcare (Netherlands). Research Coverage: In this report, the patient monitoring devices market is segmented by product and region. The report provides a detailed overview of the major drivers, challenges, and opportunities, factors impacting the patient monitoring devices market along with the estimates and forecasts of the revenue. Reasons to buy this report: The report provides insights on the following pointers: Market Penetration: Comprehensive information on portfolios offered by the top players in the patient monitoring devices market. The report analyzes the market by product and region Product Development/Innovation: Detailed insights on upcoming technologies, research & development activities, and product launches in the patient monitoring devices market Market Development: Comprehensive information about lucrative emerging markets the report analyzes the markets for patient monitoring devices across regions Market Diversification: Exhaustive information about new products, untapped geographies, and recent developments in the patient monitoring devices market Competitive Assessment: In-depth assessment of strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the key players in the patient monitoring devices market Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/5404291 About Reportbuyer Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers For more information: Sarah Smith Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com Email: [email protected] Tel: +1 (718) 213 4904 Website: www.reportbuyer.com SOURCE ReportBuyer Related Links http://www.reportbuyer.com LONDON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Quantum dots market to grow at a CAGR of 26.97% between 2018 and 2023 The quantum dots market is expected to reach USD 8.47 billion by 2023 from USD 2.57 billion in 2018, at a CAGR of 26.97%. The market growth can be attributed to factors such as the increasing demand for quantum dots in high-quality display devices, growing implementation of quantum dots in numerous applications due to their miniature property, and rising adoption of energy-efficient and less or non-toxic quantum dots in solar cells and photovoltaics. The limited availability of rare earth materials is restraining the market growth to a certain extent. Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/5404287 QD lighting (LED) solutions to hold largest market share during forecast period QD lighting (LED) solutions is expected to hold the largest share of the quantum dots market.The use of quantum dots as down converters in white LEDs or luminaires offers a significant level of tunability of the resulting spectral output. Also, the incorporation of quantum dots into LED design marks a vital step in reducing the cost of LED production and making them inexpensive for the average consumer. Quantum dots market for healthcare vertical to grow at highest CAGR during forecast period The quantum dots market for the healthcare vertical is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.In the healthcare vertical, quantum dots are used in biological imaging, cellular labeling, and DNA labeling, and cancer diagnosis. The growing adoption of quantum dots for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment is expected to propel the growth of the quantum dots market in the healthcare vertical. APAC to dominate quantum dots market during forecast period APAC was the leading market for quantum dots in 2017.Owing to the presence of local players in China, most of the TV manufacturing is being done in this country. Consumer electronics is one of the major applications for quantum dots. Thus, the growing demand for brighter, vibrant, and energy-efficient displays in countries such as India, China, and Japan is driving the quantum dots market in this region. Breakdown of primary participant profiles: By Company Type: Tier 124%, Tier 231%, and Tier 345% By Designation: C-Level Executives44%, Directors19%, and Managers37% By Region: North America38%, APAC28%, Europe26%, and RoW8% The key players operating in this market Nanosys (US), Nanoco (UK), QD Laser (Japan), NN-Labs (US), Ocean NanoTech (US), QD Vision (US), Quantum Material (US), Altair Nanotechnologies (US), and InVisage (US), Research Coverage Various market segments have been covered in this report.These include segments such as offering, technology, end-user industry, and geography. The report also provides a detailed overview of the market across 4 main regionsNorth America, Europe, APAC, and RoW. Reasons to Buy the Report This report includes statistics pertaining to the quantum dots market in terms of material, product type, vertical, and geography, along with their respective market size. The report details the major drivers, restraints, opportunities, and challenges pertaining to the quantum dots market. The report includes illustrative segmentation, analysis, and forecast for the quantum dots market based on its segments and subsegments. Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/5404287 About Reportbuyer Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers For more information: Sarah Smith Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com Email: [email protected] Tel: +1 (718) 213 4904 Website: www.reportbuyer.com SOURCE ReportBuyer Related Links http://www.reportbuyer.com TRIESTE, Italy, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AREA Science Park, a leading Italian scientific and technology innovation centre, marked its 40th anniversary as a successful example of public-private partnership and announced plans to further expand its genetic research activities and forge new partnerships with domestic and international investors. The state-owned AREA has been the incubator for the creation of more than 53 digital and high-tech start-ups in recent years, and has attracted 8 million of private sector investment. Its genetic research network, and advanced studies of epigenetics, are considering cutting-edge and on a world-class level. To celebrate the anniversary, AREA held a conference on May 25th that included a keynote from Sergio Paoletti, a leading biochemist who serves as AREA's President and who has steered the Trieste-based centre's growth in recent years, and an interview by moderator Alan Friedman with Stefano Casaleggi, the top manager who serves as Director-General and has helped launch a new round of innovation and strategic growth, especially in advanced genetics. Friedman noted the importance of AREA's advanced scientific research. "The digital economy and technology innovation should be the buzzwords for Italy because they improve productivity. So I am pleased to discover here in Trieste such a high-tech centre of innovation," said Friedman. "AREA Science Park," said Massimiliano Fedriga, Governor of the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region, "is a fine example of a well-structured ecosystem, an excellent collaboration between the public and private sectors. AREA is an important accelerator of economic growth." Stefano Casaleggi, Director-General of Area Science Park, said he hoped that AREA, "Can help Italy to become a more competitive nation which attracts more foreign investment in high tech sectors." Zeno D'Agostino, President of the Port of Trieste and of the National Port Association of Italy, said his goal is to create an innovation hub in and around the port, and act as a catalyst, in collaboration with AREA, to make Trieste even more competitive on a world scale. Licia Mattioli, the Vice President of Confindustria, Italy's employers' federation, praised AREA for its innovative approach. "Technology innovation is the key to Italy's future," said Ms. Mattioli, who is also the CEO of Mattioli, a leading Italian jewellery company. (http://www.areasciencepark.it) SOURCE AREA Science Park IRVINE, Calif., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Trace3, a pioneer in business transformation solutions, today announced that its 2018 Trace3 Outlier Award, which honors exceptional individuals for dynamic technology innovation and leadership, has been awarded to Darren Haas, Senior Vice President Platform Cloud Engineering, GE. Haas received the award at Trace3's annual EVOLVE conference in Las Vegas on May 9, 2018. He was honored for his leadership role at GE, driving the company's innovative edge-to-cloud initiative. This initiative aimed to leverage cloud technologies to create industry-leading analytics capabilities and support numerous technologies that, in some instances, have been operating without fail for more than 40 years. As part of this transformative project, Haas spent a great deal of time in the field, getting to know the engineers, mathematicians and astrophysicists that make GE tick. "I toured Africa to see a new hospital GE built, a new power plant that's powering half of South Africa, and all the trains they're building to help transportation," said Haas. "We provide the front lines for a lot of things we take for granted. Think about the number of airplanes in the air at any given time, each carrying terabytes of data about the engine, the turbine, the air quality, and other critical functions. The same is true of trains and millions of miles of track." Haas and his team launched a number of initiatives to analyze and utilize critical data for medical, wind, solar, nuclear and other uses. These enterprises included the largest IoT deployment ever from edge to cloud. To support that scale, GE is one of the world's leading businesses leveraging a NoSQL database management system capable of providing high availability with no single point of failure at scale. As part of this transformation, Haas has also embraced automation to make analytics run more quickly, removing existing intermediary stages to further shorten the window to success. This year, he plans to continue helping the teams at GE make great business decisions by implementing innovative technology to further empower internal analytics. In his award acceptance speech, Haas thanked his family and his team for all their support. "I'm a big believer in culture," said Haas. "People come first, then technology." He also congratulated his fellow Outlier Finalists and Trace3 for gathering such high-caliber IT talent every year at the Evolve conference. "We are delighted to recognize Darren's impressive achievements that leverage innovative technologies in ways that have never been imagined," said Todd Gallina, Vice President Marketing at Trace3. "Darren has a track record of identifying and adopting technology innovation and pushing businesses in ways that deviate from the norm to drive outstanding business outcomes." Gallina said that the caliber of finalists this year was outstanding, each chosen for helping their companies to continually evolve through a culture of innovation and risk-taking. Outlier finalists for 2018 included the following executives. Bryan Kissinger , PhD, VP and CISO, Banner Health , PhD, VP and CISO, Banner Health Michael McGibbney , SVP, Service Delivery & Operations, SAP SuccessFactors , SVP, Service Delivery & Operations, SAP SuccessFactors Paul Chapman , CIO, Box , CIO, Box Michelle McKenna-Doyle , SVP and CIO, National Football League , SVP and CIO, National Football League Philip Irby , CIO, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas , CIO, The Cosmopolitan of Ravi Nekkalapu, CIO & Head of Information Technology, Drive Shack Terry Dembitz , VP, Information Technology, Western Digital Resources: For information about the 2018 Trace3 Outlier Awards, plus photos and video statements from the finalists, please click here: http://outlier.trace3.com. To nominate someone for the 2019 Outlier award, please visit https://outliercioaward.com/nominate.php About EVOLVE: For more information about Trace3's EVOLVE event, please visit http://EVOLVEtechconference.com/ About Trace3: As a fully integrated Transformative IT Authority, Trace3 is the premier provider of IT solutions and consultation services. Through elite engineering and dynamic innovation, Trace3 empowers executives and organizations to keep pace with the fast-moving business landscape through the transformative power of IT. Please visit our website at www.Trace3.com. Media contacts: Lumina Communications Michael Gallo 212-239-8594 [email protected] SOURCE Trace3 GAINESVILLE, Fla., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- TradePMR, a custodial and brokerage-services provider dedicated to serving registered investment advisors (RIAs), today announced plans for their year-long "20-for-20 Initiative." TradePMR will celebrate its 20th anniversary by organizing and participating in 20 service projects, all led and staffed by TradePMR employees. The custodial services provider also announces 2019 Synergy Conference dates and location. "As a company, we take great pride in our white glove service," said founder and CEO Robb Baldwin. "The 20-for-20 Initiative allows TradePMR to extend this cultural point of pride to the communities in which we work and live. We are excited to dedicate our 20th year to community service." The first projects are already underway in Gainesville, Florida, where TradePMR is headquartered. Prior to the annual Synergy conference, held May 16-18, 2018 , in San Diego , TradePMR executives and staff members hosted an evening for families residing at the local Ronald McDonald House . Throughout the evening, more than 12 staff members volunteered and served over 50 meals. , in , TradePMR executives and staff members hosted an evening for families residing at the local . Throughout the evening, more than 12 staff members volunteered and served over 50 meals. Currently, team members from TradePMR are working in shifts, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, building a home in the Gainesville area. The project is expected to wrap up in July. Additional projects will be announced at a later date. Advisors utilizing TradePMR custodial services are encouraged to nominate additional projects for consideration by TradePMR's 20-for-20 committee. Ideas for charitable giving and community service should be sent to [email protected]. CELEBRATING 20 YEARS AT SYNERGY TradePMR just completed its annual Synergy Conference, where the firm played host to growth-minded RIAs from across the nation, May 16-18, 2018, in San Diego. Keynote speakers included what TradePMR considers top thought leaders from in and around the industry discussing topics that can be critical to an advisor's success including cybersecurity, investing and technology. A short conference highlight video can be seen on the TradePMR YouTube channel. The complete list of 2018 speakers, sponsors and full agenda is available at https://Synergy.TradePMR.com. The 2019 Synergy Conference will take place May 22-24 in West Palm Beach, Florida, at the Eau West Palm Beach Hotel. "My team and I look forward to providing a comprehensive recap of everything we have accomplished nationwide via the 20-for-20 Initiative when we gather 12 months from now for the 2019 annual conference," Baldwin said. "I am inspired every day by the people with whom I work and the advisors TradePMR serves. I can't wait to share highlights of our 20th anniversary and year-long charitable campaign." ABOUT TRADEPMR For nearly two decades, TradePMR has addressed the technology and support demands of financial advisors with solutions that are easy to implement and user-friendly. The privately held introducing brokerage firm (Member FINRA/SIPC), founded and located in Gainesville, Florida, has maintained a singular focus of providing brokerage and custody services and support to independent registered investment advisors (RIAs) and their clients. The firm delivers an integrated cloud-based workstation that enables RIAs to efficiently run their practices and be more effective. More information is available at tradepmr.com. Follow TradePMR on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. Securities offered through Trade-PMR Inc., member FINRA/SIPC. Custodial services offered through First Clearing. First Clearing is a trade name used by Wells Fargo Clearing Services LLC, Member SIPC, a registered broker-dealer and non-bank affiliate of Wells Fargo & Company. TradePMR and First Clearing are not affiliated. CONTACT: Jessica Taylor Shores Impact Communications Inc. (800) 974-7753 [email protected] SOURCE TradePMR Related Links http://tradepmr.com MUNICH and BOCA RATON, Fla., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Unify, the Atos brand for collaboration solutions, has been positioned by Aragon Research, Inc. in the Leader section of the Globe for Mobile Collaboration, 20181. Circuit, Unify's cloud-based collaboration solution and a key component of the Atos Digital Workplace, was noted for its breadth of features, consistent user interface and cloud deployment capabilities. With its Digital Workplace offering, Atos has a true end-to-end solution to transform the employee experience, which is delivered through an enhanced partnership ecosystem. It includes a secure, mobile workplace, available anytime, anywhere; Cloud-based services; consumer-like end-user support and feature-rich communication and collaboration services. As mobile collaboration becomes increasingly critical for the Digital Workplace, this report evaluates 20 major providers in the space for their ability to support this capability in the enterprise. The Globe is segmented into four sectors: leaders, contenders, innovators or specialists. Unify is positioned in the Leader section, recognizing vendors that have comprehensive strategies that align with industry direction and market demand, and effectively perform against those strategies. "Circuit, as part of the Atos Digital Workplace, delivers simple to use, powerful team collaboration capabilities for today's mobile and distributed workforce, so we are pleased that we have been recognized in the Leader section of the Aragon Research Globe for Mobile Communication," said Paul Cunningham, CMO for Unify. "The comprehensive Atos Digital Workplace offering enables businesses to create agile and secure digital workplaces in which employees can connect, communicate and collaborate efficiently. Our customers recognize that mobile collaboration is key to a more productive, engaged workforce, so we remain focused on delivering superior capabilities, including integrations with essential business tools, to help them maximize success." "As one of the first to drive the team collaboration market with Circuit, Unify has a solid platform to support the digital workplace," said Aragon Research CEO and lead analyst Jim Lundy. "Messaging and mobile collaboration are poised to become a major part of the work environment, and Unify's Circuit offers the features and flexibility enterprises need." About Unify Unify is the Atos brand for communication and collaboration solutions. At the core of the Atos Digital Workplace portfolio, Unify technology enables organizations of all sizes to transform the way they collaborate, creating a more connected and productive workforce which can dramatically improve team performance, individual engagement and business efficiency. Unify products represent a strong heritage of technology innovation, reliability and flexibility. Their award-winning intuitive user experience can be delivered through almost any device and in any combination of cloud or on-premise deployment. Augmented by Atos' secure digital platforms, vertical solutions and transformation services, they set the global standard for a rich and reliable collaboration experience that empowers teams to deliver extraordinary results. About Atos Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with approximately 100,000 employees in 73 countries and annual revenue of around 12 billion. European number one in Big Data, Cybersecurity, High Performance Computing and Digital Workplace, the Group provides Cloud services, Infrastructure & Data Management, Business & Platform solutions, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payment industry. With its cutting-edge technologies, digital expertise and industry knowledge, Atos supports the digital transformation of its clients across various business sectors: Defense, Financial Services, Health, Manufacturing, Media, Energy & Utilities, Public sector, Retail, Telecommunications and Transportation. The Group is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and operates under the brands Atos, Atos Consulting, Atos Worldgrid, Bull, Canopy, Unify and Worldline. Atos SE (Societas Europaea) is listed on the CAC40 Paris stock index. Aragon Research does not endorse vendors, or their products or services that are referenced in its research publications, and does not advise users to select those vendors that are rated the highest. Aragon Research publications consist of the opinions of Aragon Research and Advisory Services organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Aragon Research provides its research publications and the information contained in them "AS IS," without warranty of any kind. 1 Aragon Research, "The Aragon Research Globe for Mobile Collaboration, 2018" by Jim Lundy, May 25th, 2018. SOURCE Unify Related Links https://www.unify.com/us DUBLIN, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Online Recruitment Market in the US 2018-2022" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The online recruitment market in the US to grow at a CAGR of 6.95% during the period 2018-2022. Online Recruitment Market in the US 2018-2022, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market. One trend in the market is increase in the use of AI-powered searches. Online recruitment platforms' search engines provide recruiters with an extensive list of candidates that match their job profiles. By utilizing artificial intelligence, search engines can further categorize or shortlist candidates based on the skillset required by employers. According to the report, one driver in the market is growing usage of social media and easy access to hassle-free job information. Online recruitment allows employers to access profiles of potential candidates and easily connect with them through social media platforms. These platforms have a large database and employers have easy access to several candidate profiles and receive real-time updates. Further, the report states that one challenge in the market is decline in profitability due to a high level of competition. The market is becoming fragmented with new players entering the market. There are hundreds of tools that are available for recruiters, which can be used to fill up the job vacancy. Key vendors CareerBuilder College Recruiter Indeed (Recruit Holdings) LinkedIn Monster Robert Half International Key Topics Covered: PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT PART 03: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY PART 04: INTRODUCTION Market outline PART 05: MARKET LANDSCAPE Market ecosystem Market characteristics Market segmentation analysis PART 06: MARKET SIZING Market definition Market sizing 2017 Market size and forecast 2017-2022 PART 07: FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS Bargaining power of buyers Bargaining power of suppliers Threat of new entrants Threat of substitutes Threat of rivalry Market condition PART 08: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY INDUSTRY Segmentation by Industry Comparison by Industry Hospitality - Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Manufacturing - Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Healthcare - Market size and forecast 2017-2022 BFSI - Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Others - Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunity by industry PART 09: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE PART 10: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY END-USER Segmentation by end-user Comparison by end-user Recruiters/employers - Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Job seekers - Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunity by end-user PART 11: DECISION FRAMEWORK PART 12: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES Market drivers Market challenges PART 13: MARKET TRENDS Increase in the use of AI-powered searches Changing dynamics of the recruitment process Big Data applications and the use of analytics PART 14: VENDOR LANDSCAPE Overview Landscape disruption PART 15: VENDOR ANALYSIS Vendors covered Vendor classification Market positioning of vendors CareerBuilder College Recruiter Indeed (Recruit Holdings) LinkedIn Monster Robert Half International PART 16: APPENDIX For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/gqbsjx/united_states?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 At full capacity, the 108,000-sq.-ft. facility will offer hands-on, high-tech training to approximately 800 students. Students can complete core automotive and diesel technology programs and be ready to work in 11 to 18 months. "As we hear every day from our employer partners, there is a clear, significant and unmet demand for trained automotive and diesel technicians," said UTI-Bloomfield Campus President Steve McElfresh. "We give students the skills needed to fill these jobs, which cannot be outsourced, automatized or offshored, and offer opportunities to build rewarding, long-term careers." At its campuses across the nation, UTI partners with both local employers and transportation industry leaders, including brands like BMW, Cummins, Ford, Freightliner, Mercedes-Benz, NASCAR, Peterbilt, Porsche and Volvo. These partners invest in campus facilities, outfit training labs with the most current vehicles, technology and tools, and guide educational programs, so students graduate with the knowledge and skills employers want. Approximately four of five UTI graduates are employed full-time in their field within a year of graduating.* "We are thrilled to have a UTI campus in the Northeast," said John Cragg, Executive Vice President East Operations at Penske Automotive Group. "UTI is a vital source of the technicians we need to operate our 32 dealerships & collision centers in the tri-state area, and our demand for these highly skilled employees only continues to grow. We know we can rely on UTI for quality, professional technicians with high-tech skills to meet the ever increasing requirements in automotive service. Our company offers generous compensation and incentive packages to attract and retain the best UTI graduates." Last year, the federal government tripled its estimate of the number of transportation technicians needed nationwide by 2026. According to new projections, there will be more than 1.2 million job openings in the automotive, diesel and collision repair industries, and the transportation industry will have to fill more than 120,000 technician job openings every year. "Crown Lift Trucks values its relationship with UTI because it provides the opportunity to present students with a career path that can leverage their skills in ways they might not have imagined," said Tim Roth, Director of Branch Aftermarket Operations at Crown Equipment Corporation. The Bloomfield campus, which is accessible from the New York/New Jersey rail and bus systems, will predominantly serve a commuter population, allowing students to access UTI's quality education without leaving home. That, combined with a flexible curriculum that helps students fit classroom time into their work and family schedules, will make it easier and more affordable to come to UTI. "The response and support we've seen from local leaders, the community and employers is inspiring," McElfresh added. "We could not have selected a better location than Bloomfield, where we'll be able to offer new career paths and promising futures to hundreds of students every year." ACCREDITATION & STEM UTI's campuses, including UTI-Bloomfield, are accredited by the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, which is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. UTI actively participates in the STEM Education Coalition, a nationwide initiative to ensure science, technology, engineering and math skills are interwoven throughout its curriculum. UTI has also been designated a STEM Jobs Approved College by Victory Media, which created the list to assist parents, students and guidance counselors in evaluating how well education is translating into real-world jobs and how responsive institutions are to meeting the demand for STEM-based education. *Approximately 8,600 of the 9,200 UTI graduates in 2016 were available for employment. At the time of reporting, approximately 7,400 were employed within one year of their graduation date, for a total of 86%. This rate excludes graduates not available for employment because of continuing education, military service, health, incarceration, death or international student status. The rate includes graduates who completed manufacturer-specific advanced training programs and those employed in positions that were obtained before or during their UTI education, where the primary job duties after graduation align with the educational and training objectives of the program. UTI cannot guarantee employment or salary. About Universal Technical Institute, Inc. With more than 200,000 graduates in its 52-year history, Universal Technical Institute, Inc. (NYSE: UTI) is the nation's leading provider of technical training for automotive, diesel, collision repair, motorcycle and marine technicians, and offers welding technology and computer numerical control (CNC) machining programs. The company has built partnerships with industry leaders, outfits its state-of-the-industry facilities with current technology, and delivers training that is aligned with employer needs. Through its network of 12 campuses nationwide, UTI offers post-secondary programs under the banner of several well-known brands, including Universal Technical Institute (UTI), Motorcycle Mechanics Institute and Marine Mechanics Institute (MMI) and NASCAR Technical Institute (NASCAR Tech). The company is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. For more information, visit uti.edu. Website: www.uti.edu/Bloomfield For more information, visit www.uti.edu . Like UTI on www.facebook.com/UTI or follow UTI on Twitter @UTITweet , @MMITweet , and @NASCARTechUTI . CONTACT: Adam Tucker, MWW PR 201-964-2409 [email protected] SOURCE Universal Technical Institute Related Links http://www.uti.edu WASHINGTON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- U.S. News & World Report, the global authority in rankings and consumer advice, and Best Lawyers, the world's only purely peer-review guide to top talent in the legal profession, today unveiled the U.S. News Lawyer Directory powered by Best Lawyers. The new directory will initially serve as a comprehensive guide to tens of thousands of lawyers currently working in private practice throughout the United States and will eventually expand to cover the more than 1.3 million lawyers in this country. U.S. News Lawyer Directory powered by Best Lawyers is a free resource for those seeking legal representation in virtually any jurisdiction and area of practice within the United States. Using advanced search technology, comparative tools, and easy-to-read lawyer proles, users can identify a lawyer that meets their specic legal needs. Inclusion in the Lawyer Directory is solely based on whether an attorney is currently working in private practice. A lawyer does not need to be ranked by U.S. News or Best Lawyers to appear on the site, and there is no charge for a lawyer's basic information to appear in the U.S. News Lawyer Directory. "U.S. News helps millions of people each year make complex decisions, from nding the right hospital or doctor to identifying the best college, online program or graduate school," said Tim Smart, executive editor of U.S. News. "We're delighted to team up with Best Lawyers to offer our audience new legal resources." The comprehensive guide serves as a valuable resource for consumers seeking legal assistance. To learn more, visit lawyers.usnews.com. About Best Lawyers Best Lawyers is the oldest and most respected attorney ranking service in the world. For more than 30 years, Best Lawyers has assisted those in need of legal services by identifying attorneys best qualied to represent them. Recognition by Best Lawyers is widely regarded by both clients and legal professionals as a signicant honor, conferred on a lawyer by his or her peers. To date, Best Lawyers recognizes more than 82,000 lawyers, from more than 20,000 rms, in 140 practice areas, and in 75 of the leading legal markets around the world. Best Lawyers lists appear in leading local, regional, and national media across the globe. About U.S. News & World Report U.S. News & World Report is a digital news and information company that empowers people to make better, more informed decisions about important issues affecting their lives. Focusing on Education, Health, Personal Finance, Travel, Cars and News, USNews.com provides consumer advice, rankings, news and analysis to serve people making complex decisions throughout all stages of life. More than 37 million people visit USNews.com each month for research and guidance. Founded in 1933, U.S. News is headquartered in Washington, D.C. SOURCE U.S. News & World Report Related Links http://www.usnews.com WASHINGTON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- U.S. News & World Report, the global authority in education rankings, today released an inaugural list of the Top Universities for International Students. These 181 National Universities, listed in alphabetical order, offer resources to help international students adapt to and graduate from U.S.-based schools. "As international students consider their U.S. university options, it is vital that they understand whether schools will offer them financial aid, English labs, housing and dining services during holidays, and other services," said Anita Narayan, managing editor of Education at U.S. News. "This list is a natural extension of our mission with the Best Colleges rankings, which have helped students and their families make decisions about their education for more than 30 years." The Top Universities for International Students range from private institutions, such as Columbia University in New York, American University in Washington, D.C. and California Institute of Technology, to public schools, including the University of Virginia, Mississippi State University and East Carolina University in North Carolina. To compile the list, U.S. News began with the National Universities in its annual Best Colleges rankings and then evaluated those that best support the needs of international students. Nineteen initial indicators were combined, in some cases, to create the six final indicators used in the analysis. These include graduation and retention rates for international students, availability of English as a Second Language programs and grant aid to international students. U.S. News developed the methodology with input from U.S. News Global Education, a company dedicated to connecting international students with the top universities in the U.S. Prospective students visiting usnews.com/colleges and subscribers to U.S. News College Compass can access the complete data for all National Universities, including information on graduation rates, student life, enrollment and more. Additionally, U.S. News Global Education has released a white paper regarding resources that international students should look for when researching schools. The new education initiative serves U.S. News' broader mission of providing trusted information and rankings to help students navigate their higher education options. U.S. News publishes annual rankings of the Best Colleges, Best Global Universities, Best Online Programs and Best Graduate Schools. For more information on U.S. News initiatives, follow us on Facebook and Twitter. About U.S. News & World Report U.S. News & World Report is a digital news and information company that empowers people to make better, more informed decisions about important issues affecting their lives. Focusing on Education, Health, Personal Finance, Travel, Cars and News, USNews.com provides consumer advice, rankings, news and analysis to serve people making complex decisions throughout all stages of life. More than 40 million people visit USNews.com each month for research and guidance. Founded in 1933, U.S. News is headquartered in Washington, D.C. SOURCE U.S. News & World Report Related Links http://www.usnews.com OKLAHOMA CITY, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- USA Digital Communications, Inc. announced today it has finalized the deployment of its network-based Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) prevention solution, known as Call Sentinel. A TDoS attack is similar to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in its intent to render systems inoperable for a variety of nefarious reasons. DDoS affects data systems while TDoS affects voice communications systems. TDoS attacks attempt to make a communication system unavailable by consuming all available telephone resources, which prevents all incoming and/or outgoing calls. TDoS attacks are on the rise now that more businesses protect against DDoS attacks. Unprotected voice networks provide easy targets for perpetrators. TDoS attacks can completely eliminate the ability to communicate. The revenue and customer confidence losses can be devastating. Providing TDoS prevention at USAD's geo-redundant network level, rather than at the customer premise, creates redundancy, cost effectiveness and the ability for rapid deployment. There is no need for third party integrations, additional hardware deployments or database integrations, therefore eliminating capital expenditures and aggravations. "In short, it is a quick, easy and cost-effective way to add security and protection against those wishing to perform fraudulent activities or take down a voice network altogether," said Brent West, USA Digital's head of operations and product development. USAD's Call Sentinel is a fit for any company that wants to validate customer information before allowing the call to enter their infrastructure. Prime verticals for the solution are government agencies, call centers, financial, healthcare, insurance and utility providers. Because of its affordability and scalability, any size organization that relies on the ability to make or accept calls for sales or support can benefit from Call Sentinel. About USA Digital For over 20 years, USA Digital has provided voice and data communications services; including advanced routing, security and disaster recovery services to commercial and wholesale businesses. Customers include companies in the finance, healthcare and insurance sectors, and other large and medium enterprises. USAD provides wholesale services to regional LECs and CLECs, conference calling providers and call centers. USAD supports its customers with a geo-diverse network, comprised of TDM and VoIP, redundantly connected to its physical data centers and its cloud-based infrastructure. USAD is ideally suited for customers who rely on toll-free services and who require strong business continuity. For more information, visit USAD.com. Contact: Donna Rice Marketing 877-525-0614 [email protected] SOURCE USA Digital Communications, Inc. Related Links http://www.USAD.com GREENVILLE, S.C., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Wake Foot Sanctuary is thrilled to announce its first franchise opening in Greenville, SC later this year. Chris Fetter, along with her husband Tad Heineman, are excited to be the first candidates awarded a franchise after Wake launched franchise sales last year. Chris and Tad relocated to the Upstate in 2017. They brought along their shepadoodles, Lucy and Fred. Tad Heinemand and Chris Fetter, couple who were awarded the first Wake Foot Sanctuary franchise set to open in Greenville, South Carolina in late 2018. "We couldn't be more excited to open the first Wake Foot Sanctuary franchise in a city that is growing so quickly and seeing so many really exciting businesses establish themselves there," said CEO and President, Melissa Long. "Fans have been calling for us to put a second location of Wake in Greenville for a while so, we are exhilarated that Chris and Tad are going to be bringing this to fruition. We can't wait to see what's in store for them!" "Greenville is very vibrant and young. It's up-and-coming but still has old southern charm. The neighborhoods! The people are super friendly," Chris said. Wake Foot Sanctuary strives to be the best shared spa experience in the world by providing service excellence through a strong leadership culture. Ocala Magazine said, "Wake may be one of the best, most necessary and overlooked concepts in all of business." The strong leadership culture coupled with the desire to serve guests are what attracted Chris and Tad to franchising with Wake. "Taking care of people's feet is just good for your soul and your heart. And it's a very loving, kind, service that everybody needs to experience," said Chris. "I'm excited to bring Wake to Greenville because it will be available to a broad range of people. Anyone can come to Wake and be treated like a queen or king." "The business allows franchisees the rewards of owning a business that serves others. It also provides the creativity and freedom that so many desire," said Long. "In my own life this same desire for freedom, creativity, and ownership was something I yearned for. I wake up every day grateful to serve our guests, work with our fabulous teams, and to see the fruition of the risks we took in our early days to create this company." Wake Foot Sanctuary originated in Asheville, North Carolina and it now has franchise interest in over 16 states with new locations to be announced this year. The most recent company reports demonstrate 40% year-over-year growth since opening its first location, is one of the few foot-soaking spas in the U.S. and the first to franchise. It's a smart offering in the $16.3 billion-dollar-a-year U.S. spa services industry which continues to grow at an explosive rate. The company, with more than $729,000 in annual sales in its first location and industry-leading sales-per-square-foot performance, demonstrates a strong foundation for franchisees. For more information about franchising with Wake Foot Sanctuary, please contact: Lindsey Kugler at [email protected] or at (828) 767-0722. You can also visit www.wakespa.com. SOURCE Wake Foot Sanctuary Related Links http://www.wakespa.com Partnership with WE and Wholesome Wave Kicks Off as part of "Summer of Impact" NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Weight Watchers International, Inc. (NYSE: WTW) ("WW") is launching WW Good, a global social impact campaign that aims to make health and wellness more accessible to all. WW Good will ignite the WW global community of more than four million members and 18,000 employees, as well as their networks of family, friends and colleagues to support under-served communities and help them become healthier. "As a global purpose-driven brand, we have the capability and are committed to make communities healthier and make healthy habits accessible to all, not just the few," said Mindy Grossman, President and Chief Executive Officer at Weight Watchers. "WW Good is an inspiring initiative that aims to unite our global community in a purpose beyond achieving personal success to help others live healthier, inspire healthy habits and create a world that's better for everyone." The first efforts to support WW Good begin this summer, as part of the company's "Summer of Impact" initiative, which aims to demonstrate how WW can be a powerful partner in health all year whether that's improving people's personal health or having a positive impact on the health of communities. WW has partnered with WE, an international organization that makes doing good, doable, by giving people the tools to take action on local and global causes, along with Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit that provides families in poverty with produce-purchasing power to make healthier food choices by providing affordable access to fruits and vegetables. Over the 12 weeks of summer, WW will donate a total of $650,000 to these non-profit organizations to support their efforts to make wellness accessible to people throughout the world. The campaign will kick-off globally on June 9, with a social initiative that will encourage everyone within and outside the WW community to share one small change they are making to improve their health or the health of their communities, using the hashtag #wwgood on their personal social media accounts. For every public post on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook throughout the campaign, WW will donate $1 to ensure people have access to healthful foods, up to $100,000 (donation amount included in the aforementioned contribution commitment). "We are thrilled to partner with WW on this first initiative to support WW Good," said Michel Nischan, Founder and CEO of Wholesome Wave. "Our efforts together will help families in poverty, providing them the immediate benefit of healthy fruits and vegetables, as well as generating enormous long-term gains for public health, local economies and the environment." Also in June, WW Good will kick off a series of six, free mini-festivals in North America hosted by WE and supported by WW. Each event will feature inspirational speakers; interactive group fitness activities led by motivational fitness trainer Holly Rilinger; healthy food; and most importantly, community engagement opportunities for all ages. For every person who attends an event, WW will help one local family in need buy a month's worth of fruits and vegetables, distributed by Wholesome Wave. "WE is excited to support WW's incredible community of engaged members and employees who are inspired to help others live well," said Craig Kielburger, co-founder, WE. "Together we will make a difference through service opportunities at the WW Good mini-festivals where families and groups come together to create a meaningful impact in their local communities." The WW Good mini-festivals will take place throughout the summer in six cities in North America, starting on June 9 in Minneapolis and continuing on to Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Toronto. On August 26, the series will conclude with a large culmination event in New York City featuring talent known for inspiring healthy habits, such as Holly Rilinger, "The Young Jamaican Trainer" Demarjay Smith, among others. For more information about WW Good and how to get involved, please visit: www.weightwatchers.com/WWGood. About Weight Watchers International, Inc. Weight Watchers is a global wellness company and the world's leading commercial weight management program. We inspire millions of people to adopt healthy habits for real life. Through our engaging digital experience and face-to-face group meetings, members follow our livable and sustainable program that encompasses healthy eating, physical activity and positive mindset. With more than five decades of experience in building communities and our deep expertise in behavioral science, we aim to deliver wellness for all. To learn more about the Weight Watchers approach to healthy living, please visit www.weightwatchers.com. For more information about our global business, visit our corporate website at www.weightwatchersinternational.com. FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT: Jenny Zimmerman, Weight Watchers 212-589-2784 [email protected] SOURCE Weight Watchers Related Links http://www.weightwatchers.com Siam Piwat Co., Ltd., the joint venture partner of ICONSIAM as well as the owner and operator of prestige retail developments in Thailand such as Siam Paragon and Siam Center, has just been presented the world's most prestigious retail development award for the concept and "cutting-edge design" of its Siam Discovery retail destination by the world's largest retail development association the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC). In a dazzling awards ceremony organized in Las Vegas, USA, Siam Discovery rose to take the top spot from among hundreds of projects from around the world competing to be the winner of the ICSC's VIVA Award in the 'Design and Development' category. The ICSC's VIVA Awards are presented, annually, by an independent expert jury to "recognise the best-of-the-best in the world of retail development". Mrs. Chadatip Chutrakul, Chief Executive Officer of Siam Piwat Co., Ltd., said, "Siam Piwat's strategy for growth is to do things in retail and retail development that have never been done before in Thailand or even the world. We are committed to being a thought-leader on the global stage through co-creation with retailers and other partners in our developments. It's Thailand 4.0 in action, and it proves that Thai creativity and collaboration can take our country's flag to the top, even on the world stage." Siam Discovery opened its doors to visitors in 1997. It underwent a Bht 4,000 million re-build and reopened in 2016 as Thailand's largest lifestyle specialty store and 'the biggest arena of lifestyle experiments'. During the past 2 years, Siam Discovery has swept 6 global awards from prestigious competitions in the world of retailing. Among them is the World Retail Awards part of the World Retail Congress Global Series -- Store Design of the Year 2017, for being world's best designed development. Siam Discovery was also chosen by the International Council of Shopping Centers to be the winners of the Gold Award -- Design and Development Excellence Renovations/Expansions, for being Asia Pacific's best designed development, as well as the Gold Award -- Marketing, Positioning & Brand Awareness, for being the project with the best execution in marketing, positioning and brand awareness in Asia Pacific. The judges of ICSC praised Siam Discovery for being transformative. "Siam Discovery is a highly imaginative project that gets away from individual stores and walls and into an immersive open experience. It is the first mall development that makes retail an experience as well as the spaces in between being exciting and stimulating. Siam Discovery brings the latest digital technology offerings to create an interactive and experiential retail environment" "Siam Discovery is a game-changing, hybrid retail destination where products, services, and activities are brought together in a way that suits the lifestyle of Millennials. Products are grouped without the constraints of a particular brand or school of design, in a way that puts the needs of the customer at the centre. Millennials want to discover their own style while exploring new experiences with other people. Here, they can experiment and discover what they like and what expresses their own identity best," Mrs. Chutrakul said. SOURCE Siam Piwat Co., Ltd. DES MOINES, Iowa, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Yesway, the fast growing and innovative convenience store chain, today announced that it had achieved a major milestone with the acquisition of its 100th store as part of the 11-store Pick-A-Dilly portfolio transaction in northeast Missouri. This acquisition further enhances Yesway's presence in Missouri. The company now owns and operates 14 stores in Missouri and is looking to add additional stores to its portfolio in the state over the next few years. Four of these stores are located in Hannibal, with other single stores locations in Vandalia, Center, West Quincy, Edina, Kingdom City, Kirksville and Palmyra. Yesway made its first acquisition in December of 2015 and now has acquired 101 stores in Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. With the additional stores it currently has under contract to acquire, the company expects to operate nearly 150 stores and to expand into four new states by the end of June of this year. Its pipeline of new store acquisitions is robust, and the company remains on track to reach its goal of building a 500-location chain of Yesway convenience stores in selected regions of the United States over the next several years. "We are pleased with the acquisition of the Pick-A-Dilly portfolio and thrilled to have reached our 100-store milestone so quickly," said Thomas Nicholas Trkla, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Yesway. "With the stores we have under contract and the depth of the pipeline, we anticipate a heightened level of acquisition activity will be taking place over the next several months. I am very proud of our senior management team. They have done a stellar job of incorporating the new store acquisitions into our rapidly expanding portfolio and of consistently delivering terrific customer experiences in each of our stores." Editor note: To arrange interviews with Yesway executives, contact Erin Vadala, Warner Communications at [email protected] or (978) 468-3076. High-resolution images and graphics are available on request. About Yesway BW Gas & Convenience, d/b/a Yesway, is headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa. Yesway recently debuted at #7 on the Convenience Store News "2018 Top 20 Growth Chains" List and was named a "2017 Chain to Watch" by Convenience Store Decisions. Yesway plans to acquire, improve, and rebrand 500 convenience stores in selected regions of the United States over the next several years. For more information, please visit www.yesway.com. SOURCE Yesway Related Links http://www.yesway.com Jakarta, May 30 : Starting his official engagements in Indonesia on Wednesday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid a wreath at the Kalibata Heroes' Cemetery here. "Lest we forget...Paying homage to martyrs of Indonesian independence struggle! PM @narendramodi laying wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes' Cemetery and signing the Visitor's Book," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted along with pictures. Over 7,000 people, who are military casualties and veterans from the Indonesian war of independence are buried at the cemetery. These include many Japanese veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army who stayed in the then Dutch colony after the World War II of their own will and fought for Indonesia's independence. Modi arrived here on Tuesday on the first leg of his five-day three-nation tour of southeast Asia that will also see him visiting Malaysia and Singapore. Later in the day, Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo will hold a bilateral summit following which a number of agreements, including in the areas of defence and trade, are expected to be signed. The two leaders will then jointly inaugurate a kite festival being organised by Museum Layang-Layang of Jakarta and Kite Museum of Ahmedabad that will be depicting the common themes of the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, which are strong cultural and civilizational links that India share with Indonesia. Modi will also attend an Indian community event at the Jakarta Convention Centre here and take part in an India-Indonesia CEOs Forum. Indonesia is home to around 100,000 people of Indian origin and 7,000 Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) working as professionals across different sectors. New Delhi, May 30 : As the world grapples with the challenge of climate change, a top Indian scientist has called for the opening of more Indian research stations in the Arctic. "India's observer status in the Arctic Council is very important," K. Vijay Raghavan, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Indian government, said at a seminar on "Finland and India: Engaging the Arctic" here on Tuesday. "I hope India will set up more research stations in the Arctic," Raghavan said. India's sole Arctic station Himadri is located at the International Arctic Research Base in Ny-Alesund, Norway. The seminar was jointly organised by the Finland Embassy here, the Carnegie India think tank and the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the government of India. The Arctic Council is the leading inter-governmental forum promoting cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic states, Arctic indigenous communities and other Arctic inhabitants on common Arctic issues, in particular on issues of sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic. Its member nations include Finland, the chair from 2017 to 2019, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the US. India has been an observer nation of the Council since 2013. Raghavan said the discovery of the hole in the earth's ozone layer completely changed the way people viewed the world. "That changed our view of Polar science and other eco-systems," he said. Stating that the earth's climate has changed over seven cycles in the last 650,000 years, he said 16 of the warmest years on record occurred since 2001. "2016 is the warmest year on record," Raghvan said, adding that human intervention is the dominant cause for climate change. In her opening remarks, in what she called the first ever Arctic event in India, Finland Ambassador to India Nina Vaskunlahti said that "the Arctic is closer to us than you think". "Climate change has brought the world world together," she said. "Arctic Council countries and India face the common challenge of black carbon emission." Rene Soderman, Senior Arctic Official for Finland, said that the Arctic region is not an isolated and will turn into an important hub in the 21st century with migration happening. "Four million people live in the Arctic and 10 per cent of them are indigenous people," Soderman said. "Global warming is changing the lifestyle of the people in the Arctic." Stating that climate change is happening more rapidly in the Arctic than anywhere else, he said that this can be mitigated only through the full implementation of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. "Finland wants to expand multilateral cooperation on the Arctic," Soderman said. "Arctic cooperation will continue despite international tensions." Stuti Banerjee, Research Fellow at the Indian Council of World Affairs think tank, said climate change in the Arctic will affect the Indian coastline. "As the sea level rises, around 55 million people in India will be affected in terms of relocation of homes," Banerjee said, adding that New Delhi is still at a nascent stage of formulating an Arctic policy. Giving a geopolitical aspect of the issue, Shekhar Sinha, former Flag Officer Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Navy's Western Naval Command, said that China has linked the Arctic to its own prosperity. "Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that he wants China to be a Polar power," Sinha said. Stating that climate change in the Arctic can affect regional systems like the Indian monsoon, M. Rajeevan, Secretary in the Ministry of Earth Sciences, said that India is in talks with Canada for opening another Arctic research station. "We would also like to collaborate with Finland in this regard," he said. New Delhi, May 30 : The CBI on Wednesday raided the residence of Delhi Health and Power Minister Satyendra Jain over alleged violation of norms in hiring of a creative team in the Public Works Department (PWD) and registered a case. The case has been registered against Jain, S.K. Srivastava, the then Engineer-in-Chief in PWD and others, a CBI official told IANS. Searches are underway at four-to-five locations in Delhi, including residences of PWD officials and others. In 2017, the Central Bureau of Investigation had initiated a preliminary probe related to the hiring of 24 architects in the PWD's creative team for various projects, including Mohalla clinics. "CBI raids my house for hiring creative team by PWD. Professionals were hired for different projects. All were forced to leave by the CBI," Jain said in a tweet. Reacting to the raids on Jain's house, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted: "What does Prime Minister Narendra Modi want?" His deputy Manish Sisodia quoted a report that said the NITI Aayog had favoured the creative team. "The only job left with the CBI, Delhi Police, Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax department is to stop the works done by the AAP in Delhi." "Our crime is that we are working to make the national capital a better place and improve the health and education here. All this is done to harass us," he added. "The Aam Aadmi Party is not going to stop with these practice," he said. Jakarta, May 30 : In a significant boost to their strategic ties, India and Indonesia signed an agreement on defence cooperation among 15 others following a bilateral summit between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo here on Wednesday. The agreement on defence cooperation calls for "regular bilateral dialogue and consultation on strategic defence and military issues of common interest, exchange of strategic information, military education, training and exercise, cooperation among the armed forces including army, navy, air force and aerospace, humanitarian aid, disaster relief, peace-keeping and medical services among others". The agreement assumes significance given the two countries' strategic interests in the Info-Pacific region. The two sides also signed a framework agreement on cooperation in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes. According to this agreement, both sides will work together on space sciences, exploration of outer space, use of space technology, monitoring of earth's environment from outer space and remote sensing, use of integrated Biak ground station of Indonesia for mutual benefit, hosting of Indian ground station in Indonesia, support for launch services of LAPAN (Indonesia's National Institute of Aeronautics and Space)-made satellites and joint research and development activities in space technology among others. The two sides also signed 12 memorandums of understanding (MoUs), including on scientific and technological cooperation, technical cooperation in the railways sector, health cooperation, and on promoting economic, trade and technological cooperation. Both sides signed a separate plan of activities to celebrate to 70 years of diplomatic relations in 2019-20. Modi arrived here on Tuesday on the first leg of his five-day three-nation tour of southeast Asia that will also see him visiting Malaysia and Singapore. This is his first visit to Indonesia as Prime Minister. Jakarta, May 30 : India and Indonesia elevated their bilateral ties to that of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnerhsip and issued a shared vision for maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region following a bilateral summit between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo here on Wednesday. The two sides also signed 15 agreements, including on defence and economic cooperation. Reflecting India's growing ties with Southeast Asia under New Delhi's Act East Policy, the two sides issued a joint statement on "Establishing Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Between Indonesia and India" which said that Modi and Widodo held extensive talks on bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest, and provided strategic directions that would further enhance the solid and expanding relations between the two countries. "To enhance the two countries' strategic partnership, the leaders agreed to hold annual summit meetings, including on the margins of multilateral events," the statement said. "They also stressed the importance of continuing regular bilateral consultations through the robust architecture of dialogue in place, including the ministerial and working group mechanisms." According to the statement, both leaders reaffirmed that teir countries, as strategic partners and maritime neighbours, must work to further strengthen and broaden the already robust defence cooperation. "The leaders reaffirmed their commitment in the field of defence, with the signing of the Defence Cooperation Agreement between the two countries," it stated, adding that the this will further strengthen and renew the existing cooperation for mutual benefit of the two countries and the region. Modi and Widodo also agreed to further enhance mutual trust through regular meetings and staff talks between armies, navies and air forces of the two countries. In the area of defence industry, they took note on the progress made through the joint production of military equipment and identified cooperation in defence industry and technology as areas of great potential. In terms of economic cooperation, the two sides sides agreed to work intensively for the early conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and reiterated that it needs to be comprehensive, fair and balanced with benefit to all member states. RCEP is a proposed free trade agreement between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) regional bloc and the six states with which Asean has existing free trade agreements - Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. The Asean comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. "President Joko Widodo welcomed the increase in Indian investments in Indonesia and appreciated their contribution to the Indonesian economy," the statement said. "Prime Minister Modi also welcomed Indonesian companies' participation through the Make in India initiative and invited Indonesian business to avail of the opportunities presented." The joint statement said that as maritime neighbours, the two countries underlined the importance of stronger connectivity, particularly on sea links, in order to facilitate economic cooperation and people-to-people contact. Modi and Widodo welcomed the plan to build connectivity between Andaman Nicobar in India and Aceh in Indonesia to unleash the economic potentials of both areas. "Furthermore, the two sides looked forward to the expeditious conclusion of the Asean-India Maritime Transport Cooperation Agreement," the statement said. The two leaders also reiterated their "strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations including cross-border terrorism and terror-related incidents in Indonesia and India and affirmed that perpetrators of these henious acts must be brought to justice". In a manifestation of the growing geostrategic importance of the Indo-Pacific region, the two sides issued a separate statement on "Shared Vision of Indo-Indonesia Martime Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific". "In today's changing scenario in the Indo-Pacific region, we (India and Indonesia) are geostrategically located," Modi said in a joint address to the media with Indonesian President Joko Widodo following a bilateral summit here. "Under India's Act East Policy, we have SAGAR - Security and Growth for All in the Region - that matches with President Widodo's Global Maritime Fulcrum," he said. While Modi's SAGAR initiative underscores India's engagement in the Indian Ocean region, Jokowi's Global Maritime Fulcrum seeks to capitalise on Indonesia's geographic position to make the southeast Asian nation a "fulcrum" of Indo-Pacific maritime activity. India is also part of a recently revived quad, including the US, Japan and Australia, that seeks to work for peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region. According to the statement on maritime cooperation, both sides recognised "that with a coastline of 7,500 km, with more than 1,380 islands and more than two million sq. km of Exclusive Economic Zone, India occupies a central position in the Indo-Pacific, while Indonesia as the largest archipelagic state in the world, with a coastline of 108,000 km, with 17,504 islands and features and a total of maritime area of 6,400,000 sq. km including Exclusive Economic Zone, is a fulcrum that connects the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean". "The two oceans represent a combined maritime region which is important for global maritime trade and commerce," it stated. It also called for adhering to the rights and obligations under the international law including the Charter of the United Nations, the UN Convention on the Law of Sea (Unclos) and the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC). Modi arrived here on Tuesday on the first leg of his five-day three-nation tour of southeast Asia that will also see him visiting Malaysia and Singapore. This is his first visit to Indonesia as Prime Minister. New Delhi, May 30 : The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has decided to revoke the passports of five NRIs against whom Look-out-Circulars (LoC) had been issued by Integrated Nodal Agency (INA), the Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD) said on Wednesday. According to the WCD, the INA -- an inter-ministerial body dealing with matrimonial disputes headed by a Secretary, Rakesh Srivastava -- met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj earlier this week and recommended that the passports of all those who have been issued LoCs be revoked. The WCD Ministry says it has received 40 cases related to matrimonial disputes relating to NRIs, of which six found to be serious and LoC issued. The government last month found five cases of matrimonial disputes fit for issuing LoCs and notice was thereafter sent to the concerned NRIs. Earlier this month, the ministry said it had decided to issue another LoC in a matrimonial dispute. According to the ministry, in criminal matters involving NRIs, the LoC can be issued by the investigating agency in cognisable offences when the overseas husband is deliberately evading arrest or not appearing in the trial court despite non-bailable warrants and other coercive measures, or there is a likelihood that he will leave the country to evade trial or arrest. The INA had recommended the revocation of passport to the MEA in connection with the sixth LoC issued by it. The step comes after the WCD Ministry had a fall-out with the Law Ministry on impounding passports and confiscation of the property of those NRI husbands who have been found guilty of deserting their wives and failed to appear in the court. "The suggestion was presented in front of a group of ministers who approved it. However, the Law Ministry did not support the step. Therefore, we sought a meeting with Sushma Swaraj," an official said. Panaji, May 30 : Nine tourists from Pune were arrested on charge of molesting a minor, assaulting her minor brother and rioting at the popular beach village of Baga in North Goa, police said on Wednesday. The tourists earlier took snaps of the girl on the beach but later molested her and beat up her brother when the two objected to clicking of their pictures. A first information report was registered under Sections 143, 147, 323, 354 read with 149 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 8 of the Goa Children's Act. "The accused were caught while attempting to flee Goa. We have seized the mobile phone on which girl's pictures were taken. It will be sent for forensic examination," Dalvi said. Those arrested are Ramesh Kamble, Sanket Bhadale, Krishna Patil, Satyam Lambe, Aniket Gurav, Rishikesh Gurav, Akash Suvaskar, Sunny More, and Ishwar Pangare. The coastal state, renowned as a beach and nightlife tourism destination, attracts nearly seven million tourists every year. New Delhi, May 30 : Samsung's 4K "Onyx Cinema LED" display for large screens, currently available only in a few countries across the world, is set to come to India later this year, a top company executive said on Wednesday. To begin with, PVR Cinemas and INOX Group would install 'Onyx Cinema LED' in the country. The Samsung screens would be installed at PVR multiplexes in Delhi and Mumbai. "We first launched the screen in Korea, then we installed it in China, Europe, Thailand and the US. Once users watch content on 'Onyx' screen, it would be very difficult for them to switch to conventional projectors in theatres," Puneet Sethi, Vice President, Consumer Electronics Enterprise Business, Samsung India, told IANS here. Samsung "Onyx" screen has the ability to deliver better picture quality with its true black colour, bringing contents to life with higher vibrancy and accuracy in a cinema theatre near you. "We are delighted to announce our latest technology association with Samsung for their 'Onyx Cinema LED' screens in India. Partnering as the first movers, PVR will be the foremost cinema exhibition chain in the country to introduce this technology for the Indian audiences," Gautam Dutta, CEO, PVR Ltd told IANS. The display comes with comprehensive solutions such as "Onyx View", "Onyx 3D" and "Onyx Sound". The company, however, did not reveal the introductory price of the 4K "Onyx" LED screens for the Indian market. "We are introducing a game-changing technology which would showcase the work of film directors in optimal quality. In addition, it will also offer our movie-goers a new level of viewing environment, immersive in every aspect," Sethi added. Combined by an infinite contrast and specialised low-tone greyscale settings, "Onyx View" delivers brighter and more detail-rich content. The screen delivers HDR (High Dynamic Range) to the cinema, showcasing on-screen contents at peak brightness level, nearly 10 times greater than that offered by the standard cinema projectors. It is also the industry's first DCI-certified cinema screen available in various sizes. The screen also offers "Onyx" surround sound from JBL by Harman International and Samsung's Audio Lab. "This integration eliminates rearward bias by expanding the audio 'sweet spot' within Onyx theatres and ensures that all users can enjoy the same presentation throughout, regardless of the seat location," Sethi informed. The South Korean major has collaborated with cinema content developers and technology solution services providers to ensure that the display can optimise upcoming films as the theatres upgrade their screen to the Onyx screen. The screens will be able to display images of 4K, 2K, HDR and 3D quality. (Krishna SinhaChaudhury can be contacted at krishna.s@ians.in) Bengaluru, May 30 : Tech giant IBM on Wednesday announced that its Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered Enterprise Marketing Cloud services will now be available from its local Cloud Data Centre in India, thus allowing its customers in the country host their data locally. Locally hosting marketing data will give the clients proximity, scalability and also help meet the data regulatory requirements, the company said in a statement. "With this announcement, we will be able to offer our customers the power of Cloud and AI to leverage data in the digital marketing space," said Karan Bajwa, MD, IBM India. The move will enable marketers of Indian businesses and government agencies to create unique customer journeys in line with data privacy regulations, especially in sectors such as banking and insurance. "This enables us to leverage Cloud and AI in creating unique journeys for our customers, while addressing data security and privacy regulations of the country," added Harriet Green, Chairman and CEO, IBM Asia Pacific. The AI-powered marketing assistant saves users time and effort, helping marketers make better decisions. IBM clients such as Payback, IndusInd Bank and Titan are all leveraging the company's Watson solutions. "We are in the process of implementing the full suite of Watson Campaign Automation and started the phased launch from September 2017. So far we have delivered over a billion communications to our members," said Rijish Raghavan, COO, PAYBACK India. Mumbai, May 30 : Weak global cues including concerns of a resurgent US-China trade war and a fall in global markets, depressed the key Indian equity indices on Wednesday. According to market observers, heavy outflow of foreign funds also eroded investor sentiments. The indices, however, trimmed major losses made in the afternoon session to end the day's trade on flat-to-negative note. The barometer 30-scrip Sensitive Index (Sensex), which had opened at 34,876.13 points, closed at 34,906.11 points -- lower by 43.13 points or 0.12 per cent from its previous close of 34,949.24 points. The Sensex touched a high of 35,017.45 points and a low of 34,735.11 points during the intra-day trade. The BSE market breadth was tilted towards the bears with 1,495 declines against 1,197 advances during the day. The broader Nifty50 of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) closed at 10,614.35 points -- down 18.95 points or 0.18 per cent -- from the previous close of 10,633.30 points. "The weakness came on the back of weak global cues due to Italy's political crisis and fresh fears of a trade war between US and China," Deepak Jasani, Head of Retail Research at HDFC Securities, told IANS. BNP Paribas Mutual Fund's Senior Fund Manager for Equities, Abhijeet Dey said: "It was a volatile day on the bourses as global uncertainty and expiry of the May derivatives series this week, impacted investor sentiment and impeded the emergence of a trend." "Additionally, the prospect that Italy might need a fresh election that could effectively become a referendum on the nation's inclusion in the euro zone rattled markets." Further, on the currency front, the Indian rupee strengthened by 43 paise against the US dollar to 67.43, from its previous close at 67.87 per greenback. Besides, provisional data with exchanges showed that foreign institutional investors sold scrips worth Rs 1,286.91 crore, while the domestic institutional investors bought stocks worth Rs 492.46 crore. Sector-wise, the S&P BSE banking index gained by 33.18 points, the metal index was up 21.10 points and the utilities index rose marginally by 5.13 points. On the other hand, the S&P BSE capital goods index fell by 130.07 points, the healthcare index was down 101.64 points and the consumer durable index ended 95.20 points lower. The major gainers on the Sensex were Mahindra and Mahindra, up 3.08 per cent at Rs 895.60; Coal India, up 2.34 per cent at Rs 288.75; Yes Bank, up 1.64 per cent at Rs 344; KOtak Mahindra Bank, up 1.48 per cent at Rs 1,302.15; and Hindustan Unilever, up 1.34 per cent at Rs 1,593 per share. The top losers were Tata Motors (DVR), down 2 per cent at Rs 166.90; Tata Motors, down 1.92 per cent at Rs 288.95; ICICI Bank, down 1.86 per cent at Rs 285.25; Bajaj Auto, down 1.11 per cent at Rs 2,763.10; and Axis Bank, down 1.10 per cent at Rs 539.90 per share. Canberra, May 30 : Former Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has been granted personal leave from his parliamentary duties for one month. Joyce was allowed to take the leave from Tuesday, meaning his absence will not affect votes in the Australian House of Representatives and will not jeopardise the coalition's slim one-seat majority, Xinhua news agency reported. The Nationals backbencher applied for leave six weeks after he and his partner Vikki Campion welcomed a baby boy and just days after revelations the couple agreed to a paid interview of 150,000 Australian dollars ($112,500) with Channel 7's Sunday Night. On Tuesday, Joyce told the Australian newspaper it was Campion who had made the decision to accept money for the interview, because she and their son Sebastian were being "screwed over" by constant media attention. Joyce has not taken extended leave since his affair with former media advisor Campion was revealed earlier this year. The member for New England in New South Wales, stood down as Nationals leader in February and lodged a privacy complaint against the Daily Telegraph newspaper for reporting on his private life. Joyce is expected to return to Parliament on August 13. New Delhi, May 30 : A sustainable lifestyle and unclustered living is not just a present-day trend, but the need of the hour. Optimum utilisation of space and a neutral colour palette can work wonders as a background for a modern-day home, say experts. Nikhil Tiwari, designer and founder of Topstona and Jade Davies, Interior Designer at MKM Luxe Suisse, natural stone-based wall claddings, suggest how to capture the essence of metropolitan living in your home. New Delhi, May 30 : A court here on Wednesday rejected Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's plea for copies of his visuals and statements recorded by the probe agency in connection with an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by two Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs on February 19. Delhi Police had, on May 18, questioned Kejriwal and sought to know from him the sequence of events on the fateful day. Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal rejected Kejriwal's plea and said that there is no specific provision for providing a copy of the statement to a witness, whose statement has been recorded by police. "The investigation agency is not obligated under the law to give the person a copy of his recorded statement, more particularly when the status of that person is not clear -- that is, whether he will be made an accused or a witness, and further when the agency is of the view that handing over any such statement will be prejudicial to its investigation," the court said. The court also noted that the right of the accused to get a copy of the documents from the prosecution accrues after a police report is filed and he is summoned as an accused. Kejriwal had sought directions to the case Investigating Officer to supply a copy of the CD of his statement recorded by police on May 18. Kejriwal told the court that the Delhi Police had videographed the proceedings. He told the court that later that day, the police told the media that the Chief Minister had evaded certain questions by not giving specific and proper answers, which according to him is "factually incorrect". Kejriwal alleged that the police conduct indicated that they could go to any extent to frame him or other AAP leaders in the case or tamper with his statement as a witness in the case. Delhi Police opposed the plea, saying it is not maintainable. New Delhi, May 30 : The Income-Tax department has questioned Matix Group Chairman Nishant Kanodia in connection with NuPower Renewables, a leading daily reported on Wednesday. NuPower Renewables is a company promoted by Deepak Kochhar, husband of ICICI Bank's CEO Chanda Kochhar. Nishant Kanodia is the son-in-law of Essar Group's Ravi Ruia and owns the Mauritius-based Firstland Holdings that invested Rs 325 crore in NuPower between 2010 and 2012. "We are probing this investment that was routed through Mauritius. What is the source of the funds, why did Firstland Holdings exit NuPower soon after and whether this has connections with any Essat Group company," a tax official told The Hindustan Times. IANS' phone calls and text messages to an I-T department official to get more details remained unanswered. Meanwhile, at least nine public and private sector banks have reportedly classified the loans of Matix Fertilisers and Chemicals (MFC) -- whose Rs 7,000 crore urea plant in West Bengal floundered for years for the lack of coal-bed methane gas -- as sub-standard and non-performing assets (NPA) in the last quarter. However, MFCL in a response to IANS said: "Currently, MFCL is in process of refinancing its term loan (Project Loan) and availing working capital required for continuous sustained plant operation. The company expects to resume production by September, 2018." The MFCL has set up a greenfield single stream gas based integrated Urea fertiliser plant at Panagarh Industrial Park, West Bengal. "MFCL had entered into a Gas Sale and Purchase Agreement (GSPA) with Essar Oil Ltd for supply of CBM Gas. However, due to technical reasons, Essar was unable to supply required quantity of CBM gas to the Matix plant which resulted in delay in commissioning of MFCL's plant. MFCL plant successfully started trial production in the month of October, 2017," Matix said. The Indian banking system currently has an exposure of over Rs 3,500 crore to MFC as of March 31, 2018, according to loan data The Wire has accessed. Out of the 12 lenders, currently, only three classify the account as standard: Punjab National Bank (Rs 174 crore), Vijaya Bank (Rs 100 crore), and Yes Bank (Rs 83 crore). In the case of Yes Bank, it is the only lender where the Matix account is classified as a non CDR (corporate debt restructuring) standard loan and is part of its disclosed restructured standard loans as of March 31, 2018. New Delhi, May 30 : The Congress slammed the government for "playing a cruel joke" on the people after the prices of petrol and diesel recorded an effective cut of one paisa on Wednesday. "In four years, we have seen a loot of Rs 10 lakh crore when it comes to fuel prices. Today, there was a cut of one paisa. This is a cruel joke," said Congress spokesperson R.P.N. Singh, adding this "cut" came after a 16 days of continuous increase in fuel prices. "They are ready to offer Rs 100 crores to buy MLAs in Karnataka. Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) spends Rs 4,600 crore in advertisements in five years, and they reduce fuel prices by just one paisa," he added. Prices of petrol and diesel were cut by one paisa on Wednesday after the Indian Oil Corp's (IOC) website initially showed a fall of around 50-60 paise per litre in fuel prices. "The government has increased excise duty up to more than 400 per cent and 200 per cent on petrol and diesel prices respectively. This government has earned Rs 10 lakh crore in the four years. Why doesn't the government give accounts of this to the people," said Singh. "The PM is busy travelling, whereas people are incurring losses. We want to tell the government, as our party president (Rahul Gandhi) has said, we will fight against the the government till the prices of diesel and petrol are reduced," he added. He also said that it was the government's responsibility to bring petroleum products under the ambit of Goods and Services Tax. The party has launched a nation-wide campaign at the state and district level to protest against the rise in the prices of petroleum products. The Indian Youth Congress also organised a 'Bharat Bachao Jan Andolan' march on Wednesday. Kolkata, May 30 : Expressing surprise over former President Pranab Mukherjee's decision to attend a RSS event, West Bengal Congress chief Adhir Chowdhury on Wednesday said he was unable to relate the visit with Mukherjee's previous comments against the Sangh Parivar and other Hindutva forces. "My question is does he (Mukherjee) think his previous comments against RSS were wrong? "We remember how Pranab Mukherjee as a senior leader of the Congress had come down heavily on RSS as a communal and a divisive organisation," he said. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) invited Mukherjee to be the chief guest at the concluding function of "Tritiya Varsh Varg" or third-year course and address the swayamsevaks' at its Nagpur headquarters on June 7. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat will be the main speaker. According to an RSS functionary, the former President has accepted the invitation. "I am surprised to hear about Pranab Mukherjee's decision to attend RSS's function in Nagpur. Just like any other Congressman, I am really astonished too," Chowdhury said. "I can't say what prompted him to take such a decision," said Chowdhury, who has shared a long association with Mukherjee. Patna, May 30 : A Muslim man in Bihar broke his Ramadan fast on Wednesday to donate blood to save the lives of two newborns, officials said. Mohammad Imran, in his mid 20s, donated blood to nine-day-old Bharat Kumar and two-day-old Raj Kumar in Siwan district, a district health official said. "Imran donated blood to the two newborns after their family members failed to arrange a suitable donor. Both children were saved," Siwan's Sadar Hospital official Mahendar Prasad said. It is the third such case within 10 days. Last week, Jawed Alam donated blood to an eight-year-old thalassemic boy Rajesh Kumar to save his life in Gopalganj district. On Sunday, Mohammad Ashfaque, a young Muslim man in Darbhanga district, broke his Ramadan fast to donate blood to save the life of a newborn. Mumbai, May 30 : Congress' Maharashtra leader Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil on Wednesday demanded that the online shopping portal Flipkart should be banned as it was found to be source of purchase for arms seized in the state's Aurangabad. Referring to the discovery by Aurangabad police on Tuesday that a large number of weapons were allegedly bought online through Flipkart, he said this was setting a "dangerous trend". "It is shocking that such arms are now being openly traded online. Police have seized 28 weapons including swords, choppers, knives, kukris, guptis, etc, which were purchased from Flipkart's online website," said Vikhe-Patil, who is the Leader of Opposition in the Assembly. Online shopping has become the norm in recent years and now it has come to fore that even dangerous and illegal activities like this are taking place, he pointed out. Vikhe-Patil said the government must probe who bought the weapons and why, especially since Aurangabad has just revived from a bout of communal riots earlier this month, and demanded to know whether these weapons purchase were connected with the recent violence. The Aurangabad police's Crime Branch on Tuesday seized over two dozen weapons from Mukundwadi and Nageshwarwadi in the city and nabbed seven persons, including the manager of a courier company. Investigations revealed that the arms were booked through Flikpart and were delivered from Punjab's Amritsar, through courier company, Estacort Services Pvt. Ltd. The police teams raided the courier company and seized the weapons, while Aurangabad Police Commissioner Milind Bharambe said he would recommend to the Home Ministry to ban such online purchase of arms. Besides, he said police are probing how many more weapons had been ordered like this since Aurangabad is a sensitive city. Mumbai, May 30 : After becoming the most expensive buy in the history of Pro Kabaddi League (PKL), an elated Iranian Fazel Atrachali on Wednesday expressed pleasure on being picked by U Mumba. The Iranian, who was picked by the Mumbai-based franchise for Rs 1 crore, surpassed Nitin Tomar, who was till now the costliest buy in the league after being bagged by UP Yoddhas for Rs 93 lakhs in the previous year's auctions. "I am very happy to be back in my second home - U Mumba. I have immense respect for the team because it is where it all began for me," Atrachali said. "The fact that I beat the record for the highest bid in Pro Kabaddi is truly an incredible feeling," he added. Meanwhile, U-Mumba team owner Ronnie Screwvala explained the reason behind paying a whopping amount to secure the Iranian defender. "We wanted to be strong in defence. We had an extremely strong defence in season 1 and season 2 and that was part of the reason why we bargained for Fazal so fiercely," said Ronnie. "Fazal is someone who has played with us and we are quite happy to have him back. We wanted to be sure that we got who we wanted rather than going right till the end and then have to hastily pick a player," added he. Chandigarh, May 30 : With the opposition accusing his government of inaction over industries brazenly polluting the state, particularly river water, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Wednesday ordered a crackdown on polluting industries. Reiterating his government's zero tolerance to river pollution, Amarinder Singh ordered stringent enforcement of the laws and regulations governing discharge of effluents into the rivers. "My government will not allow pollution to damage the health of the people of Punjab at any cost, whether in towns or villages," he said after a meeting with senior officers, including that of Punjab Pollution Control Board (PPCB). "Strict action will be taken against all polluting units. Neither the industry nor the municipalities would be allowed to flow any effluents into the rivers without treating them," said Amarinder Singh, also directing the Chief Secretary to prepare a comprehensive river cleaning plan with a clear timeline for its implementation. The state government drew flak recently after molasses discharge by Chadha Sugar mill and distillery in Gurdaspur district not only contaminated water of the Beas river but also led to death of thousands of fish earlier this month. The government only imposed a penalty of Rs 5 crore on the sugar mill through the PPCB and did not get a case registered against the factory owners, who are considered close to the Chief Minister and the ruling Congress. Leader of Opposition Sukhpal Singh Khaira, of the Aam Aadmi Party, has openly accused the Amarinder government of turning a blind eye to the pollution being spread by the mill owned by former minister Rana Gurjit Singh. Lambasting the AAP and Khaira for playing political games over a serious issue, Amarinder Singh said his government was "seriously tackling the issue of pollution in a systematic manner". The AAP leaders had sought a meeting with the Chief Minister on Wednesday over the issue but he did not meet them. A protest march by AAP leadership to the Chief Minister's residence was stopped by the Chandigarh Police. Lashing out at the earlier Shiromani Akali Dal-BJP government for making a mess of the state during the 10 years of their misrule, Amarinder Singh said it would take time to streamline things. Moscow, May 30 : Russia's Federation Council, the Upper House of the Parliament, has invited Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to speak at one of its plenary meetings, Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said on Wednesday. "We have sent an invitation and we will try to organise his arrival," Matviyenko was quoted by TASS news agency as saying. "Whether he will be able to come is another question," she said. The suggestion to invite Zuckerberg came from Senator Anton Belyakov, who said that the US billionaire might appear at one of the parliamentary "Hour of the Expert" events, in which guests normally address the lawmakers and hold a Q&A session. Matviyenko said that the Federation Council may invite other well-known foreign experts to speak on topical issues. New Delhi, May 30 : The BJP Delhi unit on Wednesday described Public Works Department (PWD) Minister Satyendar Jain as the "accountant of all the black deeds of the Delhi government", soon after the CBI registered a case against him for alleged violation of norms in hiring a creative team in the department. Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Manoj Tiwari said that during the last three years, the people of Delhi and the country have seen the "silence" of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on cases of corruption against his party leaders and family members. "But the case of Jain is quite different. Kejriwal cannot take any action against Jain because he is the accountant of all the black deeds of the Delhi government," Tiwari, who represents the northeast Delhi seat in the Lok Sabha, alleged. "If he reveals the truth, then legal action will certainly be taken against AAP leaders, including the Chief Minister," the BJP leader claimed. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) earlier on Wednesday raided the residence of the Minister over alleged violation of norms in hiring a creative team in the PWD and registered a case. The agency registered the case against Jain, then PWD Engineer-in-Chief S.K. Srivastava and others. The CBI team carried out searches at four-to-five locations in Delhi, including the residences of PWD officials and others. In 2017, the agency initiated a preliminary probe into the hiring of 24 architects in the PWD's creative team for various projects, including Mohalla Clinics. Attacking the Chief Minister for not taking any action against his Minister, Tiwari said: "The continuance of Jain in the Delhi Cabinet even after a criminal case against him is against democratic traditions." The BJP leader said that it seemed that in the last three years in office, Kejriwal "may not have learnt anything". "But he has learnt the art of protecting corruption with the help of his friendship with RJD leader Lalu Prasad and Karnataka's H.D. Kumaraswamy and others," he added. "Trump wishes he hadn't picked Jeff Sessions for attorney general" | Main | "Blind Justice: Why the Court Refused to Accept Statistical Evidence of Discriminatory Purpose in McCleskey v. Kemp And Some Pathways for Change" The Hill this morning has this extended article under the headline "Senate grapples with prison reform bill." The piece reinforces my fear that criminal justice reform efforts are on the brink of stalling in the upper chamber of Congress. Here are excerpts: Senate negotiators are warning they are not close to a deal that would allow the prison reform bill to move quickly. Instead, the fight is pitting two influential GOP senators Cornyn and Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the Judiciary Committee chairman against each other as they jockey for competing bills. Weve got work to do here on building consensus but right now we dont have it, Cornyn said last week about what happens to prison reform in the Senate. The GOP divisions could scuttle any chance that the Trump-backed legislation becomes law this year, with leadership unlikely to bring up legislation that would highlight divisions within their own party ahead of the midterm elections. Both Cornyn and Grassley are signaling they plan to press forward with trying to build support for their own separate bills once the Senate returns to Washington, D.C., next week. Asked if he would budge on his opposition to a prison reformonly bill, Grassley responded, No. Were going to take up my bill. Or I should say, my bipartisan bill thats got 28 co-sponsors equal number Republicans and Democrats.... What the House does through that legislation is about the equivalent of a spit in the ocean compared to what the problem is of too much imprisonment, Grassley added. Grassley and Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Democrat, have introduced broad criminal justice reform legislation that would pair prison reforms to changes in sentencing, including reductions in mandatory minimums for certain drug offenses while increasing mandatory minimums for other offenses. Both senators say theyve made a deal not to separate the prison and sentencing reform components despite pressure from the White House. But that bill is unlikely to be taken up given GOP control of Congress and opposition from key members of the Trump administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was an outspoken opponent of the criminal justice reform bill when he served in the Senate. Grassley acknowledged that he has not convinced Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to bring the criminal justice reform bill to the floor. Youve got to remember that McConnell doesnt like the bill, and all I can say is that you ought to let a Republican president who needs a big, bipartisan victory have a bipartisan victory, he said. The Kentucky Republican did not move criminal justice reform legislation in 2015 or 2016 amid vocal pushback from four GOP senators. The then-Obama administration supported the bill, and senators in both parties said they had 60 votes to pass it. Supporters of the narrower prison reformonly legislation are seizing on the opposition from key Republicans and the Trump administration as they push for their bill.... Cornyn added that the decision boils down to either passing prison reform or accepting that Congress will take no action for the foreseeable future in the criminal justice space. But its unclear if McConnell would be willing to move a bill without Grassleys support.... And on Capitol Hill, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), one of Trumps closest allies in the Senate, is privately raising concerns about the bill. A spokeswoman for the senator said Cotton has concerns with provisions in the bill pertaining to lenient treatment for heroin and fentanyl traffickers. Cotton, Sessions and GOP Sens. David Perdue (Ga.) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) were a small but vocal group of Republicans senators deeply opposed to broader criminal justice legislation that included both prison reform and changes to mandatory minimum sentencing. Cornyn acknowledged that he has spoken to Cotton about trying to address his issues with the prison reform bill. Ive told him were going to work with him and come up with something that I think hell be able to support, Cornyn said, but he did express some concerns. Kolkata, May 30 : Accusing Left Front (LF) major CPI-M of compromising Left unity in West Bengal for the sake of a coalition with the Congress in recent elections, the All India Forward Bloc (AIFB) on Wednesday said such a tendency to neglect allies in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls would pose a serious question on the LF's existence and relevance. Holding the CPIM-Congress understanding chiefly responsible for the Left's dismal performance in the recent state rural polls, the AIFB claimed the people have shown their strong disapproval towards any such coalition in the last two major elections. "If the CPI-M leadership continues to remain indifferent to the strength of the fellow Left parties in the state and decides to join hands with the Congress in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the idea of left politics in the state would come under question and the LF would need to have a new definition... "The existence and relevance of the LF in the state would come under threat," AIFB state General Secretary Naren Chatterjee told reporters here. "The last state Assembly polls in 2016 and the recently concluded state rural polls have clearly proved that the Congress votes do not shift to Left parties, but the Congress itself has managed to perform better than us in both the elections with the help of the LF vote bank." Referring to the CPI-M's performance in the state Panchayat elections earlier this month, Chatterjee said the Congress has won three Zilla Parishad seats in Purulia district with the help of the CPI-M's vote bank while the Marxists drew a blank. He said the party could have captured all three seats while the Forward Bloc would have won another two in the district had there been an alliance between the two Left parties. The senior AIFB leader said the ground reality in West Bengal showed that Left democratic unity was necessary in the state. "The CPI-M has to decide what is more important, is it the existence of the Left Front or their alliance with the Congress." However, he clarified that that his party's objection did not stem from its ideological differences with the Congress. "It isn't just about ideological differences. The Left Front has a political existence in Bengal since 1977 and there is an internal calculation regarding the seat sharing among the left allies. But the calculation has been thrown into jeopardy in the last two elections and the priority has constantly shifted towards Congress. "Just keeping a front for the sake of holding meetings and walking hand in hand in the rallies would not be sufficient to strengthen Left unity. The unity must be equally promoted in constitutional democracy as well as in election battles. It is equally necessary in the city as well as in rural Bengal," the Left leader added. Mumbai, May 30 : Iranian defender Fazel Atrachali's joy of being the costliest buy in Pro Kabaddi League's (PKL) history was shortlived as Deepak Niwas Hooda and Nitin Tomar went to Jaipur Pink Panthers and Puneri Paltan respectively for identical sums of Rs 1.15 crore. Deepak sparked a bidding war between the various franchises. Haryana Steelers and Dabang Delhi fought a close fight to secure his services. However, it were the Panthers who came out victorious to bag the 23-year-old. Earlier in the day, Atrachali had become the costliest buy in the history of the tournament after being pocketed by U Mumba for a whopping 1 crore in the foreign player auctions. Meanwhile, defender Ran Singh and Srikant Tewatia were bagged by Pink Panthers and Bengal Warriors for Rs 43 lakh and Rs 25 lakh respectively. However, the franchises showed meagre interest in Manjeet Chillar, who was one of the most expensive buys at last year's auctions. Tamil Thalaivas took home the defender for a mere Rs 20 lakh. Patna Pirates paid Rs 21 lakh for all-rounder Kuldeep Singh while Pink Panthers once again spent Rs 58 lakh for Mohit Chillar. Surinder Nada, meanwhile, also emerged as one of the most expensive players as Haryana Steelers had to spend Rs 75 lakh for keeping the all-rounder in their squad. New Delhi, May 30 : The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined interim bail to then Principal Rajeev Kumar Mishra of Gorakhpur-based Baba Raghav Das Medical College, where more than 60 children - mostly infants - died last year due to alleged shortage of oxygen supply through cylinders. Unmoved by the plea for interim bail on grounds of ill health and incarceration for the last 10 months, a vacation bench of Justice L. Nageswara Rao and Justice Mohan M. Shantanagoudar sought the Uttar Pradesh government's response on the bail petition. The petitioner has challenged the April 30 order of the Allahabad High Court that rejected his plea for bail. The apex court directed for listing of the matter on June 6. Mishra's counsel Mukul Rohatgi told the bench that while others, including the oxygen supplier, have since been granted bail, the former college head -- arrested on August 29, 2017 -- was in jail for the last 10 months. Rohatgi said that the oxygen supplier was granted bail by the top court whereas co-accused Dr Kafeel Khan, who was present in the hospital on the day of the incident, was granted bail by the High Court. Assisted by advocate Anupan Lal Das, senior counsel Rohatgi told the court that Mishra's wife too was in jail for the last 10 months. Asked by the court about the charges against Mishra, Rohatgi said that he was accused of not clearing the pending bills for oxygen supply due to which the supply of cylinders was stopped to the hospital. "Then, what do you expect? That you will not clear the bills and the vendor will keep supplying the gas," asked Justice Nageswara Rao. Rohatgi told the court that children in the Gorakhpur hospital died not due to shortage of oxygen but due to Japanese Encephalitis. "A detailed enquiry held by the state government clearly affirms that the deaths were on account of Japanese Encephalitis," the petitioner claimed. Kohima, May 30 : Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday visited the forward posts of Assam Rifles along the Myanmar border and witnessed their ongoing operations, an official release said. Sitharaman, who arrived in Dimapur on Tuesday, further visited areas under the responsibility of the Dimapur-based Spear Corps, accompanied by Corps Commander, Lt Gen Gopal R. At the forward posts, she witnessed first hand the prevalent conditions and ongoing operations of units deployed to guard the border guarding and was briefed by local commanders, the release said, adding the Defence Minister expressed immense satisfaction on high standards of professionalism and dedication displayed by units and formations of Spear Corps. Sitharaman also interacted with state government functionaries and representatives of other security agencies. She also met local community leaders and appreciated their cooperation in maintaining security of the area. Surat, May 30 : Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi was honoured with 'Santokba Humanitarian Award' here on Wednesday by President Ram Nath Kovind for his services aimed at the betterment of society. Satyarhi dedicated the award to children and handed over the award money of Rs 1 crore to the Surakshit Bachpan fund, set up by the Kailash Satyarthi Children's Fund, which aims to provide legal and medical assistance to child victims of sexual abuse. Speaking on the occasion, Satyarthi said that the government, religious organisations and civil society needs to come together to protect the rights of the children. "Unless we are united against this cause, the epidemic (of sexual abuse of children) is not going to stop. I am happy that the nationwide Bharat Yatra that we undertook has started bearing fruits and the country is witnessing the results," he added. The award is given every year by the Sri Ramakrishna Foundation to people who have worked extensively for the betterment of society. Prominent awardees in the past include industrialist Ratan Tata, Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama, Sudha Murthy, Dr S. Swaminathan, Sam Pitroda and Verghese Kurien. Mumbai, May 30 : Actor Ranbir Kapoor, who isn't on any social media platform unlike other actors of his generation, says he is fine with being away from it. Ranbir was interacting with media at the trailer launch of "Sanju" along with co-stars Paresh Rawal, Manisha Koirala, Sonam Kapoor, Dia Mirza and Vicky Kaushal, director Raj Kumar Hirani and producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra here on Wednesday. Asked whether his availability on social media would have got extra mileage for his film, he said: "I don't think so. On social media, I will be showing myself and not really what the film is. "I agree that through social media, you have a reach to the larger audience but I don't miss it and I am fine being away from it. Never say never, may be tomorrow, I will come but right now, I am happy being away from it." Ranbir, who has gone nude for one scene in "Sanju" when he is being interrogated by police, asked if was intimidated while shooting that scene, said: "I went nude in my first film ("Saawariya") itself when my towel dropped. I am very shy in my real life but when the cameras are on, I am not shy as I am portraying a character so you have to be nude in your emotions and physically." Sharing his experience working with Sonam, he said: "Sonam and I worked together 10 years ago in 'Saawariya' and after that, we never got an opportunity to work together but Sonam is same as she used to be when we both were assistant directors in 'Black'.A "The only thing that changed in her is that she has become even better actress,A so, when I worked with her this time, the kind of confidence and experience she came with was amazing and I think both of us enjoyed working with each other." About working with Hirani, he said: "Working with world's greatest director Raj Kumar Hirani is every actor's dream and I am speaking for every actor who is sitting on this platform. Working with him is something else. "It is so easy and seamless that you don't realize you are working with such a great director but when the film releases... the kind of love his other films have got... even if we will be able to get 20 per cent of that love, I think I will be so happy as in my life, I got to work with Raj Kumar Hirani." "Sanju" is biographical film based on the life of Indian actor Sanjay Dutt, starring Ranbir as Sanjay Dutt in various stages of his life. It has ensemble cast which includes Anushka Sharma, Dia, Sonam, Manisha, Paresh Rawal, Jim Sarbh, Vicky, Boman Irani, and Karishma Tanna. The film is set to be released on June 29. Chennai, May 30 : Actor-turned-politician Rajinikanth on Wednesday perhaps faced the most embrassing question of his life from a injured youth in Tamil Nadu's Thoothukudi, who asked "Who are you?" Several days after the May 22 police firing at the anti-Sterlite Copper smelter plant protest in Thoothukudi left 13 people dead, Rajinikanth called on the injured persons admitted in the government hospital. As he approached one patient's bed, its occupant, a youth named Santhosh Raj slowly sat up and asked him: "Who are you?" Rajinikanth then told the youth his name. The video of this exchange has gone viral on the internet. Chandigarh, May 30 : A Haryana Civil Services (HCS) officer in Haryana's Panchkula was on Wednesday booked for sexual harassment after complaint by a woman, police said. The 27-year old woman, who is working as an officer in an organization functioning under the Haryana Education Department, alleged that HCS officer Reagan Kumar made advances towards her. She alleged that he invited her for coffee on May 27 but she refused to join him. On Tuesday, he came close to her after calling her in his office in Sector 2 of Panchkula, adjoining Chandigarh. She alleged that he sexually harassed her. She claimed that she raised and alarm and other employees gathered in her support in the office. Following the incident, a complaint was filed with the women police station in Panchkula's Sector 5. The HCS officer was posted in the Education Department early last month and had been allegedly making advances towards the woman officer. Police are investigating the matter. No arrest has been made so far. New Delhi, May 30 : The CBI on Wednesday registered a case against Sanjay Gupta, owner and promoter of OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. and others for allegedly manipulating the National Stock Exchange to get the first access to markets when they opened, officials said here. Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officials said that the case has been registered against Gupta, his brother-in-law Aman Kakrady, Ajay Narotta Shah and some unknown officials of market regulator Sebi and the NSE. It was alleged that Gupta abused the server architecture of NSE in conspiracy with unknown officials of NSE. "Unknown officials of NSE in Mumbai had provided unfair access to Gupta's company using the co-location facility during the period 2010-2012 that enabled it to log in first to the exchange server of Stock Exchange that helped to get the data before any other broker in the market," an official said. The official also said that after introduction of load balancer during October 2012 while servers of all other brokers were connected to the primary servers of NSE, the owner once again allegedly managed the data centre staff of NSE to get connected to the backup servers. "Backup servers were with zero load and therefore had provided far better and fast access to the market feed to Gupta's company in comparison to other brokers. Thus, the favour was allegedly shown by unknown officials of NSE to private company by providing market feed first in comparison to other brokers," the official said. Following the registration of the case, the CBI carried out searches at over seven places in Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru which led to recovery of several documents. The agency further alleged that in order to ensure the favourable report from Sebi in the enquiry carried out it against the role of his company in the misuse of TBT (tick-by-tick) architecture of NSE, influenced the unknown officials of the market regulator through bribery. The agency also alleged that Shah, a resident of Delhi, was instrumental in exploitation of NSE TBT architecture who collected NSE trade data in year 2005-06 for carrying out research. "And with the help of these data, Shah developed an algo software named 'Chanakya' which was sold to selected brokers including said private company," the CBI said. The CBI officials said that Gupta, along with his brother-in-law was illegally trading in Dubai, Ghana, Singapore, Hongkong and China through OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. Lucknow, May 30 : The Uttar Pradesh government late on Wednesday decided to recommend a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the suicide of senior ATS official Rajesh Sahani, who shot himself dead on Tuesday, a government spokesman said. The decision was taken at a meeting of Principal Secretary, Home, Arvind Kumar and Director General of Police O.P. Singh with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. "The top officials briefed the Chief Minister about the unfortunate death of Rajesh Sahani, ASP ATS and a decision was taken to recommend a probe by the CBI into the incident," the official said, adding that the recommendation will be sent to the Central government immediately. Earlier, Additional Director General of Police Rajeev Krishna had been assigned the probe by the state police. Sahani allegedly shot himself dead at the ATS headquarters in Gomtinagar on Tuesday. He had shot himself in his temple, dying on the spot. His family members, many colleagues, journalists covering the crime beat had however raised questions on his unfortunate death, claiming something was missing. Following this, the state government, home department and senior police officials went into a huddle and decided to go for a CBI probe "to clear the air" a senior official told IANS. Earlier in the day, Sahani was cremated in presence of his father, relatives, colleagues and friends. "In Justice Today" has now become "The Appeal" | Main | "Trump wishes he hadn't picked Jeff Sessions for attorney general" May 29, 2018 The Matthew Charles saga: another sad example of why complete abolition of parole was a mistake for federal sentencing Last year I wrote an article in this special issue of the journal Federal Probation in which I explained why I believe the federal sentencing system has been disserved by the complete abolition of parole. I have been thinking about that article in conjunction with the story that blew up my twitter feed over the weekend, the story of Matthew Charles described in this Nashville Public Radio piece. Here are excerpts from a story that should be read in full: It looks like a party but Charles isnt leaving for a big new job, or trying his luck in a new city. Hes going to prison. To finish out a 35-year term for selling crack to an informant in the 90s. Charles had already served 21 years before his sentence was cut short as a result of crack guideline changes passed by the Obama administration. But the U.S. Attorneys office appealed his release on the grounds that Charles was legally considered a career offender due to a prior stint in state prison. They said the retroactive change in the law did not apply to him and a Court of Appeals agreed. Hes rebuilt his life and now theyre coming to snatch it, says "Wolf", who met Charles at a halfway house in 2016. Theyve volunteered together almost every Saturday since, long after fulfilling their community service requirements. Wolf is talking to John Hairston, an old friend of Charles who flew in from Houston. Theyve seen each other twice in over two decades but for years, they wrote each other letters. The whole thing pisses me off to be honest, he says, partly to Wolf and partly to the group of guests seated at another table across the lawn, who're listening intently and shaking their heads. But it underscores how big a need there is for some reform in the justice system. I dont care what they say. Since his release in 2016, Charles has held a steady job. He volunteers every Saturday, has reconnected with his family, and started a serious relationship. But really, his rehabilitation started years prior. In prison, he took college classes and correspondence courses, he taught a GED program and became a law clerk. With his training, he helped other incarcerated men understand the judicial system long after their public defenders moved on to the next case. Charles kept the secrets of those who were illiterate so they wouldnt face ridicule or harassment he read them letters from the court and drafted filings for them in the library. He organized bible studies and counseled newcomers. Two decades in federal insitututions from maximum to low security without a single disciplinary infraction. Those that know Charles say they cant understand why the justice system wont recognize his rehabilitation. But the federal Bureau of Prisons did away with parole and most "good behavior" incentives years ago even the best behaved must serve out the majority of their term. Charles says the whole situation feels surreal. "I'm so tired he says, after his hearing is postponed for the second time. I am beyond tired. I always say to myself and others, when is enough going to be enough? Last time Charles faced time in prison, he was a drug dealer in his 20s. At his sentencing in December 1996, a federal judge called Charles a danger to society who should simply be off the streets. Charles doesnt dispute that. Until then, his entire life was embroiled in chaos.... Now in his 50s, Charles has the support of friends and his community and even the judge who ordered him back to prison. Everything is different. And yet, he says, nothing's changed. On March 28, in a courtroom filled with more than two dozen of Charles friends, coworkers and loved ones, Judge Aleta Trauger called Charles case sad and commended his exemplary rehabilitation. But, she added that her hands were tied and reimposed his original sentence. She gave him 45 days to get his affairs in order. The ruling from the Sixth Circuit explaining why Charles' sentencing reduction was improper is available at this link. It makes for an interesting read, as it notes that back in 1996 Charles' "recommended guidelines range [was] 360 months to life, but [the sentencing court] varied upward and imposed a 420-month sentence based on Charles background and misconduct." (I highlight this line because it itself reflects how the passage of time distorts reality: the original sentencing court did not quite "vary" upward because the concept of a "variance" did not exist prior to the 2005 Booker decision.) The initial decision to impose a prison sentence of 35 years rather than just 30 years on Charles may have made perfect sense circa 1996. As explained by the Sixth Circuit, the district court had to consider "Charles many prior offenses: kidnapping a woman on two consecutive days 'for the purpose of terrorizing her'; burglarizing a home; and fleeing from a police interrogation, shooting a man in the head, and attempting to run off in the victims car." But, obviously, Charles is now a much different man than the man he was when committing all these prior offenses. But, just as obviously, modern federal sentencing law presents no way to give effect to changed realities because parole and other like mechanisms were vanquished through the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. I am a strong supporter of the FIRST STEP Act in part because it includes some parole-like features to enable the early release of offenders who have demonstrated rehabilitation potential in various ways. (In my Federal Probation article, I describe certain prison reform efforts by Congress as a kind of "parole light.") But I continue to think the federal system would be even better served by considering a more general return of parole, at least for sentences of a decade or longer, or at least considering the kind of second-look resentencing provisions (allowing judicial modification after serving 15 years of prison sentence) that have been put forward in the new American Law Institute's revised Modern Penal Code sentencing provisions (discussed here and here by leading academics). May 29, 2018 at 05:13 PM | Permalink Comments Prof. on this we agree. The abolition of federal parole (even with all its associated problems) was a serious mistake. I very much like your idea: permitting eligibility (and I emphasize eligibily) for parole after a certain number of years. I would make it 5 instead of 10, but that's negotiable! Posted by: Michael R. Levine | May 29, 2018 6:23:30 PM Wow. We have a federal criminal justice system that deals with thousands upon thousands of criminal cases per year and deals with serious criminals. Apparently, Mr. Charles was one of them given his violent criminal history. So what was to be done about him? Was the lengthy sentence unfair at the time? No. So now, Doug, you seem to think this anecdote somehow calls the whole abolition of parole into question? Wow. Well, let's look at this guy's criminal history--seems that the kidnapping for purposes of terrorizing a woman should have gotten a stiffer sentence, as should shooting someone in the head. I can point to this very same guy and argue that he's the poster child for harsher sentences. I agree that this guy probably should have his sentence commuted to time served. But this is because we seem to know that he has, in fact, turned his life around and that the mistaken release turned out to be correct. But if we go back in time, there seem to be a lot of victims that would not have been victims had the book been thrown at this guy. Be careful of your poster children, Doug, Posted by: federalist | May 29, 2018 6:27:09 PM Federalist, the value of a system of parole is that we can throw the book at bad guys and then reconsider the decision later (often much later) based on additional information. Parole decision making will never be perfect, but it enables improved decision making over time based on additional information. My point in this post is that 35 years looked right in the 1990s, but now in 2018 you note that 21 years proved sufficient. A system with parole of extreme sentences can make sense of these competing realities, a system without cannot. Posted by: Doug B | May 29, 2018 11:07:55 PM Obviously, Doug, lenient treatment of this guy earlier in his criminal career led to increased victimization. How can you trust parole boards to make the right decisions? You never answer the risk-allocation issue. And you did choose the wrong person to make a poster child. Posted by: federalist | May 30, 2018 6:14:37 AM Doug. You will be the foster parent for this guy. He is coming to your house, on parole. What do you want the Parole Board to do? If he does not qualify for your home, why does his risk qualify him for anyone else's, especially in a poor neighborhood with little political clout? He has slowed with age. He has not change in personal quality with age. If you have him in your home, I suggest you give him what ever he asks for. Posted by: David Behar | May 30, 2018 8:23:38 AM All advocates for decarceration should be forced to attest to the willingness to take in as many released felons as their home will hold. Posted by: David Behar | May 30, 2018 8:42:45 AM federalist: can you not understand that parole eligibility for persons serving a decades-long prison term is very different than "lenient treatment" on the front end? I do not "trust" parole boards any more than I "trust" prosecutors or judges or juries or anyone else with the challenge of predicting future behavior. But a parole board has the benefit of additional (imperfect) information about an offender collected over time. Again, you tellingly acknowledge that "time served" of 21 years is "probably" the right sentence here. Based on this observation, why are you not troubled that federal prosecutors have gotten this case so wrong to the tune of 15 years of excessive incarceration? You have indicated before and you show it again here that you see no real cost to excessive incarceration. I do not see it that way, and I think this case is a good poster child for the risks of excessive incarceration being enhanced in a system without parole or some kind of general second-look resentencing provisions. Of course, there is a risk of recidivism for any and every offender released from prison. But the only way to eliminate that risk is through mass executions and/or mass LWOP. If you are not endorsing that, then the issue is what are the best sentencing decision-making systems to balance risks/harms. I think a system with some parole mechanism (as in states like Texas) is generally better than a system with no parole (as with the feds). Notably, the American Law Institute disagrees with me, as they advocate eliminating parole, but they have urged creation of a 15-year resentencing mechanism to reduced the risk of excessively severe sentences. David: Based on this account of Mr. Charles, I would welcome him to my home. But it appears he has family members and friends who would prefer to have him in their midst. Many (but still not enough) released prisoners return to friends and family who are happy and eager to have them home. Notably, sentencing systems with parole often usefully are concerned with home placement and reentry upon release, see, e.g., http://www.pbpp.pa.gov/Understanding%20Parole/offendersfams/Pages/default.aspx. A system like the federal system without parole give little or no attention to placement and reentry because release dates are essentially fixed at the time of sentencing. Posted by: Doug B | May 30, 2018 10:23:13 AM If you take as a baseline assumption that there is some appropriate limit to the number of people in prison, then I don't understand why you wouldn't want to decide whether someone belongs in prison or the street closer to the time that they might actually go to the street. Why commit yourself to incarceration beyond the point when a person might demonstrate rehabilitation? If you got parole right, you could have both reduced incarceration and more effective incapacitation Posted by: RW | May 30, 2018 11:22:00 AM Makes the case better than I did. https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/kuziemko/files/inmates_release.pdf I was originally persuaded on this point by Levitt's discussion of mandatory release orders producing increased crime. As I recall, he found the effect mitigated in states that parole boards, who could choose the least dangerous subset of the prison population Posted by: RW | May 30, 2018 11:43:01 AM Doug. If you would welcome him into your home, that is good enough an argument for me. I support release. What I do not support is the advocacy of some to send the released felons to other people's neighborhoods, especially people with less political clout. I would bring up even the Exception Fallacy if a release felon went on a crime spree, but the majority did not, if verified by an immunized confidential survey. That study has not been done. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/us/dwyane-wade-cousin-killed-chicago.html Posted by: David Behar | May 30, 2018 1:02:48 PM Fed. The Dose Response Curve applies to all substances taken in to the body. Dilute the strongest poison, it has 700 medical benefits. Drink more water than the kidneys can put out, the water swells brain cells and crushes then against the skull, causing seizures then death. I also believe it applies to all remedies. It was never mentioned in any discussion of Remedies. Too little does not work. Too much is toxic. Air pollution was like in India, EPA regs cleared the sky, dropped deaths from air pollution. Regs are excessive, their toxicty killed manufacturing. That means really hard work to get the points on the Dose Response Curve of legal remedies. The death penalty is on the too little side. I can see the arguments that the carceration level is on the high end, and toxic, especially to minorities. They are genetically the same as far the genetic tendency to crime. They are not dealing with the legal system effectively. Posted by: David Behar | May 30, 2018 1:12:26 PM Doug, I "admit" that we have good knowledge about this particular guy because he was let out (apparently mistakenly) and seems to be a person for whom release was, a posteriori, a good idea. The problem, of course, is that the decision is made a priori. My point about not trusting parole boards is that we have mandatory minimums for a reason--namely, that parole boards and lenient judges were letting people back out on the street far too early, and criminals like Mr. Charles were committing preventable crimes. Mr. Charles is, in fact, a poster boy for revolving door justice. And, while I am at it, I find it interesting that you seem to favor a "wait and see" approach with respect to letting people out in this case, but didn't criticize the Supreme Court's decision that the LWOP vs non-LWOP decision had to be made at the time of sentencing. Posted by: federalist | May 30, 2018 7:41:26 PM Interesting debate. I find it hard to understand how an optimal system could prefer set sentences to permitting opportunities for review based kn more information with the passage of time. The question almost answers itself. Sure a system with lost-hoc review will make srrors, but why in the world would one think there would be more error than in a system with a one-shot fixed sentence. The contrary view is akin to saying one would prefer to bet on a game at the outset when one could get the same odds with a free shot at seeing what happened in the first half. I also find arguments that the inmate somehow must bear the cost of error nonsensensical. There is a right answer taking into account the public and private costs of incarceration versus costs of crime error costs go to society. It individuals. I think this whole debate is warped by overvaluing the bad outcomes from leniency and undervaluing both human and economic costs of incarceratikn. For example, Bill Otis will argue unti hes blue in the cace that a single horrible incident in Ohio means all early release is ill advised. Finally, doesnt the dact that we have many times the rate of imprisonment than other industrialized countries with much lower crime rates by itself suggest at the least cause for reexamination and question of sacred cows like parole abolution? Posted by: Mark | May 30, 2018 10:07:35 PM The problem, Mark, is that, of course, theoretically (once you figured out how much retribution is needed and what sort of deterrence is needed) Doug is right. And so, assuming that we think that Charles' previous crimes were vindicated by his 21 years or, for that matter, let's assume that a murderer getting 15 years is somehow enough justice, the problem is that we don't have a crystal ball and there are a lot of too lenient judges (Olu Stevens for example) who have no business handing out sentences. Parole boards screw up--see Kenneth Macduff. So that's why we take the decisions out of their hands---it's risk allocation. To be somewhat off-topic, take a look at that twice-deported illegal who killed the young woman in Houston. He was told to leave, and he didn't. Now a young woman is dead. Posted by: federalist | May 31, 2018 7:35:09 AM Any thoughts, Mark, on Kenneth Macduff or Komisarjevsky? Posted by: federalist | May 31, 2018 7:48:12 AM federalist, even if we fully accept the assertion that in the 1970s "parole boards and lenient judges were letting people back out on the street far too early," that does not mean that we perfectly recalibrated the federal sentencing system by abolishing parole forever in 1984 or that we could not do a lot better circa 2018. And even if Mr. Charles is a "poster boy" for the need to get a harsh sentence early in his criminal career, that can still be achieved in a system that permits at least some limited parole or second-looked resentencing after a decade of incarceration. I appreciate you saying I am "theoretically" right, so now the key now is turning good theory into good practice rather than saying because we did it poorly 40 years ago there is no way we can do better now. Even if we do better we still will, of course, make mistakes --- some dangerous people will get released too soon and some not-so-dangerous people will not get released. But there are obvious costs to the status quo in terms of risk allocation just as you see costs from possible reforms. (As you often note, using prison beds for less dangerous persons means this always "scarce" resource is less available for the truly dangerous. California's reform failings for decades resulted in that Plata decision you love so much and a set of echo effects that many think have contributed to crime increases.) I like Mark's betting metaphor on a day the NBA finals are starting. I am not against placing a huge bet on the over/under before the game starts, but I would much rather place that bet at a shop that will allow me to tweak my bet at halftime. To abuse this metaphor, you are saying essentially that because 40 years ago "parole boards and lenient judges" too often made bad bets on "the under" (in terms of prison time), it now makes sense to have a system titled (against good theory) to systematically play "the over." I am saying that within a system that now so often plays the over in terms of prison time, I want to get back to allowing parole boards to tweak the bet so that we can better adjust to obvious "over" mistakes like Weldon Angelos. And, this is logically consistent with SCOTUS saying we should not have mandatory LWOP decisions about teenagers around the time of the crime. LWOP (like the death penalty) is the ultimate "over" bet. I do not think it should be mandatory for anyone AND I am generally against all LWOP sentences because it is the most costly (for society and the individual) of all bets. Requiring life with parole simply help ensure that if we are going to make a costly life-sentence "over" bet, we get some chance to reconsider the bet decades later (and that the sentenced defendant has some incentive to become a better person). Posted by: Doug B | May 31, 2018 8:30:18 AM I hope for the day that sentencing is fair, blind to race and other factors which defendants have no control over. This is someone who we should not be trumpeting for parole or relief of his proper original sentence. He kidnapped someone...twice...and shot someone in the head. I am sure these two victims were not happy with his release. But this blog post is about parole. I have unfortunately had a lot of grief in my life as my Father and Brother were both murdered. I have had to testify at parole hearings to keep the murderers in jail as they tried for early release. This blog speaks from a distance, not attached to the people involved. Let me tell you from experience that sitting in a room with the person who took the life of your loved one, and listen to him speak of his "rehabilitation" and "finding God" while I grew up from the age of 10 on without my Father and the last 29 years without my Brother is not an easy thing to do. That is why I have always favored the federal 85% rule, the victims know how long the criminals will be behind bars and you don't have to subject yourself to that situation. I firmly believe if Mr Berman and other had to sit through such an experience five times (which I had to do), your views on parole would be different. If you want to advocate for shorter sentences, that's one thing, but parole hearings are not good for the victims of crimes. I think this blog often forgets the victims!!! Posted by: Kelly | May 31, 2018 10:22:41 AM Kelly - I am terribly sorry for your losses and ask the folkowing with great respect. Why should the system put the most focus on how a victim or his or her family feel about the oucome in a particular case? We are trying to find rational outcomes, and outcomes can be distirted if we guve undue weight to victims wishes. Why should the parole decision depend on how you feel about forgiveness? Some victims take a view that extending incarceration for the perpetrator will not erase the crime (or bring back their loved one), and that can be an admirable sentiment also. Victims have the option of not attending parole gmhearinds. And, again, Im not sure a fair or rational system should turn on the victims decision in this regard. People who are incarcerated have loved ones also. And not all perpetrators even tose who did horrible things are irredemabe, whatever the view of the victim (however understandable). I dont mean to be insensitive, but these are important points for improving our criminal justice system. Fed, the examples give are horrible incidents. But, again, does a rational system properly turn on anecdote? Posted by: Mark | May 31, 2018 11:03:01 AM I very much appreciate your perspective, Kelly, and I am grateful for your thoughtful and personal contribution to this discussion. You make an especially important point about sentence certainty having particular value for victims and the unique challenges that confronts victims through a parole process. That said, one reason I am a supporter of at least some limited parole is because there are at least a few victims whose views on proper punishment also change over time. There may be many more victims whose views never change, but a parole process that ensures victim participation will allow all victims to have their (fixed or changing) views included in the process of any punishment adjustments. Still, your point is quite an important one: any process of possible sentence revision creates its own distinct problems for crime victims. Of course, particularly with a focus on the federal system, there are lots of modern crimes subject to extreme punishments that do not have any clear victims. Half of all federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses (though many, like Mr. Charles, may have prior offenses with victims). In the federal system, a good number of defendants could and should have access to sentence review without there being any obvious victim to be troubled by that process. Posted by: Doug B | May 31, 2018 11:09:33 AM In a determinate system, the victim's loss has been taken into account and they can move on with their lives. There is a definitive beginning and end to the process. In an indeterminate system, the victim is periodically being re-victimized. Of course, the victim may choose to walk away from the situation and not testify, but we chose not to. Of course, people may be rehabilitated but, in my case, my loved ones don't have that opportunity, they are gone forever. No chance for redemption (depending on your religious beliefs). I would be okay with a system for parole for non-violent crimes, but not one for violent crimes. Until you sit in that room, you truly can't understand. Posted by: Kelly | May 31, 2018 12:11:07 PM Kelly It is sadly true that your loved ones cannot be redeemed. But that is true whether or not the perpetrator is paroled. This is not a zeronsum game. To be sure, I am not a victim. But i simply dont get it. Why create more misery and cost with more (unnecessary) incarceration if it doesnt bring anyone back. I believe many victims see it tgat way also. Posted by: Mark | May 31, 2018 3:15:03 PM Just to add to your name list of people that should be given Clemency I would like to add CODY TYLER MCKINNEY , who was given a 16 year sentence at the age of 18. He turned 2o years old today... Posted by: Linda Mckinney | Jun 8, 2018 10:15:21 PM I want to ask a different question. In light of those priors, how was he out "in his 20s" to sell crack to an informant? Had he done 10 years for kidnapping the woman, perhaps he would have grown up sufficiently to decide not to burglarize the home? If not, perhaps in a sane world he might have served at least 5 more years for that one. If he was indeed reformed in his 30s, he then would not have shot a man in the head. Alternatively, in a sane world he might have served at least 10 years for the shooting (and been awfully lucky the victim survived), and, in light of the chronology, he would at that point have reached the age of 18+10+5+10=43, and been reformed at that point, would not have sold crack to an informant, and would therefore today be free. Posted by: William Jockusch | Jan 1, 2019 10:29:31 PM Post a comment IT start-up Stacktrace has signed its first Australian office premises in the Mirvac developed 410 Ann Street office tower in Brisbane. Savills agent Dan Boyes negotiated the deal. Formed in 2017, Stacktrace is a software services and products company in the not-for-profit and healthcare sectors. The company has taken up space on level seven in the East Tower of 410 Ann Street and will move into a fully fitted suite designed and constructed by The Fitout Studio. Campbell Hanan, Mirvac's head of office and industrial, said Stacktrace are one of a number of tech organisations. Were pleased to welcome Stacktrace to 410 Ann Street, where they will join a number of technology and start up organisations. "Mirvac is excited to support the growth of this business hub by providing an environment that fosters collaboration between tenants.. Taking a collaborative approach to tenant partnerships and asset management is key to our continued success in the Brisbane market. "Working with our tenants, we create workplaces that evolve to meet the changing needs of employees and building occupants. "In line with this, we have introduced a range of wellness initiatives at 410 Ann Street, designed to boost employee satisfaction, engagement and wellbeing. This includes regular yoga and meditation classes throughout the week. Mirvac has also partnered with Brisbane City Council to develop the Cathedral Square regeneration project, which includes a grassy parkland with built-in seating and an inviting space for tenants, creating a quintessentially Queensland working environment. Stacktraces founder, Chris Horwill said Mirvacs strong reputation as a property manager attracted them to 410 Ann Street. "The team has been extremely flexible and responsive in accommodating our short timelines and workplace requirements. The attention to detail in every aspect of the partnership has been outstanding and has allowed us to focus on building our business. This was important to us as a new company in a growth phase. Located on the edge of Cathedral Square, 410 Ann Street has over 20,000 square metres of commercial office space and sits at the heart of one of Brisbanes most exciting emerging urban precincts on the northern side of the Ann and Wharf Street intersection. The building has a 5 Star NABERS energy rating. EXPERT OBSERVATION The Aerotropolis Investor Summit is a positive move to encourage private sector investment into future jobs for Western Sydney. The focus on the 10,000 hectare economic zone around Western Sydney Airport as the location for a massive growth in Western Sydney jobs is a good example of the outcomes of the City Deal between the three levels of government. And the establishment of the Western Sydney Development Authority under Chief Coordinator Geoff Roberts will lead to faster decision making in turning plans into reality. The range of jobs proposed is impressive covering aerospace, defence, manufacturing, healthcare, freight, logistics, agribusiness and education. Clearly these jobs will be closer to the people of Western Sydney and help redress the jobs exodus from the West to the East in Sydney. The proposed North South Rail Link will help Western Sydney residents have easy access to the jobs hub. The potential expansion of the West Metro from Parramatta announced by the Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, at the Summit would link all three cities across metropolitan Sydney. While the Investor Summit has focussed on the issue of jobs there also needs to be more discussion about the residential components of the third city, the Parkland City. With the Western Sydney Airport having no curfew clearly housing will be located kilometres away from the airport and the economic zone. Most commentators on cities prefer a mixed use approach to planning where jobs and residential co-locate to ensure a lively public domain. Future planning will need to address this issue so that the Parkland City can be as successful as the Harbour City and the River City. CHRIS JOHNSON is chief executive officer of property development industry group Urban Taskforce and can be contacted here. Belize's Chaa Creek proves that luxury can be Green the gold standard of Belizean hospitality Three of Belizes most highly regarded resorts have come together to form Unique Hotels of Belize; an exclusive collection dedicated to offering consistently high standards in accommodations, amenities and service in three locations across Belize, according to UHB member The Lodge at Chaa Creek. And, to introduce Unique Hotels of Belize, the group is offering a twenty per cent discount off a new all-inclusive Belize vacation package that gives travellers a unique opportunity to experience Belizes inland jungles, Caribbean islands and Belizean coast in seamless luxury, with three nights at each member resort, Chaa Creeks managing director Bryony Fleming Bradley said. Ms Bradley explained that Unique Hotels of Belize brings together the award-winning jungle lodge Chaa Creek, the landmark Victoria House on Ambergris Caye and Naia Resort and Spa on the Placencia Peninsula. Together, they offer travellers a unique blend of individual styles and distinctive locations combined with a shared commitment towards providing the highest quality accommodations, amenities and service in Belize. Unique Hotels of Belize was designed to give visitors confidence that, whether in the rainforests of Belizes ancient Maya heartland, the Belize Great Barrier Reef, or on the Caribbean coast, theyll enjoy the same high standards of excellence in Belizean hospitality. Under the Unique Hotels of Belize brand were retaining our own distinctive identities and highlighting our diverse locations while giving travellers the confidence that theyll enjoy consistent high standards of hospitality whenever they stay at a UHB member resort. By combining our infrastructures and network of travel professionals both locally and internationally, were able to offer seamless transfers between our properties along with surprisingly affordable Belize vacation packages, Ms Bradley said. The all-inclusive introductory vacation package was further discounted to give more families, couples and individuals a chance to experience Belizes three most popular locations with unprecedented ease and luxury, she explained. With twenty-per cent off this introductory vacation package, weve hoping to introduce more and more people to Belizes amazing geographic and cultural diversity in a way that really hasnt been possible before now. And with luxury, service and a range of activities that will make it truly memorable, were expecting to create a buzz, she said. The travel industry is already beginning to take notice. The Washington Post, in a May 22, 2018 article with the heading; Travel Deals: Sale Fare to Vienna and 20 per cent off a Trio of Hotels in Belize, leads with Unique Hotels of Belize in what it calls This weeks best travel bargains around the globe. The Luxury Travel Advisor website described the collections goal to show travellers and authentic Belizean experience. Ms Bradley said the nine nights all-inclusive Belize vacation package features three nights at each member resort with accommodations, all meals, activities and transfers included for one set price. From the moment we pick our guests up at Belizes international airport until we drop them back off, we look after everything. For example, moving from one resort to the next, to go from breakfast in a rainforest amid ancient Maya artefacts to swimming in clear Caribbean waters that afternoon, is seamless and carefree. And there are no hidden costs or credit cards surprises when they arrive home, she said. Ms Bradley encouraged travellers to contact their travel agents, visit the Unique Hotels of Belize website, or contact Chaa Creek directly for further information or to make bookings. It is an exciting launch for what we believe will become the gold standard of Belizean hospitality, Ms Bradley said. The Lodge at Chaa Creek is a multi-award winning eco resort set within a 400-acre private nature reserve along the banks of the Macal River in Belize. It was recognised by National Geographic with first place honours at the 2017 World Legacy Awards held in Berlin. ENDS If you are new to iQ you can schedule a demo and learn more about this opportunity. PSFK iQ - Where Innovators Turn for Research. Our professional-grade research platform is designed specifically for Retail and CX leaders who want to know whats next. Whether youre staying current on trends or need a real-time research partner to help you get ahead, count on PSFK iQ to deliver the info you need to make your next move. Author Minh Les debut picture book, Let Me Finish!, features a boy in search of a quiet place to read. Les forthcoming picture book, Drawn Together, illustrated by Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat, explores the relationship between a Thai-speaking grandfather and his American grandson, which is made stronger by a shared love of art. We asked the author-illustrator duo to interview each other about the personal inspiration for the project, and their collaborative process. Le: Hey, Dan! I know youre in the midst of a launch for one of your other (approximately) bajillion books, but Im excited to finally get a chance to chat about our book. Ill guess Ill get the ball rolling: This story, inspired by my relationship with my grandfather, is obviously very personal for me. Was there something about the manuscript that resonated with you on a personal level too? Santat: Absolutely. I never really got to know most of my relatives as well as I hoped and that was mostly due to region. My parents came to America in the 70s and most of the family was still back in Thailand. Ive met my grandmother a total of four times in my entire life, but those moments were really special to me. First of all, I never learned to speak Thai because my parents taught me English first and they thought that I would develop an accent if I learned Thai first, but we never got around to it. (I believe that was the linguistic theory back in the day.) As a result, I could understand about 80% of the language but I couldnt really speak better than a three-year-old. A lot of my conversations with my grandmother were about food. This is good. or I would like more, and as a result she fed me like crazy, but I totally related to the awkward silences that the characters experienced in our book. I remember one year when I was in Thailand and I saw all these pictures of my grandmother when she was really young. There were pictures of her with my grandfather, and great-grandfather, and all these other relatives I never got to know and it felt like there was a huge chunk of my history and identity that I wanted to understand but I couldnt ask about. There was always a sense of regret and shame that I had about not learning the native tongue. Lots of other Thai kids I knew growing up knew the language, but I never did, mostly because Im just really awful at languages. I remember wanting to study Thai in college, but the university didnt provide it as a language choice and I also knew that I was only going to improve with constant use. I dont know if you ever learned to speak Vietnamese but Ive always felt like Ive had a hollowness inside me because I never felt like I was fully Thai because I couldn't speak the language, not by choice, but because its a struggle for me because my brain isnt wired that way. I see other Asian authors like Grace Lin, Gene Luen Yang, and Linda Sue Park embracing their culture in their work, and Drawn Together felt like an opportunity for a sort of redemption for me. This was the first book Ive ever done that dealt with Asian culture and it was my opportunity to fill that void that I had in me for so long. With that said, I hope you didnt feel like I hijacked the manuscript in any way? When I got the script your notes had mentioned the family was Thai or Vietnamese and I know this story was deeply personal for you. I was in a state of mind where I knew I could get the Thai cultural aspects of the story right, like my mother could write the sentences for me in Thai, and they could double-check the garments and such. Im also curious if youve felt the same way as I do about not knowing your native language? Le: HA! I didnt for a second think you hijacked the manuscript. In fact, that was exactly what I was hoping you would do. As an author, my dream scenario is that the illustrator takes the idea and makes it their own. So thank you for that! Plus, even though the language and some of the cultural details are different, the story is still very much true to my experience. If you take everything you said above about your relationship with your Thai language and culture but replace it with Vietnamese, then thats basically my life, too. Like you, my lack of fluency in Vietnamese has been a monkey on my back for as long as I can remember, so that internalized shame and regret that you mentioned are very much real for me too (and something Im still grappling with). It makes me so happy to hear that this project gave you a chance to engage with your roots in book form for the first timethat deep personal investment really shows on the page. Was there anything else unique about how you approached this book? For example, was your artistic process any different? Santat: I have to say that this was the first time in my career when the manuscript actually pushed me as an artist and I was compelled to experiment and explore my skill set even further. This manuscript was asking me not just to tell a story using my style, it was asking me to incorporate the art styles of the characters in the book, which Ive never done before. It wasnt a far stretch to think about how an old man would draw with traditional means like a brush pen and ink, but theres a sophistication in long clean brush lines that differs from the sketchiness and controlled molding of a form that I usually exhibit in my book work. I shifted my thinking to more of a fine artist than, say, a concept designer. I was more conscious of things such as line weight, and the amount of pressure you put into the brush, and how much ink was loaded into the brush in order to vary the look of a clean line or that of a dry brush. Not to say that these elements are not issues when you work digitally, but when you work with traditional means you have less control and you are prone to more mistakes. As a result your process changes. You have to think a few steps ahead to make sure that youre making good design choices, because if you screw up then youve wasted hours of work. On the other hand, when I created the artwork for the grandson I had to think about how a small child would draw, what materials he would use, and strip down everything I knew and understood about the foundations of classical art training and be completely uninhibited with the expression of that form. I had to remember how to draw like a kid again, which meant I had to be sloppy and impulsive and really enjoy the making of the form and be less concerned with the end result and more in tune with the act of making. A child isnt concerned with staying in the lines, or what color crayon they choose, or how the light reflects off a face, etc. Theyre in the moment of creating and they are done only when the feeling is right. The contrast in the forms between the grandson and the grandfather are two completely different disciplines of thought and I had to really explore my id and ego. When it came time to combine the two styles it was a matter of pure experimentation, which went on for months. I was put to a challenge of trying to take these two extremely different styles and make them harmonize so that they felt intuitively like they belonged together. I actually borrowed from a lot of the philosophies of street art that my art teachers taught me in art school. Just add layers upon layers and then add and subtract elements from it as you go. Youre reacting to the composition as a whole and you dont stop until it feels right. Usually I would spend a day or two on a spread, but for this book, I would spend anywhere from three to sometimes eight days on a piece until I got it right. What was exciting was that I had absolutely no idea what the end result would look like, which is an absolutely terrifying approach for me. I need to hit a deadline, I need to know that all these hours of work are not going to go wasted. If I jump into a piece not knowing when Ill be done or what it will look like, then what am I really doing other than just exploring for the sake of discovering something new for myself? At one point our editor, Rotem [Moscovich], was checking in from time to time to see if everything was okay, and all I could tell her was, I think Ive got something here but I dont know for certain. Yeah, publishers love to hear that. You have no idea how much this book changed me as an artist. I used to work mostly digitally. Beekle was probably a good 80% digital and 20% traditional. Drawn Together was completely opposite. It was more of a 75% traditional and 25% digital. The computer was mainly just for collaging all the elements together and I moved parts around like a puzzle. Now I work more in the manner of Drawn Together in my current projects. Ive embraced the impulsiveness of creating and Ive reverted back to using more traditional media over digital. I imagine you went through some hurdles yourself, this being your second book. Youre really putting your heart on paper with this manuscript and Im curious to know what earlier drafts of this story were like. Le: Thats amazing that this slim manuscript could push your creativity to that extent. My approach as a picture book author is to tell a story as streamlined as possible, to basically just create space for you illustrators to work your magic... so to hear that this actually got you to tap into new layers of artistry is totally mind-blowing. As for earlier drafts, funny enough, since this is a story about the inability to communicate through language, when I first conceived of the book it was completely wordless. But I figured it wouldnt be fair to make you do all the heavy lifting. ;-) I love where we landed with the text, especially since we kept the opening scene practically wordless. That (hopefully) lets the reader really feel the weight of the silence in the room. Whats been amazing for me is sharing such a personal story and already seeing how its resonating with people. Ive only shared it a few times in public so far, but each time people have come up to me in tears afterwards to share memories about their grandparents and other loved ones in their lives. Sometimes this is because they shared a language gap like the characters in the book, but people have shared stories where they spoke the same language but still had trouble finding common ground. I guess what Im saying is: We might want to consider carrying tissues with us to readings. Also, I think I read somewhere that you actually put a little bit of yourself in both characters (the grandson and the grandfather). Is that true? Santat: I could say that there is a bit of me in both characters. I looked very much like the grandson when I was younger and the grandfather would be me in another 25 years. Theres a scene in the book where the grandfather excitedly runs off to go get his sketchbook and I would say his body language is very much a mannerism of mine. I was also thinking about the dinner scene and the grandson was eating a hot dog, fries, and a small side salad for dinner. A bunch of my friends saw that and they were giving me a hard time about the side salad. Thats something my parents would do. If youre going to have that for dinner then youre going to at least have something healthy to go along with it. Im sorry to hear that your grandfather passed away before he saw the final version of the book. Did he get to see the sketches or any of the finished art? If so, I hope he was pleased with what we made. Le: Thanks so much, Dan. Unfortunately, my grandfather was admitted to the hospital at the same time that your sketches were coming in. As soon as I heard, I hastily printed everything out and made it into a little booklet to share with him. Sadly he never regained consciousness enough to truly see the book. That being said, I was able to read it to him so hopefully he heard it on some leveland I have no doubt that he would have adored the artwork (he actually wanted to be an artist so he would have really appreciated your brushwork). One of the surprising benefits of working on this book is that even though hes passed, my grandfather has felt very present in my daily life. In fact, a few weeks ago, when we got our finished copies, I sat down with my wife and sons to read it together for the first time. When we got to the dedication page and my three-year-old son saw the picture of his great-grandfather, he pointed to it and shouted, Its Ong Co (great-grandfather)! And hes smiling at me! So, needless to say, its incredibly special to me that my grandfather now has a place on the bookshelf. And Ill never be able to put into words how much it means that you put so much of yourself into this project and brought him to life in such beautiful fashion. Now, where did I put those tissues?? Santat: I was thrilled I could honor my grandmother as well. She was a rock for our family. One year, my mother had breast cancer, and my grandmother flew out from Thailand and stayed with us for a whole year. She just dropped everything and grabbed the first flight to California. The following year when my mom was recovering, we all went out to Thailand to visit various temples. She was 68 years old and she was jugging five of my cousins and attending to all their needs without dropping a beat. When I arrived my grandmother was so excited to have me there that she made me try all sorts of foods because it was the thing we really bonded over together. She once presented me with this plate of what I thought was a yellow meat and it smelled awful, like someone had farted on the plate. My mom told me it was durian, which if youve ever had is absolutely revolting and tastes exactly like a fart. My mom told me to eat it because it was expensive and I didnt want to hurt my grandmothers feelings so I did. I ate it, and it was terrible. Up to the very end she kept thinking I loved durian and I never told her. The last time I ever spoke with her was when I was speaking with her over the phone with my mom. She was going to come to my wedding and she said, Ill bring you more durian! to which I mentally prepared for the fact that I was going to have to eat it at some point. Unfortunately, six months later she developed a really aggressive form of Alzheimers and was unable to come to the States to attend. Now, I have this oddly fond memory of durian despite how repugnant it is. Le: Sorry to hear about your grandmother. One of mine also had Alzheimers and that can be such a difficult disease to deal with. But Im glad that your grandmother now has a spot on the shelf too. Also, I am very familiar with durian and actually kinda like it (despite its repugnant qualities). Next time I have some, Ill be thinking of your amazing grandmotherthough Ill be sure to eat it far away from you. Santat: Throughout the 14 years of my career Ive never really written or illustrated any Asian-centric books that celebrated our cultural heritage. One of the questions Ive asked myself as a book creator is if there is a duty to do so. I just happen to be fond of drawing superheroes and robots and animals and so my books are focused on those things. The other issue is the feeling of having to represent an entire cultural identity when we represent a small percentage of the childrens literary world. I for one admittedly have a tough time with that responsibility because I have found that you cant please everyone. Ive received complaints that my characters are not Asian enough or too Asian, which quite frankly, I ignore for the most part. My question is if you have felt that pressure and if you feel it is a duty for us to write those types of books? Le: Thats a really interesting question. I dont think I felt particular pressure to write an Asian-centric story. For this book, I was compelled to write an engaging story that felt rooted in truth. At the time, I was in the midst of two major life events: my grandfathers advancing age and the birth of my second son. So I was very much focused on generational dynamics and was engaging in some deep reflection about family, my relationship with my grandfather, and how my role as a parent was informed by being a first-generation Vietnamese-American. Looking back, it makes perfect sense that this was the story that came out of that time. Ive always enjoyed your superheroes, robots, etc., and known they were your strength. But it was when I first read Beekle that I started to get a deeper sense of the tremendous heart in your work. So when I knew I was writing a manuscript for your consideration, I wanted to incorporate fantastic and exciting elements with a story that was grounded in emotion. When this idea came to me I just thought: I would LOVE to see what Dan could do with this. Actually, I didn't even think about the Asian-American connection we had until after the fact. As for responsibility, I do think that as an industry, childrens publishing has a responsibility to put out a rich variety of stories that reflect the full diversity of the world and its readers. When talking about the responsibility of individual creators, I do think it is a more nuanced conversation, and one that is evolving as we speak. Personally, I dont want to pressure or pigeon-hole creators in a way that limits the creative process. But I do think that it is our duty to be thoughtful about what we put out into the world. And youre right: no one story is going to capture everyones cultural experience. Thats because there is no one Asian-American experience, there is no one American experience. I wrote Drawn Together from a Vietnamese-American perspective and you illustrated it from a Thai-American perspective and yet it still feels completely true to me. I think thats because while the details are different, we both drew upon our relationships with our grandparents. Each part of our story was grounded in a personal truth and hopefully that strikes at something universal that will resonate on different levels with readers of all different backgrounds. (Fingers crossed!) On that note, I think we should probably start wrapping this up. Its been fun to finally chat with you about our book and I cant wait to share Drawn Together with more people! Santat: Well, thanks for agreeing to do this interview with me on board the International Space Station! I love that we can interview each other and everyone has to read our words and everyone has to now picture this moment in their minds after we just poured our hearts out over our grandparents. Now, on top of all this its, Wait. They did this from space?!!? And Im looking forward to our next book together. Wait. Did I just spill a little secret? Le: My pleasure! Though turns out, crying about your grandparents is VERY messy in zero gravity. As for the secret next book: Stay tuned, everyone... Drawn Together by Minh Le, illus. by Dan Santat. Disney-Hyperion, $17.99 June 5 ISBN 978-1-48476760-3 Here we round up new and forthcoming childrens titles, including a book about messages in bottles, a middle grade novel set on a Caribbean cruise, a high fantasy novel, and a picture book about bubbles. Off & Away by Cale Atkinson. Disney-Hyperion, $16.99; ISBN 978-1-4847-8232-3. In this early reader illustrated book, Jos dad makes sure that messages in bottles find their destination. Lions & Liars by Kate Beasley, illustrated by Dan Santat. FSG, $16.99; ISBN 978-0-374-30263-4. In this illustrated middle grade novel, a kid tries to make friends when he mistakenly ends up at a camp for troubled boys. Heartseeker by Melinda Beatty. Putnam, $16.99; ISBN 978-1-5247-4000-9. In this middle grade fantasy novel, a girl can see the lies people tell as colors. Bubbles by Kit Chase. Putnam, $16.99; ISBN 978-0-399-54574-0. Kangaroo loves to blow bubbles. When a trail of them leads her to Koala, a fellow bubble blower, shes eager to be friends. Run Wild by David Covell. Viking, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-670-01411-8. In this picture book, Covell celebrates freedom, the out-of-doors, the joy of movement, and the importance of paying attention to the present moment. The book earned a starred review from PW. Fat Girl on a Plane by Kelly deVos. Harlequin Teen, $18.99; ISBN 978-0-373-21253-8. In this YA novel, a teen realizes that losing weight isnt the magical cure-all she thought it would be. Hawk Rising by Maria Gianferrari, illus. by Brian Floca. Roaring Brook, $18.99; ISBN 978-1-62672-096-1. The spare, poetic prose of Gianferrari (Hello Goodbye Dog) and the realistic watercolors of Floca (Princess Cora and the Crocodile) combine to present a day in the life of a red-tailed hawk. The book earned a starred review from PW. The Mortification of Fovea Munson by Mary Winn Heider. Disney-Hyperion, $16.99; ISBN 978-1-4847-8054-1. In this middle grade caper, a 12-year-old girl has the experience of a lifetime when she reluctantly serves as summer receptionist for her parents cadaver lab, where doctors experiment on, and learn from, corpses. Wild Blues by Beth Kephart. Atheneum/Dlouhy, $17.99; ISBN 978-1-4814-9153-2. In this middle grade novel, Lizzie spends the summer with her mother, who has been diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing treatment. The book earned a starred review from PW. Dear Rachel Maddow by Adrienne Kisner. Feiwel and Friends, $17.99; ISBN 978-1-250-14602-1. In this epistolary YA novel, a brilliant 17-year-old channels her frustrations at school in letters to MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow, whom she admires. Drawn Together by Minh Le, illus. by Dan Santat. Disney-Hyperion, $17.99; ISBN 978-1-48476760-3. This story from Le (Let Me Finish!), about a Thai-speaking grandfather and his assimilated American grandson, testifies to the mighty power of art. The picture book earned a starred review from PW. Pink Is for Boys by Robb Pearlman, illus. by Eda Kaban. Running Press, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-7624-6247-6. To whom does a color belong? Pearlman (Groundhogs Day Off) invites readers to think about this question gender-agnostically. The Cardboard Kingdom by Chad Sell. Knopf, $18.99; ISBN 978-1-5247-1937-1. In his first title for young people, cartoonist Sell offers a middle grade novel that unfolds in a neighborhood where children make elaborate cardboard costumes that let them try on new personas and powers. The book earned a starred review from PW. The Summer of Us by Cecilia Vinesse. Poppy, $9.99; ISBN 978-0-316-39113-9. Vinesse (Seven Days of You) takes YA readers on a tour of Europe in this novel about five friends who travel from London to Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, and Barcelona. For more childrens and YA titles on sale throughout the month of June, check out PWs full On-Sale Calendar. The stages and event rooms are chock-full of bestselling authors Saturday and Sundayheres a look at where to go to hear what they have to say. Click here for a companion guide to BookExpo childrens events. Saturday, June 2 Dangerous Characters and Dangerous Themes: Facing the True Danger in Novels Time: 10:4511:30 a.m. Location: Room 1E14 Readers drawn to fiction in which the thrill of danger and excitement lurks around every corner will want to tune into this panel featuring YA novelists Charlaine Harris, Neal Shusterman, and Holly Black. Jamie Secor, author and The Geekiary editor, moderates. Horror! Thrills! Murder! Oh My! Time: 1111:50 a.m. Location: Downtown Stage Readers beware! Kiersten White (The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein), Kara Thomas (The Cheerleaders), and Marisha Pessl (Neverworld Wake) discuss the craft of building suspense within different genres and writing intensely chilling scenes for young adults. Cristina Mari Arreola, Bustle senior books editor, moderates. Power Moves Time: 11 a.m. 12 p.m. Location: Main Stage Four bestselling YA authorsVictoria Aveyard, Tahereh Mafi, Kendare Blake, and Melissa de la Cruzchat about the fierce heroines who occupy the pages of their novel and about writing narratives that portray characters confidence, strength, and resilience. Moderating the discussion is author, podcaster, and journalist Sarah Enni. Defying Borders Time: 11:45 a.m. 12:30 p.m. Location: Room 1E16 Authors Sara Farizan, Erika Sanchez, Diane Guerrero, Tommy Orange, and Thi Bui, who have either faced cultural or ethnic challenges to truly feel American or have family members who have, share their perspectives on how the path to the American dream can be complicated and difficult. Marching Along with Congressman John Lewis Time: 1212:45 p.m. Location: Downtown Stage This program focuses on Run, a new graphic novel that continues the life story of civil rights activist Lewis, which he and Andrew Aydin began in the March trilogy. Aydin and Run illustrator Afua Richardson will participate in the discussion. The Magic of World Building Time: 12:451:30 p.m. Location: Room 1E14 What makes a world complete? Authors Renee Ahdieh (Smoke in the Sun), Sabaa Tahir (A Reaper at the Gates), Scott Westerfeld (The Uglies), Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows), and Marie Lu (Warcross) discuss the fantastical worlds theyve created and the trials and tribulations of their characters. Sarah Enni serves as moderator. Magic and Power Time: 2:153:15 p.m. Location: Main Stage Magic and power are two elements that make fantasy thrive. In a panel discussion moderated by Daniel Jose Older, Cassandra Clare (The Mortal Instruments), Brandon Sanderson (Skyward), Marissa Meyer (Renegades), and Tomi Adeyemi (Children of Blood and Bone) talk about the power struggles their characters face and the conflicts that lead to the fights of their lives. Social Justice Warriors: Redefining Youthful Rebellion Time: 33:45 p.m. Location: Room 1E10 In this panel presentation, YA authors Jason Reynolds (Long Way Down), Angie Thomas (The Hate U Give), and Jacqueline Woodson (Harbor Me) join activist DeRay Mckesson (On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope) to explore social justice and positive representation in young adult literature. Newbery Medalist Kwame Alexander moderates. Wonder Women: Kid Lit Stars Pack Power in Prose Time: 3:454:30 p.m. Location: Room 1E16 Kate DiCamillo, Shannon Hale, Meg Medina, T.R. Simon, and Jessica Spotswood will discuss strong girls in contemporary childrens literature, the literary heroes who have inspired them, and their own journeys as writers, crushing gender stereotypes one page at a time. Hale will moderate. Sunday, June 3 We Need Diverse Books Time: 10:1511 a.m. Location: Room 1E10 During this panel discussion sponsored by We Need Diverse Books, the following authors contribute their voices and viewpoints: Dhonielle Clayton, Tomi Adeyemi, Tracey Baptiste, Zoraida Cordova, Anna-Marie McLemore, and Rebecca Roanhose. Middle Grade Blowout! Time: 10:4511:45 a.m. Location: Room 1E14 Middle grade authors step into the spotlight during this panel presentation featuring Dork Diaries author Rachel Renee Russell, screenwriter John August, novelist Daniel Jose Older, and YouTube magician and author Zach King. Novelist Soman Chainani (of The School for Good and Evil fame) will moderate. Fierce and Fabulous: Find Your Inner Beyonce! Time: 11:45 p.m. Location: Room 1E14 Four YA luminaries will discuss the joys of and power in crafting stories featuring strong female protagonists: Nicola Yoon (Everything, Everything), Kiersten White (The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein), Marie Lu (Batman), and Nic Stone (Odd One Out). The Real Reel Time: 1:152 p.m. Location: Room 1E10 With or without popcorn, come listen to four authorsAngie Thomas, Becky Albertalli, Soman Chainani, and Lauren Oliverchat about seeing their books come to life on the big screen. Yet-to-Be: Bravery Time: 3-3:45 p.m. Location: Room 1E14 During this panel discussion, authors Brendan Kiely, Jason Reynolds, Kody Keplinger, Stephanie Garber, Adam Silvera, and Jen Doll will weigh in on the importance of bravery and fearlessness in the writing process. Jeff Kinney Live Time: 3:15-4 p.m. Location: Room 1E10 Wimpy Kid fans will want to turn out for this session starring mega-bestselling series author Kinney. Beyond Books Time: 3:30-4:15 p.m. Location: Room, 1E16 A trio of authorsTiffany Jackson, Zach King, and Elizabeth Acevedoshare their insights into how such media forms as slam poetry, stories ripped from the headlines, and YouTube sensations can serve as fodder for books. A Caldecott Honor artist and five-time recipient of the Pura Belpre Award for Illustration, Yuyi Morales arrives at BookExpo from her hometown of Yelapa, Mexico, to introduce booksellers to her most personal book to date. Dreamers (Holiday House/Neal Porter ) is a picture-book memoir following Moraless 1994 journey from Mexico to the San Francisco Bay Area with her infant son, and their adjustment to a new life. Moraless inspiration for Dreamers had several sources, including what she identified as a need for personal story sharing. On author visits to libraries, she encountered many Latino families eager to hear her immigration story. From their questions, I knew they were interested in what had happened to me, but I also sensed their need to tell their own stories, she says. It made me realize how important it is to have a variety of voices explaining how and why they came to the U.S. And though everyones story is different, what we all have in common is the struggle to adjust to a new homeand figure out how we belong here. Dreamers underscores the pivotal role that books played in easing that process for Morales and her son. I want this book to celebrate and honor all the people who extended their hands to make us feel welcome, especially the public librarians in the Bay Area, she says. When I first saw picture books in the library, I was amazedI couldnt believe that such a thing existed! The art was so colorful and the text so simple. If I put the two together, I could understand the storieseven though I didnt know much English. Library books also unleashed Moraless creativity. She checked out armful after armful of how-to books on such topics as painting, making handmade paper, and bookbinding. These books opened doors for me by letting me realize that I was an artistic person, she recalls. They taught me so very much, and helped me integrate so many skills into my life, and to transform myself. Theres another key message that Morales hopes Dreamers imparts, especially in todays tumultuous political climate. One of the things immigrants struggle with is this notion that we come to new places because we lack things, she observes. But if we sometimes arrive with needs, we also come bearing an abundance of gifts. I hope that Dreamers helps people realize that by opening our eyes and putting our gifts together, we can transform our world and create a brighter future. Cuban-American writer Meg Medina received the 2014 Pura Belpre Award for her young adult novel Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. Two years later she picked up Pura Belpre Honors for her picture book Mango, Abuela and Me. In Merci Suarez Switches Gears (Candlewick, Sept.), Medina targets readers who fall between both age groups with her first middle grade novel since her 2008 debut childrens book, Milagros: Girl from Away. Merci Suarez is a strong-willed sixth-grade scholarship student at a posh private school. Shes navigating tricky changes at home (where no one will tell her why her grandfather is becoming increasingly forgetful) and at school (where she becomes the target of a bossy girls jealousy). Merci Suarez Switches Gears grew out of a short story that appeared in Flying Lessons & Other Stories (2017), edited by Ellen Oh. The story was about a girl coming to terms with her socioeconomic class, and the fact that how she sees herself and her family clashes with how others see them, says Medina. Since the character seemed to resonate with readers, I began imagining bigger things for Merci. I love it when a story line moves into another reality and a fuller worldand I realize the only thing to do is write a novel. The middle school age, when kids are detaching from childhood and trying to figure so much out, really intrigues me, says Medina. It can be so exciting one moment and so scary the next. But Medina is equally comfortable on YA, middle grade, and picture book terrain. In all of my books, I always write on three levelsabout girls, family, and culture, she says. And I love exploring how the three intersect at different points in characters lives. This passion has opened endless fictional doors for me. The power of memory, which she calls the pillar of the whole process, sparks all of Medinas fiction. What I enjoy most, she says, is being able to remember myself and inhabit myself at various ages. I relive memories and put them into my work, and thats what resonates with readers. Im willing to be fuzzy with the facts, but I stay true to the feeling of the child in the moment. Thats what you most have to respect. The publishing industry may be chafing over a number of Trump administration actions and policies, but at a BookExpo panel on Wednesday, a trio of copyright heavyweights agreed that when it comes to copyright policy, the publishing industry stands with the president. The Obama administration was not kind to copyright, said Keith Kupferschmid, CEO of the Copyright Alliance, responding to a question from AP reporter Hillel Italie, who moderated the 45-minute session. The Obama administration, and President Obama in particular, was somewhat enamored with Silicon Valley, and in particular one company in Silicon Valley: Google, he said, characterizing Google as enemy number one when it comes to copyright. But thats now changed with the Trump administration, the panelists agreed. Although Kupferschmid conceded it was still wait and see and that there have not yet been any concrete changes to copyright law under Trump, he said the whole environment has changed in Washington. I think we now have an even playing field, he said. Maria Pallante, CEO of the Association of American Publishers, agreed. I would say that so far we are very pleased with the access, and the interest we have with the Trump administration, Pallante said. Weve been very pleased with the meetings, the process, and the kind of acceptance of the issues at face value, she said, adding that in some ways the pendulum is swinging back toward publishers and away from the tech sector. The general public and lawmakers are now sort of worried about the things that authors and publishers are all worried about, Pallante added, including that there is too much control in the hands of a few large tech companies. 'I would say that so far we are very pleased with the access, and the interest we have with the Trump administration' Rounding out the panel, Authors Guild executive director Mary Rasenberger said it feels to her like theres a reset in Washington, when it comes to copyright policy, and doubled down on Kupferschmids characterization of the Obama administration. I think the Obama administration was an unusual time, because they were so enamored with Google. There were 250 people in the administration that came straight from Google, she said, holding that Googles alleged sway in the Obama administration was very anti-copyright. The remarks came in a panel entitled State of the Industry: Publishing and Copyright Policy, which offered a broad look at the current copyright climate in Washington, rather than a more detailed look at current lawsuits or legislative efforts. Though the panelists cited reform of the copyright office as a priority, bemoaned the growing intrusion of courts into policy-making, and offered their strong support for a recently introduced bill that would create a copyright small claims court, they mostly focused on the overall environment. Good copyright policy is good public policy, Pallante stressed in her opening remarks, which recognizes that authors make the world a more thoughtful, informed and interesting place. But copyright law is also good economic policy, she added. The question today, she said, is whether copyright law will remain flexible enough to encourage innovation and new actors yet strong enough to protect the works of authorship central to its purpose." In the first five months of this year, Vietnam received over 6.7 million international visitors, 27.6 percent higher than in the same period last year. The country saw a rise of 33.3 percent in international visitors from Asian market against the same period last year with more than 5 million tourists. Of which, the number of visitors from China increased most by 37 percent, South Korea 62.1 percent and Japan 6.6 percent, Malaysia 12.5 percent, Thailand 9.1 percent and Singapore 5.4 percent. The number of visitors from the European market rose by 11.8 percent with remarkable growth in Russia by 9.2 percent, the UK by 9.6 percent, France by 13.1 percent, Germany by 8.5 percent, Italia by 18.3 percent. In addition, the country also saw a surge in the number of visitors from the America by 13.8 percent and the Oceania by 12.1 percent. By NGOC MINH Translated by Kim Khanh Gloria Weiner, a longtime bookseller who specialized in Judaica, African-American, and LGBTQ subjects later in her career, passed away on Sunday, May 27. She was 89. Weiner began her career in 1970 at the Palisades Bookshop in Pacific Palisades, Calif., before making stops at Hunters Bookstore, Campbells Brentanos, Classic Bookshop, and the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Bookstore (in both California and New York). Weiner then moved into publishing, working for W.W. Norton, Aperture, Basil Blackwell, Feminist Press, Routledge, Central Conference of American Rabbis, and Newmarket Press, among others. She became a special sales expert, often hired to sell a specific title to bookstores around the country as well as to non-traditional outlets. She continued her work following retirement, often selling a special book for a publisher. In addition to bookselling, Weiner supported several progressive and humanitarian organizations that worked in areas such as civil rights, world peace, feminism, social and economic justice, and equality for all. She is also the founder of the Rose Koenig and Gloria Weiner Fund for Womens Studies at the New York Public Library. Weiner is survived by three children, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Those wishing to honor her are invited to make a donation to non-profit organizations working toward social justice and change. Sarah Crichton will leave Farrar, Straus and Giroux at the end of 2018 to pursue other opportunities, the publisher said in an announcement Tuesday afternoon. Her imprint, Sarah Crichton Books/FSG, will continue publishing through December of 2019. My almost-fifteen year run at FSG has been a joy, Chrichton said in a statement. I am leaving with great fondness for my colleagues, my wonderful authors and their splendid books. This has been one of the most exciting and rewarding chapters in my life. I look forward to discovering what the next chapter holds. Since Crichton joined FSG in 2004, she has published such authors as Cathleen Schine, David Finkel, Matthew Quick, John Leland, Brigid Schulte, Colin Harrison, and, perhaps most famously, Ishmael Beah. Beah, whose A Long Way Gone chronicled his experiences as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, went on to become both a bestseller in 2007 and is now a collegiate staple. With her unique blend of enthusiasm, discernment and publishing talent, Sarah has been a beloved and energizing presence at FSG, Jonathan Galassi, FSGs publisher and president, said in a statement. She will be missed. One of 21st Century Foxs largest stockholders has written a letter to co-executive chairman Rupert Murdoch, urging him to put personal tax concerns to the side and consider Comcasts potential cash offer for Foxs media assets. The personal tax position of the Murdoch family must be an irrelevant consideration for the board, in order for the board to comply with their fiduciary duties, wrote Sir Christopher Hohn, managing director of the Childrens Investment Fund, in a letter obtained by the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News.obtained by the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. The fund has $5.3 billion invested in Fox, covering 137 million shares.Hohns letter indicates that Fox institutional investors are looking for a better deal and cash from US cable giant Comcast analysts believe that it could be as much as $60 billion, well above the deal with Disney for $52.4 billion in stock.Comcast disclosed its plans for a cash offer last week. The problem for Murdoch is that a cash transaction would result in a 20% capital gains taxes and an additional 3.8% Medicare-related taxes for him personally something he could avoid with the lower, all-stock deal (that would be would be considered a tax-free reorganisation). In addition, the gains would be taxed on a state level in many jurisdictions.We understand that you are currently not permitted to solicit offers from third parties under your merger agreement with Disney. However, should Comcast make a formal offer, we would expect the board of 21st Century Fox to immediately engage with Comcast toward evaluating their proposal, on the basis of equal and fair treatment to that of Disney, Hohn wrote. We are aware that the Murdoch family has a potential conflict of interest because of capital-gains tax, which could lead them to preferring a lower-priced Disney stock offer.Comcast is expected to finalise its offer once the fate of the pending AT&T-Time Warner merger is known. A U.S. rocket artillery strike last week on a gathering of Taliban leaders in southern Afghanistan killed at least 50 of them, a U.S. military official said Tuesday. Lt. Col. Martin O'Donnell, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, said a weapon system known as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, which is capable of firing GPS-guided rockets, destroyed a command-and-control position that was a known meeting place for high-level Taliban leaders. He said at least 50 leaders were killed. Additional, unspecified numbers of Taliban officials were killed in U.S. airstrikes over a recent 10-day period, the spokesman said. The U.S. has reportedly considered abandoning one of its most significant military installations in Syria as it prepared to enter into talks with Russia and Jordan over a deteriorating security situation in the war-torn country's restive south. The report, which first surfaced Sunday in Saudi Arabian newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, came as Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Tuesday that Moscow "supported the idea of holding a trilateral meeting at a level convenient for our partners," according to the state-run RIA Novosti. The U.S. and its Middle Eastern ally Jordan are opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose forcesbacked by Russia and Iranare planning a new offensive against rebels and jihadis across southern Syria. The Saudi publication reported that, in order to prevent an escalation between longtime foes Iran and Israel, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield was attempting to draw up a proposal for the trilateral meeting that would include the withdrawal of all Syrian and non-Syrian militias up to 15-and-a-half miles from the Jordanian border. Insurgents would also be transferred to the rebel-held province of Idlib and the Syria-Jordan border crossing would be opened. In exchange, the U.S. would reportedly dismantle its military base in Al-Tanf, located in a pocket of Syrian rebel control near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders. Both sides of the longstanding trade dispute between the United States and China suggested recently that sales of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) could be a large part of an eventual resolution. News out of Europe and Japan also features a prominent role for LNG exports to reduce trade deficits with these two allies, and potentially spurring the Trump administration to back down on the steel and aluminum tariffs that have roiled relations. The question left unasked is whether the American LNG industry can shoulder such a heavy burden. A closer look at the trajectory of this sector suggests a mixed answer, at best. Growth in LNG exports would help the U.S. economy and the environment by reducing greenhouse gases. Germany and, to a lesser extent, Japan, have been importing more U.S. coal as they phase out nuclear generating capacity. China remains the worlds largest user of CO2 rich coal. Substituting natural gas for coal would cut CO2 emissions relative to coal by at least one-half. Producing more natural gas would also be a boon for the U.S. economy, especially its industrial sector. Developing more natural gas fields and building infrastructure to get it to end users would boost not only the energy sector, but also the steel, construction machinery, and other heavy equipment industries. The problem is that the United States does not presently have sufficient capacity to meet anything near the potential demands from the worlds next three biggest economies. Existing U.S. capacity for exporting LNG is about 3.8 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/day). Japan alone imports an average of around 12.7 Bcf/day; global imports are around 45 Bcf/day. As Germany, Japan, and perhaps Korea decrease their reliance on nuclear power, and China, India, the United States, and others continue to shift from coal to natural gas, demand is expected to grow steadily. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects global LNG demand to triple by 2040. The U.S. does not have nearly enough liquefaction capacity to make a dent in this growing demand. The U.S. competes with the Gulf States, Russia, and Australia as an LNG mega-producer. But if China, Japan, and the E.U. are anxious to settle trade disputes by favoring U.S. suppliers, pressure will mount to ramp up U.S. production. The United States is the worlds largest producer of natural gas and has ample reserve capacity. But as of early 2018, American firms have limited LNG facilities. In addition to the existing 3.8 Bcf/day plant capacity, new facilities now under construction would add about 8.1 Bcf/day by the end of 2019, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Another 6.8 Bcf/day in capacity has gained regulatory approval but construction has not started. Existing plus under-construction capacity is thus around 11.9 Bcf/day, although EIA has a lower projection of 9.6 Bcf/day. LNG capacity in the U.S. was limited until 2015 due to a ban on exports and low prices. Assuming average existing export prices of $5.62 per million British Thermal Units, exports would be worth about $24.4 billion if the 11.9 Bcf/day capacity is achieved. Current capacity utilization is closer to 80 percent, so the real export figure would be closer to $19.3 billion. The combined trade deficit in goods with China, Japan, and the E.U. was $595 billion in 2017. Based on our calculations, even if all prospective LNG facilities including some permitted but not yet under construction were to be completed, the total capacity of around 18.7 Bcf/day would only generate $38.4 billion in exports and reduce the trade deficit in goods up to 6.5 percent. And this is presuming, probably erroneously, that coal exports would not be displaced. Despite the reality that LNG exports can make only a relatively small dent in the cumulative trade deficit, the effort to increase production is well worth the price. It would require a determined and sustained initiative by the Trump administration to overcome traditional obstacles, including regulatory delays and resistance to new production and pipelines. To take but one example, the North Slope of Alaska has enormous reserves of natural gas, but development has been stymied by decades of opposition. A small LNG facility in Southern Alaska was mothballed in 2015. In recent years, the Alaskan state government has cobbled together an ambitious gas extraction, pipeline, and LNG project, with a projected cost of $4045 billion, to bring North Slope gas largely to the Asian market. A 2.6 Bcf/day liquefaction and export facility is the final stage of the project. Chinese money and construction resources may be part of the project and a possible deliverable of ongoing U.S.-China trade negotiations. Japanese expertise and financing could also be a potential part of a project of this scope. The initial application for the project submitted to the Federal government was 55,000 pages in length, leaving plenty of room for assistance. But a new and more flexible approach to regulation and resource development would be required if this project and others like it are to have any chance of success. Some elements of a shift would include streamlining the permitting process for LNG facilities; eliminating the federal permit requirement to export natural gas; placing time limits on federal authorities to review applications for energy infrastructure projects; and expanded permitting for exploration and development of resources on Alaskas North Slope. A new direction in development policy would support the U.S. economy, help lower the trade deficit, and contribute to lowering CO2 emissions. Thomas J. Duesterberg is Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute. Alex Entz is Public Interest Fellow at Hudson Institute. Over the long weekend, President Trump's critics were in a sputtering rage over his supposedly losing 1,500 illegal immigrant children, sticking them in cages, and putting others on specially equipped prison buses. Turns out, it was all 100% bogus. It was likely always going to be an uphill battle for establishment candidate Adam Putnam in the race for Florida governor. Yes, the state commissioner of agriculture has raised a lot of money from special interests in Tallahassee, but as weve seen in recent history, no amount of money can paper over a problematic record that, in Putnams case, includes support for amnesty (both the Arlen Specter-sponsored immigration bill in 2006 and the so-called Gang of 8 measure in 2013), opposition to E-Verify, support for the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street banks, voting with Nancy Pelosi for the Obama cash for clunkers program and supporting a massive expansion of federal authority over K-12 education, which laid the groundwork for Common Core. But what really will be responsible for sinking Putnams candidacy is the hostility he has demonstrated toward President Trump. This hostility is not just the typical behavior exhibited by run-of-the-mill establishment Republicans, but includes actively seeking to sabotage Trumps candidacy and to undermine his presidency. This is a big reason why GOP Congressman and Trump ally Ron DeSantis will win the Republican primary for governor on Aug. 28. Deny Trump the GOP Nomination at the Convention? Incredibly, Putnam entertained the notion that Trump would be denied the partys nomination in a convention fight in Cleveland. In a piece in the Miami Herald headlined Putnam not real thrilled with Trump, wont back him, Putnam ruled out endorsing Trump prior to the national gathering. "I don't envision a scenario where I would endorse Trump prior to the convention, and we'll see what the convention yields," said Putnam, a "super delegate" as a statewide elected official. Putnams refusal was rooted in his negative view of Trump as a man. So, even though Trump amassed the necessary delegates in the spring, Putnam wanted to see what the convention yield[ed]? This could only mean that he entertained the pipe dream that a convention fight would result in Trump being denied the nomination. This is an attitude commonly found deep in the bowels of the GOP establishment: heads the establishment wins and tails the voters lose. Even though Donald Trump blitzed through the primaries amassing impressive victory after impressive victory, we somehow must allow the party establishment to render the peoples judgment null and void? Help Hillary by Unfavorably Comparing Trump to Pence During the general election campaign, Putnam continued his Trump bashing even though that only helped Hillary Clinton. He even used Indiana Gov. and Trump running mate -- Mike Pence as a way to criticize the nominee, saying that Pence was 180 degrees different than Trump. Unlike Pence, Putnam explained, Trump is not a level, steady, consistent guy who is a well-read, conservative rooted in sort of the founding philosophical documents of conservatism. By that point, Donald Trump had experienced massive success in a variety of fields ranging from real estate to television. To denigrate him by saying he wasnt level or steady on the verge of the most significant presidential election in a generation represented sabotage of the first degree. With Republicans like Putnam, who needs Democrats? More Putnam Attacks on Trump: Dishonorable and Vile As the campaign wore on, Putnam who refused to attend a single Trump rally in Florida during the campaign, even though he is a statewide official continued to offer a steady stream of negative commentary of the candidate. When Trump defended himself against attacks made by Khizr Khan and the news media during the 2016 Democratic convention, Putnam lashed out at Trump for being abhorrent and dishonorable and said Trumps defense of himself makes me question how badly he wants to win. He keeps running his mouth about the most ridiculous things. When asked whether he intended to support Trump in November, Putnam demurred, saying, I think Ive said all I need to say about Trump today. Of course, when the Access Hollywood tape was leaked to the Washington Post a month before the 2016 election, Putnam rushed to condemn Trump as vile and obscene. That the prospect of a Clinton victory would be detrimental to the country seemed not to have mattered to Putnam, who was more interested in currying favor with the media and anti-Trump political establishment. Post-Trump Victory: Putnam Keeps Trump-Bashing Following the election, Republicans across the country basked in the glow of Donald Trumps historic victory over Hillary Clinton and were delighted as President-elect Trump began assembling a stellar Cabinet, including such luminaries as Mike Pompeo. Not Adam Putnam, who continued his anti-Trumpism by deriding the Trump transition as a circus. It is almost as if Putnam was part of that small and irrelevant class of Republicans who deep down really preferred Clinton as president. The classic GOP primary battle has traditionally pitted an establishment insider against a conservative reformer. In the era of Trump, it is imperative that a candidate also capture the Trump/populist wing of the party in order to win. Given that the president has sky-high approval ratings with Republican primary voters, this is probably the largest share of the primary electorate. As great as the contrast is between Putnam (a consummate political insider and career politician) and DeSantis (an Iraq veteran and Reaganite) on the establishment vs. reformer scale, the gulf between the two of them vis-a-vis support for President Trump is immense. Since Trump assumed office, DeSantis has been a leader in supporting his policies, ranging from the border wall to the recognition of Jerusalem as Israels capital, as well as exposing the deep state of bureaucrats that targeted Trump and wreaked havoc during the Obama administration. For Adam Putnam, the Trump presidency is a circus. For Ron DeSantis, its a chance to Make American Great Again. While Democrats face an uphill climb defending seats held by a handful of incumbent senators in states Donald Trump won overwhelmingly, they are hoping to flip the script in Tennessee. Former Gov. Phil Bredesen appears to be waging a strong campaign against Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Bob Corker. In a sign of how competitive the contest has become, President Trump traveled to Nashville on Tuesday to host a fundraiser for the congresswoman and rally supporters who Republicans hope will turn out down the ballot in November. "We need Marsha in the Senate to continue the amazing progress and work we've done in the last year and a half," Trump told the crowd. "Marsha's very liberal Democrat opponent, Phil Bredesen -- who is he? He is an absolute and total tool of Chuck Schumer, and of course, the MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi." Republicans are keeping Democrats on their toes in North Dakota, Indiana, West Virginia, Montana and Missouri, all of which the president carried by high double digits in 2016 and where he remains popular. The Senate landscape thus provides ample pickup opportunities for a GOP aiming to expand its slim majority in the upper chamber, in stark contrast to a House map that puts many blue state Republican incumbents in peril. Democrats see opportunities to neutralize any Senate losses by picking off Republican seats in presidential battlegrounds like Arizona and Nevada. But flipping Tennessee, a state Trump won by 26 points, could be more consequential to their fortunes. And it presents Democrats with the rare opportunity in a Senate race to run as the Washington outsider. A few polls so far show a close race, with Bredesen leading Blackburn in the RealClearPolitics average by five percentage points. A Vanderbilt University poll earlier this month found that 67 percent of respondents approved of Bredesen while 49 percent approved of Blackburn. Bredesen leads his opponent in approval among independents, 69 percent to 44 percent. And he demonstrated some crossover appeal, receiving a 52 percent favorability rating among Republicans while Blackburn received just 23 percent favorability from Democrats. Her challenge is clearly going to be making sure our base sticks together, says Josh Thomas, a Memphis-based Republican strategist. It will be all hands on deck. Strategists in the state say Trump will be effective in that regard. At the Nashville rally, Blackburn stressed that "Tennessee needs a senator who is going to support President Donald Trump." Trump is huge asset in Tennessee, says Thomas, noting that the president won all but three of the states 95 counties. Voters there not only like him but they embrace his policies. To the extent that the midterms tend to be reflective of the incumbent president, thats great news for Republicans in Tennessee. Blackburn has been running as a Trump ally from the start. In launching her campaign last October, the eight-term lawmaker highlighted her tendency to be politically incorrect, said Republicans in the Senate act like Democrats, or worse, and pledged to fight alongside Trump every step of the way to build that wall." Blackburn has carved out an outsized profile on Capitol Hill and beyond as a regular pundit on cable news programs. And she has outraised Bredesen, who loaned his campaign $1 million of his own money. (Bredesen is a former health care executive.) Blackburn has raised $5 million compared to her opponents $3.7 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And while Bredesen has a proven ability to win statewide, his re-election as governor in 2006 was the last time a Democrat has done so. Tennessee's conservative shift was crystalized after hometown Democratic Sen. Al Gore lost the presidential contest there in 2000, and it has been trending even redder since Bredesen left office. When Trump won the state in 2016, he outperformed Mitt Romney by six points and John McCain by 11. Of the 11 members of the congressional delegation from Tennessee, only two are Democrats. And while Corker won narrowly in his first election to the Senate in 2006, a banner year for Democrats, he was easily re-elected in 2012. "The question is, are there enough Democratic votes left to win a statewide race and is there a political center left in Tennessee?" says Kent Syler, who managed former Democratic Rep. Bart Gordon's campaigns and served as his chief of staff for over two decades. Bredesen's path to victory entails high Democratic turnout while winning independents and picking off moderate Republican voters, Syler says. "Hes not attacking Donald Trump, because he understands hes got all the anti-Trump vote, and he is going to have to get some pro-Trump vote while trying to avoid being linked to the [Democratic] national brand." Such a strategy is on display in his ads. In his first television spot, Bredesen touted his bipartisan approach as governor. "Right now, we need a dose of that in the Senate less partisan squabbling, more solutions," he says. "I'm not running against Donald Trump," he says in another spot. "Theres a lot of things I dont personally like about Donald Trump, but hes the president of the United States, and if he has an idea and is pushing some things that I think are good for the people of Tennessee, Im going to be for it." Republicans are tying Bredesen to the national Democratic Party while undercutting his record as governor. In an opposition research file on him circulated ahead Trump's visit to Nashville, Republicans highlighted an increased state unemployment rate when the Democrat left office, his support for some gun control measures, and for supporting the issuance of driver certificates to undocumented immigrants (a program his administration later ended). While Republicans in the state have mostly coalesced around Blackburn, Bredesen's credentials have been boosted by an unlikely source: Corker himself. "He was a very good [Nashville] mayor, a very good governor, a very good business person," Corker told reporters last month. "And look, I'm not going to campaign against someone who I've been a friend with and worked with, so that's the way it's going to be." Later, in an interview with CNN, Corker refused to say Blackburn's name: I'm supporting the [GOP] nominee. I have worked with the nominee for some time. And I don't know what else to say." The remarks irked national and state Republicans, prompting Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to admonish Corker, according to the Washington Post. (At Tuesdays rally, Corker was booed when the president mentioned him.) After the comments, Trump quickly endorsed Blackburn. Corker has said he donated to her campaign and would support her. Still, his comments appeared to fuel Blackburn supporters in the state, and raised questions about Corker's currency among Republican base voters. Corkers comments represent the kind of sentiment Bredesen will need to garner from moderate Republicans and independents in the state. "Thats what this race is likely to turn on: whether Tennesseans want a moderate or a partisan," says Ken Blake, director of the poll at Middle Tennessee State University. "The question is, how are the moderate Republicans going to go?" A MTSU survey in early April found Bredesen leading Blackburn, 45 percent to 35 percent. But 17 percent of respondents said they weren't sure who they would vote for in November. Clarification: An earlier version of this story said Bredesen supported issuing driver licenses to undocumented immigrants. In fact, his administration briefly supported issuing driver certificates, a downgrade from the previous administration's issuance of licenses to undocumented immigrants. By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 05/30/2018 ADVERTISEMENT FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS! Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade. premiered its thirteenth season on Tuesday night, and the last amazing performance of the night won host Tyra Banks ' Golden Buzzer on NBC.Zurcaroh, a huge Austrian acrobatic dance act comprised of children, teens and young adults, took the stage last night and performed a jaw-dropping routine for judges Howie Mandel Heidi Klum and Simon Cowell Zurcaroh dressed in ripped camouflage and executed breathtaking displays of gymnastic and acrobatic skills.Despite the group's brilliant and complicated spectacle -- which included death-defying stunts and balancing tricks -- the members are nonprofessionals. Skills or no skills, people of all ages are apparently welcome to join the group as long as they have a love for the art of dance.It didn't take long for the audience and judging panel to get up on their feet and cheer, especially when small children were thrown high into the air for twists, turns and spins.The most expressive of the four judges happened to be Howie when it became time to critique the audition."Wow! Wow! Wow! That's the -- I mean, we see dancing, we see tumbling, that's, wow!" Howie marveled."For all of you to be that in sync, I'm wow too! That was on point," Mel said."You are unbelievable. There's kids flying all over the air. I can't even believe how you caught them. I was in Simon's lap for a second because one [kid] did I don't know how many spins. It was absolutely incredible. Loved it. Wow!" Heidi gushed.And then Simon paid the group a huge compliment, saying, "There's something in the air right now. I've done this a long time, and that was honestly one of the most incredible things I've ever seen on any of these shows. It was breathtaking, and I'm absolutely honored you came on our show."Just as the judges were ready to unanimously vote Zurcaroh through to the next round, Tyra walked out from backstage."Hold up! Hold up!" Tyra yelled. "I am collecting my breath and I just, I need some oxygen right now! I'm, like, freaking out right now. This is so crazy that you know what I have to do!"Tyra then reached over to the judges' table and pressed the Golden Buzzer, which automatically sends Zurcaroh to the live shows.Gold confetti then rained down on the act as they cheered, cried and hugged each other. Their American dream was really starting to come true."I am thrilled for all of you," Simon noted. "That's what the Golden Buzzer is all about." TORRINGTON - Its transition time at the Nutmeg Conservatory for the Arts. The 11-member class of 2018 has graduated amid pomp and performances on four successive days in May, culminating in an inspiring ceremony, held May 20 at the Warner Theatre. This brief lull between the regular session and the start of summer sessions was an ideal time for Nutmeg to welcome three wide-eyed representatives from the Connecticut Office of Tourism. Rose Bove, Jennifer Haag and Jean Hebert from the CT tourism marketing team were all smiles as they toured the Torrington Historical Society, the Warner Theatre, the Nutmeg Conservatory, Five Points Gallery, Five Points Annex and Noelke Gallery and then listened to Danielle Mailer outline the history of her mural on the back of the Staples building. The familiarization tour was initiated by Lesley Budny, marketing director at the Warner, who said she hopes it will result in the tourism office marketing Torrington as a tourist destination. Visionaries at the Nutmeg, the Warner and other venues have long predicted that Torrington would one day enjoy a renaissance as an arts and culture center that would attract tourists and new residents. Budny said that has already happened, and the tour on May 22 confirms that it is continuing to happen. Sharon Dante, founding executive director at the Nutmeg, welcomed the tourism office representatives in the dance shop next door to the conservatory. The dance shop was formerly Louis Tunick Company, a prominent jeweler, and it retains many of the turn-of-the-century features, including the wall safe. Holly Watson, director of operations, said, This is the original architecture. The cases on that [north] wall are jewelry cases. We just removed the glass. The store is open to the public, Dante said. It benefits the people who come to train, and we have kids who come literally from about 40 states and all around the world to train with us. The whirlwind tour of Nutmeg included the nearly 4,000-square-foot Premiere Studio on the third floor, the smaller second-floor studio, Ann Scovilles ballet sculptures on the side of the adjacent Warner and beneath the color-changing LED lighting under the Nutmegs arch, the spacious dormitories, the quarter-sawn oak wainscoting, and more. Victoria Mazzarelli, artistic director, said, And we have beautiful new dance floors. We had great funding for the floors. Weve done the studio downstairs as well. We are pretty fortunate because after 17 years the old floors certainly had a lot of wear and tear. For now, the floors are getting a rest from the daily pounding of thousands of dance steps. But the first of three summer sessions will begin on June 17 and run through June 30. Its a pre-professional program designed for highly motivated dancers aged 10 - 14. Session 2, for men up to age 21, will run from July 1 - 28. And session 3, also for men up to age 21, will run from July 29 - Aug. 11. For more information, go to https://nutmegconservatory.org/ballet-programs/professional-summer-programs/. Summer sessions also begin soon for younger children at Torrington School of Ballet. Summer ballet appreciation classes are for ages 3 - 10, and summer concentrated ballet classes are for ages 10 - 12. For information and registration forms, go to https://nutmegconservatory.org/ballet-programs/torrington-school-ballet/ or call 860-482-7375. If you need proof of Sen. Chris Murphys national star power, look no further than his campaign contributions. Actress Meryl Streep and her husband gave $5,400 to Murphys campaign this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Rosie ODonnell, listed as a self-employed comic, contributed $1,000. Fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg handed the Connecticut Democrat $5,400. Law and Order star Sam Waterston gave him $3,500. Grateful Dead founding member Phil Lesh tossed $1,200 to the campaign. Celebrities arent the only ones dishing out cash to Murphy, who is running for a second Senate term, but is rumored to be a possible 2020 presidential candidate. Billionaire Hamilton James, executive vice president of the juggernaut investment firm Blackstone Group, contributed $5,400. Walter Robb, a co-CEO of Whole Foods, sent $5,000 to Murphy. And former New York governor Eliot Spitzer gave $5,400. None of these individuals live in Connecticut. Even for the average Joe, Murphys campaign appeals across the nation. The senator collected $5.8 million from people in 46 out of 50 states, plus Washington D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands, this election cycle, according to FEC data. He also received contributions from individuals in London, Hong Kong, Toronto, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Bordeaux. Chris is proud of the incredible grassroots support he's received from folks around Connecticut and across the country, said Jenna Lowenstein, Murphys campaign manager. He's received more than 210,000 donations from people who have been inspired to chip in after seeing him stand up and fight for Connecticut values like keeping kids safe from gun violence and ensuring everyone has access to health care. She pointed out that most of his contributions were $100 or less. Now Murphy is ranked No. 15 of all senators and Senate candidates, for most contributions raised this election cycle, according to the FEC. His activism around gun control has propelled him into a national political figure, said Geoffrey Skelley, associate editor of political newsletter Sabatos Crystal Ball, from the University of Virginias Center for Politics. As the Parkland school shooting was unfolding in February, Murphy spoke out against gun violence on the Senate floor. In 2016, he garnered national attention when he filibustered for 15 hours to prompt a Senate vote on gun control measures. Ever since the Newtown massacre, he has become a notable spokesperson on behalf of increased gun control in the country, Skelley said. It is one of the reasons people view him as a potential dark horse presidential candidate. Murphy also knows how to put in the elbow grease to earn supporters dollars, said Stu Rothenberg, senior editor of the political newsletter Inside Elections. A campaign manager before he launched his own bid for office, Murphy ran Charlotte Koskoff's unsuccessful 1996 campaign for the House of Representatives in what was then Connecticuts 6th Congressional District. He then served eight years in the Connecticut General Assembly and three terms in Congress before running for the Senate in 2012. In his first race for U.S. Senate, Murphy collected $10.3 million in total contributions, just north of the $9.5 million in contributions he has received since January 2017 alone, FEC data shows. Chris Murphy is a real nuts and bolts guy, Rothenberg said. He knows how to put together campaigns and fundraising operations. A national profile It doesnt hurt that Connecticut which handed him $2.8 million in individual contributions alone is one of the wealthiest states in the nation, Rothenberg said. The state also borders the liberal bastions and massive media markets of New York individuals there gave him $1.1 million, the most of any state after Connecticut and Massachusetts where residents coughed up $146,000. In total, just under half of Murphys individual campaign contributions and transfers came from people outside of Connecticut: $2.3 out of $5.1 million, according to FEC data. Thats not unusual, experts say. In fact, many senators gather as much as 90 percent of their campaign dollars outside their state or district, said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor for the Cook Political Report. Murphys out-of-state percentage is actually lower than some senators, she said. Alabama Democrat Doug Jones, who upset Roy Moore, the GOP Senate hopeful dogged by a sex abuse scandal, is the biggest fundraiser in the Senate. He collected nearly $20 million in out-of-state dollars since 2017, compared to $3.7 million in Alabama, according to the FEC. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the second largest Senate fundraiser, drew more than $15 million in out-of-state money, compared to $2.4 million in her state. As for celebrity money, a vast majority of stars are Democrats, Duffy said, while many businessmen lean Republican with the exception of Silicon Valley execs and startup CEOs. Famous Democrats may be especially keen to give their money to Murphy because of his gun control activism, she said. Hollywood and politics have a long history with one another, Skelley said. Murphy declined to comment on whether he knew any of the celebrities who contributed to his campaign. An abundance of cash Murphys campaign had $7.7 million in cash on hand the most in the Connecticut delegation as of April 28, the FEC reports. His stuffed campaign wallet gives him a significant edge, in addition to his incumbent status and name recognition, over Republican challengers Matthew Corey and Dominic Rapini. GOP nominee Corey, a Hartford pub and window washing service owner, has raised $15,229 and had $13,336 in cash on hand as of April, based on FEC numbers. Rapini, an Apple national accounts manager, has fared better with $116,975 raised and $47,517 cash on hand. Murphy declined to say what he may do with the millions that he likely will not need in the race against Corey and Rapini. Under federal campaign finance law, candidates can save residual funds for future campaigns or give money to charity. They can also make contributions to other federal or state candidates a way of building political IOUs that could come in handy in the future, Rothenberg said. emunson@hearstmediact.com; Twitter: @emiliemunson The ruling Chinese Communist Party says one thing and does another when it comes to Hong Kong, often acting in ways that are inconsistent with the city's promised freedom to govern its own affairs, according to a recent policy report issued by the State Department in Washington. Repeated comments from Chinese officials asserting the supremacy of the Chinese constitution last year served to "dilute" the concept of a "high degree of autonomy" enshrined in the 1984 Sino-British handover treaty and the city's mini-constitution, the Basic Law, the report said. "While [Beijing] publicly and frequently reiterated its commitment to the 'one country, two systems' framework ... other statements and actions ... were inconsistent with its stated commitment to Hong Kongs high degree of autonomy," the report found. For example, China's National People's Congress Standing Committee has required the city to legislate to make "disrespect" of China's flag or national anthem a criminal offense. Beijing also announced it would apply mainland Chinese law at a high-speed rail terminal checkpoint within Hong Kong's separate jurisdiction, the report said. The State Department also cited the refusal of entry to U.K. Conservative Party human rights campaigner Benedict Rogers by Hong Kong immigration officials last October, citing U.K officials as saying that it had been carried out at Beijing's instigation. The report also criticized Beijing for issuing a preemptive interpretation in the row of the validity of oaths of allegiance sworn by newly elected members of the city's Legislative Council. "As a result of the interpretation, Hong Kong courts disqualified six pan-democratic legislators elected in 2016 for improper oath-taking; two still have appeals pending," it said. Publishing controls The report came as a survey found that Beijing's Central Liaison Office in Hong Kong controls more than half the city's publishing industry, with ownership of three major bookstore chains and more than 30 publishing houses in the city. Sino United Publishing, which was acquired by the Central Liaison Office in 2015, controls more than 80 percent of book sales via its three chains: Joint Publishing, Chung Hwa Book Co. and the Commercial Press. But the Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) survey found that the office also owns or controls more than half of the publishing industry via stakes in more than 30 publishing houses in the city. Lee Cho-jat, who was the first chairman of Sino, told the station that the group is "a national asset" and the Liaison Office is obliged by Beijing to coordinate "different units." RTHK's current affairs program "Hong Kong Connection" traced the ownership of Sino United through two holding companies in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, across the internal border in mainland China. The Guangzhou company has only one shareholder: Beijing's Central Liaison Office, the show reported. While Lee denied any political agenda, Lam Wing-kei, one of five Hong Kong booksellers held in cross-border detentions in 2015 for selling "banned books" to customers in mainland China, dismissed such claims. "Clearly this is a form of ideological control," Lam said. "Books that are considered politically sensitive or inappropriate will be completely banned." Lam said the China-owned chains had been loathe to promote books touching on the 2014 Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong. "They would take delivery of them, and put them in a cupboard, and they would only bring them out if a customer asked for them," Lam said. "[In some cases] they will actually put out a directive stopping the branches from selling books at all, for example, books that promote localism or autonomy for Hong Kong; they have been totally banned, you can be sure of that," he said. Freed Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee (C), accompanied by protesters, marches to the Chinese central government's liaison office in Hong Kong, June 18, 2016. Credit: AP Photo Shift in approach Democratic Party chairman Wu Chi-wai said he has detected a distinct shift in Beijing's approach to Hong Kong. "Their takeover of Joint Publishing, and their willingness to speak out it, in such an open manner clearly demonstrates that the central government doesn't even care about crossing certain lines when it comes to respecting the one country, two systems [framework] now," Wu told RFA. "They used to exert control via communist-backed capital in a much more underground manner; they never laid all of their cards on the table like this before." Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam told reporters that it was "difficult to comment" on the RTHK program. "The Central Liaison Office needs to buy property, or do other things, in Hong Kong as part of its operations and its work requirements," she said. "As long as it is legal, we don't get involved in what they should or shouldn't be doing." Asked if the practice undermined the "one country, two systems" arrangement, and whether Beijing's liaison office interferes in Hong Kong affairs, Lam declined to respond. Bookstores targeted Hong Kong's bookstores, which once drew Chinese bibliophiles from far and wide in pursuit of some of the city's most off-beat, salacious and politically radical writings, are being squeezed out by rising retail rents and growing influence from Beijing. One such store, Causeway Bay Books, made world headlines in 2015 when five of its staff members went missing in the course of two or three months. Swedish national Gui Minhai, who headed the Mighty Current publishing house that owned Causeway Bay Books, "disappeared" under murky circumstances from his holiday home in Pattaya, Thailand on October 2015, only to reappear in China "confessing" on video to a decade-old alleged drunk-driving offense. He now faces further charges of spying after being snatched from a train as he traveled to Beijing in the company of Swedish diplomats. In the months that followed, store manager and British national Lee Bo, 65, went missing from his workplace in Hong Kong, and the group's general manager Lui Bo (also spelled Lui Por) and colleagues Cheung Chi-ping and Lam Wing-kei were also all detained, later to resurface in China, accused of selling "banned books" to customers across the internal border in mainland China. Beijing's interest in Hong Kong's publishing industry appears to have been sparked by the city's 2014 pro-democracy movement for fully democratic elections, sparking concerns about the "gradual spread of ideas promoting Hong Kong independence" since the Occupy Central movement brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets at its height. Chinese officials blamed the "illegal occupation" on a lack of patriotic education among the city's young people and renewed calls for Beijing-backed programs of patriotic education in Hong Kong's schools. Reported by Lam Kwok-lap for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Gao Feng for the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. People stand in front of the main gate of the RYB New World Kindergarten in Beijing's Chaoyang district, Nov. 24, 2017. Authorities in the Chinese capital have indicted a 22-year-old kindergarten teacher for abusing those in her care, after denying allegations of sexual abuse of children at the school made last year. The former teacher at the RYB New World Kindergarten in Beijing's Chaoyang district was indicted by the state prosecutor, which identified her only by her surname, Liu. She had been fired from her job last November after being accused of pricking the children with needles, because they refused to take a nap. Parents told RFA at the time that they found the scapegoating of Liu highly suspicious, coming as it did after the announcement that there were "gaps" in the surveillance footage from cameras inside the building. State-run Xinhua news agency had earlier reported that police were investigating allegations that children were "reportedly sexually molested, pierced by needles and given unidentified pills." But the ruling Chinese Communist Party's propaganda department swung into action, limiting media reaction to the scandal and arresting at least two parents for "rumor-mongering" about the allegations. At least 10 parents had reported finding pinpricks on their childrens legs, arms and bottoms, according to state broadcaster China Central Television. Others said their children had been given "white pills" before their afternoon nap. Though three teachers were suspended in November, there has been scant mention since then of the sexual abuse allegations initially reported by Xinhua. A parent at a Beijing kindergarten surnamed Zhang said government censors had also been hard at work deleting any social media posts referencing the incident. "They have been deleting large numbers of posts," Zhang said. "I don't really hold out much hope because I think that this teacher is just carrying the can for the whole situation." She said her son had previously been pricked with needles by a teacher, giving him nightmares for more than a month, during which he shouted: "Teacher, don't hurt me!" But police had sided with the kindergarten, she said, adding that stories of child abuse in the Chinese education system are becoming very common. "My kid was in the kindergarten for two months, and he was physically abused in there," Zhang said. "I couldn't figure out what the little red marks on his face were. He said they hurt and that they were made by the teacher with a needle." "But when we reported it to the police, they said he must have done it to himself," she said. "When we went to the kindergarten, they called the police on us, and I was taken down to the police station." Education system is to blame A Beijing-based rights activist surnamed Yu said the problem runs throughout society, and is far too serious to be blamed on a single teacher. "Of course, we hate this teacher for doing what she did, but behind this is the entire education system, the question of how kindergartens are run and the protection of young children of preschool age," Yu said. "The entire education system and the whole of society should be concerned about this, not just go blaming it on this teacher," he said. "If it happened again tomorrow, it would be pointless just to blame it on that teacher, too." Chinas Ministry of Education and city-level education officials called for tighter regulation of the preschool education sector and tougher supervision of staff in the wake of the scandal. The kindergarten is one of around 1,800 kindergartens and daycare centers run by New York-listed RYB Education. The company has claimed a zero tolerance policy regarding child abuse, but it has also filed official complaints against parents who made "false accusations," state broadcaster CGTN reported. Reported by Yang Fan for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by the Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. North Korea has issued directives to step up propaganda to prevent possible unrest among the public from the unexpected turn of events regarding the planned summit between the United States and the North in June and the destruction of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, sources inside the country said. A meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to discuss Pyongyangs relinquishment of its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances and economic relief remains tentatively scheduled for June 12 in Singapore. A week ago, Trump called off the meeting in response to what he said was tremendous anger and open hostility displayed by Kim in recent statements that denounced top U.S. officials. On May 26, Kim had an unannounced meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is acting as a go-between for the high-stakes summit between the North and the U.S. since the recent breakthrough in detente between Seoul and Pyongyang, to get the summit with Trump back on track. After Moon publicly stated that Kim had reaffirmed his commitment to completely denuclearize the Korean peninsula, U.S. officials headed to Pyongyang to discuss the details of the still tentative summit. In anticipation of the meeting, North Korea earlier this month freed three American prisoners and on May 24 appeared to blow up tunnels and other buildings at its Punggye-ri nuclear test site in the mountainous northeastern part of the country where the regime has conducted six underground tests since 2006. Concerned about the impact that the continued uncertainty over the summit coupled with the Norths destruction of its main nuclear test facility might have on the public, the Central Committee of the ruling Workers Party of Korea has issued directives regarding the North-South meeting, the North-U.S. summit, and Punggye-ri, said a source from North Hamgyong province who declined to be named. The order was to make thorough counter-plans against the enemies pretentious peace strategy while people and cadres are thinking about whether the current situation has already brought peace, he said. The source quoted the statement of directives about the nuclear test site, which say: We are blowing up our creation for which we spent an enormous amount of money and tears of blood. However, we can build a technically perfect modern facility if we want to in the future. Prior to the destruction of tunnels and other buildings at the nuclear test site, observed by invited members of the international media, reports surfaced in April that the Punggye-ri complex had already partially collapsed from the stress of multiple nuclear explosions, possibly making it unsafe for further tests. While the Central Committees statement served to cushion possible psychological unrest among citizens, it also included phrasing to indicate that the North has not abandoned its nuclear power ambitions, the source said. It encouraged North Koreans to firmly stand on the path that our previous leaders built for national defense and pledged that the country will hold our artillery to face our enemies who hold guns and swords, said the source. Until recently, the North has viewed South Korea and the U.S. as its adversaries. The source also noted that the statement says: In order to become a world power that no other countries can attempt to attack, we need to maintain the achievements that we have earned by tightening our belt and continue the decades of years of hard work of our past generations. This clearly indicates that there will be no complete removal of nuclear capabilities, he said. What to believe? The directives will raise eyebrows among North Koreans who now will not know what to believe about recent developments, despite some signs of enthusiasm about detente with South Korea and the U.S., said a source from North Pyongan province who declined to be named. North Korean sources previously told RFAs Korean Service that citizens have been largely unmoved by, if not mistrustful of, state propaganda heralding Kims diplomatic achievements in the nuclear-armed, sanctions-hit state. Most North Koreans have reacted positively to the recent North-South summit, plans for a North-U.S. summit, and the removal of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site removal because they can expect possible economic reform, he said, referring to a hope that harsh international sanctions placed on the regime in response to its nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches may now be eased. On the other hand, the directives from the Central Committee have driven people to the opposite side of the current situation, so that they are not sure what to believe, he said. Reported by Myungchul Lee for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Lao workers at Chinese-operated banana plantations are falling ill in large numbers from exposure to chemicals used on the farms, with many suffering from respiratory or liver problems, sources in the Southeast Asian nation say. Lao government orders began closing down the environmentally destructive farms in the countrys northern provinces in January 2017, with the ban shuttering the commercial operations when their contracts expire and forbidding new contracts from being signed. In the Maung Sing district of northern Laos's Luang Namtha province, meanwhile, at least 20 banana workers, many already having left their work on the farms, come each month to the local hospital for treatment, a hospital official told RFAs Lao Service. The chemicals affected their health after they had worked for even six months or one to two years in the fields, RFAs source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Now they have liver problems, and are chronically tired and fatigued when they come to us, sometimes with related diseases. Pregnant women working in the fields are especially at risk from chemical exposure, the hospital official said, adding that many go into labor prematurely, sometimes giving birth to deformed children. One woman, a resident of Maung Sing, fell ill two years ago after working for a year at a Chinese banana farm in northern Laoss Phongsaly province, a village health worker told RFA, also on condition he not be named. Though the company released the woman from employment when it was clear that she was sick, they have said they are not responsible for her illness, and she is only receiving basic health care from her district, the source said, adding that the woman is still gravely ill and not expected to survive. In a 2016 report, the most recent available, by Laoss Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, six Lao farm workers died of pesticide or herbicide inhalation during the period 2012 to 2015, with three deaths reported in Champassak province in the south, and two in Xieng Khouang province and one in Bokeo province in the north. Safety assurances doubted Meanwhile, four or five banana workers at a Chinese plantation in Muang Nan district in northern Laoss Luang Prabang province were left covered in rashes after falling ill in December and are being treated in a local hospital, a district health official told RFA, speaking on condition of anonymity. As many as a hundred others in the district may also be ill but are not seeking treatment, she said. Bananas are now farmed in six northern provinces of Laos, in four provinces in the central part of the country, and is four provinces in the south, with other farms growing sugarcane, melon, cabbage, lettuce, and other crops. All use polluting chemicals, sources say. And while banana farming is slowly being phased out in the countrys north, Lao authorities granted a large concession in May to a Vietnamese company growing bananas in southern Laoss Savannakhet province for export to Europe and Russia. Government assurances of protection from chemical pollution at plantations in the south are widely doubted, sources say. Illnesses and deaths have long been reported among Lao workers exposed to chemicals on foreign-owned farms, with many suffering open sores, headaches, and dizzy spells, sources told RFA in earlier reports. Chemical run-off from farms has also polluted many of the countrys water sources, killing fish and other animals and leaving water from local rivers and streams unfit to drink, sources say. Reported by RFAs Lao Service. Translated by Sidney Khotpanya. Written in English by Richard Finney. Myanmar students and Buddhist monks shout slogans during a march to protest a controversial education bill that they say is undemocratic, in the central Myanmar town of Letpadan, March 3, 2015. Student organizations in Myanmar have objected to new restrictions by higher education officials on public speaking on campuses, which they say have been put in place to prevent them from holding political lectures, discussions, and panels, in the latest government assault on freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. The order issued by Myanmars Department of Higher Education, which administers colleges and universities under the Ministry of Education, said students must get permission from rectors and academic presidents to hold events and must provide the titles of talks, the names and biographies of speakers, and the number of invitees and expected attendees. The order was sent to all the countrys degree-granting higher-learning institutions on May 21. In response, the Student Union of the Yangon Institute of Economics issued a statement on Wednesday objecting to the order, arguing that because university students will lead the country in the future, restrictions on their discussions on political affairs run counter to a democratic education. Before, we had to inform the rector if we intended to hold an event, but we now have to submit an application to him with the details, Min Hein Khant, a member of the universitys student union, told RFAs Myanmar Service. The rector has to submit our application to the Higher Education Department, and the HED will decide whether it will allow us to hold the event or not, he said. It will require many steps and will take a long time for an event to be held. If university students cant hold any political activities under the democratic government, then we are worried about whether we are returning to a dictatorship under which we are not allowed to participate in any political activity, he said. Military juntas kept a tight rein on citizens and denied them various freedoms when they ruled Myanmar for 50 years until 2011 when the quasi-civilian government under former President Thein Sein came to power. Student activists fiercely protested his governments overhaul of the education system, arguing that the National Education Law, passed in 2014 and amended in 2015, curtailed academic freedom. The amended version ignored demands by student unions, such as free compulsory education, the right to take classes taught in ethnic minority languages, and a larger budget from the state for education spending. They also opposed a continued lack of autonomy reinforced by rules and regulations overseen by the Department of Higher Education. Hundreds of students protested against the amendments for a month, and nearly 130 were jailed following a violent police crackdown on demonstrators in the central Myanmar town of Letpadan in March 2015.When Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi came to power in 2016, she made their release one of the priorities of the civilian National League for Democracy (NLD) government. Min Hein Khant also said that because students at the Institute of Economics are studying economics as it relates to politics, they must be prepared to make decisions about economic projects based on political situations. If we dont know about politics, we cant do any business, he said. If students cant hold discussions on politics on campus, then we will have less knowledge from academics and outside contributors. The Representative Committee of University Teacher Associations also issued a statement on Wednesday, objecting to the order as a backward move in Myanmars democratic transition and one that will increase central control over students. NLD a military government Hla Shwe, a former student protest leader during the 1962 student demonstration against stricter campus regulations at what was then called Rangoon University, said the latest restrictions are ones that are usually made by military-run governments. In July of that year, the military brutally suppressed a series of marches and rallies by students who also opposed the end of the system of university self-administration and the policies of the new military regime of General Ne Win. We have been suffering from these kinds of restrictions for generations, Hla Shwe said. We have a civilian government now. If the NLD government does exactly what past military governments have done, then we have to conclude that the NLD government is a military government. Ko Ko Gyi, a prominent leader of Myanmars 88 Generation Student democracy movement so named because of its role in the 1988 protests against the military regime, said every university student should have a fundamental understanding of politics. Everybody is involved with politics, he told RFA. Not every university student will become a politician, but every university student should have basic political knowledge. Its a pity that we dont have this kind of freedom when we have our own civilian government, he said. When political leaders make policies about educational freedom, officials in the Education Ministry must release orders within these policies. Thats why it is important to make concrete education policies for higher education departments and university education. Yan Myo Thein, a former member of the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU) noted that students have always been involved in Myanmars politics. Myanmar won independence because university students got involved in politics, he said. Students also led the 1988 uprising as well to change the country. If students didnt get involved in politics, our country still might not be on the path to democracy. The restrictions that university students cant hold political events and cant get involved in politics are not reasonable under a democratic system, he said, adding that the new controls are a barrier to further change in Myanmar. Its like the Ministry of Education is provoking students, said Thiha Thwe, a former member of the Basic Education Students Union, which was popular during the 1988 democracy movement. I thought it even wanted to cause unrest in the country. It makes people think that engaging in politics is a rebellion, just like the previous military governments had brainwashed people into believing. It is not only a bad sign, but also a wrong lead for students when we are building a democratic country, said Thiha Thwe, who is now a Yangon-based journalist for Japanese news agency NHK. Myanmar antiwar activists call on government leaders and others to take action against police who attacked peaceful protesters in Yangon on May 12, at a press conference in the commercial city, May 30 , 2018. RFA Antiwar protesters call for action Aung San Suu Kyi and the ruling NLD have also come under fire in recent months for restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly in the form of arrests and detentions of protestors and others who openly criticize the civilian administration or the still powerful military. Antiwar activists on Wednesday urged Aung San Suu Kyi to take action against police who violently broke up a peaceful rally on May 12 in Yangon during which demonstrators called for an end to civil war in northern Myanmars Kachin state and for officials to rescue civilians trapped in conflict zones. The protest devolved into fistfights between protest organizers and baton-wielding riot police, with civil society organizations and activists accusing police and others in plainclothes of violating demonstrators human rights by attacking them as they started to head home. The Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MHRC), an independent group consisting of 11 retired bureaucrats and academics, is investigating accusations against police and plainclothes individuals to determine whether human rights violations occurred. During a press conference on Wednesday, the antiwar activists said they sent letters requesting that action be taken against police to 14 government officials and organizations, including President Win Myint, Aung San Suu Kyi, parliamentary speakers, Home Affairs Minister Kyaw Swe, and the MHRC. What we want is that government, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Myanmar Police Force take action against the people who committed these crimes against protesters, said peace activist Myat Kyaw. We want it, and we expect it. Authorities have charged 17 protesters under the Peaceful Assembly and Peaceful Procession Law for participating in the 300-strong protest at a traffic circle in the commercial capital. They each face a penalty of one month in prison or a 30,000-kyat (U.S. $22) fine. The protesters first hearing was on May 25 in Bahan Township Court, and their next hearing is scheduled for June 8. Reported by Thet Su Aung, Thinn Thiri, and Thant Zin Oo for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Two Uyghur civil servants in northwest Chinas Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have been jailed for failing to send members of their ethnic group to political re-education camps, according to sources, as part of a crackdown by authorities on so-called two-faced officials. Omerjan Hesen, 34, director of archives for the Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian) prefectural government, and Elijan Ahmet, 35, Chinas ruling Communist Party secretary of Hotans Keriye (Yutian) county government, were handed 11-year jail terms in May last year, a source with connections in the region recently told RFAs Uyghur Service, speaking on condition of anonymity. Both Hesen and Ahmet graduated from Xinjiang University in the capital Urumqi, with degrees in history and business management, respectively, and, after becoming civil servants, were handpicked by their superiors for advancement, based on their proficiency and hard work, the source said. But after XUAR party chief Chen Quanguo was appointed to his post in August 2016, initiating unprecedented repressive measures against the Uyghur people and ideological purges against so-called two-faced Uyghur officials, the source said the two men were targeted for failing to speak out in mobilization meetings against religious extremism and separatism in the region. The term two-faced is regularly applied by the government to Uyghurs who do not willingly follow directives and exhibit signs of disloyalty. The source said that Hesen and Ahmet were eventually tried and convicted for having watched a documentary in English about the June 4, 1989 military crackdown on the student-led pro-democracy movement centered on Tiananmen Square in Beijingdiscussion of which is banned by the government. Officials from the Hotan government Communist Party Committee and the Keriye county government office said they did not know Hesen or Ahmet, or hung up the phone when asked by RFA about their cases. But an official with the United Front Work Department of Hotan confirmed to RFA that the two men had been convicted on the charges in May last year, but that their downfall was a result of their lack of enthusiasm for Chens new policies. They were officially charged and sentenced as two-faced officials for watching a June 4 Tiananmen Massacre video in English online, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. But the real reason for their arrest and sentencing was because they were not proactive in past Strike Hard campaigns, and especially in sending Uyghurs to political detention centers. Beginning in April 2017, Uyghurs accused of harboring strong religious views and politically incorrect views have been jailed or detained in re-education camps throughout the XUAR, where members of the ethnic group have long complained of pervasive discrimination, religious repression, and cultural suppression under Chinese rule. Reports suggest that authorities are detaining as many Uyghurs as possible in re-education camps and jail, regardless of their age, prior service to the Communist Party, or the severity of the accusations against themas part of a bid to satisfy quotas ordered by the regional government. Those who fail to meet the detention quotas face official scrutiny and, in some cases, are sent off to the camps themselves. Party faithful targeted Uyghur sources in exile, who had previously lived in Keriye county, told RFA they were surprised to learn that Hesen and Ahmet had been jailed, but said their cases show that not even those Uyghurs who pledge allegiance to the state are safe from its policies against their ethnic group. A man from the county, who asked to remain unnamed, said he had recently learned of their arrests from friends who still live there. They were well-respected in the community and people looked up to them, so we were saddened to hear this news, he said. In this current political climate, despite not committing any crimes, they were targeted and imprisoned simply because they are Uyghur. Zumuret, a Norway-based political observer who had previously worked in Kiriye, said she knew both men well, and that their jailing had sown fear among local Uyghurs. The government is arresting its own cadres, who they have approved and promoted over the years, so you can imagine what is like for ordinary citizens, she said. Zumuret suggested that the two men were targeted because they had been given access to sensitive information about policies in the XUAR after rising to prominent government positions. It is convenient for the government to accuse them of helping their own people and giving secrets to others, she said, adding that the authorities can easily lock up anyone whom they consider to be a threat to their regime. Simply being Uyghur is becoming a crime. Camp network 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. 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. Last month, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio and U.S. Representative Chris Smiththe chair and co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on Chinacalled on U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad to visit Xinjiang and gather information on the detention of Uyghurs, which they termed "the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today. China regularly conducts strike hard campaigns in Xinjiang, including police raids on Uyghur households, restrictions on Islamic practices, and curbs on the culture and language of the Uyghur people, including videos and other material. While China blames some Uyghurs for "terrorist" attacks, experts outside China say Beijing has exaggerated the threat from the Uyghurs and that repressive domestic policies are responsible for an upsurge in violence there that has left hundreds dead since 2009. Reported by Shohret Hoshur for RFA's Uyghur Service. Translated by RFA's Uyghur Service. Written in English by Joshua Lipes. The killing of Arkady Babchenko did not happen. But youd certainly be forgiven if, in the hours after the first reports emerged late on May 29, you had glimpsed a photograph of his body lying face down in a pool of blood and concluded that this was proof that another Russian reporter had been murdered. he photograph was fake, seemingly part of the elaborate hoax that Ukrainian security officials said was concocted to thwart a murder plot against Babchenko. Who actually took and staged the shot is not known. It's not even certain that it's Babchenko in the photo. But how it came to light and circulated in the hours after the fake killing was reported is a key element of a law enforcement sting that enlisted a former journalist, a Ukrainian lawmaker, and possibly many others. The photo was first published on the Facebook page of a former Ukrainian reporter who says he now works for a shadowy consultancy organization based in the Washington, D.C., area. It quickly circulated among Ukrainian and Russian reporters -- though few, if any, media outlets chose to publish it, mainly due to its gory content. Yevhen Lauer, the reporter who published the photo along with a caption reading Damn It, Bitches, told RFE/RL late on May 29 that he received it from a law enforcement source, whom he declined to identify. Lauer, who has worked for various Ukrainian media outlets in the past, has more recently been affiliated with Trident Group LLC. Based in the Washington suburb of Arlington, the company says it specializes in law enforcement, investigations, intelligence gathering and analysis, conflict prevention and conflict resolution, international risk control, executive protection and special operations. The companys president, Yuri Koshkin, confirmed to RFE/RL that Lauer had done work for Trident but said he knew nothing of Lauers involvement with the SBU sting operation to nab Babchenkos would-be killers. RFE/RL also declined to publish the photograph when it first appeared, not only for the bloody content but also because of concerns about its sourcing. Additional questions were raised about its timing since Ukrainian officials, including a lawmaker, had said that Babchenko had died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, suggesting he was still alive when the photo was taken. In a posting to Facebook, the lawmaker, Anton Herashchenko, defended the secrecy, and the deception, of the SBU, which he said was done to avoid even the slightest possibility of information leaking. It was for this reason that a photo of the alleged victim Arkady Babchenko was made, he wrote. On May 30, after Babchenko appeared at a news conference and Ukraines main security agency, the SBU, revealed a sting operation to arrest the alleged plotter, Lauer declined to answer further questions about his involvement, responding only with a text message of smiley face emojis. He did not respond to further messages sent via Facebook. While Ukrainian officials insisted that the operation succeeded in both preventing Babchenkos killing and uncovering the involvement of Russian intelligence agencies, the hoax more broadly was condemned by many press advocates, who worried about undermining the credibility of both law enforcement agencies and media organizations. All it takes is one case like this to cast doubt on all the other political assassinations," Christophe Deloire of the organization Reporters Without Borders said in a statement. And the faked photograph was already being used by at least one pro-Russia Twitter user on May 30, who made the argument that other photographs could now not be trusted for example, the so-called White Helmet rescuers who aid civilians in war-torn Syria. Ukraine just owned the whole journalism, from now on never trust emotional articles and photos, the user, identified as Antikaratel, wrote. In remarks to reporters, and postings to social media, Babchenko, who fled to Ukraine after receiving death threats in Russia, made no specific comments about the photograph. But he apologized to his wife for what he had put her through and praised SBU officers for their work. And in a posting to Twitter later, Babchenko made clear his opinion of the Russian government. Ive promised to die when Im 96, having danced on Putins grave and taking a selfie while standing on an Abrams [tank] on Tverskoi Boulevard in Moscow, he wrote. I will try to do this. RFE/RL correspondent Christopher Miller contributed to this report from Kyiv The European Union and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) have strongly condemned the reported secret executions of two Belarusians whose appeals had been rejected by the country's Supreme Court. "Two new executions in Belarus, of Viktar Liotau and Alyaksey Mikhalenia, have reportedly taken place in secret in mid-May 2018," the EU foreign-policy chief's spokeswoman, Maja Kocijancic, said in a statement. In January, the Minsk-based Vyasna (Spring) human rights center said Liotau was sentenced to death in September 2017 for murdering his cellmate in a penal colony in Hlybokaye, some 160 kilometers north of Minsk. Mikhalenia was sentenced to death in 2016 for murdering his neighbors, Vyasna said, adding that his appeal to the Supreme Court had been rejected. "The continued application of the death penalty runs counter to [Belarus's] stated willingness to engage with the international community, including the European Union, on the matter and to consider the introduction of a moratorium on its use," Kocijancic said in her statement. She also voiced concern for the death sentences for murder handed down earlier this year to two other Belarusians, Vyachaslau Sukharka, and Alyaksandr Zhylnikau. Kocijancic said the sentences were upheld on May 30 by the Supreme Court. Kocijancic warned that "tangible steps taken by Belarus to respect universal human rights, including on the death penalty, are key for shaping the EU's future policy towards Belarus," and reaffirmed the EU's strong and unequivocal opposition on capital punishment. Yves Cruchten, general rapporteur of PACE on the abolition of the death penalty, and Andrea Rigoni, former PACE rapporteur on Belarus, also condemned the executions, saying that "the secrecy surrounding the execution of the death penalty in Belarus is a particularly disturbing feature." Cruchten and Rigoni urged the Belarusian National Assembly to "consider this issue as a matter of urgency and move towards a moratorium on the executions without further delay." Amnesty International, in its annual report on the capital punishment around the world published last month, noted that it was "particularly concerning" that no notification is being given to family members. "The families of the prisoners only find out about the executions when they go to the prison expecting to visit or to leave parcels for the [detained] relative," Amnesty said. Belarus remains the only country in Europe and Central Asia to carry out the death penalty. In 2017, two people convicted of rape and murder, Syarhey Vostrykau and Kiryl Kazachok, were executed by shooting. The two were put to death in secret, in May and October, respectively, Amnesty said. British-American financier Bill Browder says he has been released by Spanish police after being briefly detained on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. Browder, the founder of Hermitage Capital Management, wrote in a tweet that he was released after Interpol's general secretary in Lyon, France, had instructed Spanish police not to honor Russia's arrest request. Browder said he had flown to Spain to give evidence to "Spanish anti-Russia mafia prosecutor Jose Grinda about the huge amount of money from the Magnitsky case that flowed to Spain." A Spanish national police spokeswoman said Browder had been detained in Madrid and taken to a police station to check on the Interpol warrant but that it was found to be no longer valid. But Browder later said on Twitter that the information provided by the Spanish national police spokeswoman about the warrant was incorrect. "Just to be clear, my arrest this morning in Madrid was the result of a SIXTH Russian arrest warrant using Interpol channels," Browder said. "It was NOT an expired warrant, but a live one. Interpol is incapable of stopping Russian abuse of their systems." Browder has led a global push for sanctions against Russian officials implicated in the death of imprisoned Russian whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky. The latest tweets come just a few hours after Browder had said on Twitter that he had been arrested and was being taken to a police station. Browder was found guilty in absentia by a Moscow court in December of large-scale tax evasion of some 3 billion rubles ($48 million) and sentenced to nine years in prison. He was also fined 200,000 rubles (about $3,500) and banned from conducting business activities in Russia for three years. His lawyers have appealed the verdict. Ivan Cherkasov, Browder's co-defendant, was also given an eight-year sentence in absentia. Browder and Cherkasov live in Britain. Browder has repeatedly dismissed allegations against him as baseless, politically motivated, and revenge for his work to encourage countries to pass legislation similar to the U.S. Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law that imposed visa bans and asset freezes on Russians alleged to be involved in the death of whistle-blowing accountant Magnitsky. At least five other countries have since implemented sanctions based on the Magnitsky Act. In December, Browder called for Interpol to "suspend Russias membership for flagrant abuse of the Interpol system." An attack on Afghanistan's Interior Ministry in Kabul has been repelled with one policeman and all of the attackers being killed in the latest in a series of militant attacks in the city. A suicide bomber blew himself up at the first checkpoint of the Afghan Interior Ministry compound in Kabul before gunmen exchanged fire with the security forces, officials say. The attack, claimed by the Islamic State (IS) extremist group, involved seven gunmen who were killed by security forces, Interior Ministry spokesman Najib Danish told RFE/RL more than an hour after the May 30 assault was launched. One police officer died and six other people were wounded in the attack, he added. "The fighting is over. The attackers have all been killed by security forces between the first and second security perimeter," Kabul police chief Daud Amin said. The assault comes as the Taliban and a local affiliate of the IS group have launched a number of attacks in the Afghan capital in recent months, killing hundreds of people. Also on May 30, officials said at least three Afghan police officers were killed after a group of suicide bombers attacked a police station in the eastern province of Logar. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the group was responsible for the attack, which took place in the province's capital, Pol-e Alam. Khalid Safi, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said the slain policemen included the commander of the police station, another officer, and the deputy director of traffic police for the provincial capital. Twelve other people, including four police officers and eight civilians, were wounded in the attack, provincial police chief Mohmmad Abdali told RFE/RL. Some reports said a total of six police officers were killed in the attack, which began when a suicide bomber detonated a vehicle full of explosives close to the police building. Three would-be suicide bombers then tried to enter the compound, but were shot and killed by security forces. A number of civilians' houses were reportedly damaged by the car bomb. Meanwhile, in the southern city of Kandahar, three civilians were killed and at least 10 others wounded by a May 30 explosion that appeared to have targeted a mechanic's workshop repairing Afghan National Army vehicles, a spokesman for the provincial governor said. Six of those injured are in critical condition, according to the spokesman, Daud Ahmadi. No group has yet claimed responsibility for that attack. The Taliban has stepped up its attacks against Afghan security forces as well as government officials across the country since the announcement of its spring offensive in April. The Western-backed government in Kabul has been struggling to fend off the Taliban and other militant groups since the withdrawal of most NATO troops in 2014. With reporting by AP, AFP, and Reuters Criticizing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is widely seen as among Iran's so-called red lines. Dozens of intellectuals, activists, and politicians have been sidelined, harassed, or jailed for challenging the man who holds the final political and religious say in the Islamic republic. Yet earlier this week, a female student rose in Khamenei's presence to harshly criticize the state of affairs in the country, including actions by powerful bodies controlled by the Iranian leader that have been cited by critics as major barriers to reform. Sahar Mehrabi called for "deepening democracy" in Iran in the May 28 speech, delivered at an annual Iftar gathering that Khamenei holds to celebrate the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan. Mehrabi offered a list of "numerous crises" facing the country, including increasing social inequality, declining public trust, environmental problems, and discrimination against minorities. She asked Khamenei what he would do to tackle those issues. She indirectly pointed the finger at the supreme leader, noting that the bodies under his watch are virtually untouchable. "The impossibility of conducting investigations into the work of some of the institutions under the supervision of Your Excellency, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the judiciary, the state broadcaster, and the Mostazafan Foundation" -- a reference to one of Iran's largest foundations -- "is in itself problematic," Mehrabi said. At the meeting, Khamenei responded that while he appoints the heads of some of those powerful bodies, including the judiciary and the state broadcasters, he does not specifically manage their work. "For example, regarding the state broadcaster, I've always had and still have a critical position vis-a-vis both current and past managements," he said. Seemingly acknowledging other problems, Khamenei added that "taking all issues into consideration, I believe the Islamic establishment has made progress in the past 40 years in all its ideals." Mehrabi also echoed some of the positions espoused by relative moderate President Hassan Rohani, criticizing Iran's aggressive Internet censorship, pressure on the press, the arrest of students, what she described as a crackdown on women "under the pretense of guiding them," and the situation of opposition figures Mir Hossein Musavi and his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, along with reformist cleric Mehdi Karrubi, who have been under house arrest since 2011 for challenging the Iranian establishment. "What answer does Your Excellency have in response to questions, criticisms, and protests?" Mehrabi asked. She suggested that the only way forward is a return to law and the country's constitution "with all its articles." "The solution is to accept the right of the people to determine their fate and to be allowed to participate in their political, social, and economic life," Mehrabi said. Mehrabi added that no hope lies in the Iranian expat groups calling for regime change in Iran. Regime Change Needed? Monarchists and others have intensified their demand for an end to Islamic rule in Iran just as the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has pushed a tougher line toward Iran, including by abandoning the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers trading curbs on Iran's atomic activities for an easing of international sanctions. Some analysts interpreted a recent speech by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in which he made 12 demands on Tehran, including ending all nuclear enrichment and ending its support for proxy groups, as a return to U.S. calls for regime change in Iran. Pompeo has said that regime change is not a U.S. aim in Iran. In her speech, Mehrabi said the answers to Iran's problem lie "within the Islamic republic." "In our view, the solution is the deepening of democracy -- democracy based on all people, all minority, workers, teachers, students, the forgotten layers of society,... and the poor," she said. Khamenei later added via Twitter: "I [understand] the feelings of that young person who says the situation is very bad. But I don't support her comments at all." Mehrabi's speech was praised by an editor of the hard-line Tasnim news agency, which is affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, as "the peak of democracy" in Iran. Others challenged such a claim, complaining that so long as media outlets are being shuttered, students banned from studies, and state broadcasters made to reflect the views of hard-liners, there cannot be talk of genuine democracy in Iran. Mehrabi's criticisms came amid frustration over the state of the economy, which sparked nationwide protests in December and January that quickly turned into protests against the Iranian establishment and the 78-year-old Khamenei himself. A Kazakh-born computer hacker who U.S. prosecutors say unwittingly worked with a Russian spy agency in a massive Yahoo data breach has been sentenced to five years in prison. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria also fined Karim Baratov $250,000 during a sentencing hearing in San Francisco on May 29. Baratov was named in an indictment last year that charged two Russian spies with orchestrating the 2014 Yahoo breach involving 500 million users -- one of the largest breaches at any Internet company. 'Hacker For Hire' Baratov, who was born in Kazakhstan but most recently resided in Toronto, Canada, was charged with using the stolen data allegedly passed to him by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) to hack dozens of e-mail accounts belonging to journalists, government officials, and business leaders. He pleaded guilty in November to nine felony hacking charges. His guilty plea at the time spurred speculation that he might cooperate with U.S. prosecutors in pursuing the Russian spies. U.S. attorneys are also investigating the role of Russian intelligence agencies in hacking U.S. political party computers during the 2016 presidential election. But on May 29, prosecutors said Baratov, 23, was an "international hacker for hire" who did little or no research on his Russian clients and apparently was unknowingly used by them. Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers said at Baratov's sentencing that the case will nevertheless set an example for anyone contemplating such indiscriminate hacking in the future. "Criminal hackers and the countries that sponsor them make a grave mistake when they target American companies and citizens. We will identify them wherever they are and bring them to justice," he said. Baratov was extradited from Canada last year to face charges in the United States. The two Russian spies charged by the U.S. Justice Department with orchestrating the massive 2014 security breach at Yahoo were identified in court documents as Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev and Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin. They remain at large. Prosecutors said they believe the two are living in Russia, which doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States. RFE/RL has reported that Dokuchaev was a deputy chief at the Center for Information Security of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). He was one of several officials arrested in Moscow last year on treason charges for allegedly passing classified information to Western intelligence agencies. Prosecutors said the Russian security service officials in 2014 paid Baratov to target dozens of e-mail accounts using information obtained from the Yahoo hack. Prosecutors said "the targeted victims were of interest to Russian intelligence" and included "prominent leaders in the commercial industries and senior government officials of Russia and countries bordering Russia." Baratov and his attorneys claimed that his work with the Russia spy agency was unwitting. He is believed to have collected more than $1.1 million in fees from the agency, which he used to buy a house and expensive cars. In his plea agreement, Baratov acknowledged that he began hacking as a teen seven years ago and admitted to charging customers $100 to obtain an unsuspecting person's web-mail passwords by tricking them to enter their credentials into a fake password reset page. Prosecutors said in court papers that Baratov's Russian-language web site -- dubbed "webhacker" -- advertised services for "hacking of e-mail accounts without prepayment." In court documents, Baratov claimed he could access web-mail accounts maintained by Google and Russian providers such as Mail.Ru and Yandex. He would provide his customers with a screenshot of the hacked account and promised he could change security questions so they could maintain control of the account. In deciding the length of Baratov's jail sentence, Judge Chhabria said that "deterrence is particularly important in a case like this." But he rejected prosecutors' call for a prison sentence of nearly 10 years, noting Baratov's young age and clean criminal record prior to his arrest. Baratov, who has been in custody since his arrest, told the judge that his time behind bars had been "a very humbling and eye-opening experience." He apologized and promised "to be a better man" and obey the law upon his release. The judge said it is likely Baratov will be deported once he is released from prison. With reporting by AP, AFP, and Reuters The Kremlin has expressed concern over reports that Poland has requested a permanent U.S. military presence on its soil, saying NATO's expansion towards Russia's borders undermines stability in Europe. A top Polish national security official confirmed the proposal on May 29 and said Warsaw is willing to help Washington defray the costs of stationing troops in Poland by spending up to $2 billion on the infrastructure needed to support such a military presence. Asked about the move, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was every country's sovereign right to make such decisions, but he said it would prompt a Russian countermove and further roil relations between Moscow and the West. "When we see the gradual expansion of NATO military structures towards our borders...this of course in no way creates security and stability on the continent," Peskov told reporters in a conference call late on May 28. "On the contrary, these expansionist actions of course lead to counteraction from the Russian side in order to balance the parity which is violated every time in this way," Peskov said. The head of the Polish presidency's national security office, Pawel Soloch, confirmed in a television interview on May 29 that Poland's Defense Ministry had sent a proposal to permanently station U.S. troops on Polish soil to Congress, governmental institutions, and think-tanks. "Yes, we are interested in the presence of American forces in our country, and we have submitted -- including to think tanks -- some options that we could offer if such decisions were adopted," Soloch said. Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014 have raised concerns in Poland and other NATO member countries that border Russia. Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters BISHKEK -- Kyrgyz authorities have charged former Prime Minister Sapar Isakov of corruption in a case related to modernization work at a power plant in the capital, Bishkek. The announcement was made after the State Committee for National Security (UKMK) summoned Isakov on May 29 for a third time in the case since his cabinet was dismissed last month following a no-confidence vote. After almost six hours of interrogation in Bishkek, UKMK official Rakhat Sulaimanov said Isakov was indicted and barred from leaving Kyrgyzstan. Isakov expressed "shock" and claimed innocence, describing the case against him as "completely illegal." He also denounced a campaign in social networks and the media aimed at denigrating his name. The charge stems back to 2013, when Isakov was implementing a project to modernize the Bishkek Thermal Power Station while serving as deputy head of the administration of President Almazbek Atambaev. He is accused of using his position to lobby for the interests of a Chinese company in the selection process to find a contractor for the modernization of the power plant, inflicting great damage on the Kyrgyz state and society. The Chinese company TBEA has been selected as the winner of the tender. The case was launched after an accident at the Bishkek power station in January left thousands of households in the capital without heat for several days last winter. Isakov had suggested he believed the state may mount a corruption case against former officials over the heating outages, but said Atambaev and his team had worked in a clean way, with no corruption whatsoever." The 41-year-old is considered to be a close associate of Atambaev. The pressure on Isakov was seen as one of several examples of an ongoing rift between President Sooronbai Jeenbekov and his predecessor, Atambaev, who backed Jeenbekov in the October presidential election but has criticized him in recent weeks. Last month, Jeenbekov fired several Atambaev allies, including Prosecutor-General Indira Joldubaeva and UKMK head Abdil Segizbaev, who had been criticized for a crackdown on opposition politicians and independent journalists. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have spoken by telephone for the first time since Pompeo was sworn into office on April 26. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the two discussed issues and concerns related to U.S.-Russian relations. Nauert also said the two discussed the wars in Ukraine and Syria. A Russian Foreign Ministry statement said the talks on Ukraine and Syria focused on efforts to settle the conflicts and overcome the conflict in Ukraine on the basis of the Minsk Agreements of 2015. Nauert said Pompeo reiterated to Lavrov that Washington wants improved relations with Russia. But she said Pompeo told Lavrov that achieving better relations will require Russia to demonstrate that it is prepared to take concrete actions to address our concerns, including Russian interference in U.S. domestic matters. Russias Foreign Ministry said Pompeo and Lavrov agreed that it is necessary to work on accomplishing the objectives set in a telephone conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump. It said the goal should be to settle the existing disagreements through a professional dialogue in order to normalize the environment of Russia-U.S. interaction. With reporting by Reuters, AP, Interfax, and TASS KYIV -- Ukrainian security officials said they faked the death of a dissident Russian journalist in an effort to catch people it says were involved in a Russian plot to kill him. Vasyl Hrytsak, the head of Ukraines Security Service (SBU), shocked reporters at the SBU headquarters in Kyiv on May 30 when he announced that journalist and Kremlin critic Arkady Babchenko was still alive, a day after Ukrainian authorities announced he had been killed by a gunman outside of his Kyiv apartment. Hrytsak told reporters that Ukrainian intelligence sources learned that Russia's security services had ordered the killing of Babchenko several months earlier. Hrytsak also said a suspected organizer of an attempted murder plot against Babchenko, identified as a Ukrainian national, was detained as a result of a "special operation" by the SBU. "We have prevented an attempted murder of Babchenko by carrying out a special operation," Hrytsak said on May 30. "Thanks to this operation, we were able to foil a cynical plot and document how the Russian security service was planning for this crime." Babchenko made a dramatic appearance at the live May 30 television briefing after Hrytsak's announcement, saying the fictitious reports of his death were part of an SBU operation that had been prepared for two months. "As far as I know, this operation was prepared for two months. A result of that was this special operation," Babchenko told the briefing. "They saved my life. I want to say thanks. Larger terrorist attacks were prevented." Babchenko did not specify what those other planned attacks were. But Hrytsak said the SBU had received information about a plot to kill 30 people in Ukraine, including Babchenko. The security service declined to say who the other 29 people were. Hrytsak said the detained Ukrainian citizen in the case -- a former separatist fighter in eastern Ukraine -- had been recruited by Russia to find someone to kill Babchenko. The SBU said the Ukrainian suspect was given $40,000 to organize the killing of Babchenko -- $30,000 for the killer and $10,000 for being an intermediary. "It is known that once the killing was done, [the suspect] was planning to leave UkraineHe was planning to travel to Russia via a third country," Hrytsak said. "We managed not only to break this cynical provocation but also to document the preparation of this shameful crime by Russian special services," he added. Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko, who appeared alongside Babchenko at the May 30 press briefing, said it was necessary to fake the journalist's death so that the organizers of the plot to kill him would believe they had succeeded. Babchenko said he had no choice but to take part in the operation. "I did my job. I'm still alive," Babchenko said. "I would like to apologize for what you have all had to go through," said Babchenko, who broke into tears at times. "I'm sorry, but there was no other way of doing it. Separately, I want to apologize to my wife for the hell that she has been through." Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said his government would provide round-the-clock protection to Babchenko and his family and called the security services' effort a "brilliant operation." "Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are becoming stronger every day in countering Russian aggression," Poroshenko said on Twitter. "It is unlikely that Moscow will calm down -- I've given an order to provide Arkady and his family with protection." Meanwhile, the Reporters Without Borders media watchdog criticized Ukrainian authorities for staging Babchenko's death, saying it "would not help the cause of press freedom." "It is pathetic and regrettable that the Ukrainian police have played with the truth, whatever their motive...for the stunt," Christophe Deloire, the head of the group, said. All it takes is one case like this to cast doubt on all the other political assassinations," he said, referring to the deaths and attempted assassinations of several Kremlin critics outside of Russia in recent years. The faked death was also condemned by Harlem Desir, the media freedom representative at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). "I deplore the decision to spread false information on the life of a journalist," Desir said in a Twitter statement on May 30. "It is the duty of the state to provide correct information to the public." Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said after Babchenkos reappearance on May 30 that officials in Moscow were glad Babchenko was still alive. But Zakharova said Ukrainian officials had circulated a false story as propaganda. Transcript: Arkady Babchenko's Remarks After SBU Sting Operation Transcript: Arkady Babchenko's Remarks After SBU Sting Operation (Edited) "First, Id like to apologize for everything youve had to go through. Ive been at the funeral of many friends and colleagues, and I know this nauseous feeling. Sorry for imposing this upon you, but there was no other way. "Special apologies to my wife for the hell shes been through these two days. Olya, excuse me, please, but there was no other option. "Id also like to thank the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) for saving my life. ... This operation has been prepared for two months. I was told about this a month ago. ... "A week or two ago, Russia announced that [Islamic State] were preparing terrorist attacks before the Champions League [final in Kyiv]. I think it was going to be my [assassination]. ... "What else to say? As I said, two months ago I was approached and told that my assassination has been commissioned and money allocated. Forty-thousand dollars. It turns out Im quite valuable!" (Translated by Petr Serebryani) Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that he had only seen media reports so far and otherwise had "no information on the matter." He said he did not know "who is doing the accusing and what the accusations are...I cannot say anything," Peskov said. Kyiv police and officials from Ukraines Interior Ministry had announced on May 29 that Babchenko had died in an ambulance on the way to a hospital after being shot in the back at his Kyiv apartment, where he has lived in exile since August 2017. Reports of the 41-year-old's supposed death had stunned colleagues and added to tension between Moscow and Kyiv, whose ties have been badly damaged by Russia's seizure of Crimea and backing for separatist militants in a devastating war in eastern Ukraine. In a post to Facebook just hours after news of Babchenko's death emerged, Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman said, "I am convinced that the Russian totalitarian machine could not forgive his honesty and principled position." Before Babchenko's dramatic reappearance on May 30, Peskov said allegations of a Russian assassination plan were part of an anti-Russia smear campaign. Aleksandr Bortnikov, the head of Russias Federal Security Service (FSB), also said Ukrainian allegations of an FSB plot were nonsense and a provocation. Babchenko is well-known for his criticism of the Kremlin. His reporting about Moscow's support for pro-Russia separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine brought him severe criticism by Russian state media and from Russian officials. Babchenko told RFE/RL in December 2016 that "all of the elements" of Russia's state "propaganda machine" were engaged against him after he posted comments to Facebook about the crash of a Russian military plane in the Black Sea. All 92 people on board were killed, including members of the Russian Armys renowned choir, the Aleksandrov Ensemble, who were traveling to give a performance for Russian troops in Syria. Babchenko said the reaction by state officials and state media to his remarks was intended to send a signal to Russian society that "we must be in one line; we must express sadness; we must appear sad -- and anyone who doesnt must be destroyed." 'Forced To Flee' Babchenko told RFE/RL in late 2016 that State Duma Deputy Vitaly Milonov, Federation Council member Frants Klintsevich, and Russian media like Channel One and Life News were "stitching together some fake news" about him. Babchenko said: "A major effort is being organized. They arent investigating why the plane crashed but instead are persecuting me." In February 2017, writing for Britains The Guardian newspaper, Babchenko said: "I can tell you what political harassment feels like in [President Vladimir] Putin's Russia. Like many dissidents I am used to abuse, but a recent campaign against me was so personal, so scary, that I was forced to flee." Babchenko served in the Russian Army during the first separatist war in Chechnya in the 1990s before he became a journalist. He worked as a military correspondent and wrote for several Russian media organizations, including the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily newspaper and Novaya Gazeta, as well as TV Tsentr, and Channel One TV. He had been scathingly critical of the Kremlin in recent years. He moved to Kyiv in the autumn of 2017, where he worked as a host for the Crimean Tatar TV station, ATR. With reporting by Reuters, AP, AFP, Interfax, and TASS Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev says that talks between Macedonia and neighboring Greece on his countrys name are in a final phase, adding that a referendum on whatever solution is found will be held in the autumn. Today, tomorrow, or on Friday at the latest, I will speak with [Greek Prime Minister Alexis] Tsipras, after which I expect a breakthrough in the talks, Zaev said on May 30 at a news conference marking one year since he took office. The name dispute between Macedonia and Greece dates back to 1991, when Skopje declared independence following the collapse of communist Yugoslavia. Athens objects to Macedonia's name because it has a northern province called Macedonia and fears it may imply territorial ambitions. The dispute has hampered Macedonia's ambitions to join both the European Union and NATO. Zaev did not reveal any details about the possible compromise name or names that are currently on the table, but said that in any case Macedonias identity would be protected. Any new name for his country that is agreed with Greece will be put to a referendum to be held in September or October, when we expect the citizens to give us directions for our future moves, he also said. Before the referendum is held, Zaev said the expected agreement would be put to parliament for ratification in order to allow Greece to lift its blockade in NATO ahead of the military alliances summit in July. Greece has said it is prepared to lift its objection to Macedonia's membership in NATO if an agreement on the name issue can be reached. After meeting in Brussels on May 28, the foreign ministers of Greece and Macedonia said that they have completed the main round of negotiations on the contentious issue and were ready to hand the final stage over to the countries' prime ministers. With reporting by AP and Balkan Insight Residents of Turkmenistan's northern Dashoguz Province are being sent back out into the fields, although this time they're neither sowing nor harvesting. They're trying to save the crops from withering. High winds picked up dust and salt from the desiccated Aral Sea on May 26-27 and blew it all over northern and eastern Turkmenistan, as well as Uzbekistan's western Bukhara, Khorezm, and Navoi provinces and its Karakalpakstan Autonomous Republic. Images captured after the storm resemble winter scenes of a light snowfall blanketing cars, roads, and vegetation. But it's salt, in some places a centimeter thick. Eighty-year-old Temirbek bobo, a pensioner in Karakalpakstan, told RFE/RL's Uzbek Service, known locally as Ozodlik, he had never seen anything like it. He couldn't have. There's never been anything in the region like this salt storm. And unfortunately, it may well happen again. A correspondent for RFE/RL's Turkmen Service, known locally as Azatlyk, said authorities in Dashoguz were pressing "teachers and [other] state employees" out into the fields at daybreak on May 29 to remove as much of the salt as possible from fruits and vegetables, and wheat and cotton fields. The only means they have is reportedly to wash it off, which cleans the crop but deposits the salt into the soil. The same is likely to be happening in Lebap Province. There have been shortages of basic goods, notably flour, in Turkmenistan since autumn 2016. The country is experiencing its worst economic crisis since it became independent in late 1991. It may therefore lack the money to carry out the sort of decontamination work that the fields of Dashoguz and Lebap need to yield any kind of a decent harvest. But Turkmenistan also cannot afford to lose the crops in two of its five provinces. Dashoguz was already in bad shape. The Alternative Turkmenistan News website reported in April that salt was accumulating on the surface of the ground there. This storm has compounded an existing problem. But Turkmenistan's government also appears to be employing a default tactic when faced with a crisis: Don't talk about it. There has been no official acknowledgement of this freak storm or its negative effects, and no request for outside help. (Authorities in Turkmenistan have declared this an Era of Happiness. If there's never any bad news, there's never any reason to ask for help from abroad.) But there is no reason to believe that Turkmen authorities bear responsibility for this dust-salt storm. A Glimpse Of The Future? It is the likely result of the environmental disaster that is the Aral Sea, located several hundred kilometers north of Turkmenistan along the Uzbek-Kazakh border. Seventy-five years ago, it was the fourth-largest saline lake in the world; but less than 10 percent of it remains, due in large part to the overuse of rivers that once fed the Aral Sea. In its place is a large area of alkaline soil and salt. Kazakhstan has successfully stemmed the desiccation in its part of the Aral, but Uzbekistan's section continues to dry up. The Central Asian states have vowed many times to work together to save the Aral Sea, most recently on March 15 at a Central Asian summit in Astana. But it continues to shrink. It's certainly a problem that all five countries share. Small amounts of salt from this latest storm reached all the way to Bishkek, in Kyrgyzstan, some 1,000 kilometers to the east. Much of the Aral Sea once covered the area now called Karakalpakstan. People of that region suffer from an assortment of maladies that many blame on the ecological circumstances -- respiratory and diarrheal disease, for example, higher-than-normal maternal- and infant-mortality rates, and psychological problems associated with decreasing opportunities in an area that is becoming less habitable. That might be the future for more areas in Central Asia. The storm was one of the clearest signs so far of what awaits the western regions of Central Asia if nothing is done to reverse the process of the drying Aral Sea. High winds are not new to this region, but salt storms are. This latest event suggests the desiccation of the Aral Sea has reached a point where the resulting salt can easily be whipped up by dust storms and dumped onto fields and orchards hundreds of kilometers away. So Dashoguz marks a new phase in one of the first battles in a long war. Dashoguz is located in the northern part of the Karakum (Garagum) Desert. Agriculture there faces challenges at the best of times. With little water and temperatures already exceeding 40 degrees Celsius, the salt on and in the ground is going to take a toll on crops, leaving many in Turkmenistan hungrier. It's Turkmenistan's problem today. But it will increasingly be one for all of Central Asia. Azatlyk and Ozodlik contributed to this report. The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL The Pakistani and Indian militaries say they have agreed to deescalate tensions along the Line of Control (LoC) that divides the disputed region of Kashmir, where exchanges of fire between the two neighbors have killed dozens of civilians and soldiers since the beginning of the year. The understanding was reached during a special hotline contact involving the director-generals of military operations, the two armies said in almost identical statements late on May 29 -- in what Pakistan's Dawn newspaper described as an "unprecedented" move. In their statement, the Pakistani and Indian armies said both sides agreed to fully implement the 2003 truce agreement between the nuclear-armed rivals "in letter and spirit forthwith and to ensure that henceforth the cease-fire will not be violated by both sides." The Himalayan region of Kashmir has been divided between Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947. Both claim the region in its entirety and have fought two wars over it. The two neighbors regularly accuse one another of violating the 2003 cease-fire accord, with cross-border fire frequently resulting in the deaths of civilians and soldiers on both sides. Fighting along the LoC and elsewhere has left 28 Pakistani civilians dead over the past five months, according to Dawn. A number of Pakistani soldiers were also killed, but the military has not yet released the casualty figure. Based on reporting by AP and Dawn Unknown gunmen riding on a motorcycle have shot and killed a respected member of Pakistans Sikh minority, officials say. The funeral of Charanjit Singh was held on May 30, a day after he was killed inside his general store on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Peshawar. The gunmen managed to flee after the attack, which was not claimed by any group. Sikh elder Baba Amarjit Singh said Charanjit, 52, was a social worker who actively worked to improve interfaith relations. He was also described as a vocal supporter of the Pakistani military's efforts to crack down on Islamic extremists. Hindu leader Haroon Sarabdayal said he believed the attack against Charanjit was a targeted killing "since he did not have a feud with anyone." Most Sikhs went to India during the bloody partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, with only a few thousand remaining in Pakistan. With reporting by AP and The Express Tribune Russia has rejected calls at the United Nations to accept responsibility for the downing of Flight MH17 over Ukraine after an investigation found that a Russian Army missile caused the explosion that killed all 298 people on board. At a UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine late on May 29, Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok called on Moscow to accept the findings of a Dutch-led investigative team that the airliner was shot down by a Russian-made Buk missile provided by Russia's 53rd Antiaircraft Missile Brigade based in the city of Kursk. "The language of ultimatums is not something that anyone will be allowed to use when speaking to Russia," Russia's UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya responded. "We cannot accept the unfounded conclusion of the JIT," he said, referring to the Dutch-led Joint investigation Team. Separately, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on a visit to Minsk on May 29 also rejected what he called "ultimatums" from the Netherlands and Australia over compensation for relatives of people killed in the incident. All of the passengers and crew -- mostly Malaysians, Dutch, and Australians -- were killed when the missile slammed into the Malaysian Airlines flight en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur as it flew over territory held by pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine in July 2014. Russia has claimed that the investigation led by the Dutch government, working in cooperation with the Australian, Ukrainian, and Malaysian governments, was not legitimate because Russia was not included as an equal partner in the investigation. 'Transparent Denials' Moscow claims that the JIT ignored evidence provided by Russia and, for that reason, it has refused to cooperate with the investigation. "We are outraged by this terrible incident," Nebenzya said. "We insist on holding a trustworthy investigation. The true culprits should be determined on the basis of factual evidence and brought to justice." But the Dutch foreign minister, responding to Nebenzya, pointed out that Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an independent investigation of the incident. It is "very disappointing" that Russia won't acknowledge the "irrefutable evidence," Blok said. "So far, Russian authorities don't show the slightest interest in achieving truth, justice, and accountability." U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley voiced strong support for the Dutch and Australian demands that Russia acknowledge its role in the tragedy and help bring to justice those responsible for the shooting down of the plane. Haley said Moscow's denials are linked to its refusal to acknowledge Russia's involvement in the Ukrainian conflict by providing weapons such as Buk missiles to Ukrainian separatists. "Despite its transparent denials, there is no doubt Russia is driving the Ukrainian conflict," said Haley. More than 10,300 people have been killed since the conflict in eastern Ukraine broke out in April 2014 following Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told the council that Russia's rejection of the findings "did not surprise me at all." "We have no doubt that the downing of MH17 flight is a terrorist act," he said. Ukraine will present documents to the International Court of Justice next month showing that Russia was violating antiterrorism agreements, he added. Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz renewed his call for a peacekeeping mission to be deployed to east Ukraine and urged Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to appoint a UN special envoy for Ukraine. Diplomats said Russia, a veto-wielding power at the council, has blocked attempts to step up UN involvement in efforts to end the conflict. With reporting by AFP, Reuters, and TASS Exiled politician Mikheil Saakashvili is calling on European nations to impose sanctions on Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his inner circle for allegedly violating his human rights. Saakashvili on May 29 charged that Poroshenko, a former political ally who made him governor of Odesa before they parted ways over allegations of corruption in the government, breached international law by stripping him of his Ukrainian citizenship and kicking him out of the country in February. Speaking in the Netherlands, where he has been residing along with his Dutch wife and two sons, Saakashvili said sanctions should be used not only to push Poroshenko to restore his Ukrainian citizenship, but to target assets that he alleged Ukraine's leaders have obtained illegally. "We are looking for their assets across Europe to impound them, because they were stolen from the Ukrainian people," Saakashvili said. Saakashvili's British lawyer Geoffrey Robertson said he cannot take his case to European courts until he has exhausted his options in Ukraine's slow-moving judicial system. From 2004 to 2013, Saakashvili was president of Georgia, where he faces abuse of power charges that he strongly denies. After leaving Georgia, Poroshenko took him in as an ally, but Saakashvili resigned his Odesa governorship, charging that Poroshenko had failed to stem corruption in the government. Last year, Saakashvili lead antigovernment, anticorruption street protests before he was forced to leave the country. Saakashvili was detained at a restaurant in Kyiv by armed, masked men and deported to Poland. Robertson said Saakashvili would like to return to Ukraine to lead his political party in next year's presidential election. "I don't have personal ambitions," Saakashvili said. "But I have ambition to help Ukrainian democracy, to help Ukraine in the corruption fight." Based on reporting by AP and AFP WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Treasury has imposed sanctions on six Iranians and three Iran-based entities, including the notorious Evin prison in Tehran, for human rights abuses and other ill-treatment of Iranian citizens. The Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on May 30 said that along with the prison, sanctions were imposed against the Ansar-e Hizbullah organization and the Hanista Programing Group. "Todays actions target the Iranian regimes repression of its own people and the suppression of their freedoms of speech, expression, and peaceful assembly," the Treasury said. Under OFAC regulations, sanctions generally make it more difficult for a person or organization to interact with U.S. and foreign financial institutions. The Treasury had previously sanctioned the Tehran Prisons Organization and a top official in connection with "serious human rights abuses" in Iran, including at its Evin prison. In its latest statement, the Treasury said "prisoners held at Evin prison are subject to brutal tactics inflicted by prison authorities, including sexual assaults, physical assaults, and electric shock." At least three of the individuals facing the new sanctions were listed as having links to Hizbullah, also identified as Ansar-I Hizbullah and Supporters of the Party of God, "for its role in serious human rights abuses in Iran." "Ansar-e Hizbullah has been involved in the violent suppression of Iranian citizens and has collaborated with the Basij [paramilitary force] to violently attack Iranian students with knives, tear gas, and electric batons," it said. It also linked the group to "acid attacks" against women in the city of Isfahan. Abdolhamid Mohtasham, a founding member and key leader of the group, was also sanctioned, the Treasury said. The statement said Hanista Programing Group was responsible for "the operation of information and communications technology that facilitates computer or network disruption, monitoring, or tracking that could assist in or enable serious human rights abuses by or on behalf of the government of Iran." The latest move comes some three weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and vowed to reinstitute tough sanctions against Iran. On May 24, the Treasury said it was imposing sanctions on nine Iranian individuals and entities for helping to supply export-controlled parts and services to sanctioned Iranian airlines. Two days before that, the Treasury announced sanctions targeting Iranian officials associated with the hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force and Irans ballistic-missile programs. Ukraine's Naftogaz company has begun the process of trying to recover the billions of dollars it is owed by Russia's giant state-controlled gas monopoly, Gazprom, due to an arbitration-court verdict. Naftogaz said on May 30 that it was seeking to legally acquire Gazprom shares of stock and other assets in European countries to gain some of the $2.6 billion from Gazprom that Naftogaz was awarded in March by the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce. Naftogaz said it was working in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Britain to gain Gazprom assets in those countries. Gazprom -- which has thus far refused to pay the award -- has pledged to challenge the attempts to acquire its assets in court by making counterclaims against Naftogaz. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Facebook that he ordered Naftogaz to expand its efforts to other European countries in an effort to recoup the award from Gazprom. "The process of the enforcement of recovery of $2.6 billion from Gazprom has been moved to practice," he said, adding that he had held a meeting with Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolev. "My clear order is that we must not stop on these three countries and do our best to ensure the arrival of awarded funds to Ukraine." Poroshenko said the assets Naftogaz would seek to acquire would include shares in the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipelines. "I do not exclude including the shares of Nord Stream, Nord Stream 2, and cash that have high liquidity and will quickly ensure implementation of the decisions," Poroshenko said. Jens Mueller, a Nord Stream 2 spokesman, said on May 30 that a freezing of the company's shares would not affect its operations. He said Nord Stream 2 headquarters in Zug, Switzerland, had the previous day received a "freezing order in respect to claims of debts against Gazprom." "We don't comment on details of this legal procedure. It doesn't have an impact on the Nord Stream 2 project," Mueller said. The Swedish arbitration court's decision awarded Naftogaz $2.56 billion, but nearly $50 million more has been added to the award in interest because of Gazprom's failure to pay the award. Gazprom and Naftogaz filed multibillion-dollar cases against each in the Swedish court in 2014. Naftogaz has argued it was owed compensation from Gazprom due to the Russian firm's failure to send certain quantities of gas annually, as contractually agreed, and of paying Naftogaz too little for the gas that transited through the Ukrainian company's pipelines. With reporting by Interfax-Ukraine and TASS KYIV -- Outside the apartment where Arkady Babchenko wasnt killed, people wept as though he was. They brought flowers to a makeshift memorial to honor the famed Russian reporter who was, in fact, not dead. But they hadnt been told that yet. Nobody had. Ukrainian security officials had announced late on May 29 that Babchenko, a fierce critic of the Kremlin and a veteran Russian war correspondent, had been killed -- shot three times in the back as he returned to his Kyiv apartment after buying bread. Less than 20 hours later, officials revealed he was, in fact, alive, and that his death had been staged as part of a sting to thwart an alleged assassination plot. The initial news sent shock waves across Ukraine and Russia, where dozens of journalists have been targeted for assassination for their work. The later news that it was fake sent yet more shock waves, including for those who were still mourning Babchenko. Olha, a pensioner who lives in a sixth-floor apartment across the hall from Babchenko, said she had spent much of the day crying, speaking to journalists, and being questioned by police, who asked what she might have seen or heard. When she turned on a broadcast of the press conference at which Ukrainian officials revealed the hoax, and Babchenko himself appeared, she couldnt believe her eyes. Thank God hes alive, she said, wiping tears from her eyes and hugging a visiting reporter. Are you sure its true? What about the blood? For much of the night after reports of Babchenkos death were announced, and into the following day, people gathered in the apartment building's courtyard to place flowers and photographs and to mourn the reporter. Others like Olha were still frightened that the alleged killer was still at large and asked that their names not be revealed. Yulia Volodymyrivna, Babchenkos downstairs neighbor, said she was terrified by reports that a gunman had been in the building. She said the sound of three bullets being fired into the back of Babchenko had been stuck in her mind since the previous evening. She also admitted to hearing no such shots. The initial reports of Babchenkos death reverberated in the Russian capital, where friends and fans gathered at the Moscow bridge where Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down in 2015. In Kyiv, Ukrainian and Kyiv-based journalists mourned Babchenko and then began interviewing witnesses and gathering security video from businesses and residences in the area, in an effort to help solve his would-be murder. It was an effort born out of frustration with the death of another reporter, Pavel Sheremet, who died in a July 2016 car bombing in Kyiv. At the news conference in Kyiv where they revealed the plot, Babchenko emerged to gasps and applause from reporters, who were dumbstruck by the news. The chief of Ukraine's security service (SBU), Vasiliy Hrytsak, defended the need for deception, telling reporters it had helped the agency identify and catch the person who he said had promised a Ukrainian war veteran $30,000 to assassinate Babchenko. A further 10,000 was also reportedly paid to this person for mediating the killing Hrytsak said the Russian security services were behind the plot and that his agents had apprehended the organizer. He showed a video of them taking a short, overweight man into custody on May 30. Russia denied any involvement in any murder plot, and Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova later said Moscow was glad to hear Babchenko was alive, but also criticized Ukraine for staging a provocation. Babchenko, for his part, apologized for being part of the deception, but said it was necessary. Sorry for imposing this upon you, but there was no other way, he said. Special apologies to my wife for the hell shes been through these two days. Cancun increases security for summer break tourists Cancun, Q.R. Cancun security is being increased as the city gets ready for the summer travel season which is expected to begin over the coming days. The Ministry of Public Security says they will be adding additional tourist police to Cancun streets to strengthen surveillance and crime prevention making Cancun a safe place to travel. Head of Benito Juarez Public Security, Darwin Puc Asosta, said that they will also be carrying out coordinated work with elements of the fire brigade, federal police, the Navy and state police. The coordinated efforts, he explained, will be to increase patrols in the areas of beaches and specific busy zones around the city. The Directorate of Civil Protection will be focused on beach surveillance and increasing its workforce of lifeguards, eventually adding 15 elements to ensure tourists and locals enjoy a safe vacation. Puc Asosta added that in the event of a tropical storm or hurricane, Civil Protection is prepared with an emergency plan to shelter and / or evacuate if necessary. The city of Cancun is anticipating the arrival of tens of thousands of summer break domestic and international visitors from now until September. Cancun streets normalize as taxi drivers end Uber protest Cancun, Q.R. Taxi drivers from Cancun continued to block roadways and public entrances Tuesday in protest of the newly passed mobility law. The new law, which will make way for digital transportation platforms such as Uber, was unanimously passed by the state Monday morning. Since then, unionized taxi drivers across the state continued to protest by blocking public highways and roadways, creating chaos and even disrupting flights at the Cancun airport. President of the Mexican Association of Travel Agencies in Quintana Roo, Sergio Gonzalez Rubiera, acknowledged that the blockages did affect the transfers of many tourists. Tourists traveling through places like Playa del Carmen took nearly two additional hours to reach the airport, delaying the arrival and departure of tourists from hotels in Riviera Maya. The delays were the result of the nearly 900 taxi drivers who concentrated their efforts on the entrance to the Cancun International Airport and the Cancun Hotel Zone at the height of the roundabout of the National Fund for Tourism Promotion. However, the new mobility law has been welcome by many. The Caribbean Business Coordinating Council has applauded the approval of the mobility law, congratulating deputies of the Legislature for their courage in pushing the law forward. They were also credited with calling on the government to stop the blockades of taxi drivers. In a press conference, Gonzalez Rubiera announced the position of the business organization, noting that the previous law was 30 years old and obsolete. After the taxi blockades, Uber released a statement saying, At Uber, we recognize the first step forward that the Quintana Roo Congress has given in favor of a law by reaffirming the rights of its citizens for new and better mobility options as well as opportunities for self-employment. We will continue working together with authorities to promote access to mobility solutions and self-employment opportunities that Uber facilitates for the benefit of Quintana Roo. We will be pending the publication of the new Mobility Law of Quintana Roo to determine the next steps regarding the operation of Uber in the state. We reiterate our commitment to Cancun and Quintana Roo as well as to its citizens and visitors. We thank all users and Ubers drivers, civil organizations and private initiative for the constant support they have publicly shown in favor of technology and their right to choose self-employment and how to travel. TWO burglaries were interrupted by homeowners within two days across Aston and Swallownest. The first incident occurred on Chelmsford Avenue, Aston, when a homeowner returned at around 2.15pm last Tuesday (22) to discover burglars in their property. A South Yorkshire Police spokeswoman said the burglars fled the scene empty-handed. The following day a homeowner disturbed burglars who were stealing jewellery from their address on High Street, Swallownest, at around 8.20pm. The burglars made off with a quantity of jewellery, added the spokeswoman. Chief Supt Rob Odell, of South Yorkshire Police, said the offences were not believed to be linked. "There are forensic opportunities we are pursuing," he said. "Both matters are ongoing." Chief Supt Odell said no specific descriptions of the suspects had been provided to police. Anyone with information about the incidents should contact South Yorkshire Police on 101. Banks are on 2 day strike Banking activities in public sector banks across India have been interrupted as employees go on two-day nation-wide strike against the meager 2 percent salary hike offered by the management - Indian Banks Association. However, operations in the new-generation private banks like ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank were almost normal, barring few activities including cheque clearance. PSU bank staff go on two-day strike; salary disbursement Advertisement Since the strike coincides with the month-end, salary withdrawals from branches are likely to get affected. Some ATMs may also take a hit. Besides, deposit in branches, FD renewal, government treasury operation, money market operation would see the impact of the strike. As several rounds of talks between banks and the unions of their employees did not make any headway, the United Forum of Banking Unions (UFBU) -- an umbrella body of nine bank unions -- has gone on strike against the proposed wage hike of 2 percent as against 15 percent given last time, All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA), general secretary C H Venkatachalam said. Non-functioning of banks Advertisement "It is kind of an insult to the employees of public sector banks... to be offered this kind of meager hike. We had no other option but to go on strike, forgoing two days' salary," All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC) joint general secretary Ravinder Gupta said. The success of all government schemes like Mudra, Jan Dhan and demonetization was ensured by public sector bankers, but the reward is just two percent hike, he said, adding that it was a gross injustice to bankers who have worked very hard for nation-building. Bank Employees on Strike "Nearly 10 lakh employees are participating in the nation-wide strike as part of our democratic right by forgoing our salary," Venkatachalam said, hoping that good sense prevails. There are about 85,000 branches of 21 public sector banks across the country having a business share of about 70 percent. Most of the banks, including State Bank of India (SBI), Punjab National Bank (PNB) and Bank of Baroda (BoB), have already informed their customers about non-functioning of their branches and offices due to strike. Punjab CM urges knataka CM to take action against the culprits Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh has urged his Karnataka counterpart to ensure a thorough inquiry and stern action against the culprits involved in the alleged attack on a Sikh man in Gulbarga over a fake Whatsapp news. Taking serious note of the incident, Captain Amarinder Singh has, in a tweet, asked Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy to direct the police officials to book the accused under the most stringent provisions of the IPC and launch a detailed probe into the incident. Karnataka Mob Beats Sikh Man After Fake WhatsApp Texts Advertisement "Just heard about the mob attack on a Sikh in Gulbarga on suspicion of being child lifter following fake Whatsapp news. Request you Shri @hd_kumaraswamy ji to ensure stringent action against culprits, and full protection for Sikh community and their religious rights in your state," the Chief Minister wrote. In a statement later, the Punjab Chief Minister expressed concern over the incident and urgedKumaraswamyy to ensure protection for the community and steps to create awareness among the locals about the religious rights of the Sikhs. Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy The Chief Minister also urged Kumaraswamy to identify and take action against the perpetrators of the fake Whatsapp news. Avtar Singh was reportedly thrashed by a mob on suspicion of being a child lifter in the wake of some Whataspp forwards about people from certain states coming to Karnataka and abducting children, and also harvesting their organs. His kirpan was taken to be a weapon by the mob, which was ignorant about the significance of the `article of faith. The used car market in India is huge, and a noticeable pattern is that its largely unorganized or DIY. A system built with inherent problems that can easily be exploited to take one for a ride. In what seems too bizarre to pull off but perfectly possible, an engineering student got the better of a Ghaziabad-based sculptor by using a duplicate key. Manoj Singhal reportedly decided on a selling price of Rs 17.5 lakh for a Audi. The deal with Singhal was finalised in January, 2017 who handed over possession for a payment of Rs 50,000. Thereafter Rs 14 lakhs was paid via internet banking. When conversation steered to initiating transfer of ownership on Registration Certificate (RC), Singhal said documentation would be processed upon final payment. On March 15, Singhal called Sarfarazudin to National Zoological Park, Delhi for final payment. The sculptor, and his wife, Sakshi went to meet him at the canteen but nothing came of the discussion. At the time of leaving, Singhal used a duplicate key to drive away. A duplicate key is always to be handed over as part of the sale process but since this wasnt a regulated sale, the matter may not have been broached earlier. Sarfarazudin had been using the car as a taxi for a taxi aggregating company. The complainant approached Hazrat Nizamuddin police to report the loss, and a case of cheating was registered. Deputy Commissioner of Police (South-East) Chinmoy Biswal confirmed Manoj Singhals arrest on Saturday from Uttarakhand. He had been called for questioning but was a no show, whereby, a non-bailable warrant was issued against him on Friday. He was put under technical surveillance, and arrested at Kashipur, Uttarakhand. The car was recovered at Bidanpur, Karol Bagh. The accused is pursuing MTech and runs a mobile shop in the area. Many leaders likely do not possess the new mindset and skill set necessary to manage large scale hybrid work. But they can skill up. Heres what you need to know. Let's get to work! The University of South Carolinas career management platform, Handshake, is ready for you to start your job search. Here's a sample of what you'll find there. Full Time Part Time Internships Share this Story! Let friends in your social network know what you are reading about [SANAA] A new outbreak of cholera can be expected in Yemen as a result of the rainy season that began in mid-April, a study suggests. According to the study, which was published in The Lancet Global Health earlier this month, if the predictions are correct, millions of people in the war-torn country will be infected with cholera in an epidemic wave expected to be larger in scale than the previous two. An international team of researchers is behind the findings, with contributions from UNICEF, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in the United States, the Pasteur Institute in France, Yemens Central Public Health Laboratory, the World Health Organization, the medical NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF-Doctors without Borders), and the Yemeni health authorities. The study identified the first wave of the epidemic as a limited outbreak that occurred between 28 September 2016 and 23 April 2017. After the rainy season, a second wave emerged between 24 April and 2 July 2017, which brought a wider outbreak and a rise in the number of infections and deaths. This was followed by a fall in cases between 3 July and March 12 of this year. More than half of the country's 30 million people now face a risk of cholera infection in a possible third wave. The disease causes severe watery diarrhoea which, in within hours, can develop into dehydration and hypovolemic shock. About half the patients who catch the disease can lose their lives without appropriate dehydration treatment. Lorenzo Pizzoli, WHO cholera expert and co-author of the study, told SciDev.Net that the UN agency plans to implement preventive measures. These include ensuring access to safe water, environmental sanitation and health services, and helping treatment centres prepare for any coming epidemic. We launched a vaccination campaign on May 6 targeting around 350,000 people in four districts in the governorate of Aden, which continued until May 10, said Pizzoli. The vaccine is effective as only one dose of cholera vaccination provides protection for six months, while two doses provide protection for three years Lorenzo Pizzoli The organization has received about 400,000 doses of the vaccine, which are to be used initially in Aden. More will be sought later to cover the rest of Yemen, according to Pizzoli. The vaccine is effective as only one dose of cholera vaccination provides protection for six months, while two doses provide protection for three years, he confirmed. Yemeni consultant Talal Al Qahtani, a microbiological diagnostic consultant, praised the timely vaccination campaign. We have to start with the worst-affected areas to avoid any new severe setbacks, Al Qahtani said, adding that plans should separate the response to cholera from other infections to avoid duplication in efforts across governorates. But Abdul Hakim al-Kahlani, spokesman for the Houthi government's Ministry of Public Health and Population, strikes a note of caution, saying that the number of vaccines required for the southern provinces is limited, whereas the number needed for the northern provinces is huge. The quantity of vaccine available in the global market is also very limited, he adds. The target areas for immunization are Sanaa, Taiz, and Aden because they are the worst affected areas, the UNICEF Information Office in Yemen said in its response to SciDev.Net. Our initial plan targets ten districts: five in Sanaa, four in Aden, and one in Taiz, which recorded the highest numbers of suspected infections last year. The cumulative figures for the number of suspected cases, beginning with the first outbreak and until this month, as confirmed by the UNICEF office, indicate that 1.1 million cases of acute watery diarrhoea were recorded, including over 2,200 deaths. Almost 30 per cent of the cases were among children under five years of age. 72 per cent of [Yemens] population live in rural areas and rely on open, unprotected well-water for drinking, says al-Kahlani. Due to bad habits, such as defaecation in the open, rains and floods sweep all the dirt to the wells, easily causing widespread cases of diarrhoea. The study stressed that a number of reasons raise the risk of cholera outbreaks during the rainy season: using unsafe water sources during the dry season, pollution of water sources during the rainy season, and changes in the water levels of zooplankton and iron which keep cholera bacteria alive. The vaccine is only one component of prevention, and we must invest huge resources in prevention by providing clean drinking water, improving hygiene and sanitation services, and supporting solid waste management, while investing with partners in order to strengthen the weakened health system in Yemen, UNICEF added, commenting on the current vaccination campaign and its effectiveness in preventing a new outbreak. This piece was produced by SciDev.Nets Middle East & North Africa desk. Simple mud concrete bricks provide the most affordable and sustainable houses in the tropics, a Sri-Lankan study suggests. Comparisons of four different types of walling materials revealed that mud concrete bricks have the lowest environmental impact and keep houses cool. They are also the cheapest, and easiest to dispose of once a house is knocked down. Researchers compared mud concrete bricks with red bricks (modern fired clay bricks), hollow cement blocks and Cabook, the Sri Lankan name for bricks made from laterite soil, which are common in the tropics. The goal of the study was to find out which types of walling material are the most suitable for constructing affordable houses in the tropics, where population density and poverty are generally high. The sustainability of buildings and housing construction is essential to save lives and prevent inadequate living conditions. Christophe Lalande Why spend more money and destroy the environment more? asks Rangika Halwatura, a civil engineer at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka, and one of the authors of the paper. Mud concrete bricks are made from soil in the same way as traditional mud bricks, but contain gravel and sand to improve their strength. The researchers looked at the carbon footprint of all four walling materials, and found that mud concrete bricks were the most environmentally friendly to produce and dispose of. To check on thermal conductivity the researchers built one-square-metre model houses of the different walling types. Here, they found that red brick kept a house coolest, but mud concrete bricks performed almost as well. Mud concrete bricks were also found to be the cheapest, at less than US$1,000 in Sri Lanka for an average-sized house, whereas red bricks cost nearly US$3,500. Mud concrete bricks are widely used in other tropical countries but novel in Sri Lanka. They are popular because they are easy to make and therefore cheap, says Hurryson Moshi, a civil engineer in Tanzania. However, Moshi points out that as people grow wealthier they prefer the red bricks and cement blocks, as these are associated with higher socio-economic status. Red Brick (modern fired brick), Cement (Hollow Cement Blocks), Cabook (laterite soil brick), Mud (mud concrete brick). Adapted from a graphic Udawattha and Halwatura, with permission. Moshi agrees with the studys findings but says that other considerations, such as aesthetics, and symbols of modernity or social status, influence peoples choice of materials. Future studies should also take into account other sources of environmental damage such as deforestation (to produce timber to fire the bricks) or excavation of soil, he added. In 2015, the government of Sri Lanka launched a programme to build 150,000 houses for the poor. This triggered the researchers idea to compare the different types of brick. According to the United Nations, more than 850 million people around the world live in inadequate slum housing. According to Christophe Lalande, leader of the UN-Habitats Housing Unit, poor neighbourhoods in developing countries are often the most affected by climate change and natural hazards such as storms and rising temperatures. The sustainability of buildings and housing construction, being adapted to the local environment, is essential to save lives or prevent inadequate living conditions, he says. Scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute have added a new dimension to the understanding of how cells alter their communication with one another during development, wound healing, and the spread of cancer. The researchers published their results in Molecular Biology of the Cell, a journal published by the American Society for Cell Biology. "We have gained a new insight into how an individual cell can dynamically modulate its synthesis of proteins from existing genetic instructions," said James Smyth, an assistant professor in the VTCRI Center for Heart and Regenerative Medicine Research at the VTCRI and lead author on the study. "This understanding of fine-tuning is new to the field." When tissue grows or heals, its outer layer of epithelial cells takes on characteristics that allow cells to migrate, change their size and behavior, and act as other cell types, specifically multipotent mesenchymal cells that are useful for making repairs. The process is known as the epithelial mesenchymal transition, or EMT. "The problem is that EMT is also activated in various disease processes, such as fibrosis and cancer metastasis," said Smyth, who is also an assistant professor of biological sciences in Virginia Tech's College of Science. "Fortunately, these cells are very amenable to manipulation. We've developed a powerful new tool to study this process to help us get to the heart of cancer metastasis. We can observe cancer cells change their communication with each other to become more invasive, to separate, and to disperse throughout the body." Smyth said researchers will also be able to use their techniques to better understand cellular responses to injury and disease in other pathologies, such as cardiac disease, as well. advertisement Smyth normally studies communication between cardiac cells, with a specific focus on the role of a type of protein called connexin 43. Connexins are found in every tissue of the body. When six connexin 43 proteins come together, they form channels called gap junctions through which cells communicate. Historically, people thought that the more connexin proteins in the cell, the more gap junctions the cell would make, thus enriching cellular communication. Like all proteins, Connexin 43 is synthesized from the message encoded in RNA that has read out the DNA code. The RNA can also encode for smaller pieces or fragments of connexins 20k, that ensure gap junction formation. "It was thought that the amount of RNA correlated with the amount of connexin protein, but we now know that it's much more complicated than that," Smyth said. "The point of protein synthesis for translation is tightly regulated by the cell, and it is dynamic, changing with development and with disease." In this study, Smyth found that RNA and protein synthesis of connexin increased during EMT, but the amount of gap junctions on the surface of the cell did not increase as expected. advertisement In an effort to understand why, Smyth collaborated with Samy Lamouille, a research assistant professor at the VTCRI. Lamouille is an expert in EMT and the cellular signaling involved in protein translation, which he has studied since he was a postdoctoral associate at the University of California San Francisco. Lamouille, who is also a research assistant professor of biological sciences in Virginia Tech's College of Science, focuses on understanding the mechanisms that regulate cell-to-cell interaction in cancer and how deregulated intercellular communication can lead to cancer progression through EMT. "In this study, we found the formation of gap junction structures that allow cells to communicate was disrupted during EMT despite an abundance of connexin 43," Lamouille said. Normally, the cell makes the 20k connexin fragments to direct the full-length connexin 43 to the surface of the cell -- a process that becomes altered to the detriment of gap junction formation. Smyth and Lamouille hypothesized that the connexin (20k) fragments were being suppressed during the internal translation process of protein synthesis. "We had this increase in proteins, but they weren't going to the cell membrane surface," Smyth said. "Could it be that the connexins were getting stuck somewhere?" The researchers used the VTCRI's super resolution microscope to examine individual molecules and to analyze the connexins within the cells. They found that the full-length connexins were arrested in the cell's Golgi apparatus, which acts as a packaging plant for proteins heading to the surface of the cell. To counteract the suppressed expression of 20K connexin fragments, Smyth used a lentivirus vector to cause the cells' RNA to make 20k connexin, thereby rescuing the full-length connexin 43, the formation of gap junctions, and normal cellular communications. Smyth is now applying the information he learned in this research to cardiovascular disease, where he's seen the same cellular communication issues. A University of Cordoba research group has designed a method that detects the presence of pollutants in seawater in a faster and more efficient way and also at very low concentrations. Specifically, the team from Cordoba, in partnership with the University of the Balearic Islands, focused on several substances used as preservatives in soap, lotion and deodorant, which end up in the sea. Concerns about parabens and triclosan have been voiced from different sectors, and the European Commission has been monitoring these substances and limited their use. Parabens and triclosan keep bacteria and fungi from damaging shampoo and toothpaste, but they become a real problem once they get to the sea, where they affect the marine ecosystem. Identifying their presence contributes to the design of measures that correct their effects. This is the idea behind the work on the system designed by the University of Cordoba. The key to this new method based on nanotechnology is the system known as 'Lab-on-Valve,' used by the scientific community for sample analysis. More specifically, the research team led by Analytical Chemistry Professor Marisol Cardenas has added carbon-coated titanium dioxide nanotubes to this system. To date, the use of nanomaterials in the Lab-on-Valve system was not possible before due to their tendency to aggregate in aqueous media. In this case, the University of Cordoba research group was able to synthesize nanoparticles compatible with the Lab-on-Valve system due to their easy dispersion. The new system was recently described in the journal Analytical Chemistry. The study's primary author, University of Cordoba researcher Maria Teresa Garcia Valverde, explains that "the combination of the Lab-on-valve system, titanium nanotubes modified with amorphous carbon as phase extraction and the measuring tool connected to the system, allows for quantifying parabens and triclosan at very low concentrations." For the most part, these pollutants come from personal hygiene products such as soap, sunscreen, toothpaste and other toiletries. All of them have very negative effects on the environment. Garcia explained that with the Lab-on-Valve system, the nanotubes are manipulated automatically, which reduces errors in measurement and "their nanometric size makes them more efficient than other adsorbent solid materials on the market." She added, "this method is faster, more practical and more efficient." A family of trees with high drought tolerance could be crucial in restoring the world's deforested and degraded tropical lands, according to new research involving the University of Stirling. Experts analysed more than 40 sites across the Neotropics -- which includes the tropical regions of Central and South America -- and found that Leguminosae trees are critical for tropical forest regrowth in dry regions, due to their resistance to drought. Leguminosae are herbaceous plants that people will know such as peas and runner beans, but many species in this family are canopy trees that play an important role in tropical forests. Although the benefits of Leguminosae are well known, scientific understanding of the abundance of the species has previously been biased towards wet tropical regions. Significantly, this study found that, during the first three decades of natural forest regeneration, legume trees were twice as common in dry compared with wet secondary forests. The findings emerged from a global study involving Dr Daisy Dent, a Lecturer in Tropical Ecology within Stirling's Faculty of Natural Sciences, who led the collection of forest census data from a site in Panama, where she has been working for more than 12 years. Dr Dent said: "Our study shows that trees in the Leguminosae family are critical to tropical forest regrowth in dry regions. "As global temperatures warm and dry conditions become more widespread in the tropics, this has major implications for forest recovery across the region." Leguminosae trees are important in secondary forests -- woodland areas that have re-grown after forest clearance -- as they have high drought tolerance and many can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. Therefore, they are not limited by the low water availability and poor soils typical of abandoned pastures, where young forests regenerate. The overall study -- which included data from 42 sites spanning the Neotropics -- was led by Dr Maga Gei and Jennifer Powers, both of the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour at the University of Minnesota. Dr Dent commented: "This is a huge collaborative effort that indicates the benefits of collating data to generate broad-scale regional datasets that have significantly greater impact than studies from individual sites." The findings could play a key role in achieving the goals set out by the Bonn Challenge, a global effort to bring 150 million hectares of the world's deforested and degraded land into restoration by 2020, and 350 million hectares by 2030. Dr Dent said: "In light of the goals of the Bonn Challenge, our study will directly influence how we match tree species to site conditions to maximise the effective restoration of degraded tropical lands." The paper, Legume abundance along successional and rainfall gradients in neotropical forests, is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Each of the 42 sites received their own funding to support forest censuses. The Panama site is funded through an international collaboration grant from the Panamanian Secretariat for Science and Technology, and the Carnegie Trust for Scottish Universities. With palm oil production exploding around the world, a new study of a leading producer has found ways to make the process easier on the environment. PhD candidate Lain Pardo, from James Cook University in Australia, studied the industry in Colombia -- a country described as being on the 'tip of the spear' in terms of burgeoning palm oil production. The researchers used a new camera trapping technique across 2,000 square kilometres of the country's most important palm oil production region and found that while palm oil plantations are not suitable for most mammals to live in, the situation could be improved. "We found that the number and diversity of species differed significantly between oil palm plantations and their neighboring forests, with the number of species inside oil palm plantations 47% lower, on average, than in the forest," said Mr Pardo. He said that within the plantations, the number of different species declined as the number of cattle in the plantation rose, but species numbers were helped by the presence of dense undergrowth vegetation and proximity to forest. These factors, and canopy cover, were also linked to an improvement in mammal diversity within palm oil sites. advertisement The scientists looked at a savannah woodland system where much of the land was already in commercial use before being converted to palm oil. Mr Pardo said unlike Southeast Asia, most of the land in Colombia converted for use as oil palm plantations had previously been pasture, not forest, and palm oil was not the primary driver of deforestation. But he said even when planted on savannah, oil palm plantations may have a devastating impact on wildlife. "So, it's still important to know what is going on ecologically in these areas. The Colombian government says land used to grow oil palms will double to about one million hectares by the year 2020. If unplanned, this expansion could result in a disruption of the ecosystem." Mr Pardo said the scientists recommended oil palm growers promote undergrowth vegetation and avoid cattle presence inside plantations, along with respecting designated buffer areas that allow for the conservation and restoration of riparian forests. "The forests are the most important factor. Even secondary riparian forest makes an important contribution to sustaining wildlife across oil palm dominated landscapes in Colombia." He said the scientists understood that oil palm development provides social benefits in Colombia. "Development in some areas is being partly driven by government incentives and corporate investments, and also in response to the end of a prolonged armed conflict, which has allowed access to previously inaccessible areas. So it's vital to engage relevant stakeholders to balance socioeconomic and environmental goals. If Colombia follows our guidelines it has a great opportunity to produce palm oil in a more sustainable way, compared to Malaysia and Indonesia." A new study by the University of British Columbia shows that teachers don't have to test everything they want their students to remember -- as long as the knowledge they want to convey fits together well, and the test questions are well-chosen. The finding, based on an experiment with UBC pharmacy students, builds on a proven phenomenon known as "retrieval-enhanced learning" -- that the very act of recalling something reinforces it in a person's memory. But that phenomenon also has stoked fears, demonstrated in a few recent studies, of "retrieval-induced forgetting" -- that items not included on a test can be purged from students' memories. The UBC study, published May 26 in Advances in Health Sciences Education, suggests a way to strengthen students' memories of new knowledge without causing "assessment fatigue." Researchers asked more than 150 second-year pharmacy students to study a 67-slide PowerPoint file about gastroesophageal reflux disease and peptic ulcer disease -- a subject relevant to their studies but not yet covered in the curriculum. Each slide contained "bullet points" typical of slides used for university lectures. Some students were asked to study the slides for 30 minutes in anticipation of being tested on it two weeks later. Other students were asked to study the slides for 20 minutes, with the remaining 10 minutes devoted to a 10-question quiz about the material. Two weeks later, both groups took a larger test that included the original 10 questions, plus 30 more: 10 that were about the slides, 10 about other medical conditions not covered by the slides, and 10 more general questions about basic physiology and drug characteristics (also not covered by the slides). Most questions were multiple choice, with a couple of true/false items. As expected, the group that took the preliminary quiz a couple of weeks before did better -- 22 per cent better -- on the questions that were repeated in the larger test. But that group also performed 19 per cent better on other questions based on the slides even though they were not included on the preliminary quiz. On the other questions that were not specifically about reflux disease and peptic ulcer disease, there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups' performance. From those results, the researchers conclude that knowledge -- whether it's about health, law, history or anything else -- doesn't have to be tested to be remembered, if it's closely intertwined with knowledge that is being tested. "The accumulated evidence of retrieval-enhanced learning has led some educators to assert that comprehensive testing is the best way to get students to remember knowledge," said lead author Kevin Eva, a Professor in the Department of Medicine and Associate Director of UBC's Centre for Health Education Scholarship. "But that could lead to valuable class time being eaten up by assessments, creating undue stress and strain for students." To maximize the effectiveness of testing, Dr. Eva says, course material needs to be well-integrated -- each piece should be presented as part of a larger whole, not as a collection of disconnected details. In addition, test questions should be representative of the entirety of the material that instructors want students to retain. "Students are more likely to forget untested items in a curriculum of disassociated facts," Dr. Eva says. "So teachers need to do their homework, and make sure that what they teach comes together into a bigger, comprehensible whole." In the ongoing quest for a successful treatment for Alzheimer's disease, a team of scientists from several leading research institutions have created a map of the molecular network in the aging brain. Molecular networks are cellular and subcellular structures in an organism and the structures' physical interaction between molecules, RNA, or proteins. The researchers used their map to identify two new Alzheimer's disease target genes -- that is, genes that can be deleted, added, or modified, in the ongoing quest for a successful treatment for the disease. The team presented their findings in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience on May 25. Led by principal investigators Dr. David A. Bennett at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and Dr. Philip L. De Jager at Columbia University in New York, the research team is part of the Accelerating Medicines Program for Alzheimer's disease. Known as the AMP-AD, the program seeks to leverage advances in analytic methods and large-scale molecular profiles of the aging brain to identify novel therapeutic targets for Alzheimer's disease. The National Institute on Aging and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health spearheaded the development of AMP-AD in collaboration with several industry and non-profit partners. The program launched in 2013. Map distinguishes between events leading to brain pathology and to loss of cognitive function The network described in the Nature Neuroscience manuscript accounts for all older people, not just those that meet certain diagnostic guidelines. Further, it separates molecular events that lead to changes in brain tissue (pathology) from those involved in loss of cognitive function, which is the true target of therapeutic efforts. advertisement "Prior network approaches had not considered the detailed change in cognitive state over time of older individuals," said Bennett. "Instead, they had relied on comparisons of cases from a dementia clinic with volunteers who after their deaths came to autopsy without ever developing dementia. This does not capture the variability over time exhibited by a diverse population of older individuals." The burden of Alzheimer's disease on our aging human populations is growing rapidly, but current therapeutic strategies targeting a small number of proteins have yet to yield a successful treatment. Analysis honed in on genes most likely to drive cognitive decline The study drew on data about the deeply characterized subjects from two community-based studies based at the Rush Alzheimer Disease Center. Participants in these studies receive extensive medical testing and evaluation while alive and donate their brains to research upon their deaths. None of the participants had a diagnosis of dementia when they enrolled in the study, but some later developed it. The investigators have created a unique resource that links molecular changes in nearly 500 older brains profiled in this study to both the individual trajectories of participants' change in cognition over multiple years prior to death and detailed measures of Alzheimer's disease and other common brain pathologies measured after death. "We have a detailed picture of brain function before death and an extensive evaluation of the molecular features of each individual brain," De Jager observed. advertisement Co-lead author Chris Gaiteri, PhD, also from the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center, added that "unlike traditional studies, all possible outcomes and molecular events are considered simultaneously, enabling us to prioritize a few large groups of genes that are most likely to lead directly to cognitive decline and/or brain pathology, instead of having to focus on a large list of individual genes." His co-lead author, Sara Mostafavi, PhD, of the University of British Columbia, extended this comment, "The strength of our analytic approach is that it makes no assumptions as far as what genes are important," she said. "While we find thousands of genes associated with cognitive decline, we do not simply go for the strongest gene. We find patterns that lead to cognitive decline and then prioritize a small subset of genes that appear to be driving these large-scale changes." Experiment reduced genes' production of protein that contributes to Alzheimer's These so called "driver genes" are potentially excellent candidates or targets for developing Alzheimer's disease therapies. However, statistical analyses are not enough. Therefore co-investigator Tracy Young-Pearse, PhD, from Brigham and Women's Hospital designed an experiment in which some of these target genes were perturbed to see if this change affected known molecules involved in Alzheimer's disease. "When they were altered in human astrocytes, a type of brain cell that plays a key role in maintaining brain function, two of the 14 genes predicted to be driver genes by the network displayed a reduction in the secretion of amyloid beta, a protein that contributes to the onset of Alzheimer's disease," Young-Pearse said. These two genes make proteins and the approach raises the possibility that finding drugs that affect those proteins could also lower the production of amyloid beta. Dr. Bennett and his colleagues recently measured a number of the proteins in the network to see if they could replicate the predictions from the network map. Using the network to predict the 14 driver genes itself was a scientific feat akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, given that the brain map includes about 14,000 genes. "This study is a milestone in the study of Alzheimer's disease and the aging brain, said De Jager. "We established a molecular network that not only predicts Alzheimer's disease genes that can be validated experimentally but also can be repurposed to study very different molecular events involved in brain aging, such as stroke, and the fundamental function of the brain itself." Sharing science to spur discoveries All data and network models were made available to share with the scientific community via the AMP-AD Knowledge Portal and the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center Resource Sharing Hub before the publication of the manuscript to enable other investigators to make us of the data and underlying observations for their own studies and to allow them to confirm the results of the study independently. "This study is the culmination of efforts by the NIA, multiple pharmaceutical industry partners, and a tight-knit group of academic investigators to provide a novel, unbiased perspective on Alzheimer's disease biology," said Bennett. "Importantly, this approach does not focus on a single gene of interest, but rather searches for the key nodal point in a network where an intervention may be most likely to have an effect on a devastating disease that remains untreated today." While the two genes identified as candidates by the network approach and its validation need further study before they can be used as the basis for drug development efforts, this report is an important milestone for AMP-AD Target Discovery program. It shows the potential of the open science research model to deliver new disease insights with high translational potential and to create unique research resources for the community of pharmaceutical industry, small biotech and academic investigators interested in diversifying the therapeutic approaches for AD and other diseases of the aging brain. The study was funded by grants from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (including U01AG046152, R01AG036836, P30AG10161, R01AG015819, R01AG017917, R01AG036547). Spinosaurus is the longest, and among the largest predatory dinosaurs, and possesses many adaptations for a semiaquatic lifestyle. A tiny claw phalanx of the foot, discovered in Cretaceous-aged sandstones of the Sahara, shows a peculiar shape compatible with an early juvenile Spinosaurus. As reported in PeerJ -- the Journal of Life & Environmental Sciences, the fossil is from the smallest known individual of this giant, sail-backed theropod. The findings suggest the small specimen retains the same locomotor adaptations as the large version -- such as traversing soft substrates or paddling -- during the entire lifespan. Collected in Morocco in 1999, a 21 mm-long pedal ungual phalanx (a phalanx supporting a claw of the foot) remained unnoticed in the Paleontological Collection of the Natural History Museum of Milan, until the recent discovery (2014) of a new partial skeleton of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, that preserves an almost complete right foot with peculiar morphology in the phalanges. The striking similarities with the claw phalanges of the foot of Spinosaurus allowed palaeontologists Simone Maganuco and Cristiano Dal Sasso to identify the tiny bone to a very small and young specimen of the sail-backed Spinosaurus, the smallest individual reported up to today. "Besides the rarity of the fossils belonging to juvenile theropod dinosaurs, and the rarity of Spinosaurus bones, this finding is even more remarkable if we consider the dramatic size attained by some large specimens of Spinosaurus, which are possibly the longest, and among the largest predatory dinosaurs ever found"- says Maganuco. Assuming the juveniles looked like smaller versions of the adults, the 21 mm-long claw phalanx from this small specimen would pertain to an early juvenile individual, 1.78 m-long, only just a little bit longer than the estimated length of the sole head of the largest adult Spinosaurus known to date, which is also housed at the Natural History Museum of Milan. According to recent studies, the broader than deep unguals in Spinosaurus with their flat plantar surface are reminiscent of the flattened pedal shape of shorebirds that do not perch, and the whole foot may have been adapted to traversing soft substrates or webbed for paddling. "This find indicates that in Spinosaurus the foot of early juveniles had the same locomotor adaptations observed in large individuals, that were probably achieved early in ontogeny and retained for the entire lifespan," remarks co-author Cristiano Dal Sasso. When and how did the first people come to the Americas? The conventional story says that the earliest settlers came via Siberia, crossing the now-defunct Bering land bridge on foot and trekking through Canada when an ice-free corridor opened up between massive ice sheets toward the end of the last ice age. But with recent archaeological evidence casting doubt on this thinking, scientists are seeking new explanations. One dominant, new theory: The first Americans took a coastal route along Alaska's Pacific border to enter the continent. A new geological study provides compelling evidence to support this hypothesis. By analyzing boulders and bedrock, a research team led by the University at Buffalo shows that part of a coastal migration route became accessible to humans 17,000 years ago. During this period, ancient glaciers receded, exposing islands of southern Alaska's Alexander Archipelago to air and sun -- and, possibly, to human migration. The timing of these events is key: Recent genetic and archaeological estimates suggest that settlers may have begun traveling deeper into the Americas some 16,000 years ago, soon after the coastal gateway opened up. advertisement The research will be published online on May 30 in the journal Science Advances. "People are fascinated by these questions of where they come from and how they got there," says lead scientist Jason Briner, PhD, professor of geology in UB's College of Arts and Sciences. "Our research contributes to the debate about how humans came to the Americas. It's potentially adding to what we know about our ancestry and how we colonized our planet." "Our study provides some of the first geologic evidence that a coastal migration route was available for early humans as they colonized the New World," says UB geology PhD candidate Alia Lesnek, the study's first author. "There was a coastal route available, and the appearance of this newly ice-free terrain may have spurred early humans to migrate southward." The findings do not mean that early settlers definitely traversed Alaska's southern coast to spread into the Americas: The project examined just one section of the coast, and scientists would need to study multiple locations up and down the coastline to draw firmer conclusions. Still, the work is exciting because it hints that the seafaring theory of migration is viable. advertisement The bones of an ancient ringed seal -- previously discovered in a nearby cave by other researchers -- provide further, tantalizing clues. They hint that the area was capable of supporting human life at the time that early settlers may have been passing through, Briner says. The new study calculates that the seal bones are about 17,000 years old. This indicates that the region was ecologically vibrant soon after the ice retreated, with resources including food becoming available. Co-authors on the research included Briner; Lesnek; Charlotte Lindqvist, PhD, an associate professor of biological sciences at UB and a visiting associate professor at Nanyang Technological University; James Baichtal of Tongass National Forest; and Timothy Heaton, PhD, of the University of South Dakota. A landscape, touched by ice, that tells a story To conduct their study, the scientists journeyed to four islands within the Alexander Archipelago that lie about 200 miles south/southeast of Juneau. The team traveled by helicopter to reach these remote destinations. As soon as the researchers arrived, Briner knew that the islands had once been covered by ice. "The landscape is glacial," he says. "The rock surfaces are smooth and scratched from when the ice moved over it, and there are erratic boulders everywhere. When you are a geologist, it hits you in the face. You know it immediately: The glacier was here." To pinpoint when the ice receded from the region, the team collected bits of rock from the surfaces of boulders and bedrock. Later, the scientists ran tests to figure out how long the samples -- and thus the islands as a whole -- had been free of ice. The researchers used a method called surface exposure dating. As Lesnek explains, "When land is covered by a glacier, the bedrock in the area is hidden under ice. As soon as the ice disappears, however, the bedrock is exposed to cosmic radiation from space, which causes it to accumulate certain chemicals on their surface. The longer the surface has been exposed, the more of these chemicals you get. By testing for these chemicals, we were able to determine when our rock surfaces were exposed, which tells us when the ice retreated. "We use the same dating method for huge boulders called erratics. These are big rocks that are plucked from the Earth and carried to new locations by glaciers, which actually consist of moving ice. When glaciers melt and disappear from a specific region, they leave these erratics behind, and surface exposure dating can tell us when the ice retreated." For the region that was studied, this happened roughly 17,000 years ago. The case for a coastal migration route In recent years, evidence has mounted against the conventional thinking that humans populated North America by taking an inland route through Canada. To do so, they would have needed to walk through a narrow, ice-free ribbon of terrain that appeared when two major ice sheets started to separate. But recent research suggests that while this path may have opened up more than 14,000 years ago, it did not develop enough biological diversity to support human life until about 13,000 years ago, Briner says. That clashes with archaeological findings that suggest humans were already living in Chile about 15,000 years ago or more and in Florida 14,500 years ago. The coastal migration theory provides an alternative narrative, and the new study may mark a step toward solving the mystery of how humans came to the Americas. "Where we looked at it, the coastal route was not only open -- it opened at just the right time," Lindqvist says. "The timing coincides almost exactly with the time in human history that the migration into the Americas is thought to have occurred." The research was funded by a UB IMPACT award, and Lesnek's work on the project, which will contribute to her dissertation, was supported by the National Science Foundation. The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged a former registered representative with defrauding long-standing brokerage customers in an $8 million investment scam. According to the SEC's complaint, Steven Pagartanis, who was affiliated with a registered broker-dealer, told some investors - including retirees who had been Pagartanis's customers for many years - that he would invest their funds in either a publicly-traded or private land development company. He promised that the funds would be safe and also promised guaranteed monthly interest payments on the investments. At Pagartanis's direction, his investors wrote checks payable to a similarly-named entity that was secretly controlled by Pagartanis. In all, the customers invested approximately $8 million, which Pagartanis used to pay personal expenses and make the guaranteed "interest" payments to his customers. To conceal the scam, which unraveled earlier this year when Pagartanis stopped making the so-called interest payments to customers, Pagartanis created fictitious account statements reflecting ownership interests in the land development companies. The Suffolk County District Attorney's Office today filed criminal charges against Pagartanis. The SEC's complaint, filed in federal district court in Brooklyn, charges Pagartanis with violating Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder. The SEC is seeking a judgment ordering Pagartanis to disgorge his ill-gotten gains plus prejudgment interest, and to pay financial penalties. The SEC's investigation, which is continuing, is being conducted by Gerald Gross, Haimavathi Marlier, Sheldon Mui and Neil Hendelman of the New York Regional Office. The litigation will be led by Ms. Marlier and Mr. Mui. The case is being supervised by Lara Shalov Mehraban. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office and FINRA. This item is available in full to subscribers. Attention subscribers We have recently launched a new and improved website. To continue reading, you will need to either log into your subscriber account, or purchase a new subscription. If you are a digital subscriber with an active subscription, then you already have an account here. Just reset your password if you've not yet logged in to your account on this new site. If you are a current print subscriber, you can set up a free website account by clicking here. Otherwise, click here to view your options for subscribing. The Rev. Franklin Graham son of the late Rev. Billy Graham and frequent defender of President Trump is coming to Berkeley on Friday as part of his 10-city Decision America tour through California that he insists isnt political. I dont have hope in the Republican Party. I dont have hope in the Democratic Party, Graham told the faithful during a 90-minute event in Turlock (Stanislaus County) on Tuesday. The only hope for California is God. While nothing Graham said in Turlock was overtly partisan and only about eight minutes of it was political at all make no mistake: His tour of evangelistic prayer events days before Californias primary election Tuesday is thoroughly political. In an interview Wednesday, he said the goal of his tour is to encourage Christians to vote. I think we need more of the Christian voice in the political world, not less, Graham said. And when Graham is talking about Christians, he means white evangelical Christians, said Robert Jones, CEO of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, which has done extensive surveys of the evangelical community. White evangelicals are in an odd position politically. The resident of the White House is the friendliest president theyve had in a decade, but their overall numbers are in decline. In 2006, 23 percent of Americans called themselves evangelical Christians, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. Last year the total was 15 percent. In California, they represent just 7 percent of the population, according to the institute. Thats why 65-year-old Graham, who lives in North Carolina, came to California for a revival. Berkeley isnt his only Bay Area stop hell be in Santa Clara on Thursday. The white evangelical political movement is at a last stand kind of moment here, Jones said. What does give them outsize power is that they are so disproportionately active on the Republican side 80 percent of white evangelicals, he said, vote GOP. So while Graham professes not to have faith in either party, he equates being progressive with being godless. In Turlock, Graham noted that 127 churches were represented at the Stanislaus County Fairground. He encouraged them to dedicate themselves to electing Christians to political office. If every church here put up one person for school board, got behind them financially and helped them to run, you could take over your school board, Graham said. If this happened in every community, in 10 years you could see a difference politically in this state. Does he really believe all progressives are godless? There are denominations where it would be hard to find priests who didnt describe themselves as progressive. Maybe that was a little bit of a broad brush, Graham told me, but generally speaking, it is a true statement. I want people to think before they vote. We believe in the sanctity of life, the definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman. Californians, however, solidly support same-sex marriage and abortion rights. The last major statewide candidate to tout his opposition to abortion rights was Republican Dan Lungren, a devout Catholic who lost the governors race to Democrat Gray Davis in 1998. And evangelicals put so much energy into opposing same-sex marriage that when the public and the Supreme Court turned against them so quickly, they went into a state of vertigo, Jones said. So Graham is trying to reorganize at the local level. When I asked Graham if he would be OK if a Muslim were elected to a school board, he said, I would be concerned if it was anybody other than a Christian. I guess I would feel far more comfortable with a Muslim who believes in something than a progressive who had no faith in God, no faith in the afterlife. David Vasquez-Levy, president of Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and a Lutheran pastor, said Graham is missing an opportunity in California to reach out to a fast-growing slice of Christians: Latino evangelicals. There was no Spanish-language message at the Turlock event. In this particular tour, what its missing is that evangelicals in California are redefining what it means to be evangelical, Vasquez-Levy said. Increasingly evangelicals here are immigrants making Grahams 7:30 p.m. event at Berkeleys Cesar Chavez Park, named after the Latino farmworker icon, an odd pairing. 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. Politically, Graham can say hes taking his message right to the heart of progressive country. But he said that is not his motive: I want the people of Berkeley to know that God loves them. And while Grahams mission is broadly political, hes definitely not down in the weeds. He said he had spoken to some congressman in Turlock but couldnt remember his name until an aide reminded him it was Rep. Jeff Denham, a Republican who is fighting for his political life this year in a swing district. Graham added that Im supposed to meet somebody who is running for governor, but couldnt place the name of Republican John Cox, who is on his Friday calendar. It is here where Graham draws a line between politicians and politics. Theres lots of politicians in this world, and they all want something, he said. I try to avoid them. Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicles senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli Bay Area stops The Rev. Franklin Graham will hold two events in the Bay Area, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the California Great Americas Redwood Amphitheatre in Santa Clara and at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Cesar Chavez Park on the Berkeley waterfront. San Franciscos restrictions on outdoor advertising signs, permitting the signs only where advertisers conduct business, were left intact Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a challenge by business groups. The city ordinance was challenged by Contest Promotions, a company that runs raffles for prizes such as movie and concert tickets and leases space for signs in local stores where the raffle tickets are sold. Those displays were banned by the most recent version of the ordinance, enacted in 2014, which allowed commercial ad signs only for the primary business on the premises. City voters had approved an earlier, somewhat less restrictive version in 2002, primarily aimed at billboards. While both measures banned new off-site advertising signs, they allowed those already in place to remain. In a 2015 lawsuit, Contest Promotions argued that the ordinance was discriminatory and violated free speech. The company cited a Supreme Court ruling, also in 2015, that found an Arizona town violated freedom of speech by setting tighter limits on signs that advertise local church services than on signs that carry political or ideological messages. But U.S. District Judge Susan Illston dismissed Contest Promotions suit, saying the Supreme Court ruling in the Arizona case did not involve commercial speech, which has been granted lesser constitutional protection than noncommercial expression and is subject to more government regulation. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld Illstons decision last August, citing its previous rulings that allowed cities to ban commercial billboards and other off-site advertising in order to promote safety and aesthetics. The Pacific Legal Foundation, a business-supported property-rights group in Sacramento, and similar organizations in Arizona and Georgia urged the Supreme Court to take up the Contest Promotions case and apply its 2015 ruling to commercial advertising. The company, in its appeal, argued that San Franciscos ban on off-site advertising had no logical relationship to aesthetics or traffic safety. There is no reason to believe off-premises signs are uglier, or more distracting to motorists, than on-premises signs, said the companys lawyers. San Francisco, in its court filing, said city officials had concluded in 2002, when the first ordinance was passed, that additional commercial billboards could distract motorists and pedestrians and contribute to blight and visual clutter. The city also said the Supreme Court had upheld San Diegos ban on off-site commercial advertising in 1981, though Contest Promotions said the two laws were different. 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. The high court denied review Tuesday without comment. City Attorney Dennis Herrera said the courts action upholds what San Franciscans voted for in 2002, affirming their right to have a say on the billboards that appear in their city. Representatives of Contest Promotions declined to comment. The case is Concert Promotions vs. San Francisco, No. 17-1152. Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko The state Senate approved a bill Wednesday that would replace the federal governments repealed net neutrality regulations, sending the measure to the Assembly. The Senate voted 23-12 to approve the bill by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. When Donald Trumps FCC took a wrecking ball to the Obama-era net neutrality protections, we said we would step in to make sure that California residents would be protected from having their internet access manipulated, Wiener said in a statement after the vote. Assembly committee hearings start in June. The bill must be passed by that chamber by the end of August. Wiener pushed SB822 as a way for California to assert national leadership in the years-long debate over whether government should regulate internet service providers to ensure that all web traffic is treated equally. He introduced the bill a month after the Federal Communications Commission voted to revoke Obama-era net neutrality rules. Most of the FCCs order took effect April 23, although some rules arent set to expire until June 11. One of the no votes came from Sen. Patricia Bates, R-Laguna Niguel (Orange County), who argued that the bill still has some significant problems, including potentially undermining internet companies investments in broadband. The state has another net neutrality bill pending. SB460, by state Sen. Kevin de Leon, D- Los Angeles, passed the Senate Jan. 29, but has yet to be scheduled for a hearing before the Assembly. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes Wieners bill drew more attention nationally because it was far more comprehensive, seeking to replace all of the regulations the FCC threw out. The bill also drew intense opposition, particularly from large internet providers like AT&T and Comcast. The bill is a dogs breakfast of legal errors and technical impossibilities, Larry Downes, project director for the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, wrote in an opinion piece in Forbes. Benny Evangelista is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: bevangelista@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChronicleBenny As online competition reshapes one sector of retail after another, Serta Simmons Bedding, North Americas largest bedding manufacturer, said it will shut down its San Leandro plant and lay off 153 production workers. The decision came as part of the Atlanta companys evaluation of its cost structure and manufacturing operations, Serta Simmons said. The facility on Fairway Drive made Serta and Simmons Beautyrest mattress products. The company has operated in San Leandro since at least 1988, according to city records. As part of this evaluation, weve made the difficult decision to close our San Leandro plant and transfer this volume to other plants, the company said. While Serta Simmons is closing some locations, it is opening others as part of a $100 million investment in its manufacturing operations. This month, it opened a plant in Moreno Valley (Riverside County). Workers affected include material handlers, quilters, production supervisors and those who assemble the mattresses, according to a letter that a Serta Simmons subsidiary filed with the states Employment Development Department this month. The first layoffs will take place on July 15, according to the letter. Serta Simmons said it will give the affected workers severance and provide additional support. When a company has been here for a long time, its never our first choice to see them move on, said Jeff Kay, San Leandros interim city manager, adding that the city will also help the workers find jobs. Simmons, which originally owned the San Leandro plant, went bankrupt in 2009 and was purchased by the private-equity owners of Serta, which merged the companies. Serta Simmons and other traditional mattress makers face increasing competition from online sellers like Casper, Leesa and Zinus. San Leandro has had a long history in manufacturing. Ghirardelli chocolate is made there, and there are other areas in town zoned for industrial uses such as 3-D printing, Kay said. The unemployment rate in San Leandro is relatively low at 2.8 percent, and there are local businesses that are looking for more job candidates, he said. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes Zinus is also based in San Leandro, blocks away from the plant being closed. Filling the real estate space left behind by Serta Simmons will not be difficult, Kay said. Whenever a large space comes on the market, there is a strong interest, he said. It will not be long before there is a new tenant in there. Wendy Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: wlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thewendylee Esquires annual list recognizing the Best Bars in America was unveiled today and a pair of Bay Area hotspots made the cut: Lazy Bears cocktail spinoff, True Laurel and Oaklands popular natural wine bar, Ordinaire. Without diving too far into the methodology behind how Esquires Jeff Gordinier and Kevin Sintumuang add to their ever-growing hall of fame bar list, the general idea is that each place, 21 in total this year, has a specific feeling. Or as Esquire put it in a release,There is no other place youd rather be right now. Less than a week after San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon declined to file criminal charges against police officers in two controversial killings, an attorney for the mens families has a backup plan: Ask another prosecutor. John Burris is representing the families of Mario Woods and Luis Gongora Pat in their civil suits against the city, but on Tuesday the Oakland civil rights attorney told reporters that any successes in civil court wouldnt amount to justice for the families or serve as punishment for the officers involved. Flanked by activists atop the Hall of Justice steps Tuesday afternoon, Burris announced that he will ask California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to consider charges against the five officers who shot Woods to death and two officers who fired upon Gongora Pat. This is not the end, Burris said. And, hopefully, this is just the beginning. Burris criticized Gascon for not pursuing murder charges against the officers, or lesser charges such as manslaughter. Video shows officers shot at Woods more than 20 times, he said, suggesting this was enough evidence to show wrongdoing. Criminal conduct has taken place, Burris said. Holding people accountable for voluntary manslaughter is clearly an option that should have been exercised. Burris announcement followed fiery speeches from the families of the men who were killed, including Woods mother, Gwen Woods. Through sobs and moments of pained silence, she chastised both the district attorney and the officers who killed her son. I loved that kid and he was worth fighting for he was the best of me, she said. Mario deserved a little empathy. Gwen Woods has become an activist against police shootings in the more than two years since her sons death, but Tuesday was the first time she spoke publicly since Gascons announcement. Youll never forget his name, she promised, sparking cheers and chants from activists clutching prosecute killer cops signs and photos of the two men. Tuesday was also the first time, she said, that she uttered the names of the officers who killed her son. Reading from a piece of paper, she listed them each by name: Winson Seto, Antonio Santos, Charles August, Nicholas Cuevas and Scott Phillips. Mario Woods, a 26-year-old African American man, was killed Dec. 2, 2015, in the Bayview neighborhood as police were responding to a reported stabbing. Officials said he was holding a 4-inch blade when officers arrived, telling them, Youre gonna have to fing shoot me. The officers attempted to disarm Mario Woods with pepper spray and by firing two beanbag rounds and four foam rounds, but he refused to drop his weapon and began shuffling slowly to his right along a wall. Now Playing: SFPD's use of force policies have come under fire in recent years after a rash of deadly officer-involved shootings, including the killing of Mario Woods. Video: KTVU He was then cut off by Officer August, who told investigators he was trying to protect bystanders behind him at a nearby bus stop. He was the first to fire when Woods advanced toward him within 10 feet. In total the officers fired 26 rounds. Gwen Woods told those assembled Tuesday not to think of her as a victim. This is not an agenda for me, she said. This is my life. Woods death came amid nationwide protests on police use of force in communities of color after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Gongora Pats death, which occurred four months after Woods death, further inflamed tensions between communities of color and police in San Francisco. 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. Gongora Pat, 45, was fatally shot on April 7, 2016, after he allegedly threatened police with an 8-inch knife. An autopsy found he was under the influence of methamphetamine at a level high enough to kill or hospitalize a non-habitual user. At a news conference last week, Gascon said he was troubled by the shootings and that neither man should have been killed, but he cited insufficient evidence to prosecute. I have to tell you Im extremely, extremely disturbed by the state of the law today, Gascon said. Maxwell Szabo, a spokesman for the district attorneys office, said in an email Tuesday that the shooting cases underscored why Gascon is a strong advocate for a California bill that would toughen the standard for when police officers can lawfully shoot a suspect. Ultimately, the law says that no crime was committed, but that is frustrating for the D.A. because he believes that the shootings may not have been necessary, Szabo said. The state should only be using lethal force when its necessary not simply because its reasonable. The state attorney generals office did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday. Burris said he would ask Becerra to consider both cases for criminal charges. He said hes attempted the tactic before and acknowledged it was a long shot. It hasnt worked successfully, no, he said. But I just feel like Im obligated to do something. Otherwise, theres no hope. Megan Cassidy is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganrcassidy Our youngest son, Aidan, was born on May 24, 2005, which means that as of this week, there are two teenagers in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior. We did the whole parenting thing late in life. Brian wanted to wait until he wasnt touring. Which means that whenever we go to St. Johns Crab Feed, people confuse us as grandparents. No ones fault, really. Our family has a lousy sense of timing. Its an Irish Catholic thing: My mother, Nurse Vivian, and Pop practiced the rhythm method, only when I was born eight years after Brother X and Brother Not X, Pop mused, Everybody needs a little syncopation. But now that I have two teenage sons, everything else is my fault. Heres my example: Aidan teased Zane, who teased Aidan back, and they wrestled underneath the kitchen table, and Aidan busted a tooth. Whose fault? Daddys. You should have told me to stop teasing Zane before it got serious. Whose fault is it that Zane must go to summer school? I blame Zane for cutting class. Zane blames me for being so hung up on academics. In our family, its all about the culpa. Back in the early 60s in South Ozone Park, Sister Mary Magdalen was relentless that all the St. Anthonys boys and girls would get their Latin prayers down, one of the first being Mea Culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Which translates to something along the lines of My fault. No, really, my fault. I mean Big Time My Fault. Nurse Vivian, my mother, was good about the culpa business. She had done her relentless parenting with Brother X and Brother Not X, and me being the nerd in the family, I was a lot less likely to go for the big culpas, the someone-wrecked-the-neighbors-tractors-at-Grandmas-birthday culpa or I-dropped-out-of-Queens-College-and-Im-moving-to-Adak-Alaska-culpa. All of my culpas seemed minor in comparison, from the bought-the-Nehru-jacket-and-bell-bottoms-the-day-it-went-out-of-style culpa to the only-one-in-the-family-to-teach-disco-dancing culpa. But Nurse Vivian was very clear that the fault was always with the son and never the parent. So I was unprepared to raise children who thought I was to blame when Bravos Pizza was closed on a Monday. The Bedlam Bungalow has become the Culpa Cabana. As a child, I slept through almost every one of Father Fuscos sermons, so it wasnt until years later that I stayed awake for the Easter Vigil, which talks about the felix culpa or happy fault. Whats that mean? Thomas Aquinas explained that sin brought good to humanity because it was a bigger victory than remaining perfectly innocent. Now get this, in a religion full of shame and guilt, they got this escape clause that says, Sure, were all sinners, but if it wasnt for that, we wouldnt have this great excuse to get together. And thats just the thing. Its my fault. And Papas. And Zanes, Aidans, Buddyboys, even Bandits fault. One of us flushes magnets down the toilet. One of us leaves the kitchen cabinets open. One of us pees on the bed. One of us barks at the Australian cattle dog. One of us hides peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the furnace vent. One of us eats potato chips with his blood pressure medicine and puts mayonnaise on his cholesterol. It would be easy to blame all this on the fact that we all have challenges. Every single Fisher-Paulson in the known universe has a reputation for being spirited, which is code for uncontrollable. Mental illness may have its stigma, but madness has a certain style. These are our happy faults. Had any of the six of us been perfect, the other five wouldnt have been able to stand him. As a family on the edge, we have a lower benchmark for triumph. We dont shoot for an A in mathematics. We shoot for passing. So even a C seems extraordinary. Ive talked about the madly before. Started out a joke between Brian and me, two gays in a Harlequin romance, so that whenever Brian went on a tour, Id say, I miss you madly. This became the shorthand of our relationship, so that whenever one us of so much as walked down to Cordovas for a carton of milk, the other would shout, Madly. And, after 14 years of indoctrination, whenever I carry Bandit out to the lawn, the boys yell, Madly. One of the neighbors, not Aunt Dorla, not John with the Roof Cow, but one of the anonymous neighbors, as I carried Bandit back in, said, Thats what we like about your family. You guys never do it sane-ly. Madly. This is our felix culpa. And its still a great excuse to get together. Kevin Fisher-Paulson will appear at the Soldiers Journey at 3 p.m. Sunday, June 3, at the Generals Residence at Fort Mason, a benefit in honor of Heroes Voices, to celebrate National Veterans Poetry Contest winners. Tickets: www.heroesvoices.org/tickets. Kevin Fisher-Paulsons column appears Wednesdays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com To move his eponymous California Street restaurant into the future, Michael Mina is looking back to his childhood. Minas flagship restaurant, Michael Mina, is moving away from the modern American menu that earned it a Michelin star and implementing a six-course, $155 tasting menu based on Middle Eastern cuisine. Wine pairings are an additional $130, and reserve wine pairings are an additional $215. The new menu launches tonight (May 29), but the Cairo-born Mina said the transition has been in the works for the last two years, ever since his Mina Test Kitchen took a turn as Middle'terranea. It was there that the chef and his team first dabbled in refined Middle Eastern fare, and realized the desire to bring his childhood food into a refined setting. At a Middle Eastern household, with lunch it starts and then four hours later youre still at table and theres food all over the table and literally youve gone from laughing to crying to literally family members never speaking to each other back to the best of all friends, Mina said. Thats what got me into food, thats what got me into cooking, thats what got me into everything. The executive chef is Raj Dixit, who has been there since Ron Siegel left in 2016. The new Mina menu has dishes like baladi (an Egyptian flat bread), which Mina said he loved as a child. Elsewhere on the menu is a dish of Egyptian mango, foie gras and candied ginger and a grilled Mediterranean sea bass with tomato-shellfish stew. [ See the full food menu here. ] [ See the full cocktail menu here. ] One of the reasons Mina is making the transition is that he said the market could use more upscale Middle Eastern restaurants. Looking ahead, Mina said more than anything else, the new direction of the restaurant is something that he would be proud to have as the final iteration of Michael Mina as a whole. Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. As it is, the new Michael Mina restaurant is part of burgeoning category of Middle Eastern restaurants to open in the Bay Area. The most notable of late is Dyafa in Oakland, the Reem Assil restaurant which opened at Jack London Square with a focus on Arab cuisine and culture. Ive been blessed to do a lot of different things as a chef, Mina said. But this, having this will be the pinnacle. Michael Mina: 252 California St.; 252 California St.; Lunch: Monday-Friday from 11:30 a.m.-2:00 p.m.; Dinner: Monday-Thursday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday-Sunday from 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m.; www.michaelmina.net Justin Phillips is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JustMrPhillips Filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell and author Neil Gaiman are known for their knack at creating evocative, highly specific worlds and characters. Now, theyre turning their vision toward the waning days of punk and an alien visitation in Mitchells film adaptation of Gaimans short story How to Talk to Girls at Parties. I didnt want to do someone elses story after directing Rabbit Hole, said Mitchell at a recent press day with Gaiman at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Francisco. I wanted to do my own story, but it kept getting more attractive in the treatment. I always love a good puzzle to extrapolate; then there was an opportunity to put my own sense of humor in it, and I fell in love. Mitchell, the creator and star of the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and director of the 2001 film adaptation, as well as the writer-director of the film Shortbus, and Gaiman, the English fantasy writer best known for the comic book series The Sandman and the novel American Gods (since adapted into a Starz television series), spoke at length about the process of transferring, and expanding, the original short story into an intimate sociological sci-fi adventure. Its an intentionally little film, said Gaiman. On the cover of books, they used to have soon to be a major motion picture, and I joked I could get soon to be a minor motion picture on this. Not that its a minor picture; but the idea was always that the budget was going to be small, it wasnt going to be about huge special effects. Girls (adapted for the screen by Mitchell and Philippa Goslett) tells the story of Enn (Alex Sharp), a suburban English teenager, and Zan (Elle Fanning), one of the title girls at the party, who is also an extraterrestrial visitor. The original short story, said Gaiman, was the basis for Act 1 of the film, and in Act 2 one of those girls follows our hero home and then we get to see his world through her eyes. Gaimans conversations with Mitchell and Goslett about the cultural mood in 1977 England elevated punks role in the film and became the basis for Acts 2 and 3. One of the things John and I both globbed on to was the jubilee, said Gaiman of the period around Queen Elizabeth IIs 25th year as queen of England. I said, what can we do with that? Then the idea came that London is always the end of the aliens circuit on their tour but wait, they forgot to book accommodations ahead of time, joked Mitchell. Already for the punk kids its kind of over, the giant flowering of punk has happened, Gaiman continued. The kids are still in school uniform, theyre the kind of punks me and my friends were. The real punks at Kings Road with the dyed hair would not have considered us proper punks. We get to superimpose these 1970s aliens onto a world of 1970s punks and the jubilee. Like Hedwig and American Gods, Girls is a visually rich world that mashes together many sensibilities, but its the tension between British punk and retro 60s and 70s futurism that inform the films look and mood the most, call it Vivienne Westwood meets 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the 70s, it wasnt all apocalyptic; there were alternate futures that were interesting and not all doom, said Mitchell. Sadly, our future stories are all now dystopia and how do we survive the end days?, which is a limited palette. Mitchell wanted his aliens to have a sense of humor about their appearances, almost as if they were appearing as what people in the 70s thought aliens would look like. But even with all the highly specific design references, Mitchell and Gaiman agree that the films central motif that Everybody is an alien when youre in love, and everyone is an alien when youre a teenager, as Gaiman says, drives the story. Before puberty you knew who everyone was and how everything worked, said Gaiman. Now its like youve been issued with a completely new body, an alien body, and everyone else has an alien body too and nobody gets an instruction manual. Tony Bravo is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tbravo@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TonyBravoSF How to Talk to Girls at Parties (rated R) opens Friday, June 1, at Bay Area theaters. Will Toft What with a host of local performing ensembles and the umbrella sponsorship of the San Francisco Early Music Society, the greater Bay Area can sometimes feel like a full-time early music festival. Its not easy to swing a cat around here without hitting catgut strings on a violin. But the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition, which has been running biannually since Robert Cole started it in 1990, is something out of the ordinary a concentrated weeklong extravaganza of concerts, talks, master classes, industry powwows and general schmoozing. The performers are drawn from the Bay Area and beyond. Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2010 Forty protesters seeking better conditions for cooped-up chickens were arrested on Tuesday at a Petaluma egg ranch, authorities said. The peaceful protesters were part of a group of 200 people seeking to improve the lives of sick or improperly cared-for chickens that they said were on the property, Sonoma County sheriffs sergeant Spencer Crum said. As school board members in Oakland, Berkeley and West Contra Costa, we believe in the power of a public-school education. Public schools used to be a way up for students and our state once led the way. But now were falling behind the rest of the country. Shrinking budgets and resources are one of the biggest culprits and thats because, in large part, of the proliferation of charter schools. As school board members, weve seen how charter schools threaten public schools and pose a risk to the equal opportunity that public schools should provide. As we see more charter schools opening, were calling on Sacramento to give school boards like ours more control over charters. Many may wonder how charter schools, which are marketed as a choice for parents in search of better options for their children, are putting students at risk. Independently run charter schools take precious per-student taxpayer funding from traditional public schools and arent required to deliver the same quality product. The Chronicle report earlier this month, Study says Oakland school district lost $57.4 million last year because of charters, is a dismaying affirmation of what weve seen happening to public education in our state. The study showed a net loss to the Oakland Unified School District of $57.4 million in the past school year alone. This is a district that was forced to cut $9 million from its operating budget halfway through the school year. Charter school advocates point to mid-year cuts in school districts like Oakland as justification of why parents deserve school choice. But the very existence of 40 charter schools in the city of Oakland alone denies our schools the funding they need to serve our students well. Increasing class sizes and decreasing investment in programs such as foreign language, arts and music classes, counseling and library services are directly the result of charter school expansion. The majority of Oaklands charters were created during financial receivership, which seems to have created an opening for the proliferation of charter schools that sadly has not slowed down in the past decade such that each year about four to seven new applications arrive. Oakland is not alone. Not 10 miles away, the 12 charters in West Contra Costa Unified School District are causing similar pressures. Though charters take taxpayer funding from public schools, they arent held to the same transparency standards as our traditional public schools. For example, charter schools are not subject to open government rules. They often spend public dollars on charter management companies, which in turn have used their war chests to work against collective bargaining rights of educators and counselors, protecting the opaque budgeting in the schools. Charter schools also have the ability to turn away students, often refusing to educate our most needy students those with disabilities, behavioral challenges, special needs or who are new to our country. Those students require more services and ultimately more resources from our schools. We believe that elected school boards, like the boards on which we serve, are very limited in their abilities to prevent new charter schools from coming into the district and taking per-pupil dollars. Not only are we unable to prevent charter schools from coming to our districts, we are required by law to provide the charter school free space. Charter schools do all of this siphon public school funds, dodge transparency requirements, limit collective bargaining of educators, cherry-pick students and turn others away with the claim of providing a superior public education. However, study after study shows that outcomes dont differ between students who attend traditional public schools and charters. Instead, charters simply bleed public schools of precious resources, leaving educators and administrators to do more with less. In our Assembly district alone, we have some of our states best-resourced and most under-resourced schools. The funding structure is not serving Californias children fairly, and an entire generation of students will feel the effects. Thats not OK. Our Legislature must act. We need to give local school districts real control to reject charter school petitions. Legislators need to pass legislation to increase transparency and reporting of existing charters before we allow another one to open its doors. We are committed to equity in education, which means making sure that all of our students have equal access to quality education. Judy Appel is a Berkeley Unified School Board trustee. Roseann Torres is an Oakland School Board director, representing District 5. Madeline Kronenberg is a West Contra Costa Unified School Board trustee. Assembly District 15 includes Albany, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Emeryville, Hercules, portions of Oakland, Piedmont, Pinole, Richmond, and San Pablo. In Californias murky world of super PACs, just because a group is supporting a candidate doesnt always mean thats who its money is promoting. These groups which are producing much of the political advertising thats filling mailboxes and video screens these days are having an outsized influence in Californias primary. Thats because unlike a candidates campaign, they can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money. They do the dirty work of trashing opponents while the candidates get to keep their hands clean. Thats because, by law, these outside groups are not allowed to work with the candidates they are spending millions of dollars to elect. In the governors race alone, outside groups have collectively raised $29.5 million more than any of the individual campaigns and been responsible for most of the attacks, many designed to misdirect voters. Take, for example, an independent expenditure committee the formal name for super PACs called Families and Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor 2018, which is run and funded by wealthy supporters of the California Charter Schools Association Advocates. It has raised $17 million-plus more than any candidate except for polling leader Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. Its main funders are billionaires including Netflix founder Reed Hastings, entrepreneur Eli Broad, venture capitalist William Oberndorf and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The group has spent more than $1.1 million attacking Republican John Cox, who is locked in a fight with the Democrat Villaraigosa for second place in most polls. Only the top two candidates advance to the general election. What has raised eyebrows is the roundabout way the pro-Villaraigosa ads are trying to kneecap Cox with Republicans by linking him to Villaraigosas fellow liberals, like House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, Sen. Bernie Sanders, independent-Vt., and billionaire philanthropist George Soros. One mailer sent to California Republicans mocks Cox for contributing to a pro-Nancy Pelosi PAC that elected Democrats to Congress and won support from Liberal Groups with ties to Bernie Sanders and George Soros during his campaign. The connection is a tortured one: Cox gave $5,000 in 2016 to a group that then gave it to a political action committee backing candidates who would change campaign finance laws, one of whose co-founders served on boards with Soros. Another Republican-focused ad is headlined, Liberal Groups are Behind John Cox. It features a giant photo of the other Republican in the governors race, Orange County Assemblyman Travis Allen, near the headline, California Conservative Republican for Governor. So why would a group that supports a Democrat produce ads that mock Democrats and promote a conservative Republican? Because if Republicans think twice about voting for Cox, Villaraigosa has a better shot at one of the top two spots in Tuesdays primary. The pro-Villaraigosa group also has spent $241,247 saying nice things about the more conservative Allen, because he is further behind in the polls and is seen as a weaker candidate, with only $37,539 in the bank. We keep doing what were doing because its working, said Josh Pulliam, strategist for the independent pro-Villaraigosa group, pointing to internal metrics showing support for the former Los Angeles mayor ticking up. As long as Republicans feel he can win, Republicans will support Cox. The super PAC also has the money to defend Villaraigosa in ways his own campaign cant. Villaraigosa has been attacked with $3.1 million worth of ads purchased by Newsoms and state Treasurer John Chiangs campaigns, according to Pulliams group. Villaraigosas campaign has only $2.2 million cash on hand. Meanwhile, Pulliam pointed out, Newsom has barely faced any attack ads from opponents, and campaign finance reports show the former San Francisco mayor has $12.7 million in the bank. Cox was seething last week over the devious and deceptive ads created by the pro-Villaraigosa charter-school group. I havent voted for a Democrat since 1976, Cox said, calling on Villaraigosa to disavow the flood of harsh ads and mailers. Villaraigosas campaign, though, has a simple answer: Those attacks arent coming from the campaign. Theyre coming from an independent group that the campaign by law cant even communicate with. At the same time, his campaign declined to disavow the ads. Instead, a spokesman argued that an independent pro-Newsom group is trying to boost Cox because its convinced the Republican will be an easier opponent for Newsom. The pro-Newsom group, Citizens Supporting Gavin Newsom for Governor 2018, is another super PAC that is trying to play a political version of three-dimensional chess. It is funded primarily by the Service Employees International Union, which grew to dislike Villaraigosa when he called for layoffs and other givebacks from public employee unions during tough economic times when he was Los Angeles mayor. Another top funder to the pro-Newsom group is Blue Shield of California. Given that Newsom is the front-runner in the polls and has promised to put single-payer health care at the top of his agenda, it wants a voice in that debate should Newsom win. In a complaint filed with the states Fair Political Practices Commission last week, the Villaraigosa team argued that the pro-Newsom super PAC aired a 30-second TV commercial for the Democrat that spent half that time talking about Cox in an attempt to build him up to Republican voters. The ad said, Republican John Cox says hes glad Trump is president. Cox says we need tough border security, including Trumps wall. Cox is a conservative businessman who supports Trumps tax cuts. The Villaraigosa complaint alleged that the group violated state election law by not properly disclosing that the ad was supporting Cox. Other Democrats wondered why a group supporting a Democrat would want to do something thats likely to help Republicans nationally. If there is a Republican candidate for governor in the November election, their argument goes, it will help boost GOP turnout and probably hurt Democrats chances of flipping congressional seats in California and taking back the House. The race for governor has turned into a scam, Chiang said in a new 30-second TV ad. Gavin Newsom is trying to elect a Republican who was endorsed by Trump. And Villaraigosa is being bankrolled by a handful of billionaires. Its everything thats wrong with politics. And none of it is helping struggling families. Mike Roth, a spokesman for the pro-Newsom group, said the complaints are coming from losing campaigns. This smacks of desperation. Cox was able to keep his hands clean when an independent group supporting him called Restore Our Values took shots at Newsoms and Villaraigosas history of affairs while in office. One ad said Newsom and Villaraigosa think the rules shouldnt apply to them. They dont want punishment they want a promotion. The kicker: Californians deserve better: John Cox for governor. The committees biggest funders include Marin County businessman Ken Casey, who contributed $100,000 through his company, Professional Investors Security Fund. However, it is not nearly as well-endowed as others, having spent only $114,000. Cox backed away from the ads when asked about them after a May 8 candidate debate in San Jose. That ad was not mine, and Im not going to get into that, Cox said. I do disavow it, and I think we need to focus on issues. Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press Focusing more on issues is unlikely, however, given the amount of money going into independent organizations. These well-financed (independent expenditure groups) often have way more money than the campaign has to spend, said Darry Sragow, a former Democratic campaign strategist who now publishes the nonpartisan California Target Book. Its an astronomical distortion of the electoral process. The rapid rise of the independent committees is an unintended consequence of the effort by good-government groups to limit money in politics. While reformers used contribution limits and other methods to cut the amount of money campaigns could raise, they did nothing to limit the soaring cost of running for office in a state where the price of airing a TV ad in a major market for a week is $2 million. The good-government groups built walls to limit money for campaigns, Sragow said. Super PACs are the waters that flow around those walls. John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer and Joe Garofoli is the senior political writer. Email: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com, jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth, @joegarofoli Independent expenditures for governor Committees that have given the most to support or oppose the main gubernatorial candidates. Antonio Villaraigosa Total: $18.3 million Families & Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor 2018, sponsored by California Charter Schools Association Advocates. Raised: $17.3 million. Largest donors: Reed Hastings, $7 million; Michael Bloomberg, $2.5 million; Eli Broad, $2.5 million. Purpose: Supporting Villaraigosa for governor. Opposing John Cox for governor. Working Californians to Support Villaraigosa for Governor 2018, sponsored by labor organizations. Raised: $400,000. Largest donor: International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 11, Pasadena, $250,000. Purpose: Supporting Villaraigosa for governor. Public Safety Officers for Villaraigosa for Governor 2018, s ponsored by public safety organizations. Raised: $375,000. Largest donor: Los Angeles Police Protective League, $250,000. Purpose: Supporting Villaraigosa for governor. Police Officers Research Association of California. Raised: $125,000, all from the association. Purpose: Supporting Villaraigosa for governor. Gavin Newsom Total: $7.4 million Citizens Supporting Gavin Newsom for Governor 2018, sponsored by labor organizations and Blue Shield of California. Raised: $4.7 million. Largest donors: Service Employees International Union, California State Council Political Committee, $1 million; Blue Shield of California, $971,440. Purpose: Supporting Newsom for governor. Nurses for Newsom for Governor 2018, sponsored by California Nurses Association Raised: $1.2 million. Largest donor: California Nurses Association, $215,000 Purpose: Supporting Newsom for governor. Educational Organizations for Gavin Newsom for Governor 2018. Raised: $1.3 million. Largest donors: California Teachers Association, $1 million; California Federation of Teachers, $250,000. Purpose: Supporting Newsom for governor. California Statewide Law Enforcement Association Raised: $200,000 (to support Newsom). Largest donors: Various under $100. Purpose: General independent expenditures. John Cox Total: $114,506 Restore Our Values, an independent committee supporting John Cox for Governor 2018 Raised: $114,506. Largest donor: Marin County businessman Ken Casey, $100,000. Purpose: Supporting Cox, opposing Newsom and Villaraigosa. John Chiang Total: $405,000 Californians for Fiscal and Economic Leadership, primarily formed to support John Chiang for Governor 2018, sponsored by United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals Raised: $405,000. Largest donor: United Nurses Association of California/Union of Health Care Professionals: $350,000. Purpose: Supporting Chiang. Anti-Newsom Total: $189,450 Asian American Small Business PAC Raised: $189,450 (to oppose Newsom). Largest donors: Comcast, $25,000; California Teachers Association, $25,000; International Union of Operating Engineers Local 39, San Francisco, $25,000; Chevron, $25,000; United Domestic Workers of America, $25,000; United Nurses Association of California, $25,000. Purpose: General purpose political action committee. Anti-Chiang Total: $3 million Health Care Providers for Fiscal Accountability, opposed to John Chiang for Governor 2018 Raised: $3 million. Largest donors: California Medical Association, $1 million; California Dental Association, $1 million; Blue Shield of California, $1 million. Purpose: Opposing Chiang. Note: All numbers are as of May 19, the cutoff for latest California financial reports. At the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive gala in honor of its director, Larry Rinder, on May 17, a few little-known facts were gleaned: He loves dabbling in haiku and he loves his regular weekend rustication in Ukiah. And, it turns out, haiku is a semordnilap (a type of palindrome) for Ukiah, where the annual UkiaHaiku Festival is held. How did gala benefactors handle this information? They filled their tribute program, Theres Something About Larry, with their own 17-syllable efforts. Taking the stage at UC Berkeleys Pauley Ballroom, gala chairwoman Julie Simpson read her haiku: Tinkling of ice cubes / Rhythm track of headache pasts / Salut! Kampai! Cheers! Cheers were raised, too, for the $724K proceeds benefiting BAMPFAs exhibition and education efforts, including $120K earmarked for student work-study interns. Simpson, a BAMPFA trustee, attempted to distill Rinders essence into a sound bite. Instead, she was left with a long list of nouns and adjectives: Risk-taker. Maverick. Visionary. Iconoclast. Funny. And, refined eye a close-up of which adorned gala graphics designed by former trustee Eric McDougall, now reigning minister of cool. (McDougall also created cardboard cutouts of Rinder that captured his less-serious side, which guests gleefully mugged with.) Dressed in Berkeley black-tie, a dress code inspiring eclectic ensembles, 350 fans, art collectors and cultural pooh-bahs turned out to honor Rinders first decade of leadership at BAMPFA, an institution hes transformed into a cultural powerhouse yet one that adroitly satiates art intellectuals and casual viewers. Larry is a curators curator, enthused BAMPFA trustee Paul Wattis. But his exhibitions never alienate the crowd. Rinder joined BAMPFA 30 years ago to curate its Matrix program, a series of solo exhibitions by contemporary artists thats been copied by museums around the globe. Soon after, he was appointed as California College of the Arts founding director-curator of its Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. Later he was promoted to dean of CCAs graduate studies then dean of the entire college. In 2008, Rinder returned to BAMPFA, leading the charge to develop the museums downtown Berkeley building that opened in 2016. The gala commenced in typical fashion: cocktails and canapes, a McCalls three-course dinner and live art auction rife with cool lots corralled by Carla Crane and swiftly sold by auctioneer Greg Quiroga. Yet Berkeley galas are a different beast. Amplified by Meyer Sound, this event was fun and fresh with a dash of silly. Sir JoQ, a voguing artist who had just arrived from France, wildly grooved among the tables. But Rinder was deadly serious as he waved away the spotlight, instead thanking his colleagues, dedicated museum team and mentors. Tonight we celebrate amazing artists and filmmakers, he said. Its my honor, these last 30 years, to work with some of the most incredibly creative people on this planet, modestly helping them to achieve their work and connect with large, loving audiences. Homecoming: One heckuva house party recently unfurled May 19 on Potrero Hill where 400 friends, families and fans celebrated the Our House gala, raising more than $200K for the Homeless Prenatal Project and its life-changing programs. Founded in 1989 by Martha Ryan, an intrepid nurse practitioner and devoted house mother who tirelessly champions health care, job training, housing and social justice for homeless pregnant women, her quiet determination has transformed thousands of lives. This year were refocusing on our roots: supporting homeless pregnant mothers and their families with intensive services. HPPs work is two-generational and our course is upstream, Ryan said. By providing prevention services, HPP is ensuring babies born homeless today will not end up back on the streets years later. The program also annually distributes items such as 150,000 diapers, and essentials like sheets, dishes, new mattresses, Thanksgiving meals and party supplies (hats, cake mixes, decorations) to celebrate a childs birthday once families move into housing. Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. Initially funded by a $52K grant from the San Francisco Foundation and run by Ryan with three part-time staff, Homeless Prental Project now operates an $8 million budget; more than half of its 90 staffers are former HPP clients. Were also working with the city to develop the first transitional housing program for homeless pregnant women in the Bayview, explains Ryan, with a devilish aside: And we cant wait to show them how to do it the right way. Guests savored El Sur South American specialties as they toured HPPs four-story facility, including the just-opened New Generation Health Center, a reproductive clinic in partnership with UCSF and the Department of Public Health. We welcome teens, because we dont want them to become clients, Ryan said. We provide counseling and contraception so they can make informed decisions about their bodies and lives. The evening also honored Megan Lucas, a former HPP client-turned-lawyer, and Project Legal Link, a resource for homeless and low-income families founded by attorney Sacha Crittenden Steinberger. Ryan was the first to see the value of Links legal support and offered her partnership, which was a huge vote of confidence for the nascent nonprofit. What were building is about changing who has the tools to navigate a complicated and inequitable system of power. And Marthas support inspires us to continue and perform better, said Steinberger. Martha, youre one of this communitys greatest heroes. Catherine Bigelow is The San Francisco Chronicles society correspondent. Email: missbigelow@sfgate.com Instagram: @missbigelow A Los Gatos doctor who sells hissing sounds online to treat all kinds of diseases is in danger of having his medical license revoked. The California Medical Board is seeking a hearing against Stanford-educated Dr. Bill Gray, who offers his sound wave "eRemedies" at $5 per cure on his website MD In Your Hand. According to the site, a 15-second sound file is selected from 263 eRemedies based on clients' responses to "very detailed" medical questions. The healing process allegedly begins as soon as the patients listen to them on their cellphones or computers. Gray claims his audio elixirs can cure flu, diarrhea, typhoid, malaria, menstrual pain and even pet bladder infections. The physician even claims to have cured three cases of ebola in 2014 "simply by playing the appropriate eRemedy several times in an hour." His site describes his sound wave treatments as homeopathic even though homeopathy involves using minute amounts of natural substances in highly diluted solutions to treat illnesses. Gray supposedly harvests the energy of the homeopathic potions by converting it to sound waves via a coil connected to an amplifier and digitizer. The sound waves are then stored on devices as .wav files or MP3 files. MORE: Homeopathic treatments useful for none of 61 illnesses researched study Even if it were possible to extract such healing energy and digitize it and there is no science to support that it is, according to the state Medical Board homeopathic remedies have long been greeted with skepticism. A 2010 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report on homeopathy found that the remedies perform no better than placebos and the principles on which they are based on are "scientifically implausible." Providing questionable remedies to people suffering from diseases such as malaria, typhoid or ebola could keep them from seeking urgent medical attention that could potentially save their lives. Earlier this month, the Medical Board and the state attorney general filed an accusation of "gross negligence and repeated negligent acts," stating Gray's method has no scientific basis and faulted the physician for not performing actual exams. Robert Stewart, founder of the New York School of Homeopathy, distanced the school from Gray's techniques. "It is clear to me that what he is doing has nothing to do with homeopathy," he told the Los Angeles Times. "He's on his own in this." On Yelp, Gray's practice was both praised and scorned with the negative reviews receiving the most votes. Most reviews received either one or five stars. There were testimonials like this one: "My health, both mentally and physically, has significantly improved since seeing Dr. Gray." But also detractors: "I spent a lot of Money with Dr. Gray (2K+) - first couple meetings was ok - and after that his Admin keeps pushing back - none of the medications worked." The hypodermic needles that have become a frequent sighting on San Francisco streets are starting to appear on BART, sometimes wedged within cushions and wall crevices. In response to a growing number of complaints from Bay Area riders of needles littering the regions transit system as well as a media report of a woman being pricked by a hypodermic needle BART is enlisting more members for its rapid response team to manage urgent cleaning needs on trains and a mobile option for passengers to file biohazard complaints, the agency announced Wednesday. BART is unfortunately impacted by the nations opioid and intravenous drug addiction crisis, BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost said. We have recently been very focused on making sure our downtown San Francisco station hallways and our trains are clean. Its a challenging issue that we are working hard to address, as the areas we serve need more services to help people get treatment. Linda Quan, a San Ramon mother of two, told KRON-TV that she was riding a BART train from Dublin to San Francisco when she felt something prick her in the back. Quan reportedly stood up from her seat and saw that it was the tip of a syringe. In the past two weeks, BART has received 10 complaints from riders reporting issues with train cleanliness, Trost said. Currently, the rapid response team has 14 members; BART plans to add five more. The teams will be stationed at the busy MacArthur and Lake Merritt BART stations and respond to biohazard reports. On Monday, BART will also launch a biohazard reporting option to its mobile website. Riders can also file complaints with train conductors, who will then notify the control center to dispatch the rapid response team, Trost said. Weve just been getting more and more reports of urgent messes that need attention, she said. We want to make sure people feel safe and comfortable. The rapid response team comes in addition to the already existing cleaning crews that check trains that complete entire routes. It can be difficult for cleaning crews and response teams to spot needles that might be poking out of seat cushions, Trost said. Sometimes when things are hidden, the riders will see it before we do, she noted. More than 400,000 needles are handed out each month in San Francisco alone, and this year the city is on track to hand out close to 6 million syringes, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Of the 400,000 needles distributed monthly, officials estimate that about 246,000 come back to the 13 syringe access and disposal sites. By that count, roughly 154,000 needles are unaccounted for each month. When clean needles are available, there is less sharing, less disease transmission, and the discarded needles are less likely to be infectious, Rachael Kagan, a health department spokeswoman, told The Chronicle. San Francisco has no known cases of disease spread from accidental needle pricks, according to the health department. Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani Last year we attempted to categorize what restaurants best embody San Francisco. And this might be our favorite batch. Above is a slideshow of what we consider the most "Only in SF" restaurants you can find in our city. This project started with a simple request of a visiting friend, who requested to dine at a "very San Francisco" restaurant. Wondering what it really means to be a true "San Francisco" restaurant, we polled our staff and revisited Chronicle archives to make a list. There were so many worthy contenders we realized we needed to create three categories: the true classics, the new classics and the "Only in SF" eateries (above). Most of these "Only in SF" places could have easily qualified for either our "true classics" or "new classics" lists, but when considering how each of them have qualities that are so uniquely San Francisco, they deserve their own recognition. They could be a perfect and constantly-adapting example of the Bay Area dining ideology (hi, Zuni) or a beloved eatery that started a local trend, like Cha Cha Cha ushering in small plates or Burma Superstar paving the way for so many of the Bay Area's Burmese eateries or, how, thanks to the Tonga Room, San Francisco is not a tiki bar-shy city. Many of these wonderfully eclectic eateries have proven they have the ability to adapt to our ever-changing city. Others are dining spots representing a mix of old and new San Francisco. And we also had to throw in a few of our staff's personal favorites, just because. Some of these restaurants are notably "SF" for their food, while others are just quirky enough in concept or ambiance to make the list. Editor's note: This was the third installment in an SFGATE series of the "most San Francisco" restaurants. The first two slideshows featured the city's "true classics" and "new classics." It was the hottest day in the Bay Area since the start of the year the perfect opportunity to catch some sunshine or hit the surf. But Memorial Day revelers taking advantage of the holiday were met by an unusual sight at one Pacifica beach: hundreds of translucent jellyfish. Most were dead, but some were alive and reportedly stinging. All of them were squishy and squeal-inducing. Reporting from Linda Mar beach on Monday, KTVU said one surfer got stung and multiple swimmers brushed the invertebrates' short, white tentacles. Dr. Rebecca Johnson, an invertebrate scientist and the citizen science manager at the California Academy of Sciences, identified the creatures as Scrippsia pacifica, a member of the hydrozoa taxonomic class. Scrippsia pacifica are not considered "true jellyfish," Johnson said, though they act like them in their medusa, or "jellyfish," stage. And swimmers rejoice the sting of the Scrippsia pacifica is incredibly mild, if you can feel it at all. Johnson said the Academy first found a Scrippsia at Yerba Buena Island in April, and since then, reports of the creature have increased. "This is a species that doesn't normally wash up," the scientist noted, though she said it's possible there "are normally this many offshore." Jellyfish tend to gather in groups, called blooms, and a variety of environmental factors tides, winds, swells, currents can whisk them onshore by the thousands. But they don't stick around long. Some will die, some will be eaten and "the rest will get taken back into the water to become food for something else," Johnson said. Though the scene at Linda Mar looked like something out of science fiction, it's actually a common occurrence on West Coast beaches. So common, in fact, that jellyfish have been washing ashore in the Bay Area for at least 500 million years, Mike McGill, a marine biologist at the Aquarium of the Bay at Pier 39, told The Chronicle in 2010, when a jellyfish bloom blanketed Ocean Beach. Johnson advises people who see mass jellyfish groupings onshore to take a photo and upload it to the Academy's iNaturalist app so scientists can continue to collect and analyze data on the creatures. Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf. A 54-year-old man from San Jose died surfing at Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz Saturday. Richard Herrin was described by his wife, Rita, as "a fish, a Pisces" in an obituary that ran in the Santa Cruz Sentinel Wednesday. The cause of death is under investigation by the Santa Cruz Coroner's Office. Sgt. Brian Cleveland, a spokesperson for the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office, says police got a call about a person who was unresponsive and not breathing on a beach at the foot of 37th Ave., at East Cliff Drive. ALSO: Thousands of jellyfish blanket Pacifica beach "He was out surfing when he passed away," Cleveland said. "He was surfing with a friend. His friend was surfing and lost sight of him and then saw firetrucks driving up to the beach." The Sentinel obituary says Herrin was in Santa Cruz with his wife celebrating his recent graduation from San Jose State with an engineering degree. "He was one of the highest he could ever be, at that point, with school. I've never seen a smile so big, on graduation day," Rita told the paper. "He texted everybody that he was going to go surfing. He was so excited. And I'm sure he's still excited." Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, goes silent for a moment. It sounds, briefly, as if theres a faulty connection over a phone call from Los Angeles, where he lives. But Nguyen has stopped talking in mid-sentence, his voice catching. He is trembling, unexpectedly it seems even to himself, as he speaks on the variety of experiences he read about as editor of the new and necessary book, The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (Abrams; $25). What surprised me is that these stories nevertheless share so much in common, Nguyen says. Whether were speaking of someone fleeing from Hungary as a Jew in the 1950s or whether were speaking about someone who is a Hmong refugee born in a Thai refugee camp in the 1970s, theres so much ... so much pain. Prominent refugee writers present a constellation of stories from across the world, spanning decades, in The Displaced: personal narratives of their journeys, memories they struggle to piece together, essays rebuking the political rhetoric surrounding the global crisis that amounts to 22.5 million displaced worldwide, according to the United Nations. Together, the stories share similar threads of loss and adjustment, of the confusion of identity, of wounds that heal and those that dont, of the scars that remain. This Is What the Journey Does, by the Ethiopian-born writer Maaza Mengiste, provides a harrowing and powerful account of her spotting another African refugee in Italy and witnessing the disintegration of humanity that comes at the cost of leaving home in search of basic human safety. In The Ungrateful Refugee, Iranian American writer Dina Nayeri interrogates the expectations we place on refugees and what human obligation means in the face of the crisis. Even though I no longer look like a refugee, and Im no longer technically a refugee, I never ceased being a refugee, Nguyen says, referring to a piece in the book written by the Ukrainian British writer Marina Lewycka, who begins questioning her status of belonging in Britain following Brexit. That emotional history is right there waiting to be uncovered. Indeed, Nguyen, who grew up in San Jose after he became a refugee as a child when his family fled during the Vietnam War, says this before choking up again. Ive been getting weepy a lot recently. I think simply because I hear stories from people, he says, pausing to gather himself. And I have to think about what theyve been through. As a writer, he must cultivate empathy for these stories, must feel them himself, Nguyen says before expressing frustration at the lack of such empathy at large surrounding the refugee crisis. Its a basic refusal of humanity and a conservation of humanity just for us. For these writers, voicing their experiences is an assertion of humanity, especially as, Nguyen notes, the stories of refugees historically are rarely told by the refugees themselves. The very act of calling themselves refugees, as opposed to immigrants, is a political statement. Immigrants, at the very least, are a part of the American mythology, but refugees represent the unclean and unwanted. That distinction often failed to be made even with Nguyens The Sympathizer, about a North Vietnamese spy undercover in the U.S. People completely misunderstood the novel because they could just slap the immigrant label on it and that automatically allows them to fall into the language of the American dream, he says. And the whole point of The Sympathizer is to foreground refugees war experiences and to criticize that American dream. With The Displaced, there is no mistaking the reality here. These are refugees. These are their stories. The work of witnesses remains important, Nguyen says. We have to keep talking about these kinds of things to make sure that these stories continue to be out there. Nguyen discusses the new book, alongside its contributors Thi Bui and Meron Hadero, on Wednesday, June 6, at City Lights Booksellers. Brandon Yu is a Bay Area freelance writer. Book events Viet Thanh Nguyen: 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 6. City Lights, 261 Columbus Ave., S.F. www.citylights.com Nikole Hannah-Jones: The investigative reporter and founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting speaks with Alexis Madrigal at City Arts & Lectures. 7:30 p.m. Monday, June 4. Nourse Theater. 275 Hayes St., S.F. www.cityarts.net Creative Minds: Vietnamese Writers of the Diaspora: Viet Thanh Nguyen hosts an evening featuring Vietnamese writers of the diaspora. 6 p.m. Saturday, June 9. $6-$12. San Jose Museum of Art. 110 S. Market St., San Jose. https://sjmusart.org Walmart, the nations largest employer with some 2.3 million people, will offer its workers free college tuition at a trio of schools, including for online coursework. Employees can enroll for $1 a day at the University of Florida, Bellevue University in Nebraska or Brandman University in Irvine, Calif., with Walmart promising to add more nonprofit schools. It's not your imagination: congestion at San Francisco International Airport is getting worse as waits for gates become more common, airport road traffic slows down, and more passengers and planes than ever crowd in. How can the airport deal with an onslaught like that? Well, after more than a decade of record growth, SFO is preparing for a slot-controlled future which could be implemented in the coming decade. TravelSkills with Chris McGinnis sponsored by See More Collapse Slot-controls are common at the busiest airports worldwide to limit congestion. At these airports, airlines lease time slots of when they want to take-off and land. The number of slots available is capped making them pricey and valuable commodities for carriers wishing to serve the busiest airports at the most popular flight times. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses runway slots to limit scheduled air traffic at certain capacity constrained airports. In the U.S., those airports are John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) and LaGuardia Airport (LGA) in New York, and Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) in Virginia, outside Washington D.C. If, or when, SFO reaches runway capacity (the number of take-offs and landings that can be accommodated in any given day), it could become the next big U.S. airport to become slot-controlled. "We are preparing for a future that acknowledges the runway constraints that currently exist," said Airport spokesman Doug Yakel. Currently, SFO is a "slot-facilitated" airport where airlines are asked to coordinate schedules with a facilitator and maintain a lot of flexibility of when and how many flights they wish to operate. The airport's traffic forecast is expected to reach runway capacity by 2025 or 2026, but record growth recently has outpaced projections. "Subsequent growth has outpaced this forecast and, should it continue, the airport would reach its runway capacity in the 2023 timeframe," Yakel said. "Whenever that runway capacity is reached would likely be the time when the Federal Aviation Administration would consider designating SFO as a Level 3 Coordinated [slot-controlled] facility." SFO served nearly 56 million passengers in 2017, its fourteenth consistent year of growth. Federal Aviation Administration 'Smart Growth Strategy' A new runway to handle more flights won't likely happen at SFO anytime soon due to environmental concerns around expanding into San Francisco Bay, but airport officials say they have a plan to deal with the growing number of passengers. In addition to building new parking garages, creating a new ridesharing pickup/drop off area, expanding terminals, and other facilities (like the on-airport Grand Hyatt Hotel), SFO says it is encouraging the airlines to fly larger planes, rather than add flights, to accommodate demand. "While passenger traffic has grown by 36 percent since 2011, the number of flights at SFO has only grown by 14 percent," Yakel explained. "In 2011, the average flight at SFO held 134 seats. By 2017, that number had risen to 158 seats per aircraft." The airport is also getting help from the on-going pilot shortage. U.S. carriers, particularly regional airlines, are retiring smaller 30-50 seat "regional" jets in favor of flying planes that carry more people. Slot Controls = Higher Airfares? One by-product of slot-controls could be higher fares, airport officials say, because airlines would be able to charge a premium for flights to a slot-controlled SFO. "This would have the effect of pushing price-sensitive travelers out to other Bay Area airports, assuming service is available to those desired destinations," Yakel said. Last year, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said airfares went down and destinations increased at Newark-Liberty International Airport after the FAA dropped slot-controls at that airport in 2016. So it remains to be seen what overall effect slot controls could have at SFO. But given the increasing crowds, congestion and delays, it's likely something will soon be done to get it under control. How do you think SFO should deal with congestion? Raise fares? Enforce the use of larger jets? Limit growth? Please leave your thoughts in the comments. Read all recent TravelSkills posts here Get twice-per-week updates from TravelSkills via email! Sign up here Chris McGinnis is the founder of TravelSkills.com. The author is solely responsible for the content above, and it is used here by permission. You can reach Chris at chris@travelskills.com or on Twitter @cjmcginnis. Get twice-per-week updates from TravelSkills via email! Sign up here Chris McGinnis is the founder of TravelSkills.com. The author is solely responsible for the content above, and it is used here by permission. You can reach Chris at chris@travelskills.com or on Twitter @cjmcginnis. Singapore Airlines has set October 11 as the launch date for the worlds longest commercial airline flight a route from Singapore to Newark Liberty International Airport with a flight time of up to 18 hours and 45 minutes. The airline leveraged its position as one of Airbus top customers for the A350-900 widebody it has 21 in its fleet now, with another 46 on order to request a special version of the aircraft that will make the extra-long flight possible. Its designated the A350-900ULR (Ultra Long Range), and Singapore has ordered seven of them. Singapore will fly the new non-stop Newark route three times in the first week of service, then increase it to daily frequencies on October 18 following the delivery of a second aircraft. The company also plans to use the new planes to offer non-stop Los Angeles-Singapore flights, although it hasnt yet said when they will start. The Singapore-Newark route is 16,700 kilometers long (10,376 statute miles or 9,000 nautical miles). Currently, the longest non-stop route is Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Auckland at 9,032 statute miles, followed by Qantas new Perth-London service at 9,010 miles. Currently, Singapore Airlines has one-stop service to New Yorks JFK Airport via Frankfurt, and to LAX via Seoul and Tokyo. The airline also has non-stop service from Singapore to San Francisco (using an A350-900) and one-stops to Houston via Manchester. It used to offer non-stops on both the Newark-Singapore and LAX-Singapore routes with specially-configured A340-500s but discontinued that service in 2013. United Airlines currently flies non-stop to Singapore from both San Francisco and Los Angeles using Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners. The airlines new long-range version of the A350-900 will have just 161 seats in two classes 67 in business class and 94 in premium economy, with no regular economy section. (By comparison, Deltas A350-900s have 306 seats in three classes, and Singapores standard A350-900s have 253 seats in three classes.) The company said its new ultra-long-range A350 is designed with passenger comfort in mind, featuring higher ceilings, larger windows, an extra-wide body, lighting that should reduce jet lag, and improved cabin air quality. And of course the airline will also bring its renowned in-fight service to the new non-stop routes. To see what thats like, check out our Reader Report of premium economy on a Singapore flight last year, and Chris's personal experience of business class on the airlines 777-300ER from 2015. Read all recent TravelSkills posts here Get twice-per-week updates from TravelSkills via email! Sign up here Chris McGinnis is the founder of TravelSkills.com. The author is solely responsible for the content above, and it is used here by permission. You can reach Chris at chris@travelskills.com or on Twitter @cjmcginnis. Members of several San Francisco community groups hand-delivered a letter to the office of City Attorney Dennis Herrera on Wednesday demanding an end to the citys gang injunction program. The action, which started with a news conference on the steps of City Hall, comes as the San Francisco Board of Supervisors plans to review the controversial program during a June 13 hearing called by District One Supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer. We have some very serious concerns about these injunctions, said Jose Bernal, a member of the citys Reentry Council, which helps inmates released from jail and prison transition to regular life. The injunctions are unconscionable, and they are embarrassing for San Francisco. In April, Herrera announced that his office was seeking to remove 80 percent of the names from the citys Western Addition gang injunction list. He also said his office would perform a similar review on the three other injunctions, in Bayview-Hunters Point, the Mission and Visitacion Valley. Herrera launched the gang injunction program in 2006 amid escalating street violence in the citys poorer neighborhoods. The civil injunctions designate a neighborhood area as a gangs alleged turf and prohibit named gang members from associating with other members inside the boundaries. The orders also bar listed people from engaging in certain behavior, including flashing gang signs, loitering and painting graffiti. Violators can face misdemeanor charges if they break the order, or stronger penalties if they commit a felony. The injunction coincided with a sharp decline in the citys homicide rate, as tit-for-tat gang killings decreased and homicides dropped from nearly 100 a year between 2005 and 2008 to 45 in 2009. The citys homicide rate remains at historically low levels. But critics of the injunctions have said they contribute to police harassment and racial profiling. All of the listed people on San Franciscos injunctions are people of color, according to activists. The price of being on the gang injunction was constant harassment every day, said Ruben Leal, who lives in Oaklands Fruitvale neighborhood and was on an injunction list until that city dissolved its program in 2015. Im here to tell the city of San Francisco that this type of policy is outdated. Leal and others on Wednesday urged Herrera to follow in the footsteps of Oakland and other cities that have gotten rid of their gang injunctions in recent years, including Los Angeles and Portland. But from the outset, Herrera said his office aimed to avoid troubles other cities encountered with their gang injunctions. Street cops in San Francisco dont have the power to add names to the list, and a judge must sign off on the order after being presented with evidence of a persons gang involvement. Those named in a San Francisco injunction, Herrera said, can petition the city at any point to opt out by showing documentation they are on a straight path. Still, those at Wednesdays event said San Franciscos program has not been successful and the only solution is to end gang injunctions. San Francisco is a great city, but its not a good city, said Western Addition activist and former gang member Daniel Landry. The thing thats lacking in this city is compassion. Lets end the gang injunctions. Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky An early morning fire that decimated a five-story residential building under construction in Concord last month was started intentionally and the suspected arsonist was caught on video, federal authorities said Wednesday. The April 24 blaze at 1905 Concord Blvd. the fifth arson fire since 2012 at large apartment buildings under construction in the East Bay occurred around 1 a.m. and caused an estimated $55 million in damage. The blaze forced 250 people to flee their homes at the nearby Renaissance Square apartments, and two people were treated for smoke inhalation. Officials for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said surveillance video captured an image of a person believed to be an arsonist approaching the 265,000-square-foot building designed to include 180 apartments. The video shows the person carrying a bag, climbing a fence to get into the property, then entering the structure. After a moment, the cameras capture a glow of fire from inside the structure and the person coming back out, jumping again over the fence and dashing off. It was eerily similar to surveillance video released by ATF last year of a black-clad man on a bicycle seen pedaling away from a seven-story building under construction on San Pablo Avenue in Emeryville, just before a devastating fire broke out. Emeryville Mayor John Bauters said he was sorry to hear the Concord fire was arson, and noted the similarities between the video images captured in Emeryville and Concord. These crimes are troubling. They disrupt lives. Theyre reckless, and they put people in harms way, Bauters said. I have a great deal of confidence in the ATF and the other agencies investigating this. The ATF spokeswoman, along with other fire officials, said officials have not connected the arsons. At this time there is no evidence linking the fires in Concord and Emeryville, said ATF spokeswoman Alexandria Corneiro. We are treating them as individual events. The suspect is a person of interest. The string of arson fires include: Red Star, Oakland: A senior housing complex that was two months away from opening was destroyed in an early morning arson fire on June 14, 2012, that also temporarily shut down the nearby West Oakland BART Station. The fire caused $25 million in damage. Lester Avenue, Oakland: A three-story housing project of 41 units on Lester Avenue, near Lake Merritt, was destroyed in an early-morning fire on Oct. 31, 2016. The Intersection, Emeryville: A $35 million, seven-story residential and business building under construction was destroyed twice in early-morning arson fires, first on July 6, 2016, and again, as it was being rebuilt, on May 13, 2017. The arsons have prompted concerns about a possible connection but officials havent linked any of the cases. Officials are offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the Concord arsonist, and an additional $125,000 reward for arrests in the Oakland and Emeryville fires. Another predawn massive fire occurred in July 2017 at a seven-story under-construction housing project in Oakland at 23rd and Valdez streets, but the cause of that blaze was never determined. Robert Marshall, a fire marshal with the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District that is investigating the Concord blaze, said the surveillance video did not change anything from our perspective in his departments attempt to solve the case. Its fortunate we have so many great partners working on this, so hopefully well find somebody, Marshall said. Were always on the lookout. The fact that this was (another) building under construction is a little scary. Building owners are responsible for providing security at construction sites, he said, adding that it appeared that the Concord building owners were complying. An Oakland City Council member suggested the fires could be tied to gentrification. In terms of new development and displacement, some people use arson as a political instrument, said Noel Gallo. I hear this. ... Its not new. Certainly there is some political motivation to this. Athan Magganas, the Lester Avenue, Oakland, property manager, said he believes the arsons are connected and possibly politically motivated. I think its a small group of people who think they are helpful to their own community ... and its people who dont desire the housing in the neighborhood, Magganas said. Its a nonlogical reaction, similar to an anarchical reaction, to a hot-button issue. In October, he said, intruders returned to his property. Magganas said he suspected they intended to start another fire. We were not successful in arresting them, but we have more information, so thats now with the authorities, Magganas said. The manager called on the ATF and police to work harder to find the arsonists. Theres not enough of an effort put into digging up those responsible or those criminals, Magganas said. Its very, very sad to see that this is happening again and again. Its devastating. Legacy Partners, the company developing the Concord building, released a statement saying that the company appreciates the work of the fire department and law enforcement in identifying the cause of this unfortunate incident and its impact on the community. We are grateful that there were no serious injuries, the statement said. Officials asked that anyone with information about the Concord fire contact ATF at 888-283-3473, visit www.reportit.com or use the mobile reportit app, available on Google Play and Apples App Store. Megan Cassidy, Sophie Haigney and Steve Rubenstein are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com, shaigney@sfchronicle.com, srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: meganrcassidy, @SophieHaigney, @SteveRubeSF Hundreds of budding entrepreneurs lined up single-file down Market Street on Wednesday morning, hoping to snag a chance at fame and a business deal. They came with a one-minute pitch and a whole lot of chutzpah, or just enough to impress the casting directors of ABC's "Shark Tank." The reality show places inventors in front of a panel of judges "sharks" in hopes of snagging a business investment. Its already been dark for hours when I arrive at Reboot Float Spa in the Marina on a Thursday night, but the all-white walls and floor give the impression the space is glowing. Its about to get a lot darker for me Im here to pay $69 to climb into a float pod sensory deprivation tank for an hour. A sign out front suggests floating can promote Pain Relief / Better Sleep / Deep Relaxation / Stress Relief / Reduce Jetlag / Heal Sore Muscles. Operators of float spas say the experience of floating lowers cortisol levels and can help alleviate chronic pain. Well see. Im greeted at reception by a petite woman wearing a shirt that reads Namaste in the float pod. Keep calm and float on T-shirts are hanging on a wall in the corner that weird blend of New Age vibes and branded swag that seems to be a staple of the many wellness-centered businesses in the Marina. Is this your first time floating? she asks, and when I say yes Im instructed to don a pair of flip flops and shepherded to a white couch to watch an instructional video that tells me what will happen in the pod. Its narrated by a cartoon man whose head is detached and hovering above his body. I find this not entirely reassuring. The video talks me through the history of floating. The sensory deprivation tank was developed in the mid 20th century by neuroscientist John C. Lilly during his research at the National Institute of Mental Health (incidentally, he was also a big proponent of giving LSD to dolphins, but thats neither here nor there). Lilly saw the tank as a powerful aid for exploring alternate states of consciousness: A place that, separate from the stimuli of the outside world, experience could be governed entirely by the laws of thought. Bay Area Boom Float spa owners say over the past 5-10 years, the businesses have gained popularity and started to go mainstream, cropping up all over the country. John Balquist opened Oakland Floats on 40th Street in Temescal six years ago with the help of a small business loan from the city. He said back then, the national scene was very different, with maybe 20 to 30 float centers around the country. "I thought, 'Wow, I'm kind of on the start of the wave here,' and six years in there's just centers opening up everywhere. They're in North Dakota, they're in Florida, every state I think has got em, it's been amazing to see it just ballooning like that," he said. Related video: The eerie sounds of an underwater band. Story continues below. That's certainly true in the Bay Area as well. It's home to more than a dozen flotation facilities, some of them hybrid spas and float centers and others devoted solely to floating, everywhere from Oakland to Sebastopol to Campbell. Prices at most are $80 to $100 for an hour float, although most offer discounts for first-time floaters and package deals that bring the price down if you buy in bulk. Balquist decided to open his business after he saw startling improvements to his state of mind in the week after he tried floating for the first time. I started playing guitar again when I hadnt written songs for years," he said. "I used to be a songwriter so it kind of just opened that back up. I thought, 'this is pretty amazing.' In The Tank The room is outfitted with the float pod on one side and a shower in the corner. The receptionist shows me around, then ducks out and its just me and the pod, which looks like a giant sculptural egg. There are instructions to shower before climbing in, and shampoos and body washes helpfully labelled for pre- and post-floating use, along with a station with soft putty earplugs and Vaseline to smear on any cuts and scrapes so the salt water doesnt burn. I put in the earplugs, rinse off, and then its time: into the pod. The water is shallower than I expected, less than a foot. Inside, theres about enough space for me to lie down with my arms stretched above my head, and a soft blue light illuminates the inside. Droplets of water shimmer on the lid. I didnt think I had any cuts, but when I get into the pod Im immediately disabused of that notion, because every spot with broken or irritated skin comes alive with an intense sting in the salt water. I pull the lid closed and turn the lights off. The video warned me there might be an adjustment period when I first get in the pod. This turns out to be very, very true. The thoroughness of the darkness is incredibly disorienting. I lose my sense of how close the lid of the pod is to my face and how close I am to the walls. The video told me to stay as still as possible but I keep accidentally drifting around and bumping into things. I worry that I might accidentally slowly spin 180 degrees and my hair will get sucked into the filter and the Namaste in the float pod woman will find me like that, naked and screaming. I have a lot of thoughts like that in the first few minutes. Theres nothing to distract me from the thoughts, and no way to tell how much time has passed. Images fire in quick succession. I start thinking about a very upsetting Turkish horror movie I watched recently. I think about the career arc of M. Night Shyamalan. I think about how weird it is that baby carrots are just shaved-down regular carrots. I think about how Meghan Markle left her elderly dog behind when she moved to the U.K. to be with Prince Harry. The dog thoughts are maybe the most upsetting of all, so I start counting my breath like the video suggested. Inhale, exhale, one, inhale, exhale, two. The video said by the time I get to 300 Ill be relaxed. The number feels very far away. The water is more viscous than I expected the volume of Epsom salts dissolved in the water (12,000 pounds of them, according to Reboot) makes it feel thick and a little slimy. I feel like Im in a dish of Jell-O waiting to set. It takes a few hundred breaths, but eventually its like my body gives up on being stressed, and a knot of tension eases in my chest. I feel more at ease than I have in a while. Except for a brief moment of panic when I wonder if only ten minutes have passed, the rest of my float feels calm, like Im suspended halfway between sleep and waking. The return of the new-age music lets me know Im in the last few minutes of my float, and Im surprised to notice Im actually a little disappointed. Then, the lights come on bright in the same awful way as sunlight waking you up when you have a terrible hangover, like the sun is reaching through your window and punching you in the face. I raise my head out of the water and it feels like a giant, stupidly heavy melon. Now that its illuminated, the smallness of the pod is thrown into harsh relief. I clamber out feeling like a newly-evolved swamp creature testing its legs on land for the first time. Of course I bonk my melon-head on the pod lid on the way out. I try not to slip. I forget that Im not supposed to touch anything with my salty hands. I touch my face and it burns. I am very cold. The world outside the float pod is bad. Maybe the pod is where I belong now. I should never have left. Outside the pod room, I wipe some smeared eye makeup from under my eyes, chug a glass of cucumber water, and discard the flip flops in a bin, then make my way out into the night. The world still feels harsh. But sitting on the bus on the way home, I cant deny I feel lighter. Filipa Ioannou is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at fioannou@sfchronicle.com and follow her on Twitter There are crossroads and gateways, capitals and cornucopias. The slogans of Bay Area cities are charming, insightful and sometimes downright misleading. Alameda plays it straight "The Island City," it calls itself while San Francisco winks at history "Gold in Peace, Iron in War." Then there's Pleasanton, whose slogan succinctly says, "It's all the name implies." Slogans can serve to stir pride in a place's citizenry and, city officials hope, inspire tourists to give their town a try. The pithy phrases can also inspire conflict. In 2016 Oakland instated a new motto: "Love Life." The intentions were pure to inspire unity and counter the city's associations with gun violence and murder but the move spurred a bitter City Hall fight. The motto pays tribute to LoEshe Adanma Lacy, who was shot to death in 1997 near MyClymonds High School. Her first name means "Love Life" in a Nigerian language, according to a previous Chronicle report. Some said the phrase would serve as a rallying cry, others, including Mayor Libby Schaaf, said it lacked context. Further east, in the young city of Dublin, Calif., city officials spent $136,000 on a 2014 branding campaign that in part produced the slogan, "Dublin: The New American Backyard." According to the official city website, the slogan references the diversity of Dublin residents and the "welcoming nature of the backyard with the supportive energy of great neighbors, making it comfortable to do business, stay healthy, relax with friends, and raise families." "Actually that sounds cool," Dublin resident Christine Torrence told CBS at the time. Do you know the slogans of Bay Area cities? Test yourself by clicking through the above slideshow. Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf. It began, as so many of the worst ideas do, as a joke at a happy hour after a couple of beers. Wouldn't it be hilarious, I asked my boss, if I, a person who avoids physical activity and unnecessary sweating at all costs, were to try the free workouts the San Francisco Police Department runs each month for prospective cops? Unfortunately for me, my boss agreed. So I enlisted my coworker Alix to join me in the humiliation. That's how we found ourselves walking into the SFPD station in Mission Bay one recent Saturday morning and joining a group of officers, possible future officers and people looking for a free workout for two hours of exertion. "It's gonna be basic and easy," one of the officers declared before we set out. Reader, it was not. It began with a gentle jog over to a grassy area near AT&T Park to lull us into a false sense of security. "Maybe this won't be so bad," I thought to myself, like a big dumb idiot. "I am an active person. I walk places. Sometimes I walk up hills. Could that be enough to get me through this thing unscathed?" The answer, it became clear almost immediately, was no. Things escalated quickly, and as someone who is capable of doing only a single pushup (if that), my body quickly gave out as we sprinted from place to place, doing sit-ups and pushups and burpees. Well, other people were doing burpees. I was doing... something. The seemingly endless string of exercises had been happening for about an hour when the worst of it arrived: the bear crawl. I had never done this exercise before and my tired, thirsty, exercise-addled brain truly could not wrap itself around what my already-spent limbs were supposed to be doing. It soon became clear that I was not meeting even the already low standards I had set with my performance thus far, and an officer came to help me. She was patient and helpful, but she was not a miracle worker. I literally could not understand what she was trying to tell me. I had zero control over my legs, which felt like a couple of logs. It felt like trying to eat with chopsticks for the first time, but with your non-dominant hand, and the chopsticks were my legs, and also there was no food and everything was terrible. I turned to Alix and tried to plead for help with my eyes. Alix smiled at me, sympathetic but also resigned, like an early 20th-century army nurse looking at a dude who's definitely going to die of tuberculosis. Eventually, I was "bear-crawling" so slowly that the rest of the workout class was called upon to bear-crawl alongside me for support. But even watching 10 other people do the exercise alongside me, I still couldn't really figure out what I was supposed to be doing with my arms and legs. Another low point came when we had to do wheelbarrows. I couldn't seem to grab Alix's legs in a way that made sense, so with the way I was carrying them, it was basically like one long, constant kick to the groin. Then I dropped her on her face. Pretty much everyone has experienced the feeling that their past self has really screwed them over why did past-me saddle me with this hangover? Why didn't past-me study for this test? Why didn't past-me go to bed earlier? At the SFPD workout, I experienced this regret in its purest, most potent form. "Are you gonna think twice before you volunteer for stuff when you've been drinking?" one officer asked me during the workout as I wheezed and heaved and staggered through it. Yes is an understatement. Filipa Ioannou and Alix Martichoux are SFGATE staff writers. Email: fioannou@sfchronicle.com, amartichoux@sfchronicle.com Acrophobes will want to stay home. Others are likely to find the Australian documentary Mountain an exhilarating vision of many of the worlds highest and most gorgeously photogenic peaks, and the intrepid sorts who set out to conquer them. Director Jennifer Peedom (Sherpa) has brought together footage from the likes of climber/cinematographer Renan Ozturk, shot in more than two dozen countries. As if the scenery isnt impressive enough, she has also scored the film with new and classical works performed by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, which almost amounts to overkill. For much of the films 74 minutes, we feel giddily airborne, with gliding shots of magnificent and often snowy peaks, sometimes traversed by one or more tiny specks that turn out to be humans. Depending on your feelings about mountain climbing, these seem to be among the bravest people on the planet or the most foolhardy. And these mountain people dont just soldier along on foot. They ascend sheer rock faces using all four limbs; some of them blaze downhill on bikes or skis; some daredevils fly off the mountains in wingsuits; others actually walk a tightrope between two peaks. Pick your poison! The overall tone is awed and laudatory, which may rub some viewers the wrong way. Willem Dafoe delivers narration taken from Robert Macfarlanes Mountains of the Mind, which occasionally strays in the direction of the trite or overwrought. The film doesnt entirely ignore critics who lament the destructive environmental effects of humans using mountains for sport. Accounts have been published of what amounts to traffic jams of climbers on celebrated peaks like Everest. But the issue might have been given more emphasis here. To its credit, though, the narration does suggest that at least some of these impetuous folks may be motivated by a combination of narcissism and nihilism. Early in the movie, its acknowledged that until a very few centuries ago, the idea of climbing a mountain for recreation or an adrenaline charge was unheard of. Mountains were counted as hostile and foreboding, and climbing them akin to madness. There are moments in Mountain when that perspective seems altogether reasonable. Walter Addiego is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: waddiego@sfchronicle.com. Mountain Documentary. Directed by Jennifer Peedom. Not rated. 74 minutes. 1 School shooting: Students returning to class Tuesday at a Texas high school where 10 people were killed less than two weeks ago were greeted by an increased police presence and supporters holding signs saying Santa Fe Strong and United We Stand. Tuesday marked the first day of class at Santa Fe High School since the mass shooting that left eight students and two substitute teachers dead. Students who had classes in the area of the May 18 shooting were first allowed to enter at about 8 a.m., followed by the rest of the student body about two hours later. Authorities have charged student Dimitrios Pagourtzis with capital murder in the attack. 2 Governor resigns: Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens resigned amid criminal and legislative investigations stemming from an extramarital affair and campaign finance questions over alleged misuse of a charity donor list. The 44-year-old Rhodes Scholar and ex-Navy SEAL made the announcement Tuesday. The resignation takes effect Friday. A St. Louis grand jury indicted Greitens on Feb. 22 on one felony count of invasion of privacy. Prosecutors say he took a compromising photo of a woman with whom he had an affair without her consent in 2015, before his election. The woman told a legislative committee Greitens restrained, slapped, shoved and threatened her during sexual encounters. Greitens has denied criminal wrongdoing. DALLAS Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday recommended dozens of strategies to make schools safer in the wake of the deadly shooting at a Houston-area high school, including increasing the presence of law enforcement officers at schools. The Republican and staunch gun-rights supporter released a 43-page report that also included suggesting more mental health screening for students. A handful of the recommendations involved gun safety in Texas, a state that embraces its gun-friendly reputation and has more than 1.2 million people licensed to carry handguns. Michael Probst / Associated Press 2016 A 23-year-old Canadian man who pleaded guilty to an elaborate computer hacking and identity theft scheme was sentenced to five years in prison on Tuesday in San Francisco, authorities said. Karim Baratov was also fined $250,000 for his role in the plot that also involved two Russian government agents, according to U.S. Attorneys spokesman Abraham Simmons. The city of Oakland decided on Tuesday to appeal a judges ruling that would allow coal to be handled and stored at a proposed freight terminal in west Oakland. The City Council voted unanimously to challenge the ruling by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria preventing the city from enforcing its ban on coal at the terminal, City Attorney Barbara Parker said. Oakland police were continuing on Monday to look for the killers of 51-year-old east Oakland man shot to death last week in front of his pregnant wife during a home invasion robbery, police said. Hoan Harry Lieu died inside his home on the night of May 22 after at least two gunmen burst into the dwelling in the 4100 block of Carrington Street while his wife, Kat, was watching television in the living room, police and family members said. WASHINGTON By the time Attorney General Jeff Sessions arrived at President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort for dinner one Saturday evening in March 2017, he had been receiving the presidential silent treatment for two days. Sessions had flown to Florida because Trump was refusing to take his calls about a pressing decision on his travel ban. When they met, Trump was ready to talk but not about the travel ban. His grievance was with Sessions: The president objected to his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Trump, who had told aides that he needed a loyalist overseeing the inquiry, berated Sessions and told him he should reverse his decision, an unusual and potentially inappropriate request. Sessions refused. The confrontation, which has not been previously reported, is being investigated by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, as are the presidents public and private attacks on Sessions and efforts to get him to resign. Trump dwelled on the recusal for months, according to confidants and current and former administration officials who described his behavior toward the attorney general. The special counsels interest demonstrates Sessions overlooked role as a key witness in the investigation into whether Trump tried to obstruct the inquiry itself. It also suggests that the obstruction investigation is broader than it is widely understood to be encompassing not only the presidents interactions with and firing of the former FBI director, James Comey, but also his relationship with Sessions. Investigators have pressed current and former White House officials about Trumps treatment of Sessions and whether they believe the president was trying to impede the Russia investigation by pressuring him. The attorney general was also interviewed at length by Muellers investigators in January. And of the four dozen or so questions Mueller wants to ask Trump, eight relate to Sessions. Among them: What efforts did you make to try to get him to reverse his recusal? The presidents lead lawyer in the case, Rudy Giuliani, said that if Trump agreed to answer the special counsels questions an interview is the subject of continuing negotiations he should not be forced to discuss his private deliberations with senior administration officials. Talking about the attorney general, Giuliani argued, would set a bad precedent for future presidents. Giuliani said he had not discussed Sessions recusal with Trump but said that a request that Sessions reassert control over the Russia investigation would be within the bounds of the presidents authority. 'Unrecuse doesnt say, Bury the investigation. It says on the face of it: Take responsibility for it and handle it correctly, Giuliani said Tuesday evening. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. To the president, no decision has proved more devastating during his time in office than Sessions recusal. In Trumps view, Sessions, who had been one of his closest political allies and earliest prominent supporters in Washington, never would have appointed a special counsel, as the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, did last May after the president abruptly fired Comey. Before the recusal, the president and his attorney general were friends, often sharing meals and talking on the phone. Today, they rarely speak outside of Cabinet meetings, current and former White House officials and others briefed on their relationship said. They even flew separately in March from Washington to the same event in New Hampshire. Trump complains to friends about how much he would like to get rid of Sessions but has demurred under pressure from Senate Republicans who have indicated they would not confirm a new attorney general. Because of his recusal, Sessions has been mostly absent from the presidents ire toward the investigation and the Justice Department. He has enforced Trumps agenda more successfully than perhaps any Cabinet member, imposing conservative policies on immigration and violent crime that are popular with Trumps core supporters. Pressure on Sessions to step aside from the Russia investigation began building almost as soon as he took office, culminating in a Washington Post report on March 1 that he had not been forthcoming during his Senate confirmation hearing about his contacts with Russian officials during the campaign. Career lawyers at the Justice Department had advised Sessions to step aside, citing ethics guidelines about impartiality and his role as a prominent supporter of the Trump campaign. Trump immediately recognized the potential effect of a recusal. He had his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, lobby Sessions to retain oversight of the inquiry. To Justice Department officials close to Sessions, the request by the president made through McGahn was inappropriate, particularly because it was clear to them that Sessions had to step aside. After Sessions told McGahn that he would follow the Justice Department lawyers advice to recuse himself from all matters related to the election, McGahn backed down. Sessions recused himself on March 2. When Trump learned of the recusal, he asked advisers whether the decision could be reversed, according to people briefed on the matter. Told no, Trump argued that Eric Holder, President Barack Obamas first attorney general, would never have recused himself from a case that threatened to tarnish Obama. The president said he expected the same loyalty from Sessions. Some people close to the president have said privately that they believed the recusal was overly broad and done too hastily in the middle of public scrutiny over Sessions congressional testimony. The day after the recusal, as the president prepared to travel to Florida, Trump was seen through the windows of the Oval Office by news cameras, gesticulating angrily as he argued with top advisers who had gathered to determine how to go forward with the travel ban, which had been blocked by a federal judge. Justice Department officials had concluded the policy must be withdrawn and revised, a move that Trump was resisting because he thought it was watered down. But, preoccupied with Sessions decision and determined to find a way forward, he spent the first 10 minutes of the meeting venting about it, a former White House official said. The meeting ended without a resolution about the travel ban. And after Trump flew to Florida, his advisers decided that the only way to get the presidents signoff to revise the immigration order a time-sensitive matter because of pending litigation would be to dispatch the attorney general to Trumps Palm Beach, Florida, retreat, to implore him in person, the current and former administration officials said. It was at Mar-a-Lago the next evening that Trump brought up the Russia investigation with Sessions and asked him to change his mind about stepping aside, the people said. Prosecutors rarely go back on recusals. Legal experts said that occasionally, prosecutors who handed off a case to colleagues over concerns about a possible financial conflict of interest would take the decision back after confirming none existed. But the experts said they could think of no instance in which a prosecutor stepped aside from a case in circumstances similar to Sessions. Justice Department guidelines on recusal are in place to prevent the sort of political meddling the president tried to engage in, they said. Its yet more behavior that tramples on the line between law and politics, said Samuel W. Buell, a law professor at Duke University and former federal prosecutor. As the months wore on, Trump returned again and again to the recusal. In July, he told The New York Times that he never would have nominated Sessions if he had known that Sessions would not oversee the Russia investigation. Two days later, a Washington Post report about Sessions campaign discussions with Russias ambassador sent Trump into another rage. Aboard Marine One that Saturday, the president told his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to get Sessions to resign by the end of the weekend, according to a person briefed on the conversation. Unnerved and convinced the president wanted to install a new attorney general who could oversee the Russia investigation, Priebus called Sessions chief of staff at the time, Jody Hunt, who said that the president would have to ask Sessions himself to resign. Unsure how to proceed, Priebus simply waited out the president, who never called Sessions but did attack him that week on Twitter. Days later, Priebus was out as chief of staff. The special counsel has told the presidents lawyers that he wants to ask Trump about those discussions with Priebus and why he publicly criticized Sessions. Trump brought up the recusal again with associates later last year, expressing a desire for Sessions to reassert control over an investigation that has since resulted in the indictment of his former campaign chairman and guilty pleas by two other campaign aides and his former national security adviser. This article originally appeared in The New York Times The East Contra Costa Fire Protection District had a busy 12 hours, fighting a fire Tuesday night in Discovery Bay and two more this morning in Oakley and Brentwood, but no injuries were reported, a battalion chief said. Around 10 p.m. Tuesday, crews responded to a two-alarm fire in a six-unit condominium building in the 2000 block of San Point Road in the Discovery Bay area of unincorporated Contra Costa County and found several units burning, Battalion Chief Ross Macumber said. Firefighters called in assistance from the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District as well as Cal Fire, but two of the condos were deemed a total loss and a third sustained significant damage. Six or possibly seven residents were displaced, and the American Red Cross was called in to assist them. Then at 8:30 a.m. today, firefighters went to Oakley, where a duplex had caught fire at the corner of Cypress Road and Rose Avenue. One of the two units was involved in the fire and sustained major damage, but crews were able to keep the fire contained in that unit. The other had only minor smoke damage. About five residents were displaced, Macumber said. The cause of the fire was determined to be accidental, and may have involved a space heater. Then less than an hour later, firefighters were summoned at 9:20 a.m. to Heritage High School at 101 American Ave. in Brentwood, where a student had reportedly set a soap dispenser on fire in one of the campus bathrooms. Staff was able to extinguish the fire before firefighters arrived on scene, but crews still assisted the school with smoke removal and checked to make sure the fire had not extended into the walls or ceiling. That fire has been deemed suspicious in nature. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Forty people were arrested this afternoon for misdemeanor trespassing after protesting alleged animal abuse at a farm near Petaluma, the Sonoma County sheriff's office confirmed. Sheriff's officials said they received a call at noon about trespassers at Sunrise Egg Farms located in the 300 block of Liberty Road. Someone told deputies that activists had stormed the farm, broke down doors to chicken coops and removed chickens. Activists alleged that chicken coops at the farm contained rotting birds. Nearly 500 people protested at the farm, according to activists, but sheriff's officials placed the number between 200 and 250. According to sheriff's officials, the activists demanded to be allowed on the property and videotape what they believed were sick or improperly cared for chickens. The company had allowed one activist to come on the farm to view the chickens but negotiations broke down when the activists demanded that 20 people with video cameras be allowed on the farm and allowed to take any birds they believed were injured or sick. Sheriff's officials said following three hours of negotiations, organizers decided they wanted to advance their cause by being arrested. Activists worked with deputies and a predetermined group of people were arrested without any trouble after they trespassed on farm property. The arrested activists were to be taken to the county jail where they were to be booked and released on a citation to appear in court. Sheriff's officials said deputies took a report from the activists and will send the report to officials with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which regulates commercial chicken farms. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) After San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon announced last week that no charges would be filed against officers involved in two fatal police shootings, an attorney representing the families of the decedents said today that he will take the cases to state Attorney General Xavier Becerra. During a rally today outside of the Hall of Justice, Attorney John Burris called Gascon's decision not to charge the officers involved the fatal shooting of Mario Woods on Dec. 5, 2015 and that of Luis Gongora Pat on April 7, 2016 "fundamentally wrong." "I will be requesting that the state attorney general conduct an investigation and determine, based upon the evidence, whether charges should be filed," Burris said. "The families here are suffering a great deal. Justice for them has not been served," he said. According to Burris, although he's filed two civil cases in federal court on behalf of the families, the civil cases fail to hold officers accountable for police encounters that turn deadly. Burris said, "I'm going to continue vigorously with the civil cases that I have, but that doesn't bring real justice in a sense because it doesn't really hold the officers accountable. They don't really have to pay." Burris said that as long as the officers aren't held accountable "you're basically sanctioning this conduct for future officers to engage in." Woods, 26, was killed when five officers fired their weapons at him near Keith Street and Fitzgerald Avenue after he allegedly refused to put down a knife, police said. The officers were identified by police as Winson Seto, Antonio Santos, Charles August, Nicholas Cuevas and Scott Phillips. Gongora Pat, 45, was killed during a confrontation with officers. Police said he was armed with a knife near the corner of Shotwell and 18th streets. Police identified the two officers who shot Gongora Pat as Sgt. Nate Steger and Officer Michael Mellone. During today's rally, a visibly upset Gwen Woods, mother of Mario Woods, spoke for the first time in public since Gascon's announcement Friday that no charges would be filed. "It's reprehensible what he (Gascon) did to Mario," Gwen Woods said. "He's executed him all over again. "I've never said their names until today," Gwen Woods said before naming all five officers involved in Mario Woods' shooting, "You may have gotten off on this one, but there is a higher judge." "I'm speaking today with my heart broken," Luis Gongora Pat's brother Jose Manuel Gongora said in Spanish. "Gascon should have charged the two officers who killed my brother. But he chose to cover for those murderous officers." "I understand Mrs. Woods' pain as well as all the other families," Jose Gongora Pat said. "I know that together we can seek justice for the all the victims." Upon learning of the decision not to file charges, Luis Gongora Pat's wife, Carmen May Can, said in a letter read by Luis Gongora Pat's cousin Luis Poot Pat, "Life is sacred and if they knew that, they wouldn't be killing people like animals up for sacrifice... They're the real beasts. "Luis was a noble, hardworking man; a loving husband who always looked out for his sons, his parents and brothers and sisters," May Can said. "I'm going to fight for the rest of my life to dispel the lies told by police." Speaking at the rally, San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi said to the families, "You've waited for over two years for this decision. You were told that you would get justice... Reading the decisions makes one thing clear: that it is open season, particularly for young people of color. "The DA says the standard to prove is too high beyond a reasonable doubt, so we can't prosecute this case... Not even involuntary manslaughter? Not even for negligent discharge of a firearm?" Adachi said. "They're telling you that they can't prosecute any of these officers, not even for a misdemeanor. So that's a scary proposition and it's a warning to everyone out there," Adachi said. In a statement issued Friday, Gascon said he couldn't file charges against the officers because his office could not prove without a reasonable doubt that the involved officers' actions were unjustified. "Use of force cases can only be charged if we can prove that it was unreasonable for the officer to be in fear for their life or someone else's," Gascon said in the statement. "Whether or not the officer could have used another tactic such as non-lethal force, or simply waiting, is not a factor we can even consider under current law," he said. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN FRANCISC0 (BCN) A 23-year-old Canadian was sentenced in federal court in San Francisco Tuesday to five years in prison for hacking emails on behalf of Russian intelligence officials. Karim Baratov pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in November to one count of conspiring to commit computer fraud and eight counts of identity theft from the owners of eight Gmail accounts that he hacked between December 2014 and 2016. He was sentenced by Chhabria, who also ordered him to pay a $250,000 fine. Two Russian Federal Security Service officers and a Russian citizen who also allegedly hacked emails were indicted together with Baratov by a federal grand jury in San Francisco on Feb. 28, 2017, on charges of the computer fraud conspiracy and other crimes. The other defendants are believed to be in Russia, according to prosecution documents, and have never been brought to court on the charges. Baratov was arrested by Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Toronto police in March 2017 and later waived extradition and agreed to be transferred to the federal court for Northern California. U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman Abraham Simmons said that during his guilty plea, Baratov acknowledged that one of the alleged co-conspirators, Russian intelligence officer Dmitry Dokuchaev, asked him to obtain the passwords of a total of 80 email accounts. Most were Gmail accounts hosted by Mountain View-based Google, according to the indictment. Baratov was paid $100 per hack, the indictment said. Prosecutors said Baratov was able to steal the passwords of 18 of the accounts, including the eight cited in his guilty plea. Tbe indictment alleges that Dokuchaev and his superior at the Russian Federal Security Service, Igor Sushchin, obtained user data but not the content of about 500 million Yahoo email accounts as a result of the theft of a user database from Sunnyvale-based Yahoo by Alexsey Belan, the fourth defendant in the case. The Russians then allegedly used various techniques to identify the recovery emails linked to some of the Yahoo accounts and Dokuchaev assigned Baratov to hack some of them. Baratov, who was born in Kazakhstan, advertised his hacking services on Russian language websites. Dokuchaev used a false name to communicate with him and Baratov did not know he was a Russian security officer. But he never questioned Dokuchaev's identity, motive or plans, prosecutors said in a filing. The victims whose emails Baratov was asked to hack included Russian officials and businessmen, according to the indictment. Simmons said Baratov also admitted in his guilty plea that he hacked a total of 11,000 email accounts in the course of the hacking-for-hire business he conducted at his home in Canada between 2010 and 2017. Defense attorney Andrew Mancilla said in a brief that 9,000 of the hacked accounts were hosted by Russian service providers and the other 2,000 were hosted by U.S. companies. Most of those hacks were sought by jealous husbands, wives, boyfriends or girlfriends who wanted to snoop on their partners, defense lawyers said. Mancilla wrote that Baratov moved to Canada with his family at the age of 12 and was able to do advanced computer programming by that age. He began charging for hacking services at age 14. Baratov spent his gains on a $650,000 house and several luxury cars, according to prosecutors. Acting Northern California U.S. Attorney Alex Tse said, "The sentence imposed reflects the seriousness of hacking for hire. Hackers such as Baratov ply their trade without regard for the criminal objectives of the people who hire and pay them. "These hackers are not minor players; they are a critical tool used by criminals to obtain and exploit personal information illegally," Tse said in a statement. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. More than 800 PG&E customers lost power early this morning near the border between Concord and Walnut Creek after a car crashed into a power pole, a utility spokesman said. The outage was reported at about 1:55 a.m. after the crash in the 1900 block of Oak Grove Road, PG&E spokesman J.D. Guidi said. About 830 customers were without power at the peak of the outage, but crews have responded and restored power to all but three customers, Guidi said. Repairs are estimated to be complete with all customers restored by 2 p.m., he said. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. OAKLAND (BCN) The Oakland City Council has voted unanimously to appeal a federal judge's ruling two weeks ago that struck down an attempt by the city to ban the shipment of up to 5 million metric tons of coal a year through a planned terminal at the former Oakland Army Base. In his May 15 ruling, Judge Vince Chhabria said the City Council lacked legally sufficient substantial evidence when it concluded in 2016 that large coal shipments would endanger residents' health and safety. A finding of danger was the only way the city could modify a 2013 contract it reached with Oakland Bulk & Oversized Terminal LLC to build a large bulk goods terminal on the former base. The contract allowed Oakland to apply new regulations to the project only if "substantial evidence" showed a "substantial danger" to the public's health and safety. In 2016, the city passed a law banning the shipment, handling and storage of coal in Oakland and also passed a resolution applying that law retroactively to the planned terminal. The city said it found that the dangers, especially to the residents of West Oakland, included increased air pollution and the risk of combustion of the coal. Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker said in a statement that she believes the City Council enacted the 2016 ordinance "under its lawful power to prevent substantially dangerous health and safety conditions in and around the proposed terminal in West Oakland." After the council voted on Tuesday to appeal Chhabria's ruling, Parker said, "We believe the City has the responsibility and the authority to act when the health and safety of our residents is endangered." She said, "The council acted pursuant to the city's police powers to ban the storage and handling of millions of tons of coal in West Oakland. Those activities pose a clear and demonstrable danger to Oakland residents, especially children whose health will be directly impacted by coal dust and other health and safety hazards related to a massive and inherently unsafe coal export operation." Parker said she will formally file the appeal with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the coming weeks. City Councilmember Dan Kalb, who authored the legislation banning the storage and handling of coal in Oakland, said he was "disappointed" by Chhabria's ruling. "Appealing the court's ruling is critical for the health and safety of our East Bay communities and our planet. The residents and workers of Oakland and nearby communities should not and cannot afford to be subjected to any more environmental hazards, including those created by coal dust," Kalb said. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said, "I am proud Oakland will continue to fight for our community's health by appealing a federal court judgment that would allow a coal terminal built in our city." Schaaf said, "The storage and handling of unsafe coal in West Oakland threatens the well-being of all residents, but it will unfairly and unjustly impact those who live closest to the terminal and already suffer health disparities from pollutants and foul air. I am fighting for the health of our community, environmental justice, and equity." Oakland City Attorney spokesman Alex Katz said the city spent $3.1 million on fees for outside attorneys at the time of Chhabria's ruling two weeks ago. Katz said the city hasn't estimated the cost of launching an appeal but he said the money will come from the city's self-insurance liability fund. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. The California Department of Transportation has awarded a $400,000 adaptation planning grant to develop adaptation strategies to mitigate the impacts of sea level rise along state Highway 1 and U.S. Highway 101. The research project is estimated to cost $515,000, and roughly $115,000 of that will come from the Transportation Authority of Marin, the county's general fund and the county's Flood Control Zone 3 budget. The county is hoping to protect the county's transportation corridors for bicyclists, pedestrians and drivers. Flooding around the on- and off-ramps serving the Manzanita Park & Ride has been causing problems for commuters and public transit for years, according to county officials, and while this is typically associated with storm activity, it can also result from tidal events. They'll also be evaluating ways to improve the southern section of the Mill Valley-Sausalito Multiuse Pathway, which traverses the Bothin Marsh. The northern section was upgraded last year. County officials say the research project will help stakeholders discuss the full scope of risks, benefits and feasibility of the various options available to adapt their transportation infrastructure to rising sea levels. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) San Francisco police are attending a "Policing the Teen Brain" train-the-trainer session this week to prepare to train officers on improving their interactions with the city's youth. When officers take the training on some future date, a psychologist who specializes in adolescent development will discuss teen mental health issues and educate police about psychological factors, such as trauma, that play into police-youth interactions. Officers will also learn how to address disproportionate policing among minorities and practice de-escalation tactics to avoid the use of force, police said. Young people will be present at the training to perform skits and engage in conversation with police. The city's youth commission and police accountability department lobbied for eight years to implement the program department-wide, police said. "Youth in our city have expressed concerns regarding their interactions with law enforcement officers, and we are hopeful this training will help improve relationships between youth and police," youth commission Director Kiely Hosmon said. The train-the-trainer session begins today at the San Francisco Scottish Rite Masonic Center at 2850 19th Ave. and runs through Friday. Policing the Teen Brain program was developed by Strategies for Youth. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. RICHMOND (BCN) Public forums to discuss safety, oversight and other information for people living near petroleum and natural gas pipelines will be held tonight in Richmond and Thursday night in Antioch. The forums will be hosted by the Contra Costa Hazardous Materials Commission, the Alamo Improvement Association and the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. One was also held Tuesday night in Alamo, according to the county. Speakers from the Pipeline Safety Trust, the office of the state Fire Marshal, the California Public Utilities Commission, PG&E and energy company Kinder Morgan will be featured. Michael Kent, Contra Costa County's hazardous materials ombudsman, will lead a question-and-answer panel at each forum. The forums will include an overview of regulations that govern the many miles of pipelines carrying natural gas, gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel just beneath a number of county residential streets and trails; maintenance and inspection requirements; ways for the public to communicate with the oversight agencies, and strategies to reduce risk. The Richmond forum takes place from 7 to 9 p.m. today in the Bermuda and Catalina rooms of the Richmond Memorial Convention Center, 403 Civic Center Plaza. The Antioch forum runs from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Thursday in the Antioch Community Center ballroom, 4703 Lone Tree Way. The community forums are part of a campaign paid for from a $100,000 U.S. Department of Transportation grant obtained by the Alamo Improvement Association. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. 0AKLAND (BCN) An Alameda County prosecutor alleged today that a man fatally shot another man while the victim was eating his dinner and drinking beer as he was sitting in a car in East Oakland two years ago because he wanted to steal the victim's necklace. In his opening statement in the trial of 21-year-old Danny Hogg, prosecutor Alex Hernandez alleged that Hogg killed Arturo Barrerra Rodriguez, 43, in the 3700 block of Penniman Avenue at about 10:12 p.m. on June 9, 2016, "for money in an unprovoked, unjustified shooting." Hernandez said Rodriguez had just finished working at a job in Berkeley and on his way back to his home in Oakland he picked up some food at a Taco Bell restaurant and was eating his food and drinking beer with two other men in a car parked in the 3700 block of Penniman Avenue. The prosecutor said Hogg lived nearby and was armed with a loaded concealed firearm and was wearing a mask, a hoodie and latex gloves as he walked with a friend to a corner store to buy a product for rolling and smoking marijuana. Hernandez said after Hogg and his friend left the store they walked past the car where Rodriguez was eating and drinking with his companions. He said Hogg told his friend, "Hold on real quick" and put a gun to Rodriguez's face and tried to steal his necklace. Hernandez said that when Hogg was unable to steal the necklace quickly he shot Rodriguez at point-blank range without any interaction or provocation. Rodriguez was pronounced dead at the scene. Hernandez said Hogg's friend, Bruce Benson, later said to police that Hogg told him after the shooting, "I was just trying to make some money." Hernandez admitted that Rodriguez had a knife when he was killed but said Rodriguez used it for his job and didn't use it against Hogg. Hogg's lawyer Francesca Serrano didn't deny that Hogg shot Rodriguez but said the shooting occurred only after there was "a struggle" at the window of the car in which Rodriguez and the other two men were sitting. Serrano said, "What happened at that window is what this case is all about." Serrano told jurors there won't be any testimony that Hogg was reaching or grabbing for Rodriguez's necklace and said alcohol was thrown in Hogg's face during a struggle at the window. She said, "You will have to decide what happened at that window and why." Serrano also alleged that Benson is an unreliable witness because he was in custody in connection with Rodriguez's death when he gave his statement that incriminated Hogg and has given multiple conflicting accounts about what happened. Serrano said, "This loss of life was not a murder and Mr. Hogg cannot be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in this case." Hogg, who was arrested on a warrant nearly two months after the shooting, is charged with murder and the special circumstance of committing a murder during the course of a robbery. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. BERKELEY (BCN) A Richmond man was arrested last week on suspicion of identity theft after an auto burglary in Berkeley earlier this month, police said. Police said the burglary happened at 11:50 a.m. on May 18 in the 2500 block of Ridge Road and a nearby witness took photos and gave them to Berkeley police detectives. The investigation led police to arrest Jamal Rudledge, 22, at about 7 a.m. on May 23 after they served a warrant in the 600 block of South 49th Street in Richmond. Police said they located a credit card embosser, credit card encoder, laptop, blank credit cards and personal information for at least one victim of identity theft. Rudledge was arrested and booked in Berkeley City Jail Friday on suspicion of burglary, possession of burglary tools, commission of a felony while released on bail or recognizance and the unauthorized use of personal identifying information of another person. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) After San Francisco voters passed a measure in 2016 to tax sodas and other sugary drinks, Mayor Mark Farrell and Supervisor Malia Cohen announced today that the city will use $10 million of soda tax revenue annually to address health inequalities for the city's low-income residents. The funding will provide for health education, physical activity and food access programs, in addition to a campaign to raise awareness about consuming sugary beverages, Farrell's office said. "Whether encouraging more physical activity or promoting healthy eating campaigns, this budget will help provide solutions to the epidemics of obesity and heart disease in our underserved communities," Farrell said in a statement. "As the sponsor of this law, I am proud to stand with the community and uphold the promise of directing soda tax revenue toward reducing health disparities for people of color and working class people," Supervisor Malia Cohen said. "These dollars will be invested in creative programming that decrease sugary drink consumption and increase water intake. Most importantly, those spending most on the tax will see a direct reinvestment in their communities towards health education and disease prevention." More than 62 percent of San Francisco voters approved the Soda and Sugary Beverages Tax Measure, which imposed a one-cent per ounce tax on the distribution of certain sweet beverages in the city. According to Farrell's office, because soda consumption is typically higher in low-income communities, those same communities suffer higher rates of obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Of the $10 million in tax revenue funding, $4.5 million will be given as grants to community-based organizations that serve low-income communities and communities of color to focus on preventive health measures. Two and a half million will be distributed to the San Francisco Unified School District for improving food and water access, as well as oral health services in schools, in the form of improved nutrition, efforts to reduce soda consumption and the installation of water stations at 23 schools. The funding will also allow for healthy eating vouchers, which will be administered by community and faith-based organizations. Furthermore, the funding will expand peer programs at HOPE SF housing sites, support the city's Peace Parks program, the Healthy Retail program and several oral health task forces across the city, Farrell's office said. "The Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Tax revenue will increase our capacity to prepare students for learning and to practice healthy habits. As educators, we're committed to the overall well-being of our students. This tax revenue will allow us to expand access to nutritious meals made of quality ingredients and locally grown produce, install more water hydration stations in our schools, increase access to dental care and establish robust nutrition education and student engagement programs to support healthy choices," San Francisco school district Superintendent Vincent Matthews said in a statement. To come up with a funding plan for the tax measure, Cohen and Farrell took into consideration recommendations from the Sugary Drinks Distribution Tax Advisory Committee. The committee's recommendations called for a focus on prevention and direct investments in communities that are hit hardest by chronic disease and are the target of marketing campaigns from sugary drink makers, according to Farrell's office. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. UNION CITY (BCN) A teenage boy was shot in the leg during an armed robbery in Union City on Tuesday night, according to Union City police. The robbery occurred around 9:26 p.m. Tuesday when the boy along with another teenage boy and an unknown female were standing around talking at San Andreas Park in Union City, police said. Three males wearing red bandanas - according to police - then approached the two boys and female and demanded their clothing, cell phones and money. One of the suspects then shot the teenage boy and fled from the scene. Police said the three male suspects fled eastbound from the park on a creek trail. The other teenage boy was found unharmed at the scene, but the unidentified female has not been found or identified, according to police. The boy that was shot suffered injuries not considered to be life-threatening. Anyone with information on the case is asked to call Union City police at (510) 471-1365. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. REDWOOD CITY (BCN) A man charged with grand theft and larceny for posing as a licensed contractor and taking $13,000 from two clients without ever starting work on their projects pleaded no contest Friday, according to San Mateo County prosecutors. In June and August of 2015, 45-year-old Zhongcan Liu allegedly entered into construction contracts using another contractor's license number. His own license had been repeatedly suspended, and he did not have one at the time, prosecutors said. He allegedly collected $5,000 from one client and $8,000 from another, then never did any of the work. Prosecutors said that when the victims attempted to reach Liu he "simply disappeared." District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said Liu had a history of similar crimes, which is particularly unusual in these cases. "Sometimes it can be people down on their luck who didn't get a license or whatever," Wagstaffe said. "This man is simply a fraud who knew he was cheating. It's very obvious he never had any intention to do any of it. That's just fraud from the beginning." Liu is facing up to four years in state prison when he returns to court for sentencing Aug. 13. Defense attorney Charles Smith did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. A tip from another student led to the arrest of a 16-year-old male student at San Lorenzo High School in unincorporated Alameda County early this afternoon for carrying a loaded 9 mm Glock handgun to class, an Alameda County sheriff's spokesman said. Sgt. Ray Kelly said the 16-year-old was detained in a classroom without incident at about 12:45 p.m. after a fellow student told staff members at the school at 50 E. Lewelling Blvd. in San Lorenzo that the 16-year-old might have a gun. Staff members then alerted a sheriff's deputy who works as a school resource officer at the school and authorities quickly identified the 16-year-old and figured out which classroom he was in, according to Kelly. The deputy and other officers then entered that classroom and detained the student without causing much disruption. Investigators found the Glock handgun, which was stolen and was loaded with 12 rounds, in the student's backpack, according to Kelly. The 16-year-old was arrested on suspicion of possession of a loaded handgun, carrying a concealed weapon and other offenses and was taken to Alameda County Juvenile Hall in San Leandro, Kelly said. Investigators haven't found any evidence the 16-year-old had a plot to use the gun on campus but are glad he was arrested because he might have planned to use the gun somewhere else after school, according to Kelly. "We have zero tolerance for bringing guns to school so the student who reported the gun did the right thing and we're very proud of him," Kelly said. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. A woman driving in San Francisco's Bayview District died Tuesday night when she crashed her car, according to police. The crash occurred around 9:35 p.m. near Third Street and Arthur Avenue, police said. No one else was injured in the crash. The victim is believed to have been in her 20s. The city's medical examiner is working to identify her. Napa police are investigating a fatal solo vehicle crash that occurred earlier this month. A Napa County sheriff's deputy came upon the crash at the intersection of state Highways 12 and 29 around 12:35 a.m. on May 19. It appeared the driver was ejected from the vehicle and he was taken to the Queen of the Valley Medical Center with major injuries, police said. Napa police learned on Friday that the driver, Juan Antonio Moreno Rios, 36, of Napa, died of his injuries. Alcohol may have been a factor in the crash, police said. A massive fire that burned down an apartment complex under construction in Concord last month has been determined by federal investigators to be arson, a Contra Costa County Fire Protection District spokesman said today. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives made the determination, Fire Marshal Robert Marshall said. The three-alarm blaze that started early on the morning of April 24 caused an estimated $55 million in damage at the 180-unit complex planned as the second phase of the Renaissance Square apartments on Concord Boulevard near Galindo Street. The fire was similar to others involving large apartment buildings under construction in Oakland and Emeryville in 2016 and 2017 that were also determined to be arson. The ATF announced last July a $100,000 reward for information leading to the suspect's arrest and conviction. Alum Rock Unified School District's superintendent will keep her seat and some contracts with Del Terra Real Estate have been terminated as a result of Tuesday night's school board meeting, according to the Community for Better Alum Rock Schools coalition. The special meeting, which was held after a news conference held at the district offices in support of Superintendent Hilaria Bauer earlier in the day, was scheduled to discuss a possible dismissal of Bauer and was called for by board trustee Khanh Tran. The board did not take disciplinary action during their closed session meeting and did not disclose to the community whether a vote was taken or if the matter had been tabled, the Community for Better Alum Rock Schools said. A 23-year-old Canadian was sentenced in federal court in San Francisco Tuesday to five years in prison for hacking emails on behalf of Russian intelligence officials. Karim Baratov pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in November to one count of conspiring to commit computer fraud and eight counts of identity theft from the owners of eight Gmail accounts that he hacked between December 2014 and 2016. He was sentenced by Chhabria, who also ordered him to pay a $250,000 fine. Two Russian Federal Security Service officers and a Russian citizen who also allegedly hacked emails were indicted together with Baratov by a federal grand jury in San Francisco on Feb. 28, 2017, on charges of the computer fraud conspiracy and other crimes. The other defendants are believed to be in Russia, according to prosecution documents, and have never been brought to court on the charges. Baratov was arrested by Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Toronto police in March 2017 and later waived extradition and agreed to be transferred to the federal court for Northern California. A Walnut Creek man was arrested this morning on suspicion of driving under the influence, obstructing a peace officer and hit-and-run after crashing into a power pole in Concord, according to police. The crash was reported around 1:55 a.m. in the vicinity of Oak Grove and Sierra roads, Concord police said. Alan Bocanegra, 28, had a passenger in his vehicle when he allegedly crashed into a pole. He initially fled the scene, but police said he was apprehended a short distance away and was uncooperative during the arrest. Bocanegra and his passenger were both transported to a hospital with injuries, but an update on their condition was not immediately available, according to police. Roughly 830 customers lost electrical service as a result of this morning's crash, according to PG&E. A fire caused damage estimated at $250,000 to a single-story house in Santa Rosa on Tuesday afternoon, a fire battalion chief said. The fire at 752 Carr Ave. was reported around 1:55 p.m. Crews attacked the fire from the front door and made their way through the house and into a garage, Battalion Chief Matt Dahl said. The blaze was controlled within 30 minutes. The two occupants were not home at the time but returned after the fire was controlled, Dahl said. The occupants' dog was found safe in the backyard. Another residence on the property was not damaged, Dahl said. At least one resident was displaced Tuesday night during a house fire in Antioch, a Contra Costa County Fire Protection District spokesman said. It was initially reported as a backyard on fire in the 2000 block of Palo Verde Way at 8:57 p.m., according to Fire Marshal Robert Marshall. When crews arrived, they found the fire had extended to the house and there was a second, neighboring structure threatened. "But it looks like we were able to stop the fire from traveling to the neighbor's house," Marshall said. An 18-year-old man pleaded not guilty Tuesday in Sonoma County Superior Court to the murder of a Sebastopol man he allegedly killed during a fight in April. Anthony William Ibach is scheduled for a preliminary hearing Sept. 12 for the stabbing death of Cory Alan Vaughn, 19, in a Bodega Avenue parking lot in Sebastopol on April 21. Two Santa Rosa men, Joshua Cassidy, 21, and Shyzaha Thorpe, 20, were held to answer after a preliminary hearing Tuesday to a felony charge of being an accessory to the murder. They allegedly drove Ibach in Thorpe's car to a friend's house in San Rafael after the slaying and moved Ibach's BMW on Yuba Drive in Santa Rosa. Sonoma County sheriff's officials said Ibach and Vaughn had issues with each other that culminated in a fight outside a house party in Sebastopol. Vaughn was slashed and mortally wounded in the chest with a cutting instrument and died at the scene. Public forums to discuss safety, oversight and other information for people living near petroleum and natural gas pipelines will be held tonight in Richmond and Thursday night in Antioch. The forums will be hosted by the Contra Costa Hazardous Materials Commission, the Alamo Improvement Association and the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. One was also held Tuesday night in Alamo, according to the county. Speakers from the Pipeline Safety Trust, the office of the state Fire Marshal, the California Public Utilities Commission, PG&E and energy company Kinder Morgan will be featured. Michael Kent, Contra Costa County's hazardous materials ombudsman, will lead a question-and-answer panel at each forum. The Richmond forum takes place from 7 to 9 p.m. today in the Bermuda and Catalina rooms of the Richmond Memorial Convention Center, 403 Civic Center Plaza. The Antioch forum runs from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Thursday in the Antioch Community Center ballroom, 4703 Lone Tree Way. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. After San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon announced last week that no charges would be filed against officers involved in two fatal police shootings, an attorney representing the families of the decedents said Tuesday that he will take the cases to state Attorney General Xavier Becerra. During a rally Tuesday outside of the Hall of Justice, Attorney John Burris called Gascon's decision not to charge the officers involved the fatal shooting of Mario Woods on Dec. 5, 2015 and that of Luis Gongora Pat on April 7, 2016 "fundamentally wrong." "I will be requesting that the state attorney general conduct an investigation and determine, based upon the evidence, whether charges should be filed," Burris said. "The families here are suffering a great deal. Justice for them has not been served," he said. According to Burris, although he's filed two civil cases in federal court on behalf of the families, the civil cases fail to hold officers accountable for police encounters that turn deadly. Burris said, "I'm going to continue vigorously with the civil cases that I have, but that doesn't bring real justice in a sense because it doesn't really hold the officers accountable. They don't really have to pay." Forty people were arrested Tuesday afternoon for misdemeanor trespassing after protesting alleged animal abuse at a farm near Petaluma, the Sonoma County sheriff's office confirmed. Sheriff's officials said they received a call at noon about trespassers at Sunrise Egg Farms located in the 300 block of Liberty Road. Someone told deputies that activists had stormed the farm, broke down doors to chicken coops and removed chickens. Activists alleged that chicken coops at the farm contained rotting birds. Nearly 500 people protested at the farm, according to activists, but sheriff's officials placed the number between 200 and 250. According to sheriff's officials, the activists demanded to be allowed on the property and videotape what they believed were sick or improperly cared for chickens. A tip from another student led to the arrest of a 16-year-old male student at San Lorenzo High School in unincorporated Alameda County early Tuesday afternoon for carrying a loaded 9 mm Glock handgun to class, an Alameda County sheriff's spokesman said. Sgt. Ray Kelly said the 16-year-old was detained in a classroom without incident at about 12:45 p.m. after a fellow student told staff members at the school at 50 E. Lewelling Blvd. in San Lorenzo that the 16-year-old might have a gun. Staff members then alerted a sheriff's deputy who works as a school resource officer at the school and authorities quickly identified the 16-year-old and figured out which classroom he was in, according to Kelly. The deputy and other officers then entered that classroom and detained the student without causing much disruption. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera issued administrative subpoenas to Uber and Lyft Tuesday, commanding them to show whether they classify their drivers as employees or independent contractors. The subpoenas also ask for information on wages, paid sick leave and health care expenditures for any drivers viewed as employees. The two ride-booking companies are both based in San Francisco and now operate nationally and, in the case of Uber, worldwide. They have maintained since their founding that their drivers are independent contractors, which would free the companies from obeying laws on minimum wage, sick leave and health care benefits. They say the independent contractor status gives the drivers the benefits of independence and flexibility. After San Francisco voters passed a measure in 2016 to tax sodas and other sugary drinks, Mayor Mark Farrell and Supervisor Malia Cohen announced Tuesday that the city will use $10 million of soda tax revenue annually to address health inequalities for the city's low-income residents. The funding will provide for health education, physical activity and food access programs, in addition to a campaign to raise awareness about consuming sugary beverages, Farrell's office said. "Whether encouraging more physical activity or promoting healthy eating campaigns, this budget will help provide solutions to the epidemics of obesity and heart disease in our underserved communities," Farrell said in a statement. A man accused of injuring a 93-year-old woman during a robbery in Concord earlier this month pleaded not guilty Tuesday morning to second-degree robbery and elder abuse with great bodily injury charges, according to the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office. Concord police responded to a report of two women robbed in the 1000 block of Sunvalley Boulevard around 4 p.m. on May 18 and found a 64-year-old woman and a 93-year-old woman at the scene. The older victim had been knocked to the ground when her purse was stolen and had to be transported to a hospital. Otto Halafihi, 29, turned himself in to law enforcement in Stanislaus County last Wednesday after Concord police circulated images from security footage in the area of the robbery. Three Alameda County "super spellers" were among 500 students competing in Washington, D.C., Tuesday to be the Scripps National Spelling Bee champion, according to the county's Office of Education. Anisha Rao from Dublin, Anabel Loucks from Piedmont and Ojas Vatsyayan from Fremont participated in the national qualifier during "Bee Week" that started Tuesday. The top 40 spellers from the national qualifier will advance to the national finals, which will be televised Thursday on ESPN. Rao is a seventh grader at Eleanor Murray Fallon Elementary School, Vatsyayan is a sixth grader at Fred E. Weibel Elementary School and Loucks is an eighth grader at Piedmont Middle School. Two people have been identified by the Sonoma County coroner as the victims of a fatal plane crash Sunday near the Petaluma Airport, sheriff's officials said Tuesday. Richard Bristow, 67, and Susan Bristow, 67, both of Carmichael died when their plane went down shortly after 4 p.m. just east of the airport in the area of East Washington Street between Adobe Road and Executive Drive. The cause of the crash of the single-engine plane hasn't been determined. Only two people were on board. The Federal Aviation Administration is conducting an investigation. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying's Regular Press Conference on May 30, 2018 2018/05/30 Q: Late last night Beijing time, the White House said in its statement that the United States will impose a 25% tariff on $50 billion of goods imported from China containing "industrially significant technology", and will later announce specific investment restrictions and enhanced export controls for Chinese persons and entities related to the acquisition of industrially significant technology. Moreover, it will continue to pursue litigation against China at the World Trade Organization in relation to intellectual property rights. The Chinese Commerce Ministry has given its response to this. Do you have any update on it? Could you tell us the specific countermeasures China plans to take? As US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross will shortly be in Beijing for a new round of trade negotiations, will this statement by the White House affect the upcoming negotiation? Is China going to cancel his visit? A: Just like what you said, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Commerce already responded to this last night. I believe that we all share the same feeling that when it comes to international relations, each and every flip-flop will only lead to further depletion and squandering of a country's credibility and reputation. The US' statement explicitly runs against the consensus it reached with the Chinese side in Washington D.C. not long ago. We urge the US to honor its words and meet China halfway in the spirit of our joint statement. China always maintains that we should properly resolve and address relevant differences over economic and trade issues through equal-footed dialogue and consultations in a constructive manner. This serves the fundamental and long-term interests of our two countries and peoples, and meets the shared aspirations of the international community. Once again, we don't want a trade war, but will never quail or recoil from a trade war. One move can always be countered by another. If the US is bent on having its own way, we will surely take firm and forceful measures to safeguard our legitimate rights and interests. As for whether China will take specific countermeasures and the US Secretary of Commerce Ross's scheduled visit to China for a new round of trade talks, I would like to refer you to the Commerce Ministry. Q: State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will visit South Africa and attend the Formal Meeting of the BRICS Ministers of Foreign Affairs. Does this aim to lay the groundwork for President Xi Jinping's attendance at this year's BRICS Summit? A: This year marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and South Africa. During the past two decades, thanks to the concerted efforts of the two sides, China-South Africa relations have been growing in a comprehensive and in-depth manner and made big strides forward. Our bilateral ties have taken on a sound momentum of development as evidenced by the great headway in such areas as political mutual trust, economic cooperation and trade, cultural and people-to-people exchanges and strategic coordination. The strategic implications of China-South Africa ties go far beyond the bilateral context and assume growing global influence. During this visit, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will have an in-depth exchange of views with South Africa on such major diplomatic agendas as President Xi Jinping's attendance at the BRICS Johannesburg Summit and President Ramaphosa's attendance at the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). China values its relations with South Africa. We are willing to deepen bilateral friendly cooperation across the board and elevate China-South Africa comprehensive strategic partnership to a new level by taking the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties as a new starting point and supporting each other in ensuring the success of the above-mentioned two important diplomatic events as a focal point. Last year, the BRICS Xiamen Summit was successfully held, which ushered in the second "golden decade" for BRICS cooperation. China will make all-out efforts to support and coordinate with South Africa, which holds the BRICS chairmanship for 2018 in ensuring the success of the 10th BRICS Summit to be held in Johannesburg in July. Indeed, the Meeting of the BRICS Ministers of Foreign Affairs is an important event which aims to lay the groundwork for the Johannesburg Summit. Foreign ministers from the five BRICS countries will have an in-depth exchange of views on the current international landscape, major international and regional hot-spot issues, BRICS practical cooperation and the preparations for the Johannesburg Summit. We believe that this Foreign Ministers' Meeting will achieve positive outcomes and make good political preparations for the Johannesburg Summit. Q: It is reported that the US Department of State has submitted the Hong Kong Policy Act Report to the Congress. What is your comment? A: Since the return of Hong Kong, the policies of "one country, two systems", "Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong" and a high degree of autonomy have been earnestly implemented. The Chinese government strictly abides by the Constitution and the Basic Law. We are resolute in implementing the policy of "one country, two systems" in a comprehensive and faithful manner and nothing will change it. I would like to point out in particular that Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China, and Hong Kong affairs belong to China's domestic affairs and brook no foreign interference. We are strongly dissatisfied with and firmly opposed to the US issuing the relevant report and making irresponsible remarks on Hong Kong affairs. We urge the US side to stop the relevant wrong move and speak and act with caution on Hong-Kong related issues. Follow-up: If the Hong Kong SAR government follows the directives of the central government on some issues, will it undermine the policy of "one country, two systems" and affect the international community's confidence in this policy? A: Who are you referring to when you mentioned the "international community"? Just as I said just now, since the return of Hong Kong, the policies of "one country, two systems", "Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong" and a high degree of autonomy have been earnestly implemented. The Chinese government strictly abides by the Constitution and the Basic Law and implements the policy of "one country, two systems" in a comprehensive and faithful manner. Q: Vice Chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) Kim Yong Chol recently got on Air China flight to head to New York. Can you confirm that he did transit Beijing and is flying to New York? A: I have no information to offer in this regard. Q: Reports say that there will be a meeting between China, Russia and the DPRK on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in Qingdao. Can you confirm that? A: The Foreign Ministry already gave a briefing on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in Qingdao to Chinese and foreign press on May 28. As to whether a meeting between China, Russia and the DPRK will take place on the sidelines of the summit, I have not heard about that. Q: What is your response to media reports that the US is planning to restrict the length of visas for Chinese graduate students in such fields as robotics, aviation and high-tech manufacturing to one year? A: We have noted relevant reports. As is known to all, people-to-people exchanges serve as an important basis for exchanges and cooperation in various fields between countries, including between China and the US. The facilitation of visa application is reciprocal and mutually beneficial and serves the common interests of our two peoples. We believe that both sides should take more proactive measures to further facilitate people-to-people exchanges and create more enabling conditions for across-the-board exchanges and cooperation between our two countries, instead of doing the opposite. First time visitors to Samoa, Rebecca Cade and Ken Mc Croary, are here for a relaxing break. The duo from Sydney, Australia and arrived last Wednesday. Samoa is their latest Pacific destination having already visited Cook Islands, Fiji and Vanuatu. They found out about Samoa with a special offer in Lucky escape. Rebecca said Samoa is not well advertised compared to Fiji and other Pacific destinations. So how does Samoa compare to Fiji? I prefer Samoa to Fiji because there, the whole beach is filled with hotels. Here you feel like its more natural. Even in a resort it is not so touristy and you are still somehow connected to the outside. Its also a world away from their hectic lives in Australia. I think at home, everything is so commercialized so we wanted to get away from that. Ken said there is something about keeping a place unique. I think places lose their uniqueness through too much commercializing and then it wouldnt matter anymore where you go cause it would be all the same everywhere, he said. We have been in a hotel in Fiji and it could have been the same hotel anywhere else. We lost that feeling of being at a special place. That is what we like about Samoa. Despite Samoa being less developed, they noted something about the place. Probably more cars here. The other places had a lot more motorbikes then cars and it seems to be warmer here, Rebecca said. The churches are more visible here. The inspiration to come to this island came not only from their experiences on the other islands. I like anywhere where it is warm. It is getting cold at home, so we are trying to get out in a warm region this time. We try to come to this area every year. The purpose of their trip is not only an escape from the weather back home but it is a much needed stress reliever. We have been once to town and then most of the time here around snorkeling and enjoying the sun and the water. I was surprised how many fish and how close they have been while snorkeling, Rebecca said. What I like the most is having the time to relax and reading my book, Ken added. We just saw some villages while driving from the airport to the resort. It looked very similar to the Cook islands. The people have been really friendly, probably as well because of the tourism business. They attended a Fiafia night to see a bit more culture. As for the food, Ken said: We had the Oka, which we enjoyed. In terms of developing tourism, they cant see the need for drastic changes. When we have been in town, we had a guide so everything was fine. From our experience we couldnt say anything we see could be improved. Which is why they are definitely coming back. We will probably first see some other islands but it is a place I would like to return to, Rebecca said. We definitely going to recommend this place to our friends and family back home, Ken said. The gravity of the existential threat we face from Islamic Jihad is truly of epic proportions. It is essentially a battle pitting free-civilized man against a totalitarian barbarian. What is at stake is the struggle for our very soul - namely who we are and what we represent. The lives that were sacrificed for individual rights and freedoms that we've come to cherish are being chiseled away from right under our noses by the stealth jihadists. And many of us are in denial and totally clueless. The left's appeasement and pandering to evil is nothing new. What makes their utopian delusions so infuriating and unpardonable is that it is not only they who will have to pay the consequences, and deservedly, so, they are thwarting and undermining our best efforts at resistance and are thus dragging us down in the process as well. By Peter Lancz,, the head of the Raoul Wallenberg World Campaign Against Racism. The return of Clusterfest to Civic Center Plaza this weekend includes Berkeley High graduates the Lonely Island, Amy Schumer, and the return of former The Daily Show host Jon Stewart to stand-up comedy. But, as in 2017, some of the most memorable moments may be the unexpected ones. There will be a replica of the Arrested Development banana stand, a Nickelodeon Double Dare obstacle course, and music performances from Wu-Tang Clan and T-Pain. During two sets of dates, Keith Hennessy will revive a pair of acclaimed solos that were created a decade apart and exemplify his searingly independent vision. First, Sink, which premiered in December, combines poetry, dance, satire, chanting and reclaimed Nazi anthems to examine current politics, violence and neofascism. The performance runs Friday-Saturday, June 1-2, at the Joe Goode Annex. It's not just about the money. The $10,000 grand prize would surely be nice, but the prestigious title National Geographic's Travel Photographer of the Year might alone be worth the effort for this year's lineup of skilled photographers. The magazine includes three categories in their annual competition; only the winner of one of the three categories wins a grand prize, and the other two are named first-place winners (for a prize of $2,500 each). GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip Gazas Hamas rulers said Wednesday they had agreed to a cease-fire with Israel to end the largest flare-up of violence between the two sides since a 2014 war. Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, said Egyptian mediators intervened after the resistance succeeded in warding off the aggression. He said militant groups in Gaza will commit to the cease-fire as long as Israel does. Israeli Cabinet minister Arieh Deri told Israels Army Radio that he expected calm to be restored. If it will be quiet, we will respond with quiet. Weve given Hamas a chance to prove that we can return to routine ... If they release the reins there will be a very painful strike, he said. There is a good chance that the routine will be restored after the blow the army unleashed on them. The Israeli military struck dozens of militant sites in Gaza overnight as rocket fire continued toward southern Israeli communities into early Wednesday morning, setting off air raid sirens in the area throughout the night. The military said it hit drone storage facilities, military compounds, and rocket and munition workshops across the Gaza Strip. The overnight Hamas rocket fire reached the city of Netivot for the first time since the 2014 war. A home was struck, but no one was wounded. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel gave Palestinian militant groups in Gaza the strongest blow dealt to them in years, and warned against renewed rocket fire. But neither Israel nor the Palestinian factions in Gaza went full bore in their attacks, a sign that neither side was interested in escalating hostilities. Militants in Gaza did not fire long-range rockets at Israels major cities, as they did in 2014, and Israeli air strikes zeroed in on only unmanned military targets. With neither side appearing interested in a full-blown conflict, a tense calm appeared to be holding Wednesday as Israeli children went to school in the morning. The border area has been tense in recent weeks as Palestinians have held mass protests aimed at lifting an Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed after Hamas seized power in 2007. Israeli fire has killed more than 110 Palestinians, most of them during the Hamas-led protests, which climaxed on May 14. Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies and have fought three wars since the Islamic militant group seized control of Gaza in 2007. The last war, in 2014, was especially devastating, with over 2,000 Palestinians killed, including hundreds of civilians, and widespread damage on Gazas infrastructure in 50 days of fighting. Seventy-two people were killed on the Israeli side. Fares Akram is an Associated Press writer. TAALABAYA, Lebanon When the teacher asked the English class how to change a sentence from the active to the passive voice, Sarahs hand shot up from the front row, and as soon as she was called upon she answered correctly. The 10-year-old Palestinian girl has come a long way since she arrived in Lebanon after fleeing Syrias civil war five years ago, and is now a star student at an elementary school run by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, which also provides trauma counseling. But those services, and the thousands of children who rely on them, now face an uncertain future, as the U.S. threatens to cut funding at a time when the U.N. agency is struggling to cope with crises across the region. Sarahs family is descended from some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation. The refugees and their descendants now number more than 5 million, and mostly reside in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Sarahs family, who asked that their last name not be published because of safety concerns, became refugees a second time when they fled their Damascus home after it was hit by a rocket in 2013. The family recounted their ordeal from the tent they share in Lebanons eastern Bekaa Valley. The Trump administration announced in January it was slashing its aid to UNRWA, withholding $65 million of a planned $125 million funding installment. It released $60 million so the agency wouldnt shut down, but made clear that additional U.S. support would be contingent on major reforms at the agency. Israel accuses UNRWA of perpetuating the conflict by promoting Palestinian claims to a right of return, while President Trump has blamed the Palestinians for the lack of progress in Mideast peace efforts. Some 36,000 students are studying at 66 UNRWA schools in Lebanon. Salem Dib, UNRWAs chief education program officer in Lebanon, said it is difficult for Palestinians to enroll in public schools, which are already overcrowded with Syrian refugees. Bassem Mroue is an Associated Press writer. When shopping for luxury products, most people often prefer going for brands from Europe, especially from France and Italy. This is because of the perception that brands from these countries are superior in terms of taste and quality. But if you were to look keenly, youll realize that locally made Indian luxury products are in fact far much better. However, since you are dealing with an already biased market, you have to be a little smart in order to hook potential customers. And that means adopting brand names that vaguely sounds Italian, French or even British. That being said, here are 10 brands you always believed were foreign but are purely Indian: 1. Louis Philipe Louis Philipe is no doubt one of the worlds leading brands of mens apparel. And while the brand may sound so French, it is totally Indian. Its only that the name is inspired by King Louis Phillipe, who was king of France from 1830. The brand, which is owned by Madura Fashion and Lifestyle, was launched in the country back in 1989. 2. Monte Carlo Monte Carlo is a premier clothing brand that specializes in men and womens apparel. Its well-known for its superior quality woolen apparels. As Italian as it may sound, Monte Carlo is 100 percent Indian. This woolen wear brand is actually from the Ludhiana-based Nahar Group. And it is doing well both locally and international. 3. Royal Enfield Royal Enfield sounds like a brand that comes from the royal factories of Britain. But in the real sense it is a motorcycle company thats based in Chennai. Royal Enfield is a subsidiary of Eicher Motors Limited, one of the leading auto manufacturers in India. Now you know the brand isnt British as you might have thought. Royal Enfield has been manufacturing high quality motorcycles since 1948. 4. Amrut Single Malt Amrut Single Malt must have hit the market with a bang, ranking the 3rd best whisky in the world a few years after its global launch. And while you may think this fine liquor is from Europe, its actually brewed and bottled by Amrut Distilleries Ltd right in our very own Bangalore backyard. So whenever you order this whisky at the bar or liquor shop, just enjoy it like the authentic Indian liquor that it is. 5. HiDesign This leather goods brand may sound foreign but it is purely Indian. HiDesign Company is actually based in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu. Tannaries from Tamil Nadu are known for supplying leather products and accessories to a number of the biggest global brands. And one of those brands is definitely HiDesign. 6. Munich Polo One may think that this premium kids wear brand comes straight out of Germany. But thats not the case. Munich Polo is a purely Indian brand, whose name was deliberately chosen to appeal to the Indian market thats obsessed with products that have European-sounding origin. 7. La Opala La Opala is a high-end tableware brand thats the number one choice among people shopping for wedding gifts. The brand may bear a French name but thats literally the only thing related to France. La Opala Company is actually headquartered in Kolkata and all its products are manufactured locally. 8. American Swan This online shopping site dealing in clothing and fashion accessories might sound so American, but its completely Indian. The company running the website is owned by The American Swan Lifestyle, which is headquartered in Gurgaon. It sells a range of products including jeans, jackets, sweaters, t-shirts, casual shoes among other accessories. 9. Jaguar Jaguar cars always have this British aura and elegance thats no doubt charming. But did you know the brand is owned by Indians? Thats right. Jaguar is actually owned by the renowned Indian Conglomerate Tata. So if you thought Jaguar is from one of Europe or Asias giant car manufacturing companies, now you know. 10. Lakme Lakme is an Indian cosmetics brand thats owned by Hindustan Unilever. The company was started in 1952 as a subsidiary of Tata Oil Mills and has been manufacturing cosmetics for both local and international consumers since then. The name Lakme is derived from the popular French opera Lakme, which ideally means Lakshmi. Are you amazed by this list? Well, it looks like most Indians are really fascinated by foreign brands, more so those from Italy and France. Read More News Facebook CEO apologises to EU Parliament over data breach China launches satellite to explore Moon's far side STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- It's good news: Nicholas Chin of Mariners Harbor and Jeffrey Li of Midland Beach have been named recipients of $5,000 2018 Memorial Scholarships from Municipal Credit Union (MCU). Nicholas and Jeffrey received their scholarships from MCU Board Chair James Durrah and MCU Acting President/CEO Norman Kohn at a special ceremony at MCU's headquarters on May 23. Nicholas, who received MCU's Willie James Memorial Scholarship, is a senior at Port Richmond High School. He plans to use his scholarship to attend SUNY Albany to study political science in the fall. Jeffrey received MCU's Malachy T. Higgins Memorial Scholarship. Upon graduating from Staten Island Technical High School, he plans to use his scholarship to attend Cornell University to study biological engineering. Nicholas and Jeffrey are among nine recipients of MCU's 2018 memorial scholarships. This year, MCU awarded $71,000 in scholarships to college-bound graduating high school seniors: nine memorial scholarships of $5,000 each and 13 grants of $2,000 each. Eligibility for the MCU scholarships was open to an MCU member, a child, or a grandchild of a member in good standing. Selection was based on academic performance, extracurricular activities, demonstrated community service, letters of recommendation, and an essay expressing personal goals. The scholarships are part of MCU's long-standing, larger corporate commitment to youth education across the greater New York City area. A little about MCU The Municipal Credit Union (MCU) is the oldest credit union in New York State and one of the oldest and largest in the country. Established in 1916 and headquartered in New York City, today MCU has assets of more than $2.6 billion and offers a full range of financial services to its more than 425,000 members. MCU is an equal opportunity lender, and deposits are federally insured to at least $250,000 by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), a U.S. government agency. For more information about Municipal Credit Union, visit www.nymcu.org. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- During a heartwarming and inspirational ceremony on Memorial Day, members of the Marine Corps League paid homage to soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice and gave their lives for freedom. On hand for the annual observance were members of the Marine Corps stationed in Camp Lejeune, N.C., as well as and members of the US Coast Guard Sector New York stationed at Fort Wadsworth, who were on hand for Fleet Week and to march in the Memorial Day Parade. This year's observance hosted by US Marines at the Marine Corps League in Sunnyside included posting of the colors by the Detachment Color Guard directed by Sergeant at Arms, Robert Geronimo. Presentation of the Wreath was by Marine Sean Torres Sr. and PFC Sean Torres Jr. Welcoming remarks on behalf of the Marine Corps League Detachment 246 were given by Commandant Jack King, who extended a warm welcome to all guests including members, families, politicos and dignitaries. The invocation was offered by Chaplain Associate Carmela Montella, who also offered the closing prayers. The Roll Call of Honor preceded a ceremonial firing 21-gun salute conducted by Detachment Rifle Team to remember the war dead. There were several moments of silence after stats were read listing the war dead from every war since World War I, and a bell sounded once again -- as taps reverberated -- and "Amazing Grace" followed by the skirl of Celtic Cross' bagpipes. Taps was played by U.S. Marine James Sweeney. It's interesting to note U.S. Marines are sometimes referred to as "Devil Dogs." And for those who may not be familiar with the term, according to the United States Marine Corps legend, the term was first used by German soldiers to describe U.S. Marines who fought in the Battle of Belleau Wood back in 1918. The Marines fought with such ferocity that their enemies likened them to "Dogs from Hell." Staten Island Mall expansion project The Staten Island Mall is growing its footprint to meet the demand for brick-and-mortar retail in the borough. The redevelopment of the Mall, which began in 2015, adds 242,000 square feet of retail space to the nearly 1.3 million-square-foot New Springville site. "We have plenty of space that is being demanded by the retailers and that's the biggest reason for our expansion," said James Easley, senior general manager of the Staten Island Mall. "The market here on Staten Island has one of the best kept secrets in the whole country -- it's New York City, it's a very densely populated area and it's a great market," he added at the opening of the new wing last month. Here are 14 new entities that have either opened or will open in the Mall by the end of the year: Don't Edit Staten Island Advance/Tracey Porpora Zara At approximately 40,000 square feet, European apparel retailer Zara was the first store to open in the Staten Island Mall's new wing last month. Based in Spain, Zara boasts of being one of the largest international retailers, offering high fashion apparel for women, men and children. Don't Edit Staten Island Advance/Tracey Porpora Ulta Beauty Ulta Beauty, which features 20,000 beauty products across 500 brands, opened its doors to Staten Island beauty lovers on May 18. "At Ulta Beauty we believe in giving guests beauty on their terms and creating a world of exploration," said Casey Foxen, who manages all grand openings for Ulta Beauty. "In addition to products across all categories and price points, we also offer a full-service salon in every store featuring hair, skin and brow services. Our Ulta Beauty experts are excited to bring the fun of beauty to Staten Island beauty lovers." Don't Edit Tommy's Tavern + Tap When Tommy Bonfiglio -- owner of Tommy's Tavern + Tap in Sea Bright, N.J. -- heard about the Staten Island Mall expansion, he knew he wanted to bring his business to the borough. The Brooklyn native -- who runs the business with his wife, Yvette, and daughters, Christina and Andrea -- is opening a 7,200-square-foot mega bar/restaurant in the Staten Island Mall, which will include a 45-seat "wrap-around" bar, about 30 big screen televisions, and accommodations for 300 people for dinner and drinks, said Christina Bonfiglio. The bar/restaurant will open on July 15, she said. Don't Edit Staten Island Advance/Tracey Porpora Shake Shack Currently under construction, Shake Shack is slated to open in the plaza building in front of the Mall's main entrance before the summer. In addition to its Angus beef burgers, Shake Shack boasts a menu of flat-top Vienna beef dogs with no added hormones, all-natural cage-free chicken, spun-fresh frozen custard, crinkle cut fries, craft beer, wine and more. Don't Edit Don't Edit AP Photo/Gene J. Puska Chipotle Mexican Grill Chipotle Mexican Grill -- a fast food eatery known for its hearty menu of tacos, burrito bowls and salads -- is expected to open in the plaza building in front of the main entrance of the Mall this spring. Don't Edit Photo by David Keith/Courtesy of Lidl Lidl The Staten Island Mall will be adding Lidl -- a grocery store with roots in Germany -- to its list of new tenants. The supermarket, slated to open by the end of the year, offers hundreds of products, authentic specialty items from around the world, and more than 100 organic and gluten-free options. Don't Edit AMC movie theater AMC Theatres will open an 11-screen theater by the end of the year. The 45,000 square-foot theater -- equipped with more than 1,000 recliners -- is slated to open in the new wing on the Richmond Avenue side of the property, according to Mall management. AMC has not yet said whether the theater will have a dine-in option. Don't Edit Staten Island Advance/Erik Bascome Dave & Buster's A 40,000-square-foot Dave & Buster's that will be connected to the Food District is expected to open in late summer, said Easley. The popular chain restaurant is usually equipped with several bars, a game room and a dining area with a menu featuring comfort- and bar-style food. The closest Dave & Buster's to Staten Island is located in Manhattan's Times Square. Don't Edit The Melt Shop The Melt Shop -- known for its variety of melted sandwiches, tots, salads, and shakes -- will be opening in the Staten Island Mall's new Food District later this year. Don't Edit Don't Edit Neil Blake | MLive.com Chick-fil-A Chick-fil-A, a popular fast food chain, will take up space in the new Food District later this year. Don't Edit Carly Geraci | Mlive.com Popeyes Popeyes, a popular fast food resturant, will take up space in the new Food District later this year. Don't Edit Staten Island Avance Barnes & Noble Barnes & Noble will close its 26,000-square-foot New Springville location in the fall to open a new store in the Staten Island Mall, according to the retailer. The new 20,114-square-foot Barnes & Noble will open in the Mall's new wing, according to the retailer. Don't Edit The Flint Journal/Bruce Edwards Lands' End Popular apparel retailer Lands' End will open next to Zara in the new wing of the Mall. Don't Edit Screen shot of Ono Bowls website Ono Bowls The Westfield, N.J.-based Ono Bowls, which serves a variety of acai bowls and smoothies, will open later this year in the outdoor portion of the Mall expansion, said Easley. FOLLOW TRACEY PORPORA ON FACEBOOK and TWITTER Don't Edit STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A trio of very special ladies was honored recently at the Eger Auxiliary Springtime Brunch at Harbor House. Harbor House resident Gertrude Hendrick, who is 102 years young and still enjoys her trips to Atlantic City, was one of the three honorees, along with fellow resident, Emma Santiago. Santiago's family members travelled from Texas and Florida to attend the brunch event. Both women were recognized for their vital roles in their living community and were presented with the "Residents Helping Residents Award" by David Rose, president and CEO of Eger Health Care and Rehabilitation Center and Anna Pallotta, president of The Eger Ladies Auxiliary. The third honoree was Jean Ringhoff, VP Business Development for Nothfield Bank, and an Advance Woman of Achievement. Jean, who lends her time and fundraising expertise to many Staten Island non-profits, received the Eger's "Spirit of Life Award" for her invaluable contributions to the Eger mission. "We are proud to recognize such wonderful ladies as Eger's Auxiliary 2018 honorees," said Vienna Profeta, founder and president of Staten Island Friends for Hospice Care and Senior Vice President for The Eger Foundation/Eger Lutheran Homes & Services. "When life changes bring people like Jean, Emily, and Gertrude to help put special smiles on everyone's faces to help make their days a little easier, it's a blessing." Eger Lutheran Homes and Services, Inc., a leader in the delivery of post-hospital, long term and end-of-life care and support services, strives to respond to the diverse needs of Staten Island and its neighboring communities. It seeks to provide a safe, caring environment where people can live and work, one that's designed to enhance the quality of life for all. Eger Harbor House, Inc. is a 75-bed assisted living community, typically offering one bedroom apartments, multiple levels of care, restaurant style dining, and a robust resident enrichment program. "It is so gratifying to recognize sich wonderful honorees this year and see smiles on the residents' faces," said Anna Pallotta, Eger Auxiliary President. "It is through our fundraising efforts such as the Springtime Brunch that we are able to provide and improve the quality of life for the residents here at Eger. "Because of everyone's generous support, we are able to purchase equipment, provide recreational programs, and even Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day gifts for our beloved residents." About the honorees: Jean R. Ringhoff, Northfield Bank's Vice President and Business Development Officer, has over 37 years of experience in the banking industry. She is responsible for developing new commercial accounts and business relationships. She serves as a Board Member for Meals on Wheels of SI, Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, A Very Special Place and the Staten Island Heart Society. In addition, Jean is active on various committees including Visiting Nurse Association Luncheon; SI Heart Society's Chefs' Extravaganza; Meals on Wheels Carriage Ball, Spring Luncheon and Summer Soiree. Jean also serves on several golf committees of: Alzheimer's and Dementia of Staten Island, A Very Special Place, SI Heart Society, Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation and the Northfield Bank Foundation. Jean has been honored with many awards: The SI Heart Society, YMCA Counseling Service, Boys Scouts of America, Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, Soroptimist International of SI, SI Sports Hall of Fame Unsung Hero Award, Meals on Wheels and the 2014 Staten Island Advance's Women of Achievement Award. Gertrude Hendrick was born in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, NY in 1915. She moved to Staten Island and settled in New Lanes Senior Housing when their doors first opened in 1984. There she was named Senior of the Year in 1986 for her work on the Activities Committee. New Lanes remained her home for over 30 years. Gertrude kept her fellow seniors active in the community by coordinating weekly trips to the supermarket as well day trips to Atlantic City. Gertrude is known to be the life of the party and to keep up with the best of them on the dance floor. The party didn't stop when Gertrude moved to Eger Harbor House in 2016. At 102 years old, she still lights up every room she walks into with her playful personality and warm heart. Being over a century old hasn't stopped her from enjoying a French martini during one of our restaurant trips or being the first one up to dance at a party in the activity room. Gertrude deserves to be honored for keeping our community young at heart. Emma Santiago was born in 1931 in Puerto Rico. She came to live in the United States when she was 21 years old. She lived in Brooklyn, NY for a short time, before returning to Puerto Rico to take care of her grandmother. When she returned to the states she worked as a factory worker in Manhattan. She married her husband of 40 years at a Pentecostal Church on Park Avenue. During her marriage years she had four children, one son and three daughters. Emma's children have blessed her with seven grandchildren. Emma became a resident of Eger Lutheran Home in 2013. Emma is a very social, caring, and friendly resident. Emma's Pentecostal religious background is extremely important to her. On Mondays she can be found participating in Spanish Services. She also attends bible studies and prayer group weekly. Her other interests involve spiritual music, tea and talk, and crafts. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Earlier this month, Anthony Morales admitted to slaying a neighbor and her son on a Mariners Harbor street two years ago. But the stocky 51-year-old defendant didn't apologize for their deaths at his sentencing on Wednesday. Instead, Morales presented himself as the victim, claiming the decedents had harassed and tormented ceaselessly over the years, had followed him to a home he owned in Pennsylvania and had "come looking for" him on the day they died. State Supreme Court Justice Mario F. Mattei listened patiently to Morales' rambling seven-minute monologue in his St. George courtroom packed with the victims' distraught relatives. And when Morales finally sat down, the judge didn't mince words or hide his disdain. "I didn't expect the Anthony Morales pity-party was going to take place. You have the audacity to say they did this to you. ...That's despicable," Mattei said as Morales, who wore a strand of white rosary beads around his neck, sat at the defense table. "You don't have an ounce of remorse for what you've done. You do not have an ounce of human decency. ...You have no morality," the judge continued. "Based on my impression of you, of what you've done and what you've said, I don't think Dante's Inferno has a level deep enough or hot enough for you." The judge then sentenced Morales, under a plea agreement, to 40 years to life in prison for gunning down Idelle Rivera, 47, and Anthony Rivera, 21, and for seriously wounding Jose Ramirez, then 23, on March 24, 2016. REQUEST TO TAKE BACK PLEA DENIED Moments earlier, Mattei had denied Morales' motion to take back his two first-degree murder pleas, along with an attempted-murder plea. The defendant contended he didn't fully understand what he was doing when he gave up his right to a trial and instead plead guilty against the advice of his lawyer, Matthew Zuntag. Morales is sentenced to 40 years to life for murdering neighbor and son 10 Gallery: Morales is sentenced to 40 years to life for murdering neighbor and son Zuntag had intended to present an insanity defense at trial. Mattei, however, said it was apparent from the defendant's actions and responses at the plea hearing, as well as in subsequent recorded phone conversations from jail with family, that Morales had entered his plea "knowingly and voluntarily." Morales faced up to life in prison without parole if he was convicted at trial of first-degree murder. Zuntag, who Mattei said had been "a most effective advocate" for Morales, said he would appeal the ruling. SLAYINGS ON ROXBURY STREET According to a criminal complaint, the slayings occurred between 6 and 6:12 p.m. outside 20 Roxbury St., only steps from the victims' apartment building. Morales lived in a different apartment in the same building of the Mariners Harbor Houses complex as the mother and son did, according to police. Idelle Rivera was shot once in the head, while her son was hit with three bullets in the head. Ramirez, a friend of the younger Rivera, was shot nine times about the body. Authorities said a dispute over an auto may have sparked the shooting. Shortly before the slayings, Anthony Rivera had sold a car to the defendant, who was unhappy with it and wanted a refund, a source with knowledge of the police investigation told the Advance. In an exclusive interview at his hospital bed after the shooting, Ramirez told the Advance the Rivera family had an ongoing feud with Morales regarding a stolen radio antenna from the defendant's vehicle. Morales fled to Pennsylvania after the shootings, sparking a multi-state manhunt. KILLER SHOT 10 TIMES Investigators tracked him to West Brunswick Township in Schuylkill County, about 125 miles west of Staten Island. Morales was shot 10 times on March 28, 2016, when he ignored repeated commands from authorities to put up his hands before he made the sign of the cross, reached toward his waist and brandished a gun, police told reporters. Morales was rushed to Reading Hospital in critical, but stable, condition, police said. Prosecutors have said the gun recovered in Pennsylvania was the same weapon with which the defendant had shot and killed the Riveras and shot and wounded Ramirez. The sentencing hearing was highly charged. Some of the victims' family members grew visibly angered over Morales' remarks, cursing lowly in their seats when he appeared to thrust the blame for the deadly shooting onto the decedents. "I didn't come looking for those people, they came looking for me. Those was not my intentions," said Morales. "They came running toward me. I don't remember what happened that day, but it wasn't me." Esmeralda Pena wept openly as she read a statement on behalf of her brother Tony Pena. Tony Pena is Idelle Rivera's husband and Anthony Rivera's father. 'YOU ARE A LIAR AND A MURDERER' "You are a liar and a murderer, and the world knows that," Ms. Pena read as the defendant stared straight ahead. "You, Mr. Morales, are an evil person who deserves more sentencing than the one that is legally ordered against you today." "Time will be your worst enemy," Pena warned Morales. "Your conscience will be your daily reminder of the lives you took." Assistant District Attorney Lisa Davis read a statement on behalf of Ramirez, who survived, but with debilitating injuries. He said his injuries have prevented him from joining the military or being the father he wants to be to his young son. "Even though I'm still alive, who I was is dead," said Ramirez's statement. "...I became depressed, angry, distrusting and unfocused. I lost sight of who I was and was stripped of my will to thrive and succeed." Earlier, Davis, who prosecuted the case along with Assistant District Attorney Antonia Assenso, called Morales' actions "cold" and "callous," saying they "showed a complete and utter disregard for human life." "The senseless killings committed by this defendant have caused irreparable harm to the family and friends of the victims, and our thoughts and prayers remain with them," said District Attorney Michael E. McMahon in a statement. "Gun violence has no place on our streets and today's sentence of 40 years to life will ensure that this defendant is put behind bars for decades to come and no longer permitted to carry out such appalling acts of violence in our community," said the D.A. Mattei imposed consecutive sentences of 20 years to life for the two first-degree murder convictions and a concurrent sentence of 25 years for the attempted-murder conviction. As the proceeding ended, court officers escorted Morales out a side door to a holding cell. Tony Pena stood up at the rear of the courtroom. "Thank you, Your Honor," he said. James Judd wears many hats: humorist, storyteller, NPR radio personality, all-around upstanding human being. Judd, the closer on NPRs popular syndicated Snap Judgement radio show and podcasts will weave together his comedic tales and hilarious characters live at Old School Square in Delray Beach on Saturday, June 2. Judd, who is gay, is most often compared to David Sedaris, but that doesnt bother himor SedarisJudd quipped in a phone interview. My stories are all true, stories about me, and hopefully so far, theyre all funny, he promised. But audiences can expect more than his signature witticisms, because Judd travels with a two-piece band, the James Judd Six. Just dont expect him to sing, much. Hes known to break out into a full Gypsy Rose Lee number, think Let Me Entertain You, especially when he performs in old vaudeville theaters. Theres no telling what the former schoolhouse-turned-arts center in Delray Beach might inspire. He fights the urge for two important reasons. First, he describes himself as completely tone deaf and second, he has the tendency to be the one person on stage to go rogue and depart from the script. Its important to have a special relationship with the band (because) they have to roll with the punches, Judd explained, and because of my focus, I just block them out completely. When I get off stage, I have almost no memory of what the band did. Judd connects with audiences as he shares stories classified as "spectacular public embarrassments and utter failures." While working as a banned journalist, he singlehandedly ruined more than a half dozen good jobs (and counting) in industries ranging from journalism to law; he is a former patientand current pen palof a sham Manhattan dermatologist turned Attica prisoner; and he even accidentally ended up in a whorehouse in Chinaor at least thats all hell admit. Judds account of a battle with a great white shark in open water remains one of the most popular Snap Judgement stories, continuing to rack up YouTube views and other important social media analytics. A part-time resident of Miami, Judd may also draw upon his observations of life in South Florida. He still boasts of a sunnier view of the apocalypse following the 2016 elections. That was an experience as traumatic as a trip to the local market or a short drive around the city. Its not that life is zany, everybody has these stories. The best stories arent necessarily the ones that take you to crazy, its the sense of intimacy and communication that you create, Judd said. When the stressand humidityof South Florida get too high, hes always happy to escape to his California farm and winery. Unlike alcoholism, Judds work is a passion and a calling. Its not an addiction, thats negative. It took me a long time to face up to the fact this is what I wanted to do, he said. People who know me from the farm cant imagine me on stage and people on stage cant picture me moving cattle. For Judd, thats another story for another time, maybe next weekend in Delray Beach. Humorist James Judd appears at the Crest Theater at Old School Square, 51 N. Swinton Ave. in Delray Beach, on Saturday, June 2 at 8 p.m. Tickets start at $45 at OldSchoolSquare.org. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The Staten Island Conservative Party has endorsed a Democrat over the South Shore's Republican state assemblyman for the Surrogate Court judgeship. Sources told the Advance that the Island Conservative Party's executive committee voted to recommend that the body vote for Assemblyman Ron Castorina Jr. (R-South Shore), but the Conservatives instead voted Thursday for Anthony Catalano, a Democrat and Staten Island's public administrator, after former Borough President James Molinaro gave a speech on the floor in support of Catalano's candidacy. Molinaro, the former chair of the Staten Island Conservative Party, declined to go into details of his speech, but told the Advance that the vote "was based on the merits." "I didn't criticize anybody," Molinaro said. He added, "I didn't give the endorsement. It's the body that gives the endorsement." Catalano's campaign said that the Island Conservative Party chose to endorse him because his experience is most closely aligned with the position. "Legal, civic and political leaders of all stripes, from every corner of the borough, recognize that Anthony Catalano is by far the best qualified candidate to be our next Surrogate Court judge and that his credentials are unrivaled," Jake Dilemani, Catalano's campaign spokesman, told the Advance. "For a judicial position, Staten Islanders know that it's important to put partisan politics aside and support the best qualified, most experienced and most dedicated person for the job." Castorina, who won the Conservative Party's backing in his 2016 bid for the South Shore Assembly seat, said that conservative voters' interest weren't being served in the vote. "When a tested and true Conservative is robbed of a rightly earned party endorsement, and it is instead delivered by a lobbyist, on a silver platter, to a Sanctuary City supportive, Pro-Hillary, left-wing Democrat, you have to ask yourself, 'Whose interests are being served here?'" Peter LeBron, Castorina's campaign spokesman, told the Advance in a statement. "Real Conservatives won't be fooled, and they will come out in droves to bring Ron Castorina to victory in November." Castorina already has been endorsed by the Staten Island Republic County Committee. Harold Wagner Jr., chairman of the Staten Island Conservative Party, didn't immediately return calls requesting comment. ANOTHER UNEXPECTED UPSET Also on Thursday, the Staten Island Democratic Party's executive committee voted to recommend Catalano in his primary race for the Surrogate Court judgeship over longtime state Assemblyman Matthew Titone (D-North Shore). "I am truly honored to be endorsed by the Richmond County Democratic Committee's executive committee," Catalano told the Advance in a statement. "With a background as a prosecutor, a community leader and as an expert in the Surrogate's Court, Staten Island's Democratic leaders know that I have the experience, dedication and integrity we need in our next Surrogate Court judge. As our borough's next Surrogate Court judge, I will never forget that my number one priority is to stand up for Staten Island families." Assemblyman Michael Cusick, the dean of Staten Island's state delegation, spoke out on Titone's behalf. John Gulino, chairman of the Staten Island Democratic Party, didn't immediately return calls requesting comment. If the Staten Island Democrats take up the executive committee's recommendation, Catalano will have the entire committee working to collect signatures to put him on the ballot as a Democrat, but Titone's campaign can still collect petitions on its own. Titone's campaign said that the Staten Island Democrats' executive committee vote didn't matter and that Titone's history with voters was more important. "The only vote that matters is the one that happens at the polls," said Jonathan Yedin, Titone's campaign spokesman. "We are confident in the support we will receive from Staten Island Democratic voters who have consistently been supportive of Matt Titone since his first election to the state Assembly." Yedin added, "Matt has an unmatched record of public service to Staten Islanders both in the courthouse and the statehouse. Democratic voters don't just know Matt, they've voted time and time again to elect him to represent their interests." Members of the Democratic county committee will vote on who to endorse as a body Wednesday. As public administrator, Catalano oversees wills, trusts, estates and guardianships. During his time as public administrator, he pledged that all Staten Island residents with no close relatives be buried in a local cemetery if they die rather than in the city's common grave site. Prior to serving as public administrator, Catalano was an assistant district attorney on Staten Island where he prosecuted more than 40 felony trials. He later oversaw all major crimes -- including fraud, murder and narcotics sales -- when he became chief of the Staten Island district attorney's Supreme Court Bureau. Richmond County Surrogate's Court oversees the validity of wills and the distribution of estate assets according to terms of a will. Surrogate Robert Gigante, turning 70 this year, is required by law to retire at the end of 2018. FOLLOW CLIFFORD MICHEL ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The defense attorney for a man charged in connection with a fatal stabbing last week at the Urby apartments is claiming self-defense, while prosecutors argue the 12 stab wounds prove otherwise. Jahmel Russell, 27, was held without bail at his arraignment Wednesday in Richmond County Criminal Court for charges of second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon in connection with the May 23 incident at 8 Navy Pier Court in Stapleton. Police said Russell used a kitchen knife to stab 42-year-old Filroy Warner 12 times in the torso and arms just before midnight during a dispute inside the third-floor apartment. The case against Urby murder suspect Jahmel Russel 15 Gallery: The case against Urby murder suspect Jahmel Russel Following the arraignment, defense attorney Mark Fonte said Warner was the aggressor, and he expects the toxicology report for the victim to come back with "high levels of cocaine and alcohol." After allegedly stabbing Warner in the liver, heart, neck and arms, Russell chose a route out of the building to avoid security and surveillance cameras, then sought refuge at the Park Hill Apartments in Clifton, prosecutors said. Fonte said Russell was living with a girlfriend at the apartment, used by Warner to "get high, drink and snort cocaine." He said the incident had nothing to do with a love triangle. Police initially said the incident occurred during a gathering inside the apartment. As part of a bid to remand bail, prosecutors said Russell had only lived in the apartment for two weeks, was arrested multiple times in Florida for theft and fraud-related charges, and was convicted last year in Orange County, N.Y., for criminal possession of a forged instrument. Within the past year, Warner had started a new job with the Parks Department, moved to Staten Island and reconnected with his daughter, according to his girlfriend of four years. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Attacking a city Correction officer is a no-no. A Stapleton man learned that lesson the hard way on Tuesday as a justice sentenced him to 30 months in prison for the assault inside the Staten Island Courthouse six months ago. Destin Burks, 20, had been transported from Rikers Island to Criminal Court, housed within the courthouse in St. George, on Nov. 8 to answer charges in two pending cases. The defendant was accused of forcibly stealing a cell phone and cash and injuring a victim in the process on July 21, 2017. He was also charged in an unrelated incident that occurred on June 8, court records said. Burks refused to enter a holding cell, and Correction officers attempted to place him in leg restraints, said a criminal complaint. The defendant resisted, kicking a Correction captain in the face and "repeatedly" stomping on her hand, the complaint said. He also spat in a Correction officer's face, said the complaint. Burks was indicted on a slew of charges, including assault, robbery, grand larceny, resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration to cover all matters against him. Two weeks ago, he pleaded guilty in state Supreme Court, St. George, to attempted second-degree robbery with respect to the July 21 episode and to second-degree assault arising from the attack on the Correction captain. Both charges are felonies. Burks was sentenced to 30 months behind bars and two years' post-release supervision on each conviction. The sentences will run concurrently. Attorney Craig Newman represented Burks. Assistant District Attorney Adam Silberlight prosecuted the cases. On May 21, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Epic Systems Corp v. Lewis, an important labor-law case that had drawn a large number of amicus briefs for both the employers and the employees involved. It was one of three cases consolidated for review since they raised the same issue on similar sets of facts. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch began by framing the issue thusly: "Should employees and employers be allowed to agree that any disputes between them will be resolved through one-on-one arbitration? Or should employees always be permitted to bring their claims in class or collective actions, no matter what they agreed with their employers?" Gorsuch concluded that such arbitration agreements, when entered into by both parties, must be enforced. Criticism of the court's 5-4 ruling in favor of the employers quickly reached hysterical proportions from the left. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg set the stage when she insisted on reading part of her dissenting opinion from the bench. That's the judicial equivalent of having a temper tantrum, something the liberal icon has done on other occasions when her point of view didn't prevail. It was also silly because the entirety of the court's decision, including her dissent, was readily available to the media before she even opened her mouth. Union reaction Four hours later, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, went completely off the deep end, blasting the court's "shameful attack on fundamental rights" and its "blatant attempt to strip power away from working people." Then, proving that she either didn't understand the ruling or, as is much more likely, never read it in the first place, she condemned the court for its "radical interpretation of the statute in favor of corporations and the wealthy." Weingarten, by the way, is an active member of the Democratic National Committee, and so her rant, though nonsensical, is not surprising. In one of the three similar cases under review, Ernst & Young and one of its junior accountants, Stephen Morris, entered into an agreement providing that they would arbitrate any disputes that might arise between them. The agreement stated that the employee could choose the arbitration provider and that the arbitrator could grant any relief that could be provided by a court. The agreement also called for individualized arbitration, with claims involving other employees to be handled in separate proceedings. The dispute After his employment ended, however, and despite having agreed to arbitrate claims against the firm, Morris sued Ernst & Young in federal court, alleging that it had violated both federal and state law by misclassifying its junior accountants as professional employees and paying them salaries without overtime pay. Disregarding the arbitration agreement again, Morris also sought to litigate his claim on behalf of a nationwide class of individuals who, he alleged, were similarly aggrieved. In holding that Morris was bound to arbitrate his claim as per his signed agreement, Gorsuch cited the Federal Arbitration Act, which, enacted in 1925, provides that such agreements "shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable." Ginsburg based her dissent on general language in the National Labor Relations Act, which became law 10 years later, and enunciates the right of employees to work together "for mutual aid and protection." This, she maintains, supersedes the mandatory arbitration language of the earlier statute, and allows employees to pursue claims collectively in court even where they've expressly contracted to have them resolved individually through arbitration only. Reconciling statutes The problem with Ginsburg's position is that while the two statutes had coexisted for 77 years, it had never once been suggested that there was a conflict between the two. It wasn't until 2012 when, following several controversial appointments by President Barack Obama to the National Labor Relations Board, the agency took the position echoed by Ginsburg last week. In rejecting that position, Gorsuch followed a well-established principle governing the interpretation of statutes. Hence, since the Arbitration Act expressly addressed the issue before the court, its specific provisions are more relevant than the general language of the NLRA. In so holding, Gorsuch reconciled the two statutes harmoniously, rather than read one as nullifying the provisions of the other. Even if one were to assume for the sake of argument that Ginsburg's position is more persuasive, political attacks on the court, like the one launched by Weingarten, are disgraceful. For the majority did nothing more than interpret the Arbitration Act according to its plain language. Finally, if the American people want to grant workers the right to bring class action lawsuits even where they've contractually bound themselves to arbitration, their elected representatives in Congress can easily make that happen. Email Daniel Leddy at column@danielleddylaw.com. Follow him on Twitter @LegalHotShots. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Anthony Pacifico can rest, but not for long. For the tenth straight time, a state board has denied the parole request of Keith Vischio, who savagely slew Pacifico's sister, Lorraine, 10, in Oakwood 38 years ago. "I'm a little bit relieved," said Pacifico, who has opposed Vischio's release bid every time he's appeared before the parole board. "The work is done for now." Vischio is serving a sentence of 20 years to life in prison. The board determined Vischio's release at present would be "incompatible with the welfare of society," despite his "personal growth, programmatic achievements and productive use of time" while behind bars and the "seemingly genuine remorse" he displayed for the victim and her family during a recent interview. "The fact remains that this was a shockingly violent and brutal murder of a young girl," the board said. "There is also official opposition to your release. As such, with all factors considered, your release would so deprecate the seriousness of the offense as to undermine respect for the law." Even so, Pacifico knows all too well that Vischio, 58, can re-apply for parole in another two years. And he vows to do all he can to fulfill his late mother Ann Pacifico's dying wish that Vischio never walk the streets again. "The fight will continue to keep him in prison and to make sure he dies in prison," said Pacifico, who this year joined forces again with Bret Vinocur, a Columbus, Ohio, man to spearhead an online petition drive on www.blockparole.com, to shoot down Vischio's latest parole request. The web site contains a page which allowed individuals to petition the New York state parole board to deny Vischio parole. Vinocur said he launched the web site 16 years ago in response to the paroling of an Ohio man who raped and murdered the 3-year-old daughter of the parolee's girlfriend. Lorraine Pacifico was slain on July 7, 1980. The body of the gifted swimmer and animal lover was found three nights later underneath the Guyon Avenue overpass of the Staten Island Railway station in Oakwood. Authorities said Vischio, then 20 and who lived nearby, smashed her skull 20 times with a rock. The killer also slashed her stomach, from neck to waist, several times with a broken beer bottle. At the time of the attack, Vischio was under the influence of a mix of Quaaludes and alcohol, after quitting his job as a clerk for a Manhattan stock-brokerage firm earlier that same day, said Advance reports. Vischio later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced in January 1981. He admitted he killed Lorraine once she began screaming after he refused to let her leave. The Pacifico family believes it was a sex attack, and that Lorraine fought back. Vischio's fingerprint was found embedded in Lorraine's blood on a piece of glass and one of his pubic hairs was next to the little girl. In its ruling, the board noted Vischio's "significant programmatic involvement" while incarcerated, to include completing a sex-offender program. In addition, his disciplinary record is "relatively clean," said the board. But the panel expressed concern about Vischio's "low family support" and a "lack of specificity" in his proposed plans for a life outside prison to include housing, employment and support programs. Vischio can reapply for parole in May 2020. To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account. We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription. A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much! 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. The next three crew members to launch to the space station and their backups pose for a portrait at the Cosmonaut Hotel in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. From left are Expedition 56-57 crew members Alexander Gerst, Sergei Prokopyev and Serena Aunon-Chancellor with back up crew members Anne McClain, Oleg Kononenko and David Saint-Jacques. Credit: NASA. The Expedition 55 crew is unloading the Orbital ATK Cygnus space freighter today ahead of next week's crew swap at the International Space Station. On top of the cargo transfers and crew departure activities, the orbital residents are also running space experiments to benefit humans on Earth and astronauts in space. NASA Flight Engineer Scott Tingle has been working inside Cygnus today unpacking station hardware and research gear delivered just last week. He removed science kits and spacewalking gear and stowed them throughout the orbital lab. Tingle finally wrapped up his workday with his homebound crewmates Commander Anton Shkaplerov and Flight Engineer Norishige Kanai preparing for their June 3 return to Earth. The trio packed personal items and other gear inside the Soyuz MS-07 spacecraft that will parachute the crew to a landing in Kazakhstan after 168 days in space. Back on Earth, Soyuz MS-09 Commander Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineers Serena Aunon-Chancellor and Alexander Gerst are in final training in Kazakhstan ahead of their June 6 launch to the space station. The Expedition 56-57 trio will orbit Earth for two days before docking to the Rassvet module to begin a six-month stay in space. NASA astronauts Ricky Arnold and Drew Feustel, who are staying in space until Oct. 4, familiarized themselves today with the new Cold Atom Lab's hardware and installation procedures. The device, delivered last week on Cygnus, will research what happens to atoms exposed to temperatures less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. The two later split up as Arnold set up thermal hardware that will help scientists understand the processes involved in semiconductor crystal growth. Feustel moved on and began uninstalling a plant biology facility, the European Modular Cultivation System (EMCS), which has finalized its research operations. The EMCS will now be readied for return to Earth aboard the next SpaceX Dragon cargo craft. On-Orbit Status Report Solidification Using Baffles in Sealed Ampoules (SUBSA): The crew set up the SUBSA hardware today and installed a calibration sample. The objective of the SUBSA investigation is to advance understanding of the processes involved in semiconductor crystal growth. It offers a gradient freeze furnace for materials science investigations that can reach 850C. Samples are contained in transparent quartz or ceramic ampoules with high definition video imaging available in real-time along with remote commanding of thermal control parameters. European Modular Cultivation System (EMCS): The crew decommissioned and removed ESA's EMCS for return on the SpaceX-15 vehicle. The EMCS Holding Structure will be temporarily stowed in the Cygnus vehicle. Microbial Tracking-2 (MT-2): Today the crew collected saliva and body samples and placed them inside a Minus Eighty Degree Celsius Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI) in support of the Microbial Tracking-2 investigation. MT-2 monitors the different types of microbes that are present on ISS over a 1-year period. After the samples are returned to Earth, a molecular analysis of the RNA and DNA will be conducted to identify the specific microbes that are present on ISS in order to understand the microbial flora diversity on the ISS and how it changes over time. Orbital ATK (OA)-9 cargo status: The crew is scheduled for ~8 hours of Cygnus Cargo operations today. The crew has completed 13.5 hours of cargo operations since last Friday. Cargo specialist estimate approximately 16 hours of cargo operations remain to complete Cargo Message #1. Cargo Message #1 will unload the Cygnus vehicle and load about 1/3 of the trash. Mobile Servicing System (MSS) Operations: This evening ground robotics controllers will ungrapple the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) from the OA-9 Cygnus spacecraft. Once complete, the SSRMS will backaway from the vehicle, complete a walkoff to Mobile Base System (MBS)-1, and stow the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM) in preparation for tomorrow's planned robotic surveys. Today's Planned Activities: All activities are complete unless otherwise noted. Microbial Tracking-2 Sample MELFI Retrieval Insert C/o and Report Results of Virus Scan on Auxiliary Computer System [] Laptops Treadmill 2 (T2) SD Card Recovery Pt 2 Transfer Cygnus Cargo Operations Treadmill 2 (T2) Cable Secure Microbial Tracking-2 Body Sample Questionnaire Verification of SM Central Post Laptop connection to wireless SM Ethernet Wastewater Storage Tank Assembly (WSTA) Fill GoPro HERO3 Battery charging (6 pc) for Soyuz 737 - init Microbial Tracking-2 Body Sample Collection Stowage of Equipment for Disposal on Soyuz 737 Flushing -2 Multi-Filtration Unit () Prior to R&R STaARS Cryotube Kit removal Place STaARS samples into Kynar Bag -1 Flow Sensor Positioning Check Microbial Tracking-2 Sample MELFI Insert Probiotics Fecal Sample Operations URAGAN. Automatic exposure mode setting and testing Probiotics Fecal Sample MELFI Insertion VIZIR. Preparation Steps and Science Hardware Calibration. Public Affairs Office (PAO) High Definition (HD) Config JEM Setup MERLIN 1 Status Check PAO Preparation Public Affairs Office (PAO) Event in High Definition (HD) - JEM Changeout of Dust Filter 1-4 Cartridges in SM (1_4_419_1, bag 437-13 (00072389R)). Removed filters for disposal. Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) Water Recovery System (WRS) Sample Analysis Food Acceptability Questionnaire Subject Cold Atom Lab Procedure Review maintenance Cold Atom Lab Fiber Optic Cable Cleaning Dry Run 737 Transfers Completion Report Delta file prep GoPro HERO3 Battery charging (6 pc) for Soyuz 737 - completion Solidification Using Baffles in Sealed Ampoules Hardware Setup IPEHG Installation Review ISS Crew departure preparation MPEG-2 TV Downlink Test via KU-band in preparation for Soyuz 739 Docking to the ISS PEHG Hardware Install Crew Departure Preparations for Return to Earth European Modular Cultivation System Decommissioning Procedure Review VIZIR. Closeout Ops European Modular Cultivation System Facility Remove from EXPRESS Rack 3 HRF Generic Saliva Collection Setup Transfer Cygnus Cargo Operations Cold Atom Lab Hardware Gather European Modular Cultivation System Facility Remove Assist Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) Sample Data Record Health Maintenance System (HMS) Personal Medication Stow Cygnus Cargo Operations Conference HRF Generic Saliva Collection Setup RADIOSKAF. Battery charge STaRS Sample Stow Completed Task List Activities: None Ground Activities: All activities are complete unless otherwise noted. Lab MCA Zero Calibration SSRMS Ungrapple Cygnus SSRMS Walkoff MBS1 Unstow SPDM TRRJ Survey Three-Day Look Ahead: Wednesday, 05/30: Cold Atom Lab install, ETVCG Bulb R&R, JEM Camera Robot Checkout Thursday, 05/31: ER3 IPEHG Install, Soyuz Descent Drill, WRS Pump Roller R&R, PEPS Inspect Friday, 06/01: CQ Cleaning, RFID Tag Install, EHDC Locking Mechanism Adjust, WRS transfer pump tubing R&R, Change of Command Ceremony 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") - On 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 - Idle Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA) - Process Urine Processing Assembly (UPA) - Standby Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Lab - Full Up Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Node 3 - Off Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Coles is working on ways to sell its portfolio of pubs while maintaining ownership of its lucrative bottle shop network - a key obstacle to cleansing its business of poker machines. Australias two largest supermarkets have presented Queenslands archaic liquor licensing laws - which say a business must own licensed venues in order to operate retail liquor stores - as a reason for owning poker machines, which they says subsidise otherwise unviable pubs. Coles is looking to get out of its pokies portfolio. Credit:Jemma Wallace Wesfarmers, the conglomerate that owns Coles, has said it is a "reluctant owner" of poker machines because of the social harm they cause, and is looking to sell its pubs and poker machine business ahead of Coles being spun-off as an independent company. The company is reportedly working on a deal to sell the 90 or so pubs housed within Coles' Spirit Liquor to pub group The Australian Venue Company, which is 80 per cent owned by private equity giant KKR. Telstra boss Andy Penn knows he needs to pull a rabbit out of his hat in a couple of weeks when he fronts up to the companys investor day. His job depends on it. The company's share price has been in a downward spiral for the past couple of weeks since it released its Claytons reaffirmation of its earnings forecasts - which in reality was a poorly disguised downgrade. The move was exacerbated earlier this week when ratings agency S&P Global downgraded the company a notch, saying Telstra had a diminished role in the industry and faced difficulty moving from a telco to a techno. Penn would understand well that he needs to provide the market with some positive news. If, as some analysts expect, Telstra tells investors that dividends will be significantly cut in the 2019 financial year, there will be even more pressure on him to present a glimmer of hope that when earnings fall off a cliff after the NBN compensation payments dry up, there is some path to improve earnings. Telstra boss Andy Penn But curiously the flurry of negative commentary from investment bank analysts that Telstra encountered in May has eased a little. Nearly six years ago, when Europe was facing the prospect of a Greek exit from the eurozone, all it took was European Central Bank President Mario Draghi assuring the bank would do "whatever it takes" to calm markets. This time, if the prospect of a "Quitaly" - an Italian withdrawal from the eurozone - were to firm, that might not be enough. "Whatever it takes" may not be enough this time for ECB President Mario Draghi. Credit:Bloomberg The ECB response to the Grexit threat was to embark on a massive program, purchasing the bonds of weaker countries of the eurozone and granting a series of bailouts for Greece in return for promises of financial discipline. Yet where Greece was a minor economy whose exit from the eurozone wouldnt necessarily have threatened its break-up, Italy -- the zones third-largest economy -- poses a challenge of a different magnitude. National Australia Bank has pushed back against claims by a small business owner that it unexpectedly seized all the proceeds from the sale of his principal residence to pay down his business debts. Ross Dillon told the royal commission into banking misconduct on Wednesday of his shock at being told that the bank would pocket the full $2.2 million from the sale of his 40 hectare family home and broodmare farm "Goanna Downs" in Scone in NSW. Ross Dillon at the royal commission. "I recall it pretty well, I was walking down the streets of Wagga with my wife," Mr Dillon said. "We were actually killing time - I had a horse running in the Wagga guineas that afternoon." "Shaun [a NAB banker] rang me and said 'Ross, I'm sorry, I've got to tell you were taking all the money from Goanna... My reaction couldn't be printed. It was pretty blue. I was instantly furious." Iconic Australian firms would be treated like tax-dodging multinationals and forced to open their books under sweeping reforms to Australia's tax system recommended by a powerful economics committee. The corporate tax avoidance report, released after four years and eight extensions on Wednesday, recommends all local firms with a turnover of $100 million or more be forced to publicly report their total incomes, taxable incomes and tax payable every year. A shop assistant arranges RM Williams boots. Credit:AP Hundreds of local businesses such as RM Williams, Godfreys, The Sydney Fish Market and De Bortoli Wines could be swept up in the push recommended by both Labor and the Coalition as the Australian Tax Office looks to bolster its tax-gathering capabilities. "The committee recommends that all companies with a total income of $100 million for a year be required to release tax information of the level specified in the Tax Laws Amendment (Combating Multinational Tax Avoidance) Act," the inquiry reported. Former NSW education minister-turned-academic Adrian Piccoli says a Gonski-style review of higher education is "absolutely necessary" because the competing motivations within universities are "not necessarily" aligned with the national interest. The former state National Party MP, who is now a professor at the University of NSW, told a panel discussion of the Gonski 2.0 report onto excellence in school education that there should be a similar review of higher education, like the one advocated by federal Labor. Adrian Piccoli has called for a quota to restrict the enrolment of trainee teachers. Credit:James Alcock Professor Piccoli, who left politics early last year, said "a review like they've done with Gonski is absolutely necessary". He acknowledged he was new to the sector but said his initial impressions suggested "all of the motivators [at universities] are in the wrong direction," he said. "What's the motivation for universities? It's to enrol international students, because of funding." He said the same motivation also prompted some universities to enrol domestic students in courses such as teaching, which was "relatively inexpensive to produce but it's a great revenue raiser". Rickman as Severus Snape, with cast in 2004's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Credit:Warner Brothers The collection of letters, diary entries and annotated scripts including Rickman's dog-eared working scripts from Love Actually and Die Hard has been put up for auction by UK collector Neil Pearson Rare Books , and reveals Rickman's apparent irritation over his role in the blockbuster kids' series. But Alan Rickman felt "frustrated" by the role, according to newly released letters from the late British actor, who passed away in 2016, aged 69. To most viewers, his memorable turn as the complicated Professor Severus Snape was a highpoint in the Harry Potter film series. One item, a postcard from producer David Heyman, hints at the actor's disappointment over the limited scope of Snape's role in the series' second film, 2002's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. "I know, at times, you are frustrated, but please know that you are an integral part of the films. And you are brilliant," Heyman wrote to Rickman. Another note penned by Rickman, titled "Inside Snape's Head", points at a difficult working relationship with director David Yates on 2009's The Half-Blood Prince. "It is as if David Y. has decided that this is not important in the scheme of things i.e. teen audience appeal..." the note reads. Despite his misgivings, Rickman was clearly beloved by his co-workers: in one note writer JK Rowling thanks the actor "for doing justice to my most complex character..."; in another star Daniel Radcliffe thanks Rickman for gifting him a copy of Catcher in the Rye. Specifically, she's travelling down the centre, exploring Middle America, from Chicago to New Orleans, via Indiana, Ohio and Arkansas. She explains that her goal is to ascertain "the state of the States", and she describes herself as "a nosy Jew" who will conduct her inquiry with "an open mind, a warm heart and a beady eye". Bracingly candid and often baldly funny, English actress Miriam Margolyes is not shy about offering her opinions. It's one of the reasons she's such a popular chat-show guest. And her opinions count in this three-part series in which the 76-year-old sets off, with her weak bladder and a walking stick, to discover America. Margolyes lived in the US for 16 years, but she believes it's no longer the country that she once knew. The first episode, in which she explores the idea of the American Dream, sees her starting her 1600-kilometre journey in Chicago, America's third largest city and a place dramatically divided between wealth and poverty. She reluctantly gets gussied up for a swish charity fundraiser and later ventures to the Southside, which is notorious for its violence and high murder rate. Then it's on to Indianapolis, where she attends an emotional naturalisation ceremony. Margolyes is an animated and inquisitive guide, despite her laboured walking pace, and many of those she encounters are pretty chuffed to meet Professor Sprout from the Harry Potter films. The series' approach at times seems a bit odd, with someone off-screen and unidentified asking her questions, but it's a minor quibble on a largely engaging tour. Caroline always had a heavier period, but it was when she went off the pill in her 30s that it really started to affect her life. "It was seven or eight days, on average," the 51-year-old, who works in public relations, recalls. "And it kind of just kept getting heavier and heavier. By the time I was in my 40s it was going eight, nine, 10, even 11 days." Around 25 per cent of women have heavy menstrual bleeding, categorised as blood loss in excess of 80 mL per cycle. Around 25 per cent of women have heavy menstrual bleeding. Credit:Stocksy Dr Elizabeth Farrell, gynaecologist and medical director of Jean Hailes for Women's Health, admits that this measure is not particularly helpful for women trying to figure out if their menstrual cycle is "normal". The number of Canberrans leaving the National Disability Insurance Scheme has doubled in just three months, for the first time eclipsing the number joining the scheme in the same period. The latest NDIS snapshot was published on the same day representatives from the agency behind the scheme fronted an ACT parliamentary inquiry. NDIS participant Katrina Muir gives evidence to the ACT assembly inquiry last week. Credit:Karleen Minney Between December 31 and March 31 the total number of people on approved support plans in the ACT fell, as 194 Canberrans left the scheme. In that time, just 115 people joined the NDIS on approved plans. But those figures also showed about half of NDIS participants in the ACT had not been accessing disability supports before the scheme, Stephanie Gunn from the National Disability Insurance Agency told the inquiry. A funny thing happened to Wil Anderson on the way to a gig last year, though he could hardly see the funny side at the time. The comedian made headlines when he was arrested at Wagga Wagga Airport for allegedly causing a disturbance on board a flight bound for the rural town. He was later released by police and was able to take the stage for his 7.30pm show as planned. Comedian Wil Anderson is touring the country with his new show, Wilegal. At the time he remained tight-lipped about the events that led to his arrest, but a year on and he's using the saga as the basis for his new show Wilegal, telling the whole story in great detail. "The show starts with me leaving home in Sydney on the Saturday afternoon and it finishes with me arriving home in Sydney the next day on the Sunday night and it tells the story of every single thing that happens in between," said Anderson. The Catholic Church has confirmed it will sign up to the national redress scheme for survivors of child sexual abuse once the laws are passed by the Senate. More than 60 per cent of all survivors of sex abuse in religious settings who gave evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse more than 2500 people came from Catholic-managed institutions. The Catholic Church will sign up to the national redress scheme. The Catholic Church is the first national non-government institution to officially announce it will join the scheme, which has been criticised because institutions have to opt in and because it does not cover physical abuse. Federal Social Services Minister Dan Tehan described the churchs announcement as significant, saying it showed the church was remorseful and willing to take responsibility. A juvenile humpback whale found tangled in ropes off the coast of Bondi on Tuesday afternoon could not be found on Wednesday, despite extensive helicopter surveillance as far north as the Central Coast. Crew members of a Whale Watching Sydney vessel were able to partially free the whale from the fishing gear on Tuesday, after spotting the "exhausted" humpback two nautical miles off the Sydney coast. Authorities were set to disentangle the whale from remaining ropes on Wednesday, but called off the search for the it by mid-afternoon, after conditions at sea "deteriorated considerably," a spokesman for NSW National Parks said. "The Bureau of Meteorology has issued gale warnings for Sydney and Hunter waters which makes observations from the air, land and sea virtually impossible because of the white caps," he said. He said disruptions would last for "months not years". Premier Gladys Berejiklian promised to closely monitor the project and would make sure businesses do not face the same disruption that hit businesses in the CBD, some of which have reportedly had to close down. She would not say, however, whether compensation will be offered to affected businesses in Parramatta. "We know some (Sydney businesses) are struggling and we will make sure that in Parramatta we will do everything we can to support all parts of the community during the construction process," she said. Restaurant 317 owner, Pierre Sande, in front of his restaurant on Church St, Parramatta. Credit:Wolter Peeters She insisted Parramatta's popular outdoor dining area, known as "Eat Street", would become an "even better" precinct because of the increased foot traffic the light rail was expected to bring. Business owners along the popular strip previously told the Herald they feared the construction of the light rail would threaten the survival of their businesses. Restaurant 317 owner Pierre Sande said the light rail construction was likely to be "very damaging" for restaurants and cafe owners along Church Street. Stage 1 of the Parramatta light rail project has been given planning approval. Credit:NSW Government "There is going to be noise and dust. Why would people come to Church Street Parramatta if there is a lot of disruption happening?" he asked. Much of Eat Street is just a lane in each direction, bordered by hedges that separate passing traffic from the outdoor dining areas. Volcanoes Steakhouse owner Gamal Halim said business owners wanted to avoid a repeat of the disruption from the light rail construction in central Sydney. Loading "A lot of businesses in the CBD went down because of the light rail we are wanting to avoid the same thing happening here because Church Street is booming," he said. About 40 per cent of his restaurant's business is from people who do not book but walk in off the street. On the other side of Eat Street, Bondi Pizza manager Isaac Bell said the construction would have a "severe impact" on businesses along the popular strip. "A lot of walk-in customers are going to disappear. The outdoor dining is hugely important," he said. "There are businesses on the strip that only get foot traffic and a reduction is probably going to kill them off." In the CBD, the government is fighting Spanish construction giant Acciona in the NSW Supreme Court. Acciona will seek orders from the court to dismiss a motion by the state's lead transport agency to strike out the Spanish company's $1.2 billion claim for costs and damages against the state. Acciona has accused Transport for NSW of misleading or deceptive conduct over the extent of the utilities buried beneath the route of the line, prior to signing a contract in 2014. Queensland-based VAC Group has also launched legal proceedings and is seeking more than $4 million - plus damages - from the government, which it has accused of misleading and deceptive conduct. The 12-kilometre light rail project from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kensington in the city's south-east has already been dogged by cost blowouts and repeated delays, which has infuriated businesses and residents along the route of the line. Construction of the line is running a year late, and is not expected to be completed until March 2020. NSW Labor leader Luke Foley slammed Premier Gladys Berejiklian for "boasting" about the Parramatta project given the scandal surrounding Sydney light rail. "She can't tell us when the Sydney light rail project of hers will ever be finished, it is running about two years behind schedule, and yet she has got the gall to get up and boast that she is going to deliver one in Parramatta," Mr Foley told reporters. A final business case for the second stage of the project, which connects Parramatta CBD to Ermington, Melrose Park, Wentworth Point and Sydney Olympic Park, is due to be completed by the end of the year. Police must dig up investigation notes on 10 former suspects of the notorious Family Court bombings so they can be scrutinised as part of one of the states biggest murder trials. Supreme Court judge Peter Garling ordered NSW Police to deliver the records to the lawyers for Leonard John Warwick, who have criticised investigators handling of the string of bombings and shootings that occurred around Sydney between 1980 and 1985. Leonard John Warwick is escorted from the NSW Supreme Court this month. Credit:AAP Mr Warwick, 71, is the only person facing trial over seven attacks, which included the bombing of two judges homes, the Parramatta Family Court, and a Jehovahs Witness congregation, as well as to shooting of a judge and of Mr Warwicks brother-in-law. Among his 24 charges are four murder counts, allegedly motivated by an ongoing legal battle with his ex-wife over the custody of their daughter. It is not often that a magistrate bakes a cake for a young offender, or a prosecutor builds a rapport with a young person facing a potential prison sentence. But the Youth Koori Court at Parramatta, a Children's Court initiative designed to divert young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander offenders from prison by tackling the causes of crime, is no ordinary court and the results have been promising. On Thursday the Berejiklian government will announce the Koori Court, which started in 2015 and is the first court of its kind in NSW, will be expanded from Parramatta to the newly refurbished Surry Hills Children's Court complex with a $2.7 million funding boost in next month's budget. From left: Children's Court President Peter Johnstone, Treasurer Dominic Perrottet, Magistrate Sue Duncombe, Attorney-General Mark Speakman, Aunty Joanne Selfe, Children's Court executive officer Rosemary Davidson, Legal Aid NSW chief executive Brendan Thomas, Uncle Bert Gordon. Credit:Steven Siewert "Sometimes it's the smaller investments that actually make a real difference to people's lives," Treasurer Dominic Perrottet said. Red Shores Racetrack & Casino at the Charlottetown Driving Park and Red Shores Summerside are gearing up for a busy season with exciting race series, signature events, and the seventh annual Drive for Charity, presented by Red Shores. The Drive for Charity event features 10 of Prince Edward Islands top harness drivers, based on 2017 statistics from both Charlottetown and Summerside. The drivers will partner with Island businesses to raise money for local charities. Each win will earn $25 toward their charity. Here are the participating businesses, drivers and their charities: Red Shores Racetrack & Casino Jason Hughes Muscular Dystrophy Canada Daniel R Ross Ltd. Kenny Arsenault Camp Gencheff Meridian Farms Walter Cheverie Kidsport PEI A&M Snow Removal Marc Campbell MS Society Hansen Electric Ken Murphy Canadian Mental Health MacQuarries Meats Gilles Barrieau Upper Room Food Bank Metro Home Building Centre Corey MacPherson PEI Cancer Society Charlottetown Veterinary Clinic Adam Merner Queen Elizabeth Hospital Foundation (in memory of Shelley Gass) MacRae Backhoe and Trucking Gary Chappell Wolf Manor Equestrian Centre Syntrak Print and Graphic Design Mark Bradley PEI Hospice Foundation The promotion begins on Saturday, June 2 and wraps up on Sunday, September 30. The official draw was held Tuesday (May 29) during a reception in the Top of the Park. (Red Shores) Suspended Ipswich mayor Andrew Antoniolli has been released on bail with extra conditions after he was arrested and charged by the states corruption watchdog. The latest development in the controversy surrounding Ipswich City Council has prompted its longest-serving councillor, Paul Tully, to call for the stood-down mayor's immediate resignaton. Ipswich mayor Andrew Antoniolli was accused of using of council funds for his own use to purchase items from charitable organisations between 2011 and 2017. Credit:Samantha Manchee/AAP Cr Antoniolli, 47, was arrested by the Crime and Corruption Commission on Tuesday and kept in Ipswich watch house overnight, charged with breaching his bail conditions. Speaking in Ipswich Magistrates Court on Wednesday, his lawyer, Dan Rogers, said Cr Antoniolli was alleged to have spoken to a number of close colleagues as he was returning his property after being suspended, pursuant to the Local Government Act, after new government laws came into effect last Monday. A gunman who prompted a partial shutdown of the Mackay CBD in central Queensland has surrendered peacefully after police negotiations. A large area of the city was locked down after an emergency declaration was made about 5.30pm on Wednesday. An emergency situation was declared in the Mackay CBD following reports of an armed man. Members of the public inside the declared zone were advised to seek shelter in a secure place. Credit:Queensland Police Service Witnesses called police after the man, who was armed with at least two long-arm rifles, fired several shots into the air near Gregory Street. Detective Inspector Brendan Smith confirmed the gunman surrendered about 8pm. It was one of the worst weeks of Professor David Pilchers working life. Late in September last year, intensive care units around the country were flooded by a horrifying number of people experiencing severe complications from the flu. Some patients suffered multiple organ failure. Professor David Pilcher. Credit:Simon Schluter At The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, where Professor Pilcher works, they almost ran out of dialysis machines for patients with septic shock. Katrina Miles, her four children and her two parents, Cynda and Peter, have on Wednesday been farewelled in two separate funeral services being held south of Perth. The three generations of the one family were killed in an apparent murder-suicide at their rural property of Osmington, near the Margaret River, on May 11. Peter Miles, 61, is believed to have shot his wife Cynda, 58, daughter Katrina and her four children Taye, 13, Rylan, 12, Ayre, 10, and Kayden, eight, in the early hours of that Friday morning. Aaron Cockman (right) is greeted by family and friends outside Bunbury Crematorium. Credit:AAP It is believed he called police before turning the gun on himself. The man accused of mowing down pedestrians outside Melbourne's Flinders Street Station will undergo a psychiatric assessment to determine whether or not he is fit to stand trial. Saeed Noori, 33, appeared before Melbourne Magistrates Court on Wednesday, charged with deliberately ploughing a car into people crossing the road at the intersection of Flinders and Elizabeth streets on December 21 last year. Saeed Noori is taken to the custody centre at Melbourne Magistrates Court. Credit:Seven News Melbourne Eighteen people - including a four-year-old boy and international tourists - were hit and injured by the car that afternoon and one of them, 83-year-old grandfather Antonio Crocaris, died about eight days later. Mr Noori is charged with one count of murder, 18 counts of attempted murder and one count of reckless conduct endangering life. The murder charge was added after Mr Crocaris' death. Veteran news presenter Jennifer Keyte has left Seven News for rival Ten Eyewitness News. Keyte, 58, who has presented Seven Networks weekend news in Melbourne since 2003, returns to Network Ten where she worked from 1982 to 1987. Veteran news presenter Jennifer Keyte has left Seven News for rival Ten Eyewitness News. Credit:Teagan Glenane I am thrilled to be joining the team to present Ten Eyewitness News First At Five in Melbourne, Keyte said in a statement on Wednesday night. Returning to Ten, the launching pad of my career in television and broadcast journalism, is both exciting and sentimental. I am really looking forward to coming home and being part of the team again. Its wet season in the Kimberley again after the Environmental Protection Authority gave its stamp of approval to the second of four major irrigation proposals for northern WA this year. EPA chair Tom Hatton recommended Environment Minister Stephen Dawson approve the Argyle Cattle Companys 1200 hectare Shamrock Station irrigation proposal, 64 km south of Broome. Huge irrigation projects are planned for the Kimberley. Credit:Glenn Campbell There has been a surge of irrigation proposals for the Kimberley in the past year to support intensive cattle grazing in the region. In March the EPA recommended approval for the Carlton Plain station irrigation project and it was currently assessing proposals for Gogo station and the Pardoo irrigated agriculture project in the Shire of East Pilbara. A possible box of documents that may detail 40 meetings between senior ACT public servants and the Tradies Club over the Dickson land swap seems to have gone "missing", an Assembly committee has heard. The astonishing revelation came during the Assembly's Public Accounts committee's first public hearing into an audit of a tender related to the land swap, where Auditor-General Dr Maxine Cooper and audit staff gave evidence. ACT Auditor-General Dr Maxine Cooper, who says there may be a box of documents about the Dickson land swap that has gone missing. Credit:Graham Tidy The audit prompting the committee's investigation found the government potentially relinquished up to $2.65 million in value for territory taxpayers to the CFMEU-linked club, through more "favourable" terms than the original tender allowed. That deal saw the government pay the club $3.9 million for a block of land currently housing the union's office in Rosevear Place, Dickson, and $45,000 for a nearby block formerly housing the Downer club. Federal Parliament has cleared a hurdle in the push to stop foreign interference in Australian politics, with Labor and the Coalition stepping up talks on tougher laws after months of dispute over the reforms. The moves clear the ground for a bipartisan vote on the foreign interference laws after a key parliamentary committee hands down its findings on how to address fears that the measures go too far. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is supporting the bipartisan approach and the reforms are gaining ground with Labor members of the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security, the key group that must clear the changes. The Turnbull government had been frustrated at the slow pace of the committee review of the draft reforms amid an outcry from the Law Council, the media industry, the university sector and others about who could be defined as a foreign agent that threatened the national interest. Embattled Jobs Minister Michaelia Cash says she won't be "bullied" by Labor and the unions as she fights another order to appear before the Federal Court, which is examining last year's botched raids on the Australian Workers' Union. The court issued a subpoena requested by the AWU to force Senator Cash to give evidence on August 1, as it considers the union's bid to throw out an investigation into donations to GetUp! made by the union under Bill Shorten's leadership. In a question time dominated by the issue, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he had "complete faith" in Senator Cash and cast the subpoena revelations as a deliberate attempt to distract from the "legitimate inquiry" into the AWU. Minister for Jobs and Innovation Michaelia Cash. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen A previous attempt to force Senator Cash to give evidence in court was set aside, and the minister has instructed lawyers to push for this subpoena to be struck out as well. She declined to discuss her reasons for fighting the order, but noted she is not a party to the case. Sectors of the United States and Ontario Standardbred industry are supporting the Youth Literary Derby, as are municipal officials and members of the arts and educational community. Strong participation by prospective young Derby hopefuls is fuelling the impetus of the initiative. The Youth Literary Derby is a genius idea that melds creative writing with an introduction to horses, writes Betty Holt, the executive director of the Harness Horse Breeders of New York State. To thrive, our industry must continue to be built on the foundation of our youth. To introduce young people to Standardbred horses and to educate them on the economic farming benefits is the only way to make that happen. The farming and breeding aspects of the horse industry are at least as important as the racing and betting, if not more so. The best way to develop a love of horses is to be in contact with them and to get to know their personalities. To add in the benefit of high education is a win, win for all. Holt went on to say, The Harness Horse Breeders of New York State are so impressed with the idea they are looking to implement a similar program. Mike Simpson of Hanover Shoe Farms and the Standardbred Breeders Association of Pennsylvania is pleased to see that the Youth Literary Derby is offering an opportunity for todays youth to express real-world encounters with equine athletes in an imaginative way. In a sport that is driven primarily by numbers, it is great to see physical interaction and creative writing be a part of the experience, as well, he said. Its a great initiative. I think that kids are very excited to get a chance to view horses, and any time they are offered that opportunity they are bound to be excited, offered Walter Parkinson, president of Standardbred Breeders of Ontario, Association. I think the literary aspect gives them a way of connecting with horses that is unique. The Youth Literary Derby (youthliteraryderby.ca) is an Ontario-wide, juried, horse-themed writing contest that carries $2,000 in prize money and free, donated tuition from the University of Guelph for Horse Behaviour and Safety courses. It is designed to encourage writing and literary skills and reaches out for students evaluations and perceptions of their up-close encounters with Standardbred foals. Having students write poems about Standardbreds is fantastic, writes Kimberly Rinker, the vice president of the United States Harness Writers Association. We should follow your lead and do something like this in the States. What a great program and incentive to get youngsters involved or interested in harness racing. When Standardbred breeder/owner Tom Rankin greeted more than 300 horse-loving visitors to his spanking new broodmare facility on May 19 in St. Catharines, Mayor Walter Sendzik was there mingling. He was amongst the mares, foals, and the excited youngsters that were anxious to get up close and personal with newborn foals and pen their impressions for the Youth Literary Derby. Mayor Sendzik had high praise for the Youth Literary Derby. It is a great opportunity for young people to connect their writing and literacy skills with their love of horses, he said. I encourage families with an interest in horses to get involved. Thanks to the Rankin family for opening their doors and sharing their love of horses with the community to support youth literacy. Enthusiasm and strong vocal support oozed from Caledon, Ont., Mayor Allan Thompson when he learned of the Youth Literary Derby. Caledon is a proud equestrian community, and as Mayor I strongly support and endorse the Youth Literary Derby which connects young people to horses through stories and poetry, he said. Its great to see the large number of partnerships involved from both the private and public sector, all promoting and supporting this incredibly enriching program. Following an early-morning presentation on May 23 that outlined the Youth Literary Derby concept to Mayor Bonnie Crombie and Councillors of the City of Mississauga, all assembled were vocal and unanimous in their support and endorsement of the program. The last of the scheduled 20 open houses at Ontario farms for Derby hopefuls is now complete. It is now time to put pen to paper and test their creative literary abilities in prose or verse about their impressions of one of the worlds most beautiful creations, the newborn Standardbred foal. The following words from Mike Douglas, executive director of the Mississauga Arts Council, ring clear and true, and might aptly describe the feelings of one seeing a newborn foal for the first time. Essential to creative expression is the stimulating effect of experiencing something new, something that engages your senses and prompts you to think differently, see differently and feel differently. As Mike Douglas said: Sign me up. Entries for the Youth Literary Derby must be submitted by midnight June 15. (Youth Literary Derby) It came to light over the weekend that Mr Joyce and his new partner Vikki Campion had signed a deal with the Channel 7 program Sunday Night for an exclusive interview, believed to be worth $150,000. Their weeks-old baby Sebastian is likely to feature heavily in the broadcast, as the money is said to be going into a trust for him, rather than directly to Mr Joyce and Ms Campion. Its no secret that the publics trust in many institutions is at an all-time low. As we reported a couple of months ago , just one in five Australians trust the federal government to do the right thing more often than not. An Australian National University study after the 2016 election also found voter trust in politics at some of the lowest levels ever recorded. It may surprise you, but Im not opposed to chequebook journalism in all situations. Victims of crime, or people who have suffered severe hardship (physical, practical or emotional), and wish to share their experiences with a media outlet in exchange for payment should be free to do that, if someone has the cash (and willingness) to pay. After all, the ratings that ensue, or the attractiveness of the commercial environment that such a story of public interest brings to the media outlet in question, should be acknowledged and returned to the source. In most cases, the money is simply to make life easier - for example, to help pay for medical expenses, commemorate a lost life or rebuild a family left in tatters. The caveat I put on that is that if a payment is made, it should be disclosed at the time of publication of the story. Not the specific amount, necessarily, but simply that the transaction has taken place. In some cases, it would then be open to a viewer or reader to make an assessment about whether the persons answers had been influenced by the payment. Or on the upside, perhaps it would just be nice to know that reading or viewing a piece about persons tragic life event was indirectly helping contribute to an improved outcome for those involved. (Of course, the Herald doesnt pay for interviews or access - thats clearly stated in our code of conduct.) Barnaby Joyce and his former media advisor Vikki Campion, mother of his new baby boy, Sebastian. Credit:Fairfax Media That Mr Joyce is being paid (directly or not) is now public knowledge, as is the amount - and none of it has helped. In fact, its the opposite. As Tony Wright wrote in this scathing piece, Joyce used to relish his role as Australias best retail politician - but now hes allowed the market to put a price on his personal soap opera, and it comes on top of his $200,000-plus annual salary. That might not be millions, but as deputy PM he used to earn almost double that. Liberal Party powerbrokers are close to a deal that could prevent a damaging civil war over the choice of new candidates at the next federal election, imposing a forced peace in Victoria amid new signs of conflict in NSW. The extraordinary moves are likely to scrap the selection of Victorian candidates at the next election by open party member votes, confirming existing MPs in their seats to avoid an escalation of the state divisions internal warfare. The plan contrasts with growing tension in the NSW division where there are confirmed challenges to regional Liberal Ann Sudmalis and southern Sydney Liberal Craig Kelly, leaving it too late to head off preselection contests. Victorian Liberal MP Julia Banks (left) will avoid a preselection contest, unlike her NSW colleague Ann Sudmalis. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The Liberal candidate challenging Ms Sudmalis in her South Coast seat of Gilmore, local real estate agent Grant Schultz, confirmed his plan to party members on Wednesday despite the clear wishes of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to avoid a contest. Time to wind up for the day. It's been a wild ride: Barnaby Joyce, China influence debates, Michaelia Cash, the redress scheme, family court changes and an intelligence review. We'll be back in the morning for the final sitting day of this week. Until then, you can find me on Facebook here and Twitter here. And thanks to Alex Ellinghausen and Dominic Lorrimer for the photos today. You can find them on Twitter here and here. And, as always, your hot tips and feedback are welcome at fergus.hunter@fairfaxmedia.com.au. We'll wrap up the blog right there. Today has seen: more institutions opt into the national redress scheme for child sexual abuse survivors the defection of a former Labor senator to the Liberal Party One Nation splitting over the government's company tax cuts Michaelia Cash pushing back against Labor's attacks over her involvement in the AWU raids controversy pushing back against Labor's attacks over her involvement in the AWU raids controversy attention on Greg Hunt's "expletive-laden tirade" at an elderly NT mayor And that's it for this sitting week. Parliament and, therefore, our live blog will return on June 18. Until then, you can find me on Facebook here and Twitter here. And thanks to Alex Ellinghausen and Dominic Lorrimer for the photos today. You can find them on Twitter here and here. And, as always, your hot tips and feedback are welcome at fergus.hunter@fairfaxmedia.com.au. Many of us (those without specific provisions in our awards or industrial agreements) have had the freedom to choose what fund we want to be in since 2005. But the odds have been stacked against us. Banks have been paying their employees bonuses to switch us into expensive and poorly performing products. Theyve been paying our financial advisors commissions to do the same thing, and providing attractive banking terms to employers prepared to do the same thing. Those of us who try and examine the market for ourselves are presented with a deliberately large and bewildering array of more than 40,000 individual products. The commission says the more complex the product, the lower the return the fund selling it is able to offer because the less likely we are to understand it. So badly do the bank-owned funds perform that, taken together, they deliver their members a return around one sixth lower than would "plain vanilla" funds offering the same mix of asset classes and facing the same costs and taxes an achievement thats almost impossible to explain, although very large fees and using some of the funds as dumping grounds for poorly performing products might form part of the explanation. In order to find out whether the funds themselves knew why they performed so badly the commission sent out to a survey, with reminder letters, to the 208 that service most of the population. Only 114 responded. Among those that didnt respond were the Defence Force Superannuation Scheme and the AMP Eligible Rollover Fund. One attempted to game the survey by providing its name and address (so that it wouldnt be included in the list of non-responders) and leaving all of the other fields blank, a performance the commission described as contumelious a word that means showing an utter disregard for someone elses work. Australian War Memorial director Brendan Nelson has defended donations to the memorial from weapons manufacturers and called out companies that do not financially support the memorial. Under questioning at Senate estimates, Dr Nelson said the memorial had recently signed a partnership deal worth $375,000 with Lockheed Martin, had a $30,000 donation from Thales for the Napier Waller art prize, and $450,000 from Leidos Australia to develop a virtual reality tour of five large technology objects. He also detailed $100,000 of in-kind support from Kinetic Australia for engineering and scoping services on a project. Australian War Memorial director Brendan Nelson told senators he seeks donations from weapons companies. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Boeing provided $500,000 for an exhibition about the Afghanistan war, Dr Nelson said. "I actively seek [donations from weapons companies]," he said. The NSW government has defended Victoria's exclusion zones around abortion clinics in the High Court, arguing that communication prohibited inside the zone does not violate the constitutions implied freedom of political communication. The NSW government's decision to formally intervene in the High Court challenge comes as a bill very similar in substance to the Victorian legislation is due to be debated in the NSW Legislative Assembly next week. Demonstrators in favour of no-go zones around NSW abortion clinics stand outside NSW State Parliament last week. Credit:AAP In a submission filed on behalf of NSW Attorney General Mark Speakman, the government argued the Victorian law was "compatible with the maintenance of the constitutionally prescribed system of representative and responsible government". It submitted the law's target was not communications about government or political matters but those "designed to deter clients from having an abortion, which is a personal and private medical choice". Victoria's rights commissioner will try on Thursday to challenge the controversial new workplace deal for Melbournes firefighters. The Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission will appear in the Fair Work Commission to argue against the deal, which has been several years in the making but which Equal Opportunities Commissioner Kristen Hilton believes entrenches discrimination in the Metropolitan Fire Brigade. Rights commissioner Kristen Hilton. Credit:Darrian Traynor The deal has been agreed between the brigade and its firefighters, represented by the hardline United Firefighters Union, and now must be approved by the Fair Work Commission. Lawyers representing affected Yarraville owners said the acquisition could reduce property prices. But the government has told residents their properties would likely not lose value. Melbourne now has a significant number of properties above the City Loop, CityLink and EastLink tunnels, said correspondence to residents sent by Peter Sammut, chief executive of the authority overseeing the project. The Valuer-General Victoria has found there is generally little difference in the values of properties above tunnels compared to others in the same area, the letter said. The West Gate Tunnel will link the West Gate Freeway to CityLink, via a tollway under Yarraville, and is expected to ease congestion in the western suburbs. The roads minister pledged on Wednesday that in the "highly unlikely" event any home was damaged by construction of the tunnels it would be repaired by the government. The Yarraville land has been acquired using the Major Transport Projects Facilitation Act, introduced by Labor in 2009. The Napthine government planned to use its powers to build the East West Link, but lost power before it enacted them. Yarraville homeowners and businesses have two years to seek compensation. Manisha Blencowe, of Slater and Gordon, said they were not aware of any claim for compensation for the loss of land below a title since the 2009 powers came into place. For people who have now lost the right to their land under their property, many are going to feel like they have lost value in their property, said Ms Blencowe. The government is essentially discouraging people from exploring their right to seek compensation." The Western Distributor Authority is managing the project for the government and Transurban. Spokeswoman Kim Payne said in most instances the acquisition of land below houses and businesses was at a depth starting at 15 metres. Property owners above the [tunnel] will continue to use their land as they do now, she said. The acquisition "won't stop a property owner from building a pool, cellar or basement, she said. And she said when the new toll road opened, thousands of trucks that now used the inner west's residential streets could take a different route. This was very positive for property owners in the area, she said. Yarraville resident Francesca Maiorano, 62, is among 19 owners in Frederick Street to have land under their house acquired. From the moment she found a leaflet notifying her of a tunnel being built 15 metres underneath her home she has felt uneasy. "I'm really nervous because you just don't know what it means," she said. "I've lived in this house four decades, I've seen a lot of changes in that time. My house is 100 years old, but will she live to see another 100 years if they are going to build a tunnel underneath her?" Ms Maiorano said she hadn't considered compensation yet, but if her house was damaged by the development she would. "My biggest concern is that my house is going to sink," she said. Yarraville resident Andrea, who asked that her surname not be used, is among 19 owners in Frederick Street to have land under their house acquired. Andrea said her family was concerned at the impacts of the tunnels' construction, and later having traffic running beneath the property. Its a bit of a great unknown maybe in five years time I will wonder what all the fuss is about, she said. When we go to sell one day, is our house going to be identical to one that was three streets away without a tunnel? If I was comparing, Id be hesitant to buy ours." Gray Street resident George, 74, says he is bloody furious about the impact the development could have on his weatherboard home. George, who also asked that his surname not be used, said he had consulted a lawyer about the threat the development could pose. Death threats against Premier Daniel Andrews and Public Transport Minister Jacinta Allan from members of the taxi industry have been aired in parliament in an explosive session in which Ms Allan accused Opposition MPs of encouraging the online abuse. References to Mr Andrews being shot in the head and Ms Allan being choked or hanged were read out by one Labor MP, who accused shadow transport minister David Davis under parliamentary privilege of encouraging the threats and abuse. Premier Daniel Andrews and Public Transport Minister Jacinta Allan. Credit:Darrian Traynor A Public Accounts and Estimate Committee hearing into the state budget flared-up on Wednesday when Ms Allan accused the Coalition of inciting violent threats against her, including references to her husband and children. What you are doing is inciting vicious attacks against me and my family and I am quite happy to read into the record where people have been putting on Facebook that they are surprised that I havent been killed by now, Ms Allan said. New Book Explores How Faith can Overcome Society's Challenges Contact: Lisa Lloyd, 405-973-6960OKLAHOMA CITY, May 30, 2018 / Standard Newswire / -- A return to America's theological roots is the solution for what Dr. Mark Mellow refers to as "the American malaise" in his new book "The Good Neighbor: Stories that Teach Families How to Live and Love Well." Mellow is a longtime physician and clinical researcher who believes following God's teachings can have a positive impact on an individual's physical and mental health and society, in general."America is a superpower," Mellow said. "However, we should be very concerned about the strength of our social and moral fabric. We have a marked increase in secularism. Speech is increasingly polarized, and views that aren't our own are demonized. Anxiety, depression and addiction are increasingly common, especially in younger generations. This book explores how an authentic return to our faith living and loving as God intended can heal those wounds."After being challenged by his pastor at St. Luke's United Methodist Church in Oklahoma City to read the Bible in its entirety, Mellow identified more than 50 selections from both Old and New Testaments that provide important life lessons for families. These recurring messages can empower individuals to behave with genuine benevolence and understanding to overcome racial, ethnic, religious or gender differences. He outlines a plan by which a united faith community can deal with racial strife and immigration and maintain the moral fabric of our society.Mellow also offers evidence from the fields of epigenetics and social genomics that acting benevolently and being connected to others in a positive way has important and proven health and societal benefits."In his book, Dr. Mellow provides us with a powerful reminder of the role of our spiritual values in shaping our society, as well as in our personal lives," writes David L. Boren, former Oklahoma governor and U.S. senator and president of the University of Oklahoma, in the foreword of the book. "Our religious beliefs and moral values greatly impact how we treat each other. Ultimately, spiritual values do more to determine our future than economic or military strength. We should all thank Dr. Mellow for reminding us about what is fundamentally important."Mellow has authored or coauthored numerous research articles and served as a reviewer for several medical journals. Now retired, he lives in Edmond, Oklahoma. To learn more about "The Good Neighbor," visit www.thegoodneighboronline.com . Mellow is also available for interviews and speaking engagements. New York: The White House said on Wednesday that negotiations at the demilitarised zone along the border between North and South Korea for the summit were going well and that it expects the historic meeting to take place on June 12. The announcement came as a senior North Korean official made a rare visit to the United States even as the leaders of the two countries appeared far apart on the central issue of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons. North Korea's Kim Yong Chol walks into a hotel in New York. Credit:AP Kim Yong Chol, a close aide of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and vice chairman of the ruling Workers' Party's Central Committee, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy airport on a flight from Beijing. He was later seen entering a hotel in midtown Manhattan. Mexico City: A journalist was beaten to death in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas on Tuesday, local prosecutors said, becoming the third reporter in Mexico to be killed in the past two weeks. The body of Hector Gonzalez, a local correspondent for national daily newspaper Excelsior, was found in the state capital Ciudad Victoria, the Tamaulipas attorney general's office said in a statement. Gonzalez is at least the sixth journalist to be killed this year in Mexico, where violence has surged to record levels. Mexico is one of the world's most dangerous countries for reporters. Last year, 12 reporters were killed there, according to free-speech advocacy group Article 19. Bordering Texas, Tamaulipas is one of the most lawless states in the country, and has long been ravaged by turf wars between gangs to control drug-trafficking and crime rackets. Another reporter was found dead in the state in January. Beijing: Panama has decided to ditch long-standing ties with self-ruled Taiwan and switch recognition to China, but its President says it had nothing to do with "chequebook diplomacy". Panama established diplomatic relations with China in June in a major victory for Beijing, as it lures away the dwindling number of countries that have formal relations with Taiwan, an island China claims as its own. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, left, waves with Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela and Foreign Minister Isabel de Saint Malo, in Panama City, on Saturday, Credit:AP Taiwan's government said at the time it was sorry and angry over Panama's decision, and that it would not compete with China in what it described as a "diplomatic money game". China and Taiwan have tried to poach each other's allies over the years, often dangling generous aid packages in front of developing nations, although Taipei struggles to compete with an increasingly powerful China. In addition to Caruana Galizia, who was killed in October, a 27-year-old reporter, Jan Kuciak, was killed along with his fiancee in Slovakia in February. He had also been investigating corruption with suspected ties to Italian mobsters. Protesters in Bratislava march in memory of murdered Slovakian journalist Jan Kuciak. Credit:AP "There have already been two journalists killed by the Mafia inside the European Union, both investigating Mafia stories and stories that domestic governments were not looking into," said Pauline Ades-Mevel, who is responsible for the European desk at Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group for press freedom. "Italy is historically the country that has felt the Mafia the most, and has a dozen of journalists under 24-hour police protection," Ades-Mevel said. "That doesn't happen in other countries." Loading Among those journalists is Lirio Abbate, a Mafia expert with the magazine L'Espresso, who has been under protection for 11 years, since police thwarted a bomb attack in front of his house in Palermo. Federica Angeli, a reporter with La Repubblica, and her family have been under police escort for five years. And Roberto Saviano, the author of Gomorrah, a best-selling book, movie and TV series about the Neapolitan crime syndicate, has been under escort since 2006. For Borrometi, it took just a year of reporting on the secret businesses and clandestine political ties of the Mafia in southeastern Sicily for his independent news website, La Spia (The Spy), before criminals menaced him. In five years, he got hundreds of death threats from local mobsters. Borrometi, who trained as a lawyer, started writing for local papers when he was 17, inspired by a Sicilian investigative reporter, Giovanni Spampinato, who was killed by the Mafia in the 1970s. He started his own website five years ago. His first investigation, on Mafia infiltrations among top officials in the town of Scicli, contributed to the government's decision to dissolve City Hall. His articles pull no punches. They detail the connections between political powers and the mob, naming names, and accompanied by photographs. "People need to know who they are when they meet them at the bar," he said. At first, his articles prompted vandalism against him and late night phone calls. But things got physical after he began writing a series of stories that showed how Sicily's largest fruit and vegetable market was controlled by mobsters. He was feeding his dog outside his country home, when two men jumped him, grabbed his right arm, and twisted it behind his back until his shoulder muscles tore in three places. "The only words the attackers told me that day were, 'Mind your own business,' or 'This is only the first warning,' or a Sicilian, less polite, version of it," Borrometi recalled. Almost five years later, he still can't move his shoulder properly. That didn't stop him from continuing to report on the Mafia and taking a number of the Mafiosi who threatened him to court. One night, after a fire attack almost burnt down his apartment, police decided to put him under full-time protection. The Mafia wasn't cowed. "We'll cut your head off, even inside a police station," the local Mafia boss said in a public post on social media. His reporting and police investigations have by now exposed a wider network of Mafia affiliates who move produce from the fruit and vegetable market in Vittoria, Sicily, to the rest of Italy and Europe, in affiliation with other criminal groups. He found out that one of the companies growing the famed Pachino tomato, a special cherry tomato certified by Italy's Agriculture Ministry, was owned by the sons of two prominent mobsters. One of them had spent more than two decades in jail for Mafia ties, and was now working for his son's company. The news spread, and the ministry took notice and cut the company off from the list of businesses that can sell Pachino tomatoes. Not only did the mobsters feel under attack by a reporter, they were out millions of euros in lost revenue. Recently, the mobsters decided to scale up their threats. Police say they intercepted a Sicilian mobster while he was discussing a plot with his sons to kill Borrometi with a car bomb. "We need a 'firework' like those in the 1990s, when one couldn't even walk on the streets," said the man, who was caught on a police wiretap. "A death every once in a while is useful, so that all the whippersnappers calm down a little." The reference was to the tense years when two Palermo prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were brutally murdered alongside their bodyguards, and car bombs exploded around Italy, killing bystanders and damaging historic buildings. In the wiretapped conversation, the man was advocating for a return to that bloody time of overt intimidation of authorities and citizens alike. There hasn't been a Mafia car bomb in Italy since then. "This shows how much investigative journalism angers the Mafia, which thrives with its business in silence," Nino Di Matteo a prominent Mafia prosecutor, hence also a prime target said on national television a few days after police arrested those said to be planning the attack against Borrometi. "Journalism has a fundamental role in the fight against the Mafia, especially in a moment like this," said Di Matteo, who also travels with bodyguards. "I believe we are underestimating a bit of the danger that the Mafia represents to the country and to our democracy." Hermitage Capital Management founder Bill Browder was released after a brief detention by Spanish police on a Russian arrest warrant in what may be the latest move by Moscow to undermine his global campaign against the Kremlin over human-rights abuses. Police let him go about an hour after his initial arrest Wednesday at his hotel in Madrid. Browder said on Twitter the Interpol general secretary had advised Spanish authorities to ignore the arrest warrant. Bill Browder at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington in July last year. Credit:Bloomberg "Good news. Spanish National Police just released me after Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised them not to honour the new Russian Interpol Red Notice," Browder said in a tweet. "This is the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case." Browder has led a campaign to persuade countries to adopt sanctions on Russian officials believed to be responsible for human rights abuses after the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison in 2009. Browder has said Magnitsky was mistreated and denied medical care while in prison, leading to his death. Milan: Officials at the Pompeii archaeological site have announced a dramatic new discovery, the skeleton of a man crushed by an enormous stone while trying to flee the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. Pompeii officials on Tuesday released a photograph showing the skeleton protruding from beneath a large block of stone that may have been a door jamb that had been "violently thrown by the volcanic cloud." The victim, who was over 30, had his thorax crushed. This is basically a prolonged military occupation, he says. Yes, there are borders to defend but the vast majority of the friction and the combat is in the West Bank. The military does semi-police work there but with limitless power. We are controlling people who do not want to be controlled by us. Since it was founded in 2004 by soldiers who served in Hebron, Breaking the Silence has received thousands of testimonies from IDF veterans documenting Israeli military interactions with Palestinians in the occupied territories. In one account, an infantry soldier participating in 2014s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza recalled that commanders told them Dont be afraid to shoot', and There were no uninvolved civilians. A female officer detailed an incident near the Gaza Strip where an old Palestinian farmer who got too close to the fence by mistake was killed. You simply see the tank shell coming and blowing him up, she recalled. Other female officers recalled how they felt they needed to go beyond what was expected of male soldiers to prove themselves. Being a "ball-breaker", capable of "humiliating Arabs" earned them immediate kudos. A sergeant who served in Ramallah in 2007 said: Soldiers got out with army clubs and beat people to a pulp. We were told not to use it on peoples heads. I dont remember where we were told to hit but as soon as a person on the ground is beaten with such a club, it's difficult to be particular. Children are blindfolded and handcuffed by soldiers and taken to police stations. Photo taken by IDF soldier on a occupied territory mission. Credit:Breaking The Silence An air force captain recalled: We see a tsunami in Thailand and we're all very saddened by what happens to all the civilians the day after. You know, they don't have a home. But we're carrying out a f---ing tsunami 70 kilometres from Tel Aviv and we aren't even aware of it. Gvaryahu says that commanding officers tell soldiers who are new to an area to show there is a new sheriff in town. A soldier is given orders to instil in the Palestinians a sense that they are being chased, he adds. Gvaryahu says he underwent his own awakening during a night mission where his unit took over a Palestinian house. You pick a house, you kick in the windows, you barge in the house, you wake up the family. You usually handcuff the head of the family and you throw the family in a room and say if they want to use their own house they need permission from you. There are good soldiers, bad soldiers, moral soldiers, and immoral soldiers but the problem is not the soldier, Gvaryahu says. The problem is what the soldiers are ordered to uphold. A Palestinian woman hangs clothes in a damaged apartment block, which was partially destroyed during the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, in Beit Lahiya, Gaza Strip. Credit:AP Breaking the Silences research is funded by individual donors and international organisations and governments including Switzerlands Department of Foreign Affairs, Norways embassy in Tel Aviv, Christian Aid, and the European Union. Unsurprisingly, its published testimonies divide opinion across Israel and Jewish communities around the world. Our view is far from being a majority view in Israel but it is also a view that cannot be totally dismissed, Gvaryahu says. Efforts to discredit Breaking the Silence have gone beyond the expected media counterpoints and online videos. Right-wing activist group Ad Kan unsuccessfully attempted to infiltrate the group and plant false testimonies. Other groups have taken to social media to counter Gvaryahu's accounts, including an open letter claiming to be by soldiers of his same army unit. Veteran accounts published by BTS are vetted and approved by the IDF censor but that didnt stop Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claiming the testimonies crossed a red line. In 2016 the Israeli government made unsuccessful attempts through the courts to force BTS to reveal the identity of one of its sources. I am proud they see a group of young former soldiers working out of a small office with less than 20 workers as a critical voice that they have to respond to, Gvaryahu says. In an email to Fairfax Media, an IDF spokesperson said its rules of engagement vary in accordance with the circumstances on the ground, the nature of the threat, lessons learnt, and intelligence gathered in contending with the violent riots and attacks from Gaza. The spokesperson said Hamas, the de facto governing party in Gaza designated as a terrorist organisation by Israel, Australia and the United States, incited violence and used riots as cover for carrying out attacks on Israel. When dealing with violent riots, the IDF uses live fire as a last resort, when all other means have not been successful in contending with the threat. The use of live fire is approved by a commander in the field who assesses the threat in each individual case. Only in the case of an immediate threat, may the soldiers use live fire. Loading The IDF did not respond to requests to comment on testimonies published by BTS. Gaza City: Gaza Strip-based militants say they have agreed to a ceasefire with Israel, after a fresh round of hostilities that saw the largest exchange of missiles between the two sides since 2014. "We are committed to this ceasefire as long as Israel is committed to it," Dawood Shihab, a spokesman for the Islamic Jihad group, said in an emailed statement, adding that the deal had been worked out with Egyptian mediation. Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City on Wednesday. Credit:AP A less hopeful note was struck by the Israelis with one official, who declined to be named, saying: "the report about a ceasefire is incorrect". Israel earlier said that Gaza-based militants had fired about 70 mortars, up from an earlier count of 25, from the enclave on Tuesday. Israeli missiles hit the Syrian air defence system and other military bases, in Damascus, on May 10. Credit:Syrian Government/AP Last month, Israel fired a volley of missiles at Iranian positions in the area and in Damascus, triggering the Syrian air defence system into action. In return, Israel will not stand in the way of any Syrian regime offensive on the city of Deraa and other territory along the Israeli and Jordanian border. An Israeli military ambulance drives past tanks in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, near the border with Syria. Credit:AP Beirut: Russia and Israel have reportedly reached a deal that would allow Syrian forces to take rebel territory in southern Syria, as long as Iranian troops do not participate in the offensive and stay 24 kilometres back from Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. News of the deal comes as the Syrian army is said to have completed preparations for an imminent offensive against rebels in the area. Southern Syria is of concern to the United States, which last year brokered a "de-escalation" deal with Jordan and Russia that has largely contained the war near the frontier with Israel. The US warned it would take "firm and appropriate measures" in response to any violations of that ceasefire. Israel wants Iran-backed forces removed from areas near its border and from Syria in general. Martin Indyk, former US ambassador to Israel and former special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, said on Twitter Assad appeared to be offering to "get the Iranians to pull back from Golan" Heights, if Israel accepts it as Syrian. "Assad is offering a deal with the near devil to get rid of the far devil," he wrote. Sacramento: Los Angeles police said on Tuesday that they had launched a criminal investigation into accusations that a gynaecologist at the University of Southern California engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct with students over a 26-year period. Officials said the investigation would have international scope as they seek input from up to 10,000 women who were treated by Dr George Tyndall at USC's student health clinic. Dr George Tyndall worked at the University of Southern California's Engemann Student Health Centre. Credit:AP The scandal has prompted more than a dozen lawsuits and forced the resignation of the institution's president. Police so far have the names of 52 women who have said that Tyndall, 71, touched them, spoke to them inappropriately or engaged in other misconduct while examining them as a USC doctor from 1990 to 2016, Deputy Chief Justin Eisenberg said at a news conference in Los Angeles. Washington: US President Trump acknowledged again on Wednesday that he wishes he had not appointed Attorney-General Jeff Sessions, though he did not address reports that his treatment of Sessions may be part of an obstruction of justice investigation in the Russia probe. In a series of tweets, Trump quoted Representative Trey Gowdy as expressing sympathy for the president's frustration at Sessions' decision to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential campaign. President Donald Trump sits with Attorney General Jeff Sessions during the FBI National Academy graduation ceremony in Quantico, Virginia in December. Credit:AP Citing Gowdy's comment that "there are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!" Trump added: "And I wish I did!" Trump's tweets came the morning after The New York Times reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Trump's efforts to get Sessions to change his mind about the recusal. Next-generation AAV gene therapy from joined German forces The viral vector specialist SIRION Biotech GmbH today announces the signing of a preferred partnership agreement with Heidelberg University Hospital and AAV pioneer Prof. Dirk Grimm. This strategic alliance will enable both partners to offer engineering of novel AAV capsids for the development of targeted and effective gene therapies, anticipating the growing high demands of clinical gene therapy trials. In vivo gene delivery was revolutionized by the introduction of AAV-based vectors, which have taken center stage in the development of gene therapies against a wide range of diseases with a genetic component. The tremendous potential of this versatile vector class is undisputed and illustrated by its growing presence in clinical gene therapy trials. While individual applications have already yielded promising results, culminating in the commercialization of two AAV vector-based gene therapies, recent reports from several trials project a growing need for vector optimization technologies to expand the range of AAV target cells and to improve vector and thus patient safety. With a major portion of the vector industry concentrating on questions of large-scale AAV production, there has been only little initiative to unify isolated talent and build a comprehensive, flexible technology platform that is accessible to the drug development industry. With their new preferred partnership agreement in place, Heidelberg University Hospital?s Prof. Grimm and SIRION Biotech set a milestone for the AAV field, integrating commercial expertise for viral vectors and understanding of the needs of a fast-paced client base, with the newest scientific advances in AAV optimization. The undersigned partnership agreement will help compose consistent long-term projects while maintaining a maximum of flexibility. It enables users to access multiple engineering techniques that help to optimize vector cell and tissue specificities, to boost its productivity and to reduce vector immunogenicity. This will enable customers to obtain and use truly innovative vectors that go beyond the current state-of-the-art and that will be tailored to their specific demands, thereby increasing the customers\-\- chances of success in clinical trials. ?Establishing a fixed cooperation agreement with Prof. Grimm and Heidelberg University Hospital will help us streamline the way we plan and implement our AAV engineering collaborations. Our industrial partners will be able to enter clinical trials months earlier than previously possible, with capsids and vectors optimized for their specified goals,? says Dr. Christian Thirion, CEO and founder of SIRION Biotech GmbH. ?This collaboration with Prof. Grimm offers our customers direct access to the very latest AAV technologies, to maximize the efficiency and safety of their gene therapy programs?, adds Dr. Sabine Ott, VP Business Development & Licensing. Dr. Dirk Grimm, Professor for Viral Vector Technologies at Heidelberg University Hospital explains: ?This preferred partnership agreement underpins our long-lasting fruitful collaboration with SIRION and accelerates our efforts to leverage our expertise in AAV capsid optimization toward the clinic for a variety of disorders?. SIRION Biotech specializes in custom engineering services for viral vectors in the life sciences and industry. The Germany-based technology expert can cover small- to large-scale projects for customers all around the globe. SIRION?s unique focus on gene delivery aspects enables it to master broad customization and engineering projects for all 3 major virus systems (AAV, adenovirus, lentivirus [LV]), for therapeutic and research purposes. The company has a strong customer base in cancer research, neurosciences, regenerative medicine, gene therapy and immuno-oncology. Further advances in the gene therapy space are projected with the development and licensing of clinically applicable LV transduction enhancers and the expansion of its strategic and collaborative network in AAV technology. With this new alliance of SIRION Biotech and its recently announced partnership with Vibalogics GmbH to harmonize pre-clinical production methods with GMP-production processes, SIRION Biotech offers to its industrial customers to set-up, process and coordinate the entire spectrum from AAV engineering until manufacturing of the optimized AAV candidates under GMP conditions. Prof. Grimm is an expert in AAV vector design and engineering who pioneered the use of molecular evolution technologies for generation of AAV capsids with altered cell specificities and other improved properties. Located in the BioQuant building in the center of the Heidelberg University life sciences campus, his large team of scientists and technicians exploits these technologies to create novel AAV vectors for human gene therapies of diseases such as infection with viral or parasital pathogens, or of monogenic disorders affecting major organs such as skeletal muscle, heart or lung. In addition, the Grimm laboratory possesses fundamental expertise in the customization of AAV vector genomes for in vitro and in vivo expression of cDNAs, DNA engineering (CRISPR), gene knockdown (RNAi) and cellular reprogramming molecules. This is documented in ~80 peer-reviewed publications, many of which appeared in high-profile journals such as Nature, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Nature Communications, Journal of Clinical Investigation, PNAS, Nucleic Acids Research or EMBO Molecular Medicine. Besides, Prof. Grimm is an integral member of several comprehensive and international research consortia such as the EU H2020 program MYOCURE, in which he and his team essentially contribute to the preclinical and clinical development of novel AAV-based human gene therapies. Heidelberg University Hospital and Medical Faculty: Heidelberg University Hospital is one of the largest and most prestigious medical centers in Germany. The Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University belongs to the internationally most renowned biomedical research institutions in Europe. Both institutions have the common goal of developing new therapies and implementing them rapidly for patients. With about 13,000 employees, training and qualification is an important task. Every year, around 65,000 patients are treated on an inpatient basis, 56,000 cases on a day patient basis and more than 1,000,000 cases on an outpatient basis in more than 50 clinics and departments with almost 2,000 beds. Together with the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and German Cancer Aid, Heidelberg University Hospital has established the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg, where promising approaches from cancer research are translated into the clinic. SIRION Biotech provides custom engineering and production services of viral vectors (AAV, Lentivirus, Adenovirus) for research and development in the life sciences and industry. Their unique LentiBOOSTTM transduction enhancer is used in Lentivirus-based clinical trials to improve hematopoietic gene- and CAR-T cell therapies. www.sirion-biotech.com Treasury Metals Announces Additional Drilling Results, including 65 g/t Au over 3 metres in high-grade C Zone Shoot Posted by Publisher Internet Treasury Metals Inc. (TSX: TML) (?Treasury? or the ?Company? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amakzGVQXlg&t=4s? ) is pleased to announce additional assay results from the active infill and resource expansion/exploration drilling program at Treasury?s flagship Goliath Gold Project located in northwestern Ontario. The Company has three objectives in this drilling program, which include: 1) exploration drilling of a downdip potential expansion of the high-grade shoot within the C zone; 2) infill drilling to convert resources and increase confidence in targeted areas within the Main Zone; and 3) exploration drilling along strike and northeast of the proposed open pit. ?This is a continuation from the drill program that commenced at the beginning of 2018 in which 11,591m in 17 drill holes have been completed up to and including this release.? Successful results from these targets would enhance the current resource within the mine plan for the upcoming Feasibility level design studies and help define targets for future expansion. A drill hole location plan map and longitudinal sections for the Main and C Zones are provided at the end of this release. The Company has commenced the 5,000 meters of resource expansion/exploration drilling on Treasury Metals? East Resource Target, in an area not in the current mine plan.? Initial drilling results from the program will be released in June, 2018. ?The Goliath Gold Deposit remains open at depth and has significant potential as demonstrated by the recent high grade gold intersections at greater than 500m depth.? While we continue to advance our Pre-Feasibility Study, with a planned July release date, we will continue to advance our exploration program in order to provide the most robust resource we can for the upcoming Feasibility Study as well as to demonstrate the growth potential of Goliath at depth and along strike to the NE,? said Chris Stewart, President and Chief Executive Officer of Treasury Metals.? ?The East Resource Target drilling program is progressing well and we are also planning to do some surface work around the banded iron formation and fold nose structure on our property this summer as we believe there is significant potential in this area and our objective here is to put together a regional exploration program for 2019.? Drilling Highlights C Zone: TL18-489: 78 g/t over 3.00m including 1.00m @ 196.00 g/t The title hole of this release, TL18-489, intersected 65.78 g/t over 3.00m following up on nearby historical holes TL161-14RE which returned 5.47 g/t over 4.00m, TL17-422 with 4.10 g/t 5.00m, and TL16-420 with 2.72 g/t over 6.00m (see attached C Zone image). The Company is encouraged to see mineralization at the bottom of the C zone shoot, which is located behind the Main Zone.? Further drilling in the area may delineate new gold ounces into inferred resources and eventually the mine plan.? Main Zone Expansion/Infill: The Company?s recent Main Zone drilling is targeting key locations within the mine plan to convert resources from inferred category to indicated category.? TL18-474 is located in the west high-grade shoot, which is the least densely drilled shoot, and intersected 7.56 g/t over 7.00m. TL18-474: 56 g/t over 7.00m, including both 1.00m @ 44.10 g/t and 1.00m @ 5.14 g/t TL18-471A: 91 g/t over 13.30m, including 6.00m @ 2.96 g/t TL18-478: intersected gold mineralization in three sections in close proximity: 26 g/t over 2.00m, including 1.00m @ 9.93 g/t, 4.77 g/t over 3.40m, including 1.00m @ 15.10 g/t, and 0.82 g/t over 6.00m. Other highlights include TL18-471A from the bottom of the eastern shoot which intersected 1.91 g/t over 13.30m and TL18-478, located on the western edge of the central shoot, which intersected several gold intervals across the Main Zone, including 5.26 g/t over 2.00m, 4.77 g/t over 3.40m, and 0.82 g/t over 6.00m. Table 1: Infill Drill Hole Intercepts For duplicate samples, an average of the two gold assays are used to calculate the intersection grade; all grades un-cut, no-capping Holes are generally drilled 350-0? Azimuth with inclinations ranging -65 to -80? All assays are rounded to two decimal places Intervals do not indicate true widths *Metallic Screen Fire Assay Results P ? Assay results pending Full Table of Assays will be provided on the company?s website The company has not used a Gold Equivalent (AuEq) for the contained silver for this release but would expect the recovery of silver to increase the overall contained AuEq by a small amount in future studies. Qualified Persons Technical information in this press release has been reviewed and approved by Adam Larsen, P. Geo, who is the qualified person under the definitions established by National Instrument 43-101. All results from the program will be available for viewing in the Complete Assay Table on the Company?s website. To view further details about the Goliath Gold Project, please visit the Company?s website at www.treasurymetals.com. Contact: Chris Stewart President and CEO T: 1.416.214.4654 cstewart@treasurymetals.com Greg Ferron Vice President, Corporate Development T: 1.416.214.4654 greg@treasurymetals.com In Europe: Swiss Resource Capital AG Jochen Staiger info@resource-capital.ch www.resource-capital.ch Follow us on Twitter @TreasuryMetals About Treasury Metals Inc. Treasury Metals Inc. is a gold focused exploration and development company with assets in Canada and is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (?TSX?) under the symbol ?TML? and on the OTCQX? Best Market under the symbol TSRMF. Treasury Metals Inc.?s 100% owned Goliath Gold Project in northwestern Ontario is slated to become one of Canada?s next producing gold mines. With first-rate infrastructure currently in place and gold mineralization extending to surface, Treasury Metals plans on the initial development of an open pit gold mine to feed a 2,500 tonne per day processing plant with subsequent underground operations in the latter years of the mine life. QA/QC Program: The Company has implemented a quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) program to ensure sampling and analysis of all exploration work is conducted in accordance with the CIM Exploration Best Practices Guidelines. The drill core is sawn in half with one-half of the core sample dispatched to Actlabs facility located in Dryden, Ontario. The other half of the core is retained for future assay verification and/or metallurgical testing. Other QA/QC procedures include the insertion of blanks and Canadian Reference Standards for every tenth sample in the sample stream. A quarter core duplicate is assayed every 20th sample. The laboratory has its own QA/QC protocols running standards and blanks with duplicate samples in each batch stream.? Additional checks are routinely run on anomalous values including gravimetric analysis and pulp metallic screen fire assays. Gold analysis is conducted by lead collection, fire assay with atomic absorption and/or gravimetric finish on a 50 gram sample. Check assays are conducted at a secondary ISO certified laboratory (in this case AGAT Laboratories located in Mississauga, Ontario).? Metallic screen fire assaying is now completed using a 2.0 kg sample and four 50 gm fire assays of the pass (-100 mesh) pulverized material. Forward-looking Statements This release includes certain statements that may be deemed to be ?forward-looking statements?. All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address events or developments that management of the Company expect, are forward-looking statements. Actual results or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Treasury Metals disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, save and except as may be required by applicable securities laws. Call for Papers for the Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC) 2018 is open Interested speakers are invited to join the Open Source Monitoring Conference until June 30, 2018. The worldwide leading event on Open Source Monitoring will take place from November 5 to 8, 2018, in Nuremberg, Germany. Nuremberg May 30, 2018 Interested Open Source Monitoring Enthusiasts from all over the world are invited to Nuremberg to share their knowledge with fellow members of the monitoring community. Talks for the OSMC 2018 will be accepted until June 30, 2018, on www.osmc.de . Technical talks with great practical relevance, insights into new open source projects, case studies as well as new perspectives are highly welcome. Innovative technologies, advanced implementations, monitoring user stories as well as networking within the open source community have formed the Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC) for many years. Developers, decision makers, system administrators and IT managers come together to get updates on the latest developments and launch innovative projects.Participants learn how to use the best possible performance. The conference starts on November 5th with a day of four workshops: \Prometheus\, \Ansible\, \Icinga 2 / Puppet\ and \Graylog\. Participants learn and practice real time monitoring for common business applications. On November 6th and 7th, two days of expert talks await the attendees. The community hackathon on November 8th complements the event. Participants are invited to contribute their own ideas and start hacking in small groups. Past years showed great success and inspiration for more. The Open Source Monitoring Conference has evolved into the world\-\-s leading conference to explore and discuss monitoring solutions.The event attracts more than 250 participants from all over the world. All information on the conference can be found on www.osmc.de. Sensor data fusion for more reliable intrusion alarm systems Intrusion alarm systems are currently facing a growing number of potential error sources in the environment. At the same time, alarm systems must comply with increasingly demanding legal requirements for sensors and motion detectors. As a future-proof solution, detectors equipped with Sensor Data Fusion technology raise the level of security while reducing the risk of cost- and time-intensive false alarms. This article provides a comprehensive overview of Sensor Data Fusion technology. Anti-masking alarms A cultural heritage museum in the South of Germany for decades, the installed intrusion alarm system has provided reliable protection on the premises. But suddenly, the detectors trigger false alarms every night after the museum closes. The system integrators are puzzled and conduct extensive tests of the entire system. When they finally identify the culprit, its unexpected: As it turns out, the recently installed LED lighting system in the museums exhibition spaces radiates at a wavelength that triggers anti-masking alarms in the detectors. Not an easy fix situation, since a new lighting system would prove far too costly. Ultimately, the integrators need to perform extensive detector firmware updates and switch to different sensor architecture to eliminate the error source. This scenario is by no means an isolated incident, but part of a growing trend. Need for reliable detector technology Legal requirements for anti-masking technology are becoming stringent in response to tactics by criminals The number of potential triggers for erroneous alarms in the environment is on the rise. From the perspective of system operators and integrators, its a concerning development because every false alarm lowers the credibility of an intrusion alarm system. Not to mention steep costs: Every false call to the authorities comes with a price +$200 tag. Aside from error sources in the environment, legal requirements for anti-masking technology are becoming more stringent in response to ever more resourceful tactics employed by criminals to sidestep detectors. Whats more, todays detectors need to be fortified against service outages and provide reliable, around-the-clock operability to catch intruders in a timely and reliable fashion. Sensor Data Fusion Technology In light of these demands, one particular approach has emerged as a future-proof solution over the past few years: Sensor Data Fusion technology, the combination of several types of sensors within one detector designed to cross-check and verify alarm sources via intelligent algorithms holds the keys to minimising false alarms and responding appropriately to actual alarm events. This generation of detectors combines passive infrared (PIR) and microwave Doppler radar capabilities with artificial intelligence (AI) to eliminate false alarm sources without sacrificing catch performance. Motion detectors equipped with Sensor Data Fusion technology present a fail-proof solution for building security Its not about packing as many sensors as possible into a detector. But its about including the most relevant sensors with checks and balances through an intelligent algorithm that verifies the data for a highly reliable level of security. The result is the highest-possible catch performance at the minimum risk for erroneous alarms, said Michael Reimer, Senior Product Manager at Bosch Security Systems. Motion detectors with sensor data fusion Looking ahead into the future, motion detectors equipped with Sensor Data Fusion technology not only present a fail-proof solution for building security. The comprehensive data collected by these sensors also unlock value beyond security: Constant real-time information on temperature and humidity can be used by intelligent systems and devices in building automation. Integrated into building management systems, the sensors provide efficiency improvements and lowering energy costs Integrated into building management systems, the sensors provide the foundation for efficiency improvements and lowering energy costs in HVAC systems. Companies such as Bosch support these network synergies by constantly developing and optimising intelligent sensors. On that note, installers must be familiar with the latest generation of sensor technology to upgrade their systems accordingly, starting with a comprehensive overview of error sources in the environment. Prominent false alarm triggers in intrusion alarm systems The following factors emerge as frequent triggers of false alarms in conventional detectors: Strong temperature fluctuations can be interpreted by sensors as indicators of a person inside the building. Triggers range from floor heating sources to strong sunlight. In this context, room temperatures above 86F (30C) have proven particularly problematic. Dust contamination of optical detectors lowers the detection performance while raising susceptibility to false alarms. Draft air from air conditioning systems or open windows can trigger motion sensors, especially when curtains, plants, or signage attached to the ceilings (e.g. in grocery stores) are put in motion. Strong light exposure directly on the sensor surface, e.g. caused by headlights from passing vehicles, floodlights, reflected or direct sunlight all of which sensors may interpret as a flashlight from an intruder. Extensive bandwidth frequencies in Wi-Fi routers can potentially confuse sensors. Only a few years ago, wireless routers operated on a bandwidth of around 2.7GHz while todays devices often exceed 5GHz, thereby catching older detectors off guard. LED lights radiating at frequencies beyond the spectrum of visible light may trigger sensors with their infrared signals. Regarding the last two points, its important to note that legislation provides clear guidelines for the maximum frequency spectrum maintained by Wi-Fi routers and LED lighting. Long-term security But the influx of cheap and illegal products in both product groups products that do not meet the guidelines continues to pose problems when installed near conventional detectors. For this reason, Sensor Data Fusion technology provides a reliable solution by verifying alarms with data from several types of sensors within a single detector. Beyond providing immunity from false alarm triggers, the new generation of sensors also needs to comply with the current legislature. These guidelines include the latest EN50131-grade 3, and German VdS class C standards with clear requirements regarding anti-masking technology for detecting sabotage attempts. This is exactly where Sensor Data Fusion technology provides long-term security. Evolution of intrusion detector technology Initially, motion detectors designed for intrusion alarm systems were merely equipped with a single type of sensor; namely passive infrared technology (PIR). Upon their introduction, these sensors raised the overall level of building security tremendously in automated security systems. But over time, these sensors proved limited in their catch performance. As a result, manufacturers began implementing microwave Doppler radar capabilities to cover additional sources of intrusion alarms. First step detection technology In Bosch sensors, engineers added First Step detection to trigger instant alarms upon persons entering a room Over the next few years, sensors were also equipped with sensors detecting visible light to catch flashlights used by burglars, as well as temperature sensors. In Bosch sensors, engineers added proprietary technologies such as First Step detection to trigger instant alarms upon persons entering a room. But experience in the field soon proved, especially due to error sources such as rats and other animals, that comprehensive intrusion detection demands a synergetic approach: A combination of sensors aligned to cross-check one another for a proactive response to incoming signals. At the same time, the aforementioned bandwidth expansion in Wi-Fi routers and LED lighting systems required detectors to implement the latest circuit technology to avoid serving as antennas for undesired signals. Sensor data fusion approach At its very core, Sensor Data Fusion technology relies on the centralised collection of all data captured by the variety of different sensors included in a single detector. These data streams are directed to a microprocessor capable of analysing the signals in real-time via a complex algorithm. This algorithm is the key to Sensor Data Fusion. It enables the detector to balance active sensors and adjust sensitivities as needed, to make truly intelligent decisions regarding whether or not the data indicates a valid alarm condition and if so, trigger an alarm. Advanced verification mechanisms The current generation of Sensor Data Fusion detectors, for instance from Bosch, feature advanced verification mechanisms, including Microwave Noise Adaptive Processing to easily differentiate humans from false alarm sources (e.g. ceiling fans or hanging signs). For increased reliability, signals from PIR and microwave Doppler radar are compared to determine whether an actual alarm event is taking place. Additionally, the optical chamber is sealed to prevent drafts and insects from affecting the detector, while the detector is programmed for pet and small animal immunity. Sensor cross-verification Further types of sensors embedded in current and future generations of Sensor Data Fusion detectors include MEM-sensors as well as vibration sensors and accelerometers. Ultimately, its important to keep in mind that the cross-verification between sensors serves to increase false alarm immunity without sacrificing the catch performance of actual intruders. It merely serves to cover various indicators of intrusion. Protecting UNESCO World Cultural Heritage in China Intelligent detectors equipped with Sensor Data Fusion are protecting historic cultural artifacts in China from theft and damage. At the UNESCO-protected Terracotta Warriors Museum site, one hundred TriTech motion detectors from Bosch with PIR and microwave Doppler radar technology safeguard the invaluable treasures against intruders. To provide comprehensive protection amid the specific demands of the museum site, the detectors have been installed on walls and ceilings to safeguard the 16,300-square-meter museum site. To ensure an optimal visitor experience without interference from glass walls and other barriers, many detectors are mounted at a height of 4.5 meters (15 feet) above ground under the ceiling. Despite their height, the detectors provide accurate data around the clock while exceeding the performance limits of conventional motion detectors, which clock out at a mere 2 meters (6 feet) catchment area. Integrated video systems The site also presents additional error sources such as large amounts of dust that can contaminate the sensors, as well as visitors accidentally dropping their cameras or mobile phones next to museum exhibits. To distinguish these events from actual criminal activity, the intrusion alarm system is integrated with the museums video security system. This allows for verifying alarm triggers with real-time video footage at a fast pace: In the case of an actual alarm event, the system alerts the on-site security personnel in the control room in less than two seconds. Added value beyond security Sensor Data Fusion technology provides a viable solution for the rising number of error sources in the environment As of today, Sensor Data Fusion technology already provides a viable solution for the rising number of error sources in the environment while providing legally compliant building security against intruders. In light of future developments, operators can leverage significant added value from upgrading existing systems possibly without fundamentally replacing current system architecture to the new detector standard. Added value how? On one hand, the detectors can integrate with access control, video security, voice alarm, and analytics for a heightened level of security. These synergetic effects are especially pronounced on end-to-end platforms like the Bosch Building Management system. On the other hand, the data streams from intelligent detectors also supply actionable intelligence to building automation systems, for instance as the basis for efficiency improvements and lowering energy consumption in HVAC systems. New backward-compatible detectors Bosch will release a new series of commercial detectors by end of 2021, based on the latest research on risk factors for false alarm sources in the environment and line with current legislation and safety standards. Throughout these developments, installers can rest assured that all new detectors are fully backward compatible and work with existing networking/architecture. With that said, Sensor Data Fusion technology emerges as the key to more secure intrusion alarm systems today and in the future. TriTech detectors from Bosch For reliable, fail-proof alarms the current series of TriTech detectors from Bosch relies on a combination of different sensor data streams, evaluated by an integrated algorithm. These Sensor Data Fusion detectors from Bosch combine up to five different sensors in a single unit, including: Long-range passive infrared (PIR) sensor Short-range PIR sensor Microwave sensor White light sensor Temperature sensor Equipped with these sensors, TriTech detectors are capable of detecting the most frequent sources of false alarms; from headlights on passing cars to a mouse passing across the room at a 4.5-meter distance to the detector. Whats more, TriTech detectors provide reliable performance at room temperatures above 86F (30C) while fully guarding against actual intrusion and sabotage attempts from criminals. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close May's full moon, known as the Flower Moon, will be a "supermoon" as the lunar phase coincides with our satellite's closest approach to Earth. It also coincides with the only total lunar eclipse of the year, earning it the moniker "Super Flower Blood Moon." So, skywatchers who miss out on the lunar eclipse can still enjoy the full moon glowing slightly bigger and brighter than normal in the night sky. The moon will be full on Wednesday (May 26) at 7:14 a.m. EDT (1114 GMT), according to NASA. For observers on the U.S. East Coast, the moon will be below the horizon at that point the moon sets at 5:33 a.m. local time in New York City, for example. Moonrise in New York is at 8:53 p.m. the evening of May 26 and moonset is the next morning at 6:20 a.m., according to Time and Date. The sun sets the evening of May 26 at 8:16 p.m. local time. Super Flower Blood Moon 2021: Where & when to see the supermoon eclipse Webcast info: How to watch the supermoon eclipse of 2021 online The partially eclipsed moon is pictured behind fully bloomed cherry blossoms in Utsunomiya, Japan, on April 4, 2015. (Image credit: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty) Biggest supermoon of 2021 Super Flower Blood Moon Eclipse (Image credit: Courtesy of Imelda Joson and Edwin Aguirre) If you take a photo of the 2021 total lunar eclipse let us know! You can send images and comments to spacephotos@space.com. The moon becomes full less than 10 hours after reaching perigee, the nearest point to Earth in its elliptical orbit. When it is closer to Earth, the full moon can appear up to 14% larger and 30% brighter than an average full moon a phenomenon popularly known as a supermoon. On average, the angular diameter of the moon is about 31 arcminutes a touch more than one-half degree. One degree is about the size of a pinky finger held at arm's length. During Wednesday's supermoon the moon will be about 33.4 arcminutes wide, or about 10% larger in diameter. One degree is equal to 60 arcminutes, so it will take a very observant skywatcher to notice the difference. When the moon reaches perigee on Tuesday (May 25) at 9:21 p.m. EDT (0121 May 26 GMT), it will be 222,022 miles (357,311 kilometers) from Earth, according to Heavens-Above.com calculations. On average the moon is 240,000 miles (384,400 km) from Earth. When the full moon and perigee are close, it is commonly called a supermoon. On average, the moon's distance is 240,000 miles (385,000 kilometers) from the Earth. At perigee, that distance is about 220,000 miles (350,000 km), whereas at apogee it is about 250,000 miles (406,000 km). These pictures of the moon by Robert Vanderbei were taken with the same equipment: When the moon is close, it appears larger than when it is farther away. A full moon at perigee is called a supermoon (right, taken on Aug. 9, 2014), at apogee, a minimoon (left, taken on Feb. 3, 2015). (Image credit: Robert Vanderbei However, because "supermoon" is not an astronomical term with a scientific definition, the term is not consistently used in the same way. Whether a moon qualifies as "super" depends on how closely its perigee and full phase coincide, and exactly how close those events need to be remains up for debate. Some say the Super Flower Blood Moon is only the second supermoon of 2021, with April's Super Pink Moon being the first. But by looser definitions, the Full Worm Moon of March also qualified as a supermoon, making the Flower Moon the third and final supermoon of the year. Observing the "blood moon" A map showing where the May 26, 2021 lunar eclipse is visible. Contours mark the edge of the visibility region at eclipse contact times. The map is centered on 17015'W, the sublunar longitude at mid-eclipse. (Image credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio) Full moons occur when the moon is exactly on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun. Most of the time the moon is illuminated by the sun's light, but occasionally the moon's orbit carries it within the shadow of the Earth, producing a lunar eclipse. Much of the world will see a total lunar eclipse, or "blood moon" with this full moon, with the best views over southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. The umbral phase of the eclipse the point where the moon darkens completely and turns reddish in Earth's darker, inner shadow won't be visible from the eastern part of the U.S., and the moon will set before the eclipse ends for observers on the U.S. West Coast. The full moon of Wednesday, May 26 will also generate a total lunar eclipse. Due to the enlarged supermoon effect, this eclipse will barely qualify as a total one. Observers should expect the southern half of the moon, which will extend much deeper into the umbra, to look noticeably darker than the northern half. (Image credit: Starry Night) The latter half of the eclipse will be visible if you live west of the Mississippi, where the total phase will start just before the moon sets. Observers on the East Coast north of Washington will only catch the start of the penumbral phase before the moon sets in the morning; the moon will look slightly darker and a bit discolored. Some people describe it as looking a bit brown, or tea-stained. From points south of Washington and west of Pennsylvania, the moon will be partially eclipsed as it sets in the morning, appearing to have a dark "bite" taken out of it. Exactly how much of the partial phase is visible depends on your location. (Time and Date has an interactive map where you can enter your location.) Related: Just how 'bloody' will the Super Flower Blood Moon eclipse look? For those who don't get to see the eclipse, the moon still offers bright views through binoculars or a small telescope. If anything the full moon appears so bright it can be hard to see details because there are no shadows to give any contrast. From a lunar observer's perspective, a full moon means the sun is directly overhead it would be noontime on the moon. Moon filters are available that can make some features stand out, but waiting a few days after the full moon or observing a few days before, shadows bring out more craters and other details. Planets, stars and constellations While Earth's shadow is obscuring the moon's bright glare during the eclipse, stars and planets will be easier to spot in the night sky. Being in the constellation Scorpius, the scorpion, the moon will be to the northwest of Antares, the brightest star in the constellation. Antares is recognizable because of its distinct orange-red color. On Saturday (May 29), three days after the full moon, the planets Mercury and Venus will be in conjunction, or sharing the same celestial longitude Venus will be directly north of Mercury, and will pass within a quarter of a degree of the smaller planet. The actual moment of conjunction takes place at 1:34 a.m. EDT (0534 GMT), so it won't be visible from the U.S., but the planets will still be quite close to each other in the evening sky. On the evenings surrounding Friday (May 28), speedy Mercury's descent sunward (red curve) will bring it very close to much brighter Venus. At their closest approach on Friday, the two planets will be separated by only 25 arc minutes close enough to appear together in the eyepiece of a backyard telescope (red circle). (Image credit: Starry Night) Venus is so bright that it is often one of the first objects (besides the moon) to become visible in the evening. In New York City the sun sets at 8:18 p.m. on May 29, and as the sky darkens one can see how soon Venus becomes visible at sunset the planet will be 13 degrees above the horizon. About a half-hour after sunset it will be only 7-8 degrees, so the two planets will be challenging to see unless one has a relatively clear western horizon. That said, once you see them they will be close enough together that through binoculars they will be in the same field of view. On the night of the full moon (May 26) Venus will be at about the same altitude at sunset, Mercury, meanwhile, will be higher in the sky (about 14 degrees). Both planets will be in the constellation Taurus, the bull. Also visible Wednesday night (May 26) is Mars, which from mid-northern latitudes will be about 35 degrees above the western horizon at sunset, in the constellation Gemini, the twins. The Red Planet sets in New York at 11:32 p.m. local time. Saturn and Jupiter rise after midnight, at 12:42 a.m. and 1:31 a.m. on May 27 in New York, respectively. By sunrise, both are about 33 degrees high in the southeast. Saturn will be in the constellation Capricornus, the sea goat and Jupiter will be in Aquarius, the water bearer. As both constellations are relatively faint, from urban and suburban locations Jupiter and Saturn will be the brightest "stars" in the area. How the Flower Moon got its name The full moon of May is often called a Flower Moon, and the term comes from the blooms that appear in North America around that time; Algonquin-speaking peoples in the northeastern part of the continent such as the Ojibwe (or Anishinaabe), called it something similar, according to the Ontario Native Literacy Coalition. The Cree called it the Frog Moon, as May is when frogs tend to become active. Both Anishinaabe and Cree traditions reflect the environment in northeastern North America, where the two peoples live. Related: Full moon names (and more) for 2020 The Flower Moon will occur on May 26, 2021. (Image credit: Shutterstock) For the Chinese lunar calendar, the full moon occurs in the middle of the fourth month, Huaiyue, or Locust Tree Month. In the Southern Hemisphere, the Maori described the lunar month of Pipiri, which occurs from May to June: "all things on earth are contracted because of the cold," according to the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Among the Aboriginal Yolgnu people of Australia, living near the coast, kept close track of the correlation between moon phases and tides. They believe the full moon becomes full of water at high tides as it rises. Editor's note: If you have an amazing supermoon photo you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, you can send images and comments to spacephotos@space.com. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. Sunsets in New York City can be spectacular, but during certain days in May and July, the alignment of Earth and the sun creates an unusually striking phenomenon known as "Manhattanhenge," when the setting sun lines up within the grid layout of the city streets. On these special days, the sun's descent follows a path that aligns precisely with the exact center of Manhattan numbered streets that run from east to west. As the sun sets, its rays illuminate the asphalt and the buildings that line these streets with a glowing beacon of golden light. The event that is Manhattanhenge occurs because of urban design streets set at 90 degree angles juxtaposed with the timing of Earth's orbit and rotation as the planet travels around the sun. But will the city grid and the setting sun always line up so perfectly? Are there any factors cosmic or otherwise that could disrupt the perfect Manhattanhenge alignment? [Manhattanhenge: Facts About NYC's Special Sunsets] Manhattanhenge a term coined by astrophysicist and New Yorker Neil deGrasse Tyson in 2001 takes place on days that frame the summer solstice. It happens four times on two paired dates at the end of May and mid-July; twice with the half-set sun lining up in the exact center of the "canyons" between buildings, and twice with the full circle of the sun touching down in alignment with the city grid. This year, Manhattanhenge will light up NYC on May 29 and May 30, and then again on July 12 and 13. The full sun will make its dramatic appearance across the grid on May 30 at 8:12 p.m. and July 12 at 8:20 p.m. local time, while the half sun will touch down on May 29 at 8:13 p.m. and on July 13 at 8:21 p.m., according to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, which hosts a Manhattanhenge program on July 12. An unobstructed view Manhattanhenge hinges on two factors: the orientation of the city grid and the exact position of Earth relative to the sun based on its orbital path, rotation and tilt. When the timing is just right, a minute of sunset is visible simultaneously at the center of the city's east- and west-facing streets, said astrophysicist Jackie Faherty, a senior scientist and educator at AMNH. Other gridded cities such as Toronto and Chicago also experience this sunset alignment effect, though on different days than those of Manhattanhenge. But Manhattanhenge's stunning visual impact is due in part to the expanse of the Hudson River and the relatively low buildings on the New Jersey shoreline, which make for an unobstructed view of the sun as it drops to the horizon in the west for "the grid kiss," Faherty told Live Science. "If all of a sudden there was a big construction boom on the Jersey side, then we'd start to have problems with our view of Manhattanhenge, because you would have buildings that are blocking the moment of sunset," Faherty said. [Manhattanhenge Images Reveal Stunning NYC Sunsets] A catastrophic impact Manhattanhenge's alignment only happens on certain dates because the exact position of the rising and setting sun on the horizon is slightly different every day the result of Earth being tilted on its axis by 23.5 degrees in its orbital plane, Faherty said. But in addition to Manhattanhenge, the nearly setting sun is visible between the city's cross streets during a range of dates bracketing the summer solstice (falling on June 21 this year), with the so-called "Manhattanhenge Effect" lasting from the first sunset grid kiss in May until the last one in July. Between May 29 and the summer solstice, the sun is still visible at the center of the city's cross streets, hitting the "sweet spot" just a little higher each day. After the summer solstice, "when the Northern Hemisphere starts to tilt away from the sun," the same thing happens in reverse, with the sun hitting the center of the grid a little lower each day "until the second grid kiss in July, when it's the last time the sun makes it that far north," Faherty said. However, if Earth were to suddenly tip over even farther on its axis perhaps following a massive cosmic collision that would jar the alignment enough to end Manhattanhenge forever. "It would have to knock us pretty far, though, for it to not happen in Manhattan at all," Faherty said. Such a devastating impact would cause a host of more immediate concerns than the loss of Manhattanhenge. But luckily, the chances of such an Earth-changing event actually taking place are pretty slim, she said. "Earth is pretty stable in its orbit, so as far as current humanity goes, we're not losing that anytime soon. No one who's reading this is going to lose the grid kiss unless something catastrophic happens to the Earth, and I don't see anything like that on the horizon." Original article on Live Science. In 1972, citizen scientist Sir Elton John hypothesized that Mars "ain't the kind of place to raise your kids." While John's remarks were never published in a peer-reviewed journal (though they did peak at No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart), he's not wrong about the Red Planet's inhospitality. With its freezing climate, thin atmosphere and weak gravity, Mars will be a hard place to raise the children necessary to sustain a permanent colony there. And according to a new paper published in the June issue of the journal Futures, conceiving kids on Mars will be even harder. Thinking about fertility on Mars isn't just for philosophical fun; in fact, Elon Musk's SpaceX is developing a rocket with the primary purpose of bringing settlers to Mars. "Reproduction on Mars will be necessary for colony survival and subsequent expansion," a team of researchers from Brazil, the United States and Poland wrote in the new paper. "Unfortunately, such an endeavor comes with titanic challenges." [5 Mars Myths and Misconceptions] In their new paper, titled "Biological and social challenges of human reproduction in a longterm Mars base," the researchers dig into exactly what those challenges would be and the morally questionable solutions that may accompany them. Your body on Mars The biological challenges of rearing Mars babies are easy enough to wrap one's head around. For starters, Mars' atmosphere is about 1 percent as thick as Earth's, meaning the planet is hit by a lot more solar radiation than humans are currently used to. NASA studies have shown that radiation exposure might damage astronauts' brain cells and increase their risk of developing cancer. (More to the point of this new paper, it can also severely reduce sperm count.) The effects of microgravity are also concerning. Mars' gravitational pull is about one-third as strong as Earth's, and that means less pressure and stress are exerted on astronauts' bodies. Nice as that sounds, it's not how human bodies have adapted to function; previous studies of microgravity have shown that astronauts experience vision loss, dehydration, accelerated muscle and bone deterioration, significantly reduced heart rates and even a weakened immune response when living in sub-Earth gravity. That last bit is especially worrisome for the hopes of Mars reproduction, as pregnant women already experience significant immunosuppression. "Such a state may aggravate the risks of infection-induced abortions and facilitate the dissemination of diseases among pregnant and non-pregnant individuals," the authors wrote. Your body's rights on Mars Fortunately, all of these risks can be addressed with better technology and medical care improvements that agencies like NASA are already developing. The tougher nut to crack, according to the authors, might be in adjusting social and ethical standards to fit a new, dangerous way of living. "The idea to protect life at every stage of development may not be suited to a Mars colony," the authors wrote. "An inhospitable environment and a small mission crew may result in the elevation of the value of group over individual." Establishing a culture that values the survival of the colony over individual members would require some serious ethical changes, including more liberal practices regarding abortion of nonviable offspring and "euthanasia of terminally ill persons," the authors wrote. Furthermore, mating couples may have to be carefully chosen based on their genetic compatibility, while some colonists might have to forgo reproduction altogether if their traits did not favor the survival of a Martian populace. To prepare for these challenges, the researchers recommended that a psychological training regimen for would-be Martians be developed immediately. If mentally prepared, such a culture "may evolve to favor the preservation of personal and physiological traits more suitable to Martian residents," the authors said; however, if that proves too hard, it may be worth considering the idea of genetically engineering a more Mars-friendly populace instead. "The method of CRISPR makes possible adaptive genetic engineering," the authors wrote. "We should consider the idea of genetic human enhancement before and during that mission." Doing so could literally result in a "new kind of human species" with a nature better suited for life on Mars, the authors wrote. Such human-made Martians could give a future colony its best shot at survival, even as a biological and moral gulf widens between them and their Earthling ancestors. Mars may still not be the kind of place to raise your kids but it might become a serviceable place to raise Martians. Originally published on Live Science. Alan Bean, who died on May 26, 2018 at age 86, is remembered by his fellow astronauts as an explorer, hero, artist and friend. The death of Apollo moonwalker and artist Alan Bean elicited tributes by his fellow astronauts, on and off the planet. Bean, who died on Saturday (May 26) at age 86, was the fourth NASA astronaut to walk on the moon, the second to command the first U.S. space station, and the only artist to document his firsthand experiences visiting another world. "We honor and remember a fallen colleague and hero who helped advance the human species out into space," wrote Expedition 54 flight engineer Drew Feustel from on board the International Space Station. "Alan Bean inspired us all to be better, to be humble, and to strive to share the story of exploration and give our lives meaning." [Astronaut Alan Bean Remembered: Photos of a Moonwalker-Turned-Artist] "Rest In Peace Alan. Ad Astra," Feustel said on Twitter. Bean was selected with NASA's third group of astronauts. The 1963 class included Bean's future Apollo 12 crewmate Richard Gordon, who preceded him in death in 2017; Buzz Aldrin, who preceded Bean to the moon on Apollo 11; and Walt Cunningham, who preceded Bean to space as a crew member on Apollo 7. "Alan and I have been best friends for 55 years, ever since the day we became astronauts," said Cunningham, adding his comments to a statement released by Bean's family. As the head of the Skylab branch for the Astronaut Office, Cunningham worked with Bean, who flew as commander of the second crewed flight to the orbital workshop. "We've never lived more than a couple of miles apart, even after we left NASA. And for years, Alan and I never missed a month where we did not have a cheeseburger together," Cunningham said. "We are accustomed to losing friends in our business, but this is a tough one." Bean was the last living member of the Apollo 12 crew. In addition to Gordon, he was preceded in death by mission commander Pete Conrad in 1999. There are now only four of the twelve Apollo moonwalkers still alive. "My first close contact with Alan Bean began in August of 1969 with his last four months of preparation as the lunar module pilot for Apollo 12," said Harrison Schmitt, the first and only geologist to walk on the moon on Apollo 17. "Alan and Pete were extremely engaged in the planning for their exploration of the Surveyor III landing site in the Ocean of Storms [and] this commitment paid off with Alan and Pete's collection of a fantastic suite of lunar samples, a scientific gift that keeps on giving today and in the future." After returning from the moon and leading the then record-setting 59-day expedition aboard Skylab, Bean left NASA to devote his time to painting what he and his fellow Apollo moonwalkers experienced. As Apollo 12 lunar module pilot, Alan Bean became the fourth man to walk on the moon in November 1969. (Image credit: NASA) "He'd call me to ask about some detail about the lunar soil, color or equipment he wanted to have represented exactly in a painting," recounted Schmitt. "Other times, he wanted to discuss items in the description that he was writing to go with a painting. His enthusiasm about space and art never waned." "He was my superhero of spaceflight and art," said Nicole Stott, who followed Bean's example by becoming an artist after spending more than 100 days in space. "Thankful for his mentorship, friendship, and beautiful smile." Before Bean left NASA, he led the operations and training for the next generation of astronaut candidates. His role in that regard continued beyond his 18 years with the space agency. "When I was in fourth grade, I wrote a letter to Alan Bean. I was so thrilled when he wrote back! It was a life-changing moment that inspired me to become an astronaut," wrote Andrew Morgan on Twitter. NASA just assigned Morgan to fly to the space station in July 2019. "America lost another legend," said Bob Hines, a member of NASA's 22nd class of astronaut candidates selected in 2017, in a tweet. "Alan Bean was a great American with an unmatched sense of humor, a desire to share lessons with future generations, and a talented artist to boot!" "We've all benefitted from his wisdom. He will be missed," wrote Hines. Read more astronaut remembrances of moonwalker and artist Alan Bean at collectSPACE. Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2018 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved. Ninety-five percent of the universe seems to be made up of mysterious matter and energy scientists don't yet understand and a new clip from "Nova Wonders: What's the Universe Made Of," premiering tonight (May 30) at 9 p.m. EDT/8 p.m. CDT on PBS, shows a key detection of a violent smashup that could help unlock one of those cosmic mysteries. Scientists will be online at air time to take questions during a live broadcast of the episode on Nova's Facebook page tonight. When gravitational-wave detectors recorded a distant collision of two neutron stars, astronomers around the world got the call and began to search for visible evidence of the crash. A team in Chile from the Dark Energy Survey as well as other groups was able to detect the so-called kilonova's light, providing the first-ever observations of both light and gravitational waves from the same cosmic explosion. For the Dark Energy Survey crew, these observations will help gauge the universe's expansion rate, aiding their investigation into the mysterious dark energy pushing the universe apart. [First Glimpse of Colliding Neutron Stars Yields Stunning Pics] "What's the Universe Made Of" digs deep into two cosmic mysteries dark matter and dark energy showing how researchers know those entities exist, but also revealing that they are still trying to learn what they're made of and how they work. Dark matter, which seems to interact with the universe only through gravity, lends its heft to galaxies so their whirling doesn't send stars flying. And dark energy propels the universe's expansion faster and faster. Together, scientists think these two make up 95 percent of the universe, leaving the matter and energy we know and love at a paltry 5 percent. The film tracks the multiple angles scientists explore to pin down the phenomena. Editor's note: At 1 p.m. today, Space.com sat down with University of California, Riverside, physicist Flip Tanedo for an interview about the ongoing search for dark matter and Tanedo's involvement with "Nova Wonders" tune in on Space.com's Facebook page or check above to see that video. And if you're still wondering about that other 95 percent of the universe, Tanedo will be among the scientists taking questions tonight when the episode goes live at 9 p.m. EDT/8 p.m. CDT on PBS, and simulcast on Nova's Facebook page. Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. Pilot Production Commitment at ABC Source: Deadline Written by Heisler and Heline, the half-hour single-camera comedy follows the twentysomething adventures of eternal optimist Sue Heck (Sher) as she leaves the small town of Orson to navigate the ups and downs of a career and young adulthood in the big city of Chicago. Pilot Ordered Source: Read More on The Hollywood Reporter Fresh off The Middle's nine-season run and May 22 series finale, the Disney-owned broadcast network is near a deal for a spinoff revolving around Eden Sher's Sue Heck. The network is said to be considering a pilot order for the comedy, which like the flagship, the hails from Warner Bros. Television and The Middle creators DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler and their studio-based Black and Blondie Productions banner. ABC and Warner Bros. TV declined to comment as deals for the series are not done. A logline was not immediately available. Also still to be determined is if the spinoff will be a single-camera comedy (like the flagship) or a multi-cam, with the latter format becoming all the rage on broadcast following Roseanne's ratings success. Windhoek (Namibia), May 29, 2018 (SPS) - The President of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Secretary General of the Frente POLISARIO, Brahim Gali, held a meeting with the President of Namibia, Hage Geingob, on Monday in framework of the state visit to Namibia at the invititation of his counterpart President Hage Geingob. The meeting highlighted the historic relations that unite the two countries, as well as their successive national liberation movements, the Frente POLISARIO and SWAPO, which stands out for its support for the legitimate struggle of the Saharawi people for their self-determination and independence. The high-level bilateral meeting also addressed the recent resolution 2414 of the United Nations Security Council, adopted last April, which forced the parties to the conflict, the Frente POLISARIO and the Kingdom of Morocco, to start direct negotiations in order to reach a just solution that will culminate in the holding of a referendum on self-determination of the Saharawi people.SPS 125/090/TRA Bir Lahlou, May 29, 2018 (SPS) - The President of the Republic, Secretary-General of the Frente POLISARIO, Mr. Brahim Gali, has congratulated Mrs. Mia Mottley on her election as Prime Minister of Barbados in the elections held on Thursday. On behalf of the Government and people of Western Sahara and on my own behalf , I would like to convey our warm congratulations to Mrs. Mia Mottley, extending his best wishes for successful tenure of office, and further progress and prosperity for the people of that great nation. Sahrawi President says in his letter of congratulation the trust placed in the elected Prime Minister by Barbadians people will strengthen Mia Mottley resolve to achieve significant achievements that serve the people of Barbados expressing his hope in the enhancement of bilateral relation between Barbados and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic Gali adds in his letter SPS 125/090/TRA With land at a premium, price for materials climbing and people wanting to stay in their homes longer, the demand for new home construction is trending downward, but builders are keeping busy with major renovation projects designed to help people age in place. Historically, it (new home construction) is as low as its ever been - nationally and in Connecticut, Jim Blansfield of Blansfield Builders in Danbury, said. The interest to do things is there but the reality is catch-is-catch-can. It comes down to who has the money and thats usually the upper two percent. Blansfield said much of the interest for new construction in the Danbury area is for second homes for buyers out of the New York City area. Candlewood Lake and small towns such as Roxbury make the area an attractive option, he said. In a claim backed by real estate agents and reflected in the sluggish housing market, Blansfield said many people are opting to renovate their homes for the long haul. This increased longevity is leading to a dearth of homes on the market. Were finding that people are staying in their homes and updating them because the home is 30 or 40 years old, he said. The homes need to be improved to go another 30 or 40 years. The nature of many renovation projects involves age-in-place designs, such as wheelchair access, easy-to-maintain siding and windows, no-threshold showers, wider door berths, generators and elevators. Stabilizing items is another important aspect of an age-in-place remodel, Blansfield said. The designs are incorporated seamlessly into the overall look of the home. Youd never know it was an age-in-place home, he said. Other trends in home building and renovation design, Blansfield said, include radiant heat floors, LED lighting, no basements and solar energy panels. He sees solar set for a big surge in popularity over the next five years. People are using inexpensive material in a design-attractive way. Good design trumps everything. Details used to mean moldings. Now its new colors, textures and finishes, he said. I see remodeling rather than new construction for the foreseeable future. New construction will be the dream, but not the reality. The trend toward renovation over building is also being seen in places such as Greenwich, said Louis Van Leeuwen, CEO of Greenwich Construction. The biggest trend Im seeing in terms of anything shifting is that a lot more people are doing renovations, Van Leeuwen said. Theyre way up. The longtime Greenwich builder said the rise in renovations may be caused by homes getting so ridiculously expensive, Van Leeuwen said, adding he noticed the uptick beginning six months ago. Custom builds Luigi Altamura of Altamura Homes in Stamford said he likes to give each home he builds a few unique touches so they stand apart from the crowd. Our market is pretty much the high-end market, so we like anything that makes the home feels customized, he said. With every home that comes along, youre trying to do something different thats unique and trending. We try to make the best decision about what we think are the features that we think people will like. Altamura said a home under construction by his firm at 97 Skyview Lane, in New Canaan, features steel-and-glass partitioning and a wine wall in the dining room. That specific feature with the partitioning weve seen in (New York City), he said. A lot of buyers coming into the area are coming from the city. The wine wall in the dining room is functional, and it also provides a design focal point in the room. Social media, Altamura said, help buyers and builders to learn more about trends emerging across the country. I do think the buyers are pretty savvy. With the likes of Pinterest and Instagram, they can see a lot, and so can we. We can see what designers in places like California and New York are working on, he said. You find so much inspiration from different parts of the country and world. Its what makes the process fun and interesting and unique. Entertaining spaces A highlighted trend nationally in this years architectural publications has been an emphasis on larger rooms on the ground level, to create a more spacious feel in houses and a more inviting milieu for hosting guests. In Norwalk, Silver Heights Development has taken that to the extreme with massive great rooms at its Windover Common hamlet nearing completion in the citys Cranbury neighborhood. Designed by Norwalk-based Beinfield Architecture, the homes feature great rooms with vaulted ceilings and three sets of double doors opening directly onto a patio, with a kitchen anchoring one side of the hall and a fireplace the other. Midway through construction late last year, Silver Heights co-developer Seth Greenwald told Hearst Connecticut Media the homes were designed with entertaining in mind, with the homes having between 3,100 and 3,400 square feet of space. This floor concept was really designed with the idea to have a circulating flow, Greenwald said. Were trying to deliver a lot of house in a smaller footprint. With clients throughout Fairfield County, Marc Michaud of Shelton-based Michaud-Group is also seeing a larger demand for open layouts in home building and renovations. The biggest trend we see is casual space, he said. The days of formal spaces in homes is really going away. Buyers are also looking for several details in in their homes, Michaud added, such as staircases and trims to change from past designs. The demand for more space and a break from tradition also branches into the outdoor setting. Weve had a lot of sales based on what we do on the outside, Michaud said, adding that patio designs are a major draw for buyers as they look to maximize the use of their plots of land. Millennial factor Younger people having homes built are bucking several standards set by previous generations. McMansions, for instance, are out, and smaller homes are in. Smaller is the new opulence and new luxury, Christine Georgopulo, principal of Greenwich Home Builders, said. At the same time, Georgopulo added, millennials are also having homes built that can house several generations. The writer may be reached at cbosak@hearstmediact.com; 203-731-3338 Paul Schott, Macaela Bennett, Alex Soule and Jordan Grice contributed to this this story. When the University of Connecticut began demolishing its garage this spring in downtown Stamford, neighbors and nearby office workers worried about the environmental effects of airborne dust and debris coming from the demolition site. But the true cause for concern may have been in the ground decades before the first concrete block came down in April. Soil around the garage on Washington Boulevard and Broad Street was routinely found to have high concentrations of potentially cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a classification for dozens of man-made organic chemicals commonly used in construction between 1950 and 1979, according to recently compiled reports obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media. The chemicals, when found in concentrations above 1 part-per-million, often trigger remediation efforts and oversight by the state and federal government. The garage, built for Bloomingdales in 1970, was rife with concentrations well above 1 ppm, according to report summaries prepared for UConn, which bought the garage in 1994, by environmental consulting company Tighe & Bond. High concentrations of the chemicals were also found on the lawns of nearby homes, according to the reports obtained from UConn by Hearst through a Freedom of Information Act request. At least one family that grew up on Vernon Place was seeking legal representation this spring. Of the four family members that lived in the small colonial home next to the garage, three have been diagnosed with cancer, according to Stacey Yusi, who spent childhood weekends at her fathers home on the small road. At the garage, PCBs were sourced to everything from caulk to paint and glue, according to the reports. Of 240 soil samples taken from 92 spots just outside of the garages footprint, Tighe & Bond found that 73 of the locations had PCBs above 1 ppm. One sample found a concentration of 1,800 ppm. Soil next to the Rippowam River, which runs feet away from the garage, was also tested. There, Tighe & Bond found concentrations above 1 ppm in 75 percent of riverbank locations tested levels ranged from 1 ppm to 350 ppm. And in soil samples taken from each of the homes on Vernon Place, a small dead end just north of the garage, Tighe & Bond also found elevated concentrations, many higher than 15 ppm, a significant environmental hazard, according to state law, the company wrote. Yusi, who is in remission after battling a rare form of T-Cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2015, said her family has consulted some half-dozen attorneys about representing them and perhaps suing UConn, Bloomingdales or the city. None have taken the case, she said. I spent weekends in the backyard, rollerblading in the vacant garage and fishing in the creek at the end of the road, Yusi said. UConn tried to tell me (PCBs) dont cause cancer, but thats not what I read. Yusis home and nearly all the others on the block were built decades before the asphalt was poured on the site for parking in the 1950s. The garage was built two decades later. Nearly all homes on Vernon Place are single-family and multifamily homes, according to city tax records. In soil deeper than a foot, PCBs were rarely found in high concentrations. But in top-soil samples, Tighe & Bond often found concentrations around 100 ppm. For example, samples from the yard of a 1,900-square-foot, vinyl-sided home had concentrations between 1.3 ppm and 130 ppm, the report summaries show. In an email, UConn spokeswoman Stephanie Reitz said the university is working with contractors, consultants and neighbors to address the issue. She also said many of the offending materials were used when the garage was built, long before the university bought it. This was not surprising, given that PCBs were a common constituent of such products prior to 1979, Reitz wrote in an email. Since the materials can travel in rain flow, it also was not a surprise to learn some limited PCBs were present in soil and asphalt around the garages footprint. The materials containing PCBs are being disposed of during the demolition under the prescribed processes for handling and removing those kinds of substances. In a statement, the EPA said it is aware of the issue and is working with UConn on remediation plans. UConn has also kept area residents informed of these ongoing activities, wrote EPA spokesman Dave Deegan. UConn has submitted a proposed plan to address the PCB contamination on the abutting properties to both EPA and CTDEEP. STAMFORD-A Norwalk man charged with raping a woman in 2016 pleaded guilty to reduced charges and will spend at least two years in jail when he is sentenced in July. Jose Pavon-Fermin, 34, made guilty pleas to single counts of third-degree sexual assault and unlawful restraint at the Stamford courthouse Tuesday. Pavon-Fermin will be sentenced to as little as two years in jail or as many as five years in jail when he returns to court for sentencing before Judge Gary White. He will also have to spend the rest of his life on the sex offender registry, but his public defender Howard Ehring said Pavon-Fermin will be deported to his home country well be fore then. The native Honduran has been in jail since his arrest in early November 2016. Pavon Fermin was first charged with raping a Norwalk woman in his Laura Street apartment. He would have been sent to jail for a mandatory minimum 10 years in jail if found guilty, but the circumstances around the assault raised questions about what really happened. According to his five-page arrest affidavit, on July 12, 2016, police were sent to Norwalk Hospital on the report of a woman wanting to report a rape. The woman told police that on the day before Pavon-Fermin approached her after she got off Connecticut Transit bus. she said he began talking to her and told her he wanted to keep her company. She said she told Pavon-Fermin she did not want his company, and proceeded to get on another bus and Pavon-Fermin followed her on and sat down next to her. She said he kept trying to hug her and touch her, and she repeatedly told her to stop. The two got off the bus and Pavon-Fermin got off with her. When he followed her into a store, he asked if he could pay her to be his live -in girlfriend. Again she declined. She got onto another bus, and like before he followed her. They got off the bus and was walking up Laura Street when Pavon-Fermin mentioned he lived there and grabbed her hand and led her up to his apartment. The woman said she felt pressured and wanted to get rid of him and agreed to go into his apartment. She told police once in the apartment she said Pavon-Fermin raped her. Ehring said the story that Pavon-Fermin was an unwanted suitor did not make much sense to him if the woman followed him up to his apartment. The allegation was of a sexual assault in first-degree, but there were some unusual aspects of the case which led the state to believe a lesser included offense might be more appropriate, Ehring said. Assistant States Attorney Michelle Manning said the woman Pavon-Fermin sexually assaulted agreed to the sentence and pleas made by Pavon-Fermin. jnickerson@stamfordadvocate.com With just a month to go to the big night, we look at the tech and leisure companies vying for a coveted gong TECH BUSINESS The tech story has got bigger and bigger this year, a bit like the stock-market valuations of the US giants Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google. But not everything has been plain sailing: the digital giants have had to navigate everything from sexual harassment and extremist content scandals, to tough new data rules. Here are some of the pioneers seemingly navigating this all with ease: Improbable This little known start-up, whose artificial reality simulations can be used in games as well as to solve real-world problems, pulled off one of the biggest fundraisings of last year when it received a $500 million investment from Japans SoftBank, valuing it at more than $1 billion. So far the technology has been used in games such as Worlds Adrift, but Improbable, which has a partnership with Google, is talking to local authorities, infrastructure providers, the Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Defense on collaborations. Amazon Amazons share price climbed by 50% during 2017, sending its value north of $750 billion on the back of annual sales of $178 billion. The one-time online bookstore now serves 300 million customers. This was the year in which founder Jeff Bezos put his financial muscle behind his determination to own grocery shopping, swooping on upmarket grocer Whole Foods for $14 billion. It was also the year its Alexa digital assistant went mainstream. Mush Described as Tinder for Mums, this app was launched by a couple of young mothers, who wanted to help mums find others in a similar position. It now has 300,000 members and uses GPS and shared interests to link people with possible friends. The social network was given a 2 million cash injection earlier this year when Octopus Ventures led its first funding round. Mush hopes to steal users from established social networks such as Facebook by giving mothers a place where they can unashamedly be mums. Missguided One of a new breed of online fashion retailers, Missguided is a big hit with women under 30. Started by 34-year-old Nitin Passi in 2008 when his uncle let him use his warehouse, Missguided has grown rapidly, with turnover of more than 120 million last year. Its designs are now shipped to 90 countries and the brand also has three stores. LEISURE, HOSPITALITY AND TOURISM BUSINESS Tech in the form of social networks, games and TV on demand may be taking up more of our leisure time but consumers continue to splash out at the attractions which have invested to make theirs a unique experience. Our award contenders are some of those smart operators. Soho House The private members club opened two huge new establishments in the capital over the past 12 months: first The Ned, a club and hotel in Edwin Lutyens 1939 HSBC headquarters in the City, and then Soho House White City, in the old BBC TV centre. Londoners show no signs of tiring of Soho Houses style. Membership grew by 44% in 2016 and sales rose by more than a fifth to 273.6 million. There are even talks of a stock market float in New York. Winter Wonderland This Hyde Park event will be in its 11th year this year and has become a fixture of Christmas in the capital. Dreamt up by events business PWR in conjunction with the Royal Parks, the event has become a must-do attraction for Londoners, visitors and tourists alike. Visitors have gone from 200,000 to three million last year. Vue Vue International is one of Europes biggest cinema groups with 212 sites, including 87 in the UK. The cinema group, owned by Canadian pension funds, recently hired former ITV and FA boss Adam Crozier as chairman, with a possible view to floating on the stock market. It is also building up to 30 multiplexes in Saudi Arabia, after the kingdom relaxed strict rules on cinema visits for women. D&D London A fixture of the London restaurant scene for more than 20 years, D&D London is now expanding to Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow. Founded by Des Gunewardena and David Loewi (the eponymous D and D), the company has been growing rapidly since LDC came in as an investor in 2013. D&D London now has more than 100 million in revenues and employs more than 2000 people. A s the US Department of Justice launches a formal investigation into price-fixing and other misbehaviour in the global cryptocurrency markets, many in the City are convinced the whole industry is a fraud on a gullible public. We asked one such critic the fund manager Davide Serra of Algebris Investments to name his killer arguments against bitcoin, and pit them against the Evening Standards resident bitcoin enthusiast Jay Smith, The Bitcoin Guy Davide Serra: Bitcoin is the biggest bubble ever. On 2 February Bitcoin crashed below 8000 and was headed toward $7000. It went down from the peak by 60%, 40% in January including 10% in one day. Bloomberg compared this data with the historic market Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles, not to mention Tulip Mania. It found cryptocurrencies topped them all. Jay Smith: The comparisons to bubbles by non-believers is as fascinating as it is wrong. What is Bitcoin? Everything you need to know about the cryptocurrency The companies behind the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles were set up in the 1700s to trade produce from the new colonies - slaves, natural resources and land. To raise funds to fuel these companies they sold shares, which were heavily marketed to investors as easy money since they had the support of government and a full monopoly. Famously, the shares reached outlandishly inflated prices until they crashed a few years later. Some key differences with Bitcoin: These bubbles lasted no longer than 5 years and would have burst even quicker were it not for the communication issues at the time; news travelled very slowly in the 1700s. Bitcoin is approaching its 10th birthday in a world where information travels as fast as we can consume it. Surely if it were a bubble it would have burst after a year if there were no value in it. The bubbles you mention featured no innovation, no unique selling point that should cause these companies to out-perform their rivals from the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese. Bitcoin is an invention many consider as significant as the Internet in scale and disruptive effect. Faster, cheaper and more secure than any other global payment method. The South Sea and Mississippi companies were giving people loans to buy its stock, effectively an early version of a ponzi scheme. Again, with Bitcoin, since there is no single party in control, a Ponzi scheme is simply impossible. You cant use a new investors money to pay back an old investor because every single transaction is verified by the entire network. Even still I can tell that many of you are reading this thinking yeah, but nothing is backing it but faith - Correct, the same thing that gives money in video games value, our central bank-controlled currencies value, and frankly most tech companies value. If Bitcoin is a bubble, then it is one similar to the dotcom bubble, which you may notice people often refer to now as the dotcom crash or correction. Why do they call it that? Because the bubble didnt pop; good tech companies came back stronger and more powerful. Amazon shares at the height of the bubble were worth $112, 18 years later they are now trading at $1604 - almost 1500% higher. DS: Crypto currency is a money laundering tool for criminals and tax cheats. Standard Chartered chief executive Bill Winters has said 40% of criminal transactions are executed via crypto currencies. Crypto has been transformed into the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time JS: Bill Winters is apparently not very good at maths. If 40% of criminal transactions are carried out via cryptocurrencies and the Black Market is worth an estimated $1.81 trillion (according to Havocscope.com, a black market research group) then by his calculations, the crypto market should be worth a minimum of $725 billion. Thats more than double all crypto assets combined. Besides, Bitcoin is a terrible choice for criminals. In 2013 Mt.Gox, the then largest exchange in crypto, was hacked. User accounts were compromised and more than 800,000 Bitcoins were stolen. But what happened next? A group of volunteers set to work to trace the funds through the blockchain. As every transaction made using Bitcoin is public, these detectives were able to follow the money and the identity of some of the thieves was discovered. Remember, using Bitcoin for a transaction leaves a PERMANENT record on the blockchain. Immutable, never to be deleted. For a criminal, its an idiotic tool to use for laundering money or hiding from the taxman. DS: Bitcoin miners currently use 0.1% of all the electricity on earth, and will soon use 0.5%. They consume electricity mainly made with coal by more than 159 nations. Entire big data centers repeating stupid games a million times just to validate purchases of crypto-currencies. This is just a waste of energy for something which has a zero intrinsic value. JS: First of all, its not a game. Bitcoin mining - using computer code to create new coins - is a security feature, designed to ensure that nobody is able to send fraudulent transactions, censor the network, or take it down. The level of security provided by Bitcoins mining network is now enough to stop attacks from colluding super powers, be they nations or corporations. This security is already at the level where it is enough to scale with a network that could handle all global transactions. Compare that to TSB which had no internet or mobile banking available for almost two weeks. Or compare it with the data breaches at companies including Equifax, Talk Talk, Tesco Bank, Target, Sears - hundreds of millions of peoples banking data stolen. Suddenly Bitcoins mining network doesnt seem like such poor value. Bitcoin minings main locations are where energy and land is cheap. And the cheapest energy tends to be where there is most supply - either in places where new power stations have been built - or where there is ample hydro, solar, wind, tidal and nuclear power. Some of the largest mining farms in the world are in Greenland using geothermal, the deserts of Australia, Asia and the Americas using solar or scattered across Europe where there is excess nuclear and hydro electric power. Besides, this is just version 1.0. Now, newer blockchains such as Ethereum and IOTA are testing different mechanisms that remove mining all-together, requiring devices similar in power consumption to an old Nokia or Raspberry Pi. DS: Crypto currencies are run by an oligopoly. About 1000 whales own 40% of available bitcoin, exchanges are centralized and development is centralized too. Currency developers are the police, prosecutors and judges at the same time, so they develop their arbitrary rules of law based on their whims. Whales owning 40% of bitcoin is simply untrue, and even if it was, it has nothing to do with controlling the currency. Bitcoin addresses are public, but there is no easy way of measuring who owns what accurately. A Bitcoin wallet can be owned by multiple people, individuals can own multiple wallets and companies often have their own, they can also be lost with no way of knowing if the wallet is still accessible. The only thing I can tell you is what we do know: Excluding most major exchanges and companies the top 1000 wallets combined own around X% of Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin can currently be easily influenced by just a handful of mining pools, dont forget these pools are made up of tens of thousands of individual users. In the past every time a pool has got close to mining more than 50% of blocks, users have quickly turned off them or switched to different ones. I agree the system is far from ideal, but as mentioned earlier many cryptocurrencies are experimenting with new more decentralised alternatives. Bitcoin could easily adopt one of these once it has proven itself secure and decentralised. Development is far from centralised, bitcoins code is fully open source, meaning anyone in the world can read it, copy it to make their own version, or submit their own changes to the network. You can head to github and see for yourself the numbers. There are over 44 different forks of Bitcoin taking advantage of the original code in the last year alone. If you and your community dont like the direction, you can fork off and make your own ;). Moment undercover cops pounce on 500k master Bitcoin hacker DS: Crypto-land has worse inequality than North Korea or the US. Using the economists standard gini coefficient measure of inequality, in Bitcoin ownership it is 0.88 and worse for Ethereum. For North Korea it's 0.86, 0.47 for USA. The distribution of Bitcoin holdings looks much like North Korea and makes China's, and even the US's wealth distribution look like a worker's paradise. So much for democratizing finance. S ometimes an event reminds you that the world changes only very slowly. The really big stuff the power of the American consumer, the hegemony of the US dollar in finance and Europes dependence on Russian gas barely changes year-on-year. The excitement of seeing the first Tesla in your neighbourhood doesnt make credible our governments plan to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2040. Likewise, the arrival of a few cargoes of American liquefied natural gas at European ports doesnt mean that Russias dominant position in European energy supply is about to crumble. Instead, Europe is entrenching Gazprom, the Russian state gas company, as its favoured supplier of natural gas. It didnt make headlines, but last week the EU competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, agreed to settle a seven-year dispute with Gazprom under which Gazprom will avoid a huge fine in return for abiding by a set of rules governing its commercial behaviour in the EU. Letting Gazprom off the hook for rigging markets seems shocking, given German chancellor Angela Merkels glacial relations with Russian president Vladimir Putin and the Dutch governments rage over Russian involvement in the murder of its citizens in Ukraine when a Russian missile brought down a Malaysian Airlines jet. We might wonder what is the point of denying Roman Abramovich a visa when a monolithic Russian state energy utility can just ride over the bumps. In April, Gazproms chairman Alexei Miller welcomed US sanctions: This means we are doing everything right, he said. With its control over export pipelines, Gazprom has been able to carve up markets, denying its captives Poland, the Baltic States and Bulgaria the ability to resell gas and take advantage of better prices offered by Gazprom to neighbouring countries. While Gazprom is forced to benchmark its prices in Western Europe, further east it is able to divide and rule, thanks to its market power. And that is the point. Gazprom sells a commodity that is desperately needed. Last year, it supplied 41% of the EU gas market, its exports soaring by 8% to a record 194 billion cubic metres, even in the face of increasing price competition from imports of liquefied natural gas from Africa, the Middle East and the new interloper, the United States. Washington is livid, protesting over plans for a second sub-sea Baltic pipeline that will bring even more Russian gas directly to a landfall in Germany, avoiding transit fees through Poland and Ukraine. The White House wants Germany to suspend the $11.5 billion Nordstream 2 project. Instead, it wants Germany to import more American LNG; a sort of 21st-century Berlin airlift of liquefied American fuel to rescue beleaguered European states captured by the Russian gas bear. Its a crude caricature of a complicated market. American gas is very cheap, thanks to the surplus of output from the new shale drilling. However, despite the construction of a clutch of new LNG export terminals and much fanfare from political strategists American gas isnt getting much of a foothold in the European market. According to Platts, the energy price assessor, only three cargoes of US LNG have arrived in Europe since the beginning of January, two to the UK and one to the Netherlands. The costs of chilling gas into liquid and transatlantic shipment make LNG expensive and Western European gas markets are competitive. The European Commission wants to keep them that way and that is the reason Europes leaders are holding their noses and playing footsy with Gazprom. By eschewing the option of stamping feet and fining the Russian utility, the EU is keeping a tight grip on the company, forcing it to invest in return for the carrot of more income which Russia desperately needs to pay the bills. The deal signed last week means Gazprom must remove all contractual barriers to the free flow of its gas across borders within Europe, customers must be able to use swaps to access better prices and prices must be benchmarked against market prices at European hubs. The EU is right to ignore the propaganda from Washington which has more to do with commercial gamesmanship than principle. Gazprom still faces a monumental pricing problem from the global gas glut. In order to protect its market share from Middle Eastern and American competition, Gazprom will have to carry on pumping more gas at lower prices and it is this trap into which the EU is leading the Russian exporter. R oyal Bank of Scotland surprised and unnerved the City on Wednesday by announcing the sudden resignation of finance chief Ewen Stevenson. The move puts in jeopardy a plan by Chancellor Philip Hammond to sell a 10% stake in the bank, a deal expected to be announced any day. Stevenson, who is paid 2 million a year, is well respected and his work is regarded as a key factor in RBSs gradual turnaround under chief executive Ross McEwan. The announcement also came on the day of the banks AGM, when small investors were likely to question the timing of Stevensons departure, as well as the pay of executives. Stevenson is leaving to take up an opportunity elsewhere. It is not clear if this role is at a rival bank. Chairman Sir Howard Davies said: The board and I are sorry to learn that Ewen has decided to move elsewhere. He will go with our thanks for a job well done and our good wishes. It is thought that the board only learnt of Stevensons intentions last night, forcing them to rush out a statement this morning. While Hammond is likely to push ahead with plans to sell a 3 billion stake in the bank, Stevensons move is regarded in the City as unhelpful. McEwan said: For the past four years Ewen has worked tirelessly to make RBS a much simpler, safer and more customer-focused business and to resolve a number of major legacy issues. He will go with my enormous thanks and best wishes. He has been a fantastic CFO. Ian Gordon at Investec said: Ewen was genuinely widely admired. However, he leaves unfinished business. A changing of the guard is unhelpful. We continue to assume the government will recommence a sell-down of its 70% stake this year, which will, we think, caps upside for the shares, he added. Aside from the further unwelcome political developments in Europe of recent days, we see Ewens departure as contributing an additional element of uncertainty. RBS said the search for a successor will begin immediately. The bank faces political opposition to its plan to shut branches McEwan claims are seldom used. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell said the government should use its stake to block the closures, and accused it of dancing to the tune of the banks board. N o one said Ewen Stevenson is a chirpy chap. But pretty much everyone thinks hes an excellent finance director and a vital sidekick to his chief executive Ross McEwan. The Ewen/McEwan show was a good Kiwi double act. McEwan could be upbeat, allowing Stevensons somewhat (ahem) dour demeanour to manage expectations through the many bad times. In turn, this usually gruff approach added credibility to his stance when he began allowing glimmers of optimism to break through. His sudden decision to quit is somewhere between unhelpful and alarming, raising questions about his motives. Does he really think his work is done, that RBS is now a boring, sensible bank? Or has he grown tired of an impossible job, one that cant ever be truly completed given the rotten state of a balance sheet that still resembles a bowl of muesli (a complete mess). When RBS settled its case for mortgage bond mis-selling with the US Department of Justice earlier this month it was presented as the last major obstacle to be cleared before the Government could continue selling down its stake. In truth, much remains to be done at RBS. For a start the shares are barely more than half the break-even price of 502p. And the bank has just embarked on another round of cost cuts to make its goal of getting to a normal level of profitability by 2020 even vaguely plausible. Presumably, Chancellor Philip Hammond is satisfied that the shares are good to go, and hell take the jibes that hes selling at a loss on the chin. The fear now must be that McEwan is himself plotting an exit. Since hes been doing what is probably the worst job in banking for nearly five years, no one could blame him. Investors, and Hammond, will be seeking reassurance that this Kiwi plans to stick it out. Spending less time with family Whats wrong with Sir Martin Sorrell? Doesnt he like just hanging out at home? Or is the missus kicking him out the door every morning, complaining that hes in the way when shes trying to do the hoovering? WPP must wish Sorrell was keener to take it slow, content to sit on his piles of cash rather than seek out another fortune. The chances of him stealing business from his former employer with his new venture S4 Capital must be high. Even if large clients mostly stay with the established firm, smaller ones must be tempted at least to see what Sorrell can offer them (lower fees and personal attention, perhaps). Sorrell has unfinished business. His is putting 40 million of his own money into shell company Derriston Capital, which will be renamed S4 Capital - a reference to four generations of his family. Derriston Capital was previously a shell company originally set up to look for healthcare acquisitions, until Sir Martin pounced. He said: We aim to build a multinational communication services business. There are significant opportunities for development in technology, data and content. H ere the Evening Standard business team highlights all the major tech news today. Top story sees Azimo, the digital money transfer service, announce a $20 million raising led by Rakuten Capital. Investors e.ventures, Frog Capital, GR Capital Partners, Greycroft Partners, MCI, Quona Capital and Silicon Valley Bank also participated in the financing. Were excited to strengthen further our relationship with Rakuten Capital, said Azimos chief executive Michael Kent. This financing will be used to make our service even better and to sustain the rapid growth in our customer base. Were keeping our focus primarily on Europe - the largest, most diverse and chronically underserved money transfer market in the world. Azimo is rapidly growing its share of the $600 billion global cross-border payments market. Oskar Mielczarek de la Miel, managing partner at Rakuten Capital, said: "We continue to be impressed by Azimos mission, team and executional prowess. Azimo has the best technology in the sector, and the business is delivering rapid growth and efficiency. Customer acquisition costs have dropped by two-thirds since we first got involved with Azimo. This latest funding will comfortably bring the business to sustained profitability within 12 months. Meanwhile in London, Tandem announced that 100,000 Brits are now using the bank to spend, save and manage their money. At the same tie Silicon Valley Bank revealed it has been granted a lending licence from BaFin and will now officially open its doors in Frankfurt, Germany. Finally join in our Bitcoin debate about whether or not the cryptocurrency is a wise investment or a fraud. It comes as the US Department of Justice launches a formal investigation into price-fixing and other misbehaviour in the global cryptocurrency markets, with many in the City convinced the whole industry is a fraud on a gullible public. We asked one such critic - the hedge fund tycoon Davide Serra of Algebris Investments - to name his killer arguments against bitcoin, and pit them against the Evening Standards resident bitcoin enthusiast Jay Smith, The Bitcoin Guy. O ne of the biggest challenges facing our NHS (and other healthcare systems) is the rapid growth in the use of A&E. People demand instant attention in other parts of their lives, from their internet shopping to their streamed entertainment, and now they demand it in their health treatment. It puts huge pressure on a traditional health service and scarce hospital resources. That is why todays announcement from Londons NHS will be very welcome, if it represents genuine change. Londoners who call 999 will not be immediately rushed to hospital unless they require urgent hospital treatment and instead many more will receive treatment from paramedics at home, or over the phone. This is all to the good. This March brought the worst A&E waiting times on record the number of patients waiting more than 12 hours for treatment had tripled in a year. Doctors have long grumbled that A&E centres are being clogged with runny noses and hopes of a friendly chat, while real emergencies get lost in the crowd. They are right NHS England estimates 30 per cent of A&E visits don't need to be made. It is time to cut that down. There is another reason to applaud the scheme: it uses technology (paramedics will be armed with iPads to view patient medical records and share pictures with medics). As this papers Rohan Silva wrote this week, the NHS has been slow to embrace innovation that could make hospitals more cost efficient. We hope this is a positive step in the health of Londoners. Universities challenged London has long boasted of its universities, a powerful brand which draws in students and academics from all over the world but they are quietly falling behind. Londons brightest and best UCL, Imperial, King's College and LSE were all put under pressure by their Asian and American rivals in the World Reputation Rankings this year, an official measure that gives heavy weighting to research performance. The explanation is partly that there are more countries in the league table now 21, up from 18 in 2016. Academics also worry Brexit Britain is starting to put off the brightest international students and researchers. But it is also to do with money research needs funding. This week it was revealed that Oxford and Cambridge hold some 21 billion in riches more than the combined investments of the other 22 members of the Russell group of elite research universities. Are these resources really being put to the best use? As the debate over tuition fees rumbles on, Britain must consider its competition the US and Asia, which are pouring money into academia and take stock. One thing is certain. Destroying the stable source of funding from student fees that governments of all colours have put together would turn a challenge into a disaster. Pope hails food charity One of the enduring benefits of this newspapers pioneering Food for London campaign is that it instantly put The Felix Project charity on the map, raising more than 1.6 million for it as well as recruiting 300 volunteers from among our readers. Now Pope Francis has recognised this brilliant little charity that punches above its weight picking up fresh surplus food from the back of 170 food outlets each week and delivering three tons of it to 180 charities that cook hot meals for Londons most vulnerable. W e were all mesmerised by the sight of Malian migrant Mamoudou Gassama powerfully scaling the side of a building in Paris to rescue a child dangling off a balcony. It was like something from a film. In every sense. Before you could say Spider-Mans looking good he was whisked off to see President Macron at the Elysee Palace, awarded citizenship and offered a job in the fire service, but I reckon modelling and film agents will come a calling soon. Gassamas story gripped the world because it had a happy ending, its a wonderful feelgood moment and it makes us feel better about migrants. See we CAN be nice to them when they do the right thing such as rescue a child or save hostages, like another young Malian man, Lassana Bathily, did in 2015 during an extremist attack in a Jewish supermarket in Paris. The state can reward migrants as long as they are prepared to die in an act of bravery. Simples! I have no problem with celebrating this brave young man but we shouldnt let this lull us into a false sense of security that migrants feel welcome in France or indeed the UK. France is still pretty brutal towards its migrants, particularly those from Africa. Race relations have been strained since back in 2005 when the then President, Nicolas Sarkozy, called young (mainly black) male rioters scum, more than 10 million people voted for Marine Le Pen at the last election, and President Macron has just proposed tough new measures to crack down on immigration and asylum amid complaints from human rights campaigners. And the Spider-Man story also sets a false test that requires migrants to be superheroes before they are treated like human beings, as David Lammy MP tweeted. We talked about this story on CNN Talk on Monday and the question was What do migrants contribute to your society? Its a fair and positive question but why are migrants still having to justify their right to exist in this way? Because as any immigrant or their child knows, there has been a cold, hostile climate for a long time. The Windrush scandal exploded the myth that race and immigration were all kumbaya in the UK. The rhetoric used by politicians and Right-wing newspapers has been relentlessly horrible. Migrants are here to STEAL your jobs, SPONGE OFF your services, ATTACK your women screamed headlines for decades using language normally associated with pest control. Funnily enough, all this has not made people feel welcome. I am 100 per cent a victim of a hostile environment, said a promising student on Channel 4 News this week, whose Jamaican-born family have been fighting to remain in the UK for more than a decade and who live in fear of being deported. Spider-Man getting his citizenship is wonderful but a canny PR moment doesnt erase the harsh reality many migrants face. So, heres a thought instead of expecting migrants to be heroes, how about we try and not treat them as villains? Handmaid has gone all shock and gore As I awaited the result of the Irish abortion referendum on a hot sunny bank holiday weekend, I did what any self-respecting Glaswegian feminist would do. I closed the shutters and watched the latest series of The Handmaids Tale, the television drama about a dystopian world where the state removes womens agency over their reproductive organs and their bodies. The timing made it all the more powerful. But I have to confess that as much as I admire the series, agree with all the important messages about feminism and note the danger of turning back the clock to a patriarchal world where crazy men are in charge and see women as objects to be grabbed for sex or breeding (imagine that), I am finding it pretty hard going. Elisabeth Moss as Offred in The Handmaid's Tale / Hulu The graphic, bloody violence against women is stomach-churning and reminds me of the misogynistic masculine gore I try to avoid. There was a horrible scene involving an Islamic State-style mass execution of women which they tried to soften with a Kate Bush song, but it didnt really help. The show is like the opposite of yoga. As a feminist I feel that I have to persevere with it but the only thing thats getting me through is imagining the French and Saunders spoof. Thank God Love Island is back on the box. *Frances Barber plays Mrs Cheveley in An Ideal Husband at the Vaudeville with a cast involving lots of chaps from the Fox family but she steals the show. Its like Oscar Wilde wrote the part for her. Mrs Cheveley is clever, devious, ambitious, witty and is the ultimate bad girl. M y girlfriend, a state school teacher, has received a pay rise, putting her in possession of a good fortune substantially better than mine. We have, therefore, been playing inbox tennis with a CNBC article that has again been trending on Twitter over the weekend, which suggests millennial women feel worried and ashamed of earning more money than their boyfriends or husbands. I have NO problem out-earning you. No shade, says girlfriend. The feelings mutual. Our arguments are mostly confined to my snoring and biting my nails. Millennials, largely, earn bugger all, and balance bills via apps like Splitwise. Mi capital es tu capital. Am I missing something? Having canvassed male friends, the answer is, moreover, resoundingly in favour of being out-earned with the caveat that they probably still earn more: chuffed to bits says one, or sign me up says another. But society is skewed, and progress is sluggish. One friend, a banker, says she hates telling new partners what she does due to past experiences. Id say when I did something good/promotion/bonus, and thered be no interest, she says. Its definitely a thing and makes me anxious now. Were the first generation to experience a measurably closing pay gap and be brought up to know thats a good thing. Were also a generation who value other intangibles at a higher premium than paycheques: we want to be less anxious, be defined by more than our careers. The male ego is still dragging its feet and needs to catch up, fast. Still, friends who earn more than I do often enjoy their jobs less, returning home from City desks at 2am, only to have to head back to work three hours later. Truths are rarely universally acknowledged when it comes to money. But it really cant buy you happiness, after all. McEwans bad sex lost in translation Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan star in On Chesil Beach (IMOS) / PUBLICITY PICTURE The film adaptation of On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwans finger-gnashingly uncomfortable book about sexual repression in the early Sixties, is now showing in cinemas, starring Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle. It doesnt quite translate, of course, because Hollywood has taken the dysfunctional sex, adjusted it for audiences and made it beautiful. More awkward sex, please, were British. Be nice ultimately youll be richer for it No good deed goes unpunished. I have mixed feelings about a report in the Harvard Business Review that says as much. More agreeable men, who tend to be friendly and helpful to others, have significantly lower earnings than less agreeable men, writes the author. The man who is very agreeable (in the top 20 per cent) will earn about $270,000 less over a lifetime than the average man. The assertion is that niceties are inefficient they cost time, which is money, and vice versa. Thanks Harvard. But hope is not lost for the amiable procrastinator. A new book, In Praise of Timewasting, by MIT physicist Alan Lightman, suggests that slowing down and taking a pause is vital to the economy. In the history of great thinkers, he says, from Albert Einstein to Alexander Graham Bell, getting sidetracked was an important part of the creative process. Put a thought down, take the time of day, and come back to it or natter with a colleague about their kids. Pleasantries are inefficient, sure, but the world is a poorer, greyer place without them. Why I fear the rise of the kangatarian Im pescatarian. So I eat fish, said a contestant on Australiass Love Island this weekend (the scantily clad UK version returns next Monday, with Danny Dyers daughter, Dani). I was kangatarian, so I know what you mean, replied another. I only ate kangaroo and fish. Because kangaroos arent farmed. H&M is launching its first ever collection in support of the LGBTQ+ community with a capsule line of Pride apparel and accessories that launches online globally Thursday, 31 May. The Love For All collection, which will also retail in 148 US stores, is a festival-ready rainbow riot which celebrates the message of love, equality and self-expression. The Swedish clothing giant will donate 10 per cent of collection sales to UN Free & Equal, the United Nations global campaign against homophobia and transphobia. H&M believes in everybodys right to love who they want, says Andreas Lowenstam, head of menswear design. We hope people can use H&Ms Love For All collection to celebrate Pride and their belief in equal love. (H&M) / H&M People. Fashion. Power. Delivered weekly. Email Sign up Sign up I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice {{message}} {{permutiveUid}} {{message}} Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex people have the same right as everyone else to be protected from violence and discrimination, says Peggy Hicks, director of thematic work at the UN Human Rights Office. The support we receive from H&M will help the UN Free & Equal campaign work together with activists and equality champions to raise public awareness and mobilise for positive changes in laws and attitudes. (H&M) / H&M Not only is the 80s-inflected range of crop tops, rainbow stripe tracksuits and fanny packs perfect Pride Parade merch, but it also makes for an ideal selection of non-cringe festival garb. Check out the entire collection here: What with the Duchess of Cambridge on maternity leave and newlyweds Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on their honeymoon, our British royal spots have come to a screeching halt following the extraordinary royal wedding. Missing your royal fix? Dont panic, we may just have the answer. Prince Carl Philip and Princess Sofia of Sweden not only have an Instagram account @prinsparet, but have just made it public for all to see. And, after a quick scroll, theyre quickly becoming our new royal love. Normally, the only insight we get into the British royal family are perfectly-posed portraits, but the Swedish royals have decided to do things a little differently by using their Instagram to give us a glimpse into their unfiltered (literally, there is no Valencia filter to be seen) family life. For starters, their iPhone snaps give us a behind the scenes look at their glamorous ensembles and events inside the palace, with Princess Sofia showing off a series of fairytale gowns, complete with tiara. as well as trendy pastel power suits for work events and adorable off-duty his 'n' her outfits. People. Fashion. Power. Delivered weekly. Email Sign up Sign up I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice {{message}} {{permutiveUid}} {{message}} That said, they do also show the often unseen unglamorous side, from pictures of the prince filming in a kitchen, to babysitting duty of their two children, Prince Alexander (age 2) and Prince Gabriel (age 8 months). If anything, the account just confirms that the royal couple are, in some ways, just like rest of us. After all, the pair love a good selfie, aren't adversed to accessorising with flower crowns and, of course, love Instagram as much as we do. So, whilst we wait for the British royals to return, our eyes are going to be fixed on the Swedish family's social media. I ts that time of year for the big players of wine to step back and let British produce take the spotlight. This week, until Sunday 3 June 2018, marks British Wine Week, a chance to celebrate home-grown wines. Last year marked a record-breaking year for British wine with 3.8 million bottles produced, compared to just 2.3 million in 2016. It also proved exceptional for Englands leading wine producer, Chapel Down, as wine sales increased by 20 per cent to over 8m. The rise of British wines is undeniable with home-grown versions of French champagne and even Welsh red wine growing in popularity, so to celebrate British Wine Week, here are the best wine events taking place in the capital. Ormer Mayfair Limited edition menu: Ormer celebrates English Wine Week Exclusive offers and competitions weekly Email Sign up Sign up I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice {{message}} {{permutiveUid}} {{message}} To celebrate the UKs finest winemakers, Ormer Mayfair (the excellent restaurant inside Flemings Mayfair hotel), has launched a specially designed menu. Michelin starred chef Shaun Rankin and director of wine Andreas Rosendal are behind the limited-edition menu which features four incredible home-grown wines. Ormer Mayfair is also offering guests the chance to book the hotels underground wine cellar, the Barrel Room, for an exclusive evening of English wine tasting hosted by Rosendal. All week, 7-12 Half Moon St, W1J 7BH, https://www.flemings-mayfair.co.uk/fine-dining-london/ormer-mayfair-restaurant Bonhams Bonhams is hosting an English Wine Dinner featuring a four course tasting menu created by head chef Tom Kemble to go alongside the brilliant British wines taking centre stage. The event located on Bond Street will give guests the opportunity to chat with expert winemakers from Hambledon, Simpsons and Martins Lane Vineyard. Thursday 31 May, 101 New Bond Street, W1S 1SR, https://bonhams.herokuapp.com The Coral Room Delightful drinks: Chapel Down cocktails will be available at the Coral Room To celebrate British Wine Week, The Coral Room have partnered with Chapel Down to create an all-new drinks menu featuring three refreshing cocktails, all of which contain Chapel Down wine. They also have an extensive English sparkling wine list thats available for thirsty visitors looking to sample some UK produce. All week, 16-22 Great Russell Street, WC1B 3NN, https://www.thecoralroom.co.uk/ Streatham Wine House Streatham Wine House is offering guests week-long promotions on their English wine bottles and English wine flight. Theyre also hosting a Black Book Urban Winery takeover on June 1 as an opportunity for guests to chat to the co-founder and head winemaker of the Battersea-based winery. June 1, 53A Streatham Hill, SW2 4TS, http://www.streathamwinehouse.co.uk Simpsons in The Strand Rare wine tasting: Simpson's in The Strand To coincide with British Wine Week, Simpsons in The Strand have created an exclusive four course tasting menu, showcasing some of the best sparkling wines the UK has to offer. All the wines featured at the event come from Ridgeview, a winemaker based in the South Downs in Sussex. Simpsons in The Strands menu includes oysters with a Ridgeview Blanc de Blancs, a crab salad accompanied with a Ridgeview Cavendish, Gressingham Duck paired with a Blanc de Noirss and a summery dessert coupled with a glass of Rose de Noirs. Alongside the food and wine pairings, guests will be given the rare opportunity to try a glass of Ridgeviews top tier wine which is usually only sold by the bottle. The British Urban Film Festival has come on leaps and bounds since launching in 2005 and this year is releasing its first feature film, No Shade, directed by Clare Anyiam-Osigwe. No Shade has its premiere on June 5 at the Rio Cinema in Dalston, with Adele Oni starring in her debut lead role as a young woman negotiating her love hate relationship with men and her skin tone. Shes joined by Kadeem Pearse, Shone Romulus and Judith Jacob, who are directed by Anyiam Osigwe, formerly a dermatologist and skincare company founder. The festival opens with live script readings at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre on June 4, followed by the BUFF awards ceremony at the Genesis Cinema, where director Amma Asante will be honoured for her work on Belle, A Way of Life and A United Kingdom, which showed at the 2016 festival. Loretta Devine is nominated for best actress, while David Harewood is among the nominees for best actor. Three series of short films tackle issues around life and death (June 6, Bernie Grant Centre), celebrate emerging black filmmakers Black Films Matter (June 7, Bernie Grant Centre) and discuss sexuality, gender and social bias for Women in Film (June 8, Curzon Soho). Munroe Bergdorf makes her acting debut in short film Fee at the Women in Film screening, starring as a young transgender woman, dealing with rejection by her family. A special afternoon of screenings and live performances will mark the 70th anniversary of Windrush at Regent Street Cinema on June 9. Three short documentary films Stories of Windrush, Sorry We Dont Help Darkies and The Dead Sea tell of the continuing journey, followed by a discussion. I want to eat alone and eat happily. But killjoy economists have dreamed up numbers to claim the nations mood is getting worse. They say its the fault of lives lived with too many microwaved mini-meals for one. Eat with others, theyve calculated, and your cheerfulness levels rise by 0.22 points on their meaningless scale, which is apparently half as good as sex but probably still worth two bowls of boiled pasta. Lunch without a mate and they claim youll be 7.9 points under the national average. This is absurd. Eating alone is great. Not every day. Not all the time. And not I suggest as a slob in boxers in bed, dribbling cheese from a pizza crust onto the duvet. There have got to be rules. And the first of them is that to do it properly you have got to eat out. Think of the advantages. The bill will be half as big, which means you can afford to eat somewhere nice. Goodbye, Nandos; hello, Le Caprice. You are guaranteed the company of someone you like. Dining alone means no struggle with small talk. No being glared at if you flirt with the waiter or order a second glass of wine. You can eat when you want, where you want and how you want and since the other day I wanted fish, and the Standard was paying, I booked a table at the smartest chippy in town, Scotts in Mayfair. Food. Bars. Going out. Delivered weekly Email Sign up Sign up I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice {{message}} {{permutiveUid}} {{message}} Table for one: Fresh Oysters / 2013 Tang Ming Tung Here, I hit my first challenge. Booking as a couple, the restaurants website was ready to welcome me in at peak turbot-eating time. Turn into a sad single, however, and the only table was at 3.30pm. But theres a solution. Book late and show up early so I did. If you eat alone you might as well eat posh: the whole linen, whispering waiters and lots of silver on the table look. Nowhere does this better than Scotts. Top marks to the team, too, for getting the most important basic of all for solo dining right: clearing the place opposite. Nothing says loser on a failed date more than staring at an unused knife, fork and wine glass. A table for one has got to be a table for one. And no awkward questions were asked about whether I was enjoying my meal: just silent service, without a rush. Other rules? No devices. No staring down flicking Twitter as if some urgent message had just come in from your Tokyo HQ. Looking at a phone wont prove to others you have friends. If you are going online, go to Pret. A paper is fine as long as its this one or something impressively obscure such as yesterdays Politiken (but make sure you actually can speak Danish if you try this the waiters might). Opinion is divided on books. I took an Edwardian essay on the creation of national parks from the London Library, which scored heavily on looks but failed on practicality: oyster juice stains on antique pages are not a good touch. The confident thing for the single diner is to take no props along at all. The time for clutching at teddy bear substitutes is over. You have a meal to order. Here, too, there are dilemmas. One or three courses? What to drink? Youll never finish that big bottle of Badoit the staff want to up-sell, but a mini one looks mean, so go for it anyway. A cocktail is allowable, so long as it is clear, stiff and sharp: a rum and fruit punch loses that rumba magic when you are the only one dancing. Drink beer alone and youre one stop away from a six-pack of Diamond White on a bench. So I say go for wine: a half bottle of something French and red. If its summer, send it back to be chilled. The waiters will be impressed. London's best sustainable restaurants 1 /10 London's best sustainable restaurants Native Cub Cub is the joint venture of cocktail legend Ryan Chetiyawardana and chef Douglas McMaster. The latter earned a reputation for sustainable dining at Brightons zero-waste restaurant Silo, which is moving to Hackney Wick later this month. As well as purchasing their food from renewable sources, Cubs interior is also made from reused materials. The tables are ingeniously crafted from recycled yoghurt pots, while the air inside the venue is filtered through the breathable clay used to construct the walls. The food is absolutely delicious too: fellow Silo alumni Michael Thompson is head chef, and serves dishes such as confit Jersey Royals with fermented potato, whey and mustard, as well as kid goat with spring greens and wild garlic. Caravan Spring Skye Gyngells Spring at Somerset House goes further than most organic and sustainable restaurants and offers a menu designed specifically around surplus produce. The pre-theater scratch menu is made from ingredients that would otherwise have been wasted, and at three courses for 25 its an affordable way to support a good cause. The daily changing menu is only revealed on the restaurants social media about an hour before it is available (only between 5.30pm and 6.30pm), but the sample dishes hint at the likes of braised lamb shank with polenta, spinach and fennel top salsa and a chocolate Swiss roll. Kanishka Bean & Wheat Roganic The Duke Of Cambridge Pub fans are spoiled for choice when it comes to boozers in Islington, but the Duke Of Cambridge offers something unique. The St Peters Street setting is Britains first certified organic pub, with its focus firmly on serving sustainable food. Absolutely all of the ingredients used in its kitchens are organic, and never imported via air freight or grown in heated greenhouses. In addition, any surplus food is collected and processed through an anaerobic digester, which turns the waste produce into energy. Dishes include chicken sourced from the organic Rhug Estate, served with escalivada and garlic cream, as well as a ricotta and ewes milk cheesecake. Gourmet Goat Melissa Thompson As for food, you should have at least two courses. My half-dozen Morecambe Bay oysters at Scotts slipped down nicely and the ice tray they came on gave me something to look at. A decent ceviche worked on a hot day: so did a tomato salad. But the latter showed up another solo challenge. A side dish meant for two means a lot of heavy eating if you are on your own. Those greens everyone orders out of guilt soon lose their shine when you have to sit alone staring at a pile of fast-cooling garlic broccoli. And it is tempting to go crazy on the bread. Hold back. Other issues? Should you try to overhear conversation nearby or ignore it? I now know a lot about someones big company in the West Midlands. Apparently hes off to Nice next week for the summer. He drank a lot. If I knew who it was, Id advise his shareholders to sell fast. And finally theres dessert. Eat a pile of cream and raspberries on your own and youll look like Billy Bunter. Stick to a restrained plate of cheese and a single espresso. No brandy. After all, its almost time to find a smart table for dinner all alone, of course. Julian's top five solo haunts: 1. Jin Kichi, Hampstead When you go alone, go Asian quick service, small plates and a buzz. The grill bar at this fine Hampstead Japanese diner is a brilliant place for lunch for one. I love it. But watch out: the sakes potent. 2. E Pellicci, Bethnal Green Solo eating spot: E Pellicci You cant really eat alone here, in Londons best cafe: last time I shared a table with two mothers and a priest, all crammed in amid lots of cheer and amazing wood panelling. Its small, noisy and the top place for breakfast in London. 3. Kiln, Soho A long countertop by the charcoal stoves is an ideal West End pitstop for a Thai snack. You can break my no beer alone rule here it slips down well with the grilled chicken. Turn up early or youll queue. 4. Terminus Nord, Paris Eating in Paris mostly reminds you that the food is better in London but this classic has all the style of a proper grand railway restaurant, just over the road from the Eurostar. Eat as night falls and imagine you are about to join the night express to Vienna. S tephen Campbell Moore admits his character in courtroom drama Consent has tested his faith in the legal profession. The History Boys actor, 38, stars as a barrister in the West End transfer of the play, which has moved to the Harold Pinter theatre after a sell-out run at the National. Written by Nina Raine, the play begins with two barrister friends who find themselves on opposite sides of a rape trial. Campbell Moores character Ed wins the case but after his marriage falls apart he is himself accused of rape by his wife Kitty, played by Claudie Blakley. He told the Standard: Eds understanding of himself at the beginning is that its important for the law to be objective and to give a defence to somebody who may be guilty. Its the best and most just system that we have, but in arguing his points again and again he becomes colder and colder. Campbell Moore, who recently separated from The Crown star Claire Foy, said he had instinctively felt it was a great play and that there was an ancient Greek quality to it. Raine told the Standard: The justice system can be a very blunt instrument. Im interested in the tools which barristers use to test peoples testimonies, which arent actually fair. They ask people questions about their recall of events, but were human beings and we dont have perfect recall. Producer Sonia Friedman said the nature of consent is at the heart of the play. Nina managed to take the legal grey areas within the area of consent and make it into a fully fledged drama. S pain is a region that, in spite of its size and commercial heft - as the third biggest wine producing country in the world, outweighed only by France and Italy - still manages to seep under the radar when in it comes to areas of interest. With millions of bottles pouring out of the country every year, its image is perhaps one of quantity over quality, as we think of Spanish wines as merrily propping up the value section of supermarket shelves and wine lists. With sunny climes and easy grape-growing conditions, Spain is all too often counted upon for reliability and predictability, producing simple, inoffensive whites and the ever ubiquitous oaky Rioja. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, home to prohibitively expensive wines such as the renowned Vega Sicilia, known to fetch upwards of 1,000 a bottle... But delve deeper and Spain has loads more to offer, with astounding diversity across a hotbed of underrated regions. A modern wave of producers are bringing forth lighter, terroir-driven styles that speak of the land from which theyre grown - mouthwatering, zesty whites from the lush green coasts of Galicia, characterful Mediterranean wines, and the savoury sherries of Jerez join obscure wines from the volcanic soils of the Canary Islands. Spain is alive with vibrant expressions of each corner of the country. Drink up: Abbie Moulton on Spain's lesser known wine regions So, join me on a liquid tour with these five wines: Godello from Galicia Galicia, in the very north west corner of Spain, is cooled by the breath of the Atlantic, leaving it leafier, greener and a few degrees crisper than the rest of the country, and with wines of a characteristic freshness. The terse, white Albarinos of Galicias most famous subregion, Rias Baixas, have long been popular on wine lists, but the Godello grape is a contender for producing Spains most noteworthy whites - rich, textured and expressive. Food. Bars. Going out. Delivered weekly Email Sign up Sign up I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice {{message}} {{permutiveUid}} {{message}} The red Mencia is also worth a sip - this native variety from the steep hills of the region is elegant and perfumed - with the best coming from neighbouring Bierzo, an ancient region, once forgotten, thats now something of a rising star. Try Bodegas Mengoba Brezo Blanco Godello, or the red Brezo Tinto Mencia - winemaker Gregory Perez is an unsung hero, making terroir-driven low intervention wines at great value prices. Buy from Les Caves des Pyrene. Bodegas Mengoba Brezo Blanco, 13.50. Bodegas Mengoba, Brezo Tinto, 11.95 Txakoli from the Basque Country This crisp, lightly spritzy wine from the coastal regions of northern Spains Basque country is a staple in the seaside cafes of Bilbao and San Sebastian, where its famously poured from theatrically great height to enliven the bubbles. Made from the local Hondarrabi Zuri grape, Txakoli (say it with me, cha-koh-lee), in its distinguishable tall green bottle, is typically effervescent with tart green apple notes, is easy on the alcohol, and all too drinkable. A simple, smashable wine, made to drink while unwinding in the Spanish sun - or for reminiscing of the sun from the more temperamental climates of Blighty - and not for taking too seriously. Try Txakoli 2016 Gaintza for a clean, aromatic and bright example with delicate apple and citrus. Buy from Valvona & Crolla, 12.99 Xarel.Lo from Catalunya The warm Mediterranean coast of Spain is famed for production of hulking red Priorat and sparkling Cava, but some excellent unusual bottles are appearing. Xarel.Lo, one of the three grapes that makes up the recipe of Cava and not often found on its own, has in recent years risen to stardom - thanks to experimentation by a new wave of producers bringing it to light with great results. Josep Mitjans is one such producer, coaxing an aromatic and honeyed wine from the high altitude vineyards of Penedes. His wines are made in the skin contact style and aged underground in clay amphorae - try the Loxarel Xarello Amfora, for a sip thats a little wild, with honey, quince and rich nutty aromas. Buy from Highbury Vintners, 19 Sherry from Jerez, Andalucia The bodegas of Jerez are filled with solera-style barrels where sherry wines age and breathe, licked by the salt of the ocean. The Spanish fortified wine is a food lovers best friend; bone-dry fino is incredibly versatile and works with a wide range of flavours, from typical Spanish salted snacks like olives and cured meats, to seafood, as well as being pretty damn glorious on its own. Try it served very chilled in a white wine glass on a warm day for a delicious aperitif and see if you wont be converted. En Rama style fino (and manzanilla) is the traditional, pre-technological, unfiltered or only-very-lightly-filtered style thats enjoying a resurrection, for its depth and slight artisanal inconsistencies. Try Gonzalez Byass 2018 Tio Pepe En Rama for intense savoury notes, baked apple and signature saline saltiness. Buy from Lea & Sandeman, 8.95 Listan Blanco from the Canary Islands The oldest vines in Europe are often found in the most surprising places - high up in the mountains of Switzerland, say, or on a hot, humid, island, a stones throw from the coast of Morocco. Thats where we are with the Canary Islands, where winemaking dates back over five hundred years. Theres a surprisingly rich culture of winemaking here, and no fewer than 10 recognised wine producing regions. Tenerife is the main act, where rugged, volcanic soils produce wines with an impressive mineral streak and the mountains provide altitude for cooling, acidity-enhancing conditions. Native varieties flourish here, thanks to years of existence uninterrupted by the pesky phylloxera bug that wiped out so much of Europes original vines. Youll find oddities such as Listan Blanco, Listan Negro, Marmajuelo and Baboso, and some international varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon. Try Envinate Taganan Blanco, a field blend of indigenous varieties that includes Listan Blanco, Albillo Criollo, Marmajuelo, Gual, among others. Hand-picked grapes, free from chemicals, are traditionally aged in huge oak barrels and bottled with minimal sulfur, for a compelling, smoke and salt-laced wine. Buy from Highbury Vintners, 25 I t's currently the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. For those fasting and taking part in Islam's special month of Ramadan there are a very specific set of prayer times to remember. Muslim prayer times are based on the sun's movement and so, change throughout the month and year. Luckily, the East London Mosque has a prayer timetable to help Muslims keep up with the different times throughout the month of Ramadan. You can view these timings below: Yet, these times are accurate for London only. You can view prayer times for other UK cities here. What is Ramadan? Ramadan is held during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. It's a time of spiritual reflection, charitable acts and spending time with loved ones. Muslims also treat is as a month in which they can overcome sinful habits. It is also a month when Muslims fast. This means no eating or drinking between sunrise and sunset, which is important during Ramadan as it allows Muslims to devote themselves further to their faith, ultimately becoming closer to Allah, or God. The reason why Muslims fast is because it is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the other pillars being faith, prayer, charity and making the pilgrimage to Holy City of Mecca. Before sunrise, Muslims eat a meal (suhoor) and then another meal (iftar) after sunset. One who is ill, pregnant or travelling does not have to fast. Children and the elderly are also not required to fast during the month of Ramadan. When does Ramadan start this year? This year Ramadan began on the evening of Wednesday May 16 and is expected to end on Friday June 15. A London taxi driver is believed to have stabbed a minicab driver with a screwdriver following a fierce rush hour dispute outside a busy train station, police said. A 51-year-old man was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm after the incident near to Euston station at around 5.40pm on May 18. Scotland Yard have appealed for witnesses, saying that the minicab driver was "seriously assaulted" in the confrontation which was possibly motivated by anger at inconsiderate driving. The 34-year-old was rushed to hospital suffering from a small stab wound to his right shoulder. Detectives have appealed for revellers drinking outside the busy Royal George Pub on Eversholt Street A Met Police spokesman said that the man's injuries were thought to have been caused by a screwdriver. The suspect has been released under investigation. Officers from the Roads and Transport Policing Command are investigating. PC Mungo Elliott, of the Met's Taxi & Private Hire Policing Team, said: "The Eversholt Street area was crowded at the time, including a large number of people who were gathered outside the Royal George pub. "I am appealing for anyone who witnessed the altercation or the moments leading up to it to call police and tell us what they saw." D etectives are hunting two men who held a knife to the throat of an 87-year-old woman before robbing her of cash and jewellery. The suspects sneaked into the grandmothers home through the rear garden and one threatened her with a knife to stop her shouting for help. The men went upstairs and grabbed cash and gold jewellery worth 1,000, including a necklace, a ring and some bangles. Detectives are appealing for the publics help in an attempt to recover the stolen items, which are said to be of sentimental value to the victim. The suspects sneaked into the grandmothers home through the rear garden and one threatened her with a knife Police released images of the jewellery and urged anyone who had been offered them for sale or knows their location to contact them. Officers were called to the victims home on the North Circular Road in Neasden at 6.26pm on Wednesday, May 23, to reports of an aggravated burglary. They believe the suspects got into the house through the rear door and then grabbed the woman, before one held a knife to her throat and threatened to hurt her if she didnt stay quiet. The 87-year-old was unhurt by her ordeal but left severely shaken, and is now frightened to stay in her home alone. Detective Constable Azmeen Pinnu, from Brent CID, said: If you were in the area on Wednesday, 23 May at around 6.25pm please contact police. You may have seen something that you dont think is important but could massively help our investigation. Police say the first suspect, who threatened the woman with the knife, is described as black, about 5ft 10ins tall and of medium build. At the time of the burglary he is believed to have been wearing navy blue trousers, a navy shirt and a cap. The second man is described as white, of slim build with a slight moustache and in his late teens. He was wearing a maroon-coloured shirt. The break-in comes as the Met is battling an 11 per cent rise in the number of burglary offences across London. L ondon gang members are to be treated like terrorism suspects in a bid to stop a crime wave said to be encouraged by violent music videos on YouTube, according to reports. Detectives will be given new powers to clamp down those who glamourise knife and gun violence through online videos in a move that comes after a rise in violent crime across the UK. They will be traced and targeted in the same way as those who promote terrorism online, the Met Polices gang crime chief Jim Stokley said in an interview with the Times. Commander Stokley said the new measures will mean officers no longer needed to prove videos and social media posts were linked to specific acts of violence to secure a conviction for incitement to violence. He told the newspaper: There isnt specific legislation, and clearly we cant use terrorism legislation [but] in consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), we have found some existing legislation which we are going to use. The new measures first need to be approved by the judiciary before they can be enforced, he added. Quince Garcia Ex Gang Member tells us about his story Cressida Dick, the Met Police commissioner, had blamed social media for fuelling a surge in murders in the capital, singling out the drill genre of rap music for glamourising violent crime. Drill videos easily able to view online feature hooded and masked gangs threatening each other with violent lyrics, gestures and hand signals, with some attracting millions of views. The Met has built a database of more than 1,400 videos to use as an intelligence tool as the force tries to tackle an increase in killings and other violent crime. It comes after more than 60 murder investigations have been launched already this year. T iny plastic fibres from your clothing could pose a risk to your health if you breathe them in, a study claims. Kings College London researchers together with French academics have discovered microplastic particles which cannot be broken down in the body and associated contaminants floating in urban air samples. There is already concern that putting synthetic clothes such as fleeces in washing machines is leading to plastic-based fibres being released into the oceans. Now scientists say there is an urgent need for data on the human health impacts of inhaling the non-biodegradable chemicals. Two-thirds of the worlds textiles are made from materials such as polyester. Sportswear has the highest volumes and, campaigners say, fast fashion is fuelling demand for artificial fabrics. Plastic fibres blowing in the wind also soak up pollution from exhaust fumes. There is further risk from particles thrown up from tyres. Over-exposure could lead to breathing problems and lung inflammation. More research is needed into how the fibres travel, and their impact long-term on health. Most of the fibres are likely to be cleared by the lungs natural defence mechanisms, but some may persist to cause problems such as inflammation. "Plastic fibres have been observed in pulmonary tissue, suggesting the human airway is of sufficient size for them to penetrate the deep lung" The Kings study, Microplastics In Air: Are We breathing It In? says: Plastic fibres have been observed in pulmonary tissue, suggesting that the human airway is of a sufficient size for plastic fibres to penetrate the deep lung. Report author Dr Stephanie Wright, research associate at Kings College Londons analytical and environmental sciences department, said: Youre applying friction to your garments through general wear and tear as you move and sit down, which sheds fibres ... upon contact with tissue or cells it could trigger inflammation. Over long periods of time that could lead to tissue death and scarring, however its not been specifically tested for microplastics in the environment. T he Felix Project, the charity at the heart of the Evening Standards groundbreaking Food for London campaign, has been recognised by the Pope. Justin Byam Shaw, chairman of the Standard and founder of The Felix Project, and David Cohen, the newspapers campaigns editor who launched Food for London, were invited to meet the Pope as part of a private audience in Vatican City. Pope Francis, 81, warned that the current difficulties and crises within the global economic system ... has effectively created a culture of waste blind to the human dignity of the most vulnerable. He said the growing globalisation of indifference manifested itself not only in materially poorer countries but increasingly amid the opulence of the developed world. Mr Byam Shaw thanked the Pope for highlighting the issue of food waste and entreated him to keep it high on the agenda. The meeting took place in Sala Regia, a state hall in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican that is an antechamber to the Sistine Chapel and was originally used for the reception of princes. Earlier, Mr Byam Shaw had told a 300-strong audience at Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome how The Felix Project was delivering nearly three tonnes of surplus food a day to Londoners in need. How can it be that in a country as rich as the United Kingdom, two million people are struggling to feed themselves while at the same time our food industry has a surplus of 700,000 tonnes of edible food, 93 per cent of which is spread on crops, burned or wasted? he asked. It was this mismatch that attracted me as an entrepreneur to start The Felix Project. Mr Byam Shaw spoke at the 25th international conference of the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation, a Vatican institution that promotes Catholic teachings on social and economic issues. The panel was titled: Towards a sustainable food chain: responsibility against the throwaway culture. Since the launch of Food for London in 2016, Felix had grown at a phenomenal rate thanks to 300 regular volunteers, mostly Standard readers, he said. From a single van picking up from half a dozen outlets, Felix now deploys 11 vans to gather fresh surplus produce from 170 suppliers and deliver to 180 frontline charities each month, saving nearly 20 tonnes of food each week. He said: 70,000 London children go to school hungry every day adding: We hope to deliver to 120 schools and we plan to be operating across the whole of London by 2020. A n unseen photo of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry takes pride of place in the Queen's Audience Room at Buckingham Palace, it has been revealed. In the unreleased photo of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex the happy couple are seen in a loving embrace with Meghan placing her hand on her husbands chest. It was spotted in the background of the Queen's meeting with the Honourable George Brandi, the Australian High Commissioner to the UK when he visited the palace on Wednesday. The Audience Room features a number of the Queens most prized possessions. The photo was seen in the Queen's Audience Room / Getty Images The photo of the couple stands alongside other pictures of the Queen's grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Audiences are typically held in the Queens Audience Room or in the 1844 Room. Every week the Queen gives audience to the Prime Minister in the room where she also meets with the Chancellor of the Exchequer before the new budget is announced. The Queen and Prince Philip looked on proudly as Prince Harry wed Meghan on May 19 in an emotional ceremony. According to reports Prince Philip battled through the ceremony with a cracked rib after falling over in the bath just days before the big day. He was hailed a hero after turning up to the event in Windsor walking unaided just six weeks after undergoing a hip replacement. I sis have claimed responsibility for a terror attack in Belgium which saw two police officers and a 22-year-old man shot dead. A gunman, believed to be serial convict Benjamin Herman , stabbed two female police officers in the city of Liege on Tuesday before grabbing on of their weapons and turning it on them. The women were named as Soraya Belkacemi, 53, and Lucille Garcia, 45. He also shot dead a man sitting in a nearby car, named as Cyril Vangriecken, 22. Police officers Soraya Belkacemi, left, and Lucille Garcia, right, were killed in the gun attack / Facebook The suspect was killed by police after briefly taking a cleaner hostage at the city's Waha Secondary School. He cried: "Allahu akbar", the Arabic phrase for "God is great", several times during Tuesday's rampage, prosecutors said. Cyril Vangriecken, 22, was in his car when he was shot and killed by the gunman / Facebook The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on Wednesday claiming the gunman was a soldier of the Caliphate. Herman is also understood to have been on two-day release from prison for "family leave" when the attack took place. Liege shooting: Two police and passer-by dead in Belgium He was due to travel back to his home town of Rochfort, just 40 miles from Liege, during his release despite prison officers branding him "extremely violent". According to state broadcaster RTBF Herman, who was born in 1982, had a criminal record that included a number of convictions for theft, assault and drugs offences. Officials later confirmed that Herman had also killed another person on Monday. The victim is believed to have been a former inmate who did jail time with Herman. Two police officers and passer-by shot dead in Belgium 1 /14 Two police officers and passer-by shot dead in Belgium Emotional: A police officer puts up his hand to cover his face at the scene of a shooting in Liege, Belgium REUTERS Explosives experts arrive at the scene of a suspected terror attack in Liege EPA A bomb squad arrives at the scene of a suspected terror attack in Liege EPA Armed police stand behind a car at the scene of the shooting in Liege, Belgium REUTERS An ambulance car is seen on the scene of a shooting in Liege REUTERS A police cordon and police in vests at the scene of a fatal shooting in Liege REUTERS Ambulance vehicles arrive at the scene of the fatal shooting AFP/Getty Images Forensics experts after two police officers and a passer-by were shot dead during a terror attack in Liege, Belgium REUTERS Police special forces are seen during a shooting in Liege REUTERS People run from the scene of a suspected terror attack in Belgium REUTERS/VICTOR JAY Police special forces on scene after the fatal shooting REUTERS Police officers are seen on the scene of a shooting in Liege REUTERS Armed police walk past emergency services vehicle following the shooting REUTERS Four forensics officers near to the scene of the shooting REUTERS Prosecutors today branded the attack an act of terrorism. Belgian federal magistrate Wenke Roggen said the attack was considered "terrorist murder and attempted terrorist murder". A man who shot dead two police officers and a bystander in Liege had already killed another person the day before the attack, Belgium's interior minister has said. Jan Jambon told broadcaster RTL that the gunman, identified as Benjamin Herman, "also committed a murder the night before". Mr Jambon confirmed that the victim was a former inmate who did prison time with Herman. Herman is alleged to have killed the man on Monday evening by hitting him over the head with a blunt object. Belgian Special Police at the scene of the shooting / AP He was eventually killed in a shootout with police on Tuesday after stabbing two female police officers, stealing their handguns and shooting them. The two officers have been named as Soraya Belkacemi, 53, and Lucille Garcia, 45. Police officers Soraya Belkacemi, left, and Lucille Garcia, right, were killed in the gun attack / Facebook He also shot dead a man sitting in a nearby car, named as Cyril Vangriecken, 22. He later took a cleaner hostage before being shot dead by police. Cyril Vangriecken, 22, was in his car when he was shot and killed by the gunman / Facebook Tributes have poured in for the three people killed in the attack, with Liege police sharing an image of the two officers killed. Colleagues of the two officers described them as wonderful women, mothers and policewomen. Mr Vangriecken's father told BFMTV that his son was focused on his studies, adding: My son was a perfect child. When I say perfect, it was perfect. The terror suspect had been jailed numerous times and appeared in national security documents, according to reports. Theresa May condemns knife and gun attack in Belgium Herman is also understood to have been on two-day release from prison for "family leave" when the attack took place. He was due to travel back to his home town of Rochfort, just 40 miles from Liege, during his release despite prison officers branding him "extremely violent". A British lawyer and staunch critic of Vladimir Putin has been released after he was held by police in Spain on a Russian Interpol notice. Bill Browder was detained early on Wednesday morning in Madrid. He documented his arrest on Twitter, telling followers he was in Spain to give evidence to a "senior Spanish anti-Russian Mafia prosecutor". Mr Browder tweeted Wednesday that he was being arrested, posting a photo on his official profile saying that he was in the back of a Spanish police car on the way to a police station. "Urgent: Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. Going to the police station right now," Browder wrote. A Spanish national police spokeswoman confirmed that Browder had been detained Wednesday morning in Madrid and taken to a police station to check on the arrest warrant. Police found out there that the order was no longer valid, she said. The spokeswoman, who wasn't authorised to be identified in line with police rules, said the financier was released minutes after his detention. In an image of a detention report posted by Browder himself on Twitter, police identified the reason for the detention as "fraud." A Moscow court sentenced Browder, who was born in the U.S. and is now based in London, to nine years in prison in absentia over tax evasion and funneling money overseas. He has dismissed the accusations. The financier and Ivan Cherkasov, an associate who was sentenced to eight years behind bars, were also ordered to pay 4 billion rubles (52 million) to the Russian government in damages. Browder has advocated for US sanctions targeting Russian officials over human rights abuses. He was the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, named after Browder's former employee Sergei Magnitsky, who died in jail after accusing Russian officials of involvement in a tax fraud scheme. The Magnitsky Act became a sore point between the US and Russia after it was signed into law by former President Barack Obama in 2012. Shortly afterward, President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning American citizens from adopting Russian children, in a move widely viewed as retaliation. Browder led one of the biggest investment funds in Russia for 10 years before he left the country and was barred entry in 2006 as a threat to national security. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson tweeted that he had "just spoken to Bill Browder" adding he was "very glad that he has now been released". Mr Johnson added that Moscow should "concentrate on bringing those responsible for the murder of #Magnitsky to justice", referring to lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Russian prison in 2009. I llusionist David Copperfield has been found negligent over injuries sustained by a British tourist during a vanishing act in a Las Vegas show. Gavin Cox and his wife alleged negligence by the multimillionaire illusionist, two of his business entities, the MGM Grand hotel and a construction firm that was carrying out renovations. In a complex verdict reached after several weeks of testimony but only about two hours of deliberation, a state civil court jury in Nevada found negligence by Copperfield, the hotel and Copperfield's company, Backstage Disappearing Inc. But jurors found no liability for each of those named in the lawsuit, and instead found the former chef from Kent "100 per cent responsible" for his own injuries. The jury did not find Copperfield to be financially responsible for Mr Cox's injuries. The verdict means the Coxes cannot seek monetary damages. Mr Cox, 57, alleged that he suffered brain and other injuries in the 2013 fall. He told the court that stagehands urged him and others to run during an illusion that appeared to make as many as 13 audience volunteers disappear onstage and reappear moments later, waving flashlights in the back of the theatre. His lawyer, Benedict Morelli, told jurors during closing arguments that the trick was inherently dangerous and that Copperfield should be held partially liable for Mr Cox's injuries. Four years ago, attorneys estimated that Mr Cox had racked up more than 240,000 ($400,000) in medical costs. Copperfield's lawyers lost a bid to close the courtroom to the public to prevent disclosure of secrets about the illusion. Jurors learned that in about 60 to 90 seconds, stagehands with flashlights ushered the randomly chosen participants past dark curtains, down passageways, around corners, outdoors, indoors and through an MGM Grand resort kitchen to re-enter the theatre for the show's finale, according to testimony. Mr Cox told the jury he was "having a good time up until the time I was injured". He recalled stagehands shouting "Run! Run! Run!" through an outdoor alleyway that his lawyers say was coated with construction dust. Mr Cox said he fell hard on his right side and did not remember getting up to finish the illusion in November 2013. Afterwards, Mr Cox said he received medical treatment from paramedics and at a hospital for shoulder and other injuries. Two days later, he and his wife and a lawyer returned to the theatre at the MGM Grand and filed an accident report. At least 55,000 audience volunteers had taken part in the trick over 17 years, according to the magician and show executive producer Chris Kenner. Copperfield testified that until Mr Cox sued in August 2014, he never knew of anyone getting hurt during nearly 20 years performing the illusion on tour and in Las Vegas. He said he stopped performing it in 2015. The magician said he did not see construction dust on the ground when he passed through the same outdoor alley alone as part of another illusion about 10 minutes earlier. Mr Cox's lawyers brought in three women who testified that they also were injured. D onald Trump accused Mexico of doing nothing to stop illegal immigrants crossing into the US as he revived his pledge to make the country pay for his planned border wall. Mexicos president Enrique Pena Nieto quickly issued a public rebuke, saying: no we wont following Mr Trumps comments on Tuesday. The US leader was addressing supporters at a campaign-style rally in Nashville, Tennessee when he reignited the row over the proposed wall. The pledge was a favourite campaign theme of Mr Trumps before he was elected and has been a long-standing bone of contention with Mexico. "In the end, Mexico is going to pay for the wall," the US President told the crowd. "They do absolutely nothing to stop people from going through Mexico, from Honduras and all these other countries ... they do nothing to help us." Donald Trump tours Mexico border wall prototypes 1 /9 Donald Trump tours Mexico border wall prototypes REUTERS Getty Images AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images REUTERS REUTERS REUTERS AFP/Getty Images REUTERS Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto took to Twitter to hit back. F rench security forces today began the destruction of the largest illegal migrant camp in Paris. CRS riot police arrived at Porte de la Villette, in the north-east of the capital, soon after dawn with orders to move on anybody found sleeping rough. Some 1700 mainly young men living in the camp were evacuated. Scores of charity tents had been pitched alongside a canal, causing a safety and public health hazard, but they were soon removed. Police form a cordon at a large makeshift migrant camp along the Canal Saint Denis / EPA Two men drowned in the filthy water this month, and others have been injured in fights between rival gangs so increasing pressure on the authorities to act. All of those evacuated cooperated fully and were transported to temporary accommodation in the Paris area, said a charity worker at the scene. Two men drowned in the filthy canal in the past month and fights regularly broke out between inhabitants / EPA Conditions in the camp had become extremely bad, and the hope is that all those who were living there will find somewhere better. Paris city hall officials confirmed that 24 reception centres mainly gyms were being made available. Migrants form a line to board buses, as their large makeshift camp is torn down / EPA Most of the migrants come from Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, and have made dangerous journeys down through Africa before taking boats from Libya to the European mainland. They want to claim asylum in countries such as Britain and France, claiming that they have suffered persecution or been otherwise ill-treated in their own homelands. Todays was the 35th camp evacuation in Paris in the past three years, and follows President Emmanuel Macrons pledge to speed up the asylum process and to deport those who failed. Interior Minister Gerard Collomb announced two weeks ago that camps in Paris would be razed. Two other large camps remain in place in Paris one mainly used by some 1000 Afghans by the Canal Saint Martin, and another at the Porte de la Chapelle, where up to 400 Africans are sleeping rough. Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, has appealed to the government for more help, after removing some 28,000 migrants from camps since 2015. I taly's prime minister-designate today raised hopes of a compromise deal with anti-establishment parties to avoid a technocratic, caretaker government before fresh elections. Carlo Cottarelli, who was tasked by Italys president to calm political and economic turmoil, suggested an agreement might be possible with the Five Star Movement and League. Those parties were the big winners of elections in March, but their choice for the economy ministry, Eurosceptic Paolo Savona, 81, was blocked by president Sergio Mattarella. Mr Cottarelli said: New possibilities have emerged for the birth of a political government, according to the Ansa news agency. These circumstances, also considering the market tensions, have caused me to wait for further developments. A source close to Five Star said the parties were seeking a compromise candidate to take charge of the economy ministry, but League leader Matteo Salvini, whose party is surging in opinion polls, had appeared to throw cold water on that idea, saying Italy should return to an election as soon as possible. The earlier we vote the better because its the best way to get out of this quagmire and confusion, Mr Salvini said. He admitted, though, that an election in July would be disruptive for Italians, and put the spotlight on Mr Mattarella to explain to us how we can get out of this situation. Mr Mattarella has invited Mr Cottarelli, a former economist at the International Monetary Fund, to try as prime minister designate to form a government. The two men held talks this morning, but there was no immediate sign of a breakthrough that could allow Mr Cottarelli to avoid a vote of no-confidence in parliament, dominated by the two anti-establishment parties. The political chaos has spooked financial markets, with the European Central Bank said to be considering an emergency meeting on the crisis. Any deal between the president and Five Star/League would ease uncertainty but may still usher in a coalition determined to ramp up spending in the heavily indebted state and push for a revision of eurozone fiscal rules. In the event of continued stalemate, Italy will go back to elections, with most major parties calling for the president to dissolve parliament and hold a vote as soon as July 29. An opinion poll showed that the League, which says that eurozone rules are enslaving Italians, would boost its share of the vote to 25 per cent, from 17 per cent on March 4. The Ipsos poll, in the Corriere della Sera newspaper, showed support for the Leagues would-be coalition partner, the Five Star Movement, steady at 32.6 per cent, implying a much more comfortable majority if the pair were to try again to govern. I srael has warned it is closer to war than it has been for years following a major flare-up of violence on the Gaza border. Palestinian militants bombarded southern Israel with dozens of rockets and mortar shells on Tuesday, while Israeli warplanes struck targets throughout the Gaza Strip in the biggest clashes since the 2014 war. Israel today denied a claim by Hamas that they have reached a ceasefire through Egyptian mediators that would have ended the largest flare-up of violence between the sides since the 2014 war. Khalil al-Haya, a senior Hamas official, said that Egyptian mediators intervened "after the resistance succeeded in warding off the aggression". However Israeli Cabinet minister Naftali Bennett told Israel's Army Radio no agreement has been reached yet. Palestinian rockets fly towards Israel / AP The sudden burst of violence follows weeks of mass Palestinian protests along the Gaza border with Israel - triggered by the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem. Over 110 Palestinians, many of them unarmed protesters, have been killed by Israeli fire in that time. Israel says it holds Gaza's Hamas rulers responsible for the bloodshed. Israel Katz, the Israeli intelligence minister, said last night: We are the closest to the threshold of war since Operation Protective Edge. We don't want it, and the other side doesn't either, but we have our red lines. The Israeli military said its aircraft hit 55 militant targets in the Gaza strip, including sheds full of drones, military compounds and training facilities. No Palestinian casualties were reported. It came after Palestinian militants fired 70 mortar bombs into Israel earlier on Tuesday, injuring three soldiers, in what was their heaviest attack against Israel since the 2014 war. One mortar shell landed near a kindergarten shortly before it opened. The Israeli military struck 55 targets in the Gaza Strip / AP "Israel will exact a heavy price from those who seek to harm it, and we see Hamas as responsible for preventing such attacks," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies and have fought three wars since the Islamic fundamentalist group seized control of Gaza in 2007. The last war in 2014 was especially devastating, with over 2,000 Palestinians killed, including hundreds of civilians, and widespread damage inflicted on Gaza's infrastructure in 50 days of fighting. Some 72 people were killed on the Israeli side. Tuesday's violence bore a striking resemblance to the run-up to past wars. In the early morning, Palestinian militants fired over two dozen mortar rounds into southern Israel, including the shell that landed near the kindergarten. Flames of rockets fired by Palestinian militants are seen over the Gaza Strip heading toward Israeli lands / AP The Israeli military confirmed over 60 airstrikes throughout Gaza, including an unfinished tunnel near the southern city of Rafah that crossed under the border into Egypt and from there into Israeli territory. It said other targets included a rocket manufacturing workshop, naval weaponry, military and training facilities and a munitions manufacturing site. Palestinian militants continued to fire additional barrages toward southern Israel, setting off air raid sirens in the area throughout the night. Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, the chief military spokesman, threatened tougher action and said it was up to Hamas to stop the situation from escalating. "These strikes will continue to intensify as long as necessary if this fire continues," he told reporters outside Israeli military headquarters. Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant issued a joint statement Tuesday, claiming shared responsibility for firing rockets and projectiles against Israeli communities near Gaza. I talian political leaders were scrambling today to cobble together a coalition to avoid fresh elections which could plunge Europe into financial crisis, according to sources. The two anti-establishment parties, the Five Star Movement and League, were the big winners of elections in March, but their choice for the economy ministry, Eurosceptic Paolo Savona, 81, was blocked by Italys president. A source close to Five Star said the parties were seeking a compromise candidate to take charge of the economy ministry, but League leader Matteo Salvini, whose party is surging in opinion polls, appeared to throw cold water on that idea, saying Italy should return to an election as soon as possible. The earlier we vote the better because its the best way to get out of this quagmire and confusion, Mr Salvini said. He admitted, though, that an election in July would be disruptive for Italians, and put the spotlight on Italian president Sergio Mattarella to explain to us how we can get out of this situation. Mr Mattarella had invited Carlo Cottarelli, a former economist at the International Monetary Fund, to try as prime minister designate to form a government. The two men held talks this morning, but there was no sign of a breakthrough that could allow Mr Cottarelli to avoid a vote of no-confidence in parliament, which is dominated by the two anti-establishment parties. Italy's President Sergio Mattarella is under pressure to announce fresh elections / AFP/Getty Images The political chaos has spooked financial markets, which were watching nervously today, with the European Central Bank said to be considering an emergency meeting on the crisis. Any deal between the president and Five Star/League would ease uncertainty but may still usher in a coalition determined to ramp up spending in the heavily indebted state and push for a revision of eurozone fiscal rules. In the event of continued stalemate, Italy will go back to elections, with most major parties calling for the president to dissolve parliament and hold a vote as soon as July 29. An opinion poll showed that the League, which says that eurozone rules are enslaving Italians, would boost its share of the vote to 25 per cent, from 17 per cent on March 4. The Ipsos poll, in the Corriere della Sera newspaper, showed support for the Leagues would-be coalition partner, the Five Star Movement, steady at 32.6 per cent, implying a much more comfortable majority if the pair were to try again to govern. K im Kardashian has arrived at the White House for a meeting with Donald Trumps senior adviser. Kardashian was pictured entering the West Wing ahead of talks about criminal justice reform with the US Presidents son-in-law Jared Kushner on Wednesday. She had urged Mr Trump to pardon Alice Marie Johnson, 63, who is serving a life sentence without parole for committing a non-violent drug offence. Attorney Brittany K. Barnett, part of Johnson's legal team, said Kardashian also hopes to meet with President Trump to discuss the case. Kardashian is seen entering the grounds of the White House / AFP/Getty Images In an interview with Mic, Kardashian said she'd been moved by the story surrounding Johnson, a great grandmother, after seeing a video by the news outlet. "I think that she really deserves a second chance at life," she said. "I'll do whatever it takes to get her out." Kim Kardashian, right, hopes to also meet Donald Trump, left, during the visit / AP It comes after Kardashians husband rapper Kanye West sparked a social media maelstrom earlier this month by declaring his support for Mr Trump. Kardashian also forced him to backtrack on a string of Twitter posts after the Gold Digger rapper said he considered the US leader a "brother". West tweeted to his more than 18 million followers: "You don't have to agree with trump but the mob can't make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. N orth Korea does not have plans to give up its nuclear weapons but Kim Jong Un might open up a burger joint in a show of good will to America, a CIA report said. A new American intelligence assessment report stated that North Korea does not appear to have any intention of denuclearising in the near future. After reading the report which circulated earlier this month, an intelligence officer told NBC News: Everybody knows they are not going to denuclearize. Intelligence officers were allegedly shown the report days before Trump cancelled a scheduled nuclear summit with the North Korean leader. But, Trump has since made it clear he plans to continue to pursue a meeting despite the cancellation. The CIA report also outlined a list of potential concessions by North Korea which included Kim offering to open a hamburger franchise in Pyongyang in a show of good will. Trump is known for his love of fast food and has even suggested that the North Korean leader meet with him to discuss nuclear weapons over burgers. Donald Trump is known for his love of fast food / AP The report suggested that there is little evidence that North Korea will abandon its nuclear programme and said it would be more realistic to ask Kim to reverse the recent progress he has made which includes the testing of a thermonuclear device. Intelligence officials said the report was not conclusive however and described North Korea as a hard target claiming that the country was notoriously difficult to gather intelligence from. North Korea Military - In pictures 1 /33 North Korea Military - In pictures The fourth tunnel of North Korea's nuclear test site is blown up in Punggye-ri, North Korea AP AP News1 via Getty Images Reuters EPA EPA News1 via Getty Images Reuters AP EPA News1 via Getty Images North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversees a target-striking contest of the special operation forces of the Korean People's Army (KPA) Reuters An intermediate range Hwasong-12 missile launched by North Korea earlier this year AP Missiles are driven past a stand with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and other high ranking officials during a military parade marking the 105th birth anniversary of North Korea's founding father, Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang Reuters A military drill marking the 85th anniversary of the establishment of the Korean People's Army Reuters Commandoes march across the Kim Il Sung Square during a military parade AP North Korean leader Kim Jong Un guides a target-striking contest of the special operation forces of the Korean People's Army (KPA) Reuters A test launch of a Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile AP A Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile AP Soldiers on tanks parade across Kim Il Sung Square during a military parade AP North Korean leader Kim Jong Un observes the test-fire of the country's Hwasong-15 long-range ballistic missile North Korea tested ballistic missiles such as the Hwasong-14 last year AP North Korean soldiers salute while the national anthem is played during a military parade AP University students carry the national flag and two bronze statues of the late leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il during a military parade AP North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspecting soldiers AP Navy personnel sit in front of a submarine-launched ballistic missile during a military parade AP North Korean leader Kim Jong Un claps with military officers at the Command of the Strategic Force of the Korean People's Army (KPA) Reuters Women in uniform march across Kim Il Sung Square during a military parade AP Rockets being launched by Korean People's Army (KPA) personnel during a target strike exercise at an undisclosed location in North Korea AFP/Getty Images Soldiers shout as they march across Kim Il Sung Square during a military parade AP Special operation forces personnel of the Korean People's Army (KPA) conducting a target strike exercise in North Korea AFP/Getty Images North Korean soldiers march and shout slogans during a military parade marking the 105th birth anniversary of country's founding father Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang Reuters North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un inspecting the Command of the Strategic Force of the Korean People's Army AFP/Getty Images A pizza store worker in Florida fatally shot a man in a scary clown mask who was beating him with a wooden pole. CCTV footage showed the masked man attacking the Little Caesars worker as he closed up the restaurant on Saturday. Police said Heriberto Feliciano was likely justified in his actions as he was ambushed and appeared to be defending himself. Feliciano told officers the suspect had tried to stab him with scissors. He said he pulled out his gun, for which he has a concealed weapons permit, and fired multiple times at close range. The pizza worker then dialled 911 to try and save his assailant, ABC News reported. "He's not breathing," Feliciano told authorities. "I don't want to get close to him; he tried to stab me with a pair of scissors." He added: "He hit me in the face with a big piece of wood." Holly Hill Police Chief Steve Aldrich told ABC News that investigators are probing the matter "as a robbery". The suspect died in hospital, and his identity was not immediately confirmed. Feliciano was hospitalised for face and shoulder injuries, police said. A prominent Kremlin critic who was thought to have been gunned down in Kiev turned up alive at a news conference this afternoon flanked by security officials. Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was reported to have been shot dead, with Russia being accused of involvement in the killing by Ukraine. Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, told reporters that the agency faked Mr Babchenko's death "to catch those who are trying to kill him". He claimed his would-be assassin has now been captured by Ukrainian police, having allegedly been ordered to kill Mr Babchenko for $40,000. Arkady Babchenko is seen at the back of the room during a press conference on Wednesday In a statement, he said: "Special apologies to my wife, Olechka. I am sorry, but there were no options here. "The operation took two months to prepare. I was told a month ago. As a result of the operation, one person has been captured." Kiev and national police had said Mr Babchenko, a strong critic of the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin, was shot multiple times in the back at his apartment building and found bleeding by his wife. Ukrainian police guard the entrance to the Babchenko's home in Kiev following the staged shooting / EPA However Mr Babchenko, who regularly denounced Russia's actions in Syria and eastern Ukraine, walked into the press conference this afternoon, and thanked the Ukranian security service for saving his life. The 41-year-old is one of Russia's best-known war reporters. He spoke about leaving the country last year because of repeated threats against himself and his family. After news of his apparent death, Ukraine's Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said: "I am confident that the Russian totalitarian machine did not forgive him his honesty and principled stance." A senior Russian official denounced the staged assassination as "an act of provocation" by Ukrainian security services against Russia. S ingapore Airlines is launching the worlds longest commercial flight with a journey time of just under 19 hours. The flight launches in October and will travel from Singapores Changi Airport to Newark Airport in the US, a distance of some 16,700 kilometres (10,300 miles). It will knock current record holder Qatar Airways flight from Auckland to Doha into second place with a journey time of 17 hours and 40 minutes. However those wishing to travel cheaply will be disappointed as there isnt an economy class on the flight. The current world's longest flights 1. Auckland to Doha 14,535km (9032 miles) Flight time - 17 hours 40 mins 2. Perth to London 14,500 km (9,010 miles) Flight time - 17 hours 20 mins 3. Auckland to Dubai 14,201km (8,824 miles) Flight time - 17 hours 5 mins 4. Los Angeles to Singapore 14,114km (8,770 miles) Flight time - 17 hours 55 mins 5. Houston to Sydney 13,834km (8,596 miles) Flight time - 17 hours 30 mins The Airbus A350-900ULR aircraft will be configured in a two class layout with 67 business class seats and 94 premium economy class seats. The planes have higher ceilings and larger windows and is said to have lighting designed to reduce jetlag. Singapore Airlines CEO Mr Goh Choon Phong said in a statement: The flights will offer customers the fastest way to travel between the two cities in great comfort, together with Singapore Airlines legendary service and will help boost connectivity to and through the Singapore hub. The airline had flown a similar route from 2004 until 2013 but cancelled the route as it fell short of revenue expectations. Following the cancellation, customers had to travel from Singapore to JFK via Frankfurt. In March, Qantas introduced a non-stop flight from Perth to London, making it the UKs longest non-stop passenger flight. The flight takes around 17 hours, travelling a distance of 9,010 miles. It is around three hours quicker than routes which involve stopping in the Middle East to change planes or refuel. Passenger reaction to direct flight from Australia to UK A church pastor and his wife escaped with their lives after gunmen fired into their car from point blank range at a petrol station in South Africa. Mzoxolo and Perfidia Oliphant had just pulled into the garage to fill up their Jeep Grand Cherokee in Cape Town, South Africa, when terror struck. A man wearing a bobble hat is seen on CCTV walking up to the 4x4 and it is thought the churchman recognises danger as he begins to pull away with the petrol pump still in. The gunman pulls out a revolver and opens fires with three shots in quick succession hitting Mrs Oliphant, 49, sitting in the passenger seat in the neck, face and upper arm. The gunman stumbles over the petrol pipe as he runs from the scene The gunman flees and trips over the petrol pump cable and a second hitman comes into view who takes the revolver off the original shooter and re-cocks it and shoots again. He fires at least two bullets into the Jeep from behind and the drivers door is seen to open and close and then the vehicle crashes into the garage perimeter fence. Both shooters flee and when the scene appears safe garage staff rush to the aid of the victims and call for the emergency services. Ambulances raced to the scene and rushed Mrs Oliphant to hospital where she underwent lifesaving surgery and the three bullets were successfully removed. The shooting was was all over in 10 seconds but the CCTV footage shows the lack of fear of the gunmen at being caught by police. A BC cancelled Roseanne Barrs TV series after she compared former Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape. The star posted tweets online also linking Ms Jarrett to the Muslim Brotherhood before later apologising. In a grovelling apology she wrote: I apologise to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me my joke was in bad taste. Who is Valerie Jarrett? The 61-year-old served as the senior adviser to president Barack Obama. During her time with the Obama administration, she oversaw Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs and chaired the White House Council on Women and Girls. She is Obamas longest serving advisor and co-chaired the Obama-Biden presidential transition team. Ms Jarrett oversaw the Obama administrations efforts to support working families, helping to promote policies such as equal pay, paid leave and affordable childcare. She also led campaigns to try and end sexual assault and gun violence. Ms Jarrett has known the Obama family since hiring Michelle Obama in 1991 as an assistant to the mayor of Chicago. Axed show: Roseanne Barr returned to Twitter after the announcement / AFP/Getty Images Now she continues to help the former president, acting as a senior advisor to the Obama Foundation alongside her role advising media company ATTN: Early career In her early career, Ms Jarrett studied her undergraduate degree at Stanford and studied law at the University of Michigan. She left private practice for public service, serving as a planning commissioner at the Chicago city government, helping to redevelop neglected neighbourhoods. She later became chairman of the Chicago Transit Board. Ms Jarrett was born in Iran to two American parents. Her father brought the family to Iran while running a hospital that sent American doctors to developing countries. She currently serves on the boards of Lyft and Ariel Capital Management Holdings. She is also a senior fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. Why did was she attacked on Twitter by Roseanne Barr? Roseanne Barr launches fresh Twitter tirade after her show is axed over racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett Ms Barr is one of Donald Trump's most high-profile supporters. Her tweet was in response to a post from a user that accused Ms Jarrett of covering up the Obama administration's alleged "misdeeds." C omedian Roseanne Barr has launched a fresh online tirade after being sacked for posting a racist tweet about a former adviser to Barack Obama. ABC TV network cancelled the US stars show after she shared an abhorrent tweet saying Valerie Jarrett was like the child of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes film. She apologised after her show, Roseanne, was pulled by the network but later re-tweeted support and posted her own message of defiance. She first blamed being on sleeping pills for the Tweet, before going on to say she thought Ms Jarrett was white. Valerie Jarrett, the subject of Roseanne's racist Tweet / AFP/Getty Images She apologised online, writing: I'm sorry 4 my tweet, AND I will also defend myself as well as talk to my followers. So, go away if u don't like it. I will handle my sadness the way I want to." She added: "I'm tired of being attacked & belittled more than other comedians who have said worse." She went on to blame Ambien sleeping pills for her post, before stating online: "yes, I mistakenly thought she was white" in another post. In other posts on her Twitter feed, she said appealed for people not to defend her and suggested she had taken a sleeping pill called Ambien before posting the messages. Who is Valerie Jarrett... the woman at the centre of Roseanne Barr's racist tweet storm She wrote: guys I did something unforgiveable so do not defend me. It was 2 in the morning and I was ambien tweeting-it was memorial day too-i went 2 far & do not want it defended-it was egregious Indefensible. I made a mistake I wish I hadn't but...don't defend it please. Barr's co-star John Goodman pictured after the show's cancellation / TheMegaAgency.com Barr, 65, had claimed she would quit Twitter after the row was sparked by a reply to a tweet mentioning Jarrett in which she said: muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj. But she quickly returned to the platform. Tagging Jarrett in one message, she wrote: I want to apologize to you. I am very sorry to have hurt you. I hope you can accept this sincere apology!" The cast of Roseanne pictured together earlier this month at the launch of the show's reboot / Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP Earlier she apologised to her colleagues on Roseanne who lost their jobs following the show's cancellation. She wrote: "Don't feel sorry for me, guys!!-I just want to apologize to the hundreds of people,and wonderful writers (all liberal) and talented actors who lost their jobs on my show due to my stupid tweet." Barr also revealed she would be appearing on US comedian Joe Rogan's podcast on Friday. Following her original comments, Barr was widely condemned from celebrities including her own castmates. Long time star: actress Sara Gilbert / Getty Images Writing on Twitter, British actress Minnie Driver, who stars in ABC's Speechless, wrote: "So proud of @ABCNetwork for having the ethical compunction to cancel Rosanne despite the show's huge numbers. We too make a show about a middle class family, come and watch us instead speechless @Speechless-ABC." Sara Gilbert, who starred alongside Barr in Roseanne, labelled her comments "abhorrent". She said: "Roseanne's recent comments about Valerie Jarrett, and so much more, are abhorrent and do not reflect the beliefs of our cast and crew or anyone associated with our show. I am disappointed in her actions to say the least." Comedian Wanda Sykes was the first to quit the show announcing her resignation even before ABC cancelled the programme. Another of Barr's co-stars, Emma Kenney, revealed she was ready to quit the show in protest at the comments. She tweeted: "I am hurt, embarrassed, and disappointed. The racist and distasteful comments from Roseanne are inexcusable. Filming of the new series of Roseanne which was aired on ABC but cancelled after a racist tweet by Roseanne Barr / Adam Rose/ABC via Getty Images "As I called my manager to quit working on Roseanne, I was told it was cancelled. I feel so empowered by @iamwandasykes, Channing Dungey and anyone at ABC standing up for morals and abuse of power." Jarret is yet to respond to Barr's apology tweet, but earlier, speaking on MSNBC, said: "I'm fine. I'm worried about the people out there who don't have a circle of friends and followers who come right to their defence." John Goodman, who plays Roseanne's husband in the show / Andy Kropa/Invision/AP In March, Barr told ABC's Good Morning America that Donald Trump had called her to congratulate the ratings success her revived sitcom had experienced. Barr has been a vocal backer of the US president and also plays one of his supporters in Roseanne. At the time Barr said the Republican was happy for her, adding: "I've known him for many years and he's done a lot of nice things for me over the years." B ritains Got Talent viewers were in hysterics as comedian Robert White took aim at the four judges within his routine on Wednesday night. The semi-finalist impressed with his musical comedy, especially his comments about Amanda Holden, Alesha Dixon, David Walliams and Simon Cowell sitting just in front of him. With one lyric, he sang: David Walliams is obsessed with his heterosexual pretending while another mocked Cowell for liking the sound of his own voice on the show. He also made a quip about Dixons dress sense as well as savaged Holden for trying to look young and joking that her younger years are behind her. Viewers were quick to comment on Twitter, hailing Roberts act as fantastic and backing him for glory. One wrote: Robert White Take A Bow!! Best comedian so far #BGT #BGTSemiFinals. While another commented: Robert White is so funny!! I just love him. Get him to the finals!!!! #bgt #bgtsemifinals I am OBSESSED with Robert White!! He. Is. Incredible!! Amazing comedic timing and totally adorable, can I be his best friend please because that would be awesome?! I LOVE HIM!! #BritainsGotTalent #BGT, praised somebody else. Shocked: The judges reacted during Robert White's comedy routine / ITV The comedic song was similar to his first audition, which impressed the judges enough to earn him a chance to fight for a spot on the bill at the Royal Variety Performance later this year. Ant and Decs golden buzzer Marc Spelmann, Holdens golden buzzer Gruffydd Wyn Roberts and dance group Rise Unbroken were also among the acts to perform during the third live semi-final. A stream dried up. Then the ground at Umuzu Mbana village, Otolo, Nnewi in Nigeria has reportedly begun to emit flames and a strange odor. The President of the community said that when the villagers sighted the fire, they thought it was something they could just contain and put out with water. But surprisingly that was nothing like expected. Flames were unquenshable and panicked people flew away! At Umuzu Mbana village, Otolo, Nnewi, a waterfall and the resulting stream (Oduga) have suddenly dried up. The mysterious disappearance was followed by a weird, unquenshable bush fire and a very bad odor that have sent the villagers packing in distress. Many of the villagers were said to have relocated to other neighborhoods, but others are still trapped in the village helplessly. The President General of the community, Hon Afam Muodelo, said the stream was the source of potable water for the villagers. He said the water was the cleanest of all. But, it was around January 2018 when the villagers began to perceive foul odour all over the place and nobody could understand what was going on. The comminity sent people to resolve the mystery. They came back saying the bad smell was coming from the stream site which had dried up some months earlier, and which was actually burning alive. The flames were unquenshable Mysterious! Health and emergency officials were drawn to the site with no solution at sight and argued each villagers should start drinking milk morning and night, every day, as a preventive measure against health hazards. But it is most probable that everybody can afford this quantity on a daily basis. Geologists and officials have currently no clues about what is happening in the community of Nigeria right now. Is this stench due to the river mud or something decomposing? Or to oil? Nigeria is indeed full of black gold and oil fire cannot be extinguished only with water. Or gas coming out of a crack from deep underground? Why did the water suddenly dry up? A crack in the Earth? A huge sinkhole? Is a volcano awakening? As seen at Kilauea in Hawaii, eruptions trigger large cracks, emit gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, a gas that smells like eggs gone bad. In any cases, it is very shocking that so-called environmental analysts and health experts are advising residents in the area to take 2 tins of milk daily to prevent a health crisis. Follow us: Facebook and Twitter Anambra State Online Oduga Stream In Nnewi Dries Up; Emits Flames, Offensive Odor! Science/Technology Nairaland Countries & Areas Search for country or area A Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan B Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burma Burundi C Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Costa Rica Cote dIvoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czechia D Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic E Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia F Fiji Finland France G Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana H Haiti Holy See Honduras Hungary I Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy J Jamaica Japan Jordan K Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan L Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg M Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique N Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Korea North Macedonia Norway O Oman P Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territories Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Q Qatar R Republic of the Congo Romania Russia Rwanda S Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria T Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu U Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Uzbekistan V Vanuatu Venezuela Vietnam Y Yemen Z Zambia Zimbabwe Almost a hundred Romanians turned out to watch the documentary "The Greater Union - Romania at 100" documentary by the AGERPRES National News Agency at Cinema Palace in the western city of Oradea, as part of a national caravan. The audience consisted of young people, including Moldovan students, military staff, historians, heads of autonomous public administration bodies, along with Greek-Catholic bishop Virgil Bercea. A Moldovan student confessed, after watching the documentary, that "the Romanian ideal has become even stronger in his moods" and asked if the crew of directors is contemplating continuing this documentary with a second part."Our idea is to bring together increasingly more Romanians around this beautiful idea that Romania is more than just a country, Romania does not mean borders, it is tradition, love, being close to each other, regardless of where we go, whether in Romania or other countries," said Marilena Stanescu of the production crew.The documentary will be presented in the following days in two Oradea high schools, at the City of Oradea Museum, as well as at a meeting of the university rectors from all over the country who will meet June 1-3, in Oradea for a convention of the National Council of Rectors.After Oradea, the documentary film will travel to Galati, Constanta, Braila, Timisoara, as well as in other cities in the country."The Greater Union - Romania at 100" is made by Mihut Nastasache, Marilena Stanescu and Sergiu Olteanu; cinematography by Alfred Schupler, Sergiu Olteanu and Andrei Carlan; reporters: Marilena Stanescu, Mihut Nastasache and Camelia Moise; graphics, sound and editing by Andrei Carlan, technical assistant Alexandru Vintilescu.The documentary traces the AGERPRES journeys in the footsteps of the makers of the Greater Union: in Moldova, Northern Bucovina and Transylvania. The descendants of those who contributed to the reunification of Romania open to the public the backstage of this very important historical moment. Romania's Constitutional Court noted on Wednesday that there is a conflict between powers in the case of the rejection of the removal from office of Chief Prosecutor of Romania's National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) Laura Codruta Kovesi. CCR President Valer Dorneanu announced that it admitted the Prime Minister's referral in the Court's plenary, with a majority of votes, regarding the conflict of jurisdiction, a conflict between the Justice Minister and the President being noted, as determined by the refusal of the head of state to act on the request for the removal from office of the DNA head. "As regards the way forward and the other aspects, you will shortly have them in the press statement, and the arguments elaborated in the decision," he specified.The referral formulated by the premier, upon President Klaus Iohannis ' refusal to remove from office the head of DNA, was tabled with the CCR on 23 April. Romanian authorities will focus, during the exercise of Romania's Presidency of the Council of the European Union, on legislative and non-legislative files with direct and immediate impact on citizens' daily lives, said the Economy Minister Danut Andrusca, at the meetings of the Competitiveness and Growth Council (COMPET), informs a release from the relevant ministry. On May 28 and 29, Minister Danut Andrusca attended in Brussels the works of the Competitiveness and Growth Council (COMPET) Internal Market and Industry Section. On the sidelines of the COMPET meeting, the economy minister had working meetings with Carsten Pillath, Director General for Economic Affairs and Competitiveness of the General Secretariat of the EU Council, and Lowri Evans, Director-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs at the European Commission, to discuss technical issues on Romania's preparation of the Presidency of the Council of the EU..Voicing Romania's position concerning the regulation proposal on the relationships between platforms and enterprises, the economy minister said that Romania agrees that promoting trust in online platforms and transparency for their users is relevant, both from the perspective of the competitiveness of enterprises as well as of achieving the Single Digital Market's objectives."The Presidency of Romania at the Council of the EU will aim to make the Union's policies permanently relate to the principle of cohesion between the member states and between the different socio-economic categories. A priority of Romania's Presidency at the EU Council will be the deepening of the Internal Market for ensuring its full, correct and effective functionality, including from the perspective of the four fundamental freedoms - people, goods, services and capital. The European industry needs a long-term policy, at least until 2030, which will take into account the diversity of the current industrial base in the EU and the impact of the evolution of digitization. From the perspective of competitiveness, Romania pays much attention to the consolidation of the industrial policy. In the context of achieving the objective of increasing the Union's competitiveness and of using the whole potential of the Internal Market, Romania will propose, at the level of the EU, the promotion of a new Strategy on the Internal Market adapted to the economic and technological realities after 2020. We believe that the defense industry occupies an important place in the future Multi-Annual Financial Framework," Minister Andrusca said in Brussels. President Klaus Iohannis welcomed Prince Charles, on Wednesday, at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace, with whom he discussed the Romanian-British strategic partnership, based on the enhanced cooperation in the economic and security sectors. "President Klaus Iohannis evoked the excellent official visit made last year by his Royal Highness Prince Charles of Wales and appreciated, once again, the dedication and involvement of his Royal Highness in charitable acts in Romania and promoting natural beauty, authentic traditions and the biodiversity of the Romanian rural environment," according to the Presidency. In context, the president "saluted the recent presence of the Prince of Wales at the seat of the Romanian Cultural Institute in London, to visit the exhibition that celebrates the uniqueness and the extraordinary diversity of the Romanian natural heritage, a project carried out in collaboration with the Prince of Wales Foundation. Both President Iohannis and the Prince of Wales reiterated the very good level of the strategic partnership between the two countries, based on the enhanced cooperation in the economic and security fields. "Moreover, President Klaus Iohannis pointed out the solid contribution of the British armed forces in ensuring the regional security," reads the press release. President Iohannis confirmed again the role as binder of the bilateral relationship represented by the Romanian community that lives and works in the United Kingdom. The temporary dining decks, installed last year to help restaurants keep business during the coronavirus pandemic, will by next month be removed or reconstructed to stretch only along the length of respective eateries' storefronts. Minister for Romanians Abroad Natalia-Elena Intotero asked the authorities of the Piedmont region in Italy for support so that more Romanian children living there benefit from Romanian language, culture and civilisation classes in the schools where they study, a press release of the relevant ministry sent to AGERPRES on Wednesday informs. Minister Intotero, on a working visit to Italy she started on Monday, had meetings on Tuesday with the Mayor of Turin, Chiara Appendino and also with the advisor on youth, education, international cooperation, equal chances, civil rights and immigration policies of the Piedmont region President, Monica Cerutti. Among the topics tackled at the meeting with the Italian authorities were the Romanian language, culture and civilisation classes carried out in schools in Italy, the situation of the Romanian community in the Piedmont region, the most numerous foreign community in this region, the quoted source says."I have asked the Italian officials to grant us support for as many Romanian children as possible to benefit from Romanian language, culture and civilisation classes in Italy, as far as possible in the schools were they study. We notice a tendency of the Romanian families to return to their country, and LCCR classes will help children to better integrate in the Romanian system. The classes also represent a benefit for Romanians who do not intend to return home yet, as their children will not lose touch with their national language, culture and identity," Minister Natalia Intotero stated.Natalia-Elena Intotero talked about the success of the project regarding Romanian language, culture and civilisation classes at "Duca D'Aosta" school in Turin, as well as the need for as many schools in Italy to enter such partnership.Romania's Government demarches were also presented during the meetings with the authorities in Turin, aimed at putting a stop to the phenomenon of work exploitation of the Romanian working in Italy, but also the measures taken in view of socially and vocationally re-inserting Romanians who wish to return to the country.Minister Natalia Intotero hailed the good collaboration between local authorities and Romania's General Consulate in Turin and reiterated the Romanian state's availability to pursue cultural and economic exchanges, reads the release.Intotero also mentioned the readiness of university centres in the country to welcome as many foreign students as possible, giving the example of Timisoara university centre, given that an important part of the Italian community in Romania resides in Timis county.The minister also referred to the demarches carried out by the Romanian authorities at interministerial level to stop the phenomenon of abuse through labour, especially in southern Italy and voiced concern over the matter of numerous Romanian children, generally very little, who are institutionalised in Italy then given for adoption, the release further mentions.Another topic approached was the "Information at Home! Safety Abroad!" campaign, who has found support including on behalf of the Embassy of the Republic of Italy to Romania. Considering the decision of Romania's Constitutional Court in the case of the National Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA) head Laura Codruta Kovesi, the President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis should proceed to revoking the chief-prosecutor from office, as requested by the Justice Minister, Tudorel Toader, on Wednesday said the Senate's President, Calin Popescu-Tariceanu. "Today, this is a very important moment for what the strengthening of the republican character of Romania's parliamentary democracy means as far as I am concerned. For a very long time I've heard talks about Romania as a semi-presidential republic, starting from the idea that the president is voted directly. This is not a defining criterion, but it is about the president's attributes. And what is the CCR doing?! It strengthens the power of the Executive, of the Justice minister with regard to the institutional relationship between the Justice Ministry and the Public Prosecution Service. Basically, the CCR emphasises that the Public Prosecution Service is functioning under the Justice minister's authority, as it is written explicitly and unequivocally in the Constitution. The president has but a solemn role to give weight and lawfulness to the appointment decision and implicitly to the revocation decision, in the case of the prosecutors. We are talking about the legislation in force. So, the president cannot have a decisive role neither in the appointment, nor in the revocation...The assessment of the functioning of the Public Prosecution Service and of the prosecutors rests entirely with the Justice minister. I was hoping it would end this way, but I have been eagerly waiting for the opinion of the Constitutional Court and I'm glad it thus clears some of the things which in the past have created confusion and controversy (...) The revocation decision that is made by the Justice minister cannot be in any way contradicted by the President. The President must go on with the revocation request regarding the DNA head," Popescu-Tariceanu said, at the Senate seat. He stressed that the CCR decision "is marking yet another important step regarding the return to normalcy." After over sixteen years of foreign military occupation, Afghanistan, the fourth most corrupt country in the world, continues to be battered and blasted by war. Its citizens are victims of suicide attacks by insane savages and, according to the magazine Stars and Stripes, the number of US bombs dropped on Afghanistan in March 2018 was the highest for that month in five years. While ISIS is being pushed underground in Iraq and Syria, the number of fighters pledging loyalty to the group appears to be growing in Afghanistan. But it isnt only the ravages of war that are destroying the country. The social fabric is being terminally torn asunder by human rights violations that are either ignored or condoned by both the government and the US-NATO military alliance amongst whose key functions is Supporting the adherence to the principles of rule of law and good governance. The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), Mr John Sopko, has for eight years carried out his duties in an exemplary fashion, being responsible for independent and objective oversight of the $117.26 billion the US has provided to implement reconstruction programs in Afghanistan, but has been frequently deflected and misled by the US Department of Defence and the Afghan government. SIGARs Report of July 2017 recorded that Afghan officials remain complicit in the sexual exploitation of children by Afghan security forces, but as noted by the Washington Post, the Pentagon tried to block an independent assessment of child sex abuse crimes committed by Afghan soldiers and police, instead insisting on the creation of its own report offering a far less authoritative review of human rights violations perpetrated by US allies. It is now public knowledge that there is a culture of sodomy in Afghanistan and that Afghan men in positions of power at all levels enjoy immunity from prosecution for abusing young boys. The practice of bacha bazi, or boy play is revolting, and the word play is entirely inappropriate. Foreign Policy magazine states that Demeaning and damaging, the widespread subculture of paedophilia in Afghanistan constitutes one of the most egregious ongoing violations of human rights in the world. The adolescent boys who are groomed for sexual relationships with older men are bought or, in some instances, kidnapped from their families and thrust into a world which strips them of their masculine identity. These boys are often made to dress as females, wear makeup, and dance for parties of men. They are expected to engage in sexual acts with much older suitors, often remaining a mans or groups sexual underling for a protracted period. But the Pentagon doesnt want us to know anything about this, and has in the past actually punished US soldiers for taking action against bullying perverts. The New York Times reported in 2015 that after special forces Captain Dan Quinn beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave he was relieved of his command. He said later that We were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did, which is absolutely correct, because even the barbaric Taliban did not permit such criminal obscenity to go unpunished. Sexual abuse of boys in Afghanistan continues unchecked in spite of the SIGARs criticisms and regardless of the international Convention on the Rights of the Child which requires nations who ratify the agreement to undertake to protect children from all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. The United States, however, has not ratified the Convention, which means that it is not legally bound by any of its requirements. As The Economist observes, the US lawmakers who oppose the treaty say it would usurp American sovereignty, a long-standing fear about the UN among some conservative Republicans. There is a fear that the social and economic rights established by the treaty could provoke lawsuits demanding that the government pay for these things. It is not surprising that the Pentagon has done nothing at all to oppose gross abuse of children in Afghanistan. Then there is the scandalous treatment of women in that corrupt and shattered country, where in 2009 a law was passed permitting men to starve their wives to death if they deny them sex. In 2014, after another five years of US-NATO support of adherence to the principles of rule of law and good governance the Kabul parliament approved a law which allows men to attack their wives, children and sisters without fear of judicial punishment, undoing years of slow progress in tackling violence in a country blighted by so-called honour killings, forced marriage and vicious domestic abuse. Amnesty Internationals 2017-2018 Report informs us that In the first half of [2017] the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission reported thousands of cases of violence against women and girls across the country, including beatings, killings and acid attacks. Against the backdrop of impunity for such crimes and a failure to investigate, cases of violence against women remained grossly under-reported due to traditional practices, stigmatization and fear of the consequences for the victims. There is no sign whatever that women in Afghanistan are being treated better than before the US invaded in late 2001. In all its years of operations and Supporting the adherence to the principles of rule of law and good governance in Afghanistan the US-NATO military alliance has not made the slightest difference to the appalling way in which Afghan males conduct themselves towards females. Since 1979 there has been an international Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which has been ratified by 187 of the UNs 194 nations (including Afghanistan). It specifies that States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women in all matters relating to marriage and family relations and the countries refusing to agree to its enforcement are Iran, Palau, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tonga and the United States of America. Afghanistans Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) was passed by presidential decree in 2009. It laid down criminal penalties for various abuses including rape, child marriage, forced marriage, domestic violence, sale of women and girls, and baad, the giving of girls to resolve disputes between families, and seemed to be a major step forward in attempts to improve the way in which women are treated. Human Rights Watch notes that in March 2017 a revised penal code was adopted by presidential decree. It incorporated all the provisions of the EVAW law, while strengthening the definition of rape. However, because a number of conservative members of parliament have opposed the EVAW law, some activists campaigned to preserve the law in its stand-alone form decreed in 2009. In response to their efforts, in August President Ghani ordered the Ministry of Justice to remove the EVAW chapter from the new penal code. The controversial reversal has left the status of the law in limbo. In other words, women in Afghanistan are back where they started: without rights, without protection, without hope. The Afghan government and the US-NATO military alliance disregard or even condone some of the most horrendous human rights violations in the world. The people of Afghanistan are suffering from a combination of the civil wars devastation and the mediaeval mindset of many of its primitive legislators and officials. Yet foreign money continues to pour in, while the suicide detonations are echoed by B-52 bombs all over the country. The human rights calamity in Afghanistan will not be alleviated while the US-NATO adviser nations continue their present policy. They shouldnt have been in Afghanistan in the first place, but it is now time that the foreigners who have contributed to the catastrophe in Afghanistan brought pressure to bear on the Kabul government to pass and enforce legislature that enforces penalties for abuse of human rights, especially those of women and children. That would be one modest step towards bring the place into the 21st Century. Pepe ESCOBAR A crucial question has been consuming policymakers in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon: Does the Trump administration have a strategic plan for the Middle East or not? Few are more apt to answer than Saadallah Zarei, dean of the Institute of Strategic Studies Andishe Sazan-e Noor in Tehran. Zarei, a soft-spoken, extremely discreet man I met in Mashhad a few days ago, happens to be not only one of Irans top strategic analysts but also a key brain behind the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani the ultimate bete noire outside the Beltway. So US strategists could do worse than paying attention to Zarei. While the US owns 37 fixed military bases and almost 70 movable bases in the Middle East, Zarei said, We do not observe specific and exact strategies. He stressed his perplexity with contradictory behavior related to the Shiite population. Americas behavior in terms of the Shiite population of Bahrain and their rights, the Zaydi Shiite population in Yemen and Kashmir and also the Shiite population in Lebanon, which is 35% of the total population, is not specified and nobody knows how the Americans think about Shiites and how they act. Zarei also notes that America does not have a specific policy about the democracies of Turkey and Iran. There is not any specific strategy about democracy in Iraq and Lebanon too. America talks about democracy as an American value and tries to generalize it, but in this region, we see that the best friends of the US are countries where there is no election in their political systems. The bottom line, according to Zarei, is that the US strategy is not coherent in the Middle East. I think this is the main reason for the failure of American policies in this region. Saadallah Zarei. Photo: provided Enter the Hazaras Now zoom in from the macro-analysis to the micro-view on the ground. Compare Zarei to Komeil, a 24-year-old Hazara Shiite from Kabul. Komeil is one among as many as 14,000 soldiers, all Hazara Afghans, carrying an Afghan passport, which made up the Liwa Fatemiyoun brigade fighting in Syria. We met in Mashhad, where he is spending Ramadan, before going back to the frontlines next month. One of the key founders of Fatemiyoun, in 2013, was Abu Ahmad, killed by a missile, of unknown origin, near the Golan Heights, in 2015. At first, the brigade was a religious organization set up to defend Shiite holy shrines in Syria or, as Komeil prefers to stress, defend humanity, weak people. No Fatemiyoun fighters carry Iranian passports even though some, like Komeil, do live in eastern Iran; hes been in Mashhad since 2011. Almost all of them are volunteers; Komeil followed friends who joined the brigade. He undertook military training in Bagram airbase when he was part of the Afghan Army. Komeil told me he engaged in direct combat with an assortment of Salafi-jihadis from Daesh and Jabhat al-Nusra to smaller outfits that were part of the vast, rambling Free Syrian Army umbrella. Hes been on the frontlines non-stop for three years, fighting mostly in Sham and Zenaybi near Damascus, and was also present at the liberation of Aleppo. He described Daesh jihadis as very difficult in battle. He says he saw Daesh fighters wearing American clothes and carrying American-made rifles. Captured prisoners had food from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. He personally captured a French lady working with Daesh but did not know what happened to her, saying only that Commanders treat our prisoners well. He swears less than 10% of Daesh jihadis are Syrians There are Saudis, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Pakistanis, English, French and Germans. In contrast to the propaganda barrage across the Beltway, Komeil is adamant there are no Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) military commanders active with Fatemiyoun, and no Hezbollah. They fight side by side and the Iranians are essentially military advisers. He depicted Fatemiyoun as a totally independent outfit. This would indicate their military training was mostly acquired as members of the Afghan Army, and not via the IRGC. Komeil said the fabled Qods Force commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani did visit the group, but only once. Each force is responsible for its own area of operations; Fatimiyoun; Hezbollah; the Syria Arab Army (SAA); the Pakistanis (strong fighters); the al-Defae-Watan, which he portrayed as an equivalent of the Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi (also known as the People Mobilization Units); and the Medariyoun also from Iraq. The Shiite crescent, revisited The Obama administration admitted at least that Iranian military advisers, alongside Russia air power and Hezbollah fighters, helped the SAA to defeat Daesh and other Salafi-jihadi outfits in Syria. But, for the Trump administration in sync with Israel and Saudi Arabia its all black and white; all forces under Iranian command have to leave Syria (and that would include Fatemiyoun). Thats not going to happen; the virtual total collapse of what is loosely defined in the Beltway as moderate rebels al-Qaeda in Syria included yielded a power vacuum duly occupied by Damascus. And Damascus still needs all these forces to extinguish Salafi-jihadism for good. Iran exerts influence throughout an arc from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. As Zarei analyzed: The Islamic Republic of Iran has a specific strategy in the region. We have specific principles, friends, and capabilities. In addition, we have a coherent understanding of our enemy and we know where should we stand in the next 20 years. Therefore, we try to use our capabilities carefully and manage the job gradually. This has nothing to do with a threatening Shiite crescent, as suggested by Jordans King Abdullah way back in 2004. Its been essentially a slow-motion Iranian countercoup against the US non-strategy across Southwest Asia since Shock and Awe in 2003 as Zarei identified it. The Qods Force formed during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s is the extraterritorial extension of the IRGC. I talked to quite a few war veterans in Karaj, where they gather in an association set up in a replica bunker serving delicious osh soup a Persian equivalent of Tuscan pasta and fagioli after meetings. Commander Syed Mohammad Yayavi said there is no way the Trump administrations demand, expressed by Secretary of State Pompeo, for Iran to dismantle the Qods Force, will ever be accepted. The Qods Force could be described as an equivalent of the US Special Forces and CIA special ops all rolled into one. For Washington, thats a terror organization. Yet in practice, the Qods Force is as much an arm of Iranian national security policy across Southwest Asia as the Pentagon and CIA enforcing US national security interests all around the world. And theres remarkable continuity. At the bunker in Karaj I talked to Mohammad Nejad, a retired Iranian Air Force colonel who acquired his Iran-Iraq battle experience when he was in his mid-twenties, fighting in Bushher. Two years ago he was back in Syria for two months, serving as a military adviser. All eyes on the SCO The incoherent US strategy in the Middle East described by Zarei also applies to Afghanistan. Another demand by the Trump administration is that Tehran must stop supporting the Taliban. Facts on the ground are infinitely more nuanced. The endless US war in Afghanistan has generated millions of refugees; many of them live in Iran. In parallel, Washington has set up a permanent network of Afghan military bases which Tehran identifies as a serious threat, capable of supporting covert ops inside Iran. So what happens is that Tehran, with minimal means and in tandem with intelligence services from Pakistan and Russia does support small groups in western Afghanistan, around Herat, including some that are loosely linked with the Taliban. But that fits into a much larger Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) strategy. SCO members Russia, China and Pakistan, as well as future member Iran, not to mention future member Afghanistan, all want an Asian, SCO-driven solution for the Afghan tragedy. And that must include a place for the Taliban in the government in Kabul. Now compare that with the avowed Trump administration ploy geared to provoke regime change in Tehran. Saudi Arabia is already on it. Riyadh, via a think tank allegedly supported by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, known as MBS, has been funding a string of hardcore anti-Shiite madrassas in Balochistan in Pakistan, which borders Sistan-Balochistan province in Iran. The Saudi plan is to at least disrupt the emergence of Chabahar port, which happens to be the entry point of Indias own New Silk Road to Afghanistan and Central Asia, bypassing Pakistan. BRICS member India, alongside Russia and China, wont be exactly pleased; and India is also a new SCO member, and absolutely adverse to all forms of Salafi-jihadism. Adding even more trouble to this heady mix, the Attorney General for Pakistan, Ashtar Ausaf Ali, on a visit to Iran, received a warning that Daesh is being moved to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Whos doing the moving is unclear. Whats certain is that ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K that is, Daeshs Afghan branch is actually fighting the Taliban. Coincidentally, US airpower is also fighting the Taliban, via Operation Freedoms Sentinel. One report detailed how the number of US weapons released in support of Freedoms Sentinel increased to 562 in April, the highest monthly total of 2018 and the second highest total for any month since October 2011. So, its the Taliban that are getting heavily bombed, not ISIS-K. No wonder SCO nations are on red alert. The real mystery is still to be unlocked by Pakistani intelligence: that is, in what part of the porous Af-Pak border are over 4,000 well-weaponized ISIS-K jihadis being lodged? Who will rebuild Syria? And that leads us to the ultimate inter-connector: China. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his Syrian colleague Walid Muallem have a very close relationship. President Xi Jinping is a firm supporter of the Astana peace process featuring Russia, Iran and Turkey. China announced last November that it would deploy special forces to Syria against all strands of Salafi-jihadism; the Chinese goal is to neutralize 5,000 Uyghur fighters who have acted as moderate rebels, because of concern about militants causing violence if they return to Xinjiang. But most of all, China will be deeply involved in Syrian reconstruction; towns, villages, roads, railways, bridges, schools, hospitals, all connectivity networks. Syria will be rebuilt by China, Russia (energy, infrastructure) and Iran (power grids), not the US or the Gulf petro-monarchies. US and EU sanctions are still in effect, banning commercial operations both in US dollars and euros. This coincides with a meeting in Beijing last week of SCO security council chiefs. Politburo heavyweight Yang Jiechi, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, discussed matters extensively with top Russian security expert Nikolai Patrushev. The 18th SCO summit will be held in Qingdao on June 9. Russian President Vladimir Putin will be there. India and Pakistan will be there. Irans President Hassan Rouhani will be there, representing Iran as an observer, and will meet face to face with Putin and Xi. Thats where all Syria-Afghanistan connections will converge. atimes.com There had been a long fight with fiery speeches, long-winded discussions presenting opposing views, publications and statements in support of resolute steps on the one hand as well as the calls for carefully weighing pros and cons on the other. Finally, the concept of racing headlong into the unknown has prevailed. On May 23, the US House of Representatives turned down a measure that would limit the fiscal 2019 funding for the new 6.5 kt W76-2 low-yield (LY) or flexible nuclear warhead. The ordnance is to be installed on Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), which normally carry 100 kt W76 warheads. The nuclear weapon (NW) is to be developed in accordance with the provisions of Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). Before the vote, 32 former top security officials opposed the idea of low-yield nuclear warhead in a letter sent to the members of Congress. The appeal failed to influence the outcome of the vote in the House. With the funding approved, the W76-2 could be in service during the current presidential term. The proponents, including General John Hyten, the head of US Strategic Command, believe that incorporating a more usable submarine-launched warhead into the defense posture would deter Russia from using LY nukes, decreasing the likelihood of the nuclear war. The tit-for-tat philosophy boils down to the idea that if a battlefield NW is used in Europe, the US wont have to stay idle or respond with a powerful strategic strike. The W76-2 will provide the opportunity to calibrate responses on the escalation ladder with low-yield nukes, preventing an all-out nuclear conflict. This way the deterrence gap will be plugged. Its all premised on the notion that NW could be used in a limited way in Europe with the continental USA not threatened. Basing at sea allows avoiding diplomatic problems related to deploying American nukes on other states territories. But a launch will reveal the position of the submarine to make it vulnerable to attack. The new flexible warhead dangerously lowers the nuclear threshold. Any commander-in-chief would feel less restrained from using LY ordnance in a crisis. The temptation might be too strong to resist. Actually, the very idea that a limited nuclear war is possible appears to be erroneous as there is no way to draw the line and prevent escalation. If Russia sees a US strategic nuclear missile flying into its direction, it will have no choice left but launch an on warning response. It has no reason to assume the best-case scenario. There is no way to know if its low-yield weapons or eight powerful thermonuclear warheads launched as part of a wider foray. Evidently, the very idea of mixing low-yield and powerful strategic weapons on the same missile atop the same platform is very damaging and provocative. Instead of de-escalation, the low yield concept will trigger a nuclear exchange. Russia (the Soviet Union) and the US have concluded 9 major arms control agreements during the recent 50 years. The W76-2 is destabilizing enough to make all the arms control long standing efforts go down the drain. Now, a few words about the need to fill the deterrence gap. The US is going through an upgrade of its nuclear arsenal. The 2019 draft defense budget allocates funds for all the nuclear weapons programs, including the development of new nuclear-tipped long-range cruise missile to strike land targets. When in service, itll become an addition to strategic forces. The US has aircraft-based cruise missiles and gravity bombs. The military is upgrading B61 air-to-ground munitions to the B61-12 version, which is a guided weapon. 180 of them will be deployed by 2021 to carry out the same missions as long range strike systems. This is an essentially new system to strike with high accuracy (under 100 feet) at great distances. But no, thats not enough. The proponents say the B61-12-capable aircraft are not fast and stealth enough and their range is limited. The list of shortcomings can go on, leading to the conclusion that more and more nuclear weapons are needed. Nothing is ever redundant. The concept of limited nuclear war is back again, the constrains on the use of nukes are loosened and the circumstances in which nukes could be used are broadened. This is a very dangerous turn of events, being watched by Moscow very attentively. The bill is going to Senate this month. This is the last hurdle. Over 20 NGOs have sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, which contains arguments against the new weapon. Hopefully, the issue would be given serious consideration and cool heads will carry the day. Its not too late to stop the dangerous sliding down to an unfettered nuclear arms race. Firm in the belief they are representatives of the worlds moral superpower, the Swedish people continue their dangerous flirtation with every new cultural experiment under the sun. Is this really progressive politics, or is it the road to national ruin? In Sweden, everything seems possible except for dissent; dissent from the ubiquitous social message that tells its citizens they must be tolerant of every new cultural fad from getting micro-chipped under the skin to allowing four-year-olds to be indoctrinated in preschool with the newfangled concept of transgenderism. Thousands of Swedes have already been implanted with tiny microchips, typically inserted in the left hand, that will allow them the convenience of no longer fumbling around for their credit cards, identification, keys. Much of their personal information is stored on the chip, which is about the size of a piece of rice. Amazingly, despite the potential for the government, corporations or other powerful entity to hack into these devices, that possibility never seems to enter Swedish discourse. Swedes have gone on to be very active in microchipping, with scant debate about issues surrounding its use, in a country keen on new technology and where the sharing of personal information is held up as a sign of a transparent society, AFP notes. Although the amount of data each chip can hold is currently limited, most technologies begin with humble origins before they eventually exert tremendous influence over their human masters. The hand-held telephone is a great example. Beginning as a convenient method of communication, the smart phone has now gone on to literally conquer the social and cultural domain. The next step may be the realm when, as predicted by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the internet disappears. 'There will be so many IP addressesso many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won't even sense it,' he told an audience at the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos. Sweden, which has managed to avoid a major war for so long it may feel itself invincible, has willfully volunteered to serve as a guinea pig for the brave new technology, which many believe will herald in mankinds total enslavement to the system. Swedens cultural experimentation does not end with the microchip. In the realm of human behavior and sexuality it is also breaking down long-established barriers with its willingness to embrace the transgender movement. First, full disclosure. My personal opinion on transgenderism (which in a nutshell says that the determination of an individuals sex is based on an artificial social construct and possible to change if only the individual wills it) is that it is largely a media-induced mass phenomenon, bordering on mass hysteria. After all, how is it possible that such a radical change in human behavior which says that a man can be a woman (and vice-versa) so long as he identifies with that sex when such a thing was absolutely unheard of less than a decade ago? Man has been evolving for millions of years and only today we hear about people being able to dream up a 'sexual identity'? The only explanation is that it was basically concocted out of the blue and pumped into the public realm on a daily basis until it was accepted as gospel. Which proves that the masses will happily assume any story as truth if it is repeated enough times. In any case, as long as this new sexual identification (there are said to be over 60 different gender types today) remained confined to the realm of the adult world, and did not violate the rights of others (in the US during the Obama era, this was arguably not the case, as grown men who suddenly identified as a woman, were legally permitted to use the womens bathrooms and changing facilities, thereby posing a risk to women and children), then the phenomenon could be considered mostly innocuous. But as with every new cultural curiosity that arises, Sweden has taken transgenderism to the extremes, to the point where it tolerates pre-schools approaching children as if they were gender neutral freaks of nature. In this bizarre world of real-life make believe, Swedes have been addressing each other with the gender neutral pronoun hen since 2015. Swedish schools also carry so-called forward thinking books, like Hasten & Husse, which tells the story of a man who dresses up like a woman. His friend horse, apparently no less confused, is a trans-species that likes to run around the house imagining he is a dog. With this sort of absolute insanity in the air, is it any wonder that the dazed and emasculated Swedish population allowed its government, nudged along by the financial clout of George Soros, to throw open the gates to scores of illegal Middle Eastern and African migrants, many of them escaping from NATO-led conflicts? Today, while Swedish schools are promoting gender neutral role models to their children, very male migrant gangs are making some parts of Sweden practically off limits to the general population. Paramedics and firefighters sometimes need police escorts before entering vulnerable areas, particularly in some neighborhoods of Malmo, Swedens third largest city. As The Spectator reported, the gang wars serve as a constant reminder of Swedens failed migration and integration policies. This is a problem for the government (and even the opposition) in a country that prides itself on being a humanitarian superpower. Despite the lawlessness on the streets, support for the far-right, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party reportedly dropped to its lowest level since surging during the migration crisis of 2015. In light of these seemingly unsustainable trends in this progressive Nordic nation, one must ask the question: How long can the cultural experiments continue before the laboratory burns down? A border dispute in northern Somalia got violent again in mid-May and fighting went on for about a week leaving at least fifty dead. Since the 1990s the two statelets that comprise northern Somalia; Puntland and Somaliland, have been squabbling, and sometimes shooting, over possession of the Sool region that lies astride their border. Both sides claim it, and both are willing to fight for it. The dispute has been going on since Puntland was formed in 1998. Back then Puntland declared they controlled the Sool because the inhabitants belonged to a Puntland tribe. Somaliland based their claim on borders drawn by the colonial governments of Italy and Britain a century ago. Years of negotiations did not achieve anything. Both statelets sent additional troops to the border in anticipation of a fight for Sool. The current Sool violence got started in January, but there were no casualties then. There has been no threats of Sool violence since mid-2014. Before that there was brief fighting in early 2012. There was some Sool tension in 2009 and fighting in early 2008. This was a continuation of a confrontation that started in late 2007. The first real threats of violence were in 2003 and ever since the best the two statelets could do was keep things quiet. A resolution of the Sool dispute continues to be out of reach. Both statelets have been suffering from other internal disputes, but nothing as widespread and destructive as the rest of Somalia. Northern Somalia has been better governed since breaking away from Somalia in the 1990s to form Puntland (2.5 million people) and Somaliland (3.5 million). The other two-thirds of the Somali population to the south has, until the last few year, been in perpetual chaos since 1990. But the two northern statelets have noticed that the security and economic conditions have greatly improved down south. While there are still some rural areas where al Shabaab is still active (more as bandits than a threat to national security) the rest of Somalia is, for many in Somaliland and Puntland a source of envy. In Somaliland there have been demonstrations with people demanding reunification with the rest of Somalia. The local government did not agree and shut down two TV stations that supported reunifications. Three reporters were also arrested as well. After 2012, as al Shabaab gunmen fled the growing number of soldiers, peacekeepers and local militias in Somalia many Islamic terrorists fled to Puntland and Somaliland, where they continue to be a problem. Many more fled to northeast Kenya where the local population is often majority Moslem (while Kenya is overall 80 percent Christian). One of the nasty side effects of this is that many Christians will flee the northeastern areas, leaving the areas short of essential skills. For example in Aajir county (just west of Mandera country) hundreds of schools have closed because their Christian teachers have fled the area. Local leaders are trying to encourage more Moslems to go to university and become teachers. But that takes time and even with the government offering subsidies for tuition there are few takers. So the schools remain empty and fewer Moslem children get any education. Al Shabaab counts that as a victory. May 24, 2018: In the southeast (across the border in Mandera country Kenya) al Shabaab took over a major mosque at 10 PM and held the worshippers their (because of Ramadan) and lectured them for five hours, trying to convince the locals the Kenya was their enemy and Al Shabaab was there to help. The gunmen left without hurting anyone but they were apparently looking for a local Moslem leader who was somewhere else. May 23, 2018: About 40 kilometers southwest of Mogadishu an American UAV missile attacks killed ten al Shabaab gunmen. This is the 14th such airstrike so far this year. In Mogadishu police arrested two ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) members. One of the arrested men is believed involved with a recent attack on police (shooting a traffic cop in the daytime). ISIL favors assassinations against intelligence and counterterrorist officers and have carried out more than twenty such attacks in the last two years. About half of these murders take place in Mogadishu. Most of the local ISIL members are former al Shabaab men who felt al Shabaab was not radical enough. These ISIL members were a minority compared to al Shabaab membership and have had to hide from al Shabaab as well as the security forces. The only ISIL base in the area is in Puntland and all this ISIL group can do is individual murders. Attempts at larger scale attacks have been rare because of a shortage of personnel and other resources. May 22, 2018: Outside Mogadishu an al Shabaab suicide car bomber attacked an army convoy and killed several soldiers. Inside Mogadishu a landmine planted in a dirt road went off and killed three civilians and wounded two soldiers. May 15, 2018: In the north fighting between Puntland and Somaliland over a border dispute started up again. Puntland troops sought to take possession of disputed village in the Sool region, which both countries claim. May 12, 2018: In Hiran (a region 200 kilometers north of Mogadishu) Al Shabaab lost 13 men when a rural village they were trying to impose taxes on called in the army and with those reinforcement was able to defeat the al Shabaab attack. Two villagers were wounded during a five hour battle. The army then sent detachments of troops to nearby villages in case al Shabaab attempted to seize the cattle taxes they wanted from another community in the area. May 9, 2018: In the southeast (Lower Shabelle region) American and Somali commandos raided a rural village used by al Shabaab as a hideout. Three al Shabaab leaders were captured and at least five people were killed. The commandos suffered no casualties. The five people killed were apparently civilians and the Americans are being blamed for the deaths. In operations like this the Americans are there as back up and rarely use their weapons. Elsewhere in the area al Shabaab stoned a woman to death for bigamy (marrying 11 men). Bigamy by women, done in secret, is not unusual in Somalis and usually done for economic reasons. Al Shabaab also took credit for bombing a market in the area that left five dead and ten wounded. A bomb was apparently planted, rather than use a suicide bomber. May 6, 2018: In the south (Jubba) nine Kenyan peacekeepers were killed when their vehicle encountered a landmine. Al Shabaab put the last of a series of three videos on the Internet in which al Shabaab leaders continued to affirm their allegiance to al Qaeda and al Qaeda affiliates in West Africa, Arabia and Afghanistan, where the Afghan Taliban is now considered part of the al Qaeda network. May 4, 2018: In northern Kenya (Mandera) al Shabaab attacked a quarry near the Somali border and killed four Christians who were working there. This is the latest of many attacks in Kenya where over 80 percent of the population is Christian and only twelve percent are Moslem (most of them ethnic Somalis). The area around Mandera has long been the scene between the Kenyan Murule tribesmen and the Marhan from Somalia. The Marhan have long been accused of supporting al Shabaab. Ali Jahangir Siddiqui took charge as Pakistan's ambassador to the United States on Wednesday. Siddiqui arrived in Washington, DC Monday night ahead of his swearing-and replaced outgoing Ambassador Aizaz Chaudhry, the former foreign secretary who served as Pakistan's envoy to the US before his retirement last month. He was welcomed at the airport by Rizwan Saeed Sheikh, the deputy chief of Pakistan Mission to the US. Siddiqui assumes office just a few days ahead of the completion of the incumbent Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government's term. The US Department of State took almost two months otherwise, a routine to send out an agreement to pave the way for the new ambassador's appointment. Siddiqui has to present his credentials to US President Donald Trump in the coming weeks to be fully operational to perform his duties. He has daunting challenges to surmount ahead as well, given the souring US-Pakistan ties. Siddiqui, an investment banking expert by profession, was appointed by the federal government as Pakistan's ambassador to the US last month. He has previously served in the capacity of special assistant to Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, with the status of a state minister. Prior to his appointment in the prime minister's cabinet, he served as the chairman of JS Bank and JS Private Equity both held by Jahangir Siddiqui & Co. Ltd., the parent company owned by his father, renowned businessman and banker Jahangir Siddiqui. Siddiqui, who holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in Economics from Cornell University, was honoured by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2014. US-Pakistan ties On May 11, 2018, the Trump administration imposed travel restrictions on Pakistani diplomats stationed at the Embassy in Washington, confining them to a 25-mile radius and making it obligatory for them to seek permission at least five days in advance if they wish to travel beyond the imposed limits. Pakistan, in return, also imposed similar bans. US State Secretary Mike Pompeo told local lawmakers last week that "our State Department officials are being treated badly as well". "[Our people] working in the embassies and in the consulates and in other places are not being treated well by the Pakistani government either," he claimed. Though Pompeo called it "a real problem," the Department of State said: "It is the responsibility of all host governments to create the conditions necessary to permit the personnel of foreign embassies to carry out their duties." Acknowledging the movement restrictions it had placed on Pakistani diplomats, the US State Department said: "The controls are intended to encourage Pakistan to stop [the] harassment of US Mission personnel and interference with our public activities, which have risen dramatically in recent months." Trump earlier this year announced that his administration intended to cut down financial assistance to Pakistan. This came after months of comments and statements against Islamabad by the US president, who, in his first televised speech late last year, said it needed to "do more". "With respect to Pakistan, we [have] released far fewer funds in 2018 than in the year prior. The remainder of the funds available are under review. "My guess is that that number will be smaller still," Pompeo commented earlier. Last year, Trump accused Pakistan of providing safe havens to terrorist outfits, and demanded that action be taken against the Haqqani network. Given the aforementioned issues, Ambassador-designate Siddiqui faces a tough task in the coming months to bring to normalcy Islamabad-Washington relations and resume bilateral alliance in various fields. Delimitation of four constituencies was declared void while the verdict on five others was reserved by the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Tuesday, said a written court order. Justice Umar Farooq, while announcing the verdict on a petition against the delimitations, declared void delimitations of Jhang, Jhelum, Toba Tek Singh, and Lower Dir. The verdict on delimitation of Bahawalpur, Rahim Yar Khan, Chakwal, Battagram, and Haripur was reserved. The court ordered the Election Commission of Pakistan to hear all stakeholders and carry out the delimitations process again. IHC will hear 37 petitions against delimitation of 20 constituencies on Wednesday. The population proportion must be considered for the new delimitations, the court ordered. The court heard 40 of the 108 petitions lodged against delimitations from Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PML-N), and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). According to the petitioners, political basis for delimitations had not been kept in mind and rules were not considered. The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has faced severe criticism from political circles. A committee of the National Assembly (NA) had previously expressed its displeasure at the non-transparency of the exercise. The ECP follows a set formula for the number of provincial and NA seats that a district is allotted. However, the final mapping within the districts remains unclear and open to controversy. Editor's note: An earlier version of this story said the Islamabad High Court had declared void the delimitation of eight constituencies. The error is regretted. During the statement, neither Nawaz Sharif nor Maryam Safdar, ministers, political workers, lawyers and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) supporters stayed behind to support him. Nawaz Sharif and Maryam Nawaz briefly appeared before the court and left as Maryam Nawaz was scheduled to hold a press conference at Punjab House at 11am. Safdar stood alone and answered many of the questions that were from the period when he was not married to Maryam and part of the Sharif family. Some questions pertain to the period prior to my marriage, Safdar quipped when questions were being read to him. During Safdars statement, NAB prosecutor Sardar Muzaffar Abbasi also left it to other NAB prosecutors and sat in a chair in the front row until the Accountability Court Judge Muhammad Bashir inquired about his stance on something. At one moment, there were only two NAB prosecutors, defence counsel Amjad Pervaiz, one reporter and two security officials on each side who stood near Safdar. During the 15-minute break, when court reporters asked Safdar why everyone left him alone in the courtroom, Safdar said, It was my wish that Nawaz Sharif and family members are not present during my statementhaving the judge in front of you and Nawaz Sharif on your back adds extra pressure. A reporter inquired about Maryam Nawaz leaving the courtroom to which Safdar said, Maryam is with me for the last 25 yearsIsnt that enough that she has stayed with an empty-pocket man for 25 years. He said that Maryam Nawaz left the hearing because he needs her the most at this moment and added that the ministers left since they had work in they had to attend important sessions in the last working days. While answering the court questions, Safdar said, My name did not find mention in any of the documents known as PANAMA LEAKS. With regards to the Gulf Steel Mills establishment in 1974, GSMs sale 75% of shares of in 1978 and 25% in 1980, subsequent 12 million AEDs investment with Qatari Royal family who purchased Avenfield apartments through company Nielson and Nescoll, co-accused Hassan and Hussains stay in the apartments and final settlement with Qatari family in 2006, Safdar said that all these subjects do not relate to him. However, he said that it is correct that co-accused Maryam Safdar was made trustee and I signed the trust deed as witness. Meanwhile, a lawyer who regularly appears before the court regretted that all other cases pending in the court havent been properly heard for the last eight to nine months. He revealed roughly 50 cases were pending before the court but only Panamagate trial is being regularly heard. Safdar would resume his statement on May 30. Nawaz Sharif told the reporters outside the accountability court that the commission ought to comprise of judges, military men, lawmakers and other notables. He added that the proposed commission would identify who made what kind of policies and also reveal their part in it. Commenting on the recent naming of Justice (retd) Nasirul Mulk as caretaker premier, Sharif lavished praise on the English judge. Terming Mulk an outstanding chief justice, the former prime minister said he had done great service to the nation. The Israeli military has targeted dozens of bases belonging to Palestinian resistance movements, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, inside the Gaza Strip. As the Tel Aviv regime continued its aggression, Palestinians also said they were responding to the attacks by shelling Israeli-occupied towns. Israeli army spokesman Jonathan Conricus told reporters on Tuesday that its military "just concluded a significant aerial strike where we struck more than 30 different military targets. "Amongst those a tunnel and different components of military infrastructure belonging to Hamas and to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad," he added. Conricus said the attacks came in response to a barrage of rockets and mortar shells against southern Israel from Gaza earlier on Tuesday, describing the confrontation between the two sides as the most extensive since the 2014 war on Gaza. The mortar attacks from Gaza came a day after Israeli tank fire killed a young Palestinian man and injured another in the southern part of the Gaza Strip as the Tel Aviv regime presses ahead with its acts of aggression against the coastal sliver. Hamas defended mortar attacks on Israel, saying, "What the resistance carried out this morning comes within the framework of the natural right to defend our people." Tensions have been running high along the Gaza fence since March 30, which marked the start of a series of protests, dubbed The Great March of Return, demanding the right to return for those driven out of their homeland. The Gaza clashes reached their peak on May 14, the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Nakba Day (the Day of Catastrophe), which coincided this year with the US embassy relocation from Tel Aviv to the occupied Jerusalem al-Quds. Apart from enforcing its blockade, Israel has launched several wars on the Gaza Strip, the last of which began in early July 2014. The military aggression, which ended on August 26, 2014, killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians. Over 11,100 others were wounded. A Paeroa-based student has picked up a new $15,000 Zespri scholarship thanks to her commitment to safer, healthier workplaces. First year Massey University health sciences student Kelcie Mills has been awarded the kiwifruit marketing companys inaugural three-year scholarship after submitting an essay outlining the far-reaching effects of improved workplace health and safety practices in New Zealand. The 19-year-olds winning essay describes an alarming number of incidents and fatalities in New Zealand workplaces and maintains addressing these issues would in turn create more engaged, productive workers, with higher morale. Health is now being identified as more than just physical, she says. You can't cover emotions with a hard hat and earmuffs and hope for the best. Kelcie had started a business management degree when workplace experience led her to change tack. She is now working at Hauraki District Council while studying extramurally, aiming for a double major in occupational health and safety as well as environmental health. After realising I had more of a 'want to help' mind then a 'money making' mind, I figured that perhaps business management was not the career path for me. It is hard to understand how New Zealand business culture could be impassive about improving their health and safety. Zespri will award Kelcie $5000 per year over the next three years, while she completes her degree. Zespri Chief Grower & Alliances Officer Dave Courtney says his team was impressed with Ms Mills obvious passion for her chosen field of study. Kelcie demonstrated considerable commitment and huge enthusiasm for a subject that is really important for us, says Dave. Her goal is to become the kind of approachable, knowledgeable person who can empathise with workers while improving their working environment. Thats exactly the kind of attitude we are actively encouraging in our own industry. In October 2017, Zespri and WorkSafe NZ finalised details of an enforceable undertaking agreement that aims to raise health and safety standards in and around the kiwifruit industry. Kelcie says the scholarship is part of this programme. Zespri is in the throes of rolling out a series of initiatives to support efforts to improve workplace health and safety in the New Zealand kiwifruit industry and beyond, into the broader community. Bay of Plenty residents are making their concerns about homelessness clear. On Monday, around 50 people took to the streets in Rotorua, issuing a call for a night shelter to help the homeless community. A number of councillors, including Rotorua Deputy Mayor Dave Donaldson and Councillor Merepeka Raukawa-Tait along with Waiariki MP Tamati Coffey and members of Te Taumata o Ngati Whakaue, which empowers whanau, were at the council to meet and listen to concerns raised by hikoi participants. Tamati says the government is committed to addressing homelessness in Rotorua. Make no mistake - our goal is to not just manage homelessness, but to end it. We are prioritising long-term solutions. Housing First offers individually tailored support plans to help Kiwis in need get into homes quickly, stay housed and live better lives. The Housing First model aims to support people faced with chronic homelessness by getting them in to stable accommodation first and then addressing their wider needs. A proposal for the model to be funded in Rotorua has been put to the Ministry of Social Development by Te Taumata o Ngati Whakaue with support from homelessness experienced-services, Lifewise and Link People. The council is working with Te Taumata and has advocated to the Ministry of Social Development, which is responsible for emergency housing and social housing, in support of the proposal. Norma Sturley of Te Taumata and a kuia (elder) of Ngati Whakaue, says the hikoi supporters presented a solution and a possible answer. Their advice for a night shelter will be explored by the council and Te Taumata. "We're going to do our darndest to help them with a short term solution. Keeping them warm in the winter and stopping them from freezing in the cold. There were a few of them concerned about the cold and our heart goes out to them, says Norma. Councillor Merepeka Raukawa-Tait, who oversees the councils peoples portfolio, says it was evident from this mornings event that people are passionate about addressing homelessness. It was clear that there is a hope for a short-term solution. But still we dont want to lose sight that we want to help get our homeless community off the streets, altogether. We need to look for a long-term solution. They made a very passionate plea to the council to do what we can to help them. The council is working with groups and individuals with expertise in homelessness to see how its contribution can support a collective approach to addressing the issue. More about the Rotorua Lakes Councils aim to support efforts to address homelessness can be read here. Bay of Plenty We are looking for a storeman with an OSH forklift license. You will need to be physically for as the job is about 70% forklift... View or Apply on GoodWork.co.nz The Bay of Plentys free Stop Smoking Support service, Hapainga remains top of the country for its successful quit smoking rate, says the Bay of Plenty District Health Board. New Zealand has 16 Stop Smoking Support services. As part of the Governments goal of Smokefree Aotearoa 2025, each service is required to record the number of clients who are deemed to have successfully quit smoking meaning they are smokefree four weeks after their set quit date. Hapainga Team Leader Lizzie Spence says Our smoking cessation practitioners use a carbon monoxide detector, a bit like a breathalyser at four weeks. Low to nil levels of carbon monoxide shows the person is smokefree. Latest Ministry of Health results shows Bay of Plenty is the top performer across the country with a 75 per cent successful quit smoking rate at four weeks. Lizzie Spence says the service has been in the top spot for the last nine months. She says it is great news for the team of five practitioners who support people to quit smoking across the Western and Eastern Bay of Plenty. Lizzie says, The small team really focuses on treating each client as an individual. Quitting smoking is a real journey. Our team might meet with a client several times before they set a quit date. Building a rapport and trust with them is quite crucial to the successful outcome. Stevie-Lee Hiroki, Lizzie Spence, Monique Rio and Walter Harawira from Hapainga. Join the trend quit smoking for World Smokefree Day Its World Smokefree Day on Thursday 31 May. To celebrate, Hapainga, the Bay of Plentys free stop smoking support service is providing those who sign up to quit in May and June the chance to win a $250 voucher. World Smokefree Day is the perfect time to choose the smokefree lifestyle. We know its not easy to stop smoking, but with the right support it can be done, says Hapainga Stop Smoking Practitioner, Stevie-Lee Hiroki. New Zealand is moving closer to Smokefree Aotearoa 2025. The most recent tobacco-use figures show 84 per cent of New Zealanders do not smoke, which is four per cent more than in 2008. And fewer young people are starting to smoke with 96 per cent of 15 to 17 year olds staying smokefree, which is a marked increase from 84 per cent a decade ago. Hapainga staff will be outside in the Esplanade Mall in Whakatane and the Papamoa Plaza ready to sign up those who are ready to quit on World Smokefree Day, 31 May. Throughout the year, Hapainga provides $50 vouchers for all clients who successfully quit smoking. Women who successfully quit smoking during pregnancy to six weeks after their baby is born also have the opportunity to receive a $250 voucher through the Hapainga Hapu Mama incentive programme. District Health Boards have almost doubled their offer to nurses in a package of more than half a billion dollars to settle pay negotiations with the New Zealand Nurses Organisation. DHB spokesperson Helen Mason says the offer is a significant increase going beyond the recommendations of the independent panel proposed by the Prime Minister. She says it deals with pay and also has a commitment by DHBs to address the workforce and planning issues raised by nurses. The offer will invest $520 million dollars between now and mid-2020 for base pay increases, more staff and improving working conditions. Almost half of that is new funding over and above the DHBs previous offer. This offer will increase NZNO members base salary and offers a range of other benefits on top of that to the majority of nurses. The salary of a Registered Nurse with five years experience will go up by around $10,500 over 18 months thats almost $200 extra a week by the end of 2019. On top of that, theyll also get increases in on-call rates. By December 2019, the average take home pay of a full-time experienced Registered Nurse will be around $93,000 a year. In addition to the base pay increases, Helen says there will be a $2000 lump sum payment. DHBs will work with the NZNO to address its broader pay equity claim, and the Ministry of Health will provide an extra $48 million dollars to fund more nurses and measures to ensure safe staffing levels. Nurses, midwives and healthcare assistants are a highly respected and valued part of the health workforce which this increased offer recognises. We listened when nurses said raising base pay was very important to them. This offer has three pay rises in the next 15 months, and adds two steps to the top of the registered nurses scale to recognise the value of their experience. Nurses have used teachers as a benchmark this offer moves their base pay rates to a similar level, with penal rates lifting average earnings of a Registered Nurse with five years experience to $93,000 moving them even higher. The slightly longer term was key so DHBs could meet and go beyond the panels recommendations, almost doubling our last offer. This offer is a considerable improvement on the last one delivering base pay increases, additional staffing and improved working conditions. We think that its a significantly better offer and hope its the basis for an agreement that will avoid strike action. Syracuse, NY -- A New York City man came to Syracuse with criminal intent. Rene DeJesus, 33, enlisted a friend from Oklahoma, Arturo Resto Figueroa, 31, who had flown into NYC to help. The two men traveled to Syracuse in September and met up with another man, Brian Montanez, 22, who lives here, Chief Assistant District Attorney Melinda McGunnigle said today. The spent a night in a hotel, she said. The next day, the men planned to rob Jose "Jimmy" Osvaldo Castro of money and drugs, McGunnigle said. On Sept. 25, they went to an Avery Avenue apartment to stage the robbery. As planned, DeJesus hid in a closet with a loaded gun, McGunnigle said. When the time came, he came out of the closet to confront the victim, McGunnigle said. But things went badly. During the confrontation, DeJesus fired more than 25 times in the small apartment at 1125 Avery Ave., McGunnigle said. Fifteen bullets hit the intended victim, Castro, authorities have said. And one hit Resto Figueroa, one of the partners in crime, McGunnigle said. Both Castro and Figueroa were killed. Their bodies were not found until later by neighbors. DeJesus went back to NYC, where he was arrested several weeks later. Earlier this month, DeJesus pleaded guilty to a 9-count indictment that included murder, weapons and attempted robbery charges. Under a deal worked out with Judge Matthew Doran, he was sentenced today to 25 years to life in prison. Castro's wife wrote a letter to the court in which she said there were no words that could describe the murder of aloved one. DeJesus, who spoke through a Spanish translator, said today that he asked for forgiveness. Doran, the judge, noted how often it was that people start with a plan only to have things go so much differently. DeJesus will have to live with those consequences the rest of his life, the judge concluded. Montanez, the alleged accomplice, is also facing a murder charge for participating in the attempted robbery. He's maintained his innocence and his case is still planned for trial. SODUS, N.Y. -- Two weeks ago today, Owen Hidalgo-Calderon and his mother disappeared in Wayne County. The toddler's mom, Selena Hidalgo-Calderon, was found dead a week later on a Sodus apple orchard where she worked and lived. The 18-year-old mother's body was buried in a bag between two stumps. But Owen remains missing. Hundreds of people have spent over a week looking for the 14-month-old boy. Firefighters, forest rangers, paramedics and law enforcement officers from Wayne County and beyond have combed through the farm in search of Owen. An Amber Alert issued for Owen was canceled Tuesday. But police haven't given up. The search for Owen continued Wednesday. Wayne County Sheriff Barry Virts told WHAM that deputies wouldn't stop until they found the missing boy. An excavator remains here in Sodus to aide in the search for Owen Hidalgo Calderon. The Wayne County Sheriff said it will help them look under large piles of dirt and rocks. He told us he will continue to search for Owen until they find him pic.twitter.com/xEVBjHkpJc Amanda Valdes (@Whamandaa) May 30, 2018 It's been two weeks since baby Owen was last seen. Today we're back out with first responders as they canvass the woods and farmland, looking for any trace of the little boy. I'll have the latest in a live report at noon pic.twitter.com/ojpudD240V Stephanie Robusto (@WHEC_SRobusto) May 30, 2018 Investigators have not said how Hidalgo-Calderon, of Guatemala, died. But the sheriff has said her boyfriend, Evarardo Donoteo-Reyes, is a suspect in the young mother's death. Donoteo-Reyes, 25, also known as Alberto Ebavardo Guiterrez-Reyes, appeared Tuesday in Sodus Town Court on an evidence tampering charge. According to the Democrat & Chronicle, his case will be heard by a grand jury. Hidalgo-Calderon and Donteo-Reyes met at a dairy farm in Cayuga County. They later started working and living together at a Sodus orchard. Donteo-Reyes, of Mexico, illegally entered the United States three times. He has been deported twice, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Estela Calderon, Owen's grandmother and Hidalgo-Calderon's mother, made a plea to her daughter's boyfriend through the Workers' Center of CNY. "I implore Alberto to tell us where is Owen. Please tell us where is he," Calderon said. "It is not fair to have us living this nightmare, to think if he is alive, or dead or eaten by the animals." Deputies have asked anyone with information about the toddler's disappearance to call the Wayne County Sheriff's Office at (315) 946-9711. 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 Archives - Archives - July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2009 December 2009 January 2010 February 2010 March 2010 April 2010 May 2010 June 2010 July 2010 August 2010 September 2010 October 2010 November 2010 December 2010 January 2011 February 2011 March 2011 April 2011 May 2011 June 2011 July 2011 August 2011 September 2011 October 2011 November 2011 December 2011 January 2012 February 2012 March 2012 April 2012 May 2012 June 2012 July 2012 August 2012 September 2012 October 2012 November 2012 December 2012 January 2013 February 2013 March 2013 April 2013 May 2013 June 2013 July 2013 August 2013 September 2013 October 2013 November 2013 December 2013 January 2014 February 2014 March 2014 April 2014 May 2014 June 2014 July 2014 August 2014 September 2014 October 2014 November 2014 December 2014 January 2015 February 2015 March 2015 April 2015 May 2015 June 2015 July 2015 August 2015 September 2015 October 2015 November 2015 December 2015 January 2016 February 2016 March 2016 April 2016 May 2016 June 2016 July 2016 August 2016 September 2016 October 2016 November 2016 December 2016 January 2017 February 2017 March 2017 April 2017 May 2017 June 2017 July 2017 August 2017 September 2017 October 2017 November 2017 December 2017 January 2018 February 2018 March 2018 April 2018 May 2018 June 2018 July 2018 August 2018 September 2018 October 2018 November 2018 December 2018 January 2019 February 2019 March 2019 April 2019 May 2019 June 2019 July 2019 August 2019 September 2019 October 2019 November 2019 December 2019 January 2020 February 2020 March 2020 April 2020 May 2020 June 2020 July 2020 August 2020 September 2020 October 2020 November 2020 December 2020 January 2021 February 2021 March 2021 April 2021 May 2021 June 2021 July 2021 August 2021 September 2021 October 2021 By Jacob Pucci | jpucci@syracuse.com We came, we saw and we conquered a whole lot of pizza from across Central New York. We ate Neapolitan pizzas cooked in a wood oven imported from Italy and international award-winning pies and pies we had to balance on a baby high chair because our table wasn't big enough. We were impressed by all six finalists--it's clear why they were the top-voted pizzerias in Central New York. While we were visiting the six finalists, readers took part and voted for their favorite . And the winners are: Judges' Choice: Pavone's Pizza & Eatery Readers' Choice: Pavone's Pizza & Eatery Scroll down to see our thoughts on the finalists and the winners of best pizza in CNY. The finalists are listed in ascending order, from sixth place to the top prize. Judging notes: Our judging team was Jacob Pucci, Julie McMahon and Jared Paventi. Jacob Pucci is the Best of Central New York reporter for syracuse.com and The Post-Standard, Julie McMahon is a public affairs reporter for syracuse.com and The Post-Standard and Jared Paventi is a restaurant critic for syracuse.com and The Post-Standard and beer and beverage writer for NYup.com. We visited all six finalists and ate cheese pizza and at least two other types of pizza from each pizzeria. To learn more about each of the six stops, or you enjoy reading attempts at food-related humor, check out our log of thoughts and sights from the tour. Don't Edit No. 6 - Twin Trees III Twin Trees and its variants operate seven locations in Central New York and its unique thick-crust-but-not-Sicilian round pizza cut into strips has become a style in and of its own. As the sign out front says, Twin Trees serves much more than just pizza. The sit-down restaurant (no slices) also offers steaks, chops, Italian entrees, burgers, sandwiches and more. Twin Trees III beat out the original Twin Trees on Avery Avenue by the skin of its teeth in our poll to determine which location the judges would visit. Address: 310 N. Main St., North Syracuse Don't Edit Jared Paventi Twin Trees III Twin Trees cooks its pizza in a pan, so the crust is not has crispy as some of the other pizzas we ate. Judges Jared Paventi and Julie McMahon said the crust was a little soggy, even by Twin Trees standards. Judge Jacob Pucci disagreed, calling these pizzas an ideal example of Syracuse-style pizza. They do get credit for the Buffalo chicken pizza, which was the spiciest of the ones we tried and came topped with large chunks of chicken--and plenty of them. Both this pizza and the sausage and mushroom pizza we ate were piled high with toppings. This pizza came with a large cup (small soup bowl?) of blue cheese dressing along side, which earned big points in our book. It was chunky blue cheese too. If we were judging pizzerias by their blue cheese dressing, Twin Trees III would probably win. See more photos from Twin Trees III Don't Edit No. 5 - Paladino's Pizza Nowadays, it seems like most the crowd at the Northern Lights plaza is there for Paladino's Pizza, which has called Mattydale home since 1980. The shop probably hasn't changed too much since it opened, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The stiff-seated booths are a bit cramped for three adults, but us having two large pizzas might have played a role in that. Address: 231 Northern Lights Plaza, Mattydale. Don't Edit Jared Paventi Paladino's Pizza We noticed that the biggest difference in our three finalists that serve traditional New York-style pizza is the crust. Paladino's pizza was less crispy and a little more doughy than either Pavone's or Mario & Salvo's, which drew mixed reviews from our judges. We tried the cheese, meatball and Buffalo chicken pizzas. We were a bit disappointed that there was no blue cheese element, whether in the form of crumbled cheese on the pizza or in the form of a dipping sauce, with the Buffalo chicken pizza. The crumbled meatball was well-seasoned; it was actual meatball, not just ground beef. The cheese pizza was similarly good. See more photos from Paladino's Pizza Don't Edit Don't Edit Jared Paventi No. 4 - Peppino's Pizzeria A mural depicting several mustachioed men baking pizzas and bread in brick ovens takes up one whole wall of this restaurant, evoking an old-world vibe in a restaurant nearing 50 years in business. Peppino's expanded to downtown Syracuse in 2015 with Peppino's Neapolitan, where homemade pasta and Neapolitan pizza cooked in a brick oven highlight the menu of the decidedly more upscale eatery. Address: 1849 Grant Blvd., Syracuse. Don't Edit Jared Paventi Peppino's Pizzeria As you can see above, the chicken bacon ranch pizza lurked in the background while the PS2 pizza was the star. The CBR was no slouch and we particularly liked that neither the chicken, bacon, ranch sauce or the ranch dressing spiraled on top overpowered the other elements, even though the bacon and ranch on their own are strong flavors. Judge Julie McMahon dabbles in vegetarianism, but cheats often and had no problem eating the PS2, which is topped with several different types of sausage, ricotta cheese, shaved manchego cheese and Calabrian oregano. In fact, she said it was one of the best pizzas she ate on our trip. Just as Twin Trees III would likely win a hypothetical best of blue cheese dressing competition, Peppino's would probably win a best of pepperoni battle. The cup-and-char pepperoni on the PS2 were like little crispy flying saucers of smoky, meaty goodness with a texture far superior than their skinny, flat cousins. See more photos from Peppino's Pizzeria Don't Edit Jared Paventi No. 3 - Fabio's Antica Cucina Fabio's Antica Cucina opened inside the Icon Tower in downtown Syracuse in June, easily making this the youngest of our six finalists. While Fabio's takes its pizza seriously--they brought the wood-fired pizza oven and the flour used to make the pizza over from Italy--the restaurant serves a full menu of Italian entrees, homemade pastas, soups, salads and starters. When you're there, make sure to stop and see Paco the fish in the giant fish tank in the center of the dining room. Chef Fabio Santalucia has said the fish is fed a diet that includes tomatoes and garlic. Address: 344 S. Warren St., Syracuse. Don't Edit Jared Paventi Fabio's Antica Cucina Fabio's makes Neapolitan pizza, a style of pie known for its quick cooking time and thin-but-chewy crust. They were the only Neapolitan pizza place that made our finals. Is it the best Neapolitan pizza in CNY? Judge Jared Paventi suggested a separate Neapolitan pizza judging contest, pitting together the likes of Fabio's, Apizza Regionale, Ironwood, Peppino's Neapolitan and Gilda's. We enjoyed the combination of savory Italian sausage and slightly bitter broccoli rabe on one of the pies, but our favorite was the Torre Icona, billed as the signature pizza of the house. While not quite as tall as its namesake, the Torre Icona (Icon Tower) is an impressive sight with a mountain of fresh arugula, extra virgin olive oil and shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese on top of Fabio's Bianca pizza. The greens were added immediately after the pizza was taken out of the oven, so the greens closest to the pie wilted just enough to hold the pizza together. A lemon wedge accompanied the pizza to squeeze on top. The added acidity was a great compliment to the peppery greens. Judge Jacob Pucci said this was the best pizza of all the ones we ate. See more photos from Fabio's Antica Cucina Don't Edit Jared Paventi No. 2 - Mario & Salvo's Pizza Turning left into the DeWitt shopping plaza that Mario & Salvo's has called home since 1992 can be a headache, but it's worth it for pizza this good. The pizza shop itself is plain--stacked pizza boxes waiting to be filled is the primary decor and the menu is displayed on back-lit Coca-Cola-branded menu boards on the wall. It's everything a neighborhood pizza shop should be. Address: 4326 E. Genesee St., DeWitt. Don't Edit Don't Edit Jared Paventi Mario & Salvo's Pizza All three judges agreed that Mario & Salvo's had the best tomato sauce of any of the six finalists. The sauce plays a complimentary role, but it shouldn't be an oversight and it was clear to us that they take their sauce seriously. It was well-seasoned, neither too sweet nor too bitter and was robust enough to not simply be drowned out by the cheese and toppings. As for the pizza itself, judges Jacob Pucci and Julie McMahon thought this was the crispiest of the bunch. The Buffalo chicken pizza lacked a blue cheese element, but the chicken itself was great--large pieces of fried chicken breast with a sauce that packed quite a bit of spice (though not quite as much as Twin Trees III.) Thanks to a healthy helping of garlic, the broccoli pizza was a surprise star for us and eating a green vegetable made us feel a little bit better about eating little else but pizza for six days. See more photos from Mario & Salvo's Pizza Don't Edit Jared Paventi No. 1 - Pavone's Pizza & Eatery Angelo Pavone and his brother Frank started the eponymous pizzeria in 1971, about 15 years after the family came to the United States from Sicily. Angelo himself was there when we visited the DeWitt location, which narrowly edged the downtown Syracuse location in a reader poll. After introducing himself (our visits were unannounced, but we know people caught on), he sat a nearby table and tucked into two slices for lunch. Mario & Salvo's owners Mario Di Marco and Salvo Barbarino used to work at Pavone's before branching out on their own, an example of the influence Pavone's has had on New York-style pizza in Central New York. Address: 5781 Bridge St., DeWitt. Don't Edit Jared Paventi Pavone's Pizza & Eatery Pavone's took home the top prize because every component in the pizza was consistently great. The crust--less crunchy than Mario & Salvo's, but with a touch more chew--was our favorite of the bunch. The sauce finished second to Mario & Salvo's in our very informal poll among the three judges. The sausage on one of the pizzas we tried (not pictured) was shaved into wafer-thin rounds that crisped when cooked, almost like the Peppino's pepperoni we loved so much. "It was consistent from beginning to end," Judge Jared Paventi said. The vegetables on the veggie specialty pizza we ate were sliced thin enough to cook all the way through, yet not be soggy and bog the whole pizza down, which unfortunately happens all-too-often with veggie-heavy pizzas. For us, it showed the attention to detail Pavone's pays to its food and part of the reason why Pavone's is a slice above the rest. Still, the judges agreed that this was the closest and most competitive competition we've done so far. If there's one thing we learned, it's that we're pretty lucky to have so many great pizza options in Central New York. See more photos from Pavone's Pizza & Eatery Don't Edit Honorable mentions and superlatives We named our overall winner, but we wanted to break it down further and dole out more specific awards. Best cheese pizza: Mario & Salvo's Pizza Best Buffalo wing pizza: Twin Trees III Best vegetarian pizza: Fabio's Antica Cucina's Torre Icona Best meat lovers pizza: Peppino's PS2 Best specialty pizza: Fabio's Antica Cucina's Torre Icona Best value: Paladino's Pizza Best crust: Pavone's Pizza & Eatery Crispiest pizza: Mario & Salvo's Pizza Best service: Fabio's Antica Cucina Best sauce: Mario & Salvo's Pizza Spiciest pizza: Twin Trees III's Buffalo chicken pizza Best ambiance: Fabio's Antica Cucina Don't Edit Central New York's best food truck 2017 Still hungry? Then track down one of Central New York's best food trucks. Don't Edit Syracuse, N.Y. - Apizza Regionale, the wood-fired pizza place co-owned with the founder of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, is in the running for USA Today's search for the best pizza in New York. "It's amazing," said Apizza owner-operator Paul Messina. Messina grew up on Staten Island eating pizzas from Denino's, Joe's in Manhattan and Di Fara's in Brooklyn. Those shops are also in the top 10, as of today, along with Apizza. "Domenico de Marco, he's the owner of Di Fara's," Messina said. "To me, that's the Holy Grail of pizza shops. To be a part of that list is absolutely mind-blowing." Apizza is among 20 pizza restaurants competing to be the 10 Best, a contest run by USA Today. Thirteen of the 20 are from New York City. Voting for the contest is open until noon on June 26. Messina and John Stage -- who founded the Dinosaur nearly 30 years ago -- opened Apizza in March 2016 across the street from the popular barbecue restaurant. Messina described Stage as a financial partner and mentor, who helps consult on the menu. Messina is the one running the restaurant. Messina said he's not sure if the USA Today staff visited his restaurant before naming its finalists. He said he got an email late last week congratulating him for making the cut and asking for a bio and some photos. He complied, not sure at first whether the initial message was really from the national newspaper. After a few email exchanges, he understood it was. "It really is crazy," he said. SYRACUSE, N.Y. - A top Upstate Medical University official who quit last week after it was revealed he told self-aggrandizing lies about himself was thoroughly vetted before he was hired last year, according to his former boss. Dr. Danielle Laraque-Arena, Upstate's president, says Upstate scrutinized Sergio A. Garcia's application, checked his references and did not see any red flags. "The vetting process was correct ... it's a robust process," Laraque-Arena said. "There is no process that is perfect. With what we know now, I can tell you the hiring of this person was a mistake." Garcia, 43, was senior vice president and chief of staff, earning an annual salary of $340,000. He oversaw Laraque-Arena's office. He also was in charge of Upstate's offices of external relations, human resources, facilities and planning, and university police. The Albany Times-Union published a story two weeks ago showing he fabricated many details about his past in a speech he gave at Upstate last year. Some of those details included: Narrowly escaping a deadly suicide bombing in Afghanistan while employed by the State Department; Being hired to work at the State Department by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and being a close friend of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Getting a law degree from an unidentified university in Oklahoma and working for a Los Angeles law firm. Being in the White House when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred for seven days without shaving or showering. The Times-Union reported Garcia was charged in 1998 while working for a California bank with falsifying bank records, a felony, and embezzlement, a misdemeanor, for taking $560 from customer accounts for his personal use. The case was dismissed after Garcia performed community service. Garcia did not include his criminal history on his application, she said. Upstate hired Garcia after receiving 40 applications for the job and conducting numerous interviews, according to Laraque-Arena. "He didn't just walk in off the street," she said. Laraque-Arena was impressed with his experience in health care and leadership. He had previously worked for the St. Lawrence Health System in Potsdam and Northeast Ohio Medical University near Akron, Ohio. "I was confident in his qualifications and readiness for the job," she said. "I had no suspicion of the things that came out later that led me to accepting his resignation." Laraque-Arena said she knew Garcia had a background in law, but did not have a J.D. (Juris Doctor) degree usually required to practice law in the U.S. Garcia's resume published online shows he studied law in an undergraduate program at Universidad de las Americas in Mexico. "He was not hired as an attorney here. I did not rely on him for legal counsel," she said. Laraque-Arena said she did not attend the lecture in which Garcia lied or watch the video of the speech on Upstate's website until the Times-Union published its story online May 19. Laraque-Arena said she did not even know the video existed until the day before the story was published. Before the story was published, Laraque-Arena said no one from Upstate who attended the lecture or watched the video contacted her with concerns about Garcia's assertions. "Had I seen the video I would have addressed it," she said. After the story came out, Upstate blocked public access to the video on its website. Garcia was put on leave May 20 and resigned May 21. Laraque-Arena said putting Garcia on leave the same day as Upstate's graduation ceremonies, then accepting his resignation was "painful." "In what world would I want a chief of staff that places a question in terms of the integrity of this office?" she said. Laraque-Arena appointed an internal group independent of Upstate senior management to investigate Garcia's hiring. That group's preliminary report will be presented at an Upstate faculty meeting June 7. The group will issue a final report in four weeks. Garcia's work at Upstate also is being reviewed to check for any irregularities, she said. The investigations will help Upstate improve its hiring process to prevent similar incidents in the future, she said. "We're facing some tough issues and we have to do it with honesty and transparency," she said. Contact James T. Mulder anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-470-2245 SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Three vending machines at a Syracuse apartment building dispense candy, chips and soda. And they serve another purpose. They have helped the building owner avoid more than $3 million in property taxes. The vending machines are the only visible sign of commercial activity at Copper Beech Commons, a sprawling apartment complex for college students. Here's why that matters: The property owner gets a lavish tax break that is available only to renovated buildings that have both commercial and residential space. State law created the tax break to help turn old and underused buildings into the kinds of places that filled downtowns in the old days. The idea was to restore the buildings with upper-floor apartments and street-level businesses -- restaurants, offices and stores - to bring back the bustle of urban life. For Copper Beech Commons, vending machines did the trick. Without the tax break, the owner would pay $560,000 a year in property taxes. With the vending machine incentive, the annual tax bill comes to less than $33,000. Other projects use token businesses to qualify for the tax breaks: In rural Oswego County, a former school that was converted to apartments avoids $21,000 a year in taxes by including a small office for a guy who mows lawns. Destiny Arms, a four-story luxury apartment building near the Syracuse Inner Harbor, leases two rooms in the basement to a massage therapist. The break? $1.3 million over 12 years. St. Patrick's Lofts, a Syracuse apartment building in a converted school, rents out the gymnasium for birthday parties or other special events. The tax break saves $55,000 a year. The same property tax break, known as a 485-a exemption, has been claimed by 40 buildings in Syracuse so far. City taxpayers give up more than $5 million a year to subsidize the properties, which pay sharply reduced taxes for 12 years. Copper Beech Commons has apartments for roughly 300 students. Syracuse officials say it's well worth the cost. In many cases, the tax exemption works as planned. It has filled vacant or underused buildings with residents and businesses, bringing life back to once gloomy downtown corridors like Warren Street. But the 485-a exemption is vaguely worded and easy to exploit. Some projects stretch the rules in ways that make a mockery of what state lawmakers intended. Syracuse.com's investigation of the program shows other problems: Taxpayers gave incentives worth more than $4 million to help a group of investors, including Syracuse University basketball coach Jim Boeheim, build a new student apartment complex. Just two months after the building opened, the group sold it for several million dollars more than it cost to build. Some of the biggest tax exemptions in Syracuse have gone to out-of-state companies that demolish old buildings to make way for new construction. City officials have allowed that to qualify, although one of the authors of the legislation says it defeats the purpose. Vague rules for the program promote confusion and abuse. Syracuse Commissioner of Assessment David Clifford said local assessors struggle to administer the 485-a tax break, which is open to different interpretations. "They ought to tighten up some of the language,'' he said. After syracuse.com started questioning some of the projects, Clifford sent out two city assessors to investigate whether developers really deserve the tax breaks. Their review is ongoing. Tax break a factor in city revival The 485-a exemption was inspired by a similar tax break aimed at lower Manhattan in the 1990s. State lawmakers launched an Upstate version in 2002 to spur "creative reuse'' of urban buildings for "residential and commercial mixed uses,'' according to the legislative record. Before the 485-a exemption can be used, the local municipality must authorize it. Syracuse and Onondaga County adopted the 485-a exemption in late 2010 and early 2011, respectively. It rewards developers for investing in buildings, allowing them to avoid property taxes on the cost of the improvements they make for eight years. For the next four years, the tax break is reduced 20 percent per year. The tax break has helped revive Syracuse's downtown. Significant landmarks including the Pike Block, the Syracuse Savings Bank building and the State Tower Building have benefited, bringing new residents and businesses to the city center. Merchants Commons, where syracuse.com is a tenant, gets the exemption. Theory Syracuse, a student apartment complex under construction on East Genesee Street, claimed one of the biggest 485-a tax exemptions in the state, worth at least $9.2 million over 12 years. The city's chief economic development official says the development spurred by 485-a exemptions is worth more than the lost tax revenues. Properties avoid taxes in the short term, but they bring new vitality to important commercial corridors, said Honora Spillane, deputy commissioner for neighborhood and business development. "I think it's important to keep in mind that these are investments folks are making in the city for the long term,'' Spillane said. Developers using 485-a tax breaks have built $137 million of new property value in Syracuse. That will boost the city's tax base after the exemptions phase out in 12 years. Owners will avoid roughly $53 million in property taxes until then. Throughout Upstate, the tax break has been claimed by more than 220 properties, state records show. Eighteen municipalities have projects, but Syracuse and Buffalo dominate. As of 2017, the top 10 projects by dollar value -- and 37 of the top 40 -- were in Syracuse or Buffalo. Luxury digs for college kids The biggest beneficiaries of 485-a in Syracuse are developers building luxury apartments for college students on University Hill. Most are out-of-state companies. They don't need subsidies, according to one of the developers. Jared Hutter, CEO of Aptitude Development, stands at the site where a six-story, 54-unit student apartment building was built at 404 University Ave. in Syracuse. Hutter said student housing development in Syracuse would occur "with or without tax incentives.'' New apartment complexes target well-heeled families of college kids willing to pay premium rents - up to $1,350 a month for a small studio, or $4,200 for a four-bedroom. Many apartments feature granite countertops, stainless steel appliances and on-site fitness centers. By including a modest amount of commercial space, the developers can save millions. New Jersey-based Aptitude Development, whose investors include Boeheim, built a six-story student apartment building at 404 University Ave. Two months after the complex opened in 2016, they sold it for $23.1 million to a Texas company that owns a national fleet of student housing facilities. Jared Hutter, CEO of Aptitude Development, said the cost of the building was nearly $20 million, but declined to provide the exact amount. Aptitude reported a final cost of $18.5 million in 2016 to the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency, which provided $580,000 in subsidies for the project apart from the 485-a exemption. In any case, the developers made at least $3 million on the sale. The building owners will save an estimated $4.1 million on property taxes over 12 years, thanks to the 485-a tax exemption. To qualify, the developers set aside about 650 square feet for a ground-floor Express Mart convenience store. The Express Mart has since closed. The space is vacant. City assessors pegged the market value of the completed building at $13.9 million. The cheaper taxes helped Aptitude get $23.1 million for it. Hutter's company is now building The Marshall, a block-long, eight-story complex with room for 287 students. The apartments were sold out by late April. Hutter said tax incentives can help, but are not necessary to build new student housing in Syracuse, where there is strong demand. "I don't think tax incentives have anything to do with what's been going on in Syracuse,'' he said. "Incentives sometimes can help enhance a project. You can make a project better sometimes, when you have that ability. But I would tell you I think a lot of this would go on with or without tax incentives.'' Onus on the assessor, not the property owner The 485-a is more generous than most traditional economic development incentives, and easier to apply for. All developers must do is file a two-page application with the local assessor once, at the beginning of the 12-year exemption. They don't have to submit names of their commercial tenants or copies of leases unless the assessor asks. They don't have to submit annual updates. Clifford, the Syracuse assessment commissioner, said the only way to verify that property owners meet the requirements is to inspect each building every year. After getting questions from syracuse.com about 485-a properties, Clifford assigned assessors to begin a review of each property. He said he hopes to make it an annual check. City assessors went out only once before this year to inspect 485-a properties, in 2013 or 2014. At that time, they discovered that Copper Beech Commons was claiming its tax break based solely on having vending machines, Clifford said. Clifford said he told owner Norm Swanson that wasn't enough. Clifford said he threatened to rescind the tax break for the property, which is near the corner of East Genesee Street and University Avenue. Swanson then recruited a commercial tenant to rent a utility room. That satisfied Clifford. But the tenant, a bike shop, moved out a year or so later. Sara and Steve Morris, owners of Mello Velo bicycle shop, said they agreed in April 2014 to lease a converted utility room at Copper Beech Commons for $200 a month. Their regular store at the time - on the second floor of a Westcott Street building - was severely overcrowded. Mello Velo opened a small "commuter hub'' in the basement utility room, which opened onto University Avenue through a garage door. They staffed the site three days a week, mostly to assemble bikes and perform minor repairs, the Morrises said. Mello Velo put up a sign over the garage door, which was left open when the site was staffed. "It certainly was not purpose-built commercial space,'' Steve Morris said. "It was a utility room.'' A utility room with a garage door, left, was converted into the Mello Velo "commuter hub'' in 2014, right, at Copper Beech Commons. The commuter hub closed after about a year. Mello Velo vacated the space after roughly a year, he said, when the Morrises started renovating a new location for their store. The new store on Canal Street opened this month. Asked what commercial use Copper Beech Commons hosts currently, Swanson in an interview described it as "a combination of vending and food and beverage operation.'' He added: "We also have offices, things of that nature, that are commercial, that are not related to Copper Beech.'' Swanson did not say to whom he rents office space. He did not return several subsequent phone messages seeking more detail. Floor plans posted on the property's website do not show any offices. Clifford said he has no new information about Copper Beech since assessors checked the property four or five years ago. If city assessors determine during their review this year that any 485-a properties are no longer eligible, they will give owners until the end of the year to come into compliance or risk losing the exemption in future years. Clifford said the law provides no clear language on when to rescind a property's exemption. He said he prefers to work with building owners to keep them in compliance. "I'm not on real firm ground if I'm going to take peoples' exemptions away,'' Clifford said. "I'm sure they're going to take us to court.'' 'Converting' buildings by tearing them down Syracuse may have the biggest 485-a exemption in the state. Peak Campus, a Georgia company that oversees $3.5 billion worth of student housing around the nation, is constructing a block-long student apartment complex on East Genesee Street, called Theory Syracuse. Some $23.5 million of the project's assessed value, or 95 percent, is exempt from taxes this year. That's a bigger exemption than any in the state as of 2017, records show. At that rate, Peak Campus will save at least $9.2 million over 12 years. But the benefit will likely grow. The building is still under construction. Its assessment - and the value of the tax exemption -- will increase next year after the building is finished. To make way for its new complex, Peak Campus demolished three smaller commercial buildings on the site. Demolition is not what state lawmakers had in mind when they created the tax break, said U.S. Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo. Higgins sponsored the 485-a legislation in 2002 when he was a state Assembly member. "It defeats the purpose,'' Higgins said. "The idea is to redevelop these older buildings, not demolish them.'' The 505 on Walnut is among three large student apartment complexes going up on the sites of buildings that were demolished. Several other large student apartment complexes - including 404 University Ave., The Marshall, and The 505 on Walnut - are new high rises that replaced demolished buildings. Clifford, the Syracuse assessor, said the 485-a rules are ambiguous. He said he decided that demolishing a commercial structure to build a new mixed-use building could qualify as a "conversion.'' "It keeps getting stretched,'' he said. "Originally, you had to have a commercial building, and that building had to be converted. But there's no language in there that says it has to be that building. It just has to be a conversion.'' On the other hand, Clifford denied a 485-a exemption to a developer who wanted to build a new structure atop a commercial parking lot. He said he tries to apply common sense, because the law is vague. "Honestly, I don't know where to draw the line,'' Clifford said. The law says the exemption is for "non-residential real property, upon conversion to mixed-use property.'' Mixed use property is defined as "a building or structure used for both residential and commercial purposes.'' That's it. Local assessors are on their own to figure out the details. Officials at the state tax department declined to answer questions about how the law should be interpreted. "These questions are best directed to local assessors,'' spokesman James Gazzale said. The city of Albany last year hired a law firm to review its 485-a exemptions, after the city assessor conceded that he misunderstood the rules. The lawyers determined that "commercial use'' is so loosely defined that a condominium building could get the exemption by renting some parking spaces and storage units to non-residents. From Manhattan to Schroeppel Although 485-a initially targeted cities with populations of 50,000 or more, the law was amended to allow any municipality to adopt it. Even the rural Oswego County town of Schroeppel, population 8,400, is onboard. Schroeppel and the Phoenix school district approved the 485-a exemption to facilitate the district's sale of a vacant school for conversion into apartments, town assessor Hal Henty said. The building, surrounded by cow pastures, initially saved $21,000 a year by including a small coffee-and-food operation aimed mainly at tenants. The coffee shop soon failed. Greenview Apartments, a converted school building in rural Schroeppel, qualifies for a mixed-use tax exemption by renting a small office to JC's Lawn Care. Henty said he threatened to withdraw the tax exemption last year. But the day before assessments were finalized, the building owner sent Henty a copy of a new lease for a commercial tenant, this time a lawn-care company. The entrance to JC's Lawn Care was locked on a recent weekday afternoon. Through the window, it appeared to consist of a small room, with a desk, a chair and little else. Henty said a tax incentive for mixed-use buildings -- inspired by the real estate market of lower Manhattan -- can seem absurd when adopted in a town like Schroeppel. But developers will find a way to use a lucrative tax break. "A lot of people question the way it's being done,'' he said. "I just have to go by the (law).'' Staff writer Michelle Breidenbach contributed to this report. Contact reporter Tim Knauss | email | Twitter | 315-470-3023 Editor's note: This story was updated June 4 to reflect new information from the City of Syracuse on the cost of an apartment building at 404 University Ave. Update: Jeffrey Bannister died of natural causes while running around Lake Murray, according to a news release from the U.S. Army on Wednesday morning. --- A U.S. Army general died while on leave in South Carolina on Sunday, and officials say his death is being investigated. Maj. Gen. Jeffrey L. Bannister, 57, was on transition leave in Lake Murray when he died, according to a news release from Shaw Air Force Base, where Bannister was assigned. His cause of death is under investigation, according to Shaw officials. Messages left with the Lexington County Coroner's Office were not answered Tuesday. The 34-year veteran of the U.S. Army was working as a special projects officer for the Chief of Staff of the Army as he awaited retirement in the Midlands area, Shaw officials reported. "Our thoughts and prayers are with Maj. Gen. Bannister's family. Our top priority is ensuring the family has all the local support and resources they need during this emotionally difficult time," said Lt. Gen. Michael Garrett, the commanding general for U.S. Army Central. Bannister is survived by his wife, Trese, and their daughter, Lindsey. Rest easy, Sir: Army 2-star, former 10th Mountain Division commander dies just days before retirement https://t.co/U88UV11oTa pic.twitter.com/q8NsWN88wT ArmyTimes (@ArmyTimes) May 29, 2018 Bannister previously served as the 10th Mountain Division commander, which has been deployed into combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and North Africa. Bannister served in both nations, overseeing thousands of soldiers. Bannister served as deputy commanding general of support, U.S. Forces Afghanistan, according to the Army. Bannister was also senior commander at Fort Drum, where the 10th Mountain Division is based, for 27 months until he relinquished command in April 2017. "Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Bannister was a legendary soldier and good man who dedicated his life to his family and his country. His wife and daughter are forever a part of the 10th Mountain Division family, and we are grieving with them during this very difficult time," said Maj. Gen. Walter Piatt, senior commander at Fort Drum and of the 10th Mountain Division. "We mourn his loss deeply, and recognize the significance of a life so well lived as a part of our lasting legacy." The coroner's office and Shaw officials have not released additional information on the circumstances surrounding Bannister's death. -- By Noah Feit, The State (Columbia, S.C.) WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he wished he'd hired a lawyer other than Jeff Sessions to head the Justice Department, reflecting his lingering anger at his attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia probe last year. In a series of morning tweets, Trump quoted televised comments from Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who leads the House's government oversight committee, suggesting Trump had a right to be frustrated with Sessions' handling of the recusal. "'There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!'" Trump tweeted, quoting Gowdy. "And I wish I did!" Trump added in his own words. The president has aired his frustration with Sessions' recusal before, suggesting he wanted a loyalist atop the Justice Department to protect him from the Russia investigation. His latest protest, however, follows a New York Times report Tuesday night that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is investigating Trump's effort early in his presidency to get Sessions to reverse his recusal decision days after Sessions made the announcement. The men's meeting on the matter in March 2017 hadn't been previously reported. Sessions recused himself from the investigation into possible Trump campaign cooperation with Russia's election interference, citing Justice Department policy governing potential conflicts of interest given Sessions' role in the Trump campaign. Numerous legal experts from both parties have said he had no other choice. The issue has long created friction between Trump and Sessions, who as a senator from Alabama had been one of Trump's first and most loyal campaign supporters, the only Republican senator to endorse him until late in the campaign. -- By Noah Bierman, Tribune Washington Bureau Several longtime Pizza Hut locations around Central New York are closed as of today, store employees have confirmed. That includes the Pizza Hut at 3137 Erie Blvd. E. in DeWitt, which opened in 1974, according to newspaper archives. Also closed as of today are the Pizza Hut locations at 6313 S. Salina St. in Nedrow, which has been in business since the late 1970s, according to newspaper archives. The Pizza Hut at 500 Genesee St. in Chittenango also closed. The fate of the Pizza Hut at 4738 Onondaga Blvd. in Western Lights isn't known. Pizza Huts in East Syracuse, Cicero and Baldwinsville are remaining open, store employees said, but they couldn't be identified because they are not allowed to speak to the media. Most of the area Pizza Huts appear to be run by Golden Child Holdings, which operates GC Pizza Hut LLC out of Mt Kisco, NY. They are one of the largest Pizza Hut franchises in the country, according to their web site. GC Pizza Hut operates 97 restaurants in seven states. Jonathan Childs is listed as co-founder. In October, Pizza Hut in Fayetteville closed after 25 years of business. It is now a Twin Trees Pizza location. Other Pizza Hut locations in Camillus, Liverpool and Mattydale also closed in late 2017. Pizza Hut corporate officials could not be reached for comment at this time. Coconut Creek, Fla. -- A Florida police officer has been suspended over a Facebook comment about survivors of the Parkland school shooting. Brian Valenti has been suspended for five days without pay. Valenti is a K-9 officer who has been with the Coconut Creek department for 23 years, according to NBC 6 in Florida. Coconut Creek is just miles from Parkland, where 17 people died in a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February. Valenti's suspension stems from a Facebook comment he made in response to a demonstration by Parkland students on Friday. The group, led by senior David Hogg, staged a "die-in" at a Publix supermarket to protest the chain's support for gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam, according to NBC 6. Putnam is a supporter of the National Rifle Association. "Hope some old lady loses control of her car in that lot," Valenti wrote on a Facebook post about Hogg and the protest, according to NBC 6. "Jus saying..." Valenti later deleted the post and told Coconut Creek Police Chief Butch Arenal that he regretted what he wrote. He also said it was meant to be a joke, but now realizes it was not funny, according to the Sun Sentinel in Florida. He told Arenal that he plans to apologize in person to Hogg and other organizers of the event. In addition to the suspension, Valenti will be required to undergo sensitivity training, the Sun Sentinel said. The poor judgment of one officer should not reflect on the department as a whole, Arenal said, according to the Sun Sentinel. "Our officers have walked alongside Parkland students providing security during protests, have attended and assisted with events and vigils in Parkland to show solidarity with our kids and our amazing employees have gone above and beyond the call of duty to be there for our community in a time of need," Arenal said, according to the paper. Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-454-2112 Destrehan, La. -- A televangelist in Louisiana with viewers across the globe is asking his followers for money so he can buy a $54 million private jet. Jesse Duplantis asked for donations for the jet in a video posted on his website last week, according to nola.com. Duplantis is based in Destrehan, Louisiana, outside of New Orleans. "I really believe that if the Lord Jesus Christ was physically on the Earth today, he wouldn't be riding a donkey," Duplantis said in the video, according to nola.com. "He'd be in an airplane flying all over the world." Duplantis said his ministry already bought three private jets and has been "just burning them up for the Lord Jesus Christ." The one he's seeking now is a Dassault Falcon 7X, which has a range of over 5,900 nautical miles and can seat 12 to 16 passengers. A new Falcon 7X goes for $54 million, according to nola.com. In the video, Duplantis said he would not own the plane personally, according to USA Today. His ministry would own it and the aircraft would be available for future leaders of his organization. It's not the first time Duplantis has been public about his desire for private jets, according to USA Today. He appeared in a video in 2015 with another televangelist, Kenneth Copeland, to defend their use of the planes. Copeland said their fame made it difficult to travel with the public because of the number of people who would come up and ask for prayers. "You can't manage that today," Copeland said, according to USA Today. "This dope-filled world and get in a long tube with a bunch of demons. And it's deadly." Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-454-2112 There are few things more quintessentially Central New York than eating a Hofmann hot dog (or coney) at Heid's. The landmark Liverpool restaurant and Syracuse sausage company have been a winning combination since 1917. Jeff Marcyoniak cooks hot dogs at Heid's in Liverpool on Dec. 11, 1993. The iconic restaurant had dropped Hofmann's as its hot dog supplier earlier that year. But in May 1993, the unthinkable occurred: Heid's dropped Hofmann as its hot dog supplier. After 76 years and an estimated 75 million wieners sold, the Post-Standard reported that the "Hot Dog Alliance Crumbled," setting the stage for a Central New York hot dog war which lasted for four years. "Is nothing sacred?" a Post-Standard editorial asked on June 1, 1993. "Politicians have shattered our illusions about democracy. Religious leaders have shown that they, too, can succumb to greed and avarice. Now Heid's is switching hot dog suppliers. Where will it end?" A nasty "family feud" developed between descendants of the original founders of the two beloved brands and each set out grab a bit of each other's turf. In April 1992 Heid's informed Hofmann's that "it is essential for Heid's to have ownership and access to the recipes for the frank and coney." At a tense meeting, Hofmann refused to turn over the recipe and accused Heid's of mixing other company's hot dogs and coneys at its restaurants and representing that mix as a Hofmann product. The relationship was further hurt after Hofmann announced plans to open its own hot dog stand in Northern Lights Plaza in Salina. Hofmann's also did not like that Heid's planned to use several different suppliers at the new franchises Heid's planned to open in Upstate New York. Thirteen months later, after 76 years, the relationship was over. Heid's began selling hot dogs made by the Adrian Meat Company, in Buffalo, using a recipe that was said to be nearly identical to Hofmann's. Heid's planned to sell the hot dogs under its name in local supermarkets. The spat became so nasty that the Herald-American reported that Hofmann's had hired private detectives to check the hot dogs Heid's were serving at their restaurants. Undercover, and accompanied in one case by the son of the investigator, they visited the Heid's restaurants in Liverpool, Carousel Center and DeWitt. "I traveled to Heid's Hot Dog Stand in Liverpool. I arrived at 2:30 p.m.," read a June 16 report by Forensic Consulting Specialties, a Syracuse private investigating business. "No discussions regarding the hot dogs were overheard, so after eating, I said, 'The hot dogs taste different, I haven't been here in years. Are they the same ones?' I was told, 'Same ingredients, different manufacturer."' The investigator reported he was told at the Heid's in DeWitt that the hot dog was "same formula, same recipe." "That brought out the lawyers," the newspaper reported, "Hofmann's arguing that Heid's couldn't say they are selling the same hot dog and coney with the same formula. Only Hofmann's has that recipe." Hofmann's called losing Heid's as a customer a "major blow." It was a blow felt by many in the area. Although many people found the two hot dogs identical, one long-time Heid's customer said they "tasted the same, but that the new one "went down heavier," many thought a great tradition had been lost. In one letter to the editor, Donald Wright of Mattydale wrote: "How can you change things so drastically without taking people's lives into consideration? To change the hot dog would be like McDonald's painting its golden arches. What's next, the bun?" Most blamed Heid's. "I, for one, will never patronize Heid's again because it looks to me as if they've gotten just a little bit too greedy," wrote Gus Corso, of Baldwinsville. Another letter questioned why Heid's would not support a local company over another in Buffalo. Hofmann recovered from the blow. It signed deals to sell its products at BJ's Wholesale Club and Sam's Club, while opening three local restaurants. (None remain open, the Salina store is now Salt City Dogs.) Heid's meanwhile received an average of 50 angry phone calls a day and sales, the Herald-American reported in December 1993, dropped by 36 percent. Amanda Cruz, 10, in front, and her twin sister, Natalie enjoys their hot dogs at Heid's in Liverpool on July 14, 1997. Heid's had just changed back to Hofmann's, their original hot dog supplier. In August 1995, Heid's was purchased by brothers Randall and John Parker of Fulton. The Liverpool restaurant was by then the only Heid's left, the Great Northern Mall, Carousel Mall, Oneida, DeWitt, Massachusetts and Florida spots had all closed. The brothers hoped to restore Heid's to its former glory. "We want people to know we've got a lot invested in this place, and our intentions are very positive," Randy Parker said. Repairs were made to the iconic hot dog stand, but the biggest change came in the summer of 1997. Hofmann hot dogs were back. "We've been on the firing line for two years now, since we bought the business," Parker said. "If there was any possible change our customers wanted, it was the Hofmann dog. I don't blame them; it's a good dog." "Sanity restored" said an editorial headline. "It took a while. But with Heid's and Hofmann together again, at least a small piece of the world has been set right." This feature is a part of CNY Nostalgia, a section on syracuse.com. Send your ideas and curiosities to Johnathan Croyle: Email | 315-427-3958. Around a hundred people assembled across from Senate House on Kings Parade this evening to protest against the Universitys police action in the forcible removal of protestors from Greenwich House last week. Students holding large, painted banners emblazoned with slogans familiar from the Zero Carbon movement listened to speeches organized by the leaders of the campaign, broken up by chanting and singing about fossil fuel divestment but also cops out slogans and calls to fight back against the University. Similarly, speeches also reflected the shift in campaign discourse. They were joined by representatives from in and outside the university, including a student from Istanbul who gave an impassioned speech about the clamping down on student dissent in Turkey, as well as a junior academic who compared the movement to the 2010 student movements against tuition fees across the country. Notably, a member from the National Campaign Against Fees & Cuts gave an announcement about their annual conference in Sheffield, inviting divestment protestors to join others from across the country to protest about more general student issues on the 9th of June. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. With the free app, 365 Threat Monitor, scan all emails as they reach your users' mailboxes to detect ransomware, phishing and spam. Get real-time phone alerts + security breach updates and delete threats instantly with just one click. Download now! Mozilla earlier this week launched the first full edition of its Internet Health Report. The report is an open source effort to explore the state of human life on the Internet, wrote Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman in an online post. It consists of research and analysis about the Internet compiled by researchers, engineers, data scientists, policy analysts and artists in Mozillas extended community. The digital rights, open source, and Internet freedom movements stand for the idea that it is possible to build a digital world that is open, accessible and welcoming to all, according to Mozilla. The Internet Health Report is based on the principles of the recently expanded Mozilla Manifesto. The optimist in me sincerely hopes this will be successful, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. That said, you also have to ask how many outside the Mozilla community are paying attention, he told LinuxInsider. Mozilla is seeking to see the moral high ground as governments explore regulating the Internet by jumping on the ethics bandwagon early and often, suggested Michael Jude, research manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan. Fake News Front and Center In this first issue of the Internet Health Report, fake news and misinformation are in the spotlight. The topic engendered considerable interest, Surman said, and data collection became the central focus. The discussion encompassed several issues: Precision-targeted ads; Bots and fake accounts; Facebooks domination of news distribution; and Insufficient Web literacy among the general public. Taken together, these activities and circumstances provide the fuel for fraud and abuse, along with very bad real world outcomes, Surman said. Mozilla is trying to stand out as an organization with the users best interests at heart, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. This is well-timed, given that the issues Facebook has with data collection and Cambridge Analytica likely have people concerned about all tech firms at the moment, he told LinuxInsider. Also included in the report: A piece on engineers in Brazil building an open source bot that automatically inspects politicians expenses and discloses officials use of public money for private purchases; and A story about FIRST, a global network of volunteer cybersecurity experts. The Open, Accessible Digital Myth There has long been speculation that governments, companies and organizations would carve up the Internet, and that it would end up reflecting the real world with territories, borders, and battles between different groups. Absolutely, Frosts Jude told LinuxInsider. Look at Chinas attempts to close off their Internet from the rest of the world, and the EU attempting to impose privacy rights on the entire Web, regardless of where a companys based. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies, also known as the Five Eyes, have been spying on one anothers citizens online, and sharing information to get around domestic restrictions. In the business world, companies always try to game the regulatory process, Jude remarked. Although some large players dominate the space, the Internet is still very much of a free-for-all, said Dan Goldstein, president of Page 1 Solutions. The Internet Health Report is an attempt to get people to think about what theyre doing and what tools theyre using with the subtext that we all need to be safer, Enderle remarked. Unfortunately, Mozilla doesnt have much reach on a good day, he pointed out, and with Trump and Facebook news chewing up all available bandwidth, much more powerful entities are having trouble getting attention at the moment. The collection of consumer data by Internet companies is a concern, but It would be a significant mistake to eliminate free services like Facebook and Google Search, Page 1s Goldstein told LinuxInsider. Thats not likely to happen in our capitalistic economy, he said, but its important that we encourage all consumers to protect their private information both online and offline. Second Opinion Malware Scanner If your child is not feeling well and you suspect he or she has a virus infection you're going to visit your doctor. But what do you do when the doctor tells you that he cannot find anything but your child still does not feel very well? Of course, you go to visit another doctor for a second opinion. This is the same what Hitman Pro does for your computer. Hitman Pro is a second opinion scanner, designed to rescue your computer from malware (viruses, trojans, rootkits, etc.) that have infected your computer despite all the security measures you have taken (such as anti virus software, firewalls, etc.). Why A Second Opinion? Research shows that computers are still run a chance of getting infected because the existing anti virus program is not giving you a 100% protection. "32% of computers infected, despite presence of anti virus program." Just relying on a single vendor is not sufficient to completely protect you. You do need a second source to make sure you are secure. But in most cases, installing a second anti virus program is not a viable solution. Two programs are effecting the performance of the computer dramatically, and sometimes even conflict causing the computer to crash. Hitman Pro is designed to work alongside existing security programs without any conflicts. It scans the computer quickly (less than 5 minutes) and does not slow down the computer (except for the few minutes it is scanning). Hitman Pro does not need to be installed. It can be run straight from a USB flash drive, a CD/DVD, local or network attached hard drive. Hitman Pro offers you a Free Scan for a second opinion. It is designed to check if your security measures work. If nothing is found (and we sincerely hope so), then you will never need a license. When a virus is found, then you will receive a free 30-day license to remove the threat. Behavioural Scan SurfRight has done an extensive research of malware files to determine the common characteristics (behaviour) of malware. The Hitman Pro client uses this research in its Behavioural Scan, when it scans the computer for virus activities or suspicous files that have the characteristics of malware. Click here for more details about the Behavioural Scan. Scan Cloud For the files that are classified as suspicious, the Hitman Pro client sends a request to the Scan Cloud for confirmation if these files are indeed malicious. The Scan Cloud is a cluster of multiple computers, residing on the Internet. The Scan Cloud will respond to this request with the answer: Safe Malicious Unknown When the file is unknown, the Hitman Pro client uploads the file to the Scan Cloud where the file is scanned using the anti virus programs of 5 different vendors. Each of these anti virus programs analyzes the file and responds with "safe" or "malicious". Click here for more details about the Scan Cloud. Malware Removal When the file is classified as malicious by the Scan Cloud, the Hitman Pro client is placing the infection into quarantine. Various techniques ensure that all infections are completely removed without false positives. Click here for more details on the removal process. Who Should Use Hitman Pro? Computer users can use the Free Scan of Hitman Pro as a quick check (less than 5 minutes) to ensure that the existing anti virus program has not missed a threat. Help Desk and Support organizations can use the Free Scan of Hitman Pro as a quick check for viruses and other malware. It can be run from USB or CD/DVD. No installation is required. Website owners can offer the Free Scan of Hitman Pro as a service to visitors for a quick second opinion. What's New: What just happened? Theres been yet another crash involving a Tesla vehicle that was in Autopilot mode. This time, a Model S driver hit a parked police SUV in Laguna Beach, California. While the driver of the vehicle sustained minor injuries, the cruiser was unoccupied at the time of the accident. Sgt Jim Cota, the public information officer for the Laguna Beach police department who tweeted about the incident, told The Guardian that the SUV was a complete total loss, and that the Teslas front end was pretty beat up. This morning a Tesla sedan driving outbound Laguna Canyon Road in autopilot collides with a parked @LagunaBeachPD unit. Officer was not in the unit at the time of the crash and minor injuries were sustained to the Tesla driver. #lagunabeach #police #tesla pic.twitter.com/7sAs8VgVQ3 Laguna Beach PD PIO (@LBPD_PIO_45) May 29, 2018 It [the SUV] was mangled up pretty good. It took out the whole back end and halfway through the center part of the vehicle. Theres axle damage. It wouldnt be worth repairing, he said. This is the latest crash involving a Tesla where the Autopilot feature was engaged, and marks the third time this year that one of the vehicles has hit a stationary emergency vehicle while in Autopilot mode. While working a freeway accident this morning, Engine 42 was struck by a #Tesla traveling at 65 mph. The driver reports the vehicle was on autopilot. Amazingly there were no injuries! Please stay alert while driving! #abc7eyewitness #ktla #CulverCity #distracteddriving pic.twitter.com/RgEmd43tNe Culver City Firefighters (@CC_Firefighters) January 22, 2018 A driver in China is thought to have been the first person killed while using Autopilot, back in January 2016. In June that same year, Joshua Brown was the first person in the US to die while using the feature. A Model X hit a highway divider while in Autopilot mode in March, killing driver Walter Huang. Tesla said its own investigation showed Huang kept his hands off the wheel despite the vehicles warnings. NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board continue to investigate the case. Last week, Tesla settled a class-action lawsuit brought by six Model S and Model X owners who alleged that the Autopilot system was essentially unusable and demonstrably dangerous. Tesla's settlement didnt mention the safety allegations but was instead paid out to compensate owners over the delayed Autopilot updates. Tesla reiterated that the Autopilot feature requires drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings. The Autopilot system warns drivers who don't hold on to the wheel. Ignoring this will eventually see the feature disabled and can even cause the vehicle to pull up as a safety precaution. But some owners continue to leave the drivers seat when it is activated, including a UK man who was caught on video sitting in the passenger seat while his Tesla did the driving. Recap: Earlier this month, the OnePlus 6 became the latest in a line of Android handsets to arrive with an iPhone X-style notch. It seems that the cutouts are making their into a number of phones, but could Googles next Pixels be added to the list? If a leaked image is to be believed, it seems the answer is yesbut only on the Pixel 3 XL. The photo appeared on Weibo but has since been deleted, though SlashLeaks managed to grab the original picture. It purportedly shows tempered glass screen protectors for the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL. While there are question marks over its authenticity, it could be the first indication that the Pixel 3 XL will have a notch. The oval-shaped cutouts suggest that both phones will come with front-facing speakers. It could also be that the handsets will feature dual front-facing cameras, though one might be for another type of sensorGoogle could be following Apple by adding facial recognition tech. It also seems that Google is imitating most manufacturers by reducing the size of the phones bezels, which appear noticeably smaller than those found on their predecessors. As with previous Pixels, its expected that both handsets will have similar specs, with the main differences being the screen and battery sizes. Creating one Pixel with the notch and one without could be a best-of-both-worlds solution in Googles eyes, offering something for both lovers and haters of the notch. But anyone whos in the latter camp and prefers the larger version of the Pixel looks to be out of luck. To reiterate, we cant be certain that the image isnt a hoax. However, with more Android manufacturers adopting the notch and the fact that Android P supports the design feature natively, its not beyond the realms of possibility that Google will go down this route. Recap: We initially reported that Google was working with the US Department of Defense to develop drone footage-analyzing AI back in March. Later, thousands of Google employees expressed their distaste with the project via a petition and roughly a dozen others resigned. In response, Google now says they're developing ethical guidelines that will steer their military work in the right direction. Google sparked a bit of controversy in March when the public discovered the company was working with the Pentagon on a military AI project dubbed "Project Maven." Google's role in the project was to develop AI that could analyze drone footage. As you might imagine, many of Google's employees weren't too keen on the concept of developing tech for military use. As such, in April, over 3100 employees signed a petition demanding that Google leave the Pentagon partnership. In response, the company claimed the results of their work with the Department of Defense would be used for purely non-offensive purposes. Google's explanation wasn't enough for some employees, though. In May, roughly a dozen employees left the company due to Project Maven. It seems the resignations may have been at least mildly effective, according to the New York Times. The outlet says Google is now working hard to develop ethical guidelines that will dictate how the company makes decisions regarding defense contracts in the future. Specifically, Google reportedly told the Times that their new guidelines would "[preclude] the use of A.I. in weaponry." Whether or not these guidelines will be enough to soothe internal and external fears about Google's future military work remains to be seen. Californias dramatic new license plate is hitting the streets a digital display board that allows changeable messages controlled by the driver or remotely by fleet managers.The new plates use the same computer technology as Kindle eBook readers, along with a wireless communication system.They come with their own computer chips and battery.Motorists who choose to buy the plate can register their vehicles electronically and eliminate the need to physically stick tags on their plates each year. They also may be able to display personal messages if the DMV decides to allow that.If the car is stolen, the plate's manufacturer says the plate can tell the owner and police exactly where the car is or at least where the license plate is if it has been detached.California, which has been quietly prepping its roll-out this year, is the first state to try out the new plates.The state Department of Motor Vehicles is conducting a pilot project with a Bay Area company, Reviver Auto, which makes the plate and is about to begin marketing it for sale at auto dealerships.Last week, Sacramento became the first city to agree to test the plates, taking a shipment of 24 plates for its in-house vehicle fleet.The technology comes with a high price, however, and has already prompted questions about privacy and safety.Dealerships are expected to sell the plates for $699, not including installation costs. Users also must pay a monthly fee of about $7. The plates are not available through the DMV.Some drivers are questioning whether the device's communications system could allow the state, the police or private companies to track a driver's movements.In a recent blog posting, Alex Roy, an editor at The Drive website, raised those and other questions."What little privacy we have left is annihilated," he wrote. "This makes sense for fleet management. For my personal car? No thanks."Neville Boston, founder of Reviver Auto, said he expects initial interest to come from companies for their vehicle fleets.Some businesses will use them as mini-billboards to advertise their products or services, he said, but will be able to do so only when the vehicle is stopped. The license plate number will still appear on the screen when messages pop up, but it will be smaller and tucked into the upper right corner of the screen.Boston said the devices are available, though, for individual private users who want to be on the cutting edge of new technology.DMV officials declined last week to answer Bee questions about the states plans for the new plates, saying they are just testing the new product."The purpose of the pilot is to identify and detail potential benefits, so we are still in the evaluation phase and wont make any determinations until the pilot concludes," a spokesman wrote in an email to The Bee.The state legislature gave the DMV the go-ahead to explore the new devices several years ago and ordered the department to report back by July 2020 about how the plates are performing.Under the pilot program rules, the state can allow up to one-half of 1 percent of the state's 35 million vehicles or about 175,000 vehicles to use the plates during the test period.DMV officials last week said there are only 116 cars in the state with digital plates in use so far. But Reviver Auto expects that number to jump into the thousands this year as auto dealerships begin selling them and companies and consumers read about them.The city of Sacramento is about to begin testing the devices as well, in cooperation with Reviver Auto, on some fleet cars.The city's innovation officer, Louis Stewart, said the city took shipment last week of 24 new Chevy Volts with the electronic plates. It got the plates at no cost from Reviver. City officials want to see whether the plates allow them to keep track of fleet vehicles more efficiently and inexpensively via electronic messaging.Stewart said the city likely also will experiment with the plates as message boards. When a car is stopped, Stewart said, the license can display programmed public service messages, such as street closure notifications, an ad for a city service, an Amber or Silver Alert warning or some other emergency alert.Stewart said city officials will talk first with labor representatives about assurances that the city will not use the plate technology as a monitoring device on city employees.The city sees the plates as a stepping stone, he said, along with an upcoming Verizon 5G Wi-Fi network, for the city to become a national testing ground for autonomous or driverless vehicles. The goal, he said, is to create cutting-edge jobs for city residents."We want to look at ourselves as a laboratory for a lot of these technology companies," Stewart said. "Come to test in Sacramento, come see how your product or service is viable.2018 The Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. 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An Optus advertisement showing a Telstra phone box sinking in the desert has been described as humorous and not misleading consumers in a court ruling after a legal battle between the rival telcos. Australias biggest telecommunications company Telstra took Optus to court over the series of ads which included the tagline "Empires end. That's what they do" and referenced Optus' top ranking in the P3 Mobile Benchmark in December. Telstra took Optus to court over its advertisement, showing a sinking phone box. The ad was designed by Optus internal agency Yes Agency. The phone box did not show the Telstra logo, but Judge John Robson said earlier in the proceedings that its "distinctive shape, and blue-and-orange colour scheme" made it "easily recognisable as a Telstra phone box of the type that was once commonplace on Australian streets". Telstra alleged the advertisement made it appear there had been a "significant and permanent change in the relationship between the Telstra and Optus mobile networks" and that Optus was "undisputedly" operating a better mobile network than Telstra. There have been bigger ASX disappointments than product comparison site iSelect, but none can claim to have delivered the disappointment as consistently in terms of downgrades and a high level of executive turnover. In 2013, CEO Matt McCann fired off into the ether just months after the companys IPO following a disagreement with the board over strategy. Illustration: John Shakespeare iSelect deselected its next boss just two years later when Alex Stevens looked for fresh opportunities with immediate effect as the board mulled over a bid from Providence Equity Partners. Investors were hoping for a bid above $2, only slightly more than the $1.85 they paid in the IPO, and they will be ruing that missed opportunity. The board fiddled while Providence walked away. The title of the Four Corners episode came from a quote by one of the people interviewed during the media investigation. Mark Freeman, whose business had been audited by the ATO, told the investigation: "In dealing with the ATO, I've never come across such a mongrel bunch of bastards in my entire life." Mark Freeman, whose business was audited by the ATO, told the investigation: "In dealing with the ATO, I've never come across such a mongrel bunch of bastards in my entire life." Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Mr Jordan said he had not launched an official complaint when the investigation aired in early April but was still considering writing to the directors of the ABC with an official complaint. He had not so far as "I've been accused of becoming too sensitive". Mr Jordan was asked by Labor's Kristina Keneally why he refused to appear on the Four Corners program. He said it was an ATO group decision for him not to appear. "It was our decision that the head of the small business group Debbie Jenkins was the most appropriate person to do that [interview]," Mr Jordan said. Nevertheless Mr Jordan said the agency would take steps to address the issues raised by the investigation, including trialling an independent review for the small end of town. Currently only large companies with revenue of more than $250 million are granted an independent review, and the ATO has previously said the service will not be extended to small businesses and individuals due to resourcing limitations. Labor Senator Kristina Keneally asked Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan why he refused to appear on the Four Corners program. Credit:Photo: Alex Ellinghausen "We are going to trial an independent review process for certain small business audits from July 1 - with the intention over time that businesses, regardless of size, have access and rights for a fit-for-purpose review prior to finalisation of audit," Mr Jordan told Senate Estimates. Mr Jordan said the ATO had also asked the Australian National Audit Office to review the agency's debt collection process. This follows other investigations already underway. Revenue and Financial Services Minister Kelly O'Dwyer launched a probe into the tax office on the back of the Fairfax Media/ Four Corners investigation. Treasury is undertaking the review, with input from Mr Noroozi, and Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Kate Carnell. ABC News said in a statement that it stood by the story and that despite his criticisms Mr Jordan has announced the ANAO will review debt collection procedures, and has also announced a trial of an independent review process for certain small business audits. "No official complaint has been received from the ATO," the statement said. "If one is received it will be investigated according to our usual procedures." The media investigation also uncovered allegations by ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle that staff in the Adelaide office were "quite clearly and categorically to start issuing standard garnishees on every case" - which was not in sync with reasonable use of the debt collection tool. A standard garnishee notice requires the bank to keep sending money to the tax office whenever money is deposited in the account. The ATOs inappropriate use of garnishee notices is now also being examined in a review by Mr Noroozi's office. The investigation had also revealed that the ATO cancelled the ABNs (Australian Business Numbers) of contractors - most who were single mothers, carers or people with serious health conditions who wanted to work but needed flexible hours - and left them unable to work. This had happened before an audit had even been completed. Mr Jordan said that objections with ABN cancellations will be examined in a separate area managed by Second Commissioner Andrew Mills. Shadow assistant treasurer Andrew Leigh said the loss of more than 4000 jobs from the tax office in recent years had made it harder than ever for the ATO to perform at the level Australians expect. "The reporting last month by the ABC and Fairfax raised genuine concerns and prompted a call from Labor - heeded by the Turnbull Government - to launch an investigation into the Australian Tax Office," Mr Leigh said. Labor's Andrew Leigh says the reporting last month by Fairfax and Four Corners "raised genuine concerns and prompted a call from Labor - heeded by the Turnbull Government - to launch an investigation into the Australian Tax Office". Credit:Andrew Meares On other matters, Mr Jordan said the tax office expects to collect around $10 billion more from large corporations in income tax for the 2017/18 financial year than in the previous year. He said while this can be attributed to economic growth and commodity price changes, the ATO has also contributed to this increase through better taxpayer compliance in this market, both voluntary and ATO-assisted. A NSW Department of Education reading program for students in kindergarten to year 2 that has never been evaluated is negatively affecting NAPLAN scores and students' long-term reading ability, teachers and principals say. Less than half of 247 respondents to a survey of educators think the Language, Learning and Literacy (L3) program is effective for all children, according to a new report by the Centre of Independent Studies. Less than half of educators surveyed say L3 is effective for all students. Credit:Quentin Jones Additionally, about 30 per cent of the educators said they felt they could not raise concerns about L3 with their school. "L3 has not been rigorously evaluated for effectiveness, but the existing data is not positive," the CIS report states. Gringo is a comedy thriller made by Australians, written by Americans, funded by Amazon Studios, and set largely in Mexico. It's neither funny nor thrilling, but it does have a truckload of coincidences, a sign of laziness in script and direction. If you're introducing comedy, then coincidence can get a look in but audiences won't tolerate many, unless they're laughing too hard to care. O Brother Where Art Thou? has coincidences, but the Coen brothers make sure we know it's an alternate universe, with different rules. Rear Window does not; everything happens for a reason in that most perfect Hitchcock thriller. Life may be full of coincidences, but screenplays cannot be. One definition of the perfect thriller might be that everyone does something for a reason, and there are consequences, not coincidences. It also has an astonishing cast, for reasons hard to fathom. The internet tells me that Charlize Theron signed on in May 2014, but it was another 18 months before David Oyelowo, Amanda Seyfried and Joel Edgerton came on board, followed a few months later by Thandie Newton. There is a clue in the delays: someone had their doubts. Theron is credited as executive producer and her clout may have attracted the others. Joel Edgerton's brother Nash directs, in his second feature after The Square. So what went wrong? Let's start with Elaine Markinson, the character played by Theron. She's the man-eating co-owner of a Chicago pharmaceuticals company that has been selling part of its inventory to a Mexican cartel boss, known as the Black Panther (Carlos Corona). When we first meet her she is being rogered by her co-owner Richard Rusk (Joel Edgerton) in the back room of his plush, high-rise office. David Oyelowo, with an African accent, is Harold Soyinka, their senior executive, a mild-mannered honest man whose main problem is that his wife (Newton) spends all his money. The plot kicks off with a frantic phone call from Harold from Mexico: help, I've been kidnapped and they want $5 million. Elaine, a gold-plated harridan, is typically firm: no deal at that price, they'll have to come down a lot. We flash back two days, to when Rusk tells Harold they have to whizz down to Mexico to straighten out a problem at their production lab. So now we have several deadly sins lined up: lust, greed, pride, with a hint of envy and gluttony. More modern vices pile in behind betrayal, adultery, drug-trafficking, murder, extortion and cutting off toes with bolt cutters. More than a year after the alleged murder of Zeeshan Akbar at the Queanbeyan Caltex service station, the two accused teenagers have pleaded not guilty to murder. The teenagers, aged 16 and 17, appeared via video link in Queanbeyan Local Court on Wednesday. The defence lawyers for the two teens entered pleas of not guilty to murder, wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and armed robbery causing grievous bodily harm. The three charges are classed as strictly indictable and therefore require a trial. Both teenagers had a number of other charges brought against them that while not indictable will travel with the other charges to the Supreme Court in Sydney. The Crown prosecutor submitted applications in both cases to waive a committal hearing and proceed directly to trial. A major boost to paramedic numbers is being actively considered ahead of the 2018-2019 NSW budget. Health Minister Brad Hazzard has also taken steps to ease tensions over the Working With Children Check (WWCC) fees paramedics were required to pay out-of-pocket to keep working. Mr Hazzard met with Health Services Union (HSU) delegates this week to continue negotiations over paramedic numbers and registration fees. NSW Ambulance Paramedics perform CPR on a 40-year-old male who collapsed with a cardiac arrest at Easts Leagues Club. Credit:Wolter Peeters HSU NSW has long maintained a minimum of 800 additional paramedics is needed to cut response times, relieve overworked staff and improve patient outcomes across the state. Police are warning Chinese people in Australia about a "sophisticated" scam that urges them to fake their own kidnapping and that has netted millions of dollars worldwide. Scammers speaking Mandarin and pretending to be from the Chinese embassy have been targeting Chinese nationals in Australia on student or working visas. The scammers ring phone numbers at random, claiming that the person on the other end has outstayed their visa, had their identity stolen or committed an offence. The scammers then demand money. A testicle-flicking officer has failed in a Court of Appeal bid to brand a harassment investigation unfair because he was denied access to the identities of his accusers. Fairfield Senior Constable Shane Summersford received a warning following claims that he had exposed his testicles to other officers, flicked colleagues' genitalia and poked them on the buttocks. He launched Supreme Court proceedings, alleging he was denied procedural fairness as he was unable to view the complete contents of the witness statements against him. After losing that case, Senior Constable Summersford went to the Court of Appeal, which affirmed the Supreme Court decision on Tuesday. The court saga was sparked by an anonymous complaint made in March 2015 that Senior Constable Summersford had exposed parts of his genitals to co-workers, inappropriately touched them, and used sexually charged and obscene language. Emirates to launch a daily service to Edinburgh Business Desk : Emirates will start a daily service between Scotland's capital city, Edinburgh, and Dubai, from tomorrow. Edinburgh becomes airline's second destination in Scotland after Glasgow and its 8th in the United Kingdom after the airline starts its daily service to London Stansted in June, said a press release. The new service will be operated by an Emirates Boeing 777-300ER in a three class cabin configuration, with 8 private suites in First Class, 42 lie flat seats in Business Class and 304 spacious seats in Economy Class. Flight EK023 will depart Dubai daily at 0955hrs and arrive in Edinburgh at 1450hrs, while the return flight, EK024 will depart Edinburgh at 2015hrs and arrive in Dubai at 0640hrs the next morning. The arrival of the flight is conveniently timed for connecting to Emirates' services to popular outbound destinations for Scottish travellers, such as Bangkok, Lahore, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australian cities, Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. The new service will also enable Emirates SkyCargo to offer up to 20 tonnes of cargo capacity on the aircraft per flight. Sir Reginald Barnewall was a World War II veteran, Fraser Island resort owner, airline founder and farmer who supplied avocados for one of the Queen's royal visits to Australia, despite the fruit being out of season at the time. According to one of Sir Reginald's friends, the Queen sent a list of preferred food ahead and avocados were one of her demands. The plantation owner is said to have placed several unripe avocados under an electric blanket and the fruit was ripe two weeks later for her majesty's visit. Sir Reginald Barnewall inside the de Havilland Dove he flew for Southern Airlines when he was managing director. Credit:Ron Cuskelly - Queensland Air Museum Following Sir Reginald's death last month, those close to him have shared stories of the Mount Tamborine resident's life, which spanned 93 years. He inherited the title of Baronet of Crickstown Castle in Ireland and with it came the title of 'Sir'. That's it from me and the blog this morning. Thanks everyone for following along and well done to all our ticket winners. Hope you all have as smooth a commute home and I'll be back on deck dark and early tomorrow morning. Elten Gevergizyan outside court on Wednesday. Credit:Eddie Jim A truck driver accused of attacking two schoolteachers in a violent act of road rage on the Tullamarine Freeway is "withdrawing from ice", a court has heard. Elten Gevergizyan, 27, appeared handcuffed in the dock of Broadmeadows Magistrates Court on Wednesday where he made no application for bail. Visibly disheveled and dressed in a long sleeve grey T-shirt, Mr Gevergizyan sat silently throughout his brief court appearance. Lawyer Mihal Greener told the court her client was withdrawing from the drug ice. A family murdered by a grandfather who then took his own life at a rural West Australian property have been remembered as "beautiful angels" and "special friends" ahead of their funerals. Peter Miles, 61, his 58-year-old wife Cynda, their daughter Katrina, 35, and her four children - daughter Taye, 13, and sons Rylan, 12, Arye, 10, and Kadyn, eight - were found dead at Forever Dreaming Farm in Osmington on May 11. Katrina Miles with her four children. Credit:Facebook Mourners will farewell the family in two separate funeral services at the Crematorium Chapel in Bunbury on Wednesday. Tributes have been posted on the funeral company's website by mourners from all over the world. Privacy groups have blasted a decision by the Information Commissioner that found the Department of Human Services acted within the Australian Privacy Principles when it released details about a Centrelink client to a journalist last year. The statement released by the commissioner on Monday said that the release of the information was authorised by a provision of the Australian Privacy Principles that said if a government entity held "personal information for a primary purpose, it may use or disclose it for a secondary purpose if the individual would reasonably expect it to do so, and the secondary purpose is related to the primary purpose". Former information commissioner Timothy Pilgrim opened the investigation into the release of the information. Credit:Jeremy Piper The commissioner launched an inquiry in March last year after an opinion piece was published in The Canberra Times by journalist Paul Malone that included personal details of blogger Andie Fox, who had previously had an opinion piece published also in The Canberra Times where she described her negative experiences dealing with Centrelink. The details about Ms Fox were prepared by Department of Human Services staff and provided to the journalist by staff in the office of then Human Services minister Alan Tudge. Former NSW premier Bob Carr is facing demands he be expelled from Labor because of his links to China, a sign that the relationship some within the NSW division of the party have established with donors connected to Beijing is causing deep unease among the rank and file. Long-time party member Mark Powell said he had been motivated to bring action against Mr Carr following Fairfax Media's report that Mr Carr enlisted fellow former Labor premier-turned senator, Kristina Keneally to use estimates hearings to ask pro-China questions. Bob Carr and John Carnaut. Credit: Janie Barrett, Louise Kennerley Mr Powell, a Labor Party member for 21 years, has accused Mr Carr of breaking four party rules, including: "Bringing the party into disrepute, action or conduct contrary to the principles and solidarity of the party, disloyal or unworthy conduct and disruptive tactics". He wants Mr Carr immediately suspended, pending the tribunal hearing. "This stuff has to stop," Mr Powell told Fairfax Media. Beijing: North Korea's top nuclear weapons negotiator was headed for New York on Tuesday and plans to meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as officials race to settle on an agenda for a June 12 summit meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump in Singapore. Trump said on Twitter that Kim Yong Chol, one of the most trusted aides to the North's leader and a former intelligence chief, was "heading now to New York." North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, right, with Kim Yong Chol. Credit:AP In a reference to the moves made since he canceled the on-again-off-again summit meeting, the president added, "Solid response to my letter, thank you!" Kim will meet with Pompeo this week, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday. Digital Bangladesh in global context Dr. Forqan Uddin Ahmed : The power, position and prospects of ICT are very immense in Bangladesh. Realizing future prospects, Bangladesh became the member for International Telecommunication (ITU). And with an access to the world-wide ICT movement Bangladesh signed the Meniapolice declaration in the same year. At that time, the then government gave an approval of Internet use and played a significant role in ICT development by withdrawing value added tax from computers and also made the price of computers tolerable. It is known by many of us, that the Computer industries then was fully import based and price was so high that it was beyond the purchasing limit of general people. Dial-up device was the only source of dependence to use Internet. There was nothing as of today's broadbands. Internet was v-set based which was only used by some international organizations. In some cases, native multinationals and corporate agencies used it. The Prime Minister could realize that e-readiness and all necessary preparation should be made for the maximum use of ICT. In the beginning of 2001, she signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on technical assistance with government of Netherlands. With that accord, Nederland government committed to train up our 7700 teachers on computers and consented to donate 11000 computers of Tulip brands, training guides and accesssories of computers. Netherlands government donated 10 millions Euro against this project. Computer was first distributed to the prime minister's childhood educational institutions Azimpur government girls' school. But it was obstructed by a group of officers and the project was initially disturbed and hampered. After retirement, they are now on Talk-show in TV-channel and raising storms of speech with high sounding voices. In the middle of 2001, though the program was started in small scale, this agreement was postponed during time of new govt. During BNP regime, this project got a bad flavour and had a bad smell from her niece's name Tulip and it was criticized that the project deal was made only for family business sake. As a result of it image of the country has been much more deteriorated in the international arena. Netherlands government decided to stop the donation. Even they planned to stop the harboring facility of Bangladesh's ship in their seaport. For breach of agreement, Tulip Company filed case against BNP. By the judgment from Dutch court, Bangladesh was compelled to pay a fine amounting to 4.2 millions Euro. To make ICT world active, the computer businessman in 1997 played a very strong role. Bangladesh Computer Council leaders continued their negotiation with government and were able to highlight its importance. Especially it was drawn to the attention of the Prime Minister where it was made easier by her intervention. It was political commitment of 'Awami League'. Some experts and experienced personnel in her government tried their best for a firm and sound condition of ICT. Consequently in 1998, Bangladesh had a positive role in the international telecommunication union as declared in Meniapolice of USA. The then Finance Minister had a talk to Secretary General Mr. Pekka Terzani of Finland and sought cooperation of Asian development bank and World bank to launch a project for the development of telecommunication in Bangladesh. Again Bangladesh also raised their strong voice to organize a UN Apex conference for the development of ICT. In July 2000, Ukinaya, Japan organized G-8 conference in order to develop ICT and to alleviate poverty and a proposal of international memorandum was passed by majority board members which was familiar as Ukinaya Charter. Japan was the host country. Meanwhile, the former Deputy Minister Ushiho Utshomi ICT ministry gave full support for Bangladesh's ICT development. Form the beginning of our independence, Japan as a close friend of Bangladesh has been helping us much in the line of ICT. Awami League in 1997-1998 in the midst of opposition was capable to build image internationally. After 2000, a world-wide movement has been started in ICT and mutual cooperation became an inevitable subject for ICT development. Particularly the high price of ICT accessories, production and marketing and monopoly marketing control became a challenging to the developing countries. So the G-8 leaders were very serious to hear opinions of the developing countries for the implementation of Ukiaya charter. It is very eventful for us that the G-8 leaders invited our prime minister to Zenoa of Italy to participate as a guest conference. They wanted to hear from the Prime Minister on poverty alleviation, where 'digital opportunity task-force' recommendation was assigned which was named as 'Zenoa pan' of action. At the time, present prime minister was opposed by the government to join the program. But finally she could join there. Today's digital Bangladesh concept was germinated by the Prime Minister and by her intervention so that our youth force were driven to the world of innovation. Only by this, country will be made a role model. By her inspiration, our present ICT minister Mostafa Jabber, Reza Salim and some others were involved in this sectors. If people are motivated and convinced a super human force may be created by their brain storming in the thinking line where Bangladesh will be developed in the long run, where a proud nation and smart country will emerge. From Okinaya, Zeanoa to Geneva- Teunish the whole world is highly stormed in ICT area. The Prime Minister in 2008, declared her digital Bangladesh with her experience, farsightedness and maturity of thinking. Meanwhile Russia has been removed from G-8. Now it is G-7. In spite of Russia's drop out form G-8, the present G-7 leaders still eager to share with our prime minister, in the coming G-8 conference in Quebec in Canada. Broadway and Encores! veteran Colin Donnell will complete the Encores! Off-Center cast of Songs for a New World (June 27-30) at New York City Center. He joins cast members Shoshana Bean, Mykal Kilgore, and Solea Pfeiffer in the concert production, directed by Kate Whoriskey with music direction by Tom Murray. The production will also feature choreography by Rennie Harris for an ensemble of dancers being added to the cast for the Off-Center engagement. Donnell's previous Encores! credits include Lady, Be Good!; Merrily We Roll Along; and Follies. He has been seen on Broadway in Jersey Boys, Anything Goes, and Violet, and is well known for his TV roles on Chicago Med, Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Arrow, and The Affair. Opening the 2018 Off-Center season, Songs for a New World was the first musical from three-time Tony Award winner Jason Robert Brown (Parade, The Bridges of Madison County, Honeymoon in Vegas). This powerful collection of songs examines life, love, and the choices ordinary people make when faced with extraordinary moments. From the deck of a 1492 Spanish sailing ship to the ledge of a Fifth Avenue high-rise, each character faces a new world that follows the unique challenge they encounter. Starbucks. Photo: Alexander Pohl/NurPhoto via Getty Images On May 29, more than 8,000 Starbucks nationwide closed for mandatory racial-bias education after a Philadelphia store manager sparked outrage for calling the cops on two black men who asked to use the bathroom before placing an order. For four hours, approximately 175,000 employees watched informational videos about the history of workplace discrimination, spoke to their co-workers about their personal experiences of bias, and filled out notebooks containing questions related to race and privilege. In the lead-up to Tuesday, Starbuckss strategy was met with praise and skepticism, as many wondered whether a single day of training could really have an effect. So how did it go? To find out, we asked four Starbucks employees around the country about their experiences. California: I kept thinking, I wish this were the job of our nations educators. They showed a very well-produced video about the history of denying service based on race that was hosted by Common! Then they broke down the science of bias or prejudice against differences and had us think about the times we felt unwelcome. I kept thinking, I wish this were the job of our nations educators. I do think Starbucks has good intentions with what theyre trying to do, and I think the training will combat bias. A lot of my co-workers actually shed tears and shared parts of their lives with us. And Starbucks clearly has the clout and resources to send a giant message with the optimistic hopes that it will permeate the nation. New Jersey: Im hesitant to praise Starbucks as trailblazing fighters against racial bias. The literature and media provided by the company for the program was decently informative, but what I thought was the most effective was that the program allowed for an environment that felt comfortable to discuss our differences. I like to consider myself as a more socially aware person, but there is a lot that I, as a white woman, can never truly understand. Hearing testimony from some of my co-workers that are people of color was essential to the program. However, a few of my co-workers and I found the terminology color brave that was used to be strange. It was meant to serve as an antithesis to the idea of being colorblind regarding race, but we felt that it was an offensive way to approach viewing other races. Although I found the training to be an overall positive and well-constructed experience, Im hesitant to praise Starbucks as trailblazing fighters against racial bias. A few years back, there was a controversy around the companys campaign called Race Together, which was criticized for being a slacktivist approach to promoting racial inclusion. Since this less-talked-about controversy did not prompt such training, I question the companys motives this time. Florida: The training was a waste of four hours. I am half Mexican and grew up in poverty, so diversity, bias, and judgment are things Im familiar with. So for me, the training seemed very repetitive. It talked about the bias and racism towards mostly black people, but others as well, even though there are laws that should be preventing this. The training mostly wanted to remind us that each person is different and unique that we should embrace these differences. They touched on the issues that brought this training about, but they also mentioned that this was needed even before then because America itself has an issue with embracing diversity, and that as a large company, they are obligated to treat everyone the same no matter what. Something that bothered me about the training was that they didnt really give specifics of how to approach certain situations, or how they planned as a company to include everyone, except that everyone is a customer that walks into our store, even if they dont buy anything. Another thing that upset me was that they expect us to always be on and be welcoming even when customers dont treat us with respect and dignity in return. There have been instances in certain stores where I have worked where customers have threatened partners or even yelled at partners based on their race, religion, or sexual orientation, and oftentimes higher-ups dont stand up for that partner. In my opinion, the training was a waste of four hours. Minnesota: A lot of the baristas at my store hoped it would touch base on other POC and marginalized people. My specific store is fortunate enough to be very diverse in not only color, but also in regards to religion, gender, and orientation. The vast majority of our regular customers are Somalian. When you come to work at our store, if youve ever had preconceived notions or whatever beliefs about Somalians or Muslims, youre forced to confront them. Starbucks training was blanketed to every store, instead of being tailored to different demographics. I totally get that creating training sessions for each store would have been very time consuming, but there are probably stores in America where the majority if not all baristas are POC. That they had to sit through a four-hour training on how not to be racist is kind of ridiculous. The training only really covered how to not be racist towards African-Americans. Dont get me wrong, that needed to be addressed, but a lot of the baristas at my store hoped it would touch base on other forms of discrimination toward POC and marginalized people. Starbucks did say near the end of the training that they are planning on continuing these trainings. We hope to see more intersectionality in the future. Bangladesh must respond to ICC`s call to investigate Myanmar`s crimes because the crimes are international TRANSPARENCY International Bangladesh (TIB) on Tuesday stated that the government should extend all possible support, including observations and evidences, to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to decide if it had jurisdiction to open an investigation into the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas in Myanmar. Bangladesh's cooperation, especially in terms of providing the ICC with first-hand evidence to launch an all-out investigation into the maltreatment by Myanmar military in Rakhine State as well as creating international pressure on the Myanmar authorities is vital. That said - evidence acquired from Google satellite images, verbal accounts of refugees, photos of torching villages, beating up of refugees and clear marks of physical torture and rapes are all there. Also, it is easily understandable that proof or evidence of the first degree are vital preconditions before commencing any form of trial, especially trials relating to grave crimes against humanity. Now it's up to the government to decide how quickly it wants to pursue the legal course of action. However, what appeared rather baffling last month in the wake of the ICC's demand for investigation - a number of our local international relations experts and diplomats said that Bangladesh government should not be a party to encourage the ICC to exercise jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute the crime of deporting Rohingyas. They fear that the trial might put the repatriation process in jeopardy and also enable Myanmar to blackmail the entire process. From our side we expect to see both Rohingyas to be lawfully repatriated with citizenship rights and we also want justice to be delivered to them. Why should a big-scale humanitarian crime committed against more than a million helpless Muslim minorities escape the global consciousness? Punishing the members of Myanmar's military junta must be put on trial in the ICC because an international crime against humanity has been committed. The responsibility to punish the crime against humanity is a universal demand and it must be done. The immediate victims are the Rohingya Muslims but the crime is international. Baby Mysteriously Dies After Nap At DaycareParents Gesture Was Unexpected The content is not available due to expiration. Participants wave the Taiwans flag during a flag-raising ceremony at the Presidential Office Square in Taipei on Jan, 1, 2014. (Mandy Cheng/AFP/Getty Images) China Hacking Taiwanese Military Hospital Websites to Obtain Military Intelligence Taiwan has been braving relentless cyberattacks by Chinese hackers in the past four years, according to the latest statistics provided by the island nations military. Taiwanese websites, especially those run by the military, have been attacked hundreds of millions of times by the Chinese regimes cyber army and unknown sources, reported Taiwanese newspaper The Liberty Times on May 28. The annual number reached an all-time high of 727 million times in 2014. Last year, the number stood at about 200 million times. The websites of Taiwans Ministry of National Defense, National Defense University, Political Warfare Bureau, and a number of military hospitals are among the most targeted. Military hospitals were subject to the bulk of the cyber-attacks, reaching 720 million times in 2014, and 162 million times in 2017. Military hospitals are frequent targets because the Chinese regime wants to get their hands on the medical records of Taiwans military officials and their family, in order to cross-reference with Taiwan military intelligence data that the regime already has in its possession, explained the Liberty Times, citing unnamed local military experts. The Chinese regime views the self-ruled island of Taiwan as a renegade province that will one day be reunited with the mainland, with military force if necessary. In recent weeks, China has ramped up its aggressive rhetoric and staged military drills in the Taiwan Strait. With greater knowledge of Taiwans military officials, the Chinese regime ultimately wants to have greater success stealing Taiwans military intelligence, according to the Liberty Times. Major General Chen Chung-chi, spokesperson for Taiwans defense ministry, assured the public that medical recordswhich included civilian and military patientswere not compromised during the cyberattacks, in a press conference held on May 29, reported Taiwans government-run broadcaster Radio Taiwan International. Measures taken through the information security bureau under the legislature, and internal security mechanisms within the Ministry of Defense, have ensured the safety of peoples medical records, said Chen. Zheng Ji-wen, editor-in-chief of Taiwanese magazine Asia-Pacific Defense Magazine, warned of the threats from China that Taiwan continues to face, in an interview with Voice of America (VOA) on May 29. Zheng said, Chinas supercomputers and cloud technology are getting more and more powerful. Being able to compare different information it [China] has obtained, Chinas capability should not be ignored. In recent years, the relationship between Taiwan and Beijing has become more tense, since President Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016. Tsais Democratic Progressive Party supports the idea of Taiwan formally announcing independencewhich is a red flag for China. Taiwan is not the only target that the Chinese regime is trying to infiltrate. A report by computer security firm FireEye released in March found that the Chinese regime launched cyberattacks to steal U.S. intelligence related to the South China Seawhere China is currently building up its military presence, prompting territorial disputes with a number of nearby Asian countries. A month later, FireEye issued another report, pointing out increased cyberattacks from the Chinese regime targeting U.S. firms, in an effort to obtain business information advantageous to Chinese companies. China Investigates 12 Judicial Officers in a Month. They Share One Crime in Common. The Chinese Communist Party has embarked on an anti-corruption sweep of its judicial system. From mid-April to mid-May, the Party has announced internal investigations into 12 court presidents and procurator-generalswho head local prosecutors officesacross China. Since current Party leader Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he has launched an anti-corruption campaign to weed out misbehaving officials, who were often Party members loyal to former leader Jiang Zemin. They form an opposition faction to Xi and his allies. Scores of officials have been purged. The 12 judges and prosecutors in the current sweep all had one commonality: they participated in the persecution of the Chinese spiritual practice, Falun Gong, launched by Jiang in 1999. When Jiang was in power, many officials showed their political allegiance to him by carrying out the persecution. According to records kept by Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website dedicated to reporting on the persecution of Falun Gong in China, the six court presidents and six procurator-generals recently named in investigations have all either sentenced or prosecuted Falun Gong practitioners solely for their spiritual beliefs. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a meditation practice based on the moral principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It became hugely popular in China during the 1990swith official estimates of 70-100 million adherents by 1999. However, Jiang perceived Falun Gongs popularity as a threat to Communist rule and thus ordered a nationwide persecution of the group, mobilizing the states security apparatus to arrest, detain, and sentence millions to prison, forced labor camps, and brainwashing centers. For example, just two months ago, Zhang Sizhong, current procurator-general of Huizhou City, Guangdong Province, sentenced two Huizhou Falun Gong practitioners to 9 and 10-year prison sentences. While serving as procurator-general in two other cities in Guangdong, Zhang also prosecuted scores of Falun Gong practitioners. Wang Chen, who served as court president of Wuhan City Intermediate Court in Hubei Province for over 7 years, sentenced at least 82 Falun Gong practitioners to prison, according to Minghui.orgs records. Among them, Cui Hai, a practitioner imprisoned at Wuhan Womens Prison, died just 19 days into her sentence, likely due to torture. Xu Zhitao, current Procuratorial Committee member at the Yantai City, Shandong Province prosecutors office, violated the Partys own judicial procedures while serving as procurator-general of Laizhou City (also in Shandong Province). Xu conspired with the local 610 Officean extralegal, secret police established by Jiang specifically to carry out the persecution of Falun Gongto arrest and prosecute practitioners. In September 2015, Laizhou Falun Gong practitioner Cui Lili visited the local detention center to bring clothes to her husband, also a Falun Gong adherent, who was detained there. Cui was abducted on the scene and brought to a local brainwashing center, where adherents undergo psychological torture in an effort to force them into giving up their beliefs. In November, Cui was formally arrested and sentenced to 7.5 years in prison. Minghui.org also documented another case in February 2016. Sun Shouyu, a Falun Gong practitioner, was tried at court. Suns lawyer presented arguments for a not guilty plea, as freedom of belief is guaranteed under Chinas constitution. The court did not issue a sentence that day. But later, the court secretly sentenced Sun to 3.5 years imprisonment. The other judicial officials under investigation who participated in the persecution of Falun Gong come from cities around the country, from Liaoning in the north to Sichuan in Chinas west. Increasingly, though, local judges and prosecutors offices have dropped or withdrawn cases involving Falun Gong practitioners. According to Minghui.orgs records, there have been at least 75 cases where Falun Gong practitioners were released after an initial arrest. In March, the Party announced structural reforms that would significantly weaken the 610 Office, leading many observers to believe the Party would likewise back down from the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. Previously, the 610 Office could dispatch all elements of the Partys security apparatuspolice, state security, judicial, and prosecutorial systemsto persecute Falun Gong adherents. Former New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English on Sept. 13, 2017, in Auckland, New Zealand. English was accused of having connections to Chinese spies. (Phil Walter/Getty Images) Chinese Political Subversion Puts Five Eyes at Risk The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has developed inroads into Australia and New Zealand, giving the regime a strong influence over local media, academia, business, and politics. That influence may jeopardize intelligence sharing with other democracies. The issue of CCP influence is now making headlines in Australia and New Zealand, after word spread of an April 5 hearing of the U.S.China Economic and Security Review Commission. Peter Mattis, a fellow of the China Program at the Jamestown Foundation, told the commission in April that Jacinda Arderns Labour Party in New Zealand accepted donations from donors tied to one of the CCPs overt spy agencies, the United Front Department. I think because it has gotten very close to the political core, he said. One of the major fundraisers for Jacinda Arderns party has United Front links, that you have to say this is close enough to the central political core of the New Zealand system that we have to think about whether or not they take action and what kinds of action. Mattis also said former New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English had ties to Jian Yang, a member of the New Zealand parliament who was likewise exposed to have ties to the to the United Front, as well as formerly to the Chinese regimes military intelligence, in a series of articles in 2017 by local news outlets. Because of this connection, Mattis said, anything on China that was briefed to Bill English was briefed to Mr. Yang Jian, and therefore it may not be sort of official day-to-day access, but in terms of the conversations, the briefings, it was entirely present within the system. Russell Hsiao, executive director of the Global Taiwan Institute, explained during the hearing that the United Front Department works to control, indoctrinate, and mobilize non-CCP masses in service of Party-defined objectives. Due to the nature of the CCP operations, and their deep influence in the New Zealand system, Mattis said it should raise concerns over the security of U.S. intelligence information in the Five Eyes program, which is shared with New Zealand. Under Five Eyes, the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand share intelligence information. The program includes highly sensitive information collected by the intelligence agencies of each respective country, including from the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and National Security Agency of the United States. Sen. James Talent (R-Mo.) said during the hearing that the CCPs United Front Work operations deserve more scrutinyand a careful response. He added that Australia and New Zealand are Five Eyes members, yet have seen a sharp rise in political donations and media investment from United Front Work Department-affiliated entities, and even individuals affiliated with the United Front Work Department and Peoples Liberation Army holding office. Beijing also incentivizes political figures in Australia and New Zealand to parrot its line on issues it deems important, he said. Talent also noted that the CCP may be testing operations in New Zealand and Australia, which it may later attempt to use against other countries, including the United States. Its important for the United States to consider that China may be testing methods of interference to probe for weaknesses in democracies in order to use the same techniques against Western countries in the future, he said. The United States, its allies, and its partners should understand Chinas goals and recognize Chinas determination to achieve them. The Epoch Times has reported extensively on the CCPs subversive operations for more than a decade, which include its United Front Department (formerly known as the United Front Work Department) and its Overseas Chinese Affairs Office. The agencies work through the diaspora of overseas Chinese hometown associations, student associations such as the Chinese Student and Scholar Associations (CSSA), and other groups that the agents attempt to draw into their networks while also attempting to expand the CCPs influence over foreign politicians, academics, businesses, and journalists. Top criminal Joseph freed from jail on presidential mercy Tofael Ahmed Joseph, a criminal who rose to infamy in the 1990s, has been freed on presidential mercy. "We freed him after receiving the order on Sunday," said Md Jahangir Kabir, senior jail superintendent of Dhaka Central Jail in Keraniganj. Joseph has already travelled to India after he was freed. He served two decades behind bars out of his life imprisonment, said an official of the Special Branch of police. However, Joseph's family refused to comment on the issue.Joseph and his elder brother Harris Ahmed-sons of former air force officer Wadud Ahmed-were named among top criminals prepared by police. Harris is also believed to be in India. Another sibling, Sayeed Ahmed Tipu was shot dead by assailants in the 1990s while the eldest brother, Lieutenant General Aziz Ahmed, had been the director general of Border Guard Bangladesh. A Dhaka court sentenced Joseph to death in 2004 for his role in the murder of Freedom Party leader Mostafa. The High Court upheld the verdict but the Appellate Division reduced it to life imprisonment in 2015. Joseph was arrested 20 years ago when he was named in at least 11 cases tied to extortion, murder and illegal arms. All cases except for the murder of Mostafa had been settled. He was freed three days back on presidential mercy but the issue came to light after a statement by Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan on Wednesday. "He had only a year of jail term left to be served and filed a mercy petition saying he was sick," Khan said. Contacted, Senior Jail Superintendent of Dhaka Central Jail Md Jahangir Kabir said Joseph has been freed. Joseph's elder brother Harris Ahmed used to identify himself as a Jatiya Party leader in Mohammadpur during the reign of military ruler HM Ershad. Then he claimed his association with the Jubo League after Ershad's fall. He ran for the position of a ward commissioner in local elections. Joseph too, at one point in time, claimed to be a Chhatra League leader in Mohammadpur. However, he never held any position in the party. Joseph made it to the headlines last year when he spent 20 months in hospital without any complicated disease. The authority took him back to jail from hospital when it created an issue. Volcanic gases rise from the Kilauea lava flow that crossed Pohoiki Road near Highway 132, near Pahoa, Hawaii, May 28, 2018. (Reuters/Marco Garcia) Fast Lava From Hawaii Volcano Closes Highway HONOLULU A fast-moving lava flow from Hawaiis Kilauea volcano led officials to close a highway on Tuesday, May 29, and warn that sharp, thin strands of volcanic glass fibers carried on the wind could injure eyes and lungs, in its biggest eruption cycle in a century. Hawaii Countys civil defense agency said lava was quickly approaching Highway 132, prompting the closure from Lava Tree State Park to Four Corners, and warned residents to monitor their radios and phones for updates and evacuation orders. The lava flow destroyed a farm where Kevin Hopkins and partners raise tropical fish and the ornamental carp known as koi. It just came over and ate the farm, boiled the water out of the ponds, Hopkins said. Earlier on Tuesday a small explosion of ash erupted from the summit of the volcano early in a vertical plume some 15,000 feet (4,600 meters) high, the U.S. Geological Survey said, the latest outburst in a month of volcanic activity. The agency warned that ash was drifting northwest and liable to affect anyone in the summit area. Hundreds of people have been ordered to leave the vicinity of one of the worlds most active volcanoes. Kilauea, one of the worlds most active volcanoes, entered its fourth week of what may be an unprecedented, simultaneous eruption at its summit crater and along a six-mile (9.7-km) string of fissures 25 miles (40 km) down its east flank. Lava flows from multiple fissures have blocked roads and damaged dozens of buildings on Hawaiis Big Island. One fountain of lava rose more than 200 feet (60 meters) at times on Monday, May 28, the Geological Survey said. Officials are on high alert for occasional earthquakes, though most have been small. Lava has engulfed the heads of two wells that tap into steam and gas deep into the Earth at the 38-megawatt Puna Geothermal Venture electrical plant, which used to produce 1/4 of the Big Islands electricity. Its operator, Israeli-controlled Ormat Technologies Inc, said it had not been able to assess the damage. So far no deaths have been blamed on the eruption, though a mans leg was shattered when he was hit by a plate-size chunk of lava rock. Residents fear the electrical plants deep geothermal wells may be explosive. Officials have said the power plant is safe but lava has never engulfed a geothermal plant anywhere in the world, creating a measure of uncertainty. Contingency plans have been made for a possible helicopter evacuation of up to 1,000 residents in a coastal area south of the fissures should their last exit route, State Highway 130, become blocked by lava or become unsafe due to gaping cracks, County of Hawaii officials said. At least 82 homes have been destroyed in the southeastern corner of Big Island and about 2,000 people have been ordered evacuated since Kilauea began erupting on May 3. By Jolyn Rosa Watch Next: Massive Colony of Penguins Discovered on Antarcticas Danger Islands. It Changes Everything So how did 1.5 million birds seemingly go unnoticed all this time? Volcanic gases rise from the Kilauea lava flow that crossed Pohoiki Road near Highway 132, near Pahoa, Hawaii on May 28, 2018. (REUTERS/Marco Garcia) Fast Lava From Hawaiis Kilauea Volcano Closes Highway HONOLULUA fast-moving lava flow from Hawaiis Kilauea volcano led officials to close a highway on Tuesday and warn that sharp, thin strands of volcanic glass fibers carried on the wind could injure eyes and lungs, in its biggest eruption cycle in a century. Hawaii Countys civil defense agency said lava was quickly approaching Highway 132, prompting the closure from Lava Tree State Park to Four Corners, and warned residents to monitor their radios and phones for updates and evacuation orders. Earlier on Tuesday, a small explosion of ash erupted from the summit of the volcano early in a vertical plume some 15,000 feet (4,600 meters) high, the U.S. Geological Survey said, the latest outburst in a month of volcanic activity. The agency warned that ash was drifting northwest and liable to affect anyone in the summit area. Hundreds of people have been ordered to leave the vicinity of one of the worlds most active volcanoes. Kilauea, one of the worlds most active volcanoes, entered its fourth week of what may be an unprecedented, simultaneous eruption at its summit crater and along a six-mile (9.7-km) string of fissures 25 miles (40 km) down its east flank. Lava flows from multiple fissures have blocked roads and damaged dozens of buildings on Hawaiis Big Island. One fountain of lava rose more than 200 feet (60 meters) at times on Monday, the Geological Survey said. Officials are on high alert for occasional earthquakes, though most have been small. Lava has engulfed the heads of two wells that tap into steam and gas deep into the Earth at the 38-megawatt Puna Geothermal Venture electrical plant, which used to produce 1/4 of the Big Islands electricity. Its operator, Israeli-controlled Ormat Technologies Inc, said it had not been able to assess the damage. So far no deaths have been blamed on the eruption, though a mans leg was shattered when he was hit by a plate-size chunk of lava rock. Residents fear the electrical plants deep geothermal wells may be explosive. Officials have said the power plant is safe but lava has never engulfed a geothermal plant anywhere in the world, creating a measure of uncertainty. Contingency plans have been made for a possible helicopter evacuation of up to 1,000 residents in a coastal area south of the fissures should their last exit route, State Highway 130, become blocked by lava or become unsafe due to gaping cracks, County of Hawaii officials said. At least 82 homes have been destroyed in the southeastern corner of Big Island and about 2,000 people have been ordered evacuated since Kilauea began erupting on May 3. By Jolyn Rosa Israeli soldiers stand guard next to an Israeli Iron Dome defence system, designed to intercept and destroy incoming short-range rockets and artillery shells, deployed along the border with the Gaza strip on May 29, 2018. (JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images) Israel Army Destroys Irregular Hamas Tunnel Extending Into Israel Through Egypt On May 29, the Israeli army said they destroyed a tunnel created by the Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza strip area that went through Egyptian and Israeli territory. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they discovered the passage still in its construction phase near the Kerem Shalom Crossing, through which humanitarian aid is transferred to Gaza residents. The IDF said the tunnel was designed for terror purposes and weapons smuggling, adding that was the second such tunnel detected near the crossing and the 10th tunnel found since October last year. The tunnel was used to infiltrate and attack Israel. Instead of using humanitarian aid to better the lives of Gazans, Hamas uses the crossing for terror purposes, the military said. The offensive strike against Hamas comes after the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group launched a barrage of mortars and rockets at Israeli communities in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip on May 29. Most of the shells were intercepted by the IDFs Iron Dome aerial defense system. One of those rockets fell into a kindergarten and three IDF soldiers were injured in the attackstwo lightly and the third moderately. There were no other reports of injury or material damage. An Israeli army official said in a briefing that the tunnel was irregular in its characteristics and that it was 1.2 miles in length. Its an extremely long tunnel, the official said. It had exit shafts on the Egyptian side. It was handled with aerial assaults and in the coming hours the portion crossing into Israel will also be dealt with to complete its neutralization. On May 29, the United States called for an emergency meeting with the U.N. Security Council to discuss the latest attacks on Israel. The Security Council should be outraged and respond to this latest bout of violence directed at innocent Israeli civilians, Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, said in a statement. Watch Next: Kushner Talks Peace in Middle East at US Embassy Jerusalem Dedication Ceremony A North Korean ship passes in front of the Chinese border city of Dandong (at rear), in China's northeast Liaoning Province, on September 4, 2017. (Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images) Japan Says It Detects Chinese Ship Breaking North Korea Sanctions TOKYOJapan said on May 29 that it had detected what appeared to be a Chinese-flagged vessel, 218 miles off the coast of Shanghai, conducting illegal transfers to a North Korean ship. Following a comprehensive assessment, the government of Japan strongly suspects that they conducted ship-to-ship transfers banned by UNSCR, Japans Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a news release, referring to the U.N. Security Council resolutions. A Japanese P-3 maritime patrol plane detected the vessels, which lay alongside each other connected by hoses, on May 19, with one of the ships flying what seemed like a Chinese flag, it said. Chinas Foreign Ministry said the information provided was unclear and it was hard to reach any definitive conclusions. Japans decision to voice its suspicion comes as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump prepared for what may be a breakthrough summit as early as next month. Japan is urging the United States and other countries to stick to a strict imposition of U.N. sanctions on North Korea until it abandons the development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. In April, the U.N. Security Council blacklisted dozens of ships and shipping companies over oil and coal smuggling by North Korea, including five based in China. The vessels are subject to a global port ban and must be deregistered. In December last year, U.S. satellites detected Chinese ships illegally transferring oil to North Korean vessels in the Yellow Sea. From Reuters. Epoch Times staff member Annie Wu contributed to this report. L: Kim Kardashian West in Hollywood, Calif., on April 12, 2017. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images); R: President Donald Trump on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., on May 29, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) Kim Kardashian Meets Trump, Asks Him to Pardon Drug Offender Sentenced to Life Reality television celebrity Kim Kardashian West met with President Donald Trump in the White House on Wednesday, May 30. She asked Trump to pardon a woman currently serving life in prison for drug conspiracy and money laundering. I would like to thank President Trump for his time this afternoon. It is our hope that the President will grant clemency to Ms. Alice Marie Johnson who is serving a life sentence for a first-time, non-violent drug offense, Kardashian West said on Twitter the day after. We are optimistic about Ms. Johnsons future and hopeful that sheand so many like herwill get a second chance at life. I would like to thank President Trump for his time this afternoon. It is our hope that the President will grant clemency to Ms. Alice Marie Johnson who is serving a life sentence for a first-time, non-violent drug offense. Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) May 31, 2018 We are optimistic about Ms. Johnsons future and hopeful that she and so many like herwill get a second chance at life. Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) May 31, 2018 Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing, Trump said in a Thursday tweet. Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing. pic.twitter.com/uOy4UJ41JF Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 Kardashian West learned of the womans story earlier this year and contacted Trumps daughter, Ivanka Trump, who connected Kardashian West with her husband, Jared Kushner, Trumps senior adviser, according to Vanity Fair. Kushner was already working on a prison reform initiative that has recently pushed the bipartisan First Step Act through a laudable 360-59 House vote. The act would provide to all federal inmates programs teaching life skills, morals, and academics, offer drug addiction treatment, prison jobs, mentoring, and more. It would also allow many non-violent offenders with low risk of recidivism to spend the last part of their sentences in alternative detention, like home confinement, halfway houses, and community supervision. After a few months back and forth with Kushner, the Trump-Kardashian meeting was set upa chance for her to plea for the release of the 63-year-old. I would explain to him that, just like everybody else, we can make choices in our lives that were not proud of and that we dont think through all the way, Kardashian West said about what shed like to tell Trump in a recent interview with Mic. Johnson grew up in Olive Branch, Mississippi, as one of nine children. During her high school years, she got pregnant and married. She had her first child at the age of 15. Still, she finished school with fairly good grades and even spent some time in college. In the early 1980s, she landed a job with FedEx and soon made it into management. By the end of the decade, she already had five children. But something went wrong. In 1989, she divorced the father of her children. A year later she lost her jobshe was addicted to gambling. In 1991 she filed for bankruptcy and lost her house. She found a factory job, but it didnt pay enough. Thats when she made the decision to engage in the drug trade. She got involved with a group of people that were getting large shipments of cocaine from Houston and distributing them in Memphis. Soon, the money started to roll in. She bought a commercial cleaning company franchise and made a $26,000 downpayment on a house. She didnt even have to work very hard for the money, based on her account to the American Civil Liberties Union. She just let the traffickers use her phone, stashed money for them, and relayed coded messages. The enterprise didnt last long though. In 1993, she was arrested along with 15 others. Ten of the co-conspirators took plea deals and testified against the others, including Johnson. She was convicted of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine, attempted possession of cocaine with intent to distribute and deliver, money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and structuring a monetary transaction. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole plus 25 years in 1997. Johnson was at the top of the list of recommendations to President Barack Obamas Clemency Project 2014 by CAN-DO, a nonprofit advocating clemency for non-violent drug offenders. Johnson has expressed remorse for her crimes, participated in vocational training and volunteer programs, and exhibited exemplary conduct. Shes also authored and produced multiple plays. Upon release, shed like to help ex-convicts find jobs to reduce recidivism, according to her profile on the CAN-DO website. Obama, however, denied her pardon without explanation. Kardashian West was hoping to secure the pardon from Trump, who recently called America: a nation that believes in the power of redemption in support of Kushners prison reform. Trump also recently issued a rare posthumous pardon to legendary boxer Jack Johnson. Johnsons early 20th-century career was destroyed after he was prosecuted and imprisoned on racially motivated charges. Boxers, historians, academics, and politicians have pushed for a pardon for Johnson for 14 years. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama never acted on the requests. Trump revealed in April that he is considering a full pardon after speaking about it with actor Sylvester Stallone. Epoch Times reporter Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report. Watch Next: Kushner Talks Peace in Middle East at US Embassy Jerusalem Dedication Ceremony National Guardsman Corporal Scott Engels outside the surveillance center in the Border Patrol station in Nogales, Ariz., on May 23, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) National Guard Making Impact on Southwest Border NOGALES, ArizonaNational Guardsman Cpl. Scott Engels volunteered to deploy to the border to assist Border Patrol with surveillance. He had previously served in the military on active duty as an artillery radar operator for four years. I just want to serve my country and make sure everybody is as protected as they need to be, Engles said outside the surveillance room in the Nogales Border Patrol station in Arizona on May 23. He said it feels fantastic to facilitate the apprehension of an illegal alien or drug smuggler from his surveillance work. Its sad that there are these types of illegal activities going on, but its fantastic that I am able to participate in assisting these agents with the apprehension of these illegal activities, he said. His arrival at the border meant one more Border Patrol agent could be out in the field. Engles said he logs in to the remote video camera systems and integrated fixed towers that are scattered along the border. He then scans for illegal aliens or drug activity, and the computer will also start flashing an alert if it detects anything. If he sees anything, he radios Border Patrol agents in the area to investigate. Outside of this deployment, Engels is a transportation specialist for the National Guard and is also completing a criminal justice degree in Phoenix. Operation Guardian Support The National Guard has been assisting the Border Patrol on the U.S.Mexico border operations since early April and has contributed to more than 4,500 arrests, according to Customs and Border Protection numbers. Around 6,500 pounds of illicit drugs have been seized during the same period. More than 200 National Guardsmen have been deployed to the Tucson Sector, in which Nogales sits, and most of them are in the Nogales area. Arizona has provision for 600 National Guardsmen, which has not yet been reached, and it may look at recruiting from other states. The National Guard funding for the current Operation Guardian Support is through Sept. 30, 2018. It has provision for up to 4,000 soldiers. President Donald Trump announced the National Guard deployment on April 3, after illegal border crossing numbers were released. Illegal crossings spiked in March, reaching 50,296 apprehensionsup 37 percent from February and more than triple from the same period last year. Until we can have a wall and proper security, were going to be guarding our border with the military. Thats a big step, Trump said on April 3. The security of the United States is imperiled by a drastic surge of illegal activity on the southern border, Trump said in a memorandum to the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security and the attorney general on April 4. Well probably keep them, or a large portion of them, until such time as we get the wall, he said on April 5. Hooves on the Ground This is the third deployment to the border for Sgt. 1st Class Thomas Evitts. He assisted with budget work in Phoenix during Operation Jump Start in 2006 under former President George W. Bush, in which 6,000 troops were deployed in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Evitts served again in 201o, running operations in Nogales during Operation Phalanx, under former President Barack Obama, which saw 1,200 National Guard troops deployed. It is a different mission this time, Evitts said. Last time, it was more eyes on the border, whereas this mission is more getting the border agents on the border. So were more of a support role than we were in the past. His arrival to take care of the herd for the horse patrol unit immediately freed up a Border Patrol agent to the field. He helps feed, water, and tack up the horses for the unit. Its definitely doing what the mission statement is [and] getting agents back on the border, he said. Its definitely made a huge impact for them. I deal with the agents daily, helping them tack up their horses and managing the herd. It really does relieve them. Theyre able to keep their teams in the field and be productive. The horses are wild mustangs from the Bureau of Land Management, which captures them and sends them to local prisons to get broken in by the prisoners before Border Patrol gets them. Mustangs are uniquely suited to border work because they are hyper-vigilant and agile, especially in the dark. Evitts, who works for Sysco Foods, started with the National Guard in 2001 and said working with the horses is a unique opportunity. This was a need and I was available, so I decided to go ahead and do it. Its a great job. Captain Aaron Thacker said National Guard members bring a lot of unique skills and experience to the field. If you were to bring active-duty guys here, kids who enter military at 18 and learn nothing but that job, thats quite a contrast, he said. Whereas a guardsman, when they come in and enter, they bring in a lot of their civilian skill sets with them and a lot of the things they learned when they grow up in this dual world of military and civilian. So thats what also makes us a unique fit. National Guard members in the Nogales area are also assisting on the firearms range and in the vehicle maintenance garage. Further west, in Yuma, they are also helping clear brush from beside the Colorado River, which separates Arizona from Mexico. Watch Next: The National Guard Has Started Deploying Troops to the USMexico Border Tk 200cr more fund for Bhashan Char project sought Work to relocate 1 lakh Rohingyas going on in full swing Special Correspondent : Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has asked the Finance Ministry to release Tk 200 crore more for building Rohingya shelters at Bhashan Char of Hatiya upazila in Noakhali. PMO, in a letter on Tuesday, instructed the finance division to take necessary steps to release the fund kept in the budget for the current fiscal year. "The office of the Ashrayan Project-3 under the PMO has sought the fund from the Ministry for speedy implementation of the project," a senior Finance Ministry official told The New Nation yesterday. He said the Bhashan Char project initially received Tk 1,500 crore allocation as a project as part of Annual Development Programme (ADP) in the current fiscal year's budget. But the allocation increased in the revised ADP to Tk 1,898.45 crore for speedy implementation of the project. The Finance Ministry has already released a total of Tk 1,461 under the project. The amount has already been spent. Out of the total fund allocated in the ADP, an amount of Tk 437 crore still remained unutilised. The PMO sought Tk 200 crore more fund from the remaining portion. "The fund will be released as soon as possible," said the Finance Ministry official. Officials related to budget formulation said the government is likely to propose Tk 2,000 crore allocation in the upcoming budget for executing the project, which the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) approved in November last at an estimated cost of Tk 2,312.15 crore. Apart from building necessary infrastructure and temporary housing facilities for the displaced Myanmar citizens, the low-lying areas of the island will be filled in and embankments would be erected around the entire perameter to ensure it can resist tidal flooding, monsoon storms and seasonal cyclones. Officials of Disaster Management and Relief Ministry said the rehabilitation work for relocating 100,000 displaced Rohingyas is going on in full swing at Bhashan Char. Almost 50 percent of the construction works of 1,440 houses including 120 cyclone shelters has already been completed. "The government is serious to implement the Bhashan Char project in time so that Rohingya refugees vulnerable to landslides and flash floods in Cox's Bazar's makeshift camps can be relocated there as soon as possible. We hope to relocate the refugees by August this year," Senior Secretary, Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief, Md Shah Kamal told The New Nation yesterday. UN agencies earlier warned that more 100,000 Rohingya refugees face life-threatening risks from floods and landslides as the monsoon season approaches. "We have already relocated 15,000 Rohingyas who were most vulnerable to flood and landslides to a new site in Cox's Bazar," Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner Abul Kalam told The New Nation. He said the government agencies are working hard to relocate all the vulnerable refugees to Bhashan Char before the monsoon starts. "We are taking the UN alerts seriously." Bangladesh is now hosting more than one million Rohingyas who are now living in camps in border district Cox's Bazar. Of them, about 655,000, according to an UN estimate, have entered the country since August 25, when the Myanmar military launched a violent crackdown in Rakhine State following attacks by Rohingya militant. The huge Rohingya influx has created immense social and economic problem for Bangladesh. Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro attends a meeting with banks and financial institutions representatives at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela May 29, 2018. (Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS) OAS Says to Present Evidence of Venezuela Rights Violations to the Hague The Organization of American States (OAS) will present evidence that Venezuelas government under President Nicolas Maduro has committed crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the blocs chief said on Tuesday. A panel of independent international experts said in a Tuesday report that state security forces or militant grassroots groups known as colectivos had murdered 131 people between 2014 and 2017, and that more than 1,300 political prisoners had been detained in the South American country. At the OAS we seek justice. The experts report will be referred to the ICC, Luis Almagro, the secretary general of the 34-member group, said on Twitter after the report was presented. In the report, which was commissioned by Almagro, the experts recommended that the OAS present its evidence to The Hague. Human rights groups say that Venezuela systematically abused protesters against Maduros socialist government during months of demonstrations last year in which more than 120 people died. A group of 15 military officials, including two active generals, were detained around the time of Venezuelas May 20 elections. Maduro was re-elected to a six-year term amid relatively low turnout in a vote that many countries and organizations, including the OAS, did not recognize. Venezuela calls the OAS, which is based in Washington, D.C. and includes the United States, a pawn of U.S. foreign policy and withdrew from the group last year. Maduro expelled the top two U.S. diplomats in Caracas last week, accusing them of conspiring to overthrow his government. Officials also say rights groups downplay violence committed by the opposition, including setting a man on fire during a demonstration and targeting police with explosives. By Luc Cohen and Vivian Sequera Watch Now: Joshua Holt Tearfully Reunited With Family in US After Being Freed by Venezuela This is the tearful moment American citizen Joshua Holt was reunited with his family after landing in the United States, just hours after he was unexpectedly released by Venezuelas socialist government. Pompeo to Meet Top North Korean Official in New York City Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet North Koreas vice chairman, Kim Yong Chol, in New York City on May 30 and 31, according to a State Department spokesperson. Pompeo and Kim will discuss preparations for the expected summit in Singapore between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Kim Yong Chol was the head of North Koreas spy agency for seven years before becoming vice chairman of the central committee in 2016. The New York meeting takes place as additional meetings are expected between Washington and Pyongyang delegations in the demilitarized zone in North Korea. The White House officially confirmed on Tuesday that the U.S. representatives holding talks in North Korea are Sung Kim, ambassador to the Philippines, Allison Hooker, the director for Korea for the National Security Council, and Randy Schriver, the assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs. Meanwhile, in Singapore, an advance team led by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin is coordinating logistics for the planned summit on June 12. National Security Advisor John Bolton has also held regular talks with South Korean and Japanese counterparts virtually every day, according to White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders. Last week, President Donald Trump informed Kim Jong Un that he was canceling the June 12 summit due to inflammatory rhetoric emanating from North Korea. Despite walking away, Trump left the door open and North Koreans issued a measured statement expressing the willingness to continue talks. In the days that followed, Trump said that the summit may still take place as scheduled. We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea, Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young [sic] Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you! North Korea has made several major concessions ahead of the planned summit. Pyongyang released three American hostages, blew up its only nuclear testing site, and committed to the goals of peace and denuclearization. Trump and Pompeo have both promised North Korea a bright and prosperous future should its leader abandon nuclear weapons. The communist regime is destitute amid crippling sanctions spearheaded by Trump. I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial Nation one day, Trump wrote on Twitter on May 27. Kim Jong Un agrees with me on this. It will happen! The White House was preparing to impose new sanctions on North Korea on Monday, but a U.S. official informed reporters that the measures would be postponed indefinitely while talks about the summit proceed. Kim Yong Chol was part of the Norths delegation to the closing ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea; he joined Kim Jong Un in both of his two meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in April and May; and hosted Pompeo when he visited Pyongyang most recently early this month. The United States and South Korea blacklisted Kim Yong Chol for supporting the Norths nuclear and missile programs in 2010 and 2016, respectively. Due to sanctions against him, Kim Yong Chol is normally banned from visiting the United States. Any visit to the United States would indicate a waiver was granted. During his tenure as a senior intelligence official, Kim Yong Chol was accused by South Korea of masterminding deadly attacks on a South Korean navy ship and an island in 2010, and was linked by U.S. intelligence to a cyber attack on Sony Pictures in 2014. North Korea denied any involvement in the attacks. Epoch Times reporter Petr Svab and Reuters contributed to this report. Watch Next: Trump: My Proudest Achievement Would be Denuclearizing Korean Peninsula Pompeo Will Meet North Korean Official in This North American City Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet North Koreas vice chairman, Kim Yong Chol, in New York City on May 30 and 31, according to a State Department spokesperson. Pompeo and Kim will discuss preparations for the expected summit in Singapore between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Kim Yong Chol was the head of North Koreas spy agency for seven years before becoming vice chairman of the central committee in 2016. The New York City meeting takes place as additional meetings are expected between Washington and Pyongyang delegations in the demilitarized zone in North Korea. The White House officially confirmed on Tuesday that the U.S. representatives holding talks in North Korea are Sung Kim, ambassador to the Philippines, Allison Hooker, the director for Korea for the National Security Council, and Randy Schriver, the assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs. Meanwhile, in Singapore, an advance team led by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin is coordinating logistics for the planned summit on June 12. National Security Advisor John Bolton has also held regular talks with South Korean and Japanese counterparts virtually every day, according to White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders. Last week, President Donald Trump informed Kim Jong Un that he is canceling the June 12 summit due to inflammatory rhetoric emanating from North Korea. Despite walking away, Trump left the door open and North Koreans issued a measured statement expressing the willingness to continue talks. In the days that followed, Trump said that the summit may still take place as scheduled. We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea, Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you! North Korea has made several major concessions ahead of the planned summit. Pyongyang released three American hostages, blew up its only nuclear testing site, and committed to the goals of peace and denuclearization. Trump and Pompeo have both promised North Korea a bright and prosperous future should its leader abandon nuclear weapons. The communist regime is destitute amid crippling sanctions spearheaded by Trump. I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial Nation one day, Trump wrote on Twitter on May 27. Kim Jong Un agrees with me on this. It will happen! The White House was preparing to impose new sanctions on North Korea on Monday, but a U.S. official informed reporters that the measures would be postponed indefinitely while talks about the summit proceed. Kim Yong Chol was part of the Norths delegation to the closing ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea; he joined Kim Jong Un in both of his two meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in April and May; and hosted Pompeo when he visited Pyongyang most recently early this month. The United States and South Korea blacklisted Kim Yong Chol for supporting the Norths nuclear and missile programs in 2010 and 2016, respectively. Due to sanctions against him, Kim Yong Chol is banned from visiting the United States normally. Any visit to the United States would indicate a waiver was granted. During his tenure as a senior intelligence official, Kim Yong Chol was accused by South Korea of masterminding deadly attacks on a South Korean navy ship and an island in 2010, and was linked by U.S. intelligence to a cyber attack on Sony Pictures in 2014. North Korea denied any involvement in the attacks. Petr Svab and Reuters contributed to this report. Watch Next: Trump: My Proudest Achievement Would be Denuclearizing Korean Peninsula Roseanne Barr Drops Bombshell on Ambien After Show Is Canceled by Disney A day after her show Roseanne was canceled by ABC, Roseanne Barr issued a statement. Guys, I did something unforgiveable so do not defend me. It was 2 in the morning and I was Ambien tweeting-it was memorial day too-i went 2 far, she wrote. She cited Ambien again in a later tweet when she said, Not giving excuses for what I did(tweeted) but Ive done weird stuff while on ambien cracked eggs on the wall at 2am etc. The actress and comedian posted a tweet that has since been deleted, comparing ex-Obama advisor Valerie Jarett to Planet of the Apes. Barr had tweeted: Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj. Roseanne also tweeted an apology hours after that, saying, I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me-my joke was in bad taste. Hours later, Disney, which owns ABC, canned her No. 1-rated show. Dont feel sorry for me, guys!!, Barr wrote in a Tweet late on Tuesday. I just want to apologize to the hundreds of people, and wonderful writers (all liberal) and talented actors who lost their jobs on my show due to my stupid tweet. According to Reuters, Hollywood talent agency ICM said in a statement that it wouldnt represent Barr any longer, Reuters reported. Some networks said that they would remove reurns of her original Roseanne show, which ran from 1988 to 1997. The current iteration Roseanne was ABCs biggest hit of the 2017-2018 season, drawing an average 18.7 million viewers, second only to CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, according to Nielsen data through May 20, according to Reuters. Roseannes recent comments about Valerie Jarrett, and so much more, are abhorrent and do not reflect the beliefs of our cast and crew or anyone associated with our show. I am disappointed in her actions to say the least. sara gilbert (@THEsaragilbert) May 29, 2018 I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me-my joke was in bad taste. Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) May 29, 2018 Watch Next: I Was a Communist Slave A story of tragedy, faith, and resistance in the face of brutal totalitarianism, Memoir of a Communist Slave is one mans journey to uncover what he believes has held him and his people hostage for too long. San Francisco Subpoenas Uber, Lyft on Driver Classification SAN FRANCISCOSan Franciscos city attorney on Tuesday subpoenaed Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] and Lyft Inc to turn over records relating to how the ride-hailing companies classify drivers, as well as driver wages, health care and other benefits, the latest demand in a year-long investigation. City Attorney Dennis Herrera said he was seeking evidence to determine whether Uber and Lyft are in compliance with a recent California Supreme Court decision that makes it much easier for workers to prove they are employees entitled to benefits and protections, rather than independent contractors. Herrera said he was seeking evidence to show whether Uber and Lyft have lawfully classified drivers as independent contractors, or are providing minimum wage, sick leave, health care and paid parental leave. Legal experts say many companies, including San Francisco-based Uber and Lyft, may have to raise pay or provide more benefits to workers due to the court decision last month, which adopted a new test for determining whether workers are employees. Companies that want to classify workers as independent contractors must now prove they are not under their direct control, do not perform a core function of their business and are engaged in an independent business. Uber and Lyft drivers are classified as independent contractors, and the majority lack paid sick and vacation days and must pay their own expenses, such as car maintenance and gasoline. The issue goes beyond just Uber and Lyft, to the heart of the gig economy model in which many Silicon Valley companies rely on an independent-contractor workforce to reduce labour costs. We dont know whether these ride-hailing companies are breaking the law until they provide the information we seek in these subpoenas, Herrera said. We are going to ensure that these companies comply with the Supreme Courts ruling and with San Franciscos laws. Uber declined to comment. Lyft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the days following the court ruling, Lyft and San Francisco-based delivery services DoorDash and Postmates were sued in California state court by workers alleging they had been improperly classified as independent contractors. Tuesdays subpoenas followed demands last June by the city attorney that Uber and Lyft turn over records on driving and business practices as part of an investigation to determine whether the companies had become a public nuisance. Lyft has handed over most of that information, the city attorneys office said, but Uber has appealed a court order to comply. By Heather Somerville Watch Now: What You Need to Know About Earths Poles Shift 2018 Sichuan Airlines Co-pilot Sucked Halfway out of Cockpit SHANGHAIThe co-pilot of a Sichuan Airlines flight that was forced to make an emergency landing on Monday was sucked halfway out of the plane after a cockpit windshield blew out, media reported, citing the aircrafts captain. Liu Chuanjian, hailed a hero on social media after having to land the Airbus A319 manually, told the Chengdu Economic Daily his aircraft had just reached a cruising altitude of 32,000 feet when a deafening sound tore through the cockpit. The cockpit experienced a sudden loss of pressure and drop in temperature and when he looked over, the cockpits right windshield was gone. There was no warning sign. Suddenly, the windshield just cracked and made a loud bang. The next thing I know, my co-pilot had been sucked halfway out of the window, he was quoted as saying. Everything in the cockpit was floating in the air. Most of the equipment malfunctioned and I couldnt hear the radio. The plane was shaking so hard I could not read the gauges. The co-pilot, who was wearing a seatbelt, was pulled back in. He suffered scratches and a sprained wrist, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said, adding that one other cabin crew member was also injured in the descent. None of the planes 119 passengers was injured. The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said Frances BEA accident investigation agency and Airbus would send staff to China to investigate, according to CAAC News which is affiliated to the aviation regulator. Sichuan Airlines Flight 3U8633 left the central Chinese municipality of Chongqing on Monday bound for the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. It made its emergency landing in the southwest city of Chengdu. The crew were serving us breakfast when the aircraft began to shake. We didnt know what was going on and we panicked. Then the oxygen masks dropped We experienced a few seconds of free fall before it stabilized again, an unnamed passenger told the state-run China News Service. Im still nervous. I dont dare to take an airplane anymore. But Im also happy I had a narrow escape. The windshield shattered about half an hour after the plane had taken off, the Chengdu Economic Daily said. A separate report said the aircraft had accumulated 19,912 flight hours since entering service at Sichuan Airlines in July 2011. CAAC also said that the windshield was part of the original aircraft and had no previously recorded faults. Incidents involving cracked windshields do happen on a regular basis due to bird or lightning strikes but ones involving entire windshields coming off are rare. In 1990, one of the pilots on British Airways Flight 5390 was blown partially out of the cabin window after its windshield blew out at 23,000 feet. He survived the incident, which occurred on a BAC-111 jet. By Brenda Goh Watch Next: Majestic Parade in Manhattan Marks 26 Years of Falun Gong Today it is practiced by tens of millions in over 70 countries worldwide. A police officer is seen on the scene of a shooting in Liege, Belgium, May 29, 2018. (Reuters/Francois Lenoir) Three Killed in Belgium Terror Attack, Victims Identified LIEGE, Belgium Belgian authorities sought to deflect questions on Wednesday, May 30, over the furlough of a convicted criminal, known to have been radicalized in jail, who killed three people in the Belgian city of Liege. Just hours after his release, the man named by Belgian media as Benjamin Herman killed two policewomen and a bystander on Tuesday, May 29, before being gunned down in what officials say was a terrorist attack. Police also suspect the 36-year-old of the murder of a former associate found dead at his home. The two female officers have been identified as 45-year-old Lucile Garcia and 53-year-old Soraya Belkacemi, reported news.com.au. Belkacemi was the mother of 13-year-old twin daughters who earlier lost their father, also a police officer. A 22-year-old man, Cyril Vangriecken, was shot dead as he sat in a parked car. Four other officers were reportedly wounded during the attack. In and out of jail for a variety of crimes since 2003, Herman found a path to violence that has heightened concerns Europes prisons are incubators for radicalism. He converted to Islam while in detention, a Belgian security source told Reuters, and was under suspicion of radicalization. In Belgium, a prisoners inclusion on a state security list as a suspected radical is not automatically communicated to all police or the prison service, experts say. It was the fourteenth time since his detention that he was granted temporary leave, intended to help him prepare for eventual reintegration into society in 2020, Justice Minister Koen Geens told reporters. Everyone in Belgium is asking the same question: how is it possible that someone convicted for such serious acts was allowed to leave prisons? Belgiums deputy prime minister Alexander de Croo was cited by local media as saying. Herman stabbed the policewomen from behind at around 10:30 a.m. on a boulevard in the centre of Belgiums third biggest city, seized their handguns and shot both. He shot dead a 22-year-old trainee teacher who was sitting in a car before entering a high school about 100 yards (100 meters) away and taking two female employees hostage. That triggered a major intervention by armed police. Pupils were moved to safety as a gun battle broke out that sent people in the street racing for cover. The gunman was heard shouting Allahu Akbar God is greatest in Arabic when he burst from the school shooting at police, in a video shot by local residents. Four police officers were wounded before the attacker was finally killed. The national crisis centre, on high alert since past attacks by Islamic State in Paris and Brussels in the past three years, said it was monitoring events but had not raised its alert level, an indication follow-up attacks were not expected. I think it was just one individual that completely snapped and went on a killing spree, said Pieter Van Ostaeyen, a specialist on jihadism who has maintained contacts with Belgians fighting in Syria. I dont think it was an organised attack. FROM JAIL TO JIHAD? The attackers profile drew concern about the risk of petty criminals, including those not from Muslim backgrounds, being inspired to Islamist violence while jailed. Convicts have been behind several recent attacks in Europe. Hundreds of prisoners deemed radical by authorities are due to be released in the coming years, the Belgian parliament warned in a report late last year. They come in as drug dealers and leave as Salafi jihadists, a security source said. Justice Minister Koen Geens defended the decision to grant the attacker prison leave, saying there was no reason to suspect this time would be a different from his earlier furloughs. I dont think those are mistakes, he said. It is not a clear cut case of radicalisation otherwise he would have been flagged by all services. Prime Minister Charles Michel also said that Herman had not figured directly on the main national register of threats. But with Belgian media reporting that he was flagged as radical as recently as last year, the furlough raised concerns. If it were me, I would not have let him go, said Brussels security consultant Claude Moniquet, a former French agent. Security services in Belgium and France have faced criticism at home and abroad for intelligence failures and their response to attacks in Brussels, Paris and Nice. A Brussels-based Islamic State cell was involved in attacks on Paris in 2015 that killed 130 people and on Brussels in 2016 in which 32 died. By Christopher Stern and Alissa de Carbonnel Watch Next: Kushner Talks Peace in Middle East at US Embassy Jerusalem Dedication Ceremony President Donald Trump before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on May 29, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) Trump: Democrat Bill to Repeal Tax Cuts Too Good to Be True for Republicans After a Democrat Congressman introduced a bill to repeal Republicans tax cuts, President Donald Trump welcomed the bill as a help to Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. A Democratic lawmaker just introduced a bill to Repeal the GOP Tax Cuts (no chance). This is too good to be true for Republicans, Trump said on Twitter on Monday, May 28. Remember, the Nancy Pelosi Dems are also weak on Crime, the Border and want to be gentle and kind to MS-13 gang membersnot good! A Democratic lawmaker just introduced a bill to Repeal the GOP Tax Cuts (no chance). This is too good to be true for RepublicansRemember, the Nancy Pelosi Dems are also weak on Crime, the Border and want to be gentle and kind to MS-13 gang membersnot good! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2018 The bill was introduced by Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) on May 23. It would repeal the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, cancel all federal student loan debt, and increase federal grants for college tuition. Trumps tax cutsone of his campaign promisesslashed most individual income tax rates and nixed the personal exemption for doubled standard deduction, among other things. It also scrapped the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act, which fined Americans who didnt buy health insurance. Another significant change was slashing the federal corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent and ending double taxation of foreign profits, while opening a way for companies to bring back to the United States over $3 trillion in profits stashed overseas. The law also closed some tax loopholes. The hope is that people and businesses will use the extra cash theyve been allowed to keep on something productive that will help to boost the economy, thus offsetting the estimated $1.5 trillion hole that the cuts are expected to punch in the federal budget over the next decade. The economy has broken several records over the past months, like that for the most job openings in one month6.55 million in March. This figure meant that there were almost as many job openings as the number of people unemployed. Unemployment fell to 3.9 percent in April. The only time it has ever dropped to levels that low since the 1969 recession was in April 2000and that was only for one month. Black and Hispanic unemployment rates have also fallen to the lowest levels in recorded history, and among women, the unemployment rate has decreased to the lowest since the 1950s. The economy has been beating expectations for over a year thanks to a boost of confidence in the economy. According to a recent YouGov poll, almost two-thirds of Americans view the economy positively and more than two-thirds believe that Trumps policies, including the cutting of regulations, taxes, and his planned investment in infrastructure, are at least partly responsible. According to a Gallup poll, more than two in three Americans also believe its now a good time to find a quality job. Its the most positive response since Gallup started gathering responses on the topic 17 years ago. Trump ran on a core promise of reviving the economy and now, the promising results look to boost his agenda in the Nov. 6 midterm elections. In their bid to the voters, Republicans bet on Americans preferring to decide themselves what to do with their money, rather than handing them over to Washington for redistribution. Nancy Pelosi is going absolutely crazy about the big Tax Cuts given to the American People by the Republicans got not one Democrat Vote! Trump said on Twitter on April 20. Heres a choice. They want to end them and raise your taxes substantially. Republicans are working on making them permanent and more cuts! Nancy Pelosi is going absolutely crazy about the big Tax Cuts given to the American People by the Republicansgot 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 Indeed, Republicans plan to introduce a bill that would make the current tax cuts permanent for individuals instead of expiring by 2025 (the corporate tax cuts are permanent). They likely dont have the votes now to break a Democratic filibuster in the Senate though. Pelosi (D-Calif.), House minority leader, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) proposed to scrap the tax cuts for the top 1 percentindividuals or couples earning over $480,000. They expect the move would bring in about $5 billion a year, which theyd use to increase teacher compensation, and recruit and retain a strong, diverse workforce, The Hill reported. With some 3.2 million public school teachers earning an average of some $59,000, each would get a raise of about 2.7 percent. Rep. Poliss bill, however, aims to cancel the tax reform altogether and use the extra tax dollars to bail out 43 million people who collectively owe the government close to $1.4 trillion in student loans. Government grants and loans to students allowed colleges to more than triple tuition between 2005 and 2015. But some students have expressed apprehension about the value of their investment in a college education. Only one-third of students at 4-year colleges believe theyll graduate with the skills and knowledges to be successful in the job market and workplace. Only about half believe that their major will lead to a good job, according to a large-scale Strada-Gallup 2017 college student survey. Poliss bill, along with any other attempt to scrap the tax cuts by Democrats, has virtually no chance in the currently Republican-controlled Congress. Correction: The article was updated to reflect that the previous federal corporate tax rate was 35 percent. Watch Next: Joshua Holt Tearfully Reunited With Family in US After Being Freed by Venezuela This is the tearful moment American citizen Joshua Holt was reunited with his family after landing in the United States, just hours after he was unexpectedly released by Venezuelas socialist government. Burglars loot 'Tk 11.40 lakh' from 3 shops in city Burglars reportedly looted Tk 11.40 lakh cash from three shops in two shopping centres in the city's Islampur area early Wednesday. A group of burglars swooped on two shops-New Bishal Three Piece and Shatarupa Three Piece-at Habibullah Plaza breaking open the shutter and looted Tk 10 lakh cash from the two shops, said Babu Bazar police camp in-charge Sub-Inspector Humayun. Later, the burglar group stormed into Al Arafah Three Piece at Zahan Centre and looted Tk 1.40 lakh in cash from the spot, the SI added. The incident came into light on Wednesday morning when the workers of the shops came to their workplace and found the vault of the shops were open. People queue outside the visa section of the U.S. embassy in Beijing on April 27, 2012. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images) US to Shorten Length of Visas for Some Chinese Citizens NASHVILLEThe U.S. government plans to shorten the length of visas issued to some Chinese citizens as part of a strategy to prevent intellectual property theft by U.S. rivals, a White House official said on May 29. The U.S. State Department will implement measures from June 11 to enhance security for some Chinese visa applicants, the official said. The change would come as President Donald Trumps administration attempts to crack down on what it says is theft of U.S. intellectual property by China. Going forward, a reduction in the validity of some newly issued visas is part of the National Security Strategy to ensure that intellectual property is not transferred to our competitors, the official said, referring to a document issued by the Trump administration in December. The document said officials would consider restrictions on visas for science and technology students from some countries to ensure intellectual property is not transferred to our competitors. A State Department official said the visa application process had not changed but that consular officers may limit the validity of visas for some Chinese applicants on a case-by-case basis. The Associated Press (AP), which first reported about the new policy, quoted a U.S. official as saying Chinese graduate students would be limited to one-year visas if they are studying in certain fields, such as robotics, aviation, and high-tech manufacturing. Those are areas the Chinese regime has said are high-priority goals for its manufacturing sector, outlined in its economic 10-year plan, Made in China 2025. According to AP, the official said the instructions also stated that Chinese citizens seeking visas would need special clearance from multiple U.S. agencies if they work as researchers or managers for companies on a U.S. Commerce Department list of entities needing higher scrutiny. Those clearances are expected to take months for each application, AP cited the official as saying. In recent years, U.S. federal authorities have prosecuted several cases of Chinese nationals working in American academia who stole proprietary technology on behalf of Chinese entities. Also on May 29, the White House announced that it would levy a 25 percent tariff on $50 million of imported Chinese tech goods, a punitive measure against Chinas unfair trade practices such as industrial subsidies and prohibitive trade barriers. By Jeff Mason and Eric Walsh. Epoch Times staff member Annie Wu contributed to this report. Lifestyle: Strewing: An Easy Way to Add Delight and Wonder to Your Homeschool U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (R) speaks as State Department Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback (L) listens during a press event at the State Department May 29, 2018 in Washington, DC. The State Department held the event to release the 2017 Annual Report on International Religious Freedom. (Alex Wong/Getty Images) US Report Condemns China, North Korea, and Others For Persecution of Religious Freedom WASHINGTONChina, North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia and a handful of others continue to abuse religious freedom in their respective countries without hesitation, a U.S. State Department report says. The United States will not stand by as spectators, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during the press briefing at the State Department on Tuesday to introduce the latest annual international religious freedom report. We will get in the ring and stand in solidarity with every individual who seeks to enjoy their most fundamental of human rights. This years report was prepared in part by Pompeos predecessor Rex Tillerson, who notably singled out China during last years report launch briefing in August. Chinas religious freedom standing this year has not improved in the slightest, as the report detailed how the Chinese regime continues to persecute heavily Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Christians in China. Pompeo also announced plans to hold a first-ever ministerial meeting in Washington, D.C., on July 25-26, to bring together like-minded countries to discuss ways to protect religious freedom. The ministerial will also be my first to host as secretary of state, he said. And thats very intentional. Religious freedom is indeed a universal human right that I will fight for. The State Department is mandated by Congress to release the annual report, which reviews the state of religious freedom in countries around the world for the previous year. The reports section on China documents numerous abuses of religious freedom in 2017. In Xinjiang, human rights groups and others reported hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims were forcibly sent to re-education camps, and extensive and invasive security and surveillance were imposed on the Uyghur population, according to the report. The reports section on North Korea cited a South Korean NGO and said there were 1,304 cases of violations of the right to freedom of religion or belief by DPRK authorities during the year, including 119 killings and 87 disappearances. Echoing Pompeo, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback said that the situation remains dire for way too many people around the world during a press briefing at the Foreign Press Center. .@State_IRF Ambassador-at-Large Sam Brownback on the 2017 International #ReligiousFreedom Report: Our goal is to protect the freedom of conscience for all people Weve seen some progress. But theres so much more work to be done. pic.twitter.com/LSY8eYeBoY Department of State (@StateDept) May 29, 2018 What is wrong with allowing people to practice their faith? Brownback asked, when discussing Beijings use of anti-terrorism as a justification for persecuting Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Youre producing more terrorists by doing this, and thats in the academic data now. So I would ask the Chinese government, your practices are counterproductive if this is about addressing the issues of terrorism. Our goal is to protect the freedom of conscience for all people. That means protecting a Muslim, Buddhist, Falun Gong practitioner or Christian in China and their ability to pray and live out their life, Brownback said. That means protecting a blogger in the Middle East who doesnt believe what his government might believe. Our desire is to protect both, to protect everyones right to freely practice what they believe. Watch Next: How a Traditional Spiritual Practice Changed the Lives of These People The practice has attracted tens of millions across the world and at its core are just three simple principles: truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Chinese and U.S. flags are set up at China's Ministry of Transport in Beijing, China on April 27, 2018. (Jason Lee/Reuters) US to Continue Trade Actions Against China, Says White House WASHINGTONThe United States said on May 29 that it will sustain the proposed tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports and will use it unless Beijing addresses the issue of theft of American intellectual property. Washington will also press ahead with restrictions on investment by Chinese companies in the United States as well as export controls for goods exported to China, the statement from the White House said. Details of the investment and export controls will be announced by June 30 and the final tariff list will be published by June 15. The announcement on May 29 restated comments by administration officials that both the tariffs and the restrictions remained in place even after the United States and China sketched out a deal this month to reduce Chinas $375 billion trade surplus with America. A list of potential tariff targets has already been published by the United States Trade Representatives office and it largely includes intermediate tech goods used by companies to make other products as well as some consumer goods like televisions. Even though Washington had not withdrawn the threatened tariffs on imports from China, Beijing reacted harshly to the announcement, saying it was surprised by the White House statement and would defend its interests. Threats of a trade war between the United States and China had hit financial markets hard, although now most economists believe the two will manage to avoid a major economic conflict. China has repeatedly said that it will push ahead with its development of high-tech industries. The two countries earlier this month agreed to look at measures to reduce Chinas trade surplus with the United States in a move that appeared to reduce the risk of a trade war between the worlds two largest economies. That deal was separate from the U.S. investigation into Chinas alleged theft of intellectual property. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross will visit Beijing this week to try and get China to agree to firm numbers for additional U.S. exports to the country. The United States had wanted Chinas trade surplus with America to shrink by $200 billion in two years. There is room to increase exports to China by selling more agricultural commodities and energy products and China has agreed in principle to import more, but the two sides do not have a firm agreement. Walmart, the nations largest employer with some 2.3 million people, will offer its workers free college tuition at a trio of schools for online coursework all the way through to a bachelors degree, with the program covering the cost of books and fees as well. Full and part-time employees can enroll for $1 a day at the University of Florida, Bellevue University in Nebraska or Brandman University in Irvine, Calif., with workers qualifying for the program after just three months of employment. Walmart stated it selected the schools for their adult learning programs the University of Floridas placed 12th in U.S. News and World Reports most recent ranking of online bachelors degree programs with Walmart promising to add more nonprofit school options over time. Walmart will phase out an existing program under which it covered 15 percent of the costs of attending the for-profit American Public University. Walmart is administering the new program through Guild Education, a Colorado startup that has additional partnerships with the University of Denver and Wilmington University in Delaware. Other companies enrolled in Guild education programs include Lowes, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Discover, Lyft and Taco Bell. Guild touts its program as generating a 98 percent worker retention rate for the employers it assists, versus a 71 percent baseline retention rate. For workers lacking secondary school credentials required for admission, Guild offers a college prep program to help students win entry and prepare for the rigor of university instruction. And the firms services include education coaches to help students select the right academic programs to achieve their goals. The Walmart program is limited initially to business and management studies, with the company promising to add other academic fields. Among 35 stores in Connecticut, Walmart has two locations in Norwalk as well as stores in Danbury, New Milford, Milford, Shelton and Stratford. Walmarts supercenter stores employ 350 people each on average, making the retailer among the regions larger employers. On its website, Walmart does not list the specific numbers of open jobs it has at each store. The company closed a Derby store in 2016 and scrapped plans last year for a new supercenter in Monroe. It is the latest initiative by Walmart to boost benefits for workers, with the company this year pledging to raise its starting wage to $11 an hour not far above Connecticuts minimum wage of $10.10 an hour while handing out bonuses of up to $1,000 as a windfall from U.S. tax reform. Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman NORWALK For the past school year, Alexander Perez has been meeting with four other students to learn English with a language specialist at Norwalk High School. The group of mostly Spanish-speaking students met during their study hall two times a week, honing their pronunciation and vocabulary skills during a 90-minute period. And on Tuesday, they celebrated a milestone inside the library where their tutoring sessions were held: completing their first year in the Academic Support Program to Inspire, Reinforce and Empower, or ASPIRE. It is designed to help English Language Learner students pick up basic language skills at a faster pace and to make graduation and participation in post-secondary programs more likely for them. Perez, 18, is a sophomore and moved to the U.S. from Guatemala in 2015. I just want to say thank you, Perez said to ASPIRE teachers and board members Tuesday. Im so happy to be learning English. Perez was a part of this years pilot program, created by the group English Learner Support Services of Fairfield County in collaboration with Norwalk Public Schools ELL Department through a $25,000 grant from the Fairfield County Community Foundation. In the past five years, the districts ELL population has increased from 1,304 to 1,782 students now representing 15 percent of the overall student body in the 2017-18 school year. Helene Becker, ELL instructional specialist for Norwalk Public Schools, said the program aims to address this growing need and is part of the districts overall plan of meeting students where they are so they can move forward. We have students who are new to the language and some of them have gaps in their education. They havent had opportunities in their home country to have a good education, Becker said, noting most students in the ASPIRE program come from Central America. So we want to give them as much help as possible so they can be successful, graduate from high school and move on to either college or career. Carola Osses, an ELL teacher and department head at Norwalk High, helped identify students in need of the program. She thanked the students for their hard work and the many hours they invested in the program, despite the struggles and hardships they faced. I can say that I know it has helped you, Osess said Tuesday, before certificates were handed out. I have seen you in class after you reviewed things with the tutors. So I think that it was absolutely an excellent investment. Peter Shaker, a former Peace Corps volunteer who founded the English Learner Support Services of Fairfield County, said he didnt realize the great need for a program like ASPIRE until he started tutoring ELL students in Stamford. Thats when he noticed a large population of students were falling behind because they didnt have the financial resources to hire private tutoring, and he realized the same applied to Norwalk ELL students. And so, he wanted to create a program that addressed this disparity starting with the area he lives in. We want to help them communicate much better in English and gain confidence through the process, Shaker said. And we couldnt have had a more successful, I think, experience this year considering this was our first year running this program. So this was an overall positive experience for everyone and we think we have a good foundation to continue the program in the future. Moving forward, Shaker said the hope is to continue the program at Norwalk High and to eventually expand it to Brien McMahon High School if theyre able to receive more funding. skim@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2568; @stephaniehnkim NORWALK A usual work week for Lynne Moore includes after-school hours and time on the weekend. The longtime West Rocks Middle School principal said theres no such thing as walking out the door at 4 oclock, since her job involves working for students and their families. This has been her attitude ever since she joined the school as its principal in 1998. I work for my students by making certain they have all of the materials, technology that they have the best teachers, the best staff to advocate for when there are budgetary dilemmas, Moore said. So Im very big on kids being able to build relationships with staff, with each other, learning how to respond to each other with empathy and respect. Moore was recently recognized for her work, one of six to receive an administrator of the year award from the Connecticut Association of School Administrators at its annual banquet on May 24. This was the first time the association handed out the award, an effort to promote the hard work of school executives. The other administrators honored with the award were Beth Furnari of Bridgeport, Zandralyn Gordon of Hartford, Trish McGuire of Greenwich, Linda Darling of Stamford and Dianne Vumback of Meriden. I was very honored of course. I work for my students, I dont work for recognition, Moore said, but recognition is always appreciated. Anthony Ditrio, the associates chairman, said Moore was deserving of the award, having been a former Norwalk principal himself. Overall, Ditrio has spent 47 years with the district in different roles. Anyone who knows Dr. Moore and we spoke about this before giving her award theres no one who works harder for all students than Dr. Moore, Ditrio said. Shes tireless. She sacrifices her own will. She sometimes gets beat up up a lot because she gets out there for others who are afraid to talk and she stands up for everything she can to be there for her kids. In general, Ditrio said administrators in Connecticut deserve more recognition for the work they do and the effort they put forth. You only hear about administrators when they get something wrong and thats something were trying to correct, Ditrio said. This years award winners were selected from nominations submitted by the associations district members. The association has about 40 district members and about 1,000 administrators from the state, according to Ditrio. skim@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2568; @stephaniehnkim Steps to be taken if any innocent falls victim to anti-drug drive: PM Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Wednesday said steps will be taken if any innocent person falls victim to the ongoing drive against narcotics. "We'll surely take steps if any innocent person fall victim to the drive," she told a press conference at her official residence Ganobhaban in the afternoon. The press conference was arranged to brief the media about her recent tour of Wes Bengal, India. If anyone commits anything wrong during the anti-narcotic drive, he or she is surely tried, Hasina said. "What happened so far, please show at least one incident where any innocent person fell victim," the Prime Minister added. Mentioning that drug is like a disease in society, Hasina said more than 10,000 drug dealers and users have been arrested, but no newspaper ran any news over the number of arrestees during the drive. The Prime Minister said all the bilateral issues, including Teesta (Water sharing) agreement, were discussed during her visit. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina went to West Bengal, India on May 25 on a two-day official visit. WILTON Six high-achieving students left their homes in late August and relocated to Wilton as part of a prestigious academic program. Each teen left behind friends, family and the comforts of home to attend Wilton High School, one of the top-rated schools in the region. Behind each student was a hope for a brighter future. It was dreams of one day attending her hometown University of Pennsylvania that brought sophomore Nadia Voravolya from Philadelphia to Wiltons A Better Chance house, while junior Bianca Juca's wish to one day start a cosmetology business brought her from Queens, New York. ABC students definitely have an advantage when it comes to getting into college. And UPenn is really tough to get into, so this could be the difference and what gives me an edge, Voravolya said. Each teen was selected for proving academic prowess in underperforming school districts around the nation. But high school can be an emotional roller coaster for even the most diligent student, and these teens, who had been selected for the program from across New England, found themselves in a strange, new community with no pre-existing support system. Honestly, it was a pretty hard transition at first, said freshman Isabelle Szabo, who is originally from Brooklyn, New York. Making new friends had never been easy, Szabo said. However, the fear that she wouldnt make any new friends subsided as soon as she met her housemates. They have been very welcoming to me, so it wasnt all that hard after a while. It probably would have been harder without everyone else in the house. We didnt know each other that well at first, but after a while weve become a pretty tight family. Were like sisters here, she said. Underclassmen like Szabo quickly found themselves under the wing of older students Juca and Yanny Garcia, who have both been in the Wilton program for three years. Were kind of known as the leaders of the house, so Yanny and I are supposed to take care of any problems, any adjustment issues for the new girls, helping with rooms, the chores, dinner and all those kind of things, Juca said. Juca remembers when she first came to Wilton from the city, and how hard it was to get used to the shift in environment. She said she keeps those memories in mind when interacting with the new kids in the house. We all came here for the same reasons, so were in the same boat. Weve all had similar experiences that we can share with one another, so we kind of learn and grow together, she said. Each afternoon, the six students get home from school and have a few hours to themselves. Around 6 p.m., they have a sit-down dinner with each other and their host family, Michelle and Michael Perri, which is proceeded by an hour or so of studying and chores around the house. The students said that this family dynamic has allowed them to not only excel in class, but also to flourish in new endeavors. Inspired by the new environment, sophomore Kiri Clancy found herself joining the yearbook club something she admits she never wouldve done at home. For freshman Leah Cundiff, that meant trying out for the girls lacrosse team despite never playing the sport before, while Szabo picked up a new sport in softball too. I guess when youre in new place and surrounded by people with different interests, youre more willing to try something new. If I keep practicing and working at lacrosse, I think I might try playing again next year too, Cundiff said. These girls are what this program is all about. Its about bringing students from different religions, backgrounds and life experiences to a place where they can realize their potential, said John Klein, the Wilton ABC president. ABC is a nationwide program. ABC of Wilton was founded in 1996 to offer students a better chance' by placing them in an environment that encourages academic excellence, improves their college acceptance chances and creates the foundation for an improved future. It has sent alumni to esteemed programs including Princeton University, Brown University, Harvard Business School and Duke University. Wiltons ABC program, which supports a boys and girls house in town, is made possible largely through town volunteers and private donations. To learn more about volunteering for or donating, go to www.abcwilton.org/support/. In recognition of National Historic Preservation Month, Edwardsville's Historic Preservation Commission (HPC) will showcase some of Edwardsville's historic buildings in a series of articles during the month of May. . 1211 Emerson Avenue The Klausing Home . According to an announcement in the Edwardsville Intelligencer, the Craftsman bungalow at 1211 Emerson Ave. was built for Edward and Emilie Klausing in 1924. The home was then in the Village of Leclaire, which is now the Leclaire National Historic District of Edwardsville. Edward Klausing grew up on a farm in Pin Oak Township. Born Feb. 28, 1886, he was one of six children born to German immigrant parents. Edward's first wife, Anna Bress Klausin, died in November 1918, during the height of the influenza epidemic in Madison County. When Anna died, she left two young children, Helen, 5, and William, 2. Edward was a farmer and had no way to care for the children so they were taken in by Edward's sister and her husband, Minnie and Adam Flath, Jr. The children would remain with their aunt and uncle until they were grown, never returning to their father's house. In December 1921, Edward married a widow, the former Emelia Kuhlman. Emelia was born March 1, 1892, and, like Edward, grew up in Pin Oak Township. Her parents were second generation German farmers. When Emelia's first husband, Louis Wille, died in January 1917, she was left to raise their two young girls alone. Fortunately, Emelia and her daughters, Irma, 6, and Olga, 4, were able to move in with her parents. Emelia brought her children with her to the marriage so in 1924 their blended family, Edward, Emelia, Emelia's daughters and baby Rose, born in May 1924, moved into the new house on Emerson Avenue. Unfortunately, the family would not live there long. During the Great Depression, like many others in Madison County, Edward was unable to obtain a steady job. They took out several mortgages on the house, but were unable to pay them back. Before the house could be taken by the bank, Edward's nephew, John Niemeier, bought the house and the debt in 1933. John was fortunate to have a steady job at the railroad yards and was a farmer as well. Edward and Emelia moved to McKinley Avenue where they rented a house for many years. John Niemeier's parents lived on Troy Road and his soon to be wife, Rose Rinkel, lived with her parents at 1107 Lake Avenue. John purchased the Emerson Avenue house in April 1933, just a few months prior to his marriage to Ella Rinkel. Although it was the middle of the Depression, the Niemeiers escaped the financial problems experienced by many of their neighbors. John worked for the Illinois Terminal Railroad for 40 years, and his wife worked as a stenographer for the N. O. Nelson Manufacturing Company for many years. The couple never had children. The Niemeiers occupied the Emerson Avenue house until the early 1950s when they moved to the home of Ella's parents at 1107 Lake Ave. The house on Emerson was rented to family members who were very familiar with the house. Irma Wille Dustman had spent part of her childhood in the house. She was the step-daughter of Edward Klausing, John's uncle, so was a cousin by marriage to John Niemeier. Irma and her husband, John Dustman, purchased the house by contract for deed in 1958. John and Irma Dustman owned the house until 1995 when it was sold to a neighbor, George Edwards, who then used it as a rental property, all the while continuing to maintain and improve the property. Last fall the house at 1211 Emerson was purchased by Krause Properties, a property management firm with a reputation for restoring historic properties. When Edwardsville's Historic Preservation Commission (HPC) learned that Krause had plans to restore the original siding, HPC asked to make it an educational event. On Saturday, June 2, 9 a.m. noon, the public is invited to attend "the unveiling" of the house as volunteers remove aluminum siding to reveal the original wood siding below. Many homeowners are fearful of doing this, not knowing what to expect. This event will give them the opportunity to learn how the siding can be removed and witness the condition of the original wood siding that will be restored. No work will be required of attendees who are encouraged to sit back and watch, while enjoying free coffee and doughnuts. The house is a front-gabled, story-and-a-half Craftsman bungalow. The front porch extends the entire width of the house and features original tapered wood columns on raised bases of painted "pillow" block. The eave brackets, were covered when the house was sided, are one of the character-defining features the owner hopes will be "unveiled." Since there have been no additions to this house over the years and the front porch was never modernized, the restoration of the original siding will make it one of the most architecturally intact homes in Leclaire. . Information for this article was obtained from resources at the Madison County Archival Library, the Madison County Recorder and Probate Offices, Edwardsville Public Library and from area residents that knew the family. The architectural description was provided by Jennifer Plocher Wilkins. If you have questions about this article, contact Cindy Reinhardt at 618-656-1294 or cynreinhardt@yahoo.com. American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. 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Record shootouts in a single day 15 more drug peddlers gunned down in 7 dists Md Joynal Abedin Khan : The killing of drug dealers in so called gunfights in different districts reached a record high at 15 in a single day (Wednesday) while the tally of deceased in encounters reached at 132 during the countrywide ongoing anti-narcotic crackdown since May 12. A total number ten thousands people were also arrested at the same time on charge of drug peddling, smuggling and patronizing and they have been shown arrested in 9,000 cases with different police stations at this time, law enforcing agencies report said. The number of gunfight victims was also 12 on Tuesday, 11 on Monday, 10 on Sunday, 11 on Saturday, 9 on Friday and 9 in Thursday. THe number slightly varies every day but the intensity of the drive is not slowing. In yesterday's fresh count, killings were reported from Dhaka, Cox's Bazar, Chittagong, Comilla, Narail, Chuadanga and Sirajganj. In Dhaka, three persons, including Ataur Rahman alias Ata, a listed drug peddler of Savar, were killed in Bhasantek at the wee hours of the day, said a text message from Rapid Action Battalion (RAB). Arms, ammunition and a huge stash of drugs were seized from them, the text said. In Cox's Bazar, Mujibur Rahman, 42, was killed near Kabitachattar point sea beach at midnight, our local correspondent reports quoting Major Ruhul Amin, Company Commander, Cox's Bazar Camp of RAB-7. A total of 6,000 Yaba tablets, a shutter gun, five bullets and four bullet shells were recovered from the spot. "The body was sent to Cox's Bazar District Sadar Hospital for postmortem" said Officer-in-Charge Farid Uddin Khandakar of Cox's Bazar Sadar Model Police Station. In Chittagong, two alleged drug peddlers were killed in two separate "gunfights" in the port city and Sitakunda upazila. Ishak, 37, was killed at Pologround area in the city around 12:30am, said Deputy Director (DD) Lieutenant Commander Ashequr Rahman of RAB-7. Ishak was wanted in 19 cases including cases of murder. Police recovered 4,000 pieces of Yaba tablets, bullets, cartridges and one shutter gun from the spot. Meanwhile, law enforcers recovered the body of an alleged drug peddler, Rajib Hossain, 25, following a reported gunfight with his cohorts at Gulgular Bazar in Chhoto Darogar Haat area of Sitakunda upazila around 9:30am, police said. Hossain was an accused in a case filed in connection to the killing of two Tripura girls in the district, our Chittagong university correspondent reports quoting Md Iftekhar Hassan, OC of Sitakunda Police Station. In Comilla, Rosmat Ali, 40, was killed at Laribagh in Burichang upazila at around 12:45am, UNB reports quoting Manoj Kumar, OC of Burichang Police Station. Rosmat was wanted in seven cases filed under Narcotics Control Act. Police recovered one cartridge, a pipe gun and 40kg hemp from his possession. Three policemen were injured in the incident. In Narail, one Sajib, was killed at Malibagh in the suburb area of the district town, UNB reports quoting Mehedi Hasan, senior assistant superintendent of Narail police. One shutter gun, a sharp weapon and some drug items were recovered from the spot. In Chuadanga, Tanjil Hossain, 40, a top drug trader and an accused of 12 cases, was killed at Satgari Natunpara in the municipality area around 3:00am, said Abdul Khalek, OC of Sadar Police Station. Law enforcers also recovered one shutter gun, four bullets and 170 bottles of phensidyl from the spot. Relatives claimed Tanjil was arrested by plainclothes on Monday night from Bostapatti area of Chuadanga town. "Since then we had no communication with him," he said. In Jessore, two suspected drug peddlers were killed in a "gunfight" between two rival gangs of drug peddlers at Boro Achra, Benapole, around 4:00am, said Apurba Hasan, OC of Benapole Port Police Station. One of the deceased was identified as Liton Mia, 42. 10kg cannabis, one pistol, two bullets and shells of bullets were recovered from the spot. Liton was a listed drug peddler and he stood accused in several cases. In Magura, three suspected drug dealers were killed in gunfight between two groups at Batikadanga in Sadar upazila at around 2:00am, said Md Rezwan, superintendent of district Police. They are-Bacchu Chopdar, 55, Raihan Dhali, 30, and Kishore Odhikari, 43. Police recovered 320gm heroin, 1kg cannabis, six bottles of phensidyl, six bullets and eight bullet shells from the spot. Raihan and Kishore were accused in 10 narcotics-related cases each and Bacchu was wanted in seven such cases. In Sirajganj, Ahsan Habib, 45, was killed in Kamarkhand upazila, RAB-5 sources said. The deceased was said to be a listed drug peddler. RAB recovered a shutter gun, 20 bottles of phensidyl, and 1,000 pieces of yaba pills from the spot. Three RAB personnel were also reportedly hurt during the gunfight, the Rab official said. 4 hours ago EXPLAINER: Why Social Security COLA will jump next year WASHINGTON (AP) Rising inflation is expected to lead to a sizeable increase in Social Security's annual cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, for 2022. Exactly how much will be revealed Wednesday morning after a Labor Department report on inflation during September, a data point used in the final calculation. Over the last 10 years, the Social Security COLA has averaged about 1.7% annually as inflation remained low. 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LLC, XOOM Ontario Holdings LLC, XOOM Solar LLC, and eV2g LLC. Those being killed in police firing dying innocent and will have consequences Everyday the law enforcers are producing new tally of drug dealers and peddlers they have killed just the night before in their war on drug. The latest report on Wednesday said at least 15 more were killed in the night before in seven districts while the total death tolls spilled up to 132 in the last 16 days. The number of arrestees stood over 7,000. The killing spree has left shock waves all over as people wonder why police failed to act before the drug trade had flooded the country. Why they were sitting idle. Many now try to draw a parallel with Philippines President Dutarte's war on drug in total defiance to human rights as special squads are killing suspects in night time drives in that country. We must say we are not Philippines; we have a Constitution that guarantees the safety of our people that can't be ignored. Diplomats at a meeting with Awami League leaders Monday expressed concern over the killing spree and called for respect to victims' human rights; which allows legal self-defense. Illegal killing is not an answer to illegal trade. Other human rights organizations are also demanding restraints but the Home Minister has said the drive will continue. This is highly frustrating. Police claim of gunfight to justify killing is clearly extra-judical killing making the judicial system redundant. Such story of killing is being repeated every morning now as big police success in their war on drug. And it means people feel totally insecure. Law enforcers are picking suspects from homes as night descends and putting them on crossfire. But in our view such killings are clearly illegal extra-judicial killing without allowing victims the opportunity to prove their innocence at a court of law. Police are using a list of suspects, which proves in many cases based on wrong information in a highly charged political situation. In our view those being killed by police without trial are dying innocent in total denial of their Constitutional right to self-defense. Killing people without protection of law is anarchy. Why then we have a judicial system if police can arrest, try and execute people in the darkness of night. This is not governance by rule of law but at the barrel of the gun. The drug trade and network has developed under the shelter of the ruling party men in which police cooperated in most cases to avoid ire of local leaders. Now police are running the war on drug using a list prepared by the Home Ministry that targets most innocents as well. Many believe killing small traders will not destroy big drug syndicates because they will quickly replace their network with new recruits. US ambassador in Dhaka Marcia Barnicat yesterday has rightly asked the government to nab the drug kingpins. In her view arresting small traders will not do. But Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal is not reportedly willing to order arrest of Teknaf MP Bodi who is known as the number one drug lord in the country. He defended him saying his name was not in the Home Ministry's list and other intelligence agencies had previously wrongly reported his name. Human Rights activists Sultana Kamal has rightly questioned if professional intelligence reports on Bodi were wrong why others have been killed based on similar incredible reports. The killing of councillor Ekramul Haq at Teknaf showed RAB had used a wrong list in which his father's name and local address were faulty. Local people say he had no link to drug trade and wondered how his name came on the list. As a public leader he was living a modest life. On the other hand how the Home Ministry prepared list had dropped Bodi's name left many to question the credibility of the whole drive. Media reports said Ekramul was vocal against Bodi's drug network and if it was a case of eliminating a rival it needs to be investigated. We demand a judicial probe into the incident to know how he became a drug lord while police said there was no case against him as such with local police station. Police raid at city's Kawran Bazaar on Monday night showed how whimsically they are also running the drive elsewhere. Over 500 police laid siege on the area and arrested 47 persons including vendors, day laborers and some drug addicts as they were sleeping. Real drug peddlers left the area on prior information. The people being killed without trials are dying innocent and this have consequences. The law enforcers will lose public confidence as faithful law enforcers. The most damaging will be the damage the law enforcer as killers without recourse to law and justice system. The young ones will not learn to be law abiding knowing being innocent is no safety. HC frustrated with ACC's slow investigation Staff Reporter : The High Court (HC) on Wednesday expressed deep anger and frustration at the Investigation Officers over the slow pace of progress in investigation of 56 cases filed in connection with Basic Bank loan scam. The HC wondered why they failed to complete the investigation in two and half years time. The High Court bench of Justice M Enayetur Rahim and Justice Shahidul Karim expressed this anger while hearing four petitions filed by few accused including Fazlur Sobhan, the then Managing Director of Basic Bank, seeking bail in the cases. Earlier in the morning, all the 8 Investigation Officers of the 56 cases appeared before the HC bench with all the documents to place their explanation over the delay in completing the investigations as per the HC direction passed on May 23. Advocate Khurshid Alam Khan, Advocate Syed Mamun Mahbub and Advocate Fazlul Haque appeared in the court on behalf of the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) and Barrister Rokanuddin Mahmud stood for the bail petitioners. At the starting, the court told the ACC lawyers, "You failed to submit just a single charge-sheet in 56 cases in last two and half years. How the board gave consent for the loan after the negative findings of the credit checking committee? Why none of the board members was accused in the cases?" ACC lawyer Khurshid Alam Khan said, "We are trying. We hold meeting with every Investigation Officer after the court order. They did not have any fault. ACC is working. The Chairman of the bank was also interrogated. Every issue is being investigated." Then the court said, "What happened with so much of our observation? You applied pick and choose policy arresting the accused." The Junior Judge of the bench said, "If the case was filed against a farmer for only Tk 5 thousand scamming, he is being tied to his waist. So, why this is not happening with the Basic Bank accused?" Then the Senior Judge of the bench Justice M Enayetur Rahim said, "What else we say. We cannot be an Investigation Officer of a Prosecutor." "Some accused are getting bail because of your subversion. You are delaying to submit charge-sheets. The accused are getting bail. We are bound to grant them bail," said the Senior Judge. Then the court asked Iqbal Hossain, ACC Director and also an Investigation Officer, about the delay of submitting charge-sheets in the cases. Iqbal Hossain replied they were in the last stage of the investigation. Then the Senior Judge said, "We are frustrated with your performances. We have to grant bail to the petitioners. All the accused are getting bail one by one." The judge then asked the ACC Director, "Do you think that money was embezzled?" Iqbal Hossain said, "Yes, it was." Then the judge said, "If it was, then why are you not arresting the debtors? Iqbal Hossain said the loan debtors were changing their addresses regularly. So they did not find them. Then Justice M Enayetur Rahim said, "You are saying that the debtors were changing the addresses, but we see them in the talk-shows." At this stage Justice M Enayetur Rahim said, "The state has lost so much money, now if the organization (ACC) does not work, we have nothing to do. If such a statutory organization does not work, then there is no profit from it." "How much we talked about the issue! Now, we cover our eyes with shame. We think, we must cover the faces with black cloth, we talked so much but no result. There is no benefit with the order. It seems that pearls have been spread in the owl forest." On May 23, the High Court summoned all the Investigation Officers of 56 cases filed in connection with Basic Bank loan scam, seeking their explanation over the delay in completing the investigation. On that day the court also expressed dissatisfaction over the investigations of the cases as the investigations were not finished in due time of 180 days. "The Anti-Corruption commission filed 56 cases in connection with the Basic Bank loan scam," Anti-Corruption commission's lawyer Khurshid Alam Khan told the journalists. "During the proceedings, the court found that the investigations of the cases were not finished in due time. So the court summons all the investigation officers," the ACC lawyers said. According to a Bangladesh Bank enquiry, about Tk 4,500 crore was siphoned out of the state-run bank between 2010 and 2013 when Sheikh Abdul Hye Bacchu chaired its board. On July 14, 2014, the central bank sent a report on the scam to the ACC, detailing how people embezzled money from the bank through shell companies and dubious accounts. The BB found that Bacchu illegally influenced all the activities of the bank, leaving the once-sound institution in a grave state. In 2015, the ACC had filed the 56 cases over the scam at Motijheel, Paltan and Gulshan Police Stations in the city. The ACC accused 120 persons in those cases, however, Bacchu, the then Chairman of the bank, was not made accused in any of the cases. Among the 120 persons, 27 are officers of the Basic Bank, 11 are surveyors and 82 are debtors. According to the Bangladesh Bank, till June 30, 2017, the rate of the default loan of the Basic Bank is 53 percent (7 thousand 390 crore), which is highest rate of the default loan of any bank. As per BB report, the total amount of loan distributed by the Basic Bank was Tk 2 thousand 700 crore by December in 2008. The figure stood at Tk 9 thousand 373 crore by March in 2013, which means the bank distributed Tk 6 thousand 673 crore in four years and three months. About Tk 4 thousand 500 crore was distributed violating the law among the loans distributed by this time. Skateboards and scooters come from far and wide for chance to skate The Undead Archives I have finally salvaged my pre-Blogger TDR archives and added them into Blogger. They are almost totally in the form of one giant post for each month. And the formatting strayed from the originals. Sorry. But historians everywhere can rejoice that this treasure trove of my thoughts is restored to the world. MONTREALCanadian shippers breathed a collective sigh of relief Wednesday after CP Rail reached a tentative agreement with its train crews to end a strike mere hours after it began. The Calgary railway and the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference reached a four-year deal and the union also completed a five-year agreement for the Kootenay Valley Railway. Full operations at both railways will resume across Canada early Thursday morning, the union said in a news release. We believe this is a fair contract that our members can feel good about ratifying, said union president Doug Finnson. I am personally very satisfied with what we have negotiated. Railway CEO Keith Creel lauded the agreement as positive for 12,000 CP Rail employees, customers and the entire Canadian economy. It is especially meaningful to achieve a four-year tentative agreement with our valued locomotive engineers and conductors, providing long-term stability for all parties involved, he said in a statement. This is a significant step toward a renewed positive relationship growing forward together serving our customers and the Canadian economy. The tentative agreements must be ratified by Teamsters members over the coming months. Details of the agreement are being withheld pending ratification. Employment Minister Patty Hajdu thanked the parties for their commitment to the collective bargaining process. This is further evidence that when employers, organized labour, and governments work together and respect the collective bargaining process, we get the best results for Canadians and for our economy, she said in a statement after the agreement was announced. Agricultural and mining shippers, who had already been calling for government intervention, said they were pleased because the quick deal will minimize the impact on their sectors. We were mentally prepared for a strike that would have gone on longer but perhaps it would be fair to say that were relieved that its been resolved as quickly as it has been, said Wade Sobkowich, executive director of the Western Grain Elevator Association, which represents the countrys largest exporters. He said the less-than-day-long strike prevented about $20 million of grain from moving, something that should be made up. Sobkowich said he believed the two sides were under tremendous pressure from the federal government after the prime minister signalled Tuesday that it wasnt rushing to step in with back-to-work legislation or binding arbitration. If there was going to be a resolution to this it was going to have to come from the negotiating table and I think that that put pressure on both sides to try and resolve things, Sobkowich said. An agreement between CP Rail and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers representing 360 signalling workers just before Tuesday evenings strike deadline ensured that Canadas three largest cities and Via Rail would avoid chaos during Wednesday mornings commute. The quick resolution also suggested that the Teamsters may not have been far from a deal as well, added Todd Lewis, of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan. Were going to have a bad week of service this week but hopefully we can get everything back to normal and with the new legislation thats been put forward we can get some improved service, he said in an interview. Lewis believes Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus comments suggesting the government wasnt going to intervene put extra pressure on the railway. Back-to-work legislation is a two-edged sword, he said. It does impact a settlement but I think the signals were given that maybe the railroads wouldnt have been happy with the settlement that would have been imposed this time. Trudeaus comments were a little unsettling, said Pierre Gratton, CEO of the Mining Association of Canada, who assumed that the government would intervene because of the negative consequences for the mining sector and the Canadian economy as a whole. What was going on behind the scenes was much more intense than met the eye, Gratton said. The Conservative federal government was more aggressive with unions during the last two strikes. Train crews ended a brief walkout in 2015 and agreed to arbitration after the Harper government warned of back-to-work legislation. Three years earlier, federal back-to-work legislation was enacted to end a 10-day strike. Gratton wouldnt say which approach he believes is more successful. I dont really care how its resolved. We just cant have our members not able to get the materials in or out so were just delighted, relieved. CALGARYSo now Prime Minister Justin Trudeau owns a pipeline. Who will take it off his hands remains an open question. Canada said Tuesday it would buy Kinder Morgan Inc.s Trans Mountain pipeline, with its expansion project and shipping terminal, for $4.5 billion before eventually selling the project to a new buyer. Finance Minister Bill Morneau, speaking Tuesday in Ottawa, said it was too soon to say if Canada would sell in the short or medium term, but didnt want to hold the project in the long term. Finding a buyer for Trans Mountain could be tricky amid ardent opposition from British Columbia, the Pacific coast province it crosses, along with environmental and some Indigenous groups. That opposition was enough to make Kinder throw up its hands and halt construction last month. Even as Morneau struck an upbeat tone on the potential pool of buyers, he didnt give a specific time frame for a deal. Many investors have already expressed interest in the project, including Indigenous groups, Canadian pension funds, and others, he said. Read more: Justin Trudeaus $4.5 billion Trans Mountain pipeline purchase met with a storm of criticism What to do now that youve bought a pipeline Trudeau says the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion will be built One analyst floated another potential home: Kinder Morgan itself. Canadas purchase may be a vehicle to indemnify the project against regulatory risk, Katie Bays, an analyst with Height Securities LLC in Washington, said in a telephone interview. Once the construction is complete or once regulatory risk evaporates, whichever comes first, the project could be repurchased by Kinder Morgan. Kinder Morgan Canada, the unit that raised $1.75 billion for the project in an initial public offering last year, declined to comment on the speculation. Private Equity If Kinder doesnt want it back, some investors have shown interest in the project in the past. Before deciding on taking the Canadian unit public, Houston-based Kinder Morgan ran a dual-track process that also entailed exploring a joint venture of the pipeline project. That possibility attracted interest from U.S. private equity firm ArcLight Capital Partners and Australias IFM Investors Pty Ltd., people familiar with the matter said at the time. Brookfield Asset Management Inc., which was said to be another bidder on the joint venture and eventually became one of Kinder Morgan Canadas largest investors, could be a potential partner in Trans Mountain now. The Toronto-based alternative-asset manager already has a joint venture with Kinder Morgan, Natural Gas Pipeline Company of America, through its publicly traded Brookfield Infrastructure Partners. A representative declined to comment. Among pension funds, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMER) and the Alberta Investment Management Corp (AIMco). could also be interested in the project. OMERS infrastructure arm is invested in several pipeline assets, including the Czech Republics NET4GAS sro, CLH Pipeline System in the U.K. and Spain, as well as the U.K.s Scotia Gas Networks. Bill Morneau laid out Tuesday the federal governments plan to buy Trans Mountain and Kinder Morgan Canadas core assets for $4.5 billion. The finance minister says the move will ensure the oilsands pipeline expansion gets built. (The Canadian Press) Midstream Veteran OMERS also appointed Michael Ryder as the senior managing director of its infrastructure unit, OMERS Infrastructure. Ryder joined in January from U.S. private equity giant Blackstone Group LP, where he was responsible for leading the firms midstream energy and oilfield services investment strategy. A representative for the fund declined to comment. AIMCo is supportive of measures to boost investor confidence and address market uncertainty, Denes Nemeth, a spokesman for the fund, said in an email, while declining to comment on whether AIMCo would be interested in investing in the project. Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the countrys largest pension fund, said in an emailed statement it was not actively assessing an investment in the extension opportunity. Largest Investor Meanwhile, Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec, Canadas second-largest pension fund, last month disclosed holdings of 10.2 million shares in Kinder Morgan Canada, making it the largest investor outside of its parent company. A spokesman declined to comment on whether the Caisse would consider an investment in the Trans Mountain pipeline Tuesday. Caisse chief executive officer Michael Sabia told reporters last week in Montreal that the Kinder Morgan investment was made prior to the pension fund announcing a new strategy in October to reduce its holdings in carbon-intensive industries in favour of renewable energy. He said last week that the Kinder Morgan Canada investment, along with all future investments, would be reviewed in light of the new policy. After Kinder said it was halting work on the project until it had more certainty, the province of Alberta was named as a potential buyer for all or part of the project. Premier Rachel Notley said at the time that the province would consider all options for ensuring the project was built. At this point, we dont think thats necessary, she said Tuesday. Other Projects Canadas other major pipeline operators are not seen as likely to enter the fray, either. Enbridge Inc. and TransCanada Corp., both based in Calgary, already operate major pipelines that carry oilsands crude, and both are enmeshed in their own major projects. TransCanadas proposed Keystone XL pipeline has battled delays for roughly a decade, and Enbridges Line 3 replacement and expansion still hinges on a critical regulatory ruling in Minnesota. TransCanada spokesman Grady Semmens said in an emailed statement that the company isnt involved in discussions about the Trans Mountain pipeline, and that it wont comment further about speculation on the project. Suzanne Wilton, a spokeswoman for Enbridge, said the company is focused on its $22 billion growth program and would not speculate on the project. Bad Timing The time is not right for either company to take on a project like Trans Mountain, said Laura Lau, who helps manage $1.5 billion in assets, including shares of TransCanada and Enbridge, at Brompton Corp. in Toronto. Enbridge has been selling assets to help whittle down debt it took on in last years purchase of Spectra Energy Corp. TransCanada would be more able to buy it, but the company had its credit rating cut by Standard & Poors earlier this month, she said. The purchase also would distract and draw resources away from their current projects, which Lau said shes optimistic will go through. If they buy Trans Mountain, they have to not do something else, Lau said in an interview. Theres only so much money to go around. CALGARYWhen an ailing Liberal government invoked closure six decades ago to provide financing for the TransCanada pipeline project, it would prove to be one of the final nails in its political coffin. The loans to the American companies who built the natural gas link from Alberta to eastern Canada would end up being paid off in full and ahead of schedule, but the Louis St. Laurent regimes actions in 1956 would be seen as arrogant and contribute to its electoral defeat a year later against John Diefenbaker and his Progressive Conservatives. Some economic and political experts are divided now on whether the federal governments controversial plan to pay $4.5 billion to buy the entire Trans Mountain pipeline project and spend billions more in construction costs to expand the link to tidewater will end up being a prudent financial investment. But there is consensus among those watchers in Calgary that the federal move and Albertas decision to backstop the bitumen transportation project to the tune of up to $2 billion could pay political dividends for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier Rachel Notley when each heads to the polls next year. Read more: Justin Trudeaus $4.5 billion Trans Mountain pipeline purchase met with a storm of criticism Opinion | Vicky Mochama: What to do now that youve bought a pipeline This changes nothing: Indigenous leader says opposition movement will only grow as federal government buys Trans Mountain Its quite clear that the political fate of both politicians are connected to this pipeline, said Trevor Tombe, an economist at the University of Calgary. Completing this project is more certain than it has been in some time because the federal government now owns the project and they have the legal and constitutional cards they can play to get this done. Petroleum historian David Finch is skeptical that taxpayers will reap any return from the massive investment in a project to transport bitumen that may not have a market at the needed prices when the pipeline is completed. If this was such a great investment, why isnt private business willing to take the risk? Finch asked. In the short run, though, Notley and Trudeau could end up smelling like roses. Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University, said the decision will cost the federal Liberals seats in the Lower Mainland of B.C. and wont gain him any in Alberta. But if the pipeline actually goes ahead as he expects, Bratt predicts both Trudeau and Notley will get a political bounce from the additional jobs and improved investment climate. Theres no question Trudeau would sooner see Notley than (United Conservative Leader Jason) Kenney in the premiers office, he said. The question is whether the positive economic effects from the pipeline will happen soon enough to keep her there. Richard Masson, a fellow at the University of Calgarys public policy school and a former head of the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, said the federal government, unlike most private companies, has the financial heft to find the additional $6.5 billion needed to construct the project and the staying power to see it through completion. Theyre trying to say to the people protesting that this project is in the national interest, we will see it through and youre not going to stop it, so you best not plan on spending the next two years lying in front of a construction company or trying to work through the courts. Masson said. There have been many instances when government stepped in at a very risky time to move forward what turned out to be a good project, and really now it comes down to execution and how oil prices turn out the next decade or so. Other public investments in Canadian energy projects: Lloydminster Bi-Provincial Upgrader Alberta received a paltry $32 million back in 1994 when it sold its share in a project in which it had invested more than $404 million on capital costs and cost overruns during the 1980s. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley says a federal government plan to take over the Trans Mountain pipeline will unlock investment in the oilsands. B.C. Premier John Horgan says he will continue to fight the pipeline expansion in court. (The Canadian Press) Syncrude With the oil sands consortium on the brink of collapse in 1974, the Alberta government played a decisive role in keeping the project alive by investing more than $200 million. When it cashed out a decade later, the province got $352 million for its shares. As of 2015, the project had made payments of more than $14.6 billion in royalties and taxes to the federal and provincial governments. Alberta Energy Company Created by the Lougheed regime in 1973 to lessen Albertas dependence on foreign-owned oil companies, AEC had an exclusive lease to develop shallow gas reserves in the southeastern part of the province. The Suffield block turned out to be a cash cow that funded many of the companys other activities. The province sold off its remaining 36 per cent interest in 1993. PetroCanada Given startup money of $1.5 billion and easy access to capital when it was created in 1975, the federal Crown corporation held the governments 12 per cent stake in Syncrude and went on to purchase a national network of service stations from BP Canada in 1983. Most of the company was privatized in 1991 and the government sold its remaining 19 per cent share in 2004 for net proceeds of $3.2 billion. Read more about: EDMONTONWith Canadian Pacific Railway workers poised to strike Tuesday if the union and company cant come to an agreement, agricultural producers are bracing for what happens if they are caught in the middle. The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (TCRC) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) issued a strike notice for 11 p.m. on Tuesday if a deal isnt reached between the unions and CP Rail. On Friday, 97.2 per cent of IBEW members, which includes signals and communications employees, voted to reject the Calgary-based railways final offer following a 98.3 per cent vote to authorize strike action on April 12. The Teamsters voted 98.1 per cent in favour of rejecting CPs final offer. Lynn Jacobson, Alberta Federation of Agriculture president, said its not practical for agricultural producers of oilseeds, grains and pulses in the south to ship on the Canadian National Railway line. Basically, you have to sit on it, he said. He said a rail strike would not only hurt agriculture, but it would impact other sectors, such as forestry and oil. Jacobson said those customers arent at the bargaining table, even though they will be affected by a strike. Grain producers hard hit Wade Sobkowich, executive director of the Western Grain Elevator Association, said the strikes impacts would exponentially worsen as the work stoppage continues. Grain producers and handling companies will have to pay higher fees as the dispute goes on, despite the fact they have no control over the decision to strike. Seven days is much more than seven times the harm of one day, he said. When its shut down one day ... farmer deliveries dont need to be rescheduled. We can make up the time. Shipment of grain is divided roughly 50/50 among CP and CN on the Prairies, he said. About half the countrys grain crop is exported and 94 per cent of that moves by rail, according to his association. Switching to trucks for shipping is not economical, Sobkowich said, with the cost of trucking grain approximately five times higher. Were captive, Sobkowich said. We dont have alternatives. Suppliers end up paying about $20,000 per day in demurrage, a charge when goods arent loaded according to contract time lines. Those fines hurt not only grain handlers, but ultimately hurt farmers, he said. But those arent the only costs. There are immeasurable costs, such as pushing future sales to a non-peak price period and damage to the reputation as a reliable supplier of grains and oilseeds, Sobkowich said. While the oil and gas industry use tankers and agricultural producers use hopper cars for grain, the locomotives and crews are interchangeable. Over the winter, railways were caught with higher than expected demand from the energy sector, Sobkowich explained, leaving companies with fewer locomotives in service than needed for all customers. While the recently passed Bill C-49 gives suppliers a safeguard against poor service, the strike is another hit to Canadas reputation for reliability, Sobkowich said. The bill would allow railways to be penalized for failing to meet terms of a contract. Since the Western Grain Elevator Association is not privy to negotiations, the group cant say who is right on the side of negotiations, he said. All he could say is they hope the two sides work it out so the customers arent harmed. If they cant work something out to avoid a stoppage, the government should do everything in its power to help them avoid a work stoppage, he said. Petroleum industry monitoring strike The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers sent a statement to StarMetro on Monday saying it is monitoring the situation and is concerned about a reduction in rail capacity. Pipelines are full and rail capacity is very tight. Any loss of capacity will make a bad situation worse, the statement said. CAPP is monitoring these new market developments as they unfold. Increased transportation capacity of all types is needed to reach more Canadians and new, growing markets around the world to ensure Canada remains globally competitive. We live in a growing world that will need more energy. Canadas energy sector can be this responsible and sustainable supplier of choice. The strike would not affect CPs commuter trains, the company said. CP said they would not be providing any comment beyond Fridays statement. But CN issued a statement of its own in response. In the event of a labour disruption at the other major Canadian railroad, CNs first priority is to protect service levels with our existing valued customers and supply chain partners and to ensure the fluidity of our network, the statement said. As for the unions, representatives said on Saturday the company hasnt budged on negotiations. CP is offering more of the same contract language that workers just voted to reject a few hours ago. The company clearly isnt serious about reaching a negotiated settlement and delivering on their promise to do right by their employees, said Doug Finnson, president of the TCRC, in a news release on Saturday. The IBEW gave a similar statement, saying CP has changed directions several times in negotiations. We have given CP every reasonable opportunity to negotiate and avoid a strike, but sadly that has led us nowhere, said Steve Martin, senior general chairman from IBEW System Council No. 11 in a news release on Saturday. Many Alberta companies in the agriculture, forestry, energy and manufacturing sectors rely on rail services and a strike could make it harder for them to do business, the Government of Alberta said in a statement to StarMetro. While rail transportation is federally regulated we encourage both parties to continue to negotiate in good faith to avoid any service disruption to our industries. Catherine Griwkowsky is an Edmonton-based reporter. You can contact her by email at cgriwkowsky@torstar.ca , or follow her on Twitter: @CGriwkowsky Read more about: EDMONTONEdmontons police chief said his relationship with the police commission became caustic after communication breakdowns and trust issues developed ahead of a dispute over when he would step down as chief. I would say it was more than tension, I would say the relationship was caustic, said Edmonton police chief Rod Knecht in a meeting with media on Tuesday where he described how his relationship with the commission soured in 2017. Knecht said last week that he would leave his post when his contract expires in October, while the Edmonton Police Commission look for a replacement fell apart. On Tuesday, Knecht said he was taken aback when he learned the Edmonton Police Commission had decided not to extend his contract to the end of June 2019, a date he says he picked so he could see projects such as securing the creation of a Community Wellness Centre, bolstering the citys cyber crimes strategy and preparing for the launch of the Operations and Intelligence Command Centre in 2019. Instead, the commission is offering to extend his contract only to March 2019. Knecht said he had met with Edmonton police commission chair Tim OBrien and vice chair Micki Ruth in late March where he was asked to propose a date for his contract extension. Knecht said he chose June 30, 2019. That wasnt a cavalier date, it wasnt a date I picked out of the air, it was the date I picked based on a few things I thought I could finish up, and the state of flux between the police commission and the police service, Knecht said. Knecht said there was no discussion for weeks after he proposed the date, and he assumed the commission would be in agreement and was waiting for the extension to be rubber stamped. I felt like I was a in a little bit of purgatory there for a while, Knecht said. In an interview last week, OBrien said, our reasons were to get the search done as expeditiously as possible, and make the switch to the new chief as soon as we could. OBrien said he expects it to take four to six months to find a new police chief, which is why the commission proposed the March 2019 extension to Knecht. The March deadline wouldnt give him enough time to complete his plans, Knecht said. I thought I could help them and deliver on some of those things I did start to deliver on, Knecht said. Knecht said it will be up to the next chief to negotiate a joint Community Wellness Centre Initiative that would see police and social service agencies working together under one roof to address issues of social disorder caused by poverty, addictions and mental health problems. I thought that was something I could have delivered on, Knecht said, adding, this is something I really wanted to do. Knecht also wanted to continue to strengthen the Cyber Crimes Unit before he left, which he called the business of the future for policing. Everything we do has a cyber crimes component to it, everything has a link to the internet or social media, said Knecht. I think policing in general has lagged behind in that area and weve taken a very traditional approach to policing, and I think weve got to invest more in technology, investigate more in cyber crime. Weve got a six person unit, that should easily double. Knecht said despite disagreements with the Edmonton Police Commission, I dont have sour grapes, adding he intends to help the commission find a suitable replacement. Read more about: EDMONTONOttawas startling decision to pick up the $4.5-billion cost of the Trans Mountain expansion thereby kick-starting construction on the controversial pipeline rippled across the heart of oil country Tuesday. But as eager as many Albertans are to get oil flowing, many are also feeling sticker shock over the pipelines price tag. Just east of Edmonton lies ground zero for Kinder Morgans Trans Mountain pipeline. The original 1,150-km pipe was built in 1953 and currently shuttles about 300,000 barrels of oil to Burnaby, B.C., every day. Its the expansion of this decades-old pipeline that has garnered headlines across the country. But in Sherwood Park, a suburb founded in the 50s for local industry workers, the heated political debate is much more personal. Read more: Liberal government to buy Trans Mountain pipeline project, seek new investors Justin Trudeaus $4.5 billion Trans Mountain pipeline purchase met with a storm of criticism Opinion | Vicky Mochama: What to do now that youve bought a pipeline With flat, wide streets and single-family homes surrounded by trees, Sherwood Park looks like any other Canadian suburb. But its bordered on the west by a mass of towering oil facilities some of the biggest in Western Canada known locally as Refinery Row. Many of the citys roughly 70,000 residents are connected to the industry that has been around as long as the city itself. Locals say that, as oil goes, so does the town. Kevin Sembaliuk, owner of a Wild Wings in Sherwood Park, says many of his friends are still unemployed after being laid off from jobs in the oilpatch. The number of people coming in for beer and wings has been slower than he hoped. We need it, we want it, lets get this thing going, he said of the expansion Tuesday. Still, he wonders about the cost being passed down to small-business owners like himself, pointing out its a constant struggle to keep up with taxes and minimum-wage hikes. In addition to the upfront costs for the pipeline, the expansion is expected to cost several billion dollars more. Prices are going to go up. Some places are going to close; some places are going to survive, he said with a shrug. I think its more frustrating than anything because they dont give us any time to catch up. Residents in town have watched the high-profile anti-pipeline protests in recent months from afar. Rita Kowalchuk, who has lived in Sherwood Park since 1974, hoped matters wouldnt get this far. She expected the federal government to step in and mediate the B.C.-Alberta dispute before buying the pipeline outright. Now, she points out, this twist will see everyone in Canada even the critics footing the bill through taxes. Its kind of ironic because now the people who are against it are now going to be paying for it, Kowalchuk said, speaking to StarMetro while out running errands Tuesday morning. Stacy Dolynny, owner of auto-shop HART Transmission & Mechanical, is furious. In a backroom behind his garage where a huge tow-truck is being worked on, he said getting the pipeline built wasnt worth the price tag. The fact that taxpayers have to foot the bill now I think is a bunch of malarkey, he said as a power drill squealed in the background. Taxes will go up, corporate taxes will go up. It has to. Not that he doesnt see the benefit of oil jobs. Were all directly affected by oil here, Dolynny said. Were in an urban setting, but a lot of our fleet accounts, our fleet customers, theyre tied to oil somehow. In the 20 years hes run his business, hes weathered every kind of economic storm. Hes seen both ups and downs tied to oil, but this latest one was tougher than most. Some customers have been forced to repair their cars in piecemeal fashion after losing their jobs. I think the announcement was obviously a good thing, that the federal government stepped up, he said, but putting oil above other businesses is ridiculous. I guarantee you I will never be voting Liberal or NDP again. Ever, Dolynny said. As far as Im concerned, theyre a bunch of clowns. Read more about: EDMONTONAlberta environmentalists say the federal governments announcement to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion has only strengthened their opposition to the project. Calling the decision to buy the pipeline a completely unacceptable use of public funds, Anna Gerrard a member of Climate Justice Edmonton says the group will double down on its efforts to oppose the project. On Wednesday, they joined other Alberta-based anti-pipeline protesters to interrupt Finance Minister Bill Morneaus speech to the business community in Calgary. This purchase does nothing to curb the Indigenous-led resistance this pipeline faces in the courts and the streets, said Bronwen Tucker, a member of the Council of Canadians, in a statement to StarMetro. Tucker joined Gerrard at Morneaus speech in downtown Calgary before the group was escorted out of the venue. We will continue to fight this in the courts, in the streets, on the land and in the water until this project is defeated, Gerrard said in a phone interview with StarMetro shortly after the protest. Kinder Morgan bailed out they didnt think that this project was certain enough for their shareholders. Read more: Trans Mountain will push ahead despite opposition, Morneau tells Calgary business leaders On Refinery Row, pipeline debate more personal than political Justin Trudeau defends Trans Mountain takeover as vital economic move Climate Justice Edmonton is one of the groups at the forefront of anti-pipeline opposition in Edmonton. They say Indigenous groups have not been adequately consulted on the project and that the pipeline poses a threat to Canadas climate change goals. While several First Nations on the route of the planned pipeline expansion have expressed an interest in purchasing a stake in the project, others remain opposed. The Squamish First Nation, located outside Vancouver, B.C., called the decision to purchase the pipeline a betrayal of promises by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Kinder Morgan halted all non-essential spending on the pipeline expansion in April, setting a May 31 deadline for all parties to come to an agreement. The pipeline remains at the centre of a row between Alberta and British Columbia. While B.C. Premier John Horgan is worried about possible risks he says the pipeline could pose to the coastline, the Alberta New Democratic Party government says the project is essential to get bitumen from the oilsands to tidewater. Following the announcement of the sale, Kinder Morgan agreed to start construction this summer as planned, and will work until July 22 trying to find another private-sector buyer. If no one comes forward, only then will Kinder Morgan take Ottawas $4.5-billion offer to its shareholders. Pending their approval, the sale would be finalized sometime in August or September. The pipeline purchase would also transfer to the federal government all the people involved in building the expansion, including project managers and construction workers. Canada would then proceed with construction, selling the pipeline when it would generate the best return. The federal government has poured billions of public dollars into a failing pipeline project that goes against their own commitments to the climate, to phase out fossil subsidies, to Indigenous rights and then to protect the coast, as well, said Mike Hudema, an Edmonton-based activist with Greenpeace Canada. He says the governments decision to buy the pipeline will embolden protests against the project both in Alberta and across the country. Its really a reckless announcement for a pipeline that likely wont be built and now the publics on the hook for it, he said. The opposition is going to continue to escalate. With files from The Canadian Press Read more about: Richwood, TX (77531) Today Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low 78F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.. Tonight Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low 78F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. HALIFAXA day after the city apologized to a Halifax Transit employee for racial discrimination, one councillor said he intends to ask serious questions about why the situation unfolded as it did. I will be investigating how HRM or the union could have tolerated this for so long. I want to go in-camera, find out how did this happen, Councillor Tim Outhit said Wednesday. Obviously there may be details that Im not aware of, so Im not going to state an opinion until I know more information. But was I appalled and disgusted that this went on so long, and by the details? Of course. I think anybody of any decency would be. A Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission board of inquiry found widespread racial discrimination in Halifaxs transit department. Among other behaviour, the report said employees commonly used racial slurs, including the N-word as well as wagon burner when referring to an Inuit colleague. The board released its decision Tuesday morning, and an apology by Halifax CAO Jacques Dube was issued shortly afterward to the complainant and his family. The apology comes more than a decade after the Halifax Transit employee known only by the initials Y.Z. due to a publication ban filed his racial discrimination complaint. Y.Z. said the threats and bullying started long before he first filed complaints to the commission in July 2006. Racial intolerance created a poisoned work environment for him a white man starting in the early 1980s following his marriage to an African Canadian woman. The decision lists a number of specific incidents, including one from 2001. Arthur Maddox, a transit employee mentioned in the report 88 times, was fired after threatening violence against an African Nova Scotian colleague, Randy Symonds, but reinstated at the unions urging about 11 months later. Shortly after Maddoxs return, Y.Z. said Maddox tried to run him over with a bus, which Maddox denied. Y.Z. believed Maddox blamed him and his wife for his termination. Read more: 'We have more to do.' City apology issued to Halifax Transit employee for racial discrimination In 2004, Y.Z. said the stressful work environment led him to take leave from his job. He returned on light duties in 2006 for less than six months but left his job on disability again and has been unable to work at all since that time. While specific transit employees appear throughout the inquirys testimony and evidence, the decision holds HRM itself responsible. Y.Z. and others made complaints directly to HRM prior to him filing with the commission, but Y.Z. said HRM was unresponsive. Halifax activist and former poet laureate El Jones weighed in on the decision Tuesday. She expressed concern that the city was only apologizing now, so long after the fact. Where were they in 2006? In 2000? To me, before we get shocked and horrified about it, we have to ask why was there no shock and horror when (Y.Z.) was reporting this stuff in 2000 and filing complaints in 2006, Jones said Tuesday. And why is the constant sort of reaction to injustice for people to defend it to the death? That we just have to defend this stuff. We cant acknowledge it for some reason. As of March, Maddox was still working for HRM, according to comments in the board of inquirys decision. An HRM spokesperson said Tuesday that Maddox is no longer employed by the municipality but would not say when or how his employment ended. Mayor Mike Savage said that, besides an update brought to council last fall, he knew very little about the specifics of the complaint prior to the release of the report. He called the behaviour outlined in the report unacceptable. This is a staffing matter, and its not the way that the municipality should operate, its not the behaviour that we should condone. The person who did this is no longer with the municipality, Savage said. Its very concerning to me, even though this happened many, many years ago, over a decade ago. Its not acceptable, and were doing everything in our power as a council to ensure that the diversity of our community is respected and we expect the same from staff. Savage said the city has undertaken a number of steps in recent years to address racism. He points to the addition of a diversity and inclusion office and diversity advisers as well as updated diversity and inclusion training that is mandatory for all supervisors. The bottom line is that we accept this decision, and the city never disputed that there was inappropriate action taken, even racist action, he said. There was a process whereby we even tried to settle this a few years ago. It was rejected, and it goes back a long way, but we accept the findings and we do accept that there was racism towards another employee and that that is unacceptable. Outhit believes a number of his fellow councillors are going to have questions for both transit staff and the municipalitys legal team. We will certainly have some questions regarding this process. I find that it dragged on a long time, and it appears like one individual was fired for this, Outhit said. And then, for whatever reason, the union fought to bring him back, which makes me scratch my head a little bit. Savage said he also has questions. I expect that council will have an opportunity to get some more details and have some input, he said. Repeated calls to the transit unions representative Ken Wilson went unanswered Wednesday. Yvette dEntremont is a Halifax-based reporter covering health, environment and education. Follow her on Twitter: @ydentremont Read more about: OTTAWA Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould has asked for an independent review of an extradition that resulted in Ottawa professor Hassan Diab spending three years in a French jail, only to be suddenly released. The external review which has not started is in addition to an internal lessons learned examination already underway, a spokesperson for Wilson-Raybould said Wednesday. French authorities suspected Diab, 64, was involved in the 1980 bombing of a Paris synagogue that killed four people and injured dozens of others, an accusation he has always denied. The sociology professor and his supporters have been urging the federal government to hold a full public inquiry into the case and to reform the Extradition Act to ensure individual rights are respected. In a letter Tuesday to Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, Wilson-Raybould said Diab was afforded all of the procedural safeguards under the Extradition Act and that his charter rights were considered during Canadian court proceedings. Nonetheless, due to the three-year-period that Dr. Diab spent in custody in France, I have been reflecting carefully on this case, said her letter, made available to the The Canadian Press by the two rights organizations. Read more: Supporters of newly freed Canadian professor Hassan Diab want inquiry into his extradition to France French authorities drop terrorism charges against Lebanese-Canadian professor Hassan Diab As you know, Department of Justice Canada officials have undertaken a lessons learned review of the Diab extradition proceedings. I have also asked for an independent external review of this matter. Josh Paterson, executive director of the B.C. association, said Wednesday he is seeking answers from the minister about the independent review, including whether the findings will be made public. Who will be or has been appointed? What is the scope of the review? Will they have the power to require the department to co-operate with them? No other information was immediately available from Wilson-Rayboulds office. The RCMP arrested Diab, a Canadian of Lebanese descent, in November 2008 in response to a request by France. In June 2011, Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger committed Diab for extradition despite acknowledging the case against him was weak. The following year, then-justice minister Rob Nicholson signed an extradition order surrendering Diab to France. The Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the decisions of the lower court and the minister, and the Supreme Court of Canada declined to review the matter. Diabs supporters have long argued he was in Beirut not Paris when the attack took place and that his fingerprints, palm prints, physical description and age did not match those of the suspect identified in 1980. In November 2014, Diab was sent to France, where he was held in solitary confinement up to 22 hours a day. In January, French judges dismissed the allegations against Diab and ordered his immediate release. Diab is back in Canada with his wife and children. However, French prosecuting authorities have appealed his release, and a decision is expected July 6. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said she and the prime minister had advocated very energetically for Diabs return to Canada. I think that it is very important for there to be an external review of why he was sent from Canada in the first place and let me point out it was the previous Harper government which made those decisions. OTTAWAPrime Minister Justin Trudeau was on the defensive Wednesday, touting his governments $4.5 billion takeover of the Trans Mountain pipeline project as a vital economic move, even as opposition MPs condemned it as a costly folly. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer went after the government for making the big investment with no assurance that the promised pipeline expansion to help move Alberta bitumen oil to the west coast will actually go ahead. He is writing a cheque for $4.5 billion for an existing pipeline. Not a single centimetre of new pipeline will be built with this bill to the taxpayer, Scheer said in question period. But Trudeau said the move will mean higher prices for oil exports and secure jobs in the resource sector, while dodging questions about what it may ultimately cost Canadians. We are proud to make sure that we are supporting the growth in the economy, the good jobs for Albertans and all Canadians while we protect the environment, he said. The Liberal government announced Tuesday that it would buy the assets associated with the Trans Mountain pipeline project from U.S.-based Kinder Morgan. Long adamant that the pipeline expansion would go ahead, the government had its hand forced after the American energy giant backed away in the face of ardent opposition in B.C. The Liberal government is hoping to entice another company to take over the project but if not, cabinet ministers have said they will move ahead with the pipeline expansion at a cost likely to top $7 billion, all at taxpayers expense. Senior cabinet ministers travelled to western Canada Wednesday to highlight the government strategy, with Finance Minister Bill Morneau in Calgary and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale speaking in Fort McMurray as Trudeau served as point man in Ottawa. The Conservatives accused Trudeau of a double standard for not showing the same concern when TransCanada Corp. halted work last October on the Energy East pipeline, a 4,600-kilometre pipeline to move Alberta oil to a terminal in New Brunswick. Will the prime minister promise to enter into negotiations to provide the same level of certainty for Energy East? Conservative MP Lisa Raitt said, challenging the prime minister to revive the mega-project to move oil eastward. But Trudeau dismissed it as old news and said the Conservatives were playing politics on the issue. NDP MP Guy Caron demanded to know what risk assessments the federal government did before making the deal to take over the existing Trans Mountain pipeline. Champions of the environment do not buy pipelines and they do not choose to saddle Canadian taxpayers with the environmental and financial risks of a pipeline, Caron said. But Trudeau said that Albertas agreement on a carbon pricing strategy was contingent on the expansion getting built. While the expansion has the backing of some Indigenous groups along the route of the new pipeline including some who have signed formal agreements to share the economic benefits others remain opposed. That could spell trouble for a Liberal government that has made reconciliation with Indigenous peoples a priority. Asked about the ongoing opposition, Minister of Indigenous Services Jane Philpott said that Ottawa will ensure it is fully respectful of the rights of Indigenous Peoples. There are ongoing conversations and its something that we will make sure that we get right, Philpott told reporters. The pipeline takeover carries political risks for the Liberals too in B.C.,where the party has 18 MPs. Vancouver Quadra MP Joyce Murray said Trans Mountain takeover is not a popular decision among her constituents. Ive frankly had a lot of opportunity about to speak with the decision makers on this project and to be heard on it. They understand how we feel and what the constituents have been telling me, Vancouver Quadra MP Joyce Murray said Wednesday. They took a decision that was reflecting a broader interest, she said. Asked whether she was worried it might cost her votes in next years federal election, Murray said its up to the voters to weigh what their MP has been doing. I trust that they will do that, she said. Read more about: MONTREALThe self-styled Prince of Pot has pleaded guilty to trafficking cannabis and will pay a $5,000 fine. The charge against Marc Emery stemmed from the opening of Cannabis Culture boutiques in Montreal in December 2016. Two other charges of possession and conspiracy were dropped. The prosecution says its an appropriate sentence that was negotiated over months. The shops were only open for a few hours before police shut them down. Emery tweeted earlier Wednesday he would plead guilty and pay a fine. Read more: Cannabis activists Marc and Jodie Emery plead guilty to drug-related charges Prince and Princess of Pot released on bail In a brief exchange later with reporters at the Montreal courthouse, he criticized Quebecs plan to sell pots in government-run stores. The federal Liberal government plans to allow legal recreational cannabis by late summer, but the manner of selling of it is left up to the individual provinces. Pot dispensaries are illegal under current federal legislation unless they have a licence from Health Canada to sell it for medical purposes. OTTAWAThe federal government spent $2.3 billion less than originally planned last year on new military gear, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan revealed Wednesday, even as a prominent economic adviser to the Liberals sang the praises of investing in the defence sector. The spending shortage, which will require Canadas military to continue to use some equipment longer than expected, means the government is already losing ground on the promise it made last year to invest $62 billion in the Forces over the next 20 years. The mixed messages came during the first day of the two-day Cansec gathering in Ottawa, Canadas largest annual arms show, where officials from the worlds biggest defence companies descend on the national capital to pitch their wares to the government and military. Sajjan kicked off the event with an update on the Liberal governments new defence policy a blueprint that details the specific equipment the military intends to buy over the next five years. Many companies had been eagerly waiting to see which of the dozens of projects included in the multibillion-dollar defence policy were considered a priority and which were being put on the back burner. What they heard instead was that the ambitious Liberal plan to ramp up spending got off to a slower start than expected: where Ottawa had planned to spend $6.2 billion last year, figures published with the defence policy show, they only managed to get $3.9 billion out the door. Sajjan played down the discrepancy, saying a portion of the unspent money represented savings that the government was able to find on some projects, while others were the result of companies not fulfilling their obligations. But he also admitted later that for some projects, we werent able to get it to the level we wanted. Were improving on that and things have improved drastically for this. It will improve as time goes on. Defence companies wont be the only ones hoping Sajjan is right. One of the governments most influential economic advisers told a luncheon audience that Canadas defence industry will be critical to sparking innovation and ensuring the countrys prosperity over the long term. If we want to grow and we can in Canada, and we want to grow more significantly the defence sector is going to play an essential part in doing that, said Dominic Barton, the chair of Finance Minister Bill Morneaus growth council. Automation is expected to cost Canada some 2 million jobs in the coming decades, Barton said, but the defence sector is one area where there is potential for substantial growth, as well as technological developments to help build and grow new industries. This is how were going to get some of the leading-edge innovation that we can then commercialize and transform the broader economy, he said, adding that the government can support small businesses with defence investments. The defence sector currently supports 60,000 jobs in Canada and sells an estimated $6 billion worth of arms and equipment to other countries each year some of them causing headaches for the government because of questionable human-rights records. One of the more controversial sales was a multi-year, $15-billion contract for the provision of armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia, which was the top non-U.S. destination for Canadian arms in 2016. The government also faced pointed questions earlier this year about its plan to sell military helicopters to the Philippines despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau criticizing that countrys human-rights record only a few months earlier. The deal was eventually scrapped by Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte after a public outcry prompted the Trudeau government to reconsider the sale. OTTAWAThe Canadian government is preparing options including trade retaliation against the United States as high-level talks to resolve a NAFTA logjam and a looming American threat of tariffs against Canadian steel and aluminum imports stall, the Star has learned. Publicly, the Canadian government is stopping short of an outright threat of trade retaliation in the face of Fridays deadline when Canadas exemption from import tariffs 25 per cent on steel, 10 per cent on aluminum expires. Behind the scenes, the Canadian government is preparing a whole series of options that we can pursue if they do that which of course includes trade retaliation, a senior government official told The Star. Retaliation is one of our options. But the official suggested the U.S. government has exempted Canada from trade tariffs at the last minute before, and might well do so again. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke to U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence Tuesday, and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland cut short a two-day trip to the U.S. capital, returning to Ottawa Wednesday morning with chief Canadian trade negotiator Steve Verheul after a two-hour meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. However Trudeau reported no advances or concessions on the U.S. side. Trudeau told reporters he had a good conversation with Pence and impressed upon him the fact that Ive been having direct conversations with the president for close to a year now. Trudeau suggested Pence seemed to understand very clearly Canadas arguments against being targeted by U.S. tariff threats against other countries. The prime minister said he underscored the fact there is Canadian aluminum content in American jets and Canadian steel in American armoured vehicles, and he highlighted that tariffs would hit American workers, American jobs and American consumers who would pay more for, for various products. Asked if he was prepared to retaliate, Trudeau sidestepped a direct answer. Were continuing to...work on multiple fronts with the United States, whether its moving towards a renegotiated modernized NAFTA, whether its in making sure that our steel and aluminum industry and now our auto industry is protected from ...tariffs, said Trudeau before heading into a caucus meeting. There are a lot of files that we continue to work on. Nobody wins in a trade war, said Liberal MP Wayne Easter, chair of the Commons finance committee and co-chair of the Canada-U.S. Interparliamentary Group. But the government is considering its options and we will exercise some of those options should this happen, you can be assured of that. Easter said tariffs could target endless products because theres endless trade. One of the areas the U.S. is certainly most vulnerable is their farm sector. And you know who won all those states in the last election? Farm state support was crucial to Trumps election in 2016. New Democrat Brian Masse, MP for Windsor-West and a member of the cross-border interparliamentary association, said trade retaliation is risky. We have to be careful about compounding the problem, he said. It depends on how wed target it; what we can do is make things worse inadvertently to many industries, including the automotive sector where we could do ourselves further harm. I do think we have to stand up for Canadian jobs, and represent our interests well, and some of that may involve tough news, said Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu, whose Sarnia Lambton riding runs along the U.S. border. She said she wasnt surprised Ottawa is readying options, but worried that resorting to tariffs could escalate. Any good team would have lots of contingencies and lots of tactics in place that can be used, but the last time Canada was granted an exemption and I would hope the U.S. would do that again. Canadas foreign affairs minister portrayed the NAFTA negotiations the same way she has for weeks as ongoing, in a very intense phase, with a possible deal still within reach. Freeland told reporters she and Lighthizer mainly discussed how to rewrite NAFTA rules on the auto sector, as well as the Trump administrations threat to include Canada among countries targeted by tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, adding she also spoke with her Mexican counterpart Ildefonso Guajardo. Yet despite Freelands insistance NAFTA and U.S. tariffs are separate issues, it is clear NAFTA talks are deeply entangled with the steel and aluminum import issue, as well as an investigation the U.S. has launched into the national security implications of automotive imports. Freeland said she stressed to Lighthizer several times that Canada considers it frankly absurd that we would in any way be considered to be a national security threat to the United States. We are probably the closest ally of the United States, said Freeland. She reminded him when it comes to steel and steel products the U.S. has a surplus in trade with Canada. Freeland said the Liberal government is absolutely prepared to and will defend Canadian industries and Canadian jobs saying only she would respond appropriately. Jerry Dias, president of Unifor, the largest union representing auto workers, said in an interview that while domestic U.S. auto makers recognize Canada and the U.S are integrated auto industries, they support President Donald Trumps attempt to target cheap auto imports from Korea, Japan and Europe, and dumped steel from places like China and Korea. Dias said Canada is swept up in those tariff discussions because Trump is using it as political leverage in NAFTA. Trump continues to throw so many ridiculous proposals on the table that its clear to Dias the man does not want a deal...because he figures hes politically much better off heading into the U.S. primaries saying Listen, Ive got tariffs, Im retaliating, Im fighting all these countries that have ripped us off for years, Im playing absolute political hardball and I need (Republicans in) the senate and the House (of Representatives) in order to maintain it. If he had a NAFTA deal in hand, Trump could be accused by political rivals of not negotiating hard enough and getting enough concessions, Dias said. One senior official said there are currently no plans for Trudeau, Trump and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to meet on NAFTA, denying a rumour circulating on Parliament Hill that a trilateral meeting would happen before the G7 leaders next week. Mexico is not a member of the G7. Two senior Canadian government officials, speaking on background, also denied a Hill Times report Wednesday that there was a NAFTA deal, particularly on autos, on the table that three negotiating teams had agreed to that was subsequently killed by Trump. When reporters asked Freeland about the prospect of getting a deal in time to have it passed by the current Congress, she said the U.S. legislative process is not one of my responsibilities; its the job of the United States to manage its own legislative process. Dias was blunter: I think the days of crossing your fingers? I think those days are gone. Read more about: Note: This article is subject to legal complaint by MVD Law Professional Corporation. The TTC is suing a Scarborough personal injury law firm for more than $1.5 million over allegations it defrauded the transit agency for 10 years by systematically doctoring benefit claims made by victims of collisions involving buses and streetcars. According to a statement of claim dated Jan. 24, 2017 and filed by the TTC and its in-house insurance company, the transit agency alleges the Law Offices of Meleni David falsified records to claim payment for expenses for home care, housekeeping, and other services that were never actually provided to accident victims. An attorney representing David declined to comment on the allegations when reached by the Star on Tuesday. According to a statement of defence filed in April 2017, David, her company, and an employee named as a co-defendant deny that they engaged in an unlawful scheme and strictly deny that there was an unlawful scheme being practiced at the firm. The defendants also charge the damages sought by the TTC are excessive, exaggerated and remote, and ask the court to dismiss the case. The TTC alleges it has found evidence of fraudulent claims related to 13 of the firms clients, who were involved in accidents that occurred between 2005 and 2014. The payments the TTC made in the 13 cases totalled $654,553, but the agency didnt specify how much of that it believes is tied to allegedly fraudulent claims. According to the TTCs statement of claim, the agency became suspicious in 2015 when it found falsified documents in a claim handled by Davids firm, which advertises TTC Accident as one of its areas of expertise. A former legal assistant at the firm later admitted in court filings to forging signatures on invoices for home care for one accident victim, but said he did so without Davids knowledge. The assistant, who the TTC is also suing in the same case, filed a statement of defence in which he said he wasnt involved in any other of the allegedly false claims, and denied any involvement in the unlawful scheme outlined by the TTC. According to Davids statement of defence, she had no knowledge the assistant had forged signatures and she fired him as soon as she discovered the inappropriate invoice handling. The TTC says the discovery of the problems in that file prompted its in-house insurance provider, which is known as the TTC Insurance Company Limited, to review other claims Davids firm had handled. More than fifty per cent of the files audited contained demonstrably forged invoices, the TTC alleges in its claim. The agency charges that David and her employees operated the scam by having claimants sign blank invoice forms for housekeeping, home care, or other services. The firm would allegedly then either obtain or fabricate the signature of a person who was supposed to be supplying the service, and submit the invoice to the TTCs insurance company for reimbursement. The TTC alleges some of the expenses may have been legitimate but that Davids firm would fabricate subsequent invoices by copying, cutting and pasting and/or completing details on a blank form with a signature on it. As part of its investigation, the TTC determined that it appears that most claimants have stated that they did not receive most of the services for which the firm had submitted paperwork. The insurance company also contacted caregivers and other service providers, some of whom reported that they had not performed the services for various claimants represented by the firm, according to the statement of claim. The TTC alleges that the firm had a particular interest in maximizing the benefit payments because in addition to receiving a portion of clients one-time accident settlements, the companys retainer entitled it to 25 per cent of ongoing benefit payments. The TTC claims it is illegal for a law firm to receive a cut of ongoing benefit claims, which are supposed to reimburse the out-of-pocket expenses of accident victims. Davids firm disputed that allegation, arguing in its statement of defence that it is the practice in personal injury litigation for lawyers to recover fees on a contingency basis. In addition to inflating the firms cut of benefit payments, the TTC claim alleges, the fraudulent caregiving invoices also created a paper trail that made it appear the accident victim had suffered serious and chronic injuries, which would lead to more lucrative one-time settlements for the firm and its client. According to Davids defence, claimants are not asked to sign blank invoice forms, and caregiver signatures are not fabricated, nor are subsequent invoices fabricated. The statement of defence asserts that aside from the claims the former assistant admitted forging, all other claims flagged by the TTC were properly completed and submitted by the claimants and signed by the service providers themselves. The website for Davids firm describes her as a respected attorney who has received numerous awards related to her community service, including the Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award and a citation from the National Ethnic Press and Media Council. The TTC and its insurance company are suing the defendants for $1 million in damages for alleged negligence, conspiracy, breach of trust, and other claims, and $500,000 for aggravated, exemplary, or punitive damages. According to its statement of claim, the TTC believes the scope of the alleged scheme may be wider than it has been able to uncover, and has asked the court to appoint an inspector to trace any funds the defendants may have unlawfully obtained through false claims, and to place a hold on any ill-gotten assets. In addition to David and two named employees at the firm, the statement of claims cites 20 unnamed defendants listed only as Jane or John Does. The TTC is the sole owner of the TTC Insurance Company Limited, and funds accident payments through the transit agencys operating budget. In its claim it describes the alleged benefits scheme as a fraud (on) users of the TTC. The alleged fraudulent accident claims scam is separate from the major health benefits scandal at the TTC, which has resulted in the dismissal, resignation, or early retirement of more than 200 employees since 2014. In an emailed statement, TTC spokesperson Brad Ross said there is no correlation between that scandal and the alleged fraud outlined in the lawsuit against Davids firm. He said the TTCs insurance company has numerous controls in place to detect potential fraud, and in the David case, those systems helped to identify a potential pattern ... which triggered an internal investigation. The TTC is serious about fighting fraud and will take legal action when it is deemed appropriate, he said. Litigation in the David case is ongoing, no trial date has been set and none of the allegations have been proven in court. In advance of its annual festival next month, Pride Toronto is launching a new campaign to advocate for the safety of members of the LGBT community. Despite achieving mainstream acceptance on many fronts, our community is still the target of violence, hatred and systemic discrimination, Pride Toronto said in a press release. There has been a clear increase in hate crime and other assaults against our community particularly LGBTQ2S+ community members that are racialized. The campaign is organized in partnership with other community groups in the GTA, such as the 519 Church St. Community Centre, the Toronto HIV/AIDS Network and Planned Parenthood Toronto. The campaign also has the support of the federal Department of Justice. It launched Tuesday with a week of discussion, and will continue until the end of June. If youve ever felt scared, threatened, vulnerable, alone or invisible, know that we are here. You have a community that sees you, hears you and stands beside you, Olivia Nuamah, executive director of Pride Toronto, said on social media. The organization is encouraging participants on social media to show their support by using the hashtag #UntilWereSafe, and to use a special Facebook profile picture frame. In particular, the project will highlight the personal stories of 24 members of the LGBT community and how they have experienced hate crimes and other forms of violence. Our experiences may be diverse but we share a simple truth we deserve to be safe, the campaign website reads. The campaign comes amid the continuing investigation into alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur, who has been charged with eight counts of first-degree murder, with many of his alleged victims being gay men of colour. The Bruce MacArthur arrest and subsequent findings was the inspiration for the campaign. The case of Bruce McArthur has highlighted what happens when people both do not feel safe and hide, Nuamah told the Star. The stories we have featured shine a light on the consequences for some people of being your authentic self and we wanted to give those voices a platform through this campaign. This years Pride parade is on June 24, and will start from Church and Bloor Sts., ending at Yonge-Dundas Square. The parade will conclude with the Until Were Safe March, in which participants have been asked to wear black. The goals of both (marches) are to commemorate the losses in the LGBTQ2S+ community and highlight ways in which the community continues to experience danger, a statement from Pride Toronto read. Wayne Millard was found dead in his bed in November 2012 a bullet lodged in his brain. The death of the 71-year-old wealthy businessman was initially ruled a suicide. Two years later, police charged his son, Dellen Millard, with first-degree murder. The 32-year-old, who is serving two consecutive life sentences for two separate murders, has pleaded not guilty to the charge. As Dellen Millards murder trial gets underway Thursday, family members say theyre struggling to make sense of the ordeal. Im sick over all this, said Peter Roberts, who remembered his cousin Wayne Millard as a generous, caring man. Roberts recalled asking the elder Millard for help when his ailing mother wanted to spend her final days in her own home. His cousin paid nearly $100,000 for round-the-clock care for about a year, Roberts said. It was such a delight to talk to him, he said. All of a sudden I have a guy to go to talk to, like a mentor. Then hes gone. Wayne Millard was the owner of Millardair, an aviation company based near Waterloo, Ont., that he inherited from his father. According to court documents and pre-trial motions, it was Dellen Millard who found his fathers body in the home the two shared in Torontos west end on Nov. 29, 2012. He then called his mother, Madeleine Burns his parents had separated in 1990 and divorced in 1996 and told her Wayne Millard was dead, court documents show. Burns went to the house and then called 911, court documents show. In May 2013, months after friends and family had gathered to remember Wayne Millard, his son was arrested for the murder of Tim Bosma, of Hamilton, who disappeared after leaving his house with two men who asked to test drive a truck he posted for sale online. Soon after Dellen Millards arrest, police reopened the case of his fathers death. They still had the gun that was found beside his bed, court has heard. They tested the gun and found Dellen Millards DNA on the handle, court documents show. Last year, a gun trafficker pleaded guilty to selling Dellen Millard the revolver. In 2016, Dellen Millard and his friend, Mark Smich, were found guilty of first-degree murder in Bosmas death and received life sentences. The jury heard that the pair killed Bosma and burned his body in an animal incinerator. Millard and Smich were also later convicted and sentenced to life in the murder of Laura Babcock, a young Toronto woman who vanished in the summer of 2012 and whose case was also reopened by police following Millards arrest in Bosmas disappearance. Millards third murder trial will be in front of a judge alone. Ontarios attorney general agreed the mans notoriety would make it difficult to find fair jurors, thus granting the rare request to hold a first-degree murder trial without a jury. Millards defence, according to court documents, will be that his father killed himself. A portion of the trial is expected to focus on Wayne Millards state of mind at the time of his death. The elder Millard loved aviation and animals. In 1982, just days after he was arrested for filming baby seals being clubbed to death, he flew a small crew back into the area to get onto the ice near the beaches of P.E.I. Wayne Millard had the means a plane, a helicopter and money to burn for the venture. He and Burns, who would later become his wife, were making a film about the seal hunt with the help of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson. He was very incensed about the seal hunt, Watson said. He stuck to his ground and didnt give in. He was persistent, passionate and he was dedicated. Wayne Millard was a longtime Air Canada pilot before getting involved with Millardair. He once sued Air Canada because they suspended him for growing his hair too long, said Dennis Chadala, who wrote a book about his years with Millardair. Wayne was a kind man who trained me on many different kinds of planes and we had a kinship in that we were banded together in order to handle his father, Carl, who was a real tough boss, Chadala said. But he was also a rabble-rouser. After his father died in 2006, Wayne Millard took over Millardair, but the company wasnt doing well. He embarked on a project to transform Millardair into a maintenance, repair and overhaul operation and secured a massive hangar at the Region of Waterloo International Airport. He told others, including his cousin Roberts, that he was doing it so his son could run it one day. Shortly after Wayne Millard was found dead, his son fired everyone at Millardair and wound the business down. In an obituary published in the Toronto Star in 2012, Dellen Millard called his dad a generous man. His hope was for a time when co-operation would be the norm and competition was only friendly, he wrote. He was patient and stubborn ... He believed animal welfare was a humanitarian effort. He was a good man in a careless world. He was my father. More than seven years after Allan Lanteigne was beaten to death in the foyer of his Ossington Ave. home, a jury is now finally deliberating the fate of the two men charged with his murder. Lanteignes husband, Demitry Papasotiriou-Lanteigne, 38, and his lover, Michael Ivezic, 57, have been on trial for first-degree murder a plot the Crown said was driven by their plan to cash in on Lanteignes $2-million life insurance policy. For the past six months, courtroom 4-9 at the Superior Court of Justice in Toronto has featured an eclectic mix of evidence and characters: from intimate emails and diaper porn to a soldier judge and a combative defendant who acted as his own lawyer. There was also plenty the jury wasnt told. The story began on March 3, 2011 when the 49-year-old University of Toronto accounting clerk was found dead in the matrimonial home. There were no signs of forced entry. More than a year and a half later, Toronto police arrested Papasotiriou-Lanteigne. Ivezic was arrested in Athens, Greece two months after that, and extradited in early June 2013. Both men denied any involvement. The Crowns case against Ivezic, the alleged assailant, was undeniably stronger: his DNA was found in Lanteignes fingernail clippings, and he was in the GTA at the time of the killing, while Papasotiriou-Lanteigne was living in Greece. But the prosecution got off to a bumpy start. Although Ivezic was committed to stand trial for murder following a preliminary hearing in 2014, Ontario Court Justice Shaun Nakatsuru discharged Papasotiriou-Lanteigne on the grounds that there wasnt enough evidence against him. The Ministry of the Attorney General then took the rare step of issuing a preferred indictment, which reinstated the murder charge, and Papasotiriou-Lanteigne was rearrested. Papasotiriou-Lanteigne promptly challenged that action, alleging bias on the part of the man who signed the indictment, Deputy Attorney General Patrick Monahan who was a professor at Osgoode Hall law school when Papasotiriou-Lanteigne was a student there. Superior Court Justice Ian Nordheimer heard days of evidence before ultimately refusing to quash the indictment. Nevertheless, a trial date of September 2016 was vacated because the defendants were without lawyers. The pair spent the next year launching a series of legal challenges. Ivezic produced a steady stream of disclosure demands, all requiring courtroom litigation with an army of lawyers. In one of many pretrial rulings, Nordheimer noted there had been more than 50 court appearances, including 30 where disclosure played a role. Last September, Nordheimer released what would be his last decision in the case. The defendants had asked that the prosecutors be removed, alleging they had tampered with records and evidence, lied to the defence and the court and colluded with police. The evidence in support of those allegations is difficult to find, Nordheimer wrote. Within days, he was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal. Replacing him would be Superior Court Justice Robert Goldstein, a fitness buff and Canadian army reservist who once took a break from his job as a federal Crown attorney to serve in Afghanistan. Operating in the vicinity of the Taliban was a prelude of the courtroom battles ahead for Goldstein, who was conducting his first murder trial since his 2012 judicial appointment. For Crown attorney Hank Goody, a veteran of scores of murder cases, this prosecution was his final major trial. When Goodys co-counsel, Anna Tenhouse, finally delivered the Crowns opening address to the jury on Nov. 27, 2017 now more than five years after Lanteignes death the jurors were told the trial would last between three and four months. Papasotiriou-Lanteigne, who was free on bail throughout the trial, became a familiar sight at the University Ave. courthouse, clutching his smartphone with its photo collection of the lifelike portraits of his grandmother and mother that he painted at night. Ivezic was held in custody, a fact the jury was not told. It was after Christmas that the trial really started to bog down. For reasons unexplained, Ivezic fired defence lawyer Marcy Segal, who is known as an aggressive courtroom litigator, and chose to represent himself. Then, in mid-February, without the jury present, Ivezic asked the judge for permission to cross-examine a police witness about Lanteignes lifestyle. I want the truth to shine, Ivezic told Goldstein. The truth, according to Ivezic, was that Allan was no saint. He was very promiscuous, and engaged in risky behaviour with many men who could have had the opportunity kill Allan. Ivezic wanted the jury to see which websites Lanteigne had visited, especially those catering to adult diaper-wearing enthusiasts, raising the spectre that someone else levelled the lethal blows. Asked by the judge for his view, Goody told Goldstein that evidence would divert the jury from fact finding. He described the dating sites as benign, and said there is nothing to suggest (Lanteigne) had any interest in violence. In fact, Lanteigne seemed more interested in intimacy and cuddling, Goody said. After considering the arguments, Goldstein told Ivezic such evidence would be of limited value, and ordered him to refrain from gratuitous references to fetishes and (sexual) preferences. When the jury returned, Ivezic ignored the judges warning and asked the officer if he found any photos that could be described as unconventional. Where are you going with this? Goldstein asked Ivezic after ordering the jury out of the courtroom. It was a phrase he would use over and over during the trial. I want the jury to know there were some unusual photos. Im not saying what they were, Ivezic replied. Im not going to allow you to go there, snapped Goldstein. Bring the jury in. Almost immediately, Ivezic went there again, further exasperating the judge. Goldstein appeared to bend over backwards to accommodate Ivezic, steering him clear of minefields that could hurt both him and his co-accused. The defendant didnt always see it that way. Youre treating me like a kid, Ivezic complained at one point. I do have the right to defend myself, he said another time. Im facing 25 years and Im not going to be shortchanged by anybody. For the most part, Papasotiriou-Lanteignes lawyer, Gabriel Gross-Stein, who was still in law school when the murder took place, stayed in his seat. And there were more hiccups. One day in early March, Ivezic did not show up in court, prompting the judge to threaten an extraction order to get him back in the courthouse. You dont get a choice about when you get to come, Goldstein warned. Then Ivezic had his jailhouse computer and internet privileges cancelled after an audit discovered he was surfing porn sites and had set up a Facebook page. He had been using the computer to prepare his case, but also to send journalists his unproven theories about police malfeasance and how officials colluded to plant his DNA. By mid-March, nerves were frayed. Ivezic brought a mistrial application, arguing the judges facial expressions were compromising his right to a fair trial. Goldstein rejected it. Meanwhile, the courtroom drama was playing out to just a handful of spectators, including Lanteignes tiny mother and sister, who were seated in the front row. Throughout the proceedings, the elephant in the room was the DNA from Ivezic that was found in Lanteignes fingernail clippings. Ivezic had an explanation for that. Evidence will show I had lunch with Allan on Monday, Feb. 28, he told jurors during his opening address, which Goldstein had first edited to remove inadmissible comments. Evidence will show that this may be the time that the innocent transfer of my DNA, to Allans fingernails, may have taken place. By the time Ivezic eventually testified Papasotiriou-Lanteigne never did he had brought in veteran Toronto lawyer Jack Gemmell. Which brings us to the pimple. On May 31, 2017, at a separate hearing relating to legal representation, Ivezic testified about a lunch he claimed to have had with Lanteigne at a Queens Quay gyros stand on Feb. 28, 2011, several days before the murder. Allan is a very touchy-feely person and ... how should I say this, he was a groomer, if you will, he told Frank Addario, another veteran defence lawyer, who conducted the cross-examination. If theres something out of place, for example if theres a ... pimple on my nose or on my face or whatever, he, he would take it upon himself to actually, to actually pop it, or squeeze it, or scrape it or whatever. Apparently taken aback, Addario asked if Ivezic was saying Lanteinge had popped a pimple on your face. I think it was on my nose, Ivezic replied. During the just-completed trial, Ivezic did not mention the pimple-popping story. Four men are facing a total of 97 charges after a police vehicle and foot chase Monday. On Monday afternoon, police said a plainclothes officer investigating gun violence in Regent Park spotted a vehicle with the four men inside near Parliament St. and Dundas St. East. The men, police said, appeared to wear clothing meant to disguise their identities. One of the men stepped out of the car and fired a gun in a northerly direction towards traffic and pedestrians, Police said. No one is believed to have been struck. Police said the man got back into the car and police pursued the car through the intersection of Sherbourne and Shuter Sts. where it was boxed in by both marked and unmarked police vehicles. Police said the car backed into a police car, badly damaging it. The car then continued forward, striking a uniformed police officer who was not badly injured before running a red light at Shuter and Jarvis Sts., where it struck a taxi. It then continued north on Jarvis St. into oncoming traffic eventually striking another taxi. The car then turned westbound on Dundas St. E., narrowly missing pedestrians, and attempted a left turn onto Mutual St., where it lost control and collided with another police car and some garbage cans, disabling it. The four occupants fled southbound on Mutual St. forcing police officers into a foot pursuit. Police arrested four suspects close to the scene. Shakiem Anderson, a 21-year-old from Mississauga, faces 20 charges including four counts of dangerous driving. Harlem Baldwin, a 20-year-old from Toronto, faces 21 charges, the most out of the four. His charges include four counts of dangerous driving and two counts of unauthorized possession of a firearm in a motor vehicle Kareemallah Muhammad, 18, and Sharrief Muhammad, 22, also from Toronto face 15 and 14 charges respectively. The four men were scheduled to appear in court at College Park on Tuesday. The family of Matthew Staikos have released a statement saying they are mourning the loss of the tech startup CEO, who was killed in a shooting Monday night. The CEO behind a Toronto-based startup called Vleepo and a former BlackBerry employee was shot and killed late Monday night. Staikos, 37, of Toronto, was found dead at the scene after Toronto Police responded to witness reports of a shooting at Bay St. and Yorkville Ave. around 11:30 p.m. Our family is mourning the sudden loss of our beloved Matthew, the family said in a written statement Wednesday. We ask that you respect the privacy of our family as we cope with this tragedy. On Twitter, Staikos described himself as a tech junkie, entrepreneur, investor and traveller. According to his LinkedIn account, Staikos has been CEO of Vleepo Inc. since May 2015, with a software team based out of Greece. Vleepo is described on its website as a new messaging platform that is redefining what group chat should be. According to a bio on ellines.com, Staikos was born in 1980 and graduated from the Mechanical and Computer Engineering School of the University of Toronto. As an undergraduate, he and his brother George founded Torch Mobile in 2003, with subsidiaries in Beijing. Six years later Torch Mobile was acquired by BlackBerry parent company Research in Motion, where Staikos became the technical director of web technologies for Blackberry, according to his LinkedIn. He left in July 2013. I never thought hed leave us so quickly, so unjustly ... I read and reread the news in Canadian media and I dont want to accept that this wonderful man and friend will no longer be among us, Greek ambassador to Canada Dimitris Azemopoulos wrote in a Facebook post early Wednesday morning. Sometimes it is impossible to express the anguish of our soul. One of these times is also for me tonight writing these lines for my friend Matthew. The suspect is described as black, 5-foot-10 with a medium build. He fled the area in a vehicle described as a silver or grey four-door Mercedes. Staikoss death is the latest in a rash of shootings across the city over a 30-hour period. At around the same time Monday night, another shooting occurred near Yorkdale Shopping Centre; A man in his 20s was taken to hospital with serious, but non-life-threatening injuries, paramedics say. Just a day earlier, four separate shootings rocked the city. Three people were hurt and Venojan Suthesan, a 21-year-old York University student, was killed at Lester B. Pearson Collegiate Institute in Scarborough. No suspect information has been released for any of the Sunday night shootings. According to police stats, there have been 162 shootings and 215 victims this year as of Sunday, an 11 per cent increase from the same time last year. Toronto police statistics show that in 2017, there were 145 shooting occurrence and 212 victims. With files from Ilya Banares, The Canadian Press Read more about: Ontario election polls show a see-sawing battle between the PCs and the NDP in the lead-up to the June 7 vote, but experts say Andrea Horwath is at a disadvantage. Her support, they argue, is in the wrong places. The NDP faces a strategic disadvantage when it comes to winning elections, political pundits agree, due to so-called voter inefficiency. But its a disadvantage that can be overcome if the party can get out the youth vote. The PCs tend to win great swaths of rural ridings in southern and eastern Ontario, where fewer votes are required to capture a seat. Despite the close race, the Tories are playing in more seats, competitive in about 79, whereas the NDP are competitive in 67, said pollster David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data. The inefficiency of the NDP vote is compounded by the relative youth of the partys supporters. The PCs rely on older, male voters who typically turn out to cast their ballots in larger numbers than the NDPs young base. If millenials wake up and get out to vote collectively for one party that could be a game changer for the New Democrats, said pollster David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data. Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus Liberals were able to motivate young people to head to the polls in the 2015 federal election, and that had a real impact, said Frank Graves, president of EKOS Research Associates. Read more: Beleaguered Wynne joins Ford on anti-NDP bandwagon, warning Andrea Horwaths party would be bad for business Opinion | Susan Delacourt: What is it that is driving Ontario voters? Opinion | Count Us In: Women will vote on June 7 In this election, millennials are once again the wild card, he said. In the days leading up to the election, the NDP should focus on too close to call ridings like those in Mississauga, Markham, Pickering, and Chatham and urban centres outside the GTA like St. Catharines, Guelph and Cambridge, said Barry Kay, a political science professor at Wilfrid Laurier University who publishes riding projections. If theres an orange wave thats fairly consistent across the province, theres a chance the NDP will do better than we think, said Coletto. The Tories, for their part, need to hang on to the Toronto ridings where party leader Doug Ford is popular Etobicoke, Scarborough and North York as well as in their strongholds, such as certain ridings in Ottawa, Coletto said. They need to continue to prevent voters from thinking, Oh my god, I cant imagine Doug Ford as premier, he said. Theyve kept people from fearing him. I think thats helping hold their vote together. Several recent polls show a very close race between the the PCs and the NDP, with Premier Kathleen Wynnes Liberals in a distant third. Pollsters are skeptical of the prospect of a Liberal come-back. According to Graves, the governing party will likely be hard-pressed to win more than a handful of seats. I dont see anything producing such a profound shift in the electorate, he said. The public has made up their minds and wants a new government. Now the parties should be highlighting how theyll address hot-button issues in specific ridings they have the best chance of winning, said Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch, an advocacy group that pushes for democratic reform. Youre trying to get voters from other parties to stay home or switch, and youre trying to get your voters to turn out at the polls and stick with you, Conacher said. But everyones guessing how to do it. For the NDP, because of the distribution of their support, the challenge appears more difficult an accident of electoral mapping. Unlike in the U.S. where political parties create riding boundaries, Canada and its provinces have non-partisan organizations (in Ontarios case, Elections Ontario) that set the boundaries based on population. Our system is as fair and democratic as any in the world, Conacher said, who is also an adjunct law professor at the University of Ottawa. And if one party benefits more than the others from riding boundaries, thats just the luck of the vote split. Vote now: Read more about: Canada Post is late delivering half a million voter cards one week before the provincial election. The cards tell voters where, when and how to vote, and were supposed to be delivered by May 25, in time for advance polls opening May 26, said Elections Ontario in a statement Wednesday. We rely on our partnership with Canada Post to deliver essential voter information on time, said Ontarios Chief Electoral Officer Greg Essensa in the statement. We are clearly disappointed that we have not received the level of service that we have come to expect from our long-standing partner. Canada Post expected to have the cards in the mail by end of day Wednesday, and said it experienced a mechanized process failure, and processed the batch manually. It is now investigating the cause, but has delivered the 8.5 million other cards successfully. We apologize to Elections Ontario and to anyone who has yet to receive their voter card for any delay, said spokesperson Phil Legault in a statement. In an email Tuesday, Canada Post said it was confident all voters would receive the card in time for the June 7 election. Read more: Heres where Ontarios party leaders stand on the issues Here are the four candidates wanting to be Ontarios next premier, and what theyre promising Opinion | Count Us In: Women will vote on June 7 Voters can still cast their ballot without a card by bringing one piece of identification that shows their name and current residential address. Kerry Cathers has lived in the same Toronto apartment for 15 years and as of Wednesday afternoon had yet to receive her card. She said she called Elections Ontario earlier in the week and the representative told her theyd received many reports of people not receiving their cards. Its a little bit disturbing because people might not show up to vote, Cathers said, noting shell go to her voting station regardless, but worries others arent aware they dont need a card. Ballots can be cast in person, by mail or by home visit until June 6. Polls will be open June 7 from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. More information, including voting locations and acceptable identification, is available at elections.on.ca or 1-888-668-8683. Read more about: WINDSOR New Democratic Leader Andrea Horwath insists theres no anti-police undercurrent in her front-running party despite past controversial actions by NDP candidates. Not at all, Horwath said Wednesday after the Progressive Conservatives, who have slipped to second place according to most public-opinion polls, accused her of indulging offensive and radical elements in her party. The Tories highlighted a questionable July 2016 social-media post by Black NDP Toronto-St. Pauls candidate Jill Andrew that said Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders, who is also Black, deserved a coon award. My personal Facebook post was reflective of the very tensions that I, and many in Torontos marginalized communities, feel and experience, said Andrew, adding that I recognize that loaded terms compromise discussion. The Conservatives also repeated criticism of Brampton East candidate Gurratan Singh, younger brother of federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, for carrying a F--- The Police sign at a 2006 protest. PC Leader Doug Ford stressed the Tories are unwavering when it comes to our police. Read more: Your vote This present for Andrea Horwath is actually for the birds Opinion | Martin Regg Cohn: For voters, Horwath provides a safe harbour in stormy Tory waters PCs reveal how much promises will cost, but not how theyll pay for them His party is the subject of a criminal fraud probe into the Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas nomination and its Brampton East candidate was forced to resign after personal data at the 407 ETR was compromised. That breach is being investigated by police. (Theres) never a bigger supporter with the police than Doug Ford, said Ford. Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne noted that, unlike the contrite Singh, Andrew did not issue a direct apology. That needs to happen. It is really unacceptable that such language would be used by a candidate and I think Andrea Horwath has to explain why she would support such language from a candidate, Wynne said in Thornhill Horwath bristled at the suggestion her party, which polls indicate could win the June 7 election, is biased against the police. In fact, Ive spent a great deal of time over these last number of years meeting not only with the chiefs of police as a group, but also with the police associations, she said, acknowledging she was shocked by Andrews post. Its the kind of statement that takes one aback. My understanding is its language that within the Black community is utilized to show displeasure when there are Black leaders who are not felt to be doing enough to address Black community issues, the NDP leader said. As somebody who is not from the Black community when I saw that post that was made public by the Conservatives it was surprising. Its not something that I would ever say, but we do know that theres lots of situations where Black activists are trying to make some change and put some pressure on large institutions to help change the culture. Horwaths comments came at the Windsor home of seniors Debby and S.P. Aujlay, who pay $500 a month for dental benefits because they do not have coverage. The New Democrat leader was touting her partys platform pledge to deliver dental coverage to the one-third of Ontarians who do not enjoy such benefits from their employer. Its getting hard to come up with $500 a month, said S.P. Aujlay, 66, a retired trucker and tool and die maker. Debby Aujlay, a retired hospital library technician, said for seniors on a fixed income, expensive dental procedures like root canal or bridgework can be prohibitive. And you cant just let it go, she said. Later, in Leamington, Horwath promised that an NDP government would twin Hwy. 3, a key artery for Southwestern Ontarios thriving agri-food business. The two-lane highway has been the scene of many serious accidents over the years. She also blitzed Tory-held ridings in Sarnia and Kitchener as the campaign hits the home stretch. With files from Kris Rushowy and Rob Ferguson Read more about: HAMILTONHer put-downs of the NDPs ties to organized labour have cost Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne, struggling at third place in the election polls, front-line support from the union representing public high school teachers. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation sent a memo to its Toronto members Wednesday saying the unions Toronto executive is withdrawing its formal endorsement and door-to-door canvassing efforts for Wynne and six other local Liberal candidates. This new tack taken by the Ontario Liberals is an obvious act of desperation, and we can only hope that it doesnt serve to drive voters back to the Tories from the NDP, wrote Leslie Wolfe, president of the federations Toronto local. The teachers union said the last straw came Wednesday morning when Liberal campaign co-chair Deb Matthews accused the NDP of trying to hide a for-profit business partnership called Cornerstone with eight of Ontarios largest and most powerful unionsto financially backstop the NDPs campaigns and operations. Cornerstone owns the building in which the partys offices are located. New Democrat spokesperson Andrew Schwab said the party pays rent at market rate for its offices at Cornerstone and there is no financial relationship of any kind. Have your say Todays press conference cannot be interpreted as anything other than as part of a systematic attack on the Ontario Labour Movement by the Ontario Liberal Party, the OSSTF memo said. Read more: Opinion | Rick Salutin: The day Kathleen Wynne lost the 2018 election PCs reveal how much promises will cost, but not how theyll pay for them Opinion | Martin Regg Cohn: For voters, Horwath provides a safe harbour in stormy Tory waters An hour after that press conference, Wynne put on her premiers hat in NDP Leader Andrea Horwaths steeltown stronghold, touting her own efforts in meeting with U.S. lawmakers to save Ontario jobs amid protectionist sentiment south of the border. Wynne suggested Horwaths ties to labour manifested by the NDP rejection of back-to-work legislation to end prolonged strikes means she doesnt have the skill set to lead the province. We have to have the ability and the flexibility of thought to be able to bring everyone together and figure out whats in the best interest of the industry, the workers, the families who are dependent on these jobs, Wynne said at Stelco. Wynne also mentioned her meetings with 37 U.S. governors, along with senators, members of congress and Trump administration officials to fight trade barriers and protect jobs in both countries since Donald Trump was elected president. Campaigning in Leamington, Horwath fired back at Wynne for falling short in helping the struggling steel industry. Where was she a couple of weeks ago when Hamilton Specialty Bar closed down and a couple of hundred steelworkers were left without a job and many others who are pensioners were left without medical benefits for their future? She can have all the conversations that she wants, but its the action that we need, Horwath added. Premier since 2013, Wynne took credit for her governments role in helping to restructure Stelco, a major local employer and the beating heart of Hamilton, to preserve more than 2,000 jobs while protecting pensions and benefits for retired workers in the United Steelworkers union. Were dealing with conditions that we havent encountered before. Were dealing with technology, climate change, a protectionism from the United States that we could not have anticipated even five years ago. Since Sundays leadership debate, Wynne has been hammering at the NDP in a bid to bring back Liberal supporters who have drifted to the New Democrats as the alternative to stop Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford. We know were in a very tough fight, said the Liberal leader, who is spending her time on the hustings trying to convince voters that they wont like what they see if they take a closer look at the NDP. With files from Robert Benzie and Kristin Rushowy Read more about: WASHINGTONVenezuelan officials in the government of President Nicolas Maduro have committed crimes against humanity, a panel of experts said Tuesday, recommending their finding be forwarded for possible prosecution. The three-member panel asked that Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States, send its 400-page report and supporting evidence to the International Criminal Court. The report drawing a sharp response from Venezuelan officials who called it nothing more than a grotesque media farce documents 131 alleged murders perpetrated by security forces or pro-government armed civilian groups known as colectivos during street protests in 2014 and 2017. It identified 8,292 executions outside of the judicial process since 2015 and more than 12,000 people arbitrarily detained since the presidential elections of 2013, including more than 1,300 political prisoners. The widespread and systematic targeting of opponents of the regime or suspected enemies of the state, constitute the crime against humanity, the report says. These acts, for which there is no legal basis, did not take place spontaneously or in isolation, but instead reflect a policy put in place by the Government of Venezuela through acts directed by the highest State authorities. The international panel designated by the OAS secretary general included Argentine Santiago Canton, Canadian Irwin Cotler and Costa Rican Manuel Ventura. Read more: Cash-starved Venezuela increasingly reliant on migrant remittances Canada joins G7, EU in statement rejecting recent election of Venezuelas Maduro Canada downgrades ties with Venezuela after illegitimate election They drew their conclusions after five hearings held at the OAS headquarters in late 2017 with testimony from 26 witnesses. They collected documents from victims, relatives of victims and more than 40 non-governmental and international organizations. Venezuelan diplomats in Washington fired back saying the findings were prepared by anti-Venezuelan activists relying on testimony of criminal fugitives. It is part of a propaganda campaign against the Venezuelan state, whose sole objective is to overthrow the constitutional Government of President Nicolas Maduro, Venezuelan diplomats said in a statement. Maduro in recent days won a landslide election to a second six-year term as president in a vote his leading challenger called fraudulent and banned opposition parties rejected as an illegitimate victory. The panel presented its report after the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, announced a preliminary investigation had been launched into alleged crimes committed by Venezuelan police and security forces. A preliminary investigation is the first step toward a possible full investigation that could lead to charges before the international court. The International Criminal Court, governed by an international treaty called the Rome Statute, is the first permanent International Criminal Court. It investigates and prosecutes individuals accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Venezuela was the first Latin American country to ratify the Rome Statute in December 2002. Read more about: WASHINGTONDonald Trump did a campaign rally in Nashville on Tuesday night. It was supposedly intended to support Tennessee Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn. As always, it was about Donald Trump. The president briefly mentioned Blackburn four times. The rest of the speech, he lied, told elaborate stories that very much appeared to be fabrications, lobbed insults at Democrats, talked about the street gang MS-13, boasted of his own successes, and made a few vague promises. Here is a minute-by-minute account of what happened: 8:11 p.m.: I love country music, Trump says. 8:14: Trump talks about how people said he could never earn the 270 electoral votes he needed to win the presidency, but then he did. 8:15: Trump says of reporters: There they are, right back there. Theyre fake. They are fake. The crowd boos loudly. Look how many of them. Look how many. Oh boy. Thats a lot of people back there. Thats a lot of people. Fake news. 8:16: Trump calls up Blackburn. Her pitch: Tennessee needs a senator who is going to support President Donald Trump. 8:19: Trump says: There has never been an administration and even some of our enemies are begrudgingly admitting this that has done what weve done in the first year and a half. None of Trumps enemies are saying this. 8:19: Trump boasts of creating 3.3 million jobs in the 18 months since election day, then claims that, if he had promised he was going to do this, the media would have not have accepted it and would have subjected him to a brutal onslaught. In fact, his jobs record is unexceptional: more jobs, 3.9 million, were created under Barack Obama under the previous 18 months. 8:20: Trump falsely claims wages are rising for the first time in many, many years. Wages have been rising since 2014. The current pace of growth, 2.6 per cent, is lower than the 2.7 per cent pace in Obamas final full month in office. 8:22: Most importantly, our country is respected again all over the world. Were not making apologies. Were not making excuses. Were respected again as a country, Trump says. A big U-S-A chant breaks out. Respected can mean various things, but Pew polling shows that public opinion of the U.S. has plummetted around the world since Trumps election, with the exception of Russia, Israel and a smattering of other countries. 8:24: Trump says he has never heard of Blackburns Democratic opponent Phil Bredesen, who served as both two-term mayor of Nashville, where he is speaking, and two-term governor of the state. I never heard of this guy. Who is he? Who is he? 8:24: Trump calls House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi the MS-13 lover. He adds: She loves MS-13, can you imagine. There is no basis for this claim. Pelosi merely objected to Trumps use of the word animals at an immigration event (it was not entirely clear whether he was talking specifically about MS-13, as he says he was, or more broadly about unauthorized immigrants); Pelosi, who alleged that Trump made the remark about unauthorized immigrants broadly, said that every human has a spark of divinity within them. 8:25: Trump says of MS-13: Were taking them out of our country by the thousands. Out, out, by the thousands. This is an exaggeration. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says 405 MS-13 members were arrested in the first quarter of fiscal 2018; there is no word on how many were unauthorized immigrants or deported. 8:26: Trump says Crooked Hillary. There is a loud lock her up chant. 8:27: Trump brings up the FBIs use of an informant to try to find out if members of his campaign had nefarious dealings with Russia: So how do you like the fact they had people infiltrating our campaign? Can you imagine, can you imagine, can you imagine people infiltrating our campaign? Is there anybody in this big beautiful arena right now thats infiltrating our campaign? Would you please raise your hand? That would take courage. 8:27: Trump refers to Crazy Bernie Sanders. He says Sanders got screwed in the 2016 election, suggesting, with no evidence, that there was foul play involved. 8:27: Trump says he got much bigger 2016 crowds than Hillary Clinton, who, he says, had to resort to getting rapper Jay-Z to perform to fill her arenas. 8:28: Trump embarks on a rant about Jay-Zs filthy language. Hed use the F-word, the president complains. 8:31: Trump repeats an elaborate fictional story. He says San Diego begged him to build a border wall (which has not happened; even San Diegos Republican mayor is opposed to the wall)and he started wall construction in San Diego (he hasnt)but then he had second thoughts and decided not to build the wall there so hed have a city putting pressure on crazy California Gov. Jerry Brown (San Diegos government has not pressured Brown)but then a military general told him itd cost $7 million to halt construction of the wall in San Diego (construction, again, hasnt begun), so he decided, All right, keep building it. 8:34: Trump says of NAFTA: We have such a bad deal with Mexico. We have such a bad deal with Canada. 8:34: We lose with Mexico over $100 billion a year with his crazy NAFTA deal. Think of it: its impossible. The trade deficit with Mexico was $69 billion last year. It has never been $100 billion. 8:35: Trump complains of catch and release laws that dont allow his administration to indefinitely detain people arrested crossing the border: Then theyre supposed to show up to a court. Theres only one problem: they never show up. That never is false. A 2017 report released by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates a hard line on illegal immigration, concluded that 63 per cent of people who were free pending trial showed up for their hearings over the past two decades. 8:36: Trump repeats his 2016 campaign promise that Mexico will pay for a border wall: Theyre going to pay for the wall and theyre going to enjoy it. Less than an hour later, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto writes on Twitter: President @realDonaldTrump: NO. Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever. Sincerely, Mexico (all of us). 8:37: Trump graphically retells the story of a 2017 terror attack in Manhattan in which a man used a truck to run over cyclists. Missing a leg! Missing an arm! One woman lost two legs in the attack. Nobody lost an arm. 8:38: Look at whats happening to Europe, Trump says without elaboration, apparently talking about Islamic terrorism. 8:38: Trump lies that the alleged perpetrator of the Manhattan attack, Sayfullo Saipov, brought in 22 people to the United States through chain migration. Even anti-immigration activists have said this number is wildly implausible, and Trumps own aides have declined to endorse the presidents claim. 8:38: Trump makes fun of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer for becoming teary in a January 2017 speech denouncing Trumps ban on refugees and on immigrants and visitors from some Muslim-majority countries. Remember he was crying. He was so sad. He got up. He was crying. He was working those tears. He was trying so hard. Was trying so hard that actually they werent tears. It was sweat. He was working. 8:39: For the 15th time, Trump lies about the U.S. diversity visa lottery program, falsely claiming that foreign countries send their worst citizens into the lottery to dump them on the U.S. Let me ask you: so these countries that are sending people in, do you think theyre sending us their finest? They come in and then we wonder why we have problems. Were not going to be a stupid country anymore. 8:40: Trump complains of crime in Chicago, then bashes Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel. What the hell is that mayor doing? What is he doing? 8:41: We have borders down 40 per cent, Trump falsely claims. (By borders, he means illegal immigration.) Judging by the metric he has always used to make this claim, illegal immigration is spiking. After a steep decline, of more than 40 per cent, in 2017, apprehensions on the southwest border have jumped 77 per cent in the first four months of 2018. 8:41: We are going to protect your Second Amendment, Trump says of the constitutional provision protecting gun rights. Then he adds, falsely: You wont have a Second Amendment if the Democrats take over. You wont have a Second Amendment. 8:42: Trump claims the MS-13 gang has turned Long Island communities into bloodstained killing fields by savagely murdering, raping and mutilating people. They want to do it with knives. They want to cut people up into little pieces because its more painful. 8:42: Theyre not human beings, Trump says. He asks the crowd to remind him what word he uses instead. Animals, the crowd shouts as one. 8:43: Trump tells a story about how, when ICE arrests MS-13 members on Long Island, its like theyve been liberated, like from a war. He explains: Its like the enemy has been taken out and the people are dancing and theyre waving and theyre looking out their windows and theyre waving to the ICE people. 8:46: Trump boasts of his rapid pace of judicial appointments. 8:46: We put our hands on our hearts for the Pledge of Allegiance, put our hands on our hearts, and we always proudly stand for our national anthem, Trump says. Then, scoffing at NFL players who have protested racism and police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem, he adds: Thank you. Whats that all about? 8:47: Trump tells his usual fictional story about how presidents after Reagan have not been able to pass tax cuts because they have foolishly branded it as tax reform. He again ignores George W. Bushs major cuts, plus various cuts under Democratic presidents. 8:50: Trump criticizes Sen. John McCain, who is home dealing with brain cancer, for his crucial vote against Obamacare repeal. A very terrible thing, Trump says. U.S. President Trump, in Nashville, Tenn., on Tuesday, criticized Senator John McCain's 2017 vote against a Republican health care plan. McCain voted no by turning his thumb down. Trump said "somebody turned their hand in the wrong direction." (The Associated Press) 8:52: Trump retells the story about how he was not interested in opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling who cares? until a friend in the oil business told him that previous Republican presidents, such as George W. Bush, were unable to accomplish this. 8:52: Trump refers to Bush, then pauses to let people boo the name. Not many do. He says Bushs wars produced a lot of death; death and blood and money. He falsely claims, for the 14th time, that the U.S. has spent $7 trillion on Middle East wars. The highest recent estimate is $5.6 trillion. 8:56: Trump talks about how he, unlike previous presidents, kept his promise, under intense pressure, to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the U.S. embassy there. He gets applause. 8:57: Trump tells an implausible story about how he signed the Donald on an executive order to spend $1 billion on the new embassy but then had a fiscal epiphany and figured out it could be done for $150,000 instead and so did not sign the Trump. 9:02: Trump boasts of the new embassy: We opened it. It is totally beautiful. The finest stones, the finest marbles, the best location. Its open. It opened in four months after we started building. According to news reports, the U.S. has so far merely altered a small part of its existing Jerusalem consulate to accommodate the ambassador and additional staff. 9:04: Trump reminds the crowd that he said in 2016 that African-Americans have the highest crime, bad education, bad this, bad that. He boasts that the African-American unemployment rate is now the lowest on record. It dropped from 12.7 per cent to 7.8 per cent under Obama, then from 7.8 per cent to 6.6 per cent under Trump. 9:06: Weve become like a third-world country, Trump says, complaining of the quality of Americas airports. 9:07: Trump promises to rebuild Americas infrastructure then claims that, contrary to a frequent claim from some of his more juvenile opponents, he has big hands. We will do it all with these big beautiful hands. Look at these hands. 9:10: For the fourth time, Trump claims Americans build the Empire State Building in less than one year. It took 13 months. 9:10: Trump complains that the U.S. gave away the Panama Canal. 9:10: Trump takes credit for a supposed recent improvement in the U.S. space program: You see whats happening with NASA. See those rocket ships starting to go up again. When he has made this claim in the past, he has been referring to launches by SpaceX, a private company separate from NASA. 9:11: I say it and I say it all the time: we are so respected again. I cant even tell you really the degree to which people respect our country again. Its amazing. Its amazing. 9:12: The grand finale: We are one people, we are one family, and one glorious nation under God. Without a question. Without a doubt. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America strong again. We will make America safe again. And we will make America great again. Read more about: MADRID A prominent critic of the Kremlin says Russia is trying to block his investigation into the murder of a former employee by abusing an Interpol system of warrants that caused him to be briefly detained in Spain on Wednesday. Vladimir Putin and the Russian government are absolutely infuriated that we are bringing them to justice for the murder of Sergei Magnitsky, U.S.-born and London-based investor William Browder told The Associated Press. The financier has advocated for U.S. sanctions targeting Russian officials over human rights abuses. He was the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, named after Browders former employee, who died in jail after accusing Russian officials of involvement in a tax fraud scheme. Browder, who is the head of the Hermitage Capital investment fund, said Spanish police took him away when he was heading to meet with prosecutors on Wednesday to share evidence on property investments in Spain with funds allegedly linked to Magnitskys murder. A national police spokesperson said Browder was released when agents confirmed that an arrest warrant from Russia that appeared in police databases was invalid. The spokesperson had no authorization to be named in media reports. In December, a Moscow court sentenced Browder to nine years in prison in absentia on charges of tax evasion and funnelling money overseas. The financier and Ivan Cherkasov, an associate who was sentenced to eight years behind bars, were also ordered to pay $69 million (U.S.) to the Russian government in damages. The same court convicted Browder of tax evasion in another trial in absentia in 2013. Browder has dismissed the accusations. They are using everything they can to stop me, and the abuse of the Interpol system is another example of that, Browder told AP after meeting Spains top anti-corruption prosecutor, Jose Grinda, following his release from detention. Browder said he had shared with Grinda evidence about how $35 million allegedly connected to the 2009 murder of Magnitsky had been laundered through investments in Spanish property. The financier, who is a plaintiff in the Spanish investigation, said Spain is among 15 countries following the money trail. We are hoping that eventually prosecutors here seize property, seize accounts and prosecute individuals so that nobody benefits from the murder of Sergei Magnitsky, Browder said. The Magnitsky Act became a sore point between the U.S. and Russia after it was signed into law by former president Barack Obama in 2012. Shortly afterward, President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning American citizens from adopting Russian children, in a move widely viewed as retaliation. Browder himself had reported his detention in Madrid in a series of tweets. He posted a police document with the word fraud written as the cause for the detention, and then followed it with a photo of himself outside of a police station saying he had been released after Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised them not to honour the new Russian Interpol Red Notice. He claimed that this is the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case. Bill Browder remained in police custody this morning for the minimum necessary time, until Interpol Spain verified that the arrest warrant issued by the Russian authorities for tax evasion was invalid, according to a Spanish-language tweet by police. However, in an email, Interpol said it has never issued a Red Notice for Browder. Red Notice alerts are sent to Interpol member countries to locate and arrest specific people based on a national warrant. As early as July 2013, the international police organization said it erased from its database Russian requests to locate and arrest Browder due to its predominantly political character. Fair Trials, a global criminal justice watchdog, said the confusion over Browders arrest highlighted the serious problems with Interpols system of global wanted person alerts. Interpol should scrutinize alerts before it puts them out through its international networks, Fair Trials chief executive Jago Russell said in an email Wednesday. Spain should also exercise sense and discretion before arresting people. The result could have been very different if it werent for Browders high profile. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson welcomed Browders release, tweeting: Just spoken to Bill Browder very glad that he has now been released. Moscow should concentrate on bringing those responsible for the murder of #Magnitsky to justice, Johnson added. Browder led one of the biggest investment funds in Russia for 10 years before he left the country and was barred re-entry in 2006 on the grounds that he posed a threat to national security. Read more about: President Donald Trump asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his recusal from the Russia probe last spring in a conversation that is reportedly under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. The incident reportedly occurred in March 2017 at Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, shortly after Sessions stepped aside amid reports that he had twice met with Russias ambassador to the U.S. during the campaign a revelation that went against statements he made during his Senate hearing, according to The New York Times. The Times reports that Trump berated the attorney general and urged him to remain in control of the investigation. Mueller is reportedly looking into the conversation as well as Trumps repeated attacks, both public and private, on Sessions as part of his probe into whether the president obstructed justice by colluding with Russia during his campaign. Rudy Giuliani, the presidents personal lawyer, told the Times that Trump was not acting out of turn in his request, and that should he agree to an interview with the special counsel a deal thats reportedly in negotiations he should not be obligated to divulge private conversations, such as the one he had with Sessions. Unrecuse doesnt say, Bury the investigation. It says on the face of it: Take responsibility for it and handle it correctly, Giuliani said. Read more: Trump accuses Democrats of collusion with Muellers investigative team Michael Cohens lawyers have until mid-June to review documents, judge says U.S. Attorney General Sessions tells White House that his deputys firing could prompt his departure, too The paper also reports that Trump dragged his predecessor Barack Obama into his arguments, telling advisers that the former presidents first attorney general, Eric Holder, would never have acted in such a way, and he craved the same loyalty from Sessions. Trump has been vocal about his disdain for Sessions decision to step aside, and said in July he never would have nominated Sessions had he known that ultimately, he would not be the one overseeing the investigation. Reports that surfaced at the time Sessions recused himself painted a similar picture, with Trump reportedly erupting with anger and going ballistic over the news, according to ABC News. Read more about: WASHINGTONA North Korean official has arrived in New York for talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ahead of what the White House says is an expected summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Koreas Kim Jong Un. Kim Yong Chol is a former military intelligence chief and one of the North Korean leaders most trusted aides. He is the highest-level representative from the North to set foot in the United States since 2000. South Koreas Yonhap news agency reported that Kim landed shortly after 2 p.m. on an Air China flight from Beijing. Associated Press journalists saw the plane touch down at New Yorks JFK International Airport and the North Korean delegation get off the plane. The visit comes ahead of a summit planned for June 12, which Trump cancelled but now says may take place after all. Officials wouldnt say that the June 12 Singapore summit was back on, but preparations on both sides of the Pacific proceeded as if it were. Two weeks of hard-nosed negotiating, including a communications blackout by the North and a public cancellation by the U.S., appeared to be paying off as the two sides engaged in their most substantive talks to date about the meeting. Trump tweeted Tuesday that he had a great team working on the summit, confirming that top North Korean official Kim Yong Chol was headed to New York for talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In addition, teams of U.S. officials have arrived at the Korean Demilitarized Zone and in Singapore to prepare for the meeting. Solid response to my letter, thank you! tweeted Trump. He announced he had decided to terminate the summit last week in an open letter to Kim that stressed American military might, but also left the door cracked for future communication. White House officials characterized the letter as a negotiating tactic, designed to bring the North back to the table after a provocative statement, skipped planning talks and ignored phone calls. But aides almost immediately suggested the meeting could still get back on track. And after a suitably conciliatory statement from North Korea, Trump said the same. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that since the letter, the North Koreans have been engaging with the U.S. Read more: Trump says top North Korean official on way to New York, preparations for summit continue Trump says U.S. team in North Korea planning summit with Kim Jong Un Moon, Kim hold surprise second summit over North Koreas possible meeting with Trump Trump views the meeting as a legacy-defining opportunity to make the nuclear deal that has evaded others, but he pledged to walk away from the meeting if he believed the North wasnt serious about discussing dismantling its nuclear program. U.S. officials cast the on-again, off-again drama as in keeping with Trumps deal-making style, and reflective of the technically still-warring leaders testing each other. In his book The Art of the Deal, Trump wrote: The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then youre dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. After the Norths combative statements, there was debate inside the Trump administration about whether it marked a real turn to belligerence or a feint to see how far Kim Jong Un could push the U.S. in the lead-up to the talks. Trump had mused that Kims attitude had changed after the North Koreans surprise visit to China two weeks ago, suggesting China was pushing Kim away from the table. Trumps letter, the aides said, was designed to pressure the North on the international stage for appearing to have cold feet. White House officials maintain that Trump was hopeful the North was merely negotiating but that he was prepared for the letter to mark the end of the two-month flirtation. Instead, the officials said, it brought both sides to the table with increasing seriousness, as they work through myriad logistical and policy decisions to keep June 12 a viable option for the summit. The flurry of diplomatic activity intensified with Kim Yong Chols appearance at the Beijing airport Wednesday. South Korea-based Yonhap News cited diplomatic sources as saying Kim was on an Air China flight that departed in the afternoon, and U.S. officials familiar with planning have said he was scheduled to meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday. Kim is a former military intelligence chief and now a vice chairman of the North Korean ruling partys central committee. He will be the highest-level North Korean official to travel to the United States since 2000, when late National Defence Commission First Vice Chairman Jo Myong Rok visited Washington, South Koreas Unification Ministry said. Pompeo has travelled to Pyongyang, North Koreas capital, twice in recent weeks for meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and has said there is a shared understanding between the two sides about what they hope to achieve. Meanwhile, a team of American diplomats is holding preparatory discussions with North Korean officials at the DMZ. The group first met with its counterparts Sunday, and was seen leaving a Seoul hotel on Tuesday, but it was unclear whether they went to Panmunjom, a village that straddles the border inside the DMZ. The U.S. officials are led by Sung Kim, the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, who formerly was the U.S. ambassador to Seoul and a top negotiator with North Korea in past nuclear talks. It includes senior officials with the National Security Council and the Pentagon. The White House emphasized that it has remained in close contact with South Korean and Japanese officials as preparations for the talks continue. Sanders said Trump will host Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan on June 7 to co-ordinate their thinking ahead of the summit. Trump hosted South Korean President Moon Jae-in last week. Moon, who has lobbied hard for nuclear negotiations between Trump and Kim Jong Un, held a surprise meeting with the North Korean leader Saturday in an effort to keep the summit alive. South Korean media also reported that a North Korean delegation arrived in Singapore on Monday night, where other U.S. officials, led by White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, are preparing for the summit. Read more about: Violence against women services are waiting with bated breath to see who will win this election. Despite the pressing need for continued and expanded investments in sexual assault services, access to legal supports, shelters and access to reproductive health, gender equity has not been centred in either of the first two debates. Services that women use frequently are often the first to be cut when any new government proposes austerity measures. We fear that Ontario could face a crisis when it comes to gender-based violence services after this election. May has been a sobering reminder that women are not safe in this province. On May 24, Elisabeth Salm, a 59-year-old librarian at the Christian Science Reading Room in Ottawa, was beaten and sexually assaulted in her workplace. She died a day later in the hospital. Earlier this month, Timmins police released the identities of the four people killed in a car fire last month. They were Tammy Gagnon, 34, Cole Gagnon, 16 and Brandi Gagnon, 14. Found close by outside the car was Joey Gagnon, 37. Police said all along that this was a tragic violent event, that was isolated and that there was no remaining threat to the public. While the police did not provide a motive for the deaths, these words are code for domestic violence homicide. Read more: Opinion | Susan Delacourt: What is it that is driving Ontario voters? Beleaguered Wynne joins Ford on anti-NDP bandwagon, warning Andrea Horwaths party would be bad for business For victory, NDP needs young supporters to ride the orange wave to election polls, expert says Since January, approximately 19 women and their families that we know of have been murdered, and men close to them have been charged. It was not until the third debate this past Sunday that gender equity and sexual violence were raised. There was an opportunity for each leader to highlight their actions, but instead of answering the question, the man who would be premier focused on memes. In addition, in all three debates he has made demeaning remarks, such as I like to let them go at it when referring to women leaders and has commented on Wynnes nice smile. These dismissive comments and the inability to answer a direct question about how he will address sexual violence within his party, as well as gender equity in the province, are extremely worrisome. We need a premier who will point out what they will do to keep women safe and make our communities better places for everyone to thrive. Voters should be asking candidates about what they will do to end gender-based violence and achieve gender equity. Ontario Thrive sent a short survey to every candidate asking for their commitment to gender equity. Every major party but one the Progressive Conservatives has answered the questionnaire. We know that with economic security, women are less likely to become trapped in abusive relationships. We also know that research from Catalyst shows that approximately 90 per cent of trans and gender variant employees report experiencing workplace harassment and/or violence stemming from their gender identity and expression. Economic safety is built on safe workplaces, affordable child care, safe transit and a livable minimum wage. School curriculum that addresses body autonomy, self esteem, gender-based violence and sexual and gender diversity will lead to young people understanding the meaning of consent and that violence physical, sexual or emotional is never OK. Post-secondary education that is safe for students requires meaningful sexual assault policies and procedures supported by true transparency and accountability. Adequate housing that is safe and affordable means women and their children have somewhere to go when they leave an abusive relationship. Ongoing implementation of Ontarios Long Term Strategy to End Violence Against Indigenous Women will begin to address some of the long-term impacts of colonization, the residential schools program, the 60s Scoop of Indigenous children by child protection authorities and ongoing racism. Long-term, sustained funding for community-based counselling, legal and other services for survivors of male violence will support women in taking the next steps after being subjected to abuse. Implementation of an Access without Fear policy across the province will allow people with precarious immigration status to reach out to police and other services for assistance without jeopardizing their ability to remain in Canada. Safety, community health, transit, child care, access to justice, #TimesUp and #MeToo: each of these issues is connected and needs attention in the Ontario provincial election. These issues are not fringe; nor is 52 per cent of Ontarios population. Women will vote on June 7. We need everyones support to make the elected government accountable to the lives of women. This is the only way that everyone in Ontario can thrive. Pamela Cross is the legal director of Lukes Place Support and Resource Centre.Lieran Docherty is program manager at the Woman Abuse Council of Toronto.Amanda Dale is the executive director of the Barbra Schlifer Clinic.Farrah Khan is the manager of Consent Comes First, Ryerson University.Marlene Ham is the executive director of the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses.Lenore Lukasik-Foss is chair of the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres.Margaret MacPherson is co-ordinator of Building a Bigger Wave Ontario Network. In an open letter last week, the president of the United States addressed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: We greatly appreciate your time, patience and effort with respect to a summit [meeting] long sought by both parties ... Then in the same paragraph, Donald Trump cancelled the summit and threatened obliteration: You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used. Seldom are the alternatives of meeting, or killing, so baldly stated. It is something new, that millions live with these threats in mind. This awareness dates from the time, nearly a half a century ago, when perhaps the most reproduced photograph in history showed our planet as seen from space. This was a milestone in human history. There had been earlier milestones, some in secrecy. One such took place, in December 1949, in a committee room in Washington. The advisory group to the U.S. Atomic Energy Authority was meeting to determine the advisability of a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb a weapon 1,000 times more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eleven of the 13 committee members were scientists from the previous A-bomb project. Ten voted against the H-bomb, one abstained. The two non-scientists voted for it. U.S. President Truman accepted the advice of the non-scientists. The U.S.S.R. had just shocked the world by testing its first A-bomb. The U.S. was determined to keep its lead. The lead, however, proved illusory. The new U.S. H-bomb was tested three years later. The U.S.S.R. took one year to catch up. The majority of the scientists close to this project were conscious of the important divide being crossed. A decision was being made, in secret, that would affect the entire future of mankind. The last major milepost, in my view, was reached in 1983. Computation had by then made it clear a nuclear war would give rise to firestorms, hence nuclear winter and global famine. This had till then been overlooked. My milestones comprised a photograph, a committee, and a calculation. Where do they leave us? How can we save the world? There is a hint of the direction in which hope lies, in the first sentence of Trumps recent letter to Kim Jong Un. It lies in restraint. I witnessed attempted international negotiation of restraint when attending a Pugwash conference in Moscow in 1960. The participants argued the best hope for stability in a nuclear world lay in minimal deterrence, guaranteed by one bomb under Moscow, one under Washington. The existence today of 10,000 weapons in the hands of nine nations, with plans far advanced to modernize them, make a mockery of restraint. If I could turn the clock back to Moscow in 1960, I would say that two nuclear weapons were too many. The reason is simple. Peace is ascribed to the awesome power of nuclear weapons. Why, then do we always need more? It is because deterrence, to be effective, must be capable of failing. Only then will it be seen as real. The nuclear powers have ensured that the threat is indeed real. But this sets us on the path to disaster. Is there an alternative? There is. It is embodied in a treaty agreed to this past summer at the U.N., making illegal the possession of nuclear weapons. This is already the case for all other weapons of mass extermination (chemical and biological weapons, cluster bombs and landmines). There is, of course, an obstacle. Existing nuclear powers and their allies, such as Canada, reject the ban. Earlier, others have opposed bans on dueling, on slavery and on the burning of witches. But their views have not been allowed to prevail. We have reached a turning point in history. The implications go beyond nuclear weapons. Military force can no longer arbitrate differences between nations. That new truth is becoming discernible. What will take its place? Economic force, no doubt. But beyond that, the force of opinion. It can be seen when world leaders resort to writing open letters. They appeal to the court of public opinion. Simply stated, we have become too good at killing. This obliges us to use our vast new powers for caring. John Polanyi is a Nobel laureate at the University of Toronto who has written widely on the dangers of nuclear war. Read more about: As the Ontario election got underway in early May, Doug Fords PCs took an early lead in the polls, leading to considerable focus on Fords inability to explain how he would pay for his promises. This focus is both appropriate and understandable: Ford has vowed to balance the budget, but hasnt provided a timeline, hasnt told voters how much money hell spend, and has said hed achieve this balance by finding $6 billion in vague efficiencies. The media is absolutely right to badger Ford for answers; more detail is the way to help voters know just what theyre voting for. But whats remarkable isnt that reporters are doing their jobs by pressing Ford. Its that they arent doing the same thing to Fords opponents, Andrea Horwath and Kathleen Wynne. Ah, you say, but both Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath have costed plans. Assuming away the awkward conclusions of both Ontarios auditor general and financial accountability officer about the Wynne governments 2018 budget, and the NDP platforms embarrassing arithmetic error, both have plans that are costed in the sense that the numbers on various lines are tallied up to arrive at a final number at the bottom. But costed does not mean financed and the difference matters. While Doug Fords sin is failing to explain how hell ensure spending doesnt exceed revenues, Wynne and Horwaths is that they simply dont even try. Its as if were all at the grocery checkout and Ford is fumbling around with his wallet, while Wynne and Horwath simply pull out the taxpayer credit card, swipe and walk away. Yet, if its wrong for a politician to avoid explaining how theyll pay for things in one year, surely its even worse to be unable to do it over a five or 10 year horizon. Read more: PCs reveal how much promises will cost, but not how theyll pay for them Opinion | Rick Salutin: Has the NDP finally resolved its identity crisis? Teachers union pulls support from Wynnes campaign after Liberal accusation Neither Wynne nor Horwath have a plan for a balanced budget within their term should they win government. Wynnes plan doesnt contemplate a balanced budget until 2024, which would require another election, in which case all bets are off. Horwath has verbally committed to approaching balance, but her platform shows deficits until 2023. Like Wynnes plan, this would require another election. And this only addresses the issue of deficits, not debt. Thanks to the widespread conflation of deficits and debt in the public mind, politicians have long been able to get away with claiming balancing a budget in a single year is as being equivalent to paying off accumulated debt. This is analogous to running up a huge balance on your credit card, never paying down any of the principal, and then declaring victory because in one month you managed not to increase the balance. So it should be little surprise that a majority of Ontario voters including a majority of Liberal and NDP voters support spending reductions to help balance the budget. If this is what voters want, how do they go about getting it? A few simple things. First, demand to know how things will be paid for. Doug Ford needs to explain how he will pay for promised tax cuts, new spending, where immediate savings will be found, any tax hikes that will be needed, and what hell do if he is short on money. The same applies to Wynne and especially to Horwath whose sudden rise in the polls makes her a serious contender for power. Her platform doesnt explain how she will repay the billions in debt that she would rack up. Will it mean tax hikes? Will she cut back on spending in future years? Second, voters should demand balanced budgets. Balance should be the rule, not the exception. Wherever you sit on the political spectrum, we all have an interest in ensuring that whatever we collectively decide to spend, it doesnt exceed what we collectively decide to tax. Indeed, in some ways progressives should be among the most concerned about budget deficits, since it starves future governments of revenue to pay for the public services the support. Christine Van Geyn is the Ontario director, Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Aaron Wudrick is federal director, Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Vote now: Read more about: Duelling narratives at Israels border, Rosie DiManno, May 28 Rosie DiMannos column is so blatantly biased that it appears racist in presenting Israel as morally superior to the inherently violent Arab Middle East. She completely ignores the violence that Israelis enact against Palestinians on a daily basis not to mention the thousands that have been injured, even killed, in Gaza for simply exercising their right to free speech. I cannot believe the Star would allow a column that openly labels Palestinians as pathetic for holding on to keys to their homes, homes they and their descendants will never see again. In fact, the right of return is enshrined by international law. So, in fact, DiManno is calling for the squashing of Palestinian human rights. Miranda Gallo, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, Montreal Rosie DiManno cynically informs us that history is littered with lost civilizations, implying that the Palestinians in Gaza should just accept their fate and join the ranks of historys victims. But she fails to note that most of the people in Gaza are descendants of those who were removed from their homes in what is now southern Israel, and that they have never accepted their dispossession. Indeed, many of them are prepared to die protesting Israels refusal to allow them to return to their homes. DiManno suggests there is no political remedy, stating that the two-state solution is a cruel pipe dream. As several Israeli politicians have observed in recent years, there are just two alternatives to the two-state solution: a single democratic state or apartheid. Which of these two alternatives would she endorse? Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Toronto Having lived and worked in the Levant and Arabian Gulf for 30 years, I have a continuing interest in and hope for peace between Israel and Palestine. This column by Rosie DiManno is one of the most disturbing pieces I have read. Its distortions of fact are frequent and her obvious biases are very counterproductive. The only solution to the crisis is the establishment of two independent states, Israel and Palestine. There will never be peace without such a solution. Gaza is one large prison with Israeli (and Egyptian) guards. One cannot excuse Israels actions during the demonstrations. No Israeli lives were in danger; the shooting of the demonstrators should be considered as war crimes. Robert Cook, Toronto Liberal government to buy Trans Mountain pipeline project, seek new investors, Online, May 29 I was shocked to learn about the impending purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline by the federal Liberal government for $4.5 billion. As an atmospheric physicist and an active climate-change researcher, I find the conduct of the Justin Trudeau government in this regard disgusting and appalling. If we are looking for a visionary leader who would lead us from a fossil-fuel-based (and environmentally destructive) economy to a sustainable and clean low-carbon economy in Canada, then Trudeau is not that person. When Trudeau was elected, there was a sense of hope in doing our part as a nation to really start reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I have followed the United Nations COP meetings with a great deal of interest, and Canada promised achievable objectives in the Paris Agreement. These objectives do not seem achievable now. Kaz Higuchi, environmental studies professor, York University, Toronto I find it appalling that the government is using taxpayers money to benefit a corporation. This makes me realize how influential the corporations really are and how insignificant are the voices of Indigenous people and the thousands of others opposing this pipeline. How can the government turn a blind eye to the harmful effects this pipeline may pose? Oil spills are an inevitable consequence. I wish there were some mechanism to determine how I want my taxes used. I am definitely not paying them so a corporation can build an oil pipeline to endanger the environment of a province with some of the most beautiful coastlines in the country. Sneha Singh, Mississauga Pierre Bertons The Last Spike captured a moment when the Canadian government was in the railroad- building business. Now, Ottawa has entered its pipeline era. Will, at some point, Bertons book get a sequel, perhaps The Last Spill? Ken Luckhardt, Etobicoke Bill Morneau laid out Tuesday the federal governments plan to buy Trans Mountain and Kinder Morgan Canadas core assets for $4.5 billion. The finance minister says the move will ensure the oilsands pipeline expansion gets built. (The Canadian Press) Read more about: Moral turpitude. Motivated by sheer unadulterated greed. Arrogant. The author of his own misfortune. Shame and disgrace. A man of profoundly flawed character. Abused his position of trust and authority. These are not victimless crimes. The victim here is society. Justice Robert Clark let Craig Ruthowsky have it with both smoking barrels. Thats Officer Ruthowsky, a detective with the Hamilton Police Service, who can now with his prison sentence delivered Tuesday on convictions of bribery, obstruct justice, breach of trust and trafficking cocaine finally be fired from the job that had been paying his salary since he was suspended in 2012. Thirteen years in penitentiary, and three more on top of that should Ruthowsky fail to pay a $250,000 fine roughly equivalent to the amount hed received in bribes from drug dealers in a pay-for-protection scheme within 12 months. In the University Avenue courtroom, Ruthowskys mother sobbed, burying her face in her husbands shoulder. The officers wife, a cop herself, shook her head vehemently as Clark speculated that she had known plenty more about Ruthowskys corrupt practices than she claimed. And thus, as the hearing concluded, Ruthowsky, 44, removed his tie and belt, handing them over to defence lawyer Greg Lafontaine, before cuffs were slapped on his wrists and he was escorted out by court constables, taken into custody. Afterwards, in the corridor, Ruthowskys mother wailed: You dont get that much for rape! His sister hissed: Its unfair! He didnt take a cent! Ruthowskys family should have seen this coming. A week earlier, Clark had scoffed at the sentencing recommendations put forward by the Crown (10 years) and the defence (three to four years), declaring either option unfit for so appallingly crooked a cop. Essentially, in a rare occurrence, he rejected the submissions as too lenient, so grave, egregious and repugnant were the crimes. Clark had said: Its a scandalous amount of money that this man used his badge to generate as if it were an ATM, a cash machine. And so Clark read, for three hours bracketed around the lunch break, though he could just have easily gone straight to his reasons and released the entirety of decision in written form. But his methodical recitation and perhaps this was the intent left no time for Ruthowskys lawyer to go immediately across the street and apply for bail pending an appeal. That will happen on Thursday, meaning at least two nights in jail for Ruthowsky before he can be sprung. Repeatedly Clark raised his head to glare at 44-year-old Ruthowsky, who was found guilty on all but one charge (trafficking in marijuana) by a jury last month. At times, Clark practically growled. Before launching into his lengthy delivery, Clark said: I warn you in advance these reasons are quite blatant. Lafontaine, in the morning, had urged the judge to err on the side of restraint. But Clark was clearly not having any of that, just as he declined entreaty for a concurrent sentence, bundling only the first three charges, plucking out the trafficking charge (technically, conspiracy to commit an indictable offence) for the add-on three years. Ruthowsky, formerly a veteran member of the guns and gangs unit, had admitted at trial that he used unorthodox methods to fight crime, motivated by a mission to get guns and drugs off the street, eliciting crucial intel by grooming a wide rogues gallery of police informants. The Crown argued he was a cop on the take for nearly a year, in cahoots with those same informants to line his own pockets, accepting $20,000 a month in exchange for tipoffs about raids and investigations, allowing the criminals to operate with impunity. Three dealers, most vitally Mr. X, the prosecutions key witness, told a jaw-dropping tale, about how Ruthowsky had initiated the dirty-dealing relationships, had invited Mr. X to a raid on a Hamilton grow-op to eyeball the goods (half of which was to be returned to the trafficker), had once sold a seized cocaine press back to the dealer and had even, on his own initiative, paid for laboratory testing to identify a cocaine-cutting agent (to squeeze out another participant in the chain-of-drugs protocol), which ultimately, as Clark noted Tuesday, put even more drugs on the street. A separate investigation, Project Pharaoh, had caught Ruthowsky on wiretaps disclosing investigative details and proffering advice to Mr. X. Those tapes triggered Ruthowskys arrest. The jury believed the dealers. They didnt believe the accused, who spent more than a week on the stand, often imparting lengthy soliloquies to the jurors, repetitive, rambling answers, said Clark, the purpose of which was to evade the thrust of the question. Ruthowskys version of events was, said Clark, so implausible that it borders on farcical. The offender was accepting bribes even before he and (Mr. X) had commenced their corrupt relationship, said Clark, revisiting how Ruthowsky had made the tit-for-tat proposal to Mr. X, making it clear he wanted the same graft pact the dealer had enjoyed with a previous officer. Did he know the price? reminded Clark, quoting Mr. X quoting Ruthowsky. He continued to accept bribes even after he was suspended, said Clark of Ruthowsky, whod never registered Mr. X as an informant, as per Hamilton Police policy. Clark told court hed carefully read the nearly 40 letters of support submitted by Ruthowskys friends and colleagues. But he put little store by them, clearly aggrieved by the many which repudiated the jurys findings. They do not know this offender as well as they seem to, snapped Clark Several claimed Ruthowsky was merely guilty of an error in judgment and had suffered enough. Hardly so, countered the judge, who slammed those defenders for portraying Ruthowsky as someone upon whom fate has befallen through no fault of his own, almost as if hed fallen ill. Rather, said Clark, Ruthowsky had set himself on a path of corruption that involved deep consideration and conscious decisions with a sense of almost supreme entitlement. Clark went so far as to pour ridicule on the commendations Ruthowsky had received during his police career, noting that such professional laurels are part and parcel of a job where the objective is a desire to make the community a safer place. While he was actually doing the opposite. The judge turned as well to the words Ruthowsky offered last week, when Clark invited him to speak in his own defence. Ruthowsky said he and his family were shocked by the jurys verdict. It has destroyed my life and destroyed the life of my kids and I and my familys life will never be the same. Clark, Tuesday: You destroyed your own life by taking those bribes. Further: I see no indication of remorse. On the first count, bribery, Clark pointed out that the maximum sentence is 14 years. He gave him 10. On count two, breach of trust, maximum punishment is five years. Given, one, the importance of the trust of which there are few more important in our society; two, your depraved indifference to that trust; three, the number of separate times you breached that trust; four, the serious nature of your breaches, in particular that you divulged the identity of confidential informants; and five, the length of time over which your wanton breaches of trust continued, I hereby sentence you to four years in prison. On count three, obstruction justice is punishable by a maximum of 10 years. Given once again the number of separate incidents, the serious nature of those incidents and the length of time over which your disgraceful behaviour was ongoing, I hereby sentence you to a term of imprisonment of eight years. Those sentences will run concurrently. On count four, which Clark said was distinct, he agreed to reduce the sentence permitted, giving Ruthowsky three years, consecutive. Taking into account time served and time on bail restrictions, Clarke sentenced Ruthowsky to a term of 12 and a half years. Ruthowsky is still facing 16 separate criminal charges, including bribery, breach of trust, perjury, cocaine trafficking and weapons trafficking, along with another clutch of disciplinary and insubordination charges under the Police Services Act. As he was ushered from the courtroom, Ruthowsky turned to his family: I love you guys. I really do feel for Justin Trudeau, I do. There must have been quite the out-of-body experience as he heard his finance minister Bill Morneau and his natural resources minister Jim Carr talk about our great new pipeline. Im tempted to think the prime minister found out when the ministers appeared on TV. Im sure it is shocking to him that hes buying or rather, not yet buying the Trans Mountain pipeline from Kinder Morgan. After all, he didnt go into government to offer to buy a pipeline. But life, as they say, comes at you quick. When he said governments can grant permits, but only communities grant permission, he couldnt have realized hed spend the summer showing oil prospectors around a pipeline, hoping to God theyll buy it because youve promised the owners you can get a deal. When he began saying it in 2013, then the next year, then again during the election and also in the partys platform, he must have felt good about the fate of the world. Read more: Liberal government to buy Trans Mountain pipeline project, seek new investors Justin Trudeaus $4.5 billion Trans Mountain pipeline purchase met with a storm of criticism Opinion | Thomas Walkom: Nationalizing Trans Mountain pipeline a big mistake But things happen. Time makes fools of all of us. What does one do now that theyve bailed out a Texas-based energy company? First, assess the purchase. Its a seemingly solid buy. The pipeline has been in place for 60-plus years, taking oil from Alberta to the British Columbia coast. For a young person buying their first big pipeline, this one has good bones. Second, its not as if we have to buy it right away. Canada has time to find a buyer for the pipeline in the next eight weeks, which should be enough to save up $4.5 billion. Thats really only the down payment on the whole project, cause if we cant find a buyer for the pipeline, then well also wrap up the $7-billion-plus renovations ourselves. So its a starter pipeline, but the good news is the former owners are leaving the basement half dug out. It wont be a problem though, because who doesnt want a 61-year old American problem child? Itll be easy. Like selling candy to a baby, a thoroughly ethical thing to do. Bill Morneau laid out Tuesday the federal governments plan to buy Trans Mountain and Kinder Morgan Canadas core assets for $4.5 billion. The finance minister says the move will ensure the oilsands pipeline expansion gets built. (The Canadian Press) Come with me, the prime minister will say to a van load of wide-eyed and exhilarated billionaires, and youll be in a world of pure imagination. Chequebooks will come tumbling out as he trills, If you want to view paradise, simply look just past those protesters to our left. And do not look at the pipeline to the right. Give it a minute, and I swear there are mountains ahead. Like any big purchase, this one has its downsides. A big one, if were being honest, is the neighbourhood in that Canada built its first neighbourhoods through a bunch of other neighbourhoods without really asking. Hard to believe Canada would ever build something on other peoples land. Its so unlike us, so impolite. This kind of rudeness requires an apology, which Canada is really quite good at. Prime Minister Trudeau himself is a solid apologizer. A real Oscar-winning speaker of sorrys. Chances are 10 out of 10 he will apologize again. Without much doubt, Kathleen Wynne is the most-qualified candidate running for premier in the Ontario election. Shes smart, articulate, passionate, knows the issues and to many observers was the winner in last Sundays televised debate. She stands head and shoulders over Doug Ford, who is an embarrassment to many progressives in the Conservative party with his simplistic slogans, inexcusable refusal to release a full platform and lack of understanding of the complexity of many issues facing the province. Shes also a tougher campaigner than Andrea Horwath, whose NDP party is riding high in recent polls, but may have peaked too soon. But barring a last-minute miracle, Wynne will lose the June 7 election badly. Shell lose so badly that her governing Liberals may be reduced to just 12 seats, or even fewer, thus running the risk of losing status as an official party in the Legislature. And shell lose so badly that she may be defeated in her own riding of Don Valley West. Read more: Opinion | Martin Regg Cohn: For voters, Horwath provides a safe harbour in stormy Tory waters Teachers union pulls support from Wynnes after Liberal accusation PCs reveal how much promises will cost, but not how theyll pay for them In reality, Wynne lost this election more than three years back, on April 23, 2015. Thats day when the Liberals formally announced in the provincial budget that they would be selling 60 per cent of Hydro One, the provincially owned utility that transmits electricity across the province and distributes it to 1.4 million households. She made the move after embracing the findings of a pro-business panel headed by former TD Bank chair Ed Clark that recommended the sale. It was her biggest mistake as premier one from which she never recovered. On that day Wynnes personal approval rating was holding relatively steady at about 32 per cent, after having peaked in the low-40s during the 2014 provincial election. Since then, her approval rating has been in free fall, dropping to as low as 12 per cent in 2017 before rebounding a wee bit earlier this year. Those same trends have hit the Liberal party. Wynne stubbornly ignored wise advice even from her most trusted political strategists in approving the sale, insisting voters would ultimately see the benefit of using $4 billion to $5 billion from the sale to pay for new roads, bridges and public transit such as buses and subway lines. But Wynne totally misread the public, who saw Hydro One as belonging to all Ontarians. Also, the utility was hugely profitable, making about $750 million a year, with nearly $300 million going to Queens Park. Polls showed more than 80 per cent of Ontarians opposed the sale, with nearly three in four believing privatization would increase electricity prices. A top Liberal campaign organizer says one internal poll at that time indicated up to 90 per cent of Liberal supporters themselves were against the sale. What also angered voters was that Wynne had never talked about selling off Hydro One during the 2014 election. Suddenly, even for Liberal loyalists, there were questions about whether Wynne could be trusted. No longer was she seen as a different style of politician, but instead had become just like any other politician who says one thing and does another. How could she have been so out of touch with voters? After that, everything Wynne did was seen by voters with a different, more critical eye, from her access-for-cash fundraiser, to the Sudbury byelection controversy, to her last-gasp efforts to toss money at everything from free tuitions for students from low-income families to a higher minimum wage. To this day Wynne defends her decision. She said this week during a Toronto Star editorial board meeting that she knows people were surprised and angry with the sale. But she said she didnt see how else she could raise the money to build badly needed infrastructure projects. Of course, she could have raised taxes, but chose the route the business guys wanted her to take. With just a week before election day, Wynnes Liberals trail the NDP and Tories in every poll. A survey by Angus Reid Institute even indicates 45 per cent of those who backed Wynne in 2014 now preferring the NDP. If those polls hold and Wynne loses big, remember April 23, 2015. Share your thoughts: Read more about: MONTREAL To understand the counterintuitive political calculus behind Justin Trudeaus controversial decision to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline, one has to go back to the fundamental equation that has governed this prime ministers energy and climate change policies since his days in opposition. That Trudeau had no choice but to take over the pipeline if he wanted to ensure that the plan for its expansion did not die on the drawing board is not in question. By the time Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced the federal decision Tuesday, Kinder Morgan the pipelines parent company was about to pull the plug on the project. But the real question is why would the Liberal government be willing to put an open-ended amount of political and financial capital on the line to keep it alive. If one connects the dots between most major policies that past governments have deemed to be in the national interest, one almost always finds they conveniently intersected with a ruling partys election prospects. Stephen Harpers decision to bail out the auto industry in 2009 was not unrelated to the fact that his path to a coveted majority government ran through Ontario. His conversion to deficit financing at the time of the global economic crisis was a deathbed one, at least in part dictated by the need to survive confidence votes in the House of Commons. But by that measure, Trudeaus Trans Mountain move is an outlier. The electoral math does not add up. On the face of it, the prime minister has at best shored up half a dozen Liberal seats in the Prairies at the cost of potentially putting in play at least triple that number across the country. Along the way, Trudeau has put himself on a collision course with many Indigenous constituencies, and he has destroyed his international reputation as a climate change crusader. Given the stakes, the prime ministers pipeline gamble has even been compared to Brian Mulroneys decision to roll the dice in his relentless quest for constitutional reconciliation with Quebec in the early 1990s. Bill Morneau laid out Tuesday the federal governments plan to buy Trans Mountain and Kinder Morgan Canadas core assets for $4.5 billion. The finance minister says the move will ensure the oilsands pipeline expansion gets built. (The Canadian Press) But Mulroney had a compelling incentive to stick with the constitutional file to the bitter end. After the Meech Lake accord failed, he could not have let it go without risking his governing majority as the result of defections to the nascent Bloc Quebecois and without fuelling support for Quebec secession. There is an economic case to be made for ensuring the Trans Mountain pipeline is completed. Of the projects designed to link the Alberta oilfields to tidewater that were on the drawing board when Trudeau became prime minister, it is the only one that is still actively pursued. Until the last B.C. election, it was also considered the most likely to get to completion. But the Trans Mountain expansion has also become as politically indispensable to Trudeaus agenda at least in the mind of its Liberal overseers as it may be to Canadas oil industry. It was always meant to be the poster project for the federal contention that it is possible to balance Canadas energy ambitions with a more aggressive approach to mitigating climate change. Since Trudeau came to power, the emphasis has been the part of the equation that involves putting a price on carbon pollution as a necessary step to earn a social license for a pipeline projects such as Trans Mountain. But the Liberal government believes the flipside of the equation that a social license for a carbon tax cannot be sustained if it is earned on the back of Albertas energy industry to be just as essential. Allowing the Trans Mountain expansion to die this week would have cost Trudeau the support of Albertas NDP government for his national climate change framework. Back in March, Premier Rachel Notley tied meeting Ottawas carbon tax targets to the future of the project. Looking to next years federal election, the demise of the Trans Mountain expansion would have meant giving opponents of Trudeaus carbon pricing strategy starting with the federal Conservatives a prime exhibit in their prosecution of the havoc they argue his policy will wreak on the economy. As so it is that while Trudeau is widely portrayed as having picked the polluters side in the climate change debate, the Liberals will argue that they have done what they needed to do to continue to advance a pro-environment agenda. Only time will tell whether this government has trapped itself in an intricate web of twisted logic. If so, as of this weeks Trans Mountain announcement Trudeau is unlikely to untangle himself from that web in time for next years election. Chantal Hebert is a columnist based in Ottawa covering politics. Follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert Read more about: VANCOUVERB.C. will likely hold a referendum in October on whether to keep the current first-past-the-post electoral system, or change to a more complicated system that could lead to more minority governments which must co-operate with other parties to govern. Attorney General David Eby released the governments report on electoral reform, which recommends holding a mail-in referendum between Oct. 30 and Nov. 30, 2018. Some politicians and experts had feared the government would ask voters to decide whether they wanted to change the electoral system to proportional representation, and it would then be up to the government to pick which proportional system to choose. David Moscrop, a political scientist with Simon Fraser University who supports proportional representation, said he was pleasantly surprised the government is recommending the ballot question include two questions. Question one would be, Which should British Columbia use for elections to the Legislative Assembly (Vote for only one). Voters can choose The current first past the post voting system or A proportional representation voting system. The second question would ask: If British Columbia adopts a proportional representation voting system, which of the following voting systems do you prefer? (Vote for the voting systems you wish to support by ranking them in order of preference. You may choose to support one, two or all three of the systems.) Voters could then choose between dual member proportional representation; mixed member proportional; or rural-urban proportional representation. I feared a mandate-only question, Moscrop said. I was worried that the government was going to say do you want PR, yes or no, and then trust us, well work it out, which I thought would be bad for democracy and bad for winning the referendum. The referendum is an important part of the current alliance between the NDP, which does not have enough seats on its own to form government, and the Green Party. The Green Party has agreed to support the NDP, but has long lobbied for electoral reform because its difficult for smaller parties to break through in the first-past-the-post system. Sonia Furstenau, Green MLA for Cowichan Valley, said her party is pleased the government is moving forward with a public debate about which electoral system will best foster a healthy democracy. She said the current system leads to voters sometimes voting strategically out of fear to block a party they oppose. This is an exciting time for B.C., Furstenau said. Im a historian, and this opportunity has been afforded to so few people in history. In the NDP and Greens own submissions during the consultation process for electoral reform, they had pushed for voters to simply say whether they wanted to replace the first-past-the-post system with a to-be-determined form of proportional representation. That led to criticism from the Opposition BC Liberals, who said the process would be biased by parties who want proportional representation. They want to see it happen ... It just doesnt pass the smell test, BC Liberal MLA John Martin said. Furstenau said the public engagement process led to the change in approach, to put more choice on the ballot. The BC Liberals support the current electoral system, saying it has led to strong, stable governments that are elected through a straightforward balloting system. Bill Tieleman, a political strategist who is working on the campaign opposing proportional representation, warned that the proportional representation systems proposed in Ebys report could lead to a situation where a small party with only five or six per cent of the vote has the power to choose who forms government. He also predicted proportional representation would lead to less regional representation. One of the systems proposed, dual member proportional, would involve electing some MLAs province-wide instead of by riding. We could have 37-40 MLAs who have no riding, they have no accountability to voters whatsoever, he said. But Ebys report says dual member proportional, which proposes amalgamating some districts with a neighbouring riding, would meet the principle of local representation because, although most electoral districts would double in size, they would retain two MLAs serving the same total area as present. Proportional representation systems The B.C.s governments proposed electoral reform ballot will give voters the choice between staying with the current first-past-the-post system, in which the candidate with the most votes wins, and three systems of proportional representation. Heres how each of those systems would work, according to the Attorney Generals report: Dual Member Proportional A proportional voting system in which most of the provinces existing single-member electoral districts would be amalgamated with a second neighbouring district to create two-member districts. The largest rural districts could remain unchanged as single-member districts. Political parties nominate up to two candidates per electoral district who appear on the ballot in an order determined by the party. Voters cast a single vote for the pair of candidates of the political party of their choice. Seats are won in two ways: The first seats are won by the first candidates of the party that receives the most votes in each electoral district, similar to first-past-the-post; or, the second seats are allocated based on province-wide voting results and the individual district results. Mixed Member Proportional This system combines single-member electoral districts elected under first-past-the-post with List PR seats allocated on a regional or provincial level. The overall share of seats each party holds in the Legislative Assembly is determined by the partys share of the province-wide vote it receives. Candidates who fill the List PR seats are either elected directly or allocated from the parties lists of candidates to compensate for any disproportional results from the FPTP vote, so that the overall result is fairly proportional. Rural-Urban PR Rural-Urban PR consists of multi-member districts with seats filled using the Single Transferable Vote (STV) in urban and semi-urban areas and mixed-member proportional in the most rural areas. In the MMP regions, a small number of List PR seats are filled proportionally on a regional basis in order to provide some proportionality for these regions. To read more about how each system would work, read the full report here. Read more about: VANCOUVERFormer B.C. premier Christy Clark has taken a job with the Canadian law firm Bennett Jones and will work as an advisor in the firms governmental affairs and public policy team. Clark is not a lawyer but has been hired for her vision on driving growth through trade, according to the firms CEO, Hugh MacKinnon. Vancouver is a thriving market and a strategic focus for Bennett Jones, MacKinnon stated in a press release. The firm says it is well equipped to advise foreign businesses and investors with Canadian ventures, and connect Canadian businesses and investors with opportunities around the world. As premier from 2011 to 2016, Clark pushed to build a new liquified natural gas industry in B.C. and attempted to strengthen trade ties with Asia. She said she will continue to work on those files at Bennett Jones. Clark resigned after the fall of her government following the May 2017 provincial election. Her business-focused B.C. Liberal party had governed for 16 years, but they failed to win a firm majority and were toppled by the B.C. NDP supported by the Green Party. Clark joins a host of other former politicians who now work at Bennett Jones, including former deputy prime minister Anne McLellan, former federal cabinet minister John Baird, and former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge. Read more about: ALTON A local priest-filmmaker is debuting his latest creation Wednesday evening that showcases a local curiosity that attracted visitors and gawkers in Alton for 81 years. Director Fr. John Wykes screening of Deaf Bill will begin at 7:30 p.m. at the St. Marys Catholic Church Parish Center, 1015 Milton Road, Alton the former St. Matthews Church. The 15-minute documentary is on the life and death of William Deaf Bill Lee and the four decades that followed. For 81 years, the mans mummified corpse, wearing only a diaper, was stored standing upright in a closet for sometimes public view in an Alton funeral home. Lee, who died in 1915, finally had a proper wake, funeral and burial in June 1996. After Wednesdays film showing, there will be a reception and discussion with Wykes and Brian Fine, funeral director of Staten-Fine Funeral Home, who is a key part of the film. Im excited to be there tomorrow night, it sound like there will be a good crowd of people there, Fine said. Admission is free and open to the public. It should be an interesting evening, said Wykes, OMV (Oblates of the Virgin Mary) U.S. Province, St. Marys. I got interested in him at his wake when I first came to Alton in 1996. It was so intriguing and astonishing what was going on. I thought someone should make a film on it. When no one made a film, I decided to do it. Wykes, a priest at St. Marys Church in Alton, first had to obtain permission from his superiors to make a film that did not involve the church. I had to make some careful choices, he said of what to include in the film, obtaining much assistance from Fine. He said he had considered asking for public input about their memories or stories they heard, but decided against it. I didnt want it to be a film talking about Deaf Bill, but about Deaf Bill, Wykes said. The film has a few stories about the man. The rest is a straight narrative of Bill, when he lived, died and what happened after that, Wykes said. Fine said the film is respectful. I definitely would not want any part of it if it was sensational, Fine said. People will find it respectful. He approached me and I was glad to assist. I got a sneak peek at the movie. Father Wykes did a wonderful job in keeping it realistic. It will help people fill in the gaps of what they know about him (Lee). Fine, who eventually worked at and co-owned the former, Burke Funeral Home at 727 Langdon St. where Lees remains were stored in a closet said he learned about Deaf Bill when he first began working in the mortuary business at age 15 in Granite City. Anybody in the funeral business through the years heard about Deaf Bill. We are all diminished if we dont have a decent burial, if we keep someones remains in a closet, Wykes said. We get to the point where we have to ask what is the right thing to do. I want to give thanks to Brian Fine for his time, and for providing some very interesting recollections about Deaf Bill. Wykes said he stops the camera at points in the film for silent effects, such as when the body is in the closet. To show the mans bodys release from the closet tomb, Wykes used a drone to fly over Lees final resting site, filming St. Frances of Assisi Cemetery in St. Charles County. My desire was to symbolize freedom, Wykes said. Bill had to be released from the closet. Wykes said he already showed the film at a festival in Indiana, where it was accepted for judging but did not win a prize. He hopes to show it at more festivals, then put it on YouTube. A local character and hermit, Deaf Bill was a hard-of-hearing fisherman who lived in a shanty on MPike Island by the Missouri shore of the Mississippi River, a news article said. Telegraph articles at the time said he was known to hit the bottle and launch into prolific preaching and swearing, loud enough to be heard on the other side of the river. Wykes said Bill also sometimes took over a preachers pulpit, which he learned while researching Lees life for the short film. The Oct. 23, 1915 issue of the Alton Evening Telegraph, a headline said, Deaf Bill Lee is taken to hospital. Fellow fishermen had found him fallen near his cabin, with doctors urging him to seek medical help in St. Charles County, but the hermit was stubborn. He said he spent all of his money on the Illinois side of the river, so he should be Madison Countys burden or hed go back to his shanty to die, the article said. Lee was admitted to the Madison County Poor House, where he soon died. No family ever came forward to claim the body, so Alton funeral home owner Bill Bauer had to determine where to put the mans remains. Bauer and his partner, John Hoehn, then performed an experiment in embalming to keep the body from decaying. The men performed the normal embalming process, but skipped using fluids to allow the atmosphere to dehydrate the remains, and were successful. When Bauer and Hoehn Funeral Home moved to 727 Langdon in Alton, a special closet for Deaf Bill was built on the first floor in which he stood upright for decades. Tom and Dallas Burke bought the funeral home in 1948, and Deaf Bill stayed. Fine later became Dallas Burkes partner. In 1996, an estimated 350 people came to the 6-hour-long wake, viewing Deaf Bill dressed in a suit in the style of early 1900s. In a previous, much more ambitious film project, Wykes media producer for the oblates worked three years on a documentary on Pio Bruno Lanteri, founder of his religious order to commemorate its 200th anniversary. Released in December 2016, it was called, Nunc Coepi The Life of Venerable Bruno Lanteri. The movie is on YouTube in English, Italian and with Spanish subtitles. It won five awards at various independent film festivals, including three awards at The Depth of Field Film Festival; Best Film on Religion at Kolkata International Film Festival in India; and Best Documentary Film at the Auckland Film Festival in New Zealand. It also was broadcast on ETW Network in the United States, Africa, Asia and Europe. Reach Linda N. Weller at 618-208-6450 or on Twitter @Linda_Weller SPRINGFIELD, Ill. A measure spearheaded by state Rep. Monica Bristow, D-Godfrey, to help businesses in the Riverbend region become more competitive with businesses across the river passed out of the Illinois House with strong bipartisan support. Our region has so much economic potential, especially with our location right on the Mississippi River, and I am working collaboratively with local leadership and business owners to find ways to help our economy grow, said Bristow. We will be able to create more jobs in our region by investigating best business practices and developing solutions to use our regions assets to the fullest potential, which is the driving force behind this legislation. GLEN CARBON A man with a long criminal record is being held at the Madison County Jail in lieu of $200,000 bail on felony charges ranging from hate crimes to criminal damage to property for allegedly spray painting dozens of swastikas in Edwardsville and Glen Carbon. In all, the Madison County States Attorneys Office Tuesday charged Timothy V. McLean, 35, of the 200 block of Matterhorn Court, Glen Carbon, with 22 counts, including a hate crime charge that alleges he painted swastikas on 200 gravesites at Sunset Hills Cemetery, Glen Carbon on April 1. The damage to the gravesites was reported Saturday, but cemetery personnel cleaned up most of the damage by Memorial Day. Two additional hate crime charges allege he painted swastikas on three churches in Glen Carbon and another on a home in the 200 block of Glen Carbon Road, both on April 1. He was also charged with institutional vandalism, one for each church: St. James Lutheran, 146 Main St., St. Cecelias Church, 155 N. Main St. and Glenview Church of the Nazarene, 155 N. Main St. A fourth hate crime charge alleges he painted swastikas on seven homes, five cars and one entrance building at Sunset Hills County Club in Edwardsville on May 26. The hate crime and institutional vandalism charges allege he committed the acts by reason of the actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion, ancestry, gender, sexual orientation of national origin of another individual or group of individuals. The charges do not specify which group of individuals were targeted. The hate crime charges would normally result in possible sentences of between two and five years, but the fact that he was convicted of a felony, harassment by telephone, would increase the possible sentences to between three and seven years each. He pleaded guilty to harassment by telephone in August after he was examined for fitness to stand trial. A court document claimed there was bona fide doubt as to his fitness, but testing showed that he was fit. While awaiting trial, he served some of the time in custody in the Department of Human Services. He was given credit for time spent in the institution. He has a criminal record dating to 2006 when he was convicted of burglary. He also has convictions for threatening a public official, for which he was sentenced to two years in prison; retail theft, violation of probation, and reporting a false alarm. He also has 11 misdemeanor convictions. Fourteen of the 22 felony charges allege criminal damage to property. They deal with similar incidents in Edwardsville. According to those charges, McLean allegedly spray painted swastikas on the side of a 2014 Lexus, a 2012 Toyota RAV4, a 2015 Chevrolet van, and a 2018 Hyundai Santa Fe. McLean also allegedly spray painted seven homes along Sunset Hills Boulevard in Edwardsville. On Tuesday, Glen Carbon police issued a press release thanking Edwardsville police and Illinois State Police for assisting with the investigation. We would like to thank the citizens who worked with law enforcement authorities to bring this case to a swift resolution, the press release also noted. Associate Judge Neil Schroeder set McLeans bond at $100,000 for the Glen Carbon incidents and an additional $100,000 for the incidents in Edwardsville. McLean was taken into custody shortly after the swastikas were discovered. On June 24, 2014, prosecutors alleged that he used his cell phone to make derogatory remarks to Glen Carbon police, then hung up. A digital 911 map showed that the calls came from the 500 block of Glen Crossing Road, according to court records. At the time, McLean denied making the call. The officer who drove out to the area found McLean walking away from that area. The officer then asked someone at the Glen Carbon Police Department to call the number of the phone that had just called 911. Moments later, the police departments phone number showed up on McLeans phone, according to court records. McLean was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. In May 2015, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. Oxfam is a worldwideorganisation that employs works in more than 90 countries. We seek to overcomepoverty and suffering. Oxfams global strategic goals includecontributing to achieving more profound and lasting change in the lives ofpeople living with poverty and injustice. Were creating a worldwideinfluencing network to unite the power of local organizations, who share acommon vision for change. Adequately resourced, local organizations arebestpositioned to influence and actively participate in the fight against theinjustice of poverty. The output for the NUNV will be to support the UNAC to prepare anAnnual Review Report. The report will include an analysis of mainhumanitarian/recovery and development issues arising during the year ofimplementation in the region. The report will include highlights on jointefforts by UN agencies and it will feed into the annual RC report. Social media platforms are providing Africans with an opportunity to counter negative stereotypes by giving them representational agency. More and more Africans use the internet. By the end of 2000 the continent had a total of 4,514,400 users. Seventeen years later it had increased to 453,329,534, giving Africa an internet penetration of 35.2%. Africans are also increasingly active on social mediathis stood at 177,005,700 Facebook users across Africa at the end of 2017. Social media presents a powerful platform for creating multiple stories about Africa. Embracing the accessibility of modern technology, African social media bloggers and commentators are using Facebook, YouTube and other platforms to undermine longstanding Afro-pessimistic stereotypesthe backward continent characterised by strife and poverty. By giving ordinary people the space to share their everyday experiences, African bloggers are capturing positive human moments. These moments of joy, play, celebration, love and human interaction, create new narratives of Africa. These new representations could ignite a new Afro-positive turn. Examples of another Africa Different and multi-directional narratives about the continent are emerging in a number of different ways. For example, the Facebook blog Everyday Africa showcases cell phone photography shot across Africa, in an attempt to form a more complete portrayal of life on the continent than the mainstream media allows. It shows, among others, an array of images of children laughing, playing, on their way to school, or engaged otherwise. It shows men at work, plants thriving, busy produce markets and other such ordinary depictions. The images are significant in their symbolic distancing from the stereotypical, pessimistic portrayal of Africa as a homogeneous block of violence, helplessness, human rights abuses and lack of democracy. Similarly, the blog Voices of Africa aims to tell the stories the world doesnt hear often enough. We believe the everyday accounts of Africans getting on with life deserve more attention. From the fashion-crazy women in Dakar to the eligible bachelors in Somalia; from the extravagant weddings in Tanzania to the nightlife in Nairobi, we want to showcase life in Africa by those who live it. Such a lens for viewing the continent implicitly rejects stories built on the outsiders gaze, instead creating insider tales. The Twitter hashtag #TheAfricaTheMediaNeverShowsYou, also spotlights the positive stories. They have posts like, Im exploring Kigali streets. Clear why its named cleanest African city, even plastics are banned! The Africa they dont show us on tv. Another poster describes Kampala as a city full of hope and promise. These various social media voices may be conceived of as participating in a post-colonial discursive struggle to contest the Afro-pessimist code book. There famine, civil conflict and disputed elections are used to portray as quintessential African-ness. Complementing the blogosphere, through YouTube and other video sharing platforms, a growing number of Afro-positive speakers are engaged in a rebuttal of what they see as the bias of media coverage about Africa. For example, Mark Eddo, a communications expert and TEDx speaker, advocates a new narrative, lamenting, the BBC did a story called Welcome to Lagos They went to a beach where prostitutes and drug addicts hang out. These are stories that should be told, but they are told again and again and again Thats what youll think about my city, and its not true. The problems are there, but the opportunities are there as well and the picture should be more nuanced. Likewise, in a talk titled The danger of a single story, TEDx speaker Chimamanda Ngozi, a public intellectual and awardee of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, urges that multiple stories are important: Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. Quantifying the Afro-positive sentiment To date, analyses and critiques of representations of Africa have tended to focus on traditional media. The Afro-positive turn in social media is yet to be studied comprehensively and scholars are still grappling with how to analyse the huge volumes of big data generated by social networking platforms meaningfully. Patrick Wolfe, executive director of Big Data Institute at the University College of London, says, the rate at which were generating data is rapidly outpacing our ability to analyse it. Nonetheless, the above examples give a substantive qualitative indication of the richness and depth of Afro-positive content, in terms of its explicit engagement with the politics of representation. In addition, the pages and videos mentioned confirm the scale of interest in these Afro-positive narratives. Ngozis TEDx talk, for example, has been viewed more than three million times. Here there are opportunities for achieving even greater quantitative impact, if Afro-positive activists share their content with influential social media players such as BBC Africa, which has close to four million followers on Facebook. Towards Afro-optimism Social media does present a powerful platform for creating more plural stories about Africa. But the Afro-positive turn should not be about whitewashing and romanticising Africa. It should be about challenging the simplistic nature of Afro-pessimism, through introducing multiple and complex images about the continent and its people. And as new technologies become more widely available in Africa, Africans themselves will increasingly be empowered to undermine the Dark Continent thesis. They can reclaim their agency by creating and distributing their own self-representations. In this sense social media may be seen as a democratising space. Previously underrepresented voices now have a convenient and cheap platform for self-expression. Muchazondida Mkono, Research Fellow (Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellow), Business School, The University of Queensland This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Banking services are likely to be impacted for the next couple of days as employees of the public sector banks have given two-day nation-wide strike from Wednesday to press for wage revision. Most of the banks, including SBI, PNB and BoB, have already informed their customers that functioning of branches and offices will be impacted if the bank strike takes off. However, the functioning of private banks like ICICI, HDFC, Axis and Kotak Mahindra is expected to be normal except for delays in cheque clearance. Withdrawal and cash deposit in the branches of public sector banks would be affected. According to National Organisation of Bank Worker's (NOBW) vice president Ashwini Rana said 10 lakh bank employees and officers of the 21 public sector banks, old generation private banks and foreign banks will join the 2-day bank strike. As the meeting called by the Chief Labour Commissioner for a reconciliation failed on wage revision, all the 9 constituents of United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU) have decided to continue with strike call, All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC), an affiliate of UFBU, said in a statement. AIBOC general secretary D.T. Franco said the UFBU leaders conveyed their grievance, including that there is inordinate delay, an offer of 2 per cent was not in good taste and the practice of wage negotiation for officers up to Scale VIIwhich has been the practicehas to continue. On the May 5 meeting, IBA offered 2 per cent hike which was rejected by unions calling it unjust. "The CLC supported the issues and asked IBA to respond positively. The IBA representative said that they will consider revised offer but requested the UFBU to quantify the demand," All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA) general secretary C.H. Venkatachalam said. "UFBU leaders quoted figures to prove how operating profit has doubled, staff expenses have reduced, business has more than doubled. CLC said that officers and employees have to be paid for hard work and not based on profit. IBA was not ready to come out with a new offer but assured to continue the negotiations," he said. "All India State Bank Officers' Federation and All India State Bank of India Staff Federation are members of UFBU. Thus, it is likely that our bank will also be impacted to some extent by the said bank strike calls," SBI had said in a regulatory filing. A nationwide bank strike has been called by various bank-employee organizations on May 30 and May 31, 2018, which might disrupt the normal banking services at branches of our bank, said Ravindra P Marathe, MD of Bank of Maharashtra. "Hence, we urge our customers to make the maximum use of digital banking services like UPI, MahaMobile app, internet banking facilities for their transactions. We have ensured that our digital banking systems and ATMs (for those who need cash) are available at all times for the convenience of our customers," he added. There are as many as 21 public sector banks control 75 per cent of the total business in the country. The promotional strategy behind the film Sanju has been unfolding like a compelling story. Ever since the movie's teaser was released on April 24 , director Rajkumar Hirani and his team have managed to keep fans intrigued by throwing in interesting tit-bits regularly a new look of Ranbir Kapoor or a new character unveiled. On Tuesday, a day before the launch of its trailer, however, Hirani left everyone with a cliffhanger. He shared a picture of a curly-haired Anushka Sharma who plays a cameo in the film, and didn't reveal the part she is playing. He said he will reveal it during the trailer launch. Speculation went rife. Will Anushka essay one of the most popular actresses of the 90s who had a steamy affair with Sanjay Dutt back then? However, when the trailer released on Wednesday, there were too many other things that intrigued the audience, besides Anushka's cameo. Ranbir Kapoor's uncanny transformation into Dutt had been a talking point since the day one of his looks from the sets of Sanju leaked last year. It is evident that the actor Ranbir Kapoor has internalised the character so well that even in a trailer of few minutes, he has left a lasting impression. The jail scenes particularly stand out. The trailer gives glimpses of Dutt's emotional turmoilsa scene in which he is stuck in a ward with a leaking drain pipe; in another, he's nude, being interrogated by the cops. In yet another shot, his plea is that "he is not a terrorist". Last year, in an interview with THE WEEK, Ranbir said that Sanjay Dutt's life is a science fiction. How can somebody go through so much and still be loved, still be controversial and still remain relevant? It was a big challenge and I really enjoyed working on it, he said. At the trailer launch when the cast and crew of the film spoke, they didn't hesitate in saying that Sanjay Dutt has led a life that's unimaginable. "When I and Abhijat (Joshi, screenwriter) used to leave from our house to listen to Dutt's story, we felt we haven't lived life. We felt like dwarfs," said Hirani during the trailer launch. The trailer also features Vicky Kaushal as Sanjay Dutt's best friend and partner in crime, Paresh Rawal as father Sunil Dutt, and Sonam Kapoor as his love interest. In a way that deviates from the mainstream Bollywood norms, Hirani seems to have captured the darkness in Sanjay Dutt's life with a gripping honestythe dangerous drug addiction, time in prison, and his evolution from a long haired, lopsided youngster with a goofy grin, to a bearded, hardened man often dubbed a terrorist by the tabloids. And as far as Anushka's character is concerned, Hirani revealed it's a compressed character based on him and Joshi. She plays a biographer in the film. Biopics, as a genre in India, often turn out becoming hagiographies. The constant pleas by Ranbir on the screen that he is not a terrorist may give you an impression that the film is an effort to portray Sanjay Dutt in a positive light; producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra assures it isn't. That it is better if anyone makes any assumptions only after watching the film. Since the trailer is gripping enough, we don't mind waiting for the film to curb any sort of curiosity we may have. The newly released Sanju trailer is guaranteed to give you goosebumps. Ranbir Kapoor has all but gotten into the skin of Sanjay Dutt, narrating a life of hedonistic excesses with aplomb. The trailer features Vicky Kaushal as Sanjay Dutt's best friend and partner in crime, Paresh Rawal as father Sunil Dutt, and Sonam Kapoor as his love interest. In a way that deviates from the mainstream Bollywood norms, Hirani seems to have captured the darkness in Sanjay Dutt's life with a gripping honestythe dangerous drug addiction, time in prison, and his evolution from a long haired, lopsided youngster with a goofy grin, to a bearded, hardened man often dubbed a terrorist by the tabloids. Donning short curly hair, Anushka Sharma can be seen in a different avatar in the trailer. From what can be gleaned from the trailer, the focal point of the film will be the arrest of Sanjay Dutt in the 1993 bomb blast case, its impact, and his connection with the Mumbai underworld. Actress Dia Mirza will essay the role of his current wife Manyata Dutt. Manisha Koirala essays Sanjay Dutts mother Nargis. Anushka Sharma is believed to be playing the role of a journalist in Sanju. She had earlier shared a behind-the-scenes photo from the films sets in New York, featuring Ranbir Kapoor. According to rumours, Sonam's character could be based on Madhuri Dixit and her relationship with Sanjay Dutt, but the team has not commented on this. Ranbir Kapoor, as Sanjay Dutt, appears in several well recognised avatars in the teasers and the posters, echoing the long-haired days of the Bollywood heartthrob to his recent appearances. From the opening shot of the teaser of Sanju, when he steps out of the jail doors, the resemblance is uncanny; Ranbir Kapoor's efforts to get into Sanjay Dutt's shoes seem to have paid off. The Delhi's government's draft policy to cap the profit margins of private hospitals and regulate them might not pass legal scrutiny, activists say. The state government's proposal, that has some important provisions on price regulation and rights of patients, proposes to do so under the Delhi Nursing Homes Registration Act, 1953. However, the Act contains provisions for registration and licensing only, and accommodating rules for price regulation and patient rights might not be legally tenable. "We would like to sound a note of caution on the legal instrument, namely the Delhi Nursing Homes Registration Nursing Act 1953, sought to be used to pass these measures. It will most likely end up as a matter of legal dispute and impasse," said a statement from the All India Drug Action Network (AIDAN), a civil society organisation working for patient rights. Though members of AIDAN said the government's move was "positive" and aimed at reducing exploitation of patients, there was a need to constructively engage with consumer and patient groups to address these issues. "This kind of reform requires a statutory mandate, which could come through substantial modifications to the Delhi Nursing Homes Registration Act, 1953, the Act under which these measures are sought to be brought into force. Failing this, an entirely new Act would be required to accommodate the measures proposed. In the absence of such legal cover, the Delhi government's good intentions will be of no avail," said a statement from another patient rights group, Campaign for Dignified and Affordable Healthcare. It appears that the AAP government was compelled to chose this routealbeit its unlikelihood to succeedowing to its tussle with the Centre, the statement added. S. Srinivasan, AIDAN member, co-founder and managing trustee, LOCOST, said to regulate private hospitals, a better legal instrument would have been the Clinical Establishments Registration and Regulation Act, 2010. "Building on the positive provisions of the Central Act and modifying it after considering certain state-level versions would have been a better idea, one that would have also been on firmer legal footing," said Srinivasan. Currently, the Clinical Establishments Act, that seeks to regulate public and private hospitals, nursing homes, diagnostics centres and single door clinics has been taken up only by 10 states and all union territoriesexcept Delhi. The Union ministry of health and family welfare has been urging the other states to adopt the Act, but because health is a state subject, it can not compel them to do so. The adage that failures can teach many lessons seems quite... A massive fire broke out in a rubber factory here on Tuesday, and hours later, 34 tenders were still at the spot to douse the blaze, fire officials said. No casualties have been reported so far in the blaze in south Delhi's Malviya Nagar. A fire official said that a call reporting the fire near Sant Nirankari School was received at 4.57 pm and nearly 25 tenders were rushed to the spot. Meanwhile, Indian Air Force on Wednesday launched an Mi-17 helicopter attached with a Bambi bucket to douse the massive fire which broke at a rubber factory in New Delhi's Malviya Nagar. As the fire still continues to rage on, the helicopter will continue to douse it by refilling its Bambi bucket from a nearby Yamuna reservoir. The helicopter was dispatched from Palam Air Force station. Deputy Commissioner of Police, South, Romil Baaniya said that a truck was being loaded with rubber sheets at the warehouse situated at Khirki Extension area when the vehicle suddenly caught fire. It soon spread to the building, where more rubber sheets were stored. The officer said that 25 fire tenders reached the spot and the fire was partially brought under control. Later in the evening, more tenders were sent, according to fire services. A total of 34 tenders are still at the spot as the fire hasn't douted completely. Baaniya said that there have been no reports of any casualties far and that the reason for the fire was yet to be ascertained. "The nearby area has been temporarily evacuated for security reasons. "Efforts are being made to control the fire," he said. A prominent Russian journalist and critic of President Vladimir Putin was shot dead in Ukraine where he had fled into exile following threats, police said on Tuesday. Arkady Babchenko, 41, died of his wounds in an ambulance after his wife found him covered in his blood in their home, police said, adding they suspected the murder was due to Babchenkos professional activities. Babchenko, a former soldier in the Chechen war who became one of Russias best-known war correspondents, had left his homeland fearing for his life after criticising Russian policy in Ukraine and Syria. He had been denounced by pro-government politicians in Russia over comments on social media about the Russian bombing of Aleppo in Syrias war, and over his characterisation of Russia as an aggressor towards Ukraine. The first and the most probable version is his professional activity, Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko said at a televised press briefing when asked what police suspected lay behind the murder. Babchenkos wife is in a state of shock and police are unable to speak to her, he said. Ukrainian authorities released a drawing of the man they suspect is Babchenkos assassin, around 40-45 years old, with a grey beard and wearing a cap. Two years ago Pavel Sheremet, a Belarussian journalist known for his criticism of his home countrys leadership and his friendship with the slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was blown up in a car bomb in central Kiev. Putins regime takes aim at those who cannot be broken or intimidated, Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and adviser to the interior minister, wrote on Facebook. Babchenkos house had run out of bread and he had gone to the shops to buy some, Gerashchenko said. He was gunned down on Tuesday by someone waiting for him in the stairwell at the entrance to his home. He was shot in the back several times. In a statement, the Russian foreign ministry said journalists were being killed with impunity in Ukraine. Today in Kiev on the threshold of the apartment where he lived, famous Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was shot and killed, a consistent opponent of the Putin regime and a friend of Ukraine. Bloody crimes and total impunity have become routine for the Kiev regime. We demand that the Ukrainian authorities make every effort to promptly investigate, it said on Facebook. The Investigative Committee of Russia said it had opened a criminal case into Babchenkos death. Babchenko took part in the war in Chechnya as a soldier. He then he became a war reporter for several Russian newspapers. On February 27 last year, he wrote on Facebook that he had left Russia. He reported on Russia sending private military contractors to Syria and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17 in July 2014 in eastern Ukraine, for which investigators last week held the Russian state responsible. Russian authorities again denied any connection with the planes downing over an area of Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatist forces. In his last Facebook post before he was killed, Babchenko recalled an incident four years ago when he was meant to fly in a Ukrainian military helicopter in Ukraines embattled Donbass region. The helicopter was overloaded and he was not permitted to fly. It was shot down and 14 people on board were killed. And I was lucky. Second birthday, it turns out, he wrote. Reuters Albany With tick-borne illnesses on the rise, state parks officials will try to reduce risks to visitors through increased pesticide spraying, as well as using pesticide bait stations to limit ticks carried on deer, mice and other rodents. The new program, adopted by the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, applies to more than 350,000 acres of parkland in more than 200 parks and historic sites that last year drew 70 million visitors, with spraying in May, August and October. Use of pesticides against ticks will be "restricted to high-use areas with appropriate tick habitat. Examples include forest-field edge areas near ball fields and high-use areas and their immediate edge areas," according to the 38-page report. This comes as more and more people across the state are contracting Lyme disease and other illnesses caused by tick bites. Between 2010 and 2016, there were about 49,000 new cases of Lyme, averaging about 7,000 new cases each year. "Tick-borne illnesses are a major threat to the health and well-being of New Yorkers, and we are taking aggressive actions to help stop the spread of these disease," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said this month. Other blood-borne diseases from ticks, like anaplasmosis, babesiosis and ehrlichiosis, are also on the rise, going from about 500 cases combined in 2010 to about 1,400 in 2016. Efforts will also include installation of so-called "4-poster deer stations," which are feeding bins that use corn to draw in white-tailed deer. Deer are also hosts to black-legged ticks that can carry Lyme and other illnesses. At the station, deer brush up against rollers that are treated with permethrin, a pesticide commonly used for flea and tick control. This chemical is used to treat clothing as a way to repel ticks. Such stations would be set up in the spring and fall, which is the peak season for tick adults and nymphs. A single station could cover the deer population for about 40 acres. The stations have already been tested on Long Island in Robert Moses State Park and Connetquot River State Park. Smaller feeding devices called "tick tubes" also would be used at state parks to dispense pesticides on cotton balls to mice, which would carry it back to their nests for bedding. There, it could kill ticks during their larval and nymph stages. To be effective, the tubes have to be set out at 48 per acre, according to the report. Another type of small feed box would also be used that applies tick insecticides to the fur of mice and other rodents that come to the bait. Parks officials are "now conducting regional assessments to identify items such as initial target locations, regional budgets, equipment, and local parks," said agency spokesman Randy Simmons on Friday. State health officials are using "tick and human surveillance data to help inform where to launch a tick control program in state parks," according to a statement from the Health Department. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. The state Department of Environmental Conservation, which manages 118 campgrounds, is also "currently evaluating effective locations to pilot tick control measures," according to spokesman Sean Mahar. The state parks plan also calls for the removal of invasive shrubs, like Japanese barberry and multiflora rose, which create cover and habitat for deer, mice and other animals that carry ticks, which feed on the blood of mammals. Ticks prefer leafy debris and tall grass, where they attach themselves to humans and other animals that pass by. Parks officials will maintain mowing grass in high-use areas, and the plan "does not call for any increase in the areas to be mowed." Leaf and debris will be cleaned in the spring from around high-use areas. State Parks Commissioner Rose Harvey said park visitors also need to "pay special attention to the number of ways they can protect themselves while outdoors." Her office recommends that anyone spending time in wooded areas should: Wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts to protect against ticks other biting insects Check for ticks every two to three hours while outdoors and brush off any ticks before they attach Perform a full body check multiple times during the day, as well as at the end of the day to ensure that no ticks are attached Consider use of repellents containing DEET, picaridin, or IR3535, following label instructions. As part of the effort, the state Health Department will "post current and retrospective tick collection and testing results to Health Data NY, opening up the data to the public," according to a press release from the governor's office. Previously, these records were shared only with local health departments and state park managers. It will be made available at https://healthdata.ny.gov/ Albany Nearly six years after Superstorm Sandy devastated New York City, the city lags on international standards for storm-resistant building construction codes, according to an industry survey released Wednesday. But hurricane damage is less of a risk upstate where residential building codes are stronger. That's because they're based on newer standards, dating from 2015 and applied upstate since 2017. As a result newer structures upstate likely are stronger. New York City, which runs its own separate building code system, now relies on 2009 construction standards, although changes made after Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012 required new buildings to better resist strong winds and rain. Done in 2014, those changes brought city codes up to 2009 construction standards, know as the International Residential Code (IRC). That was the conclusion reached in a report by the not-for-profit Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, which is supported by property insurance and resinsurance companies. Out of 18 coastal states in the eastern U.S., New York ranked 12th, largely because of the New York City building code situation. Out of a scale of 100 possible points based on factors including building codes, state and local code enforcement, and licensing and educational requirements for officials and contractors New York scored 64. That was behind New Jersey (90), Connecticut (89), Rhode Island (87), and Massachusetts (81). Like New York, states that scored lowest in the survey, including Maine (54), New Hampshire (46), Georgia (68), Texas (34), Mississippi (28), Alabama (27) and Delaware (17), have no mandatory statewide building code. The institute's own headquarters, located in Tampa, Florida is a disaster-resistant structure made of reinforced concrete and designed to withstand high wind speeds. The building is also located out of a floodplain and features impact-resistant windows, and impact- and pressure-rated entry doors. Florida scored highest in the survey, with 95 points. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy caused an estimated $19 billion in damage to New York City during Oct. 28-29. The storm was unusual as a late-season hurricane, that combined with a Nor'easter at high tide with a full moon, making it the largest such storm ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. While damage to the Capital Region and elsewhere was much more limited, many regional firms that specialized in repair and recovery of damaged property were overwhelmed by requests coming from the hurricane-impacted areas. Atferward, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told Reuters that total damages included an estimated $4.5 billion in costs to city agencies, including $800 million for street reconstruction. About half of the total damage was covered by private insurance or the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but the rest was not. . The U.S. Supreme Court's impending ruling in a landmark labor-relations case could deal a big blow to the power of public employee unions across the country, especially in a heavily-unionized state such as New York. The concerns and questions raised by the case, Janus vs. AFSCME, were the subject of a panel hosted by the Empire Center for Public Policy on Wednesday. State Senator Diane Savino and Daniel DiSalvo, an assistant professor at the City College of New York, discussed the case at the Albany Capital Center and Capital Tonight host Liz Benjamin moderated the debate. At issue is the ability of public-sector unions to collect mandatory "agency fees" from people they represent but who are not union members. New York has more than 1 million unionized public-sector workers. Dues can run from several hundred to $1,000 annually. The state's public employee unions have long held sway with politicians because of their political contributions and their ability to lobby and get out the vote, which stems from dues that provide the funding for staff and organizing efforts. DiSalvo spoke about the legal, historical, economic and political differences between unions in the public and private sector, noting that the political profile of the former has steadily risen. He argued that while the benefits unions secure for workers can be valuable, they do not outweigh the costs to the public, and cited research that indicates more debt and government spending resulting from stronger public unions. Governments are "ultimately less efficient and less innovative," he added. A ruling in favor of Mark Janus, a child protective specialist for the state of Illinois, would "protect the rights of dissenting employees and reduce the political power" of unions, DiSalvo said. Unions provide aid and protection for members and non-members alike and "no one complains about raises or other benefits," Savino said. Public workers are under attack, and the "enemies of labor never sleep," she added. "It is about silencing the representatives of workers," she said. The general expectation is that the court will rule against the unions a move that would "bankrupt unions' ability to influence public policy," Savino said. Asked by Benjamin whether the case might force unions to do a better job of representing workers, Savino said many unions "have gotten lazy" and the case should serve as a wake-up call. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. The senator also talked about the power of banding together rather than striking out on one's own, and having the backing of an organization. DiSalvo said his primary point of contention was whether people should be coerced or forced into becoming part of a union if they don't want to be. An audience member asked why the Supreme Court would take up this case more than 40 years after ruling in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education that public workers could be required to pay union fees for non-political activities. The panelists said that the size and scope of unions has grown and they are more influential in the public sector than in 1977. "Lots of new experiences raise new issues," DiSalvo said. miszler@timesunion.com 518-454-5018 @madisoniszler Albany The cast of characters that federal prosecutors could call as witnesses or talk about at the upcoming political corruption trial of SUNY Polytechnic Institute founder Alain Kaloyeros includes many local business executives and several top SUNY Poly officials. The names of nearly 100 people are listed on a questionnaire that will be handed to potential jurors at the Manhattan courthouse where the trial will be held starting next month. About two dozen of them are current or former SUNY Poly employees or business executives who were in the orbit of Kaloyeros or had to deal with him for work. It is unclear if they are potential witnesses who will be called to testify in the case or if their names could come up in testimony or tied to evidence in the case. Some of the biggest business names on the list are John Kelly, who leads research at IBM; Doug Grose, the former CEO of GlobalFoundries and a former IBM executive who was recently hired to lead SUNY Poly's economic development projects, and Michael Castellana, the CEO of SEFCU, the region's largest credit union. It is unclear why Grose would be on the list since he has been out of the public spotlight for years before joining SUNY Poly recently. However Kelly worked closely with Kaloyeros over the years and helped Kaloyeros establish Albany Nanotech, which eventually grew into the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering and then SUNY Poly in partnership with IBM and its various computer chip research programs. Others on the list include Andrew Kennedy, the CEO of the Center for Economic Growth in Albany. Kennedy previously had been economic development policy director for Gov. Andrew Cuomo and testified in the federal corruption trial of former Cuomo aide Joseph Percoco earlier this year. Also on the list is Tom Birdsey, who is CEO of EYP Architecture and Engineering, which is headquartered at SUNY Poly's ZEN building, and Bob Blackman, a local real estate industry veteran who serves on the board of Fuller Road Management Corp., one of two entities that control's SUNY Poly's real estate holdings. Birdsey's company EYP was awarded over $20 million in building design contracts from SUNY Poly over the years, and Birdsey also was one of several members of the Fuller Road Management board that did business with SUNY Poly over the years although neither EYP nor Birdsey was ever accused of any wrongdoing in connection with SUNY Poly. Birdsey left the Fuller Road board after SUNY Poly moved to clean up potential conflicts with area businesses. Castellana also served on Fuller Road Management for a while, and SEFCU is a tenant in two SUNY Poly buildings. Castellana is no longer on the Fuller Road Management board either. Names of others who played major roles at SUNY Poly but have left the organization are Alicia Dicks, the former president of Fort Schuyler Management Corp., another entity set up to manage SUNY Poly's projects across upstate. Dicks now is CEO of a charitable group in the Utica area. Walter "Jerry" Barber, who was president of Fuller Road Management for a time before retiring in 2016, is also on the list, as is Brenda Birken, the former general counsel for Fuller Road Management, and Dean Fuleihan, a former SUNY Poly executive who is now first deputy mayor for New York City under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Birken, who was also vice president of policy and regulatory affairs at SUNY Poly before her departure in 2014, was replaced by attorney Carl "CJ" Kempf, who is also on the list and left the school shortly after Kaloyeros was arrested in September 2016 on federal bid-rigging charges. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Kaloyeros, who is on trial with several upstate developers who have been accused of trying to rig construction contracts on SUNY Poly projects in concert with the SUNY Poly founder, has maintained his innocence. The jury pool is being asked if they, or any family members or close friends, have had any dealings with the people on the list. A review of evidence assembled by prosecutors indicates that many on the list may have been included in email chains between Kaloyeros and others involved in SUNY Poly's various economic development projects, including Todd Howe, the disgraced consultant who is cooperating with prosecutors but will not be used as a witness in the Kaloyeros trial. The TU's Larry Rulison, Chris Bragg and Casey Seiler have tracked down basic information on all but a few of those named on the questionnaire. (If you have any tips on those listed as unknown below, send them our way.) Jeff Aiello: Executive vice president of COR Development. Charles Antzelevitch: A cardiovascular research scientist famous for his work on arrhythmia. In 2015, he was removed as executive director and director of research at Masonic Medical Research Laboratory in Utica, according to the Utica Observer-Dispatch. Jay Badams: Unknown. Mark Balling: A former senior vice president of Lend Lease Construction, which according to the Investigative Post submitted bids for Buffalo Billion projects. Walter Jerry Barber: The former president of Fuller Road Management Corp., one of two non-profit real estate entities that manages SUNY Poly's construction projects. Barber was also chairman of the other SUNY Poly real estate entity known as Fort Schuyler Management Corp. Barber previously had worked in the state comptroller's office and was hired for his accounting and management skills to help reorganize SUNY Poly's internal corporate governance and oversight as it expanded across upstate. Scott Bateman: Currently SUNY Polytechnic Institutes associate vice president for finance and director of state financial operations. Also serves as chief financial officer of AIM Institute for Integrated Photonics and chief administrative officer of the U.S. Photovoltaic Manufacturing Consortium, Inc. Chris Beitel: Executive vice president of global operations and planning at Silevo Inc., the predecessor to SolarCity at the RiverBend facility, according to the Buffalo News. Andrew Bellinger: Chief information officer for SUNY Poly. Kelly Bhardwaj: Has worked as marketing coordinator at LPCiminelli, according to an online profile. Tom Birdsey: President of EYP Architecture & Engineering, an Albany architecture firm that is headquartered at SUNY Poly's ZEN building. Birdsey was a board member of Fuller Road Management, which built ZEN and other buildings at SUNY Poly's Albany campus, from 2011 to 2014. Over the years EYP earned more than $20 million in design fees on SUNY Poly projects. Steve Bills: Unknown. Brenda Birken: Served as general counsel for Fuller Road Management and vice president of policy and regulatory affairs for SUNY Poly back when it was known as the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. She is currently senior legal counsel for SI Group in Niskayuna. Robert Blackman: Local real estate executive and current member of the Fuller Road Management board, Blackman is active in the local philanthropy and investment scene and is a former chair of the Center for Economic Growth in Albany. Don Bosnell: Unknown. Bob Brady: The former executive director of Moog Inc. currently sits on the SUNY Buffalo Council. John Andrew Breuer: President of Hueber-Breuer Construction Co., a Syracuse-based contractor on major civic and commercial projects across upstate. Peter Cammarata: President of the Buffalo Urban Development Corp. Maria Cassidy: Deputy general counsel with Empire State Development Corp. Michael Castellana: President and CEO of the Capital Region-based credit union SEFCU, which in 2013 became a resident in SUNY Poly's "Smart Cities" Hub at Albany's historic Kiernan Plaza. Castellana was also a member of the Fuller Road Management board for a time and SEFCU has a branch on SUNY Poly's Albany campus. Michael Chapman: Unknown. John Ciminelli: Senior vice president of LPCiminelli. Frank Ciminelli II: An executive with LPCiminelli who in 2017 founded Arc Building Partners; at the time, he said he was maintaining a leadership role at LPC. Amy Clifton: Chief financial officer of LPCiminelli. Erin Coultry: Grants and contracts manager for SUNY Poly. Peter Cutler: Former spokesman for Empire State Development Corp. RoAnn Destito: Former Assemblywoman who since 2011 has been commissioner of the state Office of General Services. Alicia Dicks: Former president of Fort Schuyler Management, one of SUNY Poly's development arms. Steve DiMeo: President of the economic development entity Mohawk Valley Edge, based in Rome. David Doyle: Former SUNY Poly vice president for communications who left the school at the end of 2016. Michael Duschen: A former project manager for Hezel Associates. Matt Enstice: President and CEO of Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. Gail Ettaro: Former director of marketing for LPCiminelli. Michael Evke: Owner of Whitesboro-based Eversan Inc., a tech company that makes electronic scoreboards and LED video screens for arenas and sports venues. Evke is a 1984 graduate of SUNY IT, which is now the Utica campus for SUNY Poly and he was a board member at Fort Schuyler Management until 2017 when he resigned. (FRMC's website incorrectly lists him as a current board member.) Joann Falletta: Musical director at the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. The Buffalo News noted that Louis Ciminelli is a former chairman of the groups board. Michael Fancher: Vice president of business development and economic outreach at SUNY Poly and a nanoeconomics professor at the school who was an assistant budget director in the state assembly in the late 1980s and 90s. James Fenton: Unknown. Dean Fuleihan: Former vice president at SUNY Poly when it was the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering who had previously been former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's state budget negotiator. Now is first deputy mayor in New York City for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Kathleen Garver: FBI agent who interviewed COR's Steve Aiello in April 2016; testified in the Percoco trial. Anthony Giattino: An investigator with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District. Philip Gitlin: Retired partner at Whiteman Osterman & Hanna. Also on the jury questionnaire in the Percoco trial. Robert Geer: Nanoscale science professor at SUNY Poly and member of the board of Fort Schuyler Management Corp., another SUNY Poly real estate nonprofit that oversees SUNY Poly's economic development projects outside of Albany. Geer had been the No. 2 in charge of SUNY Poly under Alain Kaloyeros until leaving the post in late 2016 as the scandal unraveled. Howard Glaser: Former director of state operations who according to Gannett News Service received between $25,000 and $70,000 from Columbia University in 2012 and 2013 to teach as an adjunct professor on public policy in a program run by William Eimicke. Glaser departed the administration in the summer of 2014. Glasers resume includes work for former Gov. Mario Cuomo in Albany, and with his son Andrew Cuomo at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Glaser subsequently worked alongside Todd Howe another veteran of Mario Cuomos administration and HUD at the Mortgage Bankers Association. The Wall Street Journal reported that Howe and top Cuomo aide Joe Percoco would meet in Glasers office during his tenure as state operations director. William Grogan: Unknown. Sean Grooms: Chief financial officer at COR Development. Doug Grose: Former IBM executive and CEO of GlobalFoundries who was recently hired by SUNY to take over Fuller Road Management and Fort Schuyler Management and combine them into a new entity called NY CREATES that will manage all of SUNY Poly's economic development and commercial research partnerships. From 2003 to 2004, Grose briefly worked as chief operating officer at the Albany Nanotech, the precursor to SUNY Poly. Brian Hannafin: A vice president with John W. Danforth Co., a Buffalo heating and cooling contractor that leases space at SUNY Poly's ZEN building and has done work on SUNY Poly and local high-tech projects. George Harris Katherine Herlihey: Possibly a misspelling of the name of Katherine Herlihy, a former attorney with Whiteman Osterman & Hanna. Richard Hezel: Chairman and strategic consultant for Syracuse-based Hezel Associates, which does work in education, health, and human services. Timothy Holly: Unknown. Joseph Hogan: Unknown. Todd Howe: Lobbyist-consultant who pleaded guilty to multiple felonies in September 2016. Fired in May 2016 by the large Capital Region law firm Whiteman Osterman & Hanna, where he ran a Washington, D.C.-based subsidiary called WOH Government Solutions. A former advance man for late Gov. Mario Cuomo, Howe went on to work with Andrew Cuomo at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and with future state Director of Operations Howard Glaser at the Mortgage Bankers Association. He did extensive work for SUNY Polytechnic as well as many of the companies that have secured work on its projects. Howe also operated the obscure consulting firm Potomac Strategies LLC. Its client list is currently unknown. In August 2016, COR Development of Syracuse sued Howe over his alleged failure to repay what it described as an $85,000 loan it made to him a year before. Politico New York reported that Howe served as a prodigious fundraiser for Gov. Andrew Cuomos 2014 re-election effort. The New York Times has reported that Howes personal finances have been in disarray for years. Howe and his wife have secured mortgages for homes in Washington, D.C., though companies connected to Abraham Eisner, who has served as a liaison between Cuomo and Brooklyns Orthodox Jewish community. Eisners company also provided a mortgage to former Cuomo aide Joe Percoco. Before the scandal, Howe served on the management advisory board of Columbia Universitys Earth Institute. After Howe's tumultuous testimony in the Percoco trial, prosecutors recently said he would not appear as their witness in the Kaloyeros trial. Cleveland Hughes: President and CEO of the CHC Group, a Syracuse-based construction and development firm. John Kelly: Head of IBM Research and a visionary in the field of cognitive computing, Kelly is one of the major players in the creation of Albany Nanotech, and what evolved into SUNY Poly from an initial research and development partnership between UAlbany and IBM. A graduate of both Union College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Kelly was behind IBM's partnership with Kaloyeros and SUNY Poly that has led to some of the most significant computer chip breakthroughs in the industry. Carl C.J. Kempf: A onetime vice president for policy and regulatory affairs for SUNY Poly and a special legal adviser to Kaloyeros who left in 2016 in the wake of the scandal. Andrew Kennedy: Formerly Cuomos deputy director for state operations; currently leads the Albany-based Center for Economic Growth. Christopher Kerr: Unknown. Catherine Johnson: Legal counsel at COR Development. Paul Joynt: A principal in COR Development. Kirk Knestis: Former CEO of Hezel Associates. Mary Beth Labate: Former state budget director under Cuomo; currently the executive director of the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities. Richard Leckerling: Partner at Whiteman Osterman & Hanna; Todd Howe ran a Washington, D.C.-based subsidiary of the firm that was shuttered after the upstate development scandal came to light. Edwin Lee: Empire State Development Corp.'s vice president for economic initiatives. Tom Louis: A former senior investigator for the State Police who was hired by SUNY Poly in 2014 to become the school's chief of police as the school expanded its security operations. Brian Lucey: A lobbyist and partner Whiteman Osterman & Hanna. Stephanie Miner: The former mayor of Syracuse. A Democrat who frequently feuded with Cuomo. Carl Montante: An executive at Uniland Development Corp., which was selected in 2014 as the preferred developer to rebuild and transform the former Rainbow Centre Shopping Mall in Niagara Falls. Michael Montante: Also at Uniland Development Corp. Paul Neureuter: President of Buffalo-based construction company Krog Corp. Mandy Nordstrom: Unknown. Thomas OBrien: SUNY Poly's associate vice president for innovation infrastructure and resources. Christina Orsi: Former Buffalo-based economic development official for the Cuomo administration; currently vice president for research and economic development at SUNY Buffalo. Shawna Pappel: Unknown. Gene Partridge: Executive vice president of LPCiminelli. John Puig: A municipal bond executive with RBC Capital Markets who helped SUNY Poly finance many of its projects. A Siena College and Albany Law School graduate.Jack Quinn Larry Quinn: Buffalo School Board member and ex-Buffalo Sabres president, according to the Buffalo News. Bruce Reichel: A former board member of Fort Schuyler Management Corp. John Regan: A former employee of Howe's at Whiteman Osterman's Washington D.C. lobbying subsidiary, who in 2012 landed an economic development job in the Cuomo administration. Steven Rollins: Unknown. Joseph Schell: Director of purchasing and contracts for SUNY Poly. Kevin Schuler: Former vice president of the Buffalo development firm LPCiminelli. In May, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He is cooperating Andrew Shaevel: Buffalo-area developer, managing partner of Mensch Capital Partners. Susan Shaffer: Unknown; also appeared on the jury questionnaire for the Percoco trial. Andrew Sharp: Unknown. Robert Simpson: CEO of CenterState, a Central New York entity that serves as a chamber of commerce. Former co-chair of the region's economic development council. Omar Abu Sitta: Son-in-law of Buffalo-area developer William Huntress, according to this very odd story. David Stebbins: Vice president of the Buffalo Urban Development Corp. John Timothy Vaeth: Buffalo-area developer. Christopher Walsh: The associate vice president for regulatory and programmatic compliance at SUNY Poly, who got his job at Todd Howe's recommendation and gave his longtime friend a small loan. Conrad Wesolek: A manager at LPCiminelli. Ruth Walters: An Albany-based lobbyist and former assistance state comptroller whose stated expertise is in procurement and contracting. Tom Young: A former mayor of Syracuse (1986-1993) who in 2010 tried to recruit COR Development to work on the citys inner harbor, and introduced company officials to Todd Howe. David Zebro: A principal in Buffalo-based Strategic Investments. A number of businesses and other entities most associated with certain of the individuals listed above also appeared on the questionnaire: The following capsule reviews of recent releases, long runs and revivals come from various wire services, as noted: RATINGS: G - Suitable for all ages. PG - Parental guidance recommended. PG-13 - Parental guidance strongly suggested. R - Restricted; anyone under 18 must be accompanied by adult. NC-17 - No children under 17. Excellent Good Fair Poor Avengers: Infinity War Action. The Avengers and their allies must be willing to sacrifice all in an attempt to defeat the powerful Thanos before his blitz of devastation and ruin puts an end to the universe. With "Avengers: Infinity War," the Marvel Comics franchise arrives at the stage of decadence. There's just too much of it. A victim of its own success, there are just too many appealing characters here to stuff into one story. (PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action throughout, language and some crude references) (Mick LaSalle, Hearst Newspapers) Beast Thriller. A troubled woman living in an isolated community finds herself pulled between the control of her oppressive family and the allure of a secretive outsider suspected of a series of brutal murders. Even if it has B-movie trappings and the tension wanes in the second half, it's a stylish psychodrama. The scenes between the leads are electric, thanks to the beautifully calibrated performance of Jessie Buckley, who plays Moll with subtle shadings of innocence, defiance, desperation and menace. (R) (David Lewis, Hearst Newspapers) Black Panther Action. After the events of "Captain America: Civil War," King T'Challa returns home to his technologically advanced African country of Wakanda, but when two enemies conspire to bring down the kingdom, he must suit up as the Black Panther and work with a CIA agent and members of Wakanda's all-female special forces to prevent a world war. There have been black superhero movies before, but something feels different this time around. This one is coming from a deep place, and this time the whole world is interested. (PG-13 for prolonged sequences of action violence, and a brief rude gesture) (M.L.) Book Club Comedy. Four lifelong friends (Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen) have their lives forever changed after reading "Fifty Shades of Grey" in their monthly book club. Also stars Don Johnson, Andy Garcia, Richard Dreyfus, Craig T. Nelson and Alicia Silverstone. There is a built-in pleasure in seeing Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda and Mary Steenburgen in the same movie. We're used to them. We like them but not so much that we can't notice that "Book Club" is not funny and weirdly off key. (PG-13 for sex-related material throughout, and for language) (M.L.) Breaking In Thriller. A woman (Gabrielle Union) fights to protect her family during a home invasion. "Breaking In" is an 88-minute mini nervous breakdown that audiences will start mocking before they make it to their car. Yet they may find themselves walking to that car a bit faster than usual, and looking around to see if anyone else is there. (PG-13 for violence, menace, bloody images, sexual references, and brief strong language) 1/2 (M.L.) Deadpool 2 Action. Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) forms a team of mutants called the X-Force to protect young mutant Russell from the time-traveling soldier Cable (Josh Brolin). "Deadpool 2" gets most of its ugliness out of the way in the first five minutes. The movie feels as though it were being made up on the spot, except that it moves quickly, like something that has been planned well and trimmed to the essentials. Despite the fast pace, there are stretches that drag in terms of interest. But "Deadpool 2" gets better as it goes along. (R) (M.L.) Disobedience Drama. A woman (Rachel Weisz) returns to the community that shunned her for her attraction to a childhood friend (Rachel McAdams), but once back, their passions reignite. From Sebastian Lelio, the director this year's Oscar winner for best foreign language film, "A Fantastic Woman." Weisz is the locus of the film and becomes all the more fascinating as we come to see Ronit through the eyes of McAdams' performance. It's rare in film to see such a symbiosis between actresses rare, because there are so few opportunities. The women are remarkable, unforgettable. (R for some strong sexuality) (M.L.) Isle of Dogs Animated. The latest from Wes Anderson is a stop-action animation that the director says was inspired by animated holiday specials of the 1960s (such as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer") and the movies of Akira Kurosawa. That's an eccentric combination, and the result is a movie so unusual, and so the product of a singular imagination, that it's easy to appreciate, respect and mostly enjoy it, even through some long, dull stretches. (PG-13 for thematic elements and some violent images) (M.L.) Let the Sunshine In Drama. Isabelle (Juliette Binoche) is a divorced Parisian painter searching for another shot at love, but refusing to settle for the parade of all-too-flawed men who drift in and out of her life in this romantic dramedy from Claire Denis. (NR) Life of the Party Comedy. After her husband abruptly asks for a divorce, a middle-aged mother (Melissa McCarthy) returns to college the same one her daughter attends in order to complete her degree. McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone wrote the script; Falcone directs. McCarthy is hilarious in every movie she's in, except in the ones that she and her husband create for her. The screenplay is also strange. It goes out of its way to avoid conflict or drama or crisis, and it fails to provide a single narrative reason to keep watching from one scene to the next. (PG-13 for sexual material, drug content and partying) 1/2 (M.L.) Pope Francis: A Manof His Word Documentary. The Vatican-endorsed Wim Wenders' film is intended to be a personal journey with Pope Francis, rather than a biographical documentary about him. It's tempting to forgo a regular review of the new documentary on Pope Francis and simply print as many of the film's laudable quotations from this remarkable man as space will allow. The movie won't convert any of Francis' die-hard opponents, who will deride it as uncritical, but will offer consolation to many viewers, and challenges to most. It's a bit of a surprise that the film was directed by Wim Wenders, who came to the cinematic forefront in the 1970s as a part of the New German Cinema movement. The director is clearly an admirer of Francis (both the saint and the pope), and was able to conduct extensive and exclusive interviews with the pontiff. (NR) (Walter Addiego, Hearst Newspapers) A Quiet Place Thriller. A family of four must live life in silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound. The story of "A Quiet Place" is one best left to be discovered. Suffice it to say that while most movies arrive at some kind of climax, this one comes to a crescendo that doesn't stop. (PG-13 for terror and some bloody images) (M.L.) Rampage Action. A silverback gorilla, a wolf and a reptile grow to a monstrous size after a rogue genetic experiment goes wrong. Primatologist Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson) soon joins forces with the military to prevent the mutated beasts from destroying everything in their path. "Rampage" is a monster movie, and in many ways an old-fashioned one, with a misunderstood ape, not unlike King Kong, a sea monster that's akin to Godzilla, and with effects that are striking and yet just cheesy enough to be more fun than disturbing. Mixed in, there's a warning about science run amok, but mostly it's all about giving viewers a good time, and it does. But what makes "Rampage" especially enjoyable is the way it sneaks up on the audience. Before casting off every shred of dignity and abandoning itself to good-humored excess, the movie passes itself off as a reasonably serious science fiction movie. Those worlds collide when the gorilla George and a handful of other creatures are exposed to an inhalant that sets off a genetic chain reaction. George starts getting bigger, and bigger, and the movie starts getting crazier, and crazier. A sober movie about genetics turns into a Dwayne Johnson free-for-all. But this is all for the good. (PG-13 for sequences of violence, action and destruction, brief language and crude gestures) (M.L.) RBG Documentary. A documentary look at the life and work of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "RBG" takes the familiar figure of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg the second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court and currently the court's oldest member and shows us lots of things we didn't know about her. Given the partisan divide, the documentary probably will be of interest only to people who already admire Justice Ginsburg, but it's a good story that will inspire many and should appeal to anyone with an open mind. Directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West make a persuasive case that Ginsburg was, essentially, the Thurgood Marshall of the women's movement. (PG for some thematic elements and language) (M.L.) Show Dogs Comedy. A macho, solitary Rottweiler police dog (voice of Ludacris) is ordered to go undercover as a primped show dog in a prestigious Dog Show, along with his human partner (Will Arnett). The eclectic voice cast includes Jordan Sparks, RuPaul, Gabriel Iglesias, Shaquille O'Neal, Stanley Tucci and Alan Cumming. Somewhere between the first time Will Arnett gets bitten on the butt, and when Shaquille O'Neal shows up voicing a sheepdog that sounds stoned, a realization occurs: "Show Dogs" is really bad, even for a talking dog movie. The genre isn't exactly filled with Library of Congress-bound classics. But this live action PG-rated comedy is making such a minimal effort, that at times it's striking. Visual effects sequences seem unfinished. Jokes are written with pop culture references that are mostly forgotten. "Show Dogs" is just 90 minutes long, but you'll swear entire days have passed. (PG for suggestive and rude humor, language and some action) Zero stars (Peter Hartlaub, Hearst Newspapers) Solo: A Star Wars Story Action. A young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) meets his future co-pilot Chewbacca and encounters Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) years before joining the Rebellion during an adventure into a dark criminal underworld. Also stars Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Paul Bettany and Thandie Newton. Ron Howard directed actually, he came on to direct during production, though he has the sole director's credit and although Howard's homespun authenticity would seem a nice addition to the "Star Wars" universe, his personality is not really in evidence. It's as if everyone involved here were in a creative straitjacket, assigned to produce a "Star Wars" movie, nothing more and nothing less. So that's what we get. (PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action/violence) (M.L.) Tully Comedy. Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman, screenwriter and director of "Juno," team up again for another comedic look at motherhood. Mother of three Marlo (Charlize Theron) is gifted a night nanny (Mackenzie Davis) by her brother. While hesitant at first, she soon forms a unique bond with the thoughtful, surprising and sometimes challenging young woman. "Tully" slowly reveals itself as an emotionally deep yet concise rumination on the nature of modern motherhood, on the inherently false premise of doing it all, of having it all and making it look good. (R for language and some sexuality/nudity) (Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service) ALBANY - Democrat Tistrya Houghtling believes she could be a unique state legislator in Albany. Houghtling, who is the New Lebanon town clerk, is hoping to be her party's nominee this fall in the 107th Assembly District, which includes parts of Washington, Rensselaer and Columbia counties. The district is represented by Republican Jake Ashby, who won an April special election. "I want to be a different kind of politician," Houghtling said. "I want to be a public servant that brings our voices to Albany." She is touting her understanding of rural communities and cites her creation of charitable giving programs in New Lebanon as evidence of her ability to solve problems. Houghtling wants to address infrastructure needs, create jobs, help seniors age in place and respond to the opioid epidemic. Her campaign is backed by the Columbia County Democratic Committee. She was elected town clerk in 2015 and previously worked five years for the town court and before that as a music festival organizer, according to a press release. Her first attempt to run for the seat in the special election was rebuffed by party leaders in the district, who chose Rensselaer County Legislator Cindy Doran to be their nominee. The Rensselaer County Democrats had a larger voice in the candidate selection process because they represent about 75 percent of the Democrats in the district. Doran, who initially planned on competing for the Democratic nomination, announced last week that she would not seek the party's nomination. With multiple Democratic candidates in the field, Doran said she couldn't commit the time and energy to a primary race this summer. Candidates for the November general elections are chosen through a primary process. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Houghtling could end up squaring off in September against Don Boyajian, a Washington County Democrat also hoping to run for the seat. Boyajian dropped a congressional bid earlier this month to run for the state Assembly and is supported by the Washington County Democratic Committee. He is a municipal and environmental attorney at the Albany law firm Dreyer Boyajian LLP, where his father, Donald W. Boyajian, is a founding partner. The Rensselaer County Democratic Committee has yet to make an endorsement in the race. David.Lombardo@timesunion.com - 518.454.5427 - @Poozer87 State Police HUDSON A state prison employee is accused of stealing more than $3,000 from the agency, State Police said Tuesday. Maria C. Fey, 49, of Leyden is charged with felony grand larceny, felony falsifying business records and 18 counts of felony forgery. Jerusalem Palestinian militants bombarded southern Israel with dozens of rockets and mortar shells Tuesday, while Israeli warplanes struck targets throughout the Gaza Strip in the largest flare-up of violence between the sides since a 2014 war. The Israeli military said most of the projectiles were intercepted, but three soldiers were wounded, raising the chances of further Israeli retaliation. One mortar shell landed near a kindergarten shortly before it opened. The sudden burst of violence, which stretched past midnight with no signs of slowing, follows weeks of mass Palestinian protests along the Gaza border with Israel. Over 110 Palestinians, many of them unarmed protesters, have been killed by Israeli fire in that time. Israel says it holds Gaza's Hamas rulers responsible for the bloodshed. "Israel will exact a heavy price from those who seek to harm it, and we see Hamas as responsible for preventing such attacks," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. In southern Israel, angry residents complained about the renewed rocket fire. Adva Klein of Kibbutz Kfar Aza said she only got about two hours of sleep because of the frequent incoming fire and the warning sirens. Other residents reported machine gun fire from Gaza. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. "It's been a really scary morning," said Adele Raemer of Kibbutz Nirim. Regional councils near the Gaza border instructed residents to stay close to bomb shelters. The high Palestinian death toll in the border protests has drawn strong international criticism of Israel, with rights groups saying Israel's use of live fire is illegal because in many cases it has struck unarmed protesters who did not pose an imminent threat to Israeli soldiers. But on Tuesday, the Palestinians came under criticism for the attacks. SARATOGA SPRINGS The city's Universal Unitarian Congregation will host a gun buyback program from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, June 2, at its parish at 624 N. Broadway. The event is meant to help people dispose of their unwanted guns. Local businesses have come together with $100 gift cards to give to participants. ALBANY White students in Albany are more likely than the state average to take calculus. But black and Latino students are less likely to take it. For physics, white students are less likely than the statewide average to take this course and minority students are far less likely. Overall, though, the percentage of black and Latino students taking advanced science and math courses remains lower than that for white youngsters across New York state. Those were the findings of a new study looking at so-called gateway courses that are viewed as preparation for true college level work as well as good paying science and technology jobs. Using unpublished state Education Department data from the 2016-17 school year, The New York Equity Coalition compared enrollment and availability of such courses across the state. The Coalition comprises groups such as the state Business Council, the New York Urban League, Albany County Chamber of Commerce and Education Trust-New York, which compiled the data. Other courses that are seen as gateways, or markers for future success, include middle school earth science and Algebra I, Advanced Placement math and science, computer science and advanced foreign language as well as music. This report is alarming in its findings, but hopeful in its conclusions, said Heather Briccetti, president and CEO of the Business Council of New York State. What it shows more than anything else is that the status quo will not suffice. New Yorks education system routinely denies students of color equitable access to the courses that will prepare them for college, careers, and active citizenship, said Ian Rosenblum, executive director of The Education TrustNew York. The disparities exist across the state, as well as in localities like the Albany school district. Albany is the Capital Regions largest school system and one in which 48 percent of the students are black and 17 percent are Latino. At Albany High School, for instance, white students are four times more likely to be enrolled in calculus than black students. White students are 12 times more likely to be enrolled than Latino students. Statewide, white students are about three times more likely to be enrolled in calculus than their black counterparts and two times more likely than Latino youngsters. Albany district spokeswoman Lisa Angerame took issue with the study, noting that her school system faces unique challenges. Some 11 percent of the students in the Albany schools are refugees or immigrants and 75 percent qualify for free or reduced prices lunches, which is a marker for poverty. A total of 57 languages are spoken in the district. Angerame added that the district has instituted a program, which starts in the lower grades, aimed at developing note-taking, writing and other skills early on. The Advancement Via Individual Determination or AVID program also helps kids develop organizational skills that can be applied to their studies. Angerame also took issue with some of the methodology in the study. Either way, the imbalance in students taking gateway courses is not new for Albany or the state as a whole. It appears to be persisting even as the state Board of Regents has over the years mandated that all students take a regimen of Regents courses and exams focusing on English, social studies, math and science. That requirement isnt enough to ensure that high school graduates are ready for college level work or careers, say critics. Passing a Regents exam does not indicate college and career readiness, said Abja Midha, deputy director for the Education Trust-New York. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. She noted that through an appeals process students can pass Regents exams with a score below 65, which typically would be considered a failing mark. Enrollment in a given course doesnt mean that a student will pass it, and Midha said that suggests schools need to work harder in the lower grades to prepare kids for gateway courses. The studys authors hope their findings will spur education officials to target next years sixth graders to prepare them to take gateway courses a few years later. Angerame from the Albany district noted that Albany High offers International Baccalaureate classes as well as approximately 21 Advanced Placement courses including calculus, physics, chemistry, biology and environmental science. The Coalition also looked at the availability of AP and IB courses which are viewed as more demanding and a pathway toward college work. Advanced Placement, or AP, courses, for instance, can count toward college credits if students score three out of five points on their final exams. On that count, Albany city schools may be doing better than Albany County as a whole. The study found that not all high schools in Albany County offer the AP or IB programs. rkarlin@timesunion.com 518 454 5758 @RickKarlinTU [May 30, 2018] CYBIRD to Organize First World Tour for Fans of Ikemen Series, "Otome" Mobile Games with Over 17 Million Downloads TOKYO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CYBIRD Co., Ltd. will embark on the Ikemen Series World Tour 2018 starting with Anime Expo in July in Los Angeles, followed by Taiwan, Indonesia and more for a total of four countries and one region. (Image: https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/img/201805294381-O1-l978ZiD1) Last year, the Ikemen Series was showcased at Anime Expo and C3AFA Singapore, and received high praise from adoring fans. This year, the theme is "Splash of Love" and the booths in Indonesia and the Philippines will be even bigger and better. There will be even more engaging events for fans and newcomers alike. Check out the video from last year here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QrGsx-dzXY (Photo: Anime Expo 2017 CYBIRD Booth https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/img/201805294381-O2-K2t1g0tf) Ikemen Series World Tour 2018 Dates Country/region Event Title July 5 - 8 USA Anime Expo 2018 Aug 10 - 14 Taiwan Comic Exhibition Aug 31 - Sept 2 Indonesia C3AFA Jakarta Sept 29 - 30 Philippines Cosplay Mania Nov 30 - Dec 2 Singapore C3AFA Singapore The first stop of the Ikemen Series World Tour 2018 will be Anime Expo 2018 at the Los Angeles Convention Center in July. (Logo: https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/img/201805294381-O3-RcGKDsx3) At the end of May this year, CYBIRD released the English version of the popular Japanese mobile "otome" (maiden) game, Ikemen Revolution: Love & Magic in Wonderland. The booth will have original merchandise for both the newest title, and CYBIRD's super popular title, Ikemen Sengoku: Romances Across Time. (Image: Artwork for merchandise drawn by TCB https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/img/201805294381-O4-pOvCp8xu) This year's merchandise will feature original illustrations of characters from both games. Ikemen Sengoku's artist Shiro Yamada and Ikemen Revolution's artist TCB have created gorgeously detailed and sexy illustrations to coordinate with the "Splash of Love" theme. There will be several thrilling events for fans to participate in. Last year, at Anime Expo 2017, hundreds of fans lined up for a chance to experience "Kabe Don" with famous Japanese cosplayer Hiroto. He is coming back this year, with a new event called "Doki Doki Dice Time" which includes last year's favorites: Kabe Don and back hug, plus new exciting situations: Proposal and "Ago Kui." Be sure to check it out for your very own real-life otome game experience. Event Info Event: Anime Expo 2018 Location: Los Angeles Convention Center, Booth 1206 Dates: July 5 - 8 About CYBIRD Co., Ltd. Main Offices: Mansard Daikanyama, 10-1 Sarugakucho, Shibuya, Tokyo CEO: Shuji Utsumi Founded: 1998 Business: Mobile content services, mobile business consultation and more. Website: http://www.cybird.co.jp/en/ View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cybird-to-organize-first-world-tour-for-fans-of-ikemen-series-otome-mobile-games-with-over-17-million-downloads-300656207.html SOURCE CYBIRD Co., Ltd. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Electro Power Systems S.A. (EPS): Tender Offer Initiated by ENGIE - Repayment of the EIB Financing and Possible Rights Issue PARIS and MILAN, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ENGIE ' s mandatory tender offer initiated by ENGIE now extended to the warrants held by the European Investment Bank ( EIB ) EPS will proceed with the early repayment of the first 10 million tranche of the EIB financing , and the two other tranches, for a total of 20 million not drawn down , will be cancelled Repayment as well as financing and setup of necessary resources for the development of the company will occur upon completion of the tender offer and could be financed through a capital increase with preferential subscription rights (Rights Issue), to which ENGIE would participate as well, for an amount of around 30 million, for which the issuance price would be equal to the tender offer price, i.e. 9.50 per new share, subject to market conditions allowing to setup an issuance price below the share price, and which would take place before expiring of the prepayment period granted by the EIB, thus on 6 September 2018 at the latest Electro Power Systems S.A. (EPS), technology pioneer in energy storage systems and microgrids, listed on the French-regulated market Euronext Paris (EPS:FP) - in parallel with the filing by ENGIE, through its subsidiary GDF International, of the simplified tender offer - has reached an agreement with EPS, ENGIE and the EIB with respect to the 30 million financing granted by the EIB in 2017. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/633003/EPS_Logo.jpg ) Following ENGIE's acquisition of around 56.1% of EPS' share capital and voting rights, which closed on 7 March 2018, the EIB considered its support to innovation and growth sectors, in the context of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), as accomplished. The EIB has therefore indicated to EPS its intention to exercise the change of control provision and to ask for the early repayment of the first tranche of 10 million drawn-down in June 2017. This first tranche did not accrue interest but was linked to the issuance of 660,513 warrants to the EIB, each giving the right to subscribe to one EPS share from 1st July 2017. The EIB indicated its intention to tender its warrants to the tender offer, which has therefore been extended by ENGIE to them at a price of 9.30 per warrant (i.e. a price, net of the 0.20 exercise price, equivalent to the 9.50 per EPS share). While the finance contract provided for a 30-day repayment period, the EIB agreed to extend this period to 120 days for the repayment of the first tranche of 10 million, i.e. until 6 September 2018. The two other tranches, for a total of 20 million not drawn down, will be cancelled. In order to select the financing solution that best protects the interests of EPS and of all of its shareholders, EPS is contemplating different options. The preferred option is a capital increase with preferential subscription rights (Rights Issu), for an amount of around 30 million, that will allow all the shareholders of EPS and the acquirers of preferential subscription rights to participate to the new financing strategy of the company. The issuance price would be equal to the tender offer price, i.e. 9.50 per new share, subject to market conditions allowing to setup an issuance price below the EPS share price. The capital increase would take place after closing of the tender offer and before expiring of the prepayment period granted by the EIB, thus on 6 September 2018 at the latest. ENGIE has ensured EPS of its support to take part in the refinancing of the first tranche and therefore contemplates, in case of completion of the abovementioned capital increase, to freely subscribe up to the percentage of the rights that it will hold following the tender offer, for an amount enabling the success of the transaction, it being specified that the subscription by ENGIE for an amount exceeding 10 million remains subject to the internal approval procedures pertaining to the ENGIE group. Information to the public A prospectus drafted in French language, comprising (i) the reference document of EPS that will be filed with the Autorite des Marches Financiers ("AMF") and (ii) a note d'operation (including a summary of the prospectus), subject to the AMF visa, will be made available to the public. EPS draws the attention of the public on the existence of risk factors that will be included in the reference document and the note d'operation. Disclaimer This press release is for information purposes only and the information contained herein do not, and shall not, in any circumstances, constitute a public offering by EPS nor an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe to shares in EPS in any jurisdiction (including France and Italy). This press release does not constitute or form part of an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe for securities in France. The securities referred to herein may not be and will not be offered or sold to the public in France. This announcement is not a prospectus within the meaning of Directive 2003/71/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 4 November 2003, as amended (together, the "Prospectus Directive"). With respect to the Member States of the European Economic Area which have implemented the Prospectus Directive (each a "Relevant Member State"), no action has been undertaken or will be undertaken to make an offer to the public of the securities referred to herein requiring the publication of a prospectus in any Relevant Member State. As a result, the securities may not and will not be offered in any Relevant Member State, except in accordance with the exemptions set forth in Article 3(2) of the Prospectus Directive, or under any other circumstances which do not require the publication by EPS of a prospectus pursuant to Article 3 of the Prospectus Directive and/or to applicable regulations of that Relevant Member State. This press release is not an offer of securities for sale in the United States or any other jurisdiction. Securities may not be sold or offered in the United States unless they are registered or are exempt from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended. EPS does not intend to register any portion of this offering in the United States or to conduct a public offering of securities in the United States. In the United Kingdom, this press release is only being distributed to, and is only directed at, persons that (i) are "investment professionals" falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (as amended) (the "Order"), (ii) are persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) ("high net worth companies, unincorporated associations etc.") of the Order or (iiii) are other persons to whom an invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity (within the meaning of section 21 the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000) in connection with the issue or sale of any securities may otherwise lawfully be communicated or caused to be communicated (all such persons in (i), (ii) and (iii) together being referred to as "relevant persons"). In the United Kingdom, this press release is directed only at relevant persons and must not be acted on or relied on by persons who are not relevant persons. Any investment or investment activity to which this press release relates is available only to relevant persons and will be engaged in only with relevant persons. The distribution of this document in certain countries may constitute a breach of applicable law. The persons in possession of this announcement shall then get knowledge of any local restrictions and shall comply with these restrictions. The information contained in this document does not constitute an offer of securities for sale in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan. It may be unlawful to distribute this press release in certain jurisdictions. This press release is not for distribution in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan. About EPS Electro Power Systems (EPS) operates in the sustainable energy sector, specialising in storage solutions and microgrids that enable intermittent renewable sources to be transformed into a stable power source. Listed on the French-regulated market Euronext (EPS:FP), EPS is part of the ENGIE group and is listed in the CAC Mid & Small and the CAC All-Tradable indices. Its registered office is in Paris and conducts its research, development and manufacturing in Italy. Thanks to technology covered by 130 patents and applications, combined with more than 10 years of R&D, the Group develops utility scale energy storage systems to stabilize electrical grids that are heavily penetrated by renewable sources in developed countries and microgrids in emerging economies to power off-grid areas at a lower cost than fossil fuels. As of 31 December 2017, EPS has installed and has under commissioning an aggregate of 48 large scale projects, including off-grid hybrid systems powered by renewables and energy storage that provides energy to over 165,000 customers every day, with a total capacity output of 47MWh systems in 21 countries worldwide, including Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Ziften Enters Germany with Microsoft Azure-Powered Endpoint Security Solution; Partners with Microsoft Windows Defender ATP Reseller sepago Ziften partners with sepago delivering a cloud-based, "single pane of glass" to detect and respond to advanced cyber-attacks and breaches on all endpoints COLOGNE, Germany, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ziften, a leading provider of all-the-time visibility and control for client devices, servers, and cloud VMs, today announced its entry into the German cybersecurity market in partnership with IT services and solutions partner sepago to assist with the planning, implementation, operation and support services for the Ziften Zenith security platform. sepago becomes the newest partner in Ziften's Activate Partner Program and joins via Ziften's Fast Start program for onboarding Microsoft Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) channel partners. This follows Ziften's previously announced strategic collaboration with Microsoft, and integration of its Zenith endpoint detection and response (EDR) platform with Windows Defender ATP. The integrated solution provides joint customers with a cloud-based, "single pane of glass" to detect, view, investigate, and respond to advanced cyber-attacks and breaches on Windows, macOS, and Linux endpoints including physical, virtual, and cloud-based systems. "Ziften is 100% focused on delivering customer value through channel partners", said Greg McCreight, SVP Worldwide Channels, Ziften. "With our Fast Start program, we provide hands-on partnership to existing Microsoft channel partners, rapidly enabling them to solve customer's post-breach security challenges. sepago is one of the first joint Ziften and Microsoft security partners in EMEA giving us a huge opportunity working together to disrupt the endpoint security market in Germany. Working with sepago, a leading Microsoft partner and security expert, we expect quick success in the market." "As a Microsoft channel partner, teaming with Ziften to offer their Zenith security platform integrated with Microsoft Windows Defender ATP was a perfect business and technology fit", said Paul Luetke Wissing, Managing Director, sepago. "All our customers stand to benefit from the seamless integration between Zenith and Windows Defender ATP giving them protection and deep visibility across their Windows and non-Windows systems. Ziften has been easy to work with, and supportive throughout the entire process. We expect to be extremely successful offering this powerful security solution to our customers and providing the planning, implementation, operation and support services for the Ziften security solution." Together, Ziften, sepago, and Microsoft help organizations speed detection of attacks and zero-day exploits, uncover the full scope of a breach, quickly respond to contain attacks and prevent recurrence, and increase overall security operations productivity. The integrated, cloud-powered approach supports the most complex, multi-endpoint, multi-cloud enterprise environments, giving commercial and government customers the capability to: Extend Windows Defender ATP to macOS and Linux Systems: Customers can easily extend post-breach detection, investigation, and response to any asset, anywhere - client devices, servers, and cloud VMs. They get an integrated "single pane of glass" supporting Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. Customers can easily extend post-breach detection, investigation, and response to any asset, anywhere - client devices, servers, and cloud VMs. They get an integrated "single pane of glass" supporting Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. Secure Multi-Cloud, Windows and Linux Environments: Organizations can readily overcome cloud monitoring and security concerns with visibility and control of all virtual operating systems deployed across any cloud service provider. Organizations can readily overcome cloud monitoring and security concerns with visibility and control of all virtual operating systems deployed across any cloud service provider. Conduct 6 Month, Lookback Forensics: Customers can instantaneously search 6 months of rich machine timeline unifying security events from Windows, macOS, and Linux systems both physical and virtual. About Ziften: Ziften delivers all-the-time visibility and control for any asset, anywhere - client devices, servers, and cloud VMs. Our unified systems and security operations (SysSecOps) platform empowers IT and security operations teams to quickly repair user impacting endpoint issues, reduce their overall risk posture, speed security threat response, and increase operations productivity. Ziften's secure architecture delivers continuous, streaming endpoint monitoring and historical data collection for large and mid-sized enterprises, governments, and managed security service providers (MSSP). https://ziften.com About sepago: sepago are the IT consultants for automated application provisioning, virtualization, cloud computing and IT security. We support medium and large enterprises on their path to digital transformation and ensure users can work safely and effectively. Our conceptional strength, business management knowledge, technical expertise, and solutions of our partners Microsoft and Citrix flow into your IT projects. Founded 2002 in Cologne, sepago has grown tremendously and runs business locations in Cologne, Hamburg and Munich. https://sepago.de/en Ziften Media Contact: sepago Media Contact: Zonic Group Public Relations pr@sepago.de Gregory Cross gcross@zonicgroup.com Logo- https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/696643/ziften_logo_color_Logo.jpg [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Wirecard Expands Cooperation With ENIO to Increase Digitalization and Convenience of Payments at E-charging Stations Across Europe ASCHHEIM, Germany and GRAZ, Austria, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ENIO supplies advanced technological solutions for the construction and operation of e-mobility charging infrastructures Wirecard, the leading specialist in digital financial technology, is to equip ENIO's network of e-charging stations with contactless payment methods Wirecard, the international innovation leader in the field of digital financial technology, is expanding its collaboration with ENIO - the Austrian company supplying technologically leading solutions for the development and operation of charging infrastructure for e-mobility. Wirecard and ENIO have been cooperating since 2016 to make electric mobility even more attractive for consumers. As a service provider, ENIO operates a Europe-wide service network of over 8,000 electric car charging stations for its customers. Two years ago, Wirecard and ENIO together launched an app with which consumers can find nearby charging stations from cooperating operators and pay on site fully digitally via the app. From now on, users of ENIO's e-mobility infrastructure can also pay with contactless Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards at the charging points without having to install the ENIO app in advance. Fritz Vogel, CEO and Partner of ENIO said, "In order to ensure that everybody has access to e-mobility, our aim was to create an innovative infrastructure, which in addition to numerous other aspects, includes advanced payment options. In doing so, we are relian on our partner Wirecard, who, over the past few years, has demonstrated innovative power and reliability in terms of our app and now, for the card-based solution as well. Further major projects with Wirecard are already in the pipeline with the aim of increasing customer satisfaction still further. Ultimately, we have identified the need for approximately 500,000 new charging stations across Europe over the next five years, with an additional four million required by 2030." Roland Toch, Managing Director at Wirecard CEE, adds, "We are delighted to expand our partnership with ENIO, one of the market leaders in the operation of e-charging stations, and support them with innovative digital payment methods. Together, we can significantly increase the use of e-mobility solutions across the whole of Europe and further drive forward the digitisation of payment processes in the mobility sector." About Wirecard: Wirecard AG is a global technology group that supports companies in accepting electronic payments from all sales channels. As a leading independent supplier, the Wirecard Group offers outsourcing and white label solutions for electronic payments. A global platform bundles international payment acceptances and methods with supplementary fraud prevention solutions. With regard to issuing own payment instruments in the form of cards or mobile payment solutions, the Wirecard Group provides companies with an end-to-end infrastructure, including the requisite licences for card and account products. Wirecard AG is listed on the Frankfurt Securities Exchange (TecDAX, ISIN DE0007472060, WDI). For further information about Wirecard, please visit http://www.wirecard.com or follow us on Twitter @wirecard. About ENIO: ENIO supplies technologically advanced hardware, firmware and software solutions for the construction and operation of e-mobility charging infrastructures. Operators of ENIO's charging stations receive support during the set-up process and during operation of the infrastructure. Our exceptional software - encompassing the software service platform through to full operational support - is available to exactly the extent you require. Already today, ENIO operates more than 8,000 charging points for customers right across Europe, from Norway to Croatia. It is important for us to offer scalable, reliable and secure solutions in the form of ENIO-ETSweb, which remains both flexible and innovative. Our aim is to maintain our position as a leading technology company in the field of e-mobility infrastructure. Wirecard media contact: Wirecard AG Jana Tilz Tel.: +49(0)89-4424-1363 Email: jana.tilz@wirecard.com ENIO media contact: ENIO GmbH Ing. Mag. Friedrich Vogel Tel.: +43(0)664-340-84-60 Email: friedrich.vogel@enio.at [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] PayScale Reveals Top Employers Where Employees Feel Fairly Paid SEATTLE, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today PayScale, Inc., the leader in precise, on-demand cloud compensation solutions for businesses and individuals, announced its second round of 2018 Hero Award recipients featuring the top 100 organizations where employees feel fairly paid. Employees who feel they are paid fairly are more satisfied and more engaged with their work and are more likely to be retained by the organizations for which they work. Its critical for organizations to think about their pay brand and ensure people feel good about the exchange of value compensation for investment of effort because when employees lack information, theyre not likely to give you the benefit of the doubt, commented PayScale Vice President Lydia Frank. Employees are more likely to feel fairly paid when companies are transparent about their pay strategy and practices. There really is no downside to sharing your organizations approach to compensation, but theres a well-researched downside to remaining silent. According to the recent report, "Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2018: The Rise of the Social Enterprise," Josh Bersin commented on its findings, "Organizations need to do a much better job of paying people in ways that matter to them, creating more transparency in the process, and giving people more information about why compensation decisions are made the way they are. Everyone feels personally invested in their pay, bonus, and benefits, so in many ways this is the most powerful lever we have as leaders." The PayScale Hero Awards feature employers who get high marks from their workforce on key employee engagement metrics. PayScales second Hero Awards go to the organizations where employees feel they are paid fairly, as voted on by their employees. The top organizations awarded PayScale Hero status have an impressive 70 percent of respondents saying they feel fairly paid. PayScale included organizations where at least 40 percent of employees reported high pay fairness. By contrast, only 21 percent of workers overall feel fairly paid according to recent PayScale research. The companies awarded PayScale Hero status have at least twice as many employees who feel fairly compensated. Companies with a 40 percent or higher fair pay sentiment ranking include: Embassy Suites Hotels NetApp Vmware The MITRE Corporation U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Patterson Dental Co Roche Diagnostics Corporation Philips Medical Systems Asante Health System Fairview Health Services Kellogg Co Marathon Petroleum Company The Hanover Insurance Company U.S. Air Force U.S. Army Procter & Gamble Co Federal Bureau of Investigation Leonardo DRS Trader Joe's Company Costco Wholesale Company Stanford Healthcare Tenneco Inc National Aeronautics and Space Administration Aerotek Boars Head Provisions CSX Corp City of Austin CommunityCare Discount Tire Co Duke University Medical Center Dyncorp International Facebook Inc First RF Corporation Frontier Communications Inc. Intuit Inc. Kinder Morgan Inc. Kraft Heinz Company Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company TIAA-CREF U.S. Navy World Wide Technology, Inc. Wyndham Worldwide FedEx Freight The Lincoln Financial Group U.S. Federal Aviation Administration Amedisys, Inc. Dow Chemical Co Encompass Home Health Exelon Corporation HNTB Corporation Norfolk Southern Corporation Oshkosh Corporation Penske Truck Leasing LLC U.S. Department of Homeland Security Virginia Mason Medical Center Shell Oil Company Texas Instruments, Inc. Veterans Health Administration American Airlines Concentra Medical Gannett Fleming Inc. General Electric Energy SGT Inc ATI Physical Therapy Bbva Compass Caliber Collision Ericsson Inc. General Motors Corporation Massachusetts Institute of Technology Syngenta Army National Guard Blue Cross Blue Shield Crowe Horwath LLP Delta Air Lines Inc NRG Energy, Inc. State of Ohio Teamhealth, Inc. Textron, Inc. U.S. Postal Service Wawa, Inc. Workday, Inc. Covance, Inc Google, Inc. Hyatt Hotels Kaiser Permanente Pfizer, Inc. State of California Geico Indiana University Bloomington International Paper Co Lincoln Property Company Novartis Progressive Casualty Insurance Company Qualcomm Salesforce.com, Inc. The Trane Company Fluor Corporation Pratt and Whitney Southwire Company www.payscale.com/hero-awards Methodology Employees were asked to rank the statement "I feel that I am paid fairly" on a five-point scale from 1 Strongly Disagree to 5 Strongly Agree. High Pay Fairness represents the percentage of employees selecting a 4 or 5. Employers are included in the list if at least 40 percent of employees report high pay fairness. About PayScale: PayScale offers modern compensation software and the most precise, real-time, data-driven insights for employees and employers alike. More than 6,500 customers, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, use PayScale to power pay decisions for more than 18 million employees. These companies include Dish Network, Getty Images, Skullcandy, Time Warner, T-Mobile, Macy's, Sunsweet, UnitedHealth Group, Stihl and Wendy's. For more information, please visit: www.payscale.com or follow PayScale on Twitter: https://twitter.com/payscale. Press Contact: Erica Beyer Email: erica@fireflycmns.com Tel: 206.321.0727 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Ipreo and ACE Consensus Partner to Support Investor Relations Professionals Ipreo to bring ACE Consensus functionality to European investor relations universe LONDON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ipreo, a leading global provider of market intelligence and productivity solutions to corporate investor relations and capital markets professionals, announced an exclusive partnership with UK-based ACE Consensus, helping to bring investor relations and management teams powerful insight into market expectations. ACE Consensus operates the industry's most comprehensive toolkit dedicated to the compilation, maintenance, updating, standardization, publishing, and reporting of analyst-based consensus. Its proprietary approach involves creating bespoke templates of key performance indicators for each company, dynamically linked to estimates sourced from earnings models. Consensus data can be reported through a variety of outputs, including tabular formats as well as interactive visualizations suitable for both internal and external consumption. "Especially with European companies facing the impact of a post-MIFID II world, investor relations teams are more often becoming the most trusted source of consensus estimates on their companies," said Paul Hebert, EVP, Global Corporate Solutions at Ipreo. "ACE helps issurs streamline consensus management, inform the market, and optimize internal reporting. With ACE, IR teams can leverage market expectations to provide strategic insights that help senior management make better-informed operational decisions." Alex Money, founder and managing director of ACE Consensus, said, "Ipreo has built a strong reputation over the last ten years for providing tools to the corporate IR community to help them work efficiently and think strategically. ACE Consensus shares Ipreo's view on the significance of company-compiled consensus following MIFID II, and is looking forward to working with Ipreo to help companies meet the rising demand from market participants for clear and accurate information to make strategic decisions." Ipreo clients can reach out to their account executive or account manager, or email aceconsensus@ipreo.com for more information. About Ipreo Ipreo powers the networks that connect capital to ideas. We are a leading global provider of financial services technology, data and analytics, supporting all participants in the capital-raising process, including banks, public and private companies, institutional and individual investors, as well as research, asset management and wealth management firms. Our unique, cross-asset class solutions equip our clients with the information and tools they need for more effective decision-making and a more efficient workflow. Ipreo has nearly 2000 people serving clients in every major financial hub around the world. For more information, visit www.ipreo.com. About ACE Consensus ACE adds value to the consensus management workflow of listed companies. Our proprietary approach makes gathering consensus fast, accurate and painless for both companies and analysts. ACE's digital platform combines a processing engine with an interactive visualization deck, to deliver detailed and high-quality insight into market expectations. ACE's founder and managing director is Dr. Alex Money; a former fund manager with over 20 years of professional experience. Incorporated in 2013, ACE's investors include the University of Oxford's business school, venture capital, senior executives from industry, and management. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Janam Wins Manufacturer of the Year Award for Second Consecutive Year Varlink recognizes Janam's excellence and innovation WOODBURY, New York, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Janam Technologies LLC, a leading provider of rugged mobile computers that scan barcodes and communicate wirelessly, announced today that it has been named 2018 Manufacturer of the Year by Varlink. This marks the second consecutive year (and third time overall) that Janam has won this prestigious award. KEY FACTS Varlink's Manufacturer of the Year award honors partner excellence and Varlink's thriving relationship with a mobile computing manufacturer. The award recognizes a supplier that demonstrates year-over-year business growth and the ability to always deliver innovative products and superior service and support. Earning the Manufacturer of the Year award is a testament to the strength of Janam's relationship with Varlink and the added value the company brings to the mobile computing market. As a top performing business partner, Janam plays a critcal role in Varlink's ability to deliver best-in-class solutions to its customers. Varlink presented long-term partner Janam with the Manufacturer of the Year award during its recent Meet the Manufacturer event. This exciting annual event brings together leading hardware manufacturers with IT resellers, solution providers and system integrators to explore the best ways to address enterprise customers' business challenges. As a leading Value Added Distributor of mobile computing hardware, Varlink is committed to helping manufacturers like Janam expand their reseller base and grow their business in the U.K. SUPPORTING QUOTES Robert Hurt , General Manager, EMEA, Janam Technologies "Partnerships prosper when both companies are committed to excellence. Our strong relationship with Varlink is a driving force behind the significant business growth we have both achieved over the past year. Janam is honored to be recognized two years in a row by Varlink for our unwavering focus on innovation and for delivering highly-competitive offerings." Mike Pullon, CEO, Varlink "Varlink recognizes that the service that we give to our customers is heavily reliant on the relationships that we have with our vendors. Our Manufacturer of the Year award goes to a vendor that has excelled in developing our relationship. We were delighted to present an award to Janam in recognition of their commitment to building an outstanding partnership and for bringing Varlink into significant opportunities that they have cultivated." SUPPORTING RESOURCES Learn more about Janam: www.janam.com Follow Janam on Facebook: www.facebook.com/janamtechnologies Follow Janam on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/janam-technologies Follow Janam on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JanamTech About Janam Janam Technologies LLC is a provider of rugged, handheld computing devices for mobile workers. Janam combines deep industry knowledge with advanced technologies to deliver products and accessories that increase productivity, reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction. Specializing in purpose-built mobile computers that scan barcodes and communicate wirelessly, Janam offers products that are designed to run mission-critical applications in retail, healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing and logistics. For more information, visit www.janam.com. Products or services mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/128126/janam_technologies_llc.jpg [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] RiskIQ's Q1 Mobile Threat Landscape Report Finds Cryptocurrency and Feral Apps Dominate; Malicious Apps in Global App Stores Decline Key Findings: Cryptomining apps are on the rise Feral apps are down but still the most blacklisted type of app Total apps increase, but the blacklist gets shorter Certain permissions are indicators of threat activity SAN FRANCISCO, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- RiskIQ, the global leader in digital threat management, today released its Mobile Threat Landscape Q1 2018 Report, which analyzed 120 mobile app stores and more than two billion daily scanned resources. The findings showed that taking advantage of the popularity and volatility of the cryptocurrency landscape is paying off for threat actors via the mobile attack vector and that malicious apps leveraged by nation-state actors are becoming more prominent. In March, an app called Calendar 2, which appeared in the Apple App Store, began mining Monero digital currency on user devices. Although the app disclosed this activity and offered the option for users to pay fees instead or use the app with all advanced features disabled the app developers set mining as the default option, which meant users would have to opt-out rather than opt-in. The app described mining as "free" for the user, which is misleading because of the significant energy and computing costs associated with mining activity. Ultimately, bugs that caused the app to continue mining, despite users opting out and used excessive CPU usage, caused the developer to pull the app from the store after a short period. Also in Q1, RiskIQ issued an alert warning of blacklisted apps masquerading as or associating themselves with Bitcoin exchanges, Bitcoin wallets, or just cryptocurrency in general. These are indicative of the rise of digital currencies and their attractiveness as an income stream for both crooks and legitimate businesses. The report also showd that malicious mobile apps continued to decline, despite the number of total apps observed by the company increasing over the last four quarters. In Q1, 21,948, or 1.4%, of the total of 1,508,825 newly observed apps were blacklisted, which is a lower percentage than in the previous four quarters. The numbers of blacklisted feral apps declined for the fourth-straight quarter, from 3,507 in Q4 2017 to 1,981 in Q1 2018, but still represents a significant portion of all blacklisted apps; forty-six percent of feral apps were blacklisted in Q1 2018. Meanwhile, Google hosted 8,287 blacklisted apps in Q1, which is consistent with previous quarters and outpaces the next most blacklisted store, AndroidAPKDescargar, by 4,595. Although the Play Store consistently had high numbers of blacklisted apps between Q3 2017 and Q1 2018, its rate of blacklisted apps has hovered around a relatively modest five percent. The report found that many blacklisted apps shared several of the same permissions. Eighty-six percent of apps blacklisted in Q1 claimed the READ_SMS permission, which allows the app to read messages and can be used for any number of nefarious purposes, including circumventing two-factor authentication. Most of the apps that can read messages can also track location, read and write to the call log, generate alert windows, change settings and other dubious requests. Among apps blacklisted in the Google Play Store, 1,207 access the phone's camera, nearly 800 of which also record location data and about 600 record audios. For specific metrics or to learn more, download the RiskIQ Mobile Threat Landscape Q1 2018 Report here: https://www.riskiq.com/research/2018-q1-mobile-threat-landscape-report/ About RiskIQ RiskIQ is the leader in digital threat management, providing the most comprehensive discovery, intelligence, and mitigation of threats associated with an organizations digital presence. With more than 75 percent of attacks originating outside the firewall, RiskIQ allows enterprises to gain unified insight and control over web, social and mobile exposures. Trusted by thousands of security analysts, RiskIQs platform combines advanced internet data reconnaissance and analytics to expedite investigations, understand digital attack surfaces, assess risk and take action to protect the business, brand and customers. Based in San Francisco, the company is backed by Summit Partners, Battery Ventures, Georgian Partners and MassMutual Ventures. Visit https://www.riskiq.com or follow us on Twitter. Try RiskIQ Community Edition for free by visiting https://www.riskiq.com/community/ 2018 RiskIQ, Inc. All rights reserved. RiskIQ is a registered trademark of RiskIQ, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are property of their respective owners. Contact Deb Montner Montner Tech PR dmontner@montner.com 203-984-7861 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Bestmile Joins Renovo's AWare Automated Mobility Ecosystem to Enable Robotaxi Fleet Management at Scale LAUSANNE, Switzerland and CAMPBELL, Calif., May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bestmile, the leading mobility services platform used to operate, manage, and optimize highly automated vehicle fleets, today announced it has joined mobility operating system (OS) maker Renovos AWare Ecosystem. The integration of Bestmiles Mobility Services Platform makes highly automated vehicles using Renovos AWare OS fleet ready, as Bestmiles platform can be used to deploy, manage and optimize automated mobility on demand robotaxi services using these vehicles regardless of type or the automated driving system used. Image of Renovo branded automated vehicles with Bestmile fleet operator dashboard and traveler app inset Renovo builds AWare, an Operating System for Automated Mobility For new mobility services to deliver on their promise to transform transportation, highly automated vehicles must be able to work together and use data from multiple sources to intelligently optimize performance, said Raphael Gindrat, CEO of Bestmile. We share Renovos vision of an open, interoperable, on-demand ecosystem where best-in-class technologies combine to bring about optimized autoated mobility safely, quickly and economically, and are pleased to be a part of this ecosystem. Bestmiles technology enables highly automated vehicles to work together as intelligent fleets, delivering on-demand services with automated dispatching, traveler communication, route optimization, pooling, and energy and maintenance management. Advanced matching algorithms process traveler, vehicle and third-party data to send the right vehicle to the right place at the right time. Data intelligence and machine learning constantly improve system performance. Service providers use the platform to configure service areas, define key performance metrics such as vehicle utilization and wait times, and monitor services in real time. Renovos AWare OS offers an open ecosystem of best-in-class technologies to make the deployment of highly automated vehicles in fleets safer, more secure and more efficient, said Chris Heiser, co-founder and CEO of Renovo. With Bestmile joining this ecosystem, our customers deploying automated mobility fleets now have access to Bestmiles technology which offers a leading comprehensive technology suite to manage them. We will be using Bestmiles Mobility Services Platform to help manage the Renovo fleet in California. Renovos AWare OS allows diverse mobility technologies to work together to enable automated vehicles to operate safely and efficiently. This is important as automated mobility providers need to integrate with a wide range of embedded and external technologies such as onboard sensors, cameras, 3D mapping, remote access and control, and more. The results of Bestmile and Renovos integration partnership will be shown later this year in San Jose, Calif., when Renovos double-digit fleet of highly automated vehicles will be demonstrated, managed by Bestmile, in a configuration delivering on-demand, door-to-door robotaxi services. The Bestmile platform has the tools mobility operators need to manage their mobility services, including a control center operator dashboard for autonomous fleet management and apps that travelers need to book rides, view vehicle locations and ETAs, and reach their destinations via optimized routes. The joint activities will provide valuable data for Renovo, Bestmile and its partners on the performance of passenger management, routing, vehicle tele-operation, sensors and lasers, 3D mapping, real-time traffic detection and response, and more. AWare is already powering highly automated vehicle fleets including Renovos own on public roads today, and Bestmiles technology is managing fleets on public streets and private sites on three continents. Bestmile joins the AWare ecosystem along with a growing list of leading companies in the automated mobility sector including Samsung, Verizon, Velodyne LiDAR, Parsons, INRIX, Argus Cyber Security, CARMERA, Affectiva, Phantom Auto, Metamoto, Civil Maps, Understand.ai and others. About Bestmile Bestmile empowers mobility providers to deploy, manage and optimize autonomous and human-driven vehicle fleets, supporting fixed-route and on-demand services, regardless of the vehicle brand or type. Bestmiles mobility platform allows operators to support multi-modal, multi-service offerings in a safe and efficient manner by integrating autonomous vehicles in the existing transportation ecosystem. Bestmiles autonomous mobility service platform is being used daily in shared electric autonomous vehicles in pedestrian areas and public roads. Incorporated in 2014, Bestmile has global offices in San Francisco (USA) and Lausanne (Switzerland). For more information, visit www.bestmile.com. About Renovo Renovo builds AWare, an Operating System for Automated Mobility. AWare merges software, data analytics, and automotive-grade safety systems into a unified platform that enables a growing range of technologies and services to be combined in Automated Mobility fleet deployments. Renovo is accelerating the commercial realization of Automated Mobility at scale by enabling AWare compatible technologies and services across the widest range of vehicles, fleets, and the cloud. Renovo combines Silicon Valley agility with proven automotive capabilities with a singular commitment to transform the way people and things move. For more information visit: renovo.auto Media Contacts Bestmile Alison Flood +1 (415) 317-4089 bestmile@10fold.com Renovo Mike West +1 (415) 698-8574 Renovo@codewordagency.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at //www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/70529f15-c717-4285-bb66-85995ba5f357 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] BigRentz Executives Put on the Tools to Raise Money for Habitat for Humanity of Orange County Leaders from BigRentz swapped their laptops for hammers and saws to help build desperately needed affordable homes for families in Orange (News - Alert) County, California. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005385/en/ (Left to right) Jim Arabia, VP of Marketing; Dallas Imbimbo, Founder and Chairman; Scott Cannon, CEO; Brian Weaver, VP of Sales at BigRentz at Habitat for Humanity Orange County Leaders Build. (Photo: Business Wire) BigRentz, the nation's largest equipment rental network, donated $25,000 towards the project, "Leaders Build," an annual event organized by Habitat for Humanity of Orange County. Collectively with other businesses Fluidmaster, Antis Roofing & Waterproofing, Parker Aerospace, Toshiba (News - Alert) America Business Solutions, and others, business leaders raised $200,000 benefiting Habitat for Humanity of Orange County. Founder of BigRentz, Dallas Imbimbo, CEO Scott Cannon, VP of Sales Brian Weaver, and VP of Marketing Jim Arabia, spent the day May 18th building frames for four homes that will be used for affordable houses in Orange County, California. Imbimbo, who is a member of the Board of Directors for Habitat OC and BigRentz commented, "Habitat for Humanity of Orange County is close to my heart and I believe everyone deserves a safe place to call their home. Habitat for Humanity helps families build a strong foundation to help change lives for multiple generations. We are honored to be part of the Habitat team." The BigRentz team met veteran Joseph Morales who purchased a Habitat for Humanity of Orange County home in San Juan Capistrano. BigRentz also reeived an award for being one of the non-profit organization's top sponsors. CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Orange County Sharon Ellis commented, "We are extremely grateful to BigRentz for their ongoing support because they are truly making a difference. Simple, affordable homes can transform children's lives." About BigRentz BigRentz is an online construction equipment rental marketplace. Our 1,600 rental partners and 8,000 partner locations represent the largest equipment rental network in the nation. We simplify the procurement and logistics challenges of renting construction equipment. BigRentz rents aerial lift equipment, forklifts and material handlers, earthmoving, compaction equipment, and site services to customers in a variety of industries. Visit www.BigRentz.com. About Habitat for Humanity of Orange County: Creating A World Where Everyone Has A Decent Place To Live Habitat for Humanity of Orange County, a non-profit organization headquartered in Santa Ana, CA (News - Alert) , strives to eliminate substandard housing through advocacy, education and partnership with families and individuals in need to build decent, sustainable and affordable housing. Seeking to put love and faith into action, Habitat for Humanity of Orange County brings people together to build homes, community and hope. Habitat for Humanity families and volunteers have built, repaired and sold more than 300 homes serving more than 1,000 women, men and children in Orange County since 1988. Habitat for Humanity of Orange County is an affiliate of Habitat for Humanity International who works in more than 70 countries. To learn more, visit our website at: www.HabitatOC.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005385/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Tradeshift Raises $250 Million in Series E Funding Round, Bringing Company Valuation to $1.1 Billion Tradeshift, the leader in supply chain payments and marketplaces, today announced that it is raising $250 million in a Series E funding round led by Goldman Sachs and Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments). Additional participation comes from HSBC, H14, GP Bullhound, and Gray Swan, a new venture company established by Tradeshift's founders. The new round of financing brings Tradeshift's total funding to more than $400 million. Company valuation is now at $1.1 billion. The new investors join existing backers, including HSBC, American Express Ventures, CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund, Notion Capital, Santander InnoVentures, and others. Mikkel Hippe Brun, Tradeshift's GM of China and Co-Founder, will join Tradeshift's Board of Directors. "Given the rapid increase in B2B online transactions, online marketplaces are no longer just for consumers. Tradeshift has established itself as a leader in supply chain commerce by enabling corporations around the globe to take greater control of their supply chains," said Darren Cohen, Global Head of Principal Strategic Investments at Goldman Sachs. Vinay Mendonca, Global Head of Product and Propositions, Global Trade & Receivables Finance at HSBC said, "Modernising trade and supply chain solutions is a strategic priority for HSBC. We are investing heavily to enable simpler, better and faster experiences for clients. Our partnership with Tradeshift allows us to provide fully digitised and automated working capital propositions across the entire supply chain ecosystem, supported by the breadth and depth of our global network. We are really excited to offer our clients a full range of integrated propositions across the financing and payments spectrum." "We are very happy with this validation of our vision," said Tradeshift CEO and Co-Founder Christian Lanng. "We have always believed that the future of supply chains is 100 percent digital and that connecting trade is just the first step to a digitally connected economy. This investment will enable us to continue our rapid growth and consolidate our leadership position. We welcome Goldman Sachs and PSP Investments as our newest investors and look forward to their valuable contributions as we enter our next growth phase." Tradeshift enables supply chain payments and marketplaces for more than 1.5 million businesses globally, including large enterprise brands such as Air France-KLM, DHL, Fujitsu (News - Alert) , HSBC, Siemens, Societe Generale, Unilever, and Volvo. The company's ecosystem now enables alternatives for trade financing, spend and receivables management, lending and payments, and private marketplaces, unlocking the $9 trillion of capital trapped in online payments. According to the November 2017 Forrester (News - Alert) report, Vendor Landscape: B2B Business Networks, 2017 To 2018, Tradeshift is cited among companies that "cause other PO/invoice network vendors to change strategy." The funding round will be used for core strategic initiatives, including continued global expansion of Tradeshift in Europe and Asia; growth of transacted volume and value across its platform; and strategic investments into emerging technologies, including blockchain and artificial intelligence via its Frontiers division, which was launched in January 2018. About Tradeshift Tradeshift drives supply chain innovation for the digitally connected economy. As the leader in supply chain payments and marketplaces, the company helps buyers and suppliers digitize all their trade transactions, collaborate on every process, and connect with any supply chain app. More than 1.5 million companies across 190 countries trust Tradeshift to process over half a trillion USD in transaction value, making it the largest global business network for buying and selling. Discover commerce for all at tradeshift.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005500/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] The Pfizer Foundation Announces $5 Million in Grants to Support Women and Families The Pfizer Foundation announced today a new $5 million grant commitment to initiatives in low- and middle-income countries that provide family planning access and education for women and men at the same time children are routinely vaccinated. These new grants build on The Pfizer Foundation's existing grant program by providing a second round of funding to international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) in five African countries where different barriers exist for women to access family planning services, bringing the total program funding to $11.7 million to date. "At Pfizer, we support the belief that women around the world should have access to family planning services and information so that they can make informed decisions that are appropriate for their needs," said Caroline Roan, President of The Pfizer Foundation. "We are proud to be expanding The Pfizer Foundation's support of this innovative approach to family planning, making it easier for underserved women to access family planning services at the same time their children receive critical immunizations to protect them against disease." As of 2017, an estimated 214 million women and girls who wanted to delay or avoid pregnancy were still without access to modern contraception, and the proportion of women with the highest unmet need was in Sub-Saharan Africa (21 percent).i Through each of the four initiatives in five countries (Benin, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi and Uganda), The Pfizer Foundation aims to create opportunities for women and men to access family planning services and information, while reducing the number of clinic visits and increasing health system efficiency. These projects include: An initiative with Save the Children to increase access to quality integrated childhood immunization and family planning services for women and children in three districts of southern Malawi by strengthening the quality of services at integrated outreach clinics, provider training and advocacy meetings with community leaders. to increase access to quality integrated childhood immunization and family planning services for women and children in three districts of southern Malawi by strengthening the quality of services at integrated outreach clinics, provider training and advocacy meetings with community leaders. A partnership with th International Rescue Committee to increase integrated family planning and immunization service access, quality and demand in Ethiopia and Uganda that also engages men through community education. to increase integrated family planning and immunization service access, quality and demand in Ethiopia and Uganda that also engages men through community education. An initiative with World Vision to increase voluntary use of modern family planning methods and immunization through an integrated delivery model in two Kenyan counties with poor maternal and child health. The strategic focus is on mobilizing community health workers, traditional leaders and faith leaders to increase knowledge of the maternal and child health benefits of healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies. to increase voluntary use of modern family planning methods and immunization through an integrated delivery model in two Kenyan counties with poor maternal and child health. The strategic focus is on mobilizing community health workers, traditional leaders and faith leaders to increase knowledge of the maternal and child health benefits of healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies. A program with CARE to improve family planning counseling and clinical skills of healthcare providers while addressing reasons women avoid seeking contraception in Benin, where more than one-third of women have an unmet need for family planning services.ii Among the reasons women avoid family planning are misconceptions about impact on their health or social stigma of being unmarried. An evaluation, conducted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is currently ongoing to better understand what drives the effective integration of immunization and family planning services at each of the four partner INGOs. Insights from this evaluation, which will be published in the fall of 2018 and presented at the International Conference on Family Planning in November in Rwanda, will be used to refine the implementation of these integrated services in the new grant period and potentially inform future funding and programs. About The Pfizer Foundation The Pfizer Foundation is a charitable organization established by Pfizer Inc. It is a separate legal entity from Pfizer Inc. with distinct legal restrictions. The Foundation's mission is to promote access to quality healthcare, to nurture innovation, and to support the community involvement of Pfizer colleagues. i Adding It Up: Investing in Contraception and Maternal and Newborn Health, 2017, Guttmacher Institute https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adding-it-up-contraception-mnh-2017 ii Family Planning 2020. "Benin: FP2020 Core Indicator Summary Sheet: 2017." Accessed May 8, 2018 from http://www.track20.org/download/pdf/2017%20FP2020%20CI%20Handouts/english/Benin%202017%20FP2020%20CoreIndicators.pdf View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005504/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Cell Phone Alerts To Provide "Get Out And Vote" Message Citizen suggests using cell phone and media notifications to get the message out on voting days TORONTO, May 30, 2018 /CNW/ - Evan Kosiner, recipient of the Sovereign's Medal For Volunteers, Caring Canadian Award and a House Of Commons Award, is calling on the Right Honourable Justin P.J. Trudeau, the Honourable Melanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage, and the Canadian Radio-tlevision and Telecommunications Commission to use their power regarding the National Alert Aggregation & Dissemination System (NAAD System) to get the message out to Canadians to go out and vote. Within his letter to the above parties, the suggestion was made, "If due to government bureaucracy it doesn't fall into the "emergency" category, the innovator in me suggests it perhaps it could be conveniently another test day that happens to mention to "Get out and vote!"" With forthcoming provincial and municipal elections, using this system to get Canadians into the voting booth is a viable means and in the public interest. SOURCE Kosiner Family Office [May 30, 2018] Global Waterway Transportation Software Solutions Market Analysis, Growth, Trends & Forecast 2018-2023 - ResearchAndMarkets.com The "Global Waterway Transportation Software Solutions Market - Segmented by Types of Solution, Deployment Type, End-user Vertical & Region - Growth, Trends & Forecast (2018 - 2023)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global waterway transportation software solutions market is expected to register a CAGR of 9.01 %, during the forecast period, 2018-2023. The increasing demand for heavy freight transportation is driving the waterway transportation software solutions market. The demand shift of freight from west to east is a tremendous opportunity for the market. Increasing collaborations and south-south cooperation in the waterborne trade are resulting in the emergence of new markets in economies of Asia-Pacific and the Middle East & Africa. The retail sector deals with a wide range of products, which have specific requirements regarding the processing of the order. This industry is seeking effective solutions to increase efficieny. Moreover, the sector is investing highly on supply chain, so as to remain competitive and gain an edge over the competitors. In the retail industry, transport and logistics are key issues in achieving competitive performance. North America is one of the largest markets for technology-based solutions. It is further expected to be a strong player in the global economy, especially in the development and implementation of new technologies. This implementation of new technologies is driven by the need for better and improved work atmosphere, thus leading to the implementation of various software systems. The industrial sector is growing steadily, along with increasing influence of the internet regarding the sales of industrial goods. Companies Mentioned Sap Se Cognizant (News - Alert) Accenture Plc Veson Nautical Corporation Dnv Gl Aljex Software Inc. Descartes (News - Alert) Systems Group Highjump Software Inc. Trans-I Technologies Inc. Bass Software Ltd Key Topics Covered: 1. Introduction 2. Research Approach and Methodology 3. Executive Summary 4. Market Analysis 5. Market Dynamics 6. Global Waterway Transportation Software Solutions Segmentation 7. Competitive Intelligence - Company Profiles 8. Investment Analysis 9. Future Outlook of Waterway Transportation Software Solutions Market For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/b5ggzv/global_waterway?w=4 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005724/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Octo Receives On-Ramp for the Army's $248M Cloud Computing Enterprise Transformation (ACCENT) Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA) Octo Consulting Group, Inc. (Octo), a premier next-generation IT Federal services provider, has been awarded a spot on the Army's Cloud Computing Enterprise Transformation (ACCENT) Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA). This award expands Octo's cloud and infrastructure core service offerings deeper into the Department of Defense (DoD). As a core component of the Army's Data Center Consolidation Plan (ADCCP), ACCENT enables application owners to acquire commercial cloud-based software-as-a-service ( SaaS (News - Alert) ), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) products, and provides transition support for the migration of enterprise applications to modern cloud architectures. ACCENT allows customers to access cloud service providers (CSPs) from proven government contractors that can provide the necessary consulting and orchestration services to enable seamless transition. "We are elated to have the ability to support the Army and the DoD speed their cloud adoption and leverage Octo's world class cloud migration and engineering capabilities through the ACCENT BOA," said Mehul Sanghani, Octo's CEO. "As a firm we are focused on helping the Federal Government modernize its legacy infrastructure and speed its adoption of next generation IT solutions. We see ACCENT as another way for us to continue that mission. Most importantly, we look forward to expanding our support of our warfighters at home and overseas." ACCENT is also available for decentralized use, in coordination with the Army Application Migration Business Office (AAMBO), by Army and Department of Defense customers that are moving their applications and enterprises to the cloud. About Octo Consulting Group Octo is an industry-leading, award-winning provider of digital services for the Federal Government. As a next-generation provider of technology and modernization services, Octo specializes in providing Agile (News - Alert) software development, user experience design, and cloud engineering services with scalable outcomes. Octo is known for challenging the status quo and continually exploring new ways to deliver value by improving, transforming and optimizing government IT systems. We believe results are a product of analytical and collaborative thinking, and by partnering with our customers, we develop original and strategic solutions to minimize business disruptions while maximizing resources to advance agency missions. Octo is only one of three government consulting companies in the United States to maintain both a CMMI Level 4 for Software Development (CMMI-DEV) appraisal and a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Gold Partnership. Additionally, Octo maintains ISO 9001, ISO 20000, and ISO 27001 certifications. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Octo has offices in Alexandria, Virginia and Columbia, Maryland. Learn more at octoconsulting.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005137/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Electric Imp Revolutionizes Cellular IoT With impCellular Service Electric Imp Inc., a global leader providing secure edge-to-enterprise cloud IoT connectivity, today announced impCellular, bringing seamless and cost-effective cellular communication to its security-first IoT platform. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005593/en/ The Electric Imp IoT Connectivity Platform ensures seamless, reliable and secure connectivity across cellular, WiFi (News - Alert) , Ethernet and other networks to support the most demanding IoT applications. (Graphic: Business Wire) Unlike other cellular IoT solutions on the market, impCellular leverages Electric Imp's unique platform architecture to drastically simplify the process of developing, shipping and maintaining cellular connected devices. With impCellular, customers are never exposed to SIMs, activation, complex price plans or burdensome carrier requirements; connectivity is as easy as applying power. "We developed impCellular specifically to solve the complex, time-consuming and costly development process involved in most cellular IoT projects," said Hugo Fiennes, CEO and Co-founder of Electric Imp. "With the addition of cellular connectivity, our customers have another compelling option to easily, rapidly and cost-effectively achieve zero-install secure connectivity for their IoT applications. The complete connectivity package is combined with our standard edge-to-cloud security and lifecycle management services to help customers maximize the potential of real-time connectivity without the traditional complexities of deploying connected devices at scale." Building on Electric Imp's heritage in WiFi and Ethernet connected devices, hybri operation modes are also supported, allowing devices to opportunistically -- and securely -- use lower cost networks when available. For example, telematics applications can send high volumes of buffered sensor data over WiFi when a truck is at a loading bay, but only send location data and alerts over cellular when moving. Cellular backup can also be used to improve the reliability of stationary applications, such as smart vending machines. One early customer of impCellular is Operant Solar, which developed a mesh networked monitoring system for solar panel installations that initially used imp005-powered WiFi backhaul. "The changes required to move our product to cellular literally took us one afternoon," commented Rod Sugiyama, Operant Solar's COO. "The Electric Imp Platform allows us to provide resilient, trouble-free internet connectivity for photovoltaic inverters at a very attractive cost point." "The Electric Imp cellular product is essential to our portfolio of options for customer connectivity," said Regan Ryan, CTO of energy monitoring and control specialists, GoodMeasure. "It gives our customers the freedom to pick WiFi, Ethernet or LTE (News - Alert) to suit their particular requirements. The energy industry is changing rapidly to meet new challenges and the Electric Imp Cloud's ability to work reliably and consistently across these communications media is just the advantage we need." "One of the most exciting parts of the Electric Imp Platform is the portability of the firmware between different hardware devices. We were able to move our code from a WiFi device to the cellular device in just a few hours," explained Caleb Peterson, a product development engineer with Liberty Pumps. "Cellular connectivity is difficult to get right. To stand up their cellular-based IoT solutions, companies have to work with multiple vendors while investing a lot of time and resources," said Dima Tokar, co-founder and head of research with MachNation. "Electric Imp provides a novel and compelling approach for addressing critical requirements and pain points of cellular connectivity. This type of a solution can help companies overcome the complexity of cellular and accelerate their time-to-market." The initial impCellular product is the high end impC001, which offers LTE cat 1 and 3G operation combined with powerful local processing and a diverse range of application I/O. Models of the impC001 are available for the US, Europe and Australia/New Zealand. Following in Q4 2018 is the impC002, a cost and power optimized variant with a global Cat-M / NB-IoT radio. Pricing for Electric Imp's cellular connectivity is based on the number of devices connected each month, with cellular data allowances automatically pooled across the customer's account and with no charges for devices that do not connect. In the US, devices use T-Mobile, AT&T (News - Alert) and Verizon networks transparently, providing the best coverage available. To learn more about impCellular, visit http://electricimp.com/cellular/cellular-iot-reinvented/. About Electric Imp Electric Imp helps more than 100 manufacturers and enterprises transform the world through the power of secure IoT connectivity. Over a million devices have been built with our highly secure platform as a service, with devices deployed and managed in 105 countries. Our unique solution - featuring fully integrated hardware, OS, security, APIs and cloud services purpose-built for the IoT - dramatically decreases cost and time to market while increasing security, scalability, and flexibility. The Electric Imp platform enables innovative commercial and industrial applications and empowers manufacturers to manage and quickly scale their connected products and services to millions of users. Electric Imp, founded in 2011, is located in Los Altos, California, and Cambridge, England. For more, visit https://electricimp.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005593/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Xcelerate Retail Forum to Address the Current and Future State of AI-Enabled Retail DALLAS, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Symphony RetailAI, the leading global provider of Artificial Intelligence-enabled decision platforms, solutions and customer-centric insights that drive validated growth for retailers and CPG manufacturers, today announced its annual Xcelerate Retail Forum, to be held Oct. 2-4 in Boston. Building on the momentum and success of the last three annual events in the U.S. and Europe, Xcelerate Retail Forum 2018 will include presentations and discussions covering prevailing themes in the grocery retail and consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industries from customer insights, personalized marketing and category management, to supply chain, blockchain and retail operations. Xcelerate will feature an emphasis on the current and emerging role of artificial intelligence in retail, with speakers exploring ways in which AI and machine learning are being used to analyze large amounts of data, identify trends and provide insights that matter to the business. Sessions will highlight how these technologies are enabling high-volume retailers and their CPG partners to complete complex tasks more quickly, improve decision-making and respond faster to market demands. The emergence of artificial intelligence is the single most important development for retailers and CPG suppliers who are committed to creating customer-centric strategies that improve customer loyalty and drive sustained growth, said Dr. Pallab Chatterjee, Chairman and CEO, Symphony RetailAI. Through inspiration from industry leaders and influencers, the Xcelerate Retail Forum will help retailers and suppliers understand how to better leverage their customer data, and ultimately implement machine learning and AI best practices to generate maximum business value. Attendees will experience diverse and thought-provoking presentations, discussions and demonstrations from experts in retail, including corporate leaders, analysts and innovators. In addition to executives from Symphony RetailAI, featured speakers and panelists include: Sahir Anand Managing VP, Research & Strategy, EnsembleIQ Research Solutions Managing VP, Research & Strategy, EnsembleIQ Research Solutions Yego r Anchyshkin CTO, Takeoff Technologies CTO, Takeoff Technologies Michael Casey Senior Advisor, Digital Currency Initiative, MIT Media Lab Senior Advisor, Digital Currency Initiative, MIT Media Lab Maryann Correnti Chief Financial Officer, Heinens Chief Financial Officer, Heinens Sandeep Dadlani Chief Digital Officer, Mars Inc. Chief Digital Officer, Mars Inc. Dennis Host VP Marketing, Coborns Inc. VP Marketing, Coborns Inc. Ken Hughes Leading Consumer & Shopper Behavioralist Leading Consumer & Shopper Behavioralist Jerry LeClair EVP of Merchandising and Marketing, Giant Eagle EVP of Merchandising and Marketing, Giant Eagle Tom Lee SVP and Chief Supply Chain Officer, SpartanNash Jim Montgomery Senior Manager of Category Development, Barilla Group Senior Manager of Category Development, Barilla Group Melissa Muckel Category Management Team Leader, Hormel Foods Category Management Team Leader, Hormel Foods Kevin Stafford VP Marketing, K-VA-T Foods Stores VP Marketing, K-VA-T Foods Stores Steve Strachota EVP Supply Chain, Central & Store Operation and CIO, Southeastern Grocers EVP Supply Chain, Central & Store Operation and CIO, Southeastern Grocers Katie Waeltz Director, Shopper Insights and Analytics, Topco Associates LLC Director, Shopper Insights and Analytics, Topco Associates LLC R Ray Wang Founder & Principal Analyst, Constellation Research Inc. Founder & Principal Analyst, Constellation Research Inc. Mark Wilkinson Head of Space Planning, Pets at Home Ltd. Head of Space Planning, Pets at Home Ltd. Ed Wong SVP Supply Chain and CIO, Smart & Final The 2017 Xcelerate Retail Forums, held in Las Vegas and Paris, drew more than 600 attendees from 156 retailers and CPG companies across 38 countries. At last years event, Symphony RetailAI announced key trends that are forcing unprecedented and rapid changes in the grocery industry, with the release of its Supermarket 2020 vision. This years event will include discussion around the market forces that are driving radical disruption, and how the grocery industry can transform itself with a massive re-imagination of supermarkets and AI-enabled solutions such as CINDE, also announced at last years event. Early bird registration is available through July 31. Find out more information about the Xcelerate event. Additional Resources: Watch highlight videos from previous Xcelerate. See what CINDE, the first digital assistant for grocery and hard goods retail, can do for you. Read the report, Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities in Retail. About Symphony RetailAI Symphony RetailAI is the leading global provider of Artificial Intelligence-enabled decision platforms, solutions and customer-centric insights that drive validated growth for retailers and CPG manufacturers, from customer intelligence to personalized marketing, and merchandising and category management, to supply chain and retail operations. Symphony RetailAI is innovating rapidly to drive faster, more profitable decisions through AI, machine learning and voice technologies. We are trusted by over 1,200 organizations including 15 of the worlds 25 largest grocery retailers, thousands of retail brands, and hundreds of national and regional chains worldwide to help solve their toughest business problems, through AI-powered customer intelligence and retail solutions. Symphony RetailAI was formed in January 2018 incorporating Symphony GOLD and Symphony EYC into the company as the Retail Solutions Division and Customer Intelligence Division respectively. Symphony RetailAI is a SymphonyAI company. More at www.symphonyretailai.com . Follow us on Twitter: @symphonyretail . About SymphonyAI SymphonyAI is a group of companies that provide the leading AI-centric solutions for transforming the business enterprise by driving revenue growth and operational excellence, for the retail, CPG, healthcare and industrial verticals, and for finance, IT and other key enterprise horizontal functions. Founded by Dr. Romesh Wadhwani, SymphonyAI is one of the fastest growing companies in the business-to-business AI solutions sector with revenue this year of $275 million and 1,500 employees. More at www.symphonyai.com . Media Contact Adrienne Newcomb Ketner Group Communications (for Symphony RetailAI) adrienne@ketnergroup.com 512-794-8876 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] MMI Agency Hires Former Global Agency Executive Lee Tuttle HOUSTON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- MMI Agency, a leading media innovation agency in Houston, Texas, today announced that Lee Tuttle has joined the agency as vice president, delivery. He brings more than 30 years of expertise in digital agency operations, e-commerce and technology projects for globally recognized brands and agencies. Tuttle will focus on integrating emerging capabilities within MMI's established set of services, while ensuring the continued delivery of best-in-class work at a global scale. He will be responsible for the organizational design and lean processes needed in today's quickly evolving marketplace, allowing MMI to continue delivering unique capabilities and market differentiators. Tuttle has a track record of digital leadership, improving operations and driving organizational innovation, while remaining laser focused on delivering client results. He is skilled in managing multimillion-dollar digital media budgets for brands across a vast range of verticals, including consumer goods, beauty, luxury, healthcare, technology and finance. Benjamin Spiegel, MMI Agency CEO, said: "I worked closely with Lee in a previous life and he has the rare ability to take blue-sky ideas and unpredictable requests and create scalable solutions thatgenerate winning outcomes for brands. While he is a strategic thinker and technologist at heart, he has also proven to be an inspiring mentor and leader who can motivate and drive people to produce amazing results." Prior to joining MMI, Tuttle was vice president, operations at Catalyst, a WPP company, where he was responsible for the product strategy, service delivery and scalable operations that enabled a local startup to grow into a $100 million digital marketing business. His experience complements MMI's trajectory and mirrors the brands and services the agency is focused on enhancing, as it continues to emerge as a world-leading digital marketing innovator. "Building a scalable operation capable of achieving best-in-class work is my true passion and continuous improvement is in my DNA," Tuttle said. "I also enjoy the challenges associated with high-growth businesses and I'm thrilled to join an organization that will provide those opportunities. The talented team at MMI is passionate and driven, so collaborating with them on how to win, when to scale and how to transform is going to be very exciting." ABOUT MMI AGENCY MMI Agency is a fully integrated innovation agency that delivers unquestionable value through creative, innovative media, insights, communications and social media. MMI Agency tracks consumer behavior to ignite conversations between brands and their consumers at moments that matter most to them. It is this approach that produces results and empowers brands across MMI Agency's diverse client base. For more: www.mmiagency.com. ABOUT THE STAGWELL GROUP The Stagwell Group LLC (the "Stagwell Group") is a registered investment advisory company formed by Mark Penn. The Stagwell Group manages a private equity fund whose portfolio includes more than a dozen collaborative, digital-first agencies. Online at www.stagwellgroup.com. Media Contact: Mairi Morgan MMI Agency 713.929.6900 mairi.morgan@mmiagency.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mmi-agency-hires-former-global-agency-executive-lee-tuttle-300655760.html SOURCE MMI Agency [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] VelocityEHS | MSDSonline Speakers Bring Industry-Leading EHS Expertise to ASSP Safety 2018 Conference CHICAGO, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- VelocityEHS, the global leader in cloud-based environment, health, safety (EHS) and sustainability solutions, will be delivering workshops that address the top concerns of EHS professionals at the ASSP (formerly ASSE) Safety 2018 Professional Development Conference & Exposition. The sessions focus on critical safety and regulatory issues like GHS, root cause analysis and incident investigations. Participants will receive practical, easy-to-follow advice for safeguarding employees and staying compliant, and join in a Q&A with EHS experts from VelocityEHS | MSDSonline. As the regulatory landscape becomes increasingly more complex, companies need better and easier ways to manage their compliance obligations and ensure workplace safety needs are being met, said Glenn Trout, president and CEO of VelocityEHS, and a speaker at ASSP Safety 2018. Just being told what to do is no longer enough; todays safety professionals need interactive exercises that put them into real-life situations to help them fully understand what actions to take in their own facilities. Thats why weve developed sessions like our GHS/HazCom compliance game which allows us to interact with attendees, and speak with them instead of just to them. The VelocityEHS | MSDSonline conference sessions include: Looking for Root Causes? The Problem Might be YOU: Fix Your Adits/Inspections Monday, June 4, 2018 from 4:30 5:30 p.m. Flash Session: Test Your Incident Investigation IQ Tuesday, June 5, 2018 from 10 10:15 a.m. GHS/HazCom: The Game - Can You Pass the Compliance Test? Tuesday, June 5, 2018 from 4:30 5:30 p.m. Show attendees are also encouraged to visit the VelocityEHS | MSDSonline booth (#939) for a first-hand look at how its award-winning software and mobile apps help employers improve worker safety and overcome compliance challenges. With over 13,000 active customers worldwide, more employers trust VelocityEHS and its MSDSonline chemical management solutions to safeguard employees, manage risk and meet their complex regulatory obligations than any other industry software provider. Visit www.EHS.com to learn more. The ASSP Safety 2018 Professional Development Conference & Exposition runs from June 3-6, 2018 at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas. For more information, visit https://safety.assp.org/. About VelocityEHS VelocityEHS is the leading global provider of cloud-based environment, health and safety (EHS) software. Its comprehensive software platform and innovative mobile applications, including its award-winning MSDSonline chemical inventory management solutions, aim to make enterprise-level EHS functionality accessible and affordable to businesses of all sizes, helping them solve complex compliance and regulatory challenges in simple ways. Today, more than 13,000 customers worldwide, from virtually every industry, trust VelocityEHS and its solutions to improve EHS performance. Recognized by the industrys top independent analysts, including leading scores in the Verdantix 2017 Green Quadrant Analysis and 2017 NAEM EHS & Sustainability Software Ratings Report, VelocityEHS helps customers reach their EHS goals faster with quick implementations, affordable solutions and unparalleled customer support. VelocityEHS is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois with locations in Canada, the UK and Australia. For more information, visit www.EHS.com. Media Contact Betsy Utley-Marin 312.881.2307 butleymarin@ehs.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Brilliant Named One of Chicago's Best and Brightest Companies to Work For Five Years in a Row CHICAGO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Brilliant, an award-winning search, staffing and management resources firm specializing in accounting, finance and information technology, was named one of Chicago's Best and Brightest Companies to Work For in 2018 by the National Association for Business Resources (NABR). This marks the fifth consecutive year Brilliant has received the recognition. Each year companies throughout Chicago compete to be named one of Chicago's Best and Brightest Companies to Work For. Only companies that distinguish themselves as having the most innovative and thoughtful human resources approach can be bestowed this honor. "We are proud to be recognized for our employee engagement initiatives five years in a row," says Brilliant CEO Jeff Mariola. "Since our inception in 2009, we have strived to offer an innovative, empowering and inclusive work environment for our team members." He continues, "Our mission is to make people's lives better and that starts with our own colleagues. We believe that our culture and people are our competitive advantage and winning this award five years in a row is validation of that." Key measures evaluated by the NABR include Compensation, Benefits and Employee Solutions; Employee Enrichment, Engagement and Retention; Employee Eduation and Development; Recruitment, Selection and Orientation; Employee Achievement and Recognition; Communication and Shared Vision; Diversity and Inclusion; Work-Life Balance; Community Initiatives; Strategic Company Performance and the Best of the Best Small Business, Medium Business and Large Business. Over 800 companies participated in the competition. Brilliant and 168 other organizations were selected. On July 27, 2018, all winning companies will be honored during a luncheon and awards ceremony at the Drury Lane Conference Center in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois. Mariola and other Brilliant team members will be in attendance to accept the award. For more information, visit www.brilliantfs.com. About Brilliant | Connecting People and Opportunities Brilliant is an award-winning search, staffing and management resources firm specializing in accounting, finance and information technology for the greater Chicago and south Florida labor markets. The firm represents high-quality accounting, finance and information technology talent and matches them with hiring companies throughout various industries including manufacturing, distribution, health care, professional services, retail, legal, technology, real estate, nonprofit organizations, software and hospitality, among others. Many of Brilliant's team members include former hiring managers, and accounting and finance professionals from the Big 4 accounting firms, as well as other leading professionals in the industry. Since its inception in 2009, Brilliant has been recognized on many prestigious lists including being ranked No. 6 on Forbes' 2017 America's Best Professional Recruiting Firms and No. 25 on Forbes 2017 America's Best Executive Recruiting Firmsnot to mention Crain's Chicago Business Fast 50 for three straight years including No. 1 in 2015, Staffing Industry Analysts Fastest-Growing Staffing Firms in the United States for three straight years including No. 2 in 2015, Inavero's Best of Staffing Talent for North America three years in a row, Inc. 5000 for three straight years, Best Places to Work South Florida, 101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For for four straight years, and others. To learn more about Brilliant, visit www.brilliantfs.com, call 312.582.1800 or follow @BrilliantFS on social media. About the Best and Brightest Companies to Work For The Best and Brightest Companies to Work For is a program that provides the business community with the opportunity to gain recognition, showcase their best practices and demonstrate why they are an ideal place for employees to work. This national program celebrates those companies that are making better business, creating richer lives and building a stronger community as a whole. It is presented annually in several markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Houston, Milwaukee, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, in addition to a national program. Nominations are now being accepted. Visit www.thebestandbrightest.com to obtain an application. Media Contact: Laurie Vicente, Sr. Marketing Director, Brilliant, 312.582.1812 Lvicente@brilliantfs.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brilliant-named-one-of-chicagos-best-and-brightest-companies-to-work-for-five-years-in-a-row-300656090.html SOURCE Brilliant [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Chubb Launches New Personal Cyber Protection Coverage Chubb's New Masterpiece Cyber Protection designed to safeguard clients in an evolving cyber landscape WHITEHOUSE STATION, N.J., May 30, 2018 /CNW/ -- Chubb has launched Masterpiece Cyber Protection to help keep clients safe in today's digital world. As a supplement to a Masterpiece Homeowners policy, Chubb's new Cyber coverage offers individuals and families in North America enhanced protections for cyberattacks that lead to extortion and ransomware, financial loss, cyberbullying, cyber disruption, and breach of privacy. Additionally, clients benefit from discounted access to third-party resources, with tools ranging from how to secure network and mobile devices to how to spot signs of online manipulation. Taken together, the policy is designed to help clients proactively protect themselves from cyber risks and minimize their loss if the unexpected happens. According to Chubb research, while the majority of Americans are concerned about being impacted by a cyber breach, only a small percentage are actually taking the right steps to protect themselves and their families. "While technology has enhanced our lives in countless ways, it also allows us to bring our work life home and our home life to work, thereby increasing our chances of falling victim to cyber crimes, which continue to occur at an alarming rate," said Michael Tanenbaum, Executive Vice President, Chubb's North America Cyber Practice. "Simply clicking on the wrong email or downloading a new app could put your personal data in the wrong hands. Personal cyber protection is no longer a 'nice to have,' but rather a 'must have.' Our new policy is designed with this need in mind and will provide clients with peace of mind knowing they are protected against cyber threats." Key benefits of a Chubb's Masterpiece Cyber Protection policy include: Protection against threats to release your personal information, holding your files for ransom, and destruction of your personal network; Prtection provided against loss of account funds from a cyber attack and related expenses; Assistance dealing with online harassment from cyberbullying; Support dealing with cyberattacks that prohibit you from accessing your home, or attacks interrupting a small business you operate from your home; Aid in dealing with theft, loss or unauthorized access to personal data from a cyber attack; Assistance in resolving identity theft. Arizona , Colorado , Hawaii , Kansas , Michigan , Louisiana , Maryland , New Hampshire , New Jersey , Ohio , Oregon , Pennsylvania , Rhode Island , Tennessee , Virginia , and Washington, D.C. It will be rolled out to additional states and in Canada throughout 2018 and into 2019 for all North American Masterpiece clients. About Chubb: Chubb is the world's largest publicly traded property and casualty insurance company, and the largest commercial insurer in the United States. With operations in 54 countries and territories, Chubb provides commercial and personal property and casualty insurance, personal accident and supplemental health insurance, reinsurance and life insurance to a diverse group of clients. As an underwriting company, we assess, assume and manage risk with insight and discipline. We service and pay our claims fairly and promptly. The company is also defined by its extensive product and service offerings, broad distribution capabilities, exceptional financial strength and local operations globally. Parent company Chubb Limited is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: CB) and is a component of the S&P 500 index. Chubb maintains executive offices in Zurich, New York, London and other locations, and employs approximately 31,000 people worldwide. Additional information can be found at: chubb.com. Chubb Insurance Company of Canada has offices in Toronto, Calgary, Montreal and Vancouver and provides its products and services through licensed insurance brokers across Canada. For additional information, visit: chubb.com/ca. About Chubb Cyber Chubb is a leader in insuring cyber risk. Combining industry-leading underwriting and expert third-party incident response services, Chubb offers policies that are tailored to the specific needs and risks of its clients to ensure they are ready with the tools and expertise necessary should a cyber incident occur. Moving swiftly to minimize data loss and moving rapidly to connect clients with the proper parties is only part of what Chubb delivers. Keeping an eye on the ever-evolving cyber security landscape, Chubb looks for ways to do more for its clients by offering cutting-edge products and holistic services to each and every client. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chubb-launches-new-personal-cyber-protection-coverage-300656433.html SOURCE Chubb [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] FrontStream Announces Acquisition by Marlin CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- FrontStream, Inc., provider of Panorama, the all-in-one fundraising platform, today announced that the company has been acquired by Marlin Equity Partners ("Marlin"), a leading global investment firm with over $6.7 billion of capital under management and a strong track record of growing companies over time. The investment follows several FrontStream growth milestones and will enable the company to advance its platform and deliver additional services to its customer base worldwide. "Panorama is the first all-in-one SaaS fundraising platform to help nonprofits and companies raise more money and provide a personalized experience for donors, members, volunteers, and employees alike," said Bill Wood, FrontStream's president and CEO. "With Marlin as our partner, we will have additional resources to execute our strategy and accelerate growth and innovation; ultimately making it easier and more gratifying for people to support the causes they care about." FrontStream has realized tremendous growth and now has more than 10,000 nonprofit and corporate customers using Panorama for donor management, auctions, special events, peer-to-peer & online fundraising, employee giving, volunteering and matching gifts. Overall sector revenue from online fundraising grew by 23% in 2017 (NonProfits Source), contributing to Panorama becoming the unparalleled choice for charities and companies alike. FrontStream processes more than $4 billion annually and distributes donations to more than 80,000 charities worldwide each year. "We are thrilled to add FrontStream to our exciting portfolio of growing technology businesses and further advance the company's vision of providing charities and companies with inventive solutions to raise money, engage employees, and make a positive contribution to their communities," said Nick Lukens, a principal at Marlin. "With its new, next-generation Panorama platform, the company is ideally positioned to lead at a time when nonprofits are exploring ways to creatively engage donors and optimize fundraising through online, social, and mobile channels. We look forward to supporting FrontStream during its next phase of growth." About Marlin Equity Partners Marlin Equity Partners is a global investment firm with over $6.7 billion of capital under management. The firm is focused on providing corporate parents, shareholders and other stakeholders with tailored solutions that meet their business and liquidity needs. Marlin invests in businesses across multiple industries where its capital base, industry relationships and extensive network of operational resources significantly strengthen a company's outlook and enhance value. Since its inception, Marlin, through its group of funds and related companies, has successfully completed over 130 acquisitions. The firm is headquartered in Los Angeles, California with an additional office in London. For more information, visit marlinequity.com. About FrontStream FrontStream is a leading provider of software and payment processing solutions that help charities and companies raise money, engage constituents, and make a positive impact. The company's Panorama platform offers a full suite of management tools for constituent management, auctions, special events, peer-to-peer and online fundraising, employee giving, volunteering, and gift matching, which have helped more than 10,000 customers raise billions in donations. The company employs over 200 professionals and is based in Cambridge, MA with offices in the US, Canada and Australia. To learn more, visit frontstream.com. Media Contacts: Liza Colburn Crescendo Collaborative Comm. liza@crescendocc.com +1-781-562-0111 Peter Spasov Marlin Equity Partners pspasov@marlinequity.com +1-310-364-0100 View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/frontstream-announces-acquisition-by-marlin-300656325.html SOURCE FrontStream [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Quantifind Welcomes Arby's to its Roster of QSR Clients SAN FRANCISCO, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Quantifind today announced the addition of Arby's to its growing client roster of top restaurant brands. The Atlanta-based quick serve restaurant (QSR) chain will leverage Quantifind's proprietary capabilities for correlating unstructured data to revenue, gaining access to analytics explaining the motivations behind customer buying decisions. With this new explanatory insight across millions of first and third-party unstructured consumer conversations for its brand, plus the publicly-available third-party (social) conversations for its competitors, Arby's now has additional real-time learning to explain movements in sales and can more dynamically respond to the competition. Quantifind's patented AI uniquely integrates unstructured social media content, open-ended receipt survey data, web feedback, and structured business KPIs to extract signals predictive of sales. The company's restaurant platform is configured with third-party data for the top 65+ restaurant brands, automatically identifying revenue-driving consumer and competiive insight for both analytics and market research functions across marketing, operations, and culinary departments. Quantifind now works with more than a dozen restaurant brands including 8 of the top 20 QSR / fast casual brands to help them understand consumer buying decisions for their brand and the competition. "Arby's is a powerhouse restaurant brand with more than 7 consecutive years of same-store sales growth, so we are proud and excited to have been selected to work with them! Their amazing team makes for a great client partnership," said Ari Tuchman, CEO and Co-founder of Quantifind. "We're eager to help continue their momentum with specific, revenue-driving insights around customers, competitors, service, and menu items." ABOUT QUANTIFIND Quantifind is a technology company that uncovers hidden signals in massive data sets to eliminate competitive blind spots and reveal new ways to steal market share. Quantifind uses a unique and proprietary signal extraction process to help businesses explore, understand what drives sales, and accelerate their revenue. Founded by two physicists from Stanford University and Yale University, Quantifind's clients include some of the world's most well-known brands spanning multiple industries including automotive, restaurants, media and finance. Headquartered in Menlo Park, CA, the company's investors include AME Cloud Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Cathay Innovation, Comcast Ventures, Iris Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and USVP. PRESS CONTACT Jessi Stafford 970-690-3488 jessi@quantifind.com View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/quantifind-welcomes-arbys-to-its-roster-of-qsr-clients-300656302.html SOURCE Quantifind [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] A.M. Best Reaffirms Integrity's "A" (Excellent) Rating and Stable Outlook Integrity Insurance remains a financially strong and stable company, according to A.M. Best. The global credit rating agency, which focuses on the insurance industry, recently affirmed Integrity Mutual Insurance Company and its subsidiaries, in conjunction with affiliate partner Grange Insurance Company, a financial strength rating (FSR) of "A" (Excellent) with a stable outlook. The FSR is the most important component of A.M. Best's rating because it indicates a company's ability to pay its policyholders' claims. In addition, Integrity's Issuer Credit Rating (ICR) remains an "a+" (Excellent) with a stable outlook. This rating indicates an excellent ability to meet ongoing senior financial obligations and places Integriy among the top tier of insurance companies nationally. "We're delighted with this continued acknowledgement by A.M. Best," said Integrity President Jill Wagner Kelly. "Our financial strength demonstrates our steadfast commitment to ensure the stability to uphold the promises we make to customers every day. It also validates our operational performance and communicates to agency partners and customers our strong and lasting commitment in the marketplace." In its review, A.M. Best noted Integrity's strong balance sheet, consistent operating performance and dedicated enterprise risk management team as contributing factors to the company's stable outlook. Integrity has received an "A" financial strength rating from A.M. Best for the past 16 years. This financial strength is a critical consideration when it comes to purchasing insurance. About Integrity Insurance Integrity Insurance established in 1933 and is based in Appleton, WI. Integrity offers auto, home, business and life insurance through a network of independent agents throughout IA, MN and WI. With an affiliate partner Grange Insurance based in Columbus, Ohio - the 13-state enterprise has $3 billion in assets and holds an A.M. Best rating of "A" Excellent. For more information, visit integrityinsurance.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005849/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Romania's OMV Petrom to Use Honeywell Connected Plant to Improve Reliability of Refinery Operations DES PLAINES, Ill., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Honeywell (NYSE: HON) today announced that OMV Petrom S.A. will use Honeywell Connected Plant to provide prescriptive monitoring of its CCR Platforming unit at its Petrobrazi refinery in Ploiesti, Romania. The CCR Platforming process upgrades low-value naphtha into high-octane gasoline and aromatics. OMV will use the Honeywell Connected Plant's Process Insight Reliability Advisor to continuously feed plant data through Honeywell UOP process and fault models, and to provide key performance information and process recommendations. Honeywell's Reliability Advisor will help the plant run more smoothly and mitigate issues that impact production and plant profitability by detecting and analyzing problems before they occur. "Reliability Advisor is unique in the industry because it applies Honeywell UOP's proprietary process knowledge and deep troubleshooting experience to recommend operational adjustments sooner and more accurately than has ever been possible before," said Zak Alzein, Vice President, Connected Plant, at Honeywell UOP. "Plants with this service can run consistently at the top of their capability." Honeywell Connected Plant is a suite of applications that delivers higher levels of safety, reliability, efficiency and profitability. These proven industry solutions are based on decades of domain knowledge and controls experience. They turn data into actionable insight to optimize operations, predict pant failures and eliminate unplanned downtime. As part of Honeywell's Connected Plant portfolio, Reliability Advisor gives refineries, petrochemical and gas processing plants greater visibility into their operations, helping identify and resolve problems that often avoid detection and hamper production, and preventing unplanned shutdowns for maintenance and repair that can cost plant operators millions of dollars per year in lost productivity. "Process Reliability Advisor is a powerful part of Honeywell Connected Plant because it combines process data with UOP expertise enabled by software to provide our customers with ongoing service," Alzein said. "This service can tie plant data to the right domain knowledge to gain new insights to improve operational reliability." Bucharest-based OMV Petrom is an integrated oil and gas company. It is the largest producer of crude oil in Romania and provides nearly half of Romania's domestic natural gas. The company's Petrobrazi refinery near Ploiesti has a refining capacity of 4.5 million tons per year. Honeywell UOP (www.uop.com) is a leading international supplier and licensor of process technology, catalysts, adsorbents, equipment, and consulting services to the petroleum refining, petrochemical, and gas processing industries. Honeywell UOP is part of Honeywell's Performance Materials and Technologies strategic business group, which also includes Honeywell Process Solutions (www.honeywellprocess.com), a pioneer in automation control, instrumentation and services for the oil and gas, refining, petrochemical, chemical and other industries. Honeywell (www.honeywell.com) is a Fortune 100 software-industrial company that delivers industry specific solutions that include aerospace and automotive products and services; control technologies for buildings, homes, and industry; and performance materials globally. Our technologies help everything from aircraft, cars, homes and buildings, manufacturing plants, supply chains, and workers become more connected to make our world smarter, safer, and more sustainable. For more news and information on Honeywell, please visit www.honeywell.com/newsroom. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/romanias-omv-petrom-to-use-honeywell-connected-plant-to-improve-reliability-of-refinery-operations-300656342.html SOURCE Honeywell [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Biobanking powerhouse, Brooks Life Sciences, takes ISBER 2018 with a bioBANG CHELMSFORD, Mass., May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- As Brooks Life Sciences cements its commitment to developments in the biobanking industry that accelerate research and improve patient health the events at ISBER 2018 in Dallas, TX last week only magnify this dedication. One of Brooks Life Sciences' newest innovations, the IntelliXmark won the ISBER Outstanding New Product Award. IntelliXmark is an innovative instrument that prints text, linear barcodes, 2D codes, and graphics directly onto plastic sample tubes. It is resistant to alcohol, water, liquid nitrogen, and mechanical abrasion. Brooks Life Sciences Product Marketing Manager, Mike Thurogood, highlighted that IntelliXmark can eliminate the need for less-reliable labels or marker pens in the lab. "The IntelliXmark allows clean, simple, durable labelling directly onto plastic sample tubes. So, all that supplementary information such as patient IDs and lot numbers can be printed directly onto the tubes," he explained. "It creates consistently legible text and barcodes at high resolutions for ease and convenience in the lab." Speaking of the place where science evolves Dr. Andy Brooks, Chief Scientific Officer for Brooks Life Sciences, was honored with the ISBER Special Service Award at the annual meeting. This distinction is given to those who have made exceptional contributions toward the goals of the society through performance of a special service or act on behalf of the organization. Dr. Brooks' award is for long-term commitment and promotion of the applied side of biobanking. As omeone who has devoted the better part of his career to advancing science for biological repositories, Dr. Brooks has helped develop many of the standards and SOPs in use today. "For many years, my work both scientifically and on the service side has been to develop quality assurance and quality control technologies to ensure high quality biological specimens that help link all the activities we do with sample collection and sample storage to the analytics, discovery, and clinical activities for use of those samples," he shared. "So, this award is particularly special, because it's a recognition of the contribution that my team and I have made for the different kinds of science and technologies we integrate into our service offerings and into our scientific programs." ISBER also announced that David Lewandowski with Brooks Life Sciences will assume the role of president for ISBER (International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories). In his new role, Lewandowski will carry on best practices of the global biobanking organization as it creates opportunities for networking, education, and innovations and harmonizes approaches to evolving challenges in biological and environmental repositories. "I'm very humbled to have been elected ISBER president for 2018-2019. I look forward to working with the many volunteers who have made this society what it is," said Lewandowski. "In this next year," he continued, "I think we're going to be really focused on highlighting all those breakthroughs in biobanking and successes everyone has experienced. And we'll be sharing those stories next year as we celebrate ISBER's 20th anniversary in Shanghai, China." About Brooks Life Sciences Brooks Life Sciences, a division of Brooks Automation, provides the life science industry with the most comprehensive portfolio of sample management solutions, enabling researchers worldwide to accelerate innovation and improve patient health. The company offers automated storage, cryopreservation, informatics, sample storage, lab services, transportation, consumables, and instruments. Technologies and services span the entire cold chain supporting research, GMP, pre/clinical, cell therapy, and biologics. The top 20 biopharmaceutical providers and other leading companies rely on Brooks Life Sciences to advance research. Click here for more. Media contact: Tracy Martin Brooks Life Sciences Phone +1 (317) 721-0515 Tracy.Martin@brooks.com View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/biobanking-powerhouse-brooks-life-sciences-takes-isber-2018-with-a-biobang-300656532.html SOURCE Brooks Life Sciences [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] How Over Three Thousand Parents Plan to Pay for College: Answers from College Ave Student Loans Survey With college tuition bills on the horizon, now is when many parents decide how to pay for the upcoming school year and determine how much will come from grants and scholarships, savings and income, or loans. Twice as many parents (69%) found this time - figuring out how to pay for college - more stressful than the college selection process (30%), according to a survey of 3,510 parents of college students from College Ave Student Loans conducted by Barnes & Noble College InsightsSM. And, four times as many parents (35%) are more worried about college costs and affordability than their child living away from home (9%). For 1 out of 10 families (14%), the stress during this time also includes parents who carry personal student loan debt along with the cost of their child's college tuition. For the 3,510 parents surveyed, here is a snapshot of how they plan to pay for the upcoming school year: 67% scholarships and grants 67% savings and income 47% federal student loans 15% federal parent loans 11% work-study program 11% private student loans 8% other family member contributing 7% credit card 5% private parent loan 3% home equity loan And, of the parents who are using savings to pay for college, the source of savings is: 46% bank account 27% 529 savings account 6% brokerage account 5% retirement account Overall, the majority of parents (59%) said college was more expensive than they had anticipated, with the cost of tuition, housing and books and supplies ranking as the top three surprises in terms of costs. "Our suvey highlights the stress parents feel about how to pay for college, and the variety of resources parents rely on to put together a financial plan for their child's higher education," said Joe DePaulo, CEO and Co-Founder of College Ave Student Loans. "While 67% of parents plan on using grants and scholarships and/or savings for payment, almost half still plan on using some kind of parent or student loan to close the gap. At College Ave, we're here to help provide options for overwhelmed parents who are looking for financing options. We'll make it fast and easy, and give you the options to create a personalized payment plan that works with your family's budget." For more information about ways to plan and pay for college, visit the resources at College Ave Student Loans: https://www.collegeavestudentloans.com. About the Survey The College Ave Student Loans survey was conducted by Barnes & Noble College Insights(SM). The national survey had 3,510 parent respondents and was conducted April 13 - April 17, 2018. About College Ave Student Loans College Ave Student Loans is simplifying the student loan experience so students can get on with what matters most: preparing for a bright future. As a fintech lending company with a sole focus on private student loans, we're using technology and our deep industry expertise to connect families who need to cover education costs with lenders who can provide that funding. By specializing in student loans, we are able to give our customers the attention they deserve and deliver loans that are simple, clear, and personalized for the individual: we help you find your perfect fit. We offer competitive rates, a wide range of repayment options, and a customer-friendly experience from application through repayment. Visit: www.collegeavestudentloans.com. About Barnes & Noble College Barnes & Noble College, a Barnes & Noble Education company (NYSE:BNED), is a leading operator of college bookstores in the United States. Barnes & Noble College currently operates 781 campus bookstores and the school-branded e-commerce sites for each store, serving more than 5 million college students and faculty nationwide. General information on Barnes & Noble College can be obtained by visiting the Company's website: www.bncollege.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005962/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Verific Integrates INVIO with Flagship Parser Platform ALAMEDA, Calif., May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Verific Design Automation , the recognized leader of SystemVerilog, VHDL and UPF Parser Platforms in production and development use throughout the semiconductor industry, today announced full integration of INVIO with its flagship parser platforms. The INVIO platform integration with the Verific parser platform simplifies and streamlines the design environment. This follows an earlier announcement that it acquired from Invionics Software the INVIO platform, with its high-level application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable Verific users to simplify and streamline their design environment, accelerating tool development. INVIO is SystemVerilog- and VHDL-language agnostic and offers a high of abstraction that semiconductor company CAD support departments need for their SystemVerilog and VHDL flows. The integration included the addition of C++ APIs to INVIO, and porting of Verifics native Liberty and UPF parsers to INVIO. The combined product line, named Verific with INVIO, was rolled out earlier this year and is in production use at ive semiconductor companies to date, including IBM. Our users are pleased with the additional capabilities provided by INVIO to develop their next EDA product or custom tool development, notes Rob Dekker, Verifics founder and chief technology officer. We credit a capable R&D and applications engineering group who joined Verific as part of the acquisition and did excellent work integrating INVIO with Verific and supporting the customers. As early adopters of Verific with INVIO I am happy to report that we were able to deliver two internally used EDA tools on time under an aggressive schedule, affirms Wolfgang Roesner, IBM fellow, functional verification. Verific continues to sell its SystemVerilog, UPF and VHDL parsers as standalone solutions. INVIO is marketed and sold as an add-on. Verifics parsers are in production and development flows throughout semiconductor companies worldwide, from emerging companies to established Fortune 500 vendors. Applications range from analysis, simulation, formal verification and synthesis to emulation and virtual prototyping, in-circuit debug and design for test. Verific distributes its Parser Platforms as C++ source code and compile on all 32 and 64 bit Unix, Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems. Pricing is available upon request. Verific will demonstrate its SystemVerilog, VHDL and UPF Parser Platforms, and Verific with INVIO at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Booth #2311 from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. June 25-27. DAC will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. About Verific Design Automation Verific Design Automation, with offices in Alameda, Calif., and Kolkata, India, provides SystemVerilog, Verilog, VHDL and UPF Parser Platforms that enable project groups to develop advanced electronic design automation (EDA) products quickly and cost effectively. Since 1999, Verific has shipped more than 60,000 copies of its software used worldwide by the EDA and semiconductor industry. Corporate headquarters is located at: 1516 Oak Street, Suite 115, Alameda, Calif. 94501. Telephone: (510) 522-1555. Engage with Verific at: Email: info@verific.com Website: www.verific.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/810695 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Verific-Design-Automation-100448363329771/ Verific Design Automation and Efinix acknowledge trademarks or registered trademarks of other organizations for their respective products and services. For more information, contact: Nanette Collins Public Relations for Verific (617) 437-1822 nanette@nvc.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at //www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/10d55175-4c9e-4c2a-8f03-340e4f493dbe [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Anodot Opens UK Operations With London Leadership, Customers, Partners LONDON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Hypergrowth in the UK with New Customers, Leadership, and AWS Partnership for the Autonomous Analytics Company Anodot, the autonomous analytics company, today announced the opening of its new London office and leadership as the company continues to accelerate growth with customer and partner relationships in the UK. The company also announced the appointment of Steve Morse and Bally Pal as its first UK Sales Directors. Anodot has established considerable market adoption in the region already, including leading customers like Waze, and MoreNiche. Another important part of its growth strategy is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the UK, building on its existing relationship as an AWS Advanced Technology Partner. AWS is subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Interested customers and channel partners are invited to come talk with Anodot executives at Whitehall's Media Big Data Analytics (BDA) Conference on June 13th at the Victoria Park Plaza in London. Jointly leadingUK operations, Steve Morse brings with him a proven track record of expanding analytics software companies across Europe, such as Tableau, ProClarity and Crystal. Bally Pal also brings strong leadership experience in sales, previously directing tech leaders such as Confluent, Oracle and Aperture. "Anodot uses AI analytics to catch anomalies across any and all time series data, instantly alerting companies to vital problems and their root causes," said Morse. "Anodot's global growth comes as no surprise, and I'm humbled to be a part of accelerating its demand in the UK market." "Anodot's autonomous analytics technology and incident detection provides insights like no other BI tool for analysts and business leaders. The technology continues to generate significant traction in the UK market," said Pal. The company's UK customers across gaming, AdTech, FinTech, Telecom, and E-Commerce, include Waze, and MoreNiche. They rely on Anodot's patented machine learning and autonomous analytics solution to enable them to track and correlate massive volumes of business and technical data in real-time to identify business incidents immediately. Anodot's autonomous analytics platform works across data silos and teams to uncover blind spots and root causes that could otherwise damage a company's revenue or reputation. Anodot has achieved the AWS Machine Learning Competency, which demonstrates that it has deep expertise in a Machine learning experience on the AWS platform and can deliver their solution seamlessly in the AWS Cloud environment. About Anodot Anodot illuminates business blind spots with AI analytics[BA3] , so companies will never miss another revenue leak or brand-damaging incident. Its automated machine learning algorithms continuously analyze all business data, detect the business incidents that matter, and identify why they are happening by correlating them across multiple data sources. Anodot customers in fintech, ad-tech, web and mobile apps, and other data-heavy industries use Anodot to drive real business benefits like significant cost savings, increased revenue and upturn in customer satisfaction. Founded in 2014, Anodot is headquartered in Silicon Valley and Ra'anana, Israel, with sales offices worldwide. Learn more at http://www.anodot.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. For more information, please contact: Molly Meller molly@siliconvpr.com +1-732-865-3998 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Government of Canada invests in world-leading clean technology innovations Minister Bains announces $26.3-million investment in clean technology with the potential to transform industries OTTAWA, May 30, 2018 /CNW/ - To benefit Canadians, our economy and the environment, the Government of Canada is contributing to the development of technologies that lead to less pollution, healthier communities and the creation of well-paying middle-class jobs. Today, the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, announced a federal investment of $26.3 million in four companies. The Minister made the announcement at Sustainable Development Technology Canada's (SDTC) Cleantech Leadership Summit. This third annual summit brought together 150 clean tech CEOs and thought-leaders from across Canada to discuss opportunities for Canadian clean technology producers to compete and win in the global economy. The four companies receiving funding today join the more than 300 others that SDTC has invested in since 2001. The investment announced today by Minister Bains includes: $10 million to D-Wave Systems Inc. of Burnaby, British Columbia , which is developing quantum computing systems that are more energy-efficient and help reduce emissions from high-performance computing. to D-Wave Systems Inc. of , which is developing quantum computing systems that are more energy-efficient and help reduce emissions from high-performance computing. $2.3 million to Ionomr Innovations Inc. of Vancouver, British Columbia , which has developed a more efficient, durable and cost-effective membrane systemfor water treatment and purification, grid-level energy storage, and clean-tech energy generation. to Ionomr Innovations Inc. of , which has developed a more efficient, durable and cost-effective membrane systemfor water treatment and purification, grid-level energy storage, and clean-tech energy generation. $4 million to MineSense Technologies Ltd. of Vancouver, British Columbia , which is making the mining process cleaner and more efficient using sensor technology and data analytics. to MineSense Technologies Ltd. of , which is making the mining process cleaner and more efficient using sensor technology and data analytics. $10 million to MEG Energy Corp. of Calgary, Alberta , which is developing a way to improve bitumen recovery in mining while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption. Investments in clean tech are part of the Government's Innovation and Skills Plan, a multi-year strategy to create well-paying jobs for the middle class and those working hard to join it. Quotes "Our government's investments in clean tech reflect our commitment to protecting the planet and growing our economy. They also point to a clear direction for economic development through innovation. That's because innovations in clean tech have the potential to create thousands of well-paying middle-class jobs for Canadians. That's how innovation leads to a better Canada." The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development "These companies are great examples of how Canadian innovations are poised to improve Canada's economy while protecting the environment. SDTC's investments in D-Wave, MEG Energy, MineSense and Ionomr will deliver environmental benefits to multiple industries and demonstrate our government's commitment to helping businesses scale and compete on the global stage." Leah Lawrence, President and CEO, Sustainable Development Technology Canada Quick facts Budget 2017 set aside more than $2.3 billion to boost the growth of Canada's clean tech space. That's the largest public investment ever committed to this field in Canada . to boost the growth of clean tech space. That's the largest public investment ever committed to this field in . Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) is a foundation created by the Government of Canada to advance clean technology innovation in Canada by funding and supporting small and medium-sized enterprises in developing and demonstrating clean technology solutions. to advance clean technology innovation in by funding and supporting small and medium-sized enterprises in developing and demonstrating clean technology solutions. SDTC has invested almost a billion dollars in close to 350 ideas and more than 300 companies. These companies have created more than 9,400 well-paying jobs, generated approximately $1.9 billion in annual revenues and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 10.1 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually (as of March 31, 2017 ). Follow Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada on Twitter: @ISED_CA Follow Sustainable Development Technology Canada on Twitter: @SDTC_TDDC SOURCE Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Sedor Pharmaceuticals and Los Altos Pharmaceuticals sign license agreement for People's Republic of China PAOLI, Pa. and LOS ALTOS HILLS, Calif., May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sedor Pharmaceuticals, LLC (Sedor) and Los Altos Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Los Altos) announce that Sedor has granted Los Altos an exclusive license for Captisol-enabled (CE) Meloxicam for the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Los Altos, located in Los Altos Hills, CA, has received exclusive development, manufacturing and commercialization rights for the Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau and will collaborate with Sedor on the development of CE-Meloxicam. Sedor is currently in development with IM/IV CE-Meloxicam for the treatment of acute post-surgery, trauma and cancer pain. If approved, IM/IV CE-Meloxicam would offer an alternative to opioids and their associated side effects. Barry Frankel, Chief Business Officer and co-founder of Sedor, commented, Following the earlier licensing of our lead development product, CE-Fosphenytoin for the treatment of status epilepticus, in the Chinese market, we are delighted to report this expansion of our licensing presence in this major territory with our second differentiated product, CE-Meloxicam. These new formulations of medicines will provide health care providers effective solutions to unmet needs of patients that improve their quality of life and clinical outcomes. We are looking forward to advancing these programs for the Peoples Republic of China. We are very pleased to be partnering with Sedor for this Captisol-enabled program. Sedor executives have three decades of expertise with biologics and pharmaceuticals, and a track record of success in bringing development-stage programs through to commercialization to benefit patients and providers, said Zhijian Xi, Founder and CEO of Los Altos. We look forward to bringing CE-Meloxicam to the Greater China market and offering advantages to hospitalized patients. About Sedor Pharmaceuticals, LLC Sedor Pharmaceuticals, LLC identifies and acquires acute care hospital pharmaceutical assets and applies its teams deep development, operational, manufacturing and commercialization expertise to create global clinical and economic value. The company is led by John Sedor as Chairman and an experienced team of pharmaceutical professionals with proven track record building pharmaceutical companies and shareholder value. The companys lead program, CE-Fosphenytoin, has been filed with the FDA for the treatment of status epilepticus offering, if approved, the potential to shorten the seizure and improve outcomes. The companys second program, CE-Meloxicam, is preparing for Phase I development for the treatment of acute post-surgical pain and, if approved, offers the potential to replace or delay the use of IM/IV opioids. Both products were licensed from Ligand Pharmaceuticals. CE-Fosphenytoin is available for licensing in North America, Europe, and other territories except for the Peoples Republic of China, where it has already been successfully licensed. Sedor is also in the process of seeking additional financing for pipeline development. About Los Altos Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Los Altos Pharmaceuticals, Inc. specializes in bringing the best pharmaceutical products to the Chinese market, and in making drugs developed in China available to the world. Los Altoss goal is to build a leading pharmaceutical company in China that competes on the world stage. With the licensing of CE-Meloxicam to the Greater China market, we seek to bring the best standard of care of pain medication to China and benefit the largest surgical population in the world. Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties and reflect the parties judgment as of the date of this release. Words such as plans, believes, expects, anticipates, and will, and similar expressions, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding: growth in the number of products in Sedors portfolio, the research and development expenditures of Sedors partners, including Sedors and Los Altoss future revenues and other projected financial measures, and the timing and results of Sedors clinical trials and clinical trials to be conducted by Sedors partners, including Los Altos. Actual events or results may differ from Sedors expectations. For example, Sedor and its partners, including Los Altos, may not be able to timely or successfully advance any product(s) in its internal or partnered pipeline. In addition, there can be no assurance that results of any clinical study will be timely, favorable or confirmed by later studies, that products under development by Sedor or its partners will receive regulatory approval, that there will be a market for the product(s) if successfully developed and approved, or that Sedors partners will not terminate any of its agreements or development or commercialization of any of its products. Also, Sedor and its partners, including Los Altos, may experience delays in the commencement, enrollment, completion or analysis of clinical testing for its product candidates, or significant issues regarding the adequacy of its clinical trial designs or the execution of its clinical trials, which could result in increased costs and delays, or limit the ability to obtain regulatory approval. Further, unexpected adverse side effects or inadequate therapeutic efficacy of Sedors or its partners product(s) could delay or prevent regulatory approval or commercialization. This caution is made under the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Contacts For Business Development Inquiries, please contact Geller Biopharm Inc. Avi Holchendler, MD avi@gellerbp.com 212-315-0600 For General Inquiries, please contact Sedor Pharmaceuticals, LLC Christy Troiano, 610-455-2180 ctroiano@sedorpharmaceuticals.com or Los Altos Pharmaceuticals, Incorporated Zhijian Xi, 650-353-6800 zhijianxi100@qq.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] MassChallenge Launches New FinTech Accelerator MassChallenge, a global network of zero-equity startup accelerators, will launch its newest vertical accelerator to support and grow startups in the financial technology (FinTech) industry. Headquartered in Boston, MassChallenge FinTech will match later-stage FinTech startups with industry leaders to accelerate the emerging products and services that have the power to transform the financial services ecosystem. Startups selected for MassChallenge FinTech will participate in a six-month accelerator where they will work closely with a leading partner on a range of activities from co-development and product validation to strategic investment and advisor introductions. At the end of the program, the enterprise-ready startups have the opportunity to win a portion of $250,000 in zero-equity cash prizes. To lead its newest program, MassChallenge has named Devon Sherman as Program Director of MassChallenge FinTech. Prior to joining MassChallenge, Devon was a global strategist at State Street Corporation in its Boston, New York, and London offices. Devon is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University and a graduate of Stanford Graduate School of Business's Ignite program. MassChallenge FinTech is supported by a public-private partnership that includes founding partners Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual), Putnam Investments, Fidelity Investments, Citizens Bank, John Hancock, and the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership (MACP). It has been endorsed by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker (News - Alert) , Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh, and is partnering closely with FinTech Sandbox. MassChallenge FinTech is now actively seeking additional "challenge" partners, and has received commitment from Eastern Bank. The MassChallenge FinTech program will run from January 2019 through June 2019. Applications for the first cohort will open in August 2018. For more information about MassChallenge FinTech, visit https://masschallenge.org/programs-fintech and follow MassChallenge FinTech on Facebook (News - Alert) (https://www.facebook.com/MassChallengeFT) and Twitter (News - Alert) (https://twitter.com/MassChallengeFT). MassChallenge FinTech Founding Partners Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, Putnam Investments, Fidelity Investments, Citizens Bank, John Hancock, and the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership About MassChallenge Headquartered in the United States with locations in Boston, Israel, Mexico, Switzerland, Texas, and the UK, MassChallenge is committed to strengthening the global innovation ecosystem by supporting high-potential startups across all industries, from anywhere in the world. To date, more than 1,500 MassChallenge alumni have raised more than $3 billion in funding, generated more than $2 billion in revenue, and created more than 80,000 total jobs. Learn more about MassChallenge at masschallenge.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530006216/en/ [May 30, 2018] Aldevron Appoints Don Kania to Board of Directors Don Kania, Ph.D., has been appointed to the Board of Directors of Aldevron, a leading global provider of plasmid DNA manufacturing, protein production and antibody discovery services. Dr. Kania joins Michael Chambers, CEO of Aldevron; and Ethan K. Liebermann and Mark H. Carter, both from TA Associates, on the board. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530006332/en/ Don Kania, Ph.D., joins Aldevron board. (Photo: Business Wire) "We welcome Don to the Aldevron board and look forward to his contributions as we grow the company and expand into new markets," said Mr. Chambers. "He has successfully managed rapidly growing companies in the life science industry and brings significant scientific and management expertise and experience to the board. Don's leadership will allow us to manage our growth while enhancing the exceptional reputation Aldevron has built over the past 20 years." Dr. Kania brings more than 25 years of experience that includes scientific research and development, global operations, and manufacturing. He served as Chief Executive Officer and President ofFEI Company (FEIC) from August 2006 until its sale to Thermo-Fisher in 2016 for $4.2 billion. Prior to FEI, Dr. Kania served as the Chief Operating Officer of Veeco Instruments (News - Alert) Inc (VECO), which provides manufacturing and development tools for semiconductors, disk drives, LEDs and academic research. Before serving as COO he had served in roles of increasing responsibility at Veeco since January 1998. Beginning in 1993, Dr. Kania served as a Senior Manager of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He served as Research Director of Crystallume, a venture funded thin film diamond company, from 1991 to 1993. Dr. Kania's other experience includes nine years of research experience at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos and Livermore Laboratories. He has been a Director of Leupold & Stevens, Inc., a family owned sporting optics company, since 2012 and FEI Company since August 2006. He served as a Director and Audit Chair of American Science & Engineering Inc. (ASEI) from February 2010 until the company was sold to OSI in 2016. He serves on the board or as an advisor to several privately held life sciences companies. "I am grateful to join Aldevron's Board of Directors and excited to work with the other members as we chart the path for the company's future," commented Dr. Kania. "The company has built an outstanding reputation within the life sciences industry that has fueled its substantial growth. Aldevron plays an important role in the development and commercialization of biopharmaceuticals and makes significant contributions to revolutionary new treatments. The opening of a new 70,000 square-foot GMP facility this summer and the addition of new products, including GMP Cas9 nuclease, pALD-X80 AAV helper plasmid, and mRNA will enable us to meet the increasing demands of the industry." About Aldevron Aldevron serves the biotechnology industry with custom production of nucleic acids, proteins, and antibodies. Thousands of clients use Aldevron-produced plasmids, RNA and gene editing enzymes for projects ranging from discovery research to clinical trials to commercial applications. These products are critical raw materials and key components in commercially available drugs and medical devices. Aldevron specializes in GMP manufacturing and is known for inventing the GMP- Source (News - Alert) quality system. Company headquarters are in Fargo, North Dakota, with additional facilities in Madison, Wisconsin, and Freiburg, Germany. To learn more, visit www.aldevron.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530006332/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Gencan Announces Sale of Assets TORONTO, May 30, 2018 /CNW/ - Gencan Capital Inc. ("Gencan") (CSE - "GCA" - Common) is pleased to announce the signing of an agreement of purchase and sale (the "Purchase Agreement") dated May 29, 2018 with Highroad Estates Inc. ("Highroad"). Following the recommendation of the independent directors of Gencan, the Purchase Agreement was approved by the Gencan Board of Directors on May 29, 2018. A complete copy of the Purchase Agreement can be found on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. The Purchase Agreement provides for the sale (the "Transaction") by Gencan to Highroad of Gencan's renewable power solar PV rooftop assets (the "Photovoltaic Plant"). The Photovoltaic Plant is located on an approximately 120,000 square foot portion of the roof at 450 Dobbie Drive, Cambridge, Ontario pursuant to a lease agreement with Genterra Capital Inc. ("Genterra"), the owner of the leased premises. The Photovoltaic Plant generates solar energy for utility, commercial and residential customers under a 20 year Feed-In Tariff Program Contract with the Ontario Power Authority. The sale of the Photovoltaic Plant represents the sale of all or substantially all of the assets of Gencan. The consideration to be paid by Highroad to Gencan for the Photovoltaic Plant is an aggregate of $2,635,000 (subject to customary closing adjustments) and consists of: a) a cash payment of $577,030; and b) an assumption of a oan payable by Gencan to Genterra in the amount of $2,057,970. Genterra and Highroad is each a "related party" of Gencan as defined by Multilateral Instrument 61-101 Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"). A "related party" includes, among other things, a control person of the entity and an affiliate of the control person. Genterra is considered a control person by virtue of its ownership of 12,564,188 Common Shares of Gencan (representing 78.1% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares) and Highroad is an affiliate of Genterra. In connection with the proposed sale, Corporate Valuation Services Limited, which was engaged by Gencan as an independent valuator, has provided a valuation of the Photovoltaic Plant, in accordance with Multilateral Instrument 61-101. The valuation report provides that as at March 31, 2018, subject to the scope of review, assumptions, qualifications, considerations and limitations set forth therein, the estimate of fair market value of the Photovoltaic Plant is $2,635,000. Particulars of the valuation will be provided to shareholders with the meeting materials. Based on the conclusions of Corporate Valuation Services Limited, among other matters considered, the Directors unanimously determined that the proposed transaction is in the best interests of Gencan and is fair, from a financial point of view, to the minority shareholders of Gencan. The Closing Date of the Transaction is expected to occur on or about July 4, 2018, following the receipt of approval of the shareholders of Gencan, and upon satisfaction of all the conditions in the Purchase Agreement. Full details of the transaction will be included in Gencan's management information circular which is expected to be mailed to shareholders on or about June 1, 2018 for a meeting to be held on June 28, 2018. This news release is for information purposes only and is not a substitute for the definitive agreement which will effect the proposed transaction. There can be no assurance that the conditions of closing will be satisfied, or that the transaction will be completed as proposed or at all. This news release may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties and are based on current expectations. Consequently, actual results could differ materially from the expectations expressed in forward-looking statements. Gencan Capital Inc. is a Canadian Company with significant interests in solar generation equipment located in Ontario, Canada. SOURCE Gencan Capital Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Tiger Infrastructure Announces Exit of Portfolio Company HFN to ExteNet Systems NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Tiger Infrastructure Partners announced today that its portfolio company Hudson Fiber Network (HFN) has signed a definitive merger agreement with ExteNet Systems, Inc. to sell the company in an all cash transaction. Other transaction terms were not disclosed. Hudson Fiber Network (HFN) is a data transport provider which has a significant metro fiber network in the greater New York City area and operates a national wide-area network with key international points of presence. The buyer, ExteNet Systems, is the largest private developer, owner and operator of distributed networks enabling advanced mobile broadband connectivity across the United States. ExteNet Systems' owners include Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners and Digital Bridge Holdings. Tiger Infrastructure Partners acquired a controlling stake in HFN in 2014 from the company's founders. Since then, the company has significantly expanded its network in the Manhattan and New Jersey markets by building and acquiring new fiber, grown its enterprise business, and increased its ark fiber product offerings. HFN is one of four investments that Tiger Infrastructure has made in the communications infrastructure space in the U.S. and Europe. Tiger's CEO and Managing Partner, Emil W. Henry Jr., explained "Tiger's successful partnership with HFN was a good example of our investment strategy: we provided growth capital and the resources of our operating and financial teams to help a young company with superb management build critical infrastructure and scale. The result was substantial value creation. I am confident that HFN's future as part of a larger infrastructure platform is bright. Communications infrastructure remains one of Tiger's key areas of focus." HFN's CEO Brett Diamond, commented "three years ago, I chose Tiger as our financial partner because of their intensive value-add approach to growth infrastructure. Their contributions to our success were critical." Adam Emmert, Partner with Tiger Infrastructure added, "the HFN team has done a phenomenal job building its organization, expanding its physical network and winning new customers." The transaction is expected to close in 2018, pending receipt of customary regulatory approvals. Hudson Fiber Network was advised in the transaction by Q Advisors LLC and Lowenstein Sandler LLP. Contact: Tiger Infrastructure Partners, Richard Trabulsi, info@tigerinfrastructure.com. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tiger-infrastructure-announces-exit-of-portfolio-company-hfn-to-extenet-systems-300656865.html SOURCE Tiger Infrastructure Partners [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [May 30, 2018] Novra Announces First Quarter 2018 Financial Results WINNIPEG, May 30, 2018 /CNW/ - Novra Technologies Inc. ("Novra") (TSX-V: NVI) today announced its consolidated financial results for the first quarter of 2018. All amounts are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. The results below represent the first quarter of operations that include Wegener Communications ("Wegener"), after acquiring a 51.6% controlling interest in Wegener at the end of 2017. The significant variances in our financial highlights from those in 2017 were primarily driven by the inclusion of Wegener's operating results and the lumpy nature of our products revenue. First Quarter 2018 Financial Results (in thousands, except for Gross margin and % Chg) Three Months Ended March 31, 2018 2017 % Chg Revenue by type: Products $ 1,517 $ 2,172 -30% Services 555 250 122% Total revenue 2,072 2,422 -14% Gross profit 880 1,130 -22% Gross margin 42.5% 46.7% Operating expenses ("OPEX") 1,699 953 78% Operating income (loss) (819) 177 NM Finance costs, net (52) (47) 11% Other income (expenses) 108 112 -4% Net income (loss) as reported under IFRS $ (763) $ 242 NM Adjusted EBITDA - non-IFRS measure (2) $ (570) $ 274 NM NM Not meaningful (1) Amounts in the table may not reconcile due to rounding differences. (2) Refer to the Management's Discussion & Analysis ("MD&A") for a reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to Net income (loss) as reported under IFRS. Total revenue decreased by 14% or $0.4 million. The decrease in revenue was due to a softer quarter for product shipments, including very little product revenue from our recent acquisition of Wegener. Some of the reasons for lower revenue from product shipments were delays of several of our clients' projects and manufacturing lead-times for some of our products. However, as we reported, our Q1 total revenue and bookings combined were approximately $6.0 Million and as of May 15, 2018 that total further increased to $8.0 million. Also, our cash position on March 31, 2018 improved to $2,098,000 (Dec 31, 2017: $1,804,000) Harris Liontas, President and CEO stated "Although we were expecting a soft start to 2018, I am still disappointed with our operating performance for the first quarter of 2018. Our on-going integration and cost rationalization initiatives are being implemented to position Novra to better weather lumpy revenue patterns in the future. Also, on the positive side, I am happy to report strong sales for our products and services with total orders as of May 15th, 2018 at $8.0 million. With Wegener Communications now part of the Novra Group, we are executing on our vision to bring great companies with complementary technologies together to capitalize on market opportunities and operational efficiencies. The $8.0 million in combined bookings and revenue in the first 4.5 months of 2018 is indicative of Novra's significant evolution into a strong, scalable global company in the growing multimedia broadband content distribution business. Our clients are trusting us to be their technology partner as they are looking for next generation advanced, reliable and cost-effective solutions to deliver their services". A copy of the MD&A and the unaudited interim Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements for the quarter ended March 31, 2018, are available on SEDAR (www.sedar.com). About Novra Technologies Inc.: Novra (TSX-V: NVI) is an international technology provider of products, systems and services for the distribution of multimedia broadband content. The Novra Group of companies includes Novra, International Datacasting Corporation, and Wegener Corporation. The companies in the group are known for a strong focus on applications including: broadcast video and radio, digital cinema, digital signage, and highly reliable data communications. For more information visit: www.novragroup.com Forward-Looking Statements: This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws, concerning but not limited to: our profitability outlook, the pending acquisition of Wegener, and anticipated developments in our operations in future periods. Forward-looking statements are generally identifiable by words such as "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "predicts", "outlook", "potential", "targeted", "plans" "possible", "poised for", and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions or results "will", "may", "could" or "should" occur or be achieved. As such, forward-looking statements are not historical facts but reflect our current assumptions and expectations regarding future events. These are subject to a number of risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations and assumptions. Some of these risks and uncertainties are described herein under the "Risks and Uncertainties" section of the MD&A. For the above reasons, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. SOURCE Novra Technologies Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] When AT&T was the only one among the Big four wireless carriers not to offer LG's new G7 ThinQ smartphone, it promised that it would sell another LG device instead. We're now getting a look at that new LG phone, and it's a lot like last year's LG V30. AT&T's new LG V35 ThinQ shares a lot in common with the G7, from the Snapdragon 845 processor to the dual rear cameras augmented by artificial intelligence. But it's also a lot like the LG V30, thanks to an OLED screen and a higher price tag. The LG V35 ThinQ will cost $899 at AT&T. That breaks down to $30 a month over 30 months if you buy the phone in installments through the AT&T Next payment plan. To put that price in context, the G7 ThinQ costs anywhere from $750 to $792 depending on which carrier you buy that phone from. AT&T won't be the only carrier offering the V35. Google's Project Fi is also adding the device, along with the G7 ThinQ, to its roster of supported phones. The V35 ThinQ costs $37.46 per month over 24 months at Project Fi while the G7 ThinQ is available for $31.21 a month What does the extra money get you with the LG V35? A better screen and more RAM. The V35 features a 6-inch OLED panel with Quad HD+ resolution (2880 x 1440), compared to a 6.1-inch LCD screen on the G7. (The G7 does have sharper resolution at 3120 x 1440, and packs in more pixels per inch than the V35 564 versus 538.) There's no notch on the V35, though, like there is on the G7, as LG has maintained the 18:9 aspect ratio it used with last year's V30. You'll find a little extra oomph inside the V35 ThinQ, too. While it features the same Snapdragon 845 mobile processing platform as the G7, the V35 bolsters that with 6GB of RAM. The G7 makes do with 4GB, the same as the LG V30. Otherwise, a lot of the features found in this new LG phone match what you'd get from the G7 ThinQ available at other carriers, most notably the cameras. The V35 ThinQ's setup is exactly the same as the G7's a pair of 16-megapixel shooters, one of which is a main lens with an f/1.6 aperture and the other a wide-angle shooter with an f/1.9 aperture. On the front of the phone, you'll find an 8-MP selfie cam. MORE: Here Are the 10 Best Phones Available But the real standout feature in the LG V35 ThinQ is the camera's smarts. Like the cameras on the G7, the V35 uses built-in intelligence to automatically recognize objects and scenes. LG says the camera's capable of recognizing 19 different scenes, and when it does, it applies filters and adjusts settings on the fly, with an eye toward getting you the best shot. AI-powered cameras are becoming an increasing focus at LG, as the phone maker looks to set its devices apart from the rest of the crowded Android market. Both the G7 and V30 boost similar capabilities. As with other LG phones, the V35 puts an emphasis on audio quality, supporting DTS:X Virtual Surround Sound. The new phone includes a Hi-Fi Quad DAC, which, if it works like the DAC on the G7, should produce clear, booming audio. Far-field voice recognition should let you interact with the Google Assistant from 17 feet away, according to AT&T. AT&T starts taking pre-orders on the LG V35 ThinQ this Friday (June 1). The phone arrives in stores on June 8. Project Fi only lists the new phone as "coming soon." We're planning a full review along with a more in-depth comparison to LG's other recent phone release once we get our hands on the V35 ThinQ. Less than a couple of weeks ago we found out that the Ford Fiesta RS might finally happen. It was Ford Performance Europe boss Leo Roeks who hinted about the possibility, but we just learned that the Fiesta RS remains just a rumor for the time being. The news comes from Fords head of design for Europe, Amko Leenarts, who argued that an RS model isnt necessary because the Fiesta ST is fast and powerful enough. This isn't the first time Ford denies that a Fiesta RS is in the works only a few weeks after the vehicle is unofficially confirmed In Leenarts own words to AutoRAI.nl: "We see no reason to bring a more powerful Fiesta model above the ST. The performance of the new Fiesta ST is already at such a high level that a more powerful model is not necessary." This isnt the first time Ford denies that a Fiesta RS is in the works only a few weeks after the vehicle is unofficially confirmed, so it adds even more to the confusion surrounding this hatchback. At this point, no one really has any idea if the Fiesta RS will happen or not. Meanwhile, Volkswagen could be working on a more powerful version of the Polo GTI, so it remains to be seen if Ford will change its mind about the Fiesta ST being fast and powerful enough. Previous rumors claimed that the Fiestas new platform, shared with the EcoSport, can be fitted with an all-wheel-drive system without massive costs. This is basically what stopped Ford from making a Fiesta RS in the past, and the main issue was finally out of the way. It was also rumored that the 1.5-liter three-cylinder in the ST might be replaced with a 2.0-liter, EcoBoost four-cylinder in the RS, with output to increase from 197 to around 250 horsepower. The latest predictions claimed a 2019 release. I guess we can only wait and see what happens. References Read our full speculative review on the 2019 Ford Fiesta RS Read our full review on the 2017 Ford Fiesta Read our full review on the 2018 Ford Fiesta ST. Read more Ford news. Source: Autorai.nl Its been almost a year since The Grand Tours Richard Hammond barely escaped with his life after crashing a Rimac Concept One. It was a tumultuous one for a lot of people, but apparently, the crash turned out to be a blessing of sorts for Rimac. Despite losing one of its $2.1 million machines because of the crash, the accident, and the subsequent media exposure it received, helped the company sell three units that same day. Richard Hammond Crashing the Rimac One For those who need a refresher, Richard Hammond nearly lost his life on June 10, 2017 during a hill climb event in Hemberg, Switzerland as part of a segment that was being shot for The Grand Tour. Hammond lost control of the Rimac Concept One he was driving, sending the car rolling down a hill a few times before ending up in a fiery blaze. The Hamster suffered significant injuries because of the crash but has since recovered from all of it. It was a difficult day for a lot of people, including Rimac, which saw one of its $2.1 million units get completely destroyed. But in a conversation with Autocar, Rimacs head of sales, Kreso Coric, admitted that on the same day as Hammonds accident, the company was able to sell three cars despite the company not having any plans of actually selling the model. The Concept One was called that because it was just a learning project, Coric told Autocar. We never meant to sell it. But the crash [Hammonds accident] happened and we got lucky with that. We sold three cars that day. It was the best marketing ever. Richard Hammond nearly lost his life on June 10, 2017 during a hill climb event in Hemberg, Switzerland To prevent the possibility of being painted like an insensitive tool, Coric quickly added that the crash was scary and serious and that it could have ended in a different way and we could have ended up needing a new job. Its weird for somebody like Coric to admit that Rimac actually benefitted from the crash, but the passing of time, coupled with Hammonds full recovery, did present a moment of reflection that shouldnt be taken against him. The accident did gain global exposure because of Hammonds celebrity status, and once people became aware of the Concept One and its capabilities its a 1,224-horsepower and 1,180-pound-foot electric monster that can sprint from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds and hit a top speed of 220 mph it immediately became a forbidden fruit that those who could afford it had to have. As for those who couldnt get their hands on the Concept One, more promising days are ahead because Rimac is already developing its latest creation, the 1,914-horsepower and 1,686-pound-foot C_Two. Judging by the hype its already getting, its unlikely that the C-Two will need a high-profile crash to get people to buy it. References Read our full review on the 2017 Rimac Concept One. Read more about the 2018 Rimac Concept Two. Source: Autocar The Chinese yuan comes under the spotlight Tuesday and Wednesday when 17 top central bank and government officials from 14 countries in eastern and southern Africa meet in Harare to discuss its possible use as a reserve currency for the region. In a statement to Xinhua on Monday, spokesperson for the Macroeconomic and Financial Management Institute of Eastern and Southern Africa (MEFMI) Gladys Siwela-Jadagu said the event would be attended by deputy permanent secretaries and deputy central bank governors. Officials from the African Development Bank and an investments management organisation will also attend the forum bringing together the policy makers and experts in reserves management to strategise on the weakening external positions of most member countries, following the global economy slowdown, she said. The theme for the forum is Trends in Sovereign Reserve Management. As at the end of 2017, official reserves for most countries in the MEFMI region stood barely at or below the traditional three months of import cover benchmark. Foreign currency denominated public debt continues to increase as well as interest payments, as most countries move to more commercial sources of borrowing to meet their increasing appetite for infrastructure projects, she said. She said the bulk of reserves for most countries in the region were invested in U.S. dollars, yet their composition had not kept pace with the large shifts in the world economy. This was particularly so since China and India continued to shape global economic trends as they remained major trade partners for the region. Most countries in the MEFMI region have loans or grants from China and it would only make economic sense to repay in renminbi (Chinese yuan). This is the reason why it is critical for policy makers to strategize on progress that the continent has made to embrace the Chinese yuan which has become what may be termed common currency in trade with Africa. Ascendancy of Chinese yuan in the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket of currencies is an important symbol of its importance and IMFs approval as an official reserve currency. With China as the largest trading partner of over 130 countries, the main challenge for African countries is how to benefit from the new pattern of international commerce, she added. She warned that the continent could not afford to lag behind in taking advantage of growth-enhancing opportunities with China, as it had been clear over the last five years that trade and investment with the West continued to be limited. The forum will also discuss risk perceptions and capital flows and financial products available for use by African countries. MEFMI is a regional owned Institute with 14 member countries: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The colorful papier-mache cocoons provide a safe haven for bringing baby bees into the world. Back in 2009, in a coincidence that was clearly instigated by flower fairies, two separate teams of scientists stumbled upon the exquisite handiwork of Osmia avosetta bees. The discoveries were a single day apart; one team in Turkey, the other in Iran. And why am I writing about this now, more than a decade later? Because what they discovered are some of the prettiest things I've ever seen: Wee little nests intricately crafted from flower petals, each one taking a day or two to build to offer a safe haven for a single bee egg. AMNH/J.G. Rozen "It's not common for bees to use parts of plants for nests," said Dr. Jerome Rozen of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), a member of the team in Turkey. "There's a demand for biologists to know bees nowadays," he added. "They are the foremost animal pollinators of plants, and tremendously important for maintaining ecosystems not only crops but also for conservation." To perform this beautiful tasks, mother bees bite off the petal from the flower and flies it back, one by one, to the site. She starts the nest in a small burrow, layering petals in a surprisingly orderly fashion. As described in the research, which was published in the AMNH publication, American Museum Novitates: ...the petals were all shaped like the upper part of a heart and were arranged in the same manner: their tips pointed downward and the cut side pointed upward and they overlap like scales scales in both the inner and the outer petal linings. After the first layer is made, a thin coating of mud, possibly moistened with nectar, is laid on before a second lining of petals is made. A deposit of provisions is made "a sticky mixture of yelloworange pollen, homogeneously combined with nectar" and the egg is deposited. Then mom seals up the pretty little package. After a few days, the egg hatches into a larva, eats the care package left by mother bee, then spins itself a cocoon inside of its flowery home until it is ready to emerge. AMNH/J.G. Rozen AMNH/J.G. Rozen We should all be so lucky as to have petalled walls surrounding us, but aside from their beauty, which the bee is probably unaware of, they obviously serve a purpose. The researchers explain that the floral shell includes trapped air that would allow it to float were the area flooded. As well, the moisture of the petals would help maintain the water content of the nest and provisions. Meanwhile, the rigidity of the nest would protect its inhabitant from predators and parasites. The study notes: Although the patchwork of colors on the outer surface of a cell or even the strong colors is a striking phenomenon to the human eye, color of the cell surface is obviously not important to the female bee or her nest. We think the survival value of constructing this elaborate cell lining of petals and soil is the texture, water content, and water repellent and humidity-retaining nature of petals. AMNH/J.G. Rozen Which all sounds perfectly reasonable, and undeniably beautiful ... and still provides all kinds of wonder nearly 10 years later. To see the complete description of this fascinating bee and her crafty ways, and many more images, you can download the PDF here. NorthGate College last week launched its hybrid system EduFlex which allows pupils who cannot be on campus to stream their classes and have the same experience as their peers who are in the physical classroom. Five people were shot dead in separate incidents during a 24-hour period in Arima, Cocorite and Tunapuna. These killings have pushed the murder toll to 315. The comparative figure for the same period last year was 318. With the troubles of the Police Service Commission increasing by the day, President Paul-Mae Weekes stands as a leader besieged by the partisan politics into which her lofty office has fallen. We regret to say that for this, the President has only herself to blame. Hello Everyone, I'm considering a solo trip to a nature destination that has great snorkeling in either June or July. I'm strongly considering Australia (also considering Belize at the moment and ruled out Indonesia only because of some of the horror stories around boat safety). I love day hikes and snorkeling. So it sounds like the Cairns/Port Douglas areas are potentially a very good fit. I'm a male in my mid 30s, am very fit/active, but am not the strongest swimmer as I have two torn rotator cuffs. I've done off boat and off the beach snorkeling in reasonably calm areas in Hawaii previously. In both cases I didn't have any issues with the swimming for over an hour with only flippers because no overhead movements were necessary (was swimming almost entirely with my legs). I've been doing research and I've found two options somewhat regularly suggested. The most enthusiastically supported seems to be taking Wavelength out of Port Douglas for an incredible snorkeling experience. Another option I have seen discussed is snorkeling with one of the liveaboard/overnight snorkeling/diving tours (I have zero diving experience). I had a few questions: 1.) Seeing as snorkeling is my primary motivator for choosing Australia as a destination for this vacation, it *seems* like it should command a larger portion of my itinerary than just a single day trip (if people think I'm wrong on that front, I'm happy to hear advice). There didn't seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for option lower isles locations. If I was going to do multiple days of snorkeling, what would someone recommend I do on that front to make the most of it? Multiple day trips on Wavelength to the outer reefs? An overnight/liveaboard to outer or ribbon reefs? Wavelength + an overnight/liveaboard? Multiple day trips to the outer reefs with different tour groups? Something else I'm not thinking of? I want to take advantage of the opportunity as best I can. 2.) Are there any overnight island or liveaboard options that give a notably better experience than something like Wavelength? It seems a lot of the overnight/liveaboard options are catered to divers more so than snorkelers. 3.) Does anyone have experience with Wavelength locations in June/July that can comment on whether I could expect to get by swimming without overhead motions? Thanks so much for any advice you can give! -:- Message from Tripadvisor staff -:- This topic has been closed to new posts due to inactivity. We hope you'll join the conversation by posting to an open topic or starting a new one. To review the Tripadvisor Forums Posting Guidelines, please follow this link: http://www.tripadvisor.com/pages/forums_posting_guidelines.html We remove posts that do not follow our posting guidelines, and we reserve the right to remove any post for any reason. Im currently planning a second Australia visit for the last week of 2018 and wish to get some input on my plan from Australia TripAdvisor users. I previously visited Sydney and surrounding areas in 2009. I am planning to fly United from SFO rather than Qantas, because out of SFO, its much easier to redeem the frequent flier miles thereby earned on United than on Qantass oneworld partner, American. I dont fly oneworld often enough to build up enough miles to redeem miles for anything. The only problem with flying United is that they changed their SFO-SYD flight so it arrives way too close to the last daily departure from SYD for AYQ, which is why I am flying to AYQ via MEL instead. Also, I am aware that Jetstar has a direct AYQ-BNE flightwhich doesnt fly on Saturdays. Current plan is as follows: December 24: Fly SFO-LAX-MEL on United December 26: Fly MEL-AYQ on Jetstar, rent car at BNE, stay three nights at Yulara, and visit Uluru and Kata Tjuta December 29: Fly AYQ-BNE (airline undecided), rent car at BNE, tour Brisbane briefly, then drive to and stay three nights at Surfers Paradise January 1: Fly OOL-SYD on Jetstar and SYD-SFO on United What do you think? By AM Wednesday, May 30, 2018 Share Tweet Share Share Email Photo by U.S. Embassy Jerusalem | CC BY 2.0 Stanley L Cohen is a lawyer and human rights activist in New York City. He has done extensive work in the Middle East and Africa. For days, now, the Israeli rewrite has been well underway, working overtime, to convince the world seven weeks of carnage in Palestine, more particularly Gaza, did not happen. Or, if it did, Israels response to the Great Return March was a measured, proportionate answer to the menace posed by some burning kites waving flags and nihilist teens armed with slingshot weapons of mass destruction.At times, weve seen Zionists rip a page straight out of the Sandy Hook playbook, suggesting gruesome virtual film footage of the on-going blood bath was largely staged as if an anti-Semitic Hollywood back lot production. Indeed, to some, it appears the latest Palestinian victims include the same crises actors used over and over again in false flag operations ranging from Douma, Syria to Parkland, Florida.Other apologists have turned the morgues of Gaza into a cynical goodwill gesture. Urging belief that if Israeli intent was mass slaughter thousands more would have found eternal peace as opposed to merely being left crippled or limbless on the floors of overbooked hospitals covered with the burn of noxious fumes as rivers of blood passed them by.To be sure, the methodical madness that is Israel goes something like this: We have the most effective, disciplined, efficient killers in the world. Had we wished to execute many more, running off with backs turned in panic, we could have done so with abandon and relative ease.Of course, it is that very expertise that puts to lie the claim that the 124 clearly identified members of the press killed or injured, these past months, had fallen victim by mere happenstance, alone.Apparently, Palestinians should give thanks that Israel merely wanted to set a tone with a controlled atrocity, these past Fridays of protest, as opposed to one of its, by now, regular scenes of effortless carnage sown throughout Gaza like a well planned mosaic of anguish to the palpable indifference of the world.Can it be long before Israel deducts the cost of ammunition, otherwise dangled for its token monthly occupation tithe, for the extorted quiet trauma of some two million political prisoners?After-all, busy these days in Syria , saber-rattling in Iran and preparing for its long overdue coast to coast crush of Gaza, even the most prosperous war criminal can, at times, run up against constraints on available weaponry. Despite being the worlds 8th largest arms exporter, Israel, always on the make for more and more military gifts, would have us believe it is no exception.And, predictably, when other excuses have collapsed to the honest lens of public transparency, the Hamas card is once again played with almost sneering contempt for the worlds ability to pierce the half-truths that fly, each day, alongside the Star of David cast throughout the occupied skyline that is Palestine.Time and time again, many have been an all too willing, if not complicit, party to Israels deflective use of Hamas to explain away the inexplicable: just how proportionality can ever be manipulated to excuse an unchecked attack by the 16th most powerful military force of our time , with thousands of tanks, aircraft and combat ships, with a multibillion dollar yearly military budget, upon a largely tattered urban enclave armed with little more than the determination and spirit of its long embattled people.It works. It has for decades in a world that long ago condensed the good to those with proper skin tone, religion and culture and the bad to those who invariably pray five times a day, not once each Saturday or Sunday.There are distinct components to Israels grand witting misspeak about Hamas and Palestinians: The first is a desperate attempt to recast who and what the movement is and from where it has come.On this point, Israel is to be applauded as it has apparently, successfully, packaged and sold an entirely fictitious representation of the movement to those who seek little more than a fabled narrative to maintain their dutiful support of its colonial project.I am no stranger to Hamas. To me the movement is not an academic pursuit or abstract intellectual curiosity that only takes shape whenever it confronts the brute force that is Israelbe it in the 365 square kilometer (141 sq mi) confines of Gaza or in the streets and universities of the West Bank. To the contrary, I have been privileged to represent more than a few of its leaders for some two decades. On occasion, the movement has sought my counsel on issues of international law prior to making its decision on how best to proceed with a given matter.Many of these men and women have also been close personal friends for years. I have often shared a warm welcome and meal at a family dinner table or an overnight stay with Hamas leaders throughout my travels in the Middle Easton occasion against the backdrop of on-going Israeli carnage or in its aftermath.I have known well most of its founders and current leadership including those that have either been assassinated or languish, today, in Israeli prisons and elsewhere denied any scrap of justice or due process. Over the years, I have spent literally thousands of hours meeting with movement leaders in prisons, at conferences, in Palestine and elsewhere.These are virtuous, dedicated, nationalists who seek not power for the sake of it or personal profit but have long stood among those who have fought against overwhelming odds and violence to lead the way toward a Palestinian home built of the marrow of freedom, justice and equality.Contrary to the Israeli and Western effort to reduce Hamas to a collective of essentially unschooled or unsophisticated foreign born so-called Islamists, nothing could be further from the truth. Hamas is a movement born of Palestine, composed of Palestinians who were raised on the very streets where the blood of their people and families, has been lost to the occupation terror imposed by Israel. For the many who suffer from a now decade old blockade of Gazawith its lack of food, water, medicine and mobilityHamas and their families have known the same isolation and paid a like price.Comprised, originally, of physicians, scholars, academics, lawyers, scientists, artists, religious leaders and farmers, it is a movement that evolved of necessity, born in the vacuum of what would obviously become the failed vision of Oslo.More than a few of these leaders escaped the tyranny of Israeli oppression, years before, to obtain education and accomplishment abroadonly later to give up the fruits of all personal success to return to their homeland and fight for its liberation.Over the years, Hamas evolved from a social service network, throughout Palestine, to become an armed guard of the Palestinian people through the discrete Qassam Brigades and an elected political movement swept to power in 2006. That victory came in what was described, then, by former President Carter, as the most transparent and successful electoral process he had observed as a monitor over his many years of such service in the Middle East.Not long thereafter, all of Gaza was punished for the temerity of its electoral will through the imposition of the embargo that a decade later remains in place as an on-going stranglehold on the health, welfare and safety of its two million residents, punctuated by massive deadly Israeli onslaughts every few years.Portrayed as little more than a terrorist group, one story, in particular, speaks volumes about the depth and breadth of the movement. Invited by one of its top leaders to attend a luncheon outside of Palestine, I arrived at a fourth floor walk-up to find most of its leadership, along with a number of other Palestinian resistance movements, engaged in a debate. No, it was not a heated argument over political tactics or military targets. During the next two hours, tempers flared over whether, and to what extent, language immersion should be included as a teaching tool in grammar school education throughout Palestine. The discussion was led by a PhD linguist schooled by legendary MIT professor, Noam Chomsky . Hebrew was among the languages to be learned.I am not naive or starry-eyed. Like all political and national liberation movements Hamas has had its problems and made its share of missteps. Nevertheless, Israels long-standing attempts to reduce it to a selfish and reckless collective willing to sacrifice the interests and safety of Palestinians, including their own families, to the winds of cheap political gain, is just so much nefariously crafted delusion.Although this unashamed invention has found a warm welcome in the insipid language of Zionist supporters and ignorant pundits, those with informed knowledge or experience with Hamas understand this call for what it is: a shameful and typical deflection from Israeli responsibility for what can only be called a willing slaughter, these last few months, that ranks among its many others always, of course, because it had no choice.The notion that the movement would ask or send people of Gaza to certain injury or death, at the hands of Israeli assassins lying in wait for all to see, reeks of the grand imperial lie that has been Israel for seventy years.It is no less repugnant than the racist proposition that Palestinians, themselves, care so little about their own families or community that they would willingly sacrifice them en masse to gain the momentary sympathy of a world long inured to their isolation and loss of liberty and life.Born of supremacist arrogance, Israel now seeks to reduce millions of Palestinians, who have struggled for generations, to little more than unthinking sheeple awaiting instructions from Hamas on when, and how, to express their will or gain their independence. Those with any connection to Palestine, or its long oppressed people, know all too well that the bars of its prison will never quiet its innate thirst for justice and freedom.In Israel, the expedient conflation of victimizer and victim of occupier and occupied is brazen and readily transparent; an indecent marriage of those that would pull the trigger with others who fall prey to its barbaric squeeze. There is simply no honest or moral equivalence.Yet, in a world that has long found Palestinians to be unworthy of equality and safeguard, this perverse union should come as no surprise. Indeed, willful blindness to Israeli slaughter is the explosive fuel that empowers its rage.For decades, now, Hamas has become a convenient foil for Israel and its compliant choir after each new horror. Meanwhile, Israel walks away to rearm leaving Palestine to bury her children, but not her hope.Against the wail of broken dreams and lost lives, the Great Return March, marches on. For Palestinians, there is no choice. Heres a rough itinerary for my 15-day visit to Vietnam and Cambodia. Im looking for feedback to help me determine if I need to trim out some of the stops and perhaps expand on others. (Cat Ba Island (Halong Bay) looks awesome but theres a bit of time in transit getting out there and back.) Id like to get some good coverage of the regions and mix between urban and rural towns. Any shared experiences and perspectives that would help me optimize this itinerary would be greatly appreciated. August 26th Evening arrival into Hanoi August 27th Visit Hanoi and surroundings August 28th Visit Hanoi and surroundings Overnight Sleeper train to Sapa August 29th Arrive in Sapa One day Trek in Sapa with Homestay August 30th Second day Trek in Sapa Overnight Sleeper train to Hanoi August 31st Morning Bus / Boat trip from Hanoi to Cat Ba September 1st Cat Ba September 2nd Cat Ba Noon departure: Bus / Boat transit - Cat Ba to Hanoi Overnight Sleeper Train Hanoi to Hue (7:30 PM to 8:30 AM) September 3rd Visit Hue and surroundings September 4th Visit Hue and surroundings Evening flight from Hue to HCMC September 5th Visit HCMC and surroundings September 6th Visit HCMC and surroundings September 7th Morning flight to Siem Reap Visit Siem Reap, Angkor Wat, and surrounding area September 8th Visit Siem Reap, Angkor Wat, and surrounding area September 8th Visit Siem Reap, Angkor Wat, and surrounding area September 9th Visit Siem Reap, Angkor Wat, and surrounding area September 10th Evening flight to HCMC Last night in HCMC Lodge at Airport Hotel September 11th Morning flight home A family of 3 was sitting in front of me on a Shinkansen (Tokyo > Kyoto). They swiveled one of the 2 seaters so they faced one another. All 3 had those hard case 4 wheel spinner 25" or 26" suitcases. All 3 went on the overhead rack above them. One went up easily. The other 2 he struggled a bit. Had several inches hanging over. I was actually freaking out it would tip over or slide back and forth but nothing happened. On my Osaka > Tokyo leg, I had my 25" soft side suitcase in front of me by my seat. I lined up first in line and when I boarded the Shinkansen I sat in the first row by the doors. It was the perfect height and fit right under the tray table when folded down. A group of 3 on the same train sat couple rows adjacent on the 3 seaters and they had one 28" soft side suitcase with them at their seats. Narita Express has their own dedicated luggage rack for big suitcases. No need to put it above you or have it by your seats. It's near the doors when you enter the train. Go with one 25". The only problem you guys (or she) will have is lugging it up and down the stairs, if escalators and elevators/lifts are from you How do I get from the airport (JFK, LGA, or EWR) to Manhattan? What To Do During Layovers? Vacation Apartment Rentals Violate NYC Laws Hotels: Kitchenettes and kitchens in 100+ Manhattan Hotels Hotels: Two queen beds plus a kitchen/kitchenette Hotels: Guests under 21 years old (but at least 18) Hotels: Which ones charge an additional Resort or Facilities Fee Hotels: When is the best time to go for cheaper rates? What are the Must-See's and Must-Do's? How Do I Ride the Subway (UPDATED)? Tips, Hint and Suggestions for First Timers SCAMS to avoid in NYC What Will the Weather Be Like During My Trip? Any Good Websites for Researching My Trip? How Safe is New York? Where to Eat in NYC Where to eat in NYC - Part 2 Celiac in the City? (gluten free) Which Area Should I Stay In? Is There Cheaper Lodging Outside Manhattan? How Much Do I Tip People? Are the New York Pass, Explorer Pass or CityPass worth it? How Do I Hail a Taxi? Public restrooms/toilets. Where do you go when you GOTTA GO? Where are the best areas for shopping? How do I find Discount Tickets for Broadway Shows? Events for Halloween 2019 in NYC Thanksgiving 2019 in NYC: What to Do & Where to Eat Christmastime in NYC 2020: Dates for the Trees-Windows-Markets-Ice Skating+MORE! Christmas Day 2019 in NYC: What to Do & Where to Eat What Should I Do on New Year's Eve? How Will I Survive the Cold Weather? Where are the Farmers Markets and Street Fairs? What is there to see and do near WTC/SOL/Brooklyn Bridge/SI ferry? What should I know about visiting the 9/11 Memorial and Museum? What Is There to See and Do in Brooklyn? How Do I Get to the Brooklyn Bridge? What Is There to See and Do in Queens? Exploring neighborhoods - where should I go and what should I see? Which is the best? ESB or TOTR or OWO? Which are the significant churches in Manhattan? Hidden Gems in the city - not so touristy How do I get from NYC to the Meadowlands and back? I'm Getting Married in NYC...what do I need to do? Should I Buy Knock-Off Purses? What to Do with Kids and How to Do It? What should we do at night -- especially with kids or under 21's? Places to eat (and drink) with a view Where is the Old FAQ? Trip Reports: Families with Young Kids - Add yours! Trip Reports: Groups of Friends - Add yours! Trip Reports: Couples - Add yours! Trip Reports: Families with Teenagers - Add yours! Trip Reports: Solo Travelers - Add yours! Trip Reports: Families of Adults - Add yours! Agree unless you are locked into plane tickets in and out of NYC you should look at flying into one city and out of the other. If you are locked in, think spending time in NYC on both ends makes sense so you don't have to be rushing back from Boston to catch a same day flight. For getting to Boston the Amtrak train is very easy (but book tickets as soon as your plans are firm because ticket prices go up closer to travel dates and some trains can sell out) Budget buses such as Megabus and Bolt bus are also an option. (When you consider travel time to the airport, security lines, etc. the train or bus takes a similar amount of total travel time.) - Although the graft file had been closed, EACC reopened it and handed over the files to DPP - The DPP initialed fresh criminal prosecution of Kamau and dragged him back to court - But the residents of Nyeri think it's all about 2022 politics and that someone wants the former CS out of the way Angry protests erupted in Nyeri County on Wednesday, May 30, following arrest of former Transport Cabinet Secretary (CS), Michael Kamau, over loss of KSh 33 million taxpayers money. Nyeri residents poured into the streets to demand release of Kamau, claiming the 59-year-old engineer was being targeted by unnamed individuals who wanted to finish him politically. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens The residents of Nyeri County on Wednesday, May 30, poured into the streets to protest arrest of former Transport CS Michael Kamau. Photo: Robin Njogu/Twitter. READ ALSO: NYS suspects including Omollo, Ndubai to remain in police custody until June 5 Reports reaching TUKO.co.ke on Wednesday morning indicated the protests in Nyeri broke out after the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) summoned Kamau afresh in relation to a graft case that had been dismissed by court. "Someone is trying to drag Kamau down. He is the only leader we have and who we can see his track record. We want him to be left alone to do his job so that Nyeri can develop. This is a 2022 politics," one of the protesters lamented. READ ALSO: Mtangazaji maarufu wa KTN - Betty Kyalo - alazwa hospitalini Nyeri County residents protest arrest of former Transport CS Michael Kamau. Photo: Robin Njogu/Twitter. The corruption case in question unfolded between 2007 and 2008 when Kamau was the Transport Cabinet Secretary. The former CS and two other suspects were accused of facilitating theft of taxpayers money that was reportedly meant for the design of Kamukuywa-Kaptama-Sirisia road in Bungoma County. READ ALSO: This Are The Faces Behind 791 Million NYS Scandal Kamau was accused of abuse of office and violation of procurement laws. The ex-CS was arrested but he staged a spirited fight for his freedom. He was let off the hook by a Nairobi Court on grounds that EACC was not properly constituted when it brought charges against him. The court however did not block the anti-graft commission from reopening the case. 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. Alcohol Blow Arrests in Nairobi - On Tuko TV Source: Tuko News - Police have named three people they believe are planning to carry out terror attacks in Kenya - The mastermind of the planned attacks has been identified as Ibrahim Mohammed - Police said the country has seen an upsurge in the number al-Shabaab militants getting into the county to carry out attacks - Earlier, the US embassy had warned of an impending attack on key installations, schools and churches by militants - This led to the police deploying 2,000 officers in Nairobi to curb attacks Three al-Shabaab militants have been put on the police radar following revelations they were planning an attack in the country during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Police also urged Kenyans to be extra vigilant following the risk posed by the criminals said to have sneaked to Kenya from Somalia. Members of the public were required to exercise extra caution around public institutions, public meetings and also to report any suspicious individuals. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens In a press statement by Kenya Police seen by TUKO.co.ke, on Wednesday, May 30, the security officers noted an upsurge in the number of terrorists trying to access the country via the Kenya-Somalia border. READ ALSO: If you are a thief, carry your own cross without involving your tribe - Uhuru Kenyatta "We have established the number of al-Shabaab militants along our common border with Somalia is on the rise with some trying to cross over into Kenyan counties of Wajir, Mandera and Garissa," The police went on to divulge a particular group led by one Ibrahim Mohammed also known as Sharis Lin Kulul, had been hiding in the mountain region of Gedo, Somalia, and is suspected to be planning to stage attacks in Kenya. Previosly, Kulul had reportedly sent one Ahmed Dabar to look for targets to attack in Mandera and Wajir counties including public officials. READ ALSO: One lady pocketed KSh 333 million from National Cereals and Produce Board - CS Kiunjuri The police revealed the number of al-Shabaab militia trying to enter Kenya is on the increase. Photo: National Geographic Dabar hails who from Degodia/ Omar Fai clan in Qarsa location, Wajir county and was a student at Madarasatul Muad in Wagberi location before joining the terrorist group. He was involved in the February 2018 terrorist attack on teachers at Qarsa Primary school. Abdiwahab Osman Ahmed, his accomplice in the attacks and who also hails from Wajir, is currently hiding in Gedo after fleeing to Somalia in 2016. Ahmed's mother, Mumia Eroba and his wife Asha Ahmed Gedi are involved in his terrorist activities. READ ALSO: Public Service PS and NYS heist suspect Lilian Omollo rushed to hospital after fainting Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinett inspects a mini parade. The National Police Service Commission wants to deploy 2,000 police officers in Nairobi. Photo: Kenya Police/Facebook. Police cautioned Kenyans to be alert while at the same time assuring them that they have beefed up security across the country during the Muslim fasting season and were closing in on the militants. This comes barely a month ago after the United States government warned of possible terror attacks across Kenya targeting US citizens visiting or living in the country. As reported earlier by TUKO.co.ke, the government announced the deployment of 2,000 police officers in Nairobi County alone to beef up security during the Ramadan period. 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. Top 5 Facts About Uhuru Kenyatta - Raila Odinga Pact - On Tuko TV Source: Tuko.co.ke - Socialite Sanchoka recently proved her assets were natural by showing off her mum as proof - The lass shared a photo of herself with her mother all parading their humongous behinds - From the photo, one could mistake them for twins An apple doesn't fall far from the tree. The old adage came to life recently after a Tanzanian socialite and video vixen took to social media to introduce her dear mum to fans for the first time. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens Taking to Instagram on Wednesday, May 30, the well-endowed Sancho shared a photo of herself standing with her voluptuous mother while parading their huge derrieres for all and sundry to see. READ ALSO: Donning no bra or underwear, Sanchoka stuns fans with sexy dance moves READ ALSO: Kidosho amtongoza kondakta kwa kukosa nauli The two had matching outfits which made them look like real twins, especially with the size of their 'moneymakers'. Sanchoka shared the photo with her mum while appreciating her as the world celebrated Mother's Day. ''To my beautiful strong woman, I will never thank God enough for you. Thank you for everything mama. I love you so much. Happy Mother's Day to all amazing mothers in the world. May God bless you all ,'' she captioned the photo. READ ALSO: Tahidi High actor Omosh introduces his cute little kids and the resemblance is just remarkable Clearly, the socialite had every reason to thank the mother who gave her a natural body that has been driving countless men crazy. It should be noted that Sanchoka is among the most endowed socialite in East Africa. READ ALSO: Nameless shares photo in American room and nosy fans think he is cheating on Wahu However, unlike others like Vera Sidika who went for silicon, Sanchoka is all natural with her mother acting as the solid proof. 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. Champions league 2018: Liverpool vs Real Madrid match preview; Source: Tuko - Miguna Miguna claimed Citizen TV was hesitant to broadcast his interview on JKL for fear of being switched off - He had earlier blasted Jeff Koinange and his counterpart Willis Raburu for mocking his deportation - The lawyer recently turned down Sonko's offer as Nairobi deputy governor - He has been trying to return to Kenya unsuccessfully including recently when he was declared persona non grata Fire spitting Miguna Miguna will be appearing on a live interview at Citizen TV on Wednesday, May 30, if his recent announcement is anything to go by. Miguna's return to Kenya was thrown into limbo after it emerged immigration officials had ordered international airlines to blacklist him. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens A letter from Kenyan Airport Authority addressed to Qatar Airways declared the fiery lawyer as persona non grata asking the carrier not to accept the fiery lawyer into any of its flights to Kenya. READ ALSO: Jubilee leaders reject Miguna nomination as Sonkos deputy Miguna Miguna announced he would be on JKL show on Citizen TV. Photo: Miguna Miguna/ Facebook Taking to his Twitter page on Wednesday, May 30, the self styled National Resistance Movement (NRM)'s general sensationally claimed he would be featuring in JKL show on Citizen TV from 10.30 pm. "I will be on Jeff Koinange Live at Citizen TV from 10-10:30 pm East African Time tonight" read his post. Unlike previous guests, the show host Jeff Koinange had not mentioned anything about the highly anticipated interview with the fiery lawyer. READ ALSO: Miguna will not be deputy governor of Nairobi, take that to the bank - Senator Sakaja According to Miguna, the media station was hesitant to broadcast the alleged interview fearing a repeat of what happened during the controversial swearing in of Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) leader Raila Odinga as the people's president. "I understand that Citizen TV won't advertise it for fear that the tyrants will switch their signals off. Media freedom and freedom of speech are entrenched in the Katiba. Fearless!wrote Miguna. About four months ago, the government switched off three local stations: Citizen TV, KTN and NTV, after they defied a warning not to air live the controversial swearing ceremony of the former prime minister. It would be an interesting twist given that barely a month ago, Miguna went ham on the media maestro and his colleague Willis Raburu after they were spotted mocking him. The cheeky pair released a footage of their own version of the popular #MigunaMigunachallenge on Thursday, April 5 which depicted how the lawyer was manhandled by police officers as he was thrown on a plane during his deportation. In an unprecedented turn of events, Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko left Kenyans tongue tied after nominating Miguna as his deputy governor. Sonko's was however left dejected after his arch rival scoffed at his lucrative offer terming it as "malicious sideshows." Barely a week ago, Miguna renewed efforts to be allowed entry into the country just days after cancelling his trip back to Kenya. The embattled politician has been striving to return to Kenya to no avail after he was kicked out of the country twice on separate dates despite courts ruling in his favour. In his last deportation, he was bundled into plane barely hours after he was released from police custody following his dramatic arrest on Friday, February 2. The former Nairobi gubernatorial candidate was due in court twice but on both occasions, police failed to present him before the judge. Governor Sonko had nominated Miguna as his deputy governor which the fiery lawyer flatly refused. Photo: Mike Sonko/ Facebook When they finally did on Tuesday, February 6, Milimani High Court Judge Luka Kimaru told him he had the option to sue the police following his illegal detention. This saw the Milimani Law Courts in Nairobi, Judge George Odunga slap three senior government officials with fine of KSh 200,000 each over Miguna's saga. Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish, please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news. Miguna Miguna's return: Chaos at Jomo Kenyatta Int. Airport (JKIA) - On Tuko TV Source: Tuko.co.ke - Catherine Mturi was accused of failing to meet set targets during her tenure - The KPA Board termed her tenure as marred with consistent failure - Daniel Manduku was appointed on acting capacity for a period of two months pending further directions The Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) Managing Director Catherine Mturi Wairi's three-year term at the helm of the parastatal has ended ungracefully after the Board of Directors found her unfit to continue holding office. The board placed a litany of accusations on Mturi's shoulders which TUKO.co.ke understands had informed the decision to relieve her of her duties. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens According to the directors, Mturi had not only failed to implement the board's agenda but also exhibited sheer non responsive work culture. READ ALSO: NYS suspects including Omollo, Ndubai to remain in police custody until June 5 Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) Managing Director Catherine Mturi Wairi's has been sent home after the Board of Directors found her unfit to continue holding office. Photo: Kenya Revenue Authority. READ ALSO: DP Ruto likes loitering around, if you see a problem tell him - Uhuru Kenyatta Transport Principal Secretary Paul Maringa and the KPA board chairman Michael Maina appointed Daniel Manduku in an acting capacity for a period of two months pending further directions. "Given the managing director is responsible for all these aspects of leadership and guidance on expected delivery of services, the board has decided to send her on a compulsory leave with immediate effect," said Maina. The letter announcing the major changes at KPA. Prior to her appointment, Mturi served at the rank of general manager finance before scaling to become the managing director in 2016. Mturi holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance and Accounting from United States International University (USIU), Nairobi and a Master of Business Administration from the same university. She is also a certified Public Accountant of Kenya and a Certified Public Secretary of Kenya. Mturi sits on the Board of Directors of Sidian Bank and chairs its Audit and Risk Committee. 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. Peter Pepe Interview: From a Conductor to 13.5 Million Business Owner - On Tuko TV Source: Tuko Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Just make it mandatory already! It's the call of two business chambers today, in the face of The OSCE has called on the Ukrainian authorities to conduct a detailed and immediate investigation into the murder of Russian opposition journalist Arkady Babchenko. President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly Harlem Desir wrote this on Twitter. "Horrified by report that well-known Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was shot and killed in his home in Kyiv. I call on Ukraine authorities to conduct immediate and full investigation. My thoughts are with journalist's family," he wrote. Arkady Babchenko was a Russian journalist and war correspondent. He started his journalist activity in 2000 after leaving the Russian Armed Forces, in the ranks of which he participated in the First and Second Chechen Wars. In 2017, he reported that he regularly received death threats and in this regard he left Russia with his family. First he lived in Prague and then in Israel. In August 2017, he moved to Kyiv where he hosted the program "Prime: Babchenko" on the Crimean Tatar TV channel ATR. op Verkhovna Rada Speaker Andriy Parubiy says that the free trade agreement with Israel will be ready in a few weeks for prompt ratification by the parliaments of both countries. "We actually speak about a few weeks when the agreement will be finalized and both the Ukrainian parliament and the Knesset [the parliament] of Israel will be able to ratify it. I believe that it will be a very important step in the economic relations between Ukraine and Israel," Parubiy said at a briefing on the results of his official visit to Israel. He also stressed that the parties agreed on the immediate ratification of the document upon completion of its preparation. Apart from the economic cooperation, Parubiy discussed the issues of national security during his visit to Israel. As reported, on March 28, Ukraine and Israel agreed on the completion of the negotiation process regarding the provisions of the Free Trade Agreement between the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the Government of the State of Israel. ol The process of $2.6 billion debt recovery from Gazprom has started in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to enforce the judgment of the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko said this at the meeting with CEO of the Naftogaz of Ukraine Andriy Kobolev. The process of the enforced recovery of $2.6 billion from Gazprom has been translated into action. The encumbrance of shares and other assets of Gazprom in European countries, particularly in Switzerland, the UK and the Netherlands has started today, Poroshenko noted. The President also gave instruction not to stop on these three countries and make every effort to ensure the arrival of funds, adjudged by the Stockholm Arbitration Court, in the state budget of Ukraine. These should be assets, perhaps, including the shares of Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 and the assets that have high liquidity and will quickly ensure the enforcement of judgments, the Head of State stressed. As reported, On February 28, 2018, the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce satisfied the Naftogaz's claims for compensation for gas transit volumes that Gazprom had failed to supply. The arbitrators ruled that Gazprom pay to Naftogaz $4.63 billion for the shortage of agreed gas transit volumes. Following two arbitration proceedings, Gazprom has to pay Naftogaz a total of $2.56 billion. ol On May 30, 1876, in the German city of Bad Ems, Tsar Alexander II of Russia signed the Ems Ukaz the decree aimed at the destruction of Ukrainian culture. This was not the first attempt of the Russian Empire to suppress the Ukrainian culture and language and, ultimately, the very national idea. The Ems Ukaz followed the notorious Valuev circular of 1863 to supplement its basic provisions. One of the formal reasons for the Ems Ukaz promulgation was a memorandum sent to the tsar by Russian political and cultural figure Mikhail Yuzefovich (who was avid Russian patriot, monarchist and hated Ukrainian culture), in which he accused Ukrainians of aspirations to live in a free Ukraine "in form of a hetman-led republic." On the same day, the tsars decision was sent to St. Petersburg, and on June 5, supplemented by detailed instructions, it came to Kyiv. The Ems Ukaz banned imports of any Ukrainian books into the territory of the Russian Empire from abroad, creation of original works in the Ukrainian language and making translations from foreign languages into Ukrainian, printing of text to musical notes, staging of plays and delivery of public lectures. The local administration was ordered to intensify supervision to remove the books in Ukrainian from libraries and make sure that the Ukrainian language is not used for teaching in primary schools. The Ems Ukaz was the reason to shut down the South-Western Department of the Russian Geographical Society in Kyiv, The Kyiv Telegraph newspaper, the Hromada Ukrainian associations. The professors of Ukrainian nationality were sacked from their posts at Kyiv's University of St Vladimir. This decree became one of the manifestations of the colonial-national policy of Russian tsarism in relation to Ukraine and denounced the existence of 25 million Ukrainians. The idea of "Little Russia" and "Little Russians" - a kind of second-class people capable only of serving devotedly father the tsar - was being drummed into the heads of Ukrainians and the whole world. Although the Ems Ukaz hampered the development of Ukrainian culture and national liberation movement, it failed to stop them completely. Ban on the use of the Ukrainian language in print in the Russian Empire make many authors (Nechuy-Levytsky, Drahomanov and others) publish their works in Halychyna, which was then under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This step strengthened the positions of the pro-Ukrainian forces and united Ukrainians residing on different sides of the border. The Ems Ukaz was not abolished formally, however, became void on October 17, 1905 with the promulgation of the so-called "Manifesto of Civil Liberties" by Emperor Nicholas II. ol The Information Policy Ministry of Ukraine calls the murder of journalist Arkadiy Babchenko the onslaught on truth and urges to punish the perpetrators and persons who ordered the murder. "It is a terrible crime. It is not just the murder of the outstanding person, it is the onslaught on freedom, onslaught on truth. The perpetrators and those, who ordered the murder, must be punished," Information Policy Minister of Ukraine Yuri Stets said. The Ministry expressed condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of the journalist. "In his motherland in Russia he was an irreconcilable fighter for the truth, an active opponent of Putin's criminal regime. They exerted pressure on him, tried to break him, forced him to leave. And here, in Ukraine, where he had found a refuge and continued his struggle, he was killed, shot in the back meanly and cynically," the minister added. Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was shot dead in Kyiv yesterday on May 29. Former soldier in the Chechen war who became one of Russias best-known war correspondents, Babchenko had left his homeland fearing for his life after criticizing Russian policy in Ukraine and Syria. ol The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine proposes that the Verkhovna Rada ratifies the agreement between Ukraine and Finland, which provides for allocation of about EUR 6 million in support of the Ukrainian school reform. The corresponding draft law was approved at the meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers. "When carrying out the educational reform, Finland focused on the preparation of teachers. Finnish teachers are among the best in the world. That is why the priority of our cooperation is change in the system of preparation and skill enhancement of Ukrainian teachers," Education and Science Minister of Ukraine Lilia Hrynevych said. These funds are designed for four years to implement the priorities of the New Ukrainian School reform, in particular, skill enhancement of teachers in primary schools, popularization of education, improvement of the educational environment. ol Haley accused Russia of creating "a catastrophe of suffering," by supporting separatist groups and violating its obligations under an international ceasefire agreement. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Tuesday called on Russia to withdraw from Ukraine and acknowledge its alleged role in the 2014 downing of a commercial plane, following a recent flare-up of violence in the conflict. "We condemn, in the strongest terms, Russia's involvement in eastern Ukraine and its purported annexation of Crimea," said Haley, promising U.S. sanctions will remain in place until Russia withdraws from the long-simmering conflict, which she called "a textbook example of the direct violation of the sovereignty of one (UN) member state by another member state," according to CNN. Haley made the appeal at a UN Security Council meeting on the conflict Tuesday, during which representatives were briefed on recent instability in the region. Haley further accused Russia of creating "a catastrophe of suffering," by supporting separatist groups and violating its obligations under an international ceasefire agreement. "Despite its transparent denials," said Haley, "there is no doubt Russia is driving the Ukrainian conflict." Read alsoU.S. Embassy calls on Russia to withdraw forces after Ukrainian teenage girl killed in DonbasShe also offered her support to Australia and the Netherlands, after those countries asked Russia to acknowledge its role in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014. An investigative team determined last week that the missile which brought down the passenger plane was fired from a launcher belonging to Russia's 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade. For his part, Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia mocked "pathetic expressions" accusing Russia of aggression as "propaganda." "We are not in a state of war with anyone," insisted Nebenzia in his characteristically impassioned remarks, which were often laced with sarcasm and peppered with heated criticism of the Ukrainian government. Read alsoUkraine to actively defend its position on deployment of UN peacekeepers in Donbas GroysmanHe insisted that it is Kyiv, not Moscow, that has undermined the ceasefire and stoked the conflict. Speaking for more than half an hour, Nebenzia dismissed Haley's criticism, noting the United States' "long history of illegally invading sovereign states." He further questioned the investigative team's findings on the downing of MH17, and called for a "credible" and "transparent" investigation into the tragedy. The French diplomat called for the development of a plan for organizing local elections in eastern Ukraine in the most peaceful conditions possible. The regulatory and legal framework for holding local elections in certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, temporarily occupied by Russian militants, needs to be finalized, according to Francois Delattre, France's Permanent Representative to the United Nations. The diplomat announced a joint statement from the two countries, participants in the Normandy format - France and Germany, speaking at the UN Security Council meeting in New York May 29, an UNIAN correspondent reports. In particular, he stressed that the long-term settlement in Donbas will depend on the political and economic measures to be implemented. He noted "the significant progress that the Ukrainian government has made in the last three years in terms of political agreements within the framework of Minsk accords, but it is necessary to finalize the regulatory and legal framework for holding local elections in certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and to develop a plan for their organization in the most peaceful conditions," Delattre said. Read alsoU.S. Envoy to UN: No doubt Russia driving Ukraine conflictHe added that France and Germany were taking the initiative to implement concrete measures to improve life conditions in Donbas, and in particular, to guarantee the right to pensions and send a mission of environmental experts. The ambassador stated that both countries would continue to support the population of Donbas affected by the conflict in the east of Ukraine, as well as the annexation of Crimea. "Our efforts within the Normandy format are an expression of our desire to ease the suffering of the population and lay a solid foundation for sustainable peace throughout the European continent," Delattre said. According to the minister, the situation for Moscow is getting worse over the latest results of the probe into an MH17 crash. Strengthening international pressure on Russia will force the Kremlin to change its position on the terms of deployment of a peacekeeping force in Donbas and agree to the conditions offered by Ukraine, the United States and several other countries, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin believes. Only by increasing pressure on Russia can the Kremlin be forced to agree to the deployment of peacekeepers in Donbas, Klimkin told journalists on the sidelines of the UN Security Council meeting in New York. He added that moral pressure was now adding up to sanctions and political pressure, according to RFE/RL's Ukrainian service. According to the Minister, for Moscow the situation is now being significantly worsened over the latest results of an investigation into the MH17 downing from the skies over Donbas, which the International Joint Investigative Group (JIT) in the Netherlands announced on May 24. Read alsoU.S. Envoy to UN: No doubt Russia driving Ukraine conflictHe stressed that everybody was now aware of where the deadly Buk missile launcher came from, the one that had downed a Malaysian plane, adding that "we're working to prove Russia's responsibility as a country for shooting down this plane." The chief of the Ukrainian diplomacy has told reporters that the Ukrainian plan for deploying peacekeepers is supported not only by the United States, but also by European countries, in particular Germany. According to the official, Kyiv has a common vision with EU partners regarding the "road map" and the format of the peacekeeping mission in Donbas. "First, it's about establishing real security - so that there's no shooting. Then the peacekeepers and the international administration gain control over the occupied Donbas so that those occupation administrations ceased existing. And only then goes the real preparation for the elections," explained Klimkin. Read alsoLegal framework for holding Donbas elex should be improved France in UNThe Minister has added that Ukraine is open for discussion on the order and timeframe for the deployment of a peacekeeping force, but at the same time Kyiv retains a fundamental requirement that the deployment of a peacekeeping mission should start not in separate regions, but throughout the entire Donbas simultaneously. As reported earlier, Russia, submitted to the UN Security Council a proposal for setting up a peacekeeping mission in Donbas, seeking that these forces be deployed only along the line of contact in locations where the OSCE observers operate, and be tasked with providing security for OSCE monitors. "Our goal is for Transcarpathian Hungarians to be given back the rights that they were previously afforded and guaranteed," the minister said. Hungary's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto says Hungary invites Ukraine to establish an intergovernmental working group to monitor the implementation of the recommendations of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission) on languages in the education of national minorities in Ukraine. "Hungary has no interest in a dispute, but in finally finding a solution to this situation, which is bad for everyone involved," he told the Hungarian media in New York on May 29, according to the Hungarian foreign ministry's website. "Our goal is for Transcarpathian Hungarians to be given back the rights that they were previously afforded and guaranteed. Our goal is also to enable us to return to our policy, which in Ukraine's case was built on supporting our neighbors' European and Euro-Atlantic integration processes," he added. "For this reason, Hungary is proposing to the Ukrainian Government that it establishes an intergovernmental working group that will be tasked with monitoring the implementation of the tasks that the Venice Commission has set down with relation to Ukraine," the minister said. "The Venice Commission stipulated that the Ukrainian authorities must consult with national minorities and must refrain from restricting previously acquired rights," he stressed. "Hungary is happy to work in cooperation with Ukraine in monitoring the implementation of the Venice Commission's decision, and is happy to assist Ukraine in this in the interests of assuring that the rights of the 150,000 Transcarpathian Hungarians are not violated in future," he added. Read alsoUkraine and Hungary to hold talks on language provisions of education law in JuneAs UNIAN reported, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin earlier said that the Ministry of Education of Ukraine would hold consultations with members of the Hungarian community from Ukraine's Zakarpattia region on June 5. In April, Hungary for the third time blocked the Ukraine-NATO Commission meeting at the ministerial level. Earlier, in March, Szijjarto demanded that Ukraine amend the law on education and postpone its implementation until 2023, otherwise he said Budapest would be blocking all meetings important for Ukraine at the European Union and NATO levels. In particular, he noted that Hungary would block the holding of the Ukraine-NATO Commission meeting at the ministerial level in April, as well as in July. Read alsoStoltenberg hopes Ukraine, Hungary able to find solution in language rowUNIAN memo. The new law on education, which entered into force on September 28, 2017, introduces a 12-year secondary education system in Ukraine with Ukrainian being used as the language of tuition. Children of national minorities can be taught in their mother tongue at classes (groups) along with the national language. Yet, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Greece and Bulgaria expressed concern over the language provisions of Article 7 of the law. The Venice Commission issued recommendations on December 8, 2017, that the Ukrainian authorities should balance the language provisions. On February 14, 2018, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine approved bill No. 8046, which provides for the extension of the transition period until 2023 for the introduction of the language provision of the education law. Now the draft law is under consideration by parliamentary committees. Ukraines prime minister has urged parliament to approve plans for an anti-corruption court, after delays held up international funding and dismayed Kievs western backers. Volodymyr Groysman said his embattled country very badly needed a fair judiciary to win the confidence of the public and foreign partners as it seeks to release frozen International Monetary Fund financing and prepares for elections next year. Kyivs overseas allies, which have helped Ukraine withstand a four-year proxy war with Russia, have raised pressure on the government to speed up this and other reforms, which are seen as crucial to tackling corruption and unlocking billions of dollars of further loans from the IMF, according to The Financial Times. Mr Groysman said in an interview in Brussels that he was calling on parliament to vote for adoption of the court law, which has been held up for a year amid disagreements. I am doing my best to explain to the MPs what is the essence of the draft, he said. And it is a great shame that I as a prime minister have no power to tip the balance and push forward with this process. Many MPs have balked at proposed amendments that would give experts funded by foreign donors the right to veto candidacies of judges considered tainted. But the premier said in an interview that the new court would be a potent signal to Ukrainians and outsiders of how a country dogged by allegations of corruption would be cleansed. He acknowledged parliamentary opposition to the change but said he believed and expected the law would be a top priority for MPs and President Petro Poroshenko ahead of a likely vote next week. Asked how damaging rejection of the bill would be, Groysman said: I do not even want to think about the slightest possibility that this draft is not adopted. Read also"Urgent" anti-corruption efforts in UkraineSupporters of the new court claim some politicians oppose the proposed legislation because they fear becoming targets of independent corruption probes themselves. Petro Poroshenko last week threw his weight behind the new court, predicting that adoption of the historic legislation that had been blocked for a year was days away. The intervention marked a shift from his previous argument that the foreign veto right would violate Ukraines constitution and sovereignty. Poroshenko blamed a parliament where his ruling coalition holds a thin majority for stonewalling by proposing 2,000 amendments that slow down the process. Suma Chakrabarti, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, welcomed Poroshenkos reassurances. The EBRD is one of Ukraines top investors and advocates a specialised anti-corruption court. Read alsoPoroshenko says Ukraine to continue cooperation with IMFThe premier said Ukraine was still seeking an agreement with the IMF over the removal of remaining gas price subsidies, which the fund wants before it releases a further tranche of a $17.5 billion facility. Mr Groysman said he wanted to increase the mutually beneficial co-operation with the IMF but warned that almost 70% of Ukrainians believed another gas price rise would be an insupportable problem. Its a very sensitive issue for Ukraine and the approach to solving this problem should be very well balanced, he said. The Russians know everything. They know that their country is waging war. They know that those who seized Crimea had already started killing there - murdering the Ukrainian military and Crimean Tatar civilians. They also know that this "Russian world" moved immediately to Donbas and conceived "Novorossiya." The death toll reaches thousands. And this is no secret in Russia. It's no secret that big and small towns and villages across Russia regularly see people secretly burying their loved ones, citizens of the "great" country who for some reason tried to prove their "greatness" by force of arms. Ukraine is not the only place Russians take out their "killed in action," there's also Syria... Everyone is aware of that but at the same time, no one wants to notice this. After all, it can't be that bad if Russian TV draws such a nice picture for its audience... Here in Russia people seem to really have believed in their nation's exclusiveness. Who was Arkadiy Babchenko? He was the one who had been destroying this alternative reality. He called black black and red red. After all, even those who "disagreed" with him, still knew at heart that he was actually right. Of course, it hurts when someone brings you down to this sinful Earth when they speak and write about the crimes of the country of which they are citizens. Only for some reason in the "most Orthodox" country in this galaxy, people seem to get very upset when being told that maybe it's enough dead bodies and it's enough killing... In the country of peculiar spiritual bonds, a special term was invented for such people as Babchenko - "national traitors." The Russian mindset, one can condescendingly treat defeated enemies, but never "traitors." The latter are unworthy of "forgiveness." And that's what happened. Who was Arkadiy Babchenko? He was the one who had been destroying this alternative reality. He called black black and red red This tragedy will be fully exploited in Russia as fuel for its information war and confirmation of an already familiar message: "it's only good in Russia as it's bad elsewhere." They'll be blaming everyone, you name it: the junta, fascists, and maybe even Banderites. They'll try not to look in the mirror, although, in the Russian alternative reality they are already showing what those looking in them wish to see. We will hear a lot about the bad and dangerous Ukraine, where Russian journalists keep dying. Recently, Arkadiy would often write he doesn't want to go back to war again, but, in fact, he never really left the battlefield The man who physically pulled the trigger and whose shots ended Babchenko's life could be pretty much anyone. But I have no doubt that the journalist was killed for his civic position. It's just that too many in Russia were outraged by his "I don't grieve." Arkadiy lived in Ukraine for just one year and only recently did he gradually begin to get used to the place and embrace it. He stressed that he was a foreign citizen and never commented on our Ukrainian squabbles, never tkain sides in our seemingly eternal dispute about victories and failures. Recently, Arkadiy would often write he doesn't want to go back to war again, but, in fact, he never really left the battlefield Roman Tsymbaliuk According to Omelyan, the goal of the barbarian empire is to destroy everything that they're unable to conquer. Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan has reacted to the news on the murder of journalist Arkadiy Babchenko in Kyiv, saying that the Kremlin and Moscow can't be reasoned with. "The Kremlin and Moscow can't be reasoned with. They can only be burned," he wrote on Facebook. According to Omelyan, the goal of the barbarian empire is to destroy everything that they're unable to conquer, understand or steal, to murder people by the tens of millions and lie without end. Read alsoRussian journalist Babchenko shot dead in Kyiv: All details"Concentration camps across the empire and assassins around the world that systematically murdered those who managed to escape their hellish reality. Ice axes in Mexico City. Poison in Paris, Prague, London and Berlin. 'Accidental' deaths and simple bullets," he said. "Perhaps some Western politicians don't mind shaking the bloody hand of the Kremlin imp. I guess they're lucky that the muscovite hordes haven't brought the fight to their quiet European streets yet," Omelyan added. As UNIAN reported earlier, Russian journalist and vocal Putin critic, war veteran Arkadiy Babchenko was gunned down in Kyiv May 29. The Ukrainian president thanked the SBU for the "brilliant operation." Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has instructed respective services of Ukraine to provide Russian journalist and Putin's vocal critic Arkady Babchenko and his family with 24/7 security. "I greet the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) this is a brilliant operation to protect the life of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko," Poroshenko wrote on Facebook on May 30 after an announcement that it was a staged "murder" of Babchenko. Read alsoUPDATE: Journalist Babchenko alive: His "assassination" was SBU's special operation Day by day, Ukraine's law enforcement agencies "become stronger in counteracting Russian aggression and all manifestations of hybrid warfare in Ukraine," he wrote. "Moscow is hardly likely to stop there I have ordered that Arkady and his family be provided with 24-hour security," Poroshenko added. As UNIAN reported earlier, Arkady Babchenko, the Russian journalist who was reported to have been shot dead in Kyiv, turned up alive at a news conference in Ukraine on May 30. His staged "murder" was a special operation conducted by the SBU. The SBU Security Service of Ukraine reported that the killing had been ordered by Russia's special services. Ukrainian Ambassador to Austria Olexander Scherba has trolled Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) for a reaction to the staged "murder" of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kyiv, who has turned to be alive as he was part of a special operation of Ukraine's security service. "I wonder if MFA Russia is satisfied now. Was it investigated fast enough?" he tweeted on Wednesday, May 30. I wonder if MFA Russia is satisfied now. Was it investigated fast enough? olexander scherba (@olex_scherba) May 30, 2018 Read alsoUPDATE: Journalist Babchenko alive: His "assassination" was SBU's special operation The SBU Security Service of Ukraine reported that the killing had been ordered by Russia's special services and a suspect had been detained. "Bloody crimes and total impunity have become routine for the Kiev regime. We demand that the Ukrainian authorities make every effort to promptly investigate the crime," the Russian ministry said on May 29 after reports about Babchenko's "murder." Savchenko went on hunger strike on March 23. Former Ukrainian pilot and Member of Parliament Nadiia Savchenko, who is accused of plotting a coup in Ukraine, has suspended her hunger strike after 69 days for a new polygraph test. "In connection with the fact that the investigators have not provided any results of her polygraph test for almost two months already, Nadiia Savchenko has decided to suspend her hunger strike for another test," the MP's press service said on her official page on Facebook on May 30. Read alsoSavchenko ready to serve 22 years in Russian jail in exchange for 60 Ukrainian prisoners According to the posting, the defense is working to submit a relevant request for a new test with the use of the polygraph at a government institution. "I hope the investigation will take the request into account to establish the true intentions of Savchenko, as who will be against establishing real circumstances of the case when this is the duty of a pre-trial investigator," the posting quoted Savchenko's lawyer Kostiantyn Hloba as saying. The lawyer says that he personally "will be happy with any position of a pre-trial investigation agency as regards for the polygraph." As UNIAN reported earlier, Savchenko went on hunger strike on March 23 after Ukraine's parliament on March 22 stripped her of parliamentary immunity and the court sanctioned her arrest. Some 450,000 children have been repaid debts that had been dragging for years, Petrenko said. Ukrainian Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko has said since the entry into force of the law on malicious non-payers of alimony, some UAH 1.5 billion been collected in favor of Ukrainian children. "During this time, we have made serious progress in combating such a phenomenon as irresponsible paternity. During this time, some UAH 1.5 billion in debt on child support was paid in favor of Ukrainian children," he said at a government meeting Wednesday, an UNIAN correspondent reports. Thus, 450,000 children have been repaid the debts that had been dragging for years, the minister said. Petrenko added over 120,000 violators faced strict sanctions and restrictions on traveling abroad, driving vehicles, etc. Some 250,000 non-payers have been put in the public register, 10,000 are declared wanted, while 16,000 will be sent for community service. Read alsoUkraine launches electronic register to force dads to pay child support mediaAs UNIAN reported earlier, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on January 4 signed a law of Ukraine to amend some legislative acts to enhance the protection of children's rights, providing for compulsory recovery of debts for child support and alimony. The law introduces new means of compulsory execution of decisions with regard to debtors who delayed payments of child support and alimony for over six months in total. In particular, the document establishes temporary restrictions for such individuals in the right to travel abroad, drive vehicles, use firearms and pneumatic weapons, as well as hunt. In addition, the law envisages a new type of administrative penalty, namely community service. According to Knyazev, there were several criminals involved in plotting the murder. UPDATE, May 30: Following publication of this article, it was revealed that Arkady Babchenko had not in fact died as reported. Full details can be found here. Head of the National Police Serhiy Knyazev has said Russian opposition journalist Arkadiy Babchenko was killed by a professional killer. "It's amateurs who get arrested at the crime scene. This was a premeditated crime committed by individuals yet unknown. We believe the motive of the crime is [revenge for] the victim's professional activity. Other versions also have the right to life, but there is a priority," Knyazev said at a briefing, an UNIAN correspondent reports. According to him, there were several criminals involved "It may take a single person to pull a trigger, but that single person could not prepare such a crime," he said. At the same time, Knyazev said he would not disclose any details, in particular, on whether Babchenko let the killer into the apartment or whether his widow had already been questioned. He also added the experts had not yet started examining the bullets revealed at the scene, since they had not yet received a judicial authorization. "According to the new legislation, investigators are now waiting in court to obtain a permit for expert examinations," he said. Knyazev also called on journalists who are conducting their own investigation into the murder to share the information they get with the National Police. "Dear journalists, bring us your materials. If you want to create a private detective agency, that's one thing, but another thing is that you are obliged by law to provide the information you obtain to the National Police," he said. Knyazev also said that today, at 17:00 Kyiv time, representatives of security agencies would report at a press conference on the progress of the investigation. According to the intelligence data, three occupiers were killed and another three -- wounded. Russia's hybrid military forces mounted 36 attacks on Ukrainian army positions in Donbas in the past 24 hours, with four Ukrainian soldiers reported as wounded in action (WIA). "Hostilities continued near the village of Novotoshkivske in Luhansk region, as well as near the villages of Zaitseve and Pivdenne in the Horlivka sector," the press center of Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation (JFO) said in an update on Facebook as of 07:00 Kyiv time on May 30, 2018. Fighting continues in the Donetsk sector near the towns of Avdiyivka and Maryinka, and near the village of Shyrokyne, which is in the Mariupol sector. According to the intelligence data, three occupiers were killed and another three -- wounded. As UNIAN reported earlier, the Prosecutor General's Office (PGO) of Ukraine has provided evidence that members of the Russian-backed "Donetsk People's Republic" ("DPR") terrorist organization are involved in the death of a 15-year-old Ukrainian girl in the village of Zalizne in the east of Ukraine on May 29. The financier is widely credited with the creation of the Magnitsky Act - a 2012 range of sanctions from the United States on top Russian officials accused of corruption. Financier Bill Browder, a high-profile critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been arrested in Spain earlier on Wednesday. Browder was sentenced to nine years in prison by a Russian court late last year, on fraud and tax evasion charges, according to BBC. Interpol had previously refused to enforce a similar 2013 sentence for Browder, deeming it "predominantly political in nature". But on May 30, Browder tweeted that Spanish police had arrested him on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. In the back of the Spanish police car going to the station on the Russian arrest warrant. They wont tell me which station pic.twitter.com/Xwj27xC7Zd Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) May 30, 2018 Later, Browder posted another tweet, informing on his release: "Good news. Spanish National Police just released me after Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised them not to honor the new Russian Interpol Red Notice. This is the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case." The American-born financier, who is based in the UK, is widely credited with the creation of the Magnitsky Act - a 2012 range of sanctions from the United States on top Russian officials accused of corruption. Sardar Masood Khan, President Azad Jammu and Kashmir has said that Pakistan is young and dynamic, and it would be among top economies of the world by 2050; and now that it is the hub of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Pakistan is already both a conduit and a destination for logistical chains, trade and investments Vienna; (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) Sardar Masood Khan, President Azad Jammu and Kashmir has said that Pakistan is young and dynamic, and it would be among top economies of the world by 2050; and now that it is the hub of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Pakistan is already both a conduit and a destination for logistical chains, trade and investments. The President made these remarks while addressing a seminar titled Pakistan's New Role Between China and Europe; Opportunities and Challenges of Chinas Silk Road Project organized by the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy (AIES) which was hosted by Dr. Werner Fasslabend, Former Defense Minister and President of AIES. Explaining the scope of the the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the President said that this is an unprecedented transcontinental project spanning Asia, Europe and Africa aiming for global connectivity and economic prosperity. With massive potential, he said, this initiative covers 68 countries with plans to invest over US $ 1 trillion in infrastructure, energy, and industrial projects. Underlining the importance of the European Union, President Masood Khan said that EUs market of 460 million people, as well as the EUs treasure trove of technology and knowhow, makes it imperative that modern connectivity channels are established. He said that investments in Europe by China in energy, telecommunication, real estate sector and similarly Europes investment in industrial and services sectors in China have created mutual dependencies. President AJK said that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is the flagship project and an offshoot of the BRI, thereby any role Pakistan can or will play between Europe and China will be within the framework of the BRI and CPEC combined. He added that both the BRI and CPEC are a conscious effort to reach out to Europe which will bring Europe closer to Chinese markets. CPEC, said the President, is not just a stand-alone project. It is developed into a network for connecting East Asia, South Asia, Central, West, and Southwest Asia. He added that now many regional and extra-regional states are showing interest in it and has already attracted the attention of Russia, Turkey, Italy, France and the UK and several other European countries are already consulting with Pakistan and China to participate in CPEC projects. The Gwadar Port, in particular, he said, will give Russia access to warm waters via Central Asia for international trade, helping begin a new phase of cooperation between Russia and Pakistan. President Masood Khan said that concerted joint investments by Europe, Pakistan and China under the umbrella of CPEC would create huge opportunities for livelihoods, businesses and human development. In this context, he added, it will build bridges between Europe and China, Europe and Asia, he said, adding that Pakistan will play a pivotal part in this process. While responding to the questions presented by the participants, the President said that he CPEC would continue to be implemented despite the changes in the governments in Pakistan. There would continuity in CPEC related projects, which would be completed without interruption, adding that Pakistan is now looking at the region geo-economically, not geo-strategically. The audience took a keen interest in the possible resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute. The President said that the Jammu and Kashmir should be resolved in accordance with the mechanisms established by the United Nations for the pacific settlement of disputes, which included dialogue, preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, negotiations and mediation. The President said the use of force or state terrorism will not resolve this issue. He expressed the confidence that one day the voice of the Kashmiris will be heard and their legitimate right for determining their political future will be recognized by the international community. President Masood Khan said that Azad Kashmir promotes and protects human rights, whereas the human rights situation on the Indian Occupied Kashmir is horrendous, and he strongly urged the international community to intercede to put an end to human rights crisis in Indian Occupied Kashmir. The President said Azad Jammu and Kashmir, is now also integrated into the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and four projects under CPEC have been initiated. These are two hydropower projects, one of them being directly funded by the Silk Road Fund, one expressway and an industrial zone. He added that Azad Kashmir was a peaceful territory, with the lowest crime rate and highest educational score in Pakistan. Azad Kashmir promotes and protects human rights, whereas the human rights situation on the Indian Occupied Kashmir is horrendous. The event was co-hosted by Austria National Defence academy and the Universal Peace Federation who were represented there by Brigadier Walter Feichtinger and Mr. Peter Haider respectively. It was attended by over 70 scholars, analysts, ambassadors, diplomats, UN representatives and members of civil society. UNITED NATIONS, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) :Kuwait has proposed a draft resolution to the UN Security Council, calling for consideration of establishing an international protection mechanism for Palestinians in the face of Israeli violence. The draft, which was submitted to the 15-member Council on Tuesday, and could come up for vote possibly on Thursday, is expected to face a US veto, diplomats said. France and Britain, the two US allies who also hold veto power, have claimed that the proposal fails to clearly define the scope and objective of the mission. It calls for the consideration of measures to guarantee the safety and protection of the Palestinian civilian population in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and the Tel Aviv-blockaded Gaza Strip. The draft requests that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres present a report within 60 days over recommendations on how to protect the Palestinians. More than 110 Palestinians have died since March 30, during Israels crackdown on protests at the fence separating Gaza from the Israeli-occupied territories. The new document is a revised version of the draft Kuwait, a non-permanent member of the Security Council, had submitted to the Council in mid-May, when the Israeli regime killed some 60 Palestinian protesters in Gaza in a single day as the US was inaugurating its embassy in occupied Jerusalem al-Quds. The earlier version had sought an outright demand for the establishment of such mechanism. Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon slammed the proposed resolution as shameful and said it was designed to help the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, which runs Gaza. Later on Wednesday, the UN Security Council is set to hold an emergency meeting at the request of the US in the wake of what Washington and Tel Aviv call "Palestinian aggression" against Israel. The US has circulated a draft council statement that would condemn the firing of rockets by Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza, but it remains unclear whether it will be approved. (@ChaudhryMAli88) MIRPUR (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) , May 30 (APP) ::The Austria-based Universal Peace Federation (UPF) has designated and recognized President of Azad Jammu and Kashmir Sardar Masood Khan as Ambassador of Peace. At a simple ceremony held at Austrian city of Vienna Wednesday, the president was given this award and title by President of the Universal Peace Federation Peter Haider, an official message received here Wednesday said. President Masood Khan is in Vienna to attend an international peace conference and to speak at different think tanks. While accepting the peace award, the president expressed the hope that the Jammu and Kashmir dispute would be resolved through dialogue and diplomacy, within the framework of the United Nations, and the people of Kashmir will see peace in their land. The Universal Peace Federation acknowledges as individuals whose lives exemplify the ideal of living for the sake of others, and who dedicate themselves to practices which promote universal moral values, international harmony, renewal of the United Nations initiatives, a responsible public media,and the establishment of a culture of peace. Transcending racial, national and religious barriers, the Ambassadors of Peace contribute to the fulfilment of the hope of all ages of a unified world of peace. (@rukhshanmir) ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) :President Azad Jammu and Kashmir Sardar Masood Khan said that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is the flagship project and an offshoot of the Belt and Road Initiative, thereby any role Pakistan can or will play between Europe and China will be within the framework of the BRI and CPEC combined. The President made these remarks while addressing a seminar titled " Pakistan's New Role Between China and Europe; Opportunities and Challenges of China's Silk Road Project" organized by the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy (AIES) which was hosted by Dr. Werner Fasslabend, Former Defense Minister and President of AIES, said a message received here on Wednesday. He said that Pakistan is young and dynamic, and it would be among the top economies of the world by 2050; and now that it is the hub of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Pakistan is a conduit and a destination for logistical chains, trade and investments. Explaining the scope of the the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the President said that this is an unprecedented transcontinental project spanning Asia, Europe and Africa aiming for global connectivity and economic prosperity. With massive potential, he said, this initiative covers 68 countries with plans to invest over US $ 1 trillion in infrastructure, energy, and industrial projects. Underlining the importance of the European Union, President Masood Khan said that EU's market of 460 million people, as well as the EU's treasure trove of technology and know how, makes it imperative that modern connectivity channels are established. He said that investments in Europe by China in energy, telecommunication, real estate sector and similarly Europe's investment in industrial and services sectors in China have created mutual dependencies. He asserted that both the BRI and CPEC are a conscious effort to reach out to Europe which will bring Europe closer to Chinese markets. CPEC is not just a stand-alone project, he added. It is developed into a network for connecting East Asia, South Asia, Central, West, and Southwest Asia. He added that now many regional and extra-regional states are showing interest in it and has already attracted the attention of Russia, Turkey, Italy, France and the UK and several other European countries are already consulting with Pakistan and China to participate in CPEC projects. The Gwadar Port, in particular, he said, will give Russia access to warm waters via Central Asia for international trade, helping begin a new phase of cooperation between Russia and Pakistan. President Masood Khan said that concerted joint investments by Europe, Pakistan and China under the umbrella of CPEC would create huge opportunities for livelihoods, businesses and human development. In this context, he added, it will build bridges between Europe and China, Europe and Asia, he said, adding that Pakistan will play a pivotal part in this process. While responding to the questions presented by the participants, the President said that he CPEC would continue to be implemented despite the changes in the governments in Pakistan. "There would be continuity in CPEC related projects, which would be completed without interruption, adding that Pakistan is now looking at the region geo-economically, not geo-strategically" he added. The audience took a keen interest in the possible resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute. The President said that the Jammu and Kashmir issue should be resolved in accordance with the mechanisms established by the United Nations for the pacific settlement of disputes, which included dialogue, preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, negotiations and mediation. The President said the use of force or state terrorism will not resolve this issue. He expressed the confidence that one day the voice of the Kashmiris will be heard and their legitimate right for determining their political future will be recognized by the international community. President Masood Khan said that Azad Kashmir promotes and protects human rights, whereas the human rights situation on the Indian Occupied Kashmir is horrendous, and he strongly urged the international community to intercede to put an end to human rights crisis in Indian Occupied Kashmir. The President said Azad Jammu and Kashmir, is now also integrated into the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and four projects under CPEC have been initiated. These are two hydropower projects, one of them being directly funded by the Silk Road Fund, one expressway and an industrial zone. He added that Azad Kashmir was a peaceful territory, with the lowest crime rate and highest educational score in Pakistan. Azad Kashmir promotes and protects human rights, whereas the human rights situation on the Indian Occupied Kashmir is horrendous. The event was co-hosted by Austria National Defence academy and the Universal Peace Federation who were represented there by Brigadier Walter Feichtinger and Mr. Peter Haider respectively. It was attended by over 70 scholars, analysts, ambassadors, diplomats, UN representatives and members of civil society. (@ChaudhryMAli88) RAWALPINDI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) ::Director General, Rawalpindi Development Authority (RDA) Rana Akbar Hayat Wednesday directed the officers to work hard to complete the ongoing development projects within stipulated time frame. Chairing a meeting held here to review ongoing and new schemes of RDA, Engineering Wing he directed the officers to complete the ongoing projects swiftly. Chief Engineer RDA, Athar Hussain Bokhari, Assistant Director (AD) Engineering, Rahat AliQureshi, AD Engineering Muhammad Faisal and other officers were present on the occasion. The Chief Engineer discussed and gave detailed presentation about ongoing and newschemes of the Engineering Wing like Ring Road project, Nullah Lai Expressway, Remodeling of Ammar Chowk, Dualization of Link Road from Tipu Road to Benazir Bhutto Airport Road, Sarwar Road and other projects. He said, in view of future requirements of the city, the Ring Road project is inevitable and includedin Annual Development Programme (ADP). He directed the Engineering Wing officials to work hard on the city's projects to provide relief to the citizens. The Chief Engineer also discussed construction of a commercial tower at a RDA plot, Murree Road which was supported by the DG. GILGIT, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) :The Gilgit Baltistan Assembly through a unanimously passed resolution here Wednesdaystrongly condemned the malicious propaganda of Indian Government and its mediaagainst promulgation of Gilgit Baltistan Empowerment Order 2018. The House strongly condemned India'sfailed propaganda attempts to give wrong colour to the protest of joint opposition. On May 21, 2018 the Gilgit Baltistan Government has formally promulgated Gilgit Baltistan Order 2018, which provides devolution of greater administrative authority and financialpowers to the area. The GB Order 2018 has shifted powers of the Gilgit Baltistan Council to Gilgit BaltistanAssembly, entrusting with powers to make legislation regarding mineral, hydropower and tourism sectors. The resolution presented by Provincial Minister for Law, Aurangzaib Advocate in the 28th meetingof the GB Assembly with Deputy Speaker Jafarullah Khan in the Chair, was unanimouslypassed by the House. The biased negative propaganda of Indian'smedia against Pakistan and Gilgit Baltistan and summoning of Pakistani DeputyHigh Commissioner by India over GB Order was also strongly condemned. The resolution said it was crystal clear from the protest of joint opposition that people and political parties in Gilgit Baltistan are enjoying all fundamental, human and freedom of expressionsrights. The resolution said India was making failed attempt to divert attention of United Nations from the increased atrocities, extra judicial killing and human rights violations in the Indian OccupiedKashmir, which was highly condemnable. "We were Pakistani, are Pakistani and will remain Pakistani," the GB assembly members declared in the resolution. Chief Minister Gilgit Balistan, Hafiz Hafeezur Rehman started debate on the GB Empowerment Order 2018 and said it was a highly sensitive issue, which required political maturity of themembers. The CM said there was a difference in Governance Order 2009 and GB Order 2018 as the latter has empowered the GB assembly. He said GB Order 2018 was in accordancewith wishes and aspiration of people of this province that was also dullysupported by all top forums of the country. The assembly also approved incentives bill2018 of the members of GB Assembly. The assembly was later adjourned till 2pmfor Thursday. (@ChaudhryMAli88) Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal Wednesday told the Lahore High Court (LHC) that he respected the judiciary and could not think of insulting it LAHORE, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) :Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal Wednesday told the Lahore High Court (LHC) that he respected the judiciary and could not think of insulting it. Ahsan Iqbal made this statement before a three-member bench, headed by Justice Syed Mazahar Ali Akbar Naqvi, which was hearing a contempt plea filed by Munir Ahmad against him over anti-judiciary remarks. The bench, referring to Article 68 of the Constitution, questioned the minister when the conductof a superior court judge could not be discussed even in the parliament then how did you do it before the public. To which, the minister said that his statement was a sort of complaint and he did not make any contempt ofcourt. The bench adjourning further hearing till June 5 asked for filing written statement besides ordering screening ofcontemptuous clip in the courtroom on the next hearing. Speaker National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiq Wednesday said the new Channel of PTV Parliament would change perception of the public about working of public representatives in National Assembly and Senate. ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) :Speaker National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiq Wednesday said the new Channel of ptv Parliament would change perception of the public about working of public representatives in National Assembly and Senate. Speaking on the inauguration of Channel of the Parliament, the Speaker said that the main purpose of the Channel of the Parliament was to keep the public informed what kind of issues parliamentarians were taking up on their behalf. Ayaz Sadiq said that it was general perception among people that the Parliament and its Standing committees were doing little and the new Channel would help in changing that mindset. He said that he as Speaker opened the Parliament for everyone so that people could learn about the working of both houses. Ayaz Sadiq said that delegations from various universities, colleges and schools across the country visited the Parliament and witnessed its proceedings. Students after their visit said their perception about Parliament changed as they came to know how the houses functioned, he said adding as many 200 internees had completed their internship from Parliament and they were now highlighting the role of Senate and National Assembly on the social media. "It was great achievement of the Parliament that as many as 26 universities have adopted the syllabus of the Parliamentary Studies with the help of Higher education Commission (HEC)," he added. Ayaz Sadiq expressed the hope that message of the Parliament through the channel would reach heart of the general public, adding that role of the Pakistan Television was very crucial in this regard. Recalling the meetings of Electoral Reforms Committee of the Parliament, the Speaker said the committee sought recommendations from the public and as many as 4000 pages of recommendations were received which were later incorporated in the law. He said that Pakistan was the world's first green Parliament as it was completely run on solar energy. The Speaker appreciated Minister for Information and Broadcasting Marriyum Aurangzeb and Secretary Ahmad Nawaz Sukhera for their efforts for the launch of the Parliament channel. (@ChaudhryMAli88) HYDERABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) :A highly significant orientation session on 'Capacity Planning System (CPS) through Offices of Research, Innovation and Commercialization (ORIC) at public sector universities in Pakistan" was held at the Senate Hall of the Vice-Chancellor's Secretariat University of Sindh Jamshoro on Wednesday. The Vice Chancellor University of Sindh Prof. Dr. Fateh Muhammad Burfat chaired the session while Prof. Dr. Zia Ul-Qayoom, Vice-Chancellor, University of Gujrat and CPS-ORIC HEC Country Project Director, Prof. Dr. Ghulam Raza Bhatti, Member (Operations and Planning) Higher Education Commission, Islamabad, Tanveer Ahmed, consultant HEC CPS-ORIC Project, Javed Memon, Regional Director, HEC Regional Centre, Karachi and Adnan Saleem, Project Coordinator, CPS-ORIC Project attended the sessions.The Vice-Chancellor Prof. Dr. Fateh Muhammad Burfat, in his address said that no constructive way forward, rapid progress, academic, research and infrastructural development could be thought of without first gaining self-sufficiency and necessary wherewithal, competence and required efficiency in the use and management of information and communication technology. Dr. Burfat thanked Higher Education Commission Islamabad for including University of Sindh among ten universities of the country in safe and smart university stream under CPS-ORIC national pilot project. He also congratulated Prof. Dr. Tariq Banuri the newly-appointed Chairman, Higher Education Commission, Islamabad and hoped for things to take a phenomenal positive turn under his anticipated visionary and dynamic leadership. The Vice Chancellor, University of Gujrat and Project Director CPS-ORIC Project Prof. Dr. Zia Ul-Qayoom said that HEC had, since its inception in 2002, already contributed significantly towards development of the country's public sector universities, as it had until then; allocated rupees 3200 million only to universities in Sindh, where innovative features like PERN 1, 2 and 3 projects, fiber optic backbone, Wi-Fi enabled communication networks with 600 megabytes per second internet connectivity, video-conferencing and many other such revolutionary facilities had become a norm. "Today, we live in times of social media awareness, youth activism and participatory citizenship in which people think, ask questions about use of public funds and hold individuals and institutions responsible", he said and added, " People know that billions of rupees are being spent on education through HEC and other channels. Hence, they want to know what kind of education is being imparted, what syllabi used, what methodologies exploited and what could exactly be the impact of the entire exercise. The HEC Member Operations and Planning Prof. Dr. Ghulam Raza Bhatti in his remarks reminisced his fond old memories and long association with University of Sindhhis Alma Mater. Dr. Bhatti also presented a summary sheet, outlining HEC's journey from University Grants Commission (UGC)merely a funding agency to HECthe regulatory outfit. He said he is convinced that the recent two major developments that are shortly to take off at Sindh University will change the varsity's outlook, landscape, performance, image and excellence to its best possible. The two developments included the university's inclusion in 'safe and smart university project under CPS-ORIC national initiative'" and "approval of funding of rupees 1600 million to university by the Federal Government through HEC", Dr. Bhatti emphasized. Among others, the HEC CPS-ORIC Project Consultant Tanveer Ahmed and the Director Sindh Unifersity Internet Services Centre Dr. Yasir Arafat Malkani also delivered presentations. Those who participated in the session included Pro-Vice Chancellors of Sindh University campuses, deans of faculties, academic and administrative heads, faculty, researchers and a large number of students. Later, the visiting scholars, accompanied by the Vice Chancellor Dr. Burfat, visited Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, SU Web Office, SU Internet Services Centre and other campus prominent points; where they also held talks with relevant IT experts with reference to the project implementation. (@ChaudhryMAli88) Speaker National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiq Wednesday praised the efforts of Patron-in-Chief Pakistan Sweet Homes Zamurd Khan in building self-confidence among children to make them good citizens in future ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) :Speaker National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiq Wednesday praised the efforts of Patron-in-Chief Pakistan Sweet Homes Zamurd Khan in building self-confidence among children to make them good citizens in future. Speaking at the iftar dinner of Pakistan Sweet-Homes here at H-9 organized by Zamurd Khan, the Speaker lauded Zamurad's efforts and said it was admirable when Pakistan Sweet Homes children refer to Zamurd Khan as dad. "The work he has done for these children is commendable and we should all support him in this good work," he said. He said we should all join hands to make these children better and useful citizens of the country. "Once I asked Zamurd about his thoughts for his constituency, he replied that my constituency is Pakistan Sweet Homes and its children," he said. On the occasion, Zamurd Khan said we could see representatives from all the political parties gathered under one roof to support the cause of the Pakistan Sweet Homes children. "After God I am grateful to my donors who have supported me time and again for this noble cause," he said and thanked MNAs and NA Speaker for their presence in the iftar dinner. He said the children who had no parents were his constituency and he would do his utmost effort to improve their conditions of life. (@ChaudhryMAli88) Addis Ababa, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) :Ethiopia on Tuesday released a top member of an armed opposition group whose arrest and extradition from Yemen in 2014 was slammed by Britain. Andargachew Tsige, a dual-citizen of Ethiopia and Britain, was among hundreds of prisoners pardoned last week who left jail, state-affiliated Fana Broadcast Corporate reported. "More than 500 inmates, including Andargachew Tsige, have been released from prison," the broadcaster said. His release was welcomed by British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who said he was, "pleased Andargachew [Tsige] is now able to reunite with his loved ones after being separated from them for so long."Britain had condemned Yemen for arresting Andargachew at Sanaa airport as he was travelling to Eritrea and sending him to Ethiopia the same day. Andargachew, a top member in opposition group Ginbot 7, is the latest high-profile dissident to be released by Ethiopia since Abiy Ahmed took over as prime minister in April after months of political turmoil. "Recent moves by the Ethiopian Government send a positive signal that they remain serious about following through with promised reforms to increase political space," Johnson added in his statement. Ethiopia, which considers Ginbot 7 a terrorist group, had accused Andargachew of plotting attacks and training opposition groups in Eritrea, its neighbour and arch-foe. Shortly after his arrest, Andargachew proclaimed "peace" and vowed to "calm down" in an appearance on Ethiopian state television. Ethiopia's attorney general Birhanu Tsegaye said last week Andargachew was among a special group of prisoners pardoned because they had "demonstrated remorse". On Tuesday, Fana reported Birhanu had also ordered charges dropped against Ginbot 7 leader Berhanu Nega, along with two US-based opposition media outlets that had been indicted last year, Oromia Media Network (OMN) and Ethiopian Satellite Television. Charges were also dropped against OMN's founder Jawar Mohammed, a fierce critic of the government who has promoted strikes and protests that were seen as factors in the government imposing a six-month state of emergency in February. Berhanu, who has already been sentenced to death in a previous trial, lives outside Ethiopia as does Jawar, and neither man had been arrested. Rights groups have criticised Ethiopia for claiming association with Ginbot 7 as a reason to prosecute politicians and journalists opposed to the one-party rule of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front. (@ChaudhryMAli88) A court in Kazakhstan on Wednesday convicted a man for fighting on the side of separatists in Ukraine, who are backed by the Central Asian country's ally, Russia. Astana, Kazakhstan, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) :A court in Kazakhstan on Wednesday convicted a man for fighting on the side of separatists in Ukraine, who are backed by the Central Asian country's ally, Russia. A court in the Karaganda region gave Nikita Stepin a seven-year sentence for "participation in a foreign armed conflict", a court spokeswoman told AFP by telephone. The case received significant attention from media in Kazakhstan, where neighbouring Russia's military support for rebels in eastern Ukraine is viewed warily, despite strong ties between the two countries. According to court documents cited in Kazakh media reports, Stepin fought for forces loyal to the self-proclaimed Lugansk People's Republic. The defendant also received a further 20-year sentence for two murders he committed upon returning to Kazakhstan that did not appear to be directly related to his activities in Ukraine. Provisions of Kazakhstan's criminal code mean he will serve a maximum of 25 years. Kazakhstan has a large Russian minority mostly concentrated near the country's border with Russia, and prides itself on maintaining strong relations with Kiev and the West as well as Moscow. (@ChaudhryMAli88) Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) has provided food aid to 3,500 orphans in Albania, the agency said in a statement Wednesday. ANKARA , (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th May, 2018 ) :Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) has provided food aid to 3,500 orphans in Albania, the agency said in a statement Wednesday. TIKA said the food aid has been delivered in different parts of Albania in cooperation with the Albanian Alternative Foundation of the Future. A ceremony was held in the Albanian capital Tirana for the occasion. Speaking at the event, Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj said TIKA had always supported Albania. "We were together when there was a flood, we were together when we built kindergartens, planted trees, and built playgrounds," Veliaj said. The Archbishop of Lubango in Angola and President of SECAM, Gabriel Mbilingi, says that the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar is an essential vehicle for African Bishops in fostering collaboration, solidarity and fraternity among themselves but also with other Bishops of the universal Church. Vatican News Africa Service - Vatican City Blessed Pope Paul VI launched SECAM Speaking on the sidelines of the just ended joint meeting of African and German Bishops, Archbishop Mbilingi described the encounter in Antananarivo as fruitful and one that served to reinforce the Churchs common mission in the service of integral human development. Archbishop Mbilingi explained that SECAM as a Church organsation brings together Africa's Bishops in the 37 Episcopal Conferences of the continent. SECAM was born out of the will of young African Bishops during the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965. African Bishops wanted to speak with one voice. The establishment of SECAM was, therefore, a desire by the Bishops to build a continental structure that would put forward an African way of being Church within the context of the universal Church. SECAM was officially launched, in Uganda, by Blessed Pope Paul VI on the first-ever visit of a Pope to Africa. Church in Africa as a family of God SECAMs vision of the Church in Africa is that of a Family of God, Archbishop Mbilingi said. Archbishop Mbilingi emphasised that during the Second Synod for Africa, in 2009, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wanted this identity of the African Church, as a family of God, to have a mission: To be a Church at the service of reconciliation, justice and peace. The Angolan prelate also spoke of Africa as a continent of hope, because it is mostly composed of a young population. The young people in the Church of Africa are the hope for the Church and humanity. According to Archbishop Mbilingi, this hope was best articulated by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI when he referred to Africa as "an immense spiritual lung" for all humanity. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet later this week with a North Korean four-star general in New York for talks related to a planned summit between President Donald Trump and North Korea's leader, according to the White House. Kim Yong Chol, the vice chairman of the powerful Central Committee and North Korea's former spy chief, departed Beijing on an Air China commercial flight Tuesday for John F. Kennedy International Airport. Earlier in the day, Trump tweeted that Kim's visit is a "solid response to my letter, thank you!" "Kim Yong Chol is the man who whispers in Kim Jong Un's ear. Not only does he advise him on strategy but he also conveys the leader's demands. He'll be coming to New York to negotiate on Kim Jong Un's behalf. It's another very strong sign of commitment to this summit," said Jean Lee, director of the Korea program at the Wilson Center. Tough discussions ahead Lee, former Pyongyang bureau chief for the Associated Press, tells VOA tough discussions should be expected "as the U.S. and North Korean sides try to get on the same page regarding what the two leaders will accomplish at this anticipated summit." Trump sent a letter last week to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying their scheduled June 12 summit in Singapore would not happen, and blaming what he said was "tremendous anger and open hostility" shown in a statement from Pyongyang. But negotiations between the two countries have continued, including talks at the Korean demilitarized zone. WATCH: Pompeo N. Korea delegate meet "If it takes place on June 12th, we'll certainly be prepared. If it, for some reason, takes place at a later date, we'll be prepared for that as well," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Tuesday afternoon on Air Force One. A number of factors will determine when it is scheduled, Sanders added. "Denuclearization has to be on the table on the focus of the meeting," she explained. "And the president has to feel like we're making progress on that front." A U.S. delegation is meeting with a North Korean delegation in the demilitarized zone, led by Sung Kim, who is the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines and a former envoy to South Korea. Also present are Allison Hooker, Korea director on the National Security Council, and Randy Schriver, who is the assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs. Additional meetings are planned this week. Separately, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin is leading a pre-advance team in Singapore coordinating the logistics of the expected summit. It has also been announced that Trump is to meet Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the White House on June 7. Japan concerned Behind the scenes, Japanese officials have expressed anxiety the Trump-Kim summit might sideline their priorities, especially North Korea's short- and medium-range missiles, and the fate of Japanese citizens abducted over decades by North Korean agents. "We would like to see comprehensive verifiable irreversible dismantlement [CVID] of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, the ballistic missiles dismantled irrespective of range, as well as addressing the abduction issue," Koro Bessho, Japan's ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters on Tuesday. "Abe wants to get the precise nuance of the U.S. negotiating policy," said Yoichi Sato, a professor of international security studies at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. Abe has strongly supported the Trump administration's CVID stance, and Sato tells VOA that "for the U.S. to move from that means there is a great implication for Japan's standing, especially Japan's stance on the presence of U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula." South Korean President Moon Jae-in could also be going to Singapore next month for a three-way summit with his U.S. and North Korean counterparts, a government official in Seoul said Monday. After a surprise meeting Saturday with Kim Jong Un, Moon said the North Korean leader is still committed to the "complete denuclearization" of the Korean peninsula. North Korea has rejected unilateral disarmament and called for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula without defining what that entails. The North Koreans, after expressing initial enthusiasm about diplomacy with the United States earlier this month, did not show up for a preparatory meeting in Singapore. Angers U.S. North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui also was quoted by the country's official news agency threatening to use nuclear force and she referred to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence as a "political dummy." That angered Trump, who then wrote a letter to Kim Jong Un calling off their summit. North Korean state media quickly replied with a conciliatory statement, reporting Kim's "fixed will" that his summit with Trump should go ahead. For veteran observers of the opaque North Korean regime, the speed and intensity of the turnaround was remarkable. "Trump is something new and his warnings that military force might be used, I think, have been taken seriously," Grant Newsham, senior research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies, told VOA. "Plus, there has been fair amounts of pressure, compared to the past, put on the Chinese economically." Human rights activists in Indonesia are raising concerns about a revised counterterrorism law they say may restrict freedoms of expression and association. In the wake of several shocking terrorist attacks in East Java and Riau this month, including two suicide bombings carried out by families, Indonesia's House of Representatives unanimously passed a revised counterterrorism law that would allow police to more broadly prosecute suspected terrorists and terrorist activity. The revisions were originally proposed after a terrorist attack in Jakarta in January 2016, but floundered for two years until this month, when they were quickly passed after the Surabaya bombings. President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo was under pressure to pass the revisions after the attacks and threatened to issue a presidential decree if the House did not act promptly. The new law allows police to hold suspects for up to 221 days in detention before they are brought to court, allows the military to join police in counterterrorism operations, and expands the definition of terrorism along broad lines that may criminalize activist groups. "We mainly have concerns with [the] articles that expand the definition of terrorism to include any kind of violence," said Papang Hidayat of Amnesty International Indonesia, as well as those that allow for prolonged detention. "In Indonesia, we still have a flawed criminal procedures court, inherited from Dutch colonial rule, which does not recognize rights like habeas corpus. Nor is torture considered a criminal act. So, the revised law raises major human rights concerns." Civil liberties The revised law passed after three days of discussion, according to Andreas Harsono, a researcher with Human Rights Watch in Jakarta. "The last three days were only used to argue about the definition of terrorism," he said. The language in the law's Article 1.2 broadens the definition to include "violence or threat of violence which creates or intends to create an atmosphere of terror or widespread fear, creating multiple casualties and/or resulting in damage or destruction of vital strategic objects, the environment, a public facility, or an international facility with ideological, political or security disturbance motive." Harsono said this could be used to target the peaceful activism of indigenous groups, environmentalists, and religious or political organizations. One potential target of the revised law is Papuan activists, from the two contested easternmost provinces of Indonesia, Papua and West Papua, where the Indonesian government has been embroiled in a conflict with indigenous inhabitants for over five decades. "There are two areas in Papua where criminals are tried against the state Jayapura and Timika," said Harsono. "Thus, if you attack a point in Freeport [the world's largest gold mine, which is located in Papua] or a police officer in Freeport, you might technically be branded a terrorist." Many countries have had to strike a balance between privacy and security in devising their counterterrorism laws, including the United States, which controversially expanded government surveillance with the Patriot Act after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Mitigating the impact "The revised law was definitely a response to the recent attacks in Surabaya," Hidayat said. Amnesty International Indonesia has written an open letter to the parliament with its concerns. He is particularly worried about the growing role of the Indonesian military in counterterrorism operations. "The Indonesian military has no accountability," he said. "They can only be tried in their [internal] tribunal system." The move to involve the military in counterterrorism in Article 43 of the revised law came just days after the Joint Special Operations Command, a domestic counterterrorism squad, was revived. Per the revised law, military involvement would require both a request from the police and the president's approval. "The involvement of the military must be limited going forward," Hidayat said. "But this can only be done by presidential decree." It is unlikely that Jokowi will roll back any provisions so soon after the revisions were pushed through, particularly since he is standing for re-election next year and national security will be a major policy issue. The law was passed "in an effort to protect the entire nation and all the blood of Indonesia," Muhammad Syafii, chairman of the Special Committee for the Revision of Terrorism Law, said last week. Officials in Indonesia's House of Representatives could not be immediately reached for comment. Activists say the revised law could also further curb freedom of expression in Indonesia, which already has punitive blasphemy and defamation laws. Its Article 1.4 defines the threat of violence as "speech, writing, picture, symbol or body language, with or without electronic or non-electronic form which could create widespread fear." Indonesian citizens can be arrested for Facebook posts, and blasphemy charges have a 100 percent conviction rate. The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. The U.S. military confirmed a ground-based rocket artillery strike, using the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), killed at least 50 Taliban leaders May 24 in southern Afghanistan. The artillery strike targeted a gathering of Taliban leaders in the Musa Qala district of restive Helmand province. VOA's Mohammad Habibzada reports. Nicaraguan police have used lethal force against protesters, aiming for heads, necks and chests, Amnesty International said Tuesday in the second of two international reports condemning President Daniel Ortega's response to dissent. At least 81 people have been killed and 868 wounded since April 18, according to the rights group, in violence "characterized by the excessive use of force, extrajudicial executions, control of the media and the use of pro-government armed groups." More than a month after changes to the Central American country's social security system triggered student-led protests, demonstrations have morphed into a daily challenge to the rule of Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla. Published after days of resurgent violence, the report adds five to the preliminary death count announced last week by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights following an investigation sourced in hundreds of complaints. "The strategy for repression appears to have been directed from the highest levels of government," Amnesty International said in a statement. "President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo repeatedly demonized demonstrators and denied they were being killed." The government acknowledged a request for comment on the Amnesty report but did not immediately respond. Earlier this month, Ortega lamented the violence and said there had been deaths on all sides. Ortega, an ally of socialist Venezuela, has resisted protesters' demands that he resign over the killings. His government rejected a suggestion by the Organization of American States that it call early elections. In a round of "national talks" with members of civil society last week, government representatives acknowledged the recommendations of the Inter-American Commission's report but issued no further official statements. Clashes this week included an armed attack, apparently by pro-government groups, on a university campus and witnessed by Amnesty International's America's director, Erika Guevara-Rosa. The report, based on a visit to Nicaragua in early May and delivered by Nicaraguan rights activist Bianca Jagger, also documented irregularities in the way authorities investigated deaths, including the cases of two people whose families were forced to sign waivers in a hospital denying them a right to autopsies as a condition of receiving official death certificates. Islamic State is spreading its influence to other regions, including Africa's Sahel, and experts are warning that countries in the region should take measures to keep the militant groups from regrouping in these areas. Having lost most of the territory it once controlled in Iraq and Syria, the terror group's fighters are reportedly establishing ties with local militant organizations. "A key strength of these extremist organizations has been their ability to move with ease across national borders within the Sahel, allowing them to regroup after setbacks, and to replenish their ranks with inflows of fighters, weaponry and resources," Jennifer G. Cooke of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs told VOA. Officials in the Sahel region have also voiced concerns over growing militancy and warned that the militant groups are not only destabilizing the region, but also pose a threat to the security of other countries. "Most of these terrorists are leaving these places to come to the Sahel, to harbor there and to organize attacks against everybody." Abdoulaye Diop, Mali's foreign minister, said during a discussion at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) late last year. Michael Shurkin, a senior political scientist with the Rand Corporation, shares Diop's concerns. "There is legitimate concern that if allowed to, the extremist groups will make themselves into a direct threat to the U.S. and its friends by turning the region into a new Afghanistan, where the Taliban gave al-Qaida the freedom to organize the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." G5 Sahel In order to crack down on militant groups in the region, five countries including Niger, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso and Mauritania established a joint force known as the G5, which is a 5,000-person military and police force, tasked with carrying out counterterrorism operations along the common border regions of all five countries. However, the G5 Sahel is not yet fully operational due to funding and logistical issues. On Tuesday, while on a visit to Mali, the country most affected by terrorism among the G5, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed to donors to provide more sustainable support to the G5 Sahel force. "The international community must understand the need to provide the G5 Sahel countries with predictable support," Guterres said. In February, various countries pledged $509 million to G5, just shy of the group's initial budget of $529 million, but the contributions have not been made yet. Some analysts, like George Washington University's Cooke, warn that the G5 must pull its act together to ensure that international partners do no lose interest. "The force has won initial support from European partners, the United States, Saudi Arabia and others, all of whom have been convinced of the need for a greater regional security cooperation," Cooke said. "If operationalization of the joint force becomes bogged down in disagreements or delays, international partners will very likely lose interest." Military option Some experts charge that the military option is not the only answer to the problem of extremism in the region. "Equally important, however, will be to use U.S. diplomatic and development leverage to press governments of the region to think beyond the military and address not just the symptoms, but the drivers of violence and insecurity as well," Cooke said. The Rand Corporation's Michael Shurkin agrees with Cooke's assessment. "The answer is some combination of longer-term economic and political development paired with steady progress on the part of the member nations' security force," Shurkin said. "It's about opportunities as well as about integrating marginalized populations." U.S. role A U.S military spokesperson told VOA that they are coordinating with G5 on the ground. Samantha Reho, spokesperson for the U.S. Africa Command, said that last month, several military officers from G5 Force participated in the annual Flintlock Exercise, organized by the U.S. Special Forces Command in cooperation with nations across the Sahel. Flintlock is designed to foster regional cooperation to stabilize regions of North and West Africa, and reduce the presence of violent extremist organizations. Reho added that the G5 Force is a new initiative and that there is no determination yet as to how the U.S. will support it. "But what I can tell you is that any direct support we provide will be [in] conjunction and in coordination with those respective host nations and other U.N. and international partners, mainly France's 4,000 troops, who have had a long-standing military presence in the region," said Reho. Shurkin of the Rand Corporation believes that working with the French in the Sahel will be a good idea. "The U.S. can help the G5 force be more effective, working in tandem with the French, not in isolation from the French," he said. VOA's Mehdi Jedinia contributed to this report. A man who murdered three people Tuesday in the Belgium city of Liege engaged in an act of terrorism, prosecutors said Wednesday. Benjamin Herman repeatedly stabbed two female officers with a knife from behind before seizing their handguns and shooting them as they laid on the ground. Herman also shot to death a man who was a passenger in a passing car. Police fatally shot Herman after taking at least one woman hostage at a nearby school. Investigators said Herman's methods were encouraged in online videos produced by the Islamic State militant group. Prosecutors said Herman yelled "Allahu akbar," an Arabic expression for "God is great" several times during the killing spree which also resulted in four officers being wounded. Federal magistrate Wenke Roggen said Wednesday the rampage was "terrorist murder and attempted terrorist murder." Authorities said Herman, who was on a leave of absence from jail when the attacks occurred, had several encounters with police since he was a minor. Interior Minister Jan Jambon confirmed Tuesday that Herman had murdered another person on Monday. Although the attacks are considered acts of terrorism, Jambon cautioned authorities not to jump to conclusions. "There are signals that there was radicalization in the prison, but did this radicalization lead to these actions? There, too, we can ask ourselves a lot of questions," Jambon said in an interview on the French radio network RTL. Belgium has been on high alert since January 2015, when authorities neutralized a terror cell in a town near Liege that was plotting an attack on police. The cell was linked to the mastermind of the November 2015 IS attacks on Paris that killed 130 people. In March 2016, IS suicide attackers targeted a Brussels airport and subway station, killing 32 people. Canada will impose targeted sanctions on 14 Venezuelan officials, adding to its previous moves to put pressure on President Nicolas Maduro's government, the foreign ministry said on Wednesday. The sanctions were in response to Venezuela's "illegitimate and anti-democratic presidential elections," it said in a statement. Earlier this month, Maduro won a new six-year term in an election that was denounced by a string of countries as unfair, triggering fresh sanctions from the United States. The new Canadian sanctions include freezing the assets of the officials and prohibiting Canadians from having property or financial dealings with them. "These sanctions send a clear message that the Maduro regime's anti-democratic behavior has consequences," Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said. Last September, Canada imposed sanctions against 40 Venezuelan senior officials, including Maduro. Critics say Maduro has plunged the nation into its worst-ever economic crisis. Canada is a member of the 12-nation Lima Group, which is trying to address the crisis. The U.S. military will continue sailing ships near disputed islands in the South China Sea, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis insisted Tuesday, despite Beijing's increased complaints about the operations. "They're freedom of navigation operations. And you'll notice there's only one country that seems to take active steps to rebuff them or state their resentment of them," Mattis said while en route to Hawaii. The South China Sea is expected to be a major focus this week when Mattis heads to Singapore to attend the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual gathering of Asian defense and other leaders. Two U.S. Navy warships sailed Sunday near islands occupied by China in the Paracel Islands, off the coast of Vietnam. China sent two of its own warships to the area to warn the U.S. vessels to leave, Beijing said. U.S. officials say the freedom of navigation operations (FONOP) are regularly scheduled and occur globally. But the latest FONOP comes at a particularly tense moment in U.S.-China relations. The Pentagon last week rescinded its invitation to China to take part in RIMPAC, a major international maritime exercise later this year, citing Beijing's militarization of islands in the South China Sea. Recent reports indicate China has moved air defense systems to the Spratly Islands, the latest move by Beijing to militarize South China Sea outposts. "When they do things that are opaque to the rest of us, we can't cooperate in areas that we would otherwise cooperate in," Mattis told reporters. Mattis also said the U.S. would continue to "confront what we believe is out of step with international law, out of step with international tribunals that have spoken on the issue." Part of that response includes increased freedom of navigation operations, U.S. officials insist. "It's international waters, and a lot of nations want to see freedom of navigation, so we'll continue that," Mattis said. China claims nearly the entire South China Sea, despite overlapping claims with other countries, including Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan. The territorial disputes and U.S.-China relations are expected to be a major focus of the Shangri-La Dialogue. But the conference could also be dominated by talk about a possible summit in Singapore between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Separate teams of U.S. officials are in Singapore and the Demilitarized Zone on the Korean Peninsula, trying to lay the groundwork for the summit, which was originally scheduled to take place June 12. Mattis said he spoke Monday with Trump about North Korea, but he declined to comment on the status of the summit preparations. "The diplomats are continuing to meet at Panmunjom and there's some folks already in Singapore," Mattis said. Before Singapore, Mattis is in Hawaii, where he will participate in a change of command ceremony at Pacific Command headquarters. He will also hold separate meetings with the defense ministers of Indonesia and Japan. Ethiopia's ruling coalition started talks with opposition groups on Wednesday on amending provisions of an anti-terrorism law that critics say has criminalized dissent, state-affiliated media said. Watchdog groups say the 2009 law's broad definitions have been used indiscriminately against anyone who opposes government policy. Among its provisions, it makes anyone publishing information deemed to encourage terrorism liable to a jail term of up to 20 years. The discussions follow the release on Tuesday of opposition leader Andargachew Tsige, who was sentenced to death under the law in 2009 over his role in the opposition group Ginbot 7, which the government has labelled a terrorist organization. The Fana Broadcasting Corporation said 14 political parties, including the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, were taking part in talks having "agreed to amend" unspecified articles of the legislation. Human Rights Watch has previously said the law "grants authorities the power to prosecute journalists who publish articles about protest movements, armed opposition groups, or any other individuals deemed as terrorist or anti-peace." Ethiopia has released thousands of dissidents since January as part of reforms that the government has pledged to undertake in the wake of violent unrest that broke out three years ago. The protests were sparked by an urban development plan for Addis Ababa that critics said would trigger land seizures in the surrounding Oromiya region, before broadening into rallies over political rights. The unrest led to the resignation of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn in February. He has since been replaced by former army officer Abiy Ahmed, who has pledged to push through reforms. Andargachew's Ginbot 7 is among five groups the government had blacklisted under the anti-terrorism legislation, along with the secessionist groups Oromo Liberation Front and the Ogaden National Liberation Front, as well as the militant Islamist al Qaeda and Somalia's al Shabaab. On Tuesday, the government pardoned Ginbot 7's leader Berhanu Nega, who had previously been sentenced to death. Harvey Weinstein declined Wednesday to testify before the New York grand jury that is weighing whether to indict him on rape and other sex charges, with his lawyers saying there wasn't enough time to prepare and "political pressure" made an indictment unavoidable. A statement issued through a Weinstein spokesman said the former movie mogul learned the specific charges and the accusers' identities only after turning himself in Friday, with a deadline set for Wednesday afternoon to testify or not. His request for more time was denied, the statement said. "Finally, Mr. Weinstein's attorneys noted that regardless of how compelling Mr. Weinstein's personal testimony might be, an indictment was inevitable due to the unfair political pressure being placed on Cy Vance to secure a conviction of Mr. Weinstein," the statement said, referring to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. His office declined to comment. Weinstein was charged Friday with rape and criminal sex act charges involving two women in New York, as a grand jury continued hearing evidence in the case; the panel has been at work for weeks. Defendants have the right to testify in a grand jury's secret proceedings but often don't, for various reasons. Weinstein faces rape and criminal sex act charges involving two women in New York. Dozens more women have accused him of sexual misconduct ranging from harassment to assault in various locales. He has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex, and his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said Tuesday that Weinstein was "confident he's going to clear his name" in the New York prosecution. Brafman called the rape allegation "absurd," saying that the accuser and Weinstein had a decade-long, consensual sexual relationship that continued after the alleged 2013 attack. The woman, who hasn't been identified publicly, told investigators Weinstein confined her in a hotel room and raped her. The other accuser in the case, former actress Lucia Evans, has gone public with her account of Weinstein forcing her to perform oral sex at his office in 2004. The Associated Press does not identify alleged victims of sexual assaults unless they come forward publicly. Vance, a Democrat, came under public pressure from women's groups to prosecute Weinstein after declining to do so in 2015, when an Italian model went to police to say Weinstein had groped her during a meeting. Police set up a sting in which the woman recorded herself confronting Weinstein and him apologizing for his conduct. But Vance decided there wasn't enough evidence to bring charges. Governor Andrew Cuomo, also a Democrat, ordered the state attorney general to investigate how Vance handled that matter. Irans supreme leader has called for swift punishment of those involved in a high school sex abuse scandal that erupted Monday with revelations in a state news report and a social media video of the alleged abuser. In a Tuesday post on his official website, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei shared a letter he had written to Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli-Larijani. In the letter, Khamenei said news of what he called the crime in a school in western Tehran had caused great sorrow and regret. He instructed Amoli-Larijani to execute the Islamic punishment (of those convicted) immediately after their trial. The scandal first emerged on Monday, with a report by the state-run Khabar Online news site saying several students of the Tehran boys school were sexually abused by a male staff member. The report said parents of the students accused the staffer of showing pornographic videos to their sons on a mobile phone. It quoted the parents as saying the abused boys were receiving psychological treatment due to severe mental harm. Khabar Online is affiliated to Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani. Also Monday, Masih Alinejad, the freelance host of VOA Persians Tablet program, posted a video clip on her social media profiles of the accused school staffer in handcuffs, responding to angry questions shouted at him by the parents. Alinejad said she received five minutes of video of the confrontation from a family member of one of the students Sunday. She said she verified it by communicating with several more family members before posting a shortened version on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. The clip drew thousands of comments from Iranian social media users angered by the alleged sex abuse. Alinejad said the family members, who requested anonymity, named the school staffer as Mohammad Hossein Haerizadeh, but did not disclose when or where they confronted him in the video. A report published Tuesday by another Iranian state news agency, Tasnim, said parents of the schoolchildren engaged in a confrontation with the alleged abuser Saturday, prompting police to intervene and detain the man, whom it did not name. Alinejad said both police and family members could be seen in the full version of the video she received, but not in the shortened clip that she shared online. In the online video, the school staffer says he showed the students pornographic videos on his phone for fun. Parents can be heard demanding to know if he engaged in sexual activity with the boys as well. The man denies it. Tasnim published two reports Tuesday, one quoting Tehran education officials and the other quoting the citys chief prosecutor Jafari Dolatabadi, as saying the school staffer was arrested in response to complaints from the parents and faces prosecution. The news agency is affiliated to Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Alinejad said the family members with whom she communicated told her that Iranian authorities had warned them not to share the video of the school staffer with foreign media. But, she said the family members decided to send her the video to pressure the authorities to act against the alleged abuser. Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei has faced domestic criticism for his handling of a previous sex abuse scandal involving prominent Iranian Koran reciter Saeed Toosi. Toosi is known for reciting the Koran at state events attended by senior officials, including Khamenei. In January, an appeals court acquitted Toosi of sexually abusing boys whom he had taught in previous years, allegations that had prompted a lower court to sentence him to four years in prison. Iranian lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi was among the domestic critics of Toosis acquittal. In a January 26 tweet, he said: Evidence appears to show that the child-molesting Koran reciter has the support of a person or persons within the supreme leaders office. Toosi has denied the charges against him. This report was produced in collaboration with VOAs Persian Service. Israel is barring tourists and pilgrims from Indonesia in response to what it says is a ban on Israelis by Jakarta. Tens of thousands of Indonesian Muslims visit Israel every year as part of a wider tour of the Middle East. Indonesian officials have not confirmed Israels assertion that they have suspended visas for Israeli tourists. The countries do hot have diplomatic relations. But Indonesians have protested what they say is Israels harsh treatment of the Palestinians. Earlier this month, Indonesian demonstrators set fire to U.S. and Israeli flags outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta to protest the moving of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The tourist ban comes amid signs that relations between the Jewish state and the worlds largest Muslim-populated country appeared to be warming. Trade between Israeli and Indonesia has expended and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for diplomatic ties with Indonesia. Ukraine's security chief now says his organization planned to have a prominent Russian war correspondent and Kremlin critic fake his own death as part of a ruse to save the reporter's life. The journalist Arkady Babchenko - thought dead - stunned reporters when he appeared alive and well Wednesday, one day after he had been reportedly been shot and killed in the stairwell of his Kyiv apartment. Vasyl Hrytsak of Ukraine's Security Service, SBU, stood alongside Babchenko at Wednesday's television briefing as he recounted events leading up to the foiled assassination attempt, explaining the fictitious reports of his death were part of an SBU sting operation that had been prepared for two months. The operation began with a tip from an anonymous source who said an unidentified Ukrainian national had been inquiring about buying weapons for a contract assassination in Kyiv, which triggered the SBU probe. Officials said he had been asked to find and hire someone to carry out the contract killing. During the negotiations, Hrytsak said, the man claimed Russia's Secret Service had offered him $40,000 to organize and carry out the hit. He said the suspect was a former separatist fighter who had fought in eastern Ukraine. SBU investigators then recruited Babchenko into the sting operation designed to catch Russian agents in the act of conducting an extrajudicial killing on foreign soil. Investigators said the intermediary who had been tasked with hiring the gunman was in custody, and officials said they had additional hard evidence linking Russia's secret service to the assassination plot, though they did yet want to unveil that evidence. Addressing reporters, Babchenko told his family he was sorry for faking his own death. "I'd like to apologize for everything you've had to go through," he said. "I've been at the funeral of many friends and colleagues, and I know this nauseous feeling. Sorry for imposing this upon you, but there was no other way. "Special apologies to my wife for the hell she's been through these two days," he added. "Olya, excuse me, please, but there was no other option." Read: Transcript of Babchenko's remarks Police reports that followed initial reports of the shooting say it was Babchenko's wife who discovered him lying in a pool of blood at the entry of their Kyiv apartment. It is not clear whether his wife was involved in the sting. "As far as I know, this operation was prepared for two months. A result of that was this special operation," Babchenko told the briefing." They saved my life. I want to say thanks. Larger terrorist attacks were prevented." Tuesday's news of the shooting shocked the Ukrainian capital, prompting Kyiv and Moscow officials to blame each for the reporter's death. Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman suggested Russia had orchestrated the killing, while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected that claim and condemned Ukraine as an unsafe place for journalists. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said after Babchenko's reappearance Wednesday that officials in Moscow were glad Babchenko was still alive. But Zakharova said Ukrainian officials had circulated a false story as "propaganda." A New York judge set a June 15 deadline Wednesday for lawyers for President Donald Trump's personal lawyer and Trump to make attorney-client privilege claims over data seized in April raids, saying it was important not to delay the criminal investigation. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood said a special taint team of prosecutors will make determinations after that date. Wood presided over a hearing at which a prosecutor revealed that the contents of a shredder and two Blackberry devices were all that remained to be turned over to a court-appointed special master screening evidence for attorney-client privilege. Also reviewing the materials are lawyers for Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, the president and the Trump Organization. Cohen's lawyers asked to be allowed to review materials from the April 9 raids of Cohen's office and home until mid-July, but Wood said she had to balance their needs to protect their client with the need of prosecutors to pursue their criminal fraud case against Cohen. Cohen did not speak during the court proceeding, which lasted more than an hour and featured a colorful argument between lawyers for Cohen and Trump on one side and California attorney Michael Avenatti on the other as they discussed Avenatti's public statements on behalf of his porn-star client, Stormy Daniels. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has said she had sex once with Trump in 2006. Trump denies it. Daniels was not in court Wednesday. Stephen Ryan, an attorney for Cohen, argued that Avenatti had acted outrageously by releasing banking information related to Cohen publicly and by criticizing Cohen in dozens of television appearances. Wood noted that Avenatti would have to stop making comments about his perception of what he believed was wrongdoing by Cohen if he wanted to formally intervene in Cohen's efforts to protect materials seized from violations of attorney-client privilege. Cohen's lawyers said they had finished studying about a third of the materials that were seized and were working around the clock. Special Master Barbara Jones said in a letter Tuesday that lawyers Cohen, Trump and the Trump Organization have designated more than 250 items as subject to the privilege. She said the material includes data from a video recorder. Jones said more than a million pieces of data from three of Cohen's phones are ready to be given to criminal prosecutors, and more than 12,000 pages of documents from eight boxes that survived attorney-client privilege scrutiny already have been given back to prosecutors. More than a dozen electronic devices were seized or copied in the raids, and Jones said she has not yet received data from three seized items. The raids on Cohen were triggered in part by a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller, who separately is looking into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Wood became involved after Cohen came to court, complaining that he feared attorney-client privilege would not be protected. Trump also expressed those concerns on Twitter. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has said she had sex once with Trump in 2006. Trump denies the affair. Kenyan journalists and bloggers have scored a legal victory in their fight against a new cyber law that they say erodes freedom of speech and endangers millions of Kenyans who express themselves online. Justice Chacha Mwita, a high court judge, on Tuesday suspended 26 sections of the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, which President Uhuru Kenyatta signed into law earlier this month. Kenyatta said the law would protect Kenyans and ensure the security and safety of the countrys vast communications network. But critics argued that it violated Kenyas Constitution and infringed on freedom of expression, along with the rights to privacy and property. Petition In its petition to the High Court of Kenya on Tuesday, the Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE), an alliance of digital content creators chaired by Kennedy Kachwanya, said that the act would deny, violate, infringe and threaten various rights and fundamental freedoms in the Bill of Rights in a manner that is not justified under Article 24. Article 24 states that freedoms cannot be limited unless doing so is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society. BAKE argued that much of the act was vague and overbroad, with key terms such as publish lacking definitions. Article 19 Eastern Africa and the Kenya Union of Journalists were listed as interested parties on the petition. Erick Odur, the unions secretary general, tweeted that Section 12 of the Act takes away media freedom as required by Article 34 of the Constitution and seeks to reintroduce criminal libel by imposing heavy fines when Kenyatta signed the act into law. Expanded offenses The act, signed into law May 16, lists 33 offenses, including 15 that were added after the bills introduction to the National Assembly last June. Most of the additions are among the suspended sections. Phishing, cyberterrorism, identity theft and cybersquatting, or appropriating anothers name, were among the offenses listed in the expanded law. Most of the offenses carry penalties that include millions of shillings in fines, multiple years in prison or both. I am satisfied that the issues raised affect the Constitution and fundamental rights and freedoms. I, therefore, grant the conservatory orders sought, the bloggers association quoted Mwita as saying. Accountability Supporters of the law believe it is needed to contain the spread of misinformation on the internet. Bitange Ndemo was Kenyas minister of information and communication from 2005 to 2013. He said the spread of misinformation showed that media in Kenya needed more accountability. Its very dangerous because there is no verification mechanism. You can easily confuse people with what you call fake media or fake news, Ndemo told VOA by phone. He said Kenyan media hasnt woken up to the necessity of verifying facts. That is the downside of developing countries when it comes to fake news. The suspension covers more than half of the criminal offenses listed in the law, but the matter is far from resolved legally. With some portions of the law now in effect, the case will resume July 18. Malaysia's prime minister says the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 will resume if new evidence of its possible whereabouts come to light. The latest search for the missing jetliner ended Tuesday after U.S.-based exploration company Ocean Infinity announced it was ending its three-month effort to find the plane after searching 112,000-square kilometers. "We have come to a stage where we cannot keep searching for something we cannot find," Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told reporters Wednesday. One of the world's biggest aviation mysteries began on March 8, 2014, when the Boeing 777 disappeared in 2014 carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The governments of Australia, Malaysia and China suspended the official search after scrutinizing about 119,139 square kilometers of the Indian Ocean floor at a cost of more than $150 million. Officials then concluded that the probable crash site was farther north. After pressure from the families of the victims, the former Malaysian government struck a deal with Ocean Infinity to restart the search in January on the condition it would only be paid if the Boeing 777 or its flight data recorders, or black boxes, were found. The firm stood to make up to $70 million if successful but did not find any sign of the airliner, despite scouring the seabed with some of the world's most high-tech search equipment. Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke has said a full report into the plane's disappearance will be published in the future, but a date has not been given. Australia, Malaysia and China have agreed that an official search would resume only if credible evidence emerged on the plane's location. Malaysia's 92-year-old prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, is determined to restore the country's reputation and his legacy, having wrested back leadership following national elections in early May. During his previous 22-year rule, Mahathir built the small former British colony into one of Asias proudest economic powerhouses, only to see it reduced to mockery under corruption scandals that resembled movie scripts. In an interview with VOA following his stunning electoral upset over Prime Minister Najib Razak, Mahathir was steadfast on the need for reform and said his earlier tenure in no way contributed to subsequent abuses of power - such as the allegations facing Najib. Well, my first 20 years as prime minister was fairly easy. I inherited a system that is already there. All I have to do is introduce new ideas so that we can expedite the growth and development of Malaysia, he said of that tenure, which ended in 2003. But here I am dealing with a country that has actually been destroyed, he added, referring to the recent scandals. One highly publicized scandal links Najib to the disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars from a state fund, 1 Malaysia Development Berhad, which the ousted prime minister set up in 2009 for infrastructure projects. Najib, who has now been repeatedly brought before the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, has denied any wrongdoing. Najib is also linked to alleged scams involving the Federal Land Development Authority, the Employees Provident Fund and other state institutions, and to huge contracts signed with borrowed money for infrastructure projects of questionable value. Mahathir Monday canceled one of those projects a multi-billion-dollar high-speed rail project connecting Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, calling it expensive and unnecessary. Also in his sights is the more than $18 billion Chinese-backed East Coast Rail Link project, which he said was not viable and needed to be renegotiated. Mahathir told VOA his government has already found ways to wipe out about a fifth of Malaysias foreign debt, which ballooned to more than $250 billion under Najib. He said the international perception of Malaysia as a country governed by crooks is one that has to be remedied so that foreigners will once again find it is well-governed and worthy of investments that actually benefit the nation. Whatever you may say about my period as prime minister before, the fact is that lots of people look at Malaysia as a great place to do business with, and we had huge foreign investment in this country, and this country grew at a very high rate during that period, he said. Returning to that kind of prosperity, Mahathir said, was largely a matter of returning the rule of law - something the prime minister said he could be trusted to do, while adding that Najib abused that trust. Pending checks on authorities include fixed term limits for prime ministers and parliamentary oversight of senior political appointments, and proper separation of the three branches of government, Mahathir said. As for his seemingly authoritarian use of executive instruments such as the Internal Security Act to jail political opponents and shut down critical press during his rule, Mahathir said he sees no connection to what transpired after he stepped down in 2003. They were not abuses; they were within the law as the law provided at that time. Of course, the law was harsh, and the law was inherited from my predecessors who also used the same law, he said. But what has happened is the same laws were in place when I stepped down. It is the abuse of those laws that has led to the present condition in Malaysia. Mahathir said he believes he has been demonized by former political opponents and misleadingly characterized as authoritarian by the foreign press. Wong Chin Huat, a political scientist at the Penang Institute in Malaysia, said Mahathir destroyed judicial independence and many state institutions and must shoulder some of the blame for what followed his tenure. It was a flawed system. He reinforced the system so much so that the system became like a fortress that is so hard to conquer. With a flawed character like Najib occupying that fortress, he just became very resilient, Wong said. Recent decisions, though, suggested Mahathir was committed to reform and true separation of power, said Wong. His commitment actually surprised me, Wong said. He noted Mahathir's recent decisions to resign as education minister after realizing that holding the post was a conflict of interest, and for Pakatan Harapan, the coalition that supported him, to stop taking in problematic defectors from the ousted Barisan Nasional coalition, which Najib headed. Wong said that for lasting, genuine democracy to take root, Malaysians must tackle the difficult challenge of how to build an effective opposition in a complex, multiracial society. I think a lot of people are still celebrating the fact that we have a good government. But no good government lasts unless you have a good opposition. You need a good opposition to check on them, to be prepared to stand in and replace them, he said. But if you suppress the opposition, a desperate opposition may take desperate measures and desperate positioning that eventually makes itself unelectable, and therefore the government can afford to be corrupt, can afford to abuse power. Muktar Muhammed is on the mic sending out a cheery "Good Morning" message. Its Friday morning here at the university. I hope everyone had a pleasant week, he crooned over the airwaves. Muhammed is a disc jockey at the University of Maiduguris radio station KANEM-FM, 97.7. Students were still anxious from an attack earlier in the month in which Boko Haram terrorists invaded the city but were repelled by soldiers. Muhammed said part of his job, along with playing hot tunes, was to keep students calm. We make it a point. We make it a priority to do that, to keep them positive. Of course, to try and stay relaxed, focused on their studies, he told VOA. Thats because the University of Maiduguri sits in the very city where Boko Haram was formed and has continued to launch deadly attacks since 2009. Throughout Boko Harams nine-year war against the Nigerian government, the university was never attacked -- until January 2017. Defying the threats, the campus is abuzz with students strolling and laughing with each other before summer vacation. More than 20,000 are enrolled, and the student population is growing. Third-year student Tasiu Hassan is headed to class to make a presentation. He was on campus in January 2017 when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive, killing a professor. Later, Boko Haram released a video in which the groups leader could be heard saying, The bomb that exploded on Monday morning, its our brothers responsible for it. I found myself in a very terrible situation in such a way that I had even thought of going back home, Hassan, from northern Nigeria, told VOA. But he stayed, like many of his classmates. Since then, the university has been attacked at least 12 times by suicide bombers, university officials told VOA. In July, suspected Boko Haram members kidnapped 10 members of the universitys geology and surveying department. They were later rescued by the Nigerian military. VOA reached out to the geology lecturers for comment, but they declined. Defying terrorists The University of Maiduguri is the most prestigious and largest public education institution in northeastern Nigeria. The students are defying Boko Harams message that condemns Western education as sinful. Local reports said some of the universitys students joined Boko Haram in its early days. School administrators could not confirm that allegation. Throughout Boko Haram's insurgency, the university has not closed for a single day. To show how resilient we are, to show how much sacrifice we are making and that is the true reflection of the Maiduguri spirit -- we are here because we have a responsibility to keep the system going. Someone has to be around no matter how bad the situation is, said Danjuma Gambo, a mass communication professor and the universitys spokesperson. Gambo said the university was too important to close, even for a day. Its serving many functions, he said. It contributes substantially to the local economy, to the business, to the finance, to even social activities in Maiduguri. Thats why city and state officials said they would do anything in their power to keep the university open. The commissioner for the Borno State Ministry for Education, Musa Inuwa Kubo, told VOA the university is a source of pride. Most of us are products of that institution, and the resilience of the University of Maiduguri during the insurgency, ought to be commended by everybody, he said. The university is enormous. Approximately 27 kilometers (17 miles) of trenches line the campus perimeter, mainly the eastern side that faces Nigeria's border with Cameroon where many Boko Haram insurgents operate. The trench, commissioned in 2017 by the Borno State government, is a measure to slow incoming Boko Haram terrorists who usually invade the city in convoys of motorcycles. Every day, sniffer dogs carry out inspections at two of the universitys entrances, searching for bomb chemicals and weapons. No other public Nigerian university in the region has this level of security. Its why Esther Clement continues to attend the university. Even though there is an insurgency, we are secured. Even before you come to the gate, the Gate 1, there are securities here and there. At the gate of the hostel, there is security," Clement said. "Even when there is bomb blast, they call us to calm us down. We dont go out." She has one more year of studies before she will receive a degree in mass communication. I want to become a reporter, so I can inform people about Boko Haram, she added. The U.S.-North Korea summit appears to be back on track, but Pyongyang is showing increased impatience at comments coming out of Washington that what leader Kim Jong Un really wants, even more than his nuclear security blanket, is American-style prosperity. It's a core issue for Kim and a message President Donald Trump shouldn't ignore as they work to nail down their summit next month in Singapore. Kim is as enthusiastic as Trump to see the summit happen as soon as possible, but the claim that his sudden switch to diplomacy over the past several months shows he is aching for U.S. economic aid and private-sector know-how presents a major problem for the North Korean leader, who can't be seen as going into the summit with his hat in his hand. The claim is also quite possibly off target. North Korea is far more interested in improving trade with China, its economic lifeline, and with South Korea, which it sees as a potential gold mine for tourism and large-scale joint projects. Getting the U.S. to back off sanctions so he can pursue those goals, along with the boost to his legitimacy and whatever security guarantees he can take home, is more likely foremost on Kim's mind. Even so, the North's perceived thirst for U.S. economic aid has consistently been the message coming from Trump and his senior officials. All Kim needs to do, they suggest, is commit to denuclearization and American entrepreneurs will be ready to unleash their miracles on the country's sad-sack economy. "I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial nation one day,'' Trump tweeted Sunday. "Kim Jong Un agrees with me on this.'' Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has laid Washington's road map out in more detail. "We can create conditions for real economic prosperity for the North Korean people that will rival that of the South,'' he said earlier this month in a televised interview. ``It won't be U.S. taxpayers. It will be American know-how, knowledge, entrepreneurs and risk-takers working alongside the North Korean people to create a robust economy for their people.'' Pompeo suggested that Americans help build out the North's energy grid, develop its infrastructure and deliver the finest agricultural equipment and technology "so they can eat meat and have healthy lives.'' Kim has emphatically not agreed to any of that. Under Trump's "maximum pressure'' policy, international sanctions on North Korea are stronger than ever. Sanctions relief would open the door for more trade with China, South Korea and possibly Russia - partners North Korea trusts more than it trusts Washington - and potentially unlock access to global financial institutions. The last thing Kim wants is to give up his nuclear weapons only to have his country overrun with American businessmen and entrepreneurs. To Pyongyang's ears, that scenario is less an offer than a threat. Despite its very real need for foreign investment, Kim's regime has good reason to be wary of economic aid in general. Opening up to aid inevitably involves some degree of increased contact with potentially disruptive outsiders, calls for change, loosening of controls and restrictions - all of which could be seen as a threat to Kim's near absolute authority. North Korea's message on that has been clear. Almost as soon as Pompeo started talking about his plan to rebuild North Korea's economy, Kim Kye Gwan, the North's first vice foreign minister, shot back that Pyongyang has no interest in that kind of help, saying, "We have never had any expectation of U.S. support in carrying out our economic construction and will not at all make such a deal in future, too.'' State media unleashed another attack on the idea Sunday, calling Fox News, CBS and CNN "hack media on the payroll of power'' for airing programs that featured U.S. officials talking about how large-scale, nongovernmental economic aid awaits North Korea if it moves toward verifiable and irreversible denuclearization. The North's media have been careful not to criticize Trump directly. But the issue is sensitive enough that the North has also stepped up its response in ideological terms, stressing the superiority of the socialist system and the value of independence, while warning against the underhanded scheming of the "imperialists,'' which in North Korea speak is interchangeable with "Americans.'' "It is the calculation of the imperialists that they can attain their aims without firing a single shot if they make the people degenerate and disintegrate ideologically and foment social disorder,'' said an editorial Sunday in the ruling party's newspaper. The commentary went on to call the capitalist way of life "ideological and cultural poisoning'' and concluded, "Unless such poisoning is prevented, it would be impossible to defend independence and socialism and achieve the independent development of each country and nation.'' Like much of what goes on in North Korea, little is truly known about Kim Yong Chol the former spy chief who plans to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York this week. But observers of the reclusive North, including the Wilson Center's Jean Lee, believe "Kim Yong Chol is the man who whispers in Kim Jong Un's ear. Not only does he advise him on strategy, but he also conveys the leader's demands." Kim Yong Chol's numerous titles and positions in North Korea make him one of the country's most powerful individuals. His duties include director of intelligence and chief of South Korean relations. He was previously head of a top North Korean military intelligence agency. Seoul has accused him of masterminding the sinking of a South Korean navy ship in 2010, drowning 46 sailors. The United States believes Kim was responsible for an alleged 2014 North Korean cyberattack on Sony Pictures in response to the comedy "The Interview," about a plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un. The North denied both incidents. The United States targeted Kim Yong Chol with sanctions. He would need a travel waiver to come to New York. The North Korea Leadership Watch website described Kim Yong Chol as sarcastic, hard to work with, and somewhat independent because it said he is "not properly deferential to his superiors." The website also described him as a highly intelligent, competent and uncorrupt manager. India and Pakistan have agreed to uphold a 2003 cease-fire agreement in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, ending months of back-and-forth clashes that have left dozens of people dead. Pakistan's military announced Wednesday that the two sides had agreed to end the hostilities during talks on a special hotline. Both sides have exchanged gunfire and artillery fire across the Line of Control that divides Kashmir between the two nuclear-armed rivals, forcing tens of thousands of civilians on the Indian side to flee their homes. New Delhi has accused Islamabad of supporting insurgents who are fighting for Kashmiri independence or a merger with Pakistan, a charge denied by Islamabad. India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir as its own territory, and have fought two wars over the disputed region since the split of Hindu-dominated India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan after India gained its independence from Britain in 1947. Spanish police on Wednesday briefly detained Bill Browder, a U.S.-born British financier and prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin who tweeted he had been arrested at the request of Russia. A police spokeswoman said Browder was taken to a police station to check on the arrest warrant, but that authorities found that it had expired. "Good news. Spanish National Police just released me after Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised them not to honor the new Russian Interpol Red Notice," Browder wrote on Twitter. "This is the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case." The Interpol press office told VOA, "There is not, and never has been, a Red Notice for Mr. Bill Browder," and that he is "not wanted via Interpol channels." Interpol allows member countries to request what it calls a Red Notice, or international alert for a wanted person, and it is then up to local authorities to carry out any arrests. Browder had earlier posted a message saying he had been arrested, along with a photo from inside a police car on the way to the station. He also posted a photo of what he said was his arrest warrant, but the page he showed only included details about the rights of a person arrested in Spain. Browder said last year Russia had added him to the Interpol list five times, but that each time the agency had looked at the circumstances and lifted the notices after determining they were illegitimate. In 2013, the Independent Commission for the Control of Interpol's Files investigated Russia's use of the agency to seek information about Browder and determined the Russian activity "was predominantly political in nature" and went against Interpol's rules. The agency responded by carrying out the commission's recommendation that it delete all data related to Russian requests about Browder from its databases. Browder, who ran one of the most successful investment funds in Russia before his expulsion in 2005 when his business was expropriated, lobbied hard for U.S. sanctions to be introduced after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was arrested and died in Russian custody. That resulted in Congress passing the Magnitsky Act, a measure enabling Washington to withhold visas and freeze financial assets of Russian officials thought to be corrupt or human rights abusers. Saudi Arabia is preparing to outlaw sexual harassment, less than a month before the conservative kingdom lifts its decades-long ban on female automobile drivers. The kingdom's Shura Council, the legislative body, has approved the draft law, which will introduce a prison term of up to five years and a penalty of $80,000. The bill, which preserves the anonymity of alleged victims, also criminalizes incitement to sexual harassment, as well as falsely reporting an incident to the authorities. It also stipulates alleged victims cannot withdraw a complaint or fail to report an incident to the police. The new law adds to the string of reforms adopted by the conservative kingdom in recent months, including the reopening of movie theaters and the lifting of the driving ban, which goes into effect on June 24. But the social reforms appear overshadowed by the recent arrests of at least 10 activists, mostly women, fighting for the right to drive and a change in the male guardianship system. The United Nations on Tuesday called on Saudi Arabia to provide information about the women. Saudi authorities have released three of the women, but activists and rights groups said those still detained four women and three men have been interrogated without access to lawyers. One of the women, Loujain al-Hathloul, has not been heard from since her arrest May 15. Others have been allowed just phone calls to their families. The Interior Ministry has not named those arrested, but accused them of being "traitors" and working with foreign powers, charges Amnesty International called "blatant intimidation tactics." The activists were accused of "contact with foreign entities with the aim of undermining the country's stability and social fabric," the human rights group said. The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which mysteriously vanished more than four years ago, has ended in failure. Ocean Infinity, a private American exploration company based in Houston, said Tuesday that it had covered 112,000 square kilometers of the ocean floor but ultimately found nothing. The aircraft disappeared in 2014 carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in one of the world's biggest aviation mysteries. The governments of Australia, Malaysia and China suspended the official search after scrutinizing about 119,139 square kilometers of the Indian Ocean floor at a cost of more than $150 million. Officials then concluded that the probable crash site was farther north. After pressure from the families of the victims, the former Malaysian government struck a deal with Ocean Infinity to restart the search in January on the condition it would be paid only if the Boeing 777 or its flight data recorders, or black boxes, were found. The firm stood to make up to $70 million if successful but did not find any sign of the airliner, despite scouring the seabed with some of the world's most high-tech search equipment. Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke has said a full report into the plane's disappearance will be published in the future, but a date has not been given. Australia, Malaysia and China have agreed that an official search will resume only if credible evidence about the plane's location emerges. One day before the United Nations Security Council votes on proposed U.S. sanctions against six South Sudanese officials accused of obstructing the peace process, President Salva Kiir left his nation's capital, Juba, for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He is seeking Ethiopian support to stop the U.S.-drafted sanctions. Presidential spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny says Kiir will ask Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali to use his position as head of the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development, or IGAD, to block the proposed sanctions. IGAD sponsored a series of failed peace talks between the government and rebel groups aimed at revitalizing a peace agreement signed in 2015. Ateny told VOA's South Sudan in Focus program that President Kiir will assure Prime Minister Ahmed that the Kiir government is committed to restoring peace in South Sudan. He says Kiir will argue that U.N. sanctions could hinder efforts to restore peace. South Sudan's defense minister, Kuol Manyang Juk, would be among the six officials blacklisted if the measure passes. "The gap is always widened by the fact that each time the peace process is about to start, the United States of America issues standing orders in regard to sanctioning individuals within the government. So that one is translated by the rebels to be of their advantage and they become more intransigent," Ateny told South Sudan in Focus. Ethiopia is currently one of three African non-permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Members are expected to vote on the proposed sanctions Thursday in New York. All council members must vote in favor of the resolution for it to pass. Juba-based political analyst James Okuk, a professor of politics at the University of Juba, says Kiir probably wants Ethiopia to persuade other council members to vote against the U.S. proposal. "Maybe this time, Kiir wants to lobby so that Ethiopia doesn't vote in favor of the sanctions, and it might also use its influence as an African country to convince others not to vote so that they don't get the nine votes needed in the U.N. Security Council," Okuk told South Sudan in Focus. Okuk said Kiir's lobbying efforts will only succeed if he assures the Ethiopian leader that he will make concessions on the contentious issues which prevented the warring parties from reaching a peace deal during the last round of talks earlier this month in Addis Ababa. "He has to let go some of those positions and give in to the opposition and if he does that, [it] means those who will go home will not be happy and that is the tough time he is in now. But if he doesn't make those concessions, it means there will be no peace in the country," Okuk said. He said it is now up to the president to make concessions that will appease the opposition parties so peace can be achieved in South Sudan. And Okuk warns that if Kiir does not offer serious concessions, South Sudanese leaders could face more sanctions in the near future. South Sudan's conflict began in 2013 as a power struggle between Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar. The war has driven more than 4 million South Sudanese from their homes and caused a humanitarian crisis that has left some 7 million people in need of aid. South Sudan won independence from Sudan in 2011 and is the world's youngest country. Starbucks closed 8,000 of its stores Tuesday to give 175,000 employees about four hours of anti-bias training. The sessions were part of the company's response to the April 12 arrests of two black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia. Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson had not purchased anything and told a store manager they were waiting for a friend to join them. They were asked to leave and an employee called the police, which led to their arrest. The scene was recorded on cellphones and quickly spread on social media, prompting sharp criticisms of Starbucks along with protests and calls to boycott the coffee chain. Tuesday's sessions involved asking employees to discuss with small groups of their colleagues aspects of race and bias and how they can make people feel like they belong. There were exercises of personal reflection asking people to think about when they have thought about their own race, how it has affected their day-to-day lives and interactions with other people. Questions included evaluating how in the case of speaking to someone of the same race, or the case of speaking to someone of a different race, how easy or hard is it to talk about race, feel comfortable using their natural language and gestures, to be respected without having to prove their worth and express dissatisfaction with something without being told they seem angry. "Without assigning good or bad, do you notice ways you treat people differently?" read one question. Participants were also shown a series of videos including Starbucks executives discussing bias with experts, a company-funded documentary about the history of how African-Americans have been denied access in public places in the United States and employees describing instances in which they made assumptions about customers based on appearances. Starbucks President and CEO Kevin Johnson acknowledged what he called the "disheartening situation that unfolded in Philadelphia" in one video and said the company's mission is to be a "place where everyone feels welcome." He said the focus of the training was not to be "color blind" by pretending race does not exist, but rather to be "color brave" and discuss race directly. The training was developed with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Perception Institute and other social advocacy organizations, and included contributions by the rap music artist Common. Similar unconscious bias training has been used by police departments, companies and other organizations to help address racism in the workplace and encourage workers to open up about implicit biases. In one video, Common told employees that while people usually seek similarities with others, there are great advantages to learning to love what makes you different from other people. "It's a life skill to make someone else in your presence feel welcome. You do that by not only loving what makes them the same as you, but by appreciating what makes them different from you," he said. Starbucks has announced policy changes following the Philadelphia incident, mainly that it will no longer require people to buy anything in order to be welcome in the company's stores. It also promised to give employees more training in the coming year, and to provide each store with a list of local resources for mental health and substance abuse services, housing shelters and protocols for calling authorities. "Today was a starting point. We have much to do," said Rosalind Brewer, chief operating officer and group president. Nelson and Robinson reached an agreement with Starbucks for an undisclosed amount of money and offers of a free education. They also accepted from the city of Philadelphia a symbolic $1 each and a promise to launch a $200,000 program for young entrepreneurs. An Afghan policemen is dead after an attack Wednesday on the headquarters of the interior ministry in the capital of Kabul. The attack began when a car bomb detonated at the security checkpoint outside the ministry's compound. A group of armed attackers then stormed through the gate and made their way onto the huge grounds of the compound, where they were met by security forces who repelled the attack. Interior Ministry spokesman Najib Danish said five people were wounded in the attack. The Islamic State terror network has claimed responsibility. The Taliban has vowed to step up attacks on Kabul as part of its annual spring offensive against the U.S.-backed government. Taiwan will struggle to stop a shrinking pool of mostly poor diplomatic allies from shifting allegiance to its rival, China, because it lacks the amounts of money they want, experts and officials in Taipei say. The number of countries that recognize Taiwan diplomatically fell to 18 last week after Burkina Faso severed 24 years of relations. The West African country, one of the worlds poorest, established formal relations with China days later and became the fourth country to make the change since 2016. Taiwan had extended medical and farming support to Burkina Faso, but Taiwanese media said China had offered $50 billion last year. China often sends investors to Africa to tap natural resources and build infrastructure. Failure to match Chinese money could shift more allies from Taipei to Beijing, experts believe, minimizing Taiwans voice in the United Nations and hurting its struggle to be seen internationally as separate from China. Quantitatively, China can undoubtedly offer much more than Taiwan and can offer that over a spectrum that is much wider than the Taiwan sides spectrum, said Fabrizio Bozzato, a Taiwan Strategy Research Association fellow. China sees Taiwan as part of its territory rather than a state entitled to diplomacy. Each side has ruled itself since the Chinese civil war of the 1940s. Backed by more than 170 countries including the worlds most powerful, China insists the two sides eventually unify despite polls showing Taiwanese prefer autonomy. Taiwan's government says China pays Taiwanese allies to switch allegiance as a way to put pressure on President Tsai Ing-wen. Tsai took office in Taiwan two years ago and rejects Beijing's idea that the two sides belong to a single China. Funding limitations in Taiwan Taiwan gives aid to its allies based on evaluations of what each one needs to develop socially or economically, foreign ministry spokesman Andrew Lee said. It may set a timeline of two to three years, Lee said. Common types of aid are scholarships, farming technology and medial programs. Taiwan has a limited budget, Lee told a news conference Tuesday. Our government maintains a steady stance, and the most important thing now is what the president has indicated and foreign minister has emphasized, which is no diplomatic acts that are related to so-called money diplomacy, he said. Presently, with our government financial problems and our foreign affairs budget being only so much, we must use the smallest budget to do the biggest deployment, so in this aspect we must positively use our creativity. On Tuesday Taiwan agreed to expand economic and infrastructure aid to Haiti with an eye toward luring more Taiwanese investors to the impoverished Caribbean country. They reached that deal as Haitian President Jovenel Moise visited Taipei. Taiwan seldom specifies amounts of aid to particular countries, which are mostly in the Caribbean, Central America and the South Pacific. More money, faster, from China China as a Communist country need not vet aid money through parliament or test the opinion of citizens who may prefer the aid money be kept at home, analysts say. It has more money as well as farther-reaching programs to distribute it, they add. One channel is the $1 trillion Belt-and-Road Initiative for building new infrastructure around Eurasia. China also can encourage its tourists to visit impoverished countries as a source of hospitality income, Bozzato said. Chinese took 130.5 million trips overseas last year, more than in 2016. Some money from China reaches its allies under the table, he said. China is richer than Taiwan and is seen as a great power that keeps on rising, he said. South Pacific nations allied with the United States, he said, can extract resources both from the traditional Western partners and the new Chinese partner. Exporters from nations allied with Beijing have access to the worlds biggest consumer market, as well. When the Dominican Republic cut ties with Taiwan May 1, its presidential office website said domestic industries had requested greater diplomatic, commercial and economic growth with the Peoples Republic of China. Since the African nation of Sao Tome and Principe left Taiwan for China in 2016, Beijing has pledged $146 million for the modernization of its international airport and construction of a deep-sea container port to facilitate Chinese trade in Africa. Taiwanese aid had focused on farming, energy and public health. Countries that need peacekeeping can look to China for help because its a United Nations Security Council member, as well, said Huang Kwei-bo, international affairs college vice dean at National Chengchi University in Taipei. Taiwan has no U.N. seat. You could threaten Taiwan a bit and it would give you more money, but thats still not as much as Beijing can offer, Huang said. U.S. President Donald Trump signed legislation Wednesday to give patients with deadly diseases the "right to try" experimental drugs that might extend their lives. At a White House signing ceremony, Trump called the measure a "fundamental freedom" for people with life-threatening conditions to use medications that have shown promise in initial testing but not been approved by U.S. regulators for sale to the public. The bill cleared Congress last week after a spirited debate in which Republicans said it could give hope to thousands of people looking to save their lives, while many Democrats opposed to it said it would give patients false hope. Trump had voiced support for the legislation at his State of the Union address in January, saying that the terminally ill should not have to leave the U.S. in search of an experimental drug in another country. Patients will be able to take advantage of the provision only if they have exhausted their treatment options using drugs already approved by U.S. regulators. They then will be able to use drugs the Food and Drug Administration has yet to declare as safe. UNICEF is warning that hundreds of thousands of severely malnourished children in Mali are at risk of dying, as the security situation in the country worsens. The United Nations reports that attacks by extremists and criminals in northern and central Mali are rising at an alarming rate, with many civilians being deliberately targeted. UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac says hundreds of thousands of children are going hungry because of severe food shortages. "More than 850,000 children under the age of 5 are at risk of global acute malnutrition this year, including 274,000 children facing severe malnutrition and at imminent risk of death," he said. "This represents a 34 percent increase and is largely due to the worsening food security situation in parts of the country." The U.N. reports 20 percent of the country is suffering from food insecurity and 1.2 million people lack water, sanitation and basic hygiene. UNICEF says severe acute malnutrition rates are highest in the conflict affected areas in the north, exceeding the emergency level of 15 percent in Timbuktu. It cites Mali as one of the countries with the highest newborn and maternal mortality rates in the world. Boulierac also says newborn deaths are rising because of malnutrition and lack of basic health services. Northern Mail has been in turmoil since 2012, when Islamist militant groups temporarily seized control of the region. On a visit to Mali's capital Bamako on Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres paid homage to the U.N. peacekeepers who have been killed while serving what is considered the world body's most dangerous peacekeeping mission.Twenty-one peacekeepers were killed in attacks by extremists last year. While in Mali, Guterres appealed for funds to support the G5 Sahel force, which is composed of troops from Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mauritania.The force was created to contain the West African jihadists active in Mali and nearby countries. UNICEF calls the crisis in Mali one of the most forgotten in the world. It notes nearly 80 percent of the agency's $37 million humanitarian appeal for this year remains unfunded. The United Nations says women in Afghanistan who are victims of violence have little or no judicial recourse, as perpetrators of the crimes usually go unpunished. The findings were published in a joint report by the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Office and the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. The report is based on 237 documented cases of violence against women from August 2015 through December 2017. It also examines 280 cases of murder and so-called honor killings in 2016 and 2017. U.N. Human Rights spokeswoman Liz Throssell says one of the disturbing findings is the widespread use of mediation by community leaders, Shuras, Ulemas and Jirgas, to resolve criminal acts against women. "Now the concern that we have is that violence against women in Afghanistan, including so-called 'honor killings,' too often goes unpunished. Despite concrete efforts by the Afghan government to criminalize these practices, victims are often pressured into agreeing to mediation, instead of the alleged perpetrator being brought to trial," Throssell said. It is hard to come by accurate figures on the number of rapes, honor killings and other acts of violence against women in Afghanistan. For example, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission reports it had investigated 5,575 cases of violence against women in 2016. But it adds that the number of violations was probably grossly underestimated, as most cases of violence go unreported. Throssell says U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein believes mediation should generally not be used because it prevents women from receiving justice. "The high commissioner has said that the wide use of mediation, when a woman or girl has been beaten, mutilated or murdered, or when she has been the victim of that awful concept of honor killing, normalizes such violence and makes it much more likely to recur," Throssell said. The report calls on Afghan authorities to investigate and prosecute criminal offenses of violence against women. It says offenses should be expanded to include forced marriages and harmful traditional practices. The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan played down a spate of recent Taliban attacks on Wednesday, saying violence levels were still lower than average as some insurgents talked peace a situation he described as "talking and fighting." "You see mid-level, senior-level Taliban leaders engaging with Afghans," said Army General John Nicholson, adding that a lot of the diplomatic activity was taking place "off the stage." Nicholson's remarks came the same day that gunmen armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers attempted to penetrate the heavily fortified headquarters of the Afghan interior ministry, battling security forces for more than two hours in the latest attack on the capital Kabul. The attack was a reminder of the challenges facing U.S.-backed Afghan forces even after 16 years of war, including in the capital Kabul. Last month, two explosions in Kabul killed at least 26 people, including nine journalists. Nicholson said initial indications suggested Taliban and the Haqqani network were behind the attack, even though Islamic State claimed responsibility. In his remarks to Pentagon reporters, Nicholson sought to underscore data and events he said point to forward progress in America's longest war. Critics warn the U.S.-backed Afghan army cannot promise to defeat the Taliban or overcome Afghanistan's vast political divisions and entrenched corruption. More than 2,400 U.S. forces have died in the conflict. Nicholson pointed to unreleased data showing a 30 percent decline in attacks initiated by the insurgents between February and April, compared with the average over the previous five years. Attacks increased after the Taliban announced their spring offensive on April 25 but the violence was still 10 to 12 percent lower, he said. U.S. officials in recent years have declined to offer data on levels of attacks initiated by insurgents, saying that the United States no longer had a big enough intelligence gathering operation in Afghanistan to publish reliable estimates. Nicholson acknowledged much of his data drew upon the Afghan government's estimates, which the U.S. government has long considered less reliable. But when pressed during the news briefing, Nicholson said he was still confident in the trend suggested by the data. "If this were a matter of a few percentage points, I'd have less confidence," he said. He also drew comparisons to Colombia, where insurgents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and government forces were fighting before a 2016 peace agreement. Still, many experts say there are huge differences between the Colombian and Afghan conflicts. "The idea that we're making the same kind of progress ]as in Colombia] is grasping at straws for justification," said Jason Dempsey, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security think-tank who deployed twice to Afghanistan. Nicholson highlighted a grassroots "peace movement," which he said was not aligned to any party in Afghanistan's nearly 17-year-old conflict. He said it has held events in 20 Afghan provinces, calling for ceasefires and peace talks. "And this has never happened before in Afghanistan, to my knowledge, over 20 provinces," he said. Asked about how this would affect the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, Nicholson said: "The end state of the policy is to achieve a reconciliation." U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Wednesday a U.S.-European Union trade deal could still be reached even if the United States imposes tariffs on EU steel and aluminum imports. EU and U.S. officials are holding last-minute negotiations two days before U.S. President Donald Trump decides to apply tariffs on Europe. The threat of tariffs has increased prospects of retaliation and a global trade war that could hinder the global economy. There can be negotiations with or without tariffs in place, Ross said at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. There are plenty of tariffs the EU has on us. Its not that we cant talk just because theres tariffs." The Trump administration is also exploring possible limits on foreign auto imports, citing national security. The EU wants exemptions on steel and aluminum tariffs, which Trump hopes will benefit the U.S., or impose tariffs on U.S. peanut butter, orange juice and other products. In a speech at the OECD, French President Emmanuel Macron said Europe should stand its ground in the face of unilateral actions and warned against trade wars. Unilateral responses and threats over trade wars will solve nothing of the serious imbalances in world trade. Nothing, he proclaimed. In an apparent reference to Trumps proposed tariffs, Macron said, These solutions might bring symbolic satisfaction in the short term. .... One can think about making voters happy by saying, I have a victory. Ill change the rules. Youll see. Macron also called on the EU, the U.S., China and Japan to draft a World Trade Organization reform plan for the G-20 summit in Argentina later this year. The new rules must meet the current challenges of world trade: massive state subsidies creating distortions of global markets, intellectual property, social rights and climate protection, he said. But Macrons multilateral approach has produced limited results to date, as Trump has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran nuclear deal, and is threatening to disrupt trade relations between China, the EU and other economic powers. The Trump administration says it is horrified by reports of Iranian government persecution of religious minorities in the Islamist-ruled nation. Speaking Tuesday at the U.S. State Department, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback said the "horrific" reports related to what he called Iran's persecution of people who are not part of its Shiite majority and who do not practice religion as the government directs. Brownback also said he had seen a "radical export" of such religious persecution out of Iran. He made the comments as he presented the State Department's 2017 International Religious Freedom Report. The annual report's section on Iran said its Islamist rulers continued to execute people on charges of "moharebeh" or "enmity against God," including four prisoners in Alborz province in December and four men in Kerman province in September. The U.S. report said Tehran also continued to harass, interrogate and arrest Baha'is, Christians, Sunni Muslims and other religious minorities and to use anti-Semitic and anti-Baha'i rhetoric in official statements. The report said members of religious minorities, especially Baha'is, continued to face societal discrimination and harassment, with employers experiencing social pressures not to hire Baha'is or to dismiss them from their private-sector jobs. Speaking Tuesday to VOA Persian's Late News program, U.S.-based Baha'i International Community spokesman Farhad Sabetan said Iran's international standing "always takes a hit" when there are newly published reports accusing Tehran of religious persecution. "The Islamic Republic is sensitive about its worldwide reputation and tries to defend it when it can," said Sabetan, an economics professor at California State University-East Bay in Hayward. On a visit to New York last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif spoke at a Council on Foreign Relations forum and said, "According to Iranian law, following a set of beliefs is not an offense." Asked about Iran's refusal to recognize the Baha'i religion, Zarif said: "Being a Baha'i is not a crime. We do not recognize somebody as a Baha'i as [having] a religion that's a belief." "But being a Baha'i does not immunize somebody from being prosecuted for offenses that people may commit," he added. Sabetan disputed Zarif's assertion. "Recently, Iranian officials have claimed that no one in Iran is targeted solely because they believe in a particular religion," he said. "We know that in the case of the Baha'is this is false. We have plenty of evidence that suggests otherwise." In a statement issued last Friday, the Baha'i International Community said there had been a "new wave" of arrests and raids on Baha'i homes in several Iranian provinces, including Alborz, Isfahan and Razavi Khorasan. It said in many cases, the detentions of Iranian Baha'is had been accompanied by raids on personal homes and the seizure of religious books and writings. The United States military's largest region of operations will now be known as "Indo-Pacific Command" instead of "Pacific Command," a symbolic gesture that underscores U.S. commitment to the Indian Ocean region. U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced the name change Wednesday in Hawaii during a ceremony that officially installed Admiral Philip S. Davidson as the top U.S. military commander in the Pacific. "Over many decades, this command has repeatedly adapted to changing circumstances, and today carries that legacy forward as America focuses west," Mattis said. PACOM is one of six geographic "Unified Combatant Commands" in the U.S. military. It is by far the largest stretching from Antarctica to the North Pole, and from California to the Indian Ocean. The name change is mainly symbolic. U.S. officials say the change will not be accompanied by any movement of U.S. troops or assets and does not reflect a fundamental strategic shift. It will also not result in any re-drawing of the command's area of responsibility, which already includes the Indo-Pacific. Rather, U.S. officials say the name change is meant to better describe the existing state of affairs in Asia. Pentagon officials have increasingly referred to the "Indo-Pacific" rather than the "Asia Pacific"an acknowledgement of what they see as the growing importance of the Indian Ocean region. "It is affixing a more expressive and accurate name to U.S. Pacific Command to better reflect the realities of its relationships and missions," says James Kraska, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. "It is also a function of an increasingly warm relationship with India." M. Taylor Fravel, an international relations professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the name change is also likely intended to signal support for the U.S. administration's "Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy." The Trump administration has spoken relatively little about the new Asia strategy. That stands in contrast to the Obama administration, which attempted to carry out a highly publicized "rebalance" toward the Asia-Pacific. "Without a more detailed description of the strategy, it is hard to tell if resources beyond those outlined in Obama's rebalance strategy will be committed to the region or not," Fravel says. Davidson is replacing Admiral Harry Harris, the White House's pick to be the next U.S. ambassador to South Korea. As the U.S. military's top commander in the Pacific, Davidson will oversee an expanded effort to deal with China's growing assertiveness in disputed areas of the South China Sea. On Tuesday, Mattis said the U.S. military will continue sailing ships near disputed islands in the South China Sea, despite Beijing's increased complaints about the operations. Earlier this week, two U.S. Navy warships sailed near the Paracel Islands off the coast of Vietnam. China responded by sending two ships to confront the U.S. vessels. Last week, the Pentagon rescinded an invitation for China to participate in the RIMPAC maritime exercises later this year, citing China's behavior in the South China Sea. Mattis is now headed for Singapore, where he will take part in the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual gathering of Asian defense and other leaders. The Trump administration has imposed new sanctions on three Iranian organizations and six Iranians whom it says have committed serious human rights abuses on behalf of Tehran. The three organizations sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in a Wednesday statement include Iran's pro-government vigilante group Ansar-e Hizballah, Tehran's Evin prison, and government-backed mobile app developer Hanista Programming Group. The department's Office of Foreign Assets Control also sanctioned three leaders of Ansar-e Hizballah, two government officials whom it said are involved in state censorship activities, and the director of Iranian state broadcaster IRIB. The U.S. statement quoted Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as saying Iran's government "diverts" national resources that he said belong to the Iranian people and uses those resources to "suppress" free speech and fund a "massive and expensive censorship apparatus." "Those who speak out against the regime's mismanagement and corruption are subject to abuse and mistreatment in Iran's prisons," Mnuchin said. "America stands with the people of Iran, and Treasury is taking action to hold the Iranian regime accountable for ongoing human rights abuses, censorship, and other despicable acts it commits against its own citizens." The sanctions put a freeze on all assets of the designated organizations and individuals in U.S. possession and "generally prohibit" Americans from engaging in transactions with them. Foreign financial institutions or individuals who "knowingly" provide material support to those designated also risk exposure to secondary U.S. sanctions that could cut them off from the U.S. financial system. 'Strongest sanctions in history' In a May 21st speech, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Trump administration plans to impose what he called the "strongest sanctions in history" on Iran unless it accepts 12 U.S. demands to stop activities that he said are aimed at developing nuclear weapons and pursuing regional hegemony. Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ridiculed the U.S. warning two days later in remarks to a gathering of officials, saying: "The U.S. has tried various political, economic, military and propaganda undertakings to hit the Islamic Republic, [but] all these plots failed. Like the famous cat in Tom and Jerry they will lose again." Khamenei was referencing an American cartoon series in which a wily mouse named Jerry consistently outsmarts a cat named Tom. The Treasury Department said Wednesday it sanctioned Ansar-e Hizballah for collaborating with Basij militiamen to violently attack Iranian students with knives, tear gas and electric batons. It said the group also is linked to acid attacks against women accused of flouting strict Islamic dress rules in Isfahan city. The statement said the U.S. sanctioned Evin prison because the facility subjects political prisoners and other inmates to "brutal tactics" by authorities, including sexual and physical assaults and electric shock. Iran's Hanista Programming Group also was targeted for developing two social media applications called Mobogram and MoboPlus. The Treasury Department said Hanista embedded malicious content in the apps to facilitate the monitoring and tracking of Iranian citizens a functionality that it said could enable the government to commit serious human rights abuses. Tehran has tasked Hanista with distributing domestic apps as alternatives to the popular foreign-made Telegram messaging app, which the government banned Iranians from using earlier this month. The U.S. statement said the two sanctioned government officials and IRIB director Abdulali Ali-Asgari all have engaged in efforts to censor free speech and media in Iran. This report was produced in collaboration with VOA's Persian Service. Zimbabwe's president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has set July 30 as election day. But Zimbabweans living outside the southern African nation will not be allowed to vote in those polls. Through a government gazette published Wednesday, Mnangagwa said that on that day Zimbabweans will choose their next president as well as members of parliament and city councils. September 8th is when a presidential runoff will be held in the event that there is clear winner in the first round. However, Zimbabwe's high court has ruled that Zimbabweans who do not live in the country cannot take part in the elections. On Wednesday, the Constitutional Court dismissed a challenge to electoral laws which prevent Zimbabweans in the diaspora from taking part in their countrys electoral processes. Belinda Chinowawa of the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights group said she made the application for some non-resident citizens. They had hoped Zimbabwe would join African countries like Ghana, Mozambique and South Africa in allowing their diaspora citizens to vote from the countries where they live. Naturally we are very disappointed because we really did believe that there is now a constitutional right to vote for all Zimbabweans, whether they are based in Zimbabwe or they are voting from abroad." To a question from VOA about What made you think that things would change now, in the past court has been turning down your application? Chinowawa responded: Because now we have in terms of section 67 of the Constitution, we have political rights and these include the right to vote for all Zimbabwean citizens over the age of 18. So we believe that as long as our clients were not convicted of any electoral offenses, we believe that they firmly had a right to vote and that their residence in other countries should not have denied them that right. Over the years, millions of Zimbabweans - by some estimates a third of the population - have fled Zimbabwe due to a failing economy and human rights abuses by the government of former president Robert Mugabe, who resigned under pressure from the military last November. The government argued it did not have the money to conduct elections throughout the world. Tawanda Kanengoni, the lawyer for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, speaking after the court's ruling Wednesday, said that the commission will abide by the courts ruling. The position that had been taken by the commission, was that it would be abide by the decision that would be made by the court. A decision has been handed down and the commission will act accordingly. The electoral commission must now prepare for the polls. Mnangagwa will face a challenge by Nelson Chamisa, of the country's main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. Nigeria has the world's highest occurrence of fistulas - abnormal holes in the birth canal. Between 400,000 to 800,000 women in Nigeria developed the condition while giving birth. Health workers say cultural factors are to blame for the high rate. Museums in Rome free on first Sunday of every month. Italy's state-run museums and archaeological sites are open free of charge on the first Sunday of every month, with the next edition of Domenica al Museo taking place on 3 June. Rome's city-run museums are also free on 3 June - for residents of the capital - for information see Musei in Comune website. Full details of Domenica al Museo can be found on the Beni Culturali website while for comprehensive list of Rome's museums see Wanted in Rome website. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. Lotteria has partnered with Gibier venison to sell venison burgers. Look at this poster carefully. Now, how closely does the real bur... Supporters say the measure would mean workers would no longer have to rely on the generosity of customers and in some cases, put up with harassment and it would ensure a consistent income. It would also address wage theft, where an employer fails to make up the difference as required by law when a workers tips dont add up to the minimum wage, supporters say. Companies operating in Dubai have been exempted from all fines under decree No 20 of 2018 issued by Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai. The Dubai Department of Economic Development (DED) has urged businesses in the Emirate to benefit from the decree, which exempts them from the fines imposed on them, and facilitates the procedures for renewing licenses by the end of 2018. This will add to the financial benefits of the owners of expired business licenses, restore legal records and licenses, and help the business community in Dubai enhance their competitiveness, said Sami Al Qamzi, director general, DED. Omar Bushahab, CEO, Business Registration & Licensing Sector in DED, said: This decree is a positive step in promoting economic growth and consolidating Dubai's position as one of the important commercial and economic centres internationally. It reaffirms to investors and businessmen around the world that Dubai effectively addresses various economic variables with a forward-looking vision by adopting best practices and regulations. It also helps to remove concerns among investors and entrepreneurs looking to expand their business. Bushahab urged the owners of business licenses to expedite all necessary procedures to benefit from the exemptions to renew their licenses before the grace period until the end of 2018. The decree is part of the initiatives launched by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed to reduce cost of doing business and facilitate inward investment in the emirate. The Department of Economic Development is implementing four initiatives to stimulate competitiveness and achieve sustainable economic development in Dubai. These are related to exempting businesses from fines and trade violations, reducing operational cost in the retail sector, supporting local production and procurement, as well as attracting the best startups to Dubai and promoting them. TradeArabia News Service Mashreq, a leading financial institution in the US, has been awarded the 2018 Gallup Great Workplace Award for a 5th consecutive year, by global performance-management consulting company, Gallup. The Gallup Great Workplace Award recognizes organizations for their extraordinary ability to create an engaged workplace culture. Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, CEO at Mashreq commented, Mashreq is honoured to have been awarded this prestigious tribute recognition for a 5th consecutive year. The bank values its people and prides itself on their growth and development. We see this a focus on engagement as a primary pre-requisite to driving performance. We approach engagement through a comprehensive approach, focusing not only on work related aspects, but also on Staff Wellbeing, their family and on having the opportunity to give back to the community. Receiving the Gallup award for the 5th consecutive year represents a milestone for Mashreq and reflects the wider success the Bank has enjoyed in hiring and retaining talent from all over the world. Ashok Gopal, Head of People Development, said, Mashreq has always strived to put people first. This award is testament to our commitment to developing world-class approaches to engaging our staff we recognise that a focus on engagement needs to be ongoing and this reflects in an engagement calendar that focuses on actions taken through the year. An example of this ongoing focus is the award winning Staff Wellbeing program Sahtak. This relentless focus on engagement is the platform that allows us to live our Mashreq Values on an ongoing basis and through that, to achieve world class business performance. As per Gallup tradition, Mashreq will be presented with the award at a workplace event held in Washington DC, at the Gallup world headquarters in late July. TradeArabia News Service GCCs real estate sector is on a recovery path after a tumultuous couple of years, thanks to the governments' economic diversification efforts, a stabilising oil sector, and rising private investments, according to a report. Over the last 10 years, the region has continued to witness rapid economic development and demographic changes fueled by a ballooning expat population, which currently stands at 50 per cent of the GCC population, said a report compiled by Al Masah Capital, a privately-owned investment manager. This, stated the report, has subsequently resulted in an increase in the demand for residential units across the GCC region. And in response to the demand, the UAE on its part has already started its expansive affordable residential construction project to accommodate as many as 385,000 expatriate workers. Regardless of the yield compression in the UAEs residential market and decreasing transaction values from the previous years, the UAEs real estate sector is maturing and is poised for growth in the longer term given the improving regulations, solid macroeconomic fundamentals and highly developed infrastructure. The report also indicates that the region is now positioned as a preferred destination for global investors with its real estate sector establishing itself as a key barometer for the regions economic growth. The rise in per capita income has also been attributed to the sectors continued stability, the report indicated. Al Masah Capital said the regions tourism sector was poised to further accelerate the real estate market in the GCC, especially for the UAE. On its part, UAEs real estate market and the construction sector have also been a growth trajectory collectively accounting for 15 percent of its total GDP in 2016, with individual contribution of six percent and nine percent, respectively. This, the report also indicated, is mainly due to efforts by the Abu Dhabi and Dubai governments aimed at reducing the oil dependency, improving the economy, and favorable policy decision. Increased Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has also been singled out as having a positive impact on the sectors growth. According to the report, UAEs FDI nearly doubled from Dh55.3 billion in 2010 to Dh103.1 billion in 2015 with the Foreign Portfolio Investments (FPI), which is still recovering from the 2009 economic slowdown, reaching Dh7.7 billion in 2015. On the office sector, the report said it outperformed other GCC markets registering a CAGR of 4.5 per cent during 2012-17. On its part, Saudi Arabia has also witnessed steady growth since 2012 with supply reaching 4.9 million sq m in 2017. Currently, Dubai still maintains the lowest office vacancy rate in the GCC at only 8 per cent as of 2017. But on the other hand, Dubai is still considered as the most favorable commercial destination albeit it being the costliest. It is closely followed by Saudi Arabia. On their part, the UAE and Saudi Arabia governments have also been proactively promoting affordable housing plans for both locals and expats, it added.-TradeArabia News Service Over 60 delegates from G20 members and organisations are discussing strategies for common solutions to problems relating to agriculture, nutrition, research and sustainability at a G20 meeting, being held in Argentina. Agricultural research and development officials are in the northern Argentine province of Jujuy to address the sustainability of agricultural systems at the Meeting of Chief Agricultural Scientists of the G20 (MACS-G20), said a statement from the organisation. The meeting began on May 28 with a visit to the Salinas Grandes salt flats and will conclude today (May 30) with the drafting of a communique, this event has been held annually since 2012. It is a platform for developing strategies and common solutions to key issues affecting agriculture and nutrition, it said. This year, the delegates are looking at the impact of climate change on agricultural production, adequate soil management and genetic modification, and are developing proposals for a sustainable food future, one of the priorities of the Argentine G20 presidency, it added. In his opening remarks, meeting chair Santiago del Solar, chief of staff at the Argentine Ministry of Agribusiness, said: Sustainability can sometimes be a moving target. We need to be very careful in understanding our environment to be able to research and recommend better solutions according to a changing climate and environment. Collaborative work between different branches of science have a tremendous impact and synergy. Creating new technologies means creating new jobs, he added. In addition to the excursion to Salinas Grandes, 12,000 hectares of white salt plains straddling the provinces of Salta and Jujuy at an average altitude of over 3,400 m above sea level, the first day of the meeting included a brief tour of Purmamarca, a traditional lunch at the Manantial del Silencio hotel, and a working visit to the Posta de Hornillos, one of the five sites of the Research Institute for Family Farmers (IPAF), which is part of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA). Delegates were introduced to three of the institutions areas of work Andean cultivation, alpaca raising and renewable energy to explore the institutes technologies and understand its achievements in different ecological regions across the country. Research, development, reach, and transference. Recalling those four words will ensure you know INTA, said Juan Balbin, meeting co-chair and president of INTA, the event host. Created in 1956, INTA is a decentralised public institution pertaining to the Argentine Ministry of Agribusiness. It develops skills for the agribusiness sector and generates knowledge and technology through its information and communication networks to help benefit different sectors of society. On day two of the meeting, specialists from Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the UNs Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) are discussing genetic modification and sustainable soils. The agenda at the Altos de la Vina Hotel in the provincial capital of San Salvador de Jujuy also includes group discussions and presentations. This evening, delegates will attend the official MACS-G20 dinner. The final day today (May 30) of the meeting, will be dedicated to the effects of climate change on soils, and specifically to the emergence and re-emergence of diseases. In this context, they will discuss international cooperative action to take advantage of genetic diversity as a tool to drive the productivity and resilience of agricultural systems, it said. After the traditional family photo, chief scientists will prepare a communique with the main conclusions of the meeting and look ahead to the agricultural issues on the agenda at next years G20, under the presidency of Japan, it stated. TradeArabia News Service Black leaders who are advising Starbucks on its anti-bias training program, which begins Tuesday, hope it will reinvigorate decades-old efforts to ensure minorities get equal treatment in restaurants and stores, setting an example for other corporations. Starbucks committed to the training after a Philadelphia cafe manager's call to police resulted in the arrests of two black men who were waiting for a friend. The arrests sparked protests and accusations of racial profiling at the coffee chain known for its liberal stances on social issues such as same-sex marriage. Anti-bias training is intended to get participants to recognise their own unconscious biases and avoid unintentional discrimination. Starbucks is closing 8,000 company-owned US stores at around 2 p. local time on Tuesday as a first step in training 175,000 employees on racial tolerance. Some 6,000 licensed Starbucks cafes will remain open in locations such as grocery stores and airports, and those employees will be trained at a later time. Doctor groups have long been warned against accepting drug company sponsorship in case they are influenced, but a Fairfax Media analysis has found one particular organisation is aggressively seeking financial support, collecting close to $1 million in six months. The Haematology Society of Australia and New Zealand (HSANZ) and its sub-groups received $972,000 in 50 separate payments from 17 pharmaceutical companies, including Roche, Amgen and Novartis, between May and October last year. Haematology Society of Australia and New Zealand obtained almost $1 million worth of sponsorship payments from drug companies in six months. Credit:James Davies To put that into perspective, the second biggest total amount accepted by an organisation - the Australian Rheumatology Association - was about half that, at $538,000. Dr William Stevenson, HSANZ's new president, said they "retained independent control" of all educational content at its "non-biased" forums. Its time I apologised to all fellow parents and confess that I tell every graduating class I address that their best wealth-building opportunity is to stay living at home and save, save, save. But pay board its great practice managing money and you might even be able to convince your mum and dad, if they can afford it, to stash your cash and return it to you later, I disloyally divulge. Because, for parents, the afford it bit is the rub. And you cant have missed last week the rather entertaining story of a US couple who turned to the courts to evict their 30-year old s(p)on(ge). Well, the collective parental cost of Australias stay-at-home adults is now $12.2 billion a year, according to a mozo.com.au survey of 1000 Australians, given exclusively to Fairfax Media. That frighteningly fat figure is calculated from ABS data and the spend reported by parents in this survey. Almost one in three adults under 35 remain at home, analysis of ABS data indicates. (Its on the increase too: the 2016 census showed a 20 per cent jump in the number of 25 to 34-year-olds sticking around to nearly 400,000 across Australia). Its in the back of my mind as something I need to fix but its never become an apparent problem that I need to do instantaneously, which means it never gets done, Ms Vaughan-Taylor said. Ms Vaughan-Taylor, a university student from Gladesville in Sydney, has held part-time jobs paying superannuation for four years, first as a bartender at a local pub and now nearby in a bottle shop. Like most young people, Ms Vaughan-Taylor was automatically enrolled in her employers default super funds. As a result she has one account with Rest Super and one with HostPlus. Loading Both industry funds are consistently among the top 10 performers, but it leaves Ms Vaughan-Taylor paying two sets of fixed administration costs and possibly double sets of default insurance premiums on a low balance. My brother had problems with this, Ms Vaughan-Taylor said. Im trying to find out if I have [insurance] too - its not something I need at my young age as I dont have children or anyone relying on me. Theres something hypnotic about Michaelia Cash in high dudgeon. It was very nearly a relief to see her, eyes flashing, embracing splendid indignation, because the last time we looked, she couldnt be seen at all - she was behind a great big whiteboard. You think you were surprised? You should have seen my face! she cried in marvellous, irony-free umbrage. Senator Cash denied shed had anything to do with requesting the whiteboard to hide her from the cameras as she entered a particularly awkward estimates committee early this year, declared she was as outraged as anyone when she saw it, and blamed parliamentary security, which she said had taken full responsibility for the fiasco. More than eight weeks out from the "super Saturday" byelections, union heavyweights have begun targeting the knife-edge Queensland seat of Longman. Labor's Susan Lamb will be vying to win the seat, which covers the area of Caboolture north of Brisbane, after quitting the Parliament over the dual citizenship saga against the LNP's Trevor Ruthenberg. Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus is campaigning in the wafer-thin seat of Longman. Credit:AAP Image/ Joe Castro Australian Council of Unions secretary Sally McManus arrived in Longman on Wednesday, campaigning on cost of living and pay. A ReachTel poll of 928 people in the electorate, conducted for the ACTU, found only one-quarter of voters felt their living standards had improved "a little" or "a lot" since the 2016 federal election. Kanoo Shipping, one of the largest regional shipping agencies in the Middle East, has announced an agreement to acquire Wallem South Africa, a provider of integrated maritime solutions in the cities of Durban and Cape Town. Kanoo Shipping is a business division of Yusuf bin Ahmed Kanoo Group, one of the largest, independent family-owned multinational businesses in the Middle East with an extensive portfolio of complementary business units and strategic partnerships across a range of industry sectors. Wallem South Africa, now Kanoo Africa PTY LTD, was part of The Wallem Group, a leading provider of ship management, ship agency, ship broking, commercial vessel management and freight and logistics, said a statement from the company. The strategic acquisition by the fully owned business division of Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo Group (YBA Kanoo) will give it access to all South African ports as well as clients in Mozambique, Namibia and other destinations in the southern parts of the Indian Ocean, it said. Fawzi Ahmed Kanoo, acting CEO of YBA Kanoo Group, said: The due diligence we performed prior to the acquisition made us confident that we are buying an excellent business in all aspects. Wallem is a reputable name in the maritime industry and acquiring its operations in South Africa will be a gateway for Kanoo Shipping into the continent of Africa, he said. At group level YBA Kanoos Shipping and Logistics business divisions will benefit from having a solid footprint in Africa which will reflect positively on the services they provide to their clients, he added. Handling its first vessel in 1911, Kanoo Shipping now operates in 20 countries, covering all principal ports and offshore tanker loading terminals around the Arabian Peninsula, including Iraq and assists with over 17,000 ship calls a year through a network that covers all ports from the Suez Canal to Sri Lanka and East/South Africa. TradeArabia News Service Attorney General John Quigley says he is working overtime on a compensation deal for the state's victims of institutional sexual abuse. Those who've seen at close quarters his capacity for work know this means he really is working day and night. One of the many survivors of institutionalised child abuse, still waiting for redress. Credit:Kate Hedley But when the National Redress Scheme rolls into effect on July 1, it is likely that Western Australia will remain the only state yet to sign up. Not only is there devil in the detail for example, Mr Quigley said he has been negotiating on the way criminals who were abused as children have access to the scheme but there is no money in the budget for the massive cost the state will have to bear. Such "family leave" is meant to help prisoners prepare for their eventual release, which would have been in 2020 in Herman's case after he had served the sentence he began in 2013. He had been released for two days on 13 previous occasions. Belgium's federal prosecutors office has opened an terror investigation into the murders, which come after the country was accused of being a hotbed of extremism after the 2015 Paris attacks, which killed 130 people, and suicide bombings in Brussels in 2016 in which 32 died. Belgian intelligence services have come under intense scrutiny for apparently missing a series of leads after the Paris attacks that could have led to the Brussels bombers. "[The killer] has been reported or presumed to be belonging to the entourage of an Islamist recruiter," a source close to the investigation said. Police have found a Koran and prayer mat in the convert's cell. Police trying to calm a man at the scene of the shooting. Credit:AP Confirming that the attacker was on the police watch list, George Dallemagne, a lawmaker who sits on several Belgian parliamentary security committees, wrote on Twitter: "The supervision of radicalised prisoners remains tragically flawed." Christian Beaupere, the head of the Liege police force, said: "It is clear that the assassin's objective was to attack the police." The Liege prosecutor's office said the gunman had "hunted down" the two police officers, who were checking parking meters, before attacking them from behind with a box cutter on a boulevard in the heart of Belgium's third city at about 10.30am local time. After stabbing the officers, aged 45 and 53, multiple times, Herman took the officers' guns and shot them dead before opening fire on his next victim, who was reportedly sitting in the passenger seat of his mother's car. He was named by local press as Cyril Vangriecken, 22, a trainee teacher from Vottem, a nearby town. Herman entered a nearby high school about 100 metres away and took hostage two female employees, one a cleaning lady. Pupils were evacuated to safety and people raced for cover in the ensuing gun battle when Herman came out firing at police. Four officers were wounded, two in the legs and two in the arms, before Herman was finally shot about 30 minutes after he launched his initial attack. The cleaner was reported to be "safe and healthy". A security cordon was set up around the area, while panicked parents came to collect their unhurt children. The national crisis centre said it had not raised its alert level - an indication the man was believed to be acting alone and so follow-up attacks were not expected. Herman was "already on the run" after committing another murder on Monday night in the town of On, in southern Belgium, a source told AFP, though local prosecutors said they have not yet established a link with the Liege incident. The body of a man shot in the head was found after a jewellery robbery in Rochefort earlier that evening. Charles Michel, Belgium's Prime Minister, condemned the "blind and cowardly violence" in Liege and offered his support for the victims and their families. He called for restraint after images on social media appeared to show the two officers lying feet apart in pools of blood outside a cafe. Mr Michel and Philippe, the King of the Belgians, have visited the city. A minutes silence will be held tomorrow and flags flown at half-mast at Lieges town hall, where a book of condolences has been opened. Liege, an industrial city close to the German border in the French-speaking Wallonia region, was also the scene of a shooting in 2011, when a gunman killed four people and wounded over 100 before turning the gun on himself. Wellington: When Nigel Rothsay heard the police at his door, he had no idea the bizarre turn his life was about to take. Police in Masterton, north-east of Wellington in New Zealand, had raided Rothsay's neighbour, who was under suspicion of dealing methamphetamine, and placed a restraining order on that property under the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act, he said. But in doing so, it was discovered that an apparent administrative error five years earlier meant Rothsay actually owned his neighbour's property, and his neighbour owned his both having been unaware of the mix-up until that moment in December. Nigel Rothsay says he has endured a nightmare six months after discovering he is actually the legal owner of his neighbour's house, and they own his. Credit:Illya McLellan As a result, not only does Rothsay not technically own the house he has been living in since 2012, but that property is now a target for police seizure. WSU Hosts Math and Dance Workshop to Help Teachers Better Reach Students May 30, 2018 OGDEN, Utah Weber State University professors in mathematics and performing arts are combining their knowledge to host a workshop for secondary mathematics educators, June 11-15 in the Val A. Browning Center Room 38. Participants in this weeklong summer workshop wont sit behind rows of desks to learn new ways of teaching mathematic concepts. Instead, they will move around to warm up, work with others and solve dance problems by creating and arranging movements. Erik Stern, dance professor, and Rachel Bachman, mathematics assistant professor, will incorporate an approach to teaching mathematics through dance by drawing on physical problem-solving methods. This learning approach to teaching mathematics integrates kinesthetic, creative and interpersonal concepts. Math can be accessible, but its often not taught that way, Stern said. There are ways to engage the whole person. Twenty-five educators will attend the workshop. They will learn how to explore mathematics by starting with the concrete palpable, physical problems before shifting to the abstract mathematical symbols. This method grounds mathematical concepts in physical movement, engaging both the body and breath in learning. Bachman said she started implementing this approach in her own math class soon after meeting Stern. Once she did so, she noticed a change in the way her students responded and learned. I used to ignore everything but my students minds in the classroom, Bachman said. I thought they were just brains that I had to put information into. But we all have moments when we need to get up and get a drink of water or take a walk. If I involve the body in learning, it helps regulate emotion and tends to the bodys needs. This isnt the first time the arts and mathematics have been combined in a WSU classroom. A semester-long pilot course called Pattern Play was held in 2014. Stern taught the course with WSU math associate professor Julian Chan. It was open to all students at the university, and it satisfied general education credit requirements for mathematics and creative arts. Bachman assessed the class, and the results demonstrated the effectiveness of the method. Students in Pattern Play outperformed students in a traditional general education mathematics course covering the same topics. The Pattern Play students showed better mathematics content knowledge, more positive attitudes toward the subject and more persistence in problem solving. I was doing problem-solving interviews with students, and I witnessed something that, at the time, I really didnt see my own students doing well with, Bachman said. A lot of times in math, mathematicians will look at something and think, Im not sure how to solve that, let me dive in and try stuff. Its very hard to get novice students to do that, especially students who are math anxious. Bachman found that the Pattern Play students were more willing to experiment. They just persisted and persisted and persisted with these problems, she said. Stern and Bachman hope teachers who attend the workshop will enjoy the same breakthrough with their students, particularly those who have had negative past experiences with mathematics. Its a major stumbling block to many students successes, Stern said of math. There are students who dont graduate from college, dont get a degree or dont advance because of that. As part of the workshop application process, teachers wrote essays about their teaching experiences. Many were frustrated because they had smart students who were failing math. They said they are looking for more accessible ways to teach their lesson plans. This is a very well-established method to get at the broader human experience, not just the symbols, as a way to understand mathematics, Stern said. It connects the abstract to concrete, and thats how you create understanding. Sterns experience with math and dance dates back 20+ years to the dance company he co-directs in California. He and his colleague Karl Schaffer began to notice similarities in the two subjects, such as pattern recognition, pattern manipulation and expression. It didnt take long for this simple idea to become an entire routine and outreach show, which they performed 600 times throughout North America. We started by looking at dances wed already choreographed, and finding the mathematic principles, Stern said. Then there was cross pollination. The math would inspire the choreography, and the choreography would inspire mathematical thinking. Over time, their company received more and more requests to help teachers learn how to implement these ideas in their own classrooms. They began writing lesson plans and pioneered this particular method of teaching. Though he has taught teachers for decades, Stern said this summers workshop will be the longest and most intensive one hes been involved with to date. The in-depth nature of the workshop is made possible by a $25,000 Browning Foundation Grant. Thanks to that funding, teachers will receive a stipend for attending and reporting how they implemented the methods in their own classrooms. As Bachman has already witnessed, small changes can make a big difference. The workshop provides the opportunity for an additional 25 teachers to apply these new approaches of teaching and learning. Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University. A Southbury man has been charged after police said he admitted to killing a black bear last week at his mother-in-laws house. Joshua Gendron, 43, was charged with carrying a pistol without a permit, unlawful discharge of a firearm and illegal taking of a bear, according to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Conservation (EnCon) Police. He is scheduled to appear at Superior Court in Waterbury on Tuesday. Last Thursday, EnCon police went to a home on Pascoe Road after getting a call about a man shooting at a bear. When officers arrived, police said, Gendron told them he shot the animal. Gendron told officers he went to his mother-in-laws after she called him about a bear in yard, and took a rifle and pistol, EnCon police said. Officers cited several bear attractants in the yard, including bird feeders, open bird seed, bread crumbs and some apples. When he arrived at that residence, Gendron reportedly attempted to scare the bear away from the attractants by shooting the pistol several times in the direction of the bear, EnCon police in a release. When the bear would not go away, Gendron retrieved the rifle from his vehicle and shot the bear. EnCon police said Gendron did not have a pistol permit. EnConn police said they took him into custody with help from Southbury police. The bears body was brought to the Sessions Woods Wildlife Unit for a necropsy by a biologist. More than 30 years ago, bear sightings were almost unheard of in Connecticut, said Chris Collibee, a spokesman for the DEEP. Today its much more common and we have to adapt to that. DEEP reports that there are about 800 bears in Connecticut, with the population seeing about a 10 percent increase each year. With the growing bear population, reports of nuisance bears and of bold aggressive bear behavior are increasing, DEEP Commissioner Robert Klee said recently before the legislatures environmental committee. The committee had proposed legislation that would create a limited hunting season in Litchfield County, in the hopes of decreasing the bear population. The bill never made it out of the committee. Opponents of the proposal said more public education about bears is needed. This isnt the first bear slaying in the area. Last October, about 20 people gathered in front of Norwalk Superior Court to protest illegal trophy hunting of black bears in Connecticut after the arrests of two men charged with killing two young bears by bow and arrow in Wilton the month prior. Antonio Lio, 28, of Wilton, and Daniel Moran, 33, of Norwalk, skinned a bear for a trophy mount and cut off its head and paws, DEEP said at the time. Lio shot and killed the second bear when it approached him while he was admiring the first kill, a DEEP official said. Lio was charged with illegal taking of a black bear and fourth-degree negligent hunting. Moran was charged with conspiracy to commit illegal taking of a black bear. Moran pleaded guilty. He was fined $500 and had his hunting licence suspended. Lio was granted accelerated rehabilitation. Depending on its translator, Tartuffe has two separate subtitles: The Hypocrite or The Impostor. There's no doubting that Christopher Hampton's new bilingual adaptation gives us the latter. Paul Anderson might be the picture of piety in his ascetic white robes, but he's a charlatan without the slightest scrap of conviction. The focus is always on his powers of persuasion. He takes his credible victims in like a preying mantis. Relocated to Donald Trump's duplicitous America, Tartuffe becomes a latterday evangelical: the sort of preacher who promises the keys to God's kingdom and holds his followers rapt. He speaks with a sing-song Southern accent, and walks on with bare feet, gripping his rosary beads like a thug's bicycle chain. His back is tattooed with a conspicuous crucifix, but the joker on his ribcage is less visible. Still, there's no missing the fact that he's a snake in saint's clothing and yet he bends Sebastian Roche's billionaire Orgon to his will as readily as any Rasputin, convincing him to marry off his daughter and hand over his wealth. If Orgon's taken in, it's because he's cut off by his unworldly riches and that's the point Hampton wants to make stick. Roche makes clear that self-made men are so certain of their convictions, so set in their ways and stuck in their worlds, that they simply stop seeing sense. No matter how fervently his family warn of Tartuffe's trickery, Orgon refuses to admit the possibility. He's a willing victim, ripe for the taking as, indeed, so many super-rich megastars are: Tom Cruise in thrall to scientology, the Blairs to Carole Caplin, perhaps even Trump to Steve Bannon as well. Andrew D Edwards' glossy set is a series of boxes in boxes, surrounded by mirrors that fall away into a black void. Sebastian Roche and Paul Anderson Helen Maybanks Anderson shows us Tartuffe's seductive techniques the way he seems to shapeshift, hunched small and unimposing when he needs to be, then looming large over his stinking rich prey. There's something of the cult about his hypnotic mannerisms pure Wild, Wild Country yet he wraps himself around Orgon's wife Elmire, seducing her like a spider paralyses a fly. However, in relying so fully on physicality, French director Gerald Garutti's staging lays everything up-front, obliterating subtext and subtlety in the process. When Elmire lays Tartuffe a honeytrap, for instance, Audrey Fleurot prostrates herself like a Bond girl served up as bait. How Tartuffe doesn't see through her coo-coo-ca-choo advances is beyond me. It's a French thing and Tartuffe suggests the two theatrical cultures don't mix: Garutti's English actors aren't comfortable with the physicality, his French cast (Roche excepted) mangle the words. Being bilingual makes it a difficult watch, practically speaking, as your brain's forced to flick between registers. Just as you tune into one language, the speakers switch and you're sent scrabbling for surtitles. Chunks of text go missing in a restless encounter that never settles. Moliere's play might revolve around misunderstandings "In the tower of Babel, babble's what you get," quips Elmire but Hampton's version neither hinges on it, nor makes the metaphor count. There's a second split: Hampton's both faithful to Moliere, and specific to Trump. But the two cancel each other out in Garutti's abstracted staging and, while Tartuffe's pertinence is obvious in a nation taken in, its action sits oddly in its new context. It's never more confused than when Trump himself drops in at the end a Donald-ex-machina and saves the day with a glibly satirical speech showing off his hypocrisy. Or is it impostering? Middle Eastern carriers posted the second fastest year-on-year growth in freight volumes in April 2018, up 7.3 per cent, a significant jump from the 0.8 per cent recorded in previous month, according to data released by the International Air Transport Association (Iata). The increase mainly reflects developments from a year ago rather than a substantive change in the near-term trend. The Middle Easts seasonally-adjusted freight volumes continue to track broadly sideways. This is consistent with signs of a broader moderation in global trade. Capacity increased 4.8 per cent. Iata released data for global air freight markets showing that demand, measured in freight tonne kilometers (FTKs), rose 4.1 per cent in April 2018, compared to the same period the year before. This was up from the 1.8 per cent growth in annual demand recorded in March 2018. Freight capacity, measured in available freight tonne kilometers (AFTKs), grew by 5.1 per cent year-on-year in April 2018. This was the second time in 21 months that capacity growth outstripped demand growth, it said. After a sharp fall in March, to a 23-month low, global air freight volumes recovered slightly in April. The pace at which demand is growing, however, remains significantly slower than in much of 2017. The weaker growth in air cargo is primarily due to the end of the restocking cycle, during which businesses rapidly increase their inventory to meet unexpectedly high demand. This is consistent with demand drivers moving away from the highly supportive levels seen last year. The Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) for manufacturing and export orders fell in April 2018 to its lowest level since 2016. A softening of global trade is also evident with containerized freight demand slowing in tandem with air freight demand. Seasonally-adjusted freight volumes continue to track sideways. Alexandre de Juniac, director general and CEO, Iata, said: April saw a strengthening from the abrupt slowdown in growth experienced in March. This is good news. We remain cautiously optimistic that demand will grow in the region of 4 per cent this year. But the forecast appears to have increasing downside potential. Oil prices continue to rise as does protectionist rhetoric. Borders open to people and to trade drive economic growth and social prosperity. We are all disadvantaged when they are closed, he said. All regions reported growth on 2017 levels, albeit at different levels of expansion. Asia-Pacific airlines saw freight demand recover in April 2018 to grow 3.9 per cent compared to the same period last year. Capacity increased by 6.7 per cent. Seasonally-adjusted volumes are broadly trending sideways. As the largest freight-flying region, carrying close to 37 per cent of global air freight, the risks from protectionist measures impacting the region are disproportionately high. North American airlines freight volumes expanded 3.2 per cent in April 2018 compared to the same period a year earlier. This was a slight deceleration in demand from the previous month. Capacity increased by 3.4 per cent. The weakening of the US dollar over the past year has helped boost demand for air exports. Data from the US Census Bureau shows an 11.7 per cent year-on-year increase in air export volumes from the US in Q1 2018, compared to a slower rise in imports of 7.5 per cent. More recently however, the US dollar has been rising. European airlines posted a 2.4 per cent increase in freight volumes in April 2018. This was over double the rate of growth of the previous month. Capacity increased 4.0 per cent. Seasonally-adjusted volumes are broadly trending sideways. The strength of the Euro and a softening of export orders in Germany pose downside risks to European carriers. Latin American airlines experienced growth in demand of 10.6 per cent in April 2018 - the largest increase of any region for the second consecutive month. Capacity decreased by 4.6 per cent. The pick-up in demand over the last 18 months comes alongside signs of economic recovery in the regions largest economy, Brazil. Seasonally-adjusted international freight volumes are now back to the levels seen at the end of 2014. African carriers saw freight demand grow 5.6 per cent in April 2018 compared to the same month last year, after a decline of 3.4 per cent in March. Capacity increased by 23 per cent. After a surge in international FTK volumes last year, seasonally-adjusted international freight volumes have trended downwards from a peak in late-2017 and are now at levels seen mid-2017, it stated. TradeArabia News Service Bernd Vasari Michael Umeh lives in Austria since 2002 after seeing no future in Nigeria. "I am a trained engineer, but have not found a job because I am Biafra." Since 2014, he is Austrian chairman and Vienna coordinator of the Biafra independence movement IPOB (Indigenous People of Biafra). He works as a mechanical engineer. - Luiza Puiu Vienna/Enugu. There was a time when southeast Nigeria was independent. It was 51 years ago, on May 30, 1967, when military governor Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu proclaimed the Republic of Biafra. There was a separate anthem, its own currency, its own flag with rising sun. However, with Britain's support, Nigeria re-conquered the region within three years. Now Biafra separatists are calling for a referendum on a new secession from Nigeria. The state reacts with great severity, as evidenced by reports by Amnesty International. Again and again Biafraner are kidnapped and murdered. Michael Umeh, Austrian chairman of the Biafra independence movement IPOB (Indigenous People of Biafra), talks about a life without prospects in the region: "Wiener Zeitung": Mr Umeh, Biafra separatists, including your organization IPOB, want to hold a referendum on the secession of Nigeria. Why? Michael Umeh: Nigeria is only an artificial product of the former colonial power United Kingdom. For their business, for their economic advantage. There was already Biafra before Nigeria. The British have taken different regions together and made Nigeria out of them. The marriage does not work. We are forced to be part of Nigeria. That has required a lot of bloodshed. We want to get back to the state before these people came from Europe. What kind of interest does Nigeria have in Biafra? Most resources come from Biafra. Just think of the oil. There are also numerous mineral resources. The north, however, has a desert climate with many droughts, lack of water and hunger. The British gave all the power of the country to the poor north. The north liked to play along. After all, with British support, it can rule the country and has access to our resources. Does Britain still have that much influence? In any case. The British government is still in the role of Satan. They benefit from the situation. Especially from the oil. Nigeria is one of the largest oil producing countries in the world. The oil is funded by the British company Shell. The responsibility and complicity in the crimes committed against Biafranians is undeniable. OTTAWA Winnipeg knows him as a proponent of business and privatization, but Jim Carr is now steering the federal governments nationalization of the Kinder Morgan pipeline and finds himself defending a government takeover of private assets. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 29/5/2018 (1232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA Winnipeg knows him as a proponent of business and privatization, but Jim Carr is now steering the federal governments nationalization of the Kinder Morgan pipeline and finds himself defending a government takeover of private assets. "This is an asset; there are revenues that will flow through the asset, and there'll be transparency every step of the way," Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr told reporters Tuesday. CP JUSTIN TANG / THE CANADIAN PRESS Minister of Natural Resources Jim Carr was an advocate for privatization as a civilian, but Monday defended the government's purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline. Carr, MP for Winnipeg South Centre, led the Business Council of Manitoba from its 1998 founding until stepping down to run for federal politics. The non-partisan group advocates for Manitobas private sector, including asking governments to transfer programs into corporate hands when business says it can make the case for privatization. For example, Carr suggested in 2006 that the provincial NDP government look at privatizing parts of Manitobas healthcare system, as part of its budget consultation. "We don't think that there ought to be anything that's left off the table," Carr told media at the time, acknowledging that changing healthcare funding is often controversial. On Tuesday, every opposition party lambasted the Liberals for taking ownership of the pipeline. "Why is it that every time elements of our energy sector get nationalized is when there is a Trudeau in the Prime Minister's Office?" Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer quipped in Question Period, referencing the National Energy Program of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. NDP MP Niki Ashton said separately that it was "an abuse of public ownership" to take over a pipeline instead of supporting more carbon-efficient energy projects. But Carr told reporters that hes not actually nationalizing the pipeline. "You use the word nationalizing; we use the word investment, in an asset," he said, noting that the Liberals plan is to temporarily own the pipeline and sell it after its expansion. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Carr also defended the Liberals decision to not divulge the total cost of the project. The pipeline will cost taxpayers $4.5 billion to take over, but some have estimated that construction, court cases and conservation requirements will more than double that price. "It's a commercially sensitive item; this is going to be put on the market," Carr said. "Canadian taxpayers will know every penny that's ultimately committed to the project." Finance Minister Bill Morneau stressed that Ottawa only intends to own the pipeline over the short term, which he believes is the only way to see the project through to completion. "Our view is long-term that this project should be in the private sector. It has value, commercial value for a private owner. In order to get it done, we need to deal with the political uncertainty." Environmentalists are hoping to keep up that uncertainty, including in Winnipeg. On Wednesday afternoon, activists with both Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition and the Wilderness Committee will hand out flyers to drivers and protest the Trans Mountain project, at Grant Ave. and Stafford St. at 4:30 p.m. dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca Dubai-based Zajel, one of the fastest growing courier companies in the UAE, has signed a partnership agreement with OnTime Government Services to provide logistics services to various transactions at the OnTime centres. The agreement was signed by Zajel chief executive officer Khawla Kabanji, and OnTime Group chief executive officer and founder Waleid Abdulkareim, said a statement from the company. OnTime Government Services has pioneered offering government services through the private sector since December 2003. It owns and operate more than 25 service centres across Dubai, it said. The company has an expanding relationship with many Dubai government entities to facilitate the efficient delivery of services to both government and corporate sectors, serving over 2.3 million customers per year, it added. Kabanji said: The agreement is important for us as it contributes to the expansion of the logistics we provide to our customers and enhances our role as a reliable company both locally and internationally. This agreement will benefit customers as it saves time and cost to complete transactions and facilitates delivery to customers at their residence or business premises without having to leave their office or residence, contributing to road safety, he added. TradeArabia News Service While the lead negotiators for Canada and the U.S. were in intense meetings in Washington trying to find a breakthrough in the vexing NAFTA auto industry regulations, Mexicos ambassador to Canada, Dionisio Perez Jacome, was holding a series of meetings in Winnipeg spreading the word that Mexico is committed to free trade now and in the future. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 30/5/2018 (1232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. While the lead negotiators for Canada and the U.S. were in intense meetings in Washington trying to find a breakthrough in the vexing NAFTA auto industry regulations, Mexicos ambassador to Canada, Dionisio Perez Jacome, was holding a series of meetings in Winnipeg spreading the word that Mexico is committed to free trade now and in the future. In a speech to the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce on Tuesday morning, Jacome did his best to make the point that Mexico believes that a renegotiated NAFTA has to be one that should be truly trilateral that benefits each of the countries. "We will continue to engage in negotiations in a constructive manner always keeping in mind that it should benefit all three countries," Jacome said. In addition to the auto sector, top of the agenda for Canadas foreign affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland, on Tuesday was negotiating a further reprieve from potentially crippling U.S. tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum that expires on Friday, an issue she says is separate from the NAFTA talks. Thats just one more deadline for trade negotiators to deal with on top of the looming national election in Mexico on July 1 and mid-term elections in the U.S. in November adding to the sense that negotiators are on the clock to complete the new NAFTA deal fast. But Jacome stressed that it was more important for Mexico to achieve a good deal rather than a quick one. Last week Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said he believes there is a 40 per cent chance of the deal getting done before his countrys election. "We are in no position to exchange quality for speed," Jacome said. There is no doubt that the NAFTA era has had a significant impact on Mexican-Canadian trade. Jacome pointed out that since the deal was signed in 1994 trade between the two North American countries has increased nine-fold. In his first visit to Winnipeg which Jacome said was at least partly to bestow the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest Mexican order awarded to foreigners, to Jim Downey, the long-time honorary consul to Mexico he met with the premier, the mayor and several business groups. "They were very productive meetings," he said. "The business community in Mexico and Canada have been getting to know each other better. They are doing more trade and there are good opportunities to compliment each other. I believe we are on track to continue increasing trade." Imports from Mexico to Manitoba are almost triple the size of exports from here to there, but the pork sector has perhaps made the strongest inroads. This province is a major producer of Canadian pork and Mexico is an enthusiastic importer. Its now Canadas fourth largest export destination for pork and last year Manitoba represented about 43 per cent of the total, worth about $83 million. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Both Maple Leaf Foods and HyLife Foods, the provinces two largest pork processors, export to Mexico. HyLife has a plant with 200 workers north of Mexico City where it makes sausage for the Mexican market using Manitoba-produced pork products. "The big thing about NAFTA, as the ambassador spoke about, is that it opened up the Mexican market for Canadian produced pork so that now Mexico is a major market for Canadian pork," said Andrew Dickson, general manager of Manitoba Pork. "They are currently getting most of their pork from the U.S. But they wanted to diversify the sources of supply." Jacome spoke about how free trade and not just with Canada and the U.S. but with more than 48 other countries as well has transformed the Mexican economy and allowed it to diversify. Mariette Mulaire, the CEO of World Trade Centre Winnipeg, said the desire to expand its trading perspective is one of the many examples of how the two countries share similar goals. "There is absolutely an opportunity for Canada and Mexico to work together to develop even stronger links," she said. "With the uncertainties around NAFTA (created by U.S. President Donald Trumps repeated references to it being "the worst deal")... we share the same kind of concerns." martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca OTTAWA As the federal Liberals crack open the piggy bank to salvage the planned Trans Mountain pipeline extension, Churchill residents wonder why Ottawa wont take over their rail link for a fraction of the cost. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 29/5/2018 (1232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA As the federal Liberals crack open the piggy bank to salvage the planned Trans Mountain pipeline extension, Churchill residents wonder why Ottawa wont take over their rail link for a fraction of the cost. "What's good for the goose should be good for the gander," said Joe Stover, a former port worker who lives in the northern Manitoba town on the shore of Hudson Bay. "It's all about what's in the national interest." On Tuesday morning, Ottawa announced it would put up $4.5 billion to take ownership of the Trans Mountain pipeline, after political pushback from British Columbia made Kinder Morgan's Texas-based owners wary of proceeding with the expansion. Ottawa plans to later sell the pipeline, believing it will have worthwhile economic spinoffs. (Trans Mountain carries oil to the west coast of B.C. from Alberta.) Stover said the governments logic suggests it ought to take over the Hudson Bay Railway (which washed-out last May, severing Churchill's only overland link) from Omnitrax, a Denver-based company, which owns both the rail line and the Port of Churchill, which it mothballed in 2016. Thats when Stover lost his job. He said a temporary Crown corporation like the one promised Tuesday for the pipeline would shore up the northern town, "just to get the assets back on their feet, and then slip the assets to those who are best to run it," he proposed. "I don't think people are wanting it to be a taxpayer-funded thing forever and ever." NDP MP Niki Ashton, who represents northern Manitoba, has asked for Ottawa to nationalize both assets since the 2016 port layoffs, hosted a news conference Tuesday on Parliament Hill, alongside Stover. "Weve been calling for the government to stand up for the North and take over strategic assets, and instead theyre subsidizing an American oil company," she said, fearing the pipeline will end up in a quagmire similar to the one facing Churchill. "Its short-sighted; to me, its incompetent," said Ashton. "Churchill is dying as a community, so to see this action today is a slap in the face." Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr said Ottawas focused on ongoing talks aimed at transferring both the rail line and shuttered port into local hands through a business venture. "The people of Churchill know that the government of Canada is committed to them both in the short term, to ensure they have the transportation links they need, and in the long term, so that Churchill is a very important part of an Arctic strategy for Canada." Patricia Kandiurin, a town worker in Churchill, said it rings hollow. "Could've fooled us," she said, flatly. "Maybe it would be different if we were Kinder Morgan." Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Stover said residents are getting weary of shifting developments in the Churchill saga, which Ashton described as "chaos." On Tuesday, the Free Press reported Omnitrax told the federal transport regulator it doesnt actually own the damaged railway. Earlier this month, a Calgary-based group called iChurchill went public with its bid to take over both assets, before pulling out three weeks later. "I think it got a lot of people's hopes up. So people were, unsurprisingly, not too happy when that stuff kind of fell to the wayside," Stover said. Kandiurin put it more bluntly. "We're forgotten. Were angry, still," she said, pausing. "Ignored." dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca Firefighters union president Alex Forrest does not appear to have ever been a member of one of eight city committees he has used to justify Winnipeg taxpayers covering his salary for more than a decade. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 29/5/2018 (1232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Firefighters union president Alex Forrest does not appear to have ever been a member of one of eight city committees he has used to justify Winnipeg taxpayers covering his salary for more than a decade. Thats based on responses to freedom of information requests filed by the Free Press, which also show the City of Winnipeg does not have or cannot find attendance records for four of the eight committees. The existing documents, along with the missing records, continue to paint a picture of a work environment where Forrest has been allowed to come and go as he pleases, with little to no oversight on what, if any, value he's been delivering to the Winnipeggers paying his salary, said Todd MacKay, prairie director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. "This is absolutely unacceptable and (they're running) a Post-it note city hall. Keeping track of attendance is standard procedure for a local bowling club, let alone a city," MacKay said. "They're failing on basic levels of accountability and they need to explain quickly how they're going to fix this." MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Documents obtained through freedom of information documenting Firefighters Union president Alex Forrest's attendance on various City of Winnipeg committees. That was echoed by Alan Levy, a labour-relations expert and associate professor of business at Brandon University, who said in his 35-year career he's never heard of an organization that does not keep track of who shows up for work. "The bottom line is, this is not normal and not how a well-oiled, well-managed organization would be run," Levy said. "I've been in labour relations for a long time and we always kept minutes and attendance of meetings. We did that because we had to prove that we were doing what we said we would do when we sat down at the table." Forrest did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. A request to interview City of Winnipeg chief corporate services officer Michael Jack was not granted prior to publication. Felicia Wiltshire, the city's director of customer service and communications, asked the Free Press to send copies of its freedom of information responses before the city provided comment; the Free Press declined to do so. Later Tuesday, Wiltshire sent a written statement to the Free Press, saying the city "creates records that are important for its own administrative purposes, but the city wont always keep records of attendance at meetings if it has no relevance to outcome or purpose of the meeting." RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES UFFW president Alex Forrest does not appear to have ever been a member of one of eight city committees for more than a 10 years. She went on to write arbitration hearings and the employee benefits board are not "city run, so therefore records on attendance wouldnt be kept with the city." However, that seems to be contradicted in part by the freedom of information response, which said the city does have records of United Fire Fighters of Winnipeg arbitration hearings, but its not city practice "to record or otherwise document attendees of arbitration hearings." The Free Press has obtained Forrests attendance records, going back more than a decade, for three of the committees in question: the labour management committee; joint safety committee; and medical advisory committee. From 1997 to present, Forrest has not once been listed as a member of the medical advisory committee. It remains unclear if Forrest was a member prior to becoming union president in 1997. In April, the Free Press reported Forrest hadnt attended a single joint safety meeting since at least December 2006, but can now confirm he's been absent since August that year. From October 2004 (when he became a member) to present, Forrest has attended five of 73 meetings (6.85 per cent). He continues to be listed as a "worker member" of the committee and has been marked absent for the last 60 meetings. Forrests best attendance record looks to be on the labour management committee, having shown up for 51 of 82 meetings (62 per cent) from 2001 to present. City records for that committee dont go back further than 2001. Those three committees are among the eight Forrest pointed to in past interviews with the Free Press to justifying taxpayers picking up the tab for his salary as stipulated under Article 20 of the City of Winnipeg and UFFW collective agreement. The other five are the negotiations committee, special committees appointed by council or labour management, the employee benefits board, arbitration hearings and disciplinary hearings. For four of the five, the freedom of information responses said the city does not have or cannot find any attendance records. The city also said the employee benefits board is an "independent body, separate from City of Winnipeg administration," so it remains unclear why the city agreed to pay for Forrest's work on it. To access attendance records for the negotiation committee from 1997 to present, the city's freedom of information request office attached a price tag of $1,260 in the form of a processing fee. The Free Press has not yet responded to the request for payment. "This overall lack of transparency has been outrageous," MacKay said. "(Mayor Brian) Bowman got elected on a promise to be more transparent. But the reality is city hall is failing to provide transparency that would be absolutely basic in any other scenario and they need to be held accountable for that. "(Bowman's) allowing (freedom of information) responses go out with huge price tags attached, when he should be in the photocopy room making copies for reporters and any other taxpayers who want it. This information belongs to the people. For city hall to continue with foot-dragging and red tape, and then hammer with the huge fee requests, isn't acceptable." Forrest first came under fire in January, when it was revealed the City of Winnipeg had been paying 100 per cent of his salary, plus benefits and pension payments, without reimbursement from the union, since he became UFFW president in 1997. Forrest later admitted he also collects a second paycheque a top-up representing the partial wage of a city firefighter from his union. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. In 2014, that deal which the city administration says it is unable to find a paper trail for was renegotiated, with the city agreeing to pay 60 per cent of Forrests salary for however long he remains union president. Other civic unions in Winnipeg reimburse the city for union presidents' salaries. Based on freedom of information requests filed by the Free Press, and past statements from city spokesmen, its been determined the city has no paper trail for Forrests unusual salary arrangement, no attendance records for four of the eight committees in question and no documentation on how much time he spent working outside Winnipeg from 1997-2017. In January, the Free Press reported based on information culled from his Twitter account hed taken at least 60 out-of-town trips since 2014. ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @rk_thorpe OTTAWA Inflated statistics, flimsy goals and feeble bureaucrats are impeding Ottawa from closing persistent socioeconomic gaps for Indigenous people, according to two audits tabled Tuesday in Parliament. This article was published 29/5/2018 (1232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA Inflated statistics, flimsy goals and feeble bureaucrats are impeding Ottawa from closing persistent socioeconomic gaps for Indigenous people, according to two audits tabled Tuesday in Parliament. "We dont see those gaps closing, we dont even see that they know how to measure those gaps," auditor general Michael Ferguson told reporters, chalking it up to "incomprehensible failures" by the federal government. A study published last October by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards found Manitoba will squander 11 per cent of its workforce growth over next two decades if the gap in Indigenous peoples employment and schooling persists. Ferguson found Ottawa has been hapless at fixing those problems, especially in First Nations communities. He found the federal government has been reporting a high-school graduation rate on reserves that is almost double the actual number of students who get a diploma. Thats because Ottawa counts who enters Grade 12 and compares it with how many complete the term, instead of tracking everyone who enters Grade 9 through to the end of Grade 12. Over five school years ending in 2016, Ottawa said 46 per cent of First Nations teens on-reserve had completed high school; the actual number is 24 per cent. Auditor General Michael Ferguson holds a press conference following the tabling of the AG Report in the House of Commons in Ottawa on Tuesday, May 29, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick Auditors noted the Manitoba government does a more accurate, annual count for students off-reserve, but Ottawa opts for the Grade 12 one on-reserve. In any case, the gap in high-school graduation between reserves and the rest of Canada has widened since 2001. Fergusons team also found bureaucrats dont use the datasets available to them from federal departments, band councils and provinces, meaning they have a limited picture of both schooling and employment on reserves. "Its not a matter of that they need to collect a lot more data, or they need to do some sophisticated analysis of the data. They just need to look at what the data they already have is telling them and most of it is pretty obvious." The audit also revealed the Assembly of First Nations directed its education committee in July 2017 to pull out of a year-long effort to help public servants craft an assessment tool for students on-reserve, over concerns it was going too fast and not reflecting band-council autonomy. The AFN said Tuesday that was an accurate characterization of what happened. Indigenous Services Minister Jane Philpott said her government was still able to shape its education policy with the AFN committees help and ultimate approval. "Theres still more work to do on that area. This is a new world where we are co-creating outcome metrics with First Nations, for First Nations," she said. Chart shows gap in numbers of high-school graduates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. Philpott said the Liberals move last summer to split the former Indigenous Affairs into two departments means her team can give more attention to such tasks. She touted a "regional performance-measurement" approach, so students on Manitoba reserves dont get assessed through tools designed in Ottawa. Another audit found issues with the two major programs aimed at "securing sustainable and meaningful employment" for First Nations, Metis and Inuit. The audit revealed bureaucrats wrote off short-term gigs under that category. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "They didn't have a definition of what sustainable employment means. So even if somebody got a part-time job, or a job for five days working on a construction project, they counted that as one of the clients getting a job," Ferguson said. Labour Minister Patty Hajdu said a new employment program will also be designed in lockstep with Indigenous people, instead of "paternalistic programming" she blamed on her Conservative predecessors. She said the new program will assess types of job, pay, contract duration and whether it meets local labour needs. Ferguson said his reports continue to find a public-servant "culture" that focuses on arbitrary goals over actual outcomes for Canadians, and hiding problems from higher-ups who direct departments. "I think it's very much that there's something in the culture that makes people believe that they can't bring forward these problems; (that) the system is not going to work." dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca Neither the provincial government nor Manitoba's official Opposition is cheering the federal government's decision to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline project from Kinder Morgan. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 29/5/2018 (1232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. JOHN WOODS / THE CANADIAN PRESS Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister says he favours the pipeline project, but Canadian taxpayers should have to pay for it. Neither the provincial government nor Manitoba's official Opposition is cheering the federal government's decision to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline project from Kinder Morgan. "Its obviously a commitment the federal government has made out of desperation. Were talking about billions of dollars in taxpayers money put at risk," Premier Brian Pallister said Tuesday. British Columbia and Alberta have been sparring over the project for months. Alberta wants to move its bitumen to tide water so it can be shipped, but B.C. opposes the project because it would mean more shipments in its coastal waterways, and it is concerned about spills and the harm to the environment. THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES New Democrats Leader Wab Kinew says the Trudeau government is wrong to take over the pipeline project and put taxpayers' money at risk. Pallister's government supports the construction of the pipeline, which he believes is in the best interest of Canadians. "For us in Manitoba, I think we want to continue to lead in terms of fighting the battle to reduce (inter-provincial trade) barriers such as these, so that the Canadian family can work together. And in the case of British Columbia, its a beautiful province, but its not the only province," he said. "We need to remember that in a family, the best interests of the family are what should matter most. Not just one individual member of that family." Manitoba NDP Leader Wab Kinew called the federal government's latest approach "a big mistake." "To throw $4.5 billion worth of taxpayer dollars after a pipeline that likely wont get built doesnt make a lot of sense to me. Its throwing good taxpayer dollars after this project with a ton of risk on it. And if the pipeline doesnt get built, then its the people of Canada who are going to be left holding the bag," he said. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Kinew said the Trudeau government has "misguided priorities." "Theyre shipping $4.5 billion to a Texas multinational oil company. With that same amount of dollars, they could have provided a $300,000 lost income guarantee to every single person whose jobs might potentially be impacted by the pipeline," he said. B.C. Premier John Horgan said the federal government's decision to take over the pipeline from Kinder Morgan doesn't change his government's position and it will continue to fight the case in court. With file from the Canadian Press jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @_jessbu The Winnipeg School Division rejects Minto New Democrat MLA Andrew Swan's claim that needles are scattered on the grounds around Greenway School. However, the division isn't upset with Swan the WSD supports his call for safe-injection sites in Winnipeg, school board chairwoman Sherri Rollins says. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 30/5/2018 (1231 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. The Winnipeg School Division rejects Minto New Democrat MLA Andrew Swan's claim that needles are scattered on the grounds around Greenway School. However, the division isn't upset with Swan the WSD supports his call for safe-injection sites in Winnipeg, school board chairwoman Sherri Rollins says. During debate in question period Tuesday, Swan again raised the issue of the province's meth and opioid crisis, and repeated the NDP's ongoing calls for a safe-injection site in Winnipeg. Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen once again dismissed the demand. Swan then told Goertzen: "The minister can come with me to Greenway School and see the needles lying around there." There are no needles anywhere around the St. Matthews neighbourhood school (390 Burnell St.), Rollins said by email Wednesday. "Greenway just recently did a full community and area clean-up, and no needles were brought to our attention," Rollins said. "He may have meant on the way to (the school). Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "However, he was making a point: we are concerned about our neighbourhoods and drug use in them." Rollins said the province's largest school division fully supports safe-injection sites. "The (former federal) Harper government health-era program, where governments... propose legislation to prohibit safe-injection sites in Canada wont work for Manitobans, or Goertzen. It surely doesnt work for cities like Vancouver or Winnipeg," she said. "WSD is working in partnership with people who, like Swan, would raise the narrative of harm reduction and the need for injection sites in Winnipeg," Rollins said. "Winnipeg School Division has opened up our schools and held community-led discussion to discuss the drug crises in the city." nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca SR Technics, a leading maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) service provider with major presence in the UAE, has expanded its line maintenance capabilities at its line stations in the UK to support the latest Airbus A330neo and Airbus A350 types. In addition, SR Technics line stations at Belfast, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London-Gatwick, London-Heathrow, London-Stansted and Manchester, have now been joined by East Midlands airport, further expanding the MROs portfolio to meet customers flight network, said a statement from the company, which has Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala as a minority shareholder. Jakob Straub, head of aircraft services and line maintenance at SR Technics, said: The new station at East Midlands allows us to grow and diversify our service offering, coupled with the addition of the very latest Airbus models to continue to offer industry leading delivery levels and aligning our services to the demands of our valued customers. SR Technics Line Maintenance supports over 40 aircraft type/engine combinations covering Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, Fokker and focuses on to expand further to new-technology aircraft. With over 120,000 events every year across its line stations network in Switzerland, Spain and the UK, SR Technics provides reliable support as it is continuously gaining experience, it stated. TradeArabia News Service NEARLY two months after he promised to determine if his vacation home in Costa Rica is subject to the Central American countrys luxury tax, Premier Brian Pallister says he still doesnt have a definitive answer. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 29/5/2018 (1232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. NEARLY two months after he promised to determine if his vacation home in Costa Rica is subject to the Central American countrys luxury tax, Premier Brian Pallister says he still doesnt have a definitive answer. "I can tell you that it takes time to go through their process," Pallister said to reporters at the Manitoba legislature Tuesday. He said "legal people" are working with Costa Rican officials on the issue. "They tell me that theyre doing due diligence, and theyll get back to me when they have answers." Pallister, meanwhile, disputed portions of a Free Press report that gave rise to questions about his property tax status. He denied his vacation home is 7,700 square feet in size -- a description also contained in other previous media reports -- saying it is actually 3,200 sq. ft. Pallister also said a true assessment of the value of the property could not be had based on photographs. "Photographs might be, to some degree, useful, but normally an assessment would require more than a photograph," the premier said. He did not indicate whether he has had a recent appraisal done of the property. In early April, the Free Press reported Pallisters holding company had been flagged for non-payment of Costa Ricas luxury home tax, which is also known as the Solidarity Tax for Strengthening of Housing Programs. The tax was instituted in 2009, two years after Pallister and his wife, Esther, purchased their property through a holding company, Finca Deneter Doce S.A. Pallisters home sits on seven acres of land outside Tamarindo, near Costa Ricas Pacific Coast. Tamarindo real estate agents, based on information provided on the residences size, amenities and location, pegged its value at anywhere from US$550,000 to more than US$1 million. The threshold for determining whether a homeowner is obliged to pay the luxury tax is based on the construction value of the home itself. If that threshold is met, the value of the surrounding land is also factored into calculating the tax payable. According to information supplied by Pallisters company to Costa Rican authorities -- and obtained by the Free Press -- the premier took out a building permit with the municipality of Santa Cruz in 2008, to construct a one-floor residence. The builder was Jimaco Construction and the permit declared the value of construction at 105 million colones (roughly US$186,000, as of earlier this year). In 2009, a second permit was taken out for an addition to the home, with a declared construction value of 24.7 million colones (US$44,000). Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. When the luxury tax came into being, homes were exempt if they were valued at less than 100 million colones. According to information supplied by Pallisters holding company, the construction value of his home was worth almost 130 million colones at the time. Pallister has said he "probably should have dug deeper" into whether his holding company owes the luxury tax. At the same time, he is threatening to sue the Free Press for its coverage of the story. Pallisters lawyer, Robert Tapper, has put the Free Press on notice of a possible defamation suit. In order to avoid any legal action, Tapper made a number of demands of the Free Press, including a front-page apology and a requirement the newspaper reveal its source for the story. larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca Canadian law sets the bar so high that Manitoba organized labour has no claim for an injunction blocking wage controls the government has the constitutional right to impose, provincial government lawyer Heather Leonoff argued Wednesday. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 30/5/2018 (1231 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Canadian law sets the bar so high that Manitoba organized labour has no claim for an injunction blocking wage controls the government has the constitutional right to impose, provincial government lawyer Heather Leonoff argued Wednesday. "The government has the right to legislate in the field of collective bargaining, in the field of labour relations, in the field of associational activity in the workplace, to the point of substantial interference," Leonoff told Court of Queen's Bench Judge James Edmond. Injunctions are only rarely granted in constitutional cases, and none is a precedent for what's happening in Manitoba, Leonoff said. Leonoff told the court that legislation similar to Premier Brian Pallister's Bill 28 wage controls has been held up across Canada and does not violate the constitutional test of substantial interference in bargaining. A coalition of 25 labour unions and the Manitoba Federation of Labour is challenging the constitutionality of the bill. The coalition is in court this week seeking an injunction that would block implementation of the legislation until the constitutional issue can be heard. The province has passed but not proclaimed Bill 28. There is no intention to proclaim the legislation until the court has dealt with the challenge, Leonoff said. The bill imposes four-year wage controls on the next collective bargaining agreements of 110,000 public-sector workers. There will be no salary increases and improvements to benefits for the first two years, a raise of .75 per cent in the third year and one per cent in the fourth. Leonoff said the legal term that applies is the government's "constitutional space of reasonableness." Courts have upheld government wage controls that are time-limited and broad-based, not exceeding five years and one round of bargaining in duration, she said. "That's what governments do, they control the public purse. They make decisions, they make policy choices. The courts do not supervise government policy choices within its constitutional space," she said. She pointed out Bill 28 lasts for only four years, that the parties can bargain for non-monetary items and workers still receive their incremental salary increases. Leonoff reminded the court labour lawyer Garth Smorang raised the example in court Tuesday that the provincial government had ordered the University of Manitoba during 2016 bargaining to impose a one-year wage freeze and to not disclose that information to the union. That led to the Manitoba Labour Board's finding the university guilty of bargaining in bad faith and ordering it to pay $2.4 million to its faculty union members. Leonoff said that the labour board found that information should have been shared. But it upheld that the government has the right to change the mandate of public bodies to meet government policy. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Smorang said that the labour coalition is hoping for a ruling by early July. If labour gets the injunction, Smorang believes that public-sector employers would then have to bargain normally. About 30,000 health-care workers have been without a collective bargaining agreement since last year, 15,000 teachers' contracts expire June 30 and most other civil servants in the province have a deal that expires next year. nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca Canadian courts right up to the Supreme Court of Canada are consistently supporting workers' rights to collective bargaining free from government interference, labour lawyer Garth Smorang told Court of Queen's Bench Wednesday. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 29/5/2018 (1232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Canadian courts right up to the Supreme Court of Canada are consistently supporting workers' rights to collective bargaining free from government interference, labour lawyer Garth Smorang told Court of Queen's Bench Wednesday. Smorang told Justice James Edmond that, in one decision, Supreme Court Justice Rosie Abella wrote, "Clearly, the arc increasingly bends towards workplace justice." A coalition of 25 unions and the Manitoba Federation of Labour is seeking an injunction to block Premier Brian Pallister's Bill 28 wage controls, until a larger court case can be heard challenging the constitutionality of the bill. Smorang, who hopes for a decision by early July, said in an interview that if the judge grants the injunction, then bargaining would proceed normally, with the employers unable to claim they were bargaining within the terms of Bill 28 without putting themselves in the position of bargaining in bad faith. The Pallister government has passed but not proclaimed Bill 28. The bill imposes on the next collective bargaining agreement of 110,000 public sector workers wage controls for four years. Salary increases and improvements to benefits will be zero for the first two years, 0.75 per cent for the third year, and 1.0 per cent for the fourth. Edmond told the labour and government lawyers right up front that he has ruled the request is not frivolous or vexatious. "I shall not be delving into the constitutionality," Edmond said. He cited the key factors in his decision as the irreparable harm that would come from granting or not granting an injunction, and the balance of convenience, which online law sites define as balancing the benefit to one party against the harm to the other. "True collective bargaining is not about meeting and talking," said Smorang, but about being open to genuinely reaching a compromise. That isn't happening, said Smorang. He said public sector employers are not bargaining, but are saying that Bill 28 applies. Smorang said that 180 collective bargaining agreements had yet to expire in March of 2017. There are 51 of those still to expire that would run to 2023 and even further under Bill 28. "One does not even start until 2021" when the first year of a wage freeze would occur, he said. The courtroom was packed with union leaders. MFL president Kevin Rebeck said in an interview that, "It's unfortunate the premier is determined to push it down this route. "It's a high bar to get an injunction," but if the labour coalition is successful, Rebeck said, public sector employers would have to bargain normally. Only a handful of bargaining units has agreed to a new collective agreement under those terms --- the University of Manitoba Faculty Association is the largest --- and each attached a caveat that it considers the deal invalid if the courts throw out Bill 28. Meanwhile, Pallister has obtained standing for the government of Manitoba at a Nova Scotia court of appeal hearing in October at which Nova Scotia teachers are challenging a similar bill. It's expected to go to the Supreme Court. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Most of Manitoba's 30,000 health care workers have yet to bargain under Bill 28. The province's 15,000 teachers' CBA expires June 30, and most civil servants have their CBA expiring next year. In question period Tuesday, Finance Minister Cameron Friesen again rejected NDP suggestions that the government rescind Bill 28. Citing the provincial deficit run up under the NDP government, Friesen said, "Can labour be exempt from these challenges? We say no." Pallister scoffed in Question Period on Monday that, "The NDP is controlled by the public sector bosses" running the unions. Tuesday, he accused the NDP of pursuing the issue in an attempt to prop up what's left of its base. The government will present its case in Court of Queen's Bench on Wednesday. nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca The Pallister government might not expect to see environmental groups like the Green Action Centre working together with the Manitoba Trucking Association to advance a similar agenda, but it is not surprising. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 30/5/2018 (1232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion The Pallister government might not expect to see environmental groups like the Green Action Centre working together with the Manitoba Trucking Association to advance a similar agenda, but it is not surprising. We are concerned about creating a sustainable future and frustrated with the lack of government action toward that goal. We have not seen the leadership we were promised, on Premier Brian Pallisters vision to make Manitoba into "Canadas cleanest, greenest, and most climate resilient province," a vision that lay behind the Made-in-Manitoba Climate and Green Plan. Given the Green Projects, Business Competitiveness, and Clean Technologies initiative and the rhetoric that accompanied the various surveys and public (and private) consultations, we expected more, better and sooner from this government. Specifically, we expected more from the long-promised carbon tax plan, especially in terms of how the money is going to be allocated. At the first province-sponsored consultation in October 2016, both our organizations like others present asked for the revenue to be spent on mitigating the impacts of the carbon tax on Manitobas most vulnerable citizens, and for the rest to be spent on programs to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. This would involve initiatives such as increasing and improving public transportation, enabling the use of electric vehicles by subsidizing their purchase and providing the necessary charging infrastructure, and subsidizing other efficiencies to encourage reduction in GHG emissions in the transportation sector. We also impressed upon the members of government we have met over the past two years that this is an urgent problem, something that needs to be addressed in part by reducing the amount of "green tape" that gets between us and the solutions we could offer. Truck drivers, like farmers and the rest of Manitobans, want to do their part to contribute to solutions, rather than just continuing to be seen as part of the problem. Obviously, truck drivers provide a service that feeds, clothes and employs Manitobans, and delivers the goods and services that allow us to enjoy the standard of living we have. We all want to find ways to make transportation more efficient, which is why the MTA jointly established the GrEEEn Trucking fuel efficiency initiative to provide incentives for truck drivers to do just this. Failing to use the carbon tax revenues collected to support much-needed initiatives such as this one risks having the Manitoba headquarters of our trucking industry move to other provinces where such subsidies are already government policy. After all, why should the Manitoba trucking industry pay a carbon tax, and at the same time (as good corporate citizens) spend more of their money to improve the efficiency of their operations for the benefit of all Manitobans, if this is not valued or appreciated by the government? Some things are therefore clear to both our groups: Without taking serious steps to do things differently, our greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise, fuelling global warming. As Canadians, we have made commitments under the Paris accord to reduce emissions. Whether or not this will be enough to stop global warming remains to be seen, but doing nothing is not an option. The carbon tax by itself will simply not be high enough to change consumer behaviour by punishing us into a greener lifestyle. Instead of $25 a tonne, we would need closer to $300 a tonne to do that. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The money raised, however every nickel should go to protecting the most vulnerable Manitobans first, and then to creating options for Manitobans to make lifestyle and work choices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While we are pleased to see the one-time gift to the Winnipeg Foundation for a conservation trust fund, the revenues from such a fund are woefully inadequate for new climate-change initiatives, especially since existing programs (such as the subsidies to public transit) have already been cancelled as cost-saving measures by the provincial government. Some parts of the solution are obvious. We have an abundance of electricity, which is more valuable to us kept at home than exported abroad. What we lack is the infrastructure to develop and support electric vehicles, as one part of a sustainable transportation strategy, something that carbon tax revenues could be used to promote. We need the best answers all of us together can provide, because a sustainable future is important for all Manitobans especially the next generation. We are prepared to work as allies, and across sectors, to ensure the province advances its carbon reduction strategies by reducing emissions with funds from carbon taxes. Terry Shaw is executive director of the Manitoba Trucking Association. Peter Denton chairs the policy committee of the Green Action Centre. No one would accuse the Pallister government of being soft on drugs. It has repeatedly lobbied its federal counterpart to push back the deadline for the upcoming legalization of marijuana. It has also found reasons to reject recommendations to establish safe-consumption sites in Winnipeg for the city's growing number of people addicted to harder drugs, including opiates. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 29/5/2018 (1232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. No one would accuse the Pallister government of being soft on drugs. It has repeatedly lobbied its federal counterpart to push back the deadline for the upcoming legalization of marijuana. It has also found reasons to reject recommendations to establish safe-consumption sites in Winnipeg for the city's growing number of people addicted to harder drugs, including opiates. But like it or not and, philosophically, the Pallister government clearly does not cannabis will soon be legal, likely by the end of this summer or early autumn. JOHN WOODS / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES The Manitoba government has drafted a policy banning marijuana use by civil servants at office parties.. To its credit, Manitobas government seems to have accepted the inevitable and started thinking ahead, drafting a policy to govern cannabis use among its civil servants. If other employers, both public and private, are not drafting similar policies, they should be. The criminalization that supposedly restricted cannabis use in the workplace is about to be lifted, a change that will create some unique workplace dilemmas. The provinces work on the issue is evident in a five-page draft policy from Manitobas civil service commission that was leaked to The Canadian Press. For example, the draft policy mentions staff functions such as Christmas parties, where alcohol consumption is traditionally allowed. Will staff at work-related social functions be allowed to openly use cannabis? The draft policy for the provinces civil service says no. The draft policy also posits different rules for storing alcoholic beverages and cannabis at work for later consumption on the employees free time. For example, an employee on her lunch break who buys a bottle of wine can store the unopened bottle at her desk, but she won't be allowed to bring into the office the marijuana buds she legally purchased for use on her own time. And that's only the beginning of questions all Manitoba employers will face. THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES Manitoba civil servants will be able to swig a beer at office parties, but smoking a joint will still be a no-no after recreational cannabis is legalized. Overt smoking of cannabis at the workplace can be neatly banned under the tobacco-smoking restrictions that already exist. But what about cannabis edibles? While it will be illegal for cannabis stores to sell edibles in Manitoba, cannabis cookies are easily made by anyone with access to an oven: can employees bring cannabis cookies to work or to "pot luck" workplace functions? What about executives who have expense accounts on which they "wine and dine" important clients? If the client prefers weed to wine, can the company representative vape with the VIP and write off the reefer? Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. If the Manitoba government finds itself confounded by workplace policies around cannabis, its not alone. The Canadian Human Resources Professionals Association surveyed more than 700 of its members in January and found a full 71 per cent of employers were not prepared for the legalization of cannabis. A report titled Clearing the Haze: The Impacts of Marijuana in the Workplace recommends government sets a clear legal definition of "impairment" and the grounds under which an employee can be drug-tested. This remains a serious debate for employers, as cannabis chemicals remain in the bloodstream and employees who use the drug only after clocking out could fail a drug test even if they're not under the influence at work. THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES Workers have a right to know what is allowed in the workplace. For example, are edibles OK? The report also says provincial governments should co-ordinate recreational marijuana regulations as much as possible, so employers with a national workforce can easily adhere to the policies. Its incumbent on both employees and employers to be responsible about cannabis. For employers, this includes giving workers a clear cannabis-use policy before the drug becomes legal. Workers have a right to know specifically what is, and isnt, allowed at their office, plant and job site. If workplaces don't yet have clear policies, the employers should get to work, and put in the overtime if necessary. 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 Nato Communications and Information (NCI) Agency has awarded Airbus a 40 million ($46.2 million) contract for the delivery of the first phase of the new Nato Communications Infrastructure Project. The contract also includes options for future phases of the project, worth up to 50 million ($57.8 million). The Nato Communications Infrastructure project will replace a major part of the Nato General Communications System (NGCS), involving 72 Nato sites. It will provide a major upgrade of wide area network protected IP communications across the Nato command structure, Nato headquarters and Nato points of presence in member nations. The project covers the delivery of upgraded IP access and transport services across different security classifications with significantly increased capacity, quality of service and traffic engineering capabilities. It also covers Nato unclassified voice services through the replacement of old telephony switches by voice over IP telephony at 25 sites. The design review is estimated to be completed in December 2018 while the first phase of implementation should be completed by the end of 2019. The Nato Communications Infrastructure Project, together with the IT Modernisation Project and the Enterprise Nato Public Key Infrastructure Project, is part of the wider IT Modernisation Programme which aims to transform Nato's static IT infrastructure into a homogeneous enterprise. It will include customer-funded service delivery systems, with a common service management and control layer, increased levels of virtualisation, modern cloud technology, and appropriate resilience mechanisms. - TradeArabia News Service Global Brass and Copper Holdings, Inc. converts, fabricates, processes, and distributes specialized non-ferrous products in the United States, the Asia Pacific, and Mexico. It operates in three segments: Olin Brass, Chase Brass, and A.J. Oster. The Olin Brass segment manufactures, fabricates, and converts specialized copper and brass sheets, strips, foils, tubes, and fabricated products; and rerolls and forms other alloys, such as stainless steel, carbon steel, and aluminum. The Chase Brass segment manufactures and supplies brass rods in round, hexagonal, and other shapes. The A.J. Oster segment processes and distributes copper, brass, and aluminum sheets, strips, and coated products. The company sells its products to the building and housing, automotive, electronics/electrical components, munitions, coinage, transportation, and industrial machinery and equipment markets under the Olin Brass, Chase Brass, A.J. Oster, Green Dot, and Eco Brass brands through its direct mill sales, distribution network, and third-party distributors. Global Brass and Copper Holdings, Inc. was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois. Read More Tailored Brands, Inc. (NYSE:TLRD) announced its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, March, 18th. The company reported ($0.46) EPS for the quarter, beating the Thomson Reuters' consensus estimate of ($0.54) by $0.08. The business had revenue of $690.90 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $708.46 million. Tailored Brands had a negative trailing twelve-month return on equity of 138.49% and a negative net margin of 14.39%. The business's revenue was down 12.1% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the previous year, the business earned ($0.28) earnings per share. View Tailored Brands' earnings history. The Bank of New York Mellon pays an annual dividend of $1.36 per share and currently has a dividend yield of 2.45%. The Bank of New York Mellon does not yet have a strong track record of dividend growth. 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. First American Financial Corp. operates as an insurance company. It provides title insurance and settlement services to the real estate and mortgage industries. The company operates its business through the following segments: Title Insurance & Services and Specialty Insurance. The Title Insurance & Services segment provides title insurance, escrow, closing services and similar or related financial services domestically and internationally in connection with residential and commercial real estate transactions. It also maintains, manages and provides access to title plant records and images and provides banking, trust and investment advisory services. The Specialty Insurance segment issues property & casualty insurance policies and sells home warranty products. It also provides title plant management services, which include title and other real property records and images, valuation products and services, home warranty products, property and casualty insurance and banking, trust and investment advisory services. First American Financial was founded in January, 2008 and is headquartered in Santa Ana, CA. Read More Authorities have identified the construction worker who was killed last week in drill-rig collapse at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona as 52-year-old Melvin Self. Known as Wayne to those close to him, Self was described as having calloused hands with a tender touch. A true father of five children and a grandfather of five grandchildren, Self was described as a daughters first love and a sons first hero by his family. There are dangers in construction but none of us could predict a tragedy like this. You are gone too soon, like leaving the stage in the middle of your song, Selfs family said in a statement posted on a GoFundMe page set up to cover funeral expenses. Self was operating a drilling rig on the morning of May 21 when it toppled onto its side at a construction site, Phoenix Fire Department officials reported. Self was thrown from the drill rig and into a deep hole as the sandy ground gave way underneath the machine. As he was blocked in by the heavy machinery and sand that seeped into the pit, a quick rescue of Self was impossible. The accident happened while construction crews were working on the PHX Sky Train guideway system at the airport. Workers were digging the holes for the concrete columns that would support the track connecting one of the terminals with the rental car area. Firefighters started the rescue mission on Monday, hoping to save Self before it was too late. By Tuesday, with no signs that Self remained alive, the effort turned into a recovery mission, as rescuers cited the amount of time Self would have been trapped in the hole since its collapse. According to Phoenix Fire Department Captain Rob McDade, recovery crews found Selfs body on Thursday, after four days of searching, and he was pronounced dead at the scene. Among his coworkers and family, Self was known as a whole lot of hero. Coworkers reported his last action was to warn others as the drill-rig fell into the hole, yelling for everyone to get out of the way. The tale of Selfs heroics touched the firefighters who responded to the accident, and at least two stayed at the accident site every night until his body was found. Hensel Phelps, the company overseeing construction on the PHX Sky Train, issued a statement to the Arizona Republic distancing the company from responsibility for Selfs death. All of us at Hensel Phelps and on the project team at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport are deeply saddened by the death of a team member who worked as a drill rig operator for Case Foundations, a subcontractor to Hensel Phelps at the airport. Hensel Phelps places the highest value on safety and this incident will be thoroughly investigated to understand exactly what happened. However, Hensel Phelps has been fined in the past for hazardous working conditions and safety violations. In 2017, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Hensel Phelps for having employees working at a hazardous job site that resulted in the death of two workers at a multi-employer demolition site. The workers that died were contracted by another company, but OSHA stated Hensel Phelps exposed its workers on site to the same dangerous conditions and failed to protect workers from falling objects. Notably, the company was fined in 2015 for excavation hazards at a project in Austin, Texas, including failing to provide supports where material was excavated below a structure, and not removing exposed workers from an excavation where the employer identified a hazardous condition. Selfs tragic death comes amid a rise in recorded workplace fatalities in the United States, with levels returning to those recorded prior to the economic crisis of 2007-2008. According to the most recent available data, there was a seven percent increase in the number of workers who were killed on the job between 2015 and 2016, rising from 4,836 to 5,190. An AFL-CIO study released last year found that an average of 150 workers die every day in the US due to hazardous working conditions. Despite advances in technology and techniques that could prevent many deaths and injuries, construction and extraction remains among the deadliest occupations in the US, with 12.4 deaths per 100,000 workers. Last weeks accident follows a series of high profile worker deaths or injuries, including the crushing of 60-year-old welder Steve Wade earlier this month at the Caterpillar plant in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin and the wounding of 55-year-old autoworker Lynn Hagood at the Ford assembly plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. In both cases workers at the plants have attested to a dramatic decline in safety conditions due to concessions contracts negotiated and enforced by the United Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers unions in the interest of corporate profits. The National Court last week found 29 top officials linked to Spains ruling Popular Party (PP) government guilty of corruption. Those convicted forged documents, took bribes and laundered money siphoned from kickbacks linked to public works contracts. They were sentenced to a total of 351 years in prison. The court declared that the PP had spawned an authentic and efficient system of institutional corruption. The Gurtel case, as it has become known, is the largest and most pervasive political corruption scandal since the end of the Francoist dictatorship in the mid-1970s. On Friday, Socialist Party (PSOE) General Secretary Pedro Sanchez announced a no confidence vote aimed at him replacing the PPs Mariano Rajoy as Spains prime ministerwith the intent of preventing a general election and exacerbating Spains economic and social crisis. The no confidence vote is due to take place on Friday. Sanchez, whose party has connived in keeping Rajoys minority government in power, appeared before the press to claim the PSOE would Return [Spain] to political and institutional normality, regenerate democratic life, and set in motion a social agenda that would attend to urgent social issues. Such words are cynical. The Gurtel case has been around for years. It is almost a decade since it came to public attention. Most suspects were put on trial in 2016. Throughout this time, the PSOE covered for the PPs corruption, kept it in power and backed its austerity measures and anti-democratic assault in Catalonia during the independence crisis. The PSOEs support of the PP was also covered up by the pseudo-left party, Podemos, which suppresses any independent mobilisation of the working class in its pursuit of a progressive alliance with the PSOE. Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has now offered his partys unconditional support for the PSOE motion of no confidence. It was also left to Podemos to make a direct appeal to the right-wing populist Citizens on behalf of Sanchez. Podemos number two and candidate for regional premier in Madrid, Inigo Errejon, broadcast a video on social networks calling for an end to the PP government, regardless of political names. He declared that Acronyms cannot become a trench from which to reproach us while Spain is still blocked. He warned Citizens leader Albert Rivera that he will be co-responsible for the blockade and shame if Citizens keeps the PP in power. Citizens, however, is demanding the PSOE withdraw its no-confidence vote. They do not want to replace Rajoy with Sanchez but want new elections in the hope they will become the main party in Spain. Citizens General Secretary Jose Manuel Villegas said that the solution passes through elections, there is no government programme to discuss with the PSOE. With the exception of the pro-PP ABC and La Razon, most of the Spanish media has dismissed Sanchezs grab for power and are calling for snap elections. They are using the Gurtel corruption crisis to prepare the way for a right-wing replacement to the unstable minority PP government, which has seen its share of the vote at the last election in 2016 slump, in the space of just two years, from 35 percent to around 20 percent. The main right-wing Spanish newspaper El Mundo proclaimed that the country was suffering a very deep political crisis that could lead to the fall of the government. It demanded Rajoy call an early ballot. The nominally liberal and pro-PSOE El Pais, Spains largest newspaper, declared there was a moment of national emergency. It said an early election would be the least damaging option in order to produce a new stable and coherent government. Both newspapers warned, however, about an unstable PSOE government coming to power when the economy was under pressure and having to rely on Podemos and regional nationalist parties in the Basque Country and Catalonia to rule. El Pais declared, making concessions to the secessionists is to cross a red line. El Mundo railed against Catalan and Basque separatists, and the populist anti-system Podemos, claiming they wanted to cause a territorial breakup of the state. They declared that any PSOE government would be a hostage to such forces. Another right-wing publication, El Espanol, expressed most clearly what all of them are working for, declaring, The best solution for Spain is an agreement between Sanchez and Rivera. Sanchez should add to his no confidence vote a specific day for elections And Rivera should support this scenario and allow the socialists access to the Presidency of the Government even for a few months. The neo-liberal Citizens has been nurtured by the Spanish press, helping it grow from a small anti-Catalan independence party to threaten the PP and jockey for position as number one in the national polls. Citizens is seen as the force most prepared to use whatever means are necessary to drive through structural reform of the Spanish economy, repress the working class, prevent the breakup of the Spanish state threatened by regional separatism and defend Spains geo-political interests. New elections in Spain would represent the third since December 2015, all of which produced hung parliaments. Such instability is symptomatic of the breakdown of the post-World War Two order and the two-party system, through which the Spanish bourgeoisie has ruled through the PP and PSOE in the post-Franco era. Growing sections of the ruling class see the Gurtel case as the last straw, which is worsening already explosive class relations. After Greece, Spain is the country in western Europe where the financial crisis and austerity policies have created the greatest devastation. Despite a slight economic upturn based on rock-bottom wages, cheap oil and a weak euro, Spanish capitalism is moribund. According to a study by Fedea and Accenture, Spain has almost five million people living lives of precariousness, labour poverty and unemployment. The European Commission, which has backed Spains austerity packages, was forced to describe the inequality situation in Spain as critical either not improving sufficiently fast or deteriorating further. It noted that the 20 percent of those on the highest incomes make 6.6 times more than the 20 percent with lowest incomes, placing the country in a bottom group that also includes Bulgaria, Lithuania and Greece. In contrast, the richest Spaniardsin the top 10 percentsaw their share of household wealth balloon from 44 percent in 2008, the year of the global financial crash, to 53 percent in 2014, according to a report published by the Bank of Spain. Such conditions are provoking growing social opposition. In 2017, the number of days lost due to work stoppages rose almost 53 percent. El Economista recently warned that the labour conflicts in the air and rail sectors threaten Spain with a hot summer. 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United Arab Emirates United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe A high-level UAE Space Agency delegation is taking part in Space Ops 2018, an international forum for discussing advanced and technical areas of space exploration hosted by the French Centre National dEtudes Spatiales (CNES). SpaceOps is taking place between May 28 and June 1 at the Palais du Pharo in Marseille, and was opened with a series of welcome messages and highlight talks by international dignitaries, including Dr Mohammed Al Ahbabi, director general of the UAE Space Agency; Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of CNES; Jean-Luc Beuzit, senior research officer at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Director of the Laboratoire dAstrophysique de Marseille; and William H Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Directorate at NASA. Al Ahbabi delivered a speech on the UAEs ongoing projects, including the Mars Hope Probe, Mars Scientific City, the UAE Astronaut Program and the Space Agencys ambitious long-term mission and vision. Dr Al Ahbabi said: From communications to financial operations, agriculture to accurate weather forecasting, remote sensing to navigation outer space and its applications are playing an increasing role in the activities of all nations and their peoples daily lives. For this reason and many others, our commitment to the sector extends back decades, well before the establishment of our Space Agency. For example, the UAE was an early and active member in the development and application of a number of regional and international satellite and radio-communication regulatory frameworks. Al Ahbabi went on to discuss the importance of the UAEs mission to Mars, saying: Scheduled to launch in 2020, the Mars Hope Probe will be the Arab worlds first interplanetary spacecraft to be developed. Once the Probe reaches the Red Planet and discovers more about its atmosphere, we will be sharing this information with more than 200 scientific institutions and research centers for analysis. By studying the atmosphere of Mars, we will learn why it became dry and learn how to protect our planet from the same happening. SpaceOps 2018 provides an opportunity to promote the exchange of technical and administrative information on various aspects of space operations, such as mission design and management, human systems and operations, ground systems and other key elements of peaceful space exploration and utilization. Held under the theme of Inspiring Humankinds Future, SpaceOps 2018 gathers experts, policy makers and business leaders from around the world to find ways to advance the global space sector. The significant biannual forum also attracts technologists, scientists and space sector operators, forming one of the most dedicated global space sector and industry platforms. In 2022, SpaceOps will be held in the Mena region for the first time, with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre hosting the forum in Dubai. The successful bid represents international recognition of the regions growing importance within the global space community. TradeArabia News Service A range of interconnected emerging technologies have the power to unlock a potential $50 billion in savings and increased profit, according to a recent research by international consulting firm, McKinsey. Digitalisation is the number-one trend driving CEO decision-making in the global oil and gas sector. Encompassing fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, robotics, sensor technology, machine learning, deep learning, and edge computing, digitalisation is expected to cut capital expenditure by 20 per cent, with operating costs in upstream cut 3 to 5 per cent and 1 to 3 per cent in downstream, said the research report. The related benefits to energy companies, their customers, and the wider society, are even greater, estimated to reach $1.6 trillion over the next seven years, according to data presented at the 2017 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, it said. Environmental benefits include reducing CO2-equivalent emissions by approximately 1,300 million tonnes, saving about 800 million gallons of water, and avoiding oil spills equivalent to about 230,000 barrels of oil, it added. Responding to the high importance being placed on digital transformation and disruption by industry decision-makers, unlocking the opportunities that will flow from digitalisation will be a key focus for the 2018 edition of the worlds leading oil and gas event, the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (Adipec). Held under the patronage of HH Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, hosted by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) and supported by the UAE Ministry of Energy, the Abu Dhabi Chamber, and the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority, Adipec will take place from November 12 to 15, at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (Adnec), Abu Dhabi, UAE. Jean-Philippe Cosse, vice president energy, at dmg events, said: Digitalisation is an urgent priority for industry CEOs and business leaders, offering cost savings, operational improvements, and safety and environmental gains that will reach into every corner of the business, but the opportunities come with risks that must be understood and navigated. What we are seeing is a profound disruption to business-as-usual, which will have long-lasting effects. Adipec is responding to this with a new Digitalisation in Energy zone, supporting innovation, and helping drive smart investments that will be the foundations of business success in the years ahead, he said. Spanning both the exhibition halls and the strategic and technical conference programmes, the Digitalisation in Energy zone will include top technology providers and new start-ups serving the oil and gas sector. A purpose-built Innovation Theatre will provide tech companies with the opportunity to host expert talks and take digitalisation out of the technology silo and place it at the centre of a much bigger conversation. Long-recognised as the premier meeting place for energy ministers, global business leaders and C-level executives from the worlds oil and gas giants, Adipec 2018 will see the return of the events highly regarded strategic and technical conferences, while also continuing the expansion of the exhibition and conference programmes. Conference sessions for the downstream refining and petrochemicals sector, introduced for 2017, will return to ensure that Adipec covers each link in the oil and gas value chain. The co-located waterfront Offshore and Marine Exhibition and Conference will add a commercial dive zone, while other returning features include the ADIPEC Awards, which celebrate excellence in energy, and Young Adipec, a dedicated edutainment programme designed to encourage students to choose a career in energy. New for 2018 will be an Inclusion and Diversity in Energy conference programme, continuing and expanding on the work of the Women in Energy conference in previous years. Hosting more than 80 ministers, CEOs, and global oil and gas business leaders as speakers, Adipec brings together the companies, decision and policy makers that shape the future of oil and gas supply, for four days of focused business, dialogue and knowledge transfer that addresses todays energy challenges and defines tomorrows hydrocarbon landscape. Adipecs international technical and strategic conference spans 200 sessions, with 980 expert speakers and over 10,400 delegates. The technical conference programme, organised in collaboration with the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), sets the international standard for the exchange of best-practice and operational excellence in the world of energy, with all technical abstract submissions put through a rigorous evaluation process by the Technical Programme Committee. Sessions cover upstream, midstream and downstream sectors, including specialised programmes such as offshore and marine. Alongside the conference will be the landmark Adipec exhibition areas, underpinning the events status as a premier showcase for suppliers and customers across the oil and gas industry. For 2018, Adipec is expected to attract more than 2,200 exhibiting companies, including 38 NOCs and IOCs, and 30 international country pavilions, it stated. TradeArabia News Service Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) celebrated the Gergaon night for its employees and their families at the Alba Club on May 29. The Gergaon ceremony, attended by Alba executive management and managers, featured a traditional band, Bahraini dishes, games and music as well as prizes and Gergaon gift bags for the children. Insane Robots Brings 'Rogue-Lite' Strategy to Xbox One in 2017 Police in Georgia are looking for a 43-year-old man wanted on murder and arson charges after the body of his girlfriend was discovered inside her burning home on Saturday. Sgt. Samuel Worsham of the Sandy Springs police tells PEOPLE that 39-year-old Amber Hollman was found dead at around 11:30 a.m. and that police believe she was killed. Three arrest warrants for murder, aggravated assault with intent to murder, and first-degree arson have been issued for Hollmans boyfriend, Patrick Joseph Nolan Nolan is considered a fugitive, says Worsham, who adds Nolan should be considered armed and dangerous. We are still searching for him, and weve reached out to the U.S. Marshals for their assistance, Worsham explains. Were putting a wide net out for this guy. Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter. Nolan is said to have ties to Mississippi, Alabama, New York, and Colorado. At this point, it is unclear how Hollman died. Nolan may be driving a blue 2006 Ford Explorer with Georgia plates PYZ1420. It is likely he is with his dog a Presa Canario who weighs about 160 lbs. Nolan has several tattoos on both of his arms, including an angel on his right arm and the devil on his left arm. Worsham says that anyone with information about Nolans whereabouts should call 911 or the Sandy Springs Police Department at (404) 456-9343. Forget the allure of being cool. Stay in school and you just might get to see the Jack White shred your campus for free. Thats what went down today at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, DC. The Third Man Records rocker himself made a surprise appearance in between his two sold out shows at local venue The Anthem. Accompanied by backing musicians, White performed outdoors in the schools atrium. White and his band started out playing on a makeshift stage (the steps of an amphitheater-like seating area). He eventually encouraged his young onlookers to come up and join him during a stomping rendition of The White Stripes classic Seven Nation Army. If you thought White was intense live, add in a crowd teeming with thrashing, impassioned, hormone-raging teens. And to think, when I was younger all I got was this lousy cafeteria ice cream cup. According to WTOP, the performance lasted 45 minutes and took place during the schools lunch period beginning at 11:45 a.m. They knew we have this big atrium space, and they thought that that might be an appropriate place for him to set up and do a pop-up show, explained the schools Principal Kimberly Martin. To maintain the surprise, only Martin and another school administrator were aware of the performance prior to it take below. Watch a brief video of the surprise performance below, courtesy of Jordan Grobe. A couple of photo stills from the event follow; the full gallery lives here. jack white dc woodrow wilson students Jack White performs surprise pop up concert at Washington, DC high school: Watch jack white washington dc surprise Jack White performs surprise pop up concert at Washington, DC high school: Watch jack white high school students woodrow Jack White performs surprise pop up concert at Washington, DC high school: Watch jack white washington dc students Jack White performs surprise pop up concert at Washington, DC high school: Watch Whites latest album, Boarding House Reach, dropped in March. In support, he recently appeared on Colbert as well as performed in Nashville alongside Third Man artist Margo Price. Celebrity SheKnows Its been a while since weve seen Tom Cruise on American soil, hes been busy filming Mission: Impossible 7 overseas for several years. So when we saw him at the baseball game, up close and personal, in San Francisco on Saturday, he was almost unrecognizable to many fans. His face looked different? Former ESPN reporter [] Three people, including two police officers, were killed Tuesday morning in a shooting in the Belgian city of Liege, media reports say. The attack was carried out by a gunman whose motive has not yet been revealed, but local authorities are treating the incident as a terrorist act, according to the BBC. The shooting began at a cafe near a school. The attacker assaulted police officers with a knife, then used one of their guns to open fire, killing two of them and injuring two others. The assailant went on to shoot a man who was sitting in the passenger seat of a car driving by. The gunman then took a woman hostage at a nearby school before being killed by police. The attacker had been on temporary release from prison since Monday and is suspected of having been radicalized while in prison, according to Belgian broadcaster RTBF. Like France, Belgium has been on high alert since the Paris attacks of November 2015, which killed 130 people and involved a Brussels-based cell of Islamic State, and since the 2016 attacks on the Brussels airport and a local subway station, which claimed the lives of 32 people. Related stories Can Harvey Weinstein, the Poster Boy of #MeToo, Get a Fair Day in Court? Mario Batali's Three Las Vegas Restaurants to Close Following Harassment Allegations Harvey Weinstein Accusers Asia Argento and Rose McGowan, Others React to His Arrest: 'What Took You So Long?' Subscribe to Variety Newsletters and Email Alerts! When most high school students complain about having to wake up extra early, theyre usually referring to a pre-class swim practice or a last-minute study session before a big test. But that was never the case for recent graduate Corey Patrick, who spent the last year waking up at 4:30 a.m. every morning in order to arrive on time to Tarrant High School in Alabama. As his mother Felicia White told WBRC, Corey had attended Tarrant City Schools since fourth grade, but things got tricky when their family moved to a town 14 miles away. Even though his family had no means of transportation, Patrick didnt want to miss out on senior year with friends, so he woke up at 4:30 every morning in order to make it to a 5:41 a.m. bus that would help him get to Tarrant on time. And just as he had done every other school day of the year, Corey got up one morning to start the journey from his Birmingham home to his high school; the only noticeable difference that morning was that he was wearing his graduation gown, which prompted that days bus driver, DeJuanna Beasley, to take a couple photos, which she then shared on social media with a caption saying, You tell me this aint Determination he got on my bus to go to his Graduation, no one was with him sometimes its all in what you want out of life I was so proud of this black young man. The post clearly had an impact, not only evidenced by the 43,000 shares and 74,000 reactions on Facebook, but also by the fact that it caught the attention of radio host Rickey Smiley, who surprised Corey on Friday by giving him a car at the 95.7 JAMZ studio. Smiley shared a photo of the pair on Twitter, and confirmed that he would ensure that Patrick received help with getting his drivers license. In addition to receiving the new car, a GoFundMe was also created for Corey, which has now raised over $20,000. And according to CBS 42, Corey has also received a full scholarship to Jacksonville University, where he plans to study computer science. Corey stated on the GoFundMe page that I have beat all odds and I am now a 2018 graduate of Tarrant High School. I thank you all for the support. You have shown me that it does indeed Take A Village. Related: Im Sobbing Over This Graduate's Social Media Tribute to Her Mom Photo credit: Getty Images From Seventeen The Supreme Court declined to hear an Arkansas law that places extreme restrictions on medication abortion. The decision - or rather, the lack of one - effectively bans medication abortion in Arkansas, making it the first state to do so in the country. As reported by CNN, the law was first passed in 2015 and says that any physician who "gives, sells, dispenses, administers, or otherwise provides or prescribes the abortion-inducing drug" needs a contract with a physician who has admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The law will take effect in mid-July if no other legal action is taken, and would reportedly leave Arkansas with one clinic. Does all of this sound familiar? That's probably because this clause is eerily similar to a provision in the largely overturned Texas abortion law, which included a requirement that physicians have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. That particular part of the Texas law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2016 in seemingly airtight language: "We conclude that neither of these provisions confers medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon access that each imposes," wrote Justice Breyer in the Court's official opinion for Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. "Each places a substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking a previability abortion, each constitutes an undue burden on abortion access... and each violates the Federal Constitution." Planned Parenthood says it will "swiftly" make another challenge to keep the Arkansas law from taking effect. "Arkansas is now shamefully responsible for being the first state to ban medication abortion," Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens said in a statement on Tuesday. "This dangerous law also immediately ends access to safe, legal abortion at all but one health center in the state. If that's not an undue burden, what is? This law cannot and must not stand. We will not stop fighting for every person's right to access safe, legal abortion." Story continues Medication abortion is an exceedingly safe and common procedure, accounting for nearly 21 percent of all abortions in the United States. An oft-cited Princeton study from 2012 found that fewer than one percent of all medication abortions performed at Planned Parenthood from 2009-2010 had a serious side effect or resulted in incomplete abortion (the most common side effect). It's worth noting that this non-decision from the Supreme Court comes in the wake of celebration in Ireland, where a longtime, country-wide ban on all abortion is finally over. It also comes just a few months after the Mississippi governor signed into effect the country's most restrictive abortion law, which bans abortion after 15 weeks. Donald Trump repeatedly promised he would overturn Roe v. Wade if elected president. It seems some state governments are doing part of that work for him, and getting away with it. You Might Also Like Photo credit: AP From ELLE WASHINGTON (AP)-The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed Arkansas to enforce restrictions on how so-called abortion pills can be administered while a legal challenge to the restrictions proceeds, which critics say effectively ends that option for women in the state. The justices didn't comment in rejecting an appeal from the Planned Parenthood affiliate in Arkansas that asked the court to review an appeals court ruling and reinstate a lower court order that had blocked the law from taking effect. The law says doctors who provide abortion pills must hold a contract with another physician who has admitting privileges at a hospital and who would agree to handle complications-and Planned Parenthood says it has been unable to find any able to do so. The law is similar to a provision in Texas law that the Supreme Court struck down in 2016. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the court order barring enforcement of the law, but put its ruling on hold while Planned Parenthood appealed to the Supreme Court. The legal fight over the restrictions isn't over, but the state is now free to enforce them for the time being. "As Attorney General, I have fully defended this law at every turn and applaud the Supreme Court's decision against Planned Parenthood today," Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, a Republican, said in a statement. "Protecting the health and well-being of women and the unborn will always be a priority. We are a pro-life state and always will be as long as I am attorney general." Planned Parenthood had offered pills to end pregnancies at its clinics in Fayetteville and Little Rock, but it said Tuesday that it was notifying patients that it could no longer do so because of the ruling. It said it would move quickly for emergency relief in the lower court, saying the ruling effectively makes Arkansas the first state in the country to ban medication abortions. Planned Parenthood has said it's unable to find any Arkansas obstetricians willing to handle hospital admissions, saying many doctors cited a fear of being harassed over an association with an abortion provider, objections from employers or a personal opposition to abortion. Story continues The group has said that if the law stands, Arkansas would be the only state where women would not have access to a pair of drugs that end pregnancies: mifepristone, which makes it difficult for a fetus to attach to the uterine wall, and misoprostol, which causes the body to expel it, similar to a miscarriage. Planned Parenthood doesn't offer surgical abortions at its Arkansas health centers, but a third facility in Little Rock that isn't operated by the group does. The organizations says preventing women from obtaining medication abortions creates an undue burden, which is the standard the Supreme Court has set to measure whether restrictions go too far in limiting women who want the procedure. "This dangerous law also immediately ends access to safe, legal abortion at all but one health center in the state," Dawn Laguens, vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. "If that's not an undue burden, what is? This law cannot and must not stand. We will not stop fighting for every person's right to access safe, legal abortion." The state had argued that the restriction was needed to protect women from any complications from the abortion pills. But Planned Parenthood argued that such complications are rare, and that those complications can be handled by hospitals without contacting the group's physicians. The 2015 law is among several abortion restrictions the predominantly Republican state has enacted over the past several years that have been the subject of legal challenges. You Might Also Like The buzzed-about cover shot. (Photo: Vogue Arabia) The June Vogue Arabia cover featuring Her Royal Highness Princess Hayfa Bint Abdullah Al Saud poised to drive a red convertible might not cause a commotion in the West. But in Saudi Arabia, where women have long been banned from driving a car, the cover is monumental. That ban lifts on June 24, though, and this latest issue is here to celebrate. The princess was photographed in an elegant flowing white ensemble and matching headscarf as she posed in the drivers seat of the vintage red 1980s Mercedes-Benz 450SL. And she has got a hand on the steering wheel, making a clear statement that she is ready to help drive her country forward. The decision to allow Saudi Arabias 16 million women to drive comes as part of a series of dramatic changes pushed for by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kings 32-year-old son, who has fought for for major changes pertaining to womens rights from allowing women to serve in the military to the countrys criminalization of sexual harassment. Story continues The latest issue of Vogue Arabia is a nod to the trailblazing women of Saudi Arabia. In her interview with the magazine, Princess Hayfa opens up about being an artist, a mother of three, and a witness to her countrys changes. There are some conservatives who fear change. For many, it is all they have known. Personally, I support these changes with great enthusiasm, she says. It is easy to comment on other peoples societies and think that your own society is superior, but the Western world must remember that each country is specific and unique. We have strengths and weaknesses but, invariably, its our culture, and its better to try to understand it than to judge it. On social media, the cover is getting praised for its forward-moving image. So pleased to see that @VogueArabia after over a year on the market is finally taking the world to see the beauty of Arab world through fashion and strong and powerful Arab women. Looking forward to see more issues like that.https://t.co/fpoGLkQ3s1 Helena (@Helenaoun) May 30, 2018 But not everyone feels the same way, with some even calling it insensitive. Dear @VogueArabia minor correction: this month the Kingdom of #SaudiArabia is putting women behind bars.. . There, fixed it for you. https://t.co/LVr4O8NRpF bjarke windahl (@bjarkewin) May 30, 2018 What an epic fail! What an insensitive cover! KSA put women rights activists in jail last week, and @VogueArabia is endorsing change! So HRH can drive a car, its okay, everything is cool, and let @LoujainHathloul and friends burn in hell? Shame on you Mr.Arnaut! ARE YOU BLIND? pic.twitter.com/UgDFo5jDru Sanaa (@Sanaalkhoury) May 30, 2018 Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: MACs Ramadan Makeup Tutorial Sparks Debate, Highlights The Holidays Diversity I felt nked and humiliated: Muslim womn says police officer forcibly removed her hijb in lwsuit This is my America, too, says the first hijab-wearing TV reporter in the U.S. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. (Photo: Getty Images) While some diseases, such as cancer, illicit instant sympathy and caring, others, like hepatitis C, HIV/AIDS, and mental illness are often shrouded in shame, fear, and misunderstanding. In fact, according to a survey by the World Hepatitis Alliance (WHA), more than 90 percent of countries report some degree of stigma and discrimination against those with viral hepatitis (primarily hepatitis C and B), which affects 325 million people globally. And, according to the report, having a disease thats viewed as something to be ashamed of has far-reaching effects on a persons life. In 2017, we surveyed civil society organizations from 72 countries to better understand experiences of stigma and discrimination across the world, Michael Ninburg, president of World Hepatitis Alliance, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. The findings show that stigma not only affects an individuals ability to access diagnostics and treatment but also impacts their personal life, mental health and ability to work, learn, and maintain relationships. Part of the reason why theres shame associated with hepatitis C in particular is that, in many countries, the disease is closely linked with injection drug use, which carries its own stigma. Injection drug use is one of the risk factors for hepatitis C, and the stigma with drug use in our society unfortunately gets transferred to patients with hepatitis C, Andrew Muir, MD, a member of the American Liver Foundations national medical advisory committee, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. However, sharing needles is only one of several ways that hepatitis C is transmitted. The WHA report points out that the large majority of hepatitis C transmission is through unsafe healthcare practices, including the use of unsterilized equipment and poorly-screened blood transfusions, and hepatitis B is most often passed from mother to child during birth. But one of the more surprising findings of the report was the high level of self-stigmatization reported by people with hepatitis C. Its what Ninburg describes as feelings of blame, worthlessness, internalized shame or a sense that viral hepatitis in a punishment for certain behaviors. Story continues He adds: It is truly heart-breaking to learn that 72 percent of people living with the virus experience these feelings, he says. Self-stigmatization has both emotional and long-term physical consequences, notes Ninburg, and can prevent people from seeking help and accessing medical care. When people start to wrongly view someone as dirty or contagious, says Ninburg, it can result in social exclusion and abuse, as well as having a deeper impact on an individuals opportunities for employment, education, healthcare, and family. Ninburg continues: Many people living with viral hepatitis also experience self-stigma. When society views the illness in such a way, it is no surprise that people internalize the stigma. This can obviously have a significant and lasting impact on individuals wellbeing. Maggie McGehee, who found out she contracted hepatitis C from life-saving blood transfusions as an infant and is now cured, knows firsthand what its like to feel a sense of shame surrounding a disease. Although her family and workplace were supportive of her, she struggled with self-acceptance. I absolutely isolated myself and withdrew from friends and activities I loved, the Seattle resident shares with Yahoo Lifestyle. I got deeply depressed and felt extremely other and ashamed. I felt unclean and like I didnt belong with good people anymore. Lindsay Ventura, who contracted hepatitis C from her mother during childbirth and is now cured, kept the disease a secret for years out of fear of being stigmatized for it. Liver disease in general comes with a stigma, Ventura tells Yahoo Lifestyle. People feel they need to justify themselves. Theyre so quick to say, I have cirrhosis but not from drinking. It doesnt matter. That shouldnt be the conversation. She adds: Liver disease is lonely. Im thankful I had my mom and sister to talk to, but beyond that, I was really lonely and felt extreme fear that anyone would find out. In part because of the social stigma I had met but also something Id put on myself, that there was a disease inside of me that put others at risk. Ninburg says the organization was appalled by the reports findings of how pervasive stigmatization is. In response, the organization launched a campaign on March 1, 2018 coinciding with Zero Discrimination Day called #StigmaStops. The aim of the campaign is to highlight the true impact of stigma, encourage the hepatitis community to challenge misconceptions and empower people living with viral hepatitis to share their experiences. Part of the campaign includes people with hepatitis from all over the world from Greece and China to Uganda and the U.S. opening up about their personal experiences with their diseases on WHAs Wall of Stories. Muir says that connecting with others who have the same health condition can help patients feel less isolated and alone. I think many patients are already helping by offering online forums and other opportunities to support other patients, he says. Patients may feel more comfortable sharing their diagnosis with family and friends if they hear the experiences of others. Adds Ninburg: No one should have to suffer from stigma and discrimination due to an illness. May is Hepatitis Awareness Month. Read more about the disease on Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. (Photo: MaryV Benoit; artwork: Quinn Lemmers for Yahoo Lifestyle) Chella Mans motto, be your own representation, hits close to home for so many people who grew up without diverse role models. His experience as a Chinese, Jewish, deaf, trans person is unlike any other and informs his work as an artist, writer, speaker, student, and model. Now, documenting his transition on social media, he shares every aspect of his emotional and physical journey, as well as the evolution of his relationship and his art. Garnering a combined 209,000 followers on Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, Chella is his own representation, but he serves as a role model for so many others too. Name: Chella Goldberg Man Age: 19 Favorite app: Instagram What he does: The umbrella term I use is artist. This encompasses my current studies as a full-time student in virtual reality programming, painting/drawing and selling my work, and being a signed model on the side. Three words hed use to define Gen Z: Passionate. Empathetic. Electric. What representation means to him: To me, it enables you to feel part of a community. Representation permits you to know there are others in the world with similar experiences to you due to your common identity. It has to power to diminish the negative aspects of solitude. What he wishes older people understood about him: My identity is valid, although most of it falls on a spectrum between standard categories. His greatest accomplishment (so far): Being completely honest with myself and all others around me. What hell be doing 10 years from now: Ideally, I would love to be continuously creating art, giving speeches on life as a queer, disabled person of color, and opening others minds to the fact that identities lie on a continuum. What inspires him: Seeing the ambition and passion in queer, disabled, young artists today. It inspires me to continue my path and encourage them to continue theirs. Story continues How he thinks Gen Z will change the world: Perspectives. With todays technology, we are able to see and hear others from all over the world. This exposure combined with open dialogue will encourage us to make empathetic decisions based on all that we take in online and offline. Goma (DR Congo) (AFP) - Around 20 civilians have been kidnapped since the weekend in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a stronghold of multiple armed groups, officials said Wednesday. The kidnappings are understood to have begun on Friday, some 75 kilometres (50 miles) north of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. "They have been taken between last weekend and today in different locations," said Jason Ntawiha, an official in the town of Rutshuru. "The kidnappers are demanding ransoms to free their hostages. Families have begun to organise themselves. "We are putting strategies in place to prevent these criminals from doing their dirty work." A local civil society group has called for a peaceful march on Thursday to protest against the kidnappings. Armed groups, which claim to defend Congolese communities, are fighting for control of territorial and natural resources in North Kivu, which has seen a string of deadly clashes in recent months. Eastern DRC has been wracked by violence since the mid-1990s. The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militia -- created by Muslim radicals to oppose the rule of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni -- is one of a number of armed groups fighting over the region's rich mineral resources. Good morning! Catch up on your pop culture news with our roundup of todays top stories so far. 1. Roseanne Barr apologizes for Ambien-tweeting Just hours after ABC canceled her show, Roseanne Barr returned to Twitter to apologize for her unforgivable remarks about Valerie Jarrett, an African-American woman who was an adviser to former President Barack Obama. She went on to blame the racist attack on Ambien-tweeting in a since-deleted tweet, and is now accusing former co-stars like Michael Fishman of throwing me under the bus. Read more > i created the platform for that inclusivity and you know https://t.co/hViHPX2ZUb. You throw me under the bus. nice! Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) May 30, 2018 Roseanne Barr has responded to her shows sudden cancellation. (Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images) 2. Pusha-T exposes Drakes blackface photo As far as rap feuds go, the one brewing between Pusha-T and Drake is a doozy. Pusha-Ts new track, The Story of Adidon, accuses Drake of having a secret love child and features a controversial photo that shows the Canadian rapper in blackface. Read more > Please stop referring to this picture as artworkIm not an internet baby, I dont edit imagesthis is a REAL picturethese are his truths, see for yourself https://t.co/gd6vRS3HM8 pic.twitter.com/2el58HEZ8F King Push (@PUSHA_T) May 30, 2018 3. President Trump slams Jay-Z Speaking of feuds, President Trump devoted a portion of his Tennessee rally Tuesday to berating Jay-Z over his filthy language. Pot, kettle, etc. Read more > Pres. Trump on Jay-Z at Clinton campaign rally: "His language was so filthy it made me look like the most clean-cut human being on Earth." https://t.co/JF5NpbHdng pic.twitter.com/iaUUiTFN1N ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 30, 2018 4. Paris Jackson calls out animal cruelty at Dior Paris Jackson has responded to reports that she stormed out of Diors fashion show last week, clarifying that she quietly left because she was heartbroken over the treatment of horses featured in the equestrian-themed event. Read more > Story continues furthermore, i was not enraged, just taken by surprise and a little heartbroken. and i have no doubt that all high end fashion brands will soon switch over to no-fur and anti animal cruelty, as that seems to be the pattern here. and we should all be very excited about that! Paris-Michael K. J. (@ParisJackson) May 30, 2018 5. The Walking Dead may lose lead And another one bites the dust. Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick Grimes on The Walking Dead, is rumored to be leaving the zombie-centric show after Season 9. Co-star Norman Reedus will reportedly take over as the lead star. Read more > Thanks for reading! Come back this evening for your p.m. pop culture roundup. (Photo courtesy of Delaney Colaio; Artwork by Quinn Lemmers for Yahoo Lifestyle When Delaney Colaio was just 3 years old, her father died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Soon after, her mother moved to the suburbs of New York City, where Colaio, now 19, was raised. Growing up outside of Manhattan, Colaio was one of three kids in her class who had lost a parent on that day. I guess they were my sense of community on that topic, but at the same time, we never really wanted to talk about it, the college student, who recently completed her freshman year, says about finding people to relate to. It was a weird situation like we knew we had something in common but like we didnt want to talk about it. She adds, Its not really a group you want to be a part of in the first place, so its hard. But after being interviewed for a film on a really tough topic and something that I had went through in my life that was really hard for me, Colaio came out of the experience feeling inspired to give all of that pain a purpose for the first time and for something thats greater than myself. So she decided to make her own documentary (while still a senior in high school, mind you), about the 3,051 children who lost a parent on 9/11. First, she contacted Tuesdays Children, the de facto nonprofit for families affected by the terrorist attacks, to be connected with the thousands of people greatly ranging in ages from those whose mothers were still pregnant with them on the day of the attack (whod be teenagers today) to some who are now in their 50s to be interviewed for the film. Throughout the process of finding people willing to be interviewed for the film, she unintentionally created the community she had been aching to connect with for years. Like through this community Ive created a family and a support system that I dont know how I grew up without honestly, she says. If I did have that community growing up, then I would have never built this one. Story continues While being a card-carrying member of the Dead Parents Club isnt something most people like to boast of, bringing the members of the 9/11 group together is actually what Colaio is most proud of having accomplished in her life so far. But she is not stopping with the current 3,051-person roster. Colaio hopes to use her pain to inspire hope and healing in survivors from all over the world. Recently, she met Naomi Wadler, the 11-year-old who spoke at the March for Our Lives rally in March in Washington, D.C., and traveled to Parkland, Fla. to talk with Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students. Shell also be spending her summer meeting and speaking with members of other survivor communities from Newtown, Barcelona, Manchester, Las Vegas, and elsewhere. And while talking about trauma and grief is always going to be hard for Colaio, she says, I think that there is a level of comfort talking to people who understand. Adding, I realize that even though all of the things that we went through are not the same, and our survival after what we went through isnt the same, the pain of losing a loved one and the pain of trauma basically is. Name: Delaney Anne Colaio Age: 19 Favorite app: Instagram. I know thats so generic, but it really is the one I use the most. What she does: Im a documentary filmmaker. Three words shed use to define Gen Z: Motivated. Prepared. The future. What she wishes older people understood about Gen Z: That were capable right now and not that you should listen to us but that you can listen to us. Because even though were young, we do have a lot of insight. Even though were young, we do have a lot to offer right now and that were not really wanting to wait until we get older to do stuff. How she thinks Gen Z will change the world: Oh my God in so many ways. I mean its a whole new generation of people coming forward into the world and bringing whatever they have to that. So for me its the creative arts, but for other people it can be technology or business or whatever it may be, and its just a whole new generation. So obviously were going to change the world because were already here. What she sees herself doing in 10 years: I dont really know. I think that Im the type of person that kind of takes it day by day and whatever kind of gets thrown at me, I try to take on, so I dont know. I honestly dont know where Im going to be; I just hope that Im feeling fulfilled in whatever I do. So it could be anything, I dont know. And in 20 years: I think that right now were really living in a fear-based society. And I hope that in the next decade that decreases and were living from a more purpose- and love-driven space than fear. On Wednesday, Kim Kardashian visited the White House, reportedly to try and get a pardon for Alice Marie Johnson, a great-grandmother serving a life sentence for her role in a multimillion-dollar drug ring. Kim Kardashian, center, arrives at the security entrance of the White House, May 30, 2018. (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) She was pictured heading to the West Wing wearing a black pantsuit with neon yellow heels. Vanity Fair reports that Kardashian, whos visiting the White House with attorney Shawn Chapman Holley, will meet with Jared Kushner before sitting down with President Trump. Happy Birthday Alice Marie Johnson. Today is for you Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) May 30, 2018 According to Mic, Kardashian has spoken to White House adviser Jared Kushner several times in an attempt to prioritize the 63-year-olds case, since viewing a video on the publishers website featuring the woman and tweeting it to her 60 million followers. This is so unfair https://t.co/W3lPINbQuy Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) October 26, 2017 Kim asked me several weeks ago how she could help Alice Johnson in her fight for justice. We then began corresponding with Alice and her team of lawyers, Los Angeles-based lawyer Holley told the New York Daily News in November. Since then, Kardashian has also championed Cyntoia Browns cause. Brown is a 29-year-old woman from Nashville who is serving a life sentence for murdering a male client when she was 16 after she was forced into prostitution. Johnson has been imprisoned for 21 years since she was found guilty of drug conspiracy and money laundering in 1997, according to a 2013 profile by Mic. The single mother of four is from Olive Branch, Miss., and first got pregnant at age 15. She divorced her husband in 1989 and developed a gambling addiction, which resulted in the loss of her 10-year career at FedEx. She filed for bankruptcy and her home was foreclosed on, and one year later, in 1992, her son was killed while riding a scooter. Story continues Alice Marie Johnson has been in prison for 21 years for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense. pic.twitter.com/VFe29D2ve8 Mic (@mic) October 23, 2017 Johnson then became involved in drug dealing, specifically engaging with a multimillion-dollar organization that carried cocaine from Memphis. According to Mic, during the trial, Johnsons partners plotted against her, despite her minimal role (she alleges that she never sold drugs but rather assisted with communications in the organization), resulting in her life sentence at Aliceville Correctional Facility in Alabama without parole, plus 25 years. According to a Change.org petition called Grant Clemency to Alice Marie Johnson Serving a Life Sentence launched by one of her children and signed by almost 209,000 supporters, Johnson has led an exemplary life in prison, mentoring other inmates and becoming an ordained minister. She has even given Skype interviews with Yale University and Google. She has been in prison 21 years and will die there unless President Trump grants her clemency, reads the petition. Photo: Cando And while Johnson has earned the support of multiple Democrats, she was not among the 231 people President Obama pardoned for drug-related crimes in late 2016. When the criteria came out for clemency [under President Obama], I thought for sure in fact, I was certain that Id met and exceeded all of the criteria, Johnson said in a 2017 video produced by Mic. I had 100 percent clear conduct for the entire time, my entire time in prison, no disciplinary infractions. I am a true first-time nonviolent offender. She added, One of my family members one time, and Ill never forget this, they said that coming to visit me in prison is like visiting a gravesite. They said that they can see the place where my body lay, but they could never take me home again. Currently, 39 percent of the prison population is incarcerated despite those inmates posing minor risk to the public, according to a report called How Many Americans Are Unnecessarily Incarcerated? by Time. That is in part because theyre nonviolent offenders who would benefit from various rehabilitative treatments in other words, they could be more appropriately sentenced to an alternative to prison or a shorter prison stay, with limited impact on public safety. Releasing these inmates would save $20 billion annually, enough to employ 270,000 new police officers, 360,000 probation officers, or 327,000 school teachers, says Time, which referenced a 2011 ProPublica report finding white inmates are four times more likely than minorities to get pardoned. According to TMZ, Johnson has responded to Kardashians gesture with a heartfelt letter, writing that when she learned the identity of her campaigner, I had to take time to process and digest the news that you were the one she had been alluding to. There are no words strong enough to express my deep and heartfelt gratitude. The great-grandmother added: Ms. Kardashian, you are literally helping to save my life and restore me to my family. I was drowning and you have thrown me a life jacket. I believe that history will record that Kim Kardashian had the courage to take a stand against human warehousing and was a key figure in meaningful criminal justice reform becoming a reality. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. Amazon (AMZN) is offering Prime member perks at all Whole Foods Market stores nationwide starting Wednesday, June 27, in time for its annual shopping holiday, Prime Day, in mid-July. The perk was first available in Florida and gradually expanded into other areas in the past few weeks. Amazon rolls out discounts for Prime members in Whole Foods stores nationwide. (Screenshot/Amazon) The Prime member discounts include an additional 10% off sale items, typically hundreds of products throughout the store, plus exclusive weekly deep discounts on select items. To enjoy the exclusive deals, customers need to download the Whole Foods app and login using their Amazon Prime account or phone number. This is a much-anticipated move since Amazon bought Whole Foods last year. Cem Sibay, vice president at Amazon Prime, said in a statement that customer feedback from previous launches has been overwhelmingly positive. Within a day after Whole Foods started offering deals in Florida, the apps ranking jumped to No. 18 from No. 256, based on downloads, among shopping apps in the Apple App Store, App Annie data shows. In his annual shareholder letter in April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed for the first time that Amazon has more than 100 million prime members globally. He also underscored the importance of Amazons deal with Whole Foods. Weve also begun the technical work needed to recognize Prime members at the point of sale and look forward to offering more Prime benefits to Whole Foods shoppers once that work is completed, he wrote. From Whole Foods green to Amazon Prime blue Whole Foods stores associates new apron and hat, featuring Amazon Prime. (Yahoo Finance) The announcement in May of the first expansion was a surprise to customers and some Whole Foods team members, too. One employee in Colorado said his team was not informed of the change until last Wednesday, leaving the staff little time to prepare for the in-store discounts. Amazon has sped up the rollout of the perks before the annual $20 Prime membership hike, effective June 16, according to a source. The products on sale are now selected by a team at Whole Foods headquarters in Austin, showing a more centralized decision system in Whole Foods. Regional stores used to have autonomy in selecting items and price setting. Story continues Analysts believe a more centralized purchasing system could help Whole Foods reduce costs and better compete with other players like Walmart (WMT) and Kroger (KR). But some employees and customers worry Whole Foods will gradually lose its local touch, something the company has been using to differentiate itself. Locally produced natural food brands also find it harder to find their way into Whole Foods nowadays. One thing many Whole Foods employees need to get used to the Prime Blue on posters and stickers in the typically green-themed stores. Associates sit behind a table as Prime ambassadors to answer customers questions. They look like Walmart, some said complaining about their blue aprons. This story was updated on June 25, 2018. Krystal Hu covers technology and economy for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter. Read more: Small businesses will be the losers in the Supreme Courts online sales tax case Amazon and Whole Foods clash over products like Coca-Cola Almost half of Amazon Prime members we surveyed say theyll drop the service, but the company will be fine Lyle J. Goldstein Security, Asia South Korean President Moon Jae-in shakes hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during their summit at the truce village of Panmunjom, North Korea, in this handout picture provided by the Presidential Blue House on May 26, 2018. There has to be a fat and juicy carrot for Pyongyang in any future negotiation in place of vague security assurances or nebulous promises of prosperity. America Should Not Play Smallball at the Singapore Summit Many in Washington and around the Asia-Pacific would have been substantially relieved had the Singapore summit actually been cancelled. After all, peace talks are complicated and they do not quite fit with the nifty paradigm of accelerating great-power competition within a New Cold War that takes us back to the good old days of the early 1980s. Those content with that frameworkputting all eggs in the deterrence basket and hoping for the best in the resultant crises and rivalriesmay wish to stop reading at this point. Had the summit been cancelled, then there are indeed many members of the blob who could take ownership of this new failure of American diplomacy. On the right, of course, there are those who will not be satisfied until all Communist and/or noncompliant states are either wiped out or at least rendered prostrate. There is the nefarious tendency of leaders on that side of the political spectrum to try to prove that they are more hawkish than the next commentator, leading to a vicious cycle of bellicose blather (e.g. the Libya model). To state the obvious, moreover, the untimely dissolution of the JCPOA or Iran Deal has hardly inspired confidence that Washington will keep its word on complex international agreements focusing on nuclear proliferation. One might even reasonably wonder if the commander-in-chief, who perhaps very recently seemed to enjoy speculation over whether he might receive a Nobel Peace Prize, was fully briefed regarding the pattern of military exercises scheduled for the Korean Peninsula in the run-up to the planned Singapore Summit. Then, there are the string of right-wing commentators standing by to explain, in the event of failure, why Trump was foolish to ever give peace a chance on the Korean Peninsula. Story continues And yet the other side of the political spectrum has also not entirely embraced a Kim-Trump summit either. Many liberal commentators viewed Trumps agreement to meet with Kim as dangerously naive and expected that the meeting would confer greater legitimacy on the regime in Pyongyang. Certainly, the Obama administration never seriously entertained that possibility with its aloof strategy of strategic patience. Progressive media and scholars have hardly been generating much in the way of creative solutions and proposals to defuse the crisis. Then, there was the most dangerous possibility noted by a Brookings scholar that a deal over denuclearization could result in the reform of the U.S.-ROK Alliance or even a reduction of the U.S. troops based on the peninsula. Actually, when it was revealed in early May that President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. Defense Department to consider reductions to U.S. forces based in South Korea, the reaction of the blob was swift. The New York Times reported: The directive has rattled officials at the Pentagon and other agencies, who worry that any reduction could weaken the American alliance with South Korea and raise fears in neighboring Japan. While the carrots discussionwhat little has taken place to datetended to focus on economic incentives and future investment opportunities, that approach may have been somewhat misguided (likely by mirror-imaging) and ignored basic psychological factors in Kim Jong-uns calculations. He does not wish to be viewed as a pathetic supplicant asking for food, energy and infrastructure handouts. Rather, the focus, at least at this initial stage, should have been on according the North Korean leader some substantial prestige benefits, as well as pointing out pragmatic approaches that urgently avoid humiliation to accomplish denuclearization and verification. Even as the tireless advocates for the status quo ROK-U.S. alliance will howl mightily, let us consider the possible upsides of a moderate U.S. troop withdrawal from South Korea and how that incentive could refocus negotiations on the goal of North Korean denuclearization. Yes, there are many upsides, even if they were left wholly unexplored in the New York Times article cited above. Lets momentarily put aside the fact that U.S. soldiers are asked to serve so far from home and their families for the most part; that they could train more effectively on much larger and less restrictive ranges in the United States; and then there is that rather unnerving fact that their bases (e.g. Osan) in South Korea would likely be the very first targets of North Korean missiles (which might well be nuclear-armed). We will discuss these potential benefits and some others too below, but the main reason to consider a substantial (but not total) U.S. withdrawal from the Korean Peninsula is so blindingly obvious (though rarely discussed overtly) that it should be put in flashing lights: Kim Jong-un is not likely to genuinely undertake denuclearization unless he perceives that North Korea will be substantially better off. In other words, there has to be a fat and juicy carrot for Pyongyang in any future negotiation in place of vague security assurances or nebulous promises of prosperity. And the main benefit to North Korean security of this particular carrot would emphatically not be that it alters the military situation as it really would not, but that it simply would offer Kim a way to save face and claim victory. After all, if Washington continuously plays small ball in these negotiations (as it has in times past) and makes them all about verification procedures and timelines, then a perilous breakdown in the near future is all but inevitable. Over the course of many columns in this Dragon Eye series, I have tried to demonstrate that China can play a very significant and positive role in denuclearization discussions and resolution frameworks. Beijing could obviously turn the economic screws on Pyongyang tighter or looser with major impacts depending on DPRK adherence to a prospective negotiated agreement. China can additionally offer crucial verification expertise and capabilities, as well as the potential to extend enhanced security guarantees that ease the security dilemma on the Korean Peninsula. The prospect of thousands of IAEA inspectors crawling around caves in the North Korean countryside may well have spooked the Pyongyang security elite as they began to consider the possibilities over the last few weeks. A rather more realistic plan might be organized by Beijing with most of the inspectors themselves consisting of Chinese (and Russian) arms control experts. Likewise, the scenario in which Pyongyang was to dismantle its missile, TELs, and warheads, placing them meticulously on American ships seemed bizarre and whimsical even before the tumult over the last weeks. However, the idea of rolling these sensitive items (in stages of course) into large storage warehouses just over the Yalu on Chinese territory to be jointly monitored by North Korean and Chinese personnel could still garner support in Pyongyang possibly. Meanwhile, a sweetener of perhaps a few battalions of new Chinese T-96 tanks (polished up for the parade ground naturally enough and given as a gift from China to the DPRK) could flow south to join Kims rather beleaguered conventional forces as compensation for Pyongyangs step-by-step denuclearization. Indeed, such solutions with Chinese characteristics should be fully explored as a possible remedy to the vast gulf that has seemed to separate the United States and North Korean negotiating teams in the run up to a potentially history-making summit. The main contribution of this Dragon Eye series is to garner insights from Chinese-language sources, such as monitoring Chinese-language coverage of the Xi-Kim summits. In keeping with that tradition, let us underscore the gravity of the upcoming talks by returning very briefly to that frigid and ominous winter of 195051. That moment in history is completely pivotal to the contemporary PRC and also the evolving PLA. No wonder almost every issue of the Chinese military journal Military History [] has one or two articles at least on the War to Resist America and Aid North Korea []. A mid-2017 article, for instance, by a researcher from the Chinese Military Academy of Sciences explores the impact of the geographic factor [] on the Korean War. Korean geography is generally mountainous, but with significant variation and suggests the conditions are summarized by the curt phrase that the north is high, the south is low, while the east is high and the west is low []. It is explained that the PLA used this geography to its advantage during the early phase of the Chinese intervention, since mountainous areas are not conducive to the use of mechanized military operations, but rather appropriate for more flexible infantry for attack and defense combat []. It is further explained that the exceedingly mountainous terrain of northern Korea enabled the success of initial Chinese attacks since the UN forces were isolated and could not support one another effectively. Still, this rendering also relates significant problems encountered by the PLA due to Koreas geography. Most fundamentally, the analysis emphasizes that since the Korean Peninsula is surrounded by sea areas on three sides, this was advantageous for the UN forces with their naval and air forces []. Indeed, Chinas paucity of naval and airpower meant that the ability of the PLA volunteers to control their flanks was dangerously weak []. The piece describes Chinese advances that outran their supply lines, as well as the significant role of frostbite in thinning the ranks [] of the PLA contingent in Korea. The challenging geography made coordination difficult among far-flung Chinese units and this analysis relates that Chinese soldiers were outgunned by superior U.S. artillery and also tanks in the less mountainous western area of military operations. The piece relates with evident pride how PLA soldiers learned to survive in the face of ominous American firepower by digging foxholes that were .8 meters wide and more than one meter in depth. Likewise, the PLA began to develop anti-tank tactics and it is asserted that during a three day period in October 1951 that the PLA destroyed eighteen U.S. tanks and damaged eight more. No doubt, the war proved useful for honing Chinese military innovation and . . . combat command skills [ . . . ]. Indeed, the PLAs contemporary prowess in logistics, engineering, winter warfare and air defense is most likely directly attributable to lessons learned in the Korean War. The strong contemporary focus on developing air and naval forces could also be partly attributable to this initial and bloody trial by fire in Korea. It is indeed true that todays PLA is nothing like the ragged force of Chinese volunteers who entered Korea in the fall of 1950 without even proper footwear, not to mention effective weaponry, ammunition, etc. A fight today on the Korean Peninsula involving this impressively improved PLA is hardly a welcome possibility and presents yet another reason to hope that direct negotiations may actually take place between the United States and North Korea at Singapore in the coming weeks. With that ambition in mind, let us return to the issue we started with at the outset, whether indeed the U.S. troop presence in South Korea could add seriousness to prospective U.S.-DPRK talks on denuclearization. Some benefits for training, quality of life and survivability were elaborated above. We should also not forget resources obviously. True, South Korea does pay a portion of the costs of U.S. forces in Korea, but it is far from the total costs as everyone knows. With soaring national budget deficits, the expenses for major peace-time deployments abroad are simply no longer sustainable. When it is understood, moreover, that South Korean conventional forces are vastly superior to North Korean conventional forces, these American deployments are even more difficult to justify. Indeed, one can imagine that Pyongyang was genuinely intimidated by exercises, such as Max Thunder, for the precise reason that the North Korean Air Force is a complete joke with obsolete aircraft and no jet fuel to put at training its pilots. Then, there is the rather considerable factor that North Korean military forces do not even have proper nutrition apparently. If one realizes these basic deficiencies hold true across North Koreas armed forces, then it becomes clear that the U.S. forces in South Korea may be making the nuclear proliferation problem actually more acute, since they only compound the vast conventional asymmetry in military power (that accompanies the economic, cultural and institutional asymmetries as well) between the two Koreas. The idea of alliance decoupling is viewed as wholly distasteful by the Washington foreign-policy blob, without even a thought about how alliances sometimes cause instability, either through entrapment or triggering the security dilemma in unfortunate ways. You dont have to have a PhD in international relations to realize that such tendencies were the major cause of the World War I. Well, then there is the tiresome argument about credibility, as if the American Republic would shrivel up and hide in the corner after rationalizing and reigning in various excessive commitments. On the contrary, as Stephen Walt, explains persuasively, U.S. foreign and defense policy would be immeasurably improved with enhanced credibility once commitments and interests are brought into better alignment. Moreover, the very idea of a trip wire, such a fashionable idea back in the Cold War, would in itself appear to indicate certain deep and rather mysterious insecurities among elites in both Washington and Seoul. Do they really consider Americans to be so dishonorable that they surmise the United States would walk away from South Korea in a time of genuine national emergency (i.e. under North Korean attack) instead of sending immediate reinforcements? Indeed, an approach that is more confident about American stoicism, realizes that there would be tangible benefits from offshore balancing, so that American bases would not form direct, initial targets and American forces most crucially do not trigger the security dilemma as viewed from Pyongyang. U.S. forces would still be available and indeed all in for worst case scenarios, should that somehow come to pass. Calm confidence could enable a more stable, less trigger-happy, and a genuinely more sustainable posturein addition to forming the fundamental basis for U.S.-DPRK denuclearization talks. Let us hope that, in the wake of pompous and careless talk about the Libya model, that the opportunity for peace or at least a substantially more stable and secure Korean Peninsula has not been lost altogether. Perhaps as Leon Sigal explains recently, the problem with the recent Massive Thunder exercise was not the exercise itself, but rather the fact that nuclear-capable B-52s played a prominent role. Maybe so. But was it really necessary to continue such massive military exercises during the course of delicate planning in the run up to the historic summit? I think not. Given immense U.S. and South Korean military superiority (both conventional and nuclear), exercise parameters and troop numbers should all have been placed on the table for discussion. If we want to see a serious negotiation with Pyongyang on denuclearization, then we had better realize that this would necessarily be a phased process lasting years, with an action-for-action concept as its core principle []. James Clapper seems to endorse such a tit for tat approach that puts U.S. troops on the table when he called very recently for the United States to offer North Korea a road map to withdrawing many of our forces from the peninsula. A very similar cooperation spiral may also be the best approach because this is the conclusion of social psychology regarding efforts to foster cooperation among rivals. In other words, tit for tat cooperation is much more scientifically defensible than the illusory grand bargain leap into the unknown that is all too likely to falter, as it appeared to last week. South Korean conservatives are said to argue for a return to the "paper of record and its not particularly objective rendering of the stakes that were at issue on the Korean Peninsula in the vital negotiation that seems, against all odds, to be back on trackmaybe. In considering Trumps directive to evaluate the possibility of decreasing U.S. troops on the peninsula, the arguments of the South Korean conservatives that such measures would expose their country to potential foes far stronger than North Korea, like China and Japan, which have invaded numerous times over the centuries. Is there really a Japanese threat to South Korea? A Chinese threat? No, there is not demonstrably and such arguments do not merit consideration by serious analysts with a modicum of familiarity with the regions contemporary politics. Rather, the overwhelming imperative was and continues to be stabilizing the current crisis by codifying the freeze and moving toward a more stable security arrangement through gradual disarmament and enhanced engagement. Kim (and Xi also) are no doubt aware that U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East have not gone well and Americans are quite plainly in no mood for new and large-scale military undertakings. Pressure tactics might have been helpful over the last year, to be sure, but plainly can also go way too far (especially since they ultimately lack credibility). The current administration, at once brave enough to break with the blob to schedule a meeting with Kim, nevertheless has almost fallen short since it has not yet put sufficiently weighty and shiny carrots onto the table to thoroughly test whether Kim is open to enabling a genuinely positive future for his country and the rest of Northeast Asia. For those hawks apt to call any compromise or concession a form of appeasement, they should consider the wisdom of British prime minister Winston Churchill speaking about Korea in the dark days of December 1950: Appeasement in itself may be good or bad according to the circumstances. Appeasement from weakness and fear is alike futile and fatal. Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace. It is likely not coincidental that his reflections on the issue evolved to consider the exceedingly dangerous age of nuclear weaponry that was just dawning in the early Cold War. There can be little doubt that the United States, along with South Korea and Japan, are today in a position of immense relative strength and need not fear basic compromises to reach common sense solutions. The world is applauding with enthusiasm that the Trump-Kim summit is seemingly back on. Patience, determination and above all creative problem-solving on all sides will be needed to break the militarized stalemate that has held the peoples of Northeast Asia in its menacing grip for far too long. Lyle J. Goldstein is Research Professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute at the United States Naval War College in Newport, RI. In addition to Chinese, he also speaks Russian and he is also an affiliate of the new Russia Maritime Studies Institute at Naval War College. You can reach him at goldstel@usnwc.edu. The opinions in his columns are entirely his own and do not reflect the official assessments of the U.S. Navy or any other agency of the U.S. government. Image: South Korean President Moon Jae-in shakes hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during their summit at the truce village of Panmunjom, North Korea, in this handout picture provided by the Presidential Blue House on May 26, 2018. Read full article (Photo by Daria Kobayashi Ritch, Artwork by Quinn Lemmers for Yahoo Lifestyle) Amanda Gorman cites Malala Yousafzai, the 20-year-old Pakistani activist and Nobel Prize laureate, as inspiration, saying it was partially because of Malala that she pursued the path of becoming a youth delegate for the United Nations at the age of 16. Where Amanda really found her voice was in writing and in 2014, Amanda a California native became the Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate. In 2017 she became the first National Youth Poet Laureate. At 20 years old, Amanda is a proud member of Generation Z, a Harvard student, and a poet and shes ready to change the world through words. Name: Amanda Gorman Age: 20 Favorite app: Instagram What she does: Im a student at Harvard University, and currently work as the United States Youth Poet Laureate, a community organizer, and an activist. Three words shed use to define Gen Z: Relentless. Woke. Unstoppable. How poetry became a passion: I was writing since I can remember I just didnt know it was poetry yet, or that writing could be a career. Then, when I was around 7, my teacher read the class Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, and I was hooked. I knew if I could work in the realm of metaphor and literature, the sky was the limit. It wasnt until I was named Youth Poet Laureate of L.A. in high school though that I officially began calling myself a poet. I just always loved writing, period. Photo: Julia Robinson for Mashable What she wishes older people understood about Gen Z: I hear a lot of, This generation with their technology, a criticism which comes out of a truthful place many in Gen Z were born into a fast-paced digital realm. But I also think that a lot of that finger-pointing, condemnation of Gen Z and their use of technology is (a) hypocritical, because its not just Gen Z, and (b) also robbing us of an opportunity to discuss the good that comes with it as well. Its not the technology in itself, but how were using it that matters. Were starting movements, demanding change, sharing resources, knowledge, and power. Story continues How she thinks Gen Z will change the world: Were already changing it! But as for the future, I foresee a world which is more creative, more open, more loving, more ecologically friendly, more honest about its history and progress, and I think a lot of those contributions will be made by young people. Her greatest accomplishment (so far): I think obviously theres being named the first Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, which was a real history-making moment in terms of giving young people the platforms they deserve. But I think, for me personally, that accomplishment exists in a wider pursuit that Im most proud of, which is continuing in the tradition of storytelling outlined by my ancestors, and not letting race, gender, class, or small-minded prejudice stop me. What shell be doing 10 years from now: So, 2028: Attending the Olympics in L.A.; writing a book; holding some local elected official position; teaching; trying to convince myself that Im actually 30 and not 4 or 89. What shell be doing 20 years from now: So, 2038: Being President of the United States of America, working in the Oval Office for a more actively, ecologically friendly United States, for more access to free education, and also working to ensure the equal rights of citizens are carried out through different levels of government; married to Chadwick Boseman or Chris Pine; and of course still writing poetry. There are going to be a lot of metaphors in my inaugural address. Madrid (AFP) - A British financier turned anti-Kremlin crusader who used to be the boss of late anti-corruption Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was briefly detained in Spain on Wednesday due to confusion over an arrest warrant Interpol says never existed. William Browder, who tweeted that he was in Madrid "to give evidence to senior Spanish anti-Russian mafia prosecutor Jose Grinda," was taken to a police station on Wednesday morning. The 54-year-old tweeted that he was wanted on an "Interpol Russian arrest warrant." But police later told AFP he had been released when they realised the "warrant" had expired. "An arrest warrant has a date limit and when that expires, it must be deleted from the computer programme and in this case Interpol hadn't deleted it. Once in the police station, they realised it wasn't valid," a police spokesman told AFP. Browder however tweeted that Interpol had intervened and told the police "not to honor the new Russian Interpol Red Notice," referring to the international police group's list of wanted people. Further muddying the waters, Interpol told AFP that Browder was not wanted via their own channels. "There is not, and never has been, a Red Notice for Mr Bill Browder," it said in a statement. The US-born British citizen, who describes himself as (Russian President Vladimir) "Putin's no.1 enemy," has led a high-profile campaign in memory of his former employee Magnitsky. Magnitsky went public with details of massive fraud by Russian state officials before being charged with tax evasion and later dying in detention after spending 11 months in squalid prisons in 2009. A Moscow court in December sentenced Browder in absentia to nine years in a penal colony after convicting him of deliberate bankruptcy. His campaign for Magnitsky has had strong resonance worldwide. In 2012, the US passed the "Sergei Magnitsky Act" which imposed a visa ban and froze the assets of Russian officials implicated in the lawyer's death. Story continues The act became a symbol of prison abuse in Russia and strained ties with Washington. Then, earlier this month, British lawmakers backed a measure to impose sanctions against people guilty of human rights violations in memory of Magnitsky. Browder said he was going to talk to Grinda "about the huge amount of money from the Magnitsky case that flowed to Spain." Whether it was a backyard barbecue, a mutual friend's wedding, or lounging in their private pool, celebrities soaked in the sun in their respective cities (and private homes) this Memorial Day weekend. Everyone from Kourtney Kardashian to Reese Witherspoon to Gabrielle Union shared pictures of how they ushered in summer with friends, loved ones, and bright smiles. A number of celebrities, including Andy Cohen, Kelly Ripa, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Ryan Seacrest, found themselves at a mutual friends Hamptons wedding, making for some fun photos. Others, like Bella Hadid, lounged on boats in their best summer gear, while still others traveled abroad for the long weekendLucy Hale to Cambodia, Paris Jackson to Venice, and Emily Ratajkowski to Paris. See what they and other celebs were up to over Memorial Day weekend. Related: 11 Luxurious Private Pools ABC has canceled "Roseanne" after its star posted racially charged tweets. Roseannes Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show, ABC president Channing Dungey said in a statement Tuesday. The cancellation comes a day after star Roseanne Barr shot off a racially charged tweet aimed at a former aide to President Obama. It came in response to an online claim that Obama spied on French presidential candidates while he was commander in chief. Barr posted that Valerie Jarrett looks like "Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes had a baby." The tweet was later deleted. After the tweet, comic Wanda Sykes, who is a consulting producer and writer on the sitcom revival, announced she would not be returning to the show. I will not be returning to @RoseanneOnABC. Wanda Sykes (@iamwandasykes) May 29, 2018 Barr apologized Tuesday morning following intense backlash and said it was "a joke" and "in bad taste." I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me-my joke was in bad taste. Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) May 29, 2018 She also announced she was leaving Twitter. I apologize. I am now leaving Twitter. Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) May 29, 2018 Her co-star, Sarah Gilbert slammed the comments on Twitter. Roseannes recent comments about Valerie Jarrett, and so much more, are abhorrent and do not reflect the beliefs of our cast and crew or anyone associated with our show. I am disappointed in her actions to say the least. sara gilbert (@THEsaragilbert) May 29, 2018 On Tuesday afternoon, Jarrett addressed the controversy at a town hall appearance for MSNBC where she said she was "fine" and saw the situation as a way to turn it "into a teaching moment." Story continues .@ValerieJarrett responds to Roseanne Barr's tweet, saying Disneys chairman called her before announcing that ABC was canceling the show: "This should be a teaching moment. #EverydayRacism pic.twitter.com/b0EvA8WAeY MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 29, 2018 "Avengers: Infinity War" actor Don Cheadle also responded to the controversy, saying, You can take @RoseanneOnABC out of racism but you cant take the racism out of @therealroseanne." The Rev. Al Sharpton said Barrs comments were racist and ABC must "take action." The comparison by Rosanne Barr on ABC of Former Obama aide, Valerie Jarrett to an APE is racist and inexcusable. ABC must take action NOW! Reverend Al Sharpton (@TheRevAl) May 29, 2018 Actress Patricia Arquette said she was repulsed by Barrs so-called "joke." Even Barrs former husband, actor Tom Arnold, took to Twitter to slam her tweet as "dangerous." @brianstelter that's funny. ABC execs figured out a way to control me. They blocked me from promoting anything on ABC because I called out Roseanne Barr & her dangerous tweets. @GMA https://t.co/Q0BbE4uhhg Tom Arnold (@TomArnold) May 29, 2018 RELATED STORIES What Happened to the Original Couch From 'Roseanne'? President Trump Calls Roseanne Barr to Congratulate Her on Sitcom Revival's Ratings The Cast of 'Roseanne': Where Have They Been? Related Articles: Moscow (AFP) - Russian anti-Kremlin journalist Arkady Babchenko, whose fake death Ukraine admitted on Wednesday to staging, has many admirers but probably even more detractors. Babchenko reappeared alive on Wednesday less than 24 hours after he was believed to have been gunned down in Kiev. Ukrainian security services said it was a set-up to foil an attempt on his life by Russia. "I would like to apologise for what you have all had to go through," Babchenko told reporters at a press conference. The 41-year-old, who fought with the Russian army in Chechnya in the 1990s and went on to cover conflicts in Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia and Ukraine, had previously faced a campaign of harassment over his reporting. A contributor to media outlets including top Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, he regularly accused Russian authorities of hunting down Kremlin critics and unleashing wars in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere. - 'Good soldier. Bad soldier' - He repeatedly said he hated war and did not want to take up arms again. "I used to be a good soldier," Babchenko wrote in 2017. "And now I am a bad soldier. I want to live more than to die." Babchenko was 19 when he was sent to fight in Russia's first Chechen campaign in the 1990s as a conscript. He fought in the second Chechen campaign in the 2000s as a contract soldier. After serving in the army he went on to become a war correspondent and author. He described his experience in the Chechen conflicts -- which saw Moscow suppress a separatist insurgency in the North Caucasus -- in a book published in English under the title "One Soldier's War". When a brief but bloody war broke out between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia in 2008, Babchenko went to the separatist region to cover the conflict as a correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, an award-winning opposition newspaper in Russia. "It was him who did for Novaya Gazeta the best reportages from the war in South Ossetia," the newspaper wrote in an editorial, calling him a "true artist". Story continues - 'Dying is scary' - Babchenko embraced the popular Kiev uprising that ousted a Kremlin-backed regime in 2014 and went to cover the conflict between Ukranian troops and pro-Russian insurgents in the east of the former Soviet country following the annexation of Crimea by Moscow. In recent years, he became increasingly alienated from Moscow journalists critical of the Kremlin. His bombastic Facebook posts constantly pushed the boundaries of good taste and some of his colleagues and followers stopped reading him on social networks. "From Babchenko's position, even his Moscow colleagues looked this way: weak, conformist, inclined to endless compromises," Russian journalist Yury Saprykin wrote on Meduza, an independent news site. In a controversial 2016 Facebook post, Babchenko wrote he had "no sympathy or pity" for the victims of a plane crash carrying Russia's Red Army choir to Syria given Moscow's support for Bashar al-Assad. Pro-Kremlin activists unleashed a campaign of harassment against Babchenko, forcing him to flee Russia last year. He moved to Kiev after living in the Czech Republic and Israel. In Kiev, he hosted a programme on the Crimean Tatar TV station ATR. Known for his caustic style and earthy language, Babchenko endlessly promoted doom-and-gloom scenarios for Russia under Putin. "The motherland will always dump you, my son," he used to say. In a Facebook post hours before the fake killing, Babchenko wrote about his "second birthday" when a Ukrainian general refused to let him on a helicopter that was then shot down by Kremlin-backed rebels, killing 14 people on board in 2014. After announcing Babchenko was alive and that his death was staged, the head of Ukraine's security service congratulated Babchenko on his "third birthday". Caracas (AFP) - President Nicolas Maduro's closest challenger in this month's presidential polls, Henri Falcon, on Wednesday filed an appeal with the country's highest court to have the vote annulled. Maduro was re-elected for a second six-year term with 68 percent of the vote in a poll boycotted by the main opposition and derided as a sham by the US, EU and 13 other Latin American countries. "Today we are presenting before the Supreme Court of Justice the proper foundation of our case which demonstrates that such an electoral process is invalid," Falcon told journalists. "The scope of this challenge must be the call for new elections in Venezuela," he told the court, adding that the May 20 ballot "did not exist and must be declared null and void." Falcon, an ex-army officer, scored 21 percent of the ballot, from which more than half the electorate abstained. Among Falcon's arguments is that Maduro offered cash incentives to many voters who could be tracked electronically through cards giving them access to government food aid programs. "Bribery is punished," said Falcon. "It is punishable by law and you cannot appeal to the social policy of a state to buy votes." He also denounced the use of state media to promote Maduro's campaign, and claimed "pressure and coercion" was used against opposition monitors in polling stations. Falcon said polling stations in several areas remained open beyond their official closing time to allow more socialist party voters to cast ballots. Forensic officers scour the scene for clues - AP A suspected terrorist on day release from prison executed two female police officers with their own guns and shot dead a trainee teacher before he was killed in a shootout after taking two women hostage at a school in the centre of the Belgian city of Liege. The bloody rampage on Tuesday morning, which left another four officers wounded, was captured on videos on social media, which showed the black clad man waving a pistol in each hand and shouting Allahu Akbar before he was gunned down by elite officers. Belgium's federal prosecutors office has opened an terror investigation into the attack. The lone wolf attacker, 36, was named locally as Benjamin Herman, who was well-known to police for a string of crimes including robbery, assault and drug-dealing and was from Rochefort, a city about an hour from Liege. One officer was named in local media reports as Soraya Belkacemi, 45, a widowed mother of twins, who are now orphaned. The other was Lucile Garcia, 53, who was described by fellow officers as a "fantastic colleague" who had married her partner a month ago. Herman was granted temporary release from prison on Monday night until Tuesday, despite a prison service assessment that judged him ultra-violent and that he was on a terror watchlist over suspicions he had become radicalised in 2017. Such family leave is meant to help prisoners prepare for their eventual release, which would have been in 2020 in Hermans case after he had served the sentence he began in 2013. He had been released for two days on 13 previous occasions. Belgium's federal prosecutors office has opened an terror investigation into the murders, which come after the country was accused of being a hotbed of extremism after the 2015 Paris attacks, which killed 130 people. and suicide bombings in Brussels in 2016 in which 32 died. The countrys intelligence services came under intense scrutiny for apparently missing a series of leads after the Paris attacks that could have led to the Brussels bombers. Story continues He has been reported or presumed to be belonging to the entourage of an Islamist recruiter," a source close to the investigation told AFP. Police have found a koran and prayer mat in the converts cell. Confirming that the attacker was on the police watchlist, lawmaker George Dallemagne, who sits on several Belgian parliamentary security committees, tweeted: "The supervision of radicalised prisoners remains tragically flawed." Forensic officers scour the scene for clues Credit: Geert Vanden Wijngaert /AP "It is clear that the assassin's objective was to attack the police," said Christian Beaupere, the head of the Liege police force. The Liege prosecutor's office said the gunman had "hunted down" the two police officers, who were checking parking meters, before attacking them from behind with a box cutter on a boulevard in the heart of Belgiums third city at about 10.30am local time. After stabbing the officers, aged 45 and 53, multiple times, Herman took the officers' guns and shot them dead before opening fire on his next victim, who was sitting in his car. He was named by local press as Cyril Vangriecken, a 22-year-old trainee teacher from Vottem, a nearby town. Armed Belgian police walk past the scene of the shooting in the centre of Liege Credit: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP Herman entered a nearby high school about 100 yards away and took two female employees, one a cleaning lady, hostage, which forced armed police to swing into action. Pupils were evacuated to safety and people in the street raced for cover in the ensuing gunbattle when Herman came out firing at police. Four officers were wounded, two in the legs and two in the arms, before Herman was finally neutralised about 30 minutes after he launched his initial attack. The cleaner was reported to be safe and healthy. A major security cordon was set up around the area, while panicked parents came to collect their unhurt children from the school complex. The national crisis centre said it had not raised its alert level - an indication the man was acting alone and so follow-up attacks were not expected. Emergency services arrive in Liege's central boulevard on Tuesday morning Credit: VICTORJ_FR/Twitter Herman was "already on the run" after committing another murder on Monday night in the town of On, in southern Belgium, a source told AFP, though local prosecutors said they have not yet established a link with the Liege incident. The body of a man shot in the head was found after a jewellery robbery in Rochefort earlier that evening. Charles Michel, the prime minister of Belgium, condemned the "blind and cowardly violence" in Liege and offered his support for the victims and their families. He called for restraint after images on social media appeared to show the two officers lying metres apart in pools of blood outside a cafe. Theresa May, the prime minister of Britain, said: "My thoughts are with the victims of todays cowardly attack in Belgium and their grieving families. The UK stands resolute with our Belgian allies against terror." Coups de feu a Liege, evacuation du boulevard dAvroy. Beaucoup de voitures de police sur place + secours #Avroy#Liege#gunshotpic.twitter.com/CLXo16nST3 Victor (@VICTORJ_FR) May 29, 2018 Mr Michel and Philippe, the King of the Belgians, have visited the city. A minute's silence will be held tomorrow and flags flown at half-mast at Liege's town hall, where a book of condolences has been opened. Liege, an industrial city close to the German border in the French-speaking Wallonia region, was also the scene of a shooting in 2011, when a gunman killed four people and wounded over 100 before turning the gun on himself. Liege shooting At least three people, including two policemen and a pedestrian, were killed on Tuesday when a gunman opened fire in the Belgian city of Liege. Police subsequently killed the gunman in a shootout after he entered a nearby high school and took a woman hostage. It is unclear what the motive behind the shooting was, but it is being investigated as a potential terrorist attack, according to prosecutors. The gunman had reportedly been released from prison on Monday, and police said he may have been radicalized while in jail. Police said they heard the gunman yell Allahu akbar, which means "God is great" in Arabic, during the standoff with police. The countrys interior minister took to Twitter to express his condolences for the victims and their families and pledged that law enforcement would continue to monitor the vicinity, particularly the area near the high school. Trending: Steven Tyler Exclusive Clip: 'Out On a Limb,' A New Film About The Aerosmith Frontman's Journey to Nashville "The hostage-taker has been neutralized, the two police officers have died, the passenger of a vehicle passing on the boulevard has also lost their lives. Two other police officers were injured. All children are safe, the citys police said in a statement on Facebook. Belgium has experienced numerous attacks over the past several years. In March 2016, in one of the most deadly incidents, three suicide bombers assaulted the airport and metro stations in the countrys capital, Brussels, killing 32 people and injuring hundreds of others. Investigators also say that Belgium is home to the masterminds of the deadly attack that took place in France in 2015. More young men have traveled from Belgium to fight for the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) in Iraq or Syria than from any other country in Europe. Story continues Don't miss: How Far Were We From a Real Jurassic Park in 1993? Some experts say that the country is susceptible to radicalization because Muslim youth there feel marginalized. To fight radicalization, some suggest, Belgium should do more to address discrimination and the lack of economic opportunities among the countrys Muslim youth. Liege is the third largest city in Belgium. It is a French-speaking city in the countrys east. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Brasilia (AFP) - The giant truck strike in Brazil didn't just wipe food off supermarket shelves and dry up fuel supplies: it blew away unpopular President Michel Temer's little remaining authority, analysts say. Several times during the so-far nine-day strike, Temer's center-right government has declared it's all over, only to find itself negotiating with protesters again. When Temer agreed to the strikers' main demand of lower diesel prices on Sunday, road blockades persisted across the country Monday and at least partly into Tuesday. When he did attempt to stand firm, calling out the army to escort food and fuel past picket lines under armed guard, that only restored supplies to a trickle. Even before the crisis, Temer was the most unpopular Brazilian president on record. And with elections coming up in October, which he will not contest, he was already a lame duck. But the strike debacle raises the question for some of whether he can govern at all in the remaining seven months of his administration. "We've reached the point where the Temer government has nothing more to offer. He will end his mandate in extreme weakness, a zombie administration," said Andre Cesar, at Hold consultancy in Sao Paulo. Cesar said he wasn't even sure Temer could last that long. The scenario of an early Temer exit is increasingly being whispered in political circles too, Folha newspaper reported Tuesday, with the headline: "Chances are growing for Temer not to complete his mandate, members of Congress and the Supreme Court say." - Dropping the economic ball - Temer came to power in 2016 with the self-declared mission to put order back in Brazil after more than a decade of what he said was ruinous leftist rule. He wasn't elected into the office, taking over automatically after helping to engineer the impeachment of leftist president Dilma Rousseff. That earned him hatred on the left in Brazil. On the right, Temer was initially welcomed, seen as bringing in a team of serious economists who could steer the country out of its deepest recession in history and lure back fleeing investors. Story continues Temer used that momentum to push through market-friendly though widely unpopular austerity reforms. But as public opposition grew to the reforms, he ran out of steam. His signature attempt to strip down the hugely generous pension system has ground to a halt in Congress. Now the truck strike has cast doubts over another of his liberal policies -- the 2016 decision to allow state-controlled oil company Petrobras to set fuel prices. That decision led to today's high costs and the truckers' revolt. There are calls now on the enfeebled Temer not just temporarily to bring prices back down but to do away with Petrobras' autonomy altogether. The oil company will be under renewed pressure starting Wednesday when workers are due to mount their own strike. With Temer having staked his entire credibility on the economic reforms, he's now left looking helpless. "He's lost the capacity to coordinate and to constructively intervene, as he could at the start of his rule, when he was seen as a successful reformer," said Carlos Pereira, at the Getulio Vargas Foundation university. "The Temer government is moribund." Andrew Westlake, 30, died after being rushed to hospital from Dalaman airport in south-west Turkey. (Picture: Facebook) A British father has died after reportedly falling 50ft from a ledge in a Turkish airport. Witnesses at Dalaman airport claimed that 30-year-old Andrew Westlake jumped from the balcony inside the terminal building. Mr Westlake, from Co Durham, died after being rushed to hospital in south-west Turkey. It is believed that he had waited three days for a flight home after losing his ticket. But his family has they were still waiting for answers about the circumstances, amid conflicting reports of how he died. Local media reports say that he argued with cabin crew after boarding a flight, and he was ordered off after posing a risk to flight safety. Earlier it was reported that he had fallen from a plane onto the runway. The incident occurred when the man fell from the plane at Dalaman Airport Fellow passenger Perry Sheldon, from Dudley, North Tyneside, said he spoke to Mr Westlake before they boarded. He said: I was stood next to him and he seemed a bit strange at first, I think he was just nervous. I asked if he was all right and he said they had kicked him off a previous flight and the reason he said to me was he had blisters on his feet from sunburn. He said there were signs up saying people should not wash their feet and when they questioned him about it, they said it was an insult to their culture. Andrew Westlake was on his first family holiday with his partner and daughter Mr Sheldon said passengers went through an intensive search at Dalaman, including being swabbed for explosives, before they were allowed to board. Mr Westlake had received his boarding pass and passport and was allowed on, Mr Sheldon said, but after around 20 minutes he was removed from the flight. Mr Sheldon said: He didnt act aggressively in any way, he just stood up and got off. All he did was say to the man next to him I told you that would happen. Mr Sheldon said Mr Westlake did not appear drunk and was not shouting, but described him as appearing on edge and seemed keen to get home. MOST POPULAR TODAY ON YAHOO Airline Jet2 released a statement confirming that one of their customers died at Dalaman airport, but was not injured on or in the vicinity of an aircraft. Story continues A spokesperson said: We understand that a customer sadly passed away on Tuesday morning, following an incident inside the terminal building at Dalaman Airport. Contrary to some reports, we can confirm that the customer was not injured on our aircraft or in the vicinity of our aircraft. As investigations are ongoing it would be inappropriate for us to comment any further, however we would like to extend our sincere condolences to the customers family and friends at this very sad time. His aunt Pauline Butler, sister of his mother June, said: We are still in the dark about what has happened. We have not heard from the Foreign Office. All we have heard is rumours, its not fair. Mr Westlakes relatives revealed that he was on his first family holiday with his partner and one-year-old daughter. A Foreign Office spokeswoman confirmed: We are supporting the family of a British man following his death in Turkey and are in touch with the local authorities. Bill Browder was released two hours after being arrested by Spanish - Jeff Gilbert for The Telegraph Bill Browder, the UK-based financier and anti-Putin campaigner, was taken to a Madrid police station on Wednesday morning after being detained on a Russian warrant. Mr Browder, who describes himself as "Putin's number one enemy", tweeted that he had been arrested by Spanish police on a Russian Interpol warrant, posting pictures from the back of a police car. He was released two hours later. The American-born businessman, who has held British citizenship for the past two decades, was last year sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison on fraud and tax evasion charges. The detention of Mr Browder - widely considered the creator of the Magnitsky Act, an international sanctions regime against Russian officials named for his lawyer who died in Russian custody - drew immediate international alarm. Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament's Brexit negotiator, said it was "worrying that autocratic Russia can get democratic Spain to go after someone fighting to expose Putin's crimes & those responsible for Magnitsky's murder". Urgent: Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. Going to the police station right now. Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) May 30, 2018 In the back of the Spanish police car going to the station on the Russian arrest warrant. They wont tell me which station pic.twitter.com/Xwj27xC7Zd Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) May 30, 2018 A similar 2013 sentence handed down in Russia had been dismissed by Interpol, the agency assessing it to be "predominantly political in nature". A Spanish police spokesperson said that Interpol had failed to delete the warrant from its database when it had expired, and that once at the police station, they had realised it was no longer valid. Story continues But Mr Browder claimed that the warrant was indeed "live", and that he had been released after the Interpol secretary general in Lyon advised police "not to honour" it. Good news. Spanish National Police just released me after Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised them not to honor the new Russian Interpol Red Notice. This is the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case pic.twitter.com/ZonzXizvIJ Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) May 30, 2018 Mr Browder claimed this was "the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case". Interpol later denied he was ever wanted through its channels, saying in a statement that: "There is not, and has never been, a Red Notice for Mr Bill Browder". Worrying that autocratic Russia can get democratic Spain to go after someone fighting to expose Putin's crimes & those responsible for #Magnitsky's murder. @BillBrowder's rights must be protected @marianorajoyhttps://t.co/HEM56UWpbR Guy Verhofstadt (@guyverhofstadt) May 30, 2018 Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, said he had spoken to Mr Browder and was "very glad that he has now been released". "Moscow should concentrate on bringing those responsible for the murder of Magnitsky to justice," he added. Mr Browder ran a top investment fund in Russia in the 1990s but was deported in 2005 and his business seized. Sergei Magnitsky, his Russian lawyer, was arrested after reporting the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars and died in custody in 2009, officially from heart failure. Mr Browder has always claimed Magnitsky was murdered, and insists that he himself is a top Kremlin target. In March he told the Telegraph he lived his life in the knowledge that "that the Russians are trying to kill me". Mr Browder said he was in Madrid to give evidence to a top Spanish prosecutor "about the huge amount of money from the Magnitsky case that flowed to Spain", and that following his release his "mission carries on". Ottawa (AFP) - Canada announced Wednesday further sanctions against associates of President Nicolas Maduro, including his wife, in response to what it called "illegitimate and anti-democratic" presidential elections in Venezuela last week. The May 20 vote that saw Maduro re-elected was boycotted by the main opposition parties and widely condemned by the international community, including the United States, which denounced it as a "sham." Canada rejected the result as "fraudulent," and along with its G7 partners has called on Maduro to schedule another vote, release all political prisoners and restore the authority of the country's National Assembly. "These sanctions send a clear message that the Maduro regime's anti-democratic behavior has consequences," Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said in a statement. The 14 people targeted by the new sanctions include Maduro's wife Cilia Flores and members of his inner circle, comprising lawmakers as well as election and judicial officials. Previous sanctions were aimed at Maduro himself, as well as dozens of senior officials which Ottawa said had "played a key role in undermining the security, stability and integrity of democratic institutions of Venezuela." Ottawa (AFP) - Canada's justice minister on Wednesday ordered an independent review of the extradition of a Lebanese-Canadian academic to France where he was wanted in a deadly 1980 Paris synagogue bombing. Hassan Diab was extradited from Canada in 2014 to face prosecution in France but French magistrates leading the investigation in January dismissed the case for lack of evidence and ordered his release. By then, Diab had spent a decade in jail or under strict bail conditions, most of it in Canada as authorities mulled whether to extradite him. In a letter, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said Diab "was afforded all of the procedural safeguards" provided under Canadian extradition law. Nonetheless, she has asked for an "independent external review" of the matter, she said. With the backing of civil rights groups, Diab had asked for a public inquiry into the role of Canadian justice officials in his "wrongful extradition." Diab and his supporters allege that Canadian officials intervened "to patch up the (French) case to ensure (his) extradition," misled the extradition hearing and suppressed fingerprint analysis that may have helped clear him. Diab's "ten-year ordeal was the direct consequence of actions of senior officials of the Canadian Department of Justice," said the group, which includes Amnesty International and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. The October 3, 1980, bombing of a synagogue on Rue Copernic in Paris, which killed four people and injured about 40, was the first fatal attack against Jews in France since the Nazi occupation in World War II. Diab was accused of planting the bomb inside the saddle bag of a motorbike parked outside the packed synagogue near the Champs-Elysees, where hundreds of people had gathered for Sabbath prayers. The only suspect in the case, Diab was arrested at his home in an Ottawa suburb in 2008 at the request of French authorities who alleged he was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He has insisted that he was in Beirut at the time of the attack to take university exams, which witnesses have corroborated. French prosecutors, meanwhile, have appealed Diab's discharge. A decision is expected on July 6. Editors note: On Tuesday, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorneys Office in Los Angeles confirmed that federal prosecutors had withdrawn their complaint against Stephen Beal. Further examination by the Federal Bureau of Investigation raises questions as to whether the devices meet the statutory definition for a destructive device, prosecutors said in a copy of the dismissal motion obtained by PEOPLE. Their request was brought before a judge on Saturday, approved and Beal was then released on Sunday, the spokesman says. Below is the original PEOPLE article on Beals arrest, published on May 17. The ex-boyfriend and business partner of a woman killed in an explosion at a day spa in California earlier this week has been taken into custody, PEOPLE confirms. Stephen Beal, 59, was initially arrested on suspicion of being in possession of an unregistered destructive device, according to a joint statement released by the FBI, the United States Attorneys Office, Orange County Sheriffs Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He was officially charged Thursday afternoon, prosecutors said. The explosives were allegedly discovered by the FBI during a search of Beals Long Beach home, sheriffs spokeswoman Carrie Braun tells PEOPLE. According to Beals federal criminal complaint, obtained by PEOPLE, investigators found about 130 lbs. of explosives and related materials in his residence, mostly in his garage, and he allegedly explained that he was a lapsed model rocket hobbyist. Among the recovered items, authorities claim in the complaint, were two cardboard tubes described as similar to improvised explosives, with 30-inch fuses. Asked about these, Beal allegedly said that he had not made any bombs, authorities stated in the complaint. So far, Beal has not been charged in connection with the Aliso Viejo explosion that killed 48-year-old Ildiko Krajnyak and injured three others. According to Beals criminal complain, he and Krajnyak co-owned the spa that was bombed and the two previously dated. Story continues Beal remains in custody and is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana on Monday. He has not yet entered a plea or retained an attorney who could comment on his behalf. From left: Ildiko Krajnyak and Stephen Beal The scene of the explosion in Aliso Viejo Our investigators are still determining if we can connect any of the items that were located at the house to the explosion, says Braun, adding, They are still processing the scene and evidence. Fragments of the device were shipped to the FBIs laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, she says. They are working as quick as they can to see if there is any connection, she says. Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter. Braun says the Tuesday explosion destroyed a corner of a two-story medical building in Aliso Viejo, about 50 miles south of Los Angeles, that housed Krajnyaks skin care spa, Magyar Kozmetika. The Hungarian aesthetician was found dead inside the building, Braun says. Two other women suffered injuries and were taken to the hospital for treatment and are expected to survive. A third woman was treated for smoke inhalation and was released at the scene, Braun says. The scene of the explosion Ildiko Krajnyak's home Braun says investigators are working hard to get to the bottom of who committed the crime. We know the public is vey concerned, she says. On Wednesday, according to Braun, authorities said the explosion was being investigated as a crime after they located a device in the building. Based upon witness statements and people who were there, we dont believe it was an accident, she says. It wasnt a gas leak, it wasnt an exploding oxygen tank, she adds. It was not an accident. James Holmes Security, Asia Here is the PLAN. China Could Win a War Against America in the South China Sea U.S. and allied mariners and airmen, accordingly, must study Chinas martial traditions, gleaning insight into how offshore active defense might unfold in the South China Sea. If youre Beijing and have built up a seagoing militia, an impressive coast guard, Asias biggest indigenous navy, and a sizable arsenal of land-based weaponry to influence events at sea, how do you alloy those components into a sharp combat implementand consolidate control over a semi-enclosed sea? Last year Chinas defense minister, General Chang Wanquan , implored the nation to ready itself for a peoples war at sea . The purpose of such a campaign? To safeguard sovereignty after an adverse ruling from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea . The tribunal upheld the plain meaning of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), ruling that Beijings claims to indisputable sovereignty spanning some 80-90 percent of the South China Sea are bunk. A strong coastal state, in other words, cannot simply wrest away the high seas or waters allocated to weaker neighbors and make them its own. Recommended: Why an F-22 Raptor Would Crush an F-35 in a 'Dogfight' Recommended: Air War: Stealth F-22 Raptor vs. F-14 Tomcat (That Iran Still Flies) Recommended: A New Report Reveals Why There Won't Be Any 'New' F-22 Raptors Or, at any rate, it cant do so lawfully. It could conceivably do so through conquest, enforced afterward by a constant military presence. Defenders of freedom of the sea, consequently, must heed General Changs entreaty. Southeast Asians and their external allies must take such statements seriouslydevoting ample forethought to the prospect of marine combat in the South China Sea. Thats the first point about a peoples war at sea. A clash of arms is possible. Statesmen and commanders in places like Manila, Hanoi, and Washington must not discount Changs words as mere bluster. Story continues Indeed, its doubtful China could comply with the UNCLOS tribunals ruling at this stage, even if the Chinese Communist Party leadership wished to. Think about the image compliance would project at home. For two decades now, Beijing has invested lavishly in a great navy, and backed that navy up with shore-based firepower in the form of combat aircraft, anti-ship missile batteries, and short-range warships such as fast patrol craft and diesel submarines. (This first appeared last year.) Party leaders have regaled the populace with how they will use seagoing forces to right historical wrongs and win the nation nautical renown. They must now follow through. (This first appeared in 2016.) It was foolish to tie Chinas national dignity and sovereignty to patently absurd claims to islands and seas . But party leaders did so. And they did so repeatedly, publicly, and in the most unyielding terms imaginable. By their words they stoked nationalist sentiment while making themselves accountable to it. They set in motion a toxic cycle of rising popular expectations. Breaking that cycle could verge on impossible. If Beijing relented from its maritime claims now, ordinary Chinese wouldrightlyjudge the leadership by the standard it set. Party leaders would stand condemned as weaklings who surrendered sacred territory, failed to avenge Chinas century of humiliation despite Chinas rise to great power, and let jurists and lesser neighbors backed by a certain superpower flout big, bad Chinas will . No leader relishes being seen as a weakling. Its positively dangerous in China. As the greats of diplomacy teach , its tough for negotiators or political leaders to climb down from public commitments. Make a promise and you bind yourself to keep it. Fail to keep it and you discredit yourselfand court disaster in the bargain. Like any sane leadership, Beijing prefers to get its way without fighting. Fighting, though, could be the least bad of the options party leaders have left themselves. Quite the predicament theyve made for themselves. Which leads to the second point. Judging from Changs words, small-stick diplomacy has run its course. Small-stick diplomacy was about deploying the China Coast Guard and fellow nonmilitary sea services to police waters Beijing claimed. It depicted Chinas sovereignty in the South China Sea as a fact, and dared woefully outmatched rivals to reverse that fact. Left unopposed, de facto Chinese sovereigntya near-monopoly on the use of force within borders sketched on the mapwould have become entrenched over time. Once it became the new normal, it might even have taken on an aura of legitimacy among seafaring states. The UNCLOS tribunal struck Chinas approach a grievous blow, collapsing the quasi-legal arguments underlying small-stick diplomacy. The tribunals decision makes it clear that Chinese maritime forces operating in, say, the Philippines exclusive economic zone are invaders or occupiersnot constables. If Beijing cant get its way through white-hulled coast-guard vessels, that leaves military force. Sovereign states deploy law-enforcement assets to police what is rightfully theirs. They deploy military forces to fight for things that are in dispute. Changs warlike talk implies that Beijing has abandoned the softly, softly approach and has tacitly admitted Southeast Asia constitutes a contested zone. And the lingo he employs matters. Peoples war is a Maoist phrase used to convey certain martial ideas. Mao Zedongs Red Army waged peoples war to seize contested ground from Japanese invaders and Chinese Nationalists. It appears China now sees the South China Sea in similar termsas an offshore battleground where rivals must be overcome by force. But not by military force alone. Beijing wont withdraw the coast guard, maritime enforcement services, or the fishing fleetan unofficial militiafrom embattled waters. They will stay on as part of a composite whole-of-government armada. But the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) Navy and Air Force will figure more prominently in the force mix. In the days of small-stick diplomacy, the naval big stick posed an implicit threat from over the horizon. Philippine or Vietnamese mariners knew the China Coast Guard had backup if they defied it. In all likelihood Chinese commanders will flourish the big stick more promiscuously in the futurerendering the threat overt and visible rather than latent and unobtrusive. Heres the third point. A peoples-war-at-sea strategy will confront a motley coalition in which outsidersAmerica, maybe joined by Japan or Australiasupply the bulk of the heavy-hitting combat power. The Philippines is lopsidedly outgunned. Vietnam has pluck and a formidable military, but it can hardly stand up to the northern colossus without help. The coalitions curious makeup would furnish Beijing opportunities for coalition-breaking. China might reckon that any conflict in the South China Sea would be a war by contingent for the United States, a war in which Washington fixes the size of a force dispatched to support regional allies and instructs the commanders of that force to do the best they can with the resources they have. Such strategies are excellent for troublemaking but seldom decisive in themselves. Lord Wellington, for instance, led a contingent ashore in Iberia in 1807. The expedition gave Napoleon a Spanish ulcer, a nagging commitment on a new front. Yet Wellington never kidded himself that he would win a continent-spanning war with a modest expeditionary force augmented by partisans and the Royal Navy. Such an approach, in other words, would betray half heartedness on Washingtons part. After all, America would have embarked on an open-ended enterprise in a distant theater off the opponents shores without any real thought of victory. Half Heartedness kills in such ventures. Peoples war is about outlasting stronger foes under circumstances like these. If the weaker contender is a China, endowed with sizable reserves of hard power to tap, then that contender needs time. Its armed forces protract the campaign, both to gain time to muster more strength and to wear away at enemy combat strength. In short, China could win even if it remains weaker than America in the aggregate. The PLA could narrow or reverse the balance of forces in the theateroverpowering the U.S. contingent at the place and time that truly matter. It could dishearten Washington. U.S. leaders might despair of sustaining the undertaking indefinitely. Or, China could outlast Americainflicting numerous tactical losses over a long time, and thus driving the price tag of preserving freedom of the seas higher than U.S. leaders are willing to pay. If America goes home, the venture collapses. How, in operational and tactical terms, can PLA commanders bring this about? By hewing to their own warmaking traditions. China is politically and strategically predictable in the South China Sea yet operationally and tactically unpredictable. Politically and strategically predictable because party leaders painted themselves into a corner with domestic constituencies. Tactically unpredictable because thats how Chinese forces have fought since the age of Mao. Indeed, active defense, the concept whereby Mao codified his ideas about peoples war, remains the heart of Chinese military strategy. Just ask Beijing . To oversimplify, the conceit behind active defense is that a weaker China can lure a stronger pugilist into overextending and tiring himself before delivering a punishing counterpunch. Conjure up the great Muhammad Alis Rumble in the Jungle in your mind and you get the idea. If the rope-a-dope approach works on a grand scale, Chinese forces can inflict tactical defeats that enfeeble the foe over time. Active defense, then, is all about harnessing tactical offense for strategically defensive campaigns. To prosecute it, Chinese commanders seek out isolated enemy detachments they can assault on exterior lines, encircling and crushing them. The cumulative effect of repeated tactical setbacks wears down the strongand could prompt their leadership to question whether the endeavor is still worth its hardships, perils, and costs. If not, cost/benefit logic will prod U.S. leaders toward the exitand China will prevail even without an outright victory over allied forces. U.S. and allied mariners and airmen, accordingly, must study Chinas martial traditions, gleaning insight into how offshore active defense might unfold in the South China Sea. If youre Beijing and have built up a seagoing militia, an impressive coast guard, Asias biggest indigenous navy, and a sizable arsenal of land-based weaponry to influence events at sea, how do you alloy those components into a sharp combat implementand consolidate control over a semi-enclosed sea? Essaying some foresight into these matters now could pay off handsomely if China tries to put General Changsand Maosstrategic concept into practice. Speaking of whom, a final bit of advice from Mao Zedong. Chang deployed Chinas traditional lexicon, centered on peoples war, to describe how Beijing may transact business in Southeast Asia. But bear in mind that a strategy of the weak was expedient for Mao, not his strategic preference. He was writing for a China that was flat on its back, wracked by civil war and foreign invasion. It could do little else. But the goal of active defenseof peoples warwas to make the Red Army the stronger antagonist. Once Maoist forces reversed the force imbalance, they meant to unleash a counteroffensive and win on the conventional battleground. This is not Maos China. Its already a brawny economic and military power, and would be fighting on its own ground. Todays PLA enjoys far more offensive options than did Maos Red Army. Rather than revert to pure peoples war on the Maoist pattern, PLA commanders could pursue a mix of small- and big-unit engagements against the U.S.-led coalition. Peoples war, then, could start to look awfully like conventional marine combat if Beijing believes the military balance and the trendlines favor China. By all means, lets review Chinas way of war, discerning what we can about Chinese warmaking habits and reflexes. But these are not automatons replaying the Maoist script from the 1930s and 1940s. How they might transpose Maoist doctrine to the offshore arenaand how an unruly coalition can surmount such a challengeis the question before friends of maritime freedom. James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming this October). The views voiced here are his alone. https://www.flickr.com/photos/navalsurfaceforces/30239787651/sizes/o/Image: Creative Commons. Read full article Robert Farley Security, Who wins? China vs. America: 3 Ways a War in the South China Sea Could Start Many analysts are arguing that the PLAN needs to push its submarines past the first island chain in order to seriously threaten U.S. access to Chinas littoral. Preparing for this would require increasing the tempo of the PLANs submarine operations, which would more often put Chinas boats in proximity with Japanese and American subs. To be sure, Chinese submarines are loud enough that U.S. boats should have plenty of time to get out of their way, but the same could be said of Soviet boats for much of the Cold War. Its easy to imagine an even more serious confrontation in the SCS. Another accidental collision would be bad enough, but if a scenario developed similar to that of the downing of KAL 007, with a Chinese fighter jock actually opening fire on an American plane, the situation could get ugly very quickly. And if an American pilot fired upon a Chinese plane, the reaction of the Chinese public could become too much for Beijing to reasonably handle. Recommended: Russia's Battlecruisers Could Be a Super Weapon Neither China nor the United States want war, at least not in the near future. Chinas military buildup notwithstanding, the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) and its components are not ready to fight the United States. The U.S., for its part, would surely prefer to avoid the chaos and uncertainty that any military conflict with China would create. Recommended: A Hypersonic Arms Race is Coming. Nevertheless, both China and the United States are making commitments in the South China Sea that each may find difficult to back away from. Over the past two weeks, these commitments have generated a war of words that analysts of the relationship have found troubling. The key problems focus on Chinas efforts to expand (or create) islands in the Spratlys, which could theoretically provide the basis for claims to territorial waters. The insistence of the United States on freedom of navigation could bring these tensions to a boil. Here are three ways in which tensions in the South China Sea might lead to conflict. Story continues Recommended: Report - U.S. Army is Now "Weak" Island Hopping in the SCS Over the past several months, China has stepped up construction of what observers are calling The Great Wall of Sand. This great wall involves expanding a group of islands in the Spratly chain so that they can support airstrips, weapons, and other permanent installations. It appears that Beijing is committed to defending these new islands as an integral parts of Chinese territory, a position that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea does not support. Washington has other ideas, and has maintained that it will carry out freedom-of-navigation patrols in areas that China claims as territorial waters. The prospects for conflict are clear. If U.S. ships or aircraft enter waters that China claims, then Chinese sailors, soldiers, and pilots need to take great care about how they respond. A militarized response could quickly lead to escalation, especially if American forces suffer any kind of serious damage. Its also easy to imagine scenarios in which island-building leads China to become embroiled against an ASEAN state. In such a case, a freedom-of-navigation patrol could put China in an awkward position relative to the third party. (This first appeared in 2015.) Excitable Fighter Jocks China and the United States have already come close to conflict over aircraft collisions. When a P-3 Orion collided a PLAN J-8 interceptor in 2001, it led to weeks of recriminations and negotiation before the crew of the P-3 was returned to the United States, and the plane was returned in a box. Its easy to imagine an even more serious confrontation in the SCS. Another accidental collision would be bad enough, but if a scenario developed similar to that of the downing of KAL 007, with a Chinese fighter jock actually opening fire on an American plane, the situation could get ugly very quickly. And if an American pilot fired upon a Chinese plane, the reaction of the Chinese public could become too much for Beijing to reasonably handle. If China decides to go ahead and declare an ADIZ over the South China Sea, matters could become even more complicated. The United States made an elaborate display of ignoring Chinas ADIZ in the East China Sea, but China has greater interests and a greater presence in the South China Sea. Another declaration would almost certainly incur a similar reaction from the United States, putting American and Chinese planes into close proximity. Submarine Misunderstanding In the Cold War, the Soviet Union and NATO suffered innumerable submarine near misses, as boats hunted each other, and occasionally bumped each other, in the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the North Sea. The dynamics of U.S.-Chinese sub interaction hasnt yet played out in quite the same way, in part because China has yet to establish a sustained SSBN patrol, and I part because Chinese boats do not range as far as their Soviet counterparts. But as the submarine force of the PLAN becomes more adventurous, submarine incidents may increase. Many analysts are arguing that the PLAN needs to push its submarines past the first island chain in order to seriously threaten U.S. access to Chinas littoral. Preparing for this would require increasing the tempo of the PLANs submarine operations, which would more often put Chinas boats in proximity with Japanese and American subs. To be sure, Chinese submarines are loud enough that U.S. boats should have plenty of time to get out of their way, but the same could be said of Soviet boats for much of the Cold War. If a major submarine incident happened between the United States and China, the nature of the medium might offer some hope for de-escalation (we often dont hear about these accidents until much later). But such an incident would also put more lives and property at stake than a fighter collision. Concluding Thoughts Accidental war is rare, but not impossible. Common to all of these scenarios is the potential that Chinese (or less likely, American) public opinion might become so inflamed as to box in policymakers. If Xi Jinping, who has made assertive foreign policy a cornerstone of his administration, feels that he cannot back down and survive politically, then things could get unpredictable very quickly. As Denny Roy has argued, China is playing offense in the South China Sea. By establishing facts on the ground (indeed, establishing ground), it is creating a situation in which normal U.S. behavior looks like destabilizing intervention. Whats less than clear is that Beijing fully understands the risks of this strategy, or the dangers of pushing the United States Navy on freedom of navigation, one of the long-term core interests of the United States. And given that governments sometimes dont even understand that theyre playing a dangerous game until they find themselves in the middle of it, a great deal of caution is warranted. Robert Farley is a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce. This first appeared in 2015. Read full article By Deisy Buitrago and Andreina Aponte CARACAS (Reuters) - Cuba's President Miguel Diaz-Canel flew to Caracas on Wednesday for his first foreign trip as head of state, a show of solidarity for Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro, whose controversial re-election this month has drawn condemnation in the West. "I pledge to you that no matter how big the challenges, you can count on Cuba today and forever," Diaz-Canel said after meeting Maduro in the Miraflores presidential palace. "Venezuela now needs our solidarity," he earlier told Venezuela's Constituent Assembly, a pro-government legislative superbody. The United States, the European Union and major Latin American countries have condemned Maduro's May 20 re-election, saying it did not meet democratic standards. Two of his rivals were barred from standing and the election board is run by loyalists. The U.S. government imposed new sanctions on the crisis-stricken oil exporter. But China and Russia have warned against meddling in the Socialist-run country, and fellow leftist governments in the region from Cuba to Bolivia have offered their support. "Your words express the best of the Cuban people and we are forever grateful for the support you have given us," said Delcy Rodriguez, a senior Maduro ally who heads the Assembly, which critics say has undermined the opposition-controlled legislature, the National Assembly. Maduro was the first foreign leader to meet with Diaz-Canel last month after he succeeded Raul Castro to become president of the Communist-run island. Venezuela, which holds the world's largest oil reserves, exchanges crude for Cuban medical and other technical services, though deliveries have dropped in recent years during an economic implosion in the country of 30 million people. "We felt (Maduro's) victory as our own," Diaz-Canel said. "Venezuela has supported Cuba in many ways throughout its history. We have a debt of gratitude." Venezuelan opposition politicians say bilateral relations with Cuba are deeply unfavorable. "Maduro did not sell the country, he handed it over. NATIONAL SHAME!" tweeted opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido, posting a picture of Diaz-Canel wearing a sash with the yellow blue and red Venezuelan colors on Wednesday. Diaz-Canel flew to Venezuela with his wife Liz Cuesta as first lady, in a break with custom during the nearly 60 years' rule by the Castro brothers Fidel and Raul who generally traveled without their spouses. Diaz-Canel's visit came as Cuban authorities faced the chaos of flooding in the wake of Subtropical Storm Alberto that has killed already four people and prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands. (Additional reporting by Nelson Acosta in Havana and Vivian Sequera and Alexandra Ulmer in Caracas; writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Luc Cohen; editing by David Gregorio and G Crosse) President offers no proof for allegation about special counsel investigators and says Democrats are guilty of collusion Donald Trump in the Oval Office on 16 May. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP Donald Trump reached for a loaded term on Monday when without offering proof he accused special counsel Robert Muellers investigators of meddling in the forthcoming midterm elections. The president also said only Democrats were guilty of collusion. Mueller, who was appointed last year after Trump fired FBI director James Comey, is leading the investigation into Russian election interference in 2016 and alleged collusion between Trump aides and Moscow. Mueller is also investigating whether actions like the firing of Comey constitute obstruction of justice. Four Trump associates have been charged. Three, including Trumps first national security adviser, Gen Michael Flynn, have pleaded guilty to lying to the authorities and agreed to co-operate with Mueller. Paul Manafort, Trumps former campaign manager, has pleaded not guilty on financial charges. The US intelligence community agrees that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election in Trumps favour and against Hillary Clinton. The Senate judiciary committee has supported that view; the House intelligence committee, led by Trump allies, has said there was no collusion by the Trump campaign. On Tuesday, Trump tweeted: The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls. There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats. Why arent the 13 Angry and heavily conflicted Democrats investigating the totally Crooked Campaign of totally Crooked Hillary Clinton. Its a Rigged Witch Hunt, thats why! Ask them if they enjoyed her after election celebration! Trump has repeatedly referred to Muellers team as 13 angry Democrats. Mueller is a Republican appointed by Trumps own deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, who is himself a Republican. According to publicly available information cited by the Washington Post, 13 of Muellers investigators have registered as Democrats in the past and nine have donated to Democrats. The biggest donor on the team, the Post reported, also donated to Republicans. Story continues Most polls predict a strong Democratic performance in the midterms in November, potentially producing a blue wave and handing control of the House and even the Senate back to the opposition party. Trump has pursued an aggressive strategy towards Mueller in recent weeks, as talks over a possible interview between special counsel and president continue. On Sunday Trumps attorney Rudy Giuliani admitted on CNN that Trumps repeated claim there was a spy in his campaign were made for public opinion because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach or not impeach. Intelligence analysts and experts have rubbished the spy claims, saying that if an FBI informant spoke to Trump aides observed interacting with Russians, that was normal policy if a foreign power appeared to be seeking to influence an election. Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, Giuliani said, nonetheless, are going to be informed a lot by their constituents. And so our jury and it should be is the American people. In another tweet on Tuesday, Trump said he needed to focus more of his attention on issues important to Americans and less on the Russia investigation. Sorry, he wrote. Ive got to start focusing my energy on North Korea Nuclear, bad Trade Deals, VA Choice, the Economy, rebuilding the Military, and so much more, and not on the Rigged Russia Witch Hunt that should be investigating Clinton/Russia/FBI/Justice/Obama/Comey/Lynch etc. President Donald Trump on Wednesday threw Attorney General Jeff Sessions under the bus again, tweeting that he wished he had picked someone else to lead the Justice Department. Trump referred to Rep. Trey Gowdys (R-S.C.) Wednesday appearance on CBS This Morning, in which he defended the presidents frustration with Sessions decision to recuse himself from the Russia probe. I would be frustrated, too, Trump quoted Gowdy as saying. There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else! Trump added: And I wish I did! Rep.Trey Gowdy, I dont think so, I think what the President is doing is expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward. If I were the President and I picked someone to be the countrys.... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 ....chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, oh by the way Im not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated too...and thats how I read that - Senator Sessions, why didnt you tell me before I picked you..... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 ....There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else! And I wish I did! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 Sessions, an early supporter of Trumps 2016 presidential run, has been the subject of Trumps ire since he announced his recusal in March 2017 from a federal investigation into Russias interference in the 2016 election. Despite Trumps public humiliation campaign against Sessions, he reportedly rejected an offer from Sessions to resign last spring. Story continues The Justice Department declined to comment. Although Trump seemed to embrace Gowdys comment Wednesday, the Republican lawmaker has previously criticized Trumps use of Twitter to bash Sessions. Doing this publicly, I dont think helps our justice system, Gowdy said in July 2017 after Trump attacked a beleaguered Sessions on Twitter for not investigating Hillary Clinton. I think you ought to praise in public and critique in private, Gowdy said. You shouldnt make personnel decisions, particularly at the Cabinet level, via Twitter. ... The attorney general doesnt work for the president. He works for a blindfolded woman holding a set of scales. During an appearance Tuesday on Fox News, Gowdy contradicted Trumps recent claims that the FBI spied on his campaign under the orders of President Barack Obama. Gowdy, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the FBI acted appropriately when it used an informant to gather information about Trumps campaign advisers who allegedly had suspicious contacts linked to Russia. I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump, Gowdy said on Fox News. This story has been updated throughout. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un bids farewell to South Korean president Moon Jae-In after their surprise summit at the weekend (Picture: Rex) The CIA believes North Korea doesnt plan to give up its nuclear weapons programme, it has been reported. The intelligence analysis has emerged as US president Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un try to schedule a summit to discuss the nuclear question. NBC News reported that an intelligence analysis by the CIA has concluded that the North has no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons any time soon. It quoted three US officials to back up the reports findings, which contradicts Mr Trumps assertion that Pyongyang intends to halt its weapons programme. The CIA document throws doubt over Mr Trumps goal at the summit of ridding North Korea of nuclear weapons. We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2018 One intelligence official who read the report told NBC: Everybody knows they are not going to denuclearise. It said the report was circulated earlier this month, just days before Mr Trump called off the June 12 summit. US president Donald Trump remains hopeful of a June 12 summit with Kim Jong-un (Picture: Rex) At the weekend, he was more positive about the planned meeting, saying things were moving along very nicely. Bizarrely, the CIA report says one of the concessions to the US being considered by Kim Jong-un is the opening of a burger franchise in Pyongyang. In 2016, Mr Trump famously said he wanted to talk about nuclear weapons with the North Korean leader over a burger. Meanwhile, a top North Korean official is heading to New York for talks aimed at salvaging the summit. Kim Yong Chol was spotted at Beijings airport just after noon on Wednesday ahead of the Norths highest-level mission to America in 18 years. South Koreas Yonhap news agency cited diplomatic sources as saying that Mr Kim was on an Air China flight to New York which departed on Wednesday afternoon. Story continues Yonhap said Mr Kim, who had arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, was travelling with five other North Korean officials. MOST POPULAR TODAY ON YAHOO Mr Kim, one of North Korean leader Kim Jong Uns most trusted aides, is a former military intelligence chief and now a vice chairman of the ruling partys central committee. North Koreas mission to the United Nations in New York is its sole diplomatic presence in the United States. While the US tries to nail down the summit, it has been reported that Russias foreign minster is making a visit to North Korea this week. Kim Jong-un met South Korean president Moon Jae-In on Saturday (Picture: Rex) Sergei Lavrov is expected to arrive there on Thursday, according to North Koreas state news agency. He has been invited by his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong-ho. In a statement on Wednesday, the North Korean foreign ministry said: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrovs official visit to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea will take place on May 31. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov is reportedly on his way to North Korea (Picture: Rex) The statement said the pair will discuss North Koreas nuclear programme as well as international affairs. If the meeting takes place, it will be the two foreign ministers second in the space of a month. Earlier this month, Mr Ri visited Moscow for talks with Mr Lavrov. Last week, Russian president Vladimir Putin said Russia is keen to find a solution to fears over North Koreas nuclear weapons programme. Mr Putin said a full denuclearisation of North Korea should mean giving North Korea a guarantee of their sovereignty and inviolability. He said: If you dont behave aggressively and if you dont corner North Korea, the result that we need will be achieved faster than many would think, and at less cost. By Doina Chiacu WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When Kim Yong Chol lands in New York this week, he will become the most senior North Korean envoy to hold talks with American officials on U.S. soil in 18 years. The former spy chief is a trusted adviser to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, playing a pivotal role in preparations for an historic summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump. In a sign of his importance, Trump announced Kim Yong Chol's New York trip on Twitter on Tuesday. Kim Yong Chol is due to fly to the United States on Wednesday after speaking to Chinese officials in Beijing, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said, citing an unidentified source. The White House said he would meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo later in the week. It will be the most high-level contact between the two countries in the United States since Jo Myong Rok, a marshal, met President Bill Clinton at the White House in 2000. DIPLOMATIC HEAVYWEIGHT Kim Yong Chol, who holds the rank of general, is vice chairman of the ruling Workers' Party's Central Committee and director of the United Front Department, which is responsible for relations with South Korea. His many positions in party and government make him one of the most powerful people in North Korea, according to the website North Korea Leadership Watch. He has played a central role in the recent thaw in relations between the North and South Korea, as well as the United States. He coordinated Kim Jong Un's two meetings with Pompeo in April and May. He and Kim Jong Un's sister were the only North Korean officials to attend the historic inter-Korean summit of leaders in April. SPY UNDER SANCTIONS Kim Yong Chol previously was chief of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, a top North Korean military intelligence agency, and has spent nearly 30 years as a senior member of the intelligence community. The United States and South Korea blacklisted him for supporting the North's nuclear and missile programs in 2010 and 2016, respectively, so a visit to the United States would indicate a waiver was granted. During his tenure as a senior intelligence official, Kim was accused by South Korea of masterminding deadly attacks on a South Korean navy ship and an island in 2010. He was linked by U.S intelligence to a devastating cyber attack on Sony Pictures in 2014. North Korea denied any involvement in the attack on the ship and on Sony Pictures. BODYGUARD TO KIM'S FATHER Kim Yong Chol served in the military police in the demilitarized zone on the border of the two Koreas. He also was a bodyguard to Kim Jong Il, the former leader and late father of Kim Jong Un, according to North Korea Leadership Watch, an affiliate of the 38 North think tank. He has been closely linked to Kim Jong Un's succession and has been seen flanking the leader on several public visits. Kim Yong Chol is known to be difficult to work with, sarcastic and not sufficiently deferential to his superiors, the leadership watch website said. (Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Mary Milliken and Bill Trott) Officer posted on Facebook about David Hogg, who organized protest at supermarket, in latest attack on student activists David Hogg organized a die-in at the Publix supermarket chain over its support for a pro-NRA candidate for governor. Photograph: Larry Marano/Rex/Shutterstock A Florida police officer has been suspended for writing on Facebook that a student activist who survived the Parkland massacre should be run over by a car. Albert Arenal, the Coconut Creek police chief, announced Tuesday that he had suspended the officer, Brian Valenti, for five days without pay for posting a comment about David Hogg, a high school senior and survivor of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school. Hogg had organized Friday a die-in at the Publix supermarket chain over its support of a pro-NRA gubernatorial candidate. Valenti posted he hoped some old lady loses control of her car in that lot under a photo of Hogg. Valenti has since deleted the post. A union representative, Rod Skirvin, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel the 45-year-old veteran officer was sorry for his actions. Hogg who has been one of the most vocal student activists for gun reform since the 14 February attack, which killed 17 people said he respected the apology, but added that comments like Valentis were not helpful. Parkland students have found themselves the target of numerous attacks as a result of their outspoken calls for gun control reform in the wake of the shooting. A digitally fabricated image of Emma Gonzalez, a fellow survivor and student activist, ripping up a copy of the US constitution has been disseminated online, while rightwing websites have spread the conspiracy theory that Hogg is a so-called crisis actor. Paris (AFP) - France had a million fewer daily smokers in 2017 over 2016, the health ministry said Monday, thanking the dissuasive power of higher tobacco taxes. In a special report on tobacco use in a country once synonymous with smoke-filled Parisian street cafes, the ministry did not mention whether electronic cigarettes have had any impact on the apparent trend. It cited figures from a random representative survey of 18- to 75-year-olds living in France last year. "In 2017, 31.9 percent of people surveyed said that they smoked occasionally, and 26.9 percent daily," said the report. "These numbers are 3.2 and 2.5 percentage points lower, respectively, than in 2016." This represented a decline of a million daily smokers in the space of a year, said the report. The ministry pointed out that tobacco kills about 200 people in France every day, some 73,000 per year. Globally, the World Health Organisation (WHO) says tobacco kills up to half of users -- more than seven million people every year. In 2016, according to the latest WHO data, over 1.1 billion people aged 15 and older -- about a seventh of the global population -- were smokers. The number was unchanged from 2015. Tobacco use shows signs of a slow decline globally, though in some countries -- especially developing ones -- there is a rise. Smoking has been linked to several types of cancer, heart disease and stroke. French health minister Agnes Buzyn said the so-called "sin" tax on nicotine was largely to thank for the "encouraging" new trend, boosted by state-reimbursed cessation counselling and nicotine patches, non-branded packaging and health warnings. The decline in French smokers was particularly steep among low-income puffers, said the ministry. Buzyn intends to raise the price of a packet of cigarettes to 10 euros ($11.6) by 2020, up from almost eight today after a series of hikes in recent years. The report made no specific mention of any role for the massive global switch, also observed in France, from tobacco to e-cigarettes that emit a tarless vapour that users inhale instead of smoke. At the press conference, Francois Bourdillon of France's public health agency did note that e-cigarettes were "clearly" the smoking cessation aid of choice. The survey found 2.7 percent of people in France were daily e-cigarette users in 2017. Tesla TSLA and SpaceX boss Elon Musk has been especially vocal about the potential negative implications of the development of artificial intelligence . Musk has said AI poses "vastly more risk than North Korea," that "competition for AI superiority at national level most likely cause of WW3," that "AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization," that governments "will obtain AI developed by companies at gunpoint, if necessary," and that " AI is far more dangerous than nukes ." Eric Schmidt , the former executive chairman of the Board of Directors of Alphabet GOOGL , Google's parent company, has recently come down in direct opposition to Musk's dire point of view. "So, I think that Elon is exactly wrong. So. My position is clear," said Schmidt on stage at the Viva Technology conference in Paris, France on Friday. In December, Schmidt transitioned from executive chairman of the Board of Directors to technical advisor for Alphabet, while continuing to serve on the board, according to a statement at the time . If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea. According to Schmidt, the reason Musk is "exactly wrong" is that he doesn't understand the full ramifications of the potential of artificial intelligence, he said in Paris. "And he is wrong because he doesn't understand the benefits that this technology will provide to making every human being smarter. And the fact of the matter is that AI and machine learning are so fundamentally good for humanity," said Schmidt. "Over and over again, making people smarter is a net good. He is concerned about the possible misuse of this technology. And I am too. But today, the overwhelming benefit of this is positive." Schmidt continued with an example: "You would not invent the telephone because of the possible misuse of the telephone by evil people. No. You would build the telephone and you would try to figure out a way to police the misuse of the telephone," Schmidt said. Story continues One current application of artificial intelligence is Google translate, said Schmidt. In the future, artificial intelligence will be used to power self-driving cars and to improve medical care, he said. Currently, artificial intelligence should operate in conjunction with humans, said Schmidt. "At the moment it has too many errors to fly the airplane. Okay? So it's fine for the AI to advise the pilot but you do not want AI flying your airplane. Too many errors, too many false positives," said Schmidt in Paris. "Now, over time, these errors will become smaller, and eventually perhaps zero." Another problem with current artificial intelligence technology is that computers are not able to explain how they came to an answer. "And the other problem with the systems we are talking about is in the big language and learning models, they can't exactly tell you how they learned something," says Schmidt. "So the example is you have got a car and the car makes a wrong turn and the car is self-driving. And so the accident board says to the car, 'How did you learn this?' And the car truthfully says, 'I don't know how I learned that.' Because they learn it in a different way," says Schmidt. "Again, there are people working on this problem. But until we have real accuracy, AI and machine learning need to be advisory. Advice to you. So I like to think of it not as a replacement of humans which I don't think it will be at all but rather as making you smarter." But despite these current hurdles, Schmidt sees artificial intelligence becoming as widespread in society as computers are today. "When I was young, computers were the regime of very specialized people . They were very hard to use, very hard to understand. Twenty years later, computers through the Macintosh and Apple and the IBM personal computer ultimately brought us to the iPhone and Android phones that you have today. So we went from very specialized very hard to understand solutions to very general purpose solutions and we will see the same thing with AI," says Schmidt. "This technology that is today the realm of specialists will become generally useful for humans. Of that I am sure," the Google boss said in Paris. See also: 9 of the most jaw-dropping things Elon Musk said about robots and AI in 2017 Elon Musk: 'Mark my words A.I. is far more dangerous than nukes' Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Elon Musk's doomsday AI predictions are 'pretty irresponsible' Like this story? Like CNBC Make It on Facebook . More From CNBC By Nidal al-Mughrabi GAZA (Reuters) - The Israel-Gaza border fell quiet on Wednesday under a de facto ceasefire after the most intense flare-up of hostilities between Palestinian militants and Israel since a 2014 war. Militants from Hamas, the dominant group in Gaza, and Islamic Jihad fired dozens of rockets and mortar bombs at southern Israel throughout Tuesday and overnight, to which Israel responded with tank and air strikes on more than 50 targets in the small, coastal enclave. There were no reports of further attacks after Hamas announced early on Wednesday that it would cease fire if Israel did the same. Israel signaled it would halt its strikes if the rocket barrages stopped. But even during the fighting, both sides appeared bent on avoiding wider conflict after weeks of violence along the fenced border. Hamas did not launch long-range rockets at Israel's heartland, even as salvoes from Gaza interrupted daily life in small Israeli border communities. Israeli forces targeted encampments that appeared to have been vacated in anticipation of attack. No deaths were reported by militant groups or by Israel, which said three of its soldiers were wounded by shrapnel from projectiles. A Palestinian official said Egyptian mediation led to a ceasefire, and terms of the "understanding" did not go beyond "a restoration of calm by both sides". Hamas had largely abided by an Egyptian-brokered truce that ended the seven-week Gaza war four years ago. In Israeli towns near the frontier, where rocket warning sirens sounded frequently on Tuesday, schools reopened on Wednesday morning. Gaza's streets were filled with shoppers. Israel stopped short of declaring any formal ceasefire with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which it, along with Western nations, regards as terrorist organizations, but said any resumption of Palestinian attacks would bring a stronger military response. "When they test us they pay immediately and if they continue to test us then they will pay far more," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a memorial service in Tel Aviv. Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, a member of Netanyahu's security cabinet, told Israel Radio he understood there was an "indirect agreement with Hamas to end the current round (of fighting)." Islamic Jihad spokesman Daoud Shehab, acknowledging a ceasefire was in effect, said its success would depend on "whether Israel will refrain from any military escalation against Gaza". BORDER PROTESTS Both Hamas and the pro-Iran Islamic Jihad said they fired their salvoes in response to Israel's killing of at least 116 Palestinians since March 30 in Gaza border protests. Islamic Jihad had vowed revenge in response to Israeli tank shelling that killed of three of its men on Sunday after explosives were planted along the Gaza frontier fence. Violence along the border escalated in recent weeks. Israel drew international condemnation for its use of deadly force against mass demonstrations by Gaza Palestinians. Palestinians are increasingly frustrated at their prospects for an independent state. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been moribund since April 2014 and Israeli settlements in occupied territories have expanded. By late Tuesday, Israeli aircraft had hit 55 facilities belonging to militant groups in Gaza, including a cross-border tunnel under construction, in response to the Palestinian barrages, the military said. Israel said some 70 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza into its southern territory. Some were shot down by Israel's Iron Dome rocket interceptor system and others landed in empty lots and farmland. One exploded in the yard of a kindergarten before it was due to open. (Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Mark Heinrich) Hungarys government could soon make it illegal for organizations to assist migrants and refugees traveling through the country, government officials announced Tuesday. The right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, which enjoys a super-majority in parliament, submitted a new version of its now infamous Stop Soros bill to parliament on Tuesday, and the new draft includes measures that would impose even harsher penalties on organizations assisting migrants and refugees, officials said. The bill was first proposed in February as Orban ran his re-election campaign on a vociferously anti-immigration platform that attacked billionaire philanthropist George Soros for allegedly helping migrants enter Europe. The bill called for organizations that support illegal migration to register with the government. It would also prohibit organizations from handing out food or blankets to refugees. Trending: Who Is Valerie Jarrett, the Former Obama Adviser Targeted by Roseanne Barr? Under Orban, Hungary has rejected the European Unions demand that each member state relocate around 160,000 refugees, who have been pouring into Europe over the past several years from the Middle East and Northern Africa. Instead, Hungary erected a wall with a barbed wire fence on its border with Serbia in an attempt to keep migrants out. The majority of migrants were attempting to pass through Hungary on their way to Germany, which had an open-border policy toward migrants, and did not intend to settle permanently in Hungary. Nevertheless, Orban has used the liberal, open-border ideology of Soros to launch an attack against the philanthropist and accuse him of supporting the Muslim takeover of Europe. The Soros-funded Open Society Foundation announced this month that it will leave Hungary because its employees are facing harassment. Don't miss: U.S. Military Will Leave Syria Base in Deal With Russia, Reports Say The new draft of the "Stop Soros" bill has not yet been revealed to the public, but experts say it is likely to pass parliament without difficulty, no matter how draconian the new measures. Story continues Many NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and parliamentary groups, the United Nations, have voiced concerns that the first proposal would restrict the work of organizations helping migrants. The government says that these groups are helping migrants come to Hungary illegally. We are concerned that the law was aimed at intimidating organizations by introducing arbitrary taxation on these organizations and presenting them as a national security risk and saying that they are providing illegal services to migrants, Todor Gardos, an expert on Eastern Europe with the organization Human Rights Watch, told Newsweek from Hungary. It is very likely it will pass. The only question is how complicated their proposal is, and it might have to go through the national security committee [in parliament], so it could take some time. Because of the super-majority, there is no impediment to passing this law, Gardos continued. Most popular: Russian Journalist Who Criticized Kremlin Shot Dead In Ukraine's Capital Hungarys state secretary, Csaba Domotor, told reporters Tuesday that the government aims to pass the bill as soon as possible. The original draft of the bill had proposed a 25 percent tax be levied against organizations taking foreign donations. Because the majority of non-governmental organizations rely on financial support from outside of the country, many observers argued that the bill could cripple Hungarys civil society and its humanitarian aid sector. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Coffee behemoth Starbucks (SBUX) closed all of its 8,000-plus U.S. stores for four hours on Tuesday afternoon so its 175,000 employees could participate in company-wide racial-bias training. I dont know of another company in the history of American business thats done anything remotely like this, executive chairman Howard Schultz said. Closing all U.S. stores comes at a price. Bloomberg estimates it could result in $16.7 million in lost sales, which compares to $22.4 billion in revenues the company had in fiscal 2017. Starbucks will also be paying all employees participating in the training. People are seen meeting inside the ground floor, closed Starbucks Reserve coffee shop at the companys headquarters during employee anti-bias training Tuesday, May 29, 2018, in Seattle. Starbucks closed more than 8,000 stores nationwide on Tuesday to conduct anti-bias training, the next of many steps the company is taking to try to restore its tarnished image as a hangout where all are welcome. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) [Its] quite expensive, Schultz said. Were a public company and weve had certain shareholders call and say, How much is this going to cost and how do you justify this? My answer to them was, We dont view it as on an expense. We view it as an investment in our people and the longterm culture and values of Starbucks. Some customers took to Twitter to share their frustration at not having access to their afternoon caffeine fix, while others watched in amusement as people attempted to enter the closed locations. The one day I want Starbucks during the day theyre closed early bi brown brat (@ledstephelin) May 29, 2018 watching people try to open a door to a closed Starbucks that has a sign clearly on the door that says We will see you tomorrow! is hilarious ur girls fav barista (@conshaft13) May 29, 2018 Im sitting next to a closed Starbucks rn and every 30 seconds or so I hear someone try to open the door and then let out a very load sigh. Some usually include a quick insult at Starbucks or just pretend like they didnt just make a fool of them self!! megroll eggroll (@applesauce2489) May 29, 2018 Others praised the company. Story continues So annoying to see people upset about starbucks being closed in the US when its for a important reason smh. Erin (@ImThatErin) May 29, 2018 The training comes in the aftermath of the arrest of two black men, Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson, in a Philadelphia store in early April. They were waiting for a friend without purchasing anything when a manager called the police resulting in their arrests. Right away, Starbuckss leadership went on an apology tour and called the situation reprehensible. The manager whose phone call resulted in the arrests has since left the company. Starbucks settled with Robinson and Nelson for an undisclosed sum. Following the Philadelphia incident, Starbucks also announced that it would close its stores for racial-bias training. The company also altered its bathroom policy, opening the stores to nonpaying customers. A Venti-size training session Yahoo Finance got a glimpse at the training materials being used in stores on Tuesday during the four-hour long session. These materials consist of a 68-page guidebook that resembles a newspaper and an iPad for each group and a private notebook for each employee. The average store consists of roughly 20 employees. Each store family broke into groups of three to five people. As they went through the guidebook, they were given cues to watch a specific video on the iPad, which was then followed by exercises in the personal notebook and group conversations. The ground rules were listen respectfully and speak your truth and honor other peoples truth. If conversations got off track, they were encouraged to pause and restart. Conversations about race can induce a feeling that experts call racial anxiety, and when were anxious, we cant always think clearly, Starbucks president of U.S. retail Rossann Williams says in one video. There was also a 1-800 number for employees to call and navigate through challenging moments when they needed additional help. In one exercise, employees were asked to pair up and quickly find the ways they are different from one another. In another instance, employees were asked to reflect in their notebooks the first time you noticed your racial identity. noticed how your race affected your beauty standards. felt your accent impacted peoples perception of your intelligence or competence. Carla Ruffin, a regional director in the New York-Metro region and a black woman, told Yahoo Finance that she found the training to be really profound. I think what we did today we need to embed in our training and in our daily culture. I call it saying things out loud,' Ruffin said. We need to just have that conversation and say it out loud. I think it brings people together and it helps keep those biases at bay. For Ruffin, the arrests in the Philadelphia store had many layers. I immediately understood that there had to be more behind it than just what I saw on film. I didnt immediately think there were suspects or people with ill intention. I think it was caused by the exact thing I first said is that we dont put biases out there and talk about them and therefore people are acting within those biases. As a mother of a son who just graduated from college, she also felt disappointment and concern seeing the two black men arrested. She views this as a moment to start a more extended conversation. And then there was also that I wished it didnt happen, but I have this faith knowing who Howard [Schultz] is and knowing why Im part of this company that its this opportunity for us to make a difference. The training also brought in some familiar names, including hip-hop artist and activist Common. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson also produced a film entitled Youre Welcome as part of the training. Nelsons film highlighted testimony of how people of color, many of them young, feel in public spaces, while a white man in the film says when he leaves his house he walks out a free man. Me, being a man of color, I migrated to the United States from Guyana, from South America, and I ran right into racism in 1993 just walking down the street, said Les Fable, a district manager in Brooklyn, told Yahoo Finance afterward. Some of the videos that showed some of the young men speaking to the extent of walking into a store and being followed, or people thinking that youre going to steal stuff, I experienced that. It was a little concerning that those things are going on today. Fable referred to Tuesdays training as a more of a discovery for employees to listen and have a transparent conversation. What happened in Philly, no question, we could have done better. There were so many other approaches that could have happened without leading to calling the officers. I think its more so the disconnect, not the with the company, but more so with ourselves. I think if were not challenging ourselves were going to continue to point a finger and blame other people. A step, not a solution The curriculum, prepared by SYPartners and the Perception Institute, involved experts, including Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative; Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; and Heather McGhee, president of Demos, and many others. Theres no expectation on anyones part that a four-hour block of training is going to comprehensively solve the issues of racial bias, or inequities, or discrimination, Schultz said. However, its critically important to start this conversation. From now on, the training will be part of the onboarding process for new hires. For the next year, Starbucks employees will be given one topic per month to discuss as part of this ongoing training. Stores will not close for those monthly discussions. The training will be available for other companies and organizations. The promise of America will not be achieved if it is only available to those that have the right color of skin or have the right zip code and we must provide opportunity and aspiration to every single person who is American, and we must see that through the lens of humanity, Schultz said. And I think this exercise is the beginning of that for Starbucks. And if it can, in any way, be a catalyst for companies and other organizations and for the country that would be a wonderful thing. Julia La Roche is a finance reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter. Children stand by a new section of the border wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in this picture taken from Anapra neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico May 3, 2018: Reuters There is so much dust and debris flying around Washington these days, a lot of it deliberately kicked up by Donald Trump and his enablers, that sometimes we miss the things that are really important. I have a for-instance: the evaporation of all compassion at Americas borders. It has been three weeks since the presidents top law enforcer, attorney general Jeff Sessions, announced a new "zero tolerance" policy for foreign nationals attempting to cross into the United States illegally. Send everyone to jail and refer them for prosecution, he cried, no exceptions. This is already happening at the southern border with Mexico which has seen a significant recent uptick in attempted crossings by citizens fleeing lives of danger and desperation in their Central American homes like Guatemala and Honduras. Many arrive with young children in tow. Because there is no provision for sending minors to jails, this has led to the routine separation of children from mothers and fathers. Over a two-week period this month, 638 adults were referred for prosecution under the new zero-tolerance effort, a Border Protection official told Congress last week. They bought 658 children with them. Do we mean all of them were taken from their parents and carted away? Yes. Hard to imagine, isnt it? America, a beacon of decency that once welcomed the huddled masses, ripping little ones, including infants, from the arms of those who loved and raised them, whod already put their lives at risk because they believed that if they made it here their futures would be better. This, I am afraid, is what this country, under Trump, has descended to. Some parent-child separation has happened in the past, but it was never systematic. Generally, when parents were apprehended at the border, they were sent to family shelters to await either deportation or processing for asylum. Their children stayed with them. Too humane for this administration. I keep imagining somebody taking my kids from me. My kids are two and four years old, and thats the age of some of the children that have been separated from their parents, noted Joaquin Castro, a Democrat congressman from Texas. When a lot of people hear the story, they get a similar reaction. They cant imagine why this would be a standard government practice. Story continues What happens to the children you wonder, after they are put into the backs of vans in government-purchased child seats if they are young enough and driven away? They become wards of the government, which will first attempt to trace relatives already in the US. Otherwise they may be deported, deposited in shelters or with families willing to foster them. Parents who have cases that are resolved quickly may be reunited with their offspring with equal speed. But most will spend weeks and months never knowing when they will see their kids again. In many cases they may never, Michelle Brane, executive director of migrant rights at the Womens Refugee Commission, told the Houston Chronicle. We have seen children as young as 18 months deported without their parents and more commonly, parents deported without their children. Parents arrive in Central America with no idea of how to get their children back. Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border into the U.S. Catch and Release, Lottery and Chain must also go with it and we MUST continue building the WALL! DEMOCRATS ARE PROTECTING MS-13 THUGS. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2018 Trump promised in 2016 hed repair the countrys damaged immigration system. Damaged it is, as well as cruel and dysfunctional. But what he meant, of course, was that he would choke off avenues for immigrants to get in. But its a promise hes had trouble keeping. Congress nixed his wall, though it did spend millions building prototype sections outside San Diego. I visited them and while I was there a mother clambered over the existing fence with a toddler. Lucky for her zero tolerance hadnt started. The logic is clear. Only by vowing to jail everyone when they get here can America send its message to those considering making the risky voyage north: dont do it. If images of babes being wrenched from mothers adds to the terror of taking the risk, then so be it. But its ice-cold. If you dont want your child separated, then dont bring them across the border illegally, Sessions said at the border. Its not our fault that somebody does that. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the same to the US Senate. Anyone who breaks the law will be prosecuted. If youre a parent, or youre a single person, or you happen to have a family, if you cross between the ports of entry, we will refer you for prosecution. Youve broken US law. But it is Trump himself who takes the gold star for cynicism. Perhaps seeing that what he has wrought will place in him uncomfortable company in history books waiting to be written he attempted at the weekend to blame Democrats for it. Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border, he tweeted. The brazenness of him. There is no such law, passed by Democrats or by anyone else. There is only his new policy of zero tolerance. Trump has no shame, though hopefully the country as a whole will find its own and stop this barbarism at the border before more lives are ruined. A senior Iranian military official has warned the U.S. that his armed force's missile development and regional influence was too powerful to be dismantled even in the event of a direct conflict. Brigadier General Hossein Salami, deputy commander of the elite Revolutionary Guards, criticized Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's 12-point plan for potentially reaching a new nuclear agreement with Iran after President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 deal earlier this month. In his first major policy speech as top U.S. diplomat, Pompeo said last week that any new agreement would have to include an Iranian commitment to end support for militant groups abroad and ballistic missile development, something Iranian officials have roundly rejected. "They think Iran should end the development of its missile (program)," Salami said at a ceremony in Tehran, according to Iran's semi-official Tasnim News Agency. "Since they cannot force us, they ask us to do it, ourselves." Trending: Giuliani Showed Mueller Has 'Good' Obstruction of Justice Case Against Trump, Watergate Lawyer Says "No one can destroy our missile power and if they are afraid they can go to shelters," he added. GettyImages-948014350 ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images The Revolutionary Guards are widely considered to be Iran's top fighting force, and they have been involved in regional conflicts as well. Like the U.S., Iran is involved in the government-led battle against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) in Iraq, but Iran also supports the Syrian government against ISIS and insurgents, whereas the U.S. backs a mostly Kurdish coalition that also includes Arabs and other ethnic minorities operating mostly outside of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's control in Syria. Story continues Don't miss: George Soros Says Trump Destroyed the Transatlantic Alliance, Warns Europe it Faces 'Existential Crisis' In both countries, Iran has backed Shiite Muslim groups considered terrorist organizations by the U.S., including the Lebanese Hezbollah movement in Syria and Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq. Iran's successful anti-ISIS campaigns in both Iraq and Syria have expanded its regional foothold, but have also produced a violent flare in hostilities between international-backed campaigns. In past months, U.S. and Israeli forces have conducted deadly airstrikes against Iranian and pro-Iran groups in Syria. Related: Iran Tells U.S.: We Were Invited to Iraq and Syria, What About You? While not listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department, Yemen's Zaidi Shiite Muslim Ansar Allah, or Houthi movement, has also been accused of receiving Iranian backing by the U.S. and its Saudi Arabian ally. The insurgents have fired missiles at Saudi Arabia as the kingdom leads a war to expel them from the Yemeni capital of Sanaa. Most popular: Police Discover 41 Dead Animals at Pet Store, Owner Facing Cruelty Charges The U.S. has also alleged Iranian support for Sunni Muslim designated-terrorist groups such as the Palestinian Hamas, Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Iran has charged the U.S. with clandestinely supporting ISIS, which grew out of an Al-Qaeda-led insurgency following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and a 2011 Syrian uprising backed by the West, Turkey and Gulf Arab states. IranMissiles_update_09 Center for Strategic and International Studies Missile Defense Project Trump's May 8 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement came despite pleas for the U.S. to remain by European allies and other leading powers. With U.S. nuclear-related sanctions going back into effect, Iran has expressed skepticism about staying a party to the deal, but Tehran's diplomats have met with fellow signatories China, France, Germany, Russia and the U.K. in an attempt to salvage it. The U.S. and Iran have been deeply mistrustful of one another since the 1979 Islamic Revolution brought the current theocratic leadership to power in Iran, ousting a pro-West absolute monarch who was reinstalled by a CIA coup in 1953. The countries have not maintained formal relations for decades and U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia have pushed Trump to adopt a tougher policy against Iran. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Tehran (AFP) - Iran's oil minister on Wednesday gave French energy giant Total 60 days to win a sanctions waiver from Washington or it would lose its stake in a multi-billion-dollar gas project. "Total has 60 days to negotiate with the US government," said Bijan Zanganeh, according to the oil ministry's Shana news agency. "The French government too can have negotiations with the US government during these 60 days for Total to stay in Iran." Total was the only western firm to finalise an investment deal in Iran's energy sector following the 2015 nuclear deal, from which Washington withdrew earlier this month. It signed the agreement last July to become the lead partner in a $4.8 billion (4.1 billion euro) project to develop the South Pars 11 gas field, alongside the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Iran's Petropars. But after Washington quit the deal and pledged to fully reimpose sanctions by November, Total has said it will be impossible to continue unless it gets a specific waiver from Washington. If the French firm fails to win an exemption, CNPC "will replace Total in this project," Zanganeh said. The oil minister did not explain why the French firm only had 60 days, with US sanctions on foreign energy companies in Iran not due to kick in until November 4. Even before Washington pulled out of the nuclear deal, Iran had struggled to attract investment into its oil and gas sector. The only other deal was a $742 million (600 million euro) deal with Russian state-owned firm Zarubezhneft to boost production at two oil fields in the western province of Ilam. Hardliners in Iran had opposed foreign investment in the energy sector despite the government saying billions were needed to realise its potential. "Iran failed to attract much energy investment, even when conditions were at their most favourable," wrote the US Center on Global Energy Policy in a recent briefing note. "The country was far too slow in unveiling its new Iran Petroleum Contract, and when it did, potential investors complained that the terms were unattractive." Dublin (AFP) - The Irish government gave the green light Tuesday for new abortion laws to be drawn up following a historic referendum that overturned a constitutional ban in the predominantly Catholic country. The government hopes the new laws will be in place by the end of the year, following Friday's landslide referendum vote. "Received government approval today to draft the new law following the decision of the people," Health Minister Simon Harris tweeted. "This is one of three important pieces of work we need to undertake -- the other two being clinical guidelines and regulation of medicines. Work under way! Let's get it done." He hopes the bill can be published within the coming weeks, after which it will be put to the lower and upper houses of parliament. Ireland voted by 66 percent in favour of repealing a ban on abortions after an emotional campaign, which saw women of all ages share stories about having to travel across the Irish Sea to England for the procedure. Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, a former doctor who used to oppose terminations, called the referendum a "quiet revolution". The government's proposals would see abortion allowed on demand in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and between 12 and 24 weeks in cases of fatal foetal abnormality or a risk of serious harm to the mother's health. Speaking in parliament on Tuesday, Varadkar said the government wanted to legislate as quickly as possible. However, he added: "We don't want to rush it." "It's important that we act with haste but not so much haste that we put through bad legislation." He said Harris would begin drafting the new law immediately with a view to having it reach the lower house before its summer recess. Varadkar said he was considering a suggestion to extend the parliamentary session if necessary. - Blow for Catholic Church - Varadkar, leader of Fine Gael, and Micheal Martin, head of Fianna Fail -- Ireland's other main party which props up Varadkar's minority government -- both supported a pro-choice vote but some lawmakers in their parties oppose it. Story continues The legislation is likely to win overwhelming approval given the scale of the vote in favour of reform in the referendum. Campaigners broke down in tears, crowds cheered and champagne corks popped as the result was announced at Dublin Castle on Saturday, with 39 of Ireland's 40 constituencies voting in favour of removing the ban. The result was another hammer blow to the Roman Catholic Church's authority in Ireland, coming three years after referendum voters backed legalising same-sex marriage. Ireland introduced a constitutional ban on abortion following a 1983 referendum. Under current legislation, terminating a pregnancy is only acceptable if a mother's life is in danger. Otherwise, it carries a maximum jail term of 14 years. The ban has led to thousands of women travelling each year to neighbouring Britain, where terminations are legal, or increasingly turning to abortion pills sold online. Since 1983, around 170,000 Irish women have gone abroad for terminations. In the UK, abortion is legal on the British mainland but remains outlawed in Northern Ireland and dozens of British lawmakers have called for a change in the law. Varadkar said he could "certainly imagine" Northern Irish women crossing the border for terminations. "It's already the case that women who are resident in Northern Ireland... can travel to Ireland and avail themselves of healthcare," he said. "I imagine it'll be treated as part of our health service in the normal way." ROME (Reuters) - The leader of Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement on Wednesday appealed to the far-right League to drop its insistence that euroskeptic economist Paolo Savona should be economy minister in a government of the two parties. 5-Star and the League proposed Savona to head the key ministry in a coalition that seemed poised to take office last week, but the head of state vetoed Savona due to his views on the euro, leading to renewed political uncertainty. "Let's find someone of the same caliber as Savona, who would still remain in the government in another ministry," 5-Star chief Luigi Di Maio said on Facebook after meeting with President Sergio Mattarella. "If the League agrees ... we can still form a government." So far the League has refused to take part in any government that did not have Savona as economy minister. (Reporting By Gavin Jones) Rome (AFP) - As Italy struggles to form a government to end three months of political turmoil, far-right leader Matteo Salvini has emerged strengthened and eyeing victory in the event of fresh elections, analysts says. The anti-immigrant, eurosceptic leader was the dark horse of the March 4 vote, with his League party emerging as the strongest member of a rightwing coalition which topped the polls. But no single force obtained the numbers needed to form a majority in parliament, since Salvini's alliance garnered 37 percent of the vote and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement almost 33 percent. In the months of political horsetrading that ensued to form a government, the nationalist Salvini has seen his hand strengthened and is experiencing a meteoric rise in the opinion polls. From 17 percent on election day, surveys now put the League at over 20 percent -- it scored 22 percent in a recent IndexResearch poll -- while other parties' ratings have largely stayed the same as in March or declined. Seemingly unable to put a foot wrong, the bullish Salvini has begun calling the shots. He called off a proposed populist coalition government between his party and the Five Star Movement after President Sergio Mattarella rejected his choice for economy minister, the eurosceptic Paolo Savona. Under the Italian constitution, the president has the power to veto proposed members of the cabinet. "I will never accept that anyone says no to an Italian government minister," Salvini said Wednesday. "Either the government is the one proposed or there is no government." After the Five Star-League alliance collapsed, fresh polls looked to be the most likely outcome of the political saga. But while Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio is scrambling to put the coalition back on track, Salvini says he welcomes a return to the polls, confident that his party would emerge stronger than ever. "We will go back to the polls together with those who support our programme," said Salvini at a campaign rally in Pisa. Story continues "Because Italy can no longer be the country that continues to say 'yes sir' to Europe." But what explains Salvini's popularity boom? Data websites suggest his omnipresence in the media is a factor. According to the website Mediamonitor.it which follows 1,500 media sources, Salvini was mentioned 13,533 times from May 14 to 29, far more than Five Star's Di Maio. Analysts also suggest that his unflinching stance on the party's core issues at a time of great uncertainty appeals to voters. The League appears "as the political group with the greatest consistency... this consistency makes them more clearly identifiable," said Marc Lazar, political science professor at Rome's Luiss University. - A political force - Another string in the bow of the 45-year-old Salvini, who entered the world of politics aged just 17, is his gift for public speaking. "Salvini's communication skills are quite remarkable," said Lazar, adding that the League leader understands how to "play the public against the institutions". Salvini stays close to his support base on social media, his informal and often outspoken posts earning him millions of followers on Facebook and hundreds of thousands on Twitter. And he constantly seeks dialogue, encouraging his supporters to comment on his posts. Analysts contrast Salvini's political prowess with the relative inexperience of the 31-year-old Di Maio, who entered politics with his election to parliament in 2013. "Luigi Di Maio, despite leading the party with the most votes, has no clear strategy and no cultural or ideological background to guide him," Fabbrini said. "So he makes choices that are very tactical, with little political experience." On Tuesday night at a rally in Naples, Di Maio recognised his ally Salvini's clout. Having called for Mattarella's impeachment for blocking the coalition's government, Di Maio conceded: "We cannot impeach the president because Salvini does not want to." The first daughter claims to be a mother first while the president screams nonsense about gangs and rips children from their parents Ivanka Trump holds her son Theodore alongside her husband Jared Kushner in the East Room of the White House. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images George W Bush famously said family values dont stop at the Rio Grande river. It was his way of answering all those angry questions on the campaign trail about how he would stop illegal immigrants. If moms and dads couldnt feed their kids in Mexico, he explained, they would try to provide for their families in the United States. Bush badly misjudged his party, as well as his own powers of persuasion. His efforts at immigration reform died along with his domestic influence. But that wasnt the end of his partys long journey away from his values. Now, under his Republican successor, it is official US policy to deny family values for the undocumented migrants who cross the Rio Grande. Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security adopted a new policy to start criminal prosecutions of parents crossing the border illegally, and to place their children in protective custody. It wasnt enough to deported undocumented people. Now the Trump administration would actively break up their families. This is not just an inhuman policy that violates any meaning of the words family values. Its also recklessly incompetent about childrens safety, since the federal government has lost track of almost 1,500 of children in its supposed custody. For the American Civil Liberties Union, its unconstitutional because it denies migrant families due process. How did we get to the point where the supposed party of family values believes the best way to stop undocumented migration is to break up families? The answer starts with the demonization of such migrants: they arent moms and dads, but criminals. And we all know what kind of criminals Donald Trump has in mind when he talks about undocumented people: the tiny sliver who form part of the brutal MS-13 gang. For Trump, there is a vast army of MS-13 murderers out there, a force that rivals our own military in size. Otherwise its hard to understand the numbers he cited at the top of his infamous discussion about Californias so-called sanctuary laws earlier this month. Story continues Californias law provides safe harbor to some of the most vicious and violent offenders on Earth, like MS-13 gang members, putting innocent men, women and children at the mercy of these sadistic criminals, he said. But were moving them out of this country by the thousands. MS-13, were grabbing them by the thousands and were getting them out. By the thousands. Thousands and thousands of gang members getting deported, meaning the gang represents, what, hundreds of thousands of people? The FBI estimated the gangs numbers between 6,000 and 10,000 in the US. This worldview is the context for Trumps deportation policies and his comments just a few minutes later. We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in and were stopping a lot of them but were taking people of the country. You wouldnt believe how bad these people are. These arent people. These are animals. Yes, he was talking about gang members. He just happens to believe there are thousands and thousands of them pouring across the border. And its so much easier to break up families if you think there are thousands and thousands of animals, not humans, among them. It is a remarkable gang that recruits so many mothers and young children to fill its ranks of murderers. Trump has demonized migrants as violent criminals from the start of his presidential campaign. Weve come to expect him to use these neo-Nazi tactics, to re-tweet actual neo-Nazis and to express his sympathies for neo-Nazis screaming for racial purity. As George W Bush never said, this hard bigotry has given us such low expectations. But it hasnt yet hardened us to the hollow hypocrisy of those claiming to support family friendly policies within Trumps own family. Chief among those is his daughter Ivanka, who styles herself on Twitter as a wife, mother, sister, daughter ahead of her job as a presidential adviser. Were it not for her fathers policies and repeated comments, it might be admirable that she has been an advocate for working mothers and paid family leave. We might just appreciate the cuteness of the family photo of her snuggling up to her young son. Instead, she looks like she is either out of touch with her fathers policies, or out of the loop. Theres little point in advocating for families while your own administration is breaking them up intentionally as some kind of deterrent to immigration. Never mind that none of Ivankas policy proposals have made it into reality; she works inside an executive branch that is actively working against what she says she stands for. Whether she is ineffective or just ignorant, Ivankas inability to see outside her soft-focus bubble poses some pretty fundamental questions about her own political aspirations. According to Michael Wolff, Ivanka believes she will be the first woman president. Such delusions are not just a personal affliction, apparently: her own mother thinks shell run for president in 15 years or so. She might start laying the groundwork by blocking her own fathers policies separating children from their parents. In the meantime, her father naturally blames everyone but himself. According to the president, his immigration policies are dictated to him by the all-powerful Democrats who currently control no part of the federal government. Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border into the U.S., he tweeted on Saturday, ignoring good sense as well as good spelling. He concluded the nonsensical tweet with an all-caps scream: DEMOCRATS ARE PROTECTING MS-13 THUGS. Its not clear what planet Trump is living on, but it is a terrifyingly confusing one. Democrats are both punishing undocumented families and protecting them. Trump is but a hapless and impotent observer of this nightmare he presides over. For such a good family man, this is something of a stormy scenario. Because when it comes to Trumps compassion for families, theres just no there, there. Ivanka Trump's businesses have won Chinese trademarks as President Donald Trump vows to save a Chinese company's jobs: Larry French/Getty Images for USOC Ivanka Trump has won 13 new trademarks in China in the last three months around the same time her father, US president Donald Trump, vowed to save a Chinese telecommunications giant from shutting down. The trademarks range across her several collection of businesses involving fashion, housewares, and books. The approvals raise more conflict-of-interest concerns in an administration riddled with them given the Trump family and other appointed government officials business ties. Ms Trump won seven of those trademarks the same in the last month. On 14 May, Mr Trump said he would get ZTE back into business, fast after being blacklisted by the US Department of Commerce. The agency found ZTE lied about, but later admitted, to selling products containing US parts to North Korea and Iran, a clear violation of US sanctions law. Mr Trump tweeted that the Commerce department had been instructed to get it done so jobs at the telecommunications company could be saved. Though Ms Trump stepped away from the businesses when she took her unpaid position as a White House adviser and placed them to be run by a blind trust, she still personally profits from them since she did not completely divest from them. As the New York Times reported: Even as Mr. Trump contends with Beijing on issues like security and trade, his family and the company that bears his name are trying to make money off their brand in Chinas flush and potentially promising market. Over the same period, the Chinese government has also granted Ms Trump's company provisional approval for another eight trademarks, which can be finalised if no objections are raised during a three-month comment period. This is all during negotiations on a new "more reciprocal" trade deal between the US and China, as Mr Trump has characterised it. Taken together, the trademarks could allow her brand to market a products in China like baby blankets, coffins, perfumes, makeup, bowls, mirrors, furniture, books, coffee, chocolate. and honey, to name a few. Story continues Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Washington DC-based watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, told the Associated Press that the latest approval "raises significant questions about corruption, as it invites the possibility that she could be benefiting financially from her position and her father's presidency or that she could be influenced in her policy work by countries' treatment of her business". More approvals are likely to come. Online records from China's trademark office indicate that Ms Trump's company last applied for trademarks - 17 of them to be exact - on 28 March 2017. That was just one day before she took on her White House position. Records indicate that Ms Trump's business have at least 25 trademarks pending review, 36 active marks, and eight with provisional approval. Companies register for trademarks for a variety of reasons. They can be a sign of corporate ambition, but in many countries like China, it can be a defensive move since stealing trademarks is common. Companies will file to block copycats from grabbing legal rights to a brand's name. Some trademark lawyers also advise clients to register trademarks for merchandise that is manufactured in China, even if it's not sold there, as may be the case for Ms Trump's company which does not have a huge presence there but gets the majority of US imports from China. Meanwhile, US-China relations may be experiencing another set ups and downs. Mr Trump called Chinese president Xi Jinping a "world-class poker player" for meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in China without telling the US. North Korea has been reliant on a handful of allies, China among them, for basic trade in goods and services. Mr Trump is still working to meet Mr Kim in Singapore on 12 June to discuss de-nuclearisation on the Korean peninsula. A prominent animal rights group has expressed outrage at Japan's controversial whaling program after it emerged that more than 120 pregnant whales were slaughtered last year during the country's annual hunt in the Antarctic Ocean. Latest figures show that 333 minke Antarctic whales were killed last summer, 181 of which were females and 122 of which were pregnant. The annual summer hunt, which lasted 143 days, killed 61 immature males and 53 immature females or 114 in total, according to meeting papers from the International Whaling Commission's scientific committee. Trending: AI Breakthrough Can Detect Skin Cancer Better Than Doctors Humane Society International senior program manager Alexia Wellbelove criticized the "cruelty of Japan's whale hunt. RTXGA0E Reuters "It is further demonstration, if needed, of the truly gruesome and unnecessary nature of whaling operations, especially when non-lethal surveys have been shown to be sufficient for scientific needs, she told the Sydney Morning Herald. Japan says the hunting is for scientific research which it describes as "biological sampling" that allows examination of the Antarctic marine ecosystem. Whale is allowed to be sold in Japanese food markets. Harpoons loaded with a grenade are used to target one or two whales in a school and the carcass is then taken to the Japanese research vessel Nisshin Maru where the contents of the animal's stomachs, body parts and skull are examined. Don't miss: Ivanka Trump Says 'Ignore the Trolls' After Controversy Over Photo With Son In November, video showed the brutality of a Japanese whale hunt in an Australian whale sanctuary, which was only released after five years, after the Australian government feared that it would harm ties between Canberra and Tokyo. Story continues The Japanese Embassy has not yet commented and Tokyo insists its program is carried out "in accordance with the International Convention for Regulation of Whaling." Japan says it will hunt about 4000 whales over the next decade. The International Court of Justice ruled in 2014 that Japan's JARPA II Antarctic whaling program was illegal but Japan no longer recognizes the court as an arbiter of disputes over whales, the Maritime Executive reported. Australia's shadow minister for the environment Tony Burke called on his country's government to stop the annual hunt. Most popular: One Piece Chapter 906 Predictions: Will the Reverie Finally Begin? "There is nothing scientific about harpooning a pregnant whale, chopping it up and putting it on a plate. Japans position on this is absurd and the Australian government must not be silent," he said. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly took a moment from his Memorial Day appearance with President Donald Trump at Arlington National Cemetery to make a public acknowledgement of his own loss. Kelly, along with his wife Karen Hernest and the President, visited his sons grave at Arlington on Monday. Photographs of Trumps visit to Arlington showed Kelly and Trump visiting the gravesite of Kellys son Robert Michael Kelly, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2010 when he was 29. Although Kelly is the highest ranking military officer to lose a child in Iraq or Afghanistan, he has often avoided talking about the death of his son. In November 2010, just four days after his sons death, he told a Marine officer introducing him in a speech not to mention what had just happened, the Washington Post reported at the time. We are only one of 5,500 American families who have suffered the loss of a child in this war, Kelly wrote in an e-mail to the Post for that article. The death of my boy simply cannot be made to seem any more tragic than the others. But both Kelly and his late son became enmeshed in the debate over fallen soldiers after the controversy last October, after President Trump placed calls to the four military families who had lost loved ones during an n Niger. One of the widows alleged that Trump told her that her husband knew what he was signing up for, which caused immediate pushback. Kelly gave a rare appearance in the White House briefing room at the height of that debate, speaking to reporters about the death of his son and defending the President. ARLINGTON, VA - MAY 29: As Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly shake hands, President Donald Trump lays flowers on the grave of Kelly's son Robert at Arlington National Cemetery on May 29, 2017 in Arlington, Virginia. Marine Lieutenant Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 while leading a patrol in Afghanistan Nairobi (AFP) - Kenyan President vowed Wednesday that some $80 million (70 million euros) stolen from the national youth agency in the country's latest corruption scandal would be recovered. "We shall recover all the stolen money. There will be no mercy for the thieves. Their days are numbered. They will be prosecuted and jailed," he said in a statement. On Tuesday 24 of 54 suspects were hit with a raft of fraud charges, including the director of the National Youth Service (NYS), Richard Ndubai, and the principal secretary in the youth ministry, Lilian Omollo. All pleaded not guilty at a court in Nairobi. The scandal involves the alleged fraudulent payment of millions of dollars for goods and services, often non-existent. The scale of the theft has angered many even in corruption-weary Kenya, where massive amounts of money regularly disappear with total impunity, and most citizens merely shrug it off. The NYS is a paramilitary training institution that has been at the forefront of Kenyatta's plan to combat high youth unemployment. Enrolment is voluntary, and sees youths receive a stipend while receiving technical training and working on government projects. In one example of the corruption, Kenyan media have reported how the NYS paid $10 million for beef in one year -- meaning each recruit would have had to consume 66 kilos (145 pounds) of beef a day. A joint statement from 18 foreign diplomats, including the ambassadors for the United Stated, United Kingdom, Germany, European Union, Australia and Canada, welcomed the swift charging of officials over the scandal. "Corruption has long undermined Kenya's prosperity, security, and democracy. It is, quite simply, theft from the Kenyan people. We urge that Kenya's judiciary take swift action, consistent with the rule of law, to ensure fair trials and justice," read the statement. However numerous commentators have raised concerns that small fish were being sacrificed in the probe, with the youth minister in charge of the NYS at the time of the plunder going unscathed, as well other top officials, company directors and bank managers. Story continues The Daily Nation recalled Tuesday that in a previous scandal at the NYS in 2015, when $7 million was stolen through inflated pricing and fictitious payments, all suspects were freed for lack of evidence in March this year. In an editorial the paper called for the halt of "corruption mania" and said there "must absolutely be no sacred cows." The ruling "Jubilee has a rotten record of enforcing integrity in public office. Arrests are made, charges are brought, games are played and the corrupt go scot-free." Kim Kardashian is reportedly headed to the White House. (Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Business of Fashion) Her husband, Kanye West, is a fan. Her former stepfather, Caitlyn Jenner, calls him the worst president we have ever had regarding LGBTQ rights. And while Kim Kardashian may have supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, shes now reportedly prepping for a major meeting with President Trump himself. Vanity Fair reports that Kardashian and attorney Shawn Chapman Holley will meet with Jared Kushner and his father-in-law/boss at the White House on Wednesday to discuss prison reform. The unlikely summit will give the reality star the opportunity to lobby for the pardon of Alice Marie Johnson, a great-grandmother who has been serving a life sentence since 1997 for her involvement with a multimillion-dollar drug ring. This is so unfair https://t.co/W3lPINbQuy Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) October 26, 2017 Kardashian has been vocal in her defense of inmates like Johnson, whose case she has reportedly been pursuing with Kushner for months. The White House adviser and husband of Ivanka Trump has been working to drum up support for the First Step Act, which would offer prisoners services like drug treatment and job training. Its an issue close to Kushners heart, as his father, Charles Kushner, served time in a federal prison for crimes including tax evasion. Ive been in communication with the White House and trying to bring her case to the presidents desk and figure out how we can get her out, Kardashian told Mic earlier this month of her efforts to get Johnson pardoned. Thats such a huge step from where we started with that not even being on their radar. I would explain to him that, just like everybody else, we can make choices in our lives that were not proud of and that we dont think through all the way, she added of the possibility of sitting down with Trump. Story continues Though Kardashian will reportedly travel to the meeting without a film crew or entourage, her White House visit wont be entirely without star power. According to Vanity Fair, White House staffers are buzzing with excitement, while Kushner and Ivanka Trump will reportedly host the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star for a private dinner at their home. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner will reportedly host Kardashian at their home. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images) While this is something of a coup for Kardashian who has also been tweeting about other inmates the general public seems perplexed by the possibility of a Kardashian-Trump meeting. I hate this year with the red hot heat of a thousand burning suns.#NotAnAmbienTweethttps://t.co/1MVHrqDNfU Steve Marmel (@Marmel) May 30, 2018 Probably got confused over which Kim he was supposed to meet with. Pete Woke'em (@pyochum81) May 30, 2018 This is too bonkers even for the Trump era. I hope the records for these years do not survive for aliens to discover in 10,000 years. Todd Poirier (@todd_poirier) May 30, 2018 Athough A pic of Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump at the White House completes my WTF? jigsaw. THEN I am done. Wendy Harmer (@wendy_harmer) May 30, 2018 it's 2018 Donald Trump is the president of America Kanye thinks slavery is a choice Kim Kardashian is going to meet w the president of the U.S to discuss prison reform my 2016 self would have laughed about any of this even being a possibility yet, here we are Rvcse (@rxssey) May 30, 2018 Welcome to mid-2018, folks. Meanwhile, Kardashian appeared to confirm the meeting in a tweet celebrating Johnsons 63rd birthday, which coincidentally or not falls on the very day shes headed to the White House. Ivanka Trump liked the tweet. Happy Birthday Alice Marie Johnson. Today is for you Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) May 30, 2018 Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Meet the transgender activist who called Caitlyn Jenner a fraud Kim Kardashian stars in Princess Jasmine makeup tutorial and you wont recognize her at all North Wests floral braids are your new summer hair goals Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. Seoul (AFP) - The hawkish North Korean general on his way to New York for pre-summit talks is a skillful politician who has thrived through three generations of the ruling Kim family. Kim Yong Chol, described as Kim Jong Un's right-hand man, left Beijing on Wednesday bound for the North's "imperialist enemy" where he will meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and possibly Donald Trump. The man blamed by South Korea for the 2010 sinking of a warship that killed 46 sailors will become the most senior North Korean to step on US soil in nearly two decades. The meeting is the latest in a flurry of diplomacy as the two sides lay the groundwork for a historic first summit, planned for June 12. The four-star general, who is believed to be in his 70s, has been at the forefront of Pyongyang's emergence from global isolation this year. He attended the closing ceremony of the South's Winter Olympics in February, sitting just feet (centimetres) from Ivanka Trump. He was by Kim's side when the young North Korean leader met South Korean President Moon Jae-in in April, and again for the leaders' surprise second summit on May 26. But the march to become Kim Jong Un's most trusted general has been a long one requiring intellectual heft, nimble footwork and a willingness to take extreme measures. - Purge - Kim Yong Chol first donned the uniform of the Korean People's Army in the 1960s, when he was assigned to guard the heavily-fortified border that bisects the peninsula. A graduate of Pyongyang's elite Kim Il Sung Military University, he went on to make a name for himself as an expert on the hated South Korean regime. Kim often "explained everything about the South's political and military situation for more than an hour without looking at a script", defector and former army colonel Choi Joo Hwal told the Seoul-based Daily NK news website in 2016. He won a series of promotions under the country's founding leader Kim Il Sung and even led the North's military delegation for talks with the South in 1989. Story continues Kim "came to the attention of top leadership figures by hard work and accomplishment and not through patronage connections", the respected 38 North website reported. Kim's role as a military interlocutor in dealings with the South continued under Kim Jong Il, but it was his rise to the top job at the Reconnaissance General Bureau, overseeing foreign spying operations in 2009, that made him notorious. It was at Kim that South Korean intelligence pointed the finger of blame when the Cheonan corvette was torpedoed in 2010, and when artillery units shelled a border island, killing four people. Seoul said the military man was manoeuvring to show loyalty to the regime as the power transfer from Kim Jong Il to his son was getting under way. That shift was completed in 2011, when the untested Kim Jong Un ascended, carrying out a purge that saw many senior figures removed or even executed. It was a purge Kim Yong Chol would survive, cementing his reputation as a hawk in 2013 when he threatened to break the ceasefire that ended the Korean War and to turn the US into a "sea of fire" with a nuclear strike. But in the recent reconciliatory push he has also made efforts to paint himself as a more approachable figure. Reportedly a gifted linguist, Kim has appeared at ease in international settings, and even attempted a joke with Seoul reporters who visited Pyongyang in April for a pop concert. But it was a joke with a edge of steel, and a reminder of where his loyalties lie. "I am Kim Yong Chol, the guy blamed by the South for the Cheonan ship sinking". President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Kim Yong Chol, North Koreas top nuclear weapons negotiator and go-to diplomat, was headed to the U.S. for talks this week a promising development in the ongoing will they or wont they saga regarding a planned, then cancelled, summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed that Kim Yong Chol, 72, would be meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York, making Kim the highest-ranking North Korean official to visit the U.S. since 2000 when Jo Myong Rok, the late vice marshal, met with then-President Bill Clinton in Washington. Heres what you need to know about Kim and his upcoming visit: Hes played a key role in recent denuclearization negotiations and other major diplomatic events. Kim, a vice chairman of the ruling Workers Party, was among a small and select group of North Korean officials who accompanied Kim Jong Un to the Demilitarized Zone dividing the Korean peninsula to meet twice with South Korean President Moon Jae In. Often referred to as the North Korean leaders right-hand man, he was also at Kim Jong Uns side during recent meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and to welcome Pompeo to Pyongyang during the U.S. officials two trips to the North Korean capital. In February, Kim, a four-star general and former spy chief, was part of the North Korean delegation at the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. He was pictured sitting behind Ivanka Trump, though the pair reportedly did not exchange so much as a greeting during the event. Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump's daughter and senior White House adviser, and Kim Yong Chol reportedly ignored each other during the closing ceremony in Pyeongchang. (Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters) North Korea experts said Kims visit to New York bodes well for the North Korea-U.S. summit, which had been scheduled to take place in Singapore in June before President Trump abruptly cancelled the meeting last week. He is probably one of the most up-to-date North Korean officials about what North Koreas requirements are for the summit, Catherine Dill, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told CNN of Kim. Story continues I think its a pretty big deal and to me this raises whatever the estimates were of the summit actually occurring, she said. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (left) is greeted by Kim Yong Chol in Pyongyang on May 9, 2018. (Photo: Reuters) Kim has been described as the ultimate regime insider. Kim, despite sharing the same last name, is not related to the family thats ruled North Korea since 1945; but his connection to the Kim dynasty still runs deep. One of the longest-serving officials in the Kim regime, hes served all three of its leaders first as a border guard at the DMZ and then as a liaison officer with the United Nations. In 2006 and 2008, he rose to prominence as Pyongyangs chief military negotiator during talks with South Korea, reported BBC. In 2009, Kim was appointed the director of the General Reconnaissance Bureau (RGB), North Koreas intelligence service. He was promoted to four-star general a few years later. Kim left the RGB in 2016 and took charge of the United Front Department, an arm of the Workers Party that handles inter-Korean affairs. He wears several hats, Duyeon Kim, a visiting senior research fellow at the Korean Peninsula Future Forum think tank, told The Guardian. He is extremely well-versed in denuclearization matters, and seems to have secured himself a spot in Kim Jong Uns inner circle. News that Kim Yong Chol would be part of the North Korean delegation to the Winter Olympics was met with fury by some South Koreans, who blame the former spy chief for the deadly 2010 sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan. (Photo: Getty Images) Hes been linked to the torpedoing of a South Korean vessel and a hacking attack against Sony. While Kim was the head of the RGB, he was accused of masterminding attacks on the South Korean warship Cheonan in 2010. Forty-six South Korean sailors were killed in the attack. Pyongyang has denied any involvement in the torpedoing of the vessel. Kim was also linked to a cyber-attack on Sony Pictures in 2014, aimed at blocking the release of The Interview, a comedic film about the assassination of Kim Jong Un by two American journalists. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. Kim Yong Chol (left) and Kim Jong Un speaking with South Korean President Moon Jae In at a meeting at the truce village of Panmunjom on May 26, 2018. (Photo: Reuters) To travel to the U.S., Kim had to be given a waiver from travel sanctions. Kim, whos been sanctioned by Washington, is prohibited from traveling to the United States. A waiver will need to be granted for him to enter the U.S., an American diplomat told The New York Times this week. Its likely, however, that one would automatically be given under extraordinary circumstances like these, the paper said. Also on HuffPost This article originally appeared on HuffPost. At least 14 people have died in a recent outbreak of Nipah virus in India's southern state of Kerala, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The viruswhich is thought to be the inspiration for the 2011 science fiction movie Contagionis rare but often deadly. The outbreak is ongoing in Kerala, and there have been 16 confirmed cases, 12 suspected cases, and 14 deaths, the WHO reports. Although there has never been a Nipah infection in the U.S., there have been local outbreaks in Malaysia, Bangladesh, and India. Nipah is considered a zoonotic disease, meaning its usually transferred from animals to humans, typically when people come into contact with bodily fluids of animals. Nipah virus is generally carried by bats (particularly large fruit bats), Stephen Luby, M.D., an infectious disease and geographic medicine professor at Stanford University, tells SELF. It's uncommon to see this type of infection outside of bats, and the virus doesn't make them sick. However, most other mammals experience symptoms if they are infected. In humans, Nipah infections manifest with symptoms including fever, respiratory issues, and severe headaches. The infection can lead to brain damage and death. For example, people became infected with Nipah virus in Bangladesh in 2004 after drinking date palm sap that was contaminated by infected fruit bats; the bat's saliva got into sap that was tapped from trees, which people then drank, Dr. Luby explains. However, more than 600 cases of human-to-human transmission were reported between 1998 and 2015, according to the WHO. And the fact that Nipah transmission has occurred between humans in some recent cases is concerning. This is another example of an infectious disease outbreak that should put people on notice, infectious disease expert Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, tells SELF. But it's important to point out that Nipah cant transmit efficiently from human to human, Dr. Adalja adds. "This is not contagious in the same sense that the flu is," T. G. Ksiazek, Ph.D., a professor in the departments of pathology, microbiology, and immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, tells SELF. Story continues But the fact that it's happening at all is particularly worrying because "most of the devastating infectious diseases in human history began as infections that spilled over from animals and the people and then acquired the capacity for efficient person-to-person transmission," Dr. Luby sayssuch as HIV, measles, and tuberculosis. Nipah virus is also worrisome because it can be deadly, and even those who survive the infection may end up dealing with long-term health issues. After a person is exposed to the Nipah virus, it may take between five and 14 days before they start to experience any symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Then, the person may have a fever, headache, and/or sometimes a respiratory illness for anywhere from three to 14 days, followed by drowsiness, disorientation, and mental confusion. Symptoms can progress to a coma and lead to encephalitis (inflammation of the brain). Although there aren't clear stats about how deadly Nipah virus infections are, the CDC notes that during a Nipah virus outbreak between 1998 and 1999, about 40 percent of people who went to the hospital for Nipah infections died. This is a terribly serious disease, William Schaffner, M.D., an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, tells SELF. Even people who survive it can have a long-term disability. Its a really nasty infection. Persistent convulsions and personality changes have happened to some people, the CDC says, and some patients have experienced a reactivation of the virus months and even years after they were exposed. There is also no known cure: "Once people become infected and symptomatic, there is no proven effective therapy," Dr. Luby says. So the only treatment available is supportive care, including things like IV fluids to prevent dehydration and anti-seizure medication, Dr. Adalja says. Nipah is rare, but infectious disease experts are keeping an eye on it. The WHO added Nipah virus to its list of priority diseases earlier this year, along with more well-known conditions like Ebola, Zika, and SARS. However, there has never been a Nipah infection in the U.S., or even in this hemisphere, Dr. Schaffner notes. So the major risk right now is to people in the Kerala area in India or those who are traveling there. If you're traveling in the area, it's a good idea to steer clear of date palm sap, which has been linked to Nipah virus in the past, but you should otherwise be OK, Ksiazek says. Ultimately, this is not something the average American needs to worry about, Dr. Adalja says. Related: (Reuters) - Los Angeles police said on Tuesday that they had launched a criminal investigation into accusations that a gynecologist at the University of Southern California engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct with students over a 26-year period. Officials said the investigation would have international scope as they seek input from up to 10,000 women who were treated by Dr. George Tyndall at USC's student health clinic. The scandal has prompted more than a dozen lawsuits and forced the resignation of the institution's president. Police so far have the names of 52 women who have said that Tyndall, 71, touched them, spoke to them inappropriately or engaged in other misconduct while examining them as a USC doctor from 1990 to 2016, Deputy Chief Justin Eisenberg said at a news conference in Los Angeles. Police will work closely with the Medical Board of California, which licenses doctors, and will ultimately refer any evidence of criminal wrongdoing to prosecutors, Eisenberg said. Tyndall, who resigned from USC last year, could not be reached by Reuters for comment on Tuesday. In interviews with the Los Angeles Times he has denied any wrongdoing and defended his medical exams. The university has acknowledged failing to properly act on at least eight complaints made against Tyndall between 2000 and 2014. Several former patients have filed civil lawsuits, and one accusation made in a sworn declaration that was made public last week dates back to 1991. Last week, 200 of the university's faculty members called for the resignation of USC President C.L. Max Nikias, and more than 2,200 students, alumni and others at USC signed a similar petition online. He stepped down over the weekend. Tyndall resigned from the university after an internal inquiry found that some of his examination practices were beyond accepted medical standards and that he had harassed patients. Captain William Hayes, who heads the LAPD's Robbery-Homicide division, said so far 39 former patients had agreed to speak with investigators. He said police were seeking input from as many as 10,000 women who were his patients over the years. Story continues It was too soon to know if criminal charges would be brought against Tyndall, Hayes said. A hotline set up by USC has received nearly 400 reports from patients, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday. The Chinese government has also voiced "deep concern" over reports that many of Tyndall's alleged victims were students from China. (Reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, California; Editing by Toni Reinhold) A Louisiana televangelist is asking followers to donate money for a $54 million private jet that will go anywhere in the world in one stop. Jesse Duplantis, 68, a Christian minister based in Destrehan, about 25 miles east of New Orleans, made the appeal in a video posted last week on his ministrys website, reported the Times Picayune on Monday. GettyImages-74006801 Getty Images Trending: 'Roseanne' Canceled For 'Abhorrent, Repugnant' Racist Tweet, ABC Says "I really believe that if the Lord Jesus Christ was physically on the Earth today, he wouldn't be riding a donkey," Duplantis says in the video. "He'd be in an airplane flying all over the world." He claims his Jesse Duplantis Ministry had paid cash for three private jets and had been "just burning them up for the Lord Jesus Christ." Don't miss: Bernie Sanders Considering 2020 Run Against Donald Trump, Former Campaign Manager Reveals The preacher has set his sights on a brand new Dassault Falcon 7X, a three-engine jet with a range of 5,950 nautical miles. The problem with his previous jets, Duplantis claims, is that they required frequent fueling stops, while the $54 million spent on a Dassault Falcon 7X will in fact prove a money-saver as it allows him to avoid paying those exorbitant prices with jet fuel all over the world. In the video, Duplantis says God told him: "I want you to believe in me for a Falcon 7X." He tells viewers: "Pray about becoming a partner to it." Most popular: Megyn Kelly Questioned If Starbucks Wants to 'Deal With a Mass of Homeless People' With New Store Policy Duplantis preaches the prosperity gospel, which holds that wealth is a reward for faith. He is not the only televangelist spending big on private jets. Story continues In 2015 Texas televangelist Kenneth Copeland purchased a Gulfstream V jet for $36 million. Both defended their use of private jets in an appearance on Copelands television show, arguing that commercial flights were full of "a bunch of demons" that impeded their schedule. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Your friendly neighborhood Spiderman just rescued a toddler from a French balconybut, of course, he wasnt a comic book character. He was a real human beinga migrant from Mali, who, for his bravery, was celebrated in the French press and internationally, and awarded French citizenship by President Emmanuel Macron. Its a beautiful story. Mamoudou Gassamas courage was inspiring, and he saved a child in the process. But for many of us, it has also been a bittersweet reminder of the kinds of expectations we place on immigrants to prove themselves; the arbitrariness of migration policies; and the kind of exceptionialism that shapes our attitudes toward migrantsparticularly Muslim migrants. Lets take the migrant exceptionalism first. There are millions of refugees across the world who take great risks in order to make their way to Fortress Europe. (Gassama, 22, is one of themhe traveled to Libya, made a perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea and landed in Italy in 2014.) Millions of children face as much danger as that 4-year-old child on the French balcony. These migrants risk their lives to protect their families only to arrive in Europe to be met with a continent still arguing about taking an incredibly tiny number of refugees from war zones like Syria. Of course when they arrive after braving the trip, they are not awarded citizenshipand no one would expect them to be. But the path to citizenship is fraught with immense difficulties, and they must navigate it in a climate dealing with rising populism and Islamophobia. Gassama is one of the lucky onesbut he and other migrants to France should not to have to scale buildings in order to be granted citizenship. And there is no stopping the rise of political forces that would repatriate Gassama and people like him at the first opportunity. The vice president of the National Front party, Nicolas Bay, declared that Gassama had undeniably carried out an act of bravery, but that if he had to be granted citizenship in order for all other illegal migrants to be expelled, Bay would sign up to that. It was a striking indication that the most virulently anti-immigrant politicians would point to Gassamas act of courage and use it to say they are not against all immigrants, just the bad ones. Story continues But it was the Muslim exceptionalism that struck me most of all in the reporting of the story. I have no idea if Gassama is Muslim or not; his name is very typical of Muslim Malians, but thats not a proof of much. But it raised another thought for me: Had Gassama done something violent, the coverage would have definitely included speculation about Islams role in his lifeand about Islam itself. That is what happens every time anyone who carries a seemingly Muslim-sounding name is accused of a negative act. Take, for example, Nasim Aghdam, the now infamous YouTube shooter. Because she was originally from Iran, it was assumed she was Muslim, and that identity marker started to be mentioned across social media. It didnt matter that she wasnt Muslim at all. In other cases, a violent act might be carried out by someone who was indeed Muslimbut their faith is actually irrelevant to it. Nevertheless, articles on Muslim grooming gangs in the north of England are rampant, even though religion is inconsequential to why they carried out any crime. And then articles will ensue around the need for Islam to reform, or that Islam is intrinsically violent, and so forth. The presumptions and assumptions abound about Muslim-ness and Islambut only when the perpetrator is presumed to be doing something bad. When Gassamas story came out, none of that happened. There were no assumptions about him or his faith, even though he had a name from a Muslim background. Indeed, even though he specifically references God in his explanation as to what happened, his religion played no role at all in how the event was covered: I just climbed up and thank God, God helped me. The more I climbed the more I had the courage to climb up higher. Thats it. The coverage of Gassama in this case was correct: we have no idea if Islam or his religious commitments played any role for him, so why should we assume it did? But that same type of common sense ought to apply more broadly, any time someone with a plausibly Muslim-sounding name comes into the media for any particular reasons. I hope the next time such an individual shows up in the press for a negative act, we are likely less interested making presumptions about them and their faith. Alas, I doubt that will be the case. And that is what makes this episode somewhat bittersweet. Gassama being filmed in an amazing act of bravery has now altered the course of his life forever. He no doubt deserves it. But for every Gassama who is filmed, there are hundreds if not thousands who are not filmedwho risk their lives and save others without the slightest bit of recognition. They have to deal with our increasingly difficult citizenship routes on the continent. It is easy to sensationalize the case of one man, but all it would take is France and Europe showing some bravery too. Then the lives of millions could change. Mary Kay Letourneau has returned to the public eye via a documentary in which she defends her infamous relationship with a student. "Mary Kay Letourneau: Autobiography" premiered Tuesday on A&E's Biography network, which sold the two-hour special as Letourneau's "most in-depth confessional" ever. "Am I sorry he's the father of my children and the man of my life?" Letourneau says in the special, referring to the now 34-year-old Vili Fualaau. "No, I'm not." Letourneau defends the relationship, in part by saying Fualaau was no longer her student, that he was old for the grade he was in, and by insisting as she has many times that Fualaau was the aggressor. Now 56, Letourneau gets emotional in the special as she recalls her life in the spotlight. "Everybody wants to hear the story," she said. "Whether it's because they want to analyze it or criticize it. It's been 20 years but it's still there." Letourneau began an affair with Fualaau in 1997, when she was a sixth-grade teacher in Seattle. When she became pregnant with their first daughter Audrey, he was just 14 years old. She served seven years behind bars for child rape. Letourneau was released after six months with orders that she not have contact with Fualaau. When the two were caught having sex in a car, Letourneau was imprisoned again. This time, she was pregnant with their second child. In 1999, Inside Edition was there when he saw his second daughter, Georgia, who was born behind bars, for the first time. In 2005, a year after she served seven years in prison, Letourneau and Fualaau were married. The couple was more recently in the news just last year after Fualaau filed for a legal separation from Letourneau. Fualaau also appears in the documentary, which the show's executive producer, Brad Abramson, said was shot before rumors of the separation. Story continues Like Letourneau, Fualaau defends their relationship in the show. "The age difference, all of that stuff, wasn't going through my mind," he said of their notorious 1996 courtship. Letourneau, who now works as a paralegal, uses her camera time to talk about her future and what it may hold for her and her family. While the status of her marriage remains unclear, producers hope the special will allow viewers to see Letourneau's bizarre and complex story "with a new understanding." Related Video: Mary Kay's Husband Vili Arrested for DUI For more celebrity news visit Yahoo View. RELATED STORIES Mary Kay Letourneau's Husband, Vili Fualaau, Arrested for DUI: Report As Mary Kay Letourneau and Former Student Split, a History of Their Tumultuous Relationship Husband of Mary Kay Letourneau, His Former Sixth Grade Teacher, Files for Separation Related Articles: (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Tory Burch Foundation; Artwork by Quinn Lemmers for Yahoo Lifestyle) When 11-year-old Naomi Wadler took the stage at the March for Our Lives protest earlier this year, her words resonated with many. My name is Naomi, and Im 11 years old. Me and my friend Carter led a walkout at our elementary school on [March 14]. We walked out for 18 minutes, adding a minute to honor Courtlin Arrington, an African-American girl who was the victim of gun violence in her school in Alabama, after the Parkland shooting, she told the crowd. I am here today to represent Courtlin Arrington. I represent the African-American women who are victims of gun violence. Who are simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls and full of potential. Naomi may only be 11, but her powerful words and mature-beyond-her-years poise is inspiring kids (and grown-ups) all around the world. Name: Naomi Eden Wadler Age: 11 Favorite app: Safari, because it helps me do my research for my speeches and find out whats been happening. What she does: I am a 5th grade student who just happens to be an activist. Three words shed use to define her generation: Powerful. Persistent. Unique. How activism became a passion: After Parkland I really saw the tidal wave reaction from all the students around the country, and I thought that I would join in and speak on what I believed in. How she first used her voice in the gun control conversation: When I went to my principal to discuss a walkout. Student Naomi Wadler speaks during the March for Our Lives rally against gun violence in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2018. (Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images) How she ended up speaking at March for Our Lives: They called me, well, George Clooney called me. He had seen a video I had done about why I added an extra minute [in our walkout] for Cortland Arrington. He told me I had spoken very eloquently, and that he loved my message, and that hed like me to come speak at the march. What she wishes older people understood about Gen Z: That we are more than new iPhones and school. How she thinks Gen Z will change the world: By persisting. Her heroes: Michelle Obama, Lupita Nyongo, and my mom. Her greatest accomplishment (so far): Teaching myself how to play the ukulele. Story continues What she hopes shes doing 10 or 20 years from now: Being happy. A Mexican journalist has been found beaten to death in northeastern Mexico, becoming the sixth media worker killed this year in a country already awash with drug gang violence and riddled with political corruption. Hector Gonzalez, a correspondent for national daily newspaper Excelsior, is the third journalist to be killed in the last two weeks, Reuters reported. His body was discovered in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of Tamaulipas state. Tamaulipas is a hotspot of turf wars between Mexicos cartels, who compete for drug-trafficking and other organized crime businesses. Though authorities are still investigating who is behind Gonzalezs murder, cartels have often targeted journalists investigating their illegal activities. Gonzalez had recently been reporting on security issues in the state, according to Reuters. Trending: World Cup Star Mohammed Salah's Injury is God's Punishment for Breaking Ramadan Fast, Claims Kuwaiti Preacher RTX66RA0 Facebook/via REUTERS The editorial director of ExcelsiorPascal Beltran del Riopaid tribute to the journalist on Twitter. It's with immense pain that I share the news of the murder of my colleague, Hector Gonzalez Antonio, a magnificent person, a correspondent for Excelsior and Grupo Imagen in Tamaulipas, he wrote. Del Rio called for immediate answers in this case and for justice. Gonzalez is the latest victim of a recent spate of media killings. On Friday, economics reporter Alicia Diaz Gonzalez was found beaten to death at her home in Monterrey, in northern Mexico. And earlier this month, radio journalist Juan Carlos Huerta was shot dead outside his home in Villahermosa in the southeast of the country. Don't miss: What's Coming to Amazon Prime Video in June 2018The Full List of Releases Story continues At least 11 Mexican journalists were murdered last year. A 2017 report from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) found Mexico to be the second most dangerous country in the world for media workers, with only Syria more perilous. RSF ranks the country 147th out of 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index. Since 2000, over 100 reporters have been killed, with most of the cases remaining unsolved and the perpetrators unpunished. The number of murders has been steadily increasing in the country long blighted by drug gang violence. In 2017, almost 29,000 people were killed in Mexicothe highest total since records began two decades ago. Polls open for Mexicos presidential election on July 1, and the relentless bloodshed is expected to hobble the performance of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. The party is currently led by Enrique Pena Nieto, who cannot stand for another term. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek At campaign-style rally, Trump insists Mexico will fund effort Pena Nietos response: Not now, not ever Donald Trump criticized Mexico for failing to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States and repeated his campaign promise that Mexico will pay for building a wall along Americas southern border, prompting a public rebuke from Mexicos president. In the end, Mexico is going to pay for the wall, the US president told supporters at a campaign-style rally in Nashville. They do absolutely nothing to stop people from going through Mexico, from Honduras and all these other countries They do nothing to help us. Mexicos president, Enrique Pena Nieto, swiftly responded on Twitter that his country will never pay for a wall. Not now, not ever. Mexico has long said it would not pay for a border wall and has chafed at Trumps repeated insistence otherwise. President @realDonaldTrump: NO. Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever. Sincerely, Mexico (all of us). Enrique Pena Nieto (@EPN) May 30, 2018 The presidents comments could threaten negotiations with Mexico over trade policy. Trump had vowed a revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) this year, but talks between the two countries and Canada have yet to produce a compromise. The president nonetheless escalated his hardline stance on immigration on Tuesday, even as the Trump administration faces backlash for its policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border. Trump has blamed Democrats for the policy, despite his own administration publicly stating they would enforce a new zero tolerance plan to prosecute anyone who crosses the border illegally. A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) alleges that there have been at least 429 cases of immigrant parents being separated from their children, ranging from toddlers to young teenagers, over the past two years. Rights groups have accused the Trump administration of also separating children from parents applying for asylum at legal ports of entry. Story continues Although the majority of the asylum seekers are fleeing violence in Central America, Trump revived his unsubstantiated claim that many of the immigrants were gang members while likening them to animals. They want to cut people up into little pieces, he said in Nashville. Theyre not human beings. What was the name? he then asked of the crowd, to which the rally-goers chanted: Animals! Trump also took aim at Nancy Pelosi, who criticized the presidents use of the phrase animals while discussing immigrants, labeling the House Democratic leader as an MS-13 lover. Trump traveled to Tennessee to raise campaign cash for the Republican representative Marsha Blackburn, who is running for a Senate seat. The president is slated to appear at a series of political rallies and events in the coming months to boost Republicans and brand Democrats as obstructionists to his agenda. Agencies contributed reporting Michael Avenatti is claiming he did not slow down the Michael Cohen investigation, despite a recent report saying he slowed prosecutors efforts into the probe. Avenatti took to Twitter on Tuesday after The Wall Street Journal reported that the lawyer for adult actress Stormy Daniels has pumped the brakes on the investigation into President Donald Trumps personal lawyer. Any media report citing 'unnamed sources' (and not a single document) suggesting we are delaying the investigation into Mr. Cohen and DJT is completely false and without basis. We have already waived the privilege as to a host of docs and communications to ensure justice is done, Avenatti wrote on Twitter. Trending: Who Is Valerie Jarrett, the Former Obama Adviser Targeted by Roseanne Barr? The Wall Street Journal report states that Avenatti has prolonged prosecutors into speaking with Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, about the $130,000 payment Cohen made to her weeks before the election in 2016 to keep quiet about the alleged affair she had with Trump. Avenatti has not taken the steps to waive the attorney-client privilege so investigators can interview Danielss former lawyer Keith Davidson, The Wall Street Journal reported. One unnamed source told The Wall Street Journal that Avenatti had sent Davidson a cease-and-desist letter in April and to not release Daniels's records. According to The Wall Street Journal, Avenatti had also attempted to stop Daniels's former manager, Gina Rodriguez, from handing over any communications to the prosecutors handling the case until he had reviewed them himself. Don't miss: U.S. Military Will Leave Syria Base in Deal With Russia, Reports Say Avenattis actions have frustrated prosecutors, but have yet to see any discrediting information that could stop the investigation. Avenatti told The Wall Street Journal he and Daniels have been cooperating with federal investigators. Story continues We have already started producing documents to the government so any suggestion we are not cooperating is meritless," Avenatti said. The attorneys law firm was recently under fire after the Los Angeles Times reported that it was slapped with a $10 million judgment last week. Avenattis firm was hit with the judgment in U.S. Bankruptcy Court after he had previously agreed to pay $2 million to a former colleague, Josh Frank. Frank had previously told the Los Angeles Times he was cheated out of the money when the two worked together at the firm in Newport Beach, California. Most popular: Russian Journalist Who Criticized Kremlin Shot Dead In Ukraine's Capital Avenatti previously told Newsweek that the law firm does not represent Daniels and had nothing to do with him personally. Nothing has been issued against me personally. Nothing. The law firm involved is not even the same law firm that represents Ms. Daniels, Avenatti had previously stated. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek SheKnows Its been a while since weve seen Tom Cruise on American soil, hes been busy filming Mission: Impossible 7 overseas for several years. So when we saw him at the baseball game, up close and personal, in San Francisco on Saturday, he was almost unrecognizable to many fans. His face looked different? Former ESPN reporter [] No. 4 ranked bantamweight Jimmie Rivera is 21-1 overall in his MMA career and 5-0 in the UFC. (Getty Images) One of the reasons that the UFC gave its entire American broadcast rights to ESPN was managements belief that the exposure fighters could get on the various ESPN platforms will best serve the cause of turning some into pay-per-view stars. Those are fighters who command media attention, who regularly sell out arenas and whose pay-per-view numbers regularly threaten, or surpass, 1 million. There are few of those people in the world. It takes a special combination of talent, perseverance, circumstance and luck to get to the level that Conor McGregor, Jon Jones, Ronda Rousey and Georges St-Pierre reached. There are far more fighters, though, who never make that breakthrough, who arent appearing on the covers of magazines, who dont have TMZ tracking their every move, who arent so tired of doing media that they beg not to have to do a news conference. But is there anyone who regularly watches MMA who would say that Jimmie Rivera is not a star? The No. 4 ranked bantamweight is 21-1 overall in his MMA career and 5-0 in the UFC, and hes done it the hard way: He wasnt gifted any easy fights and fought his way up the ladder. He won the King of the Cage bantamweight title (called flyweight in KOTC) and defended it once. He captured the Ring of Combat bantamweight belt and defended it once. He won the CFFC bantamweight title and defended it once, finally getting a UFC contract. In all, hes won 20 in a row and hasnt lost in nearly a decade. He wont sell a million pay-per-views, and its significant that hes headlining on Friday in Utica, New York, rather than a week later in Chicago, when UFC 225 is held at the United Center. Still, hes one of those fighters who is appointment viewing. When you hear hes fighting, you set the DVR, clear the schedule and make sure the refrigerator is stocked. As he showed in a one-sided victory over Hall of Famer Urijah Faber on Sept. 10, 2016, Rivera has the talent to compete with the best in the world in his class. Story continues Hell face fifth-ranked Marlon Moraes in a fight that figures to be highly interesting if not highly watched. Rivera and Moraes have gone back-and-forth on Twitter for several months before finally agreeing to fight. Jimmie Rivera and Marlon Moraes face off during the UFC press conference inside Barclays Center on April 6, 2018 in Brooklyn, New York. (Getty Images) When Rivera defeated Faber, much of the post-fight attention went to Faber, not Rivera, and that fundamentally changed the way he viewed his career. I had great respect for Urijah, and I did for a long time before we fought, Rivera said. A lot of people talk about all he did to help the lighter weight classes, and thats true, but really, he was a great ambassador for MMA, period. He is one of the guys who pushed this sport and helped grow it. So I gave him his respect. But after the fight, I won 30-27 on all cards and everything was like, Urijah, whats next for you? I was like, Whats next for him? Who gives a [expletive]? I just beat him all three rounds and youre asking whats next for him? It kind of pissed me off and I realized I couldnt be such a nice guy anymore. A fighter has to make noise in the marketplace. Some do it with a string of dominant victories. Others do it by talking. Most who reach the top use a combination of them. Rivera has done his part to sell the fight with Moraes, a kickboxer who has scored back-to-back wins over John Dodson and Aljamain Sterling after a split-decision loss to Raphael Assuncao in his UFC debut. Each has accused the other of ducking, and there was a brief back-and-forth with Rivera and Moraes manager Ali Abdelaziz. At the end of the day, though, Rivera has great respect for Moraes talent and knows that a win will be a significant one which will carry weight with it in the division. Hes a tough guy, no doubt about it, Rivera said. Hes not as good as I am, though. I honestly believe that. However it goes, wherever it goes, I believe Im better. I have to go in there, figure out a play, feel him out and then beat him up, picking him apart slowly but surely. Hes a kickboxer and if you watch him over any length of time, thats what he relies on. I just have to go in and be the better kickboxer that I am and I think Ill do what I have to do. More from Yahoo Sports: 76ers exec in hot water over reported secret Twitter use Lakers heaven? LiAngelo works out for L.A. NBA fans blame U.S. senator for Houstons playoff loss Why NFL players invite to Trump just wont work A sign in the window of a door of a Starbucks explains the store will close early for racial bias training: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton Affirming the reasoning for thousands of Starbucks employees attending racial bias training, a new survey found most Americans believe racism is a paramount issue. Just under two-thirds of respondents to an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll said that racism remains a major problem in American society. Nearly three-quarters said racial discrimination against blacks represented a serious issue. While 30 per cent of people said racism was not a major problem, they still agreed that it exists. Only a tiny sliver, 3 per cent, said it does not exist. Other responses suggested that Americans remain deeply divided about the role race plays in their society, even as strong two-thirds majorities said they interacted with a mix of people from different races at work, school and social situations. Many people are pessimistic about race relations, the poll found, with a plurality (45 per cent), saying they were getting worse while one-fifth of people felt things were improving. A third of respondents said things were about the same. But statistically equivalent shares of people believed that race draws either too much or too little attention. While a majority (57 per cent) of people agreed that white people benefit from advantages in society that black people do not have, a large chunk (41 per cent) said that dynamic matters little or not at all. People offered those responses after a series of incidents in which authorities have been called on African-Americans who were not breaking the law, forcing discussion of the ways prejudiced beliefs shape everyday interactions. Starbucks mandated training for some 8,000 employees after two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia location of the coffee shop chain as they awaited a friend, prompting a national outcry. Soon after the Starbucks incident prompted an apology from the chains CEO, Nordstrom Racks president apologised after a store manager called the police on a group of young African-American men. In another situation, a white woman called the police on a black Yale University student slumbering in a common area. A day after Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was allegedly murdered in Ukraine, he reappeared at a press conference and apologized to his wife for having his death staged. Ukrainian authorities had announced Tuesday that Babchenko was killed by an armed assailant at his apartment in Ukraines capital Kiev. The outpouring of condolences was immediate, and many were quick to blame Russia for the murder. "I am convinced that the Russian totalitarian machine could not forgive his honesty and principled position, Ukraines Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman posted on Facebook Tuesday. The Kremlin subsequently issued a statement calling for an investigation into the murder. Trending: Genetic Analysis Suggests Twin Legends of Inca Origins Are Correct But authorities in Ukraine now claim that they had staged the journalists death in an effort to capture those who were actually trying to kill him. During a press conference, the journalist claimed that Russian government services had attempted to murder him, but that the would-be killer had been caught in a sting operation last night due to his faked death. The journalists wife and six adopted children had not been informed about the plan to fake his death. Don't miss: China May Get World's Largest Gas Field Because of U.S. Sanctions Against Iran "Olechka, I am sorry, but there were no options here," Babchenko said during the press conference. "I'm sorry for making you live through this. I've buried my own friends and colleagues many times myself." Pundits were quick to claim that Ukraine, which has been fighting Russian-backed separatists on its territory since 2014, had destroyed its own credibility by staging a murder. In an era of fake news and Russian disinformation, many say that it is unwise to cry wolf and important to uphold the truth. But Evelyn Farkas, who served as the Obama administration's deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia and Ukraine, says the fact that Babchenko's murder was staged shouldn't distract from the Kremlin's habit of assassinating its opponents. Story continues Most popular: NYC Gynecologist Files $1 Million Lawsuit Over Negative Yelp Reviews "It clearly is not helpful to Ukraines cause in terms of their credibility with the press and the international community, but the reality is that we all believed it because it fits into a pattern of Russian behavior...of extraterritorial and extrajudicial killings," Farkas told Newsweek. "We've all accepted that's what Russia does. To my mind, were all kind of complicit in some kind of charade." Ukraine's security officials said that the operation had been planned for several months, and that it succeeded in preventing a Russian plan to kill Babchenko. It is unclear why the government decided that staging the journalist's death was the most appropriate way to catch the conspirator. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Managua (AFP) - Nicaragua's richest and most influential businessman appealed Wednesday for presidential elections to be moved forward from 2021 in a bid to calm unrest that has left scores dead since last month. The comments by Carlos Pellas came as a surprise as the powerful industrialist and other business leaders have traditionally supported President Daniel Ortega. "From my point of view, and it is something largely shared in the private sector, we must find an orderly way out of this, in a constitutional way, which implies reforms including a (presidential) election moved forward" from 2021, he said in an interview with newspaper La Prensa. At least 87 people have been killed and almost 900 wounded since protests began on April 18 against Ortega and his party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front. The protests were initially triggered by now-aborted reforms to the near-bankrupt social security system, but the unrest quickly broadened into a rejection by many Nicaraguans of Ortega and his wife and vice-president, Rosario Murillo, who are seen as autocratic. The government and opposition agreed overnight Monday to resume church-mediated peace talks that stalled amid fresh violence last week. Pellas, Nicaragua's first billionaire and who controls the vast Grupo Pellas empire, proposed that a new election date be decided during that dialogue. He called for members of the national electoral council, which is controled by judges close to Ortega, to "resign immediately." Ortega must "show the willingness to dialogue and accept fundamental changes", said Pellas, 65, who has not previously spoken out publicly about the crisis. Ortega, a former guerrilla who first ruled between 1979 and 1990 before returning as president 11 years ago, has kept power by maintaining leftist rhetoric while ensuring an accommodation with powerful private industry and keeping up trade with the United States. "I am outraged and very hurt by the more than 80 lives sacrificed and by the more than 800 wounded caused by the disproportionate violence with which the government responded to the demands of students and the general population," said Pellas. "These crimes cannot go unpunished." North Korea has accused leading U.S. broadcast media outlets of spreading disinformation about North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un's motives for wanting to make a denuclearization deal with President Donald Trump. Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the ruling Korean Workers' Party Central Committee, published a commentary Tuesday attacking Fox News, CBS and CNN for featuring "U.S. high-ranking officials appear in their programs," who claimed that North Korea was only seeking talks in order to get economic assistance from the U.S. The fate of the anticipated bilateral summit, which would be the first-ever meeting between a sitting U.S. president and North Korean supreme leader, remains unknown after a recent diplomatic spat and North Korea's tightly-controlled media has sought to dispel opposing narratives. The article branded the unnamed U.S. officials "impudent" for spreading the "rubbish that if the DPRK [acronym for the People's Democratic Republic of Korea] meets the requirements of the U.S., it can get 'large-scale non-governmental economic aid' and that it should show that the denuclearization goes in a verifiable and irreversible way." Trending: Rudy Giuliani Says Trump Wont Interview With Mueller Without Spygate FBI Informant Documents "This is nonsense of hack media on the payroll of power, ignorant of who is the rival," the commentary added. RTS1T9MW Korean Central News Agency/Reuters Rodong Sinmun said North Korea has "never expected" any economic assistance from the U.S. and reasserted the government's claim that it was the U.S. that had requested talks first. After a particularly tense year on the Korean Peninsula, Kim Jong Un followed up historic achievements in his nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs by calling for talks with longtime, U.S.-backed rival South Korea. Story continues Don't miss: Who Is Valerie Jarrett, the Former Obama Adviser Targeted by Roseanne Barr? As the rare inter-Korean dialogue progressed, the U.S. cautiously entered the fray and South Korean officials first announced in March that Kim had invited Trump to meet directly and that the Republican leader had accepted. Earlier this month, the White House officially set the meeting for June 12 in Singapore and even released a "trip coin" featuring the two leaders, but the planned talks have hit major obstacles. Related: North Korea's Kim Jong Un Does Not Need U.S. Support, China and Russia Will Do Just Fine First, North Korea gravely objected to National Security Adviser John Bolton's support for a "Libya model" of denuclearization, a reference to Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi's 2003 decision to abandon his nuclear, chemical and biological arsenal in exchange for peace with the West. Bolton first made the North Korea comparison in 2004, a year after he supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq on weapons of mass destruction charges that later proved to be false. He then repeated the analogy in March, more than six years after Qaddafi was overthrown in an uprising sponsored by the U.S. and its Western NATO allies. Most popular: U.S. Military Will Leave Syria Base in Deal With Russia, Reports Say Trump appeared to dismiss the "Libya model" comparison and promised the U.S. would instead make Kim Jong Un and his country "very rich." Last week, however, Vice President Mike Pence directly threatened Kim Jong Un's rule by saying on Fox News that North Korea "will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong Un doesn't make a deal." Another North Korean diplomat reacted by insulting Pence in a scathing statement Thursday, to which Trump responded by canceling the summit altogether. RTX5XZBO 2018 INTER-KOREAN SUMMIT PREPARATION COMMITTEE/REUTERS After calling off the summit, however, Trump responded positively the following day to a North Korean statement advocating for the talks to go on. Kim Jong Un made a surprise visit Saturday to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, only the fourth-ever between heads of the two Koreas and Kim Jong Un's third foreign visit after meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in March and Moon in April. On Monday, the U.S. and South Korea said U.S. ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim was headed to North Korea to continue talks, and on Tuesday, Trump confirmed that Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman for South Korean affairs and director of the Korean Workers' Party United Front Department was headed to New York to meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. That same day, The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House decided to call off a new round of sanctions against North Korea, citing a U.S. official who said progress in recent diplomatic initiatives were the reason behind the reversal. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Paris (AFP) - The OECD on Wednesday appealed for an end to the "escalation" in global trade tensions, as the introduction of US tariffs on steel and aluminium imports loomed. President Donald Trump announced the shock 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent duty on aluminium in March, sparking a global diplomatic tussle that sent the markets into choppy waters for weeks. The tariffs are due to enter into force from June 1, despite efforts by world leaders including France's Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Angela Merkel to bring the multilateral trade system back from the brink. The EU's top trade official earlier this week said it was unrealistic at this stage to hope for a permanent exemption for the bloc from the tariffs before they kick in on Friday. Separately, the United States is readying trade sanctions against China over intellectual property theft. Despite announcing a truce in the trade hostilities less than two weeks ago, the White House has since signalled it is ready to pull the trigger on a broad array of penalties. "First and foremost, an escalation in trade tensions should be avoided," the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's acting chief economist Alvaro Pereira said. "Since the world economy is much more integrated and linked today than in the past, a further escalation of trade tensions might significantly affect the economic expansion and disrupt vital global value chains," he added. - Threat to growth - The OECD's last-ditch appeal follows similar warnings from the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund. The protectionist threat from Trump's "America First" administration is looming large over the outlook for global growth, which the OECD has put at 3.8 percent, close to the pre-financial crisis average. The organisation meanwhile voiced concern over the recent spike in oil prices. The rise in prices follows a deal reached in 2016 between the OPEC cartel and Russia to cut production following a glut that had sent prices crashing and the crude sector into disarray. Story continues "Oil prices have risen significantly in the past year, and, if sustained, could add to inflation while softening real household income growth," the OECD said in a statement. "The threat of trade restrictions has begun to adversely affect confidence, and, if such measures were implemented, they would negatively influence investment and jobs," it added. The OECD's warning came as the organisation held its annual forum in Paris under the theme of "What brings us together". The 35-nation OECD was founded in 1961 and membership of the body immediately raises a country's economic profile and opens the possibility for deeper international ties on economic, educational and social matters. The forum convened as global markets felt the heat from Italy, where a political crisis following the electoral win of an anti-establishment, far-right alliance has raised fears of a fresh eurozone crisis. Without making any mention of the political turmoil, the OECD said it expected the Italian economy to grow 1.4 percent in 2018, and 1.1 percent in 2019. US economic growth was expected to stand at 2.9 percent this year and 2.8 percent Google celebrated the life of Sren Peder Lauritz (S.P.L.) Srensen on Tuesday with an interactive homepage doodle that pays tribute to the Danish chemist. While Srensen was working as the chemical director of Carlsberg Laboratories, the operations affiliated with the Carlsberg brewery, he developed the logarithmic pH scale that measures the acidity or basicity of a solution. A massive discovery for which hes best come to be known, the scale helps scientists understand the chemical composition of liquids, and its discovery has been invaluable. Srensen was born in 1868 in Havrebjerg, a small town that is today home to around 500 people. At the age of 18, he went to study at the University of Copenhagen, studying chemistry after being influenced by Sophus Mads Jrgensen. Srensen didnt spend his whole life working as a chemist, as he also briefly worked in consultancy for the royal naval dockyard. In 1901 he took up his position at the Carlsberg Laboratories, an institute established in 1876 by brewery founder J.C. Jacobsen to further the development of beer. It was here that Srensen developed the scale. S. P. L. Srensen In 1909, when he created the metric, Srensen was studying the effects of ion concentration in proteins. Srensen developed the pH scale, which measures the concentration of hydrogen ions, as scientists were moving from color-changing tests for measuring acidity to electrical-based systems. The scale ranges from 0 to most acidic, 7 to neutral, and 14 to most basic. The discovery pushed him into studying the application of thermodynamics to the field alongside his wife Margrethe Hyrup Srensen. Srensen left the lab in 1938, the year before his death, but his legacy endures. Carlsberg notes that his pioneering research has had a profound effect on beer and science. Its listed on the companys website as one of its biggest contributions to the world of brewing, alongside other breakthroughs like the cultivation of pure yeast. Story continues Its not the first time Google has paid tribute to a famous science discovery on his homepage. The search engine honored NASAs discovery of a multiplanet star system in February, and its also commemorated geochemist Katsuko Saruhashi and biochemist Har Gobind Khorana. Through a quest to perfect the pint, Carlsbergs top scientist helped change chemistry forever. Photos via Wikimedia Commons, Unsplash / Yutacar Photos via Wikimedia Commons, Unsplash / Yutacar More From Inverse Paris Jackson is setting the record straight on why she suddenly left Diors 2019 cruise show on Friday. The model posted a statement on Twitter denying reports that she had stormed out in a rage. She did, however, confirm that she left because she was taken by surprise and a little heartbroken about the treatment of the horses in the French label's equestrian-themed show. Paris Jackson is setting the record straight on why she suddenly left Diors 2019 cruise show on Friday. Paris Jackson posed outside the show, which took place in Chantilly, France. (Photo: Francois G. Durand/WireImage) The 20-year-old daughter of Michael Jackson posted a statement on Twitter denying reports that she had stormed out in a rage. The model did, however, confirm that she left because she was taken by surprise and a little heartbroken over the treatment of the horses in the French labels equestrian-themed show. According to Jackson, the show which was inspired by Mexicos female escaramuzo riders featured animals who were branded and whipped. furthermore, i was not enraged, just taken by surprise and a little heartbroken. and i have no doubt that all high end fashion brands will soon switch over to no-fur and anti animal cruelty, as that seems to be the pattern here. and we should all be very excited about that! Paris-Michael K. J. (@ParisJackson) May 30, 2018 Jackson was upset about the treatment of the horses in Diors show. (Photo: Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) Though shes a passionate advocate for animal rights, Jackson ended her message on an optimistic note, expressing hope that fashion brands will take steps to move past animal cruelty. The outfits of the escaramuza horsewomen reimagined by Maria Grazia Chiuri for Cruise 2019 have a layered symbolism: "The shapes are really Dior, pretty and light, but at the same time they are also strong." See all about the collection https://t.co/WViBTc3oyo!#DiorCruise pic.twitter.com/QE2hjt3W2f Dior (@Dior) May 30, 2018 Fans are cheering Jackson for staying true to her beliefs and sticking up for the animals used in the show. Meanwhile, Dior has yet to respond to the controversy. Story continues Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Kristin Cavallari accused of animal cruelty after joking about eating pet chicken Iconic Hillary Clinton quote is the star of Diors Paris Fashion Week show Claire Danes confronted by animal rights activists shouting shame on you over fur fashion Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. Terrified assengers on board a Jakarta-bound flight disembarked the aircraft after a man claimed to have a bomb on the plane on Monday. Lion Air's Boeing 737 was preparing to take off from the Supadio International Airport, about 10 miles away from Pontianak, on the western coast of the Indonesian part of Borneo Island, when 26-year-old Frantinus Nirigi told a flight attendant about the bomb. One of the 189 passengers on board the plane then broke the emergency window exits, police spokesman Nanang Purnomo said, quoted in the Associated Press. Dozens of people could be seen climbing out of the windows, onto the plane wing and then to the ground, in images shared on social media by aviation consulatant Gerry Soejatman. Trending: Russia Is Arresting Jehovahs Witnesses and Holding Them in Lengthy Pre-trial Detention, Group Says No bomb was found after an inspection, but at least 10 people were injured after evacuating the plane, mostly broken bones and head injuries, AP reported. Both Nirigi and the passenger who broke the emergency exit windows were arrested. According to a statement from Lion Air, breaking the emergency window open without an explicit instruction to do so from the cabin crew is paramount to damaging the aircraft and, therefore, company property. Don't miss: Who Is Garrett Yrigoyen? Becca Kufrins Bachelorette Frontrunner Accused of Liking Controversial Posts The flight was also delayed as passengers had to wait to board a new plane to complete the scheduled journey. Monday's episode is the latest in a series of such hoaxes reported in Indonesia, which has recently faced a wave of deadly attacks, including bombings, at the hands of religious extremists. 05_29_LionAir Thomas White/Reuters Story continues At least four passengers were removed from Lion Air flights in the past month after making false bomb claims, according to the Jakarta Post. A Lion Air spoksperson said the company hoped that Monday's incident would lead to a court prosecution in court, something that has not previously happened with other such episodes. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek After winning the presidency in the Philippines in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte has pursued a relentless war on drugs, employing police forces in a brutal campaign that has often run roughshod over constitutional guarantees of presumption of innocence and other legal due processes. This war has resulted in tens of thousands of casualties from deadly police operations or extra-judicial killings, with no end in sight. To date, no person has been held to account for any abuse of authority or human rights violations in these deaths. Impunitya reality in my country even before Dutertehas reached unprecedented levels. Later this year, the world will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Passed by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948, it was heralded then as a standard by which all nations would abide, to serve as a shield against the horrific atrocities that marked two previous world wars. Since its creation, the world has painstakingly constructed an entire edifice of human rights norms, establishing domestic and international protection mechanisms to ensure the fulfillment of the UDHRs promise. But that promise has been broken around the world. In 2014, Eric Posner, American law professor at the University of Chicago, wrote The Case Against Human Rights, an essay critically examining how human rights had fared across the globe, and exposing the great chasm that exists between rhetoric and reality in how states behave. Four years later, Posners prophetic warnings still weigh heavily upon countries where human rights are existentially challenged. A recent TIME cover story The Rise of the Strongman indicated just some of the countries where this is the case, including Russia, Turkey, Hungary and the Philippines. The appeal of the strongman is not new and has enticed adherents throughout history. Their proposition has always been simple and strangely effective. They pose a false choice, presentingin a complex society of competing interestsan alternative of greater safety, security, and stability, in exchange for diminished freedoms. This false and even dystopian dichotomy has regained some currency by feeding upon growing public frustration with governments inability to make democracy work for all. And that is how strongmenperceived to be decisive, armed with populist rhetoric in a post-truth world, and ready to cut democratic cornersrise to power. Story continues In his book The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria warned of the prospect of illiberal democracywhere populist leaders take advantage of growing public discontent and win elections. Over time they then dismantleoften with popular consentwhatever constitutional guarantees there might be to rights and freedoms, thereby diminishing democratic accountability. In the Philippines, Dutertes continued calls to ignore international outrage led the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Raad Al Hussein, to declare, I am concerned by deepening repression and increasing threats to individuals and groups with independent or dissenting views. The recent International Criminal Court decision to open a preliminary examination into the Philippine death toll has prompted the embarrassing response from the Philippine government of withdrawing from the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). Duterte has also threatened ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda with arrest, should she pursue activities in the country. Without a doubt, democracy and human rights are in retreat today, and not only in the Philippines, but across all continents. What can be done to arrest this current period of democratic recession? We can and we must direct a righteous rage toward this trend, in a manner that is both purposive and strategic. The road ahead will be difficult, but we must persevere, building solidarity to affirm a politics of civility and inclusion, while employing non-violent strategies in our parliaments, our courts, our cyberspaces, and our streets. Let us be emboldened by an unrelenting will to stand up for justice, and an undying faith in humanitys capacity for good. If we do not struggle, we will not overcome. We must push back. We need more democracy and not less of it, and we must uphold human rights for there is no battle more important today. Democracy and human rights are important enablers of human development that will create conditions for people to reach their full potential. As long as persons in any part of the world remain deprived of their fundamental rights and freedom, we are all diminished. If we are unable to ensure the respect, protection, and fulfillment of human rights and fundamental freedoms of allespecially the poorest and the most marginalizedthen the universal human rights project will indeed mean nothing. Gascon is a speaker at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2018. Washington (AFP) - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke by telephone to Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for the first time on Wednesday and warned Moscow against interfering in America's domestic politics. Relations between Washington and Moscow have plunged to historic lows after tit-for-tat expulsions of alleged spies, the closure of diplomatic missions, and Russia's interventions in Syria and Ukraine. But President Donald Trump -- who campaigned for office in 2016 pledging to improve ties with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin -- has been reluctant to acknowledge Kremlin election meddling. US intelligence believes Putin ordered agents to covertly undermine Trump's 2016 presidential rival Hillary Clinton in order to help elect the tycoon, and a special prosecutor is probing claims that his campaign colluded in this. Trump angrily dismisses this allegation and the investigation as a "witch hunt," but ties remain under strain. Former CIA chief Pompeo appears to have raised the issue with Lavrov in their call. "The two discussed issues and concerns related to the bilateral relationship, Ukraine, and Syria," Pompeo's spokeswoman Heather Nauert said after the phone call. "Secretary Pompeo reiterated that though the United States seeks an improved relationship with Russia, achieving that will require Russia to demonstrate that it is prepared to take concrete actions to address our concerns, including interfering in US domestic matters." In Moscow, the Foreign Ministry said the call had been organized at US request and that the pair had agreed "on the need to work together ... to overcome the existing disagreements through a professional dialogue." Tripoli (AFP) - The gathering of Libyan leaders in Paris this week marked a positive step for the violence-wracked country, but analysts warn the absence of key players could make the optimism short-lived. The Tuesday meeting hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron brought together four leaders representing most -- but notably not all -- of Libya's rival factions. Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, head of the UN-backed unity government in Tripoli, was at the table along with military strongman Khalifa Haftar, whose rival Libyan National Army dominates the country's east. Also present were Aguila Saleh Issa, the parliament speaker based in the eastern city of Tobruk, and Khalid Al-Mishri, the newly elected head of the High Council of State. The leaders dispute each other's legitimacy and are entwined with numerous militias who are known to switch their allegiances. Despite the stark differences, the four leaders agreed to hold parliamentary and presidential elections on December 10 and vowed to respect the results. They also said they would work towards phasing out parallel institutions and unifying the Libyan Central Bank. - Key players absent - In a sign of the fragility of such promises, the Libyans verbally agreed on the proposals rather than formally signing a text. Rachid Khechana, director of the Mediterranean Centre for Libyan Studies, said a signature on paper does not necessary mean action. "Even if the declaration had been signed, we know how many (Libyan) politicians, in particular MPs, have failed to uphold their commitment," he said, citing a 2015 Libya deal agreed in Morocco which numerous signatories did not implement. Khechana highlighted the absence in Paris of "groups and networks of great influence, including the tribal chiefs and the armed groups". In western Libya, "some of these groups are more influential than the government," he added, in reference to the UN-backed Government of National Accord. Story continues Federica Saini Fasanotti, from the Brookings Institution in Washington, agreed "the solution in Libya is strictly connected to the armed groups". As long as the international community continues to negotiate with political leaders "who are not fully recognised on the ground... the situation in Libya won't be solved," she said. The International Crisis Group drew on the absence of a delegation from the city of Misrata, home to the most powerful armed groups in western Libya. - Election hurdles - GNA deputy premier Ahmed Maiteeq, who represents Misrata, refused to attend the Paris meeting according to one of his advisers. Ibrahim Ben Rjab, a senior military figure in the Misrata militia, told AFP the city had boycotted the meeting in protest at the presence of Haftar whom they accuse of wanting to establish a dictatorship. While there are "some positive points" to come out of Paris, he said the agreement has no official status and "ultimately is not worth anything because it hasn't been signed". Fathi Bashagha, a Misrata lawmaker, said that "the outcome of the Paris meeting is good," but the pledges "remain words and wishes on paper, in the absence of a clear mechanism for applying them". Analysts remain sceptical that Libya will go to the polls in December, despite leaders in Paris agreeing to adopt the necessary laws by September 16. "The legal framework for holding elections remains opaque," said Human Rights Watch. Staging elections is "unrealistic from a strictly technical perspective," said Crisis Group. "Neither the legal nor the constitutional framework is in place -- hurdles that may prove impossible to overcome within a short timeframe," the organisation added. President Donald Trump appeared to admit Tuesday that he had far too much work to do across a number of issues instead of tweeting out attacks against his critics, enemies and the special counsels investigation of Russias meddling in the 2016 election. The president fired off six tweets touching on an array of topics, like an upcoming potential North Korea summit, and again accused Special Counsel Robert Muellers team of investigators of being 13 Angry Democrats who intended to affect the midterm elections this fall. Trump seemed to be sarcastic in his final tweet, explaining he had to start focusing his energy on other work instead of the Rigged Russia Witch Hunt. He also called for the probe to look into old foes like Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey. Trending: How Much Money Will Roseanne Barr Lose With Show's Cancellation? Sorry, Ive got to start focusing my energy on North Korea Nuclear, bad Trade Deals, VA Choice, the Economy, rebuilding the Military, and so much more, and not on the Rigged Russia Witch Hunt that should be investigating Clinton/Russia/FBI/Justice/Obama/Comey/Lynch etc., Trump tweeted. The president also claimed former members of the Obama administration, along with Muellers investigators, were trying to meddle in the midterms after Republicans experienced a boost in recent polls. Don't miss: Steven Tyler Exclusive Clip: 'Out On a Limb,' A New Film About The Aerosmith Frontman's Journey to Nashville The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls. There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats!, Trump tweeted. Trump has increasingly stepped up his attacks on the special counsel and his team while also asserting that high-ranking FBI and Justice Department officials planted informants in his 2016 campaign. Trump has dubbed the conspiracy Spygate. Story continues Most popular: How Far Were We From a Real Jurassic Park in 1993? Trump has repeatedly called for the investigation to end, often demonstrably and on Twitter. More measured calls have also come from Vice President Mike Pence and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. One of Trump's lawyers, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, told CNN on Sunday that he believed the basis on which [Mueller] was appointed was illegitimate and explained the president was very much open to an interview with Mueller because hes innocent. "The president is fine with it, he's innocent," Giuliani said. "I'm not comfortable with it because it's a matter of interpretation, not hard-and-fast true, not true." This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek President Donald Trump once again vented his frustration at Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Twitter this time saying he wished he hadnt picked the former Alabama Senator to lead the Justice Department. In a series of tweets on Wednesday morning, Trump quoted a Fox News interview with House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy in which the Republican Congressman said: I think what the President is doing is expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward. If I were the President and I picked someone to be the countrys chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, Oh by the way Im not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated too and thats how I read that. Senator Sessions, why didnt you tell me before I picked you. There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else! Rep.Trey Gowdy, I dont think so, I think what the President is doing is expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward. If I were the President and I picked someone to be the countrys.... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 ....chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, oh by the way Im not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated too...and thats how I read that - Senator Sessions, why didnt you tell me before I picked you..... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 ....There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else! And I wish I did! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 Trump added, And I wish I did! The tweets come after the New York Times reported that Trump tried to get Sessions to reverse his decision to recuse himself in Robert Muellers Russia probe, which could be key in the investigation into whether the President obstructed justice. Sessions recusal last March, which was based on contact with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. that he failed to disclose during his confirmation hearing, has been a constant point of contention with Trump during Muellers year-long investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has publicly mused about firing Sessions in the past and Sessions has called the Presidents criticism kind of hurtful. By Verity Crane and Alissa de Carbonnel LIEGE, Belgium/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Islamic State claimed responsibility on Wednesday for an attack the previous day in the Belgian city of Liege in which two policewomen and a bystander were killed, but provided no proof. The militant group said in an online statement that a "soldier of the caliphate" had carried out what Belgian police called a terrorist attack. It has previously claimed similar "lone wolf" acts thought to be Islamist-inspired, often without providing evidence. Belgian authorities meanwhile faced questions over why the attacker, a prison inmate who was suspected of links to radical Islamists in jail, was let out for a day. He was shot dead by police at a school near the scene. Interior Minister Jan Jambon said authorities were still examining the motives of Benjamin Herman, a 31-year-old Belgian drug dealer who had been in jail for years but was let out for two days on Monday to prepare for an eventual release in 2020. Herman had shouted "Allahu Akbar", the Muslim affirmation of faith, during his attack and he had had contact with Islamist radicals in jail in 2016 and early 2017. He also appeared to have followed online exhortations from Islamic State to stab police officers and use their service weapons to shoot others, prosecutors said. A cleaning woman at the school who found herself "nose to face with the killer" told public broadcaster RTBF that he spared her because she was Muslim. While he briefly held her hostage, he told her he wanted the police to "writhe; I want to make them stew". Justice Minister Koen Geens told RTBF radio he was having pangs of conscience over whether the man should have been allowed the furlough. Still reeling from the attack, residents of Belgium's third biggest city lay flowers and candles at the scene of the shooting on Wednesday, and officials held a moment of silence. "We had all of the little ones from the high school who were evacuated," said an emotional nursery school teacher, Joelle Chalon. "I walk this way to work every day." Authorities praised the quick-wittedness of the cafe owner outside whose bar Herman had killed the two policewomen, aged 54 and 44. By the time the killer, wielding two police pistols, came in looking for more victims, the cafe proprietor had got all of his customers into hiding. Jambon described Herman as a psychologically unstable man who might have been on drugs, pointing to his murder of an acquaintance 50 km (30 miles) away on Monday night. "There are signs he was radicalized in prison but is it that radicalization which drove him to commit these acts?" Jambon said, adding that although Herman was flagged up in security reports in 2016 and early 2017, he had been a fringe figure. JAIL TO JIHAD? In and out of jail for a variety of crimes since 2003, Herman may have found a path to violence that has heightened concerns that Europe's prisons are incubators for jihadism. It was the 14th time since his detention that he was granted temporary leave, Geens said. "Everyone in Belgium is asking the same question: how is it possible that someone convicted of such serious acts was allowed to leave prisons?" Deputy Prime Minister Alexander de Croo was quoted as saying. The national crisis center, on high alert since a Brussels-based Islamic State cell helped kill 130 people in Paris in 2015, did not raise its alert level, indicating no follow-up attacks were expected. "I think it was just one individual who completely snapped," said Pieter Van Ostaeyen, a specialist on jihadism. "I don't think it was an organized attack." Convicts have been behind several Islamist militant attacks in Europe. In Belgium, around 450 prisoners are deemed radical, including 46 that are seen as a threat of radicalizing others, according to lawmaker George Dallemagne, who sits on several Belgian parliamentary security committees. "We have a tragic experience in Belgium, with people entering prison as petty criminals and leaving as terrorists," he told Reuters. (Additional reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek, Alastair Macdonald and Robin Emmott in Brussels and Ali Abdelaty, John Davison in Cairo; Writing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Richard Balmforth/Mark Heinrich/Catherine Evans) By Natalia Zinets KIEV (Reuters) - A prominent Russian journalist and critic of President Vladimir Putin was shot dead in Ukraine where he had fled into exile following threats, police said on Tuesday. Arkady Babchenko, 41, died of his wounds in an ambulance after his wife found him covered in his blood in their home, police said, adding they suspected the murder was due to Babchenko's professional activities. Babchenko, a former soldier in the Chechen war who became one of Russia's best-known war correspondents, had left his homeland fearing for his life after criticizing Russian policy in Ukraine and Syria. He had been denounced by pro-government politicians in Russia over comments on social media about the Russian bombing of Aleppo in Syria's war, and over his characterization of Russia as an aggressor toward Ukraine. "The first and the most probable version is his professional activity," Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko said at a televised press briefing when asked what police suspected lay behind the murder. Babchenko's wife is in a state of shock and police are unable to speak to her, he said. Ukrainian authorities released a drawing of the man they suspect is Babchenko's assassin, around 40-45 years old, with a grey beard and wearing a cap. Two years ago Pavel Sheremet, a Belarussian journalist known for his criticism of his home country's leadership and his friendship with the slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was blown up in a car bomb in central Kiev. "Putin's regime takes aim at those who cannot be broken or intimidated," Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and adviser to the interior minister, wrote on Facebook. Babchenko's house had run out of bread and he had gone to the shops to buy some, Gerashchenko said. He was gunned down on Tuesday by someone waiting for him in the stairwell at the entrance to his home. He was shot him in the back several times. Story continues "Today in Kiev on the threshold of the apartment where he lived, famous Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was shot and killed, a consistent opponent of the Putin regime and a friend of Ukraine." In a statement, the Russian foreign ministry said journalists were being killed with impunity in Ukraine. "Bloody crimes and total impunity have become routine for the Kiev regime. We demand that the Ukrainian authorities make every effort to promptly investigate," it said on Facebook. The Investigative Committee of Russia said it had opened a criminal case into Babchenko's death. Babchenko took part in the war in Chechnya as a soldier. He then he became a war reporter for several Russian newspapers. On Feb. 27 last year, he wrote on Facebook that he had left Russia. He reported on Russia sending private military contractors to Syria and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17 in July 2014 in eastern Ukraine, for which investigators last week held the Russian state responsible. Russian authorities again denied any connection with the plane's downing over an area of Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatist forces. In his last Facebook post before he was killed, Babchenko recalled an incident four years ago when he was meant to fly in a Ukrainian military helicopter in Ukraine's embattled Donbass region. The helicopter was overloaded and he was not permitted to fly. It was shot down and 14 people on board were killed. "And I was lucky. Second birthday, it turns out," he wrote. Related Video: Giuliani Calls Out Origins of Mueller Probe Watch news, TV and more on Yahoo View. (Additional reporting by Anton Zverev and Polina Devitt in Moscow; writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Mark Heinrich) The Justice Department granted antitrust approval on Tuesday for Bayers BAYRY proposed acquisition of Monsanto MON, after requiring the German giant to divest roughly $9 billion worth of assets and businesses. So lets dive into a quick overview of everything investors need to know about the deal. Brief Background Bayer is a Leverkusen, Germany health care, pharmaceutical, and agriculture conglomerate that is currently a major force in the pesticide industry and employs almost 100,000 people worldwide. St. Louis-based Monsanto is a world leader in seeds and crop genes. Therefore, at the moment, Bayer is much bigger in Europe and Asia, while Monsantos presence in North America is huge. The roughly $66 billion merger was initially announced in September 2016, and would make Bayer the worlds largest supplier of pesticides and seeds. Bayer received antitrust approval from the EU on March 21. The DOJs approval was one of the last remaining regulatory hurdles to jump in order for Bayer to officially buy Monsanto. The move also comes after Dow Chemical and DuPont DWDP successfully completed their merger last September. Meanwhile, investors await news about AT&Ts T acquisition of Time Warner TWX, with a federal judge expected to hand down a decision by June 12. DOJ Approval The DOJ announced that it required Bayer to move on from $9 billion of assets businesses, which the department said in an official statement was the largest merger divestiture ever required by the United States. The antitrust division was reviewing Bayers acquisition based on the idea that it would lead to higher seed prices and negatively impact both farmers and consumers. Without the agreed-to divestitures, the proposed merger would likely result in higher prices, lower quality, and fewer choices across a wide array of seed and crop protection products. The merger also threatened to stifle the innovation in agricultural technologies that has delivered significant benefits to American farmers and consumers. Story continues Bayer must now divest its businesses that compete with Monsanto. The list of businesses Bayer must divest includes: cotton, canola, soybean, and vegetable seed businesses, along with Bayers Liberty herbicide businesswhich the DOJ noted is a key competitor to Monsantos Roundup brand. Furthermore, the settlement requires structural divestitures and the sell-off of some intellectual property and research capabilities, in order to foster a competitive environment going forward. This includes Bayers relatively new digital agriculture business. The German giant will sell these businesses and assets to chemicals rival BASF SE BAS, which the DOJ referred to as an experienced chemical company with a substantial crop protection business that will fully resolve all horizontal and vertical competition concerns. The DOJ now believes that American farmers and consumers will continue to benefit from competition in this industry. Going Forward The planned merger is now subject to a 60-day public comment period. Receipt of the DOJ's approval brings us close to our goal of creating a leading company in agriculture, Bayer CEO Werner Baumann said in a company statement. Bayer noted in the same statement that it has obtained almost all clearances and now expects to receive all outstanding approvals very shortly. According to the DOJ's conditional approval, the integration of Monsanto into Bayer can take place as soon as the divestments to BASF have been accomplished. This is expected to be in approximately two months. Recent Performance Shares of Bayer and Monsanto both opened higher on Wednesday following the DOJ announcement. However, over the last five years, both Bayer and Monsanto have greatly underperformed the S&P 500s 68% surge. BAYRY stock is up just 11.8%, while MON has climbed 26.7%. Over the last year, investors can see that things look even worse for Bayer, which is one of the reasons that it hopes its planned merger finally goes through after two years of speculation and review. Today's Stocks from Zacks' Hottest Strategies It's hard to believe, even for us at Zacks. But while the market gained +21.9% in 2017, our top stock-picking screens have returned +115.0%, +109.3%, +104.9%, +98.6%, and +67.1%. And this outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. Over the years it has been remarkably consistent. From 2000 - 2017, the composite yearly average gain for these strategies has beaten the market more than 19X over. Maybe even more remarkable is the fact that we're willing to share their latest stocks with you without cost or obligation. See Them Free>> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Time Warner Inc. (TWX) : Free Stock Analysis Report Bayer Aktiengesellschaft (BAYRY) : Free Stock Analysis Report AT&T Inc. (T) : Free Stock Analysis Report Basic Energy Services, Inc. (BAS) : Free Stock Analysis Report Monsanto Company (MON) : Free Stock Analysis Report Dow Chemical Company (The) (DWDP) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research A Mexican journalist has been beaten to death in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas Tuesday, the sixth journalist killed in the country this year. The body of Hector Gonzalez, a correspondent for national daily newspaper Excelsior, was found in the states capital city of Ciudad Victoria, Reuters reports citing the state attorney generals office. Gonzalez is the third reporter to be killed in Mexico in the last two weeks, and at least the sixth this year. According to Reporters Without Borders, Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist; at least 11 were killed in the country in 2017. In January, another reporter was found dead in Tamaulipas, which borders Texas and has long been wracked by gang violence and drug-related crime. Murders in Mexico reached record highs in 2017 according to official data, Reuters reports. With July 1 elections on the horizon, the uptick in violence has damaged the popularity of President Enrique Pena Nieto and fanned support for his leftist opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who currently leads public opinion polls. Former Buffalo Bills offensive guard Richie Incognito wont be charged after a strange incident at a Florida gym. (AP) At least Richie Incognito wont have any legal issues stemming from a bizarre incident at a gym in Florida. Incognito, the four-time Pro Bowl guard who was released by the Buffalo Bills earlier this month, was accused of throwing a dumbbell at another gym patron. That prompted a forced mental evaluation of Incognito. However, police in Boca Raton, Fla. told USA Today that Incognito wont be charged with a crime. No charges coming for Incognito USA Todays A.J. Perez reported that police had decided to not charge Incognito. Incognito was held for a psychiatric evaluation under the Baker Act in Florida. A person can be held involuntarily for up to 72 hours, then can be released if no charges are brought. Police told Perez that they were unaware if Incognito stayed for evaluation past the 72-hour window. Once individuals are received by the mental health facility, we are no longer involved in the process, Boca Raton police spokesperson Jessica Desir said. We do not have further information to provide. A strange incident will linger for Incognito When Incognito threw a dumbbell at another gym patron he was suffering an altered, paranoid state and believed ordinary citizens were government officials that were tracking him and recording him, police reports said. Theres a guy walking around with headphones on, Incognito reportedly said, according to the police report. Im running NSA class level 3 documents through my phone. I cant have anybody in bluetooth capability of me or taking pictures of me. Incognito is best known for his involvement in a bullying scandal when he was with the Miami Dolphins. He had a strange offseason this year, announcing his retirement and then a couple days later tweeting at the Buffalo Bills he would be at their offseason workouts. The Bills put him on the reserve/retired list, but earlier this month Incognito said he wanted to play again. The Bills, despite major departures on the offensive line this offseason, released Incognito. Story continues Incognito is a free agent, but the incident in the Florida gym will make teams think twice about considering signing him. But Incognito wont have the complications of a legal case following him. Frank Schwab is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdown.corner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! By John Miller ZURICH (Reuters) - Roche's bid to keep Merck's cancer blockbuster Keytruda within striking distance got a lift on Tuesday when the Swiss drugmaker said its immunotherapy Tecentriq mixed with chemotherapy boosted lung cancer patients' survival. Its phase III IMpower130 study, one of eight trials it has going against lung cancer that rely on Tecentriq, met goals of boosting overall survival and progression-free survival in the initial treatment of advanced non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) compared to chemotherapy alone, Roche said. This is the third late-stage study of Tecentriq alone or in a cocktail to show an overall survival benefit for people with NSCLC, Roche said. Roche's third-to-market drug after Keytruda and Bristol-Myers Squibb's Opdivo has just a fraction of their sales. Roche is under pressure to see as many trials succeed as possible because Tecentriq is central to its strategy to replace falling revenue from older, off-patent medicines. "The results of the IMpower130 study add to the growing evidence showing the clinical benefit of Tecentriq-based combinations in the treatment of advanced non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer," Roche Chief Medical Officer Sandra Horning said. Analysts remain sceptical about Tecentriq's prospects of displacing Keytruda. [nL3N1SU48D] "Merck's Keytruda has shown similar success and now has four pivotal trial wins in this disease, and has established a clear lead," said Berenberg analyst Alistair Campbell, who sees peak annual Tecentriq sales of $4 billion. Detailed IMpower 130 results are not due until later this year, possibly in September at the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer conference in Toronto or October's European Society for Medical Oncology in Munich. Given that, it "is still very difficult to interpret how Tecentriq stacks up against competitors", said Deutsche Bank analyst Tim Race. Race sees $4.7 billion in Tecentriq sales by 2022 but has a "hold" rating on Roche shares for fear biosimilar copies of Roche's older cancer medicines will limit the company's growth. Rituxan is already being hammered by copies in Europe. The patent clock is also ticking on Herceptin and Avastin, putting $21 billion in annual revenue at risk by 2020. In the first quarter, Tecentriq posted revenue of 139 million Swiss francs ($138.9 million), a tenth of Keytruda and Opdivo revenue. [nL8N1S30TG] It is already approved to treat bladder cancer and lung cancer where other treatments have failed. Still, Roche remains optimistic Tecentriq trials will carve out a place for the drug as an essential part of lung cancer treatment. It is holding out hope to beat rivals to market in first-line treatment of small cell and squamous cell lung cancer. [nL8N1SE0KT] Roche stock fell 0.3 percent by 1100 GMT, just less than the Stoxx Europe healthcare index's decline. (Editing by Michael Shields) Roseanne Barr says she was under the influence of a sleep aid when she wrote the tweet that ended her show's revival. In one of multiple apologies the comedian issued after ABC abruptly canceled her eponymous series, Barr said she was on Ambien when she referred to Valerie Jarrett, a former adviser to President Obama, as "muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby." The tweet was later deleted, but a screenshot of the post was widely shared, and a firestorm erupted. "It was 2 in the morning and I was Ambien tweeting-it was memorial day too-i went 2 far & do not want it defended-it was egregious Indefensible," she wrote. "I made a mistake I wish I hadnt but...dont defend it please." Ambien is a widely prescribed sleep aid that has been criticized for the "hangover effect" it appears to have on some users, as well as for the strange behavior some exhibit after taking it. Barr is also not the first to use what has come to be known as the "Ambien defense." Charlie Saine, of North Carolina, was accused of assaulting his wife and shooting at police after having three to four drinks and taking Ambien in January 2014. He was initially charged with four counts of assault with a deadly weapon but was acquitted in March 2016 after using the "Ambien defense." In 2014, Robert Kennedy's daughter, Kerry Kennedy, was acquitted of "drugged driving" after testifying that she took an Ambien pill by mistake, and was unable to remember what had happened. A doctor testified that Ambien can cause sleep driving or "zombiism." Barr has not elaborated on her use of Ambien since first tweeting about it. Among her multiple apologies, Barr said sorry to the show staff and cast who lost their jobs as a result of the Twitter rant. "Dont feel sorry for me, guys!!" she tweeted late Tuesday. "I just want to apologize to the hundreds of people, and wonderful writers (all liberal) and talented actors who lost their jobs on my show due to my stupid tweet." Story continues Actors Michael Fishman and Sara Gilbert both took to Twitter to condemn their co-star's remarks. "Roseanne's recent comments about Valerie Jarrett, and so much more, are abhorrent and do not reflect the beliefs of our cast and crew or anyone associated with our show. I am disappointed in her actions to say the least," wrote Gilbert, who played Darlene Conner. Actor Michael Fishman, who plated D.J. Conner, echoed his on-screen sister's statements. "Our cast, crew, writers, and production staff strived for inclusiveness, with numerous storylines designed to reflect inclusiveness," Fishman said. "The words of one person do not exemplify the thinking of all involved." RELATED STORIES Was Ambien Related to Kerry Kennedy's Arrest? 'Roseanne' Canceled After Star's Racially Charged Tweet About Valerie Jarrett President Trump Calls Roseanne Barr to Congratulate Her on Sitcom Revival's Ratings Related Articles: Russias arms makers are working on technology specifically designed to take out the U.S. cruise missiles fired at Moscows ally Syria, a senior arms design official has said. Speaking more than a month since the U.S. fired a salvo of advanced Tomahawk missiles at Syrian regime military facilities, an adviser at Radio-Electronic Technologies Concern (KRET) said that Moscow is studying the remains of the rockets to exploit their weaknesses. The end result would be a weapon that can disrupt the flight of the smart rockets, KRETs adviser to the deputy director Vladimir Mikheev told state news agency RIA Novosti. "The new technology should cover all frequency ranges, which we have seen in the manufacture of our (U.S.) counterparts, Mikheev said. He estimated that it would take up to three years to develop the jamming weapon. Trending: Who Is Valerie Jarrett, the Former Obama Adviser Targeted by Roseanne Barr? Related: Russia and China say they are closer than ever, as Putin prepares new visit during U.S. tension Tomahawks are difficult to shoot down: They can fly low where enemy rockets risk hitting obstacles on the ground, and they can be reprogrammed midflight. Although Russia, which supplies Syrias anti-aircraft defenses, claims its S-400 and S-300 systems can down cruise missiles, it has yet to show convincing proof that it has taken out a Tomahawk. As specialists, first and foremost, it is very interesting for us to watch real implementation of different combat technology in Syria, including the Tomahawks, Mikheev said. Having this rocket in our hands, we will firmly understand what communication channels it has to relay information, control, navigation and location. Don't miss: U.S. Military Will Leave Syria Base in Deal With Russia, Reports Say 05_29_Syria_map Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images Story continues The comments from KRET follow a concentrated effort by Syrian and Russian officials to portray the U.S.-led airstrike against the regime in Damascus as unsuccessful. Russias Ministry of Defense issued a televised message last month, claiming that Soviet-made Syria defenses had shot down most of the U.S. Tomahawks. The Pentagon has resoundingly dismissed the idea that Syria or Russia could have intercepted any of the missiles, and Department of Defense spokesman Eric Pahon described the claims as absurd. Most popular: Russian Journalist Who Criticized Kremlin Shot Dead In Ukraine's Capital "This is another example of the Russian disinformation campaign to distract attention from their moral complicity to the Assad regime's atrocities and the civilian carnage in western Syria," Pahon told CNBC last month. While Russian S-300 and S-400 anti-air defense systems have twice had U.S. Tomahawk attacks within range in Syria, neither has been employed to take out the missiles. This has prompted speculation that despite their advertised capabilities against cruise missiles, they may be unable to stop a barrage of many, low-flying Tomahawks. "This is likely another smoke screen of propaganda to distract from the real issue at handthe murder of innocent civilians by a murderous regime propped up by Russian backing," Pahon added. The Department of Defense was not immediately available to comment on KRETs latest claims about developing an anti-Tomahawk weapon. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Moscow (AFP) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will travel to North Korea on Thursday to discuss the reclusive state's nuclear programme and bilateral cooperation, the foreign ministry said. "Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's official visit to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea will take place on May 31," the foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. Lavrov and his North Korean counterpart will discuss bilateral ties, North Korea's nuclear programme and other key international problems, the foreign ministry said. Last month North Korea's foreign minister Ri Yong Ho held rare talks with Lavrov in Moscow as Pyongyang moves to improve strained ties with global powers. Lavrov will travel to North Korea amid preparations for a high-stakes, high-drama summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Washington wants North Korea to quickly give up all its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way in return for sanctions and economic relief. Pyongyang has a different view of denuclearization and remains deeply worried that abandoning its deterrent would leave it vulnerable, especially while the United States maintains a robust military presence in South Korea. Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, was shot dead on Tuesday in Ukraine's capital city. Babchenko, 41, was in his Kiev apartment, when the attacker shot him in the back, the Kyiv Post reported. His wife, who was in the bathroom at the time, found him bleeding on the floor and called police. After emergency services arrived, Babchenko was taken to the hospital but died en route. Ukrainian police do not yet have any specific suspects, but suggested his murder was due to his "professional activities." Babchenko was a well-known war correspondent and openly supportive of Ukraine. He left Russia in February 2017 because he feared for his life, according to Reuters. Trending: Belgium Terror Suspect Who Killed Two Liege Police Officers Was On Day Release Program I call on Ukraine authorities to conduct immediate and full investigation," Harlem Desir, the media freedom representative at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe wrote in a tweet, saying that he was "horrified" by the news. Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and an adviser to the country's interior minister, said that the investigaion would look at "Russian spy agencies efforts to get rid of those who are trying to tell the truth about what is going on in Russia and Ukraine," The Guardian reported. Don't miss: Murdered Russian Journalist Strolls Into Ukraine News Conference, Offers Special Apologies to My Wife The lawmaker also explained that the killer was waiting for the journalist in the stairwell of his building. He said that the attacker shot Babchenko in the back as he stepped out of his apartment to buy bread. Leaders in Moscow, conversely, pinned the blame on Ukrainian authorities, saying that the government was unable to adequately protect journalists. Story continues "Ukraine is becoming the most dangerous country for reporters, Russian lawmaker Yevgeny Revenko said. The Ukrainian government cant guarantee basic freedoms. Most popular: Monster Hunter World Lunastra Update: Start Time and Everything You Need to Know Babchenko had openly criticized numerous Kremlin policies and international campaigns. He attacked Moscow's annexation of Crimea and criticized its support for separatist insurgents in Ukraine. He was also vocal against Russia's ongoing military campaign in Syria. His writings drew criticism from many ordinary Russian citizens as well. In one particularly controversial article, he said he did not feel any sadness for the deaths of Russian army choir members in a December 2016 plane crash. The soldiers were headed to perform for Russian troops based in Syria. The murder marks the second of an independent journalist in the Ukrainian capital in recent years. Back in 2016, award-winning Belorussian investigative journalist Pavel Sheremet was killed in a Kiev car bomb. Sheremet often criticized government officials in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Yulia Skripal, daughter of poisoned Russian spy Sergei Skripal, speaks to Reuters in London - REUTERS The doctors who treated the Skripals following the Salisbury Novichok attack did not believe the former Russian spy and his daughter would survive, they have revealed. Medics at Salisbury District Hospital said that the prognosis for Sergei and Yulia Skripal was not good when they first arrived in the Accident and Emergency department on March 4 after collapsing on a park bench in the city. Dr Stephen Jukes, Intensive Care consultant, told BBC Newsnight: "When we first were aware this was a nerve agent we were expecting them not to survive. We would try all our therapies. We would ensure the best clinical care. But all the evidence was there that they would not survive." He added that the medical team initially thought the pair had succumbed to an opioid overdose, but the diagnosis quickly changed to nerve agent poisoning. They were heavily sedated and given large doses of drugs designed to help their bodies produce a key protective enzyme. Russian spy poisoning | Read more Staff were concerned that the illness could spread, particularly after PC Nick Bailey, a police officer who became unwell after visiting Mr Skripal's home, was also brought in for treatment. Lorna Wilkinson, the Director of Nursing at the hospital, said: " I suppose the key marker for me was when the PC [Nick Bailey] was admitted with symptoms - there was a real concern as to how big could this get. She said she remembered thinking: have we just gone from having two index patients [to] having something that actually could become all-consuming and involve many casualties? because we really didn't know at that point. Sergei and Yulia Skripal photographed having a meal while fit and healthy Credit: supplied by pixel8000 Medical staff also said they had no idea of the future prognosis for any of those affected by the nerve agent. Dr Christine Blanshard, medical director at the hospital, told the programme, the honest answer is we don't know. The medical team at the hospital had also been helped by their proximity to Porton Down laboratory, they revealed, as it offered to carry out testing and give advice on the best therapies. Story continues Dr Duncan Murray, head of the intensive care department, said international experts had helped the three to recover, alongside the "excellent teamwork by the doctors, fantastic care and dedication by our nurses". Members of the emergency services in green biohazard encapsulated suits afix a tent over the bench on which the Skripals were found Credit: BEN STANSALL /AFP All three have now been discharged, with Mr Skripal leaving hospital the most recently, on May 18, after 10 weeks of treatment. In her first appearance since leaving hospital, Ms Skripal spoke to the news agency Reuters at a secret London location last week. She said she felt she and her father were "lucky to both have survived this attempted assassination". She added: "I dont want to describe the details, but the physical treatment was invasive, painful and depressing. The British government has accused Russia of being behind the attack, expelling 23 Russian diplomats in retaliation. It has denied any involvement and expelled British diplomats from Moscow, as well as questioning the legitimacy of Ms Skripal's statement. In a statement, it said: "The UK is obliged to give us the opportunity to speak to Yulia directly in order to make sure that she is not held against her own will and is not speaking under pressure." New legislation in Saudi Arabia will punish harassers with up to five years in prison and fines of up to $80,000. The Saudi Shura Council, the kingdoms legislative body, approved the new law on Monday, with female council members hailing the move as vital to protecting the rights of all citizens. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman also instructed the kingdoms interior ministry to fully enact the law, Saudi Gazette reported. Any comprehensive society needs a law such as this one to protect the rights of all citizens, regardless of gender, Shura member Hoda Al-Helaissi told Arab News. Trending: Rudy Giuliani Says Trump Wont Interview With Mueller Without Spygate FBI Informant Documents Latifa Al-Shaalan, another Shura member, said the law fills a large legislative vacuum. It is a deterrent law compared to a number of other laws in other countries, she said. Punishments for convicted harassers start with fines of 100,000 riyals (about $26,600) and up to two years in jail. The penalties increase to a fine of 300,000 riyals (about $80,000) and up to five years in jail, depending on the severity. SaudiArabia-woman REUTERS/Reem Baeshen Don't miss: Who Is Valerie Jarrett, the Former Obama Adviser Targeted by Roseanne Barr? Individuals convicted of assisting someone else with harassment will also be punished under the new legislation. Even if a victim waives the right to prosecute a harasser, the kingdoms legal authorities can still press charges. Those who witness instances of molestation or harassment must also report the violations. Furthermore, government agencies and private businesses should take appropriate steps to address and curb harassment in the workplace, the legislation says. Dimah Alsharif, a prominent female Saudi lawyer referred to the legislation as a qualitative leap in the fight against sexual harassment. She told Arab News that the bill is not only for women, but for all genders of different ages and in different situations. Story continues Saudi Arabias decision to crack down on sexual harassment comes as the kingdom has been working to reform its oppressive policies toward women. As of June 24, Saudi women will officially be allowed to drive in the kingdom. Riyadh also granted women the right to attend public events, such as concerts and sporting competitions, alongside men last year. Under the leadership of King Salman, the kingdom has pushed forward an agenda that aims to remove many of the traditional restrictions on womens participation in society. Most popular: U.S. Military Will Leave Syria Base in Deal With Russia, Reports Say At the same time, rights groups have criticized the king and Saudi authorities following the recent detention of several prominent womens rights activists. Loujain al-Hathloul, a 28-year-old social media figure; Aziza Al-Yousef, a 60-year-old mother of five; and Eman Al-Nafjan, a university professor and popular blogger, were arrested earlier this month. Al-Hathloul and Al-Nafjan were previously arrested for violating Saudi Arabias ban on women drivers. Two other male activistsDr. Mohammed Alrabiah and Dr. Ibrahim Al-Mdmyeghwere also arrested. This group was targeted mainly because they advocate for human rights, and some of them advocated for Saudi womens rights, the same rights that the people in power are claiming to be giving to women gradually, the organization Prisoners of Conscience previously told Newsweek following the arrests. The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights also expressed concerns on Tuesday about the activists' detention. "We urge the Saudi Arabian authorities to reveal their locations, and ensure their rights to due process guarantees, U.N. human rights spokeswoman Liz Throssell said, according to Reuters. If, as it appears, their detention is related solely to their work as human rights defenders and activists on womens issues, they should be released immediately. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Ryan Pickrell Security, Asia What happens next? Showdown in the South China Sea: Why China or America Won't Backdown The South China Sea is once again rapidly becoming a major point of contention between Washington and Beijing, with both sides refusing to back down. Two U.S. Navy warships the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Higgins and Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam conducted a freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) in the South China Sea Saturday, sailing within twelve nautical miles of several Chinese-controlled islands in the Paracels, territories the Chinese military forcefully seized from Vietnam in the 1970s. In response, Beijing claims it dispatched warships to drive the U.S. ships away. Asserting that the American vessels entered Chinas territorial waters without the permission of the Chinese government, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense explained that the Chinese military immediately dispatched warships to identify and inspect the American ships according to law, and warned them to depart. This claim has not been verified. Nonetheless, China clearly intends to pursue a more confrontational approach. The Chinese army is determined to strengthen the preparations for sea and air combat readiness, raise the level of defense, defend national sovereignty and security, a defense ministry spokesman revealed. In recent months, China has dramatically bolstered its military presence in the South China Sea. China dispatched heavy bombers to contested territories in the region in mid-May. A division of the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) recently organized multiple bombers, such as the H-6K, to conduct take-off and landing training on islands and reefs in the South China Sea in order to improve our ability to reach all territory, conduct strikes at any time and strike in all directions,' Chinas air force said in an official statement. The statement described the exercises, believed to have been carried out around Woody Island in the Paracels, as preparation for the West Pacific and the battle for the South China Sea. Story continues China has also deployed YJ-12B anti-ship cruise missiles and HQ-9B surface-to-air missiles to islands in the Spratlys, boosting Chinas ability to combat U.S. aviation and naval assets should such action be necessary. Such weapons systems also serve as a warning to other claimant states. Recommended: A New Report Reveals Why There Won't Be Any 'New' F-22 Raptors Recommended: How an Old F-15 Might Kill Russias New Stealth Fighter Recommended: How China Plans to Win a War Against the U.S. Navy China always asserts that its actions are defensive in nature, arguing that the deployment of various weapons systems do not constitute militarization and are, therefore, not a violation of past agreements. Those who do not intend to be aggressive have no need to be worried, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in response to questions about the recent missile deployments. The Chinese military has also installed jamming technology in the South China Sea, escalating tensions. In response to Chinese activities, the U.S. decided to disinvite China from this years Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, the largest international maritime drills in the world. This action was described as an initial response, indicating that there may be more to come if China does not change its ways. It is, however, unclear if U.S. actions can successfully reverse current trends in the South China Sea given Chinas level of entrenchment. An international arbitration tribunal rejected Beijings claims to the South China Sea in 2016, the U.S. has been conducting FONOPS since 2015, and various international bodies have attempted to put pressure on China for its assertive behavior at sea, yet China is still moving to dominate the region. China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States, Adm. Philip Davidson, the new head of U.S. Pacific Command, said in April. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. Read full article Singapore Airlines said on Wednesday that it will relaunch the world's longest commercial flight in October, a journey of almost 19 hours from the city-state to New York, but it will not be available to economy travellers. The daily, non-stop journey from Changi to Newark Airport will cover about 16,700 kilometres (10,300 miles) and take about 18 hours 45 minutes, the airline said in a statement. The current record holder is Qatar Airways Flight 921 from Auckland to Doha, which takes 17 hours 40 minutes. The Singapore Airlines (SIA) flight will use the long-range Airbus A350-900ULR, which will be configured to carry 161 passengers -- 67 in business class and 94 in premium economy. "The two-class configuration... was a business consideration to meet market demand. "This configuration will also provide our customers with greater comfort on non-stop flights," an SIA spokesperson told AFP. The airline had flown a similar route from 2004 until 2013 but cancelled it as it fell short of revenue expectations. However, its latest decision comes as carriers look for new sources of revenue in a competitive environment, while long-haul flights often make more cash than those that require stops. There are also plans for a non-stop route from Singapore to Los Angeles using the same plane, the airline said. Analysts said the decision to have no economy class was an attempt to promote the airline to wealthy customers. "It's about SIA marketing themselves as a premium service provider," Brendan Sobie, chief analyst at the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, told AFP. - Safety concerns - But there have been concerns that such long flights might pose safety risks, particularly for cabin crew. Britain's largest union, Unite, alleged this month that Qantas had tried to "silence" crew members who wanted to discuss concerns about health and fatigue on their Perth to London route, one of the longest flights in the world at 17 hours and 20 minutes. Story continues However, Sobie noted that SIA pioneered the ultra long-haul route and had done a lot of research. "In the early 2000s when this first started, SIA did all the testing they needed to and what they have come up with has set the industry standard today," he said. SIA said cabin crew operating ultra-long-range flights such as the non-stop route to New York will be allowed one more hour of rest than those on long-haul flights. Shukor Yusof, an analyst with aviation consultancy Endau Analytics, said it was unlikely SIA could make money from the new service. "The global premium market has eroded," he told AFP. "Operating costs are higher on ultra long-haul flights too, erasing any profits an airline might make." The new route comes as the city-state's flag carrier faces tough challenges. Last year, it consolidated its low-cost units TigerAir and Scoot into a single entity in a streamlining exercise. And this month it said it will absorb its struggling premium regional wing, SilkAir, into the broader group following a multi-million-dollar upgrade as part of reforms to stay competitive. Paris (AFP) - Every minute, smokers get through nearly 11 million cigarettes and 10 die from the habit, experts say, in an industry that generates billions of dollars. Here are some facts and figures ahead of the UN's World No Tobacco Day Thursday. - How many people smoke? - There are around one billion smokers in the world, about a seventh of the global population, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) and other estimates. China has the highest number: of its population of 1.3 billion, about 315 million are smokers and they consume more than a third of the world's cigarettes, the WHO said in a report last year. Indonesia has the highest proportion of smokers at 76 percent of men aged over 15. About 80 percent of the world's smokers live in low- and middle-income countries and 226 million of them are considered poor. - On the decline? - A study published in The Lancet medical journal in April 2017 says the percentage of people using tobacco every day has dropped in 25 years. One in four men and one in 20 women smoked daily in 2015, down from one in three men and one in 12 women in 1990, it found. But reductions in smoking rates in some nations "are almost entirely offset by the increasing consumption in many countries with weaker tobacco control regulations," says The Tobacco Atlas anti-smoking lobby. These include poorer parts of the world, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa. Tobacco use has decreased in places such as Australia, Brazil and Britain, where anti-smoking measures include higher taxes, bans and health warnings. Electronic cigarettes have also entered some markets. France reports a million fewer daily smokers in 2017 over 2016. Tobacco sales have even declined in China, down by 10 percent from a peak in 2012, according to the Euromonitor International market research group. - A high human cost - Tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death, experts say. Active or passive smoking kills more than seven million people every year, according to the WHO, with tobacco consumption blamed for the death of on average one person every six seconds. Story continues Cancers, heart attacks, strokes and lung disease are the main diseases associated with tobacco. Over the 20th century tobacco claimed 100 million lives -- more than the 60-80 million deaths during World War II and the 18 million in World War I combined. At current rates tobacco could account for more up to a billion deaths in the 21st century, the WHO says. Smoking uses up almost six percent of world spending on healthcare as well as nearly two percent of global GDP, according to a January 2017 study in the scientific journal Tobacco Control. This amounted to $1.436 billion globally in 2012, 40 percent borne by developing countries, it says. - Profits and production - Around the world 4.3 million hectares (10.6 million acres) of land is used to grow tobacco, the WHO says, an area about the size of Switzerland. Cigarette sales are worth more than $680 billion annually, according to Euromonitor. China is the leading producer of tobacco, growing about 40 percent of world's leaves, says The Tobacco Atlas. Five firms control 80 percent of the global cigarette market. The top six made a profit of more than $62 billion in 2015, it says. Smokers get through about 5.7 trillion cigarettes annually, says The Tobacco Atlas. This works out to nearly 11 million every minute. Filters made from non-biodegradable cellulose acetate have become the type of litter most present on the world's beaches. Mosul (Iraq) (AFP) - Under the cover of night in the Iraqi city of Mosul, Rayan and Ali break the silence by drumming to announce suhur, the pre-dawn breakfast during the holy month of Ramadan. The Islamic State (IS) group which controlled the city for three years before its ouster last July had banned drumming, along with other Ramadan traditions that make up the festive spirit of the dawn-to-dusk fasting month. But since this year's Ramadan started in mid-May, Rayan Khalidi and Ali Mahboub have been doing their nighttime rounds, donning traditional keffiyeh headscarves and jalabiya robes. The Ramadan drummers, known as "messaharati", are "part of the religious and social heritage of Mosul", the now war-battered city which has stood for centuries as a trading and cultural hub of the Middle East, said 25-year-old Rayan. But the jihadists of IS decreed that such drumming was a sin, under their rigid interpretation of Islam enforced by its own courts and henchmen. Ironically, Mosul residents had a Ramadan much like any other in 2014, when it started just days after IS had proclaimed its "caliphate" spanning tracts of Syria and Iraq. Families descended on Mosul's tree-dotted parks along the River Tigris in the relative cool of dusk to share "iftar", the meal that breaks the daytime fast. All across town, men and women gathered in coffee shops and restaurants, many clutching nargileh water pipes or smoking cigarettes -- that was before IS laid down the law segregating the sexes and banning smoking at the risk of corporal punishment. Most of Mosul's restaurants and open-air cafes then closed their doors. "Some of them stayed open for business after iftar but people were afraid to go for fear of punishment by IS who always found some reason to make arrests," said 29-year-old housewife Umm Raghed. - Mosul's famed dishes - Ramadan is a time for family reunions in Muslim countries, but in Mosul such events often only come about after several hours of shopping to collect the ingredients for the elaborate dishes for which the city is famed. Story continues Under IS rule, "women did not have the right to go out, except in cases of extreme necessity, and even then a woman would have to be accompanied by a man and fully covered by a black veil", said Nahed Abdullah, a 32-year-old taxi driver. Hassan Abdelkarim, 26, whose sister was killed when their home was bombed last year, said the jihadists had destroyed many of Mosul's mosques. "Now we have to pay attention to hear the call for prayers from distant minarets to break the fast." If it's tricky to determine the precise time for breaking the fast, knowing when to start is impossible, according to Abdelkarim, who is unemployed and lives amid the rubble of Mosul's devastated Old City. "We don't have electricity or mobile phones to know the exact time" when the sun rises and the daily fast starts, he said. Abu Salman, 45, never experienced life under the jihadists, having been displaced before the IS takeover in 2014. He returned to find his home and shop both destroyed. "Ramadan used to be the best time of year for business. Now I have no source of revenue and have to survive on charity," he said. While families wait for the launch of the city's reconstruction and assistance to help them get back on their feet, the "Moslawis" have revived another tradition: long tables set up on the streets to feed the poor. "It's a beautiful initiative and typical of the people of Mosul who are known for their sense of solidarity, especially in hard times," said 45-year-old Umm Mahmud. Thanks to the donations, she was able to serve her children a full meal of chicken, rice and orange juice at a table in the city's Bab Lakash district. Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz defended his decision to close his companys stores for racial bias training Tuesday saying its just the first step as part of the coffee chains commitment to diversity. What weve said to our board, to our shareholders, is that we are deeply committed to making this a part of everything we do, Schultz told CBS This Morning. Schultzs TV interview came just hours before more than 8,000 Starbucks stores close for the afternoon to conduct racial bias training. The intervention comes after a white Starbucks manager called the police on two black men for sitting in a Philadelphia store without purchasing anything in April. The two men Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson were both arrested and went on to settle with the city for $1 each with the promise of setting up a $200,000 scholarship program for young entrepreneurs. Schultz confirmed the company paid the men a settlement as well as offering them college scholarships. He would not disclose how much they were paid. Schultz and other Starbucks leaders have participated in the program already, he told CBS This Morning, and the company plans to globalize the training and make it a part of the on-boarding process for new employees. Some critics of the program have said it could be seen as a PR stunt an attempt to alleviate bad blood between the company and customers upset by the incident in Philadelphia. But Schultz said the program begins a longterm commitment from leadership to addressing the issue further. "This is not an expense, this is an investment in our people, our way of life, in our culture and our values." -- @Starbucks Exec. Chairman Howard Schultz pic.twitter.com/GOaH7Lb3sN CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) May 29, 2018 "We hire 100,000 new people a year. This is going to be part of the on-boarding training. We're going to to globalize this. I've been through the training myself, as has all the global leaders," Schutlz says on Starbuck's new racial bias training https://t.co/zjkt6IEEJu pic.twitter.com/4no53suKGx CBS News (@CBSNews) May 29, 2018 We couldve spent marketing dollars a lot different than something like this, he told CBS This Morning. Story continues This is not an expense, Schultz added. This is an investment in our people, in our way of life, in our culture and our values. Every company-owned @Starbucks store in the U.S. will close this afternoon for racial-bias training after the arrest of two black men inside a Philadelphia Starbucks in April. Starbucks executive chairman Howard Schultz joins us in Studio 57: pic.twitter.com/J0smMWBxkj CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) May 29, 2018 .@Starbucks Exec. Chairman Howard Schultz says the two men placed in handcuffs at a Philadelphia Starbucks were compensated after the incident: "Obviously we can't release that. Starbucks has done a lot to try and make this right as much as we can." pic.twitter.com/xCOhGjmkfM CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) May 29, 2018 The company will release more details about their training program after Tuesday. The curriculum was developed with the help of former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Employees will watch a number of videos (with one featuring rapper Common), participate in discussions and be given booklets in which they can reflect on their own biases. Social scientists and researchers who spoke with TIME said they arent sure whether one half-day of training will produce significant results. If Starbucks is serious about confronting racial bias, it will require commitment from leadership, as well as structural and systematic changes at stores, researchers told TIME. In recent weeks, Starbucks changed its policy to now allow people to sit in its stores and use its bathrooms without having purchased an item or a drink. That kind of change, one social scientist told TIME, could give fewer chances for employees to act on their unconscious biases and thus create a safer environment for more people. Were living at a time in America where theres a fracturing of humanity, and we have an opportunity given the fact that we have stores in every community in America, to begin a very important conversation, Schultz told CBS This Morning. Weve been in business for almost 50 years, this is probably one of the most important transformational moments in the history of our company, and weve taken it very seriously. A new study that concluded the number of deaths in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria have been vastly underestimated is fueling the debate over the territorys possible future statehood. A study by a Harvard researcher released Tuesday estimated that 4,645 people died last year as a direct or indirect result of Hurricane Maria. That total is 73 times the official government count of 64 and is in line with reports from the island, including interviews with funeral home directors who said last fall that the government numbers were too low. The figure contrasts with President Trumps comments in the aftermath of the damage in which he said the storm wasnt a real catastrophe. Critics of the federal response to Maria, comparing it to the relief efforts in Texas after Hurricane Harvey, believe it would have been more effective if the U.S. territory were a state with representation in Washington. (The island sends one nonvoting representative to Congress.) To promote statehood, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello dispatched a shadow delegation of five representatives and two senators to Washington in January. What we want to impress upon Congress and, quite frankly, the whole nation is that Puerto Ricans want a change from their second-class status that Puerto Ricans have experienced and has been exposed in the path of Hurricane Maria, said Rossello in a January interview with the New York Times. Study on hurricane casualties fuels talk of statehood for Puerto Rico. (AP) Sending an uninvited delegation to Congress to enforce a demand for statehood is known as the Tennessee Plan, after the tactics used by Tennessee in 1796 to earn its way into the union when the inhabitants believed Congress was not acting quickly enough. Other states, including most recently Alaska, have followed suit. Alfonso Aguilar, a former George W. Bush administration official who favors statehood, is one of the appointed shadow representatives and says hes seen an increase in interest since Hurricane Maria. Puerto Ricans were trending toward a support of statehood, said Aguilar in an interview with Yahoo News, and Im seeing anecdotally that Maria has accelerated that process. Story continues A January poll from Rasmussen found that 47 percent of Americans supported statehood (to 34 who didnt and 19 who werent sure), up from 40 percent last March. Aguilar thinks this reflects a growing realization that Puerto Ricans are already U.S. citizens, something that nearly half of Americans didnt know before the storm. The island has been a U.S. territory since the Spanish-American War in 1898 and has had local self-governance since 1952. Theres also support from powerful Republicans. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, is chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, which gives him oversight over U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico. Earlier this month, Bishop came out in support of statehood without preconditions. Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah chairs a November hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources to examine Puerto Ricos recovery. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP) They should be on a track to statehood, said Bishop in an NPR interview earlier this month. They are Americans. They have a history of patriotism. They are a clear part of the country. And people have to realize how much Puerto Rico has been a part of the United States. Its unlikely Republican leadership would let the statehood initiative get very far, as conventional wisdom is that Puerto Ricos delegation would lean heavily Democratic. (Aguilar, a Republican, disagrees with this notion, saying it would be a swing state at worst.) When Alaska and Hawaii were added as states it came as a package deal in an attempt to balance out their votes, and there is no clear conservative pairing for Puerto Rico with Democratic Washington, D.C., the other main candidate for statehood. But there are other signs that support for statehood may be growing at least among Puerto Ricans now living in Florida as Sen. Bill Nelson and Gov. Rick Scott, competing for Nelsons Senate seat this November, have both come out in favor of statehood. Thousands of Puerto Ricans have migrated to Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, joining the million already located there. Since Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, theyre eligible to register to vote in the Sunshine State. Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello holds a news conference in Washington in June 2017 to discuss Puerto Rico becoming the 51st state. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Its tougher to tell on the island, with no recent polling as the recovery from Maria continues. A 2017 nonbinding referendum supporting statehood passed with 97 percent support, but that was with turnout of only 23 percent, with anti-statehood groups boycotting the vote. Rosello, who supports statehood, won the 2016 gubernatorial election but by only 3 points over an anti-statehood candidate. One poll of Puerto Ricans prior to Hurricane Maria found that 65 percent supported statehood. Aguilar said the push will now be on a national campaign that puts pressure on legislators, noting that Congress isnt going to grant Puerto Rico statehood out of the kindness of their hearts. He added his belief that statehood would help the Puerto Rican economy, struggling with a decadelong recession, and help alleviate billions in debt. The next step for statehood in Congress would likely come via Bishops Committee on Natural Resources, which has the power to hold a hearing on legislation codifying statehood. In the meantime, Rossello and the shadow delegation will continue pushing for support in Washington while attempting to solidify support back home. Its been a long road for supporters of Puerto Rican statehood, but with the renewed focus on the island following the tragedy of Hurricane Maria they appear to be making progress. In this photo from September, Nestor Serrano walks on the upstairs floor of his home in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, where the walls were blown off by Hurricane Maria. (Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP) Read more from Yahoo News: Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens announces his resignation during a hastily called press conference, May 29, 2018. (Photo: News Tribune/Julie Smith/AP) Politicians rise and fall, but it is difficult to think of an ascent as swift, or a downfall as brutal, as that of Gov. Eric Greitens of Missouri. Celebrated only months ago as a potential Republican presidential candidate, Greitens resigned the governorship on Tuesday, as state legislators in Jefferson City expanded their inquiry into potential wrongdoing related to campaign fundraising and moved to impeach him over the alleged blackmail and sexual assault of a woman with whom hed once had an extramarital relationship. Even as he announced his resignation, the telegenic former Navy SEAL and Rhodes Scholar looked defiant, striking repeated notes of self-pity. This ordeal has been designed to cause an incredible amount of strain on my family, he said in the afternoon press conference. That ordeal began with the revelation that Greitens had conducted a sexual affair with his hairdresser in 2015, and that he had blackmailed the woman, who was, like him, married at the time. According to a report subsequently released by a special legislative committee, Greitens allegedly coerced the woman into oral sex, struck her and took a compromising photograph that he threatened to share if she didnt keep their affair secret. Greitens was charged with violating the womans privacy, and though a St. Louis circuit attorney eventually dropped that charge, state legislators indicated that they would move forward with impeachment proceedings. Greitens acknowledged the affair but strenuously denied allegations of blackmail. And although the photograph supposedly taken on a phone, while the woman was in his basement gym, bound and partially disrobed has never been produced, it remains the central symbol of the young governors stunning collapse, seemingly brought about by his own hubris. As an emotional Greitens left the podium on Tuesday, someone from the audience shouted, Governor, did you take the photo? Greitens did not answer. Story continues I have not broken any laws, Greitens said during the press conference. He has consistently portrayed the several investigations into his personal behavior and political activity as motivated by career politicians from both parties whom he has portrayed as unable to countenance his iconoclastic style. Even as he resigned, Greitens cast himself as the victim, complaining of millions of dollars of mounting legal bills, as well as endless personal attacks designed to cause maximum damage to family and friends. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens. (Photo: Jeff Roberson/AP) What ultimately felled Greitens, however, were not the embarrassing and troubling details of his extramarital affair. Concurrent with that investigation were several others related to his campaign fundraising. One is looking into whether Greitens improperly used donor lists from the Mission Continues, a charity he started to help veterans, to raise money for his political campaigns. Using those lists would be against federal law. Last week, the special legislative committee that was investigating Greitens on the violation of privacy charge dramatically expanded its scope by turning its attention to A New Missouri, a not-for-profit organization started by Greitens supporters to promote ideas, policies and/or legislation to create more jobs, higher pay, safer streets, better schools, and more, for all Missourians, as the group described itself. The committee had apparently come to believe that A New Missouri had coordinated with Greitenss political campaign in ways that were potentially illegal. Hours before he announced his resignation, Greitens learned of a judges order that A New Missouri reveal its donor list by the end of the week. It is not clear how much that development had to do with his decision to resign. Greitens was elected in 2016 promising to clean up Jefferson City. But he made few friends as governor, while succumbing to the very same ethical lapses he promised to banish from Missouri. By the time his troubles began earlier this year, he had virtually no allies. And he was increasingly seen as a liability to Josh Hawley, the Republican trying to unseat Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat. Eager to show his independence, Hawley vowed to investigate Greitens, wanting to deprive McCaskill of an obvious, and damaging, line of attack. Greitens has long relied on his background as a Navy SEAL as a sign of his rectitude and patriotism. But a recent New Yorker magazine investigation by Phil Klay, the military veteran and fiction writer, found that Greitens had cynically (and dishonestly) used his military background to create a public image of honor, courage, and leadership. Similar accusations have been made against Ryan Zinke, the Interior secretary, who has exaggerated his involvement with the SEALs. Zinke has faced a number of questions about the exorbitant and potentially improper use of government funds. Some have pointed to the two men as examples of a SEAL culture gone dangerously astray. In fact, questions about the elite unit have only grown since its members killed al Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Writing in Newsweek the following year, Daniel Klaidman, now the editor of Yahoo News, noted that a culture of celebrity, instant book deals and Hollywood blockbusters was creating competing impulses that SEAL leadership failed to resolve. To some observers, Greitenss stated decision to stay in office was a hint of his SEAL resolve. Until Tuesday, he had vowed to fight the multiple investigations into his conduct. Much like President Trump, he attempted to portray himself as the subject of a witch hunt. Those efforts did not succeed. The new governor of Missouri will be Michael Parson. Read more from Yahoo News: 544486144 The United States Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to an Arkansas law that will heavily restrict the states ability to provide abortion services Thursday. The 2015 law bans the use of medication abortion, a procedure that allows women to take pills to induce abortion during the first nine weeks of pregnancy. The pill, mifepristone, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000 and since its approval the number of women using the noninvasive treatment has skyrocketed. About one-third of all abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions, according to a recent study. Trending: Valerie Jarrett Links Roseanne Tweet to President Trump: 'Tone Starts at the Top' The Supreme Courts decision to not intervene with Arkansass prohibition of medication abortion may also force two of the states three abortion-providing health centers to shutter their doors. That would mean that only one abortion clinic, located in Little Rock, would be accessible for the states 3 million residents. In 2014 there were four health centers in Arkansas that provided such procedures. The Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which promotes advocacy and education for Planned Parenthood, reacted to the courts decision on Twitter, writing, This fight is far from over. This law cannot and must not stand. We will not stop fighting for every persons right to access safe, legal abortion. #StopTheBans. The Supreme Courts inaction comes just days after Irelands historic vote to repeal the eighth amendment banning abortion. Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar told the media that the abortion referendum results showed that the nation will "trust and respect women to make their own decision and choices." Don't miss: Belgium Terror Suspect Who Killed Two Liege Police Officers Was On Day Release Program In the U.S., on the other hand, legislation is being passed that restrict womens health care options. Last year, during his first full day in office, President Trump enforced a global gag rule that bars any foreign organizations receiving federal aid from even mentioning abortion services. Trump also rolled-back an Obama-era policy that required health insurance to cover contraception and has threatened multiple times to defund Planned Parenthood. Story continues While the Supreme Court declined to take this case, it is still considering two more abortion-related. One case centers around anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers and a requirement to reveal information about their services, and the other about a courts decision to allow an unaccompanied teenage immigrant to end her pregnancy. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek By Laila Bassam and Tom Perry BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Syrian army has completed preparations for an imminent offensive against rebel-held areas in southwestern Syria, a non-Syrian commander in a military alliance that backs Damascus said on Tuesday, raising the prospect of a major new escalation. However, a rebel commander in the Deraa region of the southwest told Reuters there was no sign of mobilization for such an assault and accused Damascus of waging psychological warfare. Nevertheless, rebels had prepared defenses, he said. The rebel-held southwest has come into focus after the Syrian government, backed militarily by Iran and Russia, crushed the last besieged rebel enclaves near Damascus and north of the city of Homs. Damascus has vowed to recover the whole country. The southwest is of concern to the United States, which last year brokered a "de-escalation" deal with Jordan and President Bashar al-Assad's Russian allies, which has largely contained the war near the frontier with Israel. The United States warned on Saturday it would take "firm and appropriate measures" in response to any violations of the ceasefire in that area. While Assad is militarily unassailable in the Syrian conflict, swathes of territory at the frontiers with Iraq, Turkey and Jordan and Israel remain outside his control. The role of outside powers in these areas complicates further gains by Damascus. The pro-Assad commander, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Syrian army's preparations for the assault were complete. "The Syrian army will wage all the battles and has now become strong and capable," the commander said. Israel wants Iran-backed forces removed from areas near its frontier - and from Syria in general. Iran-backed Shi'ite militias, often spearheaded by Lebanon's Hezbollah, have played a critical role fighting in support of Assad. Russia said on Monday that only Syrian army troops should be at the southern border with Jordan and Israel. On Tuesday, its foreign ministry said Russia, the United States and Jordan had agreed to meet about the "de-escalation" zone, RIA news agency reported. "PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR" An article published in the pro-Damascus al-Watan newspaper said signs "on the horizon" indicated the southern battle was near as "final touches" were put in place. But the rebel commander, Colonel Nassim Abu Arra of the Youth of Sunna Forces, told Reuters there was no sign of an imminent attack. "So far there are no indications of that. I am speaking from a position on the frontlines," he said in a telephone interview. "But there are rumors, a psychological war," he said. In the last week, he said several military convoys had left government-held parts of Deraa city heading north, saying he believed these to be Iran-backed forces being evacuated from the region. They had not been replaced, he added. His faction was keeping the United States and Jordan abreast of the situation on the ground. "We are taking from them reassurances that the southern region is subjected to the de-escalation agreement and ceasefire," he said. But his fighters had still prepared defenses. "I assure you the opposition forces have taken a number of measures ... including digging trenches and tunnels to prevent the regime from launching any attack," he said. (This version of the story corrects the name of rebel commander in paragraph 11) (Reporting by Laila Bassam and Tom Perry and Polina Ivanova in Moscow; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Richard Balmforth, Larry King) Robert F. Kennedy in the Mississippi Delta Sen. Robert F. Kennedy arrives at the Jackson, Miss., airport, for an antipoverty hearing, April 10, 1967. (Photo: Jack Thornell/AP) In April 1967, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy took a fateful trip to the Mississippi Delta to investigate hunger and poverty among unemployed farm workers and their families. What he found was shocking young children living in decrepit conditions who were on the verge of starvation. Kennedy, who had been working on poverty issues since he was elected to the Senate in 1964, told aides he had never seen such horrific conditions even in developing nations, much less in the United States. The senator said he believed the nation had been woefully ignorant of hunger and demanded the country no longer turn a blind eye to the nations neediest. I think its a terrible reflection on our society, Kennedy said. We are not doing what we should be doing in the country to deal with this problem. The trip would prove transformative to Kennedy, who devoted more of his Senate agenda to helping the Mississippi Delta and other communities in need. He would make the eradication of poverty a central plank of his 1968 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination the one and only time a major candidate would focus on poverty in a campaign for the White House. But Kennedy would not live to fulfill his promise to help the residents of Mississippi. On June 5, 1968, he was shot and killed by an assassin in Los Angeles. (Holly Bailey/Yahoo News) See RELATED STORY by Holly Bailey/Yahoo News See more news-related photo galleries and follow us on Yahoo News Photo Twitter and Tumblr. Tommy Robinson was jailed at Leeds Crown Court, it emerged on Tuesday. (Getty) Tommy Robinson has been jailed for 13 months after breaking contempt of court laws. Robinson, 35, whose real is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was arrested outside Leeds Crown Court on Friday after using social media to broadcast details of an ongoing trial which is subject to blanket reporting restrictions. In footage which was played to the court, the far-right activist was seen filming himself and people involved in the trial. His jail term can be revealed after media outlets successfully contested reporting restrictions imposed on the case last week. The former leader of the far-right English Defence League was already subject to a suspended jail term after committing the same offence during a rape trial at Canterbury in 2017. The court heard how the footage, which supposedly lasted around an hour, had been watched 250,000 times within hours of being posted online via Facebook. MOST POPULAR TODAY ON YAHOO Robinson was sentenced to 10 months for contempt of court and a further three months for breaching the terms of a previous suspended sentence. His arrest led to a mass protest outside Downing Street at the weekend by his supporters. Police had to be deployed to keep the protesters under control. Robinsons arrest led to protests at Downing Street (Picture: Rex) A supporter of Robinson holds up a placard at a Downing Street protest on Saturday (Picture: Rex) A judge told him his actions may cause the rerun of a long-running trial at a cost of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds. Initially, a court order was put in place preventing any reporting of Robinsons arrest and sentencing hearing. But that was lifted by a judge on Tuesday after it was challenged by media outlets. Story continues Robinson was arrested on suspicion of breaching the peace, and was charged and sentenced within five hours. Robinson founded the English Defence League (Picture: Rex) Robinson has previous convictions for contempt of court, disobeying a court order, possessing identity documents with intent, fraud, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, possessing drugs and threatening behaviour. He pleaded guilty to contempt of court and breach of a suspended sentence. Matthew Harding, defending, said his client felt deep regret over his actions. He told the court Robinson thought what he was saying on camera was already in the public domain. Robinson founded the English Defence League in Luton in 2009 before quitting in 2013. A top North Korean general is headed for the United States in what would be the highest-profile visit in years, reports said Tuesday as the two countries prepare for a momentous summit. General Kim Yong Chol landed at Beijing airport on Tuesday and will journey on to New York the following day after talks with Chinese officials, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency, which cited diplomatic sources. The trip is part of a flurry of diplomacy as preparations gather pace for the on-again, off-again summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12. US negotiators, headed by Washington's current ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, met with North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom that divides the two Koreas on Sunday. The State Department said a separate team of White House officials has also headed to Singapore to sort out logistics for the historic meeting. Chung Sung-yoon, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said Kim Yong Chol would be the most senior North Korean official to step onto US soil since Vice Marshall Jo Myong Rok met President Bill Clinton in 2000. The general has long been a right hand man to North Korea's leader, playing a front-seat role during recent rounds of diplomacy aimed at ending the nuclear stalemate on the Korean peninsula. He sat next to Trump's daughter Ivanka, who is also a White House aide, during the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in the South Korean resort of Pyeongchang which was a turning point in the nuclear crisis. He also accompanied Kim Jong Un on both of his recent trips to China to meet President Xi Jinping and held talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when he travelled to Pyongyang. "Kim's official counterpart is Pompeo but he may also push for meetings with (National Security Advisor John) Bolton and even Trump if possible," Chung told AFP. Story continues General Kim, whose official title is vice-chairman of the central committee of North Korea's Workers' Party, has a background in military and civilian intelligence agencies and is a deeply controversial figure in South Korea. Seoul blames him for masterminding the 2010 sinking of the South Korean navy corvette the Cheonan, which killed 46 sailors, an attack North Korea denies playing any role in. Relatives of those who died protested his presence at the Winter Olympics earlier this year. From 2009 to 2016 he was also director of North Korea's General Reconnaissance Bureau, the unit tasked with cyber warfare and intelligence gathering. During that period North Korea ramped up its hacking programmes, including a hugely costly penetration of Sony Pictures that was seen as an attempt to stop the release of an American comedy film poking fun at the Kim Jong Un regime. Steel pipe to be used in the oil pipeline construction of Kinder Morgan Canadas Trans Mountain Expansion Project sit on rail cars at a stockpile site in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada May 29, 2018. (REUTERS/Dennis Owen/File Photo) On Tuesday morning Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced that the federal government will buy the Trans Mountain pipeline project from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion, doing exactly the opposite of what many business leaders and resource experts believe is best for promoting investment in this country. Following the announcement of the decision, resource and economics experts at the Montreal Economics Institute and Fraser Institute claimed that by taking the pipeline away from Kinder Morgan, the Liberal government is discouraging investors from putting money and energy into Canadian ventures. The pipeline expansion project was approved 18 months ago, following a five-year process that included environmental assessment and Indigenous support. Despite Kinder Morgan following the regulations and getting every approval necessary for the project, the project was forced to a halt by protests and legal challenges while the federal government continued to promise that the project would somehow get done. The message being conveyed to investors is: Dont come here to do business. Even if you fulfill all regulatory requirements, youll still face many obstacles, Alexandre Moreau of the Montreal Economic Institute said in a statement Monday afternoon. In other words, Moreau suggests the Trudeau administration puts way too much red tape around investing in this country. Moreaus sentiments echo the claim by the Fraser Institute that Canada is closed for business when it comes to energy. The Trudeau government repeatedly promised that the project would be built, yet failed to take concrete and timely action while sending mixed signals regarding its support, the think-tank wrote on its website. The experts at both organizations claim that the federal government should have stepped in to solve the conflict between B.C. and Alberta as the pipeline crosses provincial borders and falls under its responsibility. Instead, they say the government is wasting taxpayer money to keep the project on life support instead of offering the support it should have to get the project finished with Kinder Morgan. Story continues Over 800 business leaders from across the country have also come together to voice their disapproval of the deal, which could end up costing taxpayers a hefty $17 billion before all is said and done. Not a single private investor wanted to buy the pipeline, which shows that this is a terrible investment, said Wantoo CEO Michael Tippett in a press release. Now as taxpayers we get to be on the hook for the environmental and economic cost of this boondoggle. Better options Theres some doubt regarding the necessity of this expansion given the expected decline in fossil fuel consumption over the next decade, according to some experts. Dr. Tom Gunton at Simon Fraser University says that only two out of the four proposed pipeline expansions are necessary for meeting Canadas needs and the Trans Mountain pipeline is the worst choice. One important question is, why did the government do this when there are other options that would have met Albertas objective of getting oil to world markets without any taxpayer subsidy and without any risk to B.C.s coast? According to him, this decision does nothing but harm Canada in the long run, especially with investors. First, a government takeover of a private sector company sends a bad signal to the international business community, explains Gunton. Second, pushing this project through will continue to generate protests and discord that will harm Canadas international reputation. Third, the government is supporting Trans Mountain at the expense of its Canadian competitors Enbridge and Trans Canada and this intervention in favor of one project to the detriment of other projects is unprecedented and damaging to the investment climate. The consensus among experts seems clear: the government needs to do a better job of facilitating investment in order to keep investors coming to Canada. Following their announcement, Kinder Morgans (KMI) stock price dipped slightly, less than a day later it had already recovered and rose higher. Analysts dont expect that to last however, as future growth prospects for the company are much lower without the massive project. If investors really do turn away Canadas energy sector, the government will have a hard time finding a new buyer. It is unlikely that the government will be able to sell the project to someone else if and until the new pipeline is complete, which will be years from now, Gunton says. Kinder Morgan wanted out because of rising costs, increased competition from other pipelines and public opposition. Other private investors will have the same concerns. Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android. President Donald Trump speaks during a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery: AP Photo/Evan Vucci President Donald Trump has accused the federal investigators probing his campaigns alleged ties to Russia of meddling in the US midterm elections. The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls, Mr Trump tweeted. There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats! The tweet was a reference to special counsel Robert Muellers team, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and probing allegations that Moscow worked in concert with the Trump team. Thirteen of the 17 members of Mr Muellers team have previously registered as Democrats, according to the Washington Post. Mr Mueller himself is a Republican, who was appointed to his role by a fellow Republican Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Mr Trump has repeatedly called the investigation a witch hunt, and called allegations of collusion fake news. But Tuesday was the first time he turned the word meddling a term often used to describe Russias alleged actions during the US election against the investigators. He provided no evidence that the team was meddling in the midterm elections, which will determine the balance of power in the US Congress in November. It was not the first time the president had made unfounded allegations about the Mueller investigation in recent days. Last week, he claimed the FBI had planted a spy in his campaign to aid his Hillary Clinton, his election opponent. Several outlets have reported that the FBI had sent an informant to speak with members of the Trump campaign during the election, after the bureau found evidence of suspicious contacts with Russia. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said the informant was placed to gather information about the Russians, not to spy on the Trump campaign. Even after receiving a classified intelligence briefing on the subject, top Democrats in Congress said they had seen no evidence to support Mr Trumps claims. Story continues Mr Trump has stepped up his attacks on the Mueller team in recent weeks, as the midterms approach and the investigation drags on far past what the White House predicted. Why arent the 13 Angry and heavily conflicted Democrats investigating the totally Crooked Campaign of totally Crooked Hillary Clinton," Mr Trump tweeted on Tuesday. "Its a Rigged Witch Hunt, thats why! Ask them if they enjoyed her after election celebration! He also accused the media of running "the most highly sophisticated & dishonest Disinformation Campaign in the history of politics". Four members of Mr Trump's 2016 campaign team have been charged in connection with the Mueller probe thus far, including his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. The president's long-time personal attorney, Michael Cohen, is also under criminal investigation in New York following a tip from Mr Mueller's team. Even though smart climate policies could save tens of trillions of dollars President Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, U.S., May 26, 2018. Photograph: Yuri Gripas/Reuters Last week, the Washington Post obtained a White House internal memo that debated how the Trump administration should handle federal climate science reports. The memo presented three options without endorsing any of them: conducting a red team/blue team exercise to highlight uncertainties in climate science; more formally reviewing the science under the Administrative Procedure Act; or deciding to just ignore, and not seek to characterize or question, the science being conducted by Federal agencies and outside entities. In short, the White House considered debating established climate science, casting doubt on scientists conclusions, or just ignoring them. Accepting and/or acting on the findings of the scientific experts is not an option theyre willing to consider. So according to this memo, the administration considered 3 options--(1) framing reality as being up for debate; (2) developing their own view of reality; or (3) ignoring reality--and went with option 3. Interesting that "accepting reality" was not an option. https://t.co/ejqBOEa0B0 Katharine Hayhoe (@KHayhoe) May 24, 2018 Climate denial is very expensive Meanwhile, a paper published in Nature last week concluded that limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures would save more than $20tn as compared to a temperature of 2C. The carbon pollution cuts needed to achieve the 1.5C target would cost about $300bn more than efforts to meet 2C. In other words, the economic benefits of the more aggressive target would outweigh its costs by a factor of about 70-to-1. Current international climate policies will only limit global warming to about 33.5C global warming, and Americas policies are critically insufficient to meet either the 2C or 1.5C targets. Under the Trump administration, the US has no plans to try and cut its carbon pollution, and in fact the administration has been taking every possible step to undo established climate policies and increase pollution from the coal and oil industries, even though global warming will especially hurt Trump country. Story continues Basically, taking aggressive action to curb global warming would save the world a lot of money, and it would especially benefit the economies in southern, conservative states. But it wouldnt be good for the fossil fuel industry, and the Trump administration has prioritized short-term corporate profits above all else, including American welfare and lives. Ignoring experts is stupid Theres a 97% expert consensus that humans are causing global warming, and the scientific research is clear that the consequences of continued rapid climate change could be devastating for the economy and for all species on Earth. The case for the Trump administration approach ignoring and casting doubt on the conclusions of climate science experts is that of a bad gambler. Its not a 100% consensus; maybe the less than 3% of climate contrarians are onto something. Perhaps the experts are wrong and climate change wont be so bad. If the stakes were something inconsequential like a Trump steak, that would be fine, but it should go without saying that betting the future of humanity and life on Earth on a less than 3% long shot is a bad idea. The stakes could not be higher. Prudent risk management dictates that we should be taking serious steps to mitigate the chances of such a disastrous outcome. Thats why Americans buy home and auto and health insurance. Its why fewer than 17% of Americans today are smokers, down from 42% in 1965. Saving the Republican Party Not only is global warming denial terrible policy, but its bad for the long-term health of the Republican Party. Theres a climate change generation gap most young Americans realize that humans are causing global warming, and young conservatives want their leaders to do something about it. Climate change impacts will only become more severe over time, and todays youth know that theyll have to live with the consequences of our actions today. They simply cant afford denial, and the GOP risks losing these voters forever by willfully ignoring the problem that poses an existential threat to young Americans. There are a few glimmers of hope in the party. Trumps new Nasa administrator now accepts climate science. Eight House Republicans signed a letter to leaders of the Appropriations Committee urging them to reject any provisions in the 2019 spending bill that would undermine efforts to combat climate change. The conservative Climate Leadership Council proposed a free market, small government, revenue-neutral carbon tax ready to go as soon as the GOP can elect a leadership thats willing to make a great climate change deal. But right now the GOP is still stuck being, as Governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA) described it five years ago, the stupid party. Its leadership wont even consider the possibility that 97% of climate science experts are right. That denial is going to be very expensive, and as Americans increasingly accept the realities of climate change, it will also land the GOP on the endangered species list. President Trump on Wednesday expressed fresh regret for appointing Jeff Sessions his attorney general. In a series of tweets, Trump relayed comments from Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., about a New York Times report that said that in March 2017 the president told Sessions he should reverse his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Appearing on CBS This Morning, Gowdy was asked whether Trumps request would constitute obstruction of justice. I dont think so, Gowdy said. I think what the president is doing is expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward. If I were the president and I picked someone to be the countrys chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, Oh, by the way, Im not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated too. Gowdy continued: And thats how I read that. Sen. Sessions, why didnt you tell me this before I picked you? Look, there are lots of really good lawyers in the country. He could have picked somebody else. And I wish I did! Trump wrote. President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the FBI National Academy graduation ceremony in Quantico, Va., in December 2017. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP) Sessions, the first sitting U.S. senator to endorse Trump during his campaign, was sworn in as attorney general three weeks after Trumps inauguration. But he quickly fell out of favor with the president. The Times reports that Trump berated Sessions during a meeting at the presidents Mar-a-Lago resort in March 2017, and asked his attorney general to retain control of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation of the Trump campaigns contacts with Russia. Days before, Sessions recused himself from the probe after it was revealed hed had undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador. According to the paper, the confrontation at Mar-a-Lago is now being scrutinized by Mueller as the special counsel weighs possible obstruction charges. And Trump has repeatedly and publicly ripped Sessions ever since. Story continues President Trump watches as Vice President Mike Pence, right, swears in Jeff Sessions as U.S. attorney general as Sessionss wife, Mary, holds a Bible in the Oval Office of the White House on Feb. 9, 2017. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters) Last July, for instance, Trump accused his attorney general of taking a very weak position on investigating his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton. Trump also described Sessions as beleaguered. So why aren't the Committees and investigators, and of course our beleaguered A.G., looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations? Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2017 The same month, the Associated Press reported that Trump was considering firing Sessions. Sessions has rarely pushed back against Trumps attacks. But in February, after Trump ripped Sessions for asking the inspector general to investigate allegations of misconduct in the FBIs handling of surveillance of former Trump adviser Carter Page, the attorney general fired back. As long as I am the Attorney General, I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor, Sessions said in a statement, and this Department will continue to do its work in a fair and impartial manner according to the law and Constitution. Gowdy was also asked about Trumps claims that a spy had been planted in his presidential campaign. And the senior House Republican, who was one of the lawmakers briefed last week by the FBI, said there is no evidence to back up the presidents accusations. Appearing on Fox News on Tuesday night, Gowdy said he believes the FBI did nothing wrong when it dispatched an informant to talk to two Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page after the agency received evidence that the men had suspicious contacts linked to Russia. I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do, Gowdy said. Read more from Yahoo News: By Tuvan Gumrukcu and Ece Toksabay ANKARA (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department on Wednesday denied media reports that a deal had been reached between the United States and Turkey on a three-step plan for withdrawing the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia from Syria's Manbij. "We don't have any agreements yet with the government of Turkey," department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement in Washington. "We're continuing to have ongoing conversations regarding Syria and other issues of mutual concern," she said, adding that American and Turkish officials had met in Ankara last week for talks on the issue. Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency said on Wednesday Ankara and Washington had reached a technical agreement on the withdrawal plan, a move Turkey has long sought from the United States. The report comes as differences over Syria policy and Washington's decision in December to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem have strained ties between the NATO allies. Turkey is outraged by U.S. support for the YPG militia, considering them a terrorist organization. Ankara has threatened to push its offensive in northern Syria's Afrin region further east to Manbij. Manbij is a potential flashpoint. The Syrian government, Kurdish militants, Syrian rebel groups, Turkey, and the United States all have a military presence in northern Syria. Under the terms of the plan to be finalised during a visit by Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu to Washington on June 4, the YPG will withdraw from Manbij 30 days after the deal is signed, Anadolu said, quoting sources who attended meetings at which the decisions were made. Turkish and U.S. military forces will start joint supervision in Manbij 45 days after the agreement is signed and a local administration will be formed 60 days after June 4, Anadolu said. Earlier on Wednesday, Cavusoglu told broadcaster AHaber that a timetable for the Manbij plans could be set during talks with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington, and that it could be implemented before the end of the summer. Cavusoglu was also quoted by media on his return flight from Germany saying that, if finalised, the plan for Manbij could be applied throughout northern Syria. However, a local Manbij official later told Reuters that Cavusoglu's assertions that U.S. and Turkish forces would temporarily control the region were "premature" and lacked credibility. Relations between Ankara and Washington have hit a low-point due to factors such as the sentencing this month in New York of a former Turkish state bank executive to 32 months in prison for taking part in an Iran sanctions-busting scheme, a case Turkey has called a political attack. DEFENSE PROCUREMENT Turkey has also caused unease in Washington with its decision to buy S-400 surface-to-air missiles from Russia and drew criticism over its detention of a U.S. Christian pastor, Andrew Brunson, on terrorism charges. Brunson faces up to 35 years in prison on charges of links to the network Ankara blames for a 2016 coup attempt. The pastor denied the charges in a Turkish court this month. A U.S. Senate committee last week passed its version of a $716 billion defense policy bill, including a measure to prevent Turkey from buying Lockheed Martin F-35 jets, citing Brunson and the Russian missile deal. Cavusoglu, however, said that if the United States blocked Turkey from buying the jets, Ankara would go elsewhere to meet its needs, adding that it was unlikely Washington would be able to back out of the deal. Turkey has plans to buy more than 100 of the F-35 jets and the Pentagon last year awarded Lockheed $3.7 billion in an interim payment for the production of 50 of the aircraft earmarked for non-U.S. customers, including Ankara. (Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton in Washington; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Tom Brown) As you might expect, Donald Trumps bizarre self-pitying tweet regarding ABCs cancellation of Roseanne was the sort of thing Twitter users couldnt ignore. The president tweeted on Wednesday asking why the network never apologized for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on the network. Meanwhile, Robert Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, had reached out to Valerie Jarrett after Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet about her. Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that ABC does not tolerate comments like those made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didnt get the call? Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 Moments later, the snark started. Me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me la (@yolarae) May 30, 2018 And kept going ... And going ... Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. Some people called out Trump on his hypocrisy of demanding apologies, but never giving them. Story continues I don't recall you calling President Obama and apologizing to him about all of the despicable things you said about him. If you aren't going to apologize, then don't expect others to. They are speaking the truth. Something you have no understanding of and live in fear of. NanaOf7IsWhyIFight (@nanakim1956fl) May 30, 2018 You are just a horrible self centered human being arent you?? Everything must always be about you. This tweet here just confirms that you condone Rosannes feelings of racism... is it because the feelings are mutual? J.Scott Maycroft (@maycroft1977) May 30, 2018 Some subtly told Trump what they thought of his tweet. At least one asked the president to re-examine his priorities. I wish you were just as outraged to learn that more than 4,000 Americans died in #PuertoRico on your watch. https://t.co/T2gBPiZKGf Rep. Joe Crowley (@repjoecrowley) May 30, 2018 Finally, some offered theories on why Trump didnt get Igers call. Maybe you were too busy grabbin' pussy. Colin McTaggart (@coj22) May 30, 2018 You was busy when ABC called pic.twitter.com/Vkg5xyfwSA twobeersonthedeck (@twobeersonthed1) May 30, 2018 Also on HuffPost This article originally appeared on HuffPost. The U.S. has reportedly considered abandoning one of its most significant military installations in Syria as it prepared to enter into talks with Russia and Jordan over a deteriorating security situation in the war-torn country's restive south. The report, which first surfaced Sunday in Saudi Arabian newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, came as Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Tuesday that Moscow "supported the idea of holding a trilateral meeting at a level convenient for our partners," according to the state-run RIA Novosti. The U.S. and its Middle Eastern ally Jordan are opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose forcesbacked by Russia and Iranare planning a new offensive against rebels and jihadis across southern Syria. The Saudi publication reported that, in order to prevent an escalation between longtime foes Iran and Israel, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield was attempting to draw up a proposal for the trilateral meeting that would include the withdrawal of all Syrian and non-Syrian militias up to 15-and-a-half miles from the Jordanian border. Insurgents would also be transferred to the rebel-held province of Idlib and the Syria-Jordan border crossing would be opened. Trending: Belgium Terror Suspect Who Killed Two Liege Police Officers Was On Day Release Program In exchange, the U.S. would reportedly dismantle its military base in Al-Tanf, located in a pocket of Syrian rebel control near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders. 3978214 Staff Sergeant Jacob Connor/U.S. Department of Defense Russia has long accused the U.S. of using the Al-Tanf base to shield the remnants of jihadi groups such as the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), against which both the U.S. and Russia are supporting their respective local Syrian partners to fight. The U.S. has routinely denied the charges and has criticized Russia for backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who the West and its allies have accused of war crimes and attempted to help overthrow by backing a 2011 uprising against his rule. Story continues Don't miss: Murdered Russian Journalist Strolls Into Ukraine News Conference, Offers Special Apologies to My Wife With Russian and Iranian backing, however, Assad's armed forces have retaken most of the country and most recently reclaimed the rebel-held outskirts of Damascus. The Syrian military has since set its sights on retaking insurgent-controlled areas near the southwestern province of Daraa, located between the Jordanian border and Israel-occupied Golan Heights. The introduction of Iran-backed militias into this region, however, threatened to escalate an already explosive relationship with Israel. Related: Russia May Move Iran's Militants from Israel's Border in Unprecedented Deal on Syria, Reports Claim Israel has officially remained neutral in Syria's seven-year civil war, but has also launched numerous airstrikes against Iranian and pro-Iran positions. In what became the largest Israeli air force attack on Syria since the two went to war in 1973, Israeli bombed numerous targets across Syria after rocket fire from Syria targeted Israeli forces in the occupied Golan Heights in response to a previous Israeli airstrike southwest of Damascus. Most popular: Monster Hunter World Lunastra Update: Start Time and Everything You Need to Know The U.S. sided with Israel in the spat, but Russia has found itself torn between its strategic ally Iran and Israel, which it also maintains relations with. Reports have emerged in Israeli media suggesting that Russia was able to convince Syria to withdraw the Lebanese Shiite Muslim Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups in exchange for Israel's support for Syrian troops to reclaim the once revolutionary hub of southern Syria. RTS1QTD6 (1) INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF WAR/MAPS4NEWS/ISRAELI DEFENSE FORCES/REUTERS Bogdanov dismissed these reports Tuesday, saying at the annual Primakov Readings conferencehosted by the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relationsthat "I do not know about such an arrangement," according to RIA Novosti. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also commented on the alleged deal, reiterating his argument that "some strange things are happening in Al-Tanf" including the appearance of fighters he said were connected to ISIS. "As for media reports about the U.S. making plans to withdraw troops from the Al-Tanf area, I have already said that this zone was artificially created for reasons that are difficult to understand from the standpoint of military feasibility," Lavrov told journalists, according to the state-run Tass Russian News Agency. "This is why our Defense Ministry has been drawing our U.S. counterparts attention to that fact and they seem to be coming to the same conclusion." Russian President Vladimir Putin told Assad last week in Sochi that all foreign fighters should eventually leave Syria, but he has so far struggled to rein in his Iranian and Syrian allies. Both Tehran and Damascus said they had no plans to pull out Iranian and Hezbollah forces until the battle against ISIS and insurgents was completed. Syria has invited Russia and Iranian forces to help in the country's conflict, but considers U.S. and Turkish presence illegal. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek A California Supreme Court ruling could have serious repercussions for Uber and Lyft: REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson San Franciscos city attorney has demanded that Uber and Lyft turn over employment records after a California high court ruling that could reshape the gig economy. Technology firms that allow people to perform discrete tasks for money - like driving passengers to their destination - typically classify those workers as independent contractors, rather than full-time employees, a designation that means they are not entitled to wage and benefit guarantees. The California Supreme Court recently threw that business model into doubt by ruling that companies must meet a series of conditions to prove workers should be independent contractors. If they cannot, the court ruled, those companies have to comply with California wage orders. San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera referenced that decision in announcing he was subpoenaing Lyft and Uber to see how they classify their drivers and to obtain data on pay and benefits. If those drivers should in fact be considered employees, the ride-for-hire firms would owe them minimum wage along with sick days, paid parental leave and health benefits, Mr Herrera said. San Franciscos laws help ensure that employers provide a fair days wage for a fair days work, Mr Herrera said in a statement. Our laws also guarantee employees basic humane benefits like sick leave, health care, and paid parental leave. We are not going to turn a blind eye if companies in San Francisco deny workers their pay and benefits. A representative of Uber declined to comment. A Lyft spokesman said the company has a long track record of working collaboratively with policymakers, including the SF City Attorney, on important issues. We look forward to helping the City Attorney's office fully understand Lyft's business model, including our relationship with drivers, Adrian Durbin said. As the task-based gig economy has grown in recent years, spurred by the rapid expansion of the ride-for-hire model championed by Uber and Lyft, so too have questions about the nature of modern work. Story continues Executives at companies like Uber and Lyft argue that the works appeal derives in large part from its flexibility, which allows people to earn money in their spare time or earn supplemental wages without having to hew to a riding schedule. But labour advocates and their political allies are increasingly warning that the gig economy model deprives workers of durable employment and forces society to absorb the cost of that instability. We are not going to tolerate any company shirking its responsibility to pay for benefits and shifting that burden onto taxpayers when drivers without health insurance turn to the emergency room, Mr Herrera said. Last week Uber announced it would extend health insurance across Europe and offer one-time payments to defray the cost of having children. Efforts to form gig workers into unions have produced mixed results. While a court ruled last year that Seattle-area Uber and Lyft drivers had the right to unionise despite being classified as independent contractors, a California appeals court this month ruled against a labour Seattle law that spurred the legal challenge. Bamako (AFP) - United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has vowed to pursue support for an anti-terror force gathering five Sahel nations, despite a US rebuff for UN funding. Guterres visited the headquarters of the so-called G5 Sahel Wednesday in the central town of Sevare on the second and final day of a trip to Mali, which is battling a jihadist insurgency in the Sahel. Guterres said the trip had left him with "a warm heart" and the UN would try to help the country stage a free presidential election on July 29. "Mali must have free elections and we will do our best to help the Malian authorities to run the elections, even if I know that the difficulties are enormous", he added during a press conference in Bamako. Planned elections have been repeatedly postponed, in part because of security concerns over Islamist extremism. France intervened militarily in Mali in 2013 to help government forces drive al-Qaeda-linked jihadists out of the north. The initial mission was followed in 2014 by Operational Barkhane, which deployed 4,000 French troops alongside the UN's 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali. The insurgency however has spread to central and southern Mali and spilled into Burkina Faso and Niger. Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger last year agreed to set up the joint force, which would comprise 5,000 troops with a mandate to confront jihadists in the vulnerable Sahel belt. It was projected to be fully up and running in March, but its deployment has faced delays and the joint force is poorly-equipped. Guterres, as well as France, has been lobbying for the force to speed up its work and pushing for UN funding, which would be in addition to technical support from MINUSMA. - Setback - But on May 23, the United States said it opposed a Security Council mandate for the force and direct UN funding. Despite the setback, MINUSMA will provide the G5 with all possible support, Guterres said, adding that he was "in favour of a stronger mandate" by the Security Council for the force. Story continues "We will put forward a very strong argument for the G5 to have the necessary financial resources and equipment to be effective," he said. "We are also requesting (help for) development in the Sahel, because there is no peace without development," he said. The vast Sahel region has turned into a hotbed of lawlessness since chaos engulfed Libya in 2011, the Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 and the rise of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. About 418 million euros ($570 million dollars) have been promised for the G5 Sahel, mostly by European countries, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. US support has been bilateral and relatively low -- $60 million was promised by then secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, in October. Guterres on Tuesday visited MINUSMA, heaping praise on the force which has suffered the most fatalities of any UN peacekeeping mission. MINUSMA has 12,500 military and police personnel, but has lost more than 160 people since it deployed in 2013 -- a figure that accounts for more than half of UN peacekeeping fatalities over this period. The unrest in Mali, a former French colony, stems from a 2012 Tuareg separatist uprising against the state. Islamist extremists linked to Al-Qaeda took control of the desert north, but were largely driven out in a French-led military operation launched in January 2013. But insurgents remain active, linked to drug, arms and migrant trafficking in the vast Sahel region. United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The latest escalation of fighting between Israel and Palestinian Hamas has pushed Gaza to the brink of war, the UN envoy for the Middle East warned the Security Council on Wednesday. Nickolay Mladenov delivered the stark warning as the council remained deadlocked over how to respond to the flare-up between Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip and Israel. "This latest round of attacks is a warning to all of how close to the brink of war we are every day," said Mladenov, who spoke via video link from Jerusalem. The council met in emergency session at the request of the United States, which had asked the top UN body to condemn rocket firings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Israel. But Kuwait, a non-permanent council member that represents Arab countries, blocked the US-drafted statement, arguing that it had presented its own draft resolution that addressed the crisis. The exchange of fire on Tuesday and into the early hours of Wednesday began with a barrage of rocket and mortars into Israel from Gaza, prompting Israel to respond with strikes on 65 militant sites in the Gaza Strip. The violence was the most serious escalation since the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas and followed weeks of Palestinian protests in which more than 100 Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israeli forces. Calm returned to Gaza on Wednesday but the UN envoy expressed concern that ongoing protests in June will lead to further violence. "No one in Gaza can afford another war," said Mladenov. Kuwait is pushing for a vote at the council this week on its draft resolution calling for "the consideration of measures" for the protection of Palestinian civilians, according to the text obtained by AFP. The United States, which has veto power in the council, will oppose the measure, Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon told reporters. US Ambassador Nikki Haley said "the people of Gaza do not need protection from an external source. The people of Gaza need protection from Hamas." Story continues With the council deadlocked, France warned that the failure to agree on a response to the Gaza crisis was damaging to the United Nations. "This increasingly heavy silence, which is becoming deafening, is not acceptable," said French Ambassador Francois Delattre. "It is not acceptable for the Palestinian and Israeli populations, who are affected by this conflict. It is not acceptable for the world that is watching us," he said. President Donald Trump with China's President Xi Jinping. Mr Trump has raised the issue of the trade deficit with his counterpart a number of times: AFP/Getty The US will keep taking action against China over trade, the White House has said, just over a week after agreeing to put the dispute "on hold". Washington will release a list of some $50 billion worth of Chinese goods that will be subject to a 25 per cent tariff on 15 June, the White House said in a statement. The United States will also continue to pursue litigation against China at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In addition, the Trump administration will announce investment restrictions and enhanced export controls for Chinese individuals and entities related to the acquisition of industrially significant technology by the end of June. President Donald Trump has repeatedly bemoaned the US trade deficit with China, one of a number of countries Mr Trump has said has an "unfair" trade relationship with Washington. Having announced a number of tit-for-tat measures against each other in recent weeks - with both sides proposing punishing 25 per cent tariffs on a number of products - US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on 20 May that negotiations between Washington and Beijing had produced an agreement that meant both countries could step back from imposing them. Were putting the trade war on hold, right now, we have agreed to put the tariffs on hold while we try to execute the framework, Mr Mnuchin told Fox News. Mr Mnuchin said that the US had won several commitments from Chinese officials that should cut Americas trade deficit with China, which ran at more than $300m (225m) in 2017. In a joint statement at the time, Beijing and Washington said they had reached a consensus on taking effective measures to cut the US trade deficit in goods with China. To meet the growing consumption needs of the Chinese people and the need for high-quality economic development, China will significantly increase purchases of United States goods and services, the statement said. Chinas state-run news agency, Xinhua, said the statement was essentially a vow not to launch a trade war against each other. However, while the announcements eased worries about an escalating trade war between world's two largest economies, Mr Trump also said last week that any deal between Washington and Beijing would need "a different structure," fuelling uncertainty about the long-term status of the agreement. Since Friday, the case of British far-right activist Tommy Robinson has spread across the globe, with the hashtag #FreeTommy gaining traction among his followers from Australia to the U.S. The right-wing campaigner was arrested and jailed on Friday outside a controversial trial in northern England. Hundreds have since taken to Londons streets, thousands have signed a petition calling for his release, and several high-profile Americans, including actor Roseanne Barr, have tweeted their support for him. Heres what you need to know about the case: Who is Tommy Robinson? Tommy Robinson is the pseudonym of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a far-right activist in the UK who founded a group called the English Defense League in 2009, which aimed to counter what it called Islamism in the U.K., and also set up a British branch of the German anti-Islam group Pegida in 2016. He is active in the global far-right, writing and broadcasting for Canadian far-right channel Rebel Media and his arrest on Friday on suspicion of breaching the peace outside a court in the U.K. attracted tweets of protest by right-wing activists and commentators around the world. Like who? Actor James Woods tweeted Saturday, asking for information about Robinsons arrest and Roseanne Barr replied, he has tried to report on rape gangs being protected in UK. He was just arrested-which is a death sentence-please get involved! its sick pedo sh-t [sic] Donald Trump Jr, the eldest son of the U.S. President, also tweeted about Robinsons arrest: Reason #1776 for the original #brexit. Dont let America follow in those footsteps. https://t.co/6QLejT61i4 Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 27, 2018 Robinson was arrested outside a trial in Yorkshire, in the north of England, and has since been sentenced to 13 months in prison for contempt of court, according to The Independent, which was only able to reveal the sentence Tuesday after a judge removed a reporting restriction on Robinsons case. Story continues Why was he in contempt of court? The law in England and Wales places restrictions on what can be reported during trials in order to avoid prejudicing a jury, and in this case the media was forbidden to report any details. The case centers on rape and trafficking allegations against 29 defendants, and has attracted significant attention from far-right activists. On Friday, Robinson filmed a Facebook Live video outside Leeds Crown court in northern England while defendants entered. According to reports about the live stream, which went on for around an hour, Robinson was attempting to confront defendants as they entered the court building, and talking about details of the trial. He was arrested for a breach of the peace, and taken away by police. By filming defendants and discussing details of the trial while broadcasting via a livestream, Robinson was breaking the court-ordered restriction on media. As he was already serving a suspended sentence for filming outside another trial in May last year, he was jailed for 13 months. In the U.S., reporting on ongoing trials is usually protected by the First Amendment. Why has the arrest gained global attention? The news that Robinson had been sentenced to jail time was shared across social media throughout the weekend, and protests by his supporters in London demanded his release, with hundreds showing up outside Downing Street, chanting shame on you. However it was not until Tuesday that media outlets were able to report on Robinsons sentence due to a reporting restriction, put in place for fear of influencing the trial Robinson was live streaming outside. Many have painted Robinsons arrest as anti freedom of speech, with several high profile right-wingers sharing messages comparing him to Gandhi. Video of the protests in the U.K. have been widely shared across social media, as has footage of supporters holding smaller sympathy protests in Australia, Tel Aviv and Germany. Robinson has become well-known in the global far-right movement for his protests against what he calls the Islamisation of our countries and his recent arrest has provoked sympathetic responses from far-right groups in the U.S., including Alex Jones Infowars. In Europe, several far-right politicians criticized Robinsons jailing, with Geert Wilders, leader of the Netherlands anti-Islam Freedom party, comparing the U.K. to Saudi Arabia and German lawmaker Petr Bystron of the far-right Alternative for Germany party suggesting he wanted to help Robinson get asylum as a political prisoner. Supporters in the U.K. also set up a petition online, titled Free Tommy Robinson, with descriptions in eight languagesEnglish, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, Czech and Russian. At time of writing it had reached 470,494 signatures, with a target of 500,000. There were the Ikea bags. The plastic bin shirts. And now the T-shirt shirt or double shirt. All by famous fashion house Balenciaga, these items have regularly stirred up internet fervor thanks to their high price tags and eyebrow-raising design. The latest perpetrator to raise the ire of the fashion police is the so-called T-shirt shirt, which retails on the Balenciaga website for $1,290. (Its available for pre-order only you cant get your hands on one of these hot items until late July.) Its a t-shirt with a button-down shirt attached to the front, turning the t-shirt wearer into a kind of human hanger for the draping dress shirt. Or, as the website helpfully points out in the product description, you could flip the script and wear it the other way: as a dress shirt with a t-shirt casually hanging off of your back. (They call this a drape effect.) Made in Italy out of poplin, the shirt(s) were ostensibly designed by head designer Demna Gvasalia, who is also the mastermind of hip French brand Vetements. That brand is also known for selling pieces that poke fun at pop culture and retail for a hefty cost. The internet has plenty to say on the subject of the two-in-one shirt look, of course. Whether its a fashion crime or a pointed critique of the ridiculousness of retail and style trends remains undetermined, but it certainly has gotten the debate going. I thought this Balenciaga shirt was a joke. ...Its real and it's $1,290 pic.twitter.com/j0gwfmEaRS Troy Osinoff (@yo) May 27, 2018 To everyone complaining about Balenciaga's shirts, keep in mind that it is HIGH FASHION & alot of the pieces made for high fashion are more like art pieces, not clithing articles meant for everyday wear. ???? (@lilmilakerpants) May 29, 2018 And its inspired a few crafty copycats. Story continues Hey @BALENCIAGA, I just made my own Double Shirt and it didn't cost thousands of dollars! pic.twitter.com/8daWqAGy7C Mike (@AH_Mike) May 28, 2018 Harare (AFP) - Zimbabwe announced on Wednesday it would choose a new president and parliament on July 30, in the country's first electoral test since the removal of its autocratic leader Robert Mugabe. His successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, unveiled the date in the official Zimbabwe Government Gazette. "Monday, the 30th day of July, 2018 (is) the day of the election to the office of President, the election of members of the National Assembly and election of councillors," Mnangagwa said in a proclamation. Once a right-hand man to Mugabe, Mnangagwa dramatically succeeded the 94-year-old veteran leader in November after nearly four decades in charge when troops swarmed the streets and briefly seized key sites. Mnangagwa, 75, will square off against the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, now led by 40-year-old Nelson Chamisa following the death of Morgan Tsvangirai in February. Mnangagwa tweeted following the announcement that "what unites us as Zimbabweans is far greater than anything that could ever divide us". "I look forward to engaging with my fellow citizens on the campaign trail," he wrote. - 'We will win' - The MDC said it accepted the date but called for "electoral reforms (to be) implemented before the elections are held". "We are prepared to fight and we know we will win," said MDC spokesman Douglas Mwonzora. He added that the party wanted external scrutiny of the voter roll and impartial media coverage for parties. If no candidate receives a simple majority in the first round of the presidential election, a run-off will be held on September 8. Elections under Mugabe were marred by corruption, intimidation and violence, but Mnangagwa has vowed to hold a free and fair vote. In a move that could deter many opponents of ZANU-PF rule living in self-imposed exile overseas, the country's top court ruled Monday that non-resident Zimbabweans would be unable to vote from abroad. Story continues The MDC has called for voters living abroad to be permitted to vote in their own countries. "The tone and the conduct of the forthcoming election will be different from elections held since the year 2000 in that the government will want to ensure that the poll appears free and fair," said Maplecroft analyst Charles Laurie. The election will be the first to be monitored by Western observers in many years. On Monday, Harare and the European Union announced that observers from the bloc would monitor polls in the southern African country for the first time in 16 years. - Western observers - The head of the last EU observer mission, Pierre Schori, was thrown out of Zimbabwe in 2002 on the eve of presidential elections that were condemned as flawed. Following the high-profile spat, Zimbabwe barred the EU and other Western observers from sending further missions to monitor polls in the country as Mugabe grew more and more defiant of foreign criticism up until his downfall. And in a further sign of Zimbabwe's growing efforts to mend fences with former foes following Mugabe's resignation, the country has applied to re-join the Commonwealth, the bloc of former British colonies said Monday. Harare's membership was suspended in 2003 over the violent and graft-ridden elections the previous year. Zimbabwe left the Commonwealth at the height of violent land seizures, when white farmers were evicted in favour of landless black people -- a policy that wrecked agriculture and triggered economic collapse. Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland confirmed that the organisation would also send observers to the elections. Mugabe sent shockwaves through the ruling ZANU-PF, the party he dominated for decades, when he recently posed with a retired general who will take on the government in this year's election. Despite a slew of reformist pledges and announcements it is unclear whether Mnangagwa, who was a vital cog in the ZANU-PF party and helped Mugabe to retain power for 37 years, has won the support of ordinary Zimbabweans. Following the announcement of the poll date, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) called on voters "to conduct themselves in a peaceful manner". "Let us be peaceful and tolerant to each other," said ZEC spokeswoman Priscilla Chigumba. The Chief Rabbinate has compiled a "black list" of rabbis from Orthodox congregations abroad whose opinions on religious matters it rejects because of their liberal worldviews, an internal Rabbinal Court memo obtained by Ynet showed. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter The document seemingly contradicts the Chief Rabbinate's explicit and repeated statementsincluding ones given in courtthat it does not have such a list. Haifa's Chief Rabbinate (Photo: Gil Nechushtan) ITIM, an NGO founded help Israelis navigate religious authorities bureaucracy, has been waging an ongoing battle in recent years to have rabbis from abroad recognized by Israel's Chief Rabbinate. The NGO argues that in the existing situation, rabbis can be recognized or rejected for unrelated reasons and without explanation. The court has already ordered the Chief Rabbinate to determine criteria for the recognition of rabbis from abroad, but the Rabbinate has been dragging its feet on the matter for quite some time. ITIM claims that the Rabbinate has a "blacklist" of liberal rabbis whose religious authority it automatically disqualifies due to their personal views. The Rabbinate, meanwhile, insists that every case and every rabbi are examined on merits only. The Rabbinical Court's internal memo, however, ostensibly supports ITIM's claims. Rabbinical Court (Photo: Gil Lerner) The memo came to light when a woman requested to register her marriage with the religious council in Haifa. The applicant presented a certification of Jewish status from Rabbi Akiva Herzfeld, who was the rabbi of the Shaarei Tfiloh congregation in Portland, Maine, and has since immigrated to Israel. But the council refused to recognize the rabbi's authority and sent the woman to the Rabbinical Court to clarify the matter. The woman filed a request to clarify her Judaism to the regional religious court in Haifa, and her documents were sent to Rabbi Asher Ehrentreu of the Rabbinical Court. In an internal letter he sent to the regional court, Ehrentreu ruled that Rabbi Herzfeld's opinion could not be relied on and should not be recognized. He also disclosed in the memo that this position was based on a categorical rejection of more than 100 rabbis from a particular beit midrash (Jewish study hall) considered by the Rabbinate to be "too liberal." "Rabbi Akiva Herzfel (sic) is a member of the rabbinical association Chovevei Torah, who call themselves (Modern) Orthodox and are not recognized by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel," wrote Rabbi Ehrentreu. "I cannot determine the Jewish status of the petitioner based on this rabbi's recommendation, and I ask the court to instruct the applicant to turn to me for a comprehensive inquiry." The woman's request was finally approved only after she presented a letter from another religious court in the United States, which is recognized by the Rabbinate. Prominent rabbis on the blacklist Chovevei Torah is a rabbinical school founded by Rabbi Avi Weiss from Riverdale, NY. Rabbi Weiss is considered to be on the far-left of Orthodox Judaism because he ordains women as spiritual leaders and Halachic instructors. He resigned from the Rabbinical Council of America over differences on this issue. Four years ago, the Chief Rabbinate blacklisted Rabbi Weiss and refused to recognize his authority when reviewing the Jewish status of his community members. The Rabbinate claimed that there is doubt as to his "commitment" to Jewish law. Due to public and media pressure , Chief Rabbi David Lau eventually agreed to recognize his authority. But now it appears 124 rabbis he has ordained since 1999 have been blacklisted by the Rabbinate. Rabbi David Lau (Photo: Ynet) Rabbi Akiva Herzfeld is also from Chovevei Torah. In 2013, he was chosen by Forward magazine as one of 36 rabbis who inspire America. ITIM believes that in addition to Weiss' students, there are dozens or perhaps hundreds of rabbis who have been blacklisted by the Chief Rabbinate due to their liberal worldview. Embarrassment for the Rabbinate The internal memo coming out has caused great embarrassment to the Chief Rabbinate and the Rabbinical Courts system, especially in the wake of a Knesset debate on Monday about the recognition of rabbis abroad. Behind the scenes, officials in the Chief Rabbinate and the Rabbinical Courts system exchanged accusations, with the Chief Rabbinate claiming the Rabbinical Courts have no authority to determine which rabbis are recognized or speak on the behalf of the Rabbinate on such a sensitive matter. The Chief Rabbinate declined to comment on a document written by a rabbinical court employee, noting past experience has shown that "over the years, the Chief Rabbinate has approved documents from rabbis belonging to the Chovevei Torah community." "The Chief Rabbinate of Israel does not rule out rabbis or a group of rabbis belonging to one community or another," the Rabbinate said. "The Chief Rabbinate of Israel receives documents or certifications from rabbis that are examined on the merit of the document." Diaspora Jewry The Rabbinate added that "at the next council meeting, official criteria will be approved for the recognition of rabbis and (rabbinical) courts outside of Israel." The Rabbinical Courts said that "To date, there is no set list of rabbis from communities abroad recognized by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. We know that the Chief Rabbinate formed a committee that is working on an updated list. In such circumstances, when there is no up-to-date information, the court examines each case brought before it on a case-by-case basis, and for this purpose is assisted by experts on behalf of the court. Rabbi Asher Ehrentreu, who is familiar with the Rabbinates and Rabbinical Courts in the Diaspora, is one of the experts on whose expertise we rely on, something which has been acceptable to the Chief Rabbinate for years." The founder of ITIM, Rabbi Shaul Farber, charged that "The Chief Rabbinate has repeatedly claimed that there are no blacklists, but here the opinion of an Orthodox rabbi has been rejected only because he belongs to an institution the Rabbinate did not approve of." "What the Rabbinate is doing in this case is first and foremost dishonest," he claimed. "On the one hand, to assuage the harsh criticism against it, it issues all sorts of proclamations. On the other hand, following its takeover by extremist elements, the Rabbinate finds it difficult to stand by those proclamations," he added. "This also contradicts Jewish law. Throughout the generations, Jewish communities around the world have had different Halachic approaches, and yet the communities treated each other with mutual respect and recognized each other's Halachic authority," Farber explained. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau commented on mortar fire from Gaza at Israel and said that, "Israel has every right to defend itself against these deplorable attacks by the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad." "Our thoughts are with everyone affected today," he added. Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon said before a meeting of the organization's Security Council Wednesday regarding rocket fire from Gaza at Israel that holding the meeting was a "positive step. But the Council's members must take serious action, and not make do with words." "I call upon the Security Council to officially recognize Hamas as a terror group," he demanded. Belgian authorities sought to deflect questions on Wednesday over the furlough of a convicted criminal, known to have been radicalized in jail, who killed three people in the Belgian city of Liege. Just hours after his release, the man named by Belgian media as Benjamin Herman killed two policewomen and a bystander on Tuesday before being gunned down in what officials say was a terrorist attack. Police also suspect the 36-year-old of the murder of a former associate found dead at his home. In and out of jail for a variety of crimes since 2003, Herman found a path to violence that has heightened concerns Europe's prisons are incubators for radicalism. He converted to Islam while in detention, a Belgian security source told Reuters, and was under suspicion of radicalization. In Belgium, a prisoner's inclusion on a state security list as a suspected radical is not automatically communicated to all police or the prison service, experts say. It was the fourteenth time since his detention that he was granted temporary leave, intended to help him prepare for eventual reintegration into society in 2020, Justice Minister Koen Geens told reporters. The United States has condemned the attacks out of Gaza and called for an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council in the wake of Palestinian rocket fire on Israel fired at Israel Tuesday. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter US Ambassador Nikki Haley said the Security Council "should be outraged and respond." The rocket and mortar firings from the Gaza Strip were claimed by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, prompting Israel to respond with air strikes on bases of the terrorist Palestinian groups. US Amb. to UN Nikki Haley (Photo: AP) It was the worst flareup since the 2014 war between Israel in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. "Mortars fired by Palestinian militants hit civilian infrastructure, including a kindergarten," US Ambassador Nikki Haley said in a statement on Tuesday. "The Security Council should be outraged and respond to this latest bout of violence directed at innocent Israeli civilians, and the Palestinian leadership needs to be held accountable for what they're allowing to happen in Gaza." The United States circulated a draft statement calling on the council to condemn "in the strongest terms the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinian militants in Gaza" toward Israel, according to a copy of the text seen by AFP. The council will hear a report from UN envoy for the Middle East Nickolay Mladenov during the meeting scheduled for 3pm (7pm GMT) Wednesday. Gaza border communities under attack (Photo: Ohad Wais) Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon the planned meeting was a "positive step. But the Council's members must take serious action, and not make do with words." He called on the Security Council to "strongly condemn Hamas and hold the terrorist organization accountable for these latest attacks in order to restore calmness and protect the citizens on both sides of the fence." He further demanded the Council "to officially recognize Hamas as a terror group." "For weeks we've warned that the violent rioting along the Gaza borderincluding planting explosives along the fence and live fire at our security forceswere not a s spontaneous protest, but a violent coordinated attack against Israel," Danon elaborated. "The dozens of rockets and mortars fired at Israel leave no doubt about the intentions of those who have incited, encouraged and went as far as paying for those ongoing riots," the Israeli ambassador went on say. Mortar shells fired from Gaza at Israel (Photo: Roee Idan) The IDF has said it was not seeking an escalation, but warned Hamaswith whom it has fought three wars since 2008to rein in its fighters. Three Israeli soldiers were wounded in the exchange of fire. Islamic Jihad announced an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement with Israel. The confrontation followed weeks of deadly demonstrations and clashes along the Gaza-Israel border. Dozens of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the unrest. The US-drafted council statement would demand that Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militant groups "cease all violent activity and provocative actions, including along the boundary fence, and cease putting civilians at risk through their actions." The council has been divided over the violence in Gaza and it was unclear whether the US-proposed statement would win full backing. Security Council statements are adopted by consensus by all 15 members. Separately, council diplomats are negotiating a draft resolution, put forward by Kuwait, that calls for an "international protection mission" to be deployed for the Palestinians. Diplomats said the United States is likely to use its veto to block adoption of that measure, but Kuwait is hoping to win backing from the 14 other council members to highlight Washington's isolation on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Head of the Sdot Negev Regional Council Tamir Idan said in a Ynet studio interview that, "We have had a very disquiet night, with a lot of alarms. After a status evaluation this morning, we've instructed everyone to go to school despite fears, but with full coordination with the army." "We've seen a sort of reprieve over the last few hours, and hope this horrible round (of hostilities) is behind us," he said. Three defensive objectives defined the IDFs response to the Hamas marches: One, to prevent an infiltration of the masses and of terrorist cells into Israel; two, to minimize the number of casualties and property damage as much as possible, both on the Israeli side and on the Gazan side; three, to prevent the situation from escalating into a rocket war. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter The first objective was fully accomplished; the second objective was mostly accomplished; the third objective failed. The rocket and mortar shell barrages that were fired from Gaza into the southern communities on Tuesday are alarming. Granted, it reflects a recognition of failure among Gazas ruling organization, after two months of clashes on the border fence. The attempt to market Hamas campaign as a civilian, spontaneous, non-violent move was unsuccessful. Overall, it was met with indifference both on the Arab street and in the international public opinion. Apart from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, no one believed Hamas new clothes. IDF strike in Gaza, Tuesday night. The attempt to prevent the situation from deteriorating into a rocket war failed (Photo: AP) But the failure was ours too. Those among Israels decision makers who refused to bury their heads in the sand knew that Gaza was on the verge of explosion. Nevertheless, the necessary decisions were not made. Tuesdays events only strengthened the understanding that the status quo vis-a-vis Gaza cannot go on. Egypt, Qatar and the American administration are willing to enlist and broker talks, each with its own interests, but without a bold Israeli plan, which includes security risks as well, no good will come out of these efforts. On Tuesday, at around midnight, the feeling among Israels decision makers was that we are not yet done: there is a need to deal Hamas and Islamic Jihad a few more blows to guarantee deterrence. Egypt has offered itself to help achieve a ceasefire. A senior source on the ground described to me the chain of events on the Gaza front in the past few days. The obvious conclusion is that we may have been too successful. Three days ago, the IDF killed three Islamic Jihad terrorists near the fence; two days ago, the IDF killed two Hamas operatives. Islamic Jihad has a score to settle with the IDF. It has yet to avenge the death of 12 of its members in a terror tunnel last October. The IDF believes the two first barrages, at 7am Tuesday, were fired by Islamic Jihad without any coordination with Hamas. The barrages were fired at the Gaza border communities. The Iron Dome and warning systems performed very well. One civilian was lightly wounded on the Israeli side. The Air Force responded by attacking Islamic Jihad and Hamas targets in the strip. Following the airstrikes, Hamas started firing rockets. The IDF believes it was dragged into it: Its leaders were criticized in Gaza for their restraint and were afraid to be left behind. The Air Force responded with a series of additional airstrikes. A mortar shell fired from Gaza. Hamas is being selective (Photo: Roee Idan) The day of fire in the south brings up a number of surprising facts: One, Hamas and Jihad fired mortar shells and rockets at the Gaza border communities, but avoided launching medium-range and long-range rockets. The conclusion on our side was clear: Hamas is being selective. It doesnt want an escalation like Protective Edge or Cast Lead. The IAF bombed dozens of targets. The mushroom clouds were impressive, but according to reports from Gaza, no one was killed or wounded. This shows that Israel, like Hamas, is choosing a limited conflict. Both sides are trying to play by the rules. There is a big risk involved, however. If the mortar shell that hit a kindergarten in one of the Gaza border communities had been fired several minutes later, children and their parents would have been hurt and there would have been no escape from a ground offensive in Gaza. Both sides are walking on the precipice. The conclusion is that the events shouldnt be judged based on the rhetoric or the intention. It should be judged based on the results. And the results dont depend on the decision makers alone, in Tel Aviv or in Gaza. Sometimes, they depend on chance or on luck. As it continues its activity in the air, the IDF is also preparing for riots on the fence. Givati fighters have replaced the Golani fighters. According to military estimates, the momentum of the marches of return is over, but the marches will continue and reach a renewed peak on June 5, Naksa Day (the day marking the Palestinian disaster in 1967). The IDF took advantage of Tuesdays events to destroy a tunnel uncovered in the strip two weeks ago. For the second time, the IDF uncovered a tunnel crossing three countries. The previous tunnel crossed from Gaza into Israel and ended in Sinai. The new tunnel crossed from Gaza into Sinai and ended in Israel. GOC Southern Command Eyal Zamir handed all the information about the tunnel to his colleagues on the Egyptian side. The expectation is that the Egyptians will deal with it on their territory. The tunnel was dug in the past year, and they were still working on it in recent weeks. That is what's on Hamas list of priorities, and thats what we have to deal with. Transportation and Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz negated previous statements by other members of the Security Cabinet regarding the possibility of a military takeover of Gaza being on the table. "Cabinet is currently reviewing no proposal by a certified authority to act in an initiated manner to subdue Hamas in Gaza," the minister said in a Ynet studio interview. Katz also commented on Hamas's announcement of a ceasefire, and said, "Israel does not hold ceasefires. Our rules of engagement have changed. I won't be surprised if Hamas realized that and we may indeed be facing a calm, just as soon as they stop firing. Israel doesn't have anything to do in Gaza." The Education Ministry estimated that 75 percent of students in Gaza perimeter communities arrived to their schools Wednesday in the wake of mortars and rockets launched from Gaza at the region. Naomi Fletcher, whose home suffered a direct rocket hit early Wednesday, said it was a "great miracle" no one was hurt. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter "We heard explosions (during the night), but we didn't hear the rocket hit," Fletcher told Ynet on Wednesday. "In the morning, I got up and went outside, and then I saw debris on the floor. We thought it was cats who went wild and broke things, but then I saw the rocket." (Photo: Eshkol Regional Council) Naomi said the house's doorpost and the entrance to the storage shed were damaged. "You can see the hole that created in the roof of the shed and the floor tiles that were ripped from place and landed on the grass. You can see debris everywhere," she said. (Photo: Barel Efraim) The Fletchers' bedroom is only a meter away from the storage shed, which was heavily damaged in the rocket strike. "We don't normally sleep in the safe room. I think we had a great miracle, because it didn't hit the house itself, but rather an adjacent storage shed." (Photo: Barel Efraim) Eyal, the community's spokesman, lamented the fact that "our children unfortunately have a lot of experience and many suffer from trauma. You have to understand that even a child who undergoes a long treatment and begins getting back to normalevery incident like this takes him back months and years. We're a small and strong community, we'll support the children. Our job is to be here and grow, prosper. We're here to win." The Fletchers were just one of many families living near the Gaza border who had a tense night after a day of ceaseless barrages of rockets from the strip. "Even if there are only two or three (Code Red) rocket sirens, and even if the Iron Dome intercepted, 25,000 people are still getting up and running to safe rooms," said Adina Ozeri, 34, a mother of five from Sderot. "Even if no one is hurt, and even if Hamas stops the rockets, this period is still causing the kids regression," added Ozeri, whose eldest is 13, while her youngest is only five months old. Despite the difficulties, she stressed there was no fear in her familyonly the normal anxiety expected when dealing with such a situation. "The safe room is a place of strength, an island of stability and safety for the children in such times. We're not sinking into depression or feeling like life had stopped, but we are doing everything we can to feel safe and sane in an insane reality," Ozeri explained. The Ozeri family (Photo: Shahar Ozeri) "The children are on high alert, and it must be stressful. They won't sleep anywhere but in the safe room, but there's room for only four people there, and I have to figure out where to put the baby," she went on to say. "We should get stop saying 'no one was hurt and no damage was caused.' Of course there was damage. The emergency center in Sdeot was like an ER on Tuesday, filled with children suffering from anxiety," Ozeri noted. Not far from Sderot, Einav Bar'am, 34, from Kibbutz Nir Am, was trying to find a solution for her three children: 7-year-old Shoham, 5-year-old Hadar and one-year-old Rotem. "The past 24 hours have been very complicated," Bar-am admitted on Tuesday evening. "It started last night with Code Red sirens. At 7am, we received news alerts about sirens in other communities, and then we heard Iron Dome interceptions. Shoham, my eldest, was hysteric. It was very hard on her. Hadar, the middle child, knows the difference between 'good booms' by the IDF and 'bad booms' from Code Red." She went on to say that the family of five "spent the entire afternoon in the safe room. We left for a moment, and then went back. We tried to get the middle child in and out of the shower quickly, so she's not in there when the Code Red goes off. It happened to her once, and she was very frightened." She lamented the fact that "Four years later, an operation and then another. This place is beautiful, but that changes in an instant," adding, "I hope the decision-makers in this country know where they want to go." Transportation and Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz rejected Wednesday statements by other members of the coalitionincluding fellow Security Cabinet member Yuval Steinitzthat the possibility of a military takeover of Gaza was on the table. "There is no proposal for an initiated action to overthrow Hamas in Gaza," he told Ynet in an interview. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter In interview of their own, Energy Minister Steinitz said that Israel will have "no choice but to conquer Gaza," whereas Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked added that such an operation was being considered. "Every minister is entitled to voice his opinion, but Cabinet is currently reviewing no proposal by a certified authority to act in an initiated manner to subdue Hamas in Gaza," Katz said. Minister Katz said Israel was not reviewing any plans to overthrow Hamas (Photo: Avi Muaelm) "As far as we're concerned, there is no objective of operating inside Gaza. Israel has nothing to do there and does not wish to enter Gaza," the minister insisted. Asked nevertheless what Israel's policy was, Katz replied that it was one of "red lines. Beyond this policy, I propose another strategic move to allow a better reality vis-a-vis Gaza, to unburden us of civilian responsibility and endow them with civil expenditure not at our expensewhile we focus merely on preventing a security threat." "The IDF is capable of attaining any objective, but there is no offer on the table as an Israeli policy," he clarified. Following Hamas's announcement of a ceasefire, Katz claimed Israel did not hold negotiations on a ceasefire with the strip's terror groups. IDF footage of the strikes it carried out in Gaza overnight X "Israel retaliated to violence and fire," he explained. "Our rules of engagement have changed. The policy of zero tolerance to trickles (of rockets) is also being stepped up. I think that now that Hamas, (Palestinian Islamic) Jihad and all of their collaborators are making an inventory of exactly what was hit and at what force, they realize Israel is speaking in a different language." Asked whether the violence was truly brought to a halt, Katz replied he would not be surprised if Hamas had internalized the message of "zero tolerance" and is therefore seeking a truce. "The tunnel (which was destroyed on Tuesday) was targeted to preserve deterrence. I think the true heroes of this morning, however, are the south's residents who continue going about their daily routines despite the salvos of rockets," he commended Israelis residing on Gaza's perimeter. The intelligence minister then iterated his belief that Iran was behind the most recent round of hostilities. "We know Iran is stirring the pot in Gaza. Hamas leader (in Gaza) Yahya Sinwar gave an interview to Arab media last week and extolled his relationship with (Quds Force commander) Qasem Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guard, Quds Force and Hezbollah. They are receiving funding from them." Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (L) and Iran's Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani. Katz said Iran was 'stirring the pot in Gaza.' (Photo: AFP) "Iran is working to envelop Israel in fronts. To wit, Iranian rockets were fired in the last 24 hours," Katz elucidated. The escalation that began Tuesday lasted all through the night, with successive salvos launched at southern communities triggering Code Red alarms. Israel's communities on the Gaza perimeter suffered a heavy salvo of fire at around 1am, with a rocket exploding in a stadium located in the southern city of Netivot, causing damage. Later, multiple Code Red sirens blared in the early morning in communities in the Eshkol, Sha'ar HaNegev and Sdot Negev regional councils, preceded by sirens sounding all through the night in the aforementioned councils as well as at the Bnei Shimon and Merhavim regional councils and the cities of Ashkelon and Netivot. Footage of the mortar hitting the Netivot municipal stadium (: ') X The IDF Spokesperson's Unit said that following the Code Red sirens, several launches were identified from Gaza towards the Sha'ar HaNegev, Eshkol and Sdot Negev regional councils. Some of the rockets launched at Sha'ar HaNegev and Sdot Negev were intercepted by the Iron Dome, the army added. The remaining alarms triggered were false alarms. A residence in one of the Eshkol Regional Council communities suffered a direct hit during a barrage of rockets from. No one was hurt, but damage was caused to the home. The launches occurred a little over an hour after Hamas's deputy leader Khalil al-Hayya released a statement saying the Palestinian faction will be committed to a ceasefire insofar as Israel will be committed to one. Despite the alarms blaring throughout the night, authorities decided schools would operate normally in all of the Israeli communities surrounding the Gaza Strip. Projectiles launched from Gaza overnight (Photo: AP) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held an urgent meeting with Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, Shin Bet Director Nadav Argaman and other defense establishment officials Tuesday evening to discuss the situation. The consultations lasted for about three hours, at the end of which a political source reiterated Israel's longstanding position that Hamas was responsible for any fire emanating from Gaza. "We do not seek escalation, but the IDF will retaliate with force to any fire from the strip, exacting a price," he added. Before the meeting, Defense Minister Lieberman held a meeting of his own with a handful of security officials at the IDF's Kirya headquarters in Tel Aviv. PM Netanyahu speaking in Ma'alot (Photo: Effi Sharir) Prime Minister Netanyahu sent out a similar message at a conference in the northern city of Ma'alot Tuesday, in which he said, "Israel considered gravely attacks on its communities by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad." "The IDF will retaliate strongly to any such attacks," he added. "Israel will exact a heavy price from anyone trying to harm it, and we consider Hamas responsible for preventing these attacks against us." Itamar Eichner and Goel Beno contributed to this report. Despite the security escalation on the Gaza border, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman embarked for Russia Wednesday, heading a defense establishment delegation in an attempt to reach an agreement to return control of southern Syria, and particularly the border with Israel, to Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Defense Minister Lieberman will be accompanied by the head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, Maj.-Gen. Tamir Hayman, among others. Russia was said to have accepted Israel's fundamental demand for Assad's army to resume control of the border region without the presence of any pro-Shiite militias. PM Netanyahu (L) and Russian President Putin. Israel was pushing for an agreement with Russia to deploy only Syrian army soldiers near the border (Photo: AP) Lieberman will meet his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoygu Thursday, and his trip is considered an important attempt to reach understandings with the superpower on the matter, an issue that may have ramifications on ameliorating tensions along the northern front. The need to engender such understandings in the first place was born of preparations by Assad's army to return to southern Syria and take position along the border with Israel. While Jerusalem consented to the army's returned, they conditioned it on Iranian and Hezbollah forces not accompanying it. Russian FM Sergey Lavrov stated no foreign troops will be stationed along the Israeli border (Photo: EPA) Confirmation for the nascent understandings came Monday in Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov's statements, who explicitly stated that no foreign troops will be stationed along the Israeli border except for Syrian army soldiers. The encouraging Russian statements notwithstanding, the Prime Minister's Office was quick to clarify that Israel never consented to Iranian forces remaining elsewhere in Syria, and reiterated Israel's demand for a full withdrawal of all Iranian and Hezbollah forces from the country. "Israel is uninterested in partial agreements, rather in an exit of all Iranian forces from Syria," a source at the Prime Minister's Office said. sraeli Merkava Mark IV tanks on the border with Syria (Photo: AFP) Concurrently, Israel's National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat left for Washington to discuss a coordinated stance with the United States on the challenge posed by Iran, in the wake of US President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear deal and the 12 condition plan presented to Iran by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Netanyahu to leave for 3-day European trip next week More on the diplomatic front, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will leave next week for a three-day visit to Germany and France starting Monday, during which he will meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss the Iranian nuclear threat and Tehran's entrenchment in Syria. The premier is also said to be mulling continuing across the English Channel from Paris to London, to meet with British Prime Minister Theresa May. PM Netanyahu will meet with Germany's Merkel (L) and France's Macron (center), possibly also seeing UK's May (Photo: EPA, Reuters) Prime Minister Netanyahu outlined his upcoming trip at the outset of his Likud Party meeting Monday, saying, "Next week I will leave for Europe. I will meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with French President Emmanuel Macron and perhaps with British Prime Minister Theresa May as well." "I will discuss with them blocking Iranian nuclear aspirations and Iranian expansion in the Middle East," the premier expounded. "I will present our positions as clearly as possible. We are already well experienced. For years we stood alone against these twin threats, and I think that the situation has changed for the better. Of course I will present these matters as vital to the security of Israel." On Syria, Netanyahu said, "We believe that there is no room for any Iranian military presence anywhere in Syria. And of course, this reflects not only our position; I can say with certainty that it also reflects the positions of others in the Middle East and outside it. This will be the main focus of discussions there." The joint statement issued by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Tuesday evening, in which both organizations took responsibility for the heavy barrages fired at Gaza vicinity communities during the day, changed the situation. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Throughout the day, the estimate in the Gaza Strip and in the IDF spokespersons statements was that Islamic Jihad was responsible for the mortar fire to avenge the killing of three of its military operatives in an IDF strike on Sunday. So why did Hamas join the circle? Escalation on the south. Neither side is interested in a wide-scale military operation Well, we dont know for sure whether Hamas actually fired rockets and mortar shells on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Giving Islamic Jihad the green light to fire the mortars and rockets was enough for Hamas to take some of the credit for the day of battle. Sources in the Gaza Strip told Ynet that Islamic Jihads decision to fire a barrage at Israel was made shortly after Sundays incident, and that they were only waiting for the right moment. Those same sources said that Hamas had tried to soften the response, so as not to drag Gaza into a destructive round of fighting. Islamic Jihad, however, isnt just another rebel organization in the Gaza Strip. Islamic Jihad is the second largest organization in the Gaza Strip, with a large and advanced arsenal and a major military force. If it wants to, it responds, and no one can stop it from firing. Not even Hamas. But after the first barrage, which was fired early in the morning, Israel attacked quite a few Hamas assets in retaliation. The flagship strike was on Hamas dual tunnel at the tripoint between Israel, Egypt and Gaza. A 2-kilometer tunnel passing through Egypt and extending almost 1 kilometer into Israeli territory is a strategic asset for Hamas, an asset which the organization put a lot of time and resources into. An Islamic Jihad operative. The organization waited for the right moment From this point, Hamas faced two challenges: One, it suffered a heavy blow which forced it to respond, if only to restore its dignity; two, Hamas never liked the idea of a rival organization taking the lead in the armed struggle against Israel. These reasons forced Hamas to jump on the bandwagon and claim its part of the fame. The recent reports about talks for a possible hudna (ceasefire) in the Gaza Strip could actually increase Hamas motivation to create a limited day of battle in Gaza to remind all sides what could happen if the talks and the organizations demands fail. Islamic Jihad, on the other hand, always has an interest to create noise. The organization, which enjoys full financial backing from Iran, has to occasionally prove to its bosses in Tehran that its worth the money being poured on it. The combination between the killing of three of its operatives and the general atmosphere of escalation on the southern border served as an excellent opportunity for the organization to fire at Israel. While the events on the northern front are currently unrelated to the situation in Gaza, Iran likely has an interest in signaling to Israel that it is indirectly present in the Gaza Strip too. A Hamas gunman in Gaza. The organization suffered a heavy blow which forced it to respond (Photo: AP) Egypt, for its part, needs Hamas on its side in its long war on the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group in northern Sinai. Cairo, therefore, has an interest in maintaining the calm in the strip, which provides it with a quiet border as well. Egypt is also playing an active part in the attempts to obtain an ease of economic restrictions on the strip and has also made a contribution by opening the Rafah Crossing throughout the month of Ramadan to prevent a humanitarian collapse in the strip. Egypt has the ability to impose its will both on Hamas and on Islamic Jihad, despite its affiliation with Iran. Israel has no interest in a wide-scale operation in the strip either. Apart from the fact that such an operation entails huge financial damage to the Israeli economy (evacuating the Gaza vicinity communities, compensation for damages, calling up reserve forces, increasing the defense budget and an economic slowdown), government ministersled by Defense Minister Avigdor Liebermanhave reiterated that the Hamas rule in the strip will be toppled in the next wide-scale battle. Such an ambitious objective would require considerable military resources and a very long stay in the Gaza Strip, which would lead to many casualties. Israel likely isnt interested in entering this mess while most of its military energy should be focused on the northern front, which is more critical these days. Connecting all these dots into one map of interests proves that each side is willing to enter a very limited and time-bound conflict but doesnt want it to deteriorate to a wide-scale military round. But desires are one thing and reality is another thing. Sometimes, a 10-meter deviation in a mortar shell hit is enough to change the entire pictures, without taking either sides aspirations into account. Joint List MK Jamal Zahalka said in a Ynet studio interview that the IDF's strikes in Gaza were not a "self defense situation as it attempted to be presented, but continued Israeli aggression." Regarding the fire from Gaza at Israel, the lawmaker said that "Palestinians must not be dragged to military conflict. I call to continue nonviolent protests. The Palestinian strategy should be reject military conflict, because that's the field convenient for Israel." An Israeli political official said that, "The IDF landed a significant blow in Gaza overnight, and the fire was halted since morning." "Israel sent a message that if it resumes," he added, "attacks on Hamas and its proxies will intensify further. Actions will now dictate where we are headed." Education Minister and Security Cabinet member Naftali Bennett said during a visit to a school in a community not far from Gaza that, "Escalation on the Gazan side was not coincidental. The mind is Iranian, while the hands belong to Hamas." "Israel is in a focused, consistent campaign against the head of the Iranian octopus, which operates its tentacles in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza to harm Israel. Iran is trying to distract us by manufacturing provocations in Gaza through one of its tentacles," he theorized. Turkey will go elsewhere if the United States does not allow it to buy Lockheed Martin's F-35 jets, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted as saying by broadcaster NTV and other media on Wednesday. A US Senate committee last week passed its version of a $716 billion defense policy bill, including a measure to prevent Turkey from purchasing the jets, further straining already tense relations between the NATO allies. Speaking to reporters on a return flight from a visit to Germany, Cavusoglu said there had not yet been any pressure from the US administration to scrap a deal to buy the jets, adding this wasn't an agreement Washington could pull out of as it wished, according to NTV. Ties between Ankara and Washington have been strained in recent months over a host of issues, including President Donald Trump's decision to move the US Embassy in Israel to contested Jerusalem and US policy in Syria. Russia says foreign forces must quit Syria's southern border Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday the withdrawal of all non-Syrian forces from Syria's southern border with Israel should happen as soon as possible, the TASS news agency reported. Rebels control stretches of southwest Syria, bordering the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, while Syrian army troops and allied Iran-backed militias hold nearby territory. Housing Minister and Security Cabinet member Yoav Galant commented in a Ynet studio interview Wednesday on recent statements by other Cabinet members on the possibility of retaking the strip, and said that, "When you want to overthrow Hamas, you should ask yourself who would replace it." Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Cautioning against a military takeover of the stripas other ministers proposed TuesdayGalant echoed Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz's assertion and advised anyone entertaining the notion to reintroduce Israeli ground forces into Gaza to take into account what might happen after Hamas's downfall and the price it will exact. Housing Minister Yoav Galant advised against retaking Gaza (Photo: Eli Segal) The minister, and former GOC Southern Command, added, "I'm not seeing any volunteers to succeed Hamasnot Egypt, not the Palestinians, not the Europeans and certainly not us." "If the situation further deteriorates, the gloves will come off and the IDF can do nearly anything it wishes in Gaza. Would that be the right thing to do? No. Before doing that, we need to reach a point where that would have importance and value. That isn't the case now," he elucidated. Galant also sent a message to Hamas's leaders. "We need a holistic view of things. Israel will focus in the coming years on Syria and the Iranian (presence) there. Hamas is important, but it's a secondary matter. The balance of power is clear and I'll say this clearly: If Hamas makes a mistake, the blood of its leaders will be on their own head." Rocket debris (Photo: Barel Efraim) "There can be no compromise on this. Having said that, I hope we can contain the situation. We have no interest in continued fighting in Gaza," the Kulanu member concluded. Despite the alleged ceasefire announced by Hamas early Wednesday, the Security Cabinetof which Galant is a memberwill convene in the evening at the IDF's Kirya headquarters in Tel Aviv to discuss the situation. Education Minister Bennett visiting the Gaza perimeter school (Photo: Shaul Golan) Bennett: Gaza escalation an Iranian distraction Galant's fellow Cabinet member, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, visited a school in the Sha'ar HaNegev Regional Council Wednesday, where he spoke of recent conflagrations. "Escalation on the Gazan side was not coincidental. The mind is Iranian, while the hands belong to Hamas," Bennett claimed. "Israel is in a focused, consistent campaign against the head of the Iranian octopus, which operates its tentacles in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza to harm Israel. Iran is trying to distract us by manufacturing provocations in Gaza through one of its tentacles," he theorized. Remains of a rocket that landed in southern Israel (Photo: Or Mazuz) The education minister then afforded the defense establishment his full support. "We will not give away or trade the future safety of residents of the Gaza perimeter or the north in exchange for a temporary calm," he stated. MK Zahalka: 'Except for madman Trump, entire world denounces Israel' Meanwhile, in his own interview, Joint List MK maintained his support for a ceasefire while nevertheless blaming Israel for the situation, which he said originated with Israel's "siege" of Gaza. The IDF's strikes in Gaza were not a "self defense situation as it attempted to be presented, but continued Israeli aggression," he assured. Regarding the fire from Gaza at Israel, the lawmaker said that "Palestinians must not be dragged to military conflict. I call to continue nonviolent protests. The Palestinian strategy should be to reject military conflict, because that's the field that's convenient for Israel." MK Zahalka accused Israel of the escalation in Gaza Asked how it was possible for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to wish for as many casualties as possible on their side while the IDF seemed to do everything to prevent deaths, the parliamentarian said, "The Israeli army is the one killing people and wounding thousands in Gaza. Thousands of bullets have been fired." "The entire worldexcept for that madman (US President Donald) Trump, who's a friend of (Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahudenounces what Israel has been doing," he maintained. Confronted with the fact that both France and Canada denounced the rocket fire from Gaza, as well as the damage done to Israel's sovereignty, Zahalka equivocated that he was referring to the "killing of civilians in nonviolent protests." "I'm certain the entire world does not agree to the rocket fireI also think it shouldn't be happeningbut the problem is really the continued Israeli violence that has claimed the lives of more than 100 people and wounded thousands. That's what needs to stop." Representative of the Jewish community in Iran's parliament Siamak Moreh Sedgh said that, "We stand united and ready in defending Iran from anyone thinking of attacking it." While Sedgh did not explicitly state who he was referring to, he apparently hinted at Israel and the West. "We must remain vigilant," he added, "because the enemy is attempting to sow discord in Iran." Hamas has seemingly decided to stop the massive rocket fire from the Gaza Strip starting 1am Wednesday and has redeployed its forces to stop other Palestinian factions from launching more projectiles, according to Israeli defense officials. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter "The IDF has delivered a significant blow in Gaza last night," a senior defense official said on Wednesday morning. "There have been no rockets fired since this morning. Israel sent a message that if the fire does resume, the strikes on Hamas and its satellite groups will increase further. Now, actions will determine where we're headed." Rocket hit at Netivot stadium (Photo: Avihay Marciano/Radio Darom) The rocket fire during the nightwhich included a rocket that landed in a stadium in Netivot and another that caused heavy damage to a home in the Eshkol Regional Councilwas carried out by rebellious groups, including the Popular Resistance Committees. Rocket hit at Netivot stadium (Photo: Avihay Marciano/Radio Darom) In less than 24 hours, over 100 rockets and mortar shells were fired at Israel, with some 40 intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system. Most of the launches were carried out with the help of timers, making it harder on the IDF to track perpetrators before or after a launch. In retaliation to the Gaza fire at Israel throughout the day Tuesday, Israeli Air Force fighter jets, helicopter and other aircrafts attacked about 25 Hamas terror targets in the strip, starting at 11:30pm. The IDF said that among the targets were drone storage facilities, rocket and armament manufacturing installations, training camps, military installations, advanced naval armaments and antiaircraft missile components. However, the IDF did not target homes of commanders in the terror groups or mounted any targeted killings. The most recent strikes joined some 40 sites targeted Tuesday, totaling 65 targets since Tuesday. Rocket hit at Netivot stadium (Photo: Avihay Marciano/Radio Darom) In an effort to return to normalcy in the strip, the IDF is allowing fishing in an extended zone of 9 miles from the Gaza shore, as well as keeping the Erez and Kerem Shalom border crossings open on Wednesday. The Israel-Gaza border fell quiet on Wednesday under an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire after the most intense flareup of hostilities between Palestinian militants and Israel since a 2014 war. Militants from Hamas, the dominant group in Gaza, and Islamic Jihad fired dozens of rockets and mortar bombs at Israel throughout Tuesday and overnight, to which Israel responded with tank and air strikes on more than 50 targets in the enclave. There were no reports of further fighting after Palestinian and Israeli attacks in the early hours of Wednesday, and both sides appeared to back away from a slide towards a new war after weeks of violence along the border. Schools opened as usual in Israeli towns near the frontier where rocket warning sirens sounded frequently on Tuesday. Gaza's streets were filled with morning shoppers and children went to class. A Palestinian official said Egyptian mediation led to a ceasefire, but the terms of the "understanding" did not go beyond "a restoration of calm by both sides". A blue whale, considered the largest of all whale species, was spotted in a first ever documented visit in the Gulf of Eilat and the Red Sea Tuesday, Israeli marine researchers reported. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Whales of this kind can reach up to 33 meters and weigh up to 130 tons. Up until 1965, hundreds of thousands of the species' members were hunted commercially, until a worldwide ban prevented their extinction. Blue whale spotted near Eilat (: Marcos Schonholz) X Today, according to International Union for Conservation of Nature data, less than 12,000 of the endangered aquatic mammals exist in the wild. The blue whale was the first ever sighted in Eilat's gulf (Photo: Marcos Schonholz) The latest estimate, however, said it was a blue whale 15 or 20 meters long. First evidence of blue in gulf of Eilat Dafna Feingold, who coordinates aquatic mammal data for the IMMRAC, noted that, "This is the first piece of evidence of the existence of a new species in the Red Sea. It's the first time unequivocal photographic proof of a blue whale in the Gulf of Suez and the Red Sea came to light." A blue whale previously sighted in the US (Photo: Shutterstock) Feingold said the specimen seems to have not reached its full size yet, and that its arrival in Israel did not necessarily mean it was in poor health condition. She added that while it was possible a blue whale may have previously visited Israel's shores, this was the first time one was actually documented. "The reason they aren't often seen in our region is that they don't have enough food (here), and I imagine it will be making its way to the southern Red Sea before long," she explained. Dr. Assaf Zvuloni, head biologist of the national marine reserve in Eilat, added that, "Israel and the gulf of Eilat were a long way away from its area of distribution. The size of the specimen was observed to be at least 20 meters, based on measurements comparing it to IMMRAC's pier." (Photo: Marcos Schonholz) The biologist also added that the whale may actually be larger when taking into account parts of its body that were not visible under the water. ""This is a highly exciting sighting. Whales sometimes migrate great distances," he said. "On occasion, certain specimens increase their migrations range. This wasn't the first time whales have been sighted in the Gulf of Eilat, but never one of this size." 'Moving to see an immense whale in the wild' Omri Omasi, a marine inspector for the Nature and Parks Authority's fishery supervision division, recounted the sighting was made when he embarked on a routine tour of the bay. "We received reports of a large whale shark in the late morning, followed by reports of a whale. Mostly initial reports cite large animals, and then the closer you get, you usually discover it's a smaller animal. In this instance, we were surprised to find a very large marine mammal," he recalled. At first, Omasi said he maintained a distance of about a hundred meters from the whale so as not to disturb it on its path. "It was making long, uniform strokes, from north to south, sometimes changing direction or depth," he said. "It was hard to assume whether any other specimens were present in the area. It's moving to see such an immense whale in the world. It's hard to gauge its length, because you only see parts of it when it goes up to the water's surface to breathe," the inspector added. (Photo: Marcos Schonholz) "When we got additional reports of the whale on comm. networks, boats arrived and tried getting closea little too close. Even in encounters with such special and rare animals, it's important to allow nature to take its course uninterrupted," he noted. 'Endlessly lucky to see whale in Israel' Yoav Lindman, a doctoral candidate from the Inter-University Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat, set sail with a team from the institute to try and locate the whale. (Photo: Marcos Schonholz) "Reports come in about rare animals in the Gulf of Eilat, but this is a very rare instance. There have been three sightings of humpback whales in Eilat thus far, with no other whales sighted," he said. "It popped up to breathe in a different location each time," he continued. "When you see that it's twice as big as a seven meter long boat, that's incredibly pleasing. The boat disturbed him, however, so we tried to keep to a safe distance." (Photo: Kfir Shimoni) "I watched whales abroad, but this feels infinitely lucky to see one in Israel. There aren't immense amounts of plankton for it to eat, and we saw him continuing south until it left to search for food elsewhere," he concluded. Maya Zilber, who oversees the dolphins in Eilat's Dolphin Reef, shared that when reports of the whale started pouring in, a local team went out to look for it. "It was the first time I've ever seen a blue whale, and we kept our distance. It was a very slow moving whale," she said. (Photo: Marcos Schonholz) Dafna Feingold added that when examining the photographs it was also apparent it was a very slim whale. "Usually a layer of fat and muscle exists around the spine. Photos, however, showed the spine protruding with a concaving towards the inside of the body on both ends. There wasn't any fatty mass you'd expect to see," she noted. Members of the Nature and Parks Authority accompanied the whale as it progressed outside of Israel's borders, and bid it farewell as it continued its travels towards Egypt. A palpable sigh of relief could be heard among Gaza's citizenry Wednesday morning, after Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad officially announced understandings were reached with Israel to instate a ceasefire Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter M., a resident of the strip, told Ynet that the people of Gaza were "pleased" with the conclusion of the current round of hostilities. A "tense calm" permeated the region, M. added, but residents nevertheless assumed the fighting had come to an end. Gazans were relieved at a ceasefire being attained, a resident of the strip said (Photo: Reuters) "People don't want new escalation or warring with Israel," M. said, explaining that the discourse in the strip Tuesday centered around one thing only. "Everyone was worried yesterday, wondering whether a new war will break out and why Israel declared there were no agreements last night." The Gazan then explained the main fear felt by his neighborsthat a repeat of the summer of 2014 and Operation Protective Edge was in store. "The average Gazan doesn't want a repeat of 2014's war," he explained. "The events of that summer are still seared in the consciousness of everyone in the strip." Remnants of a PIJ outpost in Gaza (Photo: Reuters) Even if fighting in the latest round subsided, M. said the strip's problems remained unsolved. "The main issue in Gaza is that everyone is doing whatever they want. Islamic Jihad is growing militarily on its own, Hamas is growing on its own, as are the other factions. There's a feeling among residents there isn't any single entity running things, which is what bothers people the most," M. divulged. The supposed grassroots protest near the fence, M. clarified, has long since lost steam and the Gazan public's support, contrary to what Hamas has been trying to broadcast to the world. "Why aren't people swarming to protest near the fence en masse? Because they don't want to die. I don't want to die, and who for? Hamas? The only reason Hamas is able to bring people to the border is because it pays them a stipend for it," he accused. Smoke billowing from an IDF strike in the strip (Photo: AFP) M. also criticized the Palestinian leadershipboth in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. "Hamas is not part of the solution to the Gaza issue, but part of the problem," he admitted. "That's why all international projects in the strip are engineered to be created by the international organizations themselves, to leave them outside the authority of either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority." Sami Obeid, a Gaza journalist, said during a special Ynet newscast that the solution to the Gaza issue was, in fact, in the hands of Israel's government, at least as it pertained to the isolated enclave's economic future. "Want to weaken Hamas? Give Gazans a life," Obeid advised. "Want Hamas to be strong and stay in power? Starve the people." "The Israeli government does not want an airport in Gaza," he accused. IDF footage of the strikes it carried out in Gaza overnight X The Gaza newsman said that improving humanitarian conditions in the strip will invariably end up leading to Hamas falling out of power. "If elections were held tomorrow, Hamas would have gotten nothing from its citizens. Not even ten percent," Obeid claimed, before also laying blame at Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's feet. "He's not paying 70,000 government officials. They haven't received a paycheck in 18 months," he said dejectedly. LONDON - Iran's crude oil exports have declined slightly in May, according to estimates from a leading tanker-tracking company, in the first sign that the threat of US sanctions may be deterring buyers. The estimates from Geneva-based Petro-Logistics also suggest Iranian oil buyers are not rushing to cut volumes from OPEC's third-largest producer. The US sanctions have a 180-day period during which buyers should "wind down" purchases. "Exports are down by more than 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) from the very high levels seen in April, but there is no sign of a mass exodus at this time," Daniel Gerber, chief executive of Petro-Logistics, told Reuters. Supply and demand in large parts of the oil market is opaque and Petro-Logistics is among a number of consultancies that estimate supply from OPEC countries by tracking tanker shipments and other methods. Petro-Logistics did not specify the absolute volume of Iran's exports in May or April. The Foreign Affairs Ministry has decided to bar until further notice tourists from Indonesiaa Muslim country that does not have diplomatic ties with Israelas a response to the country's announcement of its decision to ban the entry of Israelis into its territory in the wake of the escalation in the Gaza-Israel security situation. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Indonesia's announcement comes two weeks after it was expectedin an unprecedented moveto begin granting tourist visas to Israelis. In addition to the Southeast Asian country being the world's largest Muslim nation, it is also accounts for the largest number of Muslim tourists flocking to Israel every yea, who receive special visas. Jakarta Trump protests (Photo: EPA) Ten of thousands of Indonesians arrive in Israel every year, with statistics consistently on the rise. In 2013, for example, 30,000 Indonesian tourists visited Israel, marking a three-fold increase on the number of tourists who visited in 2009. Indonesian tourists usually visit Israel for four days as a part of a larger regional trip which includes Jordan, Israel and Egypt. While economic ties between Israel and Indonesia have shown signs of warming, the Muslim country has decided to close its gates to Israelis. Relations further deteriorated when thousands of Indonesian Muslims staged a rally protesting President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Activists burned US and Israeli flags in front of the American embassy in Jakarta in a fourth day of protests in Indonesia against Trump's decision on Jerusalem. The two countries have held discreet talks in attempts to annul Indonesia's latest decision. The Gaza-ruling Hamas terror group will pay a lot more if it continues to launch attacks or allows other terror organizations to operate against Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday, a day after dozens of projectiles were fired from the strip into south Israel, provoking retaliatory IDF strikes. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Since yesterday, the IDF has been forcefully responding to Gaza with attacks on dozens of terror targets in the most powerful way in recent years, Netanyahu said during a speech at the annual memorial ceremony for the victims of the Altalena ship, which was sunk at the orders of Israels first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, in June 1948 after the Irgun (IZL) organization refused to hand over the weapons aboard to the IDF. PM Netanyahu during ceremony for Altalena (Photo: Hagai Dekel) The ceremony, also attended by President Reuven Rivlin, took place at the Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery in Tel Aviv. Sixteen people were killed from the Irgun, along with three IDF soldiers while dozens more were wounded in one of the most controversial decisions made by Ben Gurion. The ones responsible for the escalation inspired by Iran is the Hamas regime, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement and other terror organizations, Netanyahu continued in his remarks. I wont elaborate on our plans since I dont want the enemy to know what to expect, but one thing is clear: When they try us, they pay immediately. If they continue to try us, they will pay a lot more, he vowed, before listing Israels achievements and praising its world standing. IDF responds to Gazan rocket attacks (Photo: AFP) We are developing ourselves in all fields, in economics, in foreign relations. In our 70th year of independence, Israel is a world power. World leaders are interested in hearing our opinions, he declared. Next week I will travel to Germany, France and Britain where I will present before the leaders the latest developments in our region. I will present every Iranian attempt to spread itself in Syria and I will tell them that we will not allow it to obtain a nuclear weapon," he said, adding that he fully backed Israels actions and responses to violence gripping the Gaza border. I support the IDF soldiers and all security forces and I praise the resilience of the southern residents, he said. Gaza's Hamas rulers said Wednesday they had agreed to a cease-fire with Israel to end the largest flare-up of violence between the two sides since a 2014 war. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, said Egyptian mediators intervened "after the resistance succeeded in warding off the aggression." He said militant groups in Gaza will commit to the cease-fire as long as Israel does. Interior Minister Arieh Deri told Israel's Army Radio that he expected calm to be restored. IDF launches retaliatory strike on Gaza for mortar salvo (Photo: AFP) "If it will be quiet, we will respond with quiet. We've given Hamas a chance to prove that we can return to routine ... If they release the reins there will be a very painful strike," he said. "There is a good chance that the routine will be restored after the blow the army unleashed on them." The Israeli military struck dozens of terror sites in Gaza overnight as rocket fire continued toward southern Israeli communities into early Wednesday morning, setting off air raid sirens in the area throughout the night. The military said it hit drone storage facilities, military compounds, and rocket and munition workshops across the Gaza Strip. The overnight Hamas rocket fire reached the city of Netivot for the first time since the 2014 war. A home was struck, but no one was wounded. Khalil al-Hayya (Photo: AP) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel gave Palestinian terror groups in Gaza "the strongest blow dealt to them in years," and warned against renewed rocket fire. "When they try us, they pay immediately. And if they continue to try us, they will pay a lot more," Netanyahu said at a ceremony in Tel Aviv. But neither Israel nor the Palestinian factions in Gaza went full bore in their attacks, a sign that neither side was interested in escalating hostilities. Militants in Gaza did not fire long-range rockets at Israel's major cities, as they did in 2014, and Israeli airstrikes zeroed in on only unmanned military targets. Minister Aryeh Deri (Photo: AFP) With neither side appearing interested in a full-blown conflict, a tense calm appeared to be holding Wednesday as Israeli children went to school in the morning. The border area has been tense in recent weeks as Palestinians have held mass "March of Return" protests which they say are aimed at lifting an Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed after Hamas seized power in 2007. Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies and have fought three wars since the Islamic militant group seized control of Gaza in 2007. A crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade, imposed when Hamas took power, has meanwhile brought the local economy to a standstill. Israeli ducks as mortars fly from Gaza (Photo: Ohad Wais) After Gaza militants fired some 30 mortars shells early Tuesday, Israel responded fiercely, threatening to set off another round of confrontations. The Israeli military said most of the projectiles fired Tuesday were intercepted, but three soldiers were wounded. One mortar shell landed in a kindergarten shortly before it opened, wounding one person. Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, the chief military spokesman, threatened tougher action and said it was up to Hamas to prevent the situation from escalating. Four Jerusalem firefighting units are dealing with a large fire in Wadi Lifta at the entrance to the city Wednesday evening. The fire, assisted by high winds, is ascending the mountainside and four fire fighting aircraft are assisting local firefighters. US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley slammed the the dangerous and destructive activities of the Hamas terror group in Gaza on Wednesday afternoon during remarks made at a UN Security Council, during which she also accused its members of a different standard. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter The Security Council met at the behest of the United States to discuss Tuesdays Gaza mortar and rocket attacks on south Israel, which left 3 soldiers wounded, prompting an IDF military response. Nikki Haley addresses UNSC about Israel X Speaking after the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Mladenov, Haley said that a unanimous condemnation by the council would have been in order, but was not forthcoming because the attacks were launched on Israel. Nikki Haley (: AFP) You might think that the rest of the Security Council would join us in condemning a terrorist organization like Hamas. There shouldnt be any debate about this. But of course, because this attack involves Israel, the standard is different, she said in her opening remarks. The United States, she said, drafted a Security Council statement that would have condemned Hamas for launching rockets and endangering civilians. This should have been a no brainer. You would think no one would want to side with Hamas when it comes to condemning rocket launches but the statement was blocked, Haley added. UN Security Council (Photo: Reuters) She also bemoaned that fact that a meeting under the agenda items entitled Threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts was blocked. Apparently some Security Council members did not think that Hamas launching rockets qualifies as terrorism. The United States begs to differ, she said. "As I have asked my colleagues before, I will ask you again today. Who among us would accept 70 rockets launched into your country? We all know the answer to that. No one would, she continued, adding that the indiscriminate nature of the rocket fire demonstrated the intention to inflict carnage on Israeli communities. The mere fact that one of the rockets landed on a kindergarten playground is all the proof we need of the intentions of the terrorist Hamas openly claims responsibility for this attack. They do so proudly. Their only regret is that the attack did not kill anyone, Haley said. The ambassador also pointed the finger at the Security Council, accusing it of always being quick to pounce on Israel, regardless of the facts and the circumstances. But the facts proved, she continued, that Hamass sole aim remains the destruction of Israel. Hamass stated purpose is the destruction of Israel. That is its purpose when it fires rockets into Israel, that is its purpose when it builds terror tunnels underneath Israeli territory and that is its purpose when it orchestrates violent protests and riots at the boundary fence calling for a march of return," she told the Security Council members. Speaking before a session of the United Nations Security Council, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said: "Who among us would accept 70 rockets launched into your country? We all know the answer to that. No one would. The IDF published on Wednesday evening details of some of the terror targets struck in the Gaza Strip over the last twenty-four hours in response to a prolonged barrage of mortars and rockets launched into southern Israel in what was the most intense flare-up of hostilities since Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter More than 65 targets were hit by Israeli aerial reprisal attacks that began Tuesday afternoon and continued into the night. The days strikes were launched on what security officials in Gaza called Islamic Jihad militant training sites. IDF reveals information on targets hit in Gaza (: ") X (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit) Smoke was seen rising near the town of Deir al-Balah in the coastal strip and the Israeli military said the explosions there were related to its activity. No injuries were reported. (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit) Other targets during Israels day retaliatory bombings included military equipment sites and security infrastructures run by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror organizations. The Israel Air Force, however, refrained from hitting headquarters of the terrorist organizations. (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit) Despite the ceasefire announced by Hamas, the Israel Security Cabinet convened in the evening at the IDF's Kirya headquarters in Tel Aviv to discuss the situation. Area in Israel hit by Gaza rockets (Photo: EPA) According Eyal Zamir Southern Command chief Major-General Eyal Zamir, said the IDF obliterated important strategic targets in the Gaza Strip and porised the rapid strikes as a significant accomplishment. We attacked very valuable, very important targets and we have waited a long time for the opportunity to hit them, he said in an interview with Ynet. I think that at this point in time we have made a very big achievement. News Washington, DC - Remarks by President Trump at S.204, Right to Try Bill Signing: THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, everybody. I really appreciate it. This is to me, this is a very important moment, a very important day. Been looking forward to this for a long time, along with Senator Ron Johnson. And I will tell you, we worked hard on this. I never understood why it was hard. Theyve been trying to have it passed for years. I never understood why. Because Id see people friends of mine, and other people Id read about, where theyd travel all over the world looking for a cure. And we have the best medical people in the world, but we have trials and we long time 12 years, 15 years. Even when things look really promising, so many years. And I never understood why they didnt do this. And we worked very hard. And I want to thank Vice President Pence for helping us so much. Mike was in there, and Id say, Mike, how we doing? We got to get it approved. And he was he was really working it. And in my State of the Union Address, four months ago, I called on Congress to pass Right to Try. Its such a great name. Some bills, they dont have a good name. (Laughter.) Okay? They really dont. But this is such a great name, from the first day I heard it. Its so perfect. Right to Try. And a lot of that trying is going to be successful. I really believe that. I really believe it. So we did it. And we went through the Senate, we went through the House. The House had a bill. The Senate had a bill. Wed go and mesh them together. We got to go back and take votes. And I said, do me a favor tell me, which is the better bill for the people? Not for the insurance company, not for the pharmaceutical companies. I dont care about them. I really dont. I couldnt care less. (Applause.) And thats the bill I I wont tell you which one. But I took the one that was (laughter) they said one in particular was great for the people. Not so good for the others, but great for the people. We dont care about the others right now. And its giving terminally ill patients the right to try experimental lifesaving treatments. And some of these treatments are so promising. And were moving that timeline way up anyway, beyond this. Were moving it way up. But its still a process that takes years. Now it takes up to 15 years; even 20 years, some of these treatments are going. But for many years, patients, advocates, and lawmakers have fought for this fundamental freedom. And as I said, incredibly, they couldnt get it. And there were reasons. A lot of it was business. A lot of it was pharmaceuticals. A lot of it was insurance. A lot of it was liability. I said, so you take care of that stuff. And thats what we did. Today Im proud to keep another promise to the American people as I sign the Right to Try legislation into law. (Applause.) Right? (Speaks to participant on stage.) Youre so beautiful. So beautiful. If I looked like that, I would have been President 10 years earlier. (Laughter.) If I had that face, if I had that head of hair, I would have been President so long ago. (Laughter.) Thats great. So I want to thank a couple of people. Secretary Azar is here. Wheres the Secretary? Secretary? Please stand up. You have worked so hard on this. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Youve really done a great job. And were going to have another exciting news conference over the next, what, three weeks? Four weeks? Two weeks? What do you think? On healthcare. Were going to have great healthcare. Well get rid of the individual mandate. Without that, we couldnt be doing what were doing in a few weeks. Were going to have great, inexpensive, but really good healthcare. And we have two plans coming out. We also have, through our great Secretary of Labor, we have a great plan coming out, and thats through associations. Were going to have two plans coming out. For the most part, we will have gotten rid of a majority of Obamacare. Gotten tremendous (applause) yeah. Could have had it done a little bit easier, but somebody decided not to vote for it, so its one of those things. I want to thank Secretary Azar, and I want to thank Commissioner Gottlieb. Wheres Scott? Scott, stand up. (Applause.) Ooh, I like those I like those socks, Scott. And, Scott, let me ask you. So it takes years and years to get this approved, right? Youre bringing down beyond this, youre bringing down that period of time. What is the average time now it takes for, you know, a major medicine or cure? Whats the average time it takes to go through the system and get an approval? COMMISSIONER GOTTLIEB: Depends on the medicine. Probably three to seven years. THE PRESIDENT: Three to seven. And some go long over 10, right? COMMISSIONER GOTTLIEB: Some can go much longer. THE PRESIDENT: And youre bringing that down? Youre trying to bring that down? You know, for safety. Very good. And you, in particular, youre very happy with this. Arent you? COMMISSIONER GOTTLIEB: We are. THE PRESIDENT: You have a lot of good things in the wings that, frankly, if you moved them up, a lot of people would have a great shot. Right? COMMISSIONER GOTTLIEB: Were trying to get (inaudible), Mr. President, under your leadership. THE PRESIDENT: Right. Thats fantastic. Well, thank you, Scott. Were very proud of the job youre doing. Were also working very hard in getting the cost of medicine down. And I think people are going to see, for the first time ever in this country, a major drop in the cost of prescription drugs. Right? (Applause.) And, Mr. Secretary, thats already happening. Right? Thats already happening. You were telling me yesterday that were seeing a big a tremendous improvement. And youre going to have some big news. I think were going to have some big some of the big drug companies in two weeks. And theyre going to announce because of what we did, theyre going to announce voluntary massive drops in prices. So thats great. Thats going to be a fantastic thing. You know, were working on some really great things. Arent we? When you think about it. Ron, pretty good. Huh? We could do some of those healthcare, drug prices. But this is the baby. Right now. We would not be here today without the tireless efforts of dedicated members of Congress. Thats so true. I want to especially thank Senator Ron Johnson stand up please, Ron (applause) for his tremendous leadership. You know, I just tell you, he doesnt stop. He doesnt give up. You know, its good. Its good for all of us. This guy, Ron, very capable, very he just doesnt give up. So when we started working, I knew this was going to happen. I also want to thank Senator Donnelly. Senator Donnelly, thank you very much. Thats really great. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause.) A fantastic young gentleman, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania. Brian, congratulations. And I know how hard you work, Brian. (Applause.) And Dr. Michael Burgess. Do you like being called Doctor or Congressman? I think Doctor is better. I like Doctor. (Laughs.) So well call him Doctor. (Applause.) Thank you, Michael, very much. Great job. You worked I know how hard everybody worked, and I really appreciate it. Everybody appreciates it. The country appreciates it. Because nobody understood why this wasnt happening. You know, theyve been talking about this for how long, Ron? Twenty-five years? SENATOR JOHNSON: A long time. THE PRESIDENT: A long time. A lot of talk. Politicians. Its a lot of talk. I also want to thank Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, whos not here. But he really worked hard with us. He really did. (Applause.) And thanks, as well, to state and local officials here today who fought for this important cause. They fought so hard, so many of them. I want to thank you for the incredible work that youve done on behalf of these and all wonderful Americans. I mean, anybody can be there someday. Anybody can be there. Could you all stand up the state, local people that worked so hard on this? Because you really have been thank you. Yep. Thank you, fellas. (Applause.) Couldnt have done it without the state and local, and I appreciate it. Really great job. Thank you. Most of all, were honored to be joined by several brave Americans for whom this bill is named. Matthew Bellina, who is battling ALS, and his incredible wife Caitlin. Matthew. Right? (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you. Laura McLinn and her son, Jordan, who is battling muscular dystrophy. Some good answers. (Applause.) Thats so great. Thanks. Thanks for being with us, Jordan. Were going to have some good answers for you. (Laughter.) Matthew, youre going to be happy. You are happy. Frank Mongiello, whos battling ALS, and whos joined by his wife, Marylin, and their six children. Wow. Thats fantastic. Thats fantastic. (Applause.) Thank you. Six children. And finally, I want to thank for being here and introduce Tim Wendler, who tragically lost his wife Trickett to ALS, and joined also by their three children. So, Tim, thank you very much. Thank you, Tim. (Applause.) I want to thank you all for being here. You have extraordinary courage, determination, and love. You have love. Real love. And thanks to you, the countless American lives will ultimately be saved. We will be saving I dont even want to say thousands, because I think its going to be much more thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands. Were going to be saving tremendous numbers of lives. And its so great that youre up here with us and that were all on this front line together. Each year, thousands of terminally ill patients suffer while waiting for new and experimental drugs to receive final FDA approval. It takes a long time, and the time is coming down. While we were streamlining and doing a lot of streamlining, the current FDA approval process can take, as Scott just said, many years many, many years. And for countless patients, time, its not what they have. They dont have an abundance of time. With the Right to Try law Im signing today, patients with life-threatening illnesses will finally have access to experimental treatments that could improve or even cure their conditions. These are experimental treatments and products that have shown great promise, and we werent able to use them before. Now we can use them. And oftentimes theyre going to be very successful. Its an incredible thing. The Right to Try also offers new hope for those who either dont qualify for clinical trials or who have exhausted all available treatment options. There were no options, but now you have hope. You really have hope. Matthew Bellina, who is here with us, is just one example of many Americans who today has new cause for hope. Due to the late progression of Matts ALS, he doesnt qualify for any clinical trials in the United States. He wouldnt qualify; couldnt do it. They tried; he didnt qualify. Despite his limited mobility and budget, he was planning on traveling thousands of miles away, to Israel, to receive a treatment that is still awaiting FDA approval in America. No one in Matts position should ever have to travel from our great country to another continent or another country to receive a treatment. Now, with the passage of this bill, Americans will be able to seek cures right here at home, close to their family and their loved ones. We are finally giving these wonderful Americans the right to try. So important. (Applause.) America has always been a nation of fighters who never give up. Right? We never give up, ever. Right? Never give up. Were fighters, like the amazing patients and families here today. Now, as I proudly sign and this is very personal for me. But as I proudly sign this bill, thousands of terminally ill Americans will finally have the help, the hope, and the fighting chance and I think its going to be better than chance that they will be cured, that they will be helped, that theyll be able to be with their families for a long time or maybe just for a longer time. But were able to give them the absolute best, as to what we have at this current moment, at this current second. And now, were going to help a lot of people. Were going to help a lot of people. So its an honor to be signing this. And if I might, I think Ill present I think I have to do this, Ron. I have to present this good-looking guy with the first pen. Is that okay? You dont mind, right? Okay, good. Im going to do that. (Applause.) (The bill is signed.) (Applause.) So I want to thank (laughter) its going to be fantastic. Thank you all very much. This, to me, is very exciting. And youre going to see some tremendous results. Were going to have some incredible, incredible results. So thank you all for being here. And all of the people in the audience who have been so helpful, thank you very much. Its going to be something very, very special. Thank you. Want to get done with all your household shopping in one go? This blog lists the top supermarkets in Karachi that you can visit. Organizations have come a long way in preventing intentional discrimination against women. But how can they also neutralize implicit biases that can sabotage womens advancement? Simple changes, dramatic results While classical music may not sound like it has changed much over time, its composition is very different from what it was a few decades ago. In the 1970s, fewer than 5 percent of players in the United States top five professional orchestras were female. Now, women hold more than 50 percent of the chairs in Americas 250 top orchestras.1 Why the dramatic change? Many behavioral economists attribute it to a simple design choice: blind auditions.2 In the 1970s and 1980s, orchestras began putting a screen between auditioning musicians and the selection committee, some even going so far as to ask applicants to remove their shoes to eliminate the distinctive sound of a womans footwear.3 After intentionally redesigning the environment to remove any knowledge of or reference to gender during the audition process, orchestras suddenly started to hire more women. The lessons from this experiment extend far beyond the world of classical musicwith direct applicability to the workplace. First, although progress has been made in combating deliberate gender discrimination at work, some women still face hidden obstacles arising from what psychologists call implicit biasesbiases that exist beneath the surface and can affect decision-making without conscious knowledge.4 Second, simple changes in the way a situation is designedinstalling a screen, removing shoesare not only possible to implement in the workplace, but can also have a profound impact in mitigating the effects of implicit bias. Discrimination arising from implicit biases, which are unconscious in nature, can be difficult to identify and even more difficult to counteract.5 This challenge can be compounded when there is a lack of diversity in top leadership teams, which leaves the recognition and resolution of implicit biases to those who have likely not experienced them.6 Fortunately, design thinking offers organizations a powerful way to recognize and reduce the impact of implicit biases in the workplace. Design thinkings human-centered problem-solving approach can help leaders understand what facets of their culture and decision-making practices may be driving biased outcomes, and what design changes can be made to counteract implicit biases in play, including those related to gender. With empathy, exploration, and experimentation as its guiding principles, design thinking can enable leaders to understand what bias-driven obstacles their employees may face, informing design solutions that aim to tackle bias, reduce biased outcomes, and empower a diverse workforce for all. Design thinking in a gender bias context Design thinking is a creative, collaborative, and iterative problem-solving approach grounded in employing the experiences and perspectives of real people to help design or redesign a solution. A 2015 global survey on the state of innovation showed that design served as a driving concept for change for almost all of the top innovative companies.7 Deloittes 2016 Global Human Capital Trends report found that respondents at companies where HR delivered the highest measured levels of value were almost five times more likely to be using design thinking than their peer companiesa trend that has only elevated in prominence since.8 To counteract the implicit gender biases that may be holding women back, organizations can apply the five stages of design thinking to engage employees and iteratively redesign facets of the work environment that may be creating barriers for women9 (figure 1): Explore. The organization conducts needfinding, or exploratory research, on the user experience, gathering information directly from both users (in this case, women) and others involved in the situation at hand (in this case, other employees and perspectives from across the organization). Using methods such as interviews, focus groups, observation, and data analytics, the team collects and analyzes data with the aim of unearthing new insights about women employees, their experiences, and the possible biases that affect their journey. 10 The organization conducts needfinding, or exploratory research, on the user experience, gathering information directly from both users (in this case, women) and others involved in the situation at hand (in this case, other employees and perspectives from across the organization). Using methods such as interviews, focus groups, observation, and data analytics, the team collects and analyzes data with the aim of unearthing new insights about women employees, their experiences, and the possible biases that affect their journey. Identify. A team works with or alongside a diverse group of key users to draw on exploratory research and identify organizational or situational drivers of gender bias. 11 They employ collaborative and creative techniques to understand the unique challenges women may experience in recruitment, retention, and advancement due to implicit bias, identifying key drivers and desired outcomes in these areas. A team works with or alongside a diverse group of key users to draw on exploratory research and identify organizational or situational drivers of gender bias. They employ collaborative and creative techniques to understand the unique challenges women may experience in recruitment, retention, and advancement due to implicit bias, identifying key drivers and desired outcomes in these areas. Ideate. In collaboration with key users and other inclusive perspectives, the team brainstorms a range of possible solutions for minimizing and/or counteracting the identified challenges, such as potentially biased policies, programs, or decision processes. A set of solutions is selected for initial prototyping and testing. In collaboration with key users and other inclusive perspectives, the team brainstorms a range of possible solutions for minimizing and/or counteracting the identified challenges, such as potentially biased policies, programs, or decision processes. A set of solutions is selected for initial prototyping and testing. Test. Solutions are prototyped and tested through pilot programs with inclusive employee feedback and participation. These pilots demonstrate how each solution works or might work to mitigate bias in real-life situations. Solutions are prototyped and tested through pilot programs with inclusive employee feedback and participation. These pilots demonstrate how each solution works or might work to mitigate bias in real-life situations. Evaluate. The team collects feedback from employees to assess if and how the tested solutions are both mitigating bias and enabling other benefits deriving from decreased implicit bias in the workplace. Solutions are iteratively improved or rejected based on this feedback, with the team returning to earlier stages to gather more information, ideate more solutions, or improve previously tested solutions as needed. Though not developed specifically as a method for addressing implicit bias or latent gender discrimination, design thinking possesses several characteristics that render it well-suited for untangling a complex problem of this nature: It is grounded in employee experience. As implicit bias is more often felt through experience rather than explicitly encoded in an organizations formal policies, the employee perspective can become imperative in understanding if and how implicit bias is occurring. Without developing rich insight into the experiences of women employees, organizations risk misidentifying or misinterpreting problems, or investing in solutions that fail to target the underlying issues. As implicit bias is more often felt through experience rather than explicitly encoded in an organizations formal policies, the employee perspective can become imperative in understanding if and how implicit bias is occurring. Without developing rich insight into the experiences of women employees, organizations risk misidentifying or misinterpreting problems, or investing in solutions that fail to target the underlying issues. It is guided by information, not preconceptions. Through its emphasis on exploratory and open-minded information-gathering, design thinking bases both its understanding of the problem and its development of potential solutions on insights gained directly from women employees, rather than on preconceptionsor misconceptionsabout what women experience, want, and need. This is particularly important in situations where a leadership team may otherwise base its approach on inaccurateor implicitly biasednotions of how to support women employees. Through its emphasis on exploratory and open-minded information-gathering, design thinking bases both its understanding of the problem and its development of potential solutions on insights gained directly from women employees, rather than on preconceptionsor misconceptionsabout what women experience, want, and need. This is particularly important in situations where a leadership team may otherwise base its approach on inaccurateor implicitly biasednotions of how to support women employees. It creates customized, and therefore more effective, solutions. Women are not a monolithic group, and implicit gender bias does not take the same shape across organizations and industries. Thus, the obstacles an organization faces around implicit gender bias call for a solution that is customized to that organizations particular environment and employees. Design thinking allows for this adaptability by encouraging organizations to put their women employees at the center of the process and tailoring solutions to an organizations specific resources, capabilities, and work environment. Women are not a monolithic group, and implicit gender bias does not take the same shape across organizations and industries. Thus, the obstacles an organization faces around implicit gender bias call for a solution that is customized to that organizations particular environment and employees. Design thinking allows for this adaptability by encouraging organizations to put their women employees at the center of the process and tailoring solutions to an organizations specific resources, capabilities, and work environment. It is iterative and user-validated. Design thinkings experimental, user-informed approach allows solutions to be tested and evaluated based on real-life results and feedback until the desired outcomes are achieved. Rather than arbitrarily labeling the problem and implementing a blanket solution, design thinking creates purposeful space for trial and error. This is especially important when dealing with implicit biases: as these biases are unconscious in nature, many men and women may not even be fully aware of when and how they manifest. Thus, multiple solutions may need to be tried and testedwith women involved at every step of the processbefore an organization finds those that fit its needs. Why should organizations consider including design thinking compared to simply what theyve always done? Rather than shaping organizational culture from the top down, design thinking redesigns environments from the bottom up, starting with people. Collectively, these assets of design thinking differentiate it from what one might call a more traditional, management thinking approach to tackling implicit bias in the workplace. Management thinking typically frames and approaches problems from a leadership perspective, without systematically seeking to understand the experiences of those affected by them. Many traditional management methodologies also take a linear once and done approach in developing and implementing a solution, where user input is viewed as simply helpful in the development process rather than integral to it. Finally, management thinking often places greater value on information from the external environmentcase studies, benchmarks, or research imported from other organizationsthan on information from the internal environment, which is often more pertinent and more valuable to questions of gender bias and womens experiences. Design thinking: Not just for implicit gender bias As a strategy that actively builds empathy into the process of generating solutions, design thinking can be particularly useful for approaching problems such as implicit bias that have complex personal and social impacts. And it does not just apply to gender bias. Other implicit biases, such as those surrounding race, ethnicity, age, religious affiliation, and ability, can have equally invisible and silent effects in the workplace. The same design thinking principles presented here in a gender context can help organizations build a more empathetic understanding of other diverse populations and find ways to increase parity among all. Using design thinking to fight implicit gender bias While applying design thinking to the problem of implicit gender bias is still a novel concept, many companies have employed aspects of design thinking to mitigate when, where, and how unseen obstacles might be creating barriers for women. Here, we examine how elements of design thinking can be and have been used in three key areas of womens advancement: hiring, retention, and leadership. Getting through the door: Hiring Leaders at an organization with a low proportion of women employees might think that women do not have an interest in the profession, or that they lack the right combination of skills to be successful in the job. But what if the problem is not interest, skills, or even access to opportunitybut a problem with the hiring process itself? Research shows that certain hiring practices, such as unstructured interviews or gendered job descriptions, can lead to unequal employment of women.12 The inequities that can result from both of these practices suggest that implicit biaswhether on the part of an interviewer, the person writing the job description, or women candidates themselvescan skew behavior and decision-making. Companies suspecting implicit bias in their hiring practices could take a number of cues from design thinking to help distill the issue. They could conduct surveys and interactive focus groups with job candidates to see if women experience the process differently from men or others; create a persona-driven journey map to understand the interview process across employees; or analyze interview and hiring data to determine if meaningful gender differences exist in candidate evaluation and selection. For instance, are recruiters systematically asking men and women different types of questions? Do some women find the process more intimidating or discouraging than men? Answers to these questions could inspire solutions, such as interview scripts, blind resume evaluations, or joint interview evaluations that can be brainstormed, prototyped, and tested with women. Implicit biases in the hiring process are not the only reason that women may be underrepresented. Early exploratory research could find that few women apply to work at a company in the first place, inspiring an approach to find women who turned down an employment offer or expressed not wanting to apply to understand the factors that influenced them. This information could guide the company to make design changes to its hiring environment that aim to increase the number of women applicants, such as using gender-neutral language in job descriptions or increasing the proportion of women employees at recruiting events or interviews. Spotlight: Hiring more women with GapJumpers Research has long found evidence of hiring biases against women, where knowledge of gender and gendered perceptions of competence contribute to low female recruitment and hiring rates.13 To tackle this implicit bias, some companies are employing a play on the orchestras blind auditions: blind evaluations. GapJumpers, a hiring software platform for employers launched in 2014, works with companies to create a list of skills required for a relevant job and helps to design a targeted task or challenge that applicants for that job complete online. Much like blind auditions, this platform aims to remove hiring and resume evaluation bias by designing a blind intervention in the hiring processan initial assessment of candidates based solely on performance in a strategically designed test. After reviewing candidate performance and resumes that have been stripped of identifying information such as name, gender, graduation year, college, and address, employers invite candidates for in-person interviews. This intervention allows employers to acknowledge the influence of implicit bias in their interview and hiring selections, and redesign the process to mitigate that impact. When GapJumpers analyzed data from 1,200 blind auditions it had enabled through company pilots and tests, it learned that 54 percent of the applicants participating in the tests were womenyet 58 percent of those selected for an in-person interview were women, and 68 percent of those that were eventually hired were women.14 Another study with Stanford Universitys Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research analyzed outcomes of 6,000 blind interviews for companies that used the GapJumpers platform. When those companies had been using traditional resume evaluation and hiring methods, only 17 percent of female job applicants were asked to come in for interviews. After they started using GapJumpers blind evaluation process, 59 percent of female applicants were invited for interviews. Moreover, at the client companies surveyed, women received 43 percent of job offers after the GapJumpers platform was implemented compared to the 26 percent they received before the intervention.15 Rising through the ranks: Retention Organizational leaders who notice higher attrition of women compared to men may think that more women leave due to professional interest, familial responsibilities, or low prioritization of work and career.16 Missing from these types of assumptions is the possibility that women may also choose to leave because they feel they are held to biased standards of personality, performance, and competence, and struggle with low satisfaction, stereotype-driven feedback, or lower performance evaluations as a result.17 Design thinking research can help identify what factors are really driving the problem. If internal research suggests implicit bias is a potentially driving factor in why women leave or how women feel, solutions to test could include conducting joint evaluations, creating objective and measurable performance standards or raising awareness about biased feedback.18 Another common assumption is that women leave employers because they believe they are paid less than their male colleagues for the same work. Interviews or persona-driven exercises with women can help test that assumption and better elucidate the underlying drivers of attrition. For instance, an organization may uncover a cultural problem in which women, but not men, feel discouraged from negotiating with their managers or HR on compensationa problem that can contribute to low female job satisfaction and retention. A design thinking team might work to ideate design cues, such as explicit language stating that salaries are negotiable, in an attempt to encourage a more objective compensation process.19 Additional approaches could include not requiring job candidates to disclose their previous salaries (an act that is currently illegal in some states and can anchor women to potentially lower starting pay), or allowing employees to advocate on behalf of others regarding compensation, a strategy that has shown to increase womens assertiveness in and comfort with negotiation.20 Organizations may also assume that simply increasing family leave benefits will help retain female talent. However, user-centered research techniques such as journey mapping or interactive focus groups may unveil other factors in play, such as women feeling discouraged from taking family leave due to concerns or evidence that doing so would put their position and reputation at a disadvantage compared to their male counterparts. Collaborative brainstorming could then identify potential solutions, such as a family support service that encourages both men and women to take family leave, provides guidance and support when they return, or encourages both male and female leaders to model the behavior change by actively taking family leave and talking about it with their teams. Solution ideation may also highlight employees desire to promote policies unrelated to family leave, such as core working hours or remote working options that could be extended and promoted to all employeesnot just women. Spotlight: Creating opportunities with and for women at VMware Companies in commonly male-dominated sectors such as engineering or technology risk high attrition among women due to a lack of understanding of what drives them away and why. VMware, a cloud computing firm, employed elements of design thinking to address this issue at its own organization. In 2014, the company revamped its strategy by creating opportunities with and for women to reduce barriers to retention. It launched a womens initiative (now called Women@VMware) to oversee this work, instituted an executive sponsorship program for women to facilitate internal networking, and created peer mentoring circles to foster a shared understanding of barriers that women employees faced. In collaboration with Stanford University, the company also provided unconscious bias training and tested new initiatives with middle managers and other employees through discussion groups to drive participation and engagement. Now, VMwares chief people officer sends managers and team members an information sheet prior to performance reviews reminding them about ways to minimize biased or gendered feedback in evaluations. The company also tracks and publishes metrics related to womens retention and advancement. As of 2016, women represented 23 percent of the company globally and 22 percent of leadership. While the company seeks to further increase these numbers, the design strategies and nudges aimed at reducing gender bias have contributed to parity in an important area: A 2016 third-party analysis of VMwares pay data showed that women earned 99 percent of their male counterparts salary.21 Empowering advancement: Leadership Even when women obtain leadership positions and opportunities, they may face further barriers due to gendered stereotypes associated with leadership, leading to biased perceptions of competence and double standards regarding women and leadership.22 Having relatively few women in leadership positions can further perpetuate inequities in pay and promotion, as research evidences a strong link between the advancement of women and the visibility of women leaders.23 If organizational leaders see low female representation among managers or executives, some might attribute this disparity to womens personal choiceshaving a child, getting married and relying on their partners income, or no longer being motivated to advance. Again, the exploratory stages of design thinking enable organizations to test these assumptions rather than blindly guessing the source of the problem. User-centered research strategies may illuminate that women feel they lack role models in the company at the leadership level, or that there lacks a working mechanism for women to gain the necessary sponsorship in order to advance. Additionally, immersive observation or focus groups with current leaders could show that succession choices are made without an objective process or standards for selection, leaving these decisions open to implicit bias. Collaborative solutions here could include streamlined standards and processes for promotion to leadership positions; a 360-degree review process that engages feedback at various organizational levels; strategies to enhance current women leaders visibility; instituting peer networks to help women build community; providing experiential leadership training; or creating a sponsorship program for women to help them gain support from both men and women leaders. Spotlight: Advancing women at Gap Inc. Across industries and sectors, women are often underrepresented in management and leadership positions and more likely to be employed in lower-level positions. When Gap Inc. found that it was experiencing stagnating female leadership, it used elements of design thinking, including focus groups, interviews, and collaborative sessions with women employees, to enable current women leaders to better understand how they could support other women coming behind them, clarifying pain and exit points for high-potential women who were considering leaving the company. By 2016, women made up 74 percent of Gap Inc.s workforce and approximately 77 percent of its senior leaders. In 2018, Gap Inc. became the only US retailer to be named to the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index for its commitment to create work environments that work for women.24 Moving toward a de-biased workplace These examples highlight how a design thinking approachcustomizable to each individual organization, its people, its resources, and its needscan help organizations better understand if and how implicit biases affect womens work experience and develop effective ways to counter their impact. To harness design thinkings ability to help tackle implicit gender bias in the workplace, organizational leaders can: Start small: Find a circumscribed context (such as a single department or specific issue in the employee experience) to experiment with design thinking and de-biasing. Dont try to solve all of the organizations problems at once. Engage diverse perspectives from the start: Even within the same company, women are not a homogeneous group that share the same experiences and opinions. When building a team or soliciting participation, involve women from different levels, backgrounds, and perspectives at each stage. Give people a safe way to share sensitive information: Fear of retaliation may make people hesitant to share their experiences with implicit bias or to identify a negative workplace environment. While the collection of real and transparent feedback is a tall order, organizations can create intimate and secure environmentssuch as small, informal focus groups or discussions with trusted facilitatorsto begin gathering information in a way that makes people feel supported and heard. Collect and monitor gender-disaggregated data: Obtain data on key indicators disaggregated by gender. Metrics to examine can include the proportion of male and female employees at each level and among new hires; employee satisfaction and promotion rates; performance evaluation ratings; attrition rates; and salary and other compensation. Measure the current gap between men and women in these metrics, monitoring how new design solutions affect them. Be transparent with results and communicate change: Communicate to employees the initiatives and progress made in reducing and mitigating implicit gender bias. Spread awareness across the organization about issues related to implicit bias, how they can acknowledge and tackle it, and the efforts the organization is taking to address it. The application of design thinking to the problem of implicit gender bias in the workplace is a novel approach to a deep-seated problem. With its ability to redesign and de-bias environments, design thinking can be a powerful way to unearth and address previously hidden obstacles to womens recruitment, retention, and advancement, driving the growth of an inclusive workplace culture that supports and empowers all employees. - Firebrand NPP MP, Kennedy Agyapongs says he can execute the $1.2 billion Ghana Card project with only $50m - According to the MP, the Executive Director of the NIA, Prof Ken Attafuah is involved in fraud The Member of Parliament for Assin Central, Kennedy Agyapong, has lashed out at Government over the decision to spend $1.2 billion on the National Identification Project (Ghana Card). According to him, it is totally out out place for a third-world country like Ghana to be spending such a colossal amount on the making ID cards when a far lesser amount could be used for the same project. MP for Assin Central, Kennedy Agyapong READ ALSO: Akufo-Addo, Bawumia special guest at lavish wedding of Duncan-Williams son The outspoken MP said if given the chance, he could use just $50 million to execute the job, describing the current budget for the Ghana Card as a "fraud". Mr. Agyapong also hit out at the Executive Director of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Prof Ken Attafuah, saying he must be stopped from needlessly wasting the State's money. According to him, he personally brought a company before the NIA which was willing to undertake the same project for just $50 million, but Prof Attafuah and his outfit rejected the offer. "Are we crazy? 1.2 Billion DOLLARS for Ghana Card? Are you out of your mind? Are we crazy? This is thievery. They are disgracing Akufo-Addo and it really pains me. Are we crazy in this country? I speak for Ghana, I don In India, their population is 1.2 billion people and they used the same amount for a similar project. Ghana we are A poor country like Ghana?" Mr. Agyapong said. He added: "I took a company to NIA that was willing to do the Ghana Card for $50million. NIA rejected the offer and is currently spending $1.2billion on the Ghana Card. The NPP cannot defend the $1.2 billion for the Ghana Cards. They cannot! Click here to Join our Ghana Football Fans Zone ahead of the Russia 2018 World Cup The NIA has courted controversy in recent weeks following revelations that the Authority is set to spend a whopping $1.22 billion on the Ghana Card project. In an interview with TV3, head of the NIA, Prof Attafuah, confirmed that over the next 15years, this project is going to cost us as a nation $1.22 billion, adding that "the private partners share of this burden is 678 million dollars, the government of Ghana component 531 million dollars." Meanwhile, the registration exercise for the cards has once again been indefinitely postponed after certain hiccups were encountered yesterday. Animated Joke: Dead Horse Lottery : READ ALSO: Shatta Wale shoots 'amount' music video on set Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish on YEN.com.gh? Please contact us on Facebook. Source: Yen.com.gh - Peter Mac Manu says allegations of nepotism against by GHAPOHA staff is false - According to the Unions of GHAPOHA, Mr. Manu has obtained a contract of over 4 million for himself and family Board Chairman of the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority (GHAPOHA), Peter Mac Manu, has rejected all allegations levelled against him by staff of the Authority. Workers of the Authority last week alleged that the Board Chairman, Mr. Manu has awarded contracts to members of his family. The Board Chairman of the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority (GHAPOHA), Peter Mac Manu. READ ALSO: A year on; how Major Mahamas death struck a chord with Ghanaians But in a statement, the former NPP national chairman said the allegations are false. He proceeded to provide more information on some of them and added that he was ready to provide documentary evidence to back them. He opined that the allegations are personal, direct and, I must admit, very painful. It is painful because not a single one of the allegations is true. Painful because it is pretty obvious to me that some persons have either a personal score to settle against me or are using me falsely to paint the government as corrupt or both," he said. The aggrieved GHAPOHA staff believe their boss is involved in a conflict of interest situation after accusing him of handing contracts to his wife and children. Click here to Join our Ghana Football Fans Zone ahead of the Russia 2018 World Cup At a press conference organised on Thursday, May 24, 2018, chairman of the Senior Staff Association, John Aseeph, said Mr. Mac Manus wife has taken over ticketing for staff travels. According to him, things are no longer being ran properly at the Authority, which he described as being priced at cut-throat prices. We are paying two and three times more than other competitors are offering for ticketing, the staff chairman alleged. The aggrieved workers have thus made a call to President Akufo-Addo to immediately dismiss the GHAPOHA boss. Animated Joke: Dead Horse Lottery READ ALSO: The young painter with magical hands Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish on YEN.com.gh? Please contact us on Facebook . Source: Yen Ghanas former President, John Agyekum Kufuor, says he has forgiven his predecessor Jerry John Rawlings after the latter made some derogatory comments about him recently. The president in a statement on Monday stated that he has accepted the apology. I know with my integrity when I die, I will go to heaven but when I see these corrupt leaders, I will ask permission from God and flog them, J.J Rawlings had told a public gathering of chiefs. His statement was a direct reference to the other two living former presidents John Agyekum Kufuor and John Dramani Mahama. John Agyekum Kufour and J.J Rawlings READ ALSO: Obengfo MD collapses after being arrested over death of Deputy NEIP CEO Stacy Offei Darko Former President Rawlings however made a quick u-turn, regretting his derogatory comments on his two successors, and apologised to them. A statement issued by Dr. Kwabena Osei-Adubofour, a Senior Aide to him, said despite that President Kufuor accepts the apology, he wishes to make it clear that: He has never divested any state property to himself or his family members. All the divestiture of state properties and enterprises that took place during his tenure in office was done legally and according to laid-down procedures, rules, and regulations, and to the utmost benefit of the people of Ghana. READ ALSO: Stop defending Anas, you dont know him Ken tells Baako President Kufuor never tried to unduly influence the promotion or appointment into the security services, more so, based on tribe. Emphatically, in his government policies, he never used tribalism in serving the regions and tribes of Ghana. As to Heaven, it is only God who decides who goes there or not. Finally, as to the creation of the medal the Order of the Black Star and Eagles of Ghana, President Kufuor believes that it is the prerogative of the president of the state to make such a creation and he as such did so as the exclusive title of presidents when they attain that unique office. President Nkrumah had created all the others upon Ghana attaining independence. There has been a long-standing bad blood between Mr. Rawlings and kufuor. Check out some of the trending news in Ghana in YEN.com.gh's video below: Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish on YEN.com.gh? Please contact us on Facebook now. Source: Yen.com.gh Controversial Ghanaian musician, Charles Nii Armah Mensah, aka Shatta Wale, has requested his social media fans to seize unwarranted attacks on his industry rival, Stonebwoy. According to Shatta Wale, the time has come for Ghanaians to offer massive support and rally behind their own musicians. The Bhim Nation President was heavily mocked by some fans of Shatta Movement for allegedly putting up poor performance in Miami at the Best Of The Best Reggae Music Festival on Sunday. Shatta Wale Source: Instagram READ ALSO: Top NDC man finally reveals how 'inexperienced' Stan Dogbe wrongly managed Mahama The SM fans who monitored the Stonebwoy's performance took to various social media platforms to trolled the artiste for not unable to get his audience on their feet although he claims to be a global artiste. The fans of Shatta Wale kept reposting some videos of his performance at the music festival and kept mocking him for his inability to wow the crowd. But Shatta Wale in a latest Facebook post called for calm among his fans and also urged them to seize fire. The artiste who appears worried about attacks on his label mate begged his fans to stop mocking him and rather support Stonebwoy. READ ALSO: 'Angry' Kufour 'fires' Rawlings over his 'evil' comment Shatta Wale further added that, all the attacks are being directed at the artiste because Stonebwoys fans were always looking for faults about he [Wale], instead of focusing on promoting their artiste. READ ALSO: Police arrest Dr Obeng-Andoh of Obengfo Hospital Ghana Trends: Joy FM Editor blasted over Royal Wedding, Mahama plans comeback in 2020 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 or Instagram Source: Yen Popular Ghanaian hiplife musician, C-Zar has revealed that he is shifting his focus from his music career to focus on more profitable ventures. According to the musician, he doesn't want to die a pauper, therefore he has ventured into entrepreneurship. Being in the industry for over a decade, the Araba Lawson hitmaker told Zylofon FM on Tuesday that his decision was influenced by the fact that show business in Ghana is no more lucrative, and he could end up going broke. Hiplife musician C-zar READ ALSO: Shatta Wale 'begs' his social media fans on behalf of Stonebwoy To him, he started the electrical business alongside the music but realized that the music which was non-profit was taking most of his time hence had to choose one. C-Zar in his media conversation stressed that his decision to venture into electrical business has helped him, therefore he has expanded by opening more branches. I have quit music for good, I dont want to die poor. Sincerely, show business doesnt pay in our part of the world. See how all the veterans die as if they have never been in the limelight..." I dont even want to see myself in such a condition in future where my family has to appeal for funds to take care of me should I fall sick," C-Zer said. READ ALSO: Top NDC man finally reveals how 'inexperienced' Stan Dogbe wrongly managed Mahama The one time hitmaker added that, I can say that barely 10 people in showbiz are really raking in huge sums which suits their status as celebrities but in reality, many are broke because it doesnt pay much. I nearly collapsed my electrical business because I was focused on doing music but realizing that the electrical business was more profitable, I had to quit the music. In the early 2000s, C-Zar was one of the popular artistes in the hiplife industry. His hit songs like Araba Lawson and Mercy Lokko were on the charts and won him the Hiplife Song of the Year at the Ghana Music Awards in 2009. C-Zar enjoyed a good career with hit albums like Sunsum Sofo (2003), Araba Lawson (2006), Mercy Lokko (2008) with the last release being Azonto Pandemic in 2012. READ ALSO: 'Angry' Kufour 'fires' Rawlings over his 'evil' comment Ghana Trends: Joy FM Editor blasted over Royal Wedding, Mahama plans comeback in 2020 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 or Instagram Source: Yen Ghana Ghanaian actor Majid Michel has offered some words of advice to ladies who are looking to get into relationships. The multiple award-winning actor believes every relationship needs God if it is to be successful. Majid Michel READ ALSO: Akufo-Addo, Bawumia special guest at lavish wedding of Duncan-Williams son According to him, there are certain religious traits that every lady must look out for before agreeing to go out with a man. In an Instagram post, Majid said ladies must look out for men who follow God, insisting a man who does not know God is not fit to lead. He added that any man who does not know Jesus equally does not know what real love is and, therefore, will not be able to sustain a relationship. The star actor posted a lovely picture with three beautiful women, accompanied by the said message. Click here to join our Ghana Football Fans Zone ahead of the Russia 2018 World Cup Ladies hear this, if a man is not following God hes not fit to Lead. if he doesnt have a relationship with Jesus, he wont know how to have a relationship with you. if he doesnt know Jesus, he doesnt know real Love," he wrote. Majid is one of the most decorate actors ever to emerge from Ghana, having won numerous awards for his impressive acting skills. The popular actor moved into Gospel ministration in 2016 and has since been preaching the word of God in order to help draw people closer to Jesus. Ghana Trends: Joy FM blasted over Royal Wedding, Mahama plans comeback in 2020: READ ALSO: Mali Spiderman to be made French citizen Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish on YEN.com.gh? Please contact us on Facebook or Instagram now. Source: Yen Newspaper - Ghanaian lawmaker, Kennedy Agyapong, has reportedly released 6 photos of Anas Aremeyaw Anas - This follows his earlier threat to reveal the face of the investigative journalist - YEN.com.gh can however neither confirm if it is indeed Anas or if the photos came from the MP Ghanaian politician and Member of Parliament (MP) for Assin Central, Kennedy Agyapong, has reportedly released six images alleged to be that of Anas Aremeyaw Anas. According to a report by MyNewsGH.com, his action follows an earlier threat to reveal the identity of the top investigative journalist. In an interview on Ekosii Sen on Asempa FM on Monday, May 28, 2018, Kennedy Agyapong allegedly said that: I will expose Anas because he is not clean. I will put my life on the line against Anas. READ ALSO: I am not in a relationship - King Promise The images allegedly produced by the lawmaker are of a young man in his mid to late 20s wearing dreadlocks. YEN.com.gh cannot at the moment confirm if these are indeed images of Anas, as he is alleged to use several prosthetics, as well as body doubles in the course of his work. Kennedy Agyapong claimed that Anas often sets up most of his victims, and therafter records conversations with them. He also stated that there are high rise buildings in Dzorwulu which belong to Anas. He did not end there; according to him, Anas dubiously obtained his law degree with the help of a former Chief Justice. Close associates of Anas have reportedly kept mute over the photos and are allegedly getting ready for the event to be held in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale, starting from June 6, 2018. READ ALSO: More photos from the wedding of Duncan-Williams' son The trending photos were allegedly shared by Kennedy Agyapong, but YEN.com.gh can authoritatively confirm that they are not photos of Anas. We cannot also if they indeed came from Kennedy Agyapong. YEN however has the true pictures of Anas To view the real photos of Anas, please click here: Ghana Trends: Joy FM blasted over Royal Wedding, Mahama plans comeback in 2020 | Yen.com.gh: Want to be featured on YEN.com.gh? Send us a message on our Facebook page or on Instagram with your stories, photos or videos Source: Yen.com.gh - Musician A-plus is calling the bluff of Communications Minister, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful over her lawsuit against him - The NPP activist is daring the NPP minister with his lawyers to go do their worst over his corruption allegations Popular Ghanaian musician, and a staunch member of the New Patriotic Party, (NPP), Kwame Asare Obeng, widely known as A-Plus, has called the bluff of the Communications Minister, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful. The State Minister who is currently not happy with the musician on Tuesday, called on him to apologize and retract some Facebook comment labeling her as corrupt. Ursula Owusu through her lawyers on Tuesday, expressed that A-Plus must use the same medium to render an unqualified apology to her over his libelous Facebook comment against her. A Plus, musician READ ALSO: Dr Obeng-Andoh of Obengfo Hospital finally charged for murder But in a rather sarcastic response to the minister, the NPP activist maintained that he would prefer being consumed by Bishop Daniel Obinims infamous Angels, Nimokafui and Ayetefrem than to apologize to Ursula Owusu. A Plus in another Facebook comment insisted that an apology and retraction to the minister is the least of his worries and fears. The statement released by Ursula Owusu's lawyers The NPP activist in a further comment warned that the state minister together with her legal team can go ahead and do their worst, but should expect more humiliation from him. If I apologise, Nimokafui and Ayetefrem and chalabim and Salafim should kill me. You think this is 2017. I only helped you to win power. Im not part of your nonsense. Im not afraid of anyone. Not a single soul. Im wild like a lion!!! Bring it on, youll be humiliated! he wrote on his Facebook wall. READ ALSO: Popular Ghanaian artiste quits music for electrical business Ghana Trends: Joy FM blasted over Royal Wedding, Mahama plans comeback in 2020 | Yen.com.gh: 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 or Instagram Source: Yen - Akuapem Poloo tells Wisa Greid to stop spreading rumours that the two are lovers - She adds that the "Ekiki Mi" hitmaker is too broke for her New social media star Rosemond Brown has issued a stern warning to musician Wisa Greid to leave her alone. This was contained in a video that Brown posted on social media. Rosemond Brown, also known as "Akuapem Poloo", complained that the musician has apparently been telling frieds that she was his girlfriend. Brown vehemently denied this amidst a rain of insults on Wisa. READ ALSO: Woman offers to reward A-Plus with herself as musician attacks minister The social media star-turned model and actress has pushed herself into into the limelight recently. This is due to her publishing of images and videos about her supposed flashy lifestyle. Most Ghanaians were first introduced to her when a video of her interview at the Ghana Music Awards 2018 were circulated. It was in this video that she sought to denigrate Moesha Buodong's tactics of getting men to provide for her. In the video attacking Wisa, Rosemond Brown alleges that she is only friend's with the musician's sister and that Wisa is not in the financial state to date her. Wisa Greid is no stranger to controversy. Apart from having hit songs with very explicit language, the Afropop artiste is infamous for revealing his private parts on stage at a show. ATTENTION: Join our Facebook group Ghana Football Fan Zone That incident saw him land in court. But when a fine of GHc10,000 was pronounced on him, Wisa reportedly had no money to settle it. After the money was paid by another person, there was a dispute about who paid the money. READ ALSO: Kennedy Agyapong releases 6 alleged photos of Anas? It is not known whether both Wisa and Brown have spoken after she posted the video. But it seems like this recent happening is only another one of the drama those personalities bring with them. Ghana Trends: Joy FM blasted over Royal Wedding, Mahama plans comeback in 2020 | Yen.com.gh: Do you have amazing and critical stories for us to publish? Reach out to us on Facebook and Instagram. Source: Yen New Delhi (IANS): Swaraj India leader Yogendra Yadav on Tuesday warned that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will face the anger of the farmers in the 2019 general elections. He made the remarks at a meeting arranged by the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee which marked June 5 as Mandsaur Shaheed Kisan Smriti Diwas as six farmers were killed in the police firing in Madhya Pradeshs Mandsaur in 2017. Criticising the inaction of the Madhya Pradesh government, he said that six farmers and a child named Abhishek were killed by police, but to this day no concrete action was taken against the police officers responsible for this heinous murder. Support TwoCircles Last year farmers demanding the better price for the crops triggered the widespread protest in Mandsaur, in which six people killed in police firing. Initially the Madhya Pradesh government denied police firing but finally Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan confirmed it The committee members demanded the immediate arrest of the of police personnel responsible for the killing of the six farmers. The committee also met President Ram Nath Kovind on Monday and urged him to immediately pass the two bills prepared by the farmers of the country and asked him to arrange a parliament session to resolve the agrarian crisis. Briefing the media about the interaction with the President, AIKS leaders said 21 political parties have signed their support for the bills and expressed confidence in passing both the bills. Describing the four years regime of the prime minister as anti-farmer, V.M. Singh, the national President of Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan said: Modi should immediately waive the crop loans of the farmers unconditionally in one go. Expressing disappointment at the rising fuel prices, he said that this has terribly hit the farmers, most of whom use diesel generators as there is absence of electricity in most of the villages. By Raqib Hameed Naik, TwoCircles.net Nuh (Haryana): After running for their lives from Myanmar and taking shelter in various states of India, the ordeal of Rohingya refugees seems to see no end as a major fire in Nuh district of Haryana consumed 57 shanties, leaving 217 refugees homeless. The fire started in one of the shanties at 2 pm on Sunday and continued until 4 pm. By the time people could douse the fire, the whole camp was reduced to ashes. Support TwoCircles We were called to give fingerprints in the local SP office and everyone from the camp was there, recalls Mohammad Alishan a grocery supplier to shops in the Rohingya slums in Nuh district. At around 2 pm when a few of us came back to the camp, we saw one Jhuggi on fire and gradually it spread to others. There were cylinders in Jhuggis which made the fire uncontrollable for us, he told TwoCircles.net. Alishans savings of the last six years were all destroyed and he could only save the pair of clothes he was wearing. The refugees are presently living in a tent provided by the district administration under the open sky. It is very hot in here. We are living in open plots. There is no relief as such apart from food and water and we dont know how and when we will be able to construct our huts again, Mohammad Hassan, 25 a labourer. According to Ali Johar, who has been coordinating the relief efforts of NGOs and administration, told TwoCircles.net, This is the second time that a Rohingya Camp has caught fire in Haryana in last two years. With the soaring temperature and refugees living in open sky amid fasting, we are going to suffer immensely in the coming days. He further urged the government and NGOs to come forward to help the refugees by constructing huts for them at the shortest possible time. Repeated incidents of fire in camps Last year in April, five huts of Rohingya refugees caught fire in Nangali gaon in Mewat district of Haryana, leading to one person being severely burnt, besides the loss of household materials. The fire had also consumed a portion of a makeshift mosque, a school, and a madrasa. In another similar incident, a fire engulfed more than 8 jhuggis of Rohingya refugees living in Bhagwati Nagar area of Jammu city. On November 26, 2016, 80 shanties belonging to Rohingya refugees caught fire in Narwal area of Jammu district in which two minor girls and a woman were killed and three others were injured. Last month on April 15, about 44 huts of Rohingya refugees caught fire in Kalindi Kunj area of Delhi leading to minor burn injuries to two persons besides reducing the shelters to ashes along with a complete loss of household materials. The fire which started in the early hours of that morning had also consumed a makeshift mosque and a madrasa. The camp is being rebuilt by the Zakat Foundation of India (ZFI). Right-wing involvement raises suspicion After a Rohingya camp in Delhi was reduced to ashes last month, a member of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), in a tweet claimed responsibility for the burning of the refugee camp. On April 15, Manish Chandela, the BJYM member had replied to a tweet reporting on the fire in the camp, Well done by our heroes. Yes we burnt the houses of the Rohingya terrorists, he had added. Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan and president AIMMM Navaid Hamid later filed an FIR against the right wing affiliate. The fire in Rohingya camps is a cause of concern and there is no doubt that there is a hate environment against the Rohingya in the country created by the people affiliated to Sangh, Navaid Hamid, president of AIMMM told TwoCircles.net. These fire incidents should be thoroughly investigated by the local police, he added. At present, there are more than 40,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees living in four Indian states: Jammu, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Delhi. The hostility against the Rohingya refugees has been growing since the BJP came to power in centre. The narrative of Rohingya being a security threat was initially supported by the BJP unit of Jammu and Kashmir. The Regional Jammu Kashmir National Panthers Party later joined the cause. On August 19, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs issued a circular asking all states to identify and deport illegal Rohingya immigrants. Illegal migrants are more vulnerable for getting recruited by terrorist organizations. Infiltration from the Rakhine State of Myanmar into Indian Territory, especially in the recent years, besides being a burden on the limited resources of the country also aggravates the security challenges posed to the country, the document read. The case is presently being heard in the Supreme Court of India. By Daisy Katta, TwoCircles.net During the month of Ramadan, it is common to see acts of charity from Muslims across the world. But in a suburb of Mumbai, a youth has taken the idea of charity and turned it into a daily act ensuring that the lesser-privileged children and youth do not miss out on the importance of education. It is the first Friday of the holy month of Ramadan as I arrive in Mumbra, a largely Muslim settlement on the outskirts of Mumbai, amidst the afternoon prayers. Mumbra has a peculiar history; it largely came up after then 1992 Mumbai riots when a large number of Muslim families fled Mumbai and had to settle at the outskirts of mainland Mumbai. It has a history of being a refuge for threatened communities, especially Muslims. The present Mumbra-Kausa region has experienced a three-phase migration: first after Bhiwandi riots of 1984, the second after Mumbai riots of 1992-93 and the third phase during the twenty-first century especially after the year 2004-05, after governmental policies increasingly favouring vertical development under the world-class city rhetoric, pushing out marginalised communities to the fringes of the city. Support TwoCircles TCN met with two residents: Mohammed Nasir Shaikh, 23, and senior resident Nuruddin Naik to understand the changes the community is witnessing especially within schooling and Higher Education. Mumbra has for ages suffered governmental neglect, but residents like Nasir and Naik realised that coming together as a community is the only way towards improvement. A dismal education scenario and severe lack of government-funded education led to major dropout ratio with very few students making into higher education. Growing up in Mumbra, Nasir also faced the inevitable grim future possibilities. Nasir says, In spite of doing well in my high school exam, I had only a few options: either become a mobile repairman or go to Dubai to work in a laundry, become a driver or a helper. This is the usual trajectory of young people here. He was one of few students from financially deprived backwards in Mumbra who was able to continue his education. And now, he has put his own ambitions on hold to ensure that he helps as many children as possible in continuing education. Nasir started his education initiative with just two students in his one-room kitchen house at the age of 18 where he stayed with his parents. We would shift all the furniture to the kitchen to make room for the students and my parents would sit for the next seven hours in the kitchen so I could teach the students in the living room. Nasir also worked in a bakery to support his college education finally getting a degree in statistics. The major motivation for Nasir was the experience of overcoming his own hurdles, to achieve an education. Nasir says, If I could come so far, I wanted to help other students like me to at least try. Today, Nasir is the first person in his family to graduate. It has been five years and now Nasir has rented out a small shop floor and converted into a classroom so students can have a comfortable space to learn. To fund this project, he relied on his savings from bakery job along with the small amount he would make from giving tuitions. The model adopted by Nasir is both simple and ingenious. Of the 40 students that study to prepare for the 10th standard exam, about half are able to pay for their course, which, true to the nature of Nasirs initiative, is a small amount of Rs 500 per month. Thanks to this, students who cant pay are able to study for free, thereby ensuring that everyone gets a chance to learn regardless of their income status. This explains why students like Farid Mughal, 15, who sells clothes in the busy market area of Mumbra station, has managed to enrol at Nasirs centre. Mughal dreams of becoming train loco pilot. Farid whose parents are illiterate and unemployed couldnt support his education but thanks to Nasir, his dreams are still achievable. And Nasir can take pride in the fact that Ramadan or otherwise, his efforts will go a long way in addressing the lack of educational opportunities for the students of Mumbra. By Nikhat Fatima, TwoCircles.net Caste system in India, according to a large number of historians and intellectuals began with the advent of the Aryans and is still thriving today in sophisticated forms that common people shrug it off saying, It is a thing of the past, and does not exist anymore. For the younger generation caste system means reservations for the dalits and we see many youngsters crying hoarse over the coveted seats in professional courses and government jobs. And there are others who think caste system is practiced only in rural India. But they forget caste system plays a role in choosing a life partner for marriage, in honour killings, where all the menial work (especially manual scavenging) is concerned, in carrying out atrocious activities/ heinous crimes and so on. There are still glaring examples of caste-based discrimination- right from children of upper caste not sharing the same bench in school to educated Dalits being overlooked for promotions in Government departments. Caste system is something that is instilled right from childhood and sadly seems to be taking a more dangerous shape with the upper castes becoming more vocal about their so called superiority with each passing day. The murder of a Dalit youth for merely owning and riding a horse is a glaring example of how the upper caste want to hold on to power and dominate others. Support TwoCircles While open discrimination is there for everyone to see, it is the subtle one that is hard to recognize if one is not observant enough. One recent personal narration on Facebook by Mohan Guruswamy, a political economist, is about the strong belief of the Brahmins that all fine things such as intelligence, oration, music, arts, craftsmanship, poetry, writing, etc are owned by them and that they are the pioneers and the ones whose responsibility it is to keep it intact. Guruswamy the only non Brahmin in the elite group of people gathered at a former Prime Ministers home for lunch, was an accidental witness to the conversation of all the Brahmins in the group who after crediting themselves for preserving the Hindu arts and culture asserted that it their sole responsibility of not just preserving but also carrying this legacy forward. The funny part is that everyone in the group thought all were Brahmins and the discussion became personal with the usage of we, us and them. Of course we and us meant Brahmins and them all others. They had naturally assumed that Mohan Guruswamy with his revered last name, education, intelligence, high post was a Brahmin. This stereotype does not apply just to the Brahmins the rest of the non-Brahmin populace also swear by this stereotype that Brahmins are born with levels of IQ. And when they learnt they had a non-Brahmin amongst them there was a change in the atmosphere and the warmth they had for Mohan Guruswamy. However in the same post Mr. Guruswamy shared that when he wrote a piece on the Battle of Rezangla fought on November 18, 1962, about how the C Company of the 13 Kumaon Rifles fought till the last man to hold off a massive Chinese assault and how the C Company of the Kumaonis was entirely drawn from among the Ahirs of Haryana. The Yadav community celebrates November 18th every year with great enthusiasm. And they appreciated this article so much that thousands of copies were printed and disseminated. The Yadav community honoured Mohan Guruswamy for this piece which celebrated their bravery and the Yadav clan concluded that Guruswamy must be a Yadav. Why else would anyone write about the history of the Yadavs if one were not a yadav himself/herself? Yet another stereotype broken by Mohan Guruswamy. He corrected the Yadav gathering informing them that he was not a Yadav but a Mudiliar. Mudiliar is a caste in the state of Tamil Nadu in South India. The Yadavs were undeterred by this revelation as the President of the Yadav Mahasangh declared Mohan Guruswamy a honorary Yadav thus making him as one of their own. In conclusion Mohan points out that no such honorary Brahmin hood was ever offered to him despite being an intellectual like any of the Brahmins he knew through his work in both the government sector and corporate sector. Brahmin hood is not something that can be given away one has to be born a Brahmin. This is how the caste system works from the Brahmin point of view. Once a top dog always a top dog. While the other 3 castes may reconsider breaking the barriers of the caste system at some point, Brahmins the top notch will never break this rule. That the Brahmins are highly intelligent than all others is a stereotype which many people would endorse without hesitation. An Old Language in the New World Andrew Jojo (right) holds a candle during Mass. ( Zoey Maraist/Catholic Herald) The three languages spoken captured the history of the people at the Mass. These Syro-Malabar Catholics came from Kerala, India, where Malayalam is spoken. Now a part of the St. Jude Community, the Northern Virginians celebrate Mass at St. Andrew the Apostle Church in Clifton, and intersperse Malayalam with English. And for a few hymns and prayers, they use Syriac, which is a dialect of Aramaic -- the language spoken by Christ. The rite traces its roots to the apostle Thomas, who brought the faith to India. Seventeen children celebrated their first Holy Communion with Auxiliary Bishop Mar Joy Alappatt of the St. Thomas Syro-Malabar Diocese of Chicago May 26; eight of them also were confirmed. The diocese, which encompasses all of the United States, was established in 2001 and is growing. This year, the diocese will ordain its first priest native to the U.S. First communicants and their parents processed into the church to present the bishop with a tray of flower petals with prayers and offerings for the church. In their liturgy, the offertory occurs at the beginning of Mass, said Felix Simon, a parishioner and catechist of the community. Also in the Eastern tradition, children are baptized and confirmed at the same time. The children who were baptized in Roman Catholic churches also received the sacrament of confirmation. During his homily, Bishop Alappatt showed the boys and girls a picture of the day he received his first Communion, which he said was one of the most beautiful and important days in his life. "Don't leave Jesus here in the church," he told them. "Jesus wants to come into your home, to eat with you, to study with you, to play with you. Jesus wants to accompany you." During the Mass, the children led the congregation in a Syriac hymn and the Our Father. "This is the fourth year in succession that we've had Syriac as sort of a rite of passage," said Simon. Much like Latin in the Western tradition, Syriac was used in their liturgy until the vernacular replaced it in the early 1960s. As part of the Aramaic Project, started by his friend Father Joseph Palackal, Simon and others are trying to keep the ancient tongue alive. "It was not being used, so that knowledge base is lost," said Simon. "We're trying to reintroduce some of the elements of the Syriac hymns. For the older generation, it's nostalgic." Though it was hard at first for them to grasp the pronunciation of the words, Simon thought the children sang spectacularly. "The children were excited to learn a new language, especially the language Jesus spoke," he said. "When you say the Our Father it's almost the exact words (of) Jesus." The internal political situation in Armenia, despite the election of leader of the popular protest movement Nikol Pashinyan as prime minister, continues to be complex. Some dual authority has formed in the country, within which a parliament coexists, with the majority of deputies representing the former ruling party, and the minority representing the government. Despite the assurance of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) representatives that they have no plans to sabotage the government's work, the danger of the impasse remains acute. Holding early parliamentary elections may become the solution to the problem, which will make it possible to avoid an internal political crisis, but the sides' positions on this issue are directly opposite. On the one hand, the government and its political forces represented by former opposition parties, primarily the Civil Contract party headed by Nikol Pashinyan, are in favor of holding early elections. From the leading parliamentary forces, where the Prosperous Armenia party remains the main force, a similar position is occupied by the Tsarukyan bloc. On the other hand, the representatives of the former ruling RPA, which has virtually no support in the society, for obvious reasons do not see the need for holding early elections and declare that they are going to prepare for the 2022 elections. Reaching consensus between political forces, first of all, between the forces that dominate the parliament and the government, would be the best way out of the situation. But consensus is unlikely to be reached in the extreme situation. It should be noted that it's about holding elections under the amended Electoral Code. It is planned to prepare changes to the Electoral Code already in late June, primarily aimed at abolishing the system of so-called preferential voting. Earlier, the RPA, using special technologies based on vote-buying, used preferential voting in its own interests. The government commissioned the non-governmental organization 'Union of Informed Citizens' to develop a package of changes to the Electoral Code, as well as organize consultations between the parties on this issue. The head of the organization Daniel Ioannisyan said that consultations will be held within the next few days. According to him, if no agreement is reached with the RPA on introducing amendments to the Electoral Code, the government intends to use such options as the Ministry of Justice filing a claim to the Constitutional Court for a recognition of the preferential voting system as unconstitutional. If this does not work out, which is unlikely, there is an option of holding early elections through a referendum. Taking all these options into account, early elections cannot be an absolute guarantee of resolving the impasse in the current situation. The thing is that holding early elections until May 9, 2019 is possible only in one case - if Prime Minister Pashinyan resigns. According to the law, the parliament has no right to express a vote of no confidence towards the prime minister within a year of his election. The resignation of the prime minister may be fraught with a full return of the Republican Party of Armenia to power, which holds the majority of seats in the parliament. The prime minister says that the election can be held already before the end of this year. Perhaps, these statements are explained by Pashinyan's confidence that after his resignation the parliament will not be able to elect a new prime minister. But it may happen if the RPA faction is disunited. There is no disunion yet. The prime minister probably believes that the ranks of Republicans can be divided by anti-corruption revelations, the mechanism of which has already been launched. But before that, actualizing the internal political crisis would remain a threat. Overcoming the crisis and the opportunity to get out of the impasse is a multi-layered pie, the top layer of which can be the split of the RPA, which is the primary focus of anti-corruption revelations. The European Union is trying to rope central banks into its drive to salvage the nuclear deal with Iran but its potentially risky, and theyre not happy about it. Handelsblatt Global reports in its article EU pressuring central banks to help Iran that Tehran is pushing Europe to come up with a package of measures to offset the economic impact of Washingtons decision to pull out of the nuclear deal. And the EU has responded by getting inventive. It wants to help Iran keep at least part of its oil export revenues, its most important source of income, by enlisting the help of central banks. At present, oil sales are settled exclusively in dollars, mostly in cooperation with US banks. But thats no longer possible since the US pulled out. Using dollars to settle Iranian deals is now prohibited and US banks are also forbidden from getting involved. European banks have followed suit. So the EU is considering bypassing the US financial system by handling oil purchases from Iran in euros, without the aid of commercial banks. To achieve that, it wants central banks in Europe to transfer large sums of euros to the Iranian central bank. A number of models are being reviewed in the European central banking system. Were talking about sums in the billions, said one EU diplomat. Europe's national central banks fear the arrangement could aid money launderers or fund terrorists. It was the EU Commissions idea. We should consider if this is the right way, Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said during a visit to Tehran in mid-May. It could demonstrate to the Iranians the serious efforts to preserve economic relations between the EU and Iran, he noted. The Iranian central bank isnt directly targeted by the US sanctions. The Commission wants the money to be transferred to Tehran as soon as possible in weeks rather than months. But its proving tricky. The European Central Bank has already refused, saying such money transfers would be incompatible with its mandate. That leaves the national central banks, particularly in countries that import Iranian oil mainly Italy, France, Spain, Greece and the Netherlands, which together take the lions share of the EUs annual import of 548,000 barrels of crude oil. Germany only buys 17,000 barrels a day, according to EU figures. The German government has declined to comment on the matter, with sources in Berlin only noting that the Bundesbank, Germanys central bank, is independent. EU diplomats said Germany backed the plan, but sees less need for the Bundesbank to act than the central banks of France, Italy or Spain. The central banks, though, are deeply skeptical. They fear they are being pulled into an arrangement that could lead them to aid money laundering or even fund terrorism. No one can say for sure where money transfers to the Iranian central bank will end up, said central bank sources. Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based political party and militant group backed by Iran, is viewed as a terrorist group by the US, and the EU has put its military arm on its terrorism blacklist. Central banks could get in hot water if they transfer money that could, in theory, end up in Hezbollahs hands, said one EU diplomat. Besides, Iran has yet to fully implement international rules on capital adequacy and money laundering. There is one alternative way to pay for oil: The EU could copy China, the biggest buyer of Iranian oil, which settles deals by parking yuan in China that Iran purchases Chinese goods with. But so far, Iran doesnt want to use that system in Europe, insisting that Donald Trumps decision to quit the nuclear pact wouldnt affect Tehrans exports. That seems unlikely: During the last round of sanctions prior to the nuclear deal, Irans oil supplies fell by around one million barrels per day. Any diplomatic agreement in which North Korea agreed to give up its nuclear weapons could take as long as 10 years to implement, according to a new analysis from former US officials. The assessment, released Monday by experts at Stanford University, comes as the White House is trying to verify how committed North Korea is to denuclearization and how it could be achieved, ahead of a potential summit between the two leaders, according to CNN's article North Korea denuclearization could take a decade, experts say. Siegfried Hecker, a respected nuclear scientist who has previously traveled to North Korea to inspect its nuclear site, co-authored the roadmap with Robert Carlin, a Korea analyst who spent years at the CIA and State Department, and Elliot Serbin, Hecker's research assistant. The trio identified 22 specific programs or activities -- such as the country's nuclear weapons stockpile, its missile arsenal or its nuclear reprocessing facilities -- that US negotiators need to address with North Korea. Halting or suspending many of these will likely take less than a year, the authors estimate, but eliminating or setting limits on them will take six to 10 years. Last week, US President Donald Trump abruptly canceled his planned Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in part due to concerns on whether Pyongyang was willing to agree to what's known as CVID -- complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of the country's nuclear program. After a flurry of diplomatic activity, Trump has hinted that the talks may be back on. US officials are in Singapore and South Korea to prepare for the summit's potential revival. Sung Kim, the US envoy to the Philippines and a former ambassador to South Korea; Randall G. Schriver, the assistant secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs; and Allison Hooker, director for Korea on the White House's National Security Council, traveled to North Korea Sunday and held talks with their counterparts. Talks could potentially resume Wednesday at the demilitarized zone that divides the two Koreas, a person familiar with North Korea-US relations told CNN. "The goal here is to create an environment where North Korea would not desire nuclear weapons development by removing the threat perception (posed by the United States)," said Chun Yung-woo, a former South Korean national security adviser. Some of Washington's top officials working on North Korea -- including national security adviser John Bolton and Susan Thornton, the State Department's acting ambassador for East Asia and Pacific affairs -- have said publicly that Trump will seek a deal that involves North Korea rapidly denuclearizing. Thornton likened it to a large down payment at an event sponsored by The Wall Street Journal in Japan. Analysts and weapons experts have been quick to point out that an agreement on denuclearization would take a significant amount of time, due to the complexity of the negotiations and the lack of trust between the two sides. But the authors of the study say time is also needed to assuage North Korea's security concerns. Hecker, who previously served as the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, told The New York Times he believes it could take as long as 15 years, given the uncertainties in the process. "Such assurance cannot be achieved simply by an American promise or an agreement on paper, it will require a substantial period of coexistence and interdependence," the study concluded. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev ordered the year 2018 to be declared the Year of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR). The first democratic republic in the East was created exactly 100 years ago. In this connection, anniversary events are held in Azerbaijan and other countries. Yesterday the embassy of Azerbaijan in Moscow hosted event, dedicated to the Republic Day. Russian cultural and public figures, senators, as well as ambassadors and representatives of diplomatic missions congratulated Azerbaijanis on this day. Polad Bulbuloglu, Ambassador of Azerbaijan to Russia, greeted those who attended this event: "Our generation should be happy that we have a wonderful opportunity to celebrate this holiday together with the entire Azerbaijan here, in the capital of the Russian Federation, Moscow. President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev named 2018 the year the Year of the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic.The significance of its creation in 1918 is associated with the fact that it was the first parliamentary republic in the entire Muslim East. It was an embodiment of democratic principles and values, as well as ideals of freedom and democracy. This significant event played an important role in revival and further development of national self-consciousness of Azerbaijanis, turned historical dream of Azerbaijani people into reality, demonstrated their desire for independence and laid foundations of Azerbaijani statehood. During short period of its existence in hardest conditions of that time, young republic set a difficult historical task, took serious steps in construction of democratic state, created first parliament and government, approved state symbols, flag and anthem, declared native language to be state language, created national currency and ensured rule of law, as well as granted equal civil and political rights to all citizens without any discrimination, including gender equality in electoral field, which was unheard of in many European countries, and especially in Muslim East." Azerbaijani diplomat recalled that the ADR paid a lot of attention to development of education system and culture: "The first Baku university was created at that time, and it still exists. Azerbaijani youth was sent to the best European educational institutions, and state paid for it." "Peace-loving policy pursued by the state, desire to become a full-fledged member of international community and member of the League of Nations - all of this allowed the ADR to establish diplomatic relations with a number of states, open 16 foreign missions in Baku, get de-facto recognition of its independence at the Paris conference of 1920. After meeting between Azerbaijani delegation and allied states at the Paris Peace Conference, then US President Woodrow Wilson noted that he and representatives of the ADR share similar value. In particular, referring to meeting with head of Azerbaijani delegation, he said: "I spoke with a person who spoke the same language as me, respected ideas, concepts of freedom and concepts of rights and justice." Meanwhile, according to ambassador, political, economic and social crisis that engulfed the country, territorial claims, aggression, and terrorist acts against peaceful Azerbaijani population led to weakening of the republic: "Due to serious geopolitical events, young democracy existed only for 23 months, but remained in memory of future generations as one of the brightest pages in the history of our nation." Nevertheless, according to Polad Bulbuloglu, during the Soviet period Azerbaijan became an industrial republic with highly developed industry and diversified agriculture: "An extensive network of educational institutions has been established, the Academy of Sciences has been created, dozens of theaters have opened, cinema and art have developed, a lot of magazines and newspapers were published. After 1969, when national leader Heydar Aliyev became head of the republic, Azerbaijan became leader in many industries in the Soviet Union. Particular attention was paid to development of literature, theater, cinema, music and overall culture of Azerbaijan. As a musician, I would like to especially highlight achievements of Azerbaijani music. Works of Uzeir Hajibekov, Kara Karaev, Fikret Amirov were popular around the world and could be heard on all continents of our planet." Next stage of historical period of Azerbaijani statehood began after the collapse of the USSR, when the country faced January 1990 tragedy, internal political crisis and occupation of its lands. According to ambassador, during such difficult situation, wise Azerbaijani people appealed to national leader Heydar Aliyev and asked him to lead the republic: "Heydar Aliyev's return to power in 1993 became the point when revival of new Azerbaijani statehood began. Leading the state, he put things in order, strengthened country's independence, making it irreversible, and began full-scale reforms, leading Azerbaijan to international arena. We recently celebrated 95th anniversary since the birth of this brilliant man, who played a unique role in the history of both Soviet and modern Azerbaijan and in the history of the Soviet Union. I would like to highlight initiative of Russian side, which created a remarkable exhibition about Heydar Aliyev's work in Moscow. This exhibition opened with great success in Baku in the Heydar Aliyev Center and our public was very interested in it. Thanks to strong foundation, laid by Heydar Aliyev, our country successfully develops under leadership of President Ilham Aliyev today. Heydar Aliyev raised not just his son, but an outstanding statesman who has been leading Azerbaijan for many years in the stormy ocean of today's political life. Our republic follows the path of democratic, secular state, it has achieved great success in economic development, agriculture, became a center of tolerance." Polad Bulbuloglu pointed out that Azerbaijan plays an active role in intercultural dialogue and in recent years has become an international platform of dozen events of global scale: "The Heydar Aliyev Foundation, led by First Vice President Mehriban Alieva, is contributing to this process. Interstate policy of my country is aimed at building trustful, friendly, good-neighborly relations and has already proved that our country is a reliable partner of the international community. Azerbaijan really cares about historical, cultural and moral ties with Russia, which formed between our peoples for several centuries. Cooperation of our states has strategic nature, and personal contacts between leaders of our states are of special importance for both countries and peoples." "Hundred-year period of history of Azerbaijani statehood can't be told in just one speech. This hundred-year path wasn't always easy, sometimes it was tragic, but our country has always dealt with challenges and threats, while demonstrating its commitment to ideals of freedom, peace, democracy," Polad Bulbuloglu concluded. There is no reason for oil to hit $100 a barrel, BP Chief Executive Bob Dudley said. "There are people who predict the oil price of $100 per barrel. I do not think it will reach $100 unless there are any restrictions on oil supplies. I also see no reason for the price to hit this high," Dudley said, noting that the agreement to reduce crude oil production led to a change in the global energy landscape. CEO and co-owner of Russian oil major Lukoil Vagit Alekperov said earlier that he does not expect oil prices to grow to $100 per barrel. "I do not think that there will be such a high price, because the price is now regulated by a reduction that was reached by the OPEC+ agreement. It is being regulated by those statements that come from the U.S. on limiting oil exports from Iran. A sharp reduction of Venezuelas production. These are those factors that can be changed today," Alekperov said. Oil prices renewed 4-year highs in April and May. The Brent oil price exceeded the psychological level of $80 per barrel on May 17 for the first time since November 25, 2014, but in late May oil prices fell by 3-4% on reports about potential softer terms of the OPEC+ deal. A leading analyst of the National Energy Security Fund, a lecturer at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Igor Yushkov, speaking with Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that companies are trying to calm the market and assure traders that there will be no oil shortage. "The fact is that the more oil prices jump, the more difficult it is for companies to make decisions on projects, therefore, the level of prices is not as important as their stability," he said. "BP and Lukoil are proceeding from the two opposite trends: on the one hand, the OPEC + deal saves the market from excess supply, we spend oil reserves that have accumulated all over the world, the consumption level is catching up with the output level and oil prices are rising - and on the other hand, rising prices make US shale projects profitable again, they increase supply, so at some point the same balance of supply and demand will be established. With a further rise in prices, the US will extract more oil, the supply will increase and, as a result, prices will go down, which will make a number of US projects to leave the market again. BP and Lukoil announced that this balance will be reached before $100 a barrel," Igor Yushkov explained. The expert drew attention to the fact that the oil price of $100 per barrel is not an end in itself for companies. "Of course, high prices are very important for any exporting countries, but the most part of this price increase is received by the state, not the company. This is why the price of $100 is simply not necessary to them, especially since the revival of US projects at such a price means growth competition in the market," the leading analyst of the National Energy Security Fund said. Higher school of tariff regulation at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, Ivan Kapitonov, agreed with Yushkov. "In general, oil prices are prone to increase now, which cannot but be alarmed since US shale companies are increasing their oil production at an accelerated rate. The OPEC + deal is questionable in such a situation, since agreements to reduce oil output lose meaning at such prices. Accordingly, the prices should be lowered. The current statements are aimed at reducing the growth rate of oil prices. In general, in conditions of accelerated growth of US production, we will not see prices at $100 per barrel in the near future, as it requires something global to happen," he said. "The price threshold of $100 is important first of all for the financial market, which likes fancy large numbers. If it is passed, then the price may rise up to $110 per barrel, but then it will fall back," Ivan Kapitonov predicts. Ecuadorean Oil Minister Carlos Perez has recently argued that OPEC should maintain oil production cuts at its next meeting, Reuters reported. OPEC countries may decide in June to lift output to make up for reduced supply from Iran and Venezuela and in response to concerns from Washington about a rally in oil prices. In late 2016, OPEC and a number of non-OPEC countries agreed in Vienna to reduce their oil production by a total of 1.8 million barrels per day from the October level, with Russia's cut of 300,000 barrels per day. The agreement was concluded for the first half of 2017 with the possibility of an extension. In May, the deal was extended by nine months and is now valid until the end of March 2018. The United States was counting on a total confrontation with Tehran ran by leaving the Iran nuclear deal, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. "I remember the apocalyptic predictions of the 1980s about a 'nuclear winter. Fortunately, it did not come to pass, although the 'Arab Spring' came, which, through a series of tragic events, also exacerbated the problem of weapons of mass destruction," Lavrov said, speaking at the Primakov Readings. "I am referring to the withdrawal of the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear program with the view of organizing a total confrontation with Iran, and many staged situations involving the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government aimed at changing the regime in Damascus," Sputnik cited the minister as saying. On May 8, US President Donald Trump announced that his country would exit the 2015 JCPOA, which provided for the gradual lifting of the anti-Iranian sanctions in exchange for Tehran's maintaining the peaceful nature of its nuclear program. Besides, Trump decided to reinstate the previously lifted sanctions on Iran Russias Federation Council has unanimously approved the law on counter-sanctions in response to unfriendly actions by the United States and other countries. According to the law, the government is empowered to introduce on the basis of the Russian presidents instructions various countermeasures provided they do not apply to vital goods not manufactured in Russia and other countries, TASS recalls. Corresponding decisions may also be made by the president on the basis of proposals from the Security Council. The government terminates the counter-measures if the circumstances that had served as the reason for taking them are eliminated. The bill was proposed by a group of lower house members led by State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, on April 13 and adopted in the third reading on May 22. The Federation Council will invite Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to a plenary session, Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said. "Whether he will be able to come or not is a secondary issue, but I would support a proposal to invite him to one of our sessions. I issued an order, we sent an invitation and will try to organize his arrival," TASS cited Matviyenko as saying. Zuckerberg will be invited to deliver a speech at an "Expert Hour" session. Matviyenko ordered Nikolai Fyodorov, First Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council to study the possibility of inviting other foreign experts on relevant issues. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will officially visit the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. "On May 31, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will officially visit the Democratic People's Republic of Korea," the ministry said, adding that Lavrov will discuss the situation around the Korean Peninsula with North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho. "Negotiations between the foreign ministers are planned, which will focus on the current issues of the bilateral agenda and the exchange of opinions on the situation around the Korean Peninsula and other major international and regional problems," TASS cited the ministry as saying. Turkey will buy jets elsewhere if the United States stops it buying Lockheed Martin F-35s, Ankaras foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said. "There are no reasons why the US will not supply F-35s to us. We do not want to spoil relations with our US ally. The F-35 aircraft should be delivered to Turkey as planned. But in case of problems, Turkey will not be left without an alternative. It may buy both from Russia and from a NATO country. There is an agreement on F-35s, and if one side withdraws from it, the necessary steps will be taken," the minister stressed. Turkey has plans to buy more than 100 of the F-35 jets and last year the Pentagon last year awarded Lockheed $3.7 billion in an interim payment for the production of 50 of the aircraft earmarked for non-U.S. customers, including Ankara, Reuters recalls. Russian gas giant Gazprom said it was aware of actions by Ukrainian oil and gas firm Naftogaz to enforce an arbitration court ruling. Naftogaz said earlier today it had initiated the enforcement of a $2.6 billion award from the Stockholm arbitration court from Gazprom. "The company confirms that it has asked the Swiss courts to enforce the award, and understands that Swiss authorities already have taken measures against Gazprom's assets there," Naftogaz said. The ruling, made by the Stockholm arbitration court in February, was meant to conclude a legal battle over gas deliveries. But Naftogaz said Gazprom had not complied with the ruling which obliged the Russian company to resume gas supplies to Ukraine at a market reflective price and to pay $2.6 billion. "Despite the awards and timely pre-payment by Naftogaz, Gazprom refused to resume deliveries to Naftogaz as agreed on 1 March 2018," Naftogaz said. Legal officers visited the office of Nord Stream AG in Switzerland but they did not execute any property seizure orders, a source with knowledge of the situation. "Legal officers have visited the office, but there was no [property] seizure," Sputnik cited the source as saying. Nord Stream AG is the operator of an existing gas pipeline of the same name, while Nord Stream 2 AG is the operator of the Nord Stream 2 project, which envisages the construction of two gas pipelines that will run from the Russian coast through the Baltic Sea to a hub in Germany. In March, Chief Commercial Officer of Ukrainian oil giant Naftogaz Yuriy Vitrenko said that his company did not exclude the possibility of appealing to a Swiss court to demand the seizure of Nord Stream AG and Nord Stream 2 AG shares to recover Gazprom's debt related to the decision of the Stockholm Arbitration Court. In February 2018, the Stockholm arbitration court partially satisfied Naftogaz claims over what it said was the failure of the Russian energy giant to supply agreed volumes of gas for transit, ordering Gazprom to pay $4.63 billion to the Ukrainian company. However, taking into account the amount of money previously awarded to Gazprom in relation with the gas supply contract, the mutual offset of liabilities resulted in Gazprom's obligation to pay $2.5 billion. Gazprom appealed against the Stockholm ruling in April, and the case is ongoing. The executive vice-president of NewTech Services, professor of the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas, Valery Bessel, speaking to Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that Gazprom will not tolerate such a situation. "The Stockholm arbitration court has already been convicted by Gazprom of dishonesty: an outsider expert signed the arbitration decision, which is not supposed to happen. Therefore, Gazprom will file a claim and its struggle with Naftagaz will continue for a very long time," he said. "For Europe, it is extremely important that gas flows through Ukraine, so that it receives transit money from Gazprom and fills its budget, but it is more important for European consumers, to have the Ukrainian gas transportation system under control. I think, as a result, this trial will lead to the fact that Europe will start making decisions faster. The Stockholm arbitration court is not considered the ultimate authority, and if Gazprom proves that the conclusion was written not by an arbitrator but by an unauthorized person, then this will be an essential factor to reconsider the whole case, as well as an unpleasant incident for the Stockholm arbitration court," Valery Bessel stressed. A senior analyst of 'Uralsib Capital', Alexei Kokin, noted that the fine itself is not significant for Gazprom. "If you look at its revenue for the first quarter of this year, it exceeded 2 trillion rubles (about $38 billion). That is the amount wanted by Naftogaz is less than 7% of the of Gazprom's quarterly revenue. Gazprom can afford to pay this money in case of emergency, while it is clear that it will fight to the end," he said. Naftogaz, in turn, will try to put as much pressure on Gazprom, including the seizure of the company's property. "An appeal against a decision of the Stockholm arbitration court is still in the review process, which means that Naftogaz will try to freeze Gazprom's assets in Europe as soon as possible. Of course, it can be called a rather aggressive behavior," Alexei Kokin concluded. Russian-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome can be made a completely civilian object, minister of Kazakhstan's defense and aerospace industry Beibut Atamkulov said. "Indeed, the issue of military withdrawal from the Baikonur cosmodrome is being considered by Russia," he said. "So far, we have not yet conducted concrete bilateral talks on this issue, but work is being done in this direction," Interfax cited Atamkulov as saying. "This also has its advantages," the minister believes. "Perhaps attracting open commercial projects," he clarified. Russia pays an annual fee of approximately $115 million to use Kazakhstan's Baikonur space center. A military observer of the TASS news agency, retired Colonel Viktor Litovkin, speaking with the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that the Russian military's withdrawal from Baikonur is a distant possibility. "In fact, the issue of withdrawing Russian troops from Baikonur and turning Baikonur into a civilian object has been discussed for quite some time. But the fact that rocket launches are professional responsibility of the military continues to be an obstacle. A rocket launch is a series of expensive measures, including the rocket delivery, installation and monitoring - only special military space services are able to do it now," he pointed out. In addition, the process of transferring military property to civilian use is a rather complicated and lengthy procedure. "The property issues should be coordinated with the various services. So the negotiations are underway, but it will take some time to complete them, and withdraw our troops from the Baikonur. In the future, we will be able to compensate the loss of Baikonur with the Vostochny Cosmodrome, but it still needs to be finished," Victor Litovkin said. Russian Academy of Natural Sciences' member, Russian Academy of Military Sciences member, Professor Sergei Fokin noted the Russian army's redundant use of the cosmodrome. "Now there are two cosmodromes in Russia - Plesetsk and Vostochny, they are quite enough for military needs. And it will be better for Russia to finish Vostochny, than pay Kazakhstan more than $100 million for Baikonur annually," he said. Sergei Fokin also stressed that negotiations on the withdrawal of Russian military from Baikonur have been conducted only for economic reasons. "There is no policy here, costs are being optimized. And it will even be better for everyone when Baikonur will become civilian facility. Russian companies will be able to actively participate in its launches, put their satellites into orbit, the cosmodrome's work will be more transparent and open," the professor explained. Today, in Moscow, an event was held dedicated to Azerbaijans Republic Day, which is celebrated every year on May 28th in honor of the proclamation of the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic in 1918. This year marks the centennial anniversary of the ADR. The event was organized by the Azerbaijani Embassy in Russia. The surprise of the evening was a performance by the soloist of the Bolshoi Theater, Honored Artist of Azerbaijan Dinara Aliyeva, who received the title People's Artist of Azerbaijan the day before. Vietnam Mediation Center makes debut Updated: 11:00 - 30/05/2018 The launching ceremony of VMC on May 29 in Hanoi__Photo: VGP , , , The launching ceremony of the Vietnam Mediation Center (VMC) and the Rules of Mediation was organized on May 29 in Hanoi.The event was held by the Vietnam International Arbitration Center (VIAC), with support from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), member of the World Bank Group.The VMC, one of the first organizations of this kind in Vietnam, provides dispute resolution services through mediation based on Government Decree No. 22/2017/ND-CP on commercial mediation.The VIAC and the VMC will provide dispute resolution services through arbitration in the VIAC and medication in VMC to help businesses prevent the use of negative measures in addressing disputes as well as seek for ways to treat with disputes not only in trade issues but also socio-economic matters, said Chairman of VIAC Tran Huu Huynh.- HA NOI Viet Nam and Indonesia sought to boost cooperation in construction and property at a business forum in Ha Noi on Wednesday. The event was organised by the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia and the Viet Nam Federation of Civil Engineering Association. The forum aims to improve cooperation between Indonesia and Viet Nam in construction and property businesses in an effort to promote wide opportunities and achieve the target of bilateral trade worth US$10 billion by 2020, said Ibnu Hadi, Indonesian ambassador to Viet Nam. According to him, bilateral trade between the two countries in 2017 saw an increase of 16.36 per cent to reach $6.50 million from $5.58 million in 2016. This two-way trade comprised $3.63 million worth of Indonesian exports to Viet Nam (an increase of 22.51 per cent), while Indonesian imports amounted to $2.61 million (an increase of 9.37 per cent). With populations of more than 260 million and 96 million in 2017, respectively, Indonesia and Viet Nam are among the fastest growing economies in the world. With a gross domestic product rate of 5.17 per cent and 6.81 per cent, Indonesias and Viet Nams per capita income in 2017 were $3,859 and $2,385, respectively, Hadi said. According to the embassy, Indonesias investment in Viet Nam during 2017 was valued at $45.84 million. Last year, Indonesia ranked 30th among investor countries in Viet Nam. Meanwhile, Viet Nam has invested in eight projects in Indonesia in mining, media and manufacture processing industry worth $51 million. For Indonesia, the growth of the real estate sector is dependent on infrastructure, which is predicted to grow at 5.9 per cent every year between 2017 and 2026, outperforming the overall construction industrys projected annual growth rate of 3.9 per cent. Both residential and non-residential sectors will benefit from Indonesias strong demographics and a high urbanisation rate of 53 per cent. Although the investment cooperation between the two countries is still relatively not as huge as with South Korea, Japan and Singapore, the inflow of Indonesian investment to Viet Nam continues to increase. Indonesian investors are starting to capitalise on the potential and market opportunities offered by Viet Nam, Hadi said. VNS HCM CITY Following Chinas ban on import of plastic wastes, a lot of them are coming instead to Viet Nam, but with consignees failing to claim shipments, the wastes are piling up at ports including in HCM City. As of late May 389 containers arriving in 6,801 consignments are lying in ports for more than 90 days without being claimed by their owners, a customs official told Nguoi lao ong (The labourer) newspaper. According to a Ministry of Finance circular, goods left unclaimed for more than 90 days at ports could be seized and sold. Cat Lai Port in District 2 has 307 containers and 448 parcels while Tan Son Nhat international airport and the express customs branch have 1,949 and 4,384 parcels. A customs official at Cat Lai Port said an increasing number of consignments have been piling up at ports for more than 90 days since the beginning of this year. The reason was Chinas ban on import of plastic scrap from the EU, the US and Japan this year, who are now sending it to Southeast Asian countries, including Viet Nam, he said. But related agencies impose restrictions on import of wastes, meaning customs authorities are unable to process their entry, he said. Goods are also stuck at ports because consignees do not claim them. A recent examination of containers on an abandoned consignment at Cat Lai Port turned up more than 100 air-conditioners, 270 bicycles and bicycle parts. Most of them are used products whose imports are banned. They have been sent to a company in Tan Phu District. According to the customs department, transport companies and related agencies should co-operate by providing details of consignments to help identify the owners of goods and speed up the clearance of unclaimed goods. When the owners of abandoned goods are untraceable, the department has to bear the cost of destroying them. For this reason, the department called for assigning greater responsibility to transport companies and exporters in the case of unclaimed goods since. The destruction also affects the environment, it said. It sought severe punishment for import of waste and prohibited products into Viet Nam to reduce the pile-up of goods at ports. VNS HA NOI Foreign arrivals to Viet Nam surpassed 6.7 million in the first five months of this year, up 27.6 per cent annually, the General Statistics Office announced on Tuesday. In May alone, the figure topped 1.16 million, down 13.5 per cent month-on-month. The number of Asian tourists hit over five million in five months, up 33.3 per cent while those from China was up 37 per cent, South Korea (62.1 per cent), Japan (6.6 per cent), Malaysia (12.5 per cent), Thailand (9.1 per cent) and Singapore (5.4 per cent). Meanwhile, the number of European visitors rose by 11.8 per cent year-on-year, including those from Russia (up 9.2 per cent), France (13.1 per cent), the UK (9.6 per cent), Germany (8.5 per cent) and Italy (18.3 per cent). Visitors from America and Oceania were up 13.8 per cent and 12.1 per cent, respectively. Major tourist localities saw a surge in tourist arrivals. The central city of a Nang welcomed over 3.2 million visitors, up 30.4 per cent year-on-year, including more than 1.35 million foreigners, or a rise of 51.3 per cent. The central province of Khanh Hoa served more than 2.44 million holidaymakers in the period, marking a 20.75 per cent rise, over 1.17 million of them were foreigners, surging nearly 50 per cent. In May, the Viet Nam National Administration of Tourism and the Japanese embassy in Viet Nam held a seminar to boost exchange of tourists between the two countries. Last year, around 800,000 Japanese people arrived in Viet Nam while 300,000 Vietnamese landed in Japan. At present, almost all Viet Nams lodging facilities and flight services could serve Japanese visitors, even during the peak season. However, Viet Nam still lacks tour guides proficient in Japanese, especially in the central region. Moreover, Japanese tourists often stay in Viet Nam for short time so Viet Nams tourism sector needs to offer new products to satisfy their demand. The Viet Nam Society of Travel Agents proposed Japan loosen its visa policy, especially for groups of tourists from major travel agencies. VNS HA NOI Farmers should reduce their volumes of shrimp at present to deal with a fall in purchasing price and wait for a recovery in shrimp prices on the world market, according to the Viet Nam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP). The association said shrimp output of major global producers was predicted to reach 3.5 million tonnes in 2018, marking the highest output over the past decade. The increase in world shrimp production was due to the growth in major suppliers such as India, Ecuador, China, Viet Nam and Indonesia. In that situation, importers would create pressure to reduce prices, leading to declines on the global and domestic market, it said. Truong inh Hoe, VASEPs general secretary, said the global shrimp supply had risen sharply in the first few months of this year, while shrimp inventories in the US and among local businesses remained high. VASEP reported that the US had a high inventory after US shrimp imports increased by 10 per cent in 2017 and 15 per cent in February this year. The drop in prices hit not only Viet Nam but also other shrimp suppliers such as Ecuador, Thailand and Indonesia, causing problems for many farmers, Hoe said. Nguyen Thi Hai, a shrimp trader in Binh ai District, Ben Tre Province, said the price of shrimp dropped by between VN40,000 and VN50,000 per kilo for all sizes to VN130,000 per 30-unit kilo (30 shrimps per kilo), VN110,000 per 40-unit kilo and VN70,000 per 100-unit kilo, compared to the beginning of this year. With those prices, farmers could break even or make low profits, with some even sustaining losses, according to the association. The situation has forced most farmers to stop shrimp production or reduce the quantity of reared shrimp, waiting for prices to recover in the coming months. Trinh uc Huan, a farmer who has produced shrimp for 20 years in Ly Nhon Commune, Can Gio District, HCM City, said this was the first time he had seen such a drop in shrimp prices. Prices were low, but there were no buyers. Even shrimp reared through high technology processes according to VietGap standards like his also faced reduced prices. At present, the selling price is lower than the production cost, according to Huan. If shrimp production was halted, equipment and machinery would be damaged. He would suffer even higher losses because investment in hi-tech shrimp production stood at VN1 billion per hectare. Ho Quoc Luc, General Director of Sao Ta Food Joint Stock Company said in fact, the price reduction had been predicted. In 2017, the consumption of shrimp increased on the world market, leading to higher selling prices of shrimp for farmers. As a result, many countries had set a target for growth in areas rearing shrimp, including Viet Nam. In addition, some countries such as Indonesia and Ecuador are harvesting shrimp, leading to higher supply around the world. Meanwhile, now is not a time of strong shrimp consumption, so businesses do not want to purchase. The suppliers have to accept the low price if they want to sell shrimp, leading to a drop in the export price of shrimp. According to shrimp processing enterprises, the price of raw materials and exported shrimp decreased from the end of February 2018. Now, shrimp export prices have fallen by 20 per cent compared to the end of 2017 and nobody knows how much the price would fall over the coming months. This is the main reason why processing enterprises do not dare buy more raw materials, even with low prices. Hoe said the falling prices and the large supply would be only for the short term so cutting the areas rearing shrimp is essential. Therefore, local authorities should advise farmers to restrain farming of shrimp during this period. With the current production process, when prices recover, the shrimp production of farmers would be more stable. VASEP said that farmers should remain calm and monitor the market situation. They should also follow the authorities recommendations in shrimp production. According to many experts, after the price of shrimps fell sharply, farmers in Thailand and India began to drop areas rearing shrimp. The world shrimp supply was forecast to decrease. From the third quarter, local factories would increase purchasing raw shrimp material due to increasing demand from import markets, leading to higher shrimp prices, they said. Shrimp imports of major markets were expected to increase from the end of the second quarter or early in the third quarter. Sustainable development Tran Van Linh, chairman of the Director Board of Thuan Phuoc Seafood and Trading Joint Stock Company, said reputable export processing enterprises are often involved in global supply chains. Therefore, when the market price drops, the businesses would share losses with partners in the supply chain. Meanwhile, the businesses themselves have to adjust their export targets according to market supply and demand. The most important factor for them is to keep export markets, partners and profits but not increase export value, he said, so though there are fluctuations in the market, the businesses should focus on enhancing prestige and building their brand. Luc agreed and said to become a reputable exporter in the supply chain, enterprises must have clean shrimp varieties and shrimp production systems meeting international standards such as GlobalGap and ASC. To have certificates on using international standards for their production process, farming households must join cooperative models or large farms, he said. Those actions would improve competitiveness of the local shrimp production industry and quality of shrimp products. Hoe said Viet Nams shrimp industry had great potential in aquaculture and processing and the industry would develop further if it controlled antibiotics, traceability and disease. According to experts the violations of antibiotics and chemicals have occurred in the production process but not the processing phase. Therefore, processors have the responsibility in controlling the material that has been contaminated with antibiotics to take them out of the factories. The businesses and the VASEP have proposed the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) to develop a programme on controlling impurities and antibiotics in shrimp and seafood production. This is to protect the image and reputation of Viet Nams shrimp and seafood to overcome more stringent technical barriers of importing countries. In addition, the state should also take measures on managing the price of inputs such as varieties and feed, to reduce production costs for the benefit of farmers and more sustainable development of the industry. In the first four months of this year, national shrimp exports increased 17 per cent to nearly $1 billion. Of which, white-leg shrimp export value increased by 29 per cent to $675 million, accounting for 68 per cent while black tiger shrimp continued to decrease by 11 per cent to $219 million. - VNS HA NOI Viet Nam and Japan can accelerate co-operation in applying Japan s new technology and advanced value chain management methods to Viet Nam s agricultural production, according to experts at a conference in the capital city on Tuesday. Head of the Viet Nam Academy of Agricultural Sciences Nguyen Hong Son said Viet Nam was transforming its agricultural production to focus on increasing quality rather than quantity. The application of science and advanced technologies is a key factor in this transformation process, he said, emphasising the importance of technology in the entire farming production chain from cultivation and harvesting to processing and trading. Viet Nam has gradually co-operated with foreign partners to evaluate and choose suitable technologies which can help the country produce quality farm produce. Technologies from Japan and South Korea , where farming methods are relatively familiar to Viet Nam , are among the best candidates. Son described the adoption of advanced technologies from Japan in several areas such as seeds, bio-preparations, soil improvers and biosecurity besides those in quality control as an effective way for Viet Nam to promote exports of agricultural products to Japan as well as other countries with which Japan has trade relationships. If Viet Nam wants to export goods to Japan, its technology needs to be compatible with that of Japan in order to churn out products that meet the quality demand of this strict market, Son explained. Koichiro Abe, CEO of Raycean Co from Japan , affirmed that cutting-edge techniques and marketing strategies can increase the value of agricultural goods. During the event yesterday, Japanese firms discussed technologies Viet Nam could adopt in the areas of cultivation and livestock. VNs five-month agro-forestry-fishery exports The countrys total exports of agro-forestry-fishery products witnessed positive year-on-year growth of 10 per cent to US$15.6 billion in the first five months of this year, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) announced yesterday. During the period, forestry products led the agro, forests and seafood export group with turnover of $3.4 billion, up 9 per cent year-on-year and accounting for nearly 22 per cent of the total export value. Among major importers of Vietnamese wood and wood-based products were China , Japan , South Korea and the US . The export value of key agricultural products reached $8.25 billion, up 10 per cent from the same time last year. In May alone, the country raked in $347 million from shipping abroad some 452,000 tonnes of rice, bringing the total value of rice exports in the January-May period to $1.45 billion, up 40 per cent and 14 per cent. The average rice price in the period experienced an increase of 13 per cent to over $500 per tonne. China remained the largest buyer of Vietnamese rice, holding nearly 34 per cent of the market share. According to MARD, seafood products contributed $3.12 billion to the groups five month export turnover, a hike of 10 per cent year-on-year. The ministry also said that the country spent $12.29 billion importing agro-forestry-fishery products during January-May, marking a yearly rise of 11 per cent.-VNS TOKYO Foreign investments, including those made by Japanese firms, are a driving force for Viet Nams development and improvement of national competitive capacity, said President Tran ai Quang. In a dialogue with leaders of Japanese corporations in Tokyo yesterday, President Quang noted that Viet Nam welcomes Japanese investment in fields of Viet Nams interest and Japans strengths like infrastructure construction, support industry, high-tech agriculture, energy, environment, finance, banking and the equitisation of State-owned firms. Viet Nam commits to creating favourable conditions for Japanese groups to invest and operate in the country, he underlined. The President informed the Japanese businesses that Viet Nam is striving to maintain annual GDP growth of 6.5-7 per cent during 2016-20 along with macro-economic stability while working to promote sustainable development coupled with environmental protection. The moves will help Viet Nam maintain its position as a dynamic nation and attractive destination for investment in ASEAN. He stressed that the Viet Nam-Japan Joint Initiative is an important channel to help Viet Nam complete its policies and regulations, improve investment climate and attract high-quality foreign investments to Viet Nam, particularly those from Japan. Chairman of the Japan Business Federation Sadayuki Sakakibara and Chairman of the Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation Yoshimitsu Kobayashi expressed their delight to welcome President Quang to Japan. Lauding Viet Nams role in the development of Japanese firms, they believed that the fruitful political relations will bolster bilateral trade and investment. Japanese corporations praised Viet Nams participation in various economic deals like Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). VNS HCM CITY Many experts and scientists on Monday continued to express concern about the Cai Lon-Cai Be dual sluice project in Kien Giang Province and its possible impact on the region. The project is expected to control saline intrusion and adapt to climate change. At a meeting on the sluice project held in Can Tho on Monday, a report from the independent group of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and United Nations Development Programme in Viet Nam showed that saline intrusion was from the regions eastern sea, but the sluice only controls water from the western sea. Traffic is increasing on the two rivers of Cai Lon and Cai Be, forcing sluices to open, so it is difficult to control salinity as required. However, the group concluded that the Cai Lon-Cai Be dual sluice project is necessary. ang Kieu Nhan, representative of Mekong Delta Development Research Institute, said the project owner was unclear about the VN8 trillion (US$350.9 million) investment. As scheduled, the management board for investment and building irrigation infrastructure project No.10 under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development collected public opinions about the projects implementation last year. But residents have not been informed about the project, Nhan said. Nguyen Huu Thien, an independent expert on Mekong Deltas ecology, said the project should not be carried out. Severe drought and saline intrusion in 2016 was caused by El Ninos impact at that time, and it only occurs one time every 90 years. The independent group said that the project was needed because of rising water levels but he disagreed with that conclusion. In reality, the sea water rises only 3mm per year, while the region faces dangerous depression because of exploitation of underground water, Thien said. The environment has been damaged and rivers blocked, so people have been forced to exploit underground water, he added. If the project is carried out, the environmental risk and depression could worsen. The project would not help ensure food security as the independent group claimed, Thien said. He said that in 2016 when the region suffered severe drought and saline intrusion, nearly 5 million of tonnes of rice were exported. Food security was not severely affected. There is no evidence that shows the project would prevent fresh water from running out in the region, he said. Dr Duong Van Ni of Can Tho Universitys faculty of environment and natural resources, said the project could affect thousands of people in the region. On the same fields, farmers sometimes need both salt water and fresh water. So it is not necessary to carry out the project to prevent saline intrusion, he said. VNS HA NOI The Embassy of Israel in Viet Nam will present the Israel Film Festival 2018, from June 1-4 with various films touching on a number of topics from daily life to monumental dramas, and from documentaries to kids films. Through the films, Vietnamese audiences will have a chance to contemplate the beautiful landscapes of Israel, as well as learn more about the culture, traditions and identities of the Israeli people, said Ambassador Nadav Eshcar. Opening on June 1, Wedding Doll tells the story of Hagit, a young woman with a mild mental deficiency who works in a toilet-paper factory. She lives with her mother Sarah, a divorcee who gave up her life for her daughter. Followed by Abulele, which is about a boy living in Jerusalem. He befriends an ancient local monster called Abulele. By helping his new friend get back home, he reconnects with his parents. A Quiet Heart features Naomi, a secular young woman, who seeks refuge from the pressure of her life in Tel Aviv as a concert pianist. Presenting Princess Shaw, a documentary on the collaborative relationship between New Orleans-based songwriter and YouTube star Samantha Montgomery, and composer and video artist Ophir Kutiel. Hill Start will conclude the festival. Its a drama of the Geva family, a bourgeois family from Jerusalem. When the mother of the family, Ora, goes into a coma after a car accident, the family members try to bring her back in every way possible. See Whats on on P25 for listing. VNS HA NOI A three-year project aiming to support organisations and practitioners in the fields of arts, culture and creativity has been launched by the British Council (BC). Entitled Cultural and Creative Hubs Vietnam, the project will be implemented by the BC in partnership with the Viet Nam National Institute of Arts and Culture Studies (VICAS). To be implemented over a three year period from 2018 to 2021, the project will receive financial support of 450,000 euros (US$518,000) from the European Union. A cultural and creative hub (CCH) is a place, physical or virtual, which brings people together to express artistic ideas and creativity in a free and open environment, and in turn allows them to share a variety of artistic outputs with their communities. In Viet Nam, most CCHs are independent arts and creative spaces, often led and managed by artists and creative practitioners. These organisations are important players in the culture sector and have great potential for engaging in and supporting artistic expressions and the access to cultural life. Having worked closely with the network of CCHs in Viet Nam since 2014, and to support the implementation of the National Strategy for the Development of Cultural Industries to 2020, vision 2030, the BC and VICAS are now jointly implementing a series of activities in support of organisations and practitioners in the fields of arts, culture and creativity. The project has been designed to encompass three inter-linked key components. The first surrounds capacity building for managers and owners of CCHs, as well as their artists and creative practitioners in particular, in terms of management, audience development, and other specialised creative and cultural skills. The second component aims to create opportunities via policy dialogue and other platforms for direct and open exchange towards relationship building between CCHs and government administration of the culture sector. This will facilitate both governmental support and CCHs contribution to the national strategy for the development of cultural industries. The third component promotes sharing, learning, and networking between hubs from different parts of Viet Nam, as well as between Vietnamese hubs and their European counterparts. All activities in these three components will be largely driven by CCHs themselves to ensure that they receive the right support for designing and participating in bespoke activities that address their needs for further development. In turn, the development and sustainability of this network of Vietnamese CCHs will greatly contribute to the diverse arts and culture landscape of the country, and offer more cultural activities to Vietnamese audiences. The project will not only focus on big cities such as Ha Noi, HCM City and a Nang, but also aims to reach further to connect with hubs and audiences in non-urban areas. According to Head of the Arts and Creative Industries BC Vietnam Nguyen Phuong Thao, over the past four years, the number of CCHs in Viet Nam has increased from 40 to 140, mostly in big cities. Thats why, through supporting the network of CCHs across the country, the project aims to further the development of the arts and the culture secotrs in the country. Ambassador Bruno Angelet, head of the Delegation of the European Union to Viet Nam, said this new project demonstrates the European Union Delegation in Viet Nams mission to ensure the unity, consistency and effectiveness of the EUs relationship with Viet Nam. It forms a part of our on-going programme of activities and support to Viet Nam which spans across the fields of foreign policy, development cooperation, trade and economy, human rights, climate change, higher education as well as culture. Acting Director of the BC Vietnam Danny Whitehead said: This project shows a strong partnership between the BC, the EU, and VICAS, and will promote artistic expression and creativity in Viet Nam through developing a robust and dynamic network of creative hubs. VNS HA NOI Historical maps dating back to the 18th century were officially recognised as a heritage Memory of the World on Wednesday. The documents, that chart an envoys journey to China were given the status at the 2018 General Meeting of UNESCOs Memory of the World Committee for Asia and the Pacific (MOWCAP). The eighth meeting of MOWCAP took place on May 29-31 in Gwangju, South Korea attracting 125 representatives from 28 countries. The panel considered 12 dossiers from eight countries including Tuvalu, Myanmar, China, the Philippines, South Korea, Australia, the Solomon Islands and Viet Nam. Hoang Hoa Su Trinh o (The Envoyship Journeys to China literally translated as maps and itinerary of the envoys journey to China) belonged to the Nguyen Huy family in the central province of Ha Tinh. With writings, drawings and maps, the book recorded the diplomatic relationship between Viet Nam and China in the 18th century through journeys of Vietnamese envoys. It was compiled and edited by Nguyen Huy Oanh (1713-1789) based on documents of previous envoys and historical records as well as notes from his own journey in 1766-1767, during which he worked as the main envoy of the Vietnamese delegates. Chu Thu Phuong, member of the Vietnamese delegation at the meeting said the panel appreciated that the book is a rare and precious document relating to the diplomatic relationship between Viet Nam and China since the feudal era. The friendship between the two countries played an important role in maintaining peace in the region and the world. The dossier of the book received 17 votes from 17 members of the panel, according to Phuong. It meets all the criteria to be recognised as a documentary heritage of the Memory of the World programme. The Memory of the World Programme is an international programme aimed at safeguarding, preserving and facilitating access to and the use of documentary heritage. UNESCO launched the programme in 1992. It includes the inscription of significant documentary heritage on national, regional and international registers. MOWCAP was set up in 1998 and is the regional forum for UNESCOs global Memory of the World (MOW) Programme. MOWCAP aims to assist with the preservation of and universal access to documentary heritage of the Asia Pacific region, and also to increase awareness of the existence and significance of the heritage. VNS HA NOI A multisensory exhibition on Shan tea, the wild tea trees grown by ethnic minorities in the northern mountainous province of Ha Giang, will open to the public from 6pm on June 1 at French cultural centre LEspace. Entitled Tra ART, the exhibition is the result of the same name art project which was initiated by the Paris-based Vietnamese photographer Nguyen Thi Tuong Van. The project brings together five artists from five different fields to collaborate. They include animator Nguyen Quynh Phuong, 3D artist Marcus Bowler, the late painter Gerald Gorridge, sculptor Tran Thu Hang, and artist/musician Ngo Hong Quang. Tra ART is an experience that will awaken the five senses and show a world of Shan tea through different art forms. Audiences will also have the chance to witness a dance performance by Mai Anh with background music written by musician Quang while enjoying premium Shan tea at the opening at 6pm on June 1. The free entry exhibition will run until July 9. LEspace is at 24 Trang Tien Street. VNS An overview of the South Saigon urban area, HCM City. Illustration. VNA/VNS Photo It was Mark Twain who inimitably said: Buy land, they are not making it anymore. Sound advice when land is turned into a commodity that is bought and sold in a free market, but this is a mythical entity for many people in Viet Nam, because they can only dream of owning a piece of land or a home in the nations urban areas. Theoretically, though, as per the nations charter, all of the countrys geographical features land, water bodies, underground minerals as well as resources deep under the sea belong to the people, but the State represents the people in managing them making the State the highest authority. It is but natural then that the States management of this most precious resource comes under close, critical scrutiny. The onus, then, is on the Vietnamese State to manage this resource effectively and equitably, and despite some major steps taken in the past towards equitable distribution, its record of late has left a lot to be desired. It is a telling fact that in recent years, land disputes account for around 60 per cent of all legal headaches in the country. There is also a clearly discernible upward trend in mass land disputes and prolonged cases that have evoked alarming dissatisfaction and anger. The anger was on full display in last years ong Tam incident in a rural area of Ha Noi and during the recent flare up in the new urban area of Thu Thiem in HCM City. Both cases involved forced acquisition and relocation of local residents to implement key projects. And as things stand, key projects are quite commonplace, given the countrys fast-paced development and keenness among authorities for presenting a shiny face on the progress they want to claim. However, the question is: Why do such projects hit some people really hard and benefit some people or institutions handsomely? And the follow up question is: Is public land being managed fairly, equitably and transparently? Let us be honest about the answer: No. Problems with the vast tracts of land under the management of different State agencies only make it to the media and forefront of the peoples consciousness when they slip beyond the control of authorities, and the publicity becomes unavoidable. This, by itself, bespeaks of an opaqueness that facilitates under the table deals that, in the final analysis, hurt the people on whose behalf the properties are being managed. A glaring instance of this was the scandal that engulfed the central city of a Nang last year. A private real estate mogul, Phan Van Anh Vu, was able to buy up State-managed golden estate through personal ties with the highest authorities of the city. This was not a sudden development. The alleged ability of Vu being able to manipulate corrupt high-ranking officials of a Nang had been talked about for several years, and he was referred to as a mafia leader. The unfurling of the case has implicated corruption at very high levels. It forced the Communist Party to modify its own disciplinary regulations to extend them to cover retired and even deceased Party members so as to facilitate investigation into serious cases of corruption. This is not a symbolic move. It denotes an acknowledgement of how grave the problem is. Cao Thanh Binh, deputy head of the Budget Department, HCM City Peoples Council, said that the State-run HCM City House Trade Management Ltd Co, in charge of managing businesses concerning State real estate, has cheaply rented several land lots to private businesses. Then, there is the risk of private businesses buying up the State companies that rent land at a depreciated price, only to jack up their shares later, making the State-owned companies minority shareholders, depriving the State of due benefits from managing public property. In a report released earlier this week, several other State-run enterprises, frequently referred to as economic steel punches, such as tobacco producer Vinataba, agro-product maker Vinafood and chemical manufacturer Vinachem, were found by the State auditing agency to have committed multiple violations in land management. Most notably, when these companies implement certain projects and need to re-purpose land areas under their management, they transfer the land to a self-appointed partner investor without going through proper bidding process. Without public bidding and tendering, competitiveness is reduced while risks are heightened as the self-selected investor might not possess sufficient capacity and experience to undertake the project, the auditing agency said. And these are just three of nearly 140 State-owned enterprises that enjoy control over prime land in various areas of the country. Without constant, close supervision, the current situation is a recipe for disaster. Similar mistakes in urban land management have been found in big cities across the country. The State auditing agency also pointed out that the municipal administrations in Ha Noi, HCM City, Can Tho, Binh Duong and other cities have all appointed investors for projects without going through any public bidding process, fixing land prices at lower than their actual commercial value, leading to losses estimated (conservatively, for sure) at VN8.3 trillion (US$362 million). And this is the figure for just three years between 2013 and 2016. The actual losses incurred by the State budget because of under-evaluation and other forms of mismanagement and corruption over the last decades cannot be estimated, but they should not be underestimated, either, because this can continue in the years to come if things dont change. To put all this lost and missing money in context, we should imagine what it could be used for. It could be used revive the countrys aging railway system that has not seen a substantial infrastructure upgrade since it was built under French colonial rule 100 years ago. The money could have helped improve the living standards of thousands of overworked but underpaid doctors and teachers in a country where public institutions are still the mainstay of its soft infrastructure. To give this missing or lost funds some more specific context, let us take just two land lots in Ha Noi: 29 Lieu Giai and the land lot where the Giang Vo Exhibition Centre was built 40 years ago both located within a busy area in Ba inh District. In an open market, these areas would easily fetch VN100-200 million for each sq.m. However, these land lots belong to the State and stay under the management of the State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC), so it was sold for just one tenth of its market price to a private developer, who plans to erect condos with dizzying heights (a suspicious exception at that, since such towering buildings are a no-no in the inner urban zone). The Ministry of Finance has suggested that the Government Inspectorate inspects as many as 60 similar cases with dubious purpose conversions of prime land lots including eight in Ha Noi and five in HCM City. The Government Inspectorate has agreed to launch investigations into these cases since the middle of last year. We can safely bet that the findings are not going to assuage public anxieties about gross mismanagement or outright corruption. At this point, the least discerning amongst us can sense a shared pattern in these cases large holders of State-owned land mysteriously struggle to put a correct price tag on the hen that lays the golden eggs, underselling these prime assets and causing losses that run into several trillion ong. Faced with such a major crisis, the expected responses have been forthcoming establishment of databases, accurate land valuation mechanisms, review of State administration works on land, possibility of setting up a clean public land fund, forced re-planning of tardy projects, and so on. Well and good, but whether these will meet or belie peoples expectations remains to be seen. We have seen that there is some serious intent among the highest echelons of the Party and State to root out corruption, but as far the management of public land is concerned, ground realities will have the final say. VNS HA NOI National Assembly (NA) deputies have raised concerns that the draft law on internet security will prevent Vietnamese citizens and companies from accessing information on the web. The draft law insists that foreign service providers, including giant internet service companies like Google, Youtube and Facebook, must store Vietnamese customers information on local servers instead of on servers located overseas, as currently practised. On Tuesday morning, NA members gathered in the main hall for their second discussion on the draft law prepared by the Ministry of Public Security, which is meant to ensure national security in the age of the internet. Deputy Pham Thi Thanh Thuy from Thanh Hoa Province opposed Article 26 of the law. It requires that all local and foreign organisations and companies, which provide internet services or own an information network in Viet Nam , set up a representative office in the country and store their customers personal data as well as important data related to national security in local servers. Thuy called for reconsideration of this regulation. "Data servers for many popular internet services are located overseas," she said, adding that the world now increasingly relied on cloud servers, or virtual servers, to store data instead of older physical servers. This requirement is hardly feasible and will create problems for the Vietnamese people to access information on the internet, if service providers fail to comply with the law, she said. Phu Tho province deputy Cao inh Thuong said it would be helpful if the law could make foreign businesses store data in local servers, but raised questions about the potential consequences if those companies, for example Facebook and Google, refused to do so. What is our solution then? Will we ask them to stop providing the service in Viet Nam ? he asked. Privacy threat Many other deputies raised concerns about the threat to Vietnamese citizens privacy posed by an article stipulating that an internet security specialised force under the Ministry of Public Security will have the jurisdiction to examine the information networks of any organisations and agencies upon authorities requests. According to NA deputy Nguyen Phuong Tuan from Ninh Binh Province , that means that the specialised police could monitor not only the networks vital to national security, but also those that are not vital. "The risk for leakage of personal information or trade secrets is significant," he added, but Vietnamese people and businesses would have no choice but to endure it for the supposed sake of national security if the regulation were passed. Bac Lieu Province deputy Ta Van Ha shared his fellow deputys concern, stressing that such a potent tool given to the police would very likely lead to abuse of power, compromising the rights of individuals and organisations. National security breach Deputy Le Binh Nhuong from the southern province of Ben Tre asked why the phrase national security was repeated throughout the draft law on internet security but there is not a single regulation defining a national security breach. The (draft) law is born to protect the national security, but it also has to ensure the basic rights of freedom of the citizens and the businesses, which are guaranteed by the Constitution, Nhuong said. The people were allowed to do whatever the laws did not prohibit, he said, so the draft law must clearly state what actions were considered off limits, instead of employing the vague phrase of national security which could be construed in many ways by different people. Trust in the police Nghe An province deputy Nguyen Huu Cau, who is also the director of the provincial police department, defended the regulation regarding the establishment of a representative office. He cited Facebook, which has so far set up some 70 offices in other countries, to imply that the company could now also open a new office in Viet Nam . The regulation, according to him, was reasonable and practical. A police colonel, deputy Nguyen Minh uc from HCM City, meanwhile, assured the NA that the police would never leak personal information or trade secrets as many feared. It is the responsibility of the police. They wont compromise, he said. Earlier on the same day, Minister of Education and Training Phung Xuan Nha presented to the NA the draft amendment to the Law on Education. A highlight of the new law was to eliminate the policy of free tuition for teacher training college students. Instead, it proposes a so-called education credit scheme. It would provide loans to the students throughout their years in college, and if the students work as a teacher for a given amount of time after graduation, they would no longer need to pay the debt. The NA is expected to discuss the draft amended Law on Education on June 11. VNS HA NOI The Vietnamese government always treasures its traditional friendship with the government and people of Egypt a country with a long-lasting civilisation and world-renowned landmark destinations, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has said. The PM told newly-accredited Egyptian Ambassador to Viet Nam Mahmoud Hassan Nayel at a reception in Ha Noi on May 30 that Viet Nam is strong in agricultural products such as tea, aquatic products, rice, cashew nuts, coffee, pepper, apparel and rubber so the country wants to boost trade ties with Egypt in agriculture to lift two-way trade. He asked for promoting collaboration in oil and gas, and strengthening connections between the two countries localities, firstly accelerating the signing of agreements on establishing friendship and co-operation between Ha Noi and Cairo, and the northern province of Ninh Binh and Luxor. The host requested the holding of friendship activities this year on the occasion of the 55th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties. Nayel, for his part, spoke highly of development achievements scored by the Vietnamese government and people in diverse areas. He suggested both sides facilitate the exchange of all-level visits while promoting State, parliamentary and people-to-people diplomacy, thereby raising mutual understanding between the two countries people. Proposing further promotion of the bilateral comprehensive partnership in various fields, the guest noted that fisheries and oil and gas are strengths of Egypt. VNS HA NOI Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Wednesday hosted a reception for newly-appointed Sudanese Ambassador to Viet Nam Mohamed Elmurtada Mubarak Ismail Siraq. Phuc congratulated the diplomat on his new mission as the two countries relations are advancing. He expected the new ambassador will do his utmost to foster the bilateral ties during his term of office. The PM also conveyed his congratulations to Sudan over the lifting of US economic sanctions against the African country last year and hoped it would be a good opportunity for Viet Nam and Sudan to promote two-way trade. Ambassador Siraq expressed his honour to be the new Ambassador, saying the Sudanese people admire Viet Nams socio-economic development and want to learn from its experience and promote co-operation with the Southeast Asian country. With huge potential in oil and gas, Sudan is ready to work with Viet Nam in this industry which can benefit both sides, he added. The ambassador said he hoped to receive support from PM Phuc in his mission and that the Government of Viet Nam will soon send a delegation to Sudan to explore opportunities for partnership between the two countries. VNS HA NOI The Ministry of Health has proposed a system to identify, report and categorise adverse events to prevent untoward incidents at medical facilities. An adverse event is any undesirable experience associated with the use of a medical product in a patient, according to the US Food and Drug Administration. According to the draft circular proposed by the ministry, the system will identify the types of incidents to determine their level of seriousness. The ministry has encouraged medical facilities to set up the incident reporting system to identify causes and propose solutions to medical incidents. It said the system would be secured and would not be operated for punishment purposes, adding that reporting adverse medical events is the responsibility of the entire medical staff. It also said medical workers who identify adverse events should handle such incidents to ensure the safety of patients. The medical facilities should report the incident which killed one person and may lead to the death of more people to the facilitys incident management unit for assistance. Each medical facility has been asked to set up a patient safety department under the quality management council to investigate and analyse an incident within 24 hours and report it to the health ministrys national patient safety board or local health department. The department has to set up a standard management process to handle the incident. The process will be supervised by the health ministry or provincial health department. The patient safety department is tasked with proposing recommendations to reduce the risks of adverse medical events and holding training sessions to improve medical staffs capacity to handle adverse events. The health ministry has assigned the Medical Examination and Treatment Management Department to receive adverse event reports. Incident reporting systems at the ministry and provincial/city levels have been also proposed. The draft circular is available on the health ministrys portal for public feedback. Viet Nam has witnessed a series of adverse events in recent years. Last year, nine patients died in one of the most tragic adverse events in the country. They were undergoing treatment at Hoa Binh General Hospital in northern Hoa Binh Province for kidney failure. The patients suffered anaphylactic shock, including breathing problems, sudden fall in blood pressure, stomach ache and vomiting, while undergoing kidney dialysis at the kidney dialysis division of the hospital. According to authorised agencies, the deaths were caused by improperly treated water used for the dialysis as well as equipment that did not meet safety regulations. VNS HCM CITY The significant contributions made to the cause of religious freedom and national liberation by Vietnamese Buddhists were remembered yesterday in HCM City on the occasion of the 2,562th birthday of Lord Buddha. A grand ceremony was held at the Viet Nam Quoc Tu Pagoda in District 10, which was attended by the Supreme Patriarch Council of Viet Nam Buddhist Sangha (VBS), Executive Council of VBS, and thousands of nuns, monks and Buddhist followers and local authorities. At the ceremony, the Most Venerable Thich Tri Quang, deputy head of the Supreme Patriarch Council of VBS, read a message from the Most Venerable Thich Pho Tue, supreme patriarch of VBS, which said that Buddhists should continue to contribute to the countrys prosperity. Over the past 26 centuries, the Lord Buddha has enlightened our life, bringing happiness, peace and prosperity to humanity across the planet, keeping away inequality, war, conflict and poverty, the message from the supreme patriarch said. The Most Venerable Thich Pho Tue called on Buddhist followers and members of VBS to support the spirit of Wisdom - Ethics - Integration Development, which is essential for the national unity bloc, as well as build and defend the motherland of Viet Nam. On behalf of HCM City authorities, To Thi Bich Chau, president of the HCM City Fatherland Front, praised the outstanding contributions and services of Buddhist dignitaries and followers to national construction and defence. Chau said the Viet Nam Fatherland Front and other city agencies would create favourable conditions to promote the good values of religions as well as ensure the Party and States consistent policies in facilitation of freedom of religion. Religious dignitaries and religious followers are encouraged to actively participate in patriotic emulation movements and campaigns launched by the Government and the Fatherland Front at all levels, she added. The celebration of Lord Buddhas birthday this year took place when Buddhists nationwide marked the 55th anniversary of the self-immolation of Bodhisattva Thich Quang uc for the cause of national independence and protection of Buddhist traditions and Vietnamese culture. Ceremonial activities at the pagoda included incense offering and releasing of pigeons to pray for peace and happiness. VNS HCM CITY Deputy chairman of the HCM City Peoples Committee, Tran Vinh Tuyen, has ordered district authorities to clear all encroachment of canals and drains by the end of this year. Speaking at a meeting held on Monday to discuss the citys flooding problem, he instructed the Steering Centre of the Urban Flood Control Programme to collaborate with the 24 districts to resolve the problem. He ordered the Departments of Finance and of Planning and Investment to allocate funds on a priority basis for dredging rivers and canals. The rate of dredging should be increased from the current 2 per cent to at least 20 per cent, he said. This would help mitigate flooding and facilitate waterway transportation, he said. There have been rains on 22 occasions this year, and four of them caused flooding on one to 32 streets, according to the centre. The 32 include Ung Van Khiem, inh Bo Linh, Cay Tram, Phan Huy Ich, Nguyen Xi, Huynh Tan Phat and An Duong Vuong. The biggest downpour, on May 19, brought rainfall of 119.3mm and flooded the 32 streets. Nguyen Hoang Anh Dung, deputy director of the centre, said most of the flooded streets have small and degraded drains. Besides, throwing litter down drains and manholes remains common, he said. Littering blocks the drains. The centre has ordered the clearing of rubbish from the mouths of drains. To mitigate flooding during rains, the centre is operating three pumping stations to pump rainwater out. The Nhieu Loc Thi Nghe wastewater pumping station, for instance, can pump 76,800 cubic metres of rainwater per hour, helping reduce flooding in the Nhieu Loc Thi Nghe basin. Flood prevention works are tardy, especially land acquisition, according to the centre. It urged district authorities to speed up the process of obtaining lands for flood prevention works like the Bau Trau Canal project in District 6 and Tan Phu District to mitigate flooding on An Duong Vuong and Phan Anh streets and the Sai Gon River left bank project in District 2 and Thu uc to prevent flooding on Quoc Huong, Thao ien and Nguyen Van Huong streets. Tuyen instructed the centre to file detailed reports about flooding sites and the reasons for the flooding so that the city could adopt long-term measures to resolve the problem. Based on the reports, the city would consult experts and solicit investment in flood prevention programmes, he added. - VNS HCM CITY Nearly 1,200 people at high risk of HIV have enrolled in a pilot oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) programme in Viet Nam to reduce their risk of infection, according to the Viet Nam Administration for HIV/AIDS Control (VAAC). PrEP is a combination of two antiretroviral drugs, which, if taken daily as prescribed, can reduce the risk of HIV infection by 92-99 per cent for people who are at high risk, including men who have sex with men, transgender women, and HIV-negative partners of those diagnosed with HIV. Since 2015, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended the use of PrEP as part of a combination HIV prevention strategy that includes the use of condoms for people at substantial risk of HIV. Since March 2017, pilot interventions supported by the US Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief through USAID/PATHs Healthy Markets project and the US Agency for International Development (AID) through the Centre for Applied Research for Men And Community Health have made PrEP available to men who have sex with men, transgender women, and HIV-negative partners of those diagnosed with HIV in HCM City and Ha Noi, according to Vu Ngoc Bao of USAID/PATHs Healthy Markets project. These PrEP services are being provided by public outpatient clinics, private clinics and associated key population-led civil society organisations, Bao said at a workshop reviewing the PrEP programme held yesterday in HCM City. Nguyen Hoang Long, director of VAAC, said that results had enabled VAAC to collaborate with all partners to expand PrEP services, starting with 11 cities with a target of 5,610 PrEP clients by the end of 2019 and 7,300 by the end of 2020. PrEP is a game-changer for Viet Nam in its efforts to achieve the 90-90-90 goals, said Mei Mei Peng, deputy director of USAIDs Health Department. The numbers mean 90 per cent of all people living with HIV will know their HIV status, 90 per cent of all people with diagnosed HIV infection will receive sustained antiretroviral therapy, and 90 per cent of all people receiving antiretroviral therapy will have viral suppression. USAID supports Viet Nam, the second country to adopt PrEP in Southeast Asia, to expand options for people at risk of HIV to protect themselves and work toward HIV elimination, she said. Methadone therapy Huynh Thanh Khiet, deputy director of the citys Department of Labour, Invalids and Social Affair, said HIV prevalence among high-risk groups, including drug users, men who have sex with men, prostitutes, remained high. Last year, the city reported more than 5,800 new HIV infections, Khiet said at a meeting held on Monday (May 28) in HCM City. The rising number of young addicts taking methamphetamine and other types of drugs poses challenges for rehab programmes and management of former addicts, Khiet said. More than 9,500 drug addicts are taking part in detoxification and rehabilitation programmes at rehabilitation facilities in the city and more than 1,300 addicts are undergoing rehab at home. The city is home to 19 State-owned and three private rehab facilities offering compulsory and voluntary rehabilitation programmes for drug addicts. Nguyen Thi Kim Tien, Minister of Health, said the city had made constant efforts to manage drug addicts who do not have residential permits. However, the cost of detoxification and rehabilitation for injections is high, while relapse is common, Tien said. The city should learn from rehabilitation models in other countries and use the services of the private sector to operate voluntary rehabilitation models. Methadone maintenance therapy remains a key approach to help addicts quit their use of drugs and it should be expanded to wards and communes, she said. She said that rehab facilities should take into account the 90-90-90 treatment target by UNAIDS. Nguyen Thi Thu, deputy chairwoman of the citys Peoples Committee, said the high rate of relapse was the most serious challenge faced by rehab programmes. City authorities will review the process of voluntary rehab at home and rehab facilities to enhance the effectiveness of the programmes, Thu said. VNS HA NOI Doctors in Ha Noi have warned parents to be more cautious when treating their children with food products that claim to contain Oral Rehydration Salts. Ha Nois Bach Mai Hospital has recently provided emergency aid for three children who were hospitalised with symptoms of water loss, convulsions and falling blood pressure. The doctors said the patients had suffered dehydration and were not treated appropriately. Dehydration from diarrhoea can be prevented by giving extra fluids at home, or it can be treated simply, effectively and cheaply in all age-groups and in all but the most severe cases with a glucose-electrolyte solution called Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) solution, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). However, many people have mistakenly taken to using functional foods that claim to contain ORS instead of pure ORS. A family member of a patient told Suc khoe & oi song (Health and Life) newspaper that her mother bought a kind of ORS for her child to drink to prevent water loss by diarrhea two weeks ago. However, after three days, the 11-month-old baby still suffered diarrhea while feeling exhausted and looking weak. She was hospitalised last week with symptoms of high fever and convulsion and was diagnosed with dehydration due to severe diarrhea. According to a doctor at the hospital, she was one of three children hospitalised with dehydration as a result of diarrhea. The three childrens symptoms were all related to inappropriate rehydration therapy. Former head of the Bach Mai Hospital Paediatrics Department Nguyen Tien Dung told the newspaper that there are many kinds of functional food on the market with ingredients and formulas similar to ORS, which claim to be even more effective than ORS. However, Dung said, many products were packed with a dose of 10ml, which is not appropriate and can cause confusion for users. This kind of product is not only ineffective at treating dehydration, but could also threaten patients lives. It is important to prepare ORS strictly according to instructions to treat children with rehydration, he said. ORS is a kind of medicine used to treat diarrhea and is often packed to mix with water to create a mixture from 200ml to 1,000ml for each kind of age. Patients need to drink hundreds of ml of ORS to treat dehydration, he said. He could not confirm that these patients suffered water loss due to the use of functional foods, but their symptoms were related to those products, Dung said. Many parents mistakenly believe that ORS-containing foods are the same as ORS prescribed by doctors, he said. Moreover, these functional foods are more expensive than pure ORS so many people assume they are a superior product. VNS HA NOI The Ministry of Information and Telecommunications Authority of Information Security on Tuesday warned that routers and storages in Viet Nam have been exposed to the VPNFilter virus. The virus has affected over 500,000 routers and storages in many countries, including Viet Nam, it said. The most vulnerable devices are Internet-connected routers and storages produced by popular brands like Linksys, Mikro Tik, Netgear, and TP-Link. A research by the Cisco Talos group run by Cisco showed VNPFilter as a multi-phrase cyber-espionage virus capable of stealing information from websites and spying on the industrial command domain, such as those of power networks or industrial infrastructure. An effected device will be restarted and reset, during which the /var/run/vnpfilterw link will be created. The Authority said users should reset their devices to default mode to erase the malware while updating the firmware as soon as possible if they think their devices have been infected by the virus. The Authority has warned about lopes and weaknesses in the information security sector over the past few years. Last week, international organisations announced they have discovered at least 327 security holes that could spark attacks affecting Vietnamese users. VNS HCM CITY Three bank officers have been praised by the HCM City Peoples Committee for their bravery in pursuing and bringing under control two armed robbers. Thu uc District officials awarded certificates of merit to 25-year-old Duong Minh Quang, from Lam ong Province, 25-year-old Bui Van Tien, from Binh Phuoc Province, and 24-year-old Nguyen Son Tung, from Binh inh Province, at a ceremony on Tuesday. Nguyen Manh Cuong, secretary of the districts Party Committee, commended the men for their courage in protecting other peoples assets and for helping ensure order and security in the locality. At around 9pm on Monday, two men on Dream motorbikes snatched Tungs mobile phone while the three bank employees were driving on To Ngoc Van Street. The men shouted for help and chased the two suspects, who were later identified as Tran Ngoc Danh and Le Minh Vu Nghia, both from Long An Province. The pursuit spanned over two kilometres and ended when Quang, Tien, and Tung approached the suspects and kicked them off their motorbike. Danh tried to escape to a nearby alley, while his accomplice tried to attack the three with a knife. Both suspects were later arrested by the police and local residents. After the incident, Tung was taken to the Thu uc Hospital for emergency treatment on an injury to the main artery in his left hand and a wound in his right hand. Tien and Quang suffered minor injuries. The two suspects told police that they attempted the robbery because they did not have any money. Danh and Nghia were taken into custody for investigation on charges of "robbery of property" and "intentionally causing injuries". A mobile phone, two knives, and a motorbike were also seized by police for use as evidence. VNS KON TUM A forest belonging to ak To Forestry Company in the Central Highlands province of Kon Tums ak To District, has been exploited severely, according to local people. The company, however, refuted the report. At least five big trees in the forest area near Ngoc Lo Mountain is reported to have been cut down. Only some slides of wood, with diametre around 60cm and height of up to 4m, remain in the area as loggers have removed the trees out. Moreover, a 3m-wide road has been opened by the lumberjacks to access the area. Considering the evidence, Nguyen Thanh Chung, company director, told the Vietnam News Agency that they tried their utmost to protect the forest. We put an end to massive wood exploitation. Regarding small cases when loggers cut and transport trees at night using motorbikes, we are unable to stop it, he said. Nguyen Manh Vu, head of ak To District Forest Ranger, said the forest company has showed its inability in capturing information to handle the illegal cases of wood exploitation. Moreover, the collaboration between forest owners and the local authorities is not strong enough to conduct frequent investigations and stop the phenomenon. The subdivisions numbered 274, 275, 276 and 279 in ak Ro Nga Commune next to ak Ang Commune, Ngoc Hoi District, have become the hotspot for deforestation for a long time, according to the Vietnam News Agency. Loggers usually fell and slide trees at the spot then transfer them to hide all evidences. They divide themselves into groups of two to 15 each. Wood slides are then transported to ak Ang Commune or the adjacent area between the communes of ak To and Ngoc Hoi. VNS Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc speaks at the meeting of the National Committee for Education Reforms and the National Council of Education and Human Resources Development from 2016 2020 on Tuesday. VNA/VNS Photo Thong Nhat HA NOI Enhancing teachers skills is crucial to educational reforms, said Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc at the meeting of the National Committee for Education Reforms and the National Council of Education and Human Resources Development from 2016 2020 on Tuesday. It was the first time Phuc, also chairman of the committee and the council from 2016 2020, chaired a meeting of this kind. The meeting aimed to seek measures to implement Resolution No.29-NQ/TW, dated November 4, 2013, on fundamental and comprehensive renewal in education, serving industrialisation and modernisation in the Socialist-oriented market economy during the countrys international integration and the era of Industry 4.0. The meeting focused on reforms of teacher training and allocation, renewal of textbooks and improvement of higher education institutional autonomy in Viet Nam . The meeting also saw many proposals to reform the accreditation procedures of professor and associate professor titles and to improve the quality of Vietnamese professors and associate professors. PM Phuc spoke highly of all proposals at the meeting, saying the ultimate goal of socio-economic development is to better serve people, particularly in education and training. He agreed with the proposals to promote the application of technology in education and noted that the elimination of technological illiteracy is fundamental to developing e-government, smart cities and global citizens. He also appreciated the ideas of lifelong learning, especially for old adults, to prevent stagnancy and close-minded thinking at work. He stressed the importance of capacity building for teachers, which is the key to the countrys educational reforms, asking for the restructuring of pedagogical institutions with the focus on the quality of teachers. He wanted the teachers to receive better training to absorb new ways of thinking. The PM also requested the universities further foster students start-up businesses, saying it is important to increase Vietnamese productivity. He required stricter accreditation of professors and associate professors and improvement of the quality of the candidates and judges to ensure transparency in line with international standards. Regarding university autonomy, the top leader said when institutional autonomy is applied, the universities are only governed by the Ministry of Education and Training in terms of planning, examination, education quality and inspection. He asked for an increase in the number of universities piloting autonomy beyond the three or four universities at present to get feedback and scale up the model in the future. He endorsed ideas of university autonomy in academic curricula, organization and finance and emphasised that financial autonomy does not mean that the government will not invest in higher education institutions. VNS Iraq After ISIS: How to Get Assyrians to Stay ERBIL, Iraq -- Nearly a year since Mosul was liberated from the Islamic State and the terrorist organization effectively defeated, new challenges confront the relatively few Christians remaining in the ancient Christian towns of northern Iraq who feel let down by the United States and continually ignored by the West. "ISIS was a trial we had to face," said Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Warda in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. "Now we have another one: how to really help Christians to stay." For the archbishop, the goal now is "not just surviving; it's thriving." And to do this, he believes, not only are jobs needed, but also "sustainable projects," ones that give Christians a chance to showcase their talents and qualifications, "a chance to witness." In the once densely Christian populated Nineveh Plains to the north and east of Mosul, the challenges are similar, though each situation is different and largely contingent on which civil authorities are in charge. More than 90,000 Christians lived in the region before ISIS; that number has decreased to less than just under 40,000. In Qaraqosh, once a prosperous, predominantly Christian town a few miles east of Mosul, security is no longer just about protection from Islamic terrorists, but rather about guarantees of survival in the face of a depleted population. (So far, just over 25,000 Christians have returned -- less than half of the original Christian population -- and only over a quarter of the properties damaged by ISIS have been restored.) "Demographic change is a very sore point for us," said Syriac Catholic Father Amar Yako, the town's parish priest. He therefore wants to see Qaraqosh's Christians carving out a future that is both sustainable and economically viable to encourage them to stay. Distrust Remains Often, the challenge is coexisting peacefully with their Muslim neighbors. Many of Qaraqosh's Christians remember how militant Muslims hounded them out, took their goods and let ISIS "steal everything," Father Yako said. Consequently, there is distrust, and many Christians wonder what's the point of returning. But their priest remains confident that 90% will eventually return. "If we lose Qaraqosh," Father Yako warned, "then we lose Christianity in Iraq." Farther to the north, the once predominantly Christian town of Bartella has been overrun by the Shabak, followers of Shabakism -- a syncretistic religion made up of elements of Islam (primarily Shia Islam), Christianity and Yezidism. Persecuted by al-Qaida in the 2000s, many fled from Mosul to Bartella and are supported financially and otherwise by the Iraqi and Iranian governments. This has allowed them to buy up once-Christian properties. Although nearly 6,000 Christians have returned after the defeat of ISIS, more than two-thirds of Bartella's Christians have yet to come back, with 162 families still living in camps in Erbil. "We're completely vulnerable," said Father Benham Benoka, a Syriac Catholic parish priest. "What's going to happen in the future? Who can guarantee us a permanent presence here on the Nineveh Plains? Who can guarantee peace and security?" He lamented how his church is protected by just two Christian militia guards and was skeptical that Islamism has truly gone, as the Shabak are similarly repressive, though generally peaceful. Just as the Muslim militants tried to forcibly convert and harass Christians, so, in a similar way, do the Shabak. They carry out Muslim propaganda, Father Benoka said, steadily building new mosques and blaring out the Salah (Muslim prayer) all day. "They show themselves to be the only force in the city," he said. "There are no Iraqi soldiers here," and the mayor is "never Christian, only Shabak." Christians Return to Telleskuf In Telleskuf, a town farther to the north, the situation is better, but not without its own particular challenges: Nearly two-thirds of the town's Christian population of around 7,000 people has returned, and more than two-thirds of Christian properties have been restored. The town was less affected by ISIS, which only occupied the city for around a week. The problems there are with the Kurds, who enforce travel restrictions around the town due to political tensions with nearby Iraq (Kurdistan voted for independence from Iraq in September 2017, but Baghdad has refused to grant it). Although Mosul is only 20 miles away, roads are blocked, and it takes two hours to reach the city by an alternate route. The Kurds call Telleskuf disputed territory, but this perplexes the Christians who say the town has never been Kurdish. Security is less of an issue there, but after returning to the town, many Christians are thinking of emigrating, according to the town's parish priest, Father Salar Kajo, a canon lawyer from the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome and a specialist in sharia (Islamic law). "There's no work here," he said. "Houses are being repaired, but jobs are important, too; people have homes but no income to pay the bills." He said he was very grateful for the help of the Hungarian government, which has given $2 million to help reconstruction, largely directed to restoring St. George's Church, which was damaged by ISIS and Kurdish forces. But he said humanitarian aid from nongovernmental organizations has helped to create "lazy people" and what they need more of is aid that goes toward microfinance -- small loans to start businesses -- and investment. "The key is small-scale microfinancing -- not vast injections of capital from huge NGOs," said Father Benedict Kiely, founder of Nasarean.org, a charity that focuses on helping small startups for persecuted Christians. "Quite literally, 'small is beautiful' -- and working with the local communities to see what is viable," he said. "There is a tremendous opportunity for business leaders in the West, not only to help by investing, but to be mentors." A significant number of Christians in the region, especially in Qaraqosh, have the security of having government jobs, although these have come with strings attached, including the temporary withdrawal of salaries unless they returned to their homes. Reconstruction Efforts The churches in Iraq have been trying to coordinate the reconstruction efforts and bring hope to Nineveh's faithful. Much of this is being carried out through the Nineveh Reconstruction Committee, an interconfessional organization set up last year with Catholic NGOs to encourage Christians to return to the region. "It's very impressive how quickly the reconstruction is taking place," said Aimery de V (Tehran Times May 23): http://www.tehrantimes.com/news/423870/Iran-s-12-preconditions-for-negotiating-with-U-S 1. Full nuclear disarmament of the United States, and the destruction of its nuclear weapons, with the presence of international supervisors. 2. Stopping the construction of intercontinental ballistic missiles by the United States, and the destruction of the available missile under the supervision of arm control experts. 3- Full recognition of 20% industrial Uranium enrichment in Iran 4. Agreeing with the Islamic Republic of Iran in the international circles for the full nuclear disarmament of the Zionist regime and the regimes join to the NPT 5. U.S. thorough withdrawal from the Persian Gulf and the closure of U.S. military bases in the region. 6. The closure of all U.S. military bases in the neighboring countries of Iran, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from West Asia, Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent Note: The U.S. diplomatic presence in neighboring countries of Iran is subject to the lack of interference in the internal affairs of Iran. 7. The release of all blocked property and confiscated property of Iran in the United States, with full payout of their maintenance since 1977 8. Official apologizing the Iranian people for the coup of August 19, 1953, and paying for the 25-year presence of the Pahlavi regime since then (by forming a joint committee between Iran and the United States) 9. Admitting full responsibility for supporting Saddam Hussein during the imposed war on Iran, apologizing the Iranian people and calculating and paying for the losses incurred by the imposed war on the Islamic Republic of Iran. 10. Accepting full legal responsibility for the shot down of Irans civilian passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai, number 655, by an SM-2MR surface-to-air missile fired from USS Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser of the United States Navy (which took place on July 3, 1988), providing compensation to its survivors, and apologizing the Iranian nation (in the form of a Declaration read by the President and U.S. Secretary of State) Apart from the widespread criticism that has been raised in Iran and the international system (and even among the United States allies) against the Pompeos remarks, 12 prerequisites can be given to the United States and the Trumps government merely for letting them negotiate with Iranian authorities.It is to be noted here that the following prerequisites shouldnt be taken as Irans terms and conditions for reaching an agreement with the United States, but those are merely preconditions for setting up a negotiating table with the United States and the Trump government: Source: Irans 12 preconditions for negotiating with U.S. Tehran Times WtR Toledo Police charged Jessica Gusky with child endangering for allegedly leaving her 4-year old son home alone. It happened in the 900 block of Clifton. Investigators say the boy climbed out of the second story window. Police say he fell from the window and broke his arm. A neighbor ran to help him. The mother allegedly told detectives she and her boyfriend drove to the carryout to buy cigarettes. Lucas County Children Services is also investigating the incident. The little boy was placed with relatives. May 30, 2018 | By Thomas DWK Life Sciences will reveal a new labware product at ACHEMA 2018 manufactured using metal 3D printing. 3D printed four port connector cap DWK Life Sciences, part of the DURAN brand, is known for developing innovative glass labware products. The company has been able to successfully design a fully functional 4-port GL 45 bottle connector cap using metal 3D printing for the first time. This component is manufactured from a medical grade 316L stainless steel. Development of new lab ware, especially glass products, is traditionally a slow process, says Alistair Rees, DURAN product manager. In contrast, the development time for the 3D printed connector cap was very short: from the first idea to the final printed product only took about two months. Previously, the stainless steel connector GL 45 caps have been manufactured using conventional machining and welding processes. Previously a similar welded component weighted over 150 grams, but now the 3D printed connector weighs just 50 grams, which is more than a two-thirds weight reduction. Each batch takes around 51 hours to print using an EOS system, with a software controlled 400-Watt laser which melts the stainless steel powder into the exact shape defined for the product. The material cools immediately and the connector is finished using physical and electro-chemical processes. The new DURAN Stainless Steel 4-Port Connector Cap GL 45 will be available for demonstration on the DWK Life Sciences Stand B7 Hall 4.1, at ACHEMA 11 - 15 June 2018, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Posted in 3D Printing Application Maybe you also like: May 30, 2018 | By Thomas Leading Chinese 3D printing company INTAMSYS announced today it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a Series A funding led by CWB Capital, a venture capital firm with primary focus on firms involve in smart manufacturing ecosystem. The funding round was joined by Brizan Investments, a high technology-focused venture capital firm. We see tremendous potential from INTAMSYS in excelling and eventually leading in the era of Industry 4.0 given the companys current position as an industry leader in PEEK 3D printing, offering customized high-performance functional materials additive manufacturing solutions to the industries. said Prof. Li Zexiang, co-founder of CWB Capital and Chairman of DJI (The world's biggest UAV drones manufacturer). INTAMSYS (abbreviation of INTelligent Additive Manufacturing SYStems) was founded by a team of professional engineers with in-depth technical experience and know-how in engineering ultra-precision and high speed industrial machinery. With its headquarters in Shanghai, INTAMSYS has been a major contributor of additive manufacturing solutions to a variety of industries for many years now, with the help of its materials expertise and its state-of-the-art FUNMAT 3D printers. INTAMSYS materials portfolio includes PEEK, ULTEMTM 9085, ULTEMTM 1010, PPSU and PSU. This month, INTAMSYS officially added PEKK to its portfolio. Furthermore, users can choose from engineering-grade thermoplastics and composites such as PC-ABS, Carbon Fiber Nylon, PC, Nylon, ABS, ASA, PLA and others. The companys FUNMAT HT and FUNMAT PRO HT 3D printers are capable of 3D printing in over 20 functional materials thanks to their state-of-the-art thermal technologies on the active heated chamber, high temperature nozzle and heated build plate. In tandem with INTAMSYS vision of Creating Infinite Possibilities to Customize Future Life, the investment will accelerate the companys market deployment of its high-performance functional materials 3D printing solutions and intensify INTAMSYS advanced research and development initiatives alongside the application demands of industrial users. Charles Han, CEO of INTAMSYS, said, The new funding round will enable us to strengthen our support for application-driven innovation of our customers through enhancing mass customization 3D printing capabilities and enabling the creation and integration of digital supply chains. CWB Capital is co-founded by Prof. Li Zexiang, Sequoia Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Prof. Ping K. Ko, president of Silicon Federation International Ltd. and the former Dean of HKUST School of Engineering, and Prof. Gan Jie, the associate dean at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. The mission of the company is to integrate China, Hongkong and global technology and supply chain resources to create a sustainable smart manufacturing ecosystem that strengthens core competencies and promotes global brand building for invested companies. Posted in 3D Printer Company Maybe you also like: As fanciful, kaleidoscopic, and highly Instagrammable immersive experiences continue to trend, museums are upping the ante on just how kooky and chromatic their exhibitions can get. The latest to lay its cards on the table is the Exploratorium, where a flickering forest of luminous balloon organisms has been planted for the magical new exhibit, Inflatable: Expanding Works of Art. Curated by Christopher Jobson, founder and EIC of the culture blog Colossal, Inflatable is an escape into an alternate reality, at the intersection of art and science, where your childhood curiosities bubble up and persuade you to rethink what forms art and nature can take. A series of bouncy environments encourage a frolicsome good time, where you can see the world through an insect's eye from inside Pneuhaus's geodesic dome and squeeze between the puffy cylinders, lit from within, by artist Jimmy Kuehnle. But first things first. When I arrived at the press preview on Friday, May 25th, the priority was clear: to get outfitted with an epic balloon hat (and a margarita)to fit in with my surroundings (and post a zillion boomerangs to my Instagram). At the exhibit's entrance, I was met with a looming, wobbly humanoid on bended knee; a few paces ahead, another billowing figure crouched down as if it were posing with the couple who stood between its arms taking selfies while a few kids ran between its legs. As part of artist Amanda Parer's project Fantastic Planet, the oversized inflatable people are designed to inspire us to consider our own size and impact on the planet. (You may also remember when the Australian artist's giant rabbits overtook Civic Center in 2016.) As I made my way into the exhibit, a flailing hot pink cube with tangerine appendages and violet feet came careening down the hallway; I darted out of the way just in time and, with the ninja-like moves of a compulsive Millennial IGer, whipped out my iPhone to record it flying by. I feel like I'm on the set of Monsters, Inc. Further psychedelia ensued as I entered Taiwanese artist Shih Chieh Huang's Guardian of the Disphotic (perhaps I'm actually in a Marvel comic), an undersea realm populated by a phosphorescent octopus with pudgy arms that lift and fall like a pulsing disco ball. Sensing its audience, the balloon mollusk begins to dance; we onlookers jumped and waved to keep the motion-sensored party going. Breaking away from the spellbinding pull of the spidery neon beast, I wandered into Kuehnle's bouncy blue jungle of punching bags of sorts, where I spent a full 15 minutes wading and pushing through the huggable, shifting columns as kids (who, let's be honest, were mostly adults) bounced me around before I finally bopped on to the next thing: a menacing carnivorous plant called Cauldron Veil, created by Florida-based artist Jason Hackenwerth. Or rather, I bopped beneath it, as the wiggling overhead fixture threatened to swallow me up whole. Inspired by "universal biology," Hackenwerth's inflated sculptures mimic the organic nature of life: The artwork will slowly deflate over the course of the summer to mimic biological decomposition. Though not part of Inflatable, I also had the chance to step inside Refik Anadol's Infinity Room, which will open to the public on June 14. A small and temporary immersive environment not totally unlike those of the famed Yayoi Kusama, the room seems to traverse time, space, and unknown dimensions though it is only maybe eight-by-eight feet at best. Ready your iPhone X camerasthis is San Francisco's next IG darling. Here's a peek at what's in store. // Inflatable Expanding Works from May 26 through Sep 3, 2018 at Exploratorium, Pier 15 (Embarcadero); tickets ($30) are available at exploratorium.edu/inflatable. Infinity Room will open June 14 through July 15; tickets ($30) are available exploratorium.edu/visit/calendar/infinity-room. The first installment of our Summer Getaways series takes us to Vancouver, Canada, a megalopolis that's much like San Francisco in its status as a world class city in the Pacific Rim, but unlike SF in one enviable way. Remember when millions of bewildered Americans broke the Canadian immigration website in the hours and days following the 2016 presidential election? After an enchanted four-day sojourn in Canada (first painting the town in Vancouver and then down-shifting to the quiet surfing community of Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Islandpart two of our series), we're contemplating the idea of foreign citizenshipagain. A suite at the Opus Hotel. Yaletown seems to be the epicenter of cool in Vancouver, so we shacked up at the impossibly hip Opus Hotel, drawn to its opulent, offbeat rooms; edgy artwork (photographer Farrah Aviva's stiletto statements on gun control; Taizo Yamamoto's drawings of homeless shopping carts); and needy neon ("Just hold me" lights up the bar). // A post-flight facial should be S.O.P. for all travelers, so we walked three minutes from the hotel to the Skoah Spa. The 75- minute Facialicious treatment is tailored to your skin type and includes a head-to-toe massage. We walked out with a jar of their Hydradew moisture gel because, when your aesthetician tells you it's 10 times more hydrating than aloe vera, you pounce. // High on #selfcare, we made a beeline for Glory Juice Company around the corner, picking up a bottle of the Tiffany-blue Magic Switchel tonic, a super-healthy version of Gatorade made with apple cider vinegar, ginger, and nutrient-rich blue-green algae. // On our first night in town, we dined on endless rows of imaginative sushi at the upscale Japanese restaurant Minami, also a three-minute walk from the Opus. While the signature aburi oshi sushilacquered in sauce and then flame-kissed for that beloved note of caramelizationlived up to the hype, the star of the meal was the opera cake, a magical, unexpected layering of green-tea genoise, dark-chocolate ganache, and matcha ice cream. Capilano Suspension Bridge The next day, a little nature was in order, because, you know, when in Canada. After an obligatory six-mile bike cruise along the Stanley Park seawall, we headed to the famous Capilano Suspension Bridge: 250 feet high across a steep gorge, the span is "reassuringly wobbly," which means that while many an iPhone has been lost to the river below, mid-selfie, so far no human casualties have been reported. (Death grips are cool here.) // Afterwards, we stopped for a light, citrusy Beach Radler pint and wild funghi thin crust pizza at the Strathcona Beer Company before heading to Brunette the Label in Chinatown, where the stylish athleisure wear, emblazoned with your haircolor or catchphrases such as "Hey Babe," is Goop-approved. Brunette the Label's signature sweatshirt. (Britney Gill Photography) Worn out from our adventures, we headed back to the Opus and ordered up an in-room multi-vitamin IV drip from naturopath Dr. Jordana Aziz. The 30-minute procedure supposedly supplies an energy boost for the evening ahead, although we're still skeptical. Best takeaway: a much-needed half-hour of relaxation. // During dinner at Hawksworth, where chef Quinton Bennett's creative cuisine (think maple-glazed smoked salmon on a fragrant spruce skewer or bison with a sauce of pine and wildberries) evokes a strong sense of place, we watched carefully orchestrated plumes of smoke billow at the filming of the Supergirl finale across the street (Canada is known as Hollywood North), and we also tried to act cool when we thought we spotted the Daily Show's Michelle Wolf at a nearby table, fresh off her successful roast of the current administration at the recent White House Correspondence Dinner. Maple-glazed smoked salmon on spruce skewer at Hawksworth. Back to the hotel, we dipped into a warm bath, cued up some bedtime aromatherapy courtesy of Saje (the Vancouver-based wellness company just launched the Aromatime, an alarm clock-slash-oil diffuser; check it out at the Fillmore showroom in San Francisco), and sunk into deep slumber to prepare for forthcoming forest-to-ocean adventures in Tofino, a small surf town that's a 40-minute flight away. Tune in soon for Summer Getaways, Part Two: Tofino, which required, unsurprisingly, a thick 5/3 wetsuit, a telephoto lens, and your best cozy clothes. Gold Resource Increases 60% to 484,000 Ounces Perth, May 30, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - White Cliff Minerals Limited ( ASX:WCN ) ("White Cliff" or the "Company") is pleased to report a new JORC code compliant inferred gold and copper mineral resource for the Aucu Project in north-west Kyrgyz Republic.Highlights- New Inferred Gold Resource of 2.95Mt at 5.1 g/t gold for 484,000 ounces of gold- New Inferred Copper Resource of 17.2Mt at 0.37% copper for 64,000 tonnes of contained copper- Exploration recommencesMining industry consultant Optiro Pty Ltd (Optiro) has estimated an updated JORC code compliant inferred mineral resource reported at a lower cut-off grade of 1 g/t gold for the Aucu deposit of 2.95 million tonnes grading 5.1 g/t gold containing 484,000 ounces of gold.The new mineral resource represents a 60% increase in ounces of contained gold over the previous gold resource of 302,000 ounces reported in April 2017.Optiro has also estimated an updated JORC code compliant inferred copper mineral resource, reported at a lower cut-off grade of 0.25% copper for the Chanach Copper deposit 17.2 Mt tonnes at 0.37% copper for 64,000 tonnes of contained copper.The new inferred copper resource represents a 46% increase in contained copper over the previous contained copper resource of 44,870 tonnes reported in April 2017.As previously reported, the gold and copper inferred resources start at surface, have only been shallowly drilled in most areas and remain open along strike and at depth. The reported gold resources represent less than 5% of mineralised faults identified by rock-chip sampling within the Aucu Project tenements to date.Approximately 95% of the mineralised faults identified by rock-chip sampling are still to be drilled. The gold bearing mineralised structures extend beyond the current resource estimate area over a length greater than 3,000 metres and occur as multiple lodes (see Figure 1 in link below).The Company has recommenced exploration with the establishment of the field camp and is currently conducting an extensive soil geochemical survey to refine gold, copper and lead-zinc anomalies identified last year and to test more of the prospective areas of the licence.Managing Director Todd Hibberd commented that "The 60% increase in the JORC code compliant inferred gold resource from 302,000 ounces to 484,000 ounces based on a small drilling program indicates just how prospective the project actually it. The 46% increase in the copper resource from 43,000 tonnes to 64,000 tonnes of contained copper also demonstrates that there is more mineralisation to find. In addition, the soil geochemical program conducted in 2017 identified several new gold, copper and base metal anomalies that are currently being followed up.The quality of the current resource combined with the rock chip and soil geochemical sampling of the extensive mineralised systems shows that the Aucu gold project has significant potential for substantially more gold and copper resources to be identified from further drilling."Resource Estimate: Aucu Gold DepositThe updated Inferred Mineral Resource reported in compliance with the JORC code for the Aucu gold deposit reported above a cut-off grade of 1 g/t gold consists of 2.95 Million tonnes grading 5.1 g/t gold for 484,000 ounces of contained gold. The new resource represents a 60% increase in contained gold over the previously reported April 2017 inferred gold resource. Table 1 (see link below) provides a breakdown of the updated resource estimate by area.The project also contains an updated inferred resource for the Chanach copper deposit which consists of 17.5 Million tonnes grading 0.37% copper for 64,000 tonnes of contained copper (reported above a cut-off grade of 0.25% copper) (see Table 2 in link below). The new copper resource represents a 46% increase in contained copper over the previous contained copper resource of 44,870 tonnes reported in April 2017.Exploration and Drilling Program - 2018The Company has recommenced exploration with establishment of the field camp and is currently conducting an extensive soil geochemical survey to refine gold, copper and lead-zinc anomalies identified last year and to test more of the prospective areas of the license. The Company will release a formal exploration update once this sampling is completed.To view tables and figures, please visit:About White Cliff Minerals Ltd White Cliff Minerals Ltd is a Gold, Copper, Cobalt, Nickel resources and mining company listed in Australia (ASX:WCN). The Company is focused on developing low cost high value mineral deposits that have near term cash flow potential. Major projects include the Aucu gold deposit that contains 484,000 ounces of gold (3mt at 5.1 g/t) starting at surface and Chanach copper deposit that contains 64,000 tonnes of copper (17.2Mt at 0.37% copper). Both projects have substantial blue sky potential with drilling covering only 5% of the known structures. In Australia the company is developing the Coronation Dam cobaltnickel deposit where a maiden resource will be announced in the late 2018. Now Officially a Bank Perth, May 30, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Goldfields Money Limited ( ASX:GMY ) ("Goldfields Money" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that, following recent reforms to Section 66 of the Banking Act 1959, Goldfields Money is now able to refer to itself as a bank in Australia. Until now, the Company has been designated an authorised deposit-taking institution or ADI, with customers benefitting from the Australian Government Deposit Guarantee.In the reforms to Section 66 of the Banking Act 1959, the Federal Government has allowed authorised deposit-taking institutions, such as Goldfields Money, to use the word "bank" and its related expressions in reference to our banking business in Australia without restriction.Goldfields Money has recently launched its new digital banking platform, while working hard over the last two years to improve the quality of our service offering and provide a banking platform that is leading edge, highly scalable and one that offers significant benefits to our customers.Goldfields Money's CEO and Executive Director, Simon Lyons, said "We are very pleased with the legislative reforms that now allow us to be recognised as, and to promote ourselves as, a bank in Australia. It has been frustrating in the past that, although we offer the same services as other banks, we have not officially been allowed to refer to ourselves as a bank.""With the roll-out of the new banking platform now complete, we are pleased to be in a position to market ourselves officially as a digital bank to a wider customer base who are used to dealing with banks and their products via the internet or by using an app on their smart phones."About Goldfields Money Ltd Goldfields Money (ASX:GMY) is Australia's new revolutionary digital bank, distributing first class products through a largely branchless distribution network. A bank without the bank. This digital banking platform is built on the recently implemented mobile first, world class core banking system provided by Temenos and our proprietary mortgage distribution software "Loankit". Goldfields is ASX listed (ASX:GMY) with two key divisions: Banking (operates under "Goldfields Money" and "Better Choice" brands) - an APRA regulated bank that offers deposit and loan products that are funded either on-balance sheet or off-balance sheet through a range of third party lenders. Our deposits are all guaranteed by the Australian Government Deposit Guarantee for up to $250,000 per customer. We are the new approach to banking in Australia, we're honest, with transparent bank practices and a straightforward approach to you and your money. It's all yours, honestly. Mortgage Aggregation (operates under "Finsure" and "Loankit" brands) - an ASIC regulated mortgage aggregation and software technology platform with over 1,475 loan writers as of 31 August 2018. Finsure puts brokers first and is a leader in the market in offering a diverse lending panel, flexible commission models, training, lead generation, proprietary SaaS and mortgage broker support services. Finsure was also recently named Aggregator of the Year for 2017 at the Australian Mortgage Awards. You can read more about us at www.goldfieldsmoney.com.au and www.finsure.com.au. Historic Australia-India R&D Collaboration Agreement Signed Melbourne, May 30, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Environmental Clean Technologies Limited ( ASX:ESI ) (ECT or Company) is pleased to announce the signing of the Project Agreement with NLC India Limited (NLCIL) and NMDC Limited (NMDC) for the largest-ever joint R&D collaboration between Australia and India.Key points:- Project Agreement signed today in Canberra in the presence of India's High Commissioner, Dr Gondane- Australia and India join forces to develop ECT's low emission iron and steel process via an integrated Coldry-Mamtor plant to be built in India- The Project aims to jointly develop an integrated Coldry-Matmor pilot plant in India- Delegation to visit Parliament House on Thursday 31 May 2018 to meet available MinistersFurther to recent announcements in the lead up to today's Signing Ceremony, senior executives and Directors from NLCIL, NMDC and ECT executed the Project Agreement in the presence of His Excellency, Dr A.M. Gondane and representatives from the Australia India Business Council.The ceremony, led by ECT Chairman Mr Glenn Fozard, featured speeches by the Mr P. Selvakumar, Director (Projects & Planning) at NLCIL, Dr Narendra K. Nanda, Director (Technical) at NMDC and Mr Ashley Moore, Chairman-Managing Director of ECT India.Mr Fozard commented "We've spent the past four years building the relationship and crafting the process with NLCIL and NMDC in India with the aim of taking our two technologies - Coldry and Matmor - through the scale up process and, if successful on to commercial deployment."Today marks a significant milestone on the journey which, all going to plan, will see the commissioning of our Coldry-Matmor pilot plant in India by the end of 2019."During the ceremony NLCIL's Director of Projects and Planning Mr Selvakumar noted, "We want to use our lignite for alternative purposes. We want to dry the lignite. Coldry is a good technology for transforming lignite. When discussing lignite use with NMDC, we saw the opportunity to work together to achieve iron ore reduction as well, adding higher value to our resource through new applications.""We look forward to a successful project for the betterment of India."Dr Nanda, Director (Technical) of NMDC added, "We are standing here on this auspicious day to sign this agreement to build the pilot plant. If the pilot plant is successful, it can be taken to commercial scale.""We wish the project great success for all companies and both countries."His Excellency, Dr. Gondane (below, second from right) was quick to add his support to the collaboration, noting the importance of the project to addressing the challenges faced by India.Next StepsThe Project Agreement sets out the agreed terms for detailed sub-agreements. These include a Master Technology Licence Agreement, Tripartite Collaboration Agreement and NLCIL, NMDC and ECT Services Agreements.Following execution of the detailed sub-agreements the commencement of project works will be funded and able to commence.The parties are on track to deliver these agreements by the end of August and look forward to providing further updates as activities progress.BackgroundThe agreement sees the commencement of the next stage of development for ECT's two proprietary technologies:- Matmor is the world's first and only lignite (brown coal)-based primary iron making technology capable of replacing metallurgical coal and high-grade lump iron ore with lower-cost alternative raw materials thanks to its unique, hydrogen-based chemistry and furnace design.- Coldry is a unique, zero-emission, lignite upgrading technology capable of producing a solid fuel for use in power generation, industrial thermal applications and as a feedstock to higher-value downstream products such as hydrocarbon liquids, gas, fertiliser, chemicals, chars, activated carbon, hydrogen and steelmaking via the Matmor technology. Coldry solid fuel is significantly less CO2 intensive than lignite.The project entails two phases, commencing with an AUD 35 million R&D phase funded by the Indian partners, which aims to scale-up ECT's Matmor and Coldry technologies to deliver an integrated pilot plant capable of producing ~2 tonnes of metal per hour.Following successful R&D outcomes, phase two involves commercial expansion, targeting an integrated steel making facility with a proposed capacity of 500,000 tonnes per annum and an estimated cost of AUD 300 million.The partners will then assess opportunities for global commercial expansion based on market assessment at that time.About ColdryWhen applied to lignite and some sub-bituminous coals, the Coldry beneficiation process produces a black coal equivalent (BCE) in the form of pellets. Coldry pellets have equal or superior energy value to many black coals and produce lower CO2 emissions than raw lignite.About MATMORThe MATMOR process has the potential to revolutionise primary iron making.MATMOR is a simple, low cost, low emission production technology, utilising the patented MATMOR retort, which enables the use of cheaper feedstocks to produce primary iron.About the India R&D ProjectThe India project is aimed at advancing the Company's Coldry and Matmor technologies to demonstration and pilot scale, respectively, on the path to commercial deployment.ECT has partnered with NLC India Limited and NMDC Limited to jointly fund and execute the project.NLC India Limited is India's national lignite authority, largest lignite miner and largest lignite-based electricity generator.NMDC Limited is India's national iron ore authority.To view figures, please visit:About Environmental Clean Technologies Ltd Environmental Clean Technologies Limited (ASX:ECT) is in the business of commercialising leading-edge coal and iron making technologies, which are capable of delivering financial and environmental benefits. We are focused on advancing a portfolio of technologies, which have significant market potential globally. ECT's business plan is to pragmatically commercialise these technologies and secure sustainable, profitable income streams through licencing and other commercial mechanisms. A television news anchor and a photographer died Monday when a tree fell on their SUV while they were covering storm damage in North Carolina. According to WYFF News 4's website, anchor Mike McCormick and photojournalist Aaron Smeltzer were in a news vehicle when the large tree fell on them, apparently while they were moving. Tryon Fire Chief Geoffrey Tennant said the engine of the SUV was running and the transmission was in drive when authorities arrived at the scene about 2:30 p.m. Authorities suspect recent heavy rain saturated the ground and weakened the tree's root system. Tennant told WYFF that he had just spoken with McCormick and Smeltzer before the accident. "It personally affected me a little bit because I had done an interview with Mr. McCormick about 10 minutes before we got the call. And we had talked a little bit about how he wanted us to stay safe and I wanted him to stay safe and of course 10 or 15 minutes later we got the call and it was him and his photographer," Tennant said. WYFF said McCormick joined the station, which covers upstate South Carolina and western North Carolina, in April 2007. He anchored the newscasts on Sundays at 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. Smeltzer had been with the station only a few months, having joined the station in February of this year. WAAY 31s Scottie Kay worked with Smeltzer at a television station in Spartanburg, SC. She remembers him as a talented, creative journalist who always went above and beyond the call of duty for friends and colleagues. He won two Associated Press awards, four Regional Emmys and was a 10-time RTNDA winner. He was also engaged to be married. The station issued this statement, saying, "All of us at WYFF News 4 are grieving. We are a family and we thank you, our extended family, for your comfort as we mourn and as we seek to comfort the families of Mike and Aaron." UPDATE: 6/1/2018 4:15 p.m. OROVILLE, Calif.Valcarenghi has been found guilty by a jury of first degree murder of Audra Houston. The jury deliberated for eight hours. ________________________________________________ UPDATE 5/29/18 5:43 p.m. OROVILLE, Calif. -- The jury deliberating the fate of Marc Valcarenghi went home Tuesday evening. Valcarenghi is accused of murdering a woman in a Chico motel. The prosecution and defense delivered their closing arguments Tuesday afternoon as Valcarenghi sat motionless in the courtroom. The jurors were handed the case and began deliberating at 2:30 p.m. At 5 p.m., the jury was sent home after not reaching a verdict Tuesday afternoon. Marc Valcarenghi's trial started three weeks ago and closing arguments were held Tuesday afternoon. The defense said Audra Houston died because she and Valcarenghi were simply "caught up in the moment." The prosecution swiftly contradicted the defense's argument, saying due to the injuries on Houston's body, Valcarenghi's story was just not reasonable. Audra Houston's body was found under the bed in her room at the Safari Inn, last July. The jurors return for deliberations on Friday morning. Stay in touch with our website for the latest updates. NEWS APP: DOWNLOAD OUR NEWS APP FOR LATEST UPDATES: iOS | Android FOLLOW LAURA ENG ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook: @LauraEngNews Twitter: @LauraEngNews ------------------------------------------- OROVILLE, Calif.Closing arguments are underway in the trail of Marc Valcarenghi, the man accused of murdering a woman at a Chico motel. Audra Houstons body was found under the bed in her room at the Safari Inn last July. Prosecutors say Valcarenghi beat and strangled Houston. Valcarenghi took the stand in his own defense to say Houston accidentally strangled herself with clothing during consensual activity between the two. Valcarenghi also said that the two of them were shooting methamphetamines. Opening arguments in the trail started on May 7th. Stay with Action News Now for all of your local coverage. SIGN UP: Get our daily newsletter CHICO, Calif.-- A Sacramento man has been arrested for allegedly stealing from a Chico business. Chico Police arrested 26-year-old Steven McFarland after a foot chase. It started when officers responded to reports of an employee chasing a man on foot. According to Chico Police, McFarland had just stolen thousands of dollars worth of cell phones from the AT&T Store on Mangrove Avenue. When officers arrived, they say that McFarland ran away. The suspect ran through the Chico Cemetery and onto the campus of Chico Junior High. The middle school was put on lockdown for five minutes as officers chased down the suspect. McFarland was taken into custody when he was seen leaving a backyard in the area of Oleander Avenue and East Frances Willard. He was booked into the Butte County Jail on charges of commercial burglary and resisting arrest. The stolen cell phones were returned to the AT&T Store. Stay with Action News Now for all of your local coverage. SIGN UP: Get our daily newsletter OROVILLE, Calif.Two local fire departments partnered up to do a control burn Tuesday afternoon in Oroville. El Medio Fire Department and the Oroville Fire Department burned roughly 100 square acres. Eight crew members and two engines were on scene for the control burn. The burn happened on stumps field and a former olive orchard. El Medio station Captain Scott Marglin explained why control burns are so important. Captain Scott Marglin said, It's to eliminate all the nuisance fires we get out here. When we do get those fires and they do happen often out here, they use up our resources, it takes away from what we're here to do, serve the public when they have emergencies. The two fire departments had several announcements on social media announcing the burn. Stay with Action News Now for your Fire Watch. SIGN UP: Get our daily newsletter Oroville, Calif. -- Bringing an old Oroville attraction back to life, bigger and better than ever. Having it brought back into its original use is not only respecting the past but moving into the future, said Oroville Mayor Linda Dahlmeier. The boarded-up windows, thick dust, and cobweb covers, The Oroville Train Depot has gone through many reformations from when it was first built, back in 1910. Dahlmeier says the buyer wants to turn this building into a steakhouse saloon and a museum gift shop, but that's not all, visitors may also be able to take a train ride all the way up the beautiful Feather River Canyon. On top of having the specialty train where, you can either have dinner at the restaurant, or you can actually get on the train and take a dinner train up through the canyon. Dahlmeier is also part of the Butte County Association of Governments. She said they put a grant together to get the depot and try to turn it into a station for express bus service from Butte County to Sacramento and also bring the San Joaquin train to the Oroville area. She said Kevin Morris, a Dallas property developer, reached out to her and asked about the depot. Knowing there was a real estate transaction going on, I told him the best thing he could do was put a backup offer on the property, and that's exactly what he did. BCAG ultimately lost the grant, and Morris' offer was accepted. It seemed like it happened one right after the other, but that's how real estate transactions happen when you have a backup buyer. She said Morris is originally from Oroville and grew up there, which is why he's excited to give back to the community. She said Morris is also working with historians in the community to make sure its done exactly how it was back then. Everything is, of course, still in the early stages, but the new restaurant could be up and running by the end of the year. Stay with Action News Now for all your local coverage. SIGN UP: Get our daily newsletter CHICO, Calif. - Although students are looking forward to the last day of school, Oak Bridge Academy at the Chico Mall is counting down for their first day of classes. The free online program on Tuesday revealed their live website for students that want to enroll for the 2018-2019 academic school year. The new program offers 6th through 12 graders a flexible class schedule based on their availability. The program which is part of the Chico Unified School District hopes to reveal the Chico Mall classroom sometime in July. They hope to begin classes on August 16. If you want to check out the website click here. CHICO, Calif. - Chico State is number one when it comes to sustainability, the school received high praise for its eco-friendly efforts on Tuesday. In an email sent by the university, the school got a score of 73.41, the highest score ever for sustainability in the CSU system. The school was examined by a credible organization on the subject, Chico State recently reported a 34 percent reduction in greenhouse gas, since 2006. Now the university hopes to reduce their campus carbon footprint by the year 2030. SHASTA COUNTY, Calif.On Tuesday around 7 a.m. a Shasta County Sheriffs Deputy assigned to the Burney Station was summoned by a citizen regarding a black car dragging a cable. The deputy located the black Pontiac on Mountain View Road east of town. Michael Joseph Ybarra Michael Joseph Ybarra Tyson Noah Courtney Tyson Noah Courtney The car had 165 foot length cable tied to a carabineer near the trunk of the car. The coper cable was at least an inch and a half in diameter. The deputy identified Michael Joseph Ybarra, age 28 and Tyson Noah Courtney, age 35 both Burney residents inside the car. Courtney and Ybarra said that they were dragging the cable in attempt to strip the protective sheathing. They claimed the sheathing was too hard to strip by hand. They also claimed they found the cable lying on the side of the road. Deputies were familiar with a large PG&E project occurring in the Burney area. A PG&E contractor arrived on scene and positively identified the copper cable as PG&E property. The deputy conducted a consent search of the car and found a spool of the cable in the trunk that was also identified as PG&E property. The cables value was estimated to be in the thousands of dollars. Methamphetamines, heroin, and tools commonly used for burglaries were also found in the car. Both Tyson Courtney and Michael Ybarra were arrested for grand theft, possession of stolen property, appropriation of lost property, burglary tools, and conspiracy to commit a crime. They both received additional charges relating to the methamphetamines and heroin. Stay with Action Now Now for all of your local coverage. SIGN UP: Get our daily newsletter By the QUAERO CAPITAL Accessible Clean Energy investment team The natural inference is that step two will involve the reduction of that carbon footprint, often by seeking to reduce holdings in fossil-fuel intensive companies. These approaches variously include the Montreal Carbon Pledge, the UN Principles of Responsible Investment, carbon reporting frameworks incorporated into company annual reports such as that proposed to be implemented from 2019 through the UK Companies Act, or in France for pension funds, and campaigns for divestment from fossil fuels by pension funds and university endowments such as 350.org. The result is a strong incentive to reduce holdings in businesses that have an apparently higher carbon footprint. Unfortunately, this can have the perverse result of reducing holdings in companies in the clean energy space. Coal mining companies often report lower carbon footprints than natural gas or even solar or wind companies because coal extraction does not actually release CO2 into the atmosphere the downstream coal-burning power plant does. Investing in a services business in Switzerland will have a much lower carbon footprint than investing in a zero-carbon offshore wind project in Germany, even though one is directly related to emissions reductions. Many so-called clean energy or sustainability funds will, on inspection, include companies such as Google, Amazon and Apple, while low carbon funds can reduce their overall carbon exposure by reducing clean energy investments and maintaining holdings in ExxonMobil and Kinder Morgan. The fault lies in the approach to carbon footprinting itself. When assessing a product, it is relatively straightforward to add up the total greenhouse gas emissions used to produce it. This includes direct emissions to produce the product, as well as indirect emissions such as those made in the process of producing electricity that powers company facilities. However, the carbon footprint of an investment and particularly an investment in listed company shares is less straightforward and involves looking at a companys entire operations, both direct and indirect. It will include greenhouse gases emitted by the companys facilities and vehicles (known as Scope 1 emissions). It also includes Scope 2 indirect emissions, such as purchased electricity and steam for use in company operations. This is then assigned on a per-share basis and reported as kilograms of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) greenhouse gases per dollar value. On this basis, Apple and Google emit just a fraction of a tonne of CO2e per $100 invested thanks to extensive purchases of renewable energy in its operations. An aircraft manufacturer like Boeing will emit approximately 1.5 tonnes of CO2e, whereas a solar company like FirstSolar in fact has an almost five times higher carbon footprint because it is using more fossil fuels to build and install distributed solar panels. The mathematically minded will grasp these numbers and assume that by taking a weighted average of the reported carbon footprints of all the companies in a portfolio, you can compare two portfolios carbon footprint, and the one with the higher weighted average is therefore worse for the environment. The second assumption would be that by selling the higher carbon footprint companies, and buying the lower ones, the real-world impact of carbon emissions would be reduced. Both assumptions are in fact incorrect. Merely going along a supply chain and stages of production and adding up carbon emissions is a rather poor guide to a companys overall climate impact, for two reasons. First, extraction companies such as coal miners do not count the emissions from the coal they mine in their carbon footprint, because they are not burning the coal they mine. As a result, the carbon emissions are pushed downstream -- and a coal miner can look pretty good from a carbon footprint perspective. For instance, the Canadian coal miner Teck has a 30% lower carbon footprint than natural gas producers, even though coal is 60% more carbon-emitting than natural gas. Solar panel and wind turbine manufacturers use much more electricity than a bank or an insurance company they use carbon-emitting power sources to manufacture and install their products, while getting no reduction in their carbon footprint for the CO2e that their products have avoided being emitted into the atmosphere. Taking this one-in-one-out approach to carbon footprinting, therefore, can have the perverse result that one might sell a solar company and buy a services company, or worse a coal miner. Therefore, actively reducing carbon footprints of an average portfolio without considering what those companies are actually doing, and the effect they are having on the environment, can result in less investment going to clean and zero carbon technologies and failing to reduce any greenhouse gas emissions. While project finance can use the concept of avoided emissions to give a solar or wind company credit for all the CO2e they have prevented being emitted for the same amount of electricity generated, equity and debt investments have yet to incorporate this concept to reduce the reported carbon footprint of their companies. In the meantime, using carbon footprints remains an important discipline and a commitment to reducing carbon exposure. However, they should be used with care and with the knowledge that a lower carbon footprint does not always translate into real-world reductions in carbon emissions. Age of Autism has twice covered the Oller report which documented the use of a tetanus vaccine secretly laced with a birth control component hCG which was being used in Kenya. While this has been ruthlessly denied by the Kenyan government and across the world's media, there is no doubt that this happened, or that the vaccine was manufactured by Serum Institute of India. Current moves to revive the use of the vaccine in India have come under the scrutiny of Dr Jacob Puliyel, Department of Paediatrics, St Stephen's Hospital, Delhi in India's Sunday Guardian Live. The new version of the vaccine being trialed in India will be conjugated with E Coli not tetanus but the issues remain the same. The concept of the vaccine is that the hCG which is present in relatively small quantities only becomes active as a birth control agent when combined with a foreign protein, hence the WHO and UNICEF claim that the quantity of hCG is insufficient to cause problems with pregnancy is deliberately misleading - tetanus and E Coli are used to adjuvant the hCG as an active ingredient, and that is part of the design of the product. Ethical questions surround vaccine to reduce fertility by Jacob Puliyel The prestigious journal Nature Medicine, in its February issue reported that the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) is to do a clinical trial of a tetanus toxoid vaccine (TT) laced with a pregnancy hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). It is to be studied on 120 women in India. This vaccine against pregnancy was developed by Dr G.P. Talwar in 1972. The idea is to produce antibodies to the pregnancy hormone, such that the women would not be able to carry a normal pregnancy. Women who were pregnant would abort and those not pregnant would be rendered infertile. The report is indeed disturbing. A few months earlier an article entitled HCG Found in WHO Tetanus Vaccine in Kenya Raises Concern in the Developing World was published by Oller and colleagues in the Open Access Library Journal. The Oller report described young women in Kenya who were vaccinated with this Talwar vaccine on the pretext of preventing maternal and neonatal (baby) tetanus. Many of the samples of the tetanus vaccine that tested positive for hCG was sourced from the Serum Institute of India. Posted on: May 30, 2018 11:33 AM The Bishop of Tasmania has published a list of 78 parish properties that could be sold to fund redress to victims of abuse. The majority of the properties in the provisional list are churches, but it also includes rectories, rental properties and vacant land. In a pastoral letter to the people of the diocese last month, Bishop Richard Condie revealed that the diocese is liable for around $8 million AUD (approximately 4.5 million GBP). The proposals will be debated by the diocesan Synod meeting in Launceston on Saturday. Redress is so important, Bishop Richard said. Its a vital step in providing restorative justice, recognition and support to survivors of sexual abuse. The Prophet Isaiah teaches that God loves justice and calls us to make recompense for those who have been wronged. As people committed to Gods restoration of the world, we have an obligation to provide this. He said: The only way we can raise this amount of capital is from funds held by the trustees on behalf of the diocese and parishes, through selling parish properties, and by direct parish contributions. The diocesan council believes that this is the wisest approach, and should be shared among the whole diocesan family, rather than falling in one or two areas, and is the best way to secure the ongoing viability of the diocese. It is also better for us to make a clear proactive decision, rather than waiting for others to seize our assets over which we would then have little control. The bishop has since issued two more pastoral letters to update the diocese. In one, he said that the diocese planned to use 25 per cent from the net proceeds to fund the redress scheme. A further 25 per cent will go into the New Ministry Development Fund, while the balance will be held in trust for future use by local parishes. The National Redress Scheme is one of the recommendations that came out of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse in Australia. Although national, it requires State governments to opt-in to the scheme before non-governmental institutions, such as churches can opt in. The Tasmanian government announced last week (22 May) that it was going to join the scheme. Responding to the announcement, Bishop Richard described it as truly a great day for survivors of child sexual abuse in Tasmania. Elsewhere in Australia, the upper house of the state parliament in Victoria the Legislative Council is still considering the scheme which was approved by the Lower House last week on the same day that the Melbourne Diocesan Council gave its final approval for the diocese to join the scheme. The Anglican Church and I personally have apologised for our failures to survivors of child sexual abuse, the Archbishop of Melbourne, Philip Freier, Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia, said. We have been working continuously for well over a decade to improve our response to survivors and our approach to redress, and are grateful for the work of the Victorian Inquiry and the Royal Commission. He said that the diocese believed that an independent and easy-to-access process for survivors, such as that proposed in the National Redress Scheme, was the right way forward. We are committed to joining it, he said. The New South Wales government opted into the National Redress Scheme in March, in a move that was welcomed by the Diocese of Sydney, which said it continues to be committed to meeting its responsibilities towards those who have suffered because of the appalling acts which have been perpetrated on vulnerable children in our care. In a statement, a spokesman said: For many years, the diocese has had a redress policy offering care and assistance for survivors of child sexual abuse and payments continue to be made from that scheme. The maximum amount available from our scheme is already $150,000 [AUD, approximately 85,000] which is in line with the Prime Ministers announcement today. The diocese looks forward to receiving further details of the arrangements of the scheme and working constructively with both state and federal governments on this issue. Liege: biased reporting and Benjamin Hermans last words How important is the fact that Benjamin Herman screamed Allahu Akbar as he murdered Soraya Belkacemi, Lucille Garcia and Cyril Vangriecken in the Belgian city of Liege? Jan Jambon, Belgiums interior ministers says Herman had murdered a man the night before the attack. The BBC says the authorities were working to establish a motive. Herman, a 31-year-old drug dealer, had been in jail but was let out for two days on Monday to prepare for an eventual release in 2020. According to RTBF, Herman had a history of violent behaviour and convictions for theft, vandalism and drugs offences. Benjamin Herman is dead. Why he did it is something we might never know. But can the media present a narrative? There are signs he was radicalised in prison, but is it that radicalisation which drove him to commit these acts? Mr Jambon told RTL radio. It could have been because he had nothing to look forward to, because he also killed someone the night before, the guys psychology and the fact he may have been on drugs. What Did The Killer Say? Reuters notes in a story that includes the phrase Jail to Jihad: A police source told Reuters that he had shouted Allahu Akbar the Muslim affirmation of faith during a gunbattle with officers at a school in downtown Liege on Tuesday after killing his three victims. Or as the BBC puts it: Police sources quoted in local media said the man was heard shouting Allahu Akbar (God is greatest in Arabic). The Guardian adds (paragraph 7): Witnesses said the attacker in Liege was dressed in black and was carrying a rucksack. Footage aired by the Belgian broadcaster RTBF showed him chanting Allahu Akbar God is greatest, in Arabic as he walked through the city. In the Telegraph the story begins: A suspected terrorist on day release from prison executed two female police officers with their own guns and shot dead a trainee teacher before he was killed in a shootout after taking two women hostage at a school in the centre of the Belgian city of Liege. The bloody rampage on Tuesday morning, which left another four officers wounded, was captured on videos on social media, which showed the black clad man waving a pistol in each hand and shouting Allahu Akbar before he was gunned down by elite officers. Belgiums federal prosecutors office has opened an terror investigation into the attack. No police sources to claim the killer yelled Allahu Akbar. It was broadcast on social media. The Sun makes the killers cry the main thrust. The headline declares: BELGIUM BLOODBATH Liege shooting Terrorist on two-day jail release shouting Allahu Akbar is shot dead after killing two cops and a man. The New York Times doesnt mention Hermans cry at all, whether it be an Arabic phrase or a Muslim declaration. To omit the killers last known words is a remarkable oversight. Compare that blinkered approach to the monocular Breitbart and its report headlined: Belgian Gunman Appeared on Multiple Reports on Radicalism, Killed 4th Person Before Attack. Its an eye-catching headline that the story below does not support. The Guardian states in its more factual headline: Belgium shooting: man kills passerby and two police officers in Liege. Best to stick to the facts. Via Sky News, we get this: Media reported that the suspect had been radicalised in prison, and an AFP source close to the investigation said he had been reported as belonging to the entourage of an Islamist recruiter. But justice minister Koen Geens said there was no consistent information for the claim, adding that the case was not clear cut and that Herman certainly was not someone who could clearly be qualified as radicalised. Such are the facts. Anorak Posted: 30th, May 2018 | In: News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink TIRANA - The capital of Albania is the first city outside of Italy to host a Dante Centre, an Italian language school and cultural centre sponsored by the Dante Alighieri Society, "to promote Italian language and culture in a new, dynamic, innovative and high-quality way, to bring the citizens of the world closer to Italy". Italian Ambassador to Albania Alberto Cutillo said the project "fills a void". "Finally we will have a primary school that can accompany students with the teaching of our language right from the beginning of their schooling," Cutillo said. Cutillo's comments came during the Dante Centre's inauguration ceremony, where several Albanian officials were on hand, including Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj. In Albania, Italian is the second most-studied language after English, chosen by 60% of students, with 27.8% of the population between the ages of 25-64 years speaking the language. Dante Alighieri Society President Andrea Riccardi said the choice of Tirana as the first site for a Dante Centre abroad "is a response to a series of factors". "First of all, it is the recognition of Albania as an important strategic area for the Dante Alighieri Society, given the close historic and current ties the country has with Italy," Riccardi said. "At the same time, the initiative aims to respond in a new and efficient way to the demand for Italian teaching that has been seen in recent years," he said. He said that in addition to the "precise task of monitoring and training teachers", there is also a "new challenge". "Founding a school that is a point of reference not only for those who study, but also for those who teach our language: a home for the Italian language".(ANSAmed). Paris authorities evacuate city's largest migrant camp Migrants to be housed at about 20 different sites (ANSAmed) - PARIS, MAY 30 - Law enforcement agents in Paris on Wednesday evacuated the largest migrant camp in the city, where about 1,700 people were living. The "Millenaire" camp was located around the Bassin de la Villette, one of the canals that crosses the city, in the 19th arrondissement. The evacuation operation, the 35th of its kind in Paris over the past three years, began just past 6 a.m. on Wednesday at the camp that has been at the centre of a political battle pitting the French government against the City of Paris. French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said the migrants evacuated in the operation would be placed in "temporary housing in about 20 sites in the capital and surrounding areas". The evacuation concluded around 9 a.m. and site clean-up began. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who is at loggerheads with Collomb over evacuations, criticised the government for the delay in undertaking the operation. "I think we could have avoided waiting four months to shelter these people," she said. Hidalgo had been requesting the evacuation and transfer of migrants at the camp for some time. Collomb authorised the preparation of 780 beds in municipal Paris, to which required space in schools and gyms will be added. During an initial phase, each migrant's situation will be evaluated individually. The migrants will then be redirected towards various reception centres throughout the area in order to begin the procedures for seeking asylum or choosing to leave the structures. Two other camps still remain in the city: one on the Canal Saint-Martin, with 800 migrants; and the other at Porte de la Chapelle, where about 300 to 400 migrants are currently living. Paris Prefect Michel Cadot said those two camps will be evacuated "as soon as possible, perhaps next week".(ANSAmed). Libya to vote on Dec. 10, accord in Paris goes unsigned Four leaders have 'informal agreement', Macron thanks Italy (ANSAmed) - PARIS, MAY 30 - An informal, unsigned agreement has been reached in Paris between Libya's four rival leaders for the way forward in the country, focusing on political and presidential elections to be held on December 10. The leaders met at Elysee Palace on Tuesday, and French President Emmanuel Macron thanked Italy for its "exemplary effort". Many observers noted that without a formal signed agreement, the conference may have been simply yet another occasion for an international meeting, group photo and official announcements without any concrete results or a workable political solution. Post-Gheddafi Libya has been fragmented and ungovernable, and still hasn't managed to find any stable solutions. The Paris conference, which was attended by the four rival leaders as well as representatives of 20 countries and six international organisations, managed to set a date for elections as part of a written accord that the four leaders committed to verbally but refused to sign formally. Despite the fact that the setting of the December 10 date does represent progress, the conditions under which the elections would actually take place are still very much to be seen. The unsigned agreement provides for "sanctions" for those who don't respect or try to hinder the electoral process, and also provides for guarantees that international observers will undertake to verify. The accord said no "obstacle" to the electoral process in Libya "will be tolerated" and that anyone who aims to hinder the elections "will have to account for it". Macron called Tuesday's summit "a historic meeting". "It's the first time these Libyan leaders accepted to work together and approved a joint declaration," Macron said. The four leaders - Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj; General Khalifa Haftar; the president of the house of representatives, Aguila Saleh; and the head of the council of state, Khaled al-Mishri - chose not to sign the declaration due to mutual non-recognition. Macron said the decision not to sign was based on two fundamental reasons. "First, some participants asked to be able to first share the joint declaration with their colleagues on Libyan soil. The second reason is that here today those who participated come from institutions that do not mutually recognize each other," Macron said. If the absence at the meeting of various Libyan factions operative on the ground - which they announced with open hostility against the "foreign" initiative - is added in, the road ahead would appear to be an uphill climb. Among all of the countries present, Macron singled out Italy, perhaps to cushion Italy's displeasure with France's solitary move in organizing the conference, which took place during a time in which Italy is without a government and therefore couldn't have a say. "I wish to recognize the exemplary effort" of Italy, Macron said, emphasising the "migratory crisis" the country is facing. Italy was represented at the conference by Italian Ambassador to France Teresa Castaldo.(ANSAmed). Rajoy vows not to resign, says will stay until 2020 No-confidence vote scheduled for Friday (ANSAmed) - MADRID, MAY 30 - Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on Wednesday vowed that he will not resign and that he intends to continue in his mandate until 2020, as debate is scheduled to begin Thursday on a no-confidence motion brought by Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez that will go to a vote on Friday. In a tense session in the Spanish Parliament over government control, Rajoy accused Sanchez of wanting to build a "Frankenstein government" with the backing of the Podemos party and Catalan separatists. Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias confirmed he is preparing a new no-confidence motion to bring down Rajoy if the one presented by Sanchez's PSOE party should fail in Friday's vote. The Podemos motion would propose an "instrumental" prime minister candidate who would have the mandate to call early elections as soon as possible. Contacts are already underway with the Ciudadanos party, which would also call early elections, according to reports in the Spanish press. Names are circulating in the press of possible neutral candidates who could take over the government for a brief period until elections could be held. If the vote in Madrid's Congress of Deputies on Friday approves the no-confidence motion, PSOE leader Sanchez would be nominated as early as Monday as prime minister, the Spanish press said. No previous Spanish government has been successfully overthrown with a "censure motion". According to Spanish daily La Vanguardia, if Congress votes to approve the no-confidence motion, Lower House Speaker Ana Pastor would inform Spain's King Filipe VI on Friday. He would then have to sign the nomination decree, which would take immediate effect.(ANSAmed). Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Titan Aviation has secured two new international Air Operator Certificates (AOC) and laid out its global growth strategy at EBACE 2018. Having recently obtained an AOC from San Marino and FAA Part 135 charter operator certification, adding to its existing EASA, Cayman and DGCA accreditations, Titan Aviations immediate growth strategy has already seen the Dubai-headquartered company - now in its 14th year of operation with Titan Aviation India launching nine years ago - open eight new bases across Europe and the USA, and hugely strengthen its operations team. We are growing and expanding into the global market with the latest two certifications facilitating our international aircraft management and charter business with aircraft registered in San Marino or the USA now flying all over the world, said Captain Sakeer C. Sheik, managing director, Titan Aviation. With offices in San Marino, Italy, Germany, France, the UK, Florida, New Jersey and New York, Titan now has 25 aircraft in its globally managed fleet, including Lineage 1000, Bombardier Global 6000, Legacy 650 and Gulfstream, with several available for charter. Our target is to have 20 jets under management in Europe within two years and 50 in the USA within the same timescale of 2020, explained Sheik. The new AOCs and offices leave us well placed to reach these aims. We are now servicing the main European and American business and leisure destinations preferred by our clients in the Middle East and India, while providing seamless access to and from the USA and Europe. Titans new global operations team heading up the growth programme includes: Captain Joachim Begrunde who becomes Head of Europe Base; Henri Lauras as President of Aircraft Sales; Ilaria Cecere who takes on the mantle of Support Services Manager for Europe; James Coak who becomes VP Business Development; Horm Irani, General Manager and Head of US Base; Louis Ridley, Chief Pilot, and Steve Zirelli who joins the Titan Board in the USA This is a highly-skilled cadre of multi-national experts who bring a deep understanding of US, European and global aviation to the business. As we look to greatly widen our wing print within a jet-speed timeframe, Titan is now offering 360-degree aviation solutions around-the-clock, said Sheik. Titans international growth also includes expanding its influence into the medevac arena, particularly in the UAE where a gap in the market has arisen with the withdrawal of Abu Dhabis Royal Jet from the sector. We are looking at medevac aircraft that can also be converted into a VIP charter aircraft and we are looking far beyond the Middle East, with our current footprint which is truly global, added Sheik. ]etex will open a new FBO adjacent to the main terminal at the Dublin Airport in Irelands lively capital city. The new terminal will provide private jet passengers a gateway to the home of Dublin Castle and city streets filled with music and mirth. Ireland is preparing for a surge in air traffic in the coming years, said Adel Mardini, Jetex CEO and President. Were excited to expand our FBO network to include Dublin. The Dublin Airport, located 6 miles north of Dublin, is Irelands busiest. Over 80,000 passengers pass through the airport every day. It has an extensive short and medium haul network and significant long haul traffic focused on North America, Middle East, and East Asia. Private jet traffic is around 3,500 departures a year and is expected to grow at a steady pace. Its the perfect time for Jetex to open here, said Brendan McQuaid, Managing Director for Jetexs Dublin FBO. Dublin is booming right now, the airport itself is scaling up, and there are so many jet operators and corporations that generate a lot of air traffic. We needed Jetex in Dublin. The opening of this FBO highlights the companys continuous expansion in the European market with Jetex facilities located in Italy, France and Spain. The new FBO will have a lounge for crew and for passengers, access to a world-class platinum lounge. The services at this location will include, ground handling, fuel, concierge, and full dispatch package. It should be operational in the next few weeks. Adel Mardini, Jetex CEO and President. Rolls-Royce has launched a new engine family for business aviation, with the introduction of the Pearl. The engine has been purpose-built and will be the sole engine for Bombardiers latest business jets, the Global 5500 aircraft and the Global 6500 aircraft. Rolls-Royce is the worlds leading engine supplier for business aviation, powering over 3,000 aircraft in service today, with a 42% market share. The Pearl 15 is the first of the planned state-of-the-art Pearl engine family for business aviation and marks the sixth new civil aerospace engine introduced by Rolls-Royce in the past 10 years. The introduction of this new engine family serves to reaffirm Rolls-Royces leading position in business aviation. The Pearl engine combines innovative technologies derived from Rolls-Royces Advance2 technology demonstrator programmes with proven features from the Rolls-Royce BR700, todays leading engine family in business aviation. Its pioneering technology, combined with outstanding performance, will support Bombardiers successful Global family of aircraft in reaching new standards in the ultra-long-range corporate jet market. Enabling travellers to travel farther, faster, quicker and quieter, the Pearl 15 will deliver up to 15,125lb of thrust (ISA +15), thanks to the most efficient engine core available across the business aviation sector. Despite delivering up to 9% more thrust during take-off than the BR700, the engine will be 2 decibels quieter and operators will benefit from a 7% improvement in specific fuel consumption (SFC). The engine will also deliver world-leading emissions performance, including best in class NOx emissions, despite propelling customers at speeds approaching the speed of sound (Mach 0.90). Chris Cholerton, President Civil Aerospace, Rolls-Royce, said: Our teams have worked hard behind the scenes to develop this new engine and we are proud, once again, to lead the way in business aviation. The Pearl engine is a pioneering product, bringing together the most eco-friendly and efficient technologies available today. The new engine, which has been developed at Rolls-Royces Centre of Excellence for Business Aviation engines in Dahlewitz, Germany, has undergone a comprehensive test programme and received EASA certification on 28 February 2018. The engine is currently undergoing flight tests at Bombardiers Flight Test Centre in Wichita, Kansas, supporting the planned entry into service at the end of 2019. Chris Cholerton added: The combination of outstanding performance, economy, and reliability levels make it the perfect fit for Bombardiers newest Global aircraft and, with the Pearl engine, we are extending our successful relationship with Bombardier, which started more than 20 years ago. Together we made history by creating a whole new class of aircraft and that success story enters a new chapter today. David Coleal, President, Bombardier Business Aircraft, said: The Global 5500 and Global 6500 aircraft have the longest range, the largest cabins and the smoothest ride in their class, and we are very proud that they will be powered by the advanced and efficient Pearl engine, purpose-built for these aircraft by our longstanding partners at Rolls-Royce. According to the Baltic Times newspaper website, Latvia will receive Stinger Man-portable air-defense missile systems (MANPADS) purchased from Denmark. The planned deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2018 when air defense systems will arrive in Latvia. U.S. Army soldiers prepare to fire a FIM-92 Stinger during a training exercise, Hohenfels, Germany, April 25, 2018. (Picture source U.S. MoD) In August 2017, Latvian Ministry of Defence and Danish Ministry of Defence have signed an agreement for the purchase of Stinger air defence systems which are in service with the Danish armed forces. Latvia would like to boost its air defense capabilities, a top priority for its defence forces. The Stinger air defense missile will be delivered to many military units of Latvia including the National Guard. According to the deal for acquisition of Stinger air-defence systems, Latvia will receive missiles together with launch systems. Along with purchase of the Stinger air-defence systems, Latvia is also working on acquisition of the necessary, support, maintenance and training equipment. Armed forces of NATO countries and other allies are helping Latvia with experience and personnel training required to operate the systems. The FIM-92 Stinger is a man-portable surface-to-air missile system (MANPADS) which was designed and manufactured by the American Company Raytheon. Developed in the United States, it entered service in 1981 and is used by the militaries of the United States and by 29 other countries. The "fire-and-forget" Stinger FIM-92 missile employs a passive infrared seeker to home in on its airborne target. A passive infrared seeker emits no radiation that a target aircraft can detect, and, instead, guides on the infrared energy (heat) emitted by the target. The Stinger missile itself has an outward targeting range of up to 4,800 m (15,700 feet) and can engage low altitude enemy threats at up to 3,800m (12,500 feet). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ARTESIA POLICE DEPARTMENT May 29 ARREST 4:39 a.m. Andrew Juras, 37, of Carlsbad, arrested on a magistrate warrant for possession of a controlled substance. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 12:05 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 1000 block of West Clayton Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. OPEN DOOR 12:06 a.m. Officer dispatched to 1404 S. 24th St. in reference to an open door. ALARM 1:09 a.m. Officer dispatched to 1218 S. 15th St. in reference to an alarm. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 1:50 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 800 block of West Lolita Avenue. in reference to suspicious activity. OPEN DOOR 2:08 a.m. Officer dispatched to 701 N. Ninth St. in reference to an open door. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 2:10 a.m. Officer dispatched to North First Street and West Texas Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. 2:26 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 2000 block of West Mann Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. 4:14 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 1500 block of North First Street in reference to suspicious activity. VANDALISM 5:29 a.m. Officer dispatched to 905 S. Third St., Apt. 1, in reference to vandalism. May 28 MINOR IN POSSESSION 12:06 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 1500 block of West Main Street in reference to a minor in possession of alcohol. SHOTS FIRED 2:17 a.m. Officer dispatched to South Roselawn Avenue and West Hermosa Drive in reference to shots fired in the area. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 2:20 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 2000 block of West Briscoe Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. SHOTS FIRED 2:27 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 1100 block of South 14th Street in reference to shots fired in the area. BURGLARY 3:05 a.m. Officer dispatched to 1106 S. 14th St. in reference to burglary. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 4:33 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 900 block of North 13th Street in reference to suspicious activity. PROPERTY INCIDENT 7 a.m. Officer dispatched to 1907 W. Briscoe Ave. in reference to a property incident. 8:45 a.m. Officer dispatched to Wal-Mart in reference to a property incident. ALARM 11:41 a.m. Officer dispatched to 117 W. Grand Ave. in reference to an alarm. VANDALISM 1:13 p.m. Officer dispatched to the Abo Apartments in reference to vandalism. 1:51 p.m. Officer dispatched to the Abo Apartments in reference to vandalism. 1:58 p.m. Officer dispatched to the Abo Apartments in reference to vandalism. DISTURBANCE 4:45 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 1000 block of West Quay Avenue in reference to a disturbance. LARCENY 4:57 p.m. officer dispatched to Wal-Mart in reference to larceny. UNWANTED SUBJECT 6:11 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 200 block of North 10th Street in reference to an unwanted subject. LOUD NOISE 7:05 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 2000 block of West Bullock Avenue in reference to a loud noise. 9:42 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 1100 block of West Bullock Avenue in reference to a loud noise. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 11:05 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 1300 block of West Washington Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. BREAKING AND ENTERING 11:15 p.m. Officer dispatched to 2801 W. Dallas Ave. in reference to breaking and entering. OPEN DOOR 11:36 p.m. Officer dispatched to 2802 W. Missouri Ave. in reference to an open door. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 11:42 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 2300 block of West Bullock Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. May 27 ARRESTS 5:25 a.m. Gilbert Chavez, 38, of Artesia, arrested on a municipal warrant for failure to pay fines. 12:07 p.m. Andrew Longoria, 19, of Artesia, arrested on a municipal warrant for failure to pay fines. 12:28 p.m. Valerie Miller, 35, of Artesia, arrested on two municipal warrants for failure to pay fines. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 12:15 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 200 block of North Fourth Street in reference to suspicious activity. 1:58 a.m. Officer dispatched to Tractor Supply Co. in reference to suspicious activity. WANTED SUBJECT 4:18 a.m. Officer dispatched to Wal-Mart in reference to a wanted subject. BURGLARY 10:11 a.m. Officer dispatched to North Fifth Street and West Hank Avenue in reference to burglary. DISTURBANCE 11:10 a.m. Officer dispatched to the Abo Apartments in reference to a disturbance. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 11:41 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 900 block of South Roselawn Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. VANDALISM 1:07 p.m. Officer dispatched to 306 S. Eighth St. in reference to vandalism. BURGLARY 1:59 p.m. Officer dispatched to 2101 W. Centre Ave. in reference to burglary. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 2:57 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 1000 block of North Seventh Street in reference to suspicious activity. DISTURBANCE 3:32 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 1200 block of West Missouri Avenue in reference to a disturbance. ALARM 3:38 p.m. officer dispatched to 2404 Sierra Vista Road in reference to an alarm. LARCENY 6:27 p.m. Officer dispatched to 2202 W. Centre Ave. in reference to larceny. ACCIDENT 6:30 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 1800 block of West Runyan Avenue in reference to a motor vehicle accident. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 8:46 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 2300 block of West Main Street in reference to suspicious activity. ALARM 8:58 p.m. Officer dispatched to 206 Fletcher Road in reference to an alarm. DOMESTIC 8:58 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 1900 block of West Runyan Avenue in reference to a domestic dispute. SHOTS FIRED 9:23 p.m. Officer dispatched to North 10th Street and West Texas Avenue in reference to shots fired in the area. ALARM 11:36 a.m. Officer dispatched to 2401 Cerro Road in reference to an alarm. May 26 LOUD NOISE 12:01 a.m. Officer dispatched to South 17th Street and West Booker Avenue in reference to a loud noise. BATTERY 1:46 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 2700 block of West Main Street in reference to battery. LOUD NOISE 2:03 a.m. Officer dispatched to the Abo Apartments in reference to a loud noise. OPEN DOOR 4:27 a.m. Officer dispatched to South 13th Street and West Missouri Avenue in reference to an open door. ACCIDENT 9:08 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 400 block of East Richey Avenue in reference to a motor vehicle accident. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 9:23 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 2400 block of Parkland Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. LARCENY 10:29 a.m. Officer dispatched to 1205 W. Yucca Ave. in reference to larceny. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 11:20 a.m. Officer dispatched to North 20th Street and West Mahone Drive in reference to suspicious activity. LARCENY 12 p.m. Officer dispatched to Tractor Supply Co. in reference to larceny. ACCIDENT 12:11 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 700 block of Carper Drive in reference to a motor vehicle accident. 1:07 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 2200 block of West Centre Avenue in reference to a motor vehicle accident. DISTURBANCE 1:50 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 1400 block of West Champ Clark Avenue in reference to a disturbance. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 3 p.m. Officer dispatched to Artesia General Hospital in reference to suspicious activity. ACCIDENT 3:47 p.m. Officer dispatched to North 26th Street and West Richey Avenue in reference to a motor vehicle accident. DISTURBANCE 5:09 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 500 block of South 26th Street in reference to a disturbance. ALARM 6:06 p.m. Officer dispatched to Artesia Family Health Center in reference to an alarm. LARCENY 8:01 p.m. Officer dispatched to Wal-Mart in reference to larceny. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 8:39 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 700 block of Monterrey Way in reference to suspicious activity. 8:51 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 2200 block of West Ray Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. 9:19 p.m. Officer dispatched to South 20th Street and West Briscoe Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. LARCENY 9:25 p.m. Officer dispatched to Hollands Nail & Spa, 1308 W. Main St., in reference to larceny. OPEN DOOR 9:47 p.m. Officer dispatched to 2203 W. Briscoe Ave. in reference to an open door. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 10:01 p.m. Officer dispatched to South 26th Street and West Menefee Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. 10:04 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 1200 block of West Missouri Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. LOUD NOISE 10:04 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 400 block of York Street in reference to a loud noise. DISTURBANCE 11:38 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 900 block of South 11th Street in reference to a disturbance. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 11:53 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 1200 block of West Missouri Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. May 25 ARRESTS 9:41 a.m. Jennifer Renai Kimble, 32, of Artesia, arrested on a magistrate warrant for failure to pay fines. 10:51 a.m. Shacolby Stall, 19, of Artesia, arrested on a municipal warrant for failure to comply. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 8:08 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 1100 block of West Sears Avenue in reference to suspicious activity. WANTED SUBJECT 9:47 a.m. Officer dispatched to the 1800 block of West Sears Avenue in reference to a wanted subject. VANDALISM 10:23 a.m. Officer dispatched to 2401 Industrial Ave. in reference to vandalism. HAZARD 10:39 a.m. Officer dispatched to North Roselawn Avenue and West Main Street in reference to a hazard. LARCENY 10:39 a.m. Officer dispatched to 112 Osborn St. in reference to larceny. ALARM 11:59 a.m. Officer dispatched to 902 W. Hermosa Drive in reference to an alarm. LARCENY 12:04 p.m. Officer dispatched to Fenns Country Market in reference to larceny. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 1:26 p.m. officer dispatched to the 800 block of North Eighth Street in reference to suspicious activity. 2:06 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 400 block of South Second Street in reference to suspicious activity. BURGLARY 2:31 p.m. Officer dispatched to 2401 Industrial Ave. in reference to burglary. DISTURBANCE 4:50 p.m. officer dispatched to the Village West Apartments in reference to a disturbance. HARASSMENT 5:26 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 3200 block of West Main Street in reference to harassment. SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY 10:05 p.m. Officer dispatched to the 600 block of North Eighth Street in reference to suspicious activity. ALARM 10:18 p.m. Officer dispatched to 2404 Sierra Vista Road in reference to an alarm. LOUD NOISE 10:37 p.m. Officer dispatched to South 17th Street and West Booker Avenue in reference to a loud noise. An internal investigation was being conducted into the issue and the crew was aiding in the probe. Jet Airways has grounded four of its crew members, including a senior commander, for allegedly clicking selfies during a training flight. New Delhi: Jet Airways has grounded four of its crew members, including a senior commander, for allegedly clicking selfies during a training flight on April 19 and violating aviation safety norms, airline sources said on Wednesday. However, an airline spokesperson said that an internal investigation was being conducted into the issue and the crew was aiding in the probe. "Acting in the interest of guest safety, Jet Airways has placed four crew members off their scheduled duties. The crew members are aiding an internal investigation being conducted by the airline in connection with certain events aboard training flight of April 19," he said. "At Jet Airways, safety is of paramount interest," the spokesperson said. The airline sources said the incident took place during a training flight from Leh to Delhi. The crew -- a senior commander and a three trainee pilots -- were allegedly clicking selfies during the course of the flight, they said. The MoU was signed by the Director General of CII and the Vice Chairman of KADIN. India and Indonesia on Wednesday announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Confederation of Indian Industry and KADIN to promote bilateral economic, trade and technological cooperation between the two nations. (Photo: ANI) New Delhi: India and Indonesia on Wednesday announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Confederation of Indian Industry and KADIN to promote bilateral economic, trade and technological cooperation between the two nations. The MoU was signed by the Director General of CII and the Vice Chairman of KADIN. Under the MoU, both countries will promote technological cooperation, exchange of information and visits on economic and commercial cooperation, support activities for trade promotion, suggest and recommend possible partners etc. The CII has also announced a decision to open its first overseas office in Jakarta, Indonesia, with its representative from India. Regular convening of the forum and expansion of business sectors as it could function as constructive measure to tap more opportunities and potentials in developing bilateral cooperation in trade and investment is the agenda of the MoU. Along with this, an MOU between the Directors of Himalaya Drug Company and PT Kalbe Farma was signed to work towards establishing a joint venture company in marketing, establish research center and local manufacturing. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold public events, including a community interaction with people of Indian origin and NRIs on Wednesday evening. He will further attend the India-Indonesia CEO Forum with President Widodo. Both India and Indonesia have warm and cordial bilateral relations. The two countries also share close cultural ties as well. The actor has lent his support to Central Railways' anti-trespassing campaign, for which he has recorded a message. New Delhi: Veteran actor Amitabh Bachchan has become the face of Central Railways' anti-trespassing campaign. Trespassing on railway tracks is a major cause of deaths on Mumbai suburban rail network. There have been several campaigns to raise awarenessa among Mumbai locals about using foot-over-bridges instead of crossing railway tracks. But no significant change is seen after earlier campaigns. Central Railway has launched an initiative 'Ek Safar Rail Ke Saath', where celebrities will share their experience about Indian Railways and their journey in a short film. At the end of the film, they will give a message for railway commuters. The megastar has also done a recording for the same initiative at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) station. In the recording, the actor has made the commuters aware about the use of foot-over bridges and asked them not to trespass on railway tracks and follow all other safety measures prescribed by railways. Railways are trying to make sure that this appeal from the actor will be very effective, and people will stop trespassing on tracks after listening to his appeal. The 24-year-old M Taraque was released from the Apollo Gleneagles hospital during the day, a month after the critical brain surgery. The doctor revealed they had to get on with the surgery without much prior knowledge about the extent of the patient's brain damage as it was difficult to conduct a CT scan with such a big piece of metal stuck in his head. (Photo: File | Representational) Kolkata: A 3.5-feet-long iron rod was successfully removed by doctors in Kolkata from the skull of a youth, who suffered severe brain damage after the metal pierced through his forehead and the cranium in a car accident and the patient discharged on Tuesday. The 24-year-old M Taraque was released from the Apollo Gleneagles hospital during the day, a month after the critical brain surgery, said to be unprecedented in eastern India. "Taraque suffered a massive car accident on April 28 in which a 3.5 ft long iron rod of the roadside divider broke and went through his forehead leaving him profusely bleeding and with very little life expectancy when he was brought to the hospital," said Binod Kumar Singhania, Consultant Neuro Surgeon at the hospital. The doctor revealed they had to get on with the surgery without much prior knowledge about the extent of the patient's brain damage as it was difficult to conduct a CT scan with such a big piece of metal stuck in his head. They eventually removed the rod through a unique endoscopic process with proper haemostasis - a process which causes bleeding to stop. "The case was extremely tricky as the biggest challenge was to minimise the bleeding inside the skull after removing the metal rod. As the brain remains enclosed inside the skull, too much bleeding could have damaged a large number of brain cells that may have led to the patient's death," the doctor said. Singhania admitted that he hasn't performed such an operation in his 30-year-long career as a neurosurgeon. "The operation was successful and it was found that the patient did not suffer any major vessel damage in the accident. He is currently stable. However, there is a problem with the movements of his speech and the right side limbs, which would need post-operative care like physiotherapy and speech therapy," he said. Another doctor in the hospital lauded the success of the operation as a "miracle" and stressed that such accident victims should be immediately transferred to a specialised medical care without any attempt to remove the rod. "It is a miraculous success as most patients with such injuries can't be saved. It is important that he was immediately brought to the hospital and no attempts were made to remove the rod from his skull. "Otherwise, the situation would have been fatal as the patient would have profusely bled from the wound," added Suresh Ramasubban, senior consultant of pulmonary critical care department in the hospital. The Air India plane returned to Delhi after it was airborne for almost 40 minutes. The airlines said that all the passengers were safe. The number of passengers on board could not be immediately known. (Photo: File) New Delhi: A Kolkata-bound Air India flight, which took off from the New Delhis Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) on Wednesday morning, returned to the aerodrome due to a technical issue, a source said. The Dreamliner B787-800 aircraft, which took off at 7.10 am, landed back safely at 8.50 am, the source said, adding that all passengers were safe. The flight AI401 was scheduled to depart for Kolkata from New Delhi at 6.50 am but took off after a delay of 20 minutes. However, after it was airborne for almost 40 minutes, the pilot announced that the aircraft was returning to Delhi due to a technical snag, the source said. The number of passengers on board could not be immediately known. Air India spokesperson was not available for comments. The understanding was reached between the two sides during the two-day talks held in Beijing on May 28-29. The two sides carried out detailed and extensive discussions on the next steps which would make up the formal negotiation phase on the social security agreement that is expected to begin next year. (Photo: File | Representational) Beijing/ New Delhi: India and China have agreed to start formal negotiations on a bilateral social security agreement aimed at protecting Indian professionals and skilled workers abroad. The understanding was reached between the two sides during the two-day talks held in Beijing on May 28-29, a press release from Indian Embassy said in Beijing. During the talks, the Indian delegation led by Vinod K Jacob, Joint Secretary (economic diplomacy and states division) of the Ministry of External Affairs, and a Chinese delegation led by Ma Hezu, Deputy Director General, Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security exchanged views on the social security systems in India and China and their experiences with finalising and signing bilateral social security agreements with other countries. The two sides carried out detailed and extensive discussions on the next steps which would make up the formal negotiation phase on the social security agreement that is expected to begin next year, it said. So far, India has signed social security agreements with 18 countries from different parts of the world and is currently engaged in discussions with a number of other countries including Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Mexico, Peru and Thailand, the release said. The bilateral social security agreements are aimed at protecting the interests of Indian professionals, skilled workers working abroad by providing them benefits like avoidance of double social security contributions and facilitating remittances of accumulated social security contribution. BJP and other right wing organisations claim that these were collectively and deliberately forgotten by the country. The books now carry an additional 100 words on the Maratha leader Shivaji, his guerilla warfare tactics and how he started his military and political career at an early age. Shivaji's portrait has also been added to this chapter. (Photo: File) Mumbai: A fresh set of nationalist icons rose to renewed emphasis in the revised NCERT syllabus. BJP and other right wing organisations claim that these were collectively and deliberately forgotten by the country and include Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda, freedom fighters Lala Lajpat Rai and Vallabhbhai Patel, Peshwa and Maratha general Bajirao Ballal, Jat king Suraj Mal, Rajput icon Maharana Pratap and Maratha leader Chhatrapati Shivaji. In a study conducted by The Indian Express, where they compared old and new versions of 25 textbooks meant for Classes 6 to 10, across five subjects - History, Geography, Political Science, Science and English. The analysis of the study indicates that the revision is more noticeable in the case of Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose. - Chapter 3 of Our Past-III, part II, the Class 8 History textbook which introduces Sri Aurobindo with a picture and his ideals on national educationl. "In a speech delivered on January 15, 1908 in Bombay, Aurobindo Ghose stated that the goal of national education was to awaken the spirit of nationality among the students. This required a contemplation of the heroic deeds of our ancestors Aurobindo Ghose emphasised that although the students should remain connected to their own roots, they should also take the fullest advantage of modern scientific discoveries and Western experiments in popular governments, says the textbook. - The older version of the same chapter and section invests 21 words to describe the feats of Ramakrishna Mission and Swami Vivekananda. The new version carries an additional 250 words with special emphasis on a New York Herald report on Vivekananda's speech at World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. - Chandra Shekhar Azad, Sukhdev and Rajguru's names have been added to the Chapter 11 of the same book while earlier it mentioned only "Bhagat Singh and his comrades." - Chapter 10 of the Class 7 History textbook, Our Past-II, introduces Suraj Mal (under the section titled The Jats) as the king under whom the power of Jats reached its zenith. Suraj Mal built a number of forts and palaces and the famous Lohagarh fort in Bharatpur is regarded as one of the strongest forts built in this region, it states. - Chapters 3 and 10 of the same book now carries an additional 100 words on the Maratha leader Shivaji, his guerilla warfare tactics and how he started his military and political career at an early age. Shivaji's portrait has also been added to this chapter. - The section on Marathas in the same chapter talks about the role of Peshwas in building the Maratha empire. The revised edition mentions Peshwa Baji Rao I as a great general known for his military campaign against Malwa, Bundelkhand, Gujarat and the Portuguese. The section credits him with expanding the kingdom beyond the Vindhyas. Maharana Pratap has also been introduced in the last chapter of the Class 7 History book, in the section titled The Watan Jagirs of the Rajputs. This section is on the influential Rajput kings, especially those from Amber and Jodhpur, who served under the Mughals and in exchange were permitted to enjoy considerable autonomy in their watan jagirs. Here, Maharana Pratap of Mewar has been introduced as an exception, who did not give in to Mughal authority. A series of envoys were sent to the Rana to persuade him to accept Mughal suzerainty, but he stood his ground, it states. Shiv Sena and Hindu Janajagruti Sangha had earlier criticised by the Class 7 History book for having insufficient or no information on Shivaji and Maharana Pratap but rather investing on Mughal rulers. Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh has also stressed on many occassions that the Rajput warrior has not got his due in history. NCERT has also added more information on Lala Lajpat Rai and Vallabbhai Patel in Chapter 3 of the Class 10 book. Paika rebellion of Odisha and Khurda uprising of 1817 have been introduced in the Class 8 History textbook Our Past-III, Part II. These were resistance movements by the people of Odisha against the colonial rule and was led by Buxi Jagabandhu, the commander of the erstwhile king of Khurda. This event has recently been utilised extensively by the BJP and the BJD in Odisha as Jagabandhu's great granddaughter joined the BJP in 2017 and then the Chief Minister writing to the HRD Ministry, asking that Paiks rebellion should be declared as first War of Independence. NCERT sources have said that all the changes and revisions are based on feedback received by the council in 2017. As you are aware, personalities such as Aurobindo Ghose and Swami Vivekananda were missing from the History textbooks. We have tried to correct that. We can assure you that all changes made are based on public feedback and suggestions, an NCERT source told The Indian Express and did not wish to be identified. A total of 1,334 changes have been made over a span of 182 textbooks. Maximum changes (573) have been made to Science books, followed by Social Science (316) and Sanskrit (163). Other changes & additions NCERT has added portraits of Rani of Kittur, freedom fighter Veer Surendra Sai, Rani Laxmi Bai, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Peshwa Nana Sahib and Veer Kunwar Singh, a hero of the 1857 rebellion, across different chapters of the Class 8 History book Our Past-III, Part II. Chapter 4 of Class 7 History, Our Past-II, has new material on Akbar commissioning translation of many Sanskrit works such as Mahabharata, Ramayana, Lilavati and Yoga Vashisht into Persian. Chapter 8 (Devotional Paths to the Divine) of Our Past-II has a new paragraph on the Vaishnava poet-saints of Maharashtra such as Dnyaneshwar, Namdev and Tukaram. The same chapter also has new information on the Rishi order of Sufism that flourished in Kashmir in the 15th and 16th centuries. Chapter 8 (Devotional Paths to the Divine) of the Class 8 History book has included more material on Sankaradeva, a Bhakti saint from Assam, whose teachings were based on Bhagavad Gita and Bhagavat Purana. Chapter 6 of the Class 7 History textbook talks about the keen interest taken by Vijayanagara rulers in building tanks and canals. The police, in some cases, ignored rules on the use of force and instead fired at the heads of protesters rather than their legs. Ten people were killed on the day of the shootings, and a further three have died since, making this one of the most deadly environmental protests in the country. (Photo: File/PTI) Tuticorin: Police in the port city of Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu gave no warning last Tuesday before firing with live ammunition on protesters seeking the closure of a copper smelter owned by London-listed Vedanta Resources Plc, according to 16 witnesses interviewed by Reuters. The police also appear to have ignored rules on the use of force to quell protests by, in some cases, firing at the heads of protesters rather than their legs. Friends and relatives of two people who died said they had been shot in the face. Warning protesters before firing is stipulated in the current federal manual for crowd control, and it is also outlined in Section 129 of criminal procedure code, according to a home ministry official in New Delhi, who declined to be identified. "It is mandatory," the official stressed. Vappala Balachandran, a former deputy police commissioner in Mumbai, added that the manual gives detailed instructions about how force should be used. "First baton charge, then tear gas and when everything fails, firing. The constables have to squat on the ground placing one knee on the floor, take aim on the legs to incapacitate the rioters and fire," he said. Ten people were killed on the day of the shootings, and a further three have died since, making this one of the most deadly environmental protests in the country since at least 14 were killed by the police in Nandigram in West Bengal in 2007 in a demonstration against plans for a chemicals hub. Several state and district officials declined to comment on what happened that day, citing a pending investigation. Sandeep Nanduri, who was installed as the new district chief for Thoothukudi after the protest, told Reuters the sequence of events leading up to the firing has not yet been established. (Photo: File/PTI) The Home Ministry has asked the Tamil Nadu government to submit a report on the police firing, a ministry spokesman said. He said the ministry wouldn't say anything else at this stage. The government-funded National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) said on Tuesday it will send a team of investigators to Thoothukudi to carry out its own probe. Vedanta's Sterlite Copper smelter is one of only two major copper smelters in India and it had announced plans to double its capacity. The Tamil Nadu government ordered that the plant be shut permanently on environmental grounds on Monday, and officials physically sealed the smelter, saying it was listening to residents' complaints. Vedanta, in which Indian-born resources magnate Anil Agarwal has a controlling stake, has been accused by local residents and environmentalists of polluting the city's air and ground water. The state pollution control board in April rejected the company's request to renew its license to operate, saying it had not complied with environmental laws on five counts. The company has denied it is in breach of any environmental laws. Agarwal in a video on Twitter last Thursday expressed sadness about the protesters' deaths, saying "it was absolutely unfortunate" and his full sympathy is with the families of those killed. He said he is committed to the local community and the environment, and to abiding by the law. In response to the state shuttering the plant, Vedanta said on Monday that it will study the order and decide on its next course of action. Stormed government offices On May 22, the protest quickly got unruly and out of police control as the demonstrators reached the district offices. The protesters had been given permission to rally in a playground in the city but not to gather outside the district government offices, police said. The playground could hold only 2,000 and the protesters said numbers swelled to at least 50,000 on the 100th day of their campaign against the smelter - a campaign that began when the company announced plans for the expansion. Police and protesters threw stones at each other, seven witnesses said, and protesters stormed the offices and threatened to get into an apartment building where Vedanta employees live, police and a Vedanta official added. (Photo: File/PTI) Four police officials and two people working at the district headquarters said police fired only after protesters threw stones at the office building. Most of the 16 witnesses said police moved straight from using tear gas and sticks to live ammunition to try to control protesters. Police and other officials haven't challenged this. Reuters was unable to determine what or who prompted the police to fire on protesters, why live ammunition and not rubber bullets was deployed, and why some people were shot in the head. One police officer speaking on condition of anonymity said police had to act to restore order. "Do you expect us to take it lying down and die in a riot situation? Of course we will hit back," he said. Initially, local police and state officials defended the use of live ammunition. Chief Minister Edappadi K Palanisamy told reporters on the day of the protest that the police had been forced to act after it turned violent. And on the same day, state Fisheries Minister D Jayakumar said it had been "unavoidable" for police to fire on protesters. In the past few days, though, Tamil Nadu officials have declined to respond to detailed questions posed by Reuters about the police actions on that day, including deputy chief minister O Paneerselvam during and after a news conference on Monday. Fired from terrace Six of the witnesses - a mixture of protesters and bystanders - said in separate conversations that they saw gunmen shooting from behind trees. Two other witnesses said they saw a man shooting down on the crowd from the terrace of the district authority offices. Some of the gunmen, who carried pistols and rifles, were in police uniform, while others were in plainclothes, the witnesses said. One man, who said he lost a relative in the shootings, described seeing someone firing from the top of a van. "They were shooting from the top of a van, police were not even wearing uniforms and they gave no warning," said the 43-year-old man who gave his name as Gopal but was afraid to give his full name, citing fear of the authorities. Television channels have also shown a man, armed with an assault rifle, lying on the roof of a police bus in a marksman's position. "They started shooting at us without any warning. They came with an intent to kill as if we were terrorists," said 47-year old K Selvam, a labourer who joined the protest and was shot in the leg. None of the witnesses said the police used loudspeakers or other methods to give directions to the protesters. Such warnings are typical when police engage in crowd control. The public uproar that has resulted from the killings last Tuesday prompted the Tamil Nadu government to replace both Thoothukudi's police superintendent and the district's top administrative official. It provided no reason for the removals. The officials who had been replaced did not answer repeated calls seeking comment. The closure of the smelter means India will have to get more copper from overseas, said Goutam Chakraborty, a securities analyst with broker Emkay Global, boosting its import bill. The metal is essential for a country developing rapidly as it is used in everything from housing to autos. Horrific injuries Among those who died on Tuesday was a 17-year-old girl, J Snowlin, who was shot in her face, according to her mother J Vanitha. She died while trying to flee from the firing at the district offices, according to her mother and a school friend who was with her during the protest. A 43-year old fisherman said his friend Tamilarasan was mowed down in what appeared to be "blind shooting" by the police. "He was standing behind me, I heard a shot and I turned around, he had dropped to the ground. He had been shot in his face" the fisherman said. He requested anonymity, citing fear of retribution by the police. The state government confirmed to Reuters that a man called Tamilarasan, aged 42, died in Tuesday's violence. It is still unclear how many died from gunshot wounds, or where they died. Some people were beaten with sticks and iron rods and may have died as a result. Officials said the cause of death for the 13 would be known only after autopsies were completed. Not everyone died around the district offices - there were reports of deaths in at least two other parts of the city. Doctors at the city's main hospital, Thoothukudi Medical College, said they dealt with some horrific injuries that day. There were people shot in the head, in the groin, and in the legs. People with broken spines, fractured arms and limbs and ribcage damage were also being treated in the hospital. Altogether there at least 102 injured in addition to the dead, with 19 of them in critical condition, the state government said. The move to enhance ties with Jakarta is significant given the increased Chinese assertiveness in Southeast Asia. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo held talks in Jakarta on Wednesday, after which the two countries decided to establish a New Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and announced the setting up of a joint task force to undertake projects for port-related infrastructure in and around Sabang (a strategically-located Indonesian island at the northern tip of Sumatra, near the Malacca Straits, to which New Delhi will now gain access). Sources said India is only the second country after China with which Indonesia has established a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. It was also decided to boost connectivity between Sabang island and Indias Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which are a few hundred nautical miles apart. While the development of the strategically-located port is expected to benefit India economically, there is no official word yet on whether this could translate in the future to Indian military access to the port. Crucial global shipping lines pass through the Malacca Straits. The move to enhance ties with Jakarta is significant given the increased Chinese assertiveness in Southeast Asia. Significantly, both countries also issued a Shared Vision of India-Indonesia Maritime Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific to strengthen the existing security architecture in the Indo-Pacific. The two nations also signed 15 pacts, including one on defence, that relates to consultation on strategic defence and military issues of common interest and exchange of strategic information. The two leaders also agreed to hold annual summit meetings, including on margins of multilateral events. In what is seen as a veiled message to Beijing, both New Delhi and Jakarta jointly stressed adherence to the rights and obligations under international law, including the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) while reiterating the importance of achieving a free, open, transparent, rules-based, peaceful, prosperous and inclusive Indo-Pacific region. It was also decided to strengthen the existing naval cooperation, including the bilateral coordinated patrols initiated in 2002 between the navies of the two countries as well as commencement of regular bilateral naval exercises. A joint statement stated: Both leaders agreed to strengthen cooperation in all areas by establishing a New Comprehensive Strategic Partnership to take Indonesias and Indias bilateral relationship into a new era. Indonesia and India are not just close neighbours but fellow democracies with shared interests and a common future. It added: The leaders noted the successful visit of coordinating minister of maritime affairs of Indonesia to India on 17-19 May 2018. In this regard, the leaders appreciated the decision to set up a joint task force to undertake projects for port-related infrastructure in and around Sabang. The leaders welcomed the first Trilateral Senior Officials Strategic Dialogue involving Indonesia-India-Australia in Bogor, Indonesia, on 27 November 2018 and underlined the importance of open and frank dialogue as well as exchange of best practices among like-minded democracies, the joint statement significantly said. Agreements were signed between the two nations in the fields of defence, space, science, health and railways. The proposed Citizenship Bill has triggered massive protests in Assam with people accusing it of being discriminatory on the grounds of religion. Guwahati: Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal said on Wednesday that Union home minister Rajnath Singh had assured him that the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016, proposing to grant citizenship to minorities from neighbouring countries, would be finalised and placed before Parliament only after due consultation with all stakeholders and addressing concerns raised by the people of Assam on its provisions. Saying that the Union home minister had assured him about this at a meeting to review the administrative and security plans for the updating of the National Register of Citizens in New Delhi, Mr Sonowal said: The home minister said that there should be no apprehension in the minds of the people of Assam about the Citizenship Bill. The home minister assured us that before taking any step, the people of Assam will be taken into confidence. All stakeholders will be consulted. The proposed Citizenship Bill has triggered massive protests in Assam with people accusing it of being discriminatory on the grounds of religion. The BJPs ally, the Asom Gana Parishad, has also been agitating, and saying that it violated the Assam Accord as it sought to confer citizenship on illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The Union home ministry, meanwhile, in a statement said the meeting on Wednesday attended by senior officers of the MHA and the Assam government had agreed that adequate opportunities must be given to the people to file claims and objections to the final NRC draft and also their proper disposal as per the law. A campaign should also be launched to inform and educate people on the process of filing claims and objections, it was emphasised. Mr Sonowal requested the home minister to set up a committee to make recommendations to implement Clause 6 of the Assam Accord, which provides for constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards to protect, preserve and promote the cultural, social and linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people. Mr Singh assured the chief minister that the committee would be set up at the earliest in consultation with the state government. Rajnath Singh hailed Atal Behari Vajpayee for introducing Indias economic potential to the entire world. Lucknow: Union home minister Rajnath Singh, on Tuesday, said that former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was responsible for the mobile phone revolution in the country. It was Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee who introduced Indias economic potential to the entire world. He put the focus on road connectivity and Prime Minister Narendra Modi took it forward, Mr Singh said, while addressing a press conference here to highlight the achievements of four years of Modi rule. Mr Singh pointed out that while Mr Vajpayee had brought the Indian economy into the top ten countries of the world, the Modi government had taken it to the top seven level. At the rate at which the Indian economy is growing, we will soon make a place for ourselves in the top three nations. India has already emerged as the most attractive country for investments. The current account deficit and fiscal deficit is fully under control in fact, the current account deficit has turned into a surplus, he explained. Mr Singh said that PM Modi has ushered in a new era though Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar and Mobile connectivity which aided direct benefit transfer. Sampark se Samarthan aims to highlight Modi govts achievements. BJP president Amit Shah meets former Army chief, Gen (retd.) Dalbir Singh Suhag with wife Namita during his Sampark for Samarthan campaign to generate awareness about the NDA governments achievements, in New Delhi, on Tuesday, May 29. (Photo: PTI) New Delhi: With an eye on the 2019 Lok Sabha election, BJP president Amit Shah on Tuesday launched a massive Sampark se Samarthan (contact for support), personal outreach programme to highlight the achievements of the Narendra Modi led government in the last four years. Launching his partys massive outreach programme, Mr Shah met former Army chief Dalbir Singh Suhag and Constitutional expert and former secretary general Lok Sabha, Subhash Kashyap. He handed both few booklets on the achievements of the Modi government. Mr Shah will personally contact at least 50 people as part of the contact for support programme. Launched the nationwide campaign Sampark for Samarthan, a door-to-door initiative aimed at making people aware of the transformative initiatives undertaken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi government in the last four year, tweeted the BJP president. The BJP has been celebrating the completion of four years of the Modi government with the theme Saaf Niyat, Sahi Vikas (Clean intent, right development). About 4,000 BJP functionaries, including chief ministers, deputy chief ministers, Union ministers, MLAs, senior leaders till booth level, across the country will contact one lakh significant people from different fields to inform them about the governments achievements. Beside this, nearly 50 lakh party cadre will be reaching out to public with the acheivements of the Narendra Modi government. Mr Shah is also scheduled to visit partys state units from next month to review the tasks given to states leadership as part of his last years nationwide tour of partys state units to take stock of partys organisational strength and its poll preparedness. Leaders of both parties have agreed on 22 ministries for Congress and 12 for JD (S). BENGALURU: The agonising wait of every Kannadiga for a functional and full fledged government which can address their problems and apprehensions, continues with the JD(S)-Congress coalition unable to come to an understanding on portfolio allocation-particularly the contentious issue of who should get the all powerful finance portfolio, which determines the fund distribution among various government departments. With leaders of Congress and JD (S) digging their heels in on key portfolios, the coalition government headed by H.D. Kumaraswamy completed a week without any major decisions, with the administration now in slumber for almost two months ever since the code of conduct came into play ahead of the May 12 Assembly polls. It's not only the finance portfolio which is proving to be a stumbling block for the coalition, there are problems over allotment of other key ministries as well with parleys at different levels making little headway. What has made matters reach this point is the haste on the part of senior Congress leaders in New Delhi to forge the alliance without evolving a formula on sharing portfolios, said sources. Leaders of both parties have agreed on 22 ministries for Congress and 12 for JD (S) but the lack of clarity on allocation of portfolios has upset state leaders of both parties. The fact that differences remain unresolved was confirmed by Congress general secretary in-charge of Karnataka, K.C. Venugopal, during an interview to Deccan Chronicle. He said discussions are underway to arrive at a consensus on sharing portfolios. I am optimistic that all contentious issues will be resolved in the next few days and the process of induction of ministers will begin, he added. Mr Venugopal denied that UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Congress president Rahul Gandhis visit to the United States had delayed expansion of the ministry. He (Mr Gandhi) has favoured an early solution to the imbroglio as already one week has passed since the coalition government took over. Already, Mr Rahulji has authorised KPCC president Dr G Parameshwar and other state leaders to engage in a dialogue with JD(S) leaders in this regard. And we are in regular touch with both Mr Rahulji and Mrs Soniaji and briefing them on latest developments in Karnataka, Mr Vengugopal said. The chemical is intended for use as an insecticide but is so powerful that a quarter of a teaspoon can kill a 300-pound bear. The chemical is intended for use as an insecticide but is so powerful that a quarter of a teaspoon can kill a 300-pound bear. (Photo: AFP) Researchers and federal authorities are finding what they say is an alarming increase in the use of a powerful pesticide at illegal marijuana farms hidden on public land in California. The pesticide residue is showing up in about 30 percent of the plants themselves, researcher Mourad Gabriel told The Associated Press. Most of the illegally grown California pot is destined for Midwestern and Eastern states, federal prosecutors said. Federal and state authorities are announcing Tuesday that they will target the illegal grows with $2.5 million in federal money. Researchers found the highly toxic pesticide Carbofuran at 72 percent of grow sites last year, up from 15 percent in 2012, said Gabriel, executive director and senior ecologist at Integral Ecology Research Center and one of the few researchers studying the ecological impact of illicit grow sites. California has long allowed medicinal marijuana, and this year legalized recreational pot. While U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott will continue to enforce federal marijuana laws, he said he is targeting illicit grows on public land with cooperation from California's attorney general and the state's National Guard. "What is happening here is illegal for all purposes under anybody's law," he said in an interview before Tuesday's announcement. One of the dangers before legalization was that users could not be sure what was in the product they were smoking or eating, but authorities say the rise in Carbofuran use poses an increased danger. The chemical is intended for use as an insecticide but is so powerful that a quarter of a teaspoon can kill a 300-pound bear, Gabriel said. Research by Gabriel and colleagues previously showed that the use of pesticides at illegal marijuana farms is poisoning significant numbers of California's few hundred remaining fishers, a threatened carnivore. Carbofuran can't legally be used in the United States, and every bottle found at the grow sites since 2012 has been labeled in Spanish, Gabriel said. Scott said it is being smuggled in from Mexico by drug cartels and the itinerant laborers hired to clear forestland and replant it with marijuana. The laborers have to pack in the plants, fertilizer, irrigation hose and camping supplies for the summer growing season. Laborers apprehended by authorities tell Gabriel the remoteness of the growing sites is one reason highly toxic Carbofuran is so popular. "What they are saying to us is this is extremely effective it takes a little amount to kill a deer or a bear so we don't need to bring a lot of it to last a season," he said. At normal levels, a typical bottle containing less than 1 liter should be diluted with up to 5,000 gallons of water, he said. But illegal growers are diluting it with just 3 to 5 gallons of water to spray plants, or using the concentrate directly to kill wildlife. At that concentration, the chemical takes at least 2 years to dissipate instead of roughly a month if it is used at recommended dilutions. Young people trust vloggers more than celebrities so their endorsements may be even more impactful and exploitative. Young people trust vloggers more than celebrities so their endorsements may be even more impactful and exploitative. (Photo: PTI) Social media has a strong influence on today's youth, and new research suggests that watching unhealthy food videos on YouTube affects children's food intake. Researchers from the University of Liverpools Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, highlighted the negative influence of social media on childrens food intake at the European Congress on Obesity. Current research shows celebrity endorsement and television advertising of unhealthy foods increases childrens intake of these foods. However, children are increasingly exposed to marketing through digital avenues, such as on social media, and the impact of marketing by YouTube video bloggers (vloggers) on these outcomes has, until now, not been known. According to a recent report by Ofcom children in the UK now have more access to social media than ever before with 21% of 3-4 year olds and 35% of 5-7-year-olds having their own tablet. In older children, 39% of 8-11-year-olds have their own smartphone and 52% have their own tablet; 83% of 12-15-year-olds have their own smartphone and 55% have their own tablet. Vloggers influence PhD student Anna Coates, from the University of Liverpools Appetite and Obesity research group, conducted a study to examine the effect of social media marketing of snack foods (healthy and unhealthy), via vloggers Instagram pages, on childrens snack intake. During the study 176 children, aged between 9 and 10 years, were randomly split into three equal groups and were shown artificially created, but realistic, Instagram pages of popular vloggers (each has millions of followers). One group was shown images of the vlogger with unhealthy snacks, the second group was shown images of the vlogger with healthy snacks and the third group was shown images of the vlogger with non-food products. The participants subsequent intake of snacks (healthy and unhealthy options) were measured. Children in the group that viewed the unhealthy snack images consumed 32% more kcals from unhealthy snacks specifically and 26% more kcals in total (from healthy and unhealthy snacks) compared with children who saw the non-food images. There was no significant difference in total kcal intake, or healthy snack kcal intake, between children who saw the Instagram profile with healthy images and those who saw the non-food images. Impactful and exploitative Of the study Anna Coates, said: These findings suggest that the marketing of unhealthy foods, via vloggers Instagram pages, increases childrens immediate energy intake. The results are supported by celebrity endorsement data, which show unhealthy food endorsements increase childrens unhealthy food intake, but healthy food endorsements have little or no effect on healthy food intake. Young people trust vloggers more than celebrities so their endorsements may be even more impactful and exploitative. Tighter restrictions are needed around the digital marketing of unhealthy foods that children are exposed to, and vloggers should not be permitted to promote unhealthy foods to vulnerable young people on social media. Source: University of Liverpool Ex-public schoolboy who fought in WW2 and cared for lepers in Zimbabwe before being executed could finally be recognised. John Bradburne who had always lived his life for others was finally killed when he was caught up in the Rhodesian Bush War. (Photo: Pixabay) In the September of 1979, an English-born missionary, poet and the warden of the Mutemwa leper colony in Zimbawe was forced to march, humiliated, made to dance and sing, eat excrement and finally, after a rigged trial shot in the back with a Kalashnikov rifle when he knelt down to pray. The 58-year-old John Bradburne was left half-naked on the side of the road. John Bradburne who had always lived his life for others was finally killed when he was caught up in the Rhodesian Bush War. As per his request, Bradburne was buried in a Franciscan habit, in a cemetery 11 miles outside Harare. Now, nearly 40 years after his brutal murder, Bradburne is on the verge of becoming a saint the first British saint since 1970, when Pope Paul VI canonised Cuthbert Mayne and 39 British companions ('The 40 Martyrs of England and Wales'), who were executed for treason between 1535 and 1679, and the Scottish Catholic martyr John Ogilvie, canonised in 1976. According to campaigners for his sainthood, that includes his niece Celia Brigstocke, he was able to perform miracles. Many claim that, a decade ago, a man was cured of a brain tumour by praying to Bradburne. Now, with the support of the Archbishop of Harare, the Most Rev Robert Ndlovu, they have raised the money to fund a Vatican investigation to justify his canonisation. Born in 1921, he was the son of an Anglican rector who after private school fought in World War II with the 9th Gurkha Rifles, heroically escaping Singapore when it was invaded by the Japanese in 1942. After the war, in 1947, he converted to Catholicism, with aspirations of becoming a monk. However, since no monastery as ready to accept him immediately, he opted to travel instead and wandered the world for 16 years, trying his hand at teaching and forestry, and toiling as a stoker on a steam ship. In 1956, he joined the Franciscan Order as a layman. According to records, Bradburne had asked a Gurkha comrade John Dove if he knew of any African caves where he might pray. Dove took him to the Mutemwa leper colony at Mutoko, 90 miles east of Salisbury. Bradburne embraced them and made his home among them, eventually becoming the warden of the colony. There he lived for six years, denying himself everything except food, water and prayer. However, just as Bradburne was finally settling down, the Rhodesian Bush War took it away. The war raged from 1964 until December 1979 ending just three months after his murder. Before he died, Bradburne said that he had only three wishes to help lepers, to die a martyr and to be buried in a habit of the Franciscan Order. He achieved all three. Devendra Fadnavis expressed displeasure over slow progress in settlement of farmers' claims by insurance companies for kharif season 2017. He gave the direction during a meeting called to review the impact of the Prime Minister's Crop Insurance Scheme. (Photo: File) Mumbai: Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on May 30 directed insurance companies to expedite the process of settling farmers' claims and deposit the crop cover amount into their bank accounts by June 7. He gave the direction during a meeting called to review the impact of the Prime Minister's Crop Insurance Scheme. The chief minister expressed displeasure over the slow progress in settlement of farmers' claims by insurance companies for the kharif season 2017. Minister of State for Agriculture Sadabhau Khot was also present in the meeting. The weather forecast for this year is that the monsoon will arrive on time and there will be sufficient rainfall, Fadnavis mentioned. "Farmers will be immensely benefited if they get the money required to buy seeds and fertilisers. The insurance companies should try and ensure that farmers get the crop insurance money in their accounts before June 7," he said. A lot of information needs to be gathered about the beneficiary farmers for various government schemes before the transfer of funds into their bank accounts, Fadnavis noted, adding that this causes a delay in the disbursement of money. "In such a scenario, there should be a separate mechanism in place where all the information, of all those who open bank accounts for the purpose of getting Direct Benefit Transfer, is stored in one place. This will reduce the time in the disbursement of funds," he said. The ministrys alerts will be given priority broadcast on Twitter, Facebook and Google as well as on French public transport and television. Facebook will also allow the French government to communicate to people directly via the social networks safety check tool. (Photo: AP) Frances Interior Ministry announced plans on Tuesday to beef up its emergency alert system to the public across social media. The ministry said in a statement that from June during immediate threats of danger, such as a terror attack, the ministrys alerts will be given priority broadcast on Twitter, Facebook and Google as well as on French public transport and television. The statement said that Twitter will give special visibility to the ministrys alerts with a banner. In a specific agreement, Facebook will also allow the French government to communicate to people directly via the social networks safety check tool, created in 2014. The ministry said that this is the first time in Europe that Facebook has allowed public authorities to use this tool in this way. This announcement comes as a much-derided attack alert app launched in 2016 called SAIP is being withdrawn after malfunctions. Roaming Mantis is designed mainly to steal user information and to provide attackers with full control over the compromised device On 16 April, Kaspersky Lab researchers reported on a new Android malware distributed through a domain name system (DNS) hijacking technique and targeting mainly smartphones in Asia. Four weeks on, the threat continues to evolve rapidly and has now extended its target geography to include Europe and the Middle East, adding a phishing option for iOS devices and PC crypto-mining capability. The campaign, dubbed Roaming Mantis, is designed mainly to steal user information including credentials and to provide attackers with full control over the compromised device. The researchers believe a Korean- or Chinese-speaking cybercriminal group looking for financial gain is behind the operation. Method of attack Kaspersky Labs findings indicate that the attackers behind Roaming Mantis seek out vulnerable routers for compromise, and distribute the malware through a simple yet very effective trick of hijacking the DNS settings of those infected routers. The method of router compromise remains unknown. Once the DNS is successfully hijacked, any attempt by users to access any website leads them to a genuine-looking URL with forged content coming from the attackers server. This includes the request: To better experience the browsing, update to the latest chrome version. Clicking on the link initiates the installation of a Trojanised application named either facebook.apk or chrome.apk, which contains the attackers Android backdoor. The Roaming Mantis malware checks to see if the device is rooted and requests permission to be notified of any communications or browsing activity undertaken by the user. It is also capable of collecting a wide range of data, including credentials for two-factor authentication. Their interest in this and the fact that some of the malware code includes references to mobile banking and game application IDs popular in South Korea suggest a possible financial motive behind this campaign. Expanded target geography and features Kaspersky Labs initial research uncovered around 150 targets, mainly in South Korea, Bangladesh, and Japan, but it also revealed thousands of connections hitting the attackers command and control (C2) servers on a daily basis, pointing to a far larger scale of attack. The malware included support for four languages: Korean, simplified Chinese, Japanese, and English. The attack range has now been extended, supporting 27 languages in all, including Polish, German, Hindi, Arabic, Bulgarian and Russian. The attackers have also introduced a redirection to Apple-themed phishing pages if the malware encounters an iOS device. The latest addition to the arsenal is a malicious website with PC crypto-mining capability. Kaspersky Lab's observations suggest that at least one wave of wider attacks have taken place, with researchers noting over 100 targets among Kaspersky Lab customers within a few days. "When we first reported on Roaming Mantis in April we said that it was an active and rapidly changing threat. New evidence shows a dramatic expansion in target geography to include Europe and the Middle East, and more. We believe the attackers are cybercriminals looking for financial gain and have found a number of clues to suggest that the attackers speak either Chinese or Korean. There is clearly considerable motivation behind this threat, so it is unlikely to diminish any time soon. The use of infected routers and hijacked DNS highlights the need for robust device protection and the use of secure connections, says Suguru Ishimaru, Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab Japan. Kaspersky Lab products detect the Roaming Mantis threat as Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Wroba, and the crypto-miner as Dangerous URL blocked. In order to protect your internet connection from this infection, Kaspersky Lab recommends the following: Refer to your routers user manual to verify that your DNS settings havent been tampered with, or contact your ISP for support. Change the default login and password for the admin web interface of the router and regularly update your routers firmware from the official source. Never install router firmware from third-party sources. Avoid using third-party repositories for your Android devices. Further, always check browser and website addresses to ensure they are legitimate; look for signs such as https when asked to enter data. Consider installing a mobile security solution, such as Kaspersky Internet Security for Android, to protect your devices from these and other threats. (source) According to UN, of the 3,737 peacekeepers who have died since 1948, 163 have been from India, the highest from any country. India is currently the third largest contributor of military and police personnel to UN peacekeeping. (Photo: Wikimedia commons) New York: India has lost the highest number of its peacekeepers in various UN peacekeeping operations in the last 70 years, with 163 military, police and civilian personnel from the country laying down their lives in the line of duty. According to the UN, of the 3,737 peacekeepers who have died since 1948, 163 have been from India, the highest total from any troop-contributing country. India is currently the third largest contributor of military and police personnel to UN peacekeeping, with 6,693 now deployed in Abyei, Cyprus, Congo, Haiti, Lebanon, the Middle East, South Sudan and Western Sahara. However, the UN owes India USD 92 million for troops, formed police units and contingent-owned equipment as at April 30, 2018. The UN commemorated the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers on Tuesday, paying tribute to the service and sacrifice of peacekeepers around the world. Currently, more than 96,000 uniformed personnel from 124 troop and police-contributing countries serve under the blue flag, alongside more than 15,000 international and national civilian staff and nearly 1,600 United Nations Volunteers. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of United Nations peacekeeping, the flagship enterprise of the Organization described by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as "a proven investment in global peace, security and prosperity". "We express our gratitude to the more than one million men and women who have served under the UN flag, saving countless lives. We honour the more than 3,700 Blue Helmets who have paid the ultimate price. And we pay tribute to the 14 peacekeeping missions working around the clock to protect people and advance the cause of peace," Guterres said in Mali to mark the International Day of UN Peacekeepers. The north-west African country is the most dangerous place in the world to be a UN ''blue helmet'' and last year 21 troops serving with the UN Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) lost their lives, together with seven civilians. Upon his return from Mali, the Secretary-General will preside over the observance of the day on June 1. He will lay a wreath to honour those who lost their lives while in the service of peace and will also officiate at a ceremony to posthumously present the Dag Hammarskjold Medal to 132 military, police and civilian personnel from 37 countries who lost their lives in peacekeeping operations during 2017. Modi and Widodo recognised that access to reliable, clean and affordable energy is critical for the economic growth of both countries. Both leaders agreed to address all issues related to obstacles to trade and investment in palm oil products and industries, the joint statement said. (Photo: AP) Jakarta: India and Indonesia have agreed to double their efforts to boost bilateral trade to USD 50 billion by 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday after holding comprehensive talks with President Joko Widodo. Prime Minister Modi, who arrived in Jakarta on Tuesday night on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, exchanged views with President Widodo on potential areas of cooperation in areas like defence, maritime security, trade and economy. In a joint press statement after the talks, Modi said India and Indonesia have agreed to upgrade their ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Read: India, Indonesia to upgrade ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership He said India and Indonesia have agreed to double their efforts to take bilateral trade to USD 50 billion by 2025. According to Indonesia's Central Statistics Agency (BPS), trade between the two countries in 2016 was USD 12.9 billion. It rose 28.7 per cent to USD 18.13 billion in 2017 with Indonesia's exports to India reaching USD 14.08 billion and its imports from India standing at USD 4.05 billion. In a joint statement issued after the talks, the two countries said they have agreed to work intensively for the early conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and reiterated that it needs to be comprehensive, fair and balanced with benefit to all member states. The two leaders also instructed officials to optimise the cooperation between ASEAN and India for establishing a sustainable and mutually beneficial trade relations. They also acknowledged the need to further explore the untapped economic potentials and to remove impediments to trade and investment. Both sides agreed that there are considerable potentials for expanding trade and services in various areas. Read: PM Modi strongly condemns recent terror strikes on churches in Indonesia Modi and Widodo also welcomed the conclusion of the MoU between Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), and appreciated the setting up of a CII office in Jakarta. President Widodo welcomed the increase in Indian investments in Indonesia and appreciated their contribution to the Indonesian economy. Prime Minister Modi also welcomed Indonesian companies' participation through the "Make in India" initiative and invited Indonesian business to avail of the opportunities presented, the joint statement said. They also shared their views on the importance of intensifying infrastructure development in both countries and the mutual benefit of enhancing infrastructure development cooperation. They welcomed the signing of the MoU on health cooperation that would pave the way for closer collaboration in tackling common health challenges. They noted that there were considerable cooperation opportunities in health and pharmaceutical sector. The two leaders further directed for the convening of a meeting in second half of 2018 comprising of health officials, drug regulators and industry representatives to develop a road map on health cooperation. They underscored the important role palm oil plays in Indonesia's export to India and in India's consumer preference and growing consumption. Both leaders agreed to address all issues related to obstacles to trade and investment in palm oil products and industries, the joint statement said. Read: PM Modi, Widodo inaugurate kite exhibition themed on Indian epics Both sides welcomed the MoU on cooperation in the railways sector which would promote technical cooperation, development of rail related programmes, exchange of knowledge, technology and institutional cooperation between India and Indonesia. The two leaders welcomed the establishment of direct flights by Garuda Indonesia between Bali and Mumbai starting from April 2018 as well as the flights by Batik Air and Air Asia Indonesia serving Indonesian and Indian cities. They directed the civil aviation authorities of both countries to discuss the matter of enhancing the traffic rights through the bilateral air services consultation that will take place in 2018. As maritime neighbours, the two countries underlined the importance of stronger connectivity, particularly on sea links, in order to facilitate economic cooperation and people-to-people contact. They welcomed the plan to build connectivity between Andaman Nicobar-Aceh to unleash the economic potentials of both areas. They appreciated the decision to set up a Joint Task Force to undertake projects for port related infrastructure in and around Sabang. They recognised that access to reliable, clean and affordable energy is critical for the economic growth of both countries. Both leaders agreed to cooperate in the promotion of energy efficiency technologies, new and renewable energy technologies, with the shared aspiration to ensure energy security and to replace the use of fossil fuel, as well as meet respective climate change targets, the statement said. Both leaders welcomed potential cooperation in the area of peaceful use of nuclear energy and looked forward to the early renewal of an agreement in this sector. Read: PM Modi begins Indonesia visit by laying wreath at military cemetery The attack began when suicide bomber detonated vehicle full of explosives close to police building. Kabul: At least three police officers were killed after a group of Taliban suicide bombers attacked a police station in eastern Logar province, provincial officials said Wednesday. The slain police included the commander of the police station, another officer and the deputy director of traffic police for Logar's capital of Puli Alim, said Khalid Safi, a spokesman for the provincial governor. In addition, 12 others including four police and eight civilians were wounded in the Wednesday morning attack, said Shah Poor Ahmadzai, spokesman for the provincial police chief. Two young children were among those wounded, he said. The attack began when a suicide bomber detonated a vehicle full of explosives close to the police building. Three other suicide bombers then tried to enter into the compound, Ahmadzai said. The three were shot and killed by security forces within five minutes of the gunbattle, he said. A number of civilians houses were damaged by the car bomb, he said. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack. The Taliban have stepped up their attacks against Afghan security forces as well as government officials since the announcement of their spring offensive in April across the country. by Shafique Khokhar The acting prime minister will lead the country until the elections on 25 July and ensure the transfer of power to the new government. Known for his integrity, Mulk also served as acting chief election commissioner of Pakistan in 2013 and 2014. Head of Bishops Conference hopes God will give Justice Mulk passion and courage. Lahore (AsiaNews) The National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Pakistan (CBCP) has welcomed the appointment of Nasir-ul-Mulk as acting prime minister ahead of upcoming elections on 25 July. Opposition leader Khursheed Shah suggested Mulk, a former chief justice, during a press conference in Islamabad on Monday, following a meeting with outgoing Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi. The establishment of an interim setup is a positive sign for democracy as the elected government completed its tenure despite many hindrances, said Samson Salamat, president of the Rwadari Tehreek (Interfaith Movement for Tolerance), speaking to AsiaNews. We welcome the decision. He [Mulk] is a respected person. However, the choice of a politician as a caretaker would have been much better than appointing a judge or a bureaucrat, Salamat explained. Still, now the caretaker set up needs to ensure impartiality in every aspect and make sure that the power is transferred to next elected government without any delay. Pakistans political elites and Mulks former colleagues also expressed their support for his appointment. His fellow judges describe him as a very proactive judge who is very strict about the implementation of law in its letter and spirit. He is also known for his strictness towards implementation of law and his judgment reflecting a contextualised approach to human rights and discrimination issues. In a joint statement, NCJP president Mgr Joseph Arshad, NCJP national director Fr Emmanuel Yousaf Many and NCJP executive director Cecil Shane Chaudhry, say that "his appointment will uphold the democratic game in the upcoming general election." We are happy that the government was able to complete its five-year term and is moving forward towards another democratic transition. Justice Mulk is one of the seven judges who signed an application on 3 November 2007, restraining the government from imposing martial law in Pakistan. For Fr Yousaf, the former Supreme Court justice also served as the acting chief election commissioner of Pakistan, from 30 November 2013 to 6 July 2014. For this reason, he will ensure the upcoming election is transparent. CBCP president Archbishop Arshad is hopeful and prays that God will give Justice Mulk the passion and courage to successfully conduct free, fair and impartial elections in Pakistan in July 2018. Justice Nasir-ul-Mulk is a man of great honor, dignity and grace. by Sumon Corraya The campaign started on May 3rd. Human rights defenders complain of extra-judicial murders. The fight against drugs in Bangladesh compared to that conducted in the Philippines by President Duterte. There are between seven and eight million drug addicts across the country. Dhaka (AsiaNews) - At least 103 people have been killed among drug dealers and traffickers and 12 thousand arrested since the launch of the anti-drug campaign by the Dhaka government in early May. The high number of deaths has prompted critics to compare the crackdown on drug trafficking in Bangladesh to that made by President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and to raise suspicions about the existence of extra-judicial killings. On the other hand, experts working in drug addiction recovery welcome the government initiative. The goal of the authorities is to curb the sale of a particular pill called "yaba", a low-cost drug that combines methamphetamine and caffeine. Known as the " drug of madness", it causes hallucinations, euphoria, aggression and addiction. Approximately 40 million pills were seized last year, but it is estimated that 250-300 million tablets are circulating on the Bengali market. Police report that 10 dealers have been killed in the last 24 hours. The deaths occurred during raids conducted by the agents of the elite RAB (Rapid Action Battalion), of the State Police, or in shootings between police officers and drug traffickers. The campaign to combat drugs started on May 3rd, but the murders are the result of the last two weeks of operations across the country. Minister of the Interior, Asaduzzaman Khan, said that "the war on drugs will continue until we have complete control". Meanwhile, 12 thousand people have been accused of dealing and tried in special courts. Some of them - but there is no confirmation of the exact number - will have to serve prison sentences from seven days to six months. In Bangladesh it is estimated that there are at least seven million drug addicts. Patrick Rodrigues, a Catholic, director of Bangladesh Rehabilitation and Assistance Center for Addicts (Baraca), among the top projects of Caritas Bangladesh, comments to AsiaNews: "I think the government's decision to stop the traffickers and their pushers is positive. But the authorities must be neutral. If they do not also arrest party politicians [who support them], the operation will have no real fruits ". He prefers not to comment on the victims, but says: "The authorities know who the traffickers and the drug dealers are. If they really wanted to, they could catch them all ". Then he reports that among the Christians there are numerous drug addicts who reject a path of recovery. Amdadul Haq, a Muslim, a professor at North South University in Dhaka, believes that "the situation in Bangladesh is even worse than in the Philippines. Data for 2016 show that [in the latter country] the number of drug addicts was 1.8 million. In Bangladesh, however, there are between seven and eight million. " The teacher appreciates the central government's efforts, but emphasizes that the police should also arrest the drug bosses. by Vladimir Rozanskij Today an exhibition opens in Rome on "The new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Orthodox Church". In addition to theological dialogue, unity sought through solidarity with the poor and the persecuted, and mutual cultural enrichment. A formation course for priests of the Moscow Patriarchate concluded in Rome. "Pilgrimage and religious tourism" at the meeting of the Dialogue Group between the Catholic Church in Italy and the Russian Orthodox Church. Vatican City (AsiaNews) - An exhibition on "The new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Orthodox Church" opens today, May 30 in the Lateran Palace in Rome. Two delegates for culture from the Patriarchate and the Vatican will be present, Metropolitan Tikhon (Sevkunov) of Pskov and Card. Gianfranco Ravasi. The multiplication of these opportunities for meeting and dialogue is the result of intense work and the renewed climate in relations between Russian Catholics and Orthodox, born of the encounter between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill in 2016. These relations pursue two apparently "secondary" purposes, with respect to true theological dialogue: solidarity with the poor and the persecuted, and mutual cultural enrichment. The conviction of the Orthodox, shared by many Catholics, is that nothing is served by insisting on models demanding of "reunification" among the Churches, rather it is much more fruitful to engage in the practice of charity, friendship and mutual knowledge. These opportunities have multiplied: in recent days (19-26 May) the so-called "Third Summer Institute" was concluded, a training course for priests of the Moscow Patriarchate, held in Rome thanks to the collaboration with the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, presided over by Cardinal Kurt Koch. The Russian delegation, made up of about 15 people, was led by Bishop Arsenij of Jurevsk, vicar of Nizhny Novgorod's eparchy, and represented the Department for Foreign Affairs of the Patriarchate together with the Institute of Specialization and Doctoral Research "Cyril and Methodius", again organized by the patriarchate of Moscow. The program of the meetings included a visit to shared Christian sanctuaries, meetings and courses on the activities of the main institutions of the Catholic Church, and meetings with various high representatives of the Roman Curia. The group was also received for a two-hour interview with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State of the Holy See (see photo 2). On May 20th there was a visit to the basilica of St. Clement, where the prayer of Moleben was recited over the remains of the holy teacher of the Slavic language, the monk Constantine-Cyril, for the Catholics patron of Europe together with his brother Methodius. Next year 2019 will mark 1150 years since the death of the two brothers considered "equal to the apostles". On May 23, the group attended Pope Francis' general audience in St. Peters Square, greeting the pontiff at the conclusion (see photo 1). The Pope himself underlined the importance of dialogue among Christians, exchanging gifts with his Russian guests. The next day, Bishop Arsenij presided over the solemn liturgy in honour of Cyril and Methodius along with the whole delegation and the faithful of the church of St. Catherine Martyr, the Russian Orthodox church built on the slopes of the Janiculum Hill. The next "Summer Institute" foresees a similar trip to Russia for the selected representatives of the Catholic Church, in the autumn of 2018. After the conclusion of the course for priests, the session of the Group of bilateral dialogue between the Catholic Church in Italy and the Russian Orthodox Church was held, on the theme "Pilgrimage and religious tourism". This meeting was also attended by a large delegation of the Moscow Patriarchate, led by Metropolitan Ilarion (Alfeev), head of the Department for Foreign Affairs, together with Bishop Antonij of Vienna and Budapest, who heads the office in charge of the Russian Churches' structures abroad and various other members of various patriarchate organs. On the Catholic side, the group was led by the Secretary of the Conference of Italian Bishops (CEI), Msgr. Nunzio Galantino, together with the bishop delegated for ecumenism, Msgr. Ambrogio Spreafico and other members of Italian institutions engaged in dialogue with the Orthodox and Russia. Archbishop Galantino underlined the importance of pilgrimages between the two countries, to enhance the traditional friendship between Italians and Russians. Metropolitan Ilarion also recalled the great history of cultural relations between Russia and Italy, rooted precisely in fidelity to Christian values. He insisted on the importance of the pilgrimage to Rome, and the visit to his very important universal Christian sanctuaries. The head of foreign affairs of the Russian Church also wanted to highlight the importance of common attention to the suffering of Christians persecuted in the Middle East, and to the destruction of their ancient sanctuaries, which require the unified action of all the Churches not to be left behind in ruins. The Russian-Italian dialogue meeting included in the context of the Forum for Dialogue between the civil societies of Russia and Italy, an initiative designed by President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2004, which gave rise to several events in the course of these years. In 2013, a Working Group between the Churches of the two countries was establsihed, whose first working session took place in February 2017 on the theme "Lay and religious art as a tool for strengthening consensus and mutual understanding between the peoples ". Card Joseph Zen backs the appeal. The bishop, who is recognised by the Holy See but not by the government, has spent many years doing forced labour and under house arrest. Hong Kong (AsiaNews) The Hong Kong Justice and Peace Commission has launched a campaign to get Chinese authorities to free Mgr Augustine Cui Tai, coadjutor bishop of Xuanhua (Hebei). The prelate disappeared in the hands of the police in mid-April 2018 and, since then, his whereabouts remain unknown. Mgr Cui Tai, who is recognised by the Holy See, belongs to the underground Church. Previously he spent years in re-education camps and under house arrest for refusing to submit to the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which seeks to build a Church independent of the Holy See. Card Joseph Zen, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, supports the appeal, as he did last year (pictured). Here is the text of the appeal. The coadjutor bishop of the Diocese of Xuanhua (Hebei province), Mgr Augustine Cui Tai was taken away by government officials in mid-April 2018. So far, his fate remains unknown. Mgr Cui has endured oppression for a long time, defending the faith and freedom of conscience. He has rejected the governments religious policy, which violates the principles of faith, and has refused to accept the leadership of and membership in the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. Since 1993, Mgr Cui has been repeatedly subjected to forced labour to be re-educated, to detention and house arrest on charges like "illegal missionary activities" or "illegal and unauthorised religious meetings", all because of his practice of religious freedom. In particular, in the last 11 years, i.e. since 2007, the authorities have illegally detained Mgr Cui or placed him under house arrest almost non-stop, without any reason nor legal process. During this time, Mgr Cui was often locked up in secret detention centres, or in hotels, or taken away for forced "travel" under the escort of government officials. Only during Chinese New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival (of the moon), was he occasionally allowed to go home for a brief visit to see his elderly sister. For the rest of the time he always kept under guard and government control. Such actions by government authorities constitute a very serious violation of fundamental human rights and religious freedom, guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution and human rights international conventions. In recent years, Bishop Cuis health has worsened considerably with problems like severe gastritis, neurasthenia, vertigo, etc. We are very concerned about his situation and strongly condemn the Chinese governments violation of fundamental human rights and religious freedom. We appeal to the Chinese government to: 1. guarantee the personal safety and health of Mgr Cui Tai and provide him with adequate medical care; 2. respect religious freedom and immediately release Bishop Cui Tai without conditions; 3. release other Churchmen unjustly detained, including Bishop Su Zhizhi and Father Liu Honggen of the Diocese of Baoding, Hebei province. The Commission for Justice and Peace of the Catholic Church in Hong Kong Short biographical notes of Mgr Cui Tai Mgr Augustine Cui Tai was born in 1950 in Zhangjiakou, Hebei province. In 1990, after years of education and training at the seminary of Baoding (Hebei), he was ordained in the priesthood by Bishop John Shi Enxiang of the Diocese of Yixian (Hebei). In 2013 he was ordained coadjutor bishop of the Diocese of Xuanhua (Hebei). Mgr Cui is a pastor who leads a simple and orderly life, firm in his faith and full of virtue. The popes message gave great joy and strength to the Korean people, not only to Christians, but to everyone, says Mgr You. Kim Yong-chol is in New York to meet with Pompeo, whilst officials from North Korea and the US are meeting in Singapore and Panmunjom. A summit between North Korea, China and Russia might take place. Officials from the two Koreas will meet on 1 June. For Nuclear expert, denuclearisation will take up to 15 years. Daejeon (AsiaNews) - "America wants North Korea to eliminate all nuclear weapons; North Korea wants the ultimate guarantee of its security, but we must walk together. It takes dialogue, negotiations, patience. We must look with the eyes of the other. Only this way can we understand better," said Mgr Lazarus You Heung-sik, bishop of Daejeon, speaking about reinstated talks between North Korea and the United States. "When I heard that Trump had cancelled the summit, I cried. I felt that hope for a new beginning for peace in Korea was going away," Mgr You noted. "Then, two days later, the meeting between Moon and Kim gave me immense joy. For the prelate, this was a particularly important meeting, because unlike the previous three meetings between the leaders of the North and the South, this time, the two leaders met without a complicated and long process of preparation. Instead, it was a spontaneous meeting just like one has among brothers of one family. "Thus, they gave the world a new signal of the sincere fraternity of the Korean people, as well as the indomitable will for peace! There can be no sensitive and complicated problems after about 70 years of separation, marked by mutual hostility. We might always find ways to solve issues in this top-down manner between the two Korean leaders and promote talks between various political and charitable organisations between the two parties. In this process, the collaboration of China and the United States is also needed." "Last Sunday, the day of the Most Holy Trinity, the new apostolic nuncio, Mgr Alfred Xuereb, arrived in Korea with a message to the Korean people from the pope. The pontiff is praying. He wants reconciliation through dialogue, [he wants] other countries to help find peace in Korea. This gave great joy and strength to the Korean people, not only to Christians, but to everyone." Meanwhile, after an apparent end of talks and the possible meeting between US President Donald Trump and Northern leader Kim Jong-un, diplomats are back to work. In the next few days, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet Kim Yong-chol, former director of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Koreas main intelligence service, currently vice-chairman of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea. A controversial figure, Kim is suspected of playing role in the sinking of the South Korean Navy ship Cheonan. Currently, he is playing a leading role in talks with South Korea and the United States. He was a member of the delegation that accompanied Kim Jong-un during the first summit with the South Korean President Moon Jae-in and was the only North Korean official to accompany Kim Jong-un in last Saturdays meeting with the South Korean president. At present the US Ambassador to the Philippines (and former ambassador to South Korea), Sung Kim, is drafting the agenda for the upcoming summit together with North Korean officials. In Singapore, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagen is discussing logistical issues. Talks about the future of the Korean Peninsula are also taking place elsewhere. According to some media reports, the leaders of North Korea, China and Russia might be meeting shortly. This would be the third meeting between Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping in the past few weeks. Furthermore, on Friday, the two Koreas are scheduled to hold another high-level summit. Central to the debate is the denuclearisation of North Korea, which the US insist must be "complete, verifiable and irreversible". President Trump said he hoped to see this happen as soon as possible, but for the experts this is not feasible. Siegfried Hecker, a world-renowned nuclear physicist, published a report two days ago in collaboration with Robert Carlin and Elliot Serbin of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). For the authors, the process of denuclearisation of North Korea could take up to 15 years. For the Indonesian president, "It is the time for us to have a comprehensive strategic partnership [characterised] by concrete cooperation. Indo-Indonesian trade reached US.87 billion last year. Indonesia urges India to review its higher tariff on palm oil imports. Jakarta (AsiaNews/Agencies) Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo today received Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta on the latter's first state visit to the country. The two leaders held a private meeting during which they discussed their countries strategic partnership, including economic and defence matters. This was followed by a meeting of the two delegations. Speaking at the start of the latter, Jokowi said that Modi's visit, which also marked the Indian prime ministers first visit to Indonesia, was very timely, as it came at a time of many uncertainties in the world. "It is the time for us to have a comprehensive strategic partnership [characterised] by concrete cooperation," Jokowi said. "Such cooperation can be realised only by improving engagement, including at the leaders level." The Indonesian leader went on to express his hope that Indonesia and India, which celebrate 70 years of bilateral ties next year, could further enhance a partnership that has contributed to global peace and stability. Trade between the two countries has increased significantly over the past few years, 28.7 per cent in 2017 alone. Indonesian exports amounted to US.08 billion, including palm oil and coal, whilst imports were valued at US.05 billion. India ranked 16th among foreign investors in Indonesia in 2017, a great leap from the 24th position the year before. As for tourism, about 500,000 Indians visited Indonesia last year, a 28 per cent increased over the previous year. During the meeting, President Widodo called on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to reduce the import tariff on palm oil products from Indonesia, which is the worlds largest producer. "I beg PM Modi's attention regarding the increased tariffs on palm oil products," Jokowi said on today at the joint press conference that followed the meeting between the two leaders. Last February, the Indian government raised the import tax for crude palm oil from 30 per cent to 44 per cent. It also raised the tax for refined palm oil products from 40 per cent to 54 per cent. According to the Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association (Gapki), palm oil exports to India reached 7.6 million tonnes in 2017, up 32 per cent from 2016. In 2017, the India accounted for 24 per cent of Indonesias total palm oil exports. Last year, Indonesia increased its palm oil exports by 23 per cent year-on-year to 31.05 million tonnes. Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution said India raised its tariff on palm oil three times in one-and-a-half years, which was a heavy burden for Indonesian exports to India, especially after the European parliament imposed a ban on the use of palm oil as a biofuel. This major blow to the Indonesian economy has caused tensions between Indonesian and the European Union (EU). After the meeting at Merdeka Palace, Widodo and Modi headed to the National Monument complex to inaugurate a kite festival, jointly organised by the Jakarta Layang-Layang Museum and the Ahmedabad Kite Museum (Gujarat, India). Widodo and Modi are also expected to visit the Istiqlal Mosque. Tomorrow the Indian prime minister will leave for Kuala Lumpur, for a brief meeting with the new Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad. He will then conclude his trip to Southeast Asia in Singapore, at the invitation of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. By Ted Alcuitis, Philippine Canadian News Special to The Post Less than two years after Balita lost a libel case filed by the late Senator Tobias Enverga, Jr., it has now been slapped with another libel conviction. Balita newspaper, publisher Tess Cusipag and Managing Editor Romeo Marquez, has been severally and individually convicted of defaming Oswald Magno. In a 20-page decision handed down last Wednesday, May 23, Madame Justice Jane E. Ferguson of the Ontario Superior Court awarded Magno a total of $410,000 in general, aggravated and punitive damages excluding legal costs. This is the second major loss to what is touted as Torontos largest newspaper and one of the oldest, founded by the late Ruben Cusipag in 1978. In July 2016, the paper was found guilty of defaming Senator Enverga, the first Filipino senator appointed to the Senate of Canada. Enverga was awarded over $410,00 in damages and other costs. Payment for the award was confirmed by no less than Marquez who wrote in The Filipino Web Channel, Nov. 28, 2017. A day prior (November 15) to his death on November 16, Tess family wrote a cheque for $4,714.86 in the name of Envergas lawyer in compliance with their demand. That amount was in addition to the two cheques paid three weeks earlier in the amount of $407,955 and $2,045. Overall, the three cheques totaled $414,714.86 (four hundred fourteen thousand seven hundred fourteen and eighty-six cents). Cusipag was also convicted of criminal contempt of court for violating the injunction to refrain from publishing any more articles about Enverga after the decision. She served 13 days out of a 21-day sentence. The previous award to Enverga and the current award to Magno would bring the total to over $800,000. This does not include legal fees to Cusipag on several cases she has to defend. Legal costs could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to lawyers PCN consulted. She is still facing another Iibel case filed in 2013 against the paper by the Rustias KOL Foundation for $2.5 million. The case is still pending and has not been set for hearing. Romeo P. Marquez, the controversial writer who wrote most of the articles in Balita and his own Filipino Web Channel The Magno case was heard for two days January 22 and 25, 2018 and after receiving voluminous written materials, Justice Ferguson determined that a summary judgment was appropriate, saving the parties of a costly and long trial. She awarded Magno $300,000 in general/aggravated damages and $110,000 in punitive damages jointly and severally against the defendants Balita Media Inc., Teresita Cusipag, Editor & Publisher and in her personal capacity and Romeo P. Marquez. The defendants were represented by Roy Respicio and the plaintiff, Oswald Magno, by Michael Alexander and David A. Potts. According to the decision, Magno was a former lawyer in the Philippines who immigrated to Canada in 1972 establishing a consulting business. The case arose in 2012 when Magno and others commenced a petition to the Philippine Press Club of Ontario complaining about the journalism practiced by the defendants. Another issue between the parties was that Magno was a supporter of the Envergas. Envergas wife, Rosemere ran a competing beauty pageant with Cusipag. The court found that during the period in question Balita published 35 articles in print and online calling Magno as (among other things) an arrogant gasbag, a shambles bully a habitual liar, a fraudster, etc. Despite being given sufficient time to prepare their pleadings, defendants failed to submit sufficient particulars to prove their allegations against the plaintiff. The court ruled in para (26): The court is faced with a bald plea of justification/truth without particulars. In the absence of particulars pleaded no particular evidence can be adduced. There is no admissible evidence to support the defendants justification/truth defence. The defendants attempted unsuccessfully to explain the defendants actions/ defenses in unhelpful, non-responsive submissions. Finding defendants acted with malice, the court in para (62) accepted substantial evidence of Cusipags express malice.establish that the vilification campaign she waged against Magno, with Marquezs help, was driven by spite, ill-will, revenge and other improper motives In arriving at the amount of damages awarded to Magno, Justice Ferguson relied on the Enverga case as well as other cases. In his final paragraph, the Justice expressed concern that the defendants will behave the same way as they did with the Enverga where Cusipag was found guilty of contempt of the injunction and jailed. I have a concern that the defendants will also be undeterred in this case and will continue t publisher defamatory statements against Magno. Accordingly, the judge issued a permanent injunction against the defendant from publishing further defamatory materials against Magno. Magno sees a long road ahead, for me, theres a long road ahead in terms of having the judgment satisfied, he told philippinecanadiannews.com in an email. Our own research shows that in the absence of other assets, a judge could award ownership of the paper to the plaintiffs. This was the case of the Vancouver-based Philippine Chronicle which lost a case filed against them by a business partner. This article first appeared in Philippine Canadian News. See https://philippinecanadiannews.com/canada/breaking-magno-wins-libel-case-against-balita/ Doritos launches Jurassic World themed snack Posted by Jack Cain on 30th May 2018 Australian corn chip brand Doritos, who are owned by PepsiCo have partnered with Universal Studios to create a snack to accompany the new installment of the Jurassic World franchise, Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom. The limited edition Doritos Colossal Chargrilled Steak is a lava coloured chip. The movie inspired launch will attempt to situate the brand as a snacks category leader and drive brand awareness by featuring an on pack promotion across all Doritos flavours. Consumers will have the chance to win a trip to Hawaii as well as $500 daily cash card prizes. Alison Silver, brand manager explained: We know our consumers are always on the lookout for new flavour sensations, so it made perfect sense for us to pair up with our friends at Universal Studios and create something bold and exciting. Doritos Colossal Chargrilled Steak is available in 80g in petrol and convenience stores now and will then launch in 150g in all supermarkets from June 4th. RRP 150g $3.29. Independent giant Drakes Supermarkets 80-million-dollar distribution centre Posted by Jack Cain on 30th May 2018 South Australian-born Drakes Supermarkets is building an AUD $80m distribution centre in Adelaides north, creating up to 550 jobs. The project has received the green light from the Playford Council and is expected to create about 300 jobs during construction. Up to 250 full-time equivalent positions will be created once the centre opens in June 2019. The 17ha site at Edinburgh North will incorporate a $12m high tech warehouse picking system. Drakes general manager Bob Soang says the centre is a major investment in the sustainable future of the local, family-owned business founded in 1974. It will be the most advanced independent distribution and logistics centre in the state and is a key plank of our groups vertical integration strategy within the supermarket sector, he said. Playford Mayor Glenn Docherty says the development is a major boost for the economy to support 35,000 new residents expected to live in the council area by 2026. As a gateway to the north, we are perfectly positioned to accommodate this development, particularly with infrastructure development such as the Northern Connector Expressway, he says. The 104,000sqm development will have the capacity to house about 23,000 lines of products including grocery, dairy and frozen foods and will include a site suitable for future development. Since being established in the 70s, Drakes has grown to be one of the largest independent grocery retailers in Australia, with an annual turnover of more than $1 billion and 5500 staff. It operates 57 stores across SA and Queensland. New guide for Australian fruit and vegetable exporters Australian fruit and vegetable exporters wanting to go global can now access advice on every step of the export journey in a single online guide. Federal Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment, Steven Ciobo, and the Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, David Littleproud, has launched, Fresh fruit and vegetable export requirements: A guide for Australian business a Turnbull Coalition Government initiative ensuring Australias horticulture producers have the necessary information to capitalise on the sizeable business opportunities on our doorstep. Minister Ciobo said Australias premium-quality produce was highly prized by overseas buyers. The Turnbull Coalition Government is pursuing the most ambitious trade agenda in our countrys history, opening new doors for more Australian exporters to sell their top quality, clean, green and safe produce to more markets worldwide, the Minister said. Australias agricultural products are a sought-after commodity, and this guide will help producers benefit from Australias strong reputation, providing current information on market regulations and expectations and links to the correct export documents and templates, he added. The value of Australian fresh horticulture exports has nearly tripled over the past five years, growing from $846.5 million in 2012 to $2.11 billion in 2017, according to the IHS Global Trade Atlas (2018). Fresh fruit exports are generating more than half this value, with citrus ($423.1 million) and table grapes ($373.3 million) the standouts. China has emerged as Australias most significant horticultural export market, accounting for nearly one in five dollars of value generated from horticulture exports (19 per cent), and has maintained an average annual growth rate of over 200 per cent over the last 5 years. SunRice gets closer to ASX listing to fund Asian expansion Australian rice products giant SunRice wants to list on the Australian Securities Exchange(ASX) as part of its big plan to tap into Asias demand for clean and healthier food. SunRice plans to raise 20-30 million AUD$ from the ASX float, however it will have to wait for shareholders to approve the plan at the companys annual general meeting on 20 September 2018 Opportunities from product trends in Asia SunRice, which sells several eponymous branded products, including table rice, microwavable rice packets and rice snacks, has identified two major trends in Asia that are at the centre of its growth strategy. Chief executive Rob Gordon says SunRice is an exporter of Japanese-style sushi rice, including to Japan, and there was demand for restaurants across Asia for that type of rice. The second opportunity is Asias demand for healthier snacks and low glycemic (low GI) food that helps keep blood sugar levels more stable. Rice eating nations, as they become more affluent, are suffering from the same diseases as the West, including issues like obesity and Type 2 diabetes, Mr Gordon said. We have the lowest GI white rice in the world and we have the opportunity to take this rice to a lot of different nations in various forms and formats. SunRice products, including rice cakes and rice chips are already sold in 50 nations across the Pacific, the Middle East and the US. Mr Gordon said gaining market access in Asian countries was more political and difficult, but the company has already launched its products in Singapore and Hong Kong. New corporate strategy SunRice said trading on the ASX would expose the company to investors who are hungry for Australian branded food and agricultural stocks, while retaining A Class grower shareholder control. However, this is not the first time SunRice has sought to list on the ASX with the groups rice growing shareholders having blocked the move in 2016. He said the plan is to build SunRices presence in South East Asia and to continue to seek market access in China. The company wants to fund this growth by delisting from the smaller Sydney based National Stock Exchange to the countrys biggest equity market, the Australian Securities Exchange. Contact The Californians Robert Price at 661-395-7399, rprice@bakersfield.com or on Twitter: @stubblebuzz. His column appears on Sundays, Wednesdays and Saturdays; the views expressed are his own. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. We attempted to send a notification to your email address but we were unable to verify that you provided a valid email address. Please click here to update your email address if you wish to receive notifications. Otherwise, you may click here to disable notifications and hide this message. Media Advisory, May 30, 2018 Contacts: Kevin Bixby, Southwest Environmental Center, (575) 649-7260, kevin@wildmesquite.org Laiken Jordahl, Center for Biological Diversity, (928) 525-4433, ljordahl@biologicaldiversity.org Imelda Mejia, ACLU Border Rights Center, (713) 942-8146 ext. 123, media@aclutx.org Johana Bencomo, NM CAFe, (575) 545-3412, johana@organizenm.org 'All Against the Wall' Rally to Protest New Mexico Border Wall Construction SUNLAND PARK, N.M. Conservation and human rights groups will gather Saturday to protest new border wall construction near the Santa Teresa Port of Entry, west of El Paso, Texas. The rally will feature speakers, musicians, faith leaders and a sunset vigil in the path of the border walls construction. Local and regional residents will join artists and organizers to decry Trumps wall and highlight the human suffering and environmental devastation caused by border militarization. We will not sit idly by while Trump forces his obscene border wall on southern New Mexico, said Kevin Bixby, executive director of the Southwest Environmental Center. We invite the world to join us in rejecting Trump's wall, resisting further militarization of our communities and reclaiming space for our people and wildlife. Groups organizing and participating in the rally include the Southwest Environmental Center, the Center for Biological Diversity, the ACLU Border Rights Center, NM CAFe, Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife. What: All Against the Wall Rally When: Saturday, June 2, 58 p.m. Where: Ave. Casas Grandes, south end cul-de-sac, near Santa Teresa Port of Entry, Santa Teresa, N.M. Background In January 2018 the Trump administration waived more than 25 laws to speed construction of 20 miles of border wall near Santa Teresa, N.M., an area thats home to rare wildlife in one of the worlds most biodiverse deserts. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Southwest Environmental Center and conservation partners filed suit in March to challenge the New Mexico waiver. Last month, the Trump Administration broke ground on a 20-mile section of wall, converting existing vehicle barriers to 18-foot high steel bollard walls. Bollard-style walls obstruct the natural migration of wildlife, including birds and insects. Dozens of rare wildlife species, including the Aplomado falcon and Mexican gray wolf, make their homes in this region of New Mexico, as do kit foxes, bighorn sheep and ringtail cats. The area is also within historic jaguar habitat. Beyond jeopardizing wildlife, endangered species and public lands, the U.S.-Mexico border wall is part of a larger strategy of ongoing border militarization that damages human rights, civil liberties, native lands, local businesses and international relations. The border wall impedes the natural migrations of people and wildlife that are essential to healthy diversity. Unauthorized border crossings are at a historic low and building more walls would be a waste of taxpayer dollars. The administration's border wall plans ignore the nearly 15 million people who live border communities and who overwhelmingly oppose the wall. For Immediate Release, May 30, 2018 Contacts: Jonathan Evans, Center for Biological Diversity, (510) 844-7118, jevans@biologicaldiversity.org Caroline Cox, Center for Environmental Health, (510) 655-3900 x 308, caroline@ceh.org Sarah Aird, Californians for Pesticide Reform, (510) 788-9025, sarah@pesticidereform.org Lawsuit Seeks to Force EPA to Curb Risks From Dangerous Pesticide Malathion OAKLAND, Calif. Conservation and public health groups sued the Trump administration and Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt today for failing to protect endangered wildlife and the environment from the dangerous pesticide malathion. Todays lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that the EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have failed to complete the legally required steps to fully assess and limit the dangers of the neurotoxin. Malathion is linked to developmental disorders in children and has been found by the World Health Organization to be probably carcinogenic to humans. Last year EPA scientists determined that the pesticide, manufactured by Dow Chemical, poses widespread risks to protected plants and animals. Its deplorable that the Trump administration is putting human health and endangered wildlife at risk to please Dow, said Jonathan Evans, environmental health legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Trump and Pruitt arent above the law and they have to take reasonable steps to limit the harms of this dangerous pesticide. In January 2017 the EPA determined in a biological evaluation that 97 percent of federally protected species are likely harmed by malathion. And the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a biological opinion concluding malathian harmed or killed 38 protected species under the agencys jurisdiction. As part of a legal settlement, government scientists were required to issue a final opinion by the end of last year identifying ways to safeguard endangered species from malathion. But after the Trump administration took office, Dow officials asked the EPA and other federal agencies to abandon years of work assessing the harms of several pesticides, including malathion. Seven months later the EPA and Fish and Wildlife Service indefinitely suspended the malathion assessment. Pruitts EPA continues to roll back health and environmental protections in favor of corporate profit, said Caroline Cox, research director at the Center for Environmental Health. EPAs decisions must be based on sound science, not corporate politics. Around 1 million pounds of malathion are used nationwide annually. The neurotoxin is part of the dangerous class of organophosphate pesticides used as a nerve agent in chemical warfare. They have been linked to Gulf War syndrome, which has symptoms that include fatigue, headaches, skin problems and breathing disorders. It is unacceptable to ignore the range of well-documented dangers with this outdated class of organophosphate pesticides, said Sarah Aird, co-director of Californians for Pesticide Reform. Malathion is one of the most dangerous pesticides still available on the market. Todays lawsuit was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Environmental Health and Californians for Pesticide Reform. Background For decades the EPA refused to comply with its legal mandate to protect endangered species from the impacts of pesticides. But following a two-year review by the National Academy of Sciences, the federal government initiated a highly public and transparent process to analyze the impacts of three insecticides, including malathion. During this process Dow provided extensive comments urging the agencies to abandon the legally required effort. The Center for Biological Diversity recently sued the Trump administration to force officials to release details on Dows influence over the delay of government studies detailing the dangers of malathion. In January 2017 Dow was one of three companies that donated $1 million to Trumps inauguration. Shortly thereafter the EPA shocked public health advocates by abruptly scrapping a proposed federal ban on the organophosphate chlorpyrifos, which is known to cause brain damage in children. The London International Awards (LIA) has announced that global chief creative officer of FCB, Susan Credle has been named jury president for the New and Social Influencers category for the 2018 Awards. Susan Credle, global chief creative officer of FCB. The New is all about showcasing unexpected advertising ideas that highlight new roles for brands and agencies. This can be based on emerging media technologies like AR/VR/data or actions and brand experiences or ideas and supply chains in terms of being an influencer, Ideas that dont fit in any category In 1916, Lasker told the California Fruit Growers Exchange that if they wanted to compete with the growers in Florida, they needed a better name. He said California oranges were sun-kissed. For trademark reasons, he spelt it Sunkist. Lasker didnt create an ad; he created a brand, 2018 The New and Social Influencers jury Susan Credle jury president global chief creative officer at FCB Leah Bazalgette, executive director at Dentsu Aegis Network Sri Lanka, Colombo Adrian Bosich, managing partner/creative founder at Airbag, Melbourne Donald Chesnut, global chief experience officer at SapientRazorfish, New York Waithera Kabiru, digital marketing manager at Coca-Cola Central East and West Africa, Nairobi Menno Kluin, chief creative officer at 360i, New York Nils Leonard, creative founder at Uncommon Creative Studio, London Andrew Reinholds, managing partner at OMD NZ, Auckland Taras Wayner, EVP/chief creative officer at R/GA, New York Rosie Yakob, co-founder/partner at Genius Steals, Nashville Named one of Ad Ages 100 Most Influential Women, Credle has helped shape the industry with many trailblazing ideas in her career that has spanned more than 30 years.Barbara Levy, president of LIA explained. The New is what we would like to term as a petri dish for growing new advertising disciplines until they are fully mature. Susan Credle, who is one of the industrys leading creatives and influencer, is a perfect fit as jury president.Susan Credle is a firm believer of creating new paths in the industry. She told an interesting story of Albert Lasker, one of the creative founders of FCB, to illustrate her point.Susan explained. A few years later, when the orange crop exceeded all expectations, he recommended that instead of eating the oranges, Sunkist should encourage people to drink the oranges. This is the kind of thinking that makes us invaluable to our client partners. The New looks for these ideas that dont fit into any category but keep our business thriving. Who will defy categories for this year? I cant wait to see.The entry system is open for entries. The initial entry deadline is the 11 June.For more information on submissions and eligibility, please click here As the worlds of travel for business and holiday increasingly collide, the trend towards 'bleisure' - add-on leisure to business trips - has become a steadfast addition for many travellers and corporations in recent years. Would you extend for leisure in Africa? Dejiabimbola320 via Wikimedia Commons - Lagos, Badagry Coconut Beach Accra, Ghana Carbon Nightclub. Image Source: Yolo Port Louis, Mauritius Richard Van der Spuy via 123RF - An umbrella covered lane in the Le Caudan Waterfront Not sure how to implement bleisure in your corporate travel policy? Here's a list of points to keep in mind when you structure and implement a travel policy that allows for leisure travel: For travellers, bleisure is a great cost-saving opportunity which allows them to tack on a few leisure days on their corporate trip. For companies, travel can be seen as an incentive that boosts employee productivity, wellness and motivation. A true win-win situation.A Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) study in 2017 which looked at the trend towards extending business travel for leisure revealed business travellers, who take bleisure trips, most typically extended them for a short period of time. While 90% did so from more than one day, only one-quarter (23%) did so for more than three days. On average, travellers typically extended their trips for three days.The most common reasons business travellers identified for taking bleisure trips were to visit a destination they liked to spend their time (43%) or visit a new destination they wanted to see (38%). Not far behind was the fact that its a less expensive way to enjoy a holiday (34%) or their need for time away from home and work (34%).While travel into some parts of Africa very firmly remains in the business trip category, travellers who decide to extend their business trip may be surprised at the leisure opportunities available on the continent.Here are a few of the more interesting experiences that will leave travellers feeling that bleisure in Africa can be a real pleasure.If your company is serious about doing business in Africa, chances are youll be hopping on a plane to Lagos very soon. The commercial capital of Nigeria, Lagos has grown into a thriving business hub and a popular destination for corporate travellers.Coconut beach, located in Badagry, West of Lagos, is the place to be. Spend the day or the weekend in this holiday town to soak up the calm Atlantic Ocean, and youll feel completely recharged.Omu Resort, located along the Lekki-epe road, offers a whole range of outdoor activities. Set in a rainforest environment, this amusement/animal park offers anything from karts and quad rides to the first wax museum in Africa, horse riding, archery and even a zoo with 40 animals from around Africa. One of the more recent additions to the park includes a water park, a spaceship, bungee jumping and a butterfly park.Voted the best restaurant in Lagos on TripAdvisor for 2016, Izanagi Restaurant shouldnt be missed. At this Japanese restaurant, everything is prepared on the spot. The ambience is relaxing with soft lighting and a clearly Asian vibe. Art Cafe also offers a great reprieve for weary business travellers. This lovely coffee shop with a fantastic laid-back ambience serves all types of coffees and teas.If you are not familiar with Accra you may be surprised to know that this West African city offers some of the continents best shopping, excellent nightlife and some fantastic dining options for corporate travellers.There are quite a lot of sightseeing opportunities for corporates who would like to explore the city during the day. The Centre For National Culture, better known simply as The Arts Centre, is definitely worth a visit. Travellers will find everything in this centre from woven Kente cloth, wooden sculptures, earrings and other fashion accessories, to the latest in African fashion and arts and crafts from all over Ghana.While most people love Fridays, in Ghana, it is a true celebration. Corporates who are up for it will be able to have a lot of fun in this city. They can explore the citys pubs and clubs, its Live Band Spots (Gold Coast) as well as the City Escape Hotel.Those looking for a culinary experience will be treated to a large offer of options from continental restaurants to establishments serving local delicacies and the best way to end the night off is with a party at the Carbon Nightclub on top of the Coco Lounge.Forget what you thought you knew about Mauritius. Its capital, Port Louis, is actually quite a busy and dynamic business hub.While Port Louis offers up its fair share of museums and religious sites, there is much more to the city to discover. Business travellers who want to get an inkling of what modern-day Port Louis is all about should take some time out to explore its colourful streets, visiting the variety of street markets, the main market in Port Louis as well as the restaurants at the harbour.At Fort Adelaide, which is also known as La Citadelle, visitors can enjoy panoramic views of Port Louis. The fort is quite impressive in itself, having been built between 1834 and 1840 and it is here visitors will admire fantastic views of the Champs de Mars, believed to be the oldest known racecourse in the southern Hemisphere.With a variety of cultural influences, dining anywhere in Mauritius promises variety. At City Orient and Grand Ocean City, you will find some of the best Chinese cuisines while a quick lunch at Life Restaurant is also highly recommended. When business is done, travellers should really consider after-work drinks at Tilambic or On the Rocks at Le Suffern in Caudan. Here they can unwind and take in the gorgeous surrounds of the marina at On the Rocks.Announce company-wide that you will be adding bleisure guidelines to the corporate travel policy and establish clear guidelines on what is considered leisure travel and processes for separating expenses.Cover the grey area of travel insurance for the leisure portion of the trip by deciding if, and to what extent, the company will provide travel insurance. In the event that the company has a blanket travel insurance policy, you will have to decide and clarify whether leisure breakaways will be covered under that policy and whether the company or the employee will be responsible for the costs.Provide guidelines on where and how corporate travellers can book their additional leisure days and keep in mind that using the same travel-management company for both business and leisure will not only be convenient but also ensure greater control and oversight on total leisure and business travel spend. #Newsmaker: Marcus Brewster on moving to and making it in Malta Marcus Brewster aka 'the Maltese falcon', founder of local Marcusbrewster Public Relations, moved to Malta to expand the business into the European Union with the launch of Marcus Brewster International. A year later, and he's back in South Africa to encourage others to do the same. The introductory talks take place in Cape Town on 31 May-1 June, Johannesburg on 4-5 June, Bloemfontein on 7 June and Durban on 8 June. Acting as emcee, Brewster will accompany four Maltese speakers representing various links in the value chain. Effectively were talking up the business and lifestyle case and why South Africans should be considering these sunny islands with the highest growth rate in the EU, explains Brewster. The event serves to create awareness and provide information on moving to Malta. Most people (and not just South Africans) dont even know where Malta is on the map and are unaware of the phenomenal economic trajectory the island has been blazing over the past five years. Apart from the public seminars, which I must stress are free, we will also be scheduling one-on-one meetings. I asked Brewster what everyone else is asking him: why he chose to establish an office in Malta, and how hes managed to immerse himself in the Maltese market and mindset How do you feel about coming back to SA as a Maltese representative? How do you feel about coming back to SA as a Maltese representative? As such, Brewster will be taking part in the countywide Invest in Malta conference starting in Cape Town tomorrow.The introductory talks take place in Cape Town on 31 May-1 June, Johannesburg on 4-5 June, Bloemfontein on 7 June and Durban on 8 June. Acting as emcee, Brewster will accompany four Maltese speakers representing various links in the value chain. Effectively were talking up the business and lifestyle case and why South Africans should be considering these sunny islands with the highest growth rate in the EU, explains Brewster.The event serves to create awareness and provide information on moving to Malta. Most people (and not just South Africans) dont even know where Malta is on the map and are unaware of the phenomenal economic trajectory the island has been blazing over the past five years. Apart from the public seminars, which I must stress are free, we will also be scheduling one-on-one meetings.I asked Brewster what everyone else is asking him: why he chose to establish an office in Malta, and how hes managed to immerse himself in the Maltese market and mindset What do you plan to speak about at the event? What do you plan to speak about at the event? So, with the launch of Marcus Brewster International, why did you decide to establish an office in Malta? So, with the launch of Marcus Brewster International, why did you decide to establish an office in Malta? What have been your greatest challenges and opportunities since making the move? What have been your greatest challenges and opportunities since making the move? Next steps for the business? Next steps for the business? What are you most proud of in terms of your career? What are you most proud of in terms of your career? Comment on the current state of PR and what the future of PR looks like to you. Comment on the current state of PR and what the future of PR looks like to you. Many industry buzzwords like content creation or influencer marketing are just the new names for services that PR has traditionally excelled in. The PR rose still smells as sweet What do you love most about Malta and miss most about SA? What do you love most about Malta and miss most about SA? I have too much moment-by-moment appreciation of Malta to miss much about my old South African routines. Tell us something about yourself not generally known. Tell us something about yourself not generally known. Cape Town Johannesburg Bloemfontein Durban Jessica Tennant's articles About Jessica Tennant Jess is Senior Editor: Marketing & Media at Bizcommunity.com. She is also a contributing writer. Jess is Senior Editor: Marketing & Media at Bizcommunity.com. She is also a contributing writer. moc.ytinummoczib@swengnitekram Although my PR function on this national roadshow is as a facilitator opening private sector doors for Maltese/SA engagement, I am extremely evangelical about this little Mediterranean island and EU member state having had the good fortune to settle on the archipelago a year ago.The question everybody asks me: Why did you choose Malta? Without stealing my own thunder, I spent five years researching and visiting various Mediterranean jurisdictions from the Eastern-most stretch of the Turkish Riviera all the way out to Madeira in the wide Atlantic! I hope to tell people what boxes Malta ticks.It was a lifestyle choice first and foremost. However, because of the burgeoning economy, there is a lot of opportunity here in Malta: new launches, new campaigns, even new industries (hello Blockchain!). English is widely spoken and the de facto language of business. Plus, the rock is in the absolute middle of the middle of the Med which makes it equally quick to get anywhere in the EMEA region. Once youve digested all the salient points, youll wonder why you havent opened an office here!The tender process for marketing-related RFPs is absolutely brilliant. The evaluation deadline is often set within 48 hours of your submission deadline and client notifies all participants immediately of the outcome (supplier and quantum awarded). Its completely invigorating to work with such transparent procurement protocols an outcome of being in the EU. (As an EU member state, each country has to meet European business standards.)The biggest challenge if you can call it that is getting used to the odd hours we may be on the same time-zone as South Africa but Southern European time, i.e. the siesta needs as much cultural adjustment as African time!After having accumulated 30-plus years of SA PR expertise and media connections, I came to Malta ready to acquire new IP. My first year here has been so instructive, so rewarding and fulfilling in terms of different ways of seeing, that I believe theres an opportunity in assisting South Africans to get into in the Maltese market and mindset and vice versa.Three things: That I birthed half of Cape Towns PR industry having employed and mentored many young professionals who went on to launch their own successful consultancies.Secondly, I am enormously proud of my former staffers who now run global communications portfolios for multi-national companies.And finally, whether its pride or luck, I now look back in some awe at my 30+ years professional longevity not many agencies have gone the distance that I have and maintained consistency over the long-haul.I love the vernacular building style in general and ourin particular, the quality of the light, the sense of community in our village and the relaxed lifestyle all of which are subsumed in my evening! I love being surrounded by and immersed in European culture. Plus, I also marvel at how weve been embraced by our network of Maltese friends.I plan to write a bestselling series of Malta mysteries! Email marketing remains one of the most reliable and lucrative digital channels generating higher ROIs than instant messaging, social media, or mobile advertising. With people spending more and more time using email as their primary communication tool, marketers have now come to realise its true potential.Database accuracy, content or design - marketers are constantly trying to find out what the hidden gem behind email marketing is and how to create campaigns that not only increase engagement but also drive the right quality of leads, says Katherine Marriott, Sales Manager from Everlytic.Communications have moved away from longer form into shorter, simpler, single focused messages which drive an increase in conversions.When chatting to Karyn Strybos, Brand Manager at Everlytic, she stated: Email Marketing is still very much alive, and we continue to see increases in both open and engagement rates. Brands are sending more and more email but the fact that they are focusing on much more personalised journeys has made a huge impact on their ROI.Everlytic will once again be exhibiting at the Marketing, Advertising and Design Exhibition (MADEX) in Johannesburg and both Kate and Karyn look forward to unpacking these topics a bit more in their knowledge sharing sessions. Click here for more information on their topics. grandeduc via 123RF Packet switching and interconnectivity Protocol stacks The TCP/IP protocol stack Application: The application layer is where communications protocols and interface methods work, standardising functions like email (SMTP) and file transfers (FTP) for example. Transport: The transport layer is where your TCP steps in, asking other devices on the network if theyre willing to accept the information from the local device. Internet: The internet layer is where internet protocol uses your IP address to establish which device it is communicating with. Network: The network interface routes data between devices on your network and manages the exchange of data between your network and the outside world. How packet routes are determined Quality of service (QoS) and prioritising How it works Who is responsible for your internet experience? My last post explored how all the devices connected to the internet are able to speak to one another by understanding a common set of protocols called TCP/IP.Think of TCP/IP as the universal language of the internet. They tell computers how to break data files into bits and place them into packets for transmission across the world. And when the packets arrive at their destination, the receiving device also knows how to reassemble the data.In this post, were taking a look at how these clever little packets get from one device to another.What really makes the internet functional and beautiful is 'packet switching'.Packet switching allows the packets of data to split up and travel independently over several different routes to their destination. It also means that several types of data (video packets, email packets even voice call packets) can travel on the same route at the same time.If a route is down or heavily congested, packets can be easily redirected to a more appropriate one. Much the same as your GPS can navigate you on alternate routes.Before we can discuss how these routes are determined, heres a quick look at the process that the packets follow from one device to another.You wouldnt get dressed, put your shoes on and brush your hair before getting into the shower, would you? In the same way, computers rely on protocols to make sure they follow these steps in the right order.A group of protocols working together is called a protocol stack. Protocol stacks are made up of various layers, which each contain instructions to let both sides understand what it should do with the packets.TCP/IP, which I spoke about in my previous post , is an example of a protocol stack.The TCP/IP protocol stack is made up of four layers. These layers are responsible for disassembling data into packets, addressing, routing and delivering them, and finally ensuring correct reassembly.When you want to send data across the net, the data will go through each of these layers in a specific order: Application Transport Internet Network. This same order is reversed when data is received.Multiple factors determine the packets routes, such as time (the fastest route available) and the relationships between internet service providers (ISPs).Your internet service provider maintains relationships with many other ISPs to ensure there are as many options for routing your data as possible. When your message leaves your computer, it travels to your ISP, and they send the packets over the fastest available routes.Essentially, QoS is your networks ability to achieve maximum bandwidth by prioritising certain types of data ahead of others. QoS applies to certain network traffic, such as streaming media, online gaming, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and virtual conferencing.Imagine that youre watching Netflix on a Saturday evening, you have a VoIP line, and a call comes through.Packet switching allows both the video and voice packets to be routed over your internet line.Prioritisation, determined by your ISP, involves inspecting packet headers to identify the data traffic and determining the order that the packets then need to be received in.This means that when your friend calls, your VoIP phone will still ring. In fact, youll be able to take the phone call while Netflix runs simultaneously, without anything being interrupted.Its up to your ISP to determine the best combination QoS elements, to achieve maximum bandwidth. Your ISP will focus on and constantly refine, their QoS and prioritisation policies as this makes the difference between an okay internet experience and a brilliant one. This company article has been removed. One of South Africa's leading burger brands has undertaken another platform into account as part and parcel of the bouquet of initiatives that include Shout, Active Education's Lets Play Challenge and Varsity Cup. Danny K, Adolf Fourie, Gavin Koppel, Julius & Marsh, Kabelo Mabalane & Steers Team Danny K, Top Student Rhulani & Kabelo Mabalani in Shout Library Matsavane Governing Body With Kabelo & Danny K Rounda is a non-governmental initiative that was started by Dawie who had a profound passion to ensure that South Africans take action by means of collecting small amounts of change in an effort to make a meaningful financial contribution to various causes in a big and impactful way. The platform is supported by a board of trustees of the Nikela trust that include the Cyril Ramaphosa foundation and support from the government, who also believe the importance of the vision founded by Dawie and have been involved actively since the formation of the Rounda platform in which was established to enable brands, businesses and individuals to make a small financial contribution as little as R1 to an array of NGO entities that include the likes of Choc House, CANSA, NSPCA, SA Red Cross and more. Steers consumers will be encouraged in store, the app and on social media to make a donation of R1 along meal purchases made from 17 April in all franchises across the country.The brand felt that the partnership with Rounda resonated with their brand values towards ensuring that needs are met in a manner that is real and fulfilling. The alignment of the NGO and the brand lies strongly in the fact that Steers saw the opportunity fitting to engage with the initiative in a manner that would continuously accommodate funding of the Shout libraries program that was first launched with a unique offering in the menu that enabled the sales generated to raise one million Rand that was donated towards the construction of the libraries. Its important for us to undergo partnerships like this to ensure that our community is taken care of consistently, most especially in sustaining the Shout S.E.E.D Libraries program that was designed to create brand new fully equipped learning library mobile centers for schools that do not have access to this resource because we saw the success in the first launch of the initiative in Thembisa and Soshanguve last year. This year, the library in Bushbuck Ridge will be launched in May, which will followed by another ceremony in Knysna thereafter, says Adolf Fourie, Steers Marketing Executive.Steers will be the first to action Rounda in stores, which will later see a further extension of the project in other sectors of the economy that include banking and retail. They have already undergone a series of extensive training and piloting to ensure smooth efficiency across all the franchises nationally as well as encourage a culture that will be embodied within the brand so as to continuously support early childhood literacy improvement within the current demographic of impoverished learners who have the bare minimum to succeed. This platform really gives life to Shout on a sustainable basis that would help us build more libraries in more schools across the country because without the support from our partners and Steers in the S.E.E.D Libraries campaign, we would have never been able to create much needed mobile resources for our young minds, states Danny K, co-founder of Shout. Reciba en su email: noticias de ultima hora, analisis tecnicos o el cierre de mercado Email no valido Nombre requerido Recibira las informaciones mas relevantes del dia en tiempo real Que informacion desea recibir? Noticias de Ultima hora Boletin Cierre de Mercado Boletin analisis tecnico Boletin Fundsnews Debe seleccionar un tipo de boletin Acepto la Politica de privacidad Debe aceptar la politica de privacidad Responsable EMPRESAS DEL GRUPO WEB FINANCIAL GROUP Finalidad La remision de informacion, novedades y promociones Establecimiento o mantenimiento de Relaciones Comerciales. Legitimacion Consentimiento del interesado. Interes legitimo en el desarrollo de la relacion comercial Destinatario Empresas del Grupo WEB FINANCIAL GROUP Derechos Acceso, rectificacion, supresion, limitacion, oposicion y portabilidad Informacion adicional Politica de Privacidad de nuestra pagina Web + INFORMACION PR Newswire TAIPEI, Taiwan, May 29, 2018 TAIPEI, Taiwan, May 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- InnoVEX, the special startup exhibition of COMPUTEX started in 2016 as a platform for ICT startups to network with global buyers, investors and manufacturers, is returning to Taipei TWTC Hall 3 from June 6 to 8 2018. This year, InnoVEX will feature 388 exhibitors from 21 countries and regions. Visitors can meet with startups from not only Taiwan, but also Canada, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, United States, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Poland, Spain, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Mexico, Sweden, Austria, Germany, and Saudi Arabia. InnoVEX will have exhibitions, forums, pitch contest, and matchmaking sessions to help accelerate startups' commercialization process and network with global buyers, investors, and manufacturers. Entering its third year, InnoVEX has become the most international startup platform in Taiwan as 40% are from overseas. The total number of exhibitors also grew by over 100 from last year's number. The number of visitors is expected to grow to over 18,000. InnoVEX official Sponsor: Pan German Motors Ltd. (BMW Taiwan Importer) InnoVEX is honored to announce Pan German Motors Ltd. (BMW Taiwan Importer) as the InnoVEX official sponsor. As the only luxury car brand that participates in InnoVEX this year, BMW is going to unveil the mobility of tomorrow to the public in Taiwan through holding the "BMW Future Mobility Forum" on June 6. Moreover, Dr. Mario Urbina Cazenave, BMW Lead UI/UX (User Experience and Interaction) Designer, will be invited to give a keynote speech on the theme of "BMW Future Vision: Autonomous, Connected, Electric, Shared". The new BMW i8 Roadster is also going to be displayed at the venue to showcase the cutting-edge technology of BMW. Pavilions organized by Nations, Governments, Accelerators, and Incubators to Join InnoVEX The top 5 industries that the exhibiting startups will bring are: IoT, AI, Health & Biotech, AR/VR, and Big Data & Cloud Services. In addition to the individual exhibitors, the pavilions are also part of the main highlights of InnoVEX. The principal pavilions are organized by: Taiwan Startup Springboard, Alibaba Taiwan Entrepreneurs Fund, Taiwan Tech Arena (TTA), XR-EXPRESS TW (National Development Council), Startup [email protected] Startup Terrace, Taoyuan City Government (TYC), Global Startup Talents @ Taipei (GSTPE), Industrial Development Bureau IoT Integration Service Center (IDB IISC), and many more including the 13 national pavilions from The Netherlands, France, EU, and other innovative countries. InnoVEX Forum: 3 Days, 6 Main Topics, Over 60 Speakers The InnoVEX Forum is a 3 day long event, where speakers from around the world are invited to share their insights on the current and future trends of the ICT industry. This year's InnoVEX forum will address: AI, Blockchain, Future Mobility, Gaming, Startup Ecosystem, Women Entrepreneurship, and more in the Center Stage which more than 60 speakers are expected to join. The AI forum will focus on its applications in IoT, Health/ Medicare, and fintech. The speakers are the leaders of the AI sector in IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and NVIDIA; also featuring AI experts from Appier, CTCI, GLORIA NCKU, Graphen Inc, Hyperform Consulting, ImmerVersion, Insilico Taiwan, NCCU, NTU, Quadrant.ai, and Taipei Medical University. The blockchain forum will have a keynote speech from IOTA Foundation; and a panel discussion featuring speakers from Bitmark, KKFARM, and Health2Sync. The Women Entrepreneurship forum will have Adriana Gascoigne, the CEO and Founder of Girls in Tech; Stephanie Tang, the Managing Director of Rookie Fund and 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Honoree; also speakers from KuoBrothers Corp, Shape Protype & Women in IoT, IoX Center of NTU, Noa's Mark, and Auterion. The speakers for the startup ecosystem topic will come from multiple backgrounds. From the VC side, there will be Anis Uzzaman, the CEO & General Partner of Fenox Venture Capital; Yuma Saito, the Founder & General Director of Deloitte Tohmatsu Venture Support; and Tom Vanhoutte, the Founder and Managing Partner of Imec.xpand; all three speakers will also be in the InnoVEX PITCH Contest judge panel. InnoVEX will also invite speakers from more VC firms, the media, accelerator, and incubators from Asia. InnoVEX PITCH Contest Prize Pool Reaches A Record High USD 350,000 The InnoVEX PITCH Contest was started to help startups with their commercialization process and increasing exposure. It also serves as a means for startups to network with investors, potential users, and future partners. This year, the prize pool of the InnoVEX PITCH Contest has hit a record high of USD 350,000 with prizes from both organizers and sponsors, including VCs, corporate, and government. The registration for the pitch contest has closed with over 40% overseas participants. The semifinalists will be announced on May 30, while the semifinal round will be conducted on June 7 on the Pi Stage. The final round will be on June 8 on the Center Stage. Matchmaking Sessions for Networking, Finding Partnerships, and Investments InnoVEX will also have matchmaking sessions on the Pi Stage as a way to help startups meet with VCs and corporate capitals. The matchmaking sessions are scheduled to take place on June 6 and June 8. There will also be a global startup demo on the Pi Stage on June 6 for startups to showcase their products and solutions featuring 10 teams from France and 8 teams from Poland. Everyone's invited to join InnoVEX 2018, COMPUTEX Exhibitors and Visitors can all join for free. Visitors can pre-register for their badge & pass on InnoVEX website (innovex.computex.biz). About COMPUTEX: COMPUTEX, the iconic B2B technology exhibition in Asia is organized by Taipei Computer Association (TCA) and Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA). This year's COMPUTEX will be held from June 5 through 9. As the main event for the Global Technology Ecosystem, COMPUTEX will focus on five major themes: AI, 5G, IoT, Gaming & VR and Blockchain. At the same time, two special exhibitions, InnoVEX -- the platform for tech startups and SmarTEX - which covers various smart IoT applications, will also be hosted during COMPUTEX. InnoVEX website: https://innovex.computex.biz/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/computexinnovex/ Twitter page: https://twitter.com/InnoVEX3 YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdbCU71Iqdejjb2HEZkrRqQLinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10536216/ Media members can also join our COMPUTEX media group where we post detailed early access information. Click here to join:https://www.facebook.com/groups/COMPUTEXMediaGroup/ View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-innovation-hub-of-asia-innovex-returns-on-june-6-2018-300656170.html SOURCE Taipei Computer Association (TCA) The Most Extensive and Reliable Source of Information Related to the Mexican Drugs Cartels. You will not find this level of coverage anywhere else, join us! Send information, pictures or videos, you remain 100% anonymous. Envia fotos, videos, notas, enlaces o informacion todo 100% Anonimo. Want to be a contributor or citizen reporter for Borderland Beat? We love to have you in our team, send Sol Prendido or HEARST an email! WARNING: Posts may contain strong violent material, discretion is advised. COMMENTS: We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. KOHIMA (PTI): Indian Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday made her maiden visit to Armys Spear Corps Zone at Rangpahar, Dimapur, where she was briefed about counter terrorist as well as border management operations on Indo-Myanmar border. She would go to forward areas along the Indo-Myanmar border in Nagaland sector today, Public Relations Officer of Defence C Konwer said. The minister arrived Tuesday in Nagaland on a two-day visit. General Officer Commanding of Spear Corps, Lt Gen Gopal R, briefed the Minister on the progress of operations of the corps which include counter terrorist as well as border management operations on Indo-Myanmar border in the North Eastern states. During visit to forward areas, she would undertake a detailed assessment of the border guarding operations undertaken by Spear Corps and also interact with officers and troops of the Assam Rifles operating along the border areas so as to make a firsthand review of the security situation along the international border, the PRO said. The Defence Minister before departing for Delhi the same evening would also meet and interact with the local people at those locations, the PRO defence added. NEWTOWN BOROUGH >> Strada is taking it to the street with its edgy line of every day wear for men and women. Located at 28 South State Street, Newtown Boroughs newest retail store features a full line of casual wear for the guys, ages 30 and up, as well as a smaller selection of womens wear, jewelry and accessories. The... UB professor expands Syrian aid programs, will train teachers at refugee camps in basic dental care Other programs to increase aid include rebuilding homes and schools in Syria Training and educating refugee volunteers will not only allow our vision and goals to reach thousands of refugees to improve their oral health, but it will also provide psychological and social support to refugees by making them partners in providing oral health. BUFFALO, N.Y. Dental professor Othman Shibly travels twice a year to the borders of his native Syria to help deliver dental care to more than 2,000 refugee children. The challenge: The number amounts to one percent of the 200,000 children displaced by the ongoing Syrian civil war. To reach more people and increase the sustainability of care, Shibly is turning to teachers and community volunteers to bridge the gap. Through the University at Buffalo Miles for Smiles program, a biannual mission to deliver dental care to Syrian refugee children, Shibly will lead the training of teachers and volunteers at refugee camps in Lebanon on how to perform basic oral health care. The training, made possible through a new partnership with Harvard University, Kings College London, and the non-governmental organizations (NGO) Dental Mavericks and Global Steps, will begin in the fall. The training will be followed by a Miles for Smiles mission in October. If successful, the program will advance Shiblys goal of providing free oral health care and education to every child who lacks access to treatment due to the war. No matter how good we are in our missions, we can only treat so much. It would be impossible to have a significant impact on the oral health of refugees, says Shibly, DDS, clinical professor in the UB School of Dental Medicine. Training and educating refugee volunteers will not only allow our vision and goals to reach thousands of refugees to improve their oral health, but it will also provide psychological and social support to refugees by making them partners in providing oral health. Shibly recently completed his 15th mission to the area, during which he, for the first time, expanded care to teenagers and local children in Lebanon. The trip ran from April 30 to May 6, delivering treatment to 900 Syrian refugee children and 300 deprived and socially challenged Lebanese children. Volunteers from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, King's College London Dental Institute, Saint Joseph University of Beirut, and individual practitioners from the United States, France and Kuwait helped Shibly fill cavities, perform extractions, deliver oral health education and more. Logistics and support were organized by the Syrian American Medical Society, Multi Aid Programs and other NGOs. More than $25,000 of dental supplies and equipment were donated by Henry Schein, Inc., the worlds largest provider of health care products and services to office-based dental, animal health and medical practitioners. Since 2015, Henry Schein has supported Shibly and Miles for Smiles, by donating more than $120,000 in dental materials and equipment. Dr. Shiblys extraordinary commitment to serving the oral health needs of young Syrian refugees and Lebanese children, combined with his vision for improving the local communitys capacity to deliver care, exemplifies the Henry Schein Cares spirit, says Stanley M. Bergman, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Henry Schein, Inc. No child should go without access to quality care, and we are pleased to support compassionate and selfless health care professionals such as Dr. Shibly and his team in their efforts. Beyond teeth To provide refugees with adequate housing, Shibly is experimenting with a new program to repair homes in Syria in exchange for the owners permission to allow refugee families to occupy the house for two years. With friends, Shibly is financing the project out-of-pocket. They estimate that each house will cost $500 U.S. dollars or 250,000 Syrian pounds to repair. Nearly 70 percent of Syrian refugees live below the extreme poverty line less than $2 per day, according to the United Nations. The program could provide Syrian families with an alternative to refugee camps, which are often overcrowded and have inhumane living conditions. Shibly is also working to reestablish some of the schools that he helped create after they were recently displaced by a bombing in Damascus, the capital of Syria. With the help of donations from various organizations, he is assisting the schools move to northern Syria. These students, however, are not refugees. The schools, which range from elementary to secondary, educate the children of families who chose not to leave the war zone. The sooner the schools are settled, the faster they can return to providing a brighter future for thousands of the children affected by the war, Shibly says. Since 2012, Shibly has helped open or support more than 20 dental clinics in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon; and formed 14 schools in Syria that have taught more than 5,000 children. Research News Ancient boulders provide new clues about story of human migration to Americas Thick vegetation, low cloud cover and mountainous terrain made finding suitable sampling sites a challenge. Photo: Jason Briner By CHARLOTTE HSU People are fascinated by these questions of where they come from and how they got there. Jason Briner, professor Department of Geology When and how did the first people come to the Americas? The conventional story says the earliest settlers came via Siberia, crossing the now-defunct Bering land bridge on foot and trekking through Canada when an ice-free corridor opened up between massive ice sheets toward the end of the last ice age. But with recent archaeological evidence casting doubt on this thinking, scientists are seeking new explanations. One dominant, new theory: The first Americans took a coastal route along Alaskas Pacific border to enter the continent. A new geological study provides compelling evidence to support this hypothesis. By analyzing boulders and bedrock, a UB-led research team shows that part of a coastal migration route became accessible to humans 17,000 years ago. During this period, ancient glaciers receded, exposing islands of southern Alaskas Alexander Archipelago to air and sun and, possibly, to human migration. The timing of these events is key: Recent genetic and archaeological estimates suggest that settlers may have begun traveling deeper into the Americas some 16,000 years ago, soon after the coastal gateway opened up. The research was published on May 30 in the journal Science Advances. People are fascinated by these questions of where they come from and how they got there, says lead scientist Jason Briner, professor of geology in the College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the UB RENEW (Research and Education in eNergy, Environment and Water) Institute. Our research contributes to the debate about how humans came to the Americas. Its potentially adding to what we know about our ancestry and how we colonized our planet. Our study provides some of the first geologic evidence that a coastal migration route was available for early humans as they colonized the New World, says UB geology PhD candidate Alia Lesnek, the studys first author. There was a coastal route available, and the appearance of this newly ice-free terrain may have spurred early humans to migrate southward. The findings do not mean that early settlers definitely traversed Alaskas southern coast to spread into the Americas. The project examined just one section of the coast, and scientists would need to study multiple locations up and down the coastline to draw firmer conclusions. Still, the work is exciting because it hints that the seafaring theory of migration is viable. The bones of an ancient ringed seal previously discovered in a nearby cave by other researchers provide further, tantalizing clues. They hint that the area was capable of supporting human life at the time that early settlers may have been passing through, Briner says. The new study calculates the seal bones are about 17,000 years old. This indicates the region was ecologically vibrant soon after the ice retreated, with resources including food becoming available. Co-authors on the research include Briner; Lesnek; Charlotte Lindqvist, associate professor of biological sciences at UB and a visiting associate professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; James Baichtal of Tongass National Forest; and Timothy Heaton of the University of South Dakota. Landscape, touched by ice, tells a story To conduct their study, the scientists journeyed to four islands within the Alexander Archipelago that lie about 200 miles south/southeast of Juneau. The team traveled by helicopter to reach these remote destinations. As soon as the researchers arrived, Briner knew the islands had once been covered by ice. The landscape is glacial, he says. The rock surfaces are smooth and scratched from when the ice moved over it, and there are erratic boulders everywhere. When you are a geologist, it hits you in the face. You know it immediately: The glacier was here. To pinpoint when the ice receded from the region, the team collected bits of rock from the surfaces of boulders and bedrock. Later, the scientists ran tests to figure out how long the samples and thus the islands as a whole had been free of ice. The researchers used a method called surface exposure dating. As Lesnek explains, When land is covered by a glacier, the bedrock in the area is hidden under ice. As soon as the ice disappears, however, the bedrock is exposed to cosmic radiation from space, which causes it to accumulate certain chemicals on their surface. The longer the surface has been exposed, the more of these chemicals you get. By testing for these chemicals, we were able to determine when our rock surfaces were exposed, which tells us when the ice retreated. We use the same dating method for huge boulders called erratics. These are big rocks that are plucked from the Earth and carried to new locations by glaciers, which actually consist of moving ice. When glaciers melt and disappear from a specific region, they leave these erratics behind, and surface exposure dating can tell us when the ice retreated. For the region that was studied, this happened roughly 17,000 years ago. Case for coastal migration route Brick manufacturer Wienerberger holds its Brick Awards bi-annually, celebrating modern, innovative architecture with clay materials. Almost 600 projects from 44 countries were submitted for this years awards. An independent pre-jury narrowed down this number to the top 50, and then an expert jury of five internationally renowned architects was selected to whittle down these nominees and choose the final winners. Jonathan Sergison, architect and founding partner of Sergison Bates Architects, represented the UK on the panel. The awards were held in the Albert Hall in Vienna, Austria. Seven global projects were honoured with a Wienerberger Brick Award and received prize money totaling just under 30,000. This year, two projects were awarded the celebrated Grand Prize. The first winning project was Westkaai Towers 5 and 6 by UK-based practice Tony Fretton Architects. Situated in Antwerp, Belgium, the towers are part of a larger residential project within a new mixed-used development. The project was also the winner in the Living together category. The second Grand Prize winner was the Kunstmuseum Basel Extension project by Christ & Gantenbein, Switzerland. This grey brick structure is connected through an underground hall with the listed main building. LED lights are integrated in the grooves made of moulded bricks in the facade. This project also won the the Sharing public spaces category. Heimo Scheuch, CEO of Wienerberger AG, said: The projects submitted this year impressed the jury with their innovative spirit and quality. They represent bold and creative architectural concepts for sustainable and forward-looking living spaces. 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 After being pipped by rival Walmart in the race to acquire a majority stake in Indias largest e-commerce marketplace Flipkart, Seattle-based online retail giant Amazon says it will stay its course in organically growing its business in the country, a model which has worked wonders for it so far. Celebrating its fifth anniversary of doing business in the country on June 5, Amazon has set itself a lofty goal of bringing the next 100 million customers on to its platform in the next five years. While it will continue to focus on its core competencies of enhanced selection, delivering ... After four days and innumerable questions on why India was missing from Silicon Valley-based Tesla Motors global plans, founder and CEO Elon Musk broke his silence on social network Twitter saying that the regulations existing in the country were not conducive for the electric carmaker to do business here. On May 26, Musk had Tweeted a map of the world showing every location where the company either already has or will install its superchargers (charging stations) signifying where it was selling its cars. As not a single location in India got a mention in the list shared by ... Thinking regionally and focusing on particular sectors will help Japanese achieve success quicker in India, Mitsubishi Corporation India CMD Eisuke Shiozaki said here today. He was speaking on "Experiences of Japanese Business in India" at the Ahmedabad Management Association here. "Mid-90s (is) when the first wave of Japanese enter India. The second wave comes in around 2005. (In mid-90s) GDP was not grown, but some were looking for some markets after China. After 2005, they clearly saw this country blooming," he said. "Mitsubishi only entered, or re-entered India, after 2012....Even if we had entered India, we had lots of tax issues with Indian government, which de-motivated us....As for Mitsubishi, this is the third wave. Mitsubishi has been rather late in coming here," he said. The Japanese or Korean companies which have been in India for 20 years are getting considerable profit margins, but half of those which are here for ten years are still struggling, he said. "Why does it take so much time for Japanese companies to be successful?" he asked. While in the past bureaucracy and lack of infrastructure were the issues, now the reason is that Japanese companies take a lot of time to investigate the market, and often their analysis differs from the actual outcome, he said. "It was very difficult for Japanese companies to grasp what this country is," he said. Citing the example of Sony and Unichan, he said for them, focusing on particular regions and sectors has paid off. India still sends very few students to Japan, and even fewer Indians learn Japanese, Shiozaki said. "There is a big gap between these two cultures. But as the business grows, cultural differences start to narrow down. India is India, not South East Asia. Let's think regionally, and focus on sectors," he said. The plunge in the average exports realisations for shrimps is hitting the bottom-line of the stakeholders across the supply chain associated with the USD five billion Indian seafood export market. The export prices of shrimps, the key contributor to the country's seafood basket, have plunged by more than 20 per cent in past few months, due to increased supply from competing nations Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador. While the exporters are stating that there has been a sharp drop of two dollar per kg in prices of key verities compared to last year which is over 30 per cent. One ... The closure of Sterlite Copper, the smelting unit of Vedanta Group, is expected to impact the fertilisers and chemicals industry in Tamil Nadu, as it is a major supplier of phosphoric acid and sulphuric acid in the State. The two acids are by-products. The price of sulphuric acid has already risen more than three times due to short supply, said sources. Sterlite is said to be the only domestic supplier of Phosphoric Acid with a capacity of 220,000 metric tonnes. The by-product is a key raw material in the manufacture fertilisers such as Diammonium Phosphate (DAP) and NPK, and is also ... India-US ties seem to have hit a rough patch after making great strides in the last few years. At the heart of the issues are the two country's contrasting relationship with Russia and Iran. While US has imposed sanctions on both the countries, India has suggested that it will continue dealing with both the nations. The US on Monday expressed concerns about India's planned Rs 400 billion deal to buy the sophisticated, long-range S-400 air defence system from Russia. There is a lot of concern in the US, in both the administration and the Congress, over the ... As a massive fire broke out in a rubber godown in South Delhi's Malviya Nagar area on Tuesday evening, Indian Air Force (IAF) Mi 17 chopper were being used to douse the fire even as at least 65 fire tenders were used to contain the fire throughout the operation. The fire department had received a call around 5 pm and 35 fire tenders were immediately rushed to the spot to contain the fire, a Delhi Fire Services officer said. 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 The southwest monsoon may be slightly below normal in southern and northeastern parts of the country in 2018, but normal in the northwestern and central regions, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Wednesday. The region-wise forecast comes with a model error of plus and minus 8 per cent. Releasing its second stage forecast for the southwest, the met department said that the monsoon season this year is expected to be normal and rainfall is expected to be around 97 per cent of the Long Period Average (LPA). The forecast is with a model error of plus and minus 4 ... US investment bank Goldman Sachs said on Wednesday it had cut its euro/dollar forecast for the next 3, 6 and 12-months because of uncertainty stemming from Italy's political crisis. The bank said it forecast the euro to trade at $1.15 over the next three months, versus $1.20 previously. It also cut its six-month forecast to $1.20 from $1.27 and the 12-month forecast to $1.25 from $1.30 referendum on Italy's membership of the euro zone. Through more than two months of tough negotiations to form a government in Italy after inconclusive March elections, global financial markets remained relatively calm. Italys uncertainties seemed contained to Italy, and Europes economy kept growing. That changed this week when Italys president, Sergio Mattarella, effectively blocked two populist parties from forming a government. He judged that a crucial member of their proposed cabinet was intent on having Italy abandon the euro, though they had not explicitly campaigned on that issue. In doing so, Mr. ... China lashed out on Wednesday at renewed threats from the White House on trade, warning that it was ready to fight back if Washington was looking for a trade war, days ahead of a planned visit by US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. In an unexpected change in tone, the US said on Tuesday that it still held the threat of imposing tariffs on $50 billion of imports from China unless it addressed the issue of theft of American intellectual property. Washington also said it will press ahead with restrictions on investment by Chinese companies in the US as well as export controls for ... Nine tourists, including two minors, were arrested for allegedly assaulting a minor boy and molesting a minor girl in Calangute, Goa. The Calangute Police have arrested all the nine accused, who all are natives of Pune, Maharashtra. Police Inspector (PI) Jivba Dalvi told ANI that, the parent of the children appeared at the police station on Monday, and informed about the incident. An FIR has been registered against the accused. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Just because you stopped smoking years ago doesn't mean you're out of the woods when it comes to developing lung cancer. However, there is still a ray of hope. According to a study conducted by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the risk of lung cancer drops substantially within five years of quitting. "If you smoke, now is a great time to quit," said first author Hilary Tindle. "The fact that lung cancer risk drops relatively quickly after quitting smoking, compared to continuing smoking, gives new motivation". Tindle and her colleagues examined the records of residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, who have been followed for decades by the Framingham Heart Study. The study helped establish high blood pressure and high cholesterol as key risk factors for cardiovascular disease. But it also tracked cancer outcomes. The current study looked at 8,907 participants who had been followed for 25 to 34 years. During this period, 284 lung cancers were diagnosed, nearly 93 percent of which occurred among heavy smokers, those who had smoked at least a pack of cigarettes a day for 21 years or more. Five years after quitting, the risk of developing lung cancer in former heavy smokers dropped by 39 percent compared to current smokers and continued to fall as time went on. Yet even 25 years after quitting, their lung-cancer risk remained over threefold higher compared to people who had never smoked. The study is unique because it asked people about their smoking every two to four years, and could account for increases or decreases in smoking over time. Further study is warranted to determine whether extending the cut-off point for mandated screening would be cost-effective and save lives, the researchers concluded. "While the importance of smoking cessation cannot be overstated, former heavy smokers need to realize that the risk of lung cancer remains elevated for decades after they smoke their last cigarette, underscoring the importance of lung cancer screening," said senior author Matthew Freiberg. The findings from the study are published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Abul Hasan has been called in the Bangladesh T20I squad as a replacement for injured Mustafizur Rahman for the three-match series against Afghanistan, beginning June 3 at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Dehradun. The 25-year-old, who last appeared for Bangladesh during an ODI tri-series in January-involving Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe, will arrive in India ahead of their only warm-up game on the tour. Abul's inclusion seems to have come in the wake of his impressive performance in the 2017 edition of the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL), where he bagged 10 wickets at an average of 24.40 and finished the tournament with an economy rate of 8.13, ESPNcricinfo reported. Earlier, fast bowler Rahman was ruled out of next month's T20I series against Afghanistan due to a toe injury. Later, BCB's senior physician Dr Debashis Chowdhury said a scan had revealed that Mustafizur would take up to three weeks to recover fully from the injury. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Air India on Wednesday confirmed the death of its Mumbai-based pilot in a hotel in Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh. Air India first officer Capt Rithwik Tiwari was found dead in a small toilet room located in a health club of the hotel on Wednesday morning. A spokesperson of the airline also informed the Indian embassy in Riyadh and family of the pilot about the same. "We got the news of our pilot died in Riyadh we informed his family as well as our embassy in Riyadh," Air India spokesperson said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Delhi court on Wednesday allowed former Union minister P Chidambaram protection from arrest till June 5 in connection with the Aircel-Maxis money laundering case. This came after Chidambaram filed an anticipatory bail plea in Delhi's Patiala House Court earlier in the day in connection with the case. The court has asked the Enforcement Directorate to reply to the plea moved by Chidambaram by June 5. The former union minister had to appear before the Enforcement Directorate on June 5. Senior advocate and Congress leader Kapil Sibal will argue for the former union minister in this case. P. Chidambaram's son Karti was arrested on February 28 at the Chennai airport on his return from the United Kingdom, for his alleged role in facilitating Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance for INX Media Ltd. and its directors, Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. In October last year, during investigation, Enforcement Directorate (ED) found that FIPB approval given by Chidambaram in Aircel-Maxis case was beyond his mandate. The law enforcement agency, in its investigation, also found that the amount for FIPB approval was wrongly projected to conceal the facts. The Aircel-Maxis deal refers to a series of allegations of kickbacks in the telecom sector, which was part of the wider 2G scam that engulfed the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime. In 2011, former Aircel head C. Sivasankaran complained to the CBI that he was being forced by then telecom minister Dayanidhi Maran to sell Aircel to the Malaysia-based Maxis Communications group owned by T. Ananda Krishnan. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Muttahida Qaumi Movement's (MQM) founder and exiled leader Altaf Hussain has demanded the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to constitute a commission to look into the massacre of the Mohajirs in Pakistan since 1947. Hussain said that the UN commission should, in particular, investigate on Pukka Qilla massacre in 1990 between May 26 and 27, which was worst of all previous carnages. He made the demand during his address to the participants of an Iftar-cum-dinner that was hosted by the UK east chapter of the MQM. Hussain said that the Mohajirs are a constant victim of state-sponsored repressive agenda after they had founded Pakistan, adding that the community had erected its basic structure as a sovereign state but the "demonic military junta" of Pakistan had assassinated the country's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah through "poison." "He (Jinnah) was sick and was at his Ziarat Residency in Quetta when he was transported to Karachi in an ambulance for treatment but the military junta had put him in a highly depreciated ambulance which had halted midway to Karachi. The military junta did not want to see him survive of the poison that was given to him. This very military junta that has always been power-hungry also assassinated the first Premier of Pakistan Mr. Khan Liaquat Ali Khan, who was a right hand of the founder of Pakistan. He was shot dead during a public gathering at Rawalpindi," he claimed. Hussain further said that the Pakistani military establishment had also "assassinated" Jinnah's sister Fatimah Jinnah and called her an Indian agent. "The military junta also assassinated Mr. Jinnah's sister Ms. Fatimah Jinnah. The military junta had also declared Ms. Fatimah as Indian agent because she had dared to fight elections against military dictator Ayub Khan," he further said. Hussain explained, "According to Liaquat-Nehru Pact-1950, the property of Hindu of Pakistan migrating to India would be given to Mohajirs migrating from India to Pakistan. Mohajirs have not yet been given a single inch of evacuated property and hence they were forced to live in tents. Contrary to the facts, Sindhi nationalists claim they had favoured Mohajirs. In fact, Mohajirs' ancestors laid 20 million lives for the creation of Pakistan and freed people of present Pakistan. The truth is that they are the Mohajirs who have favoured Sindhis, Balochis, Punjabis, Seraikis and all other folks in Pakistan by freeing them from the slavery and gave them a free state. They were the Mohajirs alone who shed their blood for the freedom of Pakistan." He said that the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) carried the massacre of Mohajirs and they continued to suffer from PPP's tyranny during all of its present and previous governments. Hussain further asserted that it was PPP's founder and former Pakistan President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who presented the Sindhi ethnic language bill in the Sindh provincial assembly that was completely anti-Urdu. Late Pakistani poet Raees Amrohavi had in an improvised remark said, "Urdu Ka Janaza Hay Zara Dhoom Sey Nikley" (You are burying the Urdu language so there should be a great manifest of jubilation from your side). Hussain added that when Mohajirs protested against the bill, they were killed and their graves were still present in the compound of Masjid-e Shuhda (Mosque of martyrs) at Liaquatabad. "In rural Sindh, Mohajirs' properties were set on fire, they were attacked with arms and ammunition and they were forced to migrate from rural Sindh to urban areas. Bhutto deprived Mohajirs of employment opportunities through the imposition of the quota system. They were expelled from colleges and universities and doors of education were closed for them." He said that on unending repression on Mohajirs, he was compelled to found All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organisation (APMSO) (A student union in University of Karachi) on June 11, 1978, and on that day, they were also expelled from the university on gunpoint. Later, Hussain continued to say that he founded the MQM on March 18, 1984, on which massacre of Mohajirs was carried by Pakistan through Sindhi nationalists and law enforcement authorities. "On October 31, 1986, Mohajir convoys towards Hyderabad were attacked in which hundreds of Mohajirs were martyred at Sohrab Goth in Karachi's Super Highway and Market Chowk in Hyderabad. In addition, Mohajir leaders, my companions and I were arrested. On December 14, 1986, Mohajir colony, Aligarh and Qasba was attacked where armed militants continued to kill Mohajir men, women, elderly and children for six hours. After killing, the militants set their homes ablaze," he added. Similarly, Hussain said, on September 30, 1988, state agencies facilitated and armed groups of "militants" ensured a huge massacre of Mohajirs in Hyderabad, where hundreds of men, women, elderly and children were killed and women were raped. Hussain asserted that 300 Mohajirs were killed in the attack. However, no law enforcing authority came to protect Mohajirs and instead continued to facilitate the "militants." Hussain claimed, "On orders of Pakistan's ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had on May 26, 1990, massacred Mohajirs in Hyderabad." That was a joint conspiracy of PPP and military establishment. For the massacre, they had released criminals and terrorists from jails, armed them, dressed then in police uniforms and thus the Mohajirs were killed in an ambush at Pukka Qilla. Homes and shops of Mohajirs were set ablaze, men and women and children were brutally killed and even they had desecrated the Holy Quran." He further said that during that attack, the administration had shut water and electricity supply and later the Mohajirs were not even allowed to carry their funerals to graveyards and were again attacked with lethal weapons, resulting in heavy casualties. Hussain continued that the bodies were buried inside the Pukka Qilla premise and the massacre went for two days (May 26 and 27, 1990). He claimed that no terrorist has been arrested or taken to task and the "nominees" and mastermind of the carnage were acquitted. Keeping this in mind, Hussain has demanded the UN Secretary-General to constitute a commission to investigate on the genocide of Mohajirs, their massacre by the Pakistani authorities through its agencies and bringing the culprits to justice. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Karnataka Chief Minister on Wednesday underscored that he could only sanction the farmer loans in the state after the Congress' approval. Speaking at a meeting with farmers association and organisations in Bengaluru, said, "Not the blessing of people, but only with the blessing of we've come to power. I'll convince party, but I can only take decision once they approve." "This is golden opportunity, use it. When it's time for elections, you can vote for anyone..We know politics and how to run a government. Give me time, we'll solve all your problems. But I need time, we'll work together," he told the farmers. Waiving farmers' loan was one of the main focuses of Kumaraswamy's campaign in the recently concluded state assembly elections. He took oath as the 24th chief minister of Karnataka on May 23, marking the beginning of the JD(S)- alliance in the state. Ever since took over the chair of the chief minister, he has maintained that he was indebted to the and not the people of Karnataka. He also said that he is dependent on the Congress party and cannot do anything without its permission. "I am at the mercy of the Congress party. I am responsible for the development of the state that is different. I have to do my job as a Chief Minister," Kumaraswamy had told the media. Yoga guru Ramdev expressed happiness after the Students belonging to his boarding school, 'Acharyakulam' passed CBSE 10th exams with flying colors. Out of total 86 students, 35 scored above 90 per cent, while 37 between 75 and 90 per cent. "35 out of 86 students scored more than 90 per cent, it's a matter of pride. Student Ayush Sharma received 496 out of 500 marks. We attempted to provide a substitution for Macaulay's system and we are happy to announce that we have been successful," he said. Ramdev and Bal Krishna had earlier said that they are extremely proud of their students and teachers whose hard work has paid off and want their students to follow their dreams. Ayush Sharma, who scored 496 out of 500 marks came out as a school topper and stood second in Uttarakhand. Acharyakulam, the boarding school, was inaugurated on April 26, 2013. It is a unique school as the school administration, according to the portal, provides students with divine and spiritual knowledge along with ultra-modern to make their students fully awakened and conscious. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram on Wednesday filed an anticipatory bail in Delhi High Court in connection with the INX media case. This comes hours after securing interim protection from arrest in Aircel-Maxis money laundering case from a Delhi court. Former Finance Minister has been directed by Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to appear before it on May 31 for questioning in INX Media case. The investigative agency had earlier arrested P. Chidambaram's son, Karti Chidambaram for alleged irregularities in the INX Media case. Karti Chidambaram was arrested on February 28 at the Chennai airport on his return from the United Kingdom, for his alleged role in facilitating Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance for INX Media Ltd. and its directors, Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. According to Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Karti is accused of laundering Rs 305 crore in the INX media case in 2007. In March, Delhi High Court granted bail to Karti in the case. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Leaders of India and Indonesia on Wednesday witnessed the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between multinational conglomerate Tata and PT Pindad in Indonesia to collaborate for the supply of TATA trucks in Indonesia. In this regard, the leaders welcomed the conclusion of MoU between PT Pindad and Bhukanvala, and noted with appreciation the ongoing collaboration between PT Pindad and Tata Motors to source defence related equipments for mutual benefit. As per important announcements made under G2G and G2B, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) also announced the opening its first overseas Office in Jakarta, Indonesia with its representative from India. To highlight possibilities for collaboration made in the area of infrastructure and defence, an MoU between CEO PT Pindad (PERSERO) & CMD Bhukhanvala is also announced to make use of products and related technical discussions along with exchange of data of the project. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is on a 2 day visit to Indonesia will address an Indian community event at the Jakarta Convention Centre. Further, Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo will attend the India-Indonesia CEO Forum. Both India and Indonesia have warm and cordial bilateral relations. The two countries also share close cultural ties as well. India and Indonesia are among the largest democracies in the Both are member states of the G-20, the E7 (countries), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and the United Nations (UN) respectively. Bilateral trade between India and Indonesia was worth nearly USD 15 billion between January and October 2017, with Indonesia's surplus at USD 8.3 billion, according to Jakarta Globe. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Russian journalist, said to be a critic of Kremlin, appeared at a press conference here on Wednesday merely hours after he was "murdered". As per media reports, Arkady Babchenko who is a war journalist emerged at a press conference called by police to update the mediapersons on his murder. At the press conference, it was claimed by the chief of Ukraine's security services that they faked the killing of Arkady Babchenko to foil an alleged, planned hit on the journalist. Babchenko was shot at his home and died on his way to the hospital, the CNN had reported earlier. He left Russia in 2017 after he wrote in the United Kingdom-based daily, The Guardian, about his experience suffering political harassment in Putin's Russia. He had also written about the Russian bombing of Aleppo in Syria. The Russian Foreign Ministry called it an armed assault and demanded an investigation by independent groups. This comes amidst allegations against Russian President Vladimir Putin for attempting to silence the critics. It has been reported that a large number of Russian journalists, political activists, and human rights advocates have been killed or died under mysterious circumstances in recent years. Head of Ukraine's security services, Vasyl Hrytsak, reportedly said Babchenko's act of murder had been a trap that enabled police to catch the suspect and the mastermind behind these attacks. According to media reports, officials said they spent two months preparing for the fake attack. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delegation level talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo are underway at Merdeka Palace in Jakarta. Prime Minister Modi began his first official engagement in Indonesia by laying a wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes Cemetery and was then accorded a ceremonial guard of honour at the Istana Merdeka. Following the talks, both the leaders will give a joint statement and exchange of agreements will take place. Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo will later inaugurate the kite exhibition at the National Monument and visit the Arjuna's Chariot. After this, the two leaders will pay a visit to Istiqlal Mosque. Prime Minister Modi will then address an Indian community event at the Jakarta Convention Centre. Further, Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo will attend the India-Indonesia CEO Forum. Finally, a banquet will be hosted by the Indonesian President in honour of Prime Minister Modi, before the latter leaves for Malaysia and Singapore respectively. Both India and Indonesia have warm and cordial bilateral relations. The two countries also share close cultural ties as well. India and Indonesia are among the largest democracies in the Both are member states of the G-20, the E7 (countries), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and the United Nations (UN) respectively. Bilateral trade between India and Indonesia was worth nearly USD 15 billion between January and October 2017, with Indonesia's surplus at USD 8.3 billion, according to Jakarta Globe. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The rising temperature has taken a toll on the river Ganga in Varanasi as patches of sand are visible in long stretches in midstream after the water started drying up. Despite relevant efforts taken by the Centre, including the approval of a number of projects worth nearly Rs 4,000 crore by the Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) as part of Ganga rejuvenation programme earlier this year, the condition of the holy river is deteriorating raising concerns for experts. "Dams built on Ganga's headstreams in Uttarakhand, canals built along the river, water supply to other states and its exploitation are root causes behind the condition of river Ganga today. We'll have to work seriously. If nothing is done now, then soon it will become a lake. Around 45 crore of the total Indian population is dependent on river Ganga," river expert Dr B.D. Tripathi told ANI. Earlier this month, Union Minister for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Nitin Gadkari inaugurated a workshop on "Ganga and its Biodiversity: Developing a roadmap for habitat and Species Conservation" and emphasised on the need of an integrated approach to clean Ganga. However, experts believed that the central government needs to think practically on the issue and not just spend money via different schemes. "What will the government do with 1000s of crore if there will be no water left in river Ganga? The water of Ganga is being misused. That's why the river is drying up. Nobody can save river Ganga if the situation remains the same," Dr U.K. Chaudhary, retired professor of Banaras Hindu University (BHU), told ANI. "The Centre doesn't wish to understand the scientific reason behind this. Minimum of 6000-7000 cubic feet per second of water should flow in Ganga in Varanasi. Currently, the flow is around 4000 cubic feet per second. Ganga will dry up completely in the next 30-35 years in Varanasi," Chaudhary added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel on Wednesday rebuffed the reports of UPA government's involvement in the Air Asia clearance deal and said that the scam didn't happen during his tenure. Reacting to this, Patel told ANI, "I was not the minister when the Air Asia deal happened, so I have really no idea about this." Earlier, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) alleged that the scam in the Air Asia clearance took place during the UPA regime and some officials of then civil aviation ministry were involved in the it it. On Tuesday, the CBI booked Air Asia CEO Tony Fernandes and others for allegedly giving bribe to the then civil aviation ministry and officials to change the rules of aviation and foreign investment to get international flying licenses in the year 2013. The investigative agency also alleged that the AirAsia Group CEO lobbied with government servants for clearances, removal of existing 5/20 aviation rule and change in regulatory policies. Under the 5/20 rule, a company needs a minimum of five years of flying experience and is also required to have 20 aircraft in their possession in order to become eligible for the license. However, Air Asia India Limited (AAIL) Director Shuva Mandal issued a statement on Tuesday, saying that it was not involved in any wrong-doing and co-operating with all regulators and agencies to present the correct facts. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) According to the National Family Survey, the infant mortality rate (IMR) in India stands at 34 per 1000 live births. About 10 percent of these infant deaths can be attributed to congenital heart diseases (CHD) alone. About 1.5 lakh infants are born with CHD in the country every year, a condition which can be detected with timely screening. Considering this, relevant stakeholders and institutions came together to launch a campaign for formulating a national policy on making CCHD screening mandatory in all healthcare establishments in India. The campaign followed a high-level meeting with Manoj Jhalani, Additional Secretary, Ministry of and Family Welfare, Government of India. Current screening methods that include physical examination, fetal scan or a combination of these two can only detect 72 percent of the cases. Various clinical studies have shown that addition of reliable pulse oximetry to screening protocols can potentially increase the detection rate to 92 percent which in the Indian context can approximately save about 52,000 babies. This will further have a direct impact on IMR. Speaking during the discussion, Dr K K Aggarwal, President, Heart Care Foundation of India (HCFI), said, "Many newborns with critical CHD are symptomatic but not identified or diagnosed until after discharge. Such a delay in diagnosis increases the chance of frequent hospitalisation and can cause mortality in the longer term. Newborn screening is thus an important strategy to ensure that no babies die due to lack of a proper screening mechanism. This issue requires the formulation of a national policy that will make screening for CCHD a priority even in primary healthcare establishments in the country. This can be made a reality if all relevant stakeholders join hands and support the cause." CCHD screening can also detect other birth defects including sepsis, respiratory disorders/lung pathology, persistent pulmonary hypertension, and transitional circulation. Countries that already have mandated and/or have adopted this screening methodology include USA, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Norway, Sri Lanka, China, and Australia. USA already boasts of a 33 percent decline in infant deaths from CCHD in eight states due to timely screening. "Pulse oximetry is a proven technology in detecting critical heart defects in infants. However, during my research, I gathered that not all pulse oximeters are the same. Institutions launching CCHD programmes should therefore choose a reliable technology after considering all aspects. Infants affected by CCHD can have poorer outcomes if there is a delay in diagnosis and treatment. Diagnosing these conditions before infants leave the hospital can prevent complications and more importantly, mortality," said Dr Anne Granelli, NU Hospital Group, Sweden. Some signs of CCHD in infants include loss of healthy skin color; Cyanosis (a bluish tint to the skin, lips, and fingernails); rapid or troubled breathing, swelling or puffiness in the face, hands, feet, legs, or areas around the eyes; shortness of breath or tires easily during feedings; sweating around the head, especially during feeding; and poor weight gain. "The current scenario in terms of the number of infants that die due to CCHD is grim. It further necessitates the need to implement a policy at the national level at the earliest. A pulse oximetry screening is not only inexpensive but takes less than 2 to 3 minutes per baby, with the benefits far outweighing the costs. The screening can even be carried out by an ASHA health worker with basic training. We are sure that this high-level meeting and discussion among relevant stakeholders will help us reach a consensus and get positive results," concluded Dr BD Bhatia, President, The National Neonatology Forum. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Explosions on Wednesday afternoon occurred close to the new building of Afghan's Ministry of Interior (MoI) in Kabul on the airport road. Following the explosion, a cross-firing took place between the police personnel and militants in which a policeman was injured, as reported by the Sputnik news agency. Security forces have cordoned off the area. The identity of the militants is yet to be ascertained. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is set to brief the Bangladeshi media at a press conference about the outcomes of her recent visit to Kolkata. The briefing will be held at her official residence, Ganabhaban, in Dhaka at 4 p.m. today, as per Dhaka Tribune. Hasina visited West Bengal for two day-May 25-26 on the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. She was received by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. The three leaders attended the convocation ceremony of the Visva-Bharati University at Santi Niketan. Both Prime Ministers later inaugurated the Bangladesh Bhavan to symbolically highlight the warm bilateral cultural ties between the two countries. Prime Ministers Modi and Hasina also held bilateral meetings. Hasina urged India to ensure the safe repatriation of the Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar. Later, Hasina and the West Bengal Chief Minister met at the Taj Bengal Hotel for a meeting, where the latter greeted her after she received the Doctorate of Literature (D. Litt) degree by Kazi Nazrul University in Asansol. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Indonesia on Wednesday agreed to take steps to enhance their defence cooperation in line with their existing bilateral strategic partnership. A joint statement issued after one-on-one talks between Indonesian President Joko Widodo and visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and followed by a delegation-level meeting between the two sides, said both countries have reaffirmed that they are strategic partners and maritime neighbours, and agreed to work to "further strengthen and broaden the already robust defence cooperation." The joint statement further reaffirmed commitment in the field of defence with the signing of a Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) between two countries. This agreement, both sides said, will further strengthen and renew existing cooperation for the mutual benefit of both countries and the region. President Joko Widodo and Prime Minister Modi also agreed that regular meetings and active follow up of decisions of relevant institutional dialogue mechanisms were essential to realize the potential for bilateral defence cooperation. Both acknowledged the progress made in bilateral defence cooperation after the convening of the First Security Dialogue, the Second Biennial Defence Ministerial Dialogue, and the Fifth Joint Defence Cooperation Committee. They, according to the joint statement, further looked forward to the convening of the Sixth Joint Defence Cooperation Committee in August this year. President Widodo and Prime Minister Modi also agreed to further enhance mutual trust through regular meetings and staff talks between armies, navies and air forces of the two countries and took positive note of the First Air Force to Air Force Staff Talks. Both noted with satisfaction that ongoing joint exercise and training as well as coordinated patrol between their respective navies and welcomed the decision to hold bilateral joint exercises between their navies and air forces with an endorsement upon the finalisation of Standard Operational Procedures (SOPs) by both Navies and Air Forces. The two leaders also expressed their appreciation over the holding of the 6th Garuda Shakti Army Exercises involving Special Forces in Bandung between February 18 and March 3 this year and welcomed the growing engagement in military training and interactions at all levels, including regular cadet exchanges. They noted the desire of both sides to institutionalise cooperation between Indonesian Defence University and National Defence College India. Both President Widodo and Prime Minister Modi welcomed the convening of First Security Dialogue in New Delhi on January 9 this year during which participants discussed security-related issues in a comprehensive manner. It was then resolved to significantly enhance bilateral cooperation in countering terrorism, terrorist financing, money laundering, arms smuggling, trafficking in persons and cyber crime. They looked forward to the convening of the next Security Dialogue this year. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) To further explore the untapped economic potential of both nations, India and Indonesia on Wednesday agreed to work intensively to remove trade and investment impediments. A joint statement issued after one-on-one talks between Indonesian President Joko Widodo and visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the early conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and reiterated that it needs to be comprehensive, fair and balanced. The leaders instructed officials to optimise the cooperation between ASEAN and India for establishing a sustainable and mutually beneficial trade relations. Both leaders welcomed the holding of second meeting of Biennial Trade Ministers' Forum (BTMF) in New Delhi on 25 September 2017 and directed the officials to work on the outcomes. The Leaders acknowledged the need to further explore the untapped economic potentials and to remove impediments to trade and investment. Considering potentials for expanding trade and services, both sides agreed that there are in various areas and looked forward for the convening of the Working Group on Trade and Investment (WGTI) and Working Group on Trade Facilitation and Resolution (WGTFR) meeting forthwith. They further instructed the regular convening of the forum and expansion of sectors as it could function as constructive measure to tap more opportunities and potentials in developing bilateral cooperation in trade and investment. In this regard, both Leaders also welcomed the conclusion of the MoU between Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), and appreciated the setting up of a CII office in Jakarta. President Joko Widodo welcomed the increase in Indian investments in Indonesia and appreciated their contribution to the Indonesian economy. Prime Minister Modi also welcomed Indonesian companies' participation through the "Make in India" initiative and invited Indonesian to avail of the opportunities presented. Sharing views on the importance of intensifying infrastructure development in both countries, the leaders held discussions about the mutual benefit of enhancing infrastructure development cooperation. In this regard, both leaders welcomed the convening of the first India-Indonesia Infrastructure Forum which would enhance further infrastructure connectivity cooperation. They acknowledged the importance of connectivity in today's globalised world for enhancement of trade, tourism and people-to-people contacts. In this regard, both sides welcomed the MoU on Cooperation in the Railways Sector which would promote technical cooperation, development of rail related programs, exchange of knowledge, technology and institutional cooperation between India and Indonesia. To establish a strong air route, they welcomed direct flights by Garuda Indonesia between Bali and Mumbai starting from April 2018 as well as the flights by Batik Air and Air Asia Indonesia serving Indonesian and Indian cities. They directed the civil aviation authorities of both countries to discuss the matter of enhancing the traffic rights through the bilateral air services consultation that will take place in 2018. The statement further noted that the leaders have agreed to cooperate in the promotion of energy efficiency technologies, new and renewable energy technologies, with the shared aspiration to ensure energy security and to replace the use of fossil fuel, as well as meet respective climate change targets. Both India and Indonesia have warm and cordial bilateral relations. The two countries also share close cultural ties as well. India and Indonesia are among the largest democracies in the world. Both are member states of the G-20, the E7 (countries), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and the United Nations (UN) respectively. Bilateral trade between India and Indonesia was worth nearly USD 15 billion between January and October 2017, with Indonesia's surplus at USD 8.3 billion, according to Jakarta Globe. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Indonesia on Wednesday agreed to foster tourism and cultural exchanges and increase people-to-people contact to promote regional economic growth. The two sides affirmed to encourage "sustainable development of community-based tourism and eco-tourism," read a joint statement issued after one-on-one talks were held between Indonesian President Joko Widodo and visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Both President Joko Widodo and Prime Minister Modi have also agreed to work towards creation of Andaman Sea tourism by improving connectivity between Sabang Island and Port Blair as well as Havelock Island in Andaman for promotion of sail tourism, cruise ships, marine adventure sports, diving and wellness tourism. Both the sides have agreed to create institutional linkages between Al-Muslim University of Bireuen, University of Malikussaleh of Lhokseumawe (Aceh), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and appropriate institution in Port Blair for creation of a Centre of India-Indonesia studies at Al-Muslim University. Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi flew kites along with Indonesian President Joko Widodo at a Kite exhibition in Jakarta. The two leaders also visited at Istiqlal Mosque here. Prime Minister Modi, who is on five-day, three-nation tour to Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, reached Jakarta last evening. He began his first official engagement in the Indonesian capital by laying a wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes Cemetery and was then accorded a ceremonial welcome with a guard of honour at the Istana Merdeka-one of the six presidential palaces of Indonesia. The aim of the visit is to enhance India's relations and engagements with all the three countries, which forms Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Indonesia on Wednesday agreed to promote cooperation in academics, science and technology. The two sides affirmed to promote "cooperation between Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and National Institute of Aeronautics and Space of the Republic of Indonesia (LAPAN) in monitoring earth's environment from outer space and remote sensing of the earth," read a joint statement issued after one-on-one talks and a delegation-level meeting between Indonesian President Joko Widodo and visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Through the joint statement, both President Joko Widodo and Prime Minister Modi also agreed to develop research capacity and transfer marine technology among research and development institutions and academics. Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Modi, who is on a five-day visit to South-East Asia, flew kites along with the Indonesian President at a Kite exhibition in Jakarta. The two leaders also visited at Istiqlal Mosque here. Prime Minister Modi, who is on a three-nation tour to Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, reached Jakarta last evening. The aim of the visit is to enhance India's relations and engagements with all the three countries, which forms Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Indian government on Tuesday handed over a cheque amounting Rs 33 crore to the Nepal Government for construction of a Postal Highway. The amount was handed over to Secretary of Minister for Physical Infrastructure and Transport, Madhusudan Adhikari at Singha Durbar by Indian Mission to Nepal's Deputy Chief of Mission Dr Ajay Kumar. "The amount has been released towards 25% of the tendered cost (including 10% mobilization advance) of the two road packages of Birgunj-Thori Road being implemented under Postal Highway Project in Nepal with Government of India's grant assistance. With this payment, the Government of India has released a total of Rs 117.63 Crores to the Government of Nepal for implementing 14 packages of the Postal Highway Projects," the Indian Embassy stated on its website. Earlier this year, the Indian government granted assistance worth over Nepali rupees 100 crore on January 19, 2017, to the Nepal Government for the Dhangadhi-Bhajaniya-Satti and the Lamki- Tikapur-Khakraula roads. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Wednesday shared the name of his new-born grandson with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is not for anything he told the name to PM Modi. The new-born and the Prime Minister have similar names. Widodo's grandson's name is Jan Ethes Srinarendra, similar to the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi Srinarendra, the son of Jokowi's eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming, and daughter-in-law Selvi Ananda, was born on May 24. As per the Jakarta Post, Gibran explained the meaning of the child's name as Jan meaning "most", while Ethes "dexterous" and Srinarendra "intelligent leader". Gibran is an entrepreneur who runs several eateries under the name of Markobar. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Jet Airways has grounded four of its crew members for allegedly clicking selfies onboard a training flight on April 19. The grounded crew member includes a senior instructor level commander and three trainee pilots. An internal investigation has been undertaken for further probe in the matter. The Jet Airways aircraft, being a training flight, was without passengers travelling from Leh to Delhi on April 19. Reacting on the incident, Jet Airways issued a statement saying, "Acting in the interest of guest safety, jet Airways has placed four crew members off their scheduled duties. The crew members are adding an internal investigation being conducted by the airline in connection with certain events aboard a training flight of April 19." "At Jet Airways, safety is of paramount importance," the statement further read. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Reality TV star Kim Kardashian will be meeting United States President Donald Trump on Wednesday to free Alice Marie Johnson, a 62-year-old woman who is serving a life sentence without parole for a nonviolent drug offense. Kim will be joined by her attorney, Shawn Holley, for the meeting with Trump, reported TMZ. Johnson is serving a life sentence at the Aliceville Correctional Facility in Alabama. Kim and Holley have been working with Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka Trump and Senior Advisor to the US President Jared Kushner for months to free Alice. Although Kim was a Hillary Clinton supporter, Trump has been roped into the matter following Ivanka's support. Johnson 's case came into limelight last year when Kim tweeted about it. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, while addressing the Indian Diaspora in Jakarta, threw light on the government's first priority, which is to make India corruption free, citizen-centric and development friendly. "Our first priority as a government is to make the country corruption free, citizen-centric and development friendly," Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the Indian community in Jakarta. Highlighting "strong" bilateral relationship between both the countries, the visiting Prime Minister noted that not only do the names of the two nations rhyme but also there is a distinct rhythm in the India-Indonesia friendship. "Both India and Indonesia have a sensitive outlook when it comes to helping those in need. We do not see the colour of anyone's passport, we help our fellow humans who require any assistance," he added. The Prime Minister used the opportunity to announce that India is making arrangements for free of cost visa for Indonesian citizens for travel of up to 30 days. Prime Minister Modi also heaped praises on the Indian diaspora in Jakarta and recognised their "commitment" towards keeping their Indian heritage alive. "You are equally committed to your roots in India as you are to Indonesia, many of you are Indonesians but India is there in your hearts," Prime Minister Modi told the Indian community in Jakarta. The visiting Prime Minister likened India to Indonesia as both the countries are proud of "their democratic ethos and their diversity." "In 2014 the people of India voted for a government headed by a person belonging to a poor background. Similarly, the people of Indonesia elected President Joko Widodo whose background is also humble," Prime Minister Modi underscored. Prime Minister Modi, who is on a three-nation tour to Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, reached Jakarta last evening. He began his first official engagement in the Indonesian capital by laying a wreath at the Kalibata Heroes Cemetery and was then accorded a ceremonial welcome with a guard of honour at the Istana Merdeka-one of the six presidential palaces of Indonesia. The aim of the visit is to enhance India's relations and engagements with all the three countries, which forms Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) There seems to be no immediate respite from the prevailing heat wave conditions for the residents of western Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. But heavy rain is likely at isolated places over Coastal Karnataka, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura on Thursday, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said in a statement. Several parts of the country are also reeling under an intense surge in temperatures. Temperature has already touched the 45-Degree Celcius mark in the capital, and several other places. But, there could be some relief from the scorching heat soon for the people of Uttar Pradesh, Gangetic West Bengal, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Bihar and Odisha. Thunderstorms accompanied with squall or gusty winds are forecasted in these places. Dr K. Sathi Devi, scientist, Meteorological Department said, "The onset of Monsoon has arrived three days in advance in Kerala and Lakshadweep, and has also covered some parts of Tamil Nadu. It has advanced further to the central part of the Arabian sea." The monsoon has already hit Kerala three days ahead of the expected date. Uttarakhand too received heavy shower on Tuesday. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan in violation of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) has increased the presence of army in the Gilgit-Baltistan region. Balawaristan National Front Chairman Abdul Hamid Khan wrote a letter to United Nations Security General Antonio Guterres to highlight the tactics of Pakistan's government to establish its army control in the disputed area. The letter noted that as per UNCIP Resolution of 28th April 1949 Pakistani nationals who have entered that part of Jammu and Kashmir illegally after 14th August 1947 and Pakistani forces which entered Jammu and Kashmir should withdraw from Gilgit-Baltistan and other occupied areas within three months. Pakistan further issued a notice stating "Prime Minister of Pakistan has got powers like a King of British Empire to appoint Governor, Public Service Commission, Chief Election Commissioner, Auditor General, Inspector-General of Police and Chief Secretary." The notice further claimed that Prime Minister of Pakistan has now acquired the divine right to appoint Chief Minister and even dictate Chief Minister to appoint Ministers. Prime Minister of Pakistan has got the powers now to appoint, promote and dismiss the judicial officers (judges) and the whole judicial system. Hamid Khan in his letter argued that Pakistan government in the name of empowerment actually snatches all the rights from the indigenous people and turn the UN-declared disputed territory of Gilgit-Baltistan into its colony. He claimed that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is used as a military corridor for the supply of deadly weapons of mass destruction to Pakistan by China. Khan highlighted that Gilgit-Baltistan has no right to vote and have no representation in the Parliament. New Gilgit-Baltistan Order 2018 has given the right of citizenship of Gilgit-Baltistan to the citizens of Pakistan who have been given false domicile in the past 70 years by the Pakistani occupying regime. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi was accorded a ceremonial guard of honour at the Istana Merdeka here on Wednesday. After the welcoming ceremony, the Prime Minister will hold one-on-one verandah talks with Indonesian President Joko Widodo. Both India and Indonesia have warm and cordial bilateral relations. The two countries also share close cultural ties as well. India and Indonesia are among the largest democracies in the Both are member states of the G-20, the E7 (countries), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and the United Nations (UN) respectively. Indian ambassador to Indonesia Pradeep Kumar Rawat said on Monday that Prime Minister Modi's maiden visit to Indonesia assumes significance as Indonesia is one of India's closest maritime neighbours and shares a deep historical and cultural connection. He added that both countries were looking for joint-cooperation to counter terrorism. Speaking to ANI, Pradeep Kumar Rawat said, "Both India and Indonesia face similar challenges. Our position against the scourge of terrorism is clear. We believe in both softer and harder approaches in tackling this issue." "It (Indonesia) is our largest trading partner and the largest economy in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). We have invested 15 billion US dollars in Indonesia's economy. So, Prime Minister Modi's first ever visit to the country assumes much greater significance," Rawat added. Talking about the Act East Policy, the envoy explained, "The government's Act East Policy acquires a very important place. Bilateral relations have multiple dimensions. The Act East Policy focuses on the extended neighbourhood in the Asia-Pacific region." Bilateral trade between India and Indonesia was worth nearly USD 15 billion between January and October 2017, with Indonesia's surplus at USD 8.3 billion, according to Jakarta Globe. Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Modi began his first official engagement in Indonesia by laying a wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes Cemetery in Jakarta, after arriving in the city on Monday evening. Later, Prime Minister Modi will hold delegation-level talks with President Widodo. Following the talks, both the leaders will give a joint statement and exchange of agreements will take place. Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo will later inaugurate the kite exhibition at the National Monument and visit the Arjuna's Chariot. After this, the two leaders will pay a visit to Istiqlal Mosque. Prime Minister Modi will then address an Indian community event at the Jakarta Convention Centre. Further, Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo will attend the India-Indonesia CEO Forum. Finally, a banquet will be hosted by the Indonesian President in honour of Prime Minister Modi, before the latter leaves for Malaysia and Singapore respectively. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is on a five-day three-nation visit has conveyed his deepest condolence over the May 13 "horrific" Surabaya church attacks in Indonesia. Prime Minister Modi is on a three-nation visit to South-East countries- Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore to consolidate India's ties with three important strategic partners in the Southeast Asia region. "PM Modi had conveyed his deepest condolence for the horrific terror attack in Surabaya. The two leaders together realised that it is time once again for the global community to come together to combat terrorism," MEA Secretary (East) Preeti Saran said, during a media briefing in Jakarta. On May 13, family including their four children carried out the suicide attacks on three churches in Surabaya, Indonesia's East Java province killing seven people. The Islamic State (IS) claimed the responsibility for the attack. Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country which has been struggling with a rise in Islamist militancy. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his first official engagement in Indonesia by laying a wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes Cemetery here on Wednesday. Earlier on Tuesday evening, the Prime Minister arrived in Indonesia, which is his first official visit to the country. Prime Minister Modi is currently on a three-nation visit to Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. The Kalibata National Heroes Cemetery, located in southern Jakarta is a military cemetery containing the graves of prominent Indonesian soldiers and generals (including resistance heroes), who died during the Second War. Also, it consists of graves of Japanese soldiers, along with Indonesian soldiers who died while fighting for Indonesia's independence in the mid-1940s. Many prominent leaders visiting Indonesia have visited the monument such as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and South Korean President Moon Jae-in to name a few. Most recently, Chinese premier Li Keqiang paid a visit to Kalibata National Heroes Cemetery earlier this month. Later, Prime Minister Modi will receive an official welcoming ceremony at Istana Merdeka (Presidential Palace). After this, the Prime Minister will hold delegation-level talks with Indonesian President Joko Widodo. Following the talks, both the leaders will give a joint statement and exchange of agreements will take place. Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo will later inaugurate the kite exhibition at the National Monument and visit the Arjuna's Chariot. After this, the two leaders will pay a visit to Istiqlal Mosque. Prime Minister Modi will then address an Indian community event at the Jakarta Convention Centre. Further, Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo will attend the India-Indonesia CEO Forum. Finally, a banquet will be hosted by the Indonesian President in honour of Prime Minister Modi. Prime Minister Modi will next visit Malaysia, where he will meet and congratulate the newly-elected Prime Minister of Malaysia Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. After this, the Prime Minister will then leave for Singapore, in the last leg of his Southeast Asia visit. In a statement on Monday, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said that Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, three countries in the ASEAN region are strategic partners of India. "The Government of India attaches high importance to its relations with the ASEAN region and is committed to deepening its relationship with individual ASEAN member states, within the framework of Government's Act East Policy. The visit would enable the Leaders to discuss bilateral, regional and international issues of mutual interest," the MEA said in a statement. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is on a five-day, three-nation visit, flew kites along with Indonesian President Joko Widodo at a Kite exhibition in Jakarta on Wednesday. "Cultural connect touching the skies! Ramayana themed joint kite exhibit unveiled...Ahmedabad and Jakarta Kite Museums exchange MoUs. PM @narendramodi and Indonesian President @jokowi together taking the relationship to new heights!," Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. The two leaders also visited at Istiqlal Mosque here. "Glad to have visited the Istiqlal Mosque, one of the largest mosques in the world," Prime Minister Modi tweeted. "Ramadan Karim! Indonesian President @jokowi accompanied PM @narendramodi during a visit to Istiqlal Mosque, the national mosque of Indonesia and the largest in southeast Asia, in the holy month of Ramadan," the official spokesperson of MEA tweeted. Earlier the two countries signed 15 Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs). At the end of the delegation level talks led by Prime Minister Modi and President Joko Widodo, the two countries signed MoUs in various fields including, defence, space technology, scientific and technological cooperation, railways, health, medicine, public administration and interaction between think tanks. Both countries also agreed to celebrate 70 years of their diplomatic relations in 2019-20. Under Business to Business (B2B) and Government to Business (G2B) the agreements were signed between Kite Museum Ahmedabad and Layang Layang Gujarat to promote and popularise the art of kite designing. The two sides also recognized the importance of the Blue Economy as a driver of inclusive and sustainable economic growth and development in the region. Prime Minister Modi, who is on a three-nation tour to Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, reached Jakarta last evening. He began his first official engagement in the Indonesian capital by laying a wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes Cemetery and was then accorded a ceremonial welcome with a guard of honour at the Istana Merdeka-one of the six presidential palaces of Indonesia. The aim of the visit is to enhance India's relations and engagements with all the three countries, which forms Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is set to meet Vice Chairman of North Korea, Kim Young Chol in New York, in a bid to revive the summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, the White House said on Tuesday. This comes after Trump on Tuesday said Chol is heading to New York to hold talks over the likely summit. Taking to Twitter, the US President said a team has been put together which is working on talks with North Korea. "We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!" he tweeted. According to The Hill, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said a high-ranking delegation of US officials will have a meeting with the North Korean counterparts at the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), with "more additional meetings planned this week." She added that Deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin was on his way to Singapore to plan for logistics for the June 12 summit. The latest flurry of diplomatic activity came after Trump on May 24 had issued an official letter to Kim to call off the most awaited summit following the latter's threats to do the same following the US-South Korea 'Max' military drills. Earlier this month, North Korea also threatened to withdraw from the Trump talks if the US continued to insist Pyongyang abandon its nuclear programme. However, on May 27, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said that Kim had reaffirmed his willingness to hold a summit with the US and was for the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Wednesday welcomed Kerala government's decision of reducing the prices of petrol and diesel by Rs.1 in the state. Earlier today, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan announced to reduce the prices of petrol and diesel by Rs.1 in the state. Speaking to ANI, Pradhan said, "Kerala did good by reducing the price. I welcome it. One must also note that Kerala is one of the highest tax-collecting states and when we appealed (for fuel price cut), their Finance Minister gave a negative statement, but now they took responsibility, I thank them for it." He further urged all states, whether governed by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or opposition, to reduce fuel prices. Pradhan, however, noted that each state has different priorities and responsibilities. The petroleum minister also apologized for the Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL) faux pass and said, "It's a mistake by our official and we admit it but the issue has been blown out of proportion." The official website of IOCL, earlier today stated that petrol and diesel prices have been cut by 60 paise and 56 paise per litre respectively. It, however, later clarified that petrol and diesel prices were actually cut by 1 paisa per litre each in Delhi. He further blamed the international situations for the petrol and diesel prices that have been steadily rising every day. "Since we moved to the mechanism of daily price change, prices have gone up and down by 1 paisa, 12 paise, 27 paise etc, it is not for the first time that there has been a change of 1 paisa," he added. On Wednesday, in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai, petrol retailed at Rs 78.42, Rs 81.05, Rs 86.23 and Rs 81.42 per litre respectively while diesel sold at Rs 69.50, Rs 71.85, Rs 73.78 and Rs 73.17 per litre in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai respectively. Prices vary from state to state depending on local sales tax or VAT. Delhi has the cheapest price among all metros and most state capitals. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov is set to visit North Korea "soon", ahead of the likely summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the North Korean state media said on Wednesday. According to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Lavrov will pay a visit to Pyongyang at the invitation of his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong-ho. However, it did not mention the date. Earlier, a Russian media company reported that Lavrov will visit Pyongyang on Thursday, Yonhap News Agency reported. This comes after Ri visited Moscow last month on a rare state visit and held talks with Lavrov to boost bilateral relations between North Korea and Russia. On a related note, United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is set to meet Vice Chairman of North Korea, Kim Young Chol in New York, in a bid to revive the summit between Trump and Kim, the White House said on Tuesday. The latest flurry of diplomatic activity came after Trump on May 24 had issued an official letter to Kim to call off the most awaited summit following the latter's threats to do the same following the US-South Korea 'Max' military drills. Earlier this month, North Korea also threatened to withdraw from the Trump talks if the US continued to insist Pyongyang abandon its nuclear programme. However, on May 27, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said that Kim had reaffirmed his willingness to hold a summit with the US and was for the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Coffeehouse chain Starbucks has closed over 8,000 stores across the United States for a day to train its employees in avoiding bias. In a note to the employees, Starbucks Executive Vice President Rossann Williams said, "Our hope is that these learning sessions and discussions will make a difference within and beyond our stores." Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz appealed to customers in an open letter that the company wished "to be a place where everyone feels welcome," The Hill reported. "Sometimes, however, we fall short, disappointing ourselves and all of you," he added. The announcement follows a furore over the arrest of two African-American men at a Philadelphia Starbucks shop on April 12, which was followed by a public apology by the Starbucks CEO. The two men entered the shop and enquired to use the washroom. An employee told them it was only for paying customers. The Philadelphia Police was reportedly called by the manager when the two men sat in the store without placing the order. When they then sat in the store without ordering anything, the manager called the police, and the men were arrested for trespassing. However, no charges have been filed. The employee who called the police is no longer employed by Starbucks, according to the reports. Earlier this month, the two Black men who were arrested reached a settlement with Philadelphia. In return for not filing a lawsuit against Philadelphia or its employees, the two men - Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson asked the city spend USD 200,000 to help young entrepreneurs, to which the latter agreed, The New York Times reported. As per the agreement, the men will each be given USD 1. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Cyber Crime Police of Hyderabad has arrested three accused for creating a fake government website to cheat people seeking jobs. All three accused have been identified as Vikas Kumar, Anandparvat and Vikas Khandelwal. The three accused had created a fake website by the name of Telangana Afro Development Corporation(https://telangana.gred.co.in/ ) to dupe people seeking government jobs. The applicants used to apply for jobs through the fake website. Job aspirants initially paid Rs 98 each and after making the payment, they received letters from a company called I Tech. Solutions and were again asked to pay Rs 499 for the application forms. The preliminary investigation revealed that about 15 to 20 thousand youth from Telangana have been cheated by the accused and that approximately Rs 20 lakh in total was paid by the job seeking candidates. The police have seized Rs. 2, 50,000 from their office located in New Delhi. Moreover, two company laptops, five mobile phones have also been recovered. A case has been registered in this regard. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Terrorists on Wednesday hurled a grenade towards a joint checkpoint of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and Police in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district. However, no casualties or injuries have been reported. The grenade feel in a nearby orchard and exploded. Search operations have been launched to track down the terrorists. Earlier on May 25, terrorists hurled grenades at a camp of 34 Rashtriya Rifles in Jammu and Kashmir's Kulgam district. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of brewing the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) controversy. Dubbing the entire episode as fabricated Chief Minister Naidu told ANI, "It is totally false and fabricated, I condemn it. There were two commissions who have verified everything earlier about the gold and the diamonds. But now these people (BJP) are saying that the gold and the diamonds are missing. Now the BJP is asking for a CBI enquiry. This is a conspiracy." "They (BJP) have told that they want to take over Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) to protect the monument. Who are they? It belongs to the Andhra Pradesh government and it is being managed well",' he said. The Chief Minister further said that the BJP will have to bear the brunt for doing injustice with Andhra Pradesh. "The TDP always reviews the political situation of the country, in that context we have analysed that due to the injustice done with Andhra Pradesh and their performance at Centre, there is no chance that the BJP is coming to power again, regional parties are going to strengthen," Chief Minister Naidu added. The political slugfest began after sacked head pontiff, Dr A.V. Ramana Deekshitulu accused the TTD and the state government of a range of issues. On 15 May, he made three crucial allegations against the temple authorities-that they had violated several "puja" rituals so as to suit VIP darshans, that they had conducted secret excavations inside the temple and that they covered up the disappearance of valuable ornaments including an invaluable ruby donated to the Lord. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Days after a trade war between the two countries was averted, the United States on Tuesday announced 25 per cent tariff on USD 50 billion of tech goods imported from China, the White House said. The Donald Trump administration added that it would crack down on "illegal" Chinese trade practices by June 30. In a statement, the White House said, "To protect our national security, the United States will implement specific investment restrictions and enhanced export controls for Chinese persons and entities related to the acquisition of industrially significant technology." "A 25 percent tariff will be levied on USD 50 billion of tech goods imported from China, and the pledges in the statement to continue litigating the issue in front of the World Trade Organisation. The list of affected goods will be released by June 15," it added, The Hill reported. The statement further read, "The United States will continue efforts to protect domestic technology and intellectual property, stop noneconomic transfers of industrially significant technology and intellectual property to China, and enhance access to the Chinese market." The White House further stressed that discussions over the same would continue, adding that the was looking forward to resolving long-standing structural issues and expanding its exports by eliminating China's severe import restrictions. Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who was on a visit to China over trade negotiations said that the trade war with China was "on hold," with both sides agreeing to remove the proposed tariffs. The latest move to announce the tariffs comes ahead of US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross's visit to China next month over the same. The United States and China have been tied-up in a constant bilateral trade war. On March 23, Trump had imposed massive trade tariffs amounting to USD 60 billion on China, in an effort to stop the latter from stealing "intellectual property" from American companies. In retaliation, China threatened to impose a 25 percent tariff on USD 50 billion worth of US exports. However, none of the tariffs above came into effect. Regular incidents of violent attacks have been reported against Rohingya Muslims throughout Myanmar in 2017. As reported by the Anadolu Agency, United States International Religious Freedom Report 2017 was released on Tuesday as per which ethnic Rohingyas residing in Myanmar have faced religious discrimination. "Violence, discrimination, and harassment against ethnic Rohingya, who are nearly all Muslim, and other minority populations continued," said the annual US State Department report. Ambassador Sam Brownback, who prepared the report, told a press briefing that "I don't think you've seen progress taking place there in the country (Myanmar)". He further noted that the arrival of rainy season would invite multiple hardships for migrant Rohingyas who will be forced to move. The report documented incidents of mass gang rapes, killings of infants and young children, and abduction of citizens. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) South Korea's Prime Minister Lee Nak-yeon said that the United States is the main player in efforts to end North Korea's nuclear programme. It is linked closely to guaranteeing the security of the regime in Pyongyang, he added. "When it comes to the denuclearisation issue, the U.S. cannot help but be the main player because it is linked to guaranteeing the (North's) system," Yonhap quoted Lee, as saying. Lee made the remark, at the end of his weeklong trip to Europe. South Korea has played a mediating role between the U.S. and the North by assuring that the most awaited summit between the United States President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un takes place in Singapore on June 12, as scheduled. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Even before the multi-starrer film 'Veere Di Wedding' has hit the theatres, the star cast of the movie believed that the viewers will surely come out to watch the film. The star cast of the upcoming film, Kareena Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Swara Bhaskar and Shikha Talsania also expressed happiness over the positive response enthralled by the trailer and songs of the much-awaited movie. The movie which marks Sonam Kapoor's first film after her marriage with a long time boyfriend Anand Ahuja holds a special place in her heart because it has been produced by her sister, Rhea Kapoor. During an exclusive conversation with ANI, the 'Sawariyaa' actress said, "Every film I get is important to me but 'Veere Di Wedding' is more important to me because it is my sister Rhea Kapoor's film. Even my friends are a part of this film. This film has a lot of flavours, it has drama, comedy, romance excitement. I hope it goes really well and I hope the audience enjoys the film." 'Jab We Met' actress Kareena Kapoor Khan, who is making a comeback in 'Veerey Di Wedding' after her pregnancy break said, "I am really excited about the film. The trailer has received a good response. While shooting for 'Veere Di Wedding' it did not feel like work because we were only talking about food and having fun. We had a fun time shooting in Delhi. There is a comedy, romance, friendship, everything." Meanwhile, actress, Swara Bhaskar who is usually known for playing non-glamorous, content-based films such as, 'Nil Battey Sannata', 'Anaarkali of Aarah', will be seen in a completely different avatar in the film. She herself believes that an artist should take up challenges and do roles they are scared of. "For me 'Veere Di Wedding' was a very different experience. Till now I haven't done such roles. I am an urban, westernized, glamorous character who shops only in London. I particularly called Rhea and said I want to take up that role. My characters have always been down-to-earth. I wanted to see, that in a film that has a glamorous cast like, Sonam Kapoor Ahuja and Kareena Kapoor Khan if I can supersede them in terms of glamour. I think an artist should take up challenges and do roles they are scared of," she said. Another actress of the movie Shikha Talsania who has earlier worked with Kareena Kapoor Khan's cousin, Ranbir Kapoor in 'Wake Up Sid' said, "I was really waiting to start working with Kareena. I am her big fan and I was excited to start shooting with Kareena Kapoor Khan. I was never nervous, I was only feeling the excitement. I couldn't wait for work, shooting to begin." The chick flick is directed by Shashanka Ghosh and produced by Balaji Motion Pictures, Anil Kapoor Films & Communication Network and Saffron Broadcast & Media Ltd is slated to release on June 1. The trailer of 'Veere Di Wedding' holds true to its tagline and is a high-spirited, coming of age story revolving around the lives of four childhood friends Kalindi (Kareena Kapoor Khan), Avni (Sonam Kapoor), Meera (Shikha Talsania) and Sakshi (Swara Bhasker). The tale takes a turn when Kareena is about to get hitched with Sumeet Vyas. Filled with swear words, slapstick moments and some hilarious one-liners, 'Veere Di Wedding' is a complete joy ride. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) After creating a buzz in Bollywood, seems like Deepika Padukone's 'lungi dance' is all set to cross over seven seas. D.J. Caruso, director of Deepika's Hollywood debut 'xXx: Return Of Xander Cage', took to Twitter on Wednesday to express his desire to end the fourth film in the franchise with a Bollywood song. He then said he is considering the 32-year-old's song from 'Chennai Express' for the same. He wrote, "I want to end xxx4 with and Bollywood dance song. Led of course by @deepikapadukone. Lungi Dance?? Something new?" Meanwhile, Vin Diesel will be seen in the fourth installment of the xXx series but the 'Padmaavat' star has not been confirmed yet. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BPCL's net profit rose 45.2% to Rs 2673.64 crore on 14.4% increase in net sales to Rs 65239.31 crore in Q4 March 2018 over Q4 March 2017. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 29 May 2018. On a consolidated basis, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals' net profit fell 17.48% to Rs 151.63 crore on 7.28% decline in net sales to Rs 2247.89 crore in Q4 March 2018 over Q4 March 2017. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 29 May 2018. Power Grid Corporation of India's net profit rose 4.6% to Rs 2004.68 crore on 16.5% increase in net sales to Rs 7811.32 crore in Q4 March 2018 over Q4 March 2017. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 29 May 2018. Jubilant FoodWorks will be watched. With reference to the news report regarding stake sale by the promoters in Jubilant FoodWorks, the company clarified that the report is completely incorrect and baseless. The clarification was issued after market hours yesterday, 29 May 2018. Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilizers & Chemicals will be watched. With reference to the news report captioned 'Gas Leak reported at GNFC's TDI Unit in Dahej', the company clarified after market hours yesterday, 29 May 2018, that on 28 May 2018 at around 22:47 IST, a minor gas leak was noticed from absorption tower circulation pump. The same was immediately sensed by alarm and gas leak detector system and as a precautionary measure, immediate safe shutdown of the equipment was taken. The said leakage has remained localized and within the plant premise only, which was stopped in 13 minutes. As a matter of precaution and strict safety protocol, Rahiyad Villagers were immediately informed and alerted. Safe shutdown actions of the plant were taken. As emergency safety actions, the company measured the extent of gas leakage repeatedly in the village areas and it was found that there were no traces of gases at all. On the contrary, safety protocols have been found to be very successful. Few villagers on their own insistence were examined by the company's doctors and all of them were found not affected by gas leakage and were declared safe and discharged. The above incident was of a localized nature and it was for a very short duration leak and there was no gas ingress to area outside the plant. The plant will soon get operationalized after taking necessary actions. There is practically no impact on the business of the company since it is supplying material from the existing stock and from the company's TDI-I plant at Bharuch. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Stocks cut losses in morning trade after a gap-down opening triggered by weak Asian stocks. At 10:15 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, was down 115.05 points or 0.33% at 34,834.19. The Nifty 50 index was down 44.15 points or 0.42% at 10,589.15. Shares from cement and telecom sectors saw mixed trend. Shares of private sector banking major ICICI Bank dropped. Domestic stocks began trading for the day on a downbeat note on weak Asian stocks. The S&P BSE Mid-Cap index was down 0.03%. The S&P BSE Small-Cap index was up 0.07%. Both these indices outperformed the Sensex. The market breadth, indicating the overall health of the market, turned positive from negative. On the BSE, 970 shares rose and 903 shares fell. A total of 107 shares were unchanged. Overseas, Asian stocks dropped as concerns about the repercussions of Italy's political turmoil and the renewal of trade tensions between the US and China gripped financial markets. The prospect that Italy might need a fresh election that could effectively become a referendum on the nation's inclusion in the euro zone rattled markets. US stocks tumbled yesterday, 29 May 2018 joining a global equity selloff sparked by concern Italy's political woes will destabilise Europe. Investors are also keeping an eye on the White House, with the Trump administration giving conflicting signals on talks with North Korea and plowing ahead with plans for tariffs on Chinese goods. Back home, private sector banking major ICICI Bank lost 1.96% to Rs 284.95. Telecom stocks saw mixed trend. Bharti Airtel (down 0.74%), Idea Cellular (down 0.24%) and MTNL (down 0.89%) fell. Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) (up 1.45%) and Reliance Communications (up 2.82%) rose. Shares of Bharti Infratel fell 1.69%. Bharti Infratel is a provider of tower and related infrastructure and is a unit of Bharti Airtel. Cement stocks saw mixed trend. ACC (down 0.39%) and Shree Cement (down 0.39%) fell. UltraTech Cement (up 0.18%) and Ambuja Cements (up 0.46%) gained. Grasim Industries was off 0.09%. Grasim has exposure to the cement sector through its holding in UltraTech Cement. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Domestic stocks began trading for the day on a downbeat note on weak Asian stocks. At 9:30 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, was down 179.36 points or 0.51% at 34,769.88. The Nifty 50 index was down 65.75 points or 0.62% at 10,567.55. The S&P BSE Mid-Cap index was down 0.38%. The S&P BSE Small-Cap index was down 0.24%. Both these indices outperformed the Sensex. The market breadth, indicating the overall health of the market, was negative. On the BSE, 667 shares rose and 905 shares fell. A total of 59 shares were unchanged. Overseas, Asian stocks dropped as concerns about the repercussions of Italy's political turmoil and the renewal of trade tensions between the US and China gripped financial markets. The prospect that Italy might need a fresh election that could effectively become a referendum on the nation's inclusion in the euro zone rattled markets. US stocks tumbled yesterday, 29 May 2018 joining a global equity selloff sparked by concern Italy's political woes will destabilise Europe. Investors are also keeping an eye on the White House, with the Trump administration giving conflicting signals on talks with North Korea and plowing ahead with plans for tariffs on Chinese goods. Back home, BPCL fell 1.1%. The company's net profit rose 45.2% to Rs 2673.64 crore on 14.4% increase in net sales to Rs 65239.31 crore in Q4 March 2018 over Q4 March 2017. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 29 May 2018. Power Grid Corporation of India rose 1.91% after net profit rose 4.6% to Rs 2004.68 crore on 16.5% increase in net sales to Rs 7811.32 crore in Q4 March 2018 over Q4 March 2017. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 29 May 2018. Glenmark Pharmaceuticals lost 3.01%. On a consolidated basis, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals' net profit fell 17.48% to Rs 151.63 crore on 7.28% decline in net sales to Rs 2247.89 crore in Q4 March 2018 over Q4 March 2017. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 29 May 2018. Jubilant FoodWorks gained 2.68%. With reference to the news report regarding stake sale by the promoters in Jubilant FoodWorks, the company clarified that the report is completely incorrect and baseless. The clarification was issued after market hours yesterday, 29 May 2018. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Ministry of Women and Child and Development, Government of India has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Department of Women and Child Development, Government of Uttar Pradesh, in New Delhi today for management of Home of Widows at Sunrakh Bangar, Vrindavan. The Ministry of Women and Child Development has constructed this shelter home for widows with a capacity of 1000 inmates. According to the MoU, the Government of Uttar Pradesh shall be responsible for activities including setting up mechanism for identifying beneficiaries, providing residential care to the widows, deploying staff as per norms with prescribed qualification and experience. The MoU further states that senior officials of Government of Uttar Pradesh shall visit and check the security staff periodically and monitor their performance. The MoU also includes provisions for facilitating Aadhar Cards for all inmates and medical/geriatric care for inmates. The MoU shall be in force for a period of 2 years which may be renewed for further period on satisfactory running of the Home. The Home shall be run by the Government of Uttar Pradesh themselves or by any state government institution or by any civil society or by any reputed non-government organization to be decided by the State Government. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Archaeologists have discovered a 1,000-year-old mummy, completely intact and in well-preserved condition, in what is thought to be a late 15th century Inca pilgrimage site in Peru. "The deceased is still wrapped in the enormous funeral bundle that served as a coffin," said Peter Eeckhout, Professor at the Universite libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. "Discoveries like this one are exceptionally scarce, and this mummy is incredibly well preserved. Samples were collected for carbon-14 dating, but the area in which it was discovered and the type of tomb suggest this individual was buried between 1000 and 1200 AD," he added. The mummy is part of the discovery of three monumental structures explored during the campaign, including a sanctuary dedicated to the local ancestors. Under Inca rule, in the late 15th century, the place appears to have been transformed into a water and healing temple. The archaeologists have also discovered many offerings left by worshippers, such as Spondylus shells imported from Ecuador; these are associated with the influx of water during El Nino, and they symbolise fertility and abundance. Before the Inca settled in the area, the sanctuary included large funerary chambers and numerous mummies, most of which were looted during the Spanish conquest. However, a funeral chamber that held the mummy was found intact during the excavations. Due to how well it was preserved, the researchers will be able to study it without needing to unwrap the bundle. According to researchers, all these discoveries indicate that Incas made considerable changes to the Pachacamac site, in order to create a large pilgrimage centre on Peru's Pacific coast. The archaeologists will soon examine the mummy using the latest techniques in medical imaging (X-ray scans, axial tomography, 3D reconstruction, etc.). This will enable them to determine the individual's position, any pathologies they might have suffered from, but also what offerings might be inside the bundle. The other excavated structures include an Inca monument intended to host pilgrims and rituals, and probably one of the "chapels" for foreign pilgrims, many "foundation" offerings, such as vases, dogs, and other animals, as well as a platform with a hole in the centre, where an idol was likely placed. The complex appears to have been designed around this idol, involved in religious activities with pilgrims. "Deities and their worship played a major part in the life of Pre-Colombian societies...and by promoting empire-wide worship, Incas contributed to creating a common sense of identity among the many different peoples that made up the empire," Eeckhout said. --IANS rt/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two persons were injured when a team of Delhi power distribution company (discom) BSES checking power theft was allegedly attacked by a mob in Lal Kuan locality of Pul Prahladpur area of Delhi, the company said on Wednesday. Describing the locality as a "high power theft area in south Delhi," a BSES statement said it is a locality where it loses around 2-3 million units of electricity annually. "After detecting direct theft of electricity and booking one Irfan at C-40 Lal Kuan, the team moved to the adjoining premises. Meanwhile, Akbar (father of Irfan), along with the resident of C-33 (Sabbir Ansari) and his son, launched an unprovoked attack on BSES' inspection team with sticks and bricks," it said. The discom said a case of power theft had already been registered against Akbar. "Sabbir Ansari too had been booked for power theft in 2011," it said. In the ensuing melee, two team leaders -- Manish Sharma and Vishal Prabhakar -- sustained serious injuries. While Vishal received injuries in his right leg, Manish sustained injuries on his chest and leg. "Police was called by dialling 100 and senior BSES officials too rushed to the venue. They took the injured to the AIIMS Trauma Centre," the company said. Subsequently, an FIR under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code was filed against the culprits. While Sabbir and Akbar have been arrested, Irfan is absconding, it added. According to the discom, the bail applications of the arrested accused were rejected on Tuesday by the Metropolitan Magistrate at the Saket Court. Condemning the incident, a BSES spokesperson noted that even in February this year, a discom team was attacked and a senior official had sustained head injuries. "Such incidents are not infrequent. Efforts of discom teams to check the irregularities are often thwarted by the law-defying people who function like organised gangs," the spokesperson said. "Power theft has taken the shape of organised crime and more active police support is needed to curb this menace." During an anti-power theft drive by BSES in July 2017, a young engineer lost his life and four other officials were seriously injured when they were attacked by power thieves in Jhul-Jhuli village in South West Delhi. The BSES listed the high power theft areas in the capital as, among others, Najafgargh, Jaffarpur, Mundka, Badarpur, Shaheen Bagh, Karawal Nagar, Seelampur, Mandawali, Chandni Mahal, Nand Nagari, Turkman Gate, Yamuna Vihar, Daryaganj and Dallupura. --IANS bc/nir/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) AirAsia India Director R. Venkataramanan, who has been accused among other things of violating FDI norms in giving effective management to a foreign entity through FIPB clearance in 2013, has denied the charges. The CBI on Monday filed an FIR against Venkataramanan, AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes, Deputy CEO T. Kanagalingam alias Bo Lingam, the then Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB), and also some "unknown public servants" of the Civil Aviation Ministry. Refuting the charges in a statement, Venkataramanan said: "In my capacity as non-executive director of AirAsia India Limited, I have been wrongly named as an accused by the CBI on operational matters where I had little or no role to play. "It is commonly known that the present accusations against AirAsia India find their root in baseless allegations made by Cyrus P. Mistry and the Shapoor Pallonji Group against Tata Trusts Trustees (me included) and Tata Sons in his 'revenge' legal actions. "Emails purportedly written by me have been circulated in the media in the context of the issue of 5/20 in the aviation sector. This has been a much debated policy matter and AirAsia India was one of the many airlines that had formally sought a review of this policy." The CBI on Tuesday said it had received information that AirAsia India was indirectly controlled and operated by the AirAsia Group and particularly AirAsia Berhad, violating the norms of the then FIPB. This structure was directly formalised through a "Brand Licence Agreement" signed by AirAsia, represented by Fernandes, and AirAsia Berhad, represented by Bo Lingam, on April 17, 2013 which indirectly made AirAsia India a de facto subsidiary rather than a joint venture. As per the then FDI policy, foreign airlines were allowed to own up to 49 per cent of shares in domestic airlines but effective management control must remain with the Indian partner. --IANS rrb/him/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With the opposition accusing his government of inaction over industries brazenly polluting the state, particularly river water, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Wednesday ordered a crackdown on polluting industries. Reiterating his government's zero tolerance to river pollution, Amarinder Singh ordered stringent enforcement of the laws and regulations governing discharge of effluents into the rivers. "My government will not allow pollution to damage the health of the people of Punjab at any cost, whether in towns or villages," he said after a meeting with senior officers, including that of Punjab Pollution Control Board (PPCB). "Strict action will be taken against all polluting units. Neither the industry nor the municipalities would be allowed to flow any effluents into the rivers without treating them," said Amarinder Singh, also directing the Chief Secretary to prepare a comprehensive river cleaning plan with a clear timeline for its implementation. The state government drew flak recently after molasses discharge by Chadha Sugar mill and distillery in Gurdaspur district not only contaminated water of the Beas river but also led to death of thousands of fish earlier this month. The government only imposed a penalty of Rs 5 crore on the sugar mill through the PPCB and did not get a case registered against the factory owners, who are considered close to the Chief Minister and the ruling Congress. Leader of Opposition Sukhpal Singh Khaira, of the Aam Aadmi Party, has openly accused the Amarinder government of turning a blind eye to the pollution being spread by the mill owned by former minister Rana Gurjit Singh. Lambasting the AAP and Khaira for playing political games over a serious issue, Amarinder Singh said his government was "seriously tackling the issue of pollution in a systematic manner". The AAP leaders had sought a meeting with the Chief Minister on Wednesday over the issue but he did not meet them. A protest march by AAP leadership to the Chief Minister's residence was stopped by the Chandigarh Police. Lashing out at the earlier Shiromani Akali Dal-BJP government for making a mess of the state during the 10 years of their misrule, Amarinder Singh said it would take time to streamline things. --IANS js/him/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A week after a female journalist was found dead at her home in Mexico, another journalist was beaten to death here, police said as they launched an investigation into the case. According to the police, an investigation has been launched into the murder of the Daily Excelsior correspondent Hector Gonzalez, who was found murdered in Tamaulipas on Tuesday, to find the motive and the perpetrator, Efe reported. On May 24, Alicia Diaz, 52, was found dead at her home in Nuevo Leon, after receiving a blow in the head. According to a press freedom organisation, since the start of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's administration in 2012, 42 journalists have been murdered, while nearly 2,000 attacks against journalists have been recorded. --IANS and/qd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Muslim man in Bihar broke his Ramadan fast on Wednesday to donate blood to save the lives of two newborns, officials said. Mohammad Imran, in his mid 20s, donated blood to nine-day-old Bharat Kumar and two-day-old Raj Kumar in Siwan district, a district health official said. "Imran donated blood to the two newborns after their family members failed to arrange a suitable donor. Both children were saved," Siwan's Sadar Hospital official Mahendar Prasad said. It is the third such case within 10 days. Last week, Jawed Alam donated blood to an eight-year-old thalassemic boy Rajesh Kumar to save his life in Gopalganj district. On Sunday, Mohammad Ashfaque, a young Muslim man in Darbhanga district, broke his Ramadan fast to donate blood to save the life of a newborn. --IANS ik/tsb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Banking transactions worth about Rs 21,700 crore could not be put into effect across the country as more than 10 lakh bankers struck work on Wednesday to demand wage revision. "The strike call evoked good response. About 85,000 bank branches, including that of State Bank of India (SBI) and some private banks, spread across the country were closed," C.H. Venkatachalam, General Secretary, All India Bank Employees' Association (AIBEA), told IANS. The United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of nine bank unions, called for a two-day strike starting Wednesday. The day saw bankers across the country holding demonstrations to push for an early conclusion of wage negotiations. Queried about the value and volume of money instruments that would not be cleared by the bank's clearing houses, Venkatachalam said: "On an all-India basis, clearance of 39 lakh instruments with a value of Rs 21,700 crore per day would be impacted. The above value and volume were the averages of last 15 days clearance of instruments." Venkatachalam said the unions had requested the Indian Banks' Association (IBA) to come up with better offer than the mere two per cent hike offer, so that the strike could be averted. He said the IBA was also asked not to delink the wage negotiations for bank officers in the Scales 4-7. The IBA did not do anything. At the conciliation meeting on Monday, the Chief Labour Commissioner (CLC) asked the IBA not to raise new controversies like delinking the wage talks for officers in the 4-7 scale, he said. "Though the CLC tried its best to sort out the strike issues, there is no positive developments. Hence the strike on May 30 and 31 stands," All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC) General Secretary D.T. Franco had said earlier. According to Venkatachalam, with regard to the coverage of officers from Scale 4-7, the IBA said it did not get the mandate from six banks as they opted to cover officers up to Scale 3 level. However, 14 banks have given the mandate for covering the officers up to Scale 7 in wage negotiations as was done in the previous wage settlement negotiations, he said. Franco told IANS: "Six banks -- SBI, Punjab National Bank, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, Oriental Bank of Commerce and Indian Bank -- are not in favour of including Scale 4-7 officers under the wage negotiations." Wage revision in the banks is due from November 1, 2017. According to Venkatachalam, the Central government had been advising the IBA to conclude the wage issue before November, 2017. Unions had submitted the Charter of Demands in May, 2017 and discussions commenced with them that month. But even though several rounds of discussions had taken place in the last one year, the IBA did not come forward to make any offer. On May 5, 2018, the IBA made an offer to hike the wages by two per cent, quoting poor financial condition of the banks as a reason. This offer was not acceptable to the unions. On Wednesday, leaders of the striking employees said the response of the strike was good across the country including in the eight northeastern states. "About one lakh bank employees, including officers, stayed away from work across Karnataka," All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC) General Secretary Y. Sudarshan told IANS in Bengaluru. Admitting that banking operations have been affected, Sudarshan said the onus was on the IBA and the government. "In which way are we different from other government employees to be denied what is due for us... we also contribute to the development and growth of the economy," he said. Rejecting the IBA's contention that banks were unable to bear the burden of huge losses as loans or advances turned into NPAs, he said: "Over 80 per cent of bank loan defaulters are corporates whose funds are cleared by boards and executives." National Confederation of Bank Employees (NCBE) Tripura unit Secretary Swapan Modak told the media: "Around 4,000 bank employees belonging to about 500 nationalised bank branches in Tripura took part in the strike..." Government and foreign exchange transactions were also affected due to the shutdown while the ATM machines were being loaded with additional cash. "We have loaded ATMs with cash of around Rs 15 lakh which would take care of the average cash dispensation for four days," V. Balasubramanian, President, Financial Software and Systems (FSS), told IANS. Chennai-based FSS manages ATMs for several banks in the country. Bank of Maharashtra MD and CEO Ravindra P. Marathe urged his customers to make the maximum use of digital banking services as the strike might disrupt normal banking services at the branches. Meanwhile, industry lobby body ASSOCHAM urged the UFBU to call off the strike as it might affect customer transactions worth up to Rs 20,000 crore. Public sector banks (PSBs) are grappling with high levels of bad loans and as per reports their losses for the quarter ended March 2018 are set to hit a record Rs 50,000 crore which is more than double the losses of Rs 19,000 crore in preceding quarter ended December 2017. "Considering such a precarious situation, we at ASSOCHAM would urge the government to come up with a stimulus plan which must include restoring the PSBs to health," ASSOCHAM's Secretary General D.S. Rawat was quoted as saying in a statement. However, bank unions say the losses are due to provisions for bad loans issued to corporates and "not real losses". Union leaders say that if corporate members of lobby bodies pay back their loans or service their loans on time, the bank books would not be in the red. --IANS vj/fb/sc/him/hs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The man who shot dead two police officers and a civilian in the Belgian city of Liege had killed someone before the attacks, the country's Interior Minister said on Wednesday. Minister Jan Jambon said the gunman, named as Benjamin Herman, had killed another person the night before the attack, a man believed to be a heroin user whose body was found early Tuesday at his home in the eastern village of On, the BBC reported. Hours later, the attacker stabbed two police officers from behind, took their firearms, and shot them and a civilian. The attacker then ran into a nearby school and took a woman hostage before he was killed during a rescue operation mounted by special forces. Police sources quoted in local media said the man was heard shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greatest" in Arabic). Jambon said the hostage, believed to be a cleaner, prevented more deaths by talking the gunman around. "She was very courageous and perhaps, but this we will have to verify, she helped avoid more victims in the school," said Jambon, who visited the woman in hospital, where she was being treated for shock. Herman, a prisoner on 48-hour leave, bludgeoned to death a former cellmate with a blunt object at his home on Monday evening before "hunting" police officers the next morning, the minister said. Belgian authorities launched a terror investigation and were also probing why Herman was allowed temporary leave from prison. The 36-year-old had a lengthy criminal record including theft, assault and drug charge convictions and had been flagged in three reports on radicalism. Belgium did not raise its terror threat level following the attacks, described by Jambon as an "isolated case". "He wasn't part of a network, he did not receive instructions from anyone else, so there is no need to raise the terror threat alert level," the minister said, adding investigators had no precise information that any other attacks were likely. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) As the world grapples with the challenge of climate change, a top Indian scientist has called for the opening of more Indian research stations in the Arctic. "India's observer status in the Arctic Council is very important," K. Vijay Raghavan, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Indian government, said at a seminar on "Finland and India: Engaging the Arctic" here on Tuesday. "I hope India will set up more research stations in the Arctic," Raghavan said. India's sole Arctic station Himadri is located at the International Arctic Research Base in Ny-Alesund, Norway. The seminar was jointly organised by the Finland Embassy here, the Carnegie India think tank and the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the government of India. The Arctic Council is the leading inter-governmental forum promoting cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic states, Arctic indigenous communities and other Arctic inhabitants on common Arctic issues, in particular on issues of sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic. Its member nations include Finland, the chair from 2017 to 2019, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the US. India has been an observer nation of the Council since 2013. Raghavan said the discovery of the hole in the earth's ozone layer completely changed the way people viewed the world. "That changed our view of Polar science and other eco-systems," he said. Stating that the earth's climate has changed over seven cycles in the last 650,000 years, he said 16 of the warmest years on record occurred since 2001. "2016 is the warmest year on record," Raghvan said, adding that human intervention is the dominant cause for climate change. In her opening remarks, in what she called the first ever Arctic event in India, Finland Ambassador to India Nina Vaskunlahti said that "the Arctic is closer to us than you think". "Climate change has brought the world world together," she said. "Arctic Council countries and India face the common challenge of black carbon emission." Rene Soderman, Senior Arctic Official for Finland, said that the Arctic region is not an isolated and will turn into an important hub in the 21st century with migration happening. "Four million people live in the Arctic and 10 per cent of them are indigenous people," Soderman said. "Global warming is changing the lifestyle of the people in the Arctic." Stating that climate change is happening more rapidly in the Arctic than anywhere else, he said that this can be mitigated only through the full implementation of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. "Finland wants to expand multilateral cooperation on the Arctic," Soderman said. "Arctic cooperation will continue despite international tensions." Stuti Banerjee, Research Fellow at the Indian Council of World Affairs think tank, said climate change in the Arctic will affect the Indian coastline. "As the sea level rises, around 55 million people in India will be affected in terms of relocation of homes," Banerjee said, adding that New Delhi is still at a nascent stage of formulating an Arctic policy. Giving a geopolitical aspect of the issue, Shekhar Sinha, former Flag Officer Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Navy's Western Naval Command, said that China has linked the Arctic to its own prosperity. "Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that he wants China to be a Polar power," Sinha said. Stating that climate change in the Arctic can affect regional systems like the Indian monsoon, M. Rajeevan, Secretary in the Ministry of Earth Sciences, said that India is in talks with Canada for opening another Arctic research station. "We would also like to collaborate with Finland in this regard," he said. --IANS ab/qd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The French police on Wednesday cleared the largest migrant camp in Paris, which housed more than 1,500 people, in what was the 34th operation of its kind in the city since June 2015. The operation began early morning. The immigrants, mostly Africans, had for months been settling in tents around the peripheral motorways surrounding Paris next to the Canal Saint-Denis, Efe news reported. The immigrants were set to be relocated in some 20 shelters in the region, according to the Interior Ministry. It said that the police would use all necessary measures to prevent such camps from being set up again. Most of the immigrants boarded the buses provided by the authorities. The broadcaster France Info reported that some of them decided to move to other camps in two different parts of the city. Wednesday's evacuation followed weeks of controversy involving Interior Minister Gerard Collomb and the local authorities in Paris, led by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, over sharing responsibilities for these operations and the situation of the immigrants. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Centre has assured the people of Assam that their concerns will be taken into consideration before taking any decision on amendment to the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016, state's Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said on Wednesday. Sonowal told the media that he got this assurance from Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh during a long meeting on Wednesday, a day after thousands of people participated in a mass hunger strike in Assam to protest against the bill. "There should be no apprehension in the mind of the people of Assam about the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016. The Centre has given an assurance that concerns of the people of Assam will be allayed before taking any step. All stakeholders will be consulted," Sonowal said. The All Assam Students Union, supported by at least 28 other organisations including the Asom Gana Parishad, a partner of the BJP-led government in Assam, and the Congress on Tuesday staged protest in Guwahati warning a massive agitation in case the Centre and state went ahead with the passage and implementation of the bill. Protests have become the order of the day in Assam since a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, visited the state this month. The bill aims to grant citizenship to non-Muslim refugees who have fled from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan following persecution. However, in Assam, several indigenous groups view it as a move to legitimise Hindu migration from Bangladesh after 1971. United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa) has also threatened to derail the peace accord with the Central government over the issue related to the bill by conveying its strong opposition to government interlocutor A.B. Mathur during a meeting in New Delhi last week. Ulfa suspects the bill would reduce the indigenous people in Assam to a minority. Sonowal also said all efforts would be made to address the concerns of people of Assam in this regard. He also requested Rajnath Singh to set up a committee to make recommendations for implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord which provides for constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards to protect, preserve and promote the culture, social, linguistic identity and heritage of Assamese people. "The Home Minister assured Assam Chief Minister that a committee will be set up at the earliest in consultation with the state government," a Home Ministry statement said. The meeting discussed various administrative and security arrangements related to the updation exercise of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) as per the orders of the Supreme Court. A massive exercise to update the NRC was being carried out in Assam following a directive of the Supreme Court in 2005. Issues related to arrangements required to dispose of claims and objections after publication of the next draft NRC on June 30 was also discussed in the meeting, the statement said. It was emphasised that adequate opportunity be given to people in this regard and necessary arrangements made to avoid any inconvenience to public. It should be ensured that claims and objections are disposed of as per law, and in a proper manner, it said. According to the statement, the meeting also emphasised that a strong information, education and communication campaign be launched to inform people about the process of filing claims and objections after publication of final draft NRC. --IANS rak/nir (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.) Senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram on Wednesday moved the Delhi High Court for protection from arrest in the INX Media case, hours after a court extended to him interim protection from arrest in the Aircel-Maxis deal case. Chidambaram, a former Union Finance Minister, was asked by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to appear before it on May 31 for questioning in the INX Media case. His son Karti was arrested on February 28 for allegedly taking money to facilitate Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance to INX Media in 2007 when his father was the Union Finance Minister in the UPA government. Later, Karti was granted bail. On Wednesday morning, a special court granted interim protection to P. Chidambaram from arrest till June 5 in the Aircel-Maxis deal case. Special Judge O.P. Saini announced the order and directed him to join the investigation on June 5, the date when the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has asked him to appear before it for questioning. The court asked the ED to file a response to Chidambaram's anticipatory bail plea and listed the matter for hearing on June 5. Earlier, the court granted interim protection to Karti Chidambaram from arrest till July 10 in the Aircel-Maxis deal case. "All evidence in this case appears to be documentary in nature, which is already in the possession of probe agencies. Further, the said documentary evidence is largely in the form of files of the Ministry of Finance, which are currently in safe and secure possession of the government of the day," Chidambaram's counsel P.K. Dubey said in the plea. Dubey added that his client will not tamper with evidences in the case. The CBI and the ED are investigating how Karti Chidambaram managed to get a clearance from the FIPB in the Aircel-Maxis deal when his father P. Chidambaram was the Finance Minister in 2006. --IANS akk/him/tsb (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The CBI on Wednesday summoned former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram in connection with the INX corruption case asking him to join the investigation on Thursday, the probe agency said. Sources in the the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said Chidambaram had been asked to appear before the investigators at the agency's headquarters at south Delhi's Lodhi Road area. The CBI's move comes as Chidambaram on Wednesday filed an anticipatory bail plea in the Delhi High Court for protection from arrest in the INX case, hours after a Delhi court extended to him interim protection from arrest in the Aircel-Maxis deal case. The CBI had on February 28 arrested Chidambaram's son Karti in the INX case. Later, he was granted bail. Karti is accused of taking money to facilitate Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance to INX Media in 2007 when his father was the Finance Minister in the UPA government. The CBI registered an FIR in the case on May 15 last year. The CBI has alleged that irregularities were committed in giving INX Media the clearance to receive Rs 305 crore in foreign investment. The CBI initially alleged that Karti had received Rs 10 lakh as bribe for facilitating the FIPB clearance. The figure was, however, revised later to about Rs $1 million or 6.5 crore at the current exchange rate. The CBI and the Enforcement Directorate are probing the case. --IANS rak/him/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bihar's opposition leader Tejashwi Yadav on Wednesday said Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's fresh demand for a special category status for the state is part of the pressure against its ally BJP, which is in power at the Centre. "You have stolen our mandate and now you are trying to play pressure against the Bharatiya Janata Party over our old demand for the special category status to Bihar," the Rashtriya Janata Dal leader tweeted. Tejashwi said people were aware that Nitish Kumar had been gearing up to change sides again. "He is keen to prove that he has been working for Bihar's development. He is looking for a chance to walk away from the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance," he said. "But the truth is that he is concerned about his vote bank and his seat," he added. The Chief Minister on Tuesday raked up the old demand for the special status to Bihar and asked the 15th Finance Commission to locate resource gaps and support backward states like Bihar in their efforts to catch up with the developed states. Tejashwi questioned Nitish Kumar for writing a note to the Finance Commission to demand the special category status. "It was Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had promised to grant special status category to Bihar," he said. Earlier this month, the ruling Janata Dal-United expressed displeasure over the central government's attitude towards Bihar and accused it of injustice to the state, including not granting the special category status. In March, Nitish Kumar said that he had not given up the demand for special status "even for a second" since he first raised it in 2005. --IANS ik/qd/tsb (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Loading of coal increased by 18.7 per cent during April-May to 431.5 rakes, Railway and Coal Minister Piyush Goyal said here on Wednesday. Addressing a conference, he said: "Currently, April-May coal loading has increased by 18.7 per cent. Loading has increased from 363 rakes earlier to about 431.5 rakes in April-May 2018." In financial year 2017-18, there was the highest-ever transportation of coal in India, the minister said. "In terms of coal transportation, there have been significant achievements in the last year, where we saw highest ever coal movement in the history moving up from 533 million tonnes in 2016-17 to 555 million tonnes in 2017-18," he said. On the demand for coal, he said: "Power industry is having robust demand largely because there is a growing economic activity." "There is shortfall in nuclear and hydro and there is a significant drop in irrigation in coastal plants, which were based on imported coal which were in some difficulty due ot the judgment of the SC (Supreme Court), nearly 5,300 MW of capacity which were earlier importing coal and supplying power to five states is now shut down." The load has come on the "domestic coal roughly increasing demand of 20-22 million tonnes because of the less imports and less import based generation", he said. He also said that import of power from Bhutan also has declined around 53 per cent, which also has increased the pressure on the domestic coal industry. --IANS rrb/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP in Goa on Wednesday challenged the opposition Congress to prove its legislative strength to recapture power in the coastal state. The BJP also ridiculed the party's decision to approach President Ram Nath Kovind to demand a full-fledged Chief Minister for Goa, due to the prolonged absence of Manohar Parrikar, who is undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer in a US hospital. "It is wrong for the Congress to keep demanding from the Governor that they should be given a chance to form a government in Goa. The BJP challenges them to first prove their legislative strength in the house or outside. They simply do not have the numbers," state Bharatiya Janata Party Spokesperson Dattaprasad Naik told a press conference here. As for the Congress plan to meet the President, Naik said: "It is ridiculous that the opposition party is going to the President to demand this. The government is working perfectly with the arrangement put in place by our Chief Minister." Before leaving for the US, Parrikar appointed a Cabinet Advisory Committee comprising three Ministers, which the Congress claimed is unconstitutional and that the matter would be raised before Kovind. --IANS maya/tsb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A court here on Wednesday rejected Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's plea for copies of his visuals and statements recorded by the probe agency in connection with an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by two Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs on February 19. Delhi Police had, on May 18, questioned Kejriwal and sought to know from him the sequence of events on the fateful day. Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal rejected Kejriwal's plea and said that there is no specific provision for providing a copy of the statement to a witness, whose statement has been recorded by police. "The investigation agency is not obligated under the law to give the person a copy of his recorded statement, more particularly when the status of that person is not clear -- that is, whether he will be made an accused or a witness, and further when the agency is of the view that handing over any such statement will be prejudicial to its investigation," the court said. The court also noted that the right of the accused to get a copy of the documents from the prosecution accrues after a police report is filed and he is summoned as an accused. Kejriwal had sought directions to the case Investigating Officer to supply a copy of the CD of his statement recorded by police on May 18. Kejriwal told the court that the Delhi Police had videographed the proceedings. He told the court that later that day, the police told the media that the Chief Minister had evaded certain questions by not giving specific and proper answers, which according to him is "factually incorrect". Kejriwal alleged that the police conduct indicated that they could go to any extent to frame him or other AAP leaders in the case or tamper with his statement as a witness in the case. Delhi Police opposed the plea, saying it is not maintainable. --IANS akk/tsb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a significant boost to their strategic ties, India and Indonesia signed an agreement on defence cooperation among 15 others following a bilateral summit between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo here on Wednesday. The agreement on defence cooperation calls for "regular bilateral dialogue and consultation on strategic defence and military issues of common interest, exchange of strategic information, military education, training and exercise, cooperation among the armed forces including army, navy, air force and aerospace, humanitarian aid, disaster relief, peace-keeping and medical services among others". The agreement assumes significance given the two countries' strategic interests in the Info-Pacific region. The two sides also signed a framework agreement on cooperation in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes. According to this agreement, both sides will work together on space sciences, exploration of outer space, use of space technology, monitoring of earth's environment from outer space and remote sensing, use of integrated Biak ground station of Indonesia for mutual benefit, hosting of Indian ground station in Indonesia, support for launch services of LAPAN (Indonesia's National Institute of Aeronautics and Space)-made satellites and joint research and development activities in space technology among others. The two sides also signed 12 memorandums of understanding (MoUs), including on scientific and technological cooperation, technical cooperation in the railways sector, health cooperation, and on promoting economic, trade and technological cooperation. Both sides signed a separate plan of activities to celebrate to 70 years of diplomatic relations in 2019-20. Modi arrived here on Tuesday on the first leg of his five-day three-nation tour of southeast Asia that will also see him visiting Malaysia and Singapore. This is his first visit to Indonesia as Prime Minister. --IANS ab/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi government is taking steps to draft a start-up policy to encourage and foster the growth of entrepreneurship in the national capital, an official said on Wednesday. The first draft of the policy was presented at a meeting organised by Delhi's Industries Department. Principal Secretary, Industries Mohanjeet Singh, during the meeting with the key stakeholders, said Delhi is currently home to a number of flourishing startups and the vision is to create a world-class startup ecosystem in Delhi through strategic investment and policy interventions as well as to leverage the robust innovation climate in the national capital. According to an official, the government is keen for the growth of entrepreneurship to create new jobs and fuel economic growth, as well as to bring new competitive dynamics into the current economic system. The aim is also to facilitate generation of innovative technology solutions with a social impact, he said. The Delhi government had earlier decided to establish an Incubation Centre at the Delhi Emporium Building with a goal to provide infrastructural support as well as a conducive environment for the startup ecosystem to grow. --IANS nks/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A sustainable lifestyle and unclustered living is not just a present-day trend, but the need of the hour. Optimum utilisation of space and a neutral colour palette can work wonders as a background for a modern-day home, say experts. Nikhil Tiwari, designer and founder of Topstona and Jade Davies, Interior Designer at MKM Luxe Suisse, natural stone-based wall claddings, suggest how to capture the essence of metropolitan living in your home. * Space: Optimum utilisation of space. Sleek accent furniture, minimal design, wall decor accessories with utilitarian properties can optimise a space and bring the element of minimalistic metropolitan decor. * Wall decor: Don't overlook the wall space. Add eclectic wall accents, as well as wall mounted lights to give an edge while making the rooms look bigger. Use light colours of paint on the majority of walls and use wallpaper on maximum one wall in each room to avoid making the space look smaller. Add large mirrors where possible to increase light and give the effect of more space. * Neutral palette: Neutral colour palette can work wonders as a background for a modern-day home. Playing with textures and layering of furnishing pieces with a backdrop of neutral walls can make simplest of decor make a bold statement. * Furniture: Modular furniture will allow you to create living areas that work to your exact requirements, even if you have got an unusually shaped room or you want the option to change how the pieces are placed together in the future. * Less but large-scale furniture and decor can create a theatrical drama to play with the philosophy of modernism. Small multiple decor pieces make a room look smaller and cluttered, hence, for city apartments large pieces are the way to go. --IANS dc/rb/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Actress Emilia Clarke has praised "Game Of Thrones" for its balance of male and female nudity. She has starred as the powerful Daenerys Targaryen on the hit HBO series for seven years. In an interview to US Glamour, Clarke revealed why she thinks "Game Of Thrones" is so popular with both men and women, amid the industry's recent inequality scandal, reports dailymail.co.uk. The actress, 31, praised the series for showing both male and female nudity -- and claimed the show's depiction of power struggles is what makes it so appealing to women. Clarke reflected on why her love interest Khal Drogo was not exposed on-screen, while her character stripped fully naked. First joking of her co-star Jason Mamoa's manhood, she said: "Oh, I did. I saw his member, but it was covered in a pink fluffy sock. Showing it would make people feel bad. It's too fabulous." However, she went on to praise the show's equal amounts of male and female nudity by recalling one moment which saw another of her love interests strip for the camera. She added: "No, I don't know why. But I'd like to bring your memory back to Mr. Michiel Huisman and I copulating for the first time, which began with me saying, 'Take off your clothes', and then you got to see his perfect bottom." Her comments come amid a time of unrest in Hollywood, following the emergence of the Harvey Weinstein scandal last year. Reflecting on this, Clarke expressed her delight that so many women are fans of "Game Of Thrones" -- which she believes is due to its gender-balanced story lines. --IANS sug/qd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A former BSF DIG and four others were held guilty by a Special Court here on Wednesday in the 2006 sex scandal in Jammu and Kashmir in which several minor girls were sexually exploited. Those convicted are former Border Security Force Deputy Inspector General (DIG) K.C. Padi, former Deputy Superintendent of Police Mohammed Ashraf Mir, Maqsood Ahmad, Shabir Ahmad Langoo and Shabir Ahmad Laway. Then Additional Advocate General Anil Sethi and Mehrajudin Malik were acquitted. The scandal kingpin Sabeena and her husband died during trial. The court will pronounce the sentence on the convicts on June 4. The scandal broke after police seized some video CDs of Kashmiri girls' sexual exploitation by police and other officials. After then Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad handed over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation, the agency's probe revealed the involvement of 56 persons in the racket, including influential people like Ministers and others. The Supreme Court transferred the case trial to Chandigarh in 2006. --IANS js/tsb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Facebook did not anticipate the massive Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal nor did it see the abuse of its platform to sway election results coming, said Sheryl Sandberg, the social network's Chief Operating Officer. Responding to questions on the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal at Recode's annual Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, on Tuesday, Sandberg said that Facebook did not anticipate well enough what would happen when all of humanity was using it, CNBC reported. Facebook suspended the British data analytics firm which collected without permission the personal data of nearly 87 million Facebook users. In fact, the social network is still trying to figure out how big the Cambridge Analytica problem is. "To this day, we still don't actually know what data Cambridge Analytica had," Sandberg was quoted as saying by Recode. In response to questions on alleged Russian interference on 2016 US presidential election, Sandberg once again said that they just did not see it coming, the CNBC report said. She, however, emphasised that Facebook was taking measures to prevent abuse of its platform in future elections. Facebook is making "huge investments" to make the platform safer and prevent these kinds of abuse, she said. --IANS gb/qd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Actor Ranbir Kapoor, who isn't on any social media platform unlike other actors of his generation, says he is fine with being away from it. Ranbir was interacting with media at the trailer launch of "Sanju" along with co-stars Paresh Rawal, Manisha Koirala, Sonam Kapoor, Dia Mirza and Vicky Kaushal, director Raj Kumar Hirani and producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra here on Wednesday. Asked whether his availability on social media would have got extra mileage for his film, he said: "I don't think so. On social media, I will be showing myself and not really what the film is. "I agree that through social media, you have a reach to the larger audience but I don't miss it and I am fine being away from it. Never say never, may be tomorrow, I will come but right now, I am happy being away from it." Ranbir, who has gone nude for one scene in "Sanju" when he is being interrogated by police, asked if was intimidated while shooting that scene, said: "I went nude in my first film ("Saawariya") itself when my towel dropped. I am very shy in my real life but when the cameras are on, I am not shy as I am portraying a character so you have to be nude in your emotions and physically." Sharing his experience working with Sonam, he said: "Sonam and I worked together 10 years ago in 'Saawariya' and after that, we never got an opportunity to work together but Sonam is same as she used to be when we both were assistant directors in 'Black'.A "The only thing that changed in her is that she has become even better actress,A so, when I worked with her this time, the kind of confidence and experience she came with was amazing and I think both of us enjoyed working with each other." About working with Hirani, he said: "Working with world's greatest director Raj Kumar Hirani is every actor's dream and I am speaking for every actor who is sitting on this platform. Working with him is something else. "It is so easy and seamless that you don't realize you are working with such a great director but when the film releases... the kind of love his other films have got... even if we will be able to get 20 per cent of that love, I think I will be so happy as in my life, I got to work with Raj Kumar Hirani." "Sanju" is biographical film based on the life of Indian actor Sanjay Dutt, starring Ranbir as Sanjay Dutt in various stages of his life. It has ensemble cast which includes Anushka Sharma, Dia, Sonam, Manisha, Paresh Rawal, Jim Sarbh, Vicky, Boman Irani, and Karishma Tanna. The film is set to be released on June 29. --IANS iv/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has been granted personal leave from his parliamentary duties for one month. Joyce was allowed to take the leave from Tuesday, meaning his absence will not affect votes in the Australian House of Representatives and will not jeopardise the coalition's slim one-seat majority, Xinhua news agency reported. The Nationals backbencher applied for leave six weeks after he and his partner Vikki Campion welcomed a baby boy and just days after revelations the couple agreed to a paid interview of 150,000 Australian dollars ($112,500) with Channel 7's Sunday Night. On Tuesday, Joyce told the Australian newspaper it was Campion who had made the decision to accept money for the interview, because she and their son Sebastian were being "screwed over" by constant attention. Joyce has not taken extended leave since his affair with former advisor Campion was revealed earlier this year. The member for New England in New South Wales, stood down as Nationals leader in February and lodged a privacy complaint against the Daily Telegraph newspaper for reporting on his private life. Joyce is expected to return to Parliament on August 13. --IANS soni/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Afghanistans National Security Adviser Mohammad Hanif Atmar met an Indian delegation led by Indias Deputy National Security Adviser Rajender Khanna here on Wednesday and discussed the security situation in the country. The Office of the National Security Council (ONSC) said the meeting was organized in the framework of the joint security bilateral committee, Tolo News reported. "A joint security committee meeting between Afghanistan and India kicked off. At the outset, the @NSAAtmar has presented information about general security situation of Afghanistan," the Afghan NSA's office tweeted. No further details were given about the meeting. Khanna's trip came after Atmar, along with an Afghan delegation, visited Pakistan on Monday. Kabul and Islamabad vowed to get peace talks back on track. Afghan officials said that both countries also agreed to take specific steps regarding the implementation of the action plan for peace and for reducing the scale of threats. --IANS soni/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With opposition parties mocking the one paisa cut in the prices of petroleum products, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Wednesday said the prices are decided by the oil companies and the government has no role in it. "Petrol prices were connected to the market a few years back and daily pricing was brought in a year back. The government does not fix the price. "The government used to monitor the price when it used to give out subsidy but today the oil companies are free to decide their price as per the international market. The government has no role in monitoring the price apart from the policy framework," he said. Earlier in the day, Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) reduced the prices of petrol and diesel by one paisa after accidentally showing a fall of 50-60 paisa per litre due to a "technical glitch". The minor reduction came after a daily hike for the last 16 days totalling to Rs 4 per litre. The Congress slammed the government for "playing a cruel joke" on the people. "Dear Prime Minister, you have cut the price of petrol and diesel today by 1 paisa. One paisa!?? If this is your idea of a prank, it is childish and in poor taste. PS: A One paisa cut is not a suitable response to the #FuelChallenge I threw you last week," tweeted Congress chief Rahul Gandhi. However, Pradhan said oil is an international commodity and its prices are determined by several factors like quantum of oil production, international market and politics, oil companies and the taxes levied by the Centre and states. "I have said this (oil) is an international commodity. The price has increased because of a fight between Iran and America, America's sanction on Iran and Venezuela crisis. We need to keep in mind international diplomatic challenges when we think about energy security," he said. Noting both Central and state governments have responsibilities for welfare, he said: "Of the entire money that the Central government collects, 42 per cent is given to the states as per 14th Finance Commission. Of the balance, 60 to 70 per cent goes back through Centrally sponsored schemes. Development of the states is a priority issue." On Kerala declaring a price cut of Re 1 per litre of petrol and diesel from Friday forgoing the amount from its tax portion, Pradhan said the state is one of the largest tax collectors. Other states should try to reduce fuel prices but each state has their limitations and priorities, he said. --IANS mgu/him/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) While the popular belief is that smoking largely affects the lungs because they get directly exposed to inhaled smoke, health experts warn that it also impacts the entire cardiovascular system. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), smoking tobacco is globally the second leading cause of heart diseases after high blood pressure. Nearly 12 per cent of cardiovascular deaths worldwide occur due to tobacco abuse and secondhand smoking. In tobacco cigarette, there is combustion, a burning of an organic material that generates temperatures up to 900 degree Celsius. Chronic exposure to this tends to thicken blood vessels, making them weaker in the long run. This can lead to blood clots and ultimately result in stroke or peripheral heart diseases. "Inhaling the smoke from tobacco builds fatty material -- atheroma -- in the heart of the smoker which then damages the inner lining of arteries and also narrows them further," Tapan Ghose, Director & HOD, Cardiology at Fortis Flt. Lt. Rajan Dhall Hospital, told IANS. "This narrowing can cause the angina, stroke or heart attack," he added. Further, the presence of nicotine in the cigarettes raises the blood pressure, which can have a detrimental effect on the heart's oxygen balance. "Nicotine causes thickening of the blood vessels, which hampers the blood flow and also causes high blood pressure or hypertension," Mukesh Goel, Senior Consultant, Cardio Thoracic & Vascular Surgery at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, told IANS. Tobacco also has carbon monoxide, which blends with haemoglobin in the blood more easily than oxygen does, thus affecting the oxygen supply in the body. The carbon monoxide prevents the blood system from effectively carrying oxygen around the body, specifically to vital organs such as the heart and brain, the experts said, adding that apart from regular smokers, those who inhale the smoke passively may also be at risk. WHO states that of the seven million lives that tobacco claims worldwide each year, almost 900,000 are passive-smokers. Tobacco, whether smoked, swallowed, or chewed poses multiple hazards. In addition to affecting the lungs and heart, it also increases the risk of head and neck, lung, esophageal, pancreatic, and urologic cancers. According to a recent study published in The Journal of Physiology, smoking could directly damage the muscles by reducing the number of blood vessels in leg muscles, which in turn reduce the amount of oxygen and nutrients the muscles receive. This may impact the metabolism and activity levels. Moreover, smoking also affects both male and female fertility, doctors said. "Women smoking tobacco reduce their chances of conceiving by at least 60 per cent and is also linked to ectopic pregnancy and other tubal factor infertility," Sagarika Aggarwal, an IVF expert at Indira IVF Hospital, New Delhi, told IANS. On the other hand, male smokers can suffer from decreased sperm quality with lower mobility and increased numbers of abnormally-shaped sperms. Moreover, chain smoking might also decrease the sperm's ability to fertilise eggs. Besides causing infertility, tobacco during pregnancy can also lead to multiple issues ranging from miscarriage to under-development of the foetus and making the child susceptible to various forms of disorder such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Goel noted. Quitting is the best way, the experts said while discouraging the use of alternatives like e-cigarettes. "While it is true that e-cigarettes have less quantity of tobacco as compared to regular cigarettes, bidis or hookah, but they also expose lungs, heart and other organs to very high levels of toxic substances," Goel said. Other measures like clinical interventions, counselling and behavioural therapies can help people quit tobacco abuse. "Nicotine replacement therapy, including nicotine patches, gum, lozenges, inhalers etc, has been found to be effective. Combination therapy with drugs like bupropion has been found to be more effective than nicotine replacement alone," said Viveka Kumar, Senior Director, Max Heart & Vascular Institute, Saket. Kumar also emphasised on the role of mass media in spreading awareness about the harmful effects of tobacco, while curbing the easy access to tobacco, especially among the younger vulnerable population. "Availability and accessibility of smoking cessation programmes to smokers who want to stop smoking remains an area which needs to be addressed," Kumar said. (Shreya Ganguly can be contacted shreya.g@ians.in) --IANS sh/rt/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Income-Tax department has questioned Matix Group Chairman Nishant Kanodia in connection with NuPower Renewables, a leading daily reported on Wednesday. NuPower Renewables is a company promoted by Deepak Kochhar, husband of ICICI Bank's CEO Chanda Kochhar. Nishant Kanodia is the son-in-law of Essar Group's Ravi Ruia and owns the Mauritius-based Firstland Holdings that invested Rs 325 crore in NuPower between 2010 and 2012. "We are probing this investment that was routed through Mauritius. What is the source of the funds, why did Firstland Holdings exit NuPower soon after and whether this has connections with any Essat Group company," a tax official told The Hindustan Times. IANS' phone calls and text messages to an I-T department official to get more details remained unanswered. Meanwhile, at least nine public and private sector banks have reportedly classified the loans of Matix Fertilisers and Chemicals (MFC) -- whose Rs 7,000 crore urea plant in West Bengal floundered for years for the lack of coal-bed methane gas -- as sub-standard and non-performing assets (NPA) in the last quarter. However, MFCL in a response to IANS said: "Currently, MFCL is in process of refinancing its term loan (Project Loan) and availing working capital required for continuous sustained plant operation. The company expects to resume production by September, 2018." The MFCL has set up a greenfield single stream gas based integrated Urea fertiliser plant at Panagarh Industrial Park, West Bengal. "MFCL had entered into a Gas Sale and Purchase Agreement (GSPA) with Essar Oil Ltd for supply of CBM Gas. However, due to technical reasons, Essar was unable to supply required quantity of CBM gas to the Matix plant which resulted in delay in commissioning of MFCL's plant. MFCL plant successfully started trial production in the month of October, 2017," Matix said. The Indian banking system currently has an exposure of over Rs 3,500 crore to MFC as of March 31, 2018, according to loan data The Wire has accessed. Out of the 12 lenders, currently, only three classify the account as standard: Punjab National Bank (Rs 174 crore), Vijaya Bank (Rs 100 crore), and Yes Bank (Rs 83 crore). In the case of Yes Bank, it is the only lender where the Matix account is classified as a non CDR (corporate debt restructuring) standard loan and is part of its disclosed restructured standard loans as of March 31, 2018. --IANS bdc-rak-ag/md/hs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A massive blaze that erupted in a rubber factory of a densely-populated south Delhi neighbourhood last evening was brought under control on Wednesday after an Indian Air Force (IAF) Mi17V5 chopper was used to spray water, officials said. Strong winds on Tuesday night fanned the flames emanating from the warehouse storing rubber as it took a gigantic proportion. The IAF chopper fitted with a bambi bucket had to carry out many sorties, spray hundreds of litres of water to wrestle the blaze under control. Fire officials said the blaze will be contained only once the material burns which may take around three more hours. They said there were no casualties reported so far. The cause of it was still being ascertained. On Tuesday evening, 65 tenders, parked in the byzantine lanes of the congested neighbourhood, were put in service to douse the blaze in the Khirki Extension of Malviya Nagar. Five tenders were used to fight the fire with foam. A fire official told IANS that a call reporting the fire near Sant Nirankari School was received around 5 p.m. The warehouse is owned by Maxwell Pvt Ltd who are into business of providing rubber raw material for remoulding of vehicle tyres. Deputy Commissioner of Police, South, Romil Baaniya said it was found that a truck was being loaded with rubber sheets at the warehouse when the vehicle suddenly burst into flames. It quickly spread to the building where more rubber sheets were stored. Rubber compounds stored in inflammable metallic and plastic boxes caught fire that flared up the blaze. The officer said the fire was partially brought under control in the evening. But as it became windy during the night, flames gushed out of the building and a plume of black smoke clouded the Malviya Nagar skyline. People living around the warehouse was evacuated as a preventive measure. Some 13 buildings, a school and a gym have been evacuated for safety reasons, according to a fire department statement. "The nearby area has been temporarily evacuated for security reason," Baaniya said. Medical teams at Max Saket, Rainbow Child Specialty Hospital, Safdarjung Hospital and AIIMS were kept on alert to attend to any injured. Adequate police arrangements were deployed at the medical facilities. Policemen and women were also deployed in large numbers for assisting in the evacuation, crowd control and coordination with other agencies. --IANS team-sar/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The government should include cyber crimes in the charter of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Phone Frauds (IMCPF18) as there is no significant difference between phones and computers with growing use of smart phones, a joint report by Ficci and EY said on Wednesday. The report, "Confronting the New-Age Cybercriminal: Disrupting the web of crime", said: "An Inter-Ministerial Committee on Phone Frauds (IMCPF18) has been constituted in the Ministry of Home Affairs. This Committee needs to be mandated to include cyber crimes also as part of its charter because the distinction between phones and computers has virtually disappeared with the proliferation of smart phones." The committee comprises representatives of the Home and Electronic and Information Technology Ministeries, Departments of Financial Services and Telecommunications, the Reserve Bank of India and law enforcement agencies. The report also calls for strong bilateral agreements on cyber crime investigations, information sharing, intelligence, the applicability of international and territorial laws, capacity building, research and development among others. It further advocates strengthening the national core networks and systems with establishment and enhancement of institutions or bodies such as Cybersecurity Incidence Response Team, Security Operations Centre. Addressing the Ficci's conference on Homeland Security-2018 where its report was released, Minister of State for Electronics and IT S.S. Ahluwalia urged self-regulation and exercise of utmost care in uploading and downloading information from the internet as any indiscretion would lead to involuntarily aiding the cyber criminals in their malicious intent. --IANS rrb/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Indonesia elevated their bilateral ties to that of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnerhsip and issued a shared vision for maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region following a bilateral summit between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo here on Wednesday. The two sides also signed 15 agreements, including on defence and economic cooperation. Reflecting India's growing ties with Southeast Asia under New Delhi's Act East Policy, the two sides issued a joint statement on "Establishing Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Between Indonesia and India" which said that Modi and Widodo held extensive talks on bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest, and provided strategic directions that would further enhance the solid and expanding relations between the two countries. "To enhance the two countries' strategic partnership, the leaders agreed to hold annual summit meetings, including on the margins of multilateral events," the statement said. "They also stressed the importance of continuing regular bilateral consultations through the robust architecture of dialogue in place, including the ministerial and working group mechanisms." According to the statement, both leaders reaffirmed that teir countries, as strategic partners and maritime neighbours, must work to further strengthen and broaden the already robust defence cooperation. "The leaders reaffirmed their commitment in the field of defence, with the signing of the Defence Cooperation Agreement between the two countries," it stated, adding that the this will further strengthen and renew the existing cooperation for mutual benefit of the two countries and the region. Modi and Widodo also agreed to further enhance mutual trust through regular meetings and staff talks between armies, navies and air forces of the two countries. In the area of defence industry, they took note on the progress made through the joint production of military equipment and identified cooperation in defence industry and technology as areas of great potential. In terms of economic cooperation, the two sides sides agreed to work intensively for the early conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and reiterated that it needs to be comprehensive, fair and balanced with benefit to all member states. RCEP is a proposed free trade agreement between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) regional bloc and the six states with which Asean has existing free trade agreements - Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. The Asean comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. "President Joko Widodo welcomed the increase in Indian investments in Indonesia and appreciated their contribution to the Indonesian economy," the statement said. "Prime Minister Modi also welcomed Indonesian companies' participation through the Make in India initiative and invited Indonesian business to avail of the opportunities presented." The joint statement said that as maritime neighbours, the two countries underlined the importance of stronger connectivity, particularly on sea links, in order to facilitate economic cooperation and people-to-people contact. Modi and Widodo welcomed the plan to build connectivity between Andaman Nicobar in India and Aceh in Indonesia to unleash the economic potentials of both areas. "Furthermore, the two sides looked forward to the expeditious conclusion of the Asean-India Maritime Transport Cooperation Agreement," the statement said. The two leaders also reiterated their "strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations including cross-border terrorism and terror-related incidents in Indonesia and India and affirmed that perpetrators of these henious acts must be brought to justice". In a manifestation of the growing geostrategic importance of the Indo-Pacific region, the two sides issued a separate statement on "Shared Vision of Indo-Indonesia Martime Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific". "In today's changing scenario in the Indo-Pacific region, we (India and Indonesia) are geostrategically located," Modi said in a joint address to the media with Indonesian President Joko Widodo following a bilateral summit here. "Under India's Act East Policy, we have SAGAR - Security and Growth for All in the Region - that matches with President Widodo's Global Maritime Fulcrum," he said. While Modi's SAGAR initiative underscores India's engagement in the Indian Ocean region, Jokowi's Global Maritime Fulcrum seeks to capitalise on Indonesia's geographic position to make the southeast Asian nation a "fulcrum" of Indo-Pacific maritime activity. India is also part of a recently revived quad, including the US, Japan and Australia, that seeks to work for peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region. According to the statement on maritime cooperation, both sides recognised "that with a coastline of 7,500 km, with more than 1,380 islands and more than two million sq. km of Exclusive Economic Zone, India occupies a central position in the Indo-Pacific, while Indonesia as the largest archipelagic state in the world, with a coastline of 108,000 km, with 17,504 islands and features and a total of maritime area of 6,400,000 sq. km including Exclusive Economic Zone, is a fulcrum that connects the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean". "The two oceans represent a combined maritime region which is important for global maritime trade and commerce," it stated. It also called for adhering to the rights and obligations under the international law including the Charter of the United Nations, the UN Convention on the Law of Sea (Unclos) and the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC). Modi arrived here on Tuesday on the first leg of his five-day three-nation tour of southeast Asia that will also see him visiting Malaysia and Singapore. This is his first visit to Indonesia as Prime Minister. --IANS ab/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Taking their bilateral relationship into a new era, India and Indonesia on Wednesday agreed to establish a new Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, condemned terrorism in all its forms, including cross-border terror, and to open an inter-faith dialogue in a bid to eradicate radicalism and violent extremism. This was agreed to during a meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo who also came out with a shared vision of India-Indonesia maritime cooperation that seeks to achieve a free, open, transparent, rules-based Indo-Pacific region where sovereignty and territorial integrity are respected. In Modi's first visit to the country with the biggest Muslim population in the world, a joint statement issued after delegation-level talks said that inter-faith dialogue was a reflection of the united commitment of both the countries to explore a new understanding on the rise of religious identities, the dynamic of pluralism and to eradicate radicalism, terrorism and violent extremism. Both the leaders agreed to organise an inter-faith dialogue in Indonesia in October this year which will be followed by a similar dialogue next year. Modi and Widodo condemned terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, including cross-border terrorism and terror-related incidents in both the countries and affirmed that perpetrators of thse heinous acts must be brought to justice. Both the leaders also affirmed that terrorism should not be associated with any religion, creed, nationality and ethnicity. In a joint address to the media, Modi condemned the terror attacks in Indonesia earlier this month and said India stands in solidarity with the people and government of Indonesia. The two sides signed 15 agreements, including on defence cooperation, that will provide for regular bilateral dialogue and consultation on strategic defence and military issues of common interest and identified cooperation in defence indusrty and technology as areas of great potential. The two leaders directed officials to expand mutually beneficial collaboration between their defence industries for joint production of equipment, technology transfer, technical assistance and capacity building as well sourcing of defence equipment. In the shared vision document, the two countries acknowledged the need to maintain maritime safety and security for peace, stability and sustainable economic growth and development in the maritime waters of the Indo-Pacific region as enshrined in the UN Convention on Law of the Sea (Unclos) and relevant international laws. They welcomed the elevation of the bilateral relationship between the two countries to the level of Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and creation of new mechanisms like bilateral security dialogue, signing of an enhanced defence cooperation agreement and frame agreement on cooperation in the exploration and uses of outer space for peaceful purposes. Modi told the media that under India's Act East Policy, the SAGAR - Security and Growth for All in the Region - initiative matches Widodo's Global Maritime Fulcrum. While Modi's SAGAR initiative underscores India enagagement in the Indian Ocean region, Widodo's Global Maritime Fulcrum seeks to capitalise on Indonesia's geographic postion to make the southeast Asian nation the "fulcrum" of Indo-Pacific maritime activity. Modi also said that both sides will double their efforts to take bilateral trade to $50 billion by 2025. Both sides also agred to set up a joint task force to undertake projects port-related infrastructure in and around Sabang, which, at 90 nautical miles, is the closest port from the easternmost island of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The two sides also agreed to take necessary steps to enhance connectivity (institutional, physical, digital, and paople-to-people) between the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and provinces in Sumatra Island of Indonesia to promote trade, tourism and people-to-people contacts and facilitate B to B linkages between the Chamber of Commerce of Andaman and the ones of the provinces of Sumatra, including Aceh. Following Wednesday's meeting, Modi and Widodo unveiled a kite exhibition jointly organised by Museum Layang Layang of Jakarta and the Kite Museum of Ahmedabad. The exhibition is themed around the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. The two leaders also visited the Istiqlal Mosque here, the largest mosque in southeast Asia, on the occasion of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. --IANS ab-vsc/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US has accused Indian authorities of not prosecuting cow protection vigilantes attacking Muslims suspected of slaughtering the animals or consuming beef amid "reports of hundreds of religiously motivated killings." The State Department's International Religious Freedom Report released on Tuesday said: "Authorities often did not prosecute violence by vigilantes against persons, mostly Muslims, suspected of slaughtering or illegally transporting cows or trading in or consuming beef." It added, "There were reports of hundreds of religiously motivated killings, assaults, riots, restrictions on the right to practice religion and proselytise, discrimination, and attacks on property. Groups most frequently targeted were Muslims and Christians. "Cow protection groups, many of whose members believed cow slaughter and eating beef were an attack on the Hindu deities representing motherhood, carried out several violent attacks, including killings, beatings, harassment, and intimidation against consumers of beef or those involved in the beef industry," according to the report. "Members of civil society and religious minorities said, under the current government, religious minority communities felt more vulnerable to Hindu nationalist groups engaging in violence against non-Hindu individuals and places of worship," the reported said. The report, however, also noted that the Supreme Court directed state governments to appoint a senior police officer in each district to prevent and respond effectively to incidents of "cow vigilantism" and chief secretaries to report on actions taken to prevent them. The annual report was a long compilation of mainly news reports about legislative measures considered against minority interests or incidents of violence against or harassment of minorities. At a news conference on the report for foreign journalists, the State Department official in charge of the report, Samuel Brownback, denounced India, alleging that "there have been unfortunately a lot of religious violence that has taken place in various communities." "We have asked the Indian government to pursue more safety to see justice taking place in these cases where these arise and we will continue to pursue that with the Indian government as with all government all around the world," he said. "I get reports directly from individuals that are coming from India (about) violence they have experience because of who they are in their faith, and that is wrong," said Brownback, who is a convert to Catholicism from a fundamentalist Christian sect. He holds the title of Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom and previously as governor of Kansas he took controversial positions reflective of his faith by legislating measures restricting abortions and opposing gay rights. He said that within 90 days after the publication of the report a list for "countries of particular concern" would be issued for possible sanctions or other action. "Religious minority communities stated, while the national government sometimes spoke out against incidents of violence, local political leaders often did not, and at times made public remarks that individuals could interpret as condoning violence," the report said. The report brought up the Supreme Court ruling the "triple talaq" divorce illegal, including it in a list of matters of concern. "On August 22, the Supreme Court ruled the practice through which a Muslim man could divorce his wife instantly by saying the word "talaq" (Arabic for divorce) three times was unconstitutional," the report said. The report noted that in Andhra and Telengana, "authorities may prohibit proselytising near another religion's place of worship". It raked up the case of a Christian organisation, Compassion International, which shut down its multi-million-dollar operation in India after the Indian government revoked its permission for distributing funds in India because of violations of law. The report said, "Compassion International maintained that the government used the law to restrict the work of Christian charitable organisations". (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in) --IANS al/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The 13th edition of the annual joint military exercise "Surya Kiran" of the Indian and Nepalese armies began on Wednesday at Pithoragarh in Uttarakhand, the Indian Army said. "The aim of the exercise is joint training of troops in counter-insurgency/ counter terrorism operations in both jungle and mountainous terrain and disaster management," an Army release said. "Exercise 'Surya Kiran' can be termed as the facade of long-standing strategic ties between India and Nepal," it added. As part of the exercise, important lectures, demonstrations and drills related to counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism operations and disaster management will be conducted. Both armies will also share their experiences in countering such situations as also refined drills and procedures for joint operation wherever the need so arises. The exercise will culminate with a 72-hour joint exercise which will show the joint skills of soldiers while conducting any counter-terrorist operation, according to the release. --IANS mak/nir (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A total of 2,900 civilians have been killed since the Islamic State (IS) announced its "caliphate" in Syria, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Tuesday. The civilians are among 5,170 people, including rival militants and army personnel, the IS militants killed in Syria since declaring it's self-styled caliphate in June, 2014, said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Xinhua reported. The Observatory said that the IS control in Syria has shrunk to 3 percent after losing large swathes of areas to the Syrian army and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). IS now controls scattered pockets in the eastern countryside of Homs province, the southeastern desert of Deir al-Zour province, an area on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River and a pocket in the northern countryside of Deir al-Zour in eastern Syria. IS also controls pockets in the Yarmouk area in the countryside of the southern province of Daraa as well as pockets in the southern countryside of Hasakah province in northern Syria. Despite losing areas measuring tens of thousands of kilometers, IS continues to shade blood in Syria, said the Observatory, adding that the group carried out executions of civilians and rival fighters over the past two months. IS was recently defeated in southern Damascus when the Syrian army captured its latest strongholds in the Hajar al-Aswad and Yarmouk Camp. The SDF has also recently launched an offensive on IS east of Euphrates, but the Observatory said the SDF failed to storm Hajin area, the last IS stronghold east of Euphrates and moved the military operation to the southern countryside of Hasakah. The Syrian army said it had foiled an attack last Wednesday by the IS group on a Syrian military site in Deir al-Zour, killing 43 IS militants, while four Russian experts were also killed in the showdown. The Observatory, which says it relies on a network of activists on the ground, said intense battles raged between the Syrian army and IS in the countryside of Deir al-Zour, as the terror-designated group has attempted to distract the army by waging sudden attacks. --IANS ahm/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP Delhi unit on Wednesday described Public Works Department (PWD) Minister Satyendar Jain as the "accountant of all the black deeds of the Delhi government", soon after the CBI registered a case against him for alleged violation of norms in hiring a creative team in the department. Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Manoj Tiwari said that during the last three years, the people of Delhi and the country have seen the "silence" of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on cases of corruption against his party leaders and family members. "But the case of Jain is quite different. Kejriwal cannot take any action against Jain because he is the accountant of all the black deeds of the Delhi government," Tiwari, who represents the northeast Delhi seat in the Lok Sabha, alleged. "If he reveals the truth, then legal action will certainly be taken against AAP leaders, including the Chief Minister," the BJP leader claimed. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) earlier on Wednesday raided the residence of the Minister over alleged violation of norms in hiring a creative team in the PWD and registered a case. The agency registered the case against Jain, then PWD Engineer-in-Chief S.K. Srivastava and others. The CBI team carried out searches at four-to-five locations in Delhi, including the residences of PWD officials and others. In 2017, the agency initiated a preliminary probe into the hiring of 24 architects in the PWD's creative team for various projects, including Mohalla Clinics. Attacking the Chief Minister for not taking any action against his Minister, Tiwari said: "The continuance of Jain in the Delhi Cabinet even after a criminal case against him is against democratic traditions." The BJP leader said that it seemed that in the last three years in office, Kejriwal "may not have learnt anything". "But he has learnt the art of protecting corruption with the help of his friendship with RJD leader Lalu Prasad and Karnataka's H.D. Kumaraswamy and others," he added. --IANS aks/tsb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The White House said on Tuesday that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit Washington on June 7, ahead of the expected meeting between the leaders of Washington and Pyongyang. US President Donald Trump will meet with Abe on June 7 at the White House, said the White House Spokesperson Sarah Sanders in a tweet. The announcement came one day after Trump spoke over phone with Abe, with the two agreeing to meet before a possible meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. Sanders also said in the tweet that Washington continued to "actively prepare" for the expected summit. Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning that a senior official of North Korea is heading to New York for talks about the meeting between him and Kim. The latest positive progress for the summit came after Trump cancelled the scheduled meeting last Thursday, citing "tremendous anger and open hostility" displayed by Pyongyang recently. Trump reversed course on Friday, saying both sides wanted the meeting to happen and it could still go ahead after productive talks. He also confirmed on Sunday that a US official team had arrived in North Korea to talk about the preparation for talks. --IANS ahm/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Italy's Prime Minister-designate Carlo Cottarelli will on Wednesday meet President Sergio Mattarella, amid reports that snap elections may be called to break the political deadlock. Cottarelli, an ex-IMF economist, has failed to secure support from major political parties and may not even bother to be sworn in, media reports said. The President might choose to skip the appointment of a stop-gap government and call elections in July, the BBC said. On Sunday, Italy's two populist parties failed to form a coalition cabinet. The prospect of fresh elections and the possibility of eurosceptic parties strengthening their position has hit financial markets and raised concerns about the eurozone's stability. Italy, the European Union's fourth-biggest economy, has been without a government since elections in March because no political group can form a majority. The two big winners in that election -- Five Star and the League -- attempted to join forces but abandoned efforts after the President vetoed their choice of the Finance Minister. Mattarella said he could not appoint the eurosceptic Paolo Savona to the post, citing concern from investors at home and abroad. The rare move by the President sparked fury from both parties, who say they would reject Cottarelli's nomination in Parliament, the BBC reported. Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio then urged Parliament to impeach the President, but later it came down to peaceful protests. League's chief Matteo Salvini also criticised Mattarella's decision, calling for mass protests and accusing Brussels and Germany of meddling. Marches and rallies were expected to be organised in Italian cities, including an event in Rome on June 2 (their Republic Day). --IANS in/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) More than 24 hours after a fire swept through a godown and partially gutted a school building and a gymnasium in south Delhi's Malviya Nagar, life was limping back to normal as evacuated area residents trooped back home and authorities allowed traffic to ply. Firefighters were still busy hosing the charred remains of the godown in Khirki Extension that stored rubber sheets, hours after they had doused the flames, as smoke continued to emanate from the gutted building. Though officials were not sure of the cause of the fire, they said the flames spread quickly due to the stored rubber. School security guard Mansaram, who was witness to the fire at the godown, told IANS on Wednesday: "I and our Field Officer Arif went to the second floor of the school building and saw room windows on fire and thick smoke billowing out." Arif informed the Delhi Fire Service. "It took an hour for firefighters to reach the spot. Luckily, the wind was not blowing towards the school or else...," Arif said. The fire only spread when firemen used water to douse it, he said. The School Chairperson and Principal too visited the school. "Thank God! Students were on vacation when the fire incident occurred," school Chairperson Kumar said. She held the authorities responsible for the fire and demanded the immediate shutdown of the rubber sheet godown. As a thick column of smoke spread to nearby houses due to the fire, area residents were shifted by police to a school five km away from the spot. An area resident Rahul Sharma griped: "On Tuesday, my family had to stay put in a school for more than three hours without any facilities. We were surrounded by mosquitoes. As we were sleepy, we came back to our home." The flow of traffic -- which was disrupted due to the fire -- was limping back to normal as police allowed most vehicles to pass through Khirki Extension during the day. A firefighter said he and his colleagues were unable to breathe properly due to fumes from burning chemicals in the godown. "Since Tuesday, I have been in this godown and didn't even get time to eat my breakfast," he said. Malviya Nagar MLA Somnath Bharti visited the area on Wednesday and praised the firefighters and the disaster management authorities. "The firemen risked their lives to douse the flames. I wish they had more equipment." He said Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was briefed on the fire incident. "We will leave no stone unturned to ensure such accidents never ever happen again," he said. --IANS sm/tsb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Lt. Gen. Ranbir Singh was on Wednesday appointed as chief of the Indian Army's Northern Command and will take over the post on Friday, a defence release said. Currently, Deputy Chief of Army Staff, Information Systems and Training, he replaces Lt. Gen. Devraj Anbu who has been appointed as the Vice Chief of the Army. It was Singh, who as Director General Military Operations, announced in September 2016 that the Indian Army had carried out surgical strikes across the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered territory. Hailing from Punjab's Jalandhar district and an alumnus of Kapurthala Sainik School and Indian Military Academy, Singh was commissioned in the Dogra Regiment, and is considered an expert in counter-insurgency operations. --IANS sq/him/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Militants armed with guns and rockets attacked the Afghanistan Interior Ministry on Wednesday and casualties are feared, the media reported. "We heard a huge blast at the first gate of the Ministry which is located near Charahi Shaheed Square. The blast occurred at mid-day. The whole place has now been sealed off," an eyewitness told Xinhua news agency. "The initial information found that a suicide bomber detonated his explosive jacket in the front gate of the compound. Another group of militants tried to breach the facility," said a police officer. "But the militants failed to reach the main building which is at the centre of the big open yard with a high-profile security system. We still cannot provide details on casualties," the officer added. The number of the attackers remained unknown and sporadic gunfire still could be heard as of 1.00 p.m. The security forces cordoned off the area. A four-line road connecting the Kabul airport with the city's Intercontinental Hotel was blocked for traffic after the attack. --IANS and/soni/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Ahead of their bilateral summit, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was received by Indonesian President Joko Widodo at the Merdeka Palace here with a guard of honour. "Relationship that evokes a feeling of warmth and kinship. A red carpet welcome and a guard of honour extended to PM @narendramodi on his arrival at Istana Merdeka ahead of his talks with President @jokowi," Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. Earlier on Wednesday, Modi started his official engagements by a laying a a wreath at the Kalibata Heroes' Cemetery here. Modi arrived here on Tuesday in what is his first visit to Indonesia as Prime Minister. He will also visit Malaysia and Singapore in the course of his five-day three-nation tour of southeast Asia. Following Wednesday's bilateral summit, a number of agreements, including in the areas of defence and trade, are expected to be signed between India and Indonesia. Modi and Widodo will then jointly inaugurate a kite festival being organised by the Museum Layang-Layang of Jakarta and the Kite Museum of Ahmedabad that will be depicting the common themes of the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, which are strong cultural, civilizational linkages that India share with Indonesia. Modi will also attend an Indian community event at the Jakarta Convention Centre here and take part in an India-Indonesia CEOs Forum. Indonesia is home to around 100,000 people of Indian origin and 7,000 NRIs working as professionals across different sectors. --IANS ab/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Starting his official engagements in Indonesia on Wednesday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid a wreath at the Kalibata Heroes' Cemetery here. "Lest we forget...Paying homage to martyrs of Indonesian independence struggle! PM @narendramodi laying wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes' Cemetery and signing the Visitor's Book," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted along with pictures. Over 7,000 people, who are military casualties and veterans from the Indonesian war of independence are buried at the cemetery. These include many Japanese veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army who stayed in the then Dutch colony after the World War II of their own will and fought for Indonesia's independence. Modi arrived here on Tuesday on the first leg of his five-day three-nation tour of southeast Asia that will also see him visiting Malaysia and Singapore. Later in the day, Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo will hold a bilateral summit following which a number of agreements, including in the areas of defence and trade, are expected to be signed. The two leaders will then jointly inaugurate a kite festival being organised by Museum Layang-Layang of Jakarta and Kite Museum of Ahmedabad that will be depicting the common themes of the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, which are strong cultural and civilizational links that India share with Indonesia. Modi will also attend an Indian community event at the Jakarta Convention Centre here and take part in an India-Indonesia CEOs Forum. Indonesia is home to around 100,000 people of Indian origin and 7,000 Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) working as professionals across different sectors. --IANS ab/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Most of the 2,700-odd people who will die in the next 24 hours in India due to cancer caused by smoking and other tobacco products tried to quit but failed and were living their last days with a feeling of being powerless over their habit. As we celebrate the World No Tobacco Day on May 31, and cigarettes and other tobacco products keep getting produced and sold, experts say 2,739 people lose their lives everyday in India due to tobacco, as the quit rate is only about three per cent. "It's an irony that in coming 24 hours, 2,739 people will lose their lives due to cancer caused by use of tobacco and other tobacco products...because the quit rate is very low -- only about three per cent in India," Sambandh Health Foundation trustee Sanjay Seth said. With such a low probability of quitting and such a high probability of tobacco use leading to a multitude of diseases, the prevalence of tobacco has been rightly termed as the "Tobacco Epidemic", said the head of tobacco control at the non-profit organization. Another non-profit, Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, in their study "The State of Smoking 2018" based on a survey of smokers in 13 nations including India found that 68 per cent of smokers are "well-informed" about the impact of smoking on one's health. "Despite nearly seven of 10 smokers in India being aware that smoking is dangerous, 53 per cent have been unsuccessful in their attempts to quit," it said and recommended the need for new cessation and harm-reduction options to help smokers live longer and healthier lives. "The data show what we have anecdotally known for decades -- that many smokers have the desire to quit, but not the means to match it," said Foundation President Derek Yach. Most smokers have tried to quit barring in South Africa and Lebanon, where less than half tried to quit. Of the 13 countries the Foundation surveyed, the majority of smokers in each consider themselves addicted to cigarette, ranging from 60 per cent in India to 91 per cent in Japan. "Smokers feel powerless over their habit," the Foundation said in its release. The current number of annual deaths due to tobacco consumption in India is around 10 lakh. As per the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) Fact Sheet, it is believed that tobacco consumption will be killing over 1.5 million (15 lakh) people every year by 2020. Anshuman Kumar, Director - Surgical Oncology in Delhi-based Dharamshila Narayana Superspeciality Hospital, said: "Both smoking and smokeless (chewing) tobacco forms are fatal. You bring it close to your lips but tobacco betrays you and attacks your lungs, chokes your heart and vessels." Heart diseases, asthma, other respiratory diseases and cancer have been found to have increased risk in people who consume tobacco -- smoking, to be specific. However, evidences of vision loss and ophthalmic problems have been found higher in individuals who smoke. Ikeda Lal, Opthalmologist at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, Delhi, said: "Macular degeneration causes retina to lose its sharpness as it effects its central part which is responsible for clarity of vision. This makes it difficult for patients to drive and read properly and eventually lose their quality of life." Recent researches say that about one in four women in the metro cities is addicted to smoking. Arvind Vaid, Gynaecologist and IVF Expert at national capital-based Indira IVF Hospital, said: "As many women as men are addicted to some form of tobacco products. Smoking reduces their chances of conceiving by at least by 60 per cent. Chemicals present in a cigarette also make certain cervical changes that even put them at an elevated risk of cervical cancer." Quitting the habit is made more difficult by the physical addiction to nicotine -- the chemical stimulant in tobacco. Nicotine is a highly addictive drug that causes strong physical cravings and withdrawal symptoms like other drugs that stimulate the nervous system. "Fortunately, medical treatments are now available that can help control the withdrawal symptoms and cravings. With the treatment, significant improvements in the quality of life, daytime symptoms and bronchial hyper-reactivity can be seen," said Ajay Godse, MD Chest Physician at Bhaktivedanta Hospital, Thane in Maharashtra. Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Anupriya Patel will flag off a campaign on the occasion of World No Tobacco Day on Thursday. --IANS mgu/nir (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a bid to strengethen its presence in India, Lenovo-owned Motorola on Tuesday partnered with Reliance Digital to showcase its complete product portfolio via "Moto Hubs" at over 150 Reliance and MyJio stores. The "Moto Hubs" at Reliance Digital and MyJio stores will offer customers easy access to all Motorola products, including online exclusive smartphones. "With this partnership, we aim to provide customers with easy access to Motorola's premium products across India," said BV Mallikarjuna Rao, Regional General Manager, Motorola Mobility India. The first "Moto Hub" under the partnership was inaugurated at R-City at Ghatkopar in Mumbai, in the presence of Shashank Sharma, Executive Director, Motorola Mobility & Lenovo MBG Asia Pacific region; Kaushal Nevrekar, CMO, Reliance Digital and Pradeep Bhosale, Head of Business-Productivity, Reliance Digital, among others. Motorola plans to open several "Moto Hubs" at Reliance Digital and My Jio stores at key locations in the country. "Motorola brings in the legacy of unparalleled mobile technology, making this partnership a perfect combination. We share Motorola's vision of providing premium customer experiences and are excited to start off this relationship," added Nevrekar. Reliance Digital is the consumer durables and information technology concept from Reliance Retail Ltd. It has more than 2,000 electronics stores across India including MyJio stores. Motorola India recently announced a partnership with domestic multi-brand retail chain Sangeetha Mobiles to strengthen its retail presence in the country through "Moto Hubs." Motorola plans to open "Moto Hubs" in over 475 Sangeetha Mobiles stores in seven states, including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka. Along with Moto X4 and Moto Z2 Force smartphones, "Moto Hubs" provide access and availability to online exclusive devices like Moto e4 plus and Moto g5 plus. Motorola India is set to launch its new generation of 'G' series phones -- Moto G6 and G6 Play -- on June 4. --IANS na/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President Donald Trump has alleged "without providing any evidence" that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation will meddle in the midterm elections to benefit Democrats. Trump's claim is his latest attack on the credibility of the Russia investigation as being politically motivated, is a significant new step, CNN said. "The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked eight years for Barack Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be meddling with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans are taking the lead in polls," Trump tweeted. Asking his party members to "stay tough" Trump added that there was no "Collusion, except by the Democrats". Trump has repeatedly attacked the Mueller investigation that was intended to be an independent probe aimed at getting to the bottom of Russia's efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. --IANS in/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) said on Wednesday that he would love to roll out cars in but the tough government regulations have forced him to apply the brakes on his plans till date. "Would love to be in Some challenging government regulations, unfortunately," Musk tweeted in a response to a users who wrote "No in India" to him. "Deepak Ahuja, our CFO, is from India. Tesla will be there as soon as he believes we should," added Musk, also the founder. Would love to be in India. Some challenging government regulations, unfortunately. Deepak Ahuja, our CFO, is from India. Tesla will be there as soon as he believes we should. (@elonmusk) May 30, 2018 Ahuja, a seasoned auto industry finance executive with 15 years experience at Ford Motor Company, joined as Chief Financial Officer in 2010. He holds Bachelors' and Masters' degrees in Materials Engineering from and Northwestern University, respectively and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University. Ahuja works out of Tesla's San Carlos headquarters. He quit Tesla in 2015, only to join it back in 2017. Last year, Musk said Tesla's cars could come to India the summer but there has not been any further development. Musk later blamed the FDI norms in India for delay in Tesla's entry into the Indian market. "Maybe I'm misinformed, but I was told that 30% of parts must be locally sourced and the supply doesn't yet exist in India to support that," he had tweeted. The Make in India's handle replied: "@elonmusk With respect to news reports on launch plans of Tesla in India being delayed, please note some key clarifications#MakeInIndia". Musk has revealed plans to install 10,000 Supercharger stations for his company's electric vehicles around the world by 2019 end. He tweeted a global map of the upcoming Supercharger stations, mainly in Europe, North America and but not in India. There are at present 1,229 Supercharger stations across the world, with 9,623 Superchargers installed which can charge an electric vehicle in just 30 minutes (nearly 80 per cent capacity). Tesla recently confirmed that it has produced its 300,000th vehicle. There are now 212,821 Model S vehicles, 71,927 Model X vehicles, and 1,770 Model 3 vehicles. The Nepal government has presented a budget of 1.315 trillion Nepali rupees ($12.15 billion) for the 2018-19 fiscal year with a target of achieving an economic growth rate of eight per cent. Finance Minister Yubaraj Khatiwada presented the budget on Tuesday at the joint session of the House of Representatives and the National Assembly with an outlay of one third of the total budget for the newly elected provincial and local governments, the Himalayan Times reported. The provincial and local governments received 443 billion Nepali rupees ($4.09 billion), which will provide a base for lower level governments to prepare their own annual budget for the next fiscal year that begins in mid-July. Compared to the current fiscal year's budget, the new budget is bigger by around 37 billion rupees ($342 million). The Nepali government which vowed to make the next fiscal year a foundation year for economic prosperity, prioritised employment for the youths, speedy development of social sectors and injecting capital, technology and research in agriculture, water resources and tourism. Development of highways, railways, irrigation, energy and urban infrastructure, post earthquake reconstruction and good governance were the other priorities of the budget. It aims to create additional employment for 500,000 people in the next fiscal. The government has sought to encourage foreign direct investment (FDI) in export oriented sectors. As the Himalayan country is to celebrate Visit Nepal Year 2020, promotional programmes will be launched focusing on India and China, the two largest source markets for Nepal's tourism. The budget has lowered the threshold for applying capital gains tax in land transactions and increased excise duty on liquor and tobacco products and vehicles -- four wheelers with a capacity above 1,000cc and two wheelers with a capacity above 150cc. It also gave certain income tax waivers for industries employing over 100 people. Minister Khatiwada said he hoped the measures announced in the budget would bring a positive social and economic transformation in the country. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Samsung's 4K "Onyx Cinema LED" display for large screens, currently available only in a few countries across the world, is set to come to India later this year, a top company executive said on Wednesday. To begin with, PVR Cinemas and INOX Group would install 'Onyx Cinema LED' in the country. The Samsung screens would be installed at PVR multiplexes in Delhi and Mumbai. "We first launched the screen in Korea, then we installed it in China, Europe, Thailand and the US. Once users watch content on 'Onyx' screen, it would be very difficult for them to switch to conventional projectors in theatres," Puneet Sethi, Vice President, Consumer Electronics Enterprise Business, Samsung India, told IANS here. Samsung "Onyx" screen has the ability to deliver better picture quality with its true black colour, bringing contents to life with higher vibrancy and accuracy in a cinema theatre near you. "We are delighted to announce our latest technology association with Samsung for their 'Onyx Cinema LED' screens in India. Partnering as the first movers, PVR will be the foremost cinema exhibition chain in the country to introduce this technology for the Indian audiences," Gautam Dutta, CEO, PVR Ltd told IANS. The display comes with comprehensive solutions such as "Onyx View", "Onyx 3D" and "Onyx Sound". The company, however, did not reveal the introductory price of the 4K "Onyx" LED screens for the Indian market. "We are introducing a game-changing technology which would showcase the work of film directors in optimal quality. In addition, it will also offer our movie-goers a new level of viewing environment, immersive in every aspect," Sethi added. Combined by an infinite contrast and specialised low-tone greyscale settings, "Onyx View" delivers brighter and more detail-rich content. The screen delivers HDR (High Dynamic Range) to the cinema, showcasing on-screen contents at peak brightness level, nearly 10 times greater than that offered by the standard cinema projectors. It is also the industry's first DCI-certified cinema screen available in various sizes. The screen also offers "Onyx" surround sound from JBL by Harman International and Samsung's Audio Lab. "This integration eliminates rearward bias by expanding the audio 'sweet spot' within Onyx theatres and ensures that all users can enjoy the same presentation throughout, regardless of the seat location," Sethi informed. The South Korean major has collaborated with cinema content developers and technology solution services providers to ensure that the display can optimise upcoming films as the theatres upgrade their screen to the Onyx screen. The screens will be able to display images of 4K, 2K, HDR and 3D quality. (Krishna SinhaChaudhury can be contacted at krishna.s@ians.in) --IANS ksc/na/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nine tourists from Pune were arrested on charge of molesting a minor, assaulting her minor brother and rioting at the popular beach village of Baga in North Goa, police said on Wednesday. The tourists earlier took snaps of the girl on the beach but later molested her and beat up her brother when the two objected to clicking of their pictures. A first information report was registered under Sections 143, 147, 323, 354 read with 149 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 8 of the Goa Children's Act. "The accused were caught while attempting to flee Goa. We have seized the mobile phone on which girl's pictures were taken. It will be sent for forensic examination," Dalvi said. Those arrested are Ramesh Kamble, Sanket Bhadale, Krishna Patil, Satyam Lambe, Aniket Gurav, Rishikesh Gurav, Akash Suvaskar, Sunny More, and Ishwar Pangare. The coastal state, renowned as a beach and nightlife tourism destination, attracts nearly seven million tourists every year. --IANS maya/tsb (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Israeli officials said on Wednesday that no agreement has been reached with Hamas on a ceasefire in Gaza. Hamas official Khalil al-Haya said that it agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire "after the resistance succeeded in warding off (Israel's) aggression". He said that militant groups in the Gaza Strip will follow the agreement as long as Israel does, Xinhua news agency reported. The Israeli government did not officially announce that it agreed to the terms and a military spokesperson said that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) would not comment on the reports of a possible ceasefire. Israel's Education Minister Naftali Bennett, also a member of the security cabinet, told Israel's Army Radio that no such agreement has been achieved yet. Commenting on the possibility of a ceasefire, Israel's Intelligence Minister Israel Katz said that it all depends on Hamas, an Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip. "If it continues (to attack), I don't know what its fate will be," he said. Overnight, Israel launched a new airstrike on the Gaza Strip, attacking dozens of Hamas' sites. A statement released on Wednesday by the military said fighter jets, combat helicopters and other aircraft struck some 25 sites belonging to the movement. Overall, according to the Israeli military, 65 targets across Gaza were struck since the attack began on Tuesday. Sirens were heard in several locations across southern Israel. The military said its Iron Dome anti-missile system downed most of the projectiles but a rocket hit a home in a community in the regional council of Eshkol, without causing injuries. The violence was part of a serious escalation in the area of the fence between Gaza and Israel over the past months. Israeli forces have killed at least 121 Palestinians in Gaza since weekly demonstrations started on March 30. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Following in BJP-ruled Gujarat's footsteps, Tripura is likely to organise a "Chintan Shivir" for state government officers to "meet the desired goals", an official said on Wednesday. The plan was mooted by NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar when Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb met him in New Delhi on Tuesday. "The NITI Aayog vice chief suggested that a training programme for state's officers could be organised to reorient their approach in view of the government priorities and speed of work required to achieve the state's objectives," the state government official said. He said that Rajiv Kumar suggested that the training on the lines of a successful "Chintan Shivir" in Gujarat could be thought of to this end. He told the Chief Minister that he would get the details of this initiative and pass it on to the Tripura government. The "Chintan Shivir" was held when Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat. The first such brainstorming session was held in 2004. Initially, the event was planned to be held every year. Though, over the years, it became intermittent. Rajiv Kumar assured Deb that the NITI Aayog would recommend to the Finance Ministry to release Rs 2,400 crore assistance to the state to fill the pre-devolution gap. "Rajiv Kumar also assured that fund requirements for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, enhancement of Social Pension Schemes would be recommended by the NITI Aayog to the Ministry concerned," the official added. The Vice-Chairman also offered to depute a NITI Aayog expert to assist the state in developing an action-oriented road map to make Tripura a model state. The NITI Aayog official also suggested that quality pineapple and bamboo production can help promote the state's growth. --IANS sc/tsb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Philippines House of Representatives on Wednesday approved the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL), which would provide increased autonomy to Mindanao, the Muslim-majority southern region of the country. The Lower House introduced a number of amendments before approving the bill that would allow the establishment of a self-administered territory in an area sometimes referred to as Bangsamoro (nation of Moros), encompassing mountains, islands and jungles that is home to at least 4 million people, mostly Muslim, official news website PNA reported. One of the amendments sought to keep security forces under the central government while another mandated that the law should be ratified with a single plebiscite, to be held within 90-120 days after the law is approved, instead of a referendum every 25 years as proposed earlier, Efe news reported. The House passed the law a day after President Rodrigo Duterte certified the bill as "urgent". He had repeatedly urged a faster approval of the bill to avoid encouraging extremism in a region, which in 2017 witnessed a five-month-long conflict between the military and a group affiliated to terror group Islamic State. The law, which still needs to be approved by the Senate and signed by Duterte, aims to create a self-governing structure with greater powers in the autonomous region. The BBL is the result of a peace agreement signed in March 2014 between the Philippines government -- led by former President Benigno Aquino -- and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), in which the rebels had agreed to give up armed struggle in exchange for the creation of an autonomous region under their rule. The agreement, however, had clashed with constitutional provisions and faced opposition in Parliament, eventually getting stalled after 44 police officers were killed in an ambush in Mindanao in January 2015. The MILF was formally established in 1984 by a splinter group of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) following a split when the latter agreed to withdraw the demand of complete independence in 1977. The MNLF signed a peace deal in 1996 in exchange for being allowed to govern the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, a demarcation which is set to be replaced by the autonomous region promised to the MILF. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) At least one policeman and 10 militants were killed in an attack on the compound of the Afghan Interior Ministry here on Wednesday, officials said. The assault on the Ministry's new complex began around midday when a suicide bomber detonated the explosives he was carrying at the building's entrance. After that nine militants dressed in military uniforms and armed with weapons and suicide vests tried to storm the facility, ministry spokesperson Najib Danish told Tolo News. "We heard a huge blast at the first gate of the ministry which is located near Charahi Shaheed Square," eyewitness Farhad Mohammadi said. "But the militants failed to reach the main building which is at the centre of a big open yard with a high-profile security system," he said. The attack ended after a two-hour shootout, in which all 10 militants and one police officer were killed, while five members of the security forces were wounded. The ministry spokesperson said that out of the 10 militants involved in the attack, seven were gunned down by security forces while three of them detonated their explosives. "The situation is back to normal and under control. All employees who were inside the ministry during the attack were evacuated and sent home," Danish said. Security forces were still trying to clear the area of explosives as the suicide vests were still attached to the bodies of the attackers. No group claimed responsibility for the attack. A four-lane road connecting Kabul airport with the city's Intercontinental Hotel passing the area was blocked for traffic after the attack. Elsewhere in Afghanistan, Taliban suicide bombers attacked a police station in the eastern Logar province, killing at least seven people including three police officers. In another incident, three civilians were killed in a blast in Afghanistan's Kandahar city. The explosion took place in a market in Police District 5. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Railway Minister Piyush Goyal on Wednesday said that the power plants around Delhi do not faces any coal shortage as the Railways and the Coal Ministry are working together with all the discoms to ensure sufficient adequate coal availability. "The Coal Ministry and the Railways Ministry are working together with all the discoms to ensure sufficient adequate coal availability throughout the country and no one needs to worry. Any speculation on that behalf is completely baseless and unfounded," Goyal, who is also the Coal Minister told reporters here. He also said that the supply of coal rakes to Delhi has shown a significant improvement in last few days. "Demand for coal was almost was very very low for Dadri all through last year. So Delhi was not consuming the amount of the power that they needed or was eligible from Dadri plant," he said. He said that the Dadri was working on about three rake per day supply last year because Delhi was not procuring power, but when the power demands went up, they increased their requisition to five rakes and then to seven rakes per day. Goyal's remarks came against the backdrop of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal raising, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Lt Governor Anil Baijal, the coal shortage in the Dadri I and II, Jhajjar and Badarpur thermal power stations, which, he said, did not have stocks "sufficient for even one-day full generation". Goyal said that on May 23, eight rakes of coal, on May 24 three rakes, on May 25 seven rakes, on May 26 six rakes, on May 27 eight rakes and on May 28 seven rakes have been supplied to the Dadri plant. "So it was continuously supplying coal, despite the fact that last year they have been taking only three rakes and then we have to ramp it up to seven to eight rakes per day in the short period of time. "We are almost giving double to Dadri than they bought last year," he said. Hitting out at Kejriwal, Goyal said, "The Delhi Chief Minister has never written a letter to me and has nor come to meet me. In the Power Ministry, he has said that they have adequate infrastructure." He also asserted that for both -- coal ministry and for railways -- it is not a 'switch on and switch off' thing that overnight you say we want more rakes and the system can gear up and supply rakes overnight. "I hope that all the states will plan their requirement better, ensuring timely payment for the coal that they procure and booking the rates by the railways in time so that there isn't any complaint of shortage in future," he said. He also said that the Badarpur power plant was never running for most of the year but suddenly a demand came up and and currently they are supplying one and half rakes a day in last one week. He said that similarly, the Indira Gandhi plant in Jhajjar had a very small requisition both from Haryana and Delhi until recently. "And once the requisition has come, then we are supplying three rakes of coal per day and if the demands goes up, we shall provide accordingly." The Coal Minister also advised the Delhi government to use the tolling policy of the Coal Ministry so that it can buy the power from the discoms at lower rates as the coal for the Dadri and the Jhajjar plant has to be trasported from long distances which adds to the cost of the power. --IANS aks/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Protests erupted in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on Wednesday after the grave of a slain Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) commander was desecrated allegedly by security forces. Protests broke out in Drabgam village after the area residents found that the tombstone on Sameer Tiger's grave damaged and banners and flags put up at the graveyard torn up. The protesters accused the security forces of desecrating the grave. One of the most wanted HM commanders, Sameer Tiger was killed in a gunfight with the security forces on April 30. --IANS sq/qd/tsb (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A prominent financial manager and vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin was arrested in Spain on a Russian arrest warrant on Wednesday but was released shortly after it was found that there were technical difficulties with the paperwork. Bill Browder, an investment fund magnate with dual British and American nationality, was arrested in Madrid as the financier himself acknowledged on his Twitter account. "Urgent: Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant," Browder tweeted. "Going to the police station right now." According to Spanish police, Browder was arrested but authorities later realised the warrant was not in force, for reasons they did not specify, and he was released, CNN reported. Chicago-born Browder is the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, an international investment fund. He was once the largest investor in Russia's stock market and a supporter of the Russian President. But that all changed in 2005 when he was expelled from the country after being deemed a threat to national security. Browder claims his expulsion was because of his criticism of Russian corporate governance. In the years since, Browder has become a UK citizen and a fierce critic of corruption. He has been one of the main proponents of the Russia sanctions law in the US known as the Magnitsky Act -- named for his former lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in suspicious circumstances in 2009. The Magnitsky Act, passed in 2012, provides US lawmakers with sweeping powers to freeze assets and place travel restrictions on foreign government officials involved in human rights abuses. After leaving the police station, Browder tweeted: "Good news. Spanish National Police just released me after Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised them not to honour the new Russian Interpol Red Notice. This is the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case." Browder has previously claimed that Putin has tried multiple times to use Interpol, the multinational police organisation, to target him abroad. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson tweeted he was "very glad" that Browder had been released. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Russia on Wednesday rejected accusations that it was behind the murder of a journalist who was openly opposed to President Vladimir Putin and had been forced to flee the country in 2017 after receiving threats. Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman had claimed Russia was responsible for the death of Arkady Babchenko, 41, who was shot multiple times outside his home in Kiev on Tuesday evening and died before he got to the hospital. "I am certain that the Russian totalitarian machine could not accept his honesty and principles. He was a true friend of Ukraine who told the world the truth about Russian aggression," Groysman had said on Facebook. However, Russian Federal Security Service Director Alexander Bortnikov told Interfax that the accusations were "stupid" and said that Ukrainian authorities were "delirious and deliberately trying to provoke Moscow". Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement: "We demand that the Ukrainian authorities make every effort to promptly investigate." "Bloody crimes and total impunity had become routine for the Kiev regime", it said, while offering condolences to Babchenko's family and friends. A spokesperson from the European Union's diplomatic service (EEAS) said an investigation into Babchenko's death had to be launched so that those responsible could be made accountable. Babchenko was found bleeding at the entrance to his block of flats by his wife and died in an ambulance. He was reportedly shot several times in the back, the BBC reported. Ukrainian lawmaker Anton Herashchenko said the journalist had gone out to buy some bread and that the killer was waiting for him. Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko said they suspected Babchenko was killed because of his "professional activities". Babchenko had grown highly critical of the Russian government in recent years. He criticised Putin's annexation of Crimea and his support for the separatists of southeast Ukraine. He left Russia in February 2017, writing that it was "a country I no longer feel safe in". He moved to Prague and in August, settled in Kiev. Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny described Babchenko's murder as "shocking". Harlem Desir, the freedom representative at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said he was horrified by Babchenko's death and called on the Ukrainian government to conduct an immediate investigation. --IANS soni/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit North Korea on Thursday to discuss the situation around the Korean peninsula, it was announced on Wednesday. Lavrov will discuss with his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong-ho the situation on the Korean peninsula, bilateral issues and other key topics of international and regional significance, according to the Foreign Ministry statement cited by TASS news agency. The envoy's visit to Pyongyang comes in the middle of negotiations to save the Singapore summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un scheduled for June 12. Last week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova had said that Lavrov's visit to North Korea was being considered but did not offer any dates. The last meeting between Lavrov and Ri was on April 10 in Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin had earlier regretted Trump's announcement on May 24 cancelling his summit with Kim. According to Putin, this meeting "could serve as an important step to lower the tension and initiate the denuclearisation process of the entire Korean peninsula". Putin said that he hoped dialogue "would be restored and sustained and that the meeting must take place". --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Russia's Federation Council, the Upper House of the Parliament, has invited Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to speak at one of its plenary meetings, Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said on Wednesday. "We have sent an invitation and we will try to organise his arrival," Matviyenko was quoted by TASS news agency as saying. "Whether he will be able to come is another question," she said. The suggestion to invite Zuckerberg came from Senator Anton Belyakov, who said that the US billionaire might appear at one of the parliamentary "Hour of the Expert" events, in which guests normally address the lawmakers and hold a Q&A session. Matviyenko said that the Federation Council may invite other well-known foreign experts to speak on topical issues. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram on Monday said that as former President Pranab Mukherjee has accepted an invitation to attend an RSS event at its Nagpur headquarters, he should take the opportunity to tell them what is wrong with their ideology. He also said that there was no point in asking why Mukherjee had accepted the invitation. "Now that he has accepted the invitation, there is no point in debating why he accepted it. "The more important thing to say is, Sir you have accepted invitation, please go there and tell them what is wrong with their ideology," said the former Union Minister. The RSS invite to Mukherjee sparked off a controversy, as the Congress and left leaders expressed unhappiness over his acceptance while the BJP and RSS saw nothing wrong in it. Former Union Minister C.K. Jaffer Sharief in a letter to Mukherjee had urged him to reconsider his decision and avoid attending the event in the interest of secularism. He also asked him if the RSS has accepted what Mukherjee had said as a Union Minister about the Sangh being the "worst outfit", "communal", "anti-national" and "unpatriotic". Congress spokesperson Tom Vadakkan on Tuesday did not comment on Mukherjee's acceptance of the RSS invite. --IANS sid/vd/him/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Tamil Nadu would turn into a graveyard if people start protesting on every issue, said actor-turned-politician Rajinikanth on Wednesday. Speaking to reporters at the Chennai airport on his return from Thoothukudi, a visibly angry Rajinikanth stressed it was the anti-social elements who indulged in arson and violence in Thoothukudi during protests against a Sterlite factory that led to the death of 13 people in police firing. He said the Thoothukudi protests on May 22 turned violent only after police were attacked by anti-social elements, adding he would not accept attack on police. According to him, as it happened during the Jallikattu demonstrations, miscreants infiltrated the movement in Thoothukudi where a peaceful protest was being organised against the Sterlite Copper smelter plant of Vedanta Ltd. Earlier in the day, Rajinikanth visited the injured people admitted in a government hospital in Thoothukudi and consoled them. His comments underscore the stand of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K. Palaniswami who earlier said anti-social elements got violent during the demonstration against the Sterlite plant, which the protesters said was destroying the farm lands and leading to severe health issues in the area. Those who indulged in arson were not general public and it was a failure of the intelligence department to have not detected it, Rajinikanth told the media in Thoothukudi. The superstar said of late, anti-social elements have become active in Tamil Nadu and praised late Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa for having kept them under control in her tenure. Urging the current state government to follow in Jayalalithaa's steps, he said if they fail to control the miscreants, the state will face a grave danger. If the state turns into an arena of protests, then investments will not come in resulting in non-creation of jobs, he said. Rajinikanth also dismissed the opposition's demand that Palaniswami should quit over the violence, saying resignation is not the answer to all problems but added that he does not have faith in the one person inquiry commission announced by the state government. Welcoming Rajinikanth's comment on anti-social elements, Tamil Nadu BJP chief Tamilisai Soundararajan said regardless of criticism, it is only right to tell the truth. --IANS vj/him/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The two day bank strike by over 10 lakh bankers demanding early wage settlement starting Wednesday has evoked good response nationwide, said a top leader of the All India Bank Employees' Association. "Around 85,000 bank branches spread across the country, including that of State Bank of India and some private banks will remain closed for two days. The response to the strike is good," C.H. Venkatachalam, General Secretary, AIBEA told IANS. Queried about the value and volume of money instruments that would not be cleared by the bank's clearing houses Venkatachalam said: "On all India basis clearance of 39 lakh instruments with a value of Rs 21,700 crore per day would be impacted. "The above value and volume were the averages of last 15 days clearance of instruments." The May 30-31 strike is spearheaded by the United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of nine unions. The bankers are striking work demanding early revision of the wages. The wage revision has been due since November 1, 2017. Venkatachalam said the unions had requested the Indian Banks' Association (IBA) to come up with better offer than the mere two per cent hike offer made earlier so that the strike could be averted. He said the IBA was also asked not to delink the wage negotiations for bank officers in the Scales 4-7. The IBA did not do anything. He said at the conciliation meeting held on Monday, the Chief Labour Commissioner (CLC) had asked the IBA not to raise new controversies like delinking the wage talks for officers in the 4-7 scale. "Though the CLC tried its best to sort out the strike issues, there is no positive developments. Hence strike on May 30 and 31 (Wednesday and Thursday) stands," All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC) General Secretary D.T. Franco had said earlier. According to Venkatachalam, with regard to the coverage of officers from Scale 4-7, the IBA said it did not get the mandate from six banks as they opted to cover officers up to Scale 3 level. However, 14 banks have given the mandate for covering the officers up to Scale 7 in wage negotiations as was done in the previous wage settlement negotiations, he said. With bank branches closed for two days, the ATM machines are being loaded with additional cash to meet any contingency. "The private banks (like HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank) are working and there is no problem there. In the case of public sector banks the strike call was known well ahead. So, we have collected cash in advance from the banks for loading in the ATMs," V. Balasubramanian, President, Financial Software and Systems (FSS), told IANS. The city based FSS manages ATMs for several banks in the country. "Generally we know the cash dispensation per day per ATM. We load the machines with cash for two days transaction value which is at an average is around Rs 6 lakh. This time we have loaded ATMs with cash of around Rs 15 lakh which would take care of the average cash dispensation for four days," Balasubramanian said. According to him, the ATMs are loaded more with Rs 500 notes. The Bank of Maharashtra MD and CEO Ravindra P Marathe has urged his customers to make the maximum use of digital banking services for their transcations as the strike might disrupt normal banking services at the branches. --IANS vj/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Banking services were badly affected in Tripura on Wednesday as most of the major banks remained closed due to a nation-wide employees' strike. Leaders of the striking employees claimed that the response of the two-day bank strike is good in all the eight northeastern states, including Assam and Sikkim. The striking employees were protesting the "anti-people banking reforms" and demanding for wage revision in the wake of the proposal for a two per cent hike in salary. "Around 4,000 bank employees belonging to about 500 nationalised bank branches in Tripura took part in the strike,...," National Confederation of Bank Employees (NCBE) Tripura unit Secretary Swapan Modak told the media. He said: "The NCBE has been demanding early wage review settlement, sufficient raise in salary and improvement in other service conditions and wage revision settlement for all officers up to Scale 7." All India Bank Officers Confideration Tripura state Secretary Sanjay Datta also echoed the views of Modak. The employees of Tripura Gramin Bank and Tripura Cooperative Bank are not participating in the two-day strike. A large number of the ATMs were also closed, creating problems for the people. The United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU) -- the umbrella organisation of nine employees' unions and four officers' associations -- had called the strike after its talks with the Indian Banks Association in New Delhi failed. "The bank strike is not for the interest of the employees alone... the agitation is to protest policies of the central government and to protect the Indian banks from foreign controls," Modak said. The banking employees have also been protesting the outsourcing of non-core activities by the authorities. Government and foreign exchange transactions were also affected due to the shutdown. Protest demonstrations were also held in front of the bank branches in many cities across Tripura by the striking employees. Both Modak and Datta claimed that the responses of the bank shut down in most of the northeastern states are very good. Tripura government official Chandan Sarkar said that just before the pay day, banking transactions might hit the withdrawing of salaries of lakhs of employees. --IANS sc/in/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US has quietly funded and equipped elite paramilitary police officers in El Salvador who are accused of illegally executing gang members, according to a report. A police unit -- Special Reaction Forces (FES) -- that killed 43 alleged gang members in the first six months of 2017 received significant US funding, CNN said citing a forthcoming UN report. Several of those deaths have been investigated as murders by the Salvadoran Police. Though the FES was disbanded in 2018, many of its officers have joined a new elite force that currently receives US funding. The US administrations have pumped millions of dollars into Salvadoran law enforcement and military to shore up the government's Firm Hand programme, launched in 2003. In the report to be released in June and accessed in advance by CNN, the country's police might be accused of "a pattern of behaviour by security personnel amounting to extrajudicial executions". The exact recipients and nature of US funding are, however, shrouded in secrecy. Publicly available documents rarely specify which units benefit from the $67.9 million in aid given in 2016 and the $72.7 million in 2017, but they do say that "vetted units" get mentors from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration. Two sources told CNN that the FES was the recipient of US assistance. A spokesperson for the US Embassy in El Salvador admitted for the first time that the US had supplied assistance to the FES unit. But he said that "the US government takes allegations of extrajudicial killings extremely seriously, and has consistently expressed concerns regarding allegations of security force abuses, the need for accountability, and the critical role of rights-respecting security forces in a healthy democracy". The spokesperson added that all Salvadoran police units receiving US assistance were heavily vetted, and must show a "fundamental commitment to effective police mechanisms and respect for human rights" or the assistance stops. The US Embassy would not say if the FES received lethal aid. The US assistance to the FES and its successor exposes the compromises undertaken in the fight against groups like MS-13, a Salvadoran criminal gang that started in Los Angeles in the 1980s. It has since spread across the US and has around tens of thousands of core members in El Salvador. MS-13 recruits have been described by the US government as a "transnational threat" and as "animals" by President Donald Trump. --IANS and/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Bangladesh government has signed a $55 million financing agreement with the World Bank to expand renewable energy uses in rural areas. The agreement was signed by Kazi Shofiqul Azam, secretary of Bangladesh's Economic Relations Division, and Fan Qimiao, Asian Development Bank country Director for Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported. The additional financing to the Second Rural Electrification and Renewable Energy Development (RERED II) Project will install 1,000 solar irrigation pumps, 30 solar mini-grids and about 4 million improved cooking stoves in rural areas, said the Washington-based lender. Since 2003, the World Bank said it has been helping Bangladesh expand solar-powered electricity in remote and rural areas. Today, the country has one of the world's largest domestic solar power programmes, covering 14 per cent of the population, it said. "Following a successful demand-driven public-private partnership programme, Bangladesh installed 4.2 million solar home systems," said Fan. "This additional financing will help scale up use of clean and renewable energy such as solar irrigation pumps and solar mini-grids, which will help reduce poverty, improve the environment, create jobs, and open up new opportunities for rural people." With an additional $20 million support from the Green Climate Fund that assists developing countries in adaptation and mitigation practices to counter climate change, the project will scale up the use of improved cooking stoves, which emit 90 per cent less carbon monoxide and use half as much firewood as a traditional cooking stove, said the bank. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Wednesday announced that the country will hold its national elections on July 30. He made the proclamation in a government gazette published in the morning. The notice fixed "Monday, the 30th day of July, 2018, as the day of the election to the office of President, the election of members of the National Assembly and election of councillors", the BBC reported. It will be the first time in decades former leader Robert Mugabe is not standing for President. Mnangagwa, who took power after Mugabe was ousted in November, on Tuesday reiterated his commitment to "free and fair elections". He also fixed September 8 as the day of the runoff election to the office of President if there is no clear winner with 50 per cent plus one vote. --IANS soni/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The unseemly power struggle of politicians is there for all to see in the media. But the hunger of the bureaucrats for authority is so subtle that it can be detected only in a clause or two in the law they draft like inserting may in place of shall. Shifting of a comma in a sovereign decree famously saved a criminal from the noose and in the US cost billions of dollars in government revenue. It requires the skill of judges to lay bare the effect of such slippery syntax. Two Supreme Court judgments of recent weeks revealed how the babus yearn to wear ... The Goa Police today arrested 11 tourists, who had come to the coastal state from Pune in neighbouring Maharashtra, for allegedly assaulting and molesting two minor siblings at a beach near here. The siblings -- 17-year-old boy and his 16-year-old sister -- were sitting yesterday in a shack on the Baga beach, located in North Goa district, while their parents were having food nearby. At that time, a group of 11 visitors from Pune started clicking pictures of the girl, Calangute police station's Jivba Dalvi said, adding that this amounts to outraging her modesty. "When the boy objected to the group taking photos of his sister, they allegedly slapped and beat him," he said, quoting a complaint filed by the victims' parents. The Calangute police subsequently nabbed all the accusedbefore they could leave the state, he said. Two of the 11 accused were juveniles, aged 15, and they were sent to a state-run protection home, Dalvi said. "During the course of investigation, the police recorded statements of the minor siblings in the presence of members of an NGO working for child rights," he said. "The mobile phone used to click pictures of the girl was confiscated and will be sent to a forensic laboratory for analysis," he said. Based on a complaint, the police registered a First Information Report (FIR) and arrested the visitors, he said. Offences were registered against all the accused under IPC sections 354 (molestation), 143 (unlawful assembly), 147 (rioting) and 323 (causing hurt), and relevant provisions of the Goa Children's Act, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A man and his son were killed today when their car collided with a truck on the Delhi-Haridwar National Highway near Satheri village in the district, the police said. The incident also left eight persons injured, they said. The victims were on their way to Aligarh from Haridwar, the police said. The deceased have been identified as Gonda residents, Narendra (40) and his son Netik (15), they said. The injured were rushed to a nearby hospital, the police added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With an alarming average of 34 leopard deaths every year in Rajasthan , according to a report, as many as 238 big cats have died in the desert state from January 2012 to May 21, 2018. Listed at par with tigers under Schedule 1 of the Wildlife Protection Act (WPA), 1972, the population of leopards faces a serious challenge due to various reasons, prominent among those are man-animal conflicts, availability of prey base and road/train accidents. Quoting the report, out of the total deaths that occurred during the above mentioned period, 84 were found dead -- both natural and unnatural -- while 52 were killed in road/train accidents and 31 due to infighting. "24 were killed in seizure and poaching, 19 were killed by villagers, 14 by tiger or other animals whereas electrocution and rescue operations claimed seven deaths each," as per the data of Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI). Till May 21 this year, 23 leopard deaths were recorded. While 11 were found dead, 12 were killed, the WPSI data reveals. Talking on the issue, Forest and Minister Gajendra Singh Khimsar noted that the rise in population of leopards could be one of the reason behind increase in the conflict between man and animal. He claimed that the government is making all efforts to avoid such conflicts where villagers are forced to kill animals in their self-defence. We have launched one of its kinds 'Project Leopard' to increase prey base so that animals do not stray out for food and water. Under the project, boundary wall work will finish in next two months in Jhalana Forest Reserve in Jaipur, Khimsar told PTI. As per the wildlife census reports of past two years, the leopard count has increased from 434 in 2015 to 508 in 2016. Having said that, according to many wildlife activists it is the depletion of natural prey base in forest areas that had led to the shifting of wild animals towards killing of livestock. The forest department has not made appropriate arrangements such as water and prey base. Animal population is increasing so animals have started moving into habitations and agriculture fields in search of food and water," said People For Animals (PFA) state president Babu Lal Jaju. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Main opposition party in Punjab, AAP, today sought a special state assembly session to discuss the issue of "polluted" river waters in the state. AAP workers led by party state unit co-president Balbir Singh and MP Sadhu Singh held a protest march carrying bottles of polluted waters and tried to proceed towards Punjab Chief Minister's residence.. The protestors raised slogans against Capt. Amarinder Singh led Congress government for allegedly shielding those responsible for polluting waters of Punjab. However, they were stopped by the police on their way and taken into preventive custody. The OSD to Capt. Amarinder Singh, Sandeep Sandhu reached the police station and informed the chief minister would not be available today. He assured a meeting would be arranged with the chief minister soon. The leaders handed over the memorandum to the OSD. Balbir Singh told media that the bottles of polluted water will be handed over to all the MLAs and MPs of the state so that they could raise the matter in Assembly and Parliament. He said AAP stood by the people of the state and will not let them down. The party will continue to raise the issues of public interest inside and outside the Vidhan Sabha, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Reeling under severe criticism after molasses from a mill spilled into the Beas killing several fishes, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh today ordered a crackdown on industries and municipalities releasing untreated effluents into the river, officials said. Issuing directives to the Punjab Pollution Control Board (PPCB) and other concerned departments, the chief minister directed the chief secretary to prepare a comprehensive river cleaning plan with a timeline for its implementation. The government will not allow pollution to damage the health of the people of Punjab at any cost, whether in towns or villages, Singh said in an official release here after chairing a meeting to review the situation after the molasses spill fiasco. Strict action will be taken against all polluting units, as promised in the Vidhan Sabha earlier, he added. Singh asked the state finance department to make necessary finances available for making the existing treatment plants functional and to set up new plants equipped with modern technologies. He also sought Centre's support to strengthen the initiatives taken by the state. Singh said he has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for assistance and would do so again, besides seeking a meeting with him soon. On May 17, molasses from a sugar factory leaked into the river in Beas town, about 40 km from Amritsar, causing considerable damage to aquatic life. Attributing the accident to record production of sugarcane, the chief minister said the Centre too should ensure that the right amount of cane is produced and sold to the mills for sugar production. The chief minister lambasted the opposition Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for indulging in cheap publicity tactics over the issue and said that his government was seriously tackling pollution. He also lashed out at the erstwhile SAD-BJP government for making a "mess" of the state during the ten years of their "misrule". He said it would take time to streamline things. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) No bids have been received so far for stake in Air India, the government said today even as it hoped of getting a good response on the last day of the formal bidding process tomorrow. "We expect good response before bid closes tomorrow," Civil Aviation Secretary R N Choubey told PTI responding to a query. Earlier in the day, he said no bids have been received for the stake sale so far. The deadline for the expression of interest ends tomorrow and the request for proposal could be issued only after June 15. On May 23, Choubey had said the highest bidder for the airline would be known by August-end. But, the highest bidder might not be the successful bidder, he said, adding the government intends to complete the disinvestment by year-end. Significantly, he had said the government could decide against selling state-run Air India if it does not get "adequate" price for it. "The government has the right to sell or not to sell Air India if the bid price is found to be inadequate," Choubey had told reporters. "Though the transaction advisor (EY) will assess the enterprise value, the right price for the airline will be decided by us," he said. Asked about AI employees' union protests against the proposed sale, he said they were conscious of the fact that airlines would do well after privatisation. The government had on March 28 unveiled plans to sell up to a 76 per cent stake in the loss-making carrier, and transfer the management control to private players. The profitable Air India Express and the joint venture AISATS -- an equal joint venture between the national carrier and the Singapore-based SATS Ltd -- will also be a part of the disinvestment process. The ailing airline's total debt stood at Rs 48,781 crore at the end of March 2017. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union Minister S S Ahluwalia today asked people to be extra cautious while downloading images on their devices as they may contain viruses and said terrorists are also sending such pictures with their embedded messages in them. "They (cyber criminals) will send you a picture of Monalisa and out of curiosity you will download that Monalisa's picture but virus will be embedded in it. The terrorists are using these pictures to send their message embedded in the pictures," Minister of state for electronics and IT Ahluwalia said at a FICCI event. He said a basic training for users should be there on what they should download or share on their devices. "While forwarding (images) also we don't know. Knowingly or unknowingly we are helping people who are indulging in cyber crimes," Ahluwalia said. National Cyber Security Coordinator Gulshan Rai said that the cyber attacks have become very complex and recent European law on data regulation will make it difficult to track owner of an IP (computer system) address. "Today hackings are very different. All the recent cybercrimes are manipulation of several technologies. If you ask me every case is a case of cyber warfare. As of today, 90 per cent cases of an incident are cyber crime, 9 per cent are of targeted attack and 1 per cent are of cyber terrorism," Rai said. He said that systems are required to test new age technologies - Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to check if they are performing function which they have assigned. Former Deputy National Security Advisor and Director at Vivekananda International Foundation Arvind Gupta said the government needs to put more resources in cybersecurity and it should be seen as a separate segment from information technology. "Resources will be needed to promote cybersecurity education, certification, training and awareness. This will require government intervention. A time-bound mission approach is needed to address shortage of cybersecurity professional," Gupta said. At the event, Ahluwalia released a whitepaper jointly developed by EY and FICCI on cyber crime based on secondary research. The report said that India ranks third in the number of cyber crime incidents encountered with the United States and China on the first and second position, respectively as per the data released by a leading security vendor in April 2018. It said that technological advancements are making the task of cyber criminals easier. Encryption and steganography are being leveraged by cyber criminals to thwart the effort of law enforcement agencies (LEAs), who are not able to decrypt the information in time to predict and prevent crimes. "Migration to VoIP, Volte and other Over the Top (OTT) services like WhatsApp and Viber, etc, has made the task of intercepting voice calls extremely complex. These calls can only be intercepted with the active support of the respective service providers. Often, servers are located outside the country and make it virtually impossible to monitor voice calls of criminals in real time," the report said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Kolkata-bound Air India flight, which took off from the New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) this morning, returned to the aerodrome due to a technical issue, a source said. The Dreamliner B787-800 aircraft, which took off at 7.10 am, landed back safely at 8.50 am, the source said, adding that all passengers were safe. "The flight AI401 was scheduled to depart for Kolkata from New Delhi at 6.50 am but took off after a delay of 20 minutes. However, after it was airborne for almost 40 minutes, the pilot announced that the aircraft was returning to Delhi due to a technical snag," the source said. The number of passengers on board could not be immediately known. Air India spokesperson was not available for comments. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 27-year-old Air India pilot was found dead at a Riyadh hotel in Saudi Arabia this morning, officials said. Rithwick Tiwari, a first officer with the state-run airline, died reportedly of a heart attack while working out in the hotel gym, according to crew sources. Tiwari's colleague Captain Renu Maulay identified the body after police broke open the door of a small toilet room inside the health club of Hotel Holiday Inn where it was found lying sideways, they said. Indian Embassy officials in Riyadh have confirmed the pilot's death. "He had collapsed in the wash room of the hotel gym this morning. He was then taken to a hospital, where the doctors declared him dead," Counsellor (Community Welfare) Anil Nautiyal told PTI over the phone. He said the embassy is yet to study the detailed hospital report but it appeared to be a case of heart attack. Nautiyal said the embassy officials are in touch with the pilot's family. "We are in touch with the family but there are a lot of formalities that need to be completed before the mortal remains could be sent back to India," he said. Meanwhile, an Air India spokesperson in New Delhi said the airline's manager in Riyadh was coordinating the matter and they are awaiting the nod from the embassy before the body is flown to India. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A visibly aggressive superstar Rajinikanth today blamed anti-social elements for the violence during anti-Sterlite protests last week that resulted in 13 deaths in police firing, and warned Tamil Nadu will become a 'graveyard' if there were too many agitations. The actor, who has announced his plans to join politics, called for a Jayalalithaa-style 'iron fist' policy to crush anti-social elements in the interest of Tamil Nadu. Speaking to reporters in Chennai on his return from Tuticorin, which witnessed violence on May 22, he said the "problem started" only after police came under attack from such anti-social elements. With a visibly aggressive body language, Rajinikanth asserted that he would not tolerate assault on policemen, virtually reiterating his stand on this issue. He had slammed the alleged attack on policemen during a protest by pro-Tamil outfits last month, when they agitated against holding IPL matches in Chennai till the Cauvery Management Board was formed. The actor said that such elements had infiltrated the pro-jallikattu protest held at Marina last year, which again ended on a violent note. Asked about protests in the state, he shot back, saying "Tamil Nadu will become a graveyard if there is a protest for everything." Earlier, speaking to reporters at Tuticorin after meeting those injured in the firing,he said police and the Collector's office had not been attacked by common people, but by such anti-social elements. Rajinikanth who last week held the government responsible for the deaths caused due to the firing,however,did not favour K Palaniswami's resignation as Chief Minister over the issue. "The attack on the Collector's office and setting on fire (Sterlite) quarters was not done by the common people. Some anti-social elements infiltrated (the protesting locals). It is their handiwork," he said and expressed grief that 'this noble protest' had ended on a bloody note. The actor, who gave away Rs 10,000 relief to each of the 48 injured persons, said pro-Jallikattu protests in Tamil Nadu last year also saw infiltration of 'anti-social elements'. He had earlier announced a relief of Rs two lakh each to the families of the 13 deceased. "The government should crush such anti-social elements with an iron fist. On that front I laud Jayalalithaa as she kept such persons under check with an iron fist. They should follow her policy and keep them under check, as otherwise it will result in great danger for Tamil Nadu," he said. He also called for action against those who attacked policemen during the May 22 protest. Thirteen people were killed in police firing on May 22-23 when violence broke out at the protest by locals, demanding closure of Sterlite Industries in this district over pollution issues. On the opposition's demand for resignation of the chief minister, Rajinikanth sought to know how quitting could be a solution. "If you demand resignation for everything, what (is the purpose)... I don't want to talk about that," he said. To a question, he said he had "no confidence" in the state government appointed one-man inquiry commission to probe the violence, under retired Madras High Court judge Aruna Jegadeesan. The actor said constant agitations may not yield solutions and added that one should move courts for redressal of their grievances. Agitations often happen in the state, sometimes for "genuine reasons," he said, adding that people should be careful against being incited. Too many protests could dissuade trade and investors from coming to Tamil Nadu, affecting employment opportunities, he said, adding agriculture has already been hit due to water scarcity. The actor cautioned Vedanta Ltd, which runs Sterlite Industries, against moving court over the Tamil Nadu government's closure order of the copper smelter unit, saying "they are not humans if they do so." "With so many deaths and injuries, they should not even think of doing that," he said, adding, nothing can stand before people's power. Rajinikanth faulted the police intelligence for its 'big mistake' in failing to detect the presence of anti-social elements in the protests. At the hospital, the actor spoke to the injured and was seen holding hands of some of them. Earlier, speaking to reporters in Chennai ahead of his visit to Tuticorin, about 500 km from Chennai, Rajinikanth hoped that those injured would have "some joy" in meeting him as he was a cinema star. His visit was aimed at consoling them, he said and expressed regret that his visit to Tuticorin had come at a very "difficult time". His going there was his 'goodwill gesture,' he added. To a question on the war of words between AIADMK and DMK over the May 22 incident, he said there should be no blame game on such matters and the focus should be on moving ahead. Asked for his comments on Prime Minister Narendra Modi not reacting to the incident so far, he said: "The media is so powerful. Ask him, ok. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Superstar Rajinikanth today blamed anti-social elements for the anti-Sterlite protests here last week that resulted in 13 deaths in police firing, and called for a Jayalalithaa-style 'iron fist' policy to crush such people in the interest of Tamil Nadu. Speaking to reporters after meeting those injured in the police firing, he did not favour K Palaniswami's resignation as chief minister over the issue. "The attack on the collector's office and setting on fire (Sterlite) quarters was not done by the common people. Some anti-social elements infiltrated... (the protesting locals). It is their handiwork," he said and expressed grief that 'this noble protest' had ended on a bloody note. The actor, who gave away Rs 10,000 relief to each of the 48 injured persons, said pro-Jallikattu protests in Tamil Nadu last year also saw infiltration of 'anti-social elements'. He had earlier announced a relief of Rs two lakh each to the families of the 13 deceased. "The government should crush such anti-social elements with an iron fist. On that front I laud Jayalalithaa as she kept such persons under check with an iron fist. They should follow her policy and keep them under check, as otherwise it will result in great danger for Tamil Nadu," he said. He also called for action against those who attacked policemen during the May 22 protest. Thirteen people were killed in police firing on May 22-23 when violence broke out at the protest by locals, demanding closure of Sterlite Industries in this district over pollution issues. On the opposition's demand for resignation of the chief minister, Rajinikanth sought to know how quitting could be a solution. "If you demand resignation for everything, what (is the purpose)... I don't want to talk about that," he said. To a question, he said he had "no confidence" in the state government appointed one-man inquiry commission to probe the violence, under retired Madras High Court judge Aruna Jegadeesan. The actor, who has announced plans to join politics, said constant agitations may not yield solutions and added that one should move courts for redressal of their grievances. Agitations often happen in the state, sometimes for "genuine reasons," he said, adding that people should be careful against being incited. Too many protests could dissuade trade and investors from coming to Tamil Nadu, affecting employment opportunities, he said, adding agriculture has already been hit due to water scarcity. The actor cautioned Vedanta Ltd, which runs Sterlite Industries, against moving court over the Tamil Nadu government's closure order of the copper smelter unit, saying "they are not humans if they do so." "With so many deaths and injuries, they should not even think of doing that," he said, adding, nothing can stand before people's power. Rajinikanth faulted the police intelligence for its 'big mistake' in failing to detect the presence of anti-social elements in the protests. At the hospital, the actor spoke to the injured and was seen holding hands of some of them. Earlier, speaking to reporters in Chennai ahead of his visit here, Rajinikanth hoped that those injured would have "some joy" in meeting him as he was a cinema star. He expressed regret that his visit to Tuticorin had come at a very "difficult time" and added that going there was his 'goodwill gesture.' To a question on the war of words between the AIADMK and the DMK over the May 22 incident, he said there should be no blame game on such matters and the focus should be on moving ahead. Asked for his comments on Prime Minister Narendra Modi not reacting to the incident so far, he said: "The media is so powerful. Ask him, ok. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Delhi court would hear on June 2 the arguments on quantum of punishment to gangster Abu Salem, who has been held guilty of demanding Rs five crore as protection money from a Delhi-based businessman in 2002. Additional Sessions Judge Tarun Sehrawat, who was scheduled to hear arguments from the prosecution and the defence, adjourned the matter after Salem could not be produced in the court from judicial custody. The court had on May 26 convicted Salem in the case. It, however, acquitted the other accused -- Chanchal Mehta, Majid Khan, Pawan Kumar Mittal and Mohammad Ashraf -- citing lack of evidence against them. One of the accused, Sajjan Kumar Soni, had died during the trial. In the extortion case lodged in Delhi, it was alleged that Salem had demanded Rs five crore as protection money from businessman Ashok Gupta, a resident of Greater Kailash in south Delhi, in 2002. He faces a maximum punishment of seven years in jail. Advocate M S Khan, appearing for Salem, had denied the allegations levelled against his client and contended that the trial in the case violated the order by which the gangster was extradited from Portugal to India. Salem, who was extradited from Portugal in November 2005, is facing various other cases, including those related to the 1993 Mumbai blasts. He is currently lodged in Taloja prison in Navi Mumbai. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) President Ram Nath Kovind today described the armed forces as a "rare breed of human beings" and said they are a symbol of excellence and dedication for the entire country. The president was here to review the passing out parade of the 134th course of the National Defence Academy (NDA) at Khadakwasla near Pune. "The armed forces are not merely about doing a job they are about answering a calling. And this is a calling for a rare breed of human beings," he said during the event. Delighted to review the passing out parade, Kovind said as the supreme commander of the armed forces, this was a moment of immense satisfaction for him. "The armed forces are a symbol of excellence and dedication for the entire country. This parade comprises cadets from all parts of India and from a variety of communities. Its harmony speaks for our essential unity as much as for our pluralism as a society," he said. The president said a soldier or an officer in uniform, irrespective of whether he or she is from the Army, the Navy or the Air Force, evokes admiration and trust everywhere in the country. "If a fellow citizen sees a member of the armed forces at a railway station or a market or at any other place, there is an immediate emotion of pride and reassurance," he noted. Commending their unparalleled and unquestioning service to the nation in times of war and peace -- on the border or within the country -- during a natural calamity, Kovind said "the armed forces represent the best of the Indian ethos". Talking about the NDA, the president called it a crucible of valour and bravery, and complimented it for inculcating a resolve and spirit of national service in generations of cadets and officers. It is because of this heritage that in December 1978 (the then) president Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy conferred the president's colours on the NDA, he said. "Today, the cadets have become role models for our young people, guarantors of our peace and prosperity, and guardians of our nation," he added. The president expressed confidence that the graduating cadets would prove worthy successors to the unflinching and fearless officers who have preceded them. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bio-pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca officially opened its new Global Medicines Development (GMD) centre here today. The unit is one of AstraZeneca's nine GMD centres that the company has around the world that transforms breakthrough molecules into medicines and monitors their use and safety, the company said in a press release. With this opening, India would now play an even bigger role in AstraZeneca's global operations, the release said. The GMD Bengaluru team would focus on supporting AstraZeneca's medicines which covers treatments across a range of therapies, including oncological, respiratory and cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, it said. GMD Bengaluru plays a key role supporting 51 of AstraZenecas mature brands which are used by patients around the world. Last year, the team recruited scientific experts in the fields of regulatory science, clinical, and patient safety, and has grown from 30 to 70 people. The expansion would see a further increase to more than 100 specialists, the company said. Klas Molin, Swedish Ambassador to India and Chief Guest for the inauguration, said, Further to the bilateral innovation partnership between India and Sweden, we are pleased to bring more Swedish innovation into the country." The opening of AstraZeneca GMD unit in India is yet another promising step for strengthening this partnership for a sustainable future between Sweden and India, he said. Elisabeth Bjrk VP, Global Medicines Development Unit Head for Cardiovascular, Metabolic Renal Diseases, AstraZeneca said the GMD expansion is part of AstraZenecas continued commitment to enhance scientific innovation in the country. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The civil aviation ministry today said it would fully cooperate and provide all assistance to the CBI in the investigation into the alleged violations in the AirAsia India matter. "We are yet to receive formally anything from the CBI. We will fully cooperate with them. We will provide all assistance to them in the investigative process," Civil Aviation Secretary R N Choubey said. The CBI has filed an FIR against AirAsia and other officials, including Group CEO Tony Fernandes, for allegedly trying to manipulate government policies through corrupt means to get international licence for AirAsia India. AirAsia India is a joint venture between Tatas, which owns 51 per cent stake, and Malaysia's AirAsia Berhad. "The case has been registered under 120-B (criminal conspiracy) under the IPC and sections 13(2) read with 13 (1) (d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act. The searches took place at five locations in Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru," CBI spokesperson R K Gaur said on Tuesday. Currently, AirAsia has a fleet of 18 aircraft and has plans to start international flights after it has 20 planes. To a query on whether the case would have an impact on AirAsia India's plans for international operations, Choubey said, "We do not know what is the scope and nature of that investigation." On Tuesday, AirAsia India refuted any wrongdoing and said it was co-operating with all regulators and agencies to present the correct facts. "In November 2016, AAIL (AirAsia India Ltd) had initiated criminal charges against its ex-CEO and had also commenced civil proceedings for such irregularities. We hope to bring early resolution to all such issues," it had said in a statement. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) For the first time, the Bangladesh government has agreed to take back 33 of its nationals who were declared infiltrators by the Foreigners Tribunals in Assam, a senior police official said today. The Bangladesh Assistant High Commissioner based here recently visited detention camps in the state and found 33 inmates there declared as foreigners to be the citizens of his country, Additional Director General of Police (Special Branch) Pallab Bhattacharya told PTI. The 33 foreigners were kept in detention camps after they were declared to be illegal migrants from Bangladesh by various Foreigners Tribunals, Bhattacharya said. He hailed the decision of Bangladesh to take back those citizens for the first time, saying it was a "goodwill gesture" because there was no deportation or repatriation treaty between the two neighbouring countries. Asked when the 33 foreigners would be sent back to their homeland, the ADGP said it would take some time as the modalities for their repatriation would have to be worked out by the External Affairs Ministry with its Bangladeshi counterpart. The addresses of the people in the detention camps were sent to the Bangladeshi government and after their verification it became clear that they are Bangladeshi citizens, he said. Being declared a foreigner by a tribunal did not necessarily mean that the person was from Bangladesh as their addresses had to be verified by that country, he added. In 2013, the Centre had issued instructions to Assam government not to push back but deport the illegal foreigners to Bangladesh, Bhattacharya said. Bangladesh had last month identified 152 of its nationals lodged in the detention camps and written to the External Affairs Ministry with a proposal for their repatriation in batches, official sources said. According to the White Paper of the Assam Government on the Foreigners' Issue, "Government of India has authorised the state government under the provisions of Section 3(2) (e) of the Foreigners Act, 1946 and Para 11(2) of the Foreigners Order, 1948 to set up detention centres." "Accordingly, detention centres have been set up at Goalpara, Kokrajhar and Silchar for keeping persons declared as foreigners. "The number of such foreigners kept is three detention centres (as on 15/10/2012) is Goalpara (66), Kokrajhar (32), and Silchar (20)," it said. "Their fingerprints and photographs are kept and the photographs of absconding foreigners are being published in newspapers," the white paper added. The Supreme Court had earlier ordered to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Its final draft would be out on June 30 when those applicants without legacy data would be detected as not Indian citizens, official sources said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The two-day nationwide strike by employees of (PSBs) may affect customer transactions worth up to Rs 200 billion, industry body said today, urging the United Forum of (UFBU) to call off the strike. The chamber also urged the government to come up with a stimulus plan for restoring the health of State-owned lenders are grappling with high levels of bad loans and as per reports their losses for the quarter ended March 2018 are set to hit a record Rs 500 billion which is more than double the losses of Rs 190 billion in preceding quarter ended December 2017, said in a statement. "Considering such a precarious situation, we at would urge the government to come up with a stimulus plan which must include restoring the PSBs to health," Assocham Secretary General D S Rawat said. "With about 10 lakh bank employees going on strike, operations such as cheque clearances, cash withdrawals and deposits at PSB branches across will be affected," he added. The UFBU, an umbrella body of nine bank unions, has gone on strike against the proposed wage hike of 2 per cent as against 15 per cent given last time, All Bank Employees Association general secretary C H Venkatachalam said. Consequently, activities in across the country have been interrupted. However, operations in the new-generation like ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, were almost normal, barring few activities including cheque clearance. Since the strike coincides with the month-end, salary withdrawals from branches are likely to get affected. Some ATMs may also take a hit. Besides, deposit in branches, FD renewal, government treasury operation, money market operation would see the impact of the strike. Banking operations in the country were hit today as 10 lakh employees, primarily from PSU banks, went on 2-day strike to protest against a "meagre" 2 per cent salary hike offered by Indian Banks Association (IBA) -- the management body. The strike, also supported by employees of some old generation private sector banks and foreign banks, will continue tomorrow. Operations in the new-generation private banks like ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank were however almost normal, barring few activities including cheque clearance. There were reports of disruption in banking operations in various states. The impact of strike in certain states like Kerala, West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand was more severe compared to other states. Nearly 10 lakh employees, working in various branches of 21 public sector banks, 13 old generation private sector banks, six foreign banks and 56 regional rural banks across the country went on the strike as IBA offered them a nominal wage revision, All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA), affiliate of UFBU said in a statement. Since the strike coincides with the month-end, salary withdrawals from branches are likely to get affected. Some ATMs went dry by the evening. Operations like deposits, FD renewals, government treasury operations, money market operations were hit by the strike. A RBI official said some digital banking work was done through electronic systems like the RTGS but the functioning of banks' servers was hit. Digital banking comprises about 5 per cent of the total operations, the official said. Reserve Bank of India remained operational though the trade unions offered moral support for the ongoing strike, a RBI Trade Union leader said. As several rounds of talks between banks and the unions of their employees did not make any headway, the United Forum of Banking Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of nine bank unions, has gone on strike against the proposed wage hike of 2 per cent as against 15 per cent given last time, All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA), general secretary C H Venkatachalam said. In the last wage revision in 2012, the bank employees got a raise of 15 per cent. It is kind of an insult to the employees of public sector banks...to be offered this kind of meagre hike. We had no other option but to go on strike, forgoing two days' salary, All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC) joint general secretary Ravinder Gupta said. Success of all government schemes like Mudra, Jandhan and demonetisation were ensured by public sector bankers but the reward is just 2 per cent hike, he said, adding that it is gross injustice to bankers who have worked very hard for nation building. Employees are participating in the nation-wide strike as part of "our democratic right" by forgoing our salary, Venkatachalam said and hoped that good sense would prevail. IBA has asked the six banks including SBI, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Union Bank and Bank of Baroda to reconsider their decision and allow IBA to settle wages for bank employees up to scale seven instead of up to scale three employees. There are about 85,000 branches of 21 public sector banks across the country having business share of about 70 per cent. Most of the banks, including SBI, PNB and BoB, have already informed their customers about functioning of branches and offices due to strike. Industry chamber Assocham said the two-day nationwide bank strike may affect customer transactions worth up to Rs 20,000 crore. It also urged the government to come up with a stimulus plan for restoring the health of PSU banks. State-owned lenders are grappling with high levels of bad loans and as per reports their losses for the quarter ended March 2018 are set to hit a record Rs 50,000 crore which is more than double the losses of Rs 19,000 crore in preceding quarter ended December 2017, Assocham said in a statement. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) : Banking services in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were hit as about 85,000 employees belonging to various banks participated in the nation-wide strike today, a bank employees union leader said. United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of various bank unions like AIBEA, AIBOC, NCBE, AIBOA, BEFI, INBEF, INBOC, NOBW and NOBO called for the two-day strike today and tomorrow, pressing various demands including wage revision in the wake of the proposal for a two per cent hike in salary. "About 85,000 employees and officers working in 13,000 branches of 21 public sector banks and 10 old generation banks in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana participated in the strike. Banking operations were totally paralysed," All-India Bank Employees Association National Secretary, BS Rambabu told PTI. Currency chests and clearing houses also did not function, he said adding the situation will be similar tomorrow also. He said demonstrations were held in front of all bank branches by the respective employees and centralised demonstrations were held before Andhra Bank headquarters and Central Bank regional office here among other places. According to the union members, over 10 lakh bank employees and officers of the 21 public sector banks and old generation private banks and foreign banks were expected to join the two-day strike. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) UCO Bank and IndusInd Bank have been advised to withdraw the communications asking the exporters to complete their financial dealings with Iran by August, the FIEO said today. Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO) Director General Ajay Sahai said that in view of the US decision to impose economic sanctions against Iran, the banks had asked the exporters to complete their transactions by August. "We took up this matter with the commerce secretary who immediately spoke to the banking secretary. UCO Bank was told to withdraw such communications. IndusInd Bank is also expected to withdraw it today," Sahai said. American President Donald Trump has announced that the US will withdraw from the landmark 2015 accord to curb Iran's nuclear programme and reinstate financial sanctions on the Persian Gulf nation. Iran is India's third-largest oil supplier behind Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It supplied 18.4 million tonnes of crude oil during April 2017 and January 2018 (first 10 months of 2017-18 fiscal). Iran was the India's second biggest supplier of crude oil after Saudi Arabia till 2010-11 but western sanctions over its suspected nuclear programme relegated it to the 7th spot in the subsequent years. In 2013-14 and 2014-15, India bought 11 MT and 10.95 MT, respectively from it. The bilateral trade between India and Iran increased to USD 12.9 billion in 2016-17 from USD 9 billion in the previous fiscal. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi High Court today held that a court in Bengaluru has the jurisdiction to hear the dispute between ISRO's Antrix Corporation and Devas Multimedia which has won an arbitral award of USD 672 million from an international tribunal. Devas had moved the high court for implementation of the arbitral award by seeking attachment of bank accounts of Antrix. However, Antrix had challenged the maintainability of Devas' plea which was rejected by a single judge bench of the court last year. Later, Antrix filed an appeal, which was today allowed by a division bench of justices S Ravindra Bhat and Yogesh Khanna that said the City Civil Court in Bengaluru, where Antrix had challenged the arbitral award, alone can hear it. Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce' arbitration body, International Court of Arbitration, in its September 2015 ruling had asked Antrix to pay damages amounting to USD 672 million (Rs 4,432 crore) to Devas for "unlawfully" terminating a deal in 2011 citing national security reasons. The single judge had on February 28 last year rejected Antrix's contention that the Delhi High Court did not have the jurisdiction to hear Devas' plea as the contract was executed in Bengaluru and both the companies were also based there. The single judge had said that though the City Civil Court in Bangalore may have the territorial and pecuniary jurisdiction, it cannot grant any of the reliefs sought by Antrix in its plea there. Antrix, in its 2011 plea in Bengaluru, had sought directions to Devas for restraining it from proceeding with the ICC arbitration, contrary to the agreement between them, and from getting it modified by the ICC. Antrix had contended that till the court in Bengaluru decided whether it had the jurisdiction, the Delhi High Court could not have taken up the plea of Devas. The single judge had disagreed with Antrix' contention, saying that the only order that could possibly be passed by the Bangalore City Civil Court was that none of the reliefs sought by Antrix in its 2011 plea could be granted. The judge had said that waiting indefinitely for such a decision would be an exercise in futility. He had also directed Antrix to withdraw its plea from the Bengaluru court. Antrix had filed a plea in November 2015 in the Bengaluru court challenging the arbitral award. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat arrived on a three-day visit of the city during which he will hold interactions with 'swayamsevaks' (volunteers). Bhagwat arrived in the city early morning, an RSS office-bearer said. "Total 407 swayamsevaks from Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa have been attending a 21-day-long Sangh Shiksha Varg (training camp) here, which will conclude on June 2. Bhagwat will address the volunteers during his stay," Tejas Desai of RSS' prachar vibhag (publicity department) said. "Bhagwat will hold interactions with the swayamsevaks and give directions to them," he said. The RSS chief will leave for Nagpur on June 1, a day before the Sangh Shiksha Varg concludes, Desai said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Bihar Foundation, a platform set up to facilitate interaction between the government of the state and the Bihari diaspora, will be holding programmes in eight major cities spread across different states this year, Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi said today. Addressing the first executive of the Foundation for the current financial year, Sushil, who is its Chairman, said "conferences of non-resident Biharis will be held at Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Pune and Surat". "People interested in investing in Bihar will be specially invited to these conferences which would be marked by investors' meet organized by the state's departments for Information Technology and Industry", he said. "In order to popularize the culture of Bihar, stalls will be set up where traditional Bihari dishes would be served", he added. The Deputy CM also said that a website has been launched to popularize the Foundation, which has chapters both within the country as well as abroad and "we aim to register at least one lakh non-resident Biharis. Besides a monthly newsletter has also been launched and the Foundation's Facebook page and twitter handle have been made active". "Chapters in foreign locations like Qatar, Dubai, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Australia, South Korea and Singapore have been asked to hold celebrations of Bihar Diwas. This would enable non-resident Biharis to maintain a lively link with their home state", he added. The meeting was also attended by state industry minister and the Foundation's Executive Chairman Jai Kumar Singh, Development Commissioner and Chief Secretary-designate Deepak Kumar and Principal Secretaries for industry and art and culture S Siddharth and Chaitanya Prasad respectively. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) President Donald Trump yesterday accused House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of being an "MS-13 lover" and dismissed a Democratic Senate candidate as a "tool" of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a line of attack likely to become familiar as he boosts Republican congressional candidates ahead of mid-term elections. Trump's visit to Nashville, Tennessee, promoted the Senate candidacy of Republican Marsha Blackburn, who was expected to face former Governor Phil Bredesen in the race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Bob Corker. Besides headlining a private fund-raiser for Blackburn, he used a public rally to urge supporters not to become "complacent" this fall while Democrats were "sticking together" to block his agenda. "We need Marsha in the Senate to continue the amazing progress and work that we've done over the last year and a half," Trump said during the rally. "To keep on winning, you have to vote Republican in November." The Tennessee campaign is among several races expected to determine control of the Senate, where Republicans are defending a narrow two-seat majority. The president criticized Bredesen for being backed by national Democrats."He's a tool of Chuck Schumer and of course the MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi," Trump said. Earlier this month, the House Democratic leader criticized Trump's rhetoric and policies on immigrants after he called members of the international gang "animals." Trump added that Bredesen had donated to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016, saying, "Phil Bredesen supported her and he supported her ideas." Trump plans a series of political rallies and events to brand Democrats as obstructionists. He said his supporters can't sit back and relax this fall after working to elect him in 2016. "That's the worst thing that can happen," he said. "In November, we will reverse a trend," Trump added, alluding to recent precedent in which the party holding the White House tends to lose congressional seats. He said of Democrats, "They're bad at everything but they're good at sticking together," and appealed for GOP unity come November. The president held a similar rally in Indiana earlier this month, appearing with Republican businessman Mike Braun and ripping Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly as a "swamp person" who refused to aid the GOP agenda. Trump will also raise money for GOP candidates in Texas tomorrow. Trump is using the campaign appearances to mobilize his core backers by highlighting his accomplishments in office, like improving economic indicators and moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and resurrecting some of his go-to lines from the 2016 campaign. "I don't want to cause a problem, but in the end, Mexico's gonna pay for the wall," Trump said of his signature campaign promise. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto quickly replied to Trump, writing yesterday on his Twitter account in English, which Pena Nieto seldom does "NO. Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever. Sincerely, Mexico (all of us)." Earlier yesterday, Trump raised the prospect of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe affecting the November elections and blamed Democrats for "Collusion."On Twitter, he said the "13 Angry Democrats" on Mueller's team "will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls." Mueller is a Republican. Trump has also used his Twitter page to boost California Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, hoping to strengthen the party's chances of securing a spot on the ballot in November. He has also set his sights on Montana, where Democratic Senator Jon Tester is seeking re-election in a state Trump carried in a landslide. Both states have primaries June 5. Tennessee has a history of electing centrist senators and the race could be complicated by Corker's up-and-down relationship with Trump. Corker once said Trump had turned the White House into an "adult day care center" and the president tweeted that Corker "couldn't get elected dog catcher in Tennessee." Yet Corker was in the Oval Office on Saturday, receiving praise from the president for his help in securing the release of an American imprisoned in Venezuela. The breakthrough happened after Corker held a surprise meeting in Caracas with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Corker also greeted Trump at the Nashville airport yesterday, joined by Blackburn and Senator Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., among other dignitaries. Corker has called Bredesen a friend and said he won't actively campaign against him. Trump offered an early endorsement of Blackburn in April, tweeting that she is "a wonderful woman who has always been there when we have needed her. Great on the Military, Border Security and Crime." Blackburn, who served on Trump's transition team, has embraced the president and called herself a "hardcore, card-carrying Tennessee conservative." Bredesen, who is attempting to become the first Democrat to win a Senate campaign in Tennessee since Al Gore in 1990, has aired TV ads in which he says that he's "not running against Donald Trump" and that he learned long ago to "separate the message from the messenger. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A BSES inspection team was attacked while it was carrying out a raid to check power theft in southeast Delhi, resulting in injuries to two employees of the power distribution company, officials said. Police arrested two persons in connection with the incident and their bail application was rejected by a Saket court yesterday, a BSES spokesperson said. The team was attacked last Thursday while acting on a complaint that a resident named Irfan of Lal Kuan, Pul Prahaladpur, was involved in power theft. Irfan, his father Akbar and another person named Shabbir allegedly attacked the team members with sticks and bricks, the spokesperson said. Two senior managers of the company, Manish Sharma and Vishal Prabhakar, sustained injuries during the melee. Prabhakar received injuries on his right leg whereas Manish suffered injuries on his chest and leg, the spokesperson said. A case was registered in connection with the incident and Akbar and Shabbir, were arrested, while Irfan managed to escape. Those arrested were presented in the court and their bail was rejected. Lal Kuan is a high-power theft area in south Delhi, where the discom looses around 2-3 million units of electricity annually, the BSES spokesperson said. Such incidents are not infrequent. Even in February this year, a BSES team was attacked and a senior official had sustained head injuries," the spokesperson said. The BSES teams often face people who work like "organised gang" in such sensitive areas and more police support is needed by the discom to curb power theft. Asserting that power theft has taken the shape of "organised crime" in sensitive areas, the spokesperson said Najafgarh, Jaffarapur, Mundka, Badarpur, Shaheen Bagh, Karawal Nagar, Nand Nagari, Mandawali among others are some high loss pockets where power theft leads to revenue loss as well as burden on the distribution network. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Calcutta High Court administration has framed rules that consider strike by lawyers as interference to dispensation of justice in accordance with a Supreme Court order that said lawyers have no right to strike. A 69-day ceasework called by lawyers' associations from February had severely affected the justice delivery system at the Calcutta High Court. The administration told a division bench of Chief Justice Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya and Justice Arijit Banerjee that the rules will be placed before the full court for approval. Petitioner A K Sarangi had moved a PIL seeking direction to the high court administration to comply with the apex court's direction by framing appropriate rules under Section 34 of the Advocates Act, 1961 to make it clear that strikes by advocates will be considered interference with the administration of justice and for taking action against advocates who resort to ceasework. The counsel representing the high court administration submitted before the bench that "the rules have been framed and are waiting to be placed before the full court for approval." A 'full court' is a session of a court which is attended by all its judges. Noting the development, the division bench had disposed of the PIL on May 15. Srikanta Dutta, counsel for the petitioner, said that in 2002 the Supreme Court had passed a direction to the high courts in the ex-captain Harish Uppal versus Union of India case with regard to strikes by lawyers. The apex court had directed the high courts to frame rules under Section 34 of the Advocates Act, 1961, to make clear that any strike by lawyers will be treated as interference to the administration of justice, he said today. In 2015, Sarangi had filed an RTI application to know whether such rules had been framed by the Calcutta High Court administration. He was informed that the rules were yet to be framed, Dutta said. Sarangi had then filed a PIL before the high court seeking direction on the administration to frame the rules. In 2016, the then Chief Justice Girish Gupta and Justice Arindam Sinha directed that opinion in this regard be sought from all district courts in the state through the Bar Council of West Bengal and rules be framed within three months after receiving those. When the matter came up for hearing earlier this month, the administration told the court that rules have been framed. Three lawyers' associations had called a ceasework from February 19 seeking appointment of judges to the high court, whose strength had fallen to 30 only against a sanctioned strength of 72. The ceasework was called off after the union law ministry had appointed seven new judges to the HC. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The CBI has booked Delhi minister Satyendar Jain in a case pertaining to alleged corruption in hiring a creative team for the Public Works Department to suggest new architectural designs and bring down costs, officials said. Jain, who holds the PWD portfolio, is already facing a Central Bureau of Investigation case related to alleged money laundering. In the new case registered yesterday, the agency has also named then officials of the PWD -- engineer-in-chief S K Srivastava, principal director (projects) Manu Amitabh, deputy director (admin), A K Pait, project manager P C Chanana as accused. CBI teams today carried out searches at various locations, including the residence of Jain and other accused in the matter. In a tweet, the minister said the agency was carrying out searches at his residence. "Professionals were hired for different projects. All were forced to leave by the CBI," he said on the social media site. The CBI had registered a preliminary enquiry in the matter on April 5 last year and converted it into a regular case after it allegedly found prima facie evidence. During a year-long preliminary enquiry, the CBI said it found that Jain had allegedly entered into a criminal conspiracy with the officials of the PWD to award the tender to Soni Detective and Allied Services for hiring the creative team for the department's works. It alleged that the accused abused their official position to change the terms and conditions of the notice inviting the tender to bring within the eligibility criteria the company, which had no prior experience of such work. The order, issued by OSD to Jain, D C Goel, had proposed hiring of the creative team for PWD works for elaborate brain storming and planning not only architectural designs of government buildings, but also developing cost-effective methods of construction, it said. In September 2015, it was proposed that young professionals from reputed institutions such as the IITs, NITs, NID, SPA and IIMs could be hired with monthly emoluments ranging from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh for the creative team as the PWD did not have such in-house capacity, the enquiry report said. "No minutes of any meeting held by Satyendar Jain, Minister of PWD, are available based on which this decision to hire the creative team was purportedly taken. Similarly, there was no request from the PWD for hiring of such a creative team," the agency alleged. The CBI alleged that the funds which were to be spent for the team from the department of the accounting head of the elevated corridor for the Barapullah-III project, were "dishonestly" changed for the purpose of Mohalla clinics on February 19, 2016. The funds for architects and consultants could be met from savings of a project as per the CPWD manual but only in case of urgent requirement, while in this case no such urgent requirement was part of the records, it alleged. The condition for hiring professionals from the IITs and similar esteemed institutes was gradually diluted and finally omitted from the notice for the tender issued on March 15, 2016, it claimed. No market survey was done prior to the fixing of remunerations of the consultants, the agency alleged. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Senior Congress leader Saifuddin Soz today said the Centre was not serious about any dialogue process in Jammu and Kashmir, claiming that government's special representative to the state Dineshwar Sharma has not been able to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi or National Security Advisor Ajit Doval so far. Soz was referring to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh's comment made on Saturday that the government was ready to hold dialogue with the Hurriyat Conference leadership if the separatists came forward for talks. "A recent query from me to the concerned quarters enlightened me to know that the so-called interlocutor, Dineshwar Sharma, has not been able to meet the NSA or the PM since his appointment in October last year," Soz said in a statement here. The Congress leader said the mainstream political parties in Kashmir should understand the stand taken by the separatists groups on the dialogue process. I wish the mainstream parties in Kashmir realise, in full measure, the genuineness of the stand taken by the Joint Resistance Leadership of the Hurriyat Conference on the issue of a purposeful dialogue process between New Delhi and Kashmir. "It should be realised by one and all that there is no use of a process for dialogue if it is not based on the matrix of a definite purpose," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In the backdrop of Prime Minister Narendra Modis Swachh Bharat Mission, a Chair devoted to the study of sociology of sanitation has been set up at a University here. The Bharti-Mandan Chair for Sociology of Sanitation was set up at the L N Mishra Mithila University for encouraging research and higher studies on the topic, Sulabh International founder Bindeshwar Pathak said. Speaking at the inaugural session of a two-day seminar on womens empowerment, Pathak said yesterday the Chair has been named after eighth century scholar Mandan Mishra and his learned wife Bharti, whose debates with Adi Sankara mark a glorious chapter in the intellectual history of Mithila. A trained sociologist himself, Pathak exhorted experts in the field to devote themselves to the study of the impact of sanitation in a society and also announced an initial grant of Rs 20 lakh for the Chair. Speaking at the seminar, Binod Kumar Choudhary, the Head of the Department for Sociology in the L N Mishra Mithila University, thanked Pathak for making the announcement and coming up with the offer of financial aid for the same. Around hundred sociologists from different parts of the country including Neel Ratan, B K Nagla and A K Pandey of Benaras Hindu University (BHU) participated in the seminar. Speaking at the function, local BJP MLA Sanjay Saraogi also lauded the announcement of a chair on sociology of sanitation made by Pathak. Known for its pioneering work in human waste management and eradication of manual scavenging, Sulabh International, a non governmental body, has been involved in a number of initiatives under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, including ensuring cleanliness at the renowned Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi which is the Prime Ministers parliamentary constituency. Pathak has also been named the brand ambassador for Swachh Rail Mission as part of which many important railway stations across the country are being given a facelift. Pathak has been honoured with the Nikkei Asia Prize in Japan for his contribution to Asia's development. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hours after securing protection from arrest in Aircel-Maxis case from a city court, former Union minister P Chidambaram today moved the Delhi High Court seeking anticipatory bail in the CBI's INX media corruption case. According to advocate P K Dubey who filed the plea on behalf of Chidambaram, the matter was mentioned in-chamber before a bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar, which allowed it to be listed later today. The lawyer said that subsequently, the matter came up before Justice S P Garg who recused from hearing it. Earlier in the day, the senior Congress leader moved his plea for anticipatory bail in the Aircel Maxis money laundering case before Special Judge O P Saini, who directed him to appear before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on June 5 as per the summons already issued by the agency. The court, which also issued notice to the ED seeking its reply by June 5, also directed it not to take any coercive action against Chidambaram in the matter till then. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Union minister P on Wednesday moved a seeking protection from arrest in the Maxis money laundering case. The senior Congress leader moved his plea for anticipatory bail before Special Judge O P Saini, who directed to appear before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on June 5 as already summoned by the agency. The court, which issued a notice to the seeking its reply by June 5, also directed the agency not to take any coercive action against in the matter till then. Senior advocates and Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for Chidambaram, urged the to grant him the relief considering the former minister has clean antecedents and deep roots in society. In his plea, Chidambaram said all the evidence in the matter appears to be documentary in nature which is already in the possession of the incumbent government and nothing was to be recovered from him. However, special public proseutor Nitesh Rana, appearing for the ED, opposed Chidambaram's plea saying he did not join the investigation today, for which the had already issued summons. The has already granted interim protection from arrest till July 10 to the former minister's son Karti Chidambaram in two cases filed by the CBI and in 2011 and 2012, respectively in the Aircel-Maxis matter arising out of 2G spectrum cases. The relief was granted to Karti after the ED sought time to argue on his application seeking anticipatory bail. The matter pertains to grant of Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance to firm M/S Global Communication Holding Services Ltd for investment in Congress leader on Wednesday rushed to a trial court and the Delhi High Court seeking protection from arrest in corruption cases relating to the Aircel Maxis deal and the INX Media, in which he has been asked by probe agencies to join investigations. In both Aircel-Maxis deal of Rs 35 billion and INX Media case involving Rs 3.05 billion, Chidambaram's role has come under the scanner of the investigating agencies as during his tenure as Finance Minister in the UPA-1 regime, FIPB clearance was granted to the two ventures in which alleged irregularities have been found. A case of alleged money laundering was being probed in the Aircel-Maxis deal in which Enforcement Directorate had summoned Chidambaram for questioning today and the CBI has slapped a notice on him to join the probe in the INX Media case tomorrow. The day began with Chidamabaram approaching the court of Special Judge O P Saini, which directed the ED not to take any coercive action or arrest him till June 5 in connection with the Aircel-Maxis deal in which he was asked to appear for questioning. In the order, the court noted that Chidambaram has undertaken to comply with the summons issued by the ED while saying he apprehended his arrest by the agency. Hours after getting the relief from the trial court, senior advocates Kapil Sibal and Abhishek Manu Singhvi, drove to the Delhi High Court with a petition on behalf of Chidambaram, seeking anticipatory bail in the INX Media case. The development before the High Court witnessed some drama as Justice S P Garg recused to hear the matter and the file was placed before acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal, who allocated the case for hearing before Justice A K Pathak. Justice Pathak, in the forenoon session, said he was willing to hear the matter after 3:00pm but Sibal expressed his difficulty and both the sides consented to get the matter to be heard tomorrow. Earlier during the hearing before the trial court, Sibal and Singhvi, who are also Chidambaram's party colleagues, urged for relief contending that the former minister has clean antecedents and deep roots in the society. In his plea, Chidambaram said all the evidence in the matter appears to be documentary in nature which is already in the possession of the incumbent government and nothing was to be recovered from him. However, special public prosecutor Nitesh Rana, appearing for the ED, opposed Chidambaram's plea saying he did not join the investigation today, for which the ED had already issued summons. In the High Court, advocate P K Dubey, who was assisting the two senior counsel, filed the petition seeking anticipatory bail for Chidambaram contending that the former minister was harassed in the case in which he was not named in the FIR but has been asked to join questioning by the CBI. In both the Aircel-Maxis deal and INX Media case, the role of Chidamabaram's other family members including son Karti Chidambaram, has come under the scanner of ED and CBI. Karti was arrested by the CBI in connection with the INX Media case on February 28 and released on bail on March 23 by the Delhi High Court. The trial court had also protected him from arrest in the Aircel-Maxis matter till July 10. The Aircel-Maxis cases pertains to grant of Foreign Investment Promotion Board clearance to firm M/S Global Communication Holding Services Ltd in 2006 for investment in Aircel. The court had last year discharged former Telecom Minister Dayanidhi Maran, his industrialist brother Kalanithi Maran and others in the Aircel-Maxis cases of CBI and ED. However, that order did not have any effect on two accused Malaysian nationals -- Ralph Marshall and T Ananda Krishnan -- in the CBI's case as the court had already segregated the proceedings against them from that of the Marans and others. In the INX Media case, the CBI had registered an FIR on May 15 last year against alleged irregularities in the FIPB clearance to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 3.05 billion in 2007 when Chidambaram was the Finance Minister. It was alleged that Karti had received funds to the tune of Rs 1 milion in the case. The other accused in the case include then INX Media Director Indrani Mukerjea and then INX News Director Peter Mukerjea. Karti's arrest was made on the basis of the statement of Indrani Mukerjea, former Director of INX Media (P) Ltd, who had stated that she and her husband Peter Mukerjea had acceded to Karti's demand of one million dollars for allegedly fixing the violations done in the FIPB clearance. Amid mounting criticism at home, China has denied spending more on foreign students with hefty scholarships compared to domestic primary and high school and promised to raise standards for scholarships for foreigners. The ministry is mired in controversy after a We-media article criticised the ministry for spending only half the money on Chinese primary and high school students, a total of 1.64 billion yuan (USD 255 million) in the ministry's 2018 budget, than on foreign students, who have a budget of 3.32 billion yuan, state-run Global Times reported today. In 2016, 442,773 foreign students were studying in China's schools and other institutions, 11.07 per cent of whom received government scholarships. About 15,000 Indian students, mostly medical students, study in China. The medical courses in China are popular as they are cheaper compared to private medical colleges in India. China sees the rise of the foreign students as part of its diplomatic push to increase its global influence. While promising to raise the bar for scholarships for foreign students, the education ministry promised to increase the spending on Chinese students. "China has a strict process in awarding foreign students government scholarships. Those who don't meet the standards "will stop receiving funds," a Ministry of Education official told the daily. Stating that there was a misreading of official data, the official said the budget of 1.64 billion yuan is only for primary and high schools directly affiliated with the Ministry of Education. The official did not reveal the total spending. "The number of foreign students in China has increased over the years, which helped in promoting China's image and influence. However, it is true that problems have been emerging as the number of foreign students has been rising," Lao Kaisheng, a professor of education at Beijing Normal University, told the Global Times. The We-media article fanned online sentiment by saying the standards for overseas students to enrol in Chinese universities and receive scholarships from China are low. Moreover, some overseas students "just come to China to have fun" instead of studying, and have not made any contributions to China. The ministry is planning to introduce rules for higher education requirements for foreign students in China, thepaper.cn reported. The national fiscal spending on education in 2016 was in 3.139 trillion yuan, according to a report released by the ministry in 2017. Half of the amount was used for primary and secondary education. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) China has showcased a laser weapon that can intercept low-altitude, slow-speed and small aerial targets including drones, with experts saying it could help police and the military in counter terrorism operations and for air defence. China's Poly Technologies Inc displayed 'Silent Hunter' during the May 23-26 V International Exhibition of Weapons Systems and Military Equipment (KADEX 2018) in Kazakhstan. The anti-drone weapon can be deployed either by police for counter-terrorism or by the military for air defence, Song Zhongping, a military expert and TV commentator, told state-run Global Times. 'Silent Hunter' can intercept low-altitude, slow-speed and small aerial targets including drones. It's strong anti-jamming capability, high accuracy and low cost also played to its advantage, Song said. More than 400 companies from 55 countries and regions participated in KADEX, one of the most influential weaponry exhibitions in the Central Asia region, said a statement by the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence on its website. He said with technology for unmanned aircraft technology developing fast, drones are easier to obtain and are capable of carrying payloads, providing tools for criminals and terrorists to commit crimes or launch terror attacks. 'Silent Hunter' helps police intercept drones, the Golbal Times report said. As a tactical laser weapon, it can also be used by air defence forces whether on stationary or moving vehicles or naval vessels, Song said. During the 2016 G20 Summit in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, it was deployed to provide aerial safety, UK-based Jane's Defence Weekly reported in February 2017. Tactical laser weapons are the focus of future weapon development of the People's Liberation Army, Song said, adding that they will play an important role, especially in anti-missile, anti-satellite and air defences. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An airplane flying from China to Vietnam turned back to make an emergency landing after cracks appeared in a window, just two weeks after another airliner's cockpit window broke mid-flight in the country, state media said today. The Beijing Capital Airlines flight bound for Nha Trang in southern Vietnam with 211 people aboard returned to the eastern city of Hangzhou around an hour after take-off yesterday, the official Xinhua agency said. "After an hour of flight, the plane suddenly jolted violently," a passenger surnamed Zhang told state broadcaster CCTV. "An in-flight announcement said the plane was encountering turbulence. I have been on a lot of flights and I had never witnessed such strong turbulence. Many of the children in the cabin were scared and crying." Passengers were given 400 yuan (USD 60) in compensation, CCTV said. Several disgruntled passengers refused to board an alternative flight because they considered the compensation too low and were upset that the airline did not offer an apology, it said. The aircraft was an Airbus A321, according to plane tracking website FlightAware. The head of aviation for Beijing Capital Airlines told Xinhua that cracks had appeared in a window but not the cockpit window as some passengers had claimed. But an explanatory note given to passengers with the airline's official seal, which is being circulated on social media, only said the flight was cancelled due to "mechanical failure". The airline, a subsidiary of Chinese conglomerate HNA Group and Airbus, could not be reached for comment. It was the third window-related incident on a plane since April. A Sichuan Airlines plane carrying 128 people made an emergency landing in southwest China on May 14 after a cockpit window broke at 32,000 feet (9,800 metres), sucking the co-pilot partly out of the aircraft. The pilot was hailed a "hero" for safely landing the flight. Only two people were injured. In April, a woman died after being partially sucked out of a Southwest Airlines flight headed to Dallas from New York when a porthole was shattered mid-flight. Flying shrapnel from an engine explosion broke a window in the Boeing 737 flight with 144 passengers, which was safely landed by the pilot. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Observing that Tibetan Buddhists continue to be in a very difficult situation, a top American diplomat today said that China remains a "very troubling" country on religious freedom. "Situation for Tibetan Buddhists that continues to be a very difficult situation for them ... for Christians, for Falun Gong practitioners. China remains a very, very troubling country on religious freedom," US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback told reporters during a conference here. According to the annual State Department report on International Religious Freedom, although Chinese authorities continued to block information about the number of self-immolations of Tibetan Buddhists, including Buddhist monks, media reported on six self-immolations and one instance in which a man in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) committed suicide by slitting his throat. Reportedly, a Buddhist monk self-immolated in Haikou City due to a land requisition dispute involving a Buddhist temple. Multiple media outlets reported an increase in control over religious activities in advance of the 19th Party Congress in October, it said. There are between six-eight million Tibetan Buddhists in China. "Tibetan Buddhists in the country, including outside the TAR, are not free to venerate the Dalai Lama openly," the report said. "While there is no public law expressly forbidding it, authorities view as suspect any display of the Dalai Lama's photo by businesses or individuals and treat those seen as loyal to him as a separatist threat," it said. In February last year, the report said authorities in Xinjiang defined 26 religious activities, including some practices of Islam, Christianity, and Tibetan Buddhism, as illegal without government authorization. These regulations, which came into force April 1, stipulate that no classes, scripture study groups, or religious studies courses may be offered by any group or institution without prior government approval. No religious group is permitted to carry out any religious activities, including preaching, missionary work, proselytizing, and ordaining clergy, without government approval. "The pronouncement forbids the designation of reincarnations of Tibetan Buddhist teachers without government approval," the report said. It also bans editing, translation, publication, printing, reproduction, production, distribution, sale, and dissemination of religious publications and audiovisual products without authorization, said the Congressional-mandated report. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A day after the killing of a renowned Sikh religious leader and rights activist by gunmen here, an investigation committee, headed by a senior superintendent of police, was today set up to probe the incident that has jolted the minority community in Pakistan. Charnjit Singh, 52, a prominent member of the country's minority Sikh community and an outspoken critic of the Taliban, was shot dead by gunmen riding on a motorcycle yesterday in Scheme Chowk area in the outskirts of the city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province yesterday, Singh was a religious leader, member of several religious organisations and a social activist known for his patriotism and activism for inter-faith harmony. Police said the killing was suspected to be a targeted attack. Capital City Police Officer Qazi Jameel today constituted an investigation committee, headed by SSP Investigation Nisar Khan, to probe the attack, the Dawn reported. Khalsa Peace and Justice Foundation President Radesh Singh Tony condemned that killing and said that the slain Sikh leader "always raised his voice for Pakistan". Singh hailed from Khyber tribal region, but migrated to Peshawar in the early 1980s. He is survived by two sons and a daughter. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress today questioned TMC's protest against the hike in fuel price and asked it to reduce state-level taxes if it was "really serious" about the issue. "TMC is protesting against fuel price hike. But is it really serious about it or is it just playing to the gallery before the Lok Sabha polls ? If TMC is really serious then it should reduce VAT and other state-level taxes on fuel - that would bring down the oil prices," WBPCC president Adhir Chowdhury said. "It is very easy to blame others. Why doesn't it (TMC) do what it preaches if it is so concerned about the hardship of the masses," he told newsmen here. TMC had held protests in the city against the fuel price hike yesterday. The party supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had in a recent tweet expressed concern over the spiralling prices of petrol and diesel. Describing the steep hike in petroleum prices as an "anti-people policy of the Centre", Chowdhury alleged that it was done to suit the interests of the oil companies. Slamming the TMC government in West Bengal, he said there has been no development in the state in the last seven years "except for the dubious distinction of being the number one in terms of attack on democratic rights and opposition parties". He demanded that the government publish a white paper on the achievements in the field of industry, employment generation in the state. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Copper prices declined by Rs 2 per kg at the non-ferrous metal market today largely on weak trend overseas. Traders said sentiment in copper turned bearish on the back of weak global cues where the metal fell to a two-week low yesterday, pressured by Italy's deepening political crisis and a firmer dollar. Globally, copper for delivery in three-month was trading down by 0.7 per cent at USD 6,810 per tonne after hitting an early low of USD 6,802 on the London Metal Exchange. In the national capital, copper mixed scrap fell by Rs 2 to Rs 438 per kg. Following are today's metal rates (in Rs per kg): Zinc ingot Rs 140-146, nickel plate (4x4) Rs 870-875, gun metal scrap Rs 227, bell metal scrap Rs 229, copper mixed scrap Rs 438, chadri deshi Rs 295. Lead ingot Rs 141, lead imported Rs 148, aluminium ingots Rs 168, aluminium sheet cutting Rs 164, aluminium wire scrap Rs 164 and aluminium utensils scrap Rs 162. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Banking operations in the country were hit today as 10 lakh employees, primarily from PSU banks, went on 2-day strike to protest against a "meagre" 2 per cent salary hike offered by Indian Banks Association (IBA) -- the management body. The strike, also supported by employees of some old generation private sector banks and foreign banks, will continue tomorrow. Operations at the new-generation private banks like ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank were however almost normal, barring few activities including cheque clearance. According to official estimates, just about 25 per cent of the total branches were functioning. However, about 80 per cent of ATMs were dispensing cash till the close of the banking hours. There were reports of disruption in banking operations in various states. The impact of strike in certain states like Kerala, West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand was more severe compared to other states. Nearly 10 lakh employees, working in various branches of 21 public sector banks, 13 old generation private sector banks, six foreign banks and 56 regional rural banks across the country went on the strike as IBA offered them a nominal wage revision, All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA), affiliate of UFBU said in a statement. Since the strike coincides with the month-end, salary withdrawals from branches are likely to get affected. Some ATMs went dry by the evening. Operations like deposits, FD renewals, government treasury operations, money market operations have been hit by the strike. A RBI official said some digital banking work was done through electronic systems like the RTGS but the functioning of banks' servers was hit. Digital banking comprises about 5 per cent of the total operations, the official said. Reserve Bank of India remained operational though the trade unions offered moral support for the ongoing strike, a RBI Trade Union leader said. Reports from Maharashtra said nearly 60,000 sectoral employees in the state struck work as part of the strike. "Bank employees are on strike to demand an adequate wage revision to all employees and officers," United Forum of Bank Unions convener (Maharashtra) Devidas Tuljapurkar said. Around 60,000 bank employees and officers in Maharashtra dealing with Rs 40 lakh crore of business are on strike, he claimed, adding that nearly 12,000 bank branches in the state are shut. For Mumbai, the number stands at 25,000 staffers in 4,000 bank branches, dealing in Rs 30 lakh crore of business, he said. The state-run bank branches in the financial capital of Mumbai were either shut or witnessed thin activity. The employees took out a march from the P M Road in Fort area of south Mumbai, very close to the central bank headquarters which also has a high concentration of bank branches, to the Azad Maidan, the city's officially designated protest spot. As several rounds of talks between banks and the unions of their employees did not make any headway, the United Forum of Banking Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of nine bank unions, has gone on strike against the proposed wage hike of 2 per cent as against 15 per cent given last time, All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA), general secretary C H Venkatachalam said. In the last wage revision in 2012, the bank employees got a raise of 15 per cent. It is kind of an insult to the employees of public sector banks...to be offered this kind of meagre hike. We had no other option but to go on strike, forgoing two days' salary, All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC) joint general secretary Ravinder Gupta said. Success of all government schemes like Mudra, Jandhan and demonetisation were ensured by public sector bankers but the reward is just 2 per cent hike, he said, adding that it is gross injustice to bankers who have worked very hard for nation building. Employees are participating in the nation-wide strike as part of "our democratic right" by forgoing our salary, Venkatachalam said and hoped that good sense would prevail. IBA has asked the six banks including SBI, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Union Bank and Bank of Baroda to reconsider their decision and allow IBA to settle wages for bank employees up to scale seven instead of up to scale three employees. There are about 85,000 branches of 21 public sector banks across the country having business share of about 70 per cent. Most of the banks, including SBI, PNB and BoB, have already informed their customers about functioning of branches and offices due to strike. Industry chamber Assocham said the two-day nationwide bank strike may affect customer transactions worth up to Rs 20,000 crore. It also urged the government to come up with a stimulus plan for restoring the health of PSU banks. State-owned lenders are grappling with high levels of bad loans and as per reports their losses for the quarter ended March 2018 are set to hit a record Rs 50,000 crore which is more than double the losses of Rs 19,000 crore in preceding quarter ended December 2017, Assocham said in a statement. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The JDS-Congress government would arrive at a decision to implement a two-phase scheme for farm loan waiver within 15 days, Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy said today, even as opposition and farmers' bodies stepped up pressure on him to fulfil his pre-poll promise. Maintaining that there was no question of stepping back from his commitment, which has provided ammunition to the BJP to target the new coalition, Kumaraswamy said government would hand over debt-free certificates at farmers' doorsteps. Speaking to reporters after a meeting with the farmers' representatives here, Kumaraswamy said he and deputy chief minister G Parameshwara would meet Congress president Rahul Gandhi and decide on the implementation of the scheme. Kumaraswamy, under attack from the BJP over the alleged delay in fulfilling his pre-poll assurance to the farming community, met representatives of farmers groups and progressive peasants to discuss the problems faced by them. In the run-up to the recently held assembly polls, Kumaraswamy had promised to waive farm loans upto Rs 53,000 crore borrowed from cooperative and nationalised banks within 24 hours of assuming office as chief minister. "I am getting it (the loan amount) calculated, whatever thousand crore it is, saving you is our government's responsibility," he said, adding, the government would hand over debt-free certificates at the doorsteps of farmers. He said government intends to waive loans in a phased manner and noted that the size of the state budget is Rs 2 lakh crore. Under phase one, he said, the government would waive only the crop loan availed by small and marginal farmers. "My government will not have any limits like Maharashtra, UP, Punjab and Andhra governments. ...we will waive whatever amount of loans farmers have availed," he said. The waiver would be applicable to those farmers who had availed loans from the period of April 1, 2009 to December, 2017, Kumaraswamy said. Under phase two of the scheme, the government would address the issue of waiver of loans availed from scheduled commercial banks located in non-city corporation areas, the Chief Minister said. Kumaraswamy said he would appoint a nodal officer in every district for collecting details of loans availed for scrutiny and thereafter, the government would decide on beneficiaries of loan waiver. "We will give 15 days time to debtors to submit details to nodal officers and thereafter we will cross check the details furnished and accordingly waive the loans of eligible debtors, because the money should not be misused. It should reach farmers, not the middlemen. There is no in it," he said. In next two to three days, Kumaraswamy said, he along with Deputy Chief Minister G Parameshwara would call a meeting of nationalised banks represented by their general managers and chairman to gather information on loans. "We will discuss the possibility of waiving interest rate on the principal amount availed, we will also discuss the possibility of repayment of loans phase wise under 'One Time Settlement' scheme," he said. Kumaraswamy asked farmers to give in writing the suggestions on whether to include those in the scheme, who had availed loans in the name of agriculture and misused it for their businesses. He also asked whether to include those who have been paying Rs 4 lakh income tax for last three years. "Should we also include politicians, MLAs, MLCs and MPs, cooperative bank office-bearers, who had availed loans," he asked. The chief minister had recently said he was committed to waiving farm loans or else would retire from politics, and asked people not to fall prey to the "BJP's conspiracy". The BJP had called a statewide bandh on Monday to protest the "failure" of the chief minister to honour his farm loan waiver promise within 24 hours of coming to power, but it had evoked a lukewarm response. Kumaraswamy, who had made the promise in the run up to the elections, later sought time, saying since he was heading a coalition government with the Congress he would have to consult the alliance partner before taking a decision. He had also said he would have to take into account the financial condition of the state. "We will come to a decision in 15 days. In 15 days, it will get completely implemented. ...Whatever may be the difficulty, our government is committed to maintaining fiscal discipline, and also saving you (farmers)," Kumaraswamy told the meeting after listening to farmers for about three hours. Questioning Kumaraswamy's stand, BJP's Karnataka unit chief B S Yeddyurappa threatened to launch a stir against the state government accusing him of betraying farmers on the farm waiver loan issue. Yeddyurappa, the leader of opposition in the state assembly, asked, "Is he playing political drama?. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former champion Novak Djokovic reached the French Open third round for the 13th consecutive year by beating Spanish qualifier Jaume Munar 7-6 (7/1) 6-4 6-4 today, while women's top seed Simona Halep battled to victory in her opening match. Djokovic, the 2016 Roland Garros champion and former world number one, is seeded 20 this year after struggling to rediscover his best form after returning from a right elbow injury. He wasn't at his best on Court Suzanne Lenglen, but goes on to face Spain's Roberto Bautista Agut for a place in the last 16. The Serbian 12-time Grand Slam champion fired 39 winners but 33 unforced errors and was broken three times by Munar, the world 155. "I am very happy to be here on Suzanne Lenglen and see so many people and see the support," said Djokovic. "Jaume is a great player, he has lots of quality and good concentration. I congratulate him on a great match today." Bautista Agut, the 13th seed, saw off Colombian qualifier Santiago Giraldo 6-4 7-5 6-3, but Czech 17th seed Tomas Berdych lost a rain-interrupted first-round match to home hope Jeremy Chardy on the showpiece Court Philippe Chatrier 7-6 (7/5) 7-6 (10/8) 1-6 5-7 6-2. The unlikely adventure of Argentinian world number 190 Marco Trungelliti, who became the eighth lucky loser in the draw after driving back to Paris from Barcelona, came to an end as he lost 6-1 7-6 (7/1) 6-1 to Italian Marco Cecchinato in the second round. - Halep fights back - ===================== World number one Halep fought back after a disastrous opening set to beat American Alison Riske 2-6 6-1 6-1 in their delayed first-round match. Halep, the runner-up in Paris in 2014 and 2017, slumped 0-5 down in the opening set to world number 83 Riske whose only win at the tournament came in 2014. The Romanian committed 16 unforced errors in the set but stepped up a gear from that point on to book a second-round match against Taylor Townsend of the United States. "It's always difficult in the first round of a Grand Slam, you are always nervous," said Halep. The 26-year-old, who is still looking for a first Grand Slam title, will play for the second straight day tomorrow, after the match with Riske was pushed back from Tuesday due to rain. "I think I'll be ready tomorrow, I feel strong in my legs," said the top seed. "Anything can happen with the rain so all we can do is rest and try to be at our best when we step on the court." Halep needs to reach the semi-finals or better if she is to retain the world top spot. Eighth seed Petra Kvitova eased into the third round with a 6-0 6-4 victory over Spain's Lara Arruabarrena on Court One. The two-time Wimbledon champion has now won 13 consecutive matches on clay after claiming titles in Prague and Madrid, and will face Estonia's 25th seed Anett Kontaveit for a place in the last 16. Czech Kvitova, 28, has not reached the quarter-finals at Roland Garros since a run to the last four in 2012. Ukrainian fourth seed Elina Svitolina reached the last 32 for the fourth straight year by brushing aside Viktoria Kuzmova in straight sets. The 23-year-old, who arrived in Paris having won her second straight Italian Open title, saw off her Slovakian opponent 6-3 6-4. Svitolina, a two-time quarter-finalist at Roland Garros, will next take on Romanian 31st seed Mihaela Buzarnescu. Elsewhere, charismatic Japanese 21st seed Naomi Osaka came through a tight match with Kazakhstan's Zarina Diyas 6-4 7-5. The 20-year-old Osaka is seeded for the first time at a major tournament, having lifted the prestigious Indian Wells title earlier this year before beating Serena Williams in Miami the following week. Williams, who made her Grand Slam return with a singles win on Tuesday, is back in action in the doubles with sister Venus later on Wednesday. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan's former dictator Pervez Musharraf has said that the controversial book co-authored by former ISI chief Lt Gen (retd) Asad Durrani was not a conspiracy but sheer foolishness. Durrani's name has been put on the no-fly list and Pakistan Army has ordered a Court of Inquiry to investigate his claims mentioned in the book he co-authored with former RAW chief Amarjit Singh Dulat. When asked about the fate of Durrani, Gen (retd) Musharraf said, "Let the army decide". "I was surprised when I found out that a former DG ISI and a retired chief have authored a book together," said Musharraf while speaking in an Express talk show. He said the publication of the book 'Spy Chronicles' by Durrani was not a conspiracy but sheer foolishness. "How can two persons with different views co-author a book," the Dubai-based former Pakistan Army chief wondered. The release of the book has sparked accusations of treachery against the former spy chief after his candid views on various matters of regional and global concern came under intense public scrutiny. The powerful military, which has ruled Pakistan for about half its history since independence in 1947, is considered a major player in the country's Musharraf also claimed that he had sacked Durrani as Pakistan's ambassador to Saudi Arabia due to his poor performance. Referring to the Kargil operation of 1998, Musharraf claimed that Durrani has criticised the operation in his book because "I was able to pull it off with a reasonable success". "He was senior to me and believed that I should have learnt from him, but I [successfully] conducted the operation", Musharraf claimed. "An army official should be ashamed of himself for badmouthing the operation," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi University Teachers' Association (DUTA) today organised a mass hunger strike to protest the UGC circular on faculty reservation mechanism for universities, it said in a statement today. Following an Allahabad High Court order - upheld by the Supreme Court - the University Grants Commission (UGC) had on March 5 announced a new mechanism for implementing faculty reservations, which is calculating total posts department-wise rather than institution-wise. The UGC had said that its new reservation formula was in response to a direction of the Allahabad High Court in April last year. It is believed that the move would cut down the number of posts available for SC and ST candidates. Teachers and students took part in the satyagraha and mass hunger strike at the Parliament Street between 10 am and 5.30 pm today, DUTA said. The teachers' body said the Ministry of Human Resource Development has filed a special leave petition to undo the move that has sparked a controversy. "If the UGC notification is not withdrawn, it will set the affirmative policy of social justice through reservation back by a decade. A whole generation of research scholars from SC, ST and OBC categories who are waiting for academic jobs will get excluded by this absurd anti-reservation decision," it said. The DUTA said it will create chaos and mass-displacement among the ad-hoc teachers in Delhi University when they will be due for re-appointment in July. All current ad-hoc teachers have been appointed according to the 200-point college/university-wise roster which is to be discontinued, according to the March 5 notification, the teacher's body said. The DUTA also warned the UGC and the HRD ministry that even if a single ad-hoc teacher is displaced in July, the Delhi University would proceed on a complete lockdown in the new session. A general body meeting will also be held on June 1 to decide future course of action, it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Queen Maxima of The Netherlands, the UN Secretary General's special advocate for inclusive finance, today said India needs to do more to increase use of bank accounts and bridge gender gap. "Even though the figures of access have been very, very good, 48 per cent of the (Jan Dhan) accounts are not being used," Queen Maxima told reporters here today. She said the rollout of the ambitious scheme, which has ensured that 80 per cent of Indians now have bank accounts and has got women to open bank accounts as well, has not led to usage among the women. "The more digital we get, the more divide we have," she said, adding that rural poor and farmers also seem to be left out when going through the usage data. She said there are "low hanging fruit" in the digitisation journey like farmers and labourers who need to be shifted away from using cash. Queen Maxima said despite having a mobile phone and bank account, 50 million farmers get their agri income in cash, 70 million people get wages in cash and 120 million pay utility bills in cash. She said women have a different set of issues which start with accessibility, convenience and product designs which need to be changed and recounted meeting a woman who said she has to travel three hours to get access to her bank. The visiting royal also pitched for a better compensation to the business correspondents if the issue of usability were to go up. Lauding the country's efforts on the access front, where the PMJDY has helped get millions of more people into the banking fold, Queen Maxima said India now needs to pass the know-how and learnings to other countries grappling with the same problem of financial exclusion. When asked about concerns on privacy, she seemed to hint that biometric data will have to be used in order to extend the reach but stressed that it has to be done in the right way. "(We need) a good balance between keeping privacy and having the ability to have access to services. Its a very difficult balance to reach and the political system should find the right balance in a country. Technologically, everything is there to do it properly," she said. Queen Maxima said a slew of other bodies, including the World Bank are depending on biometrics to create IDs for all, which a key feature in ensuring compliance with the know you customer (KYC) requirements. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a virulent attack on the Election Commission (EC) over complaints of malfunctioning of EVMs and VVPAT machines in bypolls, the Shiv Sena today dubbed the poll panel, democracy and elections as "mistress" of those in power. Unsparing in its criticism of ally BJP, the Sena alleged that the ruling party, which, it said, has an "autocratic mindset", has corrupted the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) to serve its own purpose. It warned that people's loss of faith in the election process was "dangerous" for democracy. "Our country can no longer be called the largest democracy in the world. EVMs have spoilt the democracy. Those in power at present have made democracy their mistress with their autocratic mindset," an editorial in Sena mouthpiece 'Saamana' said. "The BJP has corrupted EVMs, and made them into a machinery that can be used for its own purpose. Elections and the Election Commission have become the mistress," it alleged. Referring to complaints of technical snags in EVMs and VVPAT machines in Maharashtra's Bhandara-Gondia and Palghar Lok Sabha bypolls, it said while each vote counts and can be a deciding factor, thousands of people got "bored" waiting in queues and returned without voting after the machines malfunctioned. "The present Election Commission and its machinery have become like slaves of the government. Hence, they are not ready to take complaints of distribution of alcohol and money, the autocracy of government and threatening statements," it charged. The publication also mocked EC for blaming the hot weather for malfunctioning of EVMs. "The temperature keeps fluctuating. However, we never heard of the prime minister's flight engines having stopped working due to hot weather or computers of the BJP's social media cell malfunctioning due to hostile weather," it quipped and asked "why did EVMs stop functioning then?" Since the last several years, EVMs were procured from (PSU) BHEL or from the Election Commission of India. This time, the machines were procured from a private company in Surat, the Sena pointed out, adding that this raises doubts. "People not trusting the election process is dangerous for democracy," it opined. There is a discontent among people against the BJP, yet the party is winning elections and instances of EVMs malfunctioning only gives an impetus to the belief that there is a "setting" of EVMs that ensures the party wins, the Marathi daily alleged. "There was a time when the BJP opposed these machines. Now, the whole country is opposing it, the BJP is supporting it. The whole world has rejected EVMs, then why is the government supporting it?" it sought to know. The EC yesterday announced re-poll in 73 polling stations in Uttar Pradesh's Kairana, 49 polling stations in Maharashtra's Bhandara-Gondia and one polling station in Nagaland, after the voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines developed snags during the bypolls held on Monday. No re-polling was ordered in the Palghar (ST) Lok Sabha constituency. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The ED today said it attached assets worth Rs 77 lakh, under the anti-money laundering law, of a Bihar Maoist leader who made Rs 40 lakh cash deposits in the accounts of his son-in-law's family after allegedly extracting the amount from criminal activities like extortion. The agency said it issued a provisional order, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), for attachment of properties of Binay Yadav alias Kamal Jee, a "notorious" top commander and active member of the Bihar regional committee of the CPI (Maoist), and his family. Yadav was a resident of Deora village in the Aurangabad district of the state and had as many as five aliases like Kislay jee and Guru jee. The Enforcement Directorate, in a statement, said it attached 6 plots (in Aurangabad district), 3 buses, a heavy earth-mover machine, a Bolero SUV, a mini van, a fixed deposit amount and 7 bank accounts in the name of Yadav's family and that of the family of his son-in-law. The agency said its probe found that Yadav had "transferred the proceeds of crime in cash to his wife S Devi, his son-in-law Prem Kumar and Saryu Yadav, father of Prem Kumar". It added that Yadav has deposited as much as Rs 40 lakh in cash in the bank accounts of Prem Kumar and Saryu Yadav. "The Naxal leader was transferring his ill-gotten wealth for the prosperity and comfort of his daughter's family," a senior official said. The ED took over the case and slapped criminal charges under the PMLA against Yadav on a "proposal" sent to it by the the Bihar Police that contained a list of 46 FIRs and six charge sheets filed by the police in Aurangabad and Gaya districts. "Yadav is notorious for his criminal activities in Aurangabad and Gaya and has accumulated huge wealth by extortion and collection of levy," it said. This is the third such action by the central probe agency against Naxal commanders in Bihar and Jharkhand. It comes in the backdrop of the central government (the Home Ministry) asking agencies like the Income Tax Department, the CBI, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the ED to initiate action against them. The ED said Yadav was accused of charges like killing of security forces personnel, murders, extortion, possession of arms and explosives. "Proceeds of crime have been laundered to acquire movable and immovable assets in the names of family members and relatives," it said, claiming the Naxal leader "infused" Rs 1.5 crore funds in several bank accounts and immovable assets, largely in the name of his daughter's in-laws over a period of time. "Several persons were directed to make huge cash deposits in the bank accounts of the son-in-law on the direction of Yadav's wife, which is a modus operandi to conceal the Naxal leader's ill-gotten wealth using the bank accounts of family members," the official said. It said that son-in-law and Saryu Yadav filed "false ITRs (income tax returns) to conceal the proceeds of crime in order to project the tainted properties as untainted". Yadav's wife also invested the black money acquired by her husband "for purchase of plots of land and she deliberately suppressed the value of land in sale deeds to conceal the tainted money. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The labour ministry today said the state insurer Employees' State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) has decided to open Dispensary cum Branch Office in every district of the country to strengthen medical services. Besides this, some very important decisions were taken towards improvements in service delivery mechanism of the ESIC in its 174th meeting in New Delhi yesterday under the Chairmanship of Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar, a labour ministry statement said. To strengthen medical services in all the districts of the country, the decision for opening of one ESIC Dispensary cum Branch Office (DCBO) in every district of the country was taken in the meeting, the statement said. DCBO will provide primary medical care, referrals for secondary medical care, scrutiny of bills of secondary care referrals, etc besides distribution of drugs to Modified Employer Utilisation Dispensary, IMPs (Insurance Medical Practitioners) in the district, payment of cash benefits, survey work for coverage in the district. The ESIC will bear the establishment and operational cost of DCBO, without sharing, in the similar manner of expenditure of ESIC hospitals. During the meeting, the decision for starting a Nursing Internship programme in ESIC hospitals was also taken. The programme will be open to duly registered fresh graduate nurses, who are looking to update their skill in real work setting under the supervision of regular staff, the ministry said. "The ESIC would offer practical work experience to graduate nursing pass outs, focusing on application of nursing theory and knowledge to actual nursing tasks in medical settings. "A stipend (consolidated) of Rs 22,000 could be provided for duration of the internship. The selection would be based on merit and number of positions for internship could be around 20 per cent of the sanctioned strength of Staff Nurses for the ESIC hospital," the statement noted. The ESIC has given in-principal approval to Modified Insurance Medical Practitioner (IMP) Scheme, 2018 to make it more attractive on pilot basis. This scheme may further be expanded in the new areas as well as existing areas as per need. In an area, where ESIC does not have its medical establishment, or in newly implemented area, primary medical care is provided cash less through tie up arrangement with Insurance Medical Practitioner (IMP). The ESIC will utilise the services of private practitioners (as IMPs) for delivery of primary care services (except for lab tests & medicines) to insured persons. "The decision of construction of 100 bedded ESI Hospital in Bahadurgarh, Haryana; 50 bedded additional facilities for Super Speciality treatment at ESIC Hospital, Varanasi, UP; and starting of 100 beds medical facilities in ESIC Medical Hospital, Bihta, Patna, Bihar were also taken in the meeting," it said. Besides this, the proposal for upgradation of existing ESIC Hospital at Bibvewadi, Pune from 50 to 200 beds (upgradable to 500 beds) and enhancement of bed strength of the ESIC Hospital, Namkum, Ranchi from 75 to 200 beds and construction thereby of 200-bed ESIC Hospital at Ranchi, Jharkhand were approved. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Amid the controversy over former President Pranab Mukherjee's decision to attend an RSS meet, Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij today said it should be mandatory for everyone to spend time with the organization. "The RSS is a nationalist organization," the minister tweeted in Hindi. "It should be made mandatory for all people of the country to spend some time with the sangh. Many problems of the country will be solved," he added. The tweet, however, made no direct mention of Mukherjee's decision to attend the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh event. Vij has made controversial statements in the past against Mahatma Gandhi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi. Recently, he compared Rahul Gandhi to the deadly Nipah virus, saying whoever comes in contact with him will be destroyed. He had once demanded that the cow should be declared a national animal. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A man was arrested today from the Maidan area of the city for possession of fake notes with face value of Rs 1 lakh, police said. Acting on a tip-off from a prisoner, the Kolkata Police Special Task Force (STF) unit nabbed Mitha Lal from Shahid Minar Ground in Maidan police station area and recovered 50 pieces of Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICN) of Rs 2,000 denomination each, a senior officer said. The accused, a member of an interstate FICN racket, hails from Jalor district in Rajasthan, the STF officer said. "We are looking into the matter and questioning him to find out more about the racket," he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP's Karnataka unit chief B S Yeddyurappa today threatened to launch a stir against the state government accusing chief minister Kumaraswamy of "betraying" farmers on the farm waiver loan issue. Yeddyurappa, the leader of opposition in the state assembly, said Kumarawamy had told a meeting of farmers here that he would waive loans of small and marginal farmers in 15 days and think about the rest in the second phase. "...but he had promised to waive Rs 53,000 crore loan. Is he playing political drama?" Yeddyurappa asked. Yeddyurappa was invited to attend the meeting chaired by Kumaraswamy with farmers' organisations today, but he had deputed Deputy Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Govinda Karajol on his behalf. Yeddyurappa said "If you (CM) had to ask Rahul Gandhi, why did you announce Rs 53,000 crore farm loan waiver ahead of election? Why did you say in Delhi that you will resign if you can't waive the loan? You are trying to betray people. Nofarmer will believe you; I condemn your act of betrayal..." Yeddyurappa was speaking to reporters on the outcome of the farmers meeting, where Kumaraswamy spoke about his commitment to waive farm loans within 15 days, insisting there was "no going back" on it. Kumaraswamy also said he and Deputy Chief Minister G Parameshwara would discuss the issue with Rahul Gandhi. Accusing Kumaraswamy of trying to "mislead" the people and farmers, Yeddyurappa said he condemned "this conspiracy" by the Chief Minister and his coalition government. "You had promised to waive Rs 53,000 crore loan, what happened to that promise of yours? We were all eagerly waiting for it...," he said. Alleging that the Chief Minister was trying to create confusion on farm loan waiver implementation by indicating that it would be done in phases, Yeddyurappa saidBJP would soon decide on the next course of protest. "....as promised if you don't waive Rs 53,000 crore loan from nationalised, cooperative and other banks, we will call a meeting of our legislature party and state office bearers to decide on the next course of action at the earliest, against your betrayal of farmers," Yeddyurappa said. "At no cost will we stop our agitation, until you announce farm loan waiver as promised," he added. Yeddyurappa said the chief minister had recently saidhe was committed to waiving farm loans or else would resign. "But today sitting next to Parameshwara, he has made false promises," he said. "Kumaraswamy is some one who is for the chair (Chief Minister's) and not some one who is for the sake of farmers," the BJP leader said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Taking note of the recent fire at Bajaj Hindusthan Sugar's mill in Meerut, the National Green Tribunal has sought response from the Environment Ministry and Uttar Pradesh government on the issue after a plea sought measures to avert such incidents. Two workers had died while one was hospitalised with burn injuries due to the fire in one of the storage tanks at the distillery division of the mill at Kinauni during loading of ethanol in containers. The incident occurred in the afternoon on May 26 and the fire could be fully extinguished in the evening next day with the help of state fire department along with the army. A bench headed by acting Chairperson Justice Jawad Rahim issued notices to the Ministry of Environment and Forests, UP government and Petroleum and Safety Organisation (PESO). The notice was issued after advocate Sanjay Upadhyay, appearing for petitioner NGO SAFE, said the industrial unit was one of the 14 units of Bajaj Hindusthan Sugar Mills in the state and that none of the reports submitted by the UP government had any information on status of the distillery. The lawyer said the distillery units were more accident prone during the summer months and appropriate directions should be issued to the authorities so that a similar mishap is averted in the future. The matter is listed for next hearing on July 24. The tribunal had earlier slapped a fine of Rs 50,000 on the UP government for the inordinate delay in filing a report on the status of distilleries and sugar mills manufacturing, storing and transporting ethanol without obtaining permission from PESO. The green panel had noted that despite its specific direction on February 22 to file the inspection report in two weeks, the state government failed to do so. The direction was issued after owners of some of the units, which were shut earlier for non-compliance of rules, had approached the court alleging that the UP government was delaying the inspection, which was necessary for licence renewal. The green panel initially slapped Rs five lakh as costs for the delay but reduced it to Rs 50,000 on the repeated insistence of the counsel for the state. The state government told the tribunal that it has complied with the order in "all seriousness" and inspected the five industries, but due to "inadvertence", the report could not be filed. The order came after a few industries approached the tribunal seeking modification of its order directing all states to shut down distilleries running without PESO nod. The industries claimed that due to the NGT order, the authorities concerned were not inspecting their site resulting in delay in issuance of licences. The order had come during the hearing of a contempt plea filed by NGO SAFE alleging that the authorities were allowing illegal operation of these units without licence and in contravention of the Manufacture, Storage and Import of Hazardous Chemical Rules 1989, putting lives at grave risk. The plea referred to a UP Government's affidavit and contended that only two of the 35 distilleries had requisite licence while the others were manufacturing ethanol illegally. The industries manufacturing absolute alcohol or ethanol were not only operating illegally without the requisite permission from competent authorities, but also manipulating the actual total production, storage and sales figures of absolute alcohol causing not only huge financial loss to state revenue but also jeopardising safety of people and environment, the NGO had said in its contempt plea. The NGT had in 2016 directed that no manufacturer will produce absolute alcohol without seeking appropriate permission from the Ministry of Commerce, Chief Controller Explosives and other authorities. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) E-commerce giant Amazon today said its efforts in the Indian market are focussed on bringing 100 million new users to shop online and helping small and medium businesses scale up and even go global. Amazon, which is completing five years of operations in India, competes aggressively with home-grown player Flipkart in the burgeoning Indian e-commerce market. It has over three lakh sellers on its marketplace platform in India. "Our vision remains that we want to transform how India buys. Customers care about access to selection at great value and convenience. Going ahead, I feel very confident that we will be able to do three things -- we will enable the next 100 million Indians to essentially find, discover and aspire with us..." Amazon India head Amit Agarwal told PTI. He added that the company's efforts are also directed towards strengthening its 'Prime' offering and helping Indian SMEs become global brands. Agarwal said the company has been investing in areas like skilling SMEs to expand the selection of products on its platform, building infrastructure through warehouses and enhancing the customer experience. The company has over 170 million products listed across hundreds of categories, which is double the selection from last year. Of these, 40 million are eligible as 'Prime' products. Amazon Prime membership -- the company's paid programme that offers customers access to faster order delivery as well as content like movies and music -- has doubled since July 2017. India accounted for the highest number of Prime members in a debut year, growing the fastest among the 13 countries where Amazon Prime is available. Agarwal said the company is expanding products covered under Prime as well as enhancing the content available through it. He also cited the example of its Global Selling Programme that allows sellers to ship to international locations. "We had started with a few hundred sellers and now, we have more than 32,000 Indian sellers on our Global Selling Program," he said. The fledgling e-commerce sector in the country has been growing at a phenomenal pace on the back of discounts, convenience of doorstep delivery, easy returns and availability of payment options. Reports forecast that the segment is poised to touch USD 200 billion within a decade. Earlier this month, the segment witnessed a mega deal -- which incidentally is also the biggest M&A deal in India this year -- with US retail giant Walmart announcing acquisition of 77 per cent stake in Flipkart for about USD 16 billion (Rs 1.05 lakh crore). Asked how Flipkart's deal would impact the sector and Amazon.in, Agarwal said "our approach remains the same". "Irrespective of competition, we will continue to focus on our business. We have been doing that for the last five years and have seen phenomenal growth and we will continue to do that. It's Day 1 for us," he said. Interestingly, there were reports that suggested that Amazon had made a bid for Flipkart as well even though neither companies had confirmed the development. Agarwal said Amazon in India will continue to invest in building technology and infrastructure to make its services more accessible for customers, apart from ensuring that its platform is accessible to all. Amazon has been aggressively investing in expanding infrastructure and adding solutions to enhance consumer and seller experience. The US-based company has been pumping funds into its various entities in India, including Amazon Pay, marketplace and wholesale business. These investments have been directed towards building warehouses, strengthening logistics and increasing product assortment. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has committed investments to the tune of USD 5 billion for the Indian market. During a recent investor call, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky had said the company would continue to invest in India as it sees great progress with both sellers and customers here, even though as the US e-tailing giant had registered a loss of USD 622 million from international operations in the first quarter of 2018. Amazon is also investing significant money in marketing and promotions as the company looks to bring more consumers to its online shopping platform. (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 17:00 Hours: FGN32 PM-2NDLD INDONESIA India, Indonesia ties elevated to Comprehensive Strategic PartnershipJakarta: India and Indonesia elevate their bilateral ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and called for freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region as they signed 15 agreements including one on defence cooperation after Prime Minister Narendra Modi held "productive discussions" with President Joko Widodo. FGN24 PM-INDONESIA-MOSQUE Modi, Widodo vist Istiqlal Mosque Jakarta: Prime Minister Narendra Modi pay a visit to Indonesia's grand Istiqlal Mosque, the largest in Southeast Asia, during his first official visit to the country. FGN22 PM-INDONESIA-CHARIOT Modi, Widodo vist Arjuna Chariot statue Jakarta: Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits the Arjuna Wijaya Chariot statue, one of the iconic monuments in the heart of the Indonesian capital Jakarta, during his first official visit to the key East Asian country. FGN20 PM-INDONESIA-TRADE India, Indonesia agree to nearly triple bilateral trade to USD 50 billion Jakarta: India and Indonesia have agreed to double their efforts to boost bilateral trade to USD 50 billion by 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said after holding comprehensive talks with President Joko Widodo. FGN21 PM-INDONESIA-TERRORISM Modi strongly condemns recent terror strikes on churches in Indonesia Jakarta: Prime Minister Narendra Modi strongly condemned the recent terror strikes on three churches in Indonesia and said India stands resolutely with Jakarta in its fight against terrorism. FGN25 PM-INDONESIA-INDOPACIFIC India, Indonesia for rules-based and peaceful Indo-Pacific region Jakarta: India and Indonesia underline the importance of a free, open, transparent, rules-based and peaceful Indo-Pacific region, amidst China flexing its military muscles in the strategic East and South China Seas. FGN37 PM-INDONESIA-ANDAMAN India, Indonesia to set up task force to enhance connectivity between Andaman and Sabang Jakarta: India and Indonesia agree to set up a special task force to enhance connectivity between the strategic Andaman and Nicobar Islands and provinces in Sumatera Island to promote trade, tourism and people-to-people contacts. FGN36 PM-INDONESIA-DIASPORA PM Modi announces 30-day free visa for Indonesian citizens Jakarta: Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 30-day free visa for Indonesian citizens and invited the diaspora to travel to their country of origin to experience the 'New India'. FGN38 RUSSIA-2NDLD JOURNALIST Ukraine blames Russia for murder of anti-Kremlin journalist Kiev: Ukraine said Russia's "totalitarian machine" was behind the murder of anti-Kremlin reporter Arkady Babchenko, prompting furious denials from Moscow. (AFP) FGN34 AFGHAN-2NDLD ATTACK Militants kill one, wound five in attack on interior ministry in Kabul Kabul: Militants launch a gun and bomb attack on the interior ministry in Kabul, killing one policeman and wounding at least five people, days after the Taliban vowed to target the Afghan capital. (AFP) FGN35 BELGIUM-ATTACK-2ND LD INVESTIGATION Belgium shooting rampage was terrorist act, prosecutors say Brussels: The man who killed three people during a knife and shooting rampage through the Belgian city of Liege carried out an act of "terrorist murder," prosecutors said, and authorities were trying to establish whether he acted alone. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) French President Emmanuel Macron will meet with his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau in Ottawa before the G7 summit next week, Trudeau's office announced today. Trudeau is hosting the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States at the June 8-9 summit in La Malbaie, Quebec. On June 6, he will meet with Macron "to discuss ways to work even more closely together on global issues, including strengthening multilateralism, advancing progressive trade, and defending and promoting our shared democratic heritage," his office said in a statement. This will include taking stock of the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which Trudeau said "is already creating economic growth and good, middle class jobs for people on both sides of the Atlantic." The pair also will review matters to be discussed at the summit: gender equality, combating climate change, promoting economic growth for all and advancing peace and security. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Gazprom said today its net profit climbed 11.4 per cent in the first quarter as export volumes to Europe surged to a record level despite increasing tensions over dependence on Russian gas. The state-controlled group said its net profit rose to 371.6 billion rubles (5.1 billion euros, USD 5.9 billion at current exchange rates), beating analyst expectations, thanks to both increases in export volumes and prices. Operating profit jumped 59 per cent from the January through March period last year to 467 billion rubles on an 18 per cent increase in sales to 2.14 trillion rubles. Gazprom historically generates most of its profits from exports to Europe, which climbed by 9 per cent from the first quarter of last year to 71.5 billion cubic metres, the first time they rose above 70 billion cubic metre level. Last year the group exported a record of 194.4 billion cubic metres of gas to Europe and Turkey. Gazprom has in recent years been gaining market share in Europe, accounting for around a third of total consumption there, despite rising political tensions between Russia and the European Union, which has said it wants to reduce its dependency on Russian gas. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Odisha Government has asked the district collectors of Jharsuguda, Bargarh, Sambalpur and Sonepur to take steps for final land settlement of the Hirakud land oustees by June 30. Principal Secretary of Revenue and Disaster Management department, C S Kumar has written a letter to the district collector of Jharsuguda in this regard and forwarded copies of to the collectors of Sambalpur, Bargarh and Sonepur districts for appropriate steps. The matter has to be resolved through field enquiry and concerned officials conducting enquiry shall not exclusively depend on relevant documents, the letter said. More than 200 villages were submerged due to the construction of Hirakud Dam and around 22,000 families were affected, while about 19,000 families were displaced. However, the government provided 287.14 acres homestead and 8468 acres agricultural land to only 2243 families, sources said. No step was taken for rehabilitation of the remaining affected people. In the absence of rehabilitation measures, around 15,000 families started cultivating the unutilised land, acquired for the dam, besides other government land in the periphery of the Hirakud Dam reservoir. The remaining families settled themselves in undivided Sambalpur, Sundergarh and Bolangir districts besides some parts of neighbouring Chhattisgarh, they said. Subsequently, the government provided DC Patta of 2 acres of waste land to each family residing on the periphery of Hirakud Dam Reservoir. The government provided the land, which were acquired for the dam but remained unutilised, to those families on lease for agriculture purpose. However, the government is yet to settle the land provided on lease basis to the displaced families. The people, who had got land on lease in 1959, had been paying land cess till 1990. However, the government issued an order for settlement of those lands in 1990. Subsequently, the lands were transferred to the revenue department from Water Resource Department in 2014 to allot patta to the concerned farmers. But despite the instructions of the government, settlement of those lands is yet to be done. The Principal Secretary stated in his letter that by following the instructions issued way back in 1990, the land should have been settled in favour of awardees by now. "If any issue is still persisting, it is due to the negligence of the concerned officers. Such officials may be identified and proceeded against," he said in his letter. Steps may be taken to complete the task by following instructions given earlier, he said seeking expeditious steps to settle the long pending issue in a time bound manner and report compliance by June 30, 2018. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 23-year-old man from an OBC community in Gujarat's Banaskantha district has alleged that members of the Rajput community forced him to "shave off" his moustache for adding 'Sinh' to his name which was printed on the invitation cards for a function, police said today. Police detained four persons from Godh village in Palanpur taluka of Banaskantha district after a video of the purported incident was circulated on the social media. Complainant Ranjit Thakor, a resident of Manaka village, had alleged that some men from the Rajput community from Godh village abducted him on May 27 evening and forced him to cut his moustache for adding suffix 'Sinh' to his name. In the video, Thakor is purportedly seen apologising to some men at a secluded place and shaving off his moustache using a razor. In the background, some men can be heard purportedly asking Thakor to withdraw all the invitation cards distributed by his family members for a social event scheduled to be held at their residence on June 3. "Looking at the seriousness of the issue, we have detained four persons, including a minor. We will take strict action against those who are trying to create enmity between communities and are circulating such videos," said Superintendent of Police, Banaskantha, Niraj Badgujar. An FIR was registered yesterday against unidentified persons under section 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt), 153 (promoting enmity between communities) and 341 (Punishment for wrongful restraint) of the IPC, said Police Sub Inspector, A Y Patel. Thakor's father Bhikhaji Thakor told PTI that some Rajput men from Godh village had been unhappy since his son's name got printed as 'Ranjitsinh' on the invitation cards for the June 3 function. "Though it is common that men from the Thakor community also use 'Sinh' suffix, some Rajputs from Godh village did not like it when my son's name was printed as 'Ranjitsinh'. That is why they abducted my son and forced him to shave off his moustache on Sunday," he claimed. It is to be noted that a group of Rajputs had clashed with Dalits in in Dholka town in Ahmedabad last week after a Dalit man decided to add the suffix 'Sinh' to his name. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police in various districts of Gujarat have received a fake letter, purportedly from the Election Commission of India, asking for a "discreet inquiry" into an EVM machine "scam." Gandhinagar police today registered a case of forgery against the unidentified sender. "We received the letter on May 25, purportedly from the EC, asking for a "discreet inquiry" into EVM (Electronic Voting Machine) scam and a "confidential report", Gandhinagar Superintendent of Police Virendra Singh Yadav said. "The letter appeared to be fake, and after confirming that with the state election commission, we registered an FIR today," Yadav said. A case under IPC section 465 (forgery) was registered and police were probing who sent the letter, he said. Similar letters were received by police in some other districts too, and the EC has taken note of this, the SP said. The letter received by Gandhinagar police also bore a fake signature of the deputy chief electoral officer of Gujarat. "If there is a problem with EVM machine, then under the confidential police inquiry, you should investigate scam of the EVM machine...You should send us effective report of the EVM machine scam within 30 days anyhow...You have to keep this report completely confidential," the letter read. There were no elections scheduled in Gujarat this month. The letter didn't refer to any particular election, the officer said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Belgian police were investigating today how a gunman on their own watchlist for contacts with Islamist extremists came to launch a brazen suspected terror attack, shooting dead two female officers with their own weapons before killing a bystander. The bloodshed in the eastern industrial city of Liege began around 10:30am local time (0830 GMT) yesterday when the attacker armed with a knife repeatedly stabbed the two policewomen before using their own firearms to kill them. Federal prosecutors said they had launched a terror investigation into the incident and would hold a press conference later today. "The signs are pointing towards a terrorist act," prosecutor spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt told AFP. Amateur footage picked up by AFP showed the gunman shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greatest") as he walked through the streets during the rampage. In another video, a short and intense burst of gunfire is audible, after which the man lies on the ground. "Armed with a knife, the suspect followed and attacked two police officers, and used their own firearms to kill them," prosecutor Philippe Dulieu told a conference. "He continued on foot, attacking a parked vehicle where he opened fire on a 22-year-old man in the passenger seat. The young man died. "He then continued and entered the Leonie de Waha school. He took a woman working there as hostage. Police intervened, he came out firing on the police officers, wounding several before he was killed." Belgium remains on high alert after a string of attacks including twin suicide bombings in Brussels in 2016 claimed by the Islamic State group. A source close to the investigation told AFP that the gunman was on a special police watchlist because of his contacts with radical Islamists. The source named the attacker as Benjamin Herman, born in 1982, saying he had past convictions for robbery, violence and drug dealing. Herman was "already on the run" after committing another murder on Monday night in the town of On, in southern Belgium, the source said, though local prosecutors said they have not yet established a link with the Liege incident. Belgian broadcaster RTBF reported he had been released from prison on Monday. "He is suspected of having been radicalised (in prison)... He has been reported or presumed to be belonging to the entourage of an Islamist recruiter," the source said on condition of anonymity. Liege police chief Christian Beaupere said it was "clear that the assassin's objective was to attack the police". One of the four officers wounded had suffered a serious leg injury, he added. Liege, a major city in Western Europe's former industrial heartland, was the scene of another bloody shootout in 2011 when a former convict killed six people and wounded more than 120. Prime Minister Charles Michel denounced what he called the "cowardly and blind violence" of yesterday's attack. "All our support for the victims and their loved ones. We are following the situation with the security services and the crisis centre," Michel tweeted. There was support from other European countries, with French President Emmanuel Macron condemning the "terrible attack" and expressing the "solidarity of the French people". British Prime Minister Theresa May said the UK "stands resolute with our Belgian allies against terror". A major security cordon was set up around the area, while panicked parents came to collect their children from the school complex. The governor of Liege province said all the children and staff were safe and unhurt. "All the children are fine, those of the primary and kindergarten saw nothing, they were evacuated through the back of the school," Julie Fernandez, mother of a seven-year-old at the school, told AFP. "They were cared for by staff and psychologists and high school students were cared for in a nearby park," added Fernandez, who is also an MP. Belgium has been on high alert since authorities in January 2015 smashed a terror cell in the town of Verviers that was planning an attack on police. The cell also had links to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the November 2015 Islamic State attacks on Paris that killed 130 people. Belgium further raised its terror alert level after the Paris attack and placed the capital Brussels on lockdown for a week. IS suicide attacks then targeted Brussels airport and a metro station, which killed 32 people in March 2016. In August that same year, a machete-wielding man shouting "Allahu Akbar" attacked two policewomen in the industrial town of Charleroi before being shot dead. The country's law enforcement agencies and intelligence services came under intense scrutiny for apparently missing a series of leads after the Paris attacks that could have led to the Brussels bombers. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Haryana Cabinet today approved a proposal to set up the Haryana State Commission for Scheduled Castes (HSCSC) to "leave no scope for any atrocity" on members of the community. The HSCSC to be constituted would investigate and examine the working of various safeguards provided in the Constitution or under any other law for the time being in force or under any order of the government for the welfare and protection of the scheduled castes, said an official release. The commission would inquire into specific complaints with respect to the deprivation of rights and safeguard the scheduled castes (SCs), and also take up such matters with appropriate authorities. It would participate and advise on the planning process of socio-economic development of the SCs and evaluate the progress of their development. Besides, the commission would make recommendations on the measures to be taken by the government to ensure effective implementation of safeguards and other measures for the protection, welfare and socio-economic development of SCs, and report to the government annually, the release said. It would discharge functions in relation to the protection, welfare, development and advancement of the SCs, it said The commission would consist of a chairman and four non-official members. It will also have a member-secretary who is or has been an officer of the government, not below the rank of special secretary. Meanwhile, Haryana Cabinet also decided to amend the Haryana Excise and Taxation Department (Group B) Service Rules,1988, Service Rules of Group C of Excise and Taxation Department and Excise and Taxation Commissioner's Office (Group D) Service Rules, 2008 for raising the upper age limit for entry into government service. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The lenders of Binani Cement have issued letter of intent to UltraTech after approving its bid to acquire the company under the bankruptcy code, Aditya Birla group firm said today. The Committee of Creditors (CoC) of Binani Cement on May 28 approved the resolution Plan submitted by UltraTech Cement, it said in a regulatory filing. The company said that the CoC "has today issued a letter of intent to the Company for acquisition of Binani Cement". According to sources, the CoC of Binani Cement had voted in favour of UltraTech Cement's Rs 7,960-crore offer. The race to acquire Binani was bitterly contested between two resolution applicants - UltraTech and Dalmia Bharat group. The CoC had earlier approved the bid of Dalmia Bharat Group. However, the Kolkata Bench of the National Company Law Tribunal had turned it down asking to consider UltraTech offer, which was higher. According to UltraTech, the "acquisition provides the company access to large reserves of high quality limestone." It said: "The acquisition increases the Company's presence in the highly competitive and fast growing Northern and Western markets in the country." Binai Cement has a capacity of 6.25 million tonne per annum (MTPA) in Rajasthan comprising an integrated cement unit with capacity of 4.85 MTPA and a split grinding unit with capacity of 1.4 MTPA. In addition, BCL subsidiaries operate 2 MTPA grinding unit in UAE, 3 MTPA clinker unit and 0.5 MTPA grinding unit in China, UltraTech said. "As the Company has already received the CCI approval, the resolution plan is now subject to the approval by NCLT," UltraTech further informed. Binani's acquisition would also provide UltraTech access to large reserves of high quality limestone. "The Company is confident of turning around the operations of Binani Cement, which will benefit all the stakeholders of BCL and result in synergies from optimisation of costs and improved realizations," it said. It would also "infuse the required financial stability and resources" in Binani Cements. On May 20, UltraTech announced to merge the cement business of BK Birla Group company Century Textiles and Industries through a share swap deal. "Upon consummation of this transaction, the Company's cement capacity will stand augmented to 116.15 MTPA including the recently announced acquisition of cement units of Century Textiles & Industries Ltd," said UltraTech. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi High Court today asked the AAP government and the Delhi Transport Corporation to state on an affidavit the time they would take to ensure that the fleet of buses as well as bus stops in the national capital are disabled friendly. A bench, comprising Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar, also asked the government to submit a time line, on an affidavit, on necessary repairs and renovation of the roads in rural Delhi to ensure plying of disabled-friendly low floor buses. The court said that once the affidavits as directed by it are filed, it might consider allowing the Delhi government to go ahead with its tender process to procure 2,000 standard floor buses (SFBs). The Delhi government told the court that the SFBs would ply in rural areas as the roads there are not good to allow operating of low floor buses (LFBs). The court asked for the timelines from the Delhi government while hearing two PILs moved by Nipun Malhotra, who suffers from a locomotor disability, challenging the tenders for SFBs. Advocate Jai Dehadrai, appearing for Malhotra, told the bench that disabled people live in rural areas as well and permitting procurement of SFBs would exclude them from access to public transport. He said such a move would be unconstitutional. The lawyer also said that the Delhi government cannot take the stand that SFBs are required as the roads in rural areas are bad. The bench also said that presently, even with LFBs, the bus stops are not equipped to allow disabled persons, especially those on wheelchairs. It said it will ensure that in the long run everything that was not disabled friendly was phased out. The court directed the Delhi government and the DTC to file the time lines by June 1, the next date of hearing. In his first PIL, Malhotra challenged the Delhi government's decision of last year to procure 2,000 SFBs at a cost of Rs 300 crore. Thereafter, he moved a second PIL against a second tender floated in March this year by the DTC and the Delhi government to procure 1,000 SFBs. In his fresh plea, he has contended that the authorities have "completely failed to take into account the issues which would be faced by the disabled and elderly population, when it comes to basic access to public transport". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi High Court today refrained from staying an order restraining web portal Cobrapost from making public a documentary alleging that various media houses have indulged in unethical practices like paid The bench sought the response of Dainik Bhaskar Corporation Ltd on the plea of the portal and a journalist, seeking to set aside the May 24 order of single judge of the high court and, as an interim measure, staying the order. The court said staying the order of single judge of the high court would mean that the portal could release the documentary after which nothing would remain in the matter. "Passing an interim order after staying the impugned order of the single judge would have an effect of unsuiting. You will publish and nothing will remain in the matter," the bench said. The single judge's order had come on a plea by Dainik Bhaskar seeking to restrain Cobrapost, operated by non-profit organisation Forum for Media and Literature, from releasing its documentary, titled 'operating 136: Part II'. Senior advocate Raju Ramachandran, appearing for Cobrapost, said it was a matter of freedom of speech and the single judge had granted ex-parte injunction and stayed the documentary mechanically. The senior counsel, along with advocate Pramod Kumar Dubey, said the single judge's order was passed without application of mind. Senior advocate Sajan Poovayya, representing Dainik Bhaskar, contended that there has been no instance that the group had indulged in publishing paid The portal cannot do a sting and go to the public making allegations against Dainik Bhaskar. "We moved the single judge to restrain them (Cobrapost) from saying that Dainik Bhaskar is indulging in paid news," he said. While perusing the single judge's order, the division bench said there was no reference to the law governing anticipating injury, especially when it concerned the freedom of press. When the portal's counsel insisted on staying the earlier order, the bench said "If we hear it after issuing notice, what prejudice will be caused to you? We have to examine the law when it comes to injunction." Initially, the matter was listed before a bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and C Hari Shankar and when it came up for hearing, Justice Mittal recused herself. Thereafter, the petition was listed before the bench headed by Justice Mridul which listed it for further hearing on July 3. Dainik Bhaskar had earlier argued that if released, the documentary would cause irreparable loss and injury to its reputation. The portal had, however, released the documentary, but without any reference to Dainik Bhaskar. The single judge had issued summons to the Forum for Media and Literature and others and is expected to hear the matter next on July 4. Cobrapost had carried a story titled Operation 136: Part I on 17 media houses and alleged malpractices, including indulgence in paid news, peddling of communal agenda and acceptance of black currency. It was released on March 26. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Haryana Cabinet today decided to transfer over 400 acres of land of shut tractor unit HMT Limited at Pinjore to the state government. Land measuring 446 acres out of total 846.43 acres of HMT, Pinjore (Tractor Division) will be transferred back to the state government at the agreed rates, and will be handed over to Haryana State Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (HSIIDC) for setting up of Industrial estate in view of its strategic location. A decision to this effect was taken in the meeting of the state cabinet which met under the Chairmanship of Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar here today, as per official release here. The HSIIDC will be responsible for the management of this estate including upgradation and maintenance of all services to the allottees of Industrial plots on this land. The Union Cabinet had approved the sale of land not currently in use at HMT Ltd, Pinjore unit to the Haryana government on mutually agreed terms and compensation in October 2016. In line with approval of Union Cabinet, HMT agreed to hand over physical possession of unused land of 446 acres to Haryana government. The HSIIDC will pay compensation to HMT at the prevailing circle rate for the utilisable land measuring 297 acres, which averages to Rs 62.54 lakh per acre and at the rate of 60 per cent of the average rate for the remaining 149 acres of land. The 33.33 acres of land of HMT required by the Railways for its ChandigarhBaddi railway line project is part of the above 446 acres of land and the transfer of the same to Railways has been agreed (in-principle) by both HMT and Haryana government, the release said. The payment modalities of compensation to HMT for the land required by Railways will be mutually worked out amongst Railways, HMT and the Haryana government. HSIIDC will pay the compensation for the balance land of 412.67 acres to HMT. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Indian Air Force (IAF), through its 'Bambi Bucket' operation helped in containing a major fire which broke out in a rubber godown in south Delhi's Malviya Nagar area, an official statement said today. Cooling operations are underway at the factory. A dense plume of smoke billowed from a truck and a godown in Khirki Extension area last night, causing panic among locals. The city police has arrested Sanjay Saini, owner of the godown, in the incident. "Around midnight, a request was received at HQ Western Air Command for containing a fire at Malviya Nagar. A MLH class helicopter airborne from Sarsawa did a recce and landed at Palam. Thereafter, the helicopter got airborne with bambi bucket to contain the fire," the statement by the IAF said. The helicopter filled water from Yamuna reservoir and poured it over the site. "This had to be repeated thrice to contain the fire. This was the first time the bambi bucket operation was done in an urban situation wherein the nitty gritties of drop are very precise, owing to high rises around and chances of collateral damage," the statement said. The operations picked up this morning wherein a helicopter flown by Wing Commander Pradeep Bhola of the Mighty Armours assisted in dousing the fire, the IAF said. Approximately 8,000 litres of water have been used in the operation. So far, 65 fire tenders have been used to contain the blaze, the police said, adding 13 buildings, a school and a gym have been evacuated for safety reasons. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Indian Air Force (IAF) has carried out twin "bambi bucket" operations in Mata Vaishnodevi hills in Jammu and Kashmir and Pathankot hills of Punjab to douse major fires, an official said today. "A major forest fire broke out in the hills of Mata Vaishnodevi shrine (in Katra in Reasi district) from May 23, which halted the yatra. More than 20,000 pilgrims were stuck at various places along the track due to major fire", Defence Spokesman Col N N Joshi said. Air Force Station Udhampur was requested by the civil administration to contain the situation and secure life and property, he said adding that helicopters based at Air Force Station Udhampur were immediately pressed into action. "The helicopters were equipped with under slung water buckets which can carry water up to 4,500 litres. In aviation terminology, these are known as bambi buckets", he said. A bambi bucket is essentially a collapsible bucket utilizing a pilot control valve that can deliver a concentrated column of water from the helicopter to the fire, he added. The development of bambi bucket has been a breakthrough development after feedback from helicopter operators and forest and land management agencies. The spokesman said that two helicopters were immediately launched for humanitarian operations at shrine hill and helicopters collected the water from Chenab river near Reasi and precise drop was carried at new track between Ardh Kunwari & Bhavan. It was a daunting task keeping in mind the high ridges of Trikuta hill, high tension cables and challenging terrains, he said. The operations at Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine was started on May 23 and continued till May 27. On May 28, another fire engulfed the Garh Mata Mandir in Pathankot in Punjab, posing a major threat to life of pilgrims and nearby habitants, the spokesman said. On request of the district administration Pathankot, Air Force Station Udhampur responded and launched another helicopter operation equipped with Bambi bucket, the spokesman said. As there were no standard helipads near the water body, the helicopter had to operate from remote location near Ranjit Sagar of Thein dam. The continuous operations by helicopter crews resulted in controlling of forest fire at the pilgrimage, he added. The operations towards containing fire at Garh Mata Mandir started on May 27 and was completed by May 28. A total of 10 sorties were flown towards containing the fire, he added. "Such operations are high risk operations considering challenging terrains, steep ridges, obstruction posed by high tension cables, poor visibility due to excessive smoke and turbulence", he said. The spokesman said that effective co-ordination between Air Force Station Udhampur and civil administration both at Katra and Pathankot led to swift response from the Indian Air Force towards containment of fire within a short time. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Pentagon is renaming its oldest and largest military command to reflect the growing importance of the Indian Ocean in US strategic thinking, Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said today. From now on, the storied US Pacific Command, or PACOM, which was formed after World War II, will be known as the Indo-Pacific Command. The name change is largely symbolic for now, and won't immediately result in any shifts in the command's boundaries or assets across the vast area stretching from the western part of India to America's Pacific coastline. "In recognition of the increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, today we rename the US Pacific Command to US Indo-Pacific Command," Mattis said in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. "Over many decades this command has repeatedly adapted to changing circumstance and today carries that legacy forward as America focuses west." The name change is part of Washington's efforts to counter China's growing influence across the Asia-Pacific domain, even though critics say President Donald Trump has ceded considerable regional leadership. Trump has pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreed in 2015 by a dozen nations that accounted for 40 per cent of the global economy. The remaining 11 countries are moving forward with the deal without Washington, leaving America with a diminished say on regional trade rules and creating an opening for Beijing. Recent years have seen China emerge as a major regional power. In 2017, it opened its first overseas naval base in Djibouti and has strengthened ties with several regional countries including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. And Beijing is pursuing its "Belt and Road" global infrastructure initiative that invests in Southeast Asian countries but which US critics say is based on "predatory" economics. "The Indo-Pacific has many belts and many roads," Mattis said. "America continues to invest vigorously in Indo-Pacific stability, bolstering the free and open rules-based international order." Mattis was in Hawaii for a ceremony marking the departure of Admiral Harry Harris as PACOM's head. He has been nominated to be ambassador to South Korea and is being replaced by Admiral Philip Davidson. Mattis in February unveiled the US National Defense Strategy which made clear America will focus on Asia in the context of China's growing military might. China "seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future," Mattis wrote. Pentagon officials say the command's new name also recognises India's growing role in providing regional security and forces military thinkers to consider the broader region. The Pentagon chief visited India in September in an effort to further strengthen growing military ties, saying at the time that the world's largest democracy is "clearly a pillar of regional stability and security." In 2016 the US designated India a "Major Defence Partner" with the aim of improving military cooperation, increasing information-sharing and cutting red tape to ease defense deals. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Indonesia today stressed the importance of a free, open, transparent, rules-based and peaceful Indo-Pacific region, amidst China flexing its military muscles in the strategic East and South China seas. Noting that both India and Indonesia are maritime neighbours and sea faring nations, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo issued the Shared Vision of the two countries on Maritime Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. The document, the first with any ASEAN country, outlines areas of maritime cooperation and envisages security architecture in the Indo-Pacific region, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said. The document, issued after the bilateral talks between Modi and Widodo reiterated the importance of achieving a "free, open, transparent, rules-based, peaceful, prosperous and inclusive Indo-Pacific region, where sovereignty and territorial integrity, international law, in particular UNCLOS, freedom of navigation and overflight, sustainable development and an open, free, fair and mutually beneficial trade and investment system are respected". The release of the document comes at a time when China is engaged in hotly contested territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas. Beijing has also made substantial progress in militarising its manmade islands in the past few years, which it says it has the right to defend. China claims sovereignty over all of the South China Sea. But Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei and Taiwan have counter claims. In the East China Sea, Beijing has territorial disputes with Japan. The South China Sea and the East China Sea are stated to be rich in minerals, oil and other natural resources. They are also vital to global trade. Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo said they were keen to strengthen bilateral maritime cooperation for promotion of peace, stability and bringing in robust economic growth and prosperity to the Indo-Pacific region. Noting that with a coastline of 7,500 kms, India occupies a central position in the Indo-Pacific, while Indonesia as the largest archipelagic State in the world, with a coastline of 108,000 kms, is a fulcrum that connects the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. The two oceans represent a combined maritime region which is important for global maritime trade and commerce, the document said. It highlighted the importance to adhering to the rights and obligations under the international law including the Charter of the United Nations, the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS) and the 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC). India and Indonesia have also acknowledged the need to maintain maritime safety and security for peace, stability and sustainable economic growth and development in the maritime waters of the Indo-Pacific region as enshrined by UNCLOS and relevant international laws. It noted that free and open seas, as regulated by UNCLOS, are essential for peace, stability and prosperity of the region and the international community. The reference to the UNCLOS is considered significant since the Philippines had dragged China to the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague in 2016 over their territorial disputes in the South China Sea. The PCA ruling had invalidated Beijing's claims in the South China Sea and upheld the Philippines' sovereign rights to exploit resources in vast stretches of waters off its western coast. An angry China had dismissed the PCA ruling as a "piece of waste paper". The shared vision document also highlighted the importance to address the emerging maritime security issues facing the Indo-Pacific region including the smuggling of people, arms, drugs and money; illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing; and the movement of terrorists. It recognised the importance of the blue economy as a driver of inclusive and sustainable economic growth and development in the region. The document said both sides have agreed to encourage greater flow of goods, services, investment and technology between the two countries and the region to further develop their economies sustainably. The two countries also agreed to combat climate change and ensure protection of and natural resources. They also agreed to combat marine plastic debris through bilateral and regional cooperation. India and Indonesia have decided to expand cooperation in disaster risk management, especially aid to victims of disasters. The two countries agreed to boost the existing naval cooperation including the bilateral Coordinated Patrols initiated in 2002 between the Navies of the two countries and commencement of regular bilateral naval exercises. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A joint military exercise between India and Nepal began at Pithoragarh today with soldiers from both the countries sharing their experiences of counter insurgency and counter terrorist operations. The military exercise, which is set to conclude of June 12, is called 'Surya Kiran' and is conducted alternatively in India and Nepal every six months. Notably, Surya Kiran with Nepal is India's largest military exercise in terms of troop participation, a release from central command headquarters (Lucknow) said. Over 300 soldiers from both the countries are taking part in the exercise, the release added. According to the official release, the aim of this exercise is to conduct battalion level joint training with emphasis on counter terrorism operations in mountainous terrain. The joint military exercise will enhance the level of defence cooperation between the two neighbours which will further strengthen bilateral relations, it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hundreds of highly-skilled Indian professionals are calling on the UK government to restore their right to work and other benefits until an ongoing review into their pending visa applications is completed. The UK Home Office had announced the review earlier this month after it emerged that around 1,000 doctors, lawyers, engineers and entrepreneurs from countries outside the European Union (EU) on a Tier 1 (General) visa were being denied residency rights over reportedly minor, legally acceptable corrections in their tax returns. In a letter to the House of Commons' Home Affairs Select Committee last week, UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid confirmed that cases "falling foul" of the so-called Clause 322(5) of the UK Immigration Act which pertains to an applicant's "character and conduct" have been put on hold until the review is completed. "We urge the home secretary to restore the work rights and access to health benefits of the applicants affected by this crisis while they await the outcome of the review. They have been undergoing immense hardship, which needs to be addressed urgently, said Aditi Bhardwaj, the coordinator of the Highly Skilled Migrants group. Javid's letter reveals that between January 2015 and December 2017, 238 applicants challenged the Home Office refusal of an application for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) in the Tier 1 (General) category in the UK courts through a judicial review, of which 189 were against a refusal on 322(5) grounds. These migrants, most of whom are from Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds, lose their right to work and access to state-funded healthcare while their application is pending. "Those who have lost their ILR must have it restored and the government must compensate those who have lost their jobs and livelihood and been reduced to destitution, said Lord Dick Taverne, a Liberal Democrat peer in the House of Lords who has been leading a parliamentary campaign in favour of professionals affected by the issue. He described the Home Office review into the cases, expected to be completed by next week, as a great victory for justice, adding that it should mark an end to the hostile climate for immigrants in Britain. In Sajid Javid's letter dated May 25, the minister also reveals that his department has identified 19 individuals who were refused ILR and subsequently made voluntary departures from the UK. One of them has since been issued with a visa to return to the UK, having applied under a different provision of the UK's immigration rules. "This is just the tip of the iceberg as we are certain there are more than 19 people who have been forced to leave due to these unfair refusals by the Home Office. We hope the review will highlight the true nature of this scandal, said Bhardwaj, whose group has been working with legal experts and politicians to help these professionals and their families. Besides a series of protests outside the UK Parliament, the group succeeded in collecting over 32,000 signatures on an online petition demanding the Home Office uses Clause 322(5) for what it was designed to do, protect us from terrorists, not deport our doctors, teachers, scientists and lawyers. The crisis involves migrants from outside the EU who were entitled to apply for ILR or permanent residency status after a minimum of five years' lawful residency in the UK. While the Tier 1 (General) visa they used was discontinued in 2011, former applicants were eligible to apply for ILR until April this year if they made up the required number of points on their application. However, legal experts noted a pattern of many such applications being turned down by Home Office caseworkers citing Clause 322(5) of the UK Immigration Act, a discretionary rule aimed at denying convicted criminals and terrorists the right to live in the UK. The Home Office questioned the good character of these professionals over apparent differences in their declared earnings to the UK tax department and the Home Office, resulting in hundreds facing potential deportation unless their appeals are accepted. "We've heard of a series of cases of highly skilled workers, employed in our public services and senior jobs legally for many years, now being told to leave apparently due to minor tax errors. So, it is welcome that the Home Secretary is now reviewing all those cases and putting decisions on hold, said Labour party MP Yvette Cooper, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee. The influential parliamentary committee has been conducting an investigation into wider systemic issues in the UK Home Office ever since the Windrush scandal of Caribbean immigrants being wrongfully deported from the UK emerged last month. A review into the specific HMRC [Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs] related Tier 1 issue is ongoing, a UK Home Office spokesperson said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The decision of India and Pakistan to fully implement the 2003 ceasefire and stop cross-border firing has generated hope among the border villagers here who have been bearing the brunt of fierce shelling repeatedly. The optimism, though, is tinged with wariness as promises of peace have often not lasted. The border residents are again returning to their homes after getting displaced due to intense Pakistani shelling for nine days from the middle of this month. We welcome any initiative aimed at ensuring peace along the borders. People are leaving the relief camps and returning to their homes after the DGMOs of the two countries agreed to maintain the ceasefire, Yashpal, sarpanch of Deba village of Abdullian sector, told PTI. Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) of India and Pakistan yesterday agreed to "fully implement" the ceasefire pact of 2003 in "letter and spirit" and to stop cross border firings. The two military commanders reviewed the prevailing situation along the LoC and the international border in Jammu and Kashmir during a conversation over the hotline at6 PM, the Indian Army said. The special hotline contact was initiated by the Pakistani DGMO. Following the conversation between Indian DGMO Lt Gen Anil Chauhan and Pakistan's Maj Gen Sahir Shamshad Mirza, the two armies issued identical statements saying both sides agreed to fully implement the 15-year-old ceasefire understanding. Yashpal, however, says that this was not for the first time that India and Pakistan are speaking to honour the 2003 ceasefire agreement. Pakistan has always violated the agreement and we do not have any faith in it, the village head said. Some people of the village who were reluctant to go back to their homes and were still housed at the relief camps, returned last night after getting information about the DGMOs telephonic talk and the decision to maintain ceasefire along the borders, he said. Sarpanch of Chandu Chak village, Bachan Lal, said this was the second time this year the people of the border villages were forced to flee their homes. The first migration took place in January itself and we returned after DGMOs of the two countries spoke to each other and it was followed by flag meetings between the security forces on the either side. However, after a lull of several months, we were again in the relief camps, he said. It has become a routine to migrate to safer places three to four times a year, rued Lal. We want a permanent solution to this problem. We pray that the two countries uphold the agreement in true spirit, he added. Referring to the recent Pakistani shelling that left 12 people dead and scores injured, Lal said three of those killed were natives of his panchayat area. What was their fault? They were in their homes. At least 25 mortar shells hit houses in my area," he said. There is nothing more precious than peace, Lal said. Poor people from both sides are suffering. Meagre compensation of Rs one lakh and a job or five lakhs for human life and Rs 30,000 for an animal is all that is given. Motor companies are not entertaining the claims for damage to vehicles and the government also does not cover the damage of the vehicles under any scheme, he said. Lal says he raised these issues with Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on one of her recent visits. The villahe head said the border residents have faced Pakistani shelling for the past over two decades. Besides the risk to our lives, the education of our children is getting affected along with farming and other business activities, he said. Pawan Raina of Suchetgarh said nobody can imagine the plight of border residents during the times of ceasefire violations. Over the past several years, the situation had worsened, he said supporting the peace initiatives between the two countries. Veena, 28, who works as a saleswoman at a cosmetic shop here to help her family of five comprising parents, a sister and a brother, said they returned to their house yesterday after spending nearly a week in the relief camp at the ITI campus. We have a 'kutcha' house and have no option but to run for the safety during Pakistan shelling, she said pleading for permanent peace along the border. She demanded early construction of underground bunkers for each family and a scheme to transform their 'kutcha' houses into 'pucca houses'. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Israel today approved construction of 1,958 new settler homes in the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now told AFP. It was fewer than the 2,500 for which Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said last week he intended to seek approval. It was the first tranche of settlement approvals since the controversial US embassy transfer to Jerusalem on May 14, a move that infuriated Palestinians and intensified protests on the Gaza border, with at least 61 Palestinians killed in clashes with Israeli forces that day. Peace Now said that in Wednesday's batch, around 700 units got final approval while the remainder passed the first approval stage in the planning process. It said that the majority were in isolated settlements outside the major "blocs" which the government will seek to retain in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians. Israel's West Bank settlements are considered illegal under international law and are bitterly opposed by Palestinians. Peace Now said in a statement that there had been a leap in settlement-building during US President Donald Trump's term so far, with about 14,000 approvals. That, it added, "is more than three times the amount that was approved in the year and a half before his inauguration (4,476 units). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Israel today denied having reached a ceasefire deal with Hamas, a day after it retaliated against the heaviest barrage of rocket and mortar attacks from the Gaza Strip, run by the Islamist movement. In the the worst flare-up since a 2014 war, Israel claimed over 110 rockets and mortars were fired into its territory throughout the day yesterday, a number of which were intercepted by its air defence systems, forcing thousands of people take cover in shelter houses. In retaliation, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) targeted more than 60 military targets in the Gaza Strip. According to the military, three Israeli soldiers were injured in the attack. There were no immediate reports of casualties in Gaza. Senior Israeli ministers denied that a ceasefire had been reached with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but security sources maintained that calm will prevail if attacks from Gaza come to a halt. "There is no ceasefire," Israel's Intelligence Minister Israel Katz told Israel Radio adding, "Israel maintains a clear policy not to allow fire and terror attacks against Israel." Palestinian militant factions in the Gaza Strip this morning said that they were committed to a truce with Israel that was reached following extensive mediation efforts by Egypt. "Israel does not want the situation to deteriorate, but those who started the violence must stop it," Katz, a member of the Israeli security cabinet, told the Radio. "Israel will make (Hamas) pay for all fire against Israel," he said, responding to the remarks by deputy Hamas leader, Khalil al-Hayya, who had earlier announced that a "consensus" had been reached in the Strip to "return to the understandings of the ceasefire" during the night. "This is an escalation, and we will not allow the continued firing at us...everything depends on Hamas now: If they continue, I do not know what their fate will be, he warned. In a statement, reported by Arab media, Hayya claimed that "the resistance succeeded in repelling the aggression and prevented the changing of rules," adding that there had been many mediation interventions in the previous hours. He said that Hamas and other "resistance factions" were committed to the ceasefire as long as Israel, too, was committed to it. Islamic Jihad, which fired many of the mortars at Israel, also said that it was committed to a ceasefire along the same terms reached following the 2014 Gaza War, known in Israel as Operation Protective Edge. The Intelligence Minister claimed "an Iranian fingerprint on Hamas and Hezbollah." Israel's Education Minister Naftali Bennett also denied reports of a ceasefire. "We have reached no such understanding, not even an informal one," Bennett, also a member of the Security Cabinet, told the Army Radio. Israeli Energy Minister, Yuval Steinitz, however said that there was an "understanding" in place between Israel and Hamas. "I believe there is an indirect understanding with Hamas to end the current round of violence," he said. A reported ceasefire was set to start at midnight last night but that deadline passed with no signs of a truce as dozens of rockets and mortar shells continued to rain down on Israel. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli snipers amid protests which saw thousands of Palestinians mass on the border in support of the declared right of Palestinian refugees to return to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel. Israel said its snipers had opened fire on attackers or people attempting to infiltrate under cover of protests, but UN and human right officials have accused Israel of using disproportionate force. "Hamas and Islamic Jihad have already paid a heavy price and the bill has just been presented to them", Israel's ultra-nationalist Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Israel said today it had struck 25 more Hamas "military targets" in air raids in the Gaza Strip overnight in response to rocket and mortar fire, part of the worst military flare-up since a 2014 war. Targets included drone sheds, a rocket-making workshop and "military compounds," a military statement said. Israel had said yesterday it hit more than 35 militant targets in the Palestinian enclave after a barrage of rocket and mortar fire from Hamas, the Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, and Islamic Jihad. It said late yesterday about 70 rockets and mortars had been fired at Israel throughout the day. A number of them were intercepted by air defence systems. Three Israeli soldiers were wounded. There were no immediate reports of casualties in Gaza. Sirens and explosions continued into the night after yesterday's eruption. Late yesterday, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad said a ceasefire agreement had been reached to restore calm, though the Israeli army declined to comment. In a rare joint statement, Hamas and Islamic Jihad declared shared responsibility for the rocket and mortar fire, saying it was in retaliation for Israeli attacks targeting their positions. The exchange of fire comes after weeks of deadly protests and clashes along the Gaza-Israel border. Three members of Islamic Jihad were killed in an Israeli strike on Sunday. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Israel's military said today it had struck 25 more Hamas "military targets" in air raids in the Gaza Strip overnight in response to rocket and mortar fire, part of the worst military flare-up since a 2014 war. Israel had said yesterday it hit more than 35 militant targets in the Palestinian enclave after a barrage of rocket and mortar fire from Hamas, the Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, and Islamic Jihad. It said late yesterday about 70 rockets and mortars had been fired at Israel throughout the day. A number of them were inter-cepted by air defence systems. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Jet Airways has grounded four of its crew members, including a senior commander, for allegedly clicking selfies during a training flight on April 19 and violating aviation safety norms, airline sources said today. However, an airline spokesperson said that an internal investigation was being conducted into the issue and the crew was aiding in the probe. "Acting in the interest of guest safety, Jet Airways has placed four crew members off their scheduled duties. The crew members are aiding an internal investigation being conducted by the airline in connection with certain events aboard training flight of April 19," he said. "At Jet Airways, safety is of paramount interest," the spokesperson said. The airline sources said the incident took place during a training flight from Leh to Delhi. The crew -- a senior commander and a three trainee pilots -- were allegedly clicking selfies during the course of the flight, they said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram today blamed the judiciary and the government for not elevating Justice KM Joseph to the Supreme Court. "At the moment the blame lies with the judiciary. Having decided to reiterate the elevation, they have deferred their decision. It is bizarre to defer the reiteration," the former finance minister said, when asked who is to be blamed for not elevating Justice Joseph. "The government in general is to be blamed for it," he was quick to add. The issue has been a bone of contention and the centre of a row between the government and the judiciary. Chidambaram also alleged that the government was "profiling" the candidates for being appointed as judges. "They are looking at aspects beyond a person's legal competence to be a judge. That is wrong," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala today engaged in a war of words over the recent alleged honour killing of a 23-year-old man in Kottayam. "Chennithala is known for speaking nonsense," Vijayan shot back when asked by reporters here about the Congress leader's demand that Vijayan should quit as chief minister and the Home portfolio in the wake of the killing. "Do not make me to talk more (on the matter)," he said. The senior congress leader had earlier demanded Vijayan's resignation and said if he had any obligation towards the people, he should resign. Reacting to Vijayan's outburst, Chennithala said "the chief minister is making it clear with each passing day that he was not fit to sit in the chair. CM is attacking the Opposition to hide his own inefficiency," said Chennithala, who had held the Home portfolio in the previous Congress-led UDF government headed by Oommen Chandy. "The chief minister is trying to 'trivalise' matters. If there are lapses, he must own it up, but the CM is attacking the media and opposition when the lapses were being pointed out," he said. 23-year old Kevin P Joseph, a Dalit Christian, was abducted on May 27 by a gang allegedly engaged by his fiancee's family. His body was found in a river in Kollam district a day later. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Anguished over the recent fatal attack of a man in Kerala, Governor P Sathasivam today asked people to be on guard against intolerance raising its 'ugly head' in the form of honour killing. "We as a progressive society, must also be on our guard against intolerance raising its ugly head in the form of honor killing, which was not heard of in our state", he said. Kevin Joseph, a Dalit Christian, was abducted on May 27 in Kottayam by a gang allegedly engaged by his fiancee's family. His body was found in a river in Kollam district a day later. "The killing of the man is a warning for all of us to think deeply about the degeneration of our own mindset", Sathasivam said in his validictory address at the second anniversary celebrations of the CPI(M)-led LDF government. The Governor said that even amidst so many enviable examples of amity, one is often disturbed by instances of political unrest and hatred, resulting in bloodshed in some districts and some parts of the state. True welfare also lies in peoples' right to live happily and without fear, he said, adding that the unending saga of political murders and clashes should remind people to be more vigilant "in preventing political differences rotting to murderous hatred'. There is a need to transmit the Gandhian principles of tolerance, non-violence and humanism among the young generation, who in future would become the flag holders of Gandhian philosophy in the state and the country, he said. "Let us hope that Kerala will be enriched by creative ideas that compete to make our state the most advanced, peaceful and peace loving society in the world'. The progressive steps, coupled with a stronger vigilance in ensuring social amity, would certainly take the state closer to 'Navakeralam' (a new Kerala) very soon, he added. The Governor said various political parties have been vigilant in responding to each and every issue, vigorously suggesting remedial measures and demanding action in the true spirit of democracy. He hoped this democratic tradition "would add strength to our governments and make Kerala a better and preferred place to live". Sathasivam said Kerala is noted for many progressive steps which transformed the state's social fabric. The Land Reforms Act, the leap in education,minimum wages for labourers and protection to trade union rights had made Kerala a model for other states to follow, he said. The present government has sought to rebuild the state as one of the most advanced societies in the world through the Navakeralam Mission, Sathasivam said. This Mission, clubbed with flagship schemes and central sector schemes focusing on education, agriculture and environment, housing and health, has started showing positive results, slowly building a model in each of the areas it covers, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Saving farmers is the priority of his government, Karnataka Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy said today, as he promised to honour his commitment to waive farm loans within 15 days and insisted there was "no going back" on it. Kumaraswamy, under attack from the BJP over the alleged delay in fulfilling his pre-poll assurance to the farming community, met representatives of farmers groups and progressive peasants to discuss the problems faced by them. "We will come to a decision in 15 days. In 15 days, it will get completely implemented....Whatever may be the difficulty, our governmentis committed to maintaining fiscal discipline, and also saving you (farmers)," Kumaraswamy told the meeting after listening to farmers for about three hours. Kumaraswamy said he and Deputy Chief Minister G Parameshwara will discuss the issue with Congress president Rahul Gandhi. The chief minister said Gandhi was also committed to farm loan waiver. "I'm getting it (the loan amount) calculated, whatever thousand crore rupees it is....saving you is our government's responsibility," he told the gathering. The meeting was attended by Parameshwara, deputy leader of opposition in the AssemblyGovinda Karajola (BJP), and senior officials of the stategovernment. Kumaraswamy also said he would call a meeting of representatives of nationalised banks in 2-3 days and seek information about farm loans extended by them. In the run up to the Assembly polls, The JD(S) leader had promised to write off agricultural loans totalling a whopping Rs 53,000 crore within 24 hours of coming to power. The BJP has been targeting him over the "delay" in keeping that promise, and had called a statewide bandh on Monday which evoked a lukewarm response. The chief minister had recently said he would retire from if he failed to honour the promise, and asked farmers not to "fall prey to the BJP conspiracy". But before doing that, he had said, since he was heading a coalition government, he would have to consult the alliance partner and take into account the financial condition of the state. Leader of the Opposition B S Yeddyurappa had on Monday threatened action against the state government if it failed to write off farm loans within a week. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Life in the city slowly returned to normal today, a day after the heavy downpour that claimed five lives in coastal Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts and left several areas marooned. The city witnessed cloudy skies and scattered rains insome parts today. People living in low lying areas were busy working to repair the damage caused to their dwellings in a single day. They were engaged in clearing water that entered their houses, especially at Jeppinamogeru, Alake, Bejai and Pandeshwar inand around the city. Schools and colleges had been closed for the day as per an order from the Dakshina Kannada district deputy commissioner. Rainfall statistics released by DK district administration showed that Mangaluru taluk was the worst hit region, recording 288.5 mm rain in 24 hours since 8.30 am yesterday. Panambur observatory recorded 333.8 mm during the hours, which was the highest in the region. Putturtaluk where rains occurred only in the afternoon, recorded 109 mm, while Bantwal taluk got 122.6 mm rainfall. Sullia and Belthangady received lesser rainfall of 71 mm and 65 mm respectively. The average total rainfall in DK district stood at 131.4 mm in 24 hours. The ferocity of yesterdays rains could be measured from the statistics that the district's average normal rainfall in May is 170 mm, while it received 400 mm this year during the month. In May last year, the districtreceived a cumulative rainfall of 126 mm. According to India Meteorological Department (IMD), very heavy rain, which was witnessed in DK and Udupi yesterday, will continue in the twin districts and south interior Karnataka at least till June 1. As per the warning, north interior parts of the state would witness thundershowers with gusty winds in the period. The IMD has not yet officially declared the onset of southwest monsoon in Karnataka and a formal declaration is expected in a day or two. The DK district administration had made elaborate arragements to face any eventuality with the expected onset ofmonsoon on June 1, deputy commissioner Sasikanth Senthil toldreporters here. The inadequacy of the existing drainage networks capacity to handle huge flooding and the high tide in the Arabian Sea resulted in waterlogging in many parts of the city before noon yesterday, he said. City police commissioner Vipul Kumar said two more platoons of the Karnataka State Reserve Police besides the existing two were being called in. Police personnel had beenasked to join the rescue work keeping minimum strength at all police stations, he said. Five persons, including Kannada film actor-director Santhosh Shetty Kateel, had lost their lives in rain-related incidents in DK and Udupi districts since yesterday. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today directed insurance companies to expedite the process of settling farmers' claims and deposit the crop cover amount into their bank accounts by June 7. He gave the direction during a meeting called to review the impact of the Prime Minister's Crop Insurance Scheme. The chief minister expressed displeasure over the slow progress in settlement of farmers' claims by insurance companies for the kharif season 2017. Minister of State for Agriculture Sadabhau Khot was also present in the meeting. The weather forecast for this year is that the monsoon will arrive on time and there will be sufficient rainfall, Fadnavis mentioned. "Farmers will be immensely benefited if they get the money required to buy seeds and fertilisers. The insurance companies should try and ensure that farmers get the crop insurance money in their accounts before June 7," he said. A lot of information needs to be gathered about the beneficiary farmers for various government schemes before transfer of funds into their bank accounts, Fadnavis noted, adding that this causes a delay in the disbursement of money. "In such a scenario, there should be a separate mechanism in place where all the information, of all those who open bank accounts for the purpose of getting Direct Benefit Transfer, is stored in one place. This will reduce the time in disbursement of funds," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Senior Maharashtra Congress leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil today demanded proper investigation into online purchase of sharp-edged weapons by some people in Aurangabad, which he said were seized during communal riots. He also demanded ban on an e-retailer from which the items were allegedly purchased. "Weapons seized during the Aurangabad riots were purchased online. Swords, knives, and 28 otherweapons were purchased online," the Leader of Opposition in the Legislative Assembly said in a statement. Aurangabad police's crime branch had seized weapons, like swords and knives, purchased illegally through an online shopping site and arrested four employees of a courier firm in this connection on Monday night. The courier service had apparently brought the parcel containing the weapons from Amritsar in Punjab. "Even though the Aurangabad police took necessary action, it is serious that weapons are sold so blatantly. The government should ban the portal," Vikhe Patil said while demanding a thorough investigation into the matter. Two people were killed and several others, including 10 police personnel, were injured in the violence that erupted in Aurangabad on the night of May 11. The violence started when two groups clashed in Shahganj area of the city. Police had arrested 70 persons, including alleged mastermind of the violence Laxminarayan Bakharia alias Lachchu Pahelwan, and a corporator each of the Shiv Sena and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Ahead of the 2019 Mahakumbh, the Centre today asked the Uttar Pradesh government to expedite the process of cleaning all 35 drains in Allahabad that meet river Ganga well before the mega religious congregation begins. Director General, National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) Rajiv Ranjan Mishra reviewed the progress of projects under Namami Gange programme in UP and requested the state's chief secretary for active involvement of 26 district Ganga committees to be constituted for rejuvenation of the river, a statement by the Ministry of Water Resources and Ganga Rejuvenation said.. While reviewing all 30 sewerage projects being undertaken in UP under Namami Gange programme, the NMCG urged the state government to complete eight of the 10 ongoing projects by December and start work on the remaining sanctioned projects at the earliest, it said. In addition, the UP administration was also asked to complete the repair, rehabilitation and construction work of 87 ghats along the river. During the meeting, there was also a detailed discussion on the preparations for Mahakumbh, scheduled at Allahabad in January-February next year. "A detailed discussion on the preparations for Mahakumbh 2019 at Allahabad took place. The NMCG asked the UP government to expedite the process of cleaning all 35 drains in Allahabad that meet river Ganga upstream through bioremediation so that projects could be implemented well before the Mahakumbh begins," the statement said. Bioremediation is a process by which either naturally occurring or deliberately introduced microorganisms are used to consume and break down environmental pollutants. The NMCG also urged the state government to focus on tributaries of Ganga and send proposals for Meerut, Moradabad, Saharanpur, Lucknow and Jaunpur so that work on cleaning of tributaries such as Hindon, Ram Ganga, Kali and Gomti may begin at the earliest, the statement said. The NMCG also raised with the state government the issue of solid waste going into Ganga through drains, it said. "The UP government was requested to direct the urban local bodies along river Ganga to prepare an action plan to provide adequate arrangements in the drains, stretching at least a kilometre from the river's confluence, to tap the solid waste entering into the river," the statement said. The Composite Ecological Task Force Battalion (Ganga Task Force) project, under the Namami Gange programme, was also discussed during the meeting, it said. A Ganga Task Force will be deputed in Allahabad, Varanasi and Kanpur to assist efforts to rejuvenate the river, the statement added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The beleaguered Manpasand Beverages is setting up a fruit juice manufacturing facility at Chhatabar Industrial Area, Khurdha in Odisha, at an investment of Rs 150 crore, a top executive said today. Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik performed ground breaking ceremony for the plant yesterday. "The new plants is a part of company's expansion plans which are on at full swing. This would be our ninth facility in the country, and will have a capacity of 50,000 cases per day," company's chairman and managing director Dhirendra Singh said, adding this plant will be the company's first facility in the eastern region. Of the four new plants being set up at an investment of Rs 600 crore, the first at Vadodara has already been commissioned, while the second one at Varanasi is expected to be functional soon, he said, adding, the construction work at the third plant is on at Sri City in Andhra Pradesh. He said the company has built a robust network of dealers and is well equipped to cater to the rising demand in the eastern market. With regard to the ongoing issue of the company's auditor Deloitte's resignation and its negative impact on the firm's share price, Singh said that the issue is not as serious as is it made out to be. Auditing major Deloitte Haskins & Sells resigned as statutory auditors of Manpasand Beverages this week as the fruit juice maker failed to provide them with "significant information" on the financial results for FY18. "The company's ongoing business as well as expansion plans are going on at full swing," he said. Singh said that the meeting of the board of directors of the company will be heldby June 15. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Top-scoring students may be basking in glory in this exam results season but noted personalities say the marks-based evaluation is failing India's system with creativity and innovation taking a backseat. Most of the schools and higher institutions are in a race to ensure top scores and good percentages and not on producing good human resource, according to them. There is shortage of high quality institutes and also not much incentives to original research, they say. Chairperson and Managing Director of leading biotech firm, Biocon, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw said in an era of design thinking, data science and innovation, educational assessment must change from marks-based evaluation to IQ (intelligence quotient) and EQ (emotional quotient)-based systems. "Project-based experimental learning is essential," she told PTI. Former Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation, G Madhavan Nair said the marks-based system is outdated and creates unhealthy competition. Exams have become "mugging-up" and memory tests, and they are not about the extent of knowledge that the student has acquired, he lamented. "Students are put through a standard course which produces a stereo-type product," the eminent scientist said. According to Chairman of Manipal Global Services, T V Mohandas Pai, the system has become more rigid and focused on marks; and not on learning and creating excitement and curiosity. "We need to have more active students, more projects, lighter curriculum, more doing than theory," Pai, a former Head of Human Resources at IT major Infosys where he also served as Chief Financial Officer, told PTI. He added: "Today, all knowledge is available on the web; what we need is more problem-solving skills." Secretary-General of industry body ASSOCHAM, D S Rawat said most of the higher study institutions and even schools are in a race to ensure top scores or good percentages. "As long as there are no incentives on original research, you can say, we are producing products and not a good human resource from the universities," Rawat said. Agreeing with the view, Nair, said there is no scope in the present system to assess an individual's talent and scientific temperament. Nurturing of creative thinking based on individual's aptitude and talent is needed. "Montessori type of education system is more apt," suggested Nair, who said there should also be continuous evaluation of teaching in class-room. More stress should be on learning and acquiring knowledge. Pai said creativity and innovation have become casualties in India's education system. "We need more high quality universities so that there is no mad rush to get high marks to get into top universities. This shortage (of high quality institutes) has led to excessive focus on marks", Pai said. He said the idea that shortage of seats at high quality institutes would lead better quality is absurd. India, Pai said, needs 100 IITs and IIT-like institutions in the private sector with an annual intake of 2,000 seats each as done by China. Fifty per cent of India's 3,500 engineering colleges are "bad", he said. With a population of 6.4 crore, the UK has 95-plus universities, while Karnataka with 6.5 crore, has only 45, half of which are of "poor" quality, according to him. "We need good capacity in high quality institutes so that students know that admission isn't only by marks or test," Pai added. He expressed the view that students are at different levels of learning and it's very difficult to create common standards. India needs a three-tier system -- top research and knowledge-based universities, the second one focused on skills and learning for jobs and the third one offering basic degree, he said, adding, admissions should be based on aptitude with marks only taken as an input. According to Rawat, the reforms must begin with universities which need to encourage creativity and original research without any disincentives for failures, and skill development to deal with real life problems. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BSP supremo Mayawati has vacated a government house in Lucknow, claiming compliance with a Supreme Court order, while holding on to a second official bungalow which her party says is a memorial to Kanshi Ram. The UP government recently sent notices to six politicians after Supreme Court ordered that they should shift out of the official accommodation allotted to them as former chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh. Mayawati's personal secretary said today that she has now vacated 6, Lal Bahadur Shastri Marg which was allotted to her as a former chief minister. But the UP government had sent her a notice asking her to vacate another bungalow, 13A, Mall Avenue, which the party says is a memorial to BSP founder Kashi Ram. The BSP recently said Mayawati occupied just two rooms of the Shri Kanshi Ram Ji Yadgar Vishram Sthal. The party had indicated that Mayawati was willing to vacate the bungalow on Lal Bahadur Shastri Marg if a notice was served. Following the Supreme Court order, the UP government on May 17 issued notices to Narayan Dutt Tiwari, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Kalyan Singh, Mayawati, Rajnath Singh and Akhilesh Yadav to vacate the bungalows. While Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh indicated their willingness to do so, the others have expressed reluctance. N D Tiwari's wife Ujjwala Tiwari sought more time, pleading that her husband was in the "last stages" of his life. Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav and his son Akhilesh Yadav have written to the Estate Department seeking two more years at their official residences and have moved the apex court on this. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Militants launched a gun and bomb attack on the interior ministry in Kabul today, killing one policeman and wounding at least five people, days after the Taliban vowed to target the Afghan capital. Special forces rushed to the scene after the attackers detonated what police said was a car bomb at the first checkpoint leading to the ministry, then tried to fight their way inside. "The fighting is over, the attackers have all been killed by security forces between the first and second security perimeter," Kabul police chief Daud Amin said. A security source told AFP that a clearing operation was ongoing. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, and officials gave differing figures for the number of militants involved, with police saying three to five while interior ministry spokesman Najib Danish said there were at least 10. Danish also said one police officer had been killed and five people wounded. "The situation is under control now," he said, adding that there could be more explosions as police detonate suicide vests carried by the attackers. "I was in my office when I heard a blast followed by gunfire. We were told to stay inside our offices as the compound was attacked," one ministry employee told AFP earlier. A security source told AFP there had been multiple blasts, though he could not confirm how many. Police also said they had found a car stuffed with explosives and guns at Kabul's international airport, which is near to the interior ministry, on Wednesday. Both the Taliban and the Islamic State group have stepped up their attacks on Kabul, making it the deadliest place in the country for civilians in recent months. Last week the Taliban called on Kabul residents to stay away from military and intelligence centres in the capital, saying they planned more assaults as part of their annual spring offensive. "To avoid civilian casualties and only cause damage to enemy military, we are asking Kabul residents to keep away... we don't want even a single innocent civilian to be killed," said a statement published online. In response, the defence ministry said police and troops are "ready to protect the people with all means possible", and would not allow the militants to reach their "un-Islamic and inhuman goals". The Taliban did not define what was meant by "military and intelligence centres". Such targets are difficult to avoid given that the heavily fortified city is the heart of the country's intelligence, government and military operations and plagued by traffic jams due to ubiquitous checkpoints and barriers. Kabul accounted for 16 percent of all civilian casualties last year, when 1,831 civilians were killed or wounded nationwide, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. The UN has warned that 2018 could be even deadlier. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nepal Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli today warned his new ministers that they will be sacked if they fail to learn how to operate a laptop within six months. Oli, who took charge as Nepal's prime minister in February for the second time, said the Prime Minister's Office will be made paperless within six months. Speaking during the 12th general convention of Nepal National Teachers Organisation here, he said that anyone at the Council of Ministers who does not know how to operate a laptop will be sacked, the Kathmandu Post reported. "I have already said in the Council of Ministers meeting that we will make the office paperless within six months and the meeting's programmes and agenda will be discussed using laptops, said Oli. He said that the ministers can take help from their assistants in operating the laptops for six months. "We will bid farewell to any ministers failing to operate laptops on their own after six months," he said, adding that the sacked ministers will be given the laptops so that they can learn to operate until their next tenure. Oli further said the government aims to take strides in making Nepal an information technology friendly country within the time period. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi today strongly condemned the recent terror strikes on three churches in Indonesia and said India stands resolutely with Jakarta in its fight against terrorism. "Friends, I am in grief over the deaths of innocent civilians of Indonesia in the recent terror attacks. India strongly condemns such attacks and stands with Indonesia in its fight against terrorism," Modi said in a press statement after his talks with President Joko Widodo. Six suicide bombers targeted three churches during services in Surabaya, the country's second-largest city early this month. At least seven people were killed and more than 40 others injured in the coordinated attacks. The bombings were the worst attacks on churches in the last 18 years. "Such tragic incidents give a message that it is the need of the hour to strengthen the efforts being taken on the global level to combat terrorism," Modi said. Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, has struggled with Islamist terrorism and violence against its Christian minority in the past two decades. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi today visited the Arjuna Wijaya Chariot statue, one of the iconic monuments in the heart of the Indonesian capital Jakarta, during his first official visit to the key East Asian country. Prime Minister Modi was accompanied by Indonesia President Joko Widodo during his visit to the 'Arjuna Wijaya Chariot' (chariot of the victorious Arjuna) statue. "Located in Central Jakarta, the Arjuna Wijaya Chariot statue is a vibrant testimony of the deep-rooted cultural relations between India and Indonesia. Delighted to have visited the statue with President Widodo," Modi tweeted. "A manifestation of our age-old cultural ties! PM @narendramodi and Indonesian President @jokowi at Arjuna Wijaya Chariot statue in the heart of the city," Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted with a picture of the two leaders shaking hands. The imposing monument depicts a scene from the Indian epic Mahabharata where Lord Krishna is riding a chariot with Arjuna holding a bow and arrow and the chariot is being pulled by eight golloping horses. The horses as per Javenese tradition symbolise eight philosophies of leadership called Asta Brata, namely, Kisma (Earth), Surya (Sun), Agni (fire), Kartika (stars), Baruna (ocean), Samirana (wind), Tirta (rain) and Candra (month). Built in 1987, the statue, standing just next to Monas which is the National Monument of Indonesia, is one of the most famous tourist attractions in Jakarta, especially among visitors coming from India. It is a testimony to the deep civilisational link with India and cultural reach and influence of Mahabharata in Indonesia. Modi arrived in the Indonesian capital Jakarta yesterday on the first leg of his three-nation tour to East Asia during which he will also travel to Malaysia and Singapore to further boost India's Act East Policy. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former president Pranab Mukherjee accepting an invite from the RSS to attend its function in Nagpur drew calls from more Congress leaders to him today to withdraw from the event over what they called in the "interest of secularism". Ramesh Chennithala, a senior Congress leader from Kerala, sent a letter to Mukherjee requesting him to refrain from attending the event while West Bengal Congress chief Adhir Chowdhury and senior Congress leader V Hanumantha Rao echoed similar sentiments. Mukherjee, who has been a Congress veteran, has been invited to be the chief guest at the valedictory function of Sangh Shiksha Varg -- a training camp for RSS volunteers at the organisation's headquarters in Nagpur on June 7. According to an RSS functionary, the former president has accepted the invitation. Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram said now that the former president has accepted the invitation he should go and tell the RSS "what is wrong" in their ideology. His party colleague Abhishek Singhvi opined that the party would like to first hear what Mukherjee has to say before making any comments. In his letter, Chennithala, also leader of the opposition in Kerala assembly, said Mukherjee's decision had come as a "rude shock" to the secular minds of the country. He alleged that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS) has been trying to divide the country on religious lines and to run the incumbent government by remote control. "Being one of the tallest leaders of the great Indian National Congress, which has been responsible for preserving the secular fabric of this country, your decision has invited unparalleled disgruntlement among the rank and file of the Congress Party," the letter said. "As a person who has served as the first citizen of our country and the greatest ambassador of secularism, I request you to reconsider your decision to attend the RSS meet on June 7,2018," it said. Alleging that the RSS was a 'communal outfit', the Congress leader said its vision of creating "Hindu Rashtra" comprising only one section of the population is in sharp contrast with the Congress ideology of secularism and democracy. Adhir Chowdhury expressed surprise over Mukherjee's decision and said he is unable to relate it with the former president's previous comments against the Sangh. "I am really surprised to hear about the decision of Pranab Mukherjee to attend RSS's programme in Nagpur. Just like any other Congressman, I am really astonished to hear about it," Chowdhury said in Kolkata. "My question is does he (Mukherjee) think his previous comments against RSS were wrong ... We still remember how Pranab Mukherjee as a senior leader of the Congress had criticized RSS as a communal and a divisive organization". However, Mukherjee is no longer President, nor a Congress leader, and he is free to take any decision, he said. "I can't say what prompted him to take such a decision," said Chowdhury, who has shared a long association with Mukherjee. Hanumantha Rao said the former president should withdraw his decision"in the interest of secularism". Mukherjee, who had held the highest post of President, should not attend the meeting of RSS as it is a "communal" organisation, the AICC Secretary and former Rajya Sabha member said. "I am requesting him that he should withdraw," Rao said in Hyderabad. He said Mukherjee was a senior Congress leader who has been held in high esteem by former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi. "Their (RSS) thinking is Hindutva. They are not secular. They want 'Hindu desh'. How he (Mukherjee) can go? In this country, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, everybody is there... So my request is he should rethink (his decision to attend the RSS meet) and he should not go," he said. Rao also said he would write to Mukherjee in this regard. Veteran Congressman CK Jaffer Sharief, in a letter to Mukherjee yesterday, expressed surprise over the move and said he like other secular people was "stunned" to hear about his attending the RSS function. "I personally think that a person of your stature, being secular and in for decades, having served in various capacity including the highest position of Rashtrapati, visiting Sangh Parivar at this point in time before Parliament elections is not proper. "I once again request you to reconsider and avoid visiting Sangh Parivar in the interest of secularism and the country," Sharief said in his letter which was also signed by former MP H Hanumanthappa. At the AICC briefing in Delhi, the Congress refrained from making a comment on the issue for the second day today. "We do not like to comment on the former president," the party spokesperson R P N Singh said when asked to comment on Pranab's decision. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) England captain Eoin Morgan has been included in the one-day international squad for matches against Scotland and Australia despite suffering a fractured finger. Morgan was ruled out of his scheduled appearance for the Rest of the World against the West Indies in a Twenty20 fixture at Lord's on Thursday after chipping the end of his right ring finger. Morgan's county Middlesex confirmed he suffered the injury when he was fielding during the Royal London One-Day Cup match against Somerset on Sunday. The batsman was set to captain the World XI in a game which is being held to raise funds for stadiums in Dominica and Anguilla damaged by hurricanes last year. But while he won't be able to play in that match, Morgan -- England's limited-overs skipper -- will take charge on June 10 against Scotland and then in five matches against Australia. The Irishman was named on Wednesday in a 13-man squad to travel to Edinburgh and then one of 14 against Australia in a series starting at The Oval on June 13. Sam Billings will be included against Scotland to deputise for wicketkeeper Jos Buttler, and seamer Tom Curran will bolster the squad by one when he is added to the ranks to face Australia. This will be the first time England have played in Scotland since May 2014, when they defeated the hosts by 39 runs in Aberdeen. England, currently number one in the ODI world rankings, defeated Australia 4-1 in a five-match series held in Australia in January. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Minister of State for Health Ashwini Kumar Choubey, who is on an official visit to Tuvalu, today said that India was willing to offer its expertise to the island nation in the field of medical, IT, marine, solar energy and education, the Health Ministry said. Choubey also handed over a cheque of AUD 66,705 (Australian dollar) to the Government of Tuvalu as a development partnership assistance from India and invited Prime Minister Enele Sosene Sopoaga to visit India, the ministry said. He also met Home Minister of Tuvalu Namoliki Sualiki Neemia and discussed various issues relating to Indo-Tuvalu bilateral relations. Choubey is the first Indian minister to visit the country. During his visit to a government hospital in Funafuti, Choubey requested the Tuvalu government to send a formal proposal for receiving assistance in the medical sector. The ministry said it was felt that there is a need for setting up of an effective blood bank system to make the services more effective. He visited Solar Project Site and Demonstration House of Tuvalu Electrical Complex. He was highly impressed with the work of six Tuvalu solar Mamas (women) who completed six-months training in Barefoot College Rajasthan, India in September, 2017. Choubey further said that the High Commission of India in Fiji will also organise fourth International Day of Yoga event at Funafuti. He had a meeting with the Red Cross Secretary General of Tuvalu where he discussed the current network and services of the Red Cross in the island country. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) on Wednesday allowed to make an upfront payment of Rs 53.20 billion to lenders for acquisition of A two-member bench also said this payment would be subject to the outcome of the petition filed by Renaissance Steel challenging Vedanta's bid. "During the pendency, the parties may act as far the approved resolution plan and the resolution applicant may deposit the upfront amount to Committee of Creditors subject to the order of the appeal," the NCLAT bench headed by Chairman Justice S J Mukhopadhaya said. The bench also clarified that if Renaissance Steel wins the case, then the Committee of Creditors (CoC) will have to return the money to Vedanta. The appellate tribunal also reserved its order over Renaissance Steel's petition. On May 17, NCLAT admitted the petition of Renaissance Steel challenging Vedanta's bid for debt-ridden Electrosteel. Renaissance Steel's resolution application was rejected by the CoC of Earlier on May 1, NCLAT had directed maintaining status quo in the case pertaining to the sale of the debt-laden firm to Renaissance had submitted before the NCLAT that Vedanta is not eligible to bid for Electrosteel under section 29 A of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code as one of Vedanta's affiliates in Zambia -- a unit of its UK-based parent Vedanta Resources Plc -- had been found guilty of criminal misconduct. Electrosteel owes lenders more than Rs 130 billion, of which about Rs 500 billion is to alone. Last month, the Kolkata bench of the (NCLT) had cleared Vedanta's Rs 53.20 billion resolution plan for Electrosteel, rejecting objections by Renaissance Steel. A new study has suggested 13 measures, including reducing emissions from thermal power plants and cutting use of solid fuel in households, which, it said, can reduce air pollution levels by almost 40 per cent and avoid 9 lakh premature deaths in India every year. According to a statement issued by Greenpeace India, the study said the implementation of these measures may also lead to 50-60 per cent reduction of PM2.5 levels across North India, including Delhi during winter, when it spikes. The study was done by Louisiana State University (LSU) and Greenpeace also contributed to it. Greenpeace India said its campaigners - Sunil Dahiya and Lauri Myllyvirta were part of the study particularly in terms of suggesting policy measures. "Based on our results, the policy measures with the largest potential for air quality improvements are reducing emissions from thermal power plants, instituting strong emissions standards for industries, reducing solid fuel use in households, shifting to zig-zag kilns in brick-making and introducing stronger vehicular emissions standards in an accelerated schedule," the statement said quoting Professor Hongliang Zhang, the author of report. Zhang said, "A comprehensive set of policies, including all of the 13 measures are needed to achieve a 40 per cent reduction in air pollution levels and avoid a projected 9 lakh premature deaths per year." According to the statement, the LSU study has re-emphasised that reducing emissions from thermal power plants and industry by instituting strong emissions standards has the highest potential to reduce air pollution levels. Incorporating emission targets for thermal power plants was part of the recommendations given by various researchers, civil society organisations, lawyers and activists for strengthening the draft version of National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) put out in public domain by the ministry. "We are presenting, for the first time, a set of specific, implementable policies that can halve winter-time pollution in North India. "We urge the Ministry to incorporate these measures into the clean air plan at national level and ensure that thermal power plants implement the notification of Dec 2015 and set stricter standards for highly polluting industries industry to reduce pollution in a time bound manner," Campaigner of Greenpeace India Sunil Dahiya said. The policy measures assessed in the report will constitute a major step towards cleaning air in India, it said. "If the ministry is serious about public health, then it must ensure a stronger NCAP and with all the recommendations by Clean Air Collectives (CAC) as well as the recommendations from the current LSU study should be incorporated in the final versions to reduce air pollution from its source," Dahiya said. The Greenpeace statement, quoting the study, said, "We identified a total of 13 emissions reduction measures that we judged feasible to implement by 2030 or earlier and that we expected to have significant air quality benefits." "We model the full implementation and enforcement of the thermal power plant emissions standards issued in December 2015, in operating and under construction power plants. "Full implementation requires both setting strict timelines for plant operators to meet the emission limits laid out in the regulation, with no further backpedaling, and a strong monitoring and enforcement system that ensures limits are met and excess emissions lead to punishments," the study said. It said the same emission limits that are applied to existing coal-fired power plants in India can be implemented in all industries. "This is an ambitious assumption, but in terms of practical implementation and enforcement, controlling stack emission is much easier than distributed sources," the study said. According to the 2011 census, 16.6 crore households out of a total of 24.7 crore continued to rely on solid fuels (firewood, crop residue, dung and coal) for cooking and this is the single largest source of air pollution in India, affecting both outdoor air quality and indoor air quality, both being major public health concern. "Interpolating from Global Burden of Disease (GB) Maps which assumed a virtual elimination of solid fuels in households by 2050, we model a 50 per cent reduction in use of solid fuels by 2030, even as total population is projected to increase by 20 per cent. We believe this to be an ambitious but realistic target," the study said. The other measures in the list of 13 also include reduction of stubble burning. It said both "in-situ crop residue management" and creation of infrastructure and market for the use and management of stubble outside of the field ("ex-situ" management) should be used. The study said that building and improving proper waste management systems and measures to reduce, reuse and recycle waste can reduce open burning by 80 per cent. In construction activities, it said dust control measures are assumed to reduce dust emissions by 50 per cent as per Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) "We assume that these measures can be fully implemented at 5 per cent of all construction sites across the country, which will require a major training and enforcement effort," the study said. added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Trump administration's move to impose a hefty 25 per cent tariff on the USD 50 billion worth of Chinese goods and tighten its noose against China's alleged theft of US' intellectual property rights will have an adverse impact on American consumers, industry leaders and lawmakers have warned. The White house said yesterday that the US' will impose a 25 per cent tariff on USD 50 billion of goods imported from China containing industrially significant technology, including those related to the 'Made in China 2025' programme. "The US Chamber supports the administration's ongoing efforts to deal with China's unfair trade practices and policies. However, we continue to believe that the use of tariffs puts all the burden on American companies and consumers," US Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Thomas J Donohue said yesterday. "The administration's decision to impose tariffs on USD 50 billion worth of Chinese products is in fact a tax on American consumers and will undermine the competitiveness of American companies, just as the administration's steel tariffs have dramatically raised prices on steel in the US," he said. China must address its failure to protect US intellectual property, but these tariffs are not an effective response because it will harm American jobs and consumers, said Erik Paulsen, Joint Economic Committee Chairman Congressman. "Our economy is seeing measurable gains thanks to pro-growth policies like the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act. GDP has grown an average of 2.5 per cent over the past five quarters, unemployment is at its lowest rate since December of 2000, and everywhere we are hearing positive stories from businesses large and small. Placing tariffs on medical devices and consumer electronics threaten these gains," Paulsen said. President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to confront China's unfair trade practices, but his continued chaotic trade brinkmanship threatens to invite retaliation that harms American workers and farmers and the American economy, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi alleged. "Last week, the President revealed the utter hollowness of his promises by pledging the American government resources to a Chinese company that has violated US sanctions by selling technology to North Korea and Iran, and that is a known cyber security risk to the United States," she said. Pelosi said strong, smart and strategic action not reckless and rash floundering was needed to confront China's brazen trade cheating. "Beijing's regulatory barriers, localisation requirements, labor abuses, theft of trade secrets and counterfeiting of designs, anti-competitive 'Made in China 2025' policy and many other unfair trade practices threaten America's ability to compete both in China and with China around the world," Pelosi said. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump had the potential to do more to correct China's "unfair" trade policies than any president has had but he must be strong, tough and consistent. "While obviously more details are needed, this outline represents the kind of actions we have needed to take for a long time, but the president must stick with it and not bargain it away," Schumer said. Having already undermined US national security interests by agreeing to China's precondition to trade talks by easing penalties on ZTE, the administration now appears to be saving face by rattling its saber with new deadlines on investment restrictions and tariffs on China, said Ways & Means Committee Ranking Member Richard Neal. "In the meantime, the Made in China 2025 initiative continues full speed ahead. Without a coherent strategy, it's hard to see the renewed commitment to threatening tariffs and investment restrictions as anything but more bluster and chaos," Neal said. Congressman Matt Gaetz commended Trump for taking action against China's ruthless and unfair trade practices, as well as its state-sponsored theft of American innovators' intellectual property (IP). "For too many years, China has pursued trade practices and business policies that make it impossible for foreign companies to compete on a level playing field with Chinese companies. These policies, like its 'Made in China 2025 policy' hurt American companies and limit economic growth worldwide," he said. Noting that IP theft costs the US economy over USD 225 billion a year, he said the greatest perpetrator is China. "As a member of the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, I applaud the bold steps President Trump is taking to address this troubling issue. China is one of America's largest trading partners; their predatory behaviour is unacceptable," he said. Noting that China is engaging in a systematic and multifaceted strategy to steal intellectual property, Gaetz alleged that beyond the economic costs, this theft presented significant concerns for national security. "The majority of Chinese companies that steal or benefit from stolen intellectual property are state-owned. The Chinese government is known for using their military's cyber capabilities to hack into private US tech firms, stealing IP, then transferring the technology to state-run companies who profit from its development," he said. The trade spat between the top two economies of the world began last month with Trump imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports into US. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Amidst a row over the citizenship amendment bill, Home Minister Rajnath Singh today said the people of Assam should not be apprehensive about the proposed law and any future step would be taken only after consultations with all stakeholders. This was conveyed to Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal by the home minister at a meeting where the issue was discussed. "The home minister said that there should be no apprehension in minds of the people of Assam about the citizenship amendment bill. The home minister has assured that before taking any step, the people of Assam will be taken into confidence. All stakeholders will be consulted," he told reporters here. Assam has been witnessing protests against the central government's move to enact the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016 that seeks to grant citizenship to non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan who came to India due to religious persecution in those countries. Organisations spearheading the protests said that the bill, if passed, would pave the way for giving citizenship to illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in Assam. Sonowal also said all efforts would be made to address the concerns of people of Assam in this regard. He requested the home minister to set up a committee to make recommendations for implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord which provides for constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards to protect, preserve and promote the culture, social, linguistic identity and heritage of Assamese people. "The home minister assured the chief minister that a committee will be set up at the earliest in consultation with the state government," a Home Ministry statement said. The meeting discussed various administrative and security arrangements related to the updation exercise of the National Register of Citizens(NRC) as per the orders of the Supreme Court. The meeting discussed the arrangements required to dispose of claims and objections after publication of the next draft NRC on June 30, the statement said. It was emphasised that an adequate opportunity must be given to people in this regard and necessary arrangements be made to avoid any inconvenience to public. It should be ensured that claims and objections are disposed of as per law, and in a propermanner. It was also emphasised that a strong information education and communication campaign might be launched to inform people about the process of filing claims and objections after publication of final draft NRC, it said. A massive exercise to update the NRC was being carried out in Assam following a directive of the Supreme Court in 2005. A total of 3.29 crore people applied for inclusion in the NRC. In the first list,1.9 crore names were included. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) NXP Semiconductors today said it has signed an agreement with India's largest software services firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to work on co-creating solutions for automotive, security and IoT industries. "NXP has partnered with TCS and has signed an MoU ...The MoU will see both NXP and TCS to identify and create unique solutions that will be co-created for the automotive, security and Internet of Things (IoT) industry," NXP said in a statement. A series of joint workshop at TCS innovation labs in India (Pune, Bangalore, Delhi) or in NXP Labs, involving the right SMEs and business leaders will be executed, it added. This pact is a great opportunity for two giants, NXP Semiconductors and TCS to collaborate and solve complex problems in high-technology areas, NXP India Country Manager Sanjay Gupta said. "It would also enable us to synergise our technical prowess and venture into several new and disruptive business domains that will support our customers more meaningfully," he added. Through the pact, NXP and TCS are focusing on systemically expanding the technology ecosystem, the statement said. The collaboration will also help drive advancement of the key solution areas that will yield results across industries and geographic markets, it added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Odisha government today approved five investment proposals worth over Rs 1508 crore which will help create employment opportunities for 2155 people, a senior official said. The State Level Single Window Clearance Authority (SLSWCA) accorded approval to IOCL to set up a polyester products manufacturing unit of 324 KTPA capacity at the textiles park in Bhadrak district at an investment of Rs 975.10 crore, state industries secretary Sanjeev Chopra said. It will be a joint venture with Haldia-based MCPI Private Limited and create direct and indirect employment for 185 people. The project will act as an anchor and help in supplying feedstock or raw material to the downstream technical textile industries which will come up in the textiles park. It will provide employment to more than 100,000 persons in the long run, he said. The governments nod to the projects came at meeting held under the chairmanship of Chief Secretary A P Padhi. The proposal by a leading aluminium extrusions manufacturing company to set up a greenfield manufacturing unit at Angul Aluminium Park with a capacity of 40,000 metric tonnes per annum was also given the nod. The investment outlay for this project is Rs 200 crore with employment potential for 500 persons, Chopra said. The aluminium park at Angul is being developed as an exclusive state-of-the-art industrial park for ancillary and downstream industries for alumina and aluminium. The park is the first-of-its-kind in the Indian sub-continent with facility for directly obtaining molten aluminium from the smelter. A Gujarat-based edible oil manufacturing companys proposal to set up a 750,000 tonnes per annum vegetable oil manufacturing unit at Paradip at an investment of Rs 200 crore was also approved at the meeting. The unit will create employment opportunities for 920 people directly and indirectly, he said. The SLSWCA also approved the proposal of an Andhra Pradesh based company which will invest Rs 71 crore to manufacture food products like instant pasta, vermicelli and sweet potato flour and provide employment to 300 people, Chopra said. Odisha is one of the largest producers of sweet potato. It produced 16.38 lakh ton of the vegetable in 2016-17. Sweet potato flour finds its use in food processing industries and the proposed unit will be first of its kind in the state. The fifth investment proposal approved by the SLSWCA was an integrated cold chain service of a Kolkata-based company at an investment of Rs 62.10 crore. The project is planned at the seafood park at Deras in Khordha district and will have employment potential for 250 people, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) One more person today succumbed to Nipah virus here, taking the death toll in Kerala's Kozhikode and Malappuram districts to 14. Madhusudhanan (55) of Nellikode in Kozhikode district died tonight, according to health department sources. He was undergoing treatment at a private hospital here, they said, adding that Madhusudhanan had tested positive of the virus. The number of confirmed Nipah virus cases has risen to 17 with the National Institute of Virology, Pune, finding its presence in the blood sample of a 28-year-old person from Karassery here, the sources said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress today dubbed as a "cruel joke" on the common man the reduction of petrol and diesel prices by one paisa per litre after 16 days of relentless hikes. Congress spokesperson RPN Singh said the high fuel prices have adversely impacted the people, especially the middle class and farmers, which has led to agitation across the country. "If we look at the fuel prices in the last four years, there has been Rs 10 lakh crore loot and one paisa relaxation. This is a cruel joke," he told a press conference here. "Is this the joke this government wants to play on the common people of the country," he asked as he alleged that the government has collected as much as Rs 10 lakh crore in the last four years through central excise on petrol and diesel. Another party spokesperson Manish Tewari took a dig at the government on the one paisa reduction. "May be @dpradhanbjp wants the country to dance with ecstasy at this huge relief of ONE WHOLE PAISA! WOW!," he tweeted. Singh alleged that while the ruling party has hundreds of crores to buy MLAs in Karnataka and has spent as much as Rs 4,600 crore on advertisements of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it is giving only one paisa relief to the people though price cut on fuel. He said despite the crude oil prices being much cheaper during the NDA regime as compared to the UPA's tenure, higher excise duty on petrol and diesel is taking a toll on people. Singh also said petrol and diesel should be brought under the ambit of the GST. The oil companies this morning announced reduction in petrol price by 60 paise to Rs 77.83 a litre and diesel by 56 paise to Rs 68.75 in Delhi. This was rectified to 1 paisa a litre. Singh said as his party president Rahul Gandhi has mentioned, the Congress will protest on street and Parliament till the fuel prices are reduced considerably. On a query over former president Pranab Mukherjee accepting an invite from the RSS to be the chief guest at a function at the Sangh headquarters on June 7, Singh said he would not like to comment. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Opposition parties today attacked the Centre over the 1 paisa cut in fuel prices by state-owned oil companies, with the Congress saying if this was Prime Minister Narendra Modi's idea of a "prank", it was "childish and in poor taste". While the CPI(M) demanded a roll back in prices of petrol and diesel, the CPI alleged that the government had given absolute autonomy to the oil companies to decide on a key issue which affected the lives of the people. Congress president Rahul Gandhi took to Twitter saying the one paisa cut in petroleum rates was not a "suitable response" to the fuel challenge he threw to the prime minister a few days ago. "Dear PM, You've cut the price of Petrol and Diesel today by 1 paisa. ONE paisa!?? If this is your idea of a prank, it's childish and in poor taste," he said. "P.S. A ONE paisa cut is not a suitable response to the 'Fuel Challenge' I threw you last week," Gandhi said. Condemning the reduction of fuel prices by just 1 paisa per litre after 16 days of relentless price hike, the Congress said in Mumbai that it would launch a social media campaign on June 2 to express its anguish. In Kolkata, the party questioned the TMC's protest against the current fuel prices and asked it to reduce state-level taxes if it was "really serious" about the issue. The TMC had held protests in the city against the fuel price hike yesterday. The party supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had in a recent tweet expressed concern over the spiralling prices of petrol and diesel. Meanwhile, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said petrol and diesel prices in the state would be slashed by Rs 1 per litre from June 1. Suggesting that Modi should follow Kerala's example and reduce the duties on fuel, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury alleged that while the Centre was giving Rs 3 lakh crore of relief for big unpaid loans of corporates, it had just given 1 paise relief for the common Indian. "No BJP-ruled state has done this so far. Modi should follow the Kerala example and reduce the duties on fuel to at least pre-2014 levels. The nine increases in excise duty must be rolled back immediately," he tweeted. Seeking a roll back of the fuel rates, Yechury said, "In states like West Bengal too, CM's approach to people's misery is exactly what Modi at the Centre's is: Callous disregard for their agony." CPI leader D Raja told PTI, "What are the government and oil companies doing? It is doing nothing but mocking the unprecedented miseries and hardships of the common people. It shows the government's complete insensitivity and failure to stop the fuel price hike." The Left party also asked the people to protest against such anti-people policies of the government. West Bengal Congress chief Adhir Chowdhury said in Kolkata that the ruling TMC, which was protesting, should reduce VAT and other state-level taxes on fuel to bring down prices. Mumbai Congress chief Sanjay Nirupam told PTI that as part of an online campaign, "Tweet Morcha", the opposition would mobilise people to post tweets to Modi and Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis over the issue and suggest ways to reduce fuel prices. In Chandigarh, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh described the one paisa cut in fuel prices a "cruel joke" on the people. The marginal decline in fuel prices had its share of excitement with state-owned Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) first announcing a reduction of 60 paise -- the biggest since daily price revision was introduced in mid-June last year, only to retract it within a couple of hours citing a technical error. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A US-based international nuclear proliferation watchdog today said Pakistan's application to the NSG should not be granted, mainly because of its ongoing illicit nuclear procurements abroad and its refusal to even minimally split its military and civil atomic programmes. This was stated by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in a report authored by David Albright, Sarah Burkhard, and Frank Pabian. Pakistan's application to the Nuclear Suppliers Group should not be granted at the present time, ISIS said as it released latest satellite images of the Kahuta nuclear power plant site in Pakistan. Although there are many reasons to refuse its membership, some more obvious reasons include its ongoing illicit nuclear procurements abroad and its refusal to even minimally split its military and civil nuclear programs, it said. The report discusses the purpose and size of the likely enrichment plant at Kahuta and estimates the amount of enriched uranium it could produce. We could not determine if Pakistan is building one or two enrichment plants. We are certainly interested in learning more, it said. While much of the world's attention has been directed to the nuclear programmes of Iran and North Korea, Pakistan has greatly expanded its nuclear complex dedicated to producing nuclear weapons, the report rued. One European official stated in an interview in late 2016 that in terms of instances of illicit nuclear-related procurements by the three countries, Pakistan has carried out the most, the report said. Over the last decade, Pakistan has renovated or expanded its uranium enrichment, plutonium production, and nuclear weaponisation capabilities, according to this official. It has also been expanding the number of its nuclear power plants and the means to make fuel for these new reactors, it said. In a detailed analysis of the latest satellite images it obtained, ISIS says Pakistan appears committed to building one or two large uranium enrichment plants. Whether the plants will be exclusively for peaceful purposes is undetermined, it said. Pakistan should be called upon by other states such as the United States, China, and major European powers to declare the purpose of its new enrichment plant(s), ISIS said. Based on assessing the construction project at Kahuta, which is likely an enrichment plant, it is difficult to know if this facility will lead to Pakistan expanding its supply of weapon-grade uranium or be limited to making only low enriched uranium for nuclear power reactors. Moreover, this enrichment facility could provide LEU to both military and civil nuclear programmes, ISIS said. The report said, if the Kahuta site is indeed a centrifuge plant, it will require a great deal of equipment, much of which Pakistan does not make domestically. According to government sources, Pakistan has acquired many goods from abroad. As such, supplier governments should step up efforts to thwart Pakistan's purchases for this plant or any other centrifuge plant and consider applying sanctions on Pakistani entities and individuals involved in purchasing for its centrifuge programme, ISIS said. Financial sanctions should also be applied on these entities and individuals. China should be told explicitly by other members of the NSG that the supply of goods to Pakistan's enrichment programme would violate China's NSG commitments, said the report. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) To check the sale of spurious milk and other milk products, three departments of the Punjab government today decided to launch joint crack down on the offenders. The Health and Family Welfare Department, the Cooperation Department and Dairy Development Department have agreed to work in unison to check the sale of spurious milk and other milk products, an official release here said. State Health Minister Brahm Mohindra said the decision to this effect was taken in a meeting chaired by him here today, in which Cooperation Minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa and Dairy Development Minister Balbir Singh Sidhu were also present. He said as decided in the meeting, district level teams will be constituted comprising officers of health, cooperation and dairy development departments to conduct surprise raids on individual milk vendors, milk collection centres and other entities which produce and sell milk products. Mohindra said milk samples would tested on the spot and strict punitive action as per the provisions of Food Safety Act would be taken. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi today met with Indonesian President Joko Widodo at the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta and hold informal discussion before their delegation-level talks. Prime Minister Modi, who arrived here last night on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, was accorded a red carpet welcome on his arrival at the Merdeka palace, one of the presidential palaces in Indonesia. Before the tete-e-tete between the two leaders, President Widodo welcomed Prime Minister Modi at the palace. "Relationship that evokes a feeling of warmth and kinship. A red carpet welcome and a guard of honour extended to PM @narendramodi on his arrival at Istana Merdeka ahead of his talks with President @jokowi," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. Modi and Widodo would discuss bilateral cooperation in a broad range of areas, including maritime, trade and investment. The two leaders would also attend some events, including a CEO Business Forum organised by the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and the Industry, and the Confederation of Indian Industry. Earlier, Prime Minister Modi laid a wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes' Cemetery here. "Paid tributes at the iconic Kalibata Heroes Cemetery in Jakarta," Modi tweeted in both Indonesian and English along with his pictures. Kalibata Heroes' Cemetery in South Jakarta is a military cemetery in Indonesia. It was built in 1953 and opened in November 1954 when the first burial took place. "Lest we forget...Paying homage to martyrs of Indonesian independence struggle! PM @narendramodi laying wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes' Cemetery and signing the Visitor's Book," Kumar tweeted. More than 7,000 people who are military casualties and veterans from Indonesian War of Independence are buried at the cemetery. Modi arrived in the Indonesian capital yesterday on the first leg of his three-nation tour to East Asia to cement the political, economic and strategic interest of the two friendly maritime neighbours. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo today flew kites as they inaugurated the first joint kite exhibition themed on India's largest epics Ramayana and Mahabharata at the Jakarta's National Monument here. Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo participated in the 'Kite Exhibition' which showcases the strong civilisational links between India and Indonesia. "The Leaders jointly unveiled a Kite Exhibition on the theme of Ramayana and Mahabharat," Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement. "The Leaders welcomed the conclusion of the MoU between Layang-layang Museum Jakarta and Kite Museum of Ahmadabad and noted with appreciation the holding of the First Joint Kite Exhibition on the theme of Ramayana and Mahabharat at National Monument in Jakarta," it said. Modi and Widodo also flew kites at the kite exhibition. The exhibition is themed on Hindu mythology epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata with images on kites of Lord Rama killing his rival Ravana and of demons. The Ramayana theme is designed by Indonesian organisers while the Mahabharata theme has been designed by Indians. Modi arrived in the Indonesian capital Jakarta yesterday on the first leg of his three-nation tour to East Asia during which he will also travel to Malaysia and Singapore to further boost India's Act East Policy. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Enforcement Directorate has attached a Rs 52.80 crore wind farm owned by Nirav Modi's family in Rajasthan's Jaisalmer in connection with its money laundering investigation into the over USD 2 billion PNB fraud case, the probe agency said today. The agency said it has issued a provisional order for attachment under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) for freezing the 9.6 MW-power capacity farm (consisting of multiple wind mills) that is "owned by" Ms Solar Exports, Ms Stellar Diamonds, Ms Diamond R US and Ms Neeshal Merchandising Private Limited. The first three firms are involved in the Punjab National Bank (PNB) alleged fraud case as they "got the Letters of Undertaking (LoU) issued fraudulently from the bank", the ED said in a statement. It said the market value of the asset is Rs 52.80 crore. The central probe agency has attached Nirav Modi's assets worth over Rs 691 crore till now. It also filed its first charge sheet, before a special court in Mumbai, against the diamantaire and his family on May 24 in the over USD 2 billion PNB fraud case stating that over Rs 6,400 crore of bank funds were allegedly laundered abroad to dummy companies by him and others. The ED had registered an FIR, called the Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), in this case on February 14. The CBI had also filed two charge sheets in this case earlier this month. Nirav Modi, who is absconding and has not joined the ED probe in the case till now, and others are being probed under various criminal laws after the fraud came to light this year following a complaint by the Punjab National Bank that they allegedly cheated the nationalised bank to the tune of over Rs 13,000 crore, with the purported involvement of a few employees of the bank. Both Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi are said to have left the country before criminal cases were lodged against them. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Asserting that political parties were "only rivals and not enemies", Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu today called for "less fission and more fusion" among them to realise a "better and new India". Speaking at the launch of the book 'Straight Talk' by Congress leader A M Singhvi, he said parties should also ponder if legislations are sending out the right message to the people, who have a lot of expectations from the "temples of democracy". Naidu said the divide between the ruling and opposition parties is becoming increasingly manifest in the legislatures and "it does not inspire confidence in the people". While the governments and ruling parties of the day seek to push legislative proposals, the opposition is mandated with ensuring the best possible scrutiny to see that legislations follow the aspirations of the people. "This can be realised without both loosing their respective identities. This calls for a new political approach based on 'less fission (division) and more fusion'," he said, noting that this was also the title of the articles in the book by Singhvi. "Political parties are only rivals and not enemies," he said, stressing that rivals play out their roles within a set of rules while enemies seek to destroy each other and political parties should abide by this distinction. The Vice President's comments come in the wake of frequent disruptions in Rajya Sabha, of which he is also the Chairman. He agreed with a suggestion in the book that functioning of various institutions in polity need to be widely discussed for the much needed transformation towards a 'better India'. "Singhvi dreams of a 'Better India'. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is targeting a 'New India'. The underlying concerns and intent are the same. Every Indian has a dream and every citizen has an aspiration. This makes our country 'Aspirational India'," he said. Naidu said the principal issue is realising this "new and better India" which every Indian dreams of. In parliamentary democracy, political parties have an important role to play and " should not be the be-all and end-all of political activities. It should be transformation of India towards a 'new and better India'," Naidu said. The Vice President said that lawmakers should be elected on the basis of four Cs-- Capacity, Caliber, Character and Conduct. He, however, said their election should not be on the basis of other four Cs-- Caste, Community, Cash and Criminal Prowess. Agreeing with another suggestion in the book to have fast track courts for election related cases, he said that special tribunals or courts need to be set up to dispose of election petitions within six months. Government and Parliament should seriously think on this issue, Naidu said. He also said that a committee to review rules and business of the Rajya Sabha to ensure its smooth functioning is likely to submit its interim report by next month. "I have set up a Committee to review and revisit the Rules of Procedure and Business of Rajya Sabha for enabling smooth functioning of the House. This Committee has started work and an interim report is likely to be submitted next month," he said. Referring to the suggestion made by Singhvi in the book for automatic suspension of allowances of lawmakers due to disruptions, he hoped that it would be considered by the committee. The Committee is headed by former Rajya Sabha Secretary General VK Agnihotri and will look into all the rules of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha and give its suggestions. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The police today foiled an immolation bid by a woman near the private residence of Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani here, a police official said. Hetal Makawana, a native of Padadhari town in Rajkot, was detained just before she could pour petrol on herself and set her ablaze, the official said. She wanted to take the extreme step to protest against the alleged "police inaction" into her complaint that her husband had been assaulted at the behest of a local BJP leader and former MLA Ramesh Rupapara. Her husband was injured in a clash some days back, the official said. Hetal wanted inclusion of Rupapara's name in an FIR filed in connection with the incident, the official said. She had threatened a couple of days back to set herself ablaze in front of Rupani's private residence here. A senior police official said they had stepped up the security at the chief minister's residence in advance and detained Hetal when she came to immolate herself today. Rupapara could not be contacted for his reaction despite repeated attempts. Rupani's residence is located in the city's posh Prakash society near Nirmala convent school. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress and a farmers' organisation today alleged that police was "forcing" peasants to sign bonds stating that they would not create trouble during a protest starting June 1 to mark the first anniversary of the Mandsaur firing incident. However, the state government denied the charge. To protest the police firing that took place in Mandsaur on June 6 last year, many farmers' organisations called for a nationwide protest from June 1 to June 10 demanding better prices for farm produce. Senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh today alleged that police had issued notices to farmers, asking them to sign bonds stating that they would not create any trouble during the protest. "The BJP government in the state is suppressing the voice of farmers. I have evidence which shows that farmers are being forced to fill bonds," he told reporters here. "The police have issued notices to farmers asking them to fill bonds stating they would not create any trouble during the protest," Singh alleged. He was enroute to Orchha from where he would embark on a yatra aimed at uniting Congress workers in the state ahead of the polls scheduled later this year. Congress chief Rahul Gandhi would visit Piplya Mandi village near Mandsaur on June 6 and address a condolence meeting-cum-rally to mark the first death anniversary of six farmers who were killed in police firing during a protest last year. Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Mahasangh (RKMM) president Shivkumar Sharma also alleged that the police was forcing farmers to fill peace bonds ahead of the agitation. However, Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Bhupendra Singh denied reports about issuing directives to police to make farmers sign any bonds. Farmers had held statewide protests in Madhya Pradesh last year demanding better prices for their crops. During the violence in Mandsaur, the epicentre of protests, six farmers were killed when police opened fire on them. In the wake of the protests, the state government in October 2017 launched Bhavantar Bhugtan Yojana, a scheme to protect farmers over falling farm prices. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Belgian police were today investigating how a gunman known for contacts with Islamist extremists came to launch a brazen suspected terror attack, shooting dead two female officers with their own weapons before killing a bystander. The late morning bloodshed shocked the eastern industrial city of Liege when the attacker armed with a knife repeatedly stabbed the two policewomen before using their own firearms to kill them. Police were scrambling to unpick the motives of the attacker identified as Benjamin Herman, a 36-year-old with a decade spent in and out of prison for acts of violence and petty crimes, who was out of jail on leave when he attacked. Amateur footage obtained by AFP showed the gunman shouting "Allahu Akbar" (Arabic for "God is greatest") as he walked through the Liege streets during the rampage. In another video, the suspect darts out of a school where he had holed up into a short and intense burst of police gunfire, after which the man collapses to the ground. Federal prosecutors said they had launched a terror investigation into the incident and would hold a press conference at 10:30 am (local time) today, though Interior Minister Jan Jambon urged caution over any extremist angle. "There are signals that there was radicalisation in the prison but did this radicalisation lead to these actions? There too we can ask ourselves a lot of questions," he told RTL radio. Special attention is being given to the gruesome murder of an alleged heroin dealer linked to Herman who was bludgeoned to death with a hammer late Monday near the Luxembourg border. Investigators yesterday found the hammer in Herman's car and Jambon said police believed the Liege attacker carried out the killing just hours after getting temporary release from prison. He "had nothing to lose" after "committing a murder (in the night of Monday to Tuesday)," a source close to the investigation told AFP. As well as the two policewomen, the attacker also shot dead a 22-year-old student sitting in a parked car in central Liege. He then took a female cleaner hostage in the nearby Leonie de Waha school, a public institution with several hundred students aged from two to 18. The two murdered police officers were identified as Lucile Garcia, 53, who had recently become a grandmother, and Soraya Belkacemi, 45, a mother to 13-year-old twins. Debate in Belgium was swirling on the country's prison policy with reports that Herman had repeatedly blown the conditions of his temporary leave from jail ahead of his full release set for 2020. "I feel responsible because I have responsibility for prisons," Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens told RTBF radio. Liege, a major city in Belgium's blighted rustbelt, was the scene of another bloody shootout in 2011 when a former convict killed six people and wounded more than 120 before turning the gun on himself. Liege police yesterday said it was "clear that the assassin's objective was to attack the police" and that one of the four officers wounded had suffered a serious leg injury. Prime Minister Charles Michel denounced what he called the "cowardly and blind violence" of yesterday's attack. Belgium has been on alert since authorities in January 2015 smashed a terror cell in the town of Verviers near Liege that was planning an attack on police. The cell also had links to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the November 2015 Islamic State attacks on Paris that killed 130 people. Belgium further raised its terror alert level after the Paris attack and placed the capital Brussels on lockdown for a week. IS suicide attacks then targeted Brussels airport and a metro station, leaving 32 people dead in March 2016. In August that same year, a machete-wielding man shouting "Allahu Akbar" attacked two policewomen in the industrial town of Charleroi before being shot dead. The country's law enforcement agencies and intelligence services came under intense scrutiny for apparently missing a series of leads after the Paris attacks that could have led to the Brussels bombers. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police rescued two kidnapped persons in Meghalaya's South Garo Hills district after an exchange of fire with the kidnappers, a senior police officer said today. "We had received information of two persons being kidnapped by unknown miscreants from Nagadipu area under Nongalbibra police station of the district," Superintendent of Police, Abraham T Sangma. On receiving a tip-off that the kidnapped persons were being kept in Kamila Bagan area of the district, a police team rushed to the area yesterday, he said. "The miscreants started firing towards the police team forcing the police team to retaliate in self defense. The exchange for fire lasted for five minutes after which the miscreants fled from the spot," the SP said. When the firing stopped the police team searched the area and found the body of one unknown miscreant killed on the spot during the exchange of fire. "The two kidnapped persons were also rescued from the place," the SP said. After a search of the area, police recovered one 9 mm pistol along with a magazine and 15 rounds of AK-47 ammunition, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Portugal's parliament has rejected a bill seeking to legalise voluntary euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide after a tight vote in the Catholic-majority country. A text proposed by the governing Socialist Party, which sought to set "special conditions" under which euthanasia would be permitted -- such as for patients in extreme suffering or with an incurable disease -- was defeated yesterday by 115 votes against, 110 votes for and four abstentions. Other proposals by the radical Left Bloc, the Green Party, and the People-Animals-Nature party were also rejected. Before the vote Lisbon Cardinal Dom Manuel Clemente, head of the Catholic Church in Portugal, had urged deputies to vote down the bill. Even if one of the proposals had passed, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa could have potentially vetoed the legislation. The head of state, a practising Catholic, had refused to take a public stance on the euthanasia issue, but Portuguese media reported he was prepared to use his veto if the euthanasia bill passed by only a handful of votes. Although euthanasia is not legal in Portugal, an ethics council has approved the withholding of life support or medical treatment in some cases. "This vote has expressed the will of parliament... but it has also shown there is a wide debate within Portuguese society," said Left Bloc leader Catarina Martins after the result. Earlier this month the lower house of parliament in neighbouring Spain, also predominantly Catholic, voted to examine a bill on legalising euthanasia. Voluntary euthanasia was first legalised in Belgium and the Netherlands in 2002. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Senior Congress leader V Hanumantha Rao today said former President Pranab Mukherjee should withdraw his decision to attend an RSS event as chief guest "in the interest of secularism". Mukherjee, who had held the highest post of President, should not attend the meeting of RSS as it is a "communal" organisation, the AICC Secretary and former Rajya Sabha member said. "I am requesting him that he should withdraw," Rao said. He said Mukherjee was a senior Congress leader who has been held in high esteem by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi. "Their (RSS) thinking is Hindutva. They are not secular. They want 'Hindu desh'. How he (Mukherjee) can go? In this country, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, everybody is there... So my request is he should rethink (his decision to attend the RSS meet) and he should not go," he said. Rao also said he would write to Mukherjee in this regard. Mukherjee, who has been a Congress veteran, has been invited to be the chief guest at the valedictory function of Sangh Shiksha Varg -- a training camp for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh volunteers -- at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur, scheduled on June 7. The former president has accepted the invitation, an RSS functionary said recently. Union Minister and senior BJP leader Nitin Gadkari had yesterday welcomed Mukherjee's decision to attend the event, saying the RSS was an organisation of nationalists and any kind of "political untouchability" is not good. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A demonstration against the deadly police firing in Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu was today held in front of the Indian High Commission here, condemning the incident that left 13 people dead. On May 22, police had opened fire on the protestors agitating against the expansion of the Sterlite Copper plant in Tuticorin, killing 13 people, including two women. The protestors were demanding closure of Sterlite Copper plant over pollution concerns. Holding placards, condemning the police brutality, the group members "Justice for Thoothukudi" staged demonstration opposite the Indian High Commission here. "We believe that the recent massacre of Thoothukudi (Tuticorin) protestors - specifically the targeting of leftist organisers - was an abhorrent instance of state terror and we condemn every level of the Indian government for allowing this to occur," they said in a statement. Hailing the Tamil Nadu government for shutting down the plant, the statement said that the company had left a trail of bodies and two decades worth of environmental degradation. A similar protest was held in Jaffna on May 25. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Puducherry chief minister V Narayanasamy turned 71 today. His ministerial colleagues, legislators and leaders of different wings of the ruling Congress offered prayers at the Manakula Vinayakar temple on the occasion. Special prayers were held at churches and mosques also, party sources said. Congress president Rahul Gandhi greeted the chief minister over phone, they said. Former chief minister and senior Congress leader M D R Ramachandran cut a cake weighing 71 kgs at the birthday celebrations held at the party office. Narayanasamy is out of station along with some of the party functionaries. Puducherry Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi had met Narayanasamy at his residence yesterday on the birthday eve and greeted him. Bedi and the Congress government have been at loggerheads on various issues. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Banking services in Rajasthan were crippled as nearly 30,000 employees of various banks went on a two-day nationwide strike from today, protesting the meagre 2 per cent wage hike offered by the Indian Banks' Association (IBA). The strike is likely to affect Rs 10,000 crore worth transactions daily. Nearly 5,500 bank branches are shut and 30,000 employees are on strike in support of nationwide stir, the United Forum of Bank Unions convenor (Rajasthan) Mahesh Mishra said. He added that the bank employees will tomorrow lodge a protest here at Ambedkar Circle. Nearly 10 lakh employees, working in various branches of 21 public sector banks, 13 old generation private sector banks, six foreign banks and 56 regional rural banks across the country went on the strike as the banking lobby, Indian Banks Association (IBA), offered them a nominal wage revision. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) People who wear glasses may be more intelligent, say scientists who have analysed the genetic data of more than 44,480 people. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh found that those who were more intelligent were nearly 30 per cent more likely to have genes indicating they require reading glasses. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, also linked higher cognitive ability to genes known to play a part in better cardiovascular health. Researchers examined 148 genomic regions related to better cognitive function, including 58 that have not previously been reported. The results could help understand age and illness related cognitive decline, 'The Telegraph' reported. "This study, the largest genetic study of cognitive function, has identified many genetic differences that contribute to the heritability of thinking skills," said Gail Davies from University of Edinburgh in the UK. "The discovery of shared genetic effects on health outcomes and brain structure provides a foundation for exploring the mechanisms by which these differences influence thinking skills throughout a lifetime," said Davies. Those who participated in the study had all taken a variety of thinking tests which were summarised as a general cognitive ability score. All had genetic testing that examined their DNA and none of the people had dementia or a stroke. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The National Green Tribunal has rapped the Uttarakhand government for not demolishing illegal structures inside Kalagarh, the most sensitive core area of the Jim Corbett Tiger Reserve, saying it was trying to "frustrate" its directions. A bench headed by acting Chairperson Justice Jawad Rahim slapped a penalty of Rs 3 lakh on the state government for not filing an affidavit on demolition and asked it to file the document within a week. The green panel said that it had ordered demolition of the illegal structures inside Kalagarh. However, the state government was trying to delay compliance on the pretext that land for rehabilitation was not available. "From the narration of the facts as stated, the intention of State appears not honest. The order has not been complied on one pretext or the other and now the ground created is about want of land for rehabilitation before the demolition could take place. In the circumstances, we are justified in concluding that unless a serious view is taken, the State will again frustrate the directions of the Tribunal," the bench said. The state government on September 21 last year had assured the tribunal that inhabitants would be removed and structures would be demolished as expeditiously as possible from the Jim Corbett National Park and in any case not more than one year. It had also said that the Deputy Commissioner of the area would file status-cum compliance report, every three months before the tribunal, to show progress in compliance of directions. However, no status report has been filed despite assurance. While permitting the state to file the affidavit, the tribunal said, "Be that as it may, even though we may permit filing of undertaking to give a timeline no further indulgence will be shown. Hence for defaults committed, the State of Uttarakhand is directed to pay compensation of Rs 3 lakhs for default committed within a period of one week from now. Affidavit be also filed within one week subject to deposit of cost". The NGT had earlier also criticised the Uttar Pradesh government, whose irrigation department has a residential colony in Kalagarh constructed before Uttarakhand was carved out of the state, for non-compliance of Supreme Court order directing eviction of residents from these colonies. The apex court, in December 2013, had directed the UP irrigation department to vacate residential colonies and hand them over to Uttarakhand government within six months. The green panel had also constituted a committee comprising Director of the tiger reserve, senior officials of the environment ministry, UP pollution control board and irrigation departments of UP and Uttarakhand. It had asked the panel to conduct a survey in the area and submit a report. It had asked the committee to indicate in its report the number of existing structures in the Corbett Tiger Reserve in Kalagarh, status of these structures and the area which is to be marked as eco-sensitive zone beyond the limits of the park. In its December 2013 judgement, the Supreme Court had upheld the 2004 report of its Central Empowered Committee (CEC) to return the encroached New Kalagarh irrigation colony to the Corbett Tiger Reserve and set a six-month deadline for the state government to ensure compliance. In August 1966, the Forest Department of undivided Uttar Pradesh had handed over around 9,000 hectares of Corbett National Park land to the state Irrigation Department for the Ramganga hydel project. The houses were built for people at the site during the construction of the Ram Ganga Dam also known as the Kalagarh Dam, which was completed in 1974. The Supreme Court had handed this case over to the National Green Tribunal last year. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi High Court today dubbed as "invalid" an internal complaints panel of Air France set up to deal with sexual harassment charges levelled by an Indian woman staffer against a former senior officer of the airline. It directed the French national carrier to reconstitute its internal complaints committee (ICC) in 30 days "in strict compliance with the requirements under law" and ordered the panel to conduct a fresh inquiry. The high court set aside the ICC report exonerating the official, a French national who was handling its cargo business in India, Nepal and Bhutan in 2013, of all charges, observing that the "Vishaka guidelines are to be taken seriously, and not followed in a ritualistic manner". The guidelines are a set of procedures for use in India to deal with the cases of sexual harassment at the workplace. A bench of Justices S Ravindra Bhat and A K Chawla set aside the proceedings of the ICC and its report, saying it has not conducted the matter "according to principles of natural justice". The court also noted that the sudden termination of employment of the woman "also raises concerns regarding there being bias in the proceedings of the ICC". "Apart from non-compliance in the composition, and the alleged bias by members of the ICC, that body did not take steps to lend confidence or assurance to the appellant (woman) as she repeatedly raised concerns of not feeling comfortable in the manner in which the proceedings were being conducted and also expressed her discomfort in being around the accused, which was so vital for the fairness in the enquiry, and mandated by Vishaka," the bench said while allowing her plea. The court noted in its verdict that "decision makers, Parliament, courts and employers are to be ever vigilant in ensuring that effective policies are swiftly and impartially enforced to ensure justice and see that no one is subjected to unwelcome - and unacceptable behaviour". The bench said that unlike stray cases of individual indiscipline, it was the primary obligation of employers to ensure effective implementation of the laws and rules aimed at securing a safe workplace for women employees. "A permissiveness or infraction in implementation in one case, implies the employer's lack of will or inability to assure such safety and equality at its workplace. A complainant who takes courage to speak out against unwelcome behaviour regardless of the perpetrator is not merely an object of pity or sympathy," the bench said, adding "upon us all - the employer, courts and the society as a whole, lies the duty to root out such wholly unwholesome behaviour". The judgement came on the woman's plea challenging a single judge order declining to continue hearing her petition against the ICC proceedings on account of lack of territorial jurisdiction. In her plea before the single judge, she had claimed that the ICC proceedings were not conducted in accordance with law or the principles of natural justice. She had also challenged the constitution of the ICC as being contrary to the provisions of the Workplace Harassment Prohibition Act, 2013. The single judge had on January 30 said the high court lacked the territorial jurisdiction to hear the matter. On the same day, the ICC passed its final report exonerating the French national, who was the Marketing Manager, Cargo (India, Nepal and Bhutan) in 2013, of all allegations and charges. In her plea, she had alleged that the senior officer had made repeated sexual advances inspite of her repeated or express refusal. She had also claimed that in order to victimise her for complaining against the incident of sexual harassment, she was compelled to submit her resignation under the threat of immediate termination. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's fresh pitch for special category status for Bihar heated up the political scenario in the state with the RJD mocking the plea made by him on social media and the JD(U) hitting back, claiming the opposition was incapable of understanding the nuances of the issue. Kumar, in a post on Twitter yesterday, appealed for special category status for the state which would "act as a catalyst for private investment" and boost employment generation. The Bihar chief minister said the 15th Finance Commission must locate the resource gaps and support backward states like Bihar in their efforts to catch up with the developed states. The demand for special category status had been raised by Kumar for a long time in the past. He raised the issue during days of the Congress-led UPA, when he was with the BJP, before parting ways with it in 2013. He had also held big public meetings in support of the demand in Patna as well in Delhi. The issue came to fore again recently when the TDP left the NDA over denial of special category status to Andhra Pradesh. Reacting to the fresh pitch, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav today said Kumar should have had a direct word with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the issue, instead of making a plea for the same on social media. The ruling JD(U), headed by Kumar, however, said the special status was just one part of the assistance that the chief minister had sought for Bihar from the 15th Finance Commission. "Kumar is part of a coalition which is also in power at the Centre. He is suitably placed to have a direct word with the prime minister on the issue. What is he trying to achieve through a lengthy discourse, addressed to no one in particular," Yadav, the younger son of Lalu Prasad, told reporters. "After all, whom does the chief minister expect to take a call on special status for Bihar. Does he expect US President Donald Trump to intervene on the issue," he said. Yadav claimed that Kumar suffered from a guilty conscience after his having ditched them to join the BJP-led coalition and was trying to justify his betrayal by pretending that he was fighting for the interests of Bihar. He claimed that Kumar was left with no moral courage to take up issues of the state's interests before Modi, who had snubbed him in October last year, in public view when he made a plea with folded hands for grant of central status to Patna University. JD(U) national general secretary and Rajya Sabha MP R C P Singh, also a close confidant of Kumar, said they were not making an appeal to the prime minister and it was the Finance Commission that was to take a call on the issue of special status. "The difficulty in grant of special status is arising out of the recommendations of the 14th Finance Commission. We are going to plead our case before the 15th Finance Commission set up by the Narendra Modi government," Singh said. He also said the chief minister had given a detailed description of the problems faced by Bihar and the possible remedies. "The opposition is incapable of comprehending these nuances and it has latched on to the special status issue as it sounds catchy," he claimed. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union Minister Smriti Irani today said sanctioning of pending IGST refunds will help clear dues worth Rs 2,500 crore to textiles and apparel exporters. "As vast majority of apparel units fall under MSME sector, sanction of pending IGST refund claims will invigorate the industry & give a much needed boost to exports," Irani said in a tweet. She said the sanction of pending IGST refund claims will help to clear outstanding IGST amount of approximately Rs 2,500 crore against textiles and apparel exports as enunciated by export promotion councils. "Interim solution is a big relief for exporters. Decision taken subsequent to our meeting with Export Promotion Councils on Sunday is testimony to the speed of governance & Government of India's commitment towards exponential growth of textiles sector," the Textiles Minister said. Representatives from Apparel Export Promotion Council had on Sunday raised issues related to blockage of GST refunds and delay in disbursal of Rebate on State Levies (RoSL) dues in a meeting with Finance Minister Piyush Goyal and Irani. In another tweet, the Textiles Minister said she was "grateful to dynamic @PiyushGoyal for sanctioning IGST refund claims of exporters facing blockage due to non-transmission of data between GSTN & Customs EDI System". In a circular to all principal chief commissioners and director generals, the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) said that exporters with refunds stuck have committed mistake while filing GSTR-1 and 3B. Besides, there are certain cases where they have "short paid" Integrated GST (IGST) vis-a-vis their liability declared in GSTR-1. Because of the mismatch in GSTR-3B and GSTR-1, GST Network (GSTN), the company handling the IT backbone for new indirect tax regime, could not transmit records to Customs EDI system and consequently IGST refunds could not be processed, it said. Goods and Services Tax (GST), which subsumed over a dozen local taxes, was rolled out from July 1, 2017. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court today refused to grant interim bail to a former principal of a medical college and hospital in Uttar Pradesh where scores of children had died last year allegedly due to shortage of oxygen supply. Dr Rajeev Kumar Mishra of Gorakhpur's BRD medical college and hospital told the top court that he has been in jail for more than ten months and the children had died due to Japanese Encephalitis disease and not for shortage of oxygen. A bench of Justices L Nageswara Rao and M M Shantanagoudar issued notice to Uttar Pradesh government on the plea of Mishra and listed the matter for June 6. More than 60 children, mostly infants, had died at the government-run Baba Raghav Das Medical College in Gorakhpur within a week in August 2017. There were allegations that the deaths occurred due to disruption in oxygen supply over unpaid bills to the vendor. At the outset, senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for Mishra, said he was arrested on August 29, 2017 and has remained in jail for over ten months. "Chargesheet has been filed in the case. The co-accused in the case including one doctor Kafeel Khan, who was the head of the Encephalitis ward, and the Oxygen gas supplier Manish Bhandari have already got bail. I should be granted at least interim bail till the petition is disposed of," Rohatgi said. When the bench asked him what was in the chargesheet filed against his client, the senior lawyer said it has been alleged that Mishra had not cleared the bills for supply of oxygen, due to which the gas supply to the hospital was cut. To this, the bench said, "then what do you expect, that you will not clear the bills and the vendor will keep supplying the gas". Rohatgi said "oxygen gas was not the issue, as the children had died due to a disease called Japanese encephalitis". He said at least interim bail should be granted till the petition is disposed of as over ten months have gone by. The bench, however, refused the plea and sought response from the state government. Mishra had approached the apex court challenging the order of Allahabad High Court dated April 30, by which it had denied bail to him. He has been booked for criminal negligence and offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act. The state government had told the High Court that due to the alleged role of Misra, the oxygen supply got halted in the hospital as he had stopped payments to the supplier to allegedly force the company to pay him kickbacks. On April 9, the top court had granted bail to the proprietor of a firm which supplied oxygen to the hospital saying he had spent seven months in jail for an offence which entailed maximum punishment of three years imprisonment. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Seven people, all working in a call centre of an insurance company, were arrested by Mumbai police for allegedly cheating at least 22 people to the tune of several lakhs under the pretext of offering them extra bonus on their insurance policies, police said today. The alleged fraud came to light after one Dr Rajshekhar Ujagare (70), a resident of suburban Mulund, approached the police with a complaint that he was cheated of Rs 4 lakh by unidentified persons who promised him extra bonus on his private insurance policy, a police official said. Police registered a case under various sections of the IPC and under Information Technology Act and launched investigation. During the probe, it came to light that unidentified persons had called up the complainant over his phone several times since September 2017. The callers had details of the insurance policy of the complainant and its maturity date as well, the official said. "As the callers had detailed information about the policy, the complainant thought they were genuine. The callers told the complainant that he was entitled to claim Rs 9.46 lakh bonus on his policy but had to pay the processing fees to claim it," according to the official. During the period of the last ten months, the callers kept calling the complainant and raised the amount of "bonus" each time, he said, adding that the complainant deposited at least Rs 4 lakh in the bank accounts provided by the callers to claim the extra bonus. However, he approached the police after he failed to get any amount. During investigation, the police traced the callers to areas like Thane, Ghansoli in Navi Mumbai, and Guhagar in Ratnagiri and arrested them earlier this week, he said. "Police seized cash worth Rs 1.69 lakh, 10 mobile phone handsets, 22 SIM cards, 14 debit cards, gold ornaments from the accused persons," said Akhilesh Singh, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Zone-VII). During their interrogation it came to light that all of them were working in a call centre of an insurance company and thus accessed data regarding the policy-holders, he said. "The accused persons cheated at least 22 people from various parts of the state, as per investigation so far," the officer said. The accused were produced before a court here which remanded them in police custody till June 1, he said, adding that further investigation is on. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Shahkot Assembly bypoll results, which will be out tomorrow, is being seen as a popularity test for the 14-month-old Congress government in Punjab, with opposition SAD striving to retain its stronghold. The bypoll was necessitated following the demise of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) MLA Ajit Singh Kohar in February this year. While the SAD is striving to retain its pocket borough from where Kohar was elected five-times, the results for the ruling Congress in Punjab is being seen as a barometer for the popularity of the 14-month-old Amarinder Singh dispensation. During the bypoll, the opposition party had accused the Congress of misusing official machinery against political opponents. The AAP, which faced a humiliating defeat in the Gurdaspur Lok Sabha bypoll and civic polls, is desperately looking for a victory in Shahkot. The Congress is confident of maintaining the winning momentum by wresting the seat from rival SAD. Over 76 per cent of 1.72 lakh voters had exercised their franchise for the Shahkot bypoll on May 28 where the Congress, the SAD and the AAP were locked in a triangular battle. The Shahkot Assembly constituency, considered a SAD bastion, had recorded 78.60 per cent polling during 2017 the Punjab polls. Ruling Congress had fielded Hardev Singh Laddi, while the SAD gave ticket to Ajit Singh Kohar's son Naib Singh Kohar. The AAP had nominated Rattan Singh Kakkar Kalan for the bypoll. Punjab Chief Electoral Officer S Karuna Raju said all necessary arrangements have been made for the counting of votes tomorrow. "Necessary arrangements have been for the counting of votes," said Raju. The counting of votes would start at 8 am in the presence of the election observer, candidates of political parties and their representatives. It will take place at the office of the Director, Land Records in Jalandhar. Tight security arrangements have been made to ensure peaceful counting of votes, the official said. The counting for the Shahkot by-election would be held in 17 rounds. Deputy Commissioner Jalandhar Varinder Kumar Sharma and Commissioner of Police Praveen Kumar Sinha today took stock of arrangements made in this regard. They said that more than 300 police personnel have been deployed in the counting centre for smooth and hassle free counting. Every effort would be made to ensure that the counting is held peacefully and in a congenial atmosphere, the officials said. They said that the district administration has already made elaborate arrangements for the security of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and VVPAT machines. Likewise, they said that round the clock surveillance of the machines was also being ensured through CCTV cameras installed in the premises of the counting centre. The Election Commission used EVMs and VVPATs at the all the 236 polling stations. The Congress had won 77 seats in the 117-member Punjab assembly during 2017 state polls while the SAD-BJP alliance managed to win 18. The AAP won 20 seats, while the Lok Insaf Party had bagged two seats. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) After having accepted the RSS invite, former President Pranab Mukherjee should go and tell the Sangh what is wrong with its ideology, former finance minister and senior Congress leader P Chidambaram said today. He was speaking at a discussion on "India at 71 - Hits and Misses" after the launch of book "Straight Talk". The senior Congress leader said there is no point debating now on why the former president accepted the invite to be the chief guest at an RSS function in Nagpur. "Now that he has accepted the invitation, there is no point debating why he did so. The more important thing to say is, 'Sir you have accepted the invitation, please go there and tell them what is wrong with their ideology'," he said when asked about Mukherjee accepting the RSS invite. Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said it is a "somewhat stupidish approach" to judge Mukherjee over acceptance of the invitation. "Unless and until you hear what the former president says there, you should not judge him," he said. A large number of Congress leaders have criticised the former president for accepting the RSS invitation and have asked him to reconsider "for the sake of secularism". The former president is slated to address the Sangha Shiksha Varga's (SSV) valedictory function at RSS headquarters in Nagpur on June 7. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia today met Divya Raghuvanshi, who stood first among Delhi government school students in the CBSE class 10 exam, and wished her luck for her future endeavours. Sisodia met her at the Delhi Secretariat. "Scoring 98% in her 10th Board Exams, Divya Raghuvanshi topped in #DelhiGovtSchools with 490 marks out of 500. Had a long informal interaction with her, her family, teachers & principal about her success & beyond. Lots of good wishes to her for her life ahead! #FeelingProud (sci)," he tweeted. The Central Board of Secondary had declared Class 10 exam results yesterday. At 69.32 per cent, government schools in Delhi had the lowest pass percentage among all categories of schools affiliated to the CBSE. The overall pass percentage was 86.70. Delhi recorded a pass percentage of 78.62, with girls stealing a march over boys. The pass percentage of girls is 79.15 as opposed to boys who have a pass percentage of 78.12. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Special Investigation Team probing the murder of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh today filed its first charge sheet in the sensational case, naming alleged gunrunner and Hindutva activist T Naveen Kumar as an accused. The 650-page charge sheet filed before the First Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate details the role of Naveen Kumar alone as an accomplice in the murder, which had triggered a nationwide outrage. Naveen Kumar has been charged under section 302 (murder), 120 B (criminal conspiracy), 118 (concealing a conspiracy) and 114 (abetment to the crime) of the IPC, and also under provisions of the Arms Act, SIT sources told PTI. The charge sheet contains the statement of about 131 witnesses, the sources said. The SIT has submitted that it would submit more documents relating to the case in future. Lankesh, 55, known for her left leaning and strong anti-Hindutva views, was shot dead in front of her house here on September five last year. Naveen Kumar was arrested for alleged illegal possession of firearm and ammunition on February 18. During the probe, the SIT claimed, it had found evidence of his involvement in the killing of Lankesh, and also arrested him in that case. The Arms Act case against Naveen Kumar would be heard by a city court tomorrow. Naveen Kumar, hailing from Maddur in Mandya district, was arrested with a firearm and bullets when he was waiting for a client at Majestic bus stand here. Sources claimed he had not only supplied firearms to the assassins of Lankesh but also conducted a recce of the area around her residence and provided them vital inputs about her. He is also suspected to have ferried the prime accused to a place close to Lankesh's house. Police said Naveen Kumar had named a man from Shivamogga Praveen Kumar, arrested by the city police in connection with an illegal arms case in May, in the Gauri Lankesh murder case. The sources said the SIT has taken into custody four more people suspected of involvement in Lankesh's killing. They have been identified as Manohar Edve (30), Sujith Kumar alias Praveen (37), Amol Kale alias Bhaisab (40) and Amit Degwekar alias Pradeep. While Edve and Praveen are fromKarnataka, Kale and Degvekar are from Maharashtra and Goarespectively. They were arrested for hatching a plan to kill Kannada writer K S Bhagawan, known for his anti-Hindutva stance, the sources said. "Their involvement in Gauri Lankesh case is very much likely. That's why we have taken them into custody and are interrogating them closely," said a source in the SIT. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today reviewed the security situation at forward posts of the Assam Rifles, along the India-Myanmar border, in Mon district of Nagaland. Sitharaman, who arrived in Nagaland yesterday on a two-day visit, also interacted with the commanders operating on the ground, a release issued by the PRO, Defence said. Accompanied by Lieutenant General Gopal R, the general officer commanding of the Army's Spear Corps, she assessed the border management operations at the forward posts, it said. The Spear Corps is headquartered in Rangapahar, Dimapur. The commanders briefed her about the prevalent conditions under which the Army units function along the international border, the release said. The minister, after a comprehensive assessment of the forward posts, expressed "immense satisfaction" over the "high standards of professionalism and dedication" displayed by the units, it said. Sitharaman also met state government functionaries, representatives of other security agencies and local community leaders during her visit to the district, it said. She thanked them for their cooperation in maintaining security in the area, it added. Yesterday, the defence minister had visited the Spear Corps Zone in Dimapur, where officers briefed her about the counter-terrorist operations. Defence sources said Sitharaman was unable to visit other international border areas in Nagaland owing to inclement weather conditions. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The domination of the Scripps National Spelling Bee by Indian-Americans has gone on long enough that a second generation has emerged. Last year, Mira Dedhia, whose mother competed in the bee three times, finished third. This year, the first child of a former champion is competing. Dr. Balu Natarajan, a physician from Hinsdale, Illinois, won in 1985 by spelling "milieu," a word that almost certainly wouldn't be used beyond preliminary rounds today. His 12-year-old son, Atman Balakrishnan, is making his debut this year, and his ultimate goal is to equal his father's achievement. No pressure, though. "He does help me and try to make me work harder, because he knows that I want this," Atman said. "If he knew that I did not want this, he would not push me." The bee began today with 516 spellers, by far the most in its history. The expanded field means three full days of spelling instead of two. The 50 or so spellers who make the finals will be announced Wednesday, then compete Thursday until a champion is crowned. As usual, most of the presumed favourites are Indian-American. Natarajan was the first Indian-American to win. Another followed in 1988. Eighteen of the past 22 champions have been Indian-American, including three years when there were co-champions. Natarajan is on the board of the North South Foundation, a nonprofit that hosts national competitions in spelling and other subjects and has served as a training ground for nearly all the recent champions. That's just one reason among many for the success of Indian-Americans. "It's become now kind of a good cycle where certain Indian-Americans succeed, and I think they've inspired others to do the same," Natarajan said. "I have no idea what my part is in that, if any." This year's bee has 516 spellers, roughly a fourfold increase over Natarajan's first bee. That's not the only thing that has changed. "The word bank of most of the spellers or many of the spellers has just gone up dramatically," he said. "I think you could win the spelling bee back then by knowing maybe 10,000 words, and now the kids who win have to know somewhere between 40-and-80,000 words." Here are some other things to know about today's first day of spelling: HIGH-STAKES TEST The bee begins with a written spelling and vocabulary test. It's the biggest factor in determining the roughly 50 spellers who will advance to Thursday's finals, and the consensus was that it was very difficult. The field of spellers expanded by more than 200 this year because Scripps started a wild-card program to give opportunities to more kids from highly competitive regions. As a result, Scripps had to craft a test that would separate the most skilled and prepared spellers. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A students' body in Arunachal Pradesh has requested Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to shift the Indian Air Force (IAF) firing range at Dullungmukh in Lower Subansiri district to a suitable place, where there was no human habitat nearby. The All Dullungmukh Area Students' Union (ADASU) submitted a memorandum to the Union minister, who was here yesterday, drawing her attention to the dangers posed by the bombing practices at the firing range to the lives of people who stay in close proximity, a member of the union said. The memorandum, a copy of which was available with PTI, stated that the air and sound pollution caused by the regular bombing practices adversely affect the health of people in the area. The defence minister was also apprised of a 1992 incident, in which a person was accidentally killed during a bombing practice in the firing range. "No compensation has been given to the victim's family till date," the memorandum added. On May 25, too, the residents of the area had met a visiting delegation of National Human Rights Commission, led by Justice HL Dattu, to intimate them about the problems faced by the people living in the vicinity of the IAF firing range. Sitharaman, while responding to a media query on the issue yesterday, had said she would hold a dialogue with the state government after getting a detailed report from his officials. Arunachal Information & Public Relations Minister Bamang Felix, who also present at the press meet, said the state has already taken up the matter with the Centre. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP leader Subramanian Swamy today moved a city court seeking a direction to the Delhi Police to produce the report of a vigilance enquiry conducted in Sunanda Pushkar death case. Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal, who has reserved for June 5 an order on whether to summon Pushkar's husband and senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor as accused in the case, put up the application for consideration on that day. Swamy has sought a direction to the probe agency to inform the court as to whether the shortcomings in the probe are satisfied. The application stated that the report of a vigilance inquiry, ordered by Delhi Police Commissioner, had pointed to various serious shortcomings in the probe in the case. "If this court examines those shortcomings pointed out in the vigilance report to the extent whether the investigating agency has considered these shortcomings prior to filing of the charge sheet, further investigations on the conspiracy and other angles may be carried out in the interest of justice," the application said. Swamy also sought the court's nod to assist the prosecution in conducting the case. Pushkar was found dead in the suite of a luxury hotel in south Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014. The Delhi Police had on May 14 accused the Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram of abetting Sunanda's suicide and urged the court that he should be summoned as an accused in the four-and-half year-old case, claiming there was sufficient evidence against him. In a nearly 3,000-page charge sheet, the police has named Tharoor as the only accused while also alleging that he had subjected his wife to cruelty. Tharoor has not been arrested in the case. The Congress leader has been charged under sections 498 A (husband or his relative subjecting a woman to cruelty) and 306 (abetment of suicide) of the Indian Penal Code. Under section 498A, the maximum punishment is up to three years of imprisonment, while jail term of up to 10 years is prescribed under section 306. The charge sheet, which includes several annexures including medical reports, said that Sunanda died within four years of her marriage with Tharoor. The couple had entered the wedlock on August 22, 2010. An FIR was registered by the police on January 1, 2015 against unknown persons under IPC section 302 (murder). The special investigation team on April 20 had told the apex 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's wife. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today said she has sought a report from the Indian High Commission in Pakistan over killing of a Sikh religious leader in Peshawar city. Charnjit Singh, 52, a prominent Sikh leader and an outspoken critic of the Taliban, was shot dead by gunmen in Peshawar's Scheme Chowk area yesterday. His killing has jolted the minority community in Pakistan. Swaraj today said she has sought a report from the Indian mission in Islamabad after president of Shiromani Akali Dal Sukhbir Singh Badal expressed shock over the Sikh leader's killing and asked her on twitter to take up the issue with Pakistan. "Sukhbir ji : I fully share your concern. I have already asked for a report from our High Commissioner in Islamabad. I will revert on this," Swaraj tweeted. Singh was a social activist and was known for his work for inter-faith harmony. Badal, in a tweet, said Sikhs have always been facing discrimination in Pakistan and requested Swaraj to take up the issue with her Pakistan counterpart to ensure safety and security of the community in Pakistan. Local police said the killing was suspected to be a targeted attack. Singh hailed from Khyber tribal region, but migrated to Peshawar in the early 1980s. He is survived by two sons and a daughter. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu says his Telugu Desam Party will play a pivotal role in 2019 when regional parties band together to form government at the Centre but has ruled himself out of the prime ministerial race. The TDP chief, who sidestepped a question on whether the parties would take the support of the Congress should the need arise, was also scathing in his criticism of the BJP during an interaction with journalists late last night. Describing the BJP as a "back door party" that wanted to enter south India through unscrupulous means, Naidu said it should have helped Andhra Pradesh to gain access to the region. "The BJP is only a back door party. It has a remote with which it controls its puppets," Naidu told a group of reporters at the conclusion of Mahanadu, the annual conclave of the TDP. He was responding to a question on whether the BJP had become the TDP's primary rival. "The BJP declared that Karnataka is the gateway to South India. It is a bad statement. Now you want to enter through the back door. They should have realized it... They should have supported Andhra Pradesh," Naidu said. The TDP chief -- who formally quit the BJP-led NDA earlier this year over special category to the state -- said his party would play a decisive role in the formation of a government in New Delhi in 2019 but he himself had no prime ministerial ambitions. "I do not have any prime ministerial ambitions. This post was offered to me twice in the past," he said, referring to 1996 when H D Deve Gowda became prime minister and 1997 when I K Gujral took the chair. "I just want to develop Andhra," Naidu asserted. Suggesting that he would keep his cards close to his chest till the Lok Sabha elections, he said when asked if regional parties would seek the support of the Congress should the need arise, "All these things are a matter of time. Right now, I do not want to create any confusion." About BJP chief Amit Shah alleging that the Andhra government had furnished "false" utilization certificates for the funds the Centre had sanctioned for Amravati, the proposed ultra-modern capital of the state, Naidu said, "Shah is just the president of a party. In what capacity is he questioning us? "The central minister concerned can visit Amravati to review the work. The prime minister can come and see what we are doing," the TDP chief added. Naidu also asked why Andhra Pradesh should pay taxes to the Centre, which had reneged on its promises of according special category status to Andhra Pradesh, giving full support for the Polavaram irrigation project and the choice of the state's capital. During the bifurcation of the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, the BJP demanded a special status for the state and the Congress agreed, he said. "The entire House accepted it. Why are you denying it now?" he asked "We struggled for 60 years to put Hyderabad on the world map and all of a sudden, they asked us to go... We came here debt-ridden, without assets and money. Is it not the Centre's responsibility to give us a fair deal?" According to Naidu, the BJP government had promised a special package for backward districts of Andhra Pradesh on the lines of the Bundelkhand region. But the saffron party cheated the people. "The BJP government credited Rs 50 crore each for seven backward districts of AP and after some time it debited the amount, saying the Prime Minister's Office did not approve it. This is their cooperative federalism," Naidu said. "Whatever the Centre is doing against us is making me stronger in Andhra Pradesh," he said. Asked about the resettlement of those affected by the Polavaram project, the chief minister said, "The rehabilitation work has been completed to a certain extent. As and when the Centre gives the money, we will complete the remaining work." "The Central government will have to give the money. It is our right and is mentioned in the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act. They cannot go against it. If they do all these things... Why should we pay taxes to the Centre? Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not doing us any favours," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Puducherry Minister R Kamalakannan today said as many as 520 posts of teachers in government schools were vacant and the government has decided to fill up the vacancies by posting teachers on contract basis. As the concurrence of the Finance Department of Puducherry government was not available immediately to post teachers on regular basis, the government had decided to post teachers on contract basis, he told reporters here. The government had decided on this step to manage the situation to ensure that government schools produced increased pass percentage in public examinations, he said. He also released the results of Class XI public examination conducted by the state government in March this year and said a pass percentage of 89.35 was registered in Puducherry and Karaikal regions. Of the 15,246 students who appeared through government and private schools in the two regions, 13,622 students had emerged successful, Kamalakannan said. He further said students who were not successful in the examination could proceed to do the plus two course without break, both in private and government schools. He said the government would adopt 'academic audit' to ascertain the punctuality in attendance of teachers, discipline on the part of students and coordination between schools and parents to augment pass percentage in the future. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hollywood star Hugh Jackman believes auditions in hotel rooms should be banned following a series of sexual misconduct allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein was accused of rape and sexual harassment by over 100 women and most of them claimed that they were assaulted by him in his hotel room during a meeting or an audition. The "Wolverine" star hopes the #MeToo and Time's Up campaign, which were launched after Weinstein expose and number of other similar incidents in Hollywood, will change the way things run in the film industry. ''There should never, ever be an audition again without a third person present, there should never be a meeting in a hotel room. You can call it a hotel room, but essentially it's a bedroom, right? "So why would you ever need to have a meeting there? So in many ways, it feels like there's a hopeful feeling that this could be a genuine change for the better," Jackman, 49, told the Australia's GQ magazine. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US would reassess its presence in Afghanistan only after reconciliation that lowers violence, a top American commander based in the war-torn country said today. I think that, once achieve the ends of the South Asia strategy, a reconciliation that lowers the violence to a level that they can manage, that will be the time to re-assess our presence, General John Nicholson, who is Commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan said during a video press conference from Kabul. Till then, he ruled out any changes in the current American troop presence in Afghanistan. At the same time, he praised Afghan security forces which he said has made tremendous progress in the fight against terrorism. The Afghan Air Force flew their first sortie two years ago, in an A-29. Today, they're dropping laser-guided bombs. We provided them UH-60 helicopters in September; they're flying their first combat missions now, he said. These people want to defend their own country. They view it as a matter of pride that they are the ones fighting and, if necessary, dying to protect their country. They are grateful for our presence, he said. The goal of the South Asia strategy is reconciliation, and, as President Ashraf Ghani says, it's been a game-changer, Nicholson said. Within six months of President Donald Trump's announcement and the implementation of the strategy, we had the elements of a peace proposal outlined by the Taliban in an open letter to America and a formal peace offer by President Ghani, he said. Ghani's proposal was unanimously endorsed by the international community at the Kabul peace process conference and at the Tashkent conference. Diplomatic activity picked up substantially at that point, and a number of channels of dialogue have opened up between the various stakeholders in the peace process, the American general noted. Now, what's been encouraging is that, concurrent with this intensified dialogue, we saw the levels of violence drop to lower levels. Specifically, between February, when these offers were made, and the end of April, the levels of enemy-initiated violence dropped to 30 percent below the five-year average, he said. Then, on 25 April, the Taliban announced their offensive. In the months since, we have seen the violence increase, but still to a level that is 10 per cent to 12 per cent below the five-year average. I call this talking and fighting, the US commander said. As Defence Secretary Jim Mattis has said, violence and progress can coexist, and that's what is being seen. We've seen this in other conflicts, such as Colombia, where the two sides were talking about peace at the same time that they were fighting each other on the battlefield, he said. Under the South Asia policy, he said, US forces have got additional firepower and additional authorities. The Taliban have generally, then, sought to avoid our airpower and attack more remote district centers. The one exception, this spring, has been the city of Farah, and I will come back to that specifically, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Justice A Arumughaswamy Commission of Inquiry, probing the circumstances leading to former Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa's death, has completed examining 50 witnesses, including seven who had petitioned it. Constituted by the Tamil Nadu government last year following suspicions on her death, the one man panel has examined 43 persons as its witnesses so far. Also, seven persons who had petitioned the commission including DMK's P Saravanan, seeking the nod to depose were also examined, Commission sources told PTI. The Commission, meanwhile, has issued summons to senior State official A Ramalingam (a former secretary of Jayalalithaa), S S Poongundran (aide of Jayalalithaa) and J Deepak (Jayalalithaa's nephew). They have been summoned to appear on June 2 for cross examination by the late chief minister's aide V K Sasikala's counsel. Also, assistant to Sasikala, K T Karthikeyan has been directed to appear on the same day for re-examination. The editor of AIADMK mouthpiece "Namadhu Puratchi Thalaivi Amma," Marudhu Alaguraj, and son of late political commentator and actor, Cho S Ramaswamy, (a friend and well wisher of Jayalalithaa) R Sriram have been summoned to appear for examination on June 4. So far over a dozen doctors, retired and serving government officials and police officers have been examined by the commission. Last November, Madurai based DMK functionary P Saravanan, who had submitted a petition, was the first to be examined as a witness by the panel based on his affidavit. Saravanan had said he brought to the panel's notice alleged discrepancies in press releases and the final discharge summary of the hospital where Jayalalithaa received treatment. In September 2017, the Tamil Nadu government constituted the panel under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952. The panel's terms of reference was to inquire into the circumstances and situation leading to the hospitalisation of Jayalalithaa on September 22, 2016, and treatment provided till her demise on December five 2017. The Commission had invited all those having "personal knowledge and direct acquaintance" in the matter to furnish information to it till today. Following Jayalalithaa's death, suspicion on the circumstances leading to her demise was raised by several persons, including the present Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam and his followers. Then a rebel party leader,Panneerselvam and his followers had demanded a probe into her death, either a judicial inquiry or a CBI probe. After unification of the factions led by Chief Minister K Palaniswami and O Panneerselvam, the government notified constituting the panel. The probe was a key precondition put forth by the Panneerselvam panel for the merger. DMK President M K Stalin had batted for a CBI probe and also raised the issue during campaigning for the RK Nagar bypoll in April, which was subsequently cancelled. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Director Ron Howard has revealed Hollywood star Tom Hanks wanted to make a special appearance in "Solo: A Star Wars Story". The 61-year-old veteran star was interested in playing a Stormtrooper in the recently released Han Solo stand-alone. "Tom Hanks was interested in being a Stormtrooper. It would have been great. He was shooting and he just couldn't get there. But now that Lucasfilm knows that Tom Hanks is interested, I'm sure they'll work it out some day," Howard told website JOE.ie. Hanks has previously worked with Howard in "Splash", "Apollo 13" and the "Da Vinci Code" trilogy. In the past, James Bond star Daniel Craig made a as Stormtrooper cameo on "Star Wars: The Force Awakens". "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" was suppose to have cameos by Prince Harry and William and actor Tom Hardy all disguised as Stormtroopers, but unfortunately the appearances had to be chopped from the final cut. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A senior North Korean official arrived at Beijing's international airport today to board a flight to the United States for high-level talks ahead of a planned summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. General Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the central committee of the Workers' Party and right-hand man to Kim, was driven to the restricted VIP entrance of the airport, according to AFP journalists, a day after he flew into the Chinese capital from North Korea. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Following are the top stories from the northern region at 10 pm. LUCKNOW DEL47 UP-LD REPOLL Lucknow: Repolling at 73 booths in Kairana Lok Sabha constituency passed off peacefully today with an estimated voter turn out of 61 per cent, the state election office said here. LUCKNOW DEL10 UP-KAIRANA Lucknow: The outcome tomorrow of the Kairana bye-election will show if the ruling BJP manages to break its losing streak this year in Uttar Pradesh Lok Sabha bypolls or hands over a hat-trick to the opposition. CHANDIGARH DEL38 CH-COURT- SEX SCANDAL (RPT) Chandigarh: Five persons, including a former DIG of the BSF and a former J&K police DSP, were held guilty by a special CBI court here today in the 2006 Jammu and Kashmir sex scandal. DELHI DEL28 JK-DGMO-BORDER RESIDENTS R S Pura: The decision of India and Pakistan to fully implement the 2003 ceasefire and stop cross-border firing has generated hope among the border villagers here who have been bearing the brunt of fierce shelling repeatedly. LUCKNOW DEL70 UP-MAYAWATI-BUNGALOW Lucknow: BSP supremo Mayawati has vacated a government house in Lucknow, claiming compliance with a Supreme Court order, while holding on to a second official bungalow which her party says is a memorial to Kanshi Ram. SRINAGAR DEL13 JK-MEHBOOBA CEASEFIRE Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti today welcomed the agreement by DGMOs of India and Pakistan to fully implement the ceasefire pact of 2003 and stop cross border firings, saying it would bring great relief to the people of the state. BAREILLY DEL15 UP-MLA-RAPE Bareilly: Police in Bareilly is probing the complaint of a 19-year-old woman who has charged BJP's Bisauli legislator Kushagra Sagar with raping her on the pretext of marriage, a senior official said today. DELHI DES6 LAW-HC-JUDGES New Delhi: The Punjab and Haryana High Court is set to a get a new chief justice in the coming days as the Law Ministry has cleared the name of Justice Krishna Murari for the post. FEROZEPUR DES25 PB-PAK-ARREST Ferozepur (Pb), Heartbroken over not being able to marry his lover, a Pakistani man decided to walk up to the Indian border hoping a BSF bullet would kill him. JAMMU DES9 JK-IAF-OPS Jammu: The Indian Air Force (IAF) has carried out twin "bambi bucket" operations in Mata Vaishnodevi hills in Jammu and Kashmir and Pathankot hills of Punjab to douse major fires, an official said today. JAIPUR NRG8 RJ-LEOPARD DEATHS Jaipur: With an alarming average of 34 leopard deaths every year in Rajasthan , according to a report, as many as 238 big cats have died in the desert state from January 2012 to May 21, 2018. JAMMU NRG11 JK-COURT-WARRANT Jammu: A Jammu and Kashmir court has issued an arrest warrant against BJP leader Rajinder Singh for using derogatory language against Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti during a rally in Kathua. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP-IPFT government in Tripura has decided to adopt NCERT curriculum for schools in the state instead of the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) prescribed curriculum, Minister Ratan Lal Nath said here today. Tripura Board of Secondary (TBSE) is following the SCERT books at the school level, it has not yielded desire results so far prompting the state to switch over to NCERT curriculum in order to boost the states system, Nath said. "It is more likely that CBSE pattern syllabus and tabulation system will be followed at the school level for better outputs," he said. "A six-member expert committee headed by former Vice Chancellor of Tripura Central University Prof Arunoday Saha has been constituted to prepare a roadmap for adopting NCERT curriculum. Once the committee submits its finding, the government will take an appropriate decision," Nath said. The Education Minister said two officials of SCERT went to NCERT in Delhi to discuss on how to adopt its curriculum at the school level. They are supposed to submit a report before the government. Nath said the state government wants to introduce NCERT curriculum at the earliest. This will be beneficial for the students of Tripura who could not compete with students from outside the state in competitive examination, he added. The BJP-Indigenous People's Front of Tripura (IPFT) won the Tripura Assembly elections in March this year, ending 25 years of uninterrupted rule of the CPI(M)-led Left Front in the state. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Uttar Pradesh Police has claimed to have gunned down in an encounter two notorious criminals who had allegedly shot dead a newly-wed woman and decamped with jewellery worth lakhs on the Delhi-Dehradun highway last month. Circle Officer Brajesh Kumar Singh said that the two persons - Himanshu and Dhiraj - were wanted in connection with the robbery on the Delhi-Dehradun highway. "One 9 mm carbine, two magazines, two pistols, a .315 bore pistol, 44 rounds and one Hero Honda bike was also recovered," Singh said. The officer said that STF SSP Abhishek Singh had received information following which the police tried to trace the two criminals. Following an encounter, both men, who carried a reward of Rs 25,000 each for information on them, were killed yesterday, he said. The two had several other cases registered against them, he said. Last month, armed robbers shot dead a bride and looted jewellery worth lakhs after intercepting a marriage party on the Delhi-Dehradun National Highway in Meerut district. The incident occurred near Matore village, under the Dorala police station area, of Meerut, police said, adding that the groom and four others were injured in the attack. The victims were returning to the district after the wedding ceremony in Ghaziabad district, officials had said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Heartbroken over not being able to marry his lover, a Pakistani man decided to walk up to the Indian border hoping a BSF bullet would kill him. Instead, Mohammad Asif (32) landed behind bars. He was caught by 118 Battalion of the Border Security Force on Monday near the Mabboke border post and handed over to the Mamdot police, BSF officials said here today. Asif told the security forces that he walked towards the Indian border hoping that a bullet from the BSF jawans would pierce his heart and end his trauma. He said he wanted to hang himself but changed the plan as that would not have been the right thing to do during the holy month of Ramzan. A resident of Jalloke village in Pakistan's Kasur district, Asif was in love with the sister-in-law of his eldest brother Atik-ur-Rehman. Asif decided to end his life after twice being denied permission to marry her. His family and that of the woman disapproved of their relationship, according to his account. He said both were in love and wanted to get married. But the woman was forced to marry someone else. Sometime back, she got divorced. Again, Asif pleaded with his family to let him marry her, but they refused. Asif comes from a well-off family that owns around 25 acres of land and he has cleared his senior secondary exams, Station House Officer (SHO) of Mamdot police station, Rashpal Singh, said. He has been booked under the Indian Passport Act and the Foreigners Act. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police in Bareilly is probing the complaint of a 19-year-old woman who has charged BJP's Bisauli legislator Kushagra Sagar with raping her on the pretext of marriage, a senior official said today. Sagar has refuted the allegation as "baseless". In a written complaint to the senior superintendent of police (SSP), the woman alleged that Sagar had an affair with her in 2014, when she was a minor, and she was kept in his house in Bareilly for two years on the promise of marriage and raped. Bareilly SSP Kalanidhi Naithani told PTI that an inquiry in this connection has been handed over to Circle Officer Niti Dwivedi and action will be taken on getting a report. The woman said she started going to his house in Bareilly's Green Park area, under the Baradari police station area, in 2014 along with her mother who worked there. She claimed she had complained to the police earlier. But at the time, Sagar's father Yogendra Sagar had promised her that he would get the two married when she became a major, she said. Kushagra, now an MLA of the Uttar Pradesh's ruling party, is planning to get married to somebody else, she has told the SSP. Dismissing the allegation, Sagar said, "The girl used to work in our house and at that time her family had raised the charge which was found to be false during police investigation. They had also given a written apology, which we still have." "The allegation is baseless," he told reporters here. His father, a former legislator, added that the charges were aimed at hindering the upcoming marriage of his son. The girl, who has threatened to commit suicide if she is denied justice, alleged that she is being defamed by the MLA's father who claims she has taken Rs 20 lakh and reached a compromise. The controversy comes soon after another BJP legislator, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, was jailed in connection with the alleged rape of a minor girl in Unnao district. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Taking note of the alleged suicide by an Uttar Pradesh anti-terrorist squad (ATS) officer, DGP O P Singh today assigned an enquiry into the circumstances of "the unfortunate death" to the additional director general of police of Lucknow Zone. Rajesh Sahni, an additional superintendent of police (ASP) with the squad, had allegedly committed suicide yesterday in his office at the ATS headquarters here. He had used a service weapon to shoot himself dead. "The DGP has assigned the enquiry into the entire circumstances of the unfortunate death of ASP (ATS) Rajesh Sahni to ADG, Lucknow Zone, Rajeev Krishna," an official spokesman said here. The last rites of Sahni were performed by his daughter at the Bhaisakund crematorium here in the presence of senior officers, including Principal Secretary Home Arvind Kumar and the director general of police (DGP). Demand for a probe into the alleged suicide was raised from several quarters, including on social media, following which the DGP ordered the enquiry. The 1992-batch Provincial Police Services (PPS) officer was involved in a recent ATS operation that led to the arrest of a suspected ISI agent, who worked at the house of an Indian diplomat in Pakistan, from Uttarakhand's Pithoragarh district. Ramesh Singh Kanyal, who was arrested from Pithoragarh's Didihat area, worked as a cook at the diplomat's residence in Islamabad from 2015-2017 and has confessed to his role in anti-national activities. Kanyal is accused of passing on confidential information to Pakistan's International Services Intelligence (ISI) for money while he was in Islamabad. Sahni had also led the encounter of the self-radicalised operational head of an ISIS module in Haji Colony of Kakori, Lucknow, on March 7 last year. He was with the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for around two years before joining the UP ATS in July 2014. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US is moving forward with the preparations for the June 12 Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, expecting the historic meeting to take place, but is prepared for other eventualities too, the White House said today. The comments come at a time when the White House is engaged in hectic talks with Pyongyang, Tokyo and Seoul. "We're moving forward, and we'll be prepared either way. And we're planning as if it is happening. We're expecting that to take place. But we'll be prepared, and that's what we're going to do right now is focus on the preparation side," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters in a press gaggle abroad Air Force One. US President Donald Trump, she said, thinks that the ongoing discussions are going very well and that the meetings taking place over this week are certainly signs of progress. In April, Trump had stunned the world by accepting an invitation to meet Kim in an unprecedented sit-down. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will be at the White House next week for talks with Trump in this regard, she said. North Korean Vice Chairman of the Central Committee Kim Yong-chol is arriving in New York and will meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo later this week. "Secretary looks forward to his meetings. He will be heading up to New York tomorrow," State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters at her bi-weekly conference. A US delegation is meeting with the North Korean delegation in the DMZ or demilitarized zone. The United States delegation consists of Sung Kim, US Ambassador to the Philippines, Allison Hooker, Director of Korea for the National Security Council, and Randy Schriver, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs at the Department of Defence. "They plan to have additional meetings later this week," Nauert said. Separately, Joe Hagen, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, and the US pre-advance team, including members from the State Department, are in Singapore this week, where they are conducting logistics of the expected summit. "We're looking forward to participating in those meetings as we prepare for President Trump's summit in June," she said. Senator Edward Markey, Ranking Member of the East Asia Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said it is encouraging that talks with North Korea are back on track after last week's "unforced diplomatic error". "Now, the focus must remain on tangibly reducing the threat from North Korean nuclear weapons, not simply producing a made-for-TV summit. The Trump administration cannot fall for false concessions, long the bread and butter of the Kim family's negotiating approach," he said. Markey said the US must continue to push for sustained talks to reach a diplomatic resolution backed by economic pressure, but added that the country must be prepared to further ratchet up the economic pressure if the negotiations fail. He noted there was no military solution to the North Korean threat. "It is unclear whether the regime in Pyongyang has felt the force of sanctions, so we must seriously question whether we have actually compelled North Korea to the table, ready to genuinely denuclearize," he said. The Congress must be prepared to impose stricter measures, if necessary, including on China, which is the primary enabler of the Kim regime, Markey said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) China today said the Trump adminstration is hurting its own credibility by every "flip-flop and U-turn" on trade tariffs, and warned that it does not want a trade war but will take forceful measures to defend its legitimate interests. Hitting back at the Trump administration's threat to impose a 25 per cent tariff on USD 50 billion goods imported from China, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said, "In international relations, every flip-flop and U-turn by a country will undermine and hurt its own credibility." She said the US' threat to raise duties on Chinese goods goes against the consensus the two countries reached in Washington and jointly announced earlier in May. She urged the US to keep its "word and work" with China according to the spirit demonstrated in the joint announcement. "China does not want, but is not afraid of, a trade war," Hua said. "China will surely take resolute and powerful steps to safeguard its legitimate rights if the US insists on acting recklessly." Hua also called for handling trade disputes through talks on an equal basis and in a constructive way, which is "in line with the fundamental and long-term interests of both the Chinese and American people, as well as the common aspirations of the international community."The White House yesterday announced that it will impose a hefty 25 per cent tariff on the USD 50 billion worth of Chinese goods containing "industrially significant" technology including those related to the 'Made in China 2025' programme, days after the two sides reached an agreement and vowed not to launch a trade war against each other. The announcement came just ahead of US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross's visit to China from Saturday. China's Ministry of Commerce said yesterday that the US statement is contrary to the consensuses the two sides previously reached in Washington. The ministry said the White House tactical statement is both unexpected and within expectation. "Whatever measures the US takes, China has the confidence, capability and experience to defend the interests of Chinese people and the core interests of the country," it said. It urged US to act in accordance with the spirit of recent bilateral joint statement. The trade spat between the top two economies of the world began last month with President Donald Trump imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports into US. China retaliated by imposing additional tariffs worth about USD three billion on 128 American products. Trump, while demanding China to reduce the USD 375 billion by USD 100 billion retaliated with USD 50 billion tariffs on Chinese products. In retaliation, China announced plans to impose new tariffs of 25 per cent worth USD 50 billion on 106 American products including items like soybeans which could hurt American farmers. The two countries have not yet implemented their tariff increases. During the media briefing, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson also expressed concern over reports that the US is planning to restrict visas of Chinese students studying advanced subjects like robotics, aviation and high-tech manufacturing to one year. According to report, Chinese citizens seeking visas will need special clearance from multiple US agencies if they work as researchers or managers for companies on a US Commerce Department list of entities requiring higher scrutiny. "People to people exchanges constitutes important foundation in international relations," Hua said. Visa facilitation is reciprocal and serves the interest of both the countries, she said, adding that both the countries need to take measures to facilitate visas to create more favourable conditions than doing the contrary. Of the more than a million foreign students who enrolled at universities in the US in 2016-17 over 3.50 lakhs or about 35 per cent, were Chinese, the Open Doors study by the Institute of International Education, a non-profit organisation supported by the US government, said. Over 1.65 lakh Indian students enrolled in US universities in 2016. Observers say any visa restrictions on high tech field education could hurt China's big push into high tech manufacturing including robotics and artificial intelligence. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The relationship between India and the United States is a "natural partnership" between the two Indo-Pacific partners, a top American lawmaker has said. "The US-India relationship is a natural partnership between two Indo-Pacific partners. We share interests and concerns, including transnational terrorism and China's aggressive behaviour in the region and around the world," Congressman Mac Thornberry, Chairman of House Armed Services Committee, said. Leading a bipartisan Congressional delegation, Thornberry, on Monday concluded a series of high-level meetings with senior Indian officials, including Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in New Delhi. "America is rebuilding and reforming our military to deter these adversaries and reassure friends like India, but more can be done. The US needs a whole of government strategy to confront both of these challenges, including how we can deepen our partnership with India," Thornberry said. The delegation also met Foreign Secretary Vijay Keshav Gokhale, Indian foreign policy experts, business leaders, and leading members of the Indian Parliament. Other members of the delegation were Congressmen Henry Cuellar, Vicky Hartzler and Carol Shea-Porter. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) More than 5,000 complaints of H-1B visa fraud and abuse have been received by a federal agency on a dedicated e-mail helpline that was launched by the Trump administration last year, an official said. The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. The technology companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China. "As of May 21, 2018, the USCIS has received over 5,000 tips to the dedicated H-1B email address," Philip Smith, a Spokesperson for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) told PTI. After US President Donald Trump signed the "Buy American, Hire American" executive order last year, the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) established email addresses dedicated to receiving information about suspected H-1B and H-2B fraud or abuse. The FDNS leads USCIS's efforts to combat immigration benefit fraud. Anyone (including both American workers and workers who suspect they or others may be the victim of H-1B or H-2B fraud or abuse) can email ReportH1BAbuse@uscis.dhs.gov or ReportH2BAbuse@uscis.dhs.gov to submit tips, alleged violations, and other relevant information about potential fraud or abuse, Smith said. The USCIS, however, did not provide any other details on the nature of the complaints, the companies involved and which country's high-tech professionals were the victims of H-1B visa fraud and abuse. "Pursuant to the Buy American, Hire American Executive Order, FDNS has helped the agency investigate the H-1B program to protect American workers," Smith said. In April 2017, USCIS FDNS created and implemented the Targeted Site Visit and Verification Program (TSVVP) as part of its continuous efforts to enhance the integrity of the immigration benefit process, he said. "This targeted approach focuses on H-1B dependent employers (those who have a high ratio of H-1B workers as compared to US workers, as defined by statute); Cases that we cannot validate the employer's basic business information through commercially available data; and employers petitioning for H-1B workers who work off-site at another company or organisation's location," he said in response to a question. The FDNS officers resolve background check information and other concerns that surface during the processing of immigration benefit applications and petitions. Resolution often requires communication with law enforcement or intelligence agencies to make sure that the information is relevant to the applicant or petitioner at hand and, if so, whether the information would have an impact on eligibility for the benefit. FDNS officers also perform checks of USCIS databases and public information, as well as other administrative inquiries, to verify information provided on, and in support of, applications and petitions. Smith said administrative inquiries may include targeted site visits inquiries conducted in cases where fraud is suspected. The FDNS uses the Fraud Detection and National Security Data System (FDNS-DS) to identify fraud and track potential patterns, he said. The USCIS has formed a partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in which FDNS pursues administrative inquiries into most application and petition fraud, while ICE conducts criminal investigations into major fraud conspiracies, he said. According to the USCIS, the H-1B visa programme should help US companies recruit highly-skilled foreign nationals when there is a shortage of qualified workers in the country. "Yet, too many American workers who are as qualified, willing, and deserving to work in these fields have been ignored or unfairly disadvantaged," the USCIS says on its webpage. Employers who abuse H-1B visa programme may negatively affect US workers, decreasing wages and opportunities as they import more workers from abroad, it said. Highly popular among Indian technology professional, the H-1B visa is normally issued for three years and renewed for another three years. The US Congress has a cap of 65,000 H-1B visas per year. It also issues another 20,000 H-1B visas to those who have masters and higher education from a US academic institute. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United States today said it supports free, fair, transparent and accountable elections in Pakistan which faces general elections on July 25. It also expressed hope that the 2017 electoral reforms law, being put into effect from these elections, would help facilitate the peaceful transfer of civilian power to a democratically elected government. "The United States supports free, fair, and transparent, accountable elections in Pakistan as we do in other countries around the world," State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters during her biweekly conference. The United States along with other international partners has supported Pakistan's implementation of its historic 2017 electoral reforms law, she said. "My understanding is that this is the first time that that law will actually be put into effect for these elections. We hope that the new comprehensive and transparent legal framework facilitates the peaceful transfer of civilian power to a democratically elected government," Nauert said. In response to a question, she said she is not aware if the United States is sending any observers on the ground. "We tend to support international organisations that do participate as observers," she said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US today designated two Iranian entities for allegedly committing serious human rights abuses on behalf of the Iranian government. It also slapped sanctions against three leaders of one of these entities - the Ansar-e Hizballah organisation. Iran not only exports terrorism and instability across the world, it routinely violates the rights of its own people. The Iranian regime diverts national resources that should belong to the people to fund a massive and expensive censorship apparatus and suppress free speech, said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Those who speak out against the regime's mismanagement and corruption are subject to abuse and mistreatment in Iran's prisons. America stands with the people of Iran, and treasury is taking action to hold the Iranian regime accountable for ongoing human rights abuses, censorship, and other despicable acts it commits against its own citizens, Mnuchin said. Additionally, the treasury designated an entity that has operated information or communications technology that facilitates monitoring or tracking that could assist or enable serious human rights abuses by or on behalf of the government of Iran. It also designated two individuals for engaging in censorship activities that prohibit, limit, or penalise the exercise of freedom of expression or assembly by citizens of Iran, and one individual for acting for or on behalf of an entity engaged in such censorship activities. These designations come in the wake of recent protests by the Iranian people and the regime's subsequent brutal crackdown. The treasury said the latest actions target the Iranian regime's repression of its own people and the suppression of their freedoms of speech, expression, and peaceful assembly. The US will not allow Iran's malign behaviour to go unchecked, it said adding that these actions show a desire to hold malicious actors accountable for their actions even as they try to hide from international scrutiny. Those designated include Abdulali Ali-Asgari, Director General of Director of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Hanista Programming Group, the Evin Prison, and Ansar-e Hizballah and associated individuals. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) West Bengal Congress chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury today expressed surprise over former president Pranab Mukherjee's decision to attend an RSS event and said he was unable to relate it with Mukherjee's previous comments against the saffron organisation. While the state Congress chief of Mukherjee's home state of West Bengal and others in the state who worked under him were astonished, the veteran leader's MP son Abhijit Mukherjee declined to comment on the issue. "My question is does he (Mukherjee) think his previous comments against RSS were wrong...We still remember how Pranab Mukherjee as a senior leader of the Congress had criticised RSS as a communal and a divisive organisation," Chowdhury said. Mukherjee, who is a Congress veteran, was invited to be the chief guest at the valedictory function of Sangh Shiksha Varg, a training camp for RSS volunteers at the organisation's headquarters in Nagpur on June 7. According to an RSS functionary, the former president accepted the invitation. The veteran leader's son Abhijit Mukherjee, who is also a Congress MP from Jangipur Lok Sabha constituency in the state, declined to comment on the issue. "I don't want to comment on this issue," he told PTI. The WBPCC president said, "I'm really surprised to hear about the decision of Pranab Mukherjee to attend RSS's programme in Nagpur. Just like any other Congressman, I am really astonished to hear about it," Chowdhury said. However, Mukherjee was no longer president, nor a Congress leader, and he was free to take any decision, he said. "I can't say what prompted him to take such a decision," said Chowdhury, who shared a long association with Mukherjee. The former president was two-time Congress MP from Jangipur Lok Sabha constituency of Murshidabad district from 2004-2012 and Chowdhury was the Congress president of the district. Several state Congress leaders, who had worked under Mukherjee in West Bengal, said it was hard to believe that he would be attending RSS event. "We have known Mukherjee for last several decades and a great admirer of his political and administrative acumen. But, this development has come as a shock for us. The principles of RSS are very much against the idea of secular India," said a senior Congress MLA. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) "What does PM Modi want?"--posed Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today, hours after the CBI raided the residence of PWD Minister Satyendar Jain in connection with alleged violation of norms in hiring architects for the Public Works Department. The ruling AAP accused the central dispensation of keeping the party ministers and MLAs in controversy to ensure that the work done by the Delhi government was not highlighted among the people. It said the 'raid' was an attempt to divert people's attention from the "good works" done by the Arvind Kejriwal government. The raid was conducted after the CBI filed a fresh case against Jain in connection with alleged violation of norms in hiring architects for the public works department (PWD). "What does PM Modi want?", Kejriwal tweeted after the PWD minister in a tweet earlier in the day confirmed that the central agency had raided his house over the alleged hiring of the creative team by his department. In reference to the Delhi government's recent decision to cap "excess charges" by private hospitals, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said the AAP dispensation was stopping "loot" of private hospitals, but the "Centre gets pain, and it gets raids done by CBI". Senior AAP leader Ashish Khetan alleged it has become a pattern in the last three years that whenever the Delhi government did "good work", the CBI, Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) and Delhi Police register cases against Aam Aadmi Party ministers and MLAs. "They (Centre) try to ensure that our works are not highlighted among people and keep us in controversy. In the last three years, Modi's police has failed to provide single evidence in courts against AAP ministers and MLAs. "Our MLAs have been acquitted by courts in all cases registered against them," Khetan told reporters here. The AAP leader also alleged that the CBI and Delhi Police have been trying to "implicate" AAP leaders in false cases. "Raid is conducted on us so that an elected government is not allowed to work. In the history of democracy in 70 years, such harassment of an elected government has never been done by central agencies," Khetan said. Jain is already facing probe in a case pertaining to money laundering. The CBI had registered a preliminary enquiry into the hiring of 24 architects for a creative wing of the PWD through an agency, which reportedly lacked any prior experience, the officials said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP today asked Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal why he has not taken action against his minister Satyendar Jain, who has been booked for alleged corruption. The party alleged that the AAP leaders have been "shameless" in defending Jain and it reflected their moral turpitude. The opposition's reaction came after the CBI conducted searches against Jain in connection with alleged violation of norms in hiring architects for the Public Works Department (PWD) handled by him. Manoj Tiwari, the chief of Delhi BJP, said that Jain's continuation in the cabinet of Delhi government, even after filing of a criminal case against him, is against democratic tradition. He alleged that Kejriwal was not taking any action against Jain because he was the "accountant" of all the "black deeds" of the government. "Chief Minister Kejriwal cannot take any action against him because he is the accountant of all the black deeds of Delhi government and if he reveals the truth then legal action will certainly be taken against the APP leaders including Kejriwal," Tiwari said in a statement. The AAP dispensation including Kejriwal has defended Jain, alleging that the move by the Centre was an attempt to divert people's attention from the "good works" of Delhi government. Kejriwal alleged that Jain was targeted as the BJP was against the new norms for hospitals announced by the minister and wanted it scrapped. BJP legislator and Leader of Opposition in Delhi Assembly Vijender Gupta said that Jain's defence by chief minister, deputy CM Manish Sisodia and other AAP leaders was "shameless". "It shows the depth of moral turpitude to which AAP has fallen. Kejriwal and his team have unconditionally compromised with corruption," he alleged. Gupta alleged that the AAP government was "unlawfully" hiring 24 professionals as 'creative team' causing "loss" of crores of rupees to the government exchequer. "The selected firm specialized in providing cooks, helpers, security guards etc not creative team," he alleged. The CBI has booked Jain in a case pertaining to alleged corruption in hiring a creative team for the Public Works Department to suggest new architectural designs and bring down costs, officials said. Jain, who holds the PWD and Health portfolios, is already facing a Central Bureau of Investigation case related to alleged money laundering. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi High Court today asked the AAP government why it had not taken action against the private unaided schools which had not refunded the excess fees charged by them, citing implementation of the 6th pay commission, despite a court-appointed panel's recommendation to return the money. The court said it had passed an order seven years ago for refunding of excess fee collected by the schools to the parents but it had not been done yet. It said the schools had collected the money several years ago but no benefit was rendered to the parents as they had not even received back the principal amount paid by them to the schools. A bench of justices Siddharth Mridul and Vinod Goel issued notice to the Delhi government on a plea for attaching bank accounts of the errant schools and sought its response by July 23, the next date of hearing. "The Directorate of shall file a detailed affidavit elaborating clearly and unequivocally the steps that it has taken and proposes to undertake in the averments made in the case in six weeks," the court said. The order came on an application moved by an NGO, Delhi Abhikbhavak Mahasangh, seeking directions to the Delhi government to attach bank accounts of 457 unaided private schools which had not refunded the excess fees charged from parents as recommended by the Justice (retd) Anil Dev Singh Committee in 2011. The NGO, represented by advocate Ashok Agarwal, has also sought that the excess fees deposited in court by 118 schools, which challenged the recommendations, be released to the parents. During the hearing, the bench observed that imparting educating was a spiritual function and added the relief would be for all the parents and not only for those who have approached the court. It also asked Delhi government standing counsel Ramesh Singh to address the issue and do something about it. "You do something about it. On one hand you, say schools are indulging in commercialisation, on the other hand you don't do anything. The court keep on issuing directions, it does not ring a bell with you. You tell us what technical difficulty you have. We might clear the path for you," it said. After examining 1,092 private schools, the panel had said that 531 among them had charged excess fee and recommended that it be refunded with nine per cent interest. It had also recommended special inspection of 247 schools. The high court had set up the panel and issued directions for refund of excess fees in 2011 on a plea by the NGO. Thereafter, the NGO had moved the court in 2015-16 claiming that over 500 private schools were yet to refund Rs 350 crore of excess fee taken from students on the pretext of implementing the 6th pay commission. It had also sought initiation of contempt proceedings against all such institutions. Subsequently, the Delhi government had on May 29 last year issued a notice to several defaulting schools, telling them that failure to refund the excess fees as recommended by the committee could lead to their de-recognition or taking over of their management by the department. Against the notice more than 118 schools moved the high court which is still hearing arguments in the matter. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Goa Forward Party (GFP), a constituent of the BJP-led Goa government, today said it would always remain loyal to Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, two days after Maharashtravadi Gomantak Party (MGP) leader Sudin Dhavlikar said he was mentally prepared to lead the state. The GFP and MGP are the constituents of the BJP-led government, besides three Independent MLAs. GFP president and Town & Country Planning Minister Vijai Sardesai has said that his party would never side with any other party in its bid to topple the state government. "Goemkars (Goans) are known for sticking to their word and we will do the same by continuing our support to Parrikar," Sardesai said. His remarks came two days after Dhavlikar's statement that he was "mentally-prepared" to take up the responsibility as chief minister, as Parrikar is away in the US for medical treatment. "The Congress is trying to replace the incumbent chief minister and install their CM (by toppling the government). Some others are talking other things. However, I am trying to get the CM back from America hale and hearty," Sardesai said. Parrikar, 62, has been undergoing treatment in the USA for a pancreatic ailment since the first week of March. Sardesai dismissed reports that the GFP was in discussion with any other party to destabilise government. The Parrikar-led government is supported by three MLAs each from the GFP, the MGP and as many Independents in the 40-member House in which the BJP has 14 members. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The police today detained a woman when she allegedly tried to immolate herself near Chief Minister Vijay Rupani's residence in Gujarat's Rajkot district, an official said. Hetal Makawana, a native of Padadhari town in Rajkot, had a couple of days back threatened to set herself ablaze in front of Rupani's private residence here. She wanted to protest, what she claimed as, the "police inaction" to include the name of a local BJP leader and former MLA in an FIR in connection with an incident of her husband having been allegedly beaten up. Makawana's husband was injured in a clash some days back, a police official said. The woman alleged that he was beaten up at the behest of former Rajkot MLA Ramesh Rupapara, he said. She claimed that despite her repeated request, the police did not include Rupapara's name as an accused in the FIR and threatened to set herself on fire. A senior police official said they had stepped up the security at the chief minister's residence in advance and detained Makawana when she came to immolate herself today. Rupani's residence is located in the city's posh Prakash society near Nirmala convent school. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire called today for an overhaul of the World Trade Organisation, just two days before European companies may be hit with steep US tariffs on steel and aluminium imports. "We share some of the worries expressed, for example, by the United States over the faulty workings of certain multilateral agencies," including the WTO, Le Marie said at a gathering of OECD officials in Paris. "This organisation is needed and it should be profoundly rethought," he said. The European Union has been lobbying hard to remain exempted from the punitive US tariffs, announced by President Donald Trump in early March. But officials have indicated they see little chance that Trump will continue exempting EU companies from the duties of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminium. The exemptions run out on Friday. The WTO and other agencies have warned the protectionist threat from Trump's "America First" administration could hamper global growth. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The World Trade Organisation's (WTO) dispute settlement body has agreed to set up a panel to examine America's allegations against certain alleged export subsidy measures in India. Last month, the US dragged India to the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism over export subsidies, saying that these incentives were harming the American companies. "At its meeting on 28 May, the WTO's Dispute Settlement Body agreed to a request from the United States for the establishment of a dispute panel to examine certain alleged export subsidy measures in India," the said in a statement. The US has stated that all members, including India, are required to provide subsidies consistent with provisions of the WTO's Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, including refraining from providing subsidies contingent upon export performance. The US has alleged that India appears to be providing such subsidies through various export promotion programmes, special economic zones and duty-free imports for the exporters' programme. During consultation process, the US has alleged that India was continuing to grant these export-contingent subsidies and even expanded the scope and scale of the subsidies. India has said that it was disappointed that the US chose to move forward with a request for a panel, as it believed bilateral consultations held on April 11 were constructive. During the consultations, India provided a detailed understanding of the schemes implemented under its Foreign Trade Policy by answering all the questions raised by the US. India has stated the schemes identified by the US do not violate India's obligations and are in conformity with all the elements of the agreement. India's exports to the US stood at $42.21 billion in 2016-17, while imports aggregated at USD 22.30 billion during the same fiscal. (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.) Pro-government forces in Yemen are preparing to surround a key Red Sea port in a bid to force Huthi rebels to surrender it without a fight, military sources said today. At least 60 fighters were killed in the latest clashes and air strikes, according to medical sources. Loyalist fighters backed by Saudi and Emirati forces are sending reinforcements ahead of a "new operation" to enter Hodeida city and seize its port, a commander from one of the forces said. Hodeida port is the main conduit for humanitarian aid into Yemen, where years of war have left some 22 million people in need of food aid. Colonel Sadiq Duwaid, spokesman for the "National Resistance", one of three main forces taking part in the operation, said it was "being bolstered by new forces... that will take part in retaking Hodeida". "First, we will cut off supply lines, especially between (rebel-held capital) Sanaa and Hodeida, then we will place the Huthis under siege and bring them down, perhaps without a fight," he said. Clashes broke out east of the port city on Wednesday while the Saudi-led coalition carried out numerous air strikes on rebel positions, Yemeni military sources said. Seven pro-government fighters were killed and 14 wounded, according to medical sources in Hodeida province, while at least 53 rebels also died. The deadly clashes come a day after an AFP reporter saw a large military convoy heading towards Hodeida from Mokha, 180 km to the south. Hodeida lies 230 km from Sanaa, which the Huthis seized in 2014. This prompted a Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen the following year, aimed at propping up the internationally-recognised government of exiled President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi. The coalition accuses the rebels of using Hodeida as a launchpad for attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and for smuggling in rockets. The Iran-backed insurgents have in recent months ramped up missile attacks against neighbouring Saudi Arabia. Nearly 10,000 people have been killed since the Saudi-led alliance launched its intervention in Yemen in March 2015. More than 2,200 others have died from cholera and millions are on the verge of famine in what the United Nations says is the world's gravest humanitarian crisis. The UN warned yesterday that any operation aimed at seizing Hodeida would disrupt the entry of aid shipments to Yemen, 70 per cent of which flow through the rebel-held port. "We are extremely concerned about the situation around Hodeida," said spokesman Stephane Dujarric, adding that the UN had taken precautions in case of "further escalation". The UAE, Saudi Arabia's main coalition ally, set up a force in early 2018 to ramp up the coastal offensive, leading a disparate collective of groups with the stated goal of taking Hodeida. The forces include the "Giant Brigades" -- a former elite unit of the Yemeni army rebuilt by the UAE -- which has been at the vanguard of the offensive, reinforced by thousands of fighters from southern Yemen. The "National Resistance" is made up of loyalists of Yemen's ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was assassinated by his former Huthi allies in December. It is commanded by his nephew Tarek Saleh. The third force, the "Tihama Resistance", is named for a Red Sea coastal region from which it draws most of its fighters, who are loyal to Hadi. The fighting in western Yemen has been fierce, slowed by landmines that Yemeni military sources say have been laid by the insurgents. The Huthis have said they are ready to thwart any coalition operation and have urged Hodeida residents to join their ranks to prevent the city's capture. Hamoud Abbad, the Huthi-appointed governor of Sanaa, has called for "mass mobilisation" to defend the front and appealed to tribesmen in the area. Rebel-run media outlets today claimed a drone attack on "the enemy's air defences on the west coast" and said an overland counter-attack south of Hodeida had "inflicted heavy losses on the enemy". But in a phone call to Hodeida's governor, Prime Minister Ahmed bin Dagher called on the city's residents to "close ranks... against the Huthi militia which is losing strength every day". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The body of an 18-year-old man, whom the BJP claimed as its member, was found hanging from a tree near his home in Purulia district this morning. The incident invited strong criticism of the TMC government from BJP chief Amit Shah who said the ruling dispensation has "surpassed the violent legacy of the communist rule" in West Bengal. An unsigned handwritten note in Bengali found near the body of Trilochan Mahato near his home in Balarampur, about 295 km from Kolkata, stated that he was "punished for working for the BJP" during the recent rural polls in the state, a senior district police officer said. "Because you are involved with the BJP even when you are only 18 years, it has claimed your life. I have been searching for you since the panchayat elections and now you are dead," the officer said quoting from the note. The youth had gone to a place barely three km from his village last evening and did not return home. He had called up his brother in the night and said that he was kidnapped and urged to be rescued, he said. "We were informed by his family (about it) but despite searches throughout the night we could not spot him," the officer said. The body was found in Balarampur village in the morning and the police were informed about it by the locals, he said, adding no arrests have been made in connection with the incident. Assailing the Trinamool Congress government over the incident, Shah wrote on Twitter, "Deeply hurt by the brutal killing of our young karyakarta, Trilochan Mahato, in Balarampur, West Bengal. A young life full of possibilities was brutally taken under state's patronage. He was hanged on a tree just because his ideology differed from that of state sponsored goons." He said, "The present TMC govt in West Bengal has surpassed the violent legacy of Communist rule. Entire BJP mourns this tragic loss & stands firmly with Trilochan Mahato's family in this hour of grief. His sacrifice for organisation & ideology will not go in vain."The West Bengal BJP unit condemned the incident terming it "an attack on democracy". BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya claimed that 18 party workers have been killed in the state and alleged that it was at the behest of the state government. The party's national secretary Rahul Sinha told reporters in Kolkata that the youth was associated with the party and asked, "Is it democracy where a young man is being killed just because he was associated with the BJP?" Training his gun at the TMC, he said BJP cadre are being attacked and killed as the saffron party fared well in Purulia in the recent panchayat election in the state. "The TMC wants to eliminate all signs of opposition from the areas where BJP has won (in the rural poll)", Sinha said. The Trinamool Congress termed the allegations as baseless and concocted. "The allegations against TMC are completely baseless," a senior district TMC leader said. In Purulia, the TMC and the BJP had a close fight in the gram panchayats winning 839 and 645 seats respectively. Out of the 38 Zilla Parishad seats, TMC had won 26 seats and BJP nine seats. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) (Reuters) - Twenty-First Century Fox Inc will hold a special meeting on July 10th for its stockholders to vote on a proposed merger with Walt Disney Co, the company said on Wednesday.The Fox board also recommended backing the deal but said that it was aware of Comcast Corp's moves to make an offer for certain assets of the company.Comcast said last week it was preparing a higher, all-cash offer for most of the media assets of Fox, but sources say it will only proceed if a federal judge next month allows AT&T Inc's planned $85-billion acquisition of Time Warner Inc.The announcement of the ... By David Ljunggren, Liz Hampton and Gary McWilliamsOTTAWA/HOUSTON (Reuters) - U.S. energy firm Kinder Morgan's C$4.5 billion sale of an oil pipeline to Canada's government marked an extraordinary escape from months of fraught negotiations among warring camps of Canadian officials.But even before the bailout, the company had little to lose - despite the C$1.1 billion it has spent so far on a plan to add a second pipeline from Alberta's oil sands to British Columbia's coast, according to a Reuters review of the project's bank financing and oil-shipping contracts with producers reserving space ... By Aditi ShahNEW DELHI (Reuters) - Police said on Tuesday they have filed a case against AirAsia Group Bhd, the airline's CEO Tony Fernandes and its domestic entity AirAsia India, over allegations of corruption and breaking rules in obtaining a flying licence.The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) accused the airline, some of its employees and third parties of violating India's foreign direct investment rules while obtaining the licence, and of bribing government officials in an attempt to get regulations relaxed to allow AirAsia India to fly international routes.AirAsia India said in a ... By Krishna V Kurup(Reuters) - Indian shares declined on Wednesday tracking broader Asia as investors trimmed exposure to riskier assets amid a political crisis in Italy, with financial stocks such as ICICI Bank Ltd weighing on the indexes.Asian stocks extended a global sell-off as fears of repeat elections in the euro zone's third-largest economy saw the euro hitting a 10-month low, sending investors rushing to safe-haven assets such as U.S. Treasuries. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan tumbled 1.4 percent.The broader NSE Nifty fell 0.38 percent to 10,592.40 as of ... Credit: Olivia BeeThe Smashing Pumpkins have added a special 30th anniversary concert to their Shiny and Oh So Bright tour. The show takes place August 2 at PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey. Tickets go on sale this Friday, June 1, at 10 a.m. local time via SmashingPumpkins.com. The New Jersey show will be the first in a series of dates celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Pumpkins' inception in 1988. A press release promises the concert will feature "special guests, a career-spanning set list, never before seen production, and more surprises." More anniversary dates will be announced. The Smashing Pumpkins will kick off their Shiny and Oh So Bright tour, which will feature reunited original members Billy Corgan, James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin, on July 12 in Glendale, Arizona. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Office Tools set ablaze W. Musa All scripts deposited of the General Certificate of Education Examinations deposited at Government Bilingual High School in Fundong, Boyo Division in the North West region of Cameroon, have been set ablaze by some unknown men, Monday night. The administrative block which harbored the scripts written on day one of the 2018 exams was set on fire and its entire contents reduced to ashes. The men came late in the night following a down pour which left Military sleeping, giving ample time for men of the underworld to commit the arson attack. Government Bilingual High School Fundong is the biggest accommodation centers in Boyo Division in the North West region of Cameroon with 600 students from far and wide. Students were still expecting an helicopter to airlift examination scripts for Tuesdays session. Muyuka Center Transferred to Buea Gun battle between Defense Forces and men suspected to be Ambazonia fighters Monday May 28, 2018 at Government Bilingual High School Muyuka, Fako Division in the South West region, has forced officials to transfer the Center to Buea. Candidates taking part in the exams at GHBS are now obliged to relocate to Buea for the exercise after they could hardly sit in for the exercise when the gun rattle started. The gun battle in Muyuka according to sources started around 8 am when the fighters arrived and started shooting, Security forces also reacted in a shootout which lasted for about 3 hours. Economics A/L only started around 11 am with no injuries reported. Center number 1110 GHBS Muyuka will now be in Center number 1101 in Buea after the Divisional Officer, Thomas Tambe concerted with officials. The students will be spread in schools like GHS Buea, BGS Molyko among others. All students involved have been told to do all they can to relocate to Buea for the exercise. Mali President Archives Malian President, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita has called Malian national, now declared hero in France and the Spider-man of Paris, Mamoudou Gassama to come back home and join the Malian Military. He told Gassama to think about his country first before any other, promising him, he will be integrated into the armed forces. The call was made through a phone discussion which was widely listened to as Press men and women gathered to take bytes home. The decision of the Malian President IBK to recruit Gassama in the Military according to critics comes too late after he struggled as an illegal migrant, fleeing hunger and joblessness back home. The Independent reports that, the Malian migrant who scaled four storeys up a building in Paris to rescue a dangling toddler has been named an honorary French citizen after meeting President Emmanuel Macron. Mamoudou Gassama nicknamed the Spiderman of Paris climbed the city apartment block to reach the helpless child. The 22-year-old, who arrived in the country only a few months ago, had already been promised authorities would support his efforts to settle there after a video of the rescue went viral. But, after meeting the French president at the Elysee Palace on Monday morning, he was told he would be made a naturalized citizen straight away. Mr Macron personally thanked Mr Gassama, gave him a medal for courage and said he would also be made a fireman. Footage taken at the scene on Saturday night shows crowds watching in astonishment as Mr Gassama climbed the four storeys in less than a minute to pull the four-year-old to safety. He told French broadcaster BFMTV afterwards: I did not think, I saved him. He added: When I took him in my arms, I spoke with him and asked: Why did you do that? But he did not answer. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo lauded his actions. Calling him the Spiderman of the 18th a reference to the city district where the incident unfolded she said: Congratulations to Mamoudou Gassama for his act of bravery that saved the life of a child. The Parisian fire service told how they arrived at the scene, only to find their work already done. | BY Ricki Green | Genero has announced the appointment of Aussie expat Andy McKeon, its first US-based employee, who joins as global chief creative officer, based in San Francisco. McKeon, a former chief creative officer at J. Walter Thompson ANZ, joins the company after 6 years at Facebooks Silicon Valley headquarters, working with many of the worlds biggest brands and their agencies. McKeons career is highly credentialed, having worked under Steve Jobs as a creative director at Apple, and at many illustrious advertising agencies around the world including J. Walter Thompson, Wieden + Kennedy, Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Clemenger BBDO Melbourne. Genero is the solution of choice for marketers looking for a new model to support their video content production needs. Says Mick Entwisle, co-founder, Genero: Brands need so much content these days, but the current production model isnt built to provide it at scale or speed. We were marketers who saw this growing gap, and thats why we launched Genero ten years ago. Weve patiently built our solution to make sure its the best in the world, and are seeing so much demand from brands who want a faster and smarter way to produce high quality video content. Were so excited to have someone of Andys calibre and background joining our business to raise awareness and to help our community deliver the best quality creative work for our clients. Genero works with mega marketers like Unilever, Diageo, HP Citibank, Facebook and Google, as well as small businesses and global music artists. Says McKeon: Ive been fortunate to work with every global network and a bunch of the best agencies over my career, and everyone is trying to work out a new, more effective model. This is the first solution Ive seen that feels really creatively exciting, efficient and viable in the long-term. The model works by providing brands with direct access to a global community of creators for creative ideas and production resources, and a proprietary software platform to manage the end-to-end production process. Support throughout the process is provided by Generos team. Says McKeon: Its similar to the traditional model, the key difference being that a much larger and more diverse group of creators can access the brief and respond. For example, Silicon Valley startup Instacart commissioned an ad from an award-winning animation house which had worked on the blockbuster film Iron Man, on the other side of the Pacific. Duran Duran found a teen in rural Australia to make an official music video. These are creative connections that would not have traditionally been possible and there are already thousands of those stories. Over the past decade Genero has been growing its community, building its software platform and opening offices in London, Singapore, Sydney and Melbourne. Says Entwisle: The platform and community are extremely flexible. One of the most exciting recent projects is for Asian streaming platform HOOQ. Theyve launched an annual brief to find and commission original TV pilots through Genero. Last years brief resulted in the production of six truly creative pilots, and one of those is now being turned into a full TV series. Thats the sort of creativity and quality available to brands. Marketers use the platform to produce a wide variety of content, including culturally sensitive localisations, simple animations, social content and TV commercials. | BY Ricki Green | Susan Credle, global chief creative officer of FCB, has been named the jury president for The NEW and Social Influencers in LIA 2018. Named one of Ad Ages 100 Most Influential Women, Credle has helped shape the industry with many trailblazing ideas in her career that has spanned more than 30 years. AIRBAG managing partner and creative founder Adrian Bosich will represent Australia on the jury. Says Barbara Levy, president, LIA: The NEW is all about showcasing unexpected advertising ideas that highlight new roles for brands and agencies. This can be based on emerging media technologies like AR/VR/data or actions and brand experiences or ideas and supply chains in terms of being an influencer. The NEW is what we would like to term as a petri dish for growing new advertising disciplines until they are fully mature. Susan Credle, who is one of the industrys leading creatives and influencer, is a perfect fit as jury president. Credle is a firm believer of creating new paths in the industry. She told an interesting the story of Albert Lasker, one of the creative founders of FCB, to illustrate her point. Says Credle: In 1916, Lasker told the California Fruit Growers Exchange that if they wanted to compete with the growers in Florida, they needed a better name. He said California oranges were sun-kissed. For trademark reasons, he spelled it Sunkist. Lasker didnt create an ad; he created a brand. A few years later, when the orange crop exceeded all expectations, he recommended that instead of eating the oranges, Sunkist should encourage people to drink the oranges. This is the kind of thinking that makes us invaluable to our client partners. The NEW looks for these ideas that dont fit into any category, but keep our business thriving. Who will defy categories for this year? I cant wait to see. 2018 The NEW and Social Influencers Jury: Susan Credle Jury President Global Chief Creative Officer at FCB Leah Bazalgette, Executive Director at Dentsu Aegis Network Sri Lanka, Colombo Adrian Bosich, Managing Partner / Creative Founder at AIRBAG, Melbourne Donald Chesnut, Global Chief Experience Officer at SapientRazorfish, New York Waithera Kabiru, Digital Marketing Manager at Coca-Cola Central East and West Africa, Nairobi Menno Kluin, Chief Creative Officer at 360i, New York Nils Leonard, Creative Founder at Uncommon Creative Studio, London Andrew Reinholds, Managing Partner at OMD NZ, Auckland Taras Wayner, EVP / Chief Creative Officer at R/GA, New York Rosie Yakob, Co-Founder / Partner at Genius Steals, Nashville The Entry System is open for entries. The initial entry deadline is the 11th June. | BY Ricki Green | Leading health insurance comparison service comparethemarket.com.au launched its latest TVC nationwide yesterday via VCCP London, to provide clarity on Lifetime Health Cover (LHC) and other myths surrounding private health insurance. The TVC Meer-busters sees the meerkats hit the streets to quiz Aussies on what they think LHC is, highlighting that anyone who hasnt taken out private hospital cover by their 31st birthday will be hit by a 2% annual cumulative loading on top of their premiums when they eventually take out cover. The essence of the government-introduced LHC is the longer you delay, the more you pay. Says Jenny Williams, CMO of comparethemarket.com.au: The strategy behind the Meer-busters campaign is to understand peoples pain points when it comes to their health insurance. Health insurance is a confusing category and we want to help people get on the front foot when it comes to their health needs and clear up any confusion around LHC and other common misconceptions. We have a team of consultants who are committed to demystifying health insurance and providing consumers with all the information they need to make empowered decisions when it comes to their individual health insurance needs. Compare the Market: Chief Marketing Officer: Jenny Williams Brand & Campaign Manager: Hannah Rowe Brand & Campaign Specialist: Carolina Perez Rebolledo VCCP: Senior Creative: Chris Willis Creative: Jade Sturman TV Producer: Carly Parris Account Director: Simon Mills-Houlihan Passion Pictures: Director: Dave Scanlon Live Action Director: Josh Logue Live Action Producer: Sophie Woods Melbourne Animation Producer: Kate Goodwin | BY Ricki Green | Havas Melbourne has launched a new campaign for multicultural broadcaster SBS, as the organisation seeks to promote the importance and benefits of an inclusive workplace. The campaign idea for The real you matters explores how some Australians can, and will, hide an essential part of who they are out of fear of being excluded, judged or shown negative bias. It shines a light on this behaviour through a film highlighting exaggerated scenarios where employees go out of their way to hide a part of themselves from their work colleagues and managers. Supporting this concept, a recent study by the Diversity Council of Australia found employees in inclusive workplaces are 19 times more likely to be satisfied with their job and four times more likely to stay with their employer. However, in the last 12 months, one in five Australians have experienced discrimination in the workplace and felt the need to cover up aspects of who they are in front of their co-workers and managers. SBS recognises that when people can be themselves, they achieve their best and help others to as well. Inclusion plays an important part in a happy and productive environment; it drives employee engagement, increases discretionary effort, productivity and improves mental health. Says Stig Bell, director of people and culture, SBS: At SBS we are a very diverse employer, but we recognise that diversity is just one of the building blocks for a great workplace. Inclusion is at the core of building a happier, more productive environment for everyone, because an inclusive workplace creates a place where diverse thoughts, ideas, and opinions are freely shared. This improves our business ability to adapt and grow. This campaign builds on the already positive work that SBS has done in this space. Says Damian Royce, executive creative director, Havas Melbourne: It is encouraging that there is so much conversation occurring about workplace diversity. In contrast, however, there is relatively little discussion given to the more complex notion of inclusiveness, so it was a great opportunity to help SBS highlight this important issue. Find out more about SBS inclusion at: careers.sbs.com.au/inclusion. Client: Special Broadcasting Service Director of People & Culture at Special Broadcasting Service: Stig Bell Diversity & Inclusion lead Brand: Joshua Griffin Agency: Havas Melbourne Executive Creative Director: Damian Royce Group Managing Director: Matt Houltham Creatives: Zoe Yeoman, Liam Travers, Joey Newton Designer: Alex Roby Account Director: Fiona Warren Senior Agency Producer: Lauren Bell Operations Manager: Leo Francis Production Company: +ape Director: Carl Sorheim Executive Producer: Jason Byrne Producer: Darren McFarlane 1st AD: Julian Costanzo Production Assistant: Jess Galea DOP: Aaron Farrugia 1st AC: Sunny Wilding Sound Recordist: Keith Bottomly Standby Props: Tim Disney Hair / Make Up / Wardrobe: Natalie Burley Grip / Lighting: Peter Stockley Combo Assistant: Michael Bespalov Editor / Post Production Grade: Thanassi Panagiotaras The Greater Pine Island Chamber of Commerce named Kayla McGuire as named Mango Queen for 2018 at its monthly card exchange meeting last Wednesday night at Capn Cons. Im absolutely thrilled to be Mango Queen, McGuire said. I was born on Pine Island and have lived here my whole life. I went to Pine Island Elementary and I even remember as a little girl going to MangoMania and seeing the Mango Queen so Im very excited to represent Pine Island. Kayla Camille Baker was born and raised on Pine Island and graduated from Ida Baker High School in 2011. Her parents owned and operated several businesses on the island while she was growing up. Growing up on the island, Kayla and her family were always on the water, which intrigued her to go try her skills at captains school. Capt. Kayla succeeded and holds her 6 pack OUPV captains license. Kayla and Capt. Cory McGuire of Falling Tide Charters married last year and own a home in Bokeelia. Chamber Executive Director Jennifer Jennings, who was Mango Queen in 2003, said the choice was difficult but Kayla was a great choice. As Mango Queen, McGuire will be the face of the annual MangoMania Tropical Fruit festival, Jennings said. Every year the chamber holds an adult T-shirt design contest and a childs T-shirt design contest as part of the MangoMania activities. The winner of the adult design this year is Diane Greenwoman Wickes. The students contest is run at Pine Island Elementary School and Meagan Kunkle was named the winner. This is the official kickoff to the 2018 MangoMania season, Jennings said. This will be our 22nd anniversary of Pine Islands MangoMania Tropical Fruit Fair. As you know, Pine Island is known for our mangoes but this summer festival is about all of the tropical fruit grown on Pine Island. The 2018 MangoMania Festival is a two-day event at the German American Club in Cape Coral on Saturday, July 14, and Sunday, 15. The German American Club is at 2101 S.W. Pine Island Road. This Saturday, June 2, Southwest Floridas most unique fishing event for professional and non-professional anglers will begin at the German American Social Club of Cape Coral. The contest will run for the next 7 days, until June 9. In a nutshell youll spend seven days of fishing with friends and win raffle prizes for taking pictures of fish you catch, organizer Jim Griffiths said. Youre turned loose on Saturday morning June 2 with a list of 36 species of fish that can be caught in our local waters. The seven-day event is hosted by Nautical Mile Magazine, owned by Bokeelia resident Jim Griffiths. Youre given items that must appear in photos to show you caught the fish that week, and youll get bonus tickets if a kid appears in at least half of your photos showing you took a kid fishing, Griffiths said. Fish with a team, family and/or friends, and catch as many different species of fish as you can in a week. Fish where you like, with who you like, for an hour or all week long. Entry fees are only $100 per team to participate with an estimated $30,000 in raffle prizes. Put as many people on a team as you like, but know that youll be sharing your winnings with your team, Griffiths said. The fewer amount of people on a team, the more you can win individually. A raffle of this size takes a while so we make custom raffle tickets with your team number on them to speed things up. Event day is so exciting that even younger kids dont get bored. Why sponsor any event? An events cause is as important as your return on investment, Griffiths said. For the last couple years Ive volunteered in high school business classes designed around encouraging kids to understand the facets of a business. Im currently working with a few kids that want to develop presentation skills and theyll be hosting this years event. Theyll be making the announcements and running the prize raffle, and basically controlling a room of 500+ people! This years Fish36 is funding the foundation for this project. The Fish36 is a unique annual fishing event for professional and non-professional anglers anglers who come together for a memorable week on the water while helping to develop entrepreneurial skills in our youth. For more information, visit: www.fish36.org/ Area residents looking for helpful hints to prepare for hurricane season have a number of seminars from which to choose. Among those to be offered in Cape Coral and North Fort Myers: * City of Cape Coral The city of Cape Corals annual Community Hurricane Seminar will be held from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 7, in the Cape Coral Council Chambers. The seminar will be recorded and shown on the city website. This year, the seminar will be held in conjunction with a mini-expo from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. The Red Cross, Salvation Army, Cape Coral Building Department, West Coast Guard Auxiliary, CERT and Wink News will be among those in attendance. Speakers will include members from the Cape Coral Fire Department, Cape Coral Emergency Management, Cape Coral Police Department, Cape Coral Construction Industry, as well as two keynote speakers Volunteer Florida Emergency Management Director Ken Skalitzky and Dan Noah from National Weather Service Tampa. Cape Coral City Hall is at 1015 Cultural Park Blvd. * Lee County Lee County Emergency Management will hold a hurricane seminar in Cape Coral at 2 p.m. Tuesday, June 26. The free and open-to -the public info session will be held in the large meeting room at the Cape Coral Lee County Public Library. The seminars will include information how to prepare your family and home for hurricane season, how to use new hurricane-related technology and how Emergency Management responds to hurricanes and other disasters. The Cape Coral Lee County Public Library at 921 S.W. 39th Terrace Additional seminar dates and locations will be posted at www.leeeoc.com . * North Fort Myers The Shell Factory will hold a hurricane seminar on Tuesday, June 5, beginning at 10 a.m. John Patrick, chief meteorologist with ABC-7, and representatives from the Red Cross and Lee County Emergency Management will be among those offering information at the event to be held in the Dolphin Room. Representatives from StormSmart, Fireservice, and Home Depot will also be there to add to the program and answer questions people may have. Speakers will cover topics such as what a hurricane is, when to evacuate, flood damage and storm surge, shelters, how to prepare a hurricane kit, what happens after a hurricane, insurance needs, and how to find relief assistance. Tuesdays program will provide an emphasis on preparation for the hurricane season and recovery procedures should Lee County experience another hurricane. Additional information will be provided by United Way, Project Hope, and Lee County Crime Prevention, A representative of the Deaf & Hard of Hearing Center will provide sign language. Hurricane-related businesses will have table displays that feature hurricane preparedness items. The program is free to the public. Parking is also free. Pre-registration is not required. Participants will be offered free Nature Park passes for the family and door prizes. The Shell Factory is at 2787 N Tamiami Trail, North Fort Myers. For more information, contact Chris Forbes at Christine@ShellFactory.com, or call 246-6364. On Saturday a new sign was unveiled re-dedicating the intersection of Route 28 and Chase Street to Army Lt. Richard Rogers, who was killed in Vietnam. ELIZABETH VAN WYE PHOTO HARWICH Nearly 50 years ago, Army Lt. Richard Rogers, who grew up and attended school in Harwich, was killed in action in Vietnam in Long Binh province. Last Saturday morning, in the bright sunshine with a light breeze fluttering the large and small American flags on display, dozens of Harwich officials and residents, old and young, turned out to recognize the service of this decorated hometown soldier by re-dedicating the intersection of Route 28 and Chase Street in his name. Born in Sudbury, Rogers moved to Harwich after his parents divorced. Tom Peterson, a close friend and classmate who helped organize Saturday's event, recalled Rogers, as "a third brother. We bonded as friends." In his remarks on Saturday, Peterson recalled that after high school, "everyone was in fear of being drafted and instead he (Rogers) went and signed up. That was pretty rare." The ceremony itself was a grassroots effort, according to Harwich Deputy Fire Chief Dave LeBlanc. "There was a marker placed on the intersection when it was originally dedicated, shortly after the death of Lt. Rogers in December 1968," he recalled. "But 30 years ago it was knocked down as a result of a car accident. That sign was replaced with a stone, which was nice, but wasn't visible at the intersection." He credits Peterson with launching the successful drive to replace the sign and re-dedicate the location, culminating with a Harwich Board of Selectman proclamation reaffirming the location as "Lieutenant Richard L. Rogers Memorial Square." Steve Saunders, author of "Breaking Squelch," a memoir of his own experience in combat in Vietnam, served with Rogers on the crew of an M60 machine gun during Rogers' first tour of duty in Vietnam in 1966. Saunders credits Rogers with saving his life and drove from Iowa for the ceremony to speak and to pay his respects. "We were as close as brothers and Richard was a role model for me," he recalled. Saunders recounted the fateful reconnaissance patrol he was on with Rogers. "I was carrying the 25-pound radio, rations and everything else," he remembered. "We were crossing a creek and I lost my balance on a slippery rock and went in. I couldn't stand up, couldn't get air, weighed down as I was," he said. "Richard dropped his gear, saved me and then went back and retrieved the radio." He added, "I owe Richard a life. I felt a duty not to squander the life that was spared." After contracting malaria and returning stateside, Rogers was selected for officer candidate school and emerged as a second lieutenant. According to Peterson, he learned that his younger brother Michael had been drafted and would be sent to Vietnam. "He didn't want Michael to go," Peterson recalled, "so he volunteered to go a second time. At the time the policy was that brothers couldn't be sent into combat at the same time," he explained. Peterson recalled driving Rogers to Logan airport in November 1968 for his return to Vietnam. "One month later he was killed," he recalled. He was 22 years old. Rogers was buried in Island Pond cemetery in Harwich. Following a moment of silence, the notes of Taps, through the trumpet of Monomoy High School Senior Jake Poitras, were heard as traffic sped by and the new sign was unveiled in the intersection's small triangular park. At Saturday's ceremony the Monomoy High School Ladies Acapella group performed the national anthem and the scouts of Troop and Pack 79 paraded the colors and assisted with the Pledge of Allegiance. Members of the Harwich fire and police departments were on hand to assist. Also participating were Sergeant Jeremy Armstrong, Father Marc Tremblay, Marvin Stout and Larry Valentine, representing the board of selectmen. Photo: Google Maps How do you prepare to house an additional 50,000 people by 2040? What type of housing will they need and where will they want to live? These are questions the City of Kelowna is beginning to ask as it begins to prepare the 2040 Official Community Plan. Long-range planning manager James Moore told council Monday the city's population is projected to reach about 180,000 in the next 20 years, with the largest growth expected in the 35 to 55 and 70 to 90 age groups. He says that information is important as a key driver to housing behaviour. In order to house the increase, Moore says its projected the city will need to add about 20,000 new units to its inventory with an additional 5,000 units of student and resort housing. "This is an average of about 1,300 units per year, with a greater weight of the unit numbers at the front end. Projected growth rates are looking to decline slightly over time," said Moore. And, while he says the 35 to 55 age group would traditionally choose a larger detached home during the "family foundation years," with smaller units for the 70 to 90 age group, those preferences are not static. "Yesterday's choices are not likely to be the same as tomorrow's." Moore says its expected there will be a push to change the composition of new housing, with the need for more multi-unit housing over time. "Where the current OCP projected the need for 57 per cent of new housing to be multi-unit by 2030, staff are expecting 67 per cent of housing will need to be multi-unit by 2040," said Moore. In order to plan for the growth and population distribution, staff have prepared four growth scenarios, each with a growing shift towards compact, complete communities such as urban centres and urban cores. Policy and planning manager Danielle Noble-Brandt says the first two scenarios show more growth dedicated to the outlying neighbourhoods, while three and four have a majority of new growth concentrated to the urban centres or urban cores with less in outlying areas. Staff will now take the four scenarios to the public for feedback before returning to council in September with preferred growth strategy. Photo: Rob Gibson The City of Kelowna is working to help cut down on the number of bicycle thefts in the city. As Bike to Work Week continues, riders are encouraged to register their rides with Project 529 Garage. The North-America-wide app is a community-based bike registration and recovery service, which helps riders if a bike is stolen. The database makes it easier for the RCMP to return bikes to their owner when it is recovered during an investigation. By registering, cyclists also have all the information they need for insurance claims. The good news is, bike theft in Kelowna is down by 26.8 per cent so far this year compared to a few years ago. Since January, 115 bikes in Kelowna were reported stolen, compared to 157 for the same period in 2015. Wed like to see the numbers drop even more, says Colleen Cornock, Crime Prevention Supervisor with the Citys Police Services. It can only work with us continuing to work with the community to keep property safe. The Crime Prevention Team is onsite with tablets during Bike to Work Week morning celebration stations, Thursday and Friday of this week. Alanna Kelly A Kelowna woman is mortified and asking for an apology after she claims feces fell from a plane, through the sunroof of her vehicle and landed on her. Susan Allan and her son were at the intersection of Bernard Avenue and Spall at about 1:30 on May 9 when they felt a wet liquid fall on them. It stunk, it was gross, it felt dirty and right away you could smell poop, she said. Her green BMW was covered with brown-greyish liquid. It was falling from the sky you could feel the drops hitting you, she said. Allan said it felt like a dump truck full off mud was dumped on them. When the two looked up in the sky, they saw a plane flying overhead and more fecal matter dropping from it. Oh my god, I am covered in poo, she remembers saying as her son hosed her down at a nearby carwash. Transport Canada spokesperson Daniel Savoie tells Castanet they are aware of the incident and are taking it very seriously. A swipe on Allans eye revealed conjunctivitis in both eyes after being inundated with sewage from an overhead plane while driving. Her doctor also told her she had a small burn on her eye, which is caused from liquid blue, a chemical used for freeze waste. Savoie said that each air operator is responsible for ensuring that their aircraft operates safely and in compliance with the Canadian Aviation Regulations. Frozen lavatory waste is referred to as blue ice, and it is possible that a valve malfunctioned and allowed some leakage of the tanks content. If this happens, the liquid seeping from valves freezes and adheres to the outside of the aircraft when the aircraft is flying at high altitudes, he said. As the aircraft starts its descent and the atmosphere gets warmer, the ice will start to melt and pieces will detach themselves from the aircraft. These pieces of ice will either melt or remain in their solid state before hitting the ground, said Savoie. Allan said she is confident it is human feces and not from a bird. It would have taken a thousand flocks of birds to fly over all at once to cover my car as much as it was covered, she said. She is asking for an apology from the airline and also wants her vehicle detailed because it still smells like feces. Photo: The Canadian Press Natural Resources Minister James Carr and Finance Minister Bill Morneau leave a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. The federal Liberal government has no plans to drag Canada permanently into the pipeline business, Finance Minister Bill Morneau said Tuesday as he unveiled a $4.5-billion plan to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline and its various assets to ensure a planned expansion is able to proceed. If Canada indeed ends up buying the pipeline, it will be solely to ensure its capacity can be tripled, allowing Canada to find new export markets for its oil resources, Morneau said and that ultimately, the long-term goal will be to find a private-sector buyer to take it over. "The Trans Mountain expansion project is of vital interest to Canada and to Canadians," Morneau told a news conference in Ottawa. "Our government's position is clear: it must be built, and it will be built." Morneau said the government's hand was forced by B.C. Premier John Horgan, who has gone to court for judicial approval to regulate what can flow through the pipeline a measure of opposition that made Kinder Morgan Canada, the project's original owner, too nervous to continue. The company halted all non-essential spending on the pipeline expansion in April pending reassurances from Ottawa that the project would come to fruition. Morneau had said Canada would cover any cost overruns caused by B.C.'s actions, but in the end, that clearly wasn't enough. "We need to deal with the political uncertainty," he said. "The only (way) in our estimation that that can be done is through exerting our jurisdiction by purchasing the project." Kinder Morgan agreed to start construction this summer as planned, and will work until July 22 trying to find another private-sector buyer. If none comes forward, only then will Kinder Morgan take Ottawa's $4.5-billion offer to its shareholders. Pending their approval, the sale would be finalized sometime in August or September. The purchase price includes most of Kinder Morgan Canada's core assets the existing pipeline, the pumping stations and rights of way, and the Westridge marine terminal in Burnaby, B.C. That terminal is where the diluted bitumen from the pipeline would be loaded onto tankers and shipped out to sea, with the ultimate goal being to sell Canadian oil in Asia. The pipeline purchase would also transfer to the federal government all of the people involved in building the expansion, including project managers and construction workers. Canada would then proceed with construction, selling the pipeline when it would generate the best return. There are parties interested in the pipeline, including Indigenous communities and pension funds, Morneau said, but his officials acknowledged it may be hard to find a buyer amid lingering uncertainty until after the pipeline is actually built. If Canada takes on the project, Export Development Canada would finance it through a newly established Crown corporation an approach officials say would help to defray B.C.'s threats of delay. Existing statutes stipulate one level of government cannot interfere with the work of another a situation one official called a "conversation changer" that might convince Horgan to back down. Were that court challenge to be dropped, it would remove a lot of the risk that has made the project so unattractive to the private sector. Morneau stressed repeatedly the pipeline is commercially viable and profitable. Kinder Morgan makes about $200 million a year from selling space in the existing pipeline to oil companies to ship their product. The $4.5-billion purchase price does not cover the construction costs of building the new pipeline, however; Morneau refused to say what that cost may be. Kinder Morgan last year said it was about $7.4 billion, plus about $1 billion already spent an estimate that's now considered low. Castanet's Evening Update for Tuesday, May 29, with reporter Wayne Moore. Photo: The Canadian Press Christopher Calvin Garnier, charged with second-degree murder in the death of Truro police officer Const. Catherine Campbell, walks with girlfriend Brittany Francis (left) at Nova Supreme Court for the start of his trial in Halifax on Monday, Nov. 20, 2017. The girlfriend of a Halifax man convicted of murdering a woman he met for the first time at a Halifax bar has written a glowing letter about Christopher Garnier, calling him a kind, genuine and thoughtful person. The partner of a Halifax man convicted of murdering a woman he met at a downtown bar has written a glowing letter to a judge about Christopher Garnier, calling him a kind, genuine and thoughtful person. Brittany Francis's letter is one of 31 letters of support submitted to Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Joshua Arnold as part of Garnier's parole ineligibility hearing and made public Tuesday. Garnier strangled 36-year-old Catherine Campbell, an off-duty Truro police constable, and used a compost bin to dump her body near a harbour bridge on Sept. 11, 2015. In her letter dated April 4, Francis Garnier's common-law spouse said that the 30-year-old Garnier has changed her life, taught her how to love herself, and has helped her to grow as a person. She added: "I love him more today than I ever have." "I consider myself incredibly lucky to call Christopher my significant other," Francis wrote to Arnold, who presided over Garnier's trial and his parole ineligibility hearing. "He truly is the best kind of person inside and out," she wrote. "He saved me from me and (has) given me something to look forward to for the future our future." In December, a jury convicted Garnier of second-degree murder and interfering with human remains. The Crown argues Garnier should have to serve 16 years before he's able to apply for parole, while the defence argues for a parole ineligibility period of 10 years. Garnier's father, Vince Garnier, wrote a letter appealing for leniency in the case. "Chris and our family think about Catherine and her family daily. When Chris says (repeatedly) to us that he would gladly give his life to have her back with her family, I know that he is truly sincere," Vince Garnier wrote in his March 26 letter. "The tremendously tragic event ... caused Chris to developed post-traumatic stress disorder, consequences of which have caused him to have night terrors, flashbacks, difficult sleeping, hypervigilance and more." Vince Garnier said while his son was on bail, he enrolled in an online program at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., with a goal of one day obtaining a psychology degree and working in the criminal justice system. He said his son "saw a gap in the system whereby inmates with mental health disorders are not being treated effectively," and wants to help. "I was, and still am, so very proud of him. With the utmost sincerity, Chris was, and is, my life," said Vince Garnier of his only child. He detailed a list of goals his son wrote on a brown cardboard toilet paper roll while he was in custody after his arrest: 1. Hug everyone 2. Help people 3. Show Brittany the Cabot trail 4. Restart my career 5. Start a family 6. Spend all my time with loved ones 7. See the world 8. Cherish every second 9. Make a difference in the world and people's lives. He also requested that his son be sent to a medium- or minimum-security prison, arguing he wouldn't get the help he needs for his post-traumatic stress disorder at a maximum-security facility. Christopher Garnier's parole ineligibility hearing got underway Monday, but was adjourned after legal issues arose. The Crown said seven to 10 victim impact statements have been filed as part of the parole ineligibility hearing. Photo: The Canadian Press Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister speaks at the Manitoba Legislature in Winnipeg, Tuesday, November 7, 2017. Former civil servants are being asked to share their experiences for a review of government policies around harassment after female staffers came forward with allegations that a former NDP cabinet minister tickled and groped them. Manitoba's premier says he is expecting an upswing in allegations now that the province is encouraging former civil servants to share their experiences as part of a review of government harassment policies. "The goal here is to make sure this is a harassment-free place, that the government not just here in the building, of course, but more broadly is a safe place for your children to come to work," Pallister said Tuesday. The Progressive Conservatives announced a "no wrong door" policy in February after female staff came forward with allegations that a former NDP cabinet minister tickled and groped them. The women alleged that their complaints about Stan Struthers, who left politics in 2016, were never addressed. Former NDP premier Greg Selinger said he never saw the behaviour but he apologized and later resigned his legislature seat. Pallister has said there were also two complaints about inappropriate conduct reported since the Progressive Conservatives took office in 2016. He has not revealed details but has said the situation was dealt with "to the satisfaction of the complainant.'' The government hired a law firm to review policies around such complaints and has started consultations with current employees. Former public servants and political staff have now been invited to participate through written submissions and a survey. The government says the information will be kept confidential. "We are dealing with this harassment issue and we are dealing with it openly," Pallister said. The survey's goal is to determine the nature and prevalence of harassment, to hear about people's experiences reporting it and to gather recommendations for improving the workplace. Pallister wouldn't say how many more allegations had been made but said numbers are expected to increase when "you create a culture that's more open, where people are more confident they can come forward." Manitoba's New Democrats set up a separate commission following the allegations against Struthers and released a report during the party's convention earlier this month. The report said there had been a "toxic culture" of sexual harassment and bullying in the party. NDP Leader Wab Kinew said they plan to enact the report's recommendations, which including mandatory anti-harassment training. But creating a "safer space for everyone" must involve all parties, he said. "There are a few things we need to do with other parties or the government because we can't control things like the civil service." The firm hired by the government is expected to submit its report and recommendations this summer. Photo: The Canadian Press Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, says goodbye to French President Emmanuel Macron after a meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris, Monday, April 16, 2018. Macron is scheduled to meet Trudeau next week in Ottawa before they sit down with their G7 counterparts for the leaders' summit in La Malbaie, Que. French President Emmanuel Macron is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau next week in Ottawa before the two sit down with their G7 counterparts for the leaders' summit in La Malbaie, Que. Both Trudeau and Macron will likely compare notes on how to nurture their relationships with an unpredictable G7 partner both men have worked hard to befriend: President Donald Trump. The French Embassy in Ottawa says Macron will meet Trudeau and Gov. Gen. Julie Payette on June 6 before he visits Montreal on June 7 and then Quebec City. The embassy is describing Macron's Canadian visit as a working trip to prepare for the G7 summit on June 8-9 northeast of Quebec City. France will take over the G7 presidency next year and, among other objectives, senior Canadian officials have said there's hope the exclusive club of countries will continue their work toward meeting the goals laid out by the Paris climate agreement. After a meeting last month in Paris, Trudeau and Macron agreed to mount a new attack on climate change by keeping the issue at the forefront of the world's agenda, despite Trump's decision to abandon the Paris deal. Photo: CTV Charter fisherman Ryan Chamberland Fishermen say they feel betrayed by a federal plan to close salmon fisheries off Vancouver Island. Ottawa announced plans last week to close some recreational and commercial fisheries to preserve prey for the endangered southern resident killer whale population. The federal government aims to reduce the total chinook fishery by 25 to 35 per cent. "If this keeps up ... people will be closing," charter fisherman Ryan Chamberland told CTV. The closures are expected to be in the Juan de Fuca Strait and parts of the Southern Gulf Islands, but anglers fear they could be even wider. "This is going to hurt our local economy big time," said Chamberland. Fisherman Glen Varney feels fishermen are getting "stabbed in the back." "What we're hearing is they're going to extend it even bigger," he said. "It seems like the more work we do to enhance our fish populations and to give back the government's like, the heck with you guys, we're just going to do what we want to do. I feel betrayed by our government." with files from CTV Vancouver Island Photo: CTV A Delta dog owner fears her pet was intentionally poisoned. Police are investigating after June Mark's Bernese mountain dog, Kleo, began vomiting last week and eventually had to be put down. "I didn't think anything of it. I just cleaned it up," she told CTV. "I thought my sister had just fed her a bunch of hotdogs." The dog's condition worsened to seizures before Mark took the dog to the vet. "She was staggering, falling over, walking into walls, foaming at the mouth," said Mark. With little hope of survival, her beloved pet was euthanized on Saturday. "You can't even explain how hard it is to make that choice," she said. Mark believes the hotdogs were laced. Her home is steps away from a school playground, and she's concerned a child could have eaten the tainted food. The SPCA says it's difficult to catch those responsible in such cases. "We've investigated many of these in the past. Unfortunately, very few tend to lead to the culprit," said Marcie Moriarty, the BC SPCA's chief prevention and enforcement officer. with files from CTV Vancouver Photo: Contributed A Castanet reader living in Coldstream sent us a couple of pictures of a bear making its way through their property Tuesday evening. Sightings have been common this spring and conservation officers say the bears are always on the lookout for food and they remind people to make sure they store food and garbage in a secure location and of course give the bears a wide berth. Photo: File photo Despite pleading guilty almost 17 months ago to having sex with an 11-year-old girl, a Penticton man has yet to be sentenced, and remains out of custody. Rick Allen, 28, pleaded guilty to sexual assault in January 2017, for having sex with an underage girl he met on the Plenty of Fish dating website in February 2014. She had told him she was 18, but Allen admitted he thought she may have been 15 or 16 after they met in person. The child's mother called police that night after realizing she had snuck out of the house, and the child's uncle found her at Allen's house the next morning after following footprints in the snow. Police were called to the house, and Allen was arrested. Since pleading guilty in Penticton, Allen has had several sentencing dates scheduled, but delays have plagued the case. Last July, his sentencing was delayed due to delays in producing a court-ordered psychological report. The report was ordered due to Allen's ADHD and fetal alcohol syndrome claims, which his defence says could have clouded his judgment. On Wednesday, in Kelowna court, Allen's defence lawyer James Pennington applied for another adjournment because Allen's partner has gone into labour, making him unable to attend court. Allen currently lives in Vernon. Justice Meg Shaw granted the defence's application, but said she wanted a new sentencing date to be scheduled within the next 30 days. Photo: Contributed Kelowna's 100 Men Who Give a Damn will gather to support another local charity tonight. The group has been in existence for almost three years and has raised more than $200,000 for non-profit organizations. Members each commit $100 to the chosen charity at four meetings a year. Representatives pitch the group on their organizations, and then the 100 Men select a recipient. Group co-founder Brett Millard said The total commitment for each member is very low, four hours and $400 per year. But the impact that the collective group makes on the community is huge! Tonights event is at Martin Motorsports (formerly Rayburns Marine). Doors open at 5 p.m., and the event kicks off at 6 p.m. In under one hour, the group will hear a five-minute pitch from three local groups and then vote to decide which will take home the money. The groups last event was in February at the Kelowna Yacht Club, where Karis Support Society walked away with the funds. A representative from Karis will be on hand this evening to tell the group how much good work theyve been able to accomplish with the money donated. Rob Gibson Are you ready for some new money? The new Canadian $10 bill is set for release later this year but Castanet is part of the one per cent who have seen the bill up close and personal. The bill is not only socially and politically forward it's also full of new high tech security features which make it next to impossible to counterfeit. "It's the first vertical note that we've ever designed for Canada and it's state of the art when it comes to the currency within it," says Bank of Canada Analyst, Farid Salji. "We really wanted to differentiate between our new money and our old money." Salji is in Kelowna working with RCMP, local banks and retailers to help them learn more about the unique identifiers in this bill which will make it easy to spot a fake. "Its got the intaglio ink, new types of holography at the bottom, a 3D maple leaf and a feather on the back that changes colour when the bill is folded." Even though we got our hands on the new bill in May it's not expected to hit the streets until late 2018. Photo: Contributed A joint UBC Okanagan-Interior Health study is looking for people who've pee'd their pants. Urinary incontinence affects 3.5 million Canadians. According to the Canadian Urinary Bladder Survey, 16 per cent of men and 33 per cent of women over 40 have some symptoms. The impact on older adults can be significant, with serious physical, psychological, and social consequences. On average, they suffer in silence for years before they seek health care. Left untreated, the incontinence can worsen, creating greater management challenges for both patients and health providers. Darlene Taylor, assistant professor at UBCO's School of Nursing, says the medical study on self-screening has so far recruited 10 people, but needs 26 more. The study's objective is to increase awareness of urinary incontinence and to promote timely treatment. It will develop and test a self-screening process at the community level. The hope is that older adults exposed to the self-screening process will follow up with health professionals to receive help. The study initially sought participants at seniors centres in the Central Okanagan, but has since broadened to include anyone 65 or older interested in participating. To take part, email [email protected] or phone 250-807-9511. Photo: Madison Erhardt Log booms will be installed on Okanagan Lake Thursday. Crews will begin installing log booms in select spots on Okanagan Lake, Thursday, to protect public infrastructure from high winds and waves. Up to 1.7 kilometres of logs will be placed at Hot Sands Beach in Kelowna City Park, the Maude-Roxby Bird Sanctuary just south of Strathcona Park, and at Swim Bay in Peachland. Central Okanagan Emergency Operations says more booms may be deployed in other areas if needed over the next week. The booms will be anchored to concrete blocks on the lake bottom, and the blocks will be marked with buoys. Were also reminding people to stay off the log booms, as they are unstable, and hands and feet could become trapped between the logs, leading to serious injury, the EOC said in a press release. Okanagan Lake is currently at 342.69 metres above sea level, which is 57 centimetres below last year's high water mark. But,the EOC warns strong winds or heavy rain could still lead to flooding and erosion. The lake level is expected to peak within the next week, but weather will ultimately decide when this occurs. Photo: Contributed RCMP in the Central and North Okanagan are seeking the publics help in locating a missing Vernon man. Jordan Alexander Mooney was last seen leaving a home in Kelowna's Dilworth area, late Sunday night. Since Mooney's unexplained disappearance, police have followed up several leads and reported sightings, but he has not been found. Friends and family say it is out of character for Mooney to be out of contact for this long. Mooney is 24 years old, Caucasian, five feet 10 inches tall, 180 pounds and has short, red hair. He was last seen wearing a pair of black pants and a white T-shirt. Police are also looking for his vehicle, a blue 2005 Volkswagen Jetta with B.C. plate FP995T. Anyone with information is asked to call Kelowna RCMP at 250-762-3300, Vernon RCMP at 250-545-7171, or CrimeStoppers at 1-800-222-8477, www.crimestoppers.net or by texting CRIMES (274637) ktown. Anna Amelia K. Mayers, 90, entered fully into the presence of the Lord on Friday, September 10, 2021. While she will be missed by many, we are thankful she is reunited in heaven with... The Hunter Museum is pleased to announce that the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded an Art Works grant of $10,000 to the museum for its new program Art Sense, a group of initiatives that will make the Hunter's collection more accessible to guests with limited vision or other sensory impairments and offer new avenues of understanding for museum guests without sensory impairments. Partnering with Signal Centers, the museum will develop multi-sensory experiences in its interactive art lounges, including tactile representations of artwork and digital and auditory elements that will allow guests to explore with all their senses. The collaboration will also involve the creation of sensory kits, available for all guests, to experience the Hunter's collection aurally, by touch, and by smell. The first of these programs, scheduled for October, will be Art in the Dark, an evening program open to the entire community during which guests will experience art without using sight. We are grateful to have been awarded this competitive grant from the NEA, said Virginia Anne Sharber, executive director of the Hunter Museum. The Hunter strives to engage a wide range of audiences with the visual arts, and this grant will support our continuing efforts to provide visitors of all backgrounds and abilities new points of entry to experience works of art. The variety and quality of funded projects speaks to the wealth of creativity and diversity in our country, said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. Through the work of organizations such as the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee, NEA funding invests in local communities, helping people celebrate the arts wherever they are. The Art Works category is the NEAs largest funding category and supports projects that focus on the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence, public engagement with diverse and excellent art, lifelong learning in the arts, and/or the strengthening of communities through the arts. For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news. Stora Enso has signed a strategic partnership agreement with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). Through the agreement Stora Enso and SLU intend to establish a long-term collaboration in research and development, education, competence building, and innovation within the fields of forestry and bio-based materials. The main objective of the collaboration is to jointly drive research projects to develop new knowledge within sustainable forestry and wooden biomaterials. Special focus areas include bio-based materials, forest and ecosystem management, forest technology and plant- and forest production. Moreover, the collaboration will act to strengthen competence development of staff members at Stora Enso and SLU. Collaborating with leading educational institutions, such as SLU, is a key component of Stora Ensos strategy and an enabler in our continued transformation into a renewable materials company, says Stora Ensos CEO Karl-Henrik Sundstrom. Our vision is to replace fossil-based materials by innovating and developing new products based on wooden materials. By liaising with the worlds leading forestry science university, we can accelerate this development while also increasing our exposure to educated talents in our field. We are excited to partner with one of the worlds leading forest products companies, says Peter Hogberg, Vice-Chancellor at SLU. Stora Ensos ambition to be an influential force in the bio-economy matches SLUs strive to break new ground in research and education for bio-based technologies. Through this agreement, we can together strengthen the link between academics and business towards the common goal of a renewable future. Under the agreement Stora Enso and SLU aim to have an active portfolio of shared projects. Each party assigns relevant representatives to participate in a dedicated Steering Group for the collaboration which will be responsible for developing and managing the collaboration. Chesterfield signs no-cost deal to add solar panels to 17 facilities The Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors recently approved the first-ever rooftop solar power program for government facilities and school buildings throughout the county. Included in the first wave of the... Yes, experts say expectant mothers should get vaccinated Misinformation surrounding COVID-19 vaccines and womens reproductive health quickly spread after the first shots became available last December. Since then, common myths that COVID-19 vaccines cause infertility, miscarriages and birthing... Food truck owners also say the rules have led many mobile vendors to close up shop, including one of the cases original plaintiffs. But lower courts have backed up the citys position, arguing that officials have a right to manage competition and protect business owners, including bricks-and-mortar restaurants. A Cook County Circuit Court judge first ruled in favor of the city in 2016, and an Appellate Court ruled in the citys favor in December. Pekarik asked the Illinois Supreme Court to take up the case in February. A Walmart store in Secaucus, New Jersey, on May 16, 2018. The retailer is offering employees affordable access to a college degree. (Timothy Fadek / Bloomberg) Mora said in an interview last summer that her priorities for the organization were to make it about both women and families, and to amplify diverse voices. That mission will continue, Majmudar said, by seeking partnerships we havent before, being more creative, thinking about issues of inclusivity and equity and diversity and principles for us to really base our work on." A: I grew up in Vietnam and left in the late '80s. My family and I moved to the Philippines and then to the USA. We lived in Champaign-Urbana and eventually in Virginia, which is where I grew up. It was in D.C. that I cut my teeth in the restaurant business. Six years ago I traveled to Chicago to work with Laurent Gras at L2O. Then on to the Elysian and now here as chef and co-owner. When people start talking about a country's food, they think that they know it all. But it is so often not authentic, and they wouldn't really know. So, here at Embeya I do progressive Asian food that is about all of me and not just my Vietnamese background. It represents all of my professional experiences the kitchens I came out of and the chefs I learned from. They inspire me. Then I add nuance of Southeast Asian flavors and textures. But truthfully I lean more toward my Vietnamese background but refining. It's inevitable, because I'm Vietnamese. 5) When you cant be bothered to be entirely outside, the retractable roof at Octavio Cantina & Kitchen has you covered, literally. Sit at the expansive bar or in one of the booths while sipping the restaurants frozen cocktails. The Mezcal Firing Squad is made with Banhez mezcal, Angostura bitters and house-made hibiscus grenadine, and is garnished with a lime wheel. The Playa Blanca Margarita is made with Libelula Tequila, Combier triple sec, coconut creme and lime, and is garnished with a blood orange crisp. 5310 N. Clark St., 773-293-1223, mrgchicago.com/restaurant/octavio Their first three expressions highlight aronia berries, persimmons and celery root, but its the aronia liqueur that may well turn out to be Apologues most popular. Aronia berries, also known as chokeberries, grow throughout the Midwest and are known for their tart and tannic taste. The Aronia Berry Liqueur, which also includes flavors such as raspberries, tart cherries and cinnamon, can give an Old Fashioned some added richness or act as a substitute for creme de cassis in an El Diablo. The Japanese style is called mizuwari, according to critically acclaimed mixologist Julia Momose, who is opening a Japanese-style bar called Bar Kumiko in Chicagos West Loop. You start with a glass filled with ice the colder the initial vessel, the better, to maximize carbonation. After the glass becomes frosted, the original ice and any water that has melted are discarded to avoid dilution. New ice large chunks or a spear is added, then the whisky. Soda water is poured carefully between glass and ice (not on top of the ice), and using a bar spoon, the bartender lifts the ice ever so slightly to allow the whisky and soda to mix. Too large a stir risks releasing carbonation. A little more soda is added to fill the glass, and the final result is a delicately refreshing concoction, with bubbles that dance on your tongue and an earthiness that grounds you. Weinstein, 66, learned of the specific charges and the accusers' identities only after turning himself in Friday, according to his lawyers. Brafman said that with a deadline set for Wednesday afternoon for Weinstein to testify or not, prosecutors denied his request for more time. Nearly 400 guests attended the opening-night party for the second annual Chicago Antiques + Art + Design Show on May 17 at the Chicago Merchandise Mart. The event, produced by Dolphin Promotions, was hosted by the Woman's Board of Northwestern Memorial Hospital and raised over $200,000 to benefit the programs and care initiatives supported by the board, including a recent commitment to fund a study of collaborative mental health care. So you have to suspect that she knew that the things she was saying on Twitter were inappropriate and controversial, and she knew that those could potentially harm her employment, Ramsey said. The fact that she had the presence of mind to delete past tweets tells me that she should have known better, and I dont have any sympathy for her. Her repeated behavior tells me she has no interest in learning or growing or actually taking responsibility for the things that she has said and done. Oxybenzone and zinc oxide -- the white stuff -- are the only two UVA filters broadly permitted in the U.S. DSM sees the Hawaii ban, which would apply to oxybenzone, as boosting its plans to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration this year for its sunscreen alternatives. Its Parsol Max and Parsol Shield have been available in Europe for years and provide protection against both UVA and UVB. Visitors to California wine country can get an out-of-the-ordinary experience with a nighttime kayak outing at Jenner, on the Sonoma County coast. Getaway Adventures leads the paddling after dark through waters that contain bioluminescent dinoflagellates, small organisms that light up in the water when excited by the movement of the kayaks. The outings begin in July and are priced from $119 per person. http://tinyurl.com/y7y6o43m Its cool to change the definition of what a thru-hike looks like, Leu said. There are more paved sections, more people. But youre still hiking. Youre getting yourself from the beginning to the end on your own power with everything you need on your back. The bills are being pushed by legislators from the Metro East area outside St. Louis, where Edwardsville is situated. One bill proposes to establish independent universities at Edwardsville and Carbondale, each with their own boards of trustees, and eliminate the system governance altogether. Barring that, other legislation would stipulate state allocations to both schools be split 50-50. Carbondale currently receives about two-thirds of the funding. Another bill would appoint an entirely new board with equal representation from Carbondale and Edwardsville. I think if anyone has been denigrated in this situation, it has been me for doing my job and working for the best interests of all the campuses in the SIU system which I was hired to do, Dunn wrote in a statement. To say that I have contempt for my neighbors, colleagues, friends and co-workers is insulting and is not worthy of being suggested against someone who shares a long history with this institution. The vehicle then crashed into two others at Balmoral and Mannheim Road at OHare on the Far Northwest Side around 12:35 a.m., police said. Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, whose ward includes parts of the north end of downtown, agreed making more arrests might have been better. I think that when you have people committing assaults, disorderly conduct, criminal trespass to property when theyre entering the parks after theyre closed for the night, we need to take another look at the tactics and consider making more arrests I think the pendulum has swung a little too far in the direction of leniency. He was pulled from the river and taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about two hours after firefighters received the rescue call. The body of the man who fell from the boat has not been found. I know there are other women who have been through what I have been through and have not come forward, she said. So today I am going to take a stand for myself and for them. What happened to me that on that day is a serious crime that deserves focused attention. I deserve justice in this matter. I will not back down. Later that month, the girl was staying at her grandmothers. About 3 a.m. on April 20, Carter drove to the house and picked up the teen in an alley a few houses down. He parked and had sex with her, prosecutors said. Carter then drove the teen back to her grandmothers house. Khan has made incredible strides since he came out of prison, Durkin said, when he had a hardened edge and looked like Jihadi Joe with a long beard and skull cap. After two semesters of college, Khan is hoping to earn a scholarship at the University of Illinois at Chicago, an opportunity that should not be derailed because of one incredibly stupid mistake, he said. For Chicago families that often pay thousands of dollars annually for private childcare and pre-kindergarten schooling, the chance to send a child to school at no cost for an extra year could prove a significant savings. And as the mayor tries to appeal to African-American voters who rely on the Chicago Public Schools system, hes sure to tout this latest plan as an example of how hes improving their childrens educational opportunities. The budget blueprint envisions spending $5.9 billion on human services, $1.8 billion on colleges and universities, $1.7 billion on public safety and $1.2 billion on government services, the documents show. A new $25 million scholarship program would be created to encourage students to attend school in Illinois. Universities would be asked to match it. Early childhood education and K-12 schools would get a total of $8.4 billion, which represents an increase of $50 million for early childhood education and $350 million for primary and secondary schools the yearly increase that was envisioned in a new education funding formula that was enacted last year. *Quick spin: Mayor Emanuels former policy chief Michael Negron recently got a financial boost in his bid for a North Side seat on the City Council from the mayor's close friend and top campaign donor, Michael Sacks. The GCM Grosvenor chairman and CEO and his wife, Cari, each gave Negron maximum contributions of $5,600 on Friday, according to state records. Negron, who is running to represent Emanuels home ward and succeed outgoing Ald. Ameya Pawar, reported the two donations Monday amid a total of $21,200 in contributions, records show. Emanuel controls who sits on his rubber stamp board and who calls the shots in our schools. He has hired lackeys and crooks to engineer policies that harm our students and the people who educate them, Sharkey said. Hes hired yet another new CEO. But a new CEO wont cut it. What we need is a new mayor one who actually cares about our students educations instead of gutting their schools, turning his back on their parents and sabotaging their neighborhoods. The governor also was indicted on invasion-of-privacy charges in February in St. Louis for allegedly taking an unauthorized and compromising photo of a woman during an extramarital affair in 2015, before he was elected. The charge was dropped earlier this month, but a special prosecutor is considering whether to refile it. Gowdy, who plans to retire from Congress at the end of the current term, did express support for Trump's "frustration" with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself in May 2017 from the Russia probe based on a possible conflict of interest. The recusal of Sessions, an early backer of Trump's presidential bid, followed the revelation that he had two previously undisclosed interactions during the 2016 campaign with the Russian ambassador. Republican leaders were encouraged by Trump's decision to attack Donnelly. Indiana is one of 10 states Trump won in 2016 where a Democratic senator is facing reelection in November. GOP leaders believe that Trump can be a major midterm asset for the party when he trains his attacks on red-state Democrats like Donnelly. Liberal journalists apparently have few concerns that the FBI apparently used at least one secret informant to gather information about the 2016 Trump campaign. Nor are they much bothered that members of the Obama administrations national security team unmasked the names of U.S. citizens who had been improperly surveiled. Many of those names then were leaked to the press. In the report, a 16-year-old boy said an agent threw him down and smashed his head into the ground with his boot. Another complaint described a child run over by a Border Protection truck, noting crushing damage and significant trauma to the childs leg. And a 16-year-old girl said that during a search, officials forcefully spread her legs and touched her private parts so hard that she screamed. Chicago nonprofits got $1 million in unrestricted funding. Heres how some used it. Chicago nonprofits got $1 million in unrestricted funding. Heres how some used it. She plans to work with a transition team to review data, assess needs and focus on six areas: finance and operations, academics and instruction, culture and climate, parent engagement, community and partnerships, and technology, she said. She is looking to provide the school board with a report about what they have found around her 100th day on the job, and would eventually look to work with others to create a three- to five-year plan for the district, she said. While a HIPAA form authorizes healthcare providers to release otherwise private health information to a designated agent, a medical power of attorney (aka, healthcare power of attorney, durable power of attorney for healthcare) provides parents the right to make medical decisions on behalf of adult children should they become incapacitated or unable to make decisions on their own. As each state has different laws governing this document, in addition to getting a medical power of attorney in a students home state, a medical power of attorney should also be prepared for the state in which the student attends school. And depending on the state, the signature of a witness or notary may be required. State-specific medical power of attorney forms can be found online or provided by an attorney. At that point, I had been divorced and living alone for 15 years, and I was so content and comfortable thinking about the prospect of going alone, she said of the trip, which she took in 2005. I felt like I wanted to use the time to really look at my life and look forward to the second half. By the time I got on the plane, I was filled with excitement and joy and no fear whatsoever. They get to see things in action. You can learn all about things in a classroom or in a lab setting inside a school, but to see me actually go out there, and to see those concepts and technology actually being used for something as high tech as this thats a great experience. Ramos noted eight youths and four adults from Storehouse Church were in Puerto Rico for the trip, which took place in late March. Ramos said the cost was $1,000 for each student to attend, which would cover their flights, housing and food. Efiom asked forum participants to think about how and if racism played a role in the Philadelphia Starbucks incident with questions like: Who if anyone was acting in a racially motivated way? The Starbucks manager who called the police? The dispatcher who sent officers to the restaurant? The responding officers? The white customers who were seen on the video intervening? The North Shore Mosquito Abatement District collected the positive mosquitoes on May 25, according to a news release from the Illinois Department of Public Health. No human cases of West Nile Virus have been reported so far this year, according to the department. Heading out of the library, I conveniently bumped into a friend who traveled to South Africa a few years ago to visit a daughter who was working in what was Swaziland, now known as The Kingdom of eSwatini. To be clear, it is about 4,000 miles south and east of Togo but on the continent of Africa, which prompted our discussion. The list of the turtles predators is long, from raccoons, to skunks, crows, chipmunks and foxes. And there are also blue herons and egrets that might prey on the small hatchlings. Glowacki said the adoption program allows environmentalists to grow the turtles to a larger size so they are less likely to be eaten. There is also a program to remove predators from the area where they are trying to re-introduce the turtles, so they have a self-sustaining population. Ms. Bennett was a remarkably loyal supervisor, loyal both to her employees, subordinates and to the district that employed her, defense attorney Jed Stone said. Her mistake of judgment was being too kind to others who were abusing the privilege of working for such a kind supervisor. No one is saying Ms. Bennett took things; theyre saying she turned a blind eye when others took things. The parade stepped off from the Morton Grove American Legion Post 134 Sunday afternoon, with mayor Dan DiMaria leading the villages elected officials along the parade route. The parade traveled down several local streets as it made its way to Lincoln Avenue where it stopped at the Doughboy statue. He reportedly told police that he would find the underwear during his bike rides through the preserve. Winnie would take the garments home, put them in plastic bags and then leave them along the trail. He described his actions as an experiment to see where it goes, according to police. When the lines went down, I was looking at a ring nebula, a star near the end of its life. Its out of our solar system and in our galaxy, Claeys said. Later in the evening, when its not as busy and college kids come out and people are willing to spend time to look, they might get to see galaxies, which is cool. Robert Hill, of Carol Stream, and two other suspects all wearing masks went into a Speedway gas station in Naperville on Oct. 15 and struck a clerk in the back of the head with a gun, according to a news release from DuPage County States Attorney Robert Berlin and Naperville Police Chief Robert Marshall. After he closed at the Lake Street location finding the right lease in the business district was difficult at the time, Torres said he spent a short stint in a storefront on Harlem Avenue, and then moved his business to Orland Square Mall. Customers who kept in touch wondered if he might return to Oak Park. A. I would like to be a traveling nurse to help people who may not have the kind of healthcare systems that we enjoy. A nursing degree will employ me to use my skills to help touch the lives of patients. Not only will I be helping people, but traveling will help me learn more about the world and the vast variety of people that live in it. I want to expand my horizons and learn about others backgrounds and values. Blount was one of two capital punishment cases in Lake County, along with Darren Vann, who pleaded guilty to the murders of seven women. Both cases resulted in plea agreements and the men were each sentenced of life in prison without parole. On Dec. 2, 2013, Rolando Correa, 22, of Gary, was killed when coming to the aid of his next door neighbors in Gary who were victims of a home invasion robbery that Nieto assisted in setting up, the release states. Nieto listened to a police scanner to help the robbers escape, according to the release. With the classic fiberglass nine-foot tall smiling Big Boy, holding a tray with his namesake burger to beckon customers, perched in front of the restaurant, Elmer Wiesjahn and his son Dennis opened the Valparaiso Azars on May 28, 1970. Dennis once told me, when his family launched the business, other than truck stops, this Azars ranked as one of the only family-owned sit-down dining restaurants along U.S. 30 for the miles between Fort Wayne and Chicago. He boasted the restaurant had the highest volume of business for any of the family franchises for the entire Azars chain for nearly 20 years, during a time when Merrillville was in the early stages of becoming a shopping hub. Judge Joseph Van Bokkelen continued hearing evidence during the ongoing dispute between Snyders defense attorneys and federal prosecutors over whether the mayors attorney-client privileged emails were exposed to the trial team. Snyders defense attorneys say the charges should be dismissed or trial attorney disqualified if those email communications were accessed. Video shows Clerk and Recorder Ortiz using profanity toward constituent A video circulating on social media shows Pueblo County Clerk and Recorder Gilbert "Bo" Ortiz telling the man filming him to "Go f--- yourself." By Alexander Chipman Koty Chinas State Council released a circular on May 23 directing local governments to introduce 27 reforms piloted in its 11 free trade zones (FTZs) nationwide. The reforms include opening-up measures in the services sector, namely for international shipping services, management, and agencies, as well as international maritime cargo handling services, container yards, and storage yard businesses. The circular also gives investors from Hong Kong and Macau a wider scope to establish partnership-type law firms that are jointly owned with mainland Chinese partners. Taken together, the reforms should streamline trade and customs procedures throughout China. RELATED: China to Shorten Business Registration and Construction Project Approval Processes In China, FTZs are often used to test new policies before they are adopted nationwide. According to the State Council, to date, up to 153 practices originally piloted in FTZs have been replicated nationwide. Separately, the State Council recently issued three documents on plans for expanding reform and opening-up in the Fujian, Guangdong, and Tianjin FTZs. Each plan stresses areas for the FTZ in question to develop reforms, and sets forward strategies for further integration with their respective regions. The plan for the Fujian FTZ calls for it to improve governance and marketization, extend economic cooperation with Taiwan, and promote the construction of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. The plan puts forward 21 proposed measures to accomplish these goals. The plan for the Guangdong FTZ aims for it to deepen its position as an advanced hub for foreign investment and a demonstration zone for cooperation with neighboring Hong Kong and Macau. The plan includes 18 proposed measures to expand foreign access to the financial sector and to promote free trade in services between Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macau. Pre-Investment, Market Entry Strategy Advisory Services from Dezan Shira & Associates Finally, the plan for the Tianjin FTZ encourages it to build investment and trade rules in line with international standards, and to develop demonstration zones in line with the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei integration plans. Furthermore, the plan proposes 16 measures for the Tianjin FTZ to develop emerging technologies. The Fujian, Guangdong, and Tianjin FTZs came into force in 2015 as the second generation of FTZs, following the establishment of the Shanghai FTZ in 2013. Earlier this year, China announced the creation of its 12th FTZ, in Hainan, which is set to open in 2020. The story of the doomed maiden voyage of RMS Titanic is known to most people, but the tale of the six Chinese men who survived the disaster is absent from the history books. It was this little-known fact that sparked a new documentary, The Six, and a bid to find out what happened to those Chinese survivors. "Who are they? Why were they on Titanic? How did they survive? What happened to them?" said Steven Schwankert, lead researcher and historian for The Six. Schwankert and British documentary maker Arthur Jones began their research three years ago and found the names of the Chinese men on a single ticket for third-class passengers. They were listed as, Lee Bing, Fang Lang, Chang Chip, Ah Lam, Chung Foo, and Ling Hee. Lee Ling and Len Lam died in the disaster. In April 1912, the eight Chinese passengers were among the 2,200 passengers who boarded RMS Titanic bound for New York from Southampton, England. The ship struck an iceberg and more than 1,500 people lost their lives. Around 700 survived. Fang Lang was found on a floating piece of wreckage by other survivors in a lifeboat. Four others made it onto one lifeboat and the remaining man made it onto another. Questions were raised at the time over whether the Chinese passengers were stowaways or workers on the Titanic. Schwankert said neither was true. "They were fare-paying passengers," he said from Beijing. The documentary took Schwankert, Jones and their crew to the United States, Britain, and China. "We basically pulled at every thread we could find and then, if that thread leads to something else, then we kept going with it," Schwankert said. After they were rescued, the professional mariners were taken to an immigration point in New York but were forced to leave the country the next day because of the US' Chinese Exclusion Act. They then boarded a freighter bound for the Caribbean, which had always been their ultimate destination. "Knowing their story also helps us to shine a light on aspects of the Titanic story that you would otherwise not know," Schwankert added. "Four of the six shared a lifeboat with Joseph Bruce Ismay, owner of the Titanic. This allowed us to look through Ismay's testimony and to see who else was on board." The documentary-makers tracked down the men's descendants and relatives. Some were not even aware of the connection to the Titanic. The team also made a recent visit to Taishan in Guangdong province, which had been home to one or more of the survivors. The film will be released at the end of the year. "Spittoon started as a monthly poetry event and became something a lot larger," said founder Matthew Byrne at an event Thursday celebrating the third anniversary of the international literary gathering Spittoon Poetry Night. Spittoon's founder, Matthew Byrne of the U.K., introduces a short documentary film chronicling the literary organization's activities in China over the last three years during the group's third anniversary event at The Great Outdoors restaurant and bar in Beijing, China on May 24, 2018. [Photo by Jennifer Fossenbell / China.org.cn] Spittoon's anniversary event featured performances from 14 Beijing-based poets ranging in age from their 20s to 60s and hailing from various nations, including China, the U.S., Britain, South Africa and Spain. Past poetry nights have brought together writers from six continents through the shared language of English, which for many is their second or third language. At Thursday's event, poets shared works covering a wide range of topics, all centered around the night's theme of "Birth/Rebirth," and styles spanning traditional verse, performance poetry and experimental free verse. The "Poetry in Translation" segment featured two translators from China reading poems they had translated into English from Chinese and Lithuanian, respectively. The event's founder, 29-year-old Matthew Byrne from the U.K., said he started Spittoon as a reading series in 2015 because there wasn't anything like it at the time and he saw huge potential within Beijing's international literary community. In celebration of the anniversary, Byrne screened a short documentary which followed some of the many organizers and participants that have come together under the Spittoon collective as they attended various Spittoon literary events in the fall of 2017. The film opens with a slide summarizing the group's past and future mission: "Over the last three years of Spittoon's existence, we have been lucky enough to facilitate a common ground between the vast and magnificent Chinese literary scene and an international group of writers writing from and about Asia. We consider it an honor to continue to work with such inspiring people to deepen that understanding, and to continue to explore the endless creative possibilities that we find before us." You are here: China State councilor Zhao Kezhi on Tuesday stressed a further crackdown on drug-related crimes, improvements to the system to regulate and control drugs, and implementation of the duties of drug control. During a video conference, Zhao, also director of the China National Narcotic Control Commission, required the continuance of campaigns to stop the crime of producing and selling drugs, as well as help drug addicts and control items related to drug production. He also called for building several systems to fight against drugs, including anti-drug promotion and a global cooperation system for drug control. A nationwide summer campaign against drugs has started this month, during which areas with drug problems will be examined and evaluated. You are here: The Wanshou Forum, an international gathering themed around China's reform, development and national governance modernization, is set to be held in the birthplace of the country's rural reform - Xiaogang village in Fengyang county of Anhui province - on Saturday. 2018 marks the 40th anniversary of the implementation of China's reform and opening up policy. The 19th Wanshou Forum will gather 200 representatives of 66 political parties from 45 countries and regions across the world, as well as scholars and experts from Chinese organizations, to discuss the practice and experience of China's reform as well as the deepening of the reform. Other domestic topics include new development concepts, rural vitalization, and the modernization of the country's governance system, while international topics include economic policy and reform of the global governance system. In addition, participants will see firsthand what changes the village of Xiaogang has undergone since triggering China's rural reform 40 years ago. In 1978, 18 farmers in Xiaogang village boldly signed a secret agreement to divide communally owned farmland into individual plots at the risk of being labeled "counterrevolutionary," inadvertently beginning a series of rural reforms across China. The Wanshou Forum was created by the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 2016 as a "platform for international exchange and dialogue." Rather than being strictly a dogma, Marxism is applicable to real life conditions and is itself evolving, said Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain. He spoke during an interview while attending a workshop entitled "Marxism of the 21st Century and the future for world socialism," hosted by the International Department of the CPC Central Committee in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, on May 28. "Marxism seems to be set ideas and principles, but it can be developed," said Griffiths. China's great achievements have testified that it is necessary and important to apply it in changing circumstances, he added. In face of social problems like financial crises, unemployment and terrorism, many people in Britain resort to reading classic Marxist works to seek solutions, Griffiths noted. In a poll on "which was the greatest mind of modern history" conducted by BBC Channel 4, listeners voted for Karl Marx, said Griffiths to illustrate the depth of Karl Marx's present-day influence. As for youth involvement, explained Griffiths, the Young Communist League, an independent organization allied with the Communist Party of Britain, helps young people analyze social problems and find appropriate courses of action. Griffiths expressed his admiration for the effective way socialism with Chinese characteristics has been implemented in China under the leadership of the CPC. He also said he greatly appreciates the CPC's efforts to bring together representatives of communist parties around the world and enhancing dialogue among them. The Marxism-themed workshop, which was part of the larger high-level meeting CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties, was attended by over 100 leaders and representatives of 75 communist parties from 50 countries. Zhang Huamei, a 58-year-old female entrepreneur and the owner of Huamei Costume Accessories Co. Ltd. in Wenzhou, the birthplace of modern Chinese entrepreneurship in southeastern Zhejiang province, was the first private business vendor licensed in the nation, following the adoption of the "reform and opening up" policies almost 40 years ago. Born the seventh child in a blue-collar family, Zhang dropped out of a secondary school and became an unlicensed vendor in 1970s, selling trinkets and accessories near her home. Hoping to improve her family's living conditions with one to two yuan of extra income per day as a vendor almost equaling the money they spent for the whole family's food per day, Zhang never expected that a dramatic transformation was coming that would change her destiny. A debate on whether China should adopt private business ownership was heating up, and was eventually settled in the affirmative in December of 1978 at the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China . Nor did Zhang expect that her foray as a private vendor would consequently begin her career as an entrepreneur, nearly 40 years after being named the first licensed private vendor in the country. Her story began with an incident that took place in 1979. One day, when Zhang was selling her goods near her home as usual, she was shocked to see an administrative official approaching her. Fearing that he may confiscate her goods, she packed up her belongings and prepared to run. However, the official stopped her, saying that he had just come to inform her that the country was now allowing individuals to set up their own businesses and asked her to register with the local industrial and commercial administration to run her bushiness legitimately. Then he left. After telling the news to her family, Zhang applied for business license by submitting her personal information, two photos and a description of her business to the administration the next day. In December of 1980, she became the first of more than 2,000 vendors in Wenzhou - 80 percent of whom were jobless at the time - to receive a license to operate a private business. Chen Shouzhu, the former director of the self-employed business division of the Wenzhou Industrial and Commercial Administration Bureau, recalled that there were 1,844 vendors in Wenzhou licensed for the first time in 1980, a development which soon captured the attention of the entire country. "At that time, since there were no official samples of a license for private businesses, we designed one written with Chinese brushes and had 20,000 copies printed," Chen said. According to Chen, in 1982 they issued more than 100,000 licenses to private businesses owners. With a license in hand, Zhang started to upgrade her business. She paid to renovate the first floor of her house, changing it into a store, where the buttons and key chains she managed to sell were displayed in counters. In 1982, she encountered a turning point in her life. Her brother was badly injured in a car accident, and his family had a substantial medical bill to cover. In an arrangement orchestrated by her father, Zhang handed over her business to her sister-in-law. However, by 1985, Zhang and her husband were heavily in debt after moving to a new house that they had bought for 9,000 yuan, and were living solely on her husband's meager income, which was less than 60 yuan a month. Zhang decided to become a businesswoman again. She and her husband rented a shop on North Jiefang Road and started a business selling zippers. "We didn't know at that time what the most lucrative business in the market was, but I just noted that there were few people selling zippers and accessories for formal suits, so I asked my husband to purchase some from Guangzhou," Zhang recalled, referring to Guangdong province's capital city. It proved to be a wise decision, and Zhang and her husband paid off all their housing debt in less than two years. In the ensuing years, they tried many different businesses, such as selling sweater accessories and leather shoes. However, the latter caused the couple to meet their Waterloo, undergoing a great loss in a market they were unfamiliar with and incurring a debt of tens of thousands of yuan. To recover from the setback, Zhang decided to focus on selling buttons following the latest fashion trends. In doing so, she rescued her business from the brink of bankruptcy. The twists and turns of Zhang's entrepreneurship transformed her into an astute businesswoman. In 2000, following the renovation of the city, Zhang and her husband moved to West Renmin Road, a commercial center of the city, to establish new shops totaling 200 square meters. They founded their company with design, sales and stockpile divisions in addition to several assembly lines. Each year, the company generates millions of yuan in revenue. Zhang, now 58 years old, announced her retirement a few months ago and passed on the business to her son. However, she continues to visit the company each working day, overseeing the business she started from scratch. Lin Shengbin, whose wife and three children were killed in a fire in their apartment that was started by the family's nanny, has filed a civil claim seeking 130 million yuan in compensation, reports Chinanews.com. Lin and his wife's parents filed the case with the Hangzhou City Intermediate People's Court on May 21 against nine parties, including the apartment's property services company, the Hangzhou fire department, and the housekeeping service that hired the nanny. Lin is claiming that the building's design and the lax enforcement of fire safety standards played a part in the tragedy. He is also claiming that the Hangzhou fire department bears responsibility for the failed attempt at a rescue operation. According to the Hangzhou City Intermediate People's Court, Mo Huanjing, the family's nanny, set fire to the family's apartment on June 22. The fire killed Lin's wife Zhu Xiaozhen and their three children, two boys aged 4 and 10 and their 7-year-old girl. In a meeting with her lawyer, Mo said she hadn't intended to hurt the victims. The court found that Mo started the fire with the goal of extinguishing it so that her employers, as a sign of their trust and appreciation, would loan her money that she could use to cover gambling debts. During her time working in the family, Mo financed her gambling by stealing jewelry and watches worth more than 180,000 yuan. She also borrowed 114,000 yuan from the family, claiming that the money would be used to help her buy a house. On three prior occasions, Mo had been found stealing when she was working in Zhejiang and Shanghai, and had subsequently been fired. A presentation was given at the Grand Millennium Hotel in Beijing on Tuesday to promote Robert Gordon University (RGU) to educational consultants in China, and included a speech by Martin McDermott, first secretary of Scottish affairs at the British Embassy in Beijing. A delegation from RGU are on a trip to China this week and will visit Beijing, Qingdao and Shanghai to promote their university and detail their strategy to deepen affiliations with Chinese institutions, agents and students as well as to find potential partnerships in a range of other areas. RGU Vice Principal Mark Sollis opened the proceedings in Beijing by introducing the Scottish city of Aberdeen as a city that punches above its weight considering its relatively small size. He alluded to the brand of Aberdeen, home to heavyweight companies such as Aberdeen Asset Management, and said he wants to use this globally recognized brand to focus more on RGU's partnerships in China. RGU is a relative latecomer to China, having only opened its first Beijing office in July 2016. But RGU Regional Director Dan Bennet explained that they see this as an asset rather than a drawback. We have only been recruiting in China for a short period of time, so there are not many Chinese students, only one or two per class, he said, adding, This means that our Chinese students are forced to step out of their comfort zone straight away and rapidly improve their English language skills as well. The U.K. government recently introduced a new university ranking system called the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcome Framework (TEF), which focuses on measuring teaching quality. Whereas the existing ranking system focuses heavily on research, meaning that the results have been skewed in favor of large universities with big research budgets, according to Mr. Bennet, the TEF ranking is fairer. RGU has achieved the gold award in the new system, the highest award, placing it in the top 20 percent of universities in the U.K. This conducive learning environment was echoed by James Cunningham, a professor at RGU's Aberdeen Business School, who expressed his passion for the university as it is embedded in the community and said that business is not only about making money. There is no fancy research if it doesnt help society, he said. This is illustrated by RGU's final capstone module, wherein postgraduates can choose to do their final assignment as an academic write-up, consultancy report or in the form of a personal development plan which is instead focused on gaining skills. We try to open it up, as students have different motivations for studying a postgraduate qualification, Cunningham said. The university has more than 14,000 students from 130 countries, yet only 10 percent of the student population is international, making it a good University to experience British culture while meeting people from all over the world. With a 96.3 percent employment rate among alumni according to the country's official Higher Education Statistics Agency in 2017, RGU offers full- and part-time courses on campus as well as online programs. The school also has pre-sessional courses for learning English. Almost every postgraduate course is a conversion course, meaning that regardless of a students undergraduate qualifications, they can apply to study in a different program. China's central authorities have approved the 2018-2035 master plan for Xiongan New Area. China will introduce measures to upgrade its comprehensive bonded zones in line with advanced international standards to promote trade and investment facilitation, sustain steady growth in foreign trade and investment, and nurture new competitive advantages, the State Council's executive meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang decided on Wednesday. Initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the "opendoor" policy set the country in a new direction by introducing the novel concept of an open market as a vital part of the socialist economy. Starting with the simple methodology of combining market reforms with government programs, the focus has been on achieving sustainability rather than a high economic growth. The policy was effectively executed and resulted in unprecedented economic achievements. Even though China's success was denied due recognition for a long time, achievements speak louder than words and in particular its success in poverty alleviation has become "one of the greatest stories in human history" in the words of World Bank President Jim Yong Kim. To recap the main milestones, in the very beginning, Special Economic Zones were created in the 1980s to expedite the process of "opening up China to the world" and create an export-oriented economy. Out of these, Shenzhen was the very first zone and today it symbolizes the actual rise of China from an under developed country to the world's second largest economy. After establishing these zones, the next step allowed foreign capital into the country and the Shanghai Stock Exchange was reopened in 1990. In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization, and then the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bankwas initiated. Virtually unstoppable, China recorded double digit economic growth over a span of three decades until 2012, becoming the world's largest economy on a purchasing power parity basis. Launching the yuan as a reserve currency with the acceptance of the International Monetary Fund in 2016 made a significant global impact. Now the latest achievement is the Belt and Road Initiative connecting the world with a geo-economic vision. Resolving to carry on with further reforms until the "Chinese Dream" is turned into reality, President Xi Jinping recently addressed the Boao Forum in 2018 saying, "With the 40th anniversary of the reform and opening-up policy as a turning point, we shall cut paths through mountains and build bridges across rivers, overcome all difficulties and carry reform through to the end." He announced four new measures to speed up the process, ranging from expanding market access to attracting foreign capital, increasing the volume of imports and reducing tariffs, and thepresident plans to further "open up" China to the world and bring the reform phase to completion. On a global scale, China's "socialist market economy" is an ideal model for developing countries to emulate and offers an alternate solution to a capitalist economy. Proving far more sustainable than a capitalist economy, the Chinese formula of combining the state sector with the private sector has improved the living standards and alleviated poverty at an unprecedented scale. Keeping in mind that China does not have a small economy and cannot be compared with any of the other four "Asian Tigers," it has registered the fastest growth ever seen by amajor economy. Going over the statistics, China's economy grew 35-fold from 1978 to 2017 at the annual average growth rate of 9.5percent while its economy grew 7percent annually from the years 1990 to 2015. Continuing this winning streak, it is now also the world's largest manufacturer, foreign exchange reserve holder as well as exporter. Notably, Deng Xiaoping's reforms created new possibilities for the world and changed its entire direction with the rise of the Asian continent. Right now, Asia is rising as a dominant global economic force poised to provide 52 percent of the global GDP by the year 2050, and at the very centerof it is China, with its Belt and Road Initiative enhancing regional connectivity. Becoming the world's largest consumer market as well as the largest economy is just a matter of time, so opening up further to assure greater global integration is now a strategic choice according to experts. Meanwhile, moving into the next phase of its growth model, China has seen a complete transformation and the focus now is on achieving high-quality development rather than just focus on quantitative development. In modern China, there is more interest in the latest technologies like Artificial Intelligence, cash-less transactions, start-ups, upscale innovation and e-commerce. China is also working on solutions for climate change, protecting the environment, ecology and green energy as its contribution to the world. Also the cultural implications, when the balance of economic power moved East from the West, brought about a flourishing middle class and a huge population with a growing purchasing power. Nowadays, international designer luxury brands focus on the Chinese as buyers more than any other nationality and that is just one small example signifying a changed world. 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. Flash The White House announced on Tuesday that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet with a visiting senior official of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) later this week. Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the DPRK's ruling Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) Central Committee, is traveling to New York and will meet with Pompeo later this week, said White House Spokesperson Sarah Sanders in a statement. The announcement followed a tweet from U.S. President Donald Trump Tuesday morning, saying that Kim Yong Chol is "heading now to New York." Sanders also revealed in the statement that a U.S. delegation, headed by U.S. veteran diplomat Sung Kim, was meeting with DPRK officials at the demilitarized zone (DMZ), with more meetings expected later this week. Sung Kim, now serving as U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, was a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea. The spokeswoman also said that a U.S. pre-advance team, led by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, was currently in Singapore coordinating the logistics of the expected summit. John Bolton, Trump's national security adviser, has had calls with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts "virtually every day," and these calls have been ongoing over the last couple of weeks, Sanders added. The latest positive progress for the summit, originally scheduled on June 12 in Singapore, came after Trump canceled the meeting on Thursday, citing "tremendous anger and open hostility" displayed by Pyongyang recently. Trump reversed course on Friday, saying both sides wanted the meeting to happen and it could still go ahead after productive talks. He also confirmed on Sunday that a U.S. official team had arrived in the DPRK to talk about the preparation for talks. You are here: World Flash Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday called on China and the United Kingdom to strengthen cooperation in scientific and technological innovation. Xi made the remarks when meeting with visiting British Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Xi said he appreciates the royal family's contribution to the China-UK friendship, and recalled his successful state visit to Britain in 2015, which opened up "Golden Era" of bilateral ties. Although the current international situation has changed a lot, the "Golden Era" of bilateral ties continues its steady development, Xi said. British Prime Minister Theresa May paid a successful visit to China earlier this year, Xi said, noting that bilateral cooperation in various areas maintains a sound momentum of development. China is willing to work with Britain to have frequent high-level visits, hold institutional dialogue to ensure bilateral ties will have healthy and steady development along the right track, Xi said. Xi stressed that China will continue on the path of independent innovation with Chinese characteristics and implement the strategy of innovation-driven development. Xi said China will continue its opening up and strengthen international cooperation in innovation. China-UK cooperation in strengthening scientific and technological innovation is conducive to mutual benefit and win-win results, and will further substantialize the "Golden Era" of bilateral relations, Xi said. For his part, Prince Andrew thanked Xi for meeting him and conveyed sincere regards from Queen Elizabeth II. Xi expressed his thanks and asked Prince Andrew to convey his cordial greetings to the queen. The prince said Xi's successful state visit to Britain in 2015 advanced UK-China cooperation in a wide range of areas. Britain pays high attention to China's economic transition from high-speed growth to high-quality development, he said. Prince Andrew said he is willing to continue to strengthen practical cooperation in science and technology, innovation and industry between the two countries, enhance mutual understanding between the two peoples, and promote even greater development of UK-China "Golden Era." At the invitation of Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA), Prince Andrew visited China to attend the finals of the 2nd Pitch@Palace China, which focuses on technological innovation. Flash Palestinian militants fired dozens of mortars, projectiles and rockets into Israel throughout Tuesday before Israel launched a wide-scale airstrike on Gaza, as tensions rise following weeks of lethal Israeli fire at Gaza protestors. The Israeli military said in a statement that most of the mortars, projectiles and rockets were intercepted by its Iron Dome anti-missile system. Later on Tuesday, Israel reported that four people were injured. One of them is a civilian in his forties who was injured in his shoulder and ear by shrapnel. The other three are soldiers wounded by shrapnel outside their military position of Sufa near Gaza. One of them sustained moderate injuries and two were lightly wounded. One of the mortars, launched early in the morning, fell in the backyard of a kindergarten in the Eshkol Regional Council in southern Israel. Speaking to journalists, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a spokesperson for the Israeli military, said that the kindergarten was empty at the time of the attack. "Fortunately, the attack was at seven in the morning so the kids were not there. Had the kids been there, there's no doubt they would have been injured because the yard was full of shrapnel," he said. The incident triggered angry responses by Israeli leaders, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowing to "exact a heavy price" and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked from the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party saying Israel might reoccupy Gaza. Within hours, Israeli fighter jets and aircrafts struck at least 35 sites in Gaza. A military statement said they were sites belonging to the Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian organization that runs Gaza, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a local Islamist group that Israel blamed for Tuesday's mortar barrage. As part of the strike, an "offensive terror tunnel" belonging to Hamas was neutralized in the area of the Kerem Shalom Crossing, near Rafah, the military said. The tunnel started within the Gaza Strip, crossed into Egypt's Sinai Desert and then continued into Israeli territory. A media report from Gaza said the construction hit by Israel was a smuggling tunnel to transfer goods to the besieged Palestinian enclave. According to the Israeli military, the tunnel was "dual-purposed -- designated for terror purposes, as well as to transfer munition to Egypt." This is the second tunnel neutralized in the area of the Kerem Shalom Crossing, and the tenth since last October. Conricus also said Tuesday's launches used Iran-made munition. "There's no doubt the Iranians are involved, the question is how much and in what volume," he said. The military issued a statement warning that "the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) will not allow any harm to the safety of Israeli civilians or Israeli sovereignty, and will continue to operate with determination against all kinds of terror." Civilians in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip were instructed to stay in close vicinity of shelters. The violence followed a serious escalation in the area of the fence separating between Gaza and Israel over the past months. Israeli forces have killed at least 121 Palestinians in Gaza since weekly demonstrations started on March 30. You are here: World Flash The Russian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday asked the Ukrainian authorities to "make every effort" to promptly investigate the murder of Russian journalist Arkadiy Babchenko in Kiev. "The level of physical violence and murders of media employees in Ukraine is steadily growing, and their investigations do not lead to the punishment of criminals," the ministry said in a statement. The ministry expressed condolences to the relatives and friends of Babchenko. Earlier on the day, Ukrainian lawmaker Anton Gerashchenko wrote on Facebook that Babchenko, who was working for the Ukrainian TV channel ATR, was shot in the back on the stairwell of his house and died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. Kiev police chief Andriy Kryschenko told local media that Babchenko's professional activities as a journalist would be examined in the investigation to seek the motive of the murderer. Babchenko, 41, had worked as a war correspondent in Moskovsky Komsomolets and several other Moscow-based media. He moved from Moscow to Prague, capital of Czech Republic, in February 2017, citing unspecified threats. In August 2017, Babchenko moved to Kiev. Flash With voters in Italy now headed for the latest in a quick succession of national elections, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is urging whoever ends up running the country to continue to support the European Union's eurozone. Reuters reported that the German leader is worried about the economic situation in Italy and the political volatility in the eurozone's most indebted country after Greece. Merkel, arguably Europe's most powerful politician, said she will work with any Italian coalition government, as long as it stays within the rules of the eurozone. "We should talk with every government but we have principles within the euro area and of course there will be difficult questions," Reuters cited her as saying. Her comments followed Italy almost ending up with a radical, anti-establishment government. The prospect of such a government forming eased at the weekend when several potential partners abandoned their efforts to form a government after a standoff with President Sergio Mattarella that saw him veto the group's choice of a euroskeptic for economy minister. The deadlock means Italy will hold fresh elections while a former International Monetary Fund official will hold the reins temporarily as interim prime minister. Merkel noted that solutions to economic crises, such as in the case of Greece, can be found. "Look, when there were elections in Greece and Alexis Tsipras was made premier, there were many questions on the table," she told reporters in Berlin. "We spoke with each other over many, many nights. Together, we achieved something. We have to do that task, since Italy is an important member of the EU." Italy is the third-largest economy in the 19-member eurozone, after Germany and France. Volker Treier, foreign trade chief at Germany's DIHK Chambers of Industries and Commerce, welcomed the euroskeptics' failure to grab power in Italy. "That is a relief for German businesses," he said. And Michael Roth, Germany's Europe minister, said Berlin hopes Italy will soon form a stable and pro-European government. Bloomberg, meanwhile, reported that Merkel is partly blaming bankers and the financial crisis for the rise in populism that has undermined countries, including Italy. "We saw it during the international financial crisis: Many of the bankers who walked off with lots and lots of money and never had to work again in their life are partly responsible for millions of people becoming unemployed," Merkel said while participating in a panel discussion at the Global Solutions Summit in Berlin. "People naturally ask themselves whether that's fair." Far-right politician Matteo Salvini, who was one of those trying to form the radical coalition government in Italy, now plans to turn the next round of voting in Italy into a referendum on the euro, according to Britain's Daily Express newspaper. The paper said the political crisis means there will be months of uncertainty in Italy and predicted the situation will likely boost anti-EU sentiment. KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysia's new government has promised to release a long-awaited report into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 as a privately funded underwater search ended on Tuesday. The plane, carrying 239 people, vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, becoming one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries. The government of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said last week that US seabed exploration firm Ocean Infinity, which had scoured the southern Indian Ocean for the aircraft since January, would end its hunt on Tuesday. Armenia treasures the fifth China Beijing International Fair for Trade in Services as a great opportunity to boost communications and cooperation with China, according to Hrant Abajyan, trade representative of the Armenian Embassy in China. The fair, being held in the China National Convention Center in Beijing this week, is a leading international exhibition and conference of trade in services, according to the organizing committee. "My colleagues and I all actively prepared for the big event, since all of us were excited about our debut at CIFTIS," Abajyan said. On Monday, Armenian ambassador to China, Sergey Manassarian, delivered an opening speech at CIFTIS. Abajyan said his country's presentation focuses on Armenia's economic situation, investment climate and tourism. Armenia, a landlocked country, is bordered by Georgia, Iran, Turkey and Azerbaijan, and covers 29,800 square kilometers with a population of around 3 million. "Although it is not a large country with a large population, Armenia's economy has had stable growth," the trade representative said. "In 2017, Armenia had 7.5 percent growth in GDP, which is quite an impressive figure for us. Furthermore, Armenia has recorded unprecedented GDP growth of 10.6 percent in the first quarter of 2018." When it comes to the momentum driving the economic growth, he said that Aremenia was a gateway for the Islamic Republic of Iran to the European Economic Union and vice versa. "The common border and the visa free policy opens up a market of 80 million consumers," Abajyan said. "Meanwhile Armenia is a member of the Eurasian Economic Union, which gives access to a market with 180 million people," he added. Exports from Armenia last year grew by 25.2 percent to an estimated $2.3 billion. China was one of the major export destinations for Armenia, according to the trade representative. "The trade turnover between China and Armenia balanced at $600 million in 2017, with year-on-year growth of 33 percent. "The main products exported from Armenia to China are mining products, precious and semi-precious stones, alcohol and non-alcolholic drinks," Abajyan said. With Armenia's support of the Belt and Road Initiative from the very beginning, many Chinese companies have been involved in Armenia's economy. These include Huawei, ZTE, China International Trust and Investment Corporation Group and FMD, a Chinese pharma concern, the trade representative said. Looking ahead he said: "Chinese enterprises commonly have interests in Armenia's natural resources, mining products, agricultural products and renewable resources. At the same time, China's electric vehicles are yearning for more potential markets. "So we are looking forward to more mutually beneficial cooperation being achieved at this fair." Armenia has also paid a great deal of attention to China's tourism market, offering arrival visas and electronic visas to Chinese citizens, according to Abajyan. "Looking at the almost 80 percent growth in Chinese tourists coming to Armenia in 2017, I am convinced that Armenia will become a very attractive destination for more and more Chinese," the trade representative concluded. zhangdandan@chinadaily.com.cn (China Daily 05/30/2018 page24) Peruvian Foreign Affairs Minister Nestor Popolizio noted this presidency will focus on the proximity of citizens to the bloc. Additionally, the government official emphasized citizens should see concrete benefits from this integration to strengthen the Andean identity. Plus, he underlined the implementation of a virtual Andean Migration Card, the access to the sub-regional roaming service, and the start-up of electricity interconnection projects are tangible benefits from the Andean Community The diplomat explained that trade among member countries gives a positive stimulus to the production of SMEs a key economic sector for job creation in this sub-region. On the other hand he continued integration benefits translated into soft ground transportation measures for people and goods, as well as a gradual reduction of trade barriers. He went on to stress the value of Andean institutions, which has harmonized a set of sectoral policies and has served to foster other integration processes in the region. Popolizio concluded by saying that the Andean Community will celebrate half century of integration next year. The occasion will be propitious to convene a meeting of the Andean Presidential Council and to renew the bloc's political commitment to the sub-regional integration process started in 1969. (END) NDP/RMB/MVB Peru assumed the presidency pro tempore of the Andean Community in a Tuesday ceremony held at the General Secretariat of said sub-regional integration mechanism.Published: 5/30/2018 We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form "I don't want to live in a bubble." Debbie Dingell on why she warned Trump could win - and thinks Parkland could be a turning point. by Eve Silberman From the May, 2018 issue Speaking at Pioneer High at the March for Our Lives demonstration organized in the wake of the school shootings in Parkland, Florida, Debbie Dingell bellows, "I have been told that the NRA considers me one of their worst enemies. And you know what? I'm proud of that!" A diminutive sixty-four-year-old, Dingell has represented Ann Arbor in Congress since 2015, when her husband, John Dingell Jr., retired after holding the seat for nearly sixty years. She's continued his tireless constituent service and passionate support for national health insurance--a plan first introduced by John Dingell Sr., her husband's father and predecessor. But the couple is divided on guns. An enthusiastic hunter, John Dingell had an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association and served on the group's board of directors. But not long after taking office, Debbie Dingell joined other Democrats in an overnight sit-in on the House floor. Spurred by the Orlando nightclub shootings that left forty-nine dead, they were calling for a vote on a bill that would have prevented people on the federal do-not-fly list from buying guns. In a midnight speech, Dingell shared a personal testimony. Growing up, "I lived in a house with a man that should not have had access to a gun," she said. "And I know what it's like to see a gun pointed at you and wonder if you are going to live. And I know what it's like to hide in a closet and pray to God, 'Do not let anything happen to me.'" Her father, David Insley, was a gun collector with a prescription drug habit. Before his death, he told the New York Times that he didn't recall brandishing weapons--but admitted he "hadn't done a very good job of parenting around guns." Despite their fights, her parents "stayed together because in those days you stayed together," Dingell says in an interview at the Huron Valley PACE senior services center on Ellsworth, where she's just taken part in a ...continued below... symbolic groundbreaking. As always, she's dressed beautifully: a gold and black scarf with a stark black sweater and skirt. Asked if she works out, she answers, "I run in airports."She says her emotional speech on the House floor was unplanned. Though she and her sister talk about those terrifying childhood memories, she says, it's very difficult to speak of them publicly. Her mother, now in her eighties, follows the news about her and "it's a time she wants to forget. It's a time we want to forget, too."The Republican-controlled House adjourned the next day without voting on the no-fly bill. Two subsequent bills that Dingell cosponsored--one to keep people convicted of stalking or domestic violence against dating partners from buying guns, another to ban sales of assault weapons--also remain in limbo.Despite such frustrations, Dingell--herself a onetime Republican--is emphatic about the need for "crossing lines" by engaging in bipartisan discussion. But recently, while she was drinking coffee at a Starbucks with a group of Tea Party constituents, "a World War II veteran came to me and started screaming to me," she says, telling her, "You need to resign and get out of the way and let Donald Trump save this country!"As the country's political divisions deepen, has she ever feared for her life? "I didn't until this year," she says.---Dingell is usually up by 6 a.m. and is often the first to arrive at her office. When not in D.C. she's visiting, speaking to and listening to her more than 700,000 constituents--the diverse Twelfth District encompasses Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Dearborn, and Detroit's downriver suburbs. Ann Arbor mayor Christopher Taylor praises her and her staff for being accessible and smart, for instance in the long-running project of trying to get a new rail station built. When Ypsilanti residents complained about terrible postal delivery, Dingell organized a town hall meeting that drew a crowd of 300.Dingell's maternal grandfather was one of the Fisher brothers, who built car bodies for General Motors. Raised in upscale Detroit suburbs and educated at Catholic schools, she's aware of the isolation that privilege can bring, and consciously rejected it."I don't want to live in a bubble," she stresses. "I want people to be able to talk to me ... I don't want someone trying to filter what the truth is to me." That's why she does her own grocery shopping, usually at the same Kroger, every weekend. "If I'm not there, people are like 'I didn't see you last week.'"Long before Donald Trump's upset victory, she grew nervous about the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton among union members in her district. At the time, she recalls, "I tried to hit a union hall every week." But her fellow Democrats ignored her warnings. "For two years I said that Donald Trump could win and that this state could go Republican," she says. "And everybody thought I was certifiable!"She had access--"I could talk to Hillary"--but was largely shut out of the campaign. She says that when she told then-vice president Joe Biden he was needed in Michigan, he told her, "I go where the campaign sends me.""They had a group of people who thought they knew how to win," she says, "and forgot about old-fashioned politics."Dingell is running for reelection this year. It's seen as a safe Democratic seat, but especially after Trump's victory, she's taking nothing for granted.After the State of the Union speech in January, Dingell issued a press release that read, "I will work with the President when I can and fight him when I have to." The release showed a photo of Dingell with her guest at the speech: Cindy Garcia, a UAW member whose husband, Jorge, was a "Dreamer." He'd lived in America since he was ten, but the Trump administration deported him to Mexico. Dingell tried to prevent the deportation, but could only delay it.---Dingell credits her determination to the nuns who ran the Academy of the Sacred Heart in suburban Detroit. They took the students into Detroit to tutor the week after the 1967 riots and to Grosse Pointe to hear Martin Luther King Jr. call for housing desegregation--a controversial topic in that wealthy, white, conservative city. "I can still recall the hatred in the room," Dingell says. "The Reverend Mother pointed to the back of the room and warned 'If I tell you to run, you run.'""The nuns taught me to stand up for what's right," Dingell says. "They taught me the importance of action!"A graduate of Georgetown (bachelor's and master's, both in foreign affairs), Dingell spent most of her career at General Motors. She worked as a legislative aide and lobbyist before joining the GM Foundation, where she rose to be president. She's a former trustee of Wayne State University and has served on many boards and committees, particularly those dealing with health issues.She met her future husband on a flight to D.C. Divorced and raising four children on his own, John Dingell held a position of great power as chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee--and enjoys telling that he had to ask her for a date about fifteen times before she accepted. They married in 1981, when he was fifty-five and she twenty-seven.Guns aren't the only issue on which her personal life informs her politics--the opioid crisis is another. Her youngest sister, Mary Grace, suffered from depression and, like their father, became addicted to prescription drugs. A dozen years ago, she died of an overdose at age forty-three. "We loved our baby sister," says Dingell.When the #MeToo movement caught fire, Dingell revealed that in Washington she'd been groped by a "historical figure" and subjected to aggressive advances by a former U.S. senator (she's never named either man). She tells me she also was "stalked" by a male boss when she first worked at the GM Foundation. "I went to get help from GM. I was told 'the fourteenth floor [where top executives worked] likes him. Put up with it or leave.'"#MeToo is making it OK for people to talk about what's happened to them," she says. "I continue to say it's not real until it's real for the waitress, the factory floor worker, the law partner."Some Democrats question her willingness to work with Republicans--she speaks to Mark Meadows, who heads the conservative House Freedom Caucus, every week. Asked about the criticism, Dingell looks impatient. "I've made it really clear that you've got to respect each other and be civil, but that if somebody tries to do something that is against my values, or is wrong, they will meet a buzz saw like one they've never seen."After the Parkland shootings, Dingell and western Michigan Republican Fred Upton convened a bipartisan working group on gun safety. Does she think the outcome on gun safety could be different this time?"I think our young people are going to be the answer as to whether this is a turning point or not," she says. "They're 25 percent of our population, 100 percent of our future.Dingell now tries to get into a school every week. If students "stay out in front," she says, "if they keep making their voices heard in many different ways, I actually think this can be the tipping point." [Originally published in May, 2018.] At least 10 people have been beheaded in northern Mozambique by suspected Islamist militants, BBC reported. May 30, 2018, 09:28 10 people beheaded in Mozambique STEPANAKERT, MAY 30, ARTSAKHPRESS:Children are reported to be among those targeted in the attack on Monjane village in Cabo Delgado province, a hub for mining and petroleum exploration. An Islamist militant group has carried out sporadic attacks in the region in the last year. The Nagorno Karabakh conflict should be settled exclusively through peaceful means, Armenias Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in an interview to the Russian service of Deutsche Welle. May 30, 2018, 12:24 Armenian PM doesnt see alternative to peaceful settlement of Nagorno Karabakh conflict STEPANAKERT, MAY 30, ARTSAKHPRESS:During the meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, we have discussed the Karabakh conflict in addition to other issues. It was very important to state that the peaceful settlement of the conflict is the only solution to the issue. Here there is no option of solving the issue by force. This is not only Armenias, but also Russias stance. I have also raised the issue of arms sale by Russia to Azerbaijan. In my opinion we had a constructive discussion, PM Pashinyan said. He stated that he has a friendly attitude both towards the Russian President and the leaders of the remaining EAEU member states. Armenia is a peaceful country, the Armenian people are peace-lovers. But at the same time we derive from our countrys interests. We have close relations with Russia, and I hope these relations will further deepen, the Armenian PM said, adding that Armenia also has very good ties with the European Union, the US, Iran, Georgia and all countries that wish and are ready to develop the partnership with Armenia. Talking about the Sochi summit of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), Nikol Pashinyan said there was a positive environment. I think at this stage very good personal relations have been established. I am confident that these relations will become better, the PM noted. The Armenian PM informed that he discussed with Putin the Armenia-Russia ties, as well as issues relating to the multilateral cooperation within the EAEU and the CSTO. Editor's Note: Who do you reward - and how - when an organization is successful? In this first of two Classic posts on that question, Jacque Vilet shares the story of how a Japanese based operation of a U.S. company opted for an end run around corporate management to do what they believed to be the right thing. If you know how different countries view annual bonuses or commission plans, you know that the Japanese don't feel comfortable with plans based on individual performance. Their culture is "collectivist" which means that they view themselves as a "team" and prefer group harmony over individual self-interest. In other words, satisfying the group is more important than satisfying the individual. Although this is a deeply engrained value, the Japanese have grown used to the American penchant for individualism and the fact that American multinationals design compensation programs with this in mind. Therefore, pay-for-performance, bonuses, incentives, performance ratings, salary increases are all geared to the individual employee. This does not mean the Japanese like it, but they accept it. In reality, however, in Japan you will typically find that employee performance ratings, salary increases, bonus/incentive awards, etc. are clustered very closely together so that, for all practical purposes, every employee gets about the same amount of money, rating, etc. There is one company I know where the clash between collectivism and individualism resolved itself in a very clever way. The company was U.S. based and had a sales operation in Japan. The sales commission was geared to achievement of individual quotas and paid quarterly --- a very traditional plan. One year a new Managing Director of the Japanese operation petitioned top management to allow the sales team to have a group commission plan. In other words the entire sales team would be assigned one quota as a group that would match the sum of all the individual quotas. At the end of each quarter, the bonus would be awarded to the team, not to individuals. The team would then decide how to allocate the award. Top management vetoed the proposal. Score one for corporate and zero for Japan. Later I asked the Managing Director how he felt about what had transpired. After a few minutes of silence, he smiled and told me he had turned the decision into a win-win for both parties. He said that each salesperson was given his quota (no saleswomen here!) and at the end of each quarter was awarded his commission. All the salesmen then took their awards, decided as a team how to divide the money up and paid every person in the office ----- customer service reps, inside sales reps, administrative assistants, IT people, field techs, accountants -- even HR! Everyone received something. The rationale was that the salespeople could not succeed without the help of everyone. So this was not just about the sales team ---- the team was the entire office. The Managing Director said, Now we have a win-win for corporate and our sales team. I never did tell corporate, and frankly hoped they would never find out. Some things are better left alone. But I couldnt help but think that the subterfuge could have been avoided if top management had been a little more flexible. Quotas would still have been met --- and that's the most important thing in management's mind don't you think? Jacque Vilet, President of Vilet International, has over 20 years experience in Global Human Resources with major multinationals such as Intel, Texas Instruments and Seagate Technology. She has managed both local/ in-country national and expatriate programs and has been an expatriate twice during her career. Jacque has the following certifications: CCP, GPHR, HCS and SWP as well as a B.S. and M.S in Psychology plus an MBA. She belongs to SHRM, Human Capital Institute and World at Work. Jacque has been a speaker in the U.S., Asia and Europe, and is a regular contributor to various HR and talent management publications. Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. Market Highlights: The threat intelligence management industry is going through numerous changes due to the volatile nature of technological advancements. The amount of data available to us today is a driving the enterprises to implement Threat Intelligence Management Market. Targeted and persistent threats can compromise standard security and bring vulnerabilities in the security models adopted by the organization. The need for improving the network defenses against the risk of data breach and monitoring any malicious activity are the major drivers enforcing the organizations to build more effective defense systems and deploy Threat Intelligence Management. One of the benefits of threat intelligence management solution is its ability to detect threat information and transform this information into relevant intelligence which can be utilized by analysts to upgrade the current security model and take preventive actions. Threat Intelligence Management provides the user a portal to monitor the latest threat actors, the attacks they conduct and identify frequently targeted data. With this feature, analysts can interpret various ways in which these actors and attacks can impact their business. Get Sample Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/6030 However, a major challenge that the threat intelligence management faces today is the speed at which the threat intelligence is received to prevent an attack. Incapability of security systems to share the threat in real-time can pose a challenge to the overall market. Security Systems must share the threat in real-time to match the speed of the attack. Key players: Some of the major players in global threat intelligence management market include IBM Corporation (USA), Dell Technologies Inc. (USA), McAfee LLC (USA), Trend Micro Incorporated (Japan), Symantec Corporation (USA), Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (USA), Juniper Networks Inc. (USA), FireEye Inc. (USA), LogRhythm Inc. (USA), LookingGlass Cyber Solutions Inc.(USA), Optiv Security Inc. (USA). Other players include Webroot Inc. (USA), Farsight Security Inc. (USA), F-Secure Corporation (Europe), AlienVault Inc. (USA), Splunk Inc. (USA) Segmentation: On the basis of solutions, the market is segmented into network management solutions, threat intelligence and risk management solutions, identity and access management solutions, log management and firewall. On the basis of services, the market is segmented into threat intelligence feed services, threat monitoring services and consultation. On the basis of deployment mode, the market is segmented into Cloud deployment and On-premises deployment. On the basis of organization size, the market is segmented into Small and Medium Enterprises and Large Enterprises. On the basis of end-users, the market is segmented into BFSI, healthcare, Telecommunication, manufacturing, retail, education, research organizations and transportation. Get Complete Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/threat-intelligence-management-market-6030 Regional analysis: The global threat intelligence management market is estimated to grow at a rapid rate due to market players focusing on improving their network defense system. The geographical analysis of threat intelligence management is carried out for for regions, namely North America, Europe (including Russia), Asia Pacific (including Australia and New Zealand), and Rest of the World (including the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America). Among these regions the market at present is dominated by North America due to higher adoption of Cyber Security solutions and threat intelligence services. This region is hub to the major key players that develop and innovate threat intelligence technology. The United States contributes a major portion towards this growth with key players like IBM, Symantec and McAfee planning to develop enchanced threat intelligent management Tools. Asia Pacific region is expected to achieve rapid growth over the forecast period. Many Small and Medium Enterprises and Large Enterprises in China, Japan, and India are investing in enhancing their network defenses to prevent theft of data and cyber-attacks. The increase in the volume of data and growing demand for mobile and web applications are driving the growth of threat intelligence market in Asia Pacific region. Intended Audience: Network Operators Government Agencies Telecommunication Companies IT Security Providers End-users Software Solutions Providers Cybersecurity Providers Software Vendors Media companies Manufacturing companies Retail Companies Table of Contents 1 Executive Summary 2 Scope of the Report 2.1 Market Definition 2.2 Scope of the Study 2.2.1 Research Objectives 2.2.2 Assumptions & Limitations 2.3 Markets Structure 3 Market Research Methodology 3.1 Research Process 3.2 Secondary Research 3.3 Primary Research 3.4 Forecast Model Continues... List of Tables Table 1 Threat Intelligence Management Market: By Region, 2018-2023 Table 2 North America Threat Intelligence Management Market: By Country, 2018-2023 Table 3 Europe Threat Intelligence Management Market: By Country, 2018-2023 Table 4 Asia Pacific Threat Intelligence Management Market: By Country, 2018-2023 Table 5 the Middle East & Africa Threat Intelligence Management Market: By Country, 2018-2023 Continues... List of Figures Figure 1 Global Threat Intelligence Management Market Segmentation Figure 2 Forecast Methodology Figure 3 Porters Five Forces Analysis of Global Threat Intelligence Management Market Figure 4 Value Chain of Global Threat Intelligence Management Market Figure 5 Share of Threat Intelligence Management Market In 2018, By Country (In %) Continues... About Market Research Future: At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services. MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by Solutions, 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. Contact: Market Research Future Office No. 524/528, Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road, Hadapsar Pune - 411028 Maharashtra, India +1 646 845 9312 Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Minister of transport, communication and information technologies Ashot Hakobyan on May 29 received Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Kazakhstan to Armenia Timur Urazayev, the ministry said. May 30, 2018, 13:37 Armenian minister, Kazakh Ambassador discuss cooperation programs in IT field STEPANAKERT, MAY 30, ARTSAKHPRESS:During the meeting the Kazakh Ambassador congratulated minister Hakobyan on his appointment. The officials discussed the commercial ties between the two countries, the cooperation programs in transportation, communication and IT spheres and the future actions, including the ongoing joint steps within the EAEU agreement. The Kazakh Ambassador highly valued the joint efforts with Armenia in the digitization process within the EAEU cooperation. He introduced their policy in the development of IT, in particular, the technological startups in Kazakhstan. Cooperation opportunities on this direction were also discussed during the meeting. 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate Doctor Tom Catena will arrive in Yerevan on May 31. May 30, 2018, 14:56 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate Tom Catena to visit Armenia STEPANAKERT, MAY 30, ARTSAKHPRESS-ARMENPRESS:Doctor Tom Catena, 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate, will visit Armenia ahead of the 2018 Aurora Prize Award Ceremony and a series of special events. This year, the special weekend of events will take place on June 8-10, culminating with the announcement of the 2018 Aurora Prize Laureate. A highlight of the weekend of events is the annual Aurora Dialogues, an international forum where leaders from the humanitarian and business communities will convene to discuss ways the global community can take meaningful action to solve some of the worlds most pressing problems. Tom Catena will arrive in Yerevan on May 31 and will start his tour of Armenia and Artsakh. On June 4 he will pay tribute to the victims of the Armenian Genocide at the Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial where he will also plant a tree in the Memory Alley of Tsitsernakaberd complex. On the same day Catena will attend the presentation and First Day of Issue Ceremony of a special postage stamp featuring him as the 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate. Doctor Tom Catena arrived in Sudan as a Catholic missionary from Amsterdam, New York. He has since saved thousands of lives as the sole surgeon permanently based in Sudans war-ravaged Nuba Mountains where humanitarian aid is restricted. It is for this service that he received the Aurora Prize, granted by the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, created on behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and in gratitude to their saviors. On June 5Tom Catena, who is the only surgeon treating people in the Nuba Mountains, will arrive in the town of Sisian, in Armenias southern Zangezur region, where he will stop over in the Garrison hospital to meet fellow doctors. The meeting will be followed by a conversation with the local healthcare workers and other professionals at the Sisian House of Culture.The film Armenian Doctors in Nuba will also be screened there. The film depicts the activities of three Armenian doctors who went to Nuba to substitute for doctor Catena in May 2017, to allow him to visit Armenia and attend the Aurora Prize Weekend. He will have an opportunity to enjoy the gems of Southern Armenia visiting Goris, Halidzor, Tatev Monastery complex and the Tatever ropeway. After the meeting with local community he will head to Artsakh, where he will meet with youth, students, representatives of local NGOs and the medical community as well as state officials. During a similar visit last year, Doctor Catena said, Ive never been exposed to such hospitality in my life. Im very touched by the people here. I feel like Im with my own family when I come here. Everywhere I go, its the same reception. Really, you have something very special here. I want the Armenian people to know you have something very special in this country. Dont lose that. Following this visit, he will return to Sudan and continue his work. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had a one-on-one meeting with Georgias President Giorgi Margvelashvili in Tbilisi as part of the official visit, the governments press service said. May 30, 2018, 16:46 Happy to meet Armenias democratic Prime Minister Georgian president tells Pashinyan in Tbilisi STEPANAKERT, MAY 30, ARTSAKHPRESS:At the meeting, President Margvelashvili praised the results of the meeting which took place between the governments of the two countries and mentioned that the discussed issues and initiatives will boost the further development and strengthening of relations. I am glad to meet the democratic Prime Minister of Armenia. I hope that your visit will give new impetus to the Armenian-Georgian relations, which have a history of many centuries, the Georgian president said. Nikol Pashinyan noted that he is happy to have the chance to meet the Georgian president and to discuss the prospects of development and further deepening of relations of the two countries. I am happy that my visit to Georgia is taking place on the background of the ongoing democratic developments in our country, I am convinced that democracy has vital significance for our countries. The conviction of our peoples in bilateral relations is based on love and solidarity, and we wont spare effort to boost them, he said. The PM noted that 2018 is a rather busy year for Armenia from the point of view of large scale events. PM Pashinyan expressed hope that he will have another chance to meet the Georgian president during the 17th La Francophonie summit in Yerevan in October. Dangerous times Police state powers We live in dangerous times, Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull declared, when announcing plans for new counter-terrorism powers for the Australian Federal Police (AFP) at Australias airports. Police will have the power to approach anyone in an airport in Australia and demand to see their ID, all without cause or suspicion. Turnbull is correct in that we do live in dangerous times, but the main danger in Australia is not posed by terrorism but by creeping fascism, by the ongoing erosion of democratic rights. New police powers Theres certain conditions that need to be met at the moment before police can ask for ... identification. Which is an absurdity and its an issue that the police have raised with us. So were addressing an anomaly and a deficiency in the law at the moment. (Peter Dutton minister for repression and torture, see Editorial for his job description at a joint press conference with the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, May 15, 2018.) So, its an absurdity that police have to follow a law which protects people from being intimidated and stood over by law enforcement officers based on the whim of an ASIO/Australian Federal Police/Border Force operative. Regardless of whether they suspect you have committed or are planning to commit a crime they could randomly pick you out and demand to see your ID. In practice it is much more likely to be based on racial or religious profiling. The fact that no justification is required is a measure to absolve police of any accountability for their actions and indicates how wide a net these persecution laws have. Leading barrister and human rights advocate Julian Burnside, referring to Duttons remarks, said: His attitude reveals a remarkable ignorance of basic legal and social precepts; ignorance which is all the more alarming given that he is arguably the most powerful person in the country. Big Brother The 2018-19 budget includes the purchase of new equipment such as used for body scanning, facial recognition and 3D imaging of luggage. Facial recognition technology, already in use at major airports and linked to smart passports, is particularly disturbing. The aim is to link these images to other images of people such as from CCTV cameras and police and intelligence agency cameras at rallies and other protest actions. They will also be able to link this information with drivers licences. Bit by bit large data banks will be built up of personal information on citizens. These gross infringements of privacy are the stuff of Big Brother, not a democracy. The next step, almost certainly, will be the compulsory state-issued ID cards. After that, its downhill all the way to an Orwellian nightmare, Burnside warned. With this loss of privacy and democratic rights there is also a loss of public accountability. The budget provided an additional $294 million towards the enhancement and expansion of so-called airport security. Over $100 million of this will be used to employ and train 190 new personnel. One hundred and forty of these will be AFP officers focused on first response to terrorism, as well as having been trained in improvised explosive device appraisal and detection. The other 50 AFP employees will focus on intelligence gathering and appraisal of that intelligence. Burnside quoted the Zelman Cowen-hosted Boyer Lectures on ABC Radio from 1969, in which Cowen said: A man without privacy is a man without dignity. The fear that Big Brother is watching and listening threatens the individual no less than the prison bars. He argued for the importance of the right to be left alone, Burnside said. That right is more urgently important now than it was in 1969, and more under threat if Dutton gets his way. (Lawyers Weekly, 17-05-2018) Peter Dutton, Minister for Home Affairs, and the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, is proving to be one of the most politically right-wing and dangerous politicians ever to gain a position of power in Australia. He acts with impunity, abusing his powers, showing little or no respect for tribunals and the judicial system and increasingly grabbing additional, arbitrary powers. He runs roughshod over the rule of law, including international laws that Australia is a signatory to. This behaviour is not limited to Dutton; other Ministers on the extreme right are just as complicit and Turnbull who is beholden to the right to hold onto his job, runs with them. Anti-terrorism laws threaten to criminalise social dissent and pave the way for the introduction of increasingly anti-democratic legislation and must be opposed. This latest development continues a pattern which emerged in the former Howard governments anti-terror legislation when ASIOs powers were extended. In fact it goes further, in breaching fundamental legal principles and also raises questions of constitutionality. This pattern includes: Editorial Killed by malignant neglect Minister Peter Dutton ignored doctors, and a man lost his life. Salim was a Rohingya refugee who spent five years in tortuous limbo, pleading for medical treatment and to be reunited with his family in Australia. Doctors repeatedly recommended he be brought to Australia for urgent specialist medical care but the Australian government refused to act, and the consequences have been deadly. And this isnt isolated. Activist group GetUp noted that over the last 12 months, alarming reports have emerged of Duttons department regularly disregarding medical advice, slowing processes, and denying treatment. Nick Martin, formerly the Senior Medical Official deployed by the Australian governments medical contractor on Nauru, revealed that every clinical decision made was questioned by the department. When the Australian Medical Association called for an independent assessment team to be allowed access to Manus Island, Peter Dutton refused, promising them enhanced levels of health care on Manus. (Peter Duttons ministry now oversees national security, Federal police, Border Force, ASIO, law enforcement functions of the Attorney-Generals Department, security functions of the Department of Infrastructure, Regional Development and Cities, counterintelligence and cybersecurity of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, multicultural affairs functions of the Department of Social Services, and the entire Department of Immigration and Border Protection.) In practice, Duttons department did the reverse and gutted medical services on Manus, in a move Amnesty International called inexplicable. Combined people power took on Dutton and his department when he threatened medical professionals with jail time for protecting their patients in detention. When doctors bravely stood up to challenge the Border Force Act in court, hundreds chipped in to support them, and the government watered down its secrecy rules. When the government moved to deport men, women and children back to harm on Manus and Nauru, the community came together to demand they let them stay. And last year people banded together to shine a light on the abuses occurring within Australias offshore detention regime, when the government washed its hands of the men it had detained on Manus for five years. After the third death on Manus in as many months, the spotlight must be turned on the governments deliberate, deadly disregard of doctors and medical care. Protest vigils for Salimon were held on May 22 and on May 25 in Sydney and Melbourne. Noor Zaman, president of the Queensland Rohingya Community said, Salims death was not suicide, it was murder by Peter Dutton, by Malcolm Turnbull, and by IHMS caseworkers, who would not help him. We have a lot of evidence of his appeals and our appeals for help for Salim, but they would not help him. Salim was brought to Australia for treatment for severe epilepsy in 2014 but was returned to Manus Island without it being controlled. On Manus, he suffered multiple crippling seizures a day. A petition by the Rohingya refugees on Manus was given to Border Force in May 2015 but it was ignored. Peter Dutton and offshore detention are condemned by Salims needless death, said Ian Rintoul, spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition, Salim has been killed by medical neglect and Duttons deliberate anti-refugee policies. Manus and Nauru should be immediately evacuated, so the refugees and asylum seekers can be brought to safety in Australia. Labors upcoming conference should back the call to Bring them Here. Eleven deaths in offshore detention are more than enough to reveal the dreadful mistake of re-starting offshore detention in 2013. It laid the basis for Abbott, then Turnbull, and the horror of the last five years. Amnesty International has said that detention on Manus and Nauru amounts to torture. No more Salims. Its time to end the torture and end offshore detention. For peace and self-determination Statement from CPA congratulating President Nicolas Maduro on his re-election The Communist Party of Australia sends its heartiest congratulations to the people of Venezuela on their decision to re-elect President Nicolas Maduro and to stay on the path taken with the triumph of the Bolivarian Revolution in 1998. President Maduros part in this victory is plain and is also deserving of sincere appreciation of progressive, peace loving people the world over. The people of Venezuela have withstood enormous pressure from a terroristic opposition and grave threats from the US in order to keep to their chosen course of social development. The gains the people have made far outweigh the economic shortcomings engineered for them by the Trump administration and the US-backed opposition, including in the business sector. The reports received from delegates, including that of our own Party President who witnessed the historic event, are that it was an expression of self-determination and for peace. It was also a repudiation of the Lima Declaration and its call for a humanitarian intervention in Venezuela. We repudiate the economic war being waged against the Venezuelan people by the US and its allies. These attacks make it very difficult for the Bolivarian government to purchase food and medical supplies. We salute the efforts by President Maduro and his government to confront the crisis and defend the Bolivarian Revolution despite the huge challenges. We call on the Australian government to recognise the electoral process and the will of the Venezuelan people who re-elected President Maduro for another 6-year term until 2025. The victory is welcome and deserved, but as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Venezuela, Oscar Figuera, pointed out, there is no time to celebrate. It is time to govern and make the overdue changes to deepen the movement towards socialism in Venezuela. In making those decisive changes, Venezuela can continue to rely on the Communist Party of Australia for its full support and solidarity. Bob Briton General Secretary Vinnie Molina President See Vinnies election report The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela shall overcome! Marx at 200* We live and act in the 21st century. Profound transformations have taken place in the world since Marx, including in capitalism itself, whose development has led to new and unforeseen phenomena demanding permanent and deeper analyses. But capitalism did not change its nature, nor did the currentness and operative ability of the analysis and understanding of reality by Marxs original theoretic body. Rather, its capacity was widened, with the contributions of generations of thinkers and revolutionaries and the experiences of struggle in the international communist and workers movement. In our Conference this will become evident, Im sure, showing that the great majority of laws discovered by Marx operate throughout the full history of capitalism. Throughout the history of this destructive system, as Marx stated, and the present confirms, with the refinement of its exploitative, oppressive, aggressive and predatory nature. Refinement one can clearly see in the development of the last major cyclic crisis of the capitalist system, initiated in 2007/8 and extending towards the present. A crisis that translated into a heavy burden of adjustment programs upon the backs of workers and the poor, in worsening the conditions of exploitation of labour, while offering gigantic resources to big capital, particularly the financial system. The resources offered exceed the total revenue from all the privatisations performed to date, while the budget of the rescue programs could end world hunger during the next 50 years. A gigantic operation of expropriation of workers and peoples, where the State of the liberal-bourgeois political system, transformed into a Regulator State by the dominant neo-liberal ideology, played a more open and less dissimulated central role, either legitimating the usurpation, refining the mechanisms of exploitation of labour under the excuse of the crisis, or guaranteeing the reproduction of economic and social domination by capital, thereby confirming the class nature of the State that Marx identified and explained. Given the deepening of its structural crisis, capitalism increasingly assumes its character destructive of lives and resources. Unable to surpass its incurable contradictions inherent to its genetic code, insatiable in its greed for appropriation and limitless accumulation of capital, capitalism combines its oppressive nature with new and more complex modes of exploitation of labour and planetary predation, aggravated with the processes of capitalist globalisation and financialisation of the economy, linked as they are to the response to the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall. Processes that prosper and affirm themselves politically in the shadow of strategic cooperation between the most reactionary and conservative forces and social-democracy, with the State assuming the function of promoting private capital, commodifying all domains and sectors of economic and social life. Capital attempts to contradict the effects of the structural crisis through low wages, redefining labour in the productive system and eliminating economic, social and cultural rights. Capitalist globalisation and its processes of global liberalisation of markets and free circulation of capital, under the dominion of the dictatorship of large transnational corporations, also deepen the process of concentration and centralisation of capital. Today, 1,500 large multinational companies control more than 60 percent of the world economy. Processes that Marx shrewdly anticipated, connected to the incessant search for production and appropriation of surplus-value when only in its embryonic state. Its consequences are the worsening of exploitation, unemployment, precariousness, an increase in social injustice and inequalities, attacks upon social and labour rights, the denial of democratic freedoms and rights, but also war, which increasingly appears as an answer to the crisis by a system of exploitation and oppression. The development of the crisis of capitalism confirms the fundamental theses of Marx, but also Lenin, about the laws that rule capitalism in its imperialist phase. They laid bare the law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit, elaborated by Marx; the tendency towards the financialisation of the economy, which drives capital towards speculation in detriment of productive investment; the law of relative pauperisation; the law of unequal development; the tendency towards stagnation, translated in lower GDP growth in the main capitalist countries. The inability of capitalism to surpass its own contradictions is very clear in its present evolution from its crisis, in particular the contradiction between capital and labour, and the permanent struggle around the rate of surplus- value. But also the fundamental contradiction that characterises capitalism: the increasing contradiction between the social character of production and its private appropriation. * This an abridged version of the Portuguese Communist Partys contribution to the Conference marking the Bicentennial of the birth of Karl Marx. Umsebenzi South Africian Communist Party Film Review by Chauncey K Robinson Sorry to Bother You Sorry to Bother You is a surrealist dark comedy that, whether deliberately or not, could be the epitome of the feelings of a generation. That generation? Millennials who are over capitalism. The film, directed and written by rapper, producer, and screenwriter Boots Riley, bends reality in order to show the very real pitfalls of a system based on greed and the bottom line. Lakeith Stanfield as Cassius Cash Green. (Photo: Doug Emmett) The movie clearly aims to mess with your perception to make you question what you perceive as success in a society that often puts profits before people. Its unapologetic, messy, hilarious at times, disturbing in other moments, and overall ambitious. It will leave a mark with moviegoers, and if nothing else, let young people know theyre not alone in wondering if there will ever be an end to the vicious rat race called life and work. Set in Oakland, California, the film follows a young Black man, Cassius Cash Green (Lakeith Stanfield), who is hired as a telemarketer. Cassius is a 20-something living in his uncles garage, wondering if hell have anything to show for his life when he dies of old age. Cassius decides to adopt a white accent in order to climb the ranks at work and make more money. In the midst trying to excel via this white persona, he finds himself in the middle of a labour organising campaign at his job. There are greedy corporate dealings afoot that seek to enslave working people literally. Cassius is surrounded by a colourful cast of characters that balance out his world. His performance artist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson), best friend Salvador (Jermaine Fowler), and union organiser Squeeze (Steven Yeun) make up his close-knit friend group. Danny Glover plays a veteran telemarketer that first explains to Cassius that his white voice will get him more sales. Omari Hardwick plays the mysterious Mr Blank (we never learn the characters real last name), and Armie Hammer is the maniacal Steve Lift, Cashs boss. Ultimately Cassius, as he gains more money while becoming a star telemarketer, is torn between selling out in order to succeed as an individual and sticking with his friends to fight for better working conditions and livelihoods for all. In the midst of this plot, there are a ton of different themes explored. Riley puts a lot into this film for the audience to take in and think about. Many of the themes and messages land well, while others get lost in the plot. One of the highlights of the film is the work atmosphere Riley creates for the characters. They live in a world that on the surface seems absurd and far-fetched, but a closer look reveals that many of the situations are just extreme forms of what we deal with in the real world. For example, Hammers character, Steve Lift, is a version of the capitalist boss. Hes outright greedy and absurd, and somehow always manages to come out on top from his corrupt dealings (and often richer). Hes rewarded for his extreme greed. Hes touted in the movies mainstream media as a leader, visionary, and ground breaker. Hes got a best-selling book on how to win. He wants to enslave working people, again, as I said, literally. To be honest, Steve Lift is not a fictional character that only exists in this film. There are Steve Lifts in our own reality, and his presence, although funny at times, is also a disturbing reminder that we arent too far off from the world of Sorry to Bother You. This message lands all too well in the movie. A less disturbing, and more uplifting theme in the film, however, is labour solidarity. The telemarketers are fed up with unstable working conditions and low pay. The union organising campaign, and constant picket line, in the film serves as a backdrop for a road forward in what can feel like a hopeless situation of scraping by to survive. Riley gives focus and attention to the importance of organised labour and working people actively changing the system. He has his characters, like Squeeze, discuss it with others in a real and sobering way. In one scene, Squeeze explains that people are often outraged by injustice, but when they dont know how to battle it, they resign themselves to normalising it. He goes on to explain to Cassius that working people have to know that their labour is what creates the wealth, and their voice can change the tide. He concludes that if working people know they have the power, they can use that power to create change. Its in these kinds of moments that the movie doesnt just serve as a satirical mirror to society, pleased with itself in pointing out the systems problems, but actively uses messaging to explore solutions. Race and racism is more interwoven in the narrative as opposed to being an outright main catalyst for the drama and plot. The plot device of Cassius using his white voice is explained as not necessarily his white voice being a white person, because white people can be exploited as well, but rather the idea of whiteness. That idea being more about affluence, wealth, carefree living, and confidence. Cassius isnt pretending to be a literal white person, but rather the dream of whiteness and privilege pushed as a goal in capitalist society. This serves as a way of showing that racism isnt separate and apart from the system of exploitation but an (important) tool of it. Some other themes, although still intriguing, arent completely fleshed out. One is Detroits role as a performance artist and what that means for her activism. She clearly aims to affect people with the social justice message in her work, but she also has to sell it to wealthy white people in order to make a living. This contradiction is touched upon briefly in the movie, and the opening of her gala makes for a very weird scene, but we never dive fully into what it all means for her character. Shes an activist who understands the greed of society, but she also has to eat. Therein lies her conflict, but were never really given a solution. Maybe thats the message in and of itself, that there is no easy solution. Although, at times, it seems Detroit serves more as a moral compass for Cassius, or a symbol of resistance for others, than a fully realised human with a plot of her own. Yet, Tessa Thompson embodies the role with finesse, giving Detroit subtle layers, whereas her character could have been diminished to a one-dimensional figure. At a recent advanced screening of the film, held at the University of Southern California, Boots Riley spoke to the audience after and explained some of his thoughts behind the themes. Speaking of the Detroit character, Riley explained, [There can be] an uneasiness with being an artist. Is an artist saying the truth enough? he asked the audience. What is the effectiveness of art if you dont attach it to a material movement? How do we best engage with the world? Is art alone enough? he said, speaking to the dilemma he envisioned the Detroit character having. Regarding the labour organising and picket lines shown in the film, he said, We have to be able to show people what their leverage point is in this system. Withholding labour is the most effective [strategy]. When asked about the style of surrealism in the film, Riley explained, I decided to bend reality to make you [the viewer] think more about your own reality. Overall, Sorry to Bother You is a great ambitious feature. It doesnt hit all its targets fully, but in aiming for the stars, it lands on some resonating and important clouds, so to speak. Polls and studies over the last two years have demonstrated that the millennial generation (those now aged 18-35) dont accept the basic principles and rules of the dog-eat-dog and money-driven way of life. A survey conducted by Harvard University polled young adults between ages 18 and 29 and found that 51 percent of respondents do not support capitalism. This shouldnt come as a surprise given that the millennial generation is sited to be the first generation that is worse off than their predecessors. This is a frustrating predicament to find yourself in, and Sorry to Bother You speaks to a generation with those thoughts. It also speaks to the possible solutions, thus doing what Riley spoke on, in making it so art is more than just performance, but connected to real struggles. Peoples World Continue Reading Below Advertisement There's also an image "proving" that Soros was a member of the SS, but even if he wanted to join (which is a stretch in itself), he wouldn't have been old enough, didn't have the correct "Aryan" heritage, wouldn't have passed the medical examination (think about it), and, oh right, isn't the guy in the photo. That's Oskar Groening, a Nazi who was found guilty of helping to murder at least 300,000 Jews at Auschwitz. The most "damning" "piece" of "evidence" against Soros is an interview with 60 Minutes in which he talks about how during the war, he went to live with an actual collaborator who had a side gig inventorying property already seized by the Nazis. Soros' father (himself a rich man) paid a Hungarian bureaucrat named Baumbach to pretend that George was his Christian-as-they-come godson ... a plan that went swimmingly until Baumbach was asked to inventory an estate abandoned by a wealthy Jewish family, under the watchful eyes of the Nazis. Continue Reading Below Advertisement As one biography describes, it wasn't exactly a vacation for Soros: Rather than leave his "godson" behind in Budapest for three days, he took the boy with him. As Baumbach itemized the material, George walked around the grounds and spent time with staff. He collaborated with no one and he paid attention to what he understood to be his primary responsibility: making sure that no one doubted that he was Sandor Kiss . Among his practical concerns was to make sure that no one saw him pee. A child who was frightened of going to the bathroom because he knew that he'd be killed if anyone found him out? Yeah, this guy sounds like a real fucking menace, better watch his ass. Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook! He also has a newsletter about depressing history, but that's only for the coolest kids. Support Cracked's journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you. For more, check out Good News, You Can Now Pray To Amazon (Literally) and A City In Florida Keeps Getting Zombie Alerts. Hey. You. Follow us on Facebook. They said that being outside the country they were able to read information and connecting with family back home as many of the people do not have other social media platforms other than Facebook. Speaking in a forum, the students expressed disappointment, saying there are more pressing issues that the government needs to address yet it is concerned about legislating freedom of speech for the people. BEIJING Papua New Guinean students studying in Beijing, China, have described the move by PNG communications minister Sam Basil to suspend Facebook for one month as irrelevant and damaging for educational communications. Since this article was written and the Facebook ban story widely reported around the world, PNG communications minister Sam Basil has walked back from his statement about suspending the social media platform. Basil now says his words were 'taken out of context' and 'not official, just a discussion'..... Is Sam Basil's one month takedown of Facebook for dubious "research" just a precursor to a total ban? They also said through Facebook leaders were made accountable to their actions and were condemned publicly for their wrongdoing. Some people abuse it but the majority use this to express themselves. Why is government so worried about it? They have better things to do than wasting time to FB issue, Beijing PNG students vice-president Samuel Ray said. The real issues are out there. We have police brutality on the rise, car theft, rural urban drift, poverty, deteriorating infrastructure both school, road and health services, drug shortage, TFF [tition fee free] policy not working well etcetera. It was also raised that it is obvious that people have already lost their trust in the government. As a result there would be no positive result coming from this temporary suspension. Most politicians, top government officials and top shots are always on their toes for being exposed of under the table deals, the students said. Our national media - with due respect to the hard working media team - can sometimes be compromised by the government. This leaves social media with no restrictions on people on what they post. A national social network isnt a solution. The data of citizens shouldnt rest in the hands of privileged individuals to manipulate. An international relations student suggested that PNGs Communications and Information Technology Department should focus more on things like how to improve network services around the country and work on helping PNG catch up to the digital era rather than trying to keep PNG away from it. She said shutting down Facebook will not solve anything and trying to analyse its positive or negative impacts was a waste of time and resources. The government, instead of choosing to totally shut down Facebook, should innovate ideas on establishing appropriate alternatives especially on the imposition of penalties on those abusive users of this social media platform, another student said. Shanghai (Gasgoo)- China and Japan will cooperate in autonomous driving field, Miao Wei, Minister of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Hiroshige Seko, Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry reached a consensus in Tokyo on May 28, according to NHK, Japan's largest broadcasting organization. Reportedly, this was the first time that two governments reached a consensus on the cooperation in autonomous driving area. Japan wishes to promote its advanced technologies in China, the world's largest auto market. According to NHK, both parties agreed to collaborate on setting rules for autonomous vehicle public road test and formulating international standards on communication infrastructure. Under the agreement, China and Japan will hold working-level negotiations in July in Beijing. In addition, two countries will conduct a seminar on technical development by the end of this year, involving both the governments and the public from two countries. The communication and information exchanges between China and Japan are becoming increasingly important as China boosts its efforts on market opening-up and structural reform. Japan's Seko said. Miao stated that two countries are important economic and trading partners. He expressed the hope to expand bilateral cooperation in various areas. Wastewater from the oil and gas industry that's being spread on roadways to control dust and ice in at least 13 states, including Pennsylvania, poses a threat to the environment and to human health, according to a study released this week. The wastewater, commonly referred to as "brine," contains high levels of salt along with lead, radium, organic contaminants and other heavy metals in concentrations above safe levels for drinking water. Researchers have found that nearly all of the metals from brine leach out from roadways when it rains, and they speculate that the pollutants could wind up in nearby bodies of water and find their way into local drinking water sources. "Even though the highest volumes of brine are being spread on roads in northwestern Pennsylvania, most of this activity is occurring within the Allegheny River watershed," William D. Burgos, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Pennsylvania State University who co-authored the study, told EHN. "And the Allegheny River is the drinking water source for city of Pittsburgh." In their report, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, the researchers noted that in Pennsylvania from 2008 to 2014, spreading oil and gas wastewater on roads released more than four times more radium to the environment (320 millicuries) than was released from oil and gas wastewater treatment facilities, and 200 times more radium than spills. Some lead and radium was also found to settle into roadways. Radium is radioactive and has been linked to bone marrow and lung cancer, while the health impacts of lead exposure range from lowered IQ levels and behavioral issues in children to kidney, brain and central nervous system damage in adults. The researchers also found that the levels of salt in the brine pose a threat to aquatic life, and that some of the organic contaminants showed potential toxicity outcomes in human cells that have been linked to liver cancer in animal experiments. The brine, which is a byproduct of both fracking and conventional oil and gas drilling, is sometimes used to treat icy roads during the winter, but is more commonly used to control dust on unpaved roadways in the summer. An estimated 34 percent of roads in the U.S. are unpaved, and dust from these roadways contributes to almost half of the nation's annual airborne particulate matter emissions, which causes cardiovascular and respiratory issues. "We do know that dust isn't good," Nathaniel R Warner, another of the study's co-authors out of Penn State's Civil and Environmental Engineering department, told EHN. "It also causes health issues, so we do need to suppress dust. But we need to make sure we're solving one problem while minimizing the creation of another." Previous research suggests that the use of brine may not actually be effective at controlling dust. Burgos and Warner were only able to track down one published study investigating the effectiveness of the practice, which found no statistical difference in the amount of dust being blown off roads that had been treated with brine and roads that hadn't been treated at all. The authors of that study, which was conducted in North Dakota, speculated that brine doesn't contain high enough concentrations of calcium and magnesium, which help bind dust together into clay and retain moisture. "Our recommendations for moving forward include setting a limit on radioactivity, reducing the amount of organics, and frankly, testing whether brine even works," Warner said. "If it doesn't work any better than water at suppressing dust, maybe we just don't need to be doing this." The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) does require townships that want to use oil and gas brine on their roadways obtain a "certificate of analysis" that requires testing of the fluid for some chemicals, but the researchers said those tests are very limited and ignore some of the most concerning elements of the brining liquid. "The number of analytes is really limited," Burgos said, "and radium isn't on the list at all." He noted that none of the states that allow oil and gas brine to be spread on roadways currently require any radium analysis. There are more than 200 commercially available dust suppressants, which likely undergo more rigorous efficacy, health and environmental testing than oil and gas brine. But they can cost up to a dollar a gallon, whereas the oil and gas industry generally provides townships with brining services for free since it's the cheapest method of disposal available. On May 17, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) conceded that it shouldn't have allowed hundreds of thousands of gallons of brine to be spread on dirt roads in Farmington Township in Warren County last year. The announcement came during an Environmental Hearing Board case that had been filed by a resident who claimed spreading the brine on roadways where Amish families walk and ride in open buggies was unsafe. Moving forward, the DEP has indicated that brine will be reclassified as "residual waste" and that a stricter permitting process will be required before it can be spread on roadways. The researchers at Penn State University said they'd been in talks with the DEP about their findings, but did not think their study was directly related to that decision. "Ultimately, these are really funding-driven decisions," Burgos said. "If we want to fix this, we probably have to provide these townships with more funding for road maintenance." The confidante of a woman who stole $275,000 for lavish dinners, hotel suites and celebrity trainers has revealed how she tricked people into believing she was an heiress. Speaking to The Cut, Neffatari Davis, a 25-year-old concierge at 11 Howard hotel in New York's Soho neighborhood, revealed that she first met Anna Delvey, real name Anna Sorokin, when she arrived at the concierge desk looking for 'the best food in Soho.' Others including her personal trainer shared that they believed Delvey, now 27, was actually the daughter of a Russian diplomat or the heiress to an antiques business in Germany. Con artist: Neffatari Davis (left), the confidante of con artist Anna Delvey (right) has revealed how she was able to trick people into believing she was a German heiress Friends: Davis, a 25-year-old concierge at 11 Howard hotel in New York's Soho neighborhood, first met Anna Delvey, real name Anna Sorokin, when the con-artist was staying there Roots: Delvey was born in Russia in 1991 but moved to Germany with her family in 2007 before attending Central Saint Martins fashion college in London However, Anna Sorokin was born in Russia in 1991 and moved to Germany in 2007 when she was 16 with her younger brother and parents. Her father had worked as a truck driver and later as an executive at a transport company until it became insolvent in 2013, whereupon he opened a heating-and-cooling business specializing in energy-efficient devices. After moving to London to attend Central Saint Martins fashion school, Anna returned to Berlin and interned in the fashion department of a public relations firm before relocating to Paris where she secured a coveted internshio at Purple magazine. It was at this time that she changed her name from Sorokin to Delvey. Staying in the hotel's $400 a night Howard Deluxe room, Delfey would frequently pay Davis a visit and they pair would talk about restaurants even though she quickly realized that the guest did not need recommendations. And while Delvey could be rude and demanding, she was a big tipper and frequently passed Davis $100 bill tips for restaurant recommendations. People would fight to take her packages upstairs,' she added. 'Fight, because you knew you were getting $100.' A long-term guest, Delvey became so at home at the hotel, she started walking around the hotel in a robe. 'She ran that place,' said Davis. 'You know how Rihanna walks out with wineglasses? That was Anna.' And her generosity seemed to extend outside of the hotel also, as Davis shared that she used to tip Uber drivers $100 and also spent her time shopping, getting beauty treatments and working out with a celebrity trainer who cost $4,5000 for a package of sessions. She also hosted large dinner parties attended by CEOs, artists, athletes and celebrities and invited Davis along. Delvey also shared her grandiose plan of opening a six-story arts club in Gramercy Park called the Anna Delvey Foundation, which was to be filled with pop-up shops, art installations, three restaurants, a juice bar and a German bakery. New identiry: After landing an impressive internship at Purple magazine in Paris, she changed her name to Anna Delvey and modeled herself as a European heiress Double life: Delvey stayed at the 11 Howard hotel in New York's Soho (pictured) for weeks at a time and managed to infiltrate the New York social scene seamlessly Plans: Anna (pictured far right with Giudo Cacciatori, Gro Curtis and Giorgia Tordini, at The Jane Hotel in New York) also told people she was launching an 'arts club' in Gramercy Park Big tipper: Although Anna frequently asked friends to cover expenses and even arranged a trip to Austria (pictured) with art collector Michael Xufu Huang but asked him to pay for it all While Anna's lineage was a mystery to her acquaintances, her ability to infiltrate the New York social scene seemed to happen seamlessly and she made sure she was at the important parties and hip bars and clubs in every city she visited. She also hired a PR firm to organize her birthday party at one of her favorite restaurants, Sadelle's in Soho, however she never paid the bill. Chinese art collector Michael Xufu Huang who had previously agreed to go to the Venice Biennale with Delvey and pay for flights and accommodation on his credit cards said he didnt suspect anything was amiss until a restaurant called him to ask if he had Delvey's contact details because shed skipped out on a bill for a big birthday bash. And Davis also recounted an instance when she and Delvey went for dinner at Sant Ambroeus in Soho, and Davis was forced to pay a bill of $286 after Delvey's 12 credit cards were declined. 'The waiter went back to his station and began entering the numbers. There were like 12, and I know the guy tried them all,' she said. 'He was trying it and then shaking his head. And then I started to sweat, because I knew the bill was mine.' However the next day Anna paid her back triple the amount in cash. Not long after this happened, Davis was contacted by her manager at 11 Howard who informed her that they didn't have a credit card on file for Delvey's long hotel stay, amounting to $30,000. When the hotel pressed her for payment, she told them a wire transfer was on the way and then proceeded to order a case of 1975 Dom Perignon for the hotel staff. And while Citibank did in fact send the wire transfer for the full amount, a lack of working credit card as security meant the hotel were forced to lock Delvey out of her room while she was on a trip to Omaha to try and meet billionaire Warren Buffet to ask him for funding for the arts club she had told everyone she wanted to set up. Birthday girl: Delvey posted this shot to Instagram after hiring a PR company to organize a glamorous birthday dinner at Sadelle's in New York - she never paid the bill Fully booked: Delvey was eventually kicked out of 11 Howard so moved to The Beekman Hotel where she racked up a bill for over $11,000 before getting locked out of her room Times up: In October 2017, Anna was arraigned on charges including grand larceny and theft of services relating to her unpaid hotel bills and wire fraud Consequences: And in January 2018, she rejected a plea deal and now faces multiple grand larceny charges and 15 years behind bars if convicted Shortly after, Delvey invited Davis on an all expense paid trip to Morocco however she was unable to get time of work so had to pass on the trip, even though Delvey had told her to 'just quit'. And when she was eventually kicked out of 11 Howard, Delvey checking into The Beekman Hotel where she racked up a bill for $11,518.59 before being locked out of her hotel room. A subsequent two-day $500 stay at the W Hotel ended with her wandering the streets with nowhere to stay. In October 2017, she was arraigned on charges including grand larceny and theft of services. She allegedly defrauded banks, skipped out on thousands of dollars of hotel bills and tricked a friend into paying for their $62,000 lavish trip to Morocco Manhattan prosecutors said that her cons included claiming to be a wealthy German heiress during a quest to get a $22million loan to fund her private arts club and managing to keep $55,000 which she then spent on personal trainers and hotel stays from overdrafting an account at City National Bank. Prosecutors said that Sorokin also deposited $160,000 in phony check at Citibank, siphoning off $70,000 into another account before the deposits could be reversed. In addition to bank fraud, Sorokin also left many hotel bills unpaid. And in January 2018, she rejected a plea deal and now faces multiple grand larceny charges. She faces up to 15 years behind bars if convicted. A horrified mother has revealed the terrifying moment she discovered her 18-month-old daughter swallowed a dummy in her sleep. Stacey Willett, from Queensland's Mackay, said the family only realised little Aurora had ingested the plastic product after they found it in her nappy the next morning. Speaking to 9News about the ordeal, the mother said an x-ray found just a minor scratch and tear on her toddler's intestine. Scroll down for video Mother Stacey Willett, from Queensland's Mackay, said the family only realised 18-month-old Aurora had ingested the dummy after they found it in her nappy the next morning 'The doctor said it's eye-opening to think that something was made with a big plastic piece to not go down the baby's throat, can go down the baby's throat,' she said. Ms Willett explained she noticed her daughter's behaviour changed on the night she swallowed the plastic dummy. 'She was really upset, really up and down all night, she couldn't go to the toilet. The next morning, we found the dummy in her nappy,' she said. The family rushed the girl to hospital where scans found she only had a minor scratch and tear on her intestine. The toddler girl had started behaving differently after she swallowed the dummy in her sleep 'It's a miracle that it's gone down. What if it had got stuck? Or she choked on it?' the mother said. Since the scare, the Ms Willet has vowed to never let her daughter be alone with a dummy again. 'I will never leave my child to sleep or even have a dummy in the cot anymore,' Ms Willett said. He's only 16-months-old, but Archie Innes, who was born without eyes, has undergone surgery and is set to get his first prosthetic eye. Archie has a rare genetic mutation known as SOX2 anophthalmia syndrome and is completely 'black blind', meaning his world is entirely dark. He also battles severe gross motor delay,mild-to-moderate hearing impairment, and moderate aspiration (can cause fluid to enter into his lungs), which necessitates the delivery of food and fluid through a tube. Archie Innes (pictured) underwent surgery and is set to get his first prosthetic eye Archie's mother, Fiona Innes, revealed that he was operated on by Dr Krishna Tumuluri at Westmead Children's Hospital earlier this month in Sydney. 'A hydrogel twice the size was inserted into Archie's right eye,' said Mrs Innes. 'Over a 48 hour period this hydrogel would expand to three times the size. The decision was made to put a larger hydrogel in the hope to avoid any further surgeries for the next year. Archie was operated on at Westmead Children's Hospital and an ocularist took an impression of his right eye so a prosthetic can be fitted She said that during the surgery the ocularist took an impression of Archie's right eye to make his first prosthetic eye. 'This will be made and fitted in the next month,' said Mrs Innes. 'Archie's recovery has been slow he has had pain, nausea and vomiting which is common side effect of the procedure. 'We now have a prosthetic nurse who will help us manage and care for Archie's prosthetic,' she added. 'Every month his prosthetic will need to be removed cleaned and reinserted.' Mrs Innes, who has dubbed her son 'the miracle man', set up a GoFundMe page six months ago to cover the costs of Archie's medical expenses, which include intensive therapy, physiotherapy, speech therapy and specialist equipment. Archie's mother, Fiona Innes said there will be many more surgeries in the future to get both eyes as symmetrical as possible They have already raised $101,637 but hope to reach $500,000, which she said would be ''life-changing''. 'There will be many more surgeries in the future to get both eyes as symmetrical as possible,' said Mrs Innes. 'He will require some plastic surgery to lift his eye lashes out. So far the results have been amazing and have made a huge difference in his appearance.' Speaking previously to FEMAIL, Mrs Innes and her husband Stevie, who also have a three-year-old daughter, Alba, discovered there was a problem with Archie's health during the second trimester. 'At 28 weeks into my pregnancy with Archie, the doctors performed a full scan and identified a brain abnormality,' said Mrs Innes. 'We were referred to Royal North Shore Hospital (RNSH) for a foetal MRI scan to determine exactly what it was. Archie (pictured with big sister, Alba) also battles severe gross motor delay, mild-to-moderate hearing impairment, and moderate aspiration (can cause fluid to enter into his lungs), which necessitates the delivery of food and fluid through a tube 'At 32 weeks, we had the MRI scan. Shortly after returning home we received a call from our doctor, asking us to head back to hospital.' Mrs and Mr Innes met with their obstetrician, who advised them that their son would be born without eyes. 'On that day, our lives changed forever, because we were given the news that our beautiful baby was going to be born without eyes,' Mrs Innes recalled. Post-birth, Archie was diagnosed with SOX2 Syndrome, with a genetic mutation so rare, that only one other case has ever been recorded in the world. His prognosis has continued to challenge his family, with the ongoing presentation of complications associated with SOX2 Syndrome. Parents Fiona and Stevie (pictured with their children, Alba and Archie) call their son 'miracle man' Born with SOX2 anophthalmia syndrome, Archie Innes (pictured), has no eyes and is completely 'black blind', meaning his world is entirely dark In his short life, Archie has since been diagnosed with neurosensory hearing loss, multiple respiratory infections, mild-to-moderate aspiration, multiple brain abnormalities which are yet to be completely understood, and severe motor delay. To date, Archie has spent close to half of his life in hospital, and when not in hospital, he makes almost daily visits to a plethora of doctors and paediatric physicians. 'We have learned to appreciate life to the fullest and to enjoy each and every day we have together as a family,' Mrs Innes told FEMAIL. 'Archie has brought so much joy to so many who surround him. We simply couldn't imagine life without him it in it, he's incredible.' If you would like to contribute, please head to their GoFundMe page. One of the most important foundations for any relationship is trust. But for Elizabeth and her husband, trust and security were getting harder to come by - particularly when she found out he had hired a private investigator to follow her around the city on a work day. Tom gave off early warning signs of being possessive, but Elizabeth misread these as protective: when he'd phone a lot, show up at her office at lunchtime and ask about male colleagues she was working with. But for Elizabeth and her husband trust and security was getting harder to come by - particularly when she found out he had hired a private investigator to follow her around the city on a work day (file picture) 'So I thought that was sweet at the time but his checking up on me started to get more and more intense,' she told 9Honey. Getting a coffee with workmates who happened to be men became an ongoing problem, even if Elizabeth talked about them in a general sense over the dinner table. Slowly but surely she stopped mentioning their names to avoid him throwing an adult-sized tantrum. Getting a coffee with workmates who happened to be men became an ongoing problem, even if Elizabeth talked about them in a general sense over the dinner table (file picture) Tom made it clear he was an insecure man and asked her to stop hanging out with particular men - but occasionally she needed to for the sake of work. When she'd lie and tell him she was staying in the office all day - when in fact she'd be moving around the city - he was incredibly angry when he found out she'd lied. But she couldn't figure out how he was tracking her movements. When she'd lie and tell him she was staying in the office all day - when in fact she'd be moving around the city - he was incredibly angry when he found out she'd lied 'This is how I knew my marriage was over - that night I got home and Tom had laid out a series of photos on the table - of me. He confessed he'd hired a private investigator because he knew I was lying about my whereabouts,' she explained. 'There were photos of me having a coffee with my male workmate - totally innocent! Photos of me about five kilometres from the CBD when I had lied and said I'd be in the CBD all day. There was even a photo of me shopping for makeup in a department store in my lunchbreak and talking to a male assistant. It was ludicrous.' The pair separated and Elizabeth only hopes her next partner isn't as paranoid and jealous. An Australian sex worker has revealed details of some of the strangest requests she has had from clients over the course of her time working as an escort. The Sydney-based woman, who entered the industry in her late teens and has been working has been working for the past five years, recently took to Reddit to share some very candid stories. The woman, who claims to have slept with over 1,200 men, said while the 'girlfriend experience' was her specialty, naturally there had been times when she'd fielded some odd and unusual requests. An Australian sex worker has revealed details of some of the strangest requests she has had from clients over the course of her time working in the industry (stock image) She recalled one experience where a client paid her to walk up and down a spiral staircase she had in her Perth apartment. 'One client used to like sitting underneath it,' she explained, adding that he would pleasure himself while she walked up and down the staircase. 'He had an upskirt fetish,' she said. The woman said while the girlfriend experience was her specialty - naturally there had been times when she'd fielded odd requests (stock image) Another odd incident, the woman shared, was of a man who took a phone call from his wife and put her on loudspeaker - while she was in the car. She said as she sat in the passenger seat listening it became increasingly clear the man was attempting to 'gaslight' his wife by making her think her feelings of betrayal were entirely in her mind. 'After she hung up I said "She's not stupid and you're not very good at lying. Your defensiveness is a dead giveaway".' The woman claims to have slept with 1200 men since she started working in the sex industry five years ago (stock image) She said while the man went on a long tirade about how 'dead' his marriage was, she said the worst of it was his attitude towards his and his wife's sex life. 'I was disgusted that he would equate sex with his wife with "taking one for the team",' she said. 'I was further disgusted by the way he gaslit his wife when she was firmly in the right. 'I stopped seeing him after that.' Another odd incident, the woman recalled, was of a man who took a phone call from his wife and put her on loudspeaker - while she was in the car listening The woman also revealed details of her 'worst' experience with a client - a man she described as unattractive because of his greasy hair, poor complexion and skinny frame. 'To add, he was a mouth breather. Like kept exhaling in my mouth while we were kissing. 'I asked him repeatedly to breathe through his nose but eventually, he just shrugged and said "I guess I can only breathe out of my mouth".' She said as far as she was concerned the man needed to make a bit more of an effort because 'being a mouth breather is not a good thing'. The woman also shared one of her worst experiences with a client - a man she described as unattractive because of his greasy hair and poor complexion (stock image) Previously, the woman revealed other more intimate details about her line of work, including her rates. She said that she charged $550 for the first hour, $500 for the next and then $300 for each additional hour. Twelve hours with her would cost $2,500 and she will charge $5,000 for 48 hours. A new bride revealed how she went from single to married in a matter of months after her husband flew 4,000 miles for their first date, even taking her engagement ring shopping. After the professionals matched on a dating site, Adam Deathe, 42, told Heather Carter Deathe, 39, he would love to take her for dinner, despite him living in Durham, UK, and her residing across the pond in Atlanta, Georgia. Flying halfway across the world for their first date in Atlanta in January 2017, Adam remembered a ring that investment executive Heather had liked and later bought it, before proposing and marrying her on the Greek island of Kefalonia in August 2017 - just nine months after they first spoke. Now having navigated a transatlantic move to be together, Heather, mother to 19-year-old Sophie, has finally moved to the UK after months of waiting in Atlanta for her visa to be approved, joining Adam, father to Louis, 16 and Toby, 12. Adam Deathe, a 42-year-old professional from Durham, met Heather Carter Deathe, 39, from Atlanta online, and flew 4,000 miles for their first date in the USA, taking her ring shopping Speaking about her exciting new chapter, she said: 'I can't wait to start my life in England. We've never had the chance to live as a couple for more than a week or so at a time, but I know Adam is the best person to share my life with. 'We're perfectly suited. My weaknesses are his strengths.' Heather joined dating site eharmony in November 2016, after being single for about nine months. Then, a mere 24 hours after signing up, she received a match Adam, who has two sons from a previous relationship and works for Durham BID, helping to support local businesses. Adam remembered a ring which investment executive Heather had liked and later bought it, before proposing and marrying her on the Greek island of Kefalonia in August 2017 - just nine months after they first spoke. 'The site said we had a 100 per cent compatibility rate,' said Heather, a mum to student Sophie from a previous relationship. 'I noticed he was from the UK, but although I knew how far away that was, I figured I may as well see what he was all about.' After exchanging messages, the couple moved to texting before, around a week later, sharing their first phone call, after which, chatting for hours, Heather ran up a $250 bill (175). Now having navigated a transatlantic move to be together, Heather, who has finally moved to the UK after months of waiting in Atlanta for her visa to be approved (seen on their wedding day with Adam's sons Toby, 16, and Louis, 12, and Heather's daughter Sophie, 19) Heather joined dating site eharmony in November 2016, after being single for about nine months and matched with Adam 24 hours later 'From then on, we used WhatsApp as it's free,' she laughed. 'The day after the call, I went in to work to see Adam had sent me 36 roses. 'We spoke every day from then on.' In January 2017, two months after their first phone call, Heather and Adam finally met in person, with him flying more than 4,000 miles to see her. Over the course of a weekend, they explored Atlanta together, even checking out engagement rings. Adam, has two sons from a previous relationship and works for Durham BID, helping to support local businesses, while Heather has a daughter- but their distance didn't stop them meeting Heather added: 'Meeting for the first time was a lot of pressure. I didn't want it to fall flat on its face when there was such a spark there. 'Adam was sold right away and, although I was more cautious, by the end of the weekend, I was too.' Romantic Adam even secretly phoned the jeweller where they had spotted a ring together when he returned to the UK, and bought it at the end of January. Keeping his purchase secret for weeks, in March 2017, after Heather had been joking around about marriage, he finally confessed over the phone. After their first date romantic Adam secretly phoned the jeweller where they had spotted a ring together, when he returned to the UK, and bought it at the end of January After that, Heather and Adam saw each other every four to six weeks, taking it in turns to fly across the Atlantic She continued: 'We were goofing about. Adam was telling me how much he liked me and I said, "Where's the ring then? You trying to get out of the M word?" 'And he said, "Well actually, I have a ring." 'I didn't need a big story, with him down on one knee. I just wanted to marry him, so to me, that was the perfect way to ask.' After that, Heather and Adam saw each other every four to six weeks, taking it in turns to fly across the Atlantic. Keeping his purchase secret for weeks, in March 2017, after Heather had been joking around about marriage, he finally confessed over the phone he had a ring and proposed After marrying nine months after they met, on 23 May 2018 she arrived in Durham, after sending her dogs over the pond ahead of her move Then, in August 2017, they decided to blend their families together for the first time and go on holiday to Greece as a group of five. There, in front of their respective children, they tied the knot. But then, despite being husband and wife, they had to remain thousands of miles apart with Heather living in an Air B&B as she'd sold her house while they waited for her spousal visa to be approved. On 23 May she arrived in Durham, after sending her dogs over the pond ahead of her move. Despite being husband and wife, they had to remain thousands of miles apart with Heather living in an Air B&B as she'd sold her house while they waited for her visa to be approved 'I decided that, as Sophie's grown up and living 16 hours away at university, it'd make more sense for me to move,' she said. 'Sophie loves Adam, too, so she was very supportive. He always sends her care packages at university. 'She's going to be studying at the London School of Economics this summer anyway, so I will see her then.' Paying thanks to the site that bought the newlyweds together, Heather said that, while her love story is unconventional, she would not change it for the world. 'Adam is genuinely the kindest person I've ever met,' she beamed. 'He's always three steps ahead and knows exactly what I need. 'I've never had somebody love me so perfectly.' The couple explored both side of the Atlantic during their adventurous dates Speaking of the unique intricacies of a long-distance relationship, Adam recalled how he used to stay up all night, talking to Heather Speaking of the unique intricacies of a long-distance relationship, Adam recalled how he used to stay up all night, talking to Heather. He admitted: 'I really did feel like a teenager again, getting excited every time my phone went off. 'When I first read her profile there was just something about her. 'I was almost nervous to message her, because I knew I'd be crushed if she ignored me. At the end of the day, she didn't know me from Adam, if you'll excuse the pun. Paying thanks to the site that bought the newlyweds together, Heather said that, while her love story is unconventional, she would not change it for the world 'I knew from the moment I saw her that I wanted to marry her,' Adam recalled 'She was stunningly beautiful, but as cheesy as it sounds, it was more than that. What she wrote and the pictures she posted showed how witty and intelligent she is.' And when they met in the flesh, Adam said it was love at first sight. 'I knew from the moment I saw her that I wanted to marry her,' he recalled. 'Something about Heather's presence makes me feel so comfortable. I really do think I've met my best friend. I can't imagine a world without her.' For information, visit www.eharmony.co.uk When they met in the flesh, Adam said it was love at first sight (seen on their wedding day in August 2017) A mother-of-two who breastfeeds her five-year-old daughter has been met with a barrage of negative reaction from people who disagree with her choice. Emma Shardlow Hudson, 29, from Grimsby, in North East Lincolnshire, nurses her daughter Alex, five, and son Ollie, two, in between other meals and even tandem feeds them. During an appearance on ITV's Good Morning Britain on Wednesday, she explained her daughter 'didn't know any different' and they have a lot of close friends who are also self-weaning. Emma claimed that extended breastfeeding was helping to immunise her daughter against germs children often pick up at school. But many viewers said that it was simply too long and Emma was setting her children up for a 'lifetime of embarrassment'. Scroll down for video Emma Shardlow Hudson appeared on Good Morning Britain to defend her choice to breastfeed her five-year-old daughter Emma Shardlow Hudson, 29, from Grimsby, in North East Lincolnshire, is practising extended breastfeeding with her daughter Alex, five, (pictured left) and son Ollie, two (pictured right) Emma was joined on the show by her husband Stuart, a chef, and Alex and Ollie in the green room of the studio As Emma discussed breastfeeding many people took to Twitter to insist that it 'was wrong' and 'just not right' Emma explained that Alex, who's in reception, usually breastfeeds once in the morning and once in the evening for comfort - or every few days if they're busy. But the mother-of-two insisted that she wasn't doing it to 'keep her a baby': 'No gosh not at all I am quite happy for her to grow up.' Emma said on the programme that the majority of the reaction she has is positive and it's only since she has spoken out about her choice that she has been hit with the backlash. However, those watching the segment on daytime TV took issue with Emma, one said: 'Noo don't breast feed when your daughters are 2 and 5... that's just not right.' One viewer said: 'Wrong. Just wrong.' While others said they didn't believe her children would 'appreciate' their story being made public, adding they 'will be embarrassed in their teens'. 'Breastfeeding at 5 year old, I dont know Im okay with that,' added another. 'For goodness sake woman, 5 years old is taking the whole breast fed thing too long! Opening her up for abuse from others! Theres no health benefits at this age!' raged one. Dr Hilary Jones also joined the mother on the GMB couch and praised her for continuing to breastfeed, and explained that children get benefits from breastfeeding as a newborn but at a certain age it was no longer needed. Viewers took to Twitter to criticise the mother's choice to breastfeed her five-year-old 'It's mainly security, its a great bonding experience between mum and baby there is nothing wrong with that. He added that the breastfeeding rates in this country were the 'worst in the world' suggesting that extended nursing is only considered 'eccentric because our society has oversexualised breasts'. Others were in support of Emma: 'Perfectly normal. Good on this woman.' 'I think about the kids too and how fantastic for them to have been nurtured in the most natural and healthy way for so long! Wow,' said another. One person said: 'This looking down on a mother still b/feeding her 5yo, feeds into societys view that b/feeding is somehow ick. 'It is the most natural thing in the world, and it should be encouraged and supported more! Our b/feeding rate at 3mo of 17 per cent is awful!' Some viewers stood firm beside Emma's choice praising her for breastfeeding and that it should be supported more Emma says she's convinced that her daughter hasn't developed the usual coughs and colds that children get because of the extended feeding regime; Alex, five, will often have milk before and after attending school Pictured feeding son Alex; professional photographer Emma now gives talks to others to try and encourage mothers who are struggling to feed their children to stick with it The NHS recommends all babies are exclusively breastfed until at least six months old, while 73 per cent of new mums choose to nurse from birth. Breastmilk is thought to reduce a baby's risk of infections, type 2 diabetes, obesity and childhood leukemia, according the NHS. New mums also benefit from breastfeeding, which reduces their risk of breast and ovarian cancer, cardiovascular disease and obesity. However, by the time a baby reaches their first birthday, just one in every 200 babies is still being breastfed. Emma, pictured with her husband Stuart, a chef, and Alex and Ollie; she says the hardest part of continuing to feed is that people often make negative remarks when she nurses her children in public While the overwhelming reaction to Emma's decision to breastfeed has been positive, she says the abusive remarks are hard to ignore Husband Stuart supports Emma's continued breastfeeding of his children too, saying the main thing is the family are happy Emma said previously: 'It's one of the biggest achievements of my life for sure, being able to nurture a child with my own body. 'It's a completely selfless thing to do, but it's probably the hardest thing I have ever done in my life too. 'Before Alex was born, I wasn't sure if it was a normal thing to breastfeed for so long. 'But it wasn't even a conscious decision to keep feeding for so long - I just thought why stop when it's good for them? My attitude has changed over time. 'When she started nursery there were quite a few bugs going around and she had nothing in comparison to her classmates. 'My kids are rarely ill, and I'm almost 100 per cent positive that that is because of the antibodies in the milk. 'She's always been a comforted baby and wants milk when she's upset but I do think there's a lot about the antibodies which is really good for her. 'It's nice for me to be able to provide that for her. My husband Stuart is quite happy with it all. He can see it helps her so he's like whatever's best for her and you, which is what it is. 'He's not really got any massive opinion on it so long as everyone is happy. Obviously he knows the benefits of it. He's really supportive of it.' Alex is in reception class at school but to Emma's knowledge is the only child who still breastfeeds. Greatest achievement: The mother-of-two says she's proud she's still able to nurse her children 'I have friends who don't breastfeed in public anymore because they're that scared which is horrible. 'It's only happened three or four times in those five years but if someone is not as confident as I've got over time with it they would probably find it quite off-putting. 'Apparently that old phrase 'if you've got nothing nice to say don't say anything at all' doesn't apply to breastfeeding. It's something that should be so normal and it's what breasts are for ultimately... Emma Shardlow Hudson 'I have had people come over when I feed the babies in their sling and people come over and go 'oh they're so lovely, are they sleeping?' and then go 'oh, are you feeding! 'That's lovely' which is really nice. Then they have a nice reaction so that's the flipside. 'I've had more of those comments than the negative ones but you remember the negative ones more - they make more of an impact unfortunately. 'It's something that should be so normal and it's what breasts are for ultimately.' The breastfeeding bond is something that Emma has inherited from her own mother, who breastfed her children until each was two years old. Professional photographer Emma said: 'I don't see breastfeeding as something to be embarrassed about. According to the NHS, breast milk is thought to reduce a baby's risk of infections, type 2 diabetes, obesity and childhood leukemia Professional photographer Emma says she had a strong bond with her children because of the feeding but admits that she found it tough to nurse them as babies Daughter Alex could outgrow breastfeeding soon, says Emma...but currently still enjoys nursing for comfort 'It completely equalises everyone because all women regardless of background can all do the same thing. 'Lots of people stop breastfeeding at three months because they get recommended to stop, which I think is a shame. 'It's a completely personal choice but so many people who want to breastfeed get told they can't when, with the right support, they probably could. 'It's having that all-round support and the confidence to keep going that has been so important to me.' But although she finds breastfeeding a doddle now, she struggled when she began. Emma, who gave birth to Alex when she was 24, said: 'I did struggle to breastfeed at first. I had wanted a home birth but it was quite traumatic and we ended up in hospital. 'The midwives are amazing about what they do but they do not have the time to give comprehensive breastfeeding support. 'I couldn't get my eldest to latch on properly, and the midwife just grabbed my boob and shoved the baby onto it and it was really painful. Alex is continuous because it's not just for the milk, it's for comfort too - but I do think she'll stop soon, she's heading that way... Emma Shardlow Hudson 'Luckily there was a breastfeeding support team who stayed with me for more than half an hour and really helped. 'Without that I wouldn't have been feeding her.' Now Emma has hosted events such as the Global Latch On which encourages women to sit together and nurse at the same time, while providing support to those struggling. However Emma thinks that Alex will eventually stop breastfeeding on her own. Emma said: 'Quite a lot of children have weaned by this point but Alex has always been a massive comfort feeder though. 'She's continuous because it's not just for the milk - but I do think she'll stop soon, she's heading that way.' A fashion blogger has gained social media fame after her huge eyebrows - that cover most of her forehead - went viral. Anzhelika Protodyakonova, 20, from Yakutsk in Russia's Sakha Republic, rocketed into the limelight when an onlooker took a photo of her on the bus and shared it online. The photo quickly spread over social media and gained her online recognition, and she now boasts over 90,0000 followers on Instagram - and even bigger brows. The blogger claims she now lives off the money she makes from advertising on her blog and enjoys discounts from many businesses because of her big brows. Anzhelika Protodyakonova, 20, from Yakutsk in Russia's Sakha Republic, has gained social media fame after her huge eyebrows, which cover most of her forehead, went viral The fashion blogger rocketed into the limelight when an onlooker took a photo of her on the bus and shared it online According to local media, the young woman wanted to imitate the large eyebrows from the Angry Birds According to local media, the young woman wanted to imitate the large eyebrows from hit video game the Angry Birds. Anzhelika admitted that she was embarrassed by the photo at first, but when she saw how much attention she got, she decided to embrace the situation and started painting them even bigger. She now keeps her fans updated with regular pictures of her staggering eyebrows, posing in a variety of outfits. The photo quickly spread over social media and gained her online recognition, and now boasts over 90,0000 followers on Instagram- and even bigger brows The blogger says she now lives from advertising and enjoys discounts from many businesses because of her big brows Anzhelika admitted that she was embarrassed by the photo at first, but when she saw how much attention she got, she decided to embrace the situation Boasting 90,300 followers, despite only following 387 people, Anzhelika has already shared 770 posts. One photo sees her dressed in full Mexican attire, while another shows her posing in the Angry Bird T-shirt that inspired her. Other snaps see her in superhero-inspired ensembles, and even holding up a portrait of her along with her statement brows. She started to paint them bigger than ever and take pictures in her unusual outfits for her followers One pictures sees the fashion blogger posing alongside a portrait of her- with her signature eyebrows She now keeps her fans updated with regular pictures of her staggering eyebrows, posing in a variety of outfits. Boasting 90,300 followers, despite only following 387 people, Anzhelika has already shared 770 posts Social media users have left varying reviews, with some questioning whether big brows are the next trend. One user Sadia Slayy wrote: 'Alright babes I've been seeing this video going around of super bold brows! Is this going to be the new brow trend of 2017? Meanwhile netizen 'Gyyyy' joked: 'The moment there is WIFI in any asylum, the amount of bloggers will increase.' Other snaps see her in superhero-inspired ensembles garnering thousands of likes and comments She likes to show her comical side, posing alongside dolls fans have made for her for quirky selfies The blogger describes herself as a Herbal Life ambassador and now lives off endorsements A mother who married a man serving two life sentences for double murder has spent thousands appealing his sentence as she's convinced of his innocence. Kacey Rush, 43, from Los Angeles, California - a realtor, former model and mother-of-one - began writing to 49-year-old former Crip gangster and crack dealer Travis Berry in 2010. In 2012, 18 years into his two life sentences, the pair married with the full support of Kacey's daughter Taylor who looks on Travis as a 'true father figure'. Despite having only met nine times since they were married, Kacey knew from their first kiss that Travis was her soulmate, but it wasn't until 2017 that the couple were allowed a conjugal visit so they could consummate their union. The family are now going through their fourth appeal to have his conviction overturned, with the decision pending. Kacey admits she initially wrote to Travis out of pure curiosity, and she had no interest in even being penpals. Scroll down for video Kacey Rush, 43, from Los Angeles, California with her husband Travis Berry, 49, who is serving two life sentences for murder The mother-of-one is certain of her husband's innocence and has spend thousands on lawyers to appeal his convictions 'In 2010 I came across a website that had Travis's name on it. I was more inquisitive about the psychology of people who commit these crimes,' she explained. 'I was digging about the psychological side of how they can say they are all innocent in prison and how everyone is innocent in prison. 'So I wrote him, I wanted to see what his answers would be as to why is he innocent. Like, "I don't believe you, so tell me why I should believe you?". 'I sent him a picture, just so he knew what I looked like. But it wasn't for a love interest, it wasn't to have a pen pal, I didn't want any of that. It was more like I wanted to know how his brain worked. Kacey's daughter Taylor thought the relationship was just a phase at first, but now looks on Travis as a 'true father figure' Calipatria State Prison, where Travis Berry is currently serving two life sentences for a double murder he maintains he did not commit 'I waited for the mail, not really thinking about it, and then he wrote me back and I got a letter from him.' What Kacey knew was that on January 30, 1992, two men were shot dead in the back of a rental car. Travis was charged with two counts of murder, kidnapping and burglary, and found guilty and sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole. The pair corresponded via letters for three months, during which Kacey became increasingly more convinced of Travis' innocence, and decided to visit him in prison and meet him face-to-face. She said: 'He popped out with the big ol' cheesy smile he has, and I knew I was in trouble then. I was in trouble like "Oh my god, what have I got myself into?" because I knew he was The One. Shawn Johnston and Delores Sanders, the sisters of Travis Berry, say that Kacey has been a 'godsend' for their brother Kacey Rush and her daughter Taylor Christensen on a visit to Travis in prison Kacey is convinced Travis did not commit the crimes he was imprisoned for and has spent thousands of dollars in legal fees appealing his conviction 'He might be my complete opposite, he might be my biggest headache, he might be the biggest kick in my ass, but he is the one that I am bound to. I felt that all in that moment, it was really weird.' Travis said despite being perplexed when Kacey first got in touch with him, his emotions ran high when she visited him for the first time. 'In the beginning, things are like a game to a certain extent, but when I actually saw her, things started changing for real,' Travis said. 'I got butterflies, my emotions were really out there, and I just kissed her.' Kacey began working with Travis to overturn his conviction, doing her own investigations off the back of their conversations, before handing the case over to the Innocence Project, a legal non-profit organisation that works to exonerate wrongly convicted people. Why is Travis Berry serving two life sentences? On 30th January 1992, Keith Cardell Thomas, 30, from LA and Daniel J. Chapman, 28, from Seattle were found dead in abandoned vehicle in Duarte, California after being shot in the head. Thomas was one of the oldest members of the Rollin' 60s Crips gang and had given four members marijuana valued at $10K to sell. He returned to Duarte to collect his money and drop off another load, but the members has already sold the drugs and spent the money and were waiting to kill him. Travis Berry was one of four men arrested after officers found fingerprints on the car and tip offs from informants. While admitting he was part of the gang, he insists he was not present when the two men were murdered. Tyson T-Dog Pearce admitted his own involvement, and implicated Travis, claiming he had helped to loot the SUV of money and drugs. Although it was never claimed that Travis has fired the fatal shots, his alleged involvement meant he was guilty under California law. Despite Pearce continually changing his story and little forensic evidence linking Travis to the scene, he was convicted of the two murders and sentenced to life in prison. Advertisement The pair decided to commemorate their love by getting matching tattoos on their ring fingers. Travis said: 'I thought I had to do it on my ring finger as for me that symbolises life, there is northing in the world that can ever separate us. We're forever, and we'll never divorce - we'll always be together.' In February 2012, after a year long wait for the prison to find a chapel, the couple got married, with only Kacey's daughter Taylor present, and one of Travis' inmate friends there to act as a witness. The pair had still never had never been alone without prison supervision, and wouldn't be for another five years after their wedding. 'We'd never had our chance to actually be alone one-on-one as a married couple, or as a regular couple, as anything,' Kacey said. 'The laws changed and lifers were granted family visits, so our first conjugal visit was in July 2017. That was the first time we ever got to have sex, and that is what changed our marriage.' Kacey and her daughter visiting Travis. She has only been able to see her husband nine times since they married six years ago Explaining to her family that she was romantically involved with a man convicted of a double homicide was a lot for them to take in, Kacey admits. She said: 'But they can either accept it or they can move on. I am going to do what I am regardless of what someone tells me to do, unless it was detrimental to my daughter.' When her mother told her she was dating an inmate, Kacey's daughter, Taylor Christensen, said she saw it as a passing phase that would be over in a few months, but now describes it as a blessing in disguise. She said: 'I didn't have a male figure in my life to look up to and at that point in my life I didn't want one. He has done a lot for me, more than a lot of people have, and he's done it from behind prison walls, and it's meant so much to me. The couple have only met each other a handful of times at Calipatria State Prison Taylor said that her stepfather has done more for her from behind bars than any other man has in her life Kacey turned to the Innocence Project, a legal non-profit organisation that works to exonerate wrongly convicted people to help free Travis 'He has shown me a true father figure. We are so close.' Travis' family were no less confused by his budding romance with a stranger from the outside. Shawn Johnston, Travis' younger sister, who created the website Kacey came across calling for help with Travis' appeal, said: 'I would never date someone in prison. 'I didn't think it's possible - you can't come home to them, you can hold their hand but you can hardly be intimate with them. There are lots of rules and regulations when you go for prison visits. 'I thought she was crazy, but the more visits she had with him, the more Travis started becoming himself again. 'His voice was lighter, the laughter was back, and I could see a glimmer of hope in his eyes, so Kacey's been a godsend. She's given him the hope he needed to see that there is light at the end of the tunnel.' Finding the Innocence Project 'too slow', Kacey has used her own savings and borrowed thousands of dollars off her mother to hire attorneys to fight Travis' case. Constance Hall has shared a hilarious photo comparing herself to Kate Middleton after giving birth. The outspoken mummy blogger and her husband Denim Cooke welcomed their first child Raja shortly after 2.30pm on Monday. Ms Hall took to Instagram to compare herself to the Duchess of Cambridge, who appeared in public looking immaculate just hours after giving birth to Louis in April. 'Oh god Kate... the things they expect of us royals. I hear ya babe I hear ya,' Ms Hall posted, alongside a photo comparing the two couples. Constance Hall has shared a hilarious photo comparing herself to Kate Middleton after giving birth Ms Hall and her husband Denim Cooke welcomed their first child together, Raja Wolf, on Monday afternoon Ms Hall shared the exciting news of Raja's birth via a Caesarean section on Instagram. 'Raja. Born at 2.46pm 38 weeks 4.2kgs. We couldn't have dreamt a more perfect baby,'Ms Hall wrote alongside a picture of her breastfeeding her newborn son. 'Love you so much Denzy. We are blown away with support from you all.' Taking to Facebook, the doting father shared the exciting news. 'Raja Wolf Cooke-Hall was born today at 2.46pm. At 9lb 5oz and 56cm tall he is perfect in every way,' Mr Cooke said. 'Con is sitting up in bed breastfeeding him at the moment and I couldn't be prouder of her strength and bravery and throughout this entire pregnancy. The proud parents shared the exciting news of the birth via Instagram after the mother delivered their son Raja via a Caesarean section 'Raja is absolutely adorable and feeding already and about to nap. He has barely cried and seems really content. Fingers crossed he remains chill. 'Thank you for all the well wishes and thank you to my beautiful wife for this amazing gift ... you are a warrior woman and this child unites our crazy clan. 'I feel so lucky I could jump over the moon. Oceanz [sic] of love to you all.' Earlier on Monday, Mr Cooke was seen getting changed into medical scrubs as his doting wife documented the hours leading up to the birth on Instagram. On Tuesday, the doting mother, from Perth, shared an adorable photo of her bundle of joy The proud parents shared a video of Raja on Constance's social media just hours after his birth On Monday afternoon, Constance Hall shared a footage of herself in a hospital gown before she was wheeled into the birthing suite for her C-section The doting father (left wearing medical scrubs before the birth) cradled his new baby boy Raja The doting father took to Facebook to share the exciting news about the arrival of his baby son Her baby announcement comes shortly after she shared her 'last ever baby bump photo' as she waited in the birthing suite on Monday. 'If this doesn't look like he's trying to crawl out of the bag then I don't know what does. I gotta drag him into theatre soon,' she joked. On Sunday night, the mother penned an open letter to her unborn baby son. The outspoken Perth author and her husband Denim Cooke, a father-of-two, are expecting their first child together on Monday. Taking to Instagram, the mother-of-four wrote a heartwarming letter to her baby boy as she braces for the highly-anticipated arrival of her fifth child. 'Dear baby in my belly. We get to meet you. And here's a couple of things I want you to know,' she said. 'The minute your dad and I got together we knew you were coming. We talked about you, joked about you and even picked out some names. 'Your dad told me he'd had a sign from the gods... I smiled, took another sip from my wine and proceeded to comb out his dreadlocks. 'We don't know anything about you, you might be wild and challenging of everything society throws at you like us or you might wear a suit, brush your hair and get four degrees.' Mummy blogger Constance Hall has given birth to a baby boy named The mother and her husband Denim Cooke welcomed their first baby together on Monday Ms Hall - who tied the knot to Mr Cooke in a secret wedding ceremony earlier this year - are expecting their first child together. She said she didn't care whether her unborn child is 'tough and tumble sporty boy like your dad or an emotional artsy person like your mum. 'Or you could always be both.. You might even decide you don't want to be a boy. We don't care. We just want you,' she said. 'But what I do know is that last night your dad told me that the hardest part of this extremely painful pregnancy for him has been watching me in pain and not be able to take that pain away from me and swap it for himself.' The baby boy will be the latest addition to the humble family - including seven children, two pet dogs and 'two madly in love parents'. The Perth mother already has four young children with her previous husband Bill Mahon The couple tied the knot in an intimate wedding ceremony in January, surrounded by their seven children Earlier this month, Ms Hall revealed her decision to deliver her baby via a C-section after her last vaginal birth took five months to heal 'This huge chaotic family of soon seven kids, two dogs and two madly in love parents has a place for everyone. Your place for the time being is in my arms,' she said. 'And I simply cannot wait to sniff you.' Earlier this month, Ms Hall revealed her decision to deliver her baby via a C-section after her last vaginal birth took five months to heal. 'I've decided against a Vbac (vaginal birth after delivery,' she said on May 9. 'I read some terribly sad stories and incredibly empowering ones, the decision came down a couple of factors, mainly body damage,' she said. 'My worst Vag delivery took five months to heal from, my C-section took three weeks. 'I'm not justifying my decision, in 2018 Queen make decisions about their bodies, no justification needed. But this one took a lot of back and forth. 'So when I heard him tell me that he'd prefer I had a C-section I fell a little more in love with him. It's my decision, but his opinion counts.' The sister of the mastermind behind last year's London Bridge terror attack has spoken for the first time about how her and her family's lives have been destroyed. During a tearful appearance on ITV's This Morning, Haleema Butt, 28, said the horrific fallout from the atrocity, in which eight people died and dozens more were injured, had left her living in fear. The mother-of-two young children - who was on the show to mark the one-year anniversary of the atrocity - kept her identity anonymous with her back to the camera in the studio. She wept as she told presenters Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes that she would never forgive her brother Khuram Butt for taking the lives of innocent people. On June 3 last year, Butt, 27, Rachid Redouane, 30, and Youssef Zaghba, 22, ploughed into pedestrians in a white van on the bridge before stabbing victims in the nearby market with 12-inch ceramic knives. They were all shot dead in Borough Market by police. Haleema, a mother-of-two who wasn't named on the show, said she feels as though she is another casualty of the attack: 'I've said to people it will probably haunt me until my kids grow up. Khuram Butt's sister Haleema appeared on This Morning to share how her life had been affected nearly one year since the attack on June 3, 2017. Pictured with presenters Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes Haleema (left) said she now lives in fear for her life because of what her brother did. Khuram Butt (right) massacred eight people and injured more in the June 3rd attack in 2017 'My kids are going to be known as Khuram's terrorist nephews. I am just known as the terrorist's sister.' Haleema said from the moment she discovered her brother was behind the London Bridge terror attack she had 'suffered'. 'We have lost our jobs we have received death threats, we have been attacked, our car has been vandalised, we have young kids and I am constantly worrying for our safety,' she explained. Immediately following the attack Haleema, who had two months' prior to the killings started work at Heathrow Airport, lost her job. The mother-of-two kept her back to the camera in the studio as she discussed how the attack had affected her life Haleema had secured a job at Heathrow Airport a couple of months before the attack but had a security clearance revoked because of her brother The attack was carried out by Khuram Butt along with Rachid Redouane (left) and Youssef Zaghba (right) While there was no suggestion Haleema or her husband Usman Darr were extremists or knew what Butt was planning, Haleema said on the This Morning that she didn't fully understand why she was let go. 'I do in a way, but in a way I don't, ' she told Eamonn and Ruth. I worked hard all my life to stay out of trouble and make a future for myself and my children, to lose my job and counter terrorism clearance because of the actions of my 27-year-old brother... I constantly question that 'I worked hard all my life to stay out of trouble and make a future for myself and my children, to lose my job and counter terrorism clearance because of the actions of my 27-year-old brother who I wasn't living with, just a link to. 'To lose all that, my livelihood, my job, my children's future. I constantly question that.' Khuram, a father-of-two, worked at Ummah Fitness in Ilford with Sajeel Shahid, 41, a member of Anjem Choudary's al-Muhajiroun network who was accused of helping train the 7/7 bomb ringleader Mohammed Siddique Khan. Yet Butt, who came to the UK as an asylum seeker, was deemed a 'low priority' by police and MI5 despite his links to Choudary, Europe's most notorious hate preacher. Incredibly, the Pakistani-born Briton even secured a job working on the Tube in 2016 and had access to tunnels under the Houses of Parliament while working at Westminster station. Haleema said it felt like a 'massive slap in the face' the day after she found out the identity of the killer, after posting social media statuses condemning the attack. KHURAM BUTT: MASTERMIND BEHIND THE LONDON BRIDGE TERROR Khuram Butt, 27, a married father of two, appeared on the Channel 4 documentary The Jihadi Next Door On June 3 last year Khuram Butt, 27, Rachid Redouane, 30, and Youssef Zaghba, 22, ploughed into pedestrians in a white van on the bridge before stabbing victims in the nearby market with 12-inch ceramic knives. Butt and his fellow murderers were shot dead inside Borough Market by police. The Pakistani-born Briton, who came to the UK as an asylum seeker, managed to get a job on the Tube in 2016, four months after he appeared on a Channel 4 documentary about British jihadis. He was reportedly sacked from the job at Canada Water station in the Docklands after six months for poor attendance. He also worked out at an all-Muslim gym Ummah Fitness in Ilford run by a terror suspect on a FBI watchlist, Sajeel Shahid, 41. Terrorist: Khuram Butt, 27, managed to get a job on the Tube four months after he appeared on a documentary about British jihadis and worked at an all-Muslim gym run by a terror suspect on a FBI watchlist Shahid was a member of Anjem Choudary's al-Muhajiroun network who was accused of helping train the 7/7 bomb ringleader Mohammed Siddique Khan. The London Bridge attacker himself became a supporter and trusted lieutenant of Choudary and he helped run high-octane mixed martial arts classes and he used the gym to approach young people for radicalisation, according to The Times. In 2015 he prepared to abandon his pregnant wife Zahrah to wage holy war in Syria, until relatives talked him out of it. He had links to various hate preachers including Anjem Choudary and had links to a key contact of Mohammed Siddique Khan - one of the 7/7 suicide bombers, who killed 52 people in London 12 years ago. Friends tried to tip off MI5 after his behaviour became more extreme and he became obsessed with watching YouTube rants by hate preachers. The jihadi became so extreme he called fellow Muslims without beards non-believers, would not speak to women directly and was banned from his mosque for berating worshippers and the imam for being 'un-Islamic'. Advertisement She denied her family had any idea what Khuram was planning, saying: 'Even now when I meet people I am having to explain myself or justify his actions constantly and try and make out that I am not like him. 'The only people that I have known for 20 years plus are the people that have stuck by me. I have lost all the new friends I made, I have lost all the friends that I made at work after losing the job.' Haleema said that she believes her nightmare will never come to an end and says she can never forgive him. 'It could have been my friends, it could have been anyone and he has gone out there and he has killed people that have done nothing to him for no apparent reason. 'He hasnt achieved anything as a result. He has ruined their lives, their family's lives, he's ruined our life, he's ruined his childrens life.' This Morning airs weekdays on ITV at 10.30am Former 'Peru Two' drug mule Michaella McCollum has revealed her svelte post-baby body less than a month after giving birth to twins. McCollum, 24, from Northern Ireland, showed off her trim figure in a pair of denim hot pants and fitted red t-shirt in photos shared on her Instagram story today. In a separate post the mother-of-two said it was 'great to be back in her pre-pregnancy clothes' as she pouted for the camera in a flirty summer dress. Former jailbird Michaella McCollum, 24, from Northern Ireland, showed off her trim figure in a pair of denim hot pants and fitted red t-shirt in photos shared on her Instagram story today The mother-of-two revealed her post-baby body less than three weeks after welcoming twins She offered followers a close up of her toned stomach and legs in the social media snaps The former 'Peru Two' drugs mule announced the birth of her children in an Instagram video shared earlier this month. She has not yet revealed the sex of the twins The former jailbird announced earlier this month that she had welcomed twins by posting an Instagram video with the caption 'My little darlings. 1 week today.' McCollum shot to notoriety in 2013 when she and her friend Melissa Reid were arrested in Lima for smuggling 1.5million worth of cocaine in a high-profile case that led to them being dubbed the Peru Two by the Press. They were sentenced to six years and eight months in prison in Peru but were released after three years. McCollum returned to Northern Ireland in June 2016. The proud new mother received an outpouring of good wishes from her Instagram followers Reid and McCollum met in Ibiza in 2013 where they were employed by a drug-dealing gang. Since her release from prison, Michaella has become something of a public figure, attending events and jetting off on sun-soaked holidays. Her bikini-clad snaps on various sunny getaways have become something of a regular fixture in the media. Michaella McCollum Connolly (left) and Melissa Reid after being arrested at the airport in Lima, Peru in 2013 Michaella announced her pregnancy in January with a photo of her cuddled up to an unidentified male companion The blonde beauty who is known for her love of sun holidays, pictured posing by the pool in February In contrast her former accomplice Melissa Reid, landed a charity job at Citizens Adviceafter she was released from jail in South America in June 2016. McCollum announced her pregnancy on Instagram, where she boasts more than 18,000 followers, by sharing a photo of herself lying in the arms of a mystery man, who is believed to be the twins' father. His identity has never been revealed. And she gave followers no hint during her pregnancy that two babies were on the way, displaying only a tiny bump in her recent social media posts. Is this the father of Michaella's baby? The new mother posted this snap with a male companion at a spa day, but covered his face The new mother did not give any hint to followers during her pregnancy that twins were on the way Michaella pictured with a tiny bump at the end of April. She explained that the camera angle had made her tummy look smaller A snap from the end of April showed her with a neat baby bump, but she hinted that birth was imminent, saying: 'I guess I am gonna have to shop infant car seats soon.' Michaella was also reportedly offered 250,000 for a tell-all book deal detailing her criminal exploits and time behind bars in Lima. She is expected to publish a book later this year. A previously unseen photograph of Prince Harry and his new bride Meghan Markle has been spotted at Buckingham Palace. The touching portrait of the newlyweds was spotted on display in the Audience Room of the Queen's London residence. The portrait of the couple in a loving embrace can be seen on the right hand side of the fire place of the living room where she hosts her weekly audience. An unseen photograph of Prince Harry and Meghan has been spotted in the Queen's audience room at Buckingham Palace The portrait is thought to be taken by the couple's wedding photographer Alexi Lubomirski and was spotted during George Brandis's visit to the palace on Wednesday It is the first photo of Meghan to appear in Buckingham Palace and it sits alongside Her Majesty's other treasured photographs of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The photograph sits pride of place at the front of the table and sees Harry dressed in a blue suit facing Meghan who is wearing in a figure-hugging dress. While it is unclear when and wear the photo was taken, Hello! reports is is likely to have been taken by the couple's wedding photographer Alexi Lubomirski as part of their engagement shoot in December. The photo of the couple takes the place of a portrait of the Queen's daughter Princess Anne and her husband Timothy Laurence. The photo of Harry and Meghan replaces one of Princess Anne and her husband Timothy Laurence (seen here) The photo was last seen in the Audience Room in April when the Queen welcomed the Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardem (pictured) The photograph which sees the pair posing in their naval uniform, was last seen sat on the side table in April, just a month before the wedding and has now been moved to the left of the lamp. Other portraits to feature in the room are ones of Zara and Mike Tindall on their wedding day and a picture of William and Harry in Military uniform. The Queen regularly shifts the positioning of the photo frames around but these have been in place for years. The photo was spotted as the Queen welcomed Honorable George Brandis, the Australian High Commissioner to the UK, during a private audience at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday. The Queen welcomed the Australian High Commissioner to the UK, during a private audience The audience room is where the Queen stores some of her most significant treasures, giving royal fans a rare glimpse into her personal life. The room, situated on the palace's first floor, is peppered with photographs of Royals. On the mantelpiece stands two 18th Century English porcelain pheasants valued at 20,000; as well as a white marble and gilt bronze clock, valued at 4,000; an English gilt mirror, valued at 30,000. In the fireplace there is a two-bar electric fire, with only one bar lit up. Similar models can be bought on the high street for 29.99. At Buckingham Palace, audiences are either held in The Queens Audience Room (pictured) or in the 1844 Room Meghan is clearly now well and truly part of the family following her wedding to Prince Harry on May 19. Pictured: The couple and the royal family on their wedding day The Royals are known to face the cold with fortitude, with the dated rooms in their various haunts known for their draughts and difficulty to heat. The Queen has similar budget heaters in fireplaces in all of her residences At Buckingham Palace, audiences are either held in The Queens Audience Room or in the 1844 Room. The Queen gives a weekly audience to the Prime Minister and will also have a private audience with the Chancellor of the Exchequor before a new budget is announced, as well as with visiting Heads of State who are not attending on an official State Visit. The Queen also chairs Privy Council meetings, which are held regularly throughout the year, usually around once a month. Crown Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece has gushed over her newest royal counterpart the Duchess of Sussex in an interview, saying her marriage to Harry is 'the symbol of an opening to the new millennium'. The wife of Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece paid tribute to the former Suits star's passion for human rights and equality in an interview with Paris Match. 'In countries where it still exists, monarchy is traditionally a force uniting the nation. Meghan showed and proved that she knew how to move and adapt,' she said. The clothes designer and mother-of-five said that she was sure Meghan would have the full support of the British royal family as her role evolves. 'But she will have to move away from the world of celebrities, and Hollywood, to quietly join that of other stars: the royal family. 'She is lucky to have a modern and sensitive man at her side. Harry will be there to guide her.' Marie-Chantal met Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece in New York while she was studying for her degree in History of Art. She dropped out in her final year when the royal proposed and the couple married in 1995. They couple who are parents to Maria-Olympia, Constantine-Alexios, Achileas-Andreas, Odysseas-Kimon and Aristidis-Stavros relocated to London in 2004 for their children's education. Crown Prince Pavlos' father King Constantine of Greece ascended the throne in 1964, but was forced to flee in 1967 due to a coup. He remained head of state in exile until 1973, when the Greek monarchy was abolished. King Constantine and his son the Crown Prince have no official remit, but are still active participants in royal life around Europe. The family is closely connected with the British royals as Prince William is Constantine godfather's. Prince Charles hosted a gala at Highgrove to celebrate King Constantine's 60th birthday in 2000. An amazing aerial acrobatic dance group featuring tiny children being thrown into the air has stunned the America's Got Talent judges. Taking to the stage, the leader of the group named Zucaroh revealed to the judges that the group is not professional and they take people whether they have skills or not. He also revealed that he wanted to appear on the show because its the biggest stage in the world and the perfect place to showcase their skills and talent. Scroll down for video Winners: Zucaroh, an amazing aerial acrobatic dance group featuring tiny children being thrown into the air has stunned the America's Got Talent judges Amateurs: The group which hails from Brazil is made up of non-professional dancers and included adults and children Talented: However, the second the dancers started off their routine, it became clear they were far from amateurs and the group immediately won over the audience Technique: The group showed off amazing skills including throwing a young girl into the air and seamlessly catching her mid-twirl Daring: They also performed several tricky maneuvers without the help of any safety equipment However, the second the dancers started off their routine, it became clear they were far from amateurs and the group immediately won over the audience after one of the children was lifted onto the shoulders of one of the adult dancers in a seamless yet highly technical move. The young girl then showed off her incredible balancing skills and strength by balancing one leg on the raised hand of the adult dancer below her, while doing a vertical split. The group then joined hands to create a human wave effect while some of the younger dancers were twirled around 360 degrees, to make it appear like they were doing cartwheels. However, the real showstopper came when the young girl was thrown in the air, twirled mid-flight and landed safely back into the older dancers hands. Swinging motions from a height without the aid of any safety equipment or props equally wowed the crown and judges who gave the dance troupe a standing ovation. Gasping for breath: Host Tyra Banks seemed especially impressed with the group and shared that she was out of breath from looking at them Shock: At one point, Heidi Klum clutched her fellow judge Simon Cowell as the troupe swung the smaller children in the air In awe: Mel B and Simon looked on in awe and shock as the group performed their death-defying moves Mesmerized: Judge Howie Mandel (far left) clutched his hands together in prayer for most of the nerve racking stunts Golden ticket: At the end of their performance, the judges sprang to their feet And before Simon could ask the judges for their votes, Tyra gave the only Golden Buzzer of the night, instantly sending Zucaroh through to the live rounds. 'I am collecting my breath, I need some oxygen right now,' she gasped after the judges all gave high praise for the troupe. 'I'm like freaking out right now,' Tyra added, before finally running to the judges table and pressing the buzzer, with Simon smiling: 'That was a good call.' He also was full of praise, insisting: 'There's something in the air right now. I've done this a long time, and this is honestly one of the most incredible things I've ever seen on any of these shows. I mean it was breathtaking and I'm absolutely honored that you would come on to our show.' The troupe which specializes in incredible acrobatics with its youngest members, was started as a way to escape the violence in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where the leader said his closest friends all ended up dead. Appreciation: Before Simon could ask the judges for their votes, Tyra interrupted him, stormed the stage and walked towards the Golden Buzzer Winners: Cheered on by the judges, Tyra gave the only Golden Buzzer of the night, instantly sending Zucaroh through to the live rounds Ecstatic: The audience and judges erupted in applause and cheering after Tyra sent the dance troupe through Overwhelmed: The group seemed overwhelmed by the decision with many bursting into tears Michelle Wolf was heavily criticized for her searing comedic performance at the White House Correspondents' dinner last month, but looking back on her jokes, she thinks she may have been 'too nice.' The 32-year-old star of The Break with Michelle Wolf opened the doors to her New York City TV studio for the latest installment of Vogue's 73 Questions series, and interviewer Joe Sabia couldn't help but ask the comedian about the infamous dinner. While Michelle said the experience was 'great,' she suggested that she was actually holding back when it came to her controversial jokes that night. Scroll down for video Getting candid: Michelle Wolf, 32, opened the doors to her New York City TV studio for the latest installment of Vogue's 73 Questions series Looking back: The comedian said she was 'maybe too nice' during her searing comedic performance at the White House Correspondents' dinner last month No regrets: Michelle said she liked all of her jokes that night, but her 'favorite ones' were the ones she actually cut 'I was maybe too nice,' she said of her performance, which included scathing jabs about Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, and President Donald Trump. Although journalists and politicians widely denounced the act as mean spirited and vulgar, Michelle doesn't have any regrets. 'I liked all of them,' she said of her jokes, 'but my favorites were the ones I actually cut and now they're in a vault.' During the nearly nine-minute interview, Michelle recalled her first reaction to learning that the president wouldn't be in attending the event for the second year in a row. 'What a p***y,' she said of Trump's no-show. Some political figures looked visibly uncomfortable while Michelle was roasting them that night, but the comedian insisted that telling jokes to people's faces like that is 'so much more fun.' Lasting impression: Michelle was heavily criticized for her searing comedic performance at the White House Correspondents' dinner (pictured) Not holding back: When asked her first reaction to learning that President Donald Trump (pictured in file photo) was not attending the event, she said: 'What a p***y' 'You can feel them be mad,' she said with a smile on her face. When asked if she will ever perform at the White House Correspondents' dinner again, she hit back: 'Will anyone ever do it again?' After posing a questions that has been on a lot of people's minds following her controversial performance, Michelle said she was done talking about the dinner. However, she did open up about her writing process for her new Netflix show The Break with Michelle Wolf. 'You write as many jokes as you can, and then try to beat those jokes,' she said of creating each episode. According to Michelle, the secret to comedy is 'honest, originality, and punchlines,' and the perfect joke is 'something you didn't know you wanted to hear.' Thoughtful answer: Michelle (pictured with her assistant) said the perfect joke is 'something you didn't know you wanted to hear' Too cute: To Michelle, the funniest thing in the world is cats wearing pirate costumes Fan club: 'The other day I literally almost ran into Oprah like I turned a corner,' she recounted in the video. 'My head, her boobs it was almost a whole thing.' While reflecting on the nicest thing anyone has ever said about her, she recalled getting complimented by comedy legend David Letterman, calling it 'super cool.' However, the only critic she listens to is the one in her head, explaining that it is 'way worse than anything anyone can say about me.' Interestingly enough, the thing that is funniest in the world to Michelle is actually quite innocent. 'I love those cats who wear pirate costumes,' she admitted. 'It makes it look like they're walking on their legs with their arms flailing.' Michelle also weighed in on her favorite places and cities to perform, calling the Comedy Cellar in New York City the best place to do stand-up. When she's not in New York City, she said she loves performing in San Francisco, Denver, and Madison. Big break: The comedian proudly showed of the set of her new Netflix show The Break with Michelle Wolf Honest: When asked where she would like to see American in five years, she said she'd like to see the country be 'less racist' 'Madison is so beautiful, but you've got to pace yourself on the cheese,' she said. When asked about the time she was most starstruck, she revealed she is a fan of Oprah and recently crossed paths with the media mogul. 'The other day I literally almost ran into Oprah like I turned a corner,' she recounted. 'My head, her boobs it was almost a whole thing.' She also said she'd love to have a beer with Queen Elizabeth I, explaining: 'Not only does she have red hair, she's also always been single and she liked ruled the whole world. 'She's pretty amazing,' she added. Michelle insisted that her real-life persona and her stage personality are 'pretty much the same,' and she didn't hold back when asked where she would like to see America in five years. Candid: She also opened up about how it is 'conflicting to be a woman. 'Do you post a picture of your naked butt or do you become a scientist?' she asked. 'Can you do both of these things? Hitting back: At the end of the clip, she was asked how she knows she has nailed a performance. 'When Dennis Miller gives you notes about it,' she replied She admitted she'd like to see the country be 'less racist,' saying: 'Come on guys, try like a little.' The comedian went on to say that being an American today means 'always having to say, "I am so sorry about that. So sorry."' She also noted that it is 'conflicting' to be a woman in this day and age. 'Do you post a picture of your naked butt or do you become a scientist?' she asked. 'Can you do both of these things? Are we even allowed to discuss this?' Michelle even looked back on her time working on Wall Street, sharing her own metaphor working in finance circa 2008. 'Yeah, it's like being a violin player on the deck of the Titanic and then getting rescued by a Carnival Cruise ship that was paid for by tax payers,' she said. At the end of the clip, she was asked how she knows she has nailed a performance. 'When Dennis Miller gives you notes about it,' she joked, referencing the comedian's criticism of her White House Correspondents' dinner performance. The daughter of Britain's first gay fathers has been targeted by trolls after one of her dads shared a video showcasing the aftermath of her lip fillers. In the video Saffron Drewitt-Barlow, 18, is seen with hugely swollen lips after returning from the hospital for the procedure. Father Barrie shared the clip on his Instagram account a week ago and the teen has since received cruel comments from his followers describing them as 'horrible' and 'trout-like'. But the 'spoiled' teen has since hit back at the comments, claiming that if her trolls could afford the procedure, they would have it done. Saffron Drewitt-Barlow was targeted by cruel trolls after her father Barrie shared a video of her swollen lips after having fillers The clip, which has amassed 3,000 views, sees Barrie winding up his daughter, encouraging her to 'pout' for the camera while her siblings mock her. Commenting on the post one wrote: 'What she done dear god they look horrible (sic)' Another added: 'Why oh why spoil your lips and now look like a trout Your beautiful you dont need to do this to your face'. A third agreed commenting: 'Never understood why beautiful girls do this to themselves, shes naturally beautiful please dont make yourself look plastic'. According to The Sun Saffron travelled to Beverley Hills for the 2,256 ($3,000) procedure but took a battering from people all over the world when they saw the results. Hitting back at her haters, Saffron told The Sun that she was 'upset' by the negative feedback. Saffron (pictured) says that she thinks if trolls could afford the surgery then they would also have it done The 18-year-old lives a highly privileged lifestyle in Beverley Hills thanks to her two millionaire fathers She said: 'I'm sure if most of these trolls could afford it, they would do it too. 'People need to get a life and stop moaning and groaning about every little thing I do. 'It upsets me that so many negative comments are floating about, but at the end of the day, I love my new lips.' Saffron is the eldest daughter of millionaire couple Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow, who made history by becoming the first same-sex surrogate parents. Saffron and her twin brother, Aspen, were conceived using the donor eggs of one woman. Barrie is the father of one child and Tony the father of the other. But they have never revealed which man is the biological father of either twin, as they consider themselves equal parents. Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow made history by becoming the first same-sex surrogate parents, pictured here with their twins Aspen and Saffron Saffron and her twin brother, Aspen, were conceived using the donor eggs of one woman. Barrie is the father of one child and Tony the father of the other The couple went on to have three more sons via surrogacy Orlando, 13, and twin boys, Jasper and Dallas, six. Barrie, 49, also has a biological son, Colin, from a fling with a woman when he was 19. The family live together in a sprawling 5million ten-bedroom property in Tampa, Florida. The family has had a turbulent few years, while Tony was battling throat cancer. His daughter said he will die within 18 months unless he has an operation to repair his jawbone, which has been damaged by radiotherapy treatment. Even if he has the surgery to replace his jaw with bone from his leg, Miss Drewitt-Barlow said there is still a 50/50 chance of survival. The door shut behind me and there was deafening silence. No cry of Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, no wailing for drinks, snacks or help tying shoelaces. Nothing. It was our youngest son Adams first day at pre-school, meaning he and his older brother Noah, six, would be out of the house until 3.30pm. For the first time in six years, the nest was eerily empty. Every parent feels pride tinged with sadness when their youngest child passes a milestone. But for me, it was compounded by my situation as the primary carer. Id given up my dull, but dependable job selling software to look after our children so my wife Suzi, a teacher, could return to work. Stay-at-home father John Hart (pictured with his two sons Noah, six, and Adam, three) shared the struggles of finding work after his children started school Despite having long craved peace, quiet and a house that stayed tidy for more than 20 seconds, I wasnt able to enjoy these things when I got them. Within minutes, there was a nagging voice in my ear: now you must get a proper job. I was about to discover the real issue when fathers take on the traditional female role. Caring for toddlers and doing housework, Ive learned, are a breeze compared to explaining to an employer that youve taken several years off to raise children, but would now like a job on the same level as the one you had before. Society just about tolerates a stay-at-home dad as long as hes knee-deep in nappies. The moment the children start school, though, youd better find gainful employment sharpish or youre a sponger at best, an abject failure at worst. Of course, its hard enough for mums to return to the workplace, but Ive learned that dads also experience disapproval. I used to be one of the jubilant ones; a champion of men staying at home. I extolled the virtues of being with my children to witness their first wobbly steps, hear their first garbled words (No and burger respectively; thats my boys!). Now, having sent 15 job applications within six months without being invited to a single interview, the smile is dying on my face. This is a growing problem: a recent survey showed men are the primary carers in one-in-seven British families, with the number of stay-at-home dads having doubled in the past 20 years. John (pictured with his wife and children) claims he has applied for 15 jobs and hasn't even been invited to an interview Now this first generation of stay-at-home fathers are realising that this choice is making them less employable. In 2013, a report from Toronto Universitys Rotman School of Management found that hands-on fathers were looked down on by their colleagues, with sociologists at the University of Gothenburg concluding that male-dominated industries such as financial services are the most resistant. I grew up in a traditional home, where my mum looked after me while my dad, a surveyor, went back to work the day after I was born. Indeed, my dad had his doubts about our modern set up. Early on, he said: Deep down, I worry about your career. I hope all your education and experience dont go to waste. Five years on, it seems he had a point. I admit that when I agreed to take the lead on raising our children I didnt foresee any of the issues, including my sons only being at school, from 9am until 3.30pm. With no grandparents nearby, well be lumbered with hefty breakfast club and after-school fees once I do get a job. My wife Suzi, now 35, and I met at university when she was 18 and I was 19. We dated for many years before marrying in 2009. Noah was born two years later. Suzi became a teacher and was able to take the best part of a year off. Although a journalist by trade, Id found myself selling software and was only too keen to take advantage of the shared parental leave on offer. John gave up his job selling software to look after his children so that his wife Suzi, a teacher, could go back to work The decision came down to practicalities. Suzis job was better paid and more stable. However, we should have thought about my career, too. I never struggled looking after the children. From the start, since Noah was bottle-fed for medical reasons rather than breast-fed and Suzi being a heavier sleeper than me it was often me who got up in the night. Toddler groups were a doddle. The mums, greeting a male interloper as a rare curiosity, would tell me to put my feet up and bring me coffee and cake. Our second son, Adam, was born in 2014. Again, Suzi was able to take the best part of a year off work, and I treasure the memory of a happy summer together as a family of four, all picnics and fruit-picking. Suzi and I never discussed what wed do once both boys went to school. Id been doing a little freelance work in the evenings to bring in extra cash, and that kept me fairly busy until Adam started pre-school last September. That was when the nagging voice began. The urge to find a job wasnt so much down to money as a desire to feel more productive. Or to be noticed, as sad as that might sound. Ive learned in the past six years how much your self-esteem is buoyed by success in the workplace. Your children love you unconditionally, but its conditional love that boosts the ego. John (pictured right) says other stay-at-home dad's have faced similar experiences with struggling to find employment after caring for their children full time ends At first there seemed to be plenty of jobs for someone with my experience. Or so I thought. It seems recruiters disagree. And then I found excuses for myself: Im over-qualified; maybe Im under-qualified; or maybe they had someone else in mind. But speaking to other men in a similar position has made me realise that, perhaps, its just that they dont want to hire a former stay-at-home dad. Take Ian Blyth, 41, from Lincolnshire, who spent 12 years looking after his three children. He says the experience destroyed his photography career. I naively thought Id go straight back into work. The reality was different. I would have had to spend 20,000 on new kit and time building up contacts again. And at 41, I didnt have it in me. And having responsibility for the boys caused problems when Ian did find work like the time his sons school called to say he had chicken pox and had to be picked up right away. That meant shutting down an entire photoshoot in the middle of a forest, models, make-up artists and all. I never worked for that client again. Carl Turner, 32, from Leeds, gave up a job in retail to care for his two young daughters, now four and two. He plans to return to work when his youngest starts school but says: Its not going to be easy. Ill have to climb the ladder again and Im not sure I have the energy for that. My CV is bleak and Ive found that society judges you when you say youre a stay-at-home dad. So are we unemployable? Only time will tell. Although I understand why many stay-at-home fathers do regret their choice, I wouldnt trade my time with my sons for any amount of career success. And perhaps, by the time they have children of their own, it wont be such a difficult path to take. Sheku Kanneh-Mason, 19, was one of the stand out stars at the royal wedding The cellist who performed at Prince Harry's wedding to Meghan Markle has admitted it was the first wedding he'd ever been to. Sheku Kanneh-Mason, 19, who was named the BBC's Young Musician of the Year in 2016, said the biggest wedding of the year was what he'd 'imagine a wedding to be'. Speaking to Evening Standard Magazine, Sheku, from Nottingham, recalled the secret meetings he'd had with the now Duke and Duchess of Sussex ahead of the big day, revealing that they 'really cared' about the music played. Meghan had been listening to his debut album Inspiration and made some suggestions about what he could play in St George's Chapel in Windsor. Sheku Kanneh-Mason, 19, stole the show at the royal wedding earlier this month, which he admits was the first wedding he'd ever been to Sheku became a viral sensation when he played three tunes for wedding guests - Maria Theresia von Paradis's Sicilienne, Gabriel Faure's Apres un reve and Franz Schubert's Ave Maria. Twitter users said they had fallen for the music student, and he earned the moniker 'cello bae'. Sheku said: 'I'd never actually been to a wedding before. It was pretty cool. Kind of like I'd imagine a wedding to be. I actually really enjoyed it.' In the run up to the wedding he met Meghan and Harry in St George's Chapel to discuss the music they wanted for the big day. He was personally selected by the royal couple, who had listened to his debut album Inspiration In the run up to the wedding he met Meghan and Harry in St George's Chapel to discuss the music they wanted for the big day He revealed that Meghan had her own ideas about songs and they both very passionate about what would be played. Sheku continued: 'They were really friendly. It was great to talk to them and see how much they cared about what I played.' He previously revealed that he didn't feel nervous ahead of his performance, despite performing in front of millions around the globe. Speaking on ITV's Lorraine, he said: 'Being there was amazing, I don't tend to get nervous before big performance. Sheku learning to play the cello aged six, he won the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2016 at 17 years old Sheku's entire family are very talented, and he played alongside them at a charity concert the first time he met Prince Harry 'This is a performance unlike anything I have done before. The atmosphere was amazing.' Aged 15, he reached the 2015 semi-finals of Britain's Got Talent in a classical music ensemble with four of his siblings. In May 2016 he became the first black winner in the history of the BBC's Young Musician contest. The talented cellist played three tunes for wedding guests Maria Theresia von Paradis's Sicilienne, Gabriel Faure's Apres un reve and Franz Schubert's Ave Maria Sheku's new album Inspiration has also reached the top 20 in the album charts, and he will feature on an album being released for the royal wedding. The teen explained how he first met Prince Harry at a performance for the Halo Charity Trust, where he was playing alongside his family - who all play instruments. 'It was a charity based in Antigua where my family are from, that's where we were taking part and Prince Harry was supporting that, he was there.' Sheku's cello is over 400 years and he keeps it close by to him whenever he's travelling. A New York woman has set off a heated debate on Twitter by boldly asserting her opinion on of all things chicken fingers. Last week, comedian and writer Alison Leiby took to the social media platform to fire off a call to action for her followers. And while her charge was hardly political, it's certainly garnered a vocal reaction. 'We, as a society, need to stop classifying chicken fingers as a kids' menu food. It's time,' she wrote. Love me, tender! A debate over chicken fingers has erupted on social media Voice of truth: Alison Leiby tweeted that 'as a society,' we 'need to stop classifying chicken fingers as a kids' menu food Popular opinion: Thousands of people have liked the seriously-written tweet, and hundreds have voiced agreement Must-have: Many spoke of adults who love chicken fingers and like to order them all the time Says who!? Quite a few expressed frustration that they are judged for their food choices Name switch: Sometimes, it's all about the language as this person explained that calling them 'chicken tenders' makes them sound more acceptable Duh: This person agreed, except pushed the joke by giving them cutesy nicknames Alison's call has clearly resonated with Twitter users, who have so far liked the tweet over 37,000 times. Hundreds have left comments, too, most of which are hugely supportive and in agreement. 'I've never agreed more with a tweet in my life,' a man named James Brown replied, while comedian Jared Logan added: 'I know adults who eat chicken fingers almost exclusively.' 'It is time for the judgement to stop...I will order chicken nuggets if I want to order chicken nuggets,' wrote a woman named Zoe Meier, picking up the same deadpan tone Alison used to address the 'serious' issue. Some clear fans of chicken fingers took the propaganda approach, explaining that the way to make the food appropriate for adults is to choose language that sounds more mature. Tastes like chicken! It's unclear why exactly chicken fingers are considered 'kids' food' Counterpoint! Some people, however, disagreed vehemently Keep it the way it is! Their disagreement was not due to a dislike for chicken fingers, but a desire to keep prices down and limit side-dishes to fries Bargain: Because they are often on the children's menu, chicken fingers tend to be cheaper than adult entrees Poll Should chicken fingers remain on the kids' menu? Absolutely - they're for children No! Adults love them Don't mind as long as they stay the same price Should chicken fingers remain on the kids' menu? Absolutely - they're for children 21 votes No! Adults love them 21 votes Don't mind as long as they stay the same price 55 votes Now share your opinion 'Its only a "kids food" when you call them chicken fingers. Call them "chicken tenders" and voila; adult food!' wrote one person. 'We call them tendies now, because we are mature adults,' added a man named Colin Sholes. However, there were plenty of people who took issue with her opinion but not at all because they don't think chicken fingers are OK for grown-ups to eat. 'Dude no! Once it stops being on the kids menu they'll stop charging the kids menu price,' wrote one budget diner. 'I'll accept the disapproving looks and the mini- pack of crayons w/maze if it saves me 3 bucks.' 'No no no. Then they will charge me adult prices and Im not ready for that yet,' added another. Clucking clever: This man joked that Alison's tweet provided a 'nugget of wisdom' And tots, too! This woman shared a funny story about ordering chicken fingers at a wedding and being the envy of other guests And another thing... This person takes issue with 'boneless wings' A man named Michael Hodgkins not only decried what adding them to the adult menu would mean for the price, but also how it would change the way they are served. 'Rrestaurants will start pairing them with zucchini and seasonal veggies,' he wrote. 'Who wants that?!? They are the hero of the kids menu - let them live as kings.' A few commennters pointed out that while there still may be a 'stigma' attached to ordering chicken fingers or tenders as an adult, there are some restaurants that specialize in the dish and cater to people of all ages. In New York City, there's Sticky's Finger Joint, which makes 'gourmet' chicken fingers. Winnipeg, Manitoba has Mitzis Chicken Finger Restaurant. And Raising Cane's, a chain, has locations across the US. Surgeons spent 10 hours removing a 33lb (14.9kg) tumour from the back of a man's neck after it had been left untreated for nearly 50 years. Zhao Xingfu, 64, said the growth, known as a lipoma, first appeared 47 years ago and was initially 'the size of an egg'. Aged just 17, Mr Xingfu, from Panzhou City, China, ignored the mass due to it being painless and him being unable to afford treatment. After the weight of the tumour left Mr Xingfu struggling to walk, his son Zhao Jianjiang sought the help of Dr Dong Shixiang, from the Guizhou Tumour Hospital. Now at home a week after the surgery, Mr Xingfu is expected to make a full recovery. Despite feeling 'relieved' that the operation was a success, Mr Xingfu jokingly said: 'I'm not used to it not being there yet!' Zhao Xingfu had a 33lb (14.9kg) tumour removed from the back of his neck after 47 years An X-ray shows the size of the growth, which was making it difficult for him to walk A week on from the operation, Mr Kumar is 'relieved' he no longer carries the tumour WHAT IS A LIPOMA? Lipomas are non-cancerous lumps caused by an overgrowth of fat cells. They can form anywhere on the body, but are most common on the neck, shoulders, abdomen and back. They are usually just under the skin, shaped like a dome and soft to touch. They occur in about one in every 1,000 people in the US. and about one in 100 people in the UK. Doctors are unsure of what causes lipomas, but believe it may be due to an inherited faulty gene or physical trauma. Most do not cause any pain unless they are deep in the body and press on nerves or organs. If a lipoma affects the bowels, it may cause constipation and nausea. Most lipomas do not need removing, but surgery may be necessary if the growth is large, causing symptoms or unsightly. Source: Cleveland Clinic Advertisement 'I became accustomed to it' Mr Jianjiang had never before seen his father without the growth. He said: 'I've only known my father with the large tumour, so I gradually became accustomed to it.' With the help of family, Mr Jianjiang raised enough money to pay for his father's surgery. Dr Dong said: 'In all my years, I'd never seen such a large tumour.' He cut away around 95 percent of Mr Xingfu's growth, which is expected to leave him free of the condition for the rest of his life. Since being discharged, Mr Xingfu is continuing his recovery at home. Mr Xingfu first developed an egg-sized growth when he was just 17 years old Due to it being painless and him being unable to afford treatment, Mr Xingfu ignored it The huge tumour had a circumference of 100cm, or 40 inches Dr Dong Shixiang (pictured) stepped in after Mr Xingfu's son went to him for help It took surgeons 10 hours to remove 95 per cent of Mr Xingfu's growth Dr Shixiang said Mr Xingfu's tumour was the largest mass he had ever come across A cocktail of drugs that replaces lost brain cells could restore memories in Alzheimers patients and reduce tremors in Parkinsons sufferers, new research suggests. Just eight weeks after being injected into the brains of mice, the medication mixture causes up to 90 per cent of 'support cells' to turn into neurons without any side effects, a Chinese study found. Neurons are nerve cells that carry information as electrical signals. They are the main cell type broken down in Alzheimer's, which causes memory loss, and Parkinson's disease, which leads to tremors. Although exciting, some experts doubt whether the drug cocktail will be able to replace the hundreds of thousands of brain cells lost as a result of Parkinson's. Excessive neurone production may also trigger conditions such as epilepsy, they warn. A cocktail of drugs that replaces lost brain cells could restore memories in Alzheimers (stock) IS THERE A PILL FOR ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE? A breakthrough Alzheimer's drug edges scientists one step closer to a cure, new research suggested in November 2017. Taken twice a day, a tablet, known as LMTX, significantly improves dementia sufferers' brain injuries to the extent their MRI scans resemble those of healthy people after just nine months, a study found. Lead author Professor Gordon Wilcock from the University of Oxford told MailOnline: 'I haven't seen such brain injury recovery before after a drug treatment.' LMTX, which is under investigation, also significantly improves patients' abilities to carry out everyday tasks such as bathing and dressing themselves, while also boosting their capabilities to correctly name objects and remember the date, the research adds. The drug contains a chemical that dissolves protein 'tangles' in the brain that clump together to form plaques in the region associated with memory, according to its manufacturer TauRx Pharmaceuticals. Dissolving these tangles and preventing the formation of new plaques may slow or even halt memory loss in dementia sufferers, the pharma company adds. The researchers, from the universities of Oxford and Aberdeen, analysed 800 Alzheimer's patients across 12 countries. The study's participants received either 100mg or 4mg LMTX tablets twice a day for 18 months. They were tested on their ability to name objects, follow commands such as 'make a fist', recall items from a list of 10 and identify their name, the time and date. Their ability to eat without help, use a telephone, wash and dress themselves, and control their bowel and bladder was also assessed. MRI scans monitored the participants' brain injury. Advertisement 'It would be a huge step forward' Dr Matthew Grubb, from King's College London, who was not involved in the study, told the New Scientist: 'If it holds up its absolutely amazing, and has a lot of potential applications and exciting consequences. 'If youve got a degenerating brain, for example in Alzheimers disease, and you could get the brain to regrow neurons itself, it would be a huge step forward.' As well as safety concerns, some experts doubt the treatment could restore lost memories but add it may enable dementia patients to make new ones. Scientists not involved in the study also believe very specific cells will need to be targeted due to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's having different causes. Up to 90% of cells transformed The researchers, from Peking University, injected the brains of mice with a cocktail of drugs. It is unclear what the medications were. Around eight weeks later, the scientists analysed slices of the rodents' brains. Results suggest between 80 and 90 per cent of the astrocytes at the injection sites started to resemble neurones. Astrocytes are star-shaped cells in the central nervous system that support neurones. This astrocyte change involved an alteration in the cells' shapes, genetic activities and electrical signalling. The researchers are planning to investigate the effects of the drug cocktail on the recovery of mice that have suffered a stroke. Insomnia causes the brain to eat itself and may lead to Alzheimers This comes after research released earlier this month suggested insomnia causes the brain to eat itself. Sleep is important to clear away brain cell 'wear and tear', however, a study found insufficient shut eye causes the system to go into overdrive and also remove healthy nerve cells. Study author Dr Michele Bellesi, from Marche Polytechnic University, Ancona, Italy, said: 'We show for the first time that portions of synapses are literally eaten by astrocytes because of sleep loss.' Synapses allow nerve impulses to be communicated between cells, while astrocytes 'clean' the brain. An 'unavoidable' chemical used in soap and Colgate toothpaste may boost the risk of bowel cancer, scientists fear. Trials on mice revealed triclosan may lead to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) by altering their gut microbiota. IBD - the umbrella term for the agonising colitis and Crohn's disease - is a known risk factor of deadly bowel cancer. Triclosan triggered inflammation in the colons of mice - a cause of both conditions, according to University of Massachusetts Amherst scientists. The trial gives the first evidence that triclosan - which is not banned in the UK but is banned in some products in the US - can have adverse effects on gut health. Doctors today called for 'urgent' investigations to determine the health effects of the ingredient because it is still so widely used. Triclosan, an antibacterial ingredient subject of huge criticism in recent years, may lead to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) The chemical can be detected in 75 per cent of urine samples, according to the results of a recent US Government survey. Food and Drug Administration officials banned the use of triclosan in soap and body washes two years ago. No such ban exists in the UK. They declared antibacterial soaps containing triclosan were no more effective than hot water and regular soap at killing bugs. However, it can still be found in more than 2,000 products, including toothpastes - such as Colgate Total - and even children's toys. Animal studies have shown triclosan can potentially alter hormone systems in both men and women and led to miscarriages in female rats. HOW DANGEROUS IS TRICLOSAN? Food and Drug Administration officials banned the use of triclosan in soap and body washes two years ago. No such ban exists in the UK. They declared antibacterial soaps containing triclosan were no more effective than hot water and regular soap at killing bugs. However, it can still be found in more than 2,000 products, including toothpastes - such as Colgate Total - and even children's toys. Animal studies have shown triclosan can potentially alter hormone systems in both men and women and led to miscarriages in female rats. Other trials have linked it to fueling antibiotic resistance considered by some experts to be a bigger threat to humanity than global warming. Advertisement Other trials have linked it to fueling antibiotic resistance considered by some experts to be a bigger threat to humanity than global warming. The new experiment, published in Science Translational Medicine, adds to a body of emerging evidence that shows it can damage gut health. Mice were exposed to low amounts of triclosan for a short period of time before they were analysed by researchers. Scans revealed the ingredient caused them low-grade colonic inflammation and worsened colitis - one form of IBD. Further inspections showed it also exaggerated colitis-associated colon cancer. Dr Guodong Zhang, senior author of the study, said: These results, for the first time, suggest triclosan could have adverse effects on gut health. Haixia Yang, co-author, said because this compound is so widely used there is an urgent need to evaluate its impact on gut health. He explained the results could open doors for further regulation over triclosan. Hang Xiao, another co-author of the study, said: Treatment with triclosan significantly increased disease development of IBD in the mice. He suggested IBD patients may need to reduce exposure to this compound. Figures suggest the condition strikes around 300,000 people in the UK and 1.6 million in the US. The scientists were supported by a team from five different US universities, including Harvard, and two from China. Scientists may soon be able to combat aging by ironing out the wrinkles inside our cells. A team from the University of Virginia made the discovery during a study investigating fatty liver disease, and linked the disease with cell membrane wrinkles that appear in the nucleus, where DNA is made. These wrinkles multiply as we get older due to a protein deficiency, and cause fatty liver disease by preventing the cells from synthesizing protein properly, turning ordinary liver cells into fat. But now scientists think we have a way of smoothing out these wrinkles by adding the protein back. This may even help fight the effects of aging on the body. A new study reports that we may be able to combat aging by ironing out the 'wrinkles' in cells How they conducted the study The University of Virgina study, which was published in the journal Aging Cell, investigated fatty liver disease, which is caused by fat building up inside the liver, impairing its function, and possibly leading to liver failure. Professor Irina Bochkis, one of the study authors, discovered the creation of fat in the liver is caused by the appearance of wrinkles in the nucleus of the cell. These wrinkles increase in number as we get older, and interfere with our cells ability to produce DNA. 'We have the same DNA in every single cell but each cell is different,' professor Bochkis explained. 'So how does that work? Well, actually, certain genes need to be on in the liver and they have to be turned off in the brain, for example, and vice versa. 'If they're not turned off appropriately, then you have problems.' 'When your nuclear membrane is no longer functioning properly, it can release the DNA that's supposed to be turned off,' she said. 'So then your little liver cell becomes a little fat cell.' She says this process eventually leads to a liver that resembles 'Swiss cheese'. 'Wrinkles' in cells increase as we get older, and interfere with DNA production (stock image) Reversing the aging process But there is hope that this process can be reversed, professor Bochkis says, and help recreate a more youthful liver. The wrinkling in the cell membrane is caused by a lack of a lamin, a cellular protein. Adding this protein back to the cell membrane can help reduce the wrinkles, 'like Retinol helps smooth face wrinkles', she says. The problem is how to get the proteins to the cells. Professor Bochkis and her team hope to use modified viruses to transport the protein to the liver. While using modified viruses to deliver treatments is not a new procedure, Bochkis says it could be especially easy for their purposes, because of the role the organ plays in detoxifying the body. Professor Bochkis is optimistic about the future of their research. 'You're going to have normal, healthy cells, and they will appropriately express the genes that should be expressed. 'You're going to eradicate the stuff that shouldn't be there,' she said. 'Every time I give this talk to colleagues, they say, "Do you think this is a universal mechanism?" In my opinion, I think it is.' Tennessee is the latest US state to report an outbreak of hepatitis A with around 14 cases confirmed in Nashville since December. Over the last two years, a resurgence of the infectious disease has hit at least eight states including Michigan, Kentucky, Utah and West Virginia. The Metro Public Health Department (MPHD) began issuing free vaccines for the potentially deadly virus at three public health centers on Tuesday. However, the city likely does not have enough vaccine doses to meet demand, meaning that the outbreak could spread and put more of Nashville's residents at risk. Tennessee is the latest US state to report an outbreak of hepatitis A with around 14 cases confirmed in Nashville since December According to an agency email obtained by The Tennessean, the local health department currently has about 1,150 doses, which covers less than five percent of the at-risk population, as many as 600,000 people. Risk factors include anyone who has not been vaccinated, use of recreational drugs, living in a household with an infected person and being a sexual partner of someone and affected person, according to the World Health Organization. Brian Todd, spokesman for the MPHD, said the agency had some doses on hand and received an additional 1,000 doses from the Tennessee Department of Health on Thursday. What is hepatitis A and how can it be treated? Hepatitis A is a viral liver disease that can have both minor and severe symptoms for the person infected. It is primarily spread when a person who isn't vaccinated ingests food or water that has been contaminated with feces of an infected individual. The virus is one of the most frequent causes for foodborne infections. Symptoms The incubation period of hepatitis A is normally 14 to 28 days. People can experience: Fever Loss of appetite Diarrhea Nausea Dark-colored urine Jaundice Acute liver failure Who is at risk? Anyone who has not been vaccinated or has never been infected with the hepatitis A virus is at risk. Other factors that increase risk include: Poor sanitation Lack of clean water Recreational drug use Living with an infected person or having sexual relations with one Traveling to areas with high risk without a vaccination Treatment There is no specific treatment for hepatitis A. It may take some people a couple weeks to a couple months to recover from the symptoms. Doctors recommend everyone to get a vaccination to help prevent the risk of getting infected by the virus. Source: World of Health Advertisement 'We still have a good supply of vaccine, and additional vaccine is available as needed,' he said in a statement. Hepatitis A is a virus that attacks the body through liver inflammation. It is highly contagious and is typically spread through sexual contact, needle sharing, or by consuming food that has been contaminated by someone infected with the virus. Symptoms include fever, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and dark urine. Nashville has seen an average of two cases of the disease per year over the past few years, according to a news release from the health department. Now, seven-times that many have been confirmed in a matter of months. Those who are at risk of developing hepatitis A include drug users, men who have sex with men and homeless individuals. The virus can be spread through contact with objects, food, or drinks contaminated by the feces of a person who has the virus. This extends to sexual activity or contact with fingers that have the virus on it. Public health officials in Michigan, Indiana and California highlighted these factors while Arizona's outbreak was largely restricted to homeless individuals who sought services at the same shelter. Vaccine administrators in Nashville will be prioritizing drug users and men who have had male sexual partners because 12 of the 14 known cases appear to be connected with these groups. Occasionally, a common source of exposure can be found. One example was in Utah where as many as 2,000 people were exposed to the virus at a 7-Eleven after an employee diagnosed with the virus came to work during their infectious period. Nashville Metro Health director Dr Bill Paul sent out a mass email on Thursday saying he expected that the outbreak would only increase in size. 'We anticipate that this outbreak will get bigger and require a vigorous response over many months by many organizations,' Dr Paul wrote. Since January 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued hepatitis A alerts in Arkansas, California, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Utah and West Virginia. The agency says the best way to prevent the spread of infection is to practice good personal hygiene, such as washing your hands, and to receive the hepatitis A vaccine, which is given as two shots that are six months apart. In the US, there are three FDA approved hepatitis A vaccines: Vaqta, Havrix, and Twinrix. Lustrously-maned hedge funder Pierre Lagrange, owner of Savile Row tailor Huntsman, says hed love to dress James Bond but is unwilling to waive the bill as film makers would expect. Kitting out the famous secret agent is a costly business. Around 30 suits are required for each action sequence, which in Huntsmans case would cost around 150,000. Meanwhile, Belgian-born Pierre is unimpressed with Bonds current threads, which are created by Texan designer Tom Ford. Too skinny and too tight, he scoffs. Lustrously-maned hedge funder Pierre Lagrange, owner of Savile Row tailor Huntsman, says hed love to dress James Bond but is unwilling to waive the bill as film makers would expect News that the Bank of England and the Treasury are at loggerheads over Brexit isnt totally surprising. Governor Mark Carney and Chancellor Philip Hammond rarely speak to one another, a reliable Threadneedle Street source informs me, though perhaps thats more encouraging than some suggest. The Bank is supposed to be unscrupulously independent, after all. Relations between the governor and Hammonds predecessor George Osborne, to whom Carney owed his 880,000 a year job, were discomfortingly cosy. New boy Dixons Carphone chief Alex Baldocks ungainly trashing of his portly predecessor Seb James, after being forced to issue a profit warning yesterday just eight weeks into his 2million-a-year job, is awkward for his chairman, ex-trade minister Lord Livingston. When James, 52, announced he was off to Boots in January, wee, Scots-born Livingston, 53, hosed him in treacle, remarking: Dixons Carphone is a much stronger company today since he arrived. Female attendees of next months Cannes Lion advertising festival on the sunny Cote dAzur are encouraged to dress all in black as a statement against sexual misconduct within the industry. One high-heeled ad exec groans: Havent we suffered enough without now having to endure heatstroke? Amstrad mogul and East End boy done good Lord Sugar explains how he acquired his 1.3billion fortune: I bought car aerials for 1, sold them for 1.20. Went on and bought more, sold them... Then my uncle died and left me 500million. Boom, boom! For further hilarity, his Lordships currently available for after-dinner speaking at 25,000 a pop. The prospect of new elections in Italy as early as July sent shivers around European financial markets yesterday after a sell-off in Italian bonds sent yields to their highest level for years. Ten-year bonds were hammered with yields spiking above 3 per cent, trading at their widest gap to German bonds in over four years. These are big swings. Yields move inversely to a bonds price so the higher yields reflect how nervous investors are about lending to Italys government, whose debt is about 130 per cent of GDP. Higher yields means the cost of borrowing for Italys government becomes more expensive. Maggie Pagano says the prospect of new elections in Italy as early as July sent shivers around European financial markets yesterday The bond sell-off hit Italian banks the hardest, since they are exposed to government debt. There was blood throughout the equity market with Italys benchmark index, the FTSE MIB, down at its lowest for over a year. The euro was weaker too. Investors fear the two biggest political parties, the Five Star Movement and League, will turn a snap election into a referendum about Italys place in Europe, leading to a bigger combined majority for the anti-establishment parties. The irony of the impasse, caused by President Sergio Mattarella blocking them from taking power by vetoing their choice of a eurosceptic economics minister, is not lost. Indeed, Mattarellas decision to veto their candidate, Paolo Savona, looks set to backfire spectacularly, as it can only harden support for Five Star and League. Whats also ironic is that Savona might have been the cleverer compromise candidate, since the former academic and industry minister has never demanded Italy should leave the euro but that it should not be ruled out. With some justification, Five Star and League can now claim the president has carried out what amounts to a soft coup detat on behalf of the Brussels elite. Instead, there is more uncertainty, not less. Traders predict a big unwinding for Italian bonds while the ratings agencies are raising alarm bells over debt levels. The worry is whether the latest dumping of Italian bonds is an Italian problem, or one that spills over into the eurozone. Pagano says irony of the impasse, caused by President Sergio Mattarella blocking the Five Star Movement and League from 'taking power by vetoing their choice of a eurosceptic economics minister, is not lost' Italy is not the only country with problems. In Spain, Mariano Rajoy faces a no-confidence vote on Friday after members of his party were convicted of corruption. This could lead to Rajoys minority centre-right party being ousted, and replaced by the Socialist party. Spanish stocks are also falling and bond yields are up. Yet there is not a peep of concern from Europes leaders. You would almost think they are willing the EU to implode. Emmanuel Macron talks about more Europe not less. Angela Merkel stays shtum while Jean-Claude Juncker has, rather late in the day, said that Italy deserves respect. They are behaving with breathtaking arrogance and should start listening, pronto. Dixons dilemma Like a chef moving into a new kitchen, Dixons Carphones new boss, Alex Baldock, is chucking out everything but the sink. He is closing shops, sharpening up electrical goods, pruning costs and hopes to improve relations with mobile operators which supply the chain with phones. It cant have been fun delivering a profits warning with his first trading figures, or to see shares plunge. But he is being bold by cutting flab, and admitting that changing consumer phone habits are hurting sales. Maggie says 'like a chef moving into a new kitchen, Dixons Carphones new boss, Alex Baldock, is chucking out everything but the sink' Its been obvious for some time that even the trendiest iPhone users, who not so long ago queued all night for the latest model, are holding on to older phones rather than upgrading them. Baldock claims the problems are fixable, but some serious challenges, such as stronger competition, may be beyond his control. Wielding the knife will not halt the chill wind blowing through the high street. Top-down confidence Why hasnt Steve Clarke, chief executive of WH Smith, hit back at criticism that the chain is rated the worst UK retailer? It was horribly close-to-the-bone stuff customers say shops are out-of-date, products are expensive and staff are rude. Surely Clarke should respond, saying that he will listen to the criticism and, if necessary, help staff with customer courses? Not a word. Clarke has admitted to being publicity phobic, and only gives interviews with results. He should reconsider. By saying nothing, he hurts morale further. Confidence flows from the top down. Royal Bank of Scotland's chief financial officer Ewen Stevenson has unexpectedly resigned from the bank. Details of his next move are sparse, and all is known is that Mr Stevenson will 'take up an opportunity elsewhere.' While it it not known when the finance chief will leave the bank exactly, a search for a replacement will begin straight away with an 'orderly handover' being hoped for. Stepping down: Royal Bank of Scotland's chief financial officer, Ewen Stevenson, has unexpectedly resigned from the bank Government ministers are reportedly preparing to sell a 3billion stake in RBS this week, putting it on the final path to a return to private ownership. The Government is set to lose billions of pounds on the sale. RBS shares have plunged to 290p since the state intervened and paid 502p per share back in 2008. In early morning trading, RBS' share price was down 0.73 per cent or 2.05p to 277.95p. Preparations; Government ministers are preparing to sell a 3billion stake in RBS this week Commenting on Mr Stevenson's departure, Howard Davies, RBS' chairman, said: 'The board and I are sorry to learn that Ewen has decided to move elsewhere. He will go with our thanks for a job well done and our good wishes.' Chief executive Ross McEwan added: 'For the past four years Ewen has worked tirelessly with me and my executive team to make RBS a much simpler, safer and more customer-focused business and to resolve a number of major legacy challenges. 'When Ewen leaves RBS he will go with my enormous thanks and best wishes. He has been a fantastic CFO.' Mr Stevenson's departure announcement comes as the bank gears up for its annual general meeting in Edinburgh today. The bank's board are likely to face a barrage of questions on issues such as when dividend payments will start again and the timing of its eventual privatisation. After being bailed out by taxpayers during the financial crisis, the government still owns a 72 per cent stake in the bank. Earlier this month, RBS revealed it planned to close 162 branches across the UK, putting nearly 800 jobs at risk. Today, Money Mail raises the alarm over the safety of the personal information that TSB Bank customers use to log into internet banking. Fraudsters appear to have obtained reams of personal details, passwords and account numbers belonging to TSB customers - and are using them to drain their accounts. Last week, we revealed that in the wake of the bank's IT meltdown last month - which followed a bungled transfer of accounts to a new IT system - scores of TSB customers were being robbed of their life savings. Fraudsters: They appear to have obtained reams of personal details on TSB customers For the fraudsters to steal money, they either have to hack into someone's account or get hold of the information that a customer uses to log in. To log in with TSB Bank, customers need their online banking ID number, their password and memorable information. But dozens of fraud victims who have contacted Money Mail insist that they have never handed this information to crooks. One customer says he has never shared his password with his wife, let alone a stranger. In some cases, customers say they have had their accounts emptied without even being contacted by a fraudster. All this raises the prospect that the private details of TSB customers may have fallen into the hands of criminals. Many customers are being called by sophisticated con artists pretending to work for the bank's fraud department. Typically, they are told there has been suspicious activity on their account or they are asked to confirm whether a particular transaction is genuine. The customer is then told to read out a six-digit code that is sent to their mobile phone as part of what the fraudster claims is the bank's 'routine security checks'. Many customers are being called by sophisticated con artists pretending to work for the bank's fraud department Money Mail can reveal that these are in fact the 'one-time passcodes' that TSB requires to authorise a payment out of a customer's account. The bank says it introduced this text message verification system on April 22. Crucially, to generate a code, someone must already be logged into a customer's online bank account - which suggests that the crooks could be possession of customers' ID numbers, their secret passwords and memorable information. TSB says no customer information was leaked in the bank's bungled computer systems upgrade in April - indicating that crooks are getting hold of the information another way. One theory is that they are exploiting TSB's system and changing passwords and usernames. To change these details online, customers are asked for their full name, date of birth, postcode, account number and sort code. The bank then calls a phone number registered to their account to verify the changes. Some victims claim their mobile phones stopped working just before their accounts were emptied by crooks. Experts say it is possible that their mobile phones were hijacked. TSB says no customer information was leaked in the bank's bungled computer systems upgrade in April Over the past two years, bank fraudsters have been known to use a sophisticated technique to divert text messages and calls to their own phones. This enables them to intercept any codes needed to change passwords or make payments. Another theory is victims may have been tricked into opening an email that appears to come from TSB and clicked onto a link. Cliff Moyce, head of financial practice at DataArt, a consultancy, warns: 'Plenty of personal details can be gleaned from sources such as Facebook and other social media. And if fraudsters have enough information to pose as the customer, they might be able to trick staff into handing over other details on the phone.' TSB customer Bernie Wright, a taxi driver from Essex, is adamant that he's never given any personal information to a stranger, or been a victim of computer hacking. Yet on May 8, fraudsters stole 10,000 he'd set aside for his tax bill, leaving just 52p in his current account and 1.52 in savings. Bernie, 65, says he only noticed the missing money the next time he logged into his account. He says his daughter used to work at the fraud department for a big bank, so he follows all the rules to keep his information safe, including never opening or responding to unsolicited emails and hanging up on cold-callers. He uses the same computer to access his Barclays bank accounts, and these have not been affected. 'There must be something going wrong at TSB,' he says. 'Even my wife doesn't know my password, but the fraudsters managed to get past all of TSB's checks.' A number of victims have received letters from TSB explaining that the bank's fraud detection systems failed to spot suspicious transactions. The bank would not confirm how many letters had been sent. Action Fraud, the UK's fraud and cybercrime reporting service, says it has received 51 reports of fraud from TSB customers since the bank's IT meltdown. Together, victims have lost 189,000 or 3,708 each on average. However, the true figure is likely to be far higher as many customers do not report scams to the fraud body, or they take months to do so, and many victims have struggled to get through to TSB. One customer said she had spent a total of 16 hours on hold, while others have waited five hours before being cut off or told the fraud team had gone home. Mr Moyce at DataArt says: 'The bank is in breach of its banking licence. 'You cannot take people's money and then not provide the service promised.' A spokeswoman for TSB says: 'Protecting our customers' information is our number one priority. 'We are working with the police and anti-fraud agencies to ensure customers don't become a victim of fraud, whether they bank with us in branch, online or via the phone. 'We also have a specialist team dedicated to investigating the issues reported. 'Meanwhile our commitment is absolutely clear: no customer will be left out of pocket as a result of the recent IT issues.' amelia.murray@dailymail.co.uk Ohio police seized 55 pounds of marijuana from a 'tenant' of a home owned by Cincinnati Bengals star Dre Kirkpatrick. Jarrod Blair, 36, who had been living in Tarragon Court, has been charged with marijuana trafficking after police executed a search warrant to search the residence on April 10. Authorities said the search stemmed from a traffic stop by Illinois State Police earlier in the day. Ohio police seized 55 pounds of marijuana from a 'tenant' by the name of Jarrod Blair (left), 36, at a home owned by Cincinnati Bengals star Dre Kirkpatrick (right) Blair, 36, who had been living in Tarragon Court (pictured), has been charged with marijuana trafficking after police executed a search warrant to search the residence on April 10 During the traffic stop, officers noticed a strong marijuana odor and 'during a subsequent probable cause search, approximately 55 pounds of marijuana was recovered from the trunk,' according to a search warrant obtained by WLWT. A woman in the vehicle told police that she was a drug courier and was 'paid $4,000 to deliver the drugs and will be given another $4,000 upon her return to California'. She said she was heading to Tarragon Court, a property purchased by Kirkpatrick two weeks before the drug bust at the residence. Police said the woman agreed to work with police and make the delivery. Upon searching the home that night, West Chester police found that Blair 'did possess approximately 55 pounds of marijuana located in his kitchen' in suitcases. According to the station, authorities also found eight cellphones and other electronic devices in the home. Blair was pulled over in February after he left the house and began taking 'evasive driving actions when observing a marked police cruiser to avoid being stopped'. Since February, police have been keeping a close eye on the home after marijuana residue was found in the car along with $1,000. Kirkpatrick's agent said Blair was a tenant at the rental property Kirkpatrick owns. The agent said Kirkpatrick isn't a target of the investigation and is assisting West Chester police Kirkpatrick was a Bengals first round pick in 2012 shortly after a marijuana possession charge was dropped against him During that particular traffic stop, Blair was allegedly speaking to Kirkpatrick via Facetime. Kirkpatrick's agent said Blair was a tenant at the rental property Kirkpatrick owns. The agent said Kirkpatrick isn't a target of the investigation and is assisting West Chester police. Blair has been charged with drug trafficking and drug possession. Kirkpatrick, who signed a $52.5million contract extension with the Bengals in March 2017, purchased a home in Cincinnati's Indian Hill neighborhood for $1.9million in June 2017. He was a Bengals' first round pick in 2012 shortly after a marijuana possession charge was dropped against him, according to MSN. The former Alabama Crimson Tide cornerback, who was arrested in January 2012, was a passenger in a rental car driven by former Tide defensive back Chris Rogers. Kirkpatrick admitted to being present when Rogers purchased drugs, but said he didn't know drugs had been bought. This photo shows two people in happier times, a long way removed from the present day where they are currently charged with murdering a butcher. Bruce Saunders, 54, died when he was allegedly fed through an industrial woodchipper at a property near Gympie, in Queensland's east, on November 12 last year. Mr Saunders' former lover Sharon Graham, 57, was on Tuesday charged with the murder of Mr Saunders, and allegedly attempting to pervert the course of justice. Greg Lee Roser, 59, and Peter John Koenig, 61, who were working with Mr Saunders on the day he died, were charged with the same offences and remanded in custody. Police will allege that Graham, who has been romantically linked to all three men, 'counselled' Roser and Koenig on how to commit the horrific crime, The Courier Mail reports. Scroll down for video This is a photo of Sharon Graham and Greg Roster who were both arrested and charged with the alleged murder of a Queensland butcher who was shredded alive in woodchipper In the months leading up to Mr Saunders' alleged murder, photos of Graham and Roser together were regularly posted by the pair to social media. One photo shared by Mr Roser on April 11 last year, just seven months before Mr Saunders' death, showed them gazing into each other's eyes. Graham and Mr Saunders had previously dated, and she was reportedly still living at the victim's home until her arrest on Tuesday. In the months after the alleged murder, Graham and Roser continued to be upfront on social media. On his Facebook page, Roser said he was 'trying to deal with life the best way I can'. While Graham was less direct about herself, she made a statement by saying: 'those who hesitate have lost'. Mr Saunders' former lover Sharon Graham, 57, (pictured) was on Tuesday charged with the murder of Mr Saunders, and attempting to pervert the course of justice Graham (pictured) appears less direct in her 'introduction', saying 'those who hesitate have lost' Graham, Roser and Koenig fronted Maroochydore Magistrates Court separately on Tuesday to face their charges. Police will allege the three co-defendants were known associates and 'conspired together to commit this offence'. They will also reportedly allege Ms Graham masterminded the alleged killing, despite the initial claims that it was a tragic accident. The trio also attended Mr Saunders' funeral, where a tearful Graham was comforted by the victim's son. Bruce Saunders, 54, (pictured) died when he was allegedly put through an industrial woodchipper at a Goomboorian property in November Two people have been arrested over the gruesome death of a man whose body was allegedly fed through a woodchipper - police officers are seen taking one of the men into custody this week Alleged victim Bruce Saunders is pictured with a former love interest, Sharon Graham When police were called to the property on November 12, they described the scene as 'horrific'. Gympie Police acting inspector Paul Algie said at the time it was 'one of the worst incident scenes I've ever seen'. 'It was actually quite horrific. His friends discovered him as he became entangled and attempted to extract him from the shredder and were unable to do so. 'They're obviously quite traumatised now.' The death was originally treated as an accident, but police opened a murder investigation when new details came to light. Koenig (left) and Roser (centre) have been arrested over the death of Mr Saunders (Mr Saunders' former love interest Sharon Graham is pictured right) Mr Saunders was working on a property on Tanana Road clearing vegetation with the two men when he died The three workers were lending a hand to a recently widowed woman who lived at the Gympie property. When officers returned to the homestead to investigate, they allegedly discovered fragments of human remains. They also allegedly discovered clothing and parts of a mobile phone they believe also went through the machine. Detectives are investigating several possible motives including a love triangle gone wrong, Gympie Times reported. Gympie Police acting inspector Paul Algie said at the time it was 'one of the worst incident scenes I've ever seen' (victim Bruce Saunders left and right) Detectives are seen at the Gympie property, where they allegedly discovered human remains Mr Saunders owned and operated a family butcher shop in Bundaberg, north of Gympie, before moving to Nambour in 2016. He reportedly moved from Bundaberg after the break down of a relationship, before starting another relationship in Nambour. Mr Saunders' friends and family were left devastated by the suspected murder of a man they said was always willing to help others. Police officers have arrested two people over the alleged murder of the Queensland man When officers returned to the Gympie property to investigate, they allegedly found fragments of the human body and bloody clothes (pictured is the local area) Maryborough Detective Inspector Gary Pettiford said on Tuesday Mr Saunders' family was devastated but relieved after murder charges were laid. 'The family is very relieved. They've been excellent throughout the whole process. They've been patient and very trusting of the police to do our job,' he said. 'They have been briefed and are very thankful.' Det Insp Pettiford said the family was dealing well with a very difficult situation. 'They're obviously very upset today but obviously very thankful that this stage of the operation is complete,' he said. A young boy was denied a place at a secondary school where his two sisters study - because admission rules bar him from the sibling policy. David Scott, 11, has two older siblings studying at Royal Wootton Bassett Academy, Wilts, where he expected to get a place. His eldest sister Sammie, 18, will take her A-Level exams this year and middle sister Georgia, 16, is in Year 11. But their mother Fiona was stunned to be told the girls would not be classed as David's siblings - because Sammie will have left by the time David starts school in September, and Georgia will be entering sixth form. David Scott (centre) has two older siblings Sammie (left) and Georgia (right) studying at Royal Wootton Bassett Academy, Wilts, where he expected to get a place The family live in the west side of Swindon, Wilts, and even though the school accepts children from that part of town, they are just a few streets away from falling into the catchment area. They are therefore subject to the admission policy for children coming from outside the school's designated area. The policy states: 'A child is considered under this criterion if a sibling is attending the school at the deadline date and where the child lives at the same address as the sibling. 'The sibling must not be in year 12 or 13 at the deadline date. 'Step, half and foster siblings are also included in this category.' Fiona said: 'I just feel gutted for David. 'He never had it in his head that he would never go there and he feels like they don't want him. But mum Fiona Scott was stunned to be told they would not be classed as siblings - because Sammie will have left when David starts in September, and Georgia will be in sixth form She added: 'It feels personal - both my daughters are angry about it. 'They are siblings and the school hasn't recognised that. 'They are marketing to parents even though they don't have the capacity to take more pupils because the school is already oversubscribed and this is wrong.' Mrs Scott said that she appealed to an admissions panel but was unable to overturn the decision. 'Now I want parents to know that we do not really have any choice over our children's school unless we pay for it privately and the admissions policy is all a bit of a game,' she said. A picture of Royal Wootton Bassett Academy in Wiltshire which is so oversubscribed it cannot provide school places to all prospective pupils Head teacher at Royal Wootton Bassett Academy, George Croxford, said he was sorry that some students had to be denied a place but that he was bound by admissions rules. Mr Croxford said: 'We do not make these decisions - we are very sorry that we cannot take more students but we have to abide by the Wiltshire admissions policy. 'We have applied for funding from the Department for Education to expand our school. David was devastated that he could not attend the same school as his big sisters 'However those applications have been unsuccessful. 'It would appear that the Department of Education only has money for schools that are in a need of repair and nothing to expand successful schools.' According to the academy, this year it had a total of 610 applications and 367 were first preferences. In total it said 96 children were refused a place for the next academic year. David has now been offered a place in another school in the area. The world's first set of captive-bred panda twins this year have been born. The two female cubs were born last Wednesday to third-time mother Meng Meng at a breeding centre in China's Sichuan Province. Footage released by the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding shows 11-year-old Meng Meng delivering her two daughters in an enclosure. The two female cubs were born last Wednesday in Chengdu, China, and are in good health Keepers transferred them to an incubator after their mother delivered them in an enclosure After the cubs were born, the panda mother picked them up with her mouth and licked them to care for them. Keepers at the breeding centre then transferred the tiny pink cubs to an incubator to be looked after. They also bottle-fed them milk. The two cubs were born at 5:20pm and 5:52pm on May 23. At birth, the elder sister, named Mei Meng, weighed 149.9 grams (5.3 ounces); while the younger sister, named Lan Meng, weighed 110.7 grams (3.9 ounces). Meng Meng, which had given birth twice before, delivered the twins in about an hour Meng Meng picked up the newborn cubs with her mouth and licked them to care for them The breeding centre said Meng Meng was a 'very experienced mother' and her labour lasted around one hour. Panda mother Meng Meng has five cubs, including the two newborns. She gave birth to a set of male twins, Meng Da and Meng Er, in 2013 and one male cub, Meng Lan, in 2015. The twins have been looked after by staff at the breeding centre after being born on May 23 Meng Meng and both cubs are in good health, said the breeding centre. Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base is the world's largest artificial breeding population of captive pandas. The state-run base started in 1980s with six ill pandas, according to its website. As of 2015, it had bred a total of 214 cubs, many of them sent to zoos around the world. According to latest statistics, the base looks after 152 pandas. The man suspected to be the Golden State Killer stood in court inside a metal cage on Tuesday after he was last seen in a wheelchair. Joseph DeAngelo, 72, stood inside the Sacramento courtroom during a hearing. His prior appearance in court presented a stark contrast. DeAngelo sat in a wheelchair and appeared to be mumbling incoherently during his arraignment at Sacramento Superior Court last month. But on Tuesday, DeAngelo appeared fit and spry. A judge on Tuesday weighed how much information to release about the arrest of the former police officer. Scroll down for video The man suspected to be the Golden State Killer stood in court inside a metal cage on Tuesday after he was last seen in a wheelchair Joseph DeAngelo, 72, stood inside the Sacramento courtroom during a hearing. His prior appearance in court presented a stark contrast Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Sweet began considering the issue after a hearing where attorneys for DeAngelo argued that sharing the details could lead to an unfair trial. Sweet indicated he's likely to release some information and is working with prosecutors and defense attorneys to determine how much to redact, which would continue to shield some details from public view. The Associated Press and other news outlets are pushing for information from search and arrest warrants to be made public. Transparency helps the public act as a check on the legal process and ensures investigators are acting appropriately, said Duffy Carolan, a lawyer for the news outlets. 'The press, the public and the victims deserve open proceedings,' she argued. DeAngelo sat in a wheelchair and appeared to be mumbling incoherently during his arraignment at Sacramento Superior Court last month Authorities arrested DeAngelo last month and said he is responsible for at least a dozen killings and roughly 50 rapes in the 1970s and '80s. Investigators have searched his home in Citrus Heights, California, his computer and his cellphone. Defense attorneys said the warrants include information about other allegations against DeAngelo that can no longer be tried, as well as details on evidence and methods. Making that information public could taint jurors and witnesses, defense lawyer David Lynch said. 'We have witnesses to events decades ago. Fading memories are going to be a huge issue in this case,' he said. Prosecutors did not object to the release of the documents but want to shield some information, including investigatory techniques and victim and witness identities. A prominent Russian journalist and critic of President Vladimir Putin has been shot dead in Kiev, Ukraine authorities claimed today. But hours later - in a stunning twist - Arkady Babchenko appeared at a press conference to reveal his death had been staged as part of an elaborate plot to catch those trying kill him. Arkady Babchenko, 41, was found mortally wounded by his wife in their home in Kiev, where they had moved after fearing for their lives in Russia as a result of his work. Ukrainian authorities blamed Russia's 'totalitarian machine' for his murder, while Moscow denied the charges and the Kremlin warned that Kiev had become 'a very dangerous place' for journalists. On Monday, Babchenko tweeted about a perceived threat from former Kremlin insider Marina Yudenich, who had called for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov - a close Putin ally - to 'invite him for tea'. Murdered: Russian journalist and Putin critic Arkady Babchenko, 41, pictured with his wife and one of his daughters, was shot several times at his home in Kiev, Ukraine Babchenko believed this referred to the murder of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, who was poisoned with radioactive polonium in his tea. Kadyrov is also suspected by Russian opposition figures of being behind a number of killings of Kremlin critics. In a tweet on Monday he referred to the threat, stating: 'When the president's representative openly posts an offer to have you killed.' The threat was made by Yudenich in a social media post, which read: 'So Ramzan is making tea for journalists. I am just wondering, should he not organise a tea party for another representative of the journalism community? 'He stays in Ukraine now, too, and claims to fight on Kiev's side. He is being fed there but I think tea at Ramzan's will be a lot more useful.' Putin's 'chain dog': Former Kremlin insider Marina Yudenich, who had called for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov - a close Putin ally - to 'invite Babchenko for tea' Threat: Babchenko interpreted Yudenich's post about a 'tea party' as a public suggestion to Kadyrov to have him killed Chechen regional leader Ramzan Kadyrov has been accused of being behind murders of Kremlin critics by Russian opposition figures However, it is unclear why exiled Babchenko suddenly raised her comment this week, as Yudenich's post was published in 2014. Last month, Babchenko had made a public warning that the there are 'several million' Russians ready to fight a war at any moment. 'The responsibility for what's happening now lies not on Putin's regime, but on Russia,' he said in a speech in Lithuania last month. 'You need to understand that it is not Putin's regime ready to fight. It is Russia that is ready to fight. 'It has a resource of several million people who are ready to go and fight (anywhere).' Ge sai dthey would would instantly obey any command, adding that; 'If they are ordered to go fight Gibraltar, they'll go to Gibraltar. It's true.' He said this was 'the most important thing' to understand about modern Russia'. Ukraine has claimed that that Russia's 'totalitarian machine' was behind the murder, while Ukrainian police say they suspected the crime was linked to his 'professional activities'. 'I am convinced that the Russian totalitarian machine did not forgive him his honesty and principled stance,' Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said late Tuesday. 'A true friend of Ukraine who was telling the world the truth about Russian aggression. His murderers should be punished.' An aide to the Ukrainian interior minister, Anton Gerashchenko, also pointed the finger at Moscow, writing on Facebook: 'The Putin regime targets those it cannot break or intimidate.' He said the Ukrainian government should ensure the safety of Babchenko's family. Many politicians and observers including Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin suggested Russia wanted to sow chaos in the country - already wracked by a four-year conflict with pro-Russian rebels in the east - ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections next year. Russian authorities furiously denied the blame, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying it was 'very sad' Moscow had been accused of murdering the reporter. 'The Ukrainian prime minister is already talking about how it was done by Russian secret services,' he said. 'This fashion of conducting international affairs is very sad,' Lavrov told reporters. Assasinated: Babchenko died just hours after he had posted on social media about the 2014 threat on his life made by Yudenich In waiting: Babchenko was shot in the back by a person waiting for him at his flat when he returned from food shopping Investigators in Moscow opened their own probe. 'The Investigative Committee is not going to turn a blind eye to the cruel crimes against Russian citizens,' it said in a statement. Ukrainian police spokesman Yaroslav Trakalo said Babchenko was found bleeding by his wife after she heard shooting, adding that he died in an ambulance on his way to hospital. Babchenko, who had four daughters who were living with his mother, was murdered yesterday when he returned to his home after going shopping for bread. He was shot in the back several times by someone waiting for him in the stairwell at the entrance to his home. 'The first and the most probable version is his professional activity,' Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko said at a televised press briefing when asked what police suspected lay behind the murder. Ukrainian authorities released a drawing of the man they suspect is Babchenko's assassin, around 40-45 years old, with a grey beard and wearing a cap. Babchenko, a former soldier in the Chechen war who became one of Russia's best-known war correspondents, had left his homeland fearing for his life after criticising Russian policy in Ukraine and Syria. Family: Babchenko and his wife, second from right, had adopted several children who were living with his mother, second from left He had been denounced by pro-government politicians in Russia over comments on social media about the Russian bombing of Aleppo in Syria's war, and over his characterisation of Russia as an aggressor towards Ukraine. 'Putin's regime takes aim at those who cannot be broken or intimidated,' Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and adviser to the interior minister, wrote on Facebook. Two years ago Pavel Sheremet, a Belarussian journalist known for his criticism of his home country's leadership and his friendship with the slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was blown up in a car bomb in central Kiev. Babchenko took part in the war in Chechnya as a soldier. He then he became a war reporter for several Russian newspapers. On Feb. 27 last year, he wrote on Facebook that he had left Russia. He reported on Russia sending private military contractors to Syria and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17 in July 2014 in eastern Ukraine, for which investigators last week held the Russian state responsible. Russian authorities again denied any connection with the plane's downing over an area of Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatist forces. In his last Facebook post before he was killed, Babchenko recalled an incident four years ago when he was meant to fly in a Ukrainian military helicopter in Ukraine's embattled Donbass region. The helicopter was overloaded and he was not permitted to fly. It was shot down and 14 people on board were killed. 'And I was lucky. Second birthday, it turns out,' he wrote. Local media also weighed in to defend the town, sparking the author to respond But a economic expert pulled his piece apart during a furious Twitter row He made claims about closed services and the museum and police station Three years ago, it was being praised for being on the up as projects helped reinvigorate local heritage, while new build homes, supermarkets, and thriving markets enhanced its revival. Now, though, Prescot is at the centre of a war of words, after a damning story in The New York Times labelled the town as a symbol for Britains failures of austerity, in a new series called Britains Big Squeeze. The articles author, Peter S. Goodman, set the tone when he wrote that a stroll through this modern town in the northwest of England amounts to a tour of the casualties of Britains age of austerity. Locals were quick to jump in to defend the town, which they say is 'on the rise'. Their sentiments were echoed by the head of an economic think-tank who rubbished his observations. Prescot's new fire and police station. Christopher Snowdon pointed out: A brand new police station was opened in Prescot in January, alongside a new fire station' In his article, Goodman wrote: The old library building has been sold and refashioned into a glass-fronted luxury home. 'The leisure centre has been razed, eliminating the public swimming pool. The local museum has receded into town history. The police station has been shuttered. As the local government desperately seeks to turn assets into cash, Browns Field, a lush park in the centre of town, may be doomed, too. At a meeting in November, the council included it on a list of 17 parks to sell to developers. But Monday's article has caused fury in the town with residents, the local paper and an economic's expert rubbishing his claims and painting a contrary picture to the doom and gloom presented in the story. There was further scoffing at Goodmans article in a series of tweets by Snowdon who pointed out: For a start, a brand new police station was opened in Prescot in January, alongside a new fire station' Goodman fired back, tweeting that the new police and fire station were a consolidation. Moreover, people in the village feel a loss. If you want to argue with them, that's fine' Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at right-wing think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, said the article was 'b******t' He tweeted yesterday: I havent got past the first two paragraphs of this NYT article about British austerity but Im already getting a strong smell of b*******. Snowdon said: For a start, a brand new police station was opened in Prescot in January, alongside a new fire station. The museum moved to a new location in 2012 and appears to be still open. Prescot library was tweeting two days ago and I doubt it has closed in the meantime. Snowdon said the local leisure centre is fully open with two swimming pools. Goodman fired back, tweeting that the new police and fire station were a consolidation. Moreover, people in the village feel a loss. If you want to argue with them, thats fine, but its a widespread perception in Prescot. Refusing to back down, Snowdon said the article described the police station as shuttered, to which Goodman replied that it was indeed shuttered, adding, your beef is with Prescot residents who feel they have lost services. Also weighing in to the row - mostly waged on social media - was Philip Anderson who tweeted: The historic town of Prescot is close to my heart. I was curate there, four happy years spent among the long-suffering people of the parish. 'A recent NY Times article on austerity painted a gloomy picture of this proud community. Some Prescot people pretty angry about @petersgoodmans article in the @nytimes yesterday. 'Its not that we defend austerity. We have suffered under it. But Prescot is on the up *despite* government cuts, and theres a wave of investment on the back of the new theatre. Row over Twitter as neither side gives way over whether Prescot is a symbol for Britains failures of austerity Snowdon said: My beef is with claims that are either deeply misleading or outright lies, of which there are in your first two paragraphs. Goodman returned: Thats demonstrable nonsense. Ive already knocked down your claims. Enough said. Others joined the lengthy spat on Twitter, accusing the writer of spreading fake news. One man tweeted: Shhhh. The American knows our country and its issues better than anyone... weve all written articles with 5 errors in the first 2 paragraphs, jeez. The article fired off a heated debate across the ditch, with Goodman saying there were 'no errors in the piece' Goodman countered: There are no errors in the piece, as has been covered voluminously by people in Prescot itself. And I would never pretend to know another country better than locals. In his article, Goodman, the European economics correspondent for the NYT, quotes local mum Jackie Lewis lamenting how despondent she was about potentially losing our last piece of community space. The piece includes references to councils throughout the UK suffering swingeing funding cuts from the national government, adding: By 2020, reductions will produce cuts to British social welfare programs exceeding $36 billion [27 billion] a year compared with a decade earlier, or more than $900 [680] annually for every working-age person in the country.' Local media including Prescot Online had its say on the US take on life in their town, in an article stating that the area has been 'on the up': 'Weve felt the effects of government austerity in Prescot, and weve lost some things. But we are gaining a lot, too, and Prescots future hasnt looked this promising for decades. 'And that is why this story in Monday's New York Times tells only half the story'. @TheBardPrescot tweeted: 'Prescot is positively changing and that doesnt show in the article. Still lots of issues like any other town but #WeBelieveinPrescot!' Other people also weighed, with @TheBardPrescot tweeting: 'Prescot is positively changing and that doesnt show in the article. Still lots of issues like any other town but #WeBelieveinPrescot! David Rattigan tweeted: Weve seen hard times, yes, but #Prescot is experiencing a renaissance right now. Meanwhile, the Liverpool Echo also questioned whether labelling Prescot as representing Britains austerity failures on NYT's front page was a fair picture of the town and its people. The article suggests Britains community spirit is being battered by cuts. But despite the austerity crisis, Prescot remains a strong and proud community, it added. Prescot, in Merseyside, is located less than 10 miles from Liverpool. About 15,000 people live in the area. Centuries ago, cotton was manufactured there, but the industry died out. There was also once a sail-cloth factory, and coal mines which have all long closed. In 1840, the district was noted for its superior construction of watch tools, while clay in the area was used for coarse earthenware. Currently, Prescot is building a replica Elizabethan theatre, with 350 seats, as part of an array of projects in the town, which the local council will provide visitors with a thriving attractive destination. Private walled estate and stately home Knowsley Hall, above, in Prescot is considered a Merseyside icon Authorities say a Tesla sedan in Autopilot mode has crashed into a parked police cruiser in California. It is the latest in a string of collisions that have prompted criticism of Elon Musk's firm and his vehicles. Laguna Beach Police Sgt. Jim Cota says the officer was not in the cruiser during the crash Tuesday in Laguna Beach. He says the Tesla driver suffered minor injuries. The police SUV ended up with its two passenger-side wheels on a sidewalk. Authorities say a Tesla sedan in Autopilot mode has crashed into a parked police cruiser in Laguna Beach, Southern California The carmaker says the semi-autonomous Autopilot function is not designed to avoid a collision and warns drivers not to rely on it entirely. On Thursday another incident was reported involving a semi-autonomous car in Utah. A police report of the incident says the electric Tesla Model S was on semi-autonomous Autopilot mode when it sped up from 55 mph (89 kph) to 60 mph (97 kph) in just 3.5 seconds before it hit a truck. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who issued a scathing attack on media credibility yesterday, has been vocal against those who criticize Tesla cars, despite growing concern about their safety. Police understand the Tesla was initially travelling at 55 mph (89 kph) to match the speed of another vehicle that may have changed lane, according to a report seen by Associated Press. Police Sgt. Jim Cota says the officer was not in the cruiser during the crash Tuesday in Laguna Beach. He says the Tesla driver suffered minor injuries It is thought the car then automatically sped up to its preset of 60 mph (97 kph) without noticing the stopped cars ahead of it. Data shows the time elapsed just before the Telsa plowed into the firetruck was just 3.5 seconds. The driver of the car Heather Lommatzsch, 29, told police she thought the vehicle's automatic emergency braking system would detect traffic and stop before it hit another vehicle. Lommatzsch said the car did not provide any audio or visual warnings before colliding with the firetruck which happened on on May 11 on the Utah highway. She had been driving 80 seconds in Autopilot before the crash. Tesla says on its website the Autpilot function is designed 'to detect objects that the car may impact and applies the brakes accordingly.' The separation of children from their parents at the southern U.S. border has drawn broad public outrage - but less talked about is a little-known lawsuit that has played a major role in making the Trump administration policy reality. The history is complicated, and it goes back to 1997, when the federal government, under former President Bill Clinton, settled a lawsuit that dictated how unaccompanied minors must be treated while in U.S. custody. The opposing parties in the case, Flores v. Reno, agreed on terms requiring that unaccompanied children held in federal custody be placed in 'the least restrictive' environment possible. Central American migrant families and activists gathered at the border wall in April 29 for the March Without Borders at Friendship Park in Tijuana Mexico. Under the Trump administration immigrant children have been separated from their parents Later, as more parents started crossing the U.S. border with very young children, the Obama administration responded by establishing large-scale family detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania. The move drew criticism from immigrant rights activists, and a federal judge ruled in 2015 that the family centers were in violation of Flores v. Reno even though the original settlement was intended only to apply to unaccompanied minors. That legal standard is still in place, and it means that children cannot be detained for more than 20 days even if they are with their parents, said Leon Fresco, former deputy assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Immigration under President Obama. We never thought we would separate the parents and the children, but I warned ... a different administration could. -Leon Fresco, former Obama official 'The only two choices for the current administration is to let people in who are seeking asylum - which this (Trump) administration doesn't want to do - or separate parents from children,' Fresco said. The decision on Flores led the Obama administration to institute a policy of primarily releasing asylum seekers who were caught at the border with their children. 'We (in the Obama administration) never thought we would separate the parents and the children,' Fresco said. 'But I warned at the time that a different administration could do that.' The New York Times reported in April that roughly 700 children have been separated from their parents so far under the Trump administration. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officials declined to comment for this story. President Donald trump boards Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on May 29. The administration's policy of separating immigrant children from parents has drawn public outrage and sparked Twitter hashtags, including But it was that Obama-era policy that encouraged parents to bring their children along for illegal border crossings in the first place, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington D.C.-based anti-immigration think tank. 'It was Obama's policy of letting anybody go who had a kid with them that created the expectation that it would work,' he said. Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union are in the midst of a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's policy of separating parents and children. Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, argued that there is a 'third choice' that should be legal regardless of the Flores settlement. 'Flores is not supposed to override a parent's choice and have their child sent to a strange facility,' said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project. 'A mother needs to have the ability to decide whether sending an 18-month-old to a less restrictive facility is the best choice,' he added. A mother needs to have the ability to decide whether sending an 18-month-old to a less restrictive facility is the best choice. -Lee Gelernt, ACLU Krikorian said that Trump's policy to separate families is a byproduct of enforcing border laws. 'The Democrats don't have a solution that would fix all these problems,' Krikorian added. 'The Democrat's solution would be to let everyone go, and that is not something the administration can responsibly do.' While Democrats blame Trump for the policy, and Trump has pointed the finger at an unspecified Democratic law, Fresco said the Flores v. Reno settlement is a major, overlooked factor that led to the current situation. 'Nobody wanted to get to the state of the affairs that we are at,' he said. 'No policy caused this to be where we are. This all happened because of a lawsuit.' However, Gelernt said that the Trump administration has made the decision to go through with a 'systematic' and 'unprecedented' separation of children and parents in an effort to deter families from crossing the border. 'No prior administration has done this,' he said. 'This is solely a Trump administration choice.' 'We don't believe it will deter asylum seekers,' he added. An alleged serial killer linked to three brutal murders over 13 years cannot be arrested because the case against him is not strong enough, detectives say. Major Crime detectives said they were certain three murders between 1998 and 2011 in South Australia were committed by the same man. Grandmothers Phyllis Harrison, 71, and Beverley Hanley, 64, were murdered in 1998 and 2010 respectively, and their Adelaide homes were ransacked. Scroll down for video The cold cases of three people murdered over a 13 year period are forensically linked and the work of a serial killer, detectives have revealed (pictured is Phyllis Harrison) Stephen Newton, 55, was found almost two months after being attacked in his unit in 2011, and items were stolen from his home. 'We now have proof that the same offender is responsible for all three deaths,' Detective Superintendent Des Bray said. 'There has been speculation in the past that the same offender was involved, but now I can say we have proof and we believe theft was the motive in all three matters.' Despite their surety, Det Supt Bray said on Wednesday they could not arrest the man yet. Major Crime detectives said they are certain the killings, which took place between 1998 and 2011 in South Australia, were committed by the same man (pictured is Beverley Hanley) He said the police were close to making the arrest, but appealed for more people to come forward and offer their assistance. 'It's clear that some people have withheld information and some people have told lies. Some of those people may be scared of this offender,' he said. 'I would encourage them to contact us directly or through a solicitor and we will help them with their safety and to work through the issues.' Julie Lane, victim's daughter, pleaded with the public to help bring the murderer to justice. 'This person needs to be caught, this person needs to pay for what he did. Our life hasn't been the same since,' she said. Grandmothers Phyllis Harrison, 71, and Beverly Hanley, 64, were murdered in 1998 and 2010 respectively, and their Adelaide homes were ransacked (pictured is Stephen Newton) Advertising guru Sir Martin Sorrell has bought a company best known for making wire baskets and plans to spend 40million of his own cash to take on his former ad agency in one of the most dramatic comeback in British business history. Sir Martin, 73, resigned suddenly as boss of WPP - a business he founded 33 years ago - and the 15billion global empire he left in April has already been warned to keep an eye on its top clients. He will be chairman of the listed firm Derriston Capital, as part of a plan under which Derriston will buy S4 Capital and turn it into an international media business in the quickest return to the London Stock Exchange in history. He left WPP under a cloud in mid-April amid claims he misused company funds and is said to have had less than a week off since then while plotting his return to business. Just six weeks after he stepped down as head of the world's largest advertising agency, Sir Martin Sorrell (pictured with his wife Christiana Falcone) appears to be making a dramatic comeback to battle with WPP, the firm he set up 30 years ago Sir Martin's return has caused waves in the city. Advertising expert Marc Mendoza, founder of 360 degree media said: 'WPP should be checking their client contracts and they should be all over their top 5 clients because although he hasn't get anything to technically offer them yet his contacts book is unrivalled. 'He will have the direct lines and emails of all of every one of the top spending advertisers in the UK and abroad and no doubt would have told them about his new plans over the last 24 hours because he would have been up all night doing it'. When asked how unusual the millionaire's return to work was he said: 'Unusual is not the right word, it's unprecedented. 'Most people who left the business after 30-plus years in the business in a high pressure position would look at the summer ahead and think "I'll have a bit of that" and take six months off'. He added: 'I don't think that Sir Martin has had six weeks off and he has probably spent five weeks of that plotting this comeback so really he hasn't had six days off' In mid-April, Mr Sorrell resigned suddenly from WPP in one of the biggest corporate downfalls in decades. The firm was investigating a whistleblower's allegation that he misused company funds. The inquiry has finished but the details will not be made public. WPP said: 'The allegation did not involve amounts that are material.' Sir Martin denies any wrongdoing, and remains eligible for share-based bonuses worth 19million. The tycoon has come under fire for his pay at WPP, which was about ten times as much as the average FTSE 100 boss earns. He received 274,000 to pay for his wife, Cristiana Falcone a World Economic Forum advisor almost 30 years his junior to accompany him on business trips. The twice-married father was paid more than 200million between 2010 and 2016, including 70million in 2015, mostly due to a long-term incentive scheme. He is ranked number at 285 in this year's Sunday Times Rich List, with his net worth estimated at 456million. The tycoon has come under fire for his pay at WPP, which was about ten times as much as the average FTSE 100 boss earns The Cambridge and Harvard-educated father-of-four has regularly dropped hints about getting back into business. At a conference in New York, he insisted he had no intention of retiring, and said agencies needed to be 'more agile' amid major changes in the advertising industry brought about by Facebook and other social media. The return of one of the world's most successful ad tycoons will be watched closely in the industry. His comeback vehicle, Derriston Capital, is a so-called cash-shell company, whose purpose is to buy other firms rather than trade in its own right. The London-listed firm was set up to look at opportunities in the medical technology industry, but has since shifted its focus. It will change its name to S4 Capital following the deal. Being taken over by a cash-shell is often an easier way for a private company to join the Stock Exchange. Derriston said a statement would be released to the Stock Market this morning. Sir Martin declined to comment on 'market speculation'. The UKs biggest beer festival is to offer a new drink this year - alcohol-free ale. A Dutch beer will be on sale at the Campaign for Real Ales (Camra) Great British Beer Festival in London in August. Almost 1,000 different ales, ciders, wines and gins will feature in the event at Olympia, along with a range of alcohol-free beer for the first time in the festivals 41-year history. A Dutch beer will be the first alcohol-free ale on sale at the Campaign for Real Ales Great British Beer Festival in August Braxzz Brewery has developed an alcohol-free IPA and the worlds first alcohol-free porter ale. Festival organiser Catherine Tonry said: Alcohol-free beer has become increasingly important in recent years and thankfully brewers have been keeping pace with consumer demands. There are now some fantastic innovations in the sector and a much wider range of styles and flavours than ever before. We are thrilled to provide an alcohol-free alternative to festival-goers who cannot or choose not to drink. Festival organiser Catherine Tonry says alcohol-free beer has become increasingly popular with consumers James Leary, of Braxzz, said: We are delighted to be attending the Great British Beer Festival for hopefully the first of many appearances. We hope to provide something different at the event and give another option to anybody who will not be drinking but still want to taste craft ale. Mr Javid, above, said they retain strong ties to this country, which we should respect and nurture More than 200 people from the Windrush generation who retired to the Caribbean have sought help amid fears they may be barred from returning to the UK. Home Secretary Sajid Javid revealed the number of West Indian migrants who inadvertently forfeited residence in Britain when they went back to the country of their birth. Every Commonwealth migrant was given an automatic right to stay if they arrived in the UK between 1948 and 1973. But many never applied for passports or were formally naturalised. Some went back to the Caribbean, despite having worked all their lives in the UK. But Mr Javid said they retain strong ties to this country, which we should respect and nurture. Updating the Commons Home Affairs select committee yesterday, he said that 11 individuals who fell into this category had now returned to the UK and a specialist Home Office taskforce is handling another 226 inquiries. Mr Javid said there was already provision in the immigration system for people whose permanent residence status had lapsed, through a prolonged absence from the UK, to resume it by obtaining a returning resident visa. It is limited to those who have spent most of their lives in the UK. But he told MPs: I am adjusting the visa rules to ensure they are interpreted generously in respect of the Windrush generation, who spent a considerable time in the UK and who may have been unaware that they were forfeiting residence here when they left. This will be made available free of charge. He said if individuals preferred to come back to visit friends and family in the UK, they would be issued with a ten-year visit visa, also free of charge. The Cabinet minister also revealed the Home Office had established contact with just three of up to 63 members of the Windrush generation who may have been wrongly kicked out of Britain. It followed a trawl of 8,000 records on immigrants deported or removed to the Caribbean since 2002. Officials had been checking the documents amid fears that people who had been here lawfully for decades may have been forced to leave after being mistakenly declared as illegal immigrants. Mr Javid has written to committee chairman Yvette Cooper, above All 63 people are from the West Indies and aged over 45. It means some of them might have arrived in Britain before 1973 and therefore be entitled to automatic settlement. Of this number, 32 were booted out because they had committed crimes, while 31 were subject to administrative removals, which includes people sent a Home Office letter ordering them to leave. In a letter to committee chairman Yvette Cooper, Mr Javid said those who hadnt committed crimes were being proactively contacted through a specialist Home Office unit where it had contact details. He added: We have so far made contact with three and are asking high commissioners to assist where we do not have contact details. When we reach these individuals they will be invited to contact the taskforce. Officials are still checking how many Windrush migrants have wrongly been detained. Mr Javid said this could take up to eight weeks. Retired nurse Icilda Williams, 84, has children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren living in Britain A Windrush pensioner was prevented from returning to Britain to meet her great-grandchildren, despite serving the NHS for almost 30 years. Retired nurse Icilda Williams, 84, has seven children, 20 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren all living in Britain, but she has been banned from even applying for a visa to visit. The widow, who retired to Jamaica with her husband Kenneth in 1996, had travelled to and from the Caribbean almost every year before the Home Office crackdown in 2014. It is heartbreaking, she said. I feel very lonely without being able to see my family and I find myself crying at night. Mrs Williams arrived in Britain to join her husband, a cabinet maker, in 1962 before the couple settled in Bradford. Barnaby Joyce's girlfriend Vikki Campion (pictured) has declared the pain of having an affair with Australia's former deputy PM and ending his 24-year marriage was worth it Barnaby Joyce's girlfriend Vikki Campion has revealed she was pressured to have an abortion while pregnant with the former deputy prime minister's baby. But Ms Campion, who gave birth to baby boy Sebastian five weeks ago, said the strain she came under when her affair with Mr Joyce, 51, was revealed - ending his 24-year marriage - was worth it for their son. The couple controversially accepted $150,000 from the Seven Network to tell their side of the political scandal. Ahead of the Sunday Night program airing that interview, Seven's Sunrise breakfast show aired a clip of Mr Joyce's 33-year-old former media adviser. 'Everything was worth it for this,' she said, as she held the hand of her baby son. Barnaby Joyce (pictured holding his baby son Sebastian) has taken time off work to spend time with his girlfriend who is also a first-time mother The affair between Barnaby Joyce and his former media adviser Vikki Campion caused his salary to halve from $416,000 to $203,000 as backbencher with no portfolio (the couple are pictured here at a bar at Glebe in Sydney's inner west last year before the news broke) Barnaby Joyce is estranged from his wife of 24 years Natalie and their four adult daughters as a result of the extramarital affair that forced him to quit as Nationals leader and deputy prime minister. The backbench MP for the New South Wales seat of New England told the Seven Network he had let his family down. 'I failed, I failed, I failed, I failed, I failed,' he said. The maverick former accountant's salary has also halved from $416,000 to $203,000 after the affair raised character questions about the Catholic, family values politician who had last year campaigned against gay marriage. Despite the personal and political pain that caused to her boyfriend, Vikki Campion said that was the price of love. 'I couldn't help it. You can't help who you fall in love with,' she said. Despite the pain the affair caused to her much older boyfriend Barnaby Joyce, Vikki Campion said that was the price of love Joyce refused to accept sole responsibility for the revealing tell-all - which many are calling hypocritical given the politician's previous demands for privacy - due to the fact that Vikki will be interviewed as well She also revealed she was pressured to have an abortion. 'They said, "If you don't, they're going to come after you,' she said. The pair's decision to go forward with the interview has angered Mr Joyce's own conservative side of politics. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he was opposed to the paid media interview. 'It's not a course of action I would have encouraged,' he said. Mr Joyce said the money from the interview would go into a trust fund young Sebastian and his mother. His successor as Nationals leader Michael McCormack had a similar view point as the Prime Minister when it came to a federal MP accepting cash, albeit indirectly, for a paid interview. HOW THE BARNABY JOYCE AFFAIR UNFOLDED 2016 May - Vikki Campion assists Barnaby Joyce's election campaign as media adviser, having previously worked with NSW government ministers and News Corp August - Campion joins Joyce's staff. She splits with fiance John Bergin, three months before they were due to wed. Friendship develops between Joyce and Campion December - Chief of staff Di Hallam reportedly seeks Joyce's approval to have Campion transferred out of office. Hallam later quits to take up departmental role 2017 February - Campion is photographed in a Sydney bar with Joyce, as revealed by Daily Mail Australia April - Barnaby's wife Natalie reportedly confronts Campion in Tamworth. Campion goes to minister Matt Canavan office as adviser. Natalie and Barnaby seek to make marriage work May - At New South Wales Nationals conference in Broken Hill colleagues describe Joyce as 'a mess' June - Natalie and Barnaby show up together at Canberra press gallery midwinter ball July - Campion leaves her $191,000 job in Mr Canavan's office after he quits frontbench over citizenship. She temporarily goes back to Joyce's office August - Campion moves to Damian Drum's office in a social media adviser position specially created for her. He already has a media adviser. In this time she oversees just 50 posts to Facebook Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is reportedly reassured by Joyce the relationship with Campion is over. Drum says he was told the same thing. Former Joyce chief of staff Di Hallam takes up a senior position with the Inland Rail project September - Natalie reportedly asks family friend, Catholic priest Father Frank Brennan, to counsel Joyce. Campion is seen managing Joyce media events at federal Nationals conference in Canberra October - Campion reportedly takes stress leave. Writ issued for New England by-election after Joyce quits over dual citizenship November - Natalie holidays in Bali with a daughter. Man in a pub in Inverell angers Joyce during election campaign by reportedly saying: 'Say hello to your mistress' December - Joyce wins by-election. Joyce tells parliament during same-sex marriage debate he is separated. Campion's redundancy package is approved. They move into an Armidale property provided rent-free by businessman Greg Maguire 2018 January - Joyce and Campion holiday in north Queensland and NSW north coast February - Joyce tells reporters Campion is now his partner. But denies she was his partner when she worked in Canavan's office March - Joyce casts doubt on the baby's paternity, calling it a 'grey area' and claiming journalists never asked him if Ms Campion's child was his April 16 - Sebastian Joyce born May 8 - Baby boy seen for the first time May 26 - Details emerge of Barnaby Joyce's paid $150,000 interview May 30 - Seven Network reveals Vikki Campion pressured to have abortion June 5 - Joyce announces he intends to re-contest the seat of New England at the next election June 21 - Natalie Joyce speaks out in a tell-all unpaid interview 2019 January 20 - Ms Campion and Mr Joyce announce they are expecting a second son June - The couple welcome their Thomas Michael Timothy Joyce Advertisement 'I wouldn't have done it, but you know that's a decision that Barnaby has taken,' he said. Mr Joyce has taken personal leave for several weeks to spend time with Ms Campion and their son Sebastian. Joyce has refused to accept sole responsibility for the revealing tell-all - which many are calling hypocritical given the politician's previous demands for privacy - due to the fact that Vikki will be interviewed as well. The former deputy prime minister said the decision was made after weeks of relentless media pressure that showed no signs of 'burning out', as the mother of his newborn realised she may as well benefit from the ordeal, New Corp reported. 'We tried for privacy,' said Mr Joyce. 'In the last fortnight we've had drones over our house. We've had paparazzi waiting for us outside Armidale airport... we've tried just burning this out and that didn't work.' The couple, who now have a five-week old son Sebastian, has controversially accepted $150,000 from the Seven Network to tell their side of a major political scandal The former deputy prime minister (right) said his former staffer (left) and the mother of his newborn Vikki Campion realised she may as well benefit from the ordeal after weeks of relentless media pressure The former Nationals leader claimed that if it were an interview with just him as a politician he wouldn't charge. 'But that is not what they wanted,' he said. 'They wanted an interview... to get Vikki's side of the story and like most mothers she said, "Seeing as I am being screwed over... if everybody else is making money then [I am] going to make money out of it".' Financial Services Minister Kelly O'Dwyer said that while she didn't go so far as to talk Mr Joyce out of doing the interview, she could see that it didn't sit right with the majority of Australians. 'Ultimately it's a matter for him and his judgment,' she said in an interview with ABC radio. '[But] I don't think it's right, and I think most Australians are pretty disgusted by it.' Dennis Hutchings, above, is seriously ill with kidney failure and heart disease A dying Army veteran has appealed to the Prime Minister to intervene to end his prosecution over the death of a man soldiers claimed was an IRA suspect during the Troubles. Dennis Hutchings, who is seriously ill with kidney failure and heart disease, said the stress of the court case had the potential to prematurely end his life. The 77-year-old expressed concern that politicians were washing their hands of their responsibilities to UK troops sent to fight terrorism in Northern Ireland. He said his arrest and interrogation by the Police Service of Northern Ireland 41 years after the killing was a form of torture. Mr Hutchings made his plea to No 10 after being hauled to court despite no fresh evidence to face attempted murder charges over the fatal shooting of John-Pat Cunningham, 27, in June 1974. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to a maximum 16 years in prison. Writing on behalf of Mr Hutchings to Theresa May, lawyer Philip Barden said the retired soldier needs your help and requested a meeting. He was investigated and cleared of the killing by the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time. He assisted Northern Irelands Historical Enquiries Team reviewing the case in 2011, and was told the matter was closed. But after files were re-examined by the PSNI he was arrested at home in Cornwall in 2015 and taken to the province. The retired Corporal Major with the Life Guards was detained for three-and-a-half days and questioned on 26 separate occasions. Mr Barden added: This was an unlawful denial of liberty and cause of mental distress a form of torture. Lawyer Philip Barden has written to Theresa May on behalf of Dennis Hutchings He said the letter given to Mr Hutchings informing him of his immunity from criminal charges was apparently worthless. In June 1974, Mr Hutchings was leading a patrol in Co Tyrone that came across an IRA unit moving explosives. Four men were arrested and later convicted of terror offences. The rest fled. In a search for the missing Republicans, troops found Mr Cunningham believed to be an armed IRA suspect who ran away. Mr Hutchings and another soldier, now dead, opened fire. It later emerged Mr Cunningham was innocent. Mr Hutchings says he acted lawfully. His trial is expected to take place later this year. Israel has warned it is 'closer to war' than ever with Hamas as missile sirens blared throughout the night, and fighter jets and attack helicopters pounded targets in Gaza. Israeli sirens warning of imminent rocket and mortar strikes wailed into the early hours on Wednesday, following Palestinian militants' heaviest attack against Israel since the 2014 Gaza war. Israel's military said its aircraft hit 55 militant targets in the Gaza Strip, including military compounds, sheds of drones used for terror purpose and training facilities. Action was taken after the militants had fired 70 rockets and mortar bombs into Israel on Tuesday, which injured three soldiers due to flying shrapnel. Israel warned it is 'closer to war' than ever as missile warning sirens continued to blare and military jets pounded targets in Gaza in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Pictured: Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system intercepts rocket launched from Gaza As the fighting raged, Israel cautioned that it was closer to war with Hamas than it had been at any point in the past four years. On Wednesday, Gaza's Hamas rulers said they had agreed to a cease-fire with Israel and will commit to this 'as long as Israel does'. Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, said Egyptian mediators intervened 'after the resistance succeeded in warding off the aggression.' Israeli Cabinet minister Arieh Deri told Israel's Army Radio that he expected calm to be restored, but echoed Hamas' promise of cease-fire in return for cease-fire. 'If it will be quiet, we will respond with quiet. We've given Hamas a chance to prove that we can return to routine ... If they release the reins there will be a very painful strike,' he said. Israeli sirens warning of imminent rocket and mortar strikes wailed into the early hours on Wednesday, following Palestinian militants' heaviest attack against Israel since 2014 Smoke rises following an Israeli strikes on Gaza City, early on Wednesday. Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired at least 50 rockets and mortars into southern Israel on Tuesday Earlier today, Israel Katz, the Israeli intelligence minister, said: 'We are the closest to the threshold of war since Operation Protective Edge. 'We don't want it, and the other side doesn't either, but we have our red lines.' The Israel Defense Forces announced after midnight that IAF fighter jets, attack helicopters, and aircraft struck 25 military targets belonging to the Hamas terror organisation in the Gaza Strip, bringing the total of targets hit to 55. It said hit militant target strikes included 'sheds of drones used for terror purposes, a rocket manufacturing workshop, advanced naval weaponry, military compounds, training facilities, and a munitions manufacturing site.' Following militant rocket and mortar launches throughout the day on Tuesday, countered by Israeli tank fire and air strikes, the pro-Iran Islamic Jihad militant group said a ceasefire agreement was possible. However, Israel said reports of a deal were untrue. 'Palestinian factions will abide by calm as long as (Israel) abides by it,' Islamic Jihad spokesman Daoud Shehab said. An Israeli official who declined to be named said: 'The report about a ceasefire is incorrect.' Israel has long said it would not tolerate such attacks. There was no sign that calm would be restored by midnight local time, when the militants said the ceasefire could take effect. Pictured: A rocket that was launched from Gaza lands in the Israeli city of Netivot Israeli planes attacked at least seven facilities belonging to armed group Islamic Jihad and the territory's dominant Hamas movement after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised a 'powerful' response. The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the firing and said it was in response to Israel's killing of dozens of Palestinians since March 30, mainly in Gaza border protests. The Israeli military said several of the projectiles fired from Gaza on Tuesday were shot down by its Iron Dome rocket interceptor and others landed in empty lots and farmland. One exploded in the yard of a kindergarten, damaging its walls and scattering the playground with debris and shrapnel, about an hour before it was scheduled to open for the day. Palestinian militants had launched their heaviest barrages against Israel since the 2014 Gaza war before Israeli aircraft struck back (pictured) in a surge of fighting after weeks of border violence Israel has struck 30 'military targets' in the Gaza Strip in response to a wave of mortar attacks from the Palestinian enclave. Pictured: Smoke rises after an Israeli strike in Gaza City (left) and rockets fired from the enclave are intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system (right) Israeli planes attacked at least seven facilities belonging to armed group Islamic Jihad and the territory's dominant Hamas movement after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised a 'powerful' response Violence has soared along the Gaza frontier in recent weeks during which 116 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire at mass demonstrations for a right of return to ancestral lands now in Israel. A Hamas spokesman defended Tuesday's attacks as a 'natural response to Israeli crimes'. In similarly phrased remarks, an Islamic Jihad spokesman said 'the blood of our people is not cheap'. Gaza residents said at least seven training or security facilities belonging to Islamic Jihad and Hamas were hit in the Israeli air strikes. Plumes of smoke and dust rose from the target sites. The powerful explosions shook buildings nearby, causing panic among rush hour crowds on streets and in markets. The Gazan Ministry of Education said shrapnel from one missile flew into a school. Violence has soared along the Gaza frontier in recent weeks during which 116 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire at mass demonstrations for a right of return to ancestral lands now in Israel. Pictured: An Israeli strike in the Gaza Strip today Gaza residents said at least seven training or security facilities belonging to Islamic Jihad and Hamas were hit in the Israeli air strikes A barrage of 25 mortar shells were fired into southern Israel on Tuesday, its army has claimed - hours after soldiers killed a Palestinian with tankfire. Israeli media reported that one of shells landed near a kindergarten (pictured) shortly before it opened The Israeli military said it was 'carrying out activities in the Gaza Strip', without elaborating. Nickolay Mladenov, the U.N.'s special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, said he was deeply concerned by 'the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinian militants from Gaza towards communities in southern Israel'. Calling for restraint by all parties, he said at least one of the mortar bombs 'hit in the immediate vicinity of a kindergarten and could have killed or injured children'. Amid international condemnation for its use of lethal force at the mass demonstrations, Israel said many of the dead were militants and that the army was repelling attacks on the border fence. Palestinians and their supporters say most of the protesters were unarmed civilians and Israel was using excessive force against them. The attack came hours after a Palestinian who approached the border fence with what the Israeli army said an 'intention of carrying out an attack' was killed by tankfire. Grieving relatives held a funeral (pictured) for the Palestinian, Mohammed al-Radeia, 30, in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip yesterday Most of the mortars were intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome aerial defence system but some landed in open areas with no injuries reported, officials said. A man holds shrapnel from mortar shells that landed near a kindergarten in Kibbutz Israeli troops fire tear gas as they clash with Palestinian youth in the Amari refugee camp near Ramallah in West Bank after they stormed the camp yesterday At least 121 Palestinians have been killed during weeks of unrest since March 30, when Palestinians began calling to be allowed to return to their historic homelands inside Israel. Pictured: Clashes near Ramallah yesterday Organisers of the Palestinian border protests launched a boat from Gaza on Tuesday in a challenge to Israel's maritime blockade of the enclave. 'I want to make a future for myself, I want to live,' said Ehab Abu Armana, 28, before he and 14 other protesters boarded the boat. The Israeli navy was widely expected to stop the vessel, which the organisers said would be accompanied for a short distance by several other boats. More than two million Palestinians are packed into the narrow coastal enclave. Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 but, citing security concerns, maintains tight control of its land and sea borders, which has reduced its economy to a state of collapse. Egypt also restricts movement in and out of Gaza on its border. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been stalled since 2014 and Israeli settlements built on occupied territory which Palestinians seek for a state have expanded. GCSE exams should be scrapped because they come at exactly the wrong age for teenagers, an expert believes. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore said research shows 16-year-olds are undergoing seismic changes in the brain while they took the extremely stressful exams. As a result, it could leave many vulnerable to mental health problems, she said. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore said research shows 16-year-olds are undergoing seismic changes in the brain while they took the extremely stressful exams. Prof Blakemore said the tests could damage the mental health of 16-year-old students The Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London told how research over the past two decades had changed understanding of brain development. She said it was now believed that the composition of parts of the brain changed hugely during adolescence. Speaking at the Hay Festival, Professor Blakemore said: Why do we still have GCSEs? I think we always will have them for historic reasons. But thats no good reason to have an extremely stressful exam which, by the way, I think has become more stressful in the last ten years just at an age where children are going through all this change in terms of brain, behaviour hormones and social changes, and rendering them very vulnerable to things like mental health problems. She added: Given that our children now have to stay in some form of education until theyre 18, we dont need those exams aged 16. A desperate search is underway for a 12-year-old boy who was last seen two days ago at a Melbourne train station. Max Serraglio, who has short blonde brown hair, was last seen at the Camberwell Railway Station on Monday. Police hold grave concerns for the youngster as he has a medical condition. Max Serraglio (pictured) was last seen two days ago at Melbourne train station east of the city The 12-year-old was last seen at the Camberwell Railway Station (stock image) on Monday The young child is believed to frequent the Camberwell area - about 30 kilometres east of Melbourne. The 12-year-old is about 160cm tall with a thin build and has a long fringe. 'He was last seen wearing black Fila tracksuit pants, a floral windcheater and was carrying a black backpack,' Victoria Police said. Authorities are appealing for anyone with information on Max's whereabouts to contact Boroondara Police Station. Members of the Royal Family are usually the embodiment of diplomacy. But actress Sophie Winkleman, Prince Michael of Kent's daughter-in-law, has thrown caution to the wind with an outspoken attack on the 'grubby little t***s' she blames for damaging the reputation of her friend, the colourful former charity boss Camila Batmanghelidjh. Camila set up the charity Kids Company, which worked with marginalised children and young people, but it collapsed in 2015 after David Cameron's coalition government withdrew a 3 million grant following alleged breaches of its terms. Sophie, 37, half-sister of BBC star Claudia Winkleman and wife of Lord Frederick Windsor, claims government officials 'went for' Iranian-born Camila because she's a woman and a 'bit foreign'. Actress Sophie Winkleman (pictured with husband Lord Frederick Windsor), Prince Michael of Kent's daughter-in-law, launched a foul-mouthed defence of the colourful former charity boss Camila Batmanghelidjh Lady Frederick Windsor tells me: 'They don't tell the truth. Camila was smeared in a terrible way, and her 'mistakes' were so minute compared to the magnificence of that charity, and a few grubby little t***s in government tore her to pieces.' Camila admitted to 'bending the law slightly' while running Kids Company, which was closed amid accusations of mismanagement. In distinctly unregal language, Sophie, who played Big Suze in comedy series Peep Show, claims: 'It was so evil what was done to her and that magnificent company. 'Getting out a tenner and not logging it? F*** you. I worship the woman.' Camila Batmanghelidjh (pictured) admitted to 'bending the law slightly' while running Kids Company, which was closed amid accusations of mismanagement Speaking at a Saatchi Gallery party in Chelsea, Sophie, who has two children with Lord Freddie, alleges: 'It's always women [who are targeted] and she was a bit foreign, and [so] they destroyed her. 'I don't think the Government liked her coming in, telling them how to run the child welfare system, because she was a woman.' Referring to the safe havens Camila established, Sophie says they are still needed: 'Because people in Britain are s**t at looking after their children.' Deja vu for Diana's favourite designer Catherine Walker's latest collection gave fashionistas a certain sense of deja vu. The ice-blue dress with crystals and sequins looks incredibly similar to one Princess Diana wore to a Christie's reception two months before her death in 1997. Walker, one of Diana's favourite designers, died of breast cancer in 2010 aged 65. Catherine Walker's latest collection features an ice-blue dress with crystals and sequins (right) looks incredibly similar to one Princess Diana wore to a Christie's reception two months before her death in 1997 (left) The new dress was created by her widower, Said Cyrus, who was responsible for the beading on Diana's frock. A spokesman tells me: 'Princess Diana wore a similar dress in 1997, but the detailing was slightly different.' Hewitt and lover take in Hay Festival Not known as a bookworm, James Hewitt was a most surprising visitor to the Hay Festival. Is the old cad plotting another literary venture? The former Household Cavalry officer, 60, broke Princess Diana's heart when he betrayed her by co-operating with author Anna Pasternak on 1994 book Princess In Love, which revealed their five-year affair. Sporting a Panama hat, he was at Hay with the same mystery blonde with whom he was pictured near his home in Exeter last week. A fellow festival-goer reports of the pair: 'They were strolling arm in arm when they weren't kissing and cuddling.' Baby on board! Danes dresses down for a stroll When it comes to Anglo-American marriages, Homeland star Claire Danes got there years before Meghan Markle. She tied the knot with dashing Staffordshire-born actor Hugh Dancy, 42, in 2009, and is now expecting their second child. Relaxed in animal-print leggings and a black vest, the actress, 39, shunned make-up for a walk with Oxford graduate Hugh near their home in New York. The picture could provoke bitter memories for American actress Mary-Louise Parker, 53. She was heavily pregnant when her partner, Billy Crudup, 49, left her for Claire in 2003. Claire Danes actress shunned make-up for a walk with husband Hugh Dancy near their home in New York Power dress? Not for me, says Kirsty Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark, who raised eyebrows when she appeared on screen in a pair of tracksuit bottoms a couple of years ago, declares that power dressing for ambitious women is over. 'Gone are the days when you used to wear Armani shoulders,' says the 63-year-old Scot. 'It was kind of a shield of armour, but I don't have to do that any more.' She explains: 'It's partly because life is no longer like that and also because I think women are more comfortable. On Newsnight, what you're trying to do is look modern.' You can't get more 'modern' than her fellow anchor, Evan Davis, who eschews a tie, has a tattoo and is known as 'Tinsel T***' because of his alleged nipple rings. Don't call actress Sheila Hancock 'darling'. She declares: 'I do get angry with people who patronise me. When someone says: 'You all right, darling?', I get very uppity and say: 'I am not your darling I have only just met you.' The 85-year-old widow of Morse star John Thaw adds: 'I don't like it when people I don't know ring me up and call me by my Christian name. It is not respectful and that irritates me.' Gang members suspected of inciting violent feuds on social media are to be treated like terror suspects, it was claimed last night. Police will use new powers to target gangsters who promote violence in videos shared on websites such as YouTube. Scotland Yard has blamed social media for the rising murder rate in London, singling out the drill genre of rap music for glamorising violent crime. Scotland Yard Commander Jim Stockley, pictured, said gang members are inciting violent feuds on social media using videos posted on sites such as YouTube The Met Police believe these violent videos are behind an increase in gangland murders Commander Jim Stokley, who leads the Mets response to gang crime, told The Times new measures would make it easier for detectives to pursue suspects. Currently, officers have to prove that videos and social media posts are directly linked to individual acts of violence to secure a conviction for incitement. But the Terrorism Act allows suspects to be convicted even if videos or posts are not linked to specific violent acts. Mr Stokley said that for gangs there isnt specific legislation and clearly we cant use terror legislation [but] in consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service, we have found some existing legislation which we are going to use. Mr Stokley stressed that the new measures, set out in the Serious Crime Act, would require the judiciary to agree with their reading of the law. If this does not go to plan, the Met plans to seek the new legislation in consultation with the Home Office. YouTube users can easily watch drill videos that feature masked gangs threatening each other with aggressive lyrics and gestures, some attracting millions of views. The Met has built up a database of more than 1,400 videos to identify those involved and monitor tensions among rival gangs. Has knife crime surged in Britain? A knife crime epidemic in London and England's big cities has seen the number of offences involving blades soar by more than a fifth in the last year. Police in England and Wales recorded 39,598 offences involving blades in the year ending December 2017, a 22% increase compared with the previous year. London saw a 44% increase in the number of killings, with more than 150 victims, while the number knife offences in the capital rose by more than 20 per cent to 14,680, separate stats showed. Offences involving firearms were also up, by 11% to 6,604 recorded crimes. Knife and gun crimes tend to be disproportionately concentrated in London and other metropolitan areas, the Office for National Statistics said, but it added that the majority of police force areas saw rises in these types of violent crime. Advertisement In the past two years, police have asked YouTube to take down up to 60 videos but are forced to prove the clips are harmful first. Yesterday it was revealed the Google-owned site has only removed just over 30. Met Commissioner Cressida Dick has linked drill videos, which she said describe stabbings with great joy and excitement, to at least one attack. She said web giants had a social responsibility to remove content that incites violence. YouTube said most of the videos flagged by the Met are no longer available and that it has developed policies to tackle clips related to knife crime. It comes after new Home Secretary Sajid Javid backed increased uses of stop and search powers and endorsed spit guards being rolled out to forces across the country. Mr Javid said he is 'absolutely determined' to put an end to violence that is 'terminating young lives far too soon'. Referring to stop and search, he told the Police Federation of England and Wales' annual conference in Birmingham: 'Some of you don't feel comfortable using it - and that's not how it should be. 'I have confidence in your professional judgment. So let me be clear - I support the use of stop and search. 'You have to do your job and that means protecting everyone.' The Home Secretary said it is 'ridiculous' that spit guards are available in some force areas but not others. The hoods are made of mesh and can be placed over suspects' heads to protect officers from being bitten or spat at. The Home Secretary used his first speech to the Police Federation to support an increased use of stop and search powers and the rollout of spit guards across the UK A wave of violence has plagued London this year with 67 people thought murdered by May Mr Javid used his speech to pledge to officers he would provide 'tools, the powers and the back-up that you need to get the job done'. He said: 'For those of you who stand on the front line, be in no doubt that I will be standing with you. 'I'm not arrogant enough to turn up here after three weeks in the job and tell you how to do yours. 'What I will say is that I am listening and I get it. I get that there's increased demand.' Mr Javid claimed that, including funds raised through council tax, more than 1 billion extra cash is being invested in policing now than three years ago. A Tennessee woman has been arrested after she faked a sexual assault story. Sarah Elizabeth Suddarth, 24, told officials a Jamestown man sexually assaulted her at his home in December 2016. However, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says after looking into the case, the incident never occurred, WHNT reported. Sarah Elizabeth Suddarth, 24, (left) told officials a Jamestown man sexually assaulted her at his home in December 2016. 8th District Attorney General Jared Effler (right) requested an investigation in January The Fentress County Grand Jury returned an indictment charging Suddarth with one count of Filing a False Report. Suddarth turned herself in on Tuesday and was booked into the Fentress County Jail on a $2,500 bond. 8th District Attorney General Jared Effler requested an investigation in January. A leading former British representative to the EU has landed a lucrative job at a Swiss investment bank. Lord Hill, 57, who was European commissioner for financial services, will join UBS to advise firms on Brexit. The Tory peer's appointment will raise questions about the revolving door between politics and the City, and comes after former European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso joined the bank Goldman Sachs, and ex-chancellor George Osborne joined the investment firm BlackRock. Lord Hill (pictured), who was European commissioner for financial services, will join UBS to advise firms on Brexit UBS said he would give clients 'advice in relation to Brexit and the wider political and economic environment'. The 57-year-old was an advisor to ex-minister Kenneth Clarke and former PM John Major both Remainers. He was made a life peer in 2010, and then leader of the House of Lords, before becoming the UK's EU commissioner. But he quit following the Brexit vote, saying he was 'very disappointed'. Millions of Australians who bank with NAB have demanded financial compensation after a nationwide technical glitch caused chaos. NAB ran a full-page apology ad in newspapers across the country, with a letter from CEO, Andrew Thorburn, promising to make things right for its customers. Saturday's technical glitch left furious customers without access to NAB's ATMs, EFTPOS, online banking service and mobile application for six hours. Scroll down for video Saturday's technical glitch left customers without access to NAB's ATMs, EFTPOS, online banking service and mobile application for six hours People across the country complained online about being unable to pay for groceries, fuel and taxi fares. Customers have already started receiving thousands of dollars in compensation from the bank. A business owner received $1000 compensation from the bank, Nine news reported. NAB customers are promised for compensation for any financial loss from Saturday's outage The machinery and outdoor power equipment shop owner, Mark, from Cessnock, New South Wales, said, he called the bank first thing on Monday and asked what was going on. 'They asked a lot of questions and about two or three hours later I had another phone call back from some manager higher up in the bank and we had a discussion about what possible business had we lost and what profits I would have lost because I didnt sell those goods, and he made me an offer,' Mark said. Mr Thornburn's letter of apology read: 'Our promise to our customers is to be about "more than money". Inherent in that promise is the expectation that, as your bank, we get the fundamentals (the "money" bit) right. On Saturday we failed to do that. 'Many of our services didnt work for several hours because of a nationwide NAB outage. This affected and deeply inconvenienced many of our customers. Were truly sorry this happened and apologise. 'To our business customers who lost money as a result of this outage, we're committed to compensating for your loss. On Saturday afternoon, the chief customer officer, Anthony Healy took to social media and apologised for the outage saying: 'it was not good enough'. Mr Healy was critised for the video in which he was dressed in a t-shirt and appeared to have filmed on a smartphone. National Australia Bank runs a full-page apology ad on newspapers across nation apologising for nationwide outage Donald Trump Jr. retweeted some of the offensive comments posted by Roseanne Barr during her racist Twitter rampage that ultimately led to her show being cancelled. Despite clearly retweeting one of Barr's posts on Tuesday, the son of President Trump denied that he retweeted anything that was anti-Semitic. The tweet in question was one in which Barr called billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, who is Jewish, a 'nazi' who 'turned in his fellow Jews'. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted some of the offensive comments posted by Roseanne Barr during her racist Twitter rampage that ultimately led to her show being cancelled Barr had tweeted the false conspiracy theory about Soro, which has been pushed by alt-right activists, after she claimed that Chelsea Clinton was married to one of the billionaire's nephews. After Clinton clarified that she wasn't related to Soro, Barr fired back with an apology that included the anti-Semitic claims. 'Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you!I Please forgive me! By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?' Barr tweeted. 'Soros' goal; the overthrow of us constitutional republic by buying/backing candidates 4 local district attorney races who will ignore US law & favor 'feelings' instead-and call everyone who is alarmed by that 'racist'.' Those two tweets were the ones then retweeted by Don Jr. The tweet in question was one in which Barr called billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, who is Jewish, a 'nazi' who 'turned in his fellow Jews' The President's son made his denial on Twitter as he referenced a Page Six story detailing the retweets. 'Page Six is doing what they normally do, lying and obfuscating. They know full well that I did not RT anything that was anti-semitic, but I guess facts don't matter when you're a dishonest, clickbait rag. #FAKENEWS,' he tweeted. Meanwhile Soros' son Alexander defended his father in a post on the New York Daily News, saying Barr's lie was so 'odious'. 'When Jews in his native Budapest were being rounded up and killed by the Nazis, my grandfather Tivadar Soros saved many lives including his own family by securing false identity papers and helping put Jews into hiding. Among those he helped was the wife of an official of the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture,' Alexander said. 'In exchange, my grandfather asked the official to hide my father and pretend he was his godson. The official's duties included taking inventory of the estate of a Jewish family that had fled earlier under duress and he took my then 13-year-old father with him.' Barr came under fire for a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett during an unhinged rant on Tuesday morning Many on Twitter were appalled by Barr's tweet, which was in response to an article from a conspiracy website ABC has decided to cancel Roseanne Barr's television show just hours after the comedian posted a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett Barr's tweets about Soro were among the many on Tuesday in the lead up to her racist tweet that referred to former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett as a product of the Muslim Brotherhood and the 'Planet of the Apes.' ABC swiftly canceled Barr's hit show 'Roseanne' and slammed the comedian's comments as 'abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values'. Barr was also dumped by her talent agency, ICM Partners. Jarrett responded to the ordeal when she spoke at a town hall on MSNBC called 'Everyday Racism in America' later on Tuesday. She revealed that Disney CEO Bob Iger had called her to apologize. 'He wanted me to know before he made it public that he was canceling the show,' she said. Snow flurries, icy winds and pockets of heavy rainfall are all expected to hit parts of the country as Australia braces for a chilly start to winter. While the sun should bring some warm relief in Melbourne, it won't last long with temperatures expected to drop to -3C at the weekend in some parts of Victoria and to -1C in Canberra. Weatherzone meteorologist Graeme Brittain said rain was set to hit Sydney at the start of the week as a cold front caused temperatures to plunge from 24C to 11C. Snow flurries, icy winds and rain showers is expected to hit the country as Australia braces for the chilly winter conditions Weatherzone meteorologist Graeme Brittain said rain was set to hit Sydney at the start of the week as a cold front caused temperatures to plunge from 24C to 11C While the sun brings some warm relief it won't last long with temperatures expected to drop to -3C at the weekend in some parts of Victoria Mr Brittain predicted after showers passed there would be 'much cooler air pushing in' sweeping the city with cold conditions. 'We've seen some quite blistery conditions over South Australia, Victoria and it's heading towards Tasmania now,' he said. The final days of autumn are also set to be cool in Melbourne with minimum temperatures of between 6C and 9C from Wednesday to Saturday as part of a cold front bringing snow to Victoria's Alpine region. The Alpine region and north eastern parts of Victoria will be hit with a freeze, giving the first taste of winter. 'We'll get some snowfall in the wake of this front,' Mr Brittain said. Australian Bureau of Meterology (BoM) senior forecaster Beren Bradshaw told Daily Mail Australia the weekend in Victoria will be full of 'frosty conditions'. 'There will be shower activity for rest of week and earlier next week, but not too much rainfall in it,' she said. 'Most of the state will be mostly sunny except for in the East Gippsland districts. Temperatures in Sydney and Melbourne are set to drop into single-digit figures as a southerly cold front heralds the start of winter Canberra appears to be the coldest capital city in the country as temperatures are expected to drop to -1C on Friday and Saturday (stock image) The cool conditions are expected to last until the end of August after an 'average winter' across Victoria and further north in New South Wales. Canberra appears to be the coldest capital city in the country as temperatures are expected to drop to -1C on Friday and Saturday. Winter is making it's mark as the southerly cold front from Antarctica brought single-digit figures to Sydney and Melbourne. Adelaide has already been battered with hailstones and strong winds while snow has fallen in parts of Tasmania and Victoria's Alpine region, where temperatures have dropped below zero. The cool conditions are expected to last until the end of August after an 'average winter' across Victoria and further north in New South Wales (stock image) Melbourne is forecast to freeze on Friday with temperatures of just 6C while the mercury in Sydney is tipped to fall to 9C on Thursday as cold front sweeps southern Australia. The ski fields are already covered in snow, with temperatures at Mount Buller in Victoria forecast to fall to minus four degrees on Thursday. BoM forecaster Gabrielle Woodhouse suggested from June to August it would be 'warmer than average' across NSW but overnight temperatures would still be cold. 'It suggests average conditions but there will be cold nights, winter is coming,' Ms Woodhouse said. 'The climate outlook is suggesting parts of state's maximum and minimum temperatures could be slightly warmer than usual.' Much of the state woke up to a passing cold front which brought wet conditions of up to 15 millimeters in parts of the state. A teenager has been arrested for threatening to shoot up a school, as teachers, staff and students remain on high-alert following a string of similar threats and bomb scares. Fears first spread throughout the North Lakes region of south-east Queensland over the weekend, when a school was targeted in an online post that warned students: 'Don't come to school next week.' The threat, published on the 4chan website on Saturday, promised that the 'professional' attack would be bigger than the Parkland and Columbine shootings combined, The Courier Mail reports. Fears first spread throughout the North Lakes region of south-east Queensland over the weekend, when a school was targeted in an online post that warned students: 'don't come to school next week' A series of similar threats and bomb scares followed over the next few days, with Queensland Police since having arrested a number of teenagers in relation to the alleged incidents 'A school in North Lakes QLD is going to get professionally shot up with as many casualties as possible,' the post read. 'Every d**khead gets their day... This will be bigger than both Parkland and Columbine combined I promise.' The post signed off with 'Regards, Expertly Trained Professional School Shooter.' Queensland Police promptly issued an email to parents in the area, alerting them to 'non-specific' threats that had been made against North Lakes schools. They suggested there was no reason to treat it as a credible theat. One threat using strikingly similar language was posted in an online forum on Monday - this time targeting a specific school in the North Lakes area (pictured: a North Lakes school) On Tuesday, two separate bomb scares took place at nearby schools, prompting lockdowns and police intervention Then, on Monday night, a similar threat using strikingly similar language was posted in an online forum - this time targeting a specific school in the North Lakes area with the use of initials. The next morning, on Tuesday, a bomb threat was issued via email against AB Paterson College in nearby Arundel on the Gold Coast - prompting a complete lockdown of the school as visibly shaken security guards turned parents away. That afternoon, another bomb scare was called at the Lakes College in North Lakes, with police attending the scene and the school enacting safety protocols. Tuesday morning's bomb scare took place at AB Paterson College in Arundel on the Gold Coast, with parents being turned away by security guards Another bomb scare was called at the Lakes College in North Lakes on Tuesday afternoon, with police attending the scene and the school enacting safety protocols Many anxious parents chose to keep their children home from school over the past couple of days as fears for students' safety escalated. Queensland Police have since arrested a teenager for the shooting threats made on Monday night, charging him with one count each of using a carriage service to make a threat to cause harm, and threatening violence. Two teenagers have also been arrested and charged in relation to Tuesday morning's Arundel bomb scare. Queensland Police have since arrested a teenager for the shooting threats made on Monday night, and two teenagers in relation to Tuesday morning's bomb scare. They are not treating the threats as related incidents The four separate threats are not being treated as related incidents, and investigations into the shooting threats made over the weekend and the bomb scare issued on Tuesday afternoon are still ongoing. Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, however, Queensland Police said it suspects the string of recent incidents to be a series of hoaxes. Donald Trump said Tuesday that he's still committed to forcing Mexico to pay for America's border wall that's now under construction, and he predicted his policies will help the Republican Party increase its advantages in both houses of Congress this year. The president told a rally crowd in Nashville, Tennessee that despite the historical near-certainty of presidents losing congressional seats to the opposition party two years after taking office, his first midterm election would be different. 'We will reverse a trend,' he predicted, telling voters that they can overcome a 'complacent' attitude by swarming to support GOP candidates at the polls in November like Senate hopeful Marsha Blackburn, who spoke before him. Trump earned some of his loudest applause at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium by declaring that despite high-wire-act negotiations over the North America Free Trade Agreement, he will find a way to soak America's neighbors to the south. 'I don't want to cause a problem,' he said to cheers from the 90-percent-capacity audience, 'but in the end Mexico's going to pay for the wall.' Mexico's president shoved back hard. 'NO. Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever,' Enrique Pena Nieto tweeted. 'Sincerely, Mexico (all of us).' Scroll down for videos President Donald Trump fed red meat to a rally crowd in Tennessee on Tuedsay, blasting 'Crooked Hillary' Clinton and insisting that he'll make good on a three-year-old promise to build a border wall with Mexico's money Thousands filed into the Nashville Municipal Auditorium to cheer the president Tuesday night as he promoted his own issue portfolio and helped generate interest in Republican U.S. Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn Blackburn, a conservative Tennessee congresswoman, wants to win the Senate seat held by the retiring moderate GOP Sen. Bob Corker Enrique Pena Nieto, the President of Mexico, shoved back on Twitter against Trump, saying his country will 'NEVER' pay for a wall separating it form the U.S. Trump complained about a $71 billion trade deficit inflating it to an even $100 billion and vented about a flood of illegal immigrants whose presence he blames partly on Mexico's laissez-faire attitude toward through-travelers. 'They make all of this money and they do absolutely nothing to stop people from going through Mexico, from Honduras and all these other countries,' Trump said. 'They're going to pay for the wall, and they're going to enjoy it. Okay? They do nothing for us.' Trump has demanded a wall between the U.S. and Mexico for the past three years, claiming it would have a dramatic effect on sotpping drug trafficking and the crime that comes with it including the growth of the ultra-violent Salvadoran MS-13 gang in the U.S. The president earned scorn from Rep. Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats two weeks ago when he referred to MS-13 gang members as 'animals,' but doubled and tripled down in the days that followed. 'They want to cut people up into little pieces,' he said in Nashville. 'They're not human beings. ... This vicious gang has transformed once peaceful communities into bloodstained killing fields.' He asked the crowd if they knew what he had called the gangland menaces. 'ANIMALS!' they shouted as one. Without a Congress tilted more dramatically in Republicans' favor, Trump said Tuesday, crime statistics will trend in the wrong difection. Trump has promised for three years that he would physically wall off Mexico fom the U.S., and appeared in March alongside a group of prototypes erected in San Diego, California Trump didn't manage to fill the Nashville Municipal Auditorium, leaving entire sections empty or nearly empty Country music star Trade Adkins performed three numbers before Trump spoke, including one that he said was Ivanka Trump's favorite song Trump supporters stood outside in the rain to get in on Tuesday, including some who arrived 10 hours before the doors opened Some anti-Trump protesters like Rita Tompkins and Linda Davis but not many stood outside to make their voices heard against Trump and Blackburn on Tuesday As the auditorium filled up Tuesday night and rally-goers shook the rain off their jackets and ponchos, country music star Trace Adkins performed and included in his brief set list a tune called 'Ladies Love Country Boys.' He said Trump, 'my friend,' had told him the song was his daughter Ivanka's favorite. The president made no mention of the swirling controversy of ABC's cancelation of the 'Roseanne' show, a program that was seen as giving voice to some of his backers. Roseanne Barr, an unapologetic Trump supporter whose on-screen character generated a gigantic audience by articulating similar views, became an instant pariah Tuesday afternoon after sending a racist tweet that compared a former Barack Obama adviser to an 'ape.' White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters aboard Air Force One that 'thats not what hes spending his time on. ... I think that we have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now.' Trump was all business, only straying into Hollywood talk once to point out fht Adkins was a former winner on his 'Celebrity apprentice' reality TV series. 'Crime is down in the country, but we need Republicans. ... If you want your country to be safe, you must go out and get the Democrats the hell out of office,' he said, adding that if Democrats 'take over' Congress, 'you won't have a Second Amendment.' Trump lamented his own party's inability to march in lockstep on Capitol Hill, a phenomenon that his own antics and hard-line policies sometimes drive to the surface. Democrats, he siad, are 'bad at everything, but they're good at sticking together. I give them respect for that.' The White House is concerned, an official said earlier Tuesday, that without an expansion of its current 51-49 U.S. Senate advantage, the next series of key legislative battles will favor liberals who aim to 'throw up roadblocks and grind everything the president wants to do to a halt.' The president said nothing Tuesday night about the controversy swirling around TV star Roseanne Barr, a vocal support of his who saw her career crash and burn hours earlier over a racist tweet A couple kissed in line and took a selfie before the rally in Nashville on Tuesday Trump's larger purpose coming to Tennessee was to raise money for Blackburn to support her Senate bid So Trump, the official added, wants to communicate to his supporters that 'electing another Senate Democrat means nothing they voted for in 2016 gets done.' Blackburn's race is one the president has paid special attention to, he said, and Trump didn't disappoint going after the contest's top Democrat, Phil Bredesen, by name and painting him as a far-left supporter of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. 'Crooked Hillary!' the president exclaimed, seeming surprised at his own ability to weave his former election foe's name into a speech long after her political sell-by date had passed. A few in the crowd obliged him, chanting 'Lock her up!' a throwback to the daily refrain that accompanied his every campaign speech in 2016. He threw them additional red meat, reminiscing about an Ohio rally where Clinton brought to star power of rapper Jay-Z to draw urban voters to hear her speak. The event became a punchline, though, when most of the audience filed out before the candidate delivered her remarks. For Trump, though, the problem was Jay-Z's blue-streak word choices. 'He'd use the F-word and Hillary would sit back and say, "Oh, I'm in trouble! Please don't have him use that language anymore",' Trump said Tuesday of the event that took place 571 days ago. 'His language was so filthy!' The president also signaled Tuesday that he would have no problem going after Bredesen. 'I never heard of this guy. Who is he? He's an absolute, total tool of Chuck Schumer. He's a tool of Chuck Schumer and of course the MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi,' he ranted. 'Phil whatever-the-hell-his-name-is, this guy will vote 100 per cent against us every single time.' Corker, the retiring chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has crossed swords with Trump and turned down his offer to be the U.S. ambassador to Australia Former Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, is running for Corker's Senate seat against Blackburn, and Trump blasted him as a far-left cohort of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi Blackburn and Bredesen are vying to succeed the retiring Sen. Bob Corker, a GOP moderate who once questioned the president's 'stability' and called his White House an 'adult day care center.' Corker is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, amplifying his objections to Trump's moves in North Korea and Iran. He was in Nashville Tuesady night. Thousands booed loudly at Trump's mention of his name alongside a list of other Tennessee GOP politicians. Trump was all smiles despite calling the diminutive senator 'Liddle Bob' last year and saying he 'couldn't get elected dog catcher in Tennessee.' Complaining too loudly about Corker could have produced another odd twist since the White House asked him last month to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Australia. Corker turned down the offer. When the former Chattanooga mayor suggested in December that he might vote against a broad tax cut package favored by the White House, Trump called him 'incompetent.' Corker didn't take it lying down, tweeting: 'It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning,' he tweeted. Blackburn supports Trump's emphasis on border security and slowing illegal immigration. The president was privately incensed last year when Twitter banned an ad her campaign produced that accused abortion providers of profiting from the 'sale of baby body parts.' She has also worked closely with Ivanka Trump on child care reform issues. And she raised eyebrows in April when she grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about his conservatives' complaints that his company had shadow-banned' them by quietly limiting the reach of their messages. Trump wants to see a wider Republican majority in the Senate than the GOP's current 51-49 edge, hoping for more wiggle room as he pushes policy through in 2019 and 2020 Blackburn had been tweeting up a storm in anticipation of her spotlight moment with Trump Trump tweeted last month that the congresswoman is a 'wonderful woman who has always been there when we have needed her.' Bredesen, a popular former Democratic governor, put the Senate race in play by entering the race in December. He and Blackburn are likely to romp over their primary competitors on August 2, setting the stage for a battle that pollsters say the Democrat could win by a nose. Every nonpartisan poll taken in April showed Bredesen narrowly ahead, with each survey's result within its margin of error. But the Rothenberg Political Report and political scientist Larry Sabato's 'Crystal Ball' report both rate the contest as 'leaning' toward Blackburn. Trump endorsed Blackburn a month ago, tweeting that she is 'a wonderful woman who has always been there when we have needed her. Great on the Military, Border Security and Crime.' Blackburn, a self-described 'hardcore, card-carrying Tennessee conservative,' served on Trump's transition team. She has been pointedly counting down the days on Twitter until Trump comes to town. Trump won Tennessee decidedly in 2016 and remains popular there. President Donald Trump asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to take back his recusal from the Russia investigation and oversee the probe being run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, it has been reported. Mueller is investigating the request by the president, which was reportedly made in March 2017, as part of an expanding probe into whether he obstructed justice. News of the request was first reported by The New York Times. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation because of his role as a surrogate for the Trump campaign. The campaign and its officials are being probed over suspicions that they held illegal contacts with the Russian government during and after the 2016 campaign. President Donald Trump asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to take back his recusal from the Russia investigation and oversee the probe being run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, it ha been reported Trump and the Russian government deny the allegations. The president has been seething for months over Sessions decision to recuse himself - a step that was recommended by Justice Department officials. Sessions was pressured to step aside after news surfaced that he held contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the campaign. After Sessions recusal, his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, appointed Mueller to handle the investigation. Trump had also fired James Comey as director of the FBI. The president told NBC News that the reason for Comeys dismissal was his handling of the Russia investigation. Muellers investigation is focused not only on the circumstances surrounding Comeys firing but also Trumps efforts to pressure Sessions to re-assume control of the Russia probe. Trump believes that Sessions recusal led to the Mueller investigation. In the months since the recusal, Trump has belittled Sessions on Twitter as well as in speeches before public rallies. The president has reportedly been trying to get Sessions to resign, but Senate Republicans told him that they would not confirm a new attorney general - forcing Trump to back down. Rudy Giuliani, Trumps lawyer, said that he did not discuss Sessions recusal with the president. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation because of his role as a surrogate for the Trump campaign But if a request to reverse his recusal were made by Trump, it would not be improper, according to Giuliani. Unrecuse doesnt say, Bury the investigation. It says on the face of it: Take responsibility for it and handle it correctly, Giuliani said. Giuliani also said that it would be improper for Mueller to ask Trump about his conversations with senior administration officials because it would set a bad precedent for future presidents. The Times also reported that Sessions recusal has led to a deterioration in their relationship. Before the attorney general recused himself, he and Trump were friends. They would dine together and have frequent talks on the phone. Mueller is investigating the request by the president, which was reportedly made in March 2017, as part of an expanding probe into whether he obstructed justice Sessions was pressured to step aside after news surfaced that he held contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the campaign. After Sessions recusal, his deputy, Rod Rosenstein (above), appointed Mueller to handle the investigation Now former and current White House officials say that they rarely speak outside of cabinet meetings. Trump and Sessions attended the same event in New Hampshire this past March, but they flew in separate planes, according to the Times. In an interview with the Times last July, Trump said he never would have named Sessions attorney general if he knew he would recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Days after the interview, a Washington Post report revealed that Sessions held contacts with Moscows then-ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak. Trump reacted furiously to the report. He told his then-chief of staff, Reince Priebus, that he wanted Sessions to resign by the end of the weekend. Priebus then called Sessions chief of staff, Jody Hunt, who told him that the president would need to talk to the attorney general himself if he wanted him to resign. Priebus was unsure what to do, so he decided to wait. Trump never called Sessions. Instead, he launched a Twitter attack, posting: Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes (where are E-mails & DNC server) & Intel leakers! Muellers team has told the presidents lawyers that they want to ask Trump about his discussions with Priebus as well as his public criticisms of Sessions. A teenage boy had his pants pulled down, custard thrown all over his uniform and was told the 'world would be better without him', in a harrowing bullying experience which has left him wanting to take his own life. The distressed boy, 14, who asked to be known as BJ, used to love going to school - but that all changed at the beginning of the year when the vile schoolyard bullies decided he would be their next target. And, on Tuesday, the young boy from the NSW Hunter Valley threatened to kill himself if his parents made him go back. This picture shows the chocolate yoghurt which was thrown on BJ - he spent six hours in the dirty shirt and claims none of the teachers asked about it His sister put this post up after being stunned by the young boy's threats to kill himself Clare is angry - not only for her brother but for other children who have been bullied His sister Clare told Daily Mail Australia he went from being a happy kid with an amazing attendance record to staying home twice a week and crying every day. 'I was ready to give him a stern word on Tuesday when mum couldn't get him to school again - but as soon as he saw my face he lost it. 'He said 'Please don't let me go to school, if they send me to school I will kill myself. The people at school are right the classroom is better without me if you make me go I have to kill myself.' The bullying started after the Christmas holidays, according to Clare who has six children of her own. 'He is a bigger boy so it was mostly verbal stuff, it was mean but we were not too concerned but then it escalated and nothing happened to stop it.' The angry big sister tried to contact the school, the Department of Education and the local MP about the bullying and is still 'waiting to hear back'. So - in a fit of frustration she took to Facebook to express her disgust, outlining the horrific abuse her brother copped at school. The teenager's school shirt was ruined one day when a classmate scribbled all over it 'Kids throwing chocolate custard on to his white shirt and having to sit through six periods in it a minimum of six teachers seen this boy walk around all day with this and not once asked about it or offered a clean shirt or parental contact!?' 'Having his pants pulled down in bus lines in front of a teacher and multiple students leaving him FULLY exposed and then to be continually bullied about his penis and not once did the teacher get involved?! 'Having his white school shirt drawn all over with red pen and AGAIN no action was taken?! 'Being whacked on the legs with a broken umbrella by another student leaving welts!,' she wrote. Clare said the most difficult thing for her to understand was the teachers' reactions. Some classmates appeared to admit to knowing the bullying was happening - and commented on the post. This comment mentioned a different teenage boy - who also appears to be a victim of violence at the school 'How can so many adults walk past a kid with chocolate all over his shirt and not think to ask what's wrong, or if he needed a change of clothes,' she said. Since her Facebook post the mother has been inundated with messages. 'One girl who goes to the school sent me a message to tell me all the kids were sharing my post over Snapchat - and laughing about it,' she said. 'But then she named a child and said it was only going to make it worse for him - but she didn't name my brother so that made me wonder how many kids are being treated like this.' Clare's parents pulled BJ out of school on Tuesday after he broke down, and are looking to move house so he can go somewhere else. 'He has never been bullied before, and has been to two primary schools and a high school so this was all out of the blue.' She says her mother is concentrating on BJ and his mental health - and hope his story helps change things for other tortured children at high school. Since Clare out up the post she has heard back from the Department of Education who told her 'the principal is happy to set up a meeting'. Clare is frustrated the family had to share their story online before being given the opportunity for a meeting. A heartbroken family have been left searching for answers after their baby boy tragically died in his sleep. Lucas Elliot was just nine months old when he failed to wake up from a nap at his daycare in Toowoomba, south west of Brisbane, last Thursday. Daycare staff made desperate attempts to resuscitate him as emergency services rushed to the scene. Lucas Elliot (pictured) was just nine-months-old when he failed to wake up from sleep time Lucas' parents and grandparents were already waiting for their son to arrive at Toowoomba Hospital where he was then airlifted to Lady Cilento. His mother Kathy said the team there 'were amazing' but there was nothing more that they could do for their 'brave little boy'. He died surrounded by all of his loved ones which she explains they are all so thankful for. 'We still do not understand why he didn't wake from his sleep on Thursday morning but we are so thankful for the team who resuscitated him so that we could have our time to say goodbye,' his mother Kathy said. His heartbroken family are searching for answers after the precious baby boy passed away The family now want to give back to the 'amazing organisations' who made it possible for Lucas' loved ones to spend some precious time with their special baby before he passed away. 'We wish to support Queensland Ambulance Service, Toowoomba Base Hospital, Life Flight, Lady Cilento ICU & Ronald McDonald House.' They are asking for contributions to help thank the team that made it possible for us to spend some precious time with our special baby boy Performance artist Mike Parr has hacked at his own prosthetic arm, laid motionless as he was splattered in large amounts of his own blood, and has had his face sewn together all in the name of art. But the 73-year-old's most recent endeavor aims to deliver a more grounded performance piece to the people of Hobart. As a contributor to the annual Tasmanian Dark Mofo Winter Festival, Parr intends to move his work underground - and away from the keen eye of his audiences. Production is under way to build him a 4.5m x 1.7m x 2.2m steel container, fitted with a fan forced air supply. Mike Parr (pictured) spent 72 hours in an abandoned mental asylum Construction is underway for the 2018 exhibition for Dark Mofo festival He will enter the box at 9pm on June 14 and will not reemerge until three days later. Anxiety that audiences won't be able to physically watch the performance piece is a concern with curator Jarrod Rawlins. 'When Mike Parr asks to be buried under the streets of Hobart it's hard to say no,' Dark Mofo creative director Leigh Carmichael said. Parr's conceptual practice in relation to the piece, entitled 'Underneath The Bitumen The Artist' is reflective of the 20th century totalitarian violence in all it's forms. 'To my knowledge, it will be Tasmania's first monument referencing both the Black War and the convict system.' 'It is a story that is not well known, but is ever-present, just beneath the surface of our contemporary culture.' His reference to the under ground way in which this historical moment is cultivated in Australia is evident in his desire to take his performance under the surface of the busy Macquarie Street, where he will fast, draw and meditate as cars continue about their commute directly above him. Parr has incorporated large amounts of his own blood (pictured) into his performance art in the past Whilst the performance isn't out of the ordinary in considering Parr's previous performance pieces, it has certainly divided audiences thus far. Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre chief executive Heather Sculthorpe was insulted by the project, according to The Mercury. She said Dark Mofo's representation of the Aboriginal story in Tasmania is insulting and 'some old fella under a road is not the way to do it'. Since her statement, the spokesperson for the centre, Michael Mansell released a second statement. 'The Aboriginal people of Tasmania are right behind [Parr] for making the point that Tasmania's historical treatment of Aboriginal people has been hidden buried, as it were for far too long.' The road will be sealed with Parr inside, as cars drive over the top of him for three days Hobart Mayor Ron Christie voted against the location of the performance, voicing his concern for traffic control during the construction of the room. Jennine Khalik, a journalist at the ABC was among startled individuals and challenged Parr's authority to perform such a racially motivated piece. Ms Khalik made reference to Indigenous leaders 'raised eyebrows' in regard to the entry into the exhibition. After the performance, the land will be refilled as normal. 'One day a future generation might end up digging it up and finding out what went on in there,' Mr Rawlins said. ABC Journalist Jennine Khalik shared her opinion on Mr Parr (pictured) MONA'S Dark Mofo Winter Festival runs from June 14th until June 24th. The cultural event brings enormous amounts of tourism and money into the Tasmanian economy, according to Mr Christie. In a statement released by Dark Mofo, they have confirmed that this performance is the third and final artwork that Parr will have entered into the festival. 'In 2016, the festival commissioned Parr's work Asylum [Entry by Mirror Only] at the historic Willow Court Asylum in New Norfolk. The work was comprised of a 72-hour performance followed by a two-week exhibition of Parr's photographic and film works, reflected in a kaleidoscope of mirrors left on the site by more than 10,000 visitors.' In 2016, Parr's entry into the Dark Mofo festival was titled Asylum [Entry by Mirror Only] 'In 2017, Dark Mofo travelled to Bruny Island at 2am for Empty Ocean, a performance in which Mike Parr was joined by 72 people aged around 70 years, for a one-hour performance piece in the near-darkness of the frozen morning. An experience of stark, minimal beauty ensued, as a meditation on time, ageing, and isolation, with attendees returning to the main island of Tasmania just before dawn.' 'Instead of Tasmania putting its head in the sand it needs to openly talk about the past and how it affects people today. Mr Parr is making his contribution.' The colossal carcass of a giant whale is bringing some unwanted visitors to a popular tourist destination in Western Australia. Cheynes Beach, an idyllic stretch of sand known for its now-defunct whaling station, has seen its fair share of the dead mammals over the years. But the rotting remains of a massive 23 metre fin whale has made a big splash in the area, it seems, as legions of sharks were spotted prowling the blood-stained waters on Monday. The rotting remains of a massive 23 metre fin whale have attracted legions of sharks to Cheynes Beach in Western Australia (pictured) It took six truckloads of decaying flesh, blubber and bone to completely remove the whale from the beachfront, with most the remains being taken to a landfill in nearby Albany The dead whale was first spotted on Thursday afternoon, The West Australian reports, with City of Albany rangers closing the beach due to fears that the bloated, 50-tonne mammal could attract ocean predators. By the time it was finally dragged up onto the sand for removal on Monday, a huge slick plume of blood, oil and bodily fluids had seeped out into the turquoise waters - and the sharks were circling. Local wildlife photographer Raeline Smith managed to capture some incredible images of the moment the blood-hungry menaces arrived on the scene. 'It's attracted some very large predators,' she said. 'There's some good 4 metre to 5 metre whites out there.' By the time it was finally removed a huge slick plume of blood, oil and bodily fluids had seeped out into the turquoise waters - and the sharks were circling Cheynes Beach is an idyllic stretch of sand along the Western Australian coast - a popular tourist destination that is well-known for its now-defunct whaling station It took six truckloads of decaying flesh, blubber and bone to completely remove the whale from the beachfront, with most the remains being taken to a landfill in nearby Albany. 'You don't want to get downwind of it, that's for sure,' said Ms Smith. Two great white sharks were tagged and released near the beach on Tuesday. They measured between three and four metres in length. Fin whales, the second-largest mammal on Earth, are currently listed as an endangered species A total of 1136 humpbacks and 14,695 sperm whales were caught from the Cheynes Beach Whaling Station between 1952 and 1978. Fin whales, the second-largest mammal on Earth, are currently listed as an endangered species. Four children and their mother killed in Australia's worst shooting since Port Arthur have been laid to rest at a packed memorial service. Katrina Miles, 35, daughter Taye, 13, and sons Rylan, 12, Ayre, 10, and Kadyn, eight, were farewelled on Wednesday by their father Aaron Cockman's family and more than a hundred mourners at Bunbury, south of Perth. The service heard Disney themed music, as well as Celine Dion and the Forrest Gump theme, according to the order of service. Aaron Cockman (right) hugs mourners outside a funeral service for his four children who were killed on May 11, in Australia's worst massacre in two decades The order of service featured a photo of the family of five who were all tragically killed Katrina Miles (left), her daughter Taye, 13, and sons Rylan, 12, Arye, 10, and Kadyn, eight will be farewelled at the funeral service in Western Australia on Wednesday The document featured a beautiful family photo of the murdered five. There was also a 'petal placing', the sharing of 'words of hope' and a tribute which featured the song, Somewhere Over The Rainbow. The funeral was open to members of the devastated small community of Margaret River. Uniformed members of the Red Cross were spotted on crematorium grounds. Many young children attended, some no doubt friends from the homeschooling community the four children were a part of. 'It was very moving, a mourner said outside the service. 'They said some things just can't be explained ... everyone is still shocked'. A day after his four children were shot dead as they slept, Mr Cockman fronted media and said he believed Mr Miles had planned the murder Mr Cockman (pictured) talks to a young child outside the service for his daughter and three sons Mr Cockman also spoke briefly with fond words to his late wife, the mourner said. Weeks ago, he admitted that they were estranged during an extraordinary press conference. The order of service contained a heartbreaking poem which spoke of the brevity of time, titled a 'Symbol of Hope'. 'A butterfly lights beside us like a sunbeam, and for a brief moment, its glory and beauty belong to our world. 'But then it flies again and though we wish it could have stayed... we feel lucky to have seen it.' 'It's a very, very sad day for the community,' WA Premier Mark McGowan told reporters A separate service will soon be held for the other side of the family, including her mother Cynda, 58, and suspected killer father Peter, 61. Tributes posted on the funeral company's website included friends overseas who had stayed with the family at Forever Dreaming Farm, and had many happy memories of their time together. 'Fly high beautiful children,' one mourner said. 'We were both so saddened to hear of your sudden loss. May time and the memories of happier days give you strength to overcome your sorrow,' another said. Mourners arrive at the funeral service on Wednesday morning carrying floral tributes Peter Miles (back left) shot dead his wife Cynda (back centre), his daughter Katrina (back right) and her children Taye (centre), 13, and sons Rylan, 12 (right) and Arye (left), 10 as they slept Many young families brought flowers and the President of the Shire of Augusta-Margaret River, Pamela Townshend, is attending both services in a personal capacity. Premier Mark McGowan said the state government contacted the families immediately after the tragedy to offer financial support for the funerals. 'It's a very, very sad day for the community,' Mr McGowan told reporters in Perth. Media have been asked to respect the families' wishes and their privacy by staying out of the chapel. Floral tributes laid outside the family's farm near Margaret River in the days after the massacre Mr Cockman previously told reporters he believed Mr Miles planned the murder-suicide. He speculated that the grandfather, whose son died years ago, could not bear the thought of losing his other son Neil, who has a serious kidney illness. Police spent days scouring the 11 hectare property and the investigation is continuing. Friends have told AAP Mr Miles 'couldn't look after his family' and felt a 'sense of failure'. He had financial problems, was battling mental illness and was reportedly taking antidepressants. Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14. Nipaluna (pronounced 'nip-ah-LOO-nuh') has been presented to Hobart City Council this afternoon in a bid for it to be adopted as the dual name for Tasmania's capital city. As part of Reconciliation Week, Hobart City Council has been offered the new name by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) this afternoon in hope of Hobart becoming Australia's first capital city with a dual Indigenous name that was given to Hobart by the Indigenous community at the time of European Settlement. The name is thought to be the traditional name for the city only located through painstaking research and is in the language of 'palawa kani' - Tasmania's revived Aboriginal Language. Hobart could become Australia's first capital city with an Indigenous name if the TAC's proposed name is adopted by the Hobart City Council TAC's CEO Heather Sculthorpe told the ABC: 'It will be fantastic if Hobart were to become the first [capital] in Australia that was able to adopt the original name for the territory on which it is located. 'It would be a fantastic fillip to our sense of Aboriginal history, it would be a great boon for all the citizenry and I think it wouldn't do bad for tourism either.' There are already a number of places in Tasmania with dual names such as Yingina/Great Lake, Taypalaka/Green Point and Pinmatik/Rocky Cape. Tasmania's Rocky Cape has a dual Indigenous name of 'pinmatik' and is one of 11 dual named places in Tasmania It would be an achievement for Tasmania's Indigenous community - one that has not yet been witnessed in other cities despite campaign attempts in Brisbane to rename the capital city 'Miguntyun'. This year's theme for Reconciliation Week is 'Don't Keep History a Mystery' which will be supported by the change of name to a traditional one. Lord Mayor Ron Christie of Hobart appears welcoming to the offering recently stating: '[Hobart] is a very close-knit community and I am absolutely sure they will embrace it.' Adoption of the name officially will be symbolic but does not avoid road-blocks as a review of the Tasmanian Government's Aboriginal and Dual naming policy, developed in 2012 is still looming. Further approvals of the change are required but it is likely Ms Sculthorpe will bypass traditional avenues and go straight to the public. The Tasmanian Government's Aboriginal and Dual Naming Policy is under review so the TAC will bypass traditional avenues for the name-change Traditional methods were used in 2014 when Mount Wellington was given the dual name of kunanyi under the Tasmanian Government's Aboriginal and Dual Naming Policy. Kunanyi is the name that is now used on signs and maps for the mountain but the proposed name change for Hobart may not witness this degree of success. Ms Sculthorpe recently stated: 'I don't think immediately the proper name will be used like that, but I know that even if enough people start using it, if the council starts using it, then eventually it will become the name like kunanyi is for Mount Wellington.' A shameless thief has allegedly been captured on CCTV stealing parcels from outside the front door of a home. The man, wearing a blue hoodie, black track pants and blue trainers, is shown taking the packages in broad daylight on Monday morning from the West Australian house. The homeowner who posted the video to social media claimed neighbours in her small gated community had also experienced parcels being stolen in the past. An alleged thief has been captured on CCTV stealing parcels from outside the front door of a West Australian residence 'Today some low life decided to steal some parcels that were left outside my front door just hours before while I was out,' the person wrote online, according to the New Zealand Herald. HOW TO PROTECT PACKAGE DELIVERIES Security firm ADT has released advice on how to protect packages from thieves which includes: 1. Tracking your order online 2. Requesting a signature on delivery 3. Leaving detailed delivery instructions such as a hidden spot where parcels can be left 4. Asking that the parcel be held until collected 5. Getting the parcel delivered to work 6. Redirecting the package to a neighbour and returning the favour Advertisement 'We are in Albany Village and we live in a complex so this person must be driving round looking for parcels or something as I don't recognise him from our community.' The homeowner claimed the courier responsible for delivering the package refused to take ownership, claiming they had fulfilled their end of the bargain by delivering the items. The footage comes just days after an Australia Post employee was convicted of stealing a parcel and mail from the West Australian office where she worked. Waroona resident 54-year-old Linda Terese Coote pleaded guilty to two charges of stealing as a servant in Mandurah Magistrates Court on May 22. Coote stole a package containing a CCTV system and when police went to her house they found a number of letters where the names of the addressees were blacked out and scorched. Australia Post is currently trialing a 'smart mailbox' called Receva, a digitally connected locker that can be opened by Australia Post and courier services for deliveries. The man, wearing a blue hoodie, black track pants and blue trainers, is shown stealing the packages in broad daylight on Monday morning from the Albany house A new U.S. intelligence assessment has revealed that North Korea does not intend to give up its nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future. This contradicts President Donald Trump saying that Pyongyang plans to give them up in the future. Trump continues to pursue a nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un despite a top defector saying North Korea will never completely give up its nuclear weapons. 'Everybody knows they are not going to denuclearize,' said one intelligence official. Kim Jong Un plans to open a Western hamburger franchise in Pyongyang as a show of goodwill US President Donald Trump at the White House in May. A new U.S. intelligence assessment has revealed that North Korea does not intend to give up its nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future. This contradicts President Donald Trump saying that Pyongyang plans to give them up in the future However, Kim Jong Un plans to open a Western hamburger franchise in Pyongyang as a show of goodwill, NBC reported. Trump previously said he wanted to talk nukes over a burger with the North Korean leader, therefore the opening of the joint is a peaceful gesture to the American president. During the 2016 campaign, Trump said he would like to meet with the North Korean leader in a low-key setting that entailed 'eating a hamburger on a conference table.' This undated picture shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un (center) looking at a metal casing with two bulges at an undisclosed location Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang shows vehicles carrying missiles. A top defector said North Korea will never completely give up its nuclear weapons The CIA report said Kim thought the establishment could be used to provide food during the talks and would show that he was open to Western investment. 'If the North Koreans don't agree in a joint statement that lays out denuclearization -that is, getting rid of their nuclear weapons, having them put under control by international elements - then I don't think we are going to go very far,' Chris Hill, a former ambassador to South Korea, said Tuesday. The current whirlwind of diplomacy and negotiations will not end with 'a sincere and complete disarmament' but with 'a reduced North Korean nuclear threat', said Thae Yong-ho, who fled his post as the North's deputy ambassador to Britain in August 2016. 'In the end, North Korea will remain 'a nuclear power packaged as a non-nuclear state',' Thae told the South's Newsis news agency. This picture taken on May 14, 2017 shows Kim Jong-Un reacting during a test launch of a ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket Hwasong-12 at an undisclosed location North Korea's chief delegate Lieutenant General Kim Yong-chol leaves after military talks with South Korea on the south side of the border village of Panmunjom July 26, 2007. North Korea does not intend to give up its nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future His remarks come ahead of an unprecedented summit between Kim and Trump in Singapore on June 12 where North Korea's nuclear and missile programmes are expected to dominate the agenda. North and South Korea affirmed their commitment to the goal of denuclearisation of the peninsula at a summit last month, and Pyongyang announced at the weekend it will destroy its only known nuclear test site next week. However, a top nuclear expert argued that the nuclear disarmament process in North Korea could take as a long as 15 years. This picture taken on May 14, 2017 and released from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency shows a test launch of the ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket Hwasong-12 at an undisclosed location Instead of defending Israel's efforts to defending itself and leaving it at that, Michael Brown, a conservative radio host and a Jewish believer in Jesus, went on the offensive. Brown, who spoke at the conference on May, 29,2018, began by describing his problems with the conference. "I have already been grieved by things I heard from leaders in private, comparing Israel to Hamas, vilifying Palestinian Christians who have a different perspective, CATC encouraging tours of the blatantly propagandistic Walled Off Hotel, which distorts the past and the present and accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing," Brown said. Brown didn't stop there. He challenged Palestinian Christians, especially the folks who organized the CATC conference, to Openly express your disagreements with the Palestinian Authority and Fatah and Hamas. Otherwise, the feeling is that youre in harmony with them.? It was a legitimate challenge, because, as in year's past, the first night of this year's conference (which continues until Friday) was dedicated to Palestinian Christians saying nice things about the Palestinian Authority leadership and allowing the PA to attack Israel. (And this year, one Christian from outside the region, Bishop Efraim Tendero, secretary-general of the World Evangelical alliance called Mahmoud Abbas, a man of peace in this land.? High praise for a man who complained about Jews desecrating the Temple Mount with their filthy feet? a few years ago.) Brown didn't just chide CATC organizers for their apparent submission to the PA. He called on conference organizers to condemn the tendency of Palestinian leaders to celebrate the murder of Israelis in terror attacks. He made this plea after recounting the details surrounding the murder of Fogel family in 2011: "Rabbi Yaakov Cohen, a neighbor who entered the house with their 12-year-old daughter (who returned from a youth event to find her slaughtered family), told the Ynet website that her two-year-old brother 'was lying next to his bleeding parents, shaking them with his hands and trying to get them to wake up, while crying The sight in the house was shocking.'" Brown said. "Today, the families of the murderers, Amjad Awad and Hakim Awad, receive regular payments from the PA as part of their pension. In fact, it is reported that PA payments to families of terrorists and prisoners amount to roughly 10 percent of the PA budget," he added. Then Brown made a direct plea: "Will you join me today in renouncing this?" He also described how Israelis respond to the deaths of civilians at the hands of their government when in 2002, Israeli forces killed Salah Shehade who according to one source, had direct involvement in attacks that killed 474 people and wounded 2,649 between July 2001 and July 2002.? But in killing Shehade, Brown reported, they also killed his wife, his daughter, his assistant, plus ten other civilians, including seven children, the youngest less than one year old. One hundred fifty people were wounded. Israeli intelligence relied on bad information, as a result of which so many others were killed or wounded, since he alone was targeted.? Brown continued: "When word of this got out, there were national protests in Israel, including the rebellion of air force pilots who had been involved in previous bombing missions. The nation rose up to protest the shedding of innocent Palestinian blood even in the process of killing a mass murderer." Brown then asked the Palestinian Christians to follow the example set by the Israelis and hold their leaders accountable. "The least you could do as followers of Jesus is stand with me in denouncing your governments celebration of terrorism," he said."I understand you have challenges as a Christian minority in a Muslim society, but somehow, your voices of dissent must be heard." It was a powerful speech. In addition challenging CATC organizers to confront Palestinian violence, Brown asked them to condemn replacement theology and to put Jesus at the center of the conflict? and to demonstrate this action, by expressing love for the Israeli people.? This is a tough challenge, because as Brown declared, CATC is far better known for standing against Israel than standing against Hamas and for the Gazan Christians.? Conference spokesperson Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac knew the challenge was coming (he even had a copy of Brown's speech before it was given) and should have been able to provide an irenic and substantive response. Instead, he reacted with shocking disdain for the issues Brown raised, saying he and his colleagues were tired? of having to deal with the issues and questions Brown raised in his talk, because they seem to place all the blame on us, the oppressed.? Isaac went on to say that he too could talk about the suffering endured by his community and could show pictures of the victims of Israeli violence but that he didn't want to get into a competition about who suffered more. He also declared that radical Jewish groups and politicians celebrate when Palestinians are killed, as if there were an equivalence between the incitement in Palestinian and Israeli society when there isn't. Hamas- and PA-run television stations regularly demonize Jews and the Palestinian Authority (and the Jordanian government) regularly allows for call of incitement on the Temple Mount. Demonization of the other permeates Palestinian society in ways that it simply does not in Israel. Instead of confronting the problem of incitement and the celebration of murder by both the PA and Hamas who use antisemitism as a unifying political agenda, Isaac tried to change the subject. The real question we should be asking asking as followers of Christ,? Isaac said, is 'What drives people to do these violent things?' This is the real question you should be asking. The question you should be asking is how do we together work to address the systems and structures of injustice and oppression that create these violent actions of some Palestinians. How do we as followers as Christ come together in humbleness and deal with the causes and ideologies that exclude and demonize?? Isaac also complained about a double-standard used to judge Palestinian violence. Why is every Israeli violence self-defense? Why is every Palestinian violence terrorism?? How ironic that Evangelical Christians that supported the war in Iraq and support a war in Iran condemn and criticize the Palestinian people for violent acts of certain groups among us.? He also said that the Christ at the Checkpoint has previously condemned all forms of violence but that it's just that people are not listening. Isaac, who like many other CATC speakers, has repeatedly and regularly condemned Christian Zionism at conferences over the past decade, simply couldn't be bothered to repeat these previous condemnations of Palestinian violence. In his response, Isaac missed an opportunity to send a message to Israelis and Jews throughout the world that yes, he and his fellow Palestinian Christians understand how frightening it is for them to see Palestinian leaders laud and reward the killers of Israeli women and children. Instead of acknowledging the obligation of his fellow Christians to speak truth to power in Palestinian society and not just condemn Israel Isaac spoke in vague terms about systems? and structures? that cause people to engage in acts of terror, as if the concept of sin which CATC speakers use so often to condemn Israel should not be used to assess Palestinian behavior. Apparently, in Isaac's world, it's theological condemnation for Israel, sociological explanations for the Palestinians. Brown's direct challenge to Palestinian Christians highlighted this troubling double-standard. In sum, Michael Brown did Christians throughout the world a great service by highlighting the inability of Palestinian Christians to speak truth to power in Palestinian society. Hopefully, conference organizers will take Brown's message to heart in the days ahead. Huge seven-metre 'monster' crocodiles could be lurking in isolated areas in Queensland - but we're unlikely to ever find them. That's according to researchers at Australia Zoo, who say there are 'some absolute whoppers out there', but the crocs tend to avoid interacting with humans. The Northern Territory is renowned for having terrifyingly large crocs, but new information suggests that Far North Queensland's resident crocodiles could in fact be even larger. Since the 1974 ban of crocodile hunting in the area, some say that the numbers have grown disproportionately and have simply 'gotten out of control'. Australia Zoo says the largest recorded crocodile was about 7m long In November of 2017, multiple beaches had to be closed in this area due to crocodile sightings in swimming areas. Three separate searches found crocodiles living in stinger enclosures. Lifesaving operations coordinator Jason Argent said 'people look to the red and yellow flags as a safe place to swim and putting a drone in the sky is giving them that extra bit of comfort.' Toby Millyard, head researcher for late Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo has weighed in on the debate, discussing the croc's within their monitoring program. Some of which are currently at 4.5 metres long. 'There's definitely big crocs out there, particularly in areas that don't get frequented by people a lot,' he said to the Cairns Post. Australia Zoo founder Steve Irwin (pictured) spearheaded the conservation and study of crocodiles Crocodile Conservation Program: What does it do? During their annual trip, experts are tasked with the following goals. - Tagging and tracking crocodiles in the Wenlock River area. - Monitoring crocodile behavior. - Collecting samples from croc's to discover what foods they are eating. - Uncovering the distances crocodiles move, their ability to return to their home range after relocation and revolutionary findings on their ability to remain submerged, and their behavior during flood events. Advertisement 'As far as getting as big as they used to, the largest recorded croc has been about 7m long.' He did say, however, the likelihood of seeing any of these monster sized croc's was minimal. 'The crocs are just so intelligent there could be some absolute monsters there, and you just wouldn't know.' The zoo has continued with Irwin's research and conservation programs regarding the study of crocodiles, and remains the largest and most successful crocodile research program in the world, according to their website. The conservation program travels to Cape York in August of every year in order to monitor, recapture and assess the crocodiles in the area. A luxury $120,000 car was stolen during a private test drive when a thug held the driver up at gunpoint in a terrifying carjacking. The owner of the 2015 Mercedes Benz C63S said his brother-in-law was taking a man for a test drive in Sydney's south after advertising the vehicle online when he felt a gun held at his ribs. The car owner, Raj, said his brother-in-law, Nash, was sitting in the passenger side while the man was test driving the vehicle Tuesday night about 8.30pm. A luxury car (pictured) was stolen during a test drive when a thug held the driver up at gun point in a terrifying carjacking attack The owner of the 2015 Mercedes Benz C63S (pictured) said his brother-in-law took a man for a test drive in Sydney's south where he held a gun to his ribs The car owner, Raj, said his brother-in-law, Nash (pictured), was sitting in the passenger side while the man was test driving the vehicle Tuesday night about 8.30pm. The test driver, described as being Pacific Islander or Maori in appearance, demanded Nash hand over his phone and get out of the car at Connells Point. 'He said give me the keys or that's it,' he told 9News. The 48-year-old alerted people nearby as the thug stole the luxury car which was advertised for sale for $120,000. The offender was described as being aged in his 20s or 30s, about 178cm tall, solid and had an unshaven face. The thug was reportedly dressed in a hoodie when he arrived at Nash's house to test drive the metallic silver Mercedes with the New South Wales registration 11SUMO. 'He was extremely shaken. Having a gun put into your ribs, all he could think of at that point was "just let me out of the car",' Raj said. The dentist said the offender was driven to the property in a silver Toyota Corolla hatchback but was now concerned because they know where his brother-in-law lives. 'He knows where I live now, he knows I have other cars,' Nash said. NSW Police are urging anyone with information to contact Crime Stoppers. Raj (pictured) said his brother-in-law was forced out of the car after handing over his phone before he alerted people nearby as the man took off with luxury car advertised for $120,000 People are still taking their chances when it comes to the erupting volcano in Hawaii, as the U.S. Geological Survey had to warn folks to not try roasting marshmallows near the flowing lava. On Monday, a user asked the USGS if it was possible to take the popular fluffy treat and dangle it over the volcanic vents sprouting across the Big Island. '@USGSVolcanoes Is it safe to roast marshmallows over volcanic vents?' the user asked. On Monday, a user asked the USGS if it was possible to take the popular fluffy treat and dangle it over the volcanic vents sprouting across the Big Island The USGS was quick to respond, ultimately telling the daring hopeful that that wouldn't be the best move Residents were pressed to evacuate the area so that they wouldn't be caught up in the lava's movement as more vents reactivate. Lava covers a road near Pahoa, Hawaii, on Tuesday 'Assuming you had a long enough stick, that is? Or would the resulting marshmallows be poisonous?' The USGS was quick to respond, ultimately telling the daring hopeful that that wouldn't be the best move. 'Erm...we're going to have to say no, that's not safe. (Please don't try!),' the USGS asserted. A fast-moving lava flow has been flowing through the Leilani Estate community Magma continues to fill into the lower East Rift Zone and fissures once dormant reactivated on Monday, according to the USGS 'If the vent is emitting a lot of SO2 or H2S, they would taste BAD. And if you add sulfuric acid (in vog, for example) to sugar, you get a pretty spectacular reaction.' A fast-moving lava flow has been flowing through the Leilani Estate community, according to KDKA. Residents were pressed to evacuate the area so that they wouldn't be caught up in the lava's movement. The USGS has placed the 'warning' highest alert-level on the area as 'hazardous eruption is imminent, underway or suspected A red-level aviation code is also in effect, meaning that eruption is imminent or underway with significant volcanic ash and plume in the atmosphere Magma continues to fill into the lower East Rift Zone and fissures once dormant reactivated on Monday, according to the USGS. The USGS has placed the 'warning' highest alert-level on the area as 'hazardous eruption is imminent, underway or suspected, according to their website. A red-level aviation code is also in effect, meaning that eruption is imminent or underway with significant volcanic ash and plume in the atmosphere. A man caught holding his phone between the legs of a woman on an escalator at Sydney's Central train station last year will spend at least a year behind bars. Karl Edwin Skow, 59, last month pleaded guilty to three counts of intentionally recording intimate images without consent. He also asked at the time that a magistrate take into account 33 further offences involving unidentified women upon sentencing. A man caught holding his phone between the legs of a woman on an escalator at Sydney's Central train station last year will spend at least a year behind bars Karl Edwin Skow, 59, last month pleaded guilty to three counts of intentionally recording intimate images without consent (stock image) In Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court today, magistrate Jacqueline Milledge sentenced Skow to 18 months' imprisonment with a non-parole period of 12 months, saying she considered his actions 'so grave in terms of predatory behaviour on young women'. Skow had worked as a staffing office manager at the University of Notre Dame but a spokesman last month said he had resigned with immediate effect. He was arrested in November 2017 following a confrontation with a woman at Central Station the month earlier, a statement of facts read out in court last month said. The woman had been near the top of an escalator when she felt the presence of someone very close behind her and a mobile phone touching her inner upper thigh. Magistrate Jacqueline Milledge sentenced Skow to 18 months' jail with a non-parole period of 12 months, saying she considered his actions 'so grave in terms of predatory behaviour' She looked down and saw a phone held by Skow that was positioned between her legs and below her skirt with the screen facing upwards, the statement of facts says. As they left the escalator the woman slapped Skow's arm a number of times and repeatedly asked if he'd filmed her, to which he replied 'of course not' before continuing to walk away. When Skow was later arrested at Sutherland Railway Station, in southern Sydney, police seized his mobile phone and found a number of images depicting the 'buttock area' of people wearing short skirts. They also discovered photos on his laptop and more than 30 further victims were revealed. Skow had pleaded guilty to charges related to three victims - the one who confronted him at Central Station and two others who were targeted in Haymarket in 2017 and have since been identified. A top North Korean official was headed to the U.S. on Wednesday for meetings in hopes of salvaging a summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump. Kim Yong Chol was spotted at Beijing's airport and sources say he departed Wednesday afternoon for New York. He had arrived in Beijing on Tuesday. North Korea's mission to the United Nations in New York is its sole diplomatic presence within the United States. Trump and Kim Jong Un were set to meet June 12 in Singapore, but Trump announced last week that he was pulling out of the summit. Kim Yong Chol was spotted at Beijing's airport just after noon and sources as saying that Kim was on Air China's Flight 981 to New York, which departed later Wednesday afternoon. Since then, Trump has suggested the meeting could be back on and Kim Yong Chol's trip to the U.S. seemed to imply that preparations for a summit could be in the final stages. Kim, a top lieutenant to Kim Jong Un, is to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and would be the highest-level North Korean official to travel to the U.S. since 2000. He is one of a small group of North Korean officials who have accompanied Kim Jong Un to all four of his summits with foreign leaders in recent months - twice with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and twice with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Kim Yong Chol, who is about 72, is a contentious figure outside North Korea. Before taking responsibility for relations with South Korea in 2016, he was a four-star army general and a military intelligence chief who is thought to have been behind a slew of provocations against South Korea and the West. Those include two deadly attacks in 2010 that killed 50 South Koreans and an alleged 2014 cyberattack on Sony Pictures. Both Seoul and Washington imposed sanctions on him in recent years. As a longtime ally and chief trading partner, China has sought to position itself as a key intermediary in talks over North Korea's nuclear weapons program. Beijing backs the North's proposal for a phased and synchronized denuclearization process as opposed to the U.S. insistence on a comprehensive one-shot deal in which North Korea eliminates its nukes first and receives rewards later. Four tourists have been dramatically pulled from a sinking boat off the Gold Coast. Emergency services rushed to the rescue of the four men, who were stranded off the coast of Southport on Wednesday, searching for them via helicopter as well as the water police boat. Luckily for everybody involved, video was captured and emergency services scrambled to the sinking site and managed to rescue all four of the passengers, winching them to safety after their distress call at 1:40pm. The police rescue boat returned the four passengers to safety (pictured) The men are all being treated for mild hyperthermia, but are otherwise well after the ordeal 7 News Sydney and 9 News Gold Coast have shared live footage of the rescue mission, as a police boat tears through the open ocean, carrying four passengers in life jackets to safety. Three of the passengers appear in well enough spirits as they sit comfortably in the rescue boat. The fourth appears to be laying flat on the floor of the boat, before sitting up for a drink of water. The footage was captured from well above the action, and once focusing on the rescue boat, zooms in to see one of the men performing animated motions of what appears to be swimming and sticking his fingers down his throat. The passengers have arrived safely on land and have been assessed by the Queensland Ambulance Service. They are being treated for mild hyperthermia. The Queensland Ambulance Service says the four people are safe after being rescued. Names and details of the victims are yet to be revealed. Inside time: Alice Johnson in federal prison Alice Marie Johnson, a mother-of-five, grandmother-of-six and great-grandmother of one, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted of drug dealing in 1996. It was her first conviction and some of her co-conspirators testified her against in exchange for plea deals. The 63-year-old grew up in Olive Branch, Mississippi, and was married and pregnant by age 15. In 1989, she and her husband divorced. Her life started to crumble as she struggled, as a single mother, to try and be financially stable for her five children, reports Mic. However, in 1990, because of a gambling addition, she was sacked by FedEx Corporation. After filing for bankruptcy in 1991, Johnson lost her house. The next year, a scooter accident claimed the life of her youngest son, Cory. It was while she was at rock bottom that Johnson became involved in a drug syndicate that imported cocaine into Memphis, Tennessee, where she acted as a go-between and passed on messages to drug dealers, relaying coded messages like 'everything is straight' by telephone. While admitting to acting as a middle man for the drug traffickers, passing on the messages in code via telephone, Johnson claims she never directly sold drugs. She was arrested along with 15 others in 1993 on charges including conspiracy to possess cocaine, attempted possession of cocaine and money laundering. But ten of her alleged co-conspirators turned against her in exchange for reduced sentencing or dropped charges. During the trial, evidence showed an operation with Texas-based Colombian drug dealers and their Memphis connections trading tons of cocaine for millions of dollars in cash. At the time of Johnson's February 1997 sentencing the amount of drugs and money involved meant that federal laws mandated a life sentence, despite the fact Johnson was a first-time, nonviolent offender. US District Judge Julia Gibbons, who sentenced Johnson, called the then 42-year-old the 'quintessential entrepreneur' of the drug ring. Mom: Alice Johnson is now a great-grandmother as well 'And clearly the impact of 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms of cocaine in this community is very significant,' Gibbons said at the sentencing. The quantity of cocaine - up to three tons - would now be worth about $85 million. Johnson was 21 years into her life sentence at FCI Aliceville, in Aliceville, Alabama before it was commuted by President Donald Trump on May 6. Her eldest daughter Tretessa Johnson, told Mic several years ago, 'It's like a waking death; it's like the person is alive but they're not. There's never a point of closure, ever. It's heartbreaking for me.' Tretessa has organized an online petition, via change.org, calling for her to be released, explaining that her family's life 'changed forever' when she was sentenced to life in federal prison. She said her mother had explained that she became a telephone mule passing messages between her co-conspirators after losing her job at FedEx. Alice Johnson is quoted on Tretessa's petition: 'I couldn't find a job fast enough to take care of my family. I felt like a failure. 'I went to a complete panic and out of desperation I made one of the worst decisions in my life to make some quick money. I became involved in a drug conspiracy'. Tretessa said that her 'mom's desire upon release is to assist the community with the needs of ex-offenders to help reduce recidivism. 'It serves no purpose or benefit to society to have her locked up for life. Her large and loving immediate and extended family and friends would welcome her return.' During her time in prison, Johnson has displayed exemplary behavior, become an ordained minister, a published writer and a prison tutor, a biography from Can Do Clemency reports. She had gained a large following of people pushing for her to be granted clemency. Part of this push saw her story turned into a short video, which went viral on social media. Kim Kardashian saw the video and retweeted it to her millions of followers with the caption: 'This is so unfair' in October last year. Since then, she has been working to help Johnson receive clemency from Trump. The reality star had her personal lawyer begin working on Johnson's case, and has spent months in conversation with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and adviser, on the topic. Kushner - whose father Charles is himself a federal felon - is pushing a criminal justice reform agenda. A grateful Johnson penned a moving letter to Kardashian, saying her efforts were 'literally helping to save my life'. 'I was drowning, and you have thrown me a life jacket and given me hope,' she wrote. On May 30, Kardashian went to the White House to secure Johnson's release. Johnson was released on June 6 after having her sentence commuted. The Prime Minister faced harsh criticism from environmental groups and Indigenous leaders, who gathered outside Science World in Vancouver on Tuesday. They vowed to keep protesting the $4.5-billion Trans Mountain pipeline that carries crude and refined oil from Alberta to the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. One protester held up an image of Justin Trudeau covered in oil after Canada said controversial pipeline will get built. The Prime Minister faced harsh criticism from environmental groups and Indigenous leaders, who gathered outside Science World in Vancouver on Tuesday They vowed to keep protesting the $4.5-billion Trans Mountain pipeline that carries crude and refined oil from Alberta to the west coast of British Columbia, Canada Many demonstrators are outraged with people calling the decision to use tax payer money to save the project 'ridiculous,' reported News 1130. 'We are absolutely shocked and appalled that Canada is willingly investing taxpayers' money in such a highly controversial fossil fuel expansion project,' said Grand Chief Stewart Philip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, in an emailed statement. 'We will not stand down no matter who buys this ill-fated and exorbitantly priced pipeline.' Many demonstrators are outraged with people calling the decision to use tax payer money to save the project 'ridiculous' Cal Salem with Squamish First Nation told the crowd his people do not what this pipeline, while calling Justin Trudeau a liar. 'Justin Trudeau promised,' he says. 'He promised a new relationship with my people. He promised that this project could not go through unless it was done through a vigorous review, which he broke.' Tzeporah Berman with Stand Earth is asking people to make a pledge and stand with Indigenous First Nations. 'There is little that motivates as much as betrayal. They betrayed us. I actually believed that they were serious when they talked about a just transition off fossil fuels.' Donna Oleksiuk holds a sign bearing a photograph of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a protest against the Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, in Vancouver A crane operates at Kinder Morgan's Trans-Mountain marine terminal, in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada 'They criticized the Harper government's pipeline processes, they promised us science-based decision making, democratic processesbut then was happened? They made a backroom deal together before the ministerial panel was even complete.' Green Party Leader Elizabeth May called the purchase 'an historic blunder with taxpayer dollars.' She also accused Trudeau's government of writing a 'blank cheque' for the pipeline's construction costs, which Kinder Morgan has previously pegged at $7.4 billion. 'It seems completely insane,' May said. 'I'm quite certain that this will go down as an epic financial, economic boondoggle.' A driver has miraculously escaped serious injury after his white car had been completely flattened by a soy-bean delivery truck in the Lat Krabang district, Bangkok. Worawut Yuyatmak, 42, used the horn of his flattened Toyota Fortuner to alert emergency crews and by-standers that he was indeed alive. The truck approached the bend from the opposite direction to Mr Yuyatmak before losing control and falling onto its right hand side. Scroll down for Video Worawut Yuyatmak, 42, used the horn of his crushed Toyota Fortuner to alert emergency crews that he was alive before the two-hour rescue in Lat Krabang, Bangkok Against all odds Mr Yuyatmak's general condition is fine and the driver of the truck has been charged with reckless driving, leading to another person's injury The Toyota was crushed by the 18-wheel truck which is said to have weighed about 41-tonnes. Narong Wongpen, 33, told police he was driving 40km/h when he approached the bend in the opposite direction to Mr Yuyatmak. CCTV footage shows the incident between the trucker and Mr Yuyatmak. Thai Airways Worker Mr Yuyatmak was reportedly conscious for the duration of the two-hour rescue which happened only 90-meters away from his front door. The 42 year old driver escaped serious injury with reports indicating he had pain in his left side and suffered from some leg and arm injuries. The 42 year old driver miraculously survived and escaped serious injury after the accident just 90-meters away from his home Cameras were given a thumbs-up from Mr Yuyatmak and against all odds his general condition was fine despite his vehicle being wrecked in the smash. Lamun, 39, Mr Yuyatmaks wife revealed he had been returning from the central Thailand province of Phetchaburi where he attended a seminar. She also informed his birthday was on Saturday and they were looking forward to celebrating. Mr Wongpen was charged with reckless driving, leading to another persons injury. An accused drug smuggler who was found dead in his prison cell two days after being arrested for allegedly importing $20 million worth of cocaine concealed in a shipment of frozen fish was kidnapped in Colombia two weeks ago. Dimitrios Mavris was arrested at Sydney airport a week ago and was due to face court Wednesday but was found dead in his Surry Hills cell Friday night. The 48-year-old mechanic was reportedly kidnapped by armed men in Colombia, but was rescued by local police after being found in an abandoned house in a rural area. Dimitrios Mavris (pictured) was arrested at Sydney airport a week ago and was due to face court Wednesday but was found dead in his Surry Hills cell Friday night The 48-year-old (right with his wife) was reportedly kidnapped about two weeks earlier in Colombia but was rescued after he was found in an abandoned house in a rural area Not long after kidnapping ordeal, Mavris was arrested at Sydney airport and was charged with importing commercial quantity of cocaine concealed in shipping containers of fish (pictured) The Sydney man is believed to have been kidnapped on May 15 in Pereira, west Colombia, and was found by local police about a week later, Sydney Morning Herald reported. Not long after the reported kidnapping ordeal, Mavris was arrested at the Australian airport and was charged with importing a commercial quantity of cocaine concealed in two shipping containers of frozen fish from Peru into Australia in March. The accused drug smuggler's death is not being treated as suspicious, New South Wales Police confirmed. 'Corrective services officers located the 48-year-old man deceased in his cell about 6.20pm on Friday May 26,' police said in a statement. 'Surry Hills police area command officers have commenced enquiries, however the man's death is not being treated as suspicious.' Mavris was accused of importing three shipping containers of frozen fish (pictured) with cocaine concealed within the container's walls The Greek Australian man's lawyer told ABC News he did not 'understand how this could happen'. 'I visited my client on Friday morning and he was in good spirits,' Sam Chamas said. AFP Commander Krissy Barrett said last week investigators had worked 'tirelessly' on the case, Sydney Morning Herald reported. 'They pursued the investigation and were able to stop 59 kilograms of cocaine at the border,' she said. If you or someone you know needs support phone Lifeline on 13 11 14 or the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800 (for people aged 5 to 25). The shipment was from Peru to Australia and the drugs were wrapped in taped packages A motorcyclist has been rushed to hospital after he crashed his bike and was then bitten by a suspected Eastern brown snake. Queensland Ambulance was called to a single vehicle accident on a private property in Blackwater, in the state's central highlands region, just after 11am on Wednesday. 'The man suffered minor injuries in the crash and then was bitten on the lower limbs by a suspected Eastern brown snake,' a spokesman told Daily Mail Australia. 'He was taken to Emerald Hospital in a serious but stable condition.' A motorcyclist who crashed on a private property was then bitten on the lower limbs by a suspected Eastern brown snake in Queensland (stock picture) on Wednesday morning The age of the man is unknown. Paramedics applied pressure bandages at the scene before transporting the man to hospital, where anti-venom was administered. The brown snake is considered the world's second-most venomous land snake and is responsible for around 60 per cent of snake bite deaths in Australia. Envenomation can result in paralysis, uncontrollable bleeding and death if left untreated. The man is now recovering in Emerald Hospital (pictured) in a stable condition The Queensland Ambulance spokesman told Daily Mail Australia brown snake bites are 'unusual' for this time of the year. A Central Queensland area health service spokeswoman said the patient is 'fine' and in a stable condition. It comes a week after a Bundaberg grandfather was bitten in his backyard by what he believed was a brown snake. He was bitten in the same spot in November last year. Police are hunting for a British boy feared to have been abducted in Spain and flown to eastern Europe. The six-year-old, who lives in the coastal resort of La Antilla on the Costa de la Luz close to the country's southern border with Portugal, has not been seen since last Friday. Davy Thompson, father of schoolboy David, reported him missing on Monday. He has pointed the finger at the youngster's mum, his 48-year-old Polish ex-partner who has been named locally only as Mirka. A court in the Spanish border town of Ayamonte is said to have asked Interpol to help track down the pair over fears David's mother could have headed back to Poland or flown to London where they holidayed last year and Mirka is understood to have friends. David Thompson, 6, went missing on Tuesday after failing to return following a visit to his mother Davy Thompson, father of schoolboy David, reporting the boy missing on Wednesday morning Local reports said Mr Thompson had recently been awarded full custody of the youngster following a series of court cases after a number of years of joint custody. Police chief Ezequiel Romero confirmed: 'The boy's father has reported him missing. 'We're talking about a British man who says the boy's mum should have returned him and hasn't. 'The mum is Polish and she appears to have had her phone switched off now for more than 24 hours. 'Given the possibility she could have taken the child, we are investigating and are trying to establish hers and the child's whereabouts.' He added: 'We never rule out any possibilities. In principle it appears to be a family problem between the mum and dad but obviously we can never rule out anything.' Mr Thompson said: 'I'm very worried. His mum had visiting rights from Friday to Sunday but on Sunday she didn't return my son and I reported him missing to the police. 'His mum is not at home, her car's not there, she's not answering her phone and he's not going to school. 'I've no idea where he is.' Speaking outside a local court on Tuesday, he added: 'It's possible she could have taken him to Poland.' His expat dad's lawyer Juan Carlos Gomez said he had been acting for Mr Thompson over a number of years in civil and criminal complaints which began when she 'falsely accused' her ex-partner of domestic violence in a case which led to his acquittal. Claiming she took their son to Poland last August without Mr Thompson's knowledge or permission, he added: 'Her phone is constantly switched off. We suspect she has taken the child. 'We hope the work being done by the police and the courts to find them is accelerated because time is of the essence.' According to local media Davy Thompson, 38, (pictured) had recently been awarded full custody of the child after a court case The court in Ayamonte investigating the youngster's disappearance in conjunction with the Civil Guard is expected to issue an international arrest warrant for the British boy's mum if the missing pair are not located in the next few hours. The youngster's grandmother told local press her son had won six court cases against David's mum and their main concern after her recent custody defeat was she could decide that if 'I can't have him, no-one can.' Rosario Sanchez added: 'The most important thing for us is that we get him back safe and well. I haven't eaten or slept for two days.' Mr Thompson's lawyer Juan Carlos Gomez confirmed his client had been born in the UK to a Spanish mum and British dad and still lived in Britain. He said his client had lived in Spain for a number of years. Speaking on Wednesday he added: 'David and the mum are still missing. 'She's a seasonal worker who works on farms. She was supposed to return the youngster on Sunday but didn't. 'There's a possibility she could have taken him to Poland or London where she has a friend and there's another possibility that she could have left the area with a new partner but it's all speculation and not really something I can comment on at the moment. 'Davy's son was born in Spain and as far as I know he doesn't have a passport. 'We understand his mum took him to Poland last year without the dad's consent which could mean she could have obtained a passport for the boy without his knowledge. 'I'm not aware at this stage that an international arrest warrant has been issued for her but the police are obviously looking for her and the youngster as a matter of urgency.' Although David's mum is known to friends as Mirka her full name is believed to be Miroslawa Duk. She has lived in Lepe near to La Antilla for a number of years. Advertisement A terrorist who slaughtered three people in Belgium spared a school cleaner because she was a Muslim and had clubbed his ex cellmate to death a day before the bloodbath after the pair carried out a robbery, it has emerged. The attacker, named as Benjamin Herman, knifed police officer Lucile Garcia, 54, and her colleague Soraya Belkacemi, 45, while shouting 'Allahu Akbar' before using their guns to shoot them dead during the Liege bloodshed yesterday, for which ISIS has claimed responsibility. Herman then shot 22-year-old teacher Cyril Vangriecken and took two women hostage inside a school - telling one of them he would not harm her because she was a Muslim and to spare her tears for Palestinians and Syrians. He was then killed in a hail of bullets during a dramatic shoot-out with police that was caught on camera. A Belgian federal magistrate said today the Liege attacks are considered 'terrorist murder' and the investigation now centres on whether the suspect acted alone. Herman, 31, is also suspected of murdering a former cellmate, named in Belgian media as Michael Wilmet, 30. Nieuwsblad reports that Wilmet had been Herman's accomplice in a robbery on Monday night but was later found dead in the district of Marche-en-Famenne, 30 miles from Liege, having been hit with a blunt instrument. Herman was on a 48-hour release from prison when he carried out the rampage on Tuesday. Having been in jail since 2003, it was the 14th occasion he had been given temporary leave ahead of his planned 'reintegration into society' in 2020. As questionmarks remained this morning over what was known about Herman's radicalisation, devastated police officers gathered to mourn the deaths of their fallen colleagues near the City Hall in Liege. A terrorist who slaughtered three people on the streets of Liege while shouting 'Allahu Akbar' had clubbed his ex cellmate to death a day before the bloodbath after the pair carried out a robbery, it has been claimed. This morning, police officers stood for a moment of silence to pay tribute to two colleagues butchered by the attacker, named as Benjamin Herman Devastated police officers wept today as they mourned the deaths of Lucile Garcia, 54, and her colleague Soraya Belkacemi, 45 A Belgian federal magistrate said today the Liege attacks are considered 'terrorist murder' and the investigation now centres on whether the suspect acted alone Soraya Belkacemi, left, and Lucile Garcia, right, were hailed as wonderful mothers and police officers by their colleagues after being killed in today's attack Killed: The civilian shot dead by the attacker has been named as Cyril Vangriecken, 22, from the nearby town of Vottem Herman, 31, is also suspected of murdering a former cellmate, named in Belgian media as Michael Wilmet (pictured), 30 Victims: The two female police officers were stabbed and then shot dead with their own weapons in the attack on Tuesday Attacker: This image published by Belgian news website HLN allegedly shows the male attacker brandishing two firearms which he reportedly stole from the policewomen he gunned down in Liege, Belgium Bernadette Hennart, mother of late police officer Soraya Belkacemi, accompanied by her son Kamel, wept as she paid tribute to her daughter today. Belkacemi was knifed from behind before being shot by a terror attacker yesterday Flowers have been left at the scene as a steady stream of people came to pay their respects this morning. Among them was , Bernadette Hennart, the mother of slain police officer Soraya Belkacemi Fellow students of murdered 22-year-old Cyril Vangriecken take part in a minute of silence for the victims of the shooting Prime Minister Charles Michel has acknowledged the assailant, who had a lengthy criminal record that included theft, assault and drug offenses, had appeared indirectly in three reports on radicalism but was still allowed to take a leave from prison. The prime minister added, however, that the reference was 'in notes that did not primarily target him, but others or other situations,' and he was not on a list of suspects maintained by the main OCAD anti-terror assessment group. Justice Minister Koen Geens, who oversees the prison service, said he felt 'responsible' for Tuesday's bloodshed. 'The question of whether this man should have been given leave is striking because he killed three completely innocent people with a wish to kill himself,' Koen Geens told RTBF radio. 'I have to examine my own conscience.' Earlier, Geens had defended the decision to grant the attacker prison leave, saying there was no reason to suspect this time would be a different from his earlier furloughs. 'I don't think those are mistakes,' he said. 'It is not a clear cut case of radicalisation - otherwise he would have been flagged by all services.' This morning, a Belgian security source told Reuters that the attacker had converted to Islam while in detention and was under suspicion of radicalisation. In Belgium, a prisoner's inclusion on a state security list as a suspected radical is not automatically communicated to all police or the prison service, experts say. Murdered: Police officer Lucile Garcia has been named as one of the two policewomen killed in Liege, Belgium on Tuesday This is the moment Belgian special forces shoots and kills the suspected terrorist in Liege, Belgium on Tuesday Down: Police special forces are seen next to the body of what is believed to be the attacker, outside the high school People wait in line to sign a condolence book at the town hall in Liege, Belgium. A gunman killed three people, including two police officers, in Liege on Tuesday A man is pictured today paying tribute to the three people slaughtered on the streets of Liege as police continue to probe the motives behind the attack Respects: A woman lays flowers at the scene of yesterday's bloodshed at the boulevard d'Avroy in Liege A woman cries as she walks by police officers during a moment of silence for shooting victims near the City Hall in Liege, During a shootout the man was said to have entered a high school where he took a female cleaner hostage before being shot by the police. People are pictured observing a minute's silence today Police officers and others stand for a moment of silence for shooting victims near the City Hall in Liege, Belgium The attacker's profile drew concern about the risk of petty criminals, including those not from Muslim backgrounds, being inspired to Islamist violence while jailed. Convicts have been behind several recent attacks in Europe. Hundreds of prisoners deemed radical by authorities are due to be released in the coming years, the Belgian parliament warned in a report late last year. 'They come in as drug dealers and leave as Salafi jihadists,' a security source said. 'Is our system working when we see that these kind of people are running free?' asked vice premier Alexander De Croo, echoing the thoughts of many in a nation where armed police and gun-toting soldiers still patrol the streets in the wake of the March 2016 attacks that left 32 people dead at the Brussels airport and subway system. HOW THE LIEGE ATTACK PLAYED OUT At around 10.30am (0830 GMT), a man followed two female police officers, stabbed them several times, then grabbed their firearms and shot both dead. He then travelled on foot before opening fire on a 22-year-old man in the passenger seat of a parked car, killing him. The suspect then entered the Leonie de Waha high school in the French-speaking city where he took an employee hostage. Police officers arrived on the scene, with the assailant opening fire on the officers, wounding several of them in the legs before they killed him. The high school pupils were evacuated from the rear of the building and none was injured. The school is closed through Wednesday and students will be given psychological counselling. The case has been classified as a suspected 'terrorist offence' and transferred to the Belgian federal prosecutor's office, which investigates terror cases. Officials have still to confirm media accounts that the assailant shouted 'Allahu Akbar' (God is greatest in Arabic) several times before stabbing one of the police officers in the throat. Unconfirmed reports have named the man as Benjamin Herman, 31, a career criminal described as 'violent' by fellow inmates Advertisement Tuesday's attack happened outside a cafe in the eastern city of Liege when the assailant crept up on the two female officers from behind and stabbed them repeatedly. 'He then took their weapons. He used the weapons on the officers, who died,' the Liege prosecutor's spokesman, Philippe Dulieu, told reporters. Dulieu said the attacker then shot and killed a 22-year-old teacher in a vehicle that was leaving a parking lot outside a nearby high school. He then took two women hostage inside the school before confronting police massed outside. 'He came out firing at police, wounding a number of them, notably in the legs. He was shot dead,' the spokesman said, adding that the hostages escaped unharmed. The attacker shouted 'Allahu akbar,' the Arabic phrase for 'God is great', several times during spree before he was shot down by a group of police officers, magistrate Wenke Roggen said. Ms Roggeen said the attack is being treated as terrorism given the way Herman acted, which she said resembled Islamic State calls to attack police with knives and steal their weapons. Allied to this is the fact that he yelled 'Allahu Akbar', and had been in contact with radicalised people. Adding further evidence of an Islamist motive, a school cleaning woman who was briefly held by Herman told public broadcaster RTBF that he assured her he would do her no harm as she was a Muslim and told her to spare her tears for Palestinians and Syrians. Interior Minister Jan Jambon said the woman he took hostage may have talked the shooter down and helped to avoid more deaths inside the school. Jambon, Prime Minister Charles Michel and King Philippe visited the woman in hospital, where she was being treated for shock. 'She was very courageous and perhaps, but this we will have to verify, she helped avoid more victims in the school,' Jambon said. The cleaning woman, identified only by her first name Darifa, told state broadcaster RTBF that Herman said he just wanted to 'stir up' the police. He asked her if she was a Muslim and if she was observing the holy fasting month of Ramadan. 'He told me don't worry, I won't do anything at all. Listen, you do what I say, but don't worry. I won't do anything to you,' the woman said. She said he threw his ID card on the ground before running out to confront the police. 'I think he knew that it was all over for him. And he went out,' she said. However, unlike after other suspected 'lone wolf' attacks in Europe, there has been no claim of responsibility by ISIS. The terror group had previously struck Belgium in a horrific attack on Brussels airport and metro in March 2016. Meanwhile, officials praised the quick wittedness of the cafe owner outside whose bar Herman had killed the two policewomen. By the time the killer, wielding two police pistols, came in looking for more victims, he had got all his customers into hiding. Scene: A witness' photo show emergency services in central Liege after the unnamed man shot two police officers and a bystander, and then took a woman hostage inside a high school Elite unit: Belgian Special Police are pictured at the scene of the alleged terror attack in Liege on Monday A white car is towed away away from the scene of the shooting today in Belgium as a police officer stands at the scene in Liege Murdered: A graphic video uploaded on social media shows the two police officers shot down in the street on Tuesday in what is now considered a terror attack Confirming that Herman was also believed to have killed an acquaintance 30 miles away on Monday night, Jambon told RTL radio: 'There are signs he was radicalised in prison but is it that radicalisation which drove him to commit these acts? 'It could have been because he had nothing to look forward to, because he also killed someone the night before, the guy's psychology and the fact, it seems, he may have been on drugs.' Justice Minister Koen Geens described the assailant as a repeat offender who had been incarcerated since 2003 and was due for release in two years. Police Chief Christian Beaupere said 'the goal of the attacker was to target the police.' He identified the slain officers and said Belkacemi was the mother of 13-year-old twin daughters who earlier lost their father, also a police officer. Four other officers were wounded in the attack, one seriously with a severed femoral artery. Belgian media identified the suspect as Benjamin Herman, a Belgian national born in 1982, though in keeping with standard procedure authorities declined to confirm his identity. Herman's first brush with the law was in 2003 when, aged 16, he was placed for several weeks in a juvenile home in the Flemish region of Everberg. Herman and his brother were both reported to be cocaine and heroin addicts. 'Every day they hunted for money to get their fix,' the newspaper La Meuse reported. Jambon said authorities were also investigating the suspected killing on Monday of an old acquaintance of the assailant and said there could be a link. 'It is a serious hypothesis,' he told the VRT network. Asked about a video from close to the scene in which someone appeared to be shouting 'Allahu Akbar!' in the din, Jambon said: 'My reaction is that in many terror acts, it is the last thing they shout.' The Liege victims: 22-year-old man was shot dead as he sat next to his mother, one officer was newly married to a police chief and the other was mother of twins The victims of the suspected terror attack in Belgium have been revealed as a 22-year-old trainee teacher killed in front of his mother, a newly married police officer and a mother of twins. This afternoon the two police officers were named as Lucile Garcia, 45, from Herve in Belgium's Verviers region, and her 53-year-old colleague Soraya Belkacemi. Garcia had only married a month ago to a local police commissioner Patrick Hagelstein and had recently become a grandmother - something she was 'very proud of'. Murdered: Police officer Lucile Garcia has been named as one of the two policewomen killed in Liege, Belgium today Colleagues described her as a 'fantastic woman'. She had been touched by tragedy ten years ago when a 21-year-old family member had lost his life in a road accident. Belkacemi, a mother of 13-year-old twins, started her career with the police as an assistant agent but climbed the ranks of the police force after completing her exams. The third victim was named as Cyril Vangriecken, 22, from Vottem, near Liege, who was killed in front of his mother. Mr Vangriecken was sat in the passenger seat next to her in their Ford Fiesta, when he was shot at close range. Witnesses said she was sobbing and covered in her son's blood after the attack. His Facebook profile revealed him to be popular young man, who was passionate about the game, petanque, a form of boule. Advertisement 'The investigation judge must find out if we talk about terror. Because terror also has to do with someone who gives the order, ISIS or someone else, if others are involved. We need to look at all these elements,' Jambon said. A senior official at the federal prosecutor's office told The Associated Press that 'there are indications it could be a terror attack.' He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation. Nevertheless, Belgium's crisis centre, on high alert since a Brussels-based ISIS cell helped kill 130 people in Paris in 2015, said the country's terror threat alert would not be raised and remained at level 2 out of 4. It briefly stood at a maximum 4 shortly after the 2016 Brussels attacks. Belgium's King Philippe, Michel and the country's justice and interior ministers traveled to Liege to confer with local officials. 'I want to offer my government's support for the victims, for the victims' families,' Michel said. It's not the first time Liege has been hit by a violent attack. In December 2011, a man with a history of weapons and drug offenses hurled hand grenades into a square filled with Christmas shoppers then opened fire on those who tried to escape. Five people were killed, including the assailant. The victim, known only as DSD, has vowed to come face to face with John Worboys (pictured) in prison A victim of black cap rapist John Worboys has vowed to come face to face with him in prison in a bid to stop him being freed. The woman says she plans on attending a parole hearing in the coming months to read an impact statement. She hopes that by revealing the devastating impact his crimes have had on her life, it will keep the serial sex attacker locked up. The woman, known only as DSD for legal reasons, is now backing calls for a new law allowing victims a bigger say in how criminals are given parole. She told the Daily Mirror: 'I have been in court now on and off for 10 years and at some point you have to say enough is enough. 'But it's never going to be over because every time he's up for parole I'm going to be there giving a victim impact statement, trying to block it and he comes up for parole every two years. 'He wants it over, he feels like he has done his time but what about us? We can never turn it off and say right I've done my time.' Worboys , 60, of Rotherhithe, London, was convicted of attacks on 12 women at his 2009 trial but is suspected of having more than 100 victims. Earlier this month it was reported that the sex attacker met with lawyers to discuss a renewed bid for freedom. It emerged he is hoping to win a new parole hearing later this year. Worboys (arriving at court) was convicted of attacks on 12 women at his 2009 trial but is suspected of having more than 100 victims Last year the Parole Board ruled Worboys could be freed after finding he had 'positive' treatment with psychologists. But the decision was reversed amid huge public outcry, as two victims, DSD, and another, known as NBV, appealed against the ruling in court. The board's chairman Nick Hardwick was also forced to quit. DSD told the Mirror: 'My whole life has changed as a result of Worboys. 'I'm sick and tired of thinking about him and worrying if he is going to be released. 'It should have been a case of he goes to prison and he's forgotten.' Worboys, who carried out sex attacks in the back of his cab (pictured) was almost freed earlier this year when the Parole Board ruled he was fit for release Worboys was never prosecuted over his 2003 attack on DSD, after failings by Scotland Yard. It was the first time he was reported to police. In 2014, a High Court judge found he did rape DSD, in a ruling on her case against the Met. Justice Secretary David Gauke (pictured) has outlined proposals which would allow victims to challenge Parole Board rulings DSD and NBV were awarded more than 41,000 compensation but Scotland Yard challenged the move. But in February, the Supreme Court ruled the women's human rights were breached. Last month landmark proposals were unveiled by Justice Secretary David Gauke which would allow victims to challenge any Parole Board ruling without resorting to a costly judicial review. The plans mean the new hearings could be led by a judge and open to public scrutiny in some cases, including when dealing with the most notorious criminals. Ministers also pledged to introduce legislation to immediately end the blanket ban directing that all Parole Board decisions are made in secret. Unveiling the package of measures last month, he said: We will improve the process for victims, who in this case were clearly let down. 'It is my ambition that the outcome of this process will mean victims have more confidence in the system. We have moved at a pace to address the shortcomings of the parole system which the Worboys case has brought to light. 'But we must take a balanced approach. I am determined to lead a thorough reform process. Brussels has dismissed Theresa May's (pictured in Maidenhead on Sunday) latest proposal for resolving the Irish border and unlocking the Brexit talks before it has been formally presented Brussels has dismissed Theresa May's latest proposal for resolving the Irish border and unlocking the Brexit talks before it has been formally presented, it was claimed today. The Prime Minister has suggested using the so-called 'back stop' solution for Northern Ireland - which would involve the UK mirroring EU rules - from the end of transition but for a limited time only. The idea is to allow Britain to eventually create rules and customs systems different from those imposed by Brussels but with enough time to implement them. But the EU believes the idea would only postpone negotiations on a final settlement to maintain the open Irish border, Politico revealed today. EU officials think the backstop should be a permanent solution if it is implemented. The latest impasse comes just weeks before the next European Council in June, which is meant to demonstrate progress on a border solution. EU officials are determined to only negotiate the substance of a UK-EU trade deal after a satisfactory position on Ireland is concluded. 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 An exit deal and political agreement on trade is due to be finalised by October. But responding to reports of Mrs May's time-limited backstop, a senior EU official told Politico: 'It would be a very, very complicated thing to negotiate. 'I really don't see how you get there.' Government sources played down the latest row, pointing out the proposal has not been formally presented. On other issues in the negotiations, EU opposition has disappeared once a final proposal has been presented. A Government spokeswoman told MailOnline: 'The Prime Minister has set out her position on this. 'The fallback solution put forward by the EU is not acceptable and that's why we will be bringing forward our own proposal. 'We want to make progress as soon as possible.' The new spat comes just a day after Downing Street slammed Brussels for using 'soundbites and negative, anonymous briefings' in negotiations. The latest impasse comes just weeks before the next European Council in June, which is meant to demonstrate progress on a border solution (file image of one of the border crossings) But the EU negotiators (led by Michel Barnier, file image) believe the idea would only postpone negotiations on a final settlement to maintain the open Irish border Mrs May broadly secured backing from her Cabinet, senior Brexiteers and the DUP for the latest proposal following weeks of bitter wrangling - on the condition it was a short term fix. Cruically the plan would mean keeping the UK aligned with customs tariffs rates in Brussels after the Brexit transition expires on December 31, 2020, if the final deal is not fully in place. Ministers remain split over which final plan for the Northern Ireland border to adopt. Brexiteers including Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson support the 'maximum facilitation' scheme known as Max Fac which would use trusted trader arrangements and technology like number plate recognition cameras to avoid the need for border checks The Prime Minister supports a 'customs partnership' where the UK collects tariffs on behalf of the EU. Brussels has already rejected both models as unworkable. The backstop was devised as an alternative to the European Commission proposal that Northern Ireland should remain in the customs union if no better resolution for the border issue can be found. This Brussels backstop was roundly rejected by Mrs May as something no British PM could sign up to, as it effectively draws a customs border down the Irish Sea. A six-year-old boy was killed last night after a bouncy castle was blown away by high winds in south-east China. The child was trapped inside the inflatable castle when it was lifted into the air and flipped over on a plaza in Fujian Province, according to police. Two other people sustained non-life-threatening injuries, police said. Tragic: A six-year-old boy has been killed after a bouncy castle was picked up by wind in China The accident took place at around 8pm. The bouncy castle, called 'Holiday Castle', is a part of a funfair on the Chezhan Plaza in the Fengwei Town of Quangang District in Quanzhou city, said a statement from Quangang police. The tragedy happened just days before the International Children's Day when millions of parents would take their children to funfairs across China. The boy, from Fengwei Town, was immediately taken to the Quangang Hospital after falling from heights. He was pronounced dead after resuscitation had failed, said police. Rescue attempt: A video clip shows onlookers trying to hold the bouncy castle to the ground Chaotic: Another video clip shows people trying to hold on to their motorbikes on the plaza Footage circulating on Chinese social media sites, shot by onlookers, shows the bouncy castle being picked up and flipped over by the gust of wind. Apparently, the wind also knocked over the tables, chairs and motorbikes parked on the plaza. Another clip shows more than a dozen onlookers trying to hold the bouncy castle to the ground to save the people trapped inside. It's said that government officials of Fengwei Town as well as village chiefs arrived at the scene instantly to organise the rescue effort. Police are yet to reveal who owns and operates the funfair, but they claimed to have brought 'relevant personnel' under control. Further investigation is underway. The Sussexes (pictured in New York last month), who experts believe are well on the way to building a $1billion brand in the US after quitting the Royal Family for independence and to earn their own money, have been appointed 'impact partners' at Ethic, a New York-based fintech asset manager pumping money into companies with what they deem acceptable environmental and social goals. Harry and Meghan's latest move into big business came after their deals with Netflix and Spotify worth 100million and the couple announced their latest tie-up with a statement that said: 'When we invest in each other we change the world'. And in a joint interview with the New York Times, Meghan, a multi-millionaire former actress who lives with her royal husband and children in a $14million LA mansion, said: 'From the world I come from, you don't talk about investing, right? You don't have the luxury to invest. That sounds so fancy.' She added: 'My husband has been saying for years: "Gosh, don't you wish there was a place where if your values were aligned like this, you could put your money to that same sort of thing?",' adding the couple were introduced to Ethic by friends. It is not yet known how much they have invested or if they are being paid a salary for their 'impact partner' roles. Ethic, which was set up by Briton Jay Lipman (right), a red-haired Prince Harry lookalike from London now settled in the US having worked for Deutsche Bank, claims to only invest in businesses that meet its 'social responsibility criteria', including on racial justice, climate change and workplace standards such as gender equality and fair pay. His co-founders are Australians Doug Scott and Johny Mair, who worked for banks investing in gas and oil before they formed Ethic in 2015. James Cameron is convinced he would be able to find the missing MH370 aircraft that crashed and killed 239 people in 2014 with correct equipment. The Oscar-winning Titanic director thinks it's no accident the location of the plane remains a mystery more than four years after it fell from the sky. 'We know more about the surface of Mars or the Moon than we do our deepest oceans. The equipment that I've designed is specifically designed to explore deep and local to an already identified site of scientific interest,' he told news.com.au in Sydney this week. James Cameron (pictured) is convinced that with correct equipment he would be able to find the missing MH370 aircraft that crashed and killed 239 people in 2014 'Once they find a site, I'm a specialist in wreck sites, you give me a wreck site and I know how to explore it, I know how to map it, I know how to use small robotics to go in and analyse it and do the wreck forensics on it,' Mr Cameron said. He believed all efforts to find the missing Malaysian Airlines flight had not yet been exhausted, and said the public had a misconception the entire ocean had been searched. 'I'd love for somebody to throw a few billion (dollars) at that. We'd learn an awful lot about the deep ocean. It's human arrogance to think we know so much about the Earth.' He highlighted how vast the ocean was and how much of it humans still knew nothing about, particularly when it came to deep sea investigations. The Titanic director thinks it's no accident the location of the plane remains a mystery more than four years on from when it fell from the sky (Malaysia Airlines craft pictured) Mr Cameron added it would take 'decades to survey it all' given the hundreds and thousands of square miles that remained unmapped. The public seem to have thrown their support behind Mr Cameron joining the search for the missing aircraft - many certain his skill set could be the answer investigators need. 'Can we just get @JimCameron and his fancy submarine down there to find #MH370?' someone wrote on Twitter. 'They should send James Cameron to find MH370,' another added. 'Surprised @JimCameron hasn't volunteered to help in the search efforts for flight #MH370.' Pieces of debris have been found as far away as La Reunion, but the main body of the plane has still not been located (part of MH370 pictured) Australian Transport Minister Michael McCormack described the search for the missing craft as the largest in aviation history, but said Australia was unlikely to continue being involved. 'It looks as though this will remain a mystery for the time being,' he said. 'We've got to remember the actual plane is about 60m long that's about four times less than the Titanic which they took more than 70 years to find knowing exactly the co-ordinates of where it went down,' he told AAP. 'This is a very deep ocean, this is a large aircraft admittedly, but not that large that it was obviously easily detectable.' Gerald Smith, pictured, owes the taxpayer 65million following a 35million fraud conviction in 2006 A convicted fraudster who owes more than 65million to the taxpayer has been living a luxury lifestyle around the world despite claiming to be too poor to pay back the profits from his criminal deeds. Gerald Smith, 52, has taken more than 360 flights in the past five years, spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on private jets and first-class travel to destinations including Bermuda, the Maldives and Dubai. Smith was jailed for eight years in 2006 for stealing 35million from computer software company Izodia and was ordered to pay back 41million a year later, which has since risen to 65million due to interest charges. At the time of his conviction, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said the fraud was one of the largest they had ever dealt with. Smith is currently battling efforts to send him back to jail over the unpaid debt, claiming his wealth is tied up in assets that he cannot access. But the SFO say he is living a 'conspicuously lavish lifestyle' and have submitted court documents containing details of his expensive flights and also say he has been staying in luxury hotels running up bills of 10,000. According to the Evening Standard, the documents state during one year alone he made 105 flights on private jets at a cost of 980,000 and spent another 275,000 on British Airways trips over the same period. Smith, pictured at court last year, claims his funds are tied up in assets he cannot access Smith has spent thousands of pounds on private jets to luxury destinations including the Maldives, pictured They have been handed in at Folkestone Magistrates' Court, where the confiscation order process is being overseen. Smith's lavish flights The destinations Smith has flown to include: Dubai, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Vancouver, Mexico City, Doha, Geneva, Toronto, Maldives, Bermuda, Alicante, Barcelona, Berlin, Palma de Mallorca, Malta, Perugia, Olbia (Sardinia), Nice, Geneva, Malaga, Krakow, Sion (Switzerland), Valencia, Paris, Florence, Milan, Luxembourg, Edinburgh, Inverness,Vienna, Ibiza, Vienna, Isle of Man, Luton, Southampton, Denham. In one year alone he made multiple trips to Dubai, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Vancouver, London, Bermuda and Buenos Aires at a cost of 232,226 Source: Evening Standard Advertisement The files also detail a range of assets prosecutors believe Smith bought with his ill-gotten gains, including a 12million mansion in Jersey where his ex-wife lives, a block of flats in a mansion in Holborn, two 5million villas in Majorca and a ski lodge in Whistler, Canada. At his hearing in 2006 the court heard the qualified general practitioner, who has two daughters, used the 35million to buy a yacht and pay off interest on multi-million-pound business loans. Many of the millions he swindled from software firm Izodia, based in Slough, Berks, should have gone to City institutions controlling pension funds. As well as being jailed he was banned from being a company director for 15 years. The SFO now want him to be sent back to jail for another eight year sentence unless he pays the bill. Investigators have also probed assets they believe Smith bought with his ill-gotten gains, including a 12million mansion in Jersey, pictured Prominent Kremlin critic Bill Browder who spearheaded a US law targeting Russian officials has been freed after being detained in Spain on an expired Moscow warrant. The US born financier, who once called himself the 'number one enemy' of Vladimir Putin, described his arrest in Madrid in a string of tweets this morning. The London-based 54-year-old was taken to a police station for a check on the warrant - but officers released him after finding the order, which said that he was being held over alleged fraud, was no longer valid. In December, a Moscow court sentenced Browder to nine years in prison in absentia over tax evasion and funneling money overseas. He has dismissed the accusations against him. Mr Browder, the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital management, has been a thorn in the side of the Russian authorities for more than a decade after he tried to expose the 'looting' of his investments in the country by corrupt officials. In 2009, Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer he hired to investigate what had happened to his money, died in Russian custody after accusing Russian officials of involvement in a tax fraud scheme. His death sparked global outrage. Browder then became the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act - intended to punish Russian human rights violators - which became a sore point between the U.S. and Russia after it was signed into law by former President Barack Obama in 2012. Financier William Browder (pictured), who spearheaded a US law targeting Russian officials, has been freed after being detained in Spain on an expired Moscow warrant US born Bill Browder, who once called himself the 'number one enemy' of Vladimir Putin, described his arrest in Madrid in a string of tweets this morning (pictured) The London-based 54-year-old was taken to a police station for a check on the warrant - but officers released him after finding the order, which said that he was being held over alleged fraud, was no longer valid Shortly afterward, President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning American citizens from adopting Russian children, in a move widely viewed as retaliation. This morning, Mr Browder, who is in Madrid to speak to a prosecutor gathering evidence about the Russian mafia, tweeted: 'Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. Going to the police station right now. They won't tell me which station'. The US-born British national also posted a photo of himself in the back of a police van. Shortly after, Browder shared a picture of what he claimed was the warrant for his arrest, which said that he was being held over alleged fraud. Mr Browder tweeted that he was in Madrid 'to give evidence to senior Spanish anti-Russian mafia prosecutor Jose Grinda'. He said he was wanted on an 'Interpol Russian arrest warrant.' But police later said he had been released when they realised the 'warrant' had expired. 'An arrest warrant has a date limit and when that expires, it must be deleted from the computer programme and in this case Interpol hadn't deleted it. Once in the police station, they realised it wasn't valid,' a police spokesman told AFP. Browder - originally American and banned form entering Russian - lobbied the US congress to pass the 'Magnitsky Act', a law which deeply angered Vladimir Putin (pictured) In 2009, Sergei Magnitsky (pictured), a lawyer Browder hired to investigate what had happened to his money, died in Russian custody He later posted a selfie outside a police station saying: Good news. Spanish National Police just released me after Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised them not to honor the new Russian Interpol Red Notice' Who is Bill Browder and what are his dealings with Russia and Putin? Bill Browder - who dubs himself 'Putin's enemy number one' formally fell foul of the Russian authorities in 2005. But his family is steeped in the history of the country. His grandfather was Earl Browder - the leader of the US Communist Party who twice ran for President. And his father Felix was a maths prodigy and graduate from MIT - but could not find work during the McCarthyite purges of the 1960s. Bill Browder was born in Chicago in 1964 and carved out a career in fund investments. He set up Hermitage Capital Management in Russia in 1996, when the country's markets were opening up to capitalist investment following the fall of Communism. He was once Russia's biggest foreign investor and earned hundreds of millions of pounds from his funds. But he fell foul of the Kremlin in 2005 and was black listed from Russia, while many of his assets were seized. He has spent the following decade exposing Russian officials for corruption and plundering many millions from Russian businesses. Browder chronicled his battle against Russian corruption in a book about his career titled Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice. And he has travelled the world pressing governments to pass the Magnitsky Act. The law is named after Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who was jailed , beaten and died in custody after exposing corruption. It intends to punish the Russian officials responsible for his death. It was passed in the US but while some MPs support it Britain has not passed it. Advertisement Browder however tweeted that Interpol had intervened and told the police 'not to honor the new Russian Interpol Red Notice,' referring to the international police group's list of wanted people. Further muddying the waters, Interpol told AFP that Browder was not wanted via their own channels. 'There is not, and never has been, a Red Notice for Mr Bill Browder,' it said in a statement. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson tweeted that he had 'just spoken to Bill Browder' adding he was 'very glad that he has now been released'. Mr Johnson added that Moscow should 'concentrate on bringing those responsible for the murder of Magnitsky to justice', referring to the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Mr Magnitsky had himself been arrested after investigating an alleged large-scale fraud involving Russian tax officials. Browder, who was banned form entering Russian, lobbied the US congress to pass the 'Magnitsky Act' - a law punishing human rights violators - which deeply angered Russian President Vladimir Putin. The financier has expressed fears that he could be targeted by Russian assassins saying in the past: 'If I'm killed, you will know who did it.' According to the Mirror, Mr Browder also spoke of his fears after the attempted assassination of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, saying: 'I'm at risk, at high risk. I don't spend my life living in fear, but I am definitely at risk.' Russian attempted last year to put Browder on the Interpol arrest list. British Conservative MP Sir Peter Bottomley told the Press Association: 'I have notified the Foreign Secretary's office and I shall be speaking to the Spanish ambassador. 'It is absurd that a person with British nationality who has been exposing the brutal and fatal treatment of Sergei Magnitsky should be arrested at the request of the Russians. Browder is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital management, and had employed lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in Russian custody in 2009 who had exposed how the company was victim of massive fraud. His mother is pictured standing over his body during his funeral in Moscow 'The Spanish authorities, with the encouragement of the British, should release Bill Browder. 'The Russian ambassador should be summoned to explain why it is that his country fails to prosecute the murderers of Magnitsky and instead has been for years trying to arrest Bill Browder, who is campaigning for justice and against corruption in Russia.' Foreign Affairs Committee member Bob Seely said Moscow was 'upping the ante' in going after its critics abroad. In March Mr Browder told the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that he believed the Russian government wanted him dead. He also had links with Russian millionaire Alexander Perepilichnyy, who collapsed and died while jogging near his home in Weybridge, Surrey, in 2012. Mr Perepilichnyy had been helping Mr Browder's Hermitage Capital Investment expose a 142 million money-laundering operation. The ill son of the man who committed Australia's worst shooting since Port Arthur stood by his family's seven coffins, delivered a heartbreaking eulogy - and was applauded for his brave words. Two funerals were held on Wednesday for the Miles-Cockman family, weeks after former farm worker Peter Miles, 61, allegedly killed his entire family. Wife Cynda, 58, Katrina Miles, 35, daughter Taye, 13, and sons Rylan, 12, Ayre, 10, and Kadyn, eight were all shot dead at the family's hobby farm. Scroll down for video Two funerals were held on Wednesday for the Miles-Cockman family, weeks after former farm worker Peter Miles, 61, allegedly killed his entire family (Pictured: Aaron Cockman) Cynda Miles (left), 58, Katrina Miles, 35, daughter Taye, 13, and sons Rylan, 12, Ayre, 10, and Kadyn, eight were all allegedly shot dead by Peter Miles at the family's hobby farm The memorial, where applause periodically broke out for each eulogist, came hours after a memorial was held at the same location by the family of Aaron Cockman (pictured), Katrina's ex-partner Peter and Cynda's surviving son Neil this afternoon stood up and eulogised his family - saying little about his father's actions and focusing on the clan's 'happy' life growing up together, mourners said. 'It was all about how they grew up.. (and) about Katrina and the kids,' one mourner said. The service also featured words from one of family matriarch Cynda's childhood friends and dwelled on her 'community spirit'. The memorial, where applause periodically broke out for each eulogist, came hours after a memorial was held at the same location by the family of Aaron Cockman, Katrina's ex-partner. That memorial only remembered Katrina and the kids. Mr Cockman did not attend the second service. He previously told media about how Peter Miles would be heartbroken by his son Neil's kidney illness. Friends speaking outside the crematorium said Mr Cockman paid tribute to his late, estranged partner, describing her as 'beautiful'. He stood near the coffins of his children and ex-wife and described what stood out to him about each, including his 'organised' daughter Taye. The service was held just up the road from a local Jehovah's Witness hall, the religion Mr Cockman is an ardent follower of. Mr Cockman did not attend the second service. He previously told media about how Peter Miles would be heartbroken by his son Neil's kidney illness Friends speaking outside the crematorium said Mr Cockman paid tribute to his late, estranged partner, describing her as 'beautiful' He stood near the coffins of his children and ex-wife and described what stood out to him about each, including his 'organised' daughter Taye His service also heard details of their homeschooling education in the bush, the order of service said. Mourners listened to music including Disney tunes, the Forrest Gump theme song and placed petals on each coffin. The funerals were open to members of the devastated small community of Margaret River. Uniformed members of the Red Cross were spotted on crematorium grounds. Many young children attended, some no doubt friends from the homeschooling community the four children were a part of. 'It was very moving, a mourner said outside the service. Mourners listened to music including Disney tunes, the Forrest Gump theme song and placed petals on each coffin (Pictured: Cynda Miles (left) and Katrina Miles (right) Mr Cockman also spoke briefly with fond words to his late wife, the mourner said 'They said some things just can't be explained ... everyone is still shocked'. Mr Cockman also spoke briefly with fond words to his late wife, the mourner said. Weeks ago, he admitted that they were estranged during an extraordinary press conference. The order of service contained a heartbreaking poem which spoke of the brevity of time, titled a 'Symbol of Hope'. 'A butterfly lights beside us like a sunbeam, and for a brief moment, its glory and beauty belong to our world. 'But then it flies again and though we wish it could have stayed... we feel lucky to have seen it.' A South African hunter who had shot a wild buffalo was himself killed by another member of the herd, reports say. Claude Kleynhans, 54, was attacked by a large male buffalo as he was loading a carcass onto a vehicle in Limpopo province, north east South Africa. The buffalo tore the father-of-three's femoral artery and he died at the scene, Citizen.co.za reports. Killed: Professional hunter Claude Kleynhans, 54, was attacked by a large male buffalo as he was loading the carcass of another buffalo onto vehicle in Limpopo province, South Africa Mr Kleynhans, who ran a hunting safari company in nearby Tzanen, had been out on a guided hunting trip with clients when he died last Tuesday. Another South African news website hailed Mr Kleynhans, a former police officer, as 'one of the countrys finest ethical hunters' with an interest in hunting for conservation as well as trophy. He ran the company Guwela Safari, which organises safaris where trophy hunters would pay $2,850 if they shoot a giraffe and $1,500 if they shoot zebra. Their tariff list on their website also offers hunts for buffalo, hyena, hippo and elephant, but writes that the trophy fee is provided on request. In the wake of his death, a number of people have sought out Mr Kleynhans' public Facebook and posted offensive messages. Hunted down: Mr Kleynhans was attacked by a large buffalo which tore his femoral artery One woman named Pamela Tomaro D'Angio wrote: 'I love when Poachers get killed by the animals it makes me extremely happy!! 'Hope you don't RIP you f***ing sucker. You killed plenty of animals and now it was your turn you useless sick minded coward. Rot in hell.' One man named Pedro Resendes wrote 'Karma is a B****!!!!, while Matt Skee added: 'I hope his loser family reads these... Claude deserved everything he got....' Mr Kleynhans, described as a passionate Christian, leaves behind two daughters and a son. The African buffalo, or the Cape buffalo, is one of the 'Big Five', which also includes lion, leopard, rhinoceros and elephant. The 54-year-old father-of-three ran a hunting safari company in Tzanen, Limpopo province It is widely distributed throughout southern and eastern Africa and is not endangered, however Cape buffalo hunting in South Africa is still monitored and so-called trophy hunting is carried out by specialist safari companies. The Cape buffalo is considered to be a dangerous pray, as it can become extremely aggressive and vindictive when it perceives itself to be in danger. When a member of a herd is attacked by a predator, such as a lion, the other members will rush to its defence. According to Animal Planet, Cape buffalo have killed more hunters in Africa than any other animal, and are known to ambush hunters if they have been wounded by them. Mr Kleynhans' death comes just a few months after a Croatian trophy hunter was shot dead by a stray bullet after killing a lion. Pero Jelinic, 75, had another lion in his sights when he was shot and killed at a farm in northwest South Africa, 40 miles from the border with Botswana. Jelinec died in January after travelling to South Africa to bag a lion trophy, having shot 'everything that could be hunted in Europe', according to a friend. Chelsea Clinton was seen for the first time since since her Twitter spat with Roseanne Barr, who falsely claimed she was married to George Soros' nephew. The 38-year-old daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton attended the American Songbook gala at New York's Lincoln Centre on Tuesday night. The former First Daughter wore a dark green short-sleeved dress with a matching purse and nude heels as she mingled with Hollywood stars. Chelsea Clinton was seen for the first time since since her Twitter spat with Roseanne Barr The 38-year-old daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton attended the American Songbook gala at New York's Lincoln Centre on Tuesday night Ms Clinton, a former NBC correspondent, posed with HBO chairman Richard Plepler, who was the guest of honour at the star-studded event. Other celebrities at the event included Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, Emilia Clarke, Lena Dunham, Bradley Cooper, John Oliver, and Diane Sawyer. Ms Clinton politely corrected Barr after the sitcom star went on a bizarre Twitter rant alleging that the former first daughter is married to a nephew of investor George Soros. The Clinton-Soros nephew rumor began when Trump supporter Scott Baio erroneously posted to Facebook in 2016 that Chelsea's husband Marc Mezvinsky is the nephew of Soros. Ms Clinton, a former NBC correspondent, posed with HBO chairman Richard Plepler, who was the guest of honour at the star-studded event The former First Daughter wore a dark green short-sleeved dress with a matching purse and nude heels as she mingled with Hollywood stars Ms Clinton politely corrected Barr after the sitcom star went on a bizarre Twitter rant alleging that the former first daughter is married to a nephew of investor George Soros Barr continued to spread the misinformation on Twitter early Tuesday, writing 'Chelsea Soros Clinton.' Ms Clinton responded to Barr soon-after, writing of the roundly debunked rumor: 'Good morning Roseanne - my given middle name is Victoria. I imagine George Soros's nephews are lovely people. I'm just not married to one.' Barr wrote: 'I'm sorry-Chelsea Clinton IS NOT married to a nephew of George Soros-i apologize for the mistake!' However, it did not end there. Barr, while again apologizing, tweeted: 'Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you!' She continued in the social media missive that Soros 'is a nazi who turned his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth- were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?' Roseanne Barr tried to push a conspiracy on Tuesday claiming that Chelsea Clinton was married to the nephew of George Soros. Clinton is married to Marc Mezvinsky (pictured) Barr was forced to apologize for a slew of Tuesday tweets and said she was going off Twitter. She did not in fact leave Twitter Chelsea Clinton herself was quick to shoot down the rumor, which was first propagated by actor and Trump supporter Scott Baio in 2016 Barr retweeted a clip of a 60 Minutes interview Soros did, which appears to be where she is extrapolating her information about the investor from. And yet again, Barr tweeted another correction/ attack, this one landing closer to home for Chelsea. 'CORRECTION: CHELSEA CLINTON IS NOT MARRIED TO A SOROS NEPHEW. HER HUSBAND IS THE SON OF A CORRUPT SENATOR, SO SORRY!' Chelsea's father-in-law is a former congressman and convicted felon who in March of 2001 plead guilty to 31 of 69 felony charges of mail, bank and wire fraud. He served five years in prison and was released in 2008. He was never given a pardon that was requested on his behalf under the Clinton administration. Barr sent two tweets apologizing to Clinton, which would be her first - but not last - apologies of the day during the Twitter rant While Barr's apologies to Clinton were less than in earnest, she did attempt to make more serious amends Tuesday. Barr apologized after coming under fire for a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett during the unhinged morning rant. The television star's attack on Jarrett sent shock waves. Barr was was responding to a Twitter thread with an article from SGTreports, a site known for publishing conspiracy theories, in which a commenter mentioned Jarrett. 'muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj', Roseanne then wrote about Jarret, who served as Barack Obama's senior adviser during his presidency. Roseanne's mention of the 'Muslim brotherhood' seems to be due to the long-running conspiracy theory that Jarrett is Muslim. Jarrett was born in Iran to American parents and lived in Shiraz for six years. The family had moved to Iran because her father was part of a program that sent American physicians to help developing countries. He ran a children's hospital. Roseanne Barr apologized after coming under fire for a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett during an unhinged rant on Tuesday morning Many Twitter users called out Barr and asked ABC how they could continue to order episodes of her eponymous show (pictured) There has never been any indication that Jarrett or her parents are Muslim. Barr later claimed the comment was a 'joke' when she was called out on Twitter by CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski. 'ABC is doing their best to ignore some of these statements from Roseanne and she is making it really hard for them by taking it to the next level here,' he wrote. After Roseanne responds, Kaczynski replied: 'understand it's a joke, but can you see why some people think comparing a black woman to Planet of the Apes might be racist and find the Muslim Brotherhood reference to be conspiratorial and Islamophobic?' Many Twitter users agreed, with some asking ABC how they could continue to order episodes of Barr's eponymous show. Others called the comedian 'quite literally a racist'. 'It wasn't a joke, it was a slur,' one user wrote. She also issued a blanket apology Tuesday morning in announcing, 'I am now leaving Twitter.' Barr did not in fact leave Twitter. A brazen thief has been caught on camera stealing a huge bag full of drinks from a Greggs while bystanders watched and filmed the incident on a mobile phone. Footage shows the offender casually loading up the plastic bag while the shop worker tries to stop him while appearing to call the police. The woman valiantly tried to stop him from leaving the premises only for him to force his way past her while carrying the heavy load. A shopworker bravely tried to stop a brazen thief from stealing a huge load of drinks from a Greggs in London, pictured left and right The woman was trying to call the police at the same time as trying to stop the thief, pictured At one point he even shoves her away shouting 'Get off me' after she grabs hold of him to try to prevent him leaving. Meanwhile a crowd of people are stood outside the shop, including the person filming the incident, who do nothing to stop it. The shop worker even shouts 'Get out' at the cameraman at one point, who replies 'What if I do?' The woman is then heard screaming 'Bring the drinks back!' as he flees and she continues talking to the police on the phone as the video cuts. The theft is believed to have taken place on May 23 in the Greggs bakery on Fore Street in Edmonton, London. She also tried to get in front of him to prevent him from leaving the premises, pictured, despite a crowd of people standing by and watching At one point she even tried to block the door but he pushed past her, with none of the crowd trying to intervene The clip has been shared across Instagram after originally being published on Snapchat by a user called 'Abubakar'. The footage has clocked up more than 250,000 views and it is unknown whether police are investigating. Social media users have slammed the thief and praised the shop worker for trying to stop him. One Twitter user said: 'All these w****** standing around filming and not doing anything is just a sorry indictment of our useless society. Well done to the shop worker for trying. What's wrong with people'. Another said: 'How about people go get a job and don't go robbing other people who are probably getting paid f*** all'. A woman who allowed a toddler to be subjected to horrific abuse, including being punched in the face, has been jailed. Monika Rudaityte, 27, of Badgeney Road was in a house in Peterborough when Deividas Subacius punched an 18-month-old in the face. The 29-year-old man hit the tiny tot and filmed it, sending the videos on to her grandparents and claiming he wanted 130 or he would continue to harm the child, in September last year. When the child was examined doctors found eight healed fractures to the little girl's bones including her femur, wrist, collarbone and ribs. Monika Rudaityte has been jailed for almost five years after she failed to help a child who was being abused by a man in the same house A woman has been jailed for not coming to the aid of an abused child. Monika Rudaityte will remain behind bars for almost five years Subacius was jailed for 17 years in February after pleading guilty to actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm and blackmail. On Tuesday Rudaityte pleaded guilty to neglect at Peterborough Crown Court and was sentenced today to four years and nine months in prison. Detective Constable Clemie Yaxley said: 'The child in this case suffered horrific injuries but Rudaityte did nothing to prevent it. Thankfully she has no lasting injuries and is now flourishing. 'Neglect is the ongoing failure to meet a child's basic needs and is the most common form of child abuse. It can be dangerous and can cause serious, long-term damage, even death. Deividas Subacius was jailed for 17 years in February after he attacked a defenceless toddler Monika Rudaityte was in a house in Peterborough when the child was attacked in September, 2017 'If you think a child is in immediate danger call police on 999. If you're worried about a child, but unsure call police on 101 or the NSPCC on 0808 800 5000.' An NSPCC spokesperson for the East of England said: 'This case shows how neglect can cause unimaginable consequences for children with Rudaityte's actions allowing a defenceless young girl to suffer sickening abuse. 'Babies and toddlers are fully dependant on those adults around them so it's vital that any concerns about their welfare are reported immediately. 'Our trained counsellors are available 24/7 on our helpline to offer advice and take action where necessary to protect children in danger.' Italy's two anti-EU populist parties which have been unsuccessfully trying to form a coalition government would have an outright majority in parliament if a new vote was held today, polls show. Attempts in Rome to form a coalition government crumbled again this week, sending markets into turmoil both in Italy and across the Eurozone, as a July snap election is becoming increasingly likely. It is feared repeat elections could turn into a de-facto referendum on the country's euro membership. Support for the right-wing League party was up eight per cent in one poll, and ten per cent in another, from its 17.5 per cent result at the March 4 elections. Polls show support for Matteo Salvini's League party is soaring, meaning a coalition with 5-Star would win outright if a new election was held - a prospect becoming increasingly likely in Italy Polls said support for the 5-Star Movement remain close enough to its election result of around 33 per cent that the two parties would win outright if they joined forces. In anti-establishment 5-Star Movement and the right-wing League's proposed government program they omitted language from an early draft that called for ways to allow countries to exit the common euro currency. Italy's League says it sees a euro exit as a contingency plan if its demands, including greater spending and lower taxes, are not accepted by European partners, rather than a prospect to avert at all costs. Five Star's leader Luigi Di Maio has also called for a renegotiation of the EU's strict fiscal rules. However, investors fear that an outright majority coalition government of 5-Star and the League - both eurosceptic parties - would be prepared to go further and break from the Eurozone. Despite the poll results, the 5-Star Movement has today sought to make a renewed attempt to form a coalition government with the League, a source said. However, League leader Matteo Salvini has appeared to throw cold water on that idea, saying Italy should return to an election as soon as possible. 'The earlier we vote the better because it's the best way to get out of this quagmire and confusion,' Salvini told reporters. It was President Sergio Mattarella's rejection of having 81-year-old eurosceptic Paolo Savona as economy minister which scuppered the formation of a coalition government - which has been in the works since the March elections. Rejection: President Sergio Mattarella vetoed the 5-Star/League's choice of eurosceptic Paolo Savona as economy minister which scuppered the formation of a government this week Instead, President Mattarella designated former IMF official Carlo Cottarelli to head a politically neutral government, which riled 5 Star and the League - and did nothing to calm financial markets. Mr Cottarelli returned for informal discussions with Mr Mattarella yesterday, after asking for more time to come up with a list of cabinet ministers, and left without comment. Unless there is a surprise imminent breakthrough, Italy will go back to elections, with most major parties calling for the president to dissolve parliament and hold a vote as soon as July 29. Snap elections: Five-Star Movement (M5S) leader Luigi Di Maio leaves Lower House in Rome, after meeting with Salvini last week 'It will be a heart versus wallet election': Italy's fresh election risks being a referendum on euro The euro looked to have dodged a bullet when Italy's would-be eurosceptic coalition government collapsed at the weekend, but it may turn out to have been the opening salvo in a war over Europe's single currency. On Sunday, Italy's president rejected the nomination of a eurosceptic, Paolo Savona, for the economics ministry by the far-right League and anti-establishment 5-Star Movement because Savona had previously said Italy should leave the euro zone. But now the two parties, who were rivals in the March vote, are weighing whether to join forces ahead of a fresh election seen in the autumn or early next year. 'The upcoming elections will not be political, but instead a real and true referendum ... between who wants Italy to be a free country and who wants it to be servile and enslaved,' League leader Matteo Salvini said on Monday. 'Today Italy is not free; it is occupied financially by Germans, French and eurocrats.' Sergio Mattarella vetoed the appointment of Paolo Savona (pictured) who has described the euro as a 'German cage' and said that Italy needs a plan to leave the single currency 'if necessary' The euro, bonds and stocks initially rallied on Monday after President Sergio Mattarella vetoed Savona's nomination, but relief turned to fear over snap elections. The gap between Italian and German 10-year bond yields, a measure of Italian risk, widened to its highest in over four years. 'The election is going to resemble a referendum, de facto, on the European Union and the euro,' said Francesco Galietti, head of political risk consultancy Policy Sonar in Rome. 'It's an existential threat for the entire euro zone.' If Italians were to cast a protest vote against the EU and euro at fresh elections, it would deliver the bloc's biggest challenge since Britain voted to quit the union two years ago and raise questions about the future of the single currency. As the euro zone's third-largest economy, heavily indebted Italy also represents a far bigger potential threat to the single currency than the Greek economic crisis. Polls show the League has gained support since winning 17 percent of the vote in inconclusive March 4 elections, climbing as high as 24 percent. The 5-Star has been drawing about the same 32 percent it got two months ago. Former prime minister Massimo D'Alema, caught speaking on an open microphone on Saturday, summed up the fears of traditional parties: 'If we go back to elections because of a veto on Savona, they (anti-establishment parties) are going to win 80 percent.' On the street, some voters believe Salvini is right to challenge the president's veto and go back to the polls. 'I'm really ticked off. The president sold out the country,' said Giancarlo Sacco, 54, owner of a cafe in central Rome. Sacco said he wanted Italy to remain in the euro but that its concerns needed to be taken seriously by EU partners. 'It just has to make itself respected again.' The president's veto of Savona as economy minister has put the currency, which was little discussed in the last election campaign, at the centre of the debate. 'Membership of the euro is a fundamental choice,' Mattarella said in a televised speech, explaining his veto. 'If we want to discuss it, then we should do so in a serious fashion.' In February, Salvini railed against the euro, saying it was a 'mistake for our economy'. 'We don't have a euro in our pockets. We have a German mark which they called the euro,' he said. The 5-Star dropped its previous calls for a non-binding referendum over Italy's euro membership, though its founder, comic Beppe Grillo, recently revived the idea. Political tensions are running high, with the League threatening street protests against Mattarella. On social media, League and 5-Star sympathisers made death threats against the president, while supporters crowding around Salvini and Di Maio during live TV interviews late on Sunday shouted insults at him. On the other side are Italians who, like many Britons devastated by the Brexit vote, see the country's relationship with Europe as fundamental. 'I am absolutely pro-European and I believe that Italy is connected, must have a connection with Europe for our future,' said Irene Teramo, a shopper at a street market in Rome, who supported the president's decision. Italians will also be weighing concern about their savings as financial markets put the country's stock market and bonds under pressure and borrowing costs increase. 'In his heart, the average voter will probably be cheering for the anti-establishment forces, but his wallet will be saying the opposite,' said political risk expert Galietti. 'It will be a heart versus wallet election.' Advertisement In such a case, President Mattarella would still have the constitutional right to refuse to appoint any minister suggested by a potential coalition government. The likelihood of a snap election has rocked financial markets across the Eurozone, with the currency sinking to multi-month lows. The Eurozone breakup index climbed to its highest level in 13 months, according to CNBC, as investors view a snap election as a de facto referendum on whether or not Italy will keep the euro. Italian government bonds, which suffered one of its most dramatic speculative attacks in years on Tuesday, found some support from local investors on Wednesday. THE POWER OF THE PRESIDENT OF ITALY The President of Italy is not chosen by the people but elected by MPs. He has very limited powers but can appoint heads of government and their chosen ministers. The President's right to refuse to appoint a minister, even if this is the choice of the prime minister-designate and backed by the majority of MPs, is a right is enshrined in Article 92 of the Italian constitution. This means that even if there is a new election, and a new coalition government is proposed, he can still refuse to appoint ministers. The President can be impeached, but this is a lengthy process which goes through a special committee and then a secret ballot vote in both the upper and lower houses of Parliament, before the case goes before judges in Italy's highest court. Advertisement The yield on 10-year bonds edged away from four-year highs and two-year yields, the focus of earlier attacks, also fell. Speaking to the Financial Times, Jens Nordvig, head of analysis firm Exante Data said international markets are 'in a very wobbly situation right now'. 'As the third biggest economy in the EU, as a heavily indebted one, and with Eurosceptics seemingly in the ascendancy markets have worried that the EU again faces an existential crisis,' Greg McKenna, chief market strategist at AxiTrader, said. However, he added; 'I'll go out on a limb and suggest there are a bunch of experienced political operatives in Europe and some neophytes in Italy who might just have got the shock of their lives on how quickly this situation developed and we'll see some backpedalling.' If the political situation in Italy takes a turn for the worse, it would be 'a disaster' for the whole Eurozone, the Berlin-based DIHK Chambers of Industry and Commerce said on Wednesday. DIHK Managing Director Martin Wansleben said they 'do fear' that political events in Italy could contribute to an economic shift in Germany, Europe's biggest economy and Eurozone growth driver. Goldie and his daughter Chance, 20, leave Bristol Magistrates' Court this afternoon Musician Goldie was today fined nearly 2,500 for attacking a security guard at Glastonbury Festival when he was denied access to a backstage VIP area. The 52-year-old, whose real name is Clifford Joseph Price, pushed security guard Dennis Poole and scratched his face after he was stopped from going in the area at Worthy Farm in Somerset. Goldie was sentenced one month after he became the first person in Britain to plead guilty to an offence via Facetime after failing to attend court because he was based in Thailand at the time. That hearing also saw Goldie told off after referring to District Judge Lynne Matthews as 'my dear'. He then used Facetime to admit assaulting Mr Poole on June 23 last year by beating him. But the judge ordered him to attend today's hearing in person and he arrived early in a smart three-piece suit and silver tie at Bristol Magistrates Court. Goldie (centre) was supported by his daughter Chance (left, also pictured today), 20, who had also been accused of kicking the security guard - although the case against her was dropped After Goldie changed his plea to guilty, prosecutors said it would not be in the public interest to proceed with the case against the daughter (pictured together today) District Judge David Taylor today ordered Price to pay a fine of 1,080, compensation of 500, a victim surcharge of 108 and costs of 775. The judge told Price: 'Your entirely unjustified actions demonstrate an arrogant sense of entitlement based on your own self-importance. Security guard Dennis Poole leaves Bristol Magistrates' Court after today's sentencing 'The physical injuries sustained by Mr Poole at your hands were relatively minor but the assault has had an emotional and psychological impact on him.' The DJ's daughter Chance, 20, of Leavesden, Hertfordshire, was also accused of kicking the security guard as he lay on the ground during the brawl. But after her father changed his plea to guilty, prosecutors said it would not be in the public interest to proceed with the case against the daughter. Speaking outside Bristol Magistrates' Court, Goldie said today: 'I took a bullet for my daughter, I'm happy. 'Hopefully he can move on and understand if you're doing your job do it right. I'm apologising as a man would do.' When asked if he regretted his actions, he replied: 'Me? Always sorry. Always be sorry for what you do.' Speaking outside the court in Bristol today, Goldie said he 'took a bullet for my daughter' Goldie and his daughter Chance are seen arriving at Bristol Magistrates' Court this morning The drum and bass DJ and producer is credited as being one of the artists who put the genre on the mainstream map and he was awarded an MBE in 2016. He is also known for playing gold-toothed bodyguard Mr Bullion in the 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. Chef Deborah Evans abused the trust of 15-year-old Katrina Holmes' family to babysit the child but she abused her A brave young woman who was subjected to sex abuse by her lesbian babysitter, including being made to take part in sex games, has spoken out about the abuse after her attacked was jailed. Katrina Holmes, 34, has recalled the fear she felt during the 'horrific' abuse which took place over five months, when she was only 15. Chef Deborah Evans was jailed for seven years after she abused the trust of Miss Holmes' family and forced innocent Katrina to act out sexual fantasies. But Katrina kept a secret diary of her sexual abuse, which was used in the case against the 46-year-old at Cardiff Crown Court, in February this year. Evans - who at the time owned catering firm Cardiff Cuisine Catering with her girlfriend - was convicted of 11 counts of indecent assault. The pair first met when Katrina was just seven and Evans - then 19 - started babysitting her when her dad would go to the pub. Katrina, from Cardiff, said: 'I really liked her - she always had a can of lager in her hand and would get pretty tipsy. 'But she was mischievous and fun. My own mum lived hundreds of miles away so I really looked up to Deborah and felt safe with her.' Evans became a family friend - but her attitude towards Katrina changed after the girl turned 15, leading to the woman making a pass at the girl during a sleepover. Katrina Holmes was abused as a child but she has waived her right to anonymity to speak out about how she suffered at the hands of her babysitter Katrina Holmes was just 15-years-old when she was abused by a lesbian aged 27. Pictured: Katrina with her father Terry Katrina said: 'She stayed over our house in my bedroom - with two single beds. 'She said: 'Kiss me.' I remember her opening her mouth as her lips tried to close onto mine. 'I froze and pulled away from her. 'What are you doing?' I said, trying to laugh it off. 'She was 27 and I was 15. I wanted her to care about me but I felt more afraid than safe when she was around. 'I wanted us to be close - more like a parental figure - not in this way.' Evans became 'controlling and bossy' and even called Katrina's school to say if there were any problems they were to call her. But things escalated even further when Evans began forcing the girl to take part in sex games at her flat. Katrina said: 'One evening when she stayed over at dad's house she tried to make me perform a sex act on her. It was repulsive. Katrina Holmes is speaking out about her abuse and has questioned why the older woman who subjected her to an ordeal which lasted five months, has never said sorry 'I said 'I don't want to'. But she carried on and ignored me. 'I felt powerless and afraid. Maybe I wasn't a tiny child but she had so much control over me. 'Inside I was crying - this woman who I looked up to and loved was now abusing me. 'She seemed to get a thrill out of the fantasy of being caught. 'One morning I was ironing my school uniform and Deborah walked into the room. 'She said to me: 'You are gay'. But I answered: 'I'm not gay'. 'She gripped me hard. 'You are gay and you will always be gay', she said aggressively.' Chef Deborah Evans owned a company with her then girlfriend - but she forced a child to carry out sexual fantasies while she was in her care The abuse - which went on for five months - was eventually reported to police 12 years later, with Katrina using diary entries she made as a girl as evidence. Evans told her: 'You are gay and you will always be gay' despite the young girl only being interested in boys. Katrina - who gave evidence in court and has bravely waived her legal right to anonymity - said: 'I looked over at her to gauge her reaction but there was none. She showed no emotion. 'It took me 12 years to speak because I blamed myself for so many years. But when I got to 27 myself I realised what she had done was very wrong. 'It has taken so much courage and strength to speak out but I am no longer that frightened teenager. I have made Deborah Evans accountable for what she did to me. 'I looked up to this woman and she abused that trust in the most horrific way. It was unforgivable.' Evans, from Ely, Cardiff, was ordered to register as a sex offender indefinitely. Judge Michael Fitton QC told Evans: 'The victim was groomed and managed to satisfy your own desires. 'There was overwhelming evidence that the harm she suffered was severe.' Advertisement It may be one of the most devastating sustained bombing campaigns in history, but Hitler's Blitz was not the first time Germany threatened Britain from above. During the First World War Kaiser Wilhelm launched Zeppelin raids with bombs ripping apart communities and killing around 500 people in Britain between 1915 and 1918. New colourised photos have shed new light on those attacks and the damage done to the buildings and people below. Images show the destruction caused by successful Zeppelin bomb raids over London, as British soldiers are pictured searching for survivors from the wreckage. Although the Kaiser had banned bombings on London initially because it may have threatened his relatives in the Royal Family, he did sanction attacks on industrial targets. Before Hitler launched the Blitz in the Second World War, Germany used Zeppelins in bombing raids on Britain 20 years earlier, beginning in 1915. The behemoths were responsible for the deaths of 500 people in the UK between 1915 and 1918. They were difficult to engage early on because they flew higher than fighter planes could reach to attack, were well armoured and they were almost impossible to spot at night. But eventually fighter technology improved and British planes were able to regularly shoot them down. Pictured here is a Zeppelin crashing off the coast of Norway Zeppelins were capable of great devastation, as pictured here on a raid in England where soldiers are seen standing above a huge crater caused by the bombings. Wreckage is strewn around the ground and nearby buildings have been damaged with bricks and roof tiles blasted apart This map shows the locations and dates of all the bombing raids on London by Zeppelins during the First World War The first Zeppelin to be shot down over England was destroyed by William Leefe Robinson on September 13, 1916. Robinson, then aged 21, was flying a BE-2 biplane in the early hours of the morning when he spotted the airship at 10,000 feet. Earlier attempts to down the airships failed because British aircraft were equipped with solid lead machine gun rounds which passed through the airship, ripping holes in the side - but not igniting the highly-explosive hydrogen gas inside. The airships carried dedicated sailmakers whose job was to patch up leaks. William Leefe Robinson, pictured, was the first person to shoot down a German airship over England when he attacked a Shutte-Lanz SL 11 on September 3, 1916 However, Robinson's aircraft was equipped with a mixture of explosive and incendiary rounds which ripped holes in the side of the airship and ignited the gas. Robinson attacked a Shutte-Lanz SL 11 which had been one of 16 to attack London and the south east that night. Based at what would later become RAF Hornchurch, Robinson took an hour to reach 10,000 feet and fired three magazines with his new ammunition into the air ship. He used the third magazine to concentrate on the rear of the airship. The airship, which was attacking at night, had been illuminated by search lights, which made Robinson's job of targeting the massive vessel slightly easier - even though it was operating at the very edge of his own aircraft's capabilities. Many people on the ground witnessed the airship catch fire and crash to the ground near Cuffley, Hertfordshire, killing the 16-man crew - none of whom had parachutes. Robinson received a VC later that week for his efforts. He later was transferred to the front line where he was shot down by the Red Baron's squadron spending the remainder of the war in a Prisoner of War camp. He died in December 1918, weeks after the war ended from influenza. In total, there were 57 airship raids on Britain during the First World War, killing 564 people and injuring 1,370. This image shows a German Zeppelin caught in several spotlights over London in April 1916 A Daily Mail artist who witnessed the destruction of the airship sketched what he saw for the following day's newspaper This Zeppelin was badly damaged in mid air and crashed in the Thames Estuary having been punctured during its raid on April 1, 1916. The airship received a direct hit from an anti-aircraft shell at Purfleet, but managed to continue for an hour and a quarter until it came down 15 miles north of Margate Another image shows a large sunken hole in the ground where a Zeppelin bomb tore through the earth, creating a deep well filled with rubble and debris. Military personnel and civilians are seen beside the hole as they survey the damage of yet another raid against Britain. They also include the wreckage of a damaged L20 Zeppelin aircraft after it crashed into the sea off the coast of Norway. This airship was known as the 'Raider of Loughborough' after being involved in an attack on the Midlands and the aircraft's passengers can be seen sailing away from the wreckage as they fled to the shoreline. One photo depicts a female munitions worker busy in a factory in 1915, before they became a key target for bombing. Britain's industrial heartlands were heavily populated, and their destruction would affect Britain's war resources drastically. The incredible shots were colourised by British professional colouriser Tom Marshall of PhotograFix. He said: 'Zeppelins were like no other weapon ever encountered before. They were impossible to spot in the night sky, they flew higher than any British aeroplanes could reach, and were out of range of any guns. Soldiers at home would regularly have to clear away the wreckage from the attacks, which began in Norfolk in January 1915 and continued into 1918. These soldiers are pictured using shovels to clear away wood that has splintered or been blown apart in explosions as they look for survivors and make the area safe for residents Meanwhile the colourised photos also show women hard at work for the war effort in munitions factories making shells for artillery guns on the front lines. But munitions workers also knew they were taking their lives in their own hands after Kaiser Wilhelm began targeting them in Zeppelin raids to try to damage the British war machine 'They were the height of luxury travel before the war, but nobody imagined the death and destruction that airships could bring to Britain's streets during World War One.' The first Zeppelin raid on British soil was between January 19 and 20 in 1915 over Norfolk, where two Zeppelins killed four people and injured six in attacks on Great Yarmouth, King's Lynn and Sheringham. The targets were chosen purely because of the wind after the air ships had originally been sent to attack Humberside only to be blown off course. From this, the Kaiser authorised bombings on London to happen in February, however these were then postponed until April due to poor weather. Raids were further delayed until the larger and more advanced P Class Zeppelins were available, which culminated in the first London bombings on May 31, 1915. The fatal raids at the end of May in 1915 were commanded by the German officer Viktor Leopold Linnarz who ordered an LZ 38 airship to drop explosives over the capital. A total of 120 bombs were dropped from Stoke Newington to as far south as Stepney and as far north as Leytonstone. Seven people were killed and thirty-five were injured in these raids which burned down seven buildings. The first ever building bombed in London was 16 Alkham Road in Stoke Newington, but no one was seriously injured. The damage from this one day of raids was estimated to have cost the government more than 18,500, the equivalent of approximately 2million today. Although the RAF would themselves fending off Second World War bombings, 20 years earlier fighters were unable to climb high enough to mount a defence. Pictured is the aftermath of a Zeppelin raid where a tree has been partially stripped and windows have been smashed as soldiers survey the damage. Zeppelin raids were initially banned in London by the Kaiser because he feared they may threaten his relatives in the Royal Family, but he later changed his mind and sanctioned attacks on industrial targets. However, many raids ended up missing their targets altogether because of difficulty with the weather and navigation A family are pictured holding a fragment of a bomb after a Zeppelin attack, surrounded by bricks sent flying by the raid. Zeppelin attacks continued until August 1918, by which point Germany had started using bomber planes because they were more reliable. Zeppelins had also become something of a death trap for their crews because they had no parachutes when they were shot down The Daily Mail even launched a fund during the bombing campaign to support victims of the raids, paying compensation to families of those who lost loved ones and to those injured or who lost their homes or property in the attacks Even when pilots could engage with the enemy the Zeppelins were too well armoured and sustained little damage. They were also somewhat unreliable, with many missions falling by the wayside while in progress because weather changes meant the air ships could not reach their targets. The development of the Zeppelin airship was first pioneered by the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in the early twentieth century, and were they first flown commercially in 1910. Zeppelins used an aluminium framework which held multiple gasbags inside which contained the inflammable lifting gas. During the First World War, the German military made use of the power of Zeppelins by using them as bombers and scouts, killing over 500 people during the numerous bombing raids against Britain. The Zeppelin raids over London on May 31st forced the British government to issue a D-notice which prohibited any UK press outlets from reporting anything about the raids which wasn't mentioned in official statements. In 1921 the Allied Powers requested that Germany hand over all Zeppelins in reparation for the devastation they caused during the war. Advertisement Some of the questions Starbucks asked its employees as part of its nationwide anti-bias training have emerged. Up to 180,000 employees at Starbucks locations and headquarters were trained from a 'tool kit' hoping to 'focus on understanding prejudice and the history of public accommodations in the United States.' The training took place weeks after two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia store after one asked to use the bathroom before he had made a purchase. The questionnaire, which was revealed by TMZ, began by asking participants to recall when you first experienced you racial identity and went on to ask other questions about race. Up to 180,000 employees at 8,000 Starbucks locations and headquarters were trained from a 'tool kit' hoping to 'focus on understanding prejudice and the history of public accommodations in the United States' Employees meeting in a closed Starbucks in Miami, Florida store for a special anti-bias training day The questions Starbucks asked employees about race The first time you.. Recall when you first experienced your racial identity. It may have been when you were a child, it may have been last week. If the scenario doesn't apply to you feel free to leave it blank and move onto the next one. 1. ...noticed your racial identity 2. ...noticed how your race affected beauty standards 3. ...felt your accent impacted people's perception of your intelligence or competence 4. ...altered your communication style (dialed up or down) to avoid playing into stereotypes 5. ...had a friend of a different race who regularly visited your home 6. ...felt distracted at work because of external events related to race 7. ...had a senior role model in your organization with a similar racial identity as your own 8. ...went to work with your natural hair without comments or questions from others 9. ...felt your race affected your ability to build a rapport with your manager Advertisement They included whether employees thought race affected beauty standards, whether they has altered the way they speak to avoid playing into stereotypes and whether they had a friend of a different race who visited their home. Information provided by the coffee giant ahead of the day, said it had worked with a number of organizations to devise the training and the questions including the Equal Justice Initiative, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Demos. It added that researchers, social scientists, and Starbucks own partners have also provided their advice, counsel, connections to other experts, and recommendations for the day. The company also produced a video outlining the measures it was taking to make Starbucks an 'even more welcoming and safe for all'. Starbucks closed around 8,000 coffee stores as employees inside underwent anti-bias training for just roughly four hours. At various locations across the country, employees could be seen going over the different steps to ensure a better environment. 'We'll see you tomorrow' signs could be seen strewn up on the windows of the popular coffee chain The stores were closed for up to four hours at either one or 2pm and shared with customers when they would be open again. A customer walks through a Starbucks drive thru only to find that that too is closed A customer looks disappointed that she has to wait until 6am in order to get coffee from this Seatlle location At various locations across the country, employees could be seen seated going over the different steps to ensure a better environment 'We'll see you tomorrow' signs could be seen strewn up on the windows of the popular coffee chain. Caffeine lovers found themselves stumped when discovering that the stores were closed for up to four hours. The closings took place around one or 2pm. And while a majority of the stores were closed for training, 7,000 licensed stores found in schools, hotels, airports, grocery stores and more still found that they had an option on if they wanted to partake in the training. The training took place weeks after two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia store after one asked to use the bathroom before he had made a purchase. Donte Robinson and his friend Rashon Nelson, both 23, had been waiting for a potential business partner to discuss real estate development when one of the men asked to use the bathroom and was knocked back. Minutes after the pair had sat down at the coffee shop, the manager called the police and had Robinson and Nelson arrested. A Starbucks employee can be seen bringing in the umbrellas inside in Chicago so that the store can focus on training. A customer tries to nab her last few moments in a seat The training took place weeks after two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia store after one asked to use the bathroom before he had made a purchase Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz appeared on CBS This Morning ahead of the training afternoon, to defend the move amid claims that it was simply a publicity stunt. 'We could have spent marketing dollars different from this,' he said in response to claims it was a 'marketing ploy.' 'It's just the beginning,' he said of the four-hour training session. 'What we've said to our board, our shareholders, we are deeply committed to making this part of everything we do. This is something that we're going to stay with.' Donte Robinson and his friend Rashon Nelson, both 23, had been waiting for a potential business partner to discuss real estate development when one of the men asked to use the bathroom and was knocked back. Minutes after the pair had sat down at the coffee shop, the manager called the police and had Robinson and Nelson arrested Customers are stopped by locked doors and a note at the ground floor, closed Starbucks Reserve coffee shop Schultz explained that the training would aim to teach people about unconscious bias against race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, or class, and would train staff to address customers with empathy and compassion. 'We want to be a welcoming environment to everybody regardless of their position in life,' he said. The company says their training afternoon will cost them $12million in lost revenue, according to USA Today. Three brothers who viciously attacked a man at a cinema complex have walked free despite being found guilty. Twin brothers Mohamed and Adel Al-Shamery, along with their older brother Abdelrahman, savagely launched a man to the ground before kicking and punching him in the head at Event Cinemas, Parramatta, in 2017. The brothers said the man deserved to die after accused him of shooting Mohamed Al-Shamery, 21, a few weeks prior to the incident, Nine News reported. Scroll down for video Twin brothers Mohamed and Adel Al-Shamery, along with their older brother Abdelrahman, savagely launched a man to the ground before kicking and punching him in the head at Event Cinemas, Parramatta The brothers said the man deserved to die after accusing him of shooting Mohamed Al-Shamery, 21, a few weeks prior to the incident (pictured: attack at the cinema) Appearing in the District Court on Wednesday, the three Al Shamery brothers were convicted over the brawl at the cinema. Weeks prior to the brawl, the twin brothers and their friend Ali Younes savagely beat up another two men at a karaoke bar on June 25. It's alleged two men entered a private room at Dynasty Karaoke, in Sydney, where the Al-Shamery brothers were with their friends. CCTV footage shows twins Mohammed and Adel, and Ali ambush the men, who were punched in the face and head, and had their clothes ripped The victims were left with a fractured jaw, broken nose and bruising. On Wednesday, the three brothers and their friend Ali Younes were convicted over the fight at the cinema, with the sentences ranging from two to 3.5 years, Nine News reported. They all launched immediate appeals and were granted bail ahead of fighting their prison terms. A boy in China has been saved by doctors after his mentally ill mother allegedly severed his penis and one of his testicles. The boy, who is 22-month-old, was asleep when his mother suddenly became mentally unstable with a cleaver in hand, according to a report on local newspaper Guangzhou Daily. It's said when she realised what she had done, she tried to commit suicide. The child and the mother were rushed to the hospital by neighbours who saw them in a pool of blood and both have been saved, said the report. A mother-of-two in China (left) has reportedly severed their son's penis and one of his testicles when she was mentally unstable. The boy (right) has undergone surgery and is recovering The boy's father has pleaded for help from the public after surgery and treatment for his wife and son left him with massive medical bills. The mother, known by her surname He, suffers from intermittent explosive disorder, according to Guangzhou Daily's report. Patients with intermittent explosive disorder, or IED, suffer from bouts of uncontrollable anger. They lose their tempers repeatedly, often in response to minor frustrations. As many as 7.3 percent of adults may suffer from the condition in their lifetimes, according to National Institutes of Health in the United States. The tragic incident occurred on the afternoon of May 24 in Youdong Village in Heyuan city, southern China's Guangdong Province. The boy's father (pictured looking after the boy in the hospital, right) has pleaded for help after being left with massive medical bills. Local charities have raised money for the boy (right) The boy's father, named by media as Wu Shaozhong, told Guangzhou Daily that he was working in a clothing factory at the time, and he was called to the hospital by his neighbours. It's reported that the neighbours saw the mother and son in blood and took them to the Second People's Hospital of Heyuan City. Mr Wu, 48, revealed that his wife was diagnosed with intermittent explosive disorder six years ago and was treated in Heyuan city. A devastated Mr Wu also said that his wife had apparently thrown his son's severed penis and testicle 'somewhere'. 'We still haven't found them,' said the father. Mr Wu was also quoted saying he didn't know how to live with his wife in the future. The two-year-old boy, known by his nickname 'Ahang', was given emergency surgery to stop his bleeding and remains hospitalised as of writing. He is described to be in a non-life-threatening condition. A neighbour named Wu Weixiong told Guangzhou Daily that Wu Shaozhong and his wife got married in 2005 and have two sons: 11-year-old Acheng and 22-month-old Ahang. One neighbour is pictured visiting the boy and his father in the hospital in Guangdong The family are said to be poverty-stricken. In addition to his wife and two children, Wu Shaozhong has to look after his disabled, chronically ill mother. Wu was left owing more than 150,000 yuan (17,607) to the hospital and the man hoped the public could help him and his family overcome the difficulties. Nonprofits and charities have reportedly got in touch with the family and raised money for the boy. The boy is recovering in the hospital. It remains unclear whether Ms He would be charged. But according to Chinese criminal law, a person is not criminally responsible if he or she has a mental disorder. The person's family or custodian, however, is required to look after the person and provide treatment to the person. A gunman in the Mackay CBD has surrendered himself to police after a three-hour standoff. Police declared an emergency situation in the Queensland city north of Brisbane on Wednesday evening after reports of an armed man near a licensed premises. Negotiators were at the scene and a police spokesman said the 48-year-old man - who is known to police - had been pointing the firearm at himself, the Mackay Daily Mercury reported. Detective Inspector Brendan Smith told the Gympie Times the man had a range of long firearms. 'The gentleman has just surrendered, obviously this is a great result for police, he said. Scroll down for video A gunman in the Mackay CBD has surrendered himself to police after a three-hour standoff A man who was in a shop on nearby Victoria Street said he saw the man carrying two rifles 'A number of shots were fired earlier in the day.' A man who was in a shop on nearby Victoria Street said he saw the man carrying two rifles. 'He fired one shot into the air at the front as he was crossing from the strip joint,' the witness said. Mackay resident Les Mole told the ABC he was in a building nearby when he heard the shots. 'It went 'boom', it was going off and it was pretty scary there for a while because you didn't know what they were but obviously the police reacted,' he said. 'We were pretty lucky none of the [hotel] guests were out in the street or it would've been on for young and old.' Mackay resident Les Mole told the ABC he was in a building nearby when he heard the shots Another witness said the man had his hands up in the air, and had a wooden-handled rifle with a scope on it near him. Members of the public have been advised to seek shelter in a safe place. People from outside the area have been warned to stay away. There are no reported injuries in relation to the incident. An investigation has dismissed Telstra's claims a lightning strike caused a major disruption to services across five states earlier this month. The telecommunications giant was quick to blame a lightning strike for the outrage after a Telstra cable pit was destroyed near Orange, on New South Wales' central-west, in the early hours of May 3. Numerous phone calls to the Triple 0 emergency service line were halted in NSW, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania after the cable ignited in flames. On Wednesday, New South Wales Rural Fire Service dismissed Telstra's claims, but revealed it could not rule out 'electrical infrastructure or arson' as the cause. Scroll down for video Telstra claimed a lightning strike destroyed its cable pit Orange in NSW on May 4 (pictured is the damaged cable) 'Fire investigators have ruled out lightning,' Chief Superintendent Ben Millington told 9 News. 'It appears a fire burned towards the pit. It didn't start in the pit. Whether the outage was caused by another matter is a question for Telstra.' Chief Superintendent Millington told the ABC it was not unusual that an exact cause had not been determined, despite a thorough investigation. 'That could be as a result of several things, evidence, burn patterns, the scene itself,' he said. The report has been given to police and Telstra for possible further action. Daily Mail Australia has contacted NSW Rural Fire Service for further comment. Phone calls to Triple 0 emergency service lines were halted and hundreds of traffic lights in Victoria were knocked out after the cable ignited in flames A Telstra spokesman told The Sydney Morning Herald that it would consider the NSW Rural Fire Service's findings as part of its review and response to the incident. The May 4 outage is currently being investigated by the federal government. Outages were reported in Melbourne, Sydney, Parramatta, Brisbane , Perth, Adelaide and South Yarra, according to website Aussie Outages. People in Melbourne complained about EFTPOS machine outages across the city and some Foxtel services have also been interrupted, according to 3AW. At the time, Telstra posted a photo on Twitter of the cable pit in Orange, surrounded by a large area of burnt ground and vegetation. 'Our fibre repair crew is on site at cable pit east of Orange,' Telstra tweeted. 'Significant fire damage consistent with lightning strike. We're working to restore services ASAP and are sorry for service interruptions.' Notorious Sydney gang rapist Mohammed Skaf is demanding to be released from prison after serving his minimum term, even though authorities say he still refuses to take responsibility for his actions and has 'no victim empathy'. Skaf, who was convicted alongside his brother Bilal over a series of rapes in Sydney in 2000 that shocked Australia, became eligible for parole in January 2018. But it's understood the NSW State Parole Authority refused his release after a closed-door hearing last November. Notorious Sydney gang rapist Mohammed Skaf (pictured) is demanding to be released from prison after serving his minimum term, even though authorities say he still refuses to take responsibility for his actions and has 'no victim empathy' Skaf wants to appeal against the decision, according to legal documents seen by AAP - including handwritten notes from Skaf to the parole authority in December. The 35-year-old blames NSW Corrective Services leadership for blocking his release because of his notoriety. 'How's that fair? Where's the fairness? Where's the justice?' he wrote. 'Why should I remain in prison and not be granted parole because (the commissioner) refuses to progress me 'due to my high notoriety'?' The 35-year-old blames NSW Corrective Services leadership for blocking his release because of his notoriety But a pre-release report compiled by Corrective Services says Skaf 'has demonstrated no change in his attitude toward his offences since the beginning of his sentence' and 'continues to blame the victims'. 'It appears that he still blames the victims for his offending, has no victim empathy and refuses to take responsibility for his actions,' says the report, dated October 2017. His behaviour is described as 'manipulative' and 'concerning'. Skaf, who was convicted alongside his brother Bilal (pictured) over a series of rapes in Sydney in 2000 that shocked Australia, became eligible for parole in January 2018. The report suggests Skaf blames his social awkwardness, young age and cultural upbringing for not knowing his behaviour with women was wrong. But he has decided to accept imprisonment because his Islamic faith forbids sex before marriage, it said. AAP understands the appeal is less than a month away. Cherise Lyons denies causing death by dangerous driving at Basildon Crown Court A carer fatally knocked down a 100-year-old grandmother after 'accidentally pressing the accelerator' of a van while driving a paralysed man to buy flowers for a date, a court heard today. Cherise Lyons denies causing the death of Joan Roskilly by dangerous driving at an Asda car park in Shoebury, Essex. The 57-year-old carer had been driving a Renault Trafic van belonging to Reece Clarke, who had been paralysed in a previous unrelated traffic incident. Ms Lyons stopped the van by bollards outside the Asda store so fellow carer Sophie Bodimede, who was in the front passenger seat, could get out to buy flowers for Mr Clarke to give to his date, the trial at Basildon Crown Court heard. Lyons allegedly got out to look for where the petrol cap was, and at that point Mrs Roskilly and her friend Gabrielle Thomas were walking past the bollards. Patrick Dennis, prosecuting, told jurors that as Lyons got back into the van and the door was closing, it accelerated forward. 'The vehicle accelerated forward knocking down the bollards,' said Mr Dennis. 'It entered the pedestrian area where it knocked down Joan Roskilly and Mrs Thomas. The incident happened at this Asda car park in Shoebury, Essex, in November 2016 'It narrowly avoided colliding with the store by veering to the right.' A police crash investigator concluded that when Lyons got out of the vehicle, 'she must have left the engine running with the vehicle in gear', Mr Dennis said. 'She's accidentally pressed the accelerator and that's overridden the handbrake and caused the vehicle to move forward and the bollards to be flattened,' he said. Jurors were shown CCTV footage of the adapted van, with Mr Clarke still in his wheelchair in the rear, crashing through bollards outside the supermarket. Under questioning by her solicitor Karen Dempsey, Lyons said: 'The car was rolling and I just said 'Oh s***' or whatever, the car was rolling, I panicked. Lyons has admitted causing death by careless driving, but denies it was dangerous driving 'I see the car there and obviously there are people there. I thought I put my foot on the brake just to stop it from rolling, it went over the bollard again and I panicked again and pushed down. 'I remember seeing the two ladies in front of me really close. The car went forward, I don't know whether I hit anyone, I thought I didn't. Then I saw the car was going for the shop window and I was trying not to hit anyone. I thought I was putting my foot on the brake the whole time, I obviously wasn't.' She added: 'In my head I thought I had killed her. She was laying down with a bit of blood on her head and I said sorry to her, I didn't mean it.' The great-great grandmother, who had battled cancer, a kidney transplant and survived two world wars and four heart attacks, had celebrated her landmark birthday just months earlier. She died on the way to Southend Hospital of leg and pelvis injuries while her friend Mrs Thomas escaped with aches and pains. Ms Bodimede said she was leaning into the van to give Mr Clarke the flowers she had bought when she 'heard the driver door open and the car had jolted forward'. Mrs Thomas said she was walking with Mrs Roskilly towards the trolley area at the front of the store when she heard 'the sound of a car engine'. 'It appeared to be going very fast,' she said. 'I thought the van was going to brake. 'I saw it go through the bollards knocking me and Joan flying. Unfortunately, it went over Joan after knocking us onto the pavement.' She said the area was busy with pedestrians at the time, and she injured her elbow when she was knocked down. She said she was taken into Asda's customer restaurant and a police officer told her Mrs Roskilly had died on the way to hospital on the afternoon of November 29, 2016. Lyons, of Dagenham, appeared tearful in the dock. She has admitted causing death by careless driving, but denies that it was dangerous driving. The trial continues. Two illegal immigrants lived in a luxury hotel for 243 nights costing the taxpayer almost 120,000 after falsely claiming they were victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. Couple Tommy Brooks, 51, and Elaine Douglas, 51, were unmasked as fraudsters after giving an incorrect flat number in the West London block where 72 people died last June. But before their arrests they racked up bills for 104,000 for accommodation alone while Douglas ran up a food bill of 11,000 while also complaining about the quality of the menu, Isleworth Crown Court heard. The couple came to the UK from Jamaica in 2002 and were booked on return flights but did not show up and disappeared into Britain for 15 years until their arrests. Police said today their 'appalling' exploitation of the deadliest fire for a generation was an insult to those who perished and their families currently giving evidence at the Grenfell inquiry. Tommy Brooks, 51, and Elaine Douglas, 51, were unmasked as fraudsters after giving an incorrect flat number in the West London block where 72 people died last June They enjoyed 243 nights at the Radisson Blu Edwardian Hotel, in Kensington, pictured, where they could spend freely on a credit card handed to Grenfell victims Brooks and Douglas turned up at the Grenfell support centre claiming they had narrowly escaped death from their flat on the 19th floor of the block. The couple were housed at the Radisson Blu Edwardian Hotel, in Kensington, for 243 nights and issued with credit cards and Oyster cards so they could travel around London for free. But they were caught out when they gave investigators the number of their flat - not realising it was on a different floor. Benjamin Holt, prosecuting, told Isleworth Crown Court: 'These two defendants falsely claimed to be residents at Grenfell Tower at the time of the fire. 'Both made representations they were living in flats. 'Ms Douglas spent 276 nights at Madison Blue Edwardian Hotel costing 55,000. 'She charged food and beverages at 267.35. In addition, Ms Douglas complained about the quality of the food she was receiving. She ran up charges in excess of 11,000. 'Mr Brooks, stayed a the same hotel until he was arrested after 243 nights there. His accommodation costs came to just under 49,000. 'There were 276 costs for food and pre-paid cards of 9,000. That made the total value 58,396.89.' The couple, who were in the UK illegally, claimed they lived on the 19th floor but were staying with friends on the night of the fire Mr Holt added: 'Ms Douglas came to the UK on 22nd February 2002. She was refused leave to enter the UK and was booked on a flight for 24 February. 'She did attend the flight, owing to feeling unwell, the flight was re-arranged for 8 March. She did not attend that flight either. There had been nothing heard of her for 16 years. But the police investigation showed neither of the defendants lived at the Kensington skyscraper in June 2017 when the inferno began. Elaine Douglas and Tommy Brooks both admitted two counts of fraud by false representation and one count of seeking leave to remain in UK by deception. Following the fire on 14 June 2017, they claimed they lived on the 19th floor of the tower but were staying with friends on the night of the fire. Douglas received hotel accommodation and financial support worth 67,125.35 while Brooks got 58,396.89 Detective Superintendent Matt Bonner, the senior investigating officer for Operation Northleigh, said: 'I have spent the last seven days at the commemoration hearings, listening to the sad, harrowing and often inspiring stories about the victims who died because of the fire at Grenfell Tower. 'I have previously described the actions of those who exploited the tragedy for their own personal gain as truly appalling. Not only have their actions exploited the aid and support intended for those most affected, but they also risk misrepresenting the Grenfell community as they continue to try and come to terms with their grief. 'My thoughts remain with the Grenfell community at this difficult time, the genuine victims who should continue to be at the heart and centre of all we do.' They were remanded in custody ahead of sentence on July 13 where they will be jailed. The Administrative Appeals Tribunal has 'blood on its hands' according to the family of a couple murdered by a Turkish man who's deportation was overruled twice. The Aylward family protested while about 300 public servants responsible for such crucial decisions enjoyed a recent $600,000 tax payer funded holiday in tropical Queensland, according to A Current Affair. Korinne Aylward and her partner Greg Tucker were stabbed to death by Turkish man Mustafa Kunduraci in their home in Moonee Ponds, Melbourne, in 2013. Maria Aylward (pictured) and her family protested while about 300 public servants responsible for not deporting her sister's killer enjoyed a tax payer funded holiday He was allowed to stay in Australia because the tribunal overturned his deportation on two separate occasions. 'We want them (the AAT) to be accountable so they can see the grief they've caused us (and) the trauma that we live every day,' Korinne's sister, Maria, told A Current Affair. Maria and her other sister, Katelyn, have shared parenting duties of the three children orphaned by Kunduraci; Callum, Ryan and Grace - age five, three and nearly two at the time of their parents' death. The children's grandfather, Gavin, said the tragic circumstance could have been avoided if the AAT had of made the right decision. 'Something like this should never happen,' he said. Maria and her other sister, Katelyn (pictured), have shared parenting duties of the three children orphaned by Kunduraci in 2013 The AAT reviews decisions made by Government departments like Centerlink and the Immigration Departments and even has a bigger say than Cabinet Ministers. 'They get accomodation, flights, alcohol (and) food paid for while we struggle. It's just madness,' Maria said. Kunduraci was granted a three-month short stay visitor visa originally in 1996 and later a second spouse visa in 2007. He was allowed to stay despite violently attacking and threatening to kill his former partner in 2010 - he was jailed for six months which was suspended for 12 months. The family were kicked out of the lavish hotel where members of the AAT enjoyed a three-day getaway, but continued to protest outside the establishment. Korinne Aylward and her partner Greg Tucker (pictured) were stabbed to death by Turkish man Mustafa Kunduraci in their home in Moonee Ponds, Melbourne, in 2013 'It's the bureaucrats that are buggering up the country...they're letting too many people come in here and we're having problems with them and we should do something about it,' Trevor, Korinne and Greg's uncle said. Victorian MP Jason Woods agreed: 'We need to send a firm message, enough is enough, minister Peter Dutton has been trying to do this but having the decisions overturned,' he said. 'As far as I'm concerned, it's a disgrace.' Mr Woods said the Government had launched an inquiry into the tribunal out of concern for its decision making. The children's grandfather, Gavin (pictured), said the tragic circumstance could have been avoided if the AAT had of made the right decision 'I'm greatly concerned like many other Australians of how these violent thugs, murderers and rapists are allowed to stay in the country after the ministers make a decision.' 'I don't understand how they get to do this, it's unacceptable. They're playing Russian Roulette with peoples' lives,' Katelyn added. In the past eight years, the AAT has saved 66 violent foreign-born criminals, including eight killers, from deportation. It was also recently reveled the body had overruled more recommendations than it had upheld - with 5276 saved from being kicked out, and 5110 deportations supported. A man who faked a sick note to get out of two days of work has been charged with fraud. Jacob Riley Love, 20, from the Gold Coast, pleaded guilty to fraud, forgery and leaving a crash scene in Southport Magistrates Court on Wednesday. Love, who started working at Powertech Telecommunications, wanted two days off in December last year, the court heard. Love, who started working at Powertech Telecommunications, wanted two days off in December last year, the court heard He told his employer he needed nasal surgery, who said they would grant him two days off if he provided a sick note, the Courier Mail reported. Love was not sick at the time and did not need surgery, though he was paid $160 for the two days off, the court heard. Love sent his employer an email with a letter from Eastbrooke Medical Centre, but it did not contain any contact details. After realising the note was fake, Love's employer contacted the police. Defence lawyer Michael McMillan said his client was remorseful. A man who faked a sick note to get out of two days of work has been charged with fraud 'He lost his job as a result and he makes apologies to his employer,' he said. The court also heard Love was involved in a car crash on January 22. He did not stop after the crash, and when later questioned by police said he had no memory of the accident. Love was fined $500 for the fake note and $450 for leaving a crash scene. The Tory party pulled in 4.7million in donations in the first quarter of the year - over three times more than the Labour Party, according to new figures out today. Theresa May's party received the bulk of major donations between January and March, while Labour received just under 1.5m, the Electoral Commission found. While the crisis-hit Ukip Party has banked no major donations in the first three months of the year, the figures reveal. Henry Bolton was sacked as party leader in February after he was revealed to have left his wife for Jo Marney, a former glamour model 30 years his junior. Ms Marney was later exposed for sending racist messages about Prince Harry's then fiance Meghan Markle. The affair plunged the party into a fresh bout of crisis and sparked warnings that it could collapse. The Tory party pulled in 4.7million in donations in the first quarter of the year - over three times more than the Labour Party, according to new figures out today But today a party spokesman insisted Ukip had managed to raise a significant amount of cash from its members over the same time frame. Under the law, political parties only have to register payments from individual donors if they hand over 7,500 or more - meaning small donations made by members are not counted. A spokesman for Ukip said its new leader Gerard Batten had gone to members telling them to 'back me or sack me' and urging them to donate. The party's coffers have been filled with smaller donations from the party faithful, he added. The figures Renew, the newly-established centrist party aiming to stop Brexit, collected 111,671. While the Women's Equality Party received 10,000 and the Green Party only pulled in a meagre 1,800. The Electoral Commission said the total reported to it by all parties amounted to 6.9m. The three-month total for 2018 was 2.4 million lower than donations accepted in the same period last year. The Tory Party's biggest donor was a 582,358 bequest from Gerda Winder, followed by 500,000 from businessman Ehud Sheleg. A spokesman for Ukip said its new leader Gerard Batten (pictured) had gone to members telling them to 'back me or sack me' and urging them to donate Unite the Union was Labour's biggest donor with 450,027, followed by the GMB giving 318,673. Separate figures published for the Democratic Unionist Party - the small Northern Ireland party propping Mrs May up in power - received 4,000 in donations. Sinn Fein and the United Kingdom Veterans' and People's Party failed to meet the deadline for reporting donations, according to the watchdog. Ann Watt, head of the Electoral Commission in Northern Ireland, said it was 'disappointing' the two parties had failed to deliver their returns on time. She added: 'Where there is no reasonable explanation for such a failure, we will take a robust approach in line with our enforcement policy.' Jerome Rogers was found hanged in woodland The brother of a young man who killed himself after being hounded by bailiffs has spoken out about his death as part of his family's campaign for a reform on bailiff procedures. Jerome Rogers, 20, was unable to pay two 65 fines, while working as a courier for CitySprint, straight away and they increased dramatically as a result of him missing the two-week deadline. He was tragically found hanged in a wooded area near his home in Croydon, South London, on March 7 last year. At his inquest at Croydon Coroner's Court in April last year, coroner Jacqueline Devonish recorded a verdict of suicide and raised concerns at the debt-collection company's practices, according to The Guardian. Mr Roger's heartbroken family are now campaigning for urgent reform on bailiff procedures. They are also calling for an independent regulator to be installed and and given recognition. His brother, Nat Rogers, has spoken about his family's plight ahead of his sibling's tragic tale being told in a BBC Three drama, Killed By My Debt, which airs tonight. Speaking to The Sun from his home in East Croydon, South London, Nat, 28, a contract engineer said: 'No one should have to find their little brother like that. 'It breaks my heart to think of him alone in those final moments but as difficult as it is to talk about, I cannot let his death be in vain.' Mr Rogers' family are unhappy at the way his debts were dealt with for the fines, including bailiffs being sent to his home to clamp the motorbike he needed to work as a courier. Mr Rogers said: 'On the day he disappeared a bailiff had been outside for two-and-a-half hours. We now know that while the bailiff was outside, Jerome was alone in his room searching for ways to end his life and searching for payday loans.' The case is believed to be the first in which a suicide has been linked to a bailiff visit. Coroner, Mrs Devonish, said that the bailiff dealing with Mr Rogers' case had behaved responsibly. But Mr Rogers' mother Tracey is convinced bailiffs are to blame for her son's death. She previously said in a statement: 'As a family we want nothing like this to happen to anyone else. 'It rips you apart. I believe without his money problem he would still be here.' At Mr Rogers' inquest at Croydon Crown Court the coroner raised concerns about bailiffs The BBC programme, Killed By My Debt, which airs tonight, tells Mr Rogers' tragic story Mr Rogers searched for ways to kill himself online after his 130 debt escalated to 1,000 The motorcycle courier was found hanged in a wooded area near his home in Croydon Several charities expressed concerns about bailiff methods in a report, which was published last year. A spokesman for Camden Council said after Mr Rogers' inquest that bailiffs with had a contract with the local authority were expected to abide by a code of practice. According to debt charity, Step Change Debt, around 3.3 million people in the UK experience severe debt problems. Two thirds of their clients in 2017 were under 40 and one in seven under 25 For confidential support call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch The chief of the Best for Britain campaign today compared Brexit to the appeasement of the Nazis just days before group launches its push for a second EU referendum. Lord Malloch-Brown insisted Britain still needed to learn from centuries of trying to ignore problems on the continent and in a Radio 4 interview specifically highlighted the rise of Hitler. The incendiary intervention comes a day after billionaire financier George Soros - who is bankrolling Best for Britain - revealed the referendum push would start in days. Ex Ukip leader Nigel Farage has lashed out at the campaign warning the country has already made up its mind about Brexit. Best for Britain wants to secure a large mandate to reverse the 2016 referendum on the grounds the negotiation has not secured a good deal for Britain. Lord Malloch-Brown, the chief of the Best for Britain campaign, today compared Brexit to the appeasement of the Nazis just days before group launches its push for a second EU referendum Billionaire anti Brexit campaigner George Soros yesterday admitted that the EU is in 'existential crisis' because of its failure to reform (file pic) Lord Malloch-Brown told the Today programme: 'Britain's history as an island nation adjacent to mainland Europe is when we try to, sort of, pull away from Europe's problems and close ourselves off to them they have a horrible habit of infecting us anyway. WHO ARE BEST FOR BRITAIN AND WHAT DO THEY WANT? Best for Britain was launched by Gina Miller as a campaign to encourage tactical voting against Brexit Best for Britain is a campaign group dedicating to moderating and ultimately reversing Brexit. It was launched by Gina Miller, the former model who successfully challenged the Government in court over to Article 50, to encourage anti-Brexit tactical voting at the election. Ms Miller left the group soon after the election and former Labour minister Mark Malloch-Brown took over as chairman. The group is actively fundraising for its efforts to frustrate Brexit. As well as big money donations from people like George Soros, it run crowdfunding - including a new campaign to 'stand up for free speech'. It urged MPs to vote against the flagship Brexit Withdrawal Bill and campaigns to protect universities from what it describes as a right-wing witch hunt. The group draws cross party support, frequently issuing statements from MPs including Daniel Zeichner from Labour, Tom Brake from the Lib Dems and Green Caroline Lucas.. The board includes former Olympian Stephen Peel economist Anatole Kaletsky, businessman Clive Cowdery, while the CEO is activist Eloise Todd. Advertisement 'Appeasement in the 1930s, you name it. For centuries Britain has ignored events on continental Europe at its peril.' He said Mr Soros's reputation as the 'man who broke the Bank of England' in 1992, when the financier bet against sterling on the money markets, was an 'unrelated issue' to the anti-Brexit push. 'He broke the Bank of England as a financier because the British pound was over-extended. 'It wasn't credible. He broke the pound, not the Bank of England, I should say. 'He is someone who has devoted decades to an extraordinary global philanthropy which has fought for democracy and open values.' Mr Soros, 87, yesterday warned it could take five years for Britain to fully quit the Brussels bloc because of legal wrangling. The financier suggested the Brexit vote could be reversed and the UK could decide o stay in the EU after all. In a speech at the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank event in Paris he said: 'Ultimately, it's up to the British people to decide what they want to do. 'It would be better however if they came to a decision sooner rather than later. That's the goal of an initiative called the 'Best for Britain', which I support. 'Best for Britain fought for, and helped to win, a meaningful parliamentary vote which includes the option of not leaving at all. 'This would be good for Britain but would also render Europe a great service by rescinding Brexit and not creating a hard-to-fill hole in the European budget. 'But the British public must express its support by a convincing margin in order to be taken seriously by Europe. 'That's what the Best for Britain is aiming for by engaging the electorate. It will publish its manifesto in the next few days.' Nigel Farage (pictured on his LBC show last night) lashed Mr George Soros for vowing to launch a campaign for a second EU referendum 'within days'. Who is George Soros and why is he known as the man who broke the Bank of England? George Soros had already made a fortune and a formidable reputation by 1992. But that was when he secured his tag as the 'man who broke the Bank of England'. Short selling US$10billion worth of Sterling during the Black Wednesday crisis made him a reported profit of 1.5billion. The 87-year-old Hungarian-born financier is now one of the world's richest men. His wealth was estimated by Forbes magazine last year at 25billion. Mr Soros has previously warned that Brexit will be a disaster for the economy, and suggested the UK could immediately apply to rejoin the EU. One of Mr Soros's foundations gave the money to Best for Britain, a Remain group that wants to force a second EU referendum. Over the past 40 years he is said to have donated 11billion to philanthropic causes. Advertisement He added: 'In the meantime, the EU needs to transform itself into an association which nations like Britain would want to join.' And Mr Soros warned: 'It is no longer a figure of speech to say that Europe is in existential danger; it is the harsh reality.' Mr Soros' speech came as the EU is facing a fresh crisis as political disarray in Italy casts doubt over its future in the bloc. Italian President Sergio Mattarella is facing impeachment calls after he defied voters and refused to appoint a fiercely eurosceptic finance minister. Mr Soros said the EU project has taken a series of blows over the past decade which threaten to derail it altogether. But he warned of the dangers of Brexit, telling the audience: 'Brexit is an immensely damaging process, harmful to both sides. 'This divorce will be a long process, probably five years, which is an eternity in politics.' Mr Soros - dubbed the man who broke the Bank of England after he bet against the pound on Black Wednesday - said the EU's reputation has taken a battering in recent years. He said the financial crisis of 2008 followed by the chaotic response to the huge influx of refugees in 2015 had led many young people to 'regard the EU as an enemy that has deprived them of jobs and a secure and promising future.' Brexit Secretary David Davis (pictured with EU negotiator Michel Barnier at the March summit in Brussels) is negotiating Britain's departure from the bloc. But George Soros warned that it could take many years of wrangling before Britain fully quits He also said the EU's role in foreign affairs and diplomacy has taken battering after Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal which Brussels had championed. 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 He said the move by the American President was 'effectively destroying the trans-Atlantic alliance.' He added: 'This development will put additional pressure of unpredictable force on an already beleaguered Europe - It's no longer a figure of speech to say Europe is in existential danger.' Mr Soros also warned that the election of right-wing populist Viktor Orban in Hungary is challenging the very principals the EU was funded on. He said: 'Viktor Orban based his entire re-election campaign on falsely accusing me of planning to flood Europe, Hungary included, with Muslim refugees. 'He is now posing as the defender of his version of a Christian Europe, that is challenging the values on which the European Union was founded.' Mr Soros said the EU should try to salvage its project by abandoning the euro and funding a 30 billion euro Marshall Plan for Africa to ease the flow of migrants to the continent. He said: 'The euro has many unresolved problems and they must not be allowed to destroy the European Union.' Zahid Naseem, 47, of Elm Close, Amersham, Buckinghamshire, appeared at Hove Crown Court charged with murder A businessman will go on trial charged with murder after a woman was found bludgeoned to death on her own birthday. Christina Abbotts was found dead in her flat after after she failed to turn up at celebrations in London to mark her 29th birthday. Friends alerted police who rushed to the flat in the Gossops Green area of Crawley in West Sussex and found her body on Friday night. Police say she had been bludgeoned around the head with a 'blunt' object and her body was found on the bed. Today Zahid Naseem, 47, of Elm Close, Amersham, Buckinghamshire, appeared at Hove Crown Court charged with murder. Dressed in grey jogging bottoms and top the businessman spoke only to confirm his name, date of birth and his British nationality. Although there was no arraignment Lewis Power, defending, said Naseem would be pleading not guilty to murder at a later date. Mr Power said: 'I will have to commission psychiatric and psychological reports. 'It's not a very straight forward case in terms of murder cases.' A trial was fixed for December 10. Christina was was found shortly after 10.30pm on Friday night after police raced round to the flat in Crawley. Christina Abbotts (pictured), who had missed her own party with friends, had been due to celebrate her 29th birthday with her family on Sunday, her heartbroken mother said When Ms Abbotts failed to turn up for her birthday celebrations, friends became concerned and raised the alarm before looking for her at the flat Just hours before she had received birthday greetings from her parents and had texted them back saying : 'Thank you very much. See you soon. Love you all.' An IT worker, she had been marking her birthday on Friday and was due to travel to a London hotel to celebrate with friends. When she failed to turn up friends became concerned and raised the alarm before looking for her at the flat. Witnesses told how police 'flooded' into the residential street shortly after 10.30pm on Friday night. A 47-year-old man, who was known to Miss Abbotts, was at the property when officers arrived and was arrested on suspicion of murder. The victim's Finnish mother Pirrko Hanna and dad Michael Abbotts told how their daughter had been looking after the flat where she died as a favour for a friend. Her parents identified their daughter on Saturday. Her mother said: 'It was a painful thing to do. It hasn't really sunk in' Her family have paid tribute to their 'sweet loving daughter' who was found dead in her flat in the Gossops Green area of Crawley in West Sussex on Friday night Her family said: 'Christina, our sweet loving daughter and best friend, educated at Cirencester and Oxford, will be sorely missed. This independent lady, a much travelled person was taken from us far too early' Mr Abbots, 68, a retired BT engineer, said his daughter's good deed proved fatal, saying: 'She was house sitting for a friend who had gone travelling to Thailand and had been there for a few months.' He said his daughter had never mentioned the man accused of her murder, who police say knew her. He said: 'My daughter was a very beautiful woman who had lots of friends and we never thought any enemies. 'We are so shocked and saddened by her murder and can't stop crying. She had many boyfriends in the past but didn't have one recently.' Miss Abbotts was found dead after her father arrived in the road looking for her after she failed to attend her birthday party at a London hotel Christina, who was well travelled, had been due to have a special birthday lunch with her parents and brother Stephen at their home in Stourbridge, West Midlands on Sunday. Her parents identified their daughter on Saturday. Her mother said: 'It was a painful thing to do. It hasn't really sunk in.' Mr Abbotts added: 'She was an independent and streetwise young woman. She lived the bright light of London and enjoyed living there. 'She was always moving to new places and we couldn't keep up. We'd never visited the flat near the airport she was looking after.' Her mum said she enjoyed fashion and travelling, saying: 'She'd been all over, to Dubai and Europe and Lapland. She worked in IT but wanted to be an estate agent.' Hove Crown Court said the trial starting on December 10 was expected to last between five and seven days. A senior Republican lawmaker said Tuesday that President Donald Trump will ultimately be grateful the FBI sent one or more informants to gather information about a trio of his campaign aides in 2016, since 'he was never the target Russia was the target.' The president has bitterly complained in recent weeks that the Obama administration's Justice Department 'spied' on him, but House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy told a Fox News audience that the surveillance had 'nothing to do with Donald Trump.' 'I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got,' he said. Gowdy was among the small group of legislators briefed last week by top intelligence officials about how the FBI had gathered information about potential ties between Moscow and then-candidate Trump's orbit. SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican congressman, said Tuesday night that the FBI was investigating Russia not spying on Donald Trump when it deployed an informant to find out what a handful of campaign advisers knew in 2016 Trump mocked the effort minutes later during a Nashville rally, saying the Obama Justice Department 'had people infiltrating our campaign' Tuesday night during a campaign-style rally in Nashville, Tennessee, the president had strong words for the technique. 'So how do you like the fact they had people infiltrating our campaign," Trump mocked. 'Can you imagine people infiltrating our campaign? Is there anybody in this big, beautiful arena right now, that's infiltrating our campaign? Will you please raise your hand?' The president spoke just minutes after Gowdy delivered his verdict on national television. He has branded the episode 'SPYGATE.' Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University academic, approached at least three Trump advisers in 2016, probing them to learn what they knew about Russian hacking and election interference Gowdy was among a small group of lawmakers who last week saw classified information about what the president calls 'SPYGATE,' and his takeaway was that the FBI did what it would have been expected to do at the time The jab is a reference to Stefan Halper, a former Cambridge University professor who made contact with at least three Trump campaign advisors in 2016. Halper was trying to learn how much George Papadapoulos, Carter Page and Sam Clovis knew about Russia's attempts to hack Hillary Clinton's emails and turn the election to Trump's advantage. Clovis said Tuesday night on Fox that 'two and perhaps more' FBI spies approached him. 'These guys were going at us from all different angles,' claimed Clovis. Gowdy insisted Tuesday evening that the president himself is not a target of the ongoing special counsel probe into the Kremlin's 2016 election interference. Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page claims the FBI's surveillance ruined his life, costing him his business income and his girlfriend That, he said, should give Trump the confidence to resume his earlier insistence that the FBI root out any of his current or former aides who may have been compromised by Russia. 'President Trump himself, in the Comey memos, said, "If anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it",' he said. 'And it sounds to me like that is exactly what the FBI did.' 'I think when the President finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard,' Gowdy said. 'It was President Trump himself who said, "Number one, I didn't collude with Russia, but if anyone connected with my campaign did, I want the FBI to find that out." It looks like the FBI was doing what President Trump said I want you to do find it out.' A bomb sniffer dog based in Afghanistan is to enjoy retirement in Britain after a decade on the front line after a former Royal Marine raised 4,000 to bring him home. Cocker spaniel Oscar, 14, will now see out his remaining years back in Britain, thanks to former Royal Marine Craig O'Dare. Mr O'Dare, 50, raised the cash to bring the heroic hound, who has served in war zones, back after befriending him at a compound in Afghanistan. The soldier, who spent the past 12 years serving in Afghanistan, said he couldn't believe Oscar, who has survived a truck bomb, was still being made to work at his ripe old age. Oscar pictured with his handler Simon in 2005 in Basra will be brought to Wales in late August Cocker spaniel Oscar was still working for a private security firm in Kabul at the age of 14 Mr O'Dare, from Barry, South Wales, said: 'Oscar has spent over 12 years searching for improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan and survived and attack on a compound that involved a large truck bomb. 'It was one of the biggest seen in Afghanistan. 'I would like to see him spend what time he has left running through green fields. 'This old boy has done his time and now needs to be brought home.' The 4000 target to bring Oscar home from Afghanistan was reached within three days Craig (left) with Oscar and Dr Rezaei, who works at Nowzad charity for war animals Oscar has worked for a security firm for the duration of his time abroad, working in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr O'Dare used a crowdfunding page to raise the cash for Oscar - who is 98 in dog years - which will be used to pay for medical checks and fly him home to Wales. Oscar will then live with dog trainer Simon Mallin in Bridgend, South Wales. Mr Mallin was Oscar's original handler when he was first given to the private security firm. Before that he was trained as a puppy at Malpeet K9 Academy, based in Bridgend, South Wales, which specialises in training dogs for operations. He is expected to be brought back to Wales in late August. Memphis college students whose parents were severely injured or killed on active duty will have their college tuition covered in full. The University of Memphis announced on Wednesday the national Folds of Honor scholarship, which is given to children under 24 and spouses of any age of those killed or severely wounded on active duty, would now cover full tuition. The scholarship is worth $5,000 a year, and the university will use private donations and other support funds to cover the difference - about $4,700. Residents of Tennessee with the scholarship are eligible, as are others around the country, in accordance with the university's capacity. The University of Memphis will now accept the Folds of Honor scholarship as full payment for tuition, and hopes other university's will follow their lead Bill Akey, the university's Vice Provost of Enrollment Services, said in a statement he hopes to see the idea spread to other universities across the nation. 'The hope is that other universities will follow, helping the University of Memphis establish a national consortium committed to recognizing the remarkable contributions and sacrifices of our men and women in uniform,' he said. University president David Rudd, also a veteran, told USA Today the university would also help find ways to cover board, extra fees and textbooks. 'This sacrifice is remarkable and we need to recognize that,' President David Rudd told the University board. Average university tuition is about $9,700 a year, plus room and board, fees and textbooks. If the students qualify for other scholarships as well, Rudd said, the university will still assist them in seeking those dollars. 'Our commitment is to cover any gap that exists as a result and to relieve them of that burden,' Rudd said. An Indian police officer hailed as a 'hero' for saving a Muslim man from a furious lynch mob has received death threats in the wake of his actions. A clip showing Gagandeep Singh, an officer in the northern state of Uttarakhand, saving a man accused of attempting to convert his Hindu girlfriend to Islam went viral this week after being shared on social media. In the footage, Mr Singh can be seen shielding the man from a violent crowd who are attempting to beat him despite the officer's protection. The man, who was visiting a Hindu temple with his girlfriend, was accused by other worshippers of 'love jihad'. Gagandeep Singh can be seen holding the Muslim man tightly as he fends of attacks from the mob The pair are attacked from all sides by the enraged crowd as the officer spins around quickly to ward off the belligerents Religious groups coined the phrase to describe Muslims who allegedly seduce Hindu women to convert them to Islam. Sikh officer Mr Singh was widely praised on Twitter for his 'heroic' actions - after he successfully managed to help the man escape the baying crowd. 'The Sikh police officer who saved the Muslim man. I don't care who's in power or what is your politics. That's the India I want and ever will want. Even if I am the only one left wanting it,' Indian novelist Chetan Bhagat tweeted. While actor Farhan Akhtar added: 'We are quick to condemn those who take a life but we must be quicker to commend those who save one. #hero #GagandeepSingh' Mr Singh himself spoke out after the fracas - saying he was surprised by the reaction to the video and was 'just doing his job'. 'I was just doing my duty. Even if I was not in uniform, I would have done the same thing and every Indian should do the same,' he told local media in India. 'I never thought that the video would go viral and I would get so much appreciation and love. I was just doing my job and I will be happy if my action can inspire others.' Mr Singh can be seen bravely swatting away punches from the crowd as he tucks the man under his arm The police officer eventually managed to get both himself and the Muslim man to safety after the attack But several people condemned Mr Singh's actions, adding that the mob were justified in their rage. Rakesh Nainwal a high ranking Indian politician told the BBC: 'It's wrong when these people (Muslim men) bring Hindu girls to our places of worship despite knowing it's a temple and it's pious.' Rajkumar Thukral, another politician, said: 'We don't go to mosques because we don't have the right to go there.' 'Then why did these men go to our temple with an intention to destroy the Hindu culture?' Police officials working with Mr Singh have said the policeman has received a number of death threats and has now been sent on leave as a result. Donald Trump vented at Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday morning, tweeting that he regretted choosing him to run the Justice Department last year. Writing Wednesday on Twitter, Trump quoted Rep. Trey Gowdy from a appearance on Fox News: 'There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!' 'And I wish I did!' the president added in an unusually stern public rebuke of a close political ally and key Cabinet official. Among Sessions' first acts in office was to recuse himself from what was then a slow-starting probe into Russian interference with the 2016 election. As a former Trump campaign adviser, legal ethics prohibited him from overseeing an investigation in which he might become a witness. President Donald Trump (left) said Wednesday that he wishes he had never made Jeff Sessions his attorney general Trump quoted Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy's explanation of why he's frustrated with Sessions, and then tweeted that 'I wish I did' pick someone else Trump has said both publicly and privately that the AG should have told him in advance that as a former campaign adviser himself, he would be ethically barred from overseeing the probe. With Sessions out of the way and FBI Director James Comey fired, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller whose slow moving, secretive investigation has given the president no end of heartburn. Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said on Fox that Trump 'is expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward.' 'If I were the president and I picked someone to be the countrys chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, Oh by the way, I'm not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office,' I would be frustrated too.' Sessions, a former Alabama senator, recused himself from the Russia probe almost immediately upon taking office, a move that opened the door for a special counsel Trump didn't mention Sessions during a Tuesday night rally in Nashville, Tennessee, but claimed the FBI had 'infiltrated' his campaign in a dramatic government overreach Trump was already convinced nearly a year ago that he had backed the wrong horse at the Justice Department. He told The New York Times in a July 2017 interview that 'Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else.' 'How do you take the job and then recuse himself?' he asked then, adding: 'It's extremely unfair and that's a mild word to the president.' Months earlier, according to a report in Wednesday's New York Times, Trump had pointedly asked Sessions to reverse himself. The attorney general refused. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Tuesday that Sessions could have reversed himself and helmed the Russia probe rather than ending it, avoiding claims of obstruction of justice That report, if accurate, signals a level of tinkering with the Justice Department that may drive Mueller to expand his consideration of whether the president tried to obstruct justice. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, a former New York City Mayor, told the Times that Sessions could have made a U-turn and helmed the Russia probe despite fears of a conflict of interest. '"Unrecuse" doesnt say, "Bury the investigation." It says on the face of it: Take responsibility for it and handle it correctly,' Giuliani said. Sessions first encountered public questions about his potential link with the expanding Russia probe during his January 2017 confirmation hearing, which was held 10 days before Trump's inauguration. Asked how he would handle future evidence that Trump insiders had communicated with the Russian government, he said: 'I'm not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I ... did not have communications with the Russians, and I'm unable to comment on it.' A former adviser to Donald Trump claims that 'two and perhaps more' informants approached him prior to the presidential election with information that would have 'jammed up' the campaign in some way. 'These guys were going at us from all different angles,' Michael Caputo said on a 'Hannity' panel Tuesday that included former Trump campaign hand Sam Clovis and and ex-Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Caputo said it's clear that his colleagues were 'approached by a spy' during the campaign, regardless of claims that the person was actually an FBI informant. 'A spy is a spy is a spy,' he argued. 'They've done more than this. They had to have done more.' A former adviser to Donald Trump claims that 'two and perhaps more' informants approached him prior to the presidential election with information that would have 'jammed up' the campaign in some way Caputo previously said on Fox that he thought there were at least two FBI informants sniffing around the Trump presidential campaign. He told Fox News's 'Your World' that he was approached in May 2016 by an intermediary 'who had been talking to a government official' looking to connect with the Trump campaign - purportedly to hand off Hillary Clinton-related emails. But since then more details have emerged about the second 'informant' in question that suggested the issue may have been an innocent misunderstanding. Kirk Bell, a friend of Caputo's, was at a DC-area Kentucky Derby in early May when he met a government contractor, who asked media outlets to remain unnamed. In their conversation, it came up that Bell was going to work for Trump's campaign. The government contractor mentioned he had heard about some of Clinton's missing emails floating around and said the Trump campaign should see if they could obtain them, according to the Daily Wire. The contractor denies he is an FBI informant or any type of spy or government plant. A government contractor met a friend of Michael Caputo's at a Kentucky Derby party and mentioned hearing of emails from Clinton's private email server but denies being an FBI informant or any type of government plant. 'I made no offer. I did not entice these people. I just made a cocktail party statement that is now conflated into 'I am a spy," 'the person told CNN. The contractor claimed to have seen emails that were allegedly part of the thousands Clinton deleted from her private email server, CNN reported. Bell relayed this to Caputo, who was already working for Trump. 'I am trying to find hard copies, but that is really going to be tough,' Bell said in a text message to Caputo. 'I have my people out there looking.' 'OK. That's explosive stuff,' Caputo wrote back. Caputo believes the mention of those emails along with the advice that the Trump campaign should pursue sources in the US intelligence community for information on Clinton was part of a government conspiracy to entrap staff of the Trump campaign. 'I've always believed for two years that it was hinky,' Caputo told CNN. 'Sure, it could be a misunderstanding, or it could be the keys to the kingdom of God.' Caputo and the contractor never spoke directly, both have said. The contractor claimed to CNN never have had possession of any Clinton emails, nor to have been able to independently verify their validity. 'This is just really, really overblown,' the contractor said. 'I made no offer. I had no possession. I said, 'Do your own math here.'' The contractor told The Daily Wire he had heard Clinton's missing emails in a business meeting he had while he was trying to bring in business for a private sector tech company. 'I have done no work with the [Independent Special Counsel], none,' the government contractor told the Daily Wire. 'I have no contracts, not even ancillary contracts with the intelligence community. I am not connected there at all. Zero.' Caputo, when told by the Daily Wire of the publication's interview with the contractor, said: 'This also could be a great big misunderstanding.' Kirk Bell, a friend of Michael Caputo's, was at a DC-area Kentucky Derby in early May when he met a government contractor, who said he had heard about emails from Clinton's private server. In his appearance, on 'Hannity' on Tuesday, however, Caputo said he's 'convinced' that he was contacted by at least one informant, including the government contractor. Clovis concurred, saying, 'They've come at us in multiple directions, in multiple directions and from multiple agencies and I think the American people need to know that this is the worst possible abuse of power at taxpayer expense.' Caputo had told Fox News previously that there could be another informant out there other than the 'spy' or 'mole' that President Trump and other supporters of the president had been referring to. 'Let me tell you something that I know for a fact. This informant, this person that they planted, try to plant into the campaign,' Caputo said. 'He's not the only person that came at the campaign and the FBI is not the only Obama agency that came at the campaign. I know because they came at me.' Caputo left the Trump campaign in June 2016 after he reacted too gleefully to the news that campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had been fired. He tweeted, 'Ding dong the witch is dead,' with a link to a YouTube video of the famous Wizard of Oz tune. He subsequently resigned. His explosive charge of an additional informant followed reports that Cambridge professor Stefan Halper was an FBI informant who approached Trump campaign advisers Carter Page, George Papadopoulos and Sam Clovis about any potential ties to Russia. Trump has ordered the Justice Department investigate his allegation that the FBI, under Obama, 'infiltrated or surveilled' his 2016 campaign. The DOJ subsequently directed its Office of Inspector General to formally probe those claims. The RMT trade union today decided not to reaffiliate to Labour - saying they do not want to back a 'hard core' of MPs who are trying to 'undermine' Jeremy Corbyn. The trade union suggested that they still do not think Labour is left-wing enough to formally back. Instead the union has put forward a compromise plan which will see it 'align' with Mr Corbyn and his radical policies - including his call to renationalise the railways. Under a political fudge thrashed out by a Special General Meeting of the RMT, the union says it will give Labour more backing. But by not fully affiliating the union is leaving itself the option of withdrawing its support and even backing other political parties or candidates. The RMT said that it will not back Labour MPs who support proposed reforms to get rid of guards on trains. And general secretary Mick Cash also took a swipe a 'hard core of Labour MPs' who he said are trying to 'undermine Jeremy Corbyn and the radical progressive changes he has made to Labour'. But Labour MP and leading moderate Mike Gapes told MailOnline the vote is a 'setback' for the far left and the union's leadership is trying to put a 'gloss' on its defeat. RMT general secretary Mick Cash (pictured left) ) said the decision not to reafilliate was 'finely balanced' and said the trade union will align itself with Labour - a move which encourages individual members to be active in the party if they want to be He said: 'The leadership clearly wanted to affiliate but they have done a consultation and it is clear that there is substantial number of people in the organisation who don't want to. 'So they are putting a gloss on it and saying they are going to support individual candidates- they will play factional politics. 'The vote means they will not get a block vote at national or regional conference.' A Labour Party spokeswoman hailed the decision and said they will work withe the union to fight against privatisation. She said: 'We are glad that RMT has chosen to align itself with the Labour Party and look forward to continuing to work with RMT on taking Britain's failed privatised railways back into public ownership, a policy supported by the overwhelming majority of people in our country.' What is the difference between union affiliation and alignment? The RMT has forged a political fudge by deciding to 'align' to the Labour party rather than affiliate to it. If the trade union affiliated it would be tied in to formally backing the Labour Party at all times. This means funding the organisation and also backing its MPs in elections and campaigns. It would also give the union a block vote in Labour's national and regional conferences. As allies of Jeremy Corbyn, this would have strengthen the Labour leader's position when crunch votes on rule changes come up for debate this autumn. But under the looser plan to align the union has made it clear it does back many of Mr Corbyn's policies. It also allows and encourages members to campaign for and raise funds for the Labour Party locally. But it retains the option of withholding its support form individual candidates and MPs it does not agree with - and has threatened to do precisely that. Advertisement Under today's agreement, the RMT has agreed that the union's 200 branches and regional councils can choose to help fund Labour party at elections if they want. Mr Cash said the decision not to reafilliate was 'finely balanced' - suggesting there were many in the union's ranks who wanted to fully back Labour. The Special General Meeting also agreed that the union should consider what other steps it can take to 'support, defend, and develop the socialist advances that have been made within the Labour Party'. Mr Cash said: 'Our consultation has shown that the views of our branches and regions are finely balanced and the conference has decided that, whilst we do not support affiliation at this current time, there is the potential for the union to affiliate to the Labour Party at a future date if there is clearer support for this. 'Many of our members have also reacted angrily to constant attempts by a hard core of Labour MPs to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and the radical progressive changes he has made to Labour. 'In contrast, there is a clear desire amongst RMT members to support Jeremy Corbyn and the left leadership of the Labour Party. 'And that is why we are now putting in place other concrete steps to throw the weight of the RMT behind supporting the socialist advances that have been made in the Labour Party. 'This will include aligning ourselves towards Labour, encouraging members to be active in Labour and allowing our branches and regions to fund Labour candidates.' The RMT disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 2004 after growing angry with the way the party was being led by Tony Blair (pictured at a press conference in 2016) The RMT is known as one of Britain's most militant unions and has staged a wave of strikes across Southern Rail and several other lines over the past year. Fed-up commuters told how they lost jobs, relationships and were left stressed after being hit by months of delays because of the rolling strike action over the removal of train guards. The union was led for many years by the firebrand leader Bob Crow, with Mr Cash serving as his more moderate deputy. Mr Cash was made leader in 2014 after Mr Crow died - and vowed to carry on his policy of leading a militant union. PASCAGOULA, Miss. -- Darcie Crew, former City of Pascagoula Parks and Recreation Director has been hired by Jackson County Board of Supervisors as the newest Recreation Department Director. Crew has spent the last 15 years in a similar position with the City of Pascagoula and will begin on June 1 working with current Director Jack Hamilton until he retires on June 15 with 28 years of service with the county. "Darcie brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the County," says County Administrator Brian Fulton. "Her 25 years of recreation management experience coupled with her vision for future opportunities within the Recreation Department made her the ideal candidate for the position." While with the City, Crew played an instrumental role in creating their Comprehensive Parks and Recreation Master Plan, developed programs to streamline maintenance of their over 200 acres of recreational facilities, and served as project manager for several renovation and reinvention projects. She also held Assistant Director and Program Director positions with the city. "I appreciate and look forward to the opportunity to serve the citizens and visitors of Jackson County," Crew said. "The team members in the Recreation Department work hard to provide quality recreation facilities and I am proud to serve with them. Working as a team is important, so my initial goal is to get to know everyone and absorb how the department currently operates." As she enters this position, Crew said she sees what's already in place and simply wants to build on that foundation. "I want to gather input from the employees and constituents to determine how we can improve upon what is already in place, and then look at possible new projects or programs," she said. "I look forward to what the future holds for Jackson County Recreation." Crew was an attractive hire for the city because of strong relationships she's built with people and her knowledge of day-to-day operations. She has relationships with local, state and federal agencies and is familiar with all aspects of the grant process, and an avid outdoor enthusiast. These attributes, according to supervisors say will make her an asset to the county. Crew holds a Master's in Public Administration from the University of South Alabama and a Bachelor's in Recreation & Leisure Studies from State University of New York. She is a board member and past President of the Mississippi Recreation & Park Association and was named their Professional of the Year in 2009. Crew is also Certified Playground Safety Inspector through the National Playground Safety Institute. Hamilton will be recognized for his dedicated work with the county during the June 4 supervisors meeting. A staffer on the Steve Harvey Morning Show was found dead over the weekend in his Atlanta hotel room after a night on the town with his boss Kier 'Junior' Spates. According to an incident report, police responded to the W Hotel on Sunday afternoon after Bryan Cooke was found unresponsive, with blood and vomit coming from his nose and mouth. Spates, who is a comedian and co-host of Steve Harvey's popular radio show, asked hotel workers to check on his assistant after he was unable to reach him: the two were scheduled to fly to Los Angeles together later that day. Bryan Cooke (left), 39, who worked as an assistant to Steve Harvey Morning Show radio co-host Kier 'Junior' Spates (right), was found dead in his hotel room on Sunday Boss: TV and radio host Steve Harvey, 61, has not commented on Cooke's death When hotel employees entered Cooke's room, they found him lying face down on the bed, according to TMZ. He was 39 years old. When police interviewed Spates, the Houston native told them that he and Cooke had gone out the night before, smoked cigars together and then retired to their respective rooms. Spates, 40, said he and Cooke, whom he characterized as his 'best friend,' did not take any illegal narcotics, and that his assistant appeared to be in good health on Saturday. A search of Cookes room reportedly turned up prescription medications, but the police report did not specify their exact nature. Spates took to Facebook early Wednesday morning to pay tribute to his late friend, sharing a cellphone video of the two of them doing a skit together. 'This made me smile today,' Spates wrote, 'Love you man! Thanks for all of the laughs.' Harvey, 61, has not publicly commented on his employee's passing as of Wednesday morning. She's already without a television show and an agent, and now it appears Roseanne Barr stands to lose millions of dollars. Amid the fallout from Barr's racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, reruns of the show have been pulled from TV and streaming sites - costing her millions in royalties. Following ABC's cancellation of the show's revival, Viacom's cable networks announced they would be pulling all Roseanne reruns as of Wednesday. That means Roseanne will go off the air on TV Land, CMT, and Paramount Networks, the latter of which began airing reruns of the sitcom just last month in response to the revival's massive success. Amid the fallout from Roseanne Barr's racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, reruns of the show have been pulled from TV and streaming sites - costing her millions in royalties As of Wednesday Hulu has completely yanked Roseanne from its streaming library (pictured) Hulu has since followed suit, completely yanking the show from its streaming library. Episodes of the Roseanne revival were likewise pulled from ABC's website. Reruns will also no longer air on the cable network Laff, which said it was 'disgusted' by Barr's recent comments. 'While we believe viewers have always distinguished the personal behavior of the actress Roseanne Barr from the television character Roseanne Conner, we are disgusted by Barr's comments this week,' Laff said in a statement. 'Therefore, we are removing the original Roseanne series from the Laff schedule for the time being, effective immediately.' In addition to her salary for the revival, Barr was making millions from reruns of the syndicated classic (pictured). The show earned a deal of $1million per syndicated episode in 1993 Episodes and seasons of the sitcom are still available for purchase on Amazon Prime (pictured) Barr tweeted news that her reruns were being pulled from the air, and also retweeted one fan who called the decision 'pathetic' Episodes and seasons of the sitcom remain available for purchase on Amazon Prime. Barr tweeted news that her reruns were being pulled from the air, and also retweeted one fan who called the decision 'pathetic'. 'Smaller networks were running the rerun marathons and raking in $ because the revival was a number one hit on TV,' the commenter wrote. 'ABC pulls their money maker and they bail. Pathetic.' Barr stands to lose at least $3million after she tweeted that Jarrett looked like the 'Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby' on Tuesday. ABC swiftly canceled the Roseanne revival just hours later and slammed the comedian's comments as 'abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values'. Barr, who has an estimated net worth of $80million, reportedly received $250,000 per episode for nine episodes of the revival season and earned a total of $2.25m. Before the controversy, ABC had ordered 13-episode second season for the show. ABC swiftly canceled the Roseanne revival (pictured) just hours later and slammed the comedian's comments as 'abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values' 'We have decided to cancel her show,' Channing Dungey, President of ABC Entertainment, announced on Tuesday afternoon Barr stands to lose at least $3million in salary from the revival alone following her tweets Many on Twitter were appalled by Barr's tweet, which said that Valerie Jarrett looked like the offspring of the 'Muslim brotherhood and planet of the apes' Jarrett responded to Barr's racist attack on Tuesday during a town hall on MSNBC (pictured), saying it should be turned into a 'teaching moment' Barr likely would have seen a raise in salary as the revival proved to be a massive hit, pulling in 25 million viewers when it premiered in April. Ratings dropped steadily thereafter, with last week's season finale garnering 10.33 million viewers, but the show remained one of the highest-rated on television. In addition to her salary for the revival, Barr was making millions from reruns of the syndicated classic. The show earned a deal of $1million per syndicated episode in 1993, according to Variety. Despite apologizing for the tweet early on Tuesday, Barr later blamed the sleeping drug Ambien for her racist comments on Jarrett Barr also said she thought former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was white when she penned the racist tweet that got her show pulled from television Roseanne's 220 episodes have been a fixture on cable channels for more than a decade, and Barr would have been earning a considerable amount in royalties as the show's star, creator, and executive producer. Barr was the second highest-paid woman in television in the late 1990s, second only to Oprah Winfrey. In addition to making $21million for Roseanne's final season in 1997, the comedian was also raking in money from royalties and her talk show - earning her a $41million total net worth, according to Town and Country. Twenty years later and Barr, who was enjoying a resurgence in popularity just a month ago, is now in a very different situation. Following her tweets and ABC's cancellation, Barr has also been dropped from her talent agency ICM Partners. 'We are all greatly distressed by the disgraceful and unacceptable tweet from Roseanne Barr this morning,' ICM said in an internal note to employees that was obtained by the Hollywood Reporter. 'What she wrote is antithetical to our core values, both as individuals and as an agency.' Barr also began to hit back at the responses that some of her Roseanne cast members made. She is pictured here responding to Sara Gilbert, who plays her daughter on the show Barr also claimed that Michael Fishman, who played her son, had thrown her 'under the bus' 'Consequently, we have notified her that we will not represent her. Effective immediately, Roseanne Barr is no longer a client.' It appears the cancellation of the show will also affect the Roseanne cast's Emmy prospects, as ABC revealed it is suspending the show's FYC (For Your Consideration) campaign. Jarrett has since responded to Barr's racist attack, saying it should be turned into a 'teaching moment'. 'I'm fine,' she said during a town hall appearance on MSNBC. 'I'm worried about all the people out there who don't have a circle of friends and followers who come right to their defense.' 'The person who is walking down the street minding their own business and they see somebody cling to their purse, or run across the street, or every black parent I know who has a boy who has to sit down and have a conversation - the talk - as we call it.' 'As you say, those ordinary examples of racism that happen every single day.' Barr unleashed a fresh stream of Twitter abuse overnight on Tuesday, retweeing several deeply offensive posts just hours after her show was cancelled One image Barr retweeted showed a doctored image of Whoopie Goldberg wearing a t-shirt that showed Donald Trump shooting himself in the head While Barr apologized to Jarrett and claimed she would leave Twitter on Tuesday, she has since returned to defend herself and retweet a slew of conspiracy theories and doctored tweets and images. Barr first blamed the sleeping drug Ambien for her racist comments on Jarrett, before later claiming she thought Obama's former senior adviser was white. 'I mistakenly thought she [Jarrett] was white', Barr tweeted early Wednesday morning. 'I honestly thought she was Jewish and Persian'. Jarrett was born in Iran to African-American parents. The family lived in Shiraz for six years because her father was part of a program that sent American physicians to help developing countries. He ran a children's hospital. Among hundreds of Barr's retweets on Wednesday was an image of Jarrett's face next to a character from Planet of the Apes, a fake tweet claiming Jarrett had said she wanted to make America more Islamic, and a doctored image of Whoopie Goldberg wearing a t-shirt of Donald Trump shooting himself in the head. A small business owner has passionately defended his business after a customer took to Facebook to shame his staff's attire while still dining in the restaurant. Owner Paul Davies said he was left disappointed, stunned and frustrated when he saw the post and felt he had to stick up for his staff and business, the Newcastle Herald reported. 'The fact that people rarely address anything with you face-to-face and go straight to the internet is so disappointing, but I guess it speaks volumes as to [the] current state of our society,' he said. A small business owner has passionately defended his business after a customer took to Facebook to shame his staff's attire while still dining in the restaurant The post read 'Maybe you should dress your staff in better uniform, trying to relax with a quiet drink, and staff are bent over in very revealing skirts where you see their business. Very inappropriate. Certainly not professional'. Mr Davies said online reviews played an important role for any business, but taking aim at the appearances of staff members was taking the critique too far. He immediately replied to the post on the MoneyPenny Facebook page, saying that 's*** shaming' in 2018 was the only inappropriate thing he could see. Mr Davies said online reviews played an important role for any business but taking aim at the appearances of staff members was taking critique too far. Mr Davies said he encourages his staff to be free in what they choose to wear to work, with the exception of the kitchen staff, who are dressed according to safety regulations. 'I believe for customers to love a company your staff need to love it first. For me, I know I feel much more comfortable wearing my own clothes so why shouldn't they enjoy the same freedoms?' he said. Some of his staff also said they felt the comments were inappropriate. Employee of the year, Ella, said staff encourage each other to 'express ourselves'. The original critique has since been deleted from Facebook. Allison Mack admitted that branding Nxivm 'slaves' was her idea in a newly-released interview which she participated in months before being arrested on suspicion of sex trafficking. The Smallville actress's statement emerged on Wednesday in a New York Times Magazine feature which also includes remarks by the cult's leader, Keith Raniere. The interviews took place in winter, before the pair were arrested but in the midst of a growing FBI investigation into their alleged treatment of the 'slaves' - women who joined the 'cult' after being recruited by Mack or other female members, allegedly for the purposes of having sex with Raniere under the guise of improving themselves. As part of her research, New York Times Magazine reporter Vanessa Grigoriadis visited Mack at her Brooklyn apartment where the actress told her candidly: 'I was like: "Yall, a tattoo? People get drunk and tattooed on their ankle "BFF," or a tramp stamp. I have two tattoos and they mean nothing."' Allison Mack (seen arriving in court in Brooklyn on May 4) admitted in an interview several months ago that branding members of Nxivm, an alleged sex slave cult which she is accused of operating in part, was her idea A former member of the cult shows off the brand which she received. It was carved into her skin with a cauterizing pen. The logo is ambiguous but many say it includes leader Keith Raniere's initials She was referring to the flesh burning brands given to female 'slaves' after they join which many say include the letters KR, the cult leader's initials. In her article, Grigoriadis said Mack's admission 'surprised her'. During their interview, Mack also revealed that she joined the group because she was frustrated with her acting career. 'I was like: "Yall, a tattoo? People get drunk and tattooed on their ankle "BFF," or a tramp stamp. I have two tattoos and they mean nothing."' Allison Mack Mack, 35, is now on house arrest at her parents' home in California. She was arrested in April. She is only allowed to travel to attend court hearings back in New York and, it was revealed on Wednesday, she must wear an ankle monitor during flights to ensure she does not attempt to flee. She is accused of trafficking the women by recruiting them to have sex with Raniere. Among the allegations is that she would send 'collateral' provided by the women to prove their loyalty to the group to Raniere despite claiming that it would only be seen by her. Prosecutors allege that Mack and other 'masters' deprived the women of food because, they claimed, Raniere has a sexual preference for thin women. Another allegation is that she set up a slave to go for a walk with Raniere. Keith Raniere, the leader of the cult, was also interviewed. He is pictured in January 2017. Raniere now faces life imprisonment if convicted of sex trafficking charges It is not clear if the alleged incident took place at Clifton Park, the organization's HQ near Albany, New York, where Raniere allegedly kept a sex lair and Mack is said to have housed 'slaves'. The woman was taken by him to what she thought was a shed and was blindfolded and bound to a table where, prosecutors alleged, another person performed oral sex on her. Raniere has vehemently denied the allegations that any sexual interaction was non consensual. He has vowed to fight all of the charges against him which, if he is convicted, will put him away for life. Mack has been less vocal in her response to the legal situation. As a condition of her $5million bail, Mack agreed to cut all ties with Raniere. In her interview, she explained the hierarchy of the organization and gave an alternative explanation for the 'starving' slaves allegation. Much of the alleged abuse went on at Nxivm's compound in Clifton Park, New York (shown above) 'The woman who invited you to the group was your master or 'the representation of your conscience, your higher self, your most ideal. Masters would help slaves count calories to save them from the trap of emotional eating. 'They would dictate an act of 'self-denial' like cold showers or rousing yourself from bed at 4am to stand still. Slaves were told to 'do acts of care' for masters like bring them coffee or abstain from orgasms,' Grigoriadis wrote, citing the actress's advice. It's quite a point in life for me. I question my values, how I conduct myself, all of these things. I don't think I'm seen as the person I think I am. I also want to be the person that I think I am. Keith Raniere Mack said her participation in the cult helped her 'find her spine'. 'I found my spine, I just kept solidifying my spine every time I would do something hard. '[It was] about women coming together and pledging to one another a full-time commitment to become our most powerful and embodied selves by pushing on our greatest fears, by exposing our greatest vulnerabilities, by knowing that we would stand with each other no matter what, by holding or word, by overcoming pain,' she said. She has not yet revealed whether she will plead guilty or not to the charges against her. Other members include the actress India Oxenberg who said she joined the group because she was 'repulsed' by her famous family. She is pictured in New York City on April 23. Oxenberg, insiders said, was prepared to take the fall for Raniere and say that all of the sexual incidents were consensual in order to keep him out of jail Raniere agreed to be interviewed but only after being 'introduced' by female members of the cult. He told the journalist that he was a child genius who could speak in full sentences aged one and read at two. Why can't I just be in the same room with my family who I love but at the same time I want to crawl out of my skin and run away? India Oxenberg Raniere claimed he became his cancer-stricken mother's 'sole caregiver' aged 8 when his parents divorced and revealed that she died when he was 18. Before Nxivm, he was at the helm of a discounted grocery subscription service which shut down in 1997 amid accusations it operating as a pyramid scheme. He denied those allegations. Explaining his attraction to the cult, which he viewed as a 'scheme' for women to become independent and empower themselves, he said: 'I'm like a nerd who has read too much, only I've thought too much.' Throughout his interview, he broke down into tears several times and said: 'It's quite a point in life for me. I question my values, how I conduct myself, all of these things. 'I don't think I'm seen as the person I think I am. I also want to be the person that I think I am.' Others interviewed for the piece published on Wednesday include India Oxenberg, the daughter of Dynasty star Catherine Oxygen who has made numerous public pleas for her to come home to her and ditch the group which she believes has 'brainwashed' her daughter. Billionaire heiress sisters Sara and Clare Bronfman (pictured) are other members of the group. Neither has been arrested. They are believed to have propped it up with donations India, who was been seen in New York City working at a vegan cafe since Raniere and Mack's arrests, claimed that she joined the group because she was 'repulsed' by her famous family and wanted to correct herself. Journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis interviewed key members of the cult before they were arrested 'Why can't I just be in the same room with my family who I love but at the same time I want to crawl out of my skin and run away?' she recalled thinking. Clare and Sara Bronfman, the daughters of the billionaire philanthropist Edgar Bronfman Snr, were also interviewed. They spoke glowingly of Raniere and of the organization. Sara Bronfman said she felt she had to join because she 'always wanted to do something to impact the world.' 'My dad, as we were growing up, he was bringing Jews out of Russa, he was taking on the Swiss banks. 'All of my dreams of saving the world with my dad were coming true.' Raniere remains in custody and Mack is at her parents' home on house arrest but no other members of the group have been arrested. It was earlier reported that Oxenberg would be prepared to take the fall for Raniere if it kept him out of jail. Salim Mehajer's new girlfriend has faced the wrath of cruel Instagram followers who have told her she's not as pretty as his ex and urged her to kill herself. Melissa Tysoe hit back at critics via the social media site's 'story' function on Wednesday, responding to hate with messages of disappointment and bizarrely - love. Across some nasty messages left in the comment section on her page, the model wrote, 'Why are people so rude. Treat others how you wish to be treated.' Scroll down for video Salim Mehajer's (left) girlfriend Melissa Tysoe (right) hit back at critics via the social media site's 'story' function Wednesday after they slammed her appearance and willed her to die One follower addressed the disgraced former Auburn deputy mayor and said he should have stuck with his previously lover, Aysha Learmonth, who Mehajer married in an extravagant ceremony in 2015. 'Salim what are you doing? Aysha was so much more beautiful! She (Melissa) looks like a transgender man, like a sheman, what the f***, are you that desperate man?,' they wrote. The comment seemed to have struck a cord with the beautiful blonde, who screenshot the grim words and wrote a reply to their author. 'You nasty (crying face). What happened to humanity,' Ms Tysoe wrote. Across nasty messages left in the comment section on her page, the model responded to cruel followers encouraging them to be kinder One cruel follower wrote 'die', followed by a harsh insult willing her to get cancer. Supringsly, she responded saying, 'so much love' In a separate message sent to the glamorous bombshell's inbox, a follower instructed her to die. 'Die. S**t. B***h get cancer,' they wrote. The Central Coast business graduate responded by writing across the message in an oddly kind manner. 'This is why I never check my filtered inbox (three smiley faces). So much love,' she wrote. Ms Tysoe met Mehajer at a New Year's Eve party in Vaucluse, where he gave her a fake last name so she wouldn't know immediately who he was. The mean comment seemed to have struck a cord with the beautiful blonde, who screenshot the grim words and wrote a reply to their author, telling them they were 'nasty' Ms Tysoe met Mehajer at a New Year's Eve party in Vaucluse, where he gave her a fake last name so she wouldn't know immediately who he was Ms Tysoe has become a regular feature on Mehajer's Instagram, with him uploading selfies of the pair frequently onward from January 6 In April, the blonde shared the first photo of them together to her profile with the caption, 'Never judge a person on what you hear - but rather, how they make you feel.' Ms Tysoe has become a regular feature on Mehajer's Instagram, with him uploading selfies of the pair frequently onward from January 6. Mehajer made headlines for his 2015 marriage to Ms Learmonth in what was dubbed the 'wedding of the century' and shut down an entire street. He is currently behind bars for allegedly staging a car crash in 2017 to avoid court. Mehajer made headlines for his 2015 marriage to Ms Learmonth in what was dubbed the 'wedding of the century' and shut down an entire street Advertisement These images show the very first black soldiers that signed up to the Union Army during the American Civil War. The brave men that stepped forward, did this despite the Confederate army promising death if they were captured - and even prejudices from their own side, such as unequal pay. The enlistment of black troops, most commanded by white officers, was made possible by Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made on New Year's Day, 1863. The Bureau of Colored Troops opened in May that year to facilitate the recruitment of African-American soldiers, as well as Native Americans and Asian Americans. They became known as the United States Colored Troops (USCT) and approximately 175 regiments comprising of more than 180,000 free black men, of whom 7122 were officers, served during the last two years of the war. Men from the 4th United States Colored Infantry Regiment, a part of the United States Colored Troops. The regiment was raised in Maryland and saw action in Virginia and North Carolina, taking part in the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, the capture of Fort Fisher and Wilmington, North Carolina Sergeant Henry F. Steward (left) of 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and took part in the Battle of Fort Wagner in 1863. He died two months after the battle in from wounds. Pictured right are soldiers of the United States Colored Troops firing their weapons from a farmhouse during fighting at Dutch Gap, Virginia, 1864 An unknown regiment of the United States Colored Troops. The enlistment of African American troops was made possible by Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made on New Year's Day, 1863. They were mostly commanded by white officers though some were commissioned Abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He encouraged his sons to sign up the U.S. Army's first ever black regiment as he viewed it as an opportunity for blacks to establish themselves as whites. As a result of his exhortations, black volunteers began to come forward in large numbers The very first unit was the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, and contained the sons of some of America's most famous abolitionists - including two sons of Frederick Douglass, the most photographed American of the 19th century. Despite signing up to fight against the Southern rebellion and to end slavery, the troops had to suffer the injustice of unequal pay. The U.S. Army paid black soldiers $10 a week, whilst white soldiers got $3 more. To protest against this insult, the entire regiment refused to accept their wages, including the officers - who were all white men. The unit saw extensive service whilst serving in the Union Army, including a bloody battle at Fort Wagner where 600 of them went up against 1,700 Confederates. Troops from the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment posing with a 10" Rodman cannon at Fort Massachusetts. The 54th was the first African-American unit organized by the United States government and saw extensive service in the Civil War A group of the white officers who commanded the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment (left). Captain Cabot J. Russell of the regiment is pictured right one month before he died at Fort Wanger alongside black troops. He enlisted as private in the 44th Massachusetts Regiment before rising through the ranks and transferring to the 54th Josiah Thomas Walls (pictured) served as a United States Congressman from 1871 until 1876. Walls was born a slave near Winchester, Virginia. He was forced to join the Confederate Army and was captured by the Union Army in 1862 at Yorktown. He volunteered for the United States Colored Troops in 1863 and rose to the rank of corporal A depiction of the charge of the 54th Massachusetts at the battle of Fort Wagner. In all, about 1,515 Union soldiers were killed, captured, or wounded in the ultimately unsuccessful assault on the fort which protected Morris Island, south of Charleston Harbor, South Carolina Sgt. Samuel Smith of the 119th United States Colored Troops Regiment with his family, circa 1866. Samuel and his wife Mollie were born into slavery in Kentucky. They are photographed with their children Mollie and Maggie. Samuel was the slave of a lawyer named Elisha Smith who before died actually signed for Samuel to enlist in the 119th in March of 1865 The 26th Regiment, US Colored Troops, organised by the Union League Club of New York at Riker's Island, New York City, to fight in the U.S. Civil War. The unit saw action at battles at Johns Island, Honey Hill, and Tulifinny, South Carolina and was led by William Silliman, a captain noted for his heroism at Gettysburg A poster for the 24th Regiment United States Colored Troops. The unit was organized at Camp William Penn near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 1, 1865 under the command of Colonel Orlando Brown and was disbanded in October of that year Fighting for respect: The history of black soldiers in the US Army The United States Colored Troops (USCT) comprised approximately 175 regiments of more than 180,000 free black men, of whom 7122 were officers. President Abraham Lincoln official authorized use of African-Americans in combat in the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which also freed slaves in United States. But prior to that African-Americans had already begun serving. In July of 1862, Congress passed the Militia Act , allowing the use of the African-American population to help save the Union. A few weeks after President Lincoln signed the legislation, free men of color joined volunteer regiments in Illinois and New York and African-American Units and began to see action. In August 1862, the War Department decided to officially allow the Union Army to recruit African-American soldiers. It also said that any slave who fought would be declared free and this also meant freedom for their wives and children. Those who volunteered where a mixture of free blacks living in the North and former slaves. Advertisement Two hundred and eight one of the charging soldiers were killed, wounded or captured - including one Colonel Shaw who had valiantly fought with his troops by leading from the front, but was shot in the chest and killed. To show their contempt for the soldiers of the 54th, the Confederates dumped all of their bodies in a single unmarked trench and cabled Union leaders to say that "we have buried Shaw with his n*****s." For the remaining two years of the war, the regiment participated in a series of successful siege operations in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Advertisement Military history fans have a rare chance to buy a German World War II bunker put up by the Nazis in the British Isles. The bunker was built in Jersey while the Germans occupied the Channel Islands and is sited on an area of sand dunes which are up for sale for 200,000. Hitler fortified the Channel Islands as part of the 'Atlantic Wall' and more than 250 forts were constructed along with safety bunkers like this one. A bunker, pictured, that formed part of Hitler's Atlantic Wall defence on Jersey has gone up for sale alongside around three acres of sand dunes for 200,000 The bunker is a relic from the five years of Nazi occupation that Jersey endured, with buildings covered in Nazi propaganda during the time, such as the Gaumont Palace cinema, pictured The island hosted a Nazi garrison who would march through the streets in parades, pictured, while residents went about their daily lives There are two plots of sand dunes for sale, with the concrete bunker - a listed building - located on the northern site which measures around 11 vergees - the equivalent of three acres. The land has been owned by the same family since 1909 and is located on the channel island between Le Braye and El Tico beaches near La Ville des Quennevais. The land at St Ouen's Bay - a prime surfing location along the west coast of Jersey - is on the market with Maillard's Estates. Consultant Tommy A'Court, 67, said: 'A local surfer opened up the bunker three years ago to clear it out and found the inside was very dry. Two plots of sand dunes are on sale with Maillard's Estates who say the land is part of Jersey's prime surfing territory But the area, pictured, is subject to strict planning rules as it is part of the Coastal National Park where it is difficult to get permission for new developments 'It has a big main room which I assume is where the soldiers used to sleep. 'There is also an area where the gun turret was. There are some other small rooms around the bunker as well as an escape route. 'I have been involved with this company since 1971 and I have never dealt with anything like this before.' The area is restricted to strict planning rules as it is part of the Coastal National Park where there is a presumption against any form of new development. A policeman is pictured speaking with a Luftwaffe officer during the Nazi occupation. The Germans saw occupation of the Channel Islands as an important propaganda tool during the war Before they invaded, the Nazis bombarded Jersey's harbour before landing at its deserted airfield, not realising the island had been demilitarised on Churchill's orders Mr A'Court added: 'Not a lot can be done to restore the site, but how many people can say that they own a German bunker? 'It is just metres from the seawall so it is in a prime location. St Ouen's bay is a very popular location for surfing and is very beautiful. 'It has attracted a lot of interest already as there are two 'for sale' signs down on the site.' The Germans occupied Jersey for most of WWII from 1940 to 1945. Advertisement This is the moment a room of grieving reporters burst into cheers as their anti-Putin journalist colleague, who they thought was dead, appeared alive at a press conference today. Arkady Babchenko's stunned colleagues erupted into celebration and jumped around their Kiev newsroom after the 41-year-old sensationally walked out on stage alive and unharmed. Some of the bewildered journalists collapsed into tears while others sat in stunned silence as they watched the bombshell revelation unfold that his death had been staged to smoke out a Russian murder plot. Babchenko, who has previously said he feared a Russian assassination attempt, apologised to friends and family who had begun mourning for him at the press conference - including his own wife. Late on Wednesday night, dozens of journalists descended upon the central square in Kiev laughing, hugging and drinking sparkling wine as they celebrated Babchenko's 'resurrection'. On Tuesday, Kiev and national police had said Babchenko, a strong critic of the Kremlin, had been shot multiple times in the back at his apartment building and been found bleeding by his wife. They even issued a picture purportedly showing his bullet-riddled body. Kiev had been quick to blame Russia's 'totalitarian machine' for Babchenko's murder, which the Kremlin denied. Moscow has now said that Ukraine had used Babchenko as a propaganda tool. The two nations have been in an ongoing conflict since Vladimir Putin invaded the Crimean peninsula in 2014. Arkady Babchenko's stunned colleagues erupted into celebration and jumped around their Kiev newsroom after the 41-year-old walked out on stage alive and unharmed today Some of the bewildered journalists collapsed into tears while others sat in stunned silence as they watched the bombshell revelation unfold that his death had been staged to smoke out a Russian murder plot Not dead yet: Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who had been reported shot and killed in the Ukrainian capital Tuesday, turns up at news conference on Wednesday - alive and well At today's press conference Gritsak said the reason for SBU's elaborate plan to fake Babchenko's death had been to catch the Ukrainian man hired to kill him, and his Russian paymasters. Gritsak said investigators had identified a Ukrainian citizen who had been recruited and paid $40,000 by the Russian security service to organise the killing. The unnamed Ukrainian had in turn hired an acquaintance as the gunman, who they had also identified, and both men had been arrested. However, Gritsak did not reveal how the SBU had been able to trace the chain of events from the two unnamed Ukrainian men, back to the Russians, nor how they could prove that they were the ones responsible for paying them. The SBU later released a video purportedly showing them arresting a man in Kiev today, who they claim is a suspected Russian agent who they say ordered the hit on Babchenko. They did not identify the man and gave no extra detail. When Babchenko, who has six daughters, five of whom are adopted, was ushered into the room he said: 'Apologies to my wife, Olechka (Olga). 'I'm sorry, but there were no other options. The operation was being prepared for two months. 'They told me a month ago. As the result of the operation, a man is taken, he is in custody.' One Ukrainian minister compared the operation to a Sherlock Holmes plot, where the fictional detective had staged his own death. Emotional: Babchenko breaks down in tears during his press conference after admitting that his murder had been staged Fake news: This image began circulating after Babchenko's 'death' was made public Babchenko (centre) met with Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko (left) as a group of journalists from local and international media popped corks and took selfies in Kiev's city centre on Wednesday night Media watchdog slams the operation as a 'pathetic stunt' Reporters Without Borders condemned Wednesday the staging of a murder of an anti-Kremlin journalist in Ukraine as a 'pathetic stunt'. Christophe Deloire, the head of the Paris-based media watchdog, told AFP that while he was relieved that Arkady Babchenko was alive, 'it is pathetic and regrettable that the Ukrainian police have played with the truth, whatever their motive... for the stunt'. Deloire insisted the fake set-up 'would not help the cause of press freedom. All it takes is one case like this to cast doubt on all the other political assassinations,' he said, referring to the killings of a number of the Kremlin's critics in Ukraine in recent years. 'It is the state lying, even if it was brief,' he added. Advertisement 'It's an incredible story of a resurrection,' joked Russian journalist Pavel Kanygin who like several of his Russian colleagues had rushed to Kiev to cover the story. 'It's a miracle, but a miracle that turned out to be a staged drama'. 'We were preparing for the funeral, Many of us didn't sleep last night. We bought plane tickets for the first flight to Kiev,' said Kanygin, who works for the investigative Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. He was at the offices of the Ukrainian private television ATR, where Babchenko works, when the 'murdered' journalist made his surprise reappearance. 'Everybody just erupted, shouting 'hooray, he's alive,' it was an incredible moment,' he said. Igor Solovey, international editor for the Ukrainian LB.ua news website, was all smiles as he stood in the square with a cigarette in his mouth and a plastic glass of bubbly in his hand. 'I just turned on the TV and saw his magical appearance,' he said. 'It was a shock. I was standing, I had to sit down. I couldn't even speak!' Some in the news business wondered about the impact that Ukraine's ruse will have on the media, in particular in public confidence in their work. 'For 24 hours we were putting out fake news,' one editor said. 'Obviously some think this will damage confidence in the special services, the security services and the media,' said Kanygin. 'Our readers or viewers are of course going to ask questions when we cry wolf'. Babchenko himself was in a meeting with Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko as the group of journalists from local and international media popped corks and took selfies. Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko has said they will provide protection to Babchenko and his family. 'Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are becoming stronger every day in countering Russian aggression,' Poroshenko said on Twitter. 'It is unlikely that Moscow will calm down -- I've given an order to provide Arkady and his family with protection.' The SBU later released a video purportedly showing them arresting a man in Kiev today (pictured), who they claim is a suspected Russian agent who they say ordered the hit on Babchenko. They did not identify the man and gave no extra detail Gritsak said investigators had identified a Ukrainian citizen who had been recruited and paid $40,000 by the Russian security service to organize the killing. Pictured: Police arresting the alleged mastermind of a plot designed to kill Babchenko Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: 'The fact that Babchenko is alive is the best news,' but added that Ukraine was using the case for 'propaganda'. Russian senator Sergey Kalashnikov claimed Ukraine was guilty of 'continuous fake information on all issues'. Babchenko, a former soldier in the Chechen war who became one of Russia's best-known war correspondents, had left his homeland fearing for his life after criticising Russian policy in Ukraine and Syria. His apparent death had been reported in Ukraine yesterday, with Kiev police saying he had been shot dead after returning to his home after going food shopping. Ukrainian police spokesman Yaroslav Trakalo had said Babchenko was found bleeding by his wife after she heard shooting, adding that he died in an ambulance on his way to hospital. Images circulated of Babchenko lying on his front with holes in the back of his shirt, and a pool of blood underneath him. 'The first and the most probable [reason for his murder] is his professional activity,' Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko had said at a televised press briefing earlier today. Ukrainian authorities even released a drawing of the man they suspect is Babchenko's assassin, around 40-45 years old, with a grey beard and wearing a cap. Murdered: Russian journalist and Putin critic Arkady Babchenko, 41, pictured with his wife and one of his daughters, had not even told his wife, right, of his 'fake death' Large family: Babchenko and his wife have six daughters, some of whom are adopted I'm sorry: Babchenko, pictured with some of his children, apologised to friends and family who had begun mourning for him - including his own wife 'I am convinced that the Russian totalitarian machine did not forgive him his honesty and principled stance,' Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said late Tuesday. 'A true friend of Ukraine who was telling the world the truth about Russian aggression. His murderers should be punished.' This afternoon, Ukrainian interior minister, Anton Gerashchenko admitted that he had been among a 'limited circle of people' who knew that the 'murder' had been staged. Writing on Facebook he said: 'Arkady Babchenko is alive. 'As a result of a brilliant special operation conducted by Ukrainian law enforcers, the killer who was ordered to murder Arkady and the organiser of the murder were detained. 'In order to document the customers and organisers of the crime - the representatives of the Russian special services, they had to be assured that the hired killer had successfully completed the order. 'The fact that the murder of Arkady Babchenko was staged was known to a very limited circle of people. 'This was done in the interests of preventing the slightest possibility of information leakage.' In on it: Babchenko revealed that he had been in on the murder plot for a month He continued: 'To do this, law enforcement officers had to stage a large-scale information security operation. 'This entailed publishing pictures of the allegedly murdered Arkady Babchenko, and distributing the identikit of the alleged killer with a Caucasian appearance. 'To create a picture of full reality, statements about the death of Arkady were made by officials of our National Police. 'Law enforcers clearly understood that the news of the murder of Arkady Babchenko would be a pain for thousands of hearts around the world. But they had no other choice. 'In order to trace and document the chain from the killer to the organisers and customers it was necessary to create in them full confidence that the order was executed and force them to take a number of actions that will be documented by the investigation. 'After all, even Sherlock Holmes successfully used the method of staging his own death for the effective investigation of complex and intricate crimes. No matter how painful it was for his relatives and friends. 'A unique special operation to prevent the murder of Arkady Babchenko is an example of effective cooperation between the Security Service and the National Police in the prevention of terrorist acts and political murders. 'Unique is also the fact that there was no leakage of information about this special operation either before the staging of the murder of Arkady Babchenko or after.' HOW THE OPERATION WORKED: REPORTER REVEALS HOW HE FAKED HIS OWN DEATH Speaking at the press conference today, Babchenko revealed that the operation had been planned for two months, and that he had been told about the plan a month ago. He said: 'During this month, I saw how the guys worked, how they dug into he case, how they worked like bulls. 'All this month we were in touch. We had been thinking, we had been working it all out, and the result was this special operation. 'And the man was detained. He is already in custody, the crime has been proven and all the evidence is clear.' In on it: Babchenko is seen smiling after appearing at the press conference to reveal that the Ukrainian Secret Service had faked his death Babchenko said: 'They [Ukrainian Secret Service] came to me a month ago, they said that there is an order for you to be killed they money had been transferred: $40,000 USD. 'They showed my passport details, my documents, my photo, but it was a passport which was issued when I was 25, so it was clear that the information came from the Russian Federation. 'It was clear that the information could only have come from Russian governmental services, and could only have been obtained by the special services. 'I was invited to take part in this special operation. I agreed and for a month we were preparing this special operation.' Babchenko also claimed that Russia had put a 'great deal of pressure' on the hired killers, and had bizarrely demanded they carry out the hit before the Champions League final. 'They pressed, very much, they [the Ukrainian hitmen] were given three weeks to complete the order. 'Then they started to hurry and rush them, apparently fitting to the Champions League final.' He explained: 'I had to delay it in different ways, think of some tricks: I 'broke' my leg, then I had to go somewhere, everything was supposed . I did my job, I'm still alive, they will not get me.' Vasyl Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Secret Service, said: 'We documented that a Ukrainian citizen was recruited to implement this plan. 'His surname begins with the letter G. The Russian special services also set up another task for citizen G. 'It is an illegal purchase of weapons and ammunition from the funds of Russian special services with a view to laying stashes weapons and ammunition in the central part of Ukraine.' Advertisement 'This suggests that we have learned to fight on the invisible front of confrontation with Russian special services. 'I thank all honest and daring staff of the Security Service, the National Police and the Prosecutor's Office for your contribution to the protection of the National Security of Ukraine and for saving the lives of Arkady Babchenko, Igor Bogdanov, me and other targets of Russian saboteurs. 'I wish Arkady Babchenko health and long life.' After being blamed for Babchenko's death, Russian authorities had furiously denied the blame, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying earlier today that it was 'very sad' Moscow had been accused of murdering the reporter. 'The Ukrainian prime minister is already talking about how it was done by Russian secret services,' he said. 'This fashion of conducting international affairs is very sad,' Lavrov told reporters, and investigators in Moscow opened their own probe. 'The Investigative Committee is not going to turn a blind eye to the cruel crimes against Russian citizens,' it said in a statement. On Monday, Babchenko had tweeted about a perceived threat from former Kremlin insider Marina Yudenich, who had called for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov - a close Putin ally - to 'invite him for tea'. Babchenko believed this referred to the murder of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, who was poisoned with radioactive polonium in his tea. Putin's 'chain dog': Former Kremlin insider Marina Yudenich, who had called for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov - a close Putin ally - to 'invite Babchenko for tea' Threat: Babchenko interpreted Yudenich's post about a 'tea party' as a public suggestion to Kadyrov to have him killed Chechen regional leader Ramzan Kadyrov has been accused of being behind murders of Kremlin critics by Russian opposition figures Kadyrov is also suspected by Russian opposition figures of being behind a number of killings of Kremlin critics. In a tweet on Monday he referred to the threat, stating: 'When the president's representative openly posts an offer to have you killed.' The threat was made by Yudenich in a social media post, which read: 'So Ramzan is making tea for journalists. I am just wondering, should he not organise a tea party for another representative of the journalism community? 'He stays in Ukraine now, too, and claims to fight on Kiev's side. He is being fed there but I think tea at Ramzan's will be a lot more useful.' Yudenich's post was published in 2014, and it is possible that Babchenko suddenly raised her comment this week, as part of the plot to fake his death. Porn star Stormy Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti has withdrawn from his effort to be granted the ability to appear in federal court in New York for her case, after the judge overseeing the case rapped him for his non-stop 'publicity tour.' His decision came hours after a contentious court hearing, where Judge Kimba Wood suggested he wouldn't be able to keep up his wall-to-wall TV appearances should a criminal case against Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen lead to charges or trial. 'I say publicity tour not in a derogatory sense,' the judge told him. 'You're entitled to publicity. I can't stop you, unless you're participating in a matter before me.' Cohen's lawyer, Stephen Ryan, opposed Avenatti's effort to be able to represent his client in court. The L.A.-based attorney is a member of the California bar. Attorney Michael Avenatti arrives at the United States District Court Southern District of New York on May 30, 2018 in New York City. Ryan said Avenatti had done 170 TV appearances, and accused Avenatti of leaking derogatory financial information about Cohen that gets maintained by law enforcement and banks. Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani took the opportunity to take a shot at Avenatti, who has regularly blasted his own credibility while trying to entice him to go mano-to-mano on television. 'Couldnt happen to a falser lawyer. What a phony,' Giuliani told reporters at the White House. 'Couldnt happen to a falser lawyer. What a phony,' said President Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani Michael Avenatti speaks to the press as he leaves the United States District Court Southern District of New York on May 30, 2018 in New York City Avenatti denied having chosen his role on TV over the courtroom Even if he is not taking the lead in court, Avenattai presumably he have a co-counsel admitted to practice in New York handle future proceedings. He downplayed the legal maneuver on an appearance on CNN Wednesday afternoon. 'The motion to intervene may never be heard, so I may never need to be admitted into her courtroom,' he said of Judge Wood. Avenatti denied having chosen his role on TV over the courtroom. 'Were not going to stop and were not going to change our approach, period,' he said. As soon as he left the courtroom, Avenatti brandished his knack for PR, demanding that Michael Cohen immediately release the 'Trump tapes' that he says will show the president 'conspiring' with his longtime personal attorney. Avenatti spoke outside a federal court in Manhattan after it was revealed inside the courtroom that Cohen kept audio recordings that he said are being kept under 'lock and key.' Avenatti immediately branded them the '#TrumpTapes' just minutes after being scolded by Judge Kimba Wood for engaging in 'public relations' that could impact a future jury pool. 'Just like the Nixon tapes years ago we now have what I will refer to as the Trump Tapes,' Avenatti told reporters outside the courthouse. He said Cohen's lawyer, Stephen Ryan, 'admitted that there are audio recordings that Michael Cohen was taking for years and that those recordings are to quote him not only to they exist but they are under lock and key, and some of them relate to my client and her attorney-client privilege communications,' Avenatti continued. 'Mr. Cohen and his attorney Mr. Ryan should release all of those audio recordings to the American people and the Congress so that they can be heard by all and people can make their own determinations as to their importance relating to the president and what he knew and when he knew it and what he did as to conspiring with Michael Cohen to commit one or more potential crimes.' He appeared to be referring to conversations between Cohen and Keith Davidson, Daniels' former lawyer. He has been involved in negotiations over other 'hush' agreements, and brokered her non-disclosure deal with Cohen and Donald Trump, although Trump never signed it. It resulted in a $130,000 payment from Cohen to Daniels. Trump wrote on a federal form that he 'reimbursed' Cohen for up to $250,000. Avenatti pushed back at the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday by releasing a 2016 email between a Journal reporter and Davidson, and claiming the WSJ 'sat on' the the original Stormy Daniels story in the final days of the election. According to the Journal, Avenatti has yet to act on requests that Daniels waive attorney client privilege to allow Davidson to discuss his communications. Michael Cohen's lawyers have gone through about a third of the 3.7 million files obtained in an FBI raid on President Trump's longtime lawyer. The lawyers for Cohen, who is under criminal investigation for potential tax, banking, and campaign finance violations, have made their way through 1.3 million of them, they said at a federal court appearance today. Also being reviewed are a 'not voluminous' amount of material located in a shredder. The lawyers are relying on a special master, judge Barbara Jordan, to comb through documents to identify those that might be covered by attorney-client privilege. Her first bill to the government came in Tuesday night, to the tune of $47,000, with the government and both sides splitting the cost. She is charging $700 per hour, which may well be a reduced rate for what she would normally command. That amount covered her first six days of work sorting through material. Longtime Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen arrives to court in New York, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Lawyers for President Trump and Cohen appear again before a judge in New York as part of an ongoing legal tussle about attorney client privilege and records seized from Cohen by the FBI Additionally, a 'not voluminous' amount has been found in a shredder. Plus, lawyers must sort through a pair of Blackberries that may belong to Cohen's Ukraine-born wife, according to what was shared in court. Federal Judge Kimba Wood, who overseeing the case, also chided porn star Stormy Daniels attorney Michael Avenatti for a 'publicity tour,' saying it would have to cease if Cohen faces a criminal trial, Courthouse News reported. To represent his client in the case, the California-licensed Attorney must gain the court's permission something Cohen's team is fighting, citing his stunning disclosure of Cohen's financial information. Avenatti disclosed millions in fees Cohen collected around Trump's inauguration and first year in office in an 'influence peddling' operation linked to his access to Trump. NO VICE: Avenatti is seeking the court's permission to represent his client pro hac vice, since he is a member of the California but not the New York bar Cohen's attorney, Stephen Ryan, blasted the disclosure of personal financial information as 'reckless and improper.' Daniels' attorney is expected to ask a federal judge on Wednesday to address claims that President Donald Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, leaked audio recordings seized from Cohen in raids of his home and office to news media outlets. The issue was among several slated to come up in a hearing that began before U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood in Manhattan, who is also expected to get an update on a review of materials federal agents seized in the April raids. Stormy Daniels Fan Meet And Greet at Chi Chi LaRue's on May 23, 2018 in West Hollywood, California. The porn star is suing Cohen to have a non-disclosure agreement tossed PUBLICITY TOUR: Judge Kimba Wood brought up Avenatti's 'publicity tour,' noting it could impact a potential jury pool A special master has gone through 1.3 million items found on three cell phones belonging to Cohen Cohen and Avenatti were among those in court on Wednesday morning. Cohen, who has not been charged with any crime, is under investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan regarding his business dealings. The investigation stems in part from a referral by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is probing whether Trump's 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia. Trump has repeatedly said there was no collusion, and Russia has denied interfering in the U.S. presidential elections. Cohen has worked for Trump for more than a decade, first as counsel at the Trump Organization and later as his personal lawyer. In 2016, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000. Daniels has said the payment was intended to buy her silence about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump in 2006. The president has denied the allegation. Avenatti said in a letter last week that he had reason to believe that Cohen had leaked audio recordings, which he said may relate to his client, to media outlets. Daniels' attorney asked that Wood ask Cohen about the possible leaks. Avenatti has also asked Wood to allow him to represent Daniels in the Cohen case. He has said he believes some of the seized materials could relate to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. Cohen has asked Wood to deny Avenatti permission to appear before the federal court, saying he violated court rules by making what he characterized as false statements about Cohen in frequent news media appearances. After the raids on Cohen's home and office, Cohen and Trump asked the judge to block prosecutors from reviewing the seized documents, citing attorney-client privilege. Wood responded by appointing former U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones as a so-called special master to review whether any of the documents were shielded by attorney-client privilege before turning them over to prosecutors. In a court filing on Tuesday evening, Jones said she had already turned over to prosecutors more than 290,000 seized items that were not marked privileged by Cohen or Trump. She said that more than a million items from three seized phones had also been designated as not privileged by Cohen and Trump, and would be turned over to prosecutors Wednesday after a final review. Those items, taken from three phones seized by the FBI, were deemed to be not 'privileged or highly personal' by the special master. Cohen and Trump have made at least 252 claims of privilege, according to the filing. A number of Cohen's financial dealings since Trump's January 2017 inauguration have become public. Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG has said it had paid Cohen nearly $1.2 million as a consultant; U.S. telecommunications company AT&T Inc said it made payments of $600,000; and South Korea's Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd said it hired him for $150,000. Cohen also received $500,000 from Columbus Nova Llc, a New York company linked to Russian businessman Viktor Vekselberg. The firm has said the transaction had nothing to do with Vekselberg. Mueller's investigation, which began in May 2017, has yielded 17 indictments and five guilty pleas so far. (Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis) Advertisement Donald Trump shared a photo of Kim Kardashian in the Oval Office after a 'great meeting' with her discussing prison reform and clemency for an imprisoned drug offender. The reality star spent an hour at the White House on Wednesday with the President and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and asked Trump to grant clemency to first-time drug offender and great-grandmother Alice Johnson who is serving life. Johnson was imprisoned for life in 1996 for drug dealing and money laundering after her 15 accomplices all testified against her and had their own charges dropped - despite Johnson's minor role in the cocaine ring. It was her first offence. Barack Obama denied Alice Johnson's appeal for clemency during his second term, despite granting more than a thousand requests from other non-violent drug offenders. After the meeting, Kardashian left the White House and headed for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's DC home. Exclusive photos taken by DailyMail.com show the reality star walking inside and laughing with the First Daughter and her husband. She later tweeted: 'I would like to thank President Trump for his time this afternoon. It is our hope that the President will grant clemency to Ms. Alice Marie Johnson who is serving a life sentence for a first-time, non-violent drug offense. Donald Trump shared a photo with Kim Kardashian during their meeting in the Oval Office. The reality star spent an hour at the White House on Wednesday with the President and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and asked Trump to grant clemency to first-time drug offender and great-grandmother Alice Johnson who is serving life 'We are optimistic about Ms. Johnson's future and hopeful that she and so many like herwill get a second chance at life.' After, the meeting President Trump tweeted the photo of Kim in the Oval Office with the comment: 'Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing.' Earlier, lawyer Brittany Barnett told DailyMail.com that Kardashian wanted ask President Trump to grant Alice Johnson clemency. 'Today's her birthday, so no greater gift than freedom on her birthday,' Barnett said of her 63-year-old client petitioning for a pardon. Kardashian had a confirmed meeting on prison reform with Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser. Barnett said it was her 'hope' that Kardashian would also have an opportunity to plead Johnson's case to the president. That hope came true. 'The message to the president is that Alice Johnson, the 21 years she has been in prison, represents a punishment that more than pays her debt to society and that to keep her prison the rest of her life is morally and economically unjustifiable,' Barnett stated. Before her visit to the White House, Kardashian said in a tweet Wednesday morning that confirmed reports that she was headed to the White House: 'Happy Birthday Alice Marie Johnson. Today is for you.' After the meeting, Kardashian left the White House and headed for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's DC home. A woman that appears to be Kim is seen standing alongside Jared Kushner (right) and Ivanka (center) Kim asked Trump to pardon Alice Johnson, pictured, a great-grandmother, who was imprisoned for life in 1996 for drug dealing and money laundering after her 15 accomplices all testified against her and had their own charges dropped WHO IS ALICE JOHNSON AND WHY IS KIM KARDASHIAN INVOLVED? Inside time: Alice Johnson in federal prison Alice Marie Johnson, a mother-of-five, grandmother-of-six and great-grandmother of one, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted of drug dealing in 1996. It was her first conviction and some of her co-conspirators testified her against in exchange for plea deals. The 63-year-old grew up in Olive Branch, Mississippi, and was married and pregnant by age 15. In 1989, she and her husband divorced. Her life started to crumble as she struggled, as a single mother, to try and be financially stable for her five children, reports Mic. However, in 1990, because of a gambling addition, she was sacked by FedEx Corporation. After filing for bankruptcy in 1991, Johnson lost her house. The next year, a scooter accident claimed the life of her youngest son, Cory. It was while she was at rock bottom that Johnson became involved in a drug syndicate that imported cocaine into Memphis, Tennessee, where she acted as a go-between and passed on messages to drug dealers, relaying coded messages like 'everything is straight' by telephone. While admitting to acting as a middle man for the drug traffickers, passing on the messages in code via telephone, Johnson claims she never directly sold drugs. She was arrested along with 15 others in 1993 on charges including conspiracy to possess cocaine, attempted possession of cocaine and money laundering. But ten of her alleged co-conspirators turned against her in exchange for reduced sentencing or dropped charges. During the trial, evidence showed an operation with Texas-based Colombian drug dealers and their Memphis connections trading tons of cocaine for millions of dollars in cash. At the time of Johnson's February 1997 sentencing the amount of drugs and money involved meant that federal laws mandated a life sentence, despite the fact Johnson was a first-time, nonviolent offender. US District Judge Julia Gibbons, who sentenced Johnson, called the then 42-year-old the 'quintessential entrepreneur' of the drug ring. Mom: Alice Johnson is now a great-grandmother as well 'And clearly the impact of 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms of cocaine in this community is very significant,' Gibbons said at the sentencing. The quantity of cocaine - up to three tons - would now be worth about $85 million. Johnson was 21 years into her life sentence at FCI Aliceville, in Aliceville, Alabama before it was commuted by President Donald Trump on May 6. Her eldest daughter Tretessa Johnson, told Mic several years ago, 'It's like a waking death; it's like the person is alive but they're not. There's never a point of closure, ever. It's heartbreaking for me.' Tretessa has organized an online petition, via change.org, calling for her to be released, explaining that her family's life 'changed forever' when she was sentenced to life in federal prison. She said her mother had explained that she became a telephone mule passing messages between her co-conspirators after losing her job at FedEx. Alice Johnson is quoted on Tretessa's petition: 'I couldn't find a job fast enough to take care of my family. I felt like a failure. 'I went to a complete panic and out of desperation I made one of the worst decisions in my life to make some quick money. I became involved in a drug conspiracy'. Tretessa said that her 'mom's desire upon release is to assist the community with the needs of ex-offenders to help reduce recidivism. 'It serves no purpose or benefit to society to have her locked up for life. Her large and loving immediate and extended family and friends would welcome her return.' During her time in prison, Johnson has displayed exemplary behavior, become an ordained minister, a published writer and a prison tutor, a biography from Can Do Clemency reports. She had gained a large following of people pushing for her to be granted clemency. Part of this push saw her story turned into a short video, which went viral on social media. Kim Kardashian saw the video and retweeted it to her millions of followers with the caption: 'This is so unfair' in October last year. Since then, she has been working to help Johnson receive clemency from Trump. The reality star had her personal lawyer begin working on Johnson's case, and has spent months in conversation with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and adviser, on the topic. Kushner - whose father Charles is himself a federal felon - is pushing a criminal justice reform agenda. A grateful Johnson penned a moving letter to Kardashian, saying her efforts were 'literally helping to save my life'. 'I was drowning, and you have thrown me a life jacket and given me hope,' she wrote. On May 30, Kardashian went to the White House to secure Johnson's release. Johnson was released on June 6 after having her sentence commuted. Advertisement Kim Kardashian spent an hour at the White House on Wednesday in a meeting with the president's son-in-law After the meeting at the White House, Kim went to Jared Kushner and Ivanka's home in DC Ivanka and Jared were also spotted walking into the property in a Gucci dress after the White House sports day Ivanka is seen smiling as she entertains Kim and guests in their home Kim was seen leaving the Kushner home just after 8pm on Wednesday. Ivanka appears to be sending her on her way behind the door She glanced at the cameras as she headed to her waiting car on her way home Kardashian was still in DC into the late evening in her business attire Earlier in the day, Kim pushed Donald Trump to give a first-time drug offender and great-grandmother serving a life sentence in prison a life-changing birthday present during a meeting at the White House today While Trump has a meeting with one Kim... his Secretary of State tries to salvage his summit with the other one As President Trump welcomed Kim Kardashian to the White House on Wednesday, diplomats on both sides of the Pacific were scurrying to rescue his planned summit with Kim Jong-Un. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met a senior Pyongyang official in New York on Wednesday in an effort to salvage the meeting between Trump and the North Korean leader. Kim Yong Chol met with Pompeo in Manhattan, where the two dined on 'steak, corn, and cheese,' the Secretary of State said, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was in Pyongyang. The historic meeting was scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, before Trump announced last week he was canceling the summit, blaming the 'anger and open hostility' of the North Korean regime. During visit Kim Yong Chol had dinner for about an hour-and-a-half with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who traveled from Washington to see him. The two have planned a 'day full of meetings' for Thursday, the White House said. Kim Yong Chol met with Pompeo in Manhattan, where the two dined on 'steak, corn, and cheese,' according to the secretary of state But on May 26 the president said his administration was having 'very productive talks with North Korea about reinstating the summit'. Kim arrived at JFK International Airport on Wednesday on an Air China flight from Beijing. It marks the most senior visit by a North Korean official to the United States since 2000, when Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok traveled to Washington to meet with then-President Bill Clinton in the Oval Office. As Kim and Pompeo were meeting in New York, other U.S. teams were meeting with North Korean officials in Singapore and in the heavily fortified Korean Demilitarized Zone. 'If it happens, we'll certainly be ready,' White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of the Singapore summit. Regarding the date for the meeting, she added, 'We're going to continue to shoot for June 12th.' North Korea's mission to the United Nations in New York is its sole diplomatic presence in the United States. South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who met Kim Jong Un last Saturday, said the North Korean leader is uncertain whether he can trust Trump's promise to provide a security guarantee if North Korea abandons its nuclear weapons. Pompeo, Trump's former CIA chief, has traveled to Pyongyang twice in recent weeks for meetings with Kim Jong Un, and has said there is a 'shared understanding' between the two sides about what they hope to achieve in talks. In Pyongyang Lavrov passed greetings from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Kim, saying he wished him success in the 'major undertakings that have been initiated on the Korean peninsula', Moscow said. Last month North Korea's foreign minister Ri Yong Ho held rare talks with Lavrov in Moscow as Pyongyang moves to improve strained ties with global powers. Advertisement Kardashian, 37, in both her meetings with Kushner and the president, discussed a pardon for Johnson, who will otherwise spend the rest of her life in prison for a first-time drug offense. Johnson's life sentence did not come with the opportunity for parole. Her conviction and incarceration caught the eye of Kardashian on Twitter earlier this year. Sixty-three-year-old Johnson grew up in Olive Branch, Mississippi, and was married and pregnant by age 15. In her mid 30s in the early 1990s, Johnson divorced her husband, lost her job at FedEx due to a gambling addiction and hit rock bottom when her youngest son, Cory, was killed in a scooter accident. Johnson became involved in a drug syndicate that imported cocaine into Memphis, Tennessee, where she acted as a go-between and relayed messages to drug dealers, The Memphis woman acted as a middle man for the drug traffickers, passing on the messages in code via telephone, but claims she never sold drugs. She was arrested along with 15 others in 1993 on charges including conspiracy to possess cocaine, attempted possession of cocaine and money laundering. But ten of her alleged co-conspirators turned against her in exchange for reduced sentencing or dropped charges. At the time of Johnson's February 1997 sentencing, federal laws mandated a life sentence, despite the fact Johnson was a first-time, nonviolent offender. US District Judge Julia Gibbons, who sentenced Johnson, called the then 42-year-old the 'quintessential entrepreneur' of the drug ring. 'And clearly the impact of 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms of cocaine in this community is very significant,' Gibbons said at the sentencing. Johnson is now 21 years into her life sentence at FCI Aliceville, in Aliceville, Alabama. During her time in prison, Johnson has displayed exemplary behavior, become an ordained minister, a published writer and a prison tutor, a biography from Can Do Clemency reports. She has gained a large following of people pushing for her to be granted clemency. Part of this push saw her story turned into a short video, which went viral on social media. Kim Kardashian saw the video and retweeted it to her millions of followers with the caption: 'This is so unfair' in October last year. Since then, she has been working to help Johnson receive clemency from President Donald Trump. In late November, Johnson penned a moving letter to Kardashian, saying her efforts were 'literally helping to save my life'. 'I was drowning, and you have thrown me a life jacket and given me hope,' she wrote. The White House earlier in the day confirmed that Kardashian was expected. 'She is expected to be here at the White House. I can confirm she'll be here,' press secretary Sarah Sanders told DailyMail.com during a news conference. 'We'll keep you posted on any meetings that take place, what those look like.' Kardashian, 37, was expected to sit down with Kushner and then meet with the president to discuss a pardon for Johnson, who will otherwise spend the rest of her life in prison for a first-time drug offense. Kardashian, who appeared on Trump's NBC show 'The Apprentice' in 2010, said she voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Trump, in an infamous interview with shock jock Howard Stern in 2015, said Kardashian was 'fat.' 'Does she have a fat ass? Absolutely. And if it weren't Kim, they'd say, 'wow, I don't want to go out with her,'' he told Stern. Barnett, who joined Johnson's legal team in November, said that Kardashian's 'support has been tremendous' in putting a spotlight on not only Johnson's case but all the other low-level offenders doing hard time. 'She was not only moved to tears, she was moved to action,' Barnett said of the celeb. Johnson's lawyer said the great-grandmother 'more than deserves the opportunity to reintegrate into society' after spending so many years behind bars. 'It is our profound, and hopefully realistic, hope that release is on the horizon.' Earlier on Wednesday Barnett said that Johnson's legal team does not 'have any expectations' that Trump will act today or at all. 'We do hope that the president will grant her clemency today, but we don't know that will happen,' she said. 'We're encouraged to see that people like Alice, and thousands of other people like Alice, are getting attention and hopefully release soon.' Kardashian said in a tweet on Wednesday that confirmed reports that she was headed to the White House: 'Happy Birthday Alice Marie Johnson. Today is for you' Kardashian has been campaigning for Johnson's release and has been involved in months of talks with the White House about a pardon. She reached out to first daughter Ivanka Trump and established a connection with Kushner, Vanity Fair reported, and will meet with both today in Washington. Neither her husband Kanye West, who is a Trump supporter, nor other members of the Kardashian family were at the meeting that spanned an hour from arrival to departure at the White House complex. Kardashian, who was wearing all black, arrived at and left in a black SUV. She did not make an attempt to engage with a pack of press staking her out. In the past she has said she would like to 'explain to [President Trump] that, just like everybody else, we can make choices in our lives that we're not proud of and that we don't think through all the way' as she campaigns for a pardon for Johnson and prison reform. Kushner has pulled from his father Charles' own year-long incarceration in 2005 - for tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering - in his prison reform agenda. He helped to engineer the First Step Act, created to offer job training and drug-treatment programs, as well as time off their sentences, as an incentive for inmates with good behavior. The House-passed bill that is before the U.S. Senate would allow non-violent offenders to spend the end of their sentences in halfway homes. Kushner at a White House event this month said, 'The single biggest thing we want to do is really define what the purpose of a prison is. Is the purpose to punish, is the purpose to warehouse, or is the purpose to rehabilitate?' The alternative reality: Donald Trump (centre) was mocked for nailing a meeting with Kim Kardashian on Wednesday, when he has spent many months trying to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un (left), whose face was superimposed onto the official picture in a series of memes on Thursday Black Mirror: Some suggested that the meeting was like an episode of Netflix series Black Mirror, in which dark and twisted alternative realities are explored in the future The senior White House adviser acknowledged that the legislation is indeed a first step, as the act's name suggests. 'If we can start showing that we can make the prisons more purposeful and more effective at lowering the recidivism rate over time, that may help the people who are trying to make the argument for sentencing reform,' Kushner said at the White House summit on prison reform. Trump's administration has a mixed record when it comes to reforms, however, after the president ran on a platform of 'law and order' as a candidate. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded an Obama-era memo that provided leniency for drug offenders in states that have passed rules legalizing marijuana as one of his first acts atop the Department of Justice. Trump himself has signed several politically-charged pardons for former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arapaio and other supporters. Just last week on Thursday the president posthumously pardoned Jack Johnson - the legendary black boxer who was convicted of violating the Mann Act in 1913 - at the request of actor and support Sylvester Stallone. The act made it illegal to transport women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution. It was often used, though, as a punishment for interracial relationships. However Johnson's daughterCatina said her family was at a loss as to why Obama did not pardon her mother, when he did so many others with similar circumstances. 'We don't know, we still don't know. All we know is that she was denied, that's it. I have yet to get an explanation for that,' Catina said. There are no parole hearings at a federal level, so pardoning is Alice Johnson's only hope. 'There is no opportunity other than Trump,' Catina said. The story about great-grandmother Johnson's conviction and incarceration caught the eye of Kardashian on Twitter last year. Ever since she has been campaigning for her release, and has been involved in months of talks with the White House. Catina said that the public interest in her case had given her mother a great deal of hope. OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- Four suspects from Georgia -- two adult males, two juvenile males -- have been arrested and charged with the theft of three vehicles from the parking lot of Planet Fitness in Ocean Springs. Ocean Springs Police Capt. Chuck Jackson said police were notified of the theft of the vehicles Tuesday. The vehicle owners told investigators that while they were exercising inside the building, the suspects gained access to the vehicle keys and stole the vehicles. Surveillance video confirmed that three males entered Planet Fitness and took the keys, entered the three vehicles and left. The suspects then used credit cards found in the vehicles to make purchases at a local store. The suspects were later located and taken into custody by the Pascagoula Police Department. The stolen vehicles were all recovered. Ultimately, four male suspects were arrested. The two adults were identified as 19-year-old Trebioun Juan Hunter of Douglasville, Ga., and 19-year-old Shyceal Masean Best of Powder Springs, Ga. Hunter and Best have each been charged with three counts of auto burglary, three counts of motor vehicle theft and two counts of credit card fraud. They remain in the Ocean Springs Municipal Jail awaiting an initial court appearance. The two juveniles -- ages 15 and 17 -- were also each charged with three counts of auto burglary, three counts of motor vehicle theft and two counts of credit card fraud. They were turned over to the custody of the Jackson County Youth Court. Jackson said the case remains under investigation and further charges may be coming from agencies in other states. A man who was once a hostel parent who oversaw wards of the State and was convicted of abusing eight children who were in his care up to forty years ago. Martin James Cooper, 66, helped his wife Nancy run the Warminda Hostel in East Victoria Park between 1978 and 1983 when the abuse occurred, Perth Now reported. He was found guilty of 30 historical child sex offences on Wednesday for the abuse of four girls and four boys, who were aged between 11 and 16, but was acquitted of abusing a friend of one of the girls under his care. Martin James Cooper, 66 who was once a hostel parent who oversaw wards of the State and was convicted of abusing eight children who were in his care up to forty years ago (stock image) Victims testified against Cooper and said the hostel had a culture of fear and intimidation, which included systematic acts of a violent and sexual nature. The witness testimony detailed Cooper's actions, from offering boys beers to indecently assault a girl in his car, after which he proceeded to rape the girl in front of the boys. Further testimony stated Cooper would violently lead another girl around by her hair before locking her in a cupboard which was known as the 'lock up'. The female victim said she was violently raped inside the cupboard. Further testimony stated that Cooper would violently lead another girl around by her hair before locking her in a cupboard which was known as the 'lock up' where she was violently raped Judge Mark Herron described any decision of bail as 'highly unusual' because it was 'inevitable' that Cooper would be sentenced to jail time and remanded him in custody until his sentencing Cooper would also abuse the children verbally with one victim saying he would call her 'ugly' and that she 'looked like a pig', the court heard. Cooper's lawyer David McKenzie originally requested his client be released on bail until sentencing, due to early onset dementia and a string of health issues. The court denied the request. Judge Mark Herron described any decision of bail as 'highly unusual' because it was 'inevitable' that Cooper would be sentenced to jail time and remanded him in custody until his sentencing. A number of mysterious booms in the middle of the night have been revealed to be caused by explosions. The communities of Bucks and Lehigh Counties in rural Pennsylvania have been rattled in the early hours of the morning. Authorities say more than 20 explosions are responsible for the disturbances that have been occurring frequently in the area since April 2. Federal and local authorities are investigating mysterious booms being reported. Susan Crompton, pictured, says she has been hearing them for several weeks Jerry Hertz, pictured , is also at a loss to explain the explosions The booms have been occurring in Upper Bucks and Lehigh Counties in the early hours Police also say they are still working with federal law enforcement to uncover the source of the explosions. So far, police say no one has reported any injuries in connection with the loud noises. 'I thought that somebody was making a tunnel or space junk fell out of the sky,' said Susan Crompton to CW3, who lives in Haycock Township. 'It's a rumble, it actually like rumbles the ground like an earthquake would happen but with a loud like boom.' 'It's like an explosion and, of course, it actually shakes your house,' she said. Police are on the lookout for information related to the cause of the explosions So far, authorities have been at a complete loss to understand what has been happening 'Poachers, gunfire, to explosions to a sonic boom,' said Jerry Hertz. 'I've been in the military, I've got experience with explosives, I was a Navy diver and it was definitely not a gunshot,' Hertz continued. Police have so far struggled to explain the origin of the noises and are asking for the public's help. 'We are attempting to prevent someone from accidentally getting injured by these explosions, including the individual responsible,' said Trooper Jordan Houcj, 'These events disrupt emergency response personnel from their normal course of duty, straining local resources and impeding emergency personnel from respondiong to other calls for service. 'Please remain vigilant. Regardless of how insignificant you think your tip may be, we strongly encourage you to come forward with your information.' President Donald Trump used a posh Manhattan fundraiser to brag about the military's performance in Syria, it was revealed on Wednesday. Trump, who wants to hold a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue through the heart of Washington DC, touted the might of the American military before rich New Yorkers last week. But the battle of which Trump spoke remains classified and the White House has avoided official comment on it. The president, who often speaks off-the-cuff and unscripted, said he was amazed by the performance of American F-18 pilots, according to a report in Politico. President Donald Trump used a posh Manhattan fundraiser to brag about a classified military's strike in Syria. President Trump said he was amazed by the performance of F-18 fighters in Syria and they may have taken out 100 to 300 Russians. In his remarks, Trump said the strikes may have been as brief as 10 minutes and taken out 100 to 300 Russians, Politico reported, citing a person who was briefed on the presidents remarks. Trump was apparently referring to a February 7 battle against pro-Syrian government forces that included Russian mercenaries. The New York Times reported 200 to 300 attackers were killed in the four-hour battle while none of the 40 Americans at the base being attacked were harmed. But the presence of the Russian mercenaries has threatened to inflame the already boiling tensions between the U.S. and Russia. U.S. and Russian forces have not fought each other since the cold war. Trump, who likes to brag, has been criticized in the past for his ease in sharing classified information. In May, the Washington Post reported he shared highly classified information with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador during a White House. Administration officials had to contain the damage done at the time, the Post noted. President Trump was apparently referring to a February 7 battle against pro-Syrian government forces that included Russian mercenaries. The Manhattan fundraiser, which took place last Wednesday at the Lotte New York Palace Hotel, was attended by about 100 of rich supporters, who paid a minimum of $50,000 a head to attend. Protestors gathered outside during the event, which was expected to raise $5 million for the the Trump 2020 re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee. Also during the event, Trump touted his decision to move the U.S. Embassy building to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, which earned him a standing ovation from the crowd, Politico reported. A 10-year-old boy was left staring down the barrel of a gun inside his Texas home after a 26-year-old man allegedly broke in while he was inside with his sister. 'I see this guy pointing a gun at me, and I started begging him not to shoot me,' Erik Francisco told ABC 3340. Erik and his nine-year-old sister Onayda were ushered inside the bathroom at gunpoint after the man broke into their home through a window. At the time, their father was at work and their mother was out buying medicine for Erik's injured leg. Both children were frightened by their situation, but a last minute risky decision by Erik may have saved both their lives. Erik Francisco, 10, and his sister Onayda, nine, were held up at gunpoint by a home invader while their parents were out of the house. Quick thinking by Erik helped keep the children alive Constantly getting in trouble for playing on his phone, Erik said he became an 'expert' at hiding it. As the children were headed to the bathroom, they passed his phone - which he was able to slyly grab without attracting attention. His cover was almost blown by his sister, who found Erik's phone use frustrating, but she caught on just in time. 'I was about to yell, "Erik why are you about to play on your phone? We're in this big situation, you should not be playing. You should call the police or something",' Onayda told ABC. Erik made four phone calls to 911, but between the youngster's broken English and his fear of being caught, dispatchers struggled to understand him. Tarrant Police Chief Dennis Reno told WBRC they were able to find a woman nearby who spoke Spanish and could help the petrified children. 'As luck would have it, there was a lady outside our dispatch office that spoke Spanish that was here,' he said. The children hid in the bathtub as officers raced to the Tarrant home and got into position. Erik managed to slyly grab his phone as the thief ushered the pair into the bathroom so he could rob the house. From there, he called 911 Police surrounded the house and were able to save the two youngsters as the 26-year-old suspected gunman hid under the house Noticing police, the robber, who had cased the home and smashed the children's piggy banks - full of money they had planned to give to their local church - hid in a crawlspace underneath the home. After two hours and multiple tear gas canisters, a K-9 officer was able to get the man out, where he was arrested and taken to hospital. Chief Reno praised Erik for his incredible efforts and quick thinking in getting help. 'This guy breaks in their house. Breaks down their door. Goes into the house. Holds them at gunpoint' he said. 'For him to be calm enough to grab that cell phone, take it into the bathroom, was quite astonishing.' A spokeswoman for Tarrant Police told DailyMail.com they were still waiting on official warrants to charge the man, and could not release his name until then. Pharmaceutical firm which produces Ambien has hit back at Roseanne Barr's claims that the drug was to blame for her racist tweet. ABC announced yesterday it was cancelling the top-rated sitcom, Roseanne, after its star tweeted that former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, who is African American, looked like the 'Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby'. Amid the furious backlash, Roseanne attempted to walk her comments back, blaming the sedative drug for her offensive Twitter rant. Pharmaceutical firm which produces Ambien has hit back at Roseanne Barr's claims that the drug was to blame for her racist tweet Roseanne Barr tweeted that former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, who is African American, looked like the 'Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby' In an apology to Jarrett, she tweeted: 'i don't know if u saw it, but I wanted2 apologize to u 4 hurting and upsetting u with an insensitive & tasteless tweet. I am truly sorry-my whole life has been about fighting racism. I made a terrible mistake wh caused hundreds of ppl 2 lose their jobs. so sorry!' Today, Sanofi, the drug makers of Ambien made it clear what they thought of the actress' excuse. 'People of all races, religions and nationalities work at Sanofi every day to improve the lives of people around the world,' the company said in a statement. Many were appalled by Barr's tweet, which was in response to an article from a conspiracy website The shamed star also blamed her racist rant on sleeping pill Ambien. Users have previously reported going into blackouts and performing complex actions such as driving and making food without recalling it 'While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.' And it's not just the pharmaceutical firm that has mocked Roseanne for the flimsy excuse. Hundreds of Twitter users have trolled Roseanne over the suggestion Ambien made her write the racist tweet, joking the drug must have been responsible for the behavior of some of the worst villains from history. Scandal producer Shonda Rhimes tweeted: Omg. I used to take Ambien! How many times was I racist in my sleep?! GIRL BYE. #ownyouractions.' Could Ambien really make someone post racist tweets without noticing? Ambien is the brand name for sedative zolpidem and is typically prescribed for insomnia sufferers. The drug is one of the most commonly prescribed in America, outselling painkillers such as Percocet and maximum strength ibuprofen. But users of the drug have long reported terrifying side-effects including what are known as 'Ambien blackouts'. In 2006 congressman Patrick Kennedy cashed his car on Capitol Hill around 2.45am and gave officers the bizarre excuse that he was rushing for a vote when questioned. It later emerged that Kennedy was a heavy user of Ambien and didn't remember getting into his car, the crash or speaking with the cops. Other users have reported sleepwalking, making and eating food, making phone calls and even having sex without recalling it. In fact, Ambien even carries a warning on the label which reads: 'After taking AMBIEN, you may get up out of bed while not being fully awake and do an activity that you do not know you are doing. 'The next morning, you may not remember that you did anything during the night.' Advertisement Ellen show producer Andy Lassner added: 'Can you imagine how much Ambien Hitler must have been taking?' Even Dictionary.com got involved, choosing this moment to remind readers that the name Ambien is thought 'to come from the word 'ambient' or similar words in French. Ambient does not mean 'prone to making racist comments,' but it does mean 'of the surrounding area or environment.'' Someone also managed to change the Wikipedia page on Ambien to include a line on side effects, that the drug could cause racism and cancellation of sitcoms. The most common side effects of taking Ambien are drowsiness and dizziness, according to its website. However, there have been cases of users experiencing 'Ambien blackouts' - when they have reported sleepwalking, making and eating food, making phone calls and even having sex without recalling it. In 2006 congressman Patrick Kennedy cashed his car on Capitol Hill around 2.45am and gave officers the bizarre excuse that he was rushing for a vote when questioned. It later emerged that Kennedy was a heavy user of Ambien and didn't remember getting into his car, the crash or speaking with the cops. Roseanne, 65, later tweeted that her use of Ambien was 'an explanation' and 'not an excuse.' Roseanne also attempted to claim the original tweet was a 'joke', that Muslims were 'not a race' and that she had not realized Jarrett was black as she desperately tried to do damage control. Disturbing surveillance footage from China has captured how dog thieves poisoned and stealing pooches on a street. The video, filmed in eastern China, shows two suspects shooting what's believed to be toxic darts into three dogs during the wee hours. After leaving the dogs to struggle for two minutes or so, the suspects, wearing helmets and masks, came back to pick up the motionless animals, according to the clip trending on Chinese social media. Two suspected dog thieves are caught on camera shooting deadly darts to pooches in China The men, wearing motorbike helmets, apparently poisoned the dogs before leaving the scene According to the video on Sina Weibo, the incident took place in the city of Yancheng, Jiangsu Province, on Sunday. The use of poison in stealing or killing pet dogs is a common practice in China, but few suspects are arrested and punished partially due to the lack of animal protection laws in the country. Shocking conducts captured on CCTV footage as such often spark controversy among the Chinese public, many of whom keep pet dogs. Earlier this month, a pet owner from Yangzhou, eastern China, was convicted of manslaughter after knocking over a suspected dog thief while chasing the motorcycle-riding man in his van. The suspected dog thief died in the hospital as a result of the incident. The pet owner, 42, was given a three-year suspended sentence. The case led to a heated debate in China as to how the pet owner's behaviour should be categorised and judged. About two minutes later, the pair returned to the scene as they collected the dying animals The incident took place on a street in Yancheng on May 27, according to reports from China Every year, thousands of pet dogs are poisoned and stolen in China, and as many as 20 million dogs are killed annually to satisfy the dog meat industry. During a separate dog-stealing case in eastern China's Hangzhou city last year, police found out that dog meat gang sold dead dogs to restaurants at the prices of 50 to 60 yuan (5.6-6.8) each. Also in late last year, Chinese police bust a gang based in central China that sold nearly 200,000 poisonous syringes to dog thieves across the nation through social media network. Wendy Higgins from Humane Society International UK said the practice is 'too common' in China as she called for more attention to it. She said: 'It's a cruelty that very often sees people's beloved pets targeted, and the animals involved can suffer enormously. 'HSI's Chinese partner groups routinely find dogs and cats on meat trucks headed to slaughter who are clearly suffering toxic poisoning or who have died from poisoning before reaching their destination.' The stolen pet dog's meat often ends up on the dinner table and their skin is used to make fashion accessories. The New York 'taxi king' who partnered with Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen turned down a plea deal with considerable jail time only to get a considerably sweeter no-jail offer after authorities raided Cohen's home and office. Evgeny A. Freidman, a Russian immigrant known as 'the Taxi King,' avoided jail time and got five years probation when he pleaded guilty to tax evasion last week. As a condition, he reportedly must cooperate with prosecutors, who may find him to be a valuable witness as they investigate Cohen on potential tax, campaign finance, and bank fraud charges. Cohen has previously blamed his tax problems on 'Taxi King' Evgeny Freidman, (pic on June 3, 2009) whose associates control the lawyer's 17 companies But back in April, he turned down a different offer that would have him spending a minimum of two years in prison, CNN reported. That deal would have involved between two and six years in jail, and paying a $1 million fine as he faced charges of failing to pay $5 million in taxes for his taxi business, according to court transcripts. Freidman turned down the offer, and the state attorney general said it was withdrawn. But days later, on April 9, the FBI raided Cohen's home, office, and hotel where he was staying. They scooped up 3.7 million digital documents, according to what was said in court Wednesday. By May, Freidman was in a position to accept a deal that was considerably better. If Freidman is able to provide useful information, it might strengthen prosecutors hands if they decide to charge Cohen. Cohen, who was known as a 'fixer' for Donald Trump, worked on projects for Trump ranging from Trump Tower Moscow that never got off the ground to a non-disclosure agreement with porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims she had an affair with Trump. Enlisting Cohen's cooperation could aid in the effort to investigate Trump, as the Russia probe advances in its second year. Freidman's deal, which includes a stipulation that he cooperate with authorities, was reported by theNew York Times. He could have been facing 100 years in prison if convicted. Instead, he got five years probation and pleaded guilty to evading $50,000 in taxes but must assist prosecutors. U.S. President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen leaves federal court in Manhattan, New York, U.S., May 30, 2018 Freidman was disbarred and charged with neglecting to pay $5 million in taxes owed. He faced four counts of fraud which each could have brought 25 year jail sentences if convicted. Officials said the taxes are from 50-cent Metropolitan Transportation Authority surcharges between 2012 and 2015. After the plea deal, Cohen tweeted: 'I am one of thousands of medallion owners who entrust management companies to operate my medallions according to the rules of the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission. Gene Freidman and I are not partners and have never been partners in this business or any other. #MediaWrongAgain' 'The 'Taxi King' built his empire by stealing from New Yorkers - pocketing money that should instead have been invested in our transportation system,' said State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman after he was charged. Freidman was arrested in June and charged with taking part in that alleged crime. He owned hundreds of the New York City-issued medallions - another term for permits - that allow yellow cabs to operate. The offense he pleaded guilty to was a far smaller crime a single count of evading only $50,000 worth of taxes. The judge overseeing the case said Freidman would face five years of probation if he fulfills the terms of his agreement. The plea to a lesser charge is a possible indication the authorities valued whatever information he may have. The move puts additional pressure on Cohen, who some Trump advisors have predicted will himself give in to pressure and cooperate with investigators in the southern district of New York. Evgeny Freidman is Michael Cohen's (pictured) partner in the taxi business Special Counsel Robert Mueller referred his case there before the FBI conducted raids on Cohen's home and office. Cohen owes New York nearly $54,000 in unpaid cab medallion taxes, amid claims the FBI seized records relating to his taxi empire during raids on his office and hotel room. Evgeny Freidman is Michael Cohen's (pictured) partner in the taxi business Cohen and his Ukraine-born wife, Laura, 48, own at least 32 yellow cab permits and are required to hand over 50 cents to the state for each journey, with the money funding public transport. But this has not happened for many of medallions - another name for permits - that Cohen owns, leading to an unpaid bill of $53,836, according to New York State's Department of Taxation and Finance. The deal would require him to cooperate with state and federal prosecutors. Prosecutors are already combing through Cohen's financial records, including big payments he got from major firms as he touted his access to President Trump after the elections. Also under the microscope is his $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, who signed a nondisclosure agreement and claims she had an affair with Trump. The president revealed last week on his financial disclosure that he 'reimbursed' Cohen for expenses related to a payment of up to $250,000. Cohen is under investigation for possible bank fraud. He has said he took out a home equity loan in order to make the payment to Daniels, which he executed through a Delaware LLC he set up in October of 2016, weeks before the presidential election. Cohen is known as a 'fixer' for Trump, and assisted him on an array of deals, including a plan to build a Trump Tower Moscow that never got off the ground but that Cohen discussed with Russian officials even during Trump's run for office. He's also regularly threatened lawsuits against those who pose a challenge to Trump and has worked with tabloids to kill unfavorable stories about Trump. President Trump bristled following the targeting of his longtime lawyer and campaign confidant. The president called the April federal raid on Cohen's office 'an attack on our country and what we all stand for.' He said agents 'broke into' Cohen's Manhattan office, although the FBI acted under legally authorized search warrants. 'This is the most biased group of people. These people have the biggest conflicts of interest I've ever seen. Democrats all, just about all,' Trump said, although Mueller himself is a Republican. Trump later praised Cohen during an interview on 'Fox & Friends.' He said Cohen - whom he called a 'good guy' - was being investigated over his own business dealings. 'Let me just tell you that Michael is in business,' he said. 'He's really a businessman at fairly big businesses, I understand. And I don't know his business but this doesn't have to do with me. Michael is a businessman. He's got a business. He also practices law. 'I would say probably the big thing is his business and they're looking at something having to do with his business. I have nothing to do with his business. I can tell you he's a good guy.' 'Today, the 'Taxi King' admitted that he built his empire by stealing from New Yorkers,' said New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood. 'Freidman pocketed money that should have provided much-needed investment in our transit system and he'll now have to pay back every cent. Our office will continue to hold accountable those who cheat the system.' According to the AG and the acting taxi commissioner, Freidman and his business partner stiffed taxpayers out of the 50 cent 'MTA tax' assessed on each ride. 'During this four-year period, these taxicabs provided millions of rides to millions of New York City passengers. The vast majority of those rides were subject to a 50-cent New York State Tax known as the 'MTA Tax,' which was automatically collected from passengers as part of their fare,' according to the joint statement. 'Instead of remitting that tax to the DTF as required by law, Freidman and [Taxiclub Management CFO Andreea] Dumitru allegedly orchestrated a scheme to withhold that money by improperly filing returns, failing to file returns, failing to remit the tax on filed returns and by filing falsified returns which underreported the true number of taxable rides. Through this scheme, Freidman and Dumitru allegedly withheld nearly $5 million in taxes from the State of New York that had been collected from passengers.' Young women are being 'groomed' by crime bosses to smuggle drugs into music festivals, according to police. They are chosen for their clean criminal records and are convinced to hide drugs with the promise of quick money. Drug and firearms squad commander Detective Superintendent Peter McErlain told the Daily Telegraph the women involved should be prepared to face the consequences for their actions. 'But at the end of the day, if they are caught, they will be discarded by them like pieces of rubbish,' he said. Scroll down for video Young women are being 'groomed' by crime bosses to smuggle drugs into music festivals, according to police They are chosen for their clean criminal records and are convinced to hide drugs with the promise of quick money (Pictured: Trisha Nguyen, left, and a friend) Trisha Nguyen, 19, appeared in Burwood Local Court on Thursday, charged with supplying an indictable quantity of drugs and drug possession Nine women were arrested and accused of smuggling MDMA hidden inside condoms into the Midnight Mafia Music Festival at Homebush in Sydney's west in May. Trisha Nguyen, 19, appeared in Burwood Local Court charged with supplying an indictable quantity of drugs and drug possession. Police will allege the women were mules paid by drug dealers, with some having hundreds of capsules concealed inside them. Speaking in general, Detective Chief Inspector Gus Viera said drug dealers sought out young women to do their dirty work. 'They meet through friends, they think it's a quick profit being paid on the night and that will be the end of it, well it won't. We're asking their friends and family to question them before they go out,' he said. Grace Poo, a 21-year-old marketing and social media officer allegedly had 294 grams of MDMA within 1,600 capsules at Midnight Mafia, police claim in bail documents. Nine women were arrested and accused of smuggling MDMA hidden inside condoms into the Midnight Mafia Music Festival at Homebush in Sydney's west in May Police arrested Nguyen (left) at the Midnight Mafia Music Festival at Homebush, in Sydney's west, as she was making her way into the venue Helen Tran, 21, is also accused of concealing drugs internally and trying to enter the festival. Yen Nhi Tina Pham, 18, allegedly had 28.53 grams of MDMA inside 181 capsules when she was stopped by police at the festival. Outside court, Nguyen, who hid her face behind her friend's woollen scarf, did not comment on the charges. She must report to police every Monday as part of her bail conditions. The matter was adjourned until next month. Police said Nguyen had '200 MDMA capsules wrapped in condoms and hidden in her person' A shed builder has allegedly been using his business and family members to operate a large-scale drug syndicate to supply illicit substances to prisoners. Corey David Edwards Magee faced Tweed Heads Local Court, on the Gold Coast, Wednesday on charges including supplying large commercial quantities of illegal drugs, Gold Coast Bulletin reported. He was also charged for ten counts of illegal drug supply, knowingly directing activities of a criminal group, and having an outstanding warrant. Corey Magee (pictured) allegedly sorted deals using encrypted emails and used his family to transport drugs The 26-year-old allegedly sorted deals using encrypted emails and had members of his family transport drugs on his behalf. Magee opted not to enter a plea or apply for bail, nor did his father, Mark Stanley Magee, 53, who was arrested on Tuesday charged with supply of illegal drugs, participate in a criminal group, possess illegal drug and possess or use a prohibited weapon without permission. Police will allege the younger of the duo sourced cocaine from gangs in New South Wales and reportedly used his shed business as a front for the illegal operation. It will be alleged his network included supplying inmates at South Coast Correctional Centre at Nowra. The 26-year-old (pictured) allegedly sorted deals using encrypted emails and used his shed building business as a front for his drug syndicate Magee appeared in court by videolink and thanked the magistrate for adjourning his case to August 7. His father's matter was adjourned to June 18. A police raid was conducted on his Bilinga beachfront apartment, properties in Lismore, and Byron Bay on Tuesday as part of NSW Strike Force Trevalsa. A third man, Jesse Vilkelis-Curas, 22, who appeared in court charged with two supply large commercial quantities of drugs, supply illegal drug and participate in criminal group, was also arrested on Tuesday. Magee (pictured) appeared in court by videolink and thanked magistrate for adjourning his case to August 7 In the raids, police claimed they found 7kg of MDMA, cocaine and cannabis. They swarmed the young business owner's properties a month after allegedly intercepting a deal between him and a police witness in Sydney on April 13. It will be alleged the witness paid $210,000 at a Bunnings store for 1kg of cocaine. On a separate occasion the witness allegedly arranged to meet Magee in Kingscliff, south of Tweed Heads, to buy a kilo of MDMA for $46,000. Police swarmed the young business owner's (pictured) properties a month after allegedly intercepting a deal between him and a police witness in Sydney on April 13 He was arrested later in Chinderah, about 1.30pm. The police witness allegedly met Magee in Byron Bay four months ago and had been secretly recording their conversations. Magee allegedly revealed to the insider he had access to large quantities of drugs - they then reportedly kept in contact via encrypted emails on Blackberrys and Samsungs. The pair allegedly met once more at the Chinderah Tavern before the sting unfolded. A federal minister has been forced to apologise to a mayor after allegedly swearing and physically intimidating her. Grandmother Fay Miller, 71, who is also the mayor of Katherine in the Northern Territory, accused Environment Minister Greg Hunt of telling her to 'f**king get over' herself, the Herald Sun reported. Ms Miller and Mr Hunt met in Canberra last December to discuss a health package, which concerned her town regarding a chemical contamination from nearby RAAF Base Tindal. Fay Miller (pictured) , 71, the mayor of Katherine in the Northern Territory, said Environment Minister Greg Hunt told her had to 'f**king get over' herself Environment Minister Greg Hunt (pictured) was forced to apologise to Ms Miller after allegedly swearing and physically intimidating her She told Herald Sun she had written twice to Mr Hunt and once to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull asking for an explanation and apology, but said she was not contacted for six months. Ms Miller said being shocked by Mr Hunt's alleged outburst would be an understatement, as she would never tolerate to be treated with arrogance by anyone like that. Ms Miller said Mr Hunt apologised to her on Wednesday, after he was sent detailed questions from the Herald Sun. She described the apology as 'sincere and genuine.' A spokesman for Mr Hunt told the Herald Sun, that the minister apologised directly to the mayor but denied behaving aggressively. UPDATED Many states plans for educating English-language learners under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act fall short of equity and send clear signals on how they value the educational progress of the students, an analysis by Achieve and UnidosUS finds. A pair of policy briefs prepared by the organizations reveal that more than half of states ESSA plans intentionally set lower academic goals for English-learners, at least seven states have plans that flout key provisions of the federal education law, and nearly 20 percent of state plans allow schools to earn high ratings even if English-learners are struggling. A coalition of civil rights groups have already accused U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos of approving plans that violate the law and dont account for the needs of vulnerable student groups such as English-learners. Now, with DeVos proposal to scrap the federal office of English-language acquisition, the content of state ESSA plans could play an even more significant role in determining the quality of education for ELL students across the country. To that end, Achieve, a Washington-based group that helps states strengthen academic standards, and UnidosUS, the nations largest Latino civil rights organization, offered a series of recommendations that states can consider to shore up their ESSA plans. Equity for a historically underserved student group begins with states own expectations for their success, one of the policy briefs states. States goals for English-learners not only send a powerful signal to students, parents, and communities about how the state is prioritizing the success of ELs, but also provide a window into the states long-term strategy for how they aim to serve this group of students. Here are some key findings from the briefs, which examine how states set goals for English-learners and factor the importance of English-language proficiency in their ESSA plans : Seven statesArizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina, and Tennesseedo not provide native-language assessments or testing accommodations for their English-learners in any content area. Thats despite the fact that states must make every effort to develop statewide assessments in students first languages if they constitute a significant portion of the student population. Last fall, Education Week wrote about Florida and other states with English-only laws that dont offer tests in other languages. wrote about Florida and other states with English-only laws that dont offer tests in other languages. Twenty-nine states set lower academic goals for their English-learners than other student subgroups. In the analysis, Iowa tops the list of states setting drastically lower expectations for English-learners, followed by New Hampshire and Utah. Nineteen states expect students to become English-proficient in five years. Wisconsin provides English-learners up to eight years to reach proficiency. Most research on English-language acquisition indicates that it takes between four and seven years to learn the language . . The majority of states are using the WIDA Access for ELLs 2.0 as their measure for English-language proficiency, but those states have vastly different definitions of success on the assessment. Education Week explored how changes to the widely used English proficiency exam led to a downturn in student test scores last year and the challenges those declines presented for school districts and states. explored how changes to the widely used English proficiency exam led to a downturn in student test scores last year and the challenges those declines presented for school districts and states. States set widely varying weights for English-language proficiency in their ESSA plans. The analysis found that Georgias accountability system assigned the least value to progress toward English-language proficiency. That means the state could fail to support its English-learner population and still merit a high overall rating. So far, DeVos and her team have approved plans for 44 states and the District of Columbia, according to the latest tally from Education Weeks Politics K-12 team. Civil rights groups are keeping an eye on whether DeVos approves Floridas plan . Lawmakers in that state dont want to hold schools accountable for how well students perform on English-language-proficiency exams or provide some exams in students native language, two key provisions of ESSA that amounted to a political victory for the nations large English-learner and immigrant community. Heres a look at the briefs: Achieve UnidosUS ESSA EL Goals 1 Final by corey_c_mitchell on Scribd Achieve UnidosUS ESSA ELP Indicator 1 Final by corey_c_mitchell on Scribd Related Stories on ESSA and English-Language Learners Will Your States ESSA Plan Work for English-Language Learners? More Testing is Forecast for Nations ELL Students ESSA: Ed. Dept. Releases English-Language-Learner Guidance Image Credit: Achieve and UnidosUS A New Jersey couple have confessed to stealing more than $1.4million from Hurricane Sandy victims and gambling their cash away at Atlantic City casinos. Jeffrey Colmyer, 42, and Tiffany Cimino, 34, both pleaded guilty to theft charges on Tuesday. Colmyer has also pleaded guilty to money laundering and is expected to be sentenced to seven years in state prison. Jeffrey Colmyer, 42, and Tiffany Cimino, 34, pleaded guilty to stealing more than $1.4million from Hurricane Sandy victims and gambling their cash away at Atlantic City casinos The couple bought a $17,000 diamond ring with the money they took from victims in the fraud scheme, police revealed Cimino will receive probation, as per her plea deal, according to NJ.com. The couple used their home improvement companies, Rayne Construction Management Services and Colmyer & Sons, to steal from more than 20 victims. Victims had paid the companies for reconstruction, home elevations, or repairs, often using funds that came from government relief programs. None of the services were ever completed and some had never even been started. Colmyer gambled more than $700,000 in stolen funds at seven Atlantic City casinos, police said. The couple also bought a $17,000 diamond ring with the money they took from victims in the fraud scheme. The couple used their home improvement companies to steal from more than 20 victims who had paid for reconstruction, home elevations, or repairs New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said he wanted to send a 'strong' message with Colmyer's sentencing. 'Colmyer and Cimino heartlessly preyed on Sandy victims whose homes had been destroyed, stealing the relief funds that were the lifeline these victims needed to rebuild in aftermath of the historic storm,' he said in a statement. 'By sending Colmyer to prison, we deliver a strong deterrent message that anyone willing to sink so low as to steal disaster relief money from victims will face a stern reckoning.' The victims have since been given $776,000 in additional federal relief funds by the state Division of Community Affairs to hire new contractors. Colmyer gambled more than $700,000 in stolen funds at seven Atlantic City (pictured in file photo) casinos, police said Colmyer and Cimino must pay $1.45million in restitution as part of their plea deal. Colmyer also owes $56,472 in back taxes. Superstorm Sandy was the deadliest and most destructive hurricane in 2012, causing nearly $70billion in damage. It was the second-costliest record in the history of the US until 2017, affecting 24 states. At least 233 people were killed in eight different countries in the storm, including 71 people in the US. Two young boys present when their dad was shot dead by a Victorian chilli farmer have spoken of their pain since the death of their 'beloved' father. Angelo Russo, 55, last week pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of David Calandro, who was shot while sitting in his ute at Russo's Tatura farm on February 18, 2017. A statement by Mr Calandro's son, Flavian, who was 12 at time of his father's death, was read to the court by prosecutor Nicholas Papas. David Calandro (pictured) was allegedly shot dead at a Goulburn Valley farm in 2017. He had his two sons in the car with him at the time Angelo Russo, 55, (pictured) last week pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of David Calandro 'I know I have changed since the day he died... I struggle to get out of bed to go to school because the vision of my dad has haunted me and always will,' his statement read. 'My beloved dad was killed in front of me and my brother. 'It is too hard, I feel pain in my body. 'My dad was a fun-loving guy and he'd do anything to make me and my brother happy. 'I will forever miss my dad knowing he is gone from this earth.' The plea came days after Russo's murder trial began in the Supreme Court of Victoria, with Russo admitting to manslaughter after prosecutors agreed to withdraw the murder charge. Following Russo's guilty plea, the prosecution conceded it could not prove the farmer intended to shoot Mr Calandro. During a pre-sentence hearing on Wednesday, prosecutor Nicholas Papas QC said Russo claimed Mr Calandro deliberately swerved at his dog Harry to 'spook' it, but accidentally ran it over. Russo claims he was 'pissed off' and put down his injured dog by shooting it. He says he did not intentionally kill Mr Calandro when he approached him with the shotgun still in his hand. The farmer claims he slipped on an eggplant and the shotgun discharged accidentally. He said he didn't realise Mr Calandro was injured until he heard the 43-year-old screaming. Russo claims the gun accidentally went off after he tripped on an eggplant (pictured) Mr Calandro died in hospital the next day. In a police interview, Russo said: 'he's put me in a f***ing situation, the f***ing a***hole' and that Mr Calandro was a 'f***ing c***'. However, his defence barrister Patrick Tehan QC told the court on Wednesday that Russo expressed 'the deepest of sorrow' for his victim's sons and 'was tearful and beside himself about what happened'. Mr Tehan also said Mr Calandro and Russo had been friends - a claim that prompted several family members to storm from the court. Mr Calandro's other son Anton gave an emotional victim impact statement to the court, read by a family member. Prosecutors allege Russo deliberately Mr Calandro in the head with a gun (pictured) after his dog Harry was run over 'My life is different since my dad hasn't been here,' he said in his statement. 'My dad was a nice, caring, fun dad. 'I now have to do more things at home because he's not here. I have to care for mum.' The court was also told Russo's mother died while he was in custody over Mr Calandro's death, having burnt to death when her dress caught fire. The hearing continues on Thursday. Roseanne Barr made racist remarks against Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice back in 2013, resurfaced tweets reveal. Barr's ABC show was axed on Tuesday after she tweeted that another Obama aide, Valerie Jarrett, looked like 'Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby' However, it isn't the first time she has been accused of being racist on the social media platform, tweeting that Rice was 'a big man with swinging ape balls,' in 2013. Jarrett responded to Barr's Tuesday attack during MSNBC's Everyday Racism in America town hall on Tuesday night. The former Obama aide said she partly blames Trump for setting the tone. She said: 'The tone does start up at the top, and we like to look up to our President and feel as though he reflects the values of our country.' TV sitcom star Roseanne Barr who compared a former Obama aide to an ape, made similar remarks, again over Twitter about his national security adviser Susan Rice (right) in 2013 Not the first time... This tweet from 2013 shows Barr attacking Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice, calling her 'man with big ape swinging balls' Jarrett also said Disney CEO Bob Iger called her personally to apologize and gave her advanced notice that Barr's eponymous show was being cancelled before it was announced publicly. 'First of all, I think we have to turn it into a teaching moment. I'm fine. I'm worried about all the people out there who don't have a circle of friends and followers coming to their defense,' Jarrett said during the town hall. 'The person walking down the street minding their own business and they see someone clinging to their purse or walk across the street... or every black parent I know who has a boy who has to sit down and have a conversation, the talk as we call it,' she continued. 'Those ordinary examples of racism that happen every single day.' However, Roseanne has been making controversial, race-fuelled comments on Twitter long before Trump's election. This year, she has become increasingly outspoken as her eponymous show has gobbled up ratings. In March, she wrongly accused David Hogg, the Parkland school shooting survivor, of performing a Nazi salute at a gun control march. She also pushed the right-wing Pizzagate conspiracy On Tuesday, the comedian also claimed that Chelsea Clinton was married to the nephew of George Soros, a rumor that was propagated by actor Scott Baio in 2016. 'Chelsea Soros Clinton,' Barr tweeted. The theory was quickly and swiftly dismantled. Clinton is married to Marc Mezvinsky. Meanwhile, George Soros has two sons named Peter and Jeffrey Soros. During MSNBC's town hall last night, Jarrett said she partly blames Trump for racist dialogue like Barr's But Chelsea Clinton herself was quick to respond to Barr, writing: 'Good morning Roseanne - my given middle name is Victoria. I imagine George Soros's nephews are lovely people. I'm just not married to one.' Barr first apologized to Clinton directly, tweeting: 'Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you! Please forgive me!' 'By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that?' In a separate tweet, Barr wrote: 'I'm sorry-Chelsea Clinton IS NOT married to a nephew of George Soros-i apologize for the mistake!' A spokesman for Soros has since vehemently denied Barr's claims, calling the comments 'insulting' and an 'affront to his family'. '[Mr Soros] did not collaborate with Nazis,' the statement read. 'He did not help round up people. He did not confiscate anybody's property.' 'Such allegations are insulting to the victims of the Holocaust, to all Jewish people, and to anyone who honors the truth.' Soros was 13 when he and his family, who are Jewish, survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Hungary by purchasing documents who claimed they were Christian. Walt Disney President Ben Sherwood said in an interview in March that 'you can't control Roseanne Barr'. 'Many who have tried have failed. She's the one and only,' he added. (Disney owns ABC) The Jarrett tweet that caught fire, and burned down Barr's reboot shot of Rosanne when ABC pulled the plug on the upcoming season Barr tweeted apologies Tuesday, but nothing could save her, or her show once ABC determined too much damage had been done Just one tweet? After a day of retweeting Twitter users defending her, she finally threw in the towel saying she regrets 'one tweet' more than losing her show After the backlash to her Jarrett tweets began on Tuesday, Barr began apologizing. 'I'm sorry 4 my tweet,' but also wrote, 'I'm tired of being attacked & belittled more than other comedians who have said worse.' By the end of Tuesday night, her show was cancelled, her original sitcom was pulled from streaming sites, three of her agents quit and her former cast members turned on her. Tuesday night, after re-tweeting posts from fans who came to her defense, Barr wrote: 'guys i did something unforgivable so do not defend me. It was 2 in the morning and i was ambien tweeting-it was memorial day too-i went 2 far & do not want it defended.' Two former child brides have told their harrowing stories following the death of their abuser husband, the notorious pedophile televangelist Tony Alamo, a year after his death. Amy Eddy, 34, and Pebbles Rodriguez, 32, were both forced to marry Alamo when they were teenagers. The pair endured decades of abuse before he was arrested in 2008. Pebbles joined the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries in Fouke, Arkansas, with her single mother in 1995. Her mother was struggling in New York City and learned about the ministries from a booklet. Eddy was born into it; her parents joined it before she was born and at aged 14, she married Alamo and was raped. 'He told me,"This is between me, you and God,"' she recalled to People magazine this week. Pebbles Rodriguez (left) and Amy Eddy (right) were forced to marry Tony Alamo when they were teenagers in the 1990s. Rodriguez is now 32 and Eddy is 34. They remain friends Tony Alamo is pictured in 2009 at a court appearance. Alamo died in prison last year aged 82 By the time Rodriguez arrived, Eddy was married to him. She too became subjected to his abuse after dreaming about walking down the aisle to him. She confided in Eddy about her dream at the time and Eddy told Alamo about it. They believed it was God speaking to her. The pair told how Alamo controlled them by beating them for slight mistakes like running late to breakfast or listening to music which he did not approve of. 'He got off on you screaming and crying,' Eddy explained. With no one else to confide in but one another, they used a secret code to communicate with each other. 'It was our way of supporting each other,' Eddy added. Alamo began as a televangelist with his wife Susan. Together, they built the Tony Alamo Monasteries. When Susan died in 1982, Alamo started marrying young girls who were part of the cult The teenagers lived with their families on Alamo's compound in Fouke, Arkansas. One was born there and the other was taken by her mother when she joined it Pebbles (left) was taken to live on the cult as a teenager with her mother whereas Eddy (right) was born into it Pebbles was held until the end and only fled once the cult leader was captured. Eddy got out years earlier with the help of her father. Despite his incarceration, the group still stands and Eddy's mother remains a member. 'She won't talk to me. She thinks I am going to hell,' she said of her. The two women have since started different lifes. Rodriguez lives in Phoenix with her two sons and while Eddy lives in Oklahome with her two children. They did not indicate whether the boys were born before they left Alamo's commune or not. The church (shown above following his arrest in 2008) is still running and some of the brides' mothers are still members Alamo is pictured in his 2008 mugshot Alamo died in prison aged 82 last year. He had been convicted of bringing minors across state lines for the purposes of having sex with them. He started mongering support for his religious group in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the time, he was married to his wife Susan Alamo and the pair charmed impressionable people in Hollywood. They set up the ministry together in Arkansas but when Susan died in 1982, Alamo started marrying children. Eddy and Rodriguez are just two of multiple teenagers who he forced into marriage and raped when they were underage. The women's interviews will be shown in full at 9pm on June 4 in People Magazine Investigates: Cults on Investigation Discovery Harvey Weinstein has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on two counts of rape in the first and third degree and a single count of criminal sexual act in the first degree. This came after his lawyer Ben Brafman released a statement stating that his client wold not be testifying in front of the jury and complaining that he had been 'unfairly denied access to critical information about this case that was needed to defend him before the Grand Jury.' Brafman cited the fact that he and Weinstein did not know who the accusers were in this case as part of the issue, saying they only learned who the charges were linked to on Friday after Weinstein's arrest. This despite the fact that both women shared their stories with The New Yorker. Harvey Weinstein's (pictured turning himself into police on Friday) legal team says they will not have their client testify before a grand jury in his sexual assault trial Weinstein shown in court proceedings in New York, where he will not testify before a grand jury. Weinstein's lawyers decided there wasn't enough time to prepare him Brafman told reporters on Tuesday after a court meeting that the woman who alleges she was raped by Weinstein multiple times during a 2013 incident in a midtown hotel was having a decade-long affair with the producer. 'This is an extraordinary case in my judgement where the only rape victim that Mr. Weinstein is accused of raping is someone with whom he has had a 10-year consensual sexual relationship - both before and after the alleged incident,' stated Brafman. He also called the woman's allegations 'absurd.' Brafman also said he had concerns about his client being able to get a fair trial. 'The ability for people to keep an open mind is of concern to me,' remarked Brafman. 'Demanding an indictment or prosecution is inappropriate pressure. It is unprecedented. It troubles me and I want to make those matters known to the court.' He then noted: 'I'm not certain that there's any remedy but I wanted to make clear I was unhappy with those issues.' Weinstein was not in court on Tuesday either and is remaining in the New York area after surrendering his passport Friday. He also handed over a cashier's check to cover the $1 million cash bond before leaving the court, with Weinstein heading off to be fitted for his electronic monitoring bracelet. Actress Lucia Evans (pictured) is thought to be one of at least two women who are involved in the grand jury case against Weinstein. She spoke out last week about her decision to formally file a complaint against him Shirtly after his release on Friday, Brafman spoke outside court and offered up an unexpected defense for his client. 'My job is not to defend behavior. My job is to defend something that is criminal behavior,' stated Brafman. 'Mr. Weinstein did not invent the casting couch in Hollywood. To the extent that theres bad behavior in that industry, that is not what this is about. Bad behavior is not on trial in this case.' The investigation into Weinstein's alleged assaults is ongoing, and a grand jury is still convened and hearing testimony in the case. One of the women accusing Weinstein, Lucia Evans, claimed that she was forced to perform oral sex on him at the then-Miramax offices in Tribeca. The second woman worked with Weinstein when she claims he forced himself on her at the DoubleTree Hilton in Manhattan. Evans confirmed the fact that she was one of the woman who helped bring charges against Weinstein in an interview with The New Yorker on Thursday, saying: 'At a certain point, you have to think about the greater good of humanity, of womankind.' President Donald Trump returned Wednesday to his years-long fixation on the size of his live audiences, erupting on Twitter at a newspaper that underestimated how many people came to hear him speak the night before. The New York Times reported that his campaign-style Tennessee rally was sparsely attended, drawing only about 1,000 people. The fire marshal's official head-count was 5,500, a number that the paper later used in correcting the story. The president has vented repeatedly at reporters who err on the side of caution when reporting his crowd sizes, saying they intentionally underestimate his broad appeal. 'The Failing and Corrupt @nytimes estimated the crowd last night at 1000 people, when in fact it was many times that number and the arena was rockin,' the president tweeted. President Donald Trump spoke to 5,500 people Tuesday night in Nashville, Tennessee a number barely half of the auditorium's capacity leading to the latest in a long series of squabbles over how large and loyal his base of support is 'This is the way they demean and disparage. They are very dishonest people who dont get me, and never did!' The Times reported that Trump 'worked his audience of about 1,000 into a frenzy' by restating his belief that members of the ultra-violent MS-13 drug gang are 'animals' rather than human beings. Trump has repeatedly branded the Times, whose readership and subscription numbers have reportedly soared during his time in office, as 'failing.' The Nashville Municipal Auditorium's capacity is 9,600 people when the floor area is made available for standing room as it was Tuesday night, meaning about 57 per cent of the space was taken. Trump blasted The New York Times for reporting that '1,000 people' attended; a spokesman for the Nashville Fire Marshal told DailyMail.com that the real number was about 5,500 As Trump spoke Tuesday night, large areas were blocked off behind the stage and some ofthe available upper-level seating bowl areas were left empty Joseph Pleasant, a public information officer with the Nashville Fire Department, told DailyMail.com on Wednesday: 'Our Fire Marshals Office counted around 5,500 people who attended the rally last night.' Video shot as the president entered suggests that while the upper reaches of the seating bowl included some empty sections, the floor of the arena was mostly full. Squabbling over he-said, she-said accounts of the depth of Trump's popular appeal is a longtime fascination for the 45th U.S. president. On his first day in office, Trump told newly minted press secretary Sean Spicer to berate journalists who had correctly reported that his in-person Inauguration Day crowd was far smaller than President Barack Obama's eight years earlier. Last December the president wrested an apology from a Washington Post scribe who had tweeted a half-empty arena photo and described it as a picture of the crowd listening to the president speak in Pensacola. It turned out the picture was shot an hour before he arrived. But pictures have deceived in the other direction as well, including one instance during a 2016 campaign rally in Arkansas. As Trump spoke Tuesday night, large areas were blocked off behind the stage and some ofthe available upper-level seating bowl areas were left empty After Trump declared from the podium that his audience had broken an attendance record set years earlier by ZZ Top, and sent out a man he claimed was the fire marshal to confirm it, DailyMail.com published photos showing ample empty space and a half-capacity crowd. The 'fire marshal' turned out to be a building facilities manager at the Arkansas State Fairgrounds in Little Rock, who accepted the Trump campaign's crowd-size claim without questioning it. After DailyMail.com asked a Times spokesperson whether its crowd-count number was a typographical error, the paper corrected its story. 'An earlier version of this article cited an incorrect figure for the number of people attending President Trumps rally,' the editor's notice read. 'While no exact figure is available, the fire marshals office estimated that approximately 5,500 people attended the rally, not about 1,000 people.' The daughter of Alice Johnson told DailyMail.com today that Kim Kardashian is a 'Godsend' for her mother as the reality star prepared to meet with President Trump and ask him to pardon the 63-year-old great grandmother's life sentence for a first-time drug offense. Catina Johnson, 45, said that she was aware that Kardashian would be heading to the White House today, where she will first meet with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner to discuss prison reform before asking the president to pardon Alice Johnson. She told DailyMail.com: 'Kim has given my mom so much hope. she's has been a Godsend. God sends people into your life and for him to lead her into our lives, my mom's life, has been a Godsend.' Alice Johnson's 45-year-old daughter Catina Johnson (left) told DailyMail.com that Kim Kardashian has given her mother 'so much hope' as she fights to have her life sentence pardoned. Johnson (right) is now 21 years into her mandatory life sentence for a nonviolent drug crime Alice Johnson has been fighting for clemency for years after being given a life sentence. She's pictured above center with family members, including daughters Catina (second from left) and Tretessa (right) Kardashian is heading to the White House today, where she will first meet with Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner to discuss prison reform before asking the president to pardon Alice Johnson Catina, who lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with her children and grandchildren, said that she had not heard from Kardashian personally nor had any contact with the Trump administration about her mother's case. Former President Barack Obama denied Alice Johnson's appeal for clemency during his second term, despite her exemplary conduct and achievements, and numerous letters of support. Catina said her family was at a loss as to why Obama did not pardon her mother, when he did so many others with similar circumstances. 'We don't know, we still don't know. All we know is that she was denied, that's it. I have yet to get an explanation for that,' Catina said. There are no parole hearings at a federal level, so pardoning is Alice Johnson's only hope. 'There is no opportunity other than Trump,' Catina said. The story about great-grandmother Johnson's conviction and incarceration caught the eye of Kardashian on Twitter last year. Ever since she has been campaigning for her release, and has been involved in months of talks with the White House. Catina said that the public interest in her case had given her mother a great deal of hope. Alice Marie Johnson, a mother-of-five, grandmother-of-six and great-grandmother of one, was convicted of conspiracy to possess cocaine, attempted possession of cocaine and money laundering in 1996 Johnson became involved in a drug syndicate that imported cocaine into Memphis, Tennessee, after a devastating few years where she was divorced, lost her youngest son in a scooter accident, and filed for bankruptcy Johnson is pictured above in her younger years. Left, she is pictured as a teen with her daughter Tretessa in her arms. Right she and her daughter are pictured years later During her time in prison, Johnson (second from right with fellow inmates) has displayed exemplary behavior, become an ordained minister, a published writer and a prison tutor, a biography from Can Do Clemency reports 'She is excited, she is hoping everything goes well. She is just praying,' Catina said. Alice Marie Johnson, a mother-of-five, grandmother-of-six and great-grandmother of one, was convicted of conspiracy to possess cocaine, attempted possession of cocaine and money laundering in 1996. She was a first time offender, and sentenced to life behind bars. The 63-year-old grew up in Olive Branch, Mississippi, and was married and pregnant by age 15. In her mid 30s in the early 1990s, Johnson divorced her husband, lost her job at FedEx due to a gambling addiction and hit rock bottom when her youngest son, Cory, was killed in a scooter accident. Johnson became involved in a drug syndicate that imported cocaine into Memphis, Tennessee, where she acted as a go-between and relayed messages to drug dealers, The Memphis woman acted as a middle man for the drug traffickers, passing on the messages in code via telephone, but claims she never sold drugs. She was arrested along with 15 others in 1993 on charges including conspiracy to possess cocaine, attempted possession of cocaine and money laundering. But ten of her alleged co-conspirators turned against her in exchange for reduced sentencing or dropped charges. Johnson's daughters Catina (left) and Tretessa (right) have long fought for their mother's conviction to be pardoned Catina, pictured left with Tretessa at a White House event, said that her family has suffered from Johnson's absence for the past two decades At the time of Johnson's February 1997 sentencing, federal laws mandated a life sentence, despite the fact Johnson was a first-time, nonviolent offender. US District Judge Julia Gibbons, who sentenced Johnson, called the then 42-year-old the 'quintessential entrepreneur' of the drug ring. 'And clearly the impact of 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms of cocaine in this community is very significant,' Gibbons said at the sentencing. Johnson is now 21 years into her life sentence at FCI Aliceville, in Aliceville, Alabama. During her time in prison, Johnson has displayed exemplary behavior, become an ordained minister, a published writer and a prison tutor, a biography from Can Do Clemency reports. Johnson is now hoping President Donald Trump will grant her freedom after being denied clemency by Obama. Johnson is among hundreds of cases that the ACLU has taken on and she has gained the support of congressmen and women, prison advocacy groups, the African American Mayors Association, and clergy in Tennessee, Texas, and Mississippi. Her daughter Catina said that her family has suffered from her absence for the past two decades. 'It's been hard because you have deaths, birthdays, births and everything and she's not there. She has missed all of those milestones. 'My grandparents passed away a few years ago. Her dad passed away first and then a few years later, her mother, my grandmother, passed. She wasn't allowed to come to their funerals.' Steve Woods (pictured) says he can help women struggling with menopause symptoms using their imagination Police have recruited a hypnotherapist to help female staff through the menopause while another force has set up crying rooms. West Midlands Police has brought in expert Steve Woods to work with ladies going through the change. The force has a regular support group for those experiencing related health problems at work. Mr Woods runs his company from Cannock, Staffordshire, and attended a menopause meeting at the Birmingham headquarters last week. He specialises in wellbeing at work and said menopausal women had already expressed their gratitude following the initial session. 'We are going to be doing it on a regular basis, and looking at creating products that may be useful to them, audio recordings and all sorts of things,' he said. 'At that initial meeting we got some really good feedback. It was a learning exercise on both sides - them and me - as being a man menopause is not something I know a massive amount about. 'I had a lot of learning to do as well, we did some work and they really got some benefits. Its an ongoing project. 'Hypnosis is very much experiential, because its all about experiencing things under hypnosis. Mr Woods is helping West Midlands Police officers cope with the change after another force claimed the menopause was a drain on talent 'In the case of menopause, the most common thing people think about is the night sweats and the lack of temperature control and that sort of thing. 'You can teach people self hypnosis so they can use their mind to go off to somewhere with a nice cool refreshing breeze and they feel the effects of that. 'One of the ladies emailed me back after saying shed had the best nights sleep in ages and another said shed felt better than she had in a long time just after that group session that we did. 'Almost any symptom, if you can imagine yourself without it, then you can use hypnosis to bring that about. Its a case of structuring a process that people can make use of without using lots of time. 'They arent going to self-hypnotise for an hour, but they can for two or three minutes and people can use that and benefit from it. 'I cant change the menopause but hopefully I can give them some tools to manage it better, even if its just better sleep.' Mr Woods says he has already received positive feedback from the women he has helped with their menopause symptoms It comes after West Midlands Chief Constable Dee Collins appeared on the Lorraine show last year to encourage other employers to adopt a sensitive approach. At the time she said: I think there should be a duty on employers to consider the impact of menopause in the workplace and I think its actually the right thing to do under the health and wellbeing approach - that people are more aware of what the issues are and what they can do to support women. 'What I want to do is spread the word beyond policing, into the public and private sectors, because anybody who is an employer needs to think about this as an issue.' Many complain of sweats, lack of concentration and memory issues. Several forces now run menopause education sessions for staff. Mr Woods helps women imagine they are in a cooler place when they experience hot flushes which he says can help them sleep Nottinghamshire Police have even opened up crying rooms for women going through the change who feel emotional. Former Chief Constable Sue Fish, who retired last year, discovered women were leaving the force after suffering menopausal symptoms. 'It was just a waste of talent,' she said at the time. 'Bringing in a policy was absolutely the right thing to do.' A spokeswoman for West Midlands Police said: 'Steve was invited to a meeting to talk about his services. 'There was no endorsement or costs involved in this, just an information session provided as part of our ongoing support to colleagues through the menopause support forum. 'Our intention is to provide information to enable people to make their own minds up, as part of a broader commitment to long-term health and well-being.' The average age for the menopause in the UK is 51. There are 35 associated symptoms. European business leaders today told Theresa May post Brexit trade with the EU must remain as 'frictionless' as it is now inside the customs union. The European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), told the PM she must give 'clarity and certainty' on Brexit. because 'time is running out'. The delegation of chief executives from some of the biggest corporation warned businesses need reassurance that goods will still be able to flow freely across the border. And they said that business investment in Britain could take a nosedive unless they are given more certainty. The meeting comes as Mrs May struggles to get her warring Cabinet and the EU signed up to her Brexit vision. The European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), which represents chief executives from some of the biggest corporations, held talks with the PM in Downing Street. BP's out-going Swedish chairman and chairman of Volvo Carl-Henric Svanberg (pictured outside No10 today) was among the delegation Business leaders including Senior Vice President IBM Europe Erich Clementi (pictured, left, in Downing Street today) and Britain's Royal Mail out-going CEO Moya Greene (pictured right) were part of the delegation who warned the PM that investment could be knocked unless more details about what Brexit concretely means materialise In a statement issued after this afternoon's talks with the PM, the ERT said: 'Today ERT met Prime Minister Theresa May to discuss the future partnership between the UK and the European Union. 'We appreciate the Prime Minister's openness to ERT views and ere able to express our own views and concerns. 'The uninterrupted flow of goods is essential to both the EU and UK economies. This must be frictionless as with a customs union. 'We need clarity and certainty, because time is running out. Uncertainty causes less investment.' Their warning comes as Mrs May's Cabinet remains locked in a bitter row over what future partnership to strike with the Brussels bloc. The PM has put two options on the tale. The first, a customs partnership, would see Britain collect tariffs on behalf of the EU. Under the second option known as maximum facilitation or 'max fac' Britain would cut all customs ties with the bloc and use technology and trusted trader status to enable free trade across the border. Mrs May is understood to have originally backed the first option but Brexiteers poured scorn over it with Boris Johnson publicly branding the plan 'crazy'. Ministers are believed to be heading towards backing the max fac option but with a a 'fall back' which would see the UK stay aligned to EU rules if the technology is not up and running in time. Summarising today's meeting, the PM's spokesman said: 'She spoke about the need to ensure our future economic partnership with the EU is ambitious and comprehensive, going beyond existing models, as she set out in her Mansion House speech. The meeting comes as Theresa May (pictured in Maidenhead on Sunday) struggles to get her warring Cabinet and the EU signed up to her Brexit vision 'EU Exit Secretary David Davis then provided an update on progress in the negotiations. 'On customs, the Prime Minister explained the work that was underway on the two customs models and underlined the importance of ensuring that our future trading arrangements with the EU are as frictionless as possible, delivering on the commitments to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and allowing the UK to pursue an independent trade policy. 'The PM recognised the necessity of providing certainty for businesses, pointing to the agreement of an implementation period at the European Council in March to provide time to allow businesses to prepare for the new arrangements.' They also discussed regulatory standards and agreed that 'reaching a robust agreement on data-sharing is vital to our future economic and security relationship with the EU'. But the PM suffered a fresh blow to her plans today after Brussels dismissed her proposal for the 'time limited' backstop. The EU believes the idea would only postpone negotiations on a final settlement to maintain the open Irish border, Politico revealed today. EU officials think the backstop should be a permanent solution if it is implemented. The latest impasse comes just weeks before the next European Council in June, which is meant to demonstrate progress on a border solution. Advertisement Amazing before and after aerial photos of daring Bomber Command missions including the legendary Dam Busters raid have emerged 75 years later. One dramatic image shows water gushing into the Ruhr valley after the Mohne Dam was breached by a 'bouncing bomb' following Operation Chastise on the night of May 16, 1943. Other photos capture the devastating aftermath of raids on German cities by dead-eyed British bombers with churches and factories turned to rubble. An archive of photographs from the legendary Dam Busters mission from May 1943 shows the impossible nature of the target including this reconnaissance photographs of the Mohne dam before its destruction by 617 squadron This second photograph hours after the mission shows the damage caused by Barnes Wallis's bouncing bombs The images include photographs of other RAF missions including this gun camera footage from a Spitfire filmed over northern France showing the moment a Messerschmitt Bf 109 was shot down They show the Steigletz area of Berlin decimated by aerial bombardment and the Krupp works in Essen left flattened after a direct hit from the Allies. The Bielefeld viaduct is destroyed by a 22,000lb Grand Slam bomb following a pinpoint strike, while a German ship is sunk off the Bay of Biscay. The dramatic moment is captured when a German Me109 bursts into flames following a dogfight with a Spitfire over northern France. In total, there are 40 photos in the album which belonged to photographer Noel Richards OBE, a long-serving employee at the War Office. As wartime head of the Photographic and Reproductions Branch of the Air Ministry, he also photographed the maps in the War Rooms and was granted unprecedented access to Churchill and his inner circle. The images were owned by photographer Noel Richards of the War Office and include this shot of bombed out Berlin Another image shows this German ship being strafed by allied aircraft in the Skagerrak between Denmark and Sweden This attack shows a German Sperrbrecher minesweeper ship being destroyed in an air attack. The Sperrbrechers were used to clear a path for more valuable ships and submarines. This vessel was sunk in the Bay of Biscay in January 1945 This image shows an aid package being dropped to the crew of a US B29 Superfortress which was forced to ditch in the North Sea following a mission over occupied Europe The photos have been consigned for sale by his son Peter, 73, with London-based Forum Auctions and are tipped to sell for 800. Richard Carroll, specialist at Forum Auctions, said: 'This photo album is a fascinating historical document and it is quite sobering to see the tragedy and devastation caused to cities in France and Germany by the war.' Operation Chastise was carried out by Royal Air Force No. 617 Squadron, later called the Dam Busters, under the command of Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC. The Mohne and Edersee Dams were breached, causing flooding of the Ruhr valley and of villages in the Eder valley, while the Sorpe Dam sustained minor damage. Two hydroelectric power stations were destroyed and several more damaged. The raid carried a heavy cost as eight out of the 19 aircraft were shot down and 53 out of the 133 aircrew were killed. Their heroic exploits were immortalised in the 1955 film The Dam Busters starring Michael Redgrave and Richard Todd. The auction takes place tomorrow (May 31). The Bielefeld viaduct, pictured, was attacked multiple times by the allies - including in 1945 by 617 squadron The Dam Busters eventually took out the bridge using the Barnes Wallis-designed Grand Slam bomb This is the moment the Grand Slam bomb landed near the viaduct, undermining its foundations in March 1945 The historical images are being sold by Noel Richards' son Peter, 73, and are tipped to sell for around 800 This image shows a burned out German fighter being over flown by four Spitfires in close formation This image taken from Eindhoven in Holland shows the start of the ill-fated Operation Market Garden mission This image taken in Eindhoven shows the gliders used in Operation Market Garden to attack Nijmegen and Arnhem being towed towards the combat zone and their eventually release By March 1945 the German town of Wesel, pictured, had been virtually obliterated with the shell of the cathedral still standing This reconnaissance photograph shows the Berlin suburb of Steglitz which was wiped out towards the end of the war Santa Fe High School students returned to school Tuesday, passing through throngs of community members and peers who had bused in from a neighboring Texas district to show their support for the survivors of the May 18 mass shooting that killed 10 people. Students who were in the area of the school most directly affected by the attackin which police say a student killed eight students and two educatorsentered first. They were followed a few hours later by the rest of the student body, the Associated Press reported. Returning to school after a crisis like a shooting can be a tricky thing, but mental health experts say giving students access to their normal school social networks can be an important part of the healing process. Survivors of past school shootings have said adults shouldnt rush to return students to normalcy, but the return of routine can be helpful. The 1999 graduating class at Columbine High School is known to some as the lost class because they never returned to the school between the April 20 shooting and graduation. And students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., say school hasnt been the same since the Feb. 14 shooting there, in which 17 people died. Even with added counseling and support services, students have said the return to normalcy has been difficult, leading the district to ask for an exemption from state testing. Santa Fe High School did not plan to hold regular classes Tuesday. Instead, the school held an assembly to remember the victims and offered counseling services to students. Counseling services are also available for parents and community members. Honestly, I just want to go back so I can see my friends and not spend my last three days of senior year just being secluded in a room and have that last memory (of senior year) being (the shooting), because that would honestly suck, senior Hailey Hubbard told the Associated Press. Hubbard said one of her friends had a panic attack at the thought of returning to school. Often, simply reconnecting students, teachers, and families with their natural support systems is the most powerful approach to handling a traumatic event, psychologists told Education Week after the Parkland shooting. For teenagers, that usually means being with other teenagers, which can help them realize that reactions, such as having flashbacks, nightmares, and trouble sleeping, are common and shared by friends, said Thomas Demaria, an adjunct professor in the clinical psychology doctorate program at Long Island University. But recovery from trauma can be very complicated and difficult as memories of missing classmates are intermingled with memories of a very intense experience, they warned, adding that communities and schools need long-term plans for the months and years after a shooting takes place. Santa Fe school board member Patrick Kelly told Education Week last week that his son, a senior, was in a classroom next door to where the shooting took place. Like many previous survivors of mass shootings, he takes comfort in being with people who were there that day and understand his experience, Kelly said. Hes just tired of people asking how hes doing, Kelly said. He wants to be with other kids who know how hes doing. They dont have to tell the same story again and again. Since the shooting, the community has heard from teachers and students who affected by previous school shootings at Virginia Tech University, Columbine High School and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Neighboring towns have also reached out, setting an example Kelly said the rest of the country could learn from. Students from Alvin, Texas, which is about 10 miles from Santa Fe, piled into buses early Tuesday morning so they could line the streets in front of Santa Fe High School, holding signs to welcome students back, local media outlets reported. They voluntarily came in from their summer breaks to do so. I think we dont see enough of the caring and love we need in the world, Alvin student Manolis Tjanis told the Houston Chronicle . We wait for bad things to happen before we do something like this. Dozens of Alvin High School students now showing up to take the trip to Santa Fe High School pic.twitter.com/aeLcWtkx4L -- Jeff Ehling (@JeffEhlingABC13) May 29, 2018 Santa Fe High School students return to school on May 29, in Santa Fe, Texas. This marked the first day of class at the school since the mass shooting last week that claimed the lives of 8 students and 2 substitute teachers. --Marie D. De Jesus/Houston Chronicle via AP Related reading about school shootings and trauma: Follow @evieblad on Twitter or subscribe to Rules for Engagement to get blog posts delivered directly to your inbox. Shocking footage shows a death-defying construction worker balancing on scaffolding without safety ropes as he builds a mega tall skyscraper. In the breathtaking video, the man erects scaffolding whilst hundreds of feet in the air without any safety harness at all as his stunned co-worker gasps in disbelief. The heart-stopping clip, which was filmed two weeks ago in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, shows construction workers building a skyscraper that is located on Jaltan Sultan Ismail next to 33-storey Sunway tower. The bewildering video has shocked Malaysians since it was published on Facebook and there have been calls to name and shame the reckless construction workers and the company they work for. The clip begins by showing the top of the famous Petronas Twin Towers which stand at a whopping 1,483 feet high and remain the tallest twin towers in the world to give a sense of how high up the construction workers are. The astonishing video which is being filmed on a mobile phone by a co-worker then pans to show a fearless male worker standing perilously on scaffolding whist over 700 feet high in the air. The irresponsible man has no safety harnesses or equipment on him and would surely fall to his death with one false move. Inches away from peril, the construction worker who is wearing a hard hat and yellow shorts picks up scaffolding poles and puts them above his head to form a bridge. He then astonishingly climbs up the construction frame and walks on top of these precarious poles to get to the next level of scaffolding. When he is standing on his makeshift pole bridge, the worker then daringly picks up a gigantic piece of scaffolding and affixes it to the frame all whilst hundreds of feet in mid-air without any safety equipment. As he does this, even his co-worker can be heard gasping in disbelief at his recklessness. Nevertheless, the man continues to work on the scaffolding and even walks on the hazardous pole bridge again. The video then cuts to show another death-defying construction worker a male just wears a bandana instead of a hard hat balancing on the scaffolding without any safety ropes. Shocking footage filmed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, shows a death-defying construction worker balancing on scaffolding without safety ropes as he builds a mega tall skyscraper This man nonchalantly stands on the scaffolding and affixes the poles to the frame. The camera then scans the breathtaking Kuala Lumpur skyline at that height. Afterwards the video shows the first construction worker in yellow shorts continuing to work on the scaffolding. The video ends by showing the capital city's landscape at a bird eye level once more. The construction workers are believed to from Indonesia. The workers' stupidity has been condemned by social media users in Malaysia and many have asked for them to be reported. Nagendran Ramasamy said 'This construction sites to be raided now. It's such a shame. I can't believe there's still contractors who allow workers to run jobs in high places without any security awareness'. Meanwhile Yvan Mabed commented 'It's pretty shocking to see that in 2018'. Poundland threatened legal action against ThamesLink today after the rail operator compared its bad service to 'Poundland cooking chocolate'. The social media spat started when a south east commuter called Kevin tweeted ThamesLink to complain about several trains being cancelled. Timetable changes brought in on Sunday have wreaked havoc across the network with hundreds of trains cancelled or delayed. A social media spokesman for ThamesLink quickly replied: 'Very sorry Kevin appreciate at the moment the service is less Ferrero Rocher and more Poundland cooking chocolate. We are working our best to help stabilise the service.' As the tweet gained more attention Poundland spotted it and quickly released a scathing statement threatening to bring in lawyers if it wasn't removed. The social media spat between Poundland and the rail firm started when a south east commuter called Kevin tweeted ThamesLink to complain about several trains being cancelled The rail operator's spokesman 'Neil' removed the tweet, adding: 'Very sorry for using your name here. I have removed the offending tweet. Neil.' The train company's speedy response came after Poundland's retail director Austin Cook posted an abrupt statement on the budget supermarket's Twitter page. It read: '@TLRailUK 'You're off the rails' #TLfail #Proundland. 'Dear Mr Horton, We couldn't help but notice you that your Twitter team described your failure to provide an adequate service as 'Poundland' cooking chocolate. 'Aside from the breach of our trademark, we think you're taking the chocolate biscuit. 'Frankly you have no right to use our name to describe poor service. Poundland spotted the negative comparison and posted a scathing comment on its Twitter The ThamesLink social media spokesman quickly apologised and removed the tweet 'We served eight million shoppers last week and didn't have to close any store because of leaves on the roof the wrong kind of rain, or a shortage of managers. 'In fact our Welshpool store flood and our store colleagues stood at the entrance to help customers get their shopping, so we stayed open. 'We think we have a pretty great idea of what good customer service is compared to most rail companies. 'But perhaps if we ever fall a bit short, we'll describe ourselves as a bit Thameslink. 'If you don't want to hear from our extremely twitchy legal team, we expect you to remove your tweet. Austin Cook, retail director #Proudland' A Govia ThamesLink Rail spokesman told MailOnline: 'This was meant to be lighthearted, not cause offence. 'We have taken down the tweet and apologised to Poundland.' Poundland did not wish to comment further and said its statement 'covered everything'. The spat comes after four million trains across Britain were rescheduled from Sunday in a shake-up designed to increase overall frequencies and reliability. ThamesLink's timetable shake-up on Sunday has seen hundreds of trains delayed or cancelled across the south east of England But the new timetables on Great Northern, ThamesLink and Southern - all part of the Govia ThamesLink franchise, have caused choas at stations as delays and cancellations sweep the networks. The new timetable extends stop times at busier stations and increases turnaround times at destination stations. Stations in London, Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire have all had their train times overhauled. Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) - which consists of Southern, Thameslink, Great Northern and Gatwick Express - is the UK's busiest franchise. Southern have been consistently rated the worst rail provider in the country. William Bancroft, 3, has to eat using his feet which means he has them on the table A mother claims an IHOP in Arkansas discriminated against her three-year-old son who was born without arms. Alexis Bancroft says her son William feeds himself by using his feet but when the family went to eat at a restaurant in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the manager said her son could not sit on the table or touch the syrup containers because it was a health department issue. 'When we got there, I carried him in, took him to the bathroom and washed his feet so he could eat. I asked the manager, "Do you ask all of your customers if they washed their hands before they touch them?"' she said to KARK. 'He's three years old,' Bancroft said. 'That's all he knows. That's what he was taught from therapy.' Although the manager apologized, the damage had been done and the family got up and left without paying for their drinks. A manager at an IHOP restaurant in Arkansas said it was a health issue for him to use his feet to eat and that he would not be allowed to sit on the table nor touch the bottles of syrup Mom, Alexis Bancroft, says her son William was upset to be told he could not eat at the IHOP 'She was the one who discriminated against my son for having a physical disability,' she said. William has been taught how to eat and do everything with his feet in therapy seeeions After getting home, Barncroft wrote about the incident on Facebook in a post which went viral, but has now been taken down. A number of servers from the restaurant ended up reaching out to her on Facebook to say how 'deeply ashamed' they were about what happened. A number said that were 'completely shocked' at how the manager behaved. ''Hello I'm a server at Ihop and was there today when y'all were in there. I just wanted to tell you how deeply ashamed I am of what happened to your chilc today. Me and a few other servers were completely SHOCKED that our manager did that,' wrote one server. Indeed, the manager herself got in touch saying: 'I really think this was all a misunderstanding. I would never do that to your son intentionally or otherwise. That's not what I was trying to do.' The IHOP in Arkansas is to retrain its employees after a mother said the manager discriminated against her three-year-old son, who was born without arms William is seen throwing his leg up in the air with the cookie in between two of his toes Servers at the IHOP got in touch with Bancroft after reading her Facebook post that went viral But Bancroft says although the manager's actions may not have been intentional, the next day her little boy didn't want to sit on the table to eat because of how he had been treated. 'The very next day, he didn't want to sit on the table to eat. He wanted to sit in a chair, which he can't really do,' Bancroft said. 'Other people may think it's not a big deal, but that is my child,' Bancroft said. 'I'm his advocate, and you're not going to treat my kid like that.' IHOP has apologized for the incident and is planning to re-train employees on how to treat guests with disabilities. The manager of the IHOP ended up getting in touch to apologize to Mrs Bancroft William was born without arms but that doesn't stop him from feeding himself 'IHOP and our franchisees do not tolerate actions that are or allude to discrimination of any type. The franchisee at this location has been in touch with the guest to express his sincerest apologies and will continue to be in communication with her to resolve the issue. 'Additionally, the franchise will also retrain his team members to ensure IHOP's level of service, particularly regarding guests with disabilities, is provided to all. For 60 years, IHOP and our franchisees have strived to create a warm and hospitable dining experience for all guests, and this incident is not reflective of that ongoing commitment.' The manager has since been placed on leave. Twitter is banning women from speaking out against the 'dangerous dogma of trans ideology', claim a group of angry feminists. Fair Play for Women published an open letter to Martha Lane Fox, who sits on the company's board, to back their right to 'not be shamed or silenced' for speaking about their views. The women claim Twitter accounts are being deleted for 'simply stating basic, incontrovertible biological facts', such as men are not women. The feminist group say by banning them from the site after such statements, Twitter is carrying out 'a concerted attack on women's free speech'. Fair Play for Women published an open letter to Martha Lane Fox, who sits on Twitter's board, to back their right to 'not be silenced' for speaking out against the 'dogma of trans ideology' The women claim Twitter accounts are being deleted for 'simply stating basic, incontrovertible biological facts', such as 'women give birth' The feminist group claims by banning them from the site after such statements, Twitter is carrying out 'a concerted attack on women's free speech' They hope Ms Fox, who is also a member of the House of Lords, will help 'stop allowing men to police our language, threaten us and abuse us'. Mail Online has contacted Twitter for a comment. A portion of the open letter reads: 'We are liberal minded women, committed to women's rights, and social justice. We have fought for reproductive rights, gay rights, spent our lifetimes speaking up for women and against male violence and working to change the systems and structures that oppress us. 'Feminists also use Twitter to speak about another issue that threatens to erode not only our hard won rights, spaces and services, but the very definition of who we are. Transactivism. 'This misogynistic, aggressive, violent movement, that has been embraced by the hard Left as the latest civil rights cause, has seen males colonise womanhood and hijack feminism for its own purposes.' Fair Play for Women say women have been 'threatened with violence' for saying things that 'should not be controversial, but have become so'. They hope Ms Fox (pictured), who is also a member of the House of Lords, will help 'stop allowing men to police our language, threaten us and abuse us' Fair Play for Women say women have been 'threatened with violence' for saying things that 'should not be controversial, but have become so' This includes 'saying that males cannot become females. For saying that women do not have penises. For saying that women's spaces such as refuges should be safe havens for women only,' according to the group. The letter adds: 'Not only that, women are being told that to talk about their biology is transphobic. That we must refer to ourselves as menstruators, uterus havers, pregnant people. 'This is a concerted attack on women's free speech. The words we use to describe ourselves, our bodies, our biology and our experiences as women are becoming unsayable.' Transsexual writer Miranda Yardley said she was blocked from using Twitter after writing that Green Party LGBT member Aimee Challenor, a trans woman, is a man, according to the BBC. Ms Yardley said: 'According to the rules of Twitter it is now hateful conduct to call someone who is a man, a man. 'The implication of this is that the concept of proscribed speech, things we are now not allowed to say, now extends to the truth. This is fundamentally illiberal.' Trans activist Ashleigh Talbot hit back at the letter, saying it was stoking 'hatred against trans and non-binary people by calling us dangerous'. She told the BBC that there are often anti-trans attack pieces in the media, and the community is 'small and vulnerable' and their free speech is often diminished. This is the shocking moment a police officer is shot dead in a row with his wife after she follows him to a motel with his lover. CCTV footage seized by police showed Maria das Gracas Andrade Lopes, 30, follow husband Salim de Alencar on a moped like the one he arrived on with his mistress. She is seen grabbing hold of his gun during a struggle before shots were fired in the street. Local reports said the dead man had lied to his wife he had been called in to work by bosses so he could enjoy a love-making session in the motel behind her back. The skimpily-dressed young woman he turned up with was filmed making her escape as Lopes confronted her partner before the tussle that ended in tragedy. Then she could be seen clutching her head to her hands when she realised her husband had been shot. Lopes walks around in circles in disbelief before stooping down to try to help him - but then speeds off on her moped as onlookers gathered around. The extraordinary incident happened on Sunday afternoon outside El Shaday Motel in the Amazon city of Coari, in Brazil near to where British kayaker Emma Kelty was shot dead by pirates last September. The 48-year-old victim, a military police sergeant, was rushed to hospital after being hit in the neck by one of two shots fired from his regulation firearm. His wife told cops after she was arrested on suspicion of his homicide that she had only intended hitting him with his weapon and it went off by accident. Coari police chief Pedro Moreira said: 'She threw the weapon on the ground in a state of shock when she saw him bleeding and went to her mum's house, where she was arrested around 5.30pm on Sunday. Salim de Alencar, 40 was seen driving on a moped with his mistress before his wife grabs hold of his gun during a struggle The skimpily-dressed young woman Alencar turned up with made her escape as Maria das Gracas Andrade Lopes, 30, confronted her partner 'His friends and colleagues are still trying to come to terms with what happened and are devastated at Salim's loss. He was a good professional and friends with many people.' The police chief and his wife had been married for 13 years and had two children. He is already thought to have been buried in his native town of Manacapuru near the state capital Manaus. The woman described as his mistress, who was uninjured in the drama, has not been named. A public school has closed for two weeks because locals believe it is cursed and won't return until the spell is lifted. Angurugu School on the remote Groote Eylandt island off the Northern Territory shut down on May 18 along with the local Centrelink office. The supposed curse could only be lifted with a smoking ceremony but the only person who could do it was not on the island. Angurugu School (students pictured with visiting sport coach) has been closed for two weeks because locals believe a curse was placed on it and won't return until it's lifted The school (students pictured) on the remote Groote Eylandt island off the Northern Territory shut down on May 18 Education officials worked overtime to try to get the school reopened, without success, and hoped the appropriate person would return on Thursday. 'Angurugu School has not been operating since May 18 out of consideration of local Aboriginal cultural obligations,' the Northern Territory Education Department told the NT News. 'Schooling is expected to resume on Thursday May 31 following a smoking ceremony conducted by the Anindilyakwa Land Council.' The local council has been working with Groote Eylandt's elders to get residents to ignore any future curses put on the island's buildings. Angurugu's 165 students, who have now missed a fifth of the school term, have one of the lowest attendance rates in the Territory at just 30.5 per cent It is unclear who put the curse on the school and Centrelink office, why it was placed, or what would happen if it was ignored. Angurugu's 165 students, who have now missed a fifth of the school term, have one of the lowest attendance rates in the NT at just 30.5 per cent. The curse came two years after the school's kitchen burned down in a fire in April 2016. Police suspect it was deliberately lit. The school and community of about 850 had better news in November when local teenager Travis Kennell became the first student in generations to graduate year 12. Newly released Bodycam footage shows the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy by a Los Angeles police officer after he was reported for graffitiing walls. Jesse Romero was killed by LAPD officer Eden Medina on August 9, 2016. Prosecutors declined to file charges against Medina and an LAPD investigation found that he had used 'reasonable force' to defend himself because Romero was armed. But now the teen's family said the bodycam footage proves Medina used excessive force and that Romero's gun was on the ground behind a fence when he was shot. Scroll down for video Newly released Bodycam footage shows the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old Jesse Romero (pictured) by a Los Angeles police officer in August 2016 Romero and two others were graffiiting behind an apartment building when they were approached by police. The footage shows the moment Romero fled the scene and officers, including Medina, pursued him on foot. One of the officers is heard yelling 'stop running'. A gunshot then sounds in the background of the footage as Medina rounds the corner of a building, his gun drawn. Police claimed the gunshot came from Romero's gun, and that he fired at pursuing officers while he was running away. But two witnesses said they saw Romero throw the gun over the fence as he ran away and that it went off after hitting the ground. The footage shows the moment Romero fled the scene and officers, including Medina (pictured right), pursued him on foot. One of the officers can be heard yelling 'stop running' A gunshot can be heard in the background of the footage as Medina rounds the corner of a building, his gun drawn. His camera is pointed away when he fatally shoots Romero The bodycam footage shows Medina rounding the corner after the gun sounds. But his camera is pointed away when he fatally shoots Romero. Romero's unconscious body can then be seen on the ground as officers order him to 'get down'. His revolver is seen several feet away. The bodycam footage shows police flipping his body over and handcuffing him, according to KTLA. They are not seen checking his pulse or administering aid. It took two years for the family, who is suing the city over the shooting, to retrieve the footage. But the family believes the footage will prove that the teen did not pose a threat to the officers and that Medina used excessive force. Medina is seen here with the gun drawn. His camera was pointed away when he fatally shot Romero, but the teen's gun can be seen behind the fence Two witnesses said they saw Romero throw the gun over the fence as he ran away and that it went off after hitting the ground Humberto Guizar, the family's attorney, said the proof is in the teen's gun - and the fact that it was found on the opposite side of the fence from Romero's body. It took two years for the family, who is suing the city over the shooting, to retrieve the footage of Romero's death 'The kid did have a gun, that is true,' Guizar said during a press conference on Tuesday. 'But he didn't deserve to die. He discarded the gun.' 'What happened is he threw it over the fence.' 'When it landed on the ground, that's when it fired. Because it hit something, and it caused it to fire.' Two experts, including a retired agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency, found that Romero's antique revolver likely fired after hitting the ground, according to the Los Angeles Times. Guizar also pointed to the moment in the footage when Medina turned the corner toward Romero after hearing the gunfire. 'He saw the kid did not have a gun and was firing at him,' he said. 'Otherwise, why would he walk in the line of fire?' It was also later revealed that 12 days before fatally shooting Romero, Medina fatally show another man named Omar Gonzalez in the same area Following his death, many protested the boy's death and police brutality in the area It was also revealed that 12 days before fatally shooting Romero, Medina fatally shot another man named Omar Gonzalez in the same area. The LAPD has responded to the release of the footage, stating that it conducted a 'thorough investigation' of Medina and the shooting. 'The Los Angeles Police Department understands that any time that an officer uses deadly force that ends in a fatality it is a painful tragedy for the family and friends of the suspect, the community and the officers involved, ' the statement read. 'This is why the LAPD, its oversight bodies, and the Los Angeles District Attorneys Office scrutinizes these incidents as closely as possible to ensure that the use of deadly force was appropriate to defend the life of the officer or members of the public.' A newlywed couple who returned from their dream honeymoon to find a 6ft fence around their home is celebrating after it was torn down. Thomas Entwistle, 27, and his wife Rebekah, 24, described the enormous wooden structure as 'like the Berlin Wall' and said it made them 'feel like prisoners in their own home', after it spoiled the view from their house in Blackburn, Lancashire. Music teacher Thomas was dumbfounded to discover the wooden barrier standing just 2ft from their front door and living room windows after they came back from the Dominican Republic earlier this month. It is believed the eyesore was erected by a nearby farmer who is in a long-running legal dispute with the developer who built the home. But less than 72 hours after the fence had been constructed - it was pulled down by teams from developer Persimmon Homes. Before and after: The fence at the front of the Entwistle's house in Blackburn, Lancashire which was built by property developer giants Persimmon and described as 'like the Berlin Wall' The wall is pictured on the ground in Blackburn after developers stepped in to remove it Thomas Entwistle, 27, and his wife Rebekah, 24, had both returned from a 10-day honeymoon when they found the gigantic wall just feet away from the walls of their home Speaking about the incident today Mr Entwistle said: 'We are so relieved. I can't tell you how excited we are that the fence is down. 'Our fear now is that it will put it back up again - we just hope it is gone for good. 'I was nervous about coming to the press but I am so glad we did now - it may have saved us months of dispute.' Thomas and Rebekah moved into the 220,000 four-bedroom property on Persimmon Homes's Brook View development just before Christmas. They arrived home from their honeymoon earlier this month to find their home's outlook blocked by the intrusive wooden panel. And they said that since their return, their lives had been ruined by the fence - and they even considered moving out. The couple moved into the 220,000 four-bedroom home just before Christmas last year and found the wall metres away from the side of their home when they returned from honeymoon Furious Thomas thought the fence was erected by the owner of nearby Upper Mickle Hay Farm in a dispute with Persimmon over land borders. However, Persimmon insisted that none of its development encroaches on land it does not already own. Thomas said before the wall was toppled: 'This was our dream home and now it's turned into a nightmare - it feels like we are imprisoned in our own house by this fence. 'We are being held hostage in a land dispute which is nothing to do with us. 'Rebekah and I have just started our own business and had to fight to get a mortgage and then to get this house. 'We bought it because of the view which has now been replaced by a huge wooden fence nailed to our own little one. The wall has fallen: The Entwistle's home in Blackburn is pictured without the 6ft around it The couple said they are fearful the wall could be put back up again but a planning meeting will decide whether it was a planning breach or not 'Rebekah is always in tears. She is in despair - there was no warning and the fence just appeared. 'It is 2ft from our front window and front door - it's like having the Berlin Wall in front of our home.' Thomas and his wife, who married in July, said they would not have even considered the property if they had known the trouble in store for them. Thomas said: 'We're not even sure we want to live here now. 'Even if the fence gets taken down there is no guarantee it won't come back later or even be extended around the back - we are in fear of that.' The couple, who had moved from rented accommodation, considered employing their own solicitor. The wooden structure is pictured on the ground after developers took it down with the help of local council officials Thomas added: 'At first I was tearful but now I'm angry. 'We specifically bought this house, beating off a lot of competition, for its beautiful views and now they've gone. 'We now keep the curtains closed in the front room and spend most of our time upstairs - Rebekah is too upset to be in the living room. 'We just want it sorted out quickly and permanently so we can enjoy our new home in peace.' Mr Entwistle was shocked to find that the enormous fence stands just two feet from his living room window Developers Persimmon removed the fence after Blackburn with Darwen Council planning officials visited and told the firm the fence was constructed on land they owned. The council officials will now see if it was in breach of planning regulations. A spokesman for Persimmon Homes said: 'Our staff have taken down the fence after consultation with council planning officers.' Local councillor Sylvia Liddle said: 'I am delighted for this young couple who have been so distressed - it is a victory for common sense and we now need to ensure it is a permanent solution.' A spokeswoman for the farmer's land agent Gary Hoerty Associates of Grindleton declined to comment. A spokesman for Persimmon Homes said: 'We are confident none of our development encroaches on land not legitimately within our ownership. The couple compared the structure to the Berlin Wall as it obscured their view of the surrounding countryside Thomas Entwistle and Cllr Sylvia Liddle who are petitioning the developer to do something about the fence A neighbour, whose front path has been obstructed by this new 4ft wire fence put up by the farmer has said: 'When we first bought the plot before we moved in, we were told our fence would be about 4ft tall. It is smaller than that A neighbour, whose front path has been obstructed by this new 4ft wire fence put up by the farmer said before it was removed: 'When we first bought the plot before we moved in, we were told our fence would be about 4ft tall. It is smaller than that. 'Two weeks ago I came out and saw him putting up this wire fencing. 'He claimed he was setting his boundaries. He only went so far up because the metal fencing put up by the builders is still up too. 'He already has a cattle grid so I doubt any of his animals would get down here anyway. 'If my cat was still alive, he wouldn't have been able to get out because of the fencing.' 'Two weeks ago I came out and saw him putting up this wire fencing. He claimed he was setting his boundaries. He only went so far up because the metal fencing put up by the builders is still up too,' she said A twice-deported undocumented immigrant from Mexico appeared in court in Upstate New York on Tuesday to face charges related to the death of his 18-year-old girlfriend, whose toddler son is still missing and feared dead. Everado Donoteo-Reyes, 25, so far has been charged with tampering with evidence after he admitted to burying the body of Selena Hidalgo-Calderon near an apple orchard in Sodus, New York. The Guatemalan migrant worker's decomposing remains were found last week wrapped in a plastic bag in the woods behind the farm where she worked and lived with her son, 14-month-old Owen Hidalgo-Calderon. Scroll down for video Day in court: Everado Donoteo-Reyes (left) appeared in court on Tuesday in the death of his girlfriend. Her son, Owen Hidalgo-Calderon (right), has been missing since May 16 Law enforcement officials issued an Amber Alert for the missing toddler on Friday and spent the weekend combing through the 350-acre farm, to no avail. On Tuesday, the alert was cancelled, but the Wayne County Sheriff's Office and other agencies continued scouring the area in search of the child. Wayne County Sheriff Barry Virts said during a press briefing Monday that while he hoped the toddler was still alive, there was a strong possibly that Owen has died. We have to look to reality here that he is concealed somewhere here on the farm, Virts said, as the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reported. During his initial court appearance on Tuesday, Donoteo-Reyes was led into Sodus Town Court, dressed in a black-and-white striped jail garb, with his wrists and ankles restrained. He was accompanied by a lawyer from the county public defender's office and a Spanish-language interpreter, but did not speak. Prosecutor Christine Callahan said the suspect admitted to moving or hiding his deceased girlfriends body between logs, but claimed he did not kill her. The man was allegedly afraid that he would be charged in Hidalgo-Calderons death or deported back to Mexico. Guatemalan migrant worker Selena Hidalgo-Calderon, 18 (left), was found dead last Wednesday. Her boyfriend, 25-year-old Donoteo-Reyes (right), has been charged with evidence tampering Hidalgo-Calderon was buried near the apple orchard where she lived and worked in Sodus, New York. She's pictured above with her baby He reportedly declined to answer any questions about Owen's whereabouts. The child's biological father lives in Guatemala. Donoteo-Reyes is due back in court on July 2. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Donoteo-Reyes, who also went by the alias 'Alberto Ebavardo Gutierrez-Reyes,' was previously removed from the US in 2016 and 2017 and has a 2017 federal conviction for illegal entry. His late girlfriend also had been living in the country illegally since 2016 and was in the process of being deported at the time of her death. The Guatemalan mother and her son were last seen alive at the farm on May 16. Owen was absent at day care the following two days. Hidalgo-Calderon was eventually reported missing on May 20 by her mother who hadn't heard from her in three days. Donoteo-Reyes was taken into custody after a hunter neighbor's trail cameras caught him walking with a shovel into the woods where his girlfriend's body was eventually found. Sheriff Virts said the victim 'did seek shelter earlier this year for domestic violence issues' but nothing was officially reported to the police. While he lived with his girlfriend at the farm in Sodus, he was taken into custody at a farm an hour away in York last Wednesday night. Rebecca Fuentes, of the Workers' Center of Central New York, told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle that Hidalgo-Calderon and the rest of her family were applying for asylum. Her next court date was scheduled for June 5. Hidalgo-Calderon's mom Estela issued a statement after her daughter's body was found. 'My daughter and my grandson were my life, she was my first born and I feel like a piece of my heart is gone. What has happened to my family is unfair. I want the perpetrator to go to jail forever. I do not want another family to be hurt in this way,' she said. Anyone with information should contact the Wayne County Sheriffs Office at tip@co.wayne.ny.us or call (315) 946-9711. A GoFundMe has been started to help Hidalgo-Calderon's family pay for her funeral expenses. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has warned Europe its new privacy laws could hurt the continent with less communication coming from America, including vital alerts about possible disease outbreaks. And he hints a trade war could be the result given that the regulations include 'unnecessary barriers to trade.' If that happens it would be an additional front in a global trade war the President Donald Trump administration could find itself waging. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has warned Europe its new privacy laws could hurt the continent with less communication coming from America, including vital alerts about possible disease outbreaks. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross hints a trade war could be the result of new EU privacy laws given that the regulations include 'unnecessary barriers to trade.' If that happens it would be an additional front in a global trade war the President Donald Trump administration could find itself waging. The General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., went into effect in the European Union on Friday, making Europe the world's leading tech watchdog. The GDPR and its sister law the ePrivacy Regulation are seen as the next regulatory battleground in Europe. Ross warned in an op-ed in the Financial Times on Wednesday that the new privacy guidelines 'will force big changes in the way U.S. and European companies do business.' He added: 'We do not have a clear understanding of what is required to comply.' Ross complained the regulations are too 'vague' and implored EU authorities to 'provide clearer rules and a more predictable regulatory environment to support investment and innovation.' Several countries and companies have criticized the laws for being too vague in its requirements with some big corporations, such as Facebook, taking a deliberately minimalist approach when it comes to complying with the new regulations. Ross warned of multiple disruptions in service that could come under the new laws. He offered specific examples of how business could be affected, including a warning that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 'could be restricted in sharing information with European counterparts while responding to the outbreak of diseases such as Ebola' and that the US Postal Service 'believes the new rules will prevent EU postal operators from providing the personal data on individuals it needs to process inbound mail,' which means there could be no mail delivery. The commercial stakes are high when it comes to trade with Europe. American businesses exported $283 billion of goods to the EU last year, The Washington Post reported, more than twice the total they shipped to China, while customers in the U.S. purchased nearly $435 billion in products from European companies. Trump recently threatened to impose tariffs on imported automobiles, which would hit Germany especially hard. And European companies will be hit by the reimposition of U.S. sanctions on Iran, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Congress last week. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, pictured here with Donald Trump, warned the EU that its new privacy law is too vague, telling officials that 'We do not have a clear understanding of what is required to comply.' On Friday, the EU's exemption from U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs expires and there have been no signs from the administration it plans to grant an extension - despite pleas from EU officials. Ross is scheduled to meet with EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom in Paris on Wednesday to talk about the steel and aluminum tariffs. Ross noted that the administration supports the goal of protecting personal data online but added it must take 'into account the regulatory, scientific, and commercial needs of all our countries.' Trump's commerce secretary also pointed out that small businesses will have to spend heavily in order to comply with the new regulations and that US companies in general 'have already invested billions of dollars.' Companies also updated their privacy policies to comply with European regulations, which led to a rash of emails to consumers noting the update. Meanwhile, the American Chamber of Commerce and the Developers Alliance, a group representing Facebook, Google, Intel and dozens of app makers, said new privacy regulations could cost businesses in Europe about $640 billion in annual lost revenue, the New York Times reported. The ePrivacy Regulation specifically protects the confidentiality of electronic communications and in its current form would require companies like Skype and What's App to obtain people's explicit permission before collecting data. 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. A Utah man has been charged with aggravated murder after he allegedly slit the throat of a 15-year-old girl who police claim he was 'obsessed' with and wanted to marry. Baleigh Bagshaw, 15, was found dead at her Salt Lake City home on May 7, sparking a national manhunt for Shaun French, 24, who is accused of having a sexual relationship with her. French, who was arrested just days later, reportedly admitted to a friend that he killed the teen at her home, saying he 'damn near cut her head off,' according court documents obtained by the Salt Lake Tribune. The documents also revealed that French allegedly called Bagshaw days before her death and wanted to meet up with her about accusations that he raped her. He was allegedly with a friend right before he stopped by the teen's Salt Lake City home. Utah man, Shaun French (left), 24, who is suspected of killing 15-year-old, Baleigh Bagshaw (right), has been charged with aggravated murder Bagshaw (pictured) was found dead at her Salt Lake City home on May 7, sparking a national manhunt for Shaun French, 24, who is accused of having a sexual relationship with her After Bagshaw's death, French fled to Wyoming where he reportedly dumped a backpack full of bloody clothing in a convenience store trash can. Salt Lake City investigators searched the Uintah County landfill (pictured) and found a backpack full of bloody clothing and a knife French reportedly left the friend at a park and went to Bagshaw's house. According to court documents, when he came back, he had blood on his face and hands and said he'd cut the girl's throat. French then told his friend that they needed to leave town, according to the Tribune. They made their first stop in Wyoming where they reportedly dumped a backpack full of bloody clothing in a convenience store trash can. More than 250 officers searched the Uintah County landfill in Wyoming and located a backpack full of bloody clothing, a knife, a balaclava, duct tape, rubber gloves and latex gloves, documents revealed. Another of his friends told police that French was 'obsessed' with Bagshaw and said he wanted to marry her. A few days before Bagshaw was killed, the teen told her mother that she had sex with French, according to the Tribune. Bagshaw told her mother that the sex began when she was 14. A short time later, Bagshaw's mother received nude photos of Bagshaw through a Facebook account created by French. The mother reportedly talked about reporting French, who they believed was behind the account, to police. French (left), who was arrested just days later, reportedly admitted to a friend that he killed the teen at her home, saying he 'damn near cut her head off' Police said French fled Salt Lake City in a camouflage-painted Daihatsu SUV with a Wyoming license plate A day later, French called his brother, saying he was going to be charged with rape and wanted to cut his own throat, the Tribune reported. French was tracked down and arrested two weeks ago in southeast Colorado, where is currently being held at the Otero County Jail until he's extradited back to Utah. He was initially charged with three counts of third-degree felony unlawful sexual activity with a minor, before being slapped with the aggravated murder charge. Bagshaw had been returning from school, and was chatting to her mother on the phone when she was 'brutally attacked' and killed, police said. Her mother heard part of the assault before the line went silent. She alerted a neighbor, who went round to check on Bagshaw before alerting police. The neighbor found the teen's body just after 3pm. French was tracked down and arrested two weeks ago in southeast Colorado, where he is currently being held at the Otero County Jail until he's extradited back to Utah Bagshaw always phoned her mother when she got home from West High school, according to Deseret News. Bagshaw was meant to be working at Leatherby's Family Creamery, an ice-cream shop, but her mother phoned to say she could not come in due to a 'family emergency'. Co-worker Gwendolyn Robinson described the teenager as 'very sweet', adding: 'She worked very hard. She was a good girl. 'I expect her to be walking into work still. It's not computing.' Police said that certain 'evidence' was 'widely spread throughout the home and throughout the area'. French used to live in the same house as Bagshaw but was not living there at the time of her death. He'd moved in with the family in February 2017, when Bagshaw was 14 years old and he was 23 years old. A relative of Bagshaw told police they saw French having sexual relations with the girl on three occasions. Bagshaw enjoyed building props and sets at West High's theater. Friend Talia Zamir, 15, said: 'She was incredibly smart and talented and she always got along with people around her. She was really friendly and nice. 'And that's what makes everything so heartbreaking, honestly.' Sister-in-law Nichole Newman Cannon wrote: 'I will always remember the funny jokes at the times I needed my head lifted up. 'You will be greatly missed by your siblings. Love and miss you!' Helen Holland says she was first abused by a nun and then raped by the priest to whom she turned for help A former resident at a Catholic-run orphanage has told an inquiry she was raped by a priest after confiding in him about being abused by a nun. Helen Holland, 59, has waived her right to anonymity to describe years of 'sadistic' treatment at the Nazareth House home in Kilmarnock during the 1960s and 1970s. She said the abuse began when she was just eight years old as she addressed the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry today. Ms Holland claimed the nun had told her the 'the devil was inside' her and assaulted her with a hand brush. 'She took me into her cell and told me to take my clothes off,' she said. 'She took the hand brush ... and asked if I could feel the devil. That was the start.' Ms Holland said she told a priest in confession what had happened and that she 'had to get the devil out'. The inquiry heard he then 'marched' her back to the orphanage, describing her as the 'most wicked child he had ever met'. Ms Holland said the nun joined them and they went into a room. 'He told her what I'd said,' she said. 'They looked at each other, the way people do when they have got an understanding but without language. Helen Holland is pictured, right, during her time at the orphanage, where she claims she was raped by several men and abused by a nun 'I ended up over what looks like a boardroom table with (the priest) raping me. 'She was holding my hands across the table. I was told I was a brazen hussy and I must learn to keep my mouth shut.' The witness was sexually abused over a four-year period and that she was raped by several men, the inquiry heard. The 59-year-old says she was abused while resident at Nazareth House in the 1960s and 1970s, when the orphanage was in this building She said she knew at least one of them was a priest. The nun was accused of viciously attacking children - punching, kicking and using a bamboo cane known as a 'switch' because of the noise it made. The inquiry heard she reported the hand brush attack to social services when she was a child, but nothing was done. As an adult, she said she went to the procurator fiscal but was told the case would not be pursued because the nun was 'too old and too infirm', which the witness said she had challenged. Ms Holland - pictured with her therapy dogs Pippa and Willow outside the inquiry - has claimed she was abused and raped at Nazareth House Ms Holland is now chairwoman of In-Care Abuse Survivors group, which campaigns for justice for those affected by such issues. The witness, who took her therapy dogs Pippa and Willow with her to the inquiry, called for the care system to be 'stripped back' and for the Scottish Government to take note of the inquiry's advice. The inquiry before Lady Smith in Edinburgh continues tomorrow. Porn star Stormy Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti demanded that Michael Cohen immediately release the 'trump tapes' that he says will show the president 'conspiring' with his longtime personal attorney. Avenatti spoke outside a federal court in Manhattan after it was revealed inside the courtroom that Cohen kept audio recordings that he said are being kept under 'lock and key.' Avenatti immediately branded them the '#TrumpTapes' just minutes after being scolded by Judge Kimba Wood for engaging in 'public relations' that could impact a future jury pool. 'Just like the Nixon tapes years ago we now have what I will refer to as the Trump Tapes,' Avenatti told reporters outside the courthouse. Attorney Michael Avenatti arrives at the United States District Court Southern District of New York on May 30, 2018 in New York City. He said Cohen's lawyer, Stephen Ryan, 'admitted that there are audio recordings that Michael Cohen was taking for years and that those recordings are to quote him not only to they exist but they are under lock and key, and some of them relate to my client and her attorney-client privilege communications,' Avenatti continued. 'Mr. Cohen and his attorney Mr. Ryan should release all of those audio recordings to the American people and the Congress so that they can be heard by all and people can make their own determinations as to their importance relating to the president and what he knew and when he knew it and what he did as to conspiring with Michael Cohen to commit one or more potential crimes.' He appeared to be referring to conversations between Cohen and Keith Davidson, Daniels' former lawyer. He has been involved in negotiations over other 'hush' agreements, and brokered her non-disclosure deal with Cohen and Donald Trump, although Trump never signed it. It resulted in a $130,000 payment from Cohen to Daniels. Trump wrote on a federal form that he 'reimbursed' Cohen for up to $250,000. Avenatti pushed back at the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday by releasing a 2016 email between a Journal reporter and Davidson, and claiming the WSJ 'sat on' the the original Stormy Daniels story in the final days of the election. According to the Journal, Avenatti has yet to act on requests that Daniels waive attorney client privilege to allow Davidson to discuss his communications. Michael Cohen's lawyers have gone through about a third of the 3.7 million files obtained in an FBI raid on President Trump's longtime lawyer. The lawyers for Cohen, who is under criminal investigation for potential tax, banking, and campaign finance violations, have made their way through 1.3 million of them, they said at a federal court appearance today. Also being reviewed are a 'not voluminous' amount of material located in a shredder. The lawyers are relying on a special master, judge Barbara Jordan, to comb through documents to identify those that might be covered by attorney-client privilege. Her first bill to the government came in Tuesday night, to the tune of $47,000, with the government and both sides splitting the cost. She is charging $700 per hour, which may well be a reduced rate for what she would normally command. That amount covered her first six days of work sorting through material. Longtime Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen arrives to court in New York, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Lawyers for President Trump and Cohen appear again before a judge in New York as part of an ongoing legal tussle about attorney client privilege and records seized from Cohen by the FBI Additionally, a 'not voluminous' amount has been found in a shredder. Plus, lawyers must sort through a pair of Blackberries that may belong to Cohen's Ukraine-born wife, according to what was shared in court. Federal Judge Kimba Wood, who overseeing the case, also chided porn star Stormy Daniels attorney Michael Avenatti for a 'publicity tour,' saying it would have to cease if Cohen faces a criminal trial, Courthouse News reported. To represent his client in the case, the California-licensed Attorney must gain the court's permission something Cohen's team is fighting, citing his stunning disclosure of Cohen's financial information. Avenatti disclosed millions in fees Cohen collected around Trump's inauguration and first year in office in an 'influence peddling' operation linked to his access to Trump. NO VICE: Avenatti is seeking the court's permission to represent his client pro hac vice, since he is a member of the California but not the New York bar Cohen's attorney, Stephen Ryan, blasted the disclosure of personal financial information as 'reckless and improper.' Daniels' attorney is expected to ask a federal judge on Wednesday to address claims that President Donald Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, leaked audio recordings seized from Cohen in raids of his home and office to news media outlets. The issue was among several slated to come up in a hearing that began before U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood in Manhattan, who is also expected to get an update on a review of materials federal agents seized in the April raids. Stormy Daniels Fan Meet And Greet at Chi Chi LaRue's on May 23, 2018 in West Hollywood, California. The porn star is suing Cohen to have a non-disclosure agreement tossed PUBLICITY TOUR: Judge Kimba Wood brought up Avenatti's 'publicity tour,' noting it could impact a potential jury pool A special master has gone through 1.3 million items found on three cell phones belonging to Cohen Cohen and Avenatti were among those in court on Wednesday morning. Cohen, who has not been charged with any crime, is under investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan regarding his business dealings. The investigation stems in part from a referral by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is probing whether Trump's 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia. Trump has repeatedly said there was no collusion, and Russia has denied interfering in the U.S. presidential elections. Cohen has worked for Trump for more than a decade, first as counsel at the Trump Organization and later as his personal lawyer. In 2016, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000. Daniels has said the payment was intended to buy her silence about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump in 2006. The president has denied the allegation. Avenatti said in a letter last week that he had reason to believe that Cohen had leaked audio recordings, which he said may relate to his client, to media outlets. Daniels' attorney asked that Wood ask Cohen about the possible leaks. Avenatti has also asked Wood to allow him to represent Daniels in the Cohen case. He has said he believes some of the seized materials could relate to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. Cohen has asked Wood to deny Avenatti permission to appear before the federal court, saying he violated court rules by making what he characterized as false statements about Cohen in frequent news media appearances. After the raids on Cohen's home and office, Cohen and Trump asked the judge to block prosecutors from reviewing the seized documents, citing attorney-client privilege. Wood responded by appointing former U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones as a so-called special master to review whether any of the documents were shielded by attorney-client privilege before turning them over to prosecutors. In a court filing on Tuesday evening, Jones said she had already turned over to prosecutors more than 290,000 seized items that were not marked privileged by Cohen or Trump. She said that more than a million items from three seized phones had also been designated as not privileged by Cohen and Trump, and would be turned over to prosecutors Wednesday after a final review. Those items, taken from three phones seized by the FBI, were deemed to be not 'privileged or highly personal' by the special master. Cohen and Trump have made at least 252 claims of privilege, according to the filing. A number of Cohen's financial dealings since Trump's January 2017 inauguration have become public. Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG has said it had paid Cohen nearly $1.2 million as a consultant; U.S. telecommunications company AT&T Inc said it made payments of $600,000; and South Korea's Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd said it hired him for $150,000. Cohen also received $500,000 from Columbus Nova Llc, a New York company linked to Russian businessman Viktor Vekselberg. The firm has said the transaction had nothing to do with Vekselberg. Mueller's investigation, which began in May 2017, has yielded 17 indictments and five guilty pleas so far. (Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis) An eight-year-old boy who helped inspire federal legislation giving the terminally-ill the 'Right to Try' experimental drugs stole the show on Wednesday at a bill signing event. The boy, Jordan McLinn, of Indianapolis, Indiana, left his wheelchair to stand at the president's side asDonald Trump inked his name to the legislation. While the president was passing out signing pens to the event's participants, the boy repeatedly went in for a hug. After several attempt's the president rewarded him with an embrace and a kiss. An eight-year-old boy who helped inspire federal legislation giving the terminally-ill the 'Right to Try' experimental drugs stole the show on Wednesday at a bill signing event The boy, Indiana's Jordan McLinn, left his wheelchair to stand at the president's side as Donald Trump inked his name to the legislation While the president was passing out signing pens to the event's participants, the boy repeatedly went in for a hug. After several attempt's the president rewarded him with an embrace and a kiss As Trump delivered his remarks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building's South Court Auditorium, he gave McLinn a special acknowledgement He also gave McLinn the pen he'd just used to sign to the act that passed three years ago in Indiana after a lobbying campaign led by the boy's mother, Laura, who was also present He also gave McLinn the pen he'd just used to sign to the act that passed three years ago in Indiana after a lobbying campaign led by the boy's mother, Laura, who was also present. As Trump delivered his remarks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building's South Court Auditorium, he gave McLinn a special acknowledgement. 'If I looked like that, I would have been president 10 years earlier,' the president abruptly remarked, commenting that McLinn has 'beautiful' hair. Trump told the audience that included several lawmakers who were instrumental to the bill's signing, 'If I had that face. If I had that head of hair, I would have been president so long ago. That's great.' Jordan McLinn suffers from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), a fatal disease that typically confines the afflicted to a wheelchair by age 12 and takes their lives on average at age 25. His mother, Laura, has said in news accounts that three years ago, in 2015, when Jordan was five, they heard about the Right to Try law. At the time, Jordan didn't qualify for a clinical trial. She brought him to the statehouse in Indiana and lobbied state lawmakers to pass Right to Try. Vice President Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, signed the bill in 2015 with Jordan at his side. The family later found out that because the FDA is a federal agency, its takes a federal law to give patients the approval they needed to access experimental drugs. As Trump delivered his remarks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building's South Court Auditorium, he gave McLinn a special acknowledgement In the meantime, she says, Jordan made it into a clinical trial and started accessing a drug that they believe is slowing the progress of his disease, she said in a March video created for House Republicans. 'I'm pretty excited that there's finally going to be a vote,' she said in a promotional video for Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. The president today recalled that he endorsed Right to Try earlier this year in his first State of the Union. 'Patients with terminal conditions should have access to experimental treatment immediately,' he said in the address before a joint session of Congress. Melania Trump acknowledged the conspiracy theories around her disappearance in a tweet on Wednesday but offered no photographic evidence of her presence, meaning the speculation about her absence will likely continue. 'I see the media is working overtime speculating where I am & what I'm doing,' she wrote. She said she is at the White House, 'feeling great, & working hard on behalf of children & the American people!' The first lady was spotted in the West Wing of the White House on Wednesday afternoon. CNBC White House reporter Eamon Javers tweeted Thursday that he had spotted Melania Trump in the West Wing with her aides the day before. He offered no other details nor a photo of the spotting. He admitted this was unlikely to 'deter the conspiracy theorists.' The first lady offered no photographic evidence of her presence. He offered no other details nor a photo of the spotting. Wednesday marked 19 days since the first lady had been seen in public since her kidney surgery on Monday, May 14. Wednesday marked 19 days since the first lady had been seen in public since her kidney surgery on Monday, May 14. Politico reported Wednesday there are a variety of conspiracy theories being banded about given her absence: She's moved back to New York City, she's cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, she's living with the Obamas, working on a tell-all book or she had a secret nip and tuck that she's healing from. Melania Trump is taking meetings with her staff, her office told the DailyMail.com on Wednesday. 'She has had several meetings internally with staff, and will continue to do so this week. We are focusing on her initiatives, and also some longer term planning for events such as the congressional picnic and 4th of July,' her spokesperson Stephanie Grisham said in a statement. But she offered no indications when Melania Trump may be seen in public again. Politico reported the silence is a directive from the first lady, who values her privacy. There's also a notable lack of photos of the first lady with no pictures being posted of her meetings with staff. Melania Trump herself has posted videos on social media of her work, such as one posted about the White House holiday decorations in December and another on her preparations for the first state dinner in April. But there has been nothing about her recently, leading to questions about why she spent a week in the hospital for an embolization procedure and her prolonged recovery at home. No date has been set for this year's congressional picnic but last year's took place on June 22 on the White House South Lawn. The White House traditionally hosts a big Fourth of July celebration. If the first lady isn't planning on appearing in public until then, that's nearly a month away. President Donald Trump said last week the first lady is 'doing great' after her kidney surgery. 'She's doing great. Right there. She's doing great,' he said on the White House lawn last Friday morning before he left to give the commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. President Trump has said Melania Trump is 'doing great' after her surgery. Melania Trump's last public appearance was on May 10 when she accompanied the president to Joint Base Andrews to greet three North Korean detainees on the tarmac after they were released the evening before. 'She's looking at us, right there,' he added and pointed to a window in the White House residence above him. The first lady was not visible to reporters on the ground. She underwent an embolization procedure on Monday, May 14, likely to remove a cyst from her kidney. Her office said it was benign, or non-cancerous. She spent a week in the hospital recovering, returning to the White House on Saturday, May 19. Her last public appearance was on May 10 when she accompanied the president to Joint Base Andrews to greet three North Korean detainees on the tarmac after they were released the evening before. The day before she and the president celebrated military mothers at the White House ahead of Mother's Day weekend. And she had announced her Be Best campaign against social media bullying two days before that. While she hasn't been visible in public, she has been a presence on social media. On Monday, she tweeted her thanks to service members and their families in honor of Memorial Day. Her twitter account had a post two days after her surgery thanking her doctors and her Instagram account paid tribute to Medal of Honor winner Britt Slabinski last Thursday. It's unknown if the first lady, who is an active presence on social media, wrote those posts or if they were written by staff. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders nearly lost her composure at Wednesday's press briefing after a young boy asked a question about the fear that he and his classmates share that they'll 'get shot' at school. The emotional moment followed months of reports on school shootings, and a movement driven primarily by high school students to try to get their communities and governments to institute protections. The press secretary called on the Benje Choucroun, a young reporter from TIME for Kids who was dressed in a blue blazer, after a Canadian reporter helped him gain Sanders' attention during the televised briefing. Scroll down for video Sarah Huckabee Sanders at White House press briefing May 30 2018, where a young boy shared fears of getting shot while attending school 'One thing that affects my and other students mental health is the worry about the fact that we or our friends could get shot at school,' Benje said, reading from a sheet of paper. 'Specifically can you tell me what the administration has done and will do to prevent these senseless tragedies?' he asked. Sanders nearly choked up during her response, even as she delivered a business-like answer following a formal briefing where she faced questions about FBI 'spying,' Trump's displeasure at his attorney general, and North Korea. 'As a kid and certainly as a parent there is nothing could be more terrifying for a kid to go to school and not feel safe so Im sorry that you feel that way,' said Sanders, who is a mother and who acknowledged her one-year-old nephew's birthday at the top of the briefing. 'As a kid and certainly as a parent there is nothing could be more terrifying for a kid to go to school and not feel safe so Im sorry that you feel that way,' said Sanders 'One thing that affects my and other students mental health is the worry about the fact that we or our friends could get shot at school,' a boy named Benje asked Sarah Sanders at the White House briefing 'This administration takes it seriously and the school safety commission that the president convened is meeting this week, again an official meeting, to discuss the best ways forward, and how we can do every single thing within our power to protect kids in our schools,' she said. 'And to make them feel safe and make their parents feel good about dropping them off.' Benje said he had just been through a lockdown drill at school. Schools across the country are working on such precautions, following the latest shooting at Sante Fe High School. A gunman killed 10 students there earlier this month. Students returned to their school Tuesday for the first time since the tragedy struck. The memorial for victims of the Santa Fe High School shooting lays outside the school as students return on the first day of class since the mass shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, U.S., May 29, 2018 It wasn't immediately known why the boy was in the briefing room or how he got credentialed to be there, or whether he was at the White House for an unrelated event. President Trump hosted students from Parkland Florida following an earlier school shooting. He came out for arming teachers, a policy that many teachers unions and groups immediately opposed. The administration has resisted renewed for gun control, including restoring the assault weapons ban or closing the 'gun show loophole.' A man's narrow escape from a gunman, who went on to shoot someone else, has been caught in hair-raising footage. Just after midnight, the unidentified man is seen standing on a Toronto street corner, dressed in a robe and head covering and smoking a cigarette. Unbeknownst to him, another man, dressed in white pants and a white hooded top, is approaching from behind, holding a gun. Street camera footage shows the second man hold the gun up at the first man's head and pull the trigger. Had the gun fired, he would have been dead. Luckily, the gun did not discharge. As the first man turned around, finally aware something was amiss, the second man quickly hid the gun and calmly walked away with his friend, who also wore a hood to cover his face. Shocking street camera footage shows a man walk up to another man and point a gun at his head, with the would-be victim completely unaware When the man, who was smoking a cigarette, turned his head, the gunman slyly hid his gun and walked away calmly with a friend Less than 10 minutes later, a 42-year-old man was standing near the entrance of a store when the two men walked past. Both men, who appear to be masked, pull their guns on the 42-year-old, who sprints away in fear. The two men are seen on camera chasing him towards an apartment building, the man in white determined to keep going even as his friend appears to try and signal to him to stop. The 42-year-old is seen dashing in to the lobby of an apartment building with the man in white just inches away from him. The pair, both armed, then chased another man with their guns as he sprinted awayd As the fleeing man runs inside, the man in white fires his gun, hitting the man. He was rushed to hospital and treated for a gunshot wound, but his shooters are still on the run. There does not appear to be a motive for the shooting, but police are investigating the identities of the gunmen. A spokeswoman for Toronto Police told DailyMail.com the men had not been apprehended. Just days later, four men aged 18-22 were arrested on 92 charges after a petrifying car chase. The men were seen wearing items that appear to have been used to disguise their identity, and had two loaded guns with them. Toronto Police have urged the community to be mindful of their surroundings, and ask anyone with information to contact CrimeStoppers on 416-222-TIPS (8477). A knifeman has been shot dead after he stabbed and seriously injured two people on board an intercity train in Germany. The man stabbed a policewoman before being shot dead by the officer's colleague. Federal police confirmed that the knife attack had taken place near the central train station in the northern city of Flensburg, on the Danish border. The man allegedly took out his weapon at around 7pm local time on Wednesday while on the fast train travelling to Flensburg via Cologne and Hamburg. Rescue helpers load a stretcher into an emergency ambulance car following the stabbing attack aboard a high-speed ICE train in Flensburg, northern Germany Members of the emergency services work at the scene at the train station in Flensburg where police shot a man on an intercity train Police investigators gather on a train station platform after a knifeman was shot dead after he stabbed and seriously injured two people on board the train Local media say that there has been at least one fatality and two injuries. Early reports suggested that the one dead was the assailant, while the two injured were police officers who had taken him down. German newspaper the Bild reported that the man had been shot while coming at the police with the weapon. As the train arrived in Flensburg at 7.06pm the two police officers are said to have boarded. Then the attacker is said to have injured the female police officer and her colleague then shot the man. A police spokesman said that he was 'not aware of' any connection to terrorism as yet and the suspect is not known at this time. The train station has been evacuated and cordoned off while access roads have been blocked. No trains are travelling to and from Flensburg following the incident. The German train station has been cordoned off while investigations are carried out and access roads have been blocked The train station in Flensburg has been cordoned off and access roads have been blocked following the attack Rescue helpers, police investigators and Deutsche Bahn (DB) officials gather next to a train at a platform following the stabbing attack The knife attack had taken place near the central train station in the northern German city of Flensburg, on the Danish border Yesterday, an attack took place in Liege, Belgium, where a gunman stabbed two female officers before taking their weapons and killing them. Belgian special forces took down 36-year-old Benjamin Herman who shouted 'Allahu Akbar' as he shot and killed two policewomen and a 22-year-old trainee teacher. After carrying out three brutal murders, he took a female cleaner hostage in a nearby high school. Herman, who is understood to have been on a day release from a nearby prison, had approached the female officers at around 10.30am, slashed their throats and stabbed them several times from behind, before disarming them. Dutch police have shot a man who was shouting Allahu Akbar as he tried to attack them with an axe. The 26-year-old man was heard screaming the Arabic for 'God is greatest' while waving the weapon and fatally wounded a police dog. According to Netherlands news site NU, police entered his apartment after reports of a disturbance on Wednesday afternoon. This police dog was killed in the attack as the man fatally stabbed it. Police initially thought the dog was okay but it later died Emergency workers were seen carrying the 26-year-old out of the apartment as they rushed him to the operating theatre Armed police were pictured in the streets after they shot a man who shouted Allahu Akbar while wielding an axe Officers are understood to have tried to taser the man unsuccessfully. He was taken to hospital in a critical condition During the fighting, officers reportedly tried unsuccessfully to taser the man, who stabbed a police dog. The man has been taken to hospital in critical condition but NOS reports he is now stable. Pictures from the scene showed his covered body being loaded onto a stretcher as officers sent him to hospital. The man reportedly stabbed a dog in the attack, which later died as a result of its injuries Mayor Cor Lamers told NU the man was of a Syrian background and 'was known to different aid agencies'. The police dog was pictured shortly after the accident getting into a force vehicle and officers said on social media it was fine. But shortly after they announced it had died as a result of its injuries. Sky Sports presenter Charlie Webster is leading the backlash against Germaine Greer's comment that 'most rape is just bad sex' by recounting her own story. The 35-year-old hit back at the controversial feminist on Thursday, writing on Twitter: 'I will also happily tell you Germaine Greer about how I was repeatedly sexually abused as a teenager and tell you all about what it did to me.' Miss Greer, 79, insisted on Wednesday that most rape is just 'bad sex' and poured scorn on the idea that victims can suffer from post-traumatic stress. She also said the majority of rapists should have an 'R' tattooed on their cheek and be made to do community service. Ms Webster wasn't the only one outraged by Greer, as others took to Twitter to say Greer's remarks were 'one of the most dangerous, ignorant things' ever said. Sky Sports presenter Charlie Webster (left) is leading the backlash against Germaine Greer's (right) comment that 'most rape is just bad sex' by recounting her own story Sky Sports presenter Charlie Webster led the backlash against Miss Greer for her comments Miss Webster continued in her scathing tweet: [I will] introduce you to some people both female and male survivors who will make you realise how ignorant and damaging your comments are.' In another tweet she wrote: 'Rape is NOT trivial. Survivors PLEASE know your feelings are REAL & validated. It causes deep psychological trauma. 'The psychological impact far worse than the physical & longer lasting, especially in children & those abused repeatedly.' Twitter user Amy added: 'That entire Germaine Greer article is honestly one of the most dangerous, ignorant things I have ever read. I refuse to even link it & help spread it. 'Forcing yourself inside a woman's body will ALWAYS be violent. To all survivors, your pain is real, you deserve justice.' Amy Hartman said: 'Just bc you were a feminist 20yrs ago doesn't mean you're one today. Germaine Greer is proof of that. I appreciate the work you may have done in the past but it's time to step down. The meaning of feminism has grown & changed just like everything else. Grow with it or get out.' Beenish remarked: 'Has #GermaineGreer officially lost it? Can someone explain WHY we were made to study her literature as part of so-called 'feminism' in school?!' Rachel McGovern wrote: 'I actually can't recomment that you rad this because it's so utterly insensitive. However, if people like Germaine Gree adopt this position and aren't challenged, what hope have we all of putting rape culture behind us.' Germaine Greer, 79 (pictured at the Hay Festival in Wales today) has said she doesn't believe rape is a spectacularly violent crime and it mostly 'bad sex' And Matt James added: 'I think Germaine Greer has finally lost whatever was left of her marbles.' Miss Greer told the Hay Festival: 'Most rapes don't involve any injury whatsoever. We are told it's one of the most violent crimes in the world bull****. But last night former Cabinet minister Priti Patel called Miss Greer's views 'sickening'. She said: 'These comments are an affront to the victims of appalling crimes such as rape. We should have zero tolerance of sexual violence.' And one audience member at Hay, Sherry Pack, said she was so outraged she had to leave. 'Dreadful ramblings by Germaine Greer I'm usually happy to listen to opinions different to my own but today after around 20 minutes I had to walk out,' she said. Miss Greer said: 'Most rape is just lazy, just careless, just insensitive. 'Every time a man rolls over on his exhausted wife and insists on enjoying his conjugal right, he is raping her. It will never end up in a court of law. 'Instead of thinking of rape as a spectacularly violent crime and some rapes are think about it as non-consensual, that is, bad sex. 'Sex where there is no communication, no tenderness, no mention of love.' When asked what would be an appropriate punishment for men found guilty of rape, she said: 'Two hundred hours of community service would do me. 'I have suggested maybe a little tattoo would be a good thing, maybe an R on your hand. I'd prefer it on the cheek really.' The Australian author said she knew she risked the wrath of feminists when she admitted that after she was raped at a party days before her 19th birthday, she had not been 'angry enough' with her attacker, a rugby-playing public schoolboy. She said she had been 'violently raped about as badly as it is possible to be raped if you take in the number of punches'. She added: 'I was beaten half unconscious. I kept saying 'No' so he hit me, I can't tell you how many times, maybe a dozen.' But she did not report the man to police because she believed it would have been a waste of time although he went on to rape at least one other woman. 'If I had appeared in a police station and complained against this man I would have wasted many, many, many hours, I would have been discredited and everyone would have known my ugly little story that I have shared with you,' she told the audience. The author is pictured in 1970, two years after she was raped. Her book On Rape is out soon She was 'determined to get over it and not go around for the rest of my life being a rapee'. 'Feminists would tear my head off for saying this. My feeling when it happened to me was something awful has happened to him, was he abused as a child? I still don't feel angry enough and I feel ashamed in another way.' Miss Greer, who has courted controversy since the publication of her first book, The Female Eunuch, in 1970, was speaking at Hay to publicise her forthcoming book On Rape. In it, she argues that the crime of rape should be abolished and in its place the assault law be expanded to include sex offences in varying degrees of gravity. These offences would carry lesser penalties but would require a lower burden of proof concerning consent. Miss Greer also appeared to question whether rape victims can suffer from PTSD and said a 'narrative of victimising women' meant they 'wanted to believe they were badly hurt'. 'The official position now is that 70 per cent of rape victims suffer from PTSD and only 20 per cent of war veterans,' she said. 'What the hell are you saying? That something that leaves no sign, no injury, no nothing is more damaging to women than seeing your best friend blown up? 'We don't get as badly hurt as you want to believe, you want us to believe that we've been destroyed but we haven't been destroyed we've been annoyed.' She also renewed her criticism of the MeToo campaign, saying it would be 'extraordinary if it makes any difference at all'. The only ones who will benefit from putting Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein on trial are lawyers, she said. Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2018 12:30 pm Liberty Utilities - Empire District customers will see a change in the fuel adjustment charge on their electric bills on June 1, following a ruling by the Missouri Public Service Commission. FAC is the difference between fuel and purchased power costs built into the current rate structure and the actual fuel and purchased power costs incurred by Liberty Utilities Empire District, according to a Liberty news release. This rate changes twice a year, the release said. If fuel costs are less than what was built into the current rate, customers see a credit in the FAC line. If fuel costs are more, customers see an additional charge. Those adjustments do not require a full rate case before regulators. While Empire is a regulated utility, the fuel it buys, including coal and natural gas, as well as electricity purchased on the market, is not regulated at the wholesale level, Brent Baker, national vice president of customer experience operations for Liberty Utilities - Empire District, said in the release. The previous FAC rate was $0.00184 per kilowatt hour, and the new FAC will reflect an increase of $0.00574 per kilowatt hour, the release said. For a residential customer using 1000 kilowatt hours per month, this increase in the FAC rate will result in a charge of $7.58 to their bill, the release said. Wholesale fuel and purchased power costs are not price regulated and can fluctuate significantly based on weather and other factors.The fuel adjustment reduces risk for both the customer and the company and may result in less frequent rate cases, reducing overall expenses passed on to customers, the release said. It provides customers the benefit of lower rates when fuel prices go down, while providing some price protection for the company when fuel prices go up, Baker said. Liberty Utilities Empire District, Joplin, Missouri, is a subsidiary of U.S. based Liberty Utilities Co., and headquarters for the Companys Central Region, providing electric, natural gas, water, and wastewater service to nearly 320,000 customers across six states, the release said. A subsidiary of the company provides fiber optic services. For more information regarding services in the Empire area, visit empiredistrict.com. For more information about Liberty Utilities, visit libertyutilities.com. A man was killed Tuesday afternoon while dismantling a printing press for The Morning Call newspaper out of Allentown, Pennsylvania. The Lehigh County Coroner's Office has not released the man's name, only saying that he was 32-years-old and from Cape Coral, Florida. The contractor became trapped underneath the piece of machinery that was being removed from the pressroom, suffering fatal injuries. The Morning Call reports that newsroom workers heard a loud boom shortly after 5pm. The cause of the accident is under investigation. A contractor became trapped under a printing press he was dismantling at The Morning Call, he suffered fatal injuries 'We are deeply saddened to report that an accident took the life of one of the contractors working in our production facility at the Morning Call,' said Robert York, publisher and editor. ' 'Our heartfelt sympathy, thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the deceased. 'We are fully cooperating with the authorities who are currently investigating to determine the cause of this accident.' The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been notified of the contractor's death. The Morning Call stopped printing its newspapers on the two Allentown presses in January. The shocking moment a driver ploughs into a BP garage employee forcing him onto the bonnet has been caught on camera. CCTV from the Orchard BP in Cherry Hinton Road, Cambridge, shows the terrified man being hit by a car. Police officers are now hunting for the driver of the blue Citroen Picasso following the collision at about 4pm yesterday. In the alarming footage obtained by the Cambridge News a member of staff wearing a high-vis jacket walks out on to the garage forecourt when the car suddenly drives into him. The surprised employee, who is in his 20s, puts his arms out to protect himself but is forced on to the car bonnet. The garage employee tries to protect himself just as the car hits him He is carried along by the vehicle, eventually falling to the side as it speeds away. A spokesman for the East of England Ambulance service said it was called to the scene where paramedics treated the man for leg and arm injuries and took him to Addenbrooke's hospital for further care. The Cambridge News understands that the car involved in the incident had previously driven away from the garage without paying. CCTV from the Orchard BP in Cherry Hinton Road, Cambridge, shows the terrified man being hit by a car It is believed the driver may have thought the member of staff was going to confront them and tried to escape. A spokeswoman for Cambridgeshire police said: 'Officers are appealing for information after the driver of a blue Citroen Picasso made off from the BP garage on Cherry Hinton Road yesterday without paying and also failed to stop after a collision with a pedestrian.' London fire brigade's response to the Grenfell inferno was riddled with blunders including a two-hour delay to order an evacuation and emergency calls were diverted 280 miles north to Newcastle, a damning expose has claimed. Fire chiefs were today accused of failing to react fast enough and their staff allegedly believed that the worst fire in Britain for a generation had believed it had been put out, according to a report. Staff initially believed that the fire had been put out and were confused when they received 999 calls from residents who said it had spread. As they could not see the West London tower, they had to rely on social media images to comprehend the scale, it was claimed. The main control room in Wimbledon, South-West London, was undergoing maintenance, therefore some of the 800 emergency calls received were diverted to Stratford in the east of the city or as far away as Kent and Newcastle when lines were busy. The extraordinary claims are made by journalist Andrew O'Hagan who has spent months investigating Grenfell and has now published a 30,000 word expose in The London Review of Books. The London fire brigade, cladding firms and Tony Blair are responsible for the Grenfell tragedy, the expose claimed Mr O'Hagan says the firms who wrapped the tower in cladding used 'lethal products' and Tony Blair relaxed building safety regulations, the report concluded. Then housing minister Sajid Javid failed to deal with the aftermath properly and promised all families a house even though other accommodation may have been more suitable. However, Tory Kensington and Chelsea's council leader, Nicholas Paget-Brown, who fell on his sword over the tragedy, was not to blame for it. The expose exonerates the councillor despite him previously being at the centre of criticism. The piece - written to coincide with an inquiry hearing testimonies about the victims in central London - is a damning round-up of the failings that allegedly fuelled the lethal chaos of June 14 2017 and these are its main players: London Fire Brigade's failure to evacuate: Aside from not ordering a full evacuation until two hours into the fire, the firefighters were also ill-equipped. Due to them being issued with oxygen packs of 'standard duration' as opposed to the extended packs required in the face of such a disaster, few of the firefighters made it past the 20th floor. The response by the fire brigade to the Grenfell Tower inferno was riddled with blunders, a damning expose claimed on Wednesday The main control room in Wimbledon, South-West London, was undergoing maintenance, therefore some of the 800 emergency calls received were diverted to Stratford in the east of the city or as far away as Kent and Newcastle when lines were busy. Staff initially believed the fire had been put out and were confused when they received 999 calls from residents who said it had spread. As they could not see the West London tower, they had to rely on social media images to comprehend the scale, it was claimed. One of the fire's victim's, Denis Murphy - on the 14th floor - was told to stay inside his flat. In the early stages of the blaze, many could have made for the stairs had they received different instructions. By 1.30am, Mr Murphy's flat was full of smoke. The tall ladders needed to rescue people high up in the tower aren't readily available in London and the first one arrived more than 30 minutes after the first call to emergency services. Everyone who died in the fire died above the tenth floor. Tony Blair and deregulation: Before Blair became prime minister, the home secretary had to approve to closure of any fire station in the country. But New Labour's adoption of Thatcher-inspired deregulation to appeal to a new kind of voter extended to fire-fighting services. Under Blair, 'half the fire cover within four miles of Grenfell Tower' vanished in five years, writes O'Hagan. Under Tony Blair, 'half the fire cover within four miles of Grenfell Tower' vanished in five years The loose attitude to closures meant the number of experienced firefighters available in the capital was constantly under threat and has been ever since. Labour's deregulation also made it easier for big players in the construction industry to 'flout regulations and fake tests and call it normal practice'. At this stage, O'Hagan argues, 'the marketing of insulation products is notably misleading and contractors are known to use combinations of products that have not been tested together'. It is these kinds of safety failures that are believed to have been behind the fire at Grenfell Tower. Cladding companies' lethal product Rydon's Celotex RS5000 insulation and Reynobond cladding was covered in aluminium. Its core was polyethylene and there was a 50mm gap between the insulation and cladding. This combination - used across hundreds of towers in the UK - required testing before being placed on said buildings. Rydon was accused of using a 'lethal product' of the kind allowed to flood the market due to deregulation But O'Hagan argues that the BRE's desire to keep government and industry bosses happy was the main focus of research into industry standards. One researcher said 'it was a scandal waiting to happen' and said a loose attitude to safety allowed companies to flood the market with 'lethal products'. The same insulation used at Grenfell was not tested 'in situ' but at a remote desktop, yet was still able to pass tests. Sajid Javid promised houses to improve public image At the time of the fire, the now Home Secretary was head of the Department for Communities and Local Government, which funded the Building Research Establishment (BRE). The body conducts fire safety research and aims to influence building controls. For many years, O'Hagan argues, government has been funded the researchers to say what the industry wants to hear. Critics say the BRE has allowed cladding firm to put lethal products onto the market. Javid is accused of being 'the opposite of helpful' by a Tory councillor, who said he jumped in and out with little applicable knowledge urging people to buy properties off Rightmove Pictured: Theresa May speaks to Dany Cotton, Commissioner of the London Fire Brigade as she visits Grenfell Tower, on June 15, 2017 After the fire, Javid is accused of being 'the opposite of helpful' by a Tory councillor, who said he jumped in and out with little applicable knowledge urging people to buy properties off Rightmove. Housing Officers in Kensington and Chelsea were baffled by his promises in a city with huge housing shortages and waiting lists. They accused the apparently daunted minister of believing it was just a case of throwing money at the problem. Nicholas Holgate, Kensington and Chelsea Councils town clerk, said Javid was chiefly concerned with managing public perception. The biggest error was the failure of fire chiefs to order a full evacuation of the building for almost two hours after the start of the blaze, according to the report Exonerated - former council leader Nicholas Paget-Brown In the week that followed the fire, Theresa May's Tory government distanced itself from the West London council that was run by the same political party. The prime minister said support for the survivors had not been good enough and O'Hagan argues council leader Nicholas Paget-Brown was hung out to dry. Paget-Brown, who resigned two weeks later, cannot be held responsible for the cladding used, nor the difficulties of housing people during the fire's aftermath in a capital caught in the middle of a housing and homelessness crisis, the writer states. The prime minister said support for the survivors had not been good enough and O'Hagan argues council leader Nicholas Paget-Brown (pictured) was hung out to dry The excoriating report by Andrew OHagan, which was published in the London Review of Books, blamed Labour and Tory governments for failing to tackle regulations surrounding social housing Staff initially believed that the fire had been put out and were confused when they received 999 calls from residents who said it had spread He also criticises the prime minister's assertion that people were left without shelter when hotel rooms were assigned to those in need straight away. Mrs May said she as chairing something called the Independent Grenfell Recovery Taskforce - something she'd failed to mention to Paget-Brown when she spoke with him the previous Friday. She said that a command centre would be overseen, but one was already in place. It found that the main control room in Wimbledon, south London, was undergoing maintenance and emergency calls were diverted to Stratford in east London Then she echoed Sajid Javid, announcing that everybody displaced would be rehoused within three weeks. Rather than defending himself and pointing out the hundreds of other towers across the country that used the cladding, Paget-Brown stepped down. O'Hagan writes that the leader felt it would be undignified to fight his corner while the people of his community was grieving over such profound loss. An oil baron said to have been at the centre of the infamous Wonga Coup in West Africa has died in a 'freak accident' at his mansion, it was revealed last night. Ely Calil, 72, was found after apparently falling down the stairs of the multi-million pound property in Holland Park, West London. A close friend said the tycoon 'broke his neck'. He is best known for being accused of plotting to overthrow the president of Equatorial Guinea in return for cash and oil rights a conspiracy that also embroiled Lady Thatcher's son Mark. The Wonga Coup was led by British mercenaries but ended in disaster in 2004 when a Boeing packed with men and weapons was seized during a stop-off in Zimbabwe. Ely Calil (pictured) was found after apparently falling down the stairs of the multi-million pound property in Holland Park, West London Former SAS officer Simon Mann, who led the mercenaries and served several years in African jails, said Mr Calil betrayed him. Yesterday Scotland Yard said Mr Calil was 'pronounced dead at the scene' and, although his death was 'unexplained', there were no suspicious circumstances. His legal team confirmed his death but said his family, including third wife Renuka, 59, and five children, would not comment. Last night former Etonian Mr Mann said Mr Calil had failed him over the failed coup. 'He was the person who recruited me and failed to back me as he promised,' he said. 'He can't sue me now. He was ultimately dishonest. He let me down. He promised many things and failed to deliver. Ultimately that led to the coup not working. 'He was an extraordinary guy. He was very charming, very clever but also devious and manipulative. There are a lot of stories about him.' Scotland Yard said Mr Calil was 'pronounced dead at the scene' and, although his death was 'unexplained', there were no suspicious circumstances. Pictured, Ely Calil on his wedding day with first wife Frances Condron in 1972 Mr Calil said to have been at the centre of the infamous Wonga Coup in West Africa. Former SAS officer Simon Mann (pictured), who led the mercenaries and served several years in African jails, said Mr Calil betrayed him Mr Calil was an aggressive litigant and his lawyers forced Mr Mann to remove his name from his explosive memoir about the coup which got its name from the 'Wonga list' of alleged financial backers. Born in Nigeria, but of Lebanese heritage and holding British citizenship, Mr Calil built a reputed 100million empire. He diversified from the family oil mill and groundnut business into property and finance while mixing with those at the heart of British Establishment. Operating from a 12million Chelsea mansion, and with other properties in Switzerland and Nigeria, Mr Calil was a friend of Jeffrey Archer for years. As well as Sir March and Lord Archer, his powerful circle of friends also included former Blairite minister Lord Mandelson. Last night former Etonian Mr Mann said Mr Calil had failed him over the failed coup. Pictured, Mr Mann in an African jail Mr Calil was known as an aggressive litigant and his lawyers forced Mr Mann (pictured) to remove his name from his explosive memoir about the failed coup He was invited to a Downing Street dinner hosted by the then Prime Minister Sir John Major's wife, Norma. His friendship with Lord Mandelson drew the former Northern Ireland secretary and current European Union Trade Commissioner into the murky Equatorial Guinea affair. And Mr Calil offered his Holland Park flat to the politician when Mr Mandelson was forced to sell his own Notting Hill home after admitting he had received an undisclosed loan from fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson. In 2004, media reports quoted from a document in the hands of the South African authorities which claimed the businessman and politician met privately weeks after the abortive coup. The report claimed: 'Calil says that Mandelson assured him he would get no problems from the British government side' and invited Mr Calil to come and see him again 'if you need something done'. Both Mr Calil and Mr Mandelson categorically deny discussing the coup. And few people had ever heard of the multi-millionaire until tragedy thrust his family into the spotlight. Mr Calil is best known for being accused of plotting to overthrow the president of Equatorial Guinea in return for cash and oil-rights a conspiracy that also embroiled Lady Thatcher's son Mark (pictured) In 2003 Mr Calil's son George, the eldest of his five children and an actor in the television medical drama Holby City, was arrested following the death of his girlfriend and co-star, actress Laura Sadler. The 22-year-old fell 40 feet from the balcony of his 500,000 flat in Holland Park after a cocaine and vodka binge. She lay in a coma for five days before her family made the decision to turn off her life-support machine. George Calil, 33, was released without charge. In 2006 he sold his Chelsea home, Sloane House, for an estimated 30million to Sir Anthony Bamford, the JCB chairman, before moving into a 10million rented property nearby. Mr Calil's riches have provided a global property portfolio with homes in Switzerland and Nigeria as well as a flat behind the Science Museum in Kensington. Despite his success, much of his business dealings remained shrouded in secrecy or overshadowed by controversy. In June 2002, he was questioned by French police over huge payments by a French oil company to a former Nigerian dictator. Mr Calil was accused of taking 40million in backhanders for 'fixing' a giant contract for Elf in Nigeria. He denied wrongdoing, and was released. In 2003 Mr Calil's son George, an actor then starring on medical drama Holby City, was arrested following the death of his girlfriend and co-star, actress Laura Sadler (left). George Calil, 33, was released without charge He also denied involvement in the Wonga plot, despite being accused of helping to organise and fund it. Sir Mark Thatcher was also accused of being one of its financiers. In an interview with The Telegraph in 2008, Mr Calil broke his silence on the matter and admitted he supported a regime change in Equatorial Guinea. However, he denied masterminding a coup and insisted he only ever backed 'democratic change' in the tiny oil-rich nation. 'There was no coup plot,' he maintained. But he said he had financed plans by Severo Moto, the opposition leader living in exile in Spain, to return to the country. 'Severo's belief was that if he was protected in his home town and could remain alive for a few days a political storm would occur that would sweep away the present regime,' Mr Calil said. 'I am not a coup planner. I don't have a talent in that sense,' he said. 'But yes, I financed Severo Moto's political activities and yes, I introduced Simon Mann to him because of his background in security.' 'He was the person who recruited me and failed to back me as he promised,' Mr Mann said He also admitted that Mr Mann and his mercenaries had been hired to provide military assistance to Mr Moto but said he knew nothing of the former SAS officer's plot. 'It was his lack of professionalism, his lack of discretion, his lack of judgment that caused this situation,' Mr Calil said. But Mr Calil and Sir Mark were linked to the plot when police intercepted a letter Mr Mann had written from prison in Zimbabwe. In the letter, he asked 'Smelly' - a nickname for Mr Calil - and Scratcher - a nickname for Sir Mark- to send 'a big splodge of wonga' (money) to help get him out of jail. However, Mr Calil insisted that the letter did not mean the pair were being implicated, but that Mr Mann was asking his friends for help. Mr Calil's private life friends said he enjoyed 'the best of everything' was equally complex. In 1972, aged 26, he married model Frances Condron, daughter of a US tobacco magnate. They had two children. Later he married Lebanese beauty Hayat Emma Morowa, with whom he had two more children. After their divorce, Ely married Renuka Jaine in 1989. They had a daughter. Scotland Yard said officers were called to Mr Calil's home on Bank Holiday Monday at 8am to reports of an 'unresponsive man'. Twin brothers brutally bashed in front of their mother have blasted bystanders who callously filmed the attack on their phones instead of coming to their rescue. Todd and Glenn Allsop, 22, have pleaded with people to intervene and help those in need rather than trying to capture the next viral video clip. Todd was dragged from his car and beaten unconscious by a group of strangers in the nightclub precinct in Northbridge, Perth, on Saturday night. He was taken to the Royal Perth Hospital with suspected spinal injuries. Glenn was also attacked but escaped with less serious injuries. Scroll down for video Todd Allsop, 22, was dragged from his car and beaten unconscious by a group of strangers in Northbridge, Perth, on Saturday night. He was taken to hospital with possible spinal injuries Todd said onlookers did not step in to help them as they were busy filming the attack on their phones. 'That's what hurts me about people now, is that their first reaction is to grab out their phone and to film it,' he told Seven News. Western Australia Premier Mark McGowan used the attack as an opportunity to call for social change . 'It seems to be part of the modern age, but if you can safely assist someone in need, my advice is you should do it,' he said. Todd (injuries pictured) said onlookers did not step in to help them as they were busy filming the attack on their phones Todd and Glenn Allsop, 22, have pleaded with people to intervene and help those in need rather than trying to capture the next viral video clip The incident began as the trio was driving home after a night out on the popular party strip. Their mother, who was driving, reportedly beeped the horn when a woman walked in front of their vehicle at the intersection of of Aberdeen and William streets. What transpired took them by surprise. The woman's male friends dragged Todd out of the vehicle and kicked and punched him while Glenn was also hurt Western Australia Police are still investigating the bashing. They have asked onlookers who filmed the bashing to come forward as the footage could help find the attackers. 'That's what hurts me about people now, is that their first reaction is to grab out their phone and to film it,' Mr Allsop said Twitter has exploded with old photos of Roseanne Barr dressed as Hitler to remind her that it isn't the first time she has been racist. Barr has repeatedly hit out at accusations that she is racist ever since her show 'Roseanne' was canceled on Tuesday after she compared ex-Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape on Twitter. Following the fallout, Barr apologized for the tweet about about Jarrett and said she had taken sleeping pills prior to sending the offensive message. Despite insisting that she was sorry and regretted the tweet, Barr then returned to Twitter on Wednesday to reject accusations she is racist and said she is considering fighting back. Roseanne has repeatedly hit out at accusations that she is racist ever since her show 'Roseanne' was canceled on Tuesday after she compared ex-Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape on Twitter Twitter has exploded with old photos of Roseanne Barr dressed as Hitler to remind her that it isn't the first time she has been racist 'I'm not a racist, I never was & I never will be,' she tweeted. 'One stupid joke in a lifetime of fighting 4 civil rights 4 all minorities, against networks, studios, at the expense of my nervous system/family/wealth will NEVER b taken from me.' In a second post she tweeted: 'You guys make me feel like fighting back. I will examine all of my options carefully and get back to U.' Twitter users quickly fired back with examples of times she had in fact been racist or offensive, including the time she posed as Hitler in a Nazi uniform for a 2009 photoshoot. In the photos, Barr was dressed as the Nazi leader while baking cookies. 'Oh honey... you've had way more than one stupid joke,' one Twitter user wrote alongside the Hitler photo. 'I can't believe Roseanne is an unhinged racist. If only there were signs,' another said. 'Roseanne, posing as Hitler with little burned human cookies. This woman is GARBAGE. 'People are all talking about @therealroseanne insults at Valerie Jarrett, but few said a word about her baking Jew cookies as Hitler. Yes - that's a thing that happened...' Barr repeatedly hit back at her attackers on Twitter as she continued to deny that she was racist. 'I'm a Jew, u don't get to call me a nazi for making fun of Hitler. Educate yourself on the other subjects - you're a low info citizen,' she tweeted to one critic. Earlier on Wednesday, President Donald Trump had waded into the row while the pharmaceutical company which makes Barr's brand of sleeping pill said 'racism is not a known side effect'. Trump had hit out at Bob Iger, chief executive of Disney, who own ABC. He wrote on Twitter: 'Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that 'ABC does not tolerate comments like those' made by Roseanne Barr.' Barr served as a star and executive producer on the ABC show, which was a ratings phenomenon when it returned to US television earlier this year for a 10th series, after its original run came to an end in May 1997. The return was watched by an estimated 18.4 million viewers in the US and Trump phoned Barr to congratulate her on the success. Barr has apologised to her colleagues who lost their jobs after she sent a now-deleted tweet referring to former Barack Obama adviser Jarrett as a product of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet Of The Apes. ABC decided to cancel Roseanne Barr's television show 'Roseanne' on Tuesday just hours after the comedian posted a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett Roseanne caused outrage when she compared ex-Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape on Twitter Valerie Jarrett has spoken out on the controversy surrounding Roseanne Barr's racist tweets, saying the ABC made the right decision to cancel her show Responding to a fan on Twitter, she said she believed the show was axed because of a threatened boycott of the show's advertisers. She also addressed fans, writing: 'hey guys, don't defend me, it's sweet of you 2 try, butlosing my show is 0 compared 2 being labelled a racist over one tweet-that I regret even more.' She added: 'Guys I did something unforgiveable so do not defend me. It was 2 in the morning and I was ambien tweeting-it was memorial day too-i went 2 far & do not want it defended-it was egregious Indefensible. I made a mistake I wish I hadn't butdon't defend it please. ty.' She added: 'Please don't start all of that boycott abc stuff-I'm not a censor and they have the right to do what they wish. It' all ok. thanks tho guys! 'I'm sorry 4 my tweet, AND I will also defend myself as well as talk to my followers. so, go away if u don't like it. I will handle my sadness the way I want to. I'm tired of being attacked & belittled more than other comedians who have said worse. 'I think Joe Rogan is right about ambien. Not giving excuses for what I did(tweeted) but I've done weird stuff while on ambien-cracked eggs on the wall at 2am etc.' At least one gunman is on the run after a Melbourne home was shot up as a one-week-old baby and three adults slept inside. The suspected bikie-related attack unfolded in Frankston in the city's south-east on Thursday morning. Finks boss BJ Reker, his wife and their 11-day-old son live in the property and were home at the time. Finks boss BJ Reker, his wife and their 11-day-old son live in the property and were home at the time At least one gunman is on the run after a Melbourne home was shot up as a one-week-old baby and three adults slept inside in a suspected bikie-related attack The terrifying drive-by shooting unfolded in Frankston in the city's south-east at on Thursday morning Witnesses told Daily Mail Australia the house was 'shot up and firebombed' at 4.40am. 'Bullets went through the targeted house as well as the next door neighbour's house,' the witness who doesn't want to be named said. 'There were cars blowing up out the front as well.' The front room, where the bikie's baby sleeps, was targeted by the shooter who aimed at 'head height', according to the witnesses. They claimed the attack was 'attempted murder'. 'Bullets went through the targeted house as well as the next door neighbours house,' the witness who doesn't want to be named said Police found a bullet hole through a window of the home, while a vehicle outside had been set on fire Police found a bullet hole through a window of the home, while a vehicle outside had been set on fire. A number of Finks bikie gang members were seen outside the property and speaking with police on Thursday morning, according to the Nine Network. Detectives also reportedly found five bullet casings near the home and another burnt out car about 4km away. Officers are investigating if the two incidents may be linked. No one inside the home was injured. At least one gunman is on the run after a Melbourne home was shot up as a one-week-old baby and three adults slept inside. Police are pictured at the scene Shots were fired at the home in Frankston in Melbourne's south-east on Thursday morning No one inside the home was injured. Police are pictured at the scene on Thursday morning The White House complained Wednesday that if ABC owed former Barack Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett an apology for Roseanne Barr's racist tweets, President Donald Trump should expect at least as much for enduring an endless barrage of vulgarity from his televised critics. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders offered multiple examples of what she called media bias against the president. 'The president is merely calling out media bias. No one is defending what [Roseanne] said,' she said her press briefing Wednesday afternoon. The White House is arguing if ABC apologized to Valerie Jarrett for Roseanne Barr's tweets then President Trump deserves an apology for media bias against him. The White House pointed to this photo of Kathy Griffin holding a severed head of Donald Trump that was shown on ABC's morning show 'The View.' President Tump weighed in on the Roseanne Barr controversy with a tweet Wednesday. Trump weighed in on the controversy Wednesday, complaining in a tweet that he never got an apology from ABC for the 'for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC' and calling out Disney CEO Bob Iger. Sanders expanded on what the president was angry about in a rant that called out ESPN anchor Jemele Hill calling Trump a white supremacist, complaining of comments made on ABC's daytime talk show 'The View,' and slamming ESPN for hiring Keith Olbermann, who regularly tweets criticism of Trump. ABC News and ESPN are owned by the same parent company, Disney. 'Where was the Bob Iger's apology to the White House staff for Jemele Hill calling the president and anyone associated with him a white supremacist? To Christians around the world for Joy Behar calling Christianity a mental illness? Where was the apology for Kathy Griffin going on a profane rant against the president on "The View" after a photo showed her holding President Trump's decapitated head?' Sanders asked. 'And where was the apology from Bob Iger for ESPN hiring Keith Olbermann after his numerous explicative laced tweets attacking the president, calling him a Nazi, and even expanding Olbermann's role after that attack against the president's family. This is a double standard he is speaking about. No one is defending her comments. They're inappropriate but was the point he was making.' After Trump won the election, Olbermann began a series of web shorts titled The Resistance," saying he would "take on the responsibility of the resistance. I, with complete awareness of the presumptuousness and arrogance of this statement, volunteer myself. Olbermann is known for his liberal views. Last week ESPN announced he was returning to the airwaves for his sixth stint at the network. He regularly refers to Trump as a Nazi in his tweets. Griffin apologized for a photo of her shown on 'The View' holding a bloody, decapitated head of the president. She later took the apology back. Asked if she took the photo too far, she said: 'No, not now. Not when I see his policies.' Hill voluntarily left her role as a co-anchor of ESPN's SportsCenter, to work on ESPN's Undefeated, an online vertical focused on race, sports, and culture. ESPN disavowed her tweets on the president. Behar publicly apologized in May for mocking Vice President Mike Pence's Christian faith and suggesting that his religious views made him mentally ill. She had said of Pence: 'It's one thing to talk to Jesus. It's another thing when Jesus talks to you. That's called mental illness.' ABC said Tuesday that it was cancelling Barr's television show just hours after the comedian attacked Jarrett on Twitter. Sanders said, in response to questions, that the president has not spoken to Barr since her firing and that no one at the White House has reached out to Iger. Sanders also complained about the lack of press coverage of the president's bill signing on Wednesday, legislation to give patients the right to try medication that could actually save their lives. "I'd point out that while the President signed that legislation and actually addressed America, two networks chose not to cover it, and instead covered something totally different in palace intrigue," she said. "A massive piece of legislation that had bipartisan support, that was life changing - literally life changing for millions of Americans - two networks chose not to cover the President's remarks on that." Barr was widely condemned after she tweeted that Jarrett looked like the 'Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby'. Iger reportedly called Jarrett before the network announced the cancellation to apologize to her. The White House used liberal journalist Keith Olbermann as an example of bias against Trump. Kathy Griffin apologized for a photo of her shown on 'The View' holding a bloody, decapitated head of the president. She later took the apology back. 'He wanted me to know before he made it public that he was canceling the show,' Jarrett told MSNBC. Jarrett, who was Obama's senior adviser during his presidency, was born in Iran to American parents and lived in Shiraz for six years. The family had moved to Iran because her father was part of a program that sent American physicians to help developing countries. He ran a children's hospital. There has never been any indication that Jarrett or her parents are Muslim. Barr later claimed the comment was a 'joke.' Trump, in his tweet Wednesday, complained he never got a call from Iger with an apology. In June of last year, Iger quit Trump's business advisory council, protesting the president's withdraw from the Paris climate deal. Tesla CEO Elon Musk resigned at the same time. Iger confirmed to Vogue magazine in April that he had thought of challenging Trump in 2020 with a presidential bid but decided instead to focus on his work at Disney, which had just purchased 21st Century Fox. He was said to have pledged to 'get rid of the posh girls' when he took over editorship at Vogue magazine last year. So it comes as no surprise that Edward Enninful's inaugural list of Britain's 25 most influential and aspirational women is achingly right-on. The magazine's chart known as Vogue 25 feature the likes of the Duchess of Sussex, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson and a pop star few would have heard of 12 months ago. In a snub to the nation's two most powerful women, the Queen and Prime Minister Theresa May have been left off the list. Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle (pictured left with her husband Prince Harry) and Amal Clooney (pictured right), husband of actor George, are both on the Vogue 25 list Those who make the top 25 are described as 'an extraordinary cast of leaders defining and redefining the way we live now' and range in age from 22 to 73. Plucked from the worlds of politics, arts, fashion, media and sport, they seem to indicate that Mr Enninful's purge of the toffs has made some headway. Perhaps one of the more surprising inclusions is 22-year-old pop star Dua Lipa who has been described as a 'culture definer' despite releasing her debut album only last year. Miss Lipa's song New Rules which features lyrics including 'If you're under him, you ain't getting over him' is lauded by the magazine as 'an anthem of female empowerment'. The bawdy track was credited with laying out 'a blueprint for modern sex lives'. Singer Dua Lipa, 22, is an unexpected choice, but she features on the influential women list Another of those inspirational figures is Meghan Markle the former US actress who is now the Duchess of Sussex following her marriage to Prince Harry on May 19. Vogue said the duchess is one of the most recognisable women in the world and has an influence that 'stretches far beyond the ceaseless coverage of her style as a bi-racial campaigning feminist from America, she is helping to forge a new 21st century identity for the monarchy'. The former Suits star, who asked her wedding guests to donate to a range of charities rather than buy presents, was hailed by the magazine as someone who 'captured the public imagination like no other this year'. The 36-year-old has worked as a global ambassador for World Vision and has spoken for UN Women. Human rights lawyer and activist Amal Clooney is the President of the Clooney Foundation for Justice. The mother of twins with husband George Clooney, she is a keen philanthropist. Scottish Tory Ruth Davidson the first lesbian Conservative leader is praised as a 'beacon, thanks to her relatable personality and progressive ideas' among a 'sea of old-guard Tories'. Fashion designer Stella McCartney (pictured ledt) and Karen Blackett are also featured Vogue also mentions her 'spectacular gains for her party in the last Scottish elections'. Other unsurprising inclusions are Harry Potter author J K Rowling and fashion designer Stella McCartney. Miss Rowling, who regularly shares her Left-leaning views on social media, has reportedly given millions to charity, resulting in her falling off the Forbes list of billionaires. Miss McCartney received the Courage Award in 2003 for her crusade against cancer having lost her mother Linda to the disease and has designed T-shirts for children's charity War Child. Harry Potter author JK Rowling is also on the list, compiled by Vogue editor Edward Enniful Among less well-known inclusions are Karen Blackett, CEO of media agency MediaCom, who has been described as the most influential black person in Britain. She started her career in advertising when the industry was predominantly male and white. She worked for MediaCom one of the world's largest media agencies for 20 years before being promoted to the top job in 2010 and was the first businesswoman to top the Powerlist 100. In January she was named as advertising giant WPP's first UK country manager. Also on the list are Black Panther actress Letitia Wright, Royal Court theatre artistic director Vicky Featherstone, Tate art museums and galleries director Maria Balshaw, models Edie Campbell and Adwoa Aboah, music executive Grace Ladoja, writer and academic Sinead Burke and Collette Roche, chief operating officer of Manchester United, as well as The Guardian's editor Kath Viner and two of its reporters, Amelia Gentleman who broke the Windrush story and Carole Cadwalladr. Police have dropped charges against a man accused of sexually assaulting a two-year-old girl in Tenant Creek after new evidence led to another offender. The 24-year-old man was arrested in February over the shocking incident in which the toddler was left with "significant and painful" injuries and a sexually transmitted disease. Northern Territory police said on Thursday that investigations had identified new information that cleared the accused and led to the arrest of another man. Charges against a man accused of the sexually assault of a two-year-old girl in Tennant Creek have been dropped The 25-year-old man faced Alice Springs Court on Monday charged with sexual intercourse without consent. He was remanded in custody to face court again on July 26. 'The 24-year-old has now been released from custody,' NT police said in a statement on Thursday. Sex crime detectives are continuing to investigate the incident in Tennant Creek in February. The two-year-old girl had to transferred to Alice Springs and then the Adelaide Women's and Children's Hospital for surgery and a blood transfusion. The child tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease and was provided with post-exposure HIV medication. Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2018 5:00 am Polk County community leaders are closer to reaching their goal of preventing opioid abuse in the area thanks to a recent financial award. According to a Community Foundation of the Ozarks news release, the organization, in partnership with Commerce Trust Company, awarded the Polk County Health Center a $19,000 grant through the Coover Regional Grantmaking Program. The grant funds will go toward building a coordinated, communitywide effort to address issues related to opioid abuse and misuse in Polk County through prevention, intervention and treatment, the release said. Ive worked on a lot of community collaboratives in 20 years, but this one is different because it truly involves all of our community partners, PCHC's Michelle Morris said in the release. Its a true community effort to address these problems. The grant is just another step in the county's efforts to stop opioid abuse in its tracks. Polk County's opioid task force sprang up last summer following a Department of Health and Senior Services summit in Springfield. Community representatives from multiple agencies, including the health center, public schools, law enforcement agencies, local addiction treatment programs, the county commission and area chamber of commerce, among others, have been meeting since July of last year, looking for solutions for Polk County's opioid epidemic. PCHC's Sandra Zanaboni previously told the BH-FP the task force will work together to make a community plan of action. In January, the Bolivar Board of Aldermen and Polk County Commission pledged $5,000 each to help fund the task force's efforts. In August of last year, the Polk County Commission also voted unanimously to approve an ordinance for countywide participation in a prescription drug monitoring program originated in St. Louis County. Thanks to the ordinance, when people fill controlled substance prescriptions at Polk County pharmacies, the information will be entered into a database shared by other pharmacies and medication prescribers. Every pharmacy in Polk County will be required to participate in the program, but it will be optional for prescribers, Morris told the BH-FP last year. Greenways grant The Community Foundation of the Ozarks release said the organization also granted $19,000 to Ozark Greenways. The release said the Springfield-based Ozark Greenways will use its grant to stabilize the Coates Branch stream bank, which loses about a foot of bank per year to erosion, and to continue the work of the Rail Trail Preservation Project. Were all downstream from something, Ozark Greenways' John Montgomery said in the release. If we can fix this area, hopefully everyone farther downstream and upstream can benefit as well. About the grants PCHC and Ozark Greenways were two of 17 agencies selected to receive $250,000 in funding for work on poverty, health, education, community development and arts issues. The CFO received 101 proposals requesting $1.2 million in funding, the release said. These grants are made possible through the generosity of the late Julia Dorothy Coover, who worked for Commerce Bank for 30 years. She established the Louis L. and Julia Dorothy Coover Charitable Foundation in 1992 to honor her husbands memory. Since then, the Coover Charitable Foundation has awarded about $5.4 million in grants across the Ozarks. With this years distributions, the charitable foundation surpassed the $5 million milestone in grants and distributions since its first awards in 2002. It is our sincere pleasure to have helped the Coover fund give back to the community in excess of $5 million with this years round of distributions, Commerce Trust Vice President Jill Reynolds said in the release. We are elated to continue to assist these organizations that are all working so hard to benefit our communities in southern Missouri. Mrs. Coover would be so proud to see the impact she and her husband have made through their generous legacy. The Community Foundation of the Ozarks is a regional public charitable foundation that holds more than 3,000 funds for donors, nonprofit partners and 49 affiliate foundations, including the Bolivar Area Community Foundation. Founded in 1973, the CFO has made grants and distributions of more than $300 million and currently holds assets of more than $300 million, as of March 31, 2018. Officials have charged a woman with first degree murder in the shooting death of a Tennessee deputy. Erika Castro-Miles, 38, was said to have participated in the altercation that led to the eventual killing of 32-year-old Sgt. Daniel Baker. Authorities with the Dickson County Sheriff's office are still searching for Steven Wiggins in connection to the death. Erika Castro-Miles, 38, (left) was said to have participated in the altercation that led to the eventual killing of 32-year-old Sgt. Daniel Baker as Dickson County Sheriff's office shares they are still looking for Steve Wiggins (right) Officers received a call about a 'suspicious vehicle' on a local road and Baker responded, TBI spokeswoman Susan Niland explained to WATE. Baker was eventually found dead inside his patrol car two to three miles away from the scene. His GPS system was used to find his location after contact with Baker ceased. The deputy's family identified him as a father and husband who served in the Marines. Officers received a call about a 'suspicious vehicle' on a local road and Baker responded Baker was eventually found dead inside his patrol car two to three miles away from the scene. His GPS system was used to find his location after contact with Baker ceased He joined the department in 2008 and came from a family of officers - both his father and stepbrother worked for the Spring Hill Police Department. 'There's not much I can say today but our hearts are shattered,' Sheriff Jeff Bledsoe said. 'We just ask for your help.' He added that Baker was 'one of the best.' The deputy's family identified him as a father and husband who served in the Marines The husband and father of one joined the department in 2008 and came from a family of officers 'This is one of our best deputies. He's a supervisor. He's worked his way up to sergeant on patrol, and he's one of the ones why put it all on the line every day to keep our community safe. He was doing that again today with a call about a suspicious vehicle,' Bledsoe added. The TBI has stated that Wiggins is more than likely armed and dangerous. It is also unknown whether he has gained access to a vehicle. 'We don't know what's transpired since someone last saw him,' Niland said. The procession for Sgt. Baker that escorted his body to the Medical Examiner's office in Nashville 'This is one of our best deputies. He's a supervisor. He's worked his way up to sergeant on patrol, and he's one of the ones why put it all on the line every day to keep our community safe. He was doing that again today with a call about a suspicious vehicle,' said Sheriff Jeff Bledsoe Wiggins was wanted for aggravated assault and theft. The charges stem from a Tuesday domestic call police responded to in Kingston Springs. Wiggins was wanted in connection to a domestic abuse dispute on Tuesday in Kingston Springs A victim at the scene claimed that Wiggins slapped her face and pulled her hair. She claimed that he had a gun to her head and said that he was 'going to kill her if she called the police.' Wiggins was said to have taken the woman's car without her permission. He had 'been doing meth all night and smoking marijuana,' according to the victim. A Blue Alert was issued for the man described as being 6'1' and approximately 220lbs. Pictures show Wiggins has what appears to be Nazi tattoos. He has been arrested for domestic abuse or assault at least eight times in the last 12 years. A woman related to Wiggins has been taken into custody but her identity hasn't been released. 'It's my prayer to God that our court will be a terror to him and the punishment he will receive,' Sheriff Bledsoe said. A Blue Alert was issued for the man described as being 6'1' and approximately 220lbs Advertisement A park in north-east China welcomed 24 Siberian tiger cubs in the space of a month during mating season. Pictures taken at the Shenyang Guaipo Siberian Tiger Park on Tuesday show the adorable tiger cubs curiously staring at the camera, with some frolicking with their siblings. These rare tiger cubs are ready for their public debut on International Children's Day, which falls on June 1. Shenyang Guaipo Siberian Tiger Park in Liaoning province, north-east China welcomed 24 Siberian tiger cubs in a month during the species' mating season. These rare tiger cubs are ready for their public debut on International Children's Day Cute as they are, the tiny rare tigers are expected to boost the population of the endangered animal species in China Cute as they are, the tiny tigers are expected to boost the population of the endangered animal species in China. 'The mother tigers are very protective of their cubs - they are almost inseparable,' Tiger Park spokesman Liu Changcheng told Chinese Business Morning News. 'Even the zoo keepers have trouble getting close to the cubs without alarming the tigresses,' he said. The tigers in the park has entered mating season since late April. As of now, eight tigresses have given birth to 24 purebred Siberian cubs. Among the eight mothers, six of them are new mothers. Pictures taken at the Shenyang Guaipo Siberian Tiger Park show the adorable tiger cubs frolicking with their siblings Tigers engage in polyandry where each female mates with multiple males, implying that breeders won't know who the father is until DNA tests are done on the cubs. This is usually done when the little tigers are three to six months old Siberian tigers are recorded as the world's largest cats. It is one of the world's most endangered species, with less than 500 of them in the wild. These big cats have been facing unrelenting pressures from poaching, retaliatory killings and habitat loss The new mothers are having some difficulty nursing the cubs on their own and require assistance from the breeders, Mr Liu said. The 21 cubs born to the new mothers are divided into four groups and placed into wooden boxes. The rest are allowed to be next to their mothers. After a gestation period of 16 weeks (about 3.5 months), a tiger gives birth to a live litter, usually comprising two to four cubs. In April, an 11-year-old Siberian tigress gave birth to quintuplets in a breeding centre in Hailin City in Heilongjiang province, making it a rare occasion. To ensure the cubs are purebred, the adult tigers in the park are strictly separated to avoid inter-breeding possibilities. The 21 cubs born to the six new mothers are divided into four groups and placed into wooden boxes After a gestation period of 16 weeks (about 3.5 months), a tiger gives birth to a live litter, usually comprising two to four cubs To ensure the cubs are purebred, the adult tigers in the park are strictly separated to avoid inter-breeding possibilities Tigers engage in polyandry where each female mates with multiple males, implying that breeders won't know who the father is until DNA tests are done on the cubs. This is usually done when they are three to six months old. Siberian tigers, also known as Amur Tigers, are recorded as the world's largest cats. It is one of the world's most endangered species, with less than 500 of them in the wild. These big rare cats have been facing unrelenting pressures from poaching, retaliatory killings and habitat loss, driving them to the brink of extinction, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature. They are known to reach up to 20 years of age in the wild and range across Siberia in Russia and in China's northeast region. A plane flying from China to Vietnam turned back after an hour into the journey to make an emergency landing on Tuesday. It was reported that the Beijing Capital Airlines flight was forced to turn back after cracks appeared in the cockpit windshield, according to passengers on the flight. This comes two weeks after another Chinese airlines's cockpit window broke mid-flight, forcing it to make an emergency landing. The co-pilot suffered minor injuries after being sucked out the window. A plane flying from China to Vietnam turned back to make an emergency landing on Tuesday. Passengers were put on an alternative flight (pictured), which took off at 11:35pm Photos of the crowded Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport on Tuesday shows angry passengers demanding an explanation at the Beijing Capital Airlines counter However, the airline has refuted these claims, saying it was a passenger window that cracked and calling it a 'general mechanical failure', according to state broadcaster CCTV. Flight JD421 bound for Nha Trang in southern Vietnam returned to the eastern city of Hangzhou around an hour after take-off on Tuesday, the official Xinhua news agency said. It departed Hangzhou at 3:45pm after a two-hour delay and landed back at the airport at 5:25pm. There were 211 people on board. So far, there are no injuries reported. The aircraft was an Airbus A321, according to plane tracking website FlightAware. Some passengers claimed on Weibo that the plane had a broken windshield. There were 211 people on board flight JD421. So far, there are no injuries reported. Passengers were put on an alternative flight (pictured), which took off at 11:35pm on the same day Several disgruntled passengers refused to board an alternative flight because they considered the compensation too low and were upset that the airline did not offer an apology But an explanatory note given to passengers with the airline's official seal, which is being circulated on social media, only said the flight was cancelled due to 'mechanical failure'. A Beijing Capital Airlines spokesperson added that it was a passenger window that cracked, referring it as a 'general mechanical failure', according to CCTV. 'After an hour of flight, the plane suddenly jolted violently,' a passenger surnamed Zheng told Qianjiang Evening News. 'An in-flight announcement said the plane was encountering turbulence. I have been on a lot of flights and I had never witnessed such strong turbulence. Many of the children in the cabin were scared and crying.' Passengers were given 400 yuan (47) in compensation, the report said. Several disgruntled passengers refused to board an alternative flight because they considered the compensation too low and were upset that the airline did not offer an apology. Video footage of the crowded Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport shows angry passengers demanding an explanation at the Beijing Capital Airlines counter. The alternative flight took off at 11:35pm on the same day. This was the third window-related incident on a plane since April. Separate incident: A Sichuan Airlines plane carrying 128 people made an emergency landing in south-west China on May 14 after a cockpit window broke at 32,000 feet Cockpit's temperature dropped to minus 40 degrees Celsius and things floated, said captain Passengers were told to put on oxygen masks after the plane sent out emergency code 7700 A Sichuan Airlines plane carrying 128 people made an emergency landing in southwest China on May 14 after a cockpit window broke at 32,000 feet, sucking the co-pilot partly out of the aircraft. The pilot was hailed a 'hero' for safely landing the flight. Only two people were injured in the incdient. In April, a woman died after being partially sucked out of a Southwest Airlines flight headed to Dallas from New York when a porthole was shattered mid-flight. Flying shrapnel from an engine explosion broke a window in the Boeing 737 flight with 144 passengers, which was safely landed by the pilot. 'Flippy' the one-armed robot chef has got its job back at a grill station just months after being 'fired' for being unable to work with humans. The one-armed robot chef has been re-tooled and is now flipping 300 burgers a day, seven days a week at Caliburger in Pasadena, California, its developers say. It ran into problems in March after being unable to work in sync with its human colleagues and continuously placing cooked burgers on the wrong trays. Scroll down for video The artificial intelligence-driven robot is said to 'cook the perfect burger, every time.' Called Flippy, the machine is fitted with a 6-axis robotic arm, which it uses to flip burgers. Pictured is an older model of the robot, which used a claw instead of a spatula The robot also attracted so much national interest that the CaliBurger was struggling to keep up with the crowds. David Zito from Miso Robotics says he has got the robot to work better, although it still requires human help to work properly. He says staff were initially not given training on how to work with Flippy and it was also struggling to see. 'Now he moves like a ninja and is more reliable', CEO Mr Zito told USA today. 'Now he sees better,' he said. Its creators hope to bring Flippy to 50 other CaliBurger locations across the US, including Seattle, Washington, DC and Annapolis, Maryland. The main challenge for Flippy before it got fired in March was working with its human colleagues. 'Mostly it's the timing,' Anthony Lomelino, chief technology officer for CaliBurger's parent company, Cali Group, told USA Today at the time. 'When you're in the back, working with people, you talk to each other.' Flippy the burger-flipping robot was developed by Miso Robotics and uses artificial intelligence to flip burgers on a grill. It then places the patties on a rack when they're done The one-armed robot chef has been re-tooled and is now flipping 300 burgers a day, seven days a week at Caliburger in Pasadena, California HOW DOES THE 'FLIPPY' BURGER BOT WORK? Flippy is an artificial intelligence-driven robot that can flip burgers on a grill and then place them on a bung once they are done cooking. It is designed with a 6-axis robotic arm and cameras and sensors to see its environment. The robots arm is fitted with a spatula tool, allowing it to slide under the patty on the grill and flip it over. Flippy also alerts human workers when it is time to add the cheese or other toppings. Its software lets it distinguish between different meats on the grill and when they are done cooking. Advertisement 'With Flippy, you kind of need to work around his schedule.' 'Choreographing movements of what you do, when and how you do it,' he added. The firm had said previously that Flippy could cook as many as 2,000 burgers a day. Flippy is likely to raise concerns among those who fear we're all doomed to have our jobs replaced by robots. But fortunately it does require some human assistance in order to get started. Before Flippy begins flipping burgers, a human places raw meat patties on the grill. Flippy's creators argue that the robot will bring some consistency to an industry that grapples with high turnover rates. Caliburger has a six-month exclusive period with the $60,000 (45,000) robots before other chains are allowed to purchase them. It was originally expected that Flippy would be hired in the 50 CaliBurger locations for 2019, but a large round of funding made it possible to move up the start date. In July, Miso Robotics received $3.1 million (2.3 million) in funding from strategic investors, including Acacia Research and Match Robotics VC. 'While the biggest companies in the world are focused on using computer vision and artificial intelligence to drive cars and manage the home, Cali Group will facilitate and lead the adoption of these emerging technologies in the restaurant and retail industries,' said John Miller, Chairman and CEO of Cali Group, at the time of the funding announcement. Being pitch perfect, like Mariah Carey or Mozart, is a skill only 1 in 10,000 people are blessed with. It describes being able to identify the pitch of a note without any other note to act as a reference. If the skill doesn't develop in childhood, then it won't develop at all, it has long been claimed. But now scientists have overturned decades of research to claim that some adults can be trained to be pitch perfect in just a matter of weeks. Scroll down for video Perfect pitch, also known as absolute pitch, is the ability to recognise and replicate any given pitch and is a rare talent that few possess. Mozart, Beethoven and Mariah Carey (pictured) are all believed to have been blessed with this auditory gift (file photo) Musician Rick Beato told New Scientist: '[Being pitch perfect] is a tremendous advantage.' Postdoctoral scholar Stephen Van Hedger at the University of Chicago is an auditory psychology expert who happens to be blessed with perfect pitch. Dr Van Hedger and his colleagues took six untrained people and attempted to teach them perfect pitch. The participants embarked on an eight-week long programme that involved four hours a week of listening to musical notes and trying to identify them. In the first, four-week phase of the study, the six participants were told which note they were listening for (e.g 'C') and heard a sung version. Afterwards, they were then played 16 notes from a piano, played 2.25 seconds apart. Four out of the 16 (25 per cent) were the target note, while the other 12 were non-target notes. If they thought the note was the correct one they would hit a button as soon as possible. For the second phase of the study, the participants had less time to react (1.75 seconds) and were subjected to notes from a variety of instruments, including a piano, flute and a guitar. Two of the people in the study made vast improvements over the course of the training. Initially scoring less than 40 per cent on the tests, these two people were scoring 98 per cent or higher by the end of the programme. Scientists believe that adults may be able to develop the skill of perfect pitch, much like famed composers from the 18th century Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (left) and Ludwig van Beethoven (right) One of them even scored a perfect 100 per cent by the end of the training. 'He passed the strongest test we could throw at him,' says Dr Van Hedger. The research was published in pre-print site bioRxiv and has yet to be peer-reviewed and some other experts in the field are cynical of the findings. Seung-Goo Kim, of Cambridge University, notes that the two participants who made drastic improvements had music lessons as children. 'This study shows that absolute pitch can be refined in some adults by training if they already have 'latent' absolute pitch,' he said. Mr Beato's son, Dylan, has perfect pitch and he too, is dubious of the findings. Mr Beato claims that he has never seen anyone develop perfect pitch as an adult. HOW DOES THE HUMAN BRAIN DETECT PITCH? Changes in vocal pitch, part of what linguists call 'speech prosody', are almost as fundamental to human communication as melody is to music. In tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese, pitch changes can completely alter a word's meaning But even in a non-tonal language like English, differences in pitch can significantly change the meaning of a spoken sentence. The brain's ability to interpret these changes in tone on the fly is remarkable given that each speaker has their own typical vocal pitch and style - some have low voices and others high. The brain must track and interpret these pitch changes while simultaneously parsing which consonants and vowels are being uttered, what words they form, and how they combine into phrases and sentences - within a millisecond. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, found the brain cells responsible by studying ten patients suffering from epilepsy in 2017. These cells are located in a small area known as the superior temporal gyrus (STG). As the pitch of the sentence goes high, neural activity increased. What this research showed is that there are specific regions and select cells which can detect differences in pitch. Some neurons distinguish between sounds speakers based on differences in their average vocal pitch range. As well as pitch, the human brain also has different regions which help determine between sounds. Some neurons pick up fundamental differences in sounds of words - for example, 'reindeer' sounds different from 'lawyers' no matter who is talking. Yet another group of neurons distinguish between different intonation patterns. This animation highlights pitch-sensing cells in a small brain area known as the superior temporal gyrus (STG). As the pitch of the sentence goes high (red), neural activity in certain areas increased (credit: Carla Schaffer / AAAS) Advertisement In a similar field of reasoning to Dr Kim, he believes the two people that showed marked improvement probably had the ability without realising. Psyche Loui, of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, studies musical perception and also has absolute pitch. She thinks the success may be down to a slight flaw in the method of the study,potentially giving away clues and therefore testing for relative pitch and not absolute pitch. Although it is a definite advantage for musicians, having perfect pitch does not always result in musical prowess. Dr Van Hedger was found to have perfect pitch around the age of eight but says he is 'a poor musician'. There may be a strange reason why we haven't been able to track down aliens despite the vast size of the universe. A theoretical physicist believes its because 'alien killer robots may have destroyed every extraterrestrial civilisation' in the cosmos. Alexander Berezin of the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia came up with bizarre theory to explain something known as the 'Fermi paradox'. This paradox describes the contradiction between the likelihood that alien life is present somewhere in the vastness of the universe, and the lack of any evidence to prove its existence. Scroll down for video According to one scientist, any civilisation that is capable of colonising beyond its own planet 'necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion' (Stock Image) The Fermi Paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, has perplexed scientists for decades. But Professor Berezin suggests it occurs because advanced civilizations will destroy other lifeforms with their technology. He believes any civilisations of biological organisms like ourselves or rogue AIs that rebelled against their creators which tries to colonise other planets will inevitably destroy every species in its way. Berezin has published a paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, which describes his so-called first in, last out solution to the Fermi Paradox. He writes: I am not suggesting that a highly developed civilization would consciously wipe out other lifeforms. Most likely, they simply wont notice, the same way a construction crew demolishes an anthill to build real estate because they lack incentive to protect it. WHAT IS THE FERMI PARADOX? The Fermi Paradox questions why, given the estimated 200bn-400bn stars and at least 100bn planets in our galaxy, there have been no signs of alien life. The contradiction is named after its creator, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. He first posed the question back in 1950. Fermi believed it was too extraordinary that a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has yet to be detected in the universe despite its immense vastness. Fermi concluded there must a barrier that limits the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced space-colonising civilisations. This barrier is sometimes referred to as the 'Great Filter'. Italian physicist Enrico Fermi devised the so-called Fermi Paradox in the 1950s. It explores why there is no sign of alien life, despite the 100 billions planets in our galaxy If the main obstacle preventing the colonisation of other planets is not in our past, then the barrier that will stop humanity's prospects of reaching other worlds must lie in our future, scientists have theorised. Professor Brian Cox believes the advances in science and engineering required by a civilisation to start conquering the stars ultimately lead to its destruction. He said: ' One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that. It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.' Other possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox include that no other intelligent species have arisen in the universe, intelligent alien species are out there but lack the necessary technology to communicate with Earth. Some believe that the distances between intelligent civilsations are too great to allow any kind of two-way communication. If two worlds are separated by several thousand light-years, it's possible that one or both civilisation will be extinct before a dialogue can be established. The so-called Zoo hypothesis claims intelligent alien life is out there, but deliberately avoids any contact with life on Earth to allow its natural evolution. Advertisement If humanity achieves interstellar travel and begins colonising any of the estimated 100 billion planets in our galaxy alone, it will eradicate all competition to fuel its own expansion. But if humanity doesnt achieve this advanced level of space travel, it is doomed to be eradicated by aliens or extraterrestrial AI-powered computers as they expand their civilisation. Berezin warns: The incentive to grab all available resources is strong, and it only takes one bad actor to ruin the equilibrium, with no possibility to prevent them from appearing at interstellar scale One rogue AI can potentially populate the entire supercluster with copies of itself, turning every solar system into a supercomputer, and there is no use asking why it would do that. All that matters is that it can. A.A. Berezin cautions that rogue AIs that rebelled against their creators could pose a threat to humanity if it does not begin colonising the stars first (Stock Image) According to the paper, the only way for humanity to avoid destruction from a superior extraterrestrial race is to become the first to conquer the stars. The latest solution to the Fermi Paradox is one of a multitude of possible explanations. Professor Brian Cox believes the advances in science and engineering required by any civilisation to start conquering the universe will ultimately lead to the destruction of the lifeform itself. Speaking to The Times, Professor Cox said: One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that. It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.' Some believe that the distances between intelligent civilsations are too great to allow any kind of two-way communication. If two worlds are separated by several thousand light-years, it's possible that one or both civilisation will be extinct before a dialogue can be established. The so-called Zoo hypothesis claims intelligent alien life is out there, but deliberately avoids any contact with life on Earth to allow its natural evolution. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has poked fun at Mark Zuckerberg's habit of stealing his company's ideas. From face filters to Stories and an in-app camera, it seems there's nothing Facebook has not copied - almost exactly - from Snapchat. Now, Spiegel has encouraged Zuckerberg to 'copy our data protection practices also' in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In an interview this week, Spiegel also insisted that plagiarising Snapchat's ideas would not give Facebook an edge in the ongoing war between the two companies. Scroll down for video Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has poked fun at Mark Zuckerberg's habit of stealing his company's ideas. He has encouraged Zuckerberg to 'copy our data protection practices also' in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal 'Snapchat is not just a bunch of features, it has an underlying philosophy that really runs counter to traditional social media,' Spiegel told an audience Tuesday at Recode's annual Code Conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California. 'I think that's why traditional social media feels threatened. Because fundamentally people realise that competing with their friends for 'Likes' and attention is kind of unpleasant and really not that great.' Interviewer Kara Swisher asked Spiegel what he thought about Facebook copying some of Snapchat's key features, such as 24-hour Stories and virtual reality lenses. He responded: 'We would really appreciate it if they copied our data protection practices also', adding that Facebook's copycatting 'bothers my wife more than it bothers me.' The Snapchat CEO added: 'If you can create something that is so beautiful and simple that the only thing other people can do is copy it exactly, that is the most fantastic feeling. 'It is the most fantastic thing in the entire world.' Spiegel suggested Facebook did not adequately overhaul its privacy protections following its recent data scandal in which the information of millions of users was leaked to the political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica. Spiegel made the comments during a talk at Recode's annual Code Conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California WHAT IS THE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA SCANDAL? Communications firm Cambridge Analytica has offices in London, New York, Washington, as well as Brazil and Malaysia. The company boasts it can 'find your voters and move them to action' through data-driven campaigns and a team that includes data scientists and behavioural psychologists. 'Within the United States alone, we have played a pivotal role in winning presidential races as well as congressional and state elections,' with data on more than 230 million American voters, Cambridge Analytica claims on its website. The company profited from a feature that meant apps could ask for permission to access your own data as well as the data of all your Facebook friends. The data firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix (pictured), after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that Cambridge Analytica had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump This meant the company was able to mine the information of 87 million Facebook users even though just 270,000 people gave them permission to do so. This was designed to help them create software that can predict and influence voters' choices at the ballot box. The data firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that Cambridge Analytica had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump. This information is said to have been used to help the Brexit campaign in the UK. Advertisement The company profited from a now-defunct feature that meant apps could ask for permission to access your own data as well as the data of all your Facebook friends. This meant the company was able to mine the information of 87 million Facebook users even though just 270,000 people gave them permission to do so. Following the scandal Facebook made its privacy settings more accessible and provided clearer explanations about how its data tools are used. It also added a new bulk app removal tool that allowed people to cleanse their profiles of unwanted third parties spying on their data. But according to Spiegel, Facebook did not do enough. 'Fundamentally, I think the changes have to go beyond window dressing to real changes to the ways that these platforms work,' the Snapchat founder said Tuesday. Snapchat's own data policy is far more open. 'At Snap, we make your privacy a priority. We know your trust is earned every time you use Snapchat, or any of our other products thats why we treat your information differently than most other tech companies,' the company says. 'We dont stockpile your private messages and we dont publicly showcase a timeline of everything youve ever posted. Snapchats designed so that people can only see the things you want to share, for as long as you want to share them. 'We believe this makes Snapchat feel less like a permanent record and more like a conversation with friends.' Facebook has built a reputation for stealing Snapchat's most popular features. HOW HAS FACEBOOK COPIED SNAPCHAT OVER THE YEARS? March 2016 - Filters One of the first signs Facebook was copying Snapchat was in March 2016 when it bought MSQRD, an app that overlays silly live filters to your selfies. The app lets users apply filters to their faces - similar to Snapchat 'Lens' filters. One of the first signs Facebook was copying Snapchat was in March 2016 when it bought MSQRD, an app that overlays silly live filters to your selfies. The app lets users apply filters to their faces (pictured right) - similar to Snapchat 'Lens' filters (pictured left) April 2016 - QR codes In April of last year, Facebook added QR codes to profiles in Messenger. Snapchat uses QR codes to allow people to add other users without having to search. December 2016 - Location-based filters and in-app camera Facebook introduced custom location-based camera filters that overlay pictures and videos similar to Snapchat's 'geo-filters'. Users build 'frames' on any design platform, submit them to Facebook and then friends nearby will have access to the creations. In the same month, a 'Messenger Camera' was designed to make it quicker to capture and share photos and videos without having to dip out of a conversations - a feature that already existed on Snapchat. In December, Facebook introduced custom location-based camera filters (pictured right) that overlay pictures and videos similar to Snapchat's 'geo-filters' (pictured left) March 2017 - Stories In March, Facebook introduced Facebook Stories along with two other new Snapchat-like features - Facebook Camera and Direct. Facebook Stories highlights decorative content in a horizontal layout over News Feed that disappears in 24 hours - just like Snapchat Stories. Facebook Stories (pictured right) highlights decorative content in a horizontal layout over News Feed that disappears in 24 hours - just like Snapchat Stories (pictured left) The section in the app called 'Direct' appears to be very similar to Snapchat's feed for one-to-one group messaging. The update encourages users to use Facebook's camera feature and also lets them put friends' stories at the top of their News Feed. In the same month it also introduced 'Messenger Day', which lets user share photos and videos with illustrated filters and stickers that vanish in 24 hours - just like Snapchat Stories. November 2017 - Streaks In November, Facebook copied Snapchat by testing a new feature that encourages friends to send messages back and forth for consecutive days. Like 'Snapstreaks' on Snapchat, Facebook Messenger 'Streaks' have emoji next to the name of anyone who users are regularly messaging. According to Facebook, this will encourage users to 'keep your streak going'. In March, Facebook introduced 'Messenger Day', which lets user share photos and videos with illustrated filters and stickers that vanish in 24 hours - just like Snapchat Stories January 2018 - Screenshots In January, Instagram, the Facebook-owned app, began testing a feature that lets your followers know if you've taken a sneaky screenshot of their Story. The Snapchat-inspired feature is expected to launch on the picture-sharing platform soon and is currently being trialled in Japan. May 2018 - Bitmoji As with Filters, Snaps, and Stories, Facebook revealed it is duplicating the Bitmoji feature used on Snapchat. Within the code of Facebook's Android app, developers have found an unreleased functionality that lets users 'build personalized, illustrated versions of themselves for use as stickers in Messenger and comments.' Advertisement Earlier this month the company revealed it is duplicating the Bitmoji feature used on Snapchat - adding to its copied versions of Snapchat's Filters, Snaps, and Stories. According to Spiegel, Facebook - which he refused to explicitly name during the interview - cannot win its battle with Snapchat by taking his company's ideas. He said that Facebook's values are fundamentally different to Snapchat's, meaning the photo-sharing app will always have an edge. 'At Snapchat it's all about building deeper relationships with the people that you're close to,' he said. At Facebook, 'they are having a really hard time changing the DNA of their company. The 27-year-old encouraged Mark Zuckerberg to 'copy our data protection practices also' as he revealed he's flattered Facebook has pinched some of Snapchat's features 'And the DNA of their company is all about having people compete with each other online for attention. Snap 'has a mission that runs counter to traditional social media. Our values are hard to copy.' The company has always had a different approach to privacy than most social media platforms. It was founded on the principle that all snaps and later chats between users were deleted from its servers immediately after they were sent. Snapchat does not collect data about its users' interests, or where they spend time outside of the app. Spiegel continued: 'It's important to point out that there wasn't any Russian manipulation of Snapchat. 'That there are alternatives and that the way you treat user privacy is really important. 'And for us, that goes back to when we were in my dorm room... We cared about data retention. 'It's taken seven years for people in the technology industry to look at what we've done, getting rid of personal information rather than storing it, hoarding it forever, and saying: "Hey, that actually makes sense".' Flooding really was worse in the old days, according to a new study. The number of deaths and financial losses in Europe thanks to severe rainfall has dropped since the 1950s. Researchers found that the number of catastrophic floods each year during this period has remained constant despite the devastating effects of climate change. They suggest improving survival rates and lower flood costs are likely a result of people moving from the countryside to the cities where they are better protected. Modern houses are also more sturdily built than those of the '50s and flood defences have improved significantly over the past seventy years, they said. Scroll down for video The number of deaths and financial losses in Europe thanks to severe rainfall has dropped since the 1950s, according to a new study. In this image children stand over Putney Embankment in London following a flooding of the River Thames in 1958 Scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands undertook the first comprehensive study of historical European flood records. They examined 1,564 flooding events between 1870 and 2016 and analysed their impact on life and finances. While the numbers of floods has risen over the last 150 years, the deaths they have caused across Europe has dropped by five per cent a year for the past six decades. The financial toll of these events has declined by almost three per cent a year since the 1950s, researchers found. They said that improvements to rural housing and increasing migration into urban areas have helped to boost survival rates. The invention of the helicopter and internal combustion engine have also made it easier to evacuate people during devastating weather events. Researchers found that the number of catastrophic floods each year during this period has remained constant despite the devastating effects of climate change. Pictured is flooding in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in January 2018 Study lead author Dominik Paprotny told MailOnline: 'The drop in fatalities can be attributed to better awareness, like the development of weather forecasting and early warning systems. 'More possibility of evacuation and rescue due to technological progress in transport and communications as well as establishment of emergency services and flood-management institutions is also a factor. 'Finally, better housing: The deadliest floods occurred mostly in rural areas in times when houses where often wooden or otherwise not sturdy. Scientists suggest improving survival rates and lower flood costs are likely a result of people moving from the countryside to the cities where they are better protected. Pictured is a cat marooned on a bench after a flood in the Severn Valley in 1958 'In case of financial value of losses, population and assets have become increasingly concentrated in cities, which are usually better protected than rural areas.' An Oxfordshire fire and Rescue vehicle drives through the rising flood waters of the River Thames in 2012 To create their map, researchers combined data on devastating floods over the last 150 years with how riches and the population had been distributed across 37 European nations over the same period. Researchers spotted that while there were three bad floods in the late 19th century, this number increased to more than 20 in the early 21st. But most mid-sized floods before 1950 were under-reported, meaning the statistics were distorted. When they adjusted for this, they found that extreme flooding actually decreased during the 20th century, despite global warming. Mr Paprotny said: 'Most of the increase in the number of floods or their consequences is an impression caused by the incompleteness of information on flood losses beyond the most recent decades. 'The further we go into the past, the less complete is the data on floods, especially smaller ones.' He added that global warming has increased some flooding risk factors but reduced others, such as sudden thaws. When the wintry chill sets into the air, nothing quite beats the warmth of snuggling up to a loved one or, in the case of Moroccos wild Barbary macaques, many loved ones. Researchers have found that monkeys with a larger number of social partners have a better shot at surviving the winter, as the groups are able to form huge huddles to keep warm. The technique, called thermoregulation, leaves the monkeys less exposed to environmental stresses, allowing them to save more energy for growth and reproduction. Researchers have found that monkeys with a larger number of social partners have a better shot at surviving the winter, as the groups are able to form huge huddles to keep warm In several species, research has found that the most sociable individuals within a group tend to experience greater survival, longevity, reproductive output, and offspring survival, says Dr Bonaventura Majolo, a behavioural ecologist based in the School of Psychology at the University of Lincoln. We know from previous studies of a number of different species that forming social bonds positively affects survival and reproduction, but exactly how this happens was not clear.' According to the researchers, this study is the first to show how the social bonding associated with huddling ties into the animals fitness. The team observed the grooming behaviour and hierarchy of two wild groups in Morocco, observing their habits during the day and their preparations for night. Barbary macaques were an ideal species to examine because of the varying social relationships they have with their group companions, and the extreme weather conditions they experience, such a cold and snowy winters, and hot and dry summers,' Majolo says. We found that monkeys which were more sociable would huddle together during winter nights with their social partners, and that this led to the formation of larger huddles when it rained or the temperature dropped. The study showed that monkeys who spent more time grooming together were more likely to huddle. And, when there was precipitation or especially low temperatures, they gathered in much larger groups. According to the researchers, this study is the first to show how the social bonding associated with huddling ties into the animals fitness. The team observed the grooming behaviour and hierarchy of two wild groups in Morocco DO MONKEYS RECOGNIZE FAMILIAR FACES? Researchers have long thought that being able to recognize faces is innate in humans and other primates, and that something in our brains just knows how to do this from birth. By 200 days of age, macaques form clusters of neurons responsible for recognizing faces in the superior temporal sulcus (red) But a new brain imaging study suggests otherwise - macaques need to have been exposed to faces from a young age to be able to recognize faces. To better understand the basis for facial recognition, Harvard Medical School researchers raised two groups of macaques. The first one, the control group, had a typical upbringing, spending time in early infancy with their mothers and then with other juvenile macaques and human handlers. The other groups of macaques grew up raised by humans who bottle-fed them, played with and cuddles them - while the humans worse welding masks. This group of macaques didn't see a face for the first year of their lives - human or otherwise. Researchers have long thought that being able to recognize faces is innate in humans and other primates, and that something in our brains just knows how to do this from birth. But a new brain imaging study suggests otherwise After they were raised in this way, both groups of macaques were put in social groups with fellow macaques and allowed to see both human and primate faces. When both groups of macaques were 200 days old, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at brain images measuring the presence of facial recognition patches and other specialized areas, including those responsible for recognizing hands, objects, scenes and bodies. The macaques who were raised seeing faces had consistent 'recognition' areas in their brains for each of the categories, but those who grew up never seeing faces had developed areas of the brain associated with all categories except faces. Advertisement Social thermoregulation through huddling, communal nesting or communal roosting, is a very widespread behaviour across a range of species and this could therefore be a very widespread mechanism linking sociality with an evolutionary advantage, said Liz Campbell, Programme Director at the Moroccan Primate Conservation Foundation. In the ecological conditions of our study where Barbary macaques experience severe winter energy deficits, the benefits provided by social thermoregulation can explain why more social monkeys are more likely to survive winter. In less extreme climates, more effective social thermoregulation could allow greater energetic investment in growth and reproduction, contributing to the greater longevity, reproductive output, and offspring survival experienced by more social individuals in other species. Facebook's chief operating officer has rejected Apple CEO Tim Cook's characterization of how the social media giant handled the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Cook made some fiery comments last month about Facebook's massive privacy row, saying he wouldn't be caught up in such a situation, while touting Apple's commitment to protecting user data. But Sandberg isn't letting Cook have the last laugh, as she said she and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg 'strongly disagree' with Cook's view of the situation. Scroll down for video Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (pictured) isn't letting Cook have the last laugh, as she said she and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg 'strongly disagree' with Cook's view of the situation 'It won't shock you to know that Mark and I strongly disagree with their characterization of our product,' Sandberg said at Recode's Code Conference in California. 'We're proud of the business model we built. We have an ad supported business that allows people all around the world to use a product for free. 'If you're trying to connect the world, that's pretty important. So we respectfully disagree,' Sandberg said. She tempered her comments by saying the 'stuff Apple's saying is important to them,' and that Cook clearly feels strong about Apple's products. But Facebook's CTO Mike Schroepfer gave a much more candid assessment of what Cook said one month earlier. 'I think the thing that I wish we could spend more time on is the substance of these issues,' Shroepfer said at the Code Conference. Apple CEO Tim Cook made some fiery comments about Facebook's privacy row, saying he wouldn't be caught up in such a situation, while touting how Apple protects user data Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently also disagreed with Tim Cook's comments about how the firm handled the Cambridge Analytica scandal, COO Sheryl Sandberg said 'There's times when you can get nice quippy soundbites and kick someone when it's popular and they're down and that's us right now' 'And I get it, we do in many ways deserve it,' he added. The comments come after Cook criticized Facebook for how it reacted to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. When asked what he would do if he were in Zuckerberg's shoes, Cook replied with a smirk: 'I wouldn't be in this situation.' He also criticized Facebook's well-documented data collection techniques, which involve scraping vast amounts of personal user information, using it to build detailed user profiles and selling them to advertisers. 'We could make a ton of money if we monetized our customers,' Cook explained. 'If our customers were our product. We've elected not to do that.' There has been talk of Facebook rolling out a subscription-based product that would require users to pay to avoid advertisements in the wake of its Cambridge Analytica scandal WHAT IS THE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA SCANDAL? Communications firm Cambridge Analytica has offices in London, New York, Washington, as well as Brazil and Malaysia. The company boasts it can 'find your voters and move them to action' through data-driven campaigns and a team that includes data scientists and behavioural psychologists. 'Within the United States alone, we have played a pivotal role in winning presidential races as well as congressional and state elections,' with data on more than 230 million American voters, Cambridge Analytica claims on its website. The company profited from a feature that meant apps could ask for permission to access your own data as well as the data of all your Facebook friends. The data firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix (pictured), after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that Cambridge Analytica had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump This meant the company was able to mine the information of 87 million Facebook users even though just 270,000 people gave them permission to do so. This was designed to help them create software that can predict and influence voters' choices at the ballot box. The data firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that Cambridge Analytica had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump. This information is said to have been used to help the Brexit campaign in the UK. Advertisement 'We're not going to traffic in your personal life,' Cook said. 'Privacy to us is a human right, a civil liberty,' he added. Cook also said Facebook is beyond the point of being able to regulate itself and may require government oversight to get the platform under control. However, Schroepfer said he believes there are 'tradeoffs' when a site provides a free service and that that often goes unrecognized. 'How do you build a product the whole world can use?,' Schroepfer continued. 'Can every consumer afford a $10 subscription or a $700 device? For billions of people around the world, no, not yet. 'So I think there are trade-offs,' he said. HOW TO CHECK IF YOUR DATA WAS SHARED WITH CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA All 2.2 billion Facebook users began to receive a notification automatically at the top their newsfeed after it was launched on Tuesday, April 10, a day later than expected. Titled 'Protecting Your Information,' it contains a link to let you see what apps you use and what information you have shared with them. Affected users are automatically presented with a notice that says: 'We have banned the website "This Is Your Digital Life," which one of your friends used Facebook to log into. 'We did this because the website may have misused some of your Facebook information by sharing it with a company called Cambridge Analytica.' Users can then click on a 'See how you're affected' button to find out more as well as to remove permission for apps and websites you've logged into via Facebook to have access to your profile. For those not affected by the Cambridge Analytica incident the message reads: 'You can go to the Apps and Websites section of your settings anytime to see the apps and websites you've used Facebook to log into.' The 'Go to apps and websites' button will provide quick access to review and amend these permissions. A separate 'How can I tell if my info was shared with Cambridge Analytica?' tool will also resolve the question for you. To manually access this tool, click the link here. Users not believed to be affected will see the message 'Based on our available records, neither you nor your friends logged into "This Is Your Digital Life." 'As a result, it doesn't appear your Facebook information was shared with Cambridge Analytica by "This Is Your Digital Life".' Affected users will see a different message and they will be asked to to change their app settings, available here. This is something that is still advisable for the security conscious, removing permissions for apps you no longer need or don't recognise. Facebook is not notifying individual users of the identify of friends who may have used the 'This Is Your Digital Life' app. Advertisement There has been talk of Facebook rolling out a subscription-based product that would require users to pay up each month in order to avoid being served targeted advertisements. Facebook collects mountains of data on users, ranging from phone numbers and text messages, to addresses and other demographic information, down to your specific interests. That information is then made available to a wide network of brands who can use it to serve up targeted advertisements both on and off Facebook. These practices have come under scrutiny in recent months after it was revealed in March that 87 million users' data had been harvested without their knowledge and shared with Trump-affiliated research firm Cambridge Analytica. Sandberg gave few details about whether a paid product is in the works and only suggested Facebook is looking at the idea. 'We've looked at a paid service,' Sandberg explained. 'We're looking, we've always looked. But the heart of the product is a paid service'. Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2018 8:01 pm Change is in the air for Missouris Capitol, and Polk County itself, as Gov. Eric Greitens announced his upcoming resignation during a press conference Tuesday afternoon. As a result, Polk County's own Mike Parson, Missouris current lieutenant governor, is set to become the state's next governor. In a statement released Tuesday evening, Parson said with Governor Greitens decision to resign from office, he has put the best interests of our state and all Missourians at the forefront where they belong. This is a decision that will allow our state to heal and move forward from what has been a difficult time, Parsons statement said. This is an enormous responsibility serving as our states next governor, and I am ready to fulfill the duties of the office with honor and integrity, and with a steadfast commitment to making our great state even greater for the people we are entrusted to serve. Parson is the first Missouri governor to call Polk County home. As lieutenant governor, he was the first statewide official to be elected out of the county since 1928, when Charles U. Becker won his third term as secretary of state. Parson was previously the Polk County sheriff, state representative for the 128th district (2005-2011) and state senator for the 28th district (2011-2017). In his press conference Tuesday, May 29, Greitens, whose resignation is effective Friday, June 1, said the last few months have been incredibly difficult for me, for my family, for my team, for my friends, and many, many people that I love. Indirectly referencing his recent legal battles, Greitens said this ordeal has been designed to cause an incredible amount of strain on my family through millions of dollars of mounting legal bills, endless personal attacks, designed to cause maximum damage to family and friends. Its clear that for the forces that oppose us, there is no end in sight, Greitens said. I cannot allow those forces to continue to cause pain and difficulty to the people that I love. In his speech, Greitens said he is not perfect, but maintains he has not broken any laws or committed any offense worthy of this treatment. I will let the fairness of this process be judged by history, he said. Singapore Airlines said it will relaunch the world's longest commercial flight in October, a journey of almost 19 hours from the city-state to New York, but it will not be available to economy travellers. The daily non-stop journey from Changi to Newark Airport will cover about 16,700 kilometres (10,300 miles) and take about 18 hours 45 minutes, the airline said in a statement. The current record holder is Qatar Airways Flight 921 from Auckland to Doha, which takes 17 hours 40 minutes. The flight will use the long-range Airbus A350-900ULR, which will be configured to carry 67 in business class and 94 in premium economy The Singapore Airlines flight will use the long-range Airbus A350-900ULR, which will be configured to carry 161 passengers - 67 in business class and 94 in premium economy. The airline had flown a similar route from 2004 until 2013 but cancelled it as it fell short of revenue expectations. However, its latest decision comes as carriers look for new sources of revenue in a competitive environment, while long-haul flights often make more cash than those that require stops. Changi Airport, in Singapore (pictured), is one of the busiest - and best - airports in Southeast Asia There are also plans for a non-stop route from Singapore to Los Angeles using the same plane, the airline said. The new route comes as the city-state's flag carrier faces tough challenges. Last year, it consolidated its low-cost units TigerAir and Scoot into a single entity in a streamlining exercise. And this month it said it will absorb its struggling premium regional wing, SilkAir, into the broader group following a multi-million-dollar upgrade as part of reforms to stay competitive. Earlier this month we presented some of the breathtaking entries into the People category of the 2018 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest. Now we can reveal some of the National Geographic editors' favourite photos from the Cities category of the competition, which showcase a range of bustling metropolises in all their glory. They include amazing aerial shots and candid street views. One image shows the high-rise city of Hong Kong shrouded in an extremely thick fog, while another photo captures the awesome mountainous landscape surrounding the colourful buildings packed into Nepal's capital, Kathmandu. There are three categories in the competition, which closes on May 31 - Nature, People and Cities. One of the category winners will be named the overall grand-prize winner and receive $10,000, have his or her photo posted on the @NatGeoTravel Instagram account and earn the title of National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year. The other two category winners will each be awarded $2,500. Contestants can visit natgeo.com/travelphotocontest to submit their best photos in any or all of the three categories. Here we present 10 of the most impressive pictures in the Cities category. If you thought Gilead couldn't get any darker, more dangerous or evil, then you were wrong, and The Handmaid's Tale season 2, episode 7 makes for distressing viewing. 'After' deals with the aftermath of the bomb at the Red Center, which we find out claimed the lives of 26 commanders and 31 handmaids. The episode opens with a stunningly beautiful and poignant mass funeral of the latter. Wearing their mourning robes and wings with a red cloth covering their faces, the remaining handmaids walk in formation to the red coffins, arranged in a circle formation as a devastated Aunt Lydia calls out their names and promises to 'remember them'. It seems only in death, are the handmaids shown any real respect. Mass funeral: The handmaids don their mourning robes and cover their faces Burial: The bomb at the Red Center claimed the lives of 31 handmaids and 26 commanders Respects: Aunt Lydia calls out the name of each of the handmaids who perished in the blast Tears: Aunt Lydia is devastated at the loss of 31 handmaids, 'her girls', in the bomb Post-bomb: Bodies hang from trees, homes and windows as Gilead gets rid of anyone they believe is linked to terrorist organizations Shockingly, Aunt Lydia tells the handmaids: 'I wish I could give you a world without violence, without pain. Its all I ever wanted,' which is rich coming from a woman who periodically shocked and burned the woman at will, and encouraged them to stone Janine to death. As they travel back in the van, they talk about Ofglen, the suicide bomber whose tongue had been cut out weeks before she destroyed the Red Center. June asks if anyone knows her real name, but they point out she was June's shopping partner. She responds, heavily laden with regret: 'We never got that far.' (We later find out, in Little America, that her name was Lillie Fuller). The consequences of Ofglen's actions are everywhere, as it appears Gilead has gone to extreme measures to ensure nothing like that happens again. As the handmaids look out the window noting, 'the eyes have been through here', countless bodies are hanging from trees, homes and windows. We later find out that Ofglen's whole house was executed due to her actions. Bombed: Commander Waterford was severely injured in the blast, with burns on his face and he seems to be delirious Interrogation: Commander Cushin is taking over and questions June about when she ran away Fear: A martha is gunned down in the street for no reason as June looks on in horror We learn Commander Price, Nick's allie who had promised to remove him from the Waterford's home and look after June, died in the blast. Unfortunately Fred Waterford was spared though was badly injured. He lies in a hospital bed, burned and delirious, barely able to speak. Commander Cushing appears to have taken over from Waterford and is relishing in killing people at will. He visits June behind Serena's back demanding to know who helped her escape. She insists that she was taken against her will, as was the party line, but he presses: 'We need to find those among us who wish to do us harm. Do you understand? Surely you know who helped you try to leave Gilead? Was it Commander Waterford? When June again tells him she was kidnapped, he tells her: 'Our republic is under siege, we do not have the luxury of fairy tales.' As if his words weren't menacing enough, he touches her belly and grabs her face saying: 'If your house has been infected with terrorists I need to know.' To make sure June is clear there's a new Commander in town, a martha is shot in the street by a 'guardian' for no reason and her body is left bleeding as Cushing and June look on. She later tells Serena about his visit and reminds her that Ofglen's whole house was murdered after the bomb, saying: 'Cushing would do the same to us. To any house connected to the underground.' When Serena responds that 'Fred would never allow that', June reminds her that he isn't here. Stunning scenes: There is change coming to the colonies amid the death and destruction Take: Black vans pull up and a number of handmaids are dragged off the fields, including Emily Back in Little America, Luke and Moira hear news of the explosion and Moira decides it's time she faced the truth. She asks if she can look through the records of those who have died in Gilead but have not yet been identified. It is a harrowing task, but an important one to her. In this week's flashback sequences, we learn that she was engaged to a doctor called Odette who she met when she acted as a surrogate to a British couple (and was paid $250,000 for the pleasure). June supported Moira throughout her pregnancy, going to scans and Lamaze classes with her, showing how strong their friendship was pre-Gilead. We also learn that Moira yearned to be in loving relationship like June and Luke and became resentful of 'perfect couples' during her pregnancy. A chance encounter with her doctor Odette six months later in a wine store subsequently led to their relationship and engagement. Flashback: We meet Moira's fiancee Odette, who was the doctor during her surrogate pregnancy before they later banged into one another, pre-Gilead Handover: Doctor Odette hands baby Gavin over to his adopted parents while Moira looks on Grim discovery: After hours of looking through the books of the unidentified dead people, Moira comes across pictures of Odette's body Sobbing: After months of not knowing, Moira reacts to the death of her fiancee In present day, as Moira looks through countless pictures of dead people, we find out that Odette was rounded up before the war. Moira just wants to know if she is dead, and if she was alone when she died. After endless hours searching, she gets her answer and comes across pictures of her fiancee's lifeless body, though she is somehow still beautiful. Moira screams at the loss of her partner and later goes to the memorial in Little America to lay down a photo of the couple in happier times. Luke is there to hold her hand and comfort her. Back to normal: The handmaids are shopping at the local store with heavily-armed guards watching over them Surprise: Janine is back from the colonies with Emily after the Red Center bomb ID: June tells Emily her name, because she didn't get a chance to before she was taken away Identity: June turns to the handmaid next to her to greet her and she responds with her name, which is Brianna Turning point: The handmaid's huddle together and chatter excitedly as they share their names with one another and other details Spy: While the handmaids are getting to know each other's real names, Eden looks on in scorn Back in Gilead, the handmaid's are doing their daily shop, watched over by heavily-armed guards. June is surprised when Emily and Janine arrive. Earlier we saw them get rounded up in the colonies and put into vans, but as Janine explains, there was a shortage of handmaids after the bomb so they brought some back. June calls Emily by her real name and reveals her own, saying: 'I never got a chance to tell you.' Emboldened by the return of her old friends, she turns to the handmaid next to her and greets her with her real name. The handmaid responds: 'I'm Brianna.' This spreads like wildfire through the store and suddenly the women are happy and almost gossiping like old friends as they reclaim a part of their identity back. It is a powerful, hair-standing-on-end moment as the music and emotion swells. Something has switched and it is palpable. Pictured: Outside of Gilead, the dead handmaids are remembered, with Ofglen the bomber being named as Lillie Fuller Grieving: Now that Moira knows her fiancee is dead, she is able to say goodbye to her Goodbye: Moira leaves a picture of her and Odette at the memorial site in Little America June's stark warning clearly rattled Serena, as she goes to Nick to inquire about his role in helping Commander Waterford submit warrants to the Council of the Divine Law. When Nick tells her they need to be signed by Waterford, who is currently indisposed in hospital, it is clear what Serena's plans are and together they orchestrate the arrest of Commander Cushing for 'terror and treason'. It is soon apparent that change is upon Gilead, as Serena, empowered by Cushing's arrest, takes matters even more into her own hands. She takes June to a room and shows her drafts of new executive security orders. 'Cushing turned our streets into a war zone, these drafts of new executive security orders will remove checkpoints and scale down guardian presence,' she tells her. 'It's about time things started getting back to normal around here, dont you think?' June is, of course, confused both by Serena's new warmth towards her and trust in her, and even more so when Serena hands the orders to June. She then reveals she knows June used to be an editor and asks her to read over them. Job: Serena tells June she wants her to check over the executive orders since she used to be an editor The pen is mightier than the sword: Serena offers special privileges to June so she can help Back where she belongs: Serena looks extremely comfortable behind Commander Waterford's desk Serena goes behind Fred's desk and is clearly basking and reveling in her new found power and independence. She hands June a pen a forbidden item. June holds it up and puts her finger on the top to turn it on, in much the same way Ofglen did with the bomb detonator at the end of the last episode. Will it cause the same death, destruction and chaos? One thing is for sure, resistance is coming, though a different kind of resistance, for the pen is mightier than the sword. They were clear across the country from one another. And over the weekend, Katie Holmes and boyfriend Jamie Foxx were both spotted spending a bit of quality time with their respective daughters. Katie, 39, was glimpsed alighting at a New York City helipad with her nine-year-old Suri on Memorial Day after a trip to the Hamptons. Family time: Katie Holmes, 39, was glimpsed on Memorial Day alighting at a New York City helipad with Suri, her nine-year-old daughter by her ex-husband Tom Cruise Katie let her hair fall slightly over her face, bundling up in a camel-toned sweater and wearing a matching pair of open-toed nude heels. The Batman Begins actress pulled on a pair of wide-set jeans, shielding her eyes with shades and swinging a black-and-white edition of Prada's Esplanade bag. Meanwhile, Suri struggled to keep hold of her backpack, volleyball and laundry bag as she headed across the tarmac ahead of her mother. A day before, Jamie, 50, took his eight-year-old Annalise to Disney's California Adventure. For his jaunt to the Disney theme park, Jamie slipped into Gucci's stripe reversible acetate bomber jacket, which sells online for $2,490. Only the best: The Batman Begins actress pulled on a pair of wide-set jeans, shielding her eyes with shades and swinging a black-and-white edition of Prada's Esplanade bag City girl: The brunette beauty was later seen in Manhattan wearing a blush Ulla Johnson jumpsuit and Adidas sneakers He complemented his red-white-and-blue wrap with a navy polo shirt, artfully faded jeans and a pair of black and white Nike sneakers. Jamie was glimpsed with Annalise on Radiator Springs Racers, a ride in Cars Land, which is named after the Pixar CGI franchise about talking automobiles. The Ray Oscar-winner sat side by side with his daughter on Toy Story Midway Mania!, a ride where guests fire toy guns at 4-D virtual enemies. Katie began dating Suri's father, Scientologist movie star Tom Cruise in 2005, and seven weeks into the relationship, they were engaged. Model behavior: The actress posed for a sunny snap on Tuesday Happiest place: The day prior, Jamie was seen taking his eight-year-old daughter to Disney's California Adventure; they are pictured on Toy Story Midway Mania! Their Scientologist wedding was held at the Castello Orsini-Odescalchi in Bracciano in November 2006, seven months after their daughter was born. Katie filed in 2012 for a divorce that was finalized only 10 days later, with Suri's mother retaining primary custody, though Tom could visit, per People. Ron Miscavige, father of Scientology leader David Miscavige, told the MailOnline in 2016 that Katie's misgivings about Scientology - including the effect it could have on Suri - contributed to her decision to leave Tom. Hello, gorgeous: For his jaunt to the Disney theme park, Jamie slipped into Gucci's stripe reversible acetate bomber jacket, which sells online for $2,490 Katie and Jamie Foxx only publicly became an item late last year, though there had been speculation they were a couple since 2013. There was a swirl of rumors that Katie's divorce agreement prohibited her from publicly dating anyone for five years after the split with Tom. Kate has only been married the once, but Tom had previously tried matrimony with Mimi Rogers - who quipped in Playboy after the divorce that 'he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument' - and Nicole Kidman. Having a ball: Jamie was glimpsed with Annalise on Radiator Springs Racers, a ride in Cars Land, which is named after the Pixar CGI franchise about talking automobiles Jamie, whose Christian name is Eric Marlon Bishop, had Annalise Bishop by one Kristin Grannis, whose identity only went public this past November. He also has a 24-year-old actress called Corinne, who has become a model and actress and who adopted her father's stage surname. Her mother is a military veteran called Connie Kline - a fact that only became public in 2016 when Corinne wished her a happy Veteran's Day on Instagram. It's the audio clip that divided the internet - with everyone from US President Donald Trump to Ellen Degeneres weighing in on what they were hearing. And the voice behind the Yanny/Laurel internet meme has once again confirmed what word he originally uttered. Appearing on morning breakfast program Sunrise on Wednesday, Jay Aubrey Jones was happy to divulge the answers to the questions that has kept colleagues, friends and family arguing for weeks. Laurel or Yanny? The voice behind divisive internet meme reveals why people are hearing different words in controversial audio clip... as he once again confirms what he REALLY recorded 'The big question - drum roll please,' host David Koch said in anticipation. 'What were you saying? Laurel or Yanny.' 'I was saying Laurel,' came Jay's succinct response. Wanting to confirm the claim, David and co-host Samantha Armytage asked Jay to repeat 'Laurel' three times - which he obliged. Bated breath: 'The big question - drum roll please.,' host David Koch said in anticipation. What were you saying? Laurel or Yanny.' Jay went on to explain that the reason people were hearing 'Yanny' was due to the quality of their listening device. 'Depending on the settings of your listening device, if you hear more of a bass sound, you'll hear "Laurel,'" Jay explained. 'As you get more toward the treble, stripping away the bass sound, for some reason - passing all reason - some people will hear "Yanny."' Jay went on to explain that the original clip was recorded back in 2007 when he was recording reference pronunciations for the website vocabulary.com. Audiophile: Jay went on to explain that the reason that people were hearing 'Yanny' was due to the quality of their listening device, however he still seemed stumped as to an answer for why He said that he had completely forgotten about the recording until he heard it on television earlier this month, however he didn't immediately recognise it as his voice. 'On May 16th, I'm getting ready to go to work and I have a television show on in the background and this 'Laurel/Yanny business came up and I didn't recognise my own voice,' Jay confessed. He continued: I didn't hear about it really until I was at my temp job and then I got a text from Mark Tinkler, who is the executive producer of vocabulary.com, and he says to me "you do realise it's your voice behind this don't you?" and I was completely floored.' Technical: Depending on the settings of your listening device, if you hear more of a bass sound, you'll hear "Laurel,'" Jay explained. 'As you get more toward the treble, stripping away the bass sound, for some reason - passing all reason - some people will hear "Yanny."' The meme captured the imagination of the world when it surfaced earlier this month. Talk show queen Ellen DeGeneres tweeted: 'Literally everything at my show just stopped to see if people hear Laurel or Yanny. I hear Laurel.' US President Donald Trump even weighed in his opinion in a clip posted by The White House to Twitter. 'I hear covfefe,'Donald joked in reference to a cryptic tweet he posted in May 2017 that featured the made-up word. She turns every A-list affair into her own personal catwalk with her stunning looks and glamorous ensembles. Yet Poppy Delevingne looked worlds away from her red carpet looks when she went about her day-to-day life on arrival at LAX Airport, in Los Angeles on Tuesday. With her platinum locks tucked behind her ears to show off her face, the model-turn-actress, 32, displayed her natural features by ditching her heavy make-up. Looking lovely: Poppy Delevingne exhibited her natural beauty as she went make-up free on arrival at LAX airport, in Los Angeles on Tuesday The rising star hung up her sky-scraper stilettos from the runway in favour of a comfortable pair of trainers. Poppy headed out in a pair of skintight jeans, which she teamed with a sheer top and a striped cardigan. On the move, the statuesque model toted her iPhone as well as her huge tan bag containing her everyday essentials. Gorgeous: With her platinum locks tucked behind her ears to show off her face, the model-turn-actress, 32, displayed her natural features (L) by ditching her heavy make-up (R) Strutting her stuff: The rising star hung up her sky-scraper stilettos from the runway in favour of a comfortable pair of trainers Pout and about: Poppy headed out in a pair of skintight jeans, which she teamed with a sheer top and a striped cardigan Last spotted at the New York Prada fashion show with her husband James Cook in early May, Poppy was flying solo on her arrival at LAX. Despite making her name on the showbiz circuit as a result of her stellar modelling career, Poppy claimed she 'never' felt like she 'belonged' to the catwalks. Although she has the perfect model frame and statuesque height, she insisted she wasn't a natural runway beauty citing how she clumsily fell flat on her face. On the move: The statuesque model toted her iPhone as well as her huge tan bag containing her everyday essentials Poppy told Sunday Telegraph's TV Guide in May: 'I never really sort of felt like I belonged, I was always that model who would sort-of walk on set and trip over the lighting and fall flat on my face.' Moving on from her modelling days, Poppy is carving a career in the acting sphere as she follows in her sister Cara's footsteps. Last year, she broke into the acting world by securing roles in the Kingsman: The Golden Circle as well as King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Her famous Sex And The City counterpart Samantha Jones is known for her glamorous sense of style. And Kim Cattrall proved she was just as stylish as her famous television character on Tuesday, as she made a glamorous arrival at the press night of new play Consent. The actress, 61, was effortlessly sophisticated in a smart black coat and suit trousers, as she joined a number of high profile guests at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London. Chic: Kim Cattrall proved she was just as stylish as her Sex And The City character on Tuesday, as she made a glamorous arrival at the press night of new play Consent in London Kim dressed up for the performance in form-fitting grey trousers, lined with flattering black stripes down the sides and embellished with chunky zips on the ankle. Keeping warm in the rainy London climes, the star teamed the strides with a black double-breasted jacket, adorned with a shimmering silver brooch on one lapel. She jazzed up her look with a studded black clutch bag, and tied her look together with suede pointed court shoes, in a glamorous finishing touch. Stunning: The actress, 61, was effortlessly sophisticated in a smart black coat and suit trousers, as she joined a number of high profile guests at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London Leggy lady: Kim dressed up for the performance in form-fitting grey trousers, lined with flattering black stripes down the sides and embellished with chunky zips on the ankle Cosy: Keeping warm in the rainy London climes, the star teamed the strides with a black double-breasted jacket, and jazzed up her look with a studded clutch bag Say cheese! She first posed alone outside the theatre, before joining her boyfriend Russell Thomas inside Styling her hair into loose waves and accessorising with cat-eye glasses, Kim drew attention to her enviably youthful and glowing complexion as she arrived at the event. Nina Raine's Consent has just transferred to the Harold Pinter Theatre, after a successful run at the Dorfman in the National Theatre. The play, which follows two lawyers who take on opposite sides of a rape case, began in April 2017 and was met with high praise from critics. The Guardian called it 'a play of fierce moral intelligence', while The Independent claimed it was one of 'Raine's most enjoyable and intelligent plays yet'. Homeward bound: She later looked in good spirits as she headed home after the show Radiant: Styling her hair into loose waves and accessorising with cat-eye glasses, Kim drew attention to her enviably youthful and glowing complexion as she departed the theatre Happy days! She was heading off while graciously greeting her fans Hometime: No doubt happy to relax after a night on work, she was fresh-faced and beaming Hey there! It was clear to see she was a superstar as she headed out of the theatre in style Comfy: Kim was working a low-key look yet still oozed superstar cool It is no wonder the Hollywood star attended the event, as no stranger to the London theatre scene. Back in 2013, Kim took on the role of Alexandra Del Lago in Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth at the Old Vic - to rave reviews from critics. She was also cast to play the lead role in Linda at the Royal Court Theatre two years later, but was forced to pull out days before her run began due to 'chronic, debilitating insomnia.' A number of other famous faces attending the opening, including Beverley Knight, Patrick Stewart, Bertie Carvel and Loose Women Janet Street Porter and Nadia Sawalha. All that glitters: A number of other famous faces attending the opening - including Beverley Knight, who dazzled in a sheer and sequin blouse Boys will be boys: Patrick Stewart kept things classic in a shirt and blazer (L) while Bertie Carvel opted for more striking double denim (R) Wrapping up: Sir Patrick later pulled on a flat cap to warm up in the winter chill Sports chic: Anneka Rice proved her kooky sense of style in loose-fitting trousers and a rain mac Big night out: Loose Women's Nadia Sawalha (L) and Janet Street-Porter (R) slipped into comfortable ensembles for their evening at the theatre Curls like us: Nadia was displaying her glowing good looks as she departed the theatre Commanding attention: Twiggy stunned in striped trousers and sunglasses as she and husband Leigh Lawson posed for cameras inside He is one half of the 'Gourmet Pommies' who won My Kitchen Rules back in 2015. And while Steve Flood has admitted that finding love has been a struggle in the past, the 35-year-old was seen getting cosy with MasterChef star Nicole Stevenson at the Noosa Food and Wine Festival, earlier this month. According to Women's Day, the duo 'weren't hiding their love at the food fest'. New Love? My Kitchen Rules winner Steve Flood cosies up to MasterChef star Nicole Stevenson as pair attend Noosa Food and Wine Festival At one point, Steve was pictured with his hand placed gently across Nicole's back as the two roamed the festival together. Nicole narrowly missed out on making the top 10 on last year's MasterChef. Close: At one point, Steve was pictured with his hand placed gently across Nicole's back as the two roamed the festival together Remember her: Nicole narrowly missed out on making the top 10 on last year's MasterChef After finding success on the famed cooking series in 2015, Steve revealed to News Local in 2016 that he has struggled to find love. 'I feel like I've lost the ability to get a genuine connection with someone,' the reality star admitted. At the time, he candidly told the publication he was 'in no rush' to find someone but said it would be 'lovely to meet someone special'. The downside of fame: After finding success on the famed cooking series in 2015, Steve revealed to News Local that he has struggled to find love Steve's last public relationship left him heartbroken, following a messy split with yoga enthusiast Caroline Groth in mid-2015. Finding the relationship breakdown a bitter pill to swallow, he said: 'I had a relationship that failed and I put a lot in to it... In the past it's been the other way around and I've had to break up with someone, but to be on the other end of it when you're committed to letting someone in, then it's tough.' Following their stint on MKR, Steve and cooking partner Will Stewart have since curated a menu at Butcher and the Farmer, located in the city's Tramsheds complex. The talented cast of Scandal (and some spouses) reunited over Memorial Day weekend in Mexico to vacation together a month after their ABC series concluded. 'Reunited!' Kerry Washington - who played Olivia Pope - gushed to her 4.7M Instagram followers. 'And yes, it feels soooooooo good! Love hanging with my #ScandalFam in Mexico...Much needed time together! XO!' Scroll down for video Hello again! The talented cast of Scandal (and some spouses) reunited over Memorial Day weekend in Mexico to vacation together a month after their ABC series concluded Kerry Washington - who played Olivia Pope - gushed: 'Reunited! And yes, it feels soooooooo good! Love hanging with my #ScandalFam in Mexico...Much needed time together! XO!' For privacy, the tight ensemble booked all nine of the Impression villas inside the Zoetry Paraiso de la Bonita Riviera Maya hotel located on the Yucatan Peninsula - according to People. Each villa - ranging between 832 and 2,027 square feet - features an oceanfront terrace, private plunge pool, outdoor shower, dining room, and hand-selected furnishings. The group - which also included Tony Goldwyn, Scott Foley, Bellamy Young, George Newbern, Katie Lowes, and Jeff Perry - enjoyed a private chef's tasting dinner at Dragon's. 41-year-old Kerry and 36-year-old Katie - who played Quinn Perkins in the Beltway drama - donned tall sun hats for a catamaran cruise on the coast. 'Best weekend ever!' For privacy, the tight ensemble booked all nine of the Impression villas inside the Zoetry Paraiso de la Bonita Riviera Maya hotel located on the Yucatan Peninsula Ranging between 832 and 2,027 square feet: Each villa features an oceanfront terrace, private plunge pool, outdoor shower, dining room, and hand-selected furnishings Dining: The group - which also included Tony Goldwyn, Scott Foley, Bellamy Young, George Newbern, Katie Lowes, and Jeff Perry - enjoyed a private chef's tasting dinner at Dragon's It was the first weekend Lowe and her husband Adam Shapiro spent away from their first child, son Albee, since welcoming him seven months ago. The native New Yorker wrote on Instagram: 'It was hard but being with my #ScandalSisters (and brothers) at @zoetryresorts made it so worth it!! Love you guys!' Katie could also be seen smiling and waving at the camera for an Insta-story of the close castmates swimming together. Shielded: 36-year-old Katie (L) - who played Quinn Perkins in the Beltway drama - and 41-year-old Kerry and donned tall sun hats for a catamaran cruise on the coast 'Scandal Wives Club': It was the first weekend Lowe (R) and her husband Adam Shapiro (L) spent away from their first child, son Albee, since welcoming him seven months ago 'It was hard but being with my #ScandalSisters (and brothers) at @zoetryresorts made it so worth it!' Katie (L) could also be seen swimming with her close castmates 'Date night vacation vibes': When it rained, 45-year-old Scott - who played Jake Ballard - indulged in a festive pina colada cocktail and some iPad action on the couch Bikini body alert! The Felicity alum - who divorced Jennifer Garner in 2003 - was joined in paradise by his Polish-born wife Marika Dominczyk, with whom he has three children When it rained, 45-year-old Scott - who played Jake Ballard - indulged in a festive pina colada cocktail and some iPad action on the couch. The Felicity alum - who divorced Jennifer Garner in 2003 - was joined in paradise by his Polish-born wife Marika Dominczyk, with whom he has three children. The Shonda Rhimes-crafted political thriller aired its final 124th episode on April 19 after seven successful seasons. Love Island Australia's Charlie Taylor is certainly not afraid to show off his gym-honed physique on social media. But the former rugby league player shared a little more than he intended on Tuesday night's episode while larking about in a pair of perilously small boxers. The cheeky 22-year-old left viewers blushing when he accidentally exposed more than he bargained for while stretching out on his bed. Did you see the X-rated wardrobe malfunction? Love Island star Charlie Taylor(right) suffered a embarrassing slip in a pair of perilously small boxers on Tuesday night's episode Charlie suffered the slip-up while doing an impression of newcomer Kim Hartnett's sleeping position. The Sydneysider began by positioning himself on the very edge of the double bed. Fellow Islander Erin Barnett burst into laughter, saying: 'She couldn't have been more on the edge!' Cheeky: Charlie suffered the slip-up while doing an impression of newcomer Kim Hartnett's (pictured) sleeping position during her first time sharing a bed with Josh Moss 'I am going on the show to have a ball': The former sportsman, 22, accidentally exposed more than intended while spreading his legs on the bed Another contestant, Josh Moss, then climbed onto the bed and also demonstrated how Kim was practically hanging off the frame. Charlie enthusiastically joined Josh on the other side and, in doing so, stretched his legs wide and exposed more of his crotch than intended. Daily Mail Australia has contacted a Love Island spokesperson for comment. The Insta-famous athlete, who boasts 180,000 followers, has played for the Sydney Roosters and Manly Sea Eagles and isn't shy about showing off on social media. Cocky! The Insta-famous athlete, who boasts 180,000 followers, has played for the Sydney Roosters and Manly Sea Eagles and isn't shy about showing off on social media Despite his provocative persona on social media, however, Charlie has insisted that he signed up to Love Island for the right reasons. 'I am not going on the show just to sleep with someone,' he told The Sunday Telegraph before entering the villa. 'I am going on the show to have a ball and hopefully... potentially, find love.' Could not establish database connection. DB: bostonimc and SQL: --> The administrator has been notified and will resolve the problem ASAP. He's one of the most prolific stars in Hollywood. And Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson is back this summer in another action-packed movie, Skyscraper. A second three-minute trailer for the film dropped just before the Memorial Day holiday weekend and shows the former wrestler in full stunt mode against a backdrop of CGI special effects. Scroll down for video New trailer: He's one of the most prolific stars in Hollywood. And Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson is back this summer in another action-packed movie, Skyscraper In Skyscraper, he plays a former FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader who was seriously injured when a job went badly wrong. He survived but he lost the lower portion of his left leg and now wears a prosthetic. Ten years on, he is married to the surgeon who operated on him (Neve Campbell) and they have two children, a girl and a boy. In Skyscraper, The Rock, 46, plays a former FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader who was seriously injured when a job went badly wrong Although seriously wounded, he recovers after surgery performed by the female doctor (Neve Campbell) who he goes on to marry It turns out though that he lost his lower left leg as a result of his injuries and wears a prosthetic Ten years on, he and his wife are happily married and have two children - a son and a daughter The Rock' now makes a living assessing safety and security of high-rise building He spends his time assessing safety and security of high rise buildings and is hired to assess the world's tallest new building, The Pearl in Hong Kong. As part of the job, he and his family move into the skyscraper and enjoys its luxury living. The wealthy Chinese businessman who built the structure is seen asking him what he thinks. He is hired to assess the world's tallest new building, The Pearl in Hong Kong He tells the wealthy Chinese businesmman behind the skyscraper that 'it's a breathtaking achievement' but 'no-one really knows what would happen if things go wrong' 'The Pearl is the most advanced super tall structure in the world. It's a breathtaking achievement,' he tells him. But there's a caveat, as there always is. 'No-one really knows what would happen if things go wrong,' he adds. Naturally, something does go wrong. Something does go wrong - fire breaks out on the 96th floor of the skyscraper It turns out the fire was set by a criminal gang who are searching for something of value hidden inside the building - and The Rock's wife and kids are still inside and at their mercy The kids find themselves trapped by the flames and the criminals The Rock sets out to rescue his family, climbing a super crane and flinging himself off of it and through a broken window of the burning high-rise The gang takes his daughter hostage to force him to find what they are looking for A criminal gang wants something of value that's hidden somewhere in the building and they set it on fire. The Rock's wife and children are inside the building when fire breaks out on the 96th floor and when he arrives on scene, he is forced to steal a motorbike and then scale a super crane in order to fling himself off it so as to get back inside the building. As flames rage all around him, he manages to reunite with his wife and kids only for the ruthless gang to find them and take his daughter hostage, while tasking him with finding what they are looking for. The Rock helps his wife and son get to safety in a perilous journey across burning girders. Then sets out to rescue his daughter. Skyscraper is set to open in theatres on July 13. The Rock helps his wife and son get to safety in a perilous journey across burning girders The action never stops thanks to plenty of CGI special effects He won't stop until he gets his daughter back and stops the bad guys Business owners and entrepreneurs are often racked with nerves before pitching their ideas to Shark Tank's panel of wealthy investors. But on Tuesday's episode, Perth-based personal trainers James Buchanan and Jack Zuvelek were noticeably cocky - and the Sharks weren't impressed. Jack, 24, joked about using his TV appearance to improve his Tinder profile, as he and business partner James, 26, laughed ahead of their pitch. Scroll down for video 'I'll be able to use it on my Tinder profile!' The Shark Tank investors slammed a pair of Perth 'gym bros' for boasting about using their TV appearance to impress women online on Tuesday The pair applied for the show in the hopes of receiving a $500,000 investment for 25 per cent of their personal training business, The Body Consultants. In an interview backstage, Jack claimed they 'couldn't really lose', adding: 'We either get a deal or we get really good publicity and I'll be able to use it on my Tinder profile. I'll be getting deals left, right and center.' Flexing their muscles as they walked into the studio, it wasn't long until the Sharks took issue with the young men's cocksure attitude. 'We can't really lose!' Clearly confident before their pitch, the young men joked about either walking away with a deal or good publicity that they could use to impress women on Tinder 'We've already had investors that are looking to buy in, but we believe the right investor and the right fit for us is in this room today,' Jack said. This remark prompted the investors to scoff and roll their eyes. The Veneto Group's Andrew Banks asked if the personal trainers were going to make use of the visual aids provided. Jack responded: 'No. Our belief is you're buying us.' 'Ideal situation, you all give us $100,000 (for) five per cent each,' Jack continued, as Naomi Simson blinked in disbelief and Andrew laughed out loud. 'I think you're both incredibly naive': There were plenty of scoffs and eye-rolls from the Sharks during the pitch. Pictured: Naomi Simson (left) and Glen Richards (right) 'I'm not Santa Claus, alright?' Steve Baxter claimed the pair weren't taking the pitch seriously after they said their ideal situation would be for all five investors to 'give us $100,000' each 'I'm gonna give you nothing, mate. You are selling a piece of your company and I'm buying it. I'm not Santa Claus, alright? I don't give s**t. It's a sales process. Investment's a serious sales process. Please treat it as such,' Steve Baxter told Jack. Jack later appeared to offend the Sharks when he claimed that older clients' fitness goals were limited to wanting to 'touch their toes' again. Steve said: 'You should say something more denigrating! That's fantastic.' The 'fitness bros' also spoke disparagingly of their competitors, saying that similar training programs were being 'poorly executed' by other gyms. Naomi replied: 'I think you're both incredibly naive. The first rule of business is to respect the competition and, really, you have no understanding in terms of the contribution or the relationship that many personal trainers have. 'There is nothing like experience. So, therefore, I'm out.' Steve added: 'You felt a bit cocky when you came out, and that put me off side. I can't get past that. I'm out.' Things got worse for James and Jack when the rest of the Sharks chose not to invest. Kate Hudson after recently announcing her pregnancy cradled her baby bump in a workout selfie she shared on Tuesday on Instagram. The 39-year-old actress sported a sly smile while wearing a green tank top and and green and white yoga pants. 'Happy belly,' Kate wrote in the caption for her nearly 9 million followers along with a plug for her Fabletics line of women's sportswear. Happy belly: Kate Hudson took to Instagram on Tuesday and shared a snap of her baby bump in workout gear Kate shared the image on Instagram Stories during a workout session in a home gym. The Almost Famous star revealed last month that she was expecting a daughter with her musician beau Danny Fujikawa. Kate also has sons Ryder, 14, and six-year-old Bingham from previous relationships. The daughter of Goldie Hawn was hoping to have a girl. First girl: The 39-year-old actress, shown last month in Hong Kong, is expecting her first daughter to join sons Ryder, 14, and six-year-old Bingham Her brother Wyatt Russell, 31, told People magazine: 'I was happy. I was teary-eyed because I know how badly she wanted a girl.' The How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days star was desperate for a daughter, said her good friend Erin Foster. Kate was overjoyed when her gender reveal party saw her showered in pink confetti. Family outing: Kate is shown with boyfriend Danny Fujikawa and her sons in March in Santa Monica, California The actress was spotted last year in Los Angeles shooting the movie Sister. The musical drama will serve as the directorial debut for Australian pop act Sia. Kate stars in the movie alongside Maddie Ziegler, 15, who has appeared in several wildly popular Sia music videos. Chris Klein and wife Laina Rose Thyfault are parents for the second time. On Saturday, the couple welcomed daughter Isla, who 'weighed in at 8 lbs., 7 oz.', according to People. Chris took to his newly-created Instagram account to announce the arrival of his little one. New arrival: Chris Klein, 39, and wife Laina Rose Thyfault are parents for the second time 'This Saturday 5/26 at 2:25pm my wife @lalalainarose gave birth to our second beautiful miracle. Isla Rose Klein. 8lbs 7oz of healthy baby girl,' Chris began. 'Laina and Isla took the journey together with Courage, Strength and Epic Grace. My Girls, I am so proud of you and so grateful that you were delivered safely back to me. I love you Laina. Thank you for making me a father again,' he concluded. In the black-and-white snap, the newborn can be seen sleeping while grasping a finger. Precious: On Saturday, the couple welcomed daughter Isla, who 'weighed in at 8 lbs., 7 oz.', according to People Proud dad: Laina shared this sweet snap, taken by photographer Bernadette Madden, of Chris kissing his daughter's forehead Wife Laina also took to Instagram to share the news of her daughter's arrival, and express her emotions over the birth. 'He is here! Isla Rose Klein made her arrival this Saturday afternoon. Ive been amazed with how the second time around things just fall into place and how quickly it seems as if it has always been the four of us,' she began. 'Thank you to my amazing Husband @iamchrisklein for holding my hand every step of the way and to Easton for already being an amazing Big Brother. You three are my world, my everything. @bernadettemadden She also shared a collection of photos taken by photographer Bernadette Madden. What a cutie! The Intensive Care star and his wife are also parents to son Frederick Easton, nearly two Chris and Laina are also parents to son Frederick Easton, nearly two. The actor and his travel agent wife met a friend's 2011 wedding. The couple became engaged in December 2014 and were married in Montana in August 2015. At long last, the new Bond film opened in cinemas yesterday, almost two years late. But the key four-letter word is not late or even Bond - but long. No Time To Die is the longest 007 movie ever. She's won a plethora of awards for her role on HBO's Big Little Lies. So it's no surprise that Nicole Kidman headlined the stars who came out in New York Tuesday night to honor HBO Chairman and CEO Richard Plepler at the annual American Songbook Gala. The actress, 50, who was accompanied by husband Keith Urban, dazzled in a high-neck, long-sleeved patterned gold dress before they took the stage and locked lips in a passionate clinch - making their romance plain to see. Oh my! Nicole Kidman was joined by her husband Keith Urban as they locked lips on stage at the American Songbook Gala in NYC Tuesday night She looked typically sensational as she clad her physique in a shimmering gown which made her statuesque figure look all the more stunning. Kidman's frock featured shiny swirls on a semi-sheer material and she added matching shiny strappy heels. She wore her long blonde hair tied back into a pony tail and left some tendrils loose to frame her face. She was made-up with black mascara and eye-liner, rosy blusher and bright red lip color. Urban, 50, wore a tuxedo with a black straight tie. Golden girl: Nicole, 50, dazzled in a high-neck, long-sleeved patterned shimmery dress and matching shiny heels Dazzling: Kidman's frock featured shiny swirls on a semi-sheer material. She wore her long blonde hair tied back into a pony tail and left some tendrils loose to frame her face Preparing for an embrace: The pair made their way across the stage towards the other A-list couple: Kidman was accompanied by her husband Keith Urban, 50, and the country music star wore a tuxedo with a black straight tie Big night: She's won a plethora of awards for her role on HBO's Big Little Lies so it's no surprise Kidman came out to honor HBO Chairman and CEO Richard Plepler, pictured center Devoted: Kidman, who was previously wed to Tom Cruise, married Urban in 2006 and they share two daughters, Faith, seven, and Sunday, nine Also at the event was Emilia Clarke, who stars in HBO's Game Of Thrones. The British actress, 31, put on a stylish show in a strapless black dress with sweetheart neckline and a cropped long-sleeved jacket. The black jacket had a navy blue border and Clarke added a pair of black heels. She wore her blonde bobbed hair tucked behind her ears and with her long fringe swept to one side. Her eye lashes were thickened with mascara and she added blush and glossy red lipstick. Pretty look: Emilia Clarke, who stars in HBO's Game Of Thrones, attended the event and wore her blonde bobbed hair tucked behind her ears and with her long fringe swept to one side Headturner: The British actress, 31, put on a stylish show in a strapless black dress with sweetheart neckline and a cropped long-sleeved jacket with a navy blue border Eye-catching: Lena Dunham, 32, stepped out in pink shoes paired with a long-sleeved green and blue dotted dress with asymmetrical hem Blinged: The former Girls star wore her brunette hair styled away from her face and accessorized with large hoop earrings and a pendant neck chain Lena Dunham walked the red crapet in a green and black dotted dress with asymmetrical hem and long sleeves. She added a pair of pink shoes. The creator and star of HBO series Girls wore her brunette hair styled away form her face and accessorized with hoop earrings and a pendant neck chain. Other famous guests included John Oliver, Fareed Zakaria, Diane Sawyer and Chelsea Clinton. Having a chat: Fareed Zakaria and John Oliver were spotted among the VIPs on the guest list for the gala Classic look: Diane Sawyer, 72, opted for a crisp white blouse with a cream tailored trouser suit and posed for photos with Plepler who wore a blue suit with a patterned tie Social whirl: Former First Daughter Chelsea Clinton was also on hand wearing a dark green short-sleeved dress and nude heels Handsome: Bradley Cooper, 43, looked dapper in a three-piece suit, sans tie Suits: Businessman Michael Bloomberg, 76, and the father-of-one looked to be having a good time at the event Power players: Diane met up with producer Lorne Michaels and Bradley All eyes on her: Nicole dazzled in her sparkling gown Familiar: Keith was certainly in his comfort zone as he took the stage for a performance Truly stunning: Emilia's mesmerizing smile certainly captivated the audience. The GOT star is nothing short of a natural beauty Chic: Emilia's make-up featured a soft berry lip Date night: Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa, both 47, made quite the attractive couple Putting on a show: Voice winner and Christian singer Jordan Smith sang for the attendees Legend: Tony Bennett, 91, looked handsome in his chosen suit Chatting away: At one point, it was John's turn to give a speech Doing what she does best: Lena also had some words for the audience One of the greatest: Jimmy Buffett, 71, gave a stellar performance in the evening Meeting: Andy Cohen, 49, caught up with gala co-chair Adrienne Arsht at the event Lara Worthington (nee Bingle) is known for her chic outfits on the red carpet. But the 30-year-old went for a very casual look during a family day out with actor husband Sam and their two sons Rocket Zot, three and Racer, one, in Los Angeles on Saturday. Heading to a play centre, the beauty entrepreneur's outfit comprised of a crisp white, long-sleeved button up shirt teamed with a pair of very baggy 'mom jeans'. Scroll down for video Hanging loose! Lara Bingle steps out in a pair of very baggy 'mom jeans' during a family day out husband Sam Worthington and their sons Rocket Zot, three, and Racer, one Going makeup free, she tied her copper hued bob in a mini pony tail. Lara completed the laid back ensemble with a pair of mustard yellow flats and a black backpack, containing her children's essentials. Weekend look: Heading to a play centre, the beauty entrepreneur's outfit comprised of a crisp white, long-sleeved button up shirt teamed with a pair of very baggy 'mom jeans' Day off: Following behind was Sam, who appeared to be on his day off filming Avatar 2 The doting mother-of-two had both her boys shoes in one arm as she held Racer's hand while walking to their car. Following behind was Sam, who appeared to be on his day off filming Avatar 2. He kept a low profile in his brown slacks and a grey and black shirt as his lookalike son Rocket Zot followed behind. Lara has been seen with numerous high-profile models and actresses of late, with an insider close to the blonde beauty saying she's 'putting herself out there a bit more'. LA girl squad: Lara has been seen with numerous high-profile models and actresses of late, with an insider close to the blonde beauty saying she's 'putting herself out there a bit more' and forming a support group based in Los Angeles (pictured with Bambi Northwood-Blyth) 'Now her kids are over the age of one and Sam is busy with work, she is... putting herself out there a bit more,' a friend told Confidential. The Cronulla-born stunner has appeared to have formed a support group based in Los Angeles. Part of the group include The Originals actress Phoebe Tonkin, models Bambi Northwood-Blyth and Elyse Taylor, as well as former Home And Away star Tessa James who all feature in a few photos on her Instagram account. She is a proud mother of three - but Christie Brinkley was supporting daughter Alexa Ray Joel on Tuesday night. The 64-year-old looked radiant as she attended a launch New York party for the Bella magazine beauty issue, which stars Alexa on the cover. The mother-daughter duo excitedly fawned over the stunning cover, after sharing the red carpet at La Pulperia. Scroll down for video By her side: Christie Brinkley, 64, was there to support daughter Alexa Ray Joel, 32, at the Bella magazine beauty issue party in New York Christie, 64, paired a white, one-shoulder blouse with a set of matching, wide leg pants. The bubbly blonde wore her hair down and in voluminous waves. For make-up, the blue-eyed beauty highlighted her eyes with dark liner. Christie topped of her look with bronzed skin and a neutral lip. Supportive: Alexa was the issue's cover star, and as such, the duo were determined to celebrate Glamorous: On Tuesday, the beauty looked radiant as she turned out in all white Looking sharp: The bubbly blonde paired a white, one-shoulder blouse with a set of matching, wide leg pants Her biggest fan: Christie acted like a proud mom as she snapped footage of her daughter Classy: Alexa, who is the mirror image of her father Billy Joel, 69, looked beautiful in a one-shoulder, printed dress with a ruffle bottom The supermodel was there to support daughter Alexa Ray Joel, 32, who was the issue's cover star. Alexa, who is the mirror image of her father Billy Joel, 69, looked beautiful in a one-shoulder, printed dress with a ruffle bottom. Supporting Alexa was her fiance, Ryan Gleason. The duo started dating in 2013 and got engaged in January of this year. Beauty in simplicity: The musician accessorized with large hoop earrings, a simple ring and her wedding ring His love: Supporting Alexa was her fiance, Ryan Gleason. The duo started dating in 2013 and got engaged in January of this year Stepping out: Also present for the evening was The Real Housewives of New York star, Luann de Lesseps, 53 Large family: In addition to Alexa, Christie also shares Jack, 22, and Sailor, 19, with ex-husband Peter Cook 'I couldnt be more humbled & honored': Christie and Alexa both took to social media to celebrate Alexa's big day 'My bella': Christie shared a snap of her daughter's magazine cover on newsstands, while Alexa thanked the Bella team, and revealed that the issue is 'selling out' Christie and Alexa both took to social media to celebrate Alexa's big day. Christie shared a snap of her daughter's magazine cover on newsstands, while Alexa thanked the Bella team, and revealed that the issue is 'selling out.' 'Heading uptown to my @bellanycmag Cover-Party... YAY! Thank you so dearly to the lovely Bella Team for throwing me this fabulous celebration! I couldnt be more humbled & honored to be gracing the cover of their May Beauty Issue,' she began. 'And hey, thanks to Barnes & Nobles NYC stores for featuring the issue as a Newsstand Favorite- so thrilled to hear its selling out!! If youre not in the NY area, you can order the issue at: bellanyc.com its available until July 4th. Happy Summer MLovelies!~' Leggy look: Alexa Ray looked leggy on her arrival in a printed dress Stunning: She looked every inch the cover girl in her pretty minidress Cute twosome: The pair fawned over the glossy magazine and Alexa's cover The beauty issue: Alexa looked like the perfect girl to front the beauty issue Bright white: The star looked sensational as she arrived for the cover party IMG Model Paris Jackson set the record straight after multiple outlets reported that she 'stormed out' of the Christian Dior Couture SS/19 fashion show in France 'in a rage' on Friday. The Cruise Collection presentation in a Chantilly chateau included several crop-cracking, side-saddled ladies recreating a Mexican rodeo with white horses. 'To be clear, I did not "storm out" of the show,' the 20-year-old daughter of the late Michael Jackson tweeted. Scroll down for video 'I did not "storm out" of the show': IMG Model Paris Jackson set the record straight after multiple outlets reported that she 'stormed out' of the Christian Dior Couture SS/19 fashion show in France 'in a rage' on Friday 'I quietly got up and walked out trying my hardest to not cause a scene, because I do not support animals being branded and whipped. Not trying to become enemies in the fashion world in any way, but I will always be myself.' Paris - who boasts 4.6M social media followers - added: 'Furthermore, I was not "enraged," just taken by surprise and a little heartbroken.' The Beverly Hills-born heiress concluded that she looks forward to the day where all high-end fashion houses will 'switch to no-fur and anti-animal cruelty.' Horses were still on Jackson's mind when she caught a flight from Italy to Austria and a fellow passenger was watching the 2002 DreamWorks animated western Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Stunt show: The Cruise Collection presentation in a Chantilly chateau included several crop-cracking, side-saddled ladies recreating a Mexican rodeo with white horses The 20-year-old daughter of the late Michael Jackson tweeted: 'I quietly got up and walked out trying my hardest to not cause a scene, because I do not support animals being branded and whipped' Paris - who boasts 4.6M social media followers - added: 'Furthermore, I was not "enraged," just taken by surprise and a little heartbroken' Before going barefoot: The Beverly Hills-born heiress concluded that she looks forward to the day where all high-end fashion houses will 'switch to no-fur and anti-animal cruelty' The millionaire hippie-at-heart frequently shares gushing posts about her three beloved fur-babies at home - two-year-old Koa Bear, Dexter King, and Sage Souix. The Gringo actress will be honored with the LIFE+ Award at Vienna's Life Ball this Saturday where she'll represent her late godmother's charity, The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. Other 'prominent congratulators' attending the Sound of Music-themed HIV/AIDS fundraiser in City Hall include Charlize Theron, Adrian Brody, Patti LaBelle, and Rufus Wainwright. 'I love this movie!' Horses were still on Jackson's mind when she caught a flight from Italy to Austria and a fellow passenger was watching the 2002 DreamWorks animated western Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron 'Happy photo of me and my children': The millionaire hippie-at-heart frequently shares gushing posts about her three beloved fur-babies at home - (from L-R) two-year-old Koa Bear, Dexter King, and Sage Souix (pictured August 2) Paris was only 10 years old when the legendary King of Pop succumbed to 'acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication' in 2009. Jackson now receives $8M annually from her estimated $100M inheritance as well as additional bonuses at ages 33 and 40 - according to Page Six. Meanwhile, it's unclear when the Joker's Wild guest star last visited her mother, dermatology nurse Debbie Rowe, who was battling breast cancer. This Saturday! The Gringo actress will be honored with the LIFE+ Award at Vienna's Life Ball where she'll rep her late godmother's charity, The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation Larry Emdur has shared a throwback photo from his early days as a news reporter on Channel 10's Good Morning Australia. The 53-year-old, who is best known as a TV presenter and game show host, took to Instagram on Wednesday to post the snap from 1988's World Expo in Brisbane. The Morning Show star looked rather handsome in his youth, as he posed for a friendly photo with a young woman. 'Im old!' On Wednesday, Larry Emdur shared a throwback photo from his early days as a news reporter on Channel 10's Good Morning Australia In the photo, the former Price Is Right host wore a World Expo '88 T-shirt and a pair of high waisted trousers. Larry's mullet was also a far cry from his current, low-maintenance buzz cut. 'OMG! 30 friggin' years ago reporting for Good Morning Australia at World Expo in Brissy,' Larry wrote in the caption. He added the hashtag: 'I'm old'. Fresher look: Larry's late '80s mullet was a far cry from his current, low-maintenance buzz cut (pictured alongside Kylie Gillies and Kate Ritchie) Many fans were bowled over by Larry's throwback snap, including his 19-year-old daughter Tia. Tia commented: 'I've always subscribed to the idea that you were always a dad, I almost forgot you were young once upon a time.' Former Play School host Trisha Goddard also wrote: 'Now this is how I remember you!' Familiar face: Larry, 53, is known for hosting The Morning Show, The Price Is Right (pictured) and Wheel of Fortune Meanwhile, WSFM breakfast radio presenter Brendan Jones commented: 'That's some good high daks there!' Larry and his wife-of-23-years Sylvie share two children - Jye, 24 and Tia, 19 - and recently sold their Dover Heights home in Sydney. They traded in their record-setting $11.5million property for a smaller $3million cottage in The Rocks. The Thinkergirls duo Stacey June and Kristie Mercer recently claimed they believe their axing from KIIS FM was due to a culture of sexism in commercial radio. And on Tuesday, the radio-hosts-turned-podcasters weighed in on the controversy surrounding embattled 2Day FM presenter Em Rusciano, claiming the uproar was just an example of 'double standards' in the industry. Speaking about the issue on their podcast, Stacey and Kristie pulled no punches when discussing their experiences of gender bias in radio. 'It's because she's a f**king woman!' The Thinkergirls' Stacey June and Kristie Mercer accused commercial radio of having 'double standards' amid the Em Rusciano controversy on Tuesday Stacey said: 'The coverage she [Em Rusciano] has received over the past week about this part of her behaviour... has p***ed me off because I am just laughing from when I wake up to the time I go to sleep, sitting on the other side of this radio world going, "Oh f**king hell give me a break!" 'The amount of people that are like Em is being described in the radio world is an absolute, diabolical joke.' Stacey went on to claim that she believes the controversy surrounding Em is primarily due to the fact she is a woman. 'Oh f**king hell, give me a break': Stacey claimed there were many men in the radio industry who deserve the same treatment Em Rusciano has received for being 'difficult' to work with 'And why in God's name are we flaring this behaviour up? I'll tell you why. It's because she is a f**king woman,' she added. An explosive report by The Daily Telegraph last week alleged that 'people just cannot work with Em' at 2Day FM. A source told the newspaper: 'Things are at breaking point, people just cannot work with her energy. There have been... casualties at the hands of Em Rusciano.' 'There have been casualties': An explosive report by the Daily Telegraph last week alleged that 'people just cannot work with Em Rusciano' at 2Day FM Last Friday, a source spoke exclusively with Daily Mail Australia, claiming that Em had been called in to a meeting with senior management regarding her conduct. There are even unconfirmed reports circulating that Em may be axed from the show, with media personality Ash London tipped as her replacement. Speaking about the supposed toxic environment Em had created at the network, Stacey said: 'It's almost laughable think of the amount of people we've worked with who make it a toxic work environment.' Controversy: Last Friday, a source spoke exclusively with Daily Mail Australia, claiming that Em had been called in to a meeting with senior management regarding her conduct Kristie responded: 'Yeah, there's a lot. All of them.' The Thinkergirls then claimed that Em was in hot water because she was an 'easy target' and 'a woman'. They added that there were plenty of males in the radio industry who deserved similar treatment. 'If her job is remotely on the line, where are all the other male heads on the chopping block? Why is it hers?' Stacey asked pointedly. Double standards: 'If her job is remotely on the line, where are all the other male heads on the chopping block? Why is it hers?' Stacey asked on The Thinkergirls podcast on Tuesday Kristie and Stacey then recalled some of their own experiences of 'toxic' behaviour, claiming that men were the worst offenders. Stacey claimed that one colleague had called her a 'c**t' while Kristie alleged that she once felt physically intimidated by a co-worker who stood over her shouting. They were also quick to point out they were not defending Em, but rather expressing their anger at what they believe are double standards. 'I am a broadcaster. I love what we do. I love radio,' Stacey said. 'But Jesus Christ, is it getting to the point where you need to feel... everything is just treated so unequally that you would just put up with that because you have a love? I'm just over it, being so silenced.' 'It is 100 per cent a gender issue': Speaking to Mamamia last week, the Thinkergirls said they had been scratching their heads trying to understand their dismissal from KIIS FM last year Speaking to Mamamia last week, the Thinkergirls said they had been scratching their heads trying to understand their dismissal from KIIS FM last year, after they had been in talks with management beforehand about taking over a national drive-time slot. 'It wasn't just what happened, but the way it happened,' Kristie said. 'It felt traumatic .There was no justification, it's just, "We're not renewing your contract.''' She added: 'It is 100 per cent a gender issue.' Daily Mail Australia has contacted Southern Cross Austereo for comment. Pregnant Eva Longoria was a vision of happiness as she headed out with her beloved husband Jose 'Pepe' Baston in Los Angeles on Tuesday. The 43-year-old Desperate Housewives actress lovingly caressed Pepe's face in a sweet display of affection as they headed to an organic Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood, California. Adoring Pepe, 50, could not keep his hands off the expectant mum as he wrapped his arm around Eva affectionately touching her baby bump. Lunch date: Pregnant Eva Longoria was a vision of happiness as she headed out with her beloved husband Jose 'Pepe' Baston in Los Angeles on Tuesday Eva kept it simple in a long-sleeved black scoop neck maternity top along with a long, loose red skirt. She accessorised with sunglasses pulled over her make-up free face and sported a black cap reading 'Housewife'. She also had a small black purse hanging from a long chain on her hip. Pepe kept it casual in a plain dark blue T-shirt, black Nike sweatpants and blue flip-flops. Flaunting the fabled expectant mother glow, Eva wore her hair in loose lengths while allowing her flawless skin to shine through. The Mexican media mogul also had a pair of sunglasses perched atop his head - although they were perhaps not needed on the overcast day. Showing affection: The 43-year-old Desperate Housewives actress lovingly caressed Pepe's face in a sweet display of affection as they headed to an organic Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood, California Simple style: Eva and Jose kept it simple for their lunch date in West Hollywood Eva starred as Gabrielle Solis on the ABC series Desperate Housewives from 2004 to 2012 before scooping a role in Marc Cherry's now-defunct show Devious Maids. She has long been not only a hit in the acting world but also starring in many lucrative fashion campaigns atop her charity work. Pepe was former president of Televisa and remains on the board of directors of the Mexico City-based mass media company. Holding on: Eva starred as Gabrielle Solis on the ABC series Desperate Housewives from 2004 to 2012 before scooping a role in Marc Cherry's now-defunct show Devious Maids Cute couple: Eva and Jose married in May 2016 after meeting on a blind date Eva was recently featured in the new comedy Overboard starring Anna Faris that was released on May 4. The film was a remake of the 1987 classic comedy of the same name starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. Eva was working recently in Miami as a producer on the new TV series Grand Hotel set to air on ABC during pilot season. They began a romantic relationship while making the film The Myth Of Fingerprints together in 1996. And now actress Julianne Moore is once again starring in a movie directed by her now husband Bart Freundlich. The filmmaker is helming a new adaptation of the 2006 Danish movie After The Wedding and on Tuesday he was seen with his real-life leading lady while shooting on location in New York. His real life leading lady: Julianne Moore, 57, was spotted on location in NYC Tuesday with her husband Bart Freundlich, 48, who is directing her in the film After The Wedding Also spotted on set was Moore's co-star Michelle Williams. The film tells the story of Isabel (Williams) who runs an orphanage in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, in India. She travels to New York to meet with Theresa, the wealthy woman who is her benefactress (Moore). After Theresa gets married, a mystery unfolds that proves life-changing for Isabel. The movie also stars Billy Crudup and Abby Quinn. New role: Moore, 57, was seen wearing black flared trousers and a black v-neck sweater. Her red hair was loose and she wore a chunky watch on her left wrist Telling a story: Also spotted on the location set was Moore's co-star Michelle Williams, 37 Moore, 57, was seen wearing black flared trousers and a black v-neck sweater. Her red hair was loose and she wore a chunky watch on her left wrist. Williams, 37, continues to sport a blonde pixie cut and she had on a dark blue coat dress tied with a sash at the waist. She was bare-legged in flat brown sandals and carried a large brown canvas bag. In character: Williams had on a dark blue coat dress tied with a sash at the waist. She was bare-legged in flat brown sandals and carried a large brown canvas bag He's in charge: Freundlich, who also wrote the screenplay adapted from a 2006 Danish film, was seen setting up shots and giving direction as the movie filmed on the city streets The original movie co-written and directed by Susanne Bier starred Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen in the role being played by Moore in the new version. At the Cannes Film Festival earlier this month, the Still Alice Oscar winner explained about how the gender swap came about. She said that her husband decided to change the wealthy character from male to female during the process of adapting the story and she realized she wanted the role. 'Suddenly it became that much more enticing to me because that was an interesting role,' she said, according to THR.com. 'Things dont have to be bound by gender and its very easy to switch things around, and so we did.' She's a television presenter, radio host and former Miss Australia who is married to former AFL star Buddy Franklin. And Jesinta Franklin (nee Campbell) hinted that she will soon add another feather to her cap, as she teased a mystery business venture to her fans on social media. Taking to her Instagram story on Wednesday, the 26-year-old shared two short clips of herself modelling an array of clothes and jewellery - suggesting the project could be a style blog or a shopping site. Busy bee: Jesinta Franklin (nee Campbell) looks to be adding another feather to her cap, teasing a new mystery venture to fans on social media The videos started by showing a laptop featuring a website titled simply: 'Jesinta Franklin.' The blonde beauty remained tight-lipped about the exact details of the venture, simply telling her fans: 'Swipe up to be notified when my project launches.' Swiping up takes fans to the site, jesinta.com.au and shows her modelling a white bathrobe, an array of jewellery and swimwear as well as images showing her being 'made up' by a stylist Mystery: Taking to her Instagram story on Wednesday, the 26-year-old shared two short clips that showed a laptop computer featuring a website titled simply: 'Jesinta Franklin' Cryptic; 'Swipe up to be notified when my project launches,' was the only clue given by Jesinta in the clips However, there is still no clue as to what the project would entail or indeed when it will launch. The only text appearing on the site read: 'Thanks for stopping by. Please register your email address to receive an update of when I launch my exciting new project. 'In the meantime, you can follow all the latest news via my Instagram feed. Jesinta x' It comes after the genetically-blessed Jesinta recently revealed that she had been the target of bullying as a teenager. What could it be? Swiping up takes fans to the site, jesinta.com.au and shows her modelling a white bathrobe, an array of jewellery and swimwear (pictured with her husband Buddy Franklin) She presented a gong at the InStyle and Audi Women of Style Awards earlier this month, where she opened up about her ordeal. After presenting an award to Project Rockit founders Lucy and Rosie Thomas, who aim to foster 'kindness and respect' in classrooms, Jesinta revealed her own experiences. 'I was bullied severely at school, and there was a program like this that really saved me, and it made me feel like I could conquer anything in the world so I feel really passionate about this award,' she said. She is known for showing off her killer body on runways and in photographs. But it seems Ireland Baldwin is struggling in her attempt to define her already flat stomach. The 22-year-old model wrote on an Instagram post Tuesday: 'Been trying to get abs but I keep eating spaghetti carbonara.' Darn pasta: Ireland Baldwin is struggling in her attempt to define her already flat stomach In the photo the Elle Bulgaria cover girl shared on social media, she went braless as she pulled up the bottom of a ripped, off-white t-shirt to expose her flat torso. She showed off her long lithe legs in low rise, skinny jeans while holding a pamplemousse La Croix in one hand. Her arm tattoos were clearly visible in the image as she stared down the camera, tucking her index finger into the corner of her pants pocket. Pulling her long locks back into a simple ponytail, the blonde bombshell juxtaposed her natural beauty against a simple indoor setting. But it's so delicious: The 22-year-old model wrote on an Instagram post Tuesday: 'Been trying to get abs but I keep eating spaghetti carbonara' Earlier in May, Ireland posted several nude photos by The Kandel Studio to her Instagram account. The model captioned one of the images, 'Sunday's are for the nudes @thekandelstudio.' Earlier that week, she was seen striking another pose on the beach for a moody black-and-white image shared to her Instagram account. She appeared to be wearing only a wet white T-shirt as she sprawled across the sand with waves crashing in the background in the photograph taken by Tyler Kandel. Ireland has never been afraid to speak her mind and has previously attacked critics of the numerous racy snaps she posts on social media. She is pictured earlier this month in West Hollywood Ireland has never been afraid to speak her mind and has previously attacked critics of the numerous racy snaps she posts on social media. Taking to Instagram in June 2017, she wrote: 'This is who I am, take it or leave. I am not going to be body shamed for being pale or not stick thin. 'I'm not going to spend hours photoshopping my authenticity away. I'm not going to beat myself up for not looking like someone else. 'I'm not going to be told that I'm damaged goods because of my tattoos.' Logan Browning flashed some skin as she arrived at an event hosted by Netflix in Los Angeles Tuesday night. The actress, 28, stars in Dear White People for the premium streaming service. She opted for an eclectic sleeveless white and black number with asymmetrical hem and cinched at the waist with a brown leather belt. Red carpet ready: Dear White People star Logan Browning flashed some skin as she arrived at an event hosted by Netflix in Los Angeles Tuesday night The frock's skirt had a slit at the front that flaunted her legs and she stepped out in white sandal heels. Browning wore her hair in long braids tumbling down over her shoulders on one side. She lined her eyes with black kohl and added glossy red lip color. On trend: The actress, 28, opted for an eclectic sleeveless white and black number with asymmetrical hem and cinched at the waist with a brown leather belt Stylish: The frock's skirt had a slit at the front that flaunted her legs and she stepped out in white sandal heels. She wore her hair in long braids tumbling down over her shoulders Dear White People the television series is based on Justin Simien's movie of the same name. The satirical comedy-drama released its first season in April of 2017 and returned for a second season on May 4. The critically-acclaimed show, which follows a group of black students at a predominantly white fictional Ivy League college, has received rave reviews from critics. Also at the In Conversation event was Gillian Jacobs, the star of Netflix series Love. Posed for photos: Also at the In Conversation event was Gillian Jacobs, the star of Netflix series Love. Colorful: The 35-year-old wore a red and blue floral-themed mini dress with long sleeves. She added a pair of bright red heels with pink detailing at the ankle Jacobs, 35, also put on a leggy show in a colorful mini dress. The long-sleeved outfit featured red and blue floral decorations on a black background. She added bright red heels with pink detailing at the ankle. At the event, too, was June Diane Raphael from Grace And Frankie and Justina Machado from One Day At A Time. Looking mellow: June Diane Raphael, 38, from Grace And Frankie showed up in a yellow pantsuit with diaphanous overlay and a pair of gold sandal heels She's been enjoying some down time since attending an array of glitzy Hollywood events earlier this month. But Selma Blair proved she can do casual chic just as well as red carpet glamour as she headed out in Los Angeles on Tuesday. The actress, 45, was sure to make heads turn as she put on a leggy display in a loose-fitting white jumpsuit as she grabbed her caffeine fix for the day. Legs for days: Selma Blair put on a leggy display in an all-white ensemble as she headed out on a low-key coffee run The Hellboy star teamed her comfortable ensemble with white and green lace-up sneakers and a jade green patterned handbag by Goyard. And Selma went make-up free for her relaxed day out, so that she could showcase her naturally beautiful features. The mother-of-one sheltered her eyes from the Californian sun with a pair of aviator shades and wore her light brunette locks loose around her shoulders. Casual chic: The Hellboy star teamed her comfortable ensemble with white and green lace-up sneakers and a jade green patterned handbag by Goyard The Cruel Intentions star also kept her accessories to a minimum so as to not distract from her effortlessly chic ensemble. There was no sign of the mystery man that the actress has been seen with twice earlier this month. Her outing comes after she went on a family day out with her six-year-old son Arthur Saint Bleick on Sunday, where they headed to the local farmers markers in Studio City. Selma's little man was certainly enjoying his afternoon out as he was seen adorably trying to impress a young girl by dabbing. Stunning: Selma sheltered her eyes from the Californian sun with a pair of aviator shades and went make-up free for her relaxed day out to showcase her naturally beautiful features Selma seems to have split with Dead Ant director Ron Carlson as both have wiped each other from their respective Instagram accounts, and they haven't been pictured together since December. The actress had previously been dating the single father as far back as February 2015. But the true love of her life is her son Arthur Saint, who she had while in a two-year relationship with fashion designer Jason Bleick, which ended in 2012. Family day out: Her outing comes after she went out with her six-year-old son Arthur Saint Bleick, where they headed to the local farmers markers in Studio City The beauty has candidly discussed the difficulties she previously faced while juggling her career duties with being a single mother to her child. She told US weekly in November last year: 'I did not have a support system. I was an older, tired, single mom. 'I shut myself off from everyone, and it wasnt until I accepted some help that I could just flourish as a mom.' The mother-of-one has had a stellar acting career ever since she made her screen debut back in 1995 on the television series The Adventures of Pete & Pete. His incessant teasing and naughty quips often leave his co-stars squirming. But Simon Cowell didn't find David Walliams' latest joke the least bit funny when the comic, 46, joked that the TV judge had slept with co-star Amanda Holden on Britain's Got More Talent on Tuesday night. The music mogul, 58, looked mortified by the gag and told David, 46, that he had 'crossed the line', before ordering him to leave the theatre. 'You've crossed the line': Simon Cowell didn't find David Walliams' latest joke the least bit funny when the comic, 46, joked that the TV judge had slept with co-star Amanda Holden on Britain's Got More Talent on Tuesday night Their heated exchange happened when host Stephen Mulhern asked who of Simon's three co-judges would be considered his 'deputy'. While Amanda and Alesha Dixon both chose themselves, David had other ideas, scribbling on his white board: 'Amanda (because they did it).' Standing up with a smile on his face to see what David had written, Simon's grin quickly disappeared when he saw the cheeky quip. Holden a minute! Amanda managed to see the funny side of David's gag but told the cheeky comedian that her husband was only upstairs Asking for trouble! Their heated exchange happened when host Stephen Mulhern asked who of Simon's three co-judges would be considered his 'deputy' 'You've crossed the line,' he told his co-star, with a furious look on his face. 'Good!' the Little Britain star hit back, before a giggling Amanda said: 'David, Christopher's upstairs,' referring to her husband Chris Hughes. Simon - who is in a relationship with long-time partner Lauren Silverman - then seethed: 'You really are a smutty little man, aren't you?' Raging: A horrified Simon told David: 'You really are a smutty little man, aren't you?' There's always one! While Amanda and Alesha Dixon both chose themselves as deputy judges, David had other ideas He then ordered David to 'get out', though the children's author didn't seem to mind, retorting: 'Good, because I've got dinner with Russell Crowe, anyway.' But the comment was no joke as the Oscar-winning Gladiator star was in fact sitting in the crowd as the second semi-final of Britain's Got Talent got underway. Tuning into the ITV broadcast, eagle-eyed fans quickly spotted the 54-year-old clapping and cheering from the audience, where he was sat alongside Les Miserables co-star Samantha Barks and comedian Jimmy Carr. Quick! Alesha Dixon quickly got rid of David's cheeky remark, which was scribbled on a whiteboard The actor was no doubt present with Samantha to support fellow Les Miserables star Alfie Boe, who was performing during the ITV results show. After the live event, held at the Hammersmith Apollo, Russell posed for a few snaps backstage with judge David and his showbiz pals. Sharing one to his own Instagram page, Little Britain star David wrote with excitement: 'A-list guests at BGT tonight!' She welcomed her first child with fiance Dean Vicelich in December. And Bec Chin showed off her humorous side, in an Instagram Story on Wednesday. The 31-year-old former Bachelor star captioned an image after daughter Savannah threw up on her chest: 'It will be beautiful they said.' 'It will be beautiful they said': Former Bachelor star Bec Chin, 31, showed off her humorous side after daughter Savannah, five months, VOMITED on her chest Bec, sporting a black round-neck top, sat on her home couch, with five-month-old Savannah on her lap. The newborn looked cute in a white and pastel pink ensemble and was embraced by her famous mother. Bec, who went makeup-free, pulled a rather displeased facial expression, after Savannah threw up on her chest. Brood: In December, Bec took to Instagram to confirm she and fiance Dean Vicelich had welcomed their little bundle of joy The nutritionist captioned the moment humorously: 'Have a baby they said, it will be beautiful they said.' In December, Bec took to Instagram to confirm she and Dean had welcomed their little bundle of joy. Sharing a sweet black and white snap of Savannah sleeping, Bec could be seen holding her daughter's hand. Proud mother: The nutritionist took to Instagram at the time, sharing with her fans: 'Welcome to the world Savannah Rose Vicelich. Out of our dreams and into our lives' 'Welcome to the world Savannah Rose Vicelich. Out of our dreams and into our lives 28.12.17,' she captioned the photo. Bec fell for Dean just months after being booted from Sam Wood's season of The Bachelor in 2015. The couple became engaged during a romantic New Zealand holiday in August last year. Ashton Kutcher's non-profit organisation Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children identified almost 6,000 child victims of human sex trafficking last year, it has emerged. The 40-year-old actor, co-founded Thorn, originally known as DNA Foundation, with ex-wife Demi Moore in 2009. The organisation helps fight child sex exploitation. Impact reports from the organisation for 2017, show that Thorn's software allowed law enforcement and investigators to identify 5,791 child sex trafficking victims. Making a difference: Ashton Kutcher's non-profit organisation Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children identified almost 6,000 child victims of human sex trafficking last year, it has emerged They were able to rescue 103 children from situations where sexual abuse of them was recorded and sold on. The organisation's manifesto is 'Until every child can be a kid. Thorn uses web application Spotlight which provides law enforcement with information and leads on suspected human trafficking networks, and ads which may be children, in order to identify and recover victims. It is now used by 5,000 officers in all 50 states and Canada. Impact: Impact reports from the organisation for 2017, show that Thorn's software allowed law enforcement and investigators to identify 5,791 child sex trafficking victims and rescue 103 children In 2016, during an appearance on the Today show, the actor said 'We've identified and recovered more than 6,000 trafficking victims this year. We identified and recovered more than 2,000 traffickers.' He also stated his next mission was to eliminate child pornography from the internet. In February 2017 Kutcher travelled to Washington D.C to give an impassioned speech during a hearing at the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee where he spoke about his work fighting against human trafficking and saving children from sexual abuse. Kutcher flew out to Washington a week before Shine a Light on Slavery Day, a day created by the End It organization to raise awareness on the issue. Speech: In February 2017 Kutcher travelled to Washington D.C to give an impassioned speech during a hearing at the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee where he spoke about his work fighting against human trafficking and saving children from sexual abuse The famous romcom actor became emotional during his powerful speech, stating his goal was to 'defend the right to pursue happiness'. 'But the right to pursue happiness, for so many, is stripped away. Its raped. Its abused. Its taken by force, fraud, or coercion. It is sold for the momentary happiness of another,' he said. Kutcher described his experiences as chairman of the organization saying he has met victims from Russia, India, and parts of the US and has been on FBI raids where he saw things 'no person should ever see.' He was seen holding back tears as he described a time that he watched a video of a child the same age as his own, being raped by an American man who was sex tourist in Cambodia. Kutcher also added that his organization was the 'last line of defense' in helping the Department of Homeland Security trying to locate a seven-year-old girl that was being sexually abused in content that was circulating around the dark web. 'This is the part where Internet trolls start telling me to stick to my day job, he said. After detailing his harrowing experiences on the job, Kutcher added: 'Thats my day job, and Im sticking to it.' The actor is married to actress and former co-star, Mila Kunis. The couple have two children, daughter Wyatt, three, and son Dimitri, 18 months. Emotion: The famous romcom actor became emotional during his powerful speech, stating his goal was to 'defend the right to pursue happiness' He told 48 Hours last month: 'You can roll up your sleeves and go try to be like a hero and save one person or you can build a tool that allows one person to save a lot of people," he said in the episode. 'And our algorithms are getting better we're getting smarter we're getting the tool in more people's hands.' The star also admitted that he has trouble talking about human trafficking without getting emotional. Em Rusciano believes she has hit 'peak elderly wog dog lady.' The embattled - rumoured outgoing - 2Day FM breakfast co-host made the claims via Instagram on Wednesday evening, citing the fact she was already in her pyjamas and drinking wine before 5pm. The 39-year-old shared an image that showed her sitting on the porch of her Sydney home, alongside a bottle of wine, three dogs, and a bowl of minestrone soup. 'And It's not even 5pm': Embattled 2Day FM co-host Em Rusciano seen sitting outside in her pyjamas with a bottle of wine... amid reports she will be SACKED from radio Sporting a pair of striped pyjamas and ugg boots, Em sipped soup from the bowl. She had a bottle of wine sitting next to her, but as noted by fans in the comments section, no glass could be seen. 'What you are witnessing here is peak elderly wog dog lady,' she wrote in the caption. Peak! 'What you are witnessing here is peak elderly wog dog lady,' she wrote in the caption, ''I'm sitting out the front of my house, in my pjs, eating home made minestrone, drinking a vino and it's not even 5pm' 'I'm sitting out the front of my house, in my pjs, eating home made minestrone, drinking a vino and it's not even 5pm.' 'This is me everyday but my minestrone is not homemade,' Sunrise star Edwina Bartholomew wrote in the comments. Em replied: 'I feel like you and I are on similar day routines. We're gonna KILL at old age.' Embattled: The 2Day FM breakfast co-host has had a rough month, spurred by her criticism of her network's decision making on Wil Anderson's Wilosophy podcast a fortnight ago (pictured alongside her co-hosts Ed Kavalee (L) and Grant Denyer (R) After several people pointed out the apparent lack of a glass, the former Australian Idol contestant explained: 'It's less washing up!' 'Only a bit left doll, no point getting a glass dirty!' Earlier this month, Em complained on Wil Anderson's Wilosophy podcast about having Ed Kavalee and Grant Denyer introduced as co-hosts on her 2Day FM show. Podcast peril: She told Wil the Hit Network's decision to hire co-hosts came out of the blue, leaving her with the intimidating task of generating chemistry with two people she'd never met She told Wil the Hit Network's decision came out of the blue, leaving her with the intimidating task of generating chemistry with two people she'd never met. 'It was hectic. It was the Em Rusciano Radio Show - it was my show!' And then all of a sudden Ed's anchoring and the show's called 'The 2Day FM Breakfast Show.'' A source subsequently told Daily Mail Australia Em had been called in to a meeting with senior management regarding her conduct. Meeting: A source subsequently told Daily Mail Australia Em had been called in to a meeting with senior management regarding her conduct Unconfirmed reports allege Em may be axed from the show, with media personality Ash London tipped as her replacement. According a source who spoke to The Daily Telegraph: 'Things are at breaking point, people just cannot work with her energy. There have been... casualties at the hands of Em Rusciano.' According to an insider who works with the network, co-host Ed recently refused to speak to Em off-air during a three-hour broadcast. Her ex James Stunt sparked speculation that he was engaged again on Monday night as he dined out with a mystery brunette. In light of the reports, Petra Ecclestone enjoyed a romantic dinner with her new man Sam Palmer at West Hollywood celeb haunt Craig's on Tuesday night. The Formula 1 heiress, 29, put her best fashion foot forward as she donned a thigh-skimming purple skirt for the dinner date with a pal. Stepping out: Petra Ecclestone enjoyed a romantic dinner with her new man Sam Palmer at West Hollywood celeb haunt Craig's on Tuesday night Style: Petra's beau Sam looked handsome for their outing in Los Angeles The blonde bombshell wraparound skirt highlighted her slender pins with aplomb and brought attention to her slinky grey pointed boots. Adding an edge to her ensemble, she teamed her thigh-skimming garment with a grey T-shirt which featured a young Snoop Dogg emblazoned across the front. Petra wrapped an oversized charcoal grey denim jacket around her frame and held onto her black leather clutch in her manicured mitt. She complemented her evening attire by working her blonde locks into a tousled high-ponytail and sported a dramatic smokey eye. Thigh's the limit: The Formula 1 heiress, 29, put her best fashion foot forward as she donned a thigh-skimming purple skirt for the dinner date Fashion: Adding an edge to her ensemble, she teamed her thigh-skimming garment with a grey T-shirt which featured a young Snoop Dogg emblazoned across the front Following her lead, Petra's beau Sam looked handsome for their outing in Los Angeles, wearing a navy long-sleeved knit top and dark wash denims. They are in the thick of the early stages of a sizzling romance after just seven months of dating each other as Petra continues to put her divorce behind her. While no details of the divorce settlement were released, Petra and her ex-husband James reached an agreement back in October last year, with their marriage coming to an end after just six years together. It was reported that James signed a 16 million prenuptial agreement, with Petra also awarded sole custody of the couple's three children in January. Style: The blonde bombshell wraparound skirt highlighted her slender pins with aplomb and brought attention to her slinky grey pointed boots Bag it up: Petra wrapped an oversized charcoal grey denim jacket around her frame and held onto her black leather clutch in her manicured mitt Petra has found love again with Sam, who is friends with her sister Tamara's husband Jay Rutland. 'It's very early-on dating,' the heiress told Mail On Sunday's YOU magazine in a recent interview. 'The whole thing is quite strange because my life didn't pan out the way I expected it to. I thought I wasn't the type who believed in divorce. 'I go to church and I got married thinking I would be with that person for the rest of my life. But things happen for a reason and, whatever that reason is, I've now got my three kids.' Mane attraction: She complemented her evening attire by working her blonde locks into a tousled high-ponytail and sported a dramatic smokey eye Catching up: She hugged her glamorous pal goodbye Style savvy: He sported a navy long-sleeved knit top and dark wash denims Elsewhere, Petra's ex James set tongues wagging on Monday night as he arrived at London's C Restaurant on Monday night with a mystery woman, who sported a huge diamond ring on her engagement finger. He previously was reported to have enjoyed a short-term relationship with glamorous Samantha Rowley earlier this year and the pair were even said to be engaged after she was caught wearing a giant ring. And it appeared that the businessman, who is estimated to be worth around 4billion, had moved on and was smitten with the beautiful brunette, who happened to be wearing a huge sparkler on her wedding ring, sparking new rumours of an engagement. Romance: They are in the thick of the early stages of a sizzling romance after just seven months of dating each other as Petra continues to put her divorce behind her Engaged again? James Stunt, 36, was seen arriving at London's C Restaurant on Monday night with a mystery woman who was wearing a huge ring on her wedding finger New love? The eye-catching sparkler certainly caught the eyes and sparked rumours of an engagement His outing with the beauty comes after Samantha - who was reportedly in a short-term relationship with the London native earlier this year - hit back at critics of her relationship with James stating she's 'no gold digger.' The stunning blonde said James' 'heart is as big as his bank balance' - stating: 'James has a big bank account. But he also has a big personality and a big heart. 'm no gold digger. The term is derogatory to women and sadly often comes from other women.' Following initial reports of their 'engagement', Samantha was seen brandishing a huge sapphire ring on her engagement finger - which was said to be worth 1.5million. Samantha - who recently attended the 71st annual Cannes Film Festival with pal Laura Zilli - was first photographed on James' arm just days after the final court hearing in his divorce from Petra in February. The high-flying couple were rumoured to have been dating for several months, after being first spotted together in January. Hopping in: Petra and Sam were pictured hopping into a glamorous car after the night out Heading home: The duo were seen leaving Craig's Restaurant in West Hollywood Sydney is currently shivering through its last days of autumn, with a cold blast sweeping across the city. But Kristina Mendonca and her equally alluring gal pal were certainly raising temperatures on Tudesday. The Australian model and her blonde friend braved the frigid weather as they stripped down to skimpy bikinis for a photo shoot at Bronte beach. Double trouble: On Tuesday, Kristina Mendonca (left) joined a gal pal on Sydney's Bronte Beach as they stripped down to VERY cheeky bikinis for a sizzling beach photo shoot Bottoms up! Both beauties put their backsides on display in very cheeky G-string bottoms 20-year-old Kristina - who boasts 487,000 Instagram followers - wore an orange cheetah print bikini top complete with thin spaghetti straps. Her pal opted for a strapless swimsuit - albeit in the same orange cheetah print. Both beauties put their backsides on display in very cheeky G-string bottoms. Not feeling the chill! The beauties didn't appear to mind the cooler weather, stripping down on the iconic beach Friendly display: At one point Kristina (left) wrapped her arm around her fellow model pal and leaned in lovingly Kristina is signed with Vivien's Models, and it was easy to see why during the photo shoot on Tuesday. The stunner flaunted her long, slender legs and toned torso as she pulled a series of sultry poses. At one point she wrapped her arm around her fellow model pal and leaned in lovingly. The sheer cheek of it! The scantily clad twosome also made to turn around for the photographer, so he could snap some steamy shots of their derrieres Blonde beauties! Kristina is signed with Vivien's Models (left), and it was easy to see why during the photo shoot on Tuesday The scantily clad twosome also made to turn around for the photographer, so he could snap some steamy shots of their derrieres. It appeared to be quite a distracting scene for one man who was snorkeling in the shallows of the beach, as he emerged to catch an eye full of the stunners. Newcastle-born Kristina splits her time between Sydney and Los Angeles as her career continues to go from strength to strength. Unexpected surprise: It appeared to be quite a distracting scene for one man who was snorkeling in the shallows of the beach, as he emerged to catch an eye full of the stunners (background) Paris Jackson was seen shooting a new fashion campaign on Wednesday, after protesting against Dior. Michael Jackson's daughter, 20, shot a peace sign at cameras in Venice just a matter of days after walking out of the Christian Dior Couture SS/19 show in Paris. The model was in high spirits as she posed in a rainbow-coloured, multi-patterned shawl after clarifying her reasons for leaving the Cruise show on Friday. Free spirit: Paris Jackson was spotted shooting a new fashion campaign in Venice, Italy on Monday American beauty Paris has moved from France to Italy for work, where she is shooting a new modelling campaign. Paris has been signed to one of the world's best agencies, IMG Models, since the age of 18. She has so far served as the face of underwear brand Calvin Klein and has previously landed numerous prestigious magazine covers. Her latest shoot was taken on the streets of Venice and saw the striking brunette draped in a multi-coloured cloak, over pure white trousers and a matching blouse. Back in business: The IMG Model has explained why she 'quietly' walked out of a Dior Cruise fashion show on Friday With the shirt buttoned low, free-spirited Paris exposed her numerous colourful chest inkings and beneath her wide-leg trousers peeped a pair of suitably scruffy sneakers. This week, IMG Model Paris set the record straight on her disappearance from the Christian Dior Couture SS/19 fashion show inFrance. The Cruise Collection presentation in a Chantilly chateau included several crop-cracking, side-saddled ladies recreating a Mexican rodeo with white horses. 'To be clear, I did not "storm out" of the show,' the 20-year-old daughter of the late Michael Jackson tweeted. 'I did not "storm out" of the show': IMG Model Paris set the record straight after multiple outlets reported that she 'stormed out' of the fashion show in France 'in a rage' on Friday Peace out! While clutching a cigarette, Paris posed while draping herself around a pillar and flashing a peace sign at the camera Happy days: She looked trendy and chic as she jumped up to pose for the camera 'I quietly got up and walked out trying my hardest to not cause a scene, because I do not support animals being branded and whipped. Not trying to become enemies in the fashion world in any way, but I will always be myself.' Paris - who boasts 4.6M social media followers - added: 'Furthermore, I was not "enraged," just taken by surprise and a little heartbroken.' The Beverly Hills-born heiress concluded that she looks forward to the day where all high-end fashion houses will 'switch to no-fur and anti-animal cruelty.' Horses were still on Jackson's mind when she caught a flight from Italy to Austria and a fellow passenger was watching the 2002 DreamWorks animated western Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Stunt show: The Cruise Collection presentation in a Chantilly chateau included several crop-cracking, side-saddled ladies recreating a Mexican rodeo with white horses The 20-year-old daughter of the late Michael Jackson tweeted: 'I quietly got up and walked out trying my hardest to not cause a scene, because I do not support animals being branded and whipped' Paris - who boasts 4.6M social media followers - added: 'Furthermore, I was not "enraged," just taken by surprise and a little heartbroken' Before going barefoot: The Beverly Hills-born heiress concluded that she looks forward to the day where all high-end fashion houses will 'switch to no-fur and anti-animal cruelty' The millionaire frequently shares gushing posts about her three beloved fur-babies at home - two-year-old Koa Bear, Dexter King, and Sage Souix. The Gringo actress will be honored with the LIFE+ Award at Vienna's Life Ball this Saturday where she'll represent her late godmother's charity, The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. Other 'prominent congratulators' attending the Sound of Music-themed HIV/AIDS fundraiser in City Hall include Charlize Theron, Adrian Brody, Patti LaBelle, and Rufus Wainwright. 'I love this movie!' Horses were still on Jackson's mind when she caught a flight from Italy to Austria and a fellow passenger was watching the 2002 DreamWorks animated western Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron 'Happy photo of me and my children': The millionaire hippie-at-heart frequently shares gushing posts about her three beloved fur-babies at home - (from L-R) two-year-old Koa Bear, Dexter King, and Sage Souix (pictured August 2) Paris was only 10 years old when the legendary King of Pop succumbed to 'acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication' in 2009. Jackson now receives $8M annually from her estimated $100M inheritance as well as additional bonuses at ages 33 and 40 - according to Page Six. Meanwhile, it's unclear when the Joker's Wild guest star last visited her mother, dermatology nurse Debbie Rowe, who was battling breast cancer. This Saturday! The Gringo actress will be honored with the LIFE+ Award at Vienna's Life Ball where she'll rep her late godmother's charity, The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation Samantha Armytage returned home last week after covering the Royal Wedding in London. And the Sunrise host revealed to her Instagram Story on Wednesday, that 'too much shopping' caused her bag to break. But it wasn't all bad news for the 41-year-old, having been gifted brand new suitcases from Antler Luggage. Too much baggage: Samantha Armytage, 41, revealed that her luggage broke, having shopped up a storm in London Sam showed off three navy suitcases in various sizes, that sat next to the main staircase in her home. With the tags still in place, the blonde revealed in the caption that she broke her own luggage, while in London. Sam wrote: 'Those lovely people @antlerluggageoz must have heard my bag broke at Heathrow [Airport] [bc of too much shopping],' alongside an emoji with tears of laughter. Sweet gesture: The Sunrise co-host revealed to her Instagram Story on Wednesday, that she was gifted with three brand new suitcases from Antler Luggage This is not the first time Sam has shared the after-effects from her whirlwind trip to the UK. Last Thursday, the reporter took to her Instagram Story, posting a close-up snap of her visage, in particular her under-eye bags. Using Instagram's scribble tool, Sam drew arrows and added in the text 'jet lag bags'. Jet lag: Last Thursday, Sam posted a close-up snap of her visage, in particular her under-eye bags, having returned from London where she covered the Royal Wedding She also penned: 'When Thursday feels like a Monday...#backtowork,' alongside an unimpressed face emoji. Sunrise and rival network the Today show flew to London to cover Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's Royal Wedding. The morning show teams competed to keep Australians up-to-date with the latest news in the lead-up to the nuptials at Windsor Castle, London. The Today show even upped the ante, broadcasting from famous British landmarks like the Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace and the Royal Wedding venue. Since its premiere on Sunday night, Love Island has been suffering from dismal ratings . And now the raunchy reality show is reportedly the subject of a conspiracy theory. According to series host, Sophie Monk, some viewers believe the series isn't being filmed live. 'I've never lied in my life': On Tuesday, Love Island host Sophie Monk took to Instagram Stories where she addressed a BIZARRE new conspiracy theory about the show Taking to her Instagram Stories on Wednesday, Sophie stated: 'There's a few people saying they don't believe it's live voting, but I don't believe I've ever lied in my life!' She added! 'I swear to God it's live voting right now. So vote!' The bubbly blonde then brandished her smart phone, directing followers to log on to the Love Island app. Sex isn't selling: Since its premiere on Sunday night, Love Island has been suffering from dismal ratings - and now it's the subject of a new conspiracy theory Fans will be able to have their say on a number of different facets of the show - voting to evict or save cast members, and voting on which competitors will be rewarded with treats. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Sophie also insisted that Love Island is set to get more dramatic. 'The drama is insanity! I'm going mental. Poor girls! That's all I can say!' she teased. Teasing: Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Sophie also insisted that Love Island is set to get more dramatic It's not the first time Sophie has talked up the reality show, last week promising it would be the steamiest series on Australian TV. '[It's] a really sexy version of Big Brother without [any] body fat,' the blonde beauty told Triple M's Jane Kennedy and Mick Molloy radio show. However, despite all the overtly racy promotions, it appears that sex isn't selling for Love Island. Tuesday night's episode drew in a paltry 138,000 viewers on 9Go! - coming in as the 70th most watched program of the day. Kaia Gerber showed she can still pull off a low-key look when she's not gracing the catwalks of some of the biggest shows. The 16-year-old was pictured in Malibu wearing a white vest top and a pair of baggy high-waisted trousers which were simple yet fashion forward last week. Heading out with a pal, the daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber went make-up free, letting her natural beauty shine through. Mirror image of her mother: Kaia Gerber wore a white vest top and high-waisted black trousers as she headed out in Malibu last week She wore a pair of sunglasses and wore her locks down in a sleek and blow-dried fashion, completing her ensemble in a low-key pair of trainers. Taking after her model mother, Kaia recently joined her for an Omega watch campaign which was released on Mother's day. Meanwhile, her parents celebrated 20 years of marriage in an extremely low-key fashion on Tuesday evening. Fashion forward: She wore a pair of sunglasses and wore her locks down in a sleek and blow-dried fashion, completing her ensemble in a low-key pair of trainers The 52-year-old shared a stunning shot of herself and her husband Rande, 56, from their wedding day in celebration the milestone anniversary before posting a video as they slow-danced and smooched to country music in a dive bar. Gazing lovingly at one another, the duo sat in front of a bottle of liquor while they were serenaded in the low-key setting - which saw the duo surrounded by crass wall signs and wooden decor, while they each sported minimalist ensembles. Adoring: Her parents, Cindy and Randy celebrated 20 years of marriage in an extremely low-key fashion on Tuesday Shunning lavish celebrations, the duo headed to a dive bar in Nashville to listen to country music while getting up close and personal. They were serenaded with the track from their wedding day as they sat in the very front row to the stage and mouthed the words to one another in a tender display. She added a caption on her Instagram video of the moment, reading: 'Thanks @kidrock and @missaudreyberry for making our anniversary so special. '@officialdeanjames, @jonpardipics, and @thefiddleman_ played the song from our wedding Have A Little Faith In Me good words for a long marriage!' Up close and personal: The 52-year-old shared a stunning shot of herself and her husband Rande, 56, from their wedding day in celebration the milestone anniversary before posting a video as they slow-danced and smooched to country music in a dive bar Loved-up: Gazing lovingly at one another, the duo sat in front of a bottle of liquor while they were serenaded in the low-key setting - which saw the duo surrounded by crass wall signs and wooden decor, while they each sported minimalist ensembles Time flies! Cindy once again proved she was age-defying on Tuesday as she shared a throwback photo of her wedding to Rande Gerber to mark their 20th anniversary The supermodel, who dominated the fashion industry in the '80s and '90s, made a very beautiful bride - and she's barely aged a day since then. She captioned the tender picture, in which she wowed in a white-trimmed cami dress: '20 years ago today walking down the aisle @randegerber. I couldnt have chosen a better man to do this thing called life with. I love you!' The genetically-blessed beauty opted to go barefoot on her big day and had her hair styled out into lose curls as she walked hand-in-hand with her man. Stylish: Cindy opted for a white slip lace dress and no shoes for her big day Rande: '20 years ago today, 2 amazing kids and this beautiful girl with her arms always holding on tight. Thank you for our life,' he wrote Rande also had a low-key style on his big day. The business mogul had his white shirt untucked and he sported straight leg trousers. He also took to social media to celebrate the day, as he penned: '20 years ago today, 2 amazing kids and this beautiful girl with her arms always holding on tight. Thank you for our life,' he wrote. Sharing more love, the couple's daughter Kaia Gerber, 16, also took to social media to send her wishes to her parents. She wrote on top of one of their wedding photos: 'Happy anniversary to this match made in heaven. 20 YEARS OF LOVE. (also, yes to getting married with no shoes on).' What's her secret? The '80s and '90s supermodel has continued to prove time and time again that she's age-defying (L: Fundraiser in 1997 | R: MET Gala in 2018) Music city! The couple have been spending the past few days celebrating their anniversary in Nashville, Tennessee The couple have been spending the past few days celebrating their anniversary in Nashville, Tennessee. Between 1991 to 1995, Cindy was married to actor Richard Gere. Following her divorce, she married former model Rande Gerber. The couple's two children are both models - son Presely Walker, 18, and daughter Kaia, 16. She was escaping on her first child-free holiday as a single mum. And nothing was going to bring Imogen Thomas down on Tuesday, as she posed by the poolside in Greece. Putting her recent split woes aside, the 35-year-old mum of two has flown to the island of Skiathos to celebrate a friend's wedding. Bikini babe: Imogen Thomas showcased her flawless curves in a blue bikini this week as she relaxed in Greece And the break-up couldn't have looked better on Imogen, who was flaunting her slim figure in a printed Chasing Summer bikini. The two-piece, which featured a cobalt snakeskin pattern, flashed a hint of underboob as the halterneck top showed off her cleavage. With ribbon-tie bottoms, model Imogen oozed confidence at the poolside, where she spent the day unwinding by herself. Hanging out: She was pictured heading for a sunbed as she spent the day at the pool In shape: The brunette was showcasing her toned figure in a printed two-piece bikini Flying solo: It's her first escape since news that her relationship with Adam Horsley is over Imogen jetted off to Kassandra Bay Resort & SPA last Friday, celebrating her first solo adventure since her separation from long-term boyfriend Adam Horsley. The Welsh reality star and her ex are parents to daughters Ariana Siena, five, and Siera Aleira, two. She celebrated her departure with a glass of wine at the airport, writing to her followers: 'OMG! Am I actually at the airport (child free) off to my BFF wedding in Greece... oh am I excited!!!! (sic)' Holiday vibes: Imogen celebrated her departure last Friday on her first child-free break since becoming a single mum And relax: The model has been taking some time to herself in Greece Me time: Imogen has escaped her relationship woes back at home Taking it all in: The stunner was seen letting her troubles wash over her Imogen's love split after six years was confirmed in a statement released to MailOnline last month. The statement said:'Imogen is completely heartbroken and devastated about the break up. 'However, she has amazing friends and family who are very supportive and will help to get her through this difficult time. 'Her two beautiful children are her priority moving forward, and she will continue to focus on the positive things in her life such as her business Chasing Summer.' Focus: Imogen says she is focusing on her swimwear business Chasing Summer Looking good: Imogen displayed underboob in her printed swimsuit Tanned: She took the opportunity to top up her golden glow in the sun Pose perfect: The model couldn't resist a few modelling shots by the side of the pool Relaxing: She lay out on a day bed in the shallow end of the pool Just two weeks later, Imogen was pictured was spotted sharing an extremely passionate kiss with hunky businessman Will Corlass. The model was pictured outside London's Bluebird Cafe with her new male companion, after filling her social media feed with posts lamenting her split. Previously she'd written: 'My god have I had a dark day. Sure has been #mondayblues. Tomorrow is a new day. 'No man is worth my tears anymore. Losing my dad and most recently my uncle. I need to count my blessings I am healthy. My dad would be screaming at me now!! I need to be happy. It will take time but I will begin as of tomorrow,' she continued. Imogen added the motivational hashtag: '#whatdoesntkillyoumakeyoustronger,' along with a heart emoji. Glorious: She was drawing on her modelling background for a few shots at the poolside Bikini babe: Imogen was spending some time out of the country for a friend's wedding Celebrating love: Imogen was in Skiathos to celebrate a friend's wedding Time to reflect: She has had plenty of time to think about her relationship breakdown Heartache: Imogen was left heartbroken by the split from the father of her children The final episode of her hit show The Americans will air on Wednesday. And despite the drama coming to an end after six seasons, Keri Russell looked in high spirits as she put on another leggy display at Jimmy Kimmel Live! in Los Angeles on Tuesday. The talented actress, 42, who plays Soviet spy Elizabeth Jennings in the show, showcased her tanned and toned legs in a pair of thigh-skimming leather shorts as she strutted into the studio. Final countdown: Keri Russell looked in high spirits as she put on a leggy display at Jimmy Kimmel Live! in Los Angeles on Tuesday, ahead of the airing of the final episode of her hit show, The Americans Flashing her cleavage, the star paired the shorts with a gold lame blouse which plunged to reveal her braless decolletage. Adding an edgy twist to her ensemble, she wore a silk lined black blazer over her shoulders and added height with black stiletto sandals. Her caramel flecked brunette tresses were styled in soft waves while her glamorous make-up look featured smoky shadow, fluttery lashes and a fuschia lipstick. The beauty was seen putting on an animated display as she greeted her fans before waving to the crowds as she made her way inside the studio. Toned: The talented actress, 42, who plays Soviet spy Elizabeth Jennings in the show, showcased her tanned and toned legs in a pair of thigh-skimming leather shorts as she strutted into the studio Keri's hit FX show The Americans kicked off its sixth and final season on March 28. Russell and series co-star Matthew Rhys have been both onscreen partners and real-life loves, dating since 2013 and sharing son Sam together. The star also has two older children Willa Lou, six, and River Russell, 10 from her marriage to Shane Deary. In an interview with Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens LIVE, Matthew recalls the first time he ever met Keri. Strut: Flashing her cleavage, the star paired the shorts with a gold lame blouse which plunged to reveal her braless decolletage Shout-out: The beauty was seen putting on an animated display as she greeted her fans before waving to the crowds as she made her way inside the studio 'We met a very long time ago and I very drunkenly asked her for her number when she was a young single slip of a thing,' he said in his British accent. 'I sort of knew then when I was 26. It was in a parking lot after a kickball party.' The show's creator, former CIA officer Joe Weisberg, recalls with amusement the question he was asked when he first presented his idea back in 2012: 'Who really cares about US-Russia relations?' Keri said: 'Set in this weird, heightened spy world, it just allows all of the feelings of a long-term relationship, specifically a marriage, to play out in very big firework ways.' She also let slip that 'we have a pretty juicy ending' to the series. Matthew joked: 'Everyone dies. Pretty simple.' The Block's Kyal and Kara Demmrich have welcomed the birth of their second child. The couple shared the happy news in a heartfelt post shared to Instagram on Wednesday, which included first baby photos. 'Wow! She is here, born at 2:58am this morning, 30th May on Kara's Birthday,' they wrote. 'Our little girl is feeding well and healthy': The Block's Kyal and Kara Demmrich welcome the birth of their second child Vada Jane and share the first baby photo 'Our little girl is feeding well and healthy. She's 54cm. 3.56kg. They added: 'We named her Vada Jane Demmrich. Big brother Ziya was running around the room saying 'Sissi'. Clearly stoked with his little sister!' In the snaps, Kara, 30, is seen cradling her sleepy-eyed bub while posing alongside her beaming husband Kyal, 30, and their 19-month-old son Ziya Christopher. The couple, who have been married for nine years, made their TV debut in 2014 on season 8 of the Logie award-winning series. oh baby! In the snaps, Kara is seen cradling her sleepy-eyed bub just hours after giving birth They finished at third place and have remained in the home renovation business since the show. Kyal, who works as a carpenter, previously told Daily Mail Australia that he and Kara, 30, learned a great deal about themselves on the show. 'Something we learned from The Block was that we work incredibly well together and we want to run our business like that. Kara is a perfectionist and a logical thinker,' he said. A learning experience: Kyal, a 30-year-old carpenter, previously told Daily Mail Australia that him and Kara, 29, learned a great deal about themselves on The Block in 2014 'She's also got an amazing eye for styling and detail. I'm all about the construction, building and supplies side of things.' Previously speaking to Kyle and Jackie O, the Central Coast couple recalled how they refused to let being on the show stop their bedroom antics. They said they prepared fellow contestants for what might go on behind their bedroom door. 'When we came on the show I gave each of the contestants a set of earmuffs,' said Kyal. His wife said they did come close to hearing another couple get frisky. 'There was one night where Steve and Chantelle were giggling away, and I thought oh dear, oh dear what are we going to be hearing, but we didn't hear anything after that.' It is the raunchy reality show leaving fans wanting more and more. So it's no surprise that viewers had a meltdown when they were hit with an 'temporarily unavailable' message while trying to stream the show on Channel Nine's website. Several furious fans took to Twitter to voice their distress at not being able to tune in to the raunchy reality show, with one writing: 'Tried (to stream on) my phone and laptop but it isn't working. Really want and need to watch this!!!' Can it get any worse? On Tuesday, Love Island Australia's live stream was 'temporarily unavailable' on Nine's website, prompting furious fans to take to Twitter 'Really want and need to watch this!!!' The issue was no doubt a disaster for the Nine Network, who have publicly put an emphasis on delivering the series via digital platforms The issue was no doubt a disaster for the Nine Network, who have publicly put an emphasis on delivering the series via digital platforms. On Monday, the network defended Love Island's debut in the ratings by claiming the network was looking beyond traditional free-to-air television when evaluating its success. Hoping to attract tech-savvy millennials, a spokesperson stated: 'It's a multi-platform, digital, non-traditional show. We are pleased with the start and the noise it created on Twitter and online.' It's not like they can afford to lose anymore viewers! On Wednesday night, those watching via live stream at the 8.30pm start time were met with this 'temporarily unavailable' message The network also claimed that 6,500 tuned in via the live stream link for the premiere episode. However, on Wednesday night, those watching via live stream at the 8.30pm start time were met with the 'temporarily unavailable' message. Although the issue was quickly rectified, it's unclear how many viewers Nine might have lost with the glitch. Oh no! Another disgruntled fan shared this snap to Twitter on Wednesday night Headache for Nine: The network has been hoping to attract a large digital audience with Love Island - but that may have been complicated by Wednesday night's glitch Nine told Daily Mail Australia in a statement: 'We experienced technical issues at the beginning of the live stream for five minutes between 8.30pm-8.35pm. The issue was quickly fixed and no other problems have occurred.' Advertisement She split from her True Blood actor husband Jim Parrack in March 2017 after less than two years of marriage. And after finding love again one month later, one year on, it appears as though Leven Rambin couldn't be happier. Spotted ringing in her 28th birthday with her boyfriend Tilky Jones, 36, over the weekend, the Gone actress flaunted her enviable physique in a racy bikini during a vacation to Cancun, Mexico. Stunner: Gone actress Leven Rambin was photographed flaunting her ample cleavage and gym-honed physique in a racy Adore Me bikini during loved-up Cancun vacation with boyfriend Tilky Jones over the weekend More than dating? Referring to Leven as his 'wife' on Instagram last week, it is unclear whether Tilky was joking or not He's strong! The Take 5 musician's topless ensemble showcased his ripped physique and drew attention to his large sleeve tattoo Leven opted for the Kaulana Red bikini by Adore Me for the holiday at the Live Aqua Beach Resort which was nestled on the beach. With multiple ties on the unusual two piece suit, the pinup drew attention to her gym-honed body. The triangle cut top showcased the Hunger Games star's enviable cleavage. She's been working out! With multiple ties, she drew attention to her gym-honed body Natural beauty: She appeared to have a natural glam look as she got her feet wet in the warm gulf waters Leven kept her blonde hair out naturally flowing for the beach day. She appeared to have a natural glam look as she got her feet wet in the warm waters off the Gulf Of Mexico. Suits her! Leven opted for a rust colored two-piece for the holiday at the Live Aqua Beach Resort The 5ft7in beauty even found a moment to strike various poses with a pair of angel wings. Straight from heaven! The beauty even found a moment to strike various poses with a pair of angel wings Natural beauty: Leven kept her blonde hair out naturally flowing for the beach day Busting out! The triangle cut top showcased the Hunger Games star's enviable cleavage Tilky also appeared super relaxed for the week-long getaway. He opted to leave his top back at the hotel and merely wore a pair of grey board shorts. The Take 5 musician's topless ensemble showcased his ripped physique and drew attention to his large sleeve tattoo that went up over his shoulder. In his element: Tilky also appeared super relaxed for the week-long getaway No stress ensemble: He opted to leave his top and merely wore a pair of grey board shorts However, Tilky was seen adding a Hawaiian style unbuttoned shirt to his look when he returned back to their private cabana. The One Tree Hill star had his brunette locks styled naturally and was photographed with well-groomed facial hair. And despite the very dark and gloomy day that saw no-one else on the popular beach, the couple appeared as though they couldn't be happier. Covering up: However, Tilky was seen adding a Hawaiian style unbuttoned shirt to his look when he returned back to their private cabana Love: Frolicking in the shallow sections of the water, Leven and Tilky were seen holding hands, cuddling up together and even enjoying multiple passionate make-out sessions Well kept: The One Tree Hill star had his brunette locks styled naturally and was photographed with well-groomed facial hair No sun, no problem! And despite the very dark and gloomy day that saw no-one else on the popular beach, the couple appeared as though they couldn't be happier Going strong: The couple have been dating since March 2017 Moved on: One month after her marriage was annulled, Leven and Tilky began dating Frolicking in the shallow sections of the water, Leven and Tilky were seen holding hands, cuddling up together and even enjoying multiple passionate make-out sessions. The pair who just released a song together titled Dead Bones, even documented their romantic date with a cabana selfie. At one point of the day, the loved-up couple were spotted at the bar having a laugh over a few cocktails. Flaunting it: Leven spent the day flashing her gym-honed physique Documenting their day: The pair who just released a song together titled Dead Bones, even documented their romantic date with a cabana selfie Old love: Leven previously dated True Blood actor Jim Parrack and became engaged in August 2014 Leven threw on the Leelah Kimono by Adore Me over her swimsuit and was seen with a large straw hat which read 'Happy Hour'. And with the holiday an all expenses paid for experience taken care of by the Zaring Group, it's no wonder Leven and Tilky were nothing but smiles and laughter. Leven previously dated True Blood actor Jim Parrack and became engaged in August 2014. What's the joke? At one point of the day, the loved-up couple were spotted at the bar having a laugh over a few cocktails Covering up: Leven threw on the Leelah Kimono by Adore Me over her swimsuit and was seen with a large straw hat which read 'Happy Hour' Best week ever! And with the holiday an all expenses paid for experience taken care of by the Zaring Group, it's no wonder Leven and Tilky were nothing but smiles and laughter The pair married one year later before it was announced in March 2017 that their love had dissolved and they had split. It was reported that Leven was granted an annulment and she has since referred to her relationship with the actor as 'abusive'. As of April 2017, the blonde beauty began dating Tilky. Wishing Leven a happy birthday last week, he captioned: 'My beautiful wife is 40 years old today! Happy birthday Queen.' And while he was joking about her age, it is unsure whether or not the marital status was real or not. She recently revealed that her beau Jeremy Parisi is the 'sensible' one in their relationship and will tell her when she's eaten too much dessert. But Kelly Brook, 38, didn't seem too bothered as she sat on a velvet throne while shooting a new betting commercial in Liverpool on Wednesday. The model-turned-actress pulled a number of animated faces as she failed to contain her laughter as sat at the top of her horse-drawn carriage, which showcased a row of jockeys standing behind. Hilarity: Kelly Brook, 38, appeared unable to keep her composure as she sat on a velvet throne while shooting a new betting commercial in Liverpool on Wednesday Looking effortlessly glamorous, she slipped into a figure-flaunting red pencil dress which hugged her hourglass curves to perfection and holding a riding crop. Her choice of ensemble teased at her ample cleavage and slender pins while she relaxed into her seat. Kelly's ensemble boasted dramatic feathered shoulder detail as she accessorised with a statement beaded choker and matching sheer lace gloves with studded cuffs. Having fun with the commercial, beaming Kelly placed a striking red hat with red and black floral detailing, over her curly brunette locks. Giggle away: The model-turned-actress pulled a number of animated faces as she failed to contain her laughter as sat at the top of her horse-drawn carriage, which showcased a row of jockeys standing behind Perched: She attempted to make herself comfortable on the throne Having fun: Looking effortlessly glamorous, she slipped into a figure-flaunting red pencil dress which hugged her hourglass curves to perfection Checking out: Kelly made sure everything was OK around her as things seemed a little precarious Sitting at a great height, Kelly appeared anxious as she prepared for her carriage to be pulled by two white stallions. Earlier in the day, she was pictured with rollers in her hair filming a commercial in Liverpool alongside her French boyfriend. The model sported a pair of white ankle-length jeans and tucked in a matching camisole for the shoot which appeared to be shot in an open field. She complemented the look with a green gingham shirt, which she kept open, and held onto her red Hermes Birkin bag. Red alert: Looking effortlessly glamorous, she slipped into a figure-flaunting red pencil dress which hugged her hourglass curves to perfection Cheeky: She held a crop in her glove-clad hand with spiky bondage-style leather cuffs on her wrists Pouring down: She opened up an umbrella as the heaven's opened Relaxed: Her choice of ensemble teased at her ample cleavage and slender pins while she relaxed into her seat Fix up: Kelly's ensemble boasted dramatic feathered shoulder detail The Loose Women panellist sported a flat sandal while she happily chatted to her other half, who was clad in a leather jacket and jeans. While her glossy tresses set, Kelly sported a glamorous beauty look, equipped with a pink lip and lashings of mascara. Kelly and Jeremy's appearance in Liverpool comes after she gave an insight into her relationship, admitting she can go three days without brushing her teeth. The pair started dating in April 2015, with the relationship sparking from her asking for fitness advice before they spent six months Skyping. Getting into place: Kelly made her way to her throne Helping hand: A crew member helped her to feet Careful: Kelly carefully attempted to turn around to sit on the seat All in the details: She accessorised with a statement beaded choker and matching sheer lace gloves with studded cuffs Keeping dry: She remained dry during the shoot Mane attraction: Having fun with the commercial, beaming Kelly placed a striking red hat with red and black floral detailing, over her curly brunette locks Horsing around: Kelly had to climb a height to get to her throne She confessed: 'Jeremy definitely parents me sometimes. Ive got that tendency sometimes, like, it was his birthday at the weekend and Im like lets get some people together and go for drinks. He was like, "No youve got work on Monday".' She said: 'Im always the person whos like let's have another drink, lets have a dessert and hell be like, "You had a dessert last night, you dont need one tonight," or, "You had a drink this afternoon, you dont need another one".' 'Hes the sensible one. He just keeps me on the straight and narrow and keeps me focused otherwise Id forever be eating and drinking and having a good time. Getting chic done! The model sported a pair of white ankle-length jeans and tucked in a matching camisole for the shoot which appeared to be shot in an open field Selfie time: Jeremy shared a selfie of the pair behind-the-scenes But Kelly doesn't seem to mind a bit, saying: 'Its nice to have someone whos a bit more grounded and sensible than I am.' Recently, the pair celebrated Jeremy's birthday abroad, and Kelly marked the occasion over the weekend by posting a topless image with her boyfriend alongside a gushing caption dedicated to her beau. She penned: 'Happy Birthday to my Love @jeremyparisi You make me so happy and today is your day Big. Kisses #33YearsYoung #3YearsTogether'. After four engagements, she previously confessed Jeremy is 'The One', saying last year: 'Im a very loved-up lady right now. Jeremys great and things are going really well. Hopefully Ill have a baby soon. I am entering a new phase in my life.' Bag it up: She complemented the look with a green gingham shirt, which she kept open, and held onto her red Hermes Birkin bag Heidi Montag turned into an Earth mama for a new photo shoot this week. The 31-year-old Hills vet was seen posing with her son Gunner in a woodsy setting while modeling several red-carpet gowns. This comes after the Colorado native shared, 'Becoming a mom has been the most unimaginable experience. It has changed me to the depths of my being. Pushed me beyond limits I didnt know I could reach. Filled me with a new level of love I didnt know was possible.' Angel: Heidi Montag turned into an Earth mama for a new photo shoot this week. The 31-year-old Hills vet was seen posing with her son Gunner in a woodsy setting while modeling several red-carpet gowns In one set up Heidi looks like a forest fairy in a strapless beige ballgown with a crown made of leaves and white flowers. Gunner has on only grey shorts. The two are seen in a field of yellow wild flowers that reach up to the cover girl's waist. Happy mommy: And in another stunning set up she has on a pink gown while cradling her little child as she sits on a tree branch And in another stunning set up she has on a pink gown while cradling her little child as she sits on a tree branch. The Laguna Beach star is perfectly made up with her hair worn stick straight and down as she gazes lovingly at her child. The dress has a long train that lays on the forest ground with leaves everywhere. Elegant: And a third shot sees the Famous Food start in an off-the-shoulder royal blue gown with a mermaid finish and sweetheart neckline as she stands on the grass And a third shot sees the Famous Food start in an off-the-shoulder royal blue gown with a mermaid finish and sweetheart neckline as she stands on the grass. The small screen princess often posts on social media about her little boy Long earrings are dramatic and sparkle. Her son has on a matching blue outfit complete with cap and saddle shoes. \The photographer is Oxana Alex. The Academy of Art University graduate also shared similar images in mid May. 'So thankful to be celebrating Mothers Day as a mommy! Happy Mothers Day to all you amazing moms!' she captioned one image. 'I truly have a new appreciation for my mom and all moms. It is a job that takes continual, love, nurturing, patience, selflessness, and so much more! Thank you @spencerpratt for our angel and making me a mom.' And in another post, the TV darling shared: 'Becoming a mom has been the most unimaginable experience. It has changed me to the depths of my being. Pushed me beyond limits I didnt know I could reach. Filled me with a new level of love I didnt know was possible. I am so thankful to be celebrating Mothers Day as mom. #mothersday #love #thankful.' Her last mid May post read: 'Thank you God for choosing me to be his mommy. I have been praying for you all my life.' Fan: Earlier this month she met with Taylor Swift and shared a photo to prove it. 'Thank you so much Taylor for taking time to see us! You are the sweetest, most amazing superstar! We Love you!' Earlier this month she met with Taylor Swift and shared a photo to prove it. 'Thank you so much Taylor for taking time to see us! You are the sweetest, most amazing superstar! We Love you! And your mom is an angel too! God bless you! P.s. best concert EVER! Also not photoshopped just a mom jumping in last min.' Speidi, as they're affectionately known by fans, were thrilled to welcome little Gunner into their lives when he was born in October 2017. Pratt told People magazine about how fatherhood completely changed his outlook on life on Wednesday, saying: 'My favorite part of fatherhood is seeing a baby so innocent. Before baby: When Heidi was still pregnant with Gunner; seen with Spencer in LA in July 'Until you watch a human being born and watch a little baby growing and learning how to smile and waiting for a baby to giggle it's definitely made me enjoy humans more,' he even admitted. The new mom recently shared a flawless bikini photo of herself with a caption detailing what she did to lose the baby weight. 'I am officially back to my pre-pregnancy weight,' began Heidi, who previously revealed to E! that she gained 40 pounds. 'I decided that I was going to eat balanced meals(ok I definitely eat chocolate, cookies, something sweet everyday) for breast-feeding reasons and not to have any weight loss pressure.' Adding: 'Obviously I have had some shakes and teas. My work out tips Just carrying Gunner around 24 seven LOL! It feels good but hasnt been my priority. Maybe one day I will get back into the gym... #momlife #baby.' Jazz, uh, finds a way with Jeff Goldblum. The beloved star of films such as Jurassic Park, The Fly and Thor Ragnarok is releasing a debut album after signing to Universals classical label, Decca Records. Goldblums performance on the piano alongside Gregory Porter on Graham Norton reportedly impressed producers at the record label, who quickly flew out to LA to meet with the actor. Deccas musical roster includes artists such as Michael Ball, Alfie Boe, Gregory Porter, Seal and Andrea Bocelli. The Fly's Jeff Goldblum has signed a record deal with Universal's classical label Decca Records In a Universal press release, Decca A&R Director, Tom Lewis, said: As far as I can tell, everyone loves Jeff Goldblum. Hes a fantastic jazz pianist, a great band leader and just about the loveliest man in the world. His love of jazz is infectious and whenever he plays he makes you feel very happy. If we can take Jeffs music into peoples homes then we will be helping, in our own small way, to make the world a happier place. Goldblum said he was delighted to be in cahoots with the wonderful people at Decca, describing it as as one of the coolest and most prestigious labels of all time. Before Goldblum was a Hollywood heartthrob, he studied classical and jazz piano as a child, playing in cocktail lounges in Pittsburgh during his teenage years. Goldblum also has his own band called The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra and plays in Los Angeles almost every week. In a recent interview, Goldblum said that he wakes up early in the morning, make sure I play my piano for 45 minutes. Goldblum has had a busy 2018 so far, appearing in Wes Andersons Isle of Dogs film, returning to the Jurassic Park franchise in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and starring opposite Jodie Foster in Hotel Artemis. She's a mum of one, to 16-year-old son Damian - who regularly acts as her personal photographer for her sultry Instagram snaps. And Elizabeth Hurley was posing once again, this time in front of a stunning crystal clear sea, for her latest social media shot on Wednesday - having teased that she has a new man in her life in an interview the day before. The 52-year-old actress was relishing in the sunny climes of the Maldives in the snap, which saw her smoulder for the camera in the sexy two piece. Stunning: Elizabeth Hurley, 52, posed in a stunning blue bikini Instagram on Instagram on Sunday after hinting that she has a new man in her life Make-up was at a minimum, but there was plenty of cleavage on show in the smoldering snap, which saw her stepping out of the clear waters. She wore her salt-wet brunette locks loosely around her bare shoulders and gazed down the lens through lightly shadowed eyes. Her latest post come after the Royals star told Grazia magazine that she wishes her ex Hugh Grant well - after he secretly married longterm love Anna Eberstein. Love could once again be on the horizon for Elizabeth as she hinted at a new man in her life during the interview too. Asked if she was dating anybody, she said: 'I'm not saying anything because it wouldn't be fair. I've made a vow, unless I'm engaged to somebody, I don't talk about anybody.' Close: Elizabeth has denied that her son Damian is ever embarrassed by her scantily-clad snaps while revealing he acts as her stylish on shoots The Royals actress has famously ended on good terms with all her former flames and considers Hugh, 57, and ex-husband Arun Nayar, 53, her 'best friends'. She also still 'adores' her cricketer ex Shane Warne. She recently denied her son Damian was embarrassed by her scantily-clad snaps, adding he acts as her stylist on shoots. In an interview with The Telegraph's Stella Magazine, the actress responded to source claims that her only son was 'embarrassed' by his mother and 'wanted her to cover up a bit more.' She said: 'Absolute rubbish! He choose clothes for me, he's my stylist.' The beauty added Damien was keen to photograph her, saying: 'My son happens to be a very good photographer.' Helping hand: Liz revealed her son Damian takes her swimwear snaps and acts her personal stylist Elizabeth previously spoke about Damian's eye for photography, revealing she uses his talents to be her very own swimwear snapper. The bikini designer told The Sun: '[Damian] definitely takes some, but I do have other friends that I can torture for some too.' She went on to explain on Watch What Happens Live: 'When were on holiday together, sure hell take some pictures. And you know, hes got a really good eye and hes studying photography and its ridiculous.' Close bond: This comes after Elizabeth took to the social media site to wish Damian, good luck as he prepared to take his GCSEs A source previously told Heat magazine the teenager was teased by friends. They said: 'Damian's starting to get a lot of ribbing from friends. 'He's at the age where everything his mum does is embarrassing, and he just can't understand why she can't cover up a bit more. 'But Liz is extremely proud of her youthful looks and she told him there's nothing wrong with a woman her age being sexy.' Mocked: However, Damian has reportedly been pleading with the star to cover up as her sexy selfies are getting him teased by his friends She alighted at a New York City helipad with her daughter Suri on Monday. And this Wednesday, Katie Holmes enjoyed a sunlit walk in the Big Apple, stepping out with apparently still wet hair, which is growing out since she cropped it for a film. The Toledo-born 39-year-old emphasized her svelte frame in a form-fitted white tank top, slipping on a flowing skirt with a black and white floral print. On the go: This Wednesday, Katie Holmes enjoyed a sunlit walk in the Big Apple, stepping out with apparently still wet hair, which is growing out since she cropped it for a film Swinging along her trusty black and white Prada Esplanade purse, she popped on a massive pair of shades and some striped sneakers. In Women's Health this year, Katie explained of her haircut and weight-lifting that 'I wanted to be authentic to a person who trained in the military' in her film Doorman. 'Which means someone who wasnt always paying attention to the mirror and who was in shape not for vanity, but because thats what her job called for.' The Batman Begins actress began dating Scientologist movie star Tom Cruise in 2005, and seven weeks into the relationship, they were engaged. Stepping out: The Toledo-born 39-year-old emphasized her svelte frame in a form-fitted white tank top, slipping on a flowing skirt with a black and white floral print Their Scientologist wedding was held at the Castello Orsini-Odescalchi in Bracciano in November 2006, seven months after their daughter Suri was born. Katie filed in 2012 for a divorce that was finalized only 10 days later, with Suri's mother retaining primary custody, though Tom could visit, per People. Ron Miscavige, father of Scientology leader David Miscavige, told the MailOnline in 2016 that Katie's misgivings about Scientology - including the effect it could have on Suri - contributed to her decision to leave Tom. Only the best: Swinging along her trusty black and white Prada Esplanade purse, she popped on a massive pair of shades and some striped sneakers Katie and Jamie Foxx only publicly became an item late last year, though there had been speculation they were a couple since 2013. There was a swirl of rumors that Katie's divorce agreement prohibited her from publicly dating anyone for five years after the split with Tom. Kate has only been married the once, but Tom had previously tried matrimony with Mimi Rogers - who quipped in Playboy after the divorce that 'he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument' - and Nicole Kidman. Drake's purported babymomma and son have been revealed. Sophie Brussaux, a French former porn star, has been documenting her pregnancy on Instagram, right up to the birth of baby Adonis. The rapper was accused by rival Pusha T of fathering a secret child in a diss track released on Tuesday. Pictured: Drake's purported babymomma and son Sophie Brussaux and Adonis have been revealed Following the furor Brussaux switched her Instagram account to private, but not before pictures of her as well as Drake's supposed seven-month-old son flooded the internet. In January last year, Drake was pictured on a date in Amsterdam with Sophie, after which she claimed she was expecting his child and insisted she has hard evidence to reflect the news - although his camp blasted the claims. TMZ also reported Brussaux had evidence of a text message exchange between the two, in which he demanded she have an abortion, and accused her of trying to extort money. However Brussaux who filmed under the porn name Rosee Divine never once mentioned Drake in any of her Instagram posts. Called out: Drake was accused by rival Pusha T of fathering a secret child in a diss track released on Tuesday Baby shower: Brussaux, a French former porn star, has been documenting her pregnancy on Instagram, right up to the birth of baby Adonis Spotted: In January last year, Drake was pictured on a date in Amsterdam with Sophie, after which she claimed she was expecting his child Both Sophie and Adonis were mentioned by name in a searing diss track The Story Of Adidon dropped by Pusha T amid their ongoing beef. The artwork for the song didn't paint Drake in a flattering color either, as his rival dug up an old photo of the young rapper in blackface. In the shocking song, the 41-year-old Kanye West signing claims the Canadian covered up the fact he had a child called Adonis with a porn star named Sophie, echoing claims that Drake first refuted in March last year. Out there: Following the furor Brussaux switched her Instagram account to private, but not before pictures of her as well as Drake's supposed seven-month-old son flooded the internet A Rosee by any other name: Sophie formerly filmed under the porn name Rosee Divine Not happy family: TMZ also reported Brussaux had evidence of a text message exchange between the two, in which he demanded she have an abortion, and accused her of trying to extort money Who's your daddy? However Brussaux never once mentioned Drake in any of her Instagram posts On the single, which is rapped over the acoustic tune of Jay Z's 2017 hit The Story of O.J., he states: 'Since you name-dropped my fiancee / Let em know who you chose as your Beyonce / Sophie knows better, ask your baby mother... 'Cleaned her up for IG, but the stench is on her... A babys involved, its deeper than rap / We talkin character, let me keep with the facts / You are hiding a child, let that boy come home / Deadbeat mothaf*cka playin border patrol. 'Adonis is your son / And he deserves more than an Adidas press run, thats real / Love that baby, respect that girl / Forget shes a porn star, let her be your world.' When the rumors first arose, Drake's reps told TMZ: 'This woman has a very questionable background. She has admitted to having multiple relationships. Ouch: The artwork for the song didn't paint Drake in a flattering color either, as his rival dug up an old photo of the young rapper in blackface Take cover: The two rappers have been embroiled in a quickly escalating feud, with the latter landing the latest blows in his new song Drake and Pusha T: A timeline of their feud 2011: Pusha appears to kick off the feud as he releases Don't F**k With Me, freestyled over Dreams Money Can Buy. Lines in the song hinted at Drake, including: 'Rappers on their sophomores, actin' like they boss lords', the same year as Drake's first album release 2012: Pusha then made his intentions more clear on Exodus 23:1, where he seemed to discuss Drake's then-new contract with his enemy Lil Wayne. The Lollipop singer then tweeted: 'F*k pusha t and anybody that love em' 2013: Drake finally appears to respond to Pusha T, as he pledged his allegiance to his Young Money boss on his track Tuscan Leather 2016: On his track H.G.T.V Freestyle seemed to add fuel to ongoing claims that Drake did not write his own music 2017: Two Birds, One Stone sees Drake hit out Pusha as he claimed he lives a false life, rapping: 'You middle man in this s**t, boy, you was never them' 2018: Tensions reach an all-time high as Drake releases Infrared - leading to the bold claims in The Story Of Adidon Advertisement 'We understand she may have problems getting into the United States. She's one of many women claiming he got them pregnant. 'If it is in fact Drake's child, which he does not believe, he would do the right thing by the child.' The artwork for the track featured a dug-up photo of a young Drake wearing blackface make-up, and a Jim Crow t-shirt. The image is thought to be from a 2008 shoot snapped by photographer David Leyes for Toronto-based brand Too Black Guys. MailOnline has contacted Pusha T, Drake and David Leyes for comment. In another verse, Pusha T attacks Drake's race too: 'Confused always felt you weren't black enough / afraid to grow it because your fro wasn't nap enough.' The star also hit out at Drake's producer 40, real name Noah James Shebib, as he referenced his battle with Multiple Sclerosis, rapping: 'OVO 40, hunched over like he 80, tick, tick, tick," Pusha spits. "How much time he got? That man is sick, sick, sick.' 40 soon hit back at the star, as he took to Twitter to simply state: 'Coincidentally... tomorrow is World MS Day.' The feud raged on last week when Pusha T released his new album DAYTONA, which features the diss track Infrared, which accuses Drake of not writing his own lyrics, instead using a ghostwriter named Quentin Miller. 'Your hooks did it/The lyrics pennin' equals to Trump's winnin'/The bigger question is how the Russians did it/It was written like Nas but it came from Quentin,' the rapper states. Cruel: The star also hit out at Drake's producer 40, real name Noah James Shebib, as he referenced his battle with Multiple Sclerosis, rapping: 'OVO 40, hunched over like he 80, tick, tick, tick," Pusha spits. "How much time he got? That man is sick, sick, sick' In response Drake dropped 'Duppy Freestlye,' a rebuttal calling out the hypocrisy in Pusha T's song considering the work Drake said he did for Kanye West. 'So if you rebuke me for working with someone else on a couple of Vs,' Drake chimed, 'What do you really think of the n***a that's making your beats?' 'I've done things for him I thought that he never would need. Father had to stretch his hands out and get it from me. I pop style for 30 hours, then let him repeat.' 'Your hooks did it/The lyrics pennin' equals to Trump's winnin'/The bigger question is how the Russians did it/It was written like Nas but it came from Quentin,' the 41-year-old rapper states in the song on the album Lashing out: In response Drake dropped 'Duppy Freestlye,' a rebuttal calling out the hypocrisy in Pusha T's song considering the work Drake said he did for Kanye West The hitmaker has worked with West's song 'Father Stretch My Hands,''30 Hours,' and their collaborative effort 'Pop Style.' Continuing on with his onslaught, Drake let's the Virginia Beach rapper know that he will be eventually receiving an invoice in the mail. 'It's gonna be a cruel summer for you,' he raps. 'I told Weezy and Baby 'I'ma done him for you' Returning the hit: The 31-year-old has worked with West's song 'Father Stretch My Hands,''30 Hours,' and their collaborative effort 'Pop Style' 'Tell 'Ye we gotta invoice coming to you/Considering that we just sold another 20 for you.' Soon after the release of 'Duppy Freestyle,' Pusha responded on Twitter with a link to the song and a request to 'send the invoice for the extra 20.' Drake quickly obliged, posting a picture of an invoice for G.O.O.D Music/Def Jam and the head of A&R for $100,000. The reason: 'Promotional assistance and career reviving.' Demand: Soon after the release of 'Duppy Freestyle,' Pusha responded on Twitter with a link to the song and a request to 'send the invoice for the extra 20' in reference to a line in Drake's song claiming that he is making the rapper relevant The beef between Drake and Pusha T dates back to 2016 when Drake released 'Two Birds, One Stone.' There he mocked Pusha T's history drug dealing and said: 'But really it's you with all the drug dealer stories. That's gotta stop, though. You made a couple chops and now you think you Chapo. If you ask me though, you ain't lining the trunk with kilos.' It was a point Drake would revisit in 'Duppy' when he added: 'You might've sold some college kids some Nikes and Mercedes. But you act like you sold drugs for Escobar in the '80s.' In recent years David Oyelowo has worked alongside some of the world's biggest names, including Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg. But the Brit has now found himself starring alongside Australian Joel Edgerton in the new crime comedy, Gringo. On Thursday, the 42-year-old gushed over his co-star in a new interview with The Herald-Sun, describing Joel as a man of many talents. 'He's pretty handy': Speaking with The Herald-Sun on Thursday, David Oyelowo gushes over Australian co-star Joel Edgerton as he discusses their new crime comedy Gringo Gringo was directed by Joel's brother Nash, and features an international cast that includes South-African born beauty, Charlize Theron. And when asked if there was some serious sporting competition between the Australians, Brits and South Africans on the set, David replied: 'I can assure you none of us would know our way around a rugby ball. Well, maybe Joel - Joels pretty handy'. The acclaimed actor also told The Herald Sun that the diversity of the cast gave the film an added layer, and made for interesting conversations on set. Bromance! David has gone from working with Oprah and Steven Spielberg to starring alongside Australian Joel David told The Herald Sun: 'Almost all of us on the film could empathise and relate to the immigrant story because the career weve chosen means we find ourselves living in countries that were not necessarily from'. In 2014, the star earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in the Civil Rights drama, Selma. He has also appeared in historical dramas Lincoln, The Butler, The Help and A United Kindgom. Acclaimed actor: In 2014, David earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in the Civil Rights drama, Selma Sports competition! Charlize, David and Joel may have been locked in bitter competition over sports, considering they each hail from three different competitive countries Gringo marks the first time that David has appeared in a comedy since 2001, and he told The Herald Sun he loved returning to the genre. 'I'd done a run of films that had the historical, civil rights, political element to them - all of which I loved doing, but I was looking for something lighter,' hestated. David has been been married for the past 20 years to English actress Jessica Watson - whom he wed when he was just 22. The pair have four children and now reside in the US, where they became naturalised citizens in 2016. It was recently revealed that he dressed up as Henry VIII for the royal wedding evening reception. And it seems James Corden couldn't wait any longer to slip into some more fancy dress as he channelled characters from Evita, Cats and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat while filming The Late Late Show with Andrew Lloyd Webber inLondon on Wednesday. Paying homage to the famed composer and his most celebrated musicals, the 39-year-old talk show host ran through the streets of the capital in his eye-catching ensembles. Dressed to impress: James Corden channelled characters from Evita while filming The Late Late Show with Andrew Lloyd Webber in London on Wednesday Turning heads: Paying homage to the famed composer and his most celebrated musicals, the 39-year-old talk show host ran through the streets of the capital in his eye-catching ensembles Whilst dressed as Evita, the father-of-three donned a strapless white wedding gown with a beaded bodice and tulle skirt. He added to the glamour with an ice blonde wig, and accessorised with a bejewelled necklace, yet didn't go as far to don stiletto heels, instead opting for canvas shoes. Evita was released in 1978 and focuses on the life of Argentine political leader Eva Peron, the second wife of Argentine president Juan Peron. Watching over: Andrew Lloyd Webber had the best seats in the house as he watched the skit James then dressed as the Rum Tum Tugger from Cats, sporting a glorious grey mane complete with a snout and whiskers. The British star also donned a skintight black bodysuit complete with cream leggings and arm warmers. Cats debuted in 1981 and is a sung-through British musical composed by Lloyd Webber, based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot, and produced by Cameron Mackintosh, which tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles. Wedding belle: Whilst dressed as Evita, the father-of-three donned a strapless white wedding gown with a beaded bodice and tulle skirt Keeping it casual: He added to the glamour with an ice blonde wig, and accessorised with a bejewelled necklace, yet didn't go as far to don stiletto heels, instead opting for canvas shoes Captivating: James caught the attention of the crowds with his showstopping performance Loving life: James seemed in good spirits on the outing as he belted out hits from Evita The real deal: Evita was released in 1978 and focuses on the life of Argentine political leader Eva Peron, the second wife of Argentine president Juan Peron For his final look, James donned a variety of looks to resemble the titular character in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He started out in cream robes with a golden headpiece before donning a flowing multicoloured robe, whilst surrounded by women dressed in Egyptian clothing. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, first performed in 1968, featured i lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and is based on the coat of many colours story of Joseph from the Bible's Book of Genesis. Purr-fect! James then dressed as the Rum Tum Tugger from Cats, sporting a glorious grey mane complete with a snout and whiskers The cat's whiskers: The British star also donned a skintight black bodysuit complete with cream leggings and arm warmers Meowsical: James joined a host of extras in parading around the street dressed as singing cats Copy cat: Cats debuted in 1981 and is a sung-through British musical composed by Lloyd Webber, based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot Cat fight! The group really put their all into the performance as they paraded around the street Looking good: James seemed in good spirits on the night as he played around with the group Whilst James has had a host of celebrity guests on his talk show, this will be Lloyd Webber's first appearance. Earlier this month, however, James parodied the star's musicals when he went head-to-head with Benedict Cumberbatch in a skit that demonstrated how their fierce competitiveness managed to ruin performances of Hamlet, Waiting for Godot, The Crucible, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats. The filming comes after reports James reportedly stole the limelight from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at their wedding reception by dressing as Henry VIII. Shining bright: For his final look, James donned a variety of looks to resemble the titular character in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Colourful: He started out in cream robes with a golden headpiece before donning a flowing multicoloured robe, whilst surrounded by women dressed in Egyptian clothing One to watch: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, first performed in 1968, is based on the coat of many colours story of Joseph from the Bible's Book of Genesis The actor and US talk show host, who attended the reception with his wife Julia, acted as compere for the evening, apparently turning up dressed in full Tudor regalia according to one guest. While many guests were left wiping away their tears after Meghan read an emotional poem about her new husband, James provided light relief with his hilarious turn as the erstwhile monarch. 'Your royal highnesses, ladies and gentlemen, I had no idea what to wear to a royal wedding so I looked it up in the royal etiquette manual and found this outfit. I hope I've come in the right gear,' the Sunday Times reported. Bemused: Andrew Lloyd Webber looked like he couldn't believe his eyes at the spectacle Two's company: The pair held onto one another as they chatted about the skit Loving life: The pair were beaming broadly as they watched their fellow performers Dancing through life: James threw his arms up with glee as he put on a show for the crowds Stopping traffic: The group caused chaos in London as they skipped around a car at the lights On the move: The group then ran past a taxi giggling and putting on quite the show He's recently been away for work, leaving girlfriend Gemma Atkinson pining for him in his absence. But Gorka Marquez and his beau were closer than ever on Wednesday as they uploaded a cute video to Instagram, with them in bed together relaxing. Gorka, 27, was shirtless in the snap, holding the camera out, as Gemma, 33, rested gently on his bare chest, hands interlocked. Close up: Gorka Marquez and Gemma Atkinson were closer than ever on Wednesday as they uploaded a cute video to Instagram, with them in bed together relaxing She looked to be make-up free, hair slightly messy, clearly at ease with her boyfriend of nearly six months. On Saturday, the Strictly Come Dancing alum shared an equally adorable snap of the couple snuggled up as she shared how she 'can't live without' the Spanish choreographer. For the loving snap, Gemma wrapped her around around the Strictly pro as the pair cracked a sweet smile for the selfie. In the lengthy caption, the soap star revealed how she's counting down the days until she see's Gorka again after 19 days apart, having only spent five days away from each other since August. Gemma wrote: 'Cheesy post alert!!!!! A week today and Im reunited with @gorka_marquez. Itll be 19 days weve had apart in total which is nothing looking at the bigger picture, but since we met last Aug weve never had more than 5 days apart so for us its a big deal.' Cosy: She looked to be make-up free, hair slightly messy, clearly at ease with her boyfriend of nearly six months Smitten: Gemma Atkinson, 33, posted a sweet Instagram tribute to Strictly pro boyfriend Gorka Marquez and said 'she can't live without him' Loved up: The showbiz couple have been revelling in the honeymoon phase of their romance after ending months of speculation by going public on Valentine's Day 'I've always been good on my own but Im Great when hes around so Im counting down the days like I did as a kid at Christmas. Gemma continued her gushing sentiment, adding: 'I feel so lucky to have someone who I miss when were apart and someone who makes me feel so excited about seeing them again. 'They always say the right one isnt the one you can live with, its the one you cant live without..' The showbiz couple have been revelling in the honeymoon phase of their romance after ending months of speculation by going public on Valentine's Day. Opening up: Despite waiting until the romantic holiday to go public with their romance, Gemma recently admitted that she was never hiding her relationship with the dancing hunk Despite waiting until the romantic holiday to go public with their romance, Gemma recently admitted that she was never hiding her relationship with dancing hunk Gorka, but dished to The Sun: 'It's nice to be able to say he's my boyfriend.' 'We had that awkward stage where you're dating but you haven't had "the conversation,"' she said. 'You never want to say to a guy after three coffees: "So what are we?"' Gemma also revealed: 'We'd go for coffee together on the Sunday after the show, but had never really spent more than two hours together. So it was a gradual thing. There was no lightning-bolt moment, unfortunately. Not like in the movies.' Getting serious: Gorka recently opened up about his relationship with Gemma, revealing he is in love with the talented actress and hopes for marriage and kids in the future The ex-Emmerdale star finally confirmed their relationship with a sweet Valentine's Day post on Instagram - showing off their relationship for the first time in a sweet snap with Gemma's head resting sweetly on Gorka's shoulder. Gorka recently opened up about his relationship with Gemma, revealing he is in love with the talented actress and hopes for marriage and kids in the future. Speaking to New! Magazine, the Spanish professional dancer spoke candidly about his blossoming romance with the blonde beauty. Unexpected: The twinkle-toed hunk said he had never expected to fall for Gemma as he had been focused on being the best dance partner to Alexandra Burke during the competition He said: 'I would love to have my own family. I love kids. Hopefully one day I'll become a husband and a dad.' Gushing about his partner, the twinkle-toed hunk said he had never expected to fall for Gemma as he had been focused on being the best dance partner to Alexandra Burke during the competition. He said: 'I never went into the show thinking I was going to find my partner. It happened after. You can't help who you fall in love with.' Gorka said one of the things he loves most about Gemma was her love for fitness, which he shares, saying: 'It's not something I look for but obviously it's more fun as I can train with Gemma.' She is a matter of weeks away from welcoming her fourth child, and first with her partner Alex Daw. But Jessica Cunningham showed no signs of strain from her pregnancy on Wednesday, as she hosted her Mother of Maniacs event in London. The 31-year-old showed off her burgeoning bump in a tight-fitting LBD as she greeted guests, including Jacqueline Jossa and Stacey Solomon, at the bash in Chelsea. Leading lady: Jessica Cunningham (right) showed no signs of strain from her pregnancy on Wednesday, as she hosted her Mother of Maniacs event in London where fellow pregnant star Jacqueline Jossa (left) was a guest Catching up: The 31-year-old showed off her burgeoning bump in a tight-fitting LBD as she greeted guests The former Apprentice star proved her chic sense of style has not faltered in pregnancy by arriving in a latex midi dress, which clung to her ever-growing stomach. She added a pop of colour with red and nude heeled sandals, and tied her look together with a sleek white handbag, in a glamorous finishing touch. Styling her hair into loose waves and opting for minimal make-up, the brunette displayed her glowing complexion to all as she proudly cradled her bump for cameras. Chic: Jessica proved her chic sense of style has not faltered in pregnancy by arriving in a latex midi dress, which clung to her ever-growing stomach Stunning: She added a pop of colour with red heeled sandals, and tied her look together with a sleek white handbag, in a glamorous finishing touch (pictured with her partner Alex) Jessica, who organised the event as the founder of the Mother of Maniacs blog, first posed alone, before excitedly greeting actress Jacqueline Jossa and catching up with Stacey Solomon. Jessica is already mother to three daughters with her ex Alistair Eccles, who took his own life in August 2017 aged 35. She is expecting her fourth child with boyfriend Alex, and the tot is coincidentally due on June 28 - her partner's birthday. Here she is: Jessica, who organised the event as the founder of the Mother of Maniacs blog, first posed alone, before excitedly greeting actress Jacqueline Jossa Having a ball: Jessica and Jacqueline, who kept casual in skinny jeans and a floral top, giggled animatedly as they caught up at the event Say cheese! Jessica later caught up with Stacey Solomon at the event Big smiles: The trio beamed widely as they posed together for cameras Her fourth pregnancy has no doubt been emotional however, as it came after her tragic miscarriage in October. Jessica recently discussed the six stages of grief she endured in the following weeks, and told MailOnline she had been googling every symptom since falling pregnant again. She said: 'The 12 week scan arrived and there it was a little heartbeat, beating away, strong and healthy. I felt relievedbut for how long, well until the 20 week scan. 'I'd started to feel movement and fluttering quite early on, so if I hadnt felt movement for a few hours, I started to imagine the worst. Bumping along nicely: Jessica (above) is expecting her fourth child with boyfriend Alex, and the tot is coincidentally due on June 28 - her partner's birthday Taking centre stage: Jessica had a ball at the event - talking to guests, hosting a raffle and also a panel discussion, titled #BossMum Star-studded: Stacey spoke on the panel, and delighted guests with her numerous funny tales Bit of all-white: Stacey arrived in a pretty white dress, featuring a plunging V neckline and delicate lace trim 'I'd google "How to make your baby move when pregnant" and then tried the series of experiments suggested.' A number of famous faces attended the event, with Jacqueline and Stacey both appearing on a panel to give snippets of wisdom to fellow guests. Jacqueline kept casual in a vibrant floral top and skinny jeans - which shielded her bump from view - as she posed for cameras at the event. Chic: Love Island star Cara De La Hoyde later joined proceedings, in a chic white peasant dress and metallic gold sandals Matching: Cara and Stacey co-ordinated in their white looks as they posed together for cameras Sweet: Mum-of-two Stacey later cradled an adorable baby at the event Lullaby: She later sang to the crying tot as she cradled them in her arms Meanwhile Stacey slipped into a pretty white dress, featuring a plunging V neckline and delicate lace trim. Love Island star Cara De La Hoyde later joined proceedings, in a chic white peasant dress and metallic gold sandals. Styling her hair into a chic braided up-do and sporting a typically bronzed make-up look, the reality star showed no signs of fatigue from life with a baby - having given birth to son Freddie in December. Glamorous girls: Stacey later posed with Hayley Sparkes and Francine Lewis Hanging out: Stacey and Jessica posed for pictures inside the event Bumping along: The dress hugged her bump neatly as she cuddled it with one hand Cute: Rachel Adedeji couldn't help but talk to the bump at Beaufort House Cuties: Rachel brought along her baby daughter Lillian Bonding: Jessica and Jacqueline were bonding over their pregnancies Not long now: Jacqueline looked positively glowing in her second trimester She is gearing up for the hotly-anticipated third series of Love Island after failing to make an impression with reality show Survival Of The Fittest. And Dani Dyer has also appeared to have tried her luck in the acting business - something that didn't go smoothly when she filmed a harrowing rape scene for the 2014 budget film, We Still Kill The Old Way. The daughter of Danny Dyer, 22, admits she was 'scarred' after filming the scene where her character was attacked by a hooded gang - leaving her to come to the realisation that 'things like this really do happen'. 'Scarred': Dani Dyer, 22, tried her luck in the acting business - something that didn't go smoothly when she filmed a rape scene for the 2014 budget film, We Still Kill The Old Way Speaking to The Sun at the premiere four years ago, Dani - who would have been 18 at the time - described the difficult filming process. 'That was really, really hard. There was a lot of screaming in it but I was very lucky because I was surrounded by such lovely people. 'I was quite scarred because obviously I kind of believed it. Im getting bent over and theres like five people around me holding me down so that was really, really scary and hard for me to do. 'I went home and I was sad and upset' Dani confessed before admitting: 'But I kind of picked myself up again and was like, "Woah, things like this really do happen".' Harrowing: The daughter of Danny Dyer admits she was 'scarred' after filming the scene where her character was attacked - leaving her to come to the realisation that 'things like this really do happen' 'I was sad and upset': Dani - who would have been 18 at the time of filming - described the difficult situation The scene in question is based around her character Lauren who is attacked by a gang who yell: 'Pull her skirt down and f*** that b****.' The hooded gang are then stopped by a vigilante, who pays the ultimate price by getting beaten to death. However, things are likely to have much more of a sunny disposition on Love Island, where Dani is hoping to find love. The beauty has vowed to abstain from sex during a potential eight week stay on Love Island - despite her dad giving permission before she left. Speaking to MailOnline, Dani confessed shes cautious about embarrassing her famous father in the shows villa. Gritty: The scene in question is based around her character Lauren who is attacked by a gang who yell: 'Pull her skirt down and f*** that b****' Dramatic: The hooded gang are then stopped by a vigilante, who pays the ultimate price by getting beaten to death Despite her insistence she will not get steamy on-screen, she did admit her dad has in fact given his blessing, telling his daughter: 'Dan, youve got to do what you want to do and what makes you happy'. Speaking to MailOnline, Dani, revealed: 'My dads open, hes like: Dan, youve got to do what you want to do and what makes you happy - hes not sat there with a rulebook. But obviously because he is in the limelight, I wouldnt want to do anything that can go back on him'. I personally would not have sex on TV. That is not a thing for me. Whoever does it, I will have a chat with the girl about it. I don't care. But on a personal level, it's just not something I'd do. Dani admits her famous name presents are an added pressure as she prepares to find the man of her dreams, but shes reluctant to make the same mistake she made during her brief stay in South Africa by repeatedly namechecking her father. Hot summer: However, things are likely to have much more of a sunny disposition on Love Island, where Dani is hoping to find love No sex: The beauty has vowed to abstain from sex during a potential eight week stay on Love Island - despite her dad giving permission before she left The tack was notoriously used by former Love Island contestant Marcel Sommerville, who frequently referred to his musical roots as a member of Blazin Squad, and she admits she doesnt want to be tarred with the same brush. I don't want to be the new Marcel! she said. I know [voice-over man] Iain Sterling is going to get off on that. I don't want to be called Marcel - of course I don't. Now, when I look back [at Survival], I look back and am like, Oh Dani!, but at the time it was funny. The thing is, it is always going to be cringey, of course it is. People are always going to cringe, but he is my dad and I can't really do much about it. I'm not going to go out and scream about it. The judges were all fighting back tears when Marc Spelmann auditioned for Britain's Got Talent last month. And the magician had the group welling up again during Wednesday night's live semi-finals as he incorporated his miracle IVF baby into his act while also discussing his wife's breast cancer battle. Alesha Dixon was left in tears as she watched the father-of-one's performance which included video footage of his little one. Emotional: Alesha Dixon was left in tears when Marc Spelmann appeared on Britain's Got Talent live semi-finals on Wednesday night In the VT before his act, Marc explained: 'When Tessa was pregnant she was diagnosed with breast cancer but we got through it. It was magic and that was inspiration for my act. 'I'm doing this for my girls, they are everything to me.' For his act, he made the judges pick words at random from cards containing inspirational quotes, books featuring over 1,000 incredible human beings and David Walliam's one book,Mr Stink. Magical: In the VT before his act, Marc explained: 'When Tessa was pregnant she was diagnosed with breast cancer but we got through it. It was magic and that was inspiration for my act' Emotional: Alesha Dixon was left in tears as she watched the father-of-one's performance which included video footage of his little one After Simon Cowell revealed the last word in the quote he had picked had been 'heart', Marc drew out a picture drawn by his daughter Isabella, which was of a heart. Alesha then revealed the inspirational person she had picked at random had been Ghandi, at which point Marc showed a painting he had put on the stage of the inspirational leader, alongside a clip of his daughter saying 'Ghandi'. He then quickly rearranged the squares on his painting to reveal a picture of John Lennon, as Amanda Holden revealed that was who she had been thinking of. Magic: After Simon Cowell revealed the last word in the quote he had picked had been 'heart', Marc drew out a picture drawn by his daughter Isabella, which was of a heart Speaking afterwards, Amanda gushed: 'Oh gosh, I don't know how you do it. Even though the magic is extraordinary it's the emotional pull of the story behind it. 'It didn't have the same pull as your first audition, but still very well put together. Simon, notoriously hard to please, was also impressed, revealing, 'everywhere I've gone people are talking about you. I don't want to call it magic because that's too small for what you do. David added, 'you make magic beautiful', as Alesha chocked back tears to admit: 'I was almost in a trance watching you. You did a brilliant job.' Nailed it: Alesha then revealed the inspirational person she had picked at random had been Ghandi, at which point Marc showed a painting he had put on the stage of the leader During his audition, Marc had left troubled presenter, Ant McPartlin, fighting back tears with his magical routine and secured a place into the semi-finals after the presenter hit the golden buzzer. Following his success, Marc opened up about his wife's breast cancer battle while she was pregnant with their longed for baby after years of failed IVF. During his audition, the talented act used his family's past heartache as an example of 'real magic' after Tessa managed to beat the deadly disease and welcome their precious daughter Isabella two years ago. Britain's Got Talent: Marc previously opened up to the Mirror about his wife's breast cancer battle while she was pregnant with their longed for baby after years of failed IVF 'Real magic': The talented act used his family's past heartache as an example of 'real magic' after Tessa managed to beat the deadly disease and welcome daughter Isabella two years ago Heartache: Just three months later, Tessa discovered a lump which turned out to be an aggressive form of breast cancer with Isabella born two months premature Talking to The Mirror about the full extent of his family's past battle, the magician revealed that they gave IVF one last chance, after five rounds and ten years of trying, to discover a negative result. However, after a routine blood test, they discovered that the final attempt had actually worked and Tessa was pregnant. He revealed: 'When you do IVF you have to have a blood test. 'So Tessa went and had the blood test and you have to wait an hour or so and then they said "Congratulations you are pregnant". Heartbreaking: He left troubled presenter, Ant McPartlin, fighting back tears with his magical audition on Saturday night Amazing: However, two years later, the couple's dreams have come true and they are now doting parents to gorgeous two-year-old Isabella Ant and Dec celebrate with judges David Walliams, Alesha Dixon, Amanda Holden and Simon Cowell after hitting the golden buzzer The magician's wife Tessa cannot hold back the tears as she sees her husband receive a ticket straight to the show's semi finals 'It was the most bizarre moment ever. She burst into tears because it was 10 years of trying.' However, before they could start celebrating, just three months later, Tessa discovered a lump which turned out to be an aggressive form of breast cancer, with the mum-to-be needing chemotherapy and a mastectomy. He added: 'The only words that came out of her mouth were "What about my baby?", which says everything about Tessa. 'We had days of pure hell is Tessa going to make it, is the baby going to make it? 'Tessa had a reduced form of chemotherapy so Isabella was safe inside but Tessa lost her hair and had to have a mastectomy. Marc reacts in shock after Ant hits the golden buzzer, sending his magic act straight through to the semi finals Inspirational: While Marc revealed in an Instagram post in April, that his brave wife 'continues to kick cancer's butt' after she went for her regular six month scan The stunned magician receives a hug from an emotional Ant, shortly after he and co-presenter Dec used their golden buzzer to put Marc through to the semi finals 'Isabella was two months premature but had to come out by C-section so then Tessa could be whisked away for radiotherapy and a harsher form of chemotherapy.' However, two years later, the couple's dreams have come true and they are now doting parents to gorgeous two-year-old Isabella. While Marc revealed in an Instagram post in April, that his brave wife 'continues to kick cancer's butt' after she went for her regular six month scan. Britain's Got Talent continues on Saturdays at 8pm on ITV. Her dating show just premiered on Monday night with a bit of controversy to follow. But Becca Kufrin was keeping up with her arduous press schedule as she visited the Extra set at Universal Studios Hollywood on Wednesday morning. The 28-year-old budding reality star wore a crisp white jumpsuit to film segments of the show after it was revealed that The Bachelorette network and its affiliates 'will not be commenting' on social media activity by Garrett Yrigoyen. Scroll down for video Step and repeat: Becca Kufrin was keeping up with her arduous press schedule as she visited the Extra set at Universal Studios Hollywood on Wednesday morning Los Angeles Times reporter and Bachelor Nation author Amy Kaufman took to Twitter after attempting to contact the network regarding the hateful and transphobic social media images. 'I reached out to ABC, which airs "The Bachelorette," and Warner Bros., which produces the show, to see if either had a response to Garrett allegedly liking sexist, transphobic and anti-immigrant memes. Both said they will not be commenting,' Kaufman wrote Wednesday morning. While Becca Kufrin may have felt keen on Garrett Yrigoyen (who received the first impression rose on Monday's episode), former Bachelor contestant Ashley Spivey was quick to reveal a slew of problematic 'likes' from his since deleted accounts. Bright: The 28-year-old budding reality star wore a crisp white jumpsuit to film segments of the show after it was revealed that The Bachelorette network and its affiliates 'will not be commenting' on social media activity by Garrett Yrigoyen Out and about: Becca covered up in a tailored, high-waisted jumpsuit which featured thick straps and bow wrapped around her waist Taut tummy: Kufrin later changed into a cinched LA Dodgers jersey to throw the ceremonial first pitch before they played the Philadelphia Phillies on Wednesday Hey batter batter batter! The reality star paired her sporty top with skinny jeans and Converse low-tops as she demonstrated her throwing arm Ashley showed a series of screenshots on Twitter where Yrigoyen had liked numerous transphobic memes and conservative posts before he turned his account private on May 24, according to Variety. Some of the screenshots showed that Yrigoyen had liked a host of questionable posts, including one comparing 'conservative woman' Tomi Lahren clad in an American flag ensemble to a 'leftist woman' wearing a feminist shirt. 'Yeah, I think we win this one too,' was written across the bottom of the meme which seemingly dissected a woman's appearance. Another image liked by Yrigoyen's now defunct account suggested that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg was a crisis actor. Wilted: Garrett was awarded the coveted first impression rose on Monday night's season premiere of The Bachelorette Wow: Some of the screenshots showed that Yrigoyen had liked a host of questionable posts, including one comparing 'conservative woman' Tomi Lahren clad in an American flag ensemble to a 'leftist woman' wearing a feminist shirt Questionable view: Another image liked by Yrigoyen's now defunct account suggested that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg was a crisis actor Ashley was unafraid to show a series of the posts liked by Garrett, with one image showing a member of the armed forces swinging a child with the words, 'When a kid makes it over the wall and you have to throw him back.' He seemed to have taken an interest in one particular account, having liked many of the company's photos shared on Instagram. One photo in question showed a women's restroom door covered in an image of Cailtyn Jenner on Vanity Fair, with the men's bathroom showing Caitlyn's previous identity as Bruce Jenner. The image was captioned, 'How to determine which bathroom to use in 2017.' Wow: Ashley was unafraid to show a series of the posts liked by Garrett, with one image showing a member of the armed forces swinging a child with the words, 'When a kid makes it over the wall and you have to throw him back' We can see your likes: One photo in question showed a women's restroom door covered in an image of Cailtyn Jenner on Vanity Fair, with the men's bathroom showing Caitlyn's previous identity as Bruce Jenner Not great: He seemed to have taken an interest in one particular account, having liked many of the company's photos shared on Instagram Tell it like it is: Ashley was not afraid to share a few words after publicizing the questionable content, saying 'I truly though this would be something we paid better attention to' He liked a meme saying 'what boys did in my day' with children holding guns to 'what boys are doing today' as kids posed for selfies wearing flawless makeup. Kufrin and crew are reportedly banned from social media while the show is filming, so it's not clear if she knew about his activity. Becca has been a vocal supporter of Hilary Clinton and multiple women's movements, even posting a photo flipping off a Trump booth at the Minnesota State Fair in August 2017. The ABC show has been weathered with social media controversy, most recently when contestant Lee Garrett was found to have sent a series of racist and sexist tweets- words that were later addressed on one of the show's reunions. Not a comparison: He liked a meme saying 'what boys did in my day' with children holding guns to 'what boys are doing today' as kids posed for selfies wearing flawless makeup Vocal: Becca has been a supporter of Hilary Clinton and multiple women's movements, even posting a photo flipping off a Trump booth at the Minnesota State Fair in August 2017 Amanda Holden was trolled on Twitter following her comments to a victim of the Manchester bombing during Wednesday's semi-final of Britain's Got Talent. The talent show judge, 47, was praising the efforts of dance group Rise Unbroken, which features 13-year-old Hollie Booth, who uses a wheelchair after suffering two broken legs and nerve damage in the attack. However, Amanda's poor use of words shocked fans, as the mother-of-two claimed she had been 'blown away' by the performance. Scroll down for video Oops: Amanda Holden was trolled on Twitter following her comments to a victim of the Manchester bombing during Wednesday's semi-final of Britain's Got Talent When getting feedback on her performance, judge Amanda told Hollie: 'I have to say when we first saw you, as a judging panel, we were blown away by your unity and your support for Hollie. 'Your whole story was so emotional and it was a really good audition. But now I can see that you are fantastic dancers as well. 'Hollie tonight you have come on leaps and bounds. Your recovery looks like it's going really really well. You did so well. You did yourselves and Manchester proud.' Inspirational: The talent show judge, 47, was praising the efforts of dance group Rise Unbroken, which features 13-year-old Hollie Booth (pictured) who uses a wheelchair after suffering two broken legs and nerve damage in the Manchester Bombings Her comments did not go down well on Twitter, with viewers remarking: '#BGT amanda holden 'blown away'? hmm, think before you speak woman'; 'Amanda Holden has actually just told a girl who is in a wheelchair because a terror attack that she was blown away'; 'Bit behind on #BGT but did Amanda Holden really just tell a Manchester bombing victim that she was "blown away"? 'As if you tell a girl put in a wheelchair by the Manchester bombing that you were blown away #BGT'; '"Blown away" You cant say that Amanda #bgt' Poor wording; However, Amanda's poor use of words shocked fans, as the mother-of-two claimed she had been 'blown away' by the performance Inappropriate: When getting feedback on her performance, judge Amanda told Hollie: 'I have to say when we first saw you, as a judging panel, we were blown away by your unity' 'Tonight we're going to make Manchester proud of us,' Hollie said in the group's VT before they performed to Ariana Grande's hit, Focus. Simon said afterwards: 'I bet the last thing you were thinking about before is that you'd be on this stage with your friends dancing. 'You, whatever happens have won, and that's the most important thing.' Doing Manchester proud: 'Tonight we're going to make Manchester proud of us,' Hollie said in the group's VT before they performed to Ariana Grande's hit, Focus Hollie and her dance troupe captured the hearts of the nation when they appeared on the auditions last month. Hollie was shielded from the blast by her protective aunt Kelly Brewster, 32, who was killed by terrorist Salman Abedi last May after watching Ariana Grande perform. The inspirational hopeful still uses a wheelchair after suffering two broken legs in the attack, as well as nerve damage, and has undergone 11 operations with more in the future. Emotional: Hollie and her dance troupe captured the hearts of the nation when they appeared on the auditions last month In May 2017, after Ariana Grande performed at Manchester Arena, Salman Abedi detonated a homemade explosive device, killing 23 people and injuring over 500, 59 of which were hospitalised. Concert-goers, mainly children and young people, ran for their lives as the bomb detonated at the end of her performance, around 10.30pm. Abedi, 22, used an explosive device packed with nuts and bolts to ensure maximum impact on his victims. She appeared topless in several Hollywood films in her twenties. But Sophie Monk has claimed she was too much of a 'geek' when she was younger to appear on the raunchy dating show Love Island, which she now hosts. 'I didn't have the balls back then - I was really shy!' the 38-year-old former Bachelorette told Who magazine on Thursday. Scroll down for video 'I didn't have the balls back then!' Sophie Monk has insisted she was 'such a geek' and would never have gone on Love Island when she was in her twenties She added: 'And I never went out nightclubbing. If you look back at me in interviews from that time I had the highest voice and I was such a geek.' The Love Island Australia contestants have been hitting the headlines since the raunchy dating show premiered on Sunday night. Cassidy and Grant set tongues wagging when they became the first couple to get hot and heavy under the covers. Elsewhere, a game of spin the bottle revealed that Kim had once had sex in a Myer changing room and that Natasha had slept with Justin Bieber. Shy? Sophie told Who magazine on Thursday, 'I was really shy! If you look back at me in interviews from that time I had the highest voice and I was such a geek' While Sophie claimed she was too 'shy' for the steamy antics of Love Island's singletons in her youth, she certainly came into her own in her twenties. The blonde bombshell carved out a career for herself playing temptresses in a string of films like Date Movie (2006), Click (2006) and Spring Breakdown (2009). Sophie has also enjoyed a string of high-profile romances throughout her career, most of which ended in heartbreak. She recently spoke candidly about reaching her lowest point in her love life, admitting she 'wanted to die'. Raunchy: The Love Island contestants have certainly been hitting the headlines since the show premiered on Sunday night Saucy secrets: A recent game of spin the bottle revealed that Kim had once had sex in a Myer dressing room and that Natasha (pictured) had slept with Justin Bieber 'I've been in stages where I thought, "I want to die, my life's over,"' she told News.com.au on Sunday. 'There have been a few [failed romances],' Sophie confessed, before going on to say that her heart heals 'much quicker' now. Sophie added that, on reflection, she tends to jump into relationships too fast when she's not feeling great about herself. 'My thing is, I'm such a lover. And when I didn't feel great about myself - I'd jump into relationships just because I love love and move too fast,' she explained. Wow! While Sophie claimed she was too 'shy' for the steamy antics of Love Island's singletons in her youth, she certainly came into her own in her twenties (pictured on Date Movie in 2006) It's the steamy flesh-baring promo which had everyone Down Under talking. And it seems producers of Love Island UK were so impressed with the Love Island Australia teaser, they used a very similar format for their own promotional video. Sophie Monk, new host of the controversial Channel Nine show, has claimed producers of the British series copied the Aussie version. Scroll down for video Did Love Island UK copy the Aussie promo? Host Caroline Flack plays a sexy pilot in the clip just like Sophie Monk... who claims British trailer is a rip-off In an interview with OK! magazine, Sophie gushed: 'Our promo looks so good. I'm so proud of Channel 9! Even the UK copied the promo!' Indeed, there are similarities in the two clips. Both Sophie Monk and UK host Caroline Flack are dressed as sexy pilots while sitting in the cockpit of an aeroplane. In the Aussie version, blonde bombshell Sophie 'flies' the contestants to Spain, where the show was filmed. Raunchy: The Aussie version of the Love Island promo shows 'contestants' stripping down to their bikinis as they travel to Spain Too hot for TV: Many said the clip was too steamy for TV 'Hey babe, six weeks in the sun, you up for it?,' she says to one hunky firefighter. She then turns to a shirtless blond contestant and says: 'Pack your bags handsome, the engines are running!' 'Welcome aboard you beautiful, sexy singles...we're heading to the hottest summer of your lives,' she continues. 'Six steamy weeks in a luxury Spanish villa. Welcome to Love Island.' Same, same but different: Meanwhile, the UK version also saw contestants travelling to Spain, however their video is animated Inside the jet, contestants strip off to their island wear, with some seen wearing bikinis and male contestants going shirtless. Meanwhile, in the UK promo, host Caroline is also seen wearing a sexy pilot's uniform. 'Welcome aboard this non-stop flight to Love Island, conditions today are ideal for grafting, so sit back and enjoy the ride,' she purrs. Her welcome message is followed by an animated, albeit raunchy safety video, that shows cartoon contestants stripping off and getting amorous on the plane. The Aussie version of the promo was screened two weeks before the UK version, and OK! reports it was also filmed prior to the British adaption. A spokesperson from ITV told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday: 'Thats not the case - our promo concept has been finalised for months.' Victoria's environment watchdog will slap dockless bike-share operators with $3000 fines for every bike dumped on streets, thrown up trees and into rivers. Operators will have 48 hours to remove bikes discarded on roads, and seven days for those left in waterways, or risk being fined. "This new litter abatement notice that we've put on allows us to use the maximum powers within the EPA Act, so $3000 for fines should get their interest," Environment Protection Authority boss Nial Finegan told 3AW radio on Wednesday. Labor frontbencher Doug Cameron has accused two building industry watchdog officials of covering up the law breaches which led to their former boss quitting. Former Australian Building and Construction Commission head Nigel Hadgkiss resigned in September after admitting to recklessly misrepresenting union rights on Australian Building and Construction Commission posters and handbooks. Senator Cameron zeroed in on ABCC regional managers Peter Darlaston and Murray Gregor on Wednesday, arguing they knew about the breaches two years before Mr Hadgkiss' admission. But the two men rejected the claim, saying they didn't know the offending material was in breach of the Act until 2016. But they admitted being told about the law changing in 2014. "This is the culture in the ABCC, that you're asked a question and you cover up. That's exactly what you both did - you covered up," Senator Cameron told the hearing. Both men insisted they always told the truth, while new ABCC commissioner Stephen McBurney said he didn't accept the allegations. "They all gave honest evidence," Mr McBurney said. Liberal senator Jim Molan said there was no evidence of a cover up or the agency acting based on ideology. Earlier, Senator Cameron questioned why Jobs Minister Michaelia Cash wasn't there to represent Workplace Minister Craig Laundy. The Labor veteran wanted to grill Senator Cash over her time in charge of the portfolio. "The minister can run but she can't hide on this stuff. She'll eventually have to deal with it so she may as well front up," Senator Cameron said. But Assistant Jobs Minister Zed Seselja said former portfolio responsibility didn't compel a person to appear at estimates hearings, adding he wasn't sure if Senator Cash had other commitments. "I'm not her diary secretary," Senator Seselja said. Senator Cash's office has been contacted for comment. There's a chance some breathing space has opened up in Australian-East Timor ties, which could see the first ministerial visit to Dili in more than four years. A new government is taking shape in the East Timorese capital, and a long-running maritime boundary dispute with Australia was put to bed earlier this year. Timor's court of appeal has ruled a political coalition led by independence hero Xanana Gusmao has won a majority of parliamentary seats in this month's election. The vote was called in a bid to end months of deadlock in the tiny Southeast Asian country's parliament, where there had been a minority government led by Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has praised East Timor's well-ordered and peaceful poll. "We look forward to the swearing-in of a new prime minister and cabinet, as the Australian government remains committed to deeper cooperation between our two countries," she said in a statement overnight. There has been no ministerial visits to East Timor since the coalition government came to power in 2013. Labor's foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong also flagged scope for strengthening ties. "The elections confirm the strength of (East Timor's) young democracy, having only first held democratic elections in 2001," she said. After years of bitter wrangling, Australia and East Timor in March signed a historic treaty at the United Nations to resolve a maritime boundary dispute. The deal also carves up $56 billion in potential revenue from oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea. East Timor, one of the world's most impoverished nations, will reap between 70 to 80 per cent of the revenue from the Greater Sunrise fields under the agreement. The common cold virus can spread within families and workplaces like wildfire, knocking people down like a house of cards. Emerging evidence suggests stress can be just as contagious. A new Australian study of career couples has found stress caused in the workplace was being transferred from one partner to another at home, with around half of the participants reporting it had significantly impacted their relationship. The transferred stress was then spread back into subsequent workplaces. Basically, the stress you may feel at work may be compounded by a stressed-out partner. "If you are under stress at work and so is your partner then its much worse for you," said Professor of Organisational Psychology, Paula Brough at Griffith University. Psychologists call the phenomenon 'stress contagion'. "There is quite a bit of work on stress contagion, where you pass stress from one person to another," Prof Brough told AAP. "That can be in the work environment, from your boss to you or vice versa, if you have a difficult co-worker then their issues can cause you stress and impact your performance," she said. To investigate the impact of 'stress contagion' on couples, researchers conducted extensive interviews with 16 couples, who all had full-time careers. There was a mixture of couples who did and did not have children. Prof Brough says the study, published this week in the Australian Journal of Psychology, was part of a bigger study looking at how workers manage stress, with the aim of tackling workplace bullying. "We are aware that some stress comes from the family or outside the work environment but we were looking specifically at what proportion of work stress comes from the partner, so transferred across," said Prof Brough. "So how much do workers bring their stress home, how much is passed on to their spouse and then how does it impact their spouses own work performance," she said. The research found "very clear" evidence that stress contagion does occur. "In enough cases we found when the (work) stressor was large enough they discussed it with their spouse," said Prof Brough. This would then affect their partner's level of health and well-being when they went to work, Prof Brough explained. The biggest complaint among the couples was the impact work stress had on the amount and quality of time the couples spent together. "We had couples where both partners were shift workers, so one would juggle the shift so they could at least spend a bit of time together at home each day," said Prof Brough. She says the findings highlight the importance of work-life-balance policies to ensure the workplace is psychologically healthy for workers. "Good workplaces understand the need to support their workers at different life transitions - whether that be with a new baby or sick relative," said Prof Brough. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan only exists because of compromise, senior Labor MP Tony Burke believes. The existing plan isn't what he would have designed but the former water minister says he doesn't think there would be a plan if he'd pushed for what he wanted. "Every step forward has meant compromise and that is a reality of what is in front of us," Mr Burke told parliament on Wednesday. He backed a bill to give the government a second-bite at changes to the plan blocked by the Greens and Labor in February. The changes are back on after a deal between the Turnbull government and federal Labor to reduce the amount of water being returned to the environment in southern Queensland and northern NSW. That deal was the product of direct negotiation and he believes the independent authority must now be left to do its job. "We will never resolve anything in the basin unless we accept that the independent authority, when it makes a call, must not be then litigated gigalitre-by-gigalitre by this parliament," he said. The Greens failed in a bid earlier this month to block further changes to the plan that will allow less water to be returned to the environment in the southern basin. A man test driving a luxury car in Sydney's south has allegedly pulled a gun on the owner, kicked him out of the vehicle and sped off. The 48-year-old owner of the silver 2015 Mercedes was in the passenger seat at a Connells Point intersection on Tuesday night when the driver threatened him with a firearm and demanded his mobile phone, before forcing him out of the vehicle. The thief, aged in his 20s or 30s, was last seen driving in the car along Homedale Crescent. The Mercedes has the number plate 11SUMO. Australia's peak organisation for brain cancer research has been buoyed by a "promising" vaccine that could add years to the lives of people with an aggressive form of brain cancer. The treatment for people with glioblastoma works by using the immune cells of patients to target their tumour. Early findings from an 11-year international clinical trial involving more than 300 sufferers worldwide, released on Wednesday, show those given the vaccine are living longer than expected. The international researchers says the results hint at a "major breakthrough" in the treatment of glioblastoma, which is the most common and deadly form of brain cancer. Cure Brain Cancer Foundation chief executive Michelle Stewart says once the results are confirmed they will begin work to get access to the treatment for people living with GBM in Australia. However, Ms Stewart is urging caution until the final data is released because the results "may get better or worse". The standard treatment for glioblastoma is surgery followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy. The current median survival for GBM in Australia is just 15 months. Of the 331 patients with glioblastoma who took part in the trial, 232 were injected regularly with immunotherapy vaccine DCVax in addition to standard care, while the remaining group were given a placebo. Published in the Journal of Translational Medicine, released on Wednesday, the interim results showed patients involved in the trial survived for more than 23 months on average after surgery. Almost one-third lived for an average of 40.5 months, the authors said. "These results, if confirmed when the final analysis is complete, are very encouraging," Ms Stewart said. "This therapy could have the potential to change the outlook for many patients with GBM, who currently have very few options." Every Australian high school should have a trained career advisor on staff, a new report suggests. Schools, businesses and industry should also collaborate to increase the amount of work experience and volunteer work available to high school students. The report into the transition from high school to work, released on Wednesday, reveals more than half of career advisers work part-time and that only one-in-four young people turn to them for advice. Young people spend 13 years at school learning about being an active part of the community by getting a job, but only one to six weeks is spent informing them about career choices, the NRMA highlighted in a submission to the committee. "There is a clear disconnect between providing suitable and appropriate career advice and making sure students are job ready upon leaving school," they said. It also found the education system is geared to a transition to university. University of Melbourne Associate Professor Ruth Schubert told the committee too many people were going into degree-based qualifications when they didn't need to be. "We've created many problems here with our system. We're not very efficient or effective," she said. The committee came up with 35 recommendations including around careers advisors and work experience. It also suggested the government give consideration to teacher working conditions and pay to attract and retain good teachers, and acknowledged "significant investment and reform" will be needed to raise the status of vocational education and training, apprenticeships and traineeships. Universities have been told to be more transparent about the student accommodation places they guarantee for rural and remote students. Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham made the request in accepting 11 recommendations from an independent review into regional education. Professor John Halsey's review found the number of people with degrees dwindled the further you got from a capital city. "There's clearly a gap between the city and the bush in the level of study or qualifications students achieve," Senator Birmingham said on Wednesday. Other recommendations from Prof Halsey's report included establishing a national focus on rural, regional and remote education, training and research to improve opportunities in regional Australia. He also called for improved availability and affordability of work experience placements, and vocational training and university options for students outside major cities. Senator Birmingham said the government was creating an extra 500 sub-bachelor places and 500 commonwealth supported bachelor places in regional areas, while the parental-income cut off for youth allowances is being increased to $170,000. Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop has launched a new grants scheme to empower community groups carrying out aid projects in the Indo-Pacific. The three-year "Friendship Grants" scheme offers Australian community organisations with experience delivering foreign aid up to $60,000 in funding. "There are so many Australians who are doing so much in our region, I knew we should be able to leverage this in a a way that would have an even bigger impact," Ms Bishop told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday. Veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder may soon be helped in their recovery by specially trained therapy dogs. The federal government has announced a $2 million trial of assistance dogs as a supplement to clinical treatment for veterans with the condition. Veterans' Affairs Minister Darren Chester says unlike pet or companion dogs, assistance dogs are specially trained to perform tasks that help in veterans' clinical recovery. "Dogs are great company, good fun, loyal friends and anyone who has had a dog knows they can be incredibly beneficial for your wellbeing," he said on Wednesday. The trial will match the breed and temperament of a dog with the participant. The initial training and bonding process is expected to take 18 months before the placement of the dog with the veterans on a permanent basis. Selection of the up to 20 participants will begin in early 2019, with dog or puppy selection taking place after that. La Trobe University, in partnership with the Centre for Service and Therapy Dogs Australia, will undertake the trial of the dogs as a supplement to clinical treatment. "We expect this project to make a meaningful difference to the lives of our veterans," Deputy Vice-Chancellor Keith Nugent said. States will find out how much GST revenue they will gain or lose under the new formula when a report is released in June. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says the Productivity Commission's report on the GST breakdown will be released before the Super Saturday by-elections. "The government has committed to release the report in June," Mr Turnbull told parliament on Wednesday. Tasmanian independent MP Andrew Wilkie asked if the new formula would make sure his state did not lose out. Mr Turnbull said the payments Tasmania received would not be reduced by "one cent" but he did not address whether the formula would disadvantage the state. "It is also important that any new arrangements are seen as being fair everywhere," Mr Turnbull said. "It has to pass the pub test in Burnie, as it does in Bunbury, Ballarat and Bendigo, right around the country." Any change to the GST could affect the coalition's chances in by-elections in Tasmania, South Australia and Queensland on July 28. But the Liberals are not standing candidates in Western Australia, which is where the push to change the GST formula has been the strongest. A change could result in Tasmania and South Australia losing some of their allocation, which is already above the amount of GST they raise. Two men and a woman have been arrested following armed robberies at a fast food restaurant and bottle shop in Melbourne's west. The trio, from Newport and aged between 22 and 26, were arrested on Wednesday morning and are assisting police with their inquiries. The first robbery was at a fast food restaurant in Altona North on November 26 and the second was at a bottle shop in Williamstown on December 23. During the second robbery, two men brandished guns and threatened staff before escaping with cash. The arrests come a week after detectives appealed for witnesses to the robberies, releasing CCTV footage of two men threatening a staff with guns during one of the robberies, as well as footage of an older-model white Toyota Corolla. A white Corolla was seized by police and is believed to be connected to the robberies. A federal cabinet minister has likened Labor's proposed health insurance premium cap to price controls in North Korea. The federal opposition has announced it will cap annual premium rises to two per cent for two years if elected. The Turnbull government has criticised the cap, insisting its own raft of changes in recent years including to the price of prostheses is putting downward pressure on prices. But Health Department officials would not speculate to a Senate committee on Thursday about the level of next year's rise or whether it would be around two per cent. Premiums rose by an average of 3.95 per cent on April 1 this year. Asked by Labor senator Murray Watt whether the government could guarantee a rise of two per cent next year, Rural Health Minister Bridget McKenzie said the coalition is doing everything it can to put downward pressure on increases and make sure the market is as competitive as possible. "You might be doing a few things but you certainly haven't committed to a cap," Senator Watt said. "We're not North Korea, Senator Watt, we can't stipulate exactly what everybody has to pay for the one product that we'll offer," Senator McKenzie replied. She later denied she compared Labor's policy directly to North Korea, but said Labor's cap won't do everything the coalition has been able to achieve. A new integrity body to deal with complaints against Queensland's local councils will be set up by the end of the year, the state government has promised. As part of new laws passed this month, an Office of the Independent Assessor will be established to work alongside the established corruption watchdog, the Crime and Corruption Commission. The government has not been able to confirm how much money will be allocated to the new body, saying the figure will be revealed in next month's state budget. Australia's workplace watchdog used about $180,000 of taxpayers' money to fight a court order forcing it to provide documents about raids on a union office. The Fair Work Ombudsman last year challenged a subpoena compelling it to provide documents to the Federal Court relating to October raids on Australian Workers Union offices in Melbourne and Sydney. "There is no doubt this has put a dint in the funds available for legal costs," Fair Work Ombudsman Natalie James told a Senate hearing on Wednesday. "It comes out of the same bucket of money from which we fund and support all our court action." FWO chief counsel Janine Webster confirmed the external costs were on top of 50 in-house lawyers employed by the watchdog. The move to narrow the order was partly successful but FWO failed in having the subpoena set aside completely. The raids were thrust back into the spotlight on Wednesday, with a separate subpoena reissued to cabinet minister Michaelia Cash over her office's involvement in the incident. Last year's raids came under heavy scrutiny after the media arrived at the offices before police, thanks to a tip-off from Senator Cash's adviser, David De Garis, who later quit over the incident. Defence insists it is moving away from automatically subjecting sexual abuse victims to investigations to focus on offering practical care. The shift was aimed at ensuring people had the confidence to come forward to access support and have control over the process ahead, Vice Defence Force Chief Ray Griggs told a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday. Previously, the main focus had been on an investigation process which could be distressing for the victim. Vice Admiral Griggs was responding to last week's media coverage that sexual misconduct cases in defence ranks had reached the highest level in five years. There were 265 reports of sexual misconduct in the Defence Force last year. The hearing was told that as of the start of May, there had been 27 substantiated cases of sexual assault allegations against serving defence personnel this year. There had been disciplinary action in 24 other cases, one civilian conviction, one termination of military service and one case resolved through mediation. Thirty-six cases are still under investigation. Vice Admiral Griggs attributed a recent spike in cases to historical cases finally being reported as well as the defence force ramping up training this year to encourage people to speak up. Defence Minister Marise Payne said sexual misconduct was unacceptable. A Sydney man arrested in connection with an alleged terror plot has had a weapons charge over an improvised "fly swatter" dismissed. Khaled Merhi, 40, was one of four men arrested last year over an alleged conspiracy to bring down an Etihad plane bound for the Middle East from Sydney with an improvised bomb. He was never charged with terror offences but, after a raid on his Surry Hills property, he was accused of possessing a weapon without a permit - a charge to which Mr Merhi pleaded guilty. But magistrate Jacqueline Milledge dismissed the charge in Downing Centre Local Court on Wednesday after police prosecutor Amin Assaad said the object was actually an improvised fly swatter. Sen Sgt Assaad said the effect of the device was 300-times less than the voltage of a NSW police Taser, and the time Mr Merhi had already spent in custody was sufficient penalty for the offence. The magistrate acknowledged the case had personally and physically impacted Mr Merhi, who was injured during his arrest. She took into account the effect of media publicity, and that it was Mr Merhi himself who brought the object to the police's attention. "Be careful who you're mixing with in the future, Mr Merhi," she said after dismissing the case. Nationals leader Michael McCormack says it is up to Barnaby Joyce's local branch to decide if they want to keep him in politics. The former deputy prime minister has taken two weeks sick leave after recording a tell-all, $150,000 interview with his staffer-turned-partner Vikki Campion. Mr McCormack told Michelle Grattan's The Conversation podcast it was up to Mr Joyce and his electorate whether he stayed in politics. "That'll be a matter for him and that'll be a matter for the National party in New England," Mr McCormack said. "That'll be a matter for a branch to nominate him and then that'll be a matter for the branch members in New England as to whether or not they decide if he nominates or if anybody else nominates." He raised the example of Liberal Assistant Minister Jane Prentice, who lost her own preselection despite being a sitting MP. "That's democracy at work," Mr McCormack said. But former prime minister Tony Abbott, who had Mr Joyce as his deputy prime minister, backed him to stay in politics. "He saved the government at the last election. If the National party had not won seats ... we wouldn't be in government," Mr Abbott told 2GB radio. "Barnaby has done a lot for us in the past and I hope he will do a lot for us in the future." Mr Joyce and Ms Campion's interview will be broadcast on Sunday night. Mr Joyce jumped to the back bench after his relationship with Ms Campion became public in February. Their son Sebastian was born on April 16. He has split from his wife Natalie, the mother of his four daughters. A truck driver has been charged over a crash that killed a woman on the NSW north coast. The 43-year-old woman's car collided with the truck and another vehicle on Solitary Island Way in Coffs Harbour on Tuesday morning and she died at the scene. The other drivers and passengers were treated at the scene for minor injuries and were taken to hospital. Officers from the Crash Investigation Unit and heavy vehicle inspectors have investigated the smash and on Wednesday NSW Police said the truck driver had been charged. His licence was suspended and he was granted conditional bail before an appearance next month in Coffs Harbour Local Court to face charges of dangerous driving occasioning death and negligent driving occasioning death. Existing penalties aren't enough to stop businesses using software to hide sales and reduce their tax, a federal government minister says. Kelly O'Dwyer says tougher penalties, including fines up to $1 million, will deter those who take part in the black economy. Legislation to create offences and introduce penalties for those who use sales suppression software has passed the lower house. Under the new laws, courier and cleaning companies will be required to report annual payments to contractors to the Australian Taxation Office. Ms O'Dwyer says participation in the black economy undermines trust in the tax system, creates an uneven playing field for businesses, fosters the exploitation of workers and results in a loss of government revenue. Part of the central Queensland city of Mackay is in lockdown as police search for a man armed with a gun. An emergency situation was declared about 5.30pm on Wednesday after officers were called to Gregory Street, where there were reports of a gunman near a licensed premises. Queensland Police said in a statement negotiators were on scene and urged the public to stay away from the locked-down area. "Members of the public inside the declared zone should seek shelter in a secure place," they said in a statement. "There are no reported injuries at this stage." The declared zone includes the area encompassing the intersection of River and MacCallister Streets to the intersection of River and Wood Streets, and from Wood and Gordon Streets, to Gordon and MacCallister Streets. The boss of the Australian War Memorial has defended accepting money from a controversial Chinese-Australian billionaire. Memorial director Brendan Nelson has provided Veterans' Affairs Minister Darren Chester with a detailed briefing on the support provided by Chau Chak Wing. Liberal MP Andrew Hastie last week used parliamentary privilege to allege Dr Chau funded the bribery of a senior United Nations official. Dr Chau has denied the allegations and has a defamation case against a media outlet. Dr Nelson said in 2013 he wrote to a number of wealthy individuals seeking financial support and Dr Chau had written back. "He came to the war memorial with his family and I took them on a tour," Dr Nelson told a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday, adding he had pointed out the Chinese Australians who were on the honour roll. Dr Nelson later wrote to him with a proposal seeking $60,000 to produce an Anzac diversity education project, which would explain the story of migrants and indigenous people who had served Australia's defence force overseas. Dr Chau later agreed to fund a $500,000 education and music centre. Dr Nelson also defended the memorial's acceptance of corporate donations from arms manufacturers. He argued defence companies had a responsibility to support the memorial and dismissed suggestions from Greens senator Lee Rhiannon they had a vested interest in ensuring there was further warfare. "I challenging anyone to come to the Australian War Memorial and then leave thinking they can't wait for another war," Dr Nelson said. He said the whole place was a "monument to peace". Dr Nelson suggested if there was a ban on defence contractors from supporting the memorial then the logical extension was to stop accepting government money as well. He confirmed the memorial was seeking about $500 million over seven years to upgrade the centre because it's running out of space. The memorial is working on a business case. He said both sides of politics had been fairly positive about the idea. The driver of an allegedly stolen classic Mercedes trying to escape police on a main Melbourne road during peak hour has reversed into a bus before getting the car stuck on a tram reserve kerb. Police tried to pull over the left-hand drive Mercedes 280SL on Victoria Parade at East Melbourne shortly before 6.30pm on Wednesday. "As they (the officers) got out the car's taken off and reversed into a bus that was coming down the bus lane and then kept reversing and got stuck," Sergeant Stuart Pontil-Scala told AAP at the scene. "It looks like it's a collector's car, pity what's happened to it." There were two men inside the car and because only two officers were at the scene, an urgent call for back-up was made, flooding the outward-bound lanes of Victoria Parade with police and forcing traffic to a crawl during the evening peak hour. Another three cars crashed into each other while police were still at the scene. The two men were arrested without incident and no one was injured. Australia should be a global leader in steel production and the downstream processing of its resources, British industrialist Sanjeev Gupta says. Mr Gupta says Australia has abundant mineral wealth and currently exports 180 million tonnes of metallurgical coal and 850 million tonnes of iron ore each year. He's told an industry gathering in Adelaide that such resources are enough to make 500 million tonnes of steel, yet annual production is just five million tonnes. The billionaire, who recently took charge of Whyalla's troubled steelworks, pointed to Australia's weaknesses, including high energy and labour costs. But he argued these could be overcome by the use of modern technology and the continued fall in the cost of renewable energy. "This would allow for the creation of a sustainable industry based on the utilisation of domestic resources, capitalisation of strengths and mitagation of weaknesses," his presentation to the SA Chamber of Mines and Energy said. Mr Gupta reaffirmed his promised investment strategy in South Australia, including a 90 megawatt pumped hydro power plant, large-scale solar power production at Whyalla and the development of a 100 megawatt lithium-ion battery. His company is also exploring further opportunities including a possible foray into the copper industry where it sees an opportunity for local processing. "We are therefore exploring opportunities to build copper smelting and refinery capabilities in Whyalla," he said. "This would be consistent with our mission to add value to Australia's resources industry." Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has been forced to apologise to a Northern Territory mayor after a meeting during which he treated her "boorishly and arrogantly", News Limited newspapers report. Katherine mayor Fay Miller met with the minister in Canberra last December to discuss a health package for her town after chemical contamination from nearby RAAF Base Tindal. Ms Miller told the Herald Sun Mr Hunt acted aggressively towards her during the meeting and she had written to both him and to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull seeking an explanation and an apology. But it was only after the newspaper submitted questions to the minister and Mr Turnbull on Wednesday that Mr Hunt phoned Ms Miller. The minister's office told the paper Mr Hunt had "apologised directly to the mayor for any language which may have caused offence" but denied he had behaved aggressively. Two young boys present when their dad was shot dead by a Victorian chilli farmer have spoken of their pain since the death of their "beloved" father. Angelo Russo, 55, last week pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of David Calandro, who was shot while sitting in his ute at Russo's Tatura farm on February 18, 2017. The plea came days after his murder trial began in the Supreme Court of Victoria, with Russo admitting to manslaughter after prosecutors agreed to withdraw the murder charge. Following Russo's guilty plea, the prosecution conceded it could not prove the farmer intended to shoot Mr Calandro. During a pre-sentence hearing on Wednesday, prosecutor Nicholas Papas QC said Russo claimed Mr Calandro deliberately swerved at his dog Harry to "spook" it, but accidentally ran it over. Russo claims he was "pissed off" and put down his injured dog by shooting it. He says he did not intentionally kill Mr Calandro when he approached him with the shotgun still in his hand. The farmer claims he slipped on an eggplant and the shotgun discharged accidentally and didn't realise Mr Calandro was injured until he heard the 43-year-old screaming. Mr Calandro died in hospital the next day. In a police interview, Russo said: "he's put me in a f***ing situation, the f***ing a***hole" and that Mr Calandro was a "f***ing c***". However, his defence barrister Patrick Tehan QC told the court on Wednesday that Russo expressed "the deepest of sorrow" for his victim's sons and "was tearful and beside himself about what happened". Mr Tehan also said Mr Calandro and Russo had been friends - a claim that prompted several family members to storm from the court. Mr Calandro's son Anton gave an emotional victim impact statement to the court, read by a family member. "My life is different since my dad hasn't been here," he said in his statement. "My dad was a nice, caring, fun dad. "I now have to do more things at home because he's not here. I have to care for mum." A statement by Mr Calandro's other son, Flavian, was read to the court by Mr Papas. "My beloved dad was killed in front of me and my brother," he said. "It is too hard, I feel pain in my body. "My dad was a fun-loving guy and he'd do anything to make me and my brother happy. "I will forever miss my dad knowing he is gone from this earth." The court was also told Russo's mother died while he was in custody over Mr Calandro's death, having burnt to death when her dress caught fire. The hearing continues on Thursday. Refugee activists will hold a vigil outside the Federal Immigration Minister Peter Dutton's office north of Brisbane on Thursday to express their outrage over the death of man on Manus Island last week. The 52-year-old man, Salim, died after jumping from a moving car on the island following five years in custody at the facility. Noor Zaman, president of the Queensland Rohingya Community, said Salim had been brought to Australia in 2014 for treatment for severe epilepsy but he was returned to the island soon after without the condition being brought under control, and he suffered frequent seizures. "Salim's death was not suicide, it was murder under the leadership of Peter Dutton and Malcolm Turnbull," Mr Zaman said. He is the seventh Rohingya refugee to die on the island and the third apparent suicide at the centre in less than a year. Mark Gillespie from the Refugee Action Collective said Mr Dutton and the federal government needed to take responsibility. "Salim fled genocide in Myanmar and was found to be a refugee and owed protection, but instead of safety he was condemned to five years of hell in an offshore detention centre." Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467, or Mental Health in Multicultural Australia www.mhima.org.au. The Tasmanian government won't support a dual indigenous name for Hobart after calls from a section of the state's Aboriginal community. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Council (TAC) on Wednesday put forward the name nipaluna - drawn from the revived Aboriginal language of palawa kani - as part of Reconciliation Week. "It is about unveiling the true history of the area and letting people know that there were other people here before the English," TAC CEO Heather Sculthorpe said. "That gives all Aboriginal people a pride in place of identity and ... knowing where they've come from." Hobart City Council welcomed the move, with Lord Mayor Ron Christie pledging to use the name as often as possible. He expects the use of nipaluna to be supported by a council vote on Monday. But the formal use of the name, including on signs and maps, can't happen unless it is approved by Tasmania's Nomenclature Board. A spokesperson for the government said it does not support a dual name for Hobart. Several natural landmarks in Tasmania have dual names, including kunanyi/Mount Wellington, which was in 2014 formally given an indigenous name under the government's Aboriginal dual naming policy. However, the policy is currently being reviewed by the state government following concerns over a lack of consultation in deciding names. "(The government) is optimistic the TAC will contribute to the consultation to ensure their views are included in the review process," the spokesperson said. Ms Sculthorpe hopes the city council's backing will lead to a groundswell of community support. "I think there will be an overwhelming sense that the premier won't be able to ignore," she said, adding decades of research went in to finding the most accurate name. There's been no sign of a humpback whale seen tangled in rope off Sydney for more than a day after weather conditions forced search crews to call off their mission. NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service on Wednesday said finding the sub-adult mammal had been "like trying to find a needle in a haystack" after it was first spotted by a whale-watching boat on Tuesday afternoon. Crews from that vessel managed for cut some of the ropes off but had to leave before the animal was entirely free due to fading light. Its last known position was about 4km off Bondi Beach, but there's been no sign of the humpback since, despite an extensive search that included helicopter patrols as far north as the state's Central Coast. The search was called off on Wednesday after rough conditions made observations virtually impossible. A NPWS spokesman said a decision on whether to attempt further searches on Thursday would be weather-dependent, however crews remain ready to mobilise quickly in case anyone spots the whale. One Nation senator Brian Burston says he will support the government's $35.6 billion company tax cuts, in direct opposition to his leader Pauline Hanson's authority. Senator Burston says Ms Hanson's about-face to withdraw support for the package, after initially agreeing to back them, has blindsided him and he is a "very principled person" who will honour the deal with Finance Minister Mathias Cormann in March. "I don't want to cause any angst or division in One Nation, but once I make a handshake with somebody -- that's it. I stick to my word," Senator Burston told The Australian newspaper on Thursday. A Victorian man who is the prime suspect in three separate cold-case murders in South Australia says he is innocent. Steven Hainsworth, who now lives in Mildura, has admitted detectives have linked him to the murders of two grandmothers and a pensioner over a 13-year period through new forensic evidence, but has denied killing anyone. "I've been told I'm a suspect in the crime, but I haven't done anything. Nothing. I'm not a serial killer. I haven't killed no-one. I've had fights in my life and I've got hurt, as you can see now. I'm not responsible for no-one's murder," Mr Hainsworth told the Nine Network on Thursday. "I hope that whoever is responsible is caught and then I've got the monkey off my back." 300518BUKA COMMANDERS CONDEMN THREAT TO THE ABG New Dawn FM News Buka Islands former BRA and Resistance Commanders, EDDIE MOHIN and DONALD HAMAU today condemned the threat by Service providers to shut down the PNG POWER and ABG administration because of non-payment of bills. In a joint statement today, the Commanders told New Dawn FM that Bougainvilleans fought the ten year war to free Bougainville and not to let it control by a few so called former combatants who have their selfish interest. They called on the Business people and anyone who have unpaid bills by the ABG to wait as ABG is currently cash strapped and cannot pay them. They questioned where ABG will get the funds to pay them when PAPUA NEW GUINEA is broke. The Commanders called on all Ex-combatants to make sure that they do not destroy what Bougainvilleans have fought for to achieve. They said all guns in the hands of former combatants must be disposed of to complete the weapons disposal program before the referendum. They said anyone who holds on a gun after Bougainville destroys the remaining weapons will be a law and order matter. MR. DONALD HAMAO said that as a signatory to the Bougainville Peace Agreement he wants all conditions on the Bougainville Peace Agreement met by all Bougainvilleans. He called on the Service Providers to follow up with the finance people on their claims and not to disturb the PNG Power and the Bougainville administration. Ends In the third week of September last year intensive care units across Australia struggled to function after being inundated with patients severely sick with the flu. Professor David Pilcher at The Alfred hospital in Melbourne was working night shifts that "shocking" week and said the ICU was seriously under strain. "We had a large number of ventilated patients, we had patients on heart-lung machines, we almost ran out of dialysis machines to treat patients with kidney failure," said Prof Pilcher. It was the busiest ICU he had worked in for years. A study released on Thursday has now shown ICU admissions in Australia and New Zealand in 2017 peaked at levels not seen since the swine flu pandemic of 2009. Researchers at Monash University examined all admissions to 181 ICUs between January 2009 and December 2017 using the The Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society (ANZICS) Adult Patient Database. Compared to past seasons, pneumonia and sepsis ICU admissions rose by as much as 50 per cent in 2017 - the highest seen since registry records began in 1993. This was the indirect consequence of the flu outbreak, Prof Pilcher said. "The intensive care data doesn't specifically tell you about flu but what it does tell you about is admissions due to pneumonia and sepsis, severe life-threatening infections," he said. Admissions progressively climbed over the winter period and then peaked the the week beginning September 17. "That climb in admissions and peak exactly matched the flu notifications," Prof Pilcher said. "Anecdotally the patients that we were seeing coming in and filling up our ICUs, here in Melbourne and in Sydney and elsewhere around Australia, were patients with flu and with infections they got as a consequence of flu," he said. At the peak, pneumonia or sepsis accounted for 16 per cent of all ICU admissions. In 2017, a record 1100 influenza-associated deaths were recorded, of which 90 per cent were elderly patients. The flu virus can directly affect the lungs but also makes the body more vulnerable to other infections. "Because you are already sick when you get that infection you are more likely to get sepsis, which is the development of organ failure," explained co-author Dr Aidan Burrell. "Why one person gets it and another person doesn't is difficult to say," he said. But it's not just old people who are at greater risk, he warned. "We saw many young people, particularly here at The Alfred, with very severe sepsis," Dr Burrell said. He hopes the study will better prepare ICUs for similar flu seasons and encourage people to get vaccinated. "Vaccination is a really important part of prevention of these outbreaks," Dr Burrell said. Staying at home when sick and hand washing are also critical to prevent the spread of flu, he said. "If everyone does that we can really prevent another flu season like last year." George Tyndall, former University of Southern California gynecologist, allegedly used his position to abuse student patients Los Angeles police said Tuesday they are investigating sexual misconduct allegations made by 52 former patients of a university gynecologist accused of sexually abusing thousands of students over decades. The probe into the widening firestorm surrounding George Tyndall, which has already led to the resignation of the University of Southern California's president, will center on accusations spanning from 1990 to 2016 -- roughly his entire tenure. LAPD Captain William Hayes said 39 cases were referred from a USC hotline about the 71-year-old physician, whose career came to an end last year when he resigned following nearly a year on paid leave. "We are here to listen, respond and ultimately work with prosecutors," LAPD Assistant Chief Beatrice Girmala told reporters. A Los Angeles Times investigation said Tyndall was allowed to continue working despite patients complaining about his sexually charged comments, inappropriate touching and taking of photographs during examinations. He was removed only after a nurse reported him to the rape crisis center, according to former patients and staffers interviewed by the Times. An internal university investigation concluded that his pelvic exams were outside the scope of current medical practice and amounted to sexual harassment. Tyndall defended his medical exams in an interview with the Times, saying they were thorough but appropriate, and arguing that some of his comments to patients had been misinterpreted. In a letter to the newspaper received on Thursday, Tyndall said he had heard of only one patient's complaint before March 2016 -- that he did not wear gloves during a pelvic exam, which he denies. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against one of the populous western state's most prestigious universities by former Tyndall patients who claim they were abused. A southern California law firm that had already filed several suits announced three more cases, while uproar over the allegations culminated on Friday with the resignation of USC president C.L. Max Nikias. "We have heard the message that something is broken and that urgent and profound actions are needed," said Rick J. Caruso, chairman of the board of trustees. Palestinian relatives of 23-year-old Ahmed Qutoosh, who died of his wounds endured during clashes with Israeli troops, mourn during his funeral in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip on May 25, 2018 Kuwait on Tuesday circulated a watered-down draft UN Security Council resolution on setting up an international protection mission for the Palestinians in a bid to win European support in a vote expected this week, diplomats said. The council could hold a vote, possibly on Thursday, on the draft resolution that is expected to face a US veto, the diplomats said. Still, Kuwait, a non-permanent council member that represents Arab countries, is hoping to win a high number of votes in favor of its proposal to highlight Washington's isolation on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The revised draft drops an outright demand for an international protection mission and instead requests that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres present recommendations. The new text "calls for the consideration of measures to guarantee the safety and protection of the Palestinian civilian population" in the occupied Palestinian territories and the Gaza Strip, according to the draft obtained by AFP. It requests that Guterres present a report within 60 days on proposals for the protection of Palestinian civilians including the establishment of an international mission. France and Britain, two veto-wielding council members, have complained that the draft resolution lacked details on the scope and objective of the proposed protection mission, diplomats said. The United States meanwhile maintained that the measure was biased against Israel during two expert-level meetings held last week, according to diplomatic sources. Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon has slammed the proposed resolution as "shameful" and said it was designed to help Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas. Kuwait put forward the draft resolution ten days ago after Israeli forced killed dozens of Palestinians during protests on the Gaza border and the United States opened its embassy in Jerusalem. Negotiations however have been tough-going with the Europeans and Africans pressing for more information on the proposed protection mission, according to diplomats. Diplomats have said the Palestinians may turn to the UN General Assembly if the draft resolution on protection fails to win Security Council backing. The council is due to meet Wednesday at the request of the United States to discuss Palestinian rocket firings on Israel from Gaza. The rocket and mortar firings from the Gaza Strip were claimed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, prompting Israel to respond with air strikes on bases of the militant Palestinian groups. It was the worst flareup since the 2014 war waged by Israel in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Washington has circulated a draft council statement that would condemn the firing of rockets by Palestinian militants in Gaza, but it remains unclear whether it will be approved. The enquiry is the latest in a string of reforms to espionage and foreign interference legislation Australia announced last year Australian spy agencies will undergo their largest review in decades, officials announced Wednesday, as Canberra seeks to strengthen intelligence powers amid heightened concerns about terrorism and foreign political interference. A former head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) will spearhead the wide-ranging enquiry, which will look at how national and domestic intelligence agencies share information, their resources and the laws that underpin their work. "This will be the most comprehensive review of intelligence legislation in Australia since the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security in the 1970s," Attorney-General Christian Porter said. "The national security environment is constantly changing and it is essential that we ensure our agencies have the tools and framework they need to be effective and meet their core function -- keeping Australians safe." The enquiry is the latest in a string of reforms to espionage and foreign interference legislation Canberra announced last year, when it singled out China as a focus of concern. The changes were prompted by an investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Fairfax Media which claimed Chinese billionaires were using donations to gain access to Australian political parties. The revelations have soured Canberra's relationship with Beijing, which has reacted furiously to allegations of interference suggesting Australia "take off its tinted glasses" if it wanted to improve relations. In announcing the review Porter echoed recent comments by Australia's top spy chief Duncan Lewis. "We have had the director general of ASIO put to a committee that we live in an age of unprecedented espionage and terrorism and foreign interference and influence," he told Sky News. "Now is the time to have a top-to-tail review of all of the national intelligence community agencies -- how they interact with the domestic agencies like the AFP (Australian Federal Police) and others," he added. Ivory Coast is the world's biggest grower of cashews -- it now hopes to develop the processing side of the industry, to create jobs and wealth Famous for its cocoa and coffee, the Ivory Coast has drawn up an ambitious five-year plan for the cashew industry, seeking to modernise production in a sector where it is already the world's number-one exporter. "We have shown that we know how to produce the nuts -- now we have to demonstrate that we can sell them and above all process them," Adama Coulibaly of the national Cotton-Cashew Council told AFP. From tiny harvests two decades ago, the West African country now holds the cashew crown, supplanting India as the biggest producer of the nut. Helped by price guarantees for farmers, its harvest doubled from 380,000 tonnes in 2013 to 711,000 tonnes in 2017, amounting to 22 percent of global output. This year's production of the nut -- known locally as "grey gold" -- is expected to attain 750,000 tonnes. Curvy, rich in taste and filled with protein, the cashew is a familiar ingredient in salads, stir-fries and other meals. But it also features in a widening range of other food products, including cashew butter and cheese, and its oil has found uses in medicine, industrial resins and cosmetics. - $200 mn boost - Ivory Coast has a problem, though: the processing side of its cashew sector is puny -- it is currently equipped to handle only six percent of production. This is a classic dilemma for African countries, struggling to get out of the rut of dependence on primary sourcing. "It's in food processing that the real added value lies... which can generate employment. Ivory Coast cannot allow itself to be merely an exporter of raw materials," Coulibaly told AFP. Cashew nuts are peeled by hand at a factory in Bouake, then batched for export around the world In March, the World Bank announced funding of $1 billion (866 million euros) for development purposes in Ivory Coast, including $200 million set aside to support programmes to modernise the cashew sector. Coulibaly hopes that with finance on this scale, the country might in the coming five years attain "a 50 percent rate of product transformation and 80 percent within the next 10 years." At present, the sector includes 250,000 producers grouped into a score of cooperatives and employs some 1.5 million people, directly or indirectly. The government plans to build agro-industrial zones at four population centres -- Bouake in the centre, Korhogo in the north, Bondoukou in the east and Seguela in the northwest. Economist Yves Ouya said the poverty-mired north and centre of the country had to be beneficiaries of the boom. "This is extremely important for the government in its fight against endemic poverty in these zones," he said. - 'A working business' - The cashew's extraordinary success sometimes leads to speculation -- by traders who buy nuts below the floor price fixed by the state and hope to sell it on at a profit -- and to smuggling to neighbouring countries. According to official estimates, between 20,000 and 50,000 tonnes of production is diverted this way each year. The authorities recently responded by ramping up the legal arsenal to deal with such offences, which also affect the cocoa industry. Not just nuts: Ivory Coast is hoping to meet the growing demand for cashew oil and other spinoffs Kouadio Djedri, a planter in his 60s at N'Zere village near the capital Yamoussoukro, likes to talk about how profitable the cashew business can be. "I started out growing cashew nuts 20 years ago, when the product sold for 50 CFA francs (0.07 euros/$0.08) per kilo," the farmer, wearing a cowboy hat and green boots, said. "From a harvest of 200 kilos -- two bags -- in my early days, this year I've grown 13 tonnes for sale at 500 CFA francs per kilo," he said. Djedri, who is also village chief, has a cashew plantation of 11 hectares (27 acres) and plans to expand over a further 13 hectares. "I tell young people to go into growing cashew nuts. It's a working business that has enabled me to send my children to school," he said. Communications Minister Sam Basil said Papua New Guinea was mulling a one-month shutdown of Facebook and the possible development of an alternative social networking platform for its citizens Papua New Guinea said Wednesday it was mulling a temporary shutdown of Facebook to uncover false accounts and block fake news in the Pacific nation, which hosts a major global summit later this year. The proposal, which Communications Minister Sam Basil said could lead to replacing Facebook with a locally developed social networking platform, was ridiculed as ill-timed and unworkable by opponents. Basil floated the idea of a one-month shutdown on Tuesday, saying it would "allow information to be collected" on fake accounts and users who upload pornography and defamatory information so that they could be removed from the platform. "This will allow genuine people with real identities to use the social network responsibly," he said. Basil also said PNG could create a local alternative to Facebook, which has been rocked by revelations that it improperly shared the personal data of 87 million users with British consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica. "If there need be then we can gather our local applications developers to create a site that is more conducive for Papua New Guineans to communicate within the country and abroad as well," he was quoted as saying by local media. No timeframe was given on the potential shutdown, although some reports suggested it could coincide with Port Moresby hosting the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit later this year. A spokesperson for Facebook in Sydney said they had reached out to PNG authorities and were "working to address their concerns". Basil issued a follow-up statement Wednesday acknowledging that "Facebook use in PNG is not limited to personal chats and blogs" but also serves as a forum for legitimate commercial and information services. But he stood firm on pursuing a study of "the advantages and disadvantages of use of Facebook" and of "vulnerabilities" linked to personal data use and cybercrime. PNG Institute of National Affairs executive director Paul Barker said shutting down Facebook would make a mockery of the nation during the 21-member APEC summit, expected to be attended by US President Donald Trump. "The APEC meeting is all about promoting the digital era to assist business, develop economies, and improve citizen welfare in member countries," he told the PNG Post Courier newspaper Wednesday. "It would be a travesty if PNG sought to close down Facebook during the APEC month, making PNG seem rather foolish." Facebook is widely used in PNG to discuss politics and expose corruption and MPs and officials have shown a high degree of sensitivity to posts in the past, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, one of the few foreign media groups based in the country. Basil denied the proposed ban was a threat to freedom of speech. "I don't think so because MPs are open to criticism," he said. Opposition MP Bryan Kramer, who has a large following on Facebook, called the proposal ridiculous. "The reason the word dumb comes to mind is because how does one shut down a platform to carry out research on it," he said Wednesday. "It would be equivalent to saying we are carrying out research on the negative effects of TV so we are turning it off so we can study a blank screen." Hundreds of thousands of brick kiln workers endure back-breaking labour and suffocating heat working in South Asian brick kilns Below skies darkened by thick black smoke, hundreds of thousands of brick kiln workers endure back-breaking labour and suffocating heat working in almost medieval conditions across South Asia. But in one corner of the region, the need to rebuild after Nepal's devastating 2015 earthquake has presented an unexpected opportunity. While much work remains to be done in improving working conditions, an environmental initiative has already managed to reduce emissions from the kilns and efforts are now focusing on rolling out the programme across the region, with significant implications for tackling climate change. There are more than 150,000 kilns in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal belching out thousands of tonnes of soot -- known as black carbon -- a major air pollutant and the second largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide. The factories are stuck in a bygone era. Workers toil away in furnace-like heat in a form of modern day slavery -- bonded labourers trapped by landlords in ever-spiralling debt. There are more than 150,000 kilns in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal belching out thousands of tonnes of soot -- known as black carbon -- a major air pollutant and the second largest contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide These labourers are sold between landlords and the debt starts with the sum they are sold for. It grows as the workers borrow money for food, medical care, even the bricks they use to build homes on the edge of the kilns. Along with much of Nepal, the industry was devastated by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit in 2015, killing around 9,000 people and flattening about a third of the country's brick kilns. But despite the scale of the human tragedy, the devastation presented environmentalists with a rare chance to clean up at least one part of the notoriously filthy industry. The brick kiln owners remain resistant to interference from labour rights groups, but they saw potential profit in working with environmental campaigners. The Brick Kiln Initiative, launched by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), found a way to redesign the ovens and stack the bricks differently so that less toxic soot is produced. The soot belched from the coal-powered kilns is also a major source of the toxic soup of pollutants that has given many South Asian cities the unwanted accolade of having the worst air quality in the world "We wanted to do three things: decrease emissions, increase efficiency and make the kilns earthquake-resistant," said Bidya Banmali Pradhan, programme coordinator for the initiative. The problem is acute, with industrial soot emissions from the region having a worldwide impact. South Asia has the highest such emissions in the world, according to a NASA study. The soot collects on the Arctic ice, decreasing the earth's ability to reflect the sun's rays and contributing to warming globally. Higher temperatures are affecting global weather patterns and have disrupted South Asia's annual monsoon rains, with some areas left at risk of drought while others suffer deadly deluges. The industry was devastated by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit in 2015, flattening about a third of the country's brick kilns but providing a rare chance to introduce new technology In 2017, more than 1,200 people died across South Asia in the worst monsoon floods to hit the region in years. Black carbon has also exacerbated the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, which have shrunk by nearly a quarter between the late 1970s and 2010, according to a study. And the soot belched from the coal-powered kilns is also a major source of the toxic soup of pollutants that has given many South Asian cities the unwanted accolade of having among the worst air quality in the world. - Zig-zag stacking - By stacking the bricks inside the kilns in a zig-zag pattern, the heat snakes through the gaps more efficiently, ensuring coal is completely burned so less soot is produced. But activists say while the environmental changes are positive, conditions for kiln workers have not improved Emissions are cut by 60 percent. But more importantly for the kiln owners, it nearly halves coal consumption. "The environmental factor does not necessarily motivate most kiln owners, but the zig-zag method has an economic benefit. We are using less coal and getting better bricks faster," said Mahendra Chitrakar, president of the Federation of Nepal Brick Industries. Most of the 100 brick kilns in the Kathmandu valley have already adopted the new technology, according to Chitrakar. "We had to rebuild, so we thought why not build a more scientific, environmentally friendly structure," said brick kiln owner Raj Kumar Lakhemaru. "Now there is no black smoke. The bricks are better and I am spending a lot less on coal." Most workers live in shacks around the factories. As bonded labourers, the next generation of workers are literally born into the industry and many start work as children The next step is to spread the technology. Brick manufacturers from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan met in Kathmandu this year to discuss the new design. But activists say while the environmental changes are positive, conditions for kiln workers have not improved. On the edge of Kathmandu, sweaty bare-footed workers hack away at the grey clay and haul heavy loads of bricks to the cavernous kilns. Most live in shacks around the factories. As bonded labourers, the next generation of workers are literally born into the industry and many start work as children. Nepali worker shovels coal at a brick factory in Bhaktapur, on the outskirts of Kathmandu. There are more than 200,000 kiln workers in Nepal There are more than 200,000 kiln workers in Nepal and 16 percent of them are children, according to Better Brick Nepal, which is campaigning for better conditions. "We have to clean the brick industry from not just an environmental perspective but also a human one," said the charity's head Homraj Acharya. And on that issue, he added, the Nepal earthquake has not yet cracked the factory owners' hardline opposition to change. Nicole, a pseudonym she chose to protect her identity, has a full-time office job, but still does after-hours sex work to pay off her college debts For Hong Kong's "part-time girlfriends", social media provides an easy way to connect with clients looking for sex, but campaigners warn that online convenience is tempting girls as young as 13 to put themselves at risk. The label "part-time girlfriend" is a euphemism often used by young women in the city who may be studying or have jobs, but who also offer sex on the side. By using variations of the hashtag #ptgf as shorthand, they connect with men on networks such as Instagram then switch to direct messaging to offer services and arrange to meet. Instagram says it has made #ptgf and #hkptgf unsearchable, but a host of new alternatives that add Chinese characters or initials to the original tag circumvent the block. Nicole describes sex work as a 'dark patch' in her life and says she will feel guilty about it with any future boyfriend Loneliness, curiosity, family breakdown and financial pressures are key motivators for young women to try it out, according to support workers on the ground. High-school student Kiki, a pseudonym she chose to protect her identity, started part-time sex work aged 17, saying it was easy to search for men on Instagram by using one of the #ptgf tags. "I had an argument with my sister and was not very happy, so I just wanted to find someone to listen to me," she told AFP. "For the first few times I felt quite good... so I kept looking for clients for company." She admits she was nervous about meeting strangers, but the financial incentive outweighed her doubts. "My family is not very wealthy. I was making money for myself and saved it," she says. Kiki says she charged from HK$300 ($38) for dinner or "touching", up to HK$1,000 for other sexual services. After less than a year she gave up because she had started a new relationship. Young women often do not see themselves as sex workers because they are not based out of seedy rooms, or the bars and clubs of Hong Kong's traditional red light districts Now 19, she says she is left with a sense of regret and warns other girls to think carefully before taking the leap. "A future boyfriend or husband might find it hard to accept," she says. "It's like you have a needle piercing your heart and it's always there." - Blurred boundaries - Connecting with clients online often gives young women a false sense of security, says Bowie Lam, executive director of Teen's Key, a charity that offers support to Hong Kong's sex workers under the age of 25. She says the age of "part-time girlfriends" is getting lower and believes that social media is a factor. "They think they have autonomy and control because they can screen a client online, talk with him, but it makes the boundary more blurred," Lam says. High-school student Kiki, a pseudonym she chose to protect her identity, started part-time sex work aged 17 and says it was easy to search for men on Instagram by using one of the #ptgf tags These young women often do not see themselves as sex workers because they are not based out of seedy rooms, or the bars and clubs of Hong Kong's traditional red light districts, she adds. Sometimes they meet clients without offering sex at first and are taken to theme parks, dinner or even on hikes, but as more money is offered, the path usually leads to paid sex. Some young women have their first sexual experience as a "part-time girlfriend", says Lam. Believing they have become friends with a client can lead them to drop their guard. "Girls have been treated violently and even raped because they trusted the man wouldn't harm them," Lam told AFP. - Addressing taboos - Hong Kong police said they have taken action against websites, chat rooms and discussion forums to combat "illegal prostitution activities" in a statement to AFP. The "act of prostitution" in itself is not illegal in Hong Kong, police say, but soliciting is. Instagram told AFP it acts to "swiftly remove" content, accounts and hashtags that violate its community guidelines. Hong Kong's 'part-time girlfiends' meet clients online and sometimes are taken to theme parks, dinner or even on hikes at first, but as more money is offered, the path usually leads to paid sex A long-term strategy addressing taboos around talking about sex within schools and families in Hong Kong's conservative society is what is most needed to stop girls putting themselves at risk, says Lam. Teen's Key offers young sex workers a range of support services, ranging from health tests to career advice and help with financial planning. Lam says they want to help the women reconnect with their dreams and aspirations. However, even when they are given support by the charity, some feel they cannot leave part-time sex work behind. As the cost of living in Hong Kong soars, financial pressure is often the main factor. Nicole, also a pseudonym, aged 24, started at the age of 18 to make money to put herself through college. She found clients on online forums then communicated directly with them via the popular messaging app WeChat. She now has a full-time office job, but still does after-hours sex work to pay off her college debts as her family cannot afford to help. Nicole sees what she is doing as a practical solution but admits it has taken an emotional toll. She describes sex work as a "dark patch" in her life and says she will feel guilty about it with any future boyfriend. "I don't think I'm a pure person, I feel like I'm very dirty. If someone else wanted to do this, I wouldn't recommend it," she told AFP. But she urged people not to judge young women who have made the choices she has. "Maybe they are in need, or have problems they can't solve," she said. "There isn't anyone who does this job because they want to." Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has maintained a hard line against Pyongyang but has also said Japan will need to eventually hold direct talks with North Korea Japan is weighing high-level, direct talks with North Korea, potentially an August meeting between the two countries' foreign ministers, local media said Wednesday. The idea, which Tokyo officials declined to confirm, was reported by major local media as preparations appear back on track for an unprecedented summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The talks could take place on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum in August in Singapore, the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper said citing unnamed government sources. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga declined to confirm the reports. "We are aware of the media reports. Nothing has been decided, including whether or not the minister would attend the ASEAN related meetings," he told a regular press conference. Kyodo News agency, also citing unnamed sources, said Tokyo has sounded out Pyongyang on a proposal for Foreign Minister Taro Kono to meet his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong Ho. Japanese officials, however, would first evaluate the outcome of the expected US-North Korea summit before pushing for the potential ministerial talks, Kyodo and Mainichi said. The last ministerial-level talks between Tokyo and Pyongyang were in 2015, also on the sidelines of an ASEAN meeting. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has maintained a hard line against the North, calling for continued sanctions and a maximum-pressure campaign on Pyongyang. But he has also said Japan will need to eventually hold direct talks with North Korea to resolve an emotional row over abductions of Japanese nationals by Pyongyang. Trump had been scheduled to meet Kim in Singapore on June 12, but the meeting was thrown into doubt after the US leader said he was cancelling it. Since then, meetings to prepare for the talks have resumed. Abe will meet Trump on June 7 to discuss the talks and stress the importance of the abduction issue for Tokyo. 300518WEST COAST LEADERS WANT DEVELOPMENT New Dawn FM News Two Community Government Chairmen from the West Coast of Bougainville have supported some form of development to take place on the West coast of Bougainville. Speaking at the HAHON Primary School yesterday, the Chairman of MAHARI community Government and the KEREAKA Community Government both wanted the people to see some changes in their area for the first time. The Chairman for the Kereaka Community Government NICHOLAS ETEO told the gathering that it was now or never for the forgotten people of the West Coast to feel and see some changes in their area. MR. ETEO said the people must understand that with any development one has to sacrifice something to get something. He called on the people of MAHARI and KEREAKA and other areas where the project will cover to stay united and support the ABG and the people of Bougainville come out of poverty. Meanwhile the Chairman for the MAHARI Community Government, STEVEN ETSI also supported the Exploration work in their area. He stressed the need for the people to have access to good road infrastructure to the West coast of Bougainville. Ends wounded Afghan girl Seweeta Saberi, 17, receives treatment at Wazir Akbar Khan hospital after militants launched a gun and bomb attack on the interior ministry Militants launched a gun and bomb attack on the interior ministry in Kabul Wednesday, killing a policeman in the latest chilling demonstration of their ability to strike at the heart of the Afghan capital. Five people were injured in the attack, which took place during the holy month of Ramadan and was claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group. The Taliban are also stepping up their assaults on the capital, making the heavily fortified city the deadliest place in the country for civilians. Special forces rushed to the scene after the attackers detonated what police said was a car bomb at the first checkpoint leading to the ministry, then tried to battle their way inside. "The fighting is over, the attackers have all been killed by security forces between the first and second security perimeter," said Kabul police chief Daud Amin. A security source told AFP a clearing operation was continuing. "The attackers used two vehicles to reach near interior ministry compound. There were eight attackers involved, one detonated his explosives, seven others were killed," interior ministry spokesman Najib Danish told reporters. Danish said one police officer had been killed and five civilians wounded. Policeman Mujibullah Nabizada was injured in the first blast. "I dragged myself to the road and a car picked up and brought me to the hospital," he told AFP from his hospital bed, where he was being treated for broken bones. Seweeta Saberi, 17, was also wounded in the blast and taken to hospital. "Everyone is sitting in their loved ones' blood these days," her brother Sameer told AFP. "We request you [government leaders], for God's sake, if you can't manage this country please resign." A security source told AFP there had been multiple blasts but could not confirm how many. "I was in my office when I heard a blast followed by gunfire. We were told to stay inside our offices as the compound was attacked," said one ministry employee. IS, which is trying to make inroads in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack via its Amaq propaganda service. Police also said they had found a car stuffed with explosives and guns at Kabul's international airport near the interior ministry on Wednesday. - Kabul targeted - Both IS and the Taliban have stepped up their attacks on Kabul. The city accounted for 16 percent of all civilian casualties last year, when 1,831 civilians were killed or wounded nationwide, according to the United Nations. The myriad attacks in the last 12 months included two of the deadliest in the city since the US invasion: a truck bomb on May 31, 2017 that killed more than 150 people, and an ambulance bomb in January 27 this year which killed more than 100. The UN has warned that 2018 could be even deadlier. Many fearful residents have restricted their movements as a result, afraid to linger in bazaars or to become trapped in traffic during rush hour, a prime time for attacks. Last week the Taliban called on Kabul residents to stay away from military and intelligence centres in the capital, saying they planned more assaults as part of their annual spring offensive. "To avoid civilian casualties and only cause damage to enemy military, we are asking Kabul residents to keep away," said a statement published online. The Taliban did not define what was meant by "military and intelligence centres". Such targets are difficult to avoid given that the city is the heart of the country's intelligence, government and military operations and plagued by traffic jams due to ubiquitous checkpoints and barriers. Belgian police are investigating how a gunman known for contacts with Islamist extremists came to launch a suspected terror attack, shooting dead two female officers with their own weapons before killing a bystander Belgian investigators on Wednesday said an Islamic State-style attack that killed three people in the eastern city of Liege was being treated as an act of terrorism. The bloodshed shocked the eastern industrial city of Liege on Tuesday when the attacker armed with a knife repeatedly stabbed two policewomen before using their own firearms to kill them, a method investigators said was encouraged in online videos by the Islamic State extremist group. Police were scrambling to unpick the motives of the attacker identified as Benjamin Herman, a 31-year-old drifter with a decade spent in and out of prison for acts of violence and petty crimes, who was out of jail on leave when he attacked. "The facts are qualified as terrorist murder and attempted terrorist murder," prosecutors' spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt told a news briefing in Brussels. Van Der Sypt said the assessment was based on several "first elements" from the probe, including "the fact the perpetrator shouted several times shouted 'Allahu akbar' ... and information from state security according to which the perpetrator was in touch with radicalised persons." But he cautioned that the information dated "from late 2016, early 2017" and had not been confirmed since. Prosecutors also underlined that the attacker's method -- attacking armed police officers and using their weapon against them -- was a known "modus operandi" of the IS terror group, which claimed deadly attacks in Brussels in 2016. Amateur footage obtained by AFP showed the gunman shouting "Allahu akbar" (Arabic for "God is greatest") as he walked through the Liege streets during the rampage. In another video, the suspect darts out of a school where he had holed up into a short and intense burst of police gunfire, after which the man collapses to the ground. But Interior Minister Jan Jambon urged caution over the extremist angle. "There are signals that there was radicalisation in the prison but did this radicalisation lead to these actions? There too we can ask ourselves a lot of questions," he told RTL radio. - Brutal hammer murder - Special attention is being given to the gruesome killing of an alleged heroin dealer linked to Herman who was bludgeoned to death with a hammer late Monday in a village near the Luxembourg border. Investigators on Tuesday found the hammer in Herman's car and Jambon said police believed the Liege attacker carried out the killing just hours after getting temporary release from prison. Prosecutors confirmed Herman was being investigated over the case, saying it was a separate investigation. Belgian police are investigating how a gunman known for contacts with Islamist extremists came to launch a suspected terror attack, shooting dead two female officers with their own weapons before killing a bystander As well as the two policewomen, the attacker also shot dead a 22-year-old student sitting in a parked car in central Liege. He then took a female cleaner hostage in the nearby Leonie de Waha school, a public institution with several hundred students aged from two to 18. The two murdered police officers were identified as Lucile Garcia, 53, who had recently become a grandmother, and Soraya Belkacemi, 45, a mother to 13-year-old twins. Debate in Belgium was swirling on the country's prison policy with reports that Herman had repeatedly blown the conditions of his temporary leave from jail ahead of his full release set for 2020. "I feel responsible because I have responsibility for prisons," Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens told RTBF radio. Liege, a major city in Belgium's blighted industrial rustbelt, was the scene of another bloody shootout in 2011 when a recent convict killed six people and wounded more than 120 before turning the gun on himself. Liege police on Tuesday said it was "clear that the assassin's objective was to attack the police" and that one of the four officers wounded had suffered a serious leg injury. Prime Minister Charles Michel denounced what he called the "cowardly and blind violence" of Tuesday's attack. - Terror alert - Belgium has been on alert since authorities in January 2015 smashed a terror cell in the town of Verviers near Liege that was planning an attack on police. The cell also had links to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the November 2015 Islamic State attacks on Paris that killed 130 people. IS suicide attacks then targeted Brussels airport and a metro station, leaving 32 people dead in March 2016. In August that same year, a machete-wielding man shouting "Allahu Akbar" attacked two policewomen in the industrial town of Charleroi before being shot dead. Iraqi Shiite Muslim leader and head of Hikma party Ammar al-Hakim (L) and Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr meet in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf on May 17, 2018 Close to three weeks after parliamentary polls, confusion reigns in Iraq as allegations mount of election fraud even with negotiations to form a government well underway. Since the May 12 victory of anti-establishment electoral lists, long-time political figures pushed out by Iraqi voters hoping for change have called for a recount -- with some even calling for the poll results to be cancelled. Iraqi authorities have agreed to review the results, but have yet to take any concrete measures. Experts say claims of fraud are more likely to stem from frustrated outgoing politicians, rather than any major electoral manipulations in a country determined to turn the page after a brutal three-year fight against the Islamic State group. In a surprise to many, the parliamentary poll saw populist Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr's electoral alliance with Iraq's communists beat a list of former anti-IS fighters close to Shiite Iran. "To cancel these results is not possible, it would lead to a crisis and perhaps armed clashes," political analyst Essam al-Fili told AFP. Fili said Shiite forces, now in a strong position amid negotiations to form a government, "aren't ready to give up what they've won". Many of Iraq's longtime political figures -- seemingly irremovable since the fall 15 years ago of dictator Saddam Hussein -- were pushed out of their seats by new faces. It is their voices -- with parliament speaker Salim al-Juburi leading the charge -- that have been the loudest in challenging the poll results. - '12,000 votes' - Politicians, who have until Thursday to formalise their complaints, voted Monday in parliament to annul the votes of displaced Iraqis and those living abroad. They also voted in favour of a manual recount of 10 percent of ballot boxes. If the results differ by more than 25 percent from those announced by the electoral commission, the move would force a manual recount of nearly 11 million ballots. But the vote -- which is non-binding -- is purely symbolic. Intelligence services said tests of electronic voting machines brought varied results -- appearing to give credence to the fraud claims. Populist Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr's electoral alliance with Iraq's communists received the most votes in the May 12 parliamentary polls And while the government has ordered a review of vote results, media and social networks continue to pick apart the allegations, which mainly concern polling stations abroad -- a fragment of the overall vote. An outspoken outgoing MP, Mishaan al-Juburi, has charged that while in Damascus he saw "the head of the electoral commission for (expats in) Syria and Jordan selling a political leader 12,000 votes of Iraqi expatriates in Syria and 4,000 votes in another country". Juburi has also denounced alleged fraud in Amman, where his family lives and where he claims to have conducted an intense campaign that had officially won him a mere 19 votes. "I have the impression that there is a clear conspiracy against me," he said. - 'Incongruities' - But it is in the multi-ethnic oil-rich province of Kirkuk that the challenge to the poll's results is the strongest -- and the most explosive. Kirkuk's ethnically mixed population -- majority Kurdish but with sizeable Arab and Turkmen minorities -- pushed authorities to impose a curfew. Vote results in the province reflect its communal balance, with six Kurds, three Arabs and three Turkmen elects. But the International Crisis Group has said the results have two "striking incongruities". An Iraqi Kurdish man dressed in traditional costume puts his ballot through an electronic counting machine on May 12, 2018, at polling station in Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan swept the Kurdish vote, but "won in several non-Kurdish areas where the party is not known to have any support", the group said in a report published last week. The second discrepancy was that "turnout in Kurdish areas was low compared both to past elections and to the participation rate in Turkmen neighbourhoods and camps for the internally displaced", where much of the provinces Arab population has lived since IS jihadists swept across the country in 2014. The flight will use the long-range Airbus A350-900ULR, which will be configured to carry 67 in business class and 94 in premium economy Singapore Airlines said on Wednesday that it will relaunch the world's longest commercial flight in October, a journey of almost 19 hours from the city-state to New York, but it will not be available to economy travellers. The daily, non-stop journey from Changi to Newark Airport will cover about 16,700 kilometres (10,300 miles) and take about 18 hours 45 minutes, the airline said in a statement. The current record holder is Qatar Airways Flight 921 from Auckland to Doha, which takes 17 hours 40 minutes. The Singapore Airlines (SIA) flight will use the long-range Airbus A350-900ULR, which will be configured to carry 161 passengers -- 67 in business class and 94 in premium economy. "The two-class configuration... was a business consideration to meet market demand. "This configuration will also provide our customers with greater comfort on non-stop flights," an SIA spokesperson told AFP. The airline had flown a similar route from 2004 until 2013 but cancelled it as it fell short of revenue expectations. However, its latest decision comes as carriers look for new sources of revenue in a competitive environment, while long-haul flights often make more cash than those that require stops. There are also plans for a non-stop route from Singapore to Los Angeles using the same plane, the airline said. Analysts said the decision to have no economy class was an attempt to promote the airline to wealthy customers. "It's about SIA marketing themselves as a premium service provider," Brendan Sobie, chief analyst at the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, told AFP. - Safety concerns - But there have been concerns that such long flights might pose safety risks, particularly for cabin crew. Britain's largest union, Unite, alleged this month that Qantas had tried to "silence" crew members who wanted to discuss concerns about health and fatigue on their Perth to London route, one of the longest flights in the world at 17 hours and 20 minutes. However, Sobie noted that SIA pioneered the ultra long-haul route and had done a lot of research. "In the early 2000s when this first started, SIA did all the testing they needed to and what they have come up with has set the industry standard today," he said. SIA said cabin crew operating ultra-long-range flights such as the non-stop route to New York will be allowed one more hour of rest than those on long-haul flights. Shukor Yusof, an analyst with aviation consultancy Endau Analytics, said it was unlikely SIA could make money from the new service. "The global premium market has eroded," he told AFP. "Operating costs are higher on ultra long-haul flights too, erasing any profits an airline might make." The new route comes as the city-state's flag carrier faces tough challenges. Last year, it consolidated its low-cost units TigerAir and Scoot into a single entity in a streamlining exercise. And this month it said it will absorb its struggling premium regional wing, SilkAir, into the broader group following a multi-million-dollar upgrade as part of reforms to stay competitive. Palestinian paramedics carry away a wounded protester during a demonstration along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip on May 25, 2018 A Palestinian shot by Israeli forces during protests and clashes on the Gaza border died of his wounds Wednesday, the Palestinian health ministry said. Naji Ghonaim, 23, was wounded several days ago near Rafah in southern Gaza, the ministry said, without giving a specific date. He was later transferred to Jerusalem for treatment but died Wednesday morning, the Ramallah-based ministry said in a statement. Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry also confirmed Ghonaim's death. At least 122 Palestinians have been killed since mass protests and clashes broke out along the Gaza border on March 30. No Israelis have been killed. The protests peaked on May 14 when at least 61 Palestinians were killed as thousands approached the heavily guarded border fence on the same day the United States moved its Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Israel says its actions are necessary to defend its borders and stop infiltrations. It accuses Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas of seeking to use the protests as cover for attacks. Palestinians say protesters in the demonstrations against Israel's decade-long blockade of Gaza have been shot while posing no threat to soldiers. Separately on Tuesday Islamist groups from Gaza fired dozens of mortars at Israel, leading to Israeli air strikes. Singapore Airlines transported a shipment of dried shark fins including some from endangered species to Hong Kong despite the airline banning such cargo. In total 989kg (2,180lbs) of fins were transported from Colombo in Sri Lanka to Hong Kong via Singapore and arrived earlier this month, environmental campaigners said. The cargo included fins from endangered whale sharks hidden among legal fins in order to avoid detection. Endangered fins require a special permit to transport. Singapore Airlines transported 989kg (2,180lbs) of dried shark fins from Sri Lanka to Hong Kong earlier this month despite a ban by the carrier Campaigners say fins from endangered sharks were mixed in with legal fins in order to avoid having to obtain special permits Hong Kong is one of the world's biggest shark fin trading hubs and the food remains readily available in seafood stores and restaurants, despite pressure from conservationists and bans by some airlines and food outlets. Gary Stokes, Asia director for US environmental group Sea Shepherd, said: 'Singapore Airlines are yet another victim of these shark fin smugglers, who deceived the airline by declaring the shipment as "dried seafood" to skirt the airline's internal booking checks.' Singapore Airlines is reminding staff to check all cargo labeled 'dried seafood' to see if it contains shark fin Singapore Airlines, which banned the shipment of shark fin in 2014, said it had blacklisted the shipper. The airline added it had 'sent out a reminder to all our stations' to conduct sampling checks on shipments made under the label 'dried seafood' to ensure they did not contain shark fin. Sea Shepherd called for the Hong Kong government to tighten rules to combat wildlife crime and close loopholes which allow endangered shark fins to slip past inspections. Hong Kong has an unenviable reputation for trading in several controversial, banned or endangered commodities including ivory, shark fin, rhino horn and tiger parts. Critics accuse the territory of failing to do enough to stamp out such practices. More than 70 million sharks are killed every year, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Huge quantities of fins are exported annually to Hong Kong and most are then sent on to mainland China. Hong Kong's consumption of sharks' fin soup has dropped over the years as activists campaign against the trade. The government in 2013 said it would stop serving sharks' fin soup at official functions as 'a good example'. Flag carrier Cathay Pacific banned the carriage of shark fins on all its flights in 2016. Containers are transferred at the port in Qingdao: China is hitting out at US flip-flops over trade China on Wednesday lambasted "sudden flip-flops" in US policy after President Donald Trump said he was moving to finalise trade sanctions against it -- even as a US delegation arrived in Beijing for talks. Ten days ago the White House announced a truce in trade hostilities with China, with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin saying that threatened tariffs on Chinese goods were "on hold". But on Tuesday evening it said that sanctions announced in March -- largely focused on China's theft of US intellectual property -- were still in the works and details would be announced in the coming month. The announcement is another apparent change of course for Trump, who veers from harsh threats to promises of compromise and back again on trade and other sensitive issues. It comes as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross prepares to travel to Beijing this week for another round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict. Six members of his delegation had already arrived in Beijing as of Wednesday evening, the US embassy confirmed to AFP. Speaking at a regular press briefing on Wednesday, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying slammed the latest development. "In international relations, every sudden flip-flop and contradiction of one's word depletes and squanders a country's credibility," she said. She urged the US to "follow the spirit" of the recent consensus reached between Washington and Beijing, to abandon trade wars and back off imposing tariffs on each other. "We on the Chinese side do not want to fight but are not afraid to fight a trade war," she said. "We will counteract whatever comes our way, and if the US insists on acting recklessly, China will inevitably adopt firm and forceful measures." The commerce ministry said earlier Wednesday that Beijing "has the confidence, capability and experience to defend the interests of Chinese people and the core interests of the country" -- no matter what measures the US plans to take. The US trade sanctions proposed in March include restrictions on Chinese investment, export controls and 25 percent tariffs on as much as $50 billion in Chinese tech goods. The final list of Chinese imports covered by the tariffs list will be announced June 15 and imposed shortly thereafter, while the proposed investment restrictions and enhanced export controls will be announced by June 30, according to the White House. Trump has also threatened to impose tariffs on an additional $100 billion in Chinese goods if Beijing retaliates. Trade tensions between Washington and Beijing are likely to generate uncertainty with potentially serious consequences for the Chinese economy, Alfred Schipke, senior resident representative in China of the International Monetary Fund, told a press briefing. While US tariffs would have a direct impact on China's economy, such uncertainty would likely have an even greater indirect impact as it came to affect consumption, investment confidence and financial markets, he explained. "It is important that both sides try to collaborate," he said. "These trade tensions are not beneficial for anybody." Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has set a number of "red lines" for Chinese encroachment on territory claimed by Manila in the South China Sea, an aide claims Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has said his nation could go to war if its soldiers were hurt in the disputed South China Sea, a top aide said Wednesday after allegations emerged that Beijing had harassed Manila's troops in the area. National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon made the comments as Duterte's administration pushed back against criticism its response to Chinese activities in the hotly contested waters had been weak. "Just the other night, the president said if my troops are hurt there, that could be my red line," Esperon told reporters. "Or, if our people are hurt there at Pag-asa Island. We are not saying we are going to war, but if they oppress us that may force our hand, because we will not allow ourselves to be oppressed." Pag-asa, better known as Thitu, is the largest of the islands and outcrops garrisoned by Philippine troops in the disputed areas of the South China Sea. Opposition lawmaker Gary Alejano alleged at a Wednesday congressional hearing that a Chinese navy helicopter had harassed Philippine troops on Second Thomas Shoal, also held by Manila, earlier this month. The Philippine Navy launched a rubber boat to resupply its Second Thomas Shoal base when "a chopper... hovered in a close and dangerous distance," Alejano said, adding the helicopter's proximity had blown seawater into the Philippine vessel. Beijing's claims to territory in the South China Sea overlap with those of Manila, while four other nations also have their own claims to the area Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano told the hearing the Philippines had protested the incident and resolved the matter "quietly", but refused to disclose details. China claims most of the resources-rich sea through which $5 trillion in shipping trade passes annually, and in recent years has reclaimed reefs and shoals including some claimed by Manila. Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims in the sea. China this month deployed anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missiles on the disputed Spratly Islands off the Philippine coast and flew nuclear-capable bombers to a base in another disputed part of the sea. Duterte has pointedly said elsewhere he would not go to war against Beijing and hailed improving relations that led to more Chinese trade and investment. Kim Yong Chol has successfully navigated three generations of the ruling Kim dynasty, and now finds himself at the forefront of North Korea's re-engagement with the outside world The hawkish North Korean general on his way to New York for pre-summit talks is a skillful politician who has thrived through three generations of the ruling Kim family. Kim Yong Chol, described as Kim Jong Un's right-hand man, left Beijing on Wednesday bound for the North's "imperialist enemy" where he will meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and possibly Donald Trump. The man blamed by South Korea for the 2010 sinking of a warship that killed 46 sailors will become the most senior North Korean to step on US soil in nearly two decades. The meeting is the latest in a flurry of diplomacy as the two sides lay the groundwork for a historic first summit, planned for June 12. The four-star general, who is believed to be in his 70s, has been at the forefront of Pyongyang's emergence from global isolation this year. He attended the closing ceremony of the South's Winter Olympics in February, sitting just feet (centimetres) from Ivanka Trump. He was by Kim's side when the young North Korean leader met South Korean President Moon Jae-in in April, and again for the leaders' surprise second summit on May 26. But the march to become Kim Jong Un's most trusted general has been a long one requiring intellectual heft, nimble footwork and a willingness to take extreme measures. - Purge - Kim Yong Chol first donned the uniform of the Korean People's Army in the 1960s, when he was assigned to guard the heavily-fortified border that bisects the peninsula. A graduate of Pyongyang's elite Kim Il Sung Military University, he went on to make a name for himself as an expert on the hated South Korean regime. Kim often "explained everything about the South's political and military situation for more than an hour without looking at a script", defector and former army colonel Choi Joo Hwal told the Seoul-based Daily NK news website in 2016. He won a series of promotions under the country's founding leader Kim Il Sung and even led the North's military delegation for talks with the South in 1989. Kim "came to the attention of top leadership figures by hard work and accomplishment and not through patronage connections", the respected 38 North website reported. Kim's role as a military interlocutor in dealings with the South continued under Kim Jong Il, but it was his rise to the top job at the Reconnaissance General Bureau, overseeing foreign spying operations in 2009, that made him notorious. It was at Kim that South Korean intelligence pointed the finger of blame when the Cheonan corvette was torpedoed in 2010, and when artillery units shelled a border island, killing four people. Seoul said the military man was manoeuvring to show loyalty to the regime as the power transfer from Kim Jong Il to his son was getting under way. That shift was completed in 2011, when the untested Kim Jong Un ascended, carrying out a purge that saw many senior figures removed or even executed. It was a purge Kim Yong Chol would survive, cementing his reputation as a hawk in 2013 when he threatened to break the ceasefire that ended the Korean War and to turn the US into a "sea of fire" with a nuclear strike. But in the recent reconciliatory push he has also made efforts to paint himself as a more approachable figure. Reportedly a gifted linguist, Kim has appeared at ease in international settings, and even attempted a joke with Seoul reporters who visited Pyongyang in April for a pop concert. But it was a joke with a edge of steel, and a reminder of where his loyalties lie. "I am Kim Yong Chol, the guy blamed by the South for the Cheonan ship sinking". 300518WOMEN BANK READY TO OPEN UP IN BOUGAINVILLE New Dawn FM News The Women Micro Bank based in Port Moresby has been carrying out awareness throughout Bougainville to get the women of Bougainville to buy shares and also open accounts with the Bank. Head of Marketing with the Womens Micro Bank Limited, MELISHA SINDIWAN said that they also talked to the women in Arawa and Buin and were happy with the enthusiasm by the women to becoming shareholders of the bank. Before leaving for Port Moresby this morning, MS MELISHA SINDIWAN made some last minute appeal live on New Dawn FM to the women of Bougainville to learn the Savings culture with the Micro Bank and save for the future. On the question if men can also open accounts at the Womens Micro Bank she said that Men who want to open account must be accompanied by a female family member. She also mentioned that the company has floated shares for women who want to buy shares at ONE KINA per share. MS SINDIWAN said that paying of Shares will close on the 30th of June, 2018. Ends Yemenis check the wreckage of an armoured vehicle after clashes near the coastal town of Hodeida, on May 29, 2018 Pro-government forces in Yemen are preparing to surround a key Red Sea port in a bid to force Huthi rebels to surrender it without a fight, military sources said Wednesday. At least 60 fighters were killed in the latest clashes and air strikes, according to medical sources. Loyalist fighters backed by Saudi and Emirati forces are sending reinforcements ahead of a "new operation" to enter Hodeida city and seize its port, a commander from one of the forces said. Hodeida port is the main conduit for humanitarian aid into Yemen, where years of war have left some 22 million people in need of food aid. Colonel Sadiq Duwaid, spokesman for the "National Resistance", one of three main forces taking part in the operation, said it was "being bolstered by new forces... that will take part in retaking Hodeida". "First, we will cut off supply lines, especially between (rebel-held capital) Sanaa and Hodeida, then we will place the Huthis under siege and bring them down, perhaps without a fight," he said. Clashes broke out east of the port city on Wednesday while the Saudi-led coalition carried out numerous air strikes on rebel positions, Yemeni military sources said. Seven pro-government fighters were killed and 14 wounded, according to medical sources in Hodeida province, while at least 53 rebels also died. The deadly clashes come a day after an AFP reporter saw a large military convoy heading towards Hodeida from Mokha, 180 kilometres (112 miles) to the south. - UN 'extremely concerned' - Hodeida lies 230 kilometres from Sanaa, which the Huthis seized in 2014. This prompted a Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen the following year, aimed at propping up the internationally-recognised government of exiled President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi. The coalition accuses the rebels of using Hodeida as a launchpad for attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and for smuggling in rockets. Map of Yemen locating the rebel-held port of Hodeida, now the target of Yemeni government forces The Iran-backed insurgents have in recent months ramped up missile attacks against neighbouring Saudi Arabia. Nearly 10,000 people have been killed since the Saudi-led alliance launched its intervention in Yemen in March 2015. More than 2,200 others have died from cholera and millions are on the verge of famine in what the United Nations says is the world's gravest humanitarian crisis. The UN warned Tuesday that any operation aimed at seizing Hodeida would disrupt the entry of aid shipments to Yemen, 70 percent of which flow through the rebel-held port. "We are extremely concerned about the situation around Hodeida," said spokesman Stephane Dujarric, adding that the UN had taken precautions in case of "further escalation". - 'Mass mobilisation' - The UAE, Saudi Arabia's main coalition ally, set up a force in early 2018 to ramp up the coastal offensive, leading a disparate collective of groups with the stated goal of taking Hodeida. The forces include the "Giant Brigades" -- a former elite unit of the Yemeni army rebuilt by the UAE -- which has been at the vanguard of the offensive, reinforced by thousands of fighters from southern Yemen. The "National Resistance" is made up of loyalists of Yemen's ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was assassinated by his former Huthi allies in December. It is commanded by his nephew Tarek Saleh. The third force, the "Tihama Resistance", is named for a Red Sea coastal region from which it draws most of its fighters, who are loyal to Hadi. The fighting in western Yemen has been fierce, slowed by landmines that Yemeni military sources say have been laid by the insurgents. Workers inspect damages at the site of an air strike on the maintenance hub at the Hodeidah port, on May 27, 2018 The Huthis have said they are ready to thwart any coalition operation and have urged Hodeida residents to join their ranks to prevent the city's capture. Hamoud Abbad, the Huthi-appointed governor of Sanaa, has called for "mass mobilisation" to defend the front and appealed to tribesmen in the area. Rebel-run media outlets on Wednesday claimed a drone attack on "the enemy's air defences on the west coast" and said an overland counter-attack south of Hodeida had "inflicted heavy losses on the enemy". But in a phone call to Hodeida's governor, Prime Minister Ahmed bin Dagher called on the city's residents to "close ranks... against the Huthi militia which is losing strength every day". Animal Husbandry department and Forest officials deposit a bat into a container after catching it inside a well at Changaroth in Kozhikode in the Indian state of Kerala on May 21 A Indian soldier has died in West Bengal state of suspected infection by the Nipah virus, an official said Wednesday, heightening fears the rare disease may be spreading. Nipah, which is mainly spread by bats, is confirmed to have killed 13 people in the latest outbreak which so far has been restricted to the southern state of Kerala. The soldier was admitted to hospital in Kolkata on May 20, a week after returning from holiday in Kerala, according to defence ministry spokeswoman Dipannita Dhar. "A soldier, Seenu Prasad, died of suspected Nipah virus in Command Hospital in Kolkata on Sunday," Dhar told AFP. "He had shown symptoms similar to that of Nipah virus infection." Body fluid and blood samples were being examined, the spokeswoman added. There is no vaccination for the virus, which induces flu-like symptoms that lead to brain damage and a coma and has a 70 percent mortality rate. Nipah has killed more than 260 people in Malaysia, Bangladesh and India since it first appeared in Malaysia in 1998. The World Health Organisation has named the virus as one of the eight priority diseases that could cause a global epidemic, alongside the likes of Ebola and Zika. Nipah is named after the Malaysian village where it first appeared. In India the disease was first reported in 2001 and again six years later, with the two outbreaks claiming 50 lives. Both times the disease was reported in West Bengal state which borders Bangladesh. Bangladesh has borne the brunt of the disease in recent years, with more than 100 people dying of Nipah since a first outbreak was reported in 2001. Four victims from the latest outbreak in Kerala hailed from one family. Dead bats were found in a well at their home. However a recent report by Indian medical experts ruled out bats and pigs as the primary source of the outbreak. Residents queue to collect water in Shimla Indian police on Wednesday were forced to escort water tankers through the streets of Shimla as an unprecedented shortage sparked brawls and desperation in the Himalayan hotspot popular with the rich and famous. The mountain getaway is generally crowded with vacationers but hotels are closing and tourists being told to stay away as a crippling water shortage pinches the picturesque retreat. Anxious residents have been waiting for hours in queues hundreds deep to collect water, filling buckets at tankers guarded by police. "We all know for the past fortnight the situation is so bad that people are getting water barely once in a week," Sanjay Chauhan, a former mayor of Shimla, told AFP. Shimla, the erstwhile summer capital of British India, requires around 42 million litres per day but often suffers water shortages in the summer. But supply has dipped by nearly half this year, sparking what residents say is the worst shortage in living memory. The mountainous northern state of Himachal Pradesh endured record-low snowfall during the winter which experts say is responsible for taps running dry earlier than usual. But some residents in Shimla, the state capital, say water has been syphoned off to hotels for the well-heeled or to VIP estates. Protests outside the chief minister's home late Tuesday turned violent, with demonstrators clashing with police and chanting slogans against the local government. The state's highest court has asked for an explanation from authorities and a plan for managing the crisis. But critics say the water scarcity underscores the strain placed on Shimla every summer as tens of thousands descend on it. A social media campaign urging tourists to avoid Shimla until the crisis passes has gone viral online. "Don't visit Shimla this year, let the place breathe for a while, it's overcrowded and exploited to the limits," reads the campaign slogan circulating on social media platforms like WhatsApp. Many hoteliers and travel agents say the bad publicity is already having an impact. Shimla is usually brimming with tourists in summer as temperatures on India's lower plains hover around 46 degrees Celsius (115 Fahrenheit). But visitors were cancelling bookings or shortening their trips, said travel agent Mohit Sharma. "Booking inquiries for June have dried up. Those who had booked rooms are asking to be shifted to other places outside Shimla or cancelling their bookings," he told AFP. The director of Kenya's National Youth Service, Richard Ndubai, appeared for a preliminary hearing in Nairobi after he was arrested on fraud charges Kenyan President vowed Wednesday that some $80 million (70 million euros) stolen from the national youth agency in the country's latest corruption scandal would be recovered. "We shall recover all the stolen money. There will be no mercy for the thieves. Their days are numbered. They will be prosecuted and jailed," he said in a statement. On Tuesday 24 of 54 suspects were hit with a raft of fraud charges, including the director of the National Youth Service (NYS), Richard Ndubai, and the principal secretary in the youth ministry, Lilian Omollo. All pleaded not guilty at a court in Nairobi. The scandal involves the alleged fraudulent payment of millions of dollars for goods and services, often non-existent. The scale of the theft has angered many even in corruption-weary Kenya, where massive amounts of money regularly disappear with total impunity, and most citizens merely shrug it off. The NYS is a paramilitary training institution that has been at the forefront of Kenyatta's plan to combat high youth unemployment. Enrolment is voluntary, and sees youths receive a stipend while receiving technical training and working on government projects. In one example of the corruption, Kenyan media have reported how the NYS paid $10 million for beef in one year -- meaning each recruit would have had to consume 66 kilos (145 pounds) of beef a day. A joint statement from 18 foreign diplomats, including the ambassadors for the United Stated, United Kingdom, Germany, European Union, Australia and Canada, welcomed the swift charging of officials over the scandal. "Corruption has long undermined Kenya's prosperity, security, and democracy. It is, quite simply, theft from the Kenyan people. We urge that Kenya's judiciary take swift action, consistent with the rule of law, to ensure fair trials and justice," read the statement. However numerous commentators have raised concerns that small fish were being sacrificed in the probe, with the youth minister in charge of the NYS at the time of the plunder going unscathed, as well other top officials, company directors and bank managers. The Daily Nation recalled Tuesday that in a previous scandal at the NYS in 2015, when $7 million was stolen through inflated pricing and fictitious payments, all suspects were freed for lack of evidence in March this year. In an editorial the paper called for the halt of "corruption mania" and said there "must absolutely be no sacred cows." The ruling "Jubilee has a rotten record of enforcing integrity in public office. Arrests are made, charges are brought, games are played and the corrupt go scot-free." Tractors were used to clear the hundreds of tents packed under an overpass at a migrant camp in northeast Paris on Wednesday Security forces cleared more than 1,000 people from a sprawling migrant camp in the French capital on Wednesday, the latest in a series of episodes that have thrust the issue of illegal immigration back into the spotlight. About 1,700 people, mainly from Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, were living in the "Millenaire", or Millennium, camp underneath the main Paris ring road near the Porte de la Villette in the northeast of the capital. But regional prefect Michel Cadot later said that just 1,016 migrants had been removed, since many residents had fled after learning the dawn operation was imminent. French police escorting the migrants from the "Millenaire" camp to buses which will take them to temporary shelters in the Paris area They will be housed temporarily at more than 20 sites across the Paris region while the authorities check their identities, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said in a statement. The operation came just days after a young Malian was honoured with fast-track citizenship following his daring rescue of a child hanging from a balcony. It also coincided with the trial of a 72-year-old woman in the Mediterranean city of Nice for helping two Guinean teenagers cross into the country from Italy. Three other people will face trial Thursday for helping migrants enter France illegally, even as Grenoble this week honoured a farmer convicted of guiding migrants across the Alps by bestowing him with the city's official medal. - Mixed messages? - Two similar camps migrant camps in the capital, one along the Canal St Martin, which houses 800 mostly Afghan migrants, and another of 300-400 at the Porte de la Chapelle, are set to be evacuated soon, Cadot said. The authorities said the operation Wednesday was the 35th such evacuation in Paris in the last three years as thousands of migrants have arrived seeking a better life, hoping to settle in France or reach Britain. "We don't know if we're going to be allowed to stay in France. I would like to stay, I know that I could build a life here," a Sudanese man at the site who gave his name as Ibrahim told AFP. Many migrants may have taken hope from the accolades showered on Mamoudou Gassama, the 22-year-old Malian "Spiderman" captured on video as he scaled four storeys of an apartment building to rescue a dangling four-year-old. Security forces move in on the biggest migrant camp in the French capital where some 1,700 people lived in makeshift tents alongside a canal President Emmanuel Macron hailed the heroic act, saying Gassama -- who entered France illegally in September via Libya -- would be granted citizenship. But in a warning to other African migrants, he said he "can not give (papers) to all those who come from Mali or Burkina Faso" -- two of the countries from where thousands of migrants set out each year for Europe. The 40-year-old centrist is pushing ahead with a new immigration law, decried as too hardline by some but which he sees as essential to separating genuine asylum seekers from so-called economic migrants. "Behind a few symbolic gestures there remains a policy of repression and expulsions," said Michel Rousseau of Tous Migrants (We're All Migrants), a pro-migrant aid group in southeast France. France expelled 18,000 people last year, interior ministry figures show, compared with 100,000 asylum requests. Rousseau and other activists will be demonstrating outside the courthouse in the Alpine town of Gap on Thursday, when two Swiss nationals and an Italian go on trial for aiding a group of migrants cross into France last month. They risk up to 10 years in prison. - Tensions - On Wednesday a 72-year-old Amnesty International volunteer was facing similar charges in Nice, after helping two Guinean adolescents return to France after authorities sent them back to Italy. France granted 32,000 people asylum last year, official data shows, far fewer than other EU countries such as Germany, yet immigration remains a key voter concern. The far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen won a third of votes in last year's presidential election. Rather than Gassama's heroics, however, some far-right activists have highlighted a different case involving migrants this week: that of two Afghans arrested for allegedly harassing a woman they judged to be inappropriately dressed on a train. They also point to outbreaks of violence among the migrant groups, most recently the stabbing death of a Somalian after a fight in Paris on Monday. French President Emmanuel Macron, flanked by Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (2R) and UN Special Envoy for Libya, Lebanese Ghassan Salame (L) speaks during an International conference on Libya at the Elysee Palace in Paris, on May 29, 2018 The gathering of Libyan leaders in Paris this week marked a positive step for the violence-wracked country, but analysts warn the absence of key players could make the optimism short-lived. The Tuesday meeting hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron brought together four leaders representing most -- but notably not all -- of Libya's rival factions. Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, head of the UN-backed unity government in Tripoli, was at the table along with military strongman Khalifa Haftar, whose rival Libyan National Army dominates the country's east. Also present were Aguila Saleh Issa, the parliament speaker based in the eastern city of Tobruk, and Khalid Al-Mishri, the newly elected head of the High Council of State. The leaders dispute each other's legitimacy and are entwined with numerous militias who are known to switch their allegiances. Despite the stark differences, the four leaders agreed to hold parliamentary and presidential elections on December 10 and vowed to respect the results. They also said they would work towards phasing out parallel institutions and unifying the Libyan Central Bank. - Key players absent - In a sign of the fragility of such promises, the Libyans verbally agreed on the proposals rather than formally signing a text. Rachid Khechana, director of the Mediterranean Centre for Libyan Studies, said a signature on paper does not necessary mean action. "Even if the declaration had been signed, we know how many (Libyan) politicians, in particular MPs, have failed to uphold their commitment," he said, citing a 2015 Libya deal agreed in Morocco which numerous signatories did not implement. Khechana highlighted the absence in Paris of "groups and networks of great influence, including the tribal chiefs and the armed groups". In western Libya, "some of these groups are more influential than the government," he added, in reference to the UN-backed Government of National Accord. Marshal Khalifa Haftar, whose self-styled Libyan National Army dominates the country's east, stands with his delegation on the steps of the Elysee Palace as they leave following the International conference on Libya in Paris on May 29, 2018 Federica Saini Fasanotti, from the Brookings Institution in Washington, agreed "the solution in Libya is strictly connected to the armed groups". As long as the international community continues to negotiate with political leaders "who are not fully recognised on the ground... the situation in Libya won't be solved," she said. The International Crisis Group drew on the absence of a delegation from the city of Misrata, home to the most powerful armed groups in western Libya. - Election hurdles - GNA deputy premier Ahmed Maiteeq, who represents Misrata, refused to attend the Paris meeting according to one of his advisers. Ibrahim Ben Rjab, a senior military figure in the Misrata militia, told AFP the city had boycotted the meeting in protest at the presence of Haftar whom they accuse of wanting to establish a dictatorship. While there are "some positive points" to come out of Paris, he said the agreement has no official status and "ultimately is not worth anything because it hasn't been signed". Fathi Bashagha, a Misrata lawmaker, said that "the outcome of the Paris meeting is good," but the pledges "remain words and wishes on paper, in the absence of a clear mechanism for applying them". Analysts remain sceptical that Libya will go to the polls in December, despite leaders in Paris agreeing to adopt the necessary laws by September 16. "The legal framework for holding elections remains opaque," said Human Rights Watch. Staging elections is "unrealistic from a strictly technical perspective," said Crisis Group. "Neither the legal nor the constitutional framework is in place -- hurdles that may prove impossible to overcome within a short timeframe," the organisation added. A Spanish consumer group is suing Facebook over alleged misuse of users' data A Spanish consumer group said Wednesday it will sue Facebook over the alleged misuse of the personal data of 26 million users of the social network in Spain. In a class-action lawsuit, the group OCU said it will seek "at least" 200 euros ($230) in compensation for each Facebook user. The claim will represent "all Facebook users in Spain", not just those affected by the Cambridge Analytica data sharing scandal, in which the British consultancy obtained the data of millions of Facebook users for political purposes. OCU said it believes "Facebook violated legislation regarding data protection", because it did not tell users how it would use their data, nor ask for their authorisation. It said it had acted in coordination with other consumer rights groups in Portugal, Belgium and Italy which will file similar lawsuits in their countries. The lawsuits are the latest faced by Facebook, which counts more than two billion users worldwide, over its handling of sensitive personal data that enable it to micro-target online advertising. A French internet users group said Monday it had filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook and four other tech firms -- Apple, Google, Amazon and LinkedIn -- for the alleged misuse of personal data. Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems has brought several cases against Facebook and other tech firms in several European countries, arguing they were acting illegally by forcing users to accept intrusive terms of service or lose access. Facebook has admitted that up to 87 million users may have had their data hijacked by Cambridge Analytica, which worked for US President Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign. Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg told a hearing at the European Parliament last week that his firm will make huge investments to protect users. He also said he was "sorry" for the Cambridge Analytica breaches, but also for its failure to crack down on election interference, "fake news" and other data misuses. Alistair Burt, British Minister of State for the Middle East and North Africa, visits on May 30, 2018 the Khan al-Ahmar Bedouin village, a village which is located near the Israeli settlment of Maale Adumim and is under a demolition order A British minister on Wednesday made a last-gasp call to Israel not to raze a Palestinian Bedouin village, after the Israeli supreme court rejected a final appeal against its demolition. The court last week backed the demolition of the village of Khan al-Ahmar in the occupied West Bank, located close to several Israeli settlements east of Jerusalem. Residents said they expected the demolition of the village, which is home to 180 people and includes a school, to happen in the coming weeks. Alistair Burt, British minister of state for the Middle East, visited the village Wednesday and called on the Israeli government to show restraint. "We are very concerned about the impact of the court case last week and the imminent demolition," he told AFP during the visit. He warned that any forced relocation "could constitute forcible transfer of people as far as the United Nations is concerned." Forcible transfer is considered a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Burt said they were still seeking to find an alternative to the demolition but stopped short of threatening any direct measures against the Israeli government. "I will be wanting to seek to persuade Israeli authorities." The Israeli supreme court ruled the village was built without the relevant building permits. Such permits are nearly impossible to obtain for Palestinians in Israeli-controlled areas of the West Bank. Israel says it has offered the residents an alternative location. Eid Abu Khamis, a spokesman for the village, told AFP he had heard messages of support from Western governments for many years but had seen little practical steps to stop Israel. He told Burt he would like to see action, rather than condemnation. Separately Wednesday, Israel approved the construction of nearly 2,000 new settlement homes in the West Bank, including 90 within a kilometre of Khan al-Ahmar, the Peace Now settlement watchdog said. Peace Now called the approvals near the village "the embodiment of exploitation and evil". All settlements are considered illegal under international law. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said his trip to Mali had left him with "a warm heart" and the UN would try to help the country stage a free presidential election on July 29 United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has vowed to pursue support for an anti-terror force gathering five Sahel nations, despite a US rebuff for UN funding. Guterres visited the headquarters of the so-called G5 Sahel Wednesday in the central town of Sevare on the second and final day of a trip to Mali, which is battling a jihadist insurgency in the Sahel. Guterres said the trip had left him with "a warm heart" and the UN would try to help the country stage a free presidential election on July 29. "Mali must have free elections and we will do our best to help the Malian authorities to run the elections, even if I know that the difficulties are enormous", he added during a press conference in Bamako. Planned elections have been repeatedly postponed, in part because of security concerns over Islamist extremism. France intervened militarily in Mali in 2013 to help government forces drive al-Qaeda-linked jihadists out of the north. The initial mission was followed in 2014 by Operational Barkhane, which deployed 4,000 French troops alongside the UN's 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali. The insurgency however has spread to central and southern Mali and spilled into Burkina Faso and Niger. Guterres, left, conferred with Malian general Didier Dacko, who commands the fledgling G5 Sahel force Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger last year agreed to set up the joint force, which would comprise 5,000 troops with a mandate to confront jihadists in the vulnerable Sahel belt. It was projected to be fully up and running in March, but its deployment has faced delays and the joint force is poorly-equipped. Guterres, as well as France, has been lobbying for the force to speed up its work and pushing for UN funding, which would be in addition to technical support from MINUSMA. - Setback - But on May 23, the United States said it opposed a Security Council mandate for the force and direct UN funding. Despite the setback, MINUSMA will provide the G5 with all possible support, Guterres said, adding that he was "in favour of a stronger mandate" by the Security Council for the force. "We will put forward a very strong argument for the G5 to have the necessary financial resources and equipment to be effective," he said. "We are also requesting (help for) development in the Sahel, because there is no peace without development," he said. The vast Sahel region has turned into a hotbed of lawlessness since chaos engulfed Libya in 2011, the Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 and the rise of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. The vast Sahel region has turned into a hotbed of lawlessness since chaos engulfed Libya in 2011, the Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 and the rise of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria About 418 million euros ($570 million dollars) have been promised for the G5 Sahel, mostly by European countries, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. US support has been bilateral and relatively low -- $60 million was promised by then secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, in October. Guterres on Tuesday visited MINUSMA, heaping praise on the force which has suffered the most fatalities of any UN peacekeeping mission. MINUSMA has 12,500 military and police personnel, but has lost more than 160 people since it deployed in 2013 -- a figure that accounts for more than half of UN peacekeeping fatalities over this period. The unrest in Mali, a former French colony, stems from a 2012 Tuareg separatist uprising against the state. Islamist extremists linked to Al-Qaeda took control of the desert north, but were largely driven out in a French-led military operation launched in January 2013. But insurgents remain active, linked to drug, arms and migrant trafficking in the vast Sahel region. Anti-government protests like these at the University of Tehran in December 2017 have been simmering in Iran in the past months US Treasury placed several Iranian state groups on its sanctions blacklist Wednesday, accusing them of serious human rights abuses and censorship. In the latest of a series of actions meant to increase pressure on the Tehran regime, the Treasury department named the semi-official paramilitary group Ansar-e-Hezbollah and three of its leaders to its sanctions list. The goal is to lock those who are blacklisted out of the global financial and commercial system. Ansar-e-Hezbollah is "an organization supported by the Iranian regime that harasses and attacks the Iranian people," the Treasury said, citing its alleged role in acid attacks against women seen as improperly dressed in Isfahan, and other violent attacks on student protestors. The Treasury also sanctioned Tehran's Evin Prison, used to house political prisoners, saying people held there are subject to sexual assaults, physical assaults and electric shock. Two Iranian government officials involved in censorship, including blocking the popular encrypted messaging app Telegram, and a government-linked tech unit, Hanista Programing Group, were also placed ont he sanctions blacklist. Hanista, the Treasury said, creates and distributes messaging apps meant to be alternatives to Telegram but which allow the government to monitor and track users' phones. "Treasury is taking action to hold the Iranian regime accountable for ongoing human rights abuses, censorship, and other despicable acts it commits against its own citizens," said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a statement. Wednesday's announcement added to a series of moves to increase political and economic pressure on Tehran after President Donald Trump's May 8 decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear accord. Kimberly Hill and Lauren Gibbemeyer celebrated their returns to the starting lineup as the United States continued their hot streak in the women's FIVB Volleyball Nations League with a 3-0 (25-20, 25-23, 25-21) victory against the Dominican Republic on Wednesday.Hill and Gibbemeyer both missed Tuesday's straight-sets win over Germany but capped their comebacks with a combined 27 points, with Hill finishing with 16 and Gibbemeyer racking up 11.Michelle Bartsch-Hackley was once again the US team's top scorer. She compiled 19 points to take her total for the tournament to 106, the most by any player on the American roster, as the reigning world champions posted their sixth consecutive 3-0 win in the competition.Brayelin Martinez led the Dominican Republic with 19 points, including a game-high 17 kills from 36 attempts, taking her total of spikes for the VNL to 103 and her overall points total to 120.Wing spiker Yonkaira Pena also troubled the Americans throughout the contest and picked up 13 points along the way while Lisvel Eve and Dominican captain Niverka Marte got seven each.The Dominican Republic beat the Pool 11 hosts Thailand 3-0 on Tuesday but Wednesday's defeat left them at 2-6 for the tournament while the US have been unstoppable since losing their second match at home against Turkey, winning 18 sets in a row.With Martinez's heavy hitting and Marte's never-say-die attitude, the Dominican Republic provided the Americans with a real challenge, leading late in the second and third sets, but the tournament leaders found a way each time to win.Hill dominated early on and managed 16 kills from just 26 attempts while Gibbemeyer was even more efficient, hitting 9 from 11, as the US improved to 7-1 for the tournament.Bartsch-Hackley took over in the final two sets, adding a block and four service winners to her 14 spikes from 33 swings, while Kelly Murphy became the fourth American to reach double figures when she closed with 10.The US have now won their last 13 matches against Dominican Republic since 2006.The US play Thailand in their final Pool 11 match on Thursday while the Dominican Republic tackle Germany. US televangelist Jesse Duplantis is appealing for donations to purchase a Dassault Falcon 7X jet like this one shown at Le Bourget airport An American televangelist is appealing for donations to fund the purchase of a $54 million business jet, saying that if Jesus was still preaching he "wouldn't be riding a donkey." Jesse Duplantis, 68, whose Christian ministry is based in Louisiana, made the appeal for a Dassault Falcon 7X jet in a video for his followers. Jesse Duplantis Ministries has already gone through three private planes, "burning them up for the Lord Jesus Christ," he said. "Now some people believe that preachers shouldn't have jets," he said in the video. "I really believe that preachers oughta have and go on every available voice, every available outlet to get this gospel preached to the world." Duplantis said he needs the jet "so we can go anywhere in the world one stop" and he recounted a conversation he said he had with God about needing the plane. "He said, 'Jesse, you wanna come up where I'm at?'" Duplantis said. "And I said, 'What do you mean?' "He said, 'I want you to believe in me for a Falcon 7X,'" Duplantis said. "I can't live long enough to travel by car, or by ship, or by train, but I can do it by an airplane," he said. "I really believe that if Jesus was physically on the Earth today he wouldn't be riding a donkey," he said. "He'd be in an airplane preaching the gospel all over the world." The eight-passenger Falcon 7X can fly from Paris to Tokyo or Shanghai to Seattle on a single tank of fuel. Roseanne Barr has had her show taken off air and been dropped by her talent agency amid outrage over a racist tweet Pulled off air over a racist tweet, US sitcom star Roseanne Barr has blamed her outburst on a sleeping pill -- prompting a swift retort Wednesday from pharma giant Sanofi which stated, deadpan, that its drugs do not cause racism. In a since-deleted overnight tweet, Barr blamed a dose of Ambien for the incendiary tweet in which she likened Valerie Jarrett, an African American former White House aide, to an ape. "It was 2 in the morning and I was ambien tweeting" wrote the 65-year-old actress, whose hit comedy "Roseanne" was axed by ABC over the post that read: "Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj." The French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi was quick to push back -- trolling Barr in an acerbic post that quickly went viral. "People of all races, religions and nationalities work at Sanofi every day to improve the lives of people around the world," the drugmaker tweeted. "While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication." Barr, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump who has previously used Twitter to voice hard-right and conspiracy theorist views, has been dropped by her talent agency ICM amid a wave of public outrage over the tweet. She called her own actions indefensible, saying: "I made a mistake I wish I hadn't but...don't defend it please." Barr later deleted this tweet, but in another pointed again to her use of Ambien as a reason for her misconduct. Barr also re-tweeted several people defending her. President Emmanuel Macron urged countries to stick with multilateral trade institutions in a speech Wednesday at the OECD's annual forum in Paris French President Emmanuel Macron called Wednesday for talks on overhauling the World Trade Organization, as European companies braced for the prospect of punishing US tariffs on steel and aluminium imports. "Now is the time to deal with this matter," Macron told officials at the annual forum of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. "Threats of a trade war won't fix anything," Macron added. "A trade war is always one where everyone loses: Our industries, our farmers, our consumers." His comments come after weeks of intense EU lobbying to remain exempted from the metal tariffs announced by President Donald Trump in early March. But officials have indicated they see little chance that Trump will continue exempting EU companies from the duties of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminium. The exemptions run out on Friday. "Our task is to find a collective response," Macron said, adding that "only a reformed WTO can give us this framework." He said the reform project should be launched by the US, the EU, China and Japan before a G20 summit meeting in Argentina which begins on November 30. "We have no choice but to defend with force and vigour a robust multilateralism, the only thing which can reconcile sovereignty and cooperation," he added. And in an apparent dig at the US tariffs, he said: "The strong nation is the one following the law, the one that plays by the rules it helped to create, the one that keeps its word." - Agreeing to disagree - Yet it appeared the rift between Washington and its European allies was deepening, with the US refusing to sign off on the traditional final statement to close the OECD's annual gathering. "There is no longer a joint statement," a French presidential source said, adding that the US delegation vetoed a communique denouncing protectionism and underscoring the risks of climate change. It would be the second time in a row the US has refused to add its voice to the majority position at the OECD on trade. Trump's shock announcement in March of metal tariffs led to a global diplomatic tussle that has unsettled financial markets for weeks. The threat has prompted European nations to vow to retaliate with duties of its own on American imports, including iconic items such as Harley-Davidson motorbikes and bourbon whiskey. Separately, the United States is readying trade sanctions against China over intellectual property theft. "The threat of trade restrictions has begun to adversely affect confidence, and, if such measures were implemented, they would negatively influence investment and jobs," the OECD warned in a statement Wednesday. It noted a sharp rise in protectionist moves around the globe since the financial crisis, with more than 1,200 "trade restrictive" measures taken by G20 countries since 2007. "First and foremost, an escalation in trade tensions should be avoided," the OECD's acting chief economist, Alvaro Pereira, said. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who attended a panel discussion alongside US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, urged nations to resist the temptations of unilateral action. "Yes, we must do better and do things more quickly," he said. "But let's not abandon multilateralism, because in the end unilateral decisions cannot take the place of multilateral agreements." Ross responded with a frank endorsement of one-on-one deals, saying US officials wanted to move quickly. "We don't like endless discussions, we prefer bilateral moves for negotiating," he said, saying that thanks to Trump's trade policies, "everyone agrees that the WTO needs to be reformed." "Roseanne" was rebooted in March after a 21-year hiatus with Roseanne Barr's character recast as a Donald Trump supporter -- garnering positive reviews including from the president President Donald Trump on Wednesday broke his silence about the racism row engulfing supporter Roseanne Barr, not to condemn her outburst but to attack ABC television for purported media bias. The US network on Tuesday canceled hit sitcom "Roseanne," after star Barr fired off a racist tweet against former White House advisor Valerie Jarrett, who was one of Barack Obama's closest aides. Jarrett revealed that Bob Iger, the head of ABC parent company Disney, telephoned her personally to tell her the network was cancelling the show. "Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that 'ABC does not tolerate comments like those' made by Roseanne Barr," Trump tweeted Wednesday. "Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn't get the call?" White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders later defended the president, saying that he was hitting out against media bias. "The president is pointing to the hypocrisy in the media," she said. "This is a double standard that the president is speaking about. No one is defending her comments. They're inappropriate, but that's what the point that he was making." When the scandal first broke, the White House had deflected questions with Sanders saying: "We have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now." Barr, 65 and a vocal Trump supporter who has used Twitter to voice far-right and conspiracy theorist views, took aim at Jarrett in a post that read: "Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj." She later apologized for what she called a "joke." But ABC said it was canceling the show, condemning her "abhorrent, repugnant" tweet, which was "inconsistent with our values." "I'm not a racist, I never was & I never will be," Barr tweeted Wednesday, attempting to defend herself against an onslaught of criticism. "One stupid joke in a lifetime of fighting 4 civil rights 4 all minorities, against networks, studios, at the expense of my nervous system/family/wealth will NEVER b taken from me." A since-deleted tweet blaming her outburst on a dose of the sleeping pill Ambien, prompted a swift retort from pharma giant Sanofi. "While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication," tweeted the French pharmaceutical giant in an acerbic post that quickly went viral. "Roseanne" had returned to US screens in March after a 21-year hiatus with Barr's character recast as a Trump supporter in a rare depiction of working class life on the US small screen. The show scored huge ratings and had been renewed for an 11th season following largely positive reviews -- including from the president. Supporters of Madagascar's President Hery Rajaonarimampianina staged a rally at the weekend, in response to a string of opposition protests Madagascar's president on Wednesday filed a petition to the country's paramount court over its bid to defuse a mounting political crisis. President Hery Rajaonarimampianina faces a looming deadline set by the High Constitutional Court to name a "consensus prime minister" to head a government of national unity. The Indian Ocean island nation is in the grip of weeks-long protests over new electoral legislation that the opposition says is loaded in the president's favour. Rajaonarimampianina, in his petition to the Constitutional Court, asked the panel to clarify its instructions for carrying out the order issued last Friday. "There are too many interpretations... in the decision of the High Constitutional Court, which may fuel another crisis, and this is why there is a request for clarification," a legal counsel for the presidency, Tantely Rakotonirina, told the press. Separately, the president's office said it had asked the court to explain its thinking on "the powers of the president of the republic and on the timescale for carrying out (its) decision." The court last Friday ordered the president to dissolve the government "and proceed to the nomination of a consensus prime minister within seven days." It said the new premier should lead a unity government whose composition should proportionately reflect the outcome of the last legislative elections in 2013. However, this question has triggered fierce debate between the government and opposition. Both sides say they hold the majority in parliament, where many legislators have changed allegiance since 2013. The court also set a 10-day deadline for the two opposing camps to reach an amicable agreement for exiting the crisis. And it tasked the incoming government with organising "early elections during the 2018 dry season," a period that typically runs from May to September. The two-round elections had previously been scheduled for November-December. Since April 21, hundreds of opposition supporters have occupied a key square in the heart of the capital Antananarivo, demanding Rajaonarimampianina resign. They also accuse the government of trying to sideline opposition candidates out of this year's general elections. Madagascar has seen a series of popular protest movements since the island nation gained independence from France in 1960, often resulting in bloodshed. US President Donald Trump confirmed that he would meet Kim Jong Un on June 12 after meeting a top North Korean envoy at the White House US President Donald Trump said Friday he will meet North Korea's Kim Jong Un as originally scheduled on June 12 for a historic summit after extraordinary Oval Office talks with a top envoy from Pyongyang. After more than an hour of discussion with Kim Yong Chol, Trump told reporters that denuclearization -- and a formal end to the decades-old Korean war -- would be on the table in Singapore. But the US president warned he did not expect to immediately sign a deal to bring a halt to the reclusive regime's nuclear program. "I never said it goes in one meeting. I think it's going to be a process, but the relationships are building and that's very positive," he said, after waving farewell to the North Korean leader's right-hand man. - Ending the war - The Korean War has been largely frozen since an armistice ended hostilities, but not the underlying conflict, in 1953. Since then, there have been occasional clashes on the divided peninsula. Diplomatic tensions between the US and North Korea "We talked about ending the war," Trump said. "Historically it's very important, but we'll see. We did discuss that, the ending of the Korean War. Can you believe we're talking about the ending of the Korean War?" Washington is determined that Kim should agree to what US officials call the "complete, verifiable and irreversible" end of North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs. Kim says he is committed to "denuclearization" in some form, but he is expected to demand security guarantees in return. Most expert observers are skeptical of a rapid breakthrough, and Trump admitted it would be a long and difficult process. "We're not going to go in and sign something on June 12. We never were. I told him today, 'Take your time'," he said, adding nevertheless that he expects "a really positive result in the end." Kim Yong Chol, the most senior North Korean to visit the United States in 18 years, spent almost 90 minutes in the Oval Office. Afterwards, Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo walked the North's delegation to their cars, smiling and shaking hands in front of the media before the motorcade pulled away. - Security guarantees - Meanwhile, discussions between US and North Korean officials continued in Singapore and in the Demilitarized Zone dividing the Korean peninsula. North Korean envoy Kim Yong Chol held talks with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York before his meeting with Trump On Thursday, Kim Jong Un told Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that his commitment to denuclearization remains "unchanged and consistent and fixed," but experts warn he will seek concessions from Washington. In addition to an end to the war, he is likely to want international recognition as well as guarantees against any strike by the US forces stationed in South Korea. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, however, said Saturday that the presence of American troops in South Korea is not "on the table." For the North, denuclearization has long been code for the withdrawal of US troops from the peninsula and the end of its nuclear umbrella over the South -- something unthinkable in Washington. Pyongyang has previously insisted that it needs nuclear weapons to defend against a US invasion. But it remains to be seen if either side has changed its position following the whirlwind diplomacy of the last few weeks. As expected, Kim Yong Chol handed Trump a letter from Kim that may clear up some of the questions. The US leader said the missive was "very nice" -- but then admitted he had not yet read it. An aide later confirmed he did after the talks. It came only a week after Trump threatened to consign the entire process to history, abruptly cancelling the summit in a sharply-worded letter, only to revive preparations shortly afterwards. Trump said that, after Friday's talks, the parties are "totally over that and now we're going to deal and we're going to really start a process." Since the short-lived boycott threat, diplomats from both countries have conducted an intense flurry of talks, culminating this week when Pompeo sat down in New York with Kim's envoy. - 'Their decision' - Pompeo said on Thursday that, after what have now been two meetings with Kim Jong Un and three with Kim Yong Chol, he believes the North is at least ready to consider addressing US demands for denuclearization. "I believe they are contemplating a path forward. They can make a strategic shift. One that their country has not been prepared to make before. This will obviously be their decision," he said. There has also been a recent rapprochement on the Korean peninsula, with the two Koreas holding high-level talks Friday at the border truce village of Panmunjom. The meeting followed two landmark summits between the leaders of North and South Korea in the last five weeks. Seoul welcomed Trump's meeting with Kim Yong Chol. "The delivery of a letter from Chairman Kim Jong Un to President Trump has apparently broadened and consolidated the road to the North Korea-US summit," said Kim Eui-gyeom, spokesman for South Korea's presidential Blue House. China also welcomed the development, with foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying saying that Beijing hoped the two nations "will continue to move towards each other, to demonstrate sincerity, and to actively promote the preparations for the leaders' meeting." Japanese premier Shinzo Abe meanwhile said, "I am determined to do my best so that it will be a historic summit." burs-dc/sst/qan/amu Under pressure from the Russia collusion investigation, President Donald Trump says he regrets appointing Attorney Jeff Sessions, who has recused himself from involvement in the probe President Donald Trump said Wednesday he regretted naming Jeff Sessions as attorney general, as pressure on the White House grows from a special counsel's probe into possible campaign collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. After The New York Times reported that Trump pressured Sessions to reverse his recusal from overseeing the Russia probe in March 2017, the US president confirmed his unhappiness over that decision in a tweet. He quoted a Republican lawmaker as criticizing Sessions for not telling the president before becoming attorney general that he would have to recuse himself from the investigation. "There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!" the lawmaker, Trey Gowdy, said. "I wish I did!" Trump said in his tweet. Trump has repeatedly lashed out at Sessions, who he hand-picked last year as the country's top law enforcement official, as the probe into Russian election meddling, and possible obstruction, bores in on the White House. On Sunday Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said the investigation could ultimately result in an impeachment effort in Congress over alleged obstruction by the president. "Eventually the decision here is going to be impeach, not impeach," Giuliani told CNN in an interview. The president has made clear he believes Sessions, a former senator who was active in the Trump campaign, should be helping him fight the probe, rather than standing to the side. The Times reported Wednesday that Trump's push for Sessions to reverse his recusal has become a focus of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe. The episode could put Sessions, whom Mueller's investigators interviewed in January, in the position of being a witness against the president in the obstruction side of Mueller's investigation, according to the Times. Trump has gone on the offensive, seeking to paint the Mueller investigation, the Justice Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as biased against him, and is now calling the Mueller probe "illegitimate" and "rigged." Last weekend he tweeted 14 times about the investigation, alleging that Democrats were behind what he called the "plant" of a law enforcement informant in his campaign. Giuliani said Trump and his team have to take the fight to the public with an eye to a possible impeachment fight. ""Members of Congress, Democrat and Republican, are going to be informed a lot by their constituents. So, our jury is the American -- as it should be -- is the American people," he said on CNN. US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis (C) walks with US General John Nicholson (center R) on an unannounced visit to Kabul on March 13, 2018 Senior Taliban officials have been secretly negotiating with Afghan officials on a possible ceasefire, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan disclosed Wednesday. "A lot of the diplomatic activity and dialogue is occurring off the stage, and it's occurring at multiple levels," General John Nicholson said in a teleconference with reporters at the Pentagon. He would not identify the figures involved in the negotiations, except to say that they included mid- and senior-level Taliban officials. "I should point out they met in secret. This is how they were able to advance the talks," he said, adding that the success of the effort depends in part on the "confidentiality of the process." Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in late February proposed peace talks with the Taliban, saying they could be recognized as a political party if they accepted a ceasefire and recognized the country's 2004 constitution. The Taliban have not officially responded, but deadly attacks have proliferated since then, particularly in Kabul, which has become the most dangerous place in the country for civilians. On Wednesday, militants launched a gun and bomb attack on the Interior Ministry in Kabul, killing a policeman in another demonstration of their ability to strike at the heart of the Afghan capital. The Taliban also claimed responsibility for a predawn attack on a police station in the capital of Logar province, about 70 kilometers (45 miles) southeast of Kabul. Six police officers were killed and eight civilians were wounded, provincial police spokesman Shapoor Ahmadzai said. But Nicholson, who has sought to drive the Taliban to the negotiating table by bringing to bear increased US military pressure, maintained that violence and progress can coexist. He likened the situation in Afghanistan to that of Colombia where the fighting continued up until the FARC guerrilla group and the government signed a peace accord in 2016. Goma is the capital of DR Congo's North Kivu, a province which has seen a string of deadly clashes in recent months. Around 20 civilians have been kidnapped since the weekend in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a stronghold of multiple armed groups, officials said Wednesday. The kidnappings are understood to have begun on Friday, some 75 kilometres (50 miles) north of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. "They have been taken between last weekend and today in different locations," said Jason Ntawiha, an official in the town of Rutshuru. "The kidnappers are demanding ransoms to free their hostages. Families have begun to organise themselves. "We are putting strategies in place to prevent these criminals from doing their dirty work." A local civil society group has called for a peaceful march on Thursday to protest against the kidnappings. Armed groups, which claim to defend Congolese communities, are fighting for control of territorial and natural resources in North Kivu, which has seen a string of deadly clashes in recent months. Eastern DRC has been wracked by violence since the mid-1990s. The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militia -- created by Muslim radicals to oppose the rule of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni -- is one of a number of armed groups fighting over the region's rich mineral resources. The participants of the Paris conference on Libya listen to the agreement they reached being read out at the Elysee Palace on May 29, 2018 For Abdelhakim al-Saadi, the latest meeting of Libyan leaders plays "like a broken record", with few people from Tripoli to Benghazi willing to put their faith in new promises. Doing his shopping in Tripoli's fish market, which is bustling during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Saadi doesn't want to get his hopes up about his country's prospects. "If this conference succeeds in something concrete, I will inevitably know about it because my daily life will change, for the better," he said. Speaking after the first meeting of Libya's rival leaders in Paris, the retired academic remembered the UN-backed deal signed in 2015 which was intended to lead the country on the path to stability. "The meetings of these (Libyan) politicians, are like a broken record: repeating the same thing that comes to nothing," he said. The UN accord was never fully implemented and Libya remains divided between an array of rulers and militias, who have been vying for power since dictator Moamer Kadhafi was ousted and killed in 2011. "After the euphoria, there was the disappointment," said Saadi. Tripoli was represented at the Paris conference by Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, head of the UN-backed unity government, and Khalid al-Mishri who leads the High Council of State. From the east of the country came Aguila Saleh Issa, the parliament speaker based in the city of Tobruk, and military strongman Khalifa Haftar. Together they agreed to hold elections on December 10 and accept the results, as well as unify state institutions including the central bank. As the horse-trading wears on, ordinary Libyans go about their lives, fitting their daily routines around regular power and water cuts and struggling with soaring prices for everyday items. - 'No word on our suffering' - One thousand kilometres (600 miles) east, in the coastal city of Benghazi, Hawwa Abdesaalem al-Aguri waited in line outside a bank. Libyans pick vegetables at an open-air market in the capital Tripoli, on the second day the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, on May 18, 2018 She harbours little hope that the Paris conference will improve things. Attendees "didn't even mention the suffering of Libyans or how to improve their daily lives," she said. For Moftah bin Mabruk, a 49-year-old banker, elections slated for the end of the year will matter little if the country's laws aren't also updated. "I was happy to see the different parts getting together in Paris. It gave me a little hope to see them at one table. But one thing I am sure about is that if there is no constitution, I'm not going to vote," he said. Grace Berma, 47 and originally from Ghana, hopes bickering leaders can but their differences aside for the sake of her adopted homeland. "Seeing Libyan leaders get together in Paris was a good thing but watching their faces, none of them seemed to want to let go of what he controls for the sake of his people," she said. "Life is more and more risky for us foreigners, especially Africans. We love this country and its people. They have been very good to us and we hope never to be forced to leave because we no longer feel safe," said the mother of three. Taking advantage of years of chaos, people smugglers have established Libya as a major transit point for African migrants seeking to reach Europe, with many hopefuls treated appallingly at the hands of gangs and mercenaries. "Libyans, as well as migrants, do not deserve to live such hardship just because some people are benefiting from this chaos," said Berma. A woman passes crosses at a memorial for the victims of the Santa Fe, Texas High School shooting. Texas has not responded with a major gun laws campaign while arriving to remove her car at the high school May 21, 2018 in Santa Fe, Texas. Texas Governor Greg Abbott unveiled dozens of recommendations Wednesday focused on mental health and school safety after the latest US mass shooting to claim children's lives. The governor's recommendations came nearly two weeks after a 17-year-old student gunned down eight fellow students and two teachers at Santa Fe High School in rural Southeast Texas, and injured 13 others. Of the 40 recommendations put forth by the Republican governor of the staunchly conservative state, only a few were gun safety measures. The governor mainly focused on increasing armed security on school campuses and more mental health screenings to identify troubled children. But, Abbott also called for requiring gun owners to report lost firearms and for allowing law enforcement to temporarily take away guns from people determined by courts to be "potentially dangerous" to themselves or others. The May 18 shooting in Santa Fe was the latest high-profile instance of gun violence in the US and came just a few months after the February massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 and sparked a student-led movement for more gun control. In the aftermath of the Texas shooting, there have been only modest calls for tougher gun laws, which in Texas are among the most permissive in the country. Referring to the wishes of some of the Santa Fe students themselves, Abbott called mainly for increasing armed security in schools -- including employing military veterans, more armed teachers and off-duty police -- and expanding mental health options for schools. "This plan is a starting point, not an ending place, to provide strategies that can be used before the next school year begins," Abbott said at a news conference. The $110 million plan came after the governor last week held three days of discussions with students, educators, and experts in various fields. A few Santa Fe students last week publicly called for requiring gun owners to safely lock away their weapons and for stricter background checks. The Santa Fe shooter, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, employed a shotgun and handgun belonging to his father. "We are just trying to make guns safer, and trying to make people treat them as the machines that they are, rather than as toys," Santa Fe High School student Bree Butler told a news conference Friday. First Lady Melania Trump, after a lengthy absence from public view, says she is "feeling great" US First Lady Melania Trump, after surgery and three weeks out of public view, sought on Wednesday to quell speculation about her health, saying she was "feeling great." Melania Trump's last public appearance was on May 10, when she accompanied the president to Andrews Air Force base in Maryland to welcome home three American hostages from North Korea. She underwent surgery at Walter Reed hospital on May 14 for what aides called a "benign" kidney condition and was released on May 19. Melania Trump, 48, addressed speculation about her health and whereabouts on Wednesday. "I see the media is working overtime speculating where I am & what I'm doing," she said in a tweet. "Rest assured, I'm here at the @WhiteHouse w my family, feeling great, & working hard on behalf of children and the American people!" she said. At Walter Reed, the Slovenia-born former model underwent an embolization procedure for a "benign" kidney condition, according to her spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham. Embolization is most frequently used to cut off the flow of blood to a tumor or growth. While the procedure is often performed on an outpatient basis, it is not uncommon to stay overnight to treat the pain. Members of the United Nations Security Council attend a emergency session on the flare-up between Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip and Israel The latest escalation of fighting between Israel and Palestinian Hamas has pushed Gaza to the brink of war, the UN envoy for the Middle East warned the Security Council on Wednesday. Nickolay Mladenov delivered the stark warning as the council remained deadlocked over how to respond to the flare-up between Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip and Israel. "This latest round of attacks is a warning to all of how close to the brink of war we are every day," said Mladenov, who spoke via video link from Jerusalem. The council met in emergency session at the request of the United States, which had asked the top UN body to condemn rocket firings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Israel. But Kuwait, a non-permanent council member that represents Arab countries, blocked the US-drafted statement, arguing that it had presented its own draft resolution that addressed the crisis. The exchange of fire on Tuesday and into the early hours of Wednesday began with a barrage of rocket and mortars into Israel from Gaza, prompting Israel to respond with strikes on 65 militant sites in the Gaza Strip. The violence was the most serious escalation since the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas and followed weeks of Palestinian protests in which more than 100 Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israeli forces. Calm returned to Gaza on Wednesday but the UN envoy expressed concern that ongoing protests in June will lead to further violence. "No one in Gaza can afford another war," said Mladenov. Kuwait is pushing for a vote at the council this week on its draft resolution calling for "the consideration of measures" for the protection of Palestinian civilians, according to the text obtained by AFP. The United States, which has veto power in the council, will oppose the measure, Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon told reporters. US Ambassador Nikki Haley said "the people of Gaza do not need protection from an external source. The people of Gaza need protection from Hamas." With the council deadlocked, France warned that the failure to agree on a response to the Gaza crisis was damaging to the United Nations. "This increasingly heavy silence, which is becoming deafening, is not acceptable," said French Ambassador Francois Delattre. "It is not acceptable for the Palestinian and Israeli populations, who are affected by this conflict. It is not acceptable for the world that is watching us," he said. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders speaks during the daily briefing Press Secretary Sarah Sanders' teared up as she fielded an unexpected question about school shootings from a kid reporter at the White House Wednesday. Sanders' voice wobbled and she became visibly upset after 13-year-old Benje Choucroun asked a question about kids feeling unsafe at school. The cub reporter -- on assignment for "Time for Kids" -- asked what the administration was doing to tackle the scourge of gun violence. "At my school, we recently had a lockdown drill," Choucroun began, describing the practice of training to hide if a shooter gets in the building. The drills are a regular occurrence for US kids as young as three, who are sometimes told they are pretending to hide from "bears" or "bad guys". "One thing that affects mine and other students' mental health is the worry about the fact that we or our friends could get shot at school," Choucroun continued, reading from a written question. "Can you tell me what the administration has done and will do to prevent these senseless tragedies?" Sanders, a mother of three, better known in public for her pugilistic approach to briefings, appeared taken aback by the question. "I think that as a kid, and certainly as a parent, there is nothing that could be more terrifying for a kid to go to school and not feel safe. So I'm sorry that you feel that way," she said. "This administration takes it seriously," Sanders said struggling to continue, before adding that administration was discussing ways to "do every single thing within our power to protect kids in our schools and to make them feel safe and make their parents feel good about dropping them off." Early in his administration Trump vowed to tackle gun control, but has since fallen in line with Republican gun lobby groups, backing more security measures in school and even arming teachers. On Thursday, he is expected to travel to Houston for a campaign event, where he will also meet families involved in the deadly shooting at Santa Fe High School. Earlier this month a 17-year-old student gunned down eight fellow students and two teachers, just one in a litany of US school shootings. Kim Kardashian entered the grounds of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue wearing a black suit and canary yellow stilettoes Days away from a historic summit with North Korea's mercurial leader, US President Donald Trump held a White House meeting Wednesday with another famous Kim -- reality TV star Kardashian -- to discuss prison reform and sentencing. The reality star entered the grounds of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue wearing a black suit and canary yellow stilettoes, an AFP photographer witnessed. Kardashian was expected to meet aide Jared Kushner, who has spearheaded stuttering White House efforts at criminal justice reform. In the end, she met with fellow TV personality, President Donald Trump -- formerly of "The Apprentice" and New York tabloid fame. "Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing," the president said in a tweet, accompanied by a photograph of the pair in the Oval Office, with Trump flashing a broad grin. Kardashian, 37, is known for her socialite TV persona, but has also called for the release of Alice Marie Johnson, a 62-year-old who has been in prison for more than two decades for a nonviolent drug offense. Fixing tough sentencing laws had been a priority of president Barack Obama's administration, but he failed to win Congressional support, prompting a stream of presidential pardons and clemency actions. Trump has so far taken a more hardline approach, advocating a "lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key" approach to criminal justice. During his first year and half in office he has pardoned disgraced Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, a Trump supporter who was convicted of violating a court order to halt traffic patrols targeting immigrants. He also pardoned vice president Dick Cheney's former chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Last month, Kim's rapper husband Kanye West raised eyebrows after tweeting about his "love" for Trump and describing him as a "brother" with whom he shared "dragon energy." Afghan security forces patrol, after recapturing control of the city from Taliban militants, in Farah US forces killed over 50 Taliban leaders in a series of strikes against those behind a recent attack in the Helmand provincial capital of Farah, US military and NATO commander General John Nicholson said Wednesday. After pushing out fighters in Farah, Afghan and US forces continued to pursue them, Nicholson told reporters at the Pentagon via video link. Under surveillance by the Marines, the Taliban fighters returned to their Helmand stronghold, a center for poppy cultivation. On May 24, they were spotted in a known Taliban command center in Musa Qala. "What it looks like is it was a group of commanders, meeting in part to discuss the operation in Farah that many of them had just participated in," said General Nicholson. "And they obviously thought they were meeting in relative safety in Musa Qala, but our intelligence was able to identify the group and effectively conduct the strike." The group was involved in drug trafficking, Nicholson added. "I would not call it strategic significance, but it definitely has a significant local significance in terms of the fight in Southern Afghanistan," he said. In a statement, the US command in Afghanistan said the strike resulted in "more than 50 casualties," among them the number two Taliban leader in Helmand, Abdul Manan, and several district governors and local leaders in Kandahar, Kunduz, Herat, Farah, Uruzgan and Helmand provinces. NEW YORK (AP) - A Maryland man who authorities say traveled to Somalia and became a fighter for an al-Qaida-linked extremist group has been sentenced in New York to 35 years in prison. Thirty-three-year-old Maalik Alim Jones was sentenced on Tuesday after pleading guilty to federal terrorism charges. Prosecutors say Jones trained with and supported al-Shabab, an ultra-conservative Islamic militant group. The group seeks to run Somalia under a strict interpretation of Shariah law. The Baltimore man was turned over to the U.S. by Somali authorities who arrested him in 2015 as he allegedly tried to get on a boat to travel to Yemen. Authorities say Jones confessed to fighting Kenyan government soldiers in a battle until he was injured by a missile. They say he admitted to getting paid $100 monthly by al-Shabab. POMONA, N.J. (AP) - Former Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy and his wife have added another boy to their brood. Amy Kennedy gave birth Sunday night to the couple's fourth child, Marshall, at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in New Jersey. He made his first public appearance Tuesday along with his parents and older siblings - 10-year-old stepsister Harper Petigout (PET'-ih-goo), 6-year-old Owen, 4-year-old Nora and 2-year-old Nell. Amy Kennedy was a public school teacher for more than 15 years and serves on the board of Mental Health America. Former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy and his wife Amy introduce their fifth child , Marshall, Born on May 27, who was 7 pounds, 4.2 ounces and 19 3/4 inches long at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center's Center for Childbirth, on Tuesday, May 29, 2018. Marshall's siblings are Nell, 2, Owen,6, Harper,10, and Nora,4, all from Brigantine, N.J. (Craig Matthews/The Press of Atlantic City via AP) Kennedy, a Democrat, was elected in 1994 and chose not to run again in 2010, the year after his father, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, died. Kennedy has written and spoken publicly about his long struggle with bipolar disorder and drug addiction. He has become an advocate for a stronger mental health care system. Former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy and his wife Amy introduce their fifth child, Marshall, who was 7 pounds, 4.2 ounces and 19 3/4 inches long, born Sunday, May 27, at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center's Center for Childbirth on Tuesday, May 29, 2018. (Craig Matthews/The Press of Atlantic City via AP) Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about Wednesday: 1. TOP NORTH KOREAN OFFICIAL HEADS TO NEW YORK FOR TALKS U.S. and North Korean officials aren't saying if a previously planned summit between leaders of the two countries is back on, but preparations are proceeding as if it is. FILE - In this Sept. 29, 2017 file photo, police lift the coffin that contain the remains of fellow officer Luis Angel Gonzalez Lorenzo, who was killed while trying to cross a river in his car during the passage of Hurricane Maria, in Aguada, Puerto Rico. A new study contends that many more deaths than normal occurred in Puerto Rico in the three months after Maria devastated the island, mostly because of problems getting medicines or medical care. The research was published online in the New England Journal of Medicine. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File) 2. WHICH ONCE RISING REPUBLICAN STAR IS RESIGNING FROM OFFICE Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens abruptly resigned amid investigations that arose from an affair with his former hairdresser and expanded to include questions about campaign finance law violations. 3. NEW STUDY ESTIMATES VASTLY HIGHER DEATH TOLL IN PUERTO RICO AS RESULT OF HURRICANE Harvard-led researchers estimated up to 4,600 more deaths than usual occurred in the wake of Hurricane Maria. 4. ROSEANNE BARR FACES FALLOUT FROM RACIST TWEET Network ABC quickly cancelled the reboot of "Roseanne" and Barr was also dumped by her talent agency after she referred to former Obama adviser as a product of the Muslim Brotherhood and the "Planet of the Apes." 5. INMATE'S ATTACK IS MOST SERIOUS IN BELGIUM SINCE 2016 BOMBINGS The assailant stabbed two police officers, shot them and a bystander to death, and then took two hostages inside a school before being shot by police. 6. BODY OF VETERAN WHO DISAPPEARED AMID MARYLAND FLOODING FOUND IN RIVER Eddison Hermond had last been seen as he tried to help a woman who was trying to escape the raging floodwaters find her cat. 7. WHY STARBUCKS CUSTOMERS HAD TO GO WITHOUT THEIR AFTERNOON CAFFEINE BUZZ The coffee chain closed thousands of stores so that its employees could attend anti-bias training created after two black men were arrested in a Philadelphia store in April. 8. TRUMP BORROWS LANGUAGE OF CRITICS IN TWEET ON MUELLER INVESTIGATION Trump alleged that the investigative team was "MEDDLING" in upcoming midterm elections and blamed Democrats for "Collusion." 9. WHAT'S BRINGING CALIFORNIA AND FEDERAL OFFICIALS TOGETHER ON POT Authorities are teaming up to target illegal marijuana growers who are using a highly toxic and banned pesticide that threatens water, wildlife, and people. 10. SERENA WILLIAMS MAKES TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO THE FRENCH OPEN Nine months after giving birth and 16 months after last playing a Grand Slam tournament, Williams defeated 70th-ranked Kristyna Pliskova of the Czech Republic 7-6 (4), 6-4. In this image made from video, Kim Yong Chol, right, a former military intelligence chief who is now Kim Jong Un's top official on inter-Korean relations, walks through Beijing airport after his arrival Tuesday, May 29, 2018. He was at North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's side at the table in last weekend's North-South summit, and had been a prominent senior official in other important talks. It was not possible to confirm the reason for his visit to Beijing, or if he would be traveling on to another destination. (AP Photo) SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - A judge on Tuesday weighed how much information to release about the arrest of a former police officer accused of being the Golden State Killer. Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Sweet began considering the issue after a hearing where attorneys for suspect Joseph DeAngelo argued that sharing the details could lead to an unfair trial. Sweet indicated he's likely to release some information and is working with prosecutors and defense attorneys to determine how much to redact, which would continue to shield some details from public view. Joseph James DeAngelo stands in a Sacramento, Calif., jail court on Tuesday, May 29, 2018, as a judge weighed how much information to release about the arrest of the former police officer accused of being the Golden State Killer. He is suspected in at least a dozen killings and roughly 50 rapes in the 1970s and '80s. (Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee via AP, Pool) The Associated Press and other news outlets are pushing for information from search and arrest warrants to be made public. Transparency helps the public act as a check on the legal process and ensures investigators are acting appropriately, said Duffy Carolan, a lawyer for the news outlets. "The press, the public and the victims deserve open proceedings," she argued. Authorities arrested Joseph DeAngelo, 72, in April and said he is responsible for at least a dozen killings and roughly 50 rapes in the 1970s and '80s. Investigators have searched his home in Citrus Heights, California, his computer and his cellphone. Defense attorneys said the warrants include information about other allegations against DeAngelo that can no longer be tried, as well as details on evidence and methods. Making that information public could taint jurors and witnesses, defense lawyer David Lynch said. "We have witnesses to events decades ago. Fading memories are going to be a huge issue in this case," he said. Prosecutors didn't object to the release of the documents but want to shield some information, including investigatory techniques and victim and witness identities. Joseph James DeAngelo stands with his attorney Joe Cress in a Sacramento, Calif. jail court on Tuesday, May 29, 2018, as a judge weighed how much information to release about the arrest of the former police officer accused of being the Golden State Killer. He is suspected in at least a dozen killings and roughly 50 rapes in the 1970s and '80s. (Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee via AP, Pool) Joseph James DeAngelo stands in a Sacramento, Calif., jail court on Tuesday, May 29, 2018, as a judge weighed how much information to release about the arrest of the former police officer accused of being the Golden State Killer. He is suspected in at least a dozen killings and roughly 50 rapes in the 1970s and '80s. (Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee via AP, Pool) NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - The Latest on President Donald Trump's campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee (all times local): 12:35 a.m. President Donald Trump has accused House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of being an "MS-13 lover" and dismissed a Democratic Senate candidate as a "tool" of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. President Donald Trump takes the stage at a rally Tuesday, May 29, 2018, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey) That line of attack is likely to become familiar as Trump boosts Republican congressional candidates ahead of midterm elections. He traveled to Tennessee on Tuesday to promote the Senate candidacy of congresswoman Marsha Blackburn. She is likely to face Democratic former Gov. Phil Bredesen in a fall contest that's among those crucial to holding onto a Republican majority. Besides headlining a private fundraiser for Blackburn, Trump used a public rally to urge supporters not to become "complacent" this fall while Democrats were "sticking together" to block his agenda. ___ 8:45 p.m. President Donald Trump is resurrecting his rallying cry that Mexico will pay for his proposed border wall, despite sensitive ongoing negotiations over the future of a key North American trade deal. Acknowledging the sensitivity of the subject but abandoning caution, Trump says, "I don't want to cause a problem, but in the end, Mexico's gonna pay for the wall." Talks are continuing to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump calls "crazy." Mexico has tirelessly objected to the notion that it would pay for the wall - for which Trump has sought billions from Congress - and Trump's talk on the matter has strained relations between the two countries. Trump says Mexico is "going to pay for the wall and they're going to enjoy it." __ 8:30 p.m. President Donald Trump is attacking Tennessee Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen at a rally for his GOP opponent in Nashville. Trump says he's never heard of the Democratic former governor of the state, and is branding him an "absolute total tool" of Senate Minority Chuck Schumer. Trump says Bredesen is also a tool of "MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi." The House Democratic Leader criticized Trump earlier this month for calling members of the international gang "animals." Trump is also highlighting Bredesen's donations to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016. He says, "Phil Bredesen supported her and he supported her ideas," noting Clinton was opposed to the construction of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. __ 8:20 p.m. President Donald Trump has taken the stage in Tennessee for a campaign rally to boost Republican Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn. Trump is hailing Blackburn as a very early supporter of his presidential campaign and a "very wonderful woman." The House member is expected to face Democratic former Gov. Phil Bredesen to replace retiring GOP Sen. Bob Corker in a race that will help determine the future of GOP control of the Senate. Trump says, "We need Marsha in the Senate to continue the amazing progress and work" of his first 16 months in office. The president is highlighting the nation's economic performance under his tenure, including a declining unemployment rate. Trump adds, "I'm the only politician who produced more than I said I was going to produce, and we're only 1.5 years in." __ 6:40 p.m. President Donald Trump is resuming his efforts to build a stable of Republicans who will promote his agenda and serve as a check on Democrats aiming to regain control of the House or Senate - if not both. Trump is inNashville, Tennessee, to raise campaign cash for Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who's running for a Senate seat, and to headline a rally with his most loyal supporters. Blackburn is expected to face Democratic former Gov. Phil Bredesen to replace Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who is retiring. The Tennessee campaign is among several races crucial to Trump's plans to maintain control of the Senate, where Republicans are defending a narrow two-seat majority. Trace Adkins performs before President Donald Trump speaks at a rally Tuesday, May 29, 2018, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey) President Donald Trump arrives at Nashville International Airport in Nashville, Tenn., Tuesday, May 29, 2018, to attend a rally. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Russia faced sharp criticism in the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday over the conflict in eastern Ukraine, its annexation of Crimea, and its rejection of an investigation linking the Russian military to the downing of a Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine. The three issues were raised at the council's first meeting on Ukraine since February 2017 which saw Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia clash with the foreign ministers of Ukraine, the Netherlands and Poland as well as the U.S. ambassador, and other council members. Ukraine's Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said the four-year conflict between his country's forces and separatist rebels in the east "was invented by the Kremlin to punish Ukrainians for their aspiration towards freedom, democracy and European future." "The conflict itself is not, as Russia pictures it, an ethnic conflict, a conflict between Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking population, or a civil war inside Ukraine," Klimkin said. "It is an external aggression designed to destroy Ukraine's statehood only because we did not want to be a part of the so-called Russian world." Nebenzia retorted that some Ukrainians don't want to settle the conflict - "what you do want is a hotbed of instability on the borders of Russia, and drawing satisfaction that there is tension in the relations between two brotherly peoples and countries." He said Ukraine also doesn't want a settlement because it would mean millions of separatists in the east would be able to vote in presidential elections in 2019. The conflict in the east erupted in April 2014 after Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and has killed more than 10,000 people. A 2015 peace agreement signed in the Belarus capital Minsk has helped reduce hostilities, but U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo told the council "the killing, destruction and immense suffering continues" and "eastern Ukraine is facing a serious humanitarian crisis." "The security situation on the ground remains volatile, with the continued use of weapons proscribed by the Minsk agreements," she said. "The relative calm that held in the early weeks of 2018 was followed in April and May by a sharp increase in the number of victims." Over half a million civilians live within 5 kilometers of the Line of Contact between separatist and government forces, "subjected night and day to shelling, gunfire, land mines and unexploded ordnance," DiCarlo said. She stressed that the Minsk agreements remain the foundation to restore peace but are "largely unimplemented." She cited a loss of momentum in negotiations but said "we cannot allow ourselves to give in to fatigue or complacency - we must continue to pursue peace with renewed vigor." U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley was among many council members who spoke out against Russia's involvement in the east and takeover of Crimea. "Until Russia returns the Crimean Peninsula to Ukrainian control, U.S. sanctions related to the invasion of Crimea will continue," Haley said. "And until Russia pulls its forces out of eastern Ukraine and honors its Minsk commitments, our sanctions in response to its flagrant misconduct in the eastern part of the country will stay in place." Nebenzia countered that the people of Crimea didn't want to be part of Ukraine. "I'm very touched about the concern for Crimea and the suffering of the people there," the Russian ambassador said. "Let me give you a piece of advice: Don't worry about them. They're quite happy." "What we're discussing today is Ukraine, and Crimea is part of Russia and it's about time this was accepted," Nebenzia said. On another issue, Netherlands Foreign Minister Stef Blok reiterated a call on Russia to accept its responsibility for the missile strike that blew Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 out of the sky over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board. International investigators said last week they had strong evidence that the Buk missile system that brought down the Amsterdam-Kuala Lumpur flight came from a Russia-based military unit, the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade based in the Russian city of Kursk. Russia's Nebenzia called the conclusions "unfounded" and accused the Dutch-led investigation team of "manipulating the data from social networks whose reliability cannot be verified." Russia is ready to assist "a truly independent and transparent investigation," he said, but "we can only accept those investigations in which Russia is a fully-fledged participant." Blok retorted that Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for an independent investigation. It is "very disappointing" that Russia won't acknowledge the "irrefutable evidence," he said. "So far, Russian authorities don't show the slightest interest in achieving truth, justice and accountability." SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - U.S. Senate candidate Mitt Romney defended himself at a debate Tuesday from attacks on his status as recent Utah transplant who has previously criticized President Donald Trump. Romney parried the criticism from his opponent, state Rep. Mike Kennedy, and praised the president's handling of several issues including China on trade. Trump has endorsed Romney, which the former governor of Massachusetts said shows the president "respects people who call them like they see them." Utah Senate candidates, state Rep. Mike Kennedy, R-Alpine, left, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney shake hands at the beginning of a Senate Republican primary debate, Tuesday, May 29, 2018, in Provo, Utah. (Scott G Winterton/The Deseret News via AP, Pool) Kennedy blasted Romney for comments made during the 2016 presidential election in which he called Trump a "fraud." "If I disagree with the president, I will do so in respectful fashion," Kennedy said. Kennedy said Romney doesn't work well with others and cited a recent tweet in which Romney called a pastor a "religious bigot." Romney defended his statement saying a Dallas pastor who called Mormonism and Islam "heresy from the pit of Hell," was the wrong choice to give the opening prayer at opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. "When people express bigotry they ought to be called out for it," Romney said. Romney is favored to win in Utah, where Trump's brash style doesn't always go over well. But Kennedy, a conservative doctor and lawyer, made it a contest when he won the favor of hard-right-leaning state GOP stalwarts. Both men largely praised the president's handling of issues such as North Korea and immigration and expressed dismay about the deficit. The national debt has been Kennedy's marquee issue, and he said he'd vote against any omnibus spending bills. Romney agreed, and said he'd bring together a group of senators he knows ahead of time to say they won't vote on such spending bills. The plan is in line with Romney's pitch that his high political profile would bring Utah more clout in Washington than the average freshman senator. During Tuesday's debate, which was the last scheduled before the June 26 primary, the two candidates differed on banning bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic rifles to mimic fully automatic ones. Romney said he supports a ban while Kennedy says such measures don't work and said he wants to focus preventing shootings through things such as mental health treatment. The two are vying to win the Republican primary in the race to replace Sen. Orrin Hatch, who is retiring after 40 years. Kennedy says he's a homegrown, conservative alternative to Romney, whom he painted as an outsider whose positions have flip-flopped over the years. Romney moved to the state after his failed 2012 presidential run. While Kennedy is an attractive candidate for anti-Romney Trump supporters, he'll have to gain support from a wider slice of the electorate to make his mark in Utah, where the president's brash style doesn't always go over well. Romney is a beloved adopted son in Utah, where he's known for his role in turning around the 2002 Winter Olympics and becoming the first Mormon presidential nominee of a major political party. The former governor of Massachusetts moved to Utah after his 2012 presidential loss, and made a speech there calling Trump "phony" and a "fraud" during the 2016 campaign. The two have largely buried the hatchet, though some tensions remain. The winner of the Republican primary will face Democrat Jenny Wilson. But GOP candidates have a big upper hand in conservative Utah. Kennedy has served as a representative in Utah's Legislature since 2013. He got attention this year for heading up a commission to improve school safety in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. FILE - This March 1, 2018 file photo shows Rep. Mike Kennedy, R-Alpine, speaking during news conference at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Mitt Romney is heading into a debate against Republican state lawmaker Kennedy, who forced him into a primary in the race for a Utah Senate seat. The contest Tuesday evening, May 29, pits heavily favored former presidential contender Romney against Kennedy, a conservative doctor and lawyer who won with state party stalwarts after calling for change in Washington. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File) FILE - In this Jan. 19, 2018, file photo, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at a conference in Salt Lake City. Romney is heading into a debate against Republican state lawmaker Mike Kennedy, who forced him into a primary in the race for a Utah Senate seat. The contest Tuesday evening, May 29, pits heavily favored former presidential contender Romney against Kennedy, a conservative doctor and lawyer who won with state party stalwarts after calling for change in Washington. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File) NEW YORK (AP) - A court-appointed official gave a New York judge in advance of a hearing Wednesday an upbeat report on how fast attorney-client privilege designations are being applied to materials seized from President Donald Trump's personal lawyer. Barbara Jones said in a letter filed in federal court Tuesday that lawyers for the personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and attorneys for Trump and the Trump Organization have designated more than 250 items as subject to the privilege. She said the material includes data from a video recorder. The letter to U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood preceded a hearing scheduled for Wednesday. Jones said more than a million pieces of data from three of Cohen's phones are ready to be given to criminal prosecutors, and more than 12,000 pages of documents from eight boxes that survived attorney-client privilege scrutiny already have been given back to prosecutors. More than a dozen electronic devices were seized or copied in the raids, and Jones said she has not yet received data from three seized items. Jones said data being reviewed has included various forms of electronic communications and documents typically associated with mobile devices and computer usage. Wood had asked that materials from the April 9 raids on Cohen's home and office be processed speedily. Prosecutors have said they're probing Cohen's business interests for possible fraud. The raids on Cohen were triggered in part by a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller, who separately is looking into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Wood became involved after Cohen came to court, complaining that he feared attorney-client privilege would not be protected. Trump also expressed those concerns on Twitter. A request to intervene in the case by Michael Avenatti, attorney for porn star Stormy Daniels, looms over the court proceedings. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has said she had sex once with Trump in 2006. Trump denies the affair. Avenatti and lawyers for Cohen continue to denounce each other in court filings, including with submissions on Tuesday. WASHINGTON (AP) - Since the government acknowledged last month that the Trump administration had lost track of nearly 1,500 immigrant children, the debate over what that means and who is to blame has roiled Twitter. A look at the partisan claims and a reality check behind the latest immigration fight: THE 2014 PHOTOS -"Speechless. This is not who we are as a nation." - Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa, former Los Angeles mayor now running for governor, referring in a tweet Sunday to photos showing young-looking immigrants in steel cages. FILE - In this June 18, 2014 file photo, two female detainees sleep in a holding cell, as the children are separated by age group and gender, as hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center in Nogales, Ariz. President Donald Trump has seized on an error by liberal activists for tweeting photos of detainees at the U.S.-Mexico border in steel cages and blamed the current administration for separating immigrant children from their parents. The photos were taken by The Associated Press in 2014, when President Barack Obama was in office. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, Pool) -"This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible." - Jon Favreau, who was speechwriter for President Barack Obama, referring Sunday to the same photos. THE FACTS: The photos, taken by The Associated Press, were from 2014, during the Obama administration, but were presented by liberal activists as if they showed the effects of Trump's immigration policy now. Villaraigosa, Favreau and some others deleted their tweets when the mistake was pointed out. They had linked to a June 2014 online story by The Arizona Republic titled "First peek: Immigrant children flood detention center." The story featured photos taken by AP's Ross D. Franklin at a center run by the Customs and Border Protection Agency in Nogales, Arizona. One photo shows two unidentified female detainees sleeping in a holding cell. The caption refers to U.S. efforts to process 47,000 unaccompanied children at the Nogales center and another one in Brownsville, Texas. Many tweets used the hashtag "WhereAreOurChildren," which grew out of testimony in April by a federal official that the U.S. government had lost track of nearly 1,500 unaccompanied minor children it placed with adult sponsors in the U.S. Trump tweeted: "Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama's term showing children from the Border in steel cages. They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires." He is right about the misrepresentation, though it's not clear that many prominent Democrats jumped on this particular Twitter bandwagon. ___ THE 'LOST' CHILDREN -"1500 innocent children ripped from their mothers' arms at our border. Lost in Trump's "system". Give us your tired, your poor, your huddle masses yearning to breathe free - and we will torture them for wanting a better life. From Shining City to Evil Empire in under 500 days." - tweet Sunday by actor Jim Carrey. -"What is more shameful than forcibly separating, in America, parents from infant children at the border? And then, losing track of those children?" - tweet Friday by Preet Bharara, fired by Trump as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. THE FACTS: The nearly 1,500 children in question arrived at the border without their parents and were not forced from them by U.S. authorities. Critics are conflating those children with others, who came to the border with their parents, only to be separated there. To call the children lost, as many have, is misleading. It's more accurate to say the government lost track of them, as Bharara put it. An official from the Health and Human Services Department told a congressional hearing last month that his department placed follow-up phone calls from October to December to U.S. households that were sponsoring the minors after they came to the border without their parents. They reached 86 percent of the children or sponsors, determining 6,075 remained with their sponsors, 28 had run away, five had been removed from the U.S. and 52 relocated to live with someone else. The department could not verify the whereabouts of 1,475. In some of many cases, sponsors simply didn't respond to the follow-up phone call, not surprising because many are in the U.S. illegally and reluctant to speak to authorities. HHS decided 792 of those cases merited more attention and referred them to the National Call Center. It's not highly unusual to fail to keep track of many minors who came unaccompanied to the border. During the last year of the Obama administration, HHS was able to locate 85 percent of the minors or their sponsors, according to an inspector general's report. The Trump administration slightly exceeded that success rate in the last three months of 2017, even as it is accused of losing children. ___ ZERO TOLERANCE -TRUMP: "Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border into the U.S." - tweet Saturday. THE FACTS: No law mandates that parents must be separated from their children at the border, and it's not a policy Democrats have pushed or can change alone as the minority in Congress. The policy comes from Trump's own administration, which has decided to enforce criminal charges against people crossing the border illegally with few or no previous offenses. Under U.S. protocol, if parents are jailed, their children would be separated from them. Discussing the zero-tolerance policy recently, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said: "If we do our duty and prosecute those cases, then children inevitably for a period of time might be in different conditions." A Customs and Border Protection official told lawmakers last week that 658 children had been separated from their parents at the border from May 6 to May 19, after border agents began referring every illegal entry to criminal prosecutors. This is in addition to hundreds more who were estimated to have been removed from their parents at the border since October. A 2008 law, passed unanimously by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush, says children traveling alone from countries other than Mexico or Canada must be released in the "least restrictive setting" - often to family or a government-run shelter - while their cases slowly wind through immigration court. The law came amid concerns about border control officials and their treatment of children. ___ Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Hope Yen in Washington and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report. ___ Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck FILE - In this June 18, 2014, file photo, young boys sleep in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center in Nogales, Ariz. CPB provided media tours Wednesday of two locations in Brownsville, Texas, and Nogales, that have been central to processing the more than 47,000 unaccompanied children who have entered the country since Oct. 1. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, Pool) FILE - In this Wednesday, June 18, 2014, file photo, two young girls watch a World Cup soccer match on a television from their holding area where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center in Nogales, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, Pool, File) FILE - In this June 18, 2014, file photo, detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center in Nogales, Ariz. The CPB provided media tours in Brownsville, Texas, and Nogales, that have been central to processing unaccompanied children. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, Pool) JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) - Even in surrender, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens is going out fighting. When he steps down Friday, the former Navy SEAL officer will be conceding political defeat amid allegations of sexual misconduct and campaign violations while still defiantly asserting that he's done nothing worthy of being forced out of office. He's even hinted at a possible political comeback, declaring during his resignation announcement Tuesday that "this is not the end of our fight." But political analysts say the man who had aspirations of becoming president could find a political revival challenging, especially in a #MeToo environment where he would be vulnerable to attack for allegedly taking a compromising photo of a woman during an extramarital affair in 2015. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner speaks at a news conference Wednesday, May 30, 2018, announcing that her office dismissed felony computer data tampering charges against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens. Greitens announced his resignation Tuesday, May 29, 2018, effective on Friday. (AP Photo/Jim Salter) Greitens' resignation comes just two weeks after a speech in which he recalled his grueling SEAL training and asserted he would never stop fighting. But his departure was days in the making, as Greitens wrestled with mounting legal bills and the emotional pressures of defending against possible impeachment and a criminal trial. On Wednesday, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner dismissed a felony charge accusing Greitens of tampering with computer data for providing his political fundraiser with the donor list of a veterans' charity he founded. The dropped charge was the result of a deal proposed Saturday by Greitens' defense attorneys offering his resignation in exchange, said Gardner spokeswoman Susan Ryan. The governor on Saturday also called Republican consultant Jeff Roe, who headed Greitens' aggressive public relations campaign, to inform Roe that he had decided to resign. Greitens' legal bills had grown to a couple of million dollars, and his campaign staffers also were facing legal bills because of subpoenas from a House investigation. Though Greitens had believed he could beat both a criminal charge and impeachment, "he couldn't see the end without an immense financial and personal price to pay," Roe told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Even though he's quitting amid scandal, some Greitens voters said they still like him. Retiree Wilma Nelson said she would be open to voting for Greitens again if he sought to re-enter politics. "I can't fault him for giving up. So much money, so much stress, such strain on his young family. You can't deal with such hate," said Nelson, of Platte City. Political science professor Jeremy Walling, of Southeast Missouri State University, said Greitens' pledge to keep fighting seemed to be "some face-saving." Walling said several factors would make a political revival tougher for Greitens than for other scandal-plagued politicians. He said Greitens lacks deep support among Missouri's Republican power brokers, and his acknowledged extramarital affair included claims of sexual misconduct. The allegations also extended to political fundraising violations. "I think a comeback is going to be kind of difficult for this guy," Walling said. Gardner, the St. Louis prosecutor, said her decision to drop the data-tampering charge against Greitens was no indication that she believed he was innocent. "I remain confident we have the evidence required to pursue charges against Mr. Greitens, but sometimes pursuing charges is not the right thing to do for our city or our state," said Gardner, a Democrat. Had the governor been convicted, Gardner said, it was unlikely that he would be sentenced to prison, given the type of charge he faced and the fact that he would be a first-time offender. Greitens' attorney Jim Martin acknowledged reaching out to Gardner to resolve the issue. A St. Louis judge approved the agreement, which has seven stipulations, two of which are sealed and unavailable to the public. One of the open stipulations states that Greitens has agreed to release Gardner and everyone in her office from civil liability. Former Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael Wolff said the agreement between Greitens' attorneys and Gardner's office is highly unusual because it protects Gardner and her staff from being sued for their actions and because Greitens did not have to plead guilty to any lesser charge. "Here's a guy who gets to get out of a felony charge just by agreeing to quit his job," Wolff said. "Most people don't get this deal." Jean Paul Bradshaw II, a former U.S. attorney for western Missouri, said the agreement to drop the case represents a "fair resolution" because Greitens' resignation accomplished "the greatest public benefit" possible. The governor also was indicted on an invasion-of-privacy charge in February in St. Louis for allegedly taking the photo of the woman who had been his hairdresser during their affair in 2015, before he was elected. That charge was dropped earlier this month, but a special prosecutor is considering whether to refile it. Martin said he expected the remaining charge to be resolved soon, but he offered no details. "I think what folks need to know is it's now time to leave the governor alone and let him and his family heal," Martin said. Though Greitens had apparently decided to resign days earlier, he began the week as though he would continue his fight. On Monday, he spoke with attorney Catherine Hanaway about her legal defense of Greitens' campaign, which already had turned over thousands of documents to a House investigatory committee. On Tuesday morning, a Cole County judge ordered the campaign and a pro-Greitens group called A New Missouri to comply with a House subpoena seeking more records about potential coordination between the nonprofit organization, Greitens and his campaign. The judge said the names of any donors to A New Missouri could be redacted. House Speaker Todd Richardson said Wednesday that he didn't know whether the House still has the power or desire to enforce the subpoena now that Greitens is resigning. Hanaway described the judicial ruling as "pretty innocuous," adding that she did not think the order "had any effect on the decision" to resign. Roe said Greitens had been prepared for a two-stage fight. He was first focused on the invasion-of-privacy charge, which was dropped during jury selection. Greitens had hoped to be acquitted, which Roe said would have allowed him to mount a full defense against the potential House impeachment proceedings. But the specter of those charges being refiled hampered what Greitens could say and do on both fronts, Roe said. Roe also said it appeared likely that the House would vote to impeach Greitens, a step that would have prolonged his fight for several more months until a trial could be held on whether to remove him from office. "The human and financial toll was too great," Roe said. "And it was going to go on for too long." ___ Salter reported from St. Louis. Associated Press writers Blake Nelson in Jefferson City and John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report. FILE - In this May 17, 2018 file photo, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens looks on before speaking at an event near the capitol in Jefferson City, Mo. Greitens, a sometimes brash outsider whose unconventional resume as a Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL officer made him a rising star in Republican politics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, May 29, 2018, after a scandal involving an affair with his former hairdresser led to a broader investigation by prosecutors and state legislators. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File) Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens reads from a prepared statement as he announces his resignation during a news conference, Tuesday, May 29, 2018, at the state Capitol, in Jefferson City, Mo. Greitens resigned amid a widening investigation that arose from an affair with his former hairdresser. Greitens said his resignation would take effect Friday. (Julie Smith/The Jefferson City News-Tribune via AP) Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens reads from a prepared statement as he announces his resignation during a news conference, Tuesday, May 29, 2018, at the state Capitol, in Jefferson City, Mo. Greitens resigned amid a widening investigation that arose from an affair with his former hairdresser. Greitens said his resignation would take effect Friday. (Julie Smith/The Jefferson City News-Tribune via AP) Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens reads from a prepared statement as he announces his resignation during a news conference, Tuesday, May 29, 2018, at the state Capitol, in Jefferson City, Mo. Greitens resigned amid a widening investigation that arose from an affair with his former hairdresser. Greitens said his resignation would take effect Friday. (Julie Smith/The Jefferson City News-Tribune via AP) FILE - In this Jan. 9, 2017, file photo, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens gives his inaugural address from the steps of the capitol in Jefferson City, Mo. Greitens, a sometimes brash outsider whose unconventional resume as a Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL officer made him a rising star in Republican politics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, May 29, 2018, after a scandal involving an affair with his former hairdresser led to a broader investigation by prosecutors and state legislators. The resignation takes effect Friday. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner, File) BERLIN (AP) - Austria's vice chancellor is suggesting that the European Union should consider changes to rules allowing its members' citizens to work in all 28 EU countries, arguing that it would benefit both eastern and western European nations. Many workers from ex-communist eastern countries that joined the EU since the mid-2000s have sought work in richer western nations, where there has often been resentment over competition from cheap labor. Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache, whose far-right and traditionally EU-skeptic Freedom Party joined Austria's government in December, said Tuesday night: "We must discuss openly that it is not good for European development to strip away the entire intellectual, well-trained potential of eastern Europe for western Europe." FILE - In this Dec. 16, 2017 file photo, Heinz-Christian Strache, chairman of the right-wing Freedom Party, FPOE, speaks at a news conference in Vienna, Austria. Austria's vice chancellor is suggesting that the European Union should consider changes to rules allowing its members' citizens to work in all 28 EU countries, arguing that it would benefit both eastern and western European nations. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak,file) "If I see that this on one hand isn't beneficial for eastern European countries, but on the other hand also leads to a displacement process here ... then those are areas where we should discuss whether this is a smart rule, or whether we shouldn't consider at least in part finding adjustments to do this better in everyone's interest," Strache said, the Austria Press Agency reported. Austria will take over the EU's rotating presidency for six months in July. Conservative Chancellor Sebastian Kurz's government has generally taken a hard line on migration, particularly of asylum-seekers. Earlier this week, the government agreed that welfare benefits should be capped at 563 euros ($654) per month, rather than the standard 863 euros, for most immigrants who haven't yet passed a German test. Most immigrants won't be entitled to the benefits for their first five years in Austria. HAMPTON, Va. (AP) - Lawyers for the family of a Virginia man who was killed by police are trying to take his wrongful death suit to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Daily Press reported Tuesday that attorneys for William A. "Bootsie" Cooper have filed one last appeal. They want to argue that a trial judge was wrong to bar evidence and dismiss the $10 million suit in 2016. The 69-year-old Cooper was killed in a police raid of his Hampton home in 2011. They were looking for evidence that Cooper was selling prescription painkillers. Lawyers representing Cooper's estate assert that the police conducted a "reckless" investigation. But officers later testified that they knocked loudly on Cooper's door and loudly identified themselves. They said Cooper ignored their orders to drop his gun. ___ Information from: Daily Press, http://www.dailypress.com/ PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) - Police in Pakistan say gunmen riding on a motorcycle have shot and killed a human rights activist in the northwestern city of Peshawar. Charanjit Singh, 52, was a well-known member of the country's minority Sikh community and an outspoken critic of the Taliban. Local police chief Shaukat Khan said Singh was killed at a shop on Tuesday. His funeral was held Wednesday. Singh's family in recent years had migrated to Peshawar from the Khyber tribal region, where he had been a vocal supporter of the military's efforts to crack down on Islamic extremists. Most Sikhs went to India during the 1947 partition, with only a few thousand remaining in Pakistan. Posted 5/29/18 The OATS bus in Dallas County has announced its monthly schedule.From Dallas County, the bus travels to the following towns: Springfield, second Wednesday each month. Lebanon, second and fourth PATNA, India (AP) - Strong winds, rain and lightning killed at least 38 people this week in India, including four members of a family who were crushed when a tall minaret at a mosque collapsed on their home, officials said Wednesday. State official Pallavi Mishra said three other people were injured when the 30-meter (100-foot) minaret fell on their home in a village in Lakhimpur Kheri in northern Uttar Pradesh state on Tuesday night. Winds blowing at about 80 kilometers (50 miles) per hour demolished mud homes and knocked over trees and electric poles. Officials said 19 people died in Uttar Pradesh and the same number in eastern Bihar state. North India has been hit repeatedly by strong winds and rain this month, including one storm that killed 134 people and another that killed 43, officials said. The fatalities occurred as blistering summer heat prepares to give way to annual monsoon rains. The southwest monsoon arrived in Kerala at the southern tip of India on Tuesday, starting the crop-planting season in a four-month journey from the south to northern India. Powerful rains also hit the coastal districts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi for a third straight day in the southern state of Karnataka, flooding roads and homes in low-lying areas. The Press Trust of India news agency said Mangalore city was hit badly, forcing authorities to close schools and residents to use boats in some areas. About 130 buildings were partially or fully damaged by heavy rains in Udupi, PTI said. BEIJING (AP) - The founder and former head of the sprawling Chinese insurance group that owns New York's famed Waldorf Astoria Hotel is appealing his sentence of 18 years in prison for fraud. A lawyer for Wu Xiaohui told The Associated Press on Wednesday that his client would seek to have the charges against him dismissed. Lawyer Chen Youxi said the charges were not supported by evidence, but declined to provide further information. Prior to Wu's sentencing earlier this month, his Anbang Insurance Group acquired a vast range of global assets and discussed possibly investing in a Manhattan skyscraper owned by the family of U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner. Those talks ended last year with no deal. The Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court said Wu pleaded guilty at trial to fraudulently raising billions of dollars from investors. The court also ordered the confiscation of 10.5 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) in assets from Wu, who founded privately-owned Anbang in 2004. Wu was accused of misleading investors and diverting money for his own use. He was detained last year and regulators seized control of Anbang in February. He was shown on state TV in March admitting guilt. Wu initially had denied his guilt at his one-day trial, according to a court statement. Court documents quoted by state media said Wu concealed his ownership of shares in companies controlled by Anbang, filed false statements with financial authorities and lured investors by offering a rate of return above that offered elsewhere. Much of the business relied on selling insurance products to raise investment capital. They said he used more than 100 companies under his control to manage funds and used his position to misappropriate 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in Anbang's deposits. SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) - Macedonia's prime minister said Wednesday that any new name for his country that is agreed with neighboring Greece will be put to a referendum to be held later this year. Zoran Zaev said Skopje and Athens have never been closer to reaching an agreement over Macedonia's name, which has been the subject of a decades-long dispute Macedonia's government has committed to modifying the republic's name to address Greek concerns that the current one implies territorial claims on the northern Greek province of the same name. In return, Athens has promised to lift its objections to Macedonia's NATO and European Union membership. Zaev said a referendum on whatever solution is found will be held in September or October, and that both countries' parliaments will have had to ratify the deal beforehand. The prime minister didn't specify what the new name might be, but said an "important conversation" with Greek counterpart Alexis Tsipras on the issue should take place by Friday. Several options were in play for the Balkan country's new name, including "Republic of Northern Macedonia", "Republic of Upper Macedonia", and the latest Macedonian proposal "Republic of Ilinden Macedonia," which Athens has rejected. "I would not comment on certain benchmarks, adjectives or additions to the name because we are in the final phase of a possible solution for a more than 25-year-old problem," Zaev told a news conference marking one year since he took office. VATICAN CITY (AP) - South Korean taekwondo athletes have performed for Pope Francis, after a planned show of Korean unity at the Vatican fell apart when the North pulled out at the last minute. Pope Francis didn't seem to notice or mind, thanking the athletes Wednesday for their exhibition "which was a show of the will for peace, the two Koreas together." South Korea's World Taekwondo organization, the Seoul-led international body, said last week that a demonstration team from the North withdrew from the performance over the U.S.-South Korean military drills. A Vatican Swiss Guard is framed by taekwondo athlethes from South Korea performing for Pope Francis during his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) The performance had been planned to ceremonially open the World Taekwondo's Grand Prix competition this week in Rome. The South's team performed for thousands of people in St. Peter's Square and featured a young girl releasing a dove in a sign of peace. Pope Francis, bottom center, is driven through the crowd as he arrives for his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) Taekwondo athlethes from South Korea perform for Pope Francis during his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) Taekwondo athlethes from South Korea perform for Pope Francis during his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) Taekwondo athletes from South Korea hug each other after perforimg for Pope Francis during his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. South Korean taekwondo athletes have performed for the pontiff after a planned show of Korean unity at the Vatican fell apart when the North pulled out at the last minute. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) Pope Francis waves to faithful as he leaves at the end of the weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) Pope Francis waves to faithful as he arrives for his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) Pope Francis leaves at the end of the weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) Taekwondo athlethes from South Korea release a dove after performing for Pope Francis during his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) Pope Francis waves to faithful as he arrives for his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - To the gasps, whoops and applause of stunned colleagues, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko walked into a news conference Wednesday, less than a day after police in the Ukrainian capital said he had been assassinated. Authorities said his death had been staged to foil a plot on his life by Moscow's security services and one arrest was made. Russia denounced the faked killing as an outlandish attempt at defamation by its neighbor and foe. Even Babchenko's wife was unaware of the deception, and the 41-year-old Kremlin critic who fled to Ukraine 15 months ago apologized to her "for the hell she had to go through in the past two days. There was no choice there, either." Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, right, and Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service speaks to the media during a news conference at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Neither Babchenko nor Ukrainian Security Service chief Vasyl Gritsak gave details of the sting operation or how they made his wife believe he was dead. Kiev Police Chief Andriy Krishchenko had announced Babchenko's death Tuesday, saying the journalist's wife found him bleeding at their apartment building in Kiev but that he died en route to the hospital. Lawmaker Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the interior minister, said the assailant had waited on a staircase in the building and shot Babchenko in the back as he was going to buy bread. Just hours before the shooting was reported, Babchenko wrote on Facebook that he considered the day a "second birthday" because it was the fourth anniversary of his missing a flight on a Ukrainian military helicopter that later was shot down in the conflict between Ukraine and Moscow-backed separatists in the eastern part of the country. At the start of Wednesday's news conference, Gritsak announced the journalist's murder had been solved and called the day Babchenko's "third birthday." Babchenko, clad in a black sweatshirt, walked into the room as other reporters gasped and exclaimed their surprise, then broke into applause. "I'm still alive," an uneasy-looking Babchenko said with a straight face. Then he apologized for the deception. "I know that sickening feeling when you bury a colleague," he added. The news conference produced mixed emotions. "I was shocked. But then a feeling of happiness rose up," said Serhii Nuzhnenko, a freelance journalist. Babchenko said he was not allowed to go into the details of his false death. He said Ukraine's law enforcement had been aware of a contract on his head for two months. He said he was approached by the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU, a month ago. "The important thing is my life has been saved and other, bigger terrorist attacks have been thwarted," he said. It also was unclear why authorities decided to go to such lengths to make it look as if Babchenko was dead. Gritsak said investigators had identified a Ukrainian citizen who allegedly was paid $40,000 by the Russian security service to organize and carry out the hit. The unidentified Ukrainian man in turn allegedly hired an acquaintance to be the gunman, he added. The suspected organizer of the alleged hit plot was detained Wednesday, Gritsak said, suggesting the bogus killing was aimed at flushing him out, and he showed a video of the arrest. Killing Babchenko was part of a larger alleged plot by Russian security services, Gritsak said. The Ukrainian man also was supposed to procure large quantities of weapons and explosives, including 300 AK-47 rifles and "hundreds of kilos of explosives," to perpetrate acts of terror in Ukraine, he said. The Russian Foreign Ministry said the Ukrainian government was "fanning anti-Russian hysteria. We're confident our foreign partners and the relevant international agencies will draw correct conclusions from the whole situation." Konstantin Kosachev, head of the international affairs committee of the upper house of the Russian parliament, compared Ukraine's actions to Britain accusing Moscow of being behind the nerve gas poisonings of a Russian former spy and his daughter in England. Russia vehemently denies poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal. "The logic is the same - to defame Russia," Kosachev told the state news agency Tass. Ukraine also faced a backlash from international journalism figures. "I deplore the decision to spread false information on the life of a journalist. It is the duty of the state to provide correct information to the public," said Deniz Yazici of the media freedom office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Reporters Without Borders director Christophe Deloire tweeted his "deepest indignation at the discovery of the manipulation of the Ukrainian secret services. It is always deeply dangerous for states to play with the facts." Some wondered if the ruse would ultimately backfire, harming Ukraine's credibility or undermining concern about violence against journalists. "There's one nuance - if somebody's shot now, nobody will believe it," noted journalist Mustafa Nayyem, who became a parliament member, told The Associated Press. Babchenko, one of Russia's best-known war reporters, fled the country in February 2017. He spoke and wrote about needed to leave Russia because of threats against him and his family. He said his home address was published online and the threats he received were made by phone, email and social media. Moscow's annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine were topics on which the journalist was scathingly critical of the Kremlin. His flight from Russia came several months after he wrote in a Facebook post that he wasn't sorry that members of a military band and state TV journalists died in a plane crash on their way to Russia's military base in Syria. Several Russian lawmakers said at the time that Babchenko should be stripped of his citizenship over the comment, and Russian state media called him a traitor. Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian lawmaker who also moved to Ukraine, said Babchenko continued being threatened after he settled last fall in Kiev, where he worked as a host for the Crimean Tatar TV station. ___ Vasilyeva reported from Moscow. Jim Heintz in Moscow, Ayse Wieting in Istanbul, Turkey, and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed. Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko reacts during a news conference at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life.(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, left, and Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko speak during their meeting in Kiev, Ukraine, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko, who was reported shot dead in the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday, showed up at a news conference on Wednesday, saying that the security services faked his death in order to thwart a plot on his life. (Mykola Lazarenko/Presidential Press Service Pool Photo via AP) Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, center, Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, left, and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko attend a news conference at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Police guard the front door of the multi-storey building where Russian opposition journalist Arkady Babchenko lived, in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, May 29, 2018. Police in the capital of Ukraine say a Russian journalist has been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment. Ukrainian police said Arkady Babchenko's wife found him bleeding at the apartment on Tuesday and called an ambulance, but Babchenko died on the way to a hospital. (AP Photo/Sergiy Nuzhnenko) A view of the multi-storey building where Russian opposition journalist Arkady Babchenko lived, in Kiev, Ukraine, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. A Russian journalist harshly critical of the Kremlin was shot and killed in the Ukrainian capital Tuesday, and the national police said they are assuming he was targeted because of his work. (AP Photo/Sergiy Nuzhnenko) Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, reacts during a news conference with Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko speaks to the media during a news conference at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, left, and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko attend a news conference at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, center, speaks to the media as Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, left, and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko attend a news conference at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, right, listens to Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service during a news conference at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, center, Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, left, and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko attend a news conference at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, listens during a news conference with Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, listens for a question during a news conference with Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, left, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, center, and Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service speak during their meeting in Kiev, Ukraine, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko, who was reported shot dead in the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday, showed up at a news conference on Wednesday, saying that the security services faked his death in order to thwart a plot on his life. (Mykola Lazarenko/Presidential Press Service Pool Photo via AP) THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - Dutch prosecutors have asked a judge to ban the Hells Angels motorcycle gang in the Netherlands, arguing that its members are part of "a subculture of lawlessness." The appeal is not the first time Dutch authorities have gone after the gang. An earlier attempt to outlaw a local branch of the Hells Angels was rejected by Dutch courts, including by the country's Supreme Court in 2009. Prosecutors said Wednesday that they handed to a court in the central Netherlands a dossier including hundreds of pages outlining the Hells Angels' activities. They said in a statement that the gang's members are involved in crimes such as extortion and intimidation. Dutch prosecutors have in recent years gone after other motorcycle gangs, saying that they form a threat to civil order. BEIJING (AP) - China is reducing import duties on washing machines, cosmetics and some other consumer goods amid U.S. pressure to narrow its multibillion-dollar trade surplus. The Cabinet announcement Wednesday was the third tariff cut in six months on selected imports in what Beijing says is an effort to improve consumer choice and encourage domestic consumption. Import duties on washing machines and refrigerators will be cut from 20.5 percent to 8 percent, effective July 1, said the announcement carried by state television. Duties also will be cut on cosmetics, some drugs, shoes and some other goods. Beijing is in the midst of talks with Washington on possible measures to narrow its trade surplus by increasing imports. The U.S. commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, is due in Beijing this week for talks on details of China's promise in mid-May to buy more American goods. China accounts for the bulk of global production of many of the goods covered by Wednesday's tariff cuts. The change would give foreign producers of high-end versions more access to the Chinese market. Previous rounds of tariff cuts since November covered avocados, mineral water, baby carriages and other high-value but low-volume imports. Chinese leaders are in the midst of a marathon effort to nurture self-sustaining economic growth based on consumer spending instead of trade and investment. Foreign products often are seen as higher quality, safer or cheaper. That has fueled a spending boom by Chinese tourists on basic goods including shoes, cosmetics and infant formula. Economists say the changes also can help generate jobs in China by allowing consumers to buy higher-quality goods locally instead of when they travel abroad. ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - A trial is under way for a former CIA case officer accused of giving top-secret documents to the Chinese. Kevin Mallory of Leesburg, Virginia, was charged last year under federal espionage statutes with delivering defense information to a foreign government. Prosecutors say they caught Mallory last year after he returned to the U.S. on a flight from Shanghai with more than $16,000 in undeclared cash. Mallory has argued in court papers that he never provided anything of value to the Chinese and that he was engaging them to try to gain information about their intelligence operations. A jury was selected Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, and opening statements are scheduled for Wednesday morning. The trial is expected to last about two weeks. PLANTATION KEY, Fla. (AP) - A robbery suspect who shot a Florida Keys sheriff's deputy in the chest in a videotaped shootout has been sentenced to life in prison. The Miami Herald reports that 27-year-old Timothy Thomas was sentenced Tuesday in Plantation Key for the 2015 shooting of Monroe County Deputy Joshua Gordon, who was saved by his body armor. Gordon had tried to pull him over for driving a car with stolen tags, and didn't know Thomas was wanted for robbery and a probation violation. Thomas drove off after being hit twice in the ensuing gun battle with Gordon and other deputies. He surrendered the next day in Key West after an hours-long standoff. ___ Information from: The Miami Herald, http://www.herald.com Walmart is offering its employees a new perk: affordable access to a college degree. America's largest private employer, which in the past has helped its workers get their high school or equivalency degrees, hopes the new benefit will help it recruit and retain higher quality entry-level employees in a tight U.S. labor market. The company is working with Denver-based startup Guild Education to give employees the chance to obtain a bachelor's degree in business or supply-chain management. It will cost a dollar a day at one of three nonprofit universities with online programs that have had success working with adult learners: the University of Florida, Brandman University and Bellevue University. It plans to eventually expand to more types of degrees. Walmart is offering its employees affordable access to a college degree It will also offer college-prep classes for workers who need extra help. Walmart is subsidizing the cost of tuition, books and fees. Both full-time and part-time workers who have been with the company at least 90 days will be eligible, Walmart said. About 68,000 of Walmart's 1.4 million U.S. employees are expected to enroll in the first five years, based on interest from its workers, said Julie Murphy, executive vice president of people at Bentonville, Arkansas-based Walmart. Walmart declined to disclose the cost of the program. The move underscores how retailers and restaurant chains are under increasing pressure to improve the skills of their workers as shoppers move online. Store chains including Walmart have also raised wages as low unemployment gives trained retail workers more options. America's largest private employer has in the past helped its workers get their high school or equivalency degree (file photo) Walmart has said the tax overhaul helped it also give workers one-time bonuses and expand parental leave benefits. Critics say Walmart should share even more of its profits with employees. But a shareholder proposal presented Wednesday, calling on the company to invest as much money in the stock plan for employees as it does on share buybacks, was rejected. Also defeated were proposals that would require Walmart to publish a report on racial and ethnic pay gaps and to create an independent chair. The partnership with Guild Education goes beyond Walmart's current program covering the cost of workers and eligible family members for earning a high school diploma or GED equivalent. It's hoped the new benefit will help it recruit and retain higher quality entry-level employees in a tight U.S. labor market The company also grooms managers at its Walmart Training Academy, and has a career program for entry-level workers. Guild Education, founded in 2015, works with other national chains like Chipotle Mexican Grill, Taco Bell and Lowe's, on their employee education programs. But Rachel Carlson, CEO and co-founder of Guild Education, says its partnership with Walmart is unique in several ways, including its low upfront costs. Walmart's move puts it more in league with Starbucks, which three years ago began offering four years of tuition for an online college degree from Arizona State University. Posted 5/29/18 Residents of the Cross Timbers community united in a show of support for area veterans during the towns annual Memorial Day ceremony.Several living veterans were in attendance, and 169 crosses LEXINGTON, S.C. (AP) - A South Carolina man accused of killing his five children will use an insanity defense in his upcoming death penalty trial, his lawyers say. News outlets report that attorneys for Timothy Ray Jones Jr., 36, have notified prosecutors of their intent for his trial, which is set to begin October 15 in Lexington County. His attorneys have long suggested that Jones suffered from mental problems. The children's mother said he had been smoking synthetic marijuana and that she repeatedly tried to warn social workers that he posed a danger to them before they were killed. Authorities said the father killed his children at his Lexington home in August 2014, after picking them up from school and day care. At the time, their mother, Amber Jones, was living apart from him due to marital problems. Six days later, she reported them missing and authorities began a search. Police found Jones in Mississippi, where he was stopped for driving under the influence. In his vehicle, officers found a "large amount of blood and handwritten notes with directions" on how to kill and mutilate bodies. Authorities determined that he had been driving around the Southeast for nine days with their bodies in plastic garbage bags. Jones later led police to a hillside in a rural area near Camden, Alabama, where he left their remains. Court records show four of the children - Merah, 8; Elias, 7; Gabriel, 2; and Elaine, 1 - were strangled. Nahtahn, 6, was beaten to death. Jones told investigators he thought his children planned to kill him and then "chop him up and feed him to the dogs." Amber Jones is suing the state Department of Social Services, alleging the state agency failed to safeguard her children despite repeated reports that Jones posed a danger to them. She also has filed a second lawsuit seeking damages from Lexington County retailers, alleging they sold him the synthetic marijuana product that he was under the influence of when he killed the children. JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) - The Latest on the resignation of Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (all times local): 6:05 p.m. Missouri Lt. Gov. Mike Parson says he's planning a private swearing-in ceremony to take over after Gov. Eric Greitens resigns. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens reads from a prepared statement as he announces his resignation during a news conference, Tuesday, May 29, 2018, at the state Capitol, in Jefferson City, Mo. Greitens resigned amid a widening investigation that arose from an affair with his former hairdresser. Greitens said his resignation would take effect Friday. (Julie Smith/The Jefferson City News-Tribune via AP) Greitens is resigning Friday instead of continuing to fight a criminal charge and potential impeachment proceedings over alleged sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations. Parson will take his place as governor. Both are Republicans who won separate races for their respective offices in 2016. Parson says he's planning a private ceremony Friday because of time constraints. He said he'll plan a public event later. Parson says he'll be working for the rest of the week and weekend on his transition to the state's top executive. He says he'll have discussions later about how the open lieutenant governor's seat should be handled. ___ 5:30 p.m. A former Missouri Supreme Court chief justice says a prosecutor's agreement to drop a criminal case against Gov. Eric Greitens following his resignation is "a good result for him." Michael Wolff said Wednesday that it's possible that Greitens supporters were counting Missouri House votes on his impeachment and concluded he couldn't avoid it. Greitens plans to step down Friday. Wolff also is a retired Saint Louis University law school dean. He said Greitens will leave office admitting to "doing nothing" and it's possible that in six months that he will say a "liberal cabal" pushed him out. Wolff also said it's "surprising" that the agreement would protect the prosecutor and her staff from being sued over their actions. He said, "I don't know if I've ever seen that." ___ 4 p.m. A former federal prosecutor says that an agreement to drop a criminal case against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens when he resigned is a "fair resolution" to the case. Jean Paul Bradshaw II said Wednesday that the St. Louis city prosecutor's office accomplished the "greatest public benefit" it could with Greitens' departure from office. Bradshaw is a Kansas City attorney who served as U.S. attorney for western Missouri in 1989-93. Greitens plans to step down Friday. Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner agreed to drop a felony charge of computer data tampering. The charge accused Greitens of improperly suing a donor list for a charity he founded for his 2016 campaign. Bradshaw said Greitens' resignation makes the agreement to drop the case appropriate because the state can "get back to doing business." ___ 1 p.m. A St. Louis judge has agreed to dismiss a felony computer data tampering case against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens. Circuit Judge Rex Burlison on Wednesday approved an agreement reached by Greitens' attorneys and the St. Louis circuit attorney's office. Greitens announced his resignation on Tuesday. It is effective 5 p.m. Friday. The dismissal agreement has seven stipulations, two of which are sealed and unavailable to the public. One of the open stipulations states that Greitens has agreed to release Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner and everyone in her office from civil liability. Greitens also was indicted in February on invasion of privacy stemming from an alleged affair with his St. Louis hairdresser in 2015. The charge was dropped earlier this month. A special prosecutor is deciding whether to refile that case. ___ 12:35 p.m. A county judge ordered attorneys to preserve data from phones targeted in an investigation into a text-deleting phone app used by Gov. Eric Greitens and some of his staff. Circuit Judge Jon Beetem on Wednesday ordered Robert Thompson, who is representing Greitens' office, to compile a list of those who used the Confide app, along with the telephone numbers they used. Attorney Mark Pedroli filed a lawsuit contending Greitens and his top staff violated the state's open records laws by using the app. The Columbia Daily Tribune reports Beetem's ordered Pedroli and Thompson to present draft lists of the data on the phones by the end of the day. Thompson had filed a motion seeking time to confer with Lt. Gov. Mike Parson about whether to continue to defend the case after Parson becomes governor Friday. ___ This story corrects the spelling of Greitens in one reference. ___ 12:10 p.m. A spokeswoman for St. Louis' top prosecutor says the office agreed to drop a computer tampering charge against Gov. Eric Greitens after his attorneys suggested he would resign if the case was dismissed. Susan Ryan, a spokeswoman for Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, told The Associated Press that defense attorneys approached the office and Gardner agreed to their proposal. Defense attorney Jim Martin acknowledged reaching out to Gardner to resolve the issue but added, "I don't think that's exactly the full play." He didn't elaborate. Martin says he expects a felony invasion of privacy charge against Greitens will be resolved soon as well. A special prosecutor is weighing whether to refile that charge. ___ This item corrects that Gardner agreed to the defense proposal. ___ 11:30 a.m. Defense attorney Jim Martin says he's happy "we've eliminated the issue" of the computer tampering charge against departing Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner announced Wednesday that she's dropping that charge against Greitens. A special prosecutor is considering whether to refile an invasion of privacy charge against him. Martin says he thinks "we'll resolve that soon" but would not elaborate. Martin says "it's now time to leave the governor alone and let him and his family heal." ___ 11:20 a.m. St. Louis' top prosecutor is pushing back against Gov. Eric Greitens' past statements that the charges she initially filed against him were part of a coordinated "witch hunt." St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner announced Wednesday that she's dropping the computer tampering charge against Greitens, who is resigning on Friday. A special prosecutor is weighing whether to refile another criminal charge against him. Gardner says she made the agreement to dismiss the computer charge after conversations with Greitens' attorneys. She says there was enough evidence to bring the charge but that if he were convicted, it's unlikely Greitens would have served any jail time due to his status as a first-time offender. As for Greitens allegations of a witch hunt, Gardner said she rejects his "shameful personal attacks" and "dangerous and false rhetoric about the criminal justice system and the rule of law." ___ 11:05 a.m. Missouri's top legislative leaders are meeting with Lt. Gov. Mike Parson to plan the transition in power when Gov. Eric Greitens resigns. Parson met Wednesday with House Speaker Todd Richardson, Senate President Pro Tem Ron Richard and Senate Majority Leader Mike Kehoe. The lawmakers said they have invited Parson to deliver a speech to a joint session of the Legislature in the coming weeks. Greitens announced Tuesday that he was resigning Friday instead of continuing to fight a criminal charge and potential impeachment proceedings over alleged sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations. Among those meeting Wednesday with Parson was Sarah Steelman, Greitens' administration commissioner. Parson also was receiving enhanced security that is supplied to incoming governors. ___ 10:40 a.m. The prosecutor's office in St. Louis will drop a felony charge of computer data tampering against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, now that the Republican governor has announced his resignation. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner announced the decision Wednesday, a day after Greitens' surprise announcement that he would step down effective Friday afternoon. The charge, filed in April following an investigation by the Missouri attorney general's office, accused Greitens of using a donor list from the veterans charity he founded, The Mission Continues, for his 2016 gubernatorial campaign. Greitens also was indicted on felony invasion of privacy in February in St. Louis, stemming from an extramarital affair in 2015. The case was dismissed earlier this month and a special prosecutor in Jackson County is still considering whether to refile the charge. ___ This story has been corrected to reflect the charity's name as The Mission Continues. ___ 9 a.m. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner is planning to explain the resolution of criminal charges against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens. Gardner's news conference is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. She said Tuesday that her office has reached a "fair and just resolution" on charges of tampering with a computer against Greitens. Greitens announced the same day that he is resigning as governor, effective Friday. A felony indictment in February accused Greitens of taking an unauthorized and compromising photo of a St. Louis woman during an extramarital affair in 2015. The charge was dropped earlier this month, but Jackson County prosecutor Jean Peters Baker was appointed special prosecutor to consider whether to refile it. Baker said in a statement that the investigation is ongoing. ___ 8:30 a.m. On a dreary overcast day, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens stood in a light rain near the Governor's Mansion and recounted his grueling training as a Navy SEAL officer to suggest he would never quit fighting allegations of sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations. Less than two weeks later, Greitens announced Tuesday that he is quitting with his mission incomplete. Greitens' departure will become official at 5 p.m. Friday - marking a stunning political defeat for the 44-year-old, self-made warrior-philosopher who had aspirations of someday becoming president. For those fellow Republicans who had strenuously urged his resignation, Greitens' exit provides the divided party a chance to reunify at the start of a summer campaign season in which it's seeking to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens leaves the podium after announcing his resignation at a news conference, Tuesday, May 29, 2018, at the state Capitol, in Jefferson City, Mo. Greitens resigned amid a widening investigation that arose from an affair with his former hairdresser. Greitens said his resignation would take effect Friday. (Julie Smith/The Jefferson City News-Tribune via AP) Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens reads from a prepared statement as he announces his resignation during a news conference, Tuesday, May 29, 2018, at the state Capitol, in Jefferson City, Mo. Greitens resigned amid a widening investigation that arose from an affair with his former hairdresser. Greitens said his resignation would take effect Friday. (Julie Smith/The Jefferson City News-Tribune via AP) Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens reads from a prepared statement as he announces his resignation during a news conference, Tuesday, May 29, 2018, at the state Capitol, in Jefferson City, Mo. Greitens resigned amid a widening investigation that arose from an affair with his former hairdresser. Greitens said his resignation would take effect Friday. (Julie Smith/The Jefferson City News-Tribune via AP) FILE - In this May 17, 2018 file photo, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens looks on before speaking at an event near the capitol in Jefferson City, Mo. Greitens, a sometimes brash outsider whose unconventional resume as a Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL officer made him a rising star in Republican politics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, May 29, 2018, after a scandal involving an affair with his former hairdresser led to a broader investigation by prosecutors and state legislators. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File) NEW YORK (AP) - New guidelines released Wednesday recommend U.S. adults start colon cancer screening earlier, at age 45 instead of 50. The American Cancer Society's advice puts it out of sync with guidelines from an influential government advisory group, which kept the age at 50 in an update two years ago. Cancer society officials acknowledge the shift to 45 could cause confusion for doctors and patients but felt strongly that they needed to act now. The advocacy group was influenced by its study, published last year, that found rising rates of colon cancer and deaths in people younger than 50. Experts aren't sure why there has been a 50 percent increase in cases since 1994. The guidelines are for men and women ages 45 to 75 of average risk for colon cancer; recommendations are different for people with certain conditions, like Crohn's disease, or a family history of colon cancer. The group endorses six kinds of screening exams, from inexpensive take-home stool tests performed every year to colonoscopies done every 10. "All of these tests are good tests, and the choice should be offered to patients," said the cancer society's Dr. Rich Wender. "The best test is the test that gets done." The same tests are recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a panel that reviews evidence and issues advice for a variety of screenings and treatments. It updated its colon cancer guidelines in 2016 and its next review isn't expected until around 2021. That panel's recommendations drive what screening is covered by insurance under the Affordable Care Act, although 20 states have laws that link coverage to the cancer society guidelines. It's not uncommon for groups to have slightly different guidelines although those for colon cancer have been about the same for decades. Most colon cancer occurs in adults 55 and older, and the good news is rates of cases and deaths have been falling for decades. Colon cancer, combined with rectal cancer, is the second leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. This year, more than 140,000 Americans are expected to be diagnosed with it, and about 50,000 will die from it. Doctors will probably look to specialty medical societies to sort out the different guidelines, said Dr. Marcus Plescia, of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. But it may take a little while before they offer clear advice. Some experts have worried about pre-50 risks of colon cancer in some racial and ethnic groups, and at least one specialty society for gastroenterologists has urged screening of black adults starting at age 45. Others argue that instead of lowering the age for routine screening, more effort should be put into getting more people tested. Only about two-thirds of people 50 and older have been following screening guidelines. "It's hard enough to get people to do it at all," Plescia noted. Dr. Andrew Wolf, the lead author of the latest guidelines, said they considered and rejected that reasoning. "We should be able to do both," said Wolf, a University of Virginia internist. ___ The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content. LISBON, Portugal (AP) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel has arrived in Portugal for a 24-hour official visit during which she will discuss the European Union's future with local officials. Merkel flew Wednesday to the northern Portuguese city of Porto, where she was met by Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa. She was due to inaugurate a research center run by German auto parts manufacturer Bosch before visiting Porto University's Institute for Health Research and Innovation, where she was to meet with students. On Thursday, Merkel is due in the capital city of Lisbon for talks with President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and with Costa before a lunchtime news conference. Germany is one of Portugal's biggest foreign investors. NEW YORK (AP) - Small businesses created fewer jobs during May, joining larger companies in a slowdown that may be due to a lack of qualified candidates. Payroll company ADP said Wednesday it counted 38,000 new jobs at its customers with 49 or fewer employees. That's down from an average of nearly 59,000 in the first four months of this year. ADP's tally of new jobs at companies of all sizes fell to 178,000 from a four-month average of nearly 229,000. Some companies have said in surveys they want to hire but struggle to find candidates with the right skills. A survey released Wednesday by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and MetLife showed that 32 percent of the 1,002 small business owners questioned between late March and late April expect to hire. In a separate survey taken in early April by Wells Fargo and Gallup, 43 percent of the 603 owners questioned want to hire. OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - In a story May 30 about a man who shot and wounded patrons at an Oklahoma City restaurant, The Associated Press misidentified an LGBTQ publication. Its name is The Gayly, not The Gayly Oklahoman. A corrected version of the story is below: Ammunition found in home of man who shot inside restaurant Police recovered ammunition among other items from the home of a man who shot and wounded patrons inside an Oklahoma restaurant last week By KEN MILLER Associated Press OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - Items found in the home of a man who shot and wounded patrons inside an Oklahoma City restaurant last week include ammunition that matches the type of gun he used in the shooting, according to a search warrant filed in district court. Police recovered the items from the northwest Oklahoma City apartment of Alexander Tilghman, 28, during a search that was approved just more than four hours after police say Tilghman opened fire about 6:30 p.m. last Thursday on patrons inside Louie's On The Lake, wounding a woman and two juvenile girls while a man suffered a broken arm when he fell during the chaos following the gunfire. The 9 millimeter ammunition would match the 9 millimeter handgun that police say Tilghman, who was certified as an armed security guard, used in the shooting. "He purchased that (weapon) legally," police Capt. Bo Mathews said Wednesday. The warrant, filed Tuesday, said Tilghman bought the weapon in January 2017. The warrant says investigators also recovered unspecified "writings in a notebook," a computer, a laptop, a gunbelt with a holster, handcuffs, a flashlight and pepper spray from the apartment. Police also released the January report by a reporter for The Gayly, an LGBTQ publication, who believed Tillghman could be a threat after she interviewed him about his posting of signs and stickers in the city saying that transsexual people are all clones of demons. The report says the reporter, however, told officers she was not directly threatened. "No investigation was assigned because no criminal acts took place," Mathews said. Tilghman's body was sent to the state medical examiner's office for autopsy, but a report had not been released by Wednesday afternoon and a spokeswoman for the office did not immediately respond to a phone call and email seeking comment. Wounded in the shooting were Natalie Giles, 39, her 12-year-old daughter and a 14-year-old family friend. The three were arriving at the restaurant for the birthday dinner of another of Giles' daughters, who was Giles was treated and released while her daughter has also been released, University of Oklahoma Medical Center spokeswoman Kayla Coffey said Wednesday, who said she had no information on the second girl, who was initially reported to be in good condition. The unidentified man was also initially reported in good condition and Mathews said police had no further information on the victims. DICKSON, Tenn. (AP) - The Latest on the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy (all times local): 11:20 p.m. Authorities have arrested a woman in connection to the death of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy who was fatally shot while responding to a call by a resident about a suspicious car. This 2017 photo provided by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation shows Steven Joshua Wiggins after he was arrested in Williamson County. Wiggins is a suspect in the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Authorities believe him to be "armed and dangerous." (Tennessee Bureau of Investigation via AP) In a statement Wednesday night the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says that it had developed information that 38-year-old Erika Castro-Miles had "participated in the incident." Castro-Miles was already in custody and now has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of Dickson County Sergeant Daniel Baker. She remains in custody at the Dickson County Jail. It's not immediately known if she has an attorney. Authorities are still searching for suspect Steven Joshua Wiggins. The reward for information leading to his arrest has increased to $12,500. They consider him armed and dangerous. ___ This story has been corrected to change the day of the arrest from Tuesday to Wednesday. ___ 4:45 p.m. Authorities have identified the Tennessee sheriff's deputy who was fatally shot while responding to a call by a resident about a suspicious car. Dickson County Sheriff Jeff Bledsoe said Sgt. Daniel Baker was killed early Wednesday. Bledsoe said Baker had been with the Dickson County sheriff's office for 10 years and worked his way up the ranks quickly. Baker is survived by his wife and a daughter. Bledsoe said his agency has lost a brother, and the community has lost a hero. Authorities are still searching for suspect Steven Joshua Wiggins. They consider him armed and dangerous. ___ 1:45 p.m. Authorities say the reward has increased to $7,500 for information leading to the arrest of a man sought by police in the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives helped increase the reward for information on Steven Joshua Wiggins. Authorities have said the Dickson County deputy was shot and killed early Wednesday after a responding to a call about a suspicious vehicle. They have not released the deputy's name. They say Wiggins remains at large and is believed to be armed and dangerous. State, federal and local authorities have launched a manhunt. ___ 1:20 p.m. Authorities say a Tennessee sheriff's deputy who was shot and killed was responding to a call by a resident about a suspicious car. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Susan Niland said at a news conference that the Dickson County deputy couldn't be contacted Wednesday for some time after responding to the call. The deputy's car was then tracked by GPS to a location 2 or 3 miles (3 to 5 kilometers) away, and the deputy was found dead inside of it. The deputy's name has not been released. Niland says the suspect was captured on video. Authorities have identified him as Steven Joshua Wiggins. They say he's still at large and is believed to be armed and dangerous. State, federal and local authorities have launched a manhunt, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has announced a reward of up to $2,500 for any information leading to his arrest. Niland says a female is being interviewed in the case. ___ 12:40 p.m. The man sought by police in the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy was charged the previous day with aggravated assault of a woman and vehicle theft. A report from the Kingston Springs Police Department says Steven Joshua Wiggins slapped the woman in her face and pulled out some of her hair Tuesday. The report says the woman stated that Wiggins put a gun to her head and threatened to kill her if she called the police, then he grabbed her car keys and took the car without her permission. The woman also told police Wiggins was "doing meth all night and smoking marijuana." The report says the woman plans to press charges. Authorities say Wiggins is at large and believed to be "armed and dangerous." ___ 11:10 p.m. Tennessee authorities are offering a monetary reward for information leading to the arrest of a suspect in the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation tweeted Wednesday that it has placed Steven Joshua Wiggins on its Top 10 Most Wanted list and is offering a reward of up to $2,500 for information leading to his arrest. The bureau believes Wiggins fatally shot an unidentified sheriff's deputy during a traffic stop early Wednesday in Dickson County. The agency also has sent an alert about the suspect to cellphones in the area. __ 10:20 a.m. Tennessee authorities say a sheriff's deputy has been fatally shot and a suspect believed to be "armed and dangerous" is still at large. A Tennessee Highway Patrol spokesman told news outlets the suspect was involved in an altercation with the Dickson County deputy early Wednesday after a vehicle was reported stolen. The Humphreys County Sheriff's Office identified the suspect as Steven Wiggins, who is described as a white male with balding brown hair. LONDON (AP) - In a twist straight out of a spy thriller, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko showed up at a news conference in Kiev on Wednesday - a day after he was reportedly shot dead in the Ukrainian capital. Babchenko explained that his death had been faked as part of sting by Ukrainian security services to catch his would-be assassin. It's an astonishing saga, but not the first time people under stress or duress have gone to the extreme of faking their own deaths. Here are a few cases: JUAN PUJOL Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, center, Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, left, and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko attend a news conference at the Ukrainian Security Service on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) Spanish chicken farmer Juan Pujol, codenamed Agent Garbo, played a key role in the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II. He pretended to be an agent of Germany, but was really working for Britain's MI5, feeding the Nazis misleading information about Allied war efforts. His greatest success was persuading German commanders that the Allied invasion would come in France's Pas de Calais region, far north of the real Normandy landing beaches. After the war, fearing revenge from surviving Nazis, he traveled with MI5 help to Angola where in 1949 he faked his death from malaria. Pujol, very much alive, moved to Venezuela, where he ran a bookshop. He died in 1988. ____ KEN KESEY Ken Kesey - ringmaster of acid-tripping band of 1960s jesters the Merry Pranksters - had published the acclaimed novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" when he was arrested in 1965 for marijuana possession. Fearing prison, he left his truck parked on a cliff-side road in California with an apparent suicide note reading "Ocean, Ocean, I'll beat you in the end" and was smuggled into Mexico in the trunk of a friend's car. He returned to the United States several months later, was arrested and served several months in prison. Kesey spent the rest of his life in Oregon and died in 2001 at the age of 66. ___ JOHN STONEHOUSE John Stonehouse was a British Labour lawmaker with financial troubles. With his business ventures crumbling, Stonehouse went to Florida in 1974 and faked his own death by leaving his clothes in a bundle on a Miami beach. He was arrested a month later in Australia where he was living under an alias taken from a dead former constituent. Extradited to Britain, he was sentenced to seven years for theft, fraud and deception. After being released, Stonehouse reinvented himself as the author of several thrillers. He died in 1988, aged 62. Two decades after his death, it was revealed that Stonehouse had been a Czech spy throughout the 1960s. Papers released by Britain's National Archives revealed that the British government had found out about Stonehouse's spying while he was still alive, but covered it up as there was too little evidence to put him on trial. ___ DAVID FRIEDLAND New Jersey state senator Friedland was a rising star in political circles until he was caught taking $300,000 in kickbacks in 1980. He was sentenced to seven years in jail, but avoided prison by agreeing to help the government catch other thieves. Friedland resumed his fraud, looting the pension funds of the Teamsters Union of more than $1 million. In 1985, when he learned an indictment was imminent, he traveled to the Bahamas and faked his death in a scuba-diving accident. Friedland eluded authorities until 1987, when he was captured in the Maldives, where he was running a scuba-diving business. On his release from prison in 1997, he had few regrets about his years on the run. "It would play better to say I had a miserable time, but that isn't true," he told the Asbury Park Press. "It was fun." ___ PHILIP SESSAREGO Tom Carew was the best-selling author of "Jihad!" - an account of special forces operations in Afghanistan written by a former member of Britain's elite Special Air Service. In the weeks after the Sept, 11 attacks, Carew appeared on television as an expert on the Taliban. But Carew was really Philip Sessarego, who had served in the regular British army, not the SAS. In 1993, Sessarego had faked his death in a car bombing in Croatia and reinvented himself as the dashing Carew. After the ruse was exposed by the BBC in November 2001, Sessarego moved to Belgium. His decomposed body was found in a garage in Antwerp in 2008. Police said he had likely died of carbon monoxide poisoning. FILE - In this April 24, 1997 file photo, author Ken Kesey poses with his bus "Further," in Springfield, Ore. In a twist straight out of a spy thriller, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko showed up at a press conference in Kiev on Wednesday - a day after he was reportedly shot dead in the Ukrainian capital. Ken Kesey - ringmaster of acid-tripping band of 1960s jesters the Merry Pranksters - had published the acclaimed novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Newst" when he was arrested in 1965 for marijuana possession. He left his truck parked on a cliffside road in California with an apparent suicide note reading "Ocean, Ocean, I'll beat you in the end" and was smuggled into Mexico in the trunk of a friend's car. He returned to the United States several months later, was arrested and served five months in prison. (AP Photo/Jeff Barnard, File) BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) - The Alabama Republican Party warned voters away from one of its candidates for a utility-regulating agency Wednesday in a statement that cited his "egregious" comments on social media and radio. State GOP chair Terry Lathan said the party's candidate committee had voted unanimously to censure Public Service Commission candidate Jim Bonner, who has twice served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention and bills himself as an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump. Bonner, 65, is a former community college teacher from Phil Campbell whose Facebook page includes posts that could be offensive to women, blacks and Muslims. This undated photo provided by the Alabama Republican Party shows state GOP chair Terry Lathan. Lathan released a statement on Wednesday, May 30, 2018, asking people not to vote for Jim Bonner, a Republican candidate for the Alabama Public Service Commission. The statement cited "egregious" comments made by the candidate on radio and social media. (AP Photo/Alabama Republican Party) Lathan said Bonner's comments "are not condoned by the Alabama Republican Party," and the party is asking people not to vote for him. "Mr. Bonner is welcome to his opinions and his first amendment right of free speech. The Alabama Republican Party is welcome to our opinion as well, and we reject the egregious comments Mr. Bonner continues to spew," said the statement by Lathan. Bonner, who is trying to unseat Public Service Commission member Jeremy Oden in Tuesday's primary, said he is drawing opposition within his own party for suggesting that the commission increase regulation on the politically powerful Alabama Power Co. "I'm a good old boy. I'm Mayberry RFD. I'm Andy Griffith. Well, maybe Andy Griffith with a foul mouth," Bonner said in a telephone interview. Bonner, who previously ran for the state school board, denied making any comments that are purposefully hurtful; critics are judging him on snippets of comments or social media posts taken out of context, he said. In one recent post, Bonner shared a photo of an orangutan wearing leaves like a hat with the comment, "Getting ready for the royal wedding." Critics took the post as an offensive comment aimed at the mixed-race background of Meghan Markle, but Bonner denied any such intention. "People jump up and say racist and sexist and misogynistic, or whatever that word is, and it's not," Bonner said in a telephone interview. While Bonner said he has raised only $1,000 and campaigns mainly by free social media and radio appearances, the Montgomery-based political consulting firm Cyngal said a recent survey showed Bonner in a tight race with the incumbent Oden among decided voters, although nearly 70 percent of voters are undecided. Brent Buchanan, president of Cyngal, said Bonner might be benefiting from his last name. Jo Bonner used to represent southwest Alabama in Congress, and his sister Judy Bonner is the retired president of the University of Alabama. "It appears from the data that this PSC race is within the margin of error strictly because of name confusion," Buchanan said in a statement. BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - Talks between the state of North Dakota a group of Native Americans failed to reach agreement over ways that tribal members can prove their identity in order to vote. Republican Secretary of State Al Jaeger said the two sides could find no agreement during the closed-door meeting Tuesday. He declined to discuss any of the proposals, saying they are confidential. Discussions "possibly may continue," Jaeger said. "We're leaving the door open." Tom Dickson, a Bismarck-based lawyer for tribal members, said he was hopeful a settlement could be reached. But he said "the ball is in the state's court." The talks were suggested by U.S. District Judge Daniel Hovland, who had criticized the state for raising a "litany of embellished concerns" about people taking advantage of his ruling last month that expand the proof of identity Native Americans can use for North Dakota elections. Hovland earlier had blocked a state requirement that documents used by Native American include residential street addresses that often aren't assigned on American Indian reservations. North Dakota officials called that part of his ruling unworkable, and said someone with only a post office box listed as their residence could vote where they don't live. In addition to allowing the post office box addresses, the judge expanded valid forms of identification to include more tribal documents. Jaeger, in a letter to county auditors following the failed settlement talks, said Hovland's order "remains in effect as it relates to post office boxes." American Indians tend to vote Democratic. Their strong support for Heidi Heitkamp was a big factor in helping her win a Senate seat in 2012 by fewer than 3,000 votes. But her re-election bid this year against the state's lone member of the House, Republican Kevin Cramer, is complicated by fallout from the Dakota Access pipeline issue. Some Indians are disappointed that Heitkamp didn't join them in opposing the pipeline, which drew thousands of protesters to North Dakota in 2016 and 2017. North Dakota's Republican-led legislature began tightening state voter identification laws shortly after Heitkamp's razor-thin victory six years ago, but GOP lawmakers have said it had no bearing on the legislation. North Dakota is the only U.S. state that doesn't require residents to register to vote, though it has required voters to provide ID since 2004. State law had allowed voters without an ID to sign an affidavit attesting to their eligibility to vote, but the Legislature removed that provision in 2013. Republican Gov. Doug Burgum last year signed GOP-led legislation that reworked the ID laws after tribal members sued the state in 2016. Several members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota have continued to challenge the laws, saying they are a form of voter suppression. Hovland has ruled in favor of the tribes throughout the litigation and the state has appealed. The state also is opposing attorney fees totaling more than $1.1 million filed by the Native American group. Hovland had suggested lawyers, the tribes and the state "sit down for one day and create workable and reasonable solutions so that all homeless persons, and all persons who live on Native American reservations in North Dakota, can have a meaningful opportunity to vote." He said "the solutions can be achieved with little effort and minimal expense." MOUNT PLEASANT, Wis. (AP) - Property owners in southeastern Wisconsin who believe they won't be fully compensated for land Foxconn Technology Group needs to build a $10 billion plant are appealing a ruling dismissing their case. A dozen property owners filed a federal lawsuit in January alleging the village of Mount Pleasant's use of eminent domain is unconstitutional because it is for private rather than public benefit. They say the offers for their properties are too low. The village is acquiring 18 acres (7 hectares) from landowners for the Foxconn complex. The lawsuit alleged the village was planning on to label some properties as blighted, which the property owners said would violate their Fifth Amendment rights. Judge Lynn Adelman of the U.S. Eastern District of Wisconsin dismissed the suit this month, calling it "not cognizable." "That defendants offered to pay some property owners substantially more than others to acquire their properties is hardly 'oppressive' in any actionable sense," Adelman wrote. "The facts alleged in the operative complaint do not come close to allowing me to infer that defendants violated it." The property owners' attorney, Erik Olsen, filed the appeal Tuesday, The Journal Times reported . The legal appeal won't stop the project, said Alan Marcuvitz, an attorney for the village. "We do not believe there is any merit to this lawsuit, which was confirmed in the decision by the U.S. District Court, granting the village's motion to dismiss the case," Marcuvitz said in a statement. "We are confident that the Appeals Court will reach the same conclusion." The Taiwanese company's plant will manufacture advanced liquid crystal display panels. ___ Information from: The Journal Times, http://www.journaltimes.com MIRAMAR, Fla. (AP) - A pet dog attacked and killed an 8-month-old girl at the Florida home of a caregiver. Miramar police said they received a call about the attack just before noon Wednesday, but by the time officers and paramedics arrived the baby was dead. They said the suburban Fort Lauderdale home belongs to a relative who was babysitting the child. No names or further details were immediately released, including the breed of the dog. Two other dogs at the house were not involved. DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - Leading Emirati rights activist Ahmed Mansoor has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined 1 million dirhams, or about $272,000, for criticizing the government in social media posts, local news reports said Wednesday. The National, an Abu Dhabi-based newspaper, reported that Mansoor was found guilty of insulting the "status and prestige of the UAE" and its leaders. It said Mansoor can appeal the State Security Court ruling through the Federal Supreme Court. Another UAE outlet, the Dubai-based Gulf News said the defendant, identified only as "AMS" by his initials, will be under surveillance for three years after prison. It said the defendant, who had a court-appointed lawyer, was convicted on Tuesday of defaming the United Arab Emirates on Twitter and Facebook. He was acquitted on other charges of cooperating with a "terrorist organization" outside the country, news reports said. Human Rights Watch condemned Mansoor's sentencing, saying it exposes the UAE's inability "to tolerate the mildest of criticisms from a genuine reformer." "A 10-year sentence for 'defaming' the UAE is all you need to know about the brutality and repression beneath the Emirates' gilded facade," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Mideast director at HRW. Mansoor was the recipient of the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders in 2015. He was also a member of Human Rights Watch's advisory committee on the Mideast and North Africa and a member of the Gulf Center for Human Rights' advisory board. He was arrested in March 2017 when security forces raided his home in the emirate of Ajman, confiscating computers and phones. Amnesty International said his iPhone had been targeted using elite spyware in an attempt to turn it into a tracking device and find out who his contacts were. The incident led to Apple issuing a security update to the iPhone in August 2016, according to Amnesty. In the weeks leading up to his arrest, Mansoor had criticized the imprisonment of other activists in the UAE, including Nasser bin-Ghaith, an academic and economist who was sentenced to 10 years after his criticism of Emirati and Egyptian authorities. Human Rights Watch previously reported that Mansoor had also used Twitter to draw attention to rights violations committed by the Saudi-led coalition at war in Yemen, of which the UAE is an active member. The charges Mansoor was found guilty of apparently fall under the country's 2012 cybercrimes law, which HRW says authorities in the UAE have used to imprison numerous activists. Mansoor had previously been detained in 2011 and sentenced to three years in prison for insulting top officials. He was pardoned later that year by the country's president, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, but was banned from traveling abroad. Last week, the FBI recommended rebooting home and small office routers that could have been infected with disruptive malware, allegedly by sophisticated state-backed Russian hackers . An estimated half million routers and network-attached storage devices have been infected. But even the FBI acknowledges this step will only "temporarily disrupt" the malware. Here are some questions and answers about the situation: Q: How can I tell if my router is infected? FILE- This July 27, 2008, file photo shows a, LED-illuminated wireless router in Philadelphia. Last week, the FBI recommended rebooting home and small office routers that could have been infected with disruptive malware, allegedly by sophisticated state-backed Russian hackers. An estimated half million routers and network-attached storage devices have been infected. But even the FBI admits this step will only "temporarily disrupt" the malware. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) A: Short answer: You probably can't. Routers aren't very consumer-friendly, and most people lack the ability to get deep enough inside the device to tell if it's infected. Q: If my router was infected and I reboot, is it safe? A: No. Turning an infected router off and on again only removes some of the malware - such as elements that could snoop on your internet activity or even overwrite the basic code on your router, thus "bricking" it (that is, turning it into an inoperable brick). The core infection persists on reboot and there's no simple way to delete it. The good news is that last week, the FBI seized of the command-and-control server that sends instructions to the infected routers, disrupting the zombie network that could be used to mount a crippling internet-based attack. The bad news is that the persistent malware is in listening mode, awaiting instructions. "So all the cards are still on the table," said Craig Williams of Cisco's Talos cyberthreat intelligence team, which identified the operation it calls VPNFilter. Q: Why can't I completely remove the malware from my router? A: For starters, routers are difficult for ordinary users to fiddle with. They have publicly known vulnerabilities that aren't easy for average users to patch and typically aren't equipped with anti-virus software packages or intrusion protection systems. That said, if you can update your router's "firmware" to the latest version - something you can often do via the router's phone app or web interface - you should. It may not fix the problem, but it won't hurt and may help. Q: Which devices are affected and where can I learn more? A: Cisco identified these companies as makers of affected devices: Linksys, Mikrotik, Netgear, TP-Link and QNAP. It said most of the infected routers are in Ukraine. You can find more details from Talos and the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team . The FBI says it has nothing new to report beyond the announcement it put out Friday. ___ Links: FBI announcement: https://www.ic3.gov/media/2018/180525.aspx Talos blog: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/05/VPNFilter.html U.S. CERT release: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA18-145A RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) - Brazilian oil workers have begun a 72-hour strike on the heels of a crippling nationwide truck drivers' strike that has started winding down after 10 days. The country's two main oil workers' unions say the strike was called to demand lower fuel prices and the resignation of Pedro Parente, president of state-owned oil company Petrobras. The strike began Wednesday in defiance of Brazil's top labor court, which declared it illegal and said the unions will have to pay a daily fine of 500,000 reals (about $135,000). An oil worker holds a Brazilian national flag as she stands at the entrance of Petrobras refinery during a strike in Duque da Caxias, Brazil, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Brazilian oil workers began a 3-day strike to demand a drop in the price of cooking gas. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) According to the Oil Worker's Federation, the strike has halted production at refineries in six states. Petrobras said in a statement that contingency teams were operating production units where the strike prevented shift changes from taking place. Oil workers shouts slogans as they hold a banner with a message that reads in Portuguese: "Oil Workers National Strike", at the entrance of Petrobras refinery during a strike in Duque da Caxias, Brazil, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) An oil worker wears a T-shirt with an image depicting Brazil's former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during a strike at the Petrobras refinery in Duque da Caxias, Brazil, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Brazilian oil workers began a 3-day strike to demand a drop in the price of cooking gas. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) Workers pedal their bicycles past a banner with a message that reads in Portuguese: "Get out Parente", in reference to Pedro Parente, the president of the state-owned oil company, at the entrance of a Petrobras refinery during a strike in Duque da Caxias, Brazil, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Brazilian oil workers began a 3-day strike to demand a drop in the price of cooking gas. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) An oil worker, wearing a uniform with "Out Temer" written on the backside, leads a chant at the entrance of the Petrobras refinery during a strike in Duque da Caxias, Brazil, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Brazilian oil workers began a 3-day strike to demand a drop in the price of cooking gas. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) A soldier stands guard along federal highway BR-116 which connects to Mercosur countries, after the military cleared truckers, who were protesting rising fuel costs, from blocking the road in Embu das Artes, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Andre Penner) Soldiers stand guard along federal highway BR-116 which connects to Mercosur countries, after the military cleared truckers, who were protesting rising fuel costs, from blocking the road in Embu das Artes, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Andre Penner) BALTIMORE (AP) - A grand jury has indicted four Baltimore teenagers accused of killing a Maryland police officer who was crushed by a stolen Jeep on a suburban cul-de-sac, authorities announced Wednesday. In a statement, the Baltimore County State's Attorney's office said the grand jury indictments are made up of first-degree murder and burglary charges. Baltimore County officer Amy Caprio died May 21 while responding to a report of a suspicious vehicle in the suburb of Perry Hall. Police accused 16-year-old Dawnta Harris of running her down in the stolen car as she tried to apprehend him. The state was formally supervising Harris, who was wearing an ankle bracelet pending sentencing for auto theft when he was arrested in Caprio's death. Also facing murder charges are his three alleged accomplices. They were allegedly committing a burglary in a nearby home when Caprio was run down on the street. Under the state's felony murder law, if someone is killed during a burglary, accomplices can also be prosecuted in the slaying. All four teenagers involved are now charged as adults and being held in an adult lockup. Prosecutors allege Caprio's body camera recorded Harris accelerating the Jeep at the officer as she tried to apprehend him. A defense lawyer for Harris, J. Wyndal Gordon, has argued that the state agency tasked with managing and treating youngsters like his client clearly dropped the ball. "They let Amy Caprio down," Gordon said recently. In the days following the policewoman's killing, some authorities in Maryland blamed each other for having put Harris on home arrest while he awaited sentencing for auto theft. WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump is overstating progress against the opioid epidemic, claiming "the numbers are way down" despite an increase of opioid-related deaths and overdoses in his first year in office. A look at his comments during a political rally in Nashville on Tuesday night: TRUMP: "We got $6 billion for opioid and getting rid of that scourge that's taking over our country. And the numbers are way down. We're getting the word out - bad. Bad stuff. You go to the hospital, you have a broken arm, you come out, you're a drug addict with this crap. It's way down. We're doing a good job with it. But we got $6 billion to help us with opioid." President Donald Trump points to an audience member as he speaks at a rally at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium Tuesday, May 29, 2018, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey) THE FACTS: Opioid prescriptions are down; deaths and other indicators of the epidemic are up, according to the latest statistics, from 2017. And those developments have nothing to do with the $6 billion approved by Congress because that money is for this year and next. Trump didn't specify what numbers he was talking about. But according to data released in April, prescriptions for opioid painkillers filled in the U.S. fell almost 9 percent last year, the largest drop in 25 years. The total dosage of opioid prescriptions filled in 2017 declined by 12 percent because more prescriptions were for a shorter duration, fewer new patients started on them and high-dose prescriptions dropped. The numbers are from health data firm IQVIA's Institute for Human Data Science. But legal prescriptions are only one front of the epidemic. Drug overdose deaths involving opioids rose to about 46,000 for the 12-month period ended October 2017, up about 15 percent from October 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The numbers are preliminary because of continuing cause-of-death investigations later in the reporting period. They could go higher. Other measures from the CDC also point to increasing severity of the problem last year. For example, emergency department visits for overdoses of opioids - prescription pain medications, heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl - rose 30 percent in the U.S. from July 2016 to September 2017. Overdoses shot up 70 percent in the Midwest in that time while increasing by 54 percent in large cities in 16 states. "Getting rid of that scourge" is the intent but the numbers don't show it fading. ___ Associated Press writers Mike Stobbe in New York and Carla K. Johnson in Seattle contributed to this report. ___ https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/opioid-overdoses/ ___ Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck NEW YORK (AP) - A senior North Korean official and the top U.S. diplomat had dinner in New York on Wednesday as President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un try to salvage prospects for a high-stakes nuclear summit. It's the highest-level official North Korean visit to the United States in 18 years. Kim Yong Chol, the former military intelligence chief and one of the North Korean leader's closest aides, landed midafternoon on an Air China flight from Beijing. Associated Press journalists saw the plane taxi down the tarmac before the North's delegation disembarked at JFK International Airport. During his unusual visit, Kim Yong Chol had dinner for about an hour-and-a-half with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who traveled from Washington to see him. The two planned a "day full of meetings" Thursday, the White House said. Their talks will be aimed at determining whether a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong Un, originally scheduled for June 12 but later canceled by Trump, can be restored, U.S. officials have said. North Korea's Kim Yong Chol, center, leaves a hotel in New York, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. The senior North Korean official arrived in New York on Wednesday in the highest-level official visit to the United States in 18 years, as President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un sought to salvage prospects for a high-stakes nuclear summit. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki) The talks come as preparations for the highly anticipated summit in Singapore were barreling forward on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, despite lingering uncertainty about whether it will really occur, and when. As Kim and Pompeo were meeting in New York, other U.S. teams were meeting with North Korean officials in Singapore and in the heavily fortified Korean Demilitarized Zone. "If it happens, we'll certainly be ready," White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of the Singapore summit. Regarding the date for the meeting, she added, "We're going to continue to shoot for June 12th." North Korea's flurry of diplomatic activity following a torrid run in nuclear weapons and missile tests in 2017 suggests that Kim Jong Un is eager for sanctions relief to build his economy and the international legitimacy the summit with Trump would provide. But there are lingering doubts on whether Kim will ever fully relinquish his nuclear arsenal, which he may see as his only guarantee of survival in a region surrounded by enemies. Trump announced that Kim Yong Chol was coming to New York for talks with Pompeo in a tweet on Tuesday in which he said he had a "great team" working on the summit. That was a shift from last week, when Trump announced in an open letter to Kim Jong Un that he had decided to "terminate" the summit following a provocative statement from the North. Pompeo, Trump's former CIA chief, has traveled to Pyongyang twice in recent weeks for meetings with Kim Jong Un, and has said there is a "shared understanding" between the two sides about what they hope to achieve in talks. South Korean media speculated that Pompeo could make a third trip to Pyongyang and that Kim Yong Chol was carrying a personal letter from Kim Jong Un and might push to travel to Washington to meet with Trump. North Korea's mission to the United Nations in New York is its sole diplomatic presence in the United States. That suggests Kim might have chosen to first go to New York because it would make it easier for him to communicate with officials in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital. North Korea and the United States are still technically at war and have no diplomatic ties because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. Trump views a summit as a legacy-defining opportunity to make the nuclear deal that has evaded others, but he pledged to walk away from the meeting if he believed the North wasn't serious about discussing dismantling its nuclear program. After the North's combative statements, there was debate inside the Trump administration about whether it marked a real turn to belligerence or a feint to see how far Kim Jong Un could push the U.S. in the lead-up to the talks. Trump had mused that Kim's "attitude" had changed after the North Korean leader's surprise visit to China two weeks ago, suggesting China was pushing Kim away from the table. Trump's letter, the aides said, was designed to pressure the North on the international stage for appearing to have cold feet. White House officials maintain that Trump was hopeful the North was merely negotiating but that he was prepared for the letter to mark the end of the two-month flirtation. Instead, the officials said, it brought both sides to the table with increasing seriousness, as they work through myriad logistical and policy decisions to keep June 12 a viable option for the summit. Kim Yong Chol is a vice chairman of the North Korean ruling party's central committee. The last official of his stature to visit the United States was Jo Myong Rok, the late first vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, who visited Washington in 2000, South Korea's Unification Ministry said. The White House emphasized that it has remained in close contact with South Korean and Japanese officials as preparations for the talks continue. Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump will host Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan on June 7 to coordinate their thinking ahead of the summit. Trump hosted South Korean President Moon Jae-in last week. Moon, who has lobbied hard for nuclear negotiations between Trump and Kim Jong Un, held a surprise meeting with the North Korean leader on Saturday in an effort to keep the summit alive. ___ Lederman reported from Washington and Bodeen from Beijing. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Zeke Miller and Catherine Lucey in Washington and Hyung-Jin Kim and Kim Tong-Hyung in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report. In this image made from video, Kim Yong Chol, center top, a senior North Korean official, walks across the tarmac at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport upon his arrival Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Kim is in New York for talks with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo aimed at salvaging a summit between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump, in the North's highest-level mission to the United States in 18 years. (AP Photo/Joe Frederick) Kim Yong Chol, left, a former military intelligence chief who is now North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's top official on inter-Korean relations, accompanied by North Korean Ambassador to China Ji Jae Ryong, second from left, arrives at Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Kim Yong Chol was headed to New York for talks with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) Kim Yong Chol, foreground, a former military intelligence chief who is now North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's top official on inter-Korean relations, arrives at Beijing airport in Beijing Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Kim Yong Chol was headed to New York for talks with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. (Madoka Ikegami/Kyodo News via AP) FILE - In this Feb. 27, 2018, file photo, Kim Yong Chol, center, a vice chairman of North Korea's ruling Workers' Party Central Committee, leaves to return to North Korea, at a hotel in Seoul, South Korea, (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File) SALEM, Mass. (AP) - A Salem, Massachusetts-based organization called The Satanic Temple is accusing Twitter of discriminating against it on religious grounds. Satanic Temple founder Lucien Greaves filed a complaint in March with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, saying Twitter wrongly suspended its accounts after someone tweeted a threat to the organization. The Boston Globe reports Twitter has restored the accounts but without the "verified" status Greaves wants. An attorney for Greaves says the standards used by Twitter to determine its suspensions and verifications of users is colored by its favoritism toward groups that share the social network's views. Twitter says an account is verified if it's determined to be of public interest. The Satanic Temple's building is zoned as an art gallery and is open to the public with art installations, lectures and film screenings. ___ Information from: The Boston Globe, http://www.bostonglobe.com RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - An appeals court has wiped out the convictions of two film producers sentenced to federal prison for running a synthetic marijuana operation. The Virginian-Pilot reports a Richmond appeals court ordered U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson to take up the case again of Charles Burton Ritchie and Benjamin Galecki. They were convicted last year of running a $21 million operation out of Pensacola, Florida, that shipped the drug known as spice to areas in Virginia. The court ruled Friday that Jackson shouldn't have barred defense testimony from a then-scientist with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The scientist was later arrested on charges of communicating with a child under 15 for sexual contact. The two produced "Misery Loves Comedy," a 2015 documentary featuring Martin Short, Amy Schumer, Jimmy Fallon and other comedians. ___ Information from: The Virginian-Pilot, http://pilotonline.com Voice of the People Audio Article Native son Tom Smiths history of East Chesterton (Chesterton Tribune 9-30-21 Commentary) was interesting and a poignant tribute to his five-generations back ancestors, the Morgans, who traveled from West Virginia and Ohio to settle here in 1833 to raise a family, to farm and... Voice of the People Audio Article This summer the Times of NW Indiana again suggested in an editorial that Dunes Action had been in opposition to the renovation of the State Park Pavilion. We never did. In fact, most of us had been waiting for it for decades. They did not... Guest Commentary Audio Article This is a short history of the Morgan family farm before the possible development of the remaining 49 acres east of Chesterton. Jesse and Jane Morgan arrived in Northwest Indiana in 1833 after traveling through Ohio, northern Indiana, stopping off in LaPorte County for a... Echoes of the Past Audio Article 10 Years Ago Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2011 Bethlehem Lutheran Church will host a wellness screening event. . . CHS girls soccer team beats LaPorte 5-0 and clinches a share of the DAC title. Scoring goals are Rosie Biehl (2), Hannah Kollar (2), and Sam... NORTHFIELD, N.J. (AP) - A New Jersey teacher has been convicted of simple assault of a student who hit his head on a floor after authorities say she kicked a chair he was leaning back in. The Press of Atlantic City reports that 41-year-old Kimberley Peschi was ordered Wednesday to pay about $200 in fines and fees but the forfeiture of her teaching license is still being deliberated. The Galloway Township resident was suspended from her job as a music teacher at the Belhaven Middle School in Linwood after the February 2017 injury to the sixth-grade student. Northfield Municipal Judge Timothy Maguire says surveillance video was the strongest evidence. The judge will rule on the teaching license by July 15. Peschi's defense attorney says she will appeal. ___ Information from: The Press of Atlantic City (N.J.), http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - Four in five victims of child sexual abuse in Australian institutions will be eligible for compensation after three churches, the Scouts movement and the YMCA joined a federal government redress plan, an official said on Thursday. The Catholic Church, Australia's largest denomination, on Wednesday became the first non-government institution to commit to the 3.8 billion Australian dollar ($2.9 billion) national plan. The Anglican Church, Salvation Army, Scouts Australia and the Young Men's Christian Association, better known as YMCA, committed to join on Thursday. People visit St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, Thursday, May 31, 2018. Australia's Catholic bishops and leaders of its religious orders have committed to signing on to the 3.8 billion Australian dollar ($2.9 billion) national plan that will ensure compensation will be paid to people who were sexually abused as children by church figures and puts pressure on other institutions to follow suit. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft) Flanked by representatives of the churches and associations, Social Services Minister Dan Tehan said their participation meant that 80 percent of Australia's 60,000 known abuse victims were now covered by the plan. "Can I thank the institutions who are here with us today for the leadership that they have shown, for owning up to past wrongs, for owning up for behavior which can only be described as despicable and deplorable ... for wanting to turn a page, to provide redress and make sure that those survivors get the justice that they deserve," Tehan said at Parliament House. The Catholic Church estimates it alone will be liable for about AU$1 billion ($757 million) in compensation. Archbishop of Adelaide Philip Wilson last week became the most senior Catholic cleric in the world to be convicted of covering up child sex abuse. He faces a potential two-year prison term when he appears in court in June to be sentenced for protecting a pedophile priest in the 1970s. Pope Francis' former finance minister, Cardinal George Pell, faces trial on sexual assault charges in Australia. The exact details and nature of the charges have not been disclosed to the public, though police have described them as "historical" sexual assaults, meaning they are alleged to have occurred decades ago. Catholic leaders have long backed a national redress plan but the churches, charities and other non-government institutions needed the state and territory governments to sign on first. Western Australia would be the final state to join, although state Attorney-General John Quigley said the negotiations with the federal government could be finalized within two months. Tehan said the plan was on track to begin on July 1 if legislation passes the Senate. The plan will cover people who were sexually abused as children by institutional figures over decades. Payments will be capped at AU$150,000 ($113,000), with previously received compensation being deducted from any new amount. The plan was recommended by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which made its final report in December. Australia's longest-running royal commission - which is the country's highest form of inquiry - had been investigating since 2012 how institutions responded to sexual abuse of children in Australia over 90 years. The inquiry heard the testimonies of more than 8,000 survivors of child sex abuse. Of those who were abused in religious institution, 62 percent were Catholics. People visit St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, Thursday, May 31, 2018. Australia's Catholic bishops and leaders of its religious orders have committed to signing on to the 3.8 billion Australian dollar ($2.9 billion) national plan that will ensure compensation will be paid to people who were sexually abused as children by church figures and puts pressure on other institutions to follow suit. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft) RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - In a story May 30 about Virginia expanding Medicaid, The Associated Press misspelled the House Speaker Kirk Cox's name. It is Kirk, not Kick. A corrected version of the story is below: Gridlock over: Virginia lawmakers approve Medicaid expansion Ending years of partisan gridlock, Virginia's GOP-led General Assembly approves expanding Medicaid coverage to the state's poor By ALAN SUDERMAN Associated Press RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - The Republican-controlled Virginia General Assembly gave final approval Wednesday evening to a state budget expanding Medicaid coverage to the state's poor, ending years of partisan gridlock on the issue. The state Senate voted in favor of expansion after a full day of debate. The House, which had had previously endorsed expansion, gave its final approval shortly afterward. Several Republicans in both chambers joined with Democrats to approve the measure. Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam is expected to sign the budget in coming days, and the roughly 400,000 newly eligible low-income Virginias will begin enrolling in Medicaid at the start of next year. Expanding Medicaid was a key provision of then-President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, and a tally from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows Virginia will become the 33rd state to approve Medicaid expansion. Senate passage came by a 23-17 vote with four Republicans joining Democrats for passage. The House quickly followed about an hour later with a lopsided 67-31 final endorsement. Wednesday's voting marked the end of a more than four-year battle over whether Virginia should expand the publicly funded health care program for the poor. A fight over Medicaid expansion led to a standoff over the state budget in 2014 and again this year. Virginia Democrats have argued the state should not pass up the roughly $2 billion in extra federal funding the program would bring to the state. Republicans had previously been near unified in blocking past expansion efforts, saying the long-term costs were unsustainable. Those arguments were again replayed in the final hours before Virginia's partisan battle was finally ended. Sen. Ben Chafin, a Republican lawmaker from Virginia's economically depressed southwest coal country, announced his support for expansion on the Senate floor. He said his rural area needed expansion to help bolster its hospitals and provide care for constituents in need. "I came to the conclusion that no just wasn't the answer anymore," Chafin said. But several Republican senators remained strongly opposed, saying Medicaid costs would eventually overwhelm the rest of the state's budget needs for schools and public safety. "It is a ticking time bomb," said GOP Sen. Bill Stanley. A federal-state collaboration originally meant for poor families and severely disabled people, Medicaid has grown to become the largest government health insurance program, now covering 1 in 5 people. The GOP-controlled General Assembly's support for Medicaid comes despite Trump administration rejections. President Donald Trump has vigorously sought to negate his predecessor's health law. And White House officials, including budget director Mick Mulvaney, have urged Virginia lawmakers this year not to expand Medicaid. Yet ironically, his administration's embrace of work requirements for low-income people on Medicaid prompted lawmakers in some conservative states to resurrect plans for expansion. Virginia GOP Speaker Kirk Cox said the Trump administration's openness to conservative reforms, including work requirements, "was probably the biggest key" in getting Republican support for Medicaid expansion. Last year, Virginia saw its state legislature reshaped by an anti-Trump wave as Democrats made unexpectedly large gains in the state House. And a failure by the GOP-led Congress to repeal and replace the health law helped spur several of Virginia's Republican state legislators to flip positions. Democrats campaigned heavily on expanding Medicaid last year and some House Republicans were eager to take the issue off the table before next year's election, when both House and Senate seats are up. ___ This story has been corrected the misspelling of House Speaker Kirk Cox's first name. SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - Chile's Supreme Court has approved a transgender person's request to change their name and registered gender without reassignment surgery. Chile's judiciary announced Wednesday that the top court had decided to strike down an earlier ruling by an appeals court in the capital. The statement from the judiciary did not provide the person's name. A bill that would give adults the right to change the gender listed on their official records has stalled in Congress. The measure is facing challenges from the Roman Catholic Church. Conservative lawmakers say they would approve the bill as long as it excludes underage minors and teenagers. Lorena Lorca, a law professor who led the case, said the ruling is historic because it adheres to international human rights principles that allow judges to make the change. A white supremacist who planned to carry out an attack at a pubs gay pride night is to be sentenced. Ethan Stables was arrested by armed police as he made what prosecutors described as a final reconnaissance visit to the New Empire in his home town of Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, last summer. Following his detention on June 23 last year, officers later discovered he had kept a machete, an axe and knives at his home, which were supposedly instruments for carrying out the attack. Ethan Stables posing next to a Nazi flag at his flat in Barrow (Greater Manchester Police/PA) Social media posts to far-right pages revealed he was intent on going to war and wanted to slaughter every single one of the gay bastards. Following a trial at Leeds Crown Court, the then-20-year-old was convicted of preparing an act of terrorism, making threats to kill and possessing an explosive substance in suspicious circumstances. Officers discovered that, as well as researching firearms, he had also looked into methods for making a bomb. Jurors were told how Stables, who had been diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome prior to his arrest, promoted homophobic, racist and Nazi views online. Through his phone, he supposedly communicated his hatred for Muslims and Jews, with one WhatsApp message reading: My country is being raped. I might just become a skinhead and kill people. Weapons found in Ethan Stables' flat (Greater Manchester Police/PA) Following his conviction on February 8, his barrister Patrick Upward QC told the Recorder of Leeds, Judge Peter Collier QC, that Stables led a melancholy life up to the day of his arrest and lived in almost squalid conditions. Mr Upward added that his client bears no comparison with the men who attacked Corporal (Lee) Rigby, and that he did not have the wherewithal to follow through on the plan. Prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford told the judge that Stables had intended to attack multiple persons and had looked at a number of ways of doing it. Stables will be sentenced at Leeds Crown Court by Judge Collier on Wednesday morning. Valerie Jarrett did not seek the spotlight when she served as a senior adviser to former US president Barack Obama but has found herself at the centre of a media storm in recent days. She was the subject of a now-deleted tweet penned by comedian Roseanne Barr, who said the black woman was the product of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet Of The Apes. As the ensuing scandal unfolded, prompting US network ABC to cancel Barrs hugely successful show Roseanne, Ms Jarrett appeared at a panel about everyday racism on network MSNBC, saying it should be turned into a teaching moment. Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett Ms Jarrett, 61, was a top aide for President Obama and also served as assistant to the president for public engagement and chair of the White House council on women and girls, as well as heading up his transition team when he moved into the White House. A close friend of both the former president and his wife, she arrived in Washington with no national experience but went on to be Mr Obamas longest serving adviser, proved to be a driving force in some of his most significant domestic policy decisions, and was described as the single most influential person in the Obama White House. Ms Jarrett previously held top positions in Chicago government and business and met the Obamas when she offered Michelle Obama a job in the Chicago mayors office. She went on holidays with the couple in Hawaii and Marthas Vineyard and was instrumental in deciding who was invited to small parties and dinners at the White House. Mrs Obama told the New York Times: I can count on someone like Valerie to take my hand and say, You need to think about these three things. Like a mom, a big sister, I trust her implicitly. She is now working on the Obama Library and Museum and is a senior adviser to the Obama Foundation and a senior fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. Her daughter Laura is a justice reporter for news network CNN. A London-based human rights campaigner and self-professed number one enemy of Vladimir Putin has been arrested in Spain. Financier Bill Browder was held in Madrid under a Russian arrest warrant on Wednesday, according to his Twitter account. The leading Kremlin critic wrote: Urgent: Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. Going to the police station right now. This was followed by a photograph from the back of the police car, with the words: In the back of the Spanish police car going to the station on the Russian arrest warrant. They wont tell me which station. In the back of the Spanish police car going to the station on the Russian arrest warrant. They wont tell me which station pic.twitter.com/Xwj27xC7Zd Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) May 30, 2018 Mr Browder, a US-born British national, has been a thorn in the side of the Russian authorities for more than a decade after he tried to expose the looting of his investments in the country by corrupt officials. In 2009, Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer he hired to investigate what had happened to his money, died in Russian custody. Conservative MP Sir Peter Bottomley told the Press Association: I have notified the Foreign Secretarys office and I shall be speaking to the Spanish ambassador. It is absurd that a person with British nationality who has been exposing the brutal and fatal treatment of Sergei Magnitsky should be arrested at the request of the Russians. The Spanish authorities, with the encouragement of the British, should release Bill Browder. The Russian ambassador should be summoned to explain why it is that his country fails to prosecute the murderers of Magnitsky and instead has been for years trying to arrest Bill Browder, who is campaigning for justice and against corruption in Russia. Alexander Perepilichnyy In March Mr Browder told the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that he believed the Russian government wanted him dead. He also had links with Russian millionaire Alexander Perepilichnyy, who collapsed and died while jogging near his home in Weybridge, Surrey, in 2012. Mr Perepilichnyy had been helping Mr Browders Hermitage Capital Investment expose a 230 million US dollar (142 million in November 2012) money-laundering operation. Italys premier-designate Carlo Cottarelli has said new possibilities have emerged to form a government based on the outcome of the March 4 elections. Efforts by two populist parties to create a coalition government failed over the weekend after President Sergio Mattarella vetoed the economy minister proposed by the 5-Star Movement and League. Italian president Sergio Mattarella (Fabio Frustaci/ANSA via AP) Mr Mattarella then turned to Mr Cottarelli to form a neutral government of technocrats to lead Italy until early elections. However, on Wednesday, Mr Cottarelli said in a statement that new possibilities for the birth of a political government have emerged during his consultations. The statement added: This circumstance, also considering market tensions, has compelled him to wait for further developments. A hero grandfather sheltered six people in his top-floor flat in Grenfell Tower on the night it was destroyed by fire, an inquiry has heard. Raymond Moses Bernard gave refuge to families trying to escape the inferno as it consumed the block, offering them his bed while he sat on the floor. Raymond Bernard His family gave a tearful tribute to the 63-year-old, who died with his dog Marley, during the final day of commemoration hearings at the public inquiry into the disaster. Moving to London from Trinidad in 1969, Mr Bernard became an electrician and worked at historic sites including the Palace of Westminster and Buckingham Palace. He had lived in Grenfell Tower for more than 30 years, On Wednesday, his sister Bernadette Bernard, fighting back tears, said the biblical connotations of the affectionate nickname Moses who led the Israelites through the parted Red Sea to safety was apt. My beloved Ray was my modern-day Moses, my hero, she said. Ray always had a smile on his face. He knew how to love without expecting anything in return. She continued: On that fateful night, seven individuals were located in Rays flat. These were Deborah Lamprell, Jessica Urbano (Ramirez), a mother, Berkti Haftom, and her son Biruk Haftom, Hamid Kani and one other. As there was no way down to escape, the only alternative was to head towards the top floor. There they met Ray and took refuge in his flat. The positioning of Deborah, Jessica, Berkti and Biruk were on my brothers bed with my brother resting beside the bed on the floor. This shows the respect he gave to those who lost their lives that night and we know that he would have given comfort to each of them before they took their last breaths and departed this world. INQUIRY Grenfell Ray being a man and the strongest he was probably the last to die. He would have been so alone. We know from the details shared by the coroner that Ray was a hero on that tragic night. A statement from coroner Fiona Wilcox to the family brought them a lot of comfort, it was heard. Ms Bernard said: Ray did not answer his phone on that night and so we have no telephone recordings from him, but we do know that calls made to the emergency services from his flat mention him time and time again. Sadiq Khan Mr Bernard a one-time DJ as part of a so-called sound system collective left behind three grandchildren. His sister said she had been left with post-traumatic stress disorder and was haunted by images of fire in her dreams. No amount of medication could soothe her pain, she said, adding she is unable to work. She told the hearing: Death should have taken my brother naturally, he should not have been killed in this way. He did not deserve to die by suffocation, cyanide poisoning and ultimately burn until his remains are no more than 30% of who he was. She added: He was not only my brother, my rock and friend he was also my protector. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan was among those in the audience on Wednesday, following criticism that politicians had been largely absent from the process. The tributes are taking place at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel in South Kensington ahead of formal evidence hearings next week. Three people have been arrested in connection with the murder of 17-year-old Louis-Ryan Menezes who was stabbed last Friday in Northampton. A 16-year-old boy and a 34-year-old woman from Northampton and a 37-year-old man from London were arrested on Tuesday night and are in police custody. The development follows the release of two teenage boys and a 38-year-old man without charge on Saturday after they were detained in connection with the murder. Louis-Ryan Menezes Police said house-to-house inquiries in the area provided them with fresh lines of inquiry following their release. The investigation, led by the East Midlands special operations unit, includes more than 40 detectives. Louis-Ryan was pronounced dead after being taken to Northampton General Hospital following the incident at Drayton Walk, Kingsthorpe, Northampton, at 6.15pm on Friday. Officers want to speak to anyone who was in the Drayton Walk area of St Davids between 6pm and 7pm on Friday May 25, or in or around Eastern Avenue North or the shopping parade in Newnham Road. Anyone with information is asked to call police on 101 or Crimestoppers, in confidence, on 0800 555111. A China-Russia think-tank forum kicked off in Beijing Tuesday. A China-Russia think-tank forum, jointly held by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), kicks off in Beijing, May 29, 2018. [Photo: CRI Online] The forum, jointly held by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), will be hosted in turns in China and Russia. This year's forum has attracted over 300 people to attend. The topics discussed include domestic and foreign affairs of both countries, coordination in a changing world, as well as cooperation on security, energy and culture. China-Russia relations have become healthy and mature new-type relations between major countries through development over the years, which boosted development and forcefully safeguarded the sovereignty, security and development interests of the two countries, said Dai Bingguo, Chinese chairman of the China-Russia Friendship Committee for Peace and Development. Looking forward, China-Russia relations should scale new heights, to raise the comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination between the two countries to a new higher level, Dai said. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov, who is also a RIAC member, said China-Russia cooperation has been fruitful over the past years and the two countries have deepened economic and trade cooperation. Looking ahead, building a new international order of diversity, inclusiveness, equality and mutual trust will be an important direction for bilateral cooperation, he said. CASS and RIAC will jointly release a think-tank report at the forum. The Institute of International Studies at Fudan University, RIAC and the Institute of Far Eastern Studies at Russian Academy of Sciences will jointly release a research report. The findings of the reports will provide reference for further development of China-Russia relations and synergy of strategies under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. Russia is willing to help Ukraine investigate the murder of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, a senior MP has said. The call came after Mr Babchenko, who was scathingly critical of the Kremlin, was gunned down in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on Tuesday. The 41-year-old had fled Russia last year, fearing for his life, and settled in Ukraine. He had served in the Russian army during the two wars in Chechnya in 1990s and became one of Russias best-known war reporters. The block of flats where Arkady Babchenko lived Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma, told Russian news agencies that Russia would be happy to help with the investigation if Ukrainian authorities requested it. Ukrainian authorities have said they think Mr Babchenko was killed because of his work. Several Ukrainian politicians blamed the Kremlin for the killing comments which Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed as cynical. Italys premier-designate has said new possibilities have emerged over the forming of a government based on the outcome of the March 4 election. Carlo Cottarelli also wants to give the option time to mature, given the negative market reaction to the prospect of a new poll. Efforts to create a so-called political government failed over the weekend after President Sergio Mattarella vetoed an economy minister proposed by the 5-Star Movement and the League, which had come together to form a populist alliance. After more than two months of failed negotiations, Mr Mattarella then turned to former IMF official Mr Cottarelli to form a neutral government made up of technocrats to lead Italy until early elections. Italian president Sergio Mattarella (Fabio Frustaci/ANSA via AP) The prospect of a new vote fuelled by anti-establishment and populist outrage sent stock markets plunging along with investor confidence in Europes third-largest economy. However, on Wednesday, Mr Cottarelli said new possibilities for the birth of a political government have emerged during his consultations. The statement added: This circumstance, also considering market tensions, has compelled him to wait for further developments. Officials at Mr Mattarellas office said the president had agreed with the decision. League leader Matteo Salvini Markets relaxed with the news, with the Milan stock exchange maintaining its upward momentum, up 0.8%. It was not clear what shape a political government might take. Economic analyst Lorenzo Codogno said the re-emergence of a possible political government would likely mean tweaks to the 5-Star-League coalition agreement and dropping the Eurosceptic Paolo Savona from the post of economy minister. Mr Mattarella had vetoed Mr Savona, a former industry minister who has questioned whether Italy should keep the euro, leading to the collapse of the 5-Star-League bid. Mr Codogno said: The initiative for a new anti-establishment government would have to imply a credible pro-European commitment and a commitment to the Italian Constitution, ie the fiscal framework, to have any chance of flying. 5-Star Movement leader Luigi Di Maio The head of the anti-establishment 5-Stars, Luigi Di Maio, had proposed a renewed effort to form an alliance with the right-wing League on Tuesday night, backing off his threat of launching impeachment proceedings against Mr Mattarella and insisting that the two blocs still enjoy a parliamentary majority. Mr Di Maio said: Were ready to reconsider our position in the sense that if we made a mistake something I doubt well say so, but now we should respect the will of the people. League leader Matteo Salvini said he would not stand in the way of a solution but made clear that early elections were the only way forward. I say this with all possible respect: President Mattarella explain to us show we can get out of the problem, he said. The sooner we vote the better. Mr Salvini has long complained that Mr Mattarella never gave the centre-right bloc that brought in the highest percentage of votes 37% a mandate to try to form a government. The 5-Stars, by contrast, polled 32%. The centre-right alliance grouped the League with ex-premier Silvio Berlusconis Forza Italia and the smaller right-wing Brothers of Italy. Brothers leader Giorgia Meloni renewed her call for Mr Mattarella to give the centre-right a mandate to try to form a government that can win a parliamentary majority. The Ministry of Defence has been unable to warn a high-profile veterans group to stop encouraging former soldiers to bin letters urging co-operation with Troubles inquests because it cannot find its postal address, a court has heard. A lawyer representing families of some of those killed in shootings involving the Army in Ballymurphy in west Belfast in 1971 branded the MoD explanation as bordering on the comical. Earlier this year, the Great Britain-based campaign group Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans (JFNIV) recommended that former soldiers who received letters asking them to volunteer information about the Ballymurphy shootings should throw them in the bin. A fresh inquest into the deaths of 10 people shot at Ballymurphy has been hampered by an inability to trace soldiers involved. The letters to potential military witnesses were sent on behalf of the Coroners Service for Northern Ireland. John Teggart, whose father Danny was killed (David Young/PA) The JFNIV group has been involved in a well-publicised campaign to stop historical investigations into the actions of ex-security force members in Northern Ireland. The MoD had committed to write to it to make clear that the ministry wanted former Army personnel to co-operate with the coroner. At a preliminary hearing in Belfast on Wednesday ahead of the scheduled autumn inquest, MoD barrister Kevin Rooney QC told presiding coroner Siobhan Keegan why the MoD had not yet communicated that message to the group. The MoD cant get a correspondence address for them, he said. The lawyer said the MoD had looked at the groups website, but said it did not list an address. Mr Rooney said if an address could be sourced the MoD would write to the group to let them know those letters shouldnt be thrown in the bin and there should be co-operation with the coroners office in this regard. Barry McDonald QC, representing some of the Ballymurphy families, expressed scepticism at the MoD position. It does border on the comical for the MoD to suggest that they dont know how to contact an Army veterans association or what their address is, he said. Its very difficult for the next of kin to accept that is correct. Mr Rooney highlighted that the group had no official links to the MoD. They have absolutely no connection with the MoD, he said. They are a totally independent group. They dont act with MoD authorisation and they are not under their auspices. So theres no method that we can, at this point in time, find an address for them. A Catholic priest and a mother-of-eight were among those killed during three days of gunfire involving members of the Parachute Regiment in August 1971. Another man died of a heart attack following an alleged violent confrontation with the troops in the west Belfast estate. The shootings took place as the army moved into republican strongholds to arrest IRA suspects in the wake of the introduction by the Stormont administration of the controversial policy of internment without trial. Responsibility for the deaths has long been attributed solely to soldiers on the ground, amid disputed claims they were returning IRA fire. But a number of weeks ago loyalist paramilitaries claimed they were also involved. Former members of the Ulster Volunteer Force provided information to the Coroners Court indicating that one of its gunmen had fired on crowds from a nearby loyalist estate. The inquest is scheduled to start in September. A schoolgirl who sparked an international hunt after she left the UK for Poland has been found. Serena Alexander-Benson, 13, is in the country with her mother, Scotland Yard said, and police are investigating whether any crime has been committed. The teenager left the Wimbledon home where she lives with her father at around 7.50am on May 25, apparently on her way to school. Serena Alexander-Benson When she did not arrive there she was reported missing. Police found that she had travelled out of the UK in a car on a Eurotunnel train with a female friend of her mother. On Wednesday the National Crime Agency revealed that Polish authorities had confirmed that Serena is with her mother. A would-be terrorist who plotted a machete attack on a pubs gay pride night has been given an indefinite hospital order for the protection of the pubic. A judge at Leeds Crown Court told white supremacist Ethan Stables, 20, he posed very real risks to wider society, and the sentence was necessary in light of some of the wild and crazy things he said and did. Stables, who has autism spectrum disorder, was arrested on June 23 last year as he made what prosecutors described as a final reconnaissance visit to the New Empire pub in his hometown of Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. It followed worrying posts in which the defendant told fellow members of a right-wing Facebook group that he wanted to slaughter every single one of the gay bastards. Officers later found that, as well as extensively researching firearms online, Stables kept an axe and machete as his home which, said prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford, were instruments for carrying out the attack. Flag burning In February, he was convicted by a jury of preparing an act of terrorism, making threats to kill, and possessing an explosive substance in suspicious circumstances. However, The Recorder of Leeds, Judge Peter Collier QC spared him a jail sentence on Wednesday, in lieu of his severe mental health issues. Giving Stables an indefinite hospital order and a restriction order, he described the defendant as being someone who had said many wild and crazy things, but added that he had actually done very little. Mr Collier, sentencing, told him: You are responsible for what you said and the jury decided that, by your intention, you were making plans to kill. Its my clear decision that, for the protection of the public, a hospital order and restriction order are necessary, and that is made. The judge added that, despite failing to enact his plan, Stables caused alarm and distress to those who would have been the subjects of the killings. During his evidence the defendant, described by prosecutors as a white supremacist and a Nazi, claimed that he was a fantasist, and identified as a bisexual. Ethan Stables Mr Collier told Stables: The prosecution say that you made a pack of lies as you tried to manipulate your way out of this situation. The fact that is a live issue is one of the real risks that you pose to the public. The sentence means Stables can only be released from hospital following the decision of a mental health tribunal, and would then be closely monitored by officers from the Counter Terrorism Unit. During the trial, jurors heard how the job-seeker held extreme views which prosecutors described as a deep-seated hatred of black, Jewish, Muslim and especially gay people. The court was also shown a video in which the defendant set a rainbow flag alight whilst claiming gays look nicer on fire. In messages sent from his phone, Stables blamed his joblessness on faggots, n******, spastics and the Equalities Act. Outlining his hatred for Muslims and Jews, he said in a WhatsApp message: My country is being raped. I might just become a skinhead and kill people. The daughter of a Grenfell Tower victim has launched a scathing attack on the council for housing a vulnerable, physically disabled and partially sighted pensioner on the 18th floor of the block. Nazanin Aghlani, daughter of Sakineh Afrasiabi, told the inquiry the housing allocation team at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) shared responsibility for her death. The 65-year-old Iranian grandmother died in the fire with her sister Fatemeh, who had the poor fortune to visit on June 14 last year. She was remembered for her strength in the face of adversity and quirky habits, which included regularly chatting to pigeons. Tower block fire But her health deteriorated following an accident in Iran many years before and she struggled to find suitable accommodation in the borough. She first moved to the UK in 1997. Ms Aghlani said: As early as 2003, the RBKC housing department formally recognised and stated that due to my mums disability and deteriorating health she should not be housed in a lifted property above the fourth floor. I emphasise that was in 2003. Fourth floor, because that was her human right to escape, the right every single person should have. After being refused many suitable properties, after 16 years of waiting, she was rehoused in 2016 into flat 151 on the 18th floor of Grenfell Tower. By this point, my mum was partially sighted and could only get around with the aid of a tri-walker. Undated family handout photos of Sakineh Afrasiabi, 65, left, and her younger sister Fatima (Family/PA) The move to Grenfell was out of desperation and pressure from the council. She was to take Grenfell Tower or to be suspended from the allocations for one year. She was very upset by the new place, she hated it at first. Despite this, she made great efforts to make the home her own, redecorating and filling it with furniture that was the envy of her neighbour. She even kept a pair of binoculars so visitors could enjoy the views across London from her window. A refurbishment of the block made life very difficult, however, as her health had majorly deteriorated and movement was hard, her daughter said. The only thing she kept saying about flat 151 was that she wanted to put all her furniture into it and go back to Iran. It was a home she already wanted to get away from and I dont blame her. Tower block fire She was a vulnerable disabled person and she was put in a place that was worse than her own. The fear of living so high in her condition was always at the back of her mind. On her final night, Ms Afrasiabi cooked for her family at her flat before seeing them out to the lift, where she asked her daughter if she could kiss her grandson one last time. Remembering what followed, Ms Aghlani then began a blistering attack on the local authority, saying: With the fire at Grenfell, something in all of us died that night. Tower block fire Every day, again and again, as our mind tries to make sense of this disastrous tragedy, we come to the conclusion that it was not only the horrifying fire that took my mums life that night. The discrimination and failure in duty of care by the housing allocations team which resulted in a vulnerable, physically disabled and partially sighted pensioner being housed on the 18th floor of a tower block equally took the life of my mum. Our mum lost her life not only due to the fire that night, but to the corporate negligence of the very people who were to ensure her safety. The very people who said, years before, that she was not to be housed above the fourth floor of a lifted building. She couldnt go down 18 floors of stairs on a good day, let alone in a fire. Her human right to escape was denied even before the fire happened. The charity and warmth Ms Afrasiabi displayed during her life was remembered fondly by her children at the inquiry. Her son Sharok, in a poignant tribute, said her death had helped him to see what he had been searching for through years of studying religious and theological texts, the meaning of love. I think my mum, in one sentence, showed that. That night when she was burning, she told me not to come, trying to look out for me, he said. Even though she was being surrounded by fire and smoke, she told me not to come. In one sentence, she told me something that I couldnt find in any books, the meaning of love, unconditional love. If you want to look at the face of God, if you want to see what love is, if you are lucky enough to have your mother, just look at your mother, there she is, thats the meaning of love. Unconditional love can only come from your mother. Emergency personnel are attending the scene of a helicopter crash, North Yorkshire Police have said. Rescue services were called to the scene near Aldborough, Boroughbridge at around 1.20pm on Wednesday to reports of a helicopter crashing into a field. A spokesman for North Yorkshire Police said officers were attending and that they are not yet able to confirm any information about casualties. North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue service said in a statement on Twitter that a number of engines from Boroughbridge, Knaresborough, Harrogate and Ripon had been sent to the incident. (PA Graphics) They said hoses are being used to damp down the scene. A family have won damages after a toddler drank toxic drain cleaner in a supermarket when his mothers back was turned while out shopping. Ayman Faisal was strapped in his buggy but as his mother Saira turned to pick something up, he reached out and grabbed the bottle himself off a low shelf. The youngster, aged two at the time, opened the bottle, and swallowed the cleaner containing caustic soda. Ayman Faisal with his mother Sair He suffered severe burns to his mouth, airway, oesophagus and stomach and was left fighting for his life in intensive care in a Manchester hospital following the incident in January 2013. Now aged seven, the youngster has been unable to breathe without the aid of a tracheostomy, cannot speak and needs a feeding tube in his stomach so he can eat and drink. A final financial settlement will not be reached until the long-term effects of Aymans condition are known. In the interim the shop and bottle manufacturers have agreed to fund a trip to Cincinnati Childrens Hospital in the US, an international centre of excellence for paediatric medicine, to see if anything more can be done. Following an investigation, the manufacturer Active Brands Concept Ltd admitted the child-resistant cap had been faulty and will pay two thirds damages. And the shop, SAFA Superstore in Moss Side, Manchester, was ruled partly responsible after a judge found that the bottle should have been stored on a higher shelf. They must pay one third damages. The shop also did not have the correct licence to sell the toxic substance which was clearly marked keep out of reach of children. Aymans mother, Saira Faisal, 38, from Rusholme, Manchester, also suffered chemical burns to her hands and feet as she desperately tried to help her son. Recalling the moment she realised something was wrong, she said: Ayman was strapped into his pushchair and I was reaching to get something. It was only for a few seconds, but when I turned back I saw his lips had gone purple and blue and there was blood coming out of his mouth. I remember screaming at the staff to phone an ambulance while I tried to get as much as I could out with my hands. I was terrified. All I kept thinking was please dont let me lose my son. He now attends Lancasterian School in Didsbury and is learning to communicate using his iPad and sign language, and his family have won compensation after a five-year legal battle. Mrs Faisal added: It has been a struggle and Ive had my moments, but when it comes to Ayman I just have to carry on. I am so proud of him for what he has been through and I try to stay positive and make sure he does too. Alicia Rendell, a serious injury specialist at Slater and Gordon solicitors who represented the family, said: It has been a long road for Saira to get justice for her little boy but now, finally, she has the security of knowing that he will be given the best care possible and the very best chance of getting better. These types of products are deadly and those who manufacture and sell them need to take seriously their duty of care. RBS shareholders have lashed out at executives over branch closures and its treatment of small business customers, while its departing finance chief said market turmoil could mean a delay to the Governments share sale. Shareholders at its AGM on Wednesday urged bosses to further review or completely halt closures, with the bank having recently announced plans to close 162 branches across England and Wales. It adds to 259 closures announced last autumn. Chairman Howard Davies blamed the latest round of closures on its competition responsibilities linked to its 45 billion Government bailout during the financial crisis, having scrapped plans to sell off its Williams & Glyn network. Instead, RBS is being forced to encourage SME customers to switch to other lenders in hopes of increasing competition. It would be difficult for customers to transfer or get them to transfer if their branches were still open, the chairman said. Royal Bank of Scotland AGM Chief executive Ross McEwan added that he was well aware of the issues for communities and vulnerable customers, but said the take-up of digital banking had been much more dramatic than I would have expected. Im convinced that if we as a bank dont respond or put in place other alternative actions this bank will continue to have difficulties. It did not stop protesters from the Unite union from gathering outside the AGM in Edinburgh on Wednesday, with regional officer Lyn Turner batting away suggestions that changing banking behaviour was the cause of so many closures. This is purely about profit. They are turning their backs on local communities and local businesses. Shareholders also vented anger over the companys mistreatment of small business at the hand of its now defunct turnaround unit, Global Restructuring Group (GRG), having been accused of pushing firms towards failure in the hopes of picking up assets on the cheap. Gavin Palmer, who said he only bought shares in RBS to sort you out and your bad practices also pushed Mr McEwan on his apology over GRG, asking whether it would have been made if MPs on the Treasury Select Committee had not pushed so hard for the full reports release. Royal Bank of Scotland Mr Davies insisted that the bank did apologise for parts of the bad treatment which were identified in the report, but admitted the report did tell us things we did not know. Did you not listen to what people were saying at previous AGMs? Mr Palmer asked. Did you not see (former chief executive) Mr (Stephen) Hester go bright red with shame as soon as GRG was mentioned? Did you not notice all the shareholderscomplaining about the bad treatment in small business, medium, large, listed PLCs as well? Mr Davies replied that the board carried out its own review into the controversial division. There is also speculation that the Government could very soon sell off as much as 10% of its 70.5% stake in RBS, having last year confirmed plans to offload 15 billion worth of shares by 2023. Royal Bank of Scotland However, outgoing finance chief Ewen Stevenson said the recent slump in European stocks sparked in part by jitters over the rise of Eurosceptic parties in Italy might be a cause for pause. Obviously, when you look at whats been happening in the markets in the last few days with Spain and Italy and a significant sell-off in bank stocks, I would be surprised if now is an optimum time to sell stocks, he told reporters on the sidelines of the AGM in Edinburgh. The Government is already facing a near-26.2 billion loss on its holding, with the lenders shares languishing well below the average 502p share price paid during the crisis era bailout, at around 276p. RBS announces that Ewen Stevenson has resigned from his role as Chief Financial Officer and Executive Director to take up an opportunity elsewhere: https://t.co/P9BreQmjYs NatWest Group (@NatWestGroup) May 30, 2018 The bank unexpectedly issued a market update on Wednesday to announce Mr Stevensons resignation just hours before the annual general meeting, saying he was set to take up an opportunity elsewhere. Mr Stevenson told reporters that it was the right time to move on to a new role. Youve seen what weve done over the last four to five years its a very natural inflection point given the amount of stuff weve now cleaned up at the bank, so its a very natural point to go off and do something else, he told reporters. I mean the banks back in great shape, ready to be privatised, so I know people are always surprised by the news, but they really shouldnt be surprised by the trigger points that create the news. Mr McEwan batted away questions over whether his own departure was imminent given the banks progress over his five years at the helm. Were not finished yet, let me quite clearly say that, the chief executive said. HARARE, May 29 (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's wildlife agency said on Tuesday it was investigating allegations that a South African national bribed officials to allow a Colorado-based tourist to take the ivory tusks of an elephant illegally shot in a Zimbabwe game park. Their inquiry comes after U.S. prosecutors accused the South African, who was with a hunting party in Gonarezhou National Park in southern Zimbabwe, of paying up to $8,000 in bribes to Zimbabwean government officials to kill the elephant inside the park and to have the animal's ivory released. "We are investigating the matter," said Tinashe Farawo, spokesman for the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority. He gave no further details. A government official, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media, said Zimbabwean authorities had contacted the South African but he was not forthcoming with information. A statement by the U.S. Department of Justice in Colorado dated May 21 said the South African conspired with the unidentified Colorado hunter to export the tusks by falsely saying in official documents the hunter was a South African resident and that the elephant was shot outside Gonarezhou. It is illegal under Zimbabwean law for hunters to shoot animals inside a state game park. In 2015, a U.S. dentist touched off a global storm when he killed a rare black-maned lion named Cecil with a bow and arrow outside Hwange National Park in western Zimbabwe, forcing the United States to suspend importation of elephant trophies from Africa. (Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe Editing by Alison Williams) Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan on Wednesday met with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Peter Maurer, pledging to firmly support the ICRC humanitarian cause. Wang said the ICRC made positive contributions to protecting human life and health as well as promoting world peace and development. However, the current humanitarian situation in the world remains grim, he said. Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan meets with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Peter Maurer in Beijing on May 30, 2018. [Photo: Xinhua] Wang called on the international community to enhance humanitarian assistance, and developed countries, in particular, to substantially fulfill their obligations on assistance. He said the Chinese government would, as always, support the ICRC humanitarian cause, and encourage the Red Cross Society of China to enhance practical cooperation with the International Red Cross under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. For his part, Maurer hailed China's contribution to the international humanitarian cause and said he appreciated China's support for the ICRC. He expressed hopes to deepen cooperation with Chinese side in various areas including the construction of the Belt and Road. By John O'Donnell and Gederts Gelzis RIGA, May 29 (Reuters) - Latvia is investigating whether its banks acted as conduits for Russian funds used to interfere in elections and politics elsewhere, after it received a warning from the United States, officials have told Reuters. The allegations, which highlight the country's role as a stepping stone for Russian money on its way to the west, come after Latvia's third largest bank was shut in February after being accused by the United States of money laundering. Foreign affairs minister Edgars Rinkevics told Reuters that citizens from Russia and former Soviet states, including people subject to U.S. sanctions, had put money in Latvian banks and some of it may have been used for political manipulation. "There is also the connection to ... hybrid warfare that money being transferred or kept in (the) Latvian financial system can be used to undermine ... the political systems of other countries," Rinkevics said. "Currently, our law enforcement authorities are investigating some leads that we have been provided that are related to hybrid warfare," he said, referring to campaigns to influence political developments. Latvia's finance minister, Dana Reizniece-Ozola, confirmed that the government had launched such an investigation after receiving credible information from "our strategic partners", referring to the United States. "This is the issue topical ... for the whole of Europe especially if it comes true that money has been used for manipulating election results in several European countries," Reizniece-Ozola told Reuters. When asked about possible Russian-sponsored campaigns to influence politics, she said: "If our financial sector might be used for financial crime ... especially if it is used for political goals, that is a no go." The ministers did not give details of which cases were being investigated but three senior Latvian officials said that one concerned the movement of funds from Russia through a Latvian bank to support an attempted coup in 2016 in Montenegro. Late that year, as Montenegrins voted in an election, authorities arrested 20 people from neighbouring Serbia on charges of planning armed attacks against the state. Serbia later said it had uncovered evidence including 125,000 euros ($144,000) in cash and stashed uniforms. Montenegro's Special Prosecutor later accused Moscow of involvement in the plot, which he said was aimed at halting the integration of the former Yugoslav republic into NATO. The Kremlin has dismissed such claims as absurd. "The money which flowed through Latvia was possibly used to finance the coup in Montenegro," said one of the Latvian officials, who all asked not to be named, describing the ongoing investigation into the case. "It might have been divided into parts, payments like $15,000, so that no one would notice." Russia has also been accused of interfering in elections from Germany to the United States although Moscow denies any such action. Reuters asked the Kremlin whether Russia had used Latvia to move funds that were used for political interference in Europe, whether it had been involved in an attempted coup in Montenegro and whether people from Russia now on the U.S. sanctions list had accounts with banks in Latvia. A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said, in a comment passed to Reuters by his office: "The answers to all the questions are no." A spokesman for the government in Montenegro did not comment. POLITICAL INFLUENCE The latest warning from the United States that Latvian banks may have played a role in manipulation by Russia highlights the continued pressure from Washington on the Baltic state to tighten its controls. Earlier this year, U.S. authorities accused Latvia's third biggest bank, ABLV, of money laundering and breaking sanctions on North Korea, prompting its closure and Latvia's worst financial crisis in a decade. The suspicion that large flows of Russian funds could also have been used for political interference has underlined the need to change the Swiss-style banking offered by about a dozen Latvian banks to Russians and citizens of former Soviet states. Foreign minister Rinkevics said the country's change of tack with regards to this business was also due to more aggressive Russian foreign policy, such as in Ukraine. "There has been quite ... a change in Russia's behaviour," he said. "There is connection between money laundering and the possibility of use of the black money also to influence ... the political system of our allies." "There was this concept that Latvia can be the bridge between the west and the east," he said. "We need ... to say goodbye to the whole bridge concept." Since securing independence from Russia in 1991, more than a dozen Latvian banks have promoted themselves as a gateway to Western markets for clients in Russia and former Soviet states such as Ukraine - and promised Swiss-style secrecy for clients. At the peak in 2015, Latvian banks held deposits of about 12 billion euros ($15 billion) for foreign customers. Bankers and officials have said much of the money came from Russia. Changing its approach to banking presents Latvia with a difficult balancing act. Washington is an important military ally for the former Soviet-ruled state of 2 million people on the EU's eastern flank. It also has close historical and trade ties with Russia. (Additional reporting by Margarita Popova and Christian Lowe in Moscow Writing by John O'Donnell Editing by Giles Elgood) SAO PAULO, May 29 (Reuters) - Brazil's solicitor general's office and state-led oil firm Petroleo Brasileiro SA said in a joint statement on Tuesday that they were asking the country's top labor court for an injunction to halt a planned oil workers' strike. Unions representing oil workers say they will start a 72-hour strike on Wednesday. That would wreak further havoc on Latin America's largest economy, already paralyzed by a nine-day nationwide truckers' strike against an increase in diesel prices. In a written statement, the solicitor general's office said the planned oil workers' strike was "political" and not labor-related, as workers were demanding the resignation of Petrobras chief executive officer Pedro Parente. (Reporting by Brad Brooks, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien) By Jake Spring SAO PAULO, May 29 (Reuters) - Brazilian environmental agency Ibama on Tuesday rejected French oil company Total SA's application for an environmental license to drill in the ecologically sensitive Foz do Amazonas basin. It is the fourth time that Ibama has rejected the application and requested additional information. Ibama said when denying the application for a third time in August that it would give Total one last chance to clarify the application before suspending the process. On Tuesday, however, it said it would seek more information as "new facts" had come to light. Total SA did not immediately respond to request for comment. An expedition last month by environmental activists Greenpeace documented coral in the area where Total plans to drill, following the earlier discovery of a massive coral reef nearby. The agency's refusals to accept Total's environmental impact study has held up the company's quest to explore the offshore basin for more than four years. The basin could contain up to 14 billion barrels of petroleum, or more than the entire proven reserves in the Gulf of Mexico, according to geologists. (Reporting by Jake Spring; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Rosalba O'Brien) KIEV, May 29 (Reuters) - Prominent Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was shot in Kiev and died of his wounds in an ambulance, Ukrainian police said. A woman had phoned medical services saying she had found her husband in his blood in their home, police said, adding they suspected the murder was due to Babchenko's professional activities. Babchenko was one of Russia's best-known war correspondents but had left Russia fearing for his life. (Reporting by Natalia Zinets; writing by Matthias Williams Editing by Robin Pomeroy) SHANGHAI, May 30 (Reuters) - A Capital Airlines flight from China to Vietnam was forced to turn around after cracks appeared in a window, Chinese state media reported on Wednesday. Flight JD421 from the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou to Nha Trang on Vietnam's coast turned back one hour into the journey on Tuesday afternoon, the official Xinhua news agency said. Capital Airlines said cracks had appeared in a window but not the windshield as some passengers had claimed, the agency reported, citing a company statement. A video circulating on Chinese social media showed a Capital Airlines staff member telling passengers there were cracks in the windshield. The aircraft was an Airbus A321, according to plane tracking website Flightradar24. Beijing-based Capital Airlines, a subsidiary of Chinese conglomerate HNA Group, and Airbus did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Earlier this month, a Sichuan Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing after a cockpit window blew out. Also in May, a Southwest Airlines plane made an emergency landing after a window pane cracked in flight. (Reporting by Brenda Goh; Additional reporting by SHANGHAI Newsroom; Editing by Stephen Coates) MOSCOW, May 30 (Reuters) - The following are some of the stories in Russia's newspapers on Wednesday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. VEDOMOSTI www.vedomosti.ru - International law firm Herbert Smith Freehills is to advise Russia's Postal Services company on the possibility of opening a logistics centre in China or Hong Kong, the daily says. - Russia's Justice Ministry will defend the interests of the state in all foreign and international courts, according to a new presidential decree cited by the daily. KOMMERSANT www.kommersant.ru - Russian internet providers have started increasing prices for their services by 8-10 percent to compensate for the cost of implementing a new counter-terrorism law, the daily says. The legislation demands that firms store information about users and cooperate with Russia's Federal Security Service. RBC www.rbc.ru - Russia's Defence Ministry is planning to spend almost 500 million roubles ($8.00 million) on preparations to set up a new navy base for the country's Caspian Flotilla in the North Caucuses republic of Dagestan, the daily says. ($1 = 62.5314 roubles) (Reporting By Tatiana Ustinova Editing by Andrew Osborn) After it transpired that United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) MP Dayasiri Jayaekara received one million rupees as campaign finance from Arjun Aloysius who is held responsible for the bond fraud, it stirred the hornets nest in politics. More politicos with PTL involvement? All hell will break loose if such names are revealed with veracity of allegations are proven Consequent to the revelation in court, news reports went viral in internet and social media saying that, in fact, as many as 118 MPs across the political divide had taken cash inducements from Perpetual Treasuries involved in frauds and irregularities in the Central Bank bond issue as a primary dealer. This has aroused anxiety among politically savvy people keen to ascertain who and who got money. There are names speculated. UNP MP Ranjan Ramanayake made certain allegations at a press conference conducted in his house. At one point during the press conference, he took an indirect swipe at three MPs alleged to have accepted money. Instead of mentioning their names, he revealed their identities through innuendo. Actually, he referred to their facial expressions and bodily features so that people are able to make correct guesses. There is one with a crimson face. The other one is a bearded, dark fellow. The third one is having a slim figure, he said. No formal charges have been framed against any of them. Also, there is no allegation made against them by name in public as such. Yet, Ranjan Ramanayakes hints may serve as grist for the mill when formal complaints are made one day. MP Jayasekara, who defected from the government along with 15 others MPs to sit in the opposition, is now at pain to absolve himself of any wrongdoing. He is now trying to find ways and means to put in public domain the names of others alleged to have accepted money from Perpetual Treasuries or Arjun Aloysius for that matter. In politics, all hell will break loose if such names are revealed with the veracity of allegations proven enough. If the allegations are true, it will be detrimental to their future politics in a big away, as most of them were elected on the plank of eradicating bribery and corruption in all their manifestations. Also, the parties that accommodate them will have to get beaten politically at the end. Presidents son appeared alongside Minister Sajith Premadasa in the same stage TNA took steps to revive its youth wing in the north as most Tamils youths with radical ideas stood together Ranjan took indirect swipe at three MPs alleged to have accepted money These members who remain with MR are not ready to compromise their political identity All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC)s Gajendra Kumar Ponnambalam is likely to throw his weight behind Vigneswaran Some JO members, affiliated organizations skeptical over 16-member SLFP group The 16-member SLFP group is trying to make overtures to the Joint Opposition. It is learnt from political sources close to the group that there is no uniform stand within it. According to sources, MPs such as Susil Premajayantha, John Amaratunga, Susantha Punchinilame and Sudarshani Fernandopulle wanted to team up with the Joint Opposition straightaway to work under the leadership of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Nonetheless, the others such as S.B. Dissanayake and Dayasiri Jayasekara hold a different view. They insist on taking control of the SLFP and the SLFP- UPFA by removing Ministers Mahinda Amaraweera and Duminda Dissanayake from their secretary posts forthwith. In fact, Minister Dissanayake tries to be the SLFP General Secretary. They continue to pledge their loyalty to President Maithripala Sirisena as the SLFP leader. This has incensed some members of the Joint Opposition and organizations affiliated to it. They remain skeptical about the plan of this SLFP group. It has now led to an open confrontation between the two sides. These members who remain with Mahinda Rajapaksa are not ready to compromise their political identity built around the lotus bud symbol of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP). The SLPP, in fact, articulated in clear-cut terms that it would contest the next elections only under its lotus bud symbol. TNA entangled in political whirlpool The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) is caught in a political whirlpool in the north and the east mainly because of antagonism between it and Northern Province Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran. Ahead of the elections to the northern provincial council scheduled for later this year, the Chief Minister has vowed to form a political party as an alternative to the TNA in the north. As things stand at the moment, All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC) led by Gajendra Kumar Ponnambalam is likely to throw his weight behind Mr. Wigneswaran at the next election posing a serious threat to the TNA. During this trying time, the TNA took steps to revive its youth wing in the north as most Tamils youths with radical ideas stood together Mr. Wigneswaran. They joined the Mullavaikkal commemoration together with Mr. Wigneswaran. Presidents son Daham Sirisena addresses Sajiths function President Sirisenas son Daham Sirisena was on the same stage with Housing Construction Minister Sajith Premadasa recently at a function to mark the inauguration of a housing village in Polonnaruwa. He also addressed the gathering and eulogized the work of Minister Sajith Premadasa who is also the son of former President the late Ranasinghe Premadasa. In fact, President Sirisena sent his son to deputize him at this event because he was busy with some other engagements on the day. (rt.co), 29 May, 2018 Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is ready to go to war with Beijing if it crosses red lines and unilaterally claims natural resources in the disputed South China Sea, the countrys foreign minister has warned. The Philippines will go to war to protect its rights in the South China Sea, Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano noted, somewhat contradicting President Rodrigo Dutertes policy of avoiding any confrontation with their neighbor. If anyone gets the natural resources in the West Philippine Sea, he [Duterte] will go to war, Cayetano said on Monday. Cayetano repeated, outlining red lines amid a simmering territorial dispute with Beijing, which continues to ignore the 2016 international arbitration ruling that said there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights in the South China Sea. June begins tomorrow and for whatever reason it is traditionally regarded as the month of brides. Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore has lamented that for the past few centuries in India, marriage has become a form of glorified prostitution. He points out that the parents themselves put their daughters on sale -- something like Rs.1 million for an accountant, two million for a lawyer and four for a medical doctor. This crisis prevails in Sri Lanka also and especially during the past four decades, after we swallowed the globalised capitalist market economic concept, it is not only the dowry problem but also a trend towards spending several lakhs if not millions of rupees on weddings. Facing a bad example set by the rich elites -- with their wealth obtained by legal or illegal means -- even middle class and lower middle class families borrow lakhs of rupees or pawn family jewellery to be used for a lavish wedding ceremony. For months or years later the parents or the couple face additional problems in repaying that loan. Wedding-planning companies have also been set up to add to the expenses with some now even using drones to send greetings. Thankfully, some enlightened families or couples have opted for a simple wedding without gold, glamour or glitter. Realistically we all know that a good marriage does not depend on a five-star wedding banquet but on selfless love and a sacrificial spirit towards each other. Important events such as these and the way we celebrate them need to be part of our reflection for the Global Day of Parents which we mark tomorrow. Whatever a self-centred society may say or whatever major religions do not stress, it is the parents who play the key role in guiding the children in the values and virtues of a simple and humble lifestyle. We are reminded of one Indian couple who had received millions from their parents for a lavish wedding. Instead they decided to have a simple wedding and donate millions to Mother Theresas Missionaries of Charity. They used the money to care for thousands of abandoned children and others. What a wonderful blessing for the couple and those who were helped by their golden donation. Young people, keenly interested in revolutions need to understand that a simple wedding without gold or five-star receptions, is a social revolution which will benefit thousands of others. According to the United Nations, the Global Day of Parents is observed on June 1 every year. The Day was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in 2012 and honours parents throughout the world. The Global Day provides an opportunity to appreciate parents in all parts of the world for their selfless commitment to children and their lifelong sacrifice towards nurturing this relationship. Since the 1980s, the important role of the family has increasingly come to the attention of the international community. The General Assembly adopted several resolutions, and proclaimed the International Year of the Family and the International Day of Families. Emphasizing the critical role of parents in the rearing of children, the Global Day of Parents recognizes also that the family has the primary responsibility for the nurturing and protection of children. For the full and harmonious development of their personality, children should grow up in a family environment and in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding, the UN says. According to the UN, the central goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by the world leaders in 2015, focus on ending poverty, promoting shared economic prosperity, social development and peoples well-being while protecting the environment. Families remain at the centre of social life ensuring the well-being of their members, educating and socializing children and youth and caring for young and old. In particular, family-oriented policies can contribute to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals 1 to 5 relating to doing away with poverty and hunger; ensuring healthy lives and promoting of well-being for all ages; ensuring educational opportunities throughout the lifespan and achieving gender equality. Therefore while governments need to play their roles with their leaders being gifted with honesty and integrity and the spirit of selfless, sacrificial and sincere service to the people, families also need to play their roles in bringing about a just, peaceful and all inclusive society. Chinas South Asian ambitions for its Maritime Silk Road (MSR) have hit foul waters. On the one hand, the MSR must navigate the strategic competition between India and China and on the other, it needs to satisfy the divergent interests of Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka (the South Asian countries on the MSR). Its growth in the region is not likely to be smooth. Pakistan plays a pivotal role in Chinas MSR scheme through the ChinaPakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) a key Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project that serves as the crucial link between the maritime road and the land-based belt. The Pakistani port of Gwadar, which is built, financed and operated by China, is located at the confluence of the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea and it provides China (through Kashgar in its western Xinjiang province) access to a key location in the Indian Ocean. China has made huge financial commitments to the CPEC, which have been largely welcomed by the Pakistani leadership as a means of boosting Pakistans economy grounded in their all-weather bilateral relationship. But there has recently been growing unease within sections in Pakistan about the long-term benefits of the CPEC and about the creeping transferral of sovereignty to China specifically through Pakistans CPEC debt burden. These are not the only points of concern in the ChinaPakistan relationship: China had wanted the renminbi to be used in the Gwadar free-port area and China seemingly made moves to talk directly to separatist rebels in Pakistans restive Balochistan region. Islamabad is increasingly aware of Pakistans dependence on its northern neighbour. Pakistan is not alone in its fears. India views the MSR and Chinas broader BRI as a major threat to Indian security and strategic interests. On the soft-power front, New Delhi worries that the regional countries strategic choices regarding the MSR may be hard-wiring these countries into Beijings orbit through debt burdens. On the hard-power front, New Delhi fears China aims to deploy Gwadar in the medium to long term as a dual-use port that would allow key access into the Indian Ocean for Chinas armed forces not to mention that Gwadar bolsters Pakistans ability to deter any Indian advantage in the naval realm. India considers Chinas MSR projects more broadly to be part of its strategy of challenging Indian primacy in the Indian Ocean. Maintaining this primacy has been a key strategic objective of the Modi government and the MSRs potential to enlarge Chinas influence in the Indian Ocean is seen as a direct threat to one of Indias core strategic interests. Further south, Sri Lanka has leveraged growing ties with China against its sometimes difficult relationship with India. Under Sri Lankas previous Rajapaksa government, many in India perceived its island neighbour swinging significantly towards China. China made large loans available to Sri Lanka for infrastructural building as part of Chinas MSR, of which the most distinctive project was the Hambantota port on Sri Lankas southern coast. The 2015 change in government in Sri Lanka signalled a move away from the earlier perceived swing towards China. Despite this, the current government is bound to some extent by its large MSR debt burden. Reeling from this burden, the Sri Lankan government agreed in 2017 to sell a 70 percent stake in the Hambantota port to a Chinese state-owned enterprise for 99 years. Bangladesh is struggling to maintain balance in its relationship with China and India. The BangladeshChinaIndiaMyanmar (BCIM) Economic Corridor, a transport initiative that began life in 1999, has now stalled largely because of Indias deep trepidations about the BCIM being part of Chinas BRI. In this context, Bangladesh has accepted huge Chinese financing in the form of loans and other agreements the total now stands at around 28 development projects totalling more than US $ 20 billion. Mindful of the possible long-term debt to China, Bangladesh has accepted a Japanese bid to build a port at Matarbari, while putting on hold Chinese plans to construct a similar container port on Sonadia Island. But this may not be enough: the current Bangladeshi government is still worried that its hedging strategy between India and China could be compromised by its participation in the MSR. In the Maldives, a change of government has led to a change in its approach towards IndiaChina competition in the region. In 2013, the new government cancelled an earlier privatisation award to an Indian company to develop the Maldives international airport. This was followed by an agreement with China to build infrastructure connecting the airport and a port on the atoll of Laamu. China is now deeply involved in the development and expansion of the Maldives international airport through loans from the EXIM Bank of China and Chinese tourists have become the single largest group to visit the Maldives. Indian concerns about the scale of Chinese involvement in the Maldives infrastructure development have even led to some within Indias strategic community suggesting Indian intervention to effect regime change in Indias favour. Indias concerns about the MSR have led to heightened strategic competition between India and China within the South Asian littoral and the South Asian MSR states themselves have varying levels of concerns about the initiatives financial and sovereignty implications. Taken together, these portend significant challenges for Chinas MSR in South Asian waters. (Sinderpal Singh is a Senior Fellow with the South Asia programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) After recent twists and turns and the whirlwind of diplomacy over the weekend, Washington Tuesday said there were "signs of progress" for the expected meeting between the leaders of the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders calls on a reporter during the daily press briefing at the White House, Tuesday, May 22, 2018, in Washington. [File photo: AP/Andrew Harnik] "The president (Donald Trump) thinks that the ongoing discussions are going very well," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Tuesday afternoon. The meetings taking place this week were "certainly signs of progress," the spokeswoman added. Earlier in the day, the White House announced that Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the DPRK's ruling Workers' Party of Korea Central Committee, is heading to New York and will meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The U.S. State Department later said that Pompeo will travel to New York on Wednesday for the meeting, which will be the third meeting between the two senior officials, following their talks during Pompeo's visits to the DPRK in April and May. "They've had obviously very deep conversations," State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said at a briefing on Tuesday. Meanwhile, a U.S. delegation, headed by U.S. veteran diplomat Sung Kim, was meeting with the DPRK officials at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), with more meetings expected later this week, according to a White House statement on the same day. The statement also noted that a U.S. pre-advance team, led by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, is currently in Singapore coordinating the logistics of the expected meeting between Trump and the DPRK top leader Kim Jong Un. "I think there is a reasonable chance the summit will take place," Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua, saying that the DPRK, South Korea, the United States, and China "have invested considerable time and effort in making the summit possible so each has an incentive to keep the conversation open." For Trump, it's also an opportunity to "make a historic foreign policy breakthrough," Dan Mahaffee, senior vice president and director of policy at the Center for the Study of Congress and the Presidency, told Xinhua. The latest positive progress for the summit, originally scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, came after Trump canceled the meeting in a letter to Kim Jong Un on Thursday, citing "tremendous anger and open hostility" displayed by Pyongyang recently. Pyongyang had warned Washington that it might cancel the summit because of provocative anti-DPRK remarks by top U.S. officials. In response to Trump's letter, the DPRK's First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan said early Friday that the country is ready to sit down with the United States any time in any manner for talks to solve the problems existing between them. Trump then reversed course, saying both sides wanted the meeting to happen and it could still go ahead after productive talks. He also confirmed on Sunday that a U.S. official team had arrived in the DPRK to talk about the preparation for talks. "Hopefully, despite the statements of President Trump and other administration officials, dialogue can continue to lessen tensions, but with a realistic understanding of what are likely outcomes," Mahaffee said. Amid certain optimism, Washington also remained alert for any possible future reverse. "We're moving forward, and we'll be prepared either way," Sanders told reporters. Indian Express: With zero customs duty on exports to India and Europe from Sri Lanka, Hero Cycles is planning to increase its stake in its Colombo-based bicycle unit this quarter. Hero cycles worlds largest bicycle manufacturer had purchased 60 percent stake in BSH Ventures in April 2016. Hero Cycles Chairman and Managing Director Pankaj Munjal said, This plant is strategically located to cater to the Europe and Indian markets and the plant acquisition is one of the many steps to expand Heros presence globally. While exporting to Europe from India invites a custom duty of 12-14 percent, Sri Lanka has a special status for exporting to India and Europe at zero duty. BSH Ventures is an export-oriented firm located in the Biyagama Export Zone of the island nation. The young who take to Sanuka, and do not take to Amaradeva, and the old who take to the latter and not to the former, are at the end of the day the one and the same. The rift between these two demographics goes beyond just age differences. But how do you separate the one from the other? By the following yardstick: those who dote on Sanuka are purveyors of the popular culture, while those who dote on Amaradeva are purveyors of the formal culture. By formal, I am distinguishing it from the tastes of those who follow, and subscribe to, the music of Lionel Ranwala, Piyasiri Wijeratne, and from more recent times, Rohana Baddage and Bandula Wijeweera. As such we come across a differentiation: between janapriya for popular, and jana for what we consider to be the folk culture, though it is, in fact, a formalised variant thereof. This distinction is vital when we delve into the cultural, social, economic, and political backdrops to those cultures. I have tried to the best of my ability to rationalise those backdrops and their relation to the art forms consumed by those who hailed from them - especially regarding the petty bourgeoisie - but based on the responses I got I was not, I believe now, clear enough. The truth is that Sri Lankas predicament, economic or social, can be rooted in its inability to prop up an able bourgeoisie who could be to their culture what the liberal Bengalis had been to theirs in their Renaissance. The bourgeoisie, through syndicates, cartels, and other schemes which ended up creating what Kumari Jayawardena refers to as a dynastic democracy in Sri Lanka, took off from taverns and tolls and rents but never made it beyond a pre-industrial economy. When the landowning aristocracy of a colonial society - particularly a society like ours or Indias - gains through capitalist enterprise, the conflict between their interests and those of the Colonial Office tend to deepen to such an extent that the former begin to protest; eventually, their protests find an equivalent in the cultural sphere through the literature of that period. Thus in Bengal we find the novels of Bankim Chatterjee, which like the novels of W. A. Silva were rooted in the romances of Walter Scott and Rider Haggard. In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, the interests of the propertied class and of the Colonial Office were one and the same. Macaulay, in his bid to turn the natives into brown sahibs (English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect), had brought about in Sri Lanka what he could not bring about in India: the creation of a Westernised, civilised bourgeoisie whose loyalty to the Empire was beyond doubt. As such the militant nationalist liberal bourgeoisie in India were never to be found in Ceylon, and as Tissa Abeysekara notes, we had no Motilal Nehru who could burn his Saville Row suits as a disavowal of Western tastes, opinions, morals, and intellect. What we had, instead, was a powerful but stymied milieu, petty bourgeoisie in their tastes and opinions and what not, and aspiring to be a nationalist bourgeoisie. The traditional elite the sangha, veda, guru, and govi of Bandaranaikes pancha maha balavegaya (kamkaru was an addition necessitated by the rise of labour in the 20th century; they had no elite status in traditional society) were superseded by a moneyed class, who in turn sought to overcome and overturn the old Mudliyars and Muhandirams whom the British had hitherto privileged. As scholars, including Professor Jayawardena, have noted, just as there was a division between the privileged gentry and these new capitalist upstarts, there was also a division within the latter class. Between the cautious conservatism of D. B. Jayatilake, D. S. Senanayake, and the founders (most of them, at least) of the Temperance Movement and the activism and at times chauvinistic rhetoric of Anagarika Dharmapala, for instance, there was a virtually unbridgeable chasm. (The fact that Dharmapala was never allowed in as a member of the Abstinence Union is a sign of this rift, which grew over the years.) The art forms which this milieu, particularly the more nationalistic among them, affirmed and purveyed were hybridised, though not always so: they watched the plays of John de Silva and Charles Dias and read the novels of Piyadasa Sirisena. It would be a mistake to consider these as urban artists and writers, but their appeal was broadly of an urban, quasi-sophisticated (because hybrid) kind. It was not the praja shalawa in a village where these artists gathered, but the Tower Hall at Maradana, which over the years became a rallying point for patriotism to such an extent that the then Inspector-General of Police, H. L. Dowbiggin, wrote that he believed that de Silvas plays were produced with the object of creating a spirit of nationalism. The Tower Hall was not restricted to the elite, but they opened up, not to the peasantry per se, but instead to the Sinhalese-speaking lower middle class and the urban workers: in short, the milieu which has historically been at the forefront of social and political upheavals elsewhere, particularly in continental Europe. It cannot be said that the peasantry, for whom art was not something to go out and watch after paying for a ticket, werent affected by this surge of patriotism in the cultural sphere, but the impact of these works of art would have been felt acutely by a more urbane milieu. Regi Siriwardena called this a belated and weak bourgeoisie, approximating to a trading and handicraft petty bourgeoisie, whose stand was less against imperialism (though they were radical anti-imperialists) than against their Tamil and Muslim counterparts (whose business interests were never aligned with theirs: the 1915 riots, for instance, surged once some railway workers had an argument with a neighbouring tea kiosk owner, a Muslim, after he had decided to raise the price of a cup of tea). They were, simply put, neither here nor there. They needed a guiding star, in fact a searchlight, to help them come to terms with themselves and with what they wanted to become later on. That guiding star and searchlight, who deserves treatment elsewhere, was Anagarika Dharmapala. Shed away his racist invectives, his controversial slogans aimed at the Tamils and the Muslims, and you come across the only real militant nationalist from the bourgeoisie who envisioned a self-sufficient, industrialised economy. (This aspect to the Anagarika has never properly been examined.) On the other hand, the nationalist revival which transpired after the intrusion of the Theosophists on the one hand and British rationalism on the other (where Henry Steel Olcott and Robert Ingersoll met was where the Buddhist rationalist movement began; to this day, we have leading intellectuals who equate the one with the other, a legacy of the historical coincidence of faith and scepticism during the revival) needed the help and support of the newly emerging bourgeoisie. George Bonds account of the Buddhist revival and the ideological splits and amalgamations (The Buddhist Revival in Sri Lanka) is useful for those who wish to examine how the bourgeoisie were at once with, and against, the political consequences of the movement: how, for instance, the more conservative elements of the Ceylon National Congress, including Jayatilake and Senanayake, were in favour of a division between the clergy and the laity, as a means of preserving certain vested privileges (which is not, by the way, an indictment on these people, venerated as heroes today), while the Anagarika clearly was not. Added to this was another phenomenon: while the British sought to do away with remnants of the past in their colonies, and especially in India and Sri Lanka (being the Crown Colonies we unfortunately were), they could not do away with the exotic elements of that past. The Kandyan dress, the perahera, the caste-ism so rampant in the days of the kings, remained more or less as they were, with slight modifications. As the bourgeoisie evolved from the betel bag to the coffee store (Spence Hardy), they did not or could not let go of these familiar, archaic elements of the same culture they were now, thanks to their willingness to be Westernised, ostensibly repudiating. This rather strange dichotomy repudiation versus affirmation continues with the descendants of this bourgeoisie: you see it every time a member of that class, while welcoming a political sphere free of myths and lies, jaunts off to a temple or kovil, no matter how uncomfortably misaligned they are in those places, to perform a baaraya. Perhaps because of their cultural conditioning, no matter how hard they tried, the bourgeoisie were unable to be the brown sahibs they tried to be. (The closest to a Macaulay the colonies produced was a Sinhalese: Dandris de Silva Gunaratna, who was praised by Macaulay himself as being his closest imitator.) They could not think on their own, and in not being able to think on their own, they couldnt produce a culture of their own, barring the habits and customs of the British they aped. This necessitated a catalogue of cultural objects, and those objects, which required sponsorship, were sponsored lavishly by them. Initially, the help they provided extended to the building of temples, libraries, and hospitals, and were done out of a need to appear honourable in front of the British (to gain knighthoods). As time passed, and as their offspring began to rebel against their conservatism, this supportive streak eventually shifted and congealed to a colossal revival of cultural artefacts. From Dandris de Silva to Charles Jacob Peiris, and from Charles Jacob Peiris to Amaradeva, you come across a gradual, but radical, transformation: from the anglicised crust of the bourgeoisie to the indigenous, but sophisticated, roots of the petty bourgeoisie. UDAKDEV1@GMAIL.COM The Sri Lankan banks satisfy many of the key matrices such as growth, profits, efficiency and asset quality against most regional peers but the sector is in deep thirst for fresh capital as the banks brace for full implementation of BASEL III as early as in few months. Fitch Ratings estimates the large Sri Lankan banks to have a Rs.19 billion capital shortfall against the higher capital requirements under BASEL III, out of which, the state banks accounting for 72 percent of the shortfall. The Sri Lankan banks are transitioning from the BASEL II to BASEL III regime and the latter calling for higher capital ratios, including the additional capital buffers for systematically important banks or banks with assets over Rs.500 billion. The BASEL III capital requirements include a capital conservation buffer of 2.5 percent and a capital surcharge for domestic systemically important banks or D-SIBs of 1.5 percent. Under the new BASEL III regime, the new minimum Tier I and total capital ratios have to be increased to at least 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively, from 5 percent and 10 percent under BASEL II. The BASEL III regime, which came into partial effect from July last year, gave banksboth systematically important and non-systematically importanta staggered implementation time frame till the new regime comes into full effect in January 2019. Fitch estimates the large Sri Lankan banks will have a Rs.19 billion capital shortfall against the BASEL III requirements based on bank-specific assumptions, with the state banks accounting for 72 percent of the shortfall, Fitch Ratings said in a special report, yesterday. Fitch however said the capital shortfall has not factored in the impact from the new International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 9 on finance instruments. The local banks were seen disclosing an estimated impact on capital ratios from the implementation of IFRS 9 from January 2018. However, Fitch believes the IFRS 9 impact on the banks regulatory capital ratios could be spread across several years. Large Sri Lankan banks raised Rs.42 billion in equity and Rs.11 billion in the BASEL III-compliant Tier II capital in 2017. Commercial Bank, Hatton National Bank and Sampath Bank have raised equity capital of Rs.10.1 billion, Rs.14.2 billion and Rs.20.1 billion, respectively. They separately raised Tier II capital via convertible subordinated debentures. Meanwhile, Peoples Bank and Bank of Ceylon received Rs.5.0 billion each from the state coffers. Fitch said that the state banks capital levels are vulnerable to dividend demands from the state while their ability to raise capital is in certain instances also constrained by the limitations placed on them through the respective acts that govern their establishment. Meanwhile, state-owned Bank of Ceylon has proposed a new Tier II issue. Fitch generally rates the BASEL III Tier II debt one notch below the anchor rating, where the anchor rating for an issue is the banks stand-alone strength but in the case of Bank of Ceylon, Fitch has assigned the AA rating due its extraordinary sovereign support. Fitch believes there is a case for factoring in extraordinary sovereign support into the anchor ratings of the BASEL III Tier II instruments for some select banks with strong state linkages and systemic importance as the state is likely to have a strong interest in supporting the instruments of these banks before loss absorption features are triggered, the rating agency said. (Johannesburg) REUTERS: South African retailer and wholesaler SPAR Group Ltd plans to open two more stores in Sri Lanka, it said yesterday, after warning that fuel price hikes and currency weakness could affect its home market. In 2016, SPAR entered into a 50/50 joint venture with Ceylon Biscuits Ltd in Sri Lanka to establish SPAR SL. SPAR SL opened its first store in a suburb of the capital Colombo in March and CEO Graham OConnor told Reuters two more stores would be opened by year end. (There is) strong growth, very little opposition, very fragmented market so very good opportunities, he said. The two additional stores will be located in Colombo, trading under the SPAR banner, group Financial Director Mark Godfrey added in an emailed response to questions. Sri Lankas economy is expected to grow between 5 and 5.5 percent this year from an estimate of less than 4 percent in 2017, according to the countrys central bank. Back home, the group expects its core Southern Africa market to be held back by fuel price increases and foreign currency changes, meaning consumers will remain under pressure, with a constrained spending outlook. SPAR, which also has operations in Switzerland and Ireland, reported a 5.6 percent increase in first-half group sales to 50 billion rand (US $ 4 billion), boosted by its European operations. Overall sales slowed from the 12.6 percent growth the company reported a year earlier. Sales in Southern Africa were impacted by low consumer spending due to weak economic growth and the worlds largest ever listeria outbreak, which forced retailers to remove cold meat products from their shelves. At least 200 people have died from listeria in South Africa since January 2017. The companys headline earnings per share rose 14 percent to 541.2 cents. Headline earnings per share is the main profit measure in South Africa and strips out certain one-off items. SPAR shares, which had fallen by 2.4 percent over the past year, were up 2.68 percent at 1004 GMT. From left: Eastern Echo Holdings PLC Multiclient Eastern Hemisphere Vice President Phil Davey and Petroleum Resources Development Minister Arjuna Ranatunga exchange agreements Pic by Pradeep Pathirana By Harshana Sellahewa Petroleum Resources Development Minister Arjuna Ranatunga yesterday signed an agreement on behalf of the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) with Eastern Echo Holdings PLC, a subsidiary of US-based major oilfield services company Schulmberger, giving a new boost for offshore exploration of Sri Lankas hydrocarbon potential. The agreement was signed by Ranatunga and Eastern Echo Holdings PLC Multiclient Eastern Hemisphere Vice President Phil Davey, with the intention to initiate seismic surveys along the countrys east coast and Mannar Basin, by the end of this year. The agreement will allow Eastern Echo Holdings to collect, market and license petroleum data on a multi-client basis, enabling an array of data acquisition projects, including 2D and 3D seismic in selected areas around Sri Lanka, initiating with the east coast. The total investment for this venture is estimated in excess of US $ 50 million and is wholly borne by Eastern Echo Holdings PLC. The company will resort to pre-funding agreements and selling the findings to operators such as Shell or Total to finance the project. Speaking to Mirror Business, Petroleum Resources Development Secretariat Director General Vajira Dassanayake said, The total investment is US $ 50 million for seismic acquisition. We encourage companies like Schulmberger to do more seismic acquisitions, so that our database would be modern and more comprehensive. Dassanayake further elaborated that a tripartite agreement would be signed between the GOSL, French oil major, Total and an unnamed firm, within the month of June, renewing the existing agreement with Total, which was signed in 2016. Overall, the project would provide Sri Lanka with a range of socio-economic benefits, such as enhancement of Sri Lankas interpretation and basin modelling capabilities with the provision of training on petroleum systems modelling and interpretation of new data, while accelerating the new licensing process and faster maturation of discovered assets. It will also enable knowledge transfer to local geo-scientists, access to cutting-edge technology and build in-country expertise in technical, financial and economical modelling areas. According to the Petroleum Resources Development Secretariat, the government will receive a share of the future data sales revenue either in cash or structured competency development programmes/software from Schlumberger as preferred and it will create a platform for the promotion and marketing of local data as well as the hydrocarbon potential globally, through a comprehensive network of major oil and gas companies. President Maithripala Sirisena said today the late Ven. Maduluwawe Sobitha Thera, who came forward to set up a Government through a common candidate, never asked a common candidate to loot the Central Bank. The President expressed these views at the 76th commemoration of the late Ven. Sobitha Thera held at Foundation Institute in Colombo. President Sirisena, who paid a surprise visit to the event, said he had not received an official invitation to attend the event. The President had this to say-: I had not received an official invitation to attend the event. I came to know about it through a third party. My media director said the event was organized by Ravi Jayawardene. I contacted him and asked about my omission. He said there had been a mistake. Everyone had hoped I would be invited but no one took the initiative to do so. Some say the government went wrong after I took up the chairmanship of the SLFP. I can explain to you what actually happened and who ruined the vision of the Ven. Sobitha Thera. I brought todays Daily Mirror newspaper along with me. It has posted a photo of me and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad saying that I have not done what he has done in five days. It says Malaysian Prime Minister has arrested nine ministers, 144 businessmen and 50 judges accused of corruption. I phoned Malaysia and our High Commissioner in Malaysia and they said these claims are all false. Social media also critisised me me in the last few days saying I have not done what Mahathir took five days to accomplish. I am a person who came forward to make this country better and carry out the principles of good governance in its true sense. I could have earned huge sums of money when I was the Health Minister if I wanted to. I am truly hurt by the wrong interpretations that has been formed in the minds of the public about me. I am taken aback when I hear things such as the fact that cases against wrongdoers are not being taken up because of me. People never expected an investigation to be launched into allegations that former Minister T.B. Ekanayake gave a vehicle to someone, former Deputy Minister Priyankara Jayaratne giving a job to his daughter and former Minister A.H.M. Fowzie misusing a vehicle belonging to another ministry. People in this country did not expect such behaviour from their public representatives. If family members of murdered rugby player Wasim Thajudeen and lawyers appeared in his case were taken to one place and asked, they would reveal what had happened. We must see why I could not carry out most of what people expected me to do after electing me the President. I had not experienced insults, character assassination and disgrace in my 47-year-old political career than I experienced as the President. As former President Ranasinghe Premadasa had said, I am someone who is well-tempered with politics. Some people say if anyone contested the Presidential Election as the common candidate could have won. If so they could have done so. I was used as the common candidate as I was a clean politician and came forward as a lion despite life threats. After I was sworn in as the President on January 9, Mr Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as the Prime Minister. However, the UNP had only 47 seats in Parliament then. How can a Government be formed with only 47 seats? These people came up with a One-hundred-day Programme, which didnt include a dissolving of Government. If that programme was not in place, the main task available was to dissolve Parliament. The one-hundred-day programme was one of the silliest things ever undertaken by this government. Had I not accepted the chairmanship of the SLFP, Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake of the group of 47 MPs would have failed to pass the budget in Parliament. Who provided helicopters to former President Mahinda Rajapaksa to go to Tangalle unharmed after the Presidential election results were announced? Was it me? No! It was so and so. (Ariyaratna Ranabahu) Video by Sepala Bithumb, the largest crypto exchange in South Korea and the fifth largest in the world, has announced a ban on virtual asset trading transactions of Sri Lankan residents along with 10 other countries, which were identified as having lenient policies in combatting money laundering and terrorist financing by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). In a recent press release, Bithumb stated that the ban was to reflect the recommendations of its government and the Korea Blockchain Associations money laundering policy to counter cryptocurrency-associated money laundering and other illicit financial activities. The remaining countries in the list are North Korea, Iran, Iraq Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ethiopia, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Vanuatu and Yemen. Bithumb announced that the accounts of existing users from these countries will be disabled from June 21, while Bithumb wouldnt accept new users from the specified countries. During last G-20 financial meeting, the participating nations including South Korea decided to implement FATF on money laundering standards to virtual currencies as well. Bithumb also announced that it will require the users, including mobile app users, to fully authenticate their identities and furnish proof of addresses. The FATF has listed Sri Lanka along with eight other countries as high risk and monitored jurisdictions that have taken insufficient measures to combat money laundering, terrorist financing and other threats to the international financial system. The Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) Governor Indrajith Coomaraswamy recently stated that Sri Lanka plans to move out of the list by October this year. FATF noted that Sri Lankan government has made a high-level political commitment to work with the FATF and APG to strengthen the effectiveness of its anti-money laundering/countering terrorist finance (AML/CFT) regime and address any related technical deficiencies. Reviewing Sri Lankas progress in implementing the action plan, FATF recently acknowledged that the country has taken steps to improve the effectiveness of AML/CFT regime. However, FATF insisted that Sri Lanka has much to do by continuing its work on implementing its action plan to address deficiencies. FATF has given a time period until March 2019 for the implementation of the action plan. North Korea has dispatched top officials to the United States and Singapore, media reported on Tuesday, the latest indication that the on-again-off-again summit with U.S. President Donald Trump may go ahead. North Koreas Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the ruling Workers Partys Central Committee, was scheduled to fly to the United States on Wednesday after speaking to Chinese officials in Beijing, South Koreas Yonhap news agency said, citing an unnamed source. North Korean leader Kim Jong Uns de facto chief of staff, Kim Chang Son, meanwhile, flew to Singapore via Beijing on Monday night, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported. At the same time, a pre-advance team was travelling to Singapore to meet with North Koreans, the White House said. U.S. government officials, including the White House deputy chief of staff for operations Joe Hagin, left U.S. Yokota Air Base in Japan for Singapore on Monday, NHK said. The reports indicate that planning for the historic summit, initially scheduled for June 12, is moving ahead after Trump called it off last week. A day later, Trump said he had reconsidered, and officials from both countries were meeting to work out details. When Kim Chang Son was asked by a reporter at the Beijing airport if he was flying to Singapore for talks with the United States, he said he was going there to play, according to footage from Nippon Television Network. -SEOUL REUTERS May 29 By Nishel Fernando UberINTERCITY goes live today for multiple outstation routes following a successful six-month pilot project from Colombo to Galle launched in December 2017. In an interview with Mirror Business, Uber General Manager for South India and Sri Lanka Christian Freese said, Given the phenomenal success, we are launching multiple outstation routes from tomorrow so that the riders can enjoy the convenience of booking an Uber to almost any part of Sri Lanka, including popular tourist destinations like Kataragama, Polonnaruwa, Anuradhapura, Sigiriya, Nuwara Eliya, Dambulla, Sri Pada, Kandy, Bentota, Jaffna, Pasikuda, Trincomalee and Arugam Bay. Freese noted that Uber customers, including tourists, will be able to travel almost anywhere with a push of a button on their phones. Freese also announced that UberHIRE, a time-based service, would be launched later this summer in Sri Lanka. UberHIRE is already launched in India and it provides the opportunity to the Uber users to engage in various activities such as shopping, back-to-back meeting, etc. while keeping the same cab for 12 hours with multiple stops. The US decision to unilaterally abandon the nuclear deal with Iran is likely to put a damper on Sri Lankan tea exports, a leading tea broking house in the country said. USAs decision to abandon the nuclear deal with Iran is anticipated to be a major setback for the industry, Ceylon Tea Brokers PLC said in its first quarter tea industry overview. The Iran nuclear deal was reached in 2015 between Iran and a group of world powers, namely the US, UK, Russia, France, China and Germany. The US has threatened to reimpose sanctions against Irans automobile, civil aviation, energy and finance sectors. However, the European states have been scrambling to ensure Iran gets enough economic benefits to persuade it to stay in the deal. Sri Lankas total tea production for first quarter of 2018 stood at 74.23 million kilos, in comparison to 66.88 million kilos for the same period, last year. During the quarter, Sri Lanka exported 5.56 million kilos, against 6.09 million kilos in the same period, last year. The Sri Lankan tea exports to Iran fell 19 percent to 27.4 million kilos for the full year 2017, from the year before. As at December last year, Iran was the fourth largest market, with a 9.5 percent share of total Sri Lankan tea exports, down from almost 21 percent in 2016, according to the Sri Lanka Tea Board. Meanwhile, during the first quarter of 2018, Iraq emerged as the number one market for Sri Lankan tea, with exports of 6.61 million kilos, up from 7.47 million kilos same quarter, last year, followed by Turkey with nine million kilos, up by 7.18 million kilos. Russia emerged as the number three player, with exports of 8.99 million kilos, up from 8.5 million, last year. The Sri Lankan tea exports for the first quarter of 2018 amounted to 68.89 million kilos, vis-a-vis 68.04 million kilos recorded for the same period, last year. The FOB average price per kilo for this period stood at Rs.828.45, as against Rs.769.87. The total revenue realized for the first quarter from tea exports was US $ 349.17 million, compared to US $ 311.85 million recorded for the same period, last year. The top tea importing nations in the world last year in order were Pakistan, Russia, the US, UK and Egypt, while the main tea exporters were Kenya, China, Sri Lanka and India. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will pay an official visit to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Thursday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Wednesday. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov [File Photo: Xinhua] "The talks of the heads of foreign affairs departments are planned, during which it is expected to discuss topical issues of the bilateral agenda, as well as exchange views on the situation around the Korean Peninsula and other key international and regional issues," the ministry said in a press release. New 'Christian Internet' is 'One of the Greatest Works of God Being Done;' Christians will 'Share the Gospel Without Censorship' Contact: Steven Andrew, SAN JOSE, Calif., May 30, 2018 / Why is a Christian Internet needed? "Christians are tired of being restricted and falsely called 'haters' by anti-God Facebook, Google and Twitter," Andrew said. "Do you want to go from censorship to freedom? The Christian Internet helps Christians," he said. The first priority is to finish USA.Life Social Network, which Andrew says is "the answer to Facebook and Twitter censoring Christians." Being completed at the same time is 1776Free Search Engine that "gives Christian results from pastors, news, bloggers and individuals that are being hid." "Christians and ministries could see up to a 10,000 percent increase in traffic" when compared to "the massive Christian censorship of Facebook, Google and Twitter," Andrew said. "As soon as people hear about the 'Christian Web,' they want it now," he said. It is important for "individuals, churches and businesses to sign up today" to "get preferred usernames" and to "build the community to millions of people." Free accounts are available at Andrew started a Anyone from anywhere can join and use www.USA.Life and www.1776Free.com. Family, friends and ministries in other countries can stay connected and share photos, updates, messages and videos. "Blessings come from the Christian Internet, because of it's 'pro-America algorithm (TM)'. This is based on the God-given rights of "life, liberty and happiness" and the founding fathers beliefs "to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ," Andrew said. Andrew asks grass roots activists, churches and news stations to help get the word out by "sharing about USA.Life and 1776Free" and "sending emails." "I do not have the money Facebook and Google have. The Christian Internet depends on generous donations from people, churches and businesses who want to see this become reality," Andrew said. "If enough people give just $10 today, we can launch this summer." Those giving $1,000 or more are placed on the Founders Wall. An Share Tweet Contact: Steven Andrew, USA.Life , 877-585-7729SAN JOSE, Calif., May 30, 2018 / Christian Newswire / -- The "Christian Internet" is being built to help Christians and pastors "share the Gospel without censorship." It is "one of the greatest works of God being done today and opens doors for teaching the Word of God and evangelism," said Steven Andrew. He is the Christian Silicon Valley technology leader in charge of the effort.Why is a Christian Internet needed? "Christians are tired of being restricted and falsely called 'haters' by anti-God Facebook, Google and Twitter," Andrew said."Do you want to go from censorship to freedom? The Christian Internet helps Christians," he said.The first priority is to finish USA.Life Social Network, which Andrew says is "the answer to Facebook and Twitter censoring Christians." Being completed at the same time is 1776Free Search Engine that "gives Christian results from pastors, news, bloggers and individuals that are being hid.""Christians and ministries could see up to a 10,000 percent increase in traffic" when compared to "the massive Christian censorship of Facebook, Google and Twitter," Andrew said."As soon as people hear about the 'Christian Web,' they want it now," he said. It is important for "individuals, churches and businesses to sign up today" to "get preferred usernames" and to "build the community to millions of people." Free accounts are available at www.USA.Life Andrew started a crowdfunding page, as a kickstarter for this "historic outreach." "The sooner the required funding comes in, the faster we can launch," Andrew said.Anyone from anywhere can join and use www.USA.Life and www.1776Free.com. Family, friends and ministries in other countries can stay connected and share photos, updates, messages and videos."Blessings come from the Christian Internet, because of it's 'pro-America algorithm (TM)'. This is based on the God-given rights of "life, liberty and happiness" and the founding fathers beliefs "to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ," Andrew said.Andrew asks grass roots activists, churches and news stations to help get the word out by "sharing about USA.Life and 1776Free" and "sending emails.""I do not have the money Facebook and Google have. The Christian Internet depends on generous donations from people, churches and businesses who want to see this become reality," Andrew said. "If enough people give just $10 today, we can launch this summer." Those giving $1,000 or more are placed on the Founders Wall.An overview, FAQ and video give more details. New 'Pro-America Internet' is 'the Greatest Work' to 'Unite the Nation' Contact: Steven Andrew, SAN JOSE, Calif., May 30, 2018 / "Would you like unity instead of division? A 'pro-America Algorithm (TM)' is what powers this new initiative to unite people. It heals the nation by promoting the principles of our founding fathers. No true American can argue against this," he said. The pro-America web consists of USA.Life Social Network, which Andrew says is "the answer to Facebook and Twitter blocking conservatives and causing division," and 1776Free Search Engine. 1776Free "gives results that are being hid from people online." "Conservatives are expected to see a huge traffic increase by recovering traffic lost due to Facebook, Google and Twitter censorship," Andrew said. In some cases "the growth may be as high as 10,000 percent based on our studies." "People are signing up fast," he said. The advantages for individuals and businesses to join today is to "gain access to preferred usernames" and to "help the community grow to millions of users." Free accounts are at To raise the support needed, Andrew began a Family, friends and businesses in other countries can stay connected and share photos, videos, updates and messages. "The 'pro-America algorithm (TM)' is based on the God-given rights of life, liberty and happiness and the Constitution," Andrew said. Who needs the "pro-America Internet"? "All who want to save the USA and want freedom from Facebook, Google and Twitter blocking American values," Andrew said. He asks grass roots activists, public figures and news stations to help get the word out by "sharing about USA.Life and 1776Free wherever they can." "I do not have the money Facebook and Google have. That is why the pro-America Internet depends on generous donations from people and businesses who want to see this happen," Andrew said. "If enough people give just $10 today, we can launch this summer and unite the nation." Those giving $1,000 or more have their name credited on the Founders Wall. More details are provided in a Share Tweet Contact: Steven Andrew, USA.Life , 877-585-7729SAN JOSE, Calif., May 30, 2018 / Christian Newswire / -- "To unite the nation," a new "Pro-America Internet" is being developed by Steven Andrew. He is the Conservative Silicon Valley technology leader heading up the historic project. He said, "this is the single most important work being done today to end the national division of blacks and whites, and Republicans and Democrats.""Would you like unity instead of division? A 'pro-America Algorithm (TM)' is what powers this new initiative to unite people. It heals the nation by promoting the principles of our founding fathers. No true American can argue against this," he said.The pro-America web consists of USA.Life Social Network, which Andrew says is "the answer to Facebook and Twitter blocking conservatives and causing division," and 1776Free Search Engine. 1776Free "gives results that are being hid from people online.""Conservatives are expected to see a huge traffic increase by recovering traffic lost due to Facebook, Google and Twitter censorship," Andrew said. In some cases "the growth may be as high as 10,000 percent based on our studies.""People are signing up fast," he said. The advantages for individuals and businesses to join today is to "gain access to preferred usernames" and to "help the community grow to millions of users."Free accounts are at www.USA.Life To raise the support needed, Andrew began a crowdfunding page . USA.Life and 1776Free must raise $646,000 by $10 and larger gifts to launch. Rewards are given to supporters.Family, friends and businesses in other countries can stay connected and share photos, videos, updates and messages."The 'pro-America algorithm (TM)' is based on the God-given rights of life, liberty and happiness and the Constitution," Andrew said.Who needs the "pro-America Internet"? "All who want to save the USA and want freedom from Facebook, Google and Twitter blocking American values," Andrew said.He asks grass roots activists, public figures and news stations to help get the word out by "sharing about USA.Life and 1776Free wherever they can.""I do not have the money Facebook and Google have. That is why the pro-America Internet depends on generous donations from people and businesses who want to see this happen," Andrew said."If enough people give just $10 today, we can launch this summer and unite the nation." Those giving $1,000 or more have their name credited on the Founders Wall.More details are provided in a video, description and FAQ (CNN Money) A new list of the world's most valuable brands is out, and China has claimed two of the top spots for the first time. Alibaba has joined the top 10, alongside Chinese tech group Tencent, as well as stalwarts such as Google and Apple. Ranked at No. 9., Jack Ma's Alibaba has seen its brand value nearly double to $113 billion as the e-commerce company has expanded further into fields such as mobile payments and cloud computing. Shenzhen-based Tencent broke into the annual BrandZ top 10 ranking in 2017 and has gone from strength to strength over the past year. It now holds fifth place behind Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft but above Facebook with a brand value of $179 billion, up 65 percent compared to last year. Tencent specializes in online games, apps, instant messaging services and online payments. It boasts a market capitalization of $490 billion, making it worth more than America's most valuable bank, JPMorgan Chase. Related: Alibaba is pouring billions into the food delivery business Here's the list of the top 10: Google Apple Amazon Microsoft Tencent Facebook Visa McDonald's Alibaba AT&T Doreen Wang, the head of BrandZ, said the new ranking demonstrates that Tencent and Alibaba have overcome numerous China-specific hurdles to become global powerhouses. "The challenges facing Chinese brands are by no means small," she said. "Limited brand awareness in international markets, a lack of trust due to historic quality issues and a reluctance by Chinese brands to invest in impactful global advertising campaigns has put them at a disadvantage with their more established competitors." But the rise of China and savvy young consumers has created opportunities for smart entrepreneurs, she said. "Attitudes are changing, particularly among younger consumers who are falling in love with Chinese brands," she said. "While penetration into U.S. markets may still be at a preliminary stage for both brands, other regions are embracing them." Alibaba is gaining ground in Brazil, Chile and other Latin American countries, where its online marketplace AliExpress "is rapidly becoming the leading e-commerce platform," said Wang. It also has a strong presence in countries such as Israel, Spain and South Korea. Tencent has been gaining greater recognition in south Asian markets such as Thailand and Singapore, she said. The BrandZ ranking is published annually by WPP and Kantar Millward Brown. Google has been at the top of the ranking for eight of the past 12 years. Its brand is currently valued at $302 billion, up 23 percent from last year. This story was first published on CNN.com, "Two of the world's biggest brands are now Chinese." Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 30) The government has taken steps to import cheaper diesel from Russia, Malacanang said Tuesday. In a press briefing in Mountain Province, Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque said Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi had informed him of the importation conducted by the Philippine National Oil Company Exploration Corporation (PNOC-EC), to help address the rising cost of fuel. "Ang landed cost po dito kasama na 'yung cost, insurance and freight sa Pilipinas is estimated only to be between 25 to 27," Roque said. Russia is not a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the consortium where the Philippines often outsources its oil. This is the first time it's importing from Russia. The Presidential Spokesperson added diesel from Russia may still need to be processed further in Singapore before it reaches the country. "Tinitingnan na kung pwedeng diesel from Russia pero baka kinakailangang pang i-subject daw to additional processing sa Singapore before we can use Russian diesel. But at half the price, maski may additional cost ang reprocessing sa Singapore, I think it will be a lot cheaper than current prices of diesel," he added. [Translation: We're looking if we can import diesel from Russia directly, but we may need to have Singapore process it before we can use the supply. But at half the price and additional costs in Singapore, I think it will be a lot cheaper than current prices of diesel," he added. Roque said two oil companies, Petron and Phoenix Petroleum have "voluntarily offered" to tap the expected cheaper diesel supply from Russia once it is in the country. "Mr. Ramon Ang (Petron President and CEO) and Mr. Dennis Uy (Phoenix Petroleum President and CEO) said that if we are able to import cheap diesel, they will sell it more or less at the price we're able to import it," he said. Earlier, Roque said it is also looking into importing oil from Venezuela, an OPEC founding member. But the South American country is facing its own oil crisis, after production in the country went down 20 percent from 2017. In 2017, the Philippines' petroleum product imports totaled 97,530 thousand barrels an increase of 11.8 percent from 2016. The import mix was mostly diesel oil at 41.5 percent last year, according to the Department of Energy. Global prices of oil jacked up in previous days, affecting local supply prices. However, the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) law also affects oil prices in the Philippines due to its provisions on fuel excise tax. The prices for both Brent crude oil and Dubai crude oil, both benchmarks of global oil prices, hover around the $75 per barrel mark. TRAIN's provision prevents the increase of the excise tax on fuel should the price of Dubai crude oil stay at the $80 per barrel mark from October to December this year. Several lawmakers are calling for the suspension of the fuel excise tax provision of the TRAIN given its effect on the prices of basic goods and services. CNN Philippines' Ina Andolong and Chad de Guzman contributed to this report. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 30) Another government official has been dismissed by President Rodrigo Duterte. Noel Patrick Sales Prudente, a deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Customs, was fired by the President as he delivered a speech in Manila Wednesday. "I will cut short the agony of Congress. I'm firing him today, Noel Patrick Sales Prudente," Duterte said. The President did not say why Prudente was let go, but mentioned the Customs official made frequent trips abroad. Duterte mentioned personal trips to Singapore and also Europe. Duterte has fired several officials over the last few days. He fired Government Corporate Counsel Rudolf Philip Jurado on Tuesday and Transportation Assistant Secretary for Railways Mark Tolentino on May 21. Earlier, the President hinted said he would fire at least five more officials. However, he made no mention of who they were or their offices. Luxury vehicles demolished President Duterte revealed the firing of Prudente at an event where 122 smuggled vehicles were destoryed, Six luxury vehicles and 116 motorcyles Vespas, two Triumphs. a Harley Davidson, and a BMW were destroyed Wednesday afternoon. The total cost of the motorcycles and vehicles was 34.7 million. Ukraine Agrees to Order 55 Airbus Helicopters in 555M Deal The page you requested is only available to subscribers. 1. If you are a Premium Service subscriber, please log in here to access this story: Log-in : Password : 2. If you are not a subcriber, you can: -- buy access to this page: unlimited access for seven days costs 3.00 EUR + VAT (at 20%) if applicable. Clicking on the "Ok" button below will place the item in your shopping cart and return you to our home page, where you will be able to select additional stories. -- select additional stories and services from our home page and pay for them at the same time. -- see your shopping cart. You can also see the contents of your shopping cart at any time by clicking on the "Order" tab on the navigation bar at the top of any page, or by clicking on the "Your order" light blue link in the top right-hand corner of our home page, immediately under the log-on box. San Diego County consumers looking for fresh, organic, ready-to-eat meals, cold-pressed juices and snacks now have a new choice. Urban Remedy, which sells its foods and juices in kiosks, stores and online, recently opened in San Diego County -- only the second market for the nearly 10-year-old company headquartered in the Bay Area. Earlier this year, it installed kiosks inside the Whole Foods in La Jolla and Del Mar. This month, it opened three more San Diego County kiosks inside Jimbos Naturally. It plans to open a stand-alone store in Solana Beach on June 11. Also, in the next six to 12 months, Urban Remedy hopes to open 10 to 15 more kiosks and three to four more shops in San Diego County. We are coming to San Diego in a big way, said Paul Coletta, Urban Remedys CEO. We are not just dabbling. The company rolled out its first store in 2013 and didnt introduce kiosks until 2016. Today, it has 15 stores and about 50 kiosks inside mostly grocers but also hospitals and corporate offices. Its total sales from kiosks are larger than from stores as well as online. In 2017, same-store sales for its kiosks grew more than 25 percent, Coletta said. Its stores the Solana Beach one spans about 250 square feet stock on average about 100 items vs. about 50 items for its kiosks, which only offer its best sellers. Its top-selling products include the $11.75 Macro Bowl, a gluten-free quinoa with roasted sweet potatoes, kale, pumpkin seeds, beets, cumin chickpea croutons and a Tahini vinaigrette. Also popular is the $5.25 four-ounce Booster Shot made with organic carrot and turmeric juice that has 7 grams of sugar. Below, Coletta, CEO since 2014, recently chatted about what he means by pay the farmer not the pharmacist, why kiosks are its fastest growing business and where locally hed like to put automated kiosks. (The interview was edited and condensed.) Q. Why pick San Diego County as your second market? A. We felt San Diego was a more underserved market with fewer options for fresh clean food. Im also familiar with (the area). I lived there for almost a decade. We debuted with the La Jolla Whole Foods kiosk about three months ago and opened the Del Mar Whole Foods kiosk a few weeks ago. The success of our first kiosks in La Jolla rivaled sales of some of the Bay Area locations. That gives me a lot of confidence that our products resonate in that market. Q. The company opened its first store in 2013. Why did it take about five years to enter a second market? A. We really wanted to prove out one market first with our full omni-channel network of retail and online and that took the better part of three to four years. That time also allowed us to refine our omni-channel business model and optimize our product portfolio. Q. Why are sales growing faster at a kiosk than store? A. Convenience. If Im at Jimbos market twice a week to pick up eggs and other groceries, its very convenient to pick up an Urban Remedy Macro Bowl. Our kiosks have been successful because they are in the path of the consumer who is already in the store buying other things. Consumers first discover us in a fresh kiosk and then migrate to our store for a broader offering and can participate in our loyalty program that rewards frequency. Theres real synergy between these spokes. Q. Whats the benefit of having stores? A. We can develop a product from concept to consumer in about six to eight weeks. We develop our products in house. We would first launch it in a few or all 15 retail stores we own. If it works, we next put it online. If it works in the store and online, we then move it to the kiosks where we have limited space but high volume. We own every one of our channels, even the kiosks. It allows us to launch and learn. Q. Whats been the biggest challenge in growing a fresh food business? A. We believe the future of foods is ultra fresh. But we also believe its clean. By clean, we mean certified organic, certified non GMO, low glycemic. Foods that are not clean are creating inflammation in the body, which is a precursor to most chronic diseases. Food is healing. Its not a tag line. Its a call to action. We define ultra fresh as products that are as close to nature as possible. The higher the nutrient density, the shorter the shelf life. Good food goes bad and thats a good thing. The single biggest business challenge we have is food waste. When dealing with a three-day shelf life, that is your reality. There are many ways to minimize that. You decrease waste with demand forecasting and history of what sells when and in what geography, how our products are selling and how seasonality affects the rate of sales. So we have real-time manufacturing. We place orders daily. We dont stock or inventory our items. We place the order in the afternoon. The second shift at the production facility in the Bay Area would start working on the order and finish it later that night. Its then trucked that night to arrive in the morning the next day (in San Diego County). What we dont do to minimize waste is we dont process our food. We dont strip nutrients from our food. Also, the omni channel allows you to balance inventory. So for example, if the Del Mar kiosk is having a great day and low on inventory, the store manager at Solana Beach (can stock it with foods from the store thats about 2.5 miles away.) Theres synergy and yes that helps with food waste. Q. Whats next for the company? A. We are trying to make eating fresh and clean easier. We built fully-automated kiosks (that you pay with) credit cards. We launched 10 in hospitals and corporate headquarters in the Bay Area. We started this three months ago. We dont have this in San Diego yet, but we plan to bring to them to various channels such as hospitals and airports very soon. Our intention is to take these automated kiosks (to where) the consumers live, work and play. Go where the customer is and the competition isnt. About Urban Remedy Headquarters: Point Richmond, Calif. Founded: 2009 Employees: 300 Where to find Urban Remedy locally: Kiosks inside Jimbos in Carlsbad, Del Mar Highlands and 4S Ranch stores; kiosks inside Whole Foods in La Jolla and Del Mar; and stand-alone store at 142 S. Cedros Ave. in Solana Beach. -- Hang Nguyen is a freelance writer for The San Diego Union-Tribune based in Los Angeles. A rendering of the grocery store at the new Merge 56. (Courtesy ) San Diego City Council unanimously approved the new Merge 56 development, a mixed-use town center on Camino Del Sur and SR-56 that will blend a cinema, retail, restaurants, office space, hotel and 242 residential townhouse units, 20 percent of which are devoted to affordable housing, surrounded by public and green spaces. Ive looked forward to this day for a long time, said developer Gary Levitt, a Del Mar Mesa resident, at the May 22 council meeting. The focus has been on creating a sense of place for the entire neighborhood and creating value for our neighbors so they would have somewhere to go to with friends and family for decades to come. Council President Pro Tem Barbara Bry, noting that about 10 feet of the Torrey Highlands project is in District 1, complimented Levitt for working well with the surrounding community. Its a great walkable community and hopefully this is a model of what we can build in more areas of the city, Bry said. Im happy to support the motion today. The site was originally part of the larger 147-acre Rhodes Crossing project approved by the city in 2004. Levitt purchased the 40-acre commercial portion of the property in 2013 and went to work redesigning it from the ground up. It was originally approved as a big box self-storage and commercial center with a sea of parking; instead, Levitt planned for a different type of project utilizing outstanding design to create an active, pedestrian-friendly lifestyle center. He said he reached out the the public from day oneincorporating the important extensions of Camino Del Sur and Carmel Mountain Road road to provide connectivity for the Park Village neighborhood and to provide a missing trail link with a formal trail connection between the Del Mar Mesa Preserve and Darkwood Canyon. Levitt said with all of his developments, he aims to build projects that are sustainable and have a vibrancy and walkable feel. Architect Ricardo Rabines said the idea is to create a hub and heart with anchor retail buildings around a walkable central green plaza. The projects 525,000 square feet of commercial and office space call for uses such as a movie theater, grocery store, fitness center and other retail. Instead of the large surface parking lot, there will be a parking structure hidden behind the buildings. Its been a long journey to get here and Im excited to see this project moving forward, especially considering the dramatic enhancement made in the redesign as compared to what was proposed, said District 5 Councilmember Mark Kersey. Its the ideal mix of what were looking for right now. During public comment, local residents spoke in support of the project and those opposed expressed environmental concerns. Merge 56 will bring 242 residential units, 20 percent of those affordable. (Courtesy ) In general, were not happy with Merge 56, that should surprise absolutely no one here, said Frank Landis of the California Native Plant Society. Landis voiced concerns about the developments proximity to a valuable ecological reserve, wildlife refuge and preserve home to many species teetering on the edge of extinction. He requested invasive weed removals and a less narrow wildlife crossing under the road to allow safe crossing for animals. To lessen the impact on the surrounding environment, Levitt has proposed two-lane rather than four-lane roads and has also proposed habitat restoration efforts to replace low-quality vernal pools in the area with high-quality, sustainable vernal pools. The remaining acreage of the Rhodes Crossing property surrounding Merge 56 is planned to be developed as residential homes. To illustrate how challenging it can be to get housing units produced in the city, Councilmember Scott Sherman wanted to make it known that it took nearly five years and $2 million, 15 percent of which is city processing fees, for Levitt to get to this point. The construction itself aims to be a shorter processLevitt said he hopes to break ground by the end of 2020 with the first delivery of homes and uses in 2021. At the May 23 board meeting, parents demanded that the Del Mar Union School District (DMUSD) consider stronger language in its school safety resolution and call for a ban on assault weapons. The DMUSD board passed a resolution last month that deleted the language regarding an outright ban on semi-automatic weapons as well as a ban on high capacity magazines, bump stocks and any other equipment, alteration or modification that would increase a firearms capacity for ammunition or rate of fire language that has been adopted by the boards of the Solana Beach, San Dieguito Union, San Diego Unified, Encinitas, Cardiff and Vista school districts. The vote on the resolution was 4-1 with trustee Scott Wooden opposed. Del Mars resolution was drafted after a few brave mama bears approached the board in March, requesting a resolution on gun violence following the Feb. 14 shooting at Parkland High School in which 17 people were killed. The May 23 meeting was just days removed from a shooting at Santa Fe High School in which 10 people were killed at school. DMUSD President Kristin Gibson said that the resolution the board passed does demand action from state and federal representatives to adopt stricter controls governing the sale, transfer, possession, manufacturing, and distribution of all firearms, dangerous weapons and ammunition. Those stricter controls include comprehensive and thorough background checks of all purchases of firearms as well as reasonable waiting periods and mandated training in the safe use of guns. It stopped short of calling for the outright ban. Personally, preventing gun violence is my passion, said Gibson, who as a child attended Sandy Hook Elementary and was a grad student at San Diego State University when her professor friend was one of three killed when a student opened fire on campus in 1996. While Gibson said she feels strongly about the issue, she also feels strongly about the ways school boards operate and their mandates. She said what the board was being asked to do was a departure from what a school districts role is and she said there must be respect for a variety of opinions on complex and very important matters. Some concur with the inclusion of the specific language and others do not. While they may support such firearm bans as individual citizens, as some of us here on the board do as well, they do not believe that is the role of the school district to do so, Gibson said. Gibson said she believes the resolution is stronger than others that have passed because it includes the districts implementation of research-based social and emotional learning curriculum, that all personnel are trained in options-based training response to an active shooting, the importance of threat assessment and the inclusion of mental health experts policies that promote a positive school environment so every child feels connected and included. Parents such as Kristen Panebianco, a Torrey Hills School parent and member of San Diegans for Gun Violence Prevention, said the resulting resolution does not represent the community at allshe did a quick poll of the full audience at Del Mar Hills Academy and no one raised their hand when asked if they were satisfied with the way it was written. Torrey Hills School parent Suzanne Hall requested that the board reinstate the draft language calling for a ban on assault-style weapons as well as to strike the resolutions language that stated the district would work with a broad spectrum of local community stakeholders, including gun owner organizations to provide educational opportunities on firearm safety. The draft was a response to the unsettling fact that has become the reality of our childrens lives todaythat guns and specifically assault weapons are killing our students in their classrooms, Hall said. I heard the board president say that the perspective of this board is that the language which I am requesting is not your purview, that its outside the scope of what you should be recommending in response to this crisis. But I ask you: If not you, than who? You are the policy setters for our elementary campuses. And so long as our national policy setters can do no more than send their thoughts and prayers to the grieving families, then parents and representatives that they elect to serve their children at the school sites must take matters into their own hands. On May 24, neighboring Solana Beach School District took its already-adopted resolution a step further and adopted an amended community safety resolution that specifically called on the 22nd District Agricultural Association, as the board of directors for the Del Mar Fairgrounds, to discontinue hosting gun shows at the fairgrounds. At DMUSDs April meeting, there were two hours of discussion on the resolution in which the board voiced a variety of opinions on the topic. During public comment, Michael Schwartz, of San Diego County Gun Owners, spoke out against Del Mar including the outright ban language in the resolution stating that it was inappropriate for a school board to advance an anti-second amendment agenda. Most of the resolution is fantastic. Everybody wants children to be safe and be in a safe environment but unfortunately it goes off the rails wildly when it starts to talk about the second amendment issues and banning guns specifically, Schwartz said. Schwartz said that to pass a resolution against semi-automatic weapons was extreme when approximately 65 percent of the guns owned by civilians in America are semi-automatic and 80 percent of those sold are semi-automatic. In their discussions, the board was committed to school safety but uncomfortable politicizing the school board and crafting what Wooden said had become a gun control resolution. Board members Gibson, Doug Rafner and Scott Wooden felt that the language of an outright ban felt outside of the boards realm of responsibility while Erica Halpern and Stephen Cochrane wanted to keep the language in. The language of the outright ban was not recommended by the California School Boards Association. This was brought to table by the community that elected usI dont feel its politicizing, Cochrane said. In our belief statement we talk about empowering our students to be thinkers and change makers. We need to model what we want our students to be. What we say isnt going to change the national law on gun control. But if were like a drop in the ocean at least were contributing to the degree we can. Even without the ban language, Wooden could not support the resolution as he believes it is outside their mandate as a school board to advocate for stricter controls. At the May 23 meeting, parents spoke up that they believed that the school board calling for a ban in its resolution was reasonable. I was shocked by the boards decision to gut the resolution to our legislators of this most important language simply because you believe it was not in your role, said Cheryl Landale of San Diegans for Gun Violence Prevention. It is absolutely within the role of the school board, who places student safety above all else. Legislators need to hear in the strongest possible tones that we need laws that will keep our communities and our children safe. Landale said she was also dismayed by the resolutions call for working with gun-owner organizations. Del Mar Heights parent Gary Brice agreed and said that any education on gun safety should be done by the parents or by law enforcement, It just opens a Pandoras Box if allowing other gun groups to come in here and try to have an audience with our children, he said. While earlier in the meeting Gibson said the board would not be taking further action on the resolution, she said during public comment was the first time she heard parents ask specifically for an assault weapon ban rather than a semi-automatic ban and that she requested that the resolution be referred to staff for further study. What this district will not do, and I say this loudly and emphatically for the record, is under any circumstance invite any gun ownership organization into our classrooms to train our children on the safe use of firearms, Gibson said. It will not happen. Gibson said the district has begun conversations with local organizations such as San Diegans for Gun Violence Prevention and Be Smart looking for areas to collaborate outside of the resolution. Already the district has shared resources such as ASK, which encourages parents to ask if weapons are safely stored before allowing children to play at a friend and neighbors homes. That is the sort of common ground that we can find that can potentially save a life, Gibson said. Save my User ID and Password Some subscribers prefer to save their log-in information so they do not have to enter their User ID and Password each time they visit the site. To activate this function, check the 'Save my User ID and Password' box in the log-in section. This will save the password on the computer you're using to access the site. Note: If you choose to use the log-out feature, you will lose your saved information. This means you will be required to log-in the next time you visit our site. Sony releases 0.5-type OLED microdisplay with UXGA resolution Sony has announced the upcoming release of the ECX339A OLED microdisplay featuring UXGA (1600 x 1200 resolution), the highest in class for a 0.5-type. This product achieves the world's smallest pixel pitch of 6.3-micron by leveraging Sony's OLED display technology and miniaturization technology, enabling a resolution 1.6x higher than the previous model. By employing a new drive circuit design that operates on half the voltage of the previous model, the new product achieves the same level of low-power operation as its predecessor but with much higher resolution. When paired with Sony's original driving system, a frame rate up to 240fps is supported - double that of previous product, the vendor said. Enhancing the resolution on microdisplays has traditionally presented problems such as deteriorating image quality due to decreased pixel pitch and inferior viewing angle properties. The new product features optimized transistors layout and process to address uneven characteristics and loss of withstand voltage, the issues associated with transistor miniaturization. The Sony original variation compensation circuit also enhances picture quality. Additionally, the color filter is deposited directly on the silicon substrate, reducing its distance from the light emitting layer, and the filter's color array has been modified. This helps to secure the viewing angle properties while achieving high resolution. OLED Microdisplays are widely used in digital camera electronic viewfinders (EVF) for their superior high contrast, high color gamut, and high-speed responsiveness. Sony, having achieved this high resolution and high frame rate, now offers even more realistic image display and accurate capture of subjects for use in high-end cameras that demand extremely high image quality. Going forward, Sony expects this high-definition OLED microdisplay to be employed in a diverse range of fields and applications such as AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) head-mounted displays. Sony 0.5-type OLED microdisplay ECX339A Photo: Company Sony 0.5-type OLED microdisplay ECX339A: Key specifications Item Description Name ECX339A Display Size 0.5 type (12.6mm diagonal length) Resolution UXGA]1600RGB1200^ Pixel pitch 6.3-micron Max frame rate 120 fps (progressive) / 240 fps (dual-line progressive) Power consumption (200cd/m2) 310 mW @ 60 fps (progressive) / 120 fps (dual-line progressive) Video interface LVDS/Sub-LVDS Max. luminance 1,000cd/m2 Contrast 100,000:1 or higher Color gamut (u'v') sRGB ratio: 110% Source: Company Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 30) President Rodrigo Duterte said he saw no reason to fire the Solicitor General. Speaking at an event in Manila Wednesday, the President said, "Itong si Calida. Matagal na yang security guard niya. Noon pa 'yan. Why should I fire him? Hes good, hes also from Davao. Ilokano yan. Hes good. Bakit, wala na ba tayo katwirang magnegosyo? As long as we dont participate. [Translation: This Calida. His security (agency) has been there for a long time. Why should I fire him? He's good, he's also from Davao. He's Ilocano. He's good, Why. don't we have a right to participate in business? As long as we don't participate.] The President's statement came as opposition senators filed a resolution to investigate Solicitor General Jose Calida over allegations of conflict of interest. Calida's family's company, Vigilant Investigative and Security Agency Inc., bagged two contracts with the Department of Justice (DOJ) worth 12 million when he was already SolGen. The Office of the Solicitor General is an attached agency of the DOJ, raising concerns of potential conflict of interest. The DOJ said on Tuesday there was no need to investigate Calida. Duterte to still go after corrupt officials President Duterte, addressing himself to corrupt officials, said should they need money for matters like hospital expenses and even weddings, instead of stealing from government coffers and get into corruption, they could approach him and he will give the funds. He said he would continue to pursue cases against corrupt officials, but added that should he receive intelligence reports saying that an official is engaged in corrupt acts, he won't hesitate to fire them right away. CNN Philippines' Ina Andolong and Ruth Cabal contributed to this report. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 30) President Rodrigo Duterte expressed interest in the status of the vice presidential polls vote recount, involving incumbent Vice President Leni Robredo and former Senator Bongbong Marcos. "Ano bang Ano bang latest count nito kay Bongbong pati kay ano? Ma-vice president ba talaga 'yan kasi..." Duterte said in a speech in Malacanang Monday. He did not elaborate. [Translation: What's the latest count in the Bongbong and...? Will he/she be vice President?] The recount started on April 2, two years after Marcos brought his electoral protest to the Supreme Court, sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET). He lost to Robredo by 263,473 votes in the 2016 vice presidential race. Both camps recently debated over the change in the allowed shading threshold of ballots the minimum acceptable amount of shade in the ballot's circle to qualify as a valid vote. The incumbent vice president argued the Comission on Elections in 2016 informed the PET of the 25 percent threshold, but Marcos belied her claims and called them "misleading." READ: Robredo on Marcos' claim her appeal was misleading: 'He's lying' In his comment filed Monday, Marcos said there is no categorical declaration in the Comelec Resolution No. 16-0600 that the 25 percent shading threshold was adopted by the Comelec En Banc "during the judicial recount and revision of ballots in election protest." Duterte is a known ally of the Marcoses. He expressed support for the burial of late strongman President Ferdinand Marcos whose more than 20-year term has been marred by human rights violations at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani. READ: Marcos family thanks Duterte for allowing burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani Meanwhile, Robredo and Duterte have not seen eye to eye on some social issues. She had resigned from the Duterte cabinet in December 2016. On Wednesday, former members of the Liberal Party (LP) of which Robredo is chairman slammed Duterte's expression of interest in the poll protest. "Duterte should not interfere into the affairs of the Presidential Electoral Tribunal regarding Marcos's election protest as this could cause undue pressure on the PET," said human rights lawyer and former LP-affiliate Akbayan Rep. solon Barry Gutierrez. Another former LP lawmaker, Erin Tanada, said Robredo could suffer the same fate as that of Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, who was ousted after Duterte announced his plans of removing her from her post. "Nang magsalita si Duterte laban kay Chief Justice Sereno, naalis siya sa puwesto. Ngayong nagpahayag ng interes si Duterte sa protesta ni Marcos, baka sapitin din ni VP Leni ang kapalaran ni Chief Justice Sereno," Tanada said. [Translation: When Duterte spoke against Chief Justice Sereno, she was ousted. Now that the President is expressing interest in Marcos' poll protest, VP Leni might experience the same demise.] READ: Supreme Court ousts Sereno in historic ruling Duterte's statement seeking an update on the status of the VP electoral polls recount came after he reiterated his call to detractors to prove he was behind Sereno's ouster. "She got herself into it actually. And it was not because of us. Not because of Congress, because of her peers. Wala naman tayong kasali diyan. Lalo na Supreme Court," he explained. READ: Duterte to Sereno: I am now your enemy He then made another offer to resign if proven he had a hand in the ouster of Sereno. "Sabi ko nga, kung may magsabi lang dito isa. Anyone of you. Magsabi na tumawag ka sa akin, nakalimutan mo may kinausap ka, mag-resign ako bukas. Totohanan 'yan. Tutal gusto ko nalang mag-resign rin eh," he said. [Translation: I told you, if just one, any one of you could prove that we talked, we had a phone conversation, I will resign. It is true. I've always wanted to resign.] READ: Sereno asks Duterte to resign Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 30) The gung-ho approach of the government when it comes to infrastructure spending takes a backseat when deals with China are involved, one of the administration's economic managers said. Socioeconomic Secretary Ernesto Pernia, during CNN Philippine's economic forum "Building for the Future", said that the government is aware of the possible pitfalls of getting into economic deals with China. "We read a lot of reports from Sri Lanka, African countries, Pakistan. We are well aware of that," Pernia said in response to a question by CNN International Correspondent Andrew Stevens on whether or not the Philippines was walking into China's "debt trap". Last February, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned that African countries like Djibouti may be falling into a "debt trap" with China over its infrastructure projects. An independent study from Harvard University identified countries that are vulnerable to China's "debtbook diplomacy", in which the Eastern giant uses debts to "acquire strategic assets or political influence over debtor nations." These countries include Djibouti, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines. READ: China using 'debtbook diplomacy' to spread its strategic aims in Asia Pacific According to Pernia, who is vice-chairperson of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) Board that approves big-ticket infrastructure projects by the government, the only project that is fully-funded by China is a small irrigation project in Tuguegarao City. "We have to make haste slowly in terms of Chinese-funded projects so we know every step of the way. We know what the pitfalls are," Pernia said. However, earlier this month the Department of Transportation said that they are considering having China fully fund the multi-billion peso Mindanao Railway project. "Since China already expressed intent to finance the future phases of Mindanao Railway, there is concern that if Phase 1 is not implemented by China, it will be more difficult to get China's support for the much longer future phases of the Mindanao Railway Project," the agency said. READ: DOTr bares plans for China to fund entire Mindanao Railway project Transport Secretary Arthur Tugade, who was also a speaker at the forum with Pernia and the other economic and infrastructure managers of the administration, did not dispute his fellow cabinet member's statement on China. In a press conference last week, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said that the government is also considering for the rehabilitation of Marawi two Chinese firms that have previously been blacklisted by the World Bank. READ: Rebuilding Marawi: Gov't giving Chinese firms once blacklisted by World Bank a chance Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 30) Filipinos will soon do away with a number of identification cards when transacting with the government or the private sector after Congress ratified the Philippine ID system bill. The House of Representatives on Wednesday ratified the Conference Committee report on the bill, a day after the Senate did the same. The bill will be sent to President Rodrigo Duterte for his signature. On May 24, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said the President will immediately sign the bill into law. "This landmark bill is part of the legislative priority agenda of the Duterte administration to improve the delivery of government services; thus, once ratified, the President will sign this into law," he added. Officials who will implement the measure will initially roll out the cards to one million Filipinos before 2018 ends, beginning with persons with disability, senior citizens, and the poor. The Philippine Identification System or (PhilSys) ID will have 13 sets of information. It will bear the PhilSys number (PSN), full name, sex, blood type, date of birth, place of birth, marital status, and photo of the ID owner. More information will be stored in the PhilSys registry, such as mobile number, email address, and biometrics data, including full set of fingerprints and iris scan. Filipino citizens or resident aliens should register personally in accredited registration centers nationwide, such as the regional and provincial offices of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), local civil registration offices, Government Service Insurance System, Social Security System, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG, PhilPost, Commission on Elections, and other government-owned and -controlled corporations assigned by the PSA. The program will have an initial budget of P2 billion this year, with Metro Manila, CALABARZON, and the Cordillera Autonomous Region as pilot areas. Filipino citizens and resident aliens won't have to pay for the government-issued card. 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The House voted 227-11-2 on Wednesday, while the Senate voted 21-0 early Thursday. Duterte certified the bill as urgent on Tuesday, waiving the three-day rule before Congress could vote for final reading. READ: Duterte certifies proposed BBL as urgent "We listened to the concerns of the congressmen, mostly those who are from Mindanao whose areas would be affected. The majority caucus (today) addressed that so we can proceed to pass the bill smoothly," said House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez. Meanwhile, senators discussed provisions of the bill for 10 hours until early Thursday morning. Among the issues the senators discussed are rules covering which municipalities or towns in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao can be part of the Bangasamoro government. "We will have to figure out if in the plebiscite: let's say those towns decide that they will not join, then we have a new situation. If they decide they would join and the rest of the province don't wanna join, that's another situation. What kind of rule do we want, is it a majority?" Senator Dick Gordon said. Representatives from the two chambers of Congress will meet for the bicameral conference committee during recess to iron out differences in their versions of the BBL. House Majority Leader Rudy Farinas on Saturday said the meetings are set on July 9 to 13. The panel would submit a report for ratification on July 23, which will be sent to President Rodrigo Duterte in time for his State of the Nation Address later that day. He would then have to either sign it into law or veto the proposed measure. The two chambers of Congress have previously stated they will approve the BBL before session adjourns sine die on June 2. The President has repeatedly said the BBL will help satisfy the Moro people's aspirations for real autonomy. The BBL paves the way for the creation of the Autonomous Region in the Bangsamoro, which will replace the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) established in 1989 through Republic Act 6734. ARMM groups the provinces of Basilan, Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi. READ: Road to peace in Mindanao: The Bangsamoro Organic Law The bill outlines authority in the region by assigning jurisdiction of reserved powers for the central government, exclusive powers of the Bangsamoro government, and concurrent powers for both the central and Bangsamoro governments. Anna Tarhata Basman, former head of legal team of the government panel on the BBL, emphasized the importance of the proposed measure. "What we would have wanted was for them to look at it from the perspective of the peace process. That this was a product of decades of negotiations. It encapsulates the aspirations of a group of people that has for a long time felt neglected, or isolated, or cannot relate to the central authorities," Basman said. BBL unconstitutional? Alvarez said abolishing the ARMM should be done through charter change as the region is enshrined in the Constitution. "As a lawyer, I share that doubt. Talaga namang nasa Constitution yung ARMM eh (the ARMM really is in the Constitution)," Alvarez said. Alvarez, however, said he will leave the decision of the measure's constitutionality to the Supreme Court. "Hayaan mong Supreme Court ang mag-decide diyan. Hindi kami yung magsasabi kung constitutional ba yan o hindi. Basta kami merong proposal, ito BBL as a substitute doon sa ARMM law, so gagawin namin. Now, anybody can question, yung constitutionality nung gagawin namin," he said. [Translation: Let the Supreme Court decide on that. It's not up to us to decide if it's constitutional or not. For us, we have a proposal, the BBL as a substitute for ARMM law. Now, anybody can question the constitutionality of what we will do.] Contested provisions The BBL has been the subject of many contentions among lawmakers, the Bangsamoro Transition Committee, and other affected parties. Among the contested provisions was the opt-in clause, or the inclusion of a plebiscite to be held once every five years for the next 25 years, in case more areas want to be part of the Bangsamoro territory. Zamboanga City Rep. Celso Lobregat said, however, there will only be one plebiscite of the BBL, to be held three to four months after it takes effect. The opt-in provision will only apply to all land-contiguous areas, where at least 10 percent of registered voters petition to be included prior to the plebiscite on the proposed law. Lawmakers earlier feared that this opt-in provision might result to a creeping expansion of the Autonomous Region on Bangsamoro. Lobregat said proponents also agreed that there will only be one police force in the region to be assigned by the Philippine National Police. He adds the military will no longer have to coordinate its movement and protocols. "I think none of us are opposing, we are opposed to some provisions which are unconstitutional or disadvantageous but many of these have been already addressed. Not all. But some," Lobregat said. Malacanang, meanwhile, said it is aware of the contentious issues in the BBL. National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon said they are monitoring armed groups in Mindanao that may exploit possible discontent brought about by the outcome of the legislation. "They will not go to war. Kilala naman natin sila [We know them]...They will become very good partners...Meron tayong monitor of course, ang ating security forces ay nagbabantay kung ano magiging development. Di natin pinababayaan yan [We have a monitor, of course, our security forces are monitoring the developments]," Esperon said. Thailand's pig sector in dilemma as US calls for end to pork ban Thailand's food safety standard is under threat as the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has pressured the Thai government to lift a US pork ban, said the Swine Raisers Association of Thailand. The development forces Thailand to choose between securing a US$4.2 billion trade deal and the health of consumers. The USTR office accepted the request from National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) to reconsider Thailand's trade benefit under the US Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), a tariff privilege that give an a competitive advantage to over 1,000 of Thai products in US market. The US pork council wants Thai government to eliminate its restriction on US uncooked meat, allowing them to gain full access to the market. Jim Heimerl, president of NPPC, cited an unfair treatment as the reason behind the council's petition. "Thailand's treatment of US pork provides a clear basis for removing or limiting its GSP benefits," he commented. US pork has been banned by Thailand due to the use of ractopamine, a feed addictive commonly used by US pork producers for muscle leanness and enhancing growth rate. The Thai government claims that there is not enough evidence to prove that the drug is safe for the consumers in the long term. Dr. Chaiyapoom Bunchasak, associate professor from the Department of Animal Science Faculty of Agriculture at Kasetsart University, was recently quoted to have said that the drug helps pigs to generate more protein and, therefore, rapidly enhances pig growth rates - as a result, helping farmers to lower the cost of operation and maximise productivity. Dr. Chaiyapoom added that Thailand has long held a zero tolerance policy on the use of beta-agonists (including ractopamine). Moreover, the drug is still restricted or banned in 160 countries such as members of the EU, China and Russia. The effect of ractopamine residue in human is still unknown. However, the drug has been linked to several harmful impacts on farm animal like agitation, dyspnea, cardiac rates, stress, disabilities and death. Ractopamine's effect can also pose great dangers to consumers with a history of heart disease and high blood pressure. Prayad Thirawong, a lecturer at Kasetsart University and Animal Husbandry Expert, recently wrote an article in which he describes the US pig offal as "a ticking time bomb" for other countries. He noted that a higher concentration of ractopamine residue can be found in pig organs, such as the liver and the intestine. This induces a risk for consumers as internal organs and half-cooked meat are often use in Thai dishes. Prayad added that pig parts, especially those considered to be "unwanted" in US market like head, giblets and offal will flood the Thai market, where food safety is the top priority. He pointed that the Thai government and private sectors have been working together to ensure consumers of food safety. These parties have been working for 20 years to make consumers aware of the danger from beta-agonists, as well as eliminating the illegal use of the drugs throughout the product chain. The US pressure against the pork ban is viewed by some as a unilateral attempt to dominate the local market with substandard products. According to the Swine Raisers Association of Thailand, a lift of the pork ban will cost inevitable damage to almost 200,000 pig farmers who raise 18 million pigs annually and impact related businesses such as feed producers, corn farmers and medical suppliers. Prasit Luangmanee, a pig farmer from Roi Et Province, said that Thai pig market is facing a huge oversupply. The US pork will only pose more problems for local farmers who suffered from declining prices for 10 months. In face of a problematic scenario, the Thai government has set up a working group to consider the market risk of permitting US pork and may have to wait for a year to make a decision. - Swine Raisers Association of Thailand Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 30) The weapons China has installed in the disputed South China Sea will not be used against the Philippines, top foreign affairs and security officials said Wednesday. "China [has] assured that with our growing relationship, we are not their enemies," Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano said as he briefed lawmakers about the situation in disputed waters west of the country. The country's top diplomat said China further assured that the deployment of long-range missiles on artificial islands are for defense purposes only and are not directed at the Philippines. He said Western countries, particularly the U.S., are the targets of China's intercontinental ballistic missiles in the South China Sea, having a range of 11,000 k.m. to 13,000 k.m. China does not need these if the Philippines is its target since Manila is just 3,000 k.m. away from Beijing and could easily be reached by its short-range weapons from there, he added. "That's why when they told the President it is not against you, that's why naniniwala tayo (we believe them)," he said. National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon admitted that the presence of two operational aircraft carriers of China in the South China Sea may be interpreted as "increased military activity," but added these were intended for training only. "Shall we call that militarization or shall we call that building up of the defense of a country that's rising in our region?" Esperon said. Cayetano clarified that the government is against militarization and has been pushing for the demilitarization of disputed islands. Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana was also at the hearing of the House Special Committee on the West Philippine Sea, and discussed some repairs the government is doing on Pag-asa Island in the contested Spratlys. Lawmakers dismayed Some lawmakers rejected the officials' defense of alleged militarization in the South China Sea. "You know in other scenarios yung trigger-happy yun ang nagsisimula ng putukan Giving China an elbow room to do this is a concern that goes down to us," Rep. Ruffy Biazon, a member of the committee, said. "They may be shooting at themselves but we are in the neighborhood. And our exclusive economic zone is their playground or is going to be their battleground," he added. In a landmark ruling on July 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague awarded to the Philippines areas in the South China Sea that lie within the country's 200-mile exclusive economic zone, based on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), an international treaty both the Philippines and China had signed. China has refused to acknowledge the arbitral ruling and continues to claim the South China Sea in its entirety. Duterte has repeatedly said the country cannot afford to go to war against China, but has promised to bring up the arbitral ruling with the Asian giant during his term. Opposition lawmaker Gary Alejano is dismayed that the President makes it seem like fighting for the government's sovereign rights will lead to war. "Hindi naman kailangan sumigaw tayo, hindi naman kailangan magdeclare ng giyera. Ang sinasabi lang natin we (should) assure the people that we are standing up," he said. [Translation: "We do not need to shout or declare a war. We only need to assure the people that we are standing up."] He warned, "Whether we are friends or not with China they will continue pursuing their national interest," which he said is the entire South China Sea. The House panel held an executive session with the Cabinet members to discuss developments in the South China Sea. Cayetano asked for the closed-door session, saying the government cannot divulge the contents of all diplomatic negotiations to protect national interest. CNN Philippines' Eimor Santos contributed to this report. The city of Guangzhou held a special sculpture exhibition in Frankfurt, Germany on May 25, in order to further promote the city's culture and arts in its European sister city. Held by the Guangzhou culture, radio, television, press and publications bureau and foreign affairs office of the Guangzhou municipal government, the event is part of the 2018 Guangzhou Culture Week and features 33 sculptures created by Guangzhou artists. It will run until June 5. More than 300 people attend the opening ceremony of the exhibition. [Photo/southcn.com] The year 2018 marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of the sister city relationship between Guangzhou and Frankfurt, and Guangzhou hopes use the exhibition to present a thriving, vigorous, and fast-developing image of Guangzhou and China to the people of Frankfurt. The exhibition consists of three main parts, focusing on the past, present and future of Guangzhou's development. At the opening ceremony of the exhibition, a sculpture of five rams representing Guangzhou (Guangzhou is known as the "city of rams" due to an ancient legend) was gifted to Frankfurt. The sculpture was created by Xu Hongfei, head of the Guangzhou Sculpture Academy, and displays the spirit of the Guangzhou people, such as their boldness in risk-taking and fearlessness in innovation. Tang Hanghao(R), deputy director of the Guangzhou Municipal People's Congress Standing Committee, presents the sculpture of five rams to Peter Feldmann, Lord Mayor of Frankfurt. [Photo/southcn.com] Young Frankfurt citizens admire the works on display at the exhibition. [Photo/southcn.com] By JPost , May 28 , 2018 Israel and Iran engaged over the weekend in indirect negotiations in Jordan regarding fighting in southwestern Syria, according to Elaph, a Saudi-owned website. Elaph reported that the Iranians pledged not to participate in expected battles in southwestern Syria between President Bashar Assads forces and rebel groups, and Israel has made it clear that it will not intervene in the battles in the tri-border area, as long as Hezbollah and the Iranian-backed Shiite militias are not involved. Read More: Join us - become an Elderado today at: LarryElder.com Follow Larry Elder on Follow Larry Elder on Twitter "Like" Larry Elder on Facebook Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 30) The government will publish a national security strategy for the first time, National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon said Wednesday, in the wake of competing claims in the South China Sea. President Rodrigo Duterte signed the document on May 16. It outlines the administration's plans for a "secure, peaceful, modern, and prosperous Philippines," Esperon said. Esperon announced this during a hearing of the House Special Committee on the West Philippine Sea. Esperon, Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano and Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana briefed lawmakers about the situation and developments in disputed waters west of the country. "We will bolster our position in the community of nations by strengthening diplomatic relations with our traditional allies, engaging non-traditional partners and pursuing an independent foreign policy that gives primacy to our national interest," Esperon said, quoting Duterte's words in the national security strategy. The administration said it will continue to improve defense, intelligence, and law enforcement capabilities to address urgent concerns, including the communist insurgency, terrorism, and violent extremism. Esperon said the national security strategy is in line with the National Security Policy of the Duterte administration from 2017 to 2022. The security policy is a comprehensive approach to addressing national security challenges. There was no announcement on when the document will be released. Other countries like the U.S. publish their national security strategy to outline national security concerns and how the government plans to deal with them. Magdalo party-list Rep. Gary Alejano of the opposition welcomed the government's move, saying it should be "disseminated to all high government officials." The administration has assured the public it is protecting the country's rights in the South China Sea. Esperon said the document also addresses concerns about the maritime row. Cayetano said the government cannot divulge the contents of all diplomatic negotiations to protect national interest. He added, however, that Duterte has allowed declassification of some information on the sea row, which they will discuss with lawmakers. The government calls as West Philippine Sea areas in the South China Sea that lie within the country's 200-mile exclusive economic zone, based on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, an international treaty both the Philippines and China had signed. This is stated in the July 2016 landmark ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which China refused to acknowledge. China continues to claim the South China Sea in its entirety. Duterte has promised to bring up the arbitral ruling with the East Asian giant during his term, or until 2022. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 30) Opposition senators filed a resolution on Wednesday seeking an investigation on the security service contracts between government agencies and Vigilant Investigative & Security Agency, Inc, a firm affiliated with Solicitor General Jose Calida. Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon and fellow senators Francis Pangilinan, Paolo Benigno Aquino IV, Risa Hontiveros, Leila de Lima, and Antonio Trillanes IV filed Senate Resolution No. 760 to urge the Senate committee on civil service, government reorganization, and professional regulation to look into the issue. Trillanes chairs the Senate panel that will probe the controversy. "Considering that the Solicitor General acts and represents the Republic and its people before any court, tribunal, body or commission as the ends of justice may require, it is of highest importance that the person occupying the office remains beyond reproach, acts in a manner that inspires confidence in the civil service and in the rule of law, and conducts himself with utmost integrity and decency," the minority bloc said in the resolution. Calida previously denied involvement in his family business obtaining over 39 million worth of contracts in government. Since Calida assumed his post in 2016, all the deals of Vigilant Investigative and Security Agency Inc. with government offices, such as the the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) and National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC), totaled 149.9 million, according to data from the Government Electronic Procurement System. PhilGEPS is a centralized portal containing information on government procurement. Calida resigned as president and chairman of the family-owned security agency. The notice of his resignation was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on July 13, 2016. However, SEC documents also show that the Solicitor General still holds 60 percent of shares of the company, as of September 2016. His wife and three children still own the remaining 40 percent of the security company. It was unclear if SolGen Calida had given up his shares after September 2016 - the last time Vigilant Investigative and Security Agency Inc. filed its last General Information Sheet with the SEC. DOJ open to review contracts Meanwhile, newly-confirmed Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra clarified he is open to investigate the contracts after controversies swirled about the validity of the firm's dealings with the government. During his confirmation hearing before the Commission on Appointments, Guevarra was asked by Senator Kiko Pangilinan why he said he won't probe the Solicitor General for the 149.9 million-worth of government contracts bagged by the Calida family's security agency Vigilant Investigative and Security Agency Inc. "I said earlier there is a presumption of regularity, but that's just my presumption. Ibig sabihin if there's evidence to the contrary, na baka there is some violation of the procurement laws natin, then it's something that is worth looking into," he said in a media interview after the suspension of the confirmation hearing. Guevarra clarified the department will only look into the two contracts between Vigilant and DOJ worth 12 million, which were signed after September 2016 when Calida was already a Solicitor General. "The DOJ will be open also to review mga contracts, but only in so far as the DOJ contract is concerned. We cannot speak about contracts of the security agency with Congress or with NEDA. Kasi we are not privy to the contract. But the contracts with DOJ na sort of merong question about the validity, then we'll look into it," he said. Since Calida assumed his post in 2016, all the deals of Vigilant Investigative and Security Agency Inc. with government offices, such as the the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) and National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC), totaled 149.9 million, according to data from the Government Electronic Procurement System. PhilGEPS is a centralized portal containing information on government procurement. Related: Government contracts bagged by his Calida family's security agency Calida resigned as president and chairman of the family-owned security agency. The notice of his resignation was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on July 13, 2016. However, SEC documents also show that the Solicitor General still holds 60 percent of shares of the company, as of September 2016. His wife and three children still own the remaining 40 percent of the security company. It was unclear if SolGen Calida had given up his shares after September 2016 the last time Vigilant Investigative and Security Agency Inc. filed its last General Information Sheet with the SEC. Guevarra was confirmed as Justice Secretary by the Commission on Appointments on Wednesday. CNN Philippines' Xianne Arcangel and Cecille Lardizabal contributed to this report. Reza Nazeri's saughters Saharnaz (2) and Satayesh (4) were vaccinated in Herat. Photo: Tuuli Hongisto27 May 2018 In Afghanistan, every child needs to be vaccinated to protect them from poliovirus. To achieve this, detailed plans are prepared for vaccination teams. The aim is to find where each Afghan child under 5 years of age around 10 million altogether is, and to reach them with vaccines. Read how these "microplans" work. A heavy steel gate opens on a quiet suburban street in central Herat. The city lies in a fertile river valley in western Afghanistan, an area rich with thousands of years of history. Over past centuries, different invaders from Genghis Khans army to the troops of the Timurid empire, the Mughals and the Safavids have opened the gates to rule the city once known as the Pearl of Khorasan. Now, a peaceful group can be seen walking down the streets of Herat. Equipped with blue vaccine carrier boxes and drops of polio vaccine, the teams knock on one door after another to vaccinate any children they find inside. The aim is to eradicate polio in Afghanistan. 4-year old girl Setayesh peaks behind the gate and steps out on the street, followed by her father Reza Nazeri, who is carrying sleepy 2-year-old little sister Saharnaz. Reza encourages the girls to open their mouths to receive 2 drops of polio vaccine, and a drop of vitamin A. The children look at the vaccinators with suspicion, but follow. The vaccinators thank and continue down the street. Locating 10 million children In March, around 10 million children were vaccinated in a national polio campaign in Afghanistan. During the campaign week, in Herat, vaccinators gave oral polio drops to over 150 000 children, only missing less than 5000 of them. In a country with one of the highest rates of population growth in the world and frequent population movement, it is no easy feat to tell how many children live in each province, district, village, block, house or tent. How do vaccinators know where the children in each area are located then? It takes detailed planning and tapping into local knowledge. No coincidence, who goes and where A few kilometres away from Setayeshs and Saharnazs home, dr Khushal Khan Zaman is shifting through printed plans on his desk at the WHO office. Polio eradication initiative has been working in Afghanistan for two decades since 1997. In that time, the programme has pieced together information of areas and populations bit by bit for every vaccination campaign. There are several every year. For each campaign, new documents guiding the campaign called microplans are drawn. Dr Kuhshal explains, that once a year, the cluster supervisors physically count the houses. Then they check that their plans match the numbers. Every house is assigned to a team in a specific area to visit on a particular day during the campaign. Before each campaign, supervisors update the microplans. The cluster supervisors know the approximate number of children in each house from last campaign, but as they are locals, they often know if and when new children have been born and also know, if for example nomadic tribes have settled in the area. Any new settlement, tent or group is added to the microplan. If the tents stay in the area for a longer time, they are added to the house-to-house microplan, but for shorter stays, a separate checklist used to monitor nomadic population movement is used. It is crucial to reach every child, even if they are on the move. The supervisor marks down which house is visited with which team and on which specific date. Vaccinators Marziya and Permilla Timuri examine a microplan in Herat. Photo: T Hongisto In the final plan, not only the numbers of houses and children is indicated, but the microplans also include details on how many vaccine vials, vaccine carriers, ice packs (to keep the vaccines at optimum temperature), chalks, tally sheets, pens, leaflets, finger markers, plastic bags and scissors are needed by each team. A few years ago, the plans used to just list the name of the area with the estimated number of the target population to be vaccinated. The plans have now been developed further to include even the smallest villages and individual houses. They also include information on the closest mosque and local elders. As a final step, the plans need to indicate, which teams visit which house and when. It needs to be clear to everyone, which team is responsible for which area. We mark where the teams start and which direction they take by arrows, Dr Khushal explains It is no coincidence who goes and where. It is important to ensure that the vaccinators are accepted by the local populations. Usually the teams consist of local people. Sometimes as a final check, the teams meet each other in the borders of their areas to check and confirm which team goes to which house so that no house is missed. When all pieces come together, the microplans can be finalised and vaccinator teams can start their work. Last day, last children Cluster supervisor Ahmad Rashid examines a microplan on the last day a campaign. Photo: T Hongisto At 9.30 am on a sunny Friday morning, Ahmad Rashid stands in a busy junction in the centre of Herat city and examines his plan for the day. He works as a cluster supervisor. Together with his colleague Ahmad Mujiib, they check where their teams are headed today. It is the last day of the vaccination campaign, and the last chance to reach all children in this round. Some of the children have not been home, or their parents might have refused the vaccine when the teams have visited during the campaign. The missed children are marked in the vaccinators tally sheets during the campaign days, so today the teams will revisit those houses. The men start their motorbikes and get on with the days work. A few blocks away they stop their engines, hop off and meet one of their vaccinator teams to follow them down a narrow alleyway. In the end, the group stops to knock on a red door. They know that this house has one more child unvaccinated. The door opens, and noisy a group of kids appears from a dark back room. The house is a home to a large extended family. Success! The vaccinator team convinced 3-year-old Moheburrahman's mom to allow vaccination. Photo: T Hongisto3-year-old Moheburrahman stands among his cousins and looks shyly at the door. His cousins have received their polio drops in the previous days, but his own mother is unsure about the vaccines safety. The team explains patiently that this is the only way to protect the boy from life-long paralysis. Thankfully, the mother agrees to allow vaccination. After all the hard work put into planning, this is the best reward. Text and photos: Tuuli Hongisto / WHO Afghanistan Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 30) While poverty declined during the Arroyo and Aquino administrations, its reduction has been sluggish with a dismal average of 0.9 percentage points per year between 2006 and 2015, the World Bank said. The Washington-based multilender said in its report "Making Growth Work for the Poor: A Poverty Assessment for the Philippines" the country needs to do more despite the poverty rate declining from 26.6 percent in 2006 to 21.6 percent in 2015. The World Bank added that the country needs to catch up with its neighbors China, Indonesia and Vietnam which are reducing poverty at faster rates. Its latest data show that in 2015, some 22 million Filipinos, or more than one-fifth of the population, still live below the national poverty line. Two out of five poor Filipinos live in Mindanao, the report said. READ: Making Growth Work for the Poor: A Poverty Assessment for the Philippines "Making a difference in Mindanao makes a big difference to the Philippines. Increasing public investment in Mindanao to boost development there would expand opportunities for conflict-affected communities, broaden access to services and create more and better jobs," said Xubei Luo, Senior Economist at the World Bank's Poverty and Equity Global Practice. Typhoons and armed conflicts keep many Filipinos poor, the report said. These Filipinos escape poverty by fleeing farm work and ending up in service and manufacturing sector jobs in the urban areas - industries recently flagged for conducting illegal contracting practices. Still, jobs outside of the agriculture sector accounted for two-thirds of the country's progress in reducing poverty. Government cash handouts (the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program) accounted for 25 percent of poverty reduction, domestic remittances: 12 percent and foreign remittances: six percent. READ: Anti-poverty convenor wants alternative to 4Ps The World Bank cited the Credit Suisse Wealth Report showing that the richest 1 percent of Filipinos own more than 50 percent of the country's wealth, a rate of inequality only topped by Russia, Turkey and Hong Kong. "High concentrations of wealth constrain equal opportunities and access to services, which are necessary for inclusive growth," the Bank said. The World Bank urged the government to provide more economic opportunities, which would help many more people earn higher and stable incomes. "With a strong economy, the country is well-placed to end the vicious cycles of unequal opportunity that trap people in poverty, set in place measures to improve service delivery, and boost job opportunities," said Mara Warwick, World Bank Country Director for Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand. READ: SWS: 1 out of 3 escaped poverty in Q1; 1 out 8 fell into poverty The National Economic and Development Authority said the World Bank's recommendations complement their strategies in the the Philippine Development Plan (PDP) 2017-2022. "The assessment of the World Bank is a good confirmation of what we have been advocating for. Similarly, the PDP 2017-2022 spells out strategies and priorities to lay down a solid foundation for more inclusive growth. The assessment provides us an opportunity to strengthen our collaboration in addressing poverty," Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia said. The plan targets reducing poverty to 13 to 15 percent by 2022. To help achieve these targets, the Poverty Assessment recommends the following policy directions: Create more and better jobs; Improve productivity in all sectors, especially agriculture; Equip Filipinos with skills needed for the 21st century economy; Invest in health and nutrition; Focus poverty reduction efforts on Mindanao; and Manage disaster risks and protect the vulnerable. President Erdogan is decisive in producing domestic car Erdogan slammed oppositions election promises by referring his meeting with Elon Musk. Speaking at his ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party's meeting in Istanbul, Erdogan criticized his rival Muharrem Inces -presidential candidate of the Republican People's Party (CHP)- election promise. I see the [indigenous automobile project] as a waste of time. I would want to see Turkey becoming a software base Ince had said in a televised interview with private broadcaster CNN Turk. Asked whether he has any major projects such as producing an indigenous car, Ince had said his biggest project for Turkey will be peace. We will never allow demolition alliance [opposition] to prevent us and to sabotage our projects. We will develop and deliver the first prototypes by the end of 2019 and enter production in 2022. Our indigenous cars will be something completely domestic and national. We talked throught this with Teslas CEO Elon Musk during his visit to Turkey. The cars will feature world-class technology. Erdogan stated. Hi All, I choose to provide a fixed deposit as the proof of funds in my account while lodging the application. However, wanted to check if anyone has used the same option and in that case, if they can share the format of the letter we need to ask the bank against this fixed deposit. Additionally, do I need to provide account statement along with this bank letter or just the bank letter against fixed deposit would work? I'm applying in HDFC bank in India for the same. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks ezhejiang.gov.cn The China Zhejiang New Zealand Trade and Investment Symposium takes place in Auckland, New Zealand on May 24. [Photo provided to ezhejiang.gov.cn] A delegation of 60 companies from East China's Zhejiang province visited Auckland, the largest city of New Zealand, on May 24 with the purpose of advancing economic exchanges and cooperation with the country. The China Zhejiang New Zealand Trade and Investment Symposium, initiated by the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT), held a platform for companies from both countries to hold discussions and seek possible opportunities for further connections. Chen Xiaoping, vice chairman of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, summarized the province's achievements and developments in the areas of the private economy, the marine economy, manufacturing and e-commerce. "In recent years, Zhejiang and New Zealand have conducted a lot of economic and trade exchanges," Chen said, citing the latest economic numbers, "In 2017, the trade volume between the two regions reached $1.61 billion, up 8 percent year-on-year." "Last year, New Zealand invested $520 million to establish 189 companies in Zhejiang while the number of companies that Zhejiang invested to set up in New Zealand in 2017 was 19, with a total investment of $85.22 million," Chen said that there are still opportunities for closer bilateral cooperation in trade and investment. Mike Arand, China business development advisor at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE), the country's economic development and trade promotion agency, stressed the robust growth of the cooperation between China and New Zealand in the past four decades, especially in the sectors of trade, the economy, investment, tourism and education. He said in the future, NZTE will help companies explore the Chinese market by developing a China-oriented e-commerce system. Companies from different industries such as manufacturing, textiles, traditional Chinese medicine, tourism and energy had face-to-face talks with their counterparts at the symposium. Meanwhile, the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of CCPIT announced plans to set up a liaison office in New Zealand in order to further facilitate the exchanges between the two regions. "Zhejiang has great potential in e-commerce and foreign trade. The province has released a range of preferential policies for inward investment and is continuously adjusting its industrial structure," said Wu Guiying, chairwoman of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of CCPIT, hoping the office could strengthen the ties between Zhejiang and New Zealand. Wu Guiying, chairwoman of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of CCPIT, introduces Zhejiang's overall development of trade and investment at the symposium in Auckland, New Zealand on May 24. [Photo provided to ezhejiang.gov.cn] Companies from Zhejiang and New Zealand have talks at the symposium in Auckland, New Zealand on May 24. [Photo provided to ezhejiang.gov.cn] ROCKWOOD, ON 4-H Ontario and Kubota Canada Ltd. (Kubota) are excited to announce their new partnership. This partnership will benefit 4-H Ontario youth, as Kubota has established their exclusive sponsorship of 4-H Ontarios Youth Leader Webinars and the development of a new provincial Graduating Members Award. This partnership with Kubota Canada Ltd. sets the bar for excellence and community involvement with 4-H senior members, says Debra Brown, Executive Director, 4-H Ontario. "Together we will deliver positive youth leadership development through the Youth Leader Webinars and honour the excellence and dedication of graduating 4-H members through the new Graduating Members Award." 4-H Ontario Youth Leader Webinar Training prepares senior 4-H Members with the knowledge to serve in their clubs in a leadership role. Once a youth turns 15 years old, they can take on more responsibilities within a club project. If youth wish to take on this role, they are required to attend training where they will learn more advanced techniques and theory on communications, teamwork, mentorship and leadership as applied to a 4-H club. Every year 4-H Ontario honours approximately 100-150 graduating members, who are still involved at age 21, in over 40 different 4-H Associations across the province. 4-H Association Awards Nights take place in counties across the province from October-March. Kubota will now be recognized as the Exclusive Sponsor of the Graduating Members Award for 2018. All 4-H Associations will now be able to provide a personalized gift in honour of a members dedication to the 4-H program. Local Kubota representatives will be invited to present these sponsored awards at 4-H Awards Nights. Kubota Canada Ltd. is very pleased to support 4-H youth in Ontario through these very worthwhile programs. Our partnership with 4-H Ontario is a great way to reach out and support our youth, said Rob Allison, National Brand Manager for Kubota Canada. We hope to build lasting relationships with the communities in Ontario and help our youth reach their full potential. This partnership will also see the two organizations work together on various other initiatives such as creating opportunities for 4-H members to attend Kubota dealership events and for Kubota representatives to attend 4-H clubs to experience 4-H programming. Source : 4-H Ontario The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you, we are excited to offer 4 weeks FREE Digital & Print access to all subscribers new and returning alike. We are dedicated to continuing providing reliable, high quality journalism. This is possible with the trust and support of our subscribers in the community we are proud to serve. Malaysian police with boxes siezed from Najibs condo (image via YouTube)Police in Kuala Lumpur are releasing more details about what theyve seized from houses and condos belonging to Najib Razak, the former prime minister voted out of office this month amid a growing corruption investigation. The seized items include suitcases holding about $28 million in cash, police said Friday. Police also have taken about 400 handbags, many of them Hermes Birkins, which can be worth more than $100,000 each. Other handbag brands seized include Chanel, Gucci, Versace, Prada, and Louis Vuitton. At one of Najibs houses, police said they seized 10 watches, most of them Rolexes. A police spokesperson, Amar Singh, said: From the money found, there were 26 currencies, the total amount as of yesterday is 114 million ringgit ($28.6 million). At a condo raided last week, police filled five trucks with boxes of handbags and other property. Najib, 64, was prime minister from 2009 until his ruling coalition lost power in elections earlier this month. The coalition had ruled for six decades. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that Najib deposited into his personal bank accounts about $700 million from a Malaysia sovereign wealth fund known as 1Malaysia Development Berhad or 1MDB. Najib has always denied the allegations. A government panel he appointed in Malaysia cleared him of wrongdoing. The U.S. Justice Department has alleged in court filings that more than $4.5 billion was looted from 1MDB from 2009 through 2015 by high-level officials of the fund and their associates. Najib wasnt named. He was chairman of 1MDB while he was prime minister. So far, the DOJ has filed forfeiture actions against nearly $1.7 billion in assets linked to 1MDB. Singapore seized property and bank accounts worth about $177 million linked to money allegedly diverted from the fund. Swiss prosecutors said in 2016 that a criminal investigation produced serious indications that about $4 billion may have been misappropriated from 1MBD. Police in Malaysia said last week they confiscated 1MDB-related documents from the former prime ministers office. A total of 12 locations have been searched, police said. Najib and his wife, Rosmah, havent been charged but are barred from leaving Malaysia. Amar Singh, the police spokesperson, said Friday: We confiscated 284 boxes containing handbags. We also confiscated 72 luggage bags which contain cash of various denominations, jewelry and other valuables. In the United States, the DOJ has also alleged that Najibs stepson used money taken from 1MDB to produce movies, including The Wolf of Wall Street. The new prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, 92, led Malaysia from 1981 to 2003. After he switched to the opposition, he promised to investigate the looting of 1MDB and Najibs alleged role. Najibs lawyer said last week his client is facing unwarranted harassment. ____ Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. In a recent FCPA Blog post, the author asks troubling questions about why so many corruption cases are coming out of the United Nations. Graft at the UN is something I know about, first hand. My UN story starts in 2006. Bob Appleton, who now heads the government enforcement and white collar practice group at CKR Law, was then chief of the United Nations Procurement Task Force. He first saw my name during an investigation of a corrupt UN contract. The contract had nothing to do with me or my former employer. But as often happens with global anti-bribery scandals (Unaoil, for example), the intermediary is at the epicenter of an investigation. I had a defense contract for United Nations Peacekeeping forces with the same intermediary that Bob Appleton was investigating on the other matter. Appleton sent me a fax saying he either wanted to talk with me or have his long list of questions answered. I ignored it. I didnt know then that he had come to the United Nations after a thirteen-year career at the DOJs Criminal Division, where he had prosecuted high profile weapons trafficking, international money laundering, and terrorist financing cases. When he had gathered enough evidence to implicate me, Appleton shared his findings with my then employer. He also made a law enforcement referral and turned the case over to the Justice Department. It didnt take long for Billy Jacobson, then the DOJ assistant chief of FCPA enforcement, to let me know I was the target of a criminal investigation for violating the FCPA. Jacobson said his evidence included the United Nations issue. I learned later that Appletons Procurement Task Force at the UN was staffed with experienced investigators and prosecutors from more than 15 countries. Before it was defunded and disbanded in 2008, the team managed more than 300 investigations throughout the UNs worldwide operations. In the three years it operated, the UN Procurement Task Force identified 20 major corruption schemes, and more than $630 million in tainted UN contracts. Their investigations led to five criminal convictions by national authorities of individuals (myself included) and the debarment of 47 suppliers. The most infamous case was the conviction and sentencing to eight-and-a-half years in prison, upheld on appeal, of Sanjaya Bahel. He had steered more than $100 million in contracts to preferred vendors and suppliers in India, including a huge telecommunications contract. Bahel was one of three procurement chiefs at the UN convicted as a result of cooperation between the Procurement Task Force and national authorities. After the Procurement Task Force was disbanded in 2008, the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services continued to operate, as it does today. That group no doubt is a skilled and professional team. But is it set up to succeed? Does it have the right mandate? What about staffing and budget? Given all the cases and prosecutions which cascaded from John Ashes indictment (the late former Permanent Representative of Antigua and Barbuda to the United Nations and 68th President of the UN General Assembly), where was the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services? The Department of Justice often thanks its investigatory partners, including those outside the U.S. government, when issuing releases about enforcement actions. In the releases about the recent UN cases, I couldnt find any reference to the UN or to its Office of Internal Oversight Services. Public international organizations dont have to be weak in compliance and enforcement. For example, the World Banks Integrity Vice Presidency has a team of experienced investigators from around the world, much like the UN Procurement Task Force did during Appletons tenure. Even without the power to subpoena witnesses and other evidence, those investigators can fly anywhere in the world to audit World Bank-funded programs, frequently resulting in debarment, which is reciprocated by other development agencies and banks. We know corruption finds weak links in governance and oversight wherever they exist. When institutions have their procurement and audit processes marked by secrecy instead of transparency, its an invitation for trouble. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is uncovering and prosecuting corruption at the UN. And perhaps one day well see a return to DOJ prosecutors working shoulder to shoulder with their UN counterparts, making sure that diplomatic status isnt ground cover for bribery and corruption. ____ Richard Bistrong is a contributing editor of the FCPA Blog and CEO of Front-Line Anti-Bribery LLC. In 2010 he pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to violate the FCPA and served fourteen and a half months at a U.S. federal prison camp. He was named to Compliance Weeks list of Top Minds in 2017 and was one of Ethispheres 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics in 2015. He was named by Thomson Reuters in 2018 as a Top 50 Social Influencer in Risk, Compliance and RegTech. His popular real-life compliance training video, Behind the Bribe, produced in cooperation with Mastercard, was released in 2017. To request a demo of the full eleven-minute video or a licensing fee schedule, please click here. The author wishes to thank Bob Appleton, who generously provided information and background on the work of the UN Procurement Task Force. Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release SubCategory Select Sub-Category Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 30) The remains of a Filipina student slain in Ireland was flown home today. The body of Jastine Valdez, arrived at Clark Airport today, 6:30 p.m. Valdez, 24 years old, was reportedly abducted near her home in Ireland earlier this month. She was found dead on May 21. Her suspected captor, a 41 year-old Irishman, was shot dead by police. She has been studying in the country for the past three years. READ: Officials confirm body found in Ireland is of slain Filipina student Valdez was immediately brought to her home province of Nueva Vizcaya. Philippine Honorary Consul in Dublin Mark Cogdon said that Valdezs death is the first murder case in Ireland involving a Filipina and that the country remains safe for foreigners. CNN Philippines Justine Dizon contributed to this report. Ava, a Zurich, Switzerland- and San Francisco, CA-based maker of a cycle tracking bracelet, raised $30m in Series B funding. Backers included SVC and btov Partners. The company intends to use the funds for further product research and development, enhancement of existing product and creation of new applications that empower women to take control of their reproductive health via data insights and science. Founded in Switzerland in 2014 by Pascal Koenig and also led by Chief Medical Officer Dr. Maureen Cronin, Ava provides a cycle-tracking sensor bracelet, which precisely detects the 5.3-day fertile window in a womans cycle in real time. The company is now involved in investing in clinical trials with the University Hospital of Zurich under the direction of Prof. Brigitte Leeners to study applications of the Ava technology among women trying to get pregnant, suffering from fertility challenges, and to understand complications during pregnancy. FinSMEs 30/05/2018 . , 2. . 6.00 . : " ", " 2" "" . 19.09.2021 ... Samsung has rolled out an update to Galaxy S9+ smartphone in India that finally brings Dual VoLTE support for the smartphone finally. This lets you use VoLTE on both the SIMs. The changelog also mentions improvements to VoLTE and VoWiFi. Even though it is not mentioned in the changelog, the smartphone has also received support for native call recording. This lets you record all the calls automatically and store them in the internal or external storage, instead of relying on third-party apps. The feature was rolled out in some countries along with the May Android security patch earlier this month, and via a new patch in countries like UK. Check out the complete changelog below Improved performance. VoLTE, VoWIFI Dual VoLTE/VoWIFI service is available for both of the SIM cards in the dual SIM slots. ( The service is provided only to dual SIM devices and can still be limited depending on the service operator for each SIM card. ) The security of your device has been improved The latest Samsung Galaxy S9+ update has the build number G965FXXU1BRE5 and is 426MB in size. Source Image: Vikas Khot "It is revealed that the shareholders and Indian partners at the joint venture, including the board members were not only aware of these intentions, but also consciously ensured violating the then FIPB norms, hence violation of FDI norms were prima facie found by giving effective management control to a foreign entity," the CBI said. Low cost airline AirAsia has landed into a massive scandal after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered an FIR against group promoter Anthony Francis Fernandes, directors of Air Asia (India) Limited, alleged lobbyists and unknown officials of the civil aviation ministry, accusing them of violating Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) norms and trying to secure international flying licenses in connivance with government officers.AirAsia (India) Limited (AAIL), a joint venture between Tata Sons Limited, Telestra Tradeplace Private Limited and AirAsia Investment Limited, Malaysia, submitted applications to the FIPB in February 2013 and received a formal approval in April 2013, followed by the no objection certificate in September 2013 and an Air Operating Permit in May 2014, permitting it to start domestic operations in India.According to the CBI, AAIL is a joint venture between Tata Sons Limited, which holds a 49 percent stake, and AirAsia, Berhad, which also holds a 49 percent stake. The remainder is with S Ramadorai and R Venkataramanan. AirAsia, Berhad is owned and controlled by Anthony Fernandes a.k.a Tony Fernandes, a Malaysian national of Indian origin.The CBI claims that AAIL was indirectly controlled and operated by the AirAsia Group and particularly AirAsia, Berhad, violating the then FIPB norms. As per the FDI policy back then, foreign airlines were allowed to own up to 49 percent of a domestic airline but effective management control must remain with the Indian partner.The CBI alleged that the entire company structure was indirectly formalised through a 'brand license agreement' signed between AAIL, represented by Tony Fernandes and AirAsia, Berhad, represented by T Kanagalingam aka Bo Lingam on 17 April 2013, which indirectly made AAIL a de-facto subsidiary rather than a joint venture.The CBI further claimed that the real controller of AAIL, Tony Fernandes, wanted the airline to fly internationaly from day one, and that local partner Tata Sons, via nominee Venkataramanan, was supposed to lobby to obtain government approvals including a FIPB clearance and an amendment to then prevalent 5/20 civil aviation rule.The 5/20 rule was laid down by Ministry of Civil Aviation on 29 April 2004. The rule, an eligibility criteria, would grant international licenses to airlines with five years' of domestic operations and a minimum of 20 aircraft in their fleet."Source information has further disclosed that unknown public servants of the Ministry of Civil Aviation and the then FIPB entered into a criminal conspiracy with Director AAIL R Venkataramanan, Group Chief Executive Officer AirAsia Group Malaysia Tony Fernandes, Group Chief Executive Officer of AirAsia, Berhad, T Kanagalingam, Rajendra Dubey of Green IT Com Private Limited , RRT Service India Private Limited, HNR Trading Private Limited Singapore, AAIL and unknown public servants with intent to help AAIL to expedite the approval process and change in aviation policies to suit the company."Sources further revealed that Rajendra Dubey had played a role as a liaison agent and was instrumental in seeking appointments and facilitating meetings for officials of AAIL with the various government officials for clearance. A secret cabinet note was sent on 27 February 2014 to the cabinet to amend the existing 5/20 rule for operation of international scheduled in civil aviation. Further, the civil aviation ministry had sent a clarification in the form of a supplementary note on 5 March 2014 to the cabinet. This proposal, at that time, could not be approved since the election commission had announced Lok Sabha general election on 5 March 2014," the CBI states.The agency has alleged that Tony, Kanagalingam and Venkataramanan intentionally chose to beat the legal framework and policies of the aviation sector."R.Venkataramanan was involved in lobbying with stakeholders in the government to secure mandatory approvals, some of them through non-transparent means, including the then FIPB clearance, NOC and attempt for removal of 5/20 rule. Controllers of AAIL, Fernandes and Kanagalingam, pressurised CEO Mrithyunjay Chandilya to pursue the matter regarding the change of regulatory policies for international aviation in India, suitable to them. Information also revealed that in furtherance of the said criminal conspiracy, AAIL through Tony Fernandes employed Sunil Kapur, owner of Travel/Total Food Services as a lobbying agent to whom the on board catering contract was given by Kanagalingam as a quid pro quo without any negotiation," the CBI has charged.The investigative agency has further alleged that money was paid to those lobbying for changes in the existing aviation policies. The agency said that in fiscal 2015-16, AAIL remitted about Rs.12.28 crore to HNR Trading Private Limited, Singapore, for a sham contract on the basis of a bogus agreement on plain paper, which was utilised to bribe unknown government staffers and others for securing permits for operation of international scheduled air transport services, via Deepak Talwar of DTA Consulting and Sunil Kapur, Chairman of Travel/ Total Food Services, who acted as lobbying agents.Talwar, in a presentation, outlined a strategy to engage with ministry officials, including for the removal of the 5/20 rule, for which a payment of Rs. 17.42 Lakh was made to him."Sunil Kapur, in the month of December 2014, at the coffee shop in the Four Seasons, Mumbai hotel, along with Kanagalingam, handed over a closed packet containing Rs 50 lakh in cash to one Sriram to facilitate the removal of international flying rules," the CBI claimed in the FIR filed in AAIL case.The agency has named six people in its FIR - Venkataramanan, Fernandes, Kanagalingam, Talwar, Dubey and Kapur -- along with three firms and unknown government servants. The CBI claimed that, at the instance of Fernandes and Kanagalingam, AAIL hired private people who were found lobbying with civil aviation ministry officials.Original Source: Last week, TPI Hospitality secured its unanimous approval from the Fort Myers Beach Town Council. Now, whats next for the 254-room resort hotel, aquatic venue and restaurant development? It will be several months until the visitors and residents of Fort Myers Beach see any action on the TPI-FMB property, said John Gucciardo, the spokesman for the development. In an email, developer Tom Torgerson said the construction timeline has a start date of Dec. 1. Theres still plenty to do between now and then. Developer Tom Torgerson and the TPI-FMB team sat down the day after the council meeting to start hashing out details of designing the project and setting a schedule in a five-hour meeting with construction contractor DeAngelis Diamond of Naples. Theres no gap in his timeline, Gucciardo said. Torgerson also is getting to work with Lee County and the Florida Department of Transportation. An integral part of the resort is a pedestrian bridge over Estero Boulevard connecting the bayside property to the beach. It will also be open to the public to use instead of crossing the street. But since Lee County owns Estero Boulevard, Torgerson needs its approval before the bridge can go up. In addition, the team is working with FDOT to make sure the pedestrian bridge will mesh with any of the traffic alleviation ideas that FDOT has been working on, Gucciardo said. FDOT has proposes several solutions in the area near where the pedestrian bridge would go, such as a traffic light. The state agency has been working on traffic solutions for San Carlos Boulevard and the base of the bridge for several years, and TPI-FMB doesnt intend to get in the way of that. Gucciardo says the development team is reaching out now to see if there could be any potential conflicts, and resolve them now. With the state, its coordination. With the county, its a matter of both, coordination and a formal sign-off, Gucciardo said. The council approved the development with the pedestrian bridge, and Anita Cereceda, Bruce Butcher and Shamp agreed to advocate to the county to approve the bridge, too. The pedestrian bridge will need a limited development order granted by the county; it will not have to go a formal public hearing process like the rest of the project did at the town level. The developer is working with the construction and architectural contractors to mock up the bridge design before it formally applies to the county, Gucciardo said. The only physical modification to be done before January is the demolition of the Ocean Jewel building at the base of the bridge: it will go down by Sept. 30. Part of (town councils) conditioning was to have that done sooner, Gucciardo said. Vice Mayor Joanne Shamp asked developer Tom Torgerson at the May 21 meeting to remove the Ocean Jewels building from the property before the beginning of season, so visitors and returning residents can enjoy the extended view of the Gulf as they descend the bridge. The town will also be gifted the property from TPI-FMB at a later date. The Ocean Jewels building currently houses the Fort Myers Beach Chamber of Commerce, which just moved in last year. Now, President Jacki Liszak is on the hunt for a new location for the islands business center. Im used to moving, she said. Other businesses in operation within the TPI-FMB footprint will also have to start looking for a new home. Helmerich Plaza is home to Island Life Realty, Quicky Scooters & Bikes, Nicks Beach Discount Liquor and Wine, and Sunnys on the Beach t-shirt shop. Across the street is The Cigar Hut and the Mermaid Lounge. They all know theyre on a month to month lease, Gucciardo said. The building that houses the Cigar Hut is remaining, but its being converted into the restroom and showers facility for the future aquatic venue. The Salty Crab is owned by TPI Hospitality, but it will also remain. Island developer Joe Orlandini owns The Mermaid Lounge. Its his plan to save the business and the whole building by picking it up and moving it down the street. The Mermaid building has been on the tax role since 1954. Orlandini said hes working on getting a permit from the town to move it the building from its current address at 1204 Estero Blvd. to his other property at 1510 Estero Blvd., the site of the old Sunoco gas station. Hes moved buildings before on his own last year, he put a historic cottage on a trailer and hauled it over the Matanzas Pass Bridge. But this time, hes going with a building moving company to lug the concrete bar down the road. Its a totally different deal than the cottage, he said. People have looked at it and told me they can do it. It will remain in one piece when it makes its move, and Orlandini is determined to save it in one piece. Its kind of an iconic building to the island. Its got a lot of history, he said. Once building begins in January, Gucciardo says it will take at least, in not more than, a year to finish building and open up shop. Outside of construction, Torgerson agreed to set up a good neighbor plan to keep a line of communication open with with the residential neighbors. It was something hed already been doing with conversations among Crescent Street residents like Joe and Doris Grant, but Shamp asked him to extend the radius to include Primo Drive, as well. Gucciardo said the next formal meeting would be scheduled in the fall, closer to time when neighbors will start seeing real activity on the property. Theres still quite a bit to do, Gucciardo said. At this point, theres no opening date in mind Fort Myers Beachs jewel is on its way to getting national recognition. On Thursday, the Florida National Register Review Board unanimously voted to formally nominate the Mound House to Keeper of the National Register. Mound House Director Alison Geisen, Friends of the Mound House President Becky Werner, and Ceel Spuhler, member of the Cultural and Environmental Learning Center Advisory Board, attended the meeting in Tallahassee. The members of the review board were so excited the Mound House had applied, Geisen said. They had visited. They were fans. The Mound Houses application will be sent on for federal review. Geisen said the fact the application was heard at the state level was a good sign: Very few that get up there dont get sent on, she said. The board determined the site met three out of four criteria for both state and local significance. Geisen has been in the preservation field for 15 years, and says the approval meant the Mound House had a good chance with the final step for approval. Being on the National Register of Historic Places will give the Mound House exposure on a national level for the treasure it is, but also comes with some financial benefits, too. Once approved, it will be eligible for federal financial incentives for historic preservation efforts, Geisen said. It also provides some protections from activities that could result in damage or loss to the historical site. Its not the first time fans of the Mound House have tried to get the site registered, but now its on its way to having its name on the official list. It was wonderful to see the boards reaction, see how excited and complementary they were, Geisen said. Spuhler credits the approval to the depth of work that Geisen put into the application to prove the Mound House deserved its place on the registry. The three women sat through a few other applications, some with lots of work put into them and detailed presentations, Spuhler said, and the board had to turn down a marvelous depot building because it lacked the criteria needed to gain the designation. When it came time for the board to review the Mound House, Spuhler said two of the members had visited before and were thrilled to see the application. Geisen was able to get up and speak on behalf of the application, and she talked about all the years of hard work Fort Myers Beach residents and Mound House volunteers had put into making the historic site what it is today. I think the accomplishment of what this means to the town is just wonderful, Spuhler said. Im still flying high! The Mound House should get its answer from the Keeper of the National Registry by the end of the summer. Its all in the name: Memorial Day is a time for us to reflect on those who have sacrificed their lives in service to the United States, as well as to think of those who are still currently serving. We sat down with two veterans, and the father of an active duty military man, to talk about their service and what Memorial Day means to them. Rob Barnes: VFW Post Commander Ohio-native Rob Barnes wasnt always biggest fan of the Veteran of Foreign Wars (VFW). Now, hes a post commander. He was drafted a few years into college and served in the U.S. Army as a Specialist Fifth Class medic and lab technician, assigned to a mobile lab unit in Vietnam. His father, a WWII veteran, was cheered when he returned home. Barnes watched veterans of other conflicts get a warm welcome, too. But it wasnt the case for him or his fellow service members from Vietnam. We answered the call to serve, but at that time in America, we werent being rooted for, he said. But we still served our country, and 58,000 paid the price. He signed up for VFW when he returned, but found Vietnam veterans werent welcome there at the time, either. Vietnam vets were getting opposition from all angles. The WWII guys looked down on us, he said. They called us losers because we didnt win the war. It gave him, and a lot of other veterans, a bad taste in their mouths. But now, hes the post commander of the Fort Myers Beach VFW Post 10097, overseeing more than 1,100 members and 700 auxiliary members. Barnes served as vice commander since 2014 was elected as commander earlier in May, and his involvement is thanks to his friend, Dale Mangione. Mangione was the previous commander. While Barnes was in service, his parents Bob and Jane moved to the Fort Myers area. He joined them when he returned and began working for Giant Furniture Showrooms. Eleven years later, Mangione was a store manager and Barnes was the vice president of the company, and the two became friends. He started coming around the VFW more often thanks to the friendship, and in 2009 became a regular member at the 10097. Barnes offered to start helping Mangione out. Mangione, a highly-decorated U.S. Army Ranger from Vietnam, served as commander from 2005 to 2018, when he became ill. He died April 30. The post will have a memorial for him Sunday, July 15 at 1 p.m. When he became commander, the post was struggling, Barnes said. He got the post turned around, and Im grateful for his strong leadership and longevity. Barnes says he feels like he has big shoes to fill, but after returning to the VFW, hes passionate about the cause. Attitudes about Vietnam veterans have changed now. People seem to respect any veteran whos served. Through the media, they can see the struggles and appreciate their sacrifices, he said. Barnes has embraced the role the VFW plays in the lives of veterans, not only providing them a place to gather with their fellow service men and women, but also a resource for help and a lobby for federal regulation. On Wednesday, May 23, the U.S. Congress passed a $55 billion bill to reform Veterans Affairs (VA), a piece of legislation the national VFW organization lobbied to achieve. The bill gives veterans more options for healthcare, Barnes said. For Barnes, Memorial Day is a time for prayer and reflection. Its a chance for everyone to get together for prayer and reflection on the sacrifices that so many people over the years have given for this country to be free, Barnes said. Its a time to remember, enjoy family and friends and celebrate our freedom. Jodi Hanson : Boom operator Jodi Hanson never had childhood dreams about being in military. It occurred from an opportunity and became the best decision of her life. My parents thought I was crazy, Jodi Hanson said. She wanted to go to a more expensive college, and didnt want her parents to have to pay for it. Her friend told her about the Air National Guard and she signed up. My scores were high in areas where women didnt typically test high in, Hanson said. She had done well on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test, and qualified to train as a boom operator. A boom operator is the person who refuels combat planes in the air. She was one test away from being a fully-qualified boom operator when 9/11 happened. Her base in Pennsylvania was on lockdown and she was on high alert. She flew out of Pittsburg with the 171st Air Refueling Wing to New York City and aided her team in refueling the jets that were flying over the site of the terrorist attack, as well as over the Capitol. I saw all the smoke from the quiet air space, she said. From then on her time in the military was full speed ahead. In most cases being the Air Guard is a weekend thing, where its members have normal civilian lives and have to train throughout the year. Theyre only active duty when theyre deployed on a mission. But Hanson was serving actively for her whole six years of service. She was 19 years old, flying into war zones and working with her team of a pilot, a co-pilot, and sometimes a navigator, to refuel planes flying into Iraq and Afghanistan. It was an important and dangerous job both planes have to fly in tandem and one wrong move could put someones life on the line. Hanson flew in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. It wasnt a scary thing to her at the time. It was exciting. I got to see the world, she said. As a boom operator, Hanson was one of few women. She said her colleagues treated her like a sister, and she learned how to be comfortable in male-dominated situations. But being a female boom operator was a rare thing, and many of her superiors were old-school, she said. They were not used to working with women and it took a little while to prove I wasnt some chick coming in, Hanson said. They had to see I was going to work just as hard. Once her superiors she could complete her job as well, if not better, as a man, they were more accepting. While on active duty, Hanson was also studying in her free time to finish her degree in finance and business administration. The Air Guard paid for her education one of the best decisions she made, she said. After her six years were over, Hanson returned to the U.S. and decided to move to Florida after visiting a friend in Fort Myers .She met her husband, Matt, just a week after the move. Hanson had a career within her degree for a while; Matt and his father own and manage Salty Sams Marina. She and Matt started a family; they have four children, Lana, 9, Willow, 6, Nash, 4, and Sylvie, almost 2. Being in the military made her more patriotic. While Hanson may have thought her tour in active duty was exciting, she gained a deeper appreciation for those serving who were leaving families at home. I always thought about the Marines and the Army guys, what I witnessed and the dangers I was part of wasnt anything like what they experienced, she said. For her, Memorial Day is a reminder of the pride she feels to be an American, and the pride she feels for her fellow service members. Many of the people I was working for were leaving families behind. Its a big sacrifice, but its worth it, she said. People should recognize that. Sometimes you just need to hear somebodys story to realize that. Matt Gray: Father of Active Duty Matt Gray of Cape Coral has had a long time to get used to the fact that his son Jordan would go into the military someday. Since he was a little kid, hes always been on that path. He pre-enlisted in high school, never wavered, Gray said. He remembers his son as a child would always go up to servicemembers and tell them thank you for his freedom. Hed point out if an American flag was being mistreated or misused. Jordan, 19, graduated from Island Coast High School last May. Nine days later, he was off to basic training in the U.S. Army. After that, he was stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska. His son is serving in a very specific role: hes training as a member of a Stryker brigade combat team, a group of service members who operate an armored combat vehicle similar to a tank. These teams arent deployed to serve for large lengths of time at an overseas military base. Instead, they wait for the call and can be deployed within 48 hours to complete a specific mission, which could take any amount of time, Gray said. He hasnt gotten deployed yet, but its almost happened. A few months ago, Jordan and his colleagues were told to call home and let their families know they might get sent out. With recent political tensions, his location near Russia and North Korea makes Gray worry even more. You think about those things, he said. I worry about him every day. Everyday, you wonder if you will get the call or read his name. The location itself might as well be another county for his son; Jordan grew up in Cape Coral and on Fort Myers Beach with his extended family. Alaska is a big change Gray said his son has relayed some amusing observations, like his eyelashes freezing while on a run. When he came home for Christmas, he said he could smell again. Everything in Alaska is frozen and doesnt have a smell, he said, Gray said. But being in the Army has made a marked difference on the young adult. His friends still back in Florida are talking about what theyre doing this weekend and Jordan is telling his dad about the live action fire training he just completed, where he had to make the decision whether to take out a little kid that had been fitted with self-detonating bombs. He matured very quickly. You look more at your own mortality, Gray said. You take that in, to hear your kid talk like that. Gray had plans to enter the military when he finished school, but was unable to. He started several of his own businesses, instead: MDG Electric, Gray International Realty, and Stingray Builders & Renovations. But hes beyond proud of his son for his choice. We always taught him respect for the military, but he took that on his own, he said. Hes also appreciative of the opportunities the military will give Jordan, like the GI Bill to help pay for more education. Having a son in the military hasnt changed the meaning of Memorial Day for Gray, but has intensified it. Gray said hes offended by some of the protests in the past year, with people kneeling during the National Anthem. While people can feel free to protest before or after, the act of kneeling Gray equated to spitting on the sacrifice of military men and women who died in service of the United States. This is the banner that provides those rights, Gray said, referring to the flag. If you cant defend that, you lose everything else. Dont spit on the blood of people who gave you that right. The Best Western Plus Beach Resort on Fort Myers Beach received the Champion RevPAR Award at Best Western Hotels & Resorts District IV Meeting held recently in Orlando. This award was presented in front of several hundred District IV Best Western hoteliers from Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida. The Champion RevPAR Award is earned by the property in each district with the most improved revenue per available room. The hotel also must meet quality, design and service standards, as well as other membership requirements, to qualify for this award. The Best Western Plus Beach Resort was one of only seven hotels out of more than 2,100 properties in the U.S. and Canada to receive the designation this year. Its an honor to be receiving the RevPAR award from Best Western, said Jeff Malbon, general manager of The Best Western Plus Beach Resort. Our resort continues to evolve to focus on the needs of todays travelers. We challenge our team every day to ensure our guests stay is exceptional and this award is a reflection of their hard work. Jeff Malbon and his cousin, Tim Malbon, managing general partner, operate the family-owned resort with family members. The resort is consistently recognized for excellence. Awards include a 2018 recipient of Best Westerns Chairmans award, a 2017 recipient of the M.K. Guertin Award, the brands most esteemed honor, a five-year winner of Best Westerns Champion Customer Care Award and a 2015 winner of the chains Green Award, recognizing commitment to conserving resources and reducing carbon footprint. The resort has been awarded the Trip Advisor Certificate of Excellence for six years, earning a spot in the TripAdvisor Hall of Fame. Tim Malbon serves on the 300-member Best Western board of governors. Jeff and Tim Malbon were also named Best Tourism Boss by the Lee Visitor and Convention Bureau in 2016. Frances Bean Cobains ex-husband reportedly claimed in a lawsuit that Courtney Love hired a group of men to take back Kurt Cobains guitar in June 2016. Isaiah Silva, who was married to Frances Bean Cobain for two years, claimed in a lawsuit obtained by TMZ on Tuesday that the men Love hired robbed, assaulted, sexually abused, kidnapped and tried to murder him in his West Hollywood home. Silva also reportedly claimed that the men posed as Los Angeles police officers. Silva names Sam Lutfi as one of the men involved in the alleged incident, according to TMZ. Lutfi sued his former client Britney Spears in 2012 for breach of contract after the pop icon claimed in her book Through the Storm that he drugged her and kept her away from her family, according to the New York Daily News. The guitar in question was Kurt Cobains 1959 Martin D-18E acoustic guitar from Nirvanas famous set on MTVs Unplugged in 1993. Cobains daughter reportedly agreed in May to let Silva have the guitar after a bitter dispute in wake of their December divorce. Disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein was indicted by a grand jury on Wednesday on charges of rape in the first and third degrees and criminal sexual act in the first degree, according to a statement from Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. The former movie mogul, who decided not to testify, could face more than 37 years behind bars if found guilty. Weinstein turned himself in last Friday and agreed to surrender his passport and be fitted with a GPS monitoring device. He posted $1 million bail in cash, his lawyer Benjamin Brafman said. This indictment brings the defendant another step closer to accountability for the crimes of violence with which he is now charged," Vance said in a statement. "Our office will try this case not in the press, but in the courtroom where it belongs." WEINSTEIN CHARGED WITH RAPE, CRIMINAL SEX ACT IN ATTACKS ON 2 WOMEN Following Wednesday's indictment, Brafman said in a statement that Weinstein intends to plead not guilty and will "vigorously defend against these unsupported allegations that he strongly denies. "We will soon formally move to dismiss the indictment and if this case actually proceeds to trial, we expect Mr. Weinstein to be acquitted," Brafman continued. A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that the criminal sex act charges stem from a 2004 encounter between Weinstein and aspiring actress Lucia Evans. She has said he forced her to perform oral sex. The other female accuser, who hasn't been identified publicly, told investigators Weinstein raped her in a hotel room. "The defendants recent assault on the integrity of the survivors and the legal process is predictable," the statement continued. "We are confident that when the jury hears the evidence, it will reject these attacks out of hand." Weinstein has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex, and his lawyer said Tuesday that Weinstein was "confident he's going to clear his name" in the New York prosecution. Brafman called the rape allegation "absurd," saying that the accuser and Weinstein had a decade-long, consensual sexual relationship that began before and continued after the alleged 2013 attack. Actress Rose McGowan, who accused Weinstein of rape, praised the "strength and resolve" of the two women on Twitter. Weinstein has been accused by more than a dozen women of sexual misconduct ranging from harassment to assault. The allegations were brought to light following two explosive reports in October that sparked the 66-year-old's downfall. Since late 2017, hes been spending time in a treatment facility in Arizona. Fox News' Leora Arnowitz, Sasha Savitsky, Elizabeth Zwirz and The Associated Press contributed to this report. James Van Der Beeks latest role has an interesting connection to President Trump. The Dawsons Creek alum plays a character named Matt in Ryan Murphys new FX series Pose, a series set in the 80s about Manhattans ball culture world, which came about during the citys real estate boom. The show will feature the largest ever cast of transgender actors in series regular roles. Van Der Beek plays a character closely linked to the now-president of the United States. I play Donald Trumps right-hand man, working in Trump Tower, and Evan Peters [character] comes in and interviews for a job. I dont know what else I am allowed to say but I know I can say that. We never see Donald Trump. Hes like Oz. Hes always behind the curtain, but Im his right-hand man, Van Der Beek told reporters during the Television Critics Associations Winter Press Tour, several months ahead of the shows premiere. Van Der Beek expressed disappointment when Trump won the election, writing on Twitter, Feeling a lot of pain tonight... trying to make sense of it. I feel the anger too... trying to see a way out of it. Maybe it's too soon... He revealed to reporters he once ran into Trump at a party. I did [meet Trump] at an Oscar party years ago, he said. It was a two second passing. He pretended to [recognize me] if he didnt. Now, hes playing a character set in Trumps business empire in the 80s. He said the role was one he was well prepared for. Im from Connecticut. As a straight, white, cisgender, born-Christian white male. I grew up in 80s; I felt I knew a lot of these people, he said. I felt like I knew a lot of these guys who got the right job that paid a lot of money right away. The show also examines a different community, he explained. We talk about the two realities happening in Manhattan at the time -- one of them is the wealth, Trump-era real estate boom and the other is this ballroom community, and how these two communities existed at the exact same time in this little tiny island of Manhattan, and how they go up against each other. Van Der Beek most recently starred in What Would Diplo Do? and this role was a big change for him, but the 41-year-old actor said he likes challenging roles. I always have to shake it up. I cant do the same thing more than twice without getting bored or going crazy. Pose premieres on FX on June 3. Reality television star Kim Kardashian West has her sights set on changing the realities of several incarcerated people. Kardashian West, 38, has met with President Trump at the White House multiple times now in her efforts to get pardons for certain people serving long prison sentences related to drug offenses. On June 6, 2018, Trump commuted the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, a great-grandmother who was serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug conviction. This came following a meeting with Kardashian West. But Johnson isnt the only person Kardashian West has advocated for. Read on for a look at people shes trying to help. Cyntoia Brown Now 30 years old, Cyntoia Brown was serving a life sentence for a murder she committed when she was a 16-year-old prostitute. Brown said she shot a 43-year-old real estate agent after he picked her up and brought her back to his house because she was afraid for her life. Prosecutors had alleged Brown was trying to rob him. She was slated to remain in prison for at least 51 years, meaning shell be at least 67 years old before she can be released. But Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam granted her clemency in January which will allow her to be released on parole supervision later in 2019. Kardashian West, who said last year she asked her attorneys to help with Brown's case, thanked the Republican governor on Twitter. The system has failed. Its heartbreaking to see a young girl sex trafficked then when she had the courage to fight back is jailed for life! she previously said on social media. We have to do better & do whats right. Matthew Charles In May 2018, Kardashian West shared with her more than 60 million Twitter followers the story of Matthew Charles. Charles was released from prison early in 2016 but was directed to go back to jail after a federal court said his reduced sentence was an error, Nashville Public Radio reported. Charles, who is in his 50s, already served 21 years for selling crack to an informant, but he was sentenced to 35 years, according to Nashville Public Radio. While in prison, Charles took college classes and became a law clerk. He even taught a GED program. He's had a job since he's been released. In sharing Charles story, Kardashian West called the situation so sad. This man has completely rehabilitated himself, she said. Charles was released from prison at the beginning of 2019 after Trump signed the First Step Act, a sweeping criminal justice reform legislation, into law. Alice Marie Johnson Alice Marie Johnson was arrested in 1993 and convicted of drug conspiracy and money laundering in 1996, Mic previously reported. She became involved with cocaine dealers after she lost her job, her son was killed, she got divorced and her home was foreclosed on, according to Mic. Johnson said she did not sell drugs or participate in drug deals, but she did admit to acting as an intermediary for those involved, passing along messages. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Trump granted clemency to Johnson on June 6, 2018. She was released from federal prison later that day. If you think about a decision that youve made in your life, and you get life without the possibility of parole for your first-time nonviolent offense, theres just something so wrong with that, Kardashian West previously told Mic about Johnson. Chris Young Kardashian West told Jason Flom's "Wrongful Conviction" podcast that she has taken up the case of Chris Young, a Tennessee man who authorities said was caught buying crack cocaine in 2010. Because Young had already been charged with drug crimes twice, Young received a life sentence thanks to the state's "three-strike" law, The Tennessean reported. The judge who handed down the sentence has said he does not believe it was the right decision and said what he was "required" to do was "cruel." Kardashian West reportedly met with Trump on Sept. 5, 2018 to discuss Young's case. Fox News' Benjamin Brown and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Kim Kardashian West arrived at the White House Wednesday afternoon, where she reportedly discussed prison reform and the possible pardon for a great-grandmother who is serving a drug-related life prison sentence. The reality TV star was reportedly slated to meet with Jared Kushner, White House senior adviser and son-in-law to the president, in her efforts to gain clemency for Alice Marie Johnson, 63. President Trump later tweeted a photo of the pair in the Oval Office, however he did not say whether they discussed Johnson specifically. "Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing," Trump said. Kardashian West also tweeted following her visit to the White House, thanking Trump for taking the time out to talk with her. "I would like to thank President Trump for his time this afternoon. It is our hope that the President will grant clemency to Ms. Alice Marie Johnson who is serving a life sentence for a first-time, non-violent drug offense," the star tweeted. "We are optimistic about Ms. Johnson's future and hopeful that she - and so many like her - will get a second chance at life." Johnson is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole after being convicted of a first-time nonviolent drug offense, according to Mic. Kardashian West was first drawn to the womans story after seeing a video profile on Johnson produced by the outlet in 2017. KIM KARDASHIAN ADVOCATES FOR ALICE JOHNSON, OTHERS WHO ARE JAILED If you think about a decision that youve made in your life and you get life without the possibility of parole for your first-time nonviolent offense, theres just something so wrong with that, Kardashian West told the outlet. She reportedly has been in contact with Kushner and the Trump administration over the case. I think that she really deserves a second chance at life, Kardashian West told Mic. Ill do whatever it takes to get her out. Johnson was arrested in 1993 and convicted four years later of drug conspiracy and money laundering, Mic previously reported. Her involvement with cocaine dealers came about after she lost her job, her son was killed, she got divorced and her home was foreclosed on, the outlet reported. KIM KARDASHIAN WEST WILL REPORTEDLY ASK TRUMP TO PARDON DRUG OFFENDER She reportedly wasnt involved in selling drugs or in drug deals, but she did admit to acting as an intermediary for those involved, passing along messages. The reality star hinted at her trip to the nations capital earlier on Wednesday. Happy Birthday Alice Marie Johnson, Kardashian West tweeted. Today is for you. Fox News Kaitlyn Schallhorn, Benjamin Brown and The Associated Press contributed to this report. The New York Times botched the crowd size for Trumps Tuesday night rally in Tennessee, overlooking 4,500 attendees before correcting the article when the president called out the mistake on Twitter. The Times reported that 1,000 people attended Trumps rally, but the local fire marshals office estimated that roughly 5,500 supporters were actually in the Municipal Auditorium in Nashville, where Trump supported GOP Senate hopeful Marsha Blackburn. Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to mock The Gray Lady for the crowd size error. The Failing and Corrupt @nytimes estimated the crowd last night at 1000 people, when in fact it was many times that number - and the arena was rockin. This is the way they demean and disparage, Trump wrote. They are very dishonest people who dont get me, and never did! The Nashville Tennessean reported the Trump campaign suggested the number of attendees was closer to 8,000. The Times reporter who wrote the story admitted to simply underestimating the crowd size and tweeted that Trumps claim of more was correct. President @realDonaldTrump is correct about his crowd last night. My estimate was way off, and we have corrected our story to reflect the fire marshals estimate of 5,500 people. When we get it wrong, we say so, Times reporter Julie Davis responded. Trump slammed Democratic leaders at the Nashville rally, labeling former Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat in the running to replace retiring Sen. Bob Corker, as an absolute total tool of Chuck Schumer and, of course, the MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi. Trump, who defended labeling members of the MS-13 gang as animals, hit the House minority leader for taking exception with the classification. We are all Gods children, Pelosi argued in response last week. Trump won Tennessee with more than 60 percent of the vote in the 2016 presidential election. The Times downplaying the impressive turnout isnt the first time that crowd size has made news during the Trump administration. Trump and his surrogates famously battled reporters over the crowd size of his Inauguration Day ceremony. Then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer took the podium during his first White House news conference to defend the crowd size. Trump has mocked the Times on a regular basis, often referring to the paper as failing. Earlier this week New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein was among several members of the mainstream media to incorrectly share Obama-era pictures of children sleeping in enclosed cages while giving the impression they were taken during the Trump administration. Silverstein, who blamed the mistake on being distracted by his family, was widely criticized for the blunder. The Times updated its online story about Tuesdays rally with the following correction: An earlier version of this article cited an incorrect figure for the number of people attending President Trumps rally. While no exact figure is available, the fire marshals office estimated that approximately 5,500 people attended the rally, not about 1,000 people. Fox News Matt Richardson contributed to this report. Paris Jackson is speaking out after she startled everyone by walking out of a Dior fashion show last week outside the French capital. After reports that the daughter of late superstar Michael Jackson made a statement by suddenly leaving the rodeo-themed Dior Cruise show, the young star took to Twitter to explain her actions. To be clear, I did not storm out of the show. I quietly got up and walked out trying my hardest to not cause a scene, because I do not support animals being branded and whipped, Jackson clarified. Not trying to become enemies in the fashion world in any way, but I will always be myself." A source close to Jackson confirmed her Twitter statement to People Magazine and further explained that the 20-year-old did not feel comfortable with the use of the horses for the Western-inspired runway, which featured rodeo riders performing during the show. She was uncomfortable with how the horses were being handled (the whipping sound was loud) so she quietly slipped out," the source explained. The ladies performing with the horses were riding side-saddle so they had to use a crop to get the horses to go straight and it was pouring rain with no tent. Paris meant no disrespect to the brand. She loved the collection and had a wonderful time in Paris with Dior." After she left the show, Jackson shared a photo of herself standing in the rain outside of the venue while the show was going on and said, Left early n did this." Just a few days prior, the star made headlines at the Billboard Music Awards after it was noted that she was not in the audience with the rest of her family during her aunt Janet Jackson's performance. The model defended her absence on social media and said, Dear social media followers, friends, stalkers, lovers and haters, and fellow moonwalkers: Please do not tell me/demands/try to control how I handle my relationship with the people in my life, specifically my family, she wrote in an Instagram story. As amazing and as s-- as things can be, it is no ones business but ours. I understand that some of you feel some sort of connection or need to be a part of our lives considering you watched us grow up. However, I am handling my situation exactly how my father did. And I am happy keeping it that way. I will always have love and respect for my family. ALWAYS. Less than 14 hours after following up a racist tweet by writing, "I apologize. I am now leaving Twitter," Roseanne Barr was back on the social media platform late Tuesday. In a series of late-night tweets, Barr appeared to blame the prescription sleeping pill Ambien for the racist tweet that led to her show's cancellation Tuesday. She also repeatedly criticized ABC for what she implied is the network's hypocrisy. "guys I did something unforgiveable so do not defend me," she wrote in one post and then deleted Tuesday night. "It was 2 in the morning and I was ambien tweeting-it was memorial day too-i went 2 far & do not want it defended-it was egregious Indefensible. I made a mistake I wish I hadn't but...don't defend it please. ty." PHOTOS: Cast of 'Roseanne' then and now ABC canceled Barr's widely popular reboot of "Roseanne," her hit 1988-1997 comedy series, shortly after the star posted a racist tweet about former President Barack Obama's aide Valerie Jarrett. The rebooted show became an instant hit March 27, when the first episode attracted more than 18 million viewers. Barr doubled down on appearing to blame Ambien two hours later: "I think Joe Rogan is right about ambien. Not giving excuses for what I did(tweeted) but I've done weird stuff while on ambien-cracked eggs on the wall at 2am etc -." "Don't feel sorry for me, guys!!" Barr also tweeted, before discouraging people from boycotting ABC. "I just want to apologize to the hundreds of people,and wonderful writers (all liberal) and talented actors who lost their jobs on my show due to my stupid tweet. I will be on Joe Rogan's podcast friday." Earlier Tuesday evening, Barr also retweeted several posts from a variety of other Twitter users, including some that contained doctored images and incorrect information. One of the fake images that Barr recirculated depicted Whoopi Goldberg wearing a violently anti-Trump shirt. Barr quickly deleted that retweet. ABC CANCELS 'ROSEANNE' AFTER RACIST TWEET Barr also retweeted a fake image of Jarrett's Stanford yearbook quote, in which she purportedly says she wants to make the U.S. a more Islamic country. Barr later retweeted corrections from people who pointed out the photo was fake. The comedian also posted several retweets that highlighted perceived hypocrisy by Disney, the parent company of ABC and ESPN. "Not repugnant according to @WaltDisneyCo," read one post that Barr retweeted, referring to angry anti-Trump comments by Keith Olbermann, who recently returned to ESPN. Barr also highlighted anti-Christian comments by Joy Behar, a co-host of ABC's "The View." WATCH: MIKE PENCE ASKS BEHAR TO APOLOGIZE TO ALL CHRISTIANS "Joy Behar mocked Mike Pences faith on The View and said that the way he prayed to Jesus was 'mental illness,'" read another post that Barr retweeted. "She didnt apologize until a month later. ABC was silent. Roseanne" In other posts, Barr retweeted apparent defenses of her racist comment concerning Jarrett's appearance. "I look like a monkey. Why?" began one of the posts. "My DNA is 96% similar to a monkey's. It makes scientific sense. But due to emotions, double standards & feelings science is cancelled this year. There are 5,000 genders & if you don't agree with me you're a racist xenophobe." A harsh new spotlight is falling on the vulgar social media history of ESPN star Keith Olbermann after the networks parent, Disney, fired Roseanne Barr for a racist tweet. On Tuesday, ABC pulled the plug on the wildly popular reboot of "Roseanne" after its namesake posted a racist and offensive tweet about former President Obamas aide and close friend Valerie Jarrett. Last week, ABCs cable sister, ESPN, announced that anti-Trump pundit Olbermann would return to the network despite a foul-mouthed Twitter account that includes countless offensive remarks directed at the president and his surrogates. ESPN personality-turned-political commentator Britt McHenry told Fox News that Olbermann has proven time and time again how irrationally angry, prejudiced, and outright bigoted he truly is, but none of that apparently matters to Disney executives. The message is clear: If youre a liberal, any free speech is allowed. Same rules dont apply, McHenry said. This is Olbermanns sixth stint at ESPN and the time in between has been largely spent as a far-left political pundit on MSNBC and an assortment of other networks. Most recently, he anchored an anti-Trump online program for GQ, The Resistance, and authored a book titled, Trump is F*cking Crazy: (This is Not a Joke). While Olbermann is not racist, he can certainly be considered offensive and has used profanity when attacking the president, whom he has called a Nazi on a regular basis. In Aug. 2017, Olbermann tweeted at first daughter Ivanka Trump and called her father a neo-Nazi, and racist. He has also written fk you to Trump numerous times, but ESPNs newest star doesnt bother to use the sanitized version of the cuss word. Conservative talk radio host Ben Ferguson said there was clearly a double standard at Disney during a Wednesday morning appearance on CNN, while former ESPN employee Curt Schilling tweeted, The irony of Disney canning Roseanne while continuing to employ some of the industrys biggest racist and race baiting frauds is not lost on most. Jedediah Bila recently tweeted that Barrs comment was despicable, and, much like the Roseanne namesake, Olbermann has made awful comments that should make him unemployable by respectable outlets. In addition to repeated, over-the-top profanity directed at Trump, Olbermann also once claimed that Trump and his family have done more damage to the U.S. than Usama bin Laden. He was also widely criticized when his anti-Trump book featured a cover image of himself draped in the American flag, which is visibly touching the ground a violation of U.S. flag code. Media analyst Jeffrey McCall told Fox News that nobody should feel sorry for Roseanne, but it does seem Disney needs to provide some clarity about what it expects from other employees regarding public civility. McCall pointed out that Olbermann has engaged in name calling and harsh personal attacks and the corporation doesn't seem to mind, and said he thinks the same rules should apply to all of their polarizing personalities. ESPN was criticized for bringing the polarizing Olbermann back and that was before Barrs firing resulted in talk of a double standard within Disney regarding who can get away with offensive rhetoric. ESPN has been under fire recently for what many media watchdogs consider a liberal bias and even stood by Jemele Hill last year when she called Trump a white supremacist. The Wall Street Journals Shalini Ramachandran published a piece last week about how a weakened ESPN became consumed by politics, which details several polarizing decisions the network has made in recent memory. The report notes that conservative ESPN staffers have been frustrated by the networks politics, which include everything from standing by Hill and selecting Caitlyn Jenner for its prestigious ESPY award for courage to constant on-air debates over the NFLs national anthem controversy. ESPN just continues to pile problems on itself by continuing its tired trope of liberal programming and moralizing. And when it comes to liberal moralizing, who better than the seemingly-forgotten Keith Olbermann? ESPNs decision to hire the conservative-bashing blowhard only reinforces what its ever-fleeting viewers already know the network cares more about advancing leftists causes than it does about sports, or, frankly, its own ratings, National Center for Public Policy Research general counsel Justin Danhof told Fox News. Disney and ESPN did not respond to requests for comment on critics accusing the companies of having a double standard regarding rhetoric by employees. A staff member from the Steve Harvey Morning Show died this weekend after being found unresponsive in his hotel room. According to an incident report obtained by Fox News, Bryan Cooke, an assistant of Harvey's co-host, Kier Junior Spates, was found dead at his W Hotel room in Atlanta, Ga., on Sunday. He was 39. Spates, who was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles with Cooke later that day, reached out to hotel staff requesting to check on his assistant after he was unable to get a hold of him, the document states. When hotel employees and Spates arrived to Cookes room, they found him in bed face down and cold to the touch, with blood and vomit coming out of his nose and mouth. The staffers immediately called authorities, according to the report. During an interview with the police, Spates said he and Cooke had gone out Saturday night and smoked cigars, adding that they did not take any drugs. He said Cooke seemed fine when they returned to the hotel. According to the report, there was no sign of forced entry and all of Cookes belongings were still in his room. Police also found a bottle of prescription pills in the room. Its unclear if pills played a role in his death. On Wednesday, Spates shared a Facebook post honoring his late friend. Just a little something to show yall how much of a friend he was, Spates captioned a video of him and Cooke acting together. We would come up with anything. Please meet BABYFACE Johnson and his right hand man BRYAN COOKE. Concluded Spates: This made me smile today. Love you man! Thanks for all of the laughs. Amy Eddy and Pebbles Rodriguez are speaking out about how they were controlled by apocalyptic cult leader Tony Alamo in an upcoming documentary. Eddy was 14 and Rodriguez just 12 when they were forced to marry the 62-year-old leader of the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries. Their shocking childhoods are chronicled in a new special titled People Magazine Investigates: Cults" on Investigation Discovery, People magazine reported Wednesday. According to The Los Angeles Times, Alamo was a one-time street preacher in Los Angeles who previously designed jackets for celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and several country music stars. He died in 2017 at age 82 at a federal prison hospital in North Carolina. The iconic black leather jacket Jackson wore on the cover of his 1987 album Bad was reportedly an Alamo original. The newspaper noted it was later sold at auction to settle federal tax claims against Alamo. The fallen preacher, born Bernie Lazar Hoffman, was convicted in 2009 on charges that he took underage girls across state lines for sex, including a 9-year-old. His apocalyptic ministry grew into a multimillion-dollar network of businesses and properties before he was thrown behind bars for abusing young girls he considered as wives. The religious organization, created in the late 1960s by Alamo and his wife Susan, originally preached peace and salvation, which attracted hippies and young followers alienated from their parents. Alamo, who arrived in Los Angeles from Missouri, claimed he was a music promoter with clients such as The Beatles. Time magazine reported the couple eventually moved to Alamos headquarters to Arkansas, where he was able to hold secret marriages to girls as young as 15. Alamo believed God authorized polygamy and girls were fit for marriage at a young age. When Susan died in 1982, at age 59, from cancer, the LA Times reported her body was kept for weeks in a room at the ministry, where Alamo's followers kept a vigil praying for her resurrection. Her corpse was eventually buried in a crypt on the ministrys compound in Dyer, Ark. Authorities said Alamo returned his wifes remains to her family after being threatened with jail. Witnesses at Alamos trial claimed he overruled the cult and decided on who would get married, who was allowed to eat and who received cults. Eddy and Rodriguez lived on a compound of the cult in Fouke, Ark. The women claimed they lived as child brides of Alamo and were regularly starved, beaten and raped. I was terrified that if I didnt do what I was supposed to do when he told me to do it no matter what it was Im going to hell, Eddy told the magazine. Eddy and Rodriguez were freed in 2008, when Alamo was arrested and charged with 10 counts of interstate transportation of minors for illicit sexual purposes. Both women admitted they still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and are often faced with panic attacks, along with feelings of fear and loneliness. Every day is a milestone, said Eddy. Some days are easier than others. I dont think it will ever be easy, added Rodriguez. There are things that are out of my control, like recurring nightmares. There is nothing I can do to make it go away, but I try my hardest. Eddy and Rodriguez live states apart but still speak with each other daily. People revealed Rodriguez is a stay-at-home mother to two sons in Phoenix and is in the process of getting a divorce. Eddy is in Oklahoma City, where she is raising two boys with her boyfriend. She is currently studying to get into college. Rodriguez said they can never forget their shocking past but are hopeful for the future. I have a right to be angry, she said. But no. Were free! Lets make the most of it. People Magazine Investigates: Cults premieres June 4 at 9 p.m. on Investigation Discovery. Members of a church in Maine were devastated Tuesday morning after discovering that someone had broken in and vandalized the property in addition to stealing from the food pantry. The Old Orchard Beach United Methodist Church said that some time between Monday night and Tuesday morning, someone had forcibly entered the food pantry after entering the property through a door that had been left open. According to police, the burglar left with three frozen pizzas and some ice cream. But the church seemed to be more upset about the damage done than that the items stolen. They spent a substantial amount of time vandalizing the pantry and the church. There was nothing done that cant be cleaned or fixed, but still disrespectful of the church and the community we serve. The extent of the damage was seen in several photos that the church shared on its Facebook. The church said it will be taking measures to secure the building going forward, but offered its prayers for the thief. Please pray for the person or persons involved in this unfortunate incident and - as always -for our wonderful community. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Coca-Cola is one of the most iconic brands in the world known and loved for its refreshing cola beverage yet its never strayed far from its original drinks, until now. The brand has brought out its first-ever alcoholic drink, based on a Japanese alcopop called Chu-Hi. The drink giants three fizzy and boozy lemon drinks went on sale on May 28 and the exact recipes are a closely guarded secret. The drink has been launched in Japan, where the market is thriving, and the move was confirmed by Coca-Colas Japanese president, Jorge Garduno. BUFFALO WILD WINGS GIVES HOMELESS MAN FREE WINGS FOR A YEAR AFTER STAFFER WRITES DEROGATORY MESSAGE ON RECEIPT He said: This is a canned drink that includes alcohol; traditionally, its made with a distilled beverage called shochu and sparkling water, plus some flavoring. We havent experimented in the low alcohol category before, but its an example of how we continue to explore opportunities outside our core areas. Garduno went on: Coca-Cola has always focused entirely on non-alcoholic beverages and this is a modest experiment for a specific slice of our market. Chu-Hi an abbreviation for shochu highball is a canned, alcoholic drink marketed as an alternative to beer in Japan and is a massive success with female drinkers. Traditional Chu-Hi is made with shochu and carbonated water, flavored with lemon, though some new brands are using vodka instead of shochu. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS Japanese drink giants like Suntory, Asahi and Kirin currently dominate the sector for canned Chu-Hi drinks. The most popular flavors are citrus-based. Canned Chu-Hi can have alcohol levels as high as 9 percent and is often sold in vending machines. However, alcohol percentages are often lower when the drink is sold in bars. This article originally appeared in The Sun. A Dominos employee in Tennessee has been fired after a paraplegic man posted a now viral video on social media claiming the pizza chain discriminated against him. Dustin Kaywood posted the emotional video to his Facebook page Monday detailing his experience at the Dominos in downtown Kingsport. Kaywood, whos paralyzed from the chest down, drove to the local shop in a car equipped with driving sticks to pick up a pizza he had ordered for himself and his mom and brother. NEW STARBUCKS TRAINING MANUAL PROMOTES 'BECOMING COLOR BRAVE,' SPEAKING TO CUSTOMERS 'ONE HUMAN TO ONE HUMAN' He said because he went alone, he needed someone to bring the pizza to his car. When he spotted an employee walking by in the parking lot, Kaywood told him he was a paraplegic and asked if he could bring the pizza to his car because he couldnt walk in and get it himself. Kaywood said the employee then asked him how he was driving if he was paralyzed. When Kaywood explained, he claims the employee laughed and walked off. He then tried calling the store to see if someone inside would help him out. When the employee answered and Kaywood explained the situation and what had just happened, he claims he was greeted with similar disrespect. He laughed at me like he didnt believe I was paraplegicHe said, If you cant walk in and get it, were not bringing it out to you, Kaywood said in his video. That is discrimination. Why does everybody else better than me just because I cant walk? Ive never in my life had someone do that to meit hurts. It hurts bad, he said. A spokesperson for Dominos told Fox News that some of the people who work for the independent franchise showed an unfortunate and remarkable lack of common courtesy on Monday evening. The owner of the Kingsport location addressed the situation immediately, according to the spokesperson. Dominos said the delivery driver who spoke with Kaywood in the parking lot advised him to call inside the store to get his order, as he was on his way out. This employee was suspended for one week as a teaching moment. The employee who spoke to Kaywood over the phone has been terminated for the utterly unacceptable behavior, the spokesperson confirmed. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS The franchisees director of operations released the following statement on the matter: We contacted Mr. Kaywood shortly after he posted this. The supervisor called and offered his next order for free and insured him we would investigate the situation. I then called Mr. Kaywood personally got his side of the storyI personally made sure Mr. Kaywood saved my contact info, so that he could call me directly whenever he ordered from us in the future, so that I could arrange curb side pickup. One catch-and-release Florida lemon shark was apparently so bitter about being caught, he bit his captor on the foot after he had been returned to sea. The attack occurred Monday when an unnamed fisherman reeled in a 3-foot lemon shark at Ponce Inlet at Lighthouse Point Park, Daytona Beach News-Journal reported. NORTH DAKOTA MAN'S MONSTER 15-POUND WALLEYE CATCH BREAKS STATE'S DECADES-OLD RECORD After releasing the creature back into the Atlantic Ocean, it soon turned around and bit his foot causing minor injuries, Volusia County Beach Safety and Ocean Rescue Capt. Tamara Malphurs told the outlet. Meanwhile, the shark left the scene unharmed. Malphurs surmised that the fierce fish was very unhappy about being caught. FISHERMEN FOUND WITH OVER 50 ILLEGALLY CAUGHT LOBSTERS The 52-year-old Mount Dora fisherman suffered minor injuries but was not hospitalized. Though lemon sharks are typically between 8 and 10 feet long, the University of Florida reports that they are not a high threat to humans. They are categorized as social animals that prefer group-living and feed at night. Nevertheless, lemon sharks will not hesitate to inflict a bite when threatened by humans, Discovery reports. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS -With AP A Florida mother filed a lawsuit claiming her young son developed a significant, possibly permanent skin reaction after getting his face painted at Legoland, according to complaint documents. In May 2016, the boy visited Legoland, where he got his face painted by an employee, the lawsuit filed earlier this month said. Sometime following the visit to the park, the boy started to complain that his face was itching and burning, the document said. The boy's mother, Jessica Bermudez, noticed a rash developing on her sons cheeks and took him to the doctor, the lawsuit stated, where they were given medication. However the rash persisted, further spreading around the boys cheeks as well as his nose and mouth, and causing dark spots and discoloration, the lawsuit claimed. The pair returned to the doctor, who again prescribed medication, and diagnosed the boy with eczema based on the aggressive spreading of the rash and skin discoloration, according to the documents. MAN CLAIMS WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER RIDE LEFT HIM WITH SPINAL INJURIES, SUES UNIVERSAL Several doctor visits later, and after twenty-three months of various treatments and prescriptions, the boys skin condition continues to worsen, and the doctors became baffled as to why the rash and discoloration would not go away, the lawsuit said. During a medical visit in March, by which point the rash had grown evenly around the boys mouth area, and on both cheeks, his doctor called in for a second opinion, the lawsuit said. The second medical professional asked whether anything had been on the childs face around when he got the rash, and Bermudez remembered the face paint, the document said. Bermudez shared pictures of her son when he was having his face painted and they realized that his skin had a negative reaction to the paint used on his face at Legoland that has caused him great pain and suffering, as well as two years of humiliation by other child and deep emotional distress, the lawsuit claimed. LEGOLAND RESPONDS TO CRITICISM OVER LEGO MEGHAN MARKLES SKIN COLOR According to Junior Mentor, an attorney representing the family who spoke to the Orlando Sentinel, the child has been taunted at school and given the nickname, Racoon. He doesnt know what it is. He wants it to go away, Mentor said. He goes to the mirror in the morning and tries to brush it off. The lawsuit, which is looking for more than $15,000, has claimed negligence and negligent infliction of emotional distress, according to the document. The Defendants knew or should have known that that emotional distress would likely follow if a young middle school child would have a permanent rash and nasty discoloration of his cheeks, the lawsuit said. As a direct and proximate result of the actions of defendants, the boy suffered bodily injury and resulting pain and suffering, disfigurement, mental anguish, medical expenses. The losses are either permanent or continuing, and the Plaintiff will suffer losses in the future. When contacted by Fox News, a representative for Legoland provided the following statement: Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We take all matters relating to the well-being of our guests seriously. We have not been contacted regarding this legal matter and therefore cannot comment at this time. When you hear Toblerone, you probably envision the delicious, triangular Swiss chocolate bar filled with almond nougat. But today in England, the word means something much more alarming. Across the pond, the Toblerone tunnel is taking over Instagram as the new body-image craze. The phrase, first noted in the British press, refers to a specific type of thigh gap: the triangular space that develops beneath the extra-toned butts and thighs of, say, Emily Ratajkowski and Kylie and Kendall Jenner. Critics point out that, like the traditional thigh gap, the Toblerone tunnel is just another unrealistic and problematic body goal for women to aspire to. Luckily, twittizens dont seem to be minding the gap. Yeah Ive got a toblerone tunnel . . . otherwise known as my throat, writes one social-media user. What in the actual f--- is wrong with the world when girls are posting pictures of their arses on tinterweb and inviting people to check out their toblerone tunnels?. I always thought your toblerone tunnel was the one between between your nose and your chin, writes another. This article originally appeared on the New York Post. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! Hillary Clinton strolled through the Memorial Day Parade in Chappaqua, an affluent New York City suburb where she now lives. She attends the parade every year, but on Monday the buzz was about who she attended it with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who finds himself in a Democratic primary battle with Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon as he seeks re-election. The parade was a good respite for Clinton, who has spent the better part of 18 months seeking sympathy and blaming everyone but herself for her still bitter loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Over the course of Clintons public appearances she has made striking comments about American voters, and in particular women voters especially women who voted for Trump over her, accusing them of being insufficiently committed to female empowerment. Clinton all but branded such women as traitors to their own sex and opponents of the advancement of women. Why else, in her mind, could women possibly oppose her efforts to become Americas first female president? Does Hillary feel uncomfortable with a woman in a position of power and exercising leadership of one of the most populous states? Does she feel being governor is really a mans job? More than half of white women voters cast ballots for Trump. And some 61 percent of white women without a college degree also backed Trump over Clinton. Trump also carried about 44 percent of the college-educated white female vote. This must have been extraordinarily upsetting to Clinton, who saw herself as the champion of women and deserving of just about every womans support. Particularly since her only real campaign message was shattering that glass ceiling to catchy pop songs. Just last month, while speaking in India, Clinton railed on about how Democrats do not do well with white men, and we dont do well with married, white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should. In Australia, Clinton once again spoke of perceived sexism in American politics and culture by telling interviewer Julia Gillard: There is still a very large proportion of the population that is uneasy with women in positions of leadership. There is this fear, there is this anger, even rage about women seeking power, women exercising power and people fall back on these attacks like youre a witch or you should go to prison. One of these deplorable women Hillary Clinton is referring to must be the person she sees every time she looks in the mirror. How else could anyone possibly explain her betrayal of womankind with her endorsement of Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon? Unless, of course, Clintons choice of Cuomo over Nixon is based on her own study of the policy positions and leadership qualities of each candidate and she is supporting the one she feels best represents her as a constituent. But if thats the case, then that also applies to intelligent, independent women who chose Donald Trump over her. Yet since her election loss, Clinton has refused to account for that scenario and instead written female voters off as puppet slaves trapped in some kind of Mad Men reality. In urging more people to support female candidates for office, Clinton recently told a Rutgers University crowd: "We have to keep that pipeline full. Its not one and out. Its keep getting more women to run, keep convincing young women to be part of it. But then Clinton did what she is famous for doing exactly the opposite of what she said was her position, by endorsing Cuomo over Nixon in the Sept. 13 New York primary for governor. According to Clinton, the only reason she must be endorsing Cuomo over Nixon is because her husband Bill, her brother, or her son-in-law are pressuring her to do so. Hillary must also be afraid, angry, even full of rage, over Nixon challenging Cuomo. Does she feel uncomfortable with a woman in a position of power and exercising leadership of one of the most populous states? Does she feel being governor is really a mans job? With Clintons endorsement, perhaps Nixon could surge over Cuomo in the Democratic primary for governor. Nixon also could have been helped if former Vice President Joe Biden would have endorsed her instead of Cuomo. But neither Hillary nor Biden endorsed her. Of all the female candidates seeking office this year, perhaps none hold as high a profile as Cynthia Nixon, who offers a path and a face for the far leftist Tea-Party-like insurgent wing of the Democrats desperate for fresh faces. But because Clinton chose to give in to her worst sexist impulses and accept male domination the same thing shes repeatedly accused female voters of doing when it came to her own candidacy Nixon looks to be a footnote in New York politics. Meanwhile, both New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo plot possible presidential runs in 2020. This certainly isnt the biggest or most blatant example of hypocrisy in Hillary Clintons history, but it is one of the more illuminating ones, given how much she has attempted to align herself with Womens March activists and targeted women voters for their own choices when she ran unsuccessfully for president. And as shes done so often over the course of her career, Hillary Clinton sets a trap for herself and then walks right into it. Even as she encourages more women to run for office, as she wrote for Cosmopolitan last October, her establishment cronyism prevents her from helping many women shatter the glass ceiling she tried and failed to shatter herself. Clinton has stated she will be marching side by side with the Democratic Party all the way to midterms in November. I will be there every step of the way because we are going to take back the country we love. she declared in while in Washington. As it turns out, that march she is on includes the old boys network she simultaneously claims needs to be dismantled for real change to occur in America for women. With Hillary there are always two standards. The ones she expects of everyone else, and the ones she holds for herself. It turns out, once again, that the only person standing in the way of real change is Hillary Clinton. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! Starbucks, which provided more than 175,000 of its employees at 8,000 stores with anti-bias training Tuesday afternoon, utilized more than a dozen videos and a 68-page booklet in the effort. But it might have turned to the wise guidance of all the worlds major religions to teach an important lesson. The exact wording of this guidance varies from one faith to another, but in essence, this is what weve come to know as the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Or, follow the example of the Good Samaritan, who sacrificially cared for someone not of his race or of his country, but who was in need. This should not be all that complicated. In an open letter to Starbucks customers, Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz said the purpose of Tuesdays training was to make Starbucks a place where all people feel welcome, after he said two black men were wrongly arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks while waiting for a friend. The situation was reprehensible and does not represent our companys mission and enduring values, Schultz wrote. One of my sons was among those who attended the half-day of character conversation, in which identifying racial bias and learning to be color brave was discussed. We talked afterword about the ideas presented to him in the language of a corporate culture laboring to say simple things using politically correct language. Starbucks is making an effort. Starbucks has long prided itself on using its platform (and profits) to preach for positive values. But at the same time, it has engaged politically in a way that many of its customers dont appreciate particularly when it has tweaked President Trump. Last year, Starbucks sparked outrage when it announced plans to hire 10,000 refugees in the next five years, in response to President Donald Trump's executive order that in part barred refugees from entering the US, noted Business Insider. The company engaged clumsily again on race in its Race Together campaign, and pushed its way into numerous, non-coffee related topics, much to the dismay of some investors. Schultz pontificated that in the age of Trump, the coffee chain could create "an antidote" and provide a "sense of community for the politically downtrodden. His community service paid well, earning him $21.8 million in 2016, part of an estimated net worth of $3 billion (now you know why coffee prices at Starbucks are so high). But Schultz is not alone in his passion to brew politics into every cup. His views were parroted by current CEO Kevin Johnson, who said: Will I continue on the social impact agenda as it relates to the core values of the company? Absolutely. It is what allows us to attract the partners (Starbucks' term for employees) who have an affinity to those values and who are here to serve customers." But it turns out, all those progressive political positions and posturing were not enough to overcome the uglier realities of human nature the arrests of the two African-American men at a Starbucks in the city of brotherly love. That prompted Tuesdays nationwide racial bias training in Starbucks stores. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Every now and then, stopping to remember to be kind, respectful and careful in what you say is good advice for politicians, entertainers and CEOs, as well as for folks brewing coffee and serving you baked goods. In its next round of nationwide training, I wonder if Starbucks will remind its associates that pure, American patriotism laid the foundation for the love of a cup of Joe. Moving from sea to shining sea, its not in Starbucks home of Seattle, Washington, but rather on the docks in Boston, Massachusetts, that coffee became king. When merry old England decided to shift the costs of war on the American colonists through taxes like the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767, Americans pushed back, fighting taxation without representation. And while the Brits were willing to grant some wiggle room, they were not about to turn their backs on the taxes available from the 1.2 million pounds of tea that the colonists drank each year. In the first of many tea-related protests, 342 chests of British tea were dumped during the Boston tea party and coffee gained enormously in popularity as American colonists protested heavy-handed politicking by switching their beverage. I wonder if the backlash against all that politicking over coffee will result in Americans again finding that they would rather switch their morning drink instead of enduring the weight and pay a price for other peoples opinions. Personally, Im about ready to try tea again. President Trump slammed Democratic leaders at a Tennessee rally Tuesday night, labeling former Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat in the running to replace retiring Sen. Bob Corker, as an absolute total tool of Chuck Schumer and, of course, the MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi. Trump, who defended labeling members of the MS-13 gang as animals, hit the House minority leader for taking exception with the classification. We are all Gods children, Pelosi argued in response last week. The presidents fiery comments, in front of a large crowd Tuesday at the Municipal Auditorium in Nashville, were made to boost GOP Senate hopeful Marsha Blackburn. Trump did not mention the earlier cancellation of Roseanne Barr's television show. Blackburn, a Republican congresswoman, is vying for her partys nomination to replace retiring Corker, a Republican. Blackburn and Bredesen are expected to face off in a general election that is considered a toss-up by Fox News. Theyre more interested in taking care of criminals than they are in taking care of you, Trump said of Democrats as the crowd booed. The president said Bredesen, whom he claimed he had never even heard of, donated a lot of money to the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. "Democrats have opposed every common sense measure to stop this horrendous scurge of crime, to dismantle MS-13 and to end illegal immigration," he continued. You have to get out, to vote, Trump said. We need Marsha Blackburn to win. And its going to be a very special time. Together we are taking back our country. We are returning the power back to our great American patriots. "Tennessee needs a senator thats going to support President Donald Trump and I am going to be there to stand with President Trump to take your Tennessee values to Washington, D.C. to fight with him to get the job done," Blackburn said. The campaign in Tennessee is among several races crucial to Trumps plans to maintain control of the Senate, where Republicans have a two-seat majority. Trump won Tennessee with more than 60 percent of the vote in the 2016 presidential election. This November, this is the state were Americas comeback will continue full speed ahead, the president said. Primaries are scheduled for Aug. 2. Earlier in the evening Trump resurrected talk of the construction of a southern border wall, reiterating a campaign promise that Mexico would pay for it. "I don't want to cause a problem but in the end Mexico is going to pay for the wall," the president said to cheers. "I'm just telling you Mexico is paying for the wall. They make all of this money and they do nothing to stop people coming through Mexico from Honduras and all these countries. They do nothing. They are going to pay for the wall and they are going to enjoy it, okay?" That claim was met with a swift tweet from Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. "President @realDonaldTrump: NO. Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall," he wrote. "Not now, not ever. Sincerely, Mexico (all of us)." Also at the rally, Trump spoke of pending new health care legislation. Speaking of his "two Alexes" - Labor Secretary Alex Acosta and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar - Trump said "phenomenal" health care plans would be released in the upcoming weeks. He did not discuss any additional details on the plan. Fox News Kaitlyn Schallhorn, Adam Shaw and Serafin Gomez contributed to this report. The chief of California's campaign watchdog agency abruptly quit Tuesday -- just a week before the state's June 5 primaries. The departure of Jodi Remke, who in 2014 was appointed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown to lead the Fair Political Practices Commission, came amid a power struggle that included efforts to reduce her influence, reports said. Remke resigned following months of turmoil at the agency, the Los Angeles Times reported. She reportedly clashed frequently with other commissioners, who were expected next week to push for a new structure that would drastically cut Remkes role as the top political ethics cop in the state. She was the only full-time official on the commission. In the resignation letter, Remke celebrated her achievements at the agency, but said she remained concerned with the proposed changes to the Commission's longstanding governance structure. Im confident that during this busy election cycle staff will continue to build on the significant progress we have made in advancing governmental integrity and the publics trust in government, she added. The resignation also coincides with the upcoming statewide primary election next week that typically draws multiple campaign ethics complaints to the agency. It will be seen how Remkes departure affects the policing of ethics in the election, as the agency has been criticized in the past for slow response to any alleged ethics violations by political candidates. "Staff is used to and is prepared for the normal process of changes in the Commission as there are always new commissioners and chair every two to four years," Jay Wierenga, a spokesman for the FPPC, told the Sacramento Bee, adding that Remke will take a position as the presiding administrative law judge for appellate operations for the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. Dan Schnur, who once was an FPPC chair, told the Bee that Remkes resignation will contribute to the marginalization of the watchdogs role in the eyes of the political community." "Stepping aside in the last days before an election is in keeping with a very minimalist approach to the job that shes displayed ever since she was first named chair," Schnur said. The wife of a Facebook co-founder has contributed the majority of cash to a political action committee led by Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King that targets district attorney races across the U.S. in a bid to reshape the criminal justice system. Cari Tuna -- wife of Dustin Moskovitz, who co-founded Facebook together with Mark Zuckerberg -- contributed more than $650,000 to the Real Justice PAC in February 2017, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The PAC also took in $400,000 in contributions in addition to Tunas generous donation, making her the top contributor funding most of the groups activities. King, who has recently come under fire for pushing a debunked story about a state trooper sexually assaulting a woman, said his group is working to elect reform-minded prosecutors at the county and municipal level who are committed to using the powers of their office to fight structural racism and defend our communities from abuse by state power." SHAUN KING SLAMMED FOR PUSHING WOMANS NOW-DISCREDITED CLAIM TROOPER SEXUALLY ASSAULTED HER Tunas donation appears to be the only contribution she made this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission data. In previous cycles, she spent millions on a labor union PAC and an environment group. She also gave money to the Democratic Party group and over $400,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund, Hillary Clintons fundraising committee. Her husband, who left Facebook in 2008, also used his wealth to oppose now-President Donald Trump, spending nearly $30 million to defeat him, according to the Free Beacon. "We just felt really compelled to, sort of, get off the sidelines and help ensure that the Democrats were able to win the election," Moskovitz said at the time. The revelation comes after reports that New York billionaire George Soros has funneled so far nearly $3 million into Californias district attorney races, supporting candidates that are in favor of progressive policies, including lower incarceration rates, crackdowns on police misconduct and changes in a bail system that they argue discriminates against the poor. SOROS SPENDS BIG IN CALIFORNIAS DA RACES IN BID TO RESHAPE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM Soros reportedly spent more than $1.5 million on a political action committee to prop up the San Diego County candidacy of Genevieve Jones-Wright, who pledged to form a police misconduct unit and attacked policies that criminaliz[e] poverty. She openly embraced the support of Soros, saying I love it!" during a recent fundraiser. "If he didn't take an interest in this campaign, it would be an even more uneven playing field, she added, according to the Los Angeles Times. The wealthy liberal donors are spending big on Diana Becton in Contra Costa County. Her challenger, a veteran prosecutor, slammed the support from the wealthy, describing them as billionaires who apparently think Contra Costa's public safety is for sale. Republican candidates running in Nebraska have been receiving a financial boost from the developer of the Keystone XL pipeline, as it tries to secure approval for the $8 billion project. A political action committee for TransCanada Inc., which first proposed the pipeline in July 2008, has donated more than $65,000 to campaigns within the last year, mostly to Republican state lawmakers, according to an Associated Press review of campaign disclosure records. Filings with the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission show TransCanada gave $25,000 to Gov. Pete Ricketts' re-election campaign, $15,000 to the Nebraska Republican Party and $25,500 to state lawmakers. Nebraska Republican Party Executive Director Kenny Zoeller said TransCanada made the party contributions as a sponsor for state GOP events, including recognition dinners for state senators and local volunteers. The state party has approved resolutions in the past voicing formal support for the Keystone XL, he said. TransCanada's spending in Nebraska is high compared to many companies that lobby state officials, said Jack Gould, issues chairman of Common Cause Nebraska, a political watchdog group. However, TransCanada spokesman Matthew John defended the contributions. "We participate in an open and transparent political process and will continue to support elected officials and public policies that promote the safe and environmentally responsible development of North American energy infrastructure," he said. The Keystone XL pipeline would transport up to 830,000 barrels a day of Canadian crude through Montana and South Dakota to Nebraska. The pipeline faces intense resistance from environmental groups, Native American tribes and some landowners along the route. who worry about its long-term impact on their groundwater and property rights. Pipeline opponents say the company's contributions show it's trying to exert influence over the state's top elected officials at the expense of landowners who don't want the proposed 1,179-mile pipeline running through their property. "There is no question big political donations have bought some politicians," said Jane Kleeb, president of the Bold Alliance, a group that has worked to recruit and support candidates who openly oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. Kleeb said activists have kept the project from moving forward for a decade, despite being outspent. In addition to the campaign contributions, TransCanada has previously reported spending more than $1.2 million on lobbying in Nebraska between 2006 and mid-2017. Landowners in Nebraska have filed a lawsuit challenging the Nebraska Public Service Commission's decision to approve a route through the state. In a separate legal challenge, Montana landowners and environmental groups have brought a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn President Donald Trumps decision to grant a presidential permit for the project. Last week, Trump administration attorneys defended the pipeline in federal court. The Associated Press contrbuted to this report. Michael Avenatti isn't ready to give up the green room for the courtroom just yet. The lawyer for adult film star Stormy Daniels had been trying to join the criminal case in New York against Trump attorney Michael Cohen. But during a feisty hearing Wednesday, federal Judge Kimba Wood said the lawyer -- who has been a fixture on CNN and other outlets -- would have to first stop his publicity tour. The show, it appears, will go on. After the hearing, Avenatti withdrew his motion to intervene -- at least until the court rules whether Daniels is allowed to participate in the case. Judge Wood had warned him about the "publicity tour," since he would be subject to New York laws and procedures if he were allowed on the case -- meaning he'd have to pull back on his attacks against Cohen. Avenatti has made countless appearances on cable outlets blasting President Trump and Cohen while defending his client, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. Cohen and Avenatti -- as well as attorneys for Trump and federal prosecutors -- appeared in federal court on Wednesday for the hearing related to the April 9 FBI raid of Cohens personal properties. Cohen's attorneys fought to keep Avenatti out of the case, citing a California State Bar investigation into him. Ive never seen an attorney conduct himself in a manner that Avenatti has, Cohens attorney Stephen Ryan said in court Wednesday, arguing that Avenattis promotion of Cohens bank records and other materials earlier this month was reckless and improper. Earlier this month, Avenatti tweeted bombshell allegations against Cohen, citing financial records to accuse him of receiving $500,000 from a Russian oligarch-tied company, as well as other dealings. The records suggest Cohen's firm was paid huge sums for insight into the Trump administration. Earlier this month, Avenatti also filed the motion to participate in the Cohen case. Judge Wood did not rule whether Avenatti could intervene in the case. In court, meanwhile, Avenatti suggested he received a call from a member of the press last week for comment on audio recordings between Daniels former attorney Keith Davidson and Cohen. Avenatti argued that the two exchanged privileged information. In response, Cohens attorney said he was unaware of the release of any audio file, noting that if it had been released, they would be everywhere and that if the audio files existed, they would be under lock and key at my law firm. Following the hearing, Avenatti also said that Cohen's attorneys had "audio tapes" of Cohen and the president, with some of the recordings "relating to my client." "Mr. Cohen and his attorney Mr. Ryan should release all of those audio recordings to the American people and to Congress," Avenatti said, suggesting if the recordings did relate to Daniels, it could be a violation of attorney-client privilege. Cohen is under criminal investigation as part of a grand jury probe into his personal business dealings. One topic at issue is Cohens payment of $130,000 to Daniels weeks before the 2016 presidential election in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. The president filed a financial disclosure earlier this month which included confirmation that he reimbursed Cohen for unspecified expenses -- apparently the payment to Daniels. Prior to the release of the disclosure, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani told Fox News that Trump reimbursed Cohen the $130,000 he paid to Daniels. The judge in the case last month appointed independent special master Barbara Jones to review the material seized in the FBIs raid of Cohens properties. The judge ruled Wednesday that Cohens attorneys review of the materials must be concluded by June 15, or the remaining materials will be sent to a team of lawyers not connected to the case. Fox News Jennifer Oliva and Tara Prindiville contributed to this report. Gov. Eric Greitens said he will resign this week following a report that an affair he had was at times violent and non-consensual and allegations of misuse of a charity donor list. "The time has come, though, to tend to those who have been wounded and to care for those who need us most," Greitens, a Republican, said on May 29. "So for the moment, let us walk off the battlefield with our heads held high." Greitens' last day in office will be June 1. His resignation allows him to avoid the potentially dubious distinction of becoming the first Missouri governor ever impeached. Earlier in May, prosecutors dropped the felony invasion-of-privacy charges against Greitens but said they planned to re-file the case. After he resigned, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner said her office is dropping another charge of computer data tampering, related to allegations that he misused a charity donor list. Missouri lawmakers on both sides of the aisle had been asking Greitens to step down ever since the sexual misconduct scandal surfaced. He's been accused of taking and transmitting a non-consensual -- partially nude -- photo of a woman with whom he was having the affair. Heres a look at the allegations and what the Republican governor has said about it. Why was Greitens on trial? Greitens was indicted in February on a felony invasion-of-privacy charge. He was booked at the St. Louis Justice Center before he was released on his own recognizance, according to a circuit attorney spokeswoman. The charges came after a man secretly recorded his wife admitting to having an extramarital affair with Greitens in March 2015. In the recording, she alleged that Greitens took a photo of her when she was partially nude without her permission and threatened to release photos of her if she told anyone about the affair, KMOV-TV reported. The couple, not publicly identified, have since divorced. Greitens admitted to the affair in February in a joint statement with his wife, Sheena. He said he'd made a deeply personal mistake before he was elected, and that the family had dealt with this together honestly and privately. However, his attorney told KMOV-TV that there was no blackmail. In a Facebook post, Greitens slammed the reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points. He said that while he'd made a personal mistake before becoming governor, he did not commit a crime. If convicted, Greitens could have face up to four years in prison. He has declined to directly answer questions about whether he took the photo. What was in the accusers testimony? WARNING: GRAPHIC DETAILS BELOW A Missouri House investigative committee was assembled shortly after Greitens was indicted on the felony charge. After speaking to the accuser and other witnesses, it released a report signed by five Republicans and two Democrats that included a sensitive-content warning. The lawmakers said they found the woman to be an overall credible witness. The meeting The woman said she met Greitens in 2013 when he became a client at the hair salon where she worked, according to the report. She said that she developed a crush on Greitens, but when she saw him in the salon in March 2015, he moved his hand up her leg all the way up to [her] crotch without her consent." Sexy workout Later that month, she said Greitens asked her to come to his house when his wife was out of town. She said he did not want to be seen in public with her because he was running for office. At his house, she testified that Greitens told her he thought she hadnt been treated good in so long and wanted her to exercise. She said for whatever reason, I trusted him. Greitens then gave her mens pajama pants and a mans white T-shirt with a slit at the top and instructed her to change into them, she said. After she changed, she claimed he told her he was going to teach her how to do a proper pull-up. She said she thought this is going to be some sort of sexy workout. I still really thought he was perfect, the woman testified, adding that Greitens knew she had not cheated on her husband in the past, and she didnt want to do anything physical with him. So I think I was just confused, kind of shocked. And I was curious enough he likes me this much that he has something planned for our workout? The photo When the two got to the basement, the woman alleged, Greitens taped her hands to the pull-up rings and blindfolded her. She said the items he used were already on a workout bench nearby. He then spit water into her mouth, telling her she needed to be hydrated, she testified. She said it was his way of trying to kiss her, but she did not want to be kissed. Greitens began to kiss her, and he tore off the white shirt, she testified. During this time, he was also pull[ing] down [her] pants, but she did not give consent, she said. [T]hen I hear him kind of, like, step back take a step back and I hear I can hear like a, like a cell phone like a picture, and I can see a flash through the blindfold, she added. Greitens said: Youre not going to mention my name. Dont even mention my name to anybody at all, because if you do, Im going to take these pictures, and Im going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are, she testified. She alleged he spanked her after she didnt respond. I was definitely fearful. I was so embarrassed and ashamed, because I really felt like a whore because I had let him get me in this position before weve even kissed. I felt really used, she said. A photo has not been obtained by lawmakers on the committee nor by the prosecutor in the criminal case. The aftermath As she was trying to leave, Greitens gave her a hug and laid her on the floor while she wept, the woman testified. On the floor, the woman testified, she performed oral sex on Greitens because she felt that she had no other choice if she were going to get out of the basement, according to the report. She said Greitens didnt prevent her from leaving after that, but she forgot her keys at the house. When she went back to get them, she said she confronted Greitens about the picture. You have to understand, Im running for office, and people will get me and I have to have some sort of thing to protect myself, she claimed he told her. The woman testified that Greitens told her he had deleted the photo, but that she didnt believe him. How has Greitens responded? Greitens has called the accusations a political witch hunt. He did not testify before the House committee and said the report was one-sided tabloid, trash gossip that was produced in a secret room. He also highlighted a comment the woman made during a deposition in his criminal case in which she was asked if she saw what she believed to be a phone used to take the photo. A court filing from Greitens attorneys quoted her as saying, I havent talked about it because I dont know if its because Im remembering it through a dream or I Im not sure, but yes, I feel like I saw it after that happened. Additionally, Sheena claimed in a letter to the Missouri lawmakers investigating the allegations that she was stalked by the accusers ex-husband, The Washington Examiner reported. When I didnt respond to his anonymous emails, he sent me a letter, Sheena said. When a letter to me didnt produce the desired response, he contacted my parents. When letters didnt satisfy him, he made his accusations public on Twitter. And finally, when targeting our family on social media didnt fulfill his agenda, he secretly recorded his wife admitting to the affair and began shopping the audio tape to news outlets. How have lawmakers responded? House Speaker Todd Richardson called the woman's testimony beyond disturbing and defended the integrity of the investigation. He said, Let me be very clear about this: This is not a witch hunt, and the committee had no political agenda. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called on Greitens to resign. They include the states Republican Attorney Gen. Josh Hawley, who is also a U.S. Senate candidate. The conduct the report details is certainly impeachable, in my judgment, and the House is well within its rights to proceed on that front, Hawley said in a statement. But the people of Missouri should not be put through that ordeal. Governor Greitens should resign immediately. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said she read the House investigators report and believes it is clearly time to put the interests of the people of Missouri first in calling for Greitens to resign. This is a sad chapter in our history that should never have come to pass, Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner, a Republican, said on social media. The transcripts paint the picture of a vulnerable woman and a man who preyed on that vulnerability. I am disgusted, disheartened and I believe Governor Greitens is unfit to lead our state. State Rep. Jean Evans also called on Greitens to resign, saying, Violence against women is always wrong. State Senate Majority Leader Mike Kehoe is the highest-ranking member of the legislature to call on Greitens to resign. He said the governor has lost the "moral authority and the ability to lead," KMBC-TV reported. What is Greitens background? A onetime Navy SEAL, Greitens assumed office in January 2017. He beat Democrat and former Attorney General Chris Koster. Hawley is also investigating The Mission Continues, a veterans charity founded by Greitens, as it relates to the state's consumer protection and charitable registration and reporting laws. That probe came after media reports alleged Greitens' campaign had obtained and used a charity donor list in 2015 as it ramped up fundraising for his gubernatorial bid. Greitens married Sheena in August 2011, and the pair have two children. He was married once before, but it ended in divorce in 2003, according to The Kansas City Star. Fox News Samuel Chamberlain and The Associated Press contributed to this report. North Korea's longtime spy chief and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had dinner together in New York City on Wednesday night as the rogue nation's shadowy official tries to salvage a potential summit between the two countries' leaders. Kim Yong Chol, Kim's infamous right-hand man and a vice chairman of the ruling Workers' Party, met with Pompeo after he arrived at JFK International Airport around 2 p.m. Wednesday. The North Korean is the highest-ranking official from the communist nation to visit the U.S. since 2000. Kim and Pompeo sat together for more than an hour, and planned a "day full of meetings" for Thursday, the White House said. The secretary of state tweeted the two had a "good working dinner" that featured "Steak, corn, and cheese on the menu." Trump tweeted Tuesday about Kim's impending visit, which comes ahead of a possible June 12 summit between the North and the U.S. "We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea," Trump wrote. "Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more." KIM'S GULAGS: NORTH KOREA HOLDING UP TO 120,000 POLITICAL PRISONERS, STATE DEPARTMENT REPORT SAYS Kim, believed to be 72, and Pompeo's talks will largely focus on rescheduling the summit, which Trump canceled last week following hostile rhetoric from the North. Pompeo on Wednesday tweeted that he was "Looking forward to meeting with" Kim to discuss a possible summit, and noted the State Department is "committed to the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula." Fox News' Katherine Lam and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos celebrated Barack and Michelle Obama as among the worlds most respected and highly-recognized public figures in announcing a deal last week for the Obama family to produce films and series for the streaming service. We are incredibly proud they have chosen to make Netflix the home for their formidable storytelling abilities, Sarandos said in a news release. What Sarandos didnt mention: He and his wife have long been donors and friends to the Obamas, having raised more than a half-million dollars as bundlers for the presidents campaign in 2012. His wife, Nicole Avant, also was appointed by Obama as ambassador to the Bahamas, serving from 2009 to 2011. Netflix confirmed to Fox News on Tuesday that Sarandos himself was directly involved in brokering the Obama deal. "Ted Sarandos is our chief content officer so of course he was engaged in bringing Higher Ground Productions to Netflix, a company spokesman told Fox News. Higher Ground Productions is the name of the company established by the Obamas to produce content for Netflix. OBAMAS SIGN MULTIYEAR NETFLIX DEAL TO PRODUCE SHOWS AND FILMS According to the New York Post, which first reported Sarandos involvement in the deal, Sarandos and Avant bundled nearly $600,000 in contributions to Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign. Avants father, Clarence, a music executive, also bundled nearly $450,000 for Obamas presidential campaigns, the Post reported. The newspaper said one source estimated the deal with the Obamas could be worth over $50 million. The Obama deal also comes just two months after Netflix announced that Susan Rice, Obamas former national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations, would be joining the companys board of directors. I am thrilled to be joining the board of directors of Netflix, a cutting-edge company whose leadership, high-quality productions, and unique culture I deeply admire, Rice said in March. Netflix on Tuesday suggested Rice had no involvement in bringing the Obamas to the company. Board members play no role in content decisions at Netflix," the spokesman said when asked about Rice's potential role. Netflix says the Obamas will produce a variety of content, including scripted series, unscripted series, docu-series, documentaries and features. One of the simple joys of our time in public service was getting to meet so many fascinating people from all walks of life, and to help them share their experiences with a wider audience, Obama said in a statement last week. Thats why Michelle and I are so excited to partner with Netflix we hope to cultivate and curate the talented, inspiring, creative voices who are able to promote greater empathy and understanding between peoples, and help them share their stories with the entire world. It's not yet known what specific projects the Obamas will tackle. Sarandos, during an event in New York on Tuesday, denied that the former first family would be using the platform to turn Netflix into the Obama Network. Theres no political slant to the programming, Sarandos said of the planned Obama productions, according to Variety. Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, an anti-Trump Democrat who has held the post in Arizona's capital city for more than six years, stepped down Tuesday to focus on a run for Congress. Stanton first announced in October that he intended to run for the U.S. House seat currently occupied by departing Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, who is seeking the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Republican Jeff Flake. Under Arizona's "resign to run" law, Stanton had to resign from the mayorship by the end of May in order to maintain his federal candidacy. Wednesday is the filing deadline for the race in Arizona's 9th Congressional District, which is centered in Tempe and includes parts of nearby communities, including Phoenix. The primaries are scheduled for Aug. 28, and the general election will be Nov. 6. Stanton is expected to face at least two other Democrats, while as many as five Republicans are expected to run. Independent candidates and those representing smaller parties also will run. Democrat Stanton has long criticized President Donald Trump, and has cited his opposition to Republican leadership in Washington as one of the key reasons for his run. PHOENIX MAYOR NOT HAPPY ABOUT TRUMP RALLY "Arizonans deserve better than what we're getting from Washington, and there has never been a more consequential time in the fight to protect the middle class," Stanton said in October. "In Congress, I'll continue to do what we've done in Phoenix --deliver real results that improve people's lives." In August, Stanton criticized Trump for announcing a rally in Phoenix just a day after the president blamed "both sides" for weekend violence in Charlottesville, Va., between white supremacists and counter-demonstrators. "I am disappointed that President Trump has chosen to hold a campaign rally as our nation is still healing from the tragic events in Charlottesville," Stanton said in a statement at the time. "It is my hope that more sound judgment prevails and that he delays his visit." Thelda Williams, who was the vice mayor, is now serving as Phoenix's mayor. She is expected to retain the post after a City Council vote in June, and would be up for election in November. A top Republican senator is accusing the founder of opposition research firm Fusion GPS of providing testimony that was extremely misleading, if not an outright lie, regarding the anti-Trump dossier. Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson was asked about his firms work on the dossier during closed-door testimony in August 2017. When asked specifically whether that work continued after the 2016 election, Simpson responded: I had no client after the election. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, however, challenged that answer in a new letter to committee colleague Sen. Christopher Coons, D-Del. As we now know, that was extremely misleading, if not an outright lie, he wrote. He said that, Contrary to Mr. Simpsons denial in the staff interview, according to the FBI and others, Fusion actually did continue Trump dossier work for a new client after the election. The letter cites the House Intelligence Committees Republican-authored Russia report, which included a footnote detailing a March 2017 interview between the FBI and Daniel J. Jones, a former staffer for Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. According to the footnote, Jones told agents he was leading a research organization called the Penn Quarter Group, which had secured the services of dossier author and former British spy Christopher Steele; an associate; and Fusion GPS to continue exposing Russian interference after the election. The committee report said that the Penn Quarter Group was being funded by 7 to 10 wealthy donors located primarily in New York and California, who provided approximately $50 million. Grassley noted that Jones said his group planned to push the information he obtained from Fusion and Steele to policymakers on Capitol Hill, the press, and the FBI. Jones, according to his LinkedIn profile, worked four years for the FBI doing international analysis and as a staffer for Feinstein. Feinstein, who is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary committee, unilaterally released a transcript of Simpsons testimony in January. Grassley said Simpson and Jones statements are subject to the federal statute 18 USC 1001, which bars lying to federal investigators. So, despite the fact Mr. Simpson said he had no client after the election, he in fact did, and that client revealed himself to the FBI, he wrote. Grassley, working with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., back in January sent a criminal referral on Steele to the Justice Department claiming the ex-spy lied about his contact with the media regarding allegations against members of the Trump campaign. As with the circumstances surrounding the Steele referral, we once again have two seemingly contradictory statements in contexts where material lies are criminal. I would welcome your views on what actions you are willing to take with regard to Mr. Simpsons testimony, Grassley wrote. Grassley wrote the letter in response to Coons concerns about potential inconsistencies in Donald Trump Jr.s committee interview. Grassley countered with his own concerns. Separately, as reported by Fox News, after much legal wrangling on both sides of the Atlantic, Steele is expected to sit down for a videotaped deposition on June 18 in London for civil litigation filed against Buzzfeed, which published the unverified Steele memos in January 2017. The Steele-written memos were funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton through Washington, D.C.-based law firm Perkins Coie, which hired Fusion GPS for $1.8 million. The unverified information was also used by the FBI and pushed to various journalists during the 2016 campaign. Evan Fray-Witzer, the Boston-based lawyer for Russian technology executive Aleksej Gubarev, who is suing Buzzfeed for defamation of his companies, said in a statement: We look forward to asking both Mr. Steele and Mr. Simpson about the work they performed after the election, which is when the memo concerning our clients was written. Obviously, if the work was performed for the Penn Quarter Group, its just more evidence that this was paid-for, private opposition research and not as Buzzfeed tries to portray it some sort of government investigation. There was no immediate response from Simpsons attorney or Daniel Jones. Making materially false or fraudulent statements to Congress can be pushishable by fines and imprisonment of up to eight years in prison. President Trump on Wednesday spoke out for the first time about ABCs cancellation of Roseanne, knocking the network for not apologizing in other instances where people have made "horrible" anti-Trump comments on ABC. Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that ABC does not tolerate comments like those made by Roseanne Barr, Trump tweeted Wednesday. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didnt get the call? ABC on Tuesday cancelled Barrs popular reboot of Roseanne shortly after she posted a racist tweet targeting Jarrett, a former top Obama White House aide. In a now-deleted tweet, Barr described Jarrett as like the muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby. Jarrett said later Tuesday that Disney CEO Bob Iger had called her before the network cancelled the show in response to Barrs tweets. "He apologized," Jarrett said during a MSNBC appearance. "He said he had zero tolerance for that sort of racist, bigoted comment and he wanted me to know before he made it public that he was canceling his show and so I appreciate that they did that so swiftly." VALERIE JARRETT SUGGESTS TRUMP SHARES BLAME FOR ROSEANNE TWEET Trumps tweet was the first time the president mentioned the cancellation. He did not specify what anti-Trump comments have been made on ABC. On Tuesday evening, the president held a rally in Nashville, Tenn., but did not mention Jarrett or Barrs comments. When asked what the presidents reaction was to Barrs tweets, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said the president has been focused on North Korea, trade and the economy. The president is focused on North Korea. Hes focused on trade deals. And hes focused on rebuilding our military, the economy. And thats what hes spending his time on; not responding to other things, Sanders said Tuesday. Asked whether the president thought Roseannes show should have been cancelled, Sanders said: Thats not what hes spending his time on. And I think that we have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now. Fox News Brooke Singman contributed to this report. With 15 tweets in the last five days on what hes calling the Rigged Russia Witch Hunt, President Trump is not just playing defense but keeping the investigation in the forefront of the news cycle. Just yesterday, for instance, the president said that Bob Muellers teamwhich he describes as 13 Angry Democrats, plus people who worked for Barack Obama, will be MEDDLING with the midterm elections. Now Im not clear exactly how these folks will be interfering with the 2018 elections, unless their mere employment in continuing the probe amounts to interference. But Mueller was, of course, hired by Trumps Republican appointee, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Obviously, its not a plus for Republicans trying to keep control of the House and Senate to campaign against the backdrop of the investigation, which could produce more indictments before Election Day. But the presidents increasingly harsh criticism, while shoring up his base, has the paradoxical effect of drawing more attention to the probe itself. Every tweet (or comment) generates endless retweets, blog posts, news stories and cable segments. Its hardly unprecedented, by the way, to go after an independent prosecutor. Bill Clinton and his allies tried to do the same thing to Ken Starr two decades ago. In addition to bashing the investigation, Trumps tweetstorm is aimed at some of his favorite targets from 2016 and beyond. Trump says he needs to focus on North Korea, trade and other issues, not on the Rigged Russia Witch Hunt that should be investigating Clinton/Russia/FBI/Justice/Obama/Comey/Lynch etc. And: Why didnt President Obama do something about the so-called Russian Meddling when he was told about it by the FBI before the Election? Because he thought Crooked Hillary was going to win, and he didnt want to upset the apple cart! He was in charge, not me, and did nothing. The president has also channeled his favorite network, tweeting: The President deserves some answers. @FoxNews in discussing SPYGATE. Spygate, involving the FBI informant who infiltrated Trumps campaign, is the branding hes tried, with limited success, to get the media to adopt. And circling back to his favorite target: The Fake Mainstream Media has, from the time I announced I was running for President, run the most highly sophisticated & dishonest Disinformation Campaign in the history of politics. No matter how well WE do, they find fault. But the forgotten men & women WON, Im President! Thats the first time Ive seen Trump, for all his attacks on the media, accuse them of a disinformation campaign, which sounds far more organized than news organizations could pull off. That doesnt mean they havent been overwhelmingly negative. The Washington Times said yesterday that while much of America wasnt looking, President Trump and Congress actually have been getting some work done together. The story cites new rules on VA reform and experimental drugs, as well as a partial rollback of the Dodd-Frank banking law. The latter is an important deregulation step that erodes the Democrats main response to the 2008 financial crisis. Neutering Dodd-Frank would be a big deal in a traditional administration. But its not surprising that such issues have been overshadowed by the on-again/off-again Korean summit, or by Trumps Twitter assault against Mueller and the media. The president could be laying the groundwork to blame GOP losses on a rigged system. But for now, hes shining a white-hot spotlight on the very controversy he says is interfering with his job. President Trump on Wednesday signed into law a bill that would allow those with potentially terminal diseases to try experimental treatments and bypass the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The so-called Right to Try Act of 2017, sponsored by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., unanimously passed the Senate last August, and cleared the House last week on a party-line vote of 250-169 -- in a win for both Johnson and the Trump administration. "Today I am proud to keep another promise to the American people as I sign the Right to Try legislation into law," Trump said Wednesday. "We're going to be saving tremendous numbers of lives." The president said the issue was "very personal" for him. "As I proudly sign this bill, thousands of terminally ill Americans will have the help, the hope and the fighting chance -- and I think its going to be better than chance -- that they will be cured, that they will be helped, that they will be able to be with their families for a long time, or maybe just for a longer time, Trump said. But were able to give them the absolute best we have at this current moment, at this current second. Were going to help a lot of people. Its an honor to be signing this. The president was joined by Vice President Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, FDA Deputy Commissioner Anna Abram and FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, along with several "brave Americans" battling ALS, muscular dystrophy and other conditions. The president said that he was seeking the "better bill" for "the people." "Not the pharmaceutical companies, not the insurance companies--I don't care about them. I really couldn't care less," Trump said, underscoring the importance of a bill for "the people." Trump has long supported the legislation, pushing Congress to pass the bill for the benefit of terminally ill patients during his first State of the Union address in January. Patients with terminal conditions should have access to experimental treatments that could potentially save their lives, Trump said during his address earlier this year. It is time for the Congress to give these wonderful Americans the right to try. Johnson introduced the legislation in early 2017, authorizing patients diagnosed with life-ending illnesses to use unapproved medicationsso long as they have undergone early testing on humans and are under continual evaluation. Patients also would have to have tried other treatment options. Todays Right to Try bill signing was a moment of deserved celebration for everyone who fought to return a little freedom and restore hope to terminally ill patients and their families. I applaud and thank them all," Johnson said in a statement to Fox News Wednesday. The vice president Wednesday touted the "bipartisan" legislation to "advance the interests of the American people." "I want to thank the president who cares deeply about families of this country, especially vulnerable families--economically and families struggling with serious illness," Pence said. "President Trump has fought to advance interests of American families." So far, Right to Try laws have been enacted in 40 states, according to www.righttotry.org. The only states that have not yet adopted the law at the state level are Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, Kansas, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Delaware, New Jersey and Rhode Island. The FDA drug approval process can take up to 15 years. This is far too long for dying patients to wait, the Right to Try website states. Right to Try gives life-saving hope back to those whove lost it. But Democrats have been critical of the legislation, saying it would peddle false hope and place patients at risk. Over 100 groups representing patients and research groups called the final legislation Tuesday unsafe. President Trump said Wednesday he wishes he had appointed someone else as attorney general, ramping up his criticism yet again of Jeff Sessions for his recusal from the Russia investigation. In a series of tweets Wednesday morning, the president slammed Sessions after quoting comments made by House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy on CBS This Morning. Gowdy, R-S.C., was asked about a New York Times report that Trump had asked Sessions to retain control of the Russia investigation following his recusal -- and that this was being examined by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team. Gowdy disputed the suggestion that the conversation strayed into obstruction of justice territory. I think what the president is doing is expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward. If I were the president and I picked someone to be the countrys chief law enforcement officer and they told me later, oh by the way Im not going to be able to participate on the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated too, Gowdy said on CBS This Morning." He added, There are lots of really good lawyers in the country. He could have picked someone else. Minutes after the interview, Trump quoted those remarks on Twitter and concluded: And I wish I did! Sources told Fox News that Mueller as recently as this spring had not raised questions specifically about the March 2017 meeting between Trump and Sessions at Mar-a-Lago. However, Mueller does have several questions he wants to ask Trump about Sessions recusal, including what efforts Trump may have made to get Sessions to reverse course. Trump has been highly critical of Sessions ever since the recusal, blasting the former senator for not launching full-blown investigations into Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and officials like fired FBI Director James Comey and fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. Trump's latest tweet on Sessions seems to go further than some of his past criticism. Upon Sessions recusal, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein took control of the Russia probe, ultimately appointing Mueller to investigate allegations of potential collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russia during the 2016 presidential election. A Justice Department spokesperson had no comment on the president's tweet. Last week, the president demanded that the Justice Department investigate revelations that an FBI informant was in communication with at least three Trump campaign associatesGeorge Papadopoulos, Sam Clovis, and Carter Page. The president has dubbed these new revelations as Spygate. Rosenstein instructed the Justice Department inspector general to investigate any alleged impropriety or political motivation in the FBIs investigation into Russian interference and potential collusion with Trump campaign associates. Comey and other Obama-era intelligence officials, though, defended the FBIs use of an informanttechnically referred to as a Confidential Human Source. And on Tuesday, Gowdy told Fox News that the FBI acted appropriately, on the heels of a high-level briefing last week on the matter. I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, Gowdy said on The Story with Martha MacCallum on Tuesday, adding that the move had nothing to do with Donald Trump. Gowdy added: It looks to me like the FBI was doing what President Trump said. ... President Trump himself in the Comey memos said, If anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it. Sounds to me like that was exactly what the FBI did. Fox News' John Roberts contributed to this report. Former Obama official Valerie Jarrett attempted Tuesday to make President Trump share the backlash over Roseanne Barr's racist tweet about her, saying on MSNBC that tone does start at the top. ABC cancelled Barrs popular reboot of Roseanne shortly after she posted the tweet targeting Jarrett. The former senior adviser to former President Barack Obama responded Tuesday evening during MSNBCs town hall on Everyday Racism in America. She said she was fine after Barr described Jarrett as like the muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby. But, without mentioning Trump by name, Jarrett suggested "tone" starts with him. We like to look up to our president and feel as though he reflects the values of our country, but I also think every individual citizen has a responsibility, too, Jarrett said Tuesday. And its up to all of us to push back. Our government is only going to be as good as we make it. While Barr is a Trump supporter, the president and his aides have avoided commenting on the tweet controversy. On Tuesday evening, the president held a rally in Nashville, Tenn., but did not mention Jarrett or Barrs comments. When asked what the presidents reaction was to Barrs tweets, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said the president has been focused on North Korea, trade and the economy. The president is focused on North Korea. Hes focused on trade deals. And hes focused on rebuilding our military, the economy. And thats what hes spending his time on; not responding to other things, Sanders said Tuesday. Asked whether the president thought Roseannes show should have been cancelled, Sanders said: Thats not what hes spending his time on. And I think that we have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now. Barr apologized following her tweet on Tuesday. I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive memy joke was in bad taste, Barr tweeted, noting she was now leaving Twitter. But Barr returned to the social media platform Tuesday night, apologizing again and blaming her tweet on the prescription sleeping pill Ambien. Fox News' Nicole Darrah and Gregg Re contributed to this report. President Donald Trump urged Congress to pass "Right to Try" for terminally ill patients during his State of the Union address, and on May 30 he signed the bill into law. The act, sponsored by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., cleared the Senate in August 2017 and passed in the House in late May with a 250-169 vote. "Patients with terminal conditions should have access to experimental treatments that could potentially save their lives," Trump said back in January. "It is time for the Congress to give these wonderful Americans the 'Right to Try.'" Trump's signature on the bill is seen as a victory for the administration. "Today I am proud to keep another promise to the American people as I sign the right to try legislation into law," Trump said on May 30. "I called on congress to pass Right to Trysuch a great namesome bills they dont have a great namethis one...And a lot of that trying is going to be successful. I really believe that. We did it." The "Right to Try" bill allows terminally ill patients to request access to experimental medicines that have passed Phase 1 of the Food and Drug Administration approval process. It authorizes patients diagnosed with life-ending illnesses to use unapproved medications so long as they have undergone early testing on humans and are under continual evaluation. Patients also would have to have tried other treatment options. 'RIGHT TO TRY' BILL HEADS TO TRUMP'S DESK AFTER HOUSE OK In August, the Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent. The Senate took a strong stand in support of the millions of Americans and their families suffering from terminal illness, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said in a statement following the vote. Patients with terminal diseases ought to have a right to access treatments that have demonstrated a level of safety and could potentially save their lives. "Right to Try" laws were already enacted in 40 states by the time the bill was passed, according to righttotry.org. Supporters called for federal legislation. "FDA regulations cannot preempt state laws that preserve constitutionally protected rights, such as the fundamental right to life and medical self-preservation," the website explained. "The United States Supreme Court has never addressed Right To Try specifically, but it has held that states have great latitude in regulating health and safety, including medical standards, which are primarily and historically a matter of local concern." Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report. With so many incredible, newly developing technologies, could we build a real-life Millennium Falcon? In short, no. But we're getting closer. In the "Star Wars" universe, the Millennium Falcon is heralded as the coolest ship around. The cargo vessel that Han Solo originally won from Lando Calrissian in the Cloud City Sabacc Tournament, the Millennium Falcon lies at the center of some of the most incredible adventures in the series. With "Solo: A Star Wars Story" hitting theaters on May 25, let's explore some of the most notable technological features of this iconic ship and what would have to happen before we could build it today. [Tour the Millennium Falcon with These "Star Wars" Photos!] Hyperdrive The Millennium Falcon's signature speed comes from its hyperdrive, a propulsion system that pushes the vessel to light speed though Han Solo has famously boasted that the ship can travel even faster. The hyperdrive functions by using "hypermatter particles" to send the craft into hyperspace, an alternative dimension reached by traveling at or beyond the speed of light. This technique uses wrinkles in the fabric of space-time, or wormholes: pieces of the fabric that fold over to connect two otherwise-distant points. Now, while the theory of general relativity does predict wormholes, they are still just a theoretical phenomenon. So, because we can't prove their existence, we certainly can't manipulate them for our own purposes. Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon, told our sister site Live Science, "You would need some very exotic type of matter in order to stabilize a wormhole, and it's not clear whether such matter exists in the universe." Now, there is some excitement in the scientific community surrounding an engine called the EmDrive. This is not a hyperdrive, or a warp drive as some have suggested. But it bounces microwaves around a chamber as a substitute for propellant. Recently, researchers put the EmDrive to the testand found that the thrust it produced comes from some kind of electromagnetic interaction that is likely between the engine's power cables and Earth's magnetic field, according to their study This might not be the end of the EmDrive as a potential, future engine but it certainly isn't a hyperdrive. G-Forces Even if we suspend our disbelief and accept the ship's speed, another issue arises: g-forces. According to calculations from Wired, passengers aboard the Millennium Falcon could experience up to about 12 g's while traveling at the speeds portrayed in the films (though this might not be the case if they are traveling through hyperspace). This is comparable to being in a gravitational field 12 times higher than what we normally experience on Earth. ["Star Wars" Spaceships from a Galaxy Far, Far Away] At 1 g, we can still push blood up to our brains, but as the g's increase, this becomes more difficult. Twelve g's is about the maximum that jet-fighter pilots can experience before passing out, but this assumes they're wearing g-suits, which squeeze the legs in high-g situations to prevent blood from being pushed down. So, theoretically, without high-g suits, the human passengers aboard the Millennium Falcon would black out when the ship took high-g turns, even without traveling as fast as Han Solo has bragged it can. Holochess At Chewbacca's request, a hologram "chess," or holochess, table was installed on the Millennium Falcon so passengers could play Dejarik, a classic strategy game in the "Star Wars" universe. But while astronauts aboard the International Space Station won't be playing Chewie's favorite game anytime soon, hologram technology is inching its way into modern spacecraft. In 2016, after some launch difficulties, two of Microsoft's HoloLens AR headsets traveled to the space station to aid crewmembers. Additionally, the innovators behind the Voxiebox have built an early version sort of holochess. You can't feel the pieces or move them with your hands but this feature is not far off, and researchers have already gotten close. In one example, reported by Wired, teams from the University of Tokyo and the Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan have created small, plasma holograms that you can feel with your hands. Invisible Deflector Shields Aboard most ships in the "Star Wars" universe, and throughout sci-fi stories, deflector shields are a staple security measure. Whenever conflict arises, deflectors go right up, keeping the ship intact despite enemy attacks. But is this just a well-worn science fiction trope? Not exactly. Back in 2014, ExtremeTech profiled a team of students from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom who considered the possibility of using plasma to build such a deflector. The students took notice of the Earth's ionosphere, a part of the upper atmosphere that contains plasma. Currently, we bounce communication signals off of the ionosphere's plasma to send them to different locations on Earth. This "invisible shield" around Earth was the inspiration for this team's suggestion that you could use and manipulate plasma to deflect electromagnetic radiation such as that coming from an energy-based or laser weapon, possibly. Such a shield isn't technically feasible yet, but their general concept to use plasma to deflect radiation is certainly within the realm of possibility. Additionally,in 2008, Ruth Bamford of the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England and her colleagues studied the possibility of deflecting radiation using a portable magnetic shield. While it's not the battle-ready deflector we've seen in Star Wars, it's definitely a step in that direction. Quadex Power Core Gray, circular and suitable for installation in YT-1300 light freighters like the Millennium Falcon, the Quadex power core, the ship's main source of power, is pure fiction. ['Star Wars'! 40 Surprising Facts from a Galaxy Far, Far Away] Other than its description as a power source for starships like the Millennium Falcon, the Quadex power core is a fairly mysterious technology. The series never explains how the power core operates, so it is equally possible and impossible that we could build one. Quad Laser Cannons Some of the Millennium Falcon's most powerful and most-used weapons, its quad laser cannons are also relatively feasible. The U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has spent years developing the closest thing we have to a "Star Wars" style laser cannon. It can fit on a fighter jet but is still powerful enough to shoot a 150-kilowatt energy beam. Additionally, researchers have suggested that a coherent amplification network (CAN) laser, a beam created from multiple small lasers, could get rid of space debris surrounding Earth by vaporizing a thin layer of matter off of the surface of the space junk. This would push the debris downward, where it would burn up in Earth's atmosphere. Laser weapons may currently be large, dangerous and difficult to create, but they are certainly possible. Hodgepodge Design The technologies aboard the Millennium Falcon are not a constant. The ship is an ever-evolving amalgamation of assorted, stolen, customized and found parts. It might seem odd that a highly capable future ship could be assembled this way but when you think about current spaceflight advances, it makes sense. The Millennium Falcon has a lot in common with SpaceX's Dragon, whose reusable design is optimized for efficient, sustainable launches. Similarly, the Millennium Falcon's design relies on the reuse of found parts. With long-term space travel, tech aboard a ship would occasionally break, become obsolete, etc. It might not always be possible to 3D print new items or make repairs with what is already available on a ship. Future space travelers might do what Han Solo has done and repurpose found parts to efficiently survive in the cosmos. The Millennium Falcon boasts a seemingly endless list of gadgets and capabilities. From its oversize sensor dish to its Gigyrodyne sublight engine, thrust-pressure manifold and sensor-proof smuggling compartments, the tech aboard this ship ranges from highly plausible to entirely fictional. So, humanity is not quite ready to build a Millennium Falcon. Still, many developing technologies could one day make onboard tech like laser cannons and invisible deflector shields a reality. Until then, we can always watch Han Solo and company zip through the galaxy on one of science fiction's most iconic ships. Original article on Space.com. With the eyes of the world on Hawaiis devastating Kilauea volcano, experts are weighing the human toll of volcanic eruptions. Thankfully, there have been no fatalities as a result of the current Kilauea eruption, although experts note that, on a global basis, lives are regularly lost as a result of volcanic activity. Fatalities, for example, have been recorded in 18 of the last 20 years, according to the Volcanic Fatalities Database, compiled by the U.K.'s University of Bristol. DRAMATIC VOLCANO DEATH: HUGE FLYING STONE CRUSHED MAN IN POMPEII, ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVER The latest version of the database, which was produced in September 2017, notes that about a tenth of the worlds population lives within the potential footprint of volcanic hazards. Compiled from academic data, media reports and official statements, the database spans the period 1500 AD to 2017. During that period, 635 fatal incidents were recorded, accounting for 278,368 deaths. Each record in the database contains information on the number of fatalities, fatal cause, incident date and the fatality location in terms of distance from the volcano. Nearly half of the fatal incidents are were recorded within 10 km (6.2 miles) of the volcanic activity. HAWAII VOLCANO: WHY KILAUEA'S LAVA IS CAUSING EERIE BLUE FLAMES Local residents are the most frequently killed, but tourists, volcanologists and members of the media are also identified as common victims, explained the researchers. In a BBC column, Dr. Sarah Brown of the University of Bristols School of Earth Sciences, explained that, since 1500, about 170,000 people have been killed in just six eruptions. Volcanoes can produce a host of lethal hazards, including lava flows, tsunamis, volcanic mudflows, avalanches, flying rocks and pyroclastic flow a mix of hot lava fragments, ash pumice and volcanic ash. Potentially harmful gases such as hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen fluoride, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide can also be emitted. HAWAII VOLCANO: WHAT'S THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO FOR KILAUEA? Brown, who updates the volcanic fatality database, noted that the largest loss of life to volcanic gas was in Cameroon in 1986 when more than 1,500 people died. The deaths occurred when carbon dioxide from Lake Nyos flowed into surrounding villages, she explained. While no one has died as a result of the current Kilauea eruption, a man on the Big Island was recently hit by a flying piece of lava and said the molten rock nearly sheared his leg in half. The Associated Press contributed to this article. Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers Republic RecordsEarlier this month, Ariana Grande told Jimmy Fallon that her new album would be called Sweetener, but it turns out she's had that album title for a long time. Back on November 4, 2016, Ariana posted a photo of herself on Instagram, and captioned it "Sweetener." When a fan asked her Tuesday if she knew back then that that would be her album title, she responded, "yes ! i always knew . i know some people dont understand it yet but the body of work feels like sweetener. like warm yummy agave. and clouds. w a little big of crying and sex on the side ?" Ariana also responded, "Yes, very much so" to a fan who asked her if Sweetener is her favorite album thus far, and told another fan who asked if this "current era" of her career is her favorite, "yes ! im so grateful and happy and i miss u and i love this music and life and you." The "No Tears Left to Cry" star also said there are 15 songs on the new album, and revealed that one of them, "Get Well Soon," is about a struggle she went through in 2017. "isss ab my anxiety. i felt like i was floating for like 3 months last year & not in a nice way," she explained. "like i [was] outside my body? was v scary and i couldnt breathe well. so its ab that. & lots of voices in my head singin. i hope it comforts ppl who hear it pls." Finally, Ari confirmed that she'll be touring next year behind the album. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. A Michigan man put up quite a fight against a bear as it tried to attack his barking beagle earlier this month. The Boyne Falls man let his dog outside around 4:30 a.m. When he returned minutes later to let the dog back in, he spotted a large shadow moving slowly across his driveway. He soon realized it was a black bear the only species of bear living in the state. "When his beagle barked at the bear it circled around and swatted at the dog as the owner frantically tried to pull him in only to have the leash get tangled," according to a report recently released by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The owner repeatedly kicked the bear as he struggled to untangle the leash. At first, the bear retreated. But then the animal returned and bit the dog. That's when the man punched the bear in the nose. The blow to the snout caused the bear to pause just long enough for the man to escape inside his house with the dog. He then called the Michigan DNR and conservation officer Andrea Erratt arrived at the scene. "Erratt advised the homeowner to remove all his bird feeders, clean up all the sunflower seed husks, spread some moth balls, and stop feeding corn to the deer and turkeys in the backyard," the report states. The owner agreed and then rushed his dog to a veterinarian, where it received several stitches in its side and rear. There are up to 19,000 black bears roaming the state of Michigan with about 90 percent living upstate, Michigan.gov explains on its website. Typically, black bears are "shy by nature" but they have been known to attack on occasion, the site says. When bears stand their ground, people should do the same thing, Kevin Swanson, wildlife specialist with the Michigan DNR's bear and wolf program, advised in an online statement. In these kind of encounters, you should make loud noises and back away from the bear slowly, giving the bear plenty of room to leave the area. Do not run from a black bear or play dead if one approaches. Let's face it. If you live in New York City, where light pollution is perhaps as bad as it gets, there aren't too many celestial sights that you can look forward to seeing. And yet, twice each year, New York residents and visitors from around the world are mesmerized by an uncommon appearance that occurs near sunset in the giant metropolis. It's dubbed "Manhattanhenge." Around the "traditional" date of Memorial Day (May 30) and again for a day or two around July 12, New Yorkers become intrigued by an unusual circumstance that allows the setting sun to be seen on all streets headed east and west simultaneously, provided that you have a clear view down to the New Jersey horizon. Indeed, it is not unusual, on those special evenings, to see people clustered on the corners of favored cross streets, watching the setting sun as it aligns with Manhattan's canyons of brick, glass and steel, creating dramatic vistas. In recent years, the term "Manhattanhenge" has become very popular in pop culture, even being used for the title of a 2009 episode of the television series "CSI: NY." [Night Sky, May 2018: What You Can See This Month (Maps)] The gridiron of Manhattan But Manhattanhenge's origins are not nearly as mysterious. The phenomenon is based on a design for Manhattan outlined in "The Commissioners' Plan of 1811" for a rectilinear grid, or "gridiron" of straight streets and avenues that intersect one another at right angles. This design runs from north of Houston Street in Lower Manhattan to just south of 155th Street in Upper Manhattan. Most cross streets in between were arranged in a regular right-angled grid that was tilted 29 degrees east of true north to roughly replicate the angle of the island of Manhattan. And because of this 29-degree tilt in the grid, the magic moment of the setting sun aligning with Manhattan's cross streets does not coincide with the June solstice but rather with specific dates in late May and early July. While we say that the sun sets in the west, most times that's not exactly the case. Like the popular axiom "A broken clock is correct twice a day," the sun sets at precisely due west only twice each year on the equinox days in March and September. But between the first day of spring and the first day of autumn, the position on the horizon where the sun appears to set, known as the azimuth, actually occurs somewhat north of due west. The azimuth of the sunset slowly shifts northward until the day of the June solstice; thereafter, it reverses course and shifts back to the south. On June 21, the sun sets at an azimuth of 302 degrees, or 32 degrees north of due west. But for the setting sun to be seen from all of Manhattan's cross streets, its azimuth must be 299 degrees, or 29 degrees north of due west. That happens twice first as the sun is climbing toward the solstice in late May, and then for a second time after the solstice, as the sun migrates back toward the south in early July. And that first opportunity in late May is rapidly approaching. Dates and times to look The man who first brought attention to the Manhattanhenge phenomenon almost 20 years ago is the noted astrophysicist and director of New York's Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson. He has written an interesting blog post on the topic, which you can read here. For those who will be in New York City and hope to get a view of this year's spectacle and maybe even snap a photograph here is a tip: While any cross street will suffice, Tyson suggests specific wider, two-way cross streets that ensure the best views of the west-northwest horizon (toward New Jersey): 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd and 57th streets. "The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building render 34th Street and 42nd Street especially striking vistas," he noted. We should also note that the times provided below are not for the exact moment of sunset. Sunset is defined as when the very top of the sun disappears below a "true" astronomical horizon, such as what one might see from a ship out at sea. For the Manhattanhenge effect, allowances must be taken for hills and any landmarks along the distant New Jersey landscape, so the sun's altitude is assumed to be 1 degree (or slightly less) above the actual horizon. In 2018, there are four possible dates to see the effect. For your first opportunity in May, the dates to circle on your calendar are May 29 and May 30. On the first date, at 8:13 p.m. EDT, you will see a "half sun" that is, half above and half below the landscape. On the following night, at 8:12 p.m. EDT, you will see a "full sun," with the entire solar disk resting above the horizon. If you miss out in May, you'll get a second chance in July, on the 12th and 13th. On the first July date, a "full sun" will appear at 8:20 p.m. EDT, while on the second date, we get the "half sun" effect at 8:21 p.m. EDT. [In 1925, Observers Lined Manhattan to Measure the Total Solar Eclipse] Manhattanhenge in the morning? Some of you might be wondering if Manhattanhenge is visible at sunrise. The answer is yes, but you'll have to wait until late in the year to see it. Once again, there are four opportunities this time, flanking the date of the winter solstice on Dec. 21. At this point, we will be looking 180 degrees in the opposite direction, toward an azimuth of 119 degrees or 29 degrees south of due east. The first chance comes on Nov. 26 as the sun continues to shift to the south, with a "full sun" at 7:06 a.m. EST, followed by a "half sun" on the 27th at 7:05 a.m. EST. After the solstice, the sun reverses course and begins to shift back to the north. On Jan. 15, we'll see a "half sun" at 7:27 a.m. EST, followed the next morning by a "full sun" at 7:28 a.m. EST. Keep in mind, however, that unlike with sunset, there are more likely to be local obstructions to your visibility of the rising sun. Those living in Upper Manhattan and Harlem must contend with buildings and structures rising up from The Bronx; those on the Upper East Side and Midtown will be looking toward Queens; and those in the East Village down to Houston Street will be facing Brooklyn edifices. Of course, in attempting to see or photograph Manhattanhenge in the morning, one must also consider that the ambient late fall/early winter morning air temperature is likely to be anywhere from 30 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit (17 to 33 degrees Celsius) colder than the temps in late spring/early summer evenings and there could even be some snow (especially in January). And lastly, the odds of clear and sunny winter-morning weather are considerably less favorable compared with having a clear and sunny summer evening. But whenever you attempt to see Manhattanhenge, be it summer or winter, evening or morning, we wish you good luck and clear skies! Enigma of Stonehenge Of course, there are other places on Earth where the sun aligns with certain landmarks at specific times of the year. Probably the most famous is Stonehenge, the Neolithic monument at Wiltshire in the Salisbury Plain of England, where, on the day of the summer solstice, as seen from inside the monument, the sun appears to rise directly above the so-called Heel Stone. It's an event that attracts thousands of people each year. Although experts are fairly certain that the massive upright stones that constitute Stonehenge took about 1,500 years to construct and that it probably once served as a burial ground, many mysteries about it still abound. More than half a century ago, British astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins and co-author John B. White published a book, "Stonehenge Decoded" (Doubleday, 1965), which claimed that Stonehenge was used to predict a wide number of astronomical occurrences. While gaining a large following, the book also attracted the criticism of more than a few reputable scientific scholars, who scoffed at its findings. All these years later, the issue remains a contentious one, and the true nature of Stonehenge may forever be a mystery. Original article on Space.com. A Virginia man made the catch of a lifetime on Saturday when he reeled in a 68-pound flathead catfish, beating a state record set nearly 25 years ago. Fisherman Jeffrey Dill said it wasn't easy pulling the "monster" fish out of Lake Smith in Virginia Beach with his $20 fishing rod from Walmart but he did it. "I put him on the dock, held him down for a minute. He was so big," Dill told WAVY, admitting that he wrestled with the creature for at least 15 minutes. "It was a monster. It was a true river monster." Chad Boyce, fish biologist Afterward, he hauled the giant fish, who he nicknamed "Big Earle," to nearby Oceans East Bait and Tackle to be measured. A biologist from the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (DGIF) met the man there to observe the weigh-in. FLORIDA FISHERMAN CATCHES 120-POUND 'GRANDDADDY OF ALL CATFISH' A digital scale showed the fish weighed 68.8 pounds about 2.4 pounds more than the previous record-setting flathead catfish caught by Mike Willems along the Occoquan Reservoir on May 6, 1994. "It was a true river monster," Chad Boyce, fish biologist with the Virginia DGIF, told WAVY. "It was a big fish that you don't expect to see in this part of the state, especially in Lake Smith. That's definitely a trophy." Oceans East Bait and Tackle posted a photo of the whopper on Facebook, garnering hundreds of likes and dozens of comments from impressed locals. "Saw this catfish when he weighed it in. Could not believe it weighed that much," one man commented. MYSTERIOUS SOUTH CAROLINA FISH WITH HUMAN-LIKE TEETH STUMPS THE INTERNET "Monsta! Pretty Work," another added. "How many ducks that thing got in its belly?" one Facebook user asked. Dill said his family and friends were impressed by his winning catch. "I talked with some of my older buddies and they said some people fish their whole lives and never get close to a state record. It's a big deal," Dill told WFXR. Lake Smith, across Northampton Boulevard, is shallow, measuring only about 5 feet deep. But it's still a fishing hotspot, thanks to its plentiful largemouth bass population. "There are opportunities to catch a citation," the Virginia DGIF says. "The lake also has white catfish, crappie, white perch, bluegill, and flathead catfish." This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," May 29, 2018. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS HOST: There you see the president wrapping up a massive rally in Nashville, Tennessee. We've got a ton of highlights will bring you throughout the hour. We have incredible breaking news that we're going to be covering all night tonight. The Trump administration pushing hard for peace on the peninsula and now, a senior North Korean official as we speak is traveling right here in New York for a historic meeting with the Secretary of State Mark Pompeo. By the way, they'll probably have to pay taxes while they're here. It's such a high tax state. Meanwhile, the, of course, destroy Trump media openly mocking the president's negotiations with Kim Jong Un and guess what? They're all but ignoring the Trump administration's massive diplomatic success here including freeing the American hostages from all over the world. We're going to show you the worst of the worst and how corrupt your bias media is tonight. Also, we have Robert Mueller's out of control Russia probe has now lost any sense of legitimacy and will explain. And according to reports, Obama's Justice Department, they utilized at least one informant to spy on multiple Trump campaign officials and associates during the 2016 election. And by the way, the media is lying about it. Also Robert Mueller has allegedly weaponized the information collected by the informants, spies in order to target President Trump and those connected to his campaign. I think one of the funniest moments tonight. By the way, if you here as a spy, just let me know. Please put your hand up and he's dragging out, by the way, the investigation he wants to derail many pro-Trump Republicans in the midterms. We'll explain the president's tweet from earlier and, of course, the media doesn't get it. And they are running for full cover for Robert Mueller, downplaying this elicit deep state spying scheme, the biggest abuse of power, the biggest corruption scandal in American history. Also, liberal activists all across the country were publicly embarrassed this week after they were caught pushing a salacious fake story about President Trump putting illegal immigrants in cages well it turns out that actually was under Obama's administration. And finally, we'll bring you all the latest on "Roseanne" canceled by ABC after Roseanne Barr's incendiary comments. Sit tight, buckle up, tonight's very important breaking news opening monologue is next. (MUSIC) HANNITY: You just saw the president gave a rousing speech in Nashville, Tennessee, during a campaign push for Senate candidate friend of the show, Marsha Blackburn, ahead of the midterm elections. We're going to play you some of the best moments of this rally throughout the show. But first, as the president's historic talks now with Kim Jong Un weigh in the balance, now despite what you are hearing from the left-wing media in this country, we have full reason to believe and be hopeful about the potential upcoming talks with North Korea. Tomorrow, the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is said to meet with a high- ranking North Korean official in New York City -- now, the most senior official to visit the United States in nearly two decades. A massive development and only the latest sign that these historic talks might still take place in Singapore. They're scheduled to begin on June the 12th. Of course, last week, President Trump initially canceled the summit, sending a strongly worded letter to Kim Jong Un after the despot, the dictator, authorized a series of aggressive statements and failed to comply with the -- some of the basic planning ahead of the talks. And as you can imagine, your corrupt media use that letter to trash the president, revealing what I have been saying so many times on this program, they in order to have the president fail that means the country has to fail. They're openly rooting for the president to fail, even for more peaceful world is at stake for our children watch this pathetic despicable display of Trump derangement syndrome. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) AMB. WENDY SHERMAN: It's a friend of mine who sent an email to me as I was on the train to New York. It sounds like a year old stream of consciousness in a breakup letter from overnight camp. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I get it. I'm going to break up with you before you break up with me, but by the way, call me. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Last week, a U.S. team in Singapore stood up on a date by North Korea, then ghosted by North Korea. They're not even responding to U.S. overtures. And today, of course, culminating in name-calling, a very awkward breakup letter. Oh and by the way, the threat of using nuclear weapons. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As far as we know, he didn't consult with his own National Security Council. He dictates this bizarre actually embarrassing letter. BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN: This is a total breakup letter and you realize like this -- when your relationships are souring, but you want to be the one to break up first, so you cut it off, and you're kind of like maybe we can leave it open and then, that's what this feels like. (END VIDEO CLIP) HANNITY: Breakup letter, how many times have I said that everyone in the media, they're all sheep. And they got this little, little echo chamber and they all quote themselves and they all think they're so smart. So, while the media is quick to bash the president during every twist and turn and what is a negotiation, they need to learn the art of the deal with North Korea, although more than happy to ignore the president's historic, diplomatic triumphs. This includes Trump success. So far, he has freed 17 Americans who were once detained or held hostage abroad. The latest example came this weekend when the Trump administration secured the release of an American, Joshua Holt, and his wife after they spent nearly two years in a Venezuelan prison after being detained on several bogus, politically motivated charges. Take a look. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) JOSHUA HOLT, FREED AMERICAN: I'm just overwhelmed with gratitude for you guys for everything that you've done, for the support of my wife through those two years they were very, very, very difficult two years. Just so grateful for what you guys have done and for thinking about me and caring about me just a normal person. So, it really touches me and thank you. DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You've been very brave actually. You've been incredibly brave. We saw what was happening inside of that prison. So, you really have been very, very brave. (END VIDEO CLIP) HANNITY: Thank God our fellow Americans are home. We're going to have up more on the president's historic diplomatic gains around the world throughout the program tonight. First, we have more disturbing developments from Robert Mueller's illegitimate runaway witch hunt. This needs to go away. Last week, we first reported that the Justice Department under the Obama administration utilized at least one FBI informant to actively spy on multiple people that are associated with the Trump campaign. That includes Sam Clovis and Carter Page. They will be here tonight along with George Papadopoulos who recently played guilty to lying to the FBI after pressure from the Office of the Special Counsel. Sam Clovis recently told Byron York that the informant FBI spy used him in order to secure the meeting with Papadopoulos. Meanwhile, former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo. He also, all three of these guys that were approached by the spy will join us tonight and, of course, Caputo's claiming that he was approached by multiple government informants during the 2016 election. Imagine for a second if there were spies in Hillary's campaign and she did do a deal for Russian propaganda. Take a look. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MICHAEL CAPUTO, FORMER TRUMP CAMPAIGN AIDE: Let me tell you something that I know for a fact the -- this informant, this person that they planted tried to plant into the campaign, and even into the administration if you believe "Axios", he's not the only person that came at the campaign. And the FBI is not the only Obama agency that came at the campaign. I know because they came at me and I'm looking for clearance to my attorney to reveal this to the public. This is just the beginning. (END VIDEO CLIP) HANNITY: Even former assistant U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York, Andy McCarthy, he's backing up some of these claims in an article entitled: 'The Obama administration's hypocritical pretext for spying on the Trump campaign.' And in the article, McCarthy writes, quote: 'The Obama administration decided to use its counterintelligence powers to spy on the Trump campaign using at least one covert informant electronic monitoring of communications and other intelligence gathering tactics. It ignored the norm against deploying such tactics against political opponents not based on evidence of a Trump Russia criminal conspiracy but on speculation about the Trump campaign's Russia contacts and Russians to sympathies.' How many times have I said they're weaponizing the powerful tools of intelligence? This elicit, this unprecedented spying is now being used by team Mueller to malign President Trump and everybody else around him. Hours ago, the president raised another pressing concern surrounding the ongoing Mueller witch hunt. He tweeted out, quote, 'the 13 angry Democrats plus people who work eight years for Obama worked on the rigged Russian witch-hunt will be meddling with the midterm elections, especially now that Republicans stay tough are taking the lead in the polls. There was no collusion except by the Democrats.' The president raises an important concern especially given the new revelation surrounding what the president is calling, rightly, spygate. And, of course, the mainstream media, they are providing cover for Team Mueller as they actively are rooting for the special counsel investigation to find something, to find anything on this president. And as you can probably imagine, the media's been doing everything in its power to downplay what is the single biggest abuse of power corruption scandal in American politics and history. And, by the way, you have an administration using the Justice Department to spy on an opposing political party during a presidential election, using bought and paid for the other campaign in this case, Hillary Clinton, using her bought and paid for funneled money through a law firm, to Fusion GPS, to hire a foreign national to get Russian lies that even he says in an interrogatory in Great Britain maybe 50/50 at best raw intelligence, to then get a warrant by lying to a spy -- a FISA judge in an original application and three subsequent applications and not telling any of the judges that Hillary paid for it. Take a look at how the bias press is trying to brush aside this huge, massive national abuse of power corruption scandal. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) JAMES CLAPPER, FORMER DNI: I have inversion to the use of the word "spy", but let's just for the sake of discussion use that term which conventionally means the use of tradecraft, using a formally trained case officer who would mask identity, who would attempt to recruit. So, none of the classical attributes of a spy craft, if I can use that term were present here. This is the most benign form of information gathering. So, to characterize it as a spy or spygate is, of course, part of the narrative, and it's directly antithetical to what I actually said. JOHN HEILEMANN, MSNBC: At various times, Trump has seemed attracted to conspiracy theories there's the obviously a much for (INAUDIBLE) looseness with the truth and the lies, et cetera, et cetera. But these -- the obsession with conspiracy theories in tall tales as you say, Joe, dates back for a long time. I think the point right now though is that he's using them to a particular kind of political effect. (END VIDEO CLIP) HANNITY: Heilemann is a liberal hack and Clapper is a known liar. We're going to have much more on the spying scandal and the complicit media's cover-up all throughout the show. Let's turn to a story that left many on the left totally embarrassed over the weekend. Remember this picture circulated online showing many illegal immigrants being detained in a chain-linked cage? And, of course, many on the left became outraged, just outraged, quickly accusing the Trump administration of massive human rights violations. You have activist Shawn King said that children of immigrants being held in cages like dogs and Linda Sarsour, remember her? Oh, yes, she's chimed in, hashtagging #weareourchildren. What Sarsour, King, and, yes, your friends and the media failed to realize is -- let's put those pictures back up. Those pictures were taken in 2014, Barack Hussein Obama was your president. And back then, they voice zero concern about Obama's detention policies. Meanwhile, others on the left used these photos, of course, to attack President Trump whoops-a-daisy. Take a look. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) HALLIE JACKSON, MSNBC: As the president correctly points out, the photo is from 2014, but that tweet highlights just how heated this whole discussion has become surrounding parents and children who crossed the border. BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN: Some renewed scrutiny that some children are being separated from their parents at the border. It is a policy the Trump administration has defended. STEPHANIE RUHLE, MSNBC: President Trump tweeted about one of his favorite topics this morning, immigration. This as its policies are facing major criticism, writing in part, quote, Dems must agree to wall a new border protection for good of country. Bipartisan bill! The president has been taking serious heat for his immigration policies recently, particularly his policy of separating families in detention. ALIDA GARCIA: There's actually a new policy from the administration right now to separate families. These are families who made the courageous decision, a hard decision to leave behind everything that they had, their families, their communities, their belongings out of fear to come to the United States. (END VIDEO CLIP) HANNITY: Finally, tonight, the reboot of the sitcom "Roseanne" has been canceled. This after "Roseanne Barr" made some really incendiary pretty appalling comments on Twitter about the appearance of Obama aide Valerie Jarrett. Earlier today, she did apologize, but the show is now over. We're going to have more reaction later in the show. But, first, joining us with reaction to all of this breaking news and, of course, the president's big rally in Nashville, Tennessee, is Sara Carter, and the author of the very soon to be released number one bestseller, BarnesandNoble.com, Hannity.com, you're going to want to read this book. I have read a lot of it. It's amazing. "The Russian Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump". Our own Gregg Jarrett is with us. Let's start with spygate. First of all, you did -- you know, this is what I love about you. You've become a really close friend and you're two doors down for me, when we get a lot of time to talk and you said, Sean, I looked up the definition of what a spy is. It's the government definition? GREGG JARRETT, FOX NEWS LEGAL ANALYST: No, this is just your plain dictionary definition. And in fact, if you look up spy in the thesaurus, it says, quote, secret or undercover agent. That's what this guy was. He was deployed undercover to gather information. It can be gathered through observation or listening or conversations done secretly. So, yes, this was a spy who was operating, but the media wants to quibble over semantics so they can trash Trump as a liar. The media frankly is either too lazy or stupid to look it up. HANNITY: No, no, journalism in America is dead. It's dead. It's gone. It's buried. They are all liberal activists. And I've got some amazing stuff we're doing that you're going to be proud of, I can promise you that. Sara, let's say I'm like -- fix that. Good to see you. Let's talk about it. SARA CARTER, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Good to see you too. HANNITY: I didn't watch a lot of TV this weekend and I don't like fake news, so I don't watch them very often. But I'm watching some of these shows , I'm like, they're all -- it sort of like -- oh, it's like a love letter the letter to Kim Jong Un, or what did they say break up first -- or whatever breakup -- a breakup letter. And I'm watching. They're all saying the same thing. Oh, it's not a spy. It's only an informant. OK, the informant that is approaching people in the campaign, three of whom will be on this show tonight, and trying to get information from them. That's a spy. CARTER: He is a spy because he didn't reveal his original intent and his intentions when he met them, Sean. So, it's obvious he was there to gather information. He did the same thing with George Papadopoulos after he met with Sam Clovis. He then contacts George Papadopoulos, offers him $3,000 to write a paper and come to England in August of 2016, and when Papadopoulos is there, he starts pushing on him, he starts asking him questions about what does he know about the Russians, what does he know about emails? I mean, even at that point -- HANNITY: Why don't they ask WikiLeaks? Did anyone ever ask WikiLeaks? CARTER: That's right. HANNITY: If WikiLeaks have any proof where they got the info from, because we do know that Hillary Clinton's server and the original draft of Comey said that there were six Foreign Intelligence Services that got into her email server? So, it could have been Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and I'm just guessing. CARTER: And, of course, that's what the U.S. intelligence officials that I've spoken with have said, that there is no doubt that her server was infiltrated by foreign actors. So, why haven't they asked WikiLeaks? HANNITY: I want that information. America deserves that information. CARTER: America deserves all the information, including all of the documentation -- HANNITY: Bingo! CARTER: -- that opened up this investigation. That's what America deserves. HANNITY: You know, there's a "New York Times" piece out tonight, and the bottom line of it is, is Mueller is so desperate, he's now looking into a March 2017 meeting with Trump and Sessions about him unrecusing himself. JARRETT: Right. HANNITY: And -- look, I'm not the lawyer. You are. I am beginning to think Mueller is so -- so wrapped up on this, so abusively biased and he's so desperate, he doesn't understand simple fundamentals of the law, that he should know. For example, that the president has the right to ask for investigations and stopping investigations. GREGG JARRETT, LEGAL ANALYST, FOX NEWS: Or prosecutions, or not to prosecute. A historical example would be President Andrew Johnson after the Civil War who sent word to the U.S. attorney in Norfolk, Virginia, dismiss all those indictments against Robert E. Lee and the other Confederate generals for treason. The president was authorized to do that. So, fast forward to 150 years, here we are now and Mueller wants to criminalize a perfectly legitimate conversation with the attorney general in which he's being scolded for essentially using the wrong regulation to recuse himself? The regulation calls for recusal in criminal cases. This wasn't a criminal case. It was a counter intelligence probe. This just underscores what a colossal waste of taxpayer money. Mueller is squandering and how desperate he is. (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: But this is so important. He has, the president has the constitutional authority. JARRETT: Right. HANNITY: This is what Mark Levin has been saying and you've been saying. He -- the Constitution is on his side. He has the precedence and the constitutional authority, and it's not ambiguous, Gregg. It's straightforward. And we have all this precedent. JARRETT: Mueller seems to want to criminalize a legitimate conversation the president is having with-- (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: Bingo. Alan Dershowitz. JARRETT: Yes. HANNITY: To criminalize political differences. JARRETT: That's exactly what it was. HANNITY: Sara, you also have a good, really good -- remember, you know, this phony Rod Rosenstein wants to -- he doesn't want -- want the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan to give the information. Begging on his hands and knees last hour, essentially became the FISA memo in the House Senate, a House intel committee and the Grassley-Graham memo. But then they use this tactic of redacting in the name of national security. SARA CARTER, CONTRIBUTOR, FOX NEWS: They don't have that right. And Rod Rosenstein should know better, because under the article one of the Constitution, regardless, and this is based on Supreme Court precedents, I'm sure Gregg can talk about this extensively, that even if it's classified information, Congress has the authority for oversight. And Rob Rosenstein knows this better than anyone else and that is why they are fighting so hard for these documents. These documents are essential, Sean. HANNITY: I agree. CARTER: Because if we want to find the answers to this Russia investigation, we need to get them. (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: Release them. CARTER: They need to be made public. Release them. HANNITY: Release them. CARTER: And if -- and if they won't then the president should have them released. HANNITY: And by the way, the attorney general -- you can command that they get released. The American people have had it. And I know and you know, Sara, and Gregg knows that if they are released, this whole thing blows up in their face in a massive way which is why they are fighting so hard not to release them. CARTER: Which is why we are fighting to have them released. HANNITY: Good point. Great job as always. Gregg, when is the book out? JARRETT: It's coming out about six weeks. You can pre-order it. HANNITY: Can you release it sooner, faster? JARRETT: Let's call up Harper and Collins and see if they can-- (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: Yes, tell them to get the rest of here. I agree. Absolutely. All right. Our company owns Harper Collins. Yes, get moving. All right. Tonight during his rally in Nashville the president spoke about 'spygate' as we've been discussing. Take a look. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: So, how do you like the fact that they had people infiltrating our campaign. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? (CROWD BOOING) TRUMP: Can you imagine, people infiltrating our campaign? Is there anybody in this big beautiful arena right now that's infiltrating our campaign? Would you please raise your hand? That would take courage. Now look, you take a look at what's going on. Never in the history of our country has something taken place like took place during this election. (END VIDEO CLIP) HANNITY: Joining us now, exclusively, three people whose lives have been severely and harshly impacted by Robert Mueller and his pit bull Andrew Weissmann's witch hunt. They are former Trump campaign chairman Sam Clovis, former Trump campaign aide, Michael Caputo, former Trump campaign associate Carter Page. All right. Good to see you all. Let me ask you all a simple question. I turn to you, Carter, first. Were you spied upon? Did a spy approach you? CARTER PAGE, FORMER TRUMP CAMPAIGN FOREIGN POLICY ADVISER: I'm not sure, Sean. And you know, there are two parts of the fake DNI report of January 2017. First is hacking. And we know I've been hacked, eventually. (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: And by way, I want to make sure people know. This is the Trump campaign associate. This is the guy that they used the Clinton bought and paid for phony Russian dossier with Russian lies to get FISA warrant to spy on an American. You're in, they lied to those courts four times. And Rod Rosenstein signed off on one of them, the last time which makes it worse because by then they knew it was paid for Russian lies. PAGE: Absolutely. But you know, but the other part of the DNI report as well is the fake news government propaganda and we know now, you know, which led to that FISA warrant. There is broadcasting board of governors, you know, there are affiliate-- (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: Why we are going to Russia and why didn't they just say to the FBI in the spring of 2016. Why didn't they go to the Trump campaign and say, this guy Carter Page is a Trump -- you never met Trump, right? PAGE: Never. HANNITY: Why didn't you just go to Trump and his campaign and say this guy is going to Russia, he works for your campaign, we're worried about him? PAGE: Because there's absolutely nothing to it. And I think they want to play a big story. (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: Why were you in Russia? PAGE: Gave a speech. You know, and-- (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: You didn't get paid for it? PAGE: Zero. No. HANNITY: It's been reported you are a former CIA FBI operative. PAGE: No. HANNITY: Intelligence operative. PAGE: It's funny, there's double standard there as well. I had -- I've given the information to the CIA and FBI-- (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: You cooperated with your country? PAGE: Absolutely. HANNITY: For the betterment of your country? PAGE: Absolutely. HANNITY: When you made these foreign trips? PAGE: No. HANNITY: You were debriefed? PAGE: I gave-- (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: You don't like the questions, do you? PAGE: Not really. Generally, I tried to be confidential that-- (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: But you were trying to help. When you were debriefed do you love America? PAGE: Yes. HANNITY: And you were trying to help your country by meeting with intel CIA people. PAGE: They asked for my help and I did not say no. Absolutely. HANNITY: OK. Sam Clovis, let's start with you. SAM CLOVIS, FORMER TRUMP CAMPAIGN NATIONAL CO-CHAIR: Yes, sir. HANNITY: You were approached -- I won't even -- I knew who the guy was two weeks before or long time before they mentioned his name. You were approached by this guy. What did he say to you? What did he want from you? CLOVIS: It's a bit what he wanted, he used -- he used Carter Page as the person to gain access to a meeting with me. And we met on the 1st of September in 2016 in the Washington, D.C. area. And I think he used me to create an introduction to George Papadopoulos and I did not know that this individual subsequently met with George. I had no idea about that. But our meeting was totally innocuous. It was so innocuous that I didn't report it up the chain of command at all and I didn't think anything of it. In fact, I've never open any of the attachment-- (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: Yes, because all he was saying all I work-- CLOVIS: -- that was sent to me. HANNITY: -- I was a policy guy in three campaigns, I want Trump to win. CLOVIS: Right. HANNITY: He is presenting himself. But meanwhile, he wants information from you. CLOVIS: Right. HANNITY: Fair statement? CLOVIS: Well, he wanted -- no, he didn't gather or try to get information from me. I think what this meeting was about was they used me as a way to get an introduction to George. He wanted to go to George Papadopoulos. And I think he used Carter Page to get to me and then he used me to get to George. HANNITY: Unbelievable. CLOVIS: And I really think that was the chain of -- the whole chain of events there. Because I really think what the goal was, was to create a linkage between an affiliate of the Trump campaign back to those e-mails, and in order to create more probable cause, to create more probable cause for FISA warrants and to also help create a scandal. And I really do think that was the intent and purpose of what this individual was about. HANNITY: You guys stay right here. This is very important. I have a very important question for all of you. Michael, I promise I'll get to you when we get back and all of you. And that is, here is an article of the headline, how Robert Mueller ruined my life. We're going to get to that and more as we continue. Stay with us on Hannity. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HANNITY: As we continue on 'Hannity,' exclusively now we have Sam Clovis, Michael Caputo, Carter Page, all three of them approached by the spy in the Trump campaign. Mike, tell us your side. When you were approached by the spy -- and imagine if this was Hillary's campaign. Imagine civil libertarians, imagine the left and the media in this country, how different this narrative would be. MICHAEL CAPUTO, FORMER TRUMP CAMPAIGN AIDE: Well, I believe I got at least two and perhaps more approaches by individuals who were trying to offer information to the campaign that would have jammed us up in some way, shape or form. I mean, it's very clear that Sam and Carter were both approached by a spy. I don't care what they call the spy, I mean, human intelligence or whatever. You know, back here in Buffalo, you can call it elongated cylindrical semolina but we still call it spaghetti here. A spy is a spy is a spy. HANNITY: Yes. CAPUTO: And that's what it is. And I'll tell you, they've done more than this. They had could have done than what they did with Sam and -- and Sam and Carter. HANNITY: That's more than once. CAPUTO: They had done a lot more. I mean, in reality these-- (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: Look at the FISA court, who lies to a judge? CAPUTO: We would be like that guy in good fellows, you know, watching out for helicopters and tomato sauce all day long. I mean, these guys are going at us from all different angles. I'm convinced-- (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: And by the way, what congressman or senator-- CAPUTO: -- I've been to-- HANNITY: -- somebody called -- what's congressman or senator, I don't think there is one, that if they've got a phone call I've got op research on your opponent you got to want to hear this, wouldn't take the meeting? Name one. And anyone that says otherwise is a liar. I don't believe them for a second. All right. Here's the bigger picture that I want our audience to fully understand. And we know you nearly lost your house, Michael, column about you know, Carter, that says how Robert Mueller ruined my life, nearly ruined my life. PAGE: Listen, Sean, it's like what President Trump always said on the campaign trail. It's not about me. It's about us. I think about all of the damage this did to our entire all of our volunteers on our committee. Look at what it did to Sam. You know, this is the first time I've had a chance to be talking with him in over a year and a half. And you know, all of the support he gave in terms of talking through a lot of these lies that were being put out by the U.S. government and fake media outlets, so. HANNITY: And leaking it's like a sieve from that special counsel's office. PAGE: Absolutely. HANNITY: Sam, I don't know, I've read about you, how was your life impacted by all of this? And you are laughing, but I don't think it's funny. CLOVIS: Well, I'm pretty calm. I have a great faith. And again, it's great to finally have a chance to communicate with Carter again. And I will say this. One of the reasons, I left government here about three weeks ago. I was in the administration. And I left the administration. And one of the reasons, there were many, but one of the reasons I left is because I was tired of not being able to defend myself. HANNITY: Yes. CLOVIS: And I said that's enough. I'm going to come out. I'm going to take the muzzle off. And I'm going to talk to everyone, I'm going to tell everyone what this has been about. And I can you what Michael and Carter have talked about, this has been, and I agree with Michael. This has been - - they've come at us in multiple directions and multiple avenues and from multiple agencies. And I think the American people need to know, that this is the worst possible abuse of power-- HANNITY: Bingo. CLOVIS: -- at taxpayer's expense. HANNITY: Bingo. CLOVIS: And I will say this. I've taken the oath of office three times. I've sworn my oath to the Constitution three times. And we have any number of people, many high ranking people in the Obama administration that took the same oath, and they wouldn't know it if it came up and beat them on the butt. (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: Michael Caputo-- CLOVIS: And that's how a lot of people feel about that. HANNITY: -- you nearly -- that's a powerful statement. Michael, you nearly lost your house. From what I understand the American people stepped up to help you. Real quick. CAPUTO: They really did. And I'll tell you if it weren't for the American people, you know, giving money to pay for my legal fees and more legal fees, I'm starting to pay other people's legal fees, this thing is really outrageous. I mean, you know what? I'll tell you, today I spent photocopying papers about a jealous husband-- (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: I've got to run. CAPUTO: -- and it happened after the election, just for Robert Mueller. HANNITY: Unbelievable. CAPUTO: That's how ridiculous this is. HANNITY: Yes. Hope Hicks spent more on lawyers than she did make for trying to serve the country. Last word, Carter. Quick. PAGE: The Senate should demand that Sam is brought on as the undersecretary of agriculture immediately. HANNITY: All right. PAGE: Given everything he's been through. HANNITY: We'll have you guys back. Your story is important. This can't happen in our country, otherwise, we're the former Soviet Union or Venezuela. We cannot. This is the rule of law of the Constitution, equal application, equal justice under the law. It's all relevant. We've got to end this witch hunt. Dr. Gorka and Dan Bongino, next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HANNITY: As his Tennessee rally tonight in support of Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn. President Trump went after Blackburn's opponent the Democratic leadership. This is great stuff. Watch this. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: He's an absolute tool of Chuck -- true, of Chuck Schumer. He's a tool of Chuck Schumer, and of course, the MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi. I said they are animals, and she said how dare you say that? How dare you say that? Have you seen what they've done? Have you seen what they are doing to us? And we are taking them out of our country by the thousands. Out! (END VIDEO CLIP) HANNITY: Joining us now, former deputy assistant to the president, Fox News security strategist, Dr. Gorka, NRATV and contributor former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino. Dr. Gorka, the election, I think is the biggest most important midterm. It will be about taking back the tax cuts, it will be about impeaching this president and undoing an election and it be about a lot of the other things the president mentioned tonight, he talked a lot about the election. SEBASTIAN GORKA, NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGIST, FOX NEWS: Tonight was a barnstormer. I just started taking off the things he covered, and I just ran out of space, Sean, whether it's, you know, Nancy, the MS-13 lover, whether it's standing up for the flag, whether it's the Second Amendment, rebuilding our military, the tax cuts. This was the speech. You don't any talking points for November. I don't care who the candidate is, whether it's the Senate it's the House. This is the speech that nailed the Republican wave, not the Democrat wave. And I'm not going to say blue wave. Because guess whose color is blue, it's our color. If there is any party that's red, it's the Democrats. So, tonight was spectacular. And I don't see what the Democrats have to run on after tonight. Bringing back ISIS? Raising your taxes? Letting more MS- 13 into the country? Tonight was fabulous, Sean. HANNITY: What's your take, Dan? I think -- I think this midterm election is the biggest in our lifetime. Because knowing what they want to do, is that they are saying to each other, yes, we want to do it but don't tell the American people. It's like a big lie to the American people. DAN BONGINO, FORMER SECRET SERVICE AGENT: Yes, you are right, Sean. Listen, if we lose the House, this president will be impeached for nothing, he'll be impeach because he won an election. There will be no serious crimes and misdemeanors. But I thought the line of the night was the MS-13 line. (CROSSTALK) HANNITY: Gosh, it's hilarious. BONGINO: Again, Sean, this is the gift of Donald Trump. HANNITY: Sad. It's hilarious. BONGINO: This is the gift of Donald Trump, right? Donald Trump gets the Democrats to show their butts to the American people all the time. It show them who they really are. He gets them to defend MS-13, Hamas and the North Koreans all in the span of the last month. That's your Democrats, that's who they really are. Nice job, President Trump. He's the only one that could have done that. HANNITY: It's so true. And it's like they are on the media that shift that they're, it's like a breakup letter. Well, the breakup letter got within 24 hours, Kim Jung-un's people, pretty pleased, little rocket man begging to meet with the president. It's a classic example art of the deal. All right. Thank you both. (CROSSTALK) GORKA: Sure-- HANNITY: We got to run short tonight because of the speech. When we come back, more Hannity right after this. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HANNITY: All right. Unfortunately that's all the time we have left this evening. We always thank you for being with us. I want to remind you of a couple of things. Now, so there is big news. We are going to continue our investigation. The media is wrong as it relates to no spies in the Trump campaign. We gave you tonight the definition of what a spy is, the dictionary definition. The Thesaurus definitions of what a spy is. So it's getting kind of interesting. We also are expecting the I.G. report as it relates to the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation, it could be any day of this week and all the other news. We promise we'll always be fair and balanced. We're not the destroy-Trump media. Let not your heart be troubled. Laura Ingraham has a big show. No time to chit chat, by the way. Take it away. Copy: Content and Programming Copyright 2018 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2018 ASC Services II Media, LLC. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of ASC Services II Media, LLC. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content. A British man plunged 50 feet to his death after jumping over a balcony at a Turkish airport yesterday, traumatized witnesses have claimed. Andrew Paul Westlake, 30, had been escorted off a plane for "security reasons" minutes before he is understood to have leaped over a ledge at Dalaman Airport. After boarding a flight at around 3 a.m., Westlake is said to have argued with cabin crew and been taken off the plane, the Hurriyet newspaper reported. Earlier the pilot had ordered the dad, from County Durham, off the flight for being unruly and cops were called. HONOLULU AIRPORT WORKER FILMED TOSSING LUGGAGE DOWN CHUTE, SPARKS TWITTER DEBATE Previous reports claimed Westlake had fallen from a jetway linking the plane to the terminal, but traumatised witnesses have claimed he fell to his death after climbing over the balcony inside the airport. "I was standing at the baggage drop to check in bags and I heard a woman scream and say, 'He's jumped, he's jumped,'" Bobby Youngson, who was in the airport at the time, told The Sun Online. "I ran over to the glass hand rail which came up chest height and I looked over the handrail, and he was on the ground." Mr Youngson continued. "I said 'What's happened?' She said, 'He just jumped, he's just climbed up and leaped.' "Myself and another man went downstairs in the lift, we told him stay still don't move." PASSENGER ARRESTED FOR TRYING TO FORCE HIS WAY ONTO PLANE ON TARMAC AT MELBOURNE AIRPORT According to Turkish media, Westlake had been wandering the terminal for three days looking for a ticket back to Britain after missing his flight. Another witness told the Mirror it appeared he previously tried to run into the glass balcony barrier. "My partner said, 'Are you OK?' and tried to give him a hand, but he didn't speak. My partner watched him stand back up and he backed away from the barrier and then just ran for it and hopped over straight down onto the floor below. "The image that my partner still has in his head is the man looking so desperate," she said. Another woman said a Thomas Cook Airlines worker was among the people to help Andrew as he lay on the floor "When we spoke to the airline representative who went down there, she said that he was saying to her that he just wanted it to end She didn't know what he meant by it." AER LINGUS PLANE TOWED BY AIRPORT WORKERS SMASHES INTO CONCRETE POLE Westlake's aunt Pauline Butler told the Chronicle Live he was on a family holiday with his girlfriend and baby daughter when the tragedy happened early on Tuesday morning. "We really dont know what to think. His mum is absolutely devastated. They were very close." Pauline said his mother June is "heartbroken and can barely speak" following the death of the doting dad of one. She said he had some problems during his younger years, but turned his life around following the birth of his daughter around a year ago. "He really settled down since she was born. He was a really doting dad. He absolutely idolised his little girl. He would do anything for her." Paramedics rushed to the scene and Westlake was taken to a nearby hospital where he later died later from his injuries in the early hours of Tuesday morning. He was said to have suffered broken ribs and did not regain consciousness. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS A Foreign Office spokesman told The Sun Online: "We are supporting the family of the British man following his death in Turkey and we are in touch with the local authorities." A spokesperson for Jet2 said: We understand that a customer sadly passed away on Tuesday morning, following an incident inside the terminal building at Dalaman Airport. Contrary to some reports, we can confirm that the customer was not injured on our aircraft or in the vicinity of our aircraft. As investigations are ongoing it would be inappropriate for us to comment any further, however we would like to extend our sincere condolences to the customers family and friends at this very sad time. This article originally appeared in The Sun. Carnival Cruise passengers aboard the Miracle ship said they were in for something of a nightmare when the vessel was kept docked in Tampa for two days after their scheduled departure date due to "pre-emptive but necessary maintenance work. The liner set sail for the Caribbean at last on May 29, Fox 13 reported. According to the outlet, Carnival never specified where the work was being done aboard the 2,124-passenger vessel. Some took to Twitter to voice their dissonance with the situation. FAMILY CLAIMS TERMINALLY ILL GRANDFATHER WAS WRONGLY DEPORTED FOLLOWING CARNIVAL CRUISE "The one thing that's killing everybody is that nobody knows what's going on with it. Everybody wants to know and nobody can find out, passenger Tyler Chapman told Fox 13. Though the Carnival Miracle was supposed to make stops in Belize, Honduras, Grand Cayman and Mexico, the delay wiped Belize and Honduras off the agenda, the Associated Press reported. In an effort to make amends, Carnival offered a two-day prorated fare refund, $200 onboard credit to all staterooms as well as free shuttles to some Tampa Bay attractions and special shows. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS Passengers feeling truly disgruntled by the change of plans could also cancel for a full refund, or reschedule without penalty. Though passengers were informed of the news on May 18, the advance notice failed to suffice for some. If we had a months notice, we could have come up with something, said Terri Cox, a schoolteacher from Atlanta. Traveling with a group of eight, they had begun planning the vacation six months ago. -With AP Police report gun violence is dropping this year in Chicago but it was another bloody Memorial Day weekend in the city. Seven people were killed and 38 people were shot, according to Chicago police. This years holiday weekend was slightly deadlier than last year, when six people were killed and 44 were shot, according to CPD. In anticipation of the typical uptick in violent crime during warmer months, Chicago police launched a specialized summer mobile team, adding more than 1,000 officers to the streets. Leading into Memorial Day, CPD also conducted raids in partnership with federal agencies. Chicago police say the raids resulted in at least 100 arrests and 46 guns recovered from the streets. Still, Chicagos Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said police only can do so much, and he continues to call for stricter sentencing and jail time. I wont be happy until we have zero murders, and zero shootings. But there was some progress made, so I am happy about that, Johnson said following the violent weekend. Chicago police currently report 46 fewer murders year-to-date compared to the same time last year. CPD attributes the decrease to a focus on community policing and ShotSpotter technology cameras and radar placed atop utility poles that instantly alert police to gunshots and allows them to track offenders in real-time using 30,000 cameras citywide. The technology is credited with reducing shooting by 43 percent last year in Englewood historically one of the citys most dangerous neighborhoods on the south side. Just before the Memorial Day weekend, President Donald Trump once again called out Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel for not putting a stop to the citys murder rate which is almost as much as New York and Los Angeles combined. The president tweeted, in part, The killings are at a record pace and tough police work, which Chicago will not allow, would bring things back to order fast ... the killings must stop! Emanuels spokesperson responded in a tweet, in part, Chicago is a Trump-Free zone not a fact-free zone and we had a 21% drop in gun violence in 2017 and 21% drop in 2018. Emanuel and CPDs superintendent successfully lobbied for a new bill that went into effect on January 1. Its designed to give stronger sentences to repeat gun offenders. As a police executive, its frustrating for me and the cops out on the street, when we arrest these individuals for having illegal firearms, and then we see them back out the next week doing guess what carrying another illegal firearm, Johnson said. Thats a frustration for law enforcement all over this country. Authorities in Florida said they arrested a police officer on Tuesday who allegedly sent threatening messages in order to obtain "nude photographs" from a woman in Georgia. Orange City police officer Joshua David Fancher, 25, was arrested at the department on a felony warrant from Georgia charging him with making terroristic threats, according to a news release from the Volusia County Sheriffs Office, whose detectives made the arrest. WOMAN PUNCHED BY COP ON BEACH REFUSED TO COMPLY: NEW JERSEY MAYOR SAYS The victim reported receiving numerous threatening messages from an unknown person attempting to extort her for nude photographs, authorities said. Among the messages allegedly sent by Fancher, which started via Instagram, included threats to kill the victim and kill and/or rape her family members if she didnt provide the photos, the sheriffs office said. MCDONALDS CUSTOMER ARRESTED FOR TAKING GOLF CART TO DRIVE-THRU WHILE DRUNK The arrested officers residence in DeLand, Florida, was searched by detectives to help the Lowndes County Sheriffs Office, of Georgia, who is handling the investigation, authorities said. Fancher quit his job at the police department amid the charges and was brought to the Volusia County Branch Jail, where he was to be held without bond, according to the sheriffs office. A new mugshot was released of convicted murderer Scott Peterson. Peterson is on death row at San Quentin. New mugshots are required to be updated at the prison regularly, so it was time to update Peterson's photo. Peterson's wife and unborn son Connor were killed before Christmas back in 2002. The night before her disappearance Laci Peterson talked with her mother by phone at 8:30 p.m. Prosecutors believe Peterson somehow killed Laci and his unborn son sometime later that night or the next morning. Then they believe Peterson transported her body in the back of his pick-up truck to his warehouse, which he used as an office to sell fertilizer. Then at some point Peterson moved the body into his 14 foot fishing boat, which prosecutors say he used to dump Laci in the San Francisco Bay. Despite an exhaustive search, investigators were unable to find any forensic evidence in the house, warehouse, truck, or boat. Click for more from KTVU Fox 2. Court records show a woman accused in the deaths of three members of a Connecticut family told investigators the slayings were the result of a botched fake robbery. Ruth Correa says she and her brother, Sergio, met with Matthew Lindquist on Dec. 20 to exchange drugs for guns kept inside his parents' Griswold home. Court records unsealed Tuesday show Ruth Correa said Lindquist told them to tie him up and make it look like the guns were stolen. Correa says Lindquist backed out of the plan, and her brother stabbed him. She says her brother killed Lindquist's parents and the two robbed their home before setting it on fire. Sergio Correa has not been charged, and his lawyer says he had nothing to do with the killings. A Dallas police officer is being praised for comforting a 3-month-old baby in the moments after it was pulled out alive from an overturned vehicle. Officer Donald Boice was captured cradling the infant in images taken over the weekend by a Fox 4 News photographer, which have since been shared amongst cops in the area. "That could be my child, too, Boice said. And I'd want someone treating my child the same way." Dallas police say a Chevy Trailblazer driven by a family from Michigan was traveling at a high speed early Sunday when it hit an object in a Downtown Dallas construction zone, causing the vehicle to flip. Inside were three children, ages 5, 2 and 3-months old, and their parents. The father suffered a fractured arm and a head injury, but everyone else in the car, including the 3-month-old child, Jackson, appeared to be OK, according to Fox 4 News. "The best I can do is just kind of keep him, bounce him, sing to him the same songs that I sang to my kids when they were that age, Boice said. Police say the images show a compassionate side of law enforcement that the public does not often see. Police have charged a New Hampshire couple with drug possession after searching their apartment as part of an investigation into the death of a 20-month-old. The Manchester Police Department was issued a search warrant to check the apartment of Joshua Garvey, 31, and Christen Gelinas, 33, as a part of the unexpected death of a child on Friday. There, officers found in excess of 28 grams of heroin, nearly 12 grams of cocaine, about 15 grams of crack cocaine and three Suboxone strips. The couple were charged with four counts of possession of a controlled drug with intent to distribute. The drugs were valued at more than $5,400, police said. Garvey and Gelinas were arraigned on Wednesday. Garvey faced additional charges for probation violations. While police have not released any details surrounding the toddlers death, WHDH reported that Gelinas allegedly said that the boy was playing outside when she saw him holding a clear plastic baggie containing a white rocklike substance. The Manchester Police Department Investigative Division and Hillsborough County Attorneys Office are actively working on the death investigation, so no additional information is available at this time, police said in a press release on Wednesday. The couples relationship to the child remains unclear. The Associated Press contributed to this report. A man said he crashed his car right through the front door of a home north of Boston on Tuesday morning because he'd blacked out after donating blood. The unidentified man told Boston 25 News that he had donated blood to a hospital earlier and that while he was driving on East Emerson Street in Melrose, he blacked out. After regaining consciousness, he said he realized his sedan had crashed through the front door of someones home. The homeowner was contacted by a neighbor who alerted him to the incident. No one was injured in the home and the driver sustained only minor injuries, Boston 25 News added. On college campuses and in workplaces, across social media and in deference to non-binary people, gender-neutral pronouns are more than just a new wave of political correctness. They're the focus of debate that stretches back hundreds of years. Early word coiners were usually more concerned with grammatical correctness over a keen commitment to inclusivity in avoiding the generic "he" and singular "they" as a replacement, said professor Dennis Baron, who specializes in the history of the English language at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. But as the women's rights movement grew in the late 19th century, so did interest in "common-gender" pronouns. They were a hot topic then as they are now. Feminist leaders argued, amid an effort to make "he" a generic, that such a broadening of gender scope automatically made women worthy of the vote. In 1884, the invented pronoun "thon" was publicized by the coiner, C.C. Converse, as an expedient pronoun for all genders. "Thon made a lot of headlines. It was discussed nationally. But most of these words were kind of flash in the pan words that got invented locally and went nowhere," Baron said. Converse's word was a blend of "that" and "one." Among the reasons he cited for creating it was to hide gender altogether or when gender was unknown, Baron said. The struggle for neutral pronouns reared at other times as well. In 1886, a Maryland Supreme Court decision found that "he" in a state statute covering admission to the bar referred only to males, precluding women from practicing law. In 1916, self-avowed experts declared that the use of "he" in reference to a particular section of the U.S. Constitution barred women from serving in Congress. The argument didn't hold and Montana's Jeanette Rankin became the first woman elected to the House, said Baron, who tweets on language issues as @DrGrammar and has written a book, "Grammar and Gender." Before Rankin, in 1789, William H. Marshall recorded the existence of the singular "ou," as in "Ou (ooh) will," Baron said. It expressed either "he will," ''she will" or "it will." There are references to "ou" as an indeterminate pronoun as early as 1792, but it didn't widely catch on. Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary included the use of "a'' for "he," ''she," ''it," ''they" and even "I," he said. By 1808, invented pronouns were flying, met by the grammar establishment with disdain. "It was like, get a life, don't quit your day job," Baron joked. Further back, by the 12th and 13th centuries, masculine and feminine pronouns developed to a point where, according to the OED, they were "almost or wholly indistinguishable in pronunciation," beginning as "he (hay), heo (hayo) and hit (hit). The H's slowly grew silent, rendering them neutrals. The modern feminine "she" first appears in the mid-12th century, seemingly at least in part to fight against ambiguity over gender, Baron said. Baron has collected more than 100 pronouns, invented or repurposed, making the rounds today, and the list is growing. "From what I can see the invented pronouns are interesting but their use is limited," he said. Among today's words that already existed, the singular "they" is winning the popularity contest as a gender neutral, Baron said. The American Dialect Society named it word of the year in 2015, but the word first surfaced as a neutral singular pronoun as far back as the 17th century, to the dismay of some grammarians at a time when "thee, thou, thy" began falling by the wayside. "One of the advantages today is that it's already there," Baron said of "they." Among invented options: Ze/hir (Tyler ate hir food because ze was hungry) ze pronounced like "zee" and hir as "here." Similar early efforts on neutrality caused a dustup in 1912, reported the Chicago Tribune. Ella Flagg Young, who was that city's schools superintendent and president of the National Education Association, claimed to have invented "he'er, him'er, his'er and his'er's. She made headlines when she used them in a speech before school principals, earning gasps from the crowd. Fred S. Pond of Chicago didn't take kindly to the notion that Young came up with the words, saying he proposed "he-er, his-er, him-er, hisers and himerself" in a letter to the Mansfield, Ohio, News-Journal, published March 21, 1911, Baron said. Young later admitted to discussing the words with Pond before her speech, offering him joint credit. Pond's reasoning: The generic "he" is inadequate, the singular "they" substitutes one "error" for another and the construction "he or she" is awkward. He acknowledged that his blends of masculine and feminine "sound strange and perchance ludicrous" but eventually would "enable the speaker whoever he-er may be to be correct and intelligible." Other languages are also taking on the pronoun wars. They include Swedish. A gender-neutral pronoun was accepted into the Swedish Academy Dictionary about three years ago. Many English speakers today have no idea that neutral pronouns were on the cultural radar centuries ago, Baron said. "The question today is are we in a blip or is this going to get stronger," he said. "What's working against it getting stronger is the lack of agreement on what pronoun. If everybody got behind one pronoun, that would give it a fighting chance." Marcelle Richards, 35, of Minneapolis is a non-binary person who uses "they" and "them." Richards falls "under the trans umbrella" but is gender fluid. "This is all very personal for people," Richards said. "I haven't been able to get everybody in my life onboard. It's an energy thing for me. Which battles do I want to pick?" Shane Henise, who creates media campaigns related to the trans community for GLAAD, an LGBTQ watchdog organization, uses the pronouns "he" and "him." Pronouns, he said, are particularly important to non-binary people like Richards who don't identify strictly as man or woman. "We need to start normalizing asking for pronouns, not just for non-binary trans people but in daily life," Henise said. "Why not include your pronouns in your signature on your email? Another thing that we can do is include pronouns when we're introducing people, so I would say, 'My name is Shane. I use he/him pronouns. What about you?'" A fast-moving lava flow from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano has crossed over a key highway, taking out power lines as officials said the number of homes destroyed since the eruption began earlier this month has risen to over 70. The Hawaii County Civil Defense Agency confirmed to Fox News that a total of 71 homes have been destroyed, and they expect the number to rise. There are additional structures that have been destroyed, such as outhouses and sheds, officials added. A "fast-moving" lava flow covered Highway 132 on Tuesday, which connects the commercial center of Pahoa with smaller towns and farms in the area. "It took the road," Civil Defense Administrator Talmadge Magno told Hawaii News Now. "We lost 132 and there's no power down to that area and, as explained to me, it's gonna be an extended outage." The U.S. Geological Survey said the lava flow from Fissure 8 at one point advanced 800 yards over 80 minutes before slowing down for about 200 yards an hour as of Wednesday morning. The lava destroyed the local electric utility's equipment on the highway, which knocked out power to Vacationland and Kapoho Beach Lots neighborhoods toward the coast. Hawaii Electric Light Co. said it was evaluating how to provide power to these communities once the eruption is over, but it won't be able to finalize a plan until the area is stable. HAWAII VOLCANO 'NOT SAFE' TO ROAST MARSHMALLOWS OVER, USGS SAYS The eruption has so far destroyed more than 400 utility poles, the company said. Authorities alerted residents in the Kapoho area, including Kapoho Beach Lots and Vacation Lots, to evacuate as the fast-moving lava flow near Highway 132 picked up speed and advanced toward the area. "You are at risk of being isolated due to possible lava inundation of Beach Road near Four Corners," the warning message said, according to Hawai News Now. HAWAII VOLCANO GENERATES FAST-MOVING LAVA CAUSING NEW EVACUATIONS, SHUTS MAJOR ROAD Molten rock trapped at least one person who was rescued by authorities. The Kilauea volcano has been unleashing danger on the remote, rural southeastern side of the island for nearly a month, displacing thousands of resident. Lava was shooting up from cracks in the ground and blowing strands of volcanic glass, while explosions at the summit were sending small bursts of volcanic ash as high as 15,000 feet. Wind was carrying volcanic glass, gases, pollution and ash particles to other parts of the island. Authorities on Tuesday advised residents to minimize exposure to avoid irritation to skin and eyes and breathing problems. A new fissure has opened, bringing the total number of cracks spouting lava to 24 since the volcano began erupting on May 3, Hawaii County Civil Defense said. Lava also has covered two wells at a geothermal plant. County officials said the plugged wells were stable and being monitored, and no dangerous gases have been released. Ormat Technologies, a Nevada company that owns the Puna Geothermal Venture plant, told the Associated Press it could not assess the extent of the damage to the wells. Fox News' Dan Gallo in Hawaii and the Associated Press contributed to this report. As an Indiana middle school was set to resume classes Wednesday -- five days after a male student allegedly shot and wounded a 13-year-old classmate and a teacher hailed for heroically disarming the attacker -- community members gathered to write inspirational chalk messages on sidewalks leading up to the school building. Noblesville West Middle School will reopen its classroom doors on a two-hour delay, operating on the same shortened schedule as the districts final two days of classes Thursday and Friday, school spokeswoman Marnie Cooke said. The school will use its final three days before summer vacation to focus on counseling and team building, Cooke said. Members of the community got together Tuesday and left messages of hope and support written in colorful chalk displays on sidewalks surrounding the school building. Science teacher Jason Seaman, 29, was shot three times while tackling the male suspect after watching him shoot and critically wound 13-year-old Ella Whistler on Friday morning. She remained hospitalized in Indianapolis, but school officials said her medical condition was improving. Seaman told reporters Monday that his quick moves that day were the only acceptable actions he could have taken to save his students. FOX59 Indianapolis reported that the suspect's identity will be withheld from the public unless he is tried as an adult. Juvenile law also creates additional protection for the privacy of children in Indiana and further limits the release of information to the public, prosecutor Lee Buckingham said in a news release. The station reported that extra police officers will be stationed at all the district schools to make students feel safe as their year draws to a close. Fox News Travis Fedschun and the Associated Press contributed to this report. A large explosion ripped through a UPS vehicle maintenance facility in Kentucky on Wednesday leaving at least two people with non-life threatening injuries, officials said. The two who were injured were transported to a local hospital, while at least six others were taken to the hospital as a precaution, Lexington fire battalion Chief Jason Wells said. The victims were conscious and talking on their way to the hospital, he said. Lexington police said the explosion that occurred at the facility near the Blue Sky Parkway was accidental and that Lexington fire personnel were on the scene. Welding tanks appeared to have exploded, blowing a huge hole through the roof of the facility, Wells said, adding that the cause was still under investigation. There was nothing that led investigators to believe that the cause was anything more than accidental, Wells said. The explosion caused significant structural damage to the building and there was a small fire when personnel arrived at the facility, Wells said. The Latest on the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy (all times local): 11:20 p.m. Authorities have arrested a woman in connection to the death of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy who was fatally shot while responding to a call by a resident about a suspicious car. In a statement Wednesday night the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says that it had developed information that 38-year-old Erika Castro-Miles had "participated in the incident." Castro-Miles was already in custody and now has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of Dickson County Sergeant Daniel Baker. She remains in custody at the Dickson County Jail. It's not immediately known if she has an attorney. Authorities are still searching for suspect Steven Joshua Wiggins. The reward for information leading to his arrest has increased to $12,500. They consider him armed and dangerous. ___ This story has been corrected to change the day of the arrest from Tuesday to Wednesday. ___ 4:45 p.m. Authorities have identified the Tennessee sheriff's deputy who was fatally shot while responding to a call by a resident about a suspicious car. Dickson County Sheriff Jeff Bledsoe said Sgt. Daniel Baker was killed early Wednesday. Bledsoe said Baker had been with the Dickson County sheriff's office for 10 years and worked his way up the ranks quickly. Baker is survived by his wife and a daughter. Bledsoe said his agency has lost a brother, and the community has lost a hero. Authorities are still searching for suspect Steven Joshua Wiggins. They consider him armed and dangerous. ___ 1:45 p.m. Authorities say the reward has increased to $7,500 for information leading to the arrest of a man sought by police in the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives helped increase the reward for information on Steven Joshua Wiggins. Authorities have said the Dickson County deputy was shot and killed early Wednesday after a responding to a call about a suspicious vehicle. They have not released the deputy's name. They say Wiggins remains at large and is believed to be armed and dangerous. State, federal and local authorities have launched a manhunt. ___ 1:20 p.m. Authorities say a Tennessee sheriff's deputy who was shot and killed was responding to a call by a resident about a suspicious car. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Susan Niland said at a news conference that the Dickson County deputy couldn't be contacted Wednesday for some time after responding to the call. The deputy's car was then tracked by GPS to a location 2 or 3 miles (3 to 5 kilometers) away, and the deputy was found dead inside of it. The deputy's name has not been released. Niland says the suspect was captured on video. Authorities have identified him as Steven Joshua Wiggins. They say he's still at large and is believed to be armed and dangerous. State, federal and local authorities have launched a manhunt, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has announced a reward of up to $2,500 for any information leading to his arrest. Niland says a female is being interviewed in the case. ___ 12:40 p.m. The man sought by police in the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy was charged the previous day with aggravated assault of a woman and vehicle theft. A report from the Kingston Springs Police Department says Steven Joshua Wiggins slapped the woman in her face and pulled out some of her hair Tuesday. The report says the woman stated that Wiggins put a gun to her head and threatened to kill her if she called the police, then he grabbed her car keys and took the car without her permission. The woman also told police Wiggins was "doing meth all night and smoking marijuana." The report says the woman plans to press charges. Authorities say Wiggins is at large and believed to be "armed and dangerous." ___ 11:10 p.m. Tennessee authorities are offering a monetary reward for information leading to the arrest of a suspect in the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation tweeted Wednesday that it has placed Steven Joshua Wiggins on its Top 10 Most Wanted list and is offering a reward of up to $2,500 for information leading to his arrest. The bureau believes Wiggins fatally shot an unidentified sheriff's deputy during a traffic stop early Wednesday in Dickson County. The agency also has sent an alert about the suspect to cellphones in the area. __ 10:20 a.m. Tennessee authorities say a sheriff's deputy has been fatally shot and a suspect believed to be "armed and dangerous" is still at large. A Tennessee Highway Patrol spokesman told news outlets the suspect was involved in an altercation with the Dickson County deputy early Wednesday after a vehicle was reported stolen. The Humphreys County Sheriff's Office identified the suspect as Steven Wiggins, who is described as a white male with balding brown hair. The Latest on the remnants of Subtropical Storm Alberto (all times local): 12:40 p.m. Forecasters say heavy rain has caused a river to flood in a north Georgia city as the South continues to feel the effects of Subtropical Storm Alberto. The National Weather Service says up to 7 inches (18 centimeters) of rain caused flooding to creeks and rivers in the city of Helen, Georgia, around 10 a.m. Wednesday. The weather service has issued a flash flood warning for White and Towns Counties into the evening. Atlanta station WAGA-TV reports that several roads near the downtown area were shut down because of the rising water, which is about knee high. No injuries or structural damage have been reported. Helen Police say emergency officials are monitoring the water levels. ___ 12:35 p.m. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper says the state is sending safety engineers to check on several dams in the North Carolina mountains after heavy rains from the fringes of what was Subtropical Storm Alberto. No evacuations have been ordered, but Cooper says the inspectors will make sure the dams at Lake Lure, Lake Tahoma, Lake Tuxedo and North Fork Lake are still structurally sound. Some areas have received up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain since Sunday on ground that was already saturated. Cooper has announced a state of emergency for mountain counties, where flooding and mudslides are still blocking a number of roads. Cooper said in a statement that two state Department of Transportation workers were swept away by a mudslide in McDowell County as they cleared debris from a previous slide but managed to stand on the side of the truck after it fell into the Catawba River and were rescued. ___ 12 p.m. Subtropical Storm Alberto dealt a blow to sea turtle nests in southwest Florida. Five of Collier County's 218 sea turtle nests washed away during the weekend storm. Another 26 nests were inundated, which means the eggs were covered with water; it remains to be seen how those nests will fare. The Naples Daily News reports that Lee County is also trying to determine sea turtle nest losses. Sea turtle nesting season runs May 1 to Oct. 1, which is also peak storm season in Florida. In 2017, half of the turtle nests laid on southwest Florida beaches washed out due to hurricanes. The most common nesting sea turtle in southwest Florida, the loggerhead, is listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. ___ 10:35 a.m. Authorities say 2,000 people evacuated in the North Carolina mountains because of worries a dam might break can return to their homes. McDowell County Emergency Management sent a message to the public around 10:15 a.m. Wednesday saying engineers have determined the dam at Lake Tahoma is safe. Heavy rains from the fringes of Subtropical Storm Alberto caused widespread flooding Tuesday evening. Emergency officials order the evacuations because an engineer inspecting the dam was worried it might break before officials could get a better look in the daylight. The dam is about 80 miles (129 kilometers) northwest of Charlotte. Dozens of roads in western North Carolina were blocked by mudslides or flooding, including Interstate 40 which closed for several hours near Old Fort. Forecasters warn storms could bring more flooding Wednesday, but say the heavy rains will be isolated and not widespread. ___ 10:20 a.m. About 200 people in the North Carolina mountains have evacuated to shelters as authorities watch a dam threatened by flooding from the remnants of Subtropical Storm Alberto. Emergency managers evacuated 2,000 people early Wednesday after determining the Lake Tahoma dam in western North Carolina could fail. McDowell County Emergency Management deputy director Adrienne Jones says the dam hasn't failed, but inspectors are watching it. A number of other roads in western North Carolina are closed by flooding or mudslides. Interstate 40 near Old Fort was closed for a time, but crews have cleared enough debris to open at least one lane in each direction. Forecasters say Alberto's remnants can still bring flooding rains to the Southeast and nation's midsection. ___ 11:20 p.m. The soggy remnants of Alberto are spreading rain deeper into the nation's midsection after downing trees, causing power outages and leaving scattered flooding around the South. Forecasters say what's left of the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season is still capable of causing flash flooding. The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Tuesday that as Alberto's weakening system moves inland Wednesday, it still remains a potential menace. Flash flood watches were in effort for parts of several states from Alabama through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, the Carolinas and Virginia and West Virginia. Jonas Cullwick, a former General Manager of VBTC is now a Senior Journalist with the Daily Post. Contact: [email protected]. Cell # 678 5460922 The Illinois man accused of painting swastikas on more than 200 gravestones across Memorial Day weekend has had a long history of run-ins with the law, reportedly ranging from trying to punch an officer to writing letters to a judge blasting the countrys crooked legal system. Timothy V. McLean, a 34-year-old from Glen Carbon, was charged this week with several felonies for the alleged acts this past weekend at Sunset Hill Cemetery but it is not the first time he has been accused of plastering the Nazi symbol on public property, police said. They allege McLean also has painted swastikas on houses in a neighboring town, cars, mailboxes, at a country club and even three churches dating back to the start of April. McLean has been hit with numerous hate crime and felony charges stemming from these alleged incidents. On top of this, McLean was previously convicted of harassing the Edwardsville Police Department by phone, in which he was said to have made racially-charged comments, according to the Belleville News-Democrat. The charges in that case were filed in July 2016, but McLean wasnt found mentally fit to stand trial until the following year, after he spent time at a psychological health center. Years earlier, in 2003, he was charged with taking a swing at an Edwardsville police officer, which was pleaded down to a year of court supervision and public service, among other conditions, the newspaper added. In 2004, McLean was charged with swerving his car toward a neighbor walking his dog while threatening another man that he would blow a hole in your head," it also said. In 2009, McLean was convicted of threatening a public official and sentenced to two years in prison. From there, he reportedly penned repeated letters to Madison County Circuit Judge Kyle Napp demanding he LET ME OUT while also calling the court system crooked. McLean is currently being held Wednesday at Madison County Jail on two bonds, both set at $100,000. A man who allegedly tried to set an American flag blanket on fire during Memorial Day weekend started a 5-acre wildfire in Washington state, authorities said. Firefighters from Ephrata and four units from Grant County Fire District 13 responded around 6 p.m. Monday to the blaze near Ephrata Airport and contained the fire, officials wrote on Facebook. No structures were damaged as the fire burned through acres of sagebrush, but authorities said if it had been windy the situation could have been much worse. Photos shared on Facebook by Fire Disctrict 13 showed multiple trucks hosing down acres of black charred earth in the aftermath of the wildfire. Authorities were still investigating, but did not release the identity of the suspect. It was also uncertain whether he would face charges. Though it was unclear whether the American flag blanket was set ablaze as a form of protest, authorities warned it was unsafe to start a fire regardless of political views. "No matter your political views, we think its safe to say we can all agree starting a wildfire is no good," the Facebook post said. A KC-135 Stratotanker aircraft (KC-135) based out of Mitchell Air National Guard Base experienced an in-flight emergency on Wednesday. It returned to Milwaukee after experiencing what is believed to be a lightning strike. Officials say the crew safely landed and exited the aircraft that was met by emergency response crews. The 128 Air Refueling Wing Maintenance Group sent out a tow team to tow the aircraft off the runway so that normal operations at Mitchell International airport could resume. The runway was closed so the Crash Fire Rescue team could perform response tasks. However, planes are taking off once again. An investigation into the cause of the emergency will be initiated. Mitchell International Airport temporarily delayed all flights in and out of the airport during this incident. There are two runways that normally handle commercial traffic. But one of them is shut down this summer for construction. Click for more from Fox 6 Milwaukee. An Oregon mother told police her 6-year-old son deserved it after she used a knife to inflict life-threatening injuries on the boy at their Newport apartment Saturday, court documents said. Nemoria Lynn Villagomez, 34, appeared in court Tuesday on charges of attempted murder, aggravated attempted murder, three counts of assault and criminal mistreatment. The boy was initially fighting for his life, Danielle Stringer, the boys aunt, told FOX12 Oregon. He suffered six stab wounds to his body one of which possibly struck his liver and lung and a deep cut to his chin. The 6-year-old showed up on a neighbors doorstep Saturday covered in blood and told them his mother had stabbed him, Newport police said. The neighbors immediately called police and gave the boy aid until paramedics arrived. Police searched the apartment and found a large amount of blood in the living room and a 14-month-old child in a bedroom, a news release said. Both Villagomez and the baby had blood on them. The Department of Human Services took custody of the infant after he was examined and cleared at a hospital. Detectives interviewed Villagomez, who admitted to cutting her son and said he deserved it, according to court documents. Police gave an update Tuesday, saying the 6-year-old was in good condition and would soon be released from the hospital. The mother had previously been convicted of fourth-degree assault in November 2016 and sentenced to 30 days in jail and a five-year probation, the Oregonian reported, citing court documents. Villagomez was held at the Lincoln County Jail on $1.1 million bail. The case remains under investigation. A mysterious set of explosions in the suburbs of Philadelphia over the past two months has strained emergency responses to other calls and left authorities in Pennsylvania asking for help to track down whoever is behind the blasts. Since April 2, there have been over 20 early-morning explosions in northern Bucks County, located about 45 miles northwest of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania State Police said in news release Tuesday. "Fortunately to date no one has been injured; however, we are attempting to prevent someone from accidentally getting injured by these explosions, including the individual responsible," state police said in a news released obtained by Fox News. "These events disrupt emergency response personnel from their normal course of duty, straining local resources and impeding emergency personnel from responding to other calls for service." Authorities did not release information about a potential suspect, but asked the community to remain vigilant. "Regardless of how insignificant you think your tip may be, we strongly encourage you to come forward with your information," state police said. Residents across the area have reported booms loud enough to rattle windows and shake walls taking place between 1 and 4:30 a.m. and waking them up. Its just like a boom. Thats just how it sounds, Donna Weaver told FOX29 at the end of April. Weaver, a resident of Quakertown, said she heard the booms several times over the course of the month, which woke her up in the middle of the night. "I dont know and its kind of scary," she told FOX29. "Because I thought of thinking maybe its underground, maybe underground somewhere." EX-BOYFRIEND OF CALIFORNIA DAY SPA WORKER KILLED IN BLAST IS FREED, CHARGE DROPPED The Richland Township Police Department said in a Facebook post last month that they had not given anyone permission to blast in the area. "If anyone sees anything suspicious in that area, please reach out to Police or the township. If you are close, try to pinpoint the direction it is coming from," police said. A spokeswoman from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told PennLive.com that the explosions are possibly from Tannerite, which is a mix of ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder and legal to buy. Firearms enthusiasts typically use Tannerite for target practice. "From what I understand they're pretty big explosions," ATF spokeswoman Charlene Hennessy told PennLive. "Some people have reported their houses shaking." Pennsylvania State Police are asking those with information to call Lehigh Valley Crime Stoppers at (800) 426-TIPS. A New Jersey couple confessed to taking than $1.4 million from Hurricane Sandy victims seeking home repairs, using the ill-gotten cash for a diamond ring and wagers in Atlantic City. Jeffrey Colmyer and Tiffany Cimino, of Little Egg Harbor, admitted to the theft charges on Tuesday, the states attorney general announced. Authorities say the couple ran a fraud scheme through two construction companies -- Rayne Construction Management Services and Colmyer & Sons and preyed upon more than 20 victims of the storm who gave them money for home elevations, reconstruction and other repairs -- work that was never started or completed. Most of the money came from government relief programs. But instead of the funds being used for actual construction work, the couple gambled much of it away at seven casinos in Atlantic City and bought a $17,000 diamond ring, the attorney generals office said. Meanwhile, they abandoned jobs, or in many cases failed to even start jobs, leaving many victims with uninhabitable homes, the office said. Colmyer has already pleaded guilty to money laundering and sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 7. The state says it will push for Colmyer to receive a seven-year prison sentence and for Cimino to receive probation. The couple were taken into custody in October 2016, four years after the storm plowed through New Jersey. )The superstorm killed more than 100 across the U.S. and causing an estimated $65 billion in damages in the process.) Colmyer and Cimino heartlessly preyed on Sandy victims whose homes had been destroyed, stealing the relief funds that were the lifeline these victims needed to rebuild in the aftermath of the historic storm," said New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal. "By sending Colmyer to prison, we deliver a strong deterrent message that anyone willing to sink so low as to steal disaster relief money from victims will face a stern reckoning." The states former attorney general, Christopher S. Porrino, said in 2017 that the couple were ruthlessly draining away relief funds the victims needed to reclaim their lives. We have prosecuted scores of defendants for various types of fraud related to Sandy, but this case is by far the most egregious, he added. A plea deal calls for the couple to pay $1.45 million in restitution and $56,472 in back taxes. Bob Steimle of Brick Township, an Air Force veteran who reportedly gave Colmyer $54,000 in government money to lift and repair his Sandy-damaged home, told Brick Patch on Tuesday that he was "so glad it's done and over with" after hearing the news of Colmyer's guilty plea. "He put me through hell," Steimle told the news website, explaining how he had to live in a camper for months with his adult son until a local contractor stepped in take on work that Colmyer never completed. "He just destroyed me," Steimle added. Others were even less fortunate. A one-star review on the Yelp page for Colmyer & Sons, posted in 2015, accused Colmyer of shoddy workmanship. I hired Jeff Colmyer in March of 2012, trusting that he would replace my flat roof efficiently and professionally. He was definitely efficient but professional, no, wrote the user, Sheri L. After a little more than a month, the roof began leaking, and in less than two months, the elastomeric roof coating that was warrantied for five years began peeling. Six months later, the roof sprang three other major leaks, causing thousands of dollars in damages within my home. A North Carolina dam that was in danger of imminent failure was deemed safe and people could return to their homes, officials said. Engineers inspected the Lake Tahoma dam in western North Carolina early Wednesday morning and an alert was issued by McDowell County officials at around 10 a.m. Heavy rain caused by the remnants of Alberto triggered landslides at the dam and the National Weather Service said residents were being asked to flee. McDowell County Emergency Management deputy director Adrienne Jones told the Associated Press that the dam had not failed. However, Jones said an engineer who had inspected the scene was concerned enough to order the evacuation. The Greenville-Spartanburg National Weather Service station urged residents to heed all evacuation orders and to act now to preserve your life. Officials had said water was spilling around the sides of the dam which triggered the landslides, according to FOX Carolina. Officials were continuing to inspect the dam through the daylight hours. Jones said about 200 residents were in three shelters, set up in Marion, Old Fort and Glenwood. She said five minor injuries were reported during water rescues as nearby creeks and streams overflowed their banks and several rock slides closed roads. Alberto had already been responsible for two deaths in North Carolina. Anchor Mike McCormick and photojournalist Aaron Smeltzer of WYFF-TV, a Greenville, S.C.-based station, were killed Monday while covering the weather. Police said a tree became uprooted from rain-soaked ground and fell onto their SUV. Two journalists working to keep the public informed about this storm have tragically lost their lives, and we mourn with their families, friends and colleagues, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said in a statement. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Videos Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos. An Ohio police department took to Facebook this week with a faux advisory for meth users about the Zika virus. WARNING: If you have recently purchased Meth in Preble, Montgomery, Darke or Butler Counties it may be contaminated with the Zika Virus, the Gratis Police Department wrote. They added, Please bring it to the Gratis Police Department and we will test it for free. If youre not comfortable coming into our office, please contact us and well test your Meth in the privacy of your home. Gratis police later acknowledged that the drug is unable to host the virus. "We're just trying to keep things lighthearted and humanize the police department with some jokes," Assistant Chief Dennis Blankenship told Fox 45. "We're not doing it to arrest 100 people that are going to bring in meth. Drug addiction is a serious issue and I pride myself in helping people when it comes to that." Blankenship said the Facebook post, which has racked up more than 3,100 reactions and 800 comments as of Wednesday afternoon, wasn't intended to lead to arrests. But that didn't stop people from questioning the department's motive. MAN CAUGHT MASTURBATING TELLS COPS HE'S CAPTAIN KIRK FROM 'STAR TREK' Isnt this entrapment? a commenter asked. Do you really think we're being serious and expect people to show up? Come on now. And if they do why do you care? It's more drugs off the street right," police replied. I do not support or condone the use of this drug, and get that its a funny post. But wouldnt this be considered entrapment. The police persuading you to do something you wouldnt normally do in order to bust you?" another commenter said. No, police said. You have to be persistent in attempting to persuade the person to commit the crime they otherwise wouldnt be committing. But if they are already in possession of Meth then they are not committing any crime that they wouldn't already be committing. Others had different takes on the situation. Should be going after the dealers thats distributing it and furthering addiction. Or how about the ones bringing it in to the dealers ? We are, police replied. Every single day. But at least one Facebook user suggested police in the area have a bigger problem that needs to be addressed. I don't live there, so Im unaware of the meth problem. But after reading the posts, youve got a bigger problem on your hands. Seems those in your area suffer from a serious lack of humor," the user wrote. Police have identified a masked man who was fatally shot by Florida pizza store worker he attacked with a wooden pole. Holly Hill Police Chief Steve Aldrich said Tuesday that 53-year-old Jesse L. Coggins of Greenville, North Carolina, had no local police record and it was unknown how long he had been in the area. Coggins was wearing a demon clown mask when video shows he attacked Heriberto Feliciano as he locked up a Little Caesars restaurant Saturday night. The 28-year-old Feliciano has a concealed weapons permit and shot Coggins with a handgun several times. Aldrich says Feliciano acted in self-defense and is not expected to be charged. A Taco Bell employee was stabbed in the abdomen by his manager early Tuesday in the Wrigleyville neighborhood of Chicago, police said. The unidentified victim, 21, was involved in an ongoing dispute with his manager, a man in his 40s, about a woman, police told the Chicago Tribune. Details of the argument were not immediately clear. The fight reportedly moved outside to an alley, where the older man use a knife to stab the younger man, who was later found bleeding from the abdomen, police said. The victim was uncooperative with police, declined to sign complaints or press charges, a spokeswoman for Chicago police said. Taco Bell has since released a statement obtained by the Tribune. Were shocked and saddened to hear of this incident and are hopeful that the team member recovers quickly, the statement read. Our franchisee takes the safety and well-being of guests and team members seriously and is fully cooperating with authorities in their investigation. A Tennessee sheriffs deputy was killed Wednesday and a manhunt is on for the gunman, officials said. Sgt. Daniel Scott Baker, of the Dickson County Sheriff's Office, got into an altercation with the suspect when the deputy responded to a report of a stolen vehicle in Kingston Springs. Officers said they lost contact with the deputy and were able to find him by tracking his vehicle, where they found him shot dead inside the car. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation identified the suspect as Steven Wiggins. He was described as a white male with thinning, brown hair. There was a $7,500 reward for information leading to his arrest, officials said. Officials said a female was being interviewed in connection with the incident but further details were not available. Police said Wiggins was fighting with his girlfriend on Tuesday and allegedly slapped her, held her at gunpoint and stole her car. He was wanted for aggravated assault and theft in connection with that incident, WSMV reported. An alert for an armed suspect was issued for residents in Dickson and authorities urged residents to contact authorities if they see anything suspicious. Video on social media appeared to show state troopers in tactical gear converging on the area. Tennessee officials issued a Blue Alert in the manhunt for Wiggins. A Blue Alert is issued when a Tennessee law enforcement officer is injured or killed in the line of duty. TBI spokesman Josh Devine said it's the second Blue Alert that has been issued since it was created in July 2011. Wiggins has an arrest record. He was convicted for aggravated assault, theft, vandalism and domestic assault. Earlier this year, the suspect was ordered to show up for community service but never appeared. "Our hearts are shattered, one of best deputies was killed. He's one of the guys who puts it on the line every day to keep up safe," Sheriff Jeff Bledsoe said of Baker. Baker was employed with the sheriff's department since 2008, when he was hired as a patrol deputy. The Tennessean reported the sheriff had made headlines in his career when he chased an intoxicated man who shot a gun in the parking lot of a theater. He also helped a woman in 2013 who was trapped underwater in an overturned vehicle. Baker, a member of the Marine Corps Reserve, leaves behind a wife and daughter. He served with the office for 10 years, three months and 12 days. Since the start of 2018, at least 40 law enforcement officers across the U.S. have died while on duty with 25 of the deaths caused by gunfire. Fox News' Nicole Darrah and Kathleen Joyce contributed to this report. A third man has been charged in the killing of a New York teenager who was found hacked to death with a machete last year in what is suspected to have been an MS-13 attack. Josue Figueroa-Velasquez, of Freeport, was set to be arraigned Wednesday on a second-degree murder charge in the death of 16-year-old Angel Soler, whose body was dug up in a wooded area in Nassau County in October after he was last seen leaving his home in Roosevelt on a bicycle months earlier, Nassau County Police said. The 18-year-olds alleged accomplices, David Sosa-Guevara of Wyandanch and Victor Lopez also from Roosevelt are facing the same charges, police confirmed to Fox News. Both of those men were indicted in January, according to Newsday. Solers mother and sources close to the investigation believe the teen was killed by the violent MS-13 gang, with one source claiming that Sosa-Guevara revealed himself to be a member of the group during talks with police, Newsday reported. Suyapa Soler also had said she brought her son to New Yorks Long Island to flee gang violence in Honduras, where MS-13 is active. President Trump, who visited Long Island last week amid a crackdown on the gang by his administration, called MS-13 ruthless during a roundtable discussion on immigration. Theyre not people, these are animals and we have to be very, very tough, he added. A senior North Korean official and the top U.S. diplomat had dinner in New York on Wednesday as President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un try to salvage prospects for a high-stakes nuclear summit. It's the highest-level official North Korean visit to the United States in 18 years. Kim Yong Chol, the former military intelligence chief and one of the North Korean leader's closest aides, landed midafternoon on an Air China flight from Beijing. Associated Press journalists saw the plane taxi down the tarmac before the North's delegation disembarked at JFK International Airport. During his unusual visit, Kim Yong Chol had dinner for about an hour-and-a-half with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who traveled from Washington to see him. The two planned a "day full of meetings" Thursday, the White House said. Their talks will be aimed at determining whether a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong Un, originally scheduled for June 12 but later canceled by Trump, can be restored, U.S. officials have said. The talks come as preparations for the highly anticipated summit in Singapore were barreling forward on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, despite lingering uncertainty about whether it will really occur, and when. As Kim and Pompeo were meeting in New York, other U.S. teams were meeting with North Korean officials in Singapore and in the heavily fortified Korean Demilitarized Zone. "If it happens, we'll certainly be ready," White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of the Singapore summit. Regarding the date for the meeting, she added, "We're going to continue to shoot for June 12th." North Korea's flurry of diplomatic activity following a torrid run in nuclear weapons and missile tests in 2017 suggests that Kim Jong Un is eager for sanctions relief to build his economy and the international legitimacy the summit with Trump would provide. But there are lingering doubts on whether Kim will ever fully relinquish his nuclear arsenal, which he may see as his only guarantee of survival in a region surrounded by enemies. Trump announced that Kim Yong Chol was coming to New York for talks with Pompeo in a tweet on Tuesday in which he said he had a "great team" working on the summit. That was a shift from last week, when Trump announced in an open letter to Kim Jong Un that he had decided to "terminate" the summit following a provocative statement from the North. Pompeo, Trump's former CIA chief, has traveled to Pyongyang twice in recent weeks for meetings with Kim Jong Un, and has said there is a "shared understanding" between the two sides about what they hope to achieve in talks. South Korean media speculated that Pompeo could make a third trip to Pyongyang and that Kim Yong Chol was carrying a personal letter from Kim Jong Un and might push to travel to Washington to meet with Trump. North Korea's mission to the United Nations in New York is its sole diplomatic presence in the United States. That suggests Kim might have chosen to first go to New York because it would make it easier for him to communicate with officials in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital. North Korea and the United States are still technically at war and have no diplomatic ties because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. Trump views a summit as a legacy-defining opportunity to make the nuclear deal that has evaded others, but he pledged to walk away from the meeting if he believed the North wasn't serious about discussing dismantling its nuclear program. After the North's combative statements, there was debate inside the Trump administration about whether it marked a real turn to belligerence or a feint to see how far Kim Jong Un could push the U.S. in the lead-up to the talks. Trump had mused that Kim's "attitude" had changed after the North Korean leader's surprise visit to China two weeks ago, suggesting China was pushing Kim away from the table. Trump's letter, the aides said, was designed to pressure the North on the international stage for appearing to have cold feet. White House officials maintain that Trump was hopeful the North was merely negotiating but that he was prepared for the letter to mark the end of the two-month flirtation. Instead, the officials said, it brought both sides to the table with increasing seriousness, as they work through myriad logistical and policy decisions to keep June 12 a viable option for the summit. Kim Yong Chol is a vice chairman of the North Korean ruling party's central committee. The last official of his stature to visit the United States was Jo Myong Rok, the late first vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, who visited Washington in 2000, South Korea's Unification Ministry said. The White House emphasized that it has remained in close contact with South Korean and Japanese officials as preparations for the talks continue. Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump will host Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan on June 7 to coordinate their thinking ahead of the summit. Trump hosted South Korean President Moon Jae-in last week. Moon, who has lobbied hard for nuclear negotiations between Trump and Kim Jong Un, held a surprise meeting with the North Korean leader on Saturday in an effort to keep the summit alive. ___ Lederman reported from Washington and Bodeen from Beijing. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Zeke Miller and Catherine Lucey in Washington and Hyung-Jin Kim and Kim Tong-Hyung in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report. Authorities are awaiting autopsy results to determine what caused the death of a transgender woman who was in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Federal authorities say the 33-year-old woman from Honduras died early Friday at an Albuquerque hospital, where she was admitted after showing symptoms of pneumonia, dehydration and complications associated with HIV. The woman was identified by activists as Roxana Hernandez. They say she was part of a caravan of Central American migrants that traveled to the U.S. border through Mexico. Federal authorities listed her name as Jeffry Hernandez and said she was taken into custody on May 13 in San Diego. She was later transferred to El Paso, Texas, and then to a detention center in western New Mexico where she was housed in the transgender unit. Hernandez's death has reignited concerns about the treatment of transgender people in custody. The California-based Transgender Law Center and other groups issued statements this week demanding that transgender people not be detained by immigration authorities. "The community, now more than ever, needs to organize to protect our most vulnerable, in particular transgender immigrant women who are surrounded by violence on a daily basis," said Anandrea Molina, president of Organizacion Latina de Trans en Texas. Organizers from Pueblo Sin Fronteras say Hernandez had first presented herself to U.S. border officers at the San Ysidro port of entry in California on May 9 and asked for asylum. The group questioned whether Hernandez received adequate medical care while in federal custody. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, all detainees get medical, dental and mental health screening within 12 hours of arriving at a detention facility. Detainees also have access to 24-hour emergency care. Hernandez is the sixth detainee to die in ICE custody since October 2017. According to immigration authorities, Hernandez was admitted May 17 to Cibola General Hospital in Grants, New Mexico. She was transferred later that day to the Albuquerque hospital, where she remained in the intensive care unit until she was pronounced dead. Hospital staff identified the preliminary cause of death as cardiac arrest. New Mexico health and law enforcement agencies were notified about the death. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General and ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility also were notified along with the Consulate of Honduras in Houston. Immigration authorities say that between 2005 and 2009, Hernandez twice illegally entered the United States and was granted voluntarily return to Mexico each time since she claimed Mexican nationality. In 2014, she illegally re-entered the U.S. a third time and was arrested and removed. Authorities also say she was convicted of theft in 2006 and of prostitution and other charges in 2009. Both cases were in Texas. Federal prosecutors say a Honduran man deserves 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to plotting to detonate a bomb in a Florida mall food court in support of the Islamic State extremist group. Prosecutors said in a Miami court filing Tuesday that Vicente Adolfo Solano should get the maximum prison term for attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Solano's sentencing is set Friday. His lawyers seek leniency. The FBI says the 53-year-old Solano wanted to detonate a bomb last October at the Dolphin Mall near Miami but was actually working with undercover FBI operatives who gave him a fake bomb before his arrest. Despite Solano's claims of Islamic State sympathies, the FBI says no links to terrorist groups were found. Solano never had real explosives. The victims of Tuesdays attack in a Belgian city were identified, after a prison inmate on 48-hour leave and indirectly mentioned in state security reports on radicalization grabbed the service weapons of two women officers and then fatally shot them and a bystander, a 22-year-old teacher. Liege Police Chief Christian Beaupere named the two female officers as 45-year-old Lucile Garcia and 53-year-old Soraya Belkacemi. He said Belkacemi was the mother of 13-year-old twin daughters who earlier lost their father, also a police officer. As Fox News previously reported, Prime Minister Charles Michel said the suspect, Benjamin Herman, a Belgian national born in 1982, appeared in security reports in notes that did not primarily target him, but others or other situations. Different services considered that, based on the elements they had, there was no reason to give him such a qualification, he said, adding the attack will involve, at least initially, an investigation for terrorism. Garcia got married to her boyfriend of 14 years a month ago, and the pair had just become grandparents, their colleagues told Laaste Nieuws. About 10 years ago, The New York Post reported, she lost her 21-year-old son, Axel, in a car crash. The third victim, Cyril Vangriecken, had studied at the Athenee Royale dHerstal school and was a big fan of petanque, a bowling game similar to bocce, The Post reported. His father told BFMTV his son thought only of his studies: My son was a perfect child. When I say perfect, it was perfect. Tuesdays attack unfolded outside a cafe in the eastern city of Liege when the assailant crept up on Garcia and Belkacemi from behind and stabbed them repeatedly. He then took their weapons. He used the weapons on the officers, who died, the Liege prosecutors spokesman, Philippe Dulieu, told reporters. Dulieu said the attacker then shot and killed Vangriecken in his mothers car that was leaving a parking lot outside a nearby high school. The Mail reported that witnesses saw Vangrieckens mother sobbing and covered in blood after her son was targeted in their Ford Fiesta. The attacker then took two women hostage inside the school before confronting police massed outside. He came out firing at police, wounding a number of them, notably in the legs. He was shot dead, the spokesman said, adding that the hostages escaped unharmed. Beaupere said the goal of the attacker was to target the police. Four other officers were wounded in the attack, one seriously with a severed femoral artery. Justice Minister Koen Geens described the attacker as a repeat offender who had been incarcerated since 2003, and was due for release in two years. He certainly was not someone who could clearly be qualified as radicalized. Otherwise he would have been known as such by all services, Geens said. Liege is an industrial city located near the German border. It was the scene of a 2011 shooting when a gunman killed four people and wounded more than 100, according to Reuters. Belgian police and military have been on alert since suicide bombers killed 32 people at the Brussels airport and subway system in 2016. The Associated Press contributed to this report. The three buildings were officially opened on Monday this week during a ceremony at the newly constructed Mele Medical Centre staff house. Photo: Kizzy Kalsakau The fierce anti-Kremlin Russian journalist who was reported dead in Ukraine's capital showed up to a news conference on Wednesday very much alive, as authorities revealed it was all part of a foiled murder plot against him. Vasily Gritsak, the head of the Ukrainian Security Service, said at a news conference that the agency faked Arkady Babchenko's death to catch those who were trying to kill him. Babchenko showed up at Gritsak's news conference on to gasps from the press, and thanked everyone who was mourning his death. "I'm still alive," he said. Before ushering Babchenko into the room, Gritsak said investigators had identified a Ukrainian citizen who had been recruited and paid $40,000 by the Russian security service to organize and carry out the killing. The unidentified Ukrainian man in turn hired an acquaintance who had fought in the separatist war in eastern Ukraine as the gunman. The journalist was leaving his apartment on Tuesday to go out to buy bread when he was reportedly shot several times in the staircase of his building in Kiev, Ukrainian politician Anton Gerashchenko said in a Facebook post. His wife found him bleeding and called an ambulance, but authorities claimed he died on his way to the hospital. Babchenko did not tell his wife that the murder had been staged, according to Reuters. Neither he nor Gritsak provided details of how they staged Babchenko's injuries or made his wife believe he was dead. Im sorry, but there was no other way of doing it," he said Wednesday. "Separately, I want to apologize to my wife for the hell that she has been through. Kiev Police, who said the journalist had multiple gunshot wounds in his back, had told the public they were working on the theory that he was targeted because of his work, according to Sky News. "The first and the most probable version is his professional activity," Kiev Police Chief Andriy Kryshchenko said Tuesday. Kryshchenko added that detectives had been unable to speak to his wife because she was in a state of shock Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs even released a sketch of Babchenko's possible assassin, who was described as a man between 40 and 45 years old with a grey beard and wearing a hat. Babchenko fled Russia last year, fearing for his life, and settled in Ukraine. He had served in the Russian army during the two wars in Chechnya in 1990s and became one of Russia's best-known war reporters. His reported murder triggered a war of words between Russia and Ukraine, as several Ukrainian politicians immediately blamed the Kremlin for the act. "Putin's regime takes aim at those who cannot be broken or intimidated," Gerashchenko posted to Facebook. ANTI-KREMLIN RUSSIAN JOURNALIST SHOT AND KILLED IN UKRAINE Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said the "Russian totalitarian machine" had not forgiven Babchenko for his "honesty and principled stance," Sky News reported. The Kremlin described such allegations as part of an anti-Russian smear campaign. This is the height of cynicism against the backdrop of such a brutal murder. It is anti-Russian bluster instead of talking about the need to conduct a thorough, objective investigation, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters before it was revealed that Babchenko was alive and well. The Kremlin told the TASS News Agency that Ukraine has become a "very dangerous place" for journalists, and criticized officials for failing to protect them. "Bloody crimes and total impunity have turned into daily routine for the Kiev regime," the ministry told TASS. Another well-known reporter, Pavel Sheremet, was killed in a car bombing in central Kiev in July 2016, according to Sky News. The case remains unsolved but he was also critical of Russia, Ukraine and his native Belarus. Fox News' Nicole Darrah and The Associated Press contributed to this report. An attack in Belgium that left two police officers and a bystander dead was considered to be a terrorist murder, officials said Wednesday. Benjamin Herman, 36, shouted Allahu akbar, the Arabic phrase for God is great, several times during the shooting spree Tuesday before he was fatally shot by a group of police officers, Wenke Roggen, the Belgian federal magistrate, said at a news conference. The convict was a soldier of the caliphate, the Islamic State terror network said in a brief statement on the site of its Aamaq news agency. Such wording is typical of the claims ISIS makes even when slaying suspects have not been linked directly to the terror group. Belgian officials have not said whether they had evidence the inmate had vowed allegiance to ISIS or was acting on its orders. The attack was being treated as terrorism because of the way Herman acted during the shooting, Roggen said, adding that it resembled the Islamic State groups calls to attack police with knives and steal their weapons, included the shouting of Allahu akbar and Herman was in contact with several radicalized individuals. Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said Tuesday that Herman was indirectly mentioned in state security reports on radicalization before the attack. He said Herman appeared in security reports in notes that did not primarily target him, but others or other situations. Different services considered that, based on the elements they had, there was no reason to give him such a qualification, Michel said, adding that the slayings will prompt, at least initially, an investigation for terrorism. Herman also killed another person the day before the attack, Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon said. Herman said the victim was a person with whom he spent time in prison. Herman, a Belgian native, was an inmate who had been granted a few hours release Monday, but failed to return to prison. Local media reported that he was a known drug offender and may have been held in a prison with radicalized inmates. Herman approached two police officers from behind carrying a knife and stabbed them several times in the city of Liege, city prosecutors spokesman Philippe Dulieu said. He then took their weapons. He used the weapons on the officers, who died, Dulieu told reporters. Dulieu said the attacker shot dead a 22-year-old man in a vehicle that was leaving a parking lot outside a nearby high school. The attacker then took a woman hostage inside the school. Liege police intervened. He came out firing at police, wounding a number of them, notably in the legs. He was shot dead, Dulieu said. Liege Police Chief Christian Beaupere identified the two female police officers as 45-year-old Lucile Garcia and 53-year-old Soraya Belkacemi. He said Belkacemi was the mother of 13-year-old twin daughters who earlier lost their father, also a police officer. Officials credited the female hostage the Herman took with calming him down and possibly preventing more deaths. Jambon, Michel and King Philippe visited the woman in the hospital. She was very courageous and perhaps, but this we will have to verify, she helped avoid more victims in the school, Jambon said. Officials concluded that there was no reason to raise the terror alert level because the attack was an isolated incident. The Associated Press contributed to this report. A retired Bolivian bishop tapped by Pope Francis to be a cardinal is furiously denying suggestions that he has a wife and children and is threatening legal action. Toribio Ticona said Wednesday that he "has nothing to do" with the alleged actions and said he would bring a legal complaint if the claims continue. Francis named the 81-year-old cardinal last week. Ticona says the accusations were disproven after they first emerged in 2011 and have "resurfaced as slander in an attempt to attack" the pope by "sectors that are hostile" to the pontiff. The accusations recently appeared in the Catholic blog "Adelanto en la Fe" "Forward in the Faith." It cites a 2011 complaint to local Catholic authorities that says Ticona had a family in a rural town. next Image 1 of 2 prev Image 2 of 2 Italy's president, who is holding and playing a key card in the nation's fast-evolving political crisis, was a timid law professor abruptly thrust into public life when the Mafia gunned down his brother on a Sicilian street in 1980. In the decades since, Sergio Mattarella has developed a reputation as a principled politician who has transformed what was viewed as a mainly ceremonial office into the dynamic role of defender of Italy's place in Europe. Mattarella, 76, a former parliamentary law professor and Constitutional Court jurist, came under verbal attack this week from his country's populist politicians and citizens who want them to take power. They allege the president is thwarting the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box on March 4. Earlier this week, Luigi Di Maio, who leads Parliament's largest party, the euro-skeptic 5-Star Movement, raised the specter of impeaching Mattarella. The threat came after the president refused to submit to populist demands to appoint, as economy minister, an advocate of a backup plan for Italy's exit from the euro currency. Mattarella stood his ground, as did Di Maio and fellow populist Matteo Salvini, who demanded the euroskeptic economy minister be part of what would have been the nation's first populist government. As head of state, the president has constitutional authority to name the premier and approve new ministers. His refusal to bow to pressure reflects his character and courage of convictions, those who have followed Mattarella's career say. Mattarella is someone "with strong, deep values," said Sergio Fabbrini, director of the school of government at Rome's private LUISS university. "His family was a bourgeois family that stood up to the Mafia and refused to compromise" with the powerful organization based in Sicily. In his native Palermo, Mattarella and his family were ready for Epiphany Day Mass in 1980, when his older brother, Piersanti, then governor of Sicily, was assassinated in his car on one of the city's most elegant streets. Sergio Mattarella rushed to the car, cradling his brother, still breathing, in his arms. Until that moment, the future president "had been a shy law professor," said Paolo Pagliaro, an Italian journalist. "That day signaled the start of the public life of Sergio Mattarella." Three years later, Mattarella entered Parliament. In some ways, he seemed the classic Christian Democrat, stressing moderation and compromise. His politics tilted toward the center-left. But as he climbed the political ladder, Mattarella also left no doubt that on some matters, there could be no compromise. In 1990, he quit his post as education minister to protest a law that helped to pave the way for Silvio Berlusconi to assemble a media empire, including all three of Italy's main private TV networks. That decade saw the main political parties, including the Christian Democrats, swept from power by the Clean Hands corruption probes. "All the public institutions were shaken. The only institution that guaranteed the state was the president of the Republic," Fabbrini said in a telephone interview. The head of state is elected by Parliament and serves a seven-year term. The new prestige translated into a growing role for Italy's head of state, which developed into "a sort of guarantor of internal equilibrium and the reference point for European politics," he said. Thus, Mattarella, who was serving as a Constitutional Court judge before being elected president in 2015, not only defends the 1948 Constitution, but European constitution as well, said Fabbrini. Mattarella's willingness to accommodate different viewpoints but also to draw lines he won't cross ultimately played out in the current political crisis. In rebuffing the populists' demands, Mattarella evoked a sense of justice, describing how the markets' turmoil was eroding Italians savings and driving up business loan costs. The populist narrative, Fabbrini said, depicts institutions like the presidency as "the bastion of the elite" and the "enemy of the people." In a critical moment, Mattarella crafted an alternative narrative. ___ Frances D'Emilio is on twitter at www.twitter.com/fdemilio The former head of China's sprawling Anbang Insurance Group is appealing his sentence of 18 years in prison for fraud. A lawyer for Wu Xiaohui told The Associated Press on Wednesday that his client would seek to have the charges against him dismissed. Lawyer Chen Youxi said the charges were not supported by evidence. He declined to say more. Anbang acquired global assets including New York's famed Waldorf Astoria Hotel before Wu was sentenced to prison earlier this month. The Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court said Wu pleaded guilty to fraudulently raising billions of dollars from investors. The court also ordered the confiscation of 10.5 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) in assets from Wu, under whom Anbang discussed doing business with President Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner. The Hamas terror group said Wednesday that it has reached a cease-fire agreement with Israel, after the Jewish state carried out air strikes in retaliation for rocket fire attacks from Gaza. But Israeli officials deny the Hamas claim. Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, claims Egyptian mediators intervened after the resistance succeeded in warding off the aggression. He said militants in Gaza will commit to the cease-fire if Israel does as well. But Israeli Cabinet minister Naftali Bennett told Israels Army Radio that no cease-fire agreement has yet been reached. The Israeli military bombed numerous militant sites in Gaza overnight after Palestinian militants shot dozens of mortar shells toward Israel on Tuesday morning, with several of them hitting Southern Israel, including a kindergarten building that was empty at the time. Israel said its strikes Wednesday hit drone storage facilities, military compounds, and rocket and munition workshops across the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians have escalated the conflict in recent months after holding multiple, often violent, protests near the border between Israel and Gaza, prompting clashes between the Israeli Defense Force and Palestinians. The protests peaked May 14, the same day the U.S. opened its embassy in Israels capital, Jerusalem, when more than 60 people died in a Hamas-organized action to breach the Israeli border and return to homes that were lost 70 years ago during the war that established Israel. Israel and Hamas have been exchanging rocket fire ever since the terror group seized the control of Gaza in 2007. The last war, in 2014, was particularly deadly, with more than 2,000 Palestinians dying, including hundreds of civilians. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Iraqs Christian community, still struggling to pick up the pieces of a genocidal ISIS campaign to wipe them from their ancestral homeland, are speaking up against Pope Francis and the Vatican for not doing enough to support their struggle for survival. We have actually been weakened by the stance taken by the Vatican, Aziz Emmanuel al-Zebari, 68, a Chaldean political candidate, community leader and professor at the Catholic University of Erbil (CUE), told Fox News in a recent interview. The Vatican is teaching the community to be submissive. That wont help us get our rights." In the view of Zebari and other Christians, the Popes repeated emphasis on a greater tolerance for and understanding of Islam has left the deeply persecuted Chaldean minority feeling insecure and vulnerable. It has also sparked internal divide between those who follow the Pope's guidance and others like Zebari who insist their survival rests on being much more outspoken. Zebari referred to the Popes approach as naive and short-sighted. For those like the Chaldean community leader who are far from the comforts of Rome and remain in the line of fire their lives are marked by a continual sense of the unknown. There cant dialogue when one party is down and the other party has the upper hand, Zebari lamented. There is no equal ground here. Zebari said Chaldeans "have paid a high price for being Christian, and we cannot prevail without protection. When I am displaced, when my family is threatened with sexual violence and Im then told just to pray and be tolerant... The Chaldeans belong to the Eastern Catholic Church that, while technically independent of Rome, recognizes and looks to the Pope as the authority. The Chaldeans, along with the Assyrians and Syriacs, make up the three major Christian groups in Iraq. Since the sudden rise of ISIS in 2014, in which it quickly gained control of huge swaths of Christian lands across Iraqs Nineveh Plains, the Pope routinely took the posture of speaking staunchly in defense of Islam and religious tolerance all around. In May 2016, when the ISIS invasion was at its bloody pinnacle, the Pope asked that everyone pray God would convert the hearts of the deadly perpetrators, and stressed that it was wrong to identify Islam with violence. Pope Francis has instead blamed social injustice and worship of money as being among the leading causes of terrorism. He has condemned those who support anti-immigration policies, urged Christians to take in Muslim refugees, and housed Muslim refugees in the Vatican to send a message of inclusiveness. He also campaigned repeatedly for religious tolerance and inter-faith dialogue. But earlier this year, Iraqi Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil spoke more directly to problems within Islam. He spoke in a speech at Georgetown University about the fundamental crisis within Islam itself, and warned that if the crisis were not acknowledged, addressed and fixed, "there can be no future for Christians in the Middle East. He encouraged courageous voices from Islamic leaders to continue highlighting the need for change. A spokesperson for CUE and the Archbishop, in response to the published comments, told Fox News that "Mr. Zebari does not speak for the Chaldean Catholic Church or for the Catholic University of Erbil, but only in his private capacity as an individual." "While he is entitled to his opinion, the Chaldean Catholic Church is grateful to Pope Francis for his many statements and signs of support for our persecuted people," the representative noted. "Most recently, these include announcing that our Patriarch will be made a Cardinal, and leading prayer for Christians in the Middle East in Bari on July 7." Nonetheless, there are believed to be less than 200,000 Christians left in Iraq down from 1.4 million 30 years ago, according to Iraqi census data. Most now live in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the north, and in the ISIS-battered areas of the Nineveh Plains on the outskirts of Mosul. UNDER THREAT AND HOMELESS, DISPLACED IRAQIS RETURN TO THE CAMPS YAZIDIS SEEK RESCUE OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN ENSLAVED, MARRIED OFF TO ISIS Zebari also lamented that in their fragile post-ISIS world, Christians have become more weak politically. On May 12 he ran without success for one of the just five seats reserved for Christians in Iraqi Parliament, out of 329 total seats. The winner was 32-year-old Rayan al-Kildani, leader of the controversial Christian militia known as the Babylon Brigade, which took two seats and is closely aligned to the Badr Organization, a Tehran-founded political party and militia largely supported by the Shia Muslim community. Zebari cautioned the Christian community is being further dissolved by demographic changes in the post-ISIS era, with Shia-aligned groups moving into areas traditionally Christian pockets. Our Christian ruins have been destroyed, we have lost hundreds of our villages and we are on the brink of extinction, Zebari, who is an advocate for establishing an emergency autonomous Christian canton within Iraq. Based on everything we have been through the violence, the kidnappings and the political pressure from all sides we cannot exist without political and legal power. The important thing is to have our own political entity. Zebari also acknowledged that the Christian plight has been hindered because of a regional split with half the Christians in the Kurdish region answering to Erbil, and other half in the central government terrain answering to Baghdad a concern that could possibly be solved if afforded their own independent state. Zebari said despite their pleas, Christian efforts and greater unification have been undermined by some religious leaders in the Christian community. We dont expect any support from the Vatican, Zebari said. We are in a hopeless situation. Zebari said without more Vatican support, Christians have had to rely on negligible aid support from churches in Europe, and donors across the United States. The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment. But statements released by their press office have noted various funding efforts to assist Christians in Iraq. The Pope recently auctioned off a blessed Lamborghini which fetched almost $1 million to support the rebuilding of homes and places of prayer in northern Iraq. And Chaldean priest and leader in the southern California diaspora community, Father Noel Gorgis, acknowledged that while the Vatican can always do more to water the tree of faith in Iraq, he called Pope Franciss words inspirational to Chaldeans all around the globe. Other Chaldean activists, such as Mark Arabo of the Minority Humanitarian Foundation, acceded that the Pope has served as a vessel for hope to many of these Iraqi Christians, and that they are working with the Church leadership to ensure that the Vatican assists in the rebuilding of historical Christian sites that had been ravaged by ISIS. This coming July, Pope Francis will also convene heads of churches and Christian communities from the Middle East in Bari, Italy for another day of prayer and reflection. For Zebari, such convictions without action are coming tried and true. The future is bleak for Christians here, he predicted. And I dont see much light at the end of the tunnel. But there is one small silver lining for the ailing religious minority. Defying the terrorist threat and rampant displacement, in late 2015 the Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Erbil formally opened the CUE in the Christian enclave of Ankawa. Today, Zebari and the student body many still rendered homeless and deeply scarred by the ISIS onslaught continues on with the goal of enabling Iraqi Christians, and some Muslim students too, the opportunity to make a powerful dent in the world. CUE currently features seven departments including IT, international relations, economics, accounting, English, oriental studies and computer sciences with the hopes to add dentistry and architecture to the list this year. We want more students to join us, Zebari added. We want more in the community to have this opportunity. next Image 1 of 2 prev Image 2 of 2 The Latest on diplomatic efforts focusing on North Korea (all times local): 2:45 p.m. Russia says Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will travel to North Korea for talks on Thursday. The foreign ministry said in a statement Wednesday that Lavrov would hold talks with North Korea's foreign policy chief to discuss bilateral issues as well as the overall situation on the Korean Peninsula. Lavrov's upcoming visit comes ahead of a planned summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un next month. ___ 1 p.m. A top North Korean official has arrived at Beijing's airport on his way to a meeting in New York in hopes of trying to salvage a summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump. Kim Yong Chol was seen at Beijing's airport just after noon on Wednesday as he was heading to his connecting flight. Trump and Kim Jong Un were set to meet June 12 in Singapore, but Trump last week announced he was pulling out. Since then, Trump has suggested the meeting could be back on. Kim Yong Chol is to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He would be the highest-level North Korean official to travel to the U.S. since 2000. A vocal critic of the Kremlin accused Putin and the Russian government Wednesday of trying to block his investigation into the murder of a former employee by taking advantage of an Interpol system of warrants, leading to his arrest and a brief detention in Spain. U.S.-born and London-based investor William Browder said police took him away when he was heading to meet with prosecutors to share evidence on property investments in Spain with cash allegedly linked to murder of Sergei Magnitsky, a former employee who died in 2009 in jail after accusing Russian officials of involvement in a tax fraud scheme. "Vladimir Putin and the Russian government are absolutely infuriated that we are bringing them to justice for the murder of Sergei Magnitsky, Browder told the Associated Press. Magnitsky's official cause of death was a heart attack, but independent investigators said he was tortured and denied medical treatment. Browder, who is the head of the Hermitage Capital investment fund, has previously advocated for U.S. sanctions targeting Russian officials over human rights abuses and was the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, named after Sergei. Adopted in 2012, the Magnitsky Act permitted the U.S. to freeze financial assets of Russian officials who contributed to the abuse, arrest and death of Magnitsky. It was later expanded in 2016 to include human rights abusers anywhere. A national police spokeswoman said Wednesday that Browder was released when agents confirmed that an arrest warrant from Russia that appeared in police databases was invalid. The spokeswoman had no authorization to be named in media reports. For years, Moscow courts have been going after Browder. In December, one court sentenced him to nine years in prison in absentia on charges of tax evasion and funneling money overseas. Browder and Ivan Cherkasov, an associate who was sentenced to eight years behind bars, were also ordered to pay $69 million to the Russian government in damages. The same court convicted him of tax evasion in another trial in absentia in 2013 all accusations which Browder denies. "They are using everything they can to stop me, and the abuse of the Interpol system is another example of that," Browder told the Associated Press after meeting Spain's top anti-corruption prosecutor, Jose Grinda, following his release from detention. Browder said he had shared with Grinda evidence about how $35 million allegedly connected to the 2009 murder of Magnitsky had been laundered through investments in Spanish property. The financier, who is a plaintiff in the Spanish investigation, said Spain is among 15 countries following the money trail. "We are hoping that eventually prosecutors here seize property, seize accounts and prosecute individuals so that nobody benefits from the murder of Sergei Magnitsky," Browder said. The Magnitsky Act became a sore point between the U.S. and Russia after it was signed into law by former President Barack Obama in 2012. Shortly afterward, President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning American citizens from adopting Russian children, in a move widely viewed as retaliation. Browder himself had reported his detention in Madrid in a series of tweets. He posted a police document with the word "fraud" written as the cause for the detention, and then followed it with a photo of himself outside of a police station saying he had been released "after Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised them not to honor the new Russian Interpol Red Notice." He claimed that "this is the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case." "Bill Browder remained in police custody this morning for the minimum necessary time, until Interpol Spain verified that the arrest warrant issued by the Russian authorities for tax evasion was invalid," according to a Spanish-language tweet by police. However, in an email, Interpol said it has never issued a Red Notice for Browder. Red Notice alerts are sent to Interpol member countries to locate and arrest specific people based on a national warrant. As early as July 2013, the international police organization said it erased from its database Russian requests to locate and arrest Browder due to its "predominantly political character." Fair Trials, a global criminal justice watchdog, said the confusion over Browder's arrest highlighted the serious problems with Interpol's system of global "wanted person" alerts. "Interpol should scrutinize alerts before it puts them out through its international networks," Fair Trials chief executive Jago Russell said in an email Wednesday. "Spain should also exercise sense and discretion before arresting people. The result could have been very different if it weren't for Browder's high profile." British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson welcomed Browder's release, tweeting: "Just spoken to Bill Browder - very glad that he has now been released." "Moscow should concentrate on bringing those responsible for the murder of #Magnitsky to justice," Johnson added. Browder led one of the biggest investment funds in Russia for 10 years before he left the country and was barred re-entry in 2006 on the grounds that he posed a threat to national security. Fox News' Kaitlyn Schallhorn and the Associated Press contributed to this report. Leading Emirati rights activist Ahmed Mansoor has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined 1 million dirhams, or about $272,000, by an appeals court in Abu Dhabi. The Dubai-based Gulf News reported on Wednesday that the defendant, identified as "AMS" by his initials, will also be under probation for three years after prison. Gulf News says Mansoor, who had a court-appointed lawyer, was convicted on Tuesday of defaming the United Arab Emirates on Twitter and Facebook by "publishing false information, rumors and lies ... that would damage the UAE's social harmony and unity." He was acquitted on charges of cooperating with a "terrorist organization" outside the country. Human Rights Watch condemned the sentencing, saying it exposes UAE's inability "to tolerate the mildest of criticisms from a genuine reformer." Paraguay's President Horacio Cartes has suffered at least a temporary a setback in his effort to take up a Senate seat once his term ends in August. Opponents both outside his own party and within it boycotted a congressional session on Wednesday. The lack of a quorum blocked a vote on his resignation request. He needs to leave office by June 30 to be sworn in with other senators because Paraguay's constitution says he can't hold two offices at once. Cartes couldn't seek re-election and the Senate seat would be a way to extend his political influence. Some experts argue it also might help block any possible prosecution on corruption allegations. Analysts say Cartes still has plenty of time before the deadline to win enough votes. Italy's premier-designate Carlo Cottarelli has returned to the presidential palace for informal consultations amid continued market turmoil and uncertainty about the prospects of his proposed government. Milan's stock index opened slightly higher Wednesday after Asian markets slid on investor concern that a new election could become a referendum on whether Italy will stick with the euro currency. The uncertainty rose after President Sergio Mattarella's designation of Cottarelli, a former IMF official, to head a politically neutral government failed to calm markets. The appointment also riled populists whose attempts to form a government were quashed by Mattarella over their designation of a euroskeptic economy minister. Cottarelli returned for informal discussions Wednesday with Mattarella after asking for more time to come up with a list of cabinet ministers. He left without comment. U.S. Marines in Afghanistan killed dozens of Taliban leaders last week using rocket artillery after tracking them to a meeting in volatile Helmand Province, according to the top American general in Afghanistan Wednesday. U.S. Forces Afghanistan said more than 50 Taliban commanders, including the deputy Taliban shadow governor of Helmand was killed. Taliban leaders from six other provinces across Afghanistan were killed as well in the strike in the Musa Qala district of Helmand, according to the statement. Twenty other Taliban leaders were killed in air strikes earlier this month by drones and Air Force A-10 Warthog jets based in neighboring Kandahar, which arrived earlier this year along with thousands of additional American troops. During a Pentagon press conference from his office in Kabul Wednesday, Army Gen. John Nicholson told reporters the strikes would disrupt the insurgent group the U.S. military has been fighting for more than 16 years. Helmand has been the financial engine of the insurgency. The Taliban draws 60 percent of their revenue from narcotics (and) criminal activity, Nicholson said. But Nicholson played down the impact the strikes would have nationwide. I would not call it strategic significance, but it definitively has a significant local significance in terms of the fight in southern Afghanistan, he said. Nicholsons two-year tour is winding down later this year. President Donald Trump has nominated Army Lt. Gen. Scott Miller, the current head of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which oversees the nations elite commando units, such as Delta Force, 75th Ranger Regiment and SEAL Team Six, collectively known as the National Mission Force. Recently, U.S. drones killed dozens of Taliban fighters attempting to take over western Farah Province, which borders Iran. Last month, the U.S. military launched the second highest number of airstrikes in the past six and a half years in Afghanistan. As the ISIS war in Iraq and Syria winds down, the U.S. military is ramping up operations in Afghanistan. There are roughly 15,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, about double the number when Trump took office far fewer than the 100,000 deployed by former President Barack Obama. In April, there were more airstrikes in Afghanistan 562 than Iraq and Syria combined over the previous two months. Many of the strikes targeted Taliban drug labs. But Taliban attacks remain a real threat and persist. Wednesday, U.S.-backed Afghan security forces thwarted an attempted suicide bombing at the Interior Ministry. One Afghan policeman was killed. Five others were hurt, but no civilians were killed, according to Afghan officials in Kabul. Nicholson praised the actions of the Afghan security forces for preventing the attack from becoming much worse. The Afghan guards immediately recognized these as old uniforms, called on the terrorists to exit the vehicle so they could be checked out, and at that point the fighting started, Nicholson said, in his first press conference to Pentagon reporters in six months. Hundreds of Afghan civilians have been killed in similar suicide attacks. Nicholson blamed the Taliban, or the Haqqani network a Taliban off-shoot for the attack on the Interior Ministry. An ISIS affiliate has taken credit for a spate of attacks against the countrys Shia minority in the past year killing hundreds more. But unlike the ISIS-affiliated fighters, Nicholson said the Taliban is open to peace talks and the Afghan government has been receptive. Nicholson said the talks have been conducted in secret, off the stage. Its occurring at multiple levels. So you see mid-level, senior-level Taliban leaders engaging with Afghans, Nicholson said. Nicholson said between February and April, Taliban attacks dropped 30 percent below the five-year average, while these talks were taking place. Since the Taliban announced their spring offensive, Nicholson said the levels of violence had increased, but still 10 percent below the five-year average. Acting Director Donald Pelam and his staff (l) being welcomed to Mitah Custom Village at Rentabao during launching in April Sure you don't. Nice attempt to to help justify the reaction of your fellow TDSers here, though. Someone so tolerant as you that would really go around telling nice people to FO just for offering a friendly, cheerful, common, and traditional greeting on the day of a national holiday is so reassuring of your selflessness to our nation and uphold what really stands for what Memorial Day is all about. Maybe you and the rest of your "loving and tolerant" TDS friends can go further apeshit when you learn that the origins of Memorial Day WAS to celebrate and honor the CONFEDERATE DEAD! HAHAHAHAHA The Origins of Memorial Day In the spring of 1866 the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia passed a resolution to set aside one day annually to memorialize the Confederate dead. The secretary of the association, Mrs. Charles J. (Mary Ann) Williams was directed to author a letter inviting the ladies in every Southern state to join them in the observance. The letter was written in March of 1866 and sent to all of the principal cities in the South, including Atlanta, Macon, Montgomery, Memphis, Richmond, St. Louis, Alexandria, Columbia, New Orleans, et al. The date for the holiday was selected by Mrs. Elizabeth Rutherford Ellis. She chose April 26, the first anniversary of Confederate General Johnston's final surrender to Union General Sherman at Bennett Place, NC. For many in the South, that marked the official end of the War. On April 26, 1866, tens of thousands of Southern women commemorated the first Confederate Memorial Day. Some, however, in the northernmost portions of the South did not participate because their flowers were not yet in bloom. Consequently, they selected dates later in the spring to hold their first Confederate Memorial Days. For example, parts of Virginia chose May 10, commemorating Stonewall Jackson's death. Near Petersburg, VA, they chose June 9, the anniversary of a significant battle there. Others opted for Confederate President Jefferson Davis' birthday, June 3. To the present, Southern states continue to have Confederate Memorial days. Though most are still on April 26, others continue to be later in the year. In 1868, Union General John A. Logan, who was the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), launched the US Memorial Day holiday that is currently observed in the entire United States. According to General Logan's wife, he emulated the practices of Confederate Memorial Day. She wrote that Logan "said it was not too late for the Union men of the nation to follow the example of the people of the South in perpetuating the memory of their friends who had died for the cause they thought just and right." Liberty Hangout - Right BiasRIGHT BIAS These media sources are moderately to strongly biased toward conservative causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports and omit reporting of information that may damage conservative causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy. See all Right Bias sources. Factual Reporting: MIXED Notes: Liberty Hangout is a libertarian news and opinion website. Liberty Hangout has an economic right wing bias and moderate left social bias. They moderately use loaded words, but not overtly. They typically source information, but sometimes to far right or non-credible sources. Overall, we rate Liberty Hangout Right Biased and Mixed for factual reporting based on use of poor sources. (12/14/2016) Updated (2/17/2018) From Media Bias/Fact Check. Free Freightnet Membership List your company in the Freightnet directory. It's Free, it's Easy and your company can be displayed in front of potential freight buyers within 24 hours. Dimitri001 said: What do you think are plausible scenarios which could lead to nuclear war? I mean both on the strategic level what would lead to it, but even more so on the tactical level, how might it plausibly play out that one of the sides decides to use nukes. I'm talking here specifically about nuclear war between states, not non state factions getting nukes and using them. Click to expand... When I was 21 I had the power to start a nuclear war even though I only a lowly enlistedman who did not know the codes and that equipment I had not been trained on except to protect it with force of arms. The people who worked on the nuclear weapons left their schematics unguarded which I studied when they were not looking. They had the side panel of the nuke bird open and I could hang three jumpers and unleash the nuclear demon when the rocket motor ran out of fuel. No codes needed but only a hog farmer and I am not making this up. I just did that to prove I could do it in Vietnam but I would have been wiped out too and everyone else in a six mile radius.edit: The accelerometer could not be defeated by an electrical jumper because it was a mechanical switch. Launch the Bird and when it quits accelerating, KABOOM. FESTIVAL FUN Free Access Trackless train and tractor rides along with Mad Hatter amusement rides Saturday were among the entertainment activities at the Iron City Festival in downtown Blacksburg. Limestone to offer pre-licensure nursing program Free Access Limestone University has announced that it will begin in the fall of 2022 to accept students into its new Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) Pre-Licensure program. The new program,... New cases, deaths occurring mostly in the unvaccinated Free Access More than 85% of new cases and 78% of deaths from COVID-19 over the past month in South Carolina occurred in people who were not fully vaccinated. The state Department... Woman killed, infant hurt in Thursday crash Free Access A Gaffney woman was killed and an infant was hurt Thursday evening in a two-vehicle crash on Highway 18. Cherokee County Coroner Dennis Fowler identified the victim as Betty Ann... News Islanders want council to focus on streets, housing jenniferreynolds / JENNIFER REYNOLDS/The Daily News The Galveston City Council listens to a resident during a public comment session Thursday, May 24, 2018. GALVESTON Three Galveston City Council members joined the seven-member board this month with a fourth new member slated to join in June after a runoff election. As the new council takes form and another two-year term gets underway, residents shared ideas about where they want their elected leaders to focus their attention in the coming months and over the next two-year term. Residents from across the city had different ideas about what should be at the top of the agenda, though many highlighted street and drainage projects and stricter code enforcement as big priorities. In recent years, city leaders had put Galveston on a good track, and residents wanted to see that continue. But there were areas where the people who live here also wanted to see more action, residents said. Weve made some good strides, particularly since Ike, but Id like to see a broader picture focus on all the things Galveston has to offer, said Diane Olsen, a resident of more than 20 years who lives in District 6. Sometimes the focus just seems short-sighted. STREETS, DRAINAGE Roads overwhelmingly came up in conversations with residents and some had different ideas about how improvements might be paid for. Connie Henderson has lived in Galveston for more than 12 years, first on the East End and now on Avenue P in District 2. Henderson wanted to see council members lobby harder to spend hotel occupancy taxes on road projects around the city because many of the streets are used more by tourists than residents, she said. Galveston has about 50,000 residents, but millions of visitors a year and growing, she said. Last year, we had more visitors than we did the year before, and all of that is tearing up the roads, Henderson said. CODE ENFORCEMENT A stricter enforcement of city codes also topped the list for many residents. For instance, Henderson supports a ban on new duplexes in historic residential neighborhoods being considered by the city, but wanted to see stricter code enforcement of the multi-unit housing grandfathered in under the new ordinance, she said. If they dont get them up to code, it basically just protects people that arent maintaining the buildings to begin with, she said. There also were safety concerns created by street parking and not cutting back shrubs near intersections that could be better addressed by code enforcement, Henderson said. Dennis Miller, who lives on Avenue O in District 1 and previously served on the arts and historic preservation board, wanted to see planning commission regulations followed more evenly, he said. Miller didnt support putting in new codes that might be onerous to follow, but wanted the city to enforce the codes already on the books, he said. For example, a neighbor had at one point put in a fence that was too high for a residential neighborhood. But after it was built, the city gave it a pass, he said. That wasnt a fair application of the rules, Miller said. DRAINAGE Jeff Patterson, a resident on Ball Street in District 3, thought the city had made huge progress in infrastructure projects, such as drainage, sidewalks, lighting and streets, he said. He wanted to see that focus continue, with new implementation of metric and data-driven techniques and devices to identify drainage issues, Patterson said. GREEN SPACES Some residents wanted the new city council to put a greater focus on Galvestons green spaces. City leaders have long ignored or delayed progress on different green space projects, but improving parks and natural aspects of the island has huge benefits for residents and visitors, Olsen said. The East End Lagoon project, for example, is a project near and dear to Olsen, she said. In recent years, the park board has received some money from the state to move forward on it, but she wanted to see more city investment, she said. Theres been some on council that have been really interested in it, but for the majority, I think their focus has been more on other things and not the natural elements, Olsen said. Its the citys land and they should take some responsibility. The East End Lagoon Nature Park and Preserve is a project of the Galveston Park Board of Trustees and the Galveston Island Nature Tourism Council and includes 700 acres of diverse habitat on the barrier islands East End. There were other pockets all over the city that had the potential to be better natural attractions, such as the wetlands between Harborside Drive and Broadway, she said. Having green spaces not only attracts visitors, but makes people want to stay here, Olsen said. People want to stay in livable communities. BUSINESS The most recent city council had struck a good balance of promoting tourism and business interests with conservation and quality of life for residents, said Lisa Blair, a businesswoman who lives in District 6 and owns a restaurant in District 3. She hoped the new council would be similar, but had some concerns, she said. She didnt want to see more restrictions imposed on the historic district where she owns her business because some of those changes could restrict parking, she said. A lot of people talk about how the council doesnt focus enough on residents and focuses more on tourists, Blair said. I dont think thats true at all. Galveston is a tourist town, and tourists feed the local economy, Blair said. I dont want to see too much of a shift away from building tourism and being pro-development and pro-business, Blair said. INCLUSION Other residents raised concerns about how city council was structured and a perceived lack of diversity on some of its boards. By meeting during a workday, the city council made it difficult for working people to serve as council members, said Robert Quintero, who lives in District 1. I understand the reason a lot of minorities dont put their names up is because meetings are held during the day and people cant get away from their jobs, Quintero said. AFFORDABLE HOUSING Quintero also wanted to see the city begin auctioning off more of the homes it purchased from property tax foreclosures, which could help alleviate affordable housing concerns, he said. He also wanted to see Community Development Block Grant money used again toward the first-time home-buyers program, which helps families get low-interest loans or grants to put a down-payment toward a house and promotes home ownership, he said. Galveston is expensive, and Id like to see some real affordable housing solutions, Quintero said. UNITY With the start of a new term and some close races during the election, Patterson wanted to see the council strive for unity, he said. David Collins defeated Frank Maceo, the incumbent, in District 3 by just five votes, which showed how split the district had been, Patterson said. Patterson wanted to see some old divisions in his council district overcome, he said. My hope is David can bridge some of the divides in the district and bring all the the people together, Patterson said. We all share a lot of common concerns. skews13 said: Yep. Any raise or bonus anyone may have received is now gone with higher gas prices, and rising healthcare premiums and drug costs. Then comes the shock of giving anything they got back plus some, when the tax cuts for workers reverses and their taxes start going up. Click to expand... That's the big ruse with any government...I don't care what brand..giving the tax cuts BS. Progressive taxation was created to balance out the inequalities of capitalism to start with: most of the benefits accumulate at the top, and less and less filters through to the lower layers for the people who have to do the jobs no one else is willing to do! So, the cuts are a direct attack on any progressive system, since most of the savings on taxes are taken by the higher income earners, while lower income workers are lucky to have change to buy a coffee.As for Trump, this paragraph jumps out at me in the editorial:What's ironic is it looks like both official parties are following the same strategy of handing the base symbolic victories/while giving the real winnings to their friends and people they hope will be their friends after they do them favors while in office!With Obama, it was bail out the bankers instead of the homeowners with 'liar loans'; focus on a small..mostly symbolic immigration issue of DACA and 'Dreamers' while expanding budgets for ICE, border policing and detention cells for undocumented migrants, and even separating family members in detention; talking peace while expanding military, drone warfare and adding more warfronts; commiserating about police shootings of young black men/while avoiding issues like policing reforms or reforming taxation policies so that poorer minority-dominated cities can afford decent public schools, clean water and other public services instead of more expensive, oppressive and intrusive policing as the one and only solution for urban crime and related issues.So, conservatives offer their followers symbolism and liberals try to do the same thing it seems! The real difference is that the most ruthless and nauseous policies come from rightwing administrations. It would just be good for once, if the "left" had the balls to dial them back when they get in power. Israels air defenses that were busy in recent weeks repelling rocket attacks from Syria and the Gaza strip succeeded yesterday, for the first time, to defeat mortar attacks that targeted border villages. Among the targets intercepted yesterday by the improved version of the Iron Dome were dozens of rockets and, for the first time, mortar bombs (likely 81mm) fired by the Islamic Jihad terror organization. As a short-range weapon with typical high ballistic trajectory, the mortars accuracy and lethality make it a practical and dangerous weapon which is challenging to locate and defeat. Thats what makes the Iron Domes achievement remarkable. Iron Dome relies on a radar that detects ballistic threats such as rockets, artillery projectiles, and mortar shells, as they appear over the radar horizon. The radar tracks each threat, plotting the launch and projected impact point for each projectile, to enable the battle management system to determine which of them is a potential risk those who would hit populated areas would be prioritized for intercept, over others that are projected to hit open spaces. When the system engages rockets with a flight time of tens, even hundreds of seconds, it has enough time to process all that data and optimize the intercepts. But when facing mortars with a short flight time of 10-30 seconds, time is the most critical factor for intercept. In the four years since operation Pillar of Defense, the last conflict that erupted between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, Iron Dome went through several spiral developmental cycles to expand the systems capabilities against new threats, such as unmanned aerial vehicles and mortars. Yesterday, the system demonstrated for the first time, in combat conditions, its capacity to defeat a barrage of mortar bombs. Existing C-RAM assets cannot intercept mortar bombs, as they mostly provide an alert enabling the people at risk to take cover. Directed energy defensive approaches to C-RAM, based on high-energy lasers have yet to mature to achieve readiness levels for operational use, while other Short-Range Air Defenses (SHORAD) that are optimized against aircraft and air-launched precision-guided weapons lack the quick response to react and engage such ground-launched threats. Among the improvements introduced with the Iron Dome were new surveillance modes for the radar, improving the detection and tracking speed, accelerated battle management processing addressing counter-mortar capabilities, and adaptation in the Tamir interceptor missiles to address these specific threats. All these improvements enable the system to safely destroy most of the bombs before they hit their targets. Rail traffic suspended : Storms cause flooding in NRW Essen Heavy rains around Aachen on Tuesday led to flooding, causing car accidents and train cancellations. Rail traffic was suspended in Wuppertal after the tracks were washed over. Teilen Teilen Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Tweeten Tweeten Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Drucken Strong thunderstorms and heavy rains hit North Rhine-Westphalia on Tuesday afternoon and caused damage especially in and around Wuppertal and Aachen. In Wuppertal, several cars drove into a manhole cover which had been forced up by the water. In one case, an air bag was triggered, injuring the driver in the face, according to a police spokeswoman. At a gas station in the city center, the roof buckled. Numerous roads were flooded and there were also several fallen trees. In at least one case, the water reached a depth of around 70 centimeters. Deutsche Bahn suspended rail traffic in the Wuppertal area after railroad tracks were washed over. The suspension railway also ceased operations. "In Wuppertal, the entire city is under water," said a spokesman for the German Weather Service in Essen late in the afternoon. He estimated that more than 40 liters of rain per square meter had fallen there in a short time. There was also heavy rainfall in Aachen. There, the fire department registered 450 emergency calls in the late afternoon. A request was made for help from neighboring municipalities, a spokesman said. In a district of Aachen, the power was temporarily cut off after flooding caused a short circuit in a transformer house. Because of the storm, a commemoration ceremony for the 25th anniversary of an arson attack in Solingen was canceled. A downpour during the event sent hundreds of participants seeking shelter under the trees. Organizers then requested that the visitors leave the village, in both German and Turkish. Water rushed into cellars in the Monschau area. In Duisburg, water burst into the basement of the police headquarters, as they reported via Twitter. Rail traffic was also affected in other parts of North Rhine-Westphalia. Delays occurred, for example, in the regions of Duisburg, Oberhausen, Gelsenkirchen, Aachen and in the district of Euskirchen. Even in the Hilden area the trains were temporarily kept waiting at train stations. Near Nettersheim, Autobahn 1 was flooded. At times, the road had to be closed in the direction of Blankenheim. The German Weather Service repeatedly issued official warnings of thunderstorms beginning in the afternoon on Tuesday. A DWD expert expected the storms to be through overnight into Wednesday. President Of Actors Guild Of Nigeria, Emeka Rollas Speaks On Being Gay & Having Anal Surgery Twice clarajancita at 30-05-2018 11:19 AM (3 years ago) (f) President of Actors Guild of Nigeria,AGN Emeka Rollas has finally addressed speculations suggesting he is gay following his anal surgeries. There were rumours the AGN president was practising homosexuality after he underwent two anal surgeries outside Nigeria. President of Actors Guild of Nigeria,AGN Emeka Rollas has finally addressed speculations suggesting he is gay following his anal surgeries. There were rumours the AGN president was practising homosexuality after he underwent two anal surgeries outside Nigeria. However, speaking in an interview with us, Rollas stated that he enjoys having sex with his wife who has seven children for him. He explained that he had anal surgery after detection of Anal Fistula and had to be operated on in India. Rollas said: However, speaking in an interview with us, Rollas stated that he enjoys having sex with his wife who has seven children for him. He explained that he had anal surgery after detection of Anal Fistula and had to be operated on in India.Rollas said: Quote Let me address the sexuality issues I heard sometime ago. The ignorance level of some people caused this as some of them failed to check up the name of my ailment. First of all I had anal fistula which is a skin problem that can happen to any parts of your body and needs to be cut off through surgery. I had the first anal surgery in 2012 after I suffered from haemorrhoid, someone told me to take herbs to cure it which later made it worse and made me fly to India for surgery. But after four years later, I had a relapse but this time I chose to go to America to have the second surgery. Most people talking about me did not know what happened because they heard anal they started questioning if I was gay. On why he did not address the public on the issue, Rollas said I did not address the issue of my sexuality earlier because it would have ran into a case of Daddy Freeze and Pentecostal church. For crying out loud I have seven kids with my wife, if I can have sex with my wife and have children why would I be looking the other way. Some of these things come as a celebrity, if you keep responding to such rumours you are wasting your time. Post Reply I am a metro reporter on Gistmania, I have been publishing news materials for over 5 years Posted: at 30-05-2018 11:19 AM (3 years ago) | Hero ruthie at 30-05-2018 11:35 AM (3 years ago) (f) TRUE TALK...LIKE RESPONDING TO SOME A*#SS HERE IS BENEATH ME... Posted: at 30-05-2018 11:35 AM (3 years ago) | Hero TRUE TALK...LIKE RESPONDING TO SOME A*#SS HERE IS BENEATH ME... Reply kaposky at 30-05-2018 11:52 AM (3 years ago) (m) Quote from: ruthie on 30-05-2018 11:35 AM TRUE TALK...LIKE RESPONDING TO SOME A*#SS HERE IS BENEATH ME... EMEKA ROLLAS, WE HEAR U, BUT INCASE U STILL WANT TO START phyukING THROUGH SOMEBODY,S ASS, ABEG CONTACT RUTHIE, BECAUSE SHE IS AN ANAL SEX EXPERT, HER ANUS NOW IS EVEN WIDER THAN HER PU.SSY.THANKS Posted: at 30-05-2018 11:52 AM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac EMEKA ROLLAS, WE HEAR U, BUT INCASE U STILL WANT TO START phyukING THROUGH SOMEBODY,S ASS, ABEG CONTACT RUTHIE, BECAUSE SHE IS AN ANAL SEX EXPERT, HER ANUS NOW IS EVEN WIDER THAN HER PU.SSY.THANKS Reply kaposky at 30-05-2018 11:58 AM (3 years ago) (m) Quote from: ruthie on 30-05-2018 11:35 AM TRUE TALK...LIKE RESPONDING TO SOME A*#SS HERE IS BENEATH ME... EMEKA ROLLAS, WE HEAR U, BUT INCASE U STILL WANT TO START FU.CKING THROUGH SOMEBODY,S ASS, ABEG CONTACT RUTHIE, BECAUSE SHE IS AN ANAL SEX EXPERT, HER ANUS NOW IS EVEN WIDER THAN HER PU.SSY.THANKS Posted: at 30-05-2018 11:58 AM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac EMEKA ROLLAS, WE HEAR U, BUT INCASE U STILL WANT TO START FU.CKING THROUGH SOMEBODY,S ASS, ABEG CONTACT RUTHIE, BECAUSE SHE IS AN ANAL SEX EXPERT, HER ANUS NOW IS EVEN WIDER THAN HER PU.SSY.THANKS Reply ruthie at 30-05-2018 12:16 PM (3 years ago) (f) you and your entire generation are a bunch of fools....its obvious...you can add ya mama and sisters to the list since u r an expert in the olosho biz...BANZA! Quote from: kaposky on 30-05-2018 11:52 AM EMEKA ROLLAS, WE HEAR U, BUT INCASE U STILL WANT TO START phyukING THROUGH SOMEBODY,S ASS, ABEG CONTACT RUTHIE, BECAUSE SHE IS AN ANAL SEX EXPERT, HER ANUS NOW IS EVEN WIDER THAN HER PU.SSY.THANKS Posted: at 30-05-2018 12:16 PM (3 years ago) | Hero you and your entire generation are a bunch of fools....its obvious...you can add ya mama and sisters to the list since u r an expert in the olosho biz...BANZA! Reply kaposky at 30-05-2018 12:21 PM (3 years ago) (m) Quote from: ruthie on 30-05-2018 12:16 PM you and your entire generation are a bunch of fools....its obvious...you can add ya mama and sisters to the list since u r an expert in the olosho biz...BANZA! , HAHAHAHHA SHE DON SPEAK HAUSA BY FORCE, COME JOIN AM YORUBA, U BLOODY BITCH, NA ME AND U FOR THIS FORUM.U SMELLING ROTTEN PU.SSY IDIOT Posted: at 30-05-2018 12:21 PM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac , HAHAHAHHA SHE DON SPEAK HAUSA BY FORCE, COME JOIN AM YORUBA, U BLOODY BITCH, NA ME AND U FOR THIS FORUM.U SMELLING ROTTEN PU.SSY IDIOT Reply ruthie at 30-05-2018 12:32 PM (3 years ago) (f) .... U R A DISGRACE TO YOURSELF....MAD COW....I JUST PITY THE WOMAN WHO RAISED YOU...SHE SUCCEEDED IN RAISING A honeypot LOVING c*@t.. Quote from: kaposky on 30-05-2018 12:21 PM , HAHAHAHHA SHE DON SPEAK HAUSA BY FORCE, COME JOIN AM YORUBA, U BLOODY BITCH, NA ME AND U FOR THIS FORUM.U SMELLING ROTTEN PU.SSY IDIOT , HAHAHAHHA SHE DON SPEAK HAUSA BY FORCE, COME JOIN AM YORUBA, U BLOODY BITCH, NA ME AND U FOR THIS FORUM.U SMELLING ROTTEN PU.SSY IDIOT Posted: at 30-05-2018 12:32 PM (3 years ago) | Hero .... U R A DISGRACE TO YOURSELF....MAD COW....I JUST PITY THE WOMAN WHO RAISED YOU...SHE SUCCEEDED IN RAISING A honeypot LOVING c*@t.. Reply Anthonyp7 at 30-05-2018 12:39 PM (3 years ago) (m) Get in touch with my fixed odd, 100% sure,no pain no regret,no chance of losing at all,congrats to all my subscribers,call or whatsapp me via+2348067174861(NO FREE GAMES WE ONLY ACCEPT INSTRUMENTAL PAYMENT). Posted: at 30-05-2018 12:39 PM (3 years ago) | Newbie Get in touch with my fixed odd, 100% sure,no pain no regret,no chance of losing at all,congrats to all my subscribers,call or whatsapp me via+2348067174861(NO FREE GAMES WE ONLY ACCEPT INSTRUMENTAL PAYMENT). Reply chukkychukky at 30-05-2018 12:53 PM (3 years ago) (m) if ur a gay and so? Joramentity aka chukkychukky Posted: at 30-05-2018 12:53 PM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac if ur a gay and so? Reply nature7888 at 30-05-2018 01:16 PM (3 years ago) (m) OK Rollas Posted: at 30-05-2018 01:16 PM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac OK Rollas Reply osarobo62 at 30-05-2018 01:58 PM (3 years ago) (m) Having a wife and some kids does not mean you can't be gay...nowadays, people play both sides of the field Posted: at 30-05-2018 01:58 PM (3 years ago) | Hero Reply slimber at 30-05-2018 04:30 PM (3 years ago) (f) Issorite Posted: at 30-05-2018 04:30 PM (3 years ago) | Hero Issorite Reply james987 at 31-05-2018 06:31 AM (3 years ago) (m) Wetin come scatter that area? We know say gayism dey nollywood no be today. Posted: at 31-05-2018 06:31 AM (3 years ago) | Hero Wetin come scatter that area? We know say gayism dey nollywood no be today. Reply Toronto, Canada, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Helix TCS, Inc. (OTCQB: HLIX), the leading provider of integrated operating environment solutions for the legal cannabis industry, announced its partnership with Timeless Herbal Care (Timeless), a leading Jamaican cannabis grower, to provide a wide range of services to Timeless as they begin full operations in Jamaica. The Letter of Intent, signed on 24 May in Toronto, lays the groundwork for comprehensive agreements that are expected to see Helix provide services to Timeless in the areas of security, local and international transport, market advisory, and establishing the legal wholesale market in Jamaica. Zachary L. Venegas, Chairman and CEO of Helix TCS, stated: As the only fully integrated solutions provider to the Legal Cannabis Industry, we are excited to partner with a firm that will be able to use the full suite of our services to accelerate their growth and set the international standard for market development. Timeless focus on developing the Jamaican Cannabis market in an organic and inclusive way, with their emphasis on the local, Jamaican farmers success, is a perfect match for Helix approach and deep experience in frontier markets. We look forward to beginning operations in the coming weeks. Courtney Betty, Timeless Herbal Care Limiteds founder and CEO, said: Timeless, as Jamaicas leading medical marijuana brand, has always aligned with the Best of the Best. Zac has demonstrated a tremendous understanding of the industry and the ancillary services which will play a major role. With a wide range of areas of support, Helix presents an experienced strategic partner for Timeless both in Jamaica and the international market. We are pleased to welcome Helix to Jamaica and look forward to the partnership with Timeless. About Helix TCS Helix TCS, Inc. (OTCQB: HLIX) is a premier provider of integrated operating environment solutions for the legal cannabis industry. Helix provides a proprietary software suite and partnership platform to the legal cannabis industry, helping clients manage inventory and supply costs and bespoke monitoring and transport solutions. Helix provides clients in the legal cannabis industry high standard security operations, including transportation, armed and unarmed guarding, training, investigation, and special services. About Timeless Herbal Care Limited Timeless Herbal Care Limited (www.timelessherbalcare.com) is a fully integrated Licensed Producer in Jamaica. The company is focused on producing extracted cannabis oil for the international market as well as specific value added products for the local tourist market. The company has built strong alliances with best in class leading edge companies. Forward-Looking Statements Except for historical information, all of the statements, expectations, and assumptions contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. Actual results might differ materially from those explicit or implicit in the forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: our ability to fund our operations and pay any outstanding debt; fluctuations in our financial results; general economic risks; the volatile nature of the market for our products and services and other factors that could impact our anticipated growth; our ability to manage our growth; changes in laws and regulations regarding the cannabis industry and service providers in the cannabis industry; reliance on key personnel; our ability to compete effectively; security and other risks associated with our business; intellectual property risks; and other risk factors set forth from time to time in our SEC filings. Helix TCS assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. 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 But I dont want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you cant help that," said the Cat: "were all mad here. Im mad. Youre mad." "How do you know Im mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldnt have come here. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland With freedom comes responsibility. Eleanor Roosevelt The Goal of Enhanced Accessibility Compliance Before CivicEngage and AudioEye Implementation Accessibility Compliance and Remediation Functionality Achieving the Highest Possible Accessibility Standards The City of Portsmouth, VA Tackles Website Accessibility Head-OnThey say that Virginia is for lovers, and in the City of Portsmouth, there is much to love. With three centuries of historic neighborhoods nestled along the Chesapeake Bay, The City of Portsmouth is the type of community families love to visit, and that residents never want to leave. The municipal leaders in Portsmouth work hard to protect their community and their citizens and strive to give residents and visitors every opportunity to benefit from public service offerings and maximize all the City has to offer. In todays world of digital-first communications and mobile device proliferation, a successful citizen engagement strategy has to focus on equitable and easy access to digital news, information, and resources, which is why the City of Portsmouth has long been committed to a digital content strategy that aims to ensure accessibility.With the latest updates to Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) raising awareness of accessibility compliance at the municipal level, the City of Portsmouths Information Technology (IT) leadership decided it was an opportunity for it to enhance its accessibility offering for even greater compliance. To take advantage of the latest innovations in digital accessibility, the City of Portsmouth turned to its website design and hosting partner, CivicPlus for support.According to Daniel Jones, City of Portsmouth Chief Information Officer, while the City had always worked diligently to ensure its website was accessible to all citizens, the 2018 refresh of Section 508 of the ADA provided an opportunity for the Citys leaders to ask what else it could be doing to ensure accessibility.We are here to serve all the citizens of the City of Portsmouth, said Jones. That includes citizens who are technology-advanced, citizens who are less familiar with digital media, and citizens who rely on assistive technology devices to consume digital media. We believe all citizens should have access to our Citys resources, so while we were watching the conversations regarding ADA compliance as it was impacting federal websites, we reached out to our CivicPlus account manager to ask if there was an integrated solution that could be incorporated into our current platform. Soon after, CivicPlus announced its partnership with AudioEye.In the fall of 2017, CivicPlus partnered with AudioEye, Inc. to provide enhanced ADA-related digital accessibility capabilities to its local government website design clients that utilize its CivicEngage content management system (CMS). AudioEye offers industry-leading software that enables public and private sector entities to make their content more consumable through technology. The AudioEye technology platform monitors websites as they grow, automatically fixing issues to ensure accessibility compliance using a range of assistive technology.Before integrating the AudioEye solution into its CivicEngage website, the City of Portsmouths digital administrators worked diligently to maintain digital compliance through a manual process of content management.Especially after the migration to CivicPlus we concentrated on fostering a mindset of ongoing compliance, said Jones. As best as we could, we manually took steps to ensure our text, photo, and video content was compliant so that our website was as accessible as we could make it. Our goal was to ensure an accessible experience for any citizen using assistive technology.While ongoing compliance became a City-wide goal, it has meant a continual commitment to content creation, updates, and optimization.Jones and his IT staff were primarily responsible for working with CivicPlus and AudioEye to implement the accessibility remediation solution.It was not a lengthy implementation process, said Jones. We reviewed AudioEyes solution to ensure it met or exceeded our security standards, which it did, so we held a kick-off call, established due dates and deliverables, and moved forward. Currently, the integration has completed phases two of three and has enabled citizens to begin to use the assistive technology while interacting with our municipal government.In addition to the implementation of AudioEyes website monitoring functionality, the City of Portsmouth chose to implement AudioEyes Ally Toolbar feature. The Ally Toolbar is a proprietary assistive tool that can be placed directly on a website, allowing users to customize their individual website experience. It offers users a wide range of assistive capabilities, including a dyslexic font, adjustments to color contrast, font size and navigation, keyboard controls, a player that will read site content aloud, and the ability to use voice commands to navigate.For the City of Portsmouth, improving its websites accessibility is not about complying with laws and mandates. It is about doing what is best for the citizens it serves.We feel that just because Section 508 currently applies only to federal websites and not local government websites is not a reason not to make improvements to better serve our citizenship, said Jones. The implementation of CivicPlus AudioEye solution not only allows us to offer citizens a better experience, but it also provides us with access to a subject matter expert on digital compliance, which alleviates most of our concerns regarding Section 508. Our IT Department is a support department. We are responsible for various monumental tasks. Having an internal staff member certified in compliance and trained to act as our dedicated subject matter expert on Section 508 is not feasible, and fortunately, its not necessary since we have CivicPlus as a partner that can provide us with an accessibility solution as part of its offering.Even with the implementation of the AudioEye solution, Jones and all of the digital content managers in the City of Portsmouth are not allowing their focus on accessibility to waver.We will continue to follow the same processes of optimizing content when we add or update pages, said Jones. AudioEyes solution may be our last line of defense, but it is still our job to follow compliance best practices, and that is exactly what we intend to do. The race for governor in Minnesota will likely be one of the nation's closest this year, but neither party appears to be satisfied with its leading candidate.The race is open because incumbent Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton decided not to seek reelection. Both parties are holding their state conventions this weekend, with formal endorsements of gubernatorial candidates set for Saturday.But the top candidates on both sides have a problem."There are two front-runners no one is enthusiastic about and may limp to a nomination," says David Schultz, a political scientist at Hamline University.The leading Republican candidate, former Gov. Tim Pawlenty who officially announced his candidacy in April , had been out of the political game since his poor showing in the 2012 presidential race. He's finding that his party has since changed in ways that are putting his prospects to the test."Not only is he open to Democratic attacks, but he's also weak among the base," says Larry Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist. "He is not even running for the party endorsement, having accepted the reality that he couldn't win or even block [Hennepin County Commissioner] Jeff Johnson from winning the endorsement. The former governor is that disliked among Republicans."But Jacobs stresses that Pawlenty remains a skilled candidate and a formidable fundraiser. Most people in Minnesota political circles believe he will end up winning the voters' nomination in the Aug. 14 primary, given Johnson's weak fundraising efforts.Democrats, meanwhile, are nervous that Congressman Tim Walz, who has been leading the field in terms of fundraising and endorsements, is himself not the sort of exciting candidate who sets political hearts throbbing."Walz is the front-runner but has the DFL establishment increasingly worried that he's out of his league," Jacobs says. (In Minnesota, the party is known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, or DFL.)To earn the party's endorsement this weekend, Walz must win 60 percent of the votes from convention delegates. His main challenger has appeared to be state Auditor Rebecca Otto, but the candidacy of state Rep. Erin Murphy, who has picked up some key labor endorsements, appears to be gaining momentum."The numbers just aren't clear," says state Sen. Matt Little, a Walz supporter. "Even the internal numbers that folks have aren't an exact number. People change their minds."Walz represents parts of southern Minnesota, and he has taken some more conservative positions in Congress that now aren't playing well in the progressive wing of a party increasingly dominated by urban liberals in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. In 2015, for instance, Walz voted to tighten screening on refugees coming from Syria and Iraq, a stance for which even his running mate, state Rep. Peggy Flanagan, has publicly given him grief. Walz has accepted campaign donations over the years from the National Rifle Association (NRA), but he has recently donated them to charity, saying his stance on gun issues has evolved given recent mass shootings.Like a lot of "establishment" Democratic candidates this year, Walz finds himself under attack from the party's rising left flank."Tim Walz's lack of support for single-payer health care and his long history of pro-NRA, pro-pipeline, pro-mining, anti-refugee, pro-drilling, anti-wildlife votes may not inspire the Metro DFL to turn out," Otto's campaign website warns.Sen. Little believes Walz still has "a pretty solid chance of winning the endorsement." If he fails, the primary season will become more expensive and difficult for him. He'll face attacks from the left heading into a low turnout, midsummer primary. But so far this year, Democratic establishment candidates have fared pretty well against more progressive challengers."Dayton was never endorsed by the DFL and went on to win and become beloved by all parts of the party," Little says.On the Republican side, Johnson has attacked Pawlenty for shying away from the endorsement battle."If he can't even compete for the support of his base, he'll be a disaster in the general election," Johnson said when Pawlenty announced his decision to skip the process.Little says it's a "little disingenuous" for Pawlenty to claim he got into the race too late to compete -- he had clearly been exploring the run for about a year. Pawlenty has opened himself up to populist attacks through his recent work as head of the Financial Services Roundtable, a Wall Street trade association. He has also had to fend off charges from Johnson that he was an extremely late convert to Donald Trump's candidacy in 2016.Greg Bartz, who chairs the Brown County GOP, describes himself as "disappointed" that Pawlenty didn't even give the endorsement process a go."I really thought he was a great governor for eight years, but if you're running for office, you need to come out where the voters are," Bartz says. "When people running for office more or less ignore you, that is really disappointing. It's hard to volunteer for someone who kind of ignores you."Minnesota is seen from the outside as a blue state. No Republican has won statewide office since Pawlenty himself in 2006, and Minnesota has the longest unbroken streak of voting for Democratic presidential candidates of any state, due to its singular support for home-state nominee Walter Mondale in 1984.But Trump came close to winning the state in 2016, taking 44.9 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton's 46.4 percent. Trump carried some traditionally Democratic parts of Minnesota, notably the old union mining area in the northeast known as the Iron Range. Barack Obama carried the state's 8th congressional district in both his presidential elections, but Trump won it decisively, defeating Clinton by 15 percentage points.That district, which is open this year, represents one of the Republican Party's best pickup opportunities for the U.S. House. Half the state's eight congressional races are considered tossups or highly competitive this year, meaning a great deal of outside money will come flooding in. That's on top of two U.S. Senate races, with the seat vacated by Democrat Al Franken and now held by Tina Smith considered sufficiently competitive to draw big money."We may just see tens of millions of dollars poured into this election," Schulz says.Democrats, including the eventual nominee for governor, will be counting on the popularity of U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar to boost their ticket as a whole. They'll be hoping that enthusiasm for her and concerns about Trump will drive their voters to the polls."With all the campaigns that are going to be drawing national attention, it's kind of odd that the governor's race could fall into the backdrop," Sen. Little says. "That never happens here. Usually the governor's race is the most closely watched. But if you're a governor candidate, your $4 million or $5 million is going to seem like nothing for a media buy." Since the Trump administration greenlit state governments in January to add work requirements to their Medicaid programs, many conservative states have seized on the opportunity. The concept of making work a requirement for people living in poverty to get free health insurance is a controversial one. But the exceptions to these work requirements are generating controversy of their own.In Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio, Republicans -- who control the legislature in those states -- have proposed exempting counties with high unemployment from the work requirements.Supporters argue that work requirements will incentivize people to get or stay employed and eventually stop using Medicaid.Generally speaking, the counties that would be relieved from the proposed exemptions lack jobs and public transportation.Critics, which are mostly Democrats, don't like that work requirements would leave some people uninsured -- but they also don't like the unemployment exemption because they say it would give a pass to predominantly white rural counties and not urban areas with majority-black populations.An analysis by found that exempting Michigan's high unemployment counties-- but not cities -- would disproportionately impact black and white people. Black people make up 23 percent of the population subject to a work requirement but only 1.2 percent of the population that would be eligible for the exemption. White people, meanwhile, make up 57 percent of the population subject to a work requirement but 85 percent of the population that would be eligible for the exemption.Take Detroit and Flint, for example. Both majority-black cities have unemployment rates above 8.5 percent, which is the threshold for triggering an exemption. But because they are in counties with an average unemployment rate below 8.5 percent, they are not shielded from the work requirement.Only a narrow slice of Michigan's Medicaid population -- regardless of race -- would be protected by the unemployment exemption. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a left-leaning think tank, found that only 3 percent ofMichigandersfacing the new work requirement live in high unemployment counties. The CBPP has called the bill "unfixable."Two law professors from the University of Michigan raise the possibility that the unemployment exemption could violate residents' civil rights. The professors also question the underlying premise of providing relief from work requirements based on geography."If work requirements were a good idea, conservative Michigan legislators wouldnt need to exempt their rural constituents," they wrote Medicaid would not be the first federal safety net program where work requirements can be waived for certain geographic areas. States are allowed to seek similar work requirement waivers for food stamps -- though the Trump administration has proposed eliminating some of those.Nevertheless, the Michigan Legislature has since abandoned the exemption for counties with high unemployment, saying it would have been too difficult to administer. But the bill's sponsor, Republican state Sen. Mike Shirkey, denied that the criticism about inequitable racial or geographic impacts killed the exemption."While it may have been a good idea, it's not a good idea from the standpoint of complexity and ability to administer. So that's the reason it's being removed," he told the. "It has nothing to do with these ridiculous claims."Meanwhile, the policy still has a chance elsewhere.States need federal approval to implement work requirements and any exemptions to them. Ohio submitted its waiver request this month. Kentucky won federal approval but is facing a court challenge that could block the changes from going into effect.In Michigan, the legislature still plans to send a bill to GOP Gov. Rick Snyder that would add work requirements but have no exceptions for counties with high unemployment. In April, Snyder called the Senate version of the bill "neither a reasonable nor responsible change to the states social safety net," but he stopped short of saying he would issue a veto.Flint Mayor Karen Weaver is among the critics of work requirements. She worries that having fewer people insured will hamper her city's ability to address ongoing public health problems related to lead poisoning in Flint's water. Out of about 700,000 Medicaid beneficiaries who would be subject to the work requirementin Michigan, roughly 105,000 are expected to lose coverage. Weaver called on Snyder to veto the work requirement legislation."Medicaid is a health program and not a jobs program," she wrote.Michigan's bill would require an average of 29 hours a week of certain work activities, such as employment, education and job training, to qualify for Medicaid coverage. For those found to be out of compliance, the state would issue a warning and give 30 days to fulfill the work requirement -- or else lose Medicaid for a year.All this controversy comes amid a larger national debate over Republican proposals in Washington to radically reshape several of the largest federal anti-poverty programs.The Trump administration has called for adding work requirements to federal housing assistance. The recently defeated House farm bill would have imposed stricter work requirements on more food stamp recipients, including parents of school-aged children.As for Medicaid work requirements, the federal government has approved waivers for them in Kentucky, Indiana, Arkansas and New Hampshire. Another six states have pending applications. Michigan could be next. Idaho Nebraska Utah After years of rejecting Democratic governors' pleas to expand Medicaid, the Republican-controlled Virginia Senate voted on Wednesday to join the more than 30 other states that have.Republicans have historically opposed making more low-income people eligible for the government health insurance program. Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Obama's signature legislation, the federal government pays at least percent of the costs for any state that expands. But Republican-led states have been slow to expand Medicaid, and nearly 20 of them still have not.There are two main reasons the tide has turned in Virginia. Democrats gained seats in the conservative-leaning legislature last fall. And earlier this year, the Trump administration made expansion more enticing for some Republicans by letting states add new eligibility rules, such as work requirements and time limits -- provisions that the Obama administration denied.The budget, which is expected to pass the state House as early as today and to be signed by Gov. Ralph Northam, includes work requirements for Medicaid.Without expansion, more than 300,000 Virginians fall into a coverage gap of making too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford health insurance."In Virginia, if youre a family of three and making more than $6,700 a year, you dont qualify for Medicaid now. Can you imagine a family of three getting by on that? Thats just not something I think is doable, Chris Peace, a Republican delegate in the Virginia House, toldin March. Peace supports expansion with caveats, calling it a way to practice compassionate conservatism.This comes on the heels of reports that Congressional Republicans are poised to resurrect a repeal of so-called Obamacare this summer. They spent the greater part of President Trump's first year in office trying and failing to get rid of it. Congress was able, however, to eliminate a major part of the law -- the requirement for people to have health insurance or face a tax penalty -- as part of the tax bill they passed in December. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that, largely because Congress eliminated the individual mandate, millions more will go uninsured.Meanwhile, the issue will likely be moving to the ballot box this fall.Last year, Maine was the first state where voters got a say on Medicaid expansion, and they overwhelmingly approved it. The vote inspired advocates in other states to pursue similar initiatives.In Maine, though, the Republican governor -- who had vetoed five Medicaid expansion bills and who is often compared to Trump -- has built barriers to implementing expansion. Gov. Paul LePage said he wouldn't implement Medicaid expansion unless the state legislature figures out how to fund it. Attorney General Janet Mills, a Democrat running for governor, said the state could use ongoing tobacco settlement payments, but LePage rebuffed that idea.The deadline to fund the expansion has come and gone.Last month, advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the governor, arguing that he legally has to expand Medicaid.Regardless of what happens in Maine, three other states could vote on Medicaid expansion in November.When GOP Gov. Butch Otter said in his 2013 State of the State address that he wouldn't pursue Medicaid expansion, that more or less ended any serious conversation about it in the state.Until this year.In April, an advocacy group called Reclaim Idaho said they had collected the 56,000 signatures needed to get Medicaid expansion on the ballot this fall. If approved, it would cover an additional 78,000 residents who fall into a coverage gap.But even if it gets certified, will voters approve of expanding Obamacare in a red state? Probably. A Boise State University poll in December found that 75 percent of residents would support closing the coverage gap.And unlike in Maine, whoever wins the governor's race in November will likely approve the measure. The Republican candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Brad Little, said he would honor what voters want. Democractic candidate Paulette Jordan, predictably, supports expansion.Nebraska Democrats have tried and failed for the past several years to gain any meaningful traction for a Medicaid expansion bill in the legislature. So advocates are taking the issue straight to the voters.Adam Morfeld, a Democratic state senator, said Maines vote last fall gave supporters some hope."[Maine's vote] reshapes the debate. My district is one of the top five in the state where people fall in that coverage gap, so Im constantly hearing about the need for more affordable health care, Morfeld toldlast year.The petition-gathering phase is still underway, but organizers -- a group called Insure the Good Life -- have indicated that they are on track to reach the required 85,000 signatures by July 5.GOP Gov. Pete Ricketts, who is running for reelection, is steadfastly opposed to Medicaid expansion but hasn't said if he would try to override it if voters approved it. Bob Krist, his Democratic opponent, supports expansion.To be clear, Utah has already passed some form of Medicaid expansion. Twice. But advocates say it hasnt gone far enough.In 2017, the Trump administration signed off on a waiver from Utah to let the state expand Medicaid to a small slice of the chronically homeless and mentally ill suffering from addiction. And earlier this year, GOP Gov. Gary Herbert signed a bill that would depart from traditional Medicaid expansion. It is awaiting federal approval, and officials say it could take up to a year before officials make a decision.The state is asking to add work requirements, end the expansion if federal officials lower their contribution from 90 percent, and set an eligibility limit that stops at the poverty line, which is $12,140 for a single person.Herbert signaled a willingness to expand Medicaid more traditionally in the past but couldnt come to an agreement with the Republican-led legislature.This fall, Utahans have a chance to vote on full expansion. The group, Utah Decides Healthcare, has collected more than the required 113,000 signatures to appear on the ballot. Polls conducted last fall showed widespread support for traditional expansion, with 60 percent of the state's population in favor.It's unclear what would happen in the event that the federal waiver is approvedthe ballot measure passes. The Supreme Court has refused -- for now -- to block an Arkansas abortion law that could prevent most women there from ending their early pregnancies with medication.The justices, without comment or dissent, refused to hear an appeal from the Planned Parenthood Federation, which said the state's law, if put into effect, would leave most women without access to a doctor who can provide medication that will bring about an abortion.The case is not over, however. It returns now to a district court judge, who could put the law on hold again. And while the move was a setback for Planned Parenthood, the lack of dissents from the liberal justices suggests the court's action was based more on procedure than substance.The dispute almost certainly will return to the Supreme Court after the lower court judges rule on the constitutionality of the Arkansas law.But Tuesday's action shows again that the high court is not eager to take up disputes over abortion regulations.Two years ago, the Supreme Court by a 5-3 vote struck down a Texas law that imposed strict regulations on abortion clinics that had caused most of them to close. The majority, including Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, concluded the Texas law imposed "an undue burden" on women seeking abortions under the guise of protecting their health and safety.Lawyers for Planned Parenthood had hoped the high court would quickly block the Arkansas law because, they said, it is "strikingly similar" to the Texas measure.In their appeal, they told the justices that the restriction on drug-induced abortions was "enacted supposedly to protect women's health [but] is medically unnecessary. If allowed to take effect, it would make Arkansas the only state to effectively ban medication abortion, a common method of early abortion that has been safely used by over two million American women since its approval in 2000. It would also leave only one remaining abortion provider in the entire state of more than 53,000 square miles."At issue is a provision in a 2015 law that requires a doctor who prescribes or dispenses an "abortion-inducing drug shall have a signed contract with a physician who agrees to handle complications."State legislators said these contract relationships are needed to make sure women receive emergency care if they encounter complications, including excessive bleeding.Abortion-rights advocates argued this legal restriction is unnecessary as a matter of medical safety. They said complications are rare, and in such circumstances, it is best for a patient to go immediately to an emergency room, not to seek out a second doctor who may be many miles away.Further, Planned Parenthood's lawyers say this restriction works to outlaw such abortions entirely. They say other physicians in the state have refused to enter into contracts with abortion providers. They said the law would force the closure of its abortion providers in Little Rock and Fayetteville, both of which rely on medication. A privately run facility in Little Rock would remain in business and provide surgical abortions.Arkansas Atty. Gen. Leslie Rutledge urged the court to turn down the appeal. She said her state's law differs from the Texas measure. It does not require abortion doctors to have "admitting privileges" at a nearby hospital, as Texas had required, but instead says they must have a working agreement with another doctor who can handle emergencies. She also said a high court review now would be premature.On Tuesday, in response to the high court's action, she urged the 8th Circuit Court to allow the state law to go into effect immediately.Two years ago, a federal district judge had blocked the Arkansas law on the grounds it was obviously unconstitutional. However, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals set aside that ruling last year and told the district judge to look more closely at how many women would be affected if the law were to take effect.Planned Parenthood opted to appeal directly to the Supreme Court.The justices sometimes spend weeks debating behind closed doors whether to hear a potentially significant case. The appeal in the Arkansas case -- Planned Parenthood of Arkansas vs. Jegley -- came before the justices late last week, and it was immediately turned down. Child marriages are more common than you think. Roughly 200,000 minors have gotten married since the start of the century. Nearly 90 percent of those child marriages involve a young bride, under the age of 18, and an older man -- sometimes decades older. Under such circumstances, says Arizona state Rep. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, its not difficult to think of all the potential abuses.Legislators have heard testimony from women who were forced to marry their rapists when they were as young as 11. There have also been scattered reports of marriage being used as a tool in child trafficking. Ugenti-Rita sponsored a new law, enacted in April, which banned marriages for children under the age of 16, while requiring 16- and 17-year-olds to receive permission from their parents. When a minor is getting married, the age gap between the bride and groom, under the new law, can be no greater than three years.Advocacy groups such as the Tahirih Justice Center and Unchained At Last are pushing states to raise the minimum age for marriage to 18, without exceptions. Last month, Delaware became the first state to fully ban child marriage, even with parental approval. But its proving to be a tough sell elsewhere. Lawmakers have shown themselves open to imposing higher age limits and to adding safeguards for minors allowed to marry, such as parental consent. Florida and Kentucky both passed laws this year raising the floor for child marriages to 17 and 18, respectively, following similar actions taken since 2016 in Connecticut, New York, Texas and Virginia.States shouldnt sanction relationships they would punish if marriage werent involved, opponents of child marriage contend. Some even condone marriage when it results from statutory rape, writes Nicholas Syrett, a University of Kansas professor and author of. In many cases, district attorneys have been willing to waive prosecution if a girls statutory rapist agrees to marry her and her parents are also supportive.In Missouri, which has seen not only its own minors marry but also tourist marriages involving mostly girls brought in from out of state, state Rep. Jean Evans wanted to ban marriage under the age of 17. That turned out to be too strict a standard for many of her colleagues, but the House did pass a bill raising the age to 15. Kids who are 17 would need a parents approval, while 15- and 16-year-olds would have to get permission both from their parents and a judge. The bill keeps the court in the loop, says state Rep. Bill White, to make sure the marriage is not coerced and is in the best interest of the kid, or kids.The fact that two kids may be marrying each other is one objection some legislators and religious groups have raised. They say the recent spate of child marriage bills are overly broad and harm responsible couples. If a young Romeo wants to marry his Juliet, why is that a problem for the state?The other concern thats commonly raised about strict limits is that they may prevent a pregnant 16-year-old from marrying the father of her baby. By denying them the ability to get married, were denying the children fathers or mothers, says Arizona state Rep. David Stringer, who opposed Ugenti-Ritas bill. I dont think the government should be stepping in and telling people the right age to get married.Given the concerns about abuses, however, the movement to curtail child marriage clearly has momentum. Child marriage laws are so lax as to be practically nonexistent in about half the states, but thats changing fast. We have age limits on voting, purchasing lottery tickets, alcohol and cigarettes, Ugenti-Rita says. Marriage should be no exception to that. Gov. Greg Abbott is asking for more armed teachers, heightened security presence on campuses and better identification of troubled students to make Texans safer as the nation grapples with a terrifying drumbeat of school shootings.The governor released a 40-page school and firearm safety action plan Wednesday at Dallas Independent School District, recommendations that come with more than $100 million in grant money and other matching funds to help school districts afford the changes and upgrades. The plan also includes proposed changes to state law."Everybody in this entire process and everybody in the state of Texas never wants to see another occasion where innocent children are gunned down in their own schools," Abbott said referencing this month's school shooting at Santa Fe High School that left 10 dead and 13 wounded. "This plan is a starting point, not an ending place."The governor's plan, much of which was developed over the Memorial Day weekend, also includes a gun lock giveaway and media strategy to encourage people to lock up their firearms, a school safety app, new alarms specifically to sound for active-shooter events and metal detectors.While the recommendations are optional, Abbott said he expects all school districts to boost personnel to show a greater law enforcement presence in their schools and figure out how to increase access to mental health programs.Many of the ideas can be implemented by the beginning of next school year, he said.Much of the plan was born out of three days of roundtable discussions with survivors from the Santa Fe school rampage and a church shooting in Sutherland Springs, mental health experts, law enforcement personnel and educators, among others, Abbott said.A Santa Fe senior at one of those listening sessions said she wished more teachers were allowed to go armed at her school without students' knowledge.Abbott said other students echoed her sentiment and said he wants to expand and streamline the existing voluntary school marshal program. He also plans to offer training for teachers who wish to carry guns on campus.Advocates for stricter firearms regulations had pushed for stronger background checks for gun buyers, an idea absent from the governor's proposal.However, Texas Guns Sense spokesman Ed Scruggs said he was pleased the governor proposed mandatory reporting of lost or stolen firearms and speeding up from 30 days to 48 hours the turnaround time for the courts to report certain adjudications that would disqualify people from gun ownership.Scruggs also applauded the governor's support for a so-called "red flag law" allowing law enforcement, a family member, school employee or an attorney to file a petition to remove firearms from a potentially dangerous person after due process."It's not enough, of course," Scruggs said of the governor's plan.The governor's critics were quick to find fault in his proposal for a lack of changes to the state's gun laws."Nothing in Abbott's plans address the reality that it is too easy for a weapon to end up in the hands of someone wanting to cause harm," said Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party.Lupe Valdez, former Dallas County sheriff running for governor against Abbott, said it is "astounding" how few of the governor's recommendations address gun control and vowed to release her own recommendations in the coming days.Members of the Texas House Democratic Caucus support most of the governor's plan, according to Rep. Chris Turner, a Grand Prairie Democrat and chairman of the group. But he said lawmakers are worried about the costs and want the Legislature to shore up money for cash-strapped public schools.Some lawmakers have called on Abbott to order a special session so lawmakers can pass laws to make schools safer. Abbott said that while he was open to that option, many of the key recommendations can be implemented now by school districts without waiting for for legislative action, so additional safety measures can be in place by the time classes start in August.He said more than $120 million in funding is included to expedite the added measures and said the recommendations generally are intended as options so districts can implement the measures they believe will best fit their needs, although some precautions and safety programs will be implemented statewide.Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who appeared with Abbott in San Marcos, called the plan "an excellent starting point" for improved school safety."The cost of this is not going to be an issue," he said.Patrick announced that a special Senate committee was empaneled Wednesday to begin working on legislative efforts to boost state laws.House Speaker Joe Straus announced that a separate House panel will study a potential "red flag" law to spell out a legal process for family members and law enforcement wanting to keep firearms out of the hands of those who would harm themselves or othersSchool safety and gun regulations have demanded greater attention here and across the country in recent months following a rash of mass shootings, including the one at Santa Fe.In November, a man opened fire on a church in Sutherland Springs, killing 26 people and making it the worst mass shooting in modern Texas history. Three months later, a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 students and staff, spurred a national student-led momentum to address school safety and gun control."We don't doubt that Gov. Abbott is as heartbroken as any other Texan over the recent tragedy at Santa Fe High School," said Noel Candelaria, president of the Texas State Teachers Association, which opposes arming teachers and worries money for school safety will eventually run out."But, tragically, children and educators have been dying in school shootings throughout the country for years. Why did it take a mass shooting in his own backyard in an election year to finally force the governor to respond with a sense of urgency?" she said. The Governors Official Program is comprised of a wide range of constitutional and legal duties and ceremonial and community engagements. Each year, the Governor hosts thousands of visitors to Government House to take part in investiture and award ceremonies, Open Days, receptions and meetings, and travels widely throughout Queensland to support the activities of Patron groups. View a chronological record of the Governors daily program below. On Tuesday, in the morning, at St Finbarrs Parish Primary School, Quilpie, His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC and Mrs Kaye de Jersey attended school assembly and the Governor addressed students and staff. Following, at Quilpie State College, the Governor and Mrs de Jersey attended school assembly where the Governor addressed students and staff, and visited classrooms meeting with students and staff. Following, at Quilpie Shire Council Chambers, the Governor and Mrs de Jersey received a briefing on local issues from the Mayor and Councillors. Following, at Quilpie Airport, the Governor, with Mrs de Jersey, officially opened the newly-upgraded airport terminal, and the Governor addressed guests. In the afternoon, the Governor and Mrs de Jersey returned to Brisbane from official travel to Thargomindah and Quilpie. Bloomfield Public Library will receive $12,279.33 for updated equipment and Wi-Fi installation for optimal use of existing fiber optic loop. Dona Ana County will get $30,000 to improve how it handles IPRA requests. Las Vegas Police Department plans to use $28,029 for an electronic evidence management system. Torrance County receives $42,525 for public access stations at customer service counters; for online archival search program and marriage licensing software and improvements to its emergency operations center CPU. Edgewood plans to use $12,000 for state-of-the-art equipment and wireless technology to provide free Wi-Fi in two public parks and a large open space. Questa will receive $16,348.72 for website redesign to improve access to records, public meeting software and equipment to provide more accurate and timely delivery of information. Central New Mexico Community College will use $80,267 for blockchain utilization and development, the training of up to 10 coding instructors, building production blockchain services and making them available to government agencies. (TNS) ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. The New Mexico Attorney Generals Office on Tuesday awarded more than $220,000 in settlement money to public institutions around the state for their requested technology proposals.The awards included improving local government ability to process Inspection of Public Records Act requests, money to a community college to train coding instructors and providing free public Wi-Fi in public libraries and open space.The money comes from New Mexicos share of a multi-state price-fixing lawsuit involving dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) litigation involving equipment such as computers and printers.Investing in technology, especially in our rural communities, will improve the services provided to taxpayers and spur local innovation, Attorney General Hector Balderas said in a statement.The $220,000 specifically, according to a news release, was awarded as follows: (TNS) Officials in Puerto Rico say that 64 people lost their lives after Hurricane Maria slammed into the island in September. A new report says that estimate is off by about 4,600.If the analysis is correct, it means that for every hurricane-related death that's currently on the books, another 70 fatalities in the U.S. territory have gone uncounted."Our results indicate that the official death count of 64 is a substantial underestimate of the true burden of mortality after Hurricane Maria," researchers concluded in a study published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.This isn't the first time people have questioned the official estimate of the number of deaths that ensued after the then-Category 4 hurricane made landfall on Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017. The study authors noted that several "independent investigations" have put the true number "in excess of 1,000."One of them was by Alexis Raul Santos, a demographer at Pennsylvania State University, and independent researcher Jeffrey Howard. In November, they concluded that Puerto Rico had experienced an excess of roughly 1,100 deaths in the wake of Hurricane Maria.The new study adds to "the growing consensus that the deaths have been undercounted," Santos said.And not a moment too soon, said Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of Puerto Rico's capital city of San Juan."It took too long to understand the need for an appropriate response was NOT about politics but about saving lives," Cruz said on Twitter. "These deaths and the negligence that contributed to them cannot be forgotten. This was, and continues to be, a violation of our human rights."With sustained winds of up to 155 mph and heavy rains that caused catastrophic flooding, there were many ways for Hurricane Maria to kill, explained the team led by Nishant Kishore of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.During the storm itself, residents might be hit by flying debris or swept away in flash floods. In the aftermath, deaths could be attributed to lingering safety problems, illnesses brought on by unsanitary conditions or the "loss of necessary medical services," the authors wrote.To get a better handle of Maria's true impact, interviewers fanned out across Puerto Rico between mid-January and late February. They knocked on doors and talked to adults from 3,299 households, which represented 9,522 people. Among other things, they asked whether anyone in the household died between the day the hurricane hit the island and the end of the year.More than 93% of people invited to take the survey agreed to do so. They received no payment or other form of assistance from the researchers.The researchers used these responses to calculate that between Sept. 20 and Dec. 31, there were about 14.3 deaths per 1,000 Puerto Ricans. Given the uncertainties inherent in their survey, the true mortality rate could have been as low as 9.8 deaths or as high as 18.9 deaths per 1,000 residents, they wrote.According to Puerto Rico's Department of Health, the mortality rate for the same period in 2016 was 8.8 deaths per 1,000 people. That means there was at least 0.9 of an additional death per 1,000 people in 2017, and perhaps as many as 10 extra deaths per 1,000 people.When the researchers extrapolated those mortality rates to the population of Puerto Rico, they calculated that the number of hurricane-related deaths was somewhere between 793 and 8,498. The midpoint of that range was 4,645.The study authors recognized that they had no way of counting victims who had been living alone with no remaining members of their households, the survey-takers would never learn of them. So the researchers adjusted their estimate, using the 2016 mortality rate for people living alone.This time, they calculated that there were about 5,740 excess deaths after Hurricane Maria, though it could have been as low as 1,506 or as high as 9,889.Among the deaths the researchers tallied through their survey, nearly 1 in 10 were a direct result of the storm, and one-third could be traced to "delayed or prevented access to medical care" as a result of the storm.Indeed, 31% of households surveyed reported "disruptions to medical services" after the hurricane hit. About 14% of households were unable to get medications, 9% were stymied by closed medical facilities, 6% had doctors who were absent after the storm, and 10% lacked the electricity needed to power their respiratory equipment. In the most remote neighborhoods, about 9% of households had no way to call 911.The survey-takers also found that after Maria hit, it took an average of 68 days for households to have their water service restored, 84 days for their electricity to return and 41 days for their wireless phone service to come back online.Santos, who based his study on vital statistics records from the Puerto Rican government, said the new report goes further by assessing real-world conditions throughout the island."It's really commendable that the researchers are providing as much detail as they're doing in their study," he said. "This should be the standard whenever people are publishing these kinds of studies."University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez statisticians Roberto Rivera and Wolfgang Rolke used government data to estimate that 605 to 1,039 Puerto Ricans died in the six weeks after the hurricane.Rivera said that the new study's figure of 4,645 excess deaths over 3 months sounds "really high," but that there's no way to know for sure until the Department of Health releases updated death statistics.At the same time, he added, the government is attempting to dismantle the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics, an independent agency that collects and analyzes important data."It's a bit of a contradiction because they are saying they want to be transparent, but this is one of the many things that they're doing that just doesn't add up," Rivera said.Identifying mistakes made in the wake of Hurricane Maria may help public health officials prepare for a future natural disaster, Kishore and his colleagues wrote. A proper and timely count of deaths should make it easier to get aid to survivors and perhaps prevent secondary deaths owing to a lack of doctors, hospitals and medicines.The report was published as Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello hosted a conference on disaster prevention and management. On Tuesday, he pledged to improve the government's response to future storms."Hurricane Maria is the most devastating event in America's modern history," he tweeted. "We reaffirm our commitment to maintain and improve the protocols and actions that best result in the safety of citizens."Carlos Mercader, executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, said government officials were not surprised by the new finding that more than 64 people had died as a result of Hurricane Maria."We have always expected the number to be higher than what was previously reported," Mercader said in a statement. That's why the government has commissioned a report on the death toll that is being conducted by researchers from George Washington University."Both studies will help us better prepare for future natural disasters and prevent lives from being lost," Mercader said.A spokeswoman from the university said the research team expects to announce its results this summer.The 2018 Atlantic hurricane season begins Friday.2018 the Los Angeles TimesVisit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.comDistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. (TNS) - When a massive flood hit historic Ellicott City on Sunday, Sgt. Eddison Eddie A. Hermond rushed to help. Local shop owner Kate Bowman told The Baltimore Sun that Hermond tried to rescue her as the torrent gushed by so loud she could barely hear.The 39-year-old National Guardsman, an Air Force veteran, was washed away by the floodwaters. His body was found Tuesday morning in the Patapsco River, according to Howard County police. He had drifted to Catonsville along River Road, about a quarter-mile from Frederick Road.Choking back sobs, friends say that its not surprising.Its the most Eddie thing ever that just happened, said Stephanie Williams of Seattle. She and her husband, Tariq, used to live with Hermond. She was devastated by his sudden death. She recalled a friend who idolized Superman and was a bit of a superhero himself.I can totally believe that he put his life at risk for someone he didnt know, in a town where he wasnt from, because that was home for him, said Tariq Williams, who met Hermond 15 years ago while serving in the Air Force. He said Hermond had grown up in California and New York.Everywhere Hermond went was home, he said. Everyone he met became family.A spokesman for the Maryland National Guard, Col. Charles Kohler, said Hermond joined in 2009 and was assigned to Camp Fretterd in Reisterstown. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1996 and served more than a decade on active duty.Howard County Executive Allan H. Kittleman said the entire county was indebted to Hermond for his sacrifice.Make no doubt about it: Mr. Hermond is a hero who put the lives of others before his own, Kittleman said. He saw somebody in need. He didnt think about himself. And went to bring aid. And we as a county will be forever grateful to him.Vice President Mike Pence tweeted his condolences and offered prayers for Hermonds family Tuesday night.Saddened to learn of the loss of Marylands Eddison Hermondthe brave National Guardsman & Air Force veteran who lost his life rendering assistance to a neighbor. Eddison lived a life of service to his nation, Pence tweeted. God bless Eddison Hermond.Howard County Police Chief Gary Gardner said Hermond tried to cross the raging water flowing down Main Street to rescue a woman in need who was holding a cat.Emergency crews and the National Guard draped Hermonds body in the American flag as they removed him from the river, Howard County Fire Chief John S. Butler said. Gov. Larry Hogan ordered flags lowered to half-staff on Tuesday.A woman who answered the door at the Severn home where Hermond lived declined to comment to a reporter Tuesday. His family issued a statement through the National Guard requesting respect for their privacy and thanking those who helped search for him.As of Tuesday evening, a Go Fund Me account Stephanie Williams set up to cover Hermonds funeral expenses was more than halfway to its $20,000 goal.When he wasnt on active duty, Hermond found his calling in the restaurant business. Friends say he was thrilled to get a job working with the Victoria Gastro Pub when it first opened 11 years ago. Over the years, he worked his way up from server to bartender to manager, said Randy Marriner, owner of the Victoria Restaurant Group. He was like family, Marriner said.Fellow servers and customers adored him. He touched everyone he met, said Tariq Williams, who considered Hermond 100 percent his big brother.Rose Lovely of Connecticut met Hermond only a few times, but loved his flirtatious and big-hearted personality. He was just a very contagious, infectious person in a good way, she said. Her daughters worked with Hermond and are wrecked by his passing, she said.Another friend who knew Hermond from the restaurant remembered him as a kind, selfless man.He died like he lived, as an example of selflessness. We should all be so brave, said James Hammond. I think that for those of us who know him, we feel that if he was here right now and the circumstances were the same, that he would do it all over again. He is a selfless kind of guy, as most heroes are.And everyone remembers Eddies signature drink, says Tariq Williams: a Raging Bitch from Flying Dog Brewery accompanied by a shot of Old Grand-Dad.On Friday morning, Hermond wrote what would be one of his last Facebook posts.Okay kiddos, it's Friday and the start of Memorial Day weekend, he began. Let's get the hate out of our hearts. Focus on the positives and let's all, for once, enjoy life as it's meant to be enjoyed. Whatever your pleasure is just be happy. We're free because people gave their lives for us to live this way.His friends loved it so much, one asked if he would make the post public, so that she could share it with her friends, too. Another friend, Lovely, commented to thank Hermond for his service.Wrong holiday, he corrected her. Sure, he was a veteran and member of the Maryland National Guard, but Memorial Day was for fallen heroes, not him. Not yet.Baltimore Sun reporters Alison Knezevich and Luke Broadwater and Baltimore Sun Media Group reporters Libby Solomon and Selene San Felice contributed to this article.smeehan@baltsun.comtwitter.com/sarahvmeehan2018 The Baltimore SunVisit The Baltimore Sun at www.baltimoresun.comDistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Idaho is heading up its development of self-driving vehicle policies with the states first meeting to study the issue.The Idaho Autonomous and Connected Vehicle Testing and Deployment Committee will hold its first meeting May 30 to begin the process of creating a framework for autonomous vehicle use and testing. The committee was formed by executive order by Gov. C.L. Butch Otter in January.One of the top goals of the committee is to explore how the state should handle the many vehicle regulatory oversight issues, such as registration, licensing and insurance, as well as traffic regulations and vehicle owner or operator responsibilities and liabilities under current law, said Jennifer Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for the Idaho Transportation Department.The committee is made up of leaders from multiple state departments ranging from transportation, commerce, homeland security, insurance, state police as well as industry and legislative representatives.Currently, Idaho does not allow AV testing or use, said Gonzalez.This executive committee formation is the first step in learning about AV use and testing, she added.The move comes as numerous states including neighbors to Idaho like Nevada, Utah and Washington move forward with policy development related to autonomous vehicles. All told, 29 states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation related to AVs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures . In addition, nine states have taken action on AVs through executive order.The AV Testing and Deployment Committee will also explore, strategic partnerships to leverage the social, economic and environmental benefits of autonomous and connected vehicles, said Gonzalez.Following several high-profile accidents involving autonomous vehicles, safety topics around AVs could also rank high among committee members.It would be speculative to comment on topics that may or may not come up during the first of the next three meetings, said Gonzalez. However, with a diverse committee membership that spans from Idaho State Police to the American Automobile Association to the Idaho Sheriffs Association among many others, the topic of safety is bound to come up.This comes as a growing number of drivers are increasingly uneasy about the idea of self-driving cars. A recent survey by AAA found that that 73 percent of U.S. drivers would be afraid to ride in a fully self-driving vehicle. This is up from 63 percent at the end of 2017. (TNS) SEDRO-WOOLLEY, WASH. Construction that is set to begin on Fruitdale Road now will include the installation of pipe for the future fiber optic network the Port of Skagit and Skagit Public Utility District have agreed to build across Skagit County, Wash The city of Sedro-Woolley, Port of Skagit and Skagit County each contributed to the cost of the Fruitdale Road project, which will improve access to the historic Northern State Hospital campus they are working to redevelop.The campus is now called the SWIFT (Sedro-Woolley Innovation for Tomorrow) Center.As part of the Fruitdale Road project that includes building a roundabout at the campus entrance, repairing a collapsed section of the road northeast of the entrance, and repaving the road and adding sidewalks from the entrance to the intersection with McGarigle Road, the port will pay to also install a SWIFT Center entrance sign and pipe for fiber optic cables.We want, collectively, to provide more service providers to access the SWIFT Center site, Port of Skagit Executive Director Patsy Martin said. Were taking title of the SWIFT Center July 1 and having multiple Internet service providers available to ride on the dark fiber backbone ... is great.She said current tenants including the Job Corps program, Pacific Northwest Trails Association and state Military Department will benefit from having a fiber network available. The fiber network may also be important for Janicki Bioenergy, a local company that is expected to anchor the redeveloped campus.The port will reimburse the city for the added fiber optic and sign elements of the project, which are expected to cost about $90,000, according to the agreement between the city and port.The port will also pay the city 5 percent of the cost of the pipe and sign parts of the project to compensate for the citys administration of the project. That cost will be about $4,500.The SWIFT Center sign will be modeled after those at other port properties, including the Skagit Regional Airport and La Conner Marina, according to the agreement.The installation of pipe for fiber optic cables along Fruitdale Road will be the first such project in Sedro-Woolley.Sedro-Woolley Public Works Director Mark Freiberger said incorporating the pipe for fiber cables into the project is more efficient than trying to add them later.Construction equipment will begin to appear this week along Fruitdale Road between McGarigle Road and the SWIFT Center entrance in preparation for the start of construction next week.Starting June 4, crews will build sidewalks along the road, repair the damaged section of the road and install new sewer lines near the campus, Freiberger said. In late July, work will begin on a roundabout at the campus entrance.Freiberger said all the Fruitdale Road improvements included in the project are expected to be completed by mid-September. (TNS) Mary Dahl has lived in the same home in Rincon Valley in northern California for 48 years.She doesnt have a cellphone. She doesnt have a computer. And she doesnt care to own them, either. So when Verizon proposed installing a wireless antenna on a pole just outside her house, she didnt take too kindly to it.It got my Irish dander up, says Dahl, a retired child care provider whos in her early 70s.She sent a letter to the companys installer, Nexius Solutions, which was returned to sender. The company told her to send it to the attention of the Northern California Small Cell Team, but it came back a second time, she said.When she called the number listed, she just got the runaround, she said.So when the Santa Rosa City Council announced in February that it was pausing the installation of a network of so-called small cell antennas in the city, she was hopeful.Then a few weeks later, the resident of Monte Verde Drive was notified that the permit for the antenna had been granted by the city, and construction would soon begin.She was the only one in her little neighborhood who got such a notice, she said. A few days later, the crews arrived and began installing the equipment.They said it was going to be high up on the pole, Dahl said, pointing toward the assemblage of brown boxes and cables mounted on a metal bar 7 feet off the ground on the wooden utility pole outside her home. I dont consider that high. I go out my front door and its right in my face!Dahl is one of dozens of Santa Rosa residents who have come to realize in recent months that, when it comes to telecommunications installations, neither the city council nor the residents they represent have the power to pause much.The small cells are just one piece of Verizons network expansion that have riled many residents. The companys efforts to build full-size towers, including in a new 62-foot steeple atop Community Baptist Church on Sonoma Ave., have also triggered backlashes. Opponents voice concerns about aesthetics and exposure to low-frequency electromagnetic radiation given off by communications equipment.Wireless providers say there are no credible studies indicating such radiation presents a threat to public health. The three American agencies charged with assessing cancer risks have said the typical exposure from cell towers is well below levels considered safe for humans.Im not against the radiation, I just dont want a 60-foot tower in my front yard, said Matthew Mendonsa.His neighbor directly across Sonoma Avenue from the church is so enraged he recently spray-painted a huge Stop Verizon sign, complete with crude red stop sign, on a piece of plywood in his front yard.Heidi Flato, a Verizon spokeswoman, could not be reached for comment Tuesday. The company has said the small-cell network will work with larger towers to dramatically improve high-speed wireless capacity and coverage in the city.Facing a rash of criticism over the installation of the small-cell equipment all over the city, the city council in February ordered the project halted while it processed residents feedback and worked with Verizon to find solutions. (TNS) California this week could take a step closer to having its own net neutrality rules.The state Senate may vote as soon as Tuesday on a bill by State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, which is being touted as the most comprehensive state net neutrality bill in the nation.The Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal Obama-era federal rules protecting net neutrality the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally in December. The U.S. Senate voted to overturn the FCCs repeal this month, but the effort faces an uphill battle in the House of Representatives and would have to be approved by Pres. Donald Trump. Trump named Ajit Pai, who led the repeal of the Open Internet Rules, to the chairman position at the FCC.Tragically, after decades of work (on net neutrality) Donald Trump comes into office and his FCC wipes everything away, Wiener said during a press conference at the capitol in Sacramento Tuesday, where he was joined by one of the bills co-authors, State Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, and representatives from various advocacy groups that support SB 822.Wieners bill prohibits Internet service providers from blocking or throttling Internet traffic, and takes aim at zero rating, in which Internet providers exempt certain content, sites and services from data caps. The bill cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee last Friday and must be voted on by this Friday.SB 822 is supported by former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler (who drafted the rules that this FCC overturned), California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra, the mayors of Californias biggest cities, plus dozens of public advocacy groups.Mitch Steiger, of the California Labor Federation, said net neutrality is important for workers.When the FCC repealed those net neutrality rules, it was very much a direct attack on (online) forums to organize, Steiger said during the press conference. He provided an example: Researchers found that in 2005, Canadian telecom company Telus blocked server access to a site its workers were using to organize.SB 822 is opposed by the broadband, cable and telecom industries, plus the states Chamber of Commerce.AT&T, Comcast and two major industry trade groups reported spending nearly $1 million on lobbying in Sacramento in the first three months of the year alone including against SB 822 according to documents filed with the California Secretary of State.A Comcast spokeswoman said Tuesday the company would have no comment about SB 822, but pointed to Comcasts previous statements that it does not block, slow or discriminate against Internet content.Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said proponents of the bill artists, writers and community activists planned to visit 100 legislative offices Tuesday to urge lawmakers to support SB 822.For at least one day we will match the ISP contract lobby numbers, he said.But Falcon said he was optimistic that public opinion would prevail, noting that a national online poll conducted by the University of Maryland in March found that 86 percent opposed the repeal of net neutrality rules.Whether youre a Republican or a Democrat or an independent, youre basically on the same side, Falcon said. No amount of money in the world will stop that type of lopsided opinion. I like my odds in getting this bill through the Senate and getting it through the Assembly later this year.Other states that have passed or have their own net neutrality bills in progress include Washington, Montana and Rhode Island. A New York state senator has also introduced a bill similar to Californias. The percentage of workers in the US who drove alone during their commute increased from 64% in 1980 to 76% in 2016 while carpooling declined to about half of what it was in 1980, according to the US Department of Energy (DOE). The percentage of workers who used public transportation, walked or biked also declined, but the percentage of those who worked from home doubled by 2016. The total number of workers grew by 51% in this time periodfrom 96 million in 1980 to 146 million in 2016. Source: DOE. The George Washington Bars Smoke and Melons. Photo: Melissa Hom Cheers: Esquire is back at the watering hole with its list of the best bars in the country. Like last years, its not exactly a list of places that are all brand-new or all-time essentials. There are some notable new openings on the list, including New Yorks the George Washington Bar and Washington, D.C.s Brothers and Sisters. Selected by a panel that includes food-and-drink editor Jeff Gordinier, writer Nicole Taylor, Kevin Sintumuang, and others, the 21-spot list also features Minneapoliss Marvel Bar; Daphne, Alabamas Mancis Antique Club; Oaklands Ordinaire; and Lexington, Kentuckys Ona. It also includes Prarie School, the short-lived Jim Meehan bar that recently closed. Peep the full (unranked) list below. The Anderson (Miami) Bastion (Nashville) Bibo Ergo Sum (Los Angeles) Brothers and Sisters (Washington, D.C.) Dante (New York) The Diner Bar at the Grey (Savannah, Georgia) The Elk Room (Baltimore) George Washington Bar (New York) GYST Fermentation Bar (Minneapolis) The Living Room at the Dewberry (Charleston) Nickel City (Austin) Mancis Antique Club (Daphne, Alabama) Marvel Bar (Minneapolis) Old Lightning (Los Angeles) Ona (Lexington, Kentucky) Ordinaire (Oakland) Prairie School (Chicago) Sugar House (Detroit) Ticonderoga Club (Atlanta) True Laurel (San Francisco) The World Famous (Athens, Georgia) PRESS RELEASE PORTLAND, ORE. Oregons marching band ambassadors, The Beat Goes On (TBGO), recently completed their first trip to Europe. The all-adult marching bands 120 members visited several countries during a 17-day tour in late April and early May. The band marched in a pair of segments of the two-day, 24-mile Bloemencorso Bollenstreek, one of the worlds largest and longest flower parades, through the suburbs of Amsterdam. It also played outdoor concerts at Slot Zuylen castle near Utrecht in The Netherlands, and along the shore of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Upon his return from Europe, TBGO President & Music Director Steve Tolopka reflected on the trip, which was a year in the making What was your favorite musical moment of the trip? Probably Bohemian Rhapsody, our closer at the Slot Zuylen show, because the band worked so hard on this tune during many rehearsals leading up to the trip. But a close second would be the solo triangle player we drafted out of the crowd in Lucerne. He nailed his two dings perfectly, then ran through the band high-fiving everyone afterward! And your overall favorite memory? Oh, bunches! Stepping off through cheering crowds in the daytime parade in Sassenheim. Carpets of tulips filling the fields along the parade route. Smooching my sweetie, Janet, during our Sound of Music tour of Salzberg in front of the Sixteen Going on Seventeen gazebo. Touring Paris was fun. And then theres what happened at Restaurant Fritschi the night before our show in Lucerne. Janet and I were waiting to order dinner when she looked thoughtful and said Is that what I think it is? I listened harder to the music playing in the background and realized it was the Buddy Rich recording of The Beat Goes On. (Cue Twilight Zone music here ) What was your impression of the audiences? Our audiences were terrific! We had big crowds all along the parade routes, filled with folks who were welcoming, enthusiastic, and ready to have a good time with us. People who lived along the route refilled our water bottles when we ran low during the parade. Many of them posted pictures and video to our Facebook page after the parade was over. At Slot Zuylen castle, people laughed at our dopey jokes, sang along as we played, and hung around just to talk with the band afterward. In Lucerne, a crowd of giggly teens allowed themselves to be pulled into doing a line dance with us to the Pharrell Williams song Happy. Some of your members returned home after The Netherlands. Did you face particular challenges for the Lucerne concert a week later, since half the band was gone? Yes lots of people stepped up their game to make the Lucerne concert possible. Our cowbell player schlepped a bass drum all over Europe so that she could play it in Lucerne. Our lead trumpets all went home on the early return, so two of our second trumpets warily stepped up to play lead. Our lone remaining trombonist played a solo hed never played before. It took tons of preparation to pull the trip off. Are such endeavors worth the effort? Oh, for sure! Hey we just got to hang out across Europe with 100 buddies, march in two sections of a 24-mile parade with amazing floral displays, play a show at an 18th century castle complete with moat, make new friends inside and outside the band, dance on the shores of Lake Lucerne, and put smiles on faces from the Netherlands to Switzerland. Whats not to like? This was the fifth foreign trip for TBGO. (Canada twice, The Bahamas, China, and now Europe.) How did this trip compare to the bands last overseas mega-trip, to China in 2014? They were both great trips! Up-front planning for this trip was more involved since we had to create most of the performance and travel ourselves. (Our Chinese hosts did all the in-country planning for that trip.) The prevalence of English speakers in the countries we just visited made it easier for me to emcee our shows its tough to tell jokes and work a crowd through an interpreter! But the commonalities are probably more important: the warmth of the crowds, watching people light up when we fire up the band, and marveling at the way music brings people together wherever we go. The band has taken up where it left off when it flew to Europe: with a long lineup of performances in the Pacific Northwest this spring and summer. TBGO averages about three dozen parades and concerts each year. To learn more about The Beat Goes On, go to http://www.TBGO.org. I am a retired newspaperman. I live in Poca, WV, with my wife of 44 years, Lou Ann. I grew up in Cleveland. Three kids. Grandfather. Report all errors to DonSurber@GMail.com Bordeaux and Adelaide join forces to launch high-end business course By Lisa Riley Bordeaux and Adelaide have joined forces to launch a high-end business course spanning two continents. The 10-day course, which is targeted at industry professionals, will give participants access to some of the leading minds in Adelaide, Australia, and Bordeaux, France. It will take place in Adelaide and Bordeaux, with five days spend in each region, where students will be given exclusive access to vineyard tours and masterclasses led by chief winemakers. Alongside this, a tailored academic program will cover subjects such as research and development, global market insights, wine marketing, and consumer behaviour. Launched at the Vinexpo in Hong Kong this week, the course is the result of a collaboration between the University of Adelaide and the Kedge Wine and Spirits Academy in Bordeaux. The unique and immersive program had been designed to allow people from all over the world to learn from the experiences of experts from two of the worlds greatest wine regions, said Marni Ladd, wine business program director, University of Adelaide. Participants will learn from the best academics and business leaders not just about the science of wine, but also about future challenges in the wine business, he added. While France and Australias winemaking histories and experiences were different, they were very complimentary, said Kedge director, Jacques-Olivier Pesme. As such, the experiences, practices, and technologies of these two regions provide different perspectives which are among the most successful ones in the world of wine, he said, adding the polarity was what make the program so unique and a truly holistic learning experience. The initiative follows Adelaide, which is within an hours drive of globally renowned regions Barossa, McLaren Vale and Adelaide Hills, joining Bordeaux as a Great Wine Capital in 2016. Isle Democrats elect lobbyist as new chairwoman SA May 28, 2018: Hawaiis Democrats elected lobbyist Kealii Lopez as their new chairwoman for the next two years Sunday, dealing a blow to the more liberal or progressive wing of the party. The election of Lopez was in part a reflection of continuing party tensions that date back to the 2016 split between supporters of Hillary Clinton and the more liberal backers of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. Lopez, 57, served as director of the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs under former Gov. Neil Abercrombie. She defeated current party Chairman Tim Vandeveer, a Sanders supporter. This years convention in Waikoloa was well attended by the more liberal wing of the party, which is particularly well represented in the ranks of Hawaii island delegates, but Lopez defeated Vandeveer by a vote of 529-472. A third candidate, Gloria Borland, received 38 votes. The convention at the Hilton Waikoloa Resort was actually attended by only 605 delegates, but the vote count was weighted to give more votes to off-island delegates to compensate for party members who were unable to manage the interisland travel trip to attend. I will be very upfront with you. The Hawaiian community and the Hawaiian agenda, I hope, is going to be very important to this family, she said referring to the state Democratic Party. Vandeveer supporters, including Democratic National Committeeman Bart Dame and former state Sen. Gary Hooser, said they were satisfied the election process was fair, but some delegates expressed concern privately that the party had just elected a corporate lobbyist as its chairwoman. Lopez is director of government affairs for the law firm of Alston Hunt Floyd &Ing, and was registered to lobby this year for clients that include the American Resort Development Association, Expedia Inc., the Hawaii Association of Mortgage Bankers and the Western Plant Health Association, which represents biotechnology and fertilizer companies. read Political Insider * * * * * Lopez Grateful for Vote as New Democratic Party of Hawaii Chairwoman News Release from Democratic Party of Hawaii May 29, 2018 KONA, Hawaii The Democratic Party of Hawaii elected Kealii Lopez to be the new Party Chair on Sunday at its 2018 State Convention. Lopezs main message for her campaign was that all members of the Democratic Party across the state need to come together to move Hawaii forward. The amount of enthusiasm and excitement at this years Convention was simply phenomenal. We have so many amazing members of the Democratic Party of Hawaii and I look forward to working with all of them to ensure we move Hawaii forward by supporting the many values that we all deeply care about. We must continue to support working families, protect the environment, advocate for the rights of the LGBT community and most importantly support our guiding principles found in the platform of the Democratic Party of Hawaii. Lopez said. After having hosted the 2018 Convention, former Party Chair, Tim Vandeveer said, Its been an honor serving as the Chair of the Democratic Party of Hawaii these past two years, and I look forward to working with Kealii as she takes on her role as the Partys new Chair. Lopez said she looks forward to having more of Hawaiis residents seeing the Democratic Party as a broad spectrum of people united in fostering a better future for Hawaii. * * * * * Star-Adv: Democrat Rule Cripples and Divides Hawaii SA: There are few states where Democrats hold quite the advantage as Hawaii Dems do, and there seem few prospects for overturning the balance of power in the foreseeable future. And thats truly lamentable, for a democracy benefits from challenges by a robust second, or even third, political party. The state party had its convention last weekend at Waikoloa, and seemed at least superficially to be relying on the one playbook with a unifying theme: opposition to President Donald Trump. No doubt this is a point around which the party is rallying, nationally. Democratic leaders from Hawaii and other states, however, should be seeking a more affirmative platform, as negative campaigning has its utility but may not inspire the voters as much as imagined. The elections of 1954 is the line of demarcation (but) As the party became entrenched, however, money followed the new power structure. Some of the interest groups the unions, larger businesses, to name two categories became the new elites. The labor movement began to shed private-sector membership, leaving public-sector unions among the primary beneficiaries of the new political ruling class. Successive labor contracts increased wages and retirement and health benefits to the point at which the state now faces a crippling liability for its unfunded benefits. What seems to have emerged is an elitist social stratification in which people are placed on the basis of economic status rather than race. Hawaii is as diverse as it ever was, but there are clear haves and have-nots. Those who managed to secure property are the in crowd, while the poor are on the outs, and sliding further into poverty. Its seen everywhere, in the rents that strain working families budgets, in the homelessness suffered by many who earn too little to afford the basics. read Dems must help the truly needy New Medicare Cards are Arriving in Hawaii and Pacific Territories CMS removes Social Security numbers, increasing fraud protection and consumer experience for millions of Americans News Release from US Department of Health and Human Services May 29, 2018 The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is mailing new Medicare cards to protect the safety and security of people with Medicare benefits. The new Medicare cards no longer contain a persons Social Security number, but rather a unique, randomly-assigned Medicare number that protects the identities of people with Medicare, reduces fraud, and offers better safeguards of important health and financial information. Removing Social Security numbers from Medicare cards is one of the many ways CMS is committed to putting patients first and improving the consumer healthcare experience, said Greg Dill, CMS regional administrator for Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. This change not only protects Medicare patients from fraud, but also safeguards taxpayer dollars by making it harder for criminals to use Social Security numbers to falsely bill Medicare for care services and benefits that were never performed. Work on this important initiative was made possible by the enactment of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015. CMS today began mailing the new Medicare cards to people in Hawaii and the Pacific Territories who currently have Medicare benefits. Additionally, Hawaii and Territories residents who are new to Medicare started to receive their new Medicare cards in April along with others across the country when the mailing first began. As soon as people receive their new Medicare card, they should safely and securely destroy their old Medicare card and keep their new Medicare number confidential. Our current mailing strategy allows us to complete the mailings of new cards to all people with Medicare, both new and current enrollees, over the next year. The new Medicare card will not change any of the program benefits and services that eligible people enrolled in Medicare receive. People with Medicare and their caregivers can visit medicare.gov/newcard to find out when new Medicare cards will be mailed to their area. They can also sign up for email notifications about the new card mailing and check the status in their state. Healthcare providers, suppliers, and people with Medicare will be able to use secure look-up tools that allow quick access to the new Medicare numbers when needed. There will be a 21-month transition period for healthcare providers and suppliers to use either the former Social Security-based Medicare number or the new Medicare number to ensure a seamless transition. As the new Medicare cards are being mailed, people with Medicare should look out for scams and follow these tips: Medicare will never contact you for your Medicare number or other personal information so you can obtain your new Medicare card. Dont pay for your new Medicare card. Its free. If anyone calls or approaches you and says you need to pay for it, thats a scam. Guard your card. When you get your new card, safeguard it like you would health insurance or credit cards. Only give your new Medicare number to doctors, pharmacists, other health care providers, your insurers, or people you trust to work with Medicare on your behalf. For more information including press materials, please visit: https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8277951-cmsnmc/ ### SHRUBS are set to be planted in Henley town centre to tackle air pollution. Environmental campaign group Henley in Transition and Henley in Bloom plan to install 30 troughs of elaeagnus ebbingei. The plants have rough leaves which catch pollutants from exhaust fumes. These are then washed away when it rains. Two planters were installed on the corner of Hart Street and Duke Street on Saturday for a trial. Councillor Stefan Gawrysiak said: We want to know what people think. Mayor Glen Lambert said: Planting trees and shrubs is a very simple thing that anyone can do. It can only do good to suck up particulates. Its also good for wildlife and the towns economy as it makes it look nicer and with more of them it will look even better. In March, the town councils transport strategy group discussed placing troughs containing Portuguese laurel along Duke Street, Bell Street and Greys Road and up to 10 trees in Hart Street. This was one of a number of measures designed to improve air quality in the town centre, where levels of nitrogen dioxide in some streets are 50 per cent higher than Air Quality Englands target limit of 40 micrograms per cubic metre. 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Riley Boon and Ines Regueiro, both 11, were presented with floral garlands of white chrysanthemums and buttercups by Glen Lambert, the Mayor of Henley, during the schools annual May Day celebration on Friday. Rileys sister Imogen, nine, was made her assistant and given a smaller posy to wear around her wrist. The children won the roles after nominating themselves for election among their classmates. They sat on thrones and watched as each year group performed a dance around a Maypole in the school playground. Older children performed more complex routines in which they wove ribbons into intricate patterns including a gypsys tent. About 75 parents attended the ceremony and sat on benches clapping along to the music. They enjoyed cakes and hot drinks which were sold in aid of the schools parent-teacher association. Riley said: I wanted to be May King because this is my last year at Badgemore and I have decided to have as much fun as I can. The previous May King said it was very enjoyable and a good opportunity. Ines said: I wanted to be May Queen because I love coming to Badgemore and this is something Ive always wanted to do in year 6 as it is one of my last chances to represent the school. Councillor Lambert said: This was thoroughly entertaining and I cant think of a better way to end my week. It was certainly a lot more enjoyable than council meetings! I had a nice chat with Ines, who says shed like to be a teacher one day and I think that shows how much Badgemore inspires its pupils. Its clearly somewhere the children are very happy to be. Headteacher Marion Arnold said: It was amazing to see the children dancing so beautifully, especially the little ones. It takes a good memory to remember all those steps and it was lovely to see the children helping their friends when they forgot where they were. It was a good way to build teamwork and Im very proud of them. Riley added: I would say that being May King was more scary than exciting but everyone did well. Its great that everyone got the steps right but also surprising because we had a few problems when we were practising. After the celebrations, more than half of the schools pupils were presented with prizes for achieving a 100 per cent attendance rate during the spring term. Doctors of Yerevan polyclinic N16 hold strike (video) Nearly 50 doctors have announced a strike since the very beginning of their working day. Employees of polyclinic N 16 in Qanaqer-Zeytun district complain about Nune Khachatryan, the acting director of the polyclinic appointed by the municipality. Striking doctors and nurses complained that the municipality had not taken into account their wish and they wanted to see the former deputy director Lena Hovsepyan in that post. Medical workers complained against the acting director, who was allegedly appointed yesterday, and today they will file a complaint to the Government, the Ministry of Healthcare and, as they say, to all possible bodies. It should be noted that the polyclinic has 160 employees, 110 of which have organized a collection of signatures against Nune Khachatryan. During a conversation with "A1 +" the protesters mentioned that yesterday Nune Khachatryan called the nurses technicians and threatened them. However, Nune Khachatryan denied that, saying it was a lie. Nune Khachatryan told us that that was Taron Margaryan's decision and if he decided that she should not be a director, she would not be. She refused to express her own opinion. Members of the Council of Elders are also in the polyclinic N 16. Head of the faction Davit Khazhakyan added that they come from the Kanaker-Zeytun Police Department, where they reported the crime against the abuse committed by the former director. Azat Arshakyan: When the prosecutor says that there are no political prisoners in Armenia, it means that he says that Nikol Pashinyan is a criminal The case of the armed group of Nork Marash remained outside the public's attention because for two months the court sessions have not been held, the judicial investigation is being delayed for unknown reasons, says lawyer Hayk Alumyan. "Now, when there is pressure on the courts, we hope that the court will satisfy our petition and the measure of restraint of Vahan Shirkhanyan will change." The lawyer said that Vahan Shirkhanyan was going to present a petition so that Serzh Sargsyan was brought to trial on the case and at least was interrogated. "There are problems between Serzh Sargsyan and Vahan Shirkhanyan that need to be clarified in the process of this trial. The political situation in Armenia has changed," sayid the deputy of the Supreme Council Azat Arshakyan. "The Prosecutor General of Armenia claims that the first person for Armenia is Nikol Pashinyan, a former criminal offender, he has not been convicted, and he is not justified. And when the prosecutor says that there are no political prisoners in Armenia, it means that he says that Nikol Pashinyan is a criminal. " Tsoak Khachatryan starts hunger strike (video) Tsolak Khachatryan starts a hunger strike in front of the RA Prosecutor General's Office building. On May 17, he reported about the crime, as there are inaccuracies in the documents given by the Defense Ministry in 2015 and 2016. In particular, one document states that the unused vacation is 57 days, and the preceding document does not include the data on the vacation, and the deadlines for the military service are incorrect. Former officer demands responsibility for falsified officials. "I am on a hunger strike since 12 am and will continue until the issue is resolved according to the RA law. Until this time, nobody has thought of coming and talking to me. I also have heart problems and it complicates the situation," he said. Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group At UCOM only: Tv sets at 10% discount + 1 month free UMIX package + 4k tv channel Ameriabanks Special Offer for New Clients of Hrazdan Branch "Fall forward": Gurgen Khachatryan, the Co-Founder of the Galaxy Group of Companies, addressed a message to young people in Armenia UCOM hosted interns of Russian CBOSS corporation for a month The 20-episode Bloody bet thriller to be broadcast on Ucom's Armenia Premium TV channel Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group UCOM offers affordable gadgets at bigger discount Foreign Minister of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan will pay a working visit to New York Governments preventing publication of Haykakan Zhamanak newspaper during state of emergency UCOM prolongs the unlimited internet offer for the level up 4700 and level up 5500 subscribers Ucom employees received recognition for their services to the homeland Karen Vardanyan has allocated 105 million AMD to rescue the Yerevan Botanical Garden. "The Power of One Dram" to overcome childhood cancer Generation A 13 your chance to be the change Google Ad President of the Artsakh Republic Arayik Harutyunyan met with Russian Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group Igor Khovayev "uDays" special offer at Ucom: discounts for all smartphones and accessories for 2 days only For more than 3 hours, 50 or more Azerbaijani servicemen have blocked the interstate road Call on the international community for an adequate response against azerbaijani aggresssion Transformation and trust are important for success in modern banking. Artak Hanesyan UCOMS LEVEL UP 1700 REGIONAL TARIFF PLAN USERS TO RECEIVE MORE THAN THOSE IN YEREVAN Joint statement Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group Covid-19: 163 new cases in Armenia Armenia: Remarks by Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi at the press point with Acting Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan The United States Welcomes Azerbaijans Release of Armenian Detainees and Armenias Actions to Facilitate Demining The Coronavirus-Related Situation in Armenia International aviation: Council greenlights signing of major agreements with four countries Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group At UCOM only: Tv sets at 10% discount + 1 month free UMIX package + 4k tv channel Ameriabanks Special Offer for New Clients of Hrazdan Branch Google Ad "Fall forward": Gurgen Khachatryan, the Co-Founder of the Galaxy Group of Companies, addressed a message to young people in Armenia UCOM hosted interns of Russian CBOSS corporation for a month The 20-episode Bloody bet thriller to be broadcast on Ucom's Armenia Premium TV channel Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group UCOM offers affordable gadgets at bigger discount Foreign Minister of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan will pay a working visit to New York Governments preventing publication of Haykakan Zhamanak newspaper during state of emergency UCOM prolongs the unlimited internet offer for the level up 4700 and level up 5500 subscribers Ucom employees received recognition for their services to the homeland Karen Vardanyan has allocated 105 million AMD to rescue the Yerevan Botanical Garden. "The Power of One Dram" to overcome childhood cancer Generation A 13 your chance to be the change Google Ad President of the Artsakh Republic Arayik Harutyunyan met with Russian Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group Igor Khovayev "uDays" special offer at Ucom: discounts for all smartphones and accessories for 2 days only For more than 3 hours, 50 or more Azerbaijani servicemen have blocked the interstate road Call on the international community for an adequate response against azerbaijani aggresssion Transformation and trust are important for success in modern banking. Artak Hanesyan UCOMS LEVEL UP 1700 REGIONAL TARIFF PLAN USERS TO RECEIVE MORE THAN THOSE IN YEREVAN Joint statement Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group Covid-19: 163 new cases in Armenia Armenia: Remarks by Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi at the press point with Acting Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan The United States Welcomes Azerbaijans Release of Armenian Detainees and Armenias Actions to Facilitate Demining The Coronavirus-Related Situation in Armenia International aviation: Council greenlights signing of major agreements with four countries The 1975 mutiny that inspired Tom Clancys book The Hunt for Red October was an unmistakable sign of big trouble in the Soviet navy. At midnight on Saturday, Nov. 8, 1975, the rumble of a ships engines broke the stillness of the Daugava River. BPK Storozhevoy (Russian for Sentry) unhooked from its mooring buoy in the channel that bisects the city of Riga, then capital of Soviet Latvia. The 405-foot Krivak-class antisubmarine frigate made a tight turnaround, headed north toward the Gulf of Riga, picked up speed and disappeared into the night. Four hours later and 500 miles to the east, a nervous secretary knocked on the door of Leonid Brezhnevs bedroom in the Kremlin. Hearing no response, he screwed up his courage and opened the door to wake his sleeping boss. Had it not been for the urgent message he held from Baltic Fleet headquarters, the assistant wouldnt dream of disturbing the general secretary of the Communist Party. A situation had developed, however, that demanded the Soviet leaders immediate attention. An irritable Brezhnev read the communique with alarm. A mutiny! From his bedside he ordered every ship and plane in the Baltic Fleet to hunt down Storozhevoy. Bomb that ship and sink it! he shouted. Within two hours, Yakovlev Yak-28 Brewers, Tupolev Tu-16 Badgers, patrol craft and destroyers were frantically searching for the wayward ship, armed with orders to send it to the bottom. Sound familiar? It could almost be the plot of Tom Clancys 1984 best seller The Hunt for Red October, later adapted into the blockbuster 1990 film. In fact, Clancy did draw upon the Storozhevoy mutiny for his first novel. In 1982 he came across an account of the revolt, written by Lieutenant Greg Young, in the library of the U.S. Naval Institute. In the film adaptation, American officers (Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn and James Earl Jones) play a nautical game of cat-and-mouse with a Soviet nuclear submarine captain (Sean Connery) that culminates in a thrilling confrontation in the North Atlantic. We know the fiction, but what really happened aboard Storozhevoy? For one, the real life mutiny unfolded aboard a surface ship, not a submarine. Like Red October, however, Storozhevoy was a very sophisticated and capable weapon. Its mission should the Cold War turn hotwas to sail into the North Atlantic and sink American submarines. The biggest discrepancy was the motive of the protagonist: Clancys fictional sub captain, Marko Ramius, meant to defect to the United States with his advanced submarine. While the author did model Ramius on Valery Sablin, the 36-yearold Soviet officer who led the reallife mutiny, Sablin had no intention of defecting. His goal was more ambitious, idealistic and quixotic: Sablin meant to sail Storozhevoy to Leningrad, drop anchorand overthrow the Soviet government. Everyone in the West assumed he was defecting, because thats what Russians always did. They were wrong. Just how wrong no one would know for nearly two decades, but this event raises some compelling questions: Why would a Soviet navy crew mutiny for ideological reasons? Was this a unique event? What did it say about the state of the Soviet navy? And was there a real-life counterpart to Clancys legendary intelligence officera prescient analyst who saw the cracks in the Soviet edifice that Sablins mutiny exposed and who foresaw the breakup of the Red Empire? Valery Sablin was a true believer. He may have been the last adult in the Soviet Union who still imagined that Lenins revolution could succeed. Sablin felt that communism had not yet been given a chance to thrive under the right leadership. And to complete the truth is stranger than fiction irony, Sablin was a zampolita political officer, the very type of man the Communist Party placed aboard warships to enforce ideological conformity and ensure that crews did not defect to the West. He admired Nikita Khrushchev as a reformer who was trying to make life in Russia less oppressive and more prosperous. When the Central Committee abandoned that effort in 1964 and replaced Khrushchev with the retrograde Leonid Brezhnev, Sablin decided hed had enough. He evolved from being a loyal apparatchik to an instrument of the Communist Partys destruction. In a letter to his wife he wrote, This machine needs to be broken from within, using its own armor against it. On Nov. 8, 1975, with his ship moored in the port of Riga, Sablin, then a captain, third rank, swung into action: He locked up Anatoly Potulniy, the captain of Storozhevoy, belowdecks and assembled the officers in a stateroom, where he unveiled his plan to overthrow the Soviet government. He asked them to vote their support or opposition to his scheme by choosing chess pieces from a board in front of themwhite to support the mutiny, black to oppose it. Half the officers threw in their lot with Sablin; the rest were detained. Next, he persuaded Storozhevoys sailors to take part. When KGB investigators later asked Warrant Officer Viktor Borodai why he had supported the mutiny, he spoke for many of the ships crew when he said, Because it was the first time in my life anyone in authority had spoken the truth to me. His interrogators then asked him what he thought the odds of success were for their mission. Borodai put them at 10 percent. The investigators were stunned; why would he take such a risk? Borodai answered, Because a 10 percent chance is still a chance. Sablins mutiny was not an impulsive act. He had pulled together his plan over many months, convinced his crewmen were more loyal to him than to Potulniy. Sablin appealed to the sailors patriotism, as well as their sense of injustice; everyone understood that the workers paradise was in fact a police state. The 58th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution provided the historic date for Sablin to kick off what he saw as his new revolution. Storozhevoy was scheduled to be in Riga for a commemorative naval parade. For inspiration, Sablin turned to one of the most famous mutinies in history. The 1905 Potemkin mutiny had a shattering impact on Russian society, and Sablin took that as proof a small spark could ignite a tinderbox of unrest. The battleship Potemkin was assigned to the Black Sea Fleet when its sailors revolted over bad soup. A side of beef hanging outside the galley had become infested with maggots, and the men refused to eat the borscht made from it. In an escalating standoff, the ships officers ordered the sailors to eat the soup on pain of death. The crewmen responded by killing the officers or throwing them overboard. They seized control of Potemkin and sailed it to various Black Sea ports, spreading insurrection along the way. Government troops eventually put down the revolt at a cost of 7,000 lives, but it nearly toppled the regime of Tsar Nicholas II. Sablin hoped, 70 years later, to recreate the spontaneity of the Potemkin example. His plan was part dream and part lie: Sablin first told his crew a whopper, claiming that other units of the Soviet military were standing by to join their rebellion and awaited only Storozhevoys call to action. He evidently believed that all he had to do was lead by daring example, and his fellow officerssimilarly frustrated by the corruption and hypocrisy of the Soviet regimewould rally to his rebellious colors. Leaving Riga at midnight, Sablin planned on getting an eight-hour head start, which would put him near Leningrad on the morning of November 9 before anyone was the wiser. Once they reached the City of Three Revolutions, Storozhevoy would drop anchor, and Sablin would broadcast his political manifesto to the Soviet people via the ships radio and the response would be, presumably, a fresh revolution. Sablin had put together a list of demands to make upon the Soviet government. These included declaring Storozhevoy free and independent from state and party institutions, granting a half-hour of broadcast time every night on state radio and television, allowing the ship an anchorage and mooring buoy at any port in Soviet waters, and allowing his crewmen unmolested shore leave. Finally, Sablin demanded that Brezhnev and the Politburo refrain from using any kind of violent coercion against the crewmens families, parents or loved ones. Once his demands were met, Sablin expected the naval garrison in Leningrad, particularly on Kronstadt Island, to join him in marching on the admiralty and the general staff building; Kronstadt sailors, after all, had provided key support to Lenin in 1917. Six decades later, Sablin hoped for a similar response. Given the Russian navys long history of mutiny, he also counted on the support of his fellow sailors. Once these events unfolded, as he was confident they would, it would be only a matter of time before the new revolution swept from Leningrad to Moscow. Then, exit the Brezhnev kleptocracy, and enter Sablins brave new world. It didnt work out. By 0600 on Saturday, Nov. 9, 1975, the pursuit squadron Brezhnev had ordered to hunt down Storozhevoy caught up with her in the Baltic Sea. Several attack pilots initially bombed the wrong ship, hitting and damaging another Krivak-class frigate. On overtaking their real quarry, skippers from the attack squadron signaled Sablin to stop engines and heave to. Sablin responded that he was taking his ship to Leningrad and implored his pursuers to join him. Swedish military intelligence officers, meanwhile, were experiencing a rough dawn on Gotland Island. Sablin had turned off Storozhevoys radar to avoid detection, so the Swedes first indication that something was amiss occurred when blips filled their radar screens, showing what appeared to be every ship and plane in the Soviet Baltic Fleet heading straight for their installation. Until their translators got a handle on the situation and realized this was a search for a mutinous ship, the alarmed Swedes thought they might be witnessing the start of World War III. They listened in on conversations between Soviet jets and ground control and learned that some pilots were refusing or ignoring orders to bomb Storozhevoy. For a moment, it appeared Sablins mutiny might succeed. Unable to rely on naval aviators, Minister of Defense Andrei Grechko ordered air force pilots in Sukhoi Su-24 fighter-bombers to stop the wayward ship, which they did at 10:32 that Saturday morning. They dropped 500-pound bombs on the fantail, disabling the rudder, then raked the ship with cannon fire. Soviet marines and KGB agents boarded the disabled Storozhevoy and arrested the crew. Miraculously, the only casualty was Sablin himself, whom Captain Potulniy shot in the leg after being released. Sablin and 13 other mutineers were flown to Moscow for interrogation. After a closed trial, the avid Communist who tried to change the world was found guilty of betraying the motherland and sentenced to death. On Aug. 3, 1976, that sentence was carried out in the basement of Moscows Lefortovo prison, probably with a single bullet to the back of the head. Sablins was not the only bellwether action in the Cold War Soviet navy: In 1959 another brilliant young captain, Nikolai Artamonov, defected to the U.S. and turned double agent, only to be killed by KGB agents in Austria in 1975; in 1963 a Northern Fleet radio operator, Vladimir Gavrilov, attempted to organize a mutiny; and in 1969 three naval officers of the Baltic Fleet, one a weapons-system operator on a nuclear submarine, were imprisoned for starting a subversive organization. Other reports suggest a mutiny erupted on a Baltic nuclear submarine in 1969; another mutiny was attempted on a submarine off Norway in 1972. Mutinies were also rumored to have occurred in the early 1970s aboard a cruiser, an intelligence ship in the Atlantic and a Pacific fleet ship whose crew arrested its officers and attempted to sail to Japan. The Soviets violently suppressed most such revolts. While information on Sablins mutiny and the others derives from declassified KGB files and open sources, Swedish intelligence has not declassified any of its information on Storozhevoy, and U.S. intelligence still denies any knowledge of the incident. Still, there is little debate it was a significant and all-too-real event. Nor can there be any argument that the Soviet fleets experienced serious discipline and morale problems. But questions linger about what the U.S. and its NATO allies really knew about the Cold War weakness of the Soviet Union. Sablin and his coconspirators put the handwriting on the wallbut did the U.S. read and understand it? Nate Braden is coauthor of The Last Sentry: The True Story That Inspired The Hunt for Red October. For further reading, he recommends: Mutiny on the Storozhevoy, by Gregory Young. Originally published in the August 2008 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here. General Subotais Mongols overran Europe in 1241and taught the Red Army how to fight. In 1221 a cavalry force of some 20,000 Mongols under Genghis Khans ablest general, Subotai, began a reconnaissance of the West. They swept through the Caucasus Mountains and destroyed a Georgian army over two major battles. Then, in the spring of 1223, Subotais armies reached Crimea and in a battle on the Kalka River defeated a Russian army, inflicting losses of 40,000 men, including six princes and 70 nobles. Subotais campaign represented historys longest cavalry ride, covering 5,500 miles from Mongolia to Russia, during which he fought a dozen battles, often against superior numbers. Effective as it was, his army was nevertheless too small for out-and-out conquest. So the next time the Mongols headed west, in 1236, they did so in force. The man who led these invasions, Subotai Bagatur (1175 1248), or Subotai the Valiant, was one of historys greatest generals, demonstrably the equal of Hannibal and Scipio in tactical brilliance and perhaps of Alexander and Caesar in strategy. He commanded armies whose size, scale and scope of operations surpassed most of those of the ancient world. Under his command, Mongol armies moved faster over longer distances than any armies had before. Without Subotai, there would have been no Mongol conquest of Korea, China, Persia and Russia. With his conquest of Hungary, he destroyed every European military force of consequence standing between the Mongols and Western Europe. Still almost unknown in the West for the strategist and tactical genius he was, Subotai inspired the modern military emphases on speed, maneuver, surprise, envelopment, deep battle and battles of annihilation. On the eve of the 1236 Mongol invasion, Russia was a roadless country of isolated small, weak principalities in continuous turmoil from feudal wars and foreign invasions. The strategic key to conquering Russia was to defeat each principality quickly enough to prevent formation of a defensive coalition. Accordingly, Subotai first led the Mongol army northwest to break the power of the northern Russian princes. His columns stormed the principality of Ryazan, southeast of Moscow. In a matter of days, just before Christmas, Mongol horsemen entered the city and, characteristically, turned it into a slaughterhouse. The Mongols moved next to Kolomna, which suffered the same fate, and then on to Suzdal and Moscow. Leaving Moscow in flames and with their mobility enhanced by now-frozen streams and rivers, the Mongols quickly covered the 100 miles to the important city of Vladimir. On Feb. 7, 1238, they attacked and burned the city. In response, Russian Grand Prince Yuri II assembled his armies on the Sita River to meet the Mongol threat, but hampered by deep snow, they could only wait and wonder where the Mongols were. At the end of February, the Russians sent out a reconnaissance force to locate the Mongols, only to discover they were surrounded by Subotais army, which now numbered some 200,000. On March 4, the Russian army fell quickly in the bloodstained snow, the grand prince himself killed and decapitated. By April much of northern Russia lay in smoking ruins. In less than two months, 12 walled Russian cities had been destroyed, and Mongol advance units were only a hundred miles from Novgorod, then Russias wealthiest city. But Subotai, concerned about getting trapped by spring floods, ordered his army to pull back, and for the remainder of that year and the next, the Mongol army replenished itself on the steppe pastures of the Don River basin, preparing for its next campaign against Europe. The Mongol advance resumed in late 1240, this time striking at the southern Russian principalities. By November, Mongol columns had reached the outskirts of Kiev, the center of the Orthodox faith and one of the great cities of Christianity, besieging it in early December. Despite its stone walls, Kiev fell quickly to Mongol bombardment and heavy cavalry. Subotai then put the city to the torch and massacred its people. The destruction was so great that a traveler passing by Kievs ruins six years later described just a few hundred huts on ground still littered with countless skulls and bones of dead men. The Mongol armies continued their advance against only token opposition and within three weeks reached the far Russian border. With resistance completely crushed, Subotai turned his attention to the West. When Subotai began the next phase of his European campaign, in December 1240, his chosen target was the Hungarian twin-city capital of Buda and Pest on the Danube. As the Mongol army approached, Subotai anticipated that the army of Hungarian King Bela IV would emerge to do battle. If it did, Subotai would have an opportunity to destroy the last significant armed force between the Mongols and Central Europe. He divided his invasion force into four columns, each sent to cross the snow-filled passes of the Carpathian Mountains at different locations: Mongol general Baidar led the northernmost penetration; Batu Khan moved his troops through Galicia; Kuyuks columns swept through Moldavia and Transylvania to the south; and Subotai himself swept farthest south through the Mehedia Pass. To protect against surprise attacks from the north, Subotai dispatched a force of 30,000 men under Kaidu, grandson of Ogedai Khan (the third son of Genghis Khan), to engage European forces in Poland, Bohemia and Silesia. In March 1241, Kaidus army crushed the army of Polish King Boleslav V, entered Cracow on Palm Sunday and put the abandoned city (its inhabitants had fled to nearby forests) to the torch. Kaidu then crossed the Oder River, two of his columns heading for Breslau while another swung west through Lithuania, East Prussia and along the Baltic coast of Pomerania, killing, burning and looting as they went. Kaidus army bypassed Breslaus stout stone fortifications and swept into Silesia. Mongol reconnaissance units then reported the first signs of organized resistance. Henry II the Pious, Duke of Silesia, assembled an army at Liegnitz to save Christian Europe from the Mongol horde, while King Wenceslas of Bohemia marched north with an army of 50,000 men to join Henry. Kaidu, determined to prevent the two armies from linking up, moved rapidly toward Liegnitz to engage Henrys army before Wenceslas could arrive. Henry was unsure when reinforcements would arrive and was concerned that unless he moved his army to open ground, he would be trapped in his city. About April 9, 1241 (historians disagree on the exact date), the two armies met on a wide plaindie Wahlstadt, or Chosen Placea few miles south of Liegnitz. The Duke of Silesia divided his army into four combat contingents, or battles. These battles were irregular in size and composition and commanded by officers assigned on the basis of birth and nobility rather than proven competence, as in Mongol armies. The first European contingent consisted of Henry, chosen troops from the knights of Poland and Silesia and some mercenaries. The famed Teutonic knights comprised the second battle under the command of their Landmeister, Poppo von Osterna; in their hauberks, covered by white mantles with black crosses on the front, and full-face helmets, these knights were the elite force of the European army. The third contingent was a group of Polish knights drawn from lesser nobility, and the fourth battle, probably infantry, is described in the chronicles as an army of gold-digging peasants from Silesiapresumably miners. Facing the Europeans across the open plain was the army of Kaidu Khan. Details are sketchy regarding specific troop movements, so only a general picture of events can be reconstructed. Early in the battle, one of Henrys cavalry brigades engaged the Mongol center in the usual hand-to-hand mounted combat. Mongol light cavalry quickly encircled the brigade, subjecting it to murderous arrow fire. The brigade held its ground for a short time, but with no other contingents coming to its aid, it broke free of the Mongol encirclement and fell back. Henry then committed the main body of his cavalry to a reinforcing attack against the Mongol center. Sulislav and Meshko of Opole mounted this charge by the second and third divisions. In the ensuing melee, the Mongol cavalry fell back and broke into a headlong retreat. Thinking Kaidus center had given way, Henry and his contingent, along with the rest of the Silesian cavalry, gave chase, only to ride into a Mongol trap. The feigned retreat was a proven Mongol tactic designed to separate the enemy cavalry from its infantry and disperse their tightly packed formations. Fresh Mongol light cavalry suddenly ambushed the Silesians extended and disordered ranks, decimating the knights with volleys of arrows. Behind Henrys entrapped squadrons, Mongol firepots obscured the battlefield with black smoke, further confusing the trapped cavalry and screening it from the infantry. Mongol heavy cavalry then surrounded the knights and shot them down at close range, while the light cavalry darted in and out of the smoke, peppering the infantry with arrows. Mongol archers shot the Europeans horses from under them, making the dismounted knights easy prey for the heavy cavalry, who ran them down with lance and saber. One such dismounted group of Knights Templar made a determined stand, only to be killed to a man. In the slaughter that followed, almost the entire European army perished. Duke Henry was decapitated, his headless and naked body found on the battlefield by his wife, who identified Henry by the six toes on his left foot. The Mongols tallied the body count by cutting off the right ear of every dead enemy soldier. Nine sacks of victims ears were toted from the battlefield in Mongol war wagons. The grand master of the Templars wrote to King Louis IX of France, noting that no army of consequence stood between the Mongols and France. Europe lay defenseless. The Battle of Liegnitz, while a catastrophe for the Europeans, was just one step in Subotais planned con- quest of Europe. His main Mongol army had already forced the Carpathian passes and marched swiftly into Hungary. After Liegnitz, Kaidu turned his army south to link up with the four columns of Subotais armies, which had forced their way through the Carpathians, overcome Hungarian defenses at the passes and were poised to destroy the Hungarians deployed on the banks of the Sajo River. Subotais southern columns raided the outlying districts of Buda and Pest to divert King Belas attention from the larger force marching on the two cities. Bela took the bait and sent a small force under the Palatine Hedervary to block the Mongols southern advance. They were easily brushed aside. Bela called a war council in Buda, 200 miles behind the lines of battle, to discuss how to stop the Mongol advance. While the council was in session, Bela received word that the advance guard of the Mongol army had already reached the banks of the Danube just outside Pest. As Bela debated a course of action, the other Mongol columns arrived at their assembly points a few miles north of the city. The king believed that the swollen Danube and the citys strong fortifications were sufficient to stop the Mongols until he could assemble his army. He did not think it strange that Subotai made no effort to ford the river or lay siege to the city. By the first few days of April, Bela had assembled an army of nearly 100,000 men and marched east to repel the Mongol invaders. As Belas army advanced, the Mongols withdrew before it. This slow pursuit went on for nine days. On the morning of the 10th day, Subotai crossed the stone bridge over the Sajo River and encamped a few miles beyond it, leaving only a token force to guard the bridge. Subotai was tempting Bela to cross so the Mongols could back the Hungarian forces into the swift waters of the swollen river. Bela refused to take the bait and halted. Prior to assuming defensive positions, Bela drove the Mongol detachment from the bridge and established a small bridgehead on the east bank to protect against a Mongol counterattack. The main body of Belas army remained on the west bank and encamped for the night. On the opposite bank, the Mongol army gathered on a battlefield Subotai had chosen. The stage was set for the decisive battle of the Hungarian campaign. Chroniclers of the Battle of the Sajo River record that Belas army was perhaps 100,000 strong. Comprising numerous contingents of armored knights, Belas army also included horse archers familiar with Mongol tactics. But news of the disaster at Liegnitz and rumors of the Mongol rape of the countryside had shattered the armys morale. Furthermore, the Hungarian king was unpopular with his knights, many of whom thought him too great a friend of the church; two of Belas most able and trusted commanders, Hugolin of Kolocza and Matthias of Gran, were archbishops. Belas disposition of forces on the west bank also left much to be desired: Although the Sajo is fordable in a few places, Bela guarded only the stone bridge. His camp was dense and too close to the river, occupying a very narrow front. Batu is said to have pointed out Belas mistake to his generals. They are crowded together, Batu said, like a herd of cattle in narrow stalls, with no room to move about. The final flaw in Belas position was that he did not use his light cavalry or horse archers to conduct reconnaissance along the river, leaving his flanks exposed. Just before daylight, Batu attacked the Hungarian bridgehead, subjecting its defenders to the 13th century equivalent of an artillery bombardment. The Mongols had brought up seven siege engines and hammered the bridgehead with firebombs and noisemakers. Their intent was to focus Hungarians attention on the point of attack. Stupefied by the bombardment, the defenders were quickly overrun by Mongol cavalry. Mongol artillery then targeted the far bank, and the cavalry crossed the bridge under cover of a rolling barrage. Although surprised by the attack, Hungarian commanders rallied their troops and engaged the force crossing the bridge, forcing the Mongols to give ground. But suddenly, it became clear the Mongol assault of the stone bridge was just a diversion. In spring, the rivers of Hungary run swift in full flood, posing significant obstacles even for modern combat engineers. But the audacious Subotai had found a way to cross the Sajo. Some miles downstream from the bridge, a small peninsula ringed in swampland protruded into the river. Though it seemed unsuitable for a crossing of any sizeable force, Subotai had used the cover of night to move three full toumans, 30,000 men, across the river and along the narrow peninsula to the west bank. Once across, he assembled his force, turned north and mounted an attack while the main Hungarian force was concentrated opposite the bridge. Subotais army rolled into the Hungarian armys flank, nearly shattering it in a single blow. To their credit, the Hungarians did not panic but withdrew to their camp. The Mongols moved up their siege engines and for several hours bombarded the Hungarians with stones, arrows and burning naphtha. Batu increased the pressure on the bridge, and Subotai ordered two columns to encircle the Hungarian camp. The crafty old general deliberately left a gap between the arms of the pincer, and the Hungarians looked to it as a possible avenue to safety. At first only a few horsemen braved the gap, but soon a stream of soldiers was pouring through. The Mongols did nothing to stop them. As the Hungarian defense collapsed, more and more soldiers pressed into the gap. Discipline broke down, and many flung aside their weapons. As the column of defeated, fleeing knights spread out, Subotai sprang his trap. Mounted on fresh horses, Mongol detachments suddenly appeared on both sides of the straggling column. Subotai had planned to catch the enemy on open ground, and his cavalry units did just that, hunting down the exhausted Hungarians and burning villages in which they took refuge. The butchery lasted for two days. When it was over, bodies littered the road to Pest like stones in a quarry. The Mongols slaughtered between 50,000 and 70,000 Hungarian soldiers. Emperor Frederick II wrote of the losses that day, Fere extinguitur militia totius regni Hungariae (The entire army of Hungary has been destroyed). With that victory, the Mongols controlled all of Eastern Europe from the Dnieper to the Oder Rivers and from the Baltic Sea to the Danube. In four months they had overwhelmed armies totaling five times their own strength. Subotai then consolidated his hold on Hungary and ravaged the country from end to end. One estimate placed Hungarys total losses at 50 percent of its population. As soon as the Danube froze, Subotais columns crossed the river and continued west. Mongol spearheads crossed the Julian Alps into northern Italy, and reconnaissance columns moved through the Danube valley and approached the walls of Vienna. The sovereigns of Europe, paralyzed with fear, waited helplessly for the arrival of the barbarians. The Mongols were preparing to attack Vienna when a messenger arrived with the news that Ogedai Khan had died. Mongol law required all royal offspring to return to the capital in Karakorum to take part in the election of a new khan. Subotais army had three royal princes with it. The Mongol columns turned east and began the long march back to Mongolia. Their route took them through Dalmatia and Serbia and across northern Bulgaria. They laid waste to these lands before vanishing across the lower Danube, never to return to Europe. In Russia, the Mongols established their own state, the Golden Horde of Batu Khan, and ruled the country for nearly three centuries. Subotai was 68 when he returned from the long campaign against Russia and Hungary. He died at age 73, but his tactical and strategic legacy lived on. The first modern military historian to write an analysis of Mongol tactics was Russian Lt. Gen. Mikhail I. Ivanin (18011874), who as a young officer in Central Asia fought against the Uzbeks, who practiced Mongol tactics in the same area under conditions similar to Genghis Khans Turkestan campaign. In 1846 Ivanin published The Art of War of the Mongols and the Central Asian People. The book became a standard text for students at the Imperial Military Academy and remained required reading in Soviet military schools up through World War II. In 1924 Mikhail Frunze, the deputy peoples commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, introduced the concept of deep battle, which mandates widespread seizure of the offensive by conducting long-range attacks against enemy troop concentrations, road junctions, communications, cities and supply depots, thus paralyzing his ability to concentrate in force and forcing him to react rather than act. This is, of course, the Mongol strategic theory of war. The Russian emphasis on surprise, maneuver over long distances, maintaining the offensive and striking the enemy in depth at multiple points has its origins in the Mongol experience, as does the Russian reliance on mobility, maneuver, encirclement and annihilation of the enemy wherever he can be brought to battle. Frunzes colleague Mikhail Tukhachevsky, chief of staff of the Red Army from 1925 until 1937, gave the Mongol method of war further expression in Soviet operational doctrine and equipment. Tukhachevsky modernized the Soviet army, with emphasis upon speed, mobility and offensive operations across great distances. It was Tukhachevsky who initiated the Soviet doctrinal emphasis on tanks, mirroring the role played by Mongol horsemen, and who emphasized preparatory fire against enemy formations, adapting the Mongol practice of using light cavalry archers to soften up tight formations of European and Chinese knights before shattering them with the shock of a heavy cavalry charge. By 1937 the Russians hadin a doctrinal and tactical senseessentially reinvented the Mongol army with modern equipment. The Red Army was the largest and most mechanized army in the world, and its commanders were better trained in the operational control of large units over great distances than those of any officer corps in the West. Frunze and Tukhachevsky, both students of Ivanins analysis of the Mongol campaigns, had reconfigured the Russian army in the image of the armies of Genghis Khan and Subotai. For further reading, Richard A. Gabriel suggests his book Subotai the Valiant: Genghis Khans Greatest General. Originally published in the June 2008 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here. After yesterday revealing a Belfast show at the Telegraph Building, legendary Canadian house producer Deadmau5 announces Dublin show. This will be the Canadian DJ's first gig in Ireland since 2014, a long-awaited return for one of electronic music's most recognisable names. The last Dublin show that Deadmau5 - real-name Joel Zimmerman - performed was to a sell-out crowd at the 3Arena. District 8 has a maximum capacity of just 1,000 so tickets are set to fly out. Deadmau5 will also be making his return to Belfast this November to play at The Telegraph Building, a pop-up warehouse events space that once housed the printing presses for the Belfast Telegraph newspaper. Advertisement The District 8 leg take place on November 14, the day after the Belfast show. Tickets for the District 8 show will start at 20 and will go on sale this Friday at 9am from Eventbrite. From Afro-beat and minimalist techno to retro 80s synthpop and cerebral alt. rock, Forbidden Fruit has a United Nations of acts catering to your every musical whim! _image3_ _image6_ This article can only be read with a Premium Account Please Log In or Subscribe to continue reading There had been daily protests in Gaza throughout the six-week period known as the Great March of Return, which culminates in May 15s Nakba Day commemoration of the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence that drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their ancestral lands. Dozens of Palestinians had already been killed in David vs. Goliath skirmishes with the notoriously trigger-happy Israeli Defense Forces on the other side of the beleagured Strip. The potential as Nakba Day approached for an escalation of the violence was obvious, but no one expected the ferocity of what happened on its eve as Gazans expressed their collective outrage at Donald Trumps decision to move the United States Embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. This extraordinarily crass and inflammatory move reversed Americas long-standing policy that the citys status could only be decided in negotiations with the Palestinians who, in the event of the Two State Settlement, supported by the European Union, believe that East Jerusalem should be the capital of the Palestinian nation. Edmund de Waals memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes did the rounds up here on Hog Heights after it was published in 2010. It has a special resonance for us. Our late beloved chatelaine took it with her when she set out on a mission not unlike de Waals to uncover the story of her grand-aunt Elizabeth, who died in Istanbul in the 1930s. It had been a lifelong interest, piqued by a small file of documents, moved from one house to another over 70 years. Elizabeth had worked as a governess in fin-de-siecle Paris, then Biarritz early in the Great War, followed by Madrid in 1917, the Basque country in the early 1920s and finally Istanbul in 1926. She died there in 1930 at 59 years of age. Her last employers were an Italian Sephardic Jewish family, Matteo and Suzanne Tazartes. The couple were married in the Italian synagogue in Constantinople. They had two children. Aldo was born in 1924 and Giorgio in 1927. Elizabeth lived with them in the Karakoy Building, at the north end of Galata Bridge, which spans the Golden Horn across to Eminonu. It is still there, full of financial services. Matteo Tazartes ran a large tobacco company. But he was also a Commandeur de la Legion dHonneur, an award conferred for services rendered to France, and the Couronne dItalie. Gorillaz have teased the release of the follow-up album to 2017's Humanz ahead of their Malahide Castle show next week. Album six, seemingly entitled The Now Now, is on the horizon. The virtual band fronted by Damon Albarn play Malahide Castle on June 9. In December, the band that also features comic book artist Jamie Hewlett teased that there would be no five-year break this time around because "there's ideas for a few more albums so we're going to go straight into that'. They've already debuted the new song 'Hollywood' while on tour and, now, a June 29 release seems plausible thanks to teaser posters that have popped up in relation to London's All Points East Festival. The images take fans to a site with the URL: TheNowNow.TV, which features an animation of the album title and the release date. A major new scandal has erupted in relation to children adopted under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. In a total of 126 cases, individuals were incorrectly and illegally registered as the biological children of men and women who were not their biological parents. This means that a significant number of people who are aged between 49 and 72 may have no idea that they were adopted or who their original father and mother might have been. Childrens Minister Katherine Zappone has today stated that efforts are being made to contact the 126 people involved, but according to reports, the true numbers of this scandal are unknown. Opposition parties have called for an investigation, on the basis that this may be the only way that the true number of victims can be established. Hell be bringing his tour Into The Punset to Ireland across 2018 and 2019 Canadian comedian Stewart Francis will play a number of shows in Ireland as part of his farewell tour. Francis, who has gained popularity in Ireland and the UK thanks to his appearances on Mock The Week, Live at The Apollo and Crackerjack, will be bringing his tour Into The Punset to Galway, Belfast, Cork and Limerick in 2019. Into The Punset will be a chance for fans to say goodbye to the 59-year old as he will be drawing an end to his career as a comedian. For many years he has stated his desire to pursue other interests, in particular his dream of becoming a syndicated cartoonist. Known for his deadpan delivery and one-liners, Francis was on the receiving end of Funniest Joke of the Fringe in 2012 for his this: You know who really gives kids a bad name? Posh and Becks. Stewart Francis had previously announced that he would be playing a gig in Vicar Street on 17 November 2018, which is part of the first leg of his farewell tour. Advertisement 16 May - Ulster Hall, Belfast 18 May - Cork Opera House 19 May - Lime Tree Theatre, Limerick 20 May - Town Hall Theatre, Galway Subscribing to our services is a three step process. First you have to create an account and then you have to pick if you want to subscribe to digital and or print. Some people only want to be a digital subscriber to get access online and others want to also receive the print edition. If you are already a print subscriber and want online access, it is free, you simply have to create an online account and then attach your print subscription account number to the online account you create. As an existing print subscriber it is easy to get FREE access to all our online content. When you click get started below it will walk you through creating an online account to attach your print subscription number to. After your account is created it will ask you to either add a subscription for online access or click on the print subscriber button. Click the print subscriber button header and it will open a dropdown, now click on get started. The page will reload and you will be prompted to enter an account number and a zip code. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO USE THE NUMBER OFF OF THE MOST RECENT ISSUE OR ANYTHING AFTER JANUARY 28, 2019 TO GAIN ACCESS! OLD ACCOUNT NUMBERS WILL NOT WORK The account number and zip code are easily available on your most recent issue of the High Plains Journal or Midwest Ag Journal in the address fields as is shown here. Sometimes the account number has extra zero's in front of it, just ignore those. The Humane Society of the United States is offering a reward of $2,000 for information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of the person seen kicking his dog in a surveillance video. The Case: News reports give the following account: On May 12, several people heard a dog yelping and a man screaming in the area of Herr and Front Streets in Harrisburg, PA. A resident checked his security camera to see the man walking his dog, then stopping to kick the animal twice, once in the side and once in the face. Animal Cruelty: Securing the serious attention and engagement of law enforcement, prosecutors and residents in cases involving allegations of cruelty to animals is an essential step in protecting the whole community. The connection between animal cruelty and human violence is well documented. Studies show a correlation between animal cruelty and many other crimes, from narcotics and firearms violations to battery and sexual assault. There is no excuse for abusing defenseless animals. The violence caught by a surveillance camera of a man kicking his dog is simply appalling, said Kristen Tullo, the Humane Society of the United States Pennsylvania state director. We hope our reward will help find the perpetrator of this horrible crime. We would expect that this individual be charged under the provisions of Act 10 of 2017, Libres Law. This poor dog cant fight back, but you can. Make the call now, states Harrisburg Animal Control officer Billy Sandstrom. The Investigators: Harrisburg Bureau of Police is investigating this case. Anyone with relevant information is asked to call Dauphin County Dispatch at 717-558-6900. Request Animal Control Officers Billy Sandstrom or Fred Lamke. Resources: The Humane Society of the United States Animal Cruelty Campaign raises public awareness and educates communities about the connection between animal cruelty and human violence while providing a variety of resources and support to law enforcement agencies, social work professionals, educators, legislators and families. The HSUS offers rewards in animal cruelty cases across the country and works to strengthen laws against animal cruelty. Not long ago, the National Sheriffs Association and the HSUS launched ICE BlackBox, a free smartphone tool, to allow users to record video of illegal animal cruelty and share it securely with law enforcement for possible investigation and prosecution. The Humane Society of the United States doubled its standard cruelty reward from $2,500 to $5,000 thanks to a generous donation from an HSUS board member. To see information on statistics, trends, laws and animal cruelty categories, visit our animal cruelty statistics page. Music Choice Seeks Support Of Legislation To Cheat Artists Out Of Royalties "ARTISTS BEWARE," writes A2IM CEO Richard Jame Burgess. "Music Choice is trying to solicit your support to deceive Congress into reducing your royalties from Music Choice." "The below email that Music Choice is sending out to artists may be one of the most deceitful and disingenuous efforts to cheat artists out of their rightful royalties that I have ever seen," says Burgess. The image below is the email and letter from Music Choice requesting artists support for a letter to members of Congress regarding legislation currently before the Senate that would result in a loss of artist royalties. click on image to enlarge Share on: How Spotify Is Killing Jazz, Soul, Classical Music Is it time for a Fair Streaming movement? Chris Rizik explores the structure of the new streaming economy and the way in which artists are paid could spell bad news for Jazz, Soul, Classical and other niche music genres. ________________________ Guest post by Chris Rizik of Soul Tracks Two events happened recently that caught my attention: Lil Pump, a 17 year old Miami rapper, signed an $8 million recording deal with Warner Bros. Around the same time, one of the leading modern soul singers in the US celebrated on social media the one millionth stream of her latest song on Spotify. Her financial haul on it? Likely around $3,000. Though these two stories appeared unrelated, they are instructive of the strange new world of music streaming payments, and the inherent bias against soul, jazz, classical and other genres of music aimed at adult listeners. For four generations, recorded music has been an integral part of popular culture, and has also been a key piece of how musical artists make a living. And whether it was wax, vinyl, 8-Track, cassette, CD or mp3, there was always a direct financial connection between the artist and his or her listening fans. When I bought my copy of Thriller, I knew that some money from that purchase ultimately found its way to Michael Jackson. And when my Dad purchased a Frank Sinatra album, the same thing happened. The income of both artists was directly correlated to the money that their fans spent to listen to their music. And it didnt matter if I listened to my Michael Jackson album more often than my Dad listened to the Sinatra disc. The fact is that we each made a financial commitment to our artist by buying the album, and our artist received a share of the purchase. When music streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal came around (for purposes of this article, well focus on Spotify, the industry leader), they turned the music industry on its head, changing how fans listened and paid for music, particularly with the idea of monthly all you can eat subscriptions. Those subscriptions are the main source of Spotifys revenues, and Spotify then agrees to pay a percentage of those revenues to rights holders like artists and labels. And while there has been a lot of press about how streaming initially reduced the overall payments to record companies and artists (which has since turned around), what hasnt been addressed as much is how streaming has changed which artists get paid. And, without a doubt, streaming has stacked the deck toward hip-hop, pop, and other genres whose listeners are teenagers and twenty-somethings. Chris also talks about Fair Streaming on the Music Biz Weekly podcast. Listen here. Kids listen to more music than adults do, period. Research indicates it can be as much as five times as much. And it has been that way forever. But in the past, artist revenue was based on sales, not listens. So artists with adult audiences were rewarded when their fans paid money for their music, even if they actually listened to it less often. Music streaming, on the other hand, allocates payments based on the number of listens, or streams, of songs. And THAT changes everything, creating new winners and losers. Here is a very simplified example: Lets say my 19-year old neighbor and I both subscribe to Spotify. And lets say that $5 from each of our monthly subscriptions gets paid to artists. For our example, well say that there are only two artists on Spotify, Najee and Young Jeezy. I listen only to Najee and my neighbor listens only to Jeezy. My neighbor, who has way more time on her hands, streams Jeezys songs 80 times in the month, while I listen to Najee 20 times. Back in the day, I would have bought the Najee album and my neighbor would have bought the Young Jeezy album, and each artist would have made exactly the same amount from our purchase. But with Spotify, our subscription money goes into a pool, which is split among the artists based on the number of streams. And since Jeezy was listened to 80 out of the 100 streams, he gets $8, and Najee only gets $2. So, basically, $3 out of my $5 went to Young Jeezy, even though I never listened to him once. And Najee is waaaay worse off than he was in the old days, solely because his adult audience listens less often regardless of the fact that his fan paid for of the subscription revenue that month. This problem is more than theoretical. It is the immediate dilemma facing artists, and it has an inordinate impact on jazz, soul, classical, blues and other similar genres with older audiences. Some artists are leaving the industry, some are changing their music to appeal to younger ears, and thousands of others have decided not to release any new music because they simply cant make money recording anymore. PAY-PER-STREAM Some would consider it too strong to call the pay-per-stream method unfair and I will admit that, on the surface, pay-per-stream has a simple attractiveness to it but there is little doubt that it has significantly changed the bargain that existed between artists and fans for a century. Wed consider it ludicrous for half of my $50 Gregory Porter Detroit concert ticket to be used to pay Drake for a larger show hes doing in Phoenix, but it is now completely accepted that a majority of my streaming subscription will be used to pay artists to whom I wouldnt listen on a bet. It is the opposite of the customer empowerment that otherwise pervades modern commerce. While I believe that this effect on some musical genres is a major problem, it is unlikely that many folks in positions of power in music (major labels, Apple, Spotify, etc), agree. After years of rough sledding, theyre all making more money now, so theyre not exactly focused on the (likely) unintended consequences of the new payment formula. The labels have simply adjusted to the pay-per-stream method by signing youth-oriented acts like Lil Pump and dropping older artists who would get less streams. However, I would argue than a reasonable, relatively simple, alternative exists that wouldnt affect overall revenue for the labels, but which would again financially connect artists with their fans who are streaming subscribers. That would be to more directly connect subscription revenue to the artists that the individual subscriber listens to. So the portion of my subscription that is paid out to artists actually goes to the artists whose music I streamed, spread among them based on MY streams, not those of my neighbor or anyone else. In essence, each subscriber is empowered with his or her own stream rate, allocated in the way that they listen. In my example above, my $5 would go to Najee and my neighbors $5 would go to Jeezy. Again, total label revenue remains the same, but the odd wealth reallocation among artists that streaming has wrought would be, at least partially, undone. And the music consumer is empowered in a way that largely conforms with longtime expectations, and with overall business trends. Look, I understand that streaming is a great new technology that is a net positive for the music industry. But its payment formula is not so great, and it is having significant negative effects on thousands of artists who have just as many fans as they did a few years ago, but who are getting paid a lot less because their fans are now subsidizing teen-focused artists and genres. There is nothing magical about the algorithms that were made up by a couple guys in Sweden ten years ago. They can, and should, be changed. In the end, it is just math, and it is completely do-able technically. The streaming industry can create something, dare we say, fairer, and in the process save the livelihoods of important artists in some of the most revered and historically significant genres. Chris also talks about Fair Streaming on the Music Biz Weekly podcast. Listen here. Share on: The Board of Selectmen signed the annual town warrant on Tuesday. Town meeting will be June 11 at 7 at Cheshire School. Cheshire Finalizes Proposed Fiscal 2019 Budget CHESHIRE, Mass. The Selectmen signed a town meeting warrant that includes the $6,090,255 fiscal 2019 budget. With the budget review process over, the board members signed a warrant Tuesday night that includes a spending plan for next year with a 2.7 percent increase over the fiscal 2018 budget of $5,926,130. "We have an updated, clean final budget," Town Administrator Mark Webber said. "No changes from last week." The main driver behind the increase was education spending, which bumped up 4.3 percent to $3,276,482. This is an increase of $136,158. The flat 2 percent increase programmed in for employees, as well as other small increases, also added to the budget. The budget can be found on the town website. Town Moderator Edmund St. John IV will hold a "baby town meeting" on Monday, June 4, at the Community/Senior Center at 7 p.m. for public review of the warrant articles. The annual town meeting will be held Monday, June 11, at 7 p.m. at Cheshire School with voter check-in at 6:30 p.m. In other business, Highway Superintendent Blair Crane heard from a resident who was concerned about road debris and materials left over from winter clean up. Crane said the street sweeper has yet to visit the town but that Cheshire is on the schedule. "He is running late this year and is a couple weeks behind because it has been so bad this year ... we are kind of held hostage to the whole scenario, but we are on the list for that," he said. "It goes from Florida from one community to the other." Typically, the streets in town are swept before Memorial Day. Crane was also asked about East Main Street and the number of potholes that have developed in the road. Crane said the Highway Department tries to first patch holes that could be dangerous but East Main Street is on the agenda. "There is always a list of them, but we are chewing away at it and I don't want to promise anything, but we will get down there as soon as we can," he said. "Unfortunately, it takes time and we are a small crew." Also, in his report Crane said the town's backhoe had a major hydraulic failure and will have to be sent to Springfield to be repaired. "We got it back to the shed and it is not an easy fix ... the cab has to come off," he said. "There are two ways to fix it: we can have someone that does that kind of thing come here and work on it but the cost to do that is prohibitive but we have the ability to move it so we will take it down there to save some money." He added the machine has a lot of hours on it and is showing its age. "The machine has about 7,000 hours on it so it is really not surprising that this has happened but nonetheless it is not going to be inexpensive to repair most likely," he said. In the town administrator report, Webber said he has been in contact with the Mount Greylock Advisory Council and was told although it's OK to have to co-members on the council, only one will be able to vote and the other would act as an alternative. The Selectmen appointed Christy Butler and Gary Trudeau as its representatives on the council, an advisory body for the Mount Greylock State Reservation. Town Clerk Christine Emerson said Butler decided to back out, so Trudeau will be the one and only member. Webber added that the Ashuwillticook Rail Trail will be repaved next year by the state Department of Transportation. "It is getting a little beat up in spots and it is 18 years old," he said. The reconstruction and resurfacing of the 11 miles between Adams, Cheshire and Lanesborough will cost $5 million. It is currently in the preliminary design phase. Town officials and volunteers pose with the new sign built by Carlyle Chesbro Sr. thanks to donations to the restoration. Edward Denault holds up a 'before' picture of a gravestone that was repaired. A number of the stones had cracked or broken. Some stones may be lost because of breakage. The stones date from 1803 to 1930. PreviousNext Cemetery With Clarksburg's Namesake Restored & Revealed Nicholas Clark's 200-year-old tombstone has worn away making it difficult to read the lettering. CLARKSBURG, Mass. Nicholas Clark's been resting on a knoll above Horrigan Road, and a stone's throw from his home, for more than 200 years. He hasn't been alone some four dozen of his relatives and in-laws are interred around him. But the Clark family cemetery has been little noticed since the last Clark was buried there nearly 90 years ago. That's changed since a group of volunteers have cleaned up and restored leaning and shattered stones. And a sign now notes where the town's namesake was buried in 1803. "We came up about 20 years ago and did some work so we kind of cleared the brush off," said Edward Denault, a former selectman who lives near the small cemetery, of what he and Joseph Bushika had first done. "I kept it cut the last 20 years myself. But then with the condition of the stones ... ." Denault, Bushika and other volunteers began looking into restoring gravestones that had broken or tipped over in the past couple centuries. They reached out to Rober Eurbin, who as head of the Hill Side Cemetery Restoration group in North Adams has become the go-to for guidance in repairing old headstones. The volunteers glued up and framed broken stones, righted leaning ones and searched for shattered pieces. Denault pulled out photographs taken before the restoration began showing one repaired stone had been in three pieces. "There's still some pieces but we had enough to come up with the date and name ... we can do what we can do," he said. "There's maybe one or two that are gone forever." Denault was showing around Town Administrator Carl McKinney and Select Board Chairman Jeffrey Levanos, on the final day of his term, on Tuesday morning. The cemetery had been largely hidden from view in the past, out of sight and overgrown. The old wagon road lined with majestic trees was cut off from Middle Road years ago. The volunteers have cleared and cut and trimmed and found a new pathway from Horrigan Road that takes you around to the top of the hill. The nearly 50 graves are Clarks, Dalrymples, Haskins, Clements and Cooks and possibly a Ketchum, for whom the town was almost named. Nicholas Clark arrived sometime in the 1760s to settle in the area with his brothers Aaron, Stephen and Silas from Cumberland, R.I., as well as Capt. Matthew Ketchum and Col. William Bullock, who had purchased a land grant. The town was incorporated in 1798. Seth Hudson from Fort Massachusetts was the first white man to "cut down a tree" in what one historian said was called "New Seekonk." "It was designed to name the Town after Hudson, but for some unknown reason it was changed," writes John Lockwood in the 1926 "Western Massachusetts; a history, 1636-1925." Instead, Hudson had a brook named for him and the honors for labeling the town came down to how many Clarks and Ketchums there were. "[Clark] had one more child than Ketchum, and I didn't know infants could vote but ... it counted as a vote," McKinney laughed. So instead of Ketchumville, the town became Clarksburg. Town meeting in 2012 named the Selectmen's meeting room in Town Hall the Ketchum Memorial Meeting Room as a consolation. Clark had seven sons and the family spread and prospered. He was a selectman and also the town's first treasurer and collector, positions that would remain in his family until the 1880s. At the town's 150th anniversary in 1948, North Adams National Bank President Herbert B. Clark extolled the early settlers, including his ancestors. "They were men and women of conviction but they also had in their consciousness a clear recognition of the value of human rights, a quality that persists in Clarksburg today," he said, according to the North Adams Transcript. The town's founder was buried across the road from his home on Horrigan Road, now the oldest house in the town. Denault said it has also been used for a county jail in the past and there's belief it was a way station on the Underground Railroad. The town has owned the plot of land with the cemetery but hasn't really maintained it, McKinney said. He's been trying to reach the heirs of an abutting property for a deeded right of way into the plot. Clark was the first buried there; the last family member was interred there in 1930. Denault said not much is known about them but a descendant, Stephen Clark of California, has been doing research and plotting out the graveyard. Many of the older stones have worn away so much you can barely read them. Nicholas' name and date of death are faint but his five times great-grandson copied it out when it could still be faintly read a decade ago : "Nicholas Clark died Oct. 20, 1803 in the 60th year of his age." Stephen Clark also gave a $500 donation toward the restoration and the Nelson family $200, both of which have helped pay for the sign that stands above Horrigan Road that was built by Carlyle Chesbro Sr. "My design, Kye's making," Denault said. "It's all stainless steel and forever wood. That will be there long after I'm gone." Pulmonary Specialist Joins BMC Physician Practice PITTSFIELD, Mass. Berkshire Health Systems has announced the appointment of Dr. Julio Miranda, a board- certified and fellowship-trained pulmonary and critical care specialist to the medical staff of Berkshire Medical Center and the physician staff of Pulmonary Professional Services of BMC. Dr. Miranda is accepting new patients in need of Pulmonary Care and is partnered with doctors Hafez Alsmaan, Kashif Aslam, Cynthia Callahan, Twinkle Chandak, Daniel Doyle, Michael Mortelliti and Jack Ringler, physician assistant Colleen Halvorsen Sinclair and registered nurse Rebecca Schaffrick at Pulmonary Professional Services of BMC. Miranda is board-certified in internal medicine, critical care medicine and pulmonary disease, and was fellowship trained in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. He received his medical degree from Universidad de Panama, Panama City, and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Cook County Hospital, Chicago. For an appointment with Dr. Miranda or one of his colleagues, ask your physician for a referral, and for more information, call Pulmonary Professional Services of BMC at 413-447-2695. To access our in-house intelligence please request a trial here. Read this article and more for a 30 day period. Are you already an IFLR subscriber? Login here As part of its continuing bureaucratic and economic reform programme, the Indonesian government has streamlined the country's expatriate employment requirements. The new rules, which are set out in Presidential Regulation No 20 of 2018, come into force at the end of June 2018, three months after the Regulation's promulgation. The changes contained in the Regulation are more procedural than substantive; in other words, the fundamental principles governing the employment of expats in Indonesia remain unchanged. The overarching principle in this respect is that an expat may only be hired if there are no suitably qualified Indonesian nationals available to fill the position. Despite the largely procedural nature of the changes, they are nevertheless important for employers. The key change is that the expat licensing process has been substantially streamlined. Previously, an intending employer was required to first prepare an expatriate employment plan (RPTKA) and to submit this to the Manpower Ministry for approval. Upon approval, a separate expatriate manpower employment licence (IMTA) had to be obtained. Under the Regulation, it is now enough for the prospective employer to obtain approval for its RPTKA, which then doubles up as an IMTA. The Regulation has also expanded the types of business entity that are permitted to employ expats. Under a previous decree (now revoked), partnerships, cooperatives and a number of other types of business entity were expressly prohibited from employing non-Indonesians. According to the Regulation, however, all business undertakings are permitted to employ expats as long as it is not prohibited by statute law. While the new rules are clearly a step forward, further improvements could still be made. There continue to be various sectoral regulations on the statute books that set tight requirements for the employment of expatriates in particular professions and industries. However, there have been moves to centralise the assessment of these requirements in the Manpower Ministry, at least for some sectors, which should save employers the inconvenience of having to trek back and forth between government offices. The Regulation was immediately greeted by a cacophony of criticism from opposition parties in Parliament, eager to capitalise on the fears of many Indonesians that the country is being swamped by foreign labour as China ramps up its investment. However, the government stood firm and the dissent has now largely abated. Indra Setiawan 2021 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC. For help please see our FAQs. Share this article The Central Bank of Ireland (CBI) recently published its 2017 annual report. It is essential reading for Irish finance services regulatory advisers, and for any entity with a business presence in Ireland in the banking and financial services sector. Three developments are worthy of note: first, CBI's focus on regulatory issues arising from Brexit; second, the importance of an appropriate regulatory culture in banks and financial services providers; and third, an enhanced approach to enforcement and supervision focusing on senior management responsibility. Brexit poses important challenges for CBI and for the financial services sector in Ireland in general. It is expected that there will be a substantial influx of institutions looking to use Ireland as a passporting hub for Irish and EU/European Economic Area business when the UK leaves the EU in March 2019. CBI's key objective is to strike the appropriate balance between maintaining an appropriate level of supervision, and not unduly inhibiting sectoral growth and expansion. Staffing is also an issue discussed in the annual report: the CBI has substantially increased its workforce, but indicates that there is scope for attracting further talent. Following on from public statements by the Financial Stability Board, the CBI has signalled that the critical review and assessment of the regulatory culture in banks and other financial service providers is at the top of its agenda. Culture in this context is difficult to define precisely: it clearly encompasses the business' approach to risk, compliance and governance in general. Key indicators here include formal arrangements and policies. However, the CBI will also be vigilant for soft indicators such as the business' overall approach to risk assessment and pre-empting regulatory crises. The CBI will expect firms to be proactive in anticipating problems before they arise. Finally, it seems clear that the CBI will focus on senior management responsibility for regulatory compliance. Although Ireland does not (yet) have an equivalent to the UK senior managers' regime, the CBI has responded positively to law reform proposals in this area. It is engaged in a long-running and continuing inquiry into the management of a failed building society. The conduct of senior managers and personal responsibility for regulatory breaches will be key themes of the CBI's regulatory and enforcement approach from now on. John Breslin 2021 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC. For help please see our FAQs. Share this article Crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending have been on the EU Commission's radar for a while. Until recently, the position was 'no-action required'. However, the growing relevance of the market led the Commission to issue a proposal for the regulation of European crowdfunding service providers for business (the Regulation) on March 8 2018. This regulation focuses on crowdfunding for the funding of business (hence, excluding crowdfunding for social projects). The Regulation intends to establish a European label for investment and lending-based crowdfunding platforms. Recognising the exposure of crowdfunding platforms to terrorism financing and money laundering risks, the Regulation provides a few safeguards to minimise risk. On that basis, inter alia, it determines that financing transactions should be made via authorised payment service providers. However, the Regulation does not go as far as to include crowdfunding platforms under the existing anti-money laundering (AML) regulatory framework. Portugal took the lead and went a step further. The Portuguese AML Law (Law No 83/2017 of August 18) determines that crowdfunding service providers are entities equivalent to obliged entities. Consequently, crowdfunding service providers are subject to a simplified regime, and are required to implement identification procedures for all projects, persons or entities providing funding to such projects without any type of triggering threshold, which means that such duties apply as from 1 (around $1.20). Although the idea was good in theory, execution was rather poor. When compared with the general regime, it may be still too demanding for certain crowdfunding transactions. For instance, under the general regime, general occasional transactions under 15,000 or which imply transfers of funds below 1,000 are exempt from identification duties. This means that while in occasional business transactions the identification duty is only triggered in transfers of funds above 1,000, in cases of crowdfunding the identification duty is triggered at 1. This may be particularly demanding for platforms dedicated to small investments or social/charity crowdfunding. The Regulation states that 'under the principle of proportionality, the content and form of EU action should not exceed what is necessary'. Proportionality does not seem to have been the keyword in Portugal and the costs may be too high for the development of a rather young business. So far, in accordance with EU Commission report of December 2017, 11 EU member states took the lead to regulate crowdfunding. However, the above is an example of the importance of a coordinated action by the EU in regulating crowdfunding services. That would avoid regulatory arbitrage in the EU and any unnecessary obstacles to the development of a market which can constitute a valid alternative to fund economy and social projects and might as well help boost the growth of a capital markets union. Marcio Carreira Nobre Frederico Felix Alves 2021 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC. For help please see our FAQs. Share this article The existing labour shortage is providing fertile ground for the establishment of new unions, or the strengthening of the position of existing ones, and many employers find themselves facing this prospect. The establishment of a trade union is a relatively simple process which, when combined with the prevailing situation in the job market, has contributed to the fact that trade unions are cropping up around Slovakia often only as a form of bullying employers. Increasingly we are encountering cases where the persons who establish these unions do not even actually work for the particular employer where the union is being formed. These people select companies based mainly on their economic performance and then send out mass mailings to employers informing them that a union has been established in their workplace, often stating unreasonable and even absurd demands. They have no knowledge of the conditions at play at any employer, and only afterwards do they try to recruit the workers as members of the union. There has not yet been established a cohesive and effective form of defence against these practices. The first thing to point out here is that a trade union is a civil society organisation. It can be established with as few as three people, one of which must be over the age of 18. A trade union is established upon entry on the list held at the Ministry of the Interior of the Slovak Republic following the submission of an application. Membership of the trade union is not limited to the employees of the employer, so any group of at least three people may establish a trade union. Employers are not required to undertake their own investigation as to whether a union has been established in their workplace. The trade union must notify the employer in writing that a union has been established and submit a list of members of the trade union's executive committee (not a list of the union's members). This notice does not need to provide any other information apart from the fact that the union has been established together with a list of the members of the executive committee which acts on behalf of the trade union. The consequences arising out of failure to include that information in the notice are disputable. However, failure to give this notice or the absence of the required information in the notice may, in respect of unions established solely for the purpose of bullying a certain group of employers, provide the basis for invalidating the union due to its non-compliance with the legal requirements. Apart from the legal requirement to notify the employer, the establishment and functioning of this single-purpose trade union may be deemed in conflict with the purpose of collective labour relationships as such, as well as being contrary to standard practice. No clear solution presents itself at the moment, and only if the activity of these trade unions grows to such proportions that one of the parties brings legal action will case-law then provide the ultimate answer. Nonetheless, employers are required by law to recognise trade unions in the workplace. It should also be noted that more than one trade union may be present within the same employer. In fact, there may be various types of employee representatives alongside one another, for instance a trade union and a works council. If there are several trade unions in the company, the employer must fulfil its duties, such as consultation and co-determination, in respect of all the trade unions in matters that concern all or a majority of employees. Labour laws are silent as to anything further as regards the duty of employers to recognise trade unions; however, there are various other specific requirements imposed on employers in respect of trade unions. First of all, employers must provide space to members of the union at no charge where they can conduct their activities. Employers must also give paid time off to an extent agreed between the union and the employer to members of the trade union to do their union work. Where there is no agreement, the amount of time off is determined by multiplying the average number of workers employed by the employer in the previous calendar year by 15 (representing a 15-minute time period). The most important role of a trade union is collective bargaining entering into a collective agreement with the employer. The collective agreement covers all workers, even those who are not members of the union. Negotiating and concluding a collective agreement is a complex process that should not be underestimated and employers should give the process due regard. The actual bargaining process is informal and the parties set the tone. Jana Kudelcikova Radoslava Slavikova Gerzova 2021 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC. For help please see our FAQs. Share this article Solar and wind Thailand has the highest solar and wind power output in ASEAN. The Thai regulators adopted an adder tariff policy, and subsequently a feed-in tariff policy, which provided incentives for renewable projects. As of April 1 2018, the number of solar projects which had achieved a commercial operation date (COD) in Thailand was 531 with a total selling capacity of 2,567 MW. This included seven small power project (SPP) power purchase agreements (PPAs) signed with the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) (436 MW), and 523 very small power project (VSPP) PPAs signed with the Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA)/Metropolitan Electricity Authority (MEA) (2,130 MW). The receipt of applications for open grid projects has been suspended due to the large number of applications received. Solar PV rooftop projects are still being accepted. Fifteen wind projects had achieved COD in Thailand as of April 1 2018, with a total selling capacity of 459 MW. This includes nine SPP PPAs signed with EGAT. On March 28 2018, the Minister of Energy stated that there would be no purchasing of state renewable power for five years from 2018 to 2023. Unless the cost was lower than THB2.44 (around $0.08) per kilowatt hour, the government would not consider buying additional renewable energy. His primary concern was the amount of subsidies in the tariffs, compared to purchases of power from gas-fired power projects. This will not affect the existing PPAs signed by EGAT, PPA and MEA. It will result in no further investment in solar or wind projects until satisfactory clarification on tariffs for renewables. In May 2018, the Federation of Thai Industries (FTI) and representatives of the industrial sector of renewable energy asked for clarifications and a clear policy framework from the minister. This policy is contrary to recent policies to increase the use of renewable power, and Thailand's pledge to a 20 to 25% reduction in its emission of greenhouse gases by 2030. It is contrary to the Alternative Energy Development Plan 2015 to 2036. The new national Power Development Plan (PDP) 2018 is going through the preparation process by the Ministry of Energy with the main target being to secure the public's interest without increasing power utilisation costs. The Ministry of Energy aims to complete the new PDP by September 2018. Petroleum law In 2017 the Petroleum Act (PA) and the Petroleum Income Tax Act (PITA) were amended to establish two new contractual regimes for exploration and projection, in addition to the concession: Production sharing contracts (PSC): the model PSC was issued on March 8 2018. It provides for a cost recovery ceiling of 50%, and a ceiling on the contractor's share of 'profit oil' of 50%. Service contracts: no model service contract has been issued. In December 2017, the Minister of Energy announced that two public tenders would be conducted in 2018: Auctions of the Bongkot and Erawan gas blocks in the Gulf of Thailand. The existing concessions on these fields (after one 10-year extension) expire in 2022 and 2023. Under the PA, a second extension is not allowed. The terms of reference were issued on April 23 2018. The new, 21st-bid round for rights to explore, develop and produce petroleum on 22 blocks. The Thai petroleum concession has proven to provide a very stable foundation for investment in oil and gas and downstream projects in Thailand since 1971. However Thailand has limited geological prospectivity. It imports more than 40% of its natural gas demand and 75% of its fossil fuels demand. Its petroleum reserves are declining with increasing demand. It remains uncertain how the new contract regimes will be implemented and administered, and whether the oil and gas industry will accept the proposed new terms. The PSC cost recovery limit of 50% and the 50% minimum government share of 'profit oil' may not be economically viable with the prevailing low oil prices. The PA could have simply been amended to allow second and subsequent extensions of existing concessions. This is the practice in most other producing jurisdictions, in which subsequent extensions are negotiated and granted, often on improved terms for the host government. The termination of the Bongkot and Erawan concessions, the auctioning of those fields under PSCs, the settlement of decommissioning obligations, and the transfer, removal or abandonment of assets, will present interesting issues. Foifa Tharaphan Sawanee Gulthawatvichai 2021 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC. For help please see our FAQs. Share this article C. Kumar N. Patel (center) was named an honorary member of the American Laser Study Club. In February 2000, the Indian American professor founded Pranalytica Inc. in Santa Monica, Calif., where he is the CEO and chairman of the board. (ALSC photo) Genie Harrison, the lawyer of Sandeep Rehal, a former Indian American personal assistant to Harvey Weinstein, has welcomed Weinsteins indictment. Rehal has filed a lawsuit alleging that she suffers from severe emotional distress because of incessant sexual harassment she endured working as the movie moguls assistant. (Yann Coatsaliou/AFP/Getty Images) A gift by the Gangal family to Florida Atlantic University will establish the Gangal Family Endowed Scholarship Fund. Seen here (from left) are Danita Nias, vice president for institutional advancement and CEO of the FAU Foundation; Indian American entrepreneur Shiva Gangal, Sneh Lata Gangal, Stella N. Batalama, dean of FAUs College of Engineering and Computer Science; and FAU president John Kelly. (Alex Dolce/FAU photo) Vishal Shah, of Sayreville, New Jersey, was initially charged with murdering his father, but took a plea deal of aggravated manslaughter. The 22-year-old Indian American was sentenced to 25 years in state prison on March 17. (State of New Jersey Department of Corrections mug shot) A man holds part of a mortar shell in Jammu May 22. Pakistani Rangers May 28 continued shelling on the international border in the Jammu and Samba districts of Jammu and Kashmir, affecting 30 BSF border outposts and some two dozen villages. The top commanders from the Indian and Pakistani armies spoke May 28 over a special hotline and committed to peace along the border. (IANS photo) An Indian villager performs prayers outside his house, which was gutted by firing from the Pakistan border, in the Ranbir Singh Pura district of Jammu, May 24. India and Pakistan have agreed to stop trading fire along the militarized Line of Control that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan. (AFP/Getty Images) Former President Pranab Mukherjee (left) presents flowers to former Vice President Hamid Ansari May 17, in celebration of the beginning of Ramadan. Mukherjee has sparked controversy among Congress and left party leaders by accepting an invitation to speak at an RSS event in Nagpur. (IANS photo) Canada-based Nemaska Lithium has reached an agreement to supply spodumene Li2O concentrate to Japan-based Hanwa, which will be acting as agent for Chinas General Lithium. Nemaskas spodumene Li2O concentrate will be sold on a take-or-pay basis to a market price-based formula at the time of delivery. This will take... David Wheat Wheat comes from serving as principal of KPMGs Washington nation tax practice, where he focused on corporate tax and financing transactions in the energy sector. He has thorough experience advising clients on partnerships, limited liability companies, sub c and sub k entities, tax aspects of M&A transactions and tax controversy. Wheat serves as council director for the American Bar Associations Section of Taxation and the same organisations Section of Taxation Corporate Tax Committee, and as vice chairman of the Texas Federal Tax Institute. The material on this site is for financial institutions, professional investors and their professional advisers. It is for information only. Please read our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy before using the site. All material subject to strictly enforced copyright laws. 2021 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC. For help please see our FAQ. Share this article Pt. Roberts, WA; Delta, BC - May 30, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) www.Investorideas.com, a global news source covering leading sectors including marijuana and hemp stocks and its 'potcast' site, www.potcasts.ca release today's edition of its new series, Investorideas.com potcasts - cannabis news and stocks to watch plus insight from thought leaders and experts. Listen to the podcast: http://www.investorideas.com/Audio/Podcasts/2018/053018-CannabisNews.mp3 Investor Ideas 'Potcast'; #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move; Canopy Growth, Maricann Group, Sunniva Inc. Today's podcast overview/transcript: Good afternoon and welcome to another Investorideas.com potcast - looking at cannabis news, stocks to watch as well as insights from thought leaders and experts. Today we are looking at announcements from Canopy Growth (TSX: WEED, NYSE:CGC), Maricann Group Inc. (CSE:MARI and OTCQB :MRRCF), and Sunniva Inc. (CSE: SNN and OTCQX: SNNVF). First looking at Canopy Growth Corporation who announced that the they've acquired Daddy Cann Lesotho PTY Ltd., trading as Highlands. Based in the Kingdom of Lesotho, Highlands holds a license to cultivate, manufacture, supply, hold, import, export and transport cannabis and its resin. Lesotho is a high altitude mountainous kingdom that boasts over 300 days of sunshine per year and was the first African nation to legalize medical cannabis in 2017. It has ideal humidity and growing conditions for greenhouse cultivation. Together with very low operating and resource costs, this places Canopy Growth in a position to produce large quantities of high quality medical cannabis at a low cost. Lesotho is also strategically positioned for the future medical cannabis economy of Southern Africa including the potential market of South Africa, with a population of over 55 million people, where medical cannabis laws are being developed. "Lesotho is Canopy Growth's first step into Africa and we look forward to working with the strong local team at Highlands to establish production and distribution capabilities consistent with Canopy's global standard for high-quality, regulated medical cannabis products," said Mark Zekulin, President, Canopy Growth. Combining the domestic and regional knowledge of Highlands with the global experience and expertise of Canopy Growth is the latest example of the Company establishing a meaningful local presence. With the objective of future local production to serve the regional market, these operations are part of Canopy Growth's commitment to the Lesotho economy including supporting job creation and lasting community engagement. All key members of Highlands's management team will continue to lead the organization as part of the Canopy Growth family. "We're excited to join the Canopy Growth family and bring together our strong entrepreneurial experience and local knowledge in the region with Canopy Growth's track record and quality standards in the global medical cannabis industry," said Jody Aufrichtig, Founder, Highlands. "Lesotho and Southern Africa have enormous potential and we look forward to building a responsible medical cannabis business across the region." Maricann Group Inc. reported its financial and operating results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2018 and has filed the full report on SEDAR. All figures are stated in Canadian Dollars. Maricann recognized revenue of $600,591, down from $1,143,167 in Q1 of 2017. The decline in revenue can be explained by the timing of a large bulk transaction of Switzerland-based cannabis cultivator HAXXON AG which subsequently closed in Q2. As a result, current sales for Q2 of 2018 total approximately $905,000 to date (unaudited). Consistent with previous guidance, the Company is positioned for export to the European market, having achieved European Medicines Agency Good Manufacturing Practice (EMA-GMP) certification for its facilities at 150 8th Concession Road, Langton ON ("Site 150"), a prerequisite to export cannabis to the European Union. Additionally, the Company is preserving inventory for both export to Europe and the adult use market in Canada, when legal. "We maintain our position that establishing sustainable baskets of margin for our products that will be preserved over the long term is more important than immediate gross revenue. We base all our business decisions in the interest of long term value creation for our shareholders," Stated Ben Ward, CEO. Some Other Highlights for the quarter include: Strengthened the Company's balance sheet by raising $40,250,000 by way of private placement. Positioned with Provinces for supply to the upcoming recreational market. Signed an exclusive agreement with Colorado-based Rare Dankness to provide their award-winning genetics to the Canadian market. Rare Dankness is a multi-year winner of the prestigious Amsterdam Cannabis Cup. The first room in phase 1 of Maricann's world class grow facility was ready for cultivation. Subsequently, the Company received its third License from Health Canada to move ahead with cultivation activities and is now propagating 2,639 plants in the new facility. And finally, Sunniva Incorporated's wholly-owned subsidiary, Natural Health Services Ltd. ("NHS"), Canada's largest referral network of medical cannabis patients to Licensed Producers in Canada, held an open house for media and the public, today at the grand opening of its clinic located at 7900 Anchor Drive in Windsor, Ontario. The facility is one of seven owned and operated patient-centric clinics operating in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. NHS provides consultation, medical cannabis education and an introduction to the products and strains available through Licensed Producers across Canada. NHS clinics are staffed by physicians, nurses, educators and patient care representatives on-site. Investor ideas reminds all listeners to read our disclaimers and disclosures on the Investorideas.com website and this podcast is not an endorsement to buy products or services or securities. Investors are reminded all investment involves risk and possible loss of investment Subscribe to the new cannabis podcast series: http://www.investorideas.com/rss/feeds/Podcasts-Cannabis.xml Or visit http://www.investorideas.com/Audio/Potcasts.asp Or www.potcasts.ca To hear more Investorideas.com podcasts visit: http://www.investorideas.com/Audio/. Investorideas.com podcasts are also available on iTunes, Google Play Music, Stitcher and Tunein. About Investorideas.com - News that Inspires Big Ideas Investorideas.com is a meeting place for global investors, featuring news, stock directories, video, company profiles, interviews and more in leading sectors. Investorideas.com cannabis/marijuana and hemp content now includes http://cannabisstocknews.blogspot.com on Blogger.com: the Investorideas.com news and stock directory pages, a cannabis investor group on Linkedin.com , the 420 Cannabis Investor ideas www.420cannabisinvestorideas.com, and the new AI site Global Cannabis Investing at www.Globalcannabisinvesting.com Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investment involves risk and possible loss of investment. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Contact each company directly regarding content and press release questions. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. More disclaimer info: http://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp. Additional info regarding BC Residents and global Investors: Effective September 15 2008 - all BC investors should review all OTC and Pink sheet listed companies for adherence in new disclosure filings and filing appropriate documents with Sedar. Read for more info: http://www.bcsc.bc.ca/release.aspx?id=6894. Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: http://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp To sponsor this podcast or be a guest Contact Investorideas.com http://www.investorideas.com/About/Contact.asp 800-665-0411 March 30, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) High growth economies (measured in terms of real GDP growth rate) - China, India and Indonesia are anticipated to play a key role in attracting higher FDI (foreign direct investments) inflows to the developing Asian region between 2017 and 2020, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company. TFDIs are segregated into greenfield and brown field investments. Projects built by a parent company in a foreign land from scratch are referred to as greenfield investments. Brown field investments represent the acquisition of existing facilities for new production. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) 2017 World Investment Report, FDI inflows in the developing Asian region are estimated to rise by 15% over the previous year to US$515.0bn in 2017. Arnab Nath, Economic Research Analyst at GlobalData, commented, "With the liberalization of the high growth nations, greenfield investments in the developing Asian nations witnessed over an 8% rise in 2016. This, coupled with a significant improvement in the economic outlook, is expected to spur the investor sentiment over the next three years." An increase in globalization and urbanization is resulting in a shift from the primary (mining, quarrying and petroleum) and manufacturing industries to services in the developing Asian region. Of the total greenfield investments in 2016, 60.2% were in the services sector followed by manufacturing (38%) and the primary sector (1.8%). The liberalization of major economies in the region resulted in greenfield investments in the services and manufacturing sector to rise by 13.6% and 1.6% respectively in 2016 whereas greenfield investments in the primary sector witnessed a decline of 29.3% during the same year due to lower global commodity prices. India liberalizes FDI in key sectors In early 2018, the Indian government relaxed the FDI policy for key sectors such as construction & real estate, civil aviation and retail. Foreign investments in the real estate sector were prohibited until the Government amended its FDI policy and allowed 100% FDI without any government approval. Goods are sold to individual customers under the same brand in single brand retail trading (SBRT), which has been revised from 49% to 100% FDI without any government approval. In the civil aviation sector, foreign airlines were not allowed to invest in the government owned Air India until the policy was relaxed recently. As per the latest amendment, foreign airlines can invest up to 49% of their paid up capital in Air India. Complementing all these developments, India jumped 30 spots in the World Bank's 2018 Ease of Doing Business' ranking, thereby drawing further attention for the country from foreign investors. The country's rank among 190 countries has improved from 130th in 2017 to 100th in 2018. India's score of 60.76 out of 100 in the doing business report is ahead of the South Asian nations average of 53.64 in 2018. A significant improvement has been witnessed in the parameters of resolving insolvencies (136th out of 190 countries in 2017 vs 103rd in 2018), paying taxes (172nd vs 119th), getting credit (44th vs 29th), enforcing contracts (172nd vs 164th), protecting minority investors (13th vs 4th), and construction permits (185th vs 181th). China becomes investor friendly to tap more inflows China has emerged as one of the top destinations for inward foreign investments over the last decade, which has played a key role in the country's growth. In January 2017, the State Council issued a new circular to improve the business environment and boost investments in the country. The Ministry of Commerce confirmed plans to reduce restrictions on market access in the areas of manufacturing, services, mining and green industries. Under the Made in China 2025' initiative, China is encouraging foreign investment in the fields of infrastructure construction and green manufacturing. The country's fiscal and taxation support policy makes the country more investor friendly with more authority given to China's national-level development zones (these are special areas where foreign investment is encouraged) in investment management. Regional economic partnership to trigger investment impetus The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which delivers a free trade agreement among ten ASEAN economies (Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Vietnam, Brunei, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, and The Philippines), is expected to be signed this year. The agreement will provide a stimulus for investment across ASEAN countries. For more information To gain access to our latest press releases: GlobalData Media Centre Analysts available for comment. Please contact the GlobalData Press Office: EMEA & Americas: +44 (0)207 832 4399 Asia-Pacific: +91 40 6616 6809 Email: pr@globaldata.com For expert analysis on developments in your industry, please connect with us on: GlobalData.com | LinkedIn | Facebook Editor's notes Quotes are provided by Arnab Nath, Economic Research Analyst at GlobalData The information is based on GlobalData's Country Economics Database This press release was written using data and information sourced from proprietary databases, primary and secondary research, and in-house analysis conducted by GlobalData's team of industry experts. About GlobalData 4,000 of the world's largest companies, including over 70% of FTSE 100 and 60% of Fortune 100 companies, make timelier and better business decisions thanks to GlobalData's unique data, expert analysis and innovative solutions, all in one platform. GlobalData's mission is to help our clients decode the future to be more successful and innovative across a range of industries, including the healthcare, consumer, retail, financial, technology and professional services sectors. As part of GlobalData macroeconomic offerings for cities, we provide comprehensive data on over 3,000 cities, including major metropolitan areas covering 150 countries. The database covers over 300 indicators for each city across five essential indicator themes - demographic, economic, employment, income, and expenditure data. Long-term historical data is sourced from a number of national statistical and international institutions, with forecasts provided by our team of highly experienced economists. PR1683 More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions. More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp May 30, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) The euro plunged, the USD Index soared and gold... just stayed put. There was no meaningful action except for the big intraday volatility that ended in a rather small decline. Can one infer anything at all from the above combination of factors? Yes, if one knows where to look. Let's start by recalling what was the likely reason behind the recent strength in the precious metals in the first place and why did gold move (a bit) higher along with the USD Index. First, there was a news-based factor in the form of the meeting between USA and North Korea that was cancelled and then the markets focused on the increased risks regarding the Eurozone, more precisely in Italy. We explained the details in yesterday's analysis, but in short, just as Reuters wrote, Italy's fresh election risks being referendum on euro. All in all, we have more of the same - yet another geopolitical factor that increases the price of gold in the very short term but is not likely to trigger any sustainable strength. Before negating the above, please note that Russia took Crimea from Ukraine in early 2014 and gold is lower than it was at that time even though many commentators called for an inevitable rally in gold prices. We explained that it didn't have to happen and emphasized that the greatest pressure on the price of gold was when the uncertainty was at the highest levels. We didn't have to wait long for the confirmation - the annexation became a fact, the tensions decreased, and gold declined. Just as this geopolitical event seems to be very bullish for gold, let's keep in mind that its impact is very likely to be brief. As a reminder, in general, geopolitical events' impact on the price of gold is usually only temporary. Technical factors, on the other hand, can, and are likely to result in major price moves as they represent shifts in investors' sentiment, which can have lasting implications. Consequently, let's take a look at the charts and check what's in store for the next days and weeks. Interestingly, the technical factors confirm what we wrote above - that the move higher in PMs was driven by geopolitical news and as such it's likely to be temporary. Gold is popularly viewed as the safe haven, while silver and mining stocks are generally not viewed as such. Taking the last few days into account, we see that overall nothing really happened in silver and miners, while gold moved higher. Precisely, they all moved higher, but only gold stayed relatively high. The implication is that the most recent upswing in gold is not a game-changer, but a brief event that delays the real price move that's about to happen either way. Naturally, if the World War III suddenly breaks out, or the financial system is destroyed, gold and silver will soar immediately, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon. Besides, we have the insurance part of the gold portfolio to take care of such event. Gold at its Resistance Line Looking at gold's technical picture, we see no changes based on yesterday's session. Gold remains below the declining resistance line and the downside target remains at about $1,250. Earlier this month, gold rallied on volume that was the strongest (taking daily upswings into account) since the first half of April. This may have seemed bullish at the first sight, but please note that back then the big-volume session marked the final top that preceded an almost $100 downswing. The strength of the resistance that was reached back then was bigger as it was based on more and more long-term tops, but the current resistance line is not weak either. Therefore, we may have just seen the final top this time as well. After all, the history tends to repeat itself to a certain extent. Silver's Upcoming Reversal Silver's back and forth movement around the $16.50 level continues. We could see some action shortly based on the apex-based turning point. Precisely, we're likely to see some kind of reversal on June the 1st (Friday) or very close to it. Will that be a bottom or a top? Before this week, it was very likely that it will be a bottom after a bigger decline. However, since PMs moved higher on geopolitical events, it could be the case that they will stay afloat for a few more days and decline in early June. On the other hand, silver just declined on volume that was biggest this month, which seems to confirm the bearish outlook for the near term. Overall, it currently seems best to focus on a bigger move instead of trying to time the daily ones. We know it's tiring to watch the markets move back and forth, but knowing that periods of very low volatility often precede the greatest volatility makes the waiting and paying attention to the seemingly boring market worth it. Before moving to mining stocks, we would like to briefly discuss the issue of silver's underperformance of gold. Since silver is known to outperform right at the top (or at least before declines), then perhaps one should view silver's daily underperformance as something opposite and bullish? We don't think so. This kind of performance is indeed seen from time to time, but the reliability of silver's relative performance as predictive tool is much higher when it comes to timing tops than it is to timing bottoms. Besides, silver's underperformance is perfectly understandable given the situation in the silver to gold ratio. The ratio recently moved back to the rising support / resistance line and now it's moving back down. Technically, it was simply a second verification of the breakdown. Silver's underperformance here is therefore something to be expected. It is, therefore, not a bullish sign, but rather a normal course of action. Mining Stocks' Turning Point The volume on which GDX declined last Friday was higher than the one on which it had rallied last Thursday, which means that the overall implications of that session were bearish. The true move appears to be down and the correction was to the upside. Yesterday's session definitely confirms it, as miners declined to the previous May lows even though gold is still close to its last week's highs. The cyclical turning point in the mining stocks took place yesterday, which means that the most recent short-term upswing had bearish implications, so seeing weakness in the miners was likely yesterday. Please note that yesterday was the first session, after which the US investors had the chance to react to the news from Italy, and we could have seen some temporary strength. In yesterday's alert we explained that it didn't have to be anything major and it's likely to be temporary. In fact, we wrote that the reaction could be nothing more than just an intraday move. The above is the intraday GDX price chart from finance.yahoo.com. GDX opened the session below the previous day's open, moved higher on an intraday basis and then the strength faded away. The reaction was weak and the implications are bearish. Let's go back to the price of gold. This time we'll look at it in terms of the euro. Gold's Overbought Status The RSI indicator does a very good job at detecting overbought and oversold levels for some assets and gold is one of them. The above applies also when one views gold from the European perspective. The RSI based on the gold's price in terms of the euro just moved visibly above the 70 level and the previous 2018 high. Gold's rally may seem encouraging to European gold bulls, but it actually means that it's high time for gold to turn south. We marked similar situations with red vertical lines. As you can see, this signal accompanied local tops in gold many times in the past. It was not necessarily very precise, but it was almost always followed by a tradable decline. The additional bearish confirmations come from the gold to the S&P 500 ratio. Gold vs. S&P 500 First of all, the price of gold and its ratio with the general stock market tend to move together in case of the key medium-term moves. More importantly, the ratio can lead the price of gold, and thus an important development in it could indicate that something similar is about to take place in gold. That was the case in late 2012, when the ratio was the first to break below the medium-term support line and start a big downswing. Gold joined the decline later on and that was THE decline of the decade. Of course, the decade is not over yet and what we're about to see this year could take this title from the 2012-2013 move. The thing is that we are seeing this pattern once again. What's remarkable is that the breakdown below the current support line is very similar to what we saw in the late 2012. Gold first broke below the support line, then moved back above it, then below it again and then up once again, above the previous high. Then the final breakdown followed. This is what we saw in 2012 and what we've been seeing for the past 6 months or so. The implications of this analogy are very bearish for the following months. But the USD! The USD Index moved to 94.97, which is practically right at the upper border of our trading area, which means that it could correct now. This should be a bullish trigger for the precious metals market. But will it really be one? Let's discuss the recent dynamics in the gold-USD link. The most recent strength in the USD Index wasn't accompanied by gold's decline, but by a move higher. Gold rallied more visibly in comparison to other currencies, especially in comparison to the euro. This may make you wonder if one should view this as a sign of strength in the yellow metal. Indeed, it would have been the case, if gold was moving higher despite the strength of the US currency. But, it wasn't essentially the strength of the US currency, but the weakness of other currencies (especially the euro) that caused the USD Index to move higher. The USD Index is a weighted average of several currency exchange rates, the biggest of which is the EUR/USD. Obviously, there are two sides of the currency exchange rate and it can move because something changed regarding either one currency, or the other, or regarding both of them. In this case, it was not US economy's strength that pushed USDX higher - it was EU-trouble. Why does the above matter to us - precious metals' investors? Because we check the gold-USD link in order to check if gold is showing adequate strength or not. If it doesn't, it means that it's likely to change direction. The key word here is adequate. We want to compare gold's performance to factors that should generate a certain response and they don't. For instance, a major decline in the value of the US currency in light of growing unemployment should cause gold to rally. If it doesn't, it means that gold doesn't really want to move higher at this time and one might consider shorting it. But, if there are problems in one the Eurozone's biggest economies, then shouldn't gold actually move higher as a risk hedge? Shouldn't the USD rally as a risk hedge as well as being world's key currency and it's clear that some investors will prefer to move out of the euro in the light of increased risks surrounding it? Indeed, that's what should take place and that's what we saw: gold moved higher along with the USD Index, but the size of both moves was not significant. Can we really speak of gold's strength in the light of the above? No. It moved just like it should, and its reaction actually could have been much bigger. Therefore, we don't think that there are bullish implications of the recent action in the gold-USD link. Now, let's discuss what's happening today and what's likely to happen in the following days. If it was the increased risk regarding the Eurozone that actually caused both: gold's rally and USD's rally, then subsiding risk could be negative for both: USD and gold. Consequently, while the USD Index is currently likely to move lower, it may not translate into much higher prices of precious metals and mining stocks. In fact, the USD index is down by 0.68 today and gold is basically flat ($2 higher), not responding to what should be a bullish factor. Naturally, there will be immediate-term moves (like an hourly rally or so) that cause gold to move higher when the USD declines, but over time it could be the case that gold doesn't really rally. For instance, we could have a situation, in which gold moves higher by $4 when USD declines by 0.4, but then a move $7 lower in gold while the USD goes back up by 0.2. If you repeat this several times, you'll get lower gold and USD prices even though on an immediate-term basis it will seem like gold is responding to USD's moves. Summary Summing up, while the USD Index may be forming a short-term top, gold and silver don't have to respond by rallying significantly and since the most recent precious metals strength seems to be geopolitical-news-driven, any strength that we had already seen is likely to be only temporary. The technical picture for the precious metals' market didn't change and it remains bearish as we outlined in detail in the previous alerts. If you'd like to receive follow-ups to the above analysis, we invite you to sign up to our gold newsletter. You'll receive our articles for free and if you don't like them, you can unsubscribe in just a few seconds. Sign me up! Thank you. Przemyslaw Radomski, CFA Founder, Editor-in-chief, Gold & Silver Fund Manager Sunshine Profits - Gold & Silver Investment All essays, research and information found above represent analyses and opinions of Przemyslaw Radomski, CFA and Sunshine Profits' associates only. As such, it may prove wrong and be a subject to change without notice. Opinions and analyses were based on data available to authors of respective essays at the time of writing. Although the information provided above is based on careful research and sources that are believed to be accurate, Przemyslaw Radomski, CFA and his associates do not guarantee the accuracy or thoroughness of the data or information reported. The opinions published above are neither an offer nor a recommendation to purchase or sell any securities. Mr. Radomski is not a Registered Securities Advisor. By reading Przemyslaw Radomski's, CFA reports you fully agree that he will not be held responsible or liable for any decisions you make regarding any information provided in these reports. Investing, trading and speculation in any financial markets may involve high risk of loss. Przemyslaw Radomski, CFA, Sunshine Profits' employees and affiliates as well as members of their families may have a short or long position in any securities, including those mentioned in any of the reports or essays, and may make additional purchases and/or sales of those securities without notice. More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions. More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp Vancouver, British Columbia - May 30, 2018 (Newsfile Corp.) (Investorideas.com Newswire) Power Americas Minerals Corp. (TSXV: PAM) ("Power Americas" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has signed an agreement to purchase the historic Thomas Edison mine located in the heart of the Kittson-Cobalt project. The mine lies on the same fracture system that hosts the historic Shakt-Davis mine located ~1 km to the east. The Thomas Edison property, consists of one 16 hectare patented claim with both surface and mineral rights. Power America's 100% owned Kittson Project now consists of 216 unpatented claims and 1 patented claim totaling 4,440 hectares. Jeffrey Cocks, President and CEO said: "The Thomas Edison Mine is a landmark acquisition for the Company. Over 100 years ago the famous inventor and entrepreneur, Thomas Edison, developed this mine as a source of cobalt for his groundbreaking iron-cobalt batteries. Today, cobalt is once again in demand for the green energy revolution using lithium-cobalt batteries. The Thomas Edison mine has not been explored since 1907 and will be the central focus of this summer's exploration program." The Thomas Edison mine, as the name implies, was developed by the famous inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison. While Edison is better known for inventions such as the first practical light bulb, he was also very involved in the mining industry. Edison pioneered new geophysical techniques, mineral extraction technologies, and developed the battery powered miners' head lamp. He was instrumental in the discovery of nickel at Falconbridge, Ontario and also had interests in iron ore in New Jersey, and gold in New Mexico. Edison was heavily involved with the original Cobalt, Ontario silver rush, however it was not the silver he was after. At the turn of the 20th century, Edison was developing a new cobalt-Iron battery (US patent No. US678722A). Similar to today, Edison had difficulty sourcing sufficient supplies of cobalt. In order to keep the price down, Edison sent undercover representatives to Cobalt, Ontario to buy cobalt bearing minerals, which were produced as a by-products from silver mining in the area, for his battery manufacturing facility in New Jersey. He also used these representatives to attempt to buy high-grade cobalt silver mines and prospects. Eventually Edison acquired the Darby property (now the Thomas Edison Mine) in 1905. From 1905 to 1907 Edison remotely directed operations at the mine which included sinking two shafts to 150 feet, which were connected by an adit, as well as several exploration drifts and crosscuts. Between 6 and 8 tons of ore of unknown grade are reported to have been extracted, but no commercial production is recorded. Edison's correspondence with his agent in Cobalt who was later his mine manager has been preserved and makes for a fascinating read. It has been well summarized in "TIMES WERE HARD BUT MEMORIES ARE GOOD" Proceeding of the history workshop, Timiskaming Abitibi Heritage Association, April 27, 1996, which is available from Rosanne Fisher Publishing in Haileybury, Ontario. The transaction is expected to close within 30 days. Planning is currently underway on Power Americas' summer exploration program, which will include follow-up drilling on the property, as well as reconnaissance mapping, prospecting, geophysical surveys and soil sampling on the newly-acquired claims extending to the southwest (see PAM news release: 12-18-2017). Additional results from the Company's recent drill program will be released as they become available. About the Kittson-Cobalt Project The Project is located near the town of Cobalt in northeast Ontario, Canada. The Project hosts the historic Thomas Edison, Shakt-Davis and Cobalt-Kittson mines, as well as numerous historic workings, the deepest extending down to 628 feet, and over 2,700 feet of lateral workings. Cobalt mineralization occurs in Proterozoic-aged quartz-carbonate veins hosted in brittle shears in Nipissing diabase. This style of mineralization is similar to that of the famous Cobalt Silver Camp Located ~15 km east of the Property, which produced 420 million ounces of silver with cobalt as a significant by-product. Veins hosting the mineralization at the Kittson-Cobalt Project differ from the typical Cobalt Silver Camp veins in that they are lower in silver but richer in cobalt, and are associated with significant gold. Historic reports from the Shakt-Davis mine indicate values of 1.5% Co over 1.37 metres and select grab samples returning up to 4% Co and 93.3 g/t Au. Locally significant nickel, copper and to a lesser extend lead, zinc and bismuth also occur within the quartz-carbonate veins. About Power Americas Mineral Corp. Power Americas Minerals Corporation is a Canadian-based junior mining exploration company focused on the procurement, exploration and development of cobalt, lithium and other energy metals in North and South America. Power Americas' acquisition strategy focuses on acquiring affordable, cost-effective and highly regarded mineral properties in areas with proven geological potential. The Company's shares are listed and posted for trading on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "PAM", in the USA on the OTC Markets under the symbol "PWMRF", and on the Frankfurt Exchange under the symbol "VV0". The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Neil Pettigrew, M.Sc., P.Geo., Vice President of Exploration and a director of the Company, and a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. On behalf of the Board of Directors: "Jeffrey Cocks" Jeffrey Cocks President For more information please contact: Howard Milne V.P. Business Development Tel: (604) 377-8994 Email: hdmcap@shaw.ca Website: www.poweramericascorp.com Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions. More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp A number of analysts believe that it will not be easy for Apple to switch over to OLED panels entirely for its 2019 iPhone lineup. Apple switched over to an OLED panel for the iPhone X last year, and it will reportedly be launching two new iPhones this year featuring OLED panels. They will be accompanied by a cheaper third LCD model with the same design. JPMorgan Jay Kwon believes Apples transition to OLED panels for its 2019 iPhone lineup is unlikely as OLED panels are expensive thereby increasing the overall cost of the devices. This, in turn, will defeat the entire purpose of launching a cheaper LCD model this year. Then theres also the fact that Samsung is the only major OLED supplier in the market right now. Given that Apple sells upwards of 200 million iPhone units every year, it is simply not practical for the company to rely on a single vendor for such a key component across its entire 2019 iPhone lineup. While LG Display and a few smaller Chinese OEMs have also managed to start producing OLED panels, their quality and quantity are far below that of Samsung. If Apple does end up making the switch, it would end up creating a scarcity of OLED panels in the market thereby pushing their prices up for almost every other OEM in the market. Analysts from Yuanata Securities Investment Consulting and Goldman Sachs Group echoed similar sentiments and cast a doubt on Apple making the transition to OLED panels for its 2019 iPhone lineup. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts were also skeptical, citing recent financial guidance from companies including Japan Display that suggested continued use of LCD technology. We think it is unlikely that all 2019 iPhone models will switch to OLED screens and we believe share prices have overreacted, analysts Daiki Takayama and Jie Dai wrote in note. While Apple does plan on switching over to OLED panels entirely for its iPhone lineup, its unlikely to happen with the 2019 iPhone lineup. Analyst Jerry Kang of IHS Markit believes that even with the iPhone X, Apple was not able to expand its production due to market demand and price issues. This is certainly true as Apple paid a heavy premium for the OLED display of the iPhone X. Reports claim it paid Samsung around $130 per unit for the iPhone Xs 5.8-inch OLED panel. For its 2018 iPhone, Apple has asked Samsung to reduce the prices so as to allow it to price the handsets lower. Apple has been trying to get LG Display to manufacture OLED displays by investing heavily in it. However, the latter continues to struggle for now, with the quality of its OLED panels also being sub-par. [Via Bloomberg The US Supreme Court [official website] on Tuesday dismissed [text PDF] the case of City of Hays, Kansas v. Vogt [SCOTUSblog materials], deciding that the writ of certiorari was improvidently granted. At issue [SCOTUSblog report] was whether a defendants Fifth Amendment rights are violated when statements are admitted into evidence at a probable cause hearing even though they are not admitted during the trial. The respondent, a police officer, claimed [brief, PDF] the city pressured him into making incriminating statements regarding a knife he had appropriated from work and then used the statements to bring a criminal case against him. The court of appeals held that the Fifth Amendment guarantees protections against self-incrimination not just for criminal trials but for probable cause hearings as well. The city, as petitioners, said [reply, PDF] the case was incorrectly decided because Mere compulsion does not violate the self-incrimination clause. Both sides presented oral arguments [JURIST report] in February. The court gave no explanation for its decision. Justice Neil Gorsuch took no part in the decision. Hotel Grano de Oro If you are considering a trip to Costa Rica, these three magical words: Small Distinctive Hotels will save you countless hours of web surfing for upscale, boutique hotel accommodations. When hunting for stylish stays conveniently located near some of Mother Natures finest, namely Manuel Antonio National Park, Monteverde Reserve, or the capital city of San Jose, Small Distinctive Hotels has your back. Teatro Nacional San Jose Since most of their hotels are within a two-hour drive of each other you can easily plan your trip hopscotching between their unique properties, experiencing Pura Vida (the pure way of life) in high style! SDHs diverse styles of hotels greatly adds to your enjoyment since one night you might be sleeping in an opulent gilded palace while the next night youre marveling over the emerald-green cloud forest views from your sleekly sophisticated, wood and glass enclosed eco-lodge. Hotel Grano de Oro: from warm private home to welcoming hotel If youre flying into Juan Santamaria Airport (SJO) about 30 minutes from downtown San Jose, youll probably want to spend a night or two, exploring this historic capital. Hotel Grano de Oro, conveniently located on a quiet side street in the heart of the city, provides a welcome respite from the citys non-stop energy. Once the home of Felipe Pozuelo, who owned the countrys largest cookie company in the early 1900s, this tropical Victorian mansion is now a rambling 40-room boutique hotel with polished wood, antiques, striking stained glass windows, Italian-tiled bubbling fountains, indigenous plants and dramatic floral arrangements. rooftop relaxation-Hotel Grano de Oro Search out the rooftop Jacuzzi terrace snuggled in between the turrets for some primo relaxing while taking in the city view. Explore all the nooks and crannies to fully appreciate the character of this heritage hotel, noting the black and white photos of old San Jose. No two rooms are the same although they all feature a relaxed, old-timey elegance with wrought-iron beds and handcrafted fabrics, mixed with modern amenities including free Wi-Fi, air conditioning, flat-screen TVs and comfy pillow-top mattresses with 300 thread-count linens. Vista de Oro Suite-Hotel Grano de Oro If you really want to stretch out reserve the immense Vista de Oro Suite, which can only be reached by a private staircase. Highlights include dramatic wood-paneled walls, gorgeous antique furniture, and a hot-tub with panoramic city views. In a twist on the chicken or the egg debate one could argue which is most touted, the Hotel or the Restaurante Grano de Oro. I didnt care which one since I was delighted that I could just trundle downstairs for a memorable meal. Hotel Grano de Oro Francis Canal, the French chef whose cooking offers a refined European twist on Costa Rican classics, has wowed both local and international foodies for over two decades. I bypassed the elegant dining room for a seat in the enchanting open-air, palm-filled courtyard. The menu changes often but since Im a rabbit lover I opted for the locally raised, rabbit redux, - starting with homemade rabbit raviolo, napped with mushrooms, carrot foam, and rabbit jus, followed by a roasted saddle of rabbit stuffed with a mousseline, which both made me very hoppy! Hotel Grano de Oro This would not be the place to skip dessert since menu enticements include a decadent Marquise de Chocolate dark chocolate marquise, red wine poached pear, sweet Gorgonzola and an airy Tres Leches - three-milk cake, a traditional Costa Rican dessert. Restaurante Grano de Oro also houses an award-winning wine cellar, with many fine wines available by the glass. Nice touch: To be a member of Small Distinctive Hotels the property must have a Certification For Sustainable Tourism (CST) awarded by the Costa Rican tourist board. Over and above that, each member hotel also supports their own community project. At Hotel Grano de Oro, the owners have created Casa Luz, House of Light as a haven for impoverished adolescent mothers who have been sexually abused. Luxury Vacations by Justluxe Photo for illustration Of this, the number of foreigners arriving by air was 5.38 million, up 23.5% year on year while those coming by sea and road were 157,622, down 6.1%, and over 1.16 million, up 59.9%, respectively. Most markets sending tourists to Vietnam saw growth, such as the Republic of Korea (62.1%), Finland (39.1%), China (37%), Hong Kong - China (29.2%), Italy (18.3%), Denmark (18.1%), Sweden (16.4%), the US (15.8%), Taiwan - China (14.5%), and France (13.1%). In spite of sending few tourists to Vietnam, the African market also witnessed a 20.9% increase, while number of tourists from Laos decreased 7.9% against the same period last year. During the period, the country provided services for 36.2 million domestic tourists, in which 17.4 million stayed overnight; grossing a revenue of VND260.2 trillion, up 22.6% over a year earlier./. FTAs signing markets all see strong growth As one of the Vietnam's key export goods, garment and textile is one of the sectors to have gained high export turnover in recent years. Vice President of the Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association (VITAS), Truong Van Cam, said that FTAs have played an important role in boosting the growth of garment and textile exports. Specifically, the VKFTA signed between Vietnam and the Republic of Korea (RoK), which took effect in 2015, has helped to expand Vietnam's textile and garment exports to the RoK. Vietnam's textile and garment export turnover to the RoK reached US$2.6 billion in 2016, up 9.5% compared to the previous year, while the export revenue was reported at US$2.9 billion in 2017, up 11.8% compared to 2016. The FTA between Vietnam and the Eurasian Economic Union which became effective in October 2016, has also contributed to increasing Vietnam's textile and garment exports to Russia from US$84.8 million in 2015 to approximately US$172 million in 2017. In addition, the establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) in late 2015 has also had a positive impact on Vietnam's textile and garment exports to the ASEAN market, rising from US$1 billion in 2015 to US$1.35 billion in 2017. Similar to the Chinese market, the effects of the Framework Agreement on Comprehensive Economic Cooperation between ASEAN and China, the ASEAN-China Agreement on Trade in Goods, and the Memoranda of Understanding between Vietnam and China have all helped to improve Vietnam's textile and garment exports to China, which ballooned from US$2.2 billion in 2015 to US$3.2 billion in 2017. Textile and garment is also one of the sectors to have effectively taken advantage of FTAs to increase its export turnover. Statistics from the Import-Export Department under the Ministry of Industry and Trade showed that Vietnam has so far implemented 10 FTAs. In particular, all FTA signatory markets have recorded higher rates of import and export growth compared to the time before the signing of FTAs. Of those, Chile is among the markets posting the highest export growth rate with an annual growth rate of 46.68% per year. It is followed by India with an average annual growth rate of 31.58%, the RoK with an annual growth rate of 29.8% per year, and China with an average growth rate of 21.71% per year. Vietnam reported an export turnover to China of US$8.25 billion in the first three months of 2018, up 33.6% compared to the same period last year. During the period, Vietnam's export revenue to RoK also increased by 14.4%; to ASEAN rose by 19.2%; to Japan up by 36.9%; and to India it soared by 111%; among others. In addition, the number of shipments applying for a certificate of origin (C/O) to receive tax incentives has increased sharply, demonstrating the utilisation of FTA provisions. C/O issuance agencies authorised by the Ministry of Industry and Trade granted more than 216,000 sets of C/O worth over US$10.6 billion in the first quarter of 2018, up 40% in terms of value and 39% in number over the same period of 2017. The Import-Export Department affirmed that the rate of utilising FTA incentives in Vietnam is quite high compared to other countries participating in FTAs with Vietnam. However, there remains large room for enterprises to take advantage of FTAs in the future. Continuing to make good use of FTAs Vietnam's import and export activities are forecast to continue to flourish thanks to the signing, effectiveness and implementation of more FTAs. In particular, the Vietnam-EU FTA (EVFTA) is expected to be signed in 2018 which will create a turning point in the trade cooperation between Vietnam and EU countries. Accordingly, the EVFTA will create more favourable conditions for the export of goods and the expansion of Vietnams market share in the EU due to commitments in cutting tariffs and opening the door to the market. Deputy Director of the Import-Export Department, Tran Thanh Hai, said that the Ministry of Industry and Trade will continue to spread information on FTA incentives, how best to take advantage of FTA preferences, rules of origin, and how to meet rules of origin to assist enterprises in making the most of signed FTAs. In addition, Vietnam should develop supporting industries to increase the localisation rate of its products and meet the rules of origin set by the markets with which Vietnam has signed FTAs. The government also needs to create more favourable conditions for enterprises to apply for and get C/O, including shortening the time of issuance of C/O; simplifying the C/O issuance process; providing electronic C/O declaration; and expanding the pilot issuance of C/O via the Internet. It is also advisable to expand and apply the self-certification mechanism of origin while reducing the criteria of self-certification to facilitate enterprises in participating in this mechanism. "In particular, administrative reform is one of the most important activities that has facilitated trade activities over the recent years. This activity will be further promoted in the future in order to create optimal advantages for enterprises and make the most of FTAs," Tran Thanh Hai emphasised. Vietnamese Ambassador to Cambodia Vu Quang Minh made the remark at a gathering of Vietnamese businesses in Cambodia on May 30. The event, organised by the Vietnamese Embassy in Cambodia, aimed to help Vietnamese entrepreneurs share their experience in doing business in the country. He said the event affords participants a chance to raise ideas to build support policy and facilitate their effective operations in the near future. Vietnamese Ambassador to Cambodia Vu Quang Minh (Photo:VOV) Vietnamese Commercial Counsellor in Cambodia Le Bien Cuong said the Vietnamese Party, State and people always encourage the development of Vietnamese firms in Cambodia. Vietnam ranks sixth among countries investing in Cambodia, mostly in agriculture, services, banking, insurance and consumer goods. Participants shared advantages and disadvantages in doing business in the country and wished that their difficulties would be removed by the two countries ministries and agencies. Concluding the event, Ambassador Minh vowed to gather businesses feedback to submit to Vietnamese and Cambodian authorities, thus facilitating their operations. The Vietnamese people are delighted to share with the Japanese leadership and people the pride in Japan's achievements in the cause of national construction. From the ruins of war, Japan has rapidly risen to become one of the world's leading powerful nations, as well as being an active participant in international economic, political, and social forums. In recent years, since the assumption of the office, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has effectively implemented the Abenomics new economic policy, bringing about numerous achievements. Japan's trade turnover reached JPY154.02 trillion in 2017, up 2.19% compared to 2016. Japan is currently the third largest economy in the world. Japan's tourism is also developing strongly, having welcomed 28.7 million international tourists in 2017, the highest ever number so far. With strong will and determination, Japanese leaders and people have constantly made efforts to reconstruct areas damaged by earthquakes and tsunamis in addition to restoring the pace of economic growth. The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has carried out an active foreign policy towards promoting Japan's leading role in the region, with a focus on boosting economic connectivity, trade liberalisation and maritime security, contributing significantly to enhancing Japan's position in the international and regional arena. Since diplomatic relations between the two countries were established in 1973, the friendship and cooperation between Vietnam and Japan has been continuously nurtured by generations of leaders and peoples, becoming a common treasure of both countries. In 2014, Vietnam and Japan set up the strategic partnership for peace and prosperity in Asia, marking a significant milestone in the bilateral relations. The good relations between Vietnam and Japan have been strengthened through regular high-level visits and exchanges by leaders of the two countries. Vietnam and Japan have also maintained important cooperation mechanisms such as the Vietnam-Japan Cooperation Committee which is co-chaired by the two Foreign Ministers and the Vietnam-Japan Defence Policy Dialogue at deputy ministerial level. Japan has also coordinated closely and effectively with Vietnam at many multilateral forums and international organisations. We are pleased to see that the economic cooperation between Vietnam and Japan has grown steadily. Japan is the largest provider of official development assistance (ODA) to Vietnam and is Vietnam's fourth largest trade partner. The volume of bilateral trade reached US$33.4 billion in 2017, up 16.8% compared to 2016. Japan's direct investment in Vietnam in 2017 also hit a record high of US$9.11 billion, to rank first among countries and territories investing in Vietnam. From 1992 to March 2017, Japan committed about US$30.5 billion worth of ODA loans to Vietnam. Agricultural cooperation between Vietnam and Japan has also achieved many breakthroughs. Both sides signed the medium and long term vision of Vietnam-Japan agriculture cooperation. Cooperation on climate change response continues to see strong and substantial development, with Japan continuously providing ODA to Vietnam's climate change response projects. Education cooperation between the two countries has also achieved promising results, with the number of Vietnamese on-the-job trainees and students in Japan rising to nearly 200,000 in early 2018. Japan is cooperating with Vietnam to build the Vietnam-Japan University to train high quality human resources for Vietnam in the fields of science and technology, management, and services. Bilateral cooperation in tourism and labour is also being promoted. The Vietnamese community in Japan comprises more than 262,000 people, while the Japanese community in Vietnam amounts to about 16,000 people, who all serve as a bridge to boost the relationship between the two countries. The state visit to Japan by President Tran Dai Quang takes place on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the diplomatic ties which aims to affirm Vietnam's appreciation of the strengthening of an extensive strategic partnership with Japan and the wish to bring bilateral relations into a new stage of development in all aspects, for the interests of both parties. The visit is also an opportunity for the two sides to exchange ideas on regional and international issues of mutual concern for the peace, stability, cooperation, and development of the region and the world. In the morning, Minister of Education and Training Phung Xuan Nha, on behalf of Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, presented a proposal of the draft law amending and supplementing a number of articles of the Education Law. Phan Thanh Binh, Chairman of the National Assemblys Committee for Culture, Education, Youth and Children, delivered a report on assessing the above-said document. After hearing the National Assembly Standing Committees report on acquiring feedback on the draft Law on Cyber Security, the deputies deliberated contentious contents of the bill. They focused on protecting important information about national security and ensuring information security in domestic and foreign agencies and organisations which provide services online or own information systems in Vietnam, among others. In the afternoon, they discussed in groups the draft Law on Vietnamese Coast Guard and the revised draft Law on Amnesty. The lawmakers are scheduled to look into the draft law amending and supplementing a number of articles of the Law on Higher Education, the programme on building laws and ordinances in 2019 and adjustments of the programme on building laws and ordinances in 2018 on March 30 morning. They will work in groups in the afternoon to scrutinize the draft laws amending and supplementing a number of articles of the Education Law and the Law on Higher Education. At a reception for the diplomat later the same day, Prince Albert II expressed his admiration for Vietnams struggle for national independence, as well as its rapid and impressive development in the Doi Moi (renewal) process. He voiced his delight at the fruitful development of the Vietnam-Monaco relations over recent years, adding that the two countries share common interests in many issues, especially oceans, environmental protection and sustainable development. For his part, Ambassador Thiep conveyed the regards of President Tran Dai Quang and the other leaders of Vietnam to the Monaco Prince. Vietnam is looking forward to welcoming the Prince on his first official visit to the country, scheduled for this November, Thiep said, stating that the visit will mark a new stage of development in the bilateral relations and help to promote the exchanges between the two sides business communities. Prince Albert II wished the Vietnamese diplomat a successful tenure, thus contributing to expanding the cooperation between Vietnam and Monaco in a practical manner. PORTLAND, Ore. Ten disaster responders from the local American Red Cross in Oregon and Southwest Washington (Cascades Region) are on the ground helping communities affected by evacuations from the Kilauea Volcano eruption, according to a statement from the American Red Cross. Responders from Bend, Burns, Eugene, Klamath Falls, Longview, Monmouth, Portland, Salem, Summerville and Wood Village are in Hawaii working in disaster relief shelters, providing food and water to evacuees, and delivering health or mental health services to those displaced. In addition to ongoing volcanic eruptions, residents are dealing with devastating lava flows, toxic gases, and lazewhich is made of clouds of toxic gas and steam containing tiny glass particles. The volcano has destroyed more than 40 structuresincluding more than 24 homesand has caused power outages, road closures and brush fires. As many as 2,000 people remain under mandatory evacuation orders and officials say others should be ready to evacuate at a moments notice, according to the Red Cross. People are urged to evacuate if told to do so by officials. The Red Cross says that they have five shelters open where more than 130 people spent the night on Monday night. Since the volcanic activity began, trained Red Cross workers have provided more than 3,400 overnight stays in shelters and served nearly 14,000 snacks. Health and mental health volunteers from the Red Cross are in the shelters and have already provided more than 2,700 services. In addition, the Red Cross is working with the Salvation Army to provide meals. MEDFORD, Ore. -- Senator Jeff Merkley wants to expand Medicare coverage to all Americans. Today he introduced the Choose Medicare Act. This would allow anyone to enroll in Medicare for their insurance plan, and allow employers to purchase Medicare to offer employees. Merkley says the Medicare would expand to cover reproductive and pediatric services. Senator Merkley adds it would operate under Medicare Part E, for everyone. He says it would be paid for by premiums. "It has to operate on it's own financial footing, and not in anyway affect or take away from the medicare plan that we contribute to through our paychecks," says Senator Jeff Merkley. At a press conference today Senator Jeff Merkley said he expects insurance companies to oppose the legislation. He thinks it will create a more competitive industry and level the playing field. One local health care provider at the press conference agreed with him. "I'm looking forward to the day when health care premiums are decreasing due to the creative work being done by all of us that provide health care for our communities. Sometimes the only way to make this happen is through competition," says Richard Booth, the CEO of Siskiyou Community Health. Senator Merkley says he plans to educate the public on this option over the next couple months. To read the full bill click here. MEDFORD, Ore. Extra patrols over Memorial Day weekend saw Jackson County Sheriff's Office (JCSO) deputies arrest three people for impaired drivingtwo men and a woman between the ages of 32 and 35 years-old. But the weekend doesn't spell the end for those increased patrols, according to JCSO. There will be two more weeks of a "Summer Kick-Off" DUII patrol event, according to JCSO. Deputies on grant-funded overtime will be on watch throughout the county, but particularly areas frequented by minors using alcohol and drugs, as well as routes to popular recreation areas. JCSO provided the following tips to help prevent or deter impaired driving: DRINK OR DRIVE: Once you know where you'll spend your time, decide whether you're drinking or driving - choose only one. GETTING AROUND: Before you take your first sip, leave your keys at home or give them to a friend. Get a ride from a sober friend or family member, or use public transportation. HAVE A BACKUP PLAN: Save the number of a taxi company in your phone so you are always ready. In some areas, you can use ride share services such as Uber or Lyft. CAMP OUT: Rural areas may not have cell phone service. Take an overnight bag with you so you can spend the night if youre too intoxicated to drive. PASSENGERS, TOO: Drivers aren't the only ones at risk. Only accept a ride from a sober driver. HELP A FRIEND: If you know someone who is about to drive while impaired, help them to make other arrangements to get to where they are going safely. SAY SOMETHING: If you suspect an impaired driver on the roadway, call police immediately. It is okay to call 911 to report an impaired driver. For more information or statistics on impaired driving, you can check here. LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. (AP) Authorities say a Tesla sedan in Autopilot mode has crashed into a parked police cruiser in Southern California. Police Sgt. Jim Cota says the officer was not in the cruiser during the crash Tuesday in Laguna Beach. He says the Tesla driver suffered minor injuries. The police SUV ended up with its two passenger-side wheels on a sidewalk. Tesla's semi-autonomous Autopilot mode has come under scrutiny following other recent crashes. The carmaker says the function is not designed to avoid a collision and warns drivers not to rely on it entirely. Binh, who is also Politburo member and Secretary of the CPV Central Committee, made the comment while meeting Varga Mihaly, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance; Hiller Istvan, Deputy Speaker of Hungarys National Assembly and head of the national board of the Hungarian Socialist Party; and Nemeth Zsolt, head of the Hungarian National Assemblys Committee on Foreign Affairs, and head of the ruling Fidesz Partys Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Vietnamese official, who led a CPV delegation to visit Hungary from May 27-29, said that Hungary ranks 14th in terms of investment among the EU partners of Vietnam. He suggested that the two sides promote the operation of the bilateral Joint Committee on economic cooperation, while improving their investment environments and policies, while also creating favourable conditions for the businesses of both sides to seek partnerships. The two sides should focus on areas of Vietnams demand and Hungarys strengths, such as health care, State management, IT, pharmaceutical and food safety, he proposed. Binh lauded the construction of the Hungary-funded Can Tho Tumour Hospital. He affirmed the determination of the two governments to coordinate in implementing cooperation projects utilising Hungarian preferential loans worth EUR440 million. He expressed his pleasure at the growing economic ties between the two countries, with trade revenue reaching US$354.3 million in 2017, up 33.13% annually. In the first three months of 2018, import-export revenues between the two countries surged nearly 51% to US$115 million from the same period last year. Vietnam appreciates Hungary increasing the scholarships for Vietnamese students to 200 each year, he said, thanking the Hungarian side for supporting the Vietnamese community in the country. Meanwhile, Zsolt spoke highly of the role of the CPV in national development and defence. He affirmed the partnership between the two parties is significant in fostering the ties between the two countries. The Hungarian side pledged to continue creating optimal conditions for the growth of the Hungary-Vietnam ties. In the meeting, the two sides highlighted that economic-finance cooperation is a prioritised pillar in their bilateral partnership. The Hungarian side hoped to expand their direct investment, business links and technology transfer in Vietnam in areas of Hungarys strength, such as pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, information technology, cyber security, water resources management and agriculture. Hungary also committed to continue backing Vietnam-EU relations, including the implementation of a free trade agreement between the two sides. Meanwhile, Vietnam is ready to assist Hungary to strengthen its cooperation with ASEAN and its member countries. Former B.C. premier Christy Clark speaks to media for the first time since announcing she will be stepping down as B.C. Liberal leader and MLA in Vancouver, B.C., on Monday July 31, 2017. Bennett Jones says former British Columbia premier Christy Clark is joining the law firm as a senior advisor in their Vancouver office. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ben Nelms Metis fashion designer Evan Ducharme, who will show his collection at Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto, poses for a photograph at his studio in Vancouver, on Tuesday May 29, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck Finance Minister William Morneau speaks during the opening event of a G7 of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting, in Bari, southern Italy, Thursday, May 11, 2017. Before all the attention turns to the G7's big show in Quebec next week, the finance lieutenants from the exclusive club of industrialized nations will have a more-peaceful setting to discuss global economic issues over the coming days in the fresh air of the British Columbia mountains. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Ciro Fusco/ANSA via AP Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, is shown in an undated file photo. A country-wide conversation about John A. Macdonald's place in Canadian history was debated by many of the scholars who know it best at the Canadian Historical Association's annual meeting in Regina. Members of the association voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to rename the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize to the CHA Prize for Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History. THE CANADIAN PRESS/National Archive of Canada Canadian Pacific railway workers picket at the company's intermodal terminal Wednesday, May 30, 2018 in Montreal. Canadian Pacific Rail's more than 3,000 train operators walked off the job late last night to protest lagging contract talks. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz Speaking at the meeting, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc expressed his thanks to the GEF Secretariat for choosing Vietnam as the host for the upcoming sixth GEF assembly and associated meetings. The Government leader emphasised that Vietnam attaches great importance to addressing environmental issues in the countrys development process, stating that Vietnam wishes to intensify its cooperation with the GEF and hopes the GEF will assist Vietnam in the implementation of forest ecosystem services, forest production, and food security at the local level in the context of the implementation of the United Nations to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Vietnam also needs assistance in implementing projects on ocean waste treatment, especially plastic waste, as well as addressing the challenges of climate change and sea level rise in the Mekong Delta, he noted. For her part, Naoko Ishii said Vietnam is making positive progress in solving environmental problems. However, Vietnam still faces major environmental challenges in the process of development, she noted, adding that the GEF hopes to assist Vietnam in addressing the issues related to ocean waste, and other hot environmental issues affecting the Mekong Delta. An Indian woman inspects the damage caused by firing from the Pakistan side of the border, during a lull in shelling between India and Pakistan in Jora farm village, in Ranbir Singh Pura district, India, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Pakistan and India have agreed to stop trading artillery fire in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, and on Wednesday the situation was calm after months of routine skirmishes that killed dozens of soldiers and civilians. (AP Photo/Channi Anand) William Browder, a U.S-born Britain-based financier, leaves the anti-graft prosecutor's office in Madrid, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Browder who has spearheaded a United States law targeting Russian officials accused Moscow of provoking his brief detention on Wednesday in Madrid by Spanish authorities. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco) FILE - This Feb. 24, 2018 file photo released by Melanie Grunder shows Stephen Beal in Newbury Park, Calif. Prosecutors have dropped charges against Beal, arrested on suspicion of having explosives after a blast killed his former girlfriend at her day spa. Prosecutors filed court papers Tuesday, May 29, 2018, in U.S. District Court to dismiss the single count of possessing an unregistered destructive device against Beal. (Melanie Grunder via AP,File) He made the appeal while hosting a reception for a delegation of Venezuelas Strategic Command Operations of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces led by Lieut. Gen. Omar Alexis Montes Meza, head of the operation division, in Hanoi on May 29. 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Speaking highly of Japans supply of official development assistance (ODA) to the country, Deputy PM Minh suggested Japan continues joint work in high-quality infrastructure, climate change response, as well as effective and proper use of ODA. He proposed increasing Japanese investment in Vietnam in potential fields of labour, high-tech agriculture, locality-to-locality cooperation and people-to-people exchange. At the talks in Tokyo on May 30 (Photo:MOFA) Stressing that Japan highly values ties with Vietnam in its policy, Kono noted that Japan will continue assisting Vietnam in economic development via high-quality infrastructure and human resources training projects. The host expressed wish to further reinforce bilateral ties in diverse areas, and facilitate cultural and people-to-people exchange on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties. On regional and global issues, including the East Sea issue, they pledged to offer mutual support at the United Nations, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and ASEANs related meetings. Kono lauded Vietnam for successfully holding APEC Year 2017 and thanked its close and active liaison in the negotiations and signing of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. He wished that both sides would accelerate internal procedures to soon realise the deal. Deputy PM Minh vowed to work closely with Japan in the role of coordinator of ASEAN- Japan ties for 2018-2021 to push forward their practical and effective relations. KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. (AP) -- Authorities have arrested a fire district employee in rural southern Oregon after she submitted a letter of resignation that outlined thefts from the agency. The Herald and News reports 51-year-old Tina Young was arrested Thursday on a charge of aggravated first-degree theft following her letter to the board of the Bonanza Rural Fire Protection District. In the letter last week, Young says she had personal financial difficulties that led to "some decisions that today leave me feeling guilty, ashamed, sorry and scared." Young says she mishandled funds, altered financial reports and destroyed financial records. The Klamath County Sheriff's Office says the amount stolen has not been determined. The district says it found more than $76,000 of questionable checking transactions since Young began work as its secretary and treasurer in 2013. ROSEBURG, Ore. -- The Roseburg Veterans Affairs campus received a visit from Congressman Peter Defazio on Tuesday. The Congressman met with Interim VA Director David Whitmer to catch up on the happenings at the Roseburg VA. This comes after an investigation into the Roseburg VA earlier this year found evidence of serious problems with employee management and intimidation, medical care, and inadequate resources. He toured the campus and spoke with leaders of local veterans chapters, such as the Women Veterans, American Legion, and Umpqua Community College Veterans. Their tour took them to the new Acute Psych Unit, which opened in April of 2016. Interim Director Whitmer said with him now being four months into his assignment as the temporary director, Defazio just wanted to check in on things. I think he just wanted a summary of the things weve done so far and the changes that were making going forward. But I also had an opportunity to show him where we plan to dedicate about fifteen acres of land for the state to build a home here on our campus. The group also toured the Residential Rehab Treatment Program. Defazio wrapped up his tour with a meeting with a World War II Veteran with an incredible story. World War II Veteran and Bataan survivor Glen Kuskie met with Defazio in the canteen at the Roseburg VA campus. Kuskie talked with the congressman, sharing insights about his service in the Philippines and becoming a Japanese prisoner of war for three years before escaping, and floating back to the Philippines on a cargo door. He shared his Philippine Veterans of America medal with Defazio, and the congressman returned the gesture by presenting him with an American flag. Im going to donate it to my home over there, and they can fly it on the holidays, said Kuskie. The flag was flown over the United States Capitol Building on May 24 of this year. Defazio will be able to take his findings back to the Capitol to update leadership on the progress of the Roseburg VA campus. NEWPORT, Ore. (AP) -- Court documents say an Oregon woman confessed to stabbing her 6-year-old son. A probable cause affidavit filed Tuesday says 34-year-old Nemoria Villagomez of Newport told detectives the boy "deserved it." She's being held in the Lincoln County Jail on charges of attempted murder, assault and criminal mistreatment. Authorities say the boy was stabbed six times on Saturday. Covered in blood, he ran to a neighbor's apartment for help and was later taken by LifeFlight helicopter to a Portland hospital. According to the affidavit, the officers who entered Villagomez's apartment found a large pool of blood on a coffee table and a steak knife with blood on the handle. Blood was also smeared on the walls. When police entered the bedroom, they found Villagomez holding her 14-month-old son. The mother's attorney, Mitchell Martin, did not immediately return a call seeking comment. HILLSBORO, Ore. -- A judge has ruled in favor, for now, of a Liberty High School student's wish to wear a "Border Wall" T-shirt to school. Addison Barnes was told by school officials that he couldn't wear the shirt because those school officials claimed it violated the school's dress code which forbids clothing with disruptive phrases. The judge ruled that the school couldn't prove the shirt was disruptive, even though some students said they were offended by the shirt. Stay with KEZI 9 News as this court case develops. In a dialogue with leaders of Japanese large corporations in Tokyo on May 30, President Quang noted that Vietnam always welcomes Japanese investment in the fields of Vietnams interest and Japans strengths like infrastructure construction, support industry, high-tech agriculture, energy, environment, finance, banking, and the equitisation process of state-owned firms. The Vietnamese state commits to creating favourable conditions for Japanese groups to invest and operate effective, stable and long-term business in Vietnam, he underlined. The President informed the Japanese businesses that Vietnam is striving to maintain an annual GDP growth of 6.5-7 percent during 2016-2020 along with macro-economic stability while working to promote sustainable development coupled with environmental protection. The moves will help Vietnam maintain its position as a dynamic nation and attractive destination for investment in the ASEAN bloc. He stressed that the Vietnam-Japan Joint Initiative is an important channel to help Vietnam complete its policies and regulations, improve investment climate and attract high-quality foreign investments to Vietnam, particularly those from Japan. Chairman of the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) Sadayuki Sakakibara and Chairman of the Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation Yoshimitsu Kobayashi expressed their delights to welcome President Quang on his first state visit to Japan. Speaking highly of Vietnams significant roles in the development of Japanese firms, they believed that the fruitful political relations will bolster bilateral trade and investment. Japanese corporations lauded Vietnams participation in various economic deals like Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). LEBANON, Ore. -- Lebanon police arrested Mark William Chevalier, 40, of Lebanon for multiple sex crimes at about 4 a.m. Sunday after a report that images depicting child abuse were located on a digital device he owned. Chevalier is accused of inappropriate contact with an underage female, police say. The alleged crimes took place at his residence inside the city limits. Authorities took him into custody at his residence without incident. Chevalier has been charged with two counts of using a child in a display of sexually explicit conduct, possession of material depicting sexually explicit conduct in the first degree, three counts of rape in the third degree, three counts of sex abuse in the third degree and sodomy in the third degree. The minor female is known to Chevalier and has been identified, police say. At this time, the department is not aware of any other victims in the case. Chevalier was taken to the Lebanon jail and later was transported to the Linn County jail. The department says they have had multiple contacts with Chevalier over the years, dating back to 2006. Many of those contacts involved Chevalier reporting noise complaints, disturbances and suspicious circumstances. He is not listed as a suspect with the Lebanon Police Department in any other cases such as this incident. The investigation is ongoing. Contact Lebanon Police Detective Sergeant Taylor Jackson with any information regarding the case. Eugene, Ore. -- Employees of the Whitsell mill are now trying to figure out where their next paycheck will come from, but it may come quicker than you think. At WorkSource Lane in Eugene, officials with the Oregon Employment Department say two former employees have come to their office to get help, and theyre expecting more. WorkSource Lane can help workers by getting them signed up for unemployment benefits and also help them find a new job. Henry Fields, with the Oregon Employment Department, said with a strong economy and low unemployment, many companies are looking to hire quality workers. He says one sawmill in the area will soon be hiring 20 workers and a commercial painting company will also soon be looking to hire and provide training. The people here are always willing to help and can point them in the right direction, Fields said. Whether that's temporary employment somewhere else, permanent employment somewhere else, or just staying on their feet until the right opportunity arises, they can help them figure that out. KEZI reached out to the mill's supervisors, who didn't want to comment. One former employee said between 100 and 150 people could lose their jobs. Fields believes the loss isn't likely to have a major impact on Lane County's Unemployment rate. He said former mill employees should stop by their offices to learn more about their options sooner rather than later. The PM told newly-accredited Egyptian Ambassador to Vietnam Mahmoud Hassan Nayel at a reception in Hanoi on May 30 said Vietnam is strong in agricultural products such as tea, aquatic products, rice, cashew nuts, coffee, pepper, apparel and rubber so that the country wants to boost trade ties with Egypt in agriculture to lift two-way trade. He asked for promoting collaboration in oil and gas, and strengthening connections between the two countries localities, firstly accelerating the signing of agreements on establishing friendship and cooperation between Hanoi and Cairo, and the northern province of Ninh Binh and Luxor city. The host requested successfully holding friendship activities this year on the occasion of the 55th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties. Nayel, for his part, spoke highly of development achievements scored by the Vietnamese government and people in diverse areas. He suggested both sides facilitate the exchange of all-level visits while promoting State, parliamentary and people-to-people diplomacy, thereby raising mutual understanding between the two countries people. Proposing further promotion of bilateral comprehensive partnership in various fields, the guest noted that fisheries and oil and gas are strengths of Egypt. PM Phuc congratulated the Sudanese diplomat on his new mission in Vietnam when the two countries relations are advancing. He expected that the new ambassador will do his utmost to foster the bilateral ties during his term of office. The PM also conveyed his congratulations to Sudan over the lifting of US economic sanctions against the African country last year and hoped that it would be a good opportunity for Vietnam and Sudan to promote two-way trade. Mohamed Elmurtada Mubarak Ismail Siraq expressed his honour to be the new Ambassador of Sudan to Vietnam, saying the Sudanese people admire Vietnams socio-economic development and want to learn from its experience and promote cooperation with the Southeast Asian country. With huge potential in oil and gas, Sudan is ready to work with Vietnam in this industry which can benefit both sides, he said. The ambassador said he wishes to receive support of PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc in his mission in Vietnam and hopes that the Government of Vietnam will soon send a delegation to Sudan to explore opportunities for partnership between the two sides. PM Phuc affirmed that Vietnam treasures the traditional friendship and cooperation with the Government and people of Sudan and is delighted at what the Sudanese people have achieved during the national building and development. He agreed that the two nations have much potential to further enhance the effectiveness of their cooperation, hereby increasing the two-way trade turnover. He wanted the ambassador to foster more trade promotion activities, increase exchange of business delegations and promote investment in the fields of telecommunications, agriculture, aquaculture and petroleum. He suggested the two sides continue to work closely and support each other at international forums and soon sign agreements to improve legal framework for the bilateral cooperation. Vietnam and Sudan set up diplomatic ties on August 26, 1969. Next year, the two countries will celebrate the 50th anniversary of their relations. BUTLER COUNTY, Iowa A lockdown was put into place at around 10:30 a.m. at North Butler after the district was made aware of a possible outside threat to the building by the Butler County Sheriffs office. The building was placed into lockdown to restrict access, the district said on social media. The district added the following: All students who were working outside were brought into the building. Within minutes a deputy from the sheriffs department arrived on scene as an extra precaution. Sheriff Johnson and his team quickly located the subject, which allowed us to go back to normal function within about a forty-minute timespan. The safety of our students and staff are our highest priority, Superintendent Joel Foster said. The Butler County Sheriff's Office said a press release is upcoming. MASON CITY, Iowa A man arrested after being found passed out in a running car is pleading not guilty. Nicholas Dean Mostrom, 30 of Clear Lake, is charged with two counts of possession with intent to deliver methamphetamine, carrying weapons, driving while license is revoked, and OWI-2nd offense. Police say he was found the evening of May 7 unconscious in a vehicle in the 600 block of South Vermont Avenue in Mason City. Officer said a search of his vehicle found more than five grams of meth and a black revolver, which Mostrom reportedly said was a pellet gun. His trial is scheduled to begin on July 17. CLEAR LAKE, Iowa- Power is now being restored to many residents in the Clear Lake Mason city area after massive storms left around ten thousand without power. Janice Anderson was one of the thousands without air conditioning on Tuesday with many of her neighbors saying it took 21 hours before power was finally restored. Anderson does have a generator for her home, which allowed her to continue to work, but others, such as Jose Delfeante, was not so lucky. Delfeante said he had two freezers full of meat he worried would go bad. While power was finally restored to Anderson, she was shocked to learn how many went without power. Thats crazy, she said. I thought it was just our neighborhood. I did talk to some other in Clear Lake who had no power, but they said theirs was restored around 2 AM. It wasnt just residents dealing with the outage. Mercy Family Clinic and Pharmacy had a note on their window saying there were closed Tuesday due to the extended power outage. Those with Mercy Medical Center North Iowa say many of the employees were sent home and appointments canceled. Those with Alliant Energy say the remaining customers without power will have it restored by midnight Wednsday. MASON CITY, Iowa Codie Matz, accused of killing his grandparents in 2017, has informed the court that he intends to plead guilty. The new information was filed Wednesday. A plea change hearing has been scheduled for June 5 at 2 p.m. in the Cerro Gordo County Courthouse. A trial date had been set for Oct. 15. Related: More information on the Codie Matz case. Matz is accused of stabbing to death 61-year-old Kenneth Hackbart and his wife, 64-year-old Kathleen Hackbart at their Mason City home at 327 27th St. SW in early November. Matz is facing two counts of first-degree murder. Matz was found competent to stand trial Feb. 13. A court filing by his attorney said he may use a defense of insanity, intoxication, or diminished responsibility at trial. HARMONY, Minn. A distillery is coming to southeastern Minnesota, and its expected to give a boost to local businesses. Its called Harmony Spirits, and its three owners broke ground on its site on Tuesday after years of it being just an idea. We were discussing how we really would like to have something local that we could all visit, Jim Simpson, one of the owners, said, and that conversation turned to we should do this. The other two owners are Larry Tammel and Andy Craig. They plan to use locally grown products to make their liquor. I think we're gonna support all the other local business that are here as well, Simpson said. One of those being Preston Liquor, which is about 10 miles down the road. Joe Lafreniere owns it. Anything I can bring in local people seem to like, Lafreniere said. You know everyone's looking for something local. He thinks itll boost people shopping local. I wanna see what, what's being made in the area, Lafreniere said. What the flavor is, you know, what local ingredients are in it that you can pick out from something like being mass produced from somewhere else. After construction, the plan is to start distilling vodka and whiskey first. It's been quite a process ya know, Simpson said. There's a lot of permits, a lot of regulations. So we're just excited to get the building up and get our equipment in there and get licensed and be ready to make an exceptional product that everybody can enjoy with us. Owners hope to have the building up by July, and start distilling pending their permit. CRESCO, Iowa A trial has been scheduled for a northeast Iowa teacher accused of having sexual contact with a student. Tiffany Ranweiler-Oblander, 29 of Decorah, is charged with sexual exploitation by a school employee. She was charged on May 4 after the Howard County Sheriffs Office says it obtained evidence that Ranweiler-Oblander and a student engaged in sexual conduct on four occasions between March and April of 2018. Since her arrest, she has been put on administrative leave by the Howard-Winneshiek School District. A trial is now set to begin on June 27. ELDORA, Iowa A man convicted of sexually abusing a child has now lost in civil court. A judge has sided with Dean Hilpipres victim and her mother and granted a default judgment in their lawsuit. Hilpipre pleaded guilty to lascivious acts with a child for abusing the girl and was sentenced to five years of probation. After pleading guilty, Hilpipre claimed a $100,000 prize from the Iowa Lottery and was sued for those winnings. The plaintiffs filed a motion in Hardin County District Court that Hilpipre had not responded to their lawsuit within the specified time limit and asked the judge to rule in their favor. The judge has now granted a default judgment against Hilpipre and a hearing will be scheduled to determine what sort of damages he will have to pay. DECORAH, Iowa Two men have been sentenced for stealing thousands of dollars in equipment from Alliant Energy trucks. Frank Lee Miller, 55 of Waterloo, and Ryan Robert Tovar, 34 of Waterloo, have pleaded guilty to 1st degree theft. Miller has also pleaded guilty to 2nd degree theft. Authorities say they and Kevin Gates, 42 of Waterloo, stole from the trucks as they were parked in the lot of Mihm Brothers trucking in Fort Atkinson on December 4, 2017. Kevin Gates Kevin Gates Miller and Tovar have both been ordered to spend up to 10 years in prison. Gates has also pleaded guilty to 1st degree theft but no sentencing date for him has been set. MASON CITY, Iowa Human remains were recently discovered in rural Mason City, but authorities say they are not Jodi Huisentruit. The Cerro Gordo County Sheriffs Office was called on May 20 about human remains found in the 22000 block of 275th Street. Deputies went to the scene and called for assistance from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. The skeletal remains were sent to the Iowa State Medical Examiners Office where an autopsy was performed on May 23. The results of the autopsy are not being released. The Iowa Department of Public Safety says an anthropologist determined the remains were of a white female between 20 and 45 years old, between 5-feet and 5-feet-7 inches tall, and had been at the location from between 5-15 years. The Iowa State Medical Examiners Office says a forensic examination of the teeth found as part of the remains definitively proved they are not the remains of Huisentruit, a KIMT anchor who disappeared on June 27, 1995. The Cerro Gordo County Sheriffs Office and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation ask anyone with information about a missing person matching this description to call 641-421-3000. WORTH COUNTY, Iowa A burglary charge has been dropped against an Albert Lea woman arrested in North Iowa. Tasha Nelson, 29, was accused of 3rd degree burglary for entering a womans house in Kensett on May 19 and trying to change into the womans clothes. The Worth County Attorneys Office filed to dismiss that charge, however, and the judge agreed. According to court documents, the victims in this case consented to the dismissal so that Nelson can be prosecuted on more serious criminal charges in Minnesota and receive any medical treatment which may address the behaviors that resulted in the criminal charge in Iowa. For previous coverage of this story, click here. At the event, VIFA President Nguyen Van Nam expressed his delight at the strong growth and robust achievements of Italy in the past over seven decades to become an important member of the European Union (EU) and a proactive member of the UN and many other organisations. The country has made significant contributions to the regional and global peace, development, and win-win cooperation, he highlighted. He noted that the Vietnam-Italy cultural exchange centre (or Dante Alighieri centre), since it was established in Vietnam in 2006, has become an incubator for the Italian culture in Vietnam, hoping that training centres like this will promote their roles in enhancing cultural exchange and mutual understanding between the two peoples in the coming time. For her part, Italian Ambassador to Vietnam Cecilia Peccioni affirmed that Vietnam has become one of the leading partners of Italy in the Southeast Asian region, across the fields of politics, economy, culture, education and training, and scientific research. Two-way trade hit nearly US$5 billion per year. The two nations have enjoyed close cooperation in the framework of the multilateral forums, particularly collaboration between the EU and ASEAN, she underlined. Regarding education and training, the signing of 100 agreements between universities and training centres of both sides is vivid illustration for the huge cooperation prospects in the sector, she said, adding that students will help connect the two peoples and two economies in the future. Later, Vice President of the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organisations Bui Khac Son presented the medal For Peace and Friendship among Nations to the Italian diplomat. Cecilia Peccioni also received a certificate of merit from the Hanoi University for her contributions to the bilateral education and training cooperation. The exhibition Vietnam-Italy in my eyes is organised at the Hanoi University on the occasion. Almost 5500 miles ( 8,800 kilometers ) . Thats the distance between Pyongyang and Rome. It seems a lot, right? But not for gold, the truly global monetary asset. In recent days, the price of the yellow metal has immediately reacted to the developments around both North Korea and Italy. What has happened? Love Is a Battlefield As Pat Benatar beautifully sang, love is a battlefield. The same applies to the gold market. The chart below shows the price of gold in 2018. As one can see, the price of the yellow metal dived on May the 15th below $1,300 just to rebound several days later. Chart 1: Gold prices in 2018 (London P.M. Fix, in $). What happened? Well, gold plunged because of the rebound in the greenback. The U.S. dollar strengthened partially (aside the Eurozones problems and rising yields on American Treasuries) because of the eased conflict over the Korean Peninsula. President Trump was supposed to meet with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June. But Trump pulled out of the June the 12th summit on Thursday, sending gold prices again above $1,300. Diplomatic negotiations are a battlefield. However, as the chart below shows, the jump was temporary and the price of gold has gradually fallen since Friday. As we constantly repeated, geopolitical factors in general, and threats from the North Korea in particular, have only short-lived and limited impact on the gold prices. Chart 2: Gold prices (London P.M. Fix, in $) from May 25 and May 28. Good Morning Italy with Your Elections Fast teleportation to Italy with the spaghetti al dente, strong coffee, and political instability. On Monday, Italys President Sergio Mattarella nominated Carlo Cottarelli, a former International Monetary Fund official, as interim prime minister with the goal to pass the next budget and to plan snap elections in the autumn or early next year. The decision to appoint Cottarelli, was a surprising move, as it means a conflict with the anti-establishment forces which gained the majority of votes in March elections. President Mattarella vetoed the 5-Star Movement and Leagues choice of a euro-sceptic Paolo Savona as economy minister, because he had threatened to pull Italy out of the Eurozone. He explains this move, saying: The uncertainty over our position has alarmed investors and savers both in Italy and abroad. Membership of the euro is a fundamental choice. If we want to discuss it, then we should do so in a serious fashion. Hence, President clearly wanted to calm financial markets. But it might be a bears favor. You see, snap elections may lead to an even stronger mandate for the countrys populist parties. The Presidents decision might be interpreted as desperate and disrespectful for popular vote establishments maneuver to remain in power. It is grist for the populists mill. Hence, the euro declined again the U.S. dollar, as investors are afraid that anti-euro forces will strengthen in Italy. And more weakness might come. The Italys snap election in autumn could create a problem to ECB which considers to start winding down its quantitative easing program by September. If the central bank postpones the reduction of its monetary accommodation, the U.S. is likely to strengthen further, putting the yellow metal under downward pressure. Implications for Gold As we have argued in our Gold News Monitor and Market Overview for a long time, gold behaves like a currency. But its not a typical currency, as it is not linked to any particular country or economy. Gold is a real international monetary asset, the ultimate safe haven against global turmoil. Indeed, on Thursday, its price jumped in reaction to Trumps cancellation of the meeting with Kim Jong Un. But it started to decline soon after, partially to the revived hopes that the U.S. President would eventually meet with the North Korean leader (investors should always remember about Trumps unique negotiation and communication style). But the gold prices reacted also to the developments in the Old Continent, i.e. to concerns about the snap election in Italy. Adding to these worries was news that Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy would face a vote of confidence on Friday (as dozens of people linked to the ruling center-right Peoples Party were convicted of corruption). Another potential hit for the euro. In consequence, Italian and Spanish borrowing costs relative to Germanys increased substantially. So the U.S. dollar bulls should have a good time for a while. But we cannot say the same about gold bulls, at least in the near future. Investors should also remember that the Volcker rule might be soften soon, which should support the financial sector, reducing additionally the safe-haven appeal of gold. Stay tuned! Thank you. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland vowed on Tuesday to defend Canadas workers from U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs, signaling the potential for retaliation if the Trump administration fails to grant Ottawa a permanent exemption by Friday. Speaking to reporters after meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in Washington, Freeland said they discussed Fridays expiration of a temporary exemption for Canada and Mexico from U.S. national security tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Freeland repeated her view that the metals tariff issue was entirely separate from negotiations to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement and that quotas or tariffs for Canada based on national security concerns were entirely inappropriate given the high level of security cooperation and steel industry integration between the United States and Canada. She declined to say, however, whether she expected President Donald Trumps administration to extend the exemption or impose tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports from Canada and 10 percent on aluminum. Asked if Canada were prepared to retaliate should Washington impose the tariffs, Freeland said: Our government always is very ready and very prepared to respond appropriately to every action. We are always prepared and ready to defend our workers and our industries. Freeland also said she had held very productive discussions with Lighthizer on NAFTA rules of origin for autos, as well as other issues, but did not offer specifics. The NAFTA talks have been hung up on disagreement over a U.S. proposal to boost regional value content requirements for North American-built motor vehicles to 75 percent from 62.5 percent currently, with 40 percent coming from areas paying average wages of $16 an hour. There is definitely a path forward and we are making progress, Freeland said. Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo did not travel to Washington, but Freeland said she had been in contact with him frequently in recent days. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Bloomberg Television in Toronto that he had made clear to Trump that no NAFTA is better than a bad deal. We are their (the Americans) number one customer and there is no question that any disruption of that flow of goods, yes, would be terrible for the Canadian economy but would also be pretty terrible for a lot of U.S. jobs, Trudeau said. Reporting by David Lawder in Washington and David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Editing by Peter Cooney New Energy Metals Corp. (TSXV: ENRG) says it has entered into an option agreement to acquire a lithium project in the Atacama Salar district of Chile. The Atacama Salar hosts a significant portion of the world's known lithium reserves and produces around one-third of global lithium output from two production facilities operated by Sociedad Quimica y Minera and Rockwood Lithium (Albemarle). The Atacama lithium project concessions cover an area of approximately 66,000 hectares, and New Energy says the proximity to existing production indicates exploration potential. New Energy says it can earn a 100% interest in the project through cash and share payments. "We are excited with the opportunity to acquire a project in a region recognized as having the world's highest-grade and largest producing lithium brine salt flat, says Grant Ewing, president and chief executive officer. This opportunity is viewed as a strategic acquisition by the company as it believes that potential value creation opportunities could arise in the future as a result of the transaction." By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com Continental: Buritica Project On Schedule For 2020 Gold Pour Continental Gold (TSX: CNL), a development-stage gold-mining company, says the Buritica project in Colombia remains on schedule for the first gold pour in the first half of 2020, with commercial production ramp-up anticipated approximately six months later. The Buritica project is 30% complete with approximately 50% of total project cost committed to date, the company says. As we move forward with our commitment to build Colombias largest modern underground gold mine, we are grateful for the continuing support of not only the various government agencies we work with, but also our local communities, says Donald Gray, chief operating officer. By Allen Sykora For Kitco News Follow @AllenSykora Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication. The most recent data on Swiss gold exports confirm muted gold demand in Asia lately, says Commerzbank. Analysts cited data from customs authorities showing that Switzerland exported only 43.7 tonnes of gold to China and Hong Kong in April, the least since September. Switzerland likewise exported only a small amount of gold 26.2 tonnes -- to India. On Tuesday, Commerzbank cited data from the Census and Statistics Department of the Hong Kong government that also suggested soft Chinese demand for gold. In particular, Commerzbank pointed out that net Chinese gold imports from Hong Kong fell to 38.4 tonnes in April, which was a decline of 35% month-on-month and 48% year-on-year. By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com MKS: Gold Still Seeking Direction Amid Italy Developments Gold continues to search for direction based on the political turmoil in Italy, and to a lesser extent, Spain, says Samuel Laughlin of precious metals trading and sales with MKS (Switzerland) S.A. He comments that any attempts to consolidate through $1,300 and more importantly the 200 DMA [200-day moving average] at $1,307.80 have been met with resounding resistance. Expectations are that European developments and the continued softening of U.S. yields will underpin the metal; however, currently the downtrend needs to be respected, with interest to play on the long side developing. As of 8:47 a.m. EDT, spot gold was up $3.20 to $1,301.60 an ounce. By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com BMO: Gold Stuck Near $1,300, Held Back By Dollar Strength Gold rallies remain contained by recent U.S. dollar strength, suggests BMO Capital Markets. As of 8:47 a.m. EDT, spot gold was up $3.20 to $1,301.60 an ounce but has not been able to race ahead despite political turmoil in Italy. Despite the ongoing Italian political uncertainty and renewed China-U.S. trade tensions, gold prices remain stuck around the $1,300/oz level as the stronger USD [dollar] weighs, BMO says. Gold ETF [exchange-traded-fund] holdings have risen slightly since Friday, but remain down on mid-May levels. (Kitco News) - The Mexican government needs to step up its efforts to combat the growing cartel and gang violence sweeping through the country, according to Rob McEwen, CEO of McEwen Mining (NYSE: MUX, TSX: MUX). While McEwen minings project hasnt been adversely affected by the recent rise in criminal activity, the company has not been immune to these issues. Two years ago armed robbers stole 7,000 ounces of gold from its El Gallo property in Mexicos Sinaloa State. In an interview with Kitco News McEwen said that since then the company has worked closely with state police to create a safe work environment. While the companys Mexican projects havent been disrupted, McEwen noted that the level of violence does create some uncertainty for future growth. This kind of violence impacts all mining companies, especially when it comes to finding talent. Nobody wants to work in an area where their life or property is under threat, he said. The Mexican government needs to step up and get this problem under control. McEwen said that his companys Mexican operations are slightly different, compared to other producers within the country because they are in a transition period as ore mining at El Gallo comes to an end. The company is looking to use the property to support its developing silver project. McEwen added that the futures plans they have for El Gallo could extend the companys Mexican projects by an additional 10 years. McEwens comments come after Pan American Silver Corp (NYSE: PAAS, TSX: PAAS). said it is cutting back its operations at its mine in northern Mexico due to safety concern. But its not just the mining sector that is feeling the effects of cartel violence. The worlds biggest Coke bottler, Coca-Cola Femsa, recently shut down a 160-employee distribution center in southwestern Guerrero state. But its more than just a problem for corporations, said McEwen. It is terrible that the Mexican people have to deal with this violence. Shenandoah, IA (51601) Today Partly cloudy skies early followed by scattered thunderstorms overnight. A few storms may be severe. Low near 60F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%.. Tonight Partly cloudy skies early followed by scattered thunderstorms overnight. A few storms may be severe. Low near 60F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. The draw was conducted under the presidency of Great Supreme Patriarch Tep Vong, leader of the Mohanikaya Buddhist sect, and Supreme Patriarch Bou Kry, head of the Thammayut Buddhist sect. Participants also include representatives of political parties, non-governmental organizations and donors. According to the result, the Khmer National United Party of ex-Deputy Prime Minister Nhek Bun Chhay will appear first on the ballots, the Grassroots Democracy Party of agronomist Yang Saing Koma No. 7, the Funcinpec Party of Prince Norodom Ranariddh No. 13, and the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) of Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen No. 20. The Southeast Asian nation is scheduled to hold a national election for the 125-seat parliament on July 29, 2018. NEC's Chairman Sik Bun Hok said 20 political parties will contest in the election, which will see some 8.3 million people cast their ballots. According to the NEC, the three-week election campaign will start from July 7 to 27. In the last election on July 28, 2013, eight political parties joined the race. As a result, the CPP won 68 seats against 55 seats for the now-dissolved Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) in the then-123-seat parliament. The CNRP was dissolved by the Supreme Court in November last year after its leader Kem Sokha was arrested in September last year and charged with treason for conspiring with a foreign power in an attempt to overthrow the government. A senior official of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) headed for the United States for working-level talks, Yonhap news agency reported Tuesday. Senior DPRK official Kim Yong Chol is headed to the United States presumably for talks with the U.S. side on a possible summit between DPRK's top leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump, it said. It is believed that the visit of Kim Yong Chol indicates the advancement of preparations for the DPRK-U.S. summit, according to the report. Foreign student enrollment at higher learning institutions in the US had experienced a decade of growth before slowing down at the beginning of the 2016 school year. New international student enrollment dropped by 10,000, according to a recent report from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). Today, the US is home to 1.1 million foreign students enrolled at universities, colleges, and junior colleges. As new student enrollment started to decline in the months before the 2016 US presidential election, Open Doors, a data resource published by the Institute of International Education (IIE) found that foreign student enrollment dropped due to visa delays and denials, the costs of US higher education, the shifting social and political climate, competition from institutions in other countries, and prospective students concerns about securing a job in the US after graduation. Australia and Canada have experienced massive growth in their international enrollment with the bulk of overseas students coming from China. Both countries offer quality education at cheaper rates. The Sydney Herald revealed that from 2014 to 2017, foreign student fess had risen 92 percent at universities in New South Wales, giving the region an almost $800 million boost to their economy. It was also reported that Australian universities experienced a 30 percent increase in new foreign student applications at the start of 2017. A week after US President Donald Trump was sworn into office, he issued the first of three travel bans that would highlight his rookie year at the Oval Office. Demonstrations at airports in Los Angeles and New York City were reported and it could have been the wrong reaction to an unnecessary measure based on the kind of attention the ordeal received. Federal judges shot the order down in three separate rulings, and all in one week. National Public Radio (NPR) said students from the banned countries contributed $500 million annually to the US economy, according to a survey published at the time. By the summer of 2017, smaller schools began ramping up efforts to attract more overseas students. Temple University launched the #YouAreWelcomeHere campaign which now includes 300 colleges and universities aimed at bolstering campus diversity and global educational outreach. The initiative provides scholarships and support to foreign students from over 150 countries worldwide. The biggest hurdle with going to school in the US is the price tag as it is the most expensive in the world for college. In 2016, the Los Angeles Times reported that the University of Southern California (USC) was the most expensive university in the US with a one-year price tag of $70,000 for tuition, books, and living expenses. Students, both foreign and domestic, pay the same at USC, but at other schools out-of-state and overseas students pay two or three times more. At the University of Washington in Seattle, a school with roughly 8,000 international students, annual tuition and fees alone cost state residents around $11,000, while international students pay $35,000. China is the only country that has shown consistent growth among the international student demographic. Two years ago, MPI reported there were 325,000 Chinese nationals attending schools in the US, today, that number has risen to 350,000. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese nationals have had a presence on US college campuses. In 1854, Yung Ming graduated from Yale College, and became the first Chinese national to receive a college degree in America. Officials from his hometown of Zhuhai in Southern Chinas Guangdong Province donated a bronze statue to the Ivy League institution in 2004 honoring the 150th anniversary of Yungs commencement. As enrollment has gone up among foreigners, a report for National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that for the past six consecutive years enrollment among American students has declined. Even junior colleges have gotten in on the foreign enrollment game. This fall, California will offer free tuition for one year at its junior colleges. Critics of the free initiative feel the measure will mainly attract international students while ignoring the states lower-class residents. The tuition may be covered, but books, student fees, and living expenses keep higher education out of reach for lower-class citizens. Campus diversity is a sign of a healthy academic environment. Universities should focus on narrowing the gap between lower income US citizens and international students. The only way to achieve this would be to make college affordable. The sooner schools do this, the more successful they will be. Artistic director Son Yeol-eum of PyeongChang Music Festival & School presents during a press conference held in Seoul, Tuesday. / Yonhap By Yun Suh-young The 15th annual PyeongChang Music Festival & School to be held from July 23 through Aug. 5 faces a few changes this year. It will be the first festival under a new artistic director, pianist Son Yeol-eum who took the helm of the annual event in March, after the retirement of virtuoso artistic directors Chung Myung-wha and Chung Kyung-wha who have led the event since 2011. Prior to that, Professor Kang Hyo of The Julliard School was the first artistic director from 2004. The festival will also be rebranded as "MPyC" which is an abbreviation of "Music in PyeongChang." "We wanted to be called by a friendlier name so we created a nickname," Son said during a press conference in Seoul, Tuesday. This year's festival carries a special meaning, according to Chairman Kim Sung-hwan of Gangwon Art & Culture Foundation. "The PyeongChang Music Festival was initially launched to attract the Olympics in PyeongChang. This year's festival is the first even in the town after the Olympics. It's also the first with a new artistic director to carry on the work of previous artistic directors," Kim said. "If we look at the trends these days, there are many young artistic directors of classical events. So we believed it was right to appoint Son. She is from the region, so it will be helpful for the festival to have a local artistic director to harmonize with the locals." Many questioned whether the festival would continue after the Olympics, but it will, according to Kim. "Both the summer and winter music festivals will continue. However, financially it's more difficult since the Olympics is over. We're tightening our belt and planning to create a sponsorship committee," he said. This year's festival is organized with more diverse programs, according to Son. "We have special lectures on a variety of topics and also plan to hold concerts in well-known locations in Gangwon Province such as Museum SAN. We will be touring around the Gangwon region. Also, the first week of the festival will showcase music that has never before been performed at this festival," Son said. "They are well-known pieces such as Schubert's piano trio and Brahms' piano trio. I was surprised they hadn't already been played in chamber music concerts. We plan to continue to find pieces like this." There will also be specially formatted performances such as an improvisation concert on July 28 where performers will create music requested by the audience on the spot. There are also more recitals this year. The theme for this year is "Curiosity." "I think what is amazing about classical music is its ambiguity. Anything is imaginable with classical music, compared to other art genres. We can transcend space and time. I think that is the power of creativity. So I didn't want to limit the theme from our previous regional repertoires but wanted to focus more on what classical music can do for us now," Son said. The 32-year-old initially refused the artistic director position, but accepted to give a helping hand to the event which needed many changes to level up. "I just hope I can be helpful," Son said. Visit mpyc.kr for more information. By Yoon Ja-young As the government is expected to further inject funds to pull up income for low-income households, concern is growing that it is sticking to policies that have already proven to have failed. President Moon Jae-in presided over an emergency meeting to examine household income Tuesday, following the report that the income of the bottom 20 percent of people has dipped in the first quarter. Those who participated in the meeting agreed that special measures should be taken to pull up their income, according to Cheong Wa Dae, implying that government measures will follow. "There is a need to expand public jobs for senior citizens, strengthen the earned income tax credit (EITC) and raise the basic pension," said Doh Kyu-sang, head of the economic policy bureau at the finance ministry last week, regarding how the government will cope with the falling income. The administration seems to be startled by the latest income data since the condition has worsened for low-income households despite its "income-led growth" strategy. Unlike previous administrations which focused on supporting conglomerates in expectation that the fruits will be shared by the working class through the trickle-down effect, the current administration put priority in increasing income of the working class, believing that it will lead to more consumption and more corporate profit, thereby pulling up the economic growth rate. The monthly income of the bottom 20 percent of Korean households, however, stood at 1.28 million won in the first quarter, decreasing 8 percent from a year ago. It is the steepest fall since 2003 when the government started compiling such data. The income of the top 20 percent, meanwhile, surged 9.3 percent to 10.15 million won a month. The disappointing figures come despite the government's injection of 17 trillion won to create jobs and increase income of low-income households. It includes an 11 trillion won supplementary budget set last year for job creation, a 3 trillion won job stabilization fund which aims at supporting small businesses hit by the minimum wage hike, and 3.8 trillion won in extra budget to create jobs for young people. Experts have pointed out that the steep minimum wage hike most likely negatively affected income. The bottom 20 percent of Korean households earned income plunged 13.3 percent and business income fell by 26 percent, reflecting that they are more affected by the minimum wage which was raised by 16.4 percent to 7,530 won an hour. Lee Joon-koo, professor emeritus of Seoul National University, said that the government should slow down the pace of reform. "It is difficult even for economists to precisely calculate how the steep minimum wage hike will affect employment and income of low-income households," he said. "There is need to carefully monitor the wage hike while gradually raising it. The administration should start reforms one by one instead of trying to change everything all at once." Bitcoin / Reuters By Kim Hyun-bin Korea's top court confirmed Wednesday a previous appellate court order to confiscate the 191 bitcoins from a person named Ahn, worth 2.4 billion won ($2.3 million) earned from running an online pornography website. In doing so the Supreme Court recognized cryptocurrency as an "asset with measureable value." It said Ahn increased the value of his bitcoins by running the pornography website. Ahn was previously sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined 696 million won by a lower court, confirmed by both a high court and the Supreme Court. This marks the first time a cryptocurrency has been subject to confiscation. "The crytocurrency is recognized to have value so it can be confiscated," the Supreme Court stated. The 33-year old Ahn was arrested and indicted in May 2017 for violating the Protection of Children and Juveniles From Sexual Abuse Law. His case gained the spotlight as he also made profits via a bitcoin trading platform. From 2013, Ahn distributed 235,000 obscene pictures online and made 1.9 billion won. After his sentencing, prosecutors also claimed that the 216 bitcoins in his possession were earned illegally and urged they be seized as cyber assets. However, a lower court ruled against them, stating bitcoins only existed electronically and had no physical form. By Kim Jae-kyoung North Korea demolished its nuclear test site in Punggye-ri, May 24, ahead of a historic summit between its leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump. It was part of Pyongyang's efforts to reaffirm its determination to pursue denuclearization. All six of its nuclear tests were carried out at Punggye-ri. Experts, however, have shown mixed reactions to the North's destruction of the nuclear test site. Some argue it should be taken as the first step toward the North's denuclearization, while others claim it should not be taken as a sign that the reclusive regime is willing to give up its nuclear weapons. Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University, is one of the supporters for the dismantlement of the Punggye-ri site. "It is an important step in the direction of denuclearization," said Hecker, who has visited North Korea several times since 2004 to assess its plutonium program at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center. The expert on the North Korean nuclear program believes President Trump should sit down with Kim to discuss denuclearization in order to manage risks associated with the North's nuclear development. In an analysis of the history of North Korea's nuclear program released May 26, Hecker, together with his colleagues Robert Carlin and Elliot Serbin, stressed the importance of diplomacy to resolve the nuclear crisis. "As bad as it was in 2017, the situation could get worse. The U.S. has missed several opportunities in the past by not managing the incremental risks," they said. "The U.S. must approach any denuclearization talks with an awareness of this history and a desire to manage the incremental risks so as to prevent the situation from worsening." They pointed out that U.S. diplomacy since 2000 has been sporadic, reactive and often motivated by a desire to avoid risk rather than manage it. On the other hand, some critics downplayed the significance of Punggye-ri's destruction, saying there were no experts to inspect the sites. "The demolition likely buried any evidence. North Korea is trying to portray it as a major concession, but it's not," said Tara O, an adjunct fellow at the Pacific Forum and author of "The Collapse of North Korea." "Experts said another test would collapse the mountain and release radiation into the air. So the test site's usability was already in question." She said, to even have a summit, North Korea needs to be sincere about its denuclearization. "One way is for Kim to actually say North Korea will denuclearize and announce it through its official media, such as the Korea Central News Agency, to his people using the term North Korea, not the Korean Peninsula, after the word denuclearization," she said. "There are other steps the U.S. has already laid out, such as sending the nuclear scientists and families out of North Korea." William Brown, an adjunct professor at Georgetown School of Foreign Service, said closing the site certainly does not indicate it is willing to give up its weapons. "Of far greater importance would be a willingness to close all of its facilities used to produce fissile material, that is plutonium and highly enriched uranium plants and reactors," he said. "North Korea wants everyone to think it has completed its development of nuclear weapons and thus there is no need for the test facilities." U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice Chairman of North Korea's ruling Workers' Party Central Committee Kim Yong-chol will meet in New York this week amid intensifying U.S.-North Korean summit preparations. / AFP By Kim Bo-eun Key North Korean and U.S. officials will meet in New York, Wednesday (local time), to possibly draw up the draft of an agreement on denuclearizing the North ahead of a summit between their leaders in Singapore, June 12. Vice Chairman of the Central Committee of the North Korean Workers' Party Kim Yong-chol is set to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Wednesday and Thursday to finalize the deal in which North Korea is expected to be guaranteed security in exchange for giving up its nuclear program. Kim will visit the U.S. as the de-facto special envoy of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The official is reportedly carrying a letter from Kim Jong-un to U.S. President Donald Trump, and, if this is true, could fly to Washington to deliver it. This speculation is based on the fact that Trump said in his May 24 letter to Kim cancelling the summit not to hesitate to call or write if the North Korean leader wanted the meeting to take place. Kim Yong-chol, considered Kim Jong-un's right-hand man, has been in charge of negotiations for the Pyongyang-Washington summit. He held meetings with Pompeo when the U.S. official visited Pyongyang in March and May. Meanwhile, working-level talks that began Sunday at the truce village of Panmunjeom ended Wednesday between delegations led by the North's Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui and U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, who was a former ambassador to South Korea and a special envoy for the six party talks on North Korea's denuclearization. U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un / AFP By Jung Min-ho A new U.S. intelligence assessment has concluded that North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons any time soon, NBC News reported Wednesday. U.S. President Donald Trump is preparing a nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un even though the CIA analysis, accordiung to the report. "Everybody knows they are not going to denuclearize," said one intelligence official who read the report was quoted as saying. However, in an odd twist, North Korea may agree to open a Western hamburger franchise in Pyongyang as a show of goodwill. It suggests Kim is interested in a peaceful gesture to Trump whose love of fast-food burgers is well known, NBC observed. E-cigarettes / Korea Times file South Korea's health authorities said Wednesday they will announce the results of their investigation into possible harmful substances in heat-not-burn electronic cigarettes next month. The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety said it will make its announcement before June 13. The ministry launched the probe in August into three tobacco heating devices -- IQOS by Philip Morris Korea Inc., British American Tobacco's Glo and South Korean leading cigarette maker KT&G Corp.'s lil. The investigation is focused on the amount of harmful chemicals such as nicotine and tar released in e-cigarettes. E-cigarette manufacturers have claimed their devices produce lower levels of harmful chemicals compared with conventional cigarettes. (Yonhap) Three candidates run for Seoul superintendent of education. From left Cho Hee-yeon, Cho Young-dal and Park Sun-young. By Kim Hyun-bin Three candidates have registered to run for Seoul education superintendent in the June 13 local elections. Liberal candidate Cho Hee-yeon, the city's current superintendent of education, is running for a second term. Moderate candidate Seoul National University professor Cho Young-dal and conservative candidate Dongguk University professor Park Sun-young will run against Cho, according to the National Election Commission. The most recent survey released by Hankook Research has Cho Hee-yeon with a strong lead in the polls, accounting for 33.1 percent. Distantly following is Cho Young-dal with 11.2 percent and further behind is Park Sun-young with 6.2 percent. However, there is a backside to this as 41.4 percent said they weren't sure or had no preferred candidate. With a hefty lead the current superintendent has been enforcing a relaxed strategy. "Until Election Day, we will campaign without a logo, songs and dances, but instead we will take a knock election approach," Cho Hee-yeon said. Moderate candidate Cho Young-dal has indirectly criticized the current superintendent's composure and campaign inactivity. "If I am elected, I will separate the education superintendent election from the local elections," Cho Young-dal said. "Currently, the education superintendent election is either swayed politically or the public is indifferent as it coincides with the local elections." Park also took a shot at Cho, claiming his "pro-North Korea views" could be dangerous to students. "North Korea is unreliable at best, but the current superintendent plans to take field trips north of the border," Park said. "Even if I have to stay up all night, I will study and adopt other well-rounded policies." Pledges to appeal to public Each candidate has come up with a set of educational pledges to appeal to Seoul residents, with the local elections less than two weeks away. One of Cho Hee-yeon's key pledges focuses on freeing up regulations on students' dress and hair codes, if the school's students, parents and teaching staff come to a consensus on the matter. Currently, most Korean schools have dress codes, mandating school uniforms, black shoes and certain color socks. However, Cho's pledges will free the students from such regulations and allow them to wear clothing of their choice including hoodies and shorts. By abolishing current regulations, Cho aims to strengthen students' rights. Conservative candidate Park Sun-young's key pledge is guaranteeing parents and students can apply to the school of their choice no matter the location. She plans to allow institutions to recruit students through interviews and other screening processes. The move could expand autonomy in education and enhance school competitiveness. However, some experts point out the move could intensify school ranking systems and create unnecessary competition among institutions. Cho Young-dal's key pledge is to create a "dream campus" that gives second- and third-year high school students an opportunity to freely explore careers by connecting schools and local communities. Student will have an opportunity to explore nearby universities and companies of interest. Experts believe it is an innovative education model that helps students find their career path early on so they can start taking classes that focus on their field of interest. However, in order for the idea to work there needs to be a total switch from the current grading system to a more absolute evaluation system Expected clashes The candidates are expected to conflict with each other, especially over the "innovative school" policy. Innovative schools are a new education model that aim to break away from the current school system, which mainly ranks students based on their grades. The objective of the new policy aims to enhance a student's knowledge and talents through learner-centered education. It has become a key pledge of all liberal education superintendents in the country. During his term as superintendent, Cho Hee-yeon has established an innovative curriculum at close to 200 schools in the capital and he plans to further increase the number if he is re-elected. Cho Young-dal vowed to halt additional establishment of innovative schools. He emphasized the need to enhance and resolve problematic issues surrounding the program. In contrast, Park Sun-young aims to reduce the number of innovative schools in the capital, raising the problem that many students are failing to meet basic academic standards. She also vowed to eliminate the additional support budget of 100 million won, which has been provided annually by the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education. Other pledges by the candidates that are expected to be in dispute are eliminating autonomous private and foreign language high schools as well as other college preparatory issues. "It all comes down to how the candidates will present their main pledges and how they approach key education issues, which will be the main factor that will attract voters," an education official said. / Yonhap Top military officials of South Korea, the United States and Japan have held talks over joint efforts to ensure regional peace and stability, Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said Wednesday. Seoul's JCS Chairman Gen. Jeong Kyeong-doo and his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford and Adm. Katsutoshi Kawano, attended the meeting at the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) headquarters in Hawaii on Tuesday (local time). Outgoing PACOM chief Adm. Harry Harris and his successor, Adm. Philip Davidson, also joined the meeting. Such three-way talks were last held in October 2017. "(They) discussed multilateral cooperation in establishing military readiness to promote peace and stability in Northeast Asia and prepare for all possible contingencies," the JCS said in a joint press release. At the talks, Dunford reaffirmed that Washington will provide extended deterrence to ensure the security of its key Asian allies. Extended deterrence refers to the U.S. commitment to defend its ally by mobilizing all military capabilities against an adversary's aggression. The talks came amid fast-paced diplomacy aimed at denuclearizing North Korea and establishing a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula. (Yonhap) Cho Won-tae / Yonhap The education ministry will send a team of officials to a local university next week to look into suspicions that the son of Korean Air Chairman Cho Yang-ho gained illicit admission to the school 20 years ago. Cho Won-tae, president of the national flag carrier, is the latest member of the Cho family to come under public scrutiny after his two sisters and mother underwent police questioning over alleged abuse of employees and others under their influence. Cho, 43, is suspected of entering Inha University in Incheon, west of Seoul, in 1998 by transferring from a two-year college in the United States, even though he didn't meet the credit requirement for such a transfer. The school is run by a foundation established by the family's Hanjin Group. The suspicions were investigated 20 years ago and the then education ministry determined that irregularities were involved in Cho's admission. The ministry demanded disciplinary action against school officials involved in the admission but didn't go as far as to cancel Cho's admission. The case drew renewed public attention as the family came under public outrage. BEIJING, May 29 (Xinhua) -- A total of 76.8 percent of Chinese say they are greatly influenced by peers, according to a survey. The survey, reported by Tuesday's China Youth Daily, polled 2,015 people born between the 1960s and the 2000s. The respondents said peers exert influence on their personal interactions (56.6 percent), their outlook on the world, life and values (47.3 percent) and social cognition (42.8 percent). Zhang Peng, born in the 1990s, said he chose engineering as his major at university because many senior schoolmates had also chosen the major. Cai Bin said he used to be introverted until he joined a dance club at his university upon the recommendation of one of his schoolmates, and later made friends in the club. "I was greatly influenced by my peers at university and became more outgoing," Cai said. According to Wei Qingwang, associate professor of the psychology department of Renmin University, it is inevitable for children to go through a period when they feel greater influence from peers and teachers than from parents. "It is not necessarily a good thing if a young person is always mainly influenced by parents and teachers. It is harmful to a person's self-esteem and confidence if the person receives no recognition or has nothing in common with peers," Wei said. A total of 54.6 percent of interviewees said peers can better motivate each other, while 57.8 percent pointed out potentially vicious competition among peers. By Jung Min-ho Animal rights activists have welcomed lawmakers' moves to ban dog farms in Korea. The Animal Liberation Wave has expressed support for the bill that, if it passes the National Assembly, would remove the legal basis for factory-style mass breeding of dogs. The bill, which was proposed by Rep. Lee Sang-don of the minor Bareunmirae Party earlier this month, aims to exclude dogs from what the Livestock Industry Act defines as livestock. "There are more than 3,000 dog farms where a million dogs get slaughtered every year," the group said. "We hope the bill will become a law to take the first step to end the dog meat industry in Korea." The legal status of dog is complicated. Under the livestock industry law, farmers can pursue profit with livestock, which includes dogs and many other animals. But according to the Livestock Processing Act, dogs are not categorized as livestock a reason why dog meat cannot be traded through major distribution channels like other meat. But it is legal for people to breed dogs and sell the meat, as long as they do not kill dogs in open areas or in front of other dogs, and trade the meat directly. Regardless of its legal status, the culture of eating dog meat is dying slowly. According to the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the number of restaurants serving dog meat soup, known as "bosintang," decreased from 528 in 2005 to 329 in 2014. By Lee Min-hyung Defense Minister Song Young-moo will attend Asia's annual security forum in Singapore to discuss denuclearization and peace on the Korean Peninsula with his overseas counterparts. For three days, starting Friday, Song will join the 17th Asia Security Summit: the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue where he will give a speech on the rapidly-changing defense situation on the peninsula amid rare peace gestures from North Korea Under the theme "Denuclearization, peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula," Song will explain the achievements of the historic inter-Korean summit last month and its influence on peace and security in neighboring countries, the Ministry of National Defense said Wednesday. "Song will also hold dialogue with defense chiefs from other participating countries, calling on them to support the ongoing inter-Korean peace momentum for the complete denuclearization of the peninsula," the ministry said in a statement. This year's event is expected to draw plenty of attention from the world, as it comes shortly before the first-ever summit between United States President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un slated for June 12 in Singapore. For this reason, the upcoming Washington-Pyongyang summit will top the list of agenda topics during the so-called Shangri-La Dialogue. As of now, nothing official has been unveiled about whether high-level negotiators from the two sides have narrowed their differences ahead of the summit. The security forum started in 2002 in Singapore, with high-ranking defense officials from 30 countries including the U.S., China, Russia and Japan taking part in the event annually. After ending his schedule there, Song plans to fly to Vietnam for three days from Sunday for a meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart Ngo Xuan Lich, the defense ministry said. They are going to share their ideas to enhance defense acquisition partnerships and tighten their security alliance. Song will also pay a courtesy call on Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang to share up-to-date matters on security affairs on the peninsula and request support for denuclearization here. By Lee Min-hyung North Korea is expected to raise the issues of Seoul-Washington military exercises and the repatriation of young North Korean waitresses who defected to the South at high-level inter-Korean talks slated for Friday. In recent days Pyongyang has ramped up criticism of Seoul, urging the latter to stop the drills and return the 12 defectors. The regime views the issues as major bones of contention that are hampering the inter-Korean peace momentum. Citing the Max Thunder air exercises between Seoul and Washington last week, Pyongyang threatened to cancel a planned summit with Washington. Given recent inter-Korean conflicts, ranking officials from the two sides are expected to bring the issues to the table on Friday and seek to narrow their differences. The government is taking a wait-and-see approach on the regime's demands, underlining the need to resolve the issues through continuing talks. "It is not proper for us to make any public comments on some recent reports from North Korean media outlets," South Korea's Unification Ministry spokesman Baik Tae-hyun said Wednesday at a media briefing. "One thing that has not changed is that the two Koreas share the same idea of continuing to hold dialogue to resolve any problems." North Korea has sent peace signals to South Korea and the United States, pledging to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. In a show of its strong willingness for peace, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has met South Korean President Moon Jae-in twice this year. Preparations are also under way for a meeting between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump. At Moon and Kim's first meeting on April 27, both sides signed the historic "Panmunjeom Declaration," under which Seoul and Pyongyang agreed to stop any military provocations and engage in more cultural and diplomatic activities for lasting peace. But the peace momentum began to hit a snag in mid-May when the regime canceled planned high-level talks with the South, citing the joint air drills that ended last week. The regime vented its anger over the exercises, even threatening to cancel a scheduled Trump-Kim summit on June 12. The repatriation issue is also another key agenda item expected to be raised at Friday's inter-Korean talks. On Tuesday, the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA), the North Korean regime's mouthpiece, urged the South to return the defectors. "The repatriation of the North Korean defectors will become an important momentum for sustainable improvement of inter-Korean relations and for brining peace and unification on the Korean Peninsula," the KCNA said. The propaganda outlet also called the South's possible denial of the demand a "grave criminal act" that goes against last month's peace agreements signed by the leaders of the two Koreas. By Choi Ha-young Rep. Kweon Seong-dong A dead minke whale is unloaded in Kushiro, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. / Yonhap By Kang Aa-young, Jung Min-ho More than 120 pregnant whales were killed during Japan's "science research" hunt in the Southern Ocean last summer, a recent report suggests. Minke whales, 333 in total, were caught during the country's annual scientific whaling program. Among them, 122 were pregnant and 114 were immature, according to documents from a meeting of the International Whaling Commission's scientific committee. Japanese fishers butcher a whale. / Yonhap By Do Je-hae During a recent weekend, I was in Uiwang, Gyeonggi Province. The main purpose of the visit to the satellite city was to spend the day at Wangsong Lake Park, which is famous for its rail bike experience, the nation's first rail bike that circles around a lake. The wait was too long so we gave up on the rail bike and settled for a walk. The lakeside scenery was more than I had expected, and the park was beautifully designed, with ample space for families to have a picnic lunch on the lawn with a full view of the lake, and children to run around. Everywhere you go in Uiwang, you can easily see signs proudly proclaiming Uiwang as the "city of rail." While getting around the city, I learned that it is home to several relevant establishments, including the Korea National Railroad College and the Korean Railroad Museum. Uiwang's first railroad opened in 1905. The railroad museum which sits right next to the Wangsong Lake Park was actually the highlight of my first trip to the "city of rail." The museum is worth a visit if you are interested in two things: trains, and Korean history before and after the 1910-1945 Japanese rule of Korea. As someone who enjoys trains, it was very interesting to learn about the roots of Korea's railroad system which dates back to the late 19th century. I first developed affection for trains during my first backpacking trip to Europe. I travelled through several countries with the Eurail pass and had the opportunity to see some of the most breathtaking views of my life from the train. Train rides are more enjoyable than being on airplanes, which are noisy, uncomfortable and are devoid of any good views. The entrance fee for the railroad museum is pretty cheap, 2,000 won per adult, and 1,000 won per child. The museum has an outside display of old trains used from the onset of Korea's rail industry through those used during the 1950-53 Korean War and afterwards. The outside display also features model trains used by VIPs, such as former presidents Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee. Unlike highways which were built during late 1960s, railways have more than 120 years of history in Korea. The most interesting part of the museum is the first floor, where visitors can see relics related to the major rail lines, such as the Gyeong-in, Gyeong-bu and Gyeong-ui lines which were all constructed during the Japanese occupation. A timetable for the Gyeong-ui line, which opened in 1904, was very interesting because it reminded people that it was once possible to travel to China by train from Seoul. The railway line ran from Gyeongseong, the old name for Seoul, to Sinuiju in North Korea, which was then connected to the South Manchuria Railway. The line stopped operating between the south and north of the Korean Peninsula after the Korean War. A photo of the Gyeong-ui line at the railway museum in Uiwang, Gyeonggi Province / Korea Times photo by Do Je-hae By Sandip Kumar Mishra The summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un on June 12 in Singapore has become a game of seesaw. Experts have been trying to make sense of happenings between North Korea and the U.S. as the whole sequence of events has been quite dramatic. The U.S. and North Korea showed senses of positivity till the first week of May, but soon the reference of the "Libya model" and Operation Max Thunder along with disagreements about the details about the "denuclearization" got it almost derailed. Actions and reactions from both North Korea and the U.S. in the last few weeks have led North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui to call U.S. Vice President Mike Pence "ignorant and stupid" and the U.S. President Trump announced May 24 that the summit in Singapore could not be held in this situation. It was an important move by the South Korean President Moon Jae-in to hurriedly have a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at Panmunjeom on May 26 to get the process back on track. The meeting was held at the request of Kim and after the meeting, the Trump-Kim meeting is said to be held in Singapore as scheduled. A negative turn of events has been rescued but one cannot be sure about the summit till it actually happens. Moreover, there is still a lot of ground to be covered before any realistic move toward North Korea's denuclearization can happen. There are two trends which are quite visible in the recent episode of setback and recovery. One, the U.S. appears quite sure that its policy of "maximum pressure" on North Korea has led Pyongyang to change its behavior and come to negotiating table. Two, South Korea appears determined to go ahead with its attempt to connect with North Korea regardless of the U.S. responses and actions. These two trends are basically connected and the Trump administration must mend its ways to comprehend them and revise its approach to remain constructive in the process. In reference to the success of the U.S. policy of "maximum pressure" it is being claimed that North Korea has been facing unprecedented isolation because of sanctions put on it. These sanctions include severe restrictions on North Korea's crude oil, garment industry and foreign remittances. Furthermore, through the threat of secondary boycotts and an embargo on private ships, North Korea has come to its knees and has no choice but to talk to the U.S. For the same reason, Trump has not conceded even an inch during the whole process and rather has hardened his position. His letter to Kim on May 24 about not having a meeting in Singapore also emanated from the same premise that North Korea is in dire need to talk because of "maximum pressure" and he could play tough. However, Trump must be aware that, one, isolation and sanctions in the case of North Korea would not make much difference as the North Korean regime is already quite isolated. North Korea's formal exchange with the world excluding China is less than $2 billion and even though the U.S. is successful in stopping all of them, it's not going to make much difference. Two, even though China appears to be implementing sanctions on North Korea, formal and informal exchanges between Pyongyang and Beijing would continue as China has its own reasons to support North Korea's survival. Three, even though a super-tough sanction regime is put in place, it would not have much impact on the ruling elites of North Korea. For the above reasons, so many predictions about North Korea's doom in the past four decades have proved to be wrong and the Trump administration may make a similar mistake if it does not show flexibility and statesmanship. It's true that North Korea has taken a clever move from the very beginning of 2018 and is trying to reach out to South Korea and China without being committal to its denuclearization. But the opportunity must be used by the Trump administration as it has been done by the Moon administration to create channels of communication and exchanges. Because, if the U.S. is unable to show enough deftness, there is a real possibility that South Korea may independently take measures to engage North Korea, a glimpse of which could be seen in the second summit between Moon and Kim. Actually for many months after assuming power in May 2017, Moon Jae-in struggled to create a space for South Korea in contests between the U.S. and North Korea. He got hold of it when North Korea agreed to participate in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. South Korea till now has played a key role through its engagement with North Korea to bring things back on track and has been polite in giving credit to the U.S. policy. However, if the U.S. maintains that "maximum pressure" is a successful policy and North Korea has no choice but to give up its nuclear arsenal because of it, South Korea could not just watch the whole process getting derailed. Moon Jae-in has shown that he is not going to give up South Korea's position as the prime mover and even appears ready to take a different approach toward North Korea. Overall, the coming days are going to be more dramatic as North Korea, the U.S. and South Korea are going to seek their space and interests amid dealing with one another. The author is associate professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Sejong Institute, South Korea. He could be reached at sandipmishra10@gmail.com By Zaki Laidi PARIS Europe has a new German problem. Unlike in the past, it stems neither from hegemonic ambitions nor from the sort of weakness that might tempt aggression. Instead, it is rooted in Germany's abdication of any sense of shared responsibility for Europe, despite boasting as robust an economy as it has had since 1945. The result of Germany's approach "do as we do, or leave us alone" is inertia, at a moment when Europe desperately needs momentum. For a long time, Europe was at the center of German concerns. In 1994, for example, Wolfgang Schauble then parliamentary leader of the Christian Democratic Union, and now president of the Bundestag and his CDU colleague Karl Lamers wrote a paper calling for the EU's "core" countries, including France, to move swiftly toward closer integration, including political union. France resisted German pressure because it was extremely suspicious of political federalism. Then President Francois Mitterrand did not want to move beyond the Maastricht framework. After the 2010 eurozone crisis, the debate shifted toward structural reforms. France advocated for more economic integration, but Germany conditioned any discussion of the eurozone's future on French structural reforms. President Francois Hollande agreed in principle to that trade-off, but lacked the time and political support to implement it. Today, however, France is finally undertaking Germany's long-expected domestic reforms and pressing for change at the EU level. French President Emmanuel Macron wants to create not a federal Europe nobody is proposing that but a sovereign EU capable of resisting the pressure of figures like U.S. President Donald Trump, Russia's Vladimir Putin, China's Xi Jinping, and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Unfortunately, Germany is once more resisting French proposals. Though Chancellor Angela Merkel often lavishes Macron with praise for his courage and policy goals, she seems reluctant to agree to any action to strengthen the EU. German leaders concede that French reforms are good for France, but now argue that eurozone reform is a separate issue. Although disappointing, this stance is not unexpected. Merkel is politically weakened, and German public opinion remains deeply influenced by the false narrative that the country is Europe's paymaster. Schauble, a former euro federalist, has scaled back his ambitions dramatically. While he still dreams of a European Monetary Fund, it would only resemble a solidarity mechanism. Its main purpose would be to monitor and punish fiscally lax states for the purpose of reducing further the European Commission's budgetary oversight responsibilities. The truth is that Germany aspires to live in a minimalist Europe that lacks any political union, but is tied to intergovernmental disciplinary mechanisms designed by its most prosperous countries. In other words, Germany wants to eliminate from the EU all traces of community spirit, and the politics that go with it, and replace them with an austere idyll of rigid rules. And current events in Italy are reinforcing the position of German hard-liners. It is probably no coincidence that three days after the new Italian government revealed its economic plan which, if implemented, will blow up the eurozone 154 German economists published a manifesto strongly opposing any substantial eurozone reform. But this stance also reflects the so-called ordoliberal principles that underpin German thought and that shape Germany's understanding of the eurozone crisis. Along with the Netherlands and the Baltic states, Germany blames that crisis on some member states' budgetary imprudence and insufficient monitoring of private debt, and thus refuses to examine properly the eurozone's systemic problems. Eight years later, Europeans still embrace divergent narratives about the crisis. How can we expect them to move toward the future if they strongly disagree on the past? To acknowledge that the eurozone can function only on a foundation of solidarity and interdependence would be to engage in precisely the kind of thinking that German ordoliberals have always rejected. They see the national economy as the sum of microeconomic decisions, and a supranational economy as the sum of national economies. For them, solidarity is founded on consistent management. This reasoning leads to three lines of argument that preclude basic strategic analysis. First, Germany embraces the self-serving fiction that it owes nothing to others for its prosperity. Yet we know very well how much Germany's economy depends on European demand, and how much it benefits from the undervaluation of the "German euro" (whereas the "Italian euro," for example, suffers from overvaluation). Germany also gains the most from European Central Bank policy. As the German economist Marcel Fratzscher recently tweeted, "The unbearable cynicism of some German politicians and economists: they attack ECB policy, yet Germany's government is its biggest beneficiary 294 billion euro in interest savings since 2007. Compare that to risks assumed in the crisis, and it is an excellent deal for Germany." Second, Germany insists that any slowdown should be met with greater discipline and tighter austerity, not countercyclical policies. According to German leaders, no matter how severe the effects of that approach may be, they are simply the price of redemption after committing the sin of accumulating excessive debt. Finally, Germany is convinced that, in a market economy, the state's responsibility is to set rules, not to steer the choices of economic actors. In fact, a recent report from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy portrays Germany's enormous current-account surplus as a reality that policymakers cannot change, and that thus must be accommodated. This ignores the fact, highlighted by a recent study by Guntram B. Wolff, that Germany's current-account surplus is the result not of aging households' frenzied desire to save more, but of underinvestment by businesses seeking to resist wage pressure. This presents France with a serious challenge. One option for overcoming German obstinacy would be to pursue a series of small compromises. But, as some critical German observers, such as the Financial Times' Wolfgang Munchau, have pointed out, this could lead to minimal and even illusory concessions. The alternative would be a showdown that brings the debate to the European public. Perhaps this is what Macron was trying to initiate at Aix-la-Chapelle earlier this month, as he collected from Merkel the Charlemagne Prize for his pro-European efforts. Such a confrontation need not block progress on other issues, such as border security, investments in industries of the future, taxation of U.S. tech giants, and the defense of multilateralism. European integration owes much to France's Robert Schuman and Germany's Helmut Kohl, both of whom prioritized strategic European interests (through the European Steel and Coal Community and the eurozone, respectively) over the pursuit of immediate national advantage. Today, Macron is prepared to establish himself as a similar leader, but he needs a reliable German partner willing to challenge ordoliberal rigor in the name of Europe-wide prosperity. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear that he has such a partner in Merkel. Zaki Laidi, professor of international relations at Sciences Po, was an adviser to former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Copyright belongs to Project Syndicate ( www.project-syndicate.org ). Who overpacked California's prisons? It was first-term Gov. Jerry Brown, when he signed into law the Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act in 1976. And it was the Legislature's Democratic majority, who'd sent Brown the act in the first place and then tried to outflank tough-on-crime Republicans by adding one sentence-lengthening provision (or "enhancement") after another. In his second go-round, both Brown and the Legislature have been trying to make amends for the prison growth and over-incarceration that they helped to set in motion. Lawmakers are considering and should send to Brown two bills to undo some of the enhancement excesses. One would give judges the discretion to ignore a particularly stiff enhancement now required for serious felons: an additional five years for each previous serious conviction, even if the defendant already served time for those crimes. The other would eliminate a one-year enhancement that's currently tacked on to nonviolent felony convictions for every previous jail or prison term the defendant has served. If there was evidence that the extra prison or jail time deterred repeat offenders, the enhancements might make some sense. But years of experience show instead that many repeat offenders are driven by untreated mental illness or addiction. Treating those problems, rather than expanding prisons and jails to hold more offenders longer, should be the priority. Meanwhile, California has in place safeguards such as the three-strikes law to protect the public from repeat violent offenders. For most of its history, California had what was known as indeterminate sentencing, under which a judge would sentence a convicted criminal to an indefinite term rather than a set number of years. A burglar, say, might get five years to life. Then the judge's sentencing role was finished, and the actual term spent behind bars would be determined by a parole board. That gave inmates an incentive to behave in prison and to participate in rehabilitation programs. After they had served the low end of the range, they could take their case to a board, whose members would measure the inmates' progress and grant or deny parole accordingly. And the system generally worked: The return-to-prison rate for paroled inmates hovered near 15 percent. But Brown and lawmakers moved to determinate sentencing, which counterintuitively became even more convoluted. Judges could choose a standard sentence, a stiffer one or a lighter one, depending on the defendant's prior convictions or other extenuating circumstances. All decisions were made on the front end, in court. So in prison, fewer inmates bothered with rehabilitation programs because they couldn't lead to earlier release. And, as a consequence, fewer were ready to responsibly go home to their neighborhoods after serving their time. The return-to-prison rate skyrocketed to 70 percent. Brown completed his first tour of duty as governor in 1983, but lawmakers kept adding enhancements. For example, on top of the base term for committing the crime, new laws layered on additional time for being in a gang, for using a gun, for having been in jail or prison before, and on and on. The three-strikes penalties were also enacted. Other states followed California's lead. And still recidivism rose. When Brown returned from the political wilderness and was elected state attorney general in 2006, he faced an overflowing prison system he had helped to create: Instead of 10 prisons, California had 33, and its inmate population had grown by 900 percent. In 2016, he presented and voters adopted Proposition 57, which brought back much of the former parole system and with it the incentive for inmates to participate in programs that will make them better bets to return safely to their neighborhoods. It also brought back some of the better aspects of indeterminate sentencing. But all those enhancements remain in place, even in the absence of evidence that they protect the public from repeat offenders. Some make sense. But some don't, including the requirement that new felony convictions carry an additional year for each jail term already served for a previous felony. SB 1392 would properly eliminate it. And the extra five years for having previously committed a serious crime that's something that judges should be able to keep or dismiss, in the interests of justice. SB 1393 would give them that authority. The above editorial appeared in the Los Angeles Times. It was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Minimum wage revision bill angers workers The nation's two umbrella unions, irrespective of their political inclination, are all out to fight the government to protest the passage of a revision bill at the National Assembly, Monday, that allows regular bonuses and welfare payments to be calculated as part of an employee's basic salary. Industrial peace, the sweet fruit of labor-management harmony, is definitely the basis of economic development. In particular, the pressing need of today amid worsening economic circumstances is to raise productivity based on a concord between employers and employees. The bill aims at easing the burden of rising labor costs on employers following the sharp increase of the minimum wage by more than 16 percent this year, from 6,470 won to 7,530 won per hour. President Moon Jae-in has vowed to raise the wage to 10,000 won ($9.30) by 2020. The unions argue the bill reduces the effect of raising the minimum wage. To our regret, however, the unions are even boycotting meetings of the Economic and Social Development Commission, which was formerly the 20-year-old Korea Tripartite Commission of Labor, Management and Government, an apparatus to seek compromise through negotiations. The three groups are required to narrow their differences over pending labor issues, including the minimum wage increase, through dialogue eight years after the meetings were stopped. Now the forum for the three-way talks is on the brink of being shut down again. The three are the principal agents of the Korean economy. They have to come up with a resolute will to help revive the sagging economy. The progressive Federation of Korean Trade Unions and the conservative Korean Confederation of Trade Unions are required to acknowledge that cooperative labor-management ties are crucial to overcoming the current economic difficulties. We expect the two unions to return to the tripartite talks without condition as soon as possible and discuss all pending problems with the government and management, thus seeking a way out of the current economic hardship. Merkel becomes the Western leader with the most frequent visits to China file pic German Chancellor Angela Merkel has paid her 11th visit to China as chancellor from May 24 to 25, making her the Western leader with the most frequent visits to China, which indicates Germanys strong interest for interaction with China, especially in the areas of economic cooperation and global governance, a European studies expert said. In Merkels most recent trip, she visited Chinas innovation hub: Shenzhen, in south Chinas Guangdong province, where she saw firsthand the effects of Chinas industrial upgrading and national innovation strategy. As a powerful country in science and technology, Germany can provide advanced experiences and technical assistant. And in return, the large market potential in China can boost German exports and economic development, Wang Hongyu, an associate professor at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), told Peoples Daily. As major trading countries, China and Germany have high trade complementarity as well as great potential for cooperation. In 2017, trade volume between the two countries reached $193.7 billion, an increase of 9.6% compared to 2016, according to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany. Therefore, China and Germany can deepen bilateral relations through intimate economic cooperation, said Wang, who is also executive director of UIBEs Economic Diplomacy Research Center. Anti-globalization forces are prominent in many countries across world. In the international trade arena, the Trump administration in the US has initiated a so-called Section 232 investigation into automobile imports, which puts serious trade pressure on the EU, especially for manufacturing powers, Wang observed. In this context, it is important for Germany to further expand economic cooperation with China, he noted. In addition, the USs withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal has exposed the world to the threat of nuclear weapons. As an advocator of nuclear nonproliferation, Germany now faces challenges from potential US sanctions targeting Iran and the following shortage of alternative energy. Chinas continuous contribution to nuclear nonproliferation is therefore desired by Germany and it forms a solid basis for cooperation, said Wang. Wang also pointed out that the two sides could provide sufficient guarantees for Iran through increasing energy imports to encourage Iran not to pursue nuclear development activities. US, NK should finalize details of denuclearization A visit to the U.S. by a top North Korean official is likely to bode well for the planned June 12 summit between President Donald Trump and the North's leader Kim Jong-un. This visit is crucial for both Washington and Pyongyang as it will set the tone for the historic summit to be held in Singapore. Kim Yong-chol, vice chairman of the Central Committee of North Korea's ruling Workers' Party, arrived in New York City and will meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday and Thursday. The two need to finalize details of how to denuclearize the North and what Washington will offer Pyongyang in return. Kim is the highest Pyongyang official to set foot on U.S. soil since Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok visited America in 2000. Kim and Pompeo are required to make tangible progress and agree on the denuclearization roadmap if they want to raise expectations for the upcoming summit. Kim may also travel to Washington to have a meeting with President Trump. If the meeting is realized, the North Korean official could deliver a letter from Kim Jong-un to Trump ensuring the North's commitment to giving up its nuclear program. Kim Yong-chol's visit comes at a time when preparations for the unprecedented summit are gathering pace. The U.S. and the North held working-level meetings at the truce village of Panmunjeom to set the summit agenda. Both sides are also having talks in Singapore to discuss details about protocol and security matters. It appears that Kim Yong-chol and Pompeo will make last-minute efforts to narrow their differences over the denuclearization issue. The U.S. wants North Korea to realize complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization (CVID) quickly. On the other hand, the North prefers a step-by-step and reciprocal denuclearization so that it can get compensation for every step it takes down the road. Thus, the fate of the Singapore summit will depend on how the two sides compromise and accommodate each other's demands. Pyongyang is strongly demanding U.S. security guarantees as well as sanctions relief in exchange for abandoning its nuclear arsenal. A positive sign is that the Trump administration may offer a "complete, verifiable and irreversible guarantee" (CVIG) to the Kim Jong-un regime. The idea of CVIG could help ease Kim's worries about a potential U.S. bid for regime change. It might have a positive effect on the nuclear summit. But there are still many thorny issues standing in the way of the Kim-Trump meeting. This means that no one can rule out the possibility of either side boycotting the summit as seen in Trump's brief decision to cancel the talks citing the North's "tremendous anger and open hostility" last week. Therefore it is important for Washington and Pyongyang to convince each other that they are serious about the summit and ready to clear any obstacles through dialogue and compromise. Most of all, the North should show its genuine intention for denuclearization. Photographer Francesca Moscheni poses with children with hearing problems who participated in the "Silent Yangon" project in Yangon, Myanmar. The children took pictures of the city with Samsung smartphones, which will be published in a photo book. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics By Yoon Ja-young Link for Aid, a charity organization based in Italy, and photographer Francesca Moscheni gathered with four businesses including Samsung Electronics in Myanmar to publish a special photo book titled "Silent Yangon." Yangon, the former capital of Myanmar, is known as one of the most attractive and vibrant cities in Asia. The essence of Yangon is shown in quiet but vivid photos, which were taken by hearing impaired children. They took the photos with Samsung smartphones. Link for Aid started "The Sound of Images" project to promote images of the country through the eyes of Myanmar children with hearing problems. The organization selected eight children from the Mary Chapman School for the Deaf located in Dagon for the project. Samsung Electronics contributed by providing smartphones and helping the children learn how to use them. The children learned diverse camera functions of the smartphones, including "food mode," pro mode, low light shots, slow motion, panorama and hyper-lapse. Children hit the road with their smartphones in their hands during the week of Easter. Their first destinations were Shwedagon Pagoda, a major Buddhist relic and Bogyoke Market. "I want them to know they have ways to communicate with the world even if they can't hear," said Moscheni who accompanied the children through their photographic journey. A dozen engineers from Samsung Electronics in Myanmar also provided technical support. Brand ambassadors also posed as models so the children could take diverse photos. "Silent Yangon," which includes pictures and commentary by the children, will be published at the end of the year and distributed around the world. Profits will be used for the children at the Mary Chapman School for the Deaf as well as the Parami Orphanage in Dala and the Nawarat Monastic School at Shwe Pyi Thar. The whole process will also be filmed as a documentary until the completion of the book. For this, film producer Marco Armando Piccinini joined the children. Pamela McCourt Francescone, founder of the organization, said that she wanted to make people understand that they can communicate through images even if they can't hear. "Samsung's technology helped the children capture the world in their cameras with detail. I hope that the children could pull out their hidden potential and talent through the medium called photography," she said. Soe Thura, a PR manager for Samsung Electronics in Myanmar, said the company will continue to support local communities. "I think the special perspectives of the talented children reflected in the pictures will deeply move anyone." This image captured from Google shows the search results when the keyword "street surreptitious snapshots" in Korean is searched. By Jun Ji-hye Internet giant Google is facing criticism here for not taking technical measures to prevent minors and teenagers from being exposed to obscene material such as intrusive pictures of body parts. When the words "surreptitious street snapshots" written in Korean is searched on Google, a number of pictures of women's body parts, apparently taken illicitly by hidden cameras, appear in the results. A user does not need to go through an age confirmation process to access such information. This is in contrast to what Korean portals Naver and Daum are doing. When a user attempts to search for "surreptitious street snapshots" there, the portals automatically exclude information unsuitable for minors and teenagers from the search results until a user confirms their age. Criticism against Google's failure to filter out harmful contents to minors is growing as voyeurism crimes have recently become a serious issue here after a female model was arrested for secretly taking pictures of a male nude model during a nude drawing class at Hongik University in Seoul and spreading the pictures on the internet. According to the Juvenile Sex Protection Act here, owners of online service providers can face up to three years in prison or a 20 million won ($19,000) fine if they do not take proper technical measures regarding "sexual material," being seen by minors, even after the firms become aware of such information being distributed. Also, the law regarding the promotion of information and communication network use and protection of information requires an age confirmation process in distributing obscene material. Commenting on the issue, an official from the Korea Communications Standards Commission said the commission is not authorized to block certain keywords to be searched in portals as it is tasked with deliberating on search results. "We are monitoring various search results created through various keywords," the official said. "Once any illegal obscene material is discovered, we will deliberate on it and take proper action." The official noted that foreign companies are required to comply with relevant Korean laws as long as they offer services to Korean users. But there have been some limitations to effectively taking disciplinary actions, such as the imposition of fines or criminal punishment, as the firms' corporations are not in Korea. He added that the commission has set up a cooperative system with Facebook and Twitter as well as Google since 2015, under which the service providers voluntarily delete illegal obscene material. "There are some differences in the legal systems and regulations between countries, so we are working with foreign companies to adjust standards," the official said. Google Korea said anyone can make a report to the firm when they discover improper images, and a releated team of the firm takes measures such as deletion after conducting a review. Asiana Airlines, the country's No. 2 airline, has added Barcelona to its destinations as it increases flight frequencies on its long-haul routes to Europe. Growth is on the cards for Asiana, but selectively. It has one of the largest networks of destinations, serving many destinations from North America to Europe, more than any other Asian carrier. It also has more destinations in Asia than any North American carrier. "We are present in every place we want to be," its spokesman said. An A350 on the Incheon-Venice route is seen in this file photo. Courtesy of Asiana Airlines By Kim Yoo-chul Leading chemical company LG Chem said Wednesday that it has started selling etanercept biosimilar products in Japan after obtaining regulatory approval to market the products there. The drug is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. "Regulatory hurdles were fixed," C.S. Song, head of LG's public relations team, said. "The Etanercept BS is the first biosimilar product containing etanercept material which is available in Japan. LG Chem teamed up with Mochida Pharmaceutical for joint marketing campaigns." LG Chem will supply the products made in the company's plant in the regional city of Osong to Mochida Pharmaceutical. Mochida Pharmaceutical will supply them to Ayumi Pharmaceutical for retail sales. LG Chem is also developing an adalimumab biosimilar, LBAL, referencing the drug Humira. According to its website, LG Chem is in phase 3 development of the adalimumab biosimilar. The company is also developing novel drugs targeting inflammatory diseases, type 2 diabetes, cancer and myocardial infarction. A recent study evaluating the biosimilar in comparison with its reference drug found that etanercept had stable clinical efficacy and a comparable safety profile and was well tolerated. Its latest study, conducted in patients with rheumatoid arthritis in Japan and Korea, found that injection-site reactions occurred in fewer patients receiving the biosimilar than patients receiving the reference drugs. "Given the strong sales channels that our Japanese business partners have and their price merits, LG Chem expects to increase its market share in Japan at a faster pace," the LG Chem official said. Kendallville, IN (46755) Today A mix of clouds and sun early, then becoming cloudy later in the day. High 72F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Cloudy in the evening, then thunderstorms developing after midnight. Low 64F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%. PYONGYANG, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Tuesday urged the United States to stop its large-scale joint military exercises with South Korea to create a favorable atmosphere for dialogue. Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the DPRK, said in a commentary that the U.S. Department of Defense and the White House said the U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises are "defensive" in nature and that the "annual" joint military drills would continue and their scale would not be reduced. "The U.S. maneuvers which have been conducted in South Korea every year are the root cause of disturbing the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula as they are staged under the simulated conditions of a preemptive attack and total war against the DPRK without exception," said the newspaper of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea. The commentary also said that when the DPRK and the United States are coming for "face-to-face dialogue with the will to solve the pending issues," it is unnecessary and improper to stage the joint military exercises. "At present the issue of the joint military exercises serves as a touchstone showing whether the United States wants peace or pursues war," it said. "If the United States sincerely hopes for the talks, it should stop the acts of threatening its dialogue partner by force," it added. The United States and South Korea have said they would hold their joint annual military exercises as scheduled, despite their ongoing dialogue with the DPRK. Angola, IN (46703) Today Intervals of clouds and sunshine in the morning with more clouds for later in the day. High 73F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Cloudy in the evening with scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Low 63F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%. Auburn, IN (46706) Today Intervals of clouds and sunshine in the morning with more clouds for later in the day. High 73F. Winds light and variable.. Tonight Cloudy in the evening with scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Low 64F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%. With people gathered in formal suits, the Africa Union celebrated its 55th anniversary in the Kempisky Hotel, Beijing, on the evening of May 25, 2018. During the evening, after speeches were made and a cake was cut, people walked around the hall, talking with each other and taking photos. (Photo/Peoples Daily Online) Later in the night, performances began on the stage, including Chinese martial arts, traditional African music as well as cultural song and dance performances. It was a chance for the crowd to get involved and learn more about Africa and what the day stands for. (Photo/Peoples Daily Online) African performers interact with the audience. (Photo/Peoples Daily Online) As the night drew to a close, almost everyone was up on their feet, some even joining the African dancers on stage. (Photo/Peoples Daily Online) China's Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said Tuesday that the U.S. statement is contrary to the consensuses the two sides have previously reached in Washington. The ministry said the White House tactical statement is both unexpected and within expectation. "Whatever measures the United States takes, China has the confidence, capability and experience to defend the interests of Chinese people and the core interests of the country," the MOC said on its website. China urged the United States to act in accordance with the spirit of recent bilateral joint statement, the MOC said. President Xi Jinping meets Britain's Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday. Xi expressed his appreciation for the prince's efforts to further advance China-UK relations. WU ZHIYI / CHINA DAILY President tells visiting prince both can benefit through innovation China will continue to boost opening-up and enhance international cooperation in innovation, President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday. Xi made the remark while meeting with Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Scientific innovation cooperation will result in mutually beneficial outcomes and inject new impetus into the golden era of China-UK relations, Xi said. Calling Andrew an old friend of the Chinese people, Xi expressed his appreciation for his efforts to further advance China-UK relations. During the talks, Xi recalled his state visit to Britain in October 2015, saying that the visit ushered in the golden era of China-UK ties. The current global situation is experiencing great changes, and the golden era of the nations' ties is progressing steadily, Xi said. Mentioning British Prime Minister Theresa May's visit to China early this year, Xi said that the nations' cooperation in all areas has gained good momentum. China would like to keep enhancing high-level ex-changes with the UK, hold dialogues under different mech-anisms and ensure that China-UK relations keep moving forward steadily and on the right track, Xi said. China will stick to its path of innovation with Chinese characteristics and implement an innovation-driven strategy for development to fulfill the "Two Centenary Goals", Xi said. The goals are to finish building a moderately prosperous society in all respects by 2020 and to turn China into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful by the middle of the 21st century. Xi also congratulated members of British royal family for recent good news, including Prince Harry's wedding and Prince Louis' birth. Xi said that Prince Andrew's visit to China will strengthen China-UK cooperation in innovation. Xi extended his best regards to Queen Elizabeth II, and Prince Andrew also extended her sincere greetings to Xi. Prince Andrew said that Xi's state visit to the UK in 2015 has greatly promoted UK-China cooperation in all areas. Britain pays great attention to China's transformation from high-speed growth to high-quality growth, he said, adding that he would like to push forward practical cooperation in science, innovation and industries between the two countries. Prince Andrew is visiting China to attend [email protected] events with the theme of scientific innovation. Founded by Andrew in 2014 to support his work with entrepreneurs, [email protected] indicating making a pitch for their ideas at the palace supports entrepreneurs' acceleration and amplification of their plans. Since 2016, [email protected] Global events have taken place around the world. China's education ministry denied that the country spends more on foreign students than on domestic primary and high school education, but promised to raise the bar on international student enrollment amid the controversy over China's education spending. China has a strict process in awarding foreign students government scholarships. Those who don't meet the standards "will stop receiving funds," a Ministry of Educationofficial was quoted by thepaper.cn as saying on Tuesday. The education ministry is mired in controversy after a We-media article criticized the ministry for spending only half the money on Chinese primary and high school students, a total of 1.64 billion yuan ($255 million) in the ministry's 2018 budget, than on foreign students, who have a budget of 3.32 billion yuan. The official, who requested anonymity, said there was a misreading of official data. The official said the budget of 1.64 billion yuan is only for primary and high schools directly affiliated with the Ministry of Education and is not the total spending on the 138 million Chinese primary and high school students. The official did not reveal the total spending. "The number of foreign students in China has increased over the years, which helped in promoting China's image and influence. However, it is true that problems have been emerging as the number of foreign students has been rising," Lao Kaisheng, a professor of education at Beijing Normal University, told the Global Times on Tuesday. The We-media article fanned online sentiment by saying the standards for overseas students to enroll in Chinese universities and receive scholarships from China are low. Moreover, some overseas students "just come to China to have fun" instead of studying, and have not made any contributions to China. The ministry is planning to introduce rules for higher education requirements for foreign students in China, thepaper.cn reported. The national fiscal spending on education in 2016 was in 3.139 trillion yuan, according to a report released by the ministry in 2017. Half of the amount was used for primary and secondary education. In 2016, 442,773 foreign students from 205 countries or regions were studying in China's schools and other education institutions, 11.07 percent of whom received government scholarships. "Snowflake Boy" Wang Fuman. [Photo by Ye Longfei] Wang Fuman, from rural Ludian in Yunnan province and better known on the internet as "Snowflake Boy", moved into his primary school's new dormitory recently, along with 72 other students, with the help of civil groups and local government. Chen Furong, director of the Ludian education department, told Xinhua News Agency they raised more than 800,000 yuan ($124,772) from various sources to carry out renovations on Zhuanshanbao primary school's class building, dormitory and canteen. 141 students study at Zhuanshanbao primary school in Ludian. Wang, an 8-year-old boy, is one of them. He attracted attention nationwide after his photograph was posted on the internet by the principal of his primary school on Jan 8. Johannesburg - Malian entrepreneur Mamadou Gouro Sidibe has provided local merchants and businesses with the social media platform in native tongue Lenali that can be used by anyone regardless of the language they speak. (Photo: People's Daily/Li Zhiwei) "If you ask a Malian merchant, he doesnt want to use up his data to read content elsehwere because he cant read French. But, if we provide him with a local platform where he can post voice messages in his language about the products he sells and delivers, then potential customers will understand him better," explained Sidibe. After studying in Russia and France, Sidibe returned home in 2014. He decided to develop an African Viber which would allow users to communicate using less mobile data. But no one was interested. One day, a local merchant asked Sidibe to translate some messages posted on Viber that he couldnt read. Sidibe realized that Mali is still one of the few countries in the world with an illiteracy rate just less than 50 percent of the population. Although 30 percent of the population owns a smartphone, many cannot read the content on the phones. Sidibe decided to develop an app different from his competitors and focused on the Malians who didnt know how to read and yet were equipped with cheap smartphones with Internet access. The app is voice-based, which "sticks" to African oral culture. The entrepreneur first developed voice guides in several languages, such as Bambara, Soninke, Songhay, Moore, Wolof, and French, to help with the app installation. Once installed, the other features are made accessible by voice, like making phone calls and leaving voice messages in the form of audio tape that can record 59 seconds. The latest version of Lenali rolled in March 2017. In under one year, it has been downloaded 28,000 times across Africa and Europe. Palermo, May 30 - Italian police on Wednesday placed three people under investigation for insulting President Sergio Mattarella on social media. The trio were named as Manlio Cassara, Michele Calabrese and Eloisa Zanrosso. Dozens of other insults and threats against Mattarella are being examined. Mattarella has been accused of scotching a League-Five Star government by rejecting its anti-euro economy minister. Cassara wrote on Facebook "they killed the wrong Mattarella" referring to the president's older brother, Piersanti, gunned down by Cosa Nostra when he was Sicilian regional president in 1980. Calabrese wrote a similar phrase, while Zanrosso wrote "they killed your brother, wasn't that enough for you?". Latina, May 30 - Italian police on Wednesday arrested seven people in connection with a hospice at Roccagorga near Latina south of Rome which they likened to a concentration camp. One of the residents, an elderly woman, was kept in a cage, police said. Several delegations congratulated Dr. Rajitha Senaratne, Minister of Health, Nutrition, and Indigenous Medicine of Sri Lanka on being elected as a Vice-Chair of the Executive Board (EB) of the World Health Organization (WHO) for a term of one year during the 143rd session of the EB/WHO held in Geneva from 28-29 May 2018. Sri Lanka currently serves as a Member of the Executive Board, elected for a term of three years in May 2017. Members of the South East Asia Region (SEAR) unanimously nominated Dr. Rajitha Senaratne to the post of Vice-Chair from SEAR. Dr. Senaratne thanking the Executive Board on his election, emphasized the necessity of learning from the experiences of peers, while sharing Sri Lankas experiences with them towards achieving Universal Health Coverage, a goal agreed in the UN Development Agenda 2030. During his participation of the 71st session of the World Health Assembly (WHA71) and the 143rd session of the Executive Board meeting (EB143) of the WHO, Sri Lanka received special compliments as a country which has taken progressive measures towards realization of SDG 3-Universal Health Coverage and launched bold initiatives on control of NCDs and access to affordable medicines. Minister Senaratne had been invited to address the Panel Discussion Saving lives, Spending less: A Strategic Response to Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) jointly organized by the WHO and the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for NCDs Mr. Michael Bloomberg, on the sidelines of WHA71 in recognition of Sri Lankas achievements in the health care sector under his stewardship. Permanent Mission of Sri Lanka Geneva 30 May 2018 [Photo provided to China Daily] The phrase "a community with a shared future for mankind" was one of the hottest phrases in China related to international topics last year, a new report shows. President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, first proposed the idea of "a community with a shared future for mankind" at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 2013. He has mentioned the concept on many occasions at home and abroad since then. In his work report delivered in October at the opening session of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Xi emphasized China's aspiration to build "a community with a shared future for mankind" six times. The hottest word and phrase related to domestic topics last year were "sharing" and "original aspiration", the report found. According to the 2018 Chinese Language Situation report, which was released by the Ministry of Education and National Language Committee of China on Tuesday, expressions such as "19th National Congress of the CPC", "New Era" and "Xiongan New Area" also were among the hottest terms last year. Others included "roll up our sleeves to work harder", "Tianzhou-1", China's first cargo spacecraft, "artificial intelligence" and "BRICS countries". It is the 12th time the ministry and the committee have jointly compiled and released the report on Chinese language. Lists of popular words and phrases were based on a campaign that assessed characters used by Chinese-language media, whose organizers include the National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center and the Commercial Press. The campaign received thousands of proposed words and characters between Nov 20 and Dec 4 by netizens nationwide. Its website received more than 200 million clicks. "These popular phrases, which were chosen based on netizens' votes, give a complete picture of people's lives in China last year," Tian Lixin, director of the Ministry of Education's Department of Language Application and Administration, said at a news conference about the report. They can encourage people to record their lives and depict changes in society and the world in words, Tian said. If these hot phrases can survive the test of time, they may even be included in the Modern Chinese Dictionary, which serves as the standard authoritative reference book, she said. Days after Consumer Reports ripped Tesla Inc.s new Model 3 electric sedan for substandard brake performance, Tesla issued a fix and Consumer Reports now recommends the car. Consumer Reports originally recommended against buying the Model 3 in a review published May 23, largely because in its brake tests, the car traveled a relatively long way before stopping. It retested the car after Tesla provided an over-the-air software fix for all Model 3s and said Wednesday that stopping distance had improved dramatically by nearly 20 feet. For the record: An earlier version of this article reported that in its retest, Consumer Reports found the Tesla Model 3s stopping distance to be 132 feet. It was 133 feet. Its not uncommon for manufacturers to make fixes after receiving bad reviews, the head of automobile testing at Consumer Reports, Jake Fisher, told The Times. Whats groundbreaking, Fisher said, is the way the brake problem was remedied: through Teslas over-the-air software update system. Tesla recalibrated the brakes by remote control, streaming data to Model 3 computers in a manner roughly analogous to the way Spotify streams songs to a smartphone. Advertisement We very often find deficiencies in vehicles, Fisher said. Whats unique is how quickly theyre able to react. In the May 23 review, Consumer Reports said: Teslas stopping distance of 152 feet from 60 mph was far worse than any contemporary car weve tested and about 7 feet longer than the stopping distance of a Ford F-150 full-sized pickup. After the update, stopping distance was 133 feet, compared with 135 feet for an Audi A4 and 132 feet for a BMW 3-series, two gasoline models to which the electric Model 3 is often compared. The Consumer Reports test track, in rural Connecticut. (Consumer Reports ) To test the brakes, a driver stomps hard on the brake at 60 mph, and the stopping distance is measured. Consumer Reports said it repeated the test several times on two different Model 3 vehicles. Although most automakers offer limited over-the-air services emergency assistance, for instance Tesla is the only one that regularly updates major vehicle systems with fixes and new features this way. If this were another automaker, there might be recalls, or service bulletins, and owners would have to take their cars in to get them fixed, Fisher said. Last week, Fiat Chrysler recalled 4.8 million vehicles to fix a software glitch that could prevent a driver from disengaging cruise control. (The Tesla brake fix was voluntary. Government officials did not raise safety issues or order a recall.) All automakers are developing similar systems, but unlike Tesla, they must remake legacy automobile network systems that reach decades back into the 20th century. Its an uncomfortable position for automakers, said Mark Wakefield, managing director at consulting firm Alix Partners. As automakers develop remote-update systems, customer privacy and fear of hackers are two big issues that give them pause. The risk is that someone [unauthorized] can remotely know where you are and, even worse, take some control of the car, Wakefield said. Theoretically, someone could slam on the brakes at the push of a button. But when Tesla began offering over-the-air updates, it was a wake-up call for the industry, which is now scrambling to catch up, Wakefield said. Theres plenty of incentive for automakers to embrace such software. Vehicles that can receive data wirelessly will increasingly resemble smartphones on wheels, with all the opportunities for revenue generation that implies: selling apps, charging for data, pumping advertising into the car, and probably new paid services no one has thought of yet. Timo Littke, business development manager for over-the-air software at Here a mapping and location company majority owned by Audi, Daimler and BMW said automakers must balance innovation with safety and privacy. The smartphone usually wont put peoples lives in danger, but a car update can do that, he said. Teslas brake fix illustrates how safety and performance upgrades can be sent directly to a vehicle with no need to visit a dealer or repair shop. The basic mechanism of disc brakes, like those on the Model 3, is simple: A pair of calipers clamps down on both sides of a spinning metal disc. But its not just a matter of ultimate clamping force, Fisher said. With the advent of anti-lock brakes in the 1970s, computer code began playing an increasingly crucial role in brake calibration. Its a matter of how the software determines the maximum force that is used to stop the vehicle but prevent a skid, Fisher said. A good system will feel the impending lockup and allow just enough slide so you still maintain control but get maximum stop. Dozens of variables are weighed when an automaker sets the base calibration for a cars brakes. Fisher couldnt say why Tesla didnt calibrate the Model 3 to meet the Consumer Reports test requirements from the start. Depending on how well the software is written, it could make a big impact on the [stopping] distance, he said. Tesla declined to make an executive available to discuss the companys over-the-air update feature. Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted: Really appreciate the high quality critical feedback from @ConsumerReports. Road noise & ride comfort already addressed too. [User interface] improvements coming via remote software update later this month. In its original review, Consumer Reports also criticized the Model 3s 15-inch computer touchscreen, where nearly all the vehicles controls reside. The layout forces drivers to take multiple steps to accomplish simple tasks, which can cause driver distraction because each act forces drivers to take their eyes off the road and a hand off the steering wheel, Consumer Reports said. But the review also raved about the electric cars record setting range and acceleration and handling that could make it a healthy competitor to performance-oriented cars such as BMWs 3 Series and the Audi A4. russ.mitchell@latimes.com Twitter: @russ1mitchell UPDATES: 12:35 p.m.: This article was updated with a tweet from Elon Musk. 12:25 p.m.: This article was updated with the stopping distances of other vehicles. 10:45 a.m.: This article was updated with comments from Mark Wakefield and Timo Littke. This article was originally published at 9:25 a.m. Bird, the Santa Monica-based electric scooter-sharing start-up, is raising $150 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital that will value the company at $1 billion, people familiar with the matter said. This is the first batch of money in this new round, and the company plans to raise more, said one of the people, who asked to remain anonymous while discussing the private transaction. The funding comes as venture-backed start-ups, including Lime and Spin, race to raise money and to saturate U.S. city sidewalks with small electric scooters. The companies allow users to download an app to unlock the scooters and ride them for a small fee. Its a business that is poised to be fiercely competitive and costly to grow. Both major U.S. ride-hailing companies could enter the fray. Uber Technologies Inc. purchased electric bike company Jump in April. Advertisement If the unit economics and the technology is there, our appetite to invest is infinite, Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said this month. Meanwhile, Lyft is reportedly eyeing the electric scooter business. Lime, one of Birds primary competitors, has already raised $132 million and is closing another round of financing. But unless that round closes sooner than expected, and for more than $1 billion in valuation, Bird will soon become the first so-called unicorn among scooter companies. A spokesman for Bird declined to comment. The flurry of activity comes as city governments are scrambling to figure out what to do about what many view as a sidewalk scourge. The city of San Francisco said it will ban scooters starting June 4, pending further permitting. Ubers electric bike company has city approval to operate. Scooter investors, keen on remaking the future of transportation, see an Uber-sized opportunity. Elite venture capital firm Sequoia, which is leading Birds fundraising round, has a complicated history with Uber. One of its partners, Alfred Lin, was an early Uber angel investor, and angel investor Jason Calacanis made an early investment in the company as part of Sequoias scout program, an effort to identify promising young start-ups. But the firm didnt take a major stake in the ride-hailing giant until the companys valuation had already soared. Sequoia invested in Uber as part of the SoftBank round this year. A spokeswoman for Sequoia declined to comment. Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley, one of Ubers first major investors, has expressed skepticism about the scooter-sharing business, arguing that maintenance, charging and in particular insurance could prove costly. This is the United States of Litigation, he warned on Twitter. Travis VanderZanden, Birds chief executive, was formerly an executive at both Lyft and Uber. The three Starbucks managers didnt know one another well before Tuesday morning. Huddled around an emerald guidebook at the start of the companys racial bias training, they flipped to page 2. Over the next four hours, the district managers Carrie Teeter, Carol Huang and Jose Galvez would go through the same racial bias curriculum that 175,000 other Starbucks employees completed throughout the day. The training, at 8,000 stores across the country, marked the start of Starbucks commitment to years of diversity and sensitivity programs after two African American men were arrested at a Starbucks in Philadelphia on April 12. Starbucks executives and outside experts alike point to the training as a significant response to incidents of racial profiling in commercial spaces that have recently garnered national attention and are endemic to American history. At first, the differences among the three seemed obvious, Huang said. A white woman. A female Chinese immigrant. A man from the Dominican Republic. But in talking about how bias has affected their own lives, and how bias informs the way they run their stores, the conversation dredged deeper. Huang, a 12-year Starbucks employee, remembered emigrating from China at age 5 and joining a classroom where students made fun of her accent. Advertisement Galvez, who has worked for Starbucks for three years, immigrated to the U.S. at age 5 and said he was put in remedial classes in elementary school because of his heavily accented English. And as a manager, Teeter thought about how she might rush through an interaction with a customer with accented or broken English, rather than pausing to make sure she heard the customers name correctly. I probably have done that, and didnt mean it in any kind of way, but my perception of the situation was probably a lot different from theirs, Teeter said. Days after a white manager called 911 to report Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson who had arrived two minutes before at the Philadelphia store for a business meeting Starbucks announced that stores across the country would close for sessions on racial bias. Since then the company, along with implicit bias experts and civil rights activists, have pinned Tuesdays training as just the start. No lasting change can come in four hours, they say. To complete the curriculum, Starbucks employees broke into groups of three to five people and progressed through a guidebook, complete with pages to mark up by hand, as well as video and audio clips played on an iPad. During training, store managers did not take leadership roles but instead worked alongside their employees. At first, employees were prompted to find differences between themselves and others. They watched a video in which company Chairman Howard Schultz talked about his vision for a more inclusive company and country. They reflected on what a place of belonging means to them. And they examined their own biases. Each group viewed a documentary underwritten by Starbucks and directed by Stanley Nelson. In the film, people of color talk about experiences of being racially profiled, including being followed in stores. Footage from the civil rights movement quickly progresses to 21st-century cellphone videos capturing people being dragged off a plane, threatened in a New York deli and choked at a North Carolina Waffle House. The guidebook also prompted employees to propose suggestions for corporate policy and to offer input on the obstacles they face in making all customers feel welcome. Near the end of the training, employees listened to audio recordings from other workers describing times they acted on their biases. One worker grabbed a tip jar and set it behind the counter when a group of young men walked into the store. Another told a scruffy man not to panhandle when he was actually standing in line with his wife. Near the end of the training, employees decided what steps they would take to make customers and one another feel more welcome. Stephanie Creary, an identity and diversity expert at the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School, said that to truly resonate, the training would have to address people across a continuum, from those who didnt formerly recognize that racial bias existed in the United States to those who contend with it every day. Also, an effective curriculum had to impart tools for when employees returned to work Wednesday. What Im looking forward to is to see how the training evolves to also being one about helping the employees understand what they need to do differently, Creary said. Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Heather McGhee, president of Demos, served as volunteer advisors on the curriculum. Speaking to reporters last week, they said they would publish a report this summer about how Starbucks can address issues of bias in a comprehensive way. McGhee said the volunteer advisors set high standards for accountability with the company and would not just be a rubber stamp to validate their programming. As an African American woman going into this conversation, I had a lot of cynicism about how much a corporation would actually be committed to making a significant, meaningful difference after the headlines faded, McGhee said. What surprised me has been the depth of commitment the Starbucks leadership had to seeing this as essential to their mission. Tuesdays training for employees was identical to the curriculum given to Starbucks executives over the last week and marked the beginning of monthly training sessions for employees on issues beyond racial bias. Starbucks will also host a leadership conference for store managers when the monthly sessions end next year. Speaking with reporters Tuesday morning, Schultz talked about going through the training with other executives and hearing the stories of a colleague who grew up in South Africa during apartheid. Schultz said the woman wanted us to understand the imprinting of that experience on her life, and that the group was so moved during the conversation that they paused for a short break. Trying to, as a white person, fully understand as much as possible the fact that a person of color never quite feels comfortable in a public space in America, and hearing it from them, because its not something we think about . . . how can we be better people? Schultz said. How can we be better citizens? What else can we do to try and advance a feeling of equality in the country? The Federal Reserve Board on Wednesday took the first step toward loosening the Volcker Rule restrictions on investment trades by large banks as Republicans press forward with a deregulatory agenda sought by Wall Street. The Volcker rule, mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank reforms spurred by the financial crisis, prohibits banks with federally insured deposits from trading for their own profit rather than on behalf of customers. They are also limited in owning or investing in hedge funds or private equity funds. Such so-called proprietary trading by large Wall Street firms was a factor in the 2008 crisis as banks made risky bets on the market through stocks, derivatives and other complex financial instruments. When many of those investments backfired, taxpayers ended up picking up the tab through hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts. In revisions developed jointly with other regulatory agencies, the Feds staff proposed to focus compliance on the banks that do the most trading. Proprietary trading still will be prohibited, Fed officials stressed, but the revisions are designed to give banks more clarity and leeway about what constitutes such trading and what is allowed when they seek to trade for hedging and other purposes. Advertisement Banks with smaller trading operations would get reduced requirements, with many getting the presumption that they are in compliance with the Volcker Rule. Still, the changes fall well short of the hope of many Republicans and industry executives to repeal or gut the rule. Our goal is to replace overly complex and inefficient requirements with a more streamlined set of requirements, Fed Chairman Jerome H. Powell said at the central banks board meeting Wednesday. He said the proposed changes were faithful to both the text and spirit of the law. The Feds Board of Governors voted 3-0 Wednesday to formally launch a rule-making process based on the proposal. The public will have a chance to comment. Despite the bailouts, financial industry lobbyists have pushed back strongly against the Volcker Rule restrictions, which were enacted in 2013 after regulators from five agencies spent three years crafting them. They took effect in 2015. Banks have complained that complying with the Volcker Rule has been overly burdensome. But that hasnt stopped profits from soaring in recent years. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reported last week that U.S. banks had a record $56 billion in profits in the first quarter of the year. With a slew of new financial regulators appointed by President Trump, the Fed and other agencies that oversee the Volcker Rule have jointly developed a proposal to ease the rules. It will be among the most significant set of regulatory concessions Wall Street banks will get for the foreseeable future, Ian Katz, an analyst at strategic research firm Capital Alpha Partners, wrote in a report this week. Kenneth E. Bentsen Jr., president of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Assn. trade group, said the Feds effort represents the growing recognition by policymakers of the unintended negative impact due to the excessive complexity of the current regulations. Paul Volcker, who headed the Fed from 1979 to 1987 and later advised President Obama, said he welcomed the effort to simplify compliance with the rule as long as it does not undermine the core principle of prohibiting taxpayer-backed banks from engaging in risky proprietary trading. But supporters of Dodd-Frank warned that the changes could put taxpayers at risk for future bailouts. Given the irresistible riches generated by proprietary trading, it is inevitable that weakening the Volcker Rule will result in banks again pushing the envelope, gaming the system and ramping up their dangerous trading, said Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a group that advocates stricter financial regulation. Under the proposal, banks with trading operations of at least $10 billion in assets would be required to have a comprehensive compliance program. There are about 18 such banks, and they account for about 95% of trading activities, Fed officials said. Banks with between $1 billion and $10 billion in trading operations would have reduced compliance requirements that would be tailored in light of their relatively smaller and less complex trading activities, according to the Fed proposal. Banks with trading operations of less than $1 billion would get a rebuttable presumption of compliance with the rule, the proposal said. The proposal also would remove the presumption now in the Volcker Rule that any stocks, derivatives or other investments purchased by banks that they hold for less than 60 days are proprietary trades. A bank also would be presumed to be in compliance if its daily net gains or losses from trades are less than $25 million over the previous 90 days. The proposal was drafted under the oversight of new Fed Vice Chairman Randal Quarles, a Trump appointee. Powell is a Republican who already was on the Fed board but picked to be chairman by Trump. Fed Gov. Lael Brainard, a former Treasury official in the Obama administration and a strong supporter of Dodd-Frank, also voted for the proposal. While the purpose of the Volcker Rule is compelling, our experience with its implementation suggests the inter-agency rule has turned out to be needlessly cumbersome in practice, she said. The rule was the brainchild of Volcker, who pushed for it to be included in the sweeping Dodd-Frank overhaul of regulations enacted to try to prevent a future financial crisis. He has argued that proprietary trading created conflicts of interests between the banks and their customers. Federally insured banks historically had been barred from proprietary trades under the Glass-Steagall Act that was enacted in 1933 following the Wall Street excesses that led up to the 1929 market crash. The prohibitions were partially lifted in 1999 under legislation signed by President Clinton. Critics claim the rollback contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. Last June, the Treasury Department recommended significant changes to the Volcker Rule in a report calling for a major rollback of Dodd-Frank. But Treasury officials did not recommend repealing the Volcker Rule, as have some congressional Republicans. Undue compliance burdens must be eliminated in order to eliminate unnecessary impact on market liquidity, the reports summary said. Treasury supports in principle the Volcker Rules limitations on proprietary trading and does not recommend its repeal. Regulators can loosen the rule on their own. A repeal would require congressional approval, which is unlikely given strong Democratic opposition. Small banks already are getting relief from the Volcker Rule in a bipartisan bill President Trump signed last week. The legislation, which focuses on rolling back Dodd-Frank regulations for community and regional banks, exempts institutions with less than $10 billion in total assets from complying with the Volcker Rule. The Fed must work with four other financial regulators the FDIC, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to revise the regulations. Those agencies are expected to vote in the coming days to begin considering the Volcker Rule changes. jim.puzzanghera@latimes.com Twitter: @JimPuzzanghera UPDATES: 1:55 p.m.: This article was updated with additional detail and comments from Paul Volcker and Kenneth Bentsen of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Assn. 12:30 p.m.: This article was updated with the Federal Reserve Boards vote and comments from Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets. This article originally was published at 11:50 a.m. A national poll of Americas 18-to 29-year-olds conducted by Harvards Institute of Politics, located at the Kennedy School of Government, found that 67 percent of young Americans are worried about the future of their country. The survey also shows that about 54 percent of respondents think things in the US are on the wrong track. Over half consider themselves to be neither politically engaged nor politically active. Another poll of 15- to 24-year-old Americans has found that the young Americans are not interested in politics, nor do they like public protests. About 55 percent of them think negatively of public protests, with words such as "counterproductive" and "violent" being used to describe them. Dan Cox, US Public Religion Research Institute's research director, said recent protests in the US garnered a lot of media attention, but this hasn't really led to young people adopting positive attitudes towards them. Snap Inc. Chief Executive and co-founder Evan Spiegel said a widely-shared email by a former software engineer who accused the company of harboring a sexist and toxic workplace culture was a wake-up call that has already prompted change at the Venice firm. Speaking on stage at the Code Conference in Palos Verdes Tuesday, Spiegel was asked to respond to a report published earlier in the day by digital news outlet Cheddar about the email and subsequent accusations by the former employee that the makers of Snapchat did not promote diversity. That letter was a really big wake-up call for us, Spiegel said. Were constantly thinking about how to have the culture that we want, how to reinforce the values that we want and were thinking about it even more because the company has grown so fast. In response, Spiegel said Snap reorganized the engineering department and installed new leadership. The company also hired consultants and issued a companywide survey to identify areas that require improvement. Advertisement Im proud of the progress our team has made the last six months, Spiegel said. Im glad we started moving a lot faster on these issues. Obviously theres a lot more to do. The email was reportedly written by Shannon Lubetich hours before she left the company in November and sent to about 1,300 colleagues in the engineering department. In it, she said engineers can be kind, compassionate, gay and people of color. Its fine if this list doesnt describe you, she wrote. But its not fine if you think, consciously or subconsciously, that these traits prevent you from being a good engineer. (Lubetich did not respond to a request for an interview sent to her Facebook account). Cheddar, relying on accounts from Lubetich and two dozen current and former employees, detailed a sexist atmosphere at the company. Among the examples was a party last summer at an airport hangar in Santa Monica in which scantily clad models were hired to wear deer costumes meant to look like one of Snapchats lenses. Spiegel said at the conference he was also uncomfortable with the models presence and that a Snap employee ultimately had them removed from the event. I was frustrated, to say the least, to see people dressed up as deer at a holiday party, he said. In another instance, Lubetich said she overheard Snaps now-departed vice president of engineering, Tim Sehn, make a penis enlargement joke. Sehn apologized for the incident in an email to Cheddar. Lubetich described discomfort with a frat-like atmosphere at Snap in which male colleagues boasted of taking little time off to care for their newborn children, push-up competitions and alcohol-fueled hot tub parties. With a younger workforce people are going to make mistakes, Spiegel said. david.pierson@latimes.com Follow me @dhpierson on Twitter meg.james@latimes.com Twitter: @MegJamesLAT Three courses into ArtCubeds event ArtxFood, diners are presented a plate of duck blackened in squid ink and listed cheekily on the menu as black swan. The meal, masterminded by chef and restaurateur Richard Blais of Top Chef fame, is served in a gallery space filled with paintings, installations and sculptures by Los Angeles artist Greg Ito. Titled Hallowed Ground, Itos series features hyper-flat fairy-tale symbols a frog prince, a bevy of swans, round-bellied spiders as well as optical-illusion candles and candlesticks, surreal neon objects and colorful lighting treatments. The immersive art and culinary collaboration is part of a month-long event hosted by ArtCubed, an L.A.-based experience production company. Through June 3, Itos works will serve as the backdrop of Blais 56-seat supper club for two seatings a night, Tuesday through Sunday. Advertisement Hallowed ground is a term used to define sacred space, Ito says. And what better sacred space than the dinner table? Where the concept of communal dining anchors the theme of the experience, Itos inspiration for the paintings and sculptures skews toward darker themes like lost love, fear and tragedy. More specifically, the recent loss of his fiancees mother. Were dealing with the grief of that, but we also just got engaged, he says. So its these two polarized emotions happening at the same time. That polarity informs the theme of limited time, which Ito emphasizes in his work, using recurring candles and hourglasses. Silhouettes of faces in the candlesticks allude to the uncertainty of relationships, inspired by his own impending marriage. When youre in a relationship, you always have that thought in the back of your head: How long will this last? Is this the one? he says. I wanted to play with that, because I always felt like the most interesting stories are not always happy or sad its the moments in between. In one painting, two hands gently embrace, while below, ravens crowd together on a branch, their orange eyes stark against the dark night sky. Those can be thoughts of maybe, This might not work out, Ito says. Its nice to see tension within the work. Using the combination of painting, sculpture and installation, he adds, Im able to tailor an experience where people can come and experience something that is truly different. The fairy tale-inspired images pair with Blais dishes, which have names like Unicorn Soup, Bird in Hand and Best Picnic Ever!!! served with a side of irony, according to the menu. The square gallery space, housed in Hollywoods Goya Studios, is divided into three areas. The pink room, Ito says, is inspired by L.A. sunsets where the sky is on fire. As day transitions into evening, the sky transforms into a cool blue, which inspired the second room. And then the moment in between is the dinner, Ito says. So if you see the lighting, you have the pink and the blue, which is like the moment in between. And thats where everyone is breaking bread and hanging out. Outside the dining area, Greg Itos sculptures and paintings are on display at ArtxFood, an inaugural event powered by L.A.-based experience production company ArtCubed. (Courtesy of ArtCubed ) Ito was inspired to become an artist by his uncle, sculpture artist Peter Shire. Seeing his lifestyle and his studio growing up, Ito says, I was like This is the kind of life I want to live. His interest was also piqued by a high school summer program at the California Institute of the Arts. I was around all these artists, and were away from our parents for the first time, he recalls. I was like, This is awesome, I want to be an artist. Ito spent six months on this series, beginning with the paintings, which were informed by a lexicon of imagery and colors. And also the food. Its my first time collaborating with a chef, he says, and its also my first time involving a participatory performative aspect to the artwork. Going forward, the artist whose work up to now has mostly consisted of gallery shows hopes to create more immersive, experience-based works. I can see myself continuing my studio practice, but Im also interested in seeing how I can extend my practice into a larger realm of more commercial projects, he says. I would love to see how the artwork could grow when Im doing environmental or experience design for companies and events. If this room were white with paintings on the wall like a normal gallery setting, its a little sterile, its not exciting, its not different. It also doesnt make you want to stay very long. Thats not a problem at the ArtxFood dinners everyone always stays for dessert. Guests peruse artist Greg Itos works during the cocktail hour of ArtxFood, an inaugural art and dining event from L.A. experience production company ArtCubed (Courtesy of ArtCubed ) ArtxFood Where: Goya Studios, 1541 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Los Angeles When: 6:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. through June 3 Price: $189-$235 Info: artcubedla.com sonaiya.kelley@latimes.com follow me on twitter @sonaiyak A closed cardboard box in Ken Okiishis installation reads, Kens puppet head supplies. Among the many containers in Reena Spaulings cavernous gallery, its the one that sparks the most curiosity. What kind of puppets? Why just heads? And what might they tell us if we opened the box? The boxes contain the artifacts of Okiishis childhood in Ames, Iowa, collected from his parents basement and driven by him to L.A. The effect is rather like a garage sale: an assortment of tchotkes, toys, books and magazines, inflected with hints of Christianity and piano practice. The artists future is foreshadowed by several enthusiastic if embryonic paintings, a fantastic homemade tuxedo jacket of clear plastic striated with silvery threads, and of course, the tantalizing suggestion of puppets. On his way to L.A., Okiishi stopped at the Utah site of the Topaz internment camp during World War II. He shot video of the desolate landscape and the van full of his childhood stuff. This video, spliced with a 3-D rendering he made of his parents basement, is projected on the wall above the boxes. A statue of a dark-haired choirboy standing amid the bins creates a boy-shaped void in the projection, like Okiishis former self, bearing witness. Ken Okiishi, A Model Childhood, the mainland (Ames, Iowa), circa 1978-1997, 2018. Credit: Courtesy of Ed Mumford / Reena Spaulings Ken Okiishi, detail, A Model Childhood, the mainland (Ames, Iowa), circa 1978-1997, 2018 Ed Mumford / Reena Spaulings Although his family was not interned, the camps and the racism they represent are clearly on the artists mind. The fully packed van evokes images of internees allowed to bring only what they could carry. In both cases, the baggage represents the corralling and compression of life into boxes. In the other room is a 2009 video Okiishis mother made to document all the objects in the family home. She created it for insurance purposes, but Okiishi reframes it as an inadvertent family history, a snapshot of a given moment that reverberates with what came before. Reaching further back is a large, mural-sized photograph of his fathers first Boys Day celebration in Hawaii, circa 1940. (Boys Day, now called Childrens Day, is a traditional Japanese holiday celebrating boys and masculinity.) Okiishis chubby infant father sits at the base of an enormous tiered dais filled with row upon row of male dolls, attired and posed for battle. In an artists statement, Okiishi relates how after the attack on Pearl Harbor, his grandfather threw all the familys Japanese things into the ocean, for fear of being perceived as the enemy. The artists fascination with his familys surviving artifacts feels like furious mourning for this original erasure. Ken Okiishi, A Model Childhood, Honolulu, Hawaii, circa 1940, 2018. Ed Mumford / Reena Spaulings Reena Spaulings Fine Art, 2228 W. 7th St., 2nd floor (entrance on South Grand View Street), L.A. Through June 16; closed Sundays-Tuesdays. (213) 908-5033, www.gagareena.com See all of our latest arts news and reviews at latimes.com/arts. MORE ART: Deborah Roberts' powerful statement of black female identity A 14-foot-long painting of trash makes an epic argument for 'The Feminine Sublime' MOCA has lacked an effective director for nearly 20 years. It's time for change MOCA director Philippe Vergne to depart Your penis. Your masterpiece. Thats the slogan of a new website offering customizable prints of mans best friend and no, we dont mean golden retrievers. Online art entrepreneurs from Gothenburg, Sweden, have launched the Penis Poster. The premise? Men love their best friend. And that has led to a proliferation of men sending women uninvited pictures of their best friend. A new survey from the internet-based market research YouGov found 53% of millennial women have received a pic, reads the poster website, citing the body part in question. The website suggests that men fulfill their urge to share via line art, watercolor or sketch printed on 19.7-inch-by-27.6-inch matte paper for $45 a pop. Braggers, fear not: Designs are to scale, using dimensions the customer provides. Advertisement An unspecified portion of the proceeds will be donated to the United Nations campaign for gender equality, HeForShe, the website says. A limited-edition series of prints will feature famous people in positions of power who serve as a reminder that theres still a long way to go to stop sexual harassment. The inaugural one is titled The Donald and shows a petite body part sporting an orange toupee. If youre still reading and want to see more: thepenisposter.com. deborah.vankin@latimes.com Follow me on Twitter: @debvankin MORE ARTL Brie Ruais puts all of her body weight into each sculpture she makes Sanctity and sex at Venice Architecture Biennale Damien Hirsts sharks swim from the Met to a Vegas casino: What does that mean for art? Rosie ODonnell is a hot-button name for many, but everyone has a different way of seeing her. Shes a stand-up comedy pioneer from the 1990s; shes the openhearted but politically charged host of The Rosie ODonnell Show, which ran from 1996-2002 and earned her 12 Daytime Emmys; shes Madonnas awesome BFF in 1992s A League of Their Own. Or shes the devil incarnate, if you happen to be the current president of the United States, whos been feuding with her for more than a decade. (ODonnell returns the sentiment.) But while speaking with The Envelope, Rosie ODonnell is a woman in a new phase of her career as Grandma Tutu on Showtimes grounded-in-reality comedy SMILF, a series created by and starring Frankie Shaw as a financially struggling single mother. ODonnell plays Shaws mother, a role that in many ways lets her just be herself. Youve had a pretty tough year or so. How are you doing? Not good. This was a very difficult year, yes. My daughter was diagnosed with autism. We were shooting the pilot for this show [SMILF] on election day. And he won and it was like the ground fell out from under me. Its terrifying. Advertisement WATCH: Video Q&As from this seasons hottest contenders Rosie ODonnell as Tutu, Samara Weaving as Nelson Rose, Raven Goodwin as Eliza and Frankie Shaw as Bridgette Birdin scenes from SMILF, (Claire Folger / Showtime ) Has playing Tutu on SMILF helped? Totally. While we were filming, my ex-wife (Michelle Rounds) killed herself. That was included in the year of hell. I got the call and said to Frankie, Youre not going to believe this. It was the most wonderful place to be; she really is exceptional about being open, and I think artistically shes a genius. SMILF addresses topics with an honesty rarely seen on TV. How much does that frankness surprise you? At the premiere, Id forgotten all the sex in the pilot; Im not there on those days. Im doing a wonderful show with my elderly husband and beautiful, troubled daughter, the grandbaby and my bipolar, unmedicated PTSD trauma. Thats my whole show right there [not Frankies scenes]. So when I did see the pilot, I was, like, Oh, my God. What was so surprising? When youre 56, its a whole different way that you grew up feeling about sex and what access you had to sex. When I was Frankies age we had to go to 7-Eleven and get the Penthouse Forum letters, thats where wed get sexual stimulation. Kids today are bombarded from the time they touch a computer, which is pretty much right after birth. Its terrifying to people our age. Rosie ODonnell (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times ) Were you like Frankie as a kid? No way! My mother died when I was 10, so I really craved the adult attention. We were, like, five kids and looked like we werent taken care of, because we werent. Public school teachers came in and parented us. The woman I got for algebra in seventh grade became like a second mother to me. She took me to the gynecologist when I got old enough; she was the first person to say I love you to me. I didnt have sex until I was much older, and I had so much body shame. [The frankness] on this show is what we worked for as feminists and women and Im inspired as well as terrified. About your own sex scene; how comfortable or uncomfortable was that to shoot? Not as uncomfortable as the day before, when I had the getting ready for the sex scene. The next day, the actor playing my boyfriend was so terrified and shaky and Im so codependent that I wasnt afraid because I was taking care of him. I was nurturing him. It wasnt as bad or as scary as I thought. Over the years youve railed against gun violence, you were trying to warn people about Trump long before he got into politics, you were critical about the Iraq war yet here we are today, as if nobody ever listened. Do you ever feel like Cassandra of Greek mythology? I feel more like Im ahead of the curve. I know all of this is true. So I just gotta wait. Its hard to believe that its gone this far, and every day feels like the day something is going to change. As a person, are you calmer and more at peace these days? Yes. Well, I still get enraged at injustice. I do as much as I can to drop grace on people who have suffered a lot. I feel compelled to do it. When you grow up poor, middle-class youre always one of those people. Thats why I look at Donald Trump and think, Youre a schmucky kid who grew up on 73rd and Ditmars Boulevard in a townhouse like everyone else, then your father became a slumlord millionaire. Hes acting like hes royalty, and hes just a carnival barker, con man. Its so easy to see through that. Rosie ODonnell (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times ) calendar@latimes.com A vital topic gets a heavy-handed treatment in writer-director (and social media star) Max Emersons Hooked, a cautionary melodrama about a homeless gay hustler that, in more skilled hands, could have evoked a latter-day Midnight Cowboy. The film finds 18-year-old Jack (Conor Donnally) turning tricks to stay afloat while living in a Manhattan youth hostel with boyfriend Tom (Sean Ormond), both of whom apparently fled oppressive, homophobic parents. Desperate for a better life for himself and Tom, Jack impulsively puts his faith in wealthy new client Ken (Terrance Murphy), a closeted gay businessman with a long-suffering wife (Katie McClellan). But a sudden trip to Miami with Ken turns ugly for Jack and proves no bargain for Ken either. What exactly Jack expects from Ken is a bit fuzzy. Less clear is why the confused, self-hating Ken (he wishes a pill could remove his urges) takes the bratty and volatile Jack under his wing so quickly, wholly and expensively. Advertisement Its just one of many forced, unconvincing situations that unfold as Emerson struggles to paint a meaningful social portrait, one that often feels surprisingly retro and cliched from a guy who seems pretty hip on YouTube. Spotty acting and casting, many thinly drawn or over-the-top characters, weak stabs at humor, and some awkward editing and dialogue further undermine this well-intentioned effort. ------------- Hooked Not rated Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes. Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills. On VOD June 5. See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour Movie Trailers calendar@latimes.com Commentary: One more step toward full diplomatic relations between China and Africa Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi signed a joint communique with Burkina Fasos Foreign Minister for the resumption of diplomatic relations in Beijing on May 26, two days after Burkina Faso announced it would cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Burkina Faso recognized the fact that there is only one China. Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory and the Peoples Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China. Burkina Faso used to be Taiwan's largest ally in terms of population and the second largest in national territorial area. The break was indeed a serious defeat for the Taiwan authorities and the Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen even threatened reprisals. What makes Taiwanese leaders more anxious is the consistent acknowledgement of the one-China policy. Less than one month ago, China and the Dominican Republic established a diplomatic relationship after the country cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan. From 2016 to 2017, a number of countries such as Gambia, Sao Tome and Principe and Panama made the same choice independently. Burkina Faso said in a statement that the government has its own right to choose cooperative partners and make decisions in accordance with the interests of its country and people. The trade volume between Burkina Faso and China reached $200 million in 2017, with a 31.1 percent rise compared with the previous year, far exceeding trade between Burkina Faso and Taiwan. The Burkina Faso side puts more emphasis on the progress and growing global influence of the Chinese mainland. African countries are not willing to miss the development opportunities brought by China. For many years, China has remained the largest trade partner of Africa. Chinas Belt and Road Initiative is attractive to Africa, and Chinas support in infrastructure construction has driven economic growth and recovery on the continent. Chinese enterprises have played an active role in constructing the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway and Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway in East Africa, promoting local connectivity and economic development for countries along the routes. Furthermore, the Soubre Hydropower Project in Ivory Coast was undertaken by China. This project has improved local energy structure and advanced industrial development. Production capacity cooperation between China and Africa enjoys a boom by taking the advantages of Chinas capitals, technologies and equipment together with the potential of the African side in areas such as resources, population and market. The win-win opportunities have yielded bigger and better results. China has now established diplomatic relations with 177 countries. Only 18 countries still have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, including Swaziland, the only one in Africa. Foreign Minister Wang Yi stressed that China and Africa have been longing for overall diplomatic relations. Its sincerely hoped that the only remaining African country that hasnt established diplomatic relations with China could join the big and friendly China-Africa family as soon as possible. Now is an important moment for China and Africa to enhance relations. The Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, scheduled to kick off in three months, will become a historic event for unity and cooperation between China and Africa. China is willing to work together with Africa to construct the Belt and Road, to commit to win-win cooperation and common development so as to build a closer community built on common goals in the new era. Burkina Faso has made the right move and the Chinese side has since sent out a friendly invitation to Swaziland. Its hoped that Swaziland can take the chance, make the right political decision, recognize the one-China consensus and become involved in the China-Africa development. Reverie, a new NBC series planting itself at the gates of summer Wednesday, wastes no time telling you whats what. Some of the most aggressive exposition in recent memory, quickly establishes that the technology exists to turn a persons brain into a virtual-reality device and that some customers, I guess they are, have become trapped inside their own heads, living a customized coma dream from which they are unwilling or unable to escape. Because who needs real life when there is a cheesy computerized alternative to hang out in? They brought in another one this morning, says Onira-tech security chief Charlie Ventana (Dennis Haysbert, preternaturally smooth). That makes seven. I can count, says grim-faced genius Alexis Barrett (Jessica Lu) whose work, and I guess you could say fault, this is. Advertisement In order to stem this flow of fugitives from reality, Charlie engages Mara Kint (Sarah Shahi), a hostage negotiator he knew in his previous life in real-world policing. Mara, a purported tower of empathy, has a masters of psychology from Stanford and specialized counterterrorism training with the FBI, as well as some deep-seated personal trauma this new job is totally going to bring to the surface. Sendhil Ramamurthy plays a scientist with a specialty in dreams in the NBC series Reverie. (Sergei Bachlakov / NBC ) This is all established even before the opening credits roll. As empathy goes, Alexis and Charlie appear concerned only about the effect this potentially fatal side effect might have on their business more worried about investors pulling the plug than any plugs they might have to pull themselves. (My program is doing exactly what its supposed to, says Alexis, as she and Charlie ironically gaze upon one of its casualties.) In one of the pilots imperfect premises, Onira-tech is one of those science-fictional businesses that does something historically miraculous and profitable while also seeming to remain unknown and unexamined. Well, this is what you get by not supporting investigative journalism. They use a social media footprint, a persons pictures, videos, their posts, Charlie tells Mara, describing the Reverie method. You feed them into the program and resurrect them in Reverie. Thats like a field trip to heaven, says Mara, who seconds earlier was discoursing on the debilitating effects of screen life. In fact, as a moments reflection should reveal to anyone with a social media footprint, it sounds perfectly awful. Maras job will be to go into Reveries wide-angle virtual reality and talk clients off that ledge and back into ordinary life, with its unsaturated colors and regular office hours. And as quick as you can say Inception, she is injected with a microscopic bio-computer and packed off by dream scientist Paul Hammond (Sendhil Ramamurthy) into a world of pure imagination. Sarah Shahi as empathy expert Mara Kint touches a glowing thing in NBCs virtual-reality search-and-rescue series Reverie. (Sergei Bachlakov / NBC ) Reverie was created by Mickey Fisher, who earlier created the 2014 CBS summer series Extant, where Halle Berry played an impossibly pregnant astronaut dealing with the AI child her husband whipped up in his home workshop. Extant did not make much sense but pushed a lot of buttons, and here again as in the Reverie program itself real-world consistency is being jettisoned for emotional payoff. One would expect , for example, that the R&D alone would make Reverie prohibitively expensive, not to mention the cost of the the companys fancy headquarters, with its lobby-crossing background actors and omnipresent child-voiced artificial intelligence. (Named Dylan, it tells Mara, by way of conversation, that her name means bitter in Hebrew, to which she responds that adding an h makes it joy in Arabic so you will learn something here.) Yet the the first patron-patient Mara goes in to rescue is someone who has already exhausted his savings on a sick wife. Suffice it to say there are all kinds of major design flaws that are also, of course, essential to the premise. From a low, fuzzy angle this might all seem like picking nits; its logical holes are not uncommon to the genre. The cast is good, full of pleasantly familiar faces, and there is admirable color-blind casting in the main parts. And for some viewers, a half-baked sci-fi procedural melodrama seasoned with tears and hugs a sort of psychedelic This Is Us, to cite the networks new flagship may be just what the dream doctor ordered. Reverie Where: NBC When: 10 p.m. Wednesday Rating: TV-14-V (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with an advisory for violence) robert.lloyd@latimes.com Follow Robert Lloyd on Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd ALSO Halle Berry keeps CBS Extant in orbit despite its odd turns Sarah Shahi is Fairly Legal for USA Halle Berry launches into a new era of control with CBS Extant Movie review: Inception A war reporter and critic of President Vladimir Putin who left his native Russia after receiving death threats was shot to death Tuesday in Ukraine in what government officials there alleged was a hit ordered by Moscow. Arkady Babchenko, 41, was shot in the back three times while entering his apartment building here in the Ukrainian capital and died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, according to police. Russias totalitarian machine did not forgive his honesty and principles, Volodymyr Groysman, the prime minister of Ukraine, wrote on Facebook. He called Babchenko a true friend of Ukraine who honestly told the world the truth about Russias aggression. Tensions between the two countries boiled over in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea and backed pro-Russian separatists in southeastern Ukraine. Advertisement Journalism colleagues also claimed that Moscow organized the killing. Arkady Babchenko was killed following a direct order from a terrorist state, the Russian Federation, said Ayder Muzhdabayev, who worked with Babchenko on the ATR television network. Vladimir Jabarov, a Russian senator, pushed back against the allegations, arguing that they were part of a propaganda campaign against Russia. Kiev will try to use Babchenkos death in its own interests, he told the RIA Novosti news agency. Babchenko served in the Russian army, fighting against Chechen separatists in two wars since 1994, before turning to journalism. He published reports about Russias 2008 war with the former Soviet republic of Georgia and worked for a string of publications and broadcasters that harshly criticized the Kremlin. He started receiving death threats after covering the 2016 crash of a Russian military plane near the Black Sea city of Sochi that killed 92. Most of the victims were part of the Red Army Choir, a Cold War-era artistic outfit dubbed the Kremlins singing weapon that was going to perform for Russian servicemen in Syria. Babchenko said that the choir did not deserve compassion, prompting federal lawmakers, a nationalist youth group and other Kremlin supporters to accuse him of treason and demand he be stripped of Russian citizenship. Babchenko also wrote about separatists in the Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Luhansk who vowed to hunt him down. Mirovalev is a special correspondent. Pam Sobo is having trouble getting out of her driveway in the hills of Encino. The problem is not mechanical. Her car is fine. The problem is the navigation apps that have disrupted neighborhood traffic patterns and turned her once-quiet street into a speedway. Please help me and others who live on Ballina Canyon Road, Sobo wrote after she saw my column on diverted drivers spinning out on the crazy Baxter Street incline in Echo Park. Waze has killed our street. Ruined our neighborhood. Advertisement Theres a stop sign in front of Sobos house. In the morning, cars pull to a halt (or not) and then hit the gas to blast up the hill. Everybody is in a hurry in Los Angeles. Well do anything to shave 10 seconds off a commute, unwilling to change our evil ways (which has more than one spelling). This is nothing, Sobo told me Tuesday morning as we stood in front of her house and watched the unchained caravan of cars roar by, the racket pounding through the canyon. This is pretty light. It didnt look light to me. The worst of the morning commute was over, but in a short time, I saw enough cars to fill the parking lot at Dodger Stadium. Janet Mintz, a neighbor, dropped by to back up Sobo. Its terrible and getting worse, she confirmed. The problem, they say, is that drivers who were headed south in the morning, over the hill and into the basin, used to travel up Hayvenhurst Avenue in the days before everyone had a shortcut at their fingertip. That got them to Mulholland Drive and Sepulveda Boulevard. But now they are being told by Waze, Google Maps and other navigation apps to go on Ballina Canyon to Westfall Drive and Royal Hills Drive, then cut west. For the evening rush, those same drivers come barrelling down the same route, headed in the opposite direction. Its dangerous and I mean really, really bad, said mail carrier Veronica Solis, who has worked in the neighborhood for 28 years and watched it go from undiscovered to over-burdened. It used to take me 10 minutes to deliver this street, and now it takes me 20 minutes because of all the traffic, she said. Its changed completely. Sobo and I bumped into Solis as she delivered mail to the home of Tiffany Grana, who just sold her place. I dont want to say traffic was completely the reason, but that was part of it, said Grana. Traffic was a little bit bad when we moved in here in 2002, but now its ridiculous. Absolutely and completely ridiculous. Its not just the volume of cars that bothers her, she said, but the speeding. If my kids ball rolled into the street, she said, he would probably die. In fact, Sobo and I saw one driver zip into warp speed to pass another car. And by the way, is it just my imagination, or are there more insane drivers on the freeways these days, tailgating as if theyre trying to climb into your trunk and swerving around cars like theyre in the Indy 500? In Encino, its not just the residents of Ballina Canyon Road whove grown weary of traffic that has killed off the tranquility that attracted them to the neighborhood in the first place. Social media has plenty of posts from exasperated residents of nearby streets. Between the digital diversions and a spate of break-ins, lots of people feel like theyre under siege. As I said last month, theres nothing new about the app-driven problem except that its not getting any better, and more residents seem to be demanding that something be done about it. What happened on Baxter Street, though, after City Hall got involved and proposed its mitigation measures, was a reminder that when it comes to traffic, one persons relief may cause another persons misery. The cut-through relief plan for Baxter, which rises and falls on a 33% grade, was to chop it into one-way sections heading west at one point and east at another. One-way conversions on nearby streets are also part of the plan, along with more stop signs. I dont know why the people who live here have to suffer for the *&@)! commuters who dont want to sit in traffic on the 2 Fwy, wrote Diana Wagman, who lives near Baxter and predicts mayhem. This is a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. Its ATROCIOUS for anyone who lives near Baxter, wrote Tod Mesirow, who lives in the neighborhood. I asked Mesirow if he understood why the city and the app companies couldnt have instead agreed to remove Baxter Street as an option, given the outrageous incline and the number of accidents. That is the question that no one will answer, he said. When I asked Waze representatives last month about removing Baxter from its app, I was told the city has placed a public road there, which means it should be considered usable. Should local government choose to make a change, we will of course update our maps. City Councilman Paul Krekorian made what I thought was a great point last month when he told me the use of apps to save 90 seconds of travel time not only is destroying the quality of life in Los Angeles, but also endangering public safety. The city has a data-sharing relationship with the app companies, Krekorian said. Among his questions for the transportation department: What efforts has the city made to engage mapping app makers to address neighborhood concerns and what has been the response from that engagement? A transportation spokesman told me the report Krekorian requested has not been completed. In theory, the traffic that has radically changed Sobos Encino neighborhood, and countless others, should mean that were benefiting from lighter traffic on highways and thoroughfares. But it sure doesnt feel like it. Instead, it feels like our addiction to cars and apps is taking its toll. And between here and where were going, there are no shortcuts. Get more of Steve Lopezs work and follow him on Twitter @LATstevelopez A Los Angeles city commissioner violated city standards of conduct when he called staffers gorgeous, or said they look good in a suggestive tone, an investigation has found. A Personnel Department report found that city commissioner Scott Crawford repeatedly engaged in inappropriate behavior toward city employees. Crawford, 68, was appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti to the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument Authority commission, an unpaid position helping to oversee one of the citys smallest departments. In December, four women and one man from the department filed complaints against Crawford. Advertisement Crawford remains a commissioner and completed sexual harassment training earlier this year, said Garcetti spokesman Alex Comisar. The mayor ordered training for all city commissioners in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations made last fall against filmmaker Harvey Weinstein. Crawford has defended himself, saying that he frequently compliments people. He accused an El Pueblo staffer, whom he has declined to name, of organizing the complaints as part of an effort to drive him from the commission. Crawford said in an interview last week that he has retained an attorney to protect me, but declined to elaborate. He said he received a letter earlier this month outlining the results of the investigation of the allegations against him, but hadnt seen the full report. He called the complaints ludicrous and said that, as a gay man, he is used to censoring himself. He became comfortable only recently with the realization that I can be me, Crawford said. And now, with this, I have to go back to censoring myself, he said. Its like going back into the closet. The 13-page report, obtained by The Times through a public records request, found that Crawford demonstrated insensitivity to others by making unwanted comments, jokes, teasing, remarks or questions of a sexual nature. [That behavior] fails to meet the standards expected of a city representative. The report includes a complaint that Crawford looked up and down at a female staffer who attended a work-related event with her boyfriend and was off duty. When her boyfriend stepped away, Crawford told the woman, You look good in a suggestive tone of voice, according to the report. Another female staffer complained that Crawford began a phone conversation by saying, Hi, beautiful. The report also details a statement from a male staffer who said Crawford called and asked him to email some commission-related information. Crawford gave his hotmail address, then added, I am the hot male. Do you get it? Im a hot male. Crawford told the Personnel Department investigator that he frequently makes the hot male comment so people can remember his email address, according to the report. Personnel Department spokesman Bruce Whidden said the investigation into Crawford has concluded. Should additional information related to this come to our attention, we will of course look into it, Whidden said. Separately, Whidden said a complaint alleging that Crawford treated a staffer with brusque behavior was filed in March. Whidden said a report on that complaint is expected next month. Crawford said the complaint was lodged after he raised his voice at a staffer during a commission hearing. Crawford said he is hearing impaired and that he couldnt understand what the employee said. dakota.smith@latimes.com Twitter: @dakotacdsmith 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. Los Angeles police examined whether the killing was linked to the victims recent prosecution on charges of possessing a cocktail of party drugs, but also revealed that they had a person of interest someone whod been spotted running from the fire. A week after DelVescos body was found, police arrested two students: Medina and Eric Marquez, 25. Advertisement Prosecutors say that Medina, who was a student at Fresno State University, burglarized another unit in the Westwood complex before breaking into DelVescos apartment, stabbing her and setting her home ablaze to destroy any evidence. (DelVescos dog was injured and later euthanized, the Daily Bruin reported.) During the trial, Deputy Public Defender Debra Werbel conceded to jurors that Medina had killed DelVesco but stressed that the slaying had not been premeditated. Reached after the verdict, Werbel described the case as a horrible tragedy for the DelVesco family as well as her clients family, who took pride in Medina the first in his family to attend college. Two families are suffering for very different reasons, Werbel said, adding that her client has repeatedly told her that he is very sorry. Throughout the legal proceedings, her client expressed concern with how the DelVesco family was doing and about his own parents, but never, the attorney said, worried about himself. Marquez, a UCLA student, was charged with one count of murder, two counts of burglary and a count of being an accessory after the fact. He pleaded guilty to one burglary count and the accessory count. Andrea DelVescos mother, Leslie, walks past a projected photo of her daughter during the preliminary hearing in the 2015 slaying. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times ) Not long after the slaying, criticism had turned inward at the LAPD. A month after DelVescos death, the department revealed that it had launched an internal investigation into the actions of several officers who responded to a report of a woman screaming at the Westwood apartment complex shortly before the fire engulfed DelVescos apartment. Four officers conducted an investigation but left before the fire was reported, police said at the time. In 2015, DelVescos aunt, Melanie Peskett, told The Times that she couldnt help but wonder if the officers could have saved her nieces life if theyd checked her apartment before the fire. It is a tragedy because you dont know if she was alive or not when officers came there, Peskett said, adding that she hoped the LAPD would implement policy changes to ensure officers do a more thorough job of responding to such calls. The Police Department did not respond to a request for comment on the status of two of the responding officers who according to a 2016 CNN report were terminated. Medina, whose sentencing is scheduled for July 20, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. Staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report. marisa.gerber@latimes.com For more news from the Los Angeles County courts, follow me on Twitter: @marisagerber Ricardo Zuniga pulled up next to his cousin at an intersection in Perris to tell him to meet up at his home to hang out. But Josue Leyva-Gallegos looked back at him, he told authorities, and asked, You ready? before counting to three. Zuniga knew what this meant: His cousin wanted to race. Moments later, the pair hit the gas. Each took off at a high rate of speed, authorities said, with Zuniga driving on the wrong side of the road. Soon, Zuniga was facing an oncoming car and was unable to swerve out of the way. His Honda Accord collided head-on with a Nissan Versa carrying three brothers on their way to pick up their sisters from school. Advertisement The younger two brothers Dominick and Antonio Tony Gonzalez, 6 and 8 were killed in the crash. Their older brother, who had just picked them up from an after-school program, was hospitalized. Dominick and Antonio Tony Gonzalez were killed in a suspected street racing crash in Perris. (Israel Carlos ) They are a great family. They were great kids, said Pastor Israel Carlos of the Fountain of Life Apostolic Church Moreno Valley, where the Gonzalez family worshiped. Its a very tragic situation, what happened, its devastating for the mother. After the crash, Zuniga, 26, told authorities that his cousin approached him and asked if he was OK, according to an investigators declaration filed in Riverside County Superior Court. Then, Leyva-Gallegos vanished. The deadly May 15 crash spurred a 10-day investigation that involved several law enforcement agencies searching for Leyva-Gallegos. The U.S. Marshals Service found the 30-year-old Friday at a DMV office more than a thousand miles away in Kent, Wash. Leyva-Gallegos, who previously lived in Washington and was deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2012, was trying to register a vehicle there. Now, he is awaiting extradition to California on two counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, charges that carry a sentencing enhancement for fleeing the scene of a crime, according to Riverside County court records. His bail was set at $10 million. Authorities said they have not found the Nissan Altima that Leyva-Gallegos was believed to have been driving. Zuniga, meanwhile, was charged with two counts of murder, along with one count each of driving without a license and failing to carry proof of insurance, records show. He is being held on $2-million bail and has pleaded not guilty. Police say street racing incidents are on the rise, driven by popular culture and the use of social media to put on what racers call takeovers, where people use their cars to block off streets or intersections to stage races. At least 179 people have died in Los Angeles County alone since 2000 in accidents where street racing was suspected, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of coroners records, police reports and media accounts from 2000 to 2017. It was extreme negligence for them to be racing in a residential area at the time they were racing, said Carlos, the pastor. Carlos provided The Times copies of two letters Lola Gonzalez wrote about her younger brothers and read at their funeral. She remembered Tony as a curious boy who asked questions about everything, loved dinosaurs and documentaries, and never went to church without a tie on. He wanted to be a vlogger. Even as he was getting older he loved ties, she wrote. Whenever we would go to church, he would ask to wear his tie all the time, he would never want to leave without it. Tony was a vegetarian for a week, she wrote, because he hated that people killed animals. But then he went to El Pollo Loco and gave up that vegetarian life cause pollo was too good, Lola wrote. Dominick, the sister wrote, wanted to be a cop so he could help people. He looked up to Tony whenever they went to the store together, Dominick would say, Lets get something for Tony! The 6-year-old loved pizza, tacos and his moms tamales. Almost every weekend he would ask my mom when she was gonna make her tamales, Lola wrote. Carlos said the Gonzalez family has been attending church services for about five years, and the boys, who attended Manuel L. Real Elementary School, were active in Vacation Bible School. They participated a lot, they really liked to worship, Carlos said. They actually, more than regular kids, they had a lot of faith in God. They liked to follow the rules. alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com Twitter: @AleneTchek UPDATES: 10:45 p.m.: This article was updated with quotes from letters written by the boys sister. May 30, 9:50 p.m.: This article was updated with more details from court records about the moments before the crash. This article was originally published May 29 at 10:40 p.m. On a cracked, narrow street in East Oakland, huddled among a mattress, broken furniture and buckets of used motor oil, lay two German shepherd puppies. The female pups were dirty, malnourished and severely injured. One had a broken mouth, her lower jaw dangling; the other had a missing foot. It was horrific and cruel, said Pali Boucher, founder of Rocket Dog Rescue, a nonprofit animal shelter that rescued the dogs. On Tuesday, Oakland Animal Services said it had launched an investigation after a 4-month-old husky with a broken jaw and bloody paws was left abandoned at the same location, just a day after the German shepherd puppies were found. Advertisement Were working with Oakland PD to find out if these cases are related, because it involves the same ... location and the injuries of at least two of the dogs are the same, said Rebecca Katz, executive director of Oakland Animal Services. We dont know if its animal cruelty or something else. Two German shepherds were found in a pile of rubble in East Oakland. The puppies were dirty, injured and malnourished. A third injured puppy was found dumped at the same location the next day. Oakland Animal Services has launched an investigation. (Rocket Dog Rescue ) Boucher said her shelter was notified about the three puppies over Memorial Day weekend and responded to the location to rescue them. The first two pups were found Saturday night by homeless people near the intersection of G Street and 89th Avenue, an industrial area of the city. The third was reported on Sunday. Boucher said that when she pulled the first two out of the rubble, she found them huddled together. The one with the cut-off foot was lying over her sister, protecting her, she said. She rushed the pups to Ocean Avenue Veterinary Hospital, where the dogs received medical treatment. During her 20 years in animal rescue, Boucher has seen her share of animals that have been abused, neglected and just plain unlucky. She rescued more than 100 dogs and cats from a home in Fresno where there was no running water. She helped save 13 dogs who were tied up for days in the backyard of a Central Valley home after their owner died. And she has tended stray dogs and cats that have been run over by cars. But the gruesome discovery of the puppies this weekend left her unsettled. My stomach felt as if I had sharp razor blades inside, she said. On Facebook, she shared the story about the puppies with her followers: A million questions are running through my mind: Where did these beautiful puppies come from? What else might be going on? Was this an intentional act of abuse or just terrible neglect? Boucher said it could cost up to $12,000 to try to save the German shepherd with the broken jaw, but its unknown whether the puppy will survive. I just want her to have a chance, she said. A chance for a future. Katz said the third puppy is receiving treatment from the departments emergency vet. So far, she said, there is little to go on in the case, but they hope the public can provide information that may help solve it. To help in that fight, Pet Food Express has offered a $5,000 reward for information that may lead to an arrest. Anyone with information about the puppies is asked to call (510) 535-5602. Tips can be made anonymously. ruben.vives@latimes.com For more Southern California news, follow @latvives on Twitter. The UKs biggest beer festival is to offer a new drink this year - alcohol-free ale. A Dutch beer will be on sale at the Campaign for Real Ales (Camra) Great British Beer Festival in London in August. Almost 1,000 different ales, ciders, wines and gins will feature in the event at Olympia, along with a range of alcohol-free beer for the first time in the festivals 41-year history. A Dutch beer will be the first alcohol-free ale on sale at the Campaign for Real Ales Great British Beer Festival in August. Braxzz Brewery has developed an alcohol-free IPA and the worlds first alcohol-free porter ale. Festival organiser Catherine Tonry said: Alcohol-free beer has become increasingly important in recent years and thankfully brewers have been keeping pace with consumer demands. There are now some fantastic innovations in the sector and a much wider range of styles and flavours than ever before. We are thrilled to provide an alcohol-free alternative to festival-goers who cannot or choose not to drink. Festival organiser Catherine Tonry says alcohol-free beer has become increasingly popular with consumers. James Leary, of Braxzz, said: We are delighted to be attending the Great British Beer Festival for hopefully the first of many appearances. We hope to provide something different at the event and give another option to anybody who will not be drinking but still want to taste craft ale. A New York grand jury indicted producer Harvey Weinstein on two counts of rape and another of a criminal sexual act Wednesday just days after he surrendered to authorities. Weinstein is charged with rape in the first degree, rape in the third degree and committing a criminal sexual act in the first degree for alleged forcible sexual acts against two women in 2004 and 2013. This indictment brings the defendant another step closer to accountability for the crimes of violence with which he is now charged, Manhattan Dist. Atty. Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in announcing the indictment. Our office will try this case not in the press, but in the courtroom where it belongs. The defendants recent assault on the integrity of the survivors and the legal process is predictable. We are confident that when the jury hears the evidence, it will reject these attacks out of hand. A grand jury indictment allows prosecutors to skip going before a judge to show there is sufficient evidence to bring Weinstein to trial. Advertisement Weinsteins attorneys have said that one of the women alleging that he raped her had a 10-year consenting relationship with him during the period of the alleged attacks. The announcement of Mr. Weinsteins indictment does not come as a surprise, said his attorney Benjamin Brafman. We also note of course that the indictment merely mirrors the same charges in the criminal court complaint and does not add anything to the case we did not already know. We asked the district attorney for more time so that Mr. Weinsteins attorneys could gather the material needed to properly prepare him for his grand jury testimony, but that request was denied, Brafman added. After his arrest Friday, Weinstein was released on $1-million cash bail and his movements restricted to New York and Connecticut. Weinstein consented to 24-hour-a-day GPS monitoring and a temporary restraining order requested by one accuser. Manhattan Assistant Dist. Atty. Joan Illuzzi said in court that Weinstein used his position and power to sexually exploit his victims. She said he was being prosecuted for two separate forcible sexual assaults against two separate women. Following Weinsteins arrest, Brafman set out some of the producers defense. Mr. Weinstein did not invent the casting couch in Hollywood, Brafman said Friday. And to the extent that there is bad behavior in that industry, that is not what this is about. Bad behavior is not on trial in this case. Its only if you intentionally committed a criminal act, and Mr. Weinstein vigorously denies that. Brafman added in a statement after Wednesdays indictment: Mr. Weinstein intends to enter a plea of not guilty and vigorously defend against these unsupported allegations that he strongly denies. We will soon formally move to dismiss the indictment, and if this case actually proceeds to trial, we expect Mr. Weinstein to be acquitted. The indictment is the first to result from months of investigations in New York, California and London. Sources with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity said one of the women involved is a once-aspiring actress who has alleged that Weinstein assaulted her during a meeting at his Miramax office in 2004. Lucia Evans told the New Yorker magazine last year that Weinstein said during a meeting that shed be great in Project Runway before forcing her to perform oral sex. The second alleged victims identity has not been reported. RELATED: Full coverage of Harvey Weinstein sexual misconduct scandal According to the New Yorker story, Evans said she met with Weinstein in one of his offices when she was a student at Middlebury College. He immediately was simultaneously flattering me and demeaning me and making me feel bad about myself, she told the magazine. Weinstein told her that shed be perfect for Project Runway the show, which Weinstein helped produce, premiered later in 2004 but that she needed to lose weight. She also said he told her about two scripts, a horror movie and a teen love story. At that point, after that, is when he assaulted me, Evans said. She said that she objected but that Weinstein exposed his penis and pulled her head down toward it. I said, over and over, I dont want to do this, stop, dont, Evans told the New Yorker. I tried to get away, but maybe I didnt try hard enough. I didnt want to kick him or fight him. In the end, she said, hes a big guy. He overpowered me. She added: I just sort of gave up. Thats the most horrible part of it, and thats why hes been able to do this for so long to so many women: People give up, and then they feel like its their fault. Weinstein has been accused by more than 80 women of misconduct that includes sexual harassment and rape. Police in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, New York and London have conducted investigations into more than 20 allegations. Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Laceys team has been reviewing two investigations into Weinstein by Beverly Hills police, as well as three Los Angeles Police Department investigations including an Italian actress allegation of rape in 2013. According to law enforcement sources, detectives believe that case is promising for prosecution because the woman told her story to three people, including a priest, relatively soon after the alleged attack. LAPD detectives also have evidence the woman was a guest at the Beverly Hills hotel where she claims Weinstein attacked her, the sources said. The case does have flaws, they added. Detectives found little physical evidence of an attack and have been unable to secure proof that Weinstein was at the hotel when the woman says the rape occurred. richard.winton@latimes.com Twitter: @lacrimes UPDATES: 4:25 p.m.: This article was updated with an additional statement from Weinsteins attorney and other details. This article was originally published at 3:40 p.m. Standing on the front steps of First Congregational Church of Oakland late last month, Nichola Torbett issued a declaration. We can no longer tolerate the trauma inflicted on our communities by policing, Torbett, a white church volunteer, said in front of churchgoers who held photos of African Americans shot dead by law enforcement. The church, she promised, would never call the cops again in nearly every circumstance. Dozens of members had agreed to do the same. How do police help? They often dont, Torbett later said in an interview. So, especially as white people, why call them? As videos of the aftermath of white Americans dialing 911 on African Americans for taking part in innocent activities have repeatedly gone viral two black friends meeting at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, a black grad student napping in a Yale dormitory common room, a black family having a barbecue just blocks from the Oakland congregation members of this small church are taking extreme measures in response. Advertisement They call it divesting from police. The church is part of a tiny but growing movement among liberal houses of worship around the nation making similar vows. They include another church in Oakland, one in San Jose and one in Iowa City, Iowa. Its mostly white ministers and majority white congregations leading the efforts, which come as debates over racism, stereotypes and the role of law enforcement hit universities, businesses and neighborhood councils across the U.S. At Colorado State University, administrators are grappling with an incident last month in which a white parent called police on two Native American students touring the campus. The woman told a 911 operator that the teens, who joined the tour late, were acting really odd and wore dark clothes with weird symbolism. Shawna Reeves holds her son while looking over a memorial to black people who have been killed by police. (Josh Edelson / For The Times ) Waffle House has come under fire for recent videos in which police aggressively arrested black customers at restaurants in the South. In one North Carolina incident, a video showed a white officer slamming and choking a 22-year-old man who arrived after taking his sister to her prom. An employee had called police on the customer, alleging that he yelled at workers and tried to start a fight. Waffle House and police said they did no wrong. The Starbucks incident, in which two men who had made no purchases were denied bathroom access before police were called, led to a new rule that bathrooms are open to noncustomers. Thousands of Starbucks stores shut down Tuesday afternoon while employees were trained in racial bias awareness. At First Congregational, which is part of the United Church of Christ denomination, the decision to avoid police has generated a variety of responses. A regional body of the United Church of Christ in Northern California endorsed the effort. Elsewhere in the nation, churches have scoffed. Conservative media have accused the Oakland church of being anti-police, and questioned its commitment to safety. (All I got to say is Oakland, California and immediately you know we are talking about nutcases, one commentator said during a YouTube broadcast). Some nearby houses of worship, including a Presbyterian church and a Reconstructionist Jewish synagogue, have asked how they could join. Locals, curious about the churchs announcement, have started to stop by on Sundays. On Facebook, dozens of people are signed up to attend a July workshop at the church. Its called How to NOT call the PoLice (Sheriffs & Kkkorts) Ever. Were taught to turn to police for so much, even simple disagreements between people, said church member Sarah Pritchard, who is also white and is setting up trainings such as the July workshop. Why cant we resolve issues among ourselves? We need to be there as a community for one another so we can provide safety for our congregation without police, she said. Pritchard said the ban wouldnt apply if there was a shooting or other life-threatening violence. But nearly everything else is fair game. First Congregational began 158 years ago as a small house church and has been in its current location since 1923. As the Bay Area became a center of leftist social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the church became known as one of the most politically active in the region. Today, a Black Lives Matter banner hangs from the churchs facade. Inside its sanctuary, black and white banners spell out truth, freedom, justice and equality. Its worship space features a memorial to black Americans who have died in police encounters or custody. At most, a few dozen people usually show up for Sunday service. Members are largely lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer; about half are white. Its leaders are mostly women, many of whom work in nonprofits, social work and education. Because theres no paid pastor, members take turns preaching and make all decisions collectively. It took around two years of planning before announcing the police ban. The policy was first put on its website during Holy Week, when Christians recount the last days of Jesus life before his death and resurrection. NO MORE STATE-SPONSORED CRUCIFIXIONS IN THE NAME OF SAFETY, the posting said. The church likened todays police to those who sentenced Christ to death. Last month at Oaklands Lake Merritt, a short distance from the church, a white woman complained to police about a black family using a charcoal barbecue in a no-charcoal area of the park. The event further fueled anger and disappointment among church members who believe some white people are too quick to turn to police when it concerns racial minorities. Police did not arrest anybody or issue citations. Many churchgoers feared it could have been worse. Lay leader Nichola Torbett is helping to lead the police divestment effort. (Josh Edelson / For The Times ) We recognize that Jesus was killed, not for anything he did, but for who he was, and we see the same happening to black and brown people today, Torbett said. Still, were still debating its limitations, she added about the no-police agreement. Nothing has happened yet that would typically warrant a call to the cops. Those questions about limitations came up recently after a Sunday church service. Church leaders sat in an office, discussing their nascent effort and hopes for the future. Marcia Lovelace, a volunteer worship leader, spoke about training church staffers about what to do when people wont leave the building. The church, which sits on a small hill just north of downtown Oakland, frequently opens its doors to the homeless, mentally ill and those who struggle with drug addictions. It offers a food pantry, transit cards and a place to nap. But it draws the line at hosting people overnight. We once had a street person who needed mental health care and wouldnt leave, Lovelace, who is 70 and white, said as she described an incident before the new policy. Police were called and church members who fit the description were hassled by police. For those of us who have the skin color that keeps us from having those experiences, it made things real. According to current guidelines, church members would not call police if such a situation arose again. In lieu of police services, the church has secured a $10,000 grant to train its members and other community groups on de-escalation tactics and self-defense. Carol Robison, another volunteer church leader, proposed an idea for dealing with burglaries. The buildings has no security, and thieves have taken purses and backpacks. Doors are unlocked during the day. The buildings property insurance requires police reports for claims. But wed rather not attract more police, said Robison, who is 62 and white. She suggested going to the police station to file a report instead of having the police come into your neighborhood. The conversation turned to another aspect of policing: deterring and solving crime. Church leaders said they could prevent crime by forming better relationships with neighborhood residents. Their theory, put simply: Friends wont steal from friends. But if crime still happened, church members prayed they could make peace between victims and perpetrators directly without police or courts. Recently, the church received a phone call from Oakland police with a request to talk about its announcement. The group disagreed on how to respond, if at all. We are in conversation about getting into conversation with Oakland police, Torbett said. Soo Hyun Han, a Korean American who attends services with her black spouse and biracial son, said she hoped the church wouldnt avoid talking to police completely. Hopefully that is a place where a real conversation would happen, Han, 44, said of sitting down with officers. The Police Department has not responded publicly to the churchs stance. A spokeswoman said Chief Anne E. Kirkpatrick was unavailable. But Barry Donelan, president of the Oakland police union, said he wasnt bothered by the church. If this particular group doesnt want to call the police, thats their position, thats their view, Donelan said. But my members are happy to respond to the tremendous need for police services elsewhere. If they take this view, it makes it so more police can be directed to those who ask for them. He added that he would never discourage people from calling police if they changed their minds. Donelan pointed out that officers in the city field thousands of calls a day. He said the majority dont result in injuries, shootings or deaths. He scoffed at the churchs suggestion that police contribute to violence instead of helping resolve it. Many in the city would say theres not enough of us, he said. These guys are here to serve the community as best they can. jaweed.kaleem@latimes.com | Twitter: @jaweedkaleem In the end, the governors office became a bargaining chip. A bit of leverage, which could be traded to prosecutors in return for them dropping a felony computer tampering charge. Attorneys for Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens had approached prosecutors last weekend to propose a deal, a spokeswoman for the St. Louis city circuit attorneys office said Wednesday. A cloud of controversies had surrounded Greitens administration in recent months, including allegations of sexual and financial misconduct. In St. Louis, Greitens faced a felony computer tampering charge on allegations that he improperly took a list of donors from his charity for veterans and then used the list to solicit donors to his 2016 gubernatorial campaign. The deal proposed by Greitens attorneys was this: If St. Louis prosecutors dropped the case, Greitens would resign from office. The prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, agreed to it. Advertisement Representatives for Greitens and the prosecutors office revealed the arrangement in interviews Wednesday as Missouri prepared for Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Parson to replace Greitens, also a Republican, who was expected to step down at the end of the week. At a Tuesday news conference in Jefferson City, the state capital, Greitens had indicated that the reason for his resignation after months of resisting calls for him to step down, including from state Republican leaders was the strain of mounting legal fees and personal attacks being leveled by political enemies. I know, and people of good faith know, that I am not perfect, but I have not broken any laws nor committed any offense worthy of this treatment, Greitens said Tuesday. He did not reveal the agreement he had with prosecutors in St. Louis. An attorney for the governor, Jim Martin, acknowledged in an email Wednesday that Gardner had agreed to drop charges if Greitens resigned. But that was in no way the driver for the governors decision, he said. He did not respond to additional questions about how the deal unfolded. The agreement was an unusual development. Across the U.S., defendants often make plea arrangements with prosecutors in which they agree to plead guilty in exchange for lesser charges, lighter sentences, or to testify against other defendants. In this instance, a guilty plea appears to have been off the table. And Gardner, who had been locked in an intense legal battle with Greitens lawyers in recent months, agreed to the deal. Sometimes, pursuing charges is not the right or just thing to do for our city or state, Gardner said in a statement Wednesday, announcing that the most fair and just way to resolve this situation was to drop the felony computer tampering charge against the governor. Gardner said it would have been unlikely that Greitens would have faced prison time if he were convicted, since Greitens had no previous convictions. Whats less clear is whether Greitens would have resigned regardless of whether the St. Louis prosecutor had not taken the deal. Greitens still faces accusations that he photographed his hairdresser, naked, without her permission, to blackmail her into keeping their affair quiet. He denies the accusations. A Kansas City-area prosecutor is still deciding whether to file charges. No deals were made by my office, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, who was appointed to determine whether to charge Greitens over the sexual misconduct allegations, said in a statement Tuesday. She said her review of the case will be pursued without fear or favor. Before announcing his resignation, Greitens had faced threats of impeachment and a legislative investigation about whether he had broken any campaign finance laws, including soliciting contributions from foreign donors. Greitens replacement, Parson, is a longtime politician in the state and a former member of the Legislature, where Greitens 16 months in office had alienated some Republican leaders. This is an enormous responsibility serving as our states next governor, and I am ready to fulfill the duties of the office with honor and integrity, and with a steadfast commitment to making our great state even greater for the people were are entrusted to serve, Parson said in a statement. matt.pearce@latimes.com Matt Pearce is a national reporter for The Times. Follow him on Twitter at @mattdpearce. More national headlines Lets call it microwave diplomacy. In what is likely to be a feverish 24 hours of negotiations, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is trying to hash out enough of a denuclearization agreement to allow President Trump to meet with North Koreas Kim Jong Un in less than two weeks. The proposed venue and date are clear June 12 in Singapore. Hotel rooms are tentatively booked. Planes are at the ready. Logistics teams are working out kinks. To the bemusement of late-night comedians, the commemorative coin for the Trump-Kim summit is already minted. All that is missing is the deal: The North Koreans have not agreed to the immediate or even the staged dismantlement of their nuclear weapons arsenal and infrastructure that the White House has demanded. Advertisement White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday that Pompeo and North Korean emissary Kim Yong Chol will discuss the denuclearization of the peninsula and as long as that remains the focus were going to continue to shoot for June 12. Yet Pompeo faces many obstacles. Although the New York session marks Pompeos third sit-down with Kim Yong Chol, a four-star general who is North Koreas former spy chief, Pompeo is a neophyte in nuclear diplomacy. The former Kansas congressman has been secretary of State for barely a month, after serving a little more than a year as CIA director. Kim Yong Chol has been a top aide of North Koreas ruling dynasty since the days of Kim Il Sung, grandfather of the current leader. He headed North Koreas principal arms dealing apparatus and has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for that and other action. To visit New York, he had to obtain a special waiver from the State Department. Pompeo is a smart guy, but he doesnt have experience with this. Kim Yong Chol has been involved in every negotiation since 1992. He can beat any American who goes up against him, said a veteran U.S.-Korea negotiator who asked not to be quoted by name. Pompeo also faces opposition in Washington. Trumps national security advisor John Bolton, a longtime advocate of a change of government in Pyongyang, nearly sabotaged the summit with provocative comments suggesting the surrender of Libyas nuclear infrastructure in 2003 would be a model for North Korea. North Korean leaders recoiled at the comparison with Libya, whose leader Moammar Kadafi was ignominiously killed and mutilated by rebels aided by Western air power less than a decade after he had given up his nuclear program. It didnt help that the CIA, which Pompeo headed until last month, concluded in a recent intelligent assessment that North Korea has no intention of denuclearizing. The assessment did note that the North Koreans would like an American hamburger restaurant in Pyongyang, according to NBC, which broke the story. Experts debate whether North Korea will eventually give up its nuclear arsenal but there is near unanimity that it wont do it upfront without significant U.S. concessions in return. To eliminate everything upfront and virtually all at once is tantamount to a North Korean surrender scenario. It is unimaginable, concluded a report released this week by Stanford Universitys Center for International Security and Cooperation. The report said it could take at least a decade to fully dismantle the nuclear program. North Korea has said it will not give up what it calls its treasured sword unless it is certain the United States has abandoned a hostile policy against it. It will take them watching American behavior over a long period of time, through more than one administration, said Leon V. Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project of the New York-based Social Science Research Council. The Trump administration has veered between demands for instant denuclearization and a step-by-step approach. The White House position is that North Korea must agree to complete verifiable irreversible denuclearization, or CVID in diplomatic shorthand. Trump would like to get it all at once, but if he cant, hes making space for a phased in denuclearization, said Scott Snyder, North Korea analyst with the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations. Echoing several analysts, Jung Pak, senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institute think tank, cautioned against the evident lack of preparation. Usually with a summit, the rule is no surprises: Every i is dotted and every t is crossed before it starts,' said Pak, a former CIA analyst specializing in the Koreas. This time we cant even agree on what denuclearization means. Pak said she expects the summit to go forward because Trump is so invested, and the North Koreans are so determined that it happen. Kim Yong Chol will dangle just enough in front of Pompeo [so] that he can go back to Trump and say, without lying, theyre sincere, Pak said. Other points of contention have to do with whether to include North Koreas biological and chemical weapons in a deal and whether North Korea would be allowed to maintain a civilian nuclear or space program. The Trump administration has cobbled together a new team of North Korea specialists, trying to make up for the exodus of seasoned experts during the tumultuous last year. Sung Kim, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, has been temporarily reassigned from his post as envoy to the Philippines to lead a U.S. advance team now meeting a counterpart North Korean team in the buffer zone between the two Koreas. (The Trump administration has no ambassador in Seoul. Adm. Harry Harris, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, was nominated on May 18 and he awaits Senate confirmation.) Andrew Kim, head of the CIAs Korea Mission Center, formed last year when Pompeo was CIA director, has been assigned to work with the secretary of State. He accompanied Pompeo on his two trips to Pyongyangand is with him in New York. While other teams are still working out logistics, the meetings in New York between Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol on Wednesday and Thursday will deal with the substance of the proposed summit. They most likely will determine whether this on-again, off-again summit will actually take place. Administration officials declined to discuss in detail the issues that Pompeo and Kim will debate in New York, but the potential agenda is wide open. Trump is focused on having a historic meeting, but unless that event translates into setting mutually defined objectives, it will be meaningless, said Snyder. barbara.demick@latimes.com Twitter: @BarbaraDemick Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson and special correspondent Eli Stokols contributed from Washington. Family separations on the southern border due to President Trumps zero-tolerance policy increased the number of immigrant children in government shelters 22% during the last month, officials said. As of Wednesday, 10,852 migrant children were being held at shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services, compared with 8,886 at the end of last month, said agency spokesman Kenneth Wolfe. The average time such children spent at government shelters has also increased, from 51 to 56 days. The new zero-tolerance policy piloted in Arizona and west Texas last year was extended border-wide last month. Under the policy, migrants who enter the United States illegally face misdemeanor charges in federal criminal court, felony charges if they have crossed illegally before; parents are sent to federal detention, their children to shelters. In the past, such cases were often handled administratively, not in criminal court. Trump tweeted inaccurately over the weekend that a horrible law was prompting the migrant family separations. Immigrant advocates insisted the administration was to blame for pursuing criminal charges against migrants, instead of handling their cases administratively. Advertisement Health and Human Services has 100 shelters in 14 states, and additional temporary housing is only sought as a last resort when current locations are reaching capacity, said Wolfe, a spokesman for the departments Administration for Children and Families. Thats whats happening now that the shelters are 95% full, he said. The agency has 1,218 extra beds reserved elsewhere, including several hundred at a government-owned building near an Air Force base in Homestead, Fla. Officials are also considering housing children at several military bases, as they did after an influx of Central American children in 2014. Unaccompanied minors now include children who cross the border without an adult and those separated from adults charged in federal criminal court under the new policy. At least 638 migrants who crossed with 658 children were charged under the policy between May 6 and May 19, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection official told a Senate committee last week. Last year, Health and Human Services assumed custody of more than 40,000 immigrant children, releasing 93% to family members and other sponsors (half were parents, 40% close relatives). The department has a responsibility to assume custody within 72 hours and try to place children, but it is not required to track sponsors. Last week, Health and Human Services drew criticism after reports that 1,475 of the children they placed last year were missing, according to a phone survey 30 days later. Trump administration officials responded by announcing an agreement by Health and Human Services to give the Department of Homeland Security access to information about sponsors theyre still vetting, and to improve the process, fingerprinting parents who attempt to claim children. Homeland Security officials said the new coordination will better protect migrant children, but some migrant advocates worry it could deter families from claiming children. If somebody is unwilling to claim their child from custody because theyre concerned about their own immigration status, I think that de facto calls into question whether theyre an adequate sponsor and whether we should be releasing a child to that person, Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families, told reporters in a telephone briefing Tuesday. Wagner added that the department plans to increase sponsor screening because we have the problem of people fraudulently claiming to be parents when, in fact, theyre not. Immigrants advocates said the added oversight could increase the number of children in already crowded Health and Human Services shelters. Their workload has grown significantly, and theyre not equipped to be handling children who have been orphaned by these new policies, said Ben Johnson, executive director of the Washington-based American Immigration Lawyers Assn. Johnson also criticized the departments short-term solution to the space crunch. Commandeering these military bases to house children has never turned out well, Johnson said. Its resulted in more lawsuits and more inhumane conduct and treatment of people housed there. Those facilities are not designed for these kinds of people. Migrant parents already appear less willing to claim their children, according to Leah Chavla, a policy advisor at the Washington-based Womens Refugee Commission. Three years ago, 60% of unaccompanied youths were claimed by parents, but that dropped to 41% this fiscal year following immigration crackdowns by the administration, including raids on sponsors last summer that resulted in 400 people being detained in the Midwest and southern United States. Chavlas group and other advocates filed a complaint about the raids with Homeland Securitys Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and its Office of inspector general alleging unlawful conduct, but the raids still had a chilling effect. Families are more reluctant to come forward, Chavla said, and children are reluctant to identify their parents to Health and Human Services for fear they will be deported. Theyre going to languish in custody. Were going to see the length of stay creep up for unaccompanied children, she said. Lee Gelernt, an immigration attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a lawsuit to force the government to stop separating families at the border, and a federal judge in California is considering it. Gelernt was in El Paso on Wednesday meeting with one of the plaintiffs, a Brazilian mother charged and jailed near the border and separated last August from her 14-year-old son, who was sent to Illinois. They are still not reunited. Theres just going to be hundreds of parents and kids that fall into the Brazilian moms situation, Gelernt said. She asserts that the government is separating families to deter immigration. In March and April, more than 50,000 people were detained per month trying to cross the southwest border illegally, levels similar to those during the Obama administration, according to U.S. government figures. During those two months about 8,400 unaccompanied minors were caught on the border. Soon after Trumps inauguration in January 2017, border crossings briefly dropped to record lows before creeping back up again at the end of last year. The increase has frustrated the president, who has repeatedly called for more action to seal the border. molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com Twitter: @mollyhf UPDATES: 5:10 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Lee Gelernt of the ACLU. 3:55 p.m.: This article was updated throughout with Los Angeles Times staff reporting and comments from Leah Chavla of the Womens Refugee Commission. This article was originally published at 9:20 a.m. President Trump on Tuesday accused House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of being an MS-13 lover and dismissed a Democratic Senate candidate as a tool of Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, a line of attack likely to become familiar as he boosts Republican congressional candidates ahead of the midterm election. Trumps visit to Nashville promoted the Senate candidacy of Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who was expected to face former Gov. Phil Bredesen in the race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Bob Corker. Besides headlining a private fundraiser for Blackburn, he used a public rally to urge supporters not to become complacent this fall while Democrats were sticking together to block his agenda. We need Marsha in the Senate to continue the amazing progress and work that weve done over the last year and a half, Trump said during the rally. To keep on winning, you have to vote Republican in November. The Tennessee campaign is among several races expected to determine control of the Senate, where Republicans are defending a narrow two-seat majority. The president criticized Bredesen for being backed by national Democrats. Advertisement Hes a tool of Chuck Schumer and of course the MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi, Trump said. Earlier this month, the House Democratic leader criticized Trumps rhetoric and policies on immigrants after he called members of the international gang animals. Trump added that Bredesen had donated to Hillary Clintons presidential campaign in 2016, saying, Phil Bredesen supported her and he supported her ideas. Trump plans a series of political rallies and events to brand Democrats as obstructionists. He said his supporters cant sit back and relax this fall after working to elect him in 2016. Thats the worst thing that can happen, he said. In November, we will reverse a trend, Trump added, alluding to recent precedent in which the party holding the White House tends to lose congressional seats. He said of Democrats, Theyre bad at everything but theyre good at sticking together, and appealed for GOP unity come November. The president held a similar rally in Indiana earlier this month, appearing with Republican businessman Mike Braun and ripping Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly as a swamp person who refused to aid the GOP agenda. Trump will also raise money for GOP candidates in Texas on Thursday. Trump is using the campaign appearances to mobilize his core backers by highlighting his accomplishments in office, like improving economic indicators and moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and resurrecting some of his go-to lines from the 2016 campaign. I dont want to cause a problem, but in the end, Mexicos gonna pay for the wall, Trump said of his signature campaign promise. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto quickly replied to Trump, tweeting Tuesday in English, which Pena Nieto seldom does NO. Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever. Sincerely, Mexico (all of us). Earlier Tuesday, Trump raised the prospect of special counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs Russia inquiry affecting the November elections and blamed Democrats for collusion. On Twitter, he said the 13 Angry Democrats on Muellers team will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls. Mueller is a Republican. Trump has also used his Twitter feed to boost California Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, hoping to strengthen the partys chances of securing a spot on the ballot in November. He has also set his sights on Montana, where Democratic Sen. Jon Tester is seeking reelection in a state Trump carried in a landslide. Both states have primaries Tuesday. Tennessee has a history of electing centrist senators and the race could be complicated by Corkers up-and-down relationship with Trump. Corker once said Trump had turned the White House into an adult day-care center and the president tweeted that Corker couldnt get elected dog catcher in Tennessee. Yet Corker was in the Oval Office on Saturday, receiving praise from the president for his help in securing the release of an American imprisoned in Venezuela. The breakthrough happened after Corker held a surprise meeting in Caracas with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Corker also greeted Trump at the Nashville airport Tuesday, joined by Blackburn and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), among other dignitaries. Corker has called Bredesen a friend and said he wont actively campaign against him. Trump offered an early endorsement of Blackburn in April, tweeting that she is a wonderful woman who has always been there when we have needed her. Great on the Military, Border Security and Crime. Blackburn, who served on Trumps transition team, has embraced the president and called herself a hard-core, card-carrying Tennessee conservative. Bredesen, who is attempting to become the first Democrat to win a Senate campaign in Tennessee since Al Gore in 1990, has aired TV ads in which he says that hes not running against Donald Trump and that he learned long ago to separate the message from the messenger. Its bad enough that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt wants to reopen a loophole that allows truckers to drive rebuilt rigs with dirty diesel engines that spew as much as 450 times more soot than new models. But now it turns out that Pruitt justified his plan with a questionable, company-funded study that is under investigation for research misconduct. Pruitt has spent the last year attacking the EPAs mission and undermining its integrity. Hes bucked his own scientists research in making decisions to weaken environmental rules. Hes sought to stack EPA advisory boards with industry representatives. Yet this dirty truck loophole is a particularly egregious example of how Pruitt is willing to ignore legitimate research and overwhelming industry opinion in favor of dubious analysis that supports his desire to roll back pollution rules to benefit politically connected special interests. At issue are so-called glider kits, which have typically been used to give new life to engines and other components salvaged from trucks damaged in collisions. During the Obama administration, the EPA had sought to phase out these trucks after discovering that some companies were circumventing truck emissions standards by putting older, dirtier engines inside new truck shells. Last year, however, Pruitt proposed to exempt gliders from contemporary emission limits. Advertisement The vehicles look brand-new but cost 25% less to buy without the pollution controls required on newer trucks. EPA researchers found that gliders can emit up to 450 times more diesel soot and 40 times more smog-forming emissions than new trucks on the market. Agency staff also estimated the glider trucks produce enough soot each year to cause up to 1,600 premature deaths. The broader trucking industry has opposed the loophole, arguing that it hurts truckers and truck manufacturers that have played by the rules. Yet Pruitt has justified the rollback in part by citing a study from Tennessee Tech University that declared glider trucks to be no more harmful to air quality than trucks with new engines. Turns out the study was funded by Fitzgerald Glider Kits, which happens to be one of the primary manufacturers of glider trucks. According to The Times Evan Halper, the study was run by a Tennessee Tech vice president with no graduate-level engineering training, and the research was conducted at a Fitzgerald-owned facility. The owner of the company, Tommy Fitzgerald, hosted a campaign event in 2016 for then-candidate Donald Trump, and he has met privately with Pruitt. After faculty raised concern about the legitimacy of the study, Tennessee Tech opened an investigation, telling Halper, The university takes the allegations of research misconduct seriously. The university has asked the EPA to stop using or referring to the study pending the completion of the investigation. Theres an extra special contradiction to Pruitts embrace of the Tennessee Tech study. In the name of transparency, Pruitt has proposed a rule requiring the EPA to consider only studies for which the underlying data are made public. The rule, which has been pushed by industry groups for years, would block the EPA from considering studies about the health impacts of pollutants that are based on the private medical records of individuals. But it could also apply to the questionable glider truck study because Fitzgeralds company is refusing to publicly release the full study, which it owns under its arrangement with the university. In the meantime, two former EPA chiefs one who served under a Democratic administration and one who served under a Republican administration sent a letter to Pruitt expressing concern that the agency had failed to rely on the best scientific analysis in the proposed glider truck exemption. And members of Congress from both parties have fired off letters to the EPA, complaining that the rollback for glider trucks was a bad idea. The broader trucking industry has opposed the loophole too, arguing that it hurts truckers and truck manufacturers that have played by the rules and invested in more expensive pollution control equipment. Indeed, the California Trucking Assn. is so concerned about an unlevel playing field that it sponsored legislation calling for a $25,000 fine for truckers who drive a glider truck that violates Californias strict air pollution controls. AB 2564 sailed through the Assembly with near unanimous support from Republicans and Democrats. State officials estimate that if just 7% of trucks on California roads are soot-belching gliders, it would entirely offset the clean-air benefits of the states diesel regulations. Its a rare day in American politics when there is such widespread, bipartisan support for a pollution control measure. Science, reason and consensus are all on the side of closing the dirty truck loophole once and for all. And then theres Pruitt on the other side. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook Ive long fancied myself a journalistic John the Baptist for Orange County, a voice in the wilderness crying out to the world that there is more to my homeland than suburban sprawl and vapid housewives. Well, who looks like a lunatic now? In 2018, the old Orange Curtain is looking really frayed. Issues festering here for decades that politicians and the rich alike ignored homelessness, income disparity, jailhouse corruption have received national attention, forever tarnishing our carefully crafted image as the paradise to the South of the L.A. hellmouth. On the political front, Democratic candidates are challenging GOP stalwarts for city council and congressional seats. Our congressional dinosaurs, Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa) and Mimi Walters (R-Irvine), are being forced to campaign for the first time in their careers. Grassroots groups such as Chispa and Indivisible Orange County are skewering local officials for their demonization of immigrants and their general Trumpish cluelessness. All this comes as Republicans are just 2.8 percentage points ahead of Democrats in voter registration 36.7% to 33.9%, with 24.9% registered with no party preference. This is a huge drop from 1990, when the GOP enjoyed a 22-point registration lead over the Dems in O.C. These developments make me happy, and not just because they prove Im a prophet! During the June 5 primary, Orange County liberals and progressives will show everyone that we will, some day, live in a bright, joyous Violet County. Just not yet. Advertisement I say the following with peace and love: Democrats still face a few more years of wandering in O.C.s political desert. Much has been made about how Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Orange County since FDR. This gave us a glimpse of better days ahead. But the primaries show that much work needs to get done to truly topple the GOP in Orange County. Take the Democrats running for Congress. Almost all of them are political novices candidates with no name recognition in districts that favor familiar faces. So many are running for the seat Ed Royce is vacating in the 39th Congressional District that theres a good chance they will split the Democratic vote and allow two Republicans to advance to the general election. Democratic voters should realize that electing their own kind doesnt guarantee lasting liberalism here. Meanwhile, millionaire Democrats Harley Rouda and Hans Keirstead are the leading challengers to Rohrabacher in the 45th District. They both seem like good guys who say the right things. But any time I hear about self-funded campaigns like theirs, I immediately recall Michael Huffington, the former California Republican congressman and U.S. Senate nominee who thought it was OK to simply buy his way into a seat. Is that really the type of politician that Democrats want as the force behind their blue wave? Rouda, Keirstead or the others who are running arent to blame, though. The problems lie with the Democratic Party of Orange County. Unlike the O.C. GOP, it never developed a robust farm system of candidates who learned the ropes of elections by running for school boards or sanitation districts. Now, when Orange County is itching for strong Democratic candidates, the Dems have few to showcase. (Really, state Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva of Fullerton shouldve run for the 39th and wouldve probably easily won.) Its almost as if party leaders couldnt fathom that this day would come and how sad is that? Democratic voters should also realize that electing their own kind doesnt guarantee lasting liberalism here. Old-timers remember when Democrats held a majority on the Orange County Board of Supervisors in the 1970s and other key offices, only to see those gains crumble under convictions, indictments and other scandals. That fiasco allowed the Republicans to grab power in O.C., which theyve never relinquished. Recent Democratic officeholders are nothing to brag about, either. Miguel Pulido has run Santa Ana like a PRI fiefdom in his nearly quarter-century as the citys mayor. He learned well from former Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, whose ego helped to turn the Orange County Great Park from a feasible project into a 14-year quagmire that still has no end in sight. Democratic Party officials stood by both of these guys for too long, even as activists tried to warn the party about their tyrannical tendencies. Dont shoot the messenger, Dems. I hope that your candidates advance to the general election in November. That ballot promises to carry a lot of progressive measures such as a living wage ordinance for businesses in Anaheims Disneyland Resort district and rent control in Santa Ana. If voters rally around those, you may finally have set a strong foothold here. Yet, from my mountaintop, I dont see a big blue wave headed for Orange County this year. Please prove me wrong, Dems. If yall succeed, Ill register as one of you for the first time since my early 20s. Call your prodigal son home. If not, Ill continue splitting my ballot between Libertarians, Greens and a token Peace and Freedom candidate because someone has to, right? mexicanwithglasses@gmail.com Twitter: @GustavoArellano WASHINGTON, May 30 -- A new study by a team of international researchers has shown for the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) performs better than most dermatologists at detecting skin cancer. The study, published Monday on the journal Annals of Oncology, trained a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN), a form of AI, to identify skin cancer by showing it more than 100,000 images of malignant melanomas as well as benign moles. They then compared its performance with that of 58 international dermatologists. On average, human dermatologists accurately detected 86.6 percent of melanomas from a set of 100 images, while the CNN algorithm detected 95 percent of melanomas, according to the study. "The CNN missed fewer melanomas, meaning it had a higher sensitivity than the dermatologists," said Holger Haenssle, first author of the study and a professor at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. The study also showed the CNN algorithm misdiagnosed fewer benign moles as malignant melanoma, which means it had a higher specificity. "This would result in less unnecessary surgery," said Haenssle in a statement published on EurekAlert, a news release website under the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Each year, there are an estimated 232,000 new cases of malignant melanoma worldwide and around 55,500 deaths from the disease, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a specialized cancer agency of the World Health Organization. It can be cured if detected early, but many cases are only diagnosed when the cancer is more advanced and harder to treat. Although the CNN algorithm will not replace human doctors, the researchers believe that it can be used to aid doctors to diagnose skin cancer faster and better. However, they also admitted that there is much more work to be done to implement this AI technology safely in routine clinical care. To the editor: Why was it necessary for the success of USCs recent $6-billion fundraising campaign to ignore students and nurses complaints about ex-USC gyncologist Dr. George Tyndall? Why did ex-President C.L. Max Nikias have to sacrifice one for the other? (Max Nikias rightly steps down from USC, but his departure alone wont solve the schools problems, editorial, May 26) I dont know much about the process necessary for building up a major universitys endowment, but I just dont see the conflict between guarding against malfeasance and fundraising. Surely there is a multitude of gynocologists who would be happy to have a job at USCs student health clinic. Kathi Smith, Ojai Advertisement .. To the editor: The recent unhappy news from USC is not greeted with derision or joy by those of us from UCLA. The two pinnacles of success that Los Angeles has relied on for its intellectual growth, prosperity and intelligent cultural foundation are USC and UCLA. I grew up in the shadow, almost literally, of USC, at 48th and Hoover streets. A few kids in the neighborhood went to USC, and even fewer, like me, went to UCLA, Most didnt go to either, because their parents, like mine, could barely afford their rent. These universities, however, gave us an achievable goal, and without them we could not have moved forward. I went on to law school and eventually returned to become the vice chancellor of UCLA in charge of its brand new capital fundraising program. I know that, once the current dust is brushed off, USC will have retained its place as a source of enlightenment, optimism and intellectual challenge, and next year at this time the faith will have been restored. Wait and see. Alan Charles, Beverly Hills The writer was UCLA vice chancellor for university relations and development from 1979 to 1995. .. To the editor: It was a proud day for our family a little more than two weeks ago when our son graduated from USC with a doctorate from the Thornton School of Music. He is a third-generation Trojan. It was inspiring to hear Nikias speak of the pride we should all feel as members of the Trojan family. Little did we know that two short weeks later, he wouldnt be a part of that family. It is sad what has happened at a university that Ive always been so proud to have attended as were my parents before me. Lets hope we learn from the past as we move forward with a new president. Judi D. Welch, Pacific Palisades .. To the editor: The legal definition of a trustee is a person or a member of a board given control or powers of administration of property in trust with a legal obligation to administer it solely for the purposes specified. USCs trustees did not do their job when they expressed confidence in Nikias. They should resign en masse. Jayne Gordon, Santa Monica Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook To the editor: People of conscience must speak out about the legal but immoral destruction of families at the border that caused Judge Robert Brack to step down from his post, saying, I think we as a country are better than this. It is heartbreaking to read that the good judges repeated letters to President Obama decrying this widespread cruelty went unanswered. The people that I see are, for the most part, hardworking, gentle, uneducated and completely lacking in criminal history, Brack wrote. The silence of Americans about this human tragedy involving millions of people, including even the separation of children from their parents under the zero tolerance policy of Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, is a national disgrace. We are all made complicit by our silence. Fred Fenton, Seal Beach Advertisement .. To the editor: The first law in medicine is do no harm. I wish that same law could apply to the field of law. At least this one judge decided to stop doing harm. Now, will he be a leader on a different path? Judith Anderson, Montrose Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Watch Live: White House holds surprise news briefing amid government shutdown Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Watch live: Vice President Pence and lawmakers honor George H.W. Bush at the U.S. Capitol before he lies in state Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Watch live: White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders holds a media briefing amid tensions at the border By Los Angeles Times Staff Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print 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 Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement 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 Virginia moved Wednesday to become the 33rd state to expand Medicaid coverage through the Affordable Care Act, ending a years-long impasse in the state Legislature and clearing the way for some 400,000 low-income residents to get health coverage. The breakthrough made possible by a coalition of Democrats and a handful of Republicans in the statehouse continues the expansion of the government safety net made possible by the 2010 healthcare law, often called Obamacare. Virginias move also serves as something of a retort to President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress, who have called for sweeping cuts in federal aid to states for Medicaid. The bipartisan vote is a long-overdue step towards giving hundreds of thousands of Virginians access to healthcare, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a former Virginia governor, said in Twitter post Wednesday. Now lets get it done! Advertisement Virginia is the second state to expand Medicaid since Trump was elected. Last November, voters in Maine overwhelmingly backed a state referendum to expand coverage, though the states GOP governor has resisted implementing the expansion. Later this year, Medicaid expansion initiatives are expected to be on the ballot in at least three more states, including Idaho, Nebraska and Utah. The District of Columbia has also expanded Medicaid eligibility. Medicaid, the half-century-old government health plan for the poor, is a pillar of the 2010 healthcare laws program for guaranteeing coverage, and it has helped drive a historic drop in the nations uninsured rate. Surveys indicate that at least 20 million previously uninsured Americans have gained coverage since 2014, though polling suggests the coverage gains have slowed or even reversed since Trump took office. The law makes hundreds of billions of federal dollars available to states to extend Medicaid coverage to poor adults, a population that had been largely excluded from the safety net program. Medicaid eligibility historically was limited to vulnerable populations, such as low-income children, pregnant women, the elderly and people with disabilities. Most states moved to expand eligibility as soon as the healthcare law made additional federal aid available. But GOP opposition concentrated in the Deep South and the Great Plains had left nearly 3 million low-income Americans without insurance in the states that hadnt expanded Medicaid, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. Many Republicans have argued that the program is ineffective, though a growing body of research contradicts that claim, showing Medicaid significantly improves poor Americans access to vital medical care. Virginia, where the Legislature was firmly Republican until last year, was among the states resisting expansion. But sweeping gains by Democrats in last years elections nearly swung control of the Legislature. And though Republicans retain narrow majorities, the election changed the political debate around Medicaid. At the same time, the states new Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, warned the Legislature he would not sign a state budget that didnt include Medicaid expansion. Earlier this year, the Virginia House of Delegates, the states lower chamber, approved a budget that included Medicaid expansion, with several GOP lawmakers joining Democrats to back the plan. Wednesday, the Senate finally agreed. Key to the deal was a compromise that forced Democrats to support a new mandate in Medicaid that will require at least some new Medicaid enrollees to work or show they are looking for work. This has been a conservative priority that the Trump administration has encouraged in other states, including Kentucky, Indiana, Arkansas and New Hampshire. Obamacare 101: A primer on key issues in the debate over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. The latest from Washington More stories from Noam N. Levey noam.levey@latimes.com @noamlevey More than 95% of healthcare groups that have commented on President Trumps effort to weaken Obama-era health insurance rules criticized or outright opposed the proposals, according to a Times review of thousands of official comment letters filed with federal agencies. The extraordinary one-sided outpouring came from more than 300 patient and consumer advocates, physician and nurse organizations and trade groups representing hospitals, clinics and health insurers across the country, the review found. Kris Haltmeyer, vice president of health policy and analysis at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Assn., said he couldnt recall a similar show of opposition in his more than 22 years at the trade group, which represents Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans and is among the organizations that have expressed serious reservations about the administrations proposed regulations. This seems to be a pretty overwhelming statement of concern, Haltmeyer said. Advertisement State insurance regulators from both political parties have also warned that the administrations proposals could destabilize insurance markets, raise premiums for sick Americans and open the door to insurance fraud. And dozens of industry leaders and other experts have called on the administration to rethink moves to scale back consumer protections enacted through the Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare. Basically anybody who knows anything about healthcare is opposed to these proposals, said Sandy Praeger, a former Republican state insurance regulator in Kansas and onetime president of the National Assn. of Insurance Commissioners. Its amazing. Obamacare 101: A primer on key issues in the debate over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. After the failure to repeal the healthcare law last year, the Trump administration is weighing two controversial new rules to loosen regulations governing health plans. One would expand the availability of short-term coverage plans that last less than a year. The other would make it easier for self-employed Americans and small businesses to band together to form so-called association health plans. These plans which administration officials say will be more affordable would not have to offer the full set of health benefits required under the 2010 law and in some cases could turn away sick customers. Altogether, more than 95% or 266 of 279 of the healthcare groups that filed comments about the proposed association health plan regulation expressed serious concern or opposed it, the Times analysis found. And more than 98% or 335 of 340 of the healthcare groups that commented on the proposal to loosen restrictions on short-term health plans criticized it, in many cases warning that the rule could gravely hurt sick patients. As advocates for our communities, we implore you to protect patients and consumers, including individuals with preexisting conditions and persons with disabilities, a coalition of 106 groups noted in one letter urging the administration to withdraw the proposal. Among the groups were virtually every leading patient advocate in the country, including the American Lung Assn., the American Heart Assn., the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the March of Dimes, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Susan G. Komen, AARP and the advocacy arm of the American Cancer Society. Not a single group representing patients, physicians, nurses or hospitals voiced support in the public comments for the two Trump administration proposals. The latest from Washington Before finalizing proposed regulations, federal agencies typically provide a comment period during which individuals and interest groups can share their opinions. Comment letters are then posted on an agencys website or on regulations.gov. A total of 722 comments were posted by the Department of Labor on the administrations association health plan rule; 9,205 were posted on the proposed short-term health plan rule. Most of the comments were from individual Americans, many of whom shared concerns about access to health coverage. The Times identified comments from healthcare groups to gauge the opinions of experts who work in the system or advocate for patients. Officials from 25 states including insurance regulators, attorneys general and insurance marketplace directors also submitted comments. Most were highly critical, with the exception of insurance officials from six states who welcomed one or both of the administration proposals. Several dozen individual healthcare businesses, including insurers, medical systems and benefit consultants, filed comments on the two proposals, offering more mixed views. Administration officials have said relaxing regulations and allowing more health plans that offer limited benefits or that may exclude sick consumers will provide more options to people who are currently being priced out of the health insurance market. We want people to have access to competitive, affordable health insurance, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told lawmakers on Capitol Hill recently. Unfortunately the Affordable Care Act is not delivering on that. The healthcare law has helped expand coverage to some 20 million previously uninsured Americans, through the expansion of state Medicaid programs for the poor and through new marketplaces that offer subsidized health plans for low- and moderate-income people who dont get coverage through an employer. But the marketplace plans which must offer a basic set of health benefits and cannot turn away sick consumers have become more and more expensive, as premiums that began to rise under President Obama have shot up further under the current administration. That has made coverage increasingly unaffordable for the small share of Americans perhaps as many as 15 million who dont receive coverage from their employers or from a government plan and make too much to qualify for federal marketplace subsidies. The subsidies cut off after about $48,000 for an individual and $100,000 for a family of four. The Trump administrations proposals may make some insurance more affordable, largely by allowing plans to skip currently mandated benefits, such as prescription drugs, maternity care, mental health and addiction services. Short-term plans which are currently limited to three months but which the administration wants to extend to a year could also be allowed to turn away sick people. That would allow them to charge even lower rates. Easing insurance rules has cheered some business groups, particularly those representing small employers and independent workers such as real estate agents and court reporters, which backed an expansion of association health plans. Several associations representing insurance agents, who can often earn large commissions on short-term health plans, support easing rules on these plans. While such plans are clearly not the best option for many Americans, [short-term] plans could expand affordable access to health coverage for certain individuals, said the Health Agents for America, one of the five healthcare groups writing in support of the Trump administration rule. The rising cost of health coverage has generated widespread concern among healthcare groups as well, including patient advocates, physicians, nurses, hospitals and health insurers. But they have cautioned the administration that loosening current rules creates many more problems than it solves. Many warned that allowing healthier Americans to buy plans that dont cover expensive medications or other medical benefits will drive up costs for sick patients who have no choice but to buy more costly, comprehensive coverage. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, noted that the administrations proposal to allow more association health plans could leave children, particularly children with serious, chronic, or complex medical needs, with less comprehensive coverage and higher out-of-pocket costs. The academy was among 16 physician groups including the American Medical Assn., the American College of Emergency Physicians, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that expressed concerns about the association health plan rule. They were joined by 10 hospital associations, five nursing groups and 176 patient and consumer advocates who criticized the proposal. AARP said that the proposal would greatly increase the likelihood that working Americans, especially those age 50-64, would face higher insurance premiums and loss of access to critical health insurance coverage. More stories from Noam N. Levey The outpouring against the proposed short-term rule was even more overwhelming. Among those who filed critical comments were 233 patient and consumer advocates, 17 physician groups, 30 nursing associations, 11 hospital groups and 41 groups representing other medical providers, such as physical therapists, social workers, physician assistants and multiple sclerosis clinics. Many sounded the same concern about the unfairness of making Americans suffering from mental illness, cancer, HIV/AIDS or other diseases pay more for coverage. Mental Health America warned that the short-term plans were not a realistic option for people with chronic behavioral health concerns. And the American Diabetes Assn. said that diabetics would be left with two undesirable options: an expensive plan with adequate benefits or a short-term plan with severely limited coverage and high out-of-pocket costs. Many patient advocates, physician groups and others also cautioned that expanding skimpier plans could leave healthier consumers who buy those plans without protection if they got sick, something that happened often before the 2010 heathcare law. The American Academy of Family Physicians, for example, noted that expanding short-term plans could subject patients to catastrophic medical bills and medical bankruptcy. And the National Assn. of Insurance Commissioners warned that association health plans had a long history of fraud and insolvency that left consumers in the lurch. These concerns were echoed by the leading health insurance trade groups, as well as many individual health insurers that cautioned that rates would only increase as looser rules further destabilized insurance markets across the country. The Trump administration has not indicated when it will finalize the proposed new insurance regulations. noam.levey@latimes.com @noamlevey President Trump said on Wednesday that he wished hed hired a lawyer other than Jeff Sessions to head the Justice Department, reflecting his lingering anger at his attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia investigation last year. In a series of morning tweets, Trump quoted televised comments from Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who leads the Houses government oversight committee, suggesting Trump had a right to be frustrated with Sessions handling of the recusal. There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else! Trump tweeted, quoting Gowdy. And I wish I did! Trump added in his own words. Advertisement The president has aired his frustration with Sessions recusal before, suggesting he wanted a loyalist atop the Justice Department to protect him from the Russia investigation. His latest protest, however, follows a New York Times report Tuesday night that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is investigating Trumps effort early in his presidency to get Sessions to reverse his recusal decision days after Sessions made the announcement. The mens meeting on the matter in March 2017 hadnt been previously reported. Sessions recused himself from the investigation into possible Trump campaign cooperation with Russias election interference, citing Justice Department policy governing potential conflicts of interest given Sessions role in the Trump campaign. Numerous legal experts from both parties have said he had no other choice. The issue has long created friction between Trump and Sessions, who as a senator from Alabama had been one of Trumps first and most loyal campaign supporters, the only Republican senator to endorse him until late in the campaign. Rep.Trey Gowdy, I dont think so, I think what the President is doing is expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward. If I were the President and I picked someone to be the countrys.... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 ....chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, oh by the way Im not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated too...and thats how I read that - Senator Sessions, why didnt you tell me before I picked you..... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 ....There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else! And I wish I did! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 Follow the latest news of the Trump administration on Essential Washington noah.bierman@latimes.com | Twitter: @noahbierman The air seems to be going out of Spygate. While President Trump still touts the unfounded claim that the Obama administration improperly spied on his 2016 campaign, senior Republican lawmakers have steered clear of the conspiracy theory since they received classified briefings last week on the role of an FBI confidential informant in an investigation aimed at unmasking Russian interference in the election. For the record: A previous version of this article inaccurately referred to Mitch McConnell as the Senate minority leader. He is the majority leader. That silence broke when Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), one of the few who got the Justice Department briefing, said he believes the FBI acted appropriately when the informant, a retired American academic living in England, met with three of Trumps campaign aides. When the FBI comes into contact with information about what a foreign government may be doing in our election cycle, I think they have an obligation to run it out, Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, said Wednesday on CBS News. Advertisement I think when the president finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard, Gowdy, who is not running for reelection, said a day earlier on Fox News, Trumps favorite cable news network. The pushback was noteworthy since Gowdy, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, earned a reputation among Democrats as a partisan attack dog for leading the pursuit of Hillary Clinton after a terrorist attack in 2012 killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, while she was secretary of State. He also has worked closely with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and has spearheaded Republican inquiries into the Russia investigation and spread still unproven allegations of improper surveillance of the Trump campaign. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday that Trump would not back down from his claims about what he has called Spygate. The president still has concerns, she said. Follow the latest news of the Trump administration on Essential Washington Trump also took another public swipe at Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, whom he nominated last year to lead the Justice Department but has bitterly criticized for his decision to step aside from overseeing the Russia investigation because he had served as a senior Trump campaign aide. Ironically, Trump quoted Gowdy to issue his latest condemnation on Twitter, noting that the congressman had acknowledged the presidents frustration at discovering that Sessions had recused himself from a politically charged investigation aimed directly at the White House. There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else! And I wish I did! Trump tweeted. The tweet followed a New York Times report that Trump had demanded Sessions reverse his recusal in March 2017 but that the attorney general had refused. The episode could factor into special counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs investigation into whether Trump sought to obstruct justice by interfering with the Russia investigation. Trump also responded Wednesday to ABCs decision to cancel the hit show Roseanne because the shows star sent a racist tweet comparing an African American official in the Obama administration to an ape. While much of the nation condemned Rosanne Barrs tweet, Trump used the incident to complain about his own treatment by ABC. In his tweet, Trump criticized the network, not Barr, whose revived sitcom depicted a blue-collar Midwestern family that voted for the president. Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that ABC does not tolerate comments like those made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didnt get the call? he wrote. Iger, chief executive of ABCs parent company, Walt Disney Co., quit the presidents business advisory council in June 2017, protesting the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. Later he called Trumps decision to end protections for young immigrants known as Dreamers as cruel and misguided. Trumps tweet contradicted statements by his press secretary, who repeatedly told reporters Tuesday that the president had more important concerns than the cancellation of a TV sitcom. Thats not what the president is looking at, Sanders said when pressed about Trumps reaction. Thats not whats hes spending his time on. I think we have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now. At the White House on Wednesday, Sanders redirected a question about Trumps tweet into an extended protest about what she called bias against the president. The presidents simply calling out the media bias, she said. No ones defending what [Barr] said. Sanders underlined her point by asking, Where was the apology? after various attacks on Trump. She called out several critics by name, including Jemele Hill, who is no longer anchoring SportsCenter on ESPN months after her tweets criticizing the president earned her a suspension; as well as Kathy Griffin, the comedian who lost her New Years Eve hosting duties at CNN and has been ostracized by many in Hollywood after appearing in an image with a depiction of Trumps severed head. Trump is notorious for his own refusal to apologize after generating controversy or for comments that were widely viewed as offensive. His videotaped expression of regret in October 2016 for his lewd and predatory comments about women in a 2005 Access Hollywood segment is an outlier, and he later suggested those remarks might have been faked. As a businessman, then a candidate and now president, Trump has stoked public outrage for his crass attacks on Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for having been shot down and captured during the Vietnam War, callous remarks to a Gold Star family and sometimes profane name-calling of his political opponents, journalists and athletes. In most cases, Trump has answered calls for an apology with claims that he is being unfairly attacked. Rep. Devin Nunes walks to the House chamber before a vote on Capitol Hill last week. (Michael Reynolds / EPA-EFE ) But in the case of the FBI informant, few Republican leaders are defending his assertion that his political opponents spied on his campaign. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who participated in the Justice Department briefings, havent backed up Trumps claims of wrongdoing. The caution from Republican leaders stands in stark contrast to Trumps claims at a rally in Nashville on Tuesday night. How do you like the fact they had people infiltrating our campaign? he bellowed as the crowd booed. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? Nunes has not spoken publicly about the FBI informant since the May 24 briefings. The apparent collapse of the Spygate theory, at least in Congress, is the third allegation from Nunes related to the Russia inquiry to sputter out under scrutiny. He told reporters outside the White House in March 2017 that the Obama administration may have improperly eavesdropped on Trumps team in New York during the presidential transition. A House ethics investigation later cleared Nunes of having improperly disclosed classified information, and no evidence of illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign has surfaced. More recently, Nunes also demanded classified Justice Department documents that he later used to write a public memo about FBI eavesdropping on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide who the FBI suspected might be a Russian agent. The memo harshly criticized law enforcement for including Democratic-funded opposition research in the application for a warrant and not telling the judge the information came from an opposing political party. In a rare public response, the FBI warned that it had grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memos accuracy. A spokesman for Nunes did not respond to a request for comment. But before the Justice Department briefings last week, he was making eye-popping claims. If any of that is true if they ran a spy ring or an informant ring and they were paying people within the Trump campaign if any of that is true, that is an absolute red line, Nunes told Fox News on May 20. Such statements have been fodder for Trumps legal team, particularly former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who repeatedly said the special counsel investigation could be illegitimate. We need to see reports on this spy situation, and see what the basis was, what the outcome was, he told The Times last week. Giuliani did not return a request for comment on Wednesday. Mueller has secured five guilty pleas and also charged Paul Manafort, Trumps former campaign chairman, with nearly two dozen financial crimes unrelated to the election. None of Trumps aides has been charged with assisting a Russian effort to meddle in the race, although 13 Russians have been indicted for their suspected roles. Stokols is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Noah Bierman contributed to this report. chris.megerian@latimes.com Twitter: @chrismegerian Welcome to the midweek of one of the busiest times in the political world, especially for California lawmakers. In the state Capitol, its crunch time for bills and budgets. On the campaign trail, its the final push before election day Tuesday. And on the national level, this is also a key moment in time, which is where well begin: Will there, or wont there, be a nuclear summit with North Korea? Sign up for the Essential Politics newsletter Advertisement THE SCRAMBLE FOR A SUMMIT IN SINGAPORE Thirteen days from today, the world might witness a historic meeting between the leaders of the United States and a country thats been isolated for decades. Or, then again, nothing will happen. Both scenarios seem possible. The administration of President Trump moved on multiple fronts Tuesday to lay the groundwork for a nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, as diplomats scrambled to revive a meeting that Trump publicly scrapped last week. If it takes place on June 12, were gonna be prepared, said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House spokeswoman, to reporters aboard Air Force One as Trump flew to Nashville for a rally. If it for some reason takes place at a later date, were gonna be prepared for that as well. NATIONAL POLITICS LIGHTNING ROUND -- Republican Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens announced Tuesday that he will step down from office Friday, abandoning a months-long effort to stay in office as he faced felony criminal charges and threats of impeachment by the states legislature. -- The Trump administration sought on Tuesday to apply fresh pressure on China ahead of trade negotiations, just a little more than a week after news that tariffs would be temporarily suspended. -- The Supreme Court on Tuesday extended the Constitutions privacy protection to include vehicles that are parked on a homes driveway or carport, ruling that police need a search warrant before they may inspect them. -- And in other court action, the justices have refused for now to block an Arkansas abortion law that could prevent most women there from ending their early pregnancies with medication. THE DEADLINE APPROACHES FOR CALIFORNIAS BUDGET Its hard to overstate just how different the process of crafting a California state budget was when I began covering Sacramento in the fall of 2001. Back then, the constitutional deadline for the Legislature to send a budget to the governor June 15 was routinely missed. And then, voters made the failure to do so by lawmakers punishable by forfeiting their paychecks. Having huge tax windfalls in recent years has also helped. And as the two-house budget conference committee convenes later today, thats the biggest question: How much money will lawmakers project the state to collect, and how much of that can they convince Gov. Jerry Brown to spend? Heres a quick overview of the key differences lawmakers have with not only Browns budget but also in the budget plans both the Senate and Assembly crafted on their own throughout the spring. THE LAST DASH BY THE CANDIDATES FOR GOVERNOR On the campaign trail, the days are numbered before the field of 27 candidates in the race to replace Brown is down to just two. Our reporters caught up with three of the most talked about hopefuls: Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the Democratic side, and businessman John Cox as the poll-leading Republican. Well be tracking all of this weeks action on our Essential Politics news feed. CALIFORNIAS TOP CAMPAIGN WATCHDOG CALLS IT QUITS As of next Monday, there will be no leader of Californias Fair Political Practices Commission. Jodi Remke, who has served as FPPC chair since 2014, submitted her resignation on Tuesday amid turmoil, as other members of its governing panel were moving to reduce her powers. Remkes resignation comes after a majority of FPPC commissioners supported the creation of two subcommittees to provide input on key decisions that are now made largely by the chair, who is the only member of the panel with a full-time role. PAINT COMPANIES LOOKING FOR A DEAL A ballot measure that would eliminate legal liability for paint companies to clean up lead hazards in California homes appears headed for the November ballot. But, as Liam Dillon reports, those companies are pushing the Legislature to strike a deal instead of going forward with the initiative. So far, the companies havent found any lawmakers willing to act. TODAYS ESSENTIALS -- Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerras campaign manager disputed allegations in a lawsuit filed Tuesday by Republican challenger Eric Early that the incumbent does not meet qualifications to hold office and should be kept off the November ballot. -- Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcettis unveiling of the first new public bathrooms on skid row in more than a decade was seen as a possible turning point for the homeless enclave. But after more than three months of operation, the trailers with toilets and showers shut down in late March and now are gone. -- The latest episode of the Gimme Shelter: The California Housing Crisis podcast talks about pending legislation affecting renters and features an interview with a Sacramento resident who was recently evicted. -- Top federal and state prosecutors in California raised alarms Tuesday over the growing problem of illegal marijuana farms including many tied to Mexico-based drug cartels in remote public forests and parks. -- Here is the full list of the L.A. Times Editorial Board endorsements for Tuesdays primary. LOGISTICS Essential Politics is usually published Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can keep up with breaking news on our politics page throughout the day. And are you following us on Twitter at @latimespolitics? Miss Tuesdays post-holiday newsletter? Here you go. Please send thoughts, concerns and news tips to politics@latimes.com. Did someone forward you this? Sign up here to get Essential Politics in your inbox. Chinese auto supplier Ningbo Jifeng Auto Parts Co. is in advanced negotiations to buy out its German partner Grammer AG, Grammer said Tuesday in a statement. According to Grammer, Jifeng's indicative offer valued the German auto seats manufacturer at around 772 million euros (893 million US dollars) including dividends. The proposal price is 17 percent higher than Grammer's closing price on Monday. Grammer added: "At this stage it is uncertain whether the negotiations will be concluded successfully and a takeover offer will be launched," and adding that it's "assessing strategic options in the best interest of the company." Jifeng has already been Grammer's largest shareholder with a 25 percent stake since 2017. Back then, the Grammer took Jifeng's investment to fend off stock purchases by Bosnian billionaire Hastor family. Hastor family is Grammer's second largest shareholder with a 19 percent stake. Burbank voters will have more than just the race for governor to consider when they are at the polls on June 5 for Californias primary election. The city is looking to amend its charter via three ballot measures two of which involve election procedures and another that hopes to rectify a court ruling regarding the transfer of electric funds to the General Fund. The measure that has been getting the most attention has been Measure T, a proposed charter amendment aimed at resolving a court ruling made in September 2017, in which a judge ruled in favor of Burbank resident Christopher Spencer. Spencer had sued the city in 2016, alleging that the transfer of a portion of Burbank Water and Powers gross annual sales of electricity to the General Fund was illegal and violated Propositions 26 and 218. The goal of both those propositions was to prevent hidden taxes and require a supermajority vote on new taxes and fees. Proposition 218 was approved by voters in 1996 and Proposition 26 in 2010. If approved by voters, Measure T would allow Burbank to continue moving no more than 7% of the electric sales about $12.5 million for the upcoming 2018-19 fiscal year from its city-owned utility to the General Fund. A portion of the funds will be allocated for light infrastructure maintenance while the rest can be used in other departments. Were not raising fees on utility bills, City Manager Ron Davis said in an interview. Were just continuing what weve done since the 1950s. Theres no change. Burbank voters first approved the transfer in 1958 to allow the city to move up to 7% of the city utilitys gross annual electric sales to the General Fund. In her recent court decision, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mary H. Strobel suggested the city clearly state in its charter language that the practice of transferring those funds had gained voter approval. That clarification is at the core of Measure T. Because of the lawsuit, which the city is appealing, Burbank was barred from transferring the funds during the 2017-18 fiscal year, putting the city in a budget deficit. A failure of the ballot measure on June 5 would create about a $12.4-million deficit in Burbanks General Fund for the 2018-19 fiscal year. The Burbank City Council has already looked at various long-term cuts to city services that would help the city get back into the black, should the measure not pass. Some opponents of Measure T believe the ballot measure will increase electric rates in the city, while former City Council candidate and business owner Juan Guillen, during the City Councils April 24 meeting, said that the transfers should be stopped because the city has not been able to use those funds effectively. Davis said that if Measure T fails at the polls, the city will continue the appeals process. Also on the June ballot is Measure V, a proposed charter amendment that would change when Burbank holds its elections. In September, the City Council voted to align Burbanks election with the states dates to comply with SB 415, a bill signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on Sept. 1, 2015, aimed at increasing voter turnout. The legislation states that cities are required to change their election cycles to coincide with the states schedule if the average voter turnout in those cities during a city election were below the average turnout for the previous four statewide general elections. Burbanks last four city general elections had an average turnout of about 16.9%, while the states last four statewide general elections averaged about 60.4%. Should Burbank voters approve Measure V, the citys first municipal election would be held during the November 2020 state general election. Additionally, officials that have been voted in council members, the city clerk and city treasurer would have their terms extended by one year and eight months to coincide with the realignment. A similar ballot measure, Measure Y, tackles election dates for the Burbank Unified School District. The proposed charter amendment, if approved, would also realign the school boards election with the state general election. However, there is an additional caveat in Measure Y: At the school districts request, the measure would remove Burbank Unifieds election procedures from the city charter, which means that the district would follow state election procedures. The ballot measure would not remove Burbank Unified from the charter, but would instead allow the school district to regulate its own elections. anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com Twitter: @acocarpio It is difficult for author Lillian Faderman to think of slain gay rights activist Harvey Milk as an old man. However, she believes that if he were still around today, Milk would be proud of efforts to better the world. Milk became Californias first openly gay man elected to public office when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. He was assassinated about a year later by a former county supervisor. In her latest book, Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, Faderman goes into how Milk became a dedicated activist known widely as The Mayor of Castro Street. Faderman will visit the Buena Vista Branch Library in Burbank at 7 p.m. Thursday to discuss the newest addition to Jewish Lives series published by Yale University Press. There were so many iterations of Harvey Milk, Faderman said. He was a school teacher, a jock, a deep-sea diver in the Navy, a Wall Street securities analyst, a [Barry] Goldwater supporter, a small business owner and politician. Faderman said that Milk carried out a Jewish concept called tikkun olam the moral responsibility to heal the world in whatever he was doing during various times in his life. As a politician, he really thought that gay people shouldnt just fight for their own causes, she said. They had to make coalitions with racial and ethnic minorities, and he fought for their causes. He was very much a defender of the rights of senior citizens. He fought for rent control. Faderman added that Milk, who was also an environmentalist, would have had a heart attack if he knew that there was a terminal named after him at San Francisco International Airport. In fact, one of his first proposals on the [San Francisco] Board of Supervisors was to limit the expansion of the San Francisco Airport, she said. Hed be proud of the honor, I think, but hed be a little disgusted that the airport has just gotten bigger and bigger because he opposed noise pollution and wanted to keep San Francisco small. The new book was released May 22, which would have been Milks 88th birthday. During her upcoming talk, Faderman said she hopes those in attendance learn the lesser-known sides of Milk. I want to introduce them to things that they may not know about him how he not just worked for gay causes but for other oppressed and discriminated-against groups, she said. anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com Twitter: @acocarpio Starting with a flyover from the Condor Squadron and the Armed Forces Medley performed by a Burbank community band, the annual Memorial Day ceremony was held Monday in front of the McCambridge Park War Memorial. Local dignitaries including Mayor Emily Gabel-Luddy, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), state Sen. Anthony Portantino (D-La Canada Flintridge), and Assemblywoman Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) spoke, as did members of the Burbank Veterans Committee. Mickey DePalo, chair of the veterans committee, welcomed guests and acknowledged both the sacrifice of the fallen soldiers and their families and the service of the veterans in attendance. He singled out the late Dr. Jerry A. Jones a veteran and community member who served in many posts throughout his life who died in January. He also talked about Jimmy Weldon, a World War II veteran in attendance who helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp. Gabel-Luddy reiterated the events theme of gratitude, saying of the fallen, If it werent for them, we wouldnt have this city or this country, the greatest nation on Earth. Schiff talked about his recent experience visiting troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying he was struck by how much these young people had their whole lives ahead of them, but also how many of those young peoples lives were cut short, he said. We have paid a dear price that comes with being a global leader. Portantino acknowledged the 103,000 Americans wounded during the Korean War and the more than 7,000 still unaccounted for. He also paid his respects to the roughly 1.5 million Americans who have died serving in the armed forces throughout history. Friedman said she is always moved by the Memorial Day event. Every year, when I come to Memorial Day celebrations and I hear the reading of the names, thats the part thats most profound to me because each name is a person who meant everything to their family, she said. The Crescenta Valley High School Air Force Junior ROTC conducted the traditional Presentation of Colors, followed by the national anthem sung by John Burroughs High School student Coen Sosa. David Christ, a member of the Burbank Veterans Committee, led an invocation followed by Presentation of Old Glory by Weldon. The names of the fallen soldiers who hailed from Burbank were read in chronological order, according to the war during which they gave their lives fighting. After each name was read, a Boy Scout or family member of the fallen laid a rose on the war memorial plaque. A number of songs including God Bless America, Tears in Heaven, and Amazing Grace were sung by Pat Walmisley, Bobbi and Brice Cranston, and Anajette McFarlin, respectively. Perry Fein is a contributing writer for Times Community News. Three men were arrested, two on suspicion of offenses including possessing heroin and methamphetamine, during two traffic stops in Costa Mesa, police said. Authorities said the arrests occurred Friday after they monitored white supremacist gang members in the city. Police did not confirm Wednesday whether the three are believed to be connected to the gang and did not disclose the gangs name. One of the traffic stops resulted in the seizure of $12,000, heroin, a quarter-pound of methamphetamine, a Taser, two batons and a digital money counter, the Police Department said Tuesday. Norman Michael Powers, 53, of Midway City was arrested in the 2300 block of Harbor Boulevard on suspicion of possessing heroin and meth for sale, having a Taser and billy clubs and resisting an officer, authorities said. He was in custody with bail set at $250,000. Authorities said they also seized meth, a loaded semiautomatic handgun, ammunition and drug paraphernalia after a stop in the 2400 block of Newport Boulevard. In that incident, Brian Jay Bishop, 35, of Trinidad, Texas, was arrested on suspicion of meth for sale, possession of a concealed and loaded firearm while possessing drugs and possessing a firearm but not being the registered owner, authorities said. He was released after posting bail. During the traffic stop with Bishop, David Len Mcafee, 33, of Sacramento was arrested on an outstanding warrant, authorities said. In a similar surveillance operation May 11-16, Costa Mesa Police Department gang investigators arrested 10 people in the 2000 block of Fordham Drive and seized heroin, cocaine, ammunition, drug paraphernalia and prescription medication, authorities said. UPDATES: 11:55 a.m.: This article was updated with additional details. This article was originally published at 7:35 a.m. The Costa Mesa Planning Commission is again set to review proposed changes to the citys long-debated small-lot ordinance during a special meeting Thursday. Commissioners will comb through two sets of potential revisions to the ordinance, which as currently designed eases development standards for proposals of 15 or fewer detached homes in areas zoned for multifamily units. Option A follows earlier direction from the City Council and would modify development standards for projects processed under the ordinance to make them consistent with those for common-interest developments such as condominiums. Doing so would require small-lot projects in some cases to provide more open space and additional parking or greater distance between buildings. However, planning commissioners balked at advancing that proposal in April. Some questioned whether the envisioned standards would be too stringent and whether other alterations should be considered. To that end, staff crafted Option B, which would still compel small-lot projects to provide more open space and greater distance between buildings than is currently required. However, the standards would remain below the thresholds set for common-interest developments. The alternative proposal also would create additional standards regarding driveway and lot width on certain properties specifically flag lots with long driveways and those that are accessible via an alley. Whatever recommendation the commission makes, the final decision on how to change the small-lot rules rests with the City Council. Since the ordinances adoption in 2014, critics have said it allows excessive and overly dense development that has exacerbated parking and traffic problems and negatively affected the look and character of local neighborhoods. Supporters, however, contend the ordinance encourages redevelopment and creation of new housing on underused land and that its detractors are exaggerating. The city has approved 165 units under the small-lot ordinance, and those projects combined will create 54 net additional units, with some existing units cleared to make way for new ones, according to a city staff report. Thursdays commission meeting starts at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 77 Fair Drive. luke.money@latimes.com Twitter @LukeMMoney Good morning. Its Wednesday, May 30. Heres whats been happening around O.C. Top story O.C. Fair Board: Equestrian center is not going anywhere Less than two months after a draft plan proposed taking a wrecking ball to the equestrian facility at the OC Fair & Event Center, officials put that horse back in the barn. On a 7-0 vote, the Fair Board declared it intends to keep the Orange County Fairgrounds Equestrian Center at the Costa Mesa property. We need to quit horsing around no pun intended, said board member Douglas La Belle. Daily Pilot Around the county Son of famous blues guitarist graduates despite obstacles As Johnny Ramos takes his first steps this week as a graduate of renowned Oxford Academy and moves into the next chapter of his life, hell be sure to hold onto his roots. The 18-year-old from Anaheim is the son of famed blues guitarist Kid Ramos. TimesOC Anaheim introduces its first poet laureate Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait welcomed poet Grant Hier during a May 15 City Hall meeting, acknowledging Hiers contributions to poetry anthologies and work as a literature and creative writing professor at Laguna College of Art + Design in Laguna Beach. TimesOC O.C. Music League fights against paying a price to play Since its inception in 2013, Orange County Music League has opposed pay-to-play shows in which artists wanting to improve their profile and gain more gigs pay a promoter so they can perform in a venue. TimesOC Politics Bernie Sanders to speak out for higher wages for Disneyland workers Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is injecting himself into the campaign by Disneyland resort workers demanding to get paid a living wage. The U.S. senator from Vermont will be a featured speaker at a June 2 rally in Anaheim. Los Angeles Times Arts & entertainment Knotts Berry Farm opens first dive coaster in California Billed as the first dive coaster in the state, Knotts Berry Farms new HangTime suspends riders at a crest before plunging down a 96-degree drop. And thats just the beginning. TimesOC Environmental film festival is coming to Costa Mesa One of the largest environmental film festivals in the country, the Wild and Scenic Film Festival, will head to Costa Mesa on June 2. TimesOC The Wooden Floor readies its 35th annual dance concert Unifying Catalysts is the name of The Wooden Floors upcoming 35th annual concert from May 31 through June 2 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. TimesOC Business & real estate Even the carousel gets a makeover at Irvine Spectrum Irvine Spectrum Center is undergoing a $200-million expansion, which includes four new buildings housing 30 additional stores at the former site of Macys. TimesOC Please let us know what we can do to make this newsletter more useful to you. Send comments, complaints and ideas to dailypilot@latimes.com. A court found a Glendale woman accused of trying to kidnap two children in 2016 insane at the time of the incidents. Lisa Arnold pleaded no contest in court last Wednesday to two felony counts of attempted kidnapping, according to the Los Angeles County district attorneys office. Ricardo Santiago, a spokesman for the office, said Arnold was found not guilty for the crimes by reason of insanity. The judge found that the defendant fit the legal definition of insanity at the time by two doctors, he said. The first of the attempted kidnappings occurred just after 5 p.m. on Aug. 10, 2016, when a mother was with her 14-month-old daughter near Chevy Chase Drive and Adams Street. A stranger, later identified as Arnold, approached the two and reportedly called the baby cute and attempted to lift her up from a stroller. Arnold tried to unbuckle the baby from the stroller but was pushed away by the mother. Arnold then walked to a nearby vehicle and drove away. About 20 minutes later, an 8-year-old boy called the Glendale Police Department to report a woman had attempted to kidnap his 3-year-old brother outside of John Marshall Elementary School. The woman was also identified as Arnold. Like with the mother and child, Arnold reportedly walked up to the boy outside of the school and tried to pick him up. The boys mother got into an altercation with Arnold, who put the child down and fled from the school. Police arrested Arnold several days later and, at the time, she reportedly told investigators that her actions were because of her mental status. Police declined to elaborate further on her statement. Santiago said Arnold will undergo a court-ordered mental health evaluation on June 21. andy.nguyen@latimes.com Twitter: @Andy_Truc Almost 40 years after James Bauder, a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, went missing while flying his plane over North Vietnam, Jane Bauder Castellani, who hadnt seen her father since she was 4, got an email. I do hope this email reaches you, read the message from the head of the Navys POW/MIA Branch. Please call me, I have some very important information regarding your father. The branch, responsible for identifying, searching for and recovering the Navys prisoners of war and those missing in action, found a femur that matched James Bauders DNA last fall. Castellani was stunned. James Bauder, who was a La Canada resident, was one of the fallen soldiers honored at La Crescentas Two Strike Park on Monday. The small ceremony highlighted those who remain lost after serving the country. Though Bauders family could not attend the event, organizers took time to properly honor the fallen hero near his onetime Southern California home on Oceanview Boulevard. After opening remarks by retired Lt. Col. Dave Worley, U.S. Air Force, and renditions of the national anthem and America the Beautiful by the Hot Topic Quartet, keynote speaker Ralph Peter Scaffidi, a retired U.S. Navy Reserve captain, read aloud the story of Bauder and his daughters reaction upon hearing her fathers remains had finally been found. Its been decades of wondering and hoping, and not hoping, then hoping again like a yo-yo, she told the La Canada Valley Sun in October. When the news finally came, I didnt know how to feel about it. I didnt cry. I wasnt happy. I was just kind of stoic. Scaffidi then introduced a group of veterans from the U.S. Army and Navy who carried a neatly folded American flag. The veterans extended the flag and slowly refolded it, reciting for the audience the symbolism of each fold. Worley reassured guests that Scaffidi would give the flag to the remaining family members of James Bauder Castellani and a cousin. Bauders widow died in 2011 and his sister died just days before Castellani received the email from the POW/MIA branch. Bauder is one of few who are found, but there are still an estimated 82,000 people who remain missing after fighting overseas, Scaffidi told the audience. Mondays event honored them with a POW/MIA table ceremony, executed by a group of Crescenta Valley High School ROTC members. The ceremony involves placing several materials on a round table covered by a white table cloth, such as a single yellow candle to symbolize the frailty of a lone soldier and a plate with lemon and salt that signifies the bitter fate of the soldiers who dont return home and their families tears. In his closing remarks, Scaffidi read an excerpt of President Ronald Reagans 1982 Memorial Day address: As we honor their memory today, let us pledge that their lives, their sacrifices, their valor shall be justified and remembered for as long as God gives life to this nation, he read aloud. And let us also pledge to do our utmost to carry out what must have been their wish: that no other generation of young men will every have to share their experiences and repeat their sacrifice. alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com Twitter: @r_valejandra Local leaders and families who have lost loved ones during wars gathered at Glendale City Halls war memorial Monday for a ceremony honoring the communitys fallen heroes. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), state Sen. Anthony Portantino (D-La Canada Flintridge), state Assemblywoman Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) and Mayor Zareh Sinanyan made opening remarks, urging the audience to not only honor the estimated 1.5 million Americans who have lost their lives during wars, but to remember the soldiers who do return home safely. Ruth Wong, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force and director for the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, was the events keynote speaker. She told stories about people she has come across during her years with the department, including the story of Tony, a veteran who lost his daughter and whose marriage fell apart, events that plunged him into depression and, ultimately, prison. Wong highlighted the work of the department, which has given veterans the care they need to pull themselves out of low points after returning from military service. Other speakers touched on their different experiences with soldiers or veterans, but each reiterated that veterans need more support. Portantino recalled a recent trip to Korea, where he visited the Korean War Memorial and noted that 7,000 soldiers who fought in that war remain unaccounted for. It was extremely powerful and touching to see the [names] of the thousands of Californians who paid the ultimate price, who went off to war and didnt come back, he said. Portantino, whose father served in the armed forces, said his family has struggled with depression and mental-health issues and told the audience that the challenges with mental illness that soldiers sometimes face can lead to death. I think, we as a society, have to remember and respect the veterans who come home and make sure they have the service they need, he said. To think, every day we lose a veteran to mental-health issues because we dont step up and respect and embrace those who come back. Friedman echoed those statements, adding that more needs to be done to educate young people about why the United States fights wars. She said one-fifth of young Americans dont know why the United States fought in World War II and 40% of Americans dont know anything about the Auschwitz concentration camp. Thats shocking, she said. We have to strive to teach our children history to teach them about the wars, why we fought the wars. Because if we dont do that, we diminish the memories and sacrifice that people made. She said Americans have sometimes failed, as a nation, to offer living veterans support. We have to make sure they are supported, she said. We need to make sure that every day we live the ideals that people fought for for mercy, for truth, for justice, for freedom, Friedman said. The Memorial Day event also included a POW/MIA ceremony conducted by retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. David Worley, which honored soldiers who were prisoners of war or missing in action. alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com Twitter: @r_valejandra A colossal cruise ship sailed into the Port of Los Angeles over the holiday weekend. Maybe not the biggest in the world, but certainly the biggest to ever tie up at the ports docks at San Pedro. And there may be more giant ships coming this way in the future. Norwegian Bliss, brand new, 20 stories tall and headed for a summer of cruising in Alaska, took a three-day detour while here for a spin down to Ensenada, Mexico, and back, carrying a shipload of VIPs, media and travel agents on a mini-inaugural cruise. Visitors zoomed around the top of the ship in go-karts that topped out at 33 mph on a two-story, 2,000-foot track; tried their hands at laser tag; and jumped into a swirling tube ride that drops four stories to the main pool deck. At night, they watched the live shows Jersey Boys and Havana in the main theater, or caught country music, pop or Beatles bands in various venues. Advertisement Bliss, which ranks among the top 10 cruise ships in the world in size, holds 4,000 passengers, a crew of 1,800 and is Norwegians largest and newest ship, having launched in late April in Bremerhaven, Germany. During the last month, it made its way to New York and Miami before sailing through the Panama Canal, the largest cruise ship ever to do so, according to Andy Stuart, Norwegians president and chief executive. After leaving Southern California the ship headed for Seattle, where it will be christened and then begin weeklong round-trip voyages to Alaska on Saturday. Prices start at $999 per person, double occupancy, for an inside cabin. It will return to the Port of Los Angeles in October for voyages to the Mexican Riviera, with three sailings this fall and two in April 2019. Cabin prices for the Mexican cruises start at $899 per person, double occupancy. Will NCL offer more cruises from Los Angeles? Up until now its been difficult because we couldnt take these big ships through the Panama Canal, said Stuart. But the recent widening of the canal opens up many more opportunities for us. I would expect to see more NCL ships in Los Angeles. We shouldnt let the other guys [cruise lines] have it all to themselves. The Haven is an exclusive area of Norwegian Bliss where passengers pay more but have their own pools and other amenities. (Jim Edwards ) Among its other features, Bliss has a spacious 180-degree observation lounge one of the biggest at sea, according to Stuart that was designed specifically for Alaska trips. Passengers can sit inside out of the cold and view the icy glacial waters or just find a private area to read, nap or socialize. A separate, smaller observation lounge is found in the ships exclusive Haven section. Havens prices are higher (a weeklong Alaska trip starts at $5,799 per person, double occupancy), but passengers have their own private area of the ship, with pools, a dining room, bar and other only-for-Haven-passengers perks. While the decor is handsome throughout the ship, the Haven area is particularly pleasant in a refined way. New specialty restaurants on board include Los Lobos, a Mexican diner, and the Q Texas Smokehouse. For the first time, Norwegian has a branch of Starbucks onboard and a coffee and chocolate shop, Cocos. Bliss was able to dock at the Port of Los Angeles without any problems, but a $30-million investment was necessary in Seattle because of the ships size, said Stuart. Info: Norwegian Cruise Line, (866) 234-7350 or contact a travel agent ALSO What will 2018 hurricane season bring to cruising: canceled trips or fair-weather sailing? Ready to get away from it all? Try a world cruise. Four will depart from Los Angeles next year Carnival adds more sailings to Cuba from four East Coast ports travel@latimes.com @latimestravel The story of love and sacrifice made for the protection of endangered cranes has created a stir, after the second season of The Readers, a popular Chinese literary TV program, aired a story told by a third-generation protector. Xu Tielin, a first-generation crane guardian Xu Zhuo, a third-generation crane guardian who shares her hometown with the beautiful birds, read a passage by writer Zhang Kangkang, expressing the species elegance and her whole familys connection with the conservation of the animal. Xu Tielin, a fisherman living in the Zhalong wetlands of northeast Chinas Heilongjiang province, has been devoted to crane protection for half a century, ever since he first saved an injured red-crowned crane. Xiujuan, a second-generation crane guardian In 1979, the Zhalong National Nature Reserve was founded to protect endangered red-crowned cranes. Xu Tielin and his wife became the first full-time crane breeders in China and thus first-generation crane protectors. Later, their children Xiujuan and Jianfeng joined the cause. Tragically, the brother and sister both ended up becoming martyrs for environmental protection. In 1987, Xiujuan was just 23 years old when she drowned due to exhaustion in search for a lost bird. Xiujuans younger brother Jianfeng met a similar fate, dying on the journey back from a routine nest check in 2014. Jianfeng, , a second-generation crane guardian After the passing of the second generation, the familys third generation, Xu Zhuo, Xiujuans niece and Jianfengs daughter, took over the job in the wetlands. The Xu family devoted their youth and even lives to continue the family business in wildlife protection, revealing the power of determination and faith. The Readers kicked off last year as a talk show to bring heartwarming stories to Chinese audiences through storytelling. This year saw the debut of the second series with more real and touching stories. Xu Zhuo, a third-generation crane guardian Los Angeles Times staff photographer Steve Fontanini and staff writer Charles Hillinger visited with Lulu in her Santa Barbara home. Hillingers story in the next mornings Los Angeles Times began: Theres nothing new about nudies, the pert little old lady said as she peeked out from behind the viewfinder of the early-day, hand-crank movie camera. One of the first full-length movies to be banned in theaters across the country was made with this old Bell and Howell. Leontine Lulu Phelan, 81, was talking about the movie Purity, starring Audrey Munson, filmed in Santa Barbara in 1916. Advertisement Audrey, Mrs. Phelan recalled with a chuckle, came out stark naked. Mrs. Phelan said she, too, had appeared before the camera.But not in Purity, mind you. If I had, they would have fired Audrey and hired me. Mrs. Phelans husband was Bob Phelan, pioneer motion picture cameraman who died in 1966 at the age of 81. Phelan shot many of the Charles Chaplin and Marie Dressler films. Mrs. Phelan was a film editor, her husband a cameraman when Santa Barbara was the motion picture capital of the world. Hundreds of one-, two- and three-reelers were filmed in Santa Barbara, she said. Before World War I, there were 15 movie companies based in Santa Barbara. Flying A Studios at State and Mission Streets claimed it was the largest movie studio on Earth. It had an interior stage where movies were first filmed under artificial lights. There were movie lots all over town. Many of the early custard pie comedies and railroad and cliff-hanging serials were filmed in Santa Barbara. Some of the Perils of Pauline were made here. But Santa Barbara was a small town. So, by 1917, the film studios were drifting down to Los Angeles, closer to big city backgrounds. Hollywood became the heart of it. Bob Phelans camera one of the first Bell & Howells ever made plus a number of other memorabilia from Santa Barbaras old film days are in the parlor of Lulu Phelans adobe home. The house in downtown Santa Barbara is a historic shrine. It was built in 1856 by Mrs. Phelans grandmother, Senora Ordaz de Rochin, and is known as the Rochin Adobe. ------------- The Bell & Howell camera is now at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum. This post was originally published on Oct. 16, 2015. See more from the Los Angeles Times archives here When the rain came, as Mohammad Rafiq knew it would, there was nowhere to run. The water seeped under the tarpaulin wall of his familys makeshift shelter, turning the dirt floor to mud and soaking the sacks of rice that represented most of their food. Gusts of wind ripped the bamboo-and-plastic roof, tossing the pieces like playing cards. For the record: An earlier version of this article referred to Ukhia, Bangladesh, as Ukhali. The brief storm last week offered a grim but probably mild preview of the dangers facing more than 900,000 Rohingya Muslims crammed into refugee camps in southern Bangladesh, the wettest region of a country regularly pulverized by cyclones, flash floods and landslides. With the annual monsoon rains forecast to begin within weeks, families like Rafiqs are racing to shore up their flimsy huts with rocks, sandbags, bamboo poles, plastic sheets and whatever they can scrounge, while humanitarian agencies warn of a looming disaster. Advertisement (Los Angeles Times ) We are very worried, said Rafiq, a 40-year-old father of five. The rains last for several days at a time, and then there are cyclones. No one is prepared. Rafiq was busily repairing his shelter on a muggy morning days after the storm, tying and retying knots of rope to hold sticks of bamboo in place. His children were spending nights in another familys hut; he and his wife were sleeping on mats under their tattered roof, praying more rain wouldnt fall. Pre-monsoon showers have already damaged or destroyed scores of shelters, but Rafiqs family lost more than their home: with no money, he was forced to pawn his 9-year-old daughters gold-plated earrings to raise roughly $120 to buy new bamboo and plastic sheeting. Even this wont be enough, Rafiq said. Mohammad Rafiq, 40, stands outside his rain-damaged hut in Balukhali refugee camp in Bangladesh. (Shashank Bengali / Los Angeles Times ) The upcoming monsoon, which typically runs from June through September, is the first that nearly 700,000 Rohingya refugees will spend in the camps after fleeing persecution and brutal attacks by the Myanmar army last summer. Many who survived what human rights groups have described as ethnic cleansing now confront another potentially life-threatening situation one they cannot escape. We really fear that the monsoon and cyclone seasons will create a disaster within a disaster, said Daphnee Cook, spokeswoman for the relief agency Save the Children. The low hills along the coast of southeastern Bangladesh typically receive up to 40 inches of rainfall in a month at the peak of the monsoon almost as much as Los Angeles averages in three years. To accommodate the masses of refugees who began crossing from Myanmar in August, sandy knolls were flattened and more than 1,000 acres of forests were chopped down, heightening the risk of landslides. As desperate families crowded into every available space, they built fragile huts and tents at the bottom of the hills and stacked almost atop one another along denuded slopes. The Inter Sector Coordination Group, an umbrella organization of relief agencies responding to the crisis, has said that 200,000 people need to be relocated before the rains come. On a patch of high ground in Ukhia, earthmovers are crushing hills into more flat land, but aid groups say there is only enough new space to move about 20,000 refugees. Many families have adopted a fatalistic attitude, saying they dont want to leave shelters where they are often surrounded by extended family members. After being through so much trauma, people do not want to be separated from family, said Nafeesa Shamsuddin, spokeswoman for BRAC, Bangladeshs largest relief agency, which has recruited volunteers to counsel people in waterlogged areas to move. When approached with the risks they face, a common phrase they say is: It is up to God. A sand bag weighs down the roof of a shelter in preparation for the upcoming monsoon season in Kutupalong refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh. (Munir Uz Zaman / AFP/Getty Images ) Relief groups say the rains could also damage health facilities and make dirt roads inside the refugee camps impassable, delaying the delivery of food aid and lifesaving supplies. With no plumbing, refugees rely on latrines, many of which are less than five feet deep and, if flooded, could spread sewage across the densely packed camps. Nearly one-third of latrines have been dug close to the wells that supply drinking water, creating an acute risk of contamination and outbreaks of diseases, such as cholera. Any outbreak of disease would quickly claim the lives of thousands of malnourished children given current malnutrition levels, which exceed global emergency thresholds, Cook said. Barred by authorities from receiving regular medical care in Myanmar, Rohingya Muslims have extremely low vaccination rates. In May, medical teams launched the second round of a cholera vaccination drive that has seen almost 900,000 people inoculated against the often fatal illness, which spreads through contaminated water. We have not seen in modern times a refugee population of this magnitude arriving with almost no vaccinations, said Sumbul Rizvi, who leads the Inter Sector Coordination Group. The United Nations has appealed to the international community for $951 million to meet the emergency needs of Rohingya refugees and more than 300,000 Bangladeshis living in the surrounding areas. It has received less than 20% of the funding so far, officials say. Nurul Amin, 48, repairs a hut that was damaged by pre-monsoon rains in the Balukhali camp for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. (Shashank Bengali / Los Angeles Times ) For now, the most pressing worry among refugees is fortifying their shelters. In the steamy heat, gray-haired men and barefoot children hauled 20-foot-long bamboo poles to their huts, while sweat-drenched workers dug trenches and laid tarps along hillsides to guard against flooding. The camps echoed with the thwack of hammers nailing planks into place and with the grunts of men positioning sandbags on their roofs to keep them from blowing away. In the Lombashia refugee camp, after the last rain shower, Ansar Begum scooped water out of her tent with her bare hands. Begum, 22, recalled the two-story wood-frame house that her fisherman husband, Mohammad Johar, had built in Myanmar with their savings, even after being jailed briefly by authorities who objected to Rohingya families erecting permanent structures. That house was firm during the monsoon, she said. We are back to living like beggars. She held her children close to her: a 9-year-old boy recently stricken with severe diarrhea and a 3-year-old who had already been hit with measles. We worry a lot about them getting sick, she said. When it starts to rain, I dont know what well do. We can only cry. shashank.bengali@latimes.com Shashank Bengali is South Asia correspondent for The Times. Follow him on Twitter at @SBengali Police officers in a district of southern India had an unusual assignment. They traveled from village to village early this month to tell people that some messages that had gone viral on the WhatsApp service were fake. The messages claimed that a gang from northern India had arrived to kidnap children. One showed two photographs of a man being taken away by police with the text: Please take care of your children. Dont send them alone. S.P. Pakalavan, police superintendent in the Vellore district of Tamil Nadu state, ordered officers at the 57 stations under his jurisdiction to dispel the rumor. Traveling by motorbike and auto rickshaw, some with speakers mounted on top, they covered nearly 700 villages over four days, Pakalavan said. That was the only way to pacify the panic-stricken residents, he said. Advertisement Other parts of Tamil Nadu were not so fortunate. Two people were killed in the state on May 9 by mobs that believed they were child traffickers. A man was beaten and hanged from a bridge, and separately a 63-year-old woman was lynched when she and her relatives, while traveling to a temple, reportedly stopped to hand candies to children. Police say there was no truth to the rumors and that WhatsApp has become a vehicle for mayhem and fake news in India, its biggest market with 200 million active users. Law enforcement officials say they are struggling to combat the spread of false information on the popular platform, especially messages that preach communal hatred or encourage violence. Shirish Inamdar, a former deputy police commissioner in the western state of Maharashtra, said in an interview that the messaging service has become a monster as uneducated users lack the awareness to verify rumors and educated users use the platform to spread hate. Officials with the Menlo Park-based company, which is owned by Facebook, say that policing false information is challenging because unlike Facebook, WhatsApp messages are private and encrypted and the company does not read content unless a user reports it for being offensive. The company says it is trying to educate users to be more vigilant about potentially harmful messages. WhatsApp has made communications easier and more reliable for millions of Indians, including community organizations and local police. Though sadly, some people also use WhatsApp to spread harmful misinformation, the company said in a statement to The Times. Were stepping up our education efforts so that people know about our safety features and how to spot fake news and hoaxes. According to police, at least five people were killed in southern India over the past two weeks in connection with rumors on WhatsApp of child kidnapping gangs, including some that smash skulls and devour brains. Another 10 people were beaten in related cases, police said. In Karnataka state, the messages involved violence, including videos of mobs dragging a bloodied man through the street and roughing up two unidentified men before handing them over to police. An accompanying message claimed that 400 child traffickers had arrived in Bangalore, the state capital, and said in English: Be on high alert. 3 kids were kidnapped from my friends area this morning. There were 10 guys giving biscuits and people from that area have caught all 10, and five more based on their information. Another message accused transgender people of being involved in child trafficking. Over the weekend, in the southern city of Hyderabad, a mob attacked a group of transgender women, killing one and seriously injuring two. When police arrived, onlookers reportedly attacked their vehicle, accusing them of protecting kidnappers. Some officers were injured. More than 20 suspected attackers were arrested, and police said they were placing members of the transgender community, homeless people and others at risk of beatings into shelters, or asking them to leave the city temporarily. Hyderabad police launched a campaign to urge people not to believe the social media content which is creating unnecessary panic. They were not the first instances of violence related to WhatsApp messages, authorities said. In May 2017 in the northern state of Jharkhand, police said seven innocent men were killed after messages spread about a kidnapping gang from other parts of India. Two men were arrested in the killings. In September 2015, Hindu extremists in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh spread word that a Muslim man had killed a cow which is sacred to orthodox Hindus and kept it in his refrigerator. A mob subsequently barged into his house and lynched him. Police filed charges in the killing against nearly 20 people, most of whom are out on bail. Indian political parties have used WhatsApp to rally followers, and radical groups are using it to promote communal hatred in a country increasingly divided between majority Hindus and members of minority communities, including Muslims. In a recent state election in Karnataka, party workers were among those blamed for circulating fake polls, hoaxes about the killings of Hindu activists and false claims that a Muslim lawmaker had promised unending bloodshed of Hindus if voted into power. Amid the growing outcry, and with national elections due next year, WhatsApp said this month that it had instituted new features for its group messaging option one of the most common ways that hoaxes spread rapidly giving administrators greater control over membership in the group. The company is also expected to introduce a feature that will make it more obvious when a new message has been forwarded by another user, in a bid to encourage the reader to think twice about its content. But some say that Indians will remain vulnerable to false messages that confirm their prejudices. In a society increasingly polarized along caste and religious lines, it becomes easier to exploit that through WhatsApp [messages], said Inamdar, the former police official. The ones [often] sharing communal propaganda on WhatsApp are educated people, the middle class, which we used to call the backbone of our society, he said. That is most worrying. Our law-and-order machinery, along with cybersecurity bodies, have failed miserably to judge this danger. shashank.bengali@latimes.com Twitter: @SBengali Parth M.N. is a special correspondent. ALSO Muslims faced hatred and violence in Sri Lanka. Then Facebook came along and made things worse Fake news fuels nationalism and Islamophobia sound familiar? In this case, its in India Asias newest drug war leaves more than 90 people dead in less than two weeks A suicide bomber struck outside the Afghan Interior Ministry on Wednesday, allowing several gunmen to pass through an outer gate where they traded fire with security forces, who eventually killed the attackers, officials said. Gen. Daud Amin, the Kabul police chief, said seven attackers were killed and that cleanup operations were underway. Interior Ministry spokesman Najib Danish said one policeman was killed and five were wounded. Danish said the attackers were wearing military uniforms. It appeared to be a rare victory for Afghan security forces, who have struggled to secure the capital in recent months. The Taliban and a local Islamic State affiliate have carried out a wave of attacks, mainly targeting security forces and the countrys Shiite minority, that have killed hundreds of people. Both groups have also expanded their footprint in the countryside. Elsewhere in Afghanistan, the Taliban attacked a district headquarters in the northern Takhar province, killing five members of the security forces, according to provincial police spokesman Khalil Asir. He said three civilians were wounded in the battle, which was still underway. He said 10 insurgents were killed. Advertisement In the eastern Logar province, Taliban suicide bombers attacked a police station, killing at least three police officers. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks in both provinces. In the southern city of Kandahar, a roadside bomb killed three people and wounded an additional 13, said Daud Ahmadi, spokesman for the Kandahar provincial governor. He said the victims included mechanics who had been contracted to repair Afghan army vehicles. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. As a reporter for the Mexican newspaper Excelsior, Hector Gonzalez Antonio frequently chronicled the violence engulfing his home state of Tamaulipas. Recent topics included one shootout that interrupted an Easter parade, another that killed six innocent bystanders and a group of people searching for disappeared loved ones. In January, Gonzalez wrote about the killing of a Tamaulipas journalist who was stabbed to death while waiting with his family at a stoplight. This week, Gonzalez became another victim of what he once described as the crisis of insecurity in Tamaulipas. His corpse was found Tuesday on a dirt road in the state capital, Ciudad Victoria. He had been bludgeoned to death, according to the state prosecutors office, which has not discussed possible motives. A picture released by Mexican prosecutors shows the corpse of Mexican journalist Hector Gonzalez Antonio, who was found beaten to death in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas state. (AFP/Getty Images ) Advertisement Gonzalez is the sixth journalist killed this year in Mexico, one of the deadliest countries in the world to practice journalism. Eleven journalists were slain here last year. Jan-Albert Hootsen, Mexico representative for the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, noted that Gonzalez wrote often about security and politics two notoriously dangerous topics for Mexican reporters. But he said it was too early to conclude whether he was killed in connection to his work. The group was not aware of any threats against Gonzalez, Hootsen said. Despite international outrage prompted in large part by the slaying last year of prize-winning author Javier Valdez Mexico has made little headway on preventing violence against its journalists. A government protection program for journalists under threat has enrolled hundreds but failed to reduce the numbers of those killed. Press freedom advocates say the problem is impunity. Like all crimes in Mexico, the vast majority of those targeting journalists are unsolved. News of Gonzalezs killing provoked anger among many who had worked with him. In a tweet, Pascal Beltran del Rio, the editorial director of Excelsior, described Gonzalez as a magnificent person and colleague. I join the demand for a quick investigation into this case and for justice, he wrote. Journalist Cendy Robles tweeted that Gonzalezs death is evidence that violence is out of control: It is clear that in Mexico the government is overwhelmed by organized crime. Whats next? Last year, Mexico recorded 29,159 homicides, more than any year since the country began releasing crime statistics in 1997. This year, Mexico is on track to break that record. kate.linthicum@latimes.com Twitter: @katelinthicum Fighting between Israel and Islamist movements in the Gaza Strip, which started with a sudden barrage of rockets launched into southern Israel, came to a swift end Wednesday with the announcement of a unilateral cease-fire. Over a dozen Gaza-based militias, including the military wings of the ruling Hamas movement and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, signed the agreement among themselves. Israel had blamed them for an almost 24-hour salvo of rockets and mortars that prompted a fierce Israeli response. For the record: An earlier version of this article carried a Gaza City dateline. Tarnopolsky reported from Jerusalem. Israel was not a party to the pact but indicated it will tacitly accept a cease-fire as long as they stop their terror attacks, said the Israeli army spokesman, Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis. According to the Israeli military, the Gaza-based Islamic Jihad fired about 180 Iranian-made rockets and mortar shells into Israel. The barrage included the use of a precise 107-millimeter rocket that can reach over six miles into Israeli territory. Advertisement In retaliation, the Israeli army said it struck 65 Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets throughout the Gaza Strip, including a tunnel that traversed Egypts Sinai Peninsula and penetrated half a mile into Israel. No casualties were reported in Gaza. Seven Israelis were reported wounded by shrapnel in Tuesdays rocket and mortar attack. In a joint statement announcing the agreement, Islamic Jihad took responsibility for the fusillade and indirectly elevated its profile among the factions struggling to rival Hamas hold on Gaza. The statement added, without further explanation: The time has passed when the enemy sets the rules of confrontation and alone changes the conflicts equations. The militias dedicated the day of fighting to what they described as 118 martyrs who have been killed by Israeli gunfire in weekly border clashes that started two months ago, and claimed readiness to confront with all our strength any aggression or folly perpetrated by the enemy. Israel has said that about 115 people, most of them affiliated with Hamas or other armed groups, were killed. The abrupt halt to rocket fire Wednesday supported speculation that Egypt, which borders Gaza to the south, brokered the cease-fire in the hope of avoiding the sort of conflagration that led to the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, in which over 2,000 Palestinians and about 70 Israelis, most of them soldiers, lost their lives. Egypt did not publicly acknowledge a role, but its semi-official Middle East News Agency reported that the Egyptian government will host a meeting Thursday about Gaza with the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. The Palestinian Authority has little control over Gaza and was not a party to the latest conflict or the cease-fire agreement. Implicitly acknowledging an end to the latest spurt of violence, Israels minister for regional cooperation, Tzachi Hanegbi, said he expected Hamas, which Israel holds responsible for any violence emanating from Gaza, to strike again. Any agreement with a terror organization is by definition slippery and temporary, he said during an interview on a radio news show. A terror organization is a terror organization and if it doesnt do terror, it loses its reason for being. Speaking at a public event in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Hamas of a punitive military response should it return to violence at Israels border. The Israeli army has reacted strongly, since yesterday, to the rocket fire from the Gaza Strip by attacking dozens of terrorist targets. Its the harshest blow we have dealt them in years, he said. Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations are responsible for the escalation. I dont intend to provide details of our plans, because I do not want the enemy to know what is in store for it, but one thing is clear: When they test us, they pay an immediate price. It they continue to test us, they will pay an even harsher price. News of the indirect cease-fire was transmitted to Jerusalem via Egyptian officials, according to a Foreign Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Israel has said it will meet quiet with quiet but is prepared for any scenario, according to Manelis. Elior Levy, the military affairs analyst for the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, summed up the escalation and drop in hostilities in an online post. Islamic Jihad wanted to avenge the death of its operatives and satisfy its bosses in Tehran; Hamas wanted to restore its dignity after Israel attacked its assets and wanted to claim part of the fame, but neither the Palestinian organizations nor Israel are interested in a wide-scale operation in Gaza, he wrote. On Wednesday afternoon, Israeli authorities lifted emergency conditions that had been imposed on residents of its southern communities, shuttered air raid shelters and once again permitted large public gatherings. Also Wednesday afternoon, the latest victim of the border violence was laid to rest. Naji Ghonaim, 23, died five days after he was wounded in clashes with Israeli soldiers near the southern Gazan city of Rafah. Tarnopolsky is a special correspondent. Special correspondent Hana Salah in Gaza City contributed to this report. ALSO Palestinians look to Arab governments for support, but the response is tepid In Gaza Strip protests, the anger has many targets The return of U.S. sanctions is expected to sow misery in Iran. But for those with money, theres a haven: dollars UPDATES: 12:50 p.m.: This article has been updated throughout with staff reporting, background and quotes. This article was originally published at 12:40 a.m. file pic Chinese overseas returnees, who have made great contribution to the nations groundbreaking reform and opening up, are welcoming a new era when innovation and entrepreneurship are further encouraged. Addressing a Tuesday conference on overseas returnees and reform and opening up, Wan Gang, vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference, said overseas returnees, including himself, are essential to pioneer Chinas reform and opening up with their entrepreneurship and innovation skills, which provide momentum to Chinas economic development. Chinas reform and opening up, entering its 40th anniversary this year since 1978, is hailed as a miracle in human history, according to Justin Lin Yifu, director of Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University. Back in 1978, China was one of the worlds most destitute countries in the world, with 84% of its population living with less than $1.25 every day. As of 2017, the nation has lifted 800 million people out of poverty, maintaining an average trade growth rate of 14.8%, a remarkable achievement for a country with such a low economic basis, Lin noted. The Peking University professor predicted that Chinas economic growth would become the worlds most important economic phenomenon by 2030, providing a historic opportunity for all intellectuals including returnees to tap into. Specifically, China is in demand of more innovative and creative minds amid the fourth Industrial Revolution, said Chen Shiyi, an academician with Chinese Academy of Sciences. Compared with our predecessors who have laid the foundation for Chinas development, including the development of national defense, returnees today shoulder more responsibility to boost Chinas core technology research and development, said Chen. Xiong Xiaoge, IDG Capital Global Chairman, also pointed out that the nation is ready to offer more surprise opportunities for overseas returnees in the technological sphere, including 5G communication and AI. China has witnessed a rising number of people returning to the mainland for development since 2015, the year in which the number of returnees exceeded those leaving China. As of 2017, a total of 3.13 million of returnees had traveled back to the Chinese mainland, up from 2.65 million by 2016. Wan noted that overseas returnees can also help bridge the gap between the outside world and China in the nations further opening up. Zhu Min, head of National Institute of Financial Research at Tsinghua University, agreed that the returnees, with cross-cultural experiences, can serve to help the world better understand China, whose economic scale and rapid growth sometimes appear overwhelming. Thanks to the returnees, there are now more Chinese who can understand the world than those from other countries who can empathize with China, Zhu noted, adding that Chinas development has created a new platform for people, like himself, coming back home with overseas experience. Learning how to cook at a cookery school is normal, but it's not often an option for students at other universities and in other majors. Starting this year, Southwest Jiaotong University in the Chinese city of Chengdu has made cooking an optional course, which is brand new for students there. Though the class has already reached its maximum capacity, many students continue to ask if they can apply or even just be present in the classroom. A teacher surnamed Yu said the classroom was renovated out of the schools canteen, so it's well-facilitated in order to help with teaching. Students can use the cooking facilities as they could do at home, the teacher said. He disclosed that each week 10 teachers, who all have more than 20 years of experience in the field, will show students how to cook one or two dishes. The students will not only learn theoretical knowledge and the history of Sichuan cuisine, but also learn to cook well-known Sichuan dishes such as Mapo Tofu and poached spicy slices of pork. When the semester is over, the students will cook in front of their teachers and the food will be scored by how it looks, smells and tastes. The score will go towards their course credit. Students said theyve not only learnt how to cook, but also enhanced communication with each other during the learning process. Southwest Jiaotong University is known for opening a number of creative courses other than cooking, such as handicrafts. The optional courses have improved students hands-on skills, taught them to respect labor workers, and helped them understand traditional Chinese culture and customs of different places, said a teacher at the university. The new SalusCare Center will hold its grand opening Thursday to celebrate the dedicated space for children and families who have behavioral healthcare needs. It is something we have talked about here for a little bit of time now, spokesperson Todd Cordisco said of their new Center for Growth building. We heard from the community that families dont want to sit in the same waiting room where we have our adult patients. With their Ortiz campus having 12 buildings, one of which was essentially empty, a team began taking a look at the space to see how they could retrofit it and turn it into the Center for Growth, he said. The new center, located in Building G, was a former adult residential facility. SalusCare was fortunate to possess some restricted funding available for childrens services so this became the seed money we needed to initiate this project, Cordisco said. There are still items on our wish list and opportunities for donors to support this new comprehensive center for children and families. The 4,443-square-foot space includes two full-time child psychiatrists, outpatient therapy for children and families, childrens case management, the Community Action Team, and Therapeutic Behavioral On-Site Services. The new space will include 11 offices dedicated for patient care. We are doing a lot with the space, Cordisco said. The grand opening open house will be held from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. May 31, at 2789 Ortiz Ave. in Fort Myers. A ribbon cutting will be part of the festivities. The event will include speakers, a provider and possibly a patient, as well as sharing what the Center for Growth means. Tours will also be offered. Those who wish to attend the grand opening are encouraged to RSVP to tcordisco@saluscareflorida.org. I encourage the community to come out and see what it is we offer, he said. The following Monday, they will open their doors for business and start seeing kids in the Center for Growth. Those who would like to seek services are encouraged to call the Welcome Center phone number, (239) 275-3522, where customer service representatives will help in setting up appointments. Those who are new patients will be directed to the Access Center, which is a free service where the children will receive an assessment. Cordisco said if an appointment is needed, they will be referred potentially to a psychiatrist, or outpatient therapy. Cordisco said he has heard time and time again that there are no services offered for children in the area. Fortunately, that is not true, he said. SalusCare has provided services for children for many years. During the 2017 calendar year they saw 2,300 children. We are putting services in one building and making it as convenient, welcoming and warm as possible, he said. We are here and we are ready to serve the communitys needs, especially when it comes to childrens behavioral healthcare needs. SalusCare is a merged company Lee Mental Health Center and Southwest Florida Addiction Services, which took place in 2013. We had about 75 to 80 years of combined experience, Cordisco said, at the time of the merger. The not-for-profit mental health and substance abuse service provider accepts most insurances and offers a sliding fee scale based on household income. For more information, visit www.saluscareflorida.org. Lehigh Acres Municipal Services Improvement District has decided to move Lehigh Civic Day from June 20, to July 25 this year. The event will run the entire day and be held inside the districts boardroom. Agencies, organizations and businesses that would like to take part must register by June 20. This can be a very successful event that brings a lot of agencies and organizations together, said Commissioner Michael Welch who is also the Emergency Operations director and coordinator. Commission Chair David Deetscreek is spearheading the event, which will coincide with the districts other emergency coordination efforts in preparation for the hurricane season, which begins Friday. This is the perfect time for local businesses, groups and agencies to meet and get to know more about one another and how they can work together to better serve the community, said Deetscreek. Another item on this months action agenda was the implementation of a volunteer to support Welchs emergency operations initiatives. We have the opportunity to bring someone aboard as a volunteer. His name is Mr. David Kirk. He has a lot of experience with FEMA and other emergency organizations, said Welch. Board members had some questions as to the exact role the new volunteer would play within the district. Emergency operation planning takes an enormous amount of time. Coordinating with other agencies in the area is imperative prior to this hurricane season. Mr. Kirk would serve as this coordinator and help with communication efforts, explained Welch. District board members unanimously approved the emergency operations coordinator volunteers position contingent on legal counsel drafting a more comprehensive outline of the volunteers role in the future. Other motions included the unanimous approval to authorize for emergency construction and maintenance for NRCS grants, which would allow the district to complete crucial projects within a short window of time allotted by the granting agency. The NRCS gave us an $80,000 grant that needed to be acted upon. We didnt want to lose out on these funds, so a motion was drawn up by our attorney. This allows us to facilitate these projects and get them done more quickly, as well as pre-order necessary materials ahead of time, said District Manager David Lindsay. Other items on the agenda included a review made by the districts Pre-Qualified Engineering Services Committee which presented its recommendations on engineering companies to provide services in the following areas: project engineering, surveying and mapping; GIS, geotechnical and modeling and environmental. We were a little disappointed in the submittals, but the committee has gone through and ranked the engineering services according to their experience and credentials, said Assistant District Manager Mike Cook. The district also approved the Lee County Signage Powers Agreement, which provides a step in the process for LA-MSID to acquire signage powers as provided in Chapter 2015-202, Laws of Florida. According to District Manager Lindsay, LA-MSIDs Resource and Relations Director will begin an initiative in the coming months to educate the public on the referendum and the benefits it has for the community. The Lehigh Acres Municipal Services Improvement District will hold a budget hearing on June 18, at 5 p.m., followed by its regular board meeting at 6 p.m. at the LA-MSID, at 601 East County Lane. For information, visit the their website at www.myecwcd.net Veterans returning home from duty often navigate a minefield of obstacles when acclimating themselves back into the civilian world. A lot of these men and women bring their battles home with them, coping with the post-traumatic stresses of active duty military. The American Military Veterans Foundation is currently in the works on new technology for veterans at risk; the CAMO Alert. National board member of AMMILVETS and Veteran Service Officer Keith Campbell is hoping this program will be a vital resource for veterans and help save lives. This system is to help community and law enfacement understand the severity of a missing veteran or first responder that may not be in their right thoughts, he said. This alert would be similar to Amber and Silver Alerts giving name, last known location and other details about the person sought. These alerts would be used in serious situations, when red flags arise and, potentially, even a suicide note left. Veteran suicide is an epidemic across the country, something the AMMILVETS takes very seriously. Their initiative for Florida veterans is to help our military veterans, active duty personnel and their families cope with PTSD and everyday stresses; and to educate communities about PTSD and suicides. People dont want to talk about suicide or PTSD, said Campbell, We need to stop pushing mental health to the side. According to a suicide data report conducted in 2012 by the Department of Veterans Affairs Mental Health Service Suicide Prevention Program, 22 veterans take their own life every day in America, as does one active duty solider. This may just be scratching the surface though, as this 13-year study did not include the two states with the largest populations of veterans California and Texas. Florida is home to the countrys third largest veteran population with over 1.5 million full time residents. Of all the states polled, Florida held the highest veteran suicide deaths by state, at 26 percent. Veterans can feel they are a burden to their loved ones, they think My family will be better off without me,' Campbell said. What may be surprising to some, is that 65 percent of veteran suicides are white males over the age of 50, leading the AMMILVETS to believe that some recessed thoughts come back when veterans retire and maybe have more free time to think. We get lots of crisis calls, when these men and women have down time and idle minds, bad memories can creep back. For the younger generation, they come home and dont block it out. Theyre not getting the assistance they need and are turning to drugs or alcohol. Before, it was one tour and youre done; now, these men and women are returning over and over to war zones, they get used to the adrenaline rush and search for it. Weve seen suicide by cop and even motorcycle; they look for that rush and it ends their life. David Souders, president and founder of AMMILVETS as well as a former Marine and Air National Guardsman (active side), says the biggest challenges for veterans returning home is the civilian community doesnt understand us, and we have a difficult time adapting back to an un-regimented lifestyle. Souders, with 17 years of military experience, knows what its like to return home from active duty and how tough it can be to reintegrated into everyday life. His biggest concerns are for his brothers and sisters, especially those in Florida. The number of suicides among our veteran community is the driving force behind CAMO Alert; were losing too many veterans. We can help protect veterans with mental health issues and physical disabilities with suicide prevention, along with keeping them out of the legal system, Souders added. Getting this alert into action is a process though, one the AMMILVETS are tackling head-on. Initially, state Sen. Lizbeth Benacquisto was to draft the bill and present it for approval, but in recent times, her involvement with CAMO Alert has come to a stand-still, according to AMMILVETS. Were writing the bill ourselves, with help from a local attorney who is also a veteran, along with others, Campbell said. The rest of the committee is comprised of Sauders, Joan Colosimo, a Blue Star Mother who is also on the board of directors at AMMILVETS, Megan Contreras, formerly of Wink News and Wendy Hayes-Boaz, nurse and Blue Star Mother. Campbell said they want to keep the bill simple and to the point and hope to have it done by the end of June to present in July for submission. If approved, the bill would be voted on in next fall session. Benacquisto could not be reached for comment. So how does the program work? AMMILVETS would like CAMO Alert teams established in Florida to assist with veterans that are missing or in distress. CAMO Alert teams are formed and on call 24/7, 365 days a year, whenever a veteran is in need. Local law enforcement can use CAMO Alert in quick fashion to alert communities. The program would also post updates on the situation using county, city and state-wide communications to eliminate the limitations of law enforcement. Expectations by AMMILVETS of the program include a veteran resource handbook by district to be updated annually, CAMO Alert teams to stand up, educate and bring awareness to Florida communities and PTSD and suicide prevention, State of Florida Officials to meet with established CAMO Alert teams at least once a year, CAMO Alert teams to meet quarterly with local officials and State of Florida officials working in conjuncture with CAMO Alert teams to establish Veteran Safe Zones. We want this to be a nation-wide thing, Campbell said. Wisconsin already has a similar program in place and Texas will have one as well by the end of the year. A vital resource for these men and women will be Veteran Safe Zones. Our AMMILVETS headquarters, along with other veteran centers, as well as churches and some fire stations are locations veterans can go to and feel safe, were working with communities to get them up to speed, Campbell said. These places must be drug, alcohol and weapon-free, have a friendly veteran environment and willing to offer crisis and stress management training from former veterans. We try to partner anyone feeling troubled with a peer mentor who shares similarities, usually someone from the same branch who may have fought in a similar climate who they can relate to, said Campbell. With PTSD, there is no script, you have to gain their trust, Campbell continued. We have veteran organizations all over the state we can reach out to and ask Hey, do you have any Navy guys to peer mentor, or whichever branch, and get them set up with someone they can confide in. Campbell tells of a female veteran who found success in the programs methods that potentially saved her life. We had a veteran who went missing three times in two weeks who was showing signs of wanting to end her life. We sent out a CAMO Alert on every social media platform we have and to other veteran groups. A veteran up in the Tampa area saw the alert, and found her in her vehicle in a Walgreens parking lot passed out and unresponsive in the back seat. They called police and EMS who brought her to the hospital, treated her, and released her. We were in contact with the law enforcement officer in Tampa who placed her in solace care for 5-6 days. Upon her release, she was brought down to Lee County and we provided her with the best care we could, including peer-to-peer mentoring and helping restore her military benefits. As of a couple of weeks ago, shes doing well and said CAMO Alert was the best thing that couldve happened to her. The AMMILVETS and their team are also working on different tiers of alert status, from low to severe and are reaching out to local law enforcement of how to break those levels down. Any veterans looking for support can visit the AMMILVETS headquarters at 1490 NE Pine Island Road, suite 5D in Cape Coral, or call 239-257-3410. Chinas tech giants Tencent and Alibaba remain among the top 10 brands in the world, according to the 2018 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands list released by WPP and Kantar Millward Brown on Tuesday. A total of 14 Chinese companies are now in the top-100 brand list. E-commerce platform JD and express delivery company SF were both ranked for the first time. The ranking has the highest credibility in reflecting brand position. It is concluded based on surveys from more than 3 million consumers, as well as financial and business performance reviews of each brand. Its not surprising for Chinese brands to have made such remarkable achievements given the increased national power and exploding market over the past 40 years of reform and opening up, He Maochun, director of the Research Center of Economy and Diplomacy in Tsinghua University, told Global Times on May 29. According to the report issued by Kantar Millward Brown, this year witnessed the fastest growth of non-U.S. brands, and subversive Chinese brands have made a huge impact. The value of Chinese brands is up 47% since last year, twice the figure of their U.S. counterparts, the report added. An article published on Tuesday by UK magazine Marketing Week said that Alibaba saw a 92 percent rise in brand value, rising five positions since 2017 into ninth place; fellow retailer JD increased brand value by 94 percent putting it at 59th on the list, while alcohol brand Moutais brand value jumped 89 percent taking it to 34th. These brands are the three fastest risers this year, the magazine added. On Tuesday, CNN also pointed out that Jack Ma's Alibaba has seen its brand value nearly double to $113 billion as the e-commerce company expands further into fields such as mobile payments and cloud computing. Shenzhen-based Tencent broke into the annual BrandZ top 10 in 2017, going from strength to strength over the past year. It now holds fifth place behind Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft - but above Facebook - with a brand value of $179 billion, up 65 percent compared to last year. It boasts a market capitalization of $490 billion, making it worth more than America's most valuable bank, JPMorgan Chase. Doreen Wang, the head of BrandZ, told CNN that the rise of China and savvy young consumers has created opportunities for smart entrepreneurs. More and more young Chinese consumers are falling in love with domestic brands, she explained. "While entering into US markets may still be at a preliminary stage for both brands, other regions are embracing them," she said. A 32-year-old Florida man dismantling a press at The Morning Call newspaper in Allentown died Tuesday afternoon when part of a machine apparently fell on him, city police report. City officers, EMS personnel and firefighters and the Lehigh County Coroner's Office responded after the call just before 5:15 p.m. to the newspaper at 101 N. Sixth St., Capt. Charles Roca. The Cape Coral resident, who was not immediately identified, was pinned under a piece of machinery that was being removed from the plant, Coroner Scott Grim said. The man was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m. at the scene, Grim said. The newspaper stopped printing on-site in January and now prints in Jersey City. The man was taking apart a press at the newspaper's headquarters, according to a report in the Call. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration is investigating along with police and the coroner's office, Roca said. Statement from Morning Call publisher and editor on pressroom accident: https://t.co/u80eHVoK5h pic.twitter.com/RmpCBevcSy The Morning Call (@mcall) May 29, 2018 The coroner's office will provide the victim's name once his family is fully notified, and determine the cause and manner of his death after an autopsy on Wednesday morning. "We are deeply saddened to report that an accident took the life of one of our contractors working in our production facility at The Morning Call," newspaper Publisher and Editor Robert York said in a statement published on Twitter. "Our heartfelt sympathy, thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the deceased. We are fully cooperating with authorities who are currently investigating to determine the cause of this accident." Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. The Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem had its license renewed for another five years on Wednesday. The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board voted to renew the casino operator's license for another five years following a public hearing Wednesday morning in Harrisburg. In April, the board held a public input hearing in Bethlehem's Town Hall where Sands officials made the case for extending their license and community members expressed support for renewal. The casino first opened its doors in May 2009. Since then, the gaming hall on former Bethlehem Steel Corp. land has generated almost $4 billion in gross revenue from slot machines and table games resulting in the state collecting more than $1.6 billion in gaming taxes. Its license was last renewed in April 2014. Once again, there was no acknowledgment of the pending casino sale. Parent company Las Vegas Sands Corp. announced March 8 that it plans to sell its smallest property to Wind Creek Hospitality, an affiliate of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians of Alabama, for $1.3 billion. Questions instead focused on the Sands' efforts to curb underage access to the gaming floor and how the casino stays competitive in a tightening northeast gaming market. Sands Bethlehem President Brian Carr said the casino is constantly looking at how to continue attracting guests, especially folks in the greater New York area. Its hotel renovations have been a success, he said. Sands is asking itself how to turn the Bethlehem casino more into a resort destination and getaway for our guests, Carr said. When asked if the Sands had plans to add amenities in the near future, Carr said none that he was ready to speak to Wednesday, but noted there are several options being weighed. The Sands has not filed a change of ownership and control application with the gaming oversight agency. Wind Creek Hospitality will have to go through an extensive criminal and financial background check. The board will also ensure it can afford the purchase price. The application will trigger another public hearing before the gaming board, which would eventually vote to approve or reject the sale. The Sands currently employs more than 2,400 people and has over 3,000 slot machines and 254 table games. Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. A man accused of shooting another man following an argument in the bar of an American Legion in Easton was in police custody Wednesday morning. Rashad Jones, 28, of Emmaus, turned himself in Wednesday at Easton Police Department headquarters on Fourth Street. Jones was arraigned on charges of attempt to commit homicide, aggravated assault and recklessly endangering another person. He was sent to Northampton County Prison in lieu of $500,000 bail. Jones' attorney, Brian Zeiger, did not immediately respond to a message asking about his client's charges. Police said they were called at 1:50 a.m. May 20 for a report of shots fired at the Rice Ebner/American Legion, 423 Davis St. People were leaving the bar as officers arrived, and staff reported the shooting happened in the back corner of the bar. At 1:59 a.m. police were called for a gunshot victim arriving at a local hospital for treatment. Police did not identify the man in court paperwork, but said the 31-year-old suffered a gunshot wound to his leg. The victim reportedly told police the shooting happened during an argument at the bar. The victim described the shooter, and later identified Jones from a photo lineup, police said. In May 2011, Jones was accused of firing three gunshots during an argument with another man in Easton's West Ward. Jones faced charges including aggravated assault and prohibited possession of a firearm. The case was initially dismissed in July, but the charges were re-filed in September and withdrawn three months later. In November of that year, Jones pleaded guilty to robbery in Northampton County Court for carjacking a man in the West Ward. Jones was sentenced to 2 1/2 to 5 years in state prison, records show. Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. A 41-year-old man sought by Easton police due to concerns about his well-being "was recently located and is safe," police said Tuesday. The department had put out a call Saturday for help finding Tommy Edenfield. Police Detective Benjamin Mastrofilippo provided the update Tuesday, thanking the public for assisting. Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. The decision is out of Palmer Township supervisors' hands on whether Sheetz can begin selling beer and wine at its Route 248 convenience store. But the board may decide to weigh in on the matter now before the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. "This isn't right with how they're going around this," Supervisor Jeffrey Young said during Tuesday night's regular meeting. "...It's not fair." Supervisors last November unanimously rejected the Altoona, Pennsylvania-based company's request to transfer a liquor license into the township for the 3501 Nazareth Road store. The decision before the board back then was on an inter-municipal transfer of a liquor license from Bethlehem into Palmer Township. The board based its decision on concerns about health, safety and welfare, Young said. Sheetz finding a "loophole" around the board's decision doesn't change that, he said. Sheetz had considered appealing the decision but instead found a liquor license available within the township borders: from Wing Stop at 2469 Nazareth Road. That restaurant still sells food but no alcohol, a manager said. It's up to the PLCB to approve or deny the transfer now, cutting out Palmer's official role, township Solicitor Charles Bruno said. "You're not required to do anything," he told supervisors. The board plans to consider Monday night whether to file a protest with the state board. Residents have complained about problems at the Sheetz. Supervisors' license-transfer rejection resolution last fall summed them up as "loitering, drag-racing, littering and a lack of cooperation by corporate management since the business opened." Sheetz spokesman Nick Ruffner on Tuesday said Sheetz will work with neighbors regardless of whether the company needs the board's approval. "At Sheetz, we are deeply committed to the communities we serve and are dedicated to being good neighbors and a responsible retailer. We look forward to working with the community as this process continues in order to address the concerns surrounding this liquor license," Ruffner said in a statement. A handful of residents attended Tuesday night's supervisors' meeting, far fewer than those at the board's public hearing and decision meetings last fall on the inter-municipal liquor license transfer. "It's a crock. It shouldn't be there," neighbor Paige Maitland said of beer and wine sales. "It's been nothing but a nightmare and now they want to add liquor to the mix." Neighbor Tina Walton also accused Sheetz of finding a loophole. "I think they're being extremely sneaky at this point," she said Tuesday night. Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Authorities are continuing to investigate explosions in Upper Bucks County that have been heard in neighboring Lehigh County. More than 20 explosions occurred between the hours of about 1 to 4:30 a.m. since April 2, Pennsylvania State Police Troop M officials said Tuesday. The source remained a mystery, and investigators asked for the public's help in gathering information on the incidents and who is responsible. State police are leading the investigation with help from the FBI and U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "There hasn't been any damage reported. There haven't been any injuries reported," ATF spokeswoman Charlene Hennessy said Tuesday. She said she is aware of "some craters" discovered but could not immediately comment on the size of them. Investigators "take these events very seriously and are working diligently to protect the citizens of our community," Capt. Richard D'Ambrosio and Trooper Marc Allen said in a statement from Bethlehem-based Troop M. Keeping the public safe is the No. 1 priority, the statement says. Troop M covers Bucks, Lehigh and Northampton counties. "Fortunately to date no one has been injured; however, we are attempting to prevent someone from accidentally getting injured by these explosions, including the individual responsible," the statement reads. "These events disrupt emergency response personnel from their normal course of duty, straining local resources and impeding emergency personnel from responding to other calls for service." It's possible the explosions are from "Tannerite," Hennessy said. Tannerite is a brand name that refers to a mixture of components that, separately, are not explosive and as a result are not regulated by the ATF. Visit atf.gov/explosives/binary-explosives for more on federal regulations that may apply. Some firearms enthusiasts shoot targets containing Tannerite, often in search of YouTube views. One video is said to show a Rubbermaid tote's worth of Tannerite blowing up a barn. "From what I understand they're pretty big explosions," Hennessy said. "Some people have reported their houses shaking." Exploding targets have been heard in Northampton and Warren counties, as well, and caused concern. "I would not be surprised if that's what it turns out to be," Hennessy said. State police asked anyone with information on the Upper Bucks explosions to call Lehigh Valley Crime Stoppers at 800-426-8477 (TIPS) or state police at Dublin at 215-249-9191 and ask for Trooper Jordan Houck. "We are counting on assistance from members of our community to keep our counties safe," D'Ambrosio and Allen stated. "We are asking everyone to please remain vigilant and to pay attention to events and persons around you. "Regardless of how insignificant you think your tip may be, we strongly encourage you to come forward with your information. You do have the option to remain anonymous when aiding this investigation." Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. The school bus driver charged in a crash on Interstate 80 in Morris County earlier this month that left a Paramus middle school teacher and a 10-year-old student dead was released from jail as he awaits trial. A Superior Court judge said Hudy Muldrow, 77, of Woodland Park, will remain free ahead of his trial. He was released on the condition that he turn in his driver's license and check in with pre-trial services twice a month. Muldrow is charged with two counts of death by auto in the May 17 crash with a dump truck that killed a teacher and fifth-grade student from East Brook Middle School in Paramus. Authorities say Muldrow missed an exit on Interstate 80 and later attempted to make an illegal U-turn while driving 44 passengers from Paramus to Waterloo Village on Byram on a school trip. The bus was struck from behind by a dump truck traveling in the center lane of I-80 in Mount Olive. It was ripped apart and landed on the center median of the highway. Muldrow has received eight speeding tickets over the years and his license has been suspended multiple times -- most due to parking tickets or administrative snafus. Willie Clark, a pastor at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Jersey City told reporters last week that Muldrow is "sad" but doesn't believe he did anything wrong. His son, Hudy Muldrow Jr. has said that his father is a "good driver." Alex Napoliello may be reached at anapoliello@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexnapoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips 19th Century rail service behind the times A group of six councils west of Melbourne say their residents are sick and tired of having to rely on dated rail infrastructure straight out of the 19th Century. Brimbank, Melton, Moorabool, Ballarat, Ararat and Pyrenees councils have banded together to call on the State Government for a $50 million commitment toward the electrification of the Ballarat line, ahead of the 2018 state election. Currently, the Ballarat line is only electrified to Sunshine station. The electrification shortfall is limiting the number of services running from Melbournes CBD through to Melton considerably, according to Ballarat Rail Action Committee (BRAC) spokesperson and City of Melton Mayor, Bob Turner. Electrifying the rail line to Melton will triple its carrying capacity, and allow up to 1400 people to travel on a single train. Were tired of old, out-of-date rail infrastructure literally built in the 19th Century. Its unreliable, full, slow and uncomfortable. The solution is clear; electrification of the rail line up to Melton is urgent and needs to happen now. Usage numbers on the Ballarat line have more than tripled in the past 10 years. Suburbs west of Melbourne are experiencing unprecedented population growth and the role of this railway will be fundamental in coming years. City of Ballarat Mayor, Samantha McIntosh, said that within 10 years, the rail line from Melbourne to Ballarat will require 30 trains a day, just to meet demand. Peak services to and from Ballarat are reaching capacity, and its common for our residents to have to stand for the entire hour-plus journey. Telecommunications Yeastar Adds Auto Provisioning Support for More Snom VoIP Phones Snom and Yeastar enhance interoperability 30.05.2018 12:04:09 - (live-PR.com) - XIAMEN, CHINA / BERLIN, GERMANY 30 May 2018 - Yeastar ( Yeastar auto provisioning support of Snom devices dates back to - XIAMEN, CHINA / BERLIN, GERMANY 30 May 2018 - Yeastar ( www.yeastar.com) , a leading manufacturer of VoIP PBX systems and VoIP Gateways, and Snom Technology GmbH ( www.snom.com) , a leading German manufacturer of SIP-based telephones, today jointly announced the enhanced interoperability partnership, integrating the best of breed PBX and IP phone technologies.Yeastar auto provisioning support of Snom devices dates back to its first-generation MyPBX. Investing resources and energies, Yeastar and Snom spared no efforts to guarantee interoperability. Now, the full range of Snom IP phones, including the latest Snom D785 advanced desk phone and C520 WiMi conference phone with DECT microphones, have successfully passed all interoperability tests with the Yeastar S-Series VoIP PBX and can be automatically provisioned easily and quickly. Were excited to further expand our long-term partnership with Snom, said Alan Shen, CEO of Yeastar, As more and more companies and telcos choose Snom IP phones, this auto provisioning support in Yeastar S-Series PBX is both essential and welcome to our joint customers. Yeastar and Snom are also working on bringing Snom auto provisioning support to the latest Yeastar Cloud PBX offer. Snoms Head of Interop and Integration, Mark Wiegleb, is also very excited about the closer partnership with Yeastar: The Yeastar S-Series PBX is cutting edge business telephony technology and works in perfect tandem with the Snom range of IP desk phones and IP conferencing devices. With the Snom product portfolio continuing to expand as part of our aim to become the worlds number one IP phone manufacturer, its great to have interop partners such as Yeastar. You can see Snom and Yeastars products and meet the teams in person at this years CeBIT in Hanover, Germany between 11-15 June 2018 on Stand C84(Snom), and Stand D134(Yeastar), Hall 13. About Yeastar Yeastar specializes in the design and development of innovative telecommunications equipment, including VoIP PBX systems and VoIP gateways for the SMB. Founded in 2006, Yeastar has established itself as a global leader in the telecommunications industry with a global partner network and over 100,000 customers worldwide. Yeastar products have been consistently recognized in the industry for their high performance and innovation. For more information about Yeastar or to become a Yeastar partner, please visit About Snom A leading global premium brand for innovative professional and enterprise VoIP phones, Snom is headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Founded in 1997, Snom is a pioneer in the VoIP industry, launching the worlds first IP phone in 2001. Today, Snoms product portfolio meets the full spectrum of business communications requirements of call centers, conference rooms and executive management through to safety-conscious industrial environments. A subsidiary of VTech Holdings Limited since 2016, Snom has offices in Italy, the UK, France and Taiwan and enjoys an excellent global reputation in the Voice-over-IP market. Snoms products are renowned for their technical innovation, aesthetic design, user-friendliness and outstanding audio quality. The current product portfolio is universally compatible with all leading PBX platforms and Snom products have won numerous awards around the world from independent experts. Engineered in Germany, Snoms IP solutions also make an excellent choice for vertical markets, such as healthcare and education, when searching for specialized solutions in business communications, IoT and smart technologies. Visit its first-generation MyPBX. Investing resources and energies, Yeastar and Snom spared no efforts to guarantee interoperability. Now, the full range of Snom IP phones, including the latest Snom D785 advanced desk phone and C520 WiMi conference phone with DECT microphones, have successfully passed all interoperability tests with the Yeastar S-Series VoIP PBX and can be automatically provisioned easily and quickly.Were excited to further expand our long-term partnership with Snom, said Alan Shen, CEO of Yeastar, As more and more companies and telcos choose Snom IP phones, this auto provisioning support in Yeastar S-Series PBX is both essential and welcome to our joint customers. Yeastar and Snom are also working on bringing Snom auto provisioning support to the latest Yeastar Cloud PBX offer. Snoms Head of Interop and Integration, Mark Wiegleb, is also very excited about the closer partnership with Yeastar: The Yeastar S-Series PBX is cutting edge business telephony technology and works in perfect tandem with the Snom range of IP desk phones and IP conferencing devices. With the Snom product portfolio continuing to expand as part of our aim to become the worlds number one IP phone manufacturer, its great to have interop partners such as Yeastar.You can see Snom and Yeastars products and meet the teams in person at this years CeBIT in Hanover, Germany between 11-15 June 2018 on Stand C84(Snom), and Stand D134(Yeastar), Hall 13.About YeastarYeastar specializes in the design and development of innovative telecommunications equipment, including VoIP PBX systems and VoIP gateways for the SMB. Founded in 2006, Yeastar has established itself as a global leader in the telecommunications industry with a global partner network and over 100,000 customers worldwide. Yeastar products have been consistently recognized in the industry for their high performance and innovation. For more information about Yeastar or to become a Yeastar partner, please visit www.Yeastar.com About SnomA leading global premium brand for innovative professional and enterprise VoIP phones, Snom is headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Founded in 1997, Snom is a pioneer in the VoIP industry, launching the worlds first IP phone in 2001. Today, Snoms product portfolio meets the full spectrum of business communications requirements of call centers, conference rooms and executive management through to safety-conscious industrial environments.A subsidiary of VTech Holdings Limited since 2016, Snom has offices in Italy, the UK, France and Taiwan and enjoys an excellent global reputation in the Voice-over-IP market. Snoms products are renowned for their technical innovation, aesthetic design, user-friendliness and outstanding audio quality. The current product portfolio is universally compatible with all leading PBX platforms and Snom products have won numerous awards around the world from independent experts.Engineered in Germany, Snoms IP solutions also make an excellent choice for vertical markets, such as healthcare and education, when searching for specialized solutions in business communications, IoT and smart technologies.Visit www.snom.com to find out more about Snom Technology GmbH Contact information: Snom Technology GmbH Wittestrae 30G 13509 Berlin Contact Person: Heike Cantzler Phone: +49307890760 eMail: eMail Web: http://www.snom.com Author: Peter Link e-mail Web: http://www.united.de Phone: +49 30 7890760 30.05.2018 12:04:09 - Disclaimer: If you have any questions regarding information in this article please contact the author. Please do not contact Live-PR.com. We are not able to assist you. Live-PR.com disclaims content contained in this article. Live-PR.com is not authorized to give any information about content and not responsible for content posted by third party. Stock Market News Analysts wary of reports of 11th hour deal on Italian government 30-05-2018 10:31 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Inspired by the aesthetics of classic automobiles, its elegant curves and design, the Vintage Rally collection expresses a perfect pairing between the automobile and watch world. Perfectly in line with the performance of Austin Healey automobiles, Frederique Constant launches each year limited Vintage Rally timepieces inspired by the Manufactures passion for racing. This collaboration celebrates the long-term partnership of fourteen years of the two prestigious brands, where craftsmanship and high-precision are at the heart of their common values. Vintage Rally Healey Chronograph Automatic in stainless steel featuring a green dial with white counters Frederique Constant Since 2004, Frederique Constant has been sponsoring vintage car rallies worldwide. Often being the official timekeeper for world renowned events celebrating classic automobiles. In 2018, the brand supports once again the European Healey Club as the official Gold-Sponsor for their 5th European Healey Meeting held in the Black Forest in Germany, a diversified area for driving or racing. The participants of the EHM 2018 event will discover a presentation of the collection during a gala event. The Swiss Healey Club met in May in Yverdon-les-Bains. On this occasion, a friendly race was organized around the citys lake with more than sixty automobiles present. Next July, the Healey Club France will participate in the Le Mans Classic 2018 rally with the race team consisting of the Austin Healey 3000 MK II 54 FAC of Jetze Visser and the drivers Jan Lammers and Jaap Sinke. The new limited editions These three Vintage Rally Healey Chronograph Automatic embody the alliance of timeless watchmaking know-how and the expertise of automobile engineering. The timepieces reflect shared values: a passion for racing, performance, backed by excellence. These models pick up the DNA from the iconic design of the 1960s British automobiles, paying tribute to their classic design. Featured with a 42mm diameter stainless steel or rose gold plated case, it provides enough space for readability. The use of stainless steel delivers outstanding results in terms of weight and resistance. The convex sapphire crystal over the dial resists to shocks and scratches, making it an ideal material when subjected to the stress of racing. It is up to 5 meters water resistant and makes an ideal partner for the outdoors environment. Vintage Rally Healey Chronograph Automatic in stainless steel featuring a silver dial with grey counters Frederique Constant The dial is available in three versions: green with white counters, silver with grey counters and navy with white counters. The hands and Arabic numerals on the dial are enhanced by luminous treatment, thus enabling intuitive reading by day or night. It displays a date window at 3 oclock, the Healey logo at 6 oclock and a seconds window at 9 oclock. Case back view Frederique Constant The FC-397 automatic chronograph movement can be admired with the see-through case back. The 25 jewels Swiss-made caliber, beating at 28800 per hour, delivers 46h of power reserve. An outsourced movement is responsible for indicating the hours, minutes, seconds and date functions. It also powers the measurement of elapsed time by means of the chronograph, which is started and stopped by the pusher at the 2 oclock position, and the pusher at 4 allows you to reset the chronograph counters to zero. Frederique Constant Limited to just 2888 pieces, the Vintage Rally Healey Chronograph comes with a luxurious gift box including a Healey NOJ393 miniature automobile. Theses sporty watches are equiped with leather straps perforated in the style of driving gloves, which adds a sportive and elegant look to the wrist. Stock Market News Credit Suisse drops target on Dixons on 'challenging outlook' 30-05-2018 14:09 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Stock Market News Europe close: Italian stocks bounce, but analysts remain cautious 30-05-2018 19:05 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Stock Market News Live Company prepares launch of BRICKLIVE kids in China 30-05-2018 16:06 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Stock Market News Market buzz: Rise in Brent gives BP, Shell a lift 30-05-2018 10:11 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Stock Market News Phoenix launches capital raising to help fund acquisition 30-05-2018 09:13 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Stock Market News Thursday preview: Consumer credit figures in the spotlight 30-05-2018 19:21 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Stock Market News Wednesday newspaper round-up: RBS, nuisance calls, M&S, Shire 30-05-2018 07:13 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Stock Market News Xtract Resources narrows loss after reporting first revenues 30-05-2018 14:57 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi is due to take the oath of office before Egypt's parliament on Saturday, following his re-election for a second term with a landslide victory almost two months ago. Under the Egyptian constitution, the country's president must take the oath before a special session of the parliament after winning elections and before his presidential term officially starts, which in El-Sisi's case begins on June 3. El-Sisi won a second term in office in a March election with 97 percent of the votes, the same proportion that the former military commander secured four years ago. Voter turnout was 41 percent in the election, which included only one other candidate, Ghad Party head Moussa Moustafa Moussa. Al-Ahram Arabic website said on Monday that around 1,000 people are expected to attend the swearing-in session, including ambassadors, party heads, top government officials and Muslim and Christian clerics. Search Keywords: Short link: The beginning of the school year when you got to show off your new duds, new cars, new looks! Sports! Playing, cheering, watching high school athletics. The arts: Dramatic arts, musical groups and shows, graphic arts groups, debate, etc. The prom! No dancing the night away or punch bowl antics. The daily interactions. Just being with the group, hanging with friends and classmates. Access to college recruiters and advisors its harder to line up higher education. Walking onstage to get a diploma while all the family is watching with everyone elses family. Vote View Results 'Egypt stands by Belgium's friendly government and people in this hardship,' a foreign ministry statement said Egypt's foreign ministry has condemned in a statement Wednesday Belgium's Liege shooting on Tuesday, offering deep condolences to the families of victims and hopes of speedy recovery for the injured. "Egypt stands by Belgium's friendly government and people in this hardship," the statement said. Two policewomen and a male bystander were killed in the eastern Belgian city of Liege Tuesday in an attack that amounts to terrorist murder, prosecutors spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt said. Several police officers were wounded in the shooting. The statement affirmed Egypt's rejection to all forms of terrorism regardless of any reasons or justifications, stressing the importance of combining international efforts to combat this phenomenon. The Belgium authorities ahs arrested one suspect in the case. Search Keywords: Short link: Egypt's Administrative Control Authority (ACA) said on Wednesday that a number of supply ministry officials have been recently arrested for receiving more than EGP 2 million in bribes. The arrested officials include the chairman of Food Industries Holding Company, his office manager, and the ministers media consultant and consultant for political communication, according to the statement the ACA released. They are accused of receiving bribes from food supply commodities companies in return for issuing direct supply orders and facilitating payment of dues. ACA officers have seized documents related to the case and are currently undergoing procedures to refer the defendants to prosecution, the statement read. The officials were arrested on Tuesday inside the Ministry of Supplies and Internal Trades headquarters in Cairo. The case is not the first in recent years to involve corruption inside the supply ministry. In 2016, former minister of supply Khaled Hanafy resigned over alleged corruption and graft in the wheat supply sector. In January 2018, the prosecution of public funds dropped Hanafy as a defendant in case involving the squandering of public funds in the ministry. The Administrative Control Authority, the state body responsible for enforcing laws and regulations within state bodies, has been waging a national campaign on corruption in recent years. In 2015 then-minister of agriculture Salah Helal and his office manager were arrested on bribery charges. In 2017, they were sentenced to 10 years in prison. Search Keywords: Short link: To access our in-house intelligence please request a trial here. Read this article and more for a 30 day period. Are you already an Managing IP subscriber? Login here Ann De Clercq 168 It is hard to know if you have the requisite traits to be an IP lawyer or whether the career path is right for you. Managing IP spoke to four leading female IP practitioners about their professional trajectories and the advice they would give to those who are considering a career in IP. Dont be afraid to try again Hanna-Maija Elo is partner and co-founder of the Finnish firm Properta Attorneys, but speaking to Elo it is clear that the road to success is not always straightforward. I would recommend practising in the IPRs field as the significance of IPRs is always growing, and it is a very interesting area of law Hanna-Maija Elo I didnt get into law school the first time round, she says. I didnt pass the entrance exam, but I had also done an exam for technical university that year and accepted a place to study chemistry. The whole time I was there I knew I wanted to be at law school, so the next year I tried again, studied harder and was finally accepted. After graduating from the Law Faculty of Helsinki University, Elo worked as a trainee judge in the Tuusula District Court. She then found a position at a trade mark agency and continued her work in the field from there. Now Elo is one of the founders of Properta Attorneys and has protected brands for companies such as adidas. Speaking about barriers for women in law in Finland, she says that there were no hurdles that were particular to women: In Finland the majority of students in law schools for many years have been women. Of course as partners in law firms women are still in a small minority. She explains this disparity is probably due to the responsibility of childcare, which can be difficult to balance with the workload of a partner. However, she also explains that in Finland, in order to be a partner, a practitioner must be a member of the Finnish Bar Association. Only about 30% of the members in this association are women, and she therefore suggests that women are choosing to avoid this type of work altogether. Instead, many are working as counsel for companies or following other paths in law. When asked about advice for students thinking of a career in IP, Elo says: Legal studies and graduating from law school provide an excellent grounding for many different kinds of work, and it is therefore something I would strongly recommended. She continued: I would recommend practising in the IPRs field as the significance of IPRs is always growing, and it is a very interesting area of law. Challenges make you a stronger lawyer Few know from a young age that their destiny will be in IP. But Julianna Tabastajewa, partner at Gowling WLG in Russia, was one of them: My father was a Minister of Arts and Science in the Republic of Khakassia (Siberia) and supported theatres, museums, painters, publishing houses in their activities. For this support, he needed a good IP lawyer. He found it difficult to find anyone, but I was more than willing to help him. I always had a strong sense of wanting to protect peoples work. You should be open to new knowledge and not be afraid of challenges as they make you stronger. To be successful, qualifications are what matter, not your gender Julianna Tabastajewa She went on to study law and completed a PhD focused on intellectual property aspects in unfair competition. During her career, Tabastajewa has worked on high-profile cases for car manufacturers in Germany and has been involved in ground-breaking cases in the Russian courts. Tabastajewa speaks positively about gender in the workplace in Russia: I dont think there are any real obstacles in the legal profession for women in Russia. In fact, most of the judges in Russian courts are women. If you are professional you can achieve anything. She adds that during an internship in Germany, she noticed a slight difference. She enjoyed her time just as much and was never discriminated against, but there were noticeably fewer women than men. To succeed in IP, you definitely need a certain mindset, she says. You should be open to new knowledge and not be afraid of challenges as they make you stronger. To be successful, qualifications are what matter, not your gender. She also suggests that having a mentor is a great tool in your career. Acquire experience Ann De Clercq is the owner and founder of De Clercq & Partners. She has a PhD in plant molecular biology and spent time working in Munich before building her firm in Belgium. To be successful in IP you need to be sociable, outgoing and able to express yourself both orally and in writing Ann De Clercq De Clercq explains how she decided IP was the right choice for her: I didnt know what IP was when I started university. I was doing a PhD in collaboration with a company that had a patent department and found the combination of legal and technical matters interesting. She realised this could be an interesting avenue to pursue and so after finishing her PhD, De Clercq became an examiner at the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich. She recommends this to others thinking of a career in IP: It helped me a lot to be in the EPO first. Knowing how the office works makes an understanding of IP very natural. When asked about being a woman in IP and any advice she had for students thinking about a career in this area, she says: In general I would not say that women face particular barriers. It is a business with a lot of female professionals. She advises students to take some extra courses in IP during their degree and adds: To be successful in IP you need to be sociable, outgoing and able to express yourself both orally and in writing. To those uncertain about IP she says: Talk to a patent attorney and get a hands-on sense of what they do. She also suggests that studying law is not the only path, reminding students that we need a lot of students from multiple disciplines in IP. Have a good support structure There is an imbalance and though there are certain areas that are more open to women, generally it does remain a mans world Louise Myburgh Louise Myburgh is a partner at Spoor & Fisher in Cape Town, South Africa. She did not consider IP law before university. She did a business degree and a degree in industrial psychology. It was while studying that she had her first taste of law working as a judges registrar. From the outset I found the work really interesting, she says. When I began doing law I found it enjoyably challenging and IP gave me a tremendous amount of satisfaction as you can see what youve been working on in the marketing on the shelves. Talking about inclusivity in the legal profession and IP, Myburgh says: I do not think the legal profession, broadly speaking, is inclusive. There is an imbalance and though there are certain areas that are more open to women, generally it does remain a mans world. She added: Men are traditionally seen as more successful, but that is changing. Myburgh comments on the challenges of the job: One of the things is the pace at which you have to perform. You are expected to be available 24/7 and it is very difficult to switch off. This makes it hard to find a balance and make time for other things you may be interested in. However, she continues to emphasise that despite this, she loves her work because you can see how things develop and work with very interesting people. She leaves some parting advice to future lawyers: It is very important to have a strong support structure but you must also believe in yourself. Be sure it is what you want to do. If you are uncertain, it is very difficult to be successful. The material on this site is for law firms, companies and other IP specialists. It is for information only. Please read our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Notice before using the site. All material subject to strictly enforced copyright laws. 2021 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC. For help please see our FAQs. Share this article Jakarta : India and Indonesia today agreed to upgrade their ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership as the two countries signed 15 agreements including one on defence cooperation after extensive talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Joko Widodo here. Prime Minister Modi, who arrived here last night on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, was accorded a red carpet welcome on his arrival at the Merdeka palace, one of the presidential palaces in Indonesia. The two leaders had a tete-e-tete before the delegation-level talks. In a joint press statement after the talks, Modi said India and Indonesia have agreed to upgrade their ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. During the meeting, the two leaders highlighted potential areas of cooperation in marine, economy, and socio-culture as well as discussed regional and global issues. Modi said that India's Act East Policy and the vision of SAGAR (Security and Growth for all in the Region) matches President Widodo's Maritime Fulcrum Policy. He also said that India and Indonesia will double their efforts to take bilateral trade to USD 50 billion by 2025. Recalling the visit of ASEAN leaders in January to attend the Republic Day parade, Modi said India-ASEAN partnership can become a guarantee of peace not only in Indo-Pacific region but also beyond it. He strongly condemned the recent terror strikes on three churches in Indonesia's second-largest city Surabaya, and said India stands resolutely with Jakarta in the fight against terror. How Far Is it from North Korea to Italy? Almost 5500 miles ( 8,800 kilometers ) . Thats the distance between Pyongyang and Rome. It seems a lot, right? But not for gold, the truly global monetary asset. In recent days, the price of the yellow metal has immediately reacted to the developments around both North Korea and Italy. What has happened? Love Is a Battlefield As Pat Benatar beautifully sang, love is a battlefield. The same applies to the gold market. The chart below shows the price of gold in 2018. As one can see, the price of the yellow metal dived on May the 15th below $1,300 just to rebound several days later. Chart 1: Gold prices in 2018 (London P.M. Fix, in $). What happened? Well, gold plunged because of the rebound in the greenback. The U.S. dollar strengthened partially (aside the Eurozones problems and rising yields on American Treasuries) because of the eased conflict over the Korean Peninsula. President Trump was supposed to meet with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June. But Trump pulled out of the June the 12th summit on Thursday, sending gold prices again above $1,300. Diplomatic negotiations are a battlefield. However, as the chart below shows, the jump was temporary and the price of gold has gradually fallen since Friday. As we constantly repeated, geopolitical factors in general, and threats from the North Korea in particular, have only short-lived and limited impact on the gold prices. Chart 2: Gold prices (London P.M. Fix, in $) from May 25 and May 28. Good Morning Italy with Your Elections Fast teleportation to Italy with the spaghetti al dente, strong coffee, and political instability. On Monday, Italys President Sergio Mattarella nominated Carlo Cottarelli, a former International Monetary Fund official, as interim prime minister with the goal to pass the next budget and to plan snap elections in the autumn or early next year. The decision to appoint Cottarelli, was a surprising move, as it means a conflict with the anti-establishment forces which gained the majority of votes in March elections. President Mattarella vetoed the 5-Star Movement and Leagues choice of a euro-sceptic Paolo Savona as economy minister, because he had threatened to pull Italy out of the Eurozone. He explains this move, saying: The uncertainty over our position has alarmed investors and savers both in Italy and abroad. Membership of the euro is a fundamental choice. If we want to discuss it, then we should do so in a serious fashion. Hence, President clearly wanted to calm financial markets. But it might be a bears favor. You see, snap elections may lead to an even stronger mandate for the countrys populist parties. The Presidents decision might be interpreted as desperate and disrespectful for popular vote establishments maneuver to remain in power. It is grist for the populists mill. Hence, the euro declined again the U.S. dollar, as investors are afraid that anti-euro forces will strengthen in Italy. And more weakness might come. The Italys snap election in autumn could create a problem to ECB which considers to start winding down its quantitative easing program by September. If the central bank postpones the reduction of its monetary accommodation, the U.S. is likely to strengthen further, putting the yellow metal under downward pressure. Implications for Gold As we have argued in our Gold News Monitor and Market Overview for a long time, gold behaves like a currency. But its not a typical currency, as it is not linked to any particular country or economy. Gold is a real international monetary asset, the ultimate safe haven against global turmoil. Indeed, on Thursday, its price jumped in reaction to Trumps cancellation of the meeting with Kim Jong Un. But it started to decline soon after, partially to the revived hopes that the U.S. President would eventually meet with the North Korean leader (investors should always remember about Trumps unique negotiation and communication style). But the gold prices reacted also to the developments in the Old Continent, i.e. to concerns about the snap election in Italy. Adding to these worries was news that Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy would face a vote of confidence on Friday (as dozens of people linked to the ruling center-right Peoples Party were convicted of corruption). Another potential hit for the euro. In consequence, Italian and Spanish borrowing costs relative to Germanys increased substantially. So the U.S. dollar bulls should have a good time for a while. But we cannot say the same about gold bulls, at least in the near future. Investors should also remember that the Volcker rule might be soften soon, which should support the financial sector, reducing additionally the safe-haven appeal of gold. Stay tuned! If you enjoyed the above analysis and would you like to know more about the gold ETFs and their impact on gold price, we invite you to read the April Market Overview report. If you're interested in the detailed price analysis and price projections with targets, we invite you to sign up for our Gold & Silver Trading Alerts . If you're not ready to subscribe at this time, we invite you to sign up for our gold newsletter and stay up-to-date with our latest free articles. It's free and you can unsubscribe anytime. Arkadiusz Sieron Sunshine Profits Market Overview Editor Disclaimer All essays, research and information found above represent analyses and opinions of Przemyslaw Radomski, CFA and Sunshine Profits' associates only. As such, it may prove wrong and be a subject to change without notice. Opinions and analyses were based on data available to authors of respective essays at the time of writing. Although the information provided above is based on careful research and sources that are believed to be accurate, Przemyslaw Radomski, CFA and his associates do not guarantee the accuracy or thoroughness of the data or information reported. The opinions published above are neither an offer nor a recommendation to purchase or sell any securities. Mr. Radomski is not a Registered Securities Advisor. By reading Przemyslaw Radomski's, CFA reports you fully agree that he will not be held responsible or liable for any decisions you make regarding any information provided in these reports. Investing, trading and speculation in any financial markets may involve high risk of loss. Przemyslaw Radomski, CFA, Sunshine Profits' employees and affiliates as well as members of their families may have a short or long position in any securities, including those mentioned in any of the reports or essays, and may make additional purchases and/or sales of those securities without notice. Arkadiusz Sieron Archive 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication. Egypt's general prosecution ordered on Wednesday the four-day detention pending investigation of four supply ministry officials on charges of receiving bribes from food commodity trading firms. The defendants are the chairman of the state-owned Food Industries Holding Company (FIHC), his office manager, a supply ministry spokesman and a supply ministry adviser responsible for coordination with parliament. Egypt's state news agency MENA reported on Tuesday that the officials have been arrested. The officials are accused of receiving EGP 2 million in bribes from food supply firms in return for issuing direct supply orders and facilitating payment of dues. The case is not the first in recent years to involve corruption within the supply ministry. In 2016, then-minister of supply Khaled Hanafy resigned over corruption and graft in the wheat supply sector. Earlier this year, Hanafy was removed from a legal case investigating the alleged corruption. The Administrative Control Authority, which is responsible for enforcing laws and regulations within state bodies, has been waging a state-wide campaign on corruption in recent years. In 2015, then-minister of agriculture Salah Helal and his office manager were arrested on corruption charges, and were sentenced to 10 years in prison in April 2017. Search Keywords: Short link: Egypt's foreign ministry released a statement on Wednesday saying that it rejects recent criticisms by the EU over what the European body described as the arrest of political activists in the country. The foreign ministry affirmed that Egyptian authorities do not target critics or human rights activists, and described the EUs comments as a misreading of the situation in Egypt. Earlier on Wednesday, the EU spokeswoman for foreign affairs and security policy voiced concerns over what she described as "the increasing number of arrests of human rights defenders, political activists and bloggers in the latest weeks in Egypt," adding that these events are "a worrying development." Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said that Cairo completely rejects the spokeswoman's statements, which he described as "inaccurate," adding that the comments "do not serve the channels of dialogue and partnership between Egypt and the European Union." "No citizen in Egypt gets arrested or tried because of their activity in the field of human rights, or for criticising the Egyptian government, but [they get arrested] for committing crimes punishable by law," the statement read. Over the past few weeks, Egyptian authorities have arrested and detained a number of people over charges including broadcasting false news and working with a terrorist organisation. Abu Zeid also expressed in the statement Egypt's concerns over human rights conditions in the European Union, which he says include the ill-treatment of migrants and refugees. The spokesman also highlighted the rise of extremist right-wing movements and parties in Europe and the associated racism, violence and hate speech. Search Keywords: Short link: On 24 May, the Spanish National Court finally ruled on the Gurtel corruption scandal. The verdict condemned the former treasurer of the ruling Popular Party (PP) and other high-ranking members for an illegal kickbacks-for-contracts scheme, and also determined the party as a whole had benefited from corruption. The Socialist Party (PSOE) responded by filing a no-confidence motion, which will be discussed on 31 May and 1 June and could bring the government down after seven years in power. The verdict on the Gurtel case was widely expected and is one of many corruption scandals affecting the PP. Still, the court ruling means that Spain is currently led by a party that has been condemned for corruption and was described by the police anti-corruption unit (UDEF) as acting as a criminal organisation. Over 800 high-ranking officials at all levels of the party have been indicted for corruption. Parliamentary arithmetic The leader of PSOE, Pedro Sanchez, filed the motion of no-confidence in parliament, which requires a majority backing (176 MPs) to bring down the Rajoy government. Sanchez came to power in the PSOE over a year ago on the basis of a promise to file a motion of no-confidence against the PP. As soon as he was elected he forgot his promise ever since he has loyally supported the PP on the repression of Catalan political rights, the issue that has dominated the parliamentary agenda. The PP government emerged severely weakened from the 2016 election and has ruled on the basis of the support from the extreme liberal party Ciudadanos (Cs). Last week, it could only get its budget passed by adding the votes of Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) to those of Cs. The initial impact of the motion of no-confidence was to put both the PNV and Cs in a difficult position. They had just supported the budget of a corrupt party, but it would be difficult to justify voting against the motion of no-confidence. PSOE loyally supported the PP on the repression of Catalan political rights, and the Cs benefited from Spanish chauvinism / Image: fair use From the point of view of Cs this could not have come at a worse moment. In the last few months there has been a clear shift amongst important sections of the ruling class, which are now abandoning the PP and throwing their weight behind Cs as the party best placed to carry out the policies Spanish capitalism requires. Cs has benefited from the wave of Spanish chauvinism arising out of the Catalan crisis and has the advantage of being as-yet-untarnished by public office. In many recent opinion polls Cs has overtaken PP and it was preparing to increase its advantage in the regional and municipal elections next year. The PSOE coming to power through a motion of no-confidence is the last thing it needs. In order not to appear as defending a corruption-tainted government, Cs asked Rajoy to call early elections instead. If he refuses, then Cs would propose its own motion of no-confidence, but rather than form its own government, it would use it to move quickly towards early elections. This subterfuge does not even have any basis in parliamentary procedure. Rajoy cannot call early elections once the motion of no-confidence has been filed and Cs does not have enough MPs to file its own. Perilous waters for Pedro Sanchez Sanchez on the other hand is navigating perilous waters. For his motion to pass he needs the vote of Podemos, which has already pledged its support. Additionally, it would have to get the support of the Catalan and Basque nationalists (ERC, PDECAT and PNV, EH Bildu). This has already been used by the PP in a hysterical campaign accusing Sanchez of making deals with the separatists who want the break-up of Spain. Coming to power on the basis of a no-confidence motion would be a disaster for Sanchez / Image: PSOE Still, for such an array of forces to get a majority, the votes of PNV are required. Last week, the PNV reached a deal with the PP in exchange for voting through the budget. That was already a hard pill to swallow for the PNV, because it took place at a time when the PP was blocking the formation of a new government in Catalonia by vetoing several of its members who are in jail or in exile. In exchange, the PNV received investments in the Basque Country. At this time, the PNV is not interested in early elections as its deal with the PP might damage it in the polls. It has demanded from the PSOE that it should govern on the basis of the existing PP budget. Meanwhile, the Catalan nationalists of ERC and PDECAT seem inclined to vote for the PSOE motion of no-confidence with the aim of getting rid of the PP. The PNV has indicated that it will vote for the motion but only if the Catalans do. The left-wing Basque independence party EH Bildu has already said that while Sanchez is not part of the solution they would under no circumstances prop up a PP government. Unidos Podemos (the coalition between Podemos and IU) has said it will support the motion and has offered to back a PSOE government with a social agenda. Furthermore, Pablo Iglesias has indicated that if the motion from PSOE were to fail, he would present his own, with a neutral candidate. in order to then move towards calling early elections (something even Cs would find difficult to reject). In the next two days we will see all sorts of negotiations and horse trading behind the scenes. The PP will try to stay in power at all costs, as in early elections it would be severely hit. There is even talk of Rajoy stepping down in favour of his deputy, thus throwing a spanner in the works of PSOEs no-confidence motion. However, it is highly unlikely this government will survive. The PSOE will try to please everyone, offering to let the PNV keep the deal they got from the budget, try to put Cs in an impossible situation, etc. The PNV will try to put a price to its vote. In this context of parliamentary quid pro quo, Unidos Podemos has very little chance of gaining any real concessions from the PSOE. What the ruling class wants is the least amount of disruption to the normal functioning of a government willing to implements its programme. So far the PP has played this role, but once it is clear that it has become a spent force the ruling class will have no qualms about using a replacement, be that in the form of the Cs or PSOE, or a combination of both. No illusions in PSOE The coming to power of a PSOE government, whether as an interim arrangement leading to early elections or a longer set up exhausting the current parliament (2020), in itself would not mean a fundamental change in policies. The PSOE leadership is part of the 1978 regime and has shown it in all crucial junctures in the last 40 years. In the recent past it agreed with the PPs reform of the constitution, enshrining fiscal austerity in article 135 (as the troika requested) and has fully backed the assault on Catalan democratic rights. A PSOE government could come to power through this motion of no-confidence with the backing of the left and Catalan and Basque nationalists, only to implement right-wing policies with the backing of PP and Cs on a case by case basis. The likely removal of the PP from office however, will lift a heavy weight on the minds of millions of working people in Spain. The idea that this right-wing, corrupt party had carried out a policy of cuts for so many years and been involved in so many scandals and yet remained in power had the effect of breeding pessimism. A PSOE government would immediately be under pressure to make concessions on several fronts, first of all to the pensioners movement, which has taken the streets in recent months. For this reason, a mass mobilisation would be required outside parliament. Rather than allowing everything to be decided behind closed doors, Podemos and United Left should be calling mass demonstrations outside the building, so that the removal of the PP is won not only by parliamentary arithmetic but also by the pressure of the masses. Kick out the PP, in parliament and the streets! As the Spanish comrades of Lucha de Clases have said: We must kick this government out, in parliament and in the streets. Podemos and United Left should call mass demonstrations, so the removal of the PP is won not only by parliamentary arithmetic but also by the pressure of the masses / Image: Isabel Serra All conditions exist for such a movement. There is growing discontent over a growing assault on democratic rights and freedom of expression. We have witnessed the movement of the pensioners and the huge mobilisation of women in the 8 March feminist strike and against the reactionary male chauvinist justice system. The first months of 2018 have been marked by the beginning of a recovery of the mass protest movement, after a period in which all attention had concentrated on the electoral plane. Unfortunately the leaders of Podemos and United Left have not been up to the task of providing all these separate movements with a common channel of expression. The U.S. State Department voiced outrage on Tuesday over the Syrian government's assumption of the presidency of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament for the next month, saying Damascus lacked credibility to preside over the body because of its use of chemical weapons. "We are outraged at the Syrian regime's blatant disregard for human life, its serial violations of and contempt for its international obligations and its audaciousness in assuming the presidency of an international body committed to advancing disarmament and nonproliferation," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told a briefing. "Syria lacks the credibility to assume the presidency." Search Keywords: Short link: SPRINGFIELD -- Whether it was City Hall or the Springfield Thunderbirds, a lot of offices took group field trips Wednesday morning to the new Starbucks location in Springfield's Monarch Place hotel and office complex on the coffee shop's first day of operation. "I've been waiting for this," said Alixis Pothul, of the Thunderbirds front office, before posing for a group picture out front. "I'm a big fan of Starbucks." The Monarch Place Starbucks is part of a revamped pedestrian plaza facing Main Street and Boland Way. Paul Marcelina, general manager at the Sheraton Springfield Monarch Place Hotel, said the restored fountain is back up and running and there is music playing at the outdoor seating area. "It's our oasis in the heart of downtown Springfield," he said. The new coffee shop is the second of what will soon be three downtown locations for the Seattle-based coffee giant. A Starbucks opened on East Columbus Avenue in 2006. The third location will be at the new MGM Springfield Casino. Starbucks has been in the news after two black men were arrested on trespassing charges at a Philadelphia location in April. Store employees called police because the men -- who were waiting for a business associate -- hadn't ordered anything. Subsequently, Starbucks corporate leadership changed its policy to allow people to be in its shops and use restrooms without placing an order. The chain closed all its locations Tuesday afternoon for racial sensitivity training. Marcelina said the 17 employees at the Monarch Place Starbucks -- which is a franchise location, and not a company-operated store -- have been training for weeks with a team sent by the chain's corporate offices. Staff did not participate in the anti-bias course Tuesday afternoon because they received similar instruction as part of the Sheraton hotels training process. As for policies about how folks are treated in the store, Marcelina said Monarch Place wants it to be welcoming, and will also follow the new corporate policy. "This will be run just like a corporate-owned store," he said. The coffee shop occupies about two thirds of what was a Bank of America office that closed in 2016. United Bank, which opened a Monarch Place branch in January, occupies about 2,400 square feet of the former Bank of America space. Marcelina said the Cornerstone Cafe will remain open inside the Monarch Place office tower, offering coffee and lunch items. The new Starbucks is open Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Saturday from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Marcelina said hours may expand as foot traffic through downtown Springfield grows. The space is unique, he said. It has 30-foot-tall ceilings and features a 400-pound, 10-foot medallion by artist Llew Majia. The commissioned piece celebrates the diversity of Latin American coffee-growing countries. The store previously announced that it will donate all proceeds from its first week of business to The Zoo in Forest Park & Education Center. The money will go toward a new educational exhibit featuring two African cats. Sarah Tsitso, the zoo's executive director, said she can't say too much about the cats now, including their species. The head of the sanctuary the zoo is working with is currently in Africa, and paperwork has not yet been finalized. The National Endowment for the Arts has approved a $20,000 grant to Community Music School of Springfield for its Sonido Musica partnership with the city's public schools. The grant was from NEA's Art Works category, which supports projects that focus on the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence, public engagement with diverse and excellent art, lifelong learning in the arts, and/or the strengthening of communities through the arts. Students in Sonido Musica participate in weekly hour long classes on their chosen instrument (violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, trombone or drums) led by CMSS faculty. "Through the work of organizations such as Community Music School of Springfield in Springfield, Massachusetts, NEA funding invests in local communities, helping people celebrate the arts wherever they are," NEA Chairman Jane Chu said. Sonido Musica started six years ago at three Springfield schools with 60 students. It now serves nearly 1,000 students weekly in 17 elementary, middle and high schools in Springfield. "We are thrilled to have been awarded the Art Works grant from the NEA. Our partnership program with the Springfield Public Schools, Sonido Musica, engages nearly 1,000 Springfield children each week in strings, band and percussion instruction at elementary, middle and high schools,' said CMSS Executive Director Eileen McCaffery. "We are proud that CMSS and Sonido Musica have been recognized nationally for the quality of our instruction, and the impact on young people." The NEA has approved more than $80 million in grants as part of the NEA's second major funding announcement for fiscal year 2018. A man, said to be in his 40's, was stabbed and later died at a local hospital, WHDH-TV reported. Boston police arrested a suspect within hours. The stabbing took place at La Familia Barbershop on Hyde Park Avenue at about 5:30 p.m. when two men argued. The victim was transported to a local hospital where he was later pronounced dead. The suspect fled the shop and police were able to track him down and place him under arrest. The suspect will be arraigned in district court Wednesday. Police have not identified the victim pending notification of family. Teamsters Local 25 President Sean O'Brien is running to unseat the organization's International leader James Hoffa, arguing the incumbent is out of touch with his membership. "Our leader was never a truck driver. He never worked in the craft. He doesn't understand what you go through day-in and day-out," O'Brien said at an announcement Tuesday, as reported by the Boston Herald. "It's time for him to step aside and do what's right." TEAMSTERS UNITED: O'BRIEN AND ZUCKERMAN TO TAKE BACK TEAMSTERS Sean O'Brien and Fred Zuckerman announced their candidacies for Teamsters General President and General Secretary-Treasurer. PLEASE EXCUSE THE CHOPPY LIVE STREAM VIDEO. MORE VIDEO COMING. Posted by Teamsters United on Tuesday, May 29, 2018 O'Brien is a fourth-generation Teamster and truck driver. He leads Boston's 12,000 members and presides over a joint group of 45,000 New England Teamsters. He says Hoffa has grown "comfortable" since taking the top post in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1999, according to the newspaper. Hoffa, son of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, has been re-elected four times since 1999, the newspaper says. O'Brien will challenge the Hoffa for the chance to represent International's 1.4 million workers in 2021. He is partnering with Fred Zuckerman, the head of a local Kentucky Teamsters group with more than 16,000 members. He lost in his own bid to unseat Hoffa by 6,024, but is backing O'Brien and running with him as a candidate for general secretary-treasurer. "I've been telling everybody for a long time that I'm a pissed-off Teamster," Zuckerman told the Herald. "We need to be the strongest union in the world and I believe we can do that. ... We need everybody to fight back and we need to take this union over." Amazon is still talking to Massachusetts officials as the retail behemoth searches for a place to put down its second headquarters. Gov. Charlie Baker offered a quick comment on the company's search for "HQ2" during a Wednesday appearance on WGBH's "Boston Public Radio" show. "They're still engaged in what I would describe as a back and forth with us and others around sort of what you call loose ends," Baker said. "I mean, it's just a ton of detail type stuff." Baker made the comments as recent reports suggest the Washington, D.C. area is the favorite. "The evidence is now piling up that Amazon is looking seriously at the nation's capital for its HQ2," Business Insider reported earlier this month. "After all, it may be the only place large enough to capture the company's growing ambitions across multiple sectors with its high-profile colleges, sprawling transportation system, and high concentration of powerful people." Three of the 20 locations on Amazon's current list of potential sites are in the D.C. area, including Montgomery County and Northern Virginia. The Boston area is also on the list. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh put together a bid with neighboring Revere. The city of Somerville also made the cut. Asked about D.C. as a potential favorite, Walsh told MassLive on Tuesday, "I think it's all rumor at this point." Boston was frequently mentioned as a favorite in different publications not too long ago, Walsh added. "I don't think we fully know," Walsh said. "I think it's still a very fluid situation." Walsh added, "We have not spoken to Amazon in a while. I'm sure they're trying to figure out the process, I'm sure it's a very complicated process on their part as far as creating such a big entity in another part of the country. So we're kind of seeing what happens." On "Boston Public Radio," Baker also responded to a question about Apple, the iPhone giant searching for space for another campus. "They have people here in Massachusetts but they have not, to the best of my knowledge, reached out to us," Baker said. "I don't know if they've reached out to people at the local level or not." This story elaborates on an article published at 8:14 p.m. Tuesday, May 29, 2018: Marijuana's potential for pain relief and economic booster discussed by Holyoke panel HOLYOKE -- Marijuana poses nowhere near the dependency problem of nicotine or alcohol, a physician said at a panel discussion Tuesday. And the only way marijuana acts as a gateway drug is as a gateway away from opioids, the same doctor told an audience at Gateway City Arts on Race Street. "I just think it's complete propaganda that it's a gateway. It's associated to other drug use, but that doesn't mean it's causally related to other drug use....I think cannabis, if anything, is a gateway out," Dr. Peter Grinspoon of Massachusetts General Hospital said. Grinspoon was among panelists during the forum titled "Cannabis and Opioids: Prevention or Treatment." A featured topic was use of marijuana as an alternative for pain treatment to opioids, abuse of which for the past several years has attacked Holyoke, the state and the nation as an epidemic. "I have always held the mantra: It's your recovery, it's your decision," said panelist Jennifer Flanagan of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission. Among issues are the devastation of opioids and the accompanying reality that insurance companies don't cover the medical marijuana prescribed for pain relief, she said. "But I think that cannabis is slowly but surely playing a role," Flanagan said. Other points during the forum were that more research is needed on marijuana's medical benefits, such as to determine which strains of the plant are effective against which illnesses, and the importance of explaining dosage and the perception-altering effects of marijuana. For example, people need help to understand how to use marijuana. The drug will make them feel "high," temporarily affecting how they experience their surroundings and their feelings, said panelist Ezra Parzybok, a cannabis consultant and author. So the process of integrating marijuana use into peoples' lives must include counsel about avoiding its intake before driving or going to work, he said. "It will be a continual, ongoing discovery," said Parzybok, whose book "Cannabis Consulting: Helping Patients, Parents and Practitioners Understand Medical Marijuana" comes out July 3. The panel included state Rep. Aaron M. Vega, D-Holyoke, and Dr. Marion McNabb, CEO and co-founder of the Cannabis Community Care and Research Network ("C3RN"), of Somerville, which arranged the forum. Vendors' tables lined the room's perimeter and offered information about marijuana uses and products. Opioids are medications that relieve pain by reducing the intensity of pain signals reaching the brain. Opioids have similar properties to the opium from which they are derived. Drugs in this class include Vicodin, OxyContin and Percocet. Heroin is an opioid synthesized from morphine, a substance extracted from the seed pod of the Asian opium poppy plant. Addiction to opioid painkillers such as OxyContin and the subsequent need to keep taking the drug after the prescription expires leads many people to take heroin as a substitute. Increasing the danger has been the presence of fentanyl, a synthetic narcotic hundreds of times more potent than heroin. The opioid epidemic has claimed over 300,000 lives in the United States since 2000, The New England Journal of Medicine has said. "We are really in an epidemic," McNabb said. Grinspoon said the truth is that not a lot of options for pain relief are available. Chronic pain will strike most individuals at some point at a time people are living longer and the realization is spreading about opioid-addictions' horrors. "To me, cannabis is the obvious way to treat people's chronic pain," Grinspoon said. The positive aspects of marijuana are becoming better known. But that has come after decades of misinformation such as that marijuana is as addictive as other substances and that studies must begin with the premise that marijuana is harmful. Other countries like Israel have researched marijuana more objectively than the U.S., he said. "It is a gateway -- it's a gateway out of addiction," Grinspoon said of marijuana. Indeed, said McNabb, the point of the discussion was to explore how marijuana can help in the midst of recognition that opioids have ruined so many lives. "But we do have the opportunity to create change," McNabb said. Gateway City Arts was "thrilled" to host the marijuana discussion, venue co-founder Lori Divine told the audience. "We're trying to bring dignity and we're trying to bring laughter and fun to this wretched world right now," Divine said, and the crowd applauded. Vega said Massachusetts' legalization of medical and recreational marijuana, with regulations, has allowed for progress and the realization that more research is needed. The learning is continuing about how marijuana can be harvested and cultivated in certain ways to achieve certain results. Marijuana can help some patients but perhaps not others, he said. "There's a lot of potential here," said Vega, including for economic development. The Paper City nickname for Holyoke in relation to leading the way in paper-making has long since ceased to be the reality, said Marcos A. Marrero, director of the Holyoke Department of Planning and Economic Development. As the city changes its economy, innovation becomes key. Embracing the marijuana industry and the jobs and tax revenue it brings is an innovation the city is seizing, said Marrero, addressing the audience before the panel began. "Your presence here is vital in that vertical integration of values. Where will the best strains of cannabis be grown and processed for whatever use, whether medical or recreational? We don't know. But quality is definitely something we will have to compete on in the future," Marrero said. C3RN is a marijuana industry consultant and advocate. The organization describes itself on its website as "a group of like minded cannabis industry, advocacy, academic, public health, clinical, patient, policy, and community experts that embrace open-source principles to drive collaborative science in the cannabis industry." SPRINGFIELD - Just after his announcing the Hampden County Sheriff's Department would be offering 86 beds for the treatment of people with opioid addictions, Sheriff Nick Cocchi said that number is a good start but not nearly enough to get ahead of the problem. "Eighty-six beds is not enough," he said while talking with reporters. "People are dying." Cocchi said he would like to see the number of treatment spaces, measured in the number of available beds, increase to match the need of the region. That could mean those 86 beds would have to be expanded to 106 or even 186, and an increase an increase is all but inevitable given the scope of the opioid problem, he said. The Hampden County Sheriff's Department on Wednesday announced the launch of the Stonybrook Stabilization and Treatment Centers of Springfield and Ludlow. Before some 100 local, county and state officials, Cocchi pledged making use of space at the Hampden County Correctional Centers in Ludlow and the Western Mass. Recovery and Wellness Center on Mill Street, Springfield. The facilities will be in operation within 60 days and will serve as rehabilitation centers for addicts who have been civilly committed by the courts. There will be 54 beds available at the county jail for people in the initial stages of treatment, and another 32 beds at Mill Street for those who graduate to more advanced treatment. Under Chapter 135, Section 35 of the Mass. General Laws, spouses, relatives, guardians or in some cases, police or court officials may petition the court to have an addict committed to a treatment facility. A section 35 committal is a considered a civil commitment, and not entered on one's criminal record. "These people are not criminals; they are citizens, civilly committed for treatment because of their severe addiction to drugs or alcohol," Cocchi said. The state Department of Health has tabulated the number of fatal overdoses in 2017 at 1,874, but the total cases could exceed 2,000, he said. Those amounts slightly below the numbers for 2016, which was a record year for opioid deaths. Under Section 35 legislation, there are two facilities in the state for the treatment of men, and three for women. All of them are in the greater Boston area. The Stonybrook Centers will be the only facilities in Western Massachusetts for Section 35 commitments. "This program will allow those citizens from Worcester west to the Berkshires who are civilly committed under Section 35 to come directly to us for detox and treatment," Cocchi said. "This will avoid the 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hour trips to Eastern Mass., far from family, friends and local support service agencies." Carol Mici, deputy Commissioner for the Mass. Dept. of Correction, offered her appreciation on behalf of the department of Correction for his efforts She noted that the state's 250-bed Mass Alcohol and Substance Abuse Center is in Plymouth, which is "far, far away from Western Mass." The county jails have been leaders in reentry programs for inmates with addiction issues, and this is taking that expertise and applying it to Section 35 cases," she said. "I have all the faith in the world that this program will be successful," she said. William E. Rooney of the Ludlow Board of Selectmen spoke of last year going through the process through the courts of having a nephew committed under Section 35. "It was one of the most emotional times in my life," he said. After winning approval from the courts, they then had to drive across the state to Plymouth. "Getting in a van and going 2 hours away didn't make any sense," he said. "For those people throughout Western Mass. who will be directly affected, it is going to be a better place for those in the throes of addiction," Rooney said. Denise Jordan, Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno's chief of staff, said Sarno is fully behind the effort. "I've attended a number of meetings over the last couple of years (and) I remember early on hearing Sheriff Cocchi say 'You know what? I have the room, I have the staff and we have the ability to bring this to fruition," Jordan said. Cocchi, she said, "is a man of his word because we're standing here today." Franklin County Sheriff Christopher Donelan, and Berkshire County Sheriff Thomas Bowler were each present to offer their support. "This is big for us," Bowler said. He estimated that his staff make around 200 transports per year of Section 35 cases from Pittsfield to Plymouth and each takes around 8-12 hours. Bring people to greater Springfield will be simpler, faster and more cost effective, he said. Donelan said county sheriffs have been leading the fight against addiction for years because most newly sentenced inmates have some sort of drug or alcohol dependency. He said the county jails treatment programs are successful, and the only negative is people have generally have had to be arrested, convicted and sentenced to have access to services. "What's groundbreaking here is it treats people before they have a criminal record," he said. Dr. Robert Roose, vice president of Mercy Behavioral Health Care said sheriffs departments across the country have out of necessity recognized the need for successful treatment and prevention programs "far before the opioid crisis was receiving the attention it deserved." The problem with one facility at the far edge of the state for Section 35 cases is it limits the people receiving treatment from receiving visits from family, and this denies them a chance for valuable support. "Sheriff Cocchi is not willing to let the status quo remain" he said. "This is the result of a fantastic vision." For now, the treatment is for men, not women. Cocchi said this is due to a wording in the state law that forbids female patients under Section 35 from being treated at a correctional facility. The Ludlow jail is obviously a correctional facility, but the Mill Street location is also considered one, he said. Cocchi said that designation makes little sense, especially since the Mill Street site is a minimal security operation to the point of not having locks on doors to residents' rooms. He said he is lobbying for the legislature to change the wording of the law. He said the new programs are for now carved out through savings and reallocations from within the annual Sheriff's Department budget. Cocchi said he anticipates seeking additional funding from the legislature during next year's budget. Jim Madigan, a fixture on public television in Western Massachusetts for decades, has died. Madigan worked as a journalist for nearly 40 years. He began his career in New York before he moved to Massachusetts to accept a position with WLDM, which later became WNNZ, in Westfield. He went on to spend eight years working for ABC40 before joining PBS station WGBY in 1990. He served as the longtime host of WGBY's "Connecting Point," a local public affairs series where he interviewed authors, politicians and local residents about issues impacting their lives. "At that time, commercial news was changing. Soundbites were getting shorter and shorter, and the chance to let someone sit and talk, and express a full idea, was just greater in public TV," Madigan told The Republican in an interview last year. In addition to serving as the host of "Connecting Point," Madigan produced the weekly segment "The State We're In," partnered with the Springfield Public Forum to host events and moderated seven gubernatorial debates and the 2012 U.S. Senate debate between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren held in Springfield. "The secret to good moderating is that there is always a producer in your ear helping you keep on track, it's not something I do alone," he told The Republican in 2017. "I love covering politics because it affects us all. Whether we like it or not, it's important." Madigan retired last year following a diagnosis of terminal lung disease. A service will be held on Wednesday, June 6 at 9 a.m. at Firtion Adams Funeral Home in Westfield, followed by a 10:30 a.m. funeral Mass held at Saint Mary's. In lieu of flowers, the family asks donations be made to Saint Mary's, Saint Vincent de Paul or the Common Goods Food Pantry at Westfield State University. HOLYOKE -- Dr. Peter Grinspoon of Massachusetts General Hospital said Tuesday chronic pain will strike most individuals at some point at a time people are living longer and horrors of opioid addictions are frightening. "To me, cannabis is the obvious way to treat people's chronic pain," Grinspoon said, in a panel discussion at Gateway City Arts on Race Street. "Cannabis and Opioids: Prevention or Treatment" was sponsored by the Cannabis Community Care and Research Network (helpfully shorthanded to "C3RN"), a Somerville-based marijuana industry consultant and advocate. Joining Grinspoon on the panel were: state Rep. Aaron M. Vega, D-Holyoke Jennifer Flanagan of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission Ezra Parzybok, a cannabis consultant and author of Dr. Marion McNabb, CEO and co-founder of C3RN and a public health doctor. Points discussed during the event included the extent of deaths and addictions caused by use of opioids; the need for more research on how marijuana can help medically; the potential, said during the event to be low, of marijuana addiction; the need for explanations to people about how to use marijuana and how using it will alter perceptions and feelings, so avoid use before work and driving; and the legal issues still stuck to pot use, such as it being illegal at the federal level. Check back with The Republican and MassLive.com for more coverage of the "Cannabis and Opioids" panel discussion, including photos and video. Turkey and the United States have reached an agreement on a plan for the withdrawal of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia from Syria's Manbij, Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency said on Wednesday. Under the terms of the three-step plan, which will become finalised during a visit by Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu to Washington on June 4, the YPG will withdraw from Manbij 30 days after the deal is signed, Anadolu said. Turkish and U.S. military forces will start joint supervision in Manbij 45 days after the agreement is signed and a local administration will be formed 60 days after June 4, Anadolu said. Search Keywords: Short link: President Donald Trump has contributed to the increased crassness of public discourse, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said Wednesday. Baker was appearing on WGBH's "Boston Public Radio" show as Trump took to Twitter to attack his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and the New York Times, as well as ABC after the network cancelled Roseanne Barr's rebooted show over her racist Twitter post. WGBH's Jim Braude, who co-hosts the radio show with Margery Eagan, alluded to Barr's racist remark about Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. "Many, I think including the both of us, think this is one of the trickle-down effects of Donald Trump as president," Braude said. "It's crasser. People feel more comfortable saying things like this that they wouldn't've said prior to January of last year. Do you agree with that?" Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that ABC does not tolerate comments like those made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didnt get the call? Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 "Yeah, I think there's probably truth to that," said Baker, a Republican who blanked the presidential ballot in 2016 when Trump was up against Hillary Clinton. Baker then pointed to HBO's documentary, on US Sen. John McCain, a Arizona Republican who is fighting brain cancer. The governor urged the co-hosts to watch the documentary, titled "For Whom the Bell Tolls." The documentary includes McCain discussing his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. "But the first comment that then-candidate Donald Trump made about John McCain was, 'He's not a hero, I don't think heroes are people who get captured,'" Baker said, referring to Trump's comment during the presidential campaign. "It kinda went downhill from there," Baker added. "So yeah, I do think that's affected the quality of public discourse." Tri-County Schools in Easthampton is shutting its doors on June 25, according to Paul Rilla, executive director of Northeast Center for Youth and Families. The parent agency's "difficult decision" to shutter Tri-County's summer and regular school operations will allow time for "a new 11-month school year proposal" to be submitted to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for approval, said Rilla in a prepared statement. "At this time, we would like to thank the school districts that have supported the school over the years," Rilla wrote. "We plan on providing Special Education Services again in the not too distant future." The private school facility at 203 East Street provides out-of-district placement for public school students with severe special education needs. It serves male and female students from the ages of 6 to 22, according to its literature. The program is largely funded by "sending tuition" paid by public school districts. Tri-County Schools has seen a steady decline in enrollment over the last decade. In 2007, 106 students were enrolled, according to available state data. By 2017, the reported enrollment had declined to 38. The Easthampton Public School District did not place any of its students at Tri-County this year, confirmed Sarah Mochak, the city's special education director. Several current and past staff members, who did not wish to be named for fear of reprisal, said the school has suffered from high staff turnover and low morale. Staffers were recently told the school plans to "restructure" during the summer. Their employment status is not clear. Tri-County Schools opened in 1986, and built its East Street campus in 2000. Rilla said it was a "difficult decision" to close the school after three decades of operation. Northeast Center for Youth and Families, established in 1976, provides foster care, residential, day treatment and education to hundreds of children and adolescents with emotional, behavioral, and mental health disorders in Massachusetts and Connecticut. State education department spokeswoman Jacqueline Reis confirmed Tuesday that Tri-County Schools is closing, but declined to provide the reason. "In terms of the reason, I recommend you contact the school," Reis wrote. State auditor Suzanne Bump in 2011 cited the Northeast Center for Youth and Families for mismanaging $1.2 million in public funds over a five-year period. The issue was resolved in 2017, according to the agency. In 2015, state education officials ordered a corrective action plan after the Easthampton program failed to meet certain legal standards, including those around policies and procedures related to behavior management and discipline. This story has been updated to reflect current terminology for students with emotional, behavioral, or mental health disorders. Rhode Island Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello says he supports a reworked Pawtucket Red Sox stadium plan that would keep the team in Rhode Island. As leaders in Worcester and Pawtucket continue to try to woo owners of the team, Rhode Island state legislators are taking the first concrete step in months with a Thursday hearing on the new House proposal. In January the Rhode Island Senate passed a bill that would fund the $83-million stadium. It would require the team to cover $45 million, the state $23 million and Pawtucket $15 million. The team would need to spend $12 million upfront and finance its remaining commitment with bonds from the Pawtucket Redevelopment Agency, a quasi-municipal agency that would own the stadium and least it to the state to sublease to the city. But, Mattiello said he will remove a state guarantee that would require the General Assembly to set aside money to cover any shortfalls between revenue and bond payments, according to the Providence Journal. The Pawtucket Redevelopment Agency will have to "figure out how to deal with it" if revenue comes up short, Mattiello told the newspaper. Tax revenue generated in and around the stadium, set aside through a financing agreement, would be used to pay off the public portion of the bond payments, the Providence Journal reports. Guy Dufault, a Pawsox spokesman, was "somewhat surprised" by the speaker's announcement. He told the newspaper the team has not reached an agreement with Mattiello. The House bill, which is still being reviewed, is scheduled for consideration by the House Finance Committee Thursday at 5:30 p.m. Worcester has yet to release any details about its offer to the team or if it has made one. To consider the latest whirlwind of activity around the recently canceled summit meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, one could be forgiven for believing that time is still of the essence. The summit had been scheduled for June 12 before Trump abruptly called it off last Thursday. But then, just a day later, the two sides were seen to be talking still, perhaps keeping hope alive. And on Tuesday, the North Korean leader's right-hand man was scheduled to fly to New York for a meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. As of Wednesday morning, Kim Yong Chol, a four-star general who'd have needed a travel waiver from sanctions that had been imposed by our government, was on schedule to meet with our nation's top diplomat. Simply put, from all appearances, efforts to salvage the summit were in full swing. Makes sense, it might seem, with the clock ticking and all. Except for one not so little thing: on the same day that officials in Washington and Pyongyang were apparently working overtime, a key adviser to the U.S. government made public a report that called into question the preferred schedule for ridding the Korean peninsula of nuclear arms. Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico and now a Stanford professor, says it could take as long as 15 years for North Korea to denuclearize completely. Yes, 15 years. Contrast that assertion with the White House's demand that the nation rid itself of its nukes in short order. Sounds like a recipe for a failed summit, doesn't it? Though Trump seems to enjoy the drama -- he scheduled the meeting on a whim back in March and canceled it just as quickly last week -- everyone else is likely feeling pulled hither and thither by the start-and-stop nature of the administration's doings. Which is not meant to take North Korea off the hook for its reported dithering and delays as teams from the two nations were endeavoring to work out the logistics of the summit. The newly publicized report from Hecker, the Stanford professor, and two of his colleagues makes it clear that talk of a rapid solution to the Korean problem is mostly fantasy. Hecker, the only American citizen to have toured North Korea's facility for enriching uranium, a key component in the making of nuclear weapons, is a realist. In an interview last week, he noted: "We're talking about dozens of sites, hundreds of buildings, and thousands of people." The long and the short of it all would seem plain: Even if North Korea agrees to dump its nukes, the schedule for such a complex project will be neither short nor sweet. If the summit meeting between the North Korean and American leaders is salvaged -- either on June 12 or sometime thereafter -- Trump, not the world's most patient man, will need to be fully aware of that going in. Because he'll want a "win," and a high-profile one at that. And obtaining what he'd see as one might not be so easy. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bob Massie disclosed Tuesday that he was asked to leave his home during his divorce from his first wife. Both Massie and his ex-wife said there was no abuse involved. According to the Massie campaign, the disclosure came in advance of a story that is being prepared by Boston Globe reporter Frank Phillips. The story had not been published online as of Tuesday evening. Massie, who is running against Jay Gonzalez in the Democratic primary for governor, divorced his first wife, Dana Robert, in 1995. Massie did not reveal exactly what Phillips plans to report, saying only that the Globe plans to publish the story on Wednesday. But in an apparent attempt to pre-empt the story, Massie released statements from both himself and Robert. Massie said in his statement that during his divorce, his attorney advised him to stay in his house until he and Robert could reach an agreement about custody of their young children, so that Massie did not lose his rights to see them. During that time, Massie was served with an order to leave his house, and he complied. "I never harmed or threatened my wife or kids and she does not allege that I ever did," Massie wrote. Massie said since the divorce, he and Robert have successfully co-parented their children. "While I regret that there were moments during our divorce more than 20 years ago, when we could have been more kind and respectful, they never involved any physical threats," Massie said. A statement from Robert, distributed by Massie's campaign, said during an "emotional divorce," it was decided that it would be best for her and Massie to keep distance between them. "At no point in our marriage has Bob ever physically abused me or our children," she wrote. "Despite our differences, Bob was a faithful husband and loving father." Both Massie and Robert have since remarried. A group of 20 business organizations are launching an effort to save $100 million in health care costs by 2020 by reducing avoidable emergency room visits by 20 percent. The businesses are still figuring out their exact strategies. The first step will focus primarily on raising awareness among employees about the resources available for them to get care outside of the emergency room. "Our plan is to provide employers with a toolkit, which will include appropriate information communicated in plain English about the most appropriate sites for care, why that's important, and how it impacts premiums," said Eileen McAnneny, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. McAnneny is leading the coalition together with Richard Lord, president and CEO of Associated Industries of Massachusetts. "We're talking about changing behaviors and activities of both employers and employees," Lord said. Massachusetts' Health Policy Commission has estimated that 40 percent of emergency room visits in Massachusetts, or around 370,000 visits a year, are preventable or inappropriate. These include people visiting the emergency room to treat ailments like skin rashes, back pain, dental pain, allergies or bronchitis. Many of these problems could be treated in an urgent care clinic or by a primary care doctor. The emergency room is the most expensive way to treat those types of ailments, with an emergency room visit generally costing five times more than care provided in a primary care or urgent care setting. The Health Policy Commission estimates that statewide, patients with commercial insurance spend $300 million to $350 million each year on avoidable emergency department visits. About 40 percent of avoidable emergency room visits are from patients with commercial insurance, as opposed to Medicare or Medicaid. David Seltz, executive director of the Massachusetts Health Policy Coalition, said avoidable emergency room visits contribute to overcrowding and longer wait times for people who actually need emergency care. Seltz said the initiative is about "getting patients the right care in the right place at the right time." "This is low hanging fruit," Lord said. "We all agree inappropriate use of emergency rooms is an example of wasteful spending that is not contributing to the health of residents of Massachusetts." Massachusetts is a national leader in providing access to health care, but the state has struggled with health care costs that are among the highest in the country. The state Senate passed a cost containment bill this year, and the House is developing its own version of that bill. The business coalition includes business associations representing various regions of the state and various industries, including bankers, food businesses, retailers, Realtors and technology companies. The effort has support from the state's major health insurers and hospital advocacy group. Nancy Creed, president of the Springfield Regional Chamber, said health care costs today are "unsustainable" for businesses that are trying to remain competitive. "We're going to take advantage of the toolkit that the coalition is providing, provide that to our members and ask them to provide it to their employees," Creed said. The "toolkit" will include information encouraging employees to find primary care doctors, informing them about what urgent care centers or minute clinics are available and advising them on when to seek emergency room care. Lord said one large retailer in Massachusetts saw that its members had high rates of emergency room visits and distributed information to employees about nearby alternatives, explaining that they could get better care with shorter wait times. Lord said that effort successfully reduced inappropriate emergency room visits. The coalition, working with the state's Health Policy Commission, plans to track and publicly report rates of avoidable emergency room visits, while enhancing the ability of employers to track that information about their employees. The Massachusetts Association of Health Plans, the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association and other partners have agreed to work with the businesses. Although exact strategies will be determined by the coalition, initiatives could include hospitals making more of an effort to direct patients to urgent care clinics or doctors providing easier access to care on nights and weekends. Insurance companies could offer financial incentives for patients not to seek unnecessary emergency room care. The businesses will also advocate for the adoption of technological improvements like telemedicine. Reality television personality Kim Kardashian will reportedly be in Washington D.C. Wednesday to discuss prison reform with White House officials and ask President Donald Trump to pardon a 62-year-old woman, who's serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense. The meeting, which is expected to take place Wednesday afternoon, follows months of talks between the "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" star and Jared Kushner, according to Vanity Fair. Kardashian will first sit down with Kushner to discuss overhauls to the U.S. prison system before the two meet with Trump and White House counsel, the magazine reported. Aside from focusing on prison reform, Kardashian is likely to press the president to pardon Alice Marie Johnson, a great-grandmother who has been imprisoned for more than two decades for a first-time, nonviolent offense, according to various news outlets. Johnson was expected to be released under President Barack Obama, but was passed over when he granted clemency to more than 200 people for similar nonviolent offenses in December 2016. Kardashian, who reportedly learned of Johnson's imprisonment through a video, gathered a team of attorneys to contact the White House on the woman's behalf. Kardashian's husband, rapper Kanye West, sparked headlines last month after posting a series of tweets in which he praised Trump's "dragon energy" and showed off his signed "Make America Great Again" hat. West met with the then-president-elect at Trump Tower in New York in December 2016. A group of Massachusetts politicians and government reformers wants to change the way elections are conducted, and it could be looking toward a 2020 ballot initiative to do it. Voter Choice Massachusetts is a growing coalition pushing for the adoption of ranked-choice voting. The argument made by Executive Director Adam Friedman in favor of ranked-choice voting is blunt: "Our politics are dysfunctional," Friedman said. Ranked-choice voting is a system where voters can rank their first-, second- and third-choice candidates, and so on. A winner is determined when someone gets more than 50 percent of first-choice votes. If no one gets 50 percent in the initial voting, the first-choice votes that went to the candidate with the least support will get redistributed to those voters' second-choice candidate. For example, say George W. Bush, Al Gore and Ralph Nader are running for president. None of them wins a majority of the vote, but Nader comes in third. Any voter who chose Nader as their top choice will have their votes distributed to their second-choice candidate - either Gore or Bush - and whoever ends up with a majority wins. Friedman said the result of this system is it changes politics from "a zero-sum game where various factions battle it out" to one that can be more unifying and inclusive, since politicians have to get support from a broader base of voters. Friedman said it eliminates the idea of "spoiler" candidates, in which a third-party candidate is blamed for allowing a less favored candidate to win. "I see it as a commonsense change that gives voters more power and more freedom and also allows candidates to run without being pressured to drop out by others and say wait your turn or demonize them for potentially being a spoiler or hurting a stronger candidate," Friedman said. For voters, Friedman said it means, "You can have your favorite but also register support for other candidates besides your favorite." Bills that would make it easier for municipalities to adopt ranked-choice voting and that would establish statewide ranked-choice voting were sent to study by a legislative committee, effectively killing them for this year. Friedman said if no progress is made legislatively next year, he will consider launching an effort to put ranked-choice voting on the November 2020 ballot for Massachusetts voters to decide. "Changing voting is an important thing to do. It's something that's a sacred right everyone has," Friedman said. "We want to make sure people give it full consideration with a public airing of all sides of doing this, so we know there's really strong support once we put it to a vote." Maine was the first to pass ranked-choice voting statewide after voters approved a ballot initiative in 2016, though implementation has been held up by lawsuits. It is expected to go into effect in the state primaries in June. But whether Maine will use ranked-choice voting in the long term will be subject to court challenges and a voter referendum. Cambridge is the only city in the U.S. that has extensive experience with ranked-choice voting, having used it for multicandidate city council and school board elections since 1941. Since 2000, 10 other cities have adopted ranked-choice voting for municipal elections, according to the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. Some states also use it for runoff elections. A handful of cities adopted ranked-choice voting, then repealed it. Several states passed ranked-choice voting laws but never implemented them. Amherst voted in March to begin using ranked-choice voting for its town council elections starting in 2021. Several countries use ranked-choice voting, including Australia, Malta and Ireland. Last year, the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee voted to include ranked-choice voting in its platform. The platform says ranked-choice voting "better reflects the aggregate will of the voting population and ensures that no candidate is elected without a true majority of support from their constituents." Friedman started Voter Choice Massachusetts after Maine passed ranked-choice voting in 2016. The group is still in the early stages, training volunteers, speaking around the state and building up a mailing list with 11,000 supporters. The group's advisory board includes former state treasurer Steve Grossman, entrepreneur and business leader Diane Hessan, Nobel Prize-winning economist Eric Maskin, government reform advocate Pam Wilmot, and former independent gubernatorial candidate Evan Falchuk. Falchuk ran with his United Independent Party in the 2014 gubernatorial race against Democrat Martha Coakley and Republican Charlie Baker. Baker won the election by 1.9 percentage points. Falchuk got 3.3 percent of the vote. "A lot of people told me they liked me but couldn't vote for me because they didn't think I could win," Falchuk said. "That's a problem." Falchuk said people turned into "strategic voters." He believes there should be a system where people can vote for the candidate they most like without worrying about "wasting" their vote or about "spoiler" candidates. "What I love about ranked-choice voting is it makes it so that no one's vote is ever wasted, no one feels their vote is not counted, because you get to vote for who you really believe in," Falchuk said. Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, said her group supports ranked-choice voting, particularly for crowded primaries where someone can win with less than 30 percent of the vote. "It's a centrist system that ensures the person winning has the support of a majority of voters in the district," Wilmot said. Wilmot said ranked-choice voting eliminates the "irrationality" in a system where today, for example, if there is one conservative and three liberal candidates in a liberal-leaning district, the conservative may win because the liberals split the vote. The system can also lessen negative campaigning, Wilmot said, since a candidate does not want to alienate their opponent's supporters. The Republican's Shannon Young contributed to this report. BOSTON -- Molly Bish was 16 years old and working as a lifeguard at Comins Pond in Warren when she was kidnapped on June 27, 2000. Her remains were discovered three years later. Her killer has not been found. "We don't know what our monster looks like," Molly's sister Heather Bish said Wednesday. There are 129 children in Massachusetts who are missing or whose murderers have not been found. They are boys and girls of all races and ethnicities, from across the state. They include Nailah Sanon, Michael Santos, Leigh Savoie, Patrick Silva, Haley Sousa, Michael Sugura. The Molly Bish Center and Foundation brought together families, politicians, law enforcement and advocates at the State House Wednesday to commemorate the 18th Missing Children's Day in Massachusetts. Worcester District Attorney Joe Early described these cases as the "most agonizing cases." "You're not forgotten," Early told the families. "The hard work will go on, we'll continue to bring you the best efforts we can for justice." This year, State Rep. Juana Matias, D-Lawrence, sponsored an amendment to the House budget that would require all law enforcement to undergo two hours of mandatory training on how to respond to missing persons cases. It would create uniform policies for police to respond to missing and abducted children. Matias said there is a need for "comprehensive standards across the state to ensure when your child goes missing and you walk into a police department, you're receiving the best practices available in the country." Heather Bish said when Molly Bish went missing, the police did not begin to look for her during the first three hours, even though statistics show that 76 percent of children abducted by strangers are murdered within three hours. Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni was given an award at Wednesday's event for his work solving the murder of Lisa Ziegert. Ziegert was a 24-year-old teacher's assistant at Agawam Middle School when she was abducted and killed in 1992. Gary Schara, 48, was arrested in 2017 on charges of murder, aggravated rape and kidnapping. Law enforcement officials credited DNA testing for leading them to Schara. Heather Bish praised Gulluni for taking on unresolved cases with "new fervor" and using state-of-the-art technology to develop an image of Ziegert's killer from DNA. "The heroes are the families of missing children and murder victims," Gulluni said. "They are the heroes, they are those who deserve acknowledgement and our respect and our continued work and support and affection." Lisa Ziegert's mother, Dianne "Dee" Ziegert, presented Gulluni with the award. In an interview after the event, Ziegert said it feels different to her to have Schara caught. "You expect when they catch the person responsible that it's going to change your life," Ziegert said. "It doesn't, because the realization is we've got them, that's great, but Lisa's still gone." But at the same time, Ziegert said the anniversary of her daughter's abduction felt lighter. "When I went to visit her this year on the anniversary, I didn't have to say 'Lisa, another year and we don't have any answers, we don't have any justice for you,'" Ziegert said. "This year I could say, 'We got it.'" With a new report suggesting that at least 4,700 people died as a result of Hurricane Maria, U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Springfield, urged the Trump administration this week to make sure federal funds sent to Puerto Rico are used to secure health care infrastructure and reach those most in need. The Springfield Democrat, who called the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health-funded report's results "staggering," noted that many of the deaths attributed to the hurricane related to a lack of health care available to the chronically ill and elderly. That, he argued, is why it's necessary for the White House to ensure that federal funding supports infrastructure needed for utility services critical to the health care system. "It is imperative that the Trump administration ensures federal funds are reaching those in need so that infrastructure that supports utility services critical to health care delivery is secure now and for the future," he said in a statement. Neal, who has worked with other Massachusetts colleagues on Capitol Hill to secure the necessary federal response to help Americans impacted by September hurricanes, further pledged to continue such efforts. "I will continue to stand with the people of Puerto Rico so they have what they need to recover and rebuild from Hurricane Maria and as they prepare for hurricane season right around the corner," he said. The Harvard report out today regarding the death toll in #PuertoRico is staggering. My statement is below. pic.twitter.com/MhLpAmTDbS Rep. Richard Neal (@RepRichardNeal) May 29, 2018 The Harvard study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday, suggested that as many as 5,000 people died in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria and its aftermath -- 70 times the government's official death count of 64. It attributed about a third of those deaths to limited access to medical care, noting that chronically ill patients are "particularly vulnerable to disruptions in basic utilities." U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, argued that the federal government's death count for Hurricane Maria "is either the result of shocking incompetence or a deliberate underestimation." "Someone must be held accountable," he tweeted Wednesday. Neal, who has faced criticism over his efforts to help Western Massachusetts residents impacted by the hurricanes, sat down with Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello in Washington last month to discuss the island's recovery efforts and challenges facing evacuees who have yet to return to their homes. The congressman also met with former Puerto Rico Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock and Ponce Mayor Mayita Melendez about the island's ongoing recovery efforts in April. He traveled to the island with other members of Massachusetts' congressional delegation in January. Following the trip, Neal asked Trump administration officials to provide an update on the federal government's efforts to restore electricity and other basic services in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, raising concerns that Republican leaders had fallen short in appropriating funds requested for recovery efforts. Iran's oil minister has asked OPEC to support his country against what he called "illegal, unilateral and extraterritorial sanctions" referring to the United States sanctions on the OPEC member after the U.S. pulled out of a nuclear deal with Tehran. U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this month abandoned a nuclear deal with Iran and announced the highest level of sanctions against the OPEC member. Iran is the third-largest oil producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries after Saudi Arabia and Iraq. "I would like to... seek OPECs support in accordance with Article 2 of the OPEC Statute, which emphasises safeguarding the interests of member countries individually and collectively," Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said in a letter seen by Reuters. The letter was addressed to the United Arab Emirates Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei, who holds OPEC presidency in 2018. Search Keywords: Short link: On Navajo land in Arizona, a coal plant and coal mine that have devastated the environment are being replaced by solar-with both enormous benefits and local drawbacks that can serve as a lesson for how the rest of the country will need to manage the transition to renewables. By Adele Peters https://www.fastcompany.com/40577931/solar-is-starting-to-replace-the-largest-coal-plant-in-the-western-u-s?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=&position=7&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=05302018 The innovation lab is a place where entrepreneurs, investors and mentors come together in something of an incubator to help early stage businesses achieve success. By Martin Kidston People want action on guns. But arming teachers is absurd and mental health is a separate challenge. We need to focus on what works to make us safer. Steve Bullock https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/05/30/america-wants-action-gun-violence-end-paralysis-column/651241002/ Make your marketing more effective and noticeable by incorporating plastic cards into your campaigns! These durable pieces are the perfect way to promote your company image over time. Whether youre looking for unique business cards, season passes, loyalty & membership cards or more, plastic cards outlast and outperform their paper counterparts. Personalize cards with names or photos, or include sequential numbering, QR codes, and signature panels for a custom card that is reuseable and remarkable. Think outside of the box and stand apart from the competition. Get started with your plastic card project! Place an order or contact your personal team of experts today. PrintingForLess http://www.printingforless.com [email protected] 1-800-930-7022 Order Now Secretary of State Kim Wyman is cautioning Washington business owners to be aware of a misleading and potentially fraudulent mailing that purports to be an official bill related to business registration requirements. "Were working with the Attorney Generals Office the agency that investigates and prosecutes consumer fraud to see if further action should be taken to protect businesses in Washington," said Wyman, whose office includes the Corporations and Charities Division. https://www.sos.wa.gov/office/news-releases.aspx?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery#/news/1289 Bozeman is a rapidly growing city with a high quality of life in part due to the easy access to the outdoors, burgeoning tech industry, and cultural experiences it offers. Air Mauritius will be operating commercial flights for passengers travelling outbound from Mauritius to Paris, Mumbai, Johannesburg as from 16 March 2021 and to Saint Denis Reunion as from 22 March 2021. However, no passenger will be uplifted to travel inbound to Mauritius until further notice. Scheduled flights in local time Paris twice weekly on Tuesdays and Saturdays as from 16 March 2021 Flight Route Departure Arrival MK014 Mauritius Paris CDG MRU 21H00* CDG 06H00** Note 1*: -Revised departure time for the flight on 16 March 2021: departure time MRU 20H50 local time and arrival in CDG at 06H00 local time. -Revised departure time for the flights as from 27 March 2021: departure time MRU 20H15 local time and arrival in CDG at 06H00 local time Note 2**: -Arriving in CDG next day at 06H00 local time Mumbai on Saturday 27 March 2021 Flight Route Departure Arrival MK110 Mauritius Mumbai MRU 09H15 BOM 16H55 Johannesburg on Tuesday 16 March 2021 Flight Route Departure Arrival MK851 Mauritius Johannesburg MRU 07H40 JNB 10H05 Johannesburg on Sunday 28 March 2021 Flight Route Departure Arrival MK851 Mauritius Johannesburg MRU 07H40 JNB 10H15 Saint Denis Reunion once weekly on Mondays as from 22 March 2021 Flight Route Departure Arrival MK238 Mauritius Saint Denis Reunion MRU 13H45 RUN 14H30 For more information, please contact the Call Centre on + 230 207 7575 from 08h00 to 20h00 local time or contact your Travel Agent. Partager et informez vous aussi...... 0 shares Share Tweet LinkedIn Kuwait on Wednesday blocked a US-drafted UN Security Council statement that would have strongly condemned Palestinian rocket firings from Gaza on Israel that triggered the worst military flareup since a 2014 Israeli offensive on the strip. The United States had circulated the draft text ahead of an emergency council meeting, to be held later Wednesday at Washington's request, on the rocket and mortar attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Kuwait, a non-permanent council member that represents Arab countries, said that it was blocking the statement to allow for consideration of a draft resolution it has put forward on the protection of Palestinian civilians. In an email to the US mission seen by AFP, Kuwait said: "We cannot agree to the text put forth by your delegation especially as we are considering a draft resolution that deals with the protection of civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories and the Gaza Strip." Kuwait earlier this month blocked another US-proposed statement that criticized Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas' remarks about Jews as "unacceptable." Two other draft statements expressing concern about the violence in Gaza were previously blocked by the United States, laying bare the sharp divisions on the Security Council over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Security Council statements are adopted by consensus by all 15 members. In response to the mortar and rocket firings, Israel said it pounded some 65 militant targets in the Gaza Strip. The exchange of fire on Tuesday and into the early hours of Wednesday had raised the possibility of yet another Israeli offensive on the coastal enclave, which would be the fourth since 2008. The council is expected to vote this week on the Kuwait-drafted proposal calling for "the consideration of measures to guarantee the safety and protection of the Palestinian civilian population" in the Palestinian territories and the Gaza Strip, according to the draft obtained by AFP. Diplomats however expect the United States to resort to its veto power to block that measure. *This story was edited by Ahram Online. Search Keywords: Short link: Security forces moved in on the biggest migrant camp in the French capital on Wednesday where some 1,700 people lived in makeshift tents alongside a canal. The migrants would be housed temporarily at more than 20 sites across the Paris region while the authorities checked their identities, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said in a statement. CRS riot police were deployed at dawn, some arriving by boat, as the migrants emerged from their tents and waited patiently to be bussed away from the Port de la Villette camp in the northeast of Paris. "We don't really know where we are going," said a Libyan who reached Paris seven months ago and gave his name as Issam. "It was hard here," he added, holding on to his one piece of baggage. The "Millenaire" or Millennium camp was home mainly to Sudanese, Somali and Eritrean migrants. Two similar camp sites in the capital along the Canal St Martin, which houses 800 mostly Afghan migrants, and the Porte de la Chapelle, home to 300-400 people, would also be quickly evacuated, said regional prefect Michel Cadot. "The other camps will be evacuated as soon as possible next week," Cadot told reporters. The authorities said the dawn operation Wednesday was the 35th such evacuation in Paris in the last three years as thousands of migrants have arrived seeking a better life. French President Emmanuel Macron has pushed a new immigration law, decried as too hardline by some associations but which he sees as essential to identify genuine asylum seekers and economic migrants. The law, which is still being debated in parliament, would speed up the asylum process and lead to increased deportations of people who are seeking work in France, rather than fleeing war or persecution at home. The issue of migration was thrown into the spotlight at the weekend after a Malian migrant, in the country illegally and working in the construction industry, saved a child dangling from a fourth-floor balcony. The dramatic rescue act by Mamoudou Gassama, who scaled the Parisian apartment bloc with his bare hands, turned him into a global superstar and led Macron to grant him honorary citizenship. Immigration remains one of the main concerns of French voters, polls show, and the far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen won a third of votes in last year's presidential election. Rather than Gassama's heroics, some far-right activists have highlighted a different case involving migrants this week: that of two Afghans arrested for allegedly harassing a woman they judged to be inappropriately dressed on a train. The Paris mayor's office, run by Socialist Anne Hidalgo, praised the clearance of the camps on Wednesday but said that it had been calling on the national government and interior ministry to take action for four months. Several officials from the mayor's office were openly critical of Interior Minister Gerard Collomb. Search Keywords: Short link: Egyptian and British officials have discussed the future growth of trade and investment ties between the two countries in the wake of Brexit, the British embassy said on Wednesday. According to an embassy press release, Egyptian Minister of Trade and Industry Tarek Kabil met with the UKs Minister of Investment Stuart to discuss avoiding any disruption of the trade between both countries when the UK leaves the EU in 2019. The two ministers also discussed the Egyptian economy and UK investments in Egypt. Kabil and Graham praised the agreement reached between the EU and UK at the March European Council by which the UK is to be treated as a member state for the purposes of international agreements during the EU-UK Implementation Period (1 April 2019 to 31 December 2020). The agreement provides further certainty to both British and Egyptian traders that there will be no disruption to the existing trading relationship during the implementation period, the statement said. Both ministers welcomed the significant progress made so far in discussions to ensure continuity of the EU-Egyptian Association Agreement, which facilities almost 3 billion in trade between the two countries. "We appreciate the efforts and cooperation of UK officials with their Egyptian counterparts, to ensure not only continuity and certainty on current Egypt-UK trade arrangements, but that those principles form the basis of a future bilateral Egypt-UK economic relationship under a new, independent UK trade policy," Kabil said. He added that Egypt will "thrive for tighter relationship with the UK while maintaining its excellent relations with the EU and its member states." Stuart said he was delighted to discuss the economic partnership between the UK and Egypt, adding that the trade relationship continues to go from strength to strength, with the total trade between the two countries growing by nearly 6 percent between 2015 and 2016. "As we leave the EU and create a new independent UK trade policy, we will build further on our 3 billion of annual trade with Egypt, and continue to work closely together to champion free trade," he said. The UK is the largest foreign investor in Egypt, with British investments in the country amounting to $30.5 billion since 2011, according to Egypt's State Information Service website. Last week, Kabil said the UK has investments of $5.6 billion through 1,450 companies operating in Egypt. Search Keywords: Short link: Head of Egypt's State Information Service Deyaa Rashwan said on Tuesday that he has only one official Facebook page under his name, Al-Ahram Gate reported. Rashwan said that an anonymous person created a second account under his name, using his photo as a profile picture. The SIS head also said the person had been sending friend requests to public figures and Egyptian officials using this profile. He gave the following link goes as his only real and official profile on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Deyaa.Rashwan. Authorities have been notified to take necessary legal procedures. Rashwan also said that Facebook administration has been informed and asked to delete the fake account. Search Keywords: Short link: All personal data provided by you (the applicant) will be treated as confidential and stored / managed on our secure servers in accordance with The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). We do however require your consent to process and transmit your information to third parties for the purpose of finding you suitable employment and obtaining essential supporting documentation. This consent covers all information we may require whilst representing you; including but not limited to your application, training & compliance, work placements, payroll and general day-to-day correspondence. Temporary work dictates the need for quick, effective communication for us to secure assignments for you. It is therefore essential for us to maintain regular contact with you across multiple channels. This includes; phone, Email, SMS and in-app push notifications (where applicable). Your consent is required for us to do so. Our privacy policy can be read here: Privacy Policy Off one minute, on the next, the road to the Singapore summit between the US and North Korea is strewn with uncertainties Those following the ups and downs of American-North Korean relations ever since President Donald Trump occupied the Oval Office 15 months ago could nonetheless have never imagined the sudden diplomatic fluctuations in the American approach to questions of peace and security on the Korean Peninsula in a 24-hour span, from Thursday, 24 May to Friday, 25 May. The two sides already agreed to hold an unprecedented summit in Singapore on 12 June, thanks to sustained diplomatic efforts by South Korean President Moon Jae-in who travelled to Washington and held a constructive meeting with President Trump, 22 May. Based on the statements of both sides, there were no indications whatsoever that the Singapore summit was facing insurmountable hurdles. But things abruptly changed in Washington on 24 May. In a letter addressed to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, President Trump, in a bellicose style, alternating diplomatic niceties with veiled threats, informed the North Koreans that he decided to cancel the summit till a more appropriate time. The reason he gave for this sudden shift was statements coming out of Pyongyang, particularly its reactions to an interview on Fox News with US Vice President Mike Pence on 21 May, in which he stressed that what is known as the Libyan model of denuclearisation will apply to North Korea if Kim does not agree to denuclearise. Of course, nothing infuriates the North Koreans more than an allusion to the Libyan precedent in this regard. To mark their displeasure, the North Korean Foreign Ministry issued a statement attacking Pence personally, and hinted that North Korea was ready for a nuclear showdown in case diplomacy fails. According to reports in the American press, the hawkish new national security adviser in the White House, John Bolton, briefed President Trump on the latest warning out of Pyongyang, a briefing that could explain why the US president cancelled the Singapore summit. While he left the door open for a future meeting with Kim, he expressed his wish never to have to try the massive nuclear arsenal at the disposal of the United States. Needless to say, worldwide reactions to this shattering news were of utter consternation coupled with growing fears that the world would see, once again, the inflammatory rhetoric that had characterised American-North Korean relations last year. A rare and historic opportunity to make peace, at long last, on the Korean Peninsula, for the first time since 1953, appeared to be waning. And no one was more dismayed and frustrated than the South Koreans. The Blue House spokesman, Kim Eui-kyeom, said that, We are attempting to make sense of what precisely President Trump means. South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha got on the phone with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on 25 May, to try to salvage the summit and ease the concerns of the United States as to the utility of holding it as scheduled. According to a statement by the South Korean Foreign Ministry, the two agreed that both sides should devote effort to save the dialogue opportunity. Seemingly, the North Koreans were of the same mind. Kim Kye Gwan, a top official at the North Korean Foreign Ministry, in comments published by state-run news agency KCNA on 25 May, said that his country would like to make known to the US side once again that we have the intent to sit with the US... to solve the problems regardless of ways at any time. Moreover, the comments contained some flattering remarks concerning Trump that show that the North Koreans understand fully well the psychology of the US president. The comments lauded his decision to agree to meet the North Korean leader, and emphasised that, We have inwardly highly appreciated President Trump for having made the bold decision which any other US presidents dared not [take]. The conciliatory tone of the official North Korean reaction to the US decision to cancel the summit seems to have made President Trump change his mind 24 hours later. On 25 May he tweeted that the summit could take place after all. The irony in the initial American decision is that on the same day the North Koreans closed their nuclear test site at Punggye-ri. Meanwhile, and in order to demonstrate their commitment to the Panmunjom Declaration of 27 April, the two Korean leaders, President Moon Jae-in and Chairman Kim Jong-un, held an unscheduled summit on 26 May, 29 days after their first meeting at the Demilitarised Zone. The purpose of the second meeting was nothing less than salvaging the Singapore summit. Both leaders have invested much political capital in trying to make it happen; they could not afford the high political costs of the summit not taking place. In this context, President Moon Jae-in sent an implicit message to the White House as to the chances of success of the Singapore summit. To assure the White House of the true intentions of Kim Jong-un, the South Korean president said, after his two-hour meeting with his North Korean counterpart, that the latter once again made clear his will for the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula and expressed his intent to settle the history of war and confrontation, and to cooperate for peace and prosperity through the success of the North Korean-US summit. In other words, President Trump should not harbour fears of failure. In fact, what the American president should be wary of is the unending warnings of Republican hawks and other foreign policy experts in various think-tanks in the United States as to the true intentions of the North Korean leader. The following quote by Senator Lindsey Graham (Republican-South Carolina) is just an example. Recently he said: Here is what I told the president: North Koreans are going to try to wait you out. They are going to nickel and dime you. They are going to delay. They are going to obfuscate. They are going to make commitments and pull them back. Now, it is up to President Trump to decide if he wants to lend his ears to President Moon Jae-in, or to Senator Lindsey Graham and National Security Adviser John Bolton, who keeps speaking of the Libyan model in denuclearisation as the future American blueprint when it comes to the dismantlement of the North Korean nuclear arsenal. The road to the Singapore summit is strewn with uncertainties. The writer is former assistant foreign minister. *A version of this article appears in print in the 24 May 2018 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly with headline: New unknowns Search Keywords: Short link: Despite Washingtons withdrawal from the expected summit with North Korea, neither side will be able to easily abandon the process that has started The US announced last week that it had pulled out of the scheduled presidential summit with North Korea. It subsequently left the door slightly ajar, saying that the meeting between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un could still happen. The sudden decision to cancel and then to leave the summit up in the air came as no less a surprise to analysts and observers than the decision to convene it. The planned summit plus the agreement to dismantle North Koreas nuclear weapons led observers to draw a comparison a valid one with Richard Nixons visit to Beijing and meeting with Mao Tse-tung in the early 1970s. Until that point, it seemed inconceivable that the Chinese leader could meet with a US president who had built his political reputation on a hardline anti-communist stance. But the summit between the far-right leader from the West and the far-left leader from the East did take place, paving the way to the era of international detente, one China, and a complicated three-way relationship between Washington, Beijing and Moscow at a time when leadership of the international communism movement was split between China and Russia. As was the case in the past, the path to a summit, today, led through mutual entrenchment, sabre rattling and vitriol, political and diplomatic jockeying, nuclear and missile tests, and US naval movements. At one point, political analysts had begun to draw up possible nuclear war scenarios. The general thinking at the time was that the fate of the world rested in the hands of two leaders reputed for their impetuosity and lack of clarity as they steered the world to the precipice. Yet, they set a date for a summit meeting, 12 June, in Singapore, the tiny city-state that woke up one morning to find that it was about to become one of the most important places in the universe. We have previously discussed, in this column, how South Korea, fearful of a war for which it, alone, would have to pay the price, and China, which played a pivotal role in persuading Kim to declare his readiness to relinquish his nuclear weapons, were instrumental in paving the way for the summit. Naturally, there were thousands of other details. Would the dismantlement of the North Korean nuclear programme mean that the whole Korean peninsula would become a nuclear-free zone, eliminating the justification for the presence of US forces in South Korea, or at least for the USs nearby naval bases which are armed with nuclear weapons? If Pyongyang gives up its most effective weapon, will the US-South Korean joint manoeuvres programme end? In general, what will North Korea get in return for relinquishing nuclear weapons? The foregoing questions and more would certainly have been brought up in talks between the North Korean and US negotiating teams, with or without a South Korean presence, while China played the crucial mediating role. Were they resolved? It was clear that many had been, if not resolved, at least addressed during Mike Pompeos visits to Pyongyang, which occurred twice, once in his capacity as CIA director and then in his capacity as US secretary of state. Regardless of the details, the forthcoming summit had raised hopes that the Korean war had finally reached an end and that a peace treaty would be signed. Then, Trumps national security advisor, John Bolton, announced that the Libyan model would serve as a guideline for US talks with North Korea. Suddenly, the summit was cast into doubt and the diplomatic game seemed to enter a dead end. The general belief was that, to Pyongyang, the Libyan model stood for total capitulation: Libya had given up its arms and intelligence while gaining nothing in return except for the end to the Lockerbie crisis. Moreover, even after all the Libyan concessions, US troops led the NATO invasion of Libya, which culminated in the killing of Gaddafi. This is hardly what the North Koreans had in mind when they embarked upon diplomatic and political avenues toward peace. So, tensions erupted again. Kim saw the Libyan model as a manoeuvre to eliminate North Korea as it defines itself with its hereditary rule and communist system. His country would not become, as he had envisioned, another Vietnam or China, which is to say, a regime that survives intact with its system of government even if it agrees to certain terms in order to engage in an extensive modernisation process. In short, he feared a huge scam and all the confidence that had been built up over previous months had vanished. A summit seemed pointless. Still, I believe that the US and North Korea have embarked on a path that they cannot back out of easily, even if the dates of the summit are no longer sacred and can be postponed. Certainly, war is no longer an option and they are unlikely to forfeit much of what has already been accomplished in the detailed negotiations. In addition, both Trump and Kim have an interest in reaching an agreement. Trump, for one, stands to become a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which would solve all his domestic problems which have been accumulating by the day. Ultimately, Boltons remark was little more than a political and diplomatic gaffe. As Trump, himself, pointed out, there is no legitimate comparison between the Libyan model and the entirely different Korean one. In the latter case, the doors to prosperity are open and investments could pour into North Korea. But for this to happen there need to be guarantees and they need to be discussed in negotiations in greater detail. In this framework, South Korea, which has worked to create extensive bridges with Pyongyang, will continue to have an important role to play. But the key to solving all the problems will be China. During the Korean war, which began with North Koreas invasion of the south, the US stepped in to rescue the south from the communist invasion. US troops under General MacArthur pushed North Korean forces out of the south and then became bogged down in the north. The Chinese intervened on the side of North Korea and drove US forces south of the current partition line. China had supplied North Koreas guarantee at the time by dealing the US its first defeat since World War II. Beijing can serve as the guarantee again, today, in order to save a peace agreement that will have to happen sooner or later. The writer is chairman of the board, CEO and director of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies. *A version of this article appears in print in the 24 May 2018 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly with headline: Un-Trump Search Keywords: Short link: Travis SchneiderAnother day, another Cardi B feature. This time around, it's Maroon 5 who's getting the benefit of the "Bodak Yellow" rapper's talents. Following online chatter that the two acts were working together, Maroon 5 tweeted, "Rumors are true. Our new single #GirlsLikeYou, ft. @iamcardib, is out tomorrow. Stay tuned for more!" In recent years, Maroon 5 has made a habit of collaborating with rappers. Since 2012, the group has featured Kendrick Lamar, Wiz Khalifa and Future on their singles. The first single from their current album, Red Pill Blues, "What Lovers Do," featured rising R&B star SZA. Meanwhile, "Girls Like You" is the fourth record -- other than her own -- on which Cardi's been featured this year, following Bruno Mars' "Finesse," Rita Ora's "Girls" and Jennifer Lopez's "Dinero." Maroon 5 is kicking off their Red Pill Blues tour tonight in Tacoma, WA. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Calls for uncontrolled connectivity and absolute freedom on the Internet have given way to more sober evaluations of the strengths and weaknesses of digital technology Digital empowerment, cell phones for all, the road to democracy via social media, technological agents of change, a free Internet, virtual inclusion as opposed to reality exclusion, and a whole list of digital freedoms that seemed to offer the solution to poverty, oppression and dictatorship all these things are no longer trending today. Two decades ago, the inhabitants of the planet were made to believe that the road to development, democracy, freedom, poverty eradication and education ran through technology, and more precisely through the digitalisation of societies. But the world today has changed, and what was once regarded as an agent of change, a tool of democracy, and the key to inclusion is now being revisited. There is no longer a call for a virtual world of undefined accessibility, uncontrolled connectivity, or absolute freedom. However, there have been moves towards the greater protection of data from online surveillance, the securing of democracies against the influences of social media, the tracking of digital pick-pockets, cyber-security, and global stability, all in a bid to maintain humanity in an age of artificial intelligence. In other words, the message today is no longer one of technology and innovation but more one of technology, innovation and society, the title of a gathering organised by the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi in partnership with the Tangier-Tetouan-Al-Hoceima regional council and the Moroccan Ministry of Industry, Investment, Trade and the Digital Economy that took place in Tangiers in mid-May under the auspices of king Mohamed VI of Morocco. Experts from all over the world convened to discuss the opportunities, as well as the threats, of technology, innovation and inclusion, with a special eye on Africa and the Arab world. For nearly a decade, the relationship between individuals and technology companies was quite simple: data was exchanged in return for services that were often free. Digital ecosystems thrived on the free flow of data, and millions of people started thinking that this was the norm and that being online was somehow nearly equivalent to being in paradise. However, aided by new and intrusive technologies, this business model has been posing societal, political and security risks over the past two years in the West and over the past seven years in the Arab region. Perhaps one should be thankful to Russian operations in the US and the Cambridge Analytica revelations in the UK about the misuse of data, since otherwise digital risks could have continued to pose threats in the Arab world. However, when the world realised that data had been used to manipulate the public sphere in adverse ways in the Western democracies, people woke up to what had been going on for years in other parts of the world and during the 2011 Arab Spring. Sessions at the Morocco meeting tackled issues such as how personal data remains online, how social media has been capable of influencing electoral outcomes, the rapid increases in cyber-attacks and how efficient tools of cyber-security are, and how to counter violent extremism online. As the Arab world is sometimes seen as being at the centre of terrorism in the world today, it was interesting to see how tackling online terrorism, or even the online encouragement and recruiting of future terrorists, clashed with digital freedoms and the notion of democratisation via the Internet. The prominent role played by technology in the rise of radicalism in Africa and Asia, and of course in the Arab world, is no longer a point of argument, but has rather become a topic attracting a certain degree of unanimity. Encryption-enabled mobile phones have made it easier for terrorists to avoid detection while they coordinate their activities, and social media can serve as a fertile breeding ground for extremists. Fighting Extremism Information technology coordinator at the UN Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED) Marc Poret said at the meeting that technology had been a facilitator rather than a driver of extremism. It was for this reason that there had been calls to outlaw extremist ideologies on the Internet. Professor of political risk at New York University Maha Aziz suggested using former extremists who had defected from their groups to help spot sleeper cells online, in addition to understanding the reasons why people are recruited in the first place. In other words, more should be done to understand what makes extremism attractive. Political advisor to the UN Mohamed Fayoumi said that tools remained tools, and in this sense the tool of technology to disseminate ideologies was one and the same, whether it be for Islamist extremists, progressive liberals, or right-wing groups. He also added that states continued to be the major supporters and financers of extremist groups, and the Islamic State (IS) group had even possessed land, a political and economic system, and a currency. These things belong to states, he argued. The solution, as Fayoumi perceived it, was a strong state. However, tackling extremism on the Internet and controlling the activities of those who are recruited and those who recruit poses the question of human rights and whether such controls constitute an intrusion or violation of such rights. Human rights in the digital age have become a major issue, and there are risks of cyber-attacks, digital divides, and hate speech on the Internet. Can security concerns be tackled without endangering digital freedoms? Head of cyber-policy at the German foreign office Karsten Geier said at the meeting that there were no differences between online and offline freedoms. Even though spreading fake news online has never been easier, not a single country has managed to find a real solution to it, she said, especially since some cyber-attacks are launched via states. Over the years, the variety and intensity of cyber-attacks have multiplied exponentially, even as many states have been struggling to arrive at framework for cyber-security. While information technology can help build open and equitable societies, governments are increasingly worried that they are becoming insecure because of the destabilising effect of the Internet. It has been apparent that Internet services have been among the top casualties in places where political unrest breaks out. But spreading lies, destabilising states and inducing change for the worse have also been problems associated with the Internet. A major question looms: who is Big Brother today? Is he associated most with states, intelligence apparatuses, foreign entities, groups with ideologies, or merely individuals having fun? Who should he be protecting? Who is violating the rules? What if the one who protects also violates? Should the idea of a department for the defence of democracy in a major IT company be taken seriously, or should it be seen as simply a facade for something else? What if part of the digital revolution, together with online freedoms and digital rights, is only a facade for neo-colonialism? If some countries agree on the necessity for some sort of monitoring and controlling of the hate and extremism taking place online, would the majority be able to reach an agreement on what is offensive and what is not? Who should be the ombudsman of the online world? Could there be guarantees that cyber-security would not be used as an excuse for political repression? There were many differences at the conference on fully understanding and being able to deal with cyber-threats without violating digital freedoms. Some experts said that the most important tool for controlling dangers was censorship applied by the users themselves. Others claimed that the word censorship did not apply in this context. What is sure is that when it comes to digital security, the world is still in a transitional phase. It is trying to find solutions. There are many challenges, but there are also many opportunities. While user-generated content is posed as a solution to state oppression, fake news, and the manipulation of information, can also be a problem. User-generated content is also a dark side of the story. Leaving cyber-threats and opportunities to one side, even as we speak someone somewhere is getting ready for artificial intelligence to take the lead worldwide and with it peoples jobs and critical abilities. The writer is a journalist at Al-Hayat newspaper. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 May 2018 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly with headline: Cyber-security in an age of insecurity Search Keywords: Short link: How has China managed to become the driving force of the global economy in just the last 30 years On the invitation of Chinese Cultural Counseller in Egypt Shi Yu Yun, I recently visited several cities and provinces in China, including Beijing and Chengdu, capital of the Sichuan Province in the southwest of the country. I was amazed by the huge progress that has been made over the last 30 years, raising the Middle Kingdom from the rank of a developing country to that of the worlds second-largest economy and the workshop of the world. China even goes beyond several developed countries in the Western world in many ways, and it deserves special attention from us in Egypt if we are to understand the Chinese success story that has been brought about in only a single generation. China, a sub-continent sized country of 9,388,211 km2, is the second-largest economy in the world behind the United States in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). However, the World Bank has estimated that in 2014 it became the worlds largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). According to such estimates, Chinas GDP amounted to $18,030,932 million in 2014, compared to $17,419,000 million in the United States. PPP is a tool that measures the purchasing power of a basket of 3,000 goods, instead of converting GDP according to the official exchange rate to the US dollar. This measure is preferred, especially for comparing per capita GDP levels in different countries. Over the years to come, China should move further and further ahead of the United States. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts that Chinas GDP, when measured in PPP dollars, will reach $27 trillion by 2019, when US GDP will be around $22 trillion. These figures, however, include significant regional inequalities: the east coast of China where the countrys economic heart is located, particularly around the cities of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macao, sees much of the production of the countrys wealth at the expense of the western provinces, which remain very rural and with significant development lags. Beijing is already the world capital of billionaires ahead of New York, while China ranks 81st in the GDP per capita ranking. Led by the Chinese Communist Party since 1949 and Mao Zedongs rise to power, Chinas economy was marked by strong state interventionism until the 1970s. Inspired by the Soviet model, this dirigiste economic model included central planning in many agricultural and industrial sectors, as well as relative isolation on the international trading scene. Since 1976, the year of the accession to power of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, China has developed a model called the socialist market economy that combines an always omnipresent public sector, a certain amount of economic liberalism, and a gradual opening of internal markets. Thanks to such policies, since the 1980s China has experienced strong economic growth, exceeding 10 per cent in some years and showing little sensitivity to cyclical shocks, particularly the subprime crisis in the US and the debt crisis in the Eurozone. From 2000 to 2010, China supplied 33 per cent of world growth in absolute terms. From 1979 to 2011, per capita income quadrupled, rising from five per cent to more than 20 per cent of the developed countries, and it now exceeds that of several emerging Asian countries. The massive industrialisation of China since the 1980s has made it a major player in labour-intensive industries like the textile industries and manufactured goods of lower quality. But since the 2000s, China has also progressed towards more technologically advanced exports. For example, in 2008, it made more than a quarter of global telecommunication equipment exports. Thanks to a large and cheap labour force and a very competitive exchange rate, China can export large quantities at low prices. Industrialisation strengthens its productive and exporting capacities from year to year, making the country the worlds factory. Its international economic opening has been based on the Special Economic Zones (SEZs), which today cover almost the entire coastline in the east of the country. Offering low-cost working conditions and tax benefits to multinational firms, the Chinese government obliges such firms to make their technologies public in the event of the relocation of their factories. On average, Chinas volume of exports increased by 14 per cent between 1990 and 1999, and 20.5 per cent between 2000 and 2008. Imports grew a little more slowly: 13 per cent per year during the 1990s, and 16 per cent between 2000 and 2008. China accounted for about nine per cent of exports and seven per cent of world imports in 2008, compared with 1.2 and 1.1 per cent, respectively, in 1983. Its place in world trade varies across sectors. It has a larger place for manufactured goods, where the country generates 13 per cent of world exports, than for agricultural or mining products. In industry, there are also great inequalities depending on products. Thus, the country accounts for 33 per cent of world exports of clothing, but only three per cent of those of food and two per cent of those of automotive products. Boosted by the countrys trade surplus, the Chinese government has launched a Go Out Policy, which is a globalisation strategy encouraging Chinese companies to invest in the strategic sectors of foreign economies. The strong trade surplus enabled by Chinas industrial exports has allowed the country to build up large foreign-exchange reserves, which reached $3,125 trillion in April 2018. These reserves, which guarantee 18 months of imports and cover ten times the short-term debts of the country, give China considerable financial strength on the international scene. However, Chinese finance is currently experiencing difficulties related to the explosion of shadow-banking in the country, being unconventional and unregulated finance that the political authorities do not seem able to stem and that the international ratings agency Moodys estimated at $4.8 trillion in 2014. Recipe For Success The Chinese economic miracle is due to several reasons, especially a sharp increase in the factors of production, labour and capital. From 1980 to 2010, the working-age population (15-59 years) in China increased by 360 million to more than 914 million people. The investment effort has been considerable, and the investment rate has reached an exceptionally high level at almost 50 per cent of GDP in 2010, even in relation to the rates observed in Asia. The investments were directed mainly towards industry and infrastructure, such as roads and real estate. Labour productivity has improved thanks to the increase in available capital per worker, the rising level of education and qualification of the labour force, and the reforms in agriculture as in industry. On the other hand, the change in the distribution of employment to industry and services in China has also been the source of significant labour productivity gains, as these have been much stronger than in agriculture. Agriculture accounted for 33.6 per cent of the Chinese workforce in 2012, but only 10 per cent of GDP. Industry has a more prominent place, and it employs about 30.3 per cent of the active population and is the most productive sector, producing nearly 47 per cent of GDP. A whole series of reforms has accompanied the double movement of internal liberalisation and openness to world markets in China. A preliminary law allowed individuals to set up limited liability companies. In 2004, the Chinese constitution was reworked to strengthen the role of the non-state sector and reaffirm the right of private property. The prohibition on private enterprises to invest in certain sectors, such as infrastructure, public services, and financial services, was abolished in 2005. Foreign direct investment was authorised and encouraged by the establishment of coastal free zones and the lowering of customs duties. The state monopoly on foreign trade has been dismantled, as has the system of multiple exchange rates. As a result, the private sector has expanded to produce nearly half of GDP and three-quarters of Chinese exports. It thus now creates the bulk of new jobs and generates the best profitability (15 per cent against five to 10 per cent in the state sector). Within the private sector, foreign firms, often joint ventures with Chinese firms, account for 75 per cent of exports. However, Chinese-controlled private-sector exports are growing fast. At the same time, the state sector is undergoing restructuring in China, leading to the elimination of 45 million jobs in the first half of the decade. But 35 per cent of state-owned enterprises are still considered unprofitable, and in the new economic context tinged with liberalism, public companies, or Danwei, are struggling to find their place and face more and more difficulties. Their losses reached a peak of 102.6 billion yuan ($12.75 billion) in 2005. Rising production costs, an inefficient pricing system, overcapacity and significant technological shortcomings are the main causes of this situation, according to analysts. Several decades of reform were needed to gradually stop the huge losses of the Chinese public companies and increase their productivity. The rapid growth of the private sector has lowered the importance of public enterprise assets in China from almost 99 per cent in the late 1970s to 25.2 per cent in 2013, particularly as their results have remained well below comparable companies in the sector. As a result, the indebtedness of state-owned enterprises has reached 55 per cent of total Chinese corporate debt, while their share of total production is only 22 per cent. An Ageing Population Chinas continued economic growth is linked to its demographic strength. In this regard, it ranks first in the world, with an estimated population of 1,414,339,756 in May 2018, based on United Nations estimates. Chinas population is thus equivalent to 18.54 per cent of the total world population. In the early 1980s, Chinas population reached about one billion, and in the early 2000s it surpassed 1.3 billion. During the 1980s, average population growth was about 1.5 per cent. In the 1990s, this rate dropped to about one per cent, and today it is about 0.6 per cent, one of the lowest for a developing country. However, three decades ago, only five per cent of the Chinese population was over 65. In 2015, 123 million people, or nine per cent of the Chinese population, were older than 65. A government think-tank has predicted that China will become the worlds oldest society in 2030. By 2050, Chinas ageing population could reach 330 million people, a quarter to 31 per cent of its total population. Children and young people under 20 could fall to 21 per cent of its population. These distortions are the source of increasing pressures on the Chinese age pyramid and existing social structures. However, the labour force has continued to increase due to continued rural-to-urban migration, albeit more slowly. Nevertheless, the dependency ratio (the number of people not of working age to those who are) remains relatively low because of Chinas one-child policy that restricts the flow of new entrants. However, the countrys rapidly aging population, combined with the slowdown in the rural exodus, means that the growth potential will likely be lower in the future. It was for this reason that the Chinese government abandoned its one-child policy in 2015. Introduced in 1979, this policy required Han ethnic couples, the vast majority of the population, to have only one child (the law largely exempted ethnic minorities). The policy was cancelled due to profound distortions in the countrys demographic structure and enormous consequences for future growth prospects. The government has predicted the lowest growth rate in 28 years in 2018 at 6.5 per cent, after 6.9 per cent in 2017 and 6.7 per cent in 2016. The unbridled growth of the last 30 years has also had a flip side that Beijing can no longer neglect: the acceleration and deepening of income inequalities, pollution and environmental degradation, and public and private over-indebtedness. For this reason, Chinese premier Li Keqiang announced in March that these three areas would be the field of three decisive battles against poverty, pollution and financial risks linked to colossal public and private debt of more than 250 per cent of GDP. Geopolitical Shifts The rise of China on the world economic scene has led to global geopolitical changes. Chinas international political and military influence should be confirmed in the medium and long run. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the worlds largest consulting firms, China is expected to be the worlds leading economy in 2030, with a GDP of $38 trillion against $23.4 trillion for the United States. It will widen the gap in 2050, with $58.5 trillion against $34.1 for the US, which should plummet to third place, the second place being inherited by India with a GDP of $44.1 trillion. These forecasts are to be placed in the context of the steady increases in Chinese defence spending. In March, China announced that its military budget, the second-largest in the world after the United States, would increase by 8.1 per cent in 2018, a growth rate higher than last year (+ seven per cent). Thus, the Chinese defence budget would reach 1.107 billion yuan ($175 billion) in 2018. China spent a total of $151 billion in 2017 on its military, according to a recent report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a London-based think tank. This is four times less than the United States at $603 billion, but far more than Saudi Arabia ($77 billion), Russia ($61 billion), India ($53 billion), the United Kingdom ($51 billion) and France ($49 billion). Beijing has been increasing its defence spending for more than 30 years to catch up with the West. The annual increase reached almost 18 per cent in the late 2000s. Led by China, Asia is consolidating its position on the global economic scene. 2018 should confirm the rise of the continent, with the emergence of India as the fifth-largest economy on the planet. This Asian giant would supplant France and the United Kingdom, which would go to sixth and seventh place, respectively. The ranking, published on 26 December, was produced by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), a British institute. This growth of the Asian economies will further strengthen in the next 15 years, when according to the CEBR, South Korea and Indonesia will have entered the top 10, and Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines and Pakistan will have entered the top 25. A study published in February 2017 by PwC said that by 2030 four of the worlds five major economic powers would be Asian in the shape of China, India, Japan and Indonesia. This means that the centres of gravity of the global economy are moving more and more towards Asia, and the economic weight of the western countries will continue to fall. In its study, the CEBR recalled that what is commonly called the developed world represented 76 per cent of the global economy until 2000. By 2032, this proportion should have fallen to 44 per cent, while the former developing countries will constitute 56 per cent of the world economy. This shift seems inevitable given the growth dynamics that govern the different parts of the globe. While almost no country is missing on the growth chart, Asia clearly leads the race. According to the IMF, in 2018 the Asia-Pacific region is expected to grow by 5.4 per cent, faster than the pace of the global economy (+ 3.7 per cent) and all the other regional blocs. North America should grow by 2.2 per cent, Europe by two per cent, and Africa by 3.7 per cent. Several factors favour the Asian economies, including strong macroeconomic policies, strong trade integration driven by China, and a growing population. According to the BMI Research Institute (the Fitch Group), by 2030 the continent should have an additional 410 million inhabitants and continue to represent more than 50 per cent of the worlds population. Economists also cite the catch-up potential offered by the rate of urbanisation in Asia. This is around 40 per cent in Asia against 80 to 90 per cent in the advanced western economies. The development of urban centres is usually accompanied by a boom in the industrial sector, services and consumer spending, and so it is an additional impulse for growth. *A version of this article appears in print in the 31 May 2018 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly with headline: Chinas recipe for success Search Keywords: Short link: PLYMOUTH, MI - U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is scheduled to speak to a Plymouth crowd Thursday, May 31 at the Michigan Chapter of the Federalist Society's Annual Dinner & Grano Award Presentation. The dinner and presentation will be held at The Inn at St. John's Plymouth Detroit, according to the U.S. Attorney's office. Opening remarks begin at 6:10 p.m. and the speaker portion of the dinner starts at 7:10 p.m. Sessions' visit comes amid nationwide debate over a new federal immigration policy of separating children from their parents when families arrive at the border illegally. Earlier this month, Sessions announced plans to criminally prosecute anyone who crosses the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Previously, families detained at the border were held briefly at facilities where they could stay together before being sent back. Because children cannot be held in adult jails, the new policy causes children to be split from their parents. It's Hard When You're Young Sometimes it takes time and distance to know what the heart really wants. Posted by George Takei Presents on Sunday, May 27, 2018 MILAN, MI - Vika Marchenko and Franklyn Rutkowski are a Michigan couple with a love story similar to that of "The Notebook" or "A Walk to Remember." OK, maybe not that extreme, but a social-media video documenting the Washtenaw County couple's journey recently went viral. Their story has reached over 4.6 million views on Facebook, thanks to former "Star Trek" actor George Takei, who shared the video on his channel, "George Takei Presents." Marchenko said she couldn't believe their story is so popular. "I submitted a summary of our story to 'The Way We Met' on Instagram, so I never expected it to reach as many people as it did," she said. "The lady from the site loved our story, so she must have submitted it to another website on Facebook as well." The two 26-year-olds dated throughout their teen years at Saline High School, south of Ann Arbor, until graduating in 2010. However, Marchenko said their immaturity at the time had them frequently breaking up and they eventually called it quits for good before each moved out of state. After hearing lyrics to a song by The Chainsmokers that reminded her of her old boyfriend in 2017, Marchenko reached out to Rutkowski on Facebook. They texted and spoke on the phone every day after that and could feel their connection growing stronger than ever. When Rutkowski, who lived in Charleston, South Carolina, was coming back home to visit his family, he had a plane layover in Atlanta, Georgia, where Marchenko lived. He bought her a ticket just so she could get past security to see him and the two met face-to-face for the first time in seven years. They fell back in love. Rutkowski proposed two months later at the same airport when he returned and the couple eloped soon after. "We spent so much time doing some soul searching on our own and we grew into much better people than we were as kids," Marchenko said. "We learned how to take care of ourselves, how to treat others, how we want to be treated in relationships, how to cope and handle difficult situations, how to be patient and understanding in life and love." Marchenko said she hopes their story is an inspiration to other couples and to people who dream of finding their own happy ever after. "I truly hope they get out of our story is that it's OK sometimes to part with people who are important to you and it's OK to work on your own personal growth and to try to better your life and yourself while you're young," she said. The couple recently moved back to the area and reside in Milan, but they plan on traveling across the country the next few years due to Rutkowski's job. They will be celebrating their marriage with family and friends in Kalamazoo sometime in June, Marchenko said. PITTSFIELD TWP., MI - Expert witnesses testified in court Tuesday that the body of Latisha Bargaineer, who was found dead in the back of a car in Detroit almost a year ago, appeared to have been washed before being transported away from the Ypsilanti crime scene and abandoned. Bargaineer's boyfriend, Demetrius Montgomery, is accused of killing her and is now a step closer to trial after his preliminary examination was held Tuesday, May 29 before 14A1 District Judge Cedric Simpson. Montgomery faces trial in Washtenaw County Trial Court on one count of open murder, which allows a jury to decide the degree of the crime. "In my opinion, she was dead before getting in the car," said David Moons, a pathologist for the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office, who performed Bargaineer's autopsy. Bargaineer's body was found June 18, 2017 in Montgomery's vehicle in Detroit. But a crime scene was found at the couple's Ypsilanti apartment in the 300 block of West Cross Street. Montgomery is accused of fleeing the state in a cousin's vehicle after abandoning the body outside the cousin's home. Bargaineer suffered a large stab wound to the abdomen, penetrating her liver. The medical examiner also found several cuts to her head, as well as multiple defensive wounds on her arms and hands, Moons said. Citing a lack of blood coming from her wounds or in her hair, Moons said it appeared she was washed before being placed in the car. An evidence technician from the Detroit Police Department who examined the vehicle agreed with that assessment, pointing to a lack of substantial blood in the car. And Michigan State Police Forensic Scientist Ashley Bolahan, who collected evidence from the pair's Ypsilanti apartment, said she found traces of blood in every room of the apartment except one bedroom. Using a chemical that illuminates traces of blood, police found a bloody path in the apartment leading from the shower to the living room. Much of the blood in the bathroom and kitchen appeared to have been washed or diluted, Bolahan said. A kitchen knife covered in Bargaineer's blood was found on Montgomery's couch in the living room, she said. Near a blood-stained mattress in the bedroom, police found a shopping bag packed with a fitted bed sheet soaked in blood, Bolahan said. Though blood was found throughout the apartment, Montgomery's attorney Robert Killewald argued that police could not determine how long each blood stain was in the apartment. Bargaineer's sister, Anquanetta Bargaineer, said the pair had been dating off and on for about 10 years, and claimed Montgomery was violent in the past. "Every time he has said she will beat her ass, he has done it," she said in court. The woman who found Bargainer body in the car in Detroit, who was at the home of Montgomery's cousin at the time, said she noticed blood on his clothes and hands when he arrived and demanded his cousin's car keys. After he left, she saw that Montgomery left his car door open, and went to close it when she saw Bargaineer dead in the backseat and called 911, she said. Joanne Fagans, Bargaineer's friend of more than 10 years, also took the stand Tuesday, testifying that there was a history of violence between Montgomery and Bargaineer. She recalled a 2009 incident in which Montgomery told her to leave his Detroit home after she heard something crash on the second floor of the residence. "(Bargaineer) told me not to go, so I just waited outside for a bit when I saw her jump out a window naked," Fagans said. "She was naked, scared and injured with two black eyes and cuts on her arms." They ran to Fagans' father's house three streets away and called police, she said. "She said he stabbed her and was going to kill her," Fagans said. "She was terrified of him, but she loved him." Montgomery was arrested on June 25, 2017 in Lincoln, Alabama for attempting to elude police, resisting arrest, and using a false identification to obstruct justice, Talladega County Jail records show. He was then extradited to Michigan and charged with murder. Montgomery was also arraigned March 6 in Wayne County in one felony case involving assault with intent to murder and armed robbery and several misdemeanor cases, county records show. Montgomery is scheduled for a pretrial hearing July 5 before Washtenaw County Trial Judge Darlene O'Brien. He is being held in the Washtenaw County Jail without bond. HAZLETON TWP., MI -- A Shiawassee County man faces a felony charge after investigators found 17 dead cows under his care earlier this month. The Shiawassee County Sheriff's office received a complaint about several deceased cattle along a row of trees off of Allan Road near Jacobs Road, according to Deputy Kirt Stechschulte, who is assigned to the animal control division. Raymond Jacobs, 53, faces a felony charge of cruelty, abandonment of 10 or more animals, according to Stechschulte. He was arraigned on the charge in Shiawassee District Court on May 21, police said. When Stechschulte went to the property on May 3, Stechschulte said he started walking toward the trees and found a dead cow 25 yards into the property. He also found 15 more dead cattle in the trees. A 17th dead cow was found inside one of the barns, Stechschulte said. The Michigan Department of Agriculture was called in to assist with the investigation. It was determined that the cattle died from chronic malnutrition, inadequate living conditions and insufficient veterinary care, Stechschulte said. The 17 cows died over the last six months, investigators said, and accounted for about 50 percent of the herd. "Something had to be done," Stechschulte said. The property belonged to Jacobs' father, and the remaining cattle were seized and moved to a different farm in Shiawassee County. FLINT, MI -- Emergency surgery has sidelined the lead attorney for a state engineer charged with criminal wrongdoing related to the Flint water crisis and will delay his and three other preliminary examinations. Genesee District Court Judge Jennifer Manley has granted a motion to adjourn preliminary exams scheduled to continue this week for four Michigan Department of Environmental Quality officials, further bogging down what has already been a drawn-out process. Michael Prysby filed the motion to adjourn this week's continuation of the exams after his lead attorney, Frank Reynolds of Foster, Swift, Collins & Smith, underwent "emergency lifesaving surgery" on May 15, according to court records. Prysby asked, and Manley granted, a six-week postponement in his case and those of three other current and former DEQ employes -- Stephen Busch, Liane Shekter-Smith and Patrick Cook. The four cases were combined for the purpose of preliminary exams, which have already lasted 10 days. "Mr. Reynolds is currently recovering and has been advised by his physicians that he will be unable to work for approximately eight weeks ...," the motion to adjourn says. "Defense has identified an additional attorney to be added to the defense team and is awaiting approval from the state of Michigan prior to retaining new counsel. "It is expected that new counsel will need six weeks to become familiar with the case in order to proceed with preliminary examination." Prysby argued that he needs two attorneys with him in court due to the complexity of the case and volume of discovery, including approximately 2.5 million pages of various documents. Reynolds has been Prysby's primary attorney since before charges were issued in his case more than two years ago. Manley's order has scheduled the DEQ preliminary exams to resume July 12. GRAND RAPIDS, MI - Thousands of dollars are being set aside to fund ideas about how to reduce neighborhood violence in Grand Rapids. In a public contest created by city task force Safe Alliances For Everyone (SAFE), six ideas pitched by the public will be funded in an effort to affect the community. SAFE is encouraging members of the community and nonprofit organizations to come up with proposals and present them at a Pitch and Highlight Night, where a panel will then judge the ideas on ways to reduce neighborhood violence. Winners of the contest will receive funds to implement the programs they come up with in the Grand Rapids community. Three individual winners will receive $1,000 each and three nonprofit organization winners will receive $10,000 each. It's double the funding from what was awarded at the first Pitch and Highlight Night - in December, the SAFE Task Force funded $500 to individuals and $5,000 to nonprofits. There were 25 proposals pitched at the December Pitch and Highlight Night. SAFE Task Force Chair and Third Ward Commissioner Senita Lenear said she expects the second event to have an even greater turnout and impact than the first event. "We thought, OK, violence takes a spike sometimes in the summer months, so it would be great to continue to invest in reducing violence in additional programs," Lenear said. Lenear said the increase in funding is due to the financial needs the December pitches demonstrated. "As we were experiencing the pitch night, someone or organization would be asking for the maximum for the pitch, but the budget that they were explaining during the pitch had exceeded the maximum amount that we had allocated," she said. "So it was clear that a higher investment would get us more return in the community." Online registration for proposals is open until June 14. The Pitch and Highlight Night is scheduled for 6 to 8:30 p.m. on June 19 at the Salvation Army Kroc Center at 2500 S. Division St. Participants will have five minutes to present their idea to the panel of judges. Ideas must address one or more of the following themes: prevention investment, eliminate violent acts, activate economic opportunities, community engagement and effect positive change in public institutions (local, county and state). Ideas also must address issues 15- to 24-year-olds face in the community. Past winning ideas have included creating mentorship programs, radio and television series, community workshops and justice initiatives. While many of the projects from the December contest are already in action, Lenear said it's too soon to tell if the projects are truly reducing neighborhood violence levels, but said as more projects are established, data patterns will be easier to detect. "If there's work happening across different sectors of the community, if we're addressing economic development issues, if we're addressing ending violent acts and we're addressing policy and things of that nature all at the same time, we should be able to see a reduction in violence," Lenear said. IONIA, MI -- Bumpers for the new line of Ford Ranger trucks will be assembled at an expanding plant in Ionia, economic development officials announced Wednesday. Ford is bringing back its line of midsize Ranger pickup trucks in 2019 after an eight-year hiatus. Production is planned for the Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne -- where the plant will be closed from May to October to retool. Ventra Ionia will be putting $4.85 million into an expansion to make room to assemble, paint and chrome finish bumpers for the new Ford Ranger. The program will create 109 jobs. The company plans to purchase a 48,900-square-foot facility at 1790 East Blue Water Highway in Ionia -- adjacent to its existing location at 14 N. Beardsley Road -- to make room. The company manufactures front and rear bumpers and grille assemblies for manufacturers including Ford and General Motors at its Ionia facility. "Today's news wouldn't be possible if not for the commitment and talent of our workforce in Ionia, a workforce that has been directly responsible for years of success and now an extremely promising future for our Ventra operation," said Bill Beistline, vice president of procurement at Ventra Ionia's parent company, Flex-N-Gate. The expansion project will receive a $600,000 performance-based grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. Ford has said the Ranger will come equipped with a 2.3-liter EcoBoost engine, 10-speed auto transmission and high-strength steel frame backbone, and available in 2WD or 4WD. The 2019 Ford Ranger will come in XL, XLT and the Lariat trims, which will be available with chrome, sport or the FX Off-Road packages in either SuperCab or SuperCrew cab setups. A new industrial building at 1810 Turner Ave. built by Visser Development. (Courtesy | Colliers International) GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Gone are hundreds of rusting, picked-apart cars and trucks visible from U.S. 131. In their place at 1810 Turner Ave. NW is a new small-scale industrial park, in development since November 2017. The $12.3 million redevelopment of the 5.8-acre Grand Rapids Auto Parts salvage yard has almost completed construction of a 70,150-square-foot building on the site. DEG Development Co. LLC, which is registered to Bruce Visser, purchased the property in 2017. Visser Development served as the general contractor. The first tenants of the building were announced this week: All-Phase Electric Supply Co. and Axis Company LLC. All-Phase is an electrical distribution company that serves contractors and has its headquarters in Wyoming. The company plans to keep their Wyoming location open as the Grand Rapids location opens this summer. Axis Company is an advanced technology automation systems manufacturer. A second industrial building -- almost double the size of the first building -- with space for four tenants is in the works and will be open in summer 2019, said Greg Bol, sales associate with Visser Development. The project received $1.2 million in tax incentives from the Michigan Strategic Fund. The Strategic Fund approval allows the partnership headed by Visser Development Co. to capture $1.2 million in state and local taxes, including an estimated $563,731 in school tax capture over the next 14 years. After the salvage yard removed the rows of junked cars, Visser Development removed soil contaminated with heavy metals, Bol said. Industrial spaces in central Grand Rapids are a rare find, Bol said. The property's proximity to U.S. 131 has made it attractive to businesses looking for space -- who otherwise would have to locate on the fringes of the city or to the north in Sparta or Kent City, Bol said. "All-Phase had been touring the market for over a year, so when the Turner Avenue site became an option, all parties involved were confident the location would be a strategic fit to accommodate their incredible growth for many years to come, and also enable All-Phase to offer their customers best-in-class service," said Tim Van Noord, associate at Colliers International West Michigan. Colliers International brokered the deal between All-Phase, Axis and Visser Development. GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- A neighbor to Gerald R. Ford International Airport says groundwater contamination concerns at the air transit hub are causing nearby residents to worry about their health and property values. Scott Baldwin, a resident of the Thornapple neighborhood just northeast of the airport, asked officials to remember their neighbors during their probe into possible contamination by fire suppressant chemicals. "As a neighbor I'm also really concerned that the use of those products has had impact on the environment," said Baldwin, one of several people who addressed the airport board at their meeting on Wednesday, May 30. Ford Airport has dug monitoring wells and sampled soils around a former firefighting training area to determine if past use of aqueous film forming foam (AFFF) has contaminated groundwater with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. But the airport says it won't sample nearby homes for PFAS before results of airport property testing come back this summer, despite private residential test results that show some nearby drinking water wells do contain PFAS. In the face of several residents asking for immediate well testing at Wednesday's meeting, the airport board doubled down on that position. Airport CEO James Gill said wells can have built-in sources of PFAS contamination and indicated there could be false positive results. "Doing it the right way does not mean necessarily mean going into individual wells," he said. "Individual well tests, especially from some of what I'll say retail customers, can be inaccurate. We're trying to get the most accurate results we can get." Ford Airport's test results aren't expected back until June, and airport officials say they're withholding them from the state for nearly a month afterward to ensure accuracy. The airport recently sent the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality a letter questioning the state's authority to regulate contaminants in AFFF after the state asked them to expand testing. The airport is part of a growing list of PFAS sites under investigation statewide. Exposure to the chemicals has been linked in human studies to certain cancers, thyroid malfunction and other diseases. Some nearby residents have sought private well testing or stopped using their tap water until there are definitive answers. Katy Steele Barone, who said she plans to run for county commissioner, addressed the airport board on behalf of neighbors she said are afraid to speak up. "People are scared to speak out publicly," Steele Barone said. "They're worried about property values." One of those residents attended the meeting. She declined to give her name, fearing the stigma that comes with having moderate levels of PFOA in her home's water which she said private testing showed. More than a decade ago, she used her well water to mix baby formula. Now she worries that she exposed her children to toxic chemicals. Steele Barone implored the airport to commission testing of private wells that could be affected by any AFFF contamination. "I think the airport should focus any extra resources on making sure residents are safe right now," Steele Barone said. Moderate levels of PFOA have been detected in private drinking water wells downgradient of the airport, according to local water treatment supplier Gordon Water Services. Since March, contamination worries have prompted dozens of homeowners to test their wells. Eleven of 30 tests facilitated by Gordon Water Services within about four miles of the airport have come back positive with PFAS at levels ranging in the single digits to the mid- 50-ppt range. PFOA was the primary contaminant discovered. The Environmental Protection Agency health advisory for PFOS and PFOA -- two of numerous PFAS chemicals, is 70-ppt. Some researchers argue the safety threshold should be lower. The chemicals can spread long distances in groundwater and do not naturally degrade in the environment. In its recent letter to the DEQ, the airport claimed it didn't use AFFF made with PFOS and PFOA -- the only two PFAS chemicals the state has thus far classified as hazardous under its Part 201 law. "The airport continues to deny that any AFFF that has been used on airport property is or contains "hazardous substances" regulated by MDEQ during all relevant time periods," the airport wrote. According to the DEQ, Ford Airport used AFFF at several locations on the property in the past, including a fire training area, equipment testing areas and two locations where the foam was deployed in an emergency. The state has asked the airport to sample soils and groundwater at various depths in those areas. The airport is owned by the Kent County Board of Commissioners and managed by an independent authority. Firefighting foam is one of multiple PFAS products used in commerce that have resulted in contamination plumes in Michigan and elsewhere. The Federal Aviation Administration requires airports have the foam on hand to combat jet fuel fires. Board member Steven Heacock asked for clarification on the problem during the meeting, saying "you gotta remind me -- the creation or the use of PFAS by the airport, it was about fire training?" Asked afterward about his basic understanding of AFFF and PFAS, Heacock, a board member since 2014, declined to elaborate. "I'm really not scientifically inclined," he said. "I'm not real comfortable, frankly, in answering this question. I don't have deep understanding of it." Heacock, a vice president at Spectrum Health, declined to say whether the upper echelon of the hospital system has been discussing the PFAS contamination incidents in West Michigan and elsewhere. Seven Michigan candidates for Congress -- including five Democrats and two Republicans -- lack enough valid signatures on petitions to get their names on the August primary ballot, the Michigan Secretary of State office said today. That includes candidates running against incumbents Justin Amash, R-Cascade Township; Bill Huizenga, R-Zeeland, and Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, as well as the only opponent of Jack Bergman, R-Crystal Falls. Two of the seven were vying to fill the seat being vacated by Dave Trott, R-Birmingham. The seven Congressional candidates who failed to collect 1,000 valid signatures: Matt Morgan Nick Schiller Joseph Farrington Paul Clements Eponine Garrod Dan Haberman Kristine Bonds The Secretary of State's office also said that two judicial candidates lacked enough signatures. Tory Rocca, who was running for 16th circuit court judge in Macomb County, needed 2,000 signatures, but only 1,816 were deemed valid. There are two other candidates for the newly created seat. Kameshia Gant, a candidate for 46th District court judge in Southfield, had all her nominating petitions thrown out because she failed to state she was running for a judicial seat. Gant's withdrawal means Judge Debra Nance will run unopposed. Shri Thanedar, a Democrat running for governor, survived a challenge of his nominating petitions by fellow Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, another Democrat seeking the party's gubernatorial nomination. In the end, Thanedar needed 15,000 signatures and had 16,286. Meanwhile, John Conyers III filed a lawsuit today challenging the Wayne County Clerk's office decision earlier this month that he lacked enough signatures to run for his father's seat in the 13th Congressional District this year. "Voters have a right to a fair choice," Conyers said in a statement released today. "Attempts to suppress the voice of voters or any other machinations designed to narrow voters' choices won't work. After comparing the qualified state voter registration file to our petition signors, we are confident that the court will have little choice other than to uphold the scared right to vote and to place my name on the ballots." About 35 percent of Michigan public school students in the Class of 2018 tested as fully "college ready" based on their SAT scores as juniors. Students must get at least a 530 SAT subscore on the math section and a 480 subscore on the evidence-based reading and writing section to meet the SAT's college-ready benchmarks. About 73 percent of Michigan's Class of 2018 met the reading and writing benchmark, up from 60 percent for the Class of 2017. About 37 percent met the math benchmark, the same as the year before. About 35 percent of test-takers met both standards, also the same as the Class of 2017. Look up the numbers for any Michigan public high school in the database below. You can look up by district or type in the name of the school, and you can see the college-ready rate for all test-takers at the school. The data listed here is based on SAT tests administered in March 2017 to the Class of 2018 when they were 11th-graders. The database doesn't include schools with fewer than 10 test-takers. College-readiness percentage by high school You can sort the data by clicking on the column title. One click will perform a top-to-bottom ranking, with the lowest number first. Two clicks will result in a ranking with the highest number first. The numbers provided here come from the website maintained by the Michigan Department of Education and Michigan Center for Educational Performance and Information. Students who meet the benchmarks have at least a 75 percent chance of earning at least a C in college freshman math, English, social studies and/or science classes, according to the SAT. "Students are considered college- and career-ready when their SAT section scores meet both the Math and the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing benchmarks," the SAT says on its website. "It is important to note that college readiness is a continuum -- students scoring below the SAT benchmarks can still be successful in college, especially with additional preparation and perseverance." It's also important to note the Michigan college-readiness rates are based on students' assessments in March of their junior year, when they still have a third of their high school career to go. Indeed, a number of students retook the test as seniors and improved their scores, although that data is not available. The Class of 2017 were the first Michigan students required to take the SAT as part of their 11th-grade state assessment tests. Previous Michigan juniors were required to take the ACT. MACKINAC ISLAND, MI - Gov. Rick Snyder took the stage for the last time as governor at the Detroit Regional Chamber's Mackinac Policy Conference. Michigan had come a long way, he said, and now he has a new concern. "My greatest concern when I look at where Michigan is at is that we start getting complacent and content again," Snyder said. Michigan has come a long way in the eight years he's served as governor, Snyder said, citing more stable state finances, more Michiganders in the workforce and new state programs. And it's made a difference in the lives of Michiganders seeking work. "Back in 2010 the issue was 'is there a job.' Now the question is how do you get those skills to take those well-paying jobs that are out there?" Snyder said. In 2010 Michigan's unemployment rate was 12.6 percent, according to data from the state Department of Technology Management and Budget. In 2017, Michigan's unemployment rate was 4.4 percent. But thinking we're fully prepared for the future would be a mistake, he said, because everything is moving too quickly for anybody to be fully prepared. The policy conference, taking place this week on Mackinac Island, focuses on three big ideas: ensuring Michigan is prepared, the disruption caused by the new mobility sector and trust. That last piece is an important one to Snyder. "My greatest concern for our nation is the lack of civility that we have. How can you be the world's greatest country if you can't get along with yourself?" He said. He did not directly address the Flint water crisis, a tragedy under his tenure which many Flint residents cite as having eroded their trust in government. But he did say what matters most in terms of building trust is taking action to help people. "Words don't cut it, folks. You do it by actions," Snyder said. He encouraged people to get together on what they agree on. And as Michigan looks ahead, he asked people to sign on to support his Marshall Plan, a broad policy vision that includes filling 800,000 jobs through partnerships, programs and policymaking. Snyder has engaged in the conference throughout his tenure, taking the stage often multiple times per year and rolling out state initiatives on the island. This year's conference marks his last as governor. Detroit Regional Chamber President and CEO Sandy Baruah said he wanted to recognize Snyder for his contributions and unveiled a large sign with the governor's oft-repeated mantra. "For 2018 we are rebranding this conference in honor of our governor, the RPA governor, the Relentless Positive Action Conference," Baruah said. The conference takes place on Mackinac Island from May 29 to June 1. KALAMAZOO, MI -- A two-time Democratic challenger to U.S. Rep. Fred Upton may not see his name on the ballot a third time. The Michigan Secretary of State office said Democrats Paul Clements and Eponine Garrod are among seven candidates who lack enough valid signatures from registered voters to be on the Aug. 7 primary ballot. The Board of State Canvassers will meet Friday to vote on the recommendation to remove the candidates from the ballot. Fred Woodhams, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State's office, said candidates will have the chance to plead their case, but it's "uncommon" that the recommendation isn't followed. Garrod said she will attend the Friday Board of Canvassers meeting to argue her case. Clements was unable to be reached by MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette. Clements was his party's pick to challenge Upton for the 6th District congressional seat in 2014 and 2016 but fell nine signatures short of the 1,000 required. Clements submitted 1,346 signatures, of which 991 were deemed valid. Garrod, a first-time politician, also did not have enough valid signatures from registered voters to qualify for the ballot. She submitted 1,019 signatures, of which 974 were valid. Of the 1,346 signatures filed by Clements, the Secretary of State originally found 1,148 were valid. A challenge to petitions turned in by Clements was filed by Andrew Davis, an endorser of Longjohn's campaign. Davis was a failed challenger to Upton in 1992 and serves on the executive committee for the Democratic Party in the 6th District. Davis challenged 417 of Clements' 1,148 remaining signatures and 157 were found to be invalid. Signatures were disqualified for writing an "incorrect jurisdiction of registration." Too many signers living in jurisdictions that have cities and townships with the same name checked the wrong box indicating where they are registered to vote. This could occur in the following jurisdictions if the signer selected the wrong box to indicate whether he or she was registered to vote in the city or township: Kalamazoo (city), Kalamazoo Township New Buffalo (city), New Buffalo Township Saugatuck (city), Saugatuck Township South Haven (city), South Haven Township St. Joseph (city), St. Joseph Charter Township Sturgis (city), Sturgis Township Clements, a Western Michigan University political science professor unsuccessfully ran for Congress twice already, losing to Upton in 2014 and by a wider margin in 2016. After considering staying out of the 2018 election, Clements saw an opportunity to run again. Garrod, a Pfizer quality control tester, identified as a grassroots progressive originally inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders. The 24-year-old was a vocal supporter of progressive issues, often attending local government meetings in Kalamazoo County to speak. The Secretary of State found 45 signatures were invalid, including 35 for having a date error. KALAMAZOO, MI -- A long-vacant former medical research facility is being demolished in downtown Kalamazoo to make room for future use by Bronson Healthcare Group. Bronson purchased 160,000-square-foot building from MPI Research Inc. in 2016 for $2 million, according to Kalamazoo County records. "Building 126" was constructed in 1967 by the Upjohn Company as part of its downtown campus. The building was formerly used as a research laboratory, but has remained vacant since 2008. Bronson purchased the site at 251 E. Lovell St. and the large parking lot at the corner of Portage and Lovell streets in anticipation of future development, spokesperson Carolyn Wyllie said in an email. Demolition started in May and is expected to end in July. After Upjohn merged with Pharmacia in 1995, the building and labs underwent a $35 million upgrade, completed in 2002. It was later purchased by Pfizer in 2004, and MPI Research acquired it in 2008. Pfizer also acquired the 330,000-square-foot Building 267, located just off the northwest corner of Lovell and Portage streets, later donating it to Western Michigan University. Building 267 was renovated and later became the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. Wyllie said WMed and Bronson both explored possible uses for Building 126 before concluding that necessary renovations would be more expensive than tearing the 51-year-old building down and starting over. Inefficiencies at the building have prevented it from being used in the past. In 2005, the WMU Foundation announced plans to pay $3.8 million for Building 126. WMU saw it as an opportunity to expand its research portfolio, provide needed room for scientists and use lease space to private life-sciences firms. The idea was scrapped a year later when the university concluded it could not afford $2 million in annual energy and operations costs. Wyllie said the building is obsolete for anything other than its intended purpose as a research lab within a broader campus. It does not have a loading dock or an independent energy plant; heating and cooling come from the Zoetis building on Portage Street. By demolishing the building, Bronson will be able to eliminate facility maintenance, utility costs and taxes which currently total more than $500,000 per year. Wyllie said Bronson doesn't plan to put the property on the market. The area will be kept as green space until a future use for the land is determined. Meanwhile, work continues at the former Kalamazoo Gazette building. Bronson Healthcare Group began demolishing newer sections of the 131,419-square-foot building in December 2016. Wyllie said crews are working to stabilize and preserve the architecturally significant 1925 building. When work is done at the end of this summer, the building will be sealed off until Bronson determines a suitable use for it. Bronson expects to break ground this fall on land adjacent to the Gazette building to build a new centralized lab facility. The Bronson lab will be built just south of the Kahn building facing Burdick Street with green space between the two structures. It will replace and expand the functionality of Bronson Methodist Hospital's current lab, located on Bronson's North Campus and provide comprehensive reference lab services for the entire healthcare system, Wyllie said. KALAMAZOO, MI -- Gilbert H. Bradley Jr., Kalamazoo's first black mayor, remains an inspiring figure for African-American community leaders. Bradley, 77, died Friday, May 25 surrounded by family at Elkhart Memorial Hospital in Indiana. He served as Kalamazoo's vice mayor from 1969-71 before becoming the city's first black mayor from 1971-73 and later its assistant city manger. "I believe he paved the way for so many of us African-Americans on this commission during a time that wasn't simple or easy," said Bobby Hopewell, the city's current and longest-serving mayor. "We are sitting in these seats because of him." Partly because commissioners are elected on an at-large basis, minority representation in Kalamazoo was nonexistent until Arthur Washington Jr. broke the barrier in 1959. He was followed by figures like Bradley, Moses Walker, Beverly Moore, the first female black mayor, Dorothy Spurlock, Alexander Lipsey and Robert Jones. But becoming mayor was an even greater challenge than serving on the commission. Before recent changes to the City Charter, the highest vote-earner became mayor. That means Bradley was the second-highest vote-earner in his first campaign, then earned the most votes in his second election. At 31 years old, he topped a slate of 19 candidates for seven seats. Hopewell said that's an astounding fact considering the racial tensions America experienced in the 1970s. In a 1969 Kalamazoo Gazette article, Bradley said his election to vice mayor shows the city is "not as racist as some people might have thought." "It is an indication to both the black and white community that there is meaningful potential to really work together," he said. A story about his election was featured on the front page of the New York Times in November 1971. Bradley was a prolific worker, taking innumerable jobs in teaching, social services and health. He was baptized by his father at a young age, and became an ordained minister in 1985, pastoring two churches in Virginia toward the end of his career. Gilbert was born in Hodge, Louisiana, but his family moved to Inkster when he was three years old. He came to Kalamazoo in 1961 as a student at Western Michigan University. While studying at WMU, he was a founding member of the university's Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity chapter. The fraternity was the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African-American men. After graduating, he worked as a custodian and meat chopper. Bradley taught at Woodward School for Technology and Research from 1965 to 1969, and managed the Kalamazoo County Chamber of Commerce Human Development Department while serving as mayor. He was hired to lead the city's human services department in 1976. He left the city in 1978 to pursue a career in Alexandria, Virginia but returned to Michigan after his retirement. He is survived by his wife of almost fifty years, Mary Bradley, and two daughters, Gayle Williams of Vandalia and Karla Smith of Centreville, Virginia. He has two grandchildren, several sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law and a host of nieces and nephews. According to his obituary, one of Bradley's favorite Bible versus is John 14:1-3. "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also." Family and friends will gather Saturday, June 2, at 4 p.m. at Connelly Chapel Wagner Family Funerals, 202 North Broadway Street, Cassopolis. MUSKEGON COUNTY, MI - A Grand Rapids area man already convicted in Kent County has been sentenced to up to 15 years in prison for criminal sexual conduct involving a teenager in Muskegon County. Nicholas Griswold, 38, of Wyoming was sentenced in Muskegon County Circuit Court after pleading guilty to two counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct. Muskegon Circuit Judge Timothy Hicks on May 25 ordered Griswold confined to state prison for a minimum of four and maximum of 15 years. He was given credit for 103 days served in jail. A charge of first-degree criminal sexual conduct was dismissed by the prosecutor. It was alleged that Griswold had contact with the teen, who was between the ages of 13 and 16, on more than one occasion between January 2010 and January 2013. Griswold also entered a plea to third degree CSC involving a teen in Kent County in 2013, for which he was sentenced to five to 15 years on May 10, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections web site. SAGINAW, MI -- Two men accused of trying to rob a Saginaw medical marijuana-grower, killing his dog in the process and, in turn, taking a pair of bullets themselves, have been charged with several felonies. Jermonii D. Perry, 27, and Aaron S. "Twin" Pinkston, 23, on Wednesday, May 30, appeared before Saginaw County District Judge Elian E. H. Fichtner for arraignment on 10 counts each -- five counts of felony firearm and single counts of assault with intent to murder, first-degree home invasion, conspiracy to commit first-degree home invasion, killing or torturing an animal, and felon in possession of a firearm. In a separate file, the judge arraigned Perry on charges of first-degree home invasion, felonious assault, and two counts of felony firearm. The judge set both men's bonds at $500,000 cash-surety. Court records list both men as unemployed Saginaw residents. Authorities allege Perry, Pinkston, and a 28-year-old man in the early morning hours of Sunday, May 27, went to a home in the 1700 block of Vermont Street and kicked in the door of a porch-area. In attempting to kick in the door's main house, a resident from within yelled that he had a gun and would fire. At least one of the intruders fired several shots through the door and the homeowner returned fire. Perry took a bullet to the arm and Pinkston took one to the leg, police have said. Amid the shooting, a dog owned by the resident was killed. The three would-be robbers fled. Perry went to an area hospital for treatment of his wound and was arrested there by police. Pinkston did not seek medical attention for his wound at the hospital, police have said. Responding to a tip, police located Pinkston in a Saginaw residence Monday night and arrested him. As of 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, the third suspect remains at large, though police have identified him. Police believe the suspects targeted the house due to medical marijuana being grown there. The charges in Perry's other file relate to him allegedly breaking into the same house and assaulting the homeowner in March. The Michigan Department of Corrections discharged both men in late 2017. The two suspects are to appear for a preliminary examination at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, June 19. The chronicle of a life split between urban Manhattan and rural Montana. Effects of COVID-19 on children the focus of first Pennridge Community Partnership event Letter to editor: Congress can get this right Of All Things: How to keep your brain busy By By: Dr. Francis R. Souder, 85, formerly of Telford, died Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2007 in the skilled nursing unit of Peter Becker Community, Franconia Township. He and his wife Marion R. (Parker) Souder celebrated their 62nd wedding anniversary in July. Born in Souderton, he was a son of the late Elvin B. and Mary (Rittenhouse) Souder. A 1938 graduate of Souderton High School, he received his undergraduate degree in 1941 from the University of Pennsylvania where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa. Dr. Souder went on to receive his medical degree from Hahnemann Medical College in 1944 and completed his internship at Hahnemann Hospital from Oct. 1944 July, 1945. He served with the U.S. Navy Medical Corps for 30 months in San Diego and Long Beach, Calif. during WW II and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant prior to his discharge. He entered his second tour of duty during the Korean War where he served in Panama City, Fla. as the medical officer for the Panama City Naval Air Station and the Tyndal Air Force Base. Dr. Souder owned and operated his family practice on Main Street in Telford from 1947-1989. He served on the staff of Grand View Hospital, and as its president, and taught at the Grand View Hospital Nursing School. He was a member of the Pa. Medical Society, the Bucks County Medical Society, Diplomat American Academy of Family Practices, and served on the board of trustees at Grand View Hospital, Sellersville. He was a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Telford, where he sang in the church choir. He was also a member of the MacCalla Lodge #596 in Souderton, the Raja Shrine, and Lehigh Consistory. In addition to his widow, he is survived by a son, Dr. Ronald L. Souder, and his wife Susan L. of Green Lane; a daughter, Susan J. Souder, and her husband Stephan Russo of New York, N.Y.; five grandchildren: Jennifer A. Souder of Philadelphia; Emily E. Souder of Philadelphia; Kathryn A. Souder of Washington, D.C.; Noah Russo of New York, N.Y., and Rebekah Russo of New York, N.Y., and two brothers: Attorney Elvin B. Souder of Souderton and Dr. Lawrence Souder of Souderton. Memorial services will be held on Saturday, Nov. 10 at 12 p.m. in Trinity United Church of Christ, 101 S. Main St., Telford, with calling hours following the service. Interment will be private in Trinity UCC Cemetery Telford. Memorial contributions may be made to Grand View Hospital, 700 Lawn Ave., Sellersville, Pa. 18960. Arrangements are by Sadler-Suess Funeral Home, Telford. Shortly afterwards she apologised, deleted the tweet and announced she would be leaving Twitter. In a statement, ABC announced that in light of Barr's comments they would be pulling Roseanne from the air. "Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show." Barr has a history of making offensive comments online, including labelling Muslims and Palestinians "Nazis", labelling Israel a "Nazi state" and calling for a nuclear attack on the non-Jewish students and staff of University of California. Just before the Roseanne cancellation was announced, comedian Wanda Sykes tweeted that she would not be returning to the sitcom for a second season. Co-star Sara Gilbert also tweeted about Barr's remarks, calling them "abhorrent". Roseanne, which centres on a low-income American family, originally aired from 1988 to 1997. It was revived for a new season in March 2018 and a second season was ordered after high ratings. The reboot was popular with conservative Americans as it portrayed lead character Roseanne Conner as a Donald Trump supporter. Newshub. Labor rights icon Dolores Huerta, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012, was in South County and San Benito County last week campaigning for her preferred candidate in the 30th District State Assembly race. On Thursday, May 24, Huerta stopped at the Morgan Hill home of Amy McElroy, who is the communications director for Robert Rivas campaign for the 30th Assembly seat. After that, Huerta swung through Gilroy for dinner with another supporter. On Friday, Huerta attended a campaign breakfast in Hollister, then continued to Salinas and Watsonville for more campaign stops. At McElroys home, Huerta and Rivas stood side by side in the living room, urging the gathered supporters to call or text their friends and family to ask them to vote for the candidate, who has served on the San Benito County Board of Supervisors since 2010. Huerta, who fought alongside Cesar Chavez for labor rights and who co-founded the National Farmworkers Association, said she is supporting Rivas in the 30th Assembly race for a variety of reasons. Chiefly, she said he has demonstrated integrity in his ongoing fight against Big Oil and defeat of a push for fracking in San Benito County in 2014. The main thing I like about him is he has the courage to take on difficult issues, like fracking, Huerta said. Hes willing to stand up for the environment. He has integrity. He stands up for working people, who are the majority of people in our communities. Rivas said of Big Oil, Im going to be their worst enemy in Sacramento, if elected. Rivas faces a crowded field in the June 5 election for the 30th Assembly District seat, which is currently occupied by Anna Caballero. Also vying to replace Caballero June 5 are Gilroy City Councilman Peter Leroe-Munoz; Watsonville City Councilwoman Trina Coffman-Gomez; policy manager Bill Lipe; and businessman and rancher Neil G. Kitchens. Early voting is underway for the June 5 election, which also features local races for county sheriff, county supervisors, district attorney, judicial seats and other races. The 30th District stretches from King City to Morgan Hill and includes Watsonville and all of San Benito County. Caballero is running for state senate in the June 5 election. A Sacramento man who was in town for the Mushroom Mardi Gras festival was accidentally stabbed by his friend when two groups clashed in a fight outside a downtown Morgan Hill bar Sunday night, according to police. < The 52-year-old victim and his girlfriend, a Morgan Hill woman, were finishing a drink at the M&H Tavern when they decided the venue was getting a little rowdy, Morgan Hill Police Sgt. Troy Hoefling. After having one drink, the couplejoined by three other friends including a family member of the womandecided to walk across Monterey Road to The Hill, another late-night bar and restaurant. < As they got to The Hill, about 10 guys came out and some punches were thrown, including (from) the victim who got stabbed, Hoefling said. < During the altercation, which took place on the sidewalk outside the bar, the Sacramento man was knocked to the ground and stabbed in the back, according to police. The suspected stabber was the victims girlfriends family member, and police think his knife connected with the wrong target. < He thought (he was stabbing) somebody who hit him, Hoefling said. < The suspect ran away from the scene on foot as police arrived about 10:40pm, according to Hoefling. However, witnesses pointed him out and he was arrested. The suspect also suffered a stab wound to his leg, and police think this injury was accidentally self-inflicted in the process of running away. < The suspected stabber, Anthony Paul Hernandez, 33, of Morgan Hill, was booked at Santa Clara County Jail, Hoefling said. < Hernandez and the Sacramento man suffered non-life threatening wounds, Hoefling said. < Officers were able to arrive at the scene quickly as they were already behind the M&H Tavern responding to a report of an unrelated fight, Hoefling noted. The suspects in that incident scattered as police arrived, resulting in no arrests. Police do not think any of those involved in the incident behind the Tavern were involved in the fight in front of The Hill. < The fight that resulted in the stabbing does not appear to have been gang-related. Hoefling said it is unclear what started the fist fight outside The Hill, but it appears one of the 10 males exiting The Hill was more rambunctious than the others and physically instigated the conflict by throwing initial punches. < Hoefling added that all involved in the fight had been drinking alcohol. The group of 10 individuals who exited The Hill were much more intoxicated than the Sacramento man, alleged stabber and their family/friends, Hoefling said. < The 39th annual Mushroom Mardi Gras took place May 26-27 in downtown Morgan Hill. On Sunday, the festival ended at 6pm. In previous years, downtown business owners have complained about the impact of patrons who become intoxicated at the festival, then visit local establishments for more alcoholic drinks, contributing to incidents of violence, vandalism and other disturbances. Welcome to Morningstar.co.uk! You have been redirected here from Hemscott.com as we are merging our websites to provide you with a one-stop shop for all your investment research needs.To search for a security, type the name or ticker in the search box at the top of the page and select from the dropdown results.Registered Hemscott users can log in to Morningstar using the same login details. Similarly, if you are a Hemscott Premium user, you now have a Morningstar Premium account which you can access using the same login details. Vous etes confrontes a une infestation par la puce, la punaise de lit ? Voici plusieurs actions qui sont a mettre en uvre pour faire [] Sign up to receive the First Reading newsletter, your guide to the world of Canadian politics. First Reading is your guide to the world of Canadian politics. Sign up now> By Guo Yuandan The U.S. Department of Defense on May 23 decided to disinvite China from the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) international military exercise next month as a reaction, it said, to China's continued militarization in the South China Sea. Experts said that not participating in some multilateral exercise was no big deal for China. In fact, many of China's own exercises in the annual training program are more realistic and can better improve its defense combat capacity. The RIMPAC exercise is a biennial multilateral maritime military exercise led by the US Navy. The Chinese Ministry of National Defense (MND) confirmed in January this year that it received the invitation from the American side, the third time it has been invited to participate in the exercise. The reporter learnt that after receiving the invitation, the Chinese side assigned people to attend the RIMPAC mid-term and end-term planning meetings and preparations were under way all the time. Now all relevant work stops. A military expert who wished to remain anonymous told Global Times on the morning of May 24 that the disinvitation was final, and China won't take part in the RIMPAC this time. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi responded to this when he stopped at Washington on his way back from a visit to Argentina on May 23, local time. According to news from China News Service, Wang Yi said this decision made by Washington was perfunctory and not constructive and would undermine mutual understanding and trust between the two countries. The US should give up this kind of negative thinking. Both China and the US are world powers, and they can totally carry out cooperation and build mutual trust concerning maritime security issues. That's the right way to jointly contribute to world peace and stability, Wang Yi said. In the statement of disinviting China from the RIMPAC, the US Department of Defense said, "we have strong evidence that China has deployed anti-ship missiles, ground-to-air missile systems and electronic jammers on the disputed features of the Nansha Islands. The landing of Chinese bombers on the Yongxing Island also exacerbated the tension." The US requested China to dismantle those systems immediately and withdraw the militarization efforts on disputed islands of the South China Sea. A military expert, who also asked for anonymity, said China's islands and reefs construction in the South China Sea won't be affected in any way. Instead, it will intensify the defense capacity on the islands and reefs according to the level of threat. A person familiar with the matter said on the morning of May 24 that the disinvitation came as a surprise and the accusation made by the US was groundless. China enhanced its defense capacity on South China Sea islands exactly because of the persistent and long-term provocations made by the American military in nearby waters, the person said. The South China Sea used to be very peaceful, and China and all countries in the region are committed to safeguarding its peace and development, but the US seems determined to make waves in the region, and China definitely needs to put up a defensive front, the person said. But he also said the disinvitation wasn't a "serious setback in China-US military relations". In fact in the military relations between the two countries, the US is always doubtful and averse to China's military development, and the disinvitation is just a reflection of its fundamental attitude. According to the anonymous military expert, America's disinvitation of China to RIMPAC is bad for the development of bilateral military relations. In the previous statement welcoming the Chinese Navy to participate in RIMPAC, the American side said China's participation is beneficial for reducing the misunderstanding and misjudgment between the two militaries, for them to jointly deal with maritime threats, and for developing the relations between the two countries and militaries. But such "benefit" goes both ways. China doesn't have any urgent need for the US. In fact, it's quite to the contrary. The US invited China to take part in the RIMPAC exercise in order to know more about the Chinese Navy and reduce misunderstanding and misjudgment. But for China, it's no big deal whether it takes part in one more exercise or not. This view was echoed by the related person mentioned above. According to him, China didn't pay much attention to the disinvitation. "If America welcomes us, China is willing to participate as an important country in the Asia Pacific, but if it doesn't, we will carry out our own military exercises according to the annual plan, which can better improve our defense combat capability." These remarks reveal more than their literal meaning. The Chinese Navy participated in the RIMPAC twice before, but it was only engaged in non-traditional security subjects such as search and rescue, anti-pirate operations and submarine aid, because the US didn't open up traditional security subjects like anti-submarine operations and air defenses to China. Disclaimer: The author is Guo Yuandan, reporter with the Global Times. The article is translated from Chinese into English by the China Military online. The information, ideas or opinions appearing in this article are those of the author from the Global Times and do not reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn. Chinamil.com.cn does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same. If the article carries photographs or images, we do not vouch for their authenticity. Berlin Reporter Morency receives suspended sentence by Jody Houle LANCASTER According to court documents, Christina Morency, 31, of Berlin, the daughter of Berlin Police Chief Peter Morency, changed her plea to guilty for a charge of possession of the controlled drug fentanyl under an agreement. The plea agreement lowered the charges from felonies to a misdemeanor. According to information shared with us by the Berlin Daily Sun, Morency received a one year suspended jail sentence, which can be obligatory for a period of up to five years. She was also placed on probation for two years. She was ordered to continue counseling, treatment and educational programs. She was fined $930, with $600 suspended for five years. She was also ordered to pay $200 in restitution. Two Class A felonies for charges of possession of drugs with intent to sell were nolle-prossed under the plea agreement. After Morency was arrested just before Christmas, she appeared in Coos County Superior Court on Monday, Jan. 8 and pled not guilty of charges that she allegedly possessed and distributed an undisclosed amount of the opioid fentanyl. Morency was arrested on Dec. 20 at her residence on upper Main Street after being investigated. She was later released on $5,000 bail. It was reported initially that she was charged with possessing and distributing heroin. However, according to Coos County Superior Court documents, she was actually charged with possessing and distributing the prescription drug, fentanyl, which is a stronger, synthetic opiate known for causing many deaths of addicts and sometimes mixed in with heroin making strands even stronger. Allegedly, between Dec. 1 and Dec. 10 of last year, Morency sold a certain amount of fentanyl to an informant who was working with the state police. Morency waived arraignment and pled not guilty. She was released on $10,000 personal recognizance bail. She was ordered to continue living in Berlin, and to not use drugs or drink excessively. She was also required to waive extradition. The initial report stated that she was being charged with Class A felony. However, it was later reported now that she was charged with two Class B felonies. The charges carry up to seven years in prison. Chief Morency, who was kept unaware of the investigation, worked undercover for the New Hampshire Drug Task Force for 10 years. He said at the time of Morency's arrest that he was "devastated" and shocked by the news. LANCASTER According to court documents, Christina Morency, 31, of Berlin, the daughter of Berlin Police Chief Peter Morency, changed her plea to guilty for a charge of possession of the controlled drug fentanyl under an agreement. The plea agreement lowered the charges from felonies to a misdemeanor.According to information shared with us by the Berlin Daily Sun, Morency received a one year suspended jail sentence, which can be obligatory for a period of up to five years. She was also placed on probation for two years. She was ordered to continue counseling, treatment and educational programs. She was fined $930, with $600 suspended for five years. She was also ordered to pay $200 in restitution.Two Class A felonies for charges of possession of drugs with intent to sell were nolle-prossed under the plea agreement.After Morency was arrested just before Christmas, she appeared in Coos County Superior Court on Monday, Jan. 8 and pled not guilty of charges that she allegedly possessed and distributed an undisclosed amount of the opioid fentanyl.Morency was arrested on Dec. 20 at her residence on upper Main Street after being investigated. She was later released on $5,000 bail. It was reported initially that she was charged with possessing and distributing heroin. However, according to Coos County Superior Court documents, she was actually charged with possessing and distributing the prescription drug, fentanyl, which is a stronger, synthetic opiate known for causing many deaths of addicts and sometimes mixed in with heroin making strands even stronger.Allegedly, between Dec. 1 and Dec. 10 of last year, Morency sold a certain amount of fentanyl to an informant who was working with the state police.Morency waived arraignment and pled not guilty. She was released on $10,000 personal recognizance bail. She was ordered to continue living in Berlin, and to not use drugs or drink excessively. She was also required to waive extradition.The initial report stated that she was being charged with Class A felony. However, it was later reported now that she was charged with two Class B felonies. The charges carry up to seven years in prison.Chief Morency, who was kept unaware of the investigation, worked undercover for the New Hampshire Drug Task Force for 10 years. He said at the time of Morency's arrest that he was "devastated" and shocked by the news. Home Salmon Press Coverage Map Print Advertising Rate Card About Us Advertisers Info Pay My Advertising Bill Subscribe Your Account Single Paper Multi-paper Buy Log out Archives Meredith News Winnisquam Echo Gilford Steamer Record Enterprise Granite State News The Baysider Carroll County Independent Coos County Democrat Littleton Courier Berlin Reporter Mountain Ear Newfound Landing Photo Reprints Facebook Coos County Democrat Salmon Sports (Wolfeboro) NH Front Page Berlin Reporter Regulators refuse Northern Pass reconsideration; Eversource refuses to give up by Garry Rayno The hearing room at 49 Donovan St. in Concord filled Thursday for the Site Evaluation Committee to hear Northern Pass' motion seeking reconsideration of the denial of its application to build a 192-mile high-voltage powerline from Pittsburg to Deerfield. (Photo by Garry Rayno/InDepthNH.org) (click for larger version) CONCORD State utility regulators voted 7-0 on Thursday to reject a motion to reconsider their decision turning down the $1.6 billion, 192-mile Northern Pass Transmission project. Project developer Eversource wanted the Site Evaluation Committee to vacate its February decision denying the application, reopen deliberations and consider conditions the utility said would mitigate its concerns. Eversource said it is not giving up the fight for what they believe is a needed project. "We intend to pursue all options for making this critical clean energy project a reality, along with the many economic and environmental benefits for New Hampshire and the region. This opportunity to significantly lower energy costs for customers should be given great weight," said Eversource New Hampshire President Bill Quinlan. "Large infrastructure projects of this scale often face challenges during the siting process, and we will continue to work with all of the stakeholders to present a project that receives New Hampshire's approval." But opponents of the project hailed the decision saying Eversource should abandon the proposal. "Today, the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee confirmed its decision to (deny) a certificate of Site and Authority to Northern Pass. In doing so, it dismissed complaints and found no merit in arguments by Eversource that they were somehow entitled to a permit despite the failings of their own application and witnesses," said Jack Savage of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, which opposed the project. "We stand ready to continue the fight to defend New Hampshire's landscapes from Northern Pass at the New Hampshire Supreme Court should Eversource take its complaints there." He noted the company failed to meet its burden of proof because the project as proposed would have unreasonable adverse impacts. "Ignoring the obvious doesn't make it go away," Savage said. "In short, Northern Pass was not a winnerconceptually flawed, with far too many adverse impacts and few if any real benefits to the people of New Hampshire, and there simply are no conditions or cash payments that could turn a bad idea into good." But the company said they are not going to give up and are seriously considering taking the decision to the Supreme Court. "We're disappointed, particularly in light of the Supreme Court's ruling this week that reiterated the emphasis that state law places on lowering costs for customers," said project spokesman Martin Murray. "We will pursue all options for moving the project forward. We don't take lightly an appeal to the Supreme Court. It's a rare occurrence and one we take only when we have strong conviction and confidence that we will prevail." An appeal to the Supreme Court is expected to take about a year. Northern Pass officials had hoped to have the transmission line in service by the end of 2020. The SEC turned down the project saying Eversource failed to meet its burden of proof that the project to bring 1,090 megawatts of Hydro-Quebec electricity to New England wouldn't interfere with the orderly development of the region. The committee said Eversource and its experts failed to provide enough credible evidence for the committee to make an informed decision on the project's impact on property values, local businesses and tourism and on the changes in land use. Eversource claimed the committee did not consider proposed conditions that could have mitigated concerns, but SEC chair Martin Honigberg said the committee could place conditions on the project if it were going to approve a proposal. In this case, he said the committee was not given an adequate base of information to determine what could be done to address the problems. "Without knowing how bad it would be, we don't know how much better we could make it to make it reasonable," Honigberg said. "We did not get what we needed from the applicant's witnesses so there is no way to figure out how to make it good enough or not bad enough." SEC member and Department of Business and Economic Affairs representative Christopher Way said the studies done by the company's experts on tourism and property values were often based on work done by others and led to faulty conclusions. "There was a party line that was spoken and stuck to," Way said, "that did not give us the information we needed." In Thursday's deliberation, the SEC found little merit to Eversource's request to continue deliberating the four criteria an applicant must meet for approval. The committee reached conclusions on two of the four criteria, but did not continue after determining the applicant failed to meet its burden of proof on orderly development. Honigberg said it probably is better administrative practice to continue deliberating on all four criteria, but is not not required according to statute. To approve a project, the committee would have to determine all four criteria are met, he said, but not if the project is denied because it fails to meet one of the standards. "I don't believe this motion should be granted," he said, and the committee voted 5 to 2 not to reopen deliberations on the remaining standards. The committee also rejected Eversource's claim that the committee's decision was arbitrary and ad hoc, which Honigberg said was a claim made for lawyers in anticipation of taking the case to the Supreme Court if the committee denies the reconsideration motion. The claim allows Eversource to determine whether the committee rules properly implement statute, if they are clear enough for companies, and if the committee applied the rules fairly, he said. Honigberg said he largely agreed with Counsel for the Public's response the decision that the applicant failed to meet its burden of proof is not vague on its face or as applied by committee. "The applicant had within its own power to make the case it needed to make and it failed," Honigberg said. Eversource also claimed the committee gave undo weigh to the opinions of regional planning commissions and local municipalities, using phrases not in statutes like "tipping point" in its ruling and misconstruing or misapplying evidence. Way noted the views of the host communities is overwhelmingly against the project, and said the applicant is required to interact with those communities but did so in a passive way. "There was not a lot of information coming to us," he said, from Eversource. Honigberg said the statute directs the committee to consider municipal views. "We followed the directive of the legislature," Honigberg said. "If it were up to municipalities, nothing would happen with large infrastructure projects like this. The legislature gives authority to override local authority." Eversource also claimed the written order would indicate there were deliberations conducted outside the public process, but several committee members said that is how the two-step decision-making process works: the committee deliberates in public and then the order is written to reflect that decision including the evidence, laws and rules that may not be cited in public. The committee also rejected a motion for committee members Kathryn Bailey and Patricia Weathersby to recuse themselves from the deliberations now and in the future, but both members refused and said they were quoted out of context in a motion filed by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and Coos County Business and Employers Group. They said their comments did not reflect any bias or animosity and were part of the public deliberation process. The SEC issued a 7-0 oral order Feb. 1 and Eversource asked the SEC to reconsider its decision on Feb. 28. The SEC then decided March 13 to suspend its oral order saying it would entertain motions for reconsideration after the written order is issued, which it was on March 30. Eversource filed April 27 seeking reconsideration. Northern Pass was proposed in 2010. Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com CONCORD State utility regulators voted 7-0 on Thursday to reject a motion to reconsider their decision turning down the $1.6 billion, 192-mile Northern Pass Transmission project.Project developer Eversource wanted the Site Evaluation Committee to vacate its February decision denying the application, reopen deliberations and consider conditions the utility said would mitigate its concerns.Eversource said it is not giving up the fight for what they believe is a needed project."We intend to pursue all options for making this critical clean energy project a reality, along with the many economic and environmental benefits for New Hampshire and the region. This opportunity to significantly lower energy costs for customers should be given great weight," said Eversource New Hampshire President Bill Quinlan. "Large infrastructure projects of this scale often face challenges during the siting process, and we will continue to work with all of the stakeholders to present a project that receives New Hampshire's approval."But opponents of the project hailed the decision saying Eversource should abandon the proposal."Today, the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee confirmed its decision to (deny) a certificate of Site and Authority to Northern Pass. In doing so, it dismissed complaints and found no merit in arguments by Eversource that they were somehow entitled to a permit despite the failings of their own application and witnesses," said Jack Savage of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, which opposed the project. "We stand ready to continue the fight to defend New Hampshire's landscapes from Northern Pass at the New Hampshire Supreme Court should Eversource take its complaints there."He noted the company failed to meet its burden of proof because the project as proposed would have unreasonable adverse impacts."Ignoring the obvious doesn't make it go away," Savage said. "In short, Northern Pass was not a winnerconceptually flawed, with far too many adverse impacts and few if any real benefits to the people of New Hampshire, and there simply are no conditions or cash payments that could turn a bad idea into good."But the company said they are not going to give up and are seriously considering taking the decision to the Supreme Court."We're disappointed, particularly in light of the Supreme Court's ruling this week that reiterated the emphasis that state law places on lowering costs for customers," said project spokesman Martin Murray."We will pursue all options for moving the project forward. We don't take lightly an appeal to the Supreme Court. It's a rare occurrence and one we take only when we have strong conviction and confidence that we will prevail."An appeal to the Supreme Court is expected to take about a year. Northern Pass officials had hoped to have the transmission line in service by the end of 2020.The SEC turned down the project saying Eversource failed to meet its burden of proof that the project to bring 1,090 megawatts of Hydro-Quebec electricity to New England wouldn't interfere with the orderly development of the region.The committee said Eversource and its experts failed to provide enough credible evidence for the committee to make an informed decision on the project's impact on property values, local businesses and tourism and on the changes in land use.Eversource claimed the committee did not consider proposed conditions that could have mitigated concerns, but SEC chair Martin Honigberg said the committee could place conditions on the project if it were going to approve a proposal.In this case, he said the committee was not given an adequate base of information to determine what could be done to address the problems."Without knowing how bad it would be, we don't know how much better we could make it to make it reasonable," Honigberg said. "We did not get what we needed from the applicant's witnesses so there is no way to figure out how to make it good enough or not bad enough."SEC member and Department of Business and Economic Affairs representative Christopher Way said the studies done by the company's experts on tourism and property values were often based on work done by others and led to faulty conclusions."There was a party line that was spoken and stuck to," Way said, "that did not give us the information we needed."In Thursday's deliberation, the SEC found little merit to Eversource's request to continue deliberating the four criteria an applicant must meet for approval.The committee reached conclusions on two of the four criteria, but did not continue after determining the applicant failed to meet its burden of proof on orderly development.Honigberg said it probably is better administrative practice to continue deliberating on all four criteria, but is not not required according to statute. To approve a project, the committee would have to determine all four criteria are met, he said, but not if the project is denied because it fails to meet one of the standards."I don't believe this motion should be granted," he said, and the committee voted 5 to 2 not to reopen deliberations on the remaining standards.The committee also rejected Eversource's claim that the committee's decision was arbitrary and ad hoc, which Honigberg said was a claim made for lawyers in anticipation of taking the case to the Supreme Court if the committee denies the reconsideration motion.The claim allows Eversource to determine whether the committee rules properly implement statute, if they are clear enough for companies, and if the committee applied the rules fairly, he said.Honigberg said he largely agreed with Counsel for the Public's response the decision that the applicant failed to meet its burden of proof is not vague on its face or as applied by committee."The applicant had within its own power to make the case it needed to make and it failed," Honigberg said.Eversource also claimed the committee gave undo weigh to the opinions of regional planning commissions and local municipalities, using phrases not in statutes like "tipping point" in its ruling and misconstruing or misapplying evidence.Way noted the views of the host communities is overwhelmingly against the project, and said the applicant is required to interact with those communities but did so in a passive way."There was not a lot of information coming to us," he said, from Eversource.Honigberg said the statute directs the committee to consider municipal views."We followed the directive of the legislature," Honigberg said. "If it were up to municipalities, nothing would happen with large infrastructure projects like this. The legislature gives authority to override local authority."Eversource also claimed the written order would indicate there were deliberations conducted outside the public process, but several committee members said that is how the two-step decision-making process works: the committee deliberates in public and then the order is written to reflect that decision including the evidence, laws and rules that may not be cited in public.The committee also rejected a motion for committee members Kathryn Bailey and Patricia Weathersby to recuse themselves from the deliberations now and in the future, but both members refused and said they were quoted out of context in a motion filed by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and Coos County Business and Employers Group.They said their comments did not reflect any bias or animosity and were part of the public deliberation process.The SEC issued a 7-0 oral order Feb. 1 and Eversource asked the SEC to reconsider its decision on Feb. 28. The SEC then decided March 13 to suspend its oral order saying it would entertain motions for reconsideration after the written order is issued, which it was on March 30.Eversource filed April 27 seeking reconsideration.Northern Pass was proposed in 2010.Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com Berlin Reporter City Council examines taking over portion of Route 110 Landry cracks top-10 in Kennett Invitational Thanks for visiting SalmonPress.com Carroll County Independent Texas woman sentenced to nine months for financially exploiting mother-in-law by Mellisa Seamans Reporter Reporter write the author OSSIPEE A Texas woman has been sentenced to nine months in jail for financially exploiting her mother-in-law. Elizabeth Seibel, 55, of Austin, Texas was sentenced May 23 in Carroll County Superior Court on felony counts of financial exploitation of an elder adult and theft by unauthorized taking. She was convicted of the offenses after a bench trial in March. Seibel was sentenced to serve 12 months at Carroll County House of Corrections, with 90 days of that suspended for five years. She was also sentenced to serve two to four years at New Hampshire State Prison but that was suspended for five years as well. The suspended portions of the sentence hinge on Seibel remaining on good behavior and paying restitution to the victim. Seibel was the power of attorney for her 86-year-old mother-in-law from October 2013 to May 2015. In an investigation conducted by Conway Police Department, it was determined that during that time Seibel stole approximately $102,000 from the elder Seibel and used most of the money to purchase and renovate a home in Conway. The New Hampshire Attorney General Consumer Protection and Antitrust Bureau works with local police to investigate and prosecute crimes involving elder abuse and financial exploitation. If you suspect an elderly person is victim to either of these crimes, contact your local police department or Bureau of Elderly and Adult Services at (800) 949-0470. OSSIPEE A Texas woman has been sentenced to nine months in jail for financially exploiting her mother-in-law.Elizabeth Seibel, 55, of Austin, Texas was sentenced May 23 in Carroll County Superior Court on felony counts of financial exploitation of an elder adult and theft by unauthorized taking. She was convicted of the offenses after a bench trial in March.Seibel was sentenced to serve 12 months at Carroll County House of Corrections, with 90 days of that suspended for five years. She was also sentenced to serve two to four years at New Hampshire State Prison but that was suspended for five years as well. The suspended portions of the sentence hinge on Seibel remaining on good behavior and paying restitution to the victim.Seibel was the power of attorney for her 86-year-old mother-in-law from October 2013 to May 2015. In an investigation conducted by Conway Police Department, it was determined that during that time Seibel stole approximately $102,000 from the elder Seibel and used most of the money to purchase and renovate a home in Conway.The New Hampshire Attorney General Consumer Protection and Antitrust Bureau works with local police to investigate and prosecute crimes involving elder abuse and financial exploitation. If you suspect an elderly person is victim to either of these crimes, contact your local police department or Bureau of Elderly and Adult Services at (800) 949-0470. Granite State News Wolfeboro remembers the fallen on Memorial Day by Thomas Beeler Editor of The Granite State News Editor of The Granite State News write the author Memorial Day services in Wolfeboro began at Brewster Field, where veteran and members of the Kingswood Regional High School band assembled. American Legion Post 18 Commander Harold Chamberlin (right) lowered the flag to half-mast, "Taps" was played near and far, and a three shot volley was done to honor the fallen. For more scenes from Wolfeboro's Memorial Day, see page A14. (Photo by Thomas Beeler) (click for larger version) WOLFEBORO Under somber skies last Monday, Wolfeboro remembered its fallen in Memorial Day ceremonies. The annual Memorial Day parade began in Brewster Field with American Legion Commander Harold Chamberlin lowering the flags to half mast before a color guard of veterans from all branches of military service and the Kingswood Regional High School marching band. The Legion Auxiliary ladies placed a wreath in front of the Civil War monument, "Taps" were played near and far and three shots were fired to honor those who fell during that conflict. With traffic control provided by Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro police, the color guard and band marched down South Main Street to Carpenter School and the downtown post office to perform the same memorial services before the memorials to WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam fallen veterans. The parade ended at the Wolfeboro Community Bandstand at dockside. There members of the Legion Auxiliary scattered flower petals on the waters of the bay to recognize those servicemen lost at sea. Despite the threatening weather, the turnout of veterans and their families and spectators was high, and people were solemn and attentive at each location. Two speakers This year at the bandstand ceremony there were not one but two speakers, both Vietnam War veterans. Joe Ewing of Tuftonboro spoke on the origins in 1868 of Memorial Day, which was first called Decoration Day. The graves of the 650,000 soldiers, Union and Confederate, killed in the recent Civil War were decorated with flowers in the spring. General John A. Logan, commander of the Grand Army of the Republic led a movement to set aside a day to decorate the graves as long as those who survived the conflict still lived. WWI, in which 205,000 Americans died, renewed interest in observing a Memorial Day. Different days were chosen by the states at first and it was not until 1967 that a specific day in May was made a national day of remembrance. Ewing noted that on Memorial Day we remember the sacrifices of men and women who fought in the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and "over 70 other non-declared conflicts," including fighting in Syria. He concluded his address by quoting President Ronald Reagan, who spoke at the Arlington National Cemetery in 1986: "Today is the day we put aside to remember fallen heroes and to pray that no heroes will ever have to die for us again. It's a day of thanks for the valor of others, a day to remember the splendor of America and those of her children who rest in this cemetery and others. It is important for Americans to take the time to remember the sacrifices that bought their freedom." Col. Bob Ness directed his remarks to members of the Kingswood Regional High School band as the young people who will shape the future. "I count you as among the most important people here today . . . Funerals are for the living, not the dead. So, too, are these observances," he said. To make his point he spoke of three young men from Wolfeboro: Harry, Clayton, and Matthew. "For each of these three the most significant event in the decade after the ninth grade was their date with destiny. How they died is not important. That they answered their country's call at a time of need is. That is why we are here today." Harry was Harry Harriman, the first World War I soldier from Wolfeboro to die in battle. Clayton was Clayton Hale, remembered as "The First to Die" from Wolfeboro in World War II. Their names have been forever linked together in the name of the Harriman-Hale American Legion Post #18. Matthew is Matthew Stanley for whom the Smith River Bridge on Center Street was renamed in 2010. Ness urged the students to think for themselves and not let their minds be closed by such things as "political correctness." In closing, he advised heeding the words of President John Kennedy in his inaugural address: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." WOLFEBORO Under somber skies last Monday, Wolfeboro remembered its fallen in Memorial Day ceremonies.The annual Memorial Day parade began in Brewster Field with American Legion Commander Harold Chamberlin lowering the flags to half mast before a color guard of veterans from all branches of military service and the Kingswood Regional High School marching band. The Legion Auxiliary ladies placed a wreath in front of the Civil War monument, "Taps" were played near and far and three shots were fired to honor those who fell during that conflict.With traffic control provided by Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro police, the color guard and band marched down South Main Street to Carpenter School and the downtown post office to perform the same memorial services before the memorials to WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam fallen veterans. The parade ended at the Wolfeboro Community Bandstand at dockside. There members of the Legion Auxiliary scattered flower petals on the waters of the bay to recognize those servicemen lost at sea.Despite the threatening weather, the turnout of veterans and their families and spectators was high, and people were solemn and attentive at each location.Two speakersThis year at the bandstand ceremony there were not one but two speakers, both Vietnam War veterans.Joe Ewing of Tuftonboro spoke on the origins in 1868 of Memorial Day, which was first called Decoration Day. The graves of the 650,000 soldiers, Union and Confederate, killed in the recent Civil War were decorated with flowers in the spring. General John A. Logan, commander of the Grand Army of the Republic led a movement to set aside a day to decorate the graves as long as those who survived the conflict still lived. WWI, in which 205,000 Americans died, renewed interest in observing a Memorial Day. Different days were chosen by the states at first and it was not until 1967 that a specific day in May was made a national day of remembrance.Ewing noted that on Memorial Day we remember the sacrifices of men and women who fought in the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and "over 70 other non-declared conflicts," including fighting in Syria.He concluded his address by quoting President Ronald Reagan, who spoke at the Arlington National Cemetery in 1986: "Today is the day we put aside to remember fallen heroes and to pray that no heroes will ever have to die for us again. It's a day of thanks for the valor of others, a day to remember the splendor of America and those of her children who rest in this cemetery and others. It is important for Americans to take the time to remember the sacrifices that bought their freedom."Col. Bob Ness directed his remarks to members of the Kingswood Regional High School band as the young people who will shape the future. "I count you as among the most important people here today . . . Funerals are for the living, not the dead. So, too, are these observances," he said.To make his point he spoke of three young men from Wolfeboro: Harry, Clayton, and Matthew. "For each of these three the most significant event in the decade after the ninth grade was their date with destiny. How they died is not important. That they answered their country's call at a time of need is. That is why we are here today."Harry was Harry Harriman, the first World War I soldier from Wolfeboro to die in battle. Clayton was Clayton Hale, remembered as "The First to Die" from Wolfeboro in World War II. Their names have been forever linked together in the name of the Harriman-Hale American Legion Post #18. Matthew is Matthew Stanley for whom the Smith River Bridge on Center Street was renamed in 2010.Ness urged the students to think for themselves and not let their minds be closed by such things as "political correctness."In closing, he advised heeding the words of President John Kennedy in his inaugural address: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Granite State News Wolfeboro residents urged to push for reconsideration of Bradley's animal cruelty bill by Elissa Paquette write the author WOLFEBORO Wolfeboro Police Chief Dean Rondeau, speaking to the Police Commissioners at their monthly meeting, appealed to the commissioners and those who watch the meetings to contact their state representatives in support of reinstating Sen. Jeb Bradley's legislation intended to strengthen New Hampshire's animal cruelty laws. Rondeau, along with others, awaits the final sentencing of Great Dane dog breeder Christina Fay in Superior Court on June 14 for her responsibility in the neglect of 75 Great Danes. The conditions prompted a rescue operation in June 2017 coordinated between the police department and the Humane Society of the United States. So far, the cost of the animals' care and medical attention are around $1.8 million dollars. The chief serves on the Governor's Committee for the Humane and Ethical Treatment of Animals and Bradley's legislative committee to strengthen the state's animal cruelty laws, which resulted in a bipartisan bill, SB 569-FN, said Rondeau. However the bill was "gutted" on April 24 by a House committee, to the extent that "it weakened the already substandard animal cruelty laws on the books. This is simply unacceptable and should not be tolerated by the citizens of Wolfeboro or New Hampshire in general," he proclaimed. Rondeau also encouraged citizens to join him and Captain Mark Livie for Coffee and Connections, a Wolfeboro Community TV program at the Downtown Grill Cafe, held at 10 a.m. on the third Friday of the month. He also continues to participate in a series of podcasts with Jake on the Lake's Jake Quimby of WASR. Residents are forewarned that the Department is focusing its enhanced speed enforcement operations on Bay St., North Line Road, Beach Pond Road (especially between Pine Hill and North Line Roads), Center Street, North Main Street and 109E. Statistics for April include 48 incidents: 28 arrests, 10 collisions, and 218 traffic stops, resulting in 10 tickets. Department prosecutor Tim Morgan dealt with 23 defendants with 23 offenses. Of those 23, 14 were found guilty; 9 had their cases placed on file with education and restitution components added to their hearings. The conviction rate for April cases was 100 percent. Training in April included Capt. Livie's participation in an Executive Development Series pertaining to early warning systems PIO and FTO; Mary Swift attended a course in basic drug investigation, went to Counter Narcotics school and SPOTS training; and Pete Llewellyn had further training in Juvenile Delinquency, Justice training, ICAC training, and attended a Homeland Security SRO conference. The entire department received Stop Stick Training, which applies to stopping and avoiding pursuits by means of strips placed in the roadway where a vehicle is headed. WOLFEBORO Wolfeboro Police Chief Dean Rondeau, speaking to the Police Commissioners at their monthly meeting, appealed to the commissioners and those who watch the meetings to contact their state representatives in support of reinstating Sen. Jeb Bradley's legislation intended to strengthen New Hampshire's animal cruelty laws.Rondeau, along with others, awaits the final sentencing of Great Dane dog breeder Christina Fay in Superior Court on June 14 for her responsibility in the neglect of 75 Great Danes. The conditions prompted a rescue operation in June 2017 coordinated between the police department and the Humane Society of the United States. So far, the cost of the animals' care and medical attention are around $1.8 million dollars.The chief serves on the Governor's Committee for the Humane and Ethical Treatment of Animals and Bradley's legislative committee to strengthen the state's animal cruelty laws, which resulted in a bipartisan bill, SB 569-FN, said Rondeau. However the bill was "gutted" on April 24 by a House committee, to the extent that "it weakened the already substandard animal cruelty laws on the books. This is simply unacceptable and should not be tolerated by the citizens of Wolfeboro or New Hampshire in general," he proclaimed.Rondeau also encouraged citizens to join him and Captain Mark Livie for Coffee and Connections, a Wolfeboro Community TV program at the Downtown Grill Cafe, held at 10 a.m. on the third Friday of the month. He also continues to participate in a series of podcasts with Jake on the Lake's Jake Quimby of WASR.Residents are forewarned that the Department is focusing its enhanced speed enforcement operations on Bay St., North Line Road, Beach Pond Road (especially between Pine Hill and North Line Roads), Center Street, North Main Street and 109E.Statistics for April include 48 incidents: 28 arrests, 10 collisions, and 218 traffic stops, resulting in 10 tickets.Department prosecutor Tim Morgan dealt with 23 defendants with 23 offenses. Of those 23, 14 were found guilty; 9 had their cases placed on file with education and restitution components added to their hearings. The conviction rate for April cases was 100 percent.Training in April included Capt. Livie's participation in an Executive Development Series pertaining to early warning systems PIO and FTO; Mary Swift attended a course in basic drug investigation, went to Counter Narcotics school and SPOTS training; and Pete Llewellyn had further training in Juvenile Delinquency, Justice training, ICAC training, and attended a Homeland Security SRO conference. The entire department received Stop Stick Training, which applies to stopping and avoiding pursuits by means of strips placed in the roadway where a vehicle is headed. Littleton Courier Asher House Adventure comes to New Hampshire by Angel Larcom Lee Asher receives kisses from Stella, one of his six rescue dogs. (Photo by Angel Larcom) (click for larger version) LITTLETON "Coming from someone who is very passionate about rescue, I understand why people go to breeders. I know it's easier, more fun, less sad, you get to play with puppies before you buy your dog, and you know what you're getting. But I promise you that if you deal with the sadness, you experience the shelter, and you have patience before you choose your rescue dog, you will have a stronger bond with your pet." Lee Asher made a life-changing decision to quit his corporate job in California, pack up his six rescue dogs in an RV and set off across the lower 48 states of America with the goal to raise awareness about shelter pets and get 48 dogs into forever homes. Last week, the Asher House Adventure came to New Hampshire for the first time, and Asher said although this was only the 28th state they have visited, they have already successfully helped place 77 dogs into new homes. He went on to say that this experience has not only been life-changing, but so successful that they intend to do another trip across the country after they complete this initial journey. Visiting One Love Brewery in Lincoln on May 8, and partnering with regional shelters such as Muddy Paws and Above the Notch Humane Society, Lee Asher welcomed several people into his RV where they could meet all six of his dogs and ask questions about his experiences. Both Muddy Paws and Above the Notch Humane Society brought dogs currently available for adoption through their facilities; Sue, a 13-year-old retired lead sled dog and Priya, a three-year-old pitbull mix. Both dogs are still available and looking for forever homes. Asher said "I really do believe a dog knows it's being rescued. I don't think a dog thinks about its horror stories but I do know a dog can feel pain. After something experiences pain for so long and then experiences love, joy, and pleasure, it's going to want to stick to that." Asher's six dogs; Cali, the Golden Retriever, Bo-Bo the Chocolate Lab, Lillie, the Saint Bernard, Stella, the Pitbull, and two toy breed dogs, Butters and Molly, are having the adventure of a lifetime, hiking and exploring America alongside Asher, and meeting thousands of people along the way. According to the Asher House website, the media has done a brilliant job of making us believe that adoptable dogs aren't friendly, that shelters are awful places to go to, and that the only dogs that exist there are angry Cujo type dogs. It's far from the case. Every breed can be found in the shelters, every breed can be rescued. Another vital part of their mission is to introduce people to shelters through events and social gatherings at the shelter and educate them on the importance of local humane societies as well as try to abolish that preliminary fear that people may have regarding shelter dogs. To learn more about the Asher House Adventure, to support their work, or to track their next visit to New Hampshire, please visit their Web site at LITTLETON "Coming from someone who is very passionate about rescue, I understand why people go to breeders. I know it's easier, more fun, less sad, you get to play with puppies before you buy your dog, and you know what you're getting. But I promise you that if you deal with the sadness, you experience the shelter, and you have patience before you choose your rescue dog, you will have a stronger bond with your pet."Lee Asher made a life-changing decision to quit his corporate job in California, pack up his six rescue dogs in an RV and set off across the lower 48 states of America with the goal to raise awareness about shelter pets and get 48 dogs into forever homes.Last week, the Asher House Adventure came to New Hampshire for the first time, and Asher said although this was only the 28th state they have visited, they have already successfully helped place 77 dogs into new homes. He went on to say that this experience has not only been life-changing, but so successful that they intend to do another trip across the country after they complete this initial journey.Visiting One Love Brewery in Lincoln on May 8, and partnering with regional shelters such as Muddy Paws and Above the Notch Humane Society, Lee Asher welcomed several people into his RV where they could meet all six of his dogs and ask questions about his experiences. Both Muddy Paws and Above the Notch Humane Society brought dogs currently available for adoption through their facilities; Sue, a 13-year-old retired lead sled dog and Priya, a three-year-old pitbull mix. Both dogs are still available and looking for forever homes.Asher said "I really do believe a dog knows it's being rescued. I don't think a dog thinks about its horror stories but I do know a dog can feel pain. After something experiences pain for so long and then experiences love, joy, and pleasure, it's going to want to stick to that."Asher's six dogs; Cali, the Golden Retriever, Bo-Bo the Chocolate Lab, Lillie, the Saint Bernard, Stella, the Pitbull, and two toy breed dogs, Butters and Molly, are having the adventure of a lifetime, hiking and exploring America alongside Asher, and meeting thousands of people along the way.According to the Asher House website, the media has done a brilliant job of making us believe that adoptable dogs aren't friendly, that shelters are awful places to go to, and that the only dogs that exist there are angry Cujo type dogs. It's far from the case. Every breed can be found in the shelters, every breed can be rescued.Another vital part of their mission is to introduce people to shelters through events and social gatherings at the shelter and educate them on the importance of local humane societies as well as try to abolish that preliminary fear that people may have regarding shelter dogs.To learn more about the Asher House Adventure, to support their work, or to track their next visit to New Hampshire, please visit their Web site at www.theasherhouse.com Littleton Courier LRH modifies visitor policy Haverhill selectmen to consider airport safety solutions Thanks for visiting SalmonPress.com Meredith News Meredith Memorial Day ceremonies honor sacrifice, courage by Erin Plummer A wreath is laid in Meredith Bay in honor of those who died at sea in service to their country. (Photo by Erin Plummer) (click for larger version) MEREDITH A series of processions and ceremonies on Memorial Day honored the courage and sacrifice of those who lost their lives to the service of their country. American Legion Post 33 led a series of Memorial Day observances on Wednesday with an honor guard procession and ceremonies at local cemeteries culminating with a parade down Main street to the Meredith Public Library and down to Hesky Park. The Post 33 Honor Guard led the parade, which also featured local scouts, the marching bands from Inter-Lakes High School and Elementary School, classic autos, and many more. The parade ended at the Meredith Public Library for a special ceremony. Elliott Finn, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, talked about the sacrifices made during World War II. He said in the 20 months of World War I, a total of 53,402 servicemembers died, around 2,670 every month. In the 20 months of Korea, a sobering 43,739 American soldiers died, and 47,434 died in the 228 months of the Vietnam War. Finn said after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, which claimed the lives of 2,402 Americans, hundreds of people lined up at recruiting stations to fight in World War II. After 43 months 405,399 American servicepeople died, a rate of 9,428 a month and 314 a day. He said 1,900 soldiers died during the Battle of the Bulge alone and "12,500 Marines died in hand to hand combat in Okinawa." "These brave men remind us what it means to be citizens of the greatest nation on earth," Finn said. Finn said when World War II was over, veterans put their uniforms in mothballs and retired to civilian life. Over half a million World War II veterans are alive today. Finn said they have given a "legacy of freedom" and imparted the value of courage and sacrifice. "On this Memorial Day what can we possibly do or say to honor the World War II veterans," Finn said. "Perhaps nothing's better than to call them what they are: America's greatest generation." Meredith selectman Jeanie Forrester said while Memorial Day is regarded as the unofficial start of summer, it is important to remember the true meaning of the day. She said Americans would not have the liberties they have without sacrifices. "Today, we are united in our thanks to those who made the cause of America their supreme choice," Forrester said. "How precious we hold liberty, and how fortunate we are as a nation." The parade made a stop at Lang Street cemetery and then down to Hesky Park for a special tribute to POW/MIA's. Bob Jones said Memorial Day is a day to honor what the flag flying over Hesky Park symbolizes. He said while much is said about the soldiers who gave their lives for their country, Jones said from his experience in the military he and the majority of his comrades didn't serve their country to give their lives. "Lives were taken from them in the service to their country," Jones said. He said the soldiers were looking out for each other and thinking about their loved ones. Jones recognized Gold Star families: all those who lost a family member in the military. "As a veteran, I say to all my comrades, 'Thank you,'" Jones said. MEREDITH A series of processions and ceremonies on Memorial Day honored the courage and sacrifice of those who lost their lives to the service of their country.American Legion Post 33 led a series of Memorial Day observances on Wednesday with an honor guard procession and ceremonies at local cemeteries culminating with a parade down Main street to the Meredith Public Library and down to Hesky Park.The Post 33 Honor Guard led the parade, which also featured local scouts, the marching bands from Inter-Lakes High School and Elementary School, classic autos, and many more. The parade ended at the Meredith Public Library for a special ceremony.Elliott Finn, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, talked about the sacrifices made during World War II. He said in the 20 months of World War I, a total of 53,402 servicemembers died, around 2,670 every month. In the 20 months of Korea, a sobering 43,739 American soldiers died, and 47,434 died in the 228 months of the Vietnam War.Finn said after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, which claimed the lives of 2,402 Americans, hundreds of people lined up at recruiting stations to fight in World War II. After 43 months 405,399 American servicepeople died, a rate of 9,428 a month and 314 a day. He said 1,900 soldiers died during the Battle of the Bulge alone and "12,500 Marines died in hand to hand combat in Okinawa.""These brave men remind us what it means to be citizens of the greatest nation on earth," Finn said.Finn said when World War II was over, veterans put their uniforms in mothballs and retired to civilian life. Over half a million World War II veterans are alive today. Finn said they have given a "legacy of freedom" and imparted the value of courage and sacrifice."On this Memorial Day what can we possibly do or say to honor the World War II veterans," Finn said. "Perhaps nothing's better than to call them what they are: America's greatest generation."Meredith selectman Jeanie Forrester said while Memorial Day is regarded as the unofficial start of summer, it is important to remember the true meaning of the day. She said Americans would not have the liberties they have without sacrifices."Today, we are united in our thanks to those who made the cause of America their supreme choice," Forrester said. "How precious we hold liberty, and how fortunate we are as a nation."The parade made a stop at Lang Street cemetery and then down to Hesky Park for a special tribute to POW/MIA's. Bob Jones said Memorial Day is a day to honor what the flag flying over Hesky Park symbolizes.He said while much is said about the soldiers who gave their lives for their country, Jones said from his experience in the military he and the majority of his comrades didn't serve their country to give their lives."Lives were taken from them in the service to their country," Jones said.He said the soldiers were looking out for each other and thinking about their loved ones.Jones recognized Gold Star families: all those who lost a family member in the military."As a veteran, I say to all my comrades, 'Thank you,'" Jones said. Meredith News Sandwich Fair returns this weekend Special School District meeting will decide on optional mask use Thanks for visiting SalmonPress.com China has 2,507 peacekeepers on active duty, says PLA Daily China's decades-long, steadfast commitment to UN Peacekeeping fully displays its status as a leader in maintaining world peace without favor or bias and no hidden agenda, said Chinese observers on Tuesday, which marked the 70th anniversary of UN Peacekeeping missions. "Under the mandate of the UN, China has been deploying its blue berets to the most turbulent spots around the world, shouldering an increasing share of the UN Peacekeeping budget, which shows it is fulfilling its responsibility as a world power," Song Zhongping, a military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Tuesday. Chinese experts predict that the country's peacekeeping role will grow and will expand its overseas supply facilities at key ports around the globe. The UN webpage commemorating the anniversary, titled "70 Years of Service & Sacrifice," notes that more than 1 million men and women have served under the United Nations flag in 71 peacekeeping operations over the past seven decades. More than 3,700 peacekeepers have lost their lives, including 129 who died last year, says the website. The first UN Peacekeeping mission began on May 29, 1948, when the Security Council authorized the deployment of a small number of UN military observers to the Middle East to form the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) to monitor the armistice agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors. China joined UN Peacekeeping operations in 1990, and Chinese troops have been deployed 24 times, involving more than 37,000 personnel. Thirteen Chinese peacekeepers sacrificed their lives during those missions, China's People's Liberation Army Daily (PLA) website 81.cn reported on Tuesday. Currently, 2,507 UN Peacekeepers from China are on active duty in eight locations around the world including 2,419 soldiers and 88 experts and staff officers, and Chinese troops have also trained nearly 1,000 peacekeeping personnel from other countries, according to data provided by the PLA Daily report. China has also registered an 8,000-strong standby force of UN Peacekeepers, according to the Ministry of National Defense(MOD) in September 2017. China contributes about 10.25 percent of the UN Peacekeeping budget, making it the second largest contributor to UN Peacekeeping costs. It has dispatched more UN Peacekeepers than any other permanent members of the UN Security Council, according to the Xinhua News Agency. Chinese peacekeepers' services and sacrifices have been repeatedly hailed by UN officials. "China's contributions are very important," Nick Birnback, spokesperson for UN Peacekeeping, told Xinhua recently, noting that "China's contribution has steadily grown over the years." Groundless slander China's contribution to the UN Peacekeeping missions is not without detractors, who have impugned China's motives. The Diplomat, a Washington DC-based magazine on international politics, suggested that China's emergence as a leading power in peacekeeping serves multiple agendas including fostering relations in Africa and elsewhere. The magazine described China's UN Peacekeepers as a national image-building mechanism, designed to improve Beijing's reputation abroad and modernize its military. Li Daguang, a professor at the National Defense University of the People's Liberation Army, called such reports "groundless slander." "As the world's second largest economy, China is living up to its responsibility in those UN missions. China's recent ascendency includes responding to UN requests and serves no political or military agenda," Li said. China's first foreign support base in Djibouti serves to enhance China's capability in escorting, peace-keeping and humanitarian aid missions in Africa and West Asia, said Song. The area is among the most turbulent and is home to the world's most vulnerable people who need protecting, he noted. Establishing foreign bases should not be seen as a military expansion, as they are designed to support China's UN Peacekeeping missions, Song said. In addition to its Djibouti base, China will continue to set up peacekeeping support bases along key mission routes, said Li The Gwadar port of Pakistan will serve as a resupply base for China's peacekeeping convoys, Li told the Global Times on Tuesday. Plymouth Record Enterprise Runners take to the streets in memory of Plymouth's fallen heroes by Donna Rhodes write the author Chris Hodges of Thornton carried a memorial flag for SPC Marc Decoteau on Sunday as he took part in the Bobcat Memorial 5K, which honors the memory of Decouteau, and fellow Plymouth Regional High School alumni CPT Doug DiCenzo and MSG Jared Van Aalst who all lost their lives while serving overseas. (Photo by Donna Rhodes) (click for larger version) PLYMOUTH This past Sunday marked the ninth running of the Bobcat Memorial 5K, and approximately 100 people came out this year to honor the memory of three Plymouth Regional High School graduates who were killed in the line of duty and to help raise money for scholarships in their name at the school. The alumni remembered through the event each year are MSG Jared Van Aalst (Class of 1993), CPT Doug DiCenzo (Class of 1995) and (Class of 2008) who lost their lives while serving the nation in Iraq and Afghanistan. This year, Chris Hodges of Thornton brought along a special flag to honoring SPC Descouteau, who died on Jan. 29, 2010 while serving in Afghanistan. The flag bears the words "Honor and Remember" and besides Descouteau's name and the date of his death, it also features a Gold Star, an Eternal Flame and a folded American flag in the center. "His parents, Mark and Nancy, couldn't be here today so I brought their flag to carry along with me for the 5K," said Hodges. As the runners and walkers prepared for the start of the trek that would lead them over the DiCenzo Bridge, through downtown Plymouth and back to the high school, organizer Denise McGlone, the PRHS OSSIPEE club leader and health educator, thanked all for participating. "This is such an amazing event in memory of Marc and Doug and Jared. Thank you all for coming out today," she said before introducing seven-year-old Serena and her five-year-old sister Sylvie of Plymouth who then led the crowd in the singing of the National Anthem. McGlone said many people helped make the day possible. Among them were students from the OSSIPEE club, the National Honor Society, local scouting groups and area businesses. Scholarships this year will once again be awarded to PRHS seniors who will be heading off to join the military after graduation in June. PLYMOUTH This past Sunday marked the ninth running of the Bobcat Memorial 5K, and approximately 100 people came out this year to honor the memory of three Plymouth Regional High School graduates who were killed in the line of duty and to help raise money for scholarships in their name at the school.The alumni remembered through the event each year are MSG Jared Van Aalst (Class of 1993), CPT Doug DiCenzo (Class of 1995) and (Class of 2008) who lost their lives while serving the nation in Iraq and Afghanistan.This year, Chris Hodges of Thornton brought along a special flag to honoring SPC Descouteau, who died on Jan. 29, 2010 while serving in Afghanistan. The flag bears the words "Honor and Remember" and besides Descouteau's name and the date of his death, it also features a Gold Star, an Eternal Flame and a folded American flag in the center."His parents, Mark and Nancy, couldn't be here today so I brought their flag to carry along with me for the 5K," said Hodges.As the runners and walkers prepared for the start of the trek that would lead them over the DiCenzo Bridge, through downtown Plymouth and back to the high school, organizer Denise McGlone, the PRHS OSSIPEE club leader and health educator, thanked all for participating."This is such an amazing event in memory of Marc and Doug and Jared. Thank you all for coming out today," she said before introducing seven-year-old Serena and her five-year-old sister Sylvie of Plymouth who then led the crowd in the singing of the National Anthem.McGlone said many people helped make the day possible. Among them were students from the OSSIPEE club, the National Honor Society, local scouting groups and area businesses. Scholarships this year will once again be awarded to PRHS seniors who will be heading off to join the military after graduation in June. Winnisquam Echo Belmont's Memorial Day ceremonies pay special tribute to the fallen of WWI by Donna Rhodes write the author Howard Brown salutes the flag as it is dipped and raised over Memorial Day ceremonies in Belmont. (Photo by Donna Rhodes) (click for larger version) Members of Belmont Boy Scout Troop 65 placed a wreath before the WWI monument during the Memorial Day proceedings in Belmont. (Photo by Donna Rhodes) (click for larger version) BELMONT This year marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World I, and members of the Charles Kilborn American Legion Post 58 took time to pay a special tribute to those brave soldiers who sacrificed their lives in the "War to End All Wars." The day began with a parade from Belmont Middle School to the WWI monument on Church Street where a crowd gathered to take part in the annual ceremonies. Post Commander Richard Stanley led the event, saying it was a day to remember the fallen who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom, the ones who never came home. He noted 35 brave men from Belmont who were lost in that war and later in the ceremony former Post Commander Steve Bracey and Lt. Col. Richard Nowak read their names with a solemn bell toll after each recognition. Nowak, a member of Post 58, was also the guest speaker for the day, bringing a bit of harsh reality to the event. Beginning with a letter from a WWI soldier on his last wishes should he not return home, Nowak delved into the history of the first World War, where besides soldiers, 144 of them from New Hampshire, more than seven million civilians throughout Europe also lost their lives. His eye-opening speech didn't end there though. Nowak then presented a lengthy list of all conflicts, battles and wars that have occurred since the early 1900's where a staggering number of brave American men and women gave of their lives in the name of freedom. "It seems like the 'War to End All Wars' really did not end them all," Nowak solemnly said. Other contributors to the day were Boy Scout Troop 65, whose representatives laid a wreath at the WWI monument, and members of Girl Scout Troop 21532, who tossed flowers in the Tioga River in honor of those lost at sea. Legion members Steve Bracey and Nowak raised the flag above Belmont's WWI monument, followed by a gun salute from the Belmont Police Department Honor Guard. Providing opening and closing prayers for the ceremonies were Post 58 Chaplain Maurice Tandy and Pastor Andy Barnes of Belmont Baptist Church. The Belmont High School Band, under the direction of director Lauren Fountain, not only participated in the parade and ensuing ceremonies with their musical tributes, but band members Cody York and Brian Miles also played "Taps" and "Taps with Echo" after the gun salute. The ceremony concluded with the new tradition of a community sing-a-long of "God Bless America," where everyone joined hands for the final patriotic tribute. This year, the singing was led by Grace Shaw. Editor's note: For more photos from this year's Memorial Day parades in Belmont and Tilton, see page A2. BELMONT This year marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World I, and members of the Charles Kilborn American Legion Post 58 took time to pay a special tribute to those brave soldiers who sacrificed their lives in the "War to End All Wars."The day began with a parade from Belmont Middle School to the WWI monument on Church Street where a crowd gathered to take part in the annual ceremonies.Post Commander Richard Stanley led the event, saying it was a day to remember the fallen who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom, the ones who never came home. He noted 35 brave men from Belmont who were lost in that war and later in the ceremony former Post Commander Steve Bracey and Lt. Col. Richard Nowak read their names with a solemn bell toll after each recognition.Nowak, a member of Post 58, was also the guest speaker for the day, bringing a bit of harsh reality to the event. Beginning with a letter from a WWI soldier on his last wishes should he not return home, Nowak delved into the history of the first World War, where besides soldiers, 144 of them from New Hampshire, more than seven million civilians throughout Europe also lost their lives. His eye-opening speech didn't end there though. Nowak then presented a lengthy list of all conflicts, battles and wars that have occurred since the early 1900's where a staggering number of brave American men and women gave of their lives in the name of freedom."It seems like the 'War to End All Wars' really did not end them all," Nowak solemnly said.Other contributors to the day were Boy Scout Troop 65, whose representatives laid a wreath at the WWI monument, and members of Girl Scout Troop 21532, who tossed flowers in the Tioga River in honor of those lost at sea.Legion members Steve Bracey and Nowak raised the flag above Belmont's WWI monument, followed by a gun salute from the Belmont Police Department Honor Guard. Providing opening and closing prayers for the ceremonies were Post 58 Chaplain Maurice Tandy and Pastor Andy Barnes of Belmont Baptist Church.The Belmont High School Band, under the direction of director Lauren Fountain, not only participated in the parade and ensuing ceremonies with their musical tributes, but band members Cody York and Brian Miles also played "Taps" and "Taps with Echo" after the gun salute.The ceremony concluded with the new tradition of a community sing-a-long of "God Bless America," where everyone joined hands for the final patriotic tribute. This year, the singing was led by Grace Shaw.Editor's note: For more photos from this year's Memorial Day parades in Belmont and Tilton, see page A2. Express News Service By NEW DELHI: The Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) on Wednesday early morning raided Delhi minister Satyendar Jain's house after registering a case against him. The raid was conducted in connection with the hiring of creative team by PWD. The PE was registered in 2017. The hiring of 24 architects was allegedly done through a detective agency which had no prior experience but was tasked with finding the "best brains" in architecture colleges across the country to be inducted in the creative team of the PWD. Mediapersons wait outside Delhi home and health minister Satyender Kumar Jain's house where the CBI raids are on. (Parveen Negi | EPS) Reacting on the development, Jain tweeted "CBI raids my house for hiring creative team by PWD. Professionals were hired for different projects. All were forced to leave by CBI". Cbi raids my house for hiring creative team by PWD. Professionals were hired for different projects. All were forced to leave by cbi. Satyendar Jain (@SatyendarJain) May 30, 2018 Quoting his tweet Delhi CM and AAP party Chief Arvind Kejriwal said, "What does PM Modi wants." The CBI has initiated an inquiry against Delhi PWD Minister Satyendar Jain in connection with alleged irregularities in the hiring of professionals in the Public Works Department. Sequence of events: 1. CBI closes one case on @SatyendarJain yesterday 2. @SatyendarJain announces price capping and regulation of private hospitals 3. Immediately CBI raids the residence of @SatyendarJain today morning Does this sequence of events say anything to you?! Atishi Marlena (@AtishiMarlena) May 30, 2018 It is alleged that the creative wing floated by the Delhi government on September 1, 2015 was without the requisite approval or knowledge of the Lieutenant Governor. It is also alleged that the hiring of the 24 professionals was done for two years on which Rs 5.74 crore were spent. The preliminary enquiry was registered on the complaint from Vigilance Department of the Delhi government. By UNI JAKARTA: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday condemned the recent terror attacks in Indonesia and said at this juncture of sadness and challenges, India stands shoulder to shoulder with Indonesia. At a joint press conference with Indonesian President Joko Widodo here, Mr Modi said such terror strikes only make it clear once again that: "in order to fight terror - there is need to work together globally". Earlier this month, three separate locations in the city of Surabaya were hit by the bombings. Blasts, including a suicide bombing, also struck outside churches in Indonesia killing at least six and wounding dozens of others. READ | India, Indonesia to upgrade ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Underlining the importance of greater ties between two countries, the Prime Minister said special focus should be laid on maritime security as this would be also vital to serve the economic and commercial interests of both India and Indonesia. Describing President Widodo as a "bharat ke bahut hi acchey dost (a very good friend of India)", Mr Modi said the geo-strategic location of both India and Indonesia is also crucial in the context of safety and security in the Indo-Pacific region. He also lauded the warm welcome given to him by Indonesian government and citizens and said he is particularly delighted to appreciate President Widodo's "personal commitment" to give a boost to India-Indonesia ties. "The warm welcome has touched my heart," he said. Before the delegation level talks, both PM Modi and President Widodo held one-on-one parleys. In a tweet, MEA spokesman Raveesh Kumar wrote: "Productive exchange of views on bringing our two countries further closer! Tete-a-tete between PM @narendramodi and Indonesian President @jokowi at Merdeka Palace in Jakarta". Mr Modi also said with regard to countries like Indonesia, India is keen to add another element to its Act East Policy. "It will be SAGAR - that would mean Security and Growth for All in the Region," Mr Modi said, adding this idea is also in tune with the "visionary leadership" of the Indonesian President. Earlier, President Widodo accorded a warm welcome to Prime Minister Modi to the Merdeka Palace. The meeting between two leaders on Wednesday has been the fourth moot but this is Prime Minister Modi's first visit to Indonesia. By AFP UNITED NATIONS: The United States requested today an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks on Israel, the US mission said. The council is expected to meet Wednesday to discuss the attacks from the Gaza Strip that were claimed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, prompting Israel to respond with air strikes on bases of the militant Palestinian groups. "Mortars fired by Palestinian militants hit civilian infrastructure, including a kindergarten," US Ambassador Nikki Haley said in a statement. "The Security Council should be outraged and respond to this latest bout of violence directed at innocent Israeli civilians, and the Palestinian leadership needs to be held accountable for what they're allowing to happen in Gaza." Israel's military has said it was not seeking an escalation, but warned Hamas, with whom it has fought three wars since 2008, to rein in its fighters. IN PHOTOS: Israeli forces kill 55 Palestine protestors at Gaza border as anger mounts over US embassy opening in Jerusalem The exchange of fire followed weeks of deadly demonstrations and clashes along the Gaza-Israel border. Dozens of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the unrest. The US request came as council diplomats are negotiating a draft resolution, put forward by Kuwait, that calls for an "international protection mission" to be deployed for the Palestinians. Diplomats said the United States is likely to use its veto to block adoption of the measure, but Kuwait is hoping to win backing from the 14 other council members to highlight Washington's isolation on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. BEIJING, May 30 (ChinaMil) -- The Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) and the Russian Armed Forces held the 20th round of strategic consultation on Wednesday in Beijing. Major General Shao Yuanming, deputy chief of staff of the Joint Staff Department of Chinas Central Military Commission (CMC), and Colonel General Sergei Rudskoy, chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, co-hosted the consultation. The two sides exchanged views and reached broad consensus on current international and regional hotspot issues and on further deepening China-Russia military cooperation under the new situation. The two sides indicated that they will firmly implement the important consensus reached by President Xi Jinping and President Putin, further enhance the level of bilateral military cooperation and make positive efforts to help the strategic cooperation between the two militaries to take new steps in the new stage. General Li Zuocheng, member of the CMC and chief of staff of the CMC Joint Staff Department, met with the Russian delegation during the consultation. Champaign, IL (61820) Today Rain showers early with overcast skies later in the day. High 73F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%.. Tonight Showers and scattered thunderstorms. Low near 65F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Homecoming court representatives named Washington Wilkes Comprehensive High School homecoming activities will be held this Friday night with the W-W Tigers facing off against Greene County. Homecoming court representatives have been selected for Homecoming... County and BOE set millage rate On October 1, at 10 a.m., the county commission met to set the 2021 millage rate. After the call to order, the commissioners voted to accept the Millage Rate as... Mule Day 40 anniversary festival upcoming; local girl designs t-shirts Mule day, a long-standing festival that has become an annual tradition for Wilkes County residents, will be celebrating its fortieth anniversary this October. In commemoration of the milestone, the Chamber... SEOUL, May 30 (Xinhua) -- South Korean Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon said on Wednesday that the difference between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the United States over how to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula could be narrowed down. Cho made the remarks when meeting with a European Union (EU) mission to explain Seoul's policy toward Pyongyang, according to local media reports. The unification minister responsible for inter-Korean affairs said there remained a big difference between Pyongyang and Washington over how to make the Korean Peninsula nuclear-free. Cho noted that it would not be impossible to narrow down the difference, though it will not be easy. Admitting that there were many difficulties yet to be overcome in denuclearizing the peninsula, Cho said Pyongyang's commitment to denuclearization was clear, citing the stop of nuclear and missile tests, the demolition of a nuclear test site, and the second summit meeting between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and DPRK top leader Kim Jong Un on Saturday. Officials from the DPRK and the United States have reportedly been in preparatory talks for a first-ever DPRK-U.S. leaders' meeting. Expectations run high for the meeting planned to be held in Singapore on June 12 between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump. Cho said there had been an "up and down" last week between Pyongyang and Washington as they were unfamiliar with each other's positions, while noting that the two sides were currently negotiating. Trump on Thursday canceled the Singapore meeting, citing "tremendous anger and open hostility" displayed by Pyongyang recently, but reversed course on Friday, saying both sides wanted the meeting to happen and it could still go ahead after productive talks. Chinese State Councilor and Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe (R) meets with General Othmar Commenda (L), chief of the General Staff of the Austrian Armed Forces in Beijing on May 30, 2018. (mod.gov.cn/Li Xiaowei) BEIJING, May 30 (ChinaMil) -- Chinese State Councilor and Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe met with General Othmar Commenda, chief of the General Staff of the Austrian Armed Forces, in Beijing on Wednesday afternoon. Wei said that Austria is an important cooperative partner of China in Europe, China-Austria relations are developing smoothly with increasingly close multi-level exchange and cooperation in various fields. President Xi Jinping and President Alexander Van der Bellen decided in this April to establish the China-Austria strategic partnership of friendship, giving directions for the future development of bilateral state and military relations between the two countries, Wei said. As an important part of bilateral relations, Chinese military is willing to work with the Austrian military to earnestly implement the important consensus reached by the heads of state of the two countries and with an eye to promote the construction of a community of shared future for mankind and the Belt and Road Initiative, to strengthen pragmatic cooperation and push forward the relations between the two militaries to make continuous development, Wei told his Austrian guest. Commenda said Austria attaches importance to the friendly relations of cooperation with China and is looking forward to promoting fruitful cooperation between the two countries. Austrian military is willing to work with Chinese military to deepen cooperation, expand exchanges and promote the sound development of friendly relations between the two militaries, Commenda said. Chinese State Councilor and Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe (5th R) meets with General Othmar Commenda (4th L), chief of the General Staff of the Austrian Armed Forces in Beijing on May 30, 2018. (mod.gov.cn/Li Xiaowei) Chinese President Xi Jinping (R), also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, holds talks with his Laotian counterpart Bounnhang Vorachit in Beijing, capital of China, May 30, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Xueren) BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- China and Laos on Wednesday agreed to advance the building of a community of shared future to achieve new outcomes. The agreement was reached during the talks between Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, and Laotian President Bounnhang Vorachit, also general secretary of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) Central Committee, in Beijing. Xi recalled his meetings with Bounnhang in the past few years, saying that many consensuses reached between the two sides are being implemented actively and effectively, bringing tangible benefits to both peoples. Xi said the two sides have reached important consensus on building a community of shared future with strategic importance, which has played a leading role in the development of relations between the two parties and two countries. Noting that bilateral relations are at their historical best and stepping into new development stage, Xi urged both sides to concentrate on the building of China-Laos community of shared future and promote its transformation from concept to action, from vision to reality. He suggested that both sides strengthen strategic communication and consolidate the political foundation of China-Laos community of shared future. The two sides should carry out comprehensive, multi-level and institutional dialogues and exchanges and raise the level of mutual trust, Xi said. He called on both sides to deepen pragmatic cooperation and tighten the bonds of China-Laos community of shared future. The two sides should make great efforts to promote cooperation in major projects under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, improve people's livelihood and strengthen cooperation in poverty alleviation, and work together to form a new pattern of China-Laos cooperation, Xi added. Xi suggested that the two countries strengthen security cooperation to ensure safety of China-Laos community of shared future. The two sides should strengthen coordination and cooperation in multilateral mechanisms such as the United Nations, East Asian cooperation and the Lancang-Mekong cooperation, and effectively safeguard the common interests of both countries, he said. He hoped that the two sides can actively engage in cultural and people-to-people exchanges to consolidate the public foundation of China-Laos community of shared future. Xi also suggested the two sides attach importance to ecological protection and promote the sustainable development of China-Laos community of shared future. The two sides should strengthen exchanges and mutual learning in ecological and environmental protection and explore new ways to build a green community, he said. Calling Xi "a reliable and close friend of the LPRP, the Lao government and the people," Bounnhang said that the various consensuses reached during Xi's visit to Laos last year are being implemented comprehensively, which has guided bilateral ties to a new height. "I completely agree with Xi's idea on advancing the building of Laos-China community of shared future," Bounnhang said, pledging to maintain regular high-level exchanges between the two parties, and strengthen exchanges of experience in party building and state governance. He also vowed to beef up pragmatic cooperation between the governments in all areas, speed up big-project cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, and strengthen coordination in international and regional affairs, so as to build an unbreakable socialist community of shared future and benefit the two countries and people in the region. Xi expressed his congratulations to Bounnhang on the new achievements made by the Lao people under the leadership of the LPRP and introduced to him the achievements and experiences of China's reform and opening-up, stressing that China will take more active actions to promote a higher level of opening-up to the outside world and make greater contributions to the prosperity and development of Asia and the world. China has been continuously scoring new achievements in economic development, social harmony, reform and opening-up as well as building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, under the guidance of the Communist Party of China Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core, Bounnhang said. Hailing China's important role in international and regional affairs, and prominent contribution to peace and development of Northeast Asia and the world, Bounnhang expressed gratitude to Xi for China's long-standing support and help to Laos. After the talks, the two heads of state attended the signing ceremony of a number of cooperation documents. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, holds talks with his Laotian counterpart Bounnhang Vorachit in Beijing, capital of China, May 30, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Tao) Portland Beer Week is teaming up with the Oregon Zoo for the beer week Kickoff Party on Thursday, June 7th from 4-9pm. Portland Beer Week and the Oregon Zoo invite you to walk with the elephants, swing with the chimps and dive with the penguins, all while enjoying some of the best craft beers and ciders around.This all-ages celebration on the zoos amphitheater lawn will feature more than 30 beers and ciders from the Pacific Northwest, lawn games, local food carts and restaurants, axe throwing, DJs, live photo booth and, yes, lots of animals and exciting attractions. Tickets are now on sale for $34.95 at the zoos website. Each ticket is a full admission to the Zoo grounds and exhibits plus a collectible pint glass and four drink tickets, each ticket worth a 7oz pour. Kids and designated drivers get into the zoo at regular ticket prices. Carousel and train rides are available for an additional fee. Portland Beer Week is presented by PSUs The Business of Craft Beer, Loyal Legion beer hall and GrowlerWerks. Portland Beer Week is an eleven-day, city-wide celebration of craft beer in the greatest beer city on earth. Tunes will be provided by DJ Nine Inch Nilina, performances by AWOL troop, live meet-and-greets with animals provided by the zoo and amazing food from Hotlips Pizza, Foster Burger, Pok Pok, Ruby Jewel Ice Cream and much more. The Oregon Zoo encourages visitors to take public transport to the zoo, which is located five minutes from downtown Portland, and is accessible by MAX light rail line. Call TriMet Customer Service, 503-238-RIDE (7433), or visit trimet.orgfor fare and route information. Purchase your advance tickets here. Invite your friends via the Facebook event page. KICKOFF PARTY BEERS AND CIDERS: 1. Stormbreaker Brewing: Dino Head Hazy IPA, When I Froot, I Froot For The... 2. pFriem Family Brewers: Bright Pale, Super Saison 3. Breakside Brewery: Tall Guy IPA, Pilsner 4. Von Ebert Brewing: Pilsner, Basic Beach Beer 5. Silver Moon Brewing: IPA 97, Mango Daze Pale Ale 6. McMenamins Breweries: Tropic Heat Sour, Sunflower IPA 7. Thirsty Monk: Screaming Monk, Brother Noah 8. Fremont Brewing: Summer Ale, Lush IPA 9. Little Beast Brewing: Bess Tart Wheat, Belgian Pale Ale 10. Dirty Pretty Brewing: Dirty Pretty x Breakside's "Call Me Hazy" pale ale, TBD 11. Modern Times Beer: Fruitlands, Critical Band 12. Ninkasi Brewing: Double Hopped IPA, Yours Truly Easy Drinking Ale 13. Hopworks Urban Brewery: Totally Chill Hazy IPA, Wave Train 14. Lompoc Brewing: Enter the Dank IPA, Portland Parkways Premium Pilsner 15. Gigantic Brewing: Gigantic IPA, Ginormous MK5 16. Portland Cider: Pineapple Cider, Kinda Dry 17. 2 Towns Ciderhouse: Easy Peasy, Pacific Pineapple WHAT: 2018 Portland Beer Week Kickoff Party WHERE: Oregon Zoo WHEN: Thursday, June 7th 4-9pm COST: $34.95 tickets here FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/events/1945232042177084/ WEBSITE: http://pdxbeerweek.com/events/kickoff-party-at-the-oregon-zoo/ About PSU's Business of Craft Brewing Certificate: Our fully online certificate program focuses on the business side of brewing and is ideal for home brewers looking to reach larger audiences, as well as industry professionals who want to advance their careers. While brewing is emphasized, distillery and cidery business models are also included. By the end of the program, each student has an investor-ready business plan, and many of our students have now gone on to open their own craft beverage businesses. There are no prerequisites to get in, and there's no application - students just sign up when they're ready. Anyone interested can start as early as this summer with the Craft Beverage Distribution elective, or fall term with the core courses. For more information or to register, check out our course schedule page. About GrowlerWerks: If you're like us, many of your favorite microbrews aren't sold in bottles. GrowlerWerks was created by local Portlanders who love craft beer. We've drawn on a combined 47 years of engineering and product-design experience to make a better way to store beer. With a GrowlerWerks growler your beer will always taste exactly how the brewmaster intended. Email us to find out more at info@growlerwerks.com. About Loyal Legion: Portland, Oregon has more breweries per capita than any other city in the world, and yet it does not have a signature beer hall to celebrate the tremendous tradition of Oregon Craft Brewing. The craft brewing movement may have officially started in a neighboring state but it is universally acknowledged that Oregon redefined the craft brewing movement and established itself as the capital of American brewing since the late 1980s. The Loyal Legions sole purpose is to celebrate the Oregon Craft Brewing tradition. About Portland Beer Week: Portland Beer Week is eleven days of fun, educational, eye and palate opening eating and drinking events in the greatest beer city on earth. More than just a beer festival, Portland Beer Week is a celebration of craft beer culture and all of its tangents from food pairings to beer ice cream, artwork and design, film and science. Though our namesake is for the city of Portland, Oregon, we are not exclusive to only local brands and companies, we wish to bring the best of the beer world to Portland. Our goals are to showcase the world of beer in the greatest beer city on earth from brewers dinners, to tastings, seminars, festivals and games. Our grass roots organization was founded by beer journalists, taproom and bottle shop owners, craft beer entrepreneurs and brewery marketing experts in an effort to expand beer education and promote our city. Inspection of the provisional voters roll ended yesterday, with the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) recording over 100 000 new voter registrants. The inspection began on May 19 and the electoral body established 10 807 centres for the exercise. This comes amid reports that civil society organisations (CSOs) yesterday bussed in hordes of new registrants in Harare and Norton forcing ZEC to extend its operating hours. ZEC chairperson Justice Priscilla Chigumba yesterday said inspection of the voters roll went on smoothly countrywide. I am just receiving reports that some CSOs have bussed in people to our registration centres in Harare and Norton, she said. I do not know where they bussed them in from. They are new registrants and our officers will not be able to close stations by the time they are supposed to. We have extended the closing time for those stations and we have instructed our provincial election officers to accommodate them up to a reasonable time and that should be about 8 and 9pm. She said those who failed to register could be captured in the next few days at ZEC static centres. We had 11 days of inspection and today (yesterday) is the last day for inspection and not registration, Justice Chigumba said. Registration will continue except that it will be at the 63 districts and 10 provincial offices. In terms of statics, Justice Chigumba said: I really do not have current statics, but as of yesterday (Monday), I know that we had slightly over 100 000 new registrants around the country. We had increased the registration centres to over 2 000 instead of the usual 73. It was actually a good turnout and we believe the number of new registrants increased not only because more people turned 18, but that there were more centres which we opened during the period of inspection. She said the next stage after voters roll inspection would be the gazetting of the voters roll. After that the President will proclaim the date of the election, she said. After proclamation we count 14 days and the nomination court will sit. As of last Friday, more than 4,7 million people had inspected the provisional voters roll. ZEC said 694 030 physically inspected the voters roll while 819 935 used their mobile phones using the USSD code *265#. Another 3 256 440 received bulk SMS. Of the total registered 5,4 million voters, 11 018 have been excluded from the voters roll for various reason as 5 326 died, 3 077 were multiple registrants while 2 615 had incorrect ID numbers. Unregistered voters were also expected to use the same programme to register at various polling stations. ZEC is coming up with a new voters roll after taking over the process from the Registrar Generals office in line with the Constitution. Herald The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) says it is fully prepared to run the 2018 harmonised elections thanks to the support from government and co-operating partners. Other stakeholders, among them journalists, aspiring voters and politicians expressed mixed sentiments over the development. Following President Emmerson Mnangagwas proclamation in an extraordinary Government Gazette released today, setting the 2018 harmonised polls for the 30th of July 2018, ZEC said it is fully prepared for the exercise. ZEC chairperson Justice Priscilla Chigumba said electronic voters rolls will be availed to candidates who make it at the nomination court at no cost. Justice Chigumba also said they had identified an unnamed regional company for the printing of the ballot paper and ink. Critical stakeholders among them journalists raised concerns over the payment of accreditation fees to ZEC. People said they are eagerly awaiting to exercise their democratic right to select leaders of their choice, while Zimbabwe Development Party president Kisinoti Mukwazhi said they have petitioned Chief Justice Luke Malaba challenging their application seeking political parties funding. zbc 10 of the Best Horror Movies Released in the US Since 2000 Earlier in the day, Trump tweeted that Kim's visit is a "solid response to my letter, thank you!" "Kim Yong-chol is the man who whispers in Kim Jong-un's ear. Not only does he advise him on strategy but he also conveys the leader's demands. He'll be coming to New York to negotiate on Kim Jong-un's behalf. It's another very strong sign of commitment to this summit," said Jean Lee, director of the Korea program at the Wilson Center. Kim Yong-chol, the vice chairman of the powerful Central Committee and North Korea's former spy chief, departed Beijing on an Air China commercial flight Tuesday for John F. Kennedy International Airport. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet later this week with a North Korean four-star general in New York for talks related to a planned summit between President Donald Trump and North Korea's leader, according to the White House. Tough Discussions Ahead Lee, former Pyongyang bureau chief for the Associated Press, tells VOA tough discussions should be expected "as the U.S. and North Korean sides try to get on the same page regarding what the two leaders will accomplish at this anticipated summit." Trump sent a letter last week to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, saying their scheduled June 12 summit in Singapore would not happen, and blaming what he said was "tremendous anger and open hostility" shown in a statement from Pyongyang. But negotiations between the two countries have continued, including talks at the Korean demilitarized zone. "If it takes place on June 12th, we'll certainly be prepared. If it, for some reason, takes place at a later date, we'll be prepared for that as well," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Tuesday afternoon on Air Force One. A number of factors will determine when it is scheduled, Sanders added. "Denuclearization has to be on the table on the focus of the meeting," she explained. "And the president has to feel like we're making progress on that front." A U.S. delegation is meeting with a North Korean delegation in the demilitarized zone, led by Sung Kim, who is the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines and a former envoy to South Korea. Also present are Allison Hooker, Korea director on the National Security Council, and Randy Schriver, who is the assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs. Additional meetings are planned this week. Separately, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin is leading a pre-advance team in Singapore coordinating the logistics of the expected summit. It has also been announced that Trump is to meet Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the White House on June 7. Japan Concerned Behind the scenes, Japanese officials have expressed anxiety the Trump-Kim summit might sideline their priorities, especially North Korea's short- and medium-range missiles, and the fate of Japanese citizens abducted over decades by North Korean agents. "We would like to see comprehensive verifiable irreversible dismantlement [CVID] of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, the ballistic missiles dismantled irrespective of range, as well as addressing the abduction issue," Koro Bessho, Japan's ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters on Tuesday. "Abe wants to get the precise nuance of the U.S. negotiating policy," said Yoichi Sato, a professor of international security studies at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. Abe has strongly supported the Trump administration's CVID stance, and Sato tells VOA that "for the U.S. to move from that means there is a great implication for Japan's standing, especially Japan's stance on the presence of U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula." South Korean President Moon Jae-in could also be going to Singapore next month for a three-way summit with his U.S. and North Korean counterparts, a government official in Seoul said Monday. After a surprise meeting Saturday with Kim Jong-un, Moon said the North Korean leader is still committed to the "complete denuclearization" of the Korean Peninsula. North Korea has rejected unilateral disarmament and called for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula without defining what that entails. The North Koreans, after expressing initial enthusiasm about diplomacy with the United States earlier this month, did not show up for a preparatory meeting in Singapore. Angers U.S. North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui also was quoted by the country's official news agency threatening to use nuclear force and she referred to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence as a "political dummy." That angered Trump, who then wrote a letter to Kim Jong-un calling off their summit. North Korean state media quickly replied with a conciliatory statement, reporting Kim's "fixed will" that his summit with Trump should go ahead. For veteran observers of the opaque North Korean regime, the speed and intensity of the turnaround was remarkable. "Trump is something new and his warnings that military force might be used, I think, have been taken seriously," Grant Newsham, senior research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies, told VOA. "Plus, there has been fair amounts of pressure, compared to the past, put on the Chinese economically." (Newser) They didn't want cheese on their Quarter Pounders. They claim they had to pay for it anywaya cost of up to $1and now want $5 million for the trouble. That's according to a new lawsuit filed by two Florida residents against McDonald's, which should be used to such fights by now. It came after Leonard Werner says he realized McDonald's was repeatedly charging him for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, but giving him a cheese-less sandwich, as he requested. "I started talking with some lawyer friends, saying, 'What's the deal? They can charge for something I didn't get?' It's not right," Werner says, per the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. According to Werner, McDonald's restaurant menus no longer feature a cheese-less Quarter Pounder, but its app menu does, at a reduced cost of 30 cents to $1. story continues below Restaurant customers are therefore "being forced to pay for two slices of cheese, which they do not want, order, or receive, to be able to purchase their desired product," the suit says. One of the attorneys who filed the suit, which is seeking class-action status, explains people who order a Big Mac with items left off "are not entitled to a credit against the purchase price" because the burger is trademarked according to its ingredients, per the Miami Herald. He says that's not the case with the Quarter Pounder, since a cheese-less option is sold. Another lawyer involved says up to 25 million customers may have been overcharged and could be eligible to receive $10 and a free sandwich should a judge side with the plaintiffs. McDonald's doesn't expect that to happen, claiming the suit is without legal merit. (Read about another person who had a problem with McDonald's.) (Newser) Jesse Duplantis Ministries has three private jets, but Duplantis needs one more: After all, as the televangelist who preaches the controversial "prosperity gospel" explained to his followers in a video last week, if Jesus Christ walked the earth today, "he wouldn't be riding a donkey." There's just one thing: To buy that $54 million private jet (Duplantis has his eye on a Dassault Falcon 7x), the Louisiana preacher needs his followers to donate money to the cause. As for those aforementioned three jets, the most recent of which was purchased in 2006, the ministry has been "just burning them up for the Lord Jesus Christ," Duplantis said in the video, per NOLA.com. The Falcon 7x, with a range of 5,950 nautical miles, is needed "so we can go anywhere in the world in one stop," he explained. None of his other jets can do that. story continues below Duplantis told his followers that God told him, "I want you to believe in me for a Falcon 7X." He said viewers should "pray about becoming a partner to it." He addressed the possible controversial nature of his request, per WGNO: "Now some people believe that preachers shouldnt have jets. I really believe that preachers ought to go on every available voice, every available outlet, to get this gospel preached to the world." He has defended his use of private planes in the past in what the Washington Post calls a "widely mocked" video in which he and another preacher said, among other things, that you can't speak openly to God on a commercial airliner. Duplantis, who has a church just outside New Orleans, also owns one of the largest homes in St. Charles Parish; it has 22,039 square feet of living space and 12,947 square feet of outdoor patios, garages, and other amenities. (Read more televangelist stories.) (Newser) Palestinian militants bombarded southern Israel with dozens of rockets and mortar shells Tuesday, while Israeli warplanes struck targets throughout the Gaza Strip in the largest flare-up of violence between the sides since a 2014 war. The Israeli military said most of the projectiles were intercepted, but three soldiers were wounded, raising the chances of further Israeli retaliation. One mortar shell landed near a kindergarten shortly before it opened, the AP reports. The sudden burst of violence, which stretched past midnight with no signs of slowing, follows weeks of mass Palestinian protests along the Gaza border with Israel. Over 110 Palestinians, many of them unarmed protesters, have been killed by Israeli fire in that time. Israel says it holds Gaza's Hamas rulers responsible for the bloodshed. story continues below Tuesday's violence bore a striking resemblance to the run-up to past wars. Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, the chief military spokesman in Israel, threatened tougher action and said it was up to Hamas to stop the situation from escalating. Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant issued a joint statement Tuesday, claiming shared responsibility for firing rockets and projectiles against Israeli communities near Gaza. They said Israel "began this round of escalation" by targeting their installations in the past two days, killing four militants. It was the first time the armed wing of Hamas has claimed responsibility for rocket attacks out of Gaza since the 2014 war. The United States condemned the attacks out of Gaza and called for an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council (Read more Israel stories.) (Newser) A Massachusetts woman died from severe burns after falling into a fire pit outside her home, authorities say. Jacqueline Cardinal, 71, was pronounced dead at the scene of the Saturday night accident in Worcester, MassLive.com reports. Michelle Gay, one of her two daughters, says her mother was outside the family home alone when she fell into the fire pit at around 8:40pm. Gay says her husband arrived and found Cardinal, who had been fine just 10 minutes earlier, badly injured. "She is the most wonderful woman there is," Gay says. "There isn't anybody who would say anything different." Investigators say Cardinal was unable to climb out of the pit after falling in, People reports. The fire was already out when firefighters arrived, authorities say. (Read more Massachusetts stories.) (Newser) It'll take a "herculean focus on all kinds of details" to revive President Trump and Kim Jong Un's June 12 summit, reports the New York Times, and a herculean effort seems to be underway. The paper tracks three separate efforts in three corners of the world to salvage the meeting: in New York, Singapore, and the DMZ. Yonhap's sources tell it that Kim Yong Chol departed Beijing on Wednesday aboard an Air China flight en route to New York, where he is set to meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; the two have met twice prior, during Pompeo's past visits to North Korea. How Reuters frames the purpose of their meeting, per a US official: to evaluate "whether North Korea is prepared to make sufficient commitments toward getting rid of its nuclear weapons." story continues below If that path to denuclearization reveals itself, shoring up security for the summit becomes paramount, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Joe Hagin and counterpart Kim Chang Son have been in Singapore since Monday to establish meeting locations and related details. On Sunday in the DMZ village of Panmunjom, US Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim and Choe Son Hui (who made the now-infamous comments about Mike Pence) met, with the Times speculating they were ironing out an agenda. Meanwhile, NBC News casts doubt on the depths of North Korea's intentions on the denuclearization front, citing sources with knowledge of a CIA analysis who say the best the US may be able to hope for is that the North undoes some of its recent progress on nukes. A quirky concession it may be willing to make: bringing a Western hamburger franchise to Pyongyang. (Read more North Korea stories.) (Newser) When you live near a major dam, the last thing you want to hear is that the integrity of it has been "compromised" by landslides. But that's exactly what residents living below North Carolina's Lake Tahoma were told late Tuesday in a tweet from a local National Weather Service account. "MANDATORY EVACUATIONS," the post read, with specifics on who exactly in McDowell County should be getting out. "ACT NOW TO PRESERVE YOUR LIFE!" NBC News reports the flash-flood emergency warning to thousands came after an engineer checked out the dam, and after heavy rain had caused "significant and life-threatening flooding" throughout the county, per the NWS. story continues below Weather.com says there were two landslides reported in the area, with local authorities noting the dam is in "imminent danger" of failing, per CBS News. Water was reported spilling out from the sides of the dam early Wednesday. "Floodwaters have reached levels not seen since the September 2004 floods associated with Hurricanes Frances and Ivan," the NWS says, per NBC. The communities of Marion and Old Fort are among those most severely affected. Heavy rainfall throughout several Southern states is linked to the storm Alberto, which took the lives of two South Carolina journalists Monday when a tree fell on their SUV. (A "once in 1,000 years" flood slammed a Maryland citytwice in two years.) (Newser) On Wednesday morning, the AP referred to it as a "brazen killing." Hours later, it reported a shocker: that Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who was reportedly shot dead in Kiev on Tuesday, is actually alive. He showed up at a news conference in Ukraine. The initial reports into Babchenko's "death" said his wife found him bleeding in their Kiev apartment building with multiple gunshot wounds to the back; police confirmed that he died en route to a hospital. "I'm still alive," he announced instead upon appearing, explaining it was all part of a plot to catch those who allegedly plotted to kill him. How things unfolded: Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, had organized the news conference under the auspices of revealing updates on the investigation into Babchenko's murder. The AP reports Gritsak then "confused everyone" by inviting Babchenko into the room, and that gasps and applause followed, as well as apologies. "I know that sickening feeling when you bury a colleague. I'm sorry you had to go through this but there was no other way," said the journalist. story continues below Gritsak said the fake murder was staged in order to "foil a cynical plot and document how the Russian security service was planning for this crime," per the Guardian. He alleged Ukrainian authorities learned the Russians engaged a Ukrainian man to orchestrate a hit on Babchenko for $10,000, with another $30,000 to be paid to the man who pulled the trigger, reports Radio Free Europe. The BBC reports the Ukrainian reportedly approached a number of potential assassins, and one informed officials, who then worked with Babchenko to stage the hit. The Guardian reports the general prosecutor who appeared alongside Gritsak said they believed they had to convince the organizers of the plot that the hit had been successful. Gritsak says the Ukrainian organizer was arrested Wednesday. Babchenko suggested his wife didn't know about the plan: "Special apologies to my wife. Olechka, I am sorry, but there were no options here. The operation took two months to prepare. I was told a month ago. As a result of the operation, one person has been captured, he is being held," Babchenko is quoted as saying. He also said "larger terrorist attacks were prevented." Gritsak alleged Babchecko's death was to be part of a larger plot to kill 30 in the country, though none of the other alleged targets were identified. Neither Babchenko nor Gritsak explained how Babchenko was made to look injured. The AP offers this list of five other "stranger-than-fiction faked deaths." (Read more Russia stories.) (Newser) Its official: President Trump has weighed in on the Roseanne controversy. He tweeted Wednesday, Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that 'ABC does not tolerate comments like those' made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didnt get the call?" Trump has some history with the Disney CEO: Last June, Iger quit Trumps business advisory council in response to the White Houses decision to exit the Paris climate agreement, per CNN. Iger has spoken out from time to time on hot-button political issues, a departure from Disney's long-standing reluctance to weigh in on such topics, as the New York Times detailed in an October profile. (Barr blamed her racist tweet against Jarrett on Ambien; the drug's maker burned her in response.) Sorry! This content is not available in your region The proposed investment restrictions and export controls will be announced by June 30, 2018 and adopted shortly thereafter, according to the White House. Other punitive steps include implementing stronger investment restrictions and enhanced export controls for Chinese citizens and companies related to the acquisition of industrially significant technology to protect national security. The Trump administration made the announcement in a statement called "Steps to Protect Domestic Technology and Intellectual Property from China's Discriminatory and Burdensome Trade Practices." The White House said Tuesday the proposed tariffs are in response to China's practices with respect to technology transfer, intellectual property, and innovation. It will announce the final list of covered imports by June 15, 2018, and the tariffs will be imposed shortly thereafter. The White House says it plans to impose 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese goods that contain "industrially-significant technology" as trade talks between United States and China continue. Trade Barriers In addition, the Trump administration said trade talks with China will continue and it will request China remove all of its many trade barriers, including non-monetary trade barriers, and that tariffs and taxes between the two countries be "reciprocal in nature and value." In response to the latest threat of tariffs from the White House, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a short statement it is "surprised" by the announcement but added it "also expects it." The Chinese ministry's statement claimed the White House move "was apparently contrary to the consensus both sides reached recently." "China has the confidence, ability, and experience to safeguard its core interests, China urged the United Sates to act in accordance to the spirit of their recent joint statement," it said. In April, Trump announced he planned to impose tariffs on $150 billion worth of Chinese goods, and Beijing responded by declaring it will retaliate by imposing similar amount of tariffs of imported American goods. China in Violation The Trump administration's decision to take action is a result of an investigation conducted by the U.S. Trade Representative under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to determine whether Beijing's trade practices may be "unreasonable or discriminatory" and may be "harming American intellectual property rights, innovation or technology development." After a seven-month investigation, the USTR found the policies were in violation. The United States and China subsequently conducted two rounds of trade talks aimed at avoiding a full-blown trade war. The last round of trade talks was concluded on May 19 after both sides reached a deal for Beijing to buy more American goods to "substantially reduce" the huge trade deficit with the United States. But there was no mention of any specific import and export targets in the statement agreed to by the two countries. Following the trade talks in Washington, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced the world's two biggest economic powers have agreed to back away from imposing tough new tariffs on each other's exports. Trump initially touted the agreement, but later contended he was neither pleased nor satisfied with the result. U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is set to go to Beijing this week to negotiate on how China might buy more American goods to reduce the huge U.S. trade deficit with Beijing, which last year totaled $375 billion. North Korea hid nuclear scientists at the test site in Punggye-ri in a hospital before foreign reporters arrived to cover its demolition, Radio Free Asia reported Tuesday. RFA quoted a source in North Pyongyang Province as saying he was told by a high-ranking official that a large number of nuclear scientists were sent to a hospital run by the General Bureau of Atomic Energy. "I was unable to assess how many were admitted," the source said. "The hospital treats technicians and staff at nuclear research facilities, is guarded by armed soldiers and only authorized personnel can enter. The fact that some technicians are staying there with their entire families shows that they are not there to be treated as officials claim, but are being isolated there." The source said locals think it is a tuberculosis hospital, "but they are not allowed even to pass by the facility, and there is a common awareness that it is a classified military installation." New Delhi: Banking services across the country would take a hit as public sector banks have gone for a two-day nationwide strike from Wednesday. Around 10 lakh employees of state-run banks are protesting against the two per cent salary hike proposed by the Indian Banks Association (IBA). Due to the bank strike, which coincides with the month end, the salaried class may have to bear the brunt as salary withdrawals would get affected. The strike would also affect the normal lives as ATMs are likely to go dry over the next two days. However, a little relief for the people would be that online banking services will be available at all times during the PSU banks strike. In its meeting with Bank unions on May 5, the IBA negotiated on a nominal two per cent wage hike but failed to convince the bank employees. The marginal wage hike decision came following the high losses due to Non-Performing Assets and scams in the state-run banks. The employees, however, argued that the losses were not because of them. In the last wage settlement between November 1, 2012 and October 31, 2017, the IBA had given a wage hike of 15 per cent. For all the Latest Business News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: A massive fire that broke out in a rubber godown in south Delhias Malviya Nagar area on Tuesday evening, was put on after 19 hours of extensive fire fighting operation. The fireA was extinguishedA with the help of Air Force. The Air Force had deployed a Mi-17 helicopter from its Palam airbase to douse the fire. Earlier, a dense plume of smoke billowed from a burning truck and the godown was seen in the skies over Khirki Extension area. "Have launched a Mi-17 helicopter for Bambi operations from Palam to try and contain fire at Malviya Nagar godown," the Air Force said in a statement. The police evacuated the area to ensureA the safetyA of the people living near the area. So far, no casualty was reported in the fire. Meanwhile, a political blame game has started over the incident and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj alleged that despite several complaints from the local AAP leaders, the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (BJP), which is in the folds of BJP, didnat take any action against the illegal godowns and factories in the area. Watch: Air Force's MI 17 helicopter trying to douse the fire in Malviya Nagaras Khirki Extension area. #WATCH Delhi: Fire which broke out at a godown in Malviya Nagar yesterday has still not been doused, Air Force's MI 17 helicopter deployed for Bambi bucket operations pic.twitter.com/s8m1dXPjim a ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 New Delhi: The International Yoga Day on June 21 will witness an unprecedented large performance in Dehradun. In the world's largest, over 60,000 people will perform together different asanas at the event, a government official has said. The Uttarakhand government has moved a proposal to make the Forest Research Institute (FRI) the venue for the event, Chief Secretary Utpal Kumar Singh said on Tuesday at a meeting to review preparations for the event. The Yoga Day programme will start at 7 am and continue till 7.45 am with over 60,000 participants performing together different asanas in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Singh said in a statement. Two rehearsals for the event will be held on June 18-19, he said. The Uttarakhand Police, the Army, para-military personnel, NCC, NSS, Scout guide, yog sansthan, school and college students, and representatives of different organisations will participate in the event, the release said. Besides the national event in Dehradun, programmes will also be held at every district headquarters, blocks and gram panchayats to mark the occasion. A run for yoga will also be held in the city in June, Singh was quoted as saying in the release. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: West Bengal Congress chief Adhir Chowdhury on Wednesday expressed surprise over former President Pranab Mukherjee's decision to attend an RSS occasion and said he is finding it hard to relate it with Mukherjee's earlier comments against the saffron organisation. "My question is does he (Mukherjee) think his previous comments against RSS were wrong ... We still remember how Pranab Mukherjee as a senior leader of the Congress had criticized RSS as a communal and a divisive organization," Chowdhury said. Mukherjee, who has been a Congress veteran, has been invited to be the chief guest at a function of Sangh Shiksha Varg that is a training camp for RSS volunteers at the organisation's headquarters in Nagpur on June 7. According to an RSS functionary, the former President has gratefully accepted the invitation. "I am really surprised to hear about the decision of Pranab Mukherjee to attend RSS's program in Nagpur. Just like any other Congressman, I am really astonished to hear about it," Chowdhury said. However, Pranab Mukherjee is no longer President, nor a Congress leader, and hence, is free to take any decision, he said. "I can't say what prompted him to take such a decision," said Chowdhury, who has shared a long association with Mukherjee. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Is reading glasses linked to higher intelligence? Scientists think so. They say that people who wear glasses may be more intelligent than those who don't. The scientists at the University of Edinburgh studied the genetic data of over 44,480 people, and found that those who were more intelligent were nearly 30 per cent more likely to have genes indicating they require reading glasses. "This study, the largest genetic study of cognitive function, has identified many genetic differences that contribute to the heritability of thinking skills," said Gail Davies from University of Edinburgh in the UK. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, also linked higher cognitive ability to genes known to play a part in better cardiovascular health. The scientists analysed 148 genomic regions related to better cognitive function, including 58 that have not previously been reported. The results of the study could help understand the related cognitive decline in age and illness, The Telegraph reported. "The discovery of shared genetic effects on health outcomes and brain structure provides a foundation for exploring the mechanisms by which these differences influence thinking skills throughout a lifetime," said Davies. Participants had taken various thinking tests which were summarised as a general cognitive ability score. All had genetic testing that examined their DNA and none of the people had dementia or a stroke, the study shows. (With PTI inputs) For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on announced a free visa for Indonesian citizens for a travel period of 30 days and invited the diaspora to visit their country of origin to experience the 'New India'. "Not only do the names of our nations rhyme but also there is a distinct rhythm in the India-Indonesia friendship," Modi said while addressing a gathering of the Indian diaspora at the Jakarta Convention Centre in the Indonesian capital. "We will grant free of cost visa for Indonesian citizens for travel of up to 30 days... Many of you may never have been to India. I invite you all to come to India for the Kumbh in Prayag (Allahabad) next year," Modi told the gathering. Kumbh Mela in Allahabad is one of the largest spiritual events in India. The mega Kumbh event would be a new experience for the visitors who will get a glimpse of 'New India', Modi said. The prime minister then called upon the Indian diaspora to visit their country of origin with friends and experience the changing India which he claimed his government has brought about. "Our government, has been preparing India according to the need and expectations of the 21st century," he said, adding, "We have gone a step ahead of the Ease of Doing Business. Our focus is Ease of Living. Our processes are transparent and sensitive". "We have to make a 'New India'. We have to start working to realise the dream of New India by 2022, when India will celebrate 75 years of her independence," Modi added. In the last two-and-a-half years, more than 9,000 start-ups have been registered in India, he said, adding that the world's second largest start-up ecosystem is built in India. "And my friends living in Indonesia, these are happening, laws are the same, officers are the same, offices are the same, tables and chairs are the same, only the government has changed and the country is changing," Modi said. "If the policy is clear and intension pure, then development has to happen which we have shown," he asserted. He lauded the people of Bali and Surabaya for rescuing thousands of Indian tourists stranded in these two places at the time of volcano eruption last year and making arrangements for their safe return. "For this human act, I praise you with all my heart and I thank you. Showing such gestures of human values have been an integral part of India. We are living this with the same spirit in India," Modi said. Be it an earthquake in Nepal or flood in Sri Lanka, India has been recognised as one of the countries which always come forward at the time of calamity, he said. "There is a sensitive government in New Delhi which does not see the colour of the passport. For us, an Indian is important. And in times of calamities, in the last four years in different places, we have rescued and brought back more than 90,000 people without seeing the colour of their passports," Modi said. Prime Minister Modi, who arrived in Jakarta on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, earlier met President Joko Widodo at the Merdeka palace, one of the presidential palaces in Indonesia. (With PTI inputs) For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday arrived in Indonesia's capital Jakarta on the first leg of his five-day three-nation tour. Modi's visit is likely to enhance Indiaas economic and strategic ties with Indonesia. Apart from Indonesia, Modi will also visit Malaysia and Singapore. The three-nation tour of Modi is in line with his governmentas Act East Policy. "Landed in Jakarta. India and Indonesia are friendly maritime neighbours with deep civilisational links. This visit will further the convergence of our political, economic and strategic interests,"A the prime minister tweeted soon after landing in Jakarta. HIGHLIGHTS #06:00 PM: Modi announces 30-day free visa for Indonesian citizens A A A Modi invited the diaspora to travel to their country of origin to experience the 'New India'. #03:20 PM:A There is a special link between the cultures of India and Indonesia.A There is a special link between the cultures of India and Indonesia. https://t.co/cGk6Wwb69n pic.twitter.com/5sCqWiHuGQ a PMO India (@PMOIndia) May 30, 2018 #03:10 PM:A In the last four years India has witnessed the unparalleled transformation. In the last four years India has witnessed unparalleled transformation. https://t.co/cGk6Wwb69n pic.twitter.com/brtpbkr6q4 a PMO India (@PMOIndia) May 30, 2018 #03:05 PM:A We are all proud of the manner in which the Indian diaspora has distinguished itself in Indonesia. You are proud citizens of Indonesia and at the same time you want to remain connected to your Indian roots: PM Modi #03:00 PM:A WATCH: PM Modi addresses Indian community in Jakarta. #01:33 PM:A Ramadan Karim! Indonesian President accompanied PM Narendra Modi during a visit to Istiqlal Mosque, the national mosque of Indonesia and the largest in southeast Asia, in the holy month of Ramadan. Ramadan Karim! Indonesian President @jokowi accompanied PM @narendramodi during a visit to Istiqlal Mosque, the national mosque of Indonesia and the largest in southeast Asia, in the holy month of Ramadan. pic.twitter.com/X5xXddlRo6 a Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) May 30, 2018 #11:55 AM:A Statement on Shared Vision of India-Indonesia Maritime Cooperation in the Indo Pacific agreed during PM Narendra Modi visit. The document, 1st with any ASEAN country, outlines areas of maritime cooperation & envisages security architecture in Indo Pacific. Read full statement here:A mymea.in/d7nA #11:40 AM:A Jakarta: 15 MoUs were signed between Indian & Indonesia including in the fields of defence, scientific and technological cooperation, railways and health. In the presence of PM @narendramodi and President @jokowi 9 G2G MoUs in Defence, Space, S&T, Railways, Pharma, Policy Planning & Research and 6 G2B and B2B MoUs a include between twinning of Bali & Uttarakhand were exchanged. List at https://t.co/d4q3VsIUw7. pic.twitter.com/Ht1QcvvgmP a Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) May 30, 2018 #11:00 AM: India stands resolutely with Indonesia in the fight against terror, we condemn the recent terror attacks in Indonesia in which many innocent people lost their lives: Modi #10:55 AM:A India-ASEAN partnership is such an important power that can become a guarantee of peace not only in Indo-Pacific region but also beyond it: PM Modi in Jakarta #10:50 AM:A For the development of Indo-Pacific region we (India - Indonesia) have agreed to the same shared vision. India's Act East Policy and the vision of SAGAR (Security and Growth for all in the Region) matches President Jidodo's Maritime Fulcrum Policy: PM Modi #09:50 AM:A "Productive exchange of views on bringing our two countries further closer! Tete-a-tete between PM Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo at Merdeka Palace in Jakarta,"A tweets MEA. # 08:59 AM:A PM Narendra Modi at Merdeka Palace, Indonesian President Joko Widodo also present. Jakarta: PM Narendra Modi at Merdeka Palace,Indonesian President Joko Widodo also present pic.twitter.com/dBlQICe2bj a ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 #08:50 AM:A Jakarta: PM Narendra Modi arrives at Merdeka Palace, welcomed by Indonesian President Joko Widodo. Jakarta: PM Narendra Modi arrives at Merdeka Palace, welcomed by Indonesian President Joko Widodo pic.twitter.com/lWcCkkAcMn a ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 #08:30 AM: Watch: Modi arrives in Jakarta. Indian Community welcome prime minister with loud cheers. (Earlier visuals) A warm welcome for PM @narendramodi by the Indian community in Jakarta. pic.twitter.com/OMKDDjY9IH a PMO India (@PMOIndia) May 29, 2018 #08:15 AM: PM Narendra Modi pays tribute at Kalibata National Heroes' Cemetery in Jakarta. PM Narendra Modi pays tribute at Kalibata National Heroes' Cemetery in Jakarta. #Indonesia pic.twitter.com/UsFVPc6Gv4 a ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 #08:00 AM: Hello and welcome to the News Nation live updates. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Indonesia today on the first leg of his three-nation tour. During the visit, Modi will hold extensive talks withA Indonesian President Joko Widodo and address Indian community there. A lot lined up for the PM and we will be updating you with all the latest news and information. Stay with us. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Japan's Foreign Ministry on Tuesday revealed photographs on its website showing North Korean vessels smuggling oil on the high seas from ships flying what appear to be Chinese flags. This is the fifth time this year that the Japanese government has published pictures of suspected petroleum smuggling by North Korean ships on the high seas. According to the ministry, the North Korean vessel Ji Song 6 lined up next to a small ship of unknown nationality on the East China Sea on May 19 which was flying what appeared to be the Chinese flag. A prominent nuclear expert has warned that North Korea's denuclearization could take up to 15 years. The New York Times on Monday said Siegfried Hecker revealed a roadmap for denuclearization after dividing the process of dismantling North Korea's nuclear weapons into three stages. They are a "halt of military, industrial and personnel operations," followed by a "winding down of sites, facilities and weapons" and "the elimination or limiting of factories and programs." The first stage is expected to take a year, the second between two and five years and the third six to 10 years, according to Hecker. "Dr. Hecker's time frame stands in stark contrast with what the United States initially demanded, on what could be a key sticking point in any summit meeting between President [Donald] Trump and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader," the NYT said. HRH Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and First Deputy Prime Minister, has instructed the Minister of Interior to prepare a draft edict to create a new self-sponsorship residency permit for foreign investors. Under the new system, which is designed to reinforce Bahrains position as an investment destination, foreign investors will be able to obtain a 10-year, renewable residency permit on a self-sponsorship basis. HE Lieutenant General Shaikh Rashid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa, the Minister of Interior, affirmed the importance of instilling the principles of Bahrains Economic Vision 2030 - sustainability, competitiveness and justice across all development areas. In this regard, HE the Minister noted that government efforts to advance public services in line with international best practises are aimed at supporting an economic environment conducive to securing growth and investment in key sectors. Egyptian fruits to return to the markets of Bahrain following termination of import ban Egyptian fruits to return to the markets of Bahrain following termination of import ban Some Egyptian fruits will soon return to Bahraini markets, a year after the authorities here banned their imports due to health concerns, a senior Egyptian official confirmed recently. According to Egyptian Agriculture and Land Reclamation Minister Abdulmoneim Al Banna, The import ban imposed on fresh Egyptian guava has been lifted by the Bahraini authorities. The minister told Egyptian press on Sunday, We have been informed by the Bahraini authorities today that it has been recommended to lift the ban on the imports of Egyptian fresh Guava. The exportation of the fruit to Bahrain will be resumed by the beginning of the 2018-2019 export season, which begins by next September and ends by August 2019. As reported earlier by Tribune, a ban on importing vegetables and fruits from several countries in the region, including Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon, was imposed on April 27, 2017. Agriculture and Marine Resources Affairs in Works, Municipalities Affairs and Urban Planning Ministry explained back then that the decision comes as reports proved that agricultural pesticides were excessively used in those countries. Similar decisions were made by neighbouring GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia, which imposed a ban on several agricultural products from Egypt and other regional countries during the same period and lifted the ban on guava last month. Despite booming opportunities in the Kingdoms healthcare sector, a new generation of well-trained Bahraini nurses is finding it hard to get jobs. Their fate is not different from Bahraini medical graduates who have come out in open against the lack of career opportunities. Going by the Health Ministry data, the Kingdom has over 1,200 registered nurses out of which more than 500 are expatriates. Bahraini Mohammed Ibrahim completed his nursing studies at a recognised university in Jordan three years ago. Though he has all the requirements to enter the profession, his career hasnt taken off. He had send his resume to every government and private hospitals in the kingdom but then he didnt get any positive results. Mohammed then approached the National Health Regulatory Authority and the officials there asked him to obtain a short-term experience before applying for a nursing licence. Some of his friends adviced him to go back to Jordan and he worked there for a year and a half but he didnt get sufficient income to support his family. He came back to bahrian with full hope but the laws were changed by then. He had to produce a two-year experience certificate for obtaining the licence. They also suggested him to do some expensive courses before I could practice the profession here. Left with no options, Mohammed again took a Jordan flight and worked there a few more months. Now NHRA says I should obtain a threeyear experience certificate to get the licence. I am now 30, a totally frustrated individual with no hope of achieving anything in life. Mohammeds experience is not a unique one. Many Bahraini nurses are moving out of the Kingdom to get jobs, while hospitals here are hiring expatriate nurses. Chairing the Cabinet on Monday, His Royal Highness Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa directed the Health Ministry to recruit Bahrainis graduates in medical as well as paramedical fields. This follows an appeal by 310 doctors whose applications for jobs were not accepted by the Health Ministry. Only 70 were given appointment orders following a written exam and personal interviews. Online shopping site Gmarket said Tuesday, "We are being inundated with overseas orders for BTS album packages that also include posters and life-sized photos costing W65,000" (US$1=W1,080). Overseas fans of popular boy band Bangtan Boys, also known as BTS, are rushing to Korean shopping websites to buy the band's latest hit album "Love Yourself: Tear." Album sales at Gmarket have risen 40 percent on-year since it started taking pre-orders for the BTS album on April 18. The album entered the U.S. Billboard charts at No. 1, and overseas supplies are running out quickly. Taiwanese fans made up the biggest group of buyers on Korean shopping sites with 20 percent, followed by Chinese and Malaysians at 11 percent. But overseas buyers also include those from Saudi Arabia and the UAE for the first time. U.S. officials are holding more behind-the-scenes talks with North Korea ahead of a summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The officials left the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Seoul on Tuesday after trying desperately to avoid the South Korean media. The talks take place Wednesday in the border truce village of Panmunjom. Allison Hooker, a National Security Council official for Korean affairs, left the hotel by car at 9:40 a.m. on Tuesday, followed by U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, a seasoned nuclear negotiator, and Randall Shriver, assistant secretary of defense for Asia and Pacific security affairs. They used a staff elevator to sneak out through the underground car park to avoid running into reporters. The EFCC on Wednesday, filed an amended 39-count charge before a Federal High Court Lagos, against a former Governor of Abia, Orji Uzor Kalu in an alleged N3.2 billion fraud.The EFCC had on Oct. 31, 2016, preferred a 34-count charge bordering against Kalu and a former Commissioner for Finance in Abia, Ude Udeogo.A Company, Slok Nig. Ltd, said to be owned by Kalu, was also joined in the charge.The accused had pleaded not guilty to the charge, and were granted bails.The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that at the last adjourned date on May 11, EFCC had closed its case, but had informed the court that it intended to file an amended charge against the accused, to reflect further evidences.The court had then adjourned the case, for the defence to open its defence.On Wednesday, when the case was called, the prosecutor Mr Rotimi Jacobs (SAN), informed the court of an amended charge against the accused which he had filed this morning, adding that the prosecution was also served with a no case submission by each of the accused.He said that he received the no case submission of first accused on May 28 at 5pm, while he received those of the second and third accused shortly before the court sat this morning.In response, first defence counsel, Mr Awa Kalu (SAN) confirmed to the court that he had filed a no case submission on behalf of first accused but added that the accused had not been served with any amended charge by prosecution.Second and third defence counsel, Messrs Solo Akuma (SAN) and K. C Nwofo (SAN) also informed the court that they had filed no case submissions on behalf of the second and third accused, which were served on the prosecution this morning.They also informed the court that neither the defence nor any of its legal team had seen or received copies of the said amended charge by prosecution.Specifically, Akuma drew the courts attention to the provisions of sections 216 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, which he argued does not allow prosecution to amend a charge without leave of court.He said that the prosecution ought to have applied by way of motion on notice for amendment, which will afford the defence an opportunity to be heard, before the court exercises its discretion for or against the application.When the prosecution opted to serve the charge on defence counsel in court, first defence counsel (Kalu) objected to service, on the grounds that the charge ought to be served personally on the accused and not on his counsel.In his response, Jacobs reminded the court that at the last adjourned date, before he closed the case for the prosecution, he had informed the court of the amended charge.He said that however, following gentlemen agreements between him and the defence, he had decided to close his case before bringing the amended charge.He told the court that the era of technicality was gone, and that by the decision of the Supreme Court, the prosecution was not bound to seek leave of court before amending a criminal charge.Jacobs then sought for permission of the court, to serve the amended charge on the accused in the presence of the judge in the courtroom, since defence counsel had refused to take service.Justice Idris consequently held that in the light of the foregoing, the learned prosecutor was permitted to serve the accused with the amended charge in court.Kalu and Udeogo were then respectively handed the amended charge.Defence counsel then informed the court that they required ample time to study the amended charge, before taking any steps.Justice Idris adjourned the case until June 13 at noon, for hearing of both the no case submission and hearing on the amended charge.in the charge, the EFCC alleged that Kalu and the others committed the offences from August 2001 to October 2005.The commission accused Kalu of utilising his company (Slok Nig. Ltd.) to retain in the account of First Inland Bank, now First City Monument Bank, the sum of N200 million.The commission said that the sum formed part of funds illegally derived from the coffers of the Abia State Government.The commission also said that the accused retained, in different bank accounts, about N2.5 billion belonging to the Abia Government.The EFCC alleged that that the accused diverted about N3.2 billion from the coffers of Abia Government.The offences contravenes the provisions of sections 15(6), 16, and 21 of the Money Laundering (Prohibition) Act, 2005.It also contravenes the provisions of the Money Laundering Act of 1995 as amended by the amendment Act No.9 of 2002 and section 477 of the Criminal Code Act, Laws of the Federation, 1990. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Ekiti State has chided the All Progressives Congress (APC) for its criticisms of President Goodluc... The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Ekiti State has chided the All Progressives Congress (APC) for its criticisms of President Goodluck Jonathan during his last visit to the state.Jonathan, who commissioned the Ado-Ekiti Flyover last Friday, warned President Muhammadu Buhari not to rig the July 14 governorship poll in favour of his party, the APC.But, the APC slammed Jonathan saying the ex-President lacked the moral justification to warn Buhari not to rig alleging that he provided an enabling environment for the PDP to rig the 2014 poll.The opposition also chiled the former President for describing the Ado-Ekiti Flyover as the best in the country alleging that the project was used to loot the Ekiti treasury. The APC also condemned Jonathans endorsement of the PDP governorship candidate, Prof. Kolapo OlusolaThe Ekiti PDP, in a statement by its Publicity Secretary, Jackson Adebayo, described the APC attack as senseless saying it is only party peopled by demons that would criticise the flyover and other projects executed by Fayose.He said such projects were executed to change the face of the state capital and local government headquarters across the state.He faulted the APC claim that Jonathans endorsement of the flyover means he ran a government that was largely corrupt is a confirmation that the party lacks moral and respect for humanity.Clarifying the actual cost of the project, Adebayo said the cost was below N7 billion as a gainst the N17 billion quoted by the APC.Adebayo said: How can the APC members and leaders in Ekiti appreciate good thing since God has deprived them the knowledge, wisdom and understanding to do good.It is not only ridiculous, but insensitive on the part of the APC leaders to condemn the construction of legacy projects such as the new Governors Office, the flyover, the High court, the Kings Market among others.If they suffer from dementia, the good people of Ekiti do not and can compare and contrast their years of locust with what we have now.Ekiti people still remember vividly the big billboard put at the entrance of Ewis Palace by former Governor Kayode Fayemi then to showcase his proposed new Kings Market. Where is that his market?Similarly, in one of the annual calendars that his inglorious administration printed, he put in the prototype of a flyover there.Did he do it?Similarly, the APC and Fayemis said they would build a new Governors Office, they went as far as scrapping a piece of land near the state Secretariat at hundreds of millions of Naira, but nothing sprung up.The loan Fayemi took for these proposed projects from capital market and commercial banks, ended in the pockets of these gluttons. This is the debt which Fayose administration is paying now.The Fayose administration took step to give Ekiti people airport, but the jittery APC leaders incited the land owners to frustrate theproject.The irony of it all is that, the APC in Ekiti is not committed to developing the state and will always want to frustrate who God has given wisdom to do it. Senator Dino Melaye on Wednesday made a dramatic appearance at the Senate, declaring his intention to cross-carpet to the Senate wing of t... Senator Dino Melaye on Wednesday made a dramatic appearance at the Senate, declaring his intention to cross-carpet to the Senate wing of the chamber. Melaye had been away from the Senate, since over a month, when the Nigerian Police arrested him and he was subsequently admitted at the intensive care unit of the National Hospital, Abuja. Appearing with clutches and neck support to Wednesdays plenary, Melaye said he was no longer comfortable sitting on his seat at the wing of the All Progressive Congress (APC), saying he would cross over to the wing of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The Nigeria Police Force has arrested the Personal Assistant to the Governor of Kwara State on Political Matters (Kwara South) Mr. Alabi O... The Nigeria Police Force has arrested the Personal Assistant to the Governor of Kwara State on Political Matters (Kwara South) Mr. Alabi Olalekan. Reports have it that informed that Olalekan was arrested Tuesday night from his residence in Ilorin. Operatives were said to have immediately taken him to the Force Headquarters in Abuja. A reliable source in the Kwara government confirmed the development to our correspondent on Wednesday. Yes, we understand the police invited him to explain his role as one of the channels of the administrations youth empowerment schemes, said the source. Its not clear if the arrest is connected with the face-off between the Police and the camp of Senate President, Bukola Saraki/Governor Ahmed. On May 17, Ahmed had described as false and misleading, insinuations linking him and Saraki with the suspected cultists arrested in Ilorin, the state capital, and transferred by the Nigeria Police to Abuja. An Abuja-based Muslim cleric, Ustaz Umar Solomon, has urged Nigerians to stop blaming President Muhammadu Buhari or the government for the... An Abuja-based Muslim cleric, Ustaz Umar Solomon, has urged Nigerians to stop blaming President Muhammadu Buhari or the government for the nations problems. Solomon said this on Tuesday in Abuja at the annual Ramadan lecture with the theme: Fighting Poverty And Creation of Wealth in Islam, organised by the Afemai Islamic Movement, AIM. Our problem is not the policy of the government but not seeing where the opportunities are. President Buhari or the government is not the problem but disobedience to Allah and Prophet Muhammad. We are no longer depending on Allah, thus we are not getting things right. However, relying on Allah does not mean staying at home, expecting monies to miraculously land on your table or pockets without working and striving legitimately, Solomon said. He said that the most hit of the mass unemployment are the youths who sometimes attend the Universities to obtain certificates only or for the sake of being a graduate. A Federal High Court sitting in Lagos has ordered President Muhammadu Buhari to probe allegations of padding and stealing of about N481 ... A Federal High Court sitting in Lagos has ordered President Muhammadu Buhari to probe allegations of padding and stealing of about N481 billion from the 2016 budget by some principal officers of the National AssemblyJustice Mohammed Idris who gave the order also instructed the President to direct Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami (SAN), and/or appropriate anti-corruption agencies to immediately commence the prosecution of indicted lawmakers.Justice Idris issued the order in a judgment delivered on Monday in a mandamus suit filed by Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP).The defendants in the suit are the President and Malami.The suit was filed last year after the organisation received credible information from multiple sources that the Department of State Services (DSS) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) have completed investigation into the allegations of padding of the 2016 budget, completed their reports, and indicted some principal officers of the House of Representatives and the Senate.The organisation also claimed to have found out that the accounts of some of the principal officers containing allegedly illicit funds were frozen, and that the case files for the prosecution of those indicted were ready.The suit claims that Unless the principal officers indicted in the alleged padding of the 2016 budget are prosecuted and any stolen public funds recovered, the Federal Government will not be able to stop padding of future budgets. Alleged corruption in the budget process will not just melt away or simply evaporate without addressing the fundamental issue of impunity of perpetrators.Addressing alleged corruption in the budget process by pursuing prosecution of indicted principal officers of the National Assembly will provide an important opportunity for the Federal Government to reignite the fight against corruption and fulfill a cardinal campaign promise, to show that the Federal Government works on behalf of the many, and not the few, as well as jump start economic activities and break the back of the recession.Justice Idris, ordered the President to direct the publication of the report of investigations by security and anti-corruption bodies into the alleged padding of the 2016budget.He held that President Buhari in the exercise of his executive powers; has a duty to ensure compliance with the provisions of Article 22 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, and that the President is expected to use his executive powers for the public good of Nigeria.Article 22 of the African Charter provides that, All peoples shall have the right to their economic, social and cultural development with due regard to their freedom, and that States shall have the duty, individually or collectively, to ensure the exercise of the right to development.Justice Idris also granted an order directing the President to urgently halt alleged attempt by some principal officers of the National Assembly to steal N40 billion of the N100 billion allocated by his government as zonal intervention in the 2017 budget.The court also ordered the President to closely monitor and scrutinize the spending of N131 billion (accrued from increased oil bench mark) allocated for additional non-constituency projects expenditure, to remove the possibility of corruption.It was the contention of the court that SERAP, being a human rights non-governmental organisation has sufficient interest in the way and manner public funds are being utilized in this country. The International Religious Freedom Report for 2017 says the federal government has not held soldiers who were implicated in the killing o... The International Religious Freedom Report for 2017 says the federal government has not held soldiers who were implicated in the killing of over 300 Shiites accountable. The report was released by the US department of states bureau of democracy, human rights and labour. In 2015, soldiers and members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) clashed in Zaria, Kaduna state. The clash led to the death of over 300 members of the IMN and since then Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, their leader, has been in the custody of the Department of State Services (DSS) despite a court order which granted him bail. The report said the order which awarded El-Zakzaky a sum of N25 million as restitution has also not been complied with. Human rights groups continued to report the federal government often failed to prevent, quell, or respond to violence affecting religious groups, particularly in the north eastern and central regions of the country, the report read. In November, Kano State police fired tear gas and bullets, killing three members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria during its annual Ashura procession. The government continued to detain the leader of the IMN, the countrys largest Shia group, and restrict the activities, free movement, and free association of its members. There were no reports of accountability for soldiers implicated in the December 2015 clash between the army and IMN members that, according to a Kaduna State Government report and reports from non-government observers, left at least 348 IMN members and one soldier dead, with IMN members buried in a mass grave. The government stated publicly that Sheikh El-Zakzaky, leader of the IMN and a prominent Shia cleric, would remain in what it said was protective custody pending the appeal of the December 2016 decision of the Federal High Court in Abuja that the government must release him. At years end, El-Zakzaky remained in prison. The court also ruled that the government must provide him with a house and pay him and his wife restitution of N25m ($69,600) by January 15; at years end, the courts order had yet to be followed. It also noted that human rights observers have expressed concern that a presidential investigative panel set up by then Acting President Yemi Osinbajo to check such excesses lack transparency. Chimamanda Adichie, an award-winning author, reportedly suffered instances of depression while growing up and even as an adult. Chimamanda Adichie, an award-winning author, reportedly suffered instances of depression while growing up and even as an adult. Adichies experience was recounted through the narrative of Eghosa Imasuen, a medical doctor who attended one of her workshops. Imasuen said he encountered Adichie online after his mother showed him the picture of a girl in a magazine. The girl was Adichie. The incident was in 2005. He said: So I go online and I read about Chimamanda, the girl in the magazine who got me insulted by my mother. Eventually, I travelled to Lagos and bought her novel Purple Hibiscus. But Imasuen did not get to meet Adichie until two years later when she organised a writing workshop in September 2007 in Lagos. The workshop would last 10 days. Imasuen, from interactions with the literary icon during the workshop, talks about her fears, depression, marriage, and her family in an interview with The New Yorker. NO TO A WRITER HUSBAND Despite Adichies love for writing, she would not tolerate a writer for a husband nor live in a place surrounded by writers, Imasuen said. She thought if she were married to a writer, one day shed wake up and strangle him, he said. She could never live somewhere like New York, where you were tripping over writers every time you turned around, writers in restaurants, writers in the supermarket, writers on the subway. But back then the thought of a roomful of writers discussing craft appealed to her. Imaseun said Adichie thought she would marry someone flambouyantly unfamiliar but the man she ended up marrying, in 2009, was almost comically suitable. Adichie was quoted to have said: One of the perils of a feminist marriage is that the man actually wants to be there. He is so present and he does every damn thing! And the child adores him. I swear to God, sometimes I look at her and say, I carried you for nine months, my breasts went down because of you, my belly is slack because of you, and now Papa comes home and you run off and ignore me. Really? WANTED TO BE A PRIEST Adichie was raised Catholic and loved the ways of the church. But she wanted to be more than just a worshiper, she wanted to be a priest, simply because of the power that comes with it. Nigerian Catholicism is almost feudal, and the priest is God, Adichie was quoted to have said. The priest would sweep in in his long soutane, and you cleared the way because Father was coming. I wanted that! I wanted the power. But it was a beautiful kind of power, because I felt I would instruct people on I had dangerous ideas as a child. BATTLE WITH DEPRESSION I was a popular child who had tons of friends and did well in school, but then I would have moments where I didnt want to see anybody, didnt want to talk to anybody, cried for no reason, felt that I was bad and terrible, isolated myself, she said. Adichie said she feared she would suffer postpartum depression, given how she felt during pregnancy. Her family, she said, does not understand depression because they expect a reason for it. I cant even read. Its a horrible, horrible thing. I cant see my life, Im blind. I feel myself sinkingthats the word I use with my family and friends. Well, actually, I dont talk about it with my family much, as lovely as they are, because they dont really understand depression. They expect a reason, but I dont have a reason, she said. Imosuen said when Adichie is depressed, she sits for hours and watches films about the Holocaust. Her family tries to discourage her from doing thisit seems to them unlikely to be helpfulbut she does it anyway. He further said Adichie is not trying to cure herself of depression. I think Im addicted to a certain kind of nostalgia, Adichie said. I watch these films and I find myself in a state of mourning for all the things that could have been. They just make me cry and cry. I dont know. All I know is that I will continue to watch them. I go on Netflix all the time to check, to see. Imasuen added that Adichie loves originality, freedom and self expression, irrespective of the twists in ones life. North Korea is renewing demands for the U.S. and South Korea to cancel military exercises scheduled for August of this year and for Seoul to repatriate a group of women who defected from China in 2016. The aim seems to be to improve its negotiating position in high-level talks on Friday with demands that it knows are unacceptable to Seoul. North Korea abruptly canceled the high-level talks initially scheduled for May 16, citing the then ongoing Max Thunder joint aerial drills, and demanded the return of the women, who it claims were abducted by South Korea's National Intelligence Service. President Mon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during their second summit last weekend agreed to reschedule the talks, but the latest rumblings from the North suggest nothing will be achieved. Some government officials here fear that North Korea could cancel other planned inter-Korean engagements like reunions of families separated by the Korean War. The North's official Rodong Sinmun daily on Tuesday slammed announcements by South Korean and U.S. military officials that the August joint military drills will not be scaled down. "If the U.S. sincerely wishes to hold talks, it must refrain from threatening the other side by force and intimidation," the daily said, warning that "everything will return to the original state" if the U.S. brings nuclear-powered armaments to the drills. One former Unification Ministry official said, "There's a worry that North Korea could use these issues as an excuse not to resume the family reunions, which the leaders of the two Koreas agreed to pursue without preconditions." The August drills coincide with the tentative schedule for the reunions. The Special Assistant to the Ekiti State Governor on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, has told the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, to steer clear of his boss.Olayinka advised Shehu not to drag Governor Ayodele Fayose into President Muhammadu Buharis messy fight with former President Olusegun Obasanjo.He said, These people should rather fight their battle alone because when they were going to Obasanjos house to prostrate for him to get his support, they didnt remember that he was a despot and that he spent $16bn on power.Olayinka challenged Buhari to go ahead and arrest Obasanjo, since he had challenged them to probe him.What are they waiting for? As far as we are concerned, Obasanjo and Buhari are allies in the comity of dictators and treasury looters. It was under Obasanjo that Buhari served as the Minister of Petroleum and the NNPC chairman in 1977 and N2.8bn oil money went missing from the accounts of the NNPC in Midlands Bank, United Kingdom. N2.8bn as of that time is like $2.8bn (over N1tr) now!It is the height of hypocrisy for Garba Shehu to have said that none of the absurdities recorded under Obasanjo had happened under President Buhari.Garba Shehu should tell Nigerians what this government has done differently. Today, Nigeria under President Buhari is now a country where Nigerians are arrested and detained without trial and orders of the court to release them are brazenly disobeyed. Dino Melaye, senator representing Kogi west, returned to the red chamber on Wednesday after weeks of being away. Dino Melaye, senator representing Kogi west, returned to the red chamber on Wednesday after weeks of being away. In April, Melaye was arrested after presenting himself to the police to answer questions on allegations of arming thugs to commit robbery and kidnapping. Speaking during plenary, Melaye, who was wearing a neck brace, said the police attempted to kill him twice while he was in their custody. He said: Mr President I want to say that the Nigerian police attempted to kill me twice, one through the application of a chemical substance and the second time through injection. They actually came with an injection but God intervened. Having appreciated God for his love and kindness and protection upon my soul, I want to specially acknowledge the Nigerian senate under the capable leadership and irremovable president of the senate. I want to thank you for your love, for your concern, for speaking for me and the course of democracy. I will not also conclude my appreciation without appreciating the indomitable speaker of the house of representatives and indeed the house of representatives. I thank them immensely for showing that an injury to one is an injury to all. The national chairman of PDP and the executive of the PDP in Kogi state I salute you. I thank Nigerians for their support. The battle to salvage this country from financial scavengers and economic cankerworms, to me, is a battle of no retreat, no surrender. We must salvage this country together we dont have any other to call our own. As my voice gets better, it will get louder. I shall not cease to ask questions where necessary. Melaye asked Senate President Bukola Saraki for permission to leave his allotted seat and move to the opposite side of the chamber. Mr President I want to seek your indulgence you will call in the sergeant-at-arms to look for a comfortable seat for me on this side of the divide I am no longer comfortable sitting here, the senator said. Embattled former Abia State Governor, Orji Kalu, on Wednesday told a Federal High Court in Lagos that he has no case to answer as regards the alleged fraud preferred against him by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.Kalu is being prosecuted alongside his company, Slok Nigeria Limited; and a former Director of Finance and Account at the Abia State Government House, Mr. Ude Udeogu.The EFCC, in the charges, alleged that while he was governor of Abia State, Kalu siphoned funds running into over N2.9bn from the states treasury.Kalus lawyer, Awa Kalu (SAN) at the resumed hearing on Wednesday informed Justice Mohammed Idris that he has filed a motion for no case submission on behalf of his client, stating that the ex-governor has no case to answer with regard to the alleged fraud.A motion for no case submission was filed on behalf of the first defendant on May 28 and it has been served on the prosecution, Kalu said.The other defence counsel, Solo Akuma (SAN) and K. C. Nwofo (SAN) also informed the court that they had filed no case submissions on behalf of the other defendants.Earlier, EFCCs counsel, Adebisi Adeniyi, had drawn the courts attention to an amended charge filed by the anti-graft agency before the commencement of proceedings.We did inform the court at the last adjourned date that we want to file an amended charge. We have filed the amended charge this morning. We were also served with the defendants motion for no case submissions, Adeniyi said.In response, defence lawyers told the court that the defendants had not been served with any amended charge by the prosecution.Akuma, however, drew the courts attention to the provisions of Section 216 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, which, he argued, does not allow the prosecution to amend a charge without leave of court.He said that the prosecution ought to have applied by way of motion on notice for amendment, which would afford the defence an opportunity to be heard before the court exercises its discretion for or against the application.When the prosecution opted to serve the charge on defence counsel in court, Kalu objected to service on the grounds that the charge ought to be served personally on the accused and not on his counsel.In a bench ruling, Justice Idris directed the service of the amended charge on the defendants inside the court.The defence lawyers, however, sought for an adjournment to enable them to study the amended charge.Justice Idris adjourned till June 13 for further hearing.Kalu was accused of diverting state funds into the account of Slok Nigeria Limited, a company the EFCC claimed was owned by Kalu and his family members. The senate has asked Attahiru Jega, former chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to name national assembly mem... The senate has asked Attahiru Jega, former chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to name national assembly members demanding bribes. On Tuesday, Jega said the nations lawmakers are notorious for demanding bribes with impunity. He made the remark at a lecture to mark Democracy Day in Abuja. Drawing the attention of the lawmakers to the statement credited to Jega, Isah Misau, senator representing Bauchi central, said his privilege has been breached by the allegation. He said it would be in order to name the lawmakers who are involved as it would help the governments anti-corruption war. I find it difficult to explain to them and I feel that not only Professor Jega but anybody that would make statements concerning the credibility of this senate and the chairmen, the senator said. I think you should be bold enough to mention the committee chairmen especially when it is about fighting corruption in Nigeria. If we really want to fight corruption and want to help the government, he would not be making such statements without mentioning the committee chairmen and those who gave him that sort of information. I felt embarrassed. We need the Professor to throw more light on what he made. On his part, Senate President Bukola Saraki said he was embarrassed by Jegas comment. All of us are committed to the fight against corruption. But I believe it doesnt help the fight against corruption, it is a slight to the integrity of some of us, where such a statement is made. If he has those kinds of evidence, he should bring it forward, Saraki said. Because to say that is to suggest that every member of the national assembly is part of this. I think the professor should come out and mention these kinds of members he is aware of. The Sit-at-home order issued by the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB on its members Wednesday flopped in Ebonyi State as citizens of the state were seen going about their normal businesses without harassment and intimidation.Recall that Governor David Umahi of Ebonyi State had during his May 29th Democracy celebration warned that any trader that closes his shop in line with the directive of IPOB would forfeit it foreverWhen Vanguard visited the Abakaliki Main market, meat market and Kpirikpiri markets within the metropolis around 9am, they were all opened business transaction as a joint patrol of major securityagencies with over 20 vehicles were seen patrolling the streets of the city to forestall any breakdown of law and order.Speaking with newsmen in Abakaliki, the Senior Special Assistant to Governor David Umahi on Internal Security, Hon. Kenneth UgbalaI have gone round the two major businesses area in the state. I visited the banks, Abakpa main market, the parks where commuters do their businesses and am happy that in Ebonyi state we have full compliance to the directive of government even in the rural communities or areas; we dont have any challenge at all.The little little cases that cropped in had been resolved in the rural areas; we want to thank God; we want to advise those championing the cause of IPOB or MASSOB to follow the normal process that will bein line with the law and we had always said that in Ebonyi State here, we had been economically disadvantaged.We cannot leave our productive periods to engage in nothing because we have suffered criminal marginalization from the states we were carved out from and we want to meet up and we cannot sit at home when we are supposed to be working. The oil is drying up. We have to work; go to farm and do our business transactions to make sure we keep the state moving; we want to thank Ebonyians for the full compliance to the directive of the Governor. I think today has been awesome and we thank God for it.However, the major transport companies like Peace Mass and Ebotrans as at the time of this report were not loading to Aba, Onitsha and Port Harcourt where they felt people would obey the sit at home order of IPOB.The major streets like Water Walks, Ogoja road and Gunning road were busy and had heavy vehicular traffic like any other day.Women traders at depot of kpirikpiri market, Abakaliki in EboyinThe Nigeria Police Force, Ebonyi Command in Abakaliki urged residents of Abakaliki to ignore the sit at home order by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) describing the order as unlawful.The Commands Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), Mrs Lovett Odah told Vanguard that adequate security preparations had been put in place to secure lives and property of every citizen.She urged residents of Abakaliki and every citizen of Ebonyi to go about their lawful and legitimate business noting that the law would deal with anybody or group who tried to molest them.The police authorities wish to urge the people of Ebonyi and Abakaliki residents in particular to ignore the unlawful order from an unlawful organization. I want to remind members of the publicincluding the press that IPOB remains proscribed, it is an illegal organization and they can never give order in Nigeria.The Ebonyi Police Command under the Commissioner of Police, Mr Titus Sumba-Lamorde wants to assure residents of its readiness to deal with anybody or group who wants to foment crisis by forcing innocent law-abiding citizens to comply with the unlawful order. The police wish to remind those out there that want to commit crime to relocate out of the state because there is no room for them and that the eagle eyes of the Police will catch up with them.She said that any member or members of IPOB caught forcing innocent Nigerians to obey the unlawful order would face immediate prosecution.Meanwhile, there was zero compliance by Abakaliki residents to the sit-at-home as government offices, shops, private and public schools, banks as well as commercial activities within the Abakaliki metropolis remained opened for businesses and operation.Two shop owners at the popular Abakpa Main Market in Abakaliki, Messrs Lawrence Obiekwena and Magnus Onwe in separate interviews told Vanguard that they defied the order because the Market officials said that the market would not be closed for business.They maintained that people should not be forced or intimidated to observe the sit at home order.Vanguard reports that Police and other security agencies are on surveillance to forestall possible security breaches in the State. Senator Dino Melaye has defected from the ruling party, APC to the opposition party, PDP. Senator Dino Melaye has defected from the ruling party, APC to the opposition party, PDP. Welcoming him to PDP, fellow Senator Ben Murray Brue tweeted, 'Great to have @dino_melaye at the @NGRSenate today and hearty welcome to our great party, @OfficialPDPNig. We will treat you good - no trauma or intimidation whatsoever'. as far as he is concerned, Dino Melaye is still a member of the APC. Saraki said this shortly after Dino announced his defection to the opposition party this morning. Saraki who was laughing after Dino announced his defection, said Senator Melaye remains a member of the ruling party. He added that Melaye will be allowed to temporarily seat among the opposition for now. Dino had asked that his seat be moved to the aisle where members of the opposition usually seat in the chambers. Meanwhile, the senate president, Bukola Saraki has said that A Bucks County, Pennsylvania man has pleaded guilty to attempted murder for the stabbing of a woman in his car outside Caesars Palace in Atlantic City, the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office said. David Legette The woman suffered 19 knife wounds. David Legette, 54, of Bristol Township, Pa. was arrested in July 2017 three weeks after he pulled out a knife and attacked the woman while parked at the casino's parking garage, the office said. Legette activated child locks on his doors so the woman could not escape, but she was able to reach out of a window, open the door from the outside, and throw herself out of the car and into the middle of Atlantic Avenue. The woman's injuries included multiple stab wounds, a partially eviscerated intestine, and a lacerated liver and spleen. After witnesses called the police, the woman was able to identify Legette as her attacker, the prosecutor's office said. Legette is scheduled to be sentenced to 16 years in prison on July 20, as part of a plea agreement, the prosecutor's office said. Gianluca D'Elia may be reached at gdelia@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @gianluca_delia. Find NJ.com on Facebook. When East Brunswick High School gave standardized tests this spring, hundreds of sophomores skipped their English exam with confidence. The teens had previously passed the PARCC English test for ninth-graders and were told that meant they fulfilled a key graduation requirement, Superintendent Victor Valeski said. But in New Jersey's complicated and controversial world of standardized testing, checking off a graduation requirement isn't as simple as it may seem. After an apparent miscommunication over the state's graduation rules, East Brunswick and districts across the state are scrambling to get sophomores to take the PARCC test they skipped, even if means voluntarily coming in after school or over the summer, educators told NJ Advance Media. School officials and education groups said it's not that they didn't understand the state's graduation rules but that the state never clearly explained them. "It was frustrating," Valeski said. "I would disagree that we misinterpreted it." Added Dana Karas, past president of the New Jersey School Counselor Association: "Obviously we don't think it was clear. ... How can so many intelligent individuals be reading a document and no one has seen something?' The Department of Education acknowledged "some confusion and misinterpretation" over the Class of 2020 graduation requirements and said in a statement it will work with districts to make sure all students have a chance to take necessary exams. In a memo to districts, the department said its guidance "could have been improperly interpreted if not read in its entirety." The flap is the latest in the long line of drama surrounding PARCC and new graduation requirements tied to the exams, both of which new Gov. Phil Murphy promised he would eliminate but has yet to officially do so. Even though students can resolve the issue by taking the 10th-grade exam, the confusion among students and school officials exposes a deeper problem, said Steve Baker, spokesman for the state's largest teachers union. "This is evidence that New Jersey's entire assessment system has spun out of control," Baker said. A class of its own It didn't used to be like this. In the past, New Jersey had a single exam high school students took during their junior year to fulfill a decades-old state requirement that teens pass standardized tests in English and math before graduation. If students passed the exam and fulfilled all other academic requirements, they graduated. If they failed, they could do a retake or try an alternative test. Then, four years ago, graduation requirements became complicated after the debut of PARCC. "The rules are so convoluted," said Stan Karp, a director for the Education Law Center. "There has just been lot of confusion from the beginning." New Jersey said all students who graduated by 2019 could meet the graduation requirement by passing PARCC's English exam for either ninth, 10th or 11th grades and PARCC's math exam for either Algebra I, Algebra II or geometry. The state also agreed to allow students to use scores from alternative exams, including the SAT or ACT, if they didn't take or couldn't pass PARCC. With an eye toward the future, the state Board of Education voted to require all students who graduated in 2021 or later to pass the PARCC test in 10th-grade English and Algebra I with no alternatives except a portfolio appeal process. "The policy was originally designed to kind of pave the way for the institutionalization of PARCC as the state exam," Karp said. "They were phasing it in." Left in the middle was the Class of 2020, incoming freshmen at the time, who would get a unique set of rules. The requirements approved by the state board said the Class of 2020 would be able to graduate using the same pathways as the classes of 2017 through 2019, as long as they participated in all possible PARCC exams before turning to the alternative tests. A graphic published by the state Education Department described the Class of 2020's "first pathway" as "take and pass a PARCC test" and listed the ninth-, 10th- or 11th-grade tests as options for English and the Algebra 1 or Algebra II or Geometry tests for math. New Jersey's original guidance to schools on the graduation requirements for the Class of 2020. Based on the chart, districts widely understood that students in the Class of 2020 could meet the graduation requirement by passing any PARCC English exam and any PARCC math exam. Students wouldn't have to worry about taking every single PARCC exam, administrators thought, because as long as they passed one in English and math they wouldn't need to use scores from the alternative tests like the SAT, listed under the "second pathway." "Many districts were basing their understanding of graduation requirements on the chart," said Michael LaSusa, superintendent of the School District of the Chathams. By the time districts realized the graphic was misleading, it was already too late. 'How dare they?' In East Brunswick, more than 350 students passed PARCC's ninth-grade English exam last year and then skipped the 10th-grade test this year, according to the district. In Chatham, about 250 sophomores did the same, LaSusa said. Statewide, it's likely that thousands of students skipped the 10th-grade English exam for the same reason, thinking they met the graduation requirement because that's what the Department of Education chart indicated, Karas said. "Students could either take and pass the ninth-grade (English) PARCC or the 10th grade or the 11th grade, and the words are very clearly in their documentation," Valeski said in defense of his district. "We didn't make this chart up." Yet, in mid-May, new guidance on the state website stunned school officials. A new graphic showed the Class of 2020's "first pathway" to graduation as passing the 10th-grade English test and the Algebra 1 exam. The revised guidance from the state on the Class of 2020 graduation requirements. All other PARCC tests, including ninth-grade English, were now listed among the alternative exams, meaning students wouldn't be able to use their scores to meet the graduation requirement unless they at least tried to pass the 10th-grade English and Algebra 1 exams. The Department of Education called it a clarification. Parents and schools considered it a major change in guidance. "How dare they change it now?" said Lenore Elfand, the parent of an East Brunswick sophomore. "It's very upsetting." East Brunswick reached out to parents who thought their teens already met their graduation requirements to tell them they would need to take the 10th-grade English test. The district scheduled both in-school and after-school hours this week, including allowing students to test in the afternoon on a scheduled half-day. Other districts also rushed to schedule more testing before the end of the year or will test students over the summer or next fall, during a busy junior year packed with SAT exams and Advanced Placement tests. The extra testing won't necessarily cost more money, school officials said, but requires more time planning the logistics and communicating with parents. School officials said they're glad the graduation rules were clarified before the Class of 2020 got even closer to its senior year. "If it was a mistake on our part, I will take responsibility for it," Valeski said, "but based on what I am seeing right now, it does not look like this was." Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Astrid Stawiarz | Getty Images By Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com ABC canceled its "Roseanne" revival on Tuesday after series creator and star Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet. A public outcry followed Barr's now-deleted tweet, which was about Valerie Jarrett, a former senior aide to President Barack Obama. "Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj," Barr had tweeted early Tuesday morning in reply to another tweet that mentioned Jarrett. Though Barr apologized, in the wake of sustained criticism of her comment, ABC decided to completely pull the plug on the popular show. "Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show," said Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment, in a statement on Tuesday. The decision to recognize Barr's transgression was significant, in part because the show had been a ratings success. Dungey previously announced that one in 10 Americans had seen the "Roseanne" revival (the first run of the show wrapped in 1997). Don't Edit I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me-my joke was in bad taste. -- Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) May 29, 2018 "I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans," Barr had tweeted before ABC axed the show, also pledging to quit Twitter. "I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me-my joke was in bad taste." (As of Tuesday afternoon, Barr had not deleted her Twitter account.) Don't Edit I apologize. I am now leaving Twitter. -- Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) May 29, 2018 Don't Edit Roseanne's recent comments about Valerie Jarrett, and so much more, are abhorrent and do not reflect the beliefs of our cast and crew or anyone associated with our show. I am disappointed in her actions to say the least. -- sara gilbert (@THEsaragilbert) May 29, 2018 Barr's co-star, Sara Gilbert, who plays her daughter Darlene on the show, tweeted about Barr's comment before the decision was made, saying she was disappointed in Barr's actions. She went on to say that the show, which routinely draws high ratings, should be considered "separate and apart from the opinions and words of one cast member." Don't Edit This is incredibly sad and difficult for all of us, as we've created a show that we believe in, are proud of, and that audiences love-- one that is separate and apart from the opinions and words of one cast member. -- sara gilbert (@THEsaragilbert) May 29, 2018 Don't Edit Don't Edit I will not be returning to @RoseanneOnABC. -- Wanda Sykes (@iamwandasykes) May 29, 2018 But before ABC made the announcement, Wanda Sykes, who serves as a producer on the show, said she would not be returning. Don't Edit Variety reports that Barr was also dropped by her talent agency, ICM Partners. "What she wrote is antithetical to our core values, both as individuals and as an agency," the agency said in a statement. "Consequently, we have notified her that we will not represent her. Effective immediately, Roseanne Barr is no longer a client." And in the wake of the revival's cancelation, the Wrap reported that Viacom was pulling "Roseanne" reruns from its TV Land, Paramount Network and CMT channels. Don't Edit Just In: @ValerieJarrett reacts to Roseanne's racist tweet about her. pic.twitter.com/6y6Vornhmx -- Yashar Ali [?] (@yashar) May 29, 2018 Later, on MSNBC, Jarrett spoke of making the Roseanne tweet about her "a teaching moment." "I'm fine," she said. "I'm worried about all the people out there who don't have a circle of friends and followers who come right to their defense." Don't Edit More Roseanne tweets Meanwhile, billionaire investor George Soros, another target of Barr's tweets, entered the Twitter trends after Chelsea Clinton replied to a tweet from Barr that sought to link her husband with Soros. In replying to Clinton, Barr also repeated a false claim about Soros, a Hungarian Jew whose family had to conceal its identity during World War II. Barr's tweet, which accused Soros, then a child, of being a Nazi, was in turn retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. Don't Edit Good morning Roseanne - my given middle name is Victoria. I imagine George Soros's nephews are lovely people. I'm just not married to one. I am grateful for the important work @OpenSociety does in the world. Have a great day! https://t.co/mXokiTEwN7 -- Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) May 29, 2018 Don't Edit Don't Edit Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you!I Please forgive me! By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea? -- Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) May 29, 2018 Don't Edit ROSEANNE HAS BEEN CANCELLED. Why? Because the people spoke up. Why? Because we've seen enough to that racist tweets turn into more-and enough is enough. Keep standing up against hate, bigotry, racism and wrong. Keep telling the truth! https://t.co/lIPnbLVHP7 -- Brittany Packnett (@MsPackyetti) May 29, 2018 Social reaction Hollywood talents, reporters, TV writers and those following along on Twitter sounded off on Barr's tweets and ABC's decision on Tuesday afternoon. Don't Edit I'll never get tired of press releases saying "we have decided to cut ties with this person for being exactly the hateful scumbag we knew they were when we hired them". -- Anil Dash (@anildash) May 29, 2018 Don't Edit Oftentimes these days, decency in discourse is talked about but never followed. This is a rare -- and shocking -- victory for decorum. https://t.co/cisSbMvFkY -- Matt Viser (@mviser) May 29, 2018 Don't Edit My mind is honestly blown. That took real guts and integrity. -- Emily Nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) May 29, 2018 Don't Edit Don't Edit Shonda Rhimes, creator of hit ABC shows "Scandal" and "Grey's Anatomy," tweeted that she was pleased with the decision and thanked Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment, but issued a reminder that the show's cancelation would result in the loss of many jobs. As the Hollywood Reporter notes, the "Roseanne" revival emerged from its debut season as the No. 1 show in scripted television. Work was even set to begin on a second season. Don't Edit The terrible part is all of the talented innocent people who worked on that show now suffer because of this. #notjustice -- shonda rhimes (@shondarhimes) May 29, 2018 Don't Edit But honestly she got what she deserved. As I tell my 4 year old, one makes a choice with one's actions. Roseanne made a choice. A racist one. ABC made a choice. A human one. -- shonda rhimes (@shondarhimes) May 29, 2018 Don't Edit For the record, this is Channing Dungey. Sitting on top of your world like a Queen in full judgement of your garbage and taking it out. #Roseanne pic.twitter.com/GxEP2B61uq -- Ava DuVernay (@ava) May 29, 2018 Director Ava DuVernay also praised Dungey for her role in canceling the show. Don't Edit Thank you Channing Dungey!https://t.co/VIlKTF9y7Z -- Viola Davis (@violadavis) May 29, 2018 So did actress Viola Davis, the star of the ABC series "How to Get Away With Murder," which is produced by Rhimes. Don't Edit Don't Edit Roseanne Barr, 2018: I apologize for comparing Valerie Jarrett, a black woman, to an ape. I should have known better. Forgive me--my joke was in bad taste Roseanne Barr, 2013: I apologize for comparing Susan Rice, a black woman, to an ape. I should have known be pic.twitter.com/P10YtYH9Sc -- Jeff Yang (@originalspin) May 29, 2018 There was also a reminder that this is far from the first time that Barr has posted racist, inflammatory tweets, and that another comment she made in 2013 closely echoed the one she made about Jarrett. Don't Edit Watching Roseanne disappear like... pic.twitter.com/ec7uB2SNIM -- Kal Penn (@kalpenn) May 29, 2018 And then there was this from actor Kal Penn, a Montclair native who worked alongside Jarrett in the Obama administration as associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. Don't Edit Trying to imagine ABC execs meeting with Roseanne, hearing her raving about like pizzagate and George Soros, and thinking it was a good idea to give her a show -- Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) May 29, 2018 Don't Edit Thanks, @ABCNetwork for putting morals ahead of money, as @CNN just put it. I'm sad as I loved the show & have always been a fan of @therealroseanne -- but WOW -- michael P coleman (@ColemanMichaelP) May 29, 2018 Don't Edit More social media Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook. Don't Edit JERSEY CITY -- Jurors have begun deliberating in the trial of a West New York man charged with the 2016 manslaughter of a man who died after plummeting down a flight of stairs on Christmas Day. Wilmer G. Ruiz-Martinez, 34, of Bergenline Avenue, faces up to 10 years in prison for the death of Leny Antonio Lainez-Hernandez, 39, who died two days after the incident. Ruiz-Martinez is accused of dragging the victim down a flight of stairs inside a Hudson Avenue building where a Christmas party was being held. He was initially charged with aggravated assault, but was indicted on the charge of manslaughter after Lainez-Hernandez died at a hospital. During the trial, a forensic pathologist testified that Hernandez suffered a large fracture across the back of his skull. Meanwhile, security video from outside the building shows two men plunging down a flight of stairs and out the building. Video from inside the building shows the men facing each other and interacting before the fall. The criminal complaint says Ruiz-Martinez admitted pulling Lainez-Hernandez down the stairs. It was said in court today that he also told investigators he "had to do this. What if he had thrown me down the stairs?" The defense, which argued that self-defense led to Hernandez's death, presented testimony by a forensic pathologist who said Hernandez's blood alcohol level was very high at the time of the incident as a result of drinking about 15 beers. He said Hernandez's intoxication was a factor in his death and made the likelihood of falling greater. Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor David Feldman showed still images of the security video while cross-examining the doctor. He worked to convince jurors that the images show Ruiz-Martinez grabbing Hernandez and throwing him down the steps. Feldman noted that the medical examiner's office determined that Herandez's death was the result of blunt force trauma to the head. The doctor agreed when the prosecutor asked if it was true that "certain brain trauma can be so severe that someone is going to die regardless of how drunk they are." Reckless manslaughter is a second-degree offense and carries a possible sentence of five to 10 years in prison upon conviction. Ruiz-Martinez chose not to testify in his own defense during the trial. The defense's other witness was a woman who also attended the Christmas party in the building where the incident occurred. Closing statements in the trial were heard this morning and the jury was then instructed on points of the law pertinent to their deliberations. Jurors began deliberating shortly before 2 p.m. Ruiz-Martinez is represented by attorney's Chris Orriss and Claude Heffron. Also representing the state is Assistant Prosecutor Jennifer Pinales. Steelmaker POSCO is shoring up investments in lithium-ion batteries that it considerers a new growth engine after suffering punitive U.S. tariffs on steel. POSCO signed a memorandum of understanding with Galaxy Resources, an Australian global lithium company, on Tuesday to buy a salt lake in Argentina to extract lithium. The Sal de Vida brine project, which POSCO is trying to buy for US$280 million, has estimated lithium deposits of 2.5 million tons. The steelmaker hopes to sign the contract in the third quarter of this year. The same day, subsidiary POSCO ESM said it will build an anode material plant with an annual production capacity of 6,000 tons in Gwangyang, South Jeolla Province. Lithium-ion batteries for electric cars consist of two electrodes, anode and cathode, separated by a polymer membrane. Anode material can be produced from a composition of lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and aluminum. POSCO will finish the plant by 2019 and increase its annual capacity to 50,000 tons by 2022. If that is combined with the 12,000 tons produced at its plant in Gumi, POSCO ESM's total annual production capacity will reach 62,000 tons, enough to make 1 million batteries. "Annual production capacity at the Gumi plant is set to be increased from 8,000 tons to 12,000 tons, but that still couldn't meet the soaring demand for rechargeable batteries," a company spokesman said. POSCO also wants to build a separate lithium plant with an annual capacity of 30,000 tons by 2020 in Gwangayang. A 20,000 ton-capacity nickel plant will complete the battery complex. With many countries going green, demand for electric vehicles and industrial energy storage systems is soaring. The market of anode material is expected to more than quadruple from 210,000 tons in 2016 to 860,000 tons in 2020. The hiker who died in a fall from a New York cliff overlooking the Delaware River Sunday night has been identified as 24-year-old Bartlomiej Rzemieniecki, of Harrison, authorities in New York said Wednesday. New York State Police said that Rzemieniecki and two friends were hiking in the area of Hancock, New York, and that Rzemieniecki was taking pictures when he fell between 50 and 100 feet. Authorities in Sullivan County received a 911 call at 6:31 p.m. Sunday that the 24-year-old had fallen from Jensen's Ledge. Bartlomiej Rzemieniecki is seen in a Facebook photo at a Baruch College event. A Sullivan County deputy located Rzemieniecki and confirmed he had died in the fall, authorities said. New York State Police, New York State Forest Rangers, Hancock Fire Department, Long Eddy Fire Department and the Beach Lake (Pennsylvania) Fire Department responded, but given the limited light and difficult terrain, officials decided to recover the body Monday morning. New York State Police said that forest rangers stayed with the body through the night. Rzemieniecki's body was extricated at 2:45 p.m. Monday by the state forest rangers and the Hancock Fire Department, New York State Police said. New York State Police Trooper Aga Dembinska said the cause of death was massive head trauma and Rzemieniecki also suffered multiple fractures. According to online profiles, Rzemieniecki last worked for Alpine Motorsports in Irvington, where he was an assistant manager. Rzemieniecki attended Manhattan Borough Community College and Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business, his online profile said. Syed Hussain, a close friend, told The Jersey Journal that Rzemieniecki was also an avid outdoorsman who loved hiking and skiing. "He passed away doing what he loved," Hussain said. "He had just got his degree earlier this year. He was someone you could always lean on when times were tough." The Jersey Journal's Patrick Villanova contributed to this report. A Harrison man died Sunday night after falling from a cliff overlooking the Delaware River while taking photographs, the Associated Press reported. The man, whose name has not been released, was with two friends when he fell near Hancock, New York, in Sullivan County. Authorities said his body was not recovered until Monday because of the difficult terrain prevented rescue crews from getting to the body Sunday night. More information and details were not immediately available from New York State Police. BAYONNE -- An employee of Planet Wings chased a man and his nephew down Broadway with a butcher knife, beat the man and destroyed his cellphone, authorities said. Adrian Ramos-Menendez, 21, of West Fifth Street, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault, unlawful possession of a weapon, simple assault and criminal mischief, authorities said. According to police, the victim, a 32-year-old man, was walking near Planet Wings with his nephew just before 2:30 p.m. when he peered into the restaurant's window to see if a friend was inside, police said. After spotting him, Ramos-Menendez then ran out of the restaurant wielding a butcher knife and began chasing the victim down Broadway, police said. When Ramos-Menendez caught up to the victim, he began punching him in the head and body. Police said he did not use the knife at any point. It is unclear if the two men had a prior relationship or what prompted the altercation. A police spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment. The victim broke free of the assault and flagged down a police officer, but during the altercation the victim's cellphone fell out of his pocket. Police said that Ramos-Menendez took the phone at the scene and while on his way back to the restaurant, he tossed it into the air and it shattered when it hit the ground. After interviewing witnesses at the scene, police arrested Ramos-Menendez in Planet Wings. The victim suffered minor injuries to his face and head, but refused medical attention, police said. A manager for Planet Wings could not immediately be reached, but an employee of the restaurant said it is "unlikely" Ramos-Menendez will be returning for work. A 45-year-old Jersey City man convicted of sexual assault 25 years ago has been arrested on charges he violated the requirements of Megan's Law's supervision for life. William Askew appeared in court on Friday on the charge of failing to verify his address with Jersey City police as of Sept. 7, 2017, according to the criminal complaint. The New Jersey State Police Sex Offender Registry lists Askew as having been convicted of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old acquaintance using force in 1993. The new complaint says a warrant for Askew's arrest charging him with the Megan's Law violation was issued in March. The state moved to detain Askew through the course of his prosecution when he appeared in Criminal Justice Reform Court in Jersey City on Friday via video link from Hudson County jail in Kearny. A detention hearing is scheduled for tomorrow before Superior Court Judge Paul DePascale in the Hudson County Administration Building in Jersey City. EDITOR'S NOTE: Interested in the marijuana business industry? NJ Cannabis Insider is a new premium intelligence briefing that features exclusive weekly content geared toward entrepreneurs, lawyers and realtors. View a sample issue. A bold plan to tie medical marijuana expansion to the legalization of recreational weed could jeopardize both efforts in New Jersey, state legislators say. Multiple sources in the state Legislature have told NJ Advance Media that state Sen. Nicholas Scutari, D-Union, is working on combining the two measures in a political gamble that risks dooming their chances of passage before the Legislature takes its summer break at the end of June. "That would be brilliant, because medical expansion has to happen," said one lawmaker, who asked not to be named due to the sensitive nature of the negotiations. The legislator added that it could slow both medical and recreational plans. State Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, D-Bergen, on Tuesday told NJ Advance Media that there have been discussions about combining the medical marijuana plan, which has broad support, with the much more contentious legal weed bill. Two other sources in the Legislature confirmed such discussions. Gov. Phil Murphy announced a major expansion of New Jersey's medical marijuana program earlier this year. Several health conditions were added to the program and enrollment has gone from around 16,000 to more than 21,000 since Murphy took office. While the governor has been able to take steps to grow the program, he's also looked to the Legislature to codify some of the more ambitious changes, like allowing the state to issue licenses for new businesses to join the state's market. Earlier this month, state Senate Health Committee Chairman Joseph Vitale, D-Middlesex, introduced legislation to significantly increase access to the medical marijuana program by allowing more dispensaries and cultivation centers to open and permitting more medical professionals to refer their patients. Vitale on Wednesday said he was staunchly opposed to consolidating his bill with one legalizing recreational cannabis for adult use. "They should absolutely not be mixing medical marijuana (legislation) with recreational," Vitale said. "Let the chips fall where they may on recreational (cannabis)." Vitale and Scutari are scheduled to confer today to resolve their differences. Scutari did not return text messages seeking comment, and neither the senator nor his staff have returned multiple calls this week. He'd previously said he wasn't planning to merge the bills, though he did say he wanted them considered together. That appears to have changed. Earlier this month, Scutari told NJ Advance Media that he was planning on introducing his legal weed bill by the end of May. That timeline now seems unlikely. State Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, declined to comment on a combined bill, but said he's "hopeful to get recreational and medical marijuana done before the end of June." The Legislature traditionally takes takes its summer break at the end of June, which is the state budget deadline, and lawmakers often tackle tough issues before then. If no bill gets passed, the plan could have to wait a while to be reconsidered. Democratic leaders in the Senate are expected to meet on Thursday, with a full caucus planned for June 7. It's unclear just when New Jerseyans could begin buying marijuana for adult use if a bill is passed, but Murphy clearly hopes it will be soon: He felt confident enough to project some $60 million in recreational marijuana tax revenue in the 2019 fiscal year budget that begins July 1. Murphy didn't comment specifically on the merged bills, but said he's hopeful a deal can be reached. "Gov. Murphy is looking forward to continuing talks with the Legislature on efforts to expand access to medical marijuana and legalize adult-use marijuana," said Murphy's spokesman Dan Bryan. "Although these negotiations have been complex and time-consuming, the governor hopes to reach an agreement on both efforts in the near future." Are you interested in the N.J. cannabis industry? Subscribe here for exclusive insider information from NJ Cannabis Insider. NJ Advance Media staff writers Brent Johnson and Susan K. Livio contributed to this report. Payton Guion may be reached at PGuion@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @PaytonGuion. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. New Jersey's top doctor Tuesday encouraged physicians and medical students to embrace cannabis as another tool to help their patients, despite acknowledging that rigorous scientific research is lacking. During an hour-long special grand rounds presentation that drew more than 100 attendees at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, State Health Commissioner Shereef Elnahal said his goal was to "demystify" medical marijuana because thousands of patients are using it and finding relief. "We want to see more research, better research, but we are not," Elnahal said. As long as marijuana remains a "schedule 1 drug," the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration will view it as among the most dangerous substances with no medical benefit, he said. The limited studies that have occurred in the United States often rely on private funding, and the outcomes are based on a small sample size, he said. But the research is promising, Elhanal said. Cannabis reduces pain, muscle spasms and the incidence of seizures, and promotes appetite and sleep, he said. "I want this to be in physicians' and other providers' heads as a therapeutic option -- not something separate, not sort of in a different category like alternative medicine. This really is reaching a level of relevance and importance to patients," said Elnahal, a physician and former Veterans Administration official. He urged doctors to recommend vaping or to consume non-smokable forms of cannabis, which anecdotally have shown great benefits. Before 7-year-old Jake Honig's death from cancer in January, the boy's parents Mike and Janet from Howell said "medical marijuana oil was the only therapy that allowed for him to be comfortable in the last few months of his life," Elnahal said. "At the end of the day, this is about patients. The Department of Health is pushing this because...many times it is the best therapy you can give them." This presentation was the first in a series to promote New Jersey's medical marijuana program, which has grown from 16,000 patients in December to 22,000 this month, with expansions and changes touted by Gov. Phil Murphy's administration. But in a state will 28,000 registered physicians, only 622 participate -- a problem for patients seeking access to the program. New Jersey Health Commissioner Shereef Elnahal speaks with medical residents, doctors and med school faculty to promote medical cannabis at the Robert Wood Johnson medical school in New Brunswick, NJ. Tuesday,05/29/2018 It was hard to tell whether Elnahal changed minds. The audience, many in scrubs and white coats, listened intently and applauded respectfully. But when it came time for questions, the doubt was obvious. One child psychiatrist said she could understand how cannabis might be recommended for a terminal cancer patient, but not for her patients, who may be diagnosed with depression and post traumatic stress disorder. "We don't have the evidence, for me, to jump on board to do that," the psychiatrist said. Jill Williams, an addiction psychiatrist and medical school professor, said the state needs to be more cautious, especially when involving mental health diagnoses like anxiety. Murphy added that condition to the list of qualifying illnesses in March. "The leading research right on the biology of addiction says all people use substances to take away bad feelings, so they idea they would feel better when they use marijuana is not a surprise," Williams said. "I don't think you can totally interpret that as medicinal. People use alcohol to cope with trauma and depression and other problems." Williams said the state should "come clean" and legalize marijuana for everybody if it's going to be used to treat "human conditions" like anxiety. Gloria Bachman, a professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, asked the health commissioner to include perinatal physicians in any discussions about women of child-bearing age using cannabis. Elnahal said that was a "totally reasonable" request. Laura Methuin, an internal medicine resident, suggested the state drop the slang and street terms, such as "edibles" or even the word "marijuana," itself, to help build acceptance from the medical community. Elnahal called that "a great idea," one that has been suggested by the National Academy of Medicine. Medical ethicists contacted by NJ Advance Media gave Elnahal credit for having the conversation, but urged caution because of the limited research. "If you are not teaching this at medical school, you are not giving an adequate education. It's out there enough and being used from an educational standpoint. It deserves to be talked about," said Barron Lerner, a professor of Medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center. "It shouldn't be used to replace other medications that are efficacious," Lerner said, offering his opinion. "There should be good informed consent before prescribing it." Abraham M. Nussbaum, an associate professor at the University of Colorado's Department of Psychiatry, said physicians should keep an open mind about cannabis, especially for their patients who want to try it. "I don't think physician are obligated ethically to recommend anything to anyone," Nussbaum said. "But physicians are always obligated to be open to where their patients are, and talk in a neutral way. We should keep abreast of scientific knowledge - so patients know the risks and benefits, which are changing monthly." Are you interested in the N.J. cannabis industry? Subscribe here for exclusive insider information from NJ Cannabis Insider. Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. One of the two homeless men killed Saturday in a fire in a boarded up house in New Brunswick has been identified as 30-year-old Alexander Merino-Martinez, police said Wednesday. The second man killed in the fire on Seaman Street just before 10 p.m. has not been identified, police said. Officials said that the house, which had been boarded up with plywood prior to the fire, was fully involved when they arrived to the scene. Both men were found unresponsive on the second floor and pronounced dead at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. The second man is believed to be around 35-years-old, police said. The investigation is ongoing. Caitlyn Stulpin may be reached at cstulpin@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitstulpin. Find NJ.com on Facebook. A 29-year-old patient at a New Jersey hospital attacked an employee and forced another woman to drive him to New York City before she escaped and he was arrested Friday, authorities said. Akeem K. Benson (Edison police) Akeem K. Benson, of the Bronx, New York, was charged with carjacking, aggravated assault and making terroristic threats, Edison police said in a statement on Tuesday. An employee at JFK Medical Center in Edison was in Benson's room on Friday morning watching for what police described as "erratic behavior" when he tossed a cup of lukewarm tea at her, officials said. Benson then allegedly tossed the woman on the floor and punched her. He fled the hospital room at 5:45 a.m. wearing green hospital scrubs and white socks, authorities said. When Benson got outside the hospital, he forced a different woman leaving the facility into her Ford Focus and ordered her to drive him to his mother's home in the Bronx, authorities said. When they arrived in New York, Benson instructed her to stop the vehicle in an industrial neighborhood so he could relieve himself, according to police. As Benson got out and walked behind the car, the woman drove away, police said. New York City police arrested Benson at his home later that morning. Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook. UPDATE: School bus driver accused in fatal crash released from jail The school bus driver accused of causing a crash with a dump truck on Interstate 80 in Morris County earlier this month that left two dead and dozens of others hurt will be back in court for a detention hearing on Wednesday morning. Hudy Muldrow, 77, of Woodland Park, is charged with two counts of death by auto. Hudy Muldrow listens to Judge Stephen Taylor while sitting next to his attorney Matthew Reisig during his first court appearance on Friday, May 25 in Morristown. A judge will decide whether Muldrow should continue to be held in the Morris County jail or be released while he awaits trial. The hearing in Superior Court in Morristown is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. and follows Muldrow's first appearance Friday in which prosecutors outlined the charges against him. Authorities say he missed an exit on Interstate 80 and later attempted to make an illegal U-turn while driving 44 passengers from Paramus to Waterloo Village on Byram on a school trip. The bus was struck from behind by dump truck traveling in the center lane of I-80 in Mount Olive. It was ripped apart and landed on the center median of the highway. The crash killed a student and a teacher from East Brook Middle School in Paramus -- Jennifer Williamson, 51 and and fifth-grader Miranda Vargas, 10. Most of the injured have been released from various hospitals. The bus was one of the three taking children to the restored canal town. Muldrow has received eight speeding tickets over the years and his license has been suspended multiple times -- most due to parking tickets or administrative snafus. Willie Clark, a pastor at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Jersey City told reporters last week that Muldrow is "sad" but doesn't believe he did anything wrong. His son, Hudy Muldrow Jr. has said that his father is a "good driver." Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Police have posted three body camera videos showing the encounter and violent arrest of a woman cited for underage drinking in Wildwood over the Memorial Day weekend. The incident gained global attention over the weekend when a bystander posted video to social media showing an officer punching Emily Weinman in the head during the arrest. Weinman, 20, of Philadelphia, was charged with assaulting officers by kicking and spitting on them during the encounter. The body camera footage released Wednesday afternoon shows an officer as he confronts and argues with Weinman over the discovery of alcoholic iced tea drinks in her possession. She was visiting the beach with her 18-month-old child and her boyfriend. The situation escalates as Weinman refuses to give the officer her last name. "You don't need my last name," she says as she starts to walk away from him. "Alright, that's it. I'm done with you," the officer responds. He asks another officer for handcuffs and Weinman declares, "Don't (expletive) touch me." "You're about to get dropped," the officer responds. When he tries to arrest her, she resists and hurls expletives as they struggle in the sand. The officer punches the women as she resists. On the ground, while being cuffed, she then turns her head toward the arresting officer and spits in his direction before she is taken away to a waiting police vehicle. Weinman's lawyer, Stephen Dicht, said the videos support his prior statements about the arrest. "I don't think it changes anything," Dicht said. "I think it shows the police overreacted and used excessive force." On Tuesday, Wildwood Mayor Ernie Troiano Jr.'s comments alluded to Weinman spiting at the officers before the arrest, provoking them: "She assaults them, she spits at them, she kicks them. At that point, the police officer did what he had to do." On Wednesday, Troiano Jr. softened his tone a bit, calling the incident unfortunate. "It's just a shame that all she had to do was comply," Troiano said. "She probably would have just gotten a citation. Once the officer says 'you're under arrest', he has to continue with that arrest." Wildwood posted three video clips of the incident to YouTube. In the first, the officer indicates he was going to have her pour out the alcohol without issuing any violation. He then turns off the camera. When he decides to arrest her, he turns the camera back on. When she was told she would be arrested, Weinman, "forcibly struck" the officer in the torso, causing the camera to turn off, according to Police Chief Robert Regalbuto. When the officer turns the camera back on, the physical confrontation is underway. Officials have defended the officers' actions in the arrest, but Wildwood and the county prosecutor's office are continuing an investigation of the incident. "From what I see on the video and only on the video, from not even talking to the officers, I think they did a decent job," Regalbuto said. "I think we could have done a better job at trying to explain to her, but it didn't appear Ms. Weinman wanted to hear what we had to say. She tried to tell us it was okay for her to possess alcohol and that doesn't make any sense." The point in the video where the officer says "That's it," before striking Weinman was not an indication that he meant to hurt her, officials said. "It appears to me like he was trying to use a pressure point strike to be able to bend her arm, but the (internal affairs unit) hasn't done the interview yet so we will find out from the officers themselves," Regalbuto said. The officers involved in the arrest are Patrolmen Thomas Cannon, John Hillman and Robert Jordan. All are Class II special law enforcement officers. It's not clear which officer actually punched the woman. None of the officers have a history of using excessive force, Regalbuto said. Wildwood traditionally sees a large influx of young adults for Memorial Day weekend, Regalbuto noted, and a huge 2015 party left the beach "destroyed and trashed." As a result, police added more officers last summer to combat underage drinking. "Last year, we did aggressive patrols and it worked," Regalbuto said. "This year we did it again and we were having the same type of success." A uncensored version of the videos with explicit language can be found here. 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. P&G strives to stay in sync with consumers' changing needs From:ChinaDaily | 2018-05-30 10:09 Editor's Note: This year marks the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening-up. China Daily interviewed top executives of well-known multinational companies for their views on the country's socioeconomic development. Please use three words to describe China's changes in the past 40 years. Unprecedented, leapfrog and prosperity. What are the biggest achievements in China since the introduction of the reform and opening-up policy 40 years ago? The remarkable and sustained high speed of economic growththe economic growth rate of China from 1978 to 2018 was the fastest of any major economy in human history. The dramatic upgrading of people's standard of living, the growth of the middle class as well as the decrease of povertymore than 700 million Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty since 1978. Digitalization and technological advancements across a variety of areas including e-commerce, mobile payments and the sharing economy. How has your company benefited from the reform and opening-up policy? P&G China is fortunate to have had the opportunity to grow together with China. This year, China celebrates 40 years of reform and opening-up. P&G China celebrates its 30th year. Being here in the Chinese mainland for the past 30 yearsthat is the biggest proof of benefiting from China's reform and opening-up. The reform and opening-up policies encourage innovation, and they significantly raised the awareness of the need to protect intellectual property. P&G has built up its innovation capacity in China and has been able to build its brands under an increasingly transparent regulatory environment and strengthened enforcement. These allowed us to offer Chinese consumers quality products and services. P&G began with a joint venture set up in 1988 to provide the best quality products for Chinese consumers. At the onset, we brought our best global technologies to China. As we learned more about Chinese consumer needs, we began adapting our products to meet local needs and preferences. This approach sustained our business for many years, but the rapid growth of the Chinese economy has brought about tremendous changes in the habits of Chinese consumers. We are now designing our products and innovations specifically with the most discerning Chinese consumer in mindinnovating specifically for China. With the success we are seeing in China, we are now moving to the next phase of our journeyexporting the best innovations designed from China to the rest of the world. The reforms and policies allowed P&G to nurture a talented homegrown team in China to develop and sustain its business growth. These talents are not only building P&G business in China, but also supporting other parts of the world. How do you view China's role in the world today? China is clearly on its way to leading the world on many fronts, including economically and technologically. It is already shaping the future of the world in many ways, and will continue to do so. For P&G, China is our most important market internationally. And P&G China is leading our whole company in many ways, including e-commerce, the use of technology in brand-building, our go-to-market and business operations. Could China's experiences and practices be used to solve global problems? Definitely, yes. The lessons from China's experience and practices have brought and will continue to bring positive influence to the world in many aspects. Special mention should be made on the development of e-commerce. China is now the largest, as well as the most advanced e-commerce market. I believe all e-commerce partners in China are showing the world how this can be done. For instance, the country has created the biggest shopping day in the world, Double 11. And along with this, there are physical and digital infrastructures to support this. Chinese talents are among the smartest, most innovative, most entrepreneurial and most diligent in the world. We are privileged to be able to attract these top talents and provide them with interesting and challenging work, global top-tier training and a healthy working environment, and help groom them into world-class business leaders. P&G China businesses are now 98 percent run by Chinese talents. Other than this, P&G China is called "Huangpu Military Academy" by peer companies and in the business world. We are happy to see that many P&G alumni are now also playing leading roles in other companies including Chinese domestic firms. What measures are needed if China wants to deepen reforms? We expect that the Chinese government will continue to offer a fair and transparent market with further opening of its policies. Reinforce the protection of intellectual property and crack down on fake products. Enhance the support of foreign enterprises and involve us further in China's development. Has competition intensified between your company and Chinese companies? We look at competition positively and believe healthy competition is good for consumers. It gives consumers more choice and it helps bring a better quality of life for all. We have the highest respect for our competitors, global and local. Competition reminds us never to lose sight of our purpose of winning consumers' hearts and minds with products and services of superior quality and value. We always begin with the consumers in mind, and strive to be in sync with their growing and changing needs. We stay close to understanding the Chinese consumer needs, articulated and unarticulated, and discovering insights that can turn into product and communications ideas. We are investing more into innovation, which is one of our competitive advantages. We have more than 700 scientists and researchers at our Beijing innovation center focused on innovating for Chinese consumers. What is the most unforgettable experience you have had in China? The most unforgettable experience is how digitization has enabled our everyday lives. For instance, friends and family who have not worked and lived in China are often in awe when I tell them about mobile payments. You really don't need your wallet or credit cards these days. All you need is your mobile phone. Payments can be made via Alipay or WeChat in virtually every kind of store, even in the smaller towns. This is unthinkable for many people in Western countries. Apart from economic development, what progress in other fields have you witnessed in China in the past 40 years? Technology and digitalizationChina has now truly moved to a situation where we are leading the world in this area. For instance, China now has world-leading high-speed railway, aerospace technology and 3-D printing. China is on the forefront of using digitalization to enable better lives in fields such as e-commerce, e-payments and bicycle sharing. I have not seen anything like this. EducationChina is paying more attention to quality-oriented education these years with open policies and advanced concepts that care more about children's all-round development. P&G has witnessed great changes in education in rural areas in China with our 22-year-old Project Hope School program. We have moved from just providing material support to now providing spiritual support for our children and teachers. We have also moved from one-way support to mutual communication, giving our children the right to participate. We will continue to explore and do our best to ensure that children in rural areas are not disadvantaged in terms of quality of education vs their urban counterparts. What will be the country's "calling card" in the coming years? Beautiful China. Beautiful Life. CV Name: Matthew Price Nationality: United Kingdom Career: 2015 onward: President, P&G China 2010-15: Vice-president, Baby Care, Western Europe and India, Middle East and Africa 2005-10: Vice-president, Baby Care, Eastern Europe 2004-05: Vice-president, Baby Care, Balkans 2001-04: General manager, Baby Care, Balkans 1998-2001: Marketing director, Always, Pampers, Central and Eastern Europe 1995-98: Marketing director, Always, Pampers, Greece 1994-95: Marketing manager, Hair Care, UK 1993-94: Brand manager, Hair Care, UK Education: Bachelor's degree in economics from York University, UK Family: Married with twin boys A former sales representative for a major drug manufacturer has admitted to charges she helped fuel the opioid addiction crisis by bribing doctors to prescribe a potent painkiller, authorities said. Michelle Breitenbach, who worked for the pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics, Inc., pleaded guilty Wednesday to a second-degree charge of conspiracy to commit commercial bribery, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice, which brought the charges. Michelle Breitenbach, 38, of Middletown. Breitenbach's guilty plea comes after state authorities filed a civil lawsuit against her former employer, accusing Insys of "evil" practices that pushed doctors to prescribe its painkiller Subsys for conditions it was never intended to treat. The civil case is ongoing. Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said Wednesday that a "primary cause of the devastating opioid epidemic gripping the country has been overprescribing of prescription opioids, driven by the greed of manufacturers." State authorities say the company gave kickbacks to doctors in the form of phony "speaker's fees" that really served as payments for "off-label" prescriptions that gave patients the painkillers for purposes not approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. An NJ Advance Media investigation published last year found many doctors across the state received lucrative payments from drug companies. From 2013 to 2015, doctors in New Jersey were paid at least $1.67 million by pharmaceutical companies marketing various forms of of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, including Insys. Last year, the state Board of Medical Examiners cracked down on doctors with relationships with Insys. In court filings, Breitenbach was quoted as telling one doctor who had allegedly prescribed Subsys to multiple patients to "keep them rolling." As part of a plea deal, Breitenbach, 38, "admitted that the payments made to the doctors as 'speakers' were actually rewards for prescribing more Subsys," the Attorney General's Office said Wednesday. The Middletown resident now faces up to five years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for July 6. Her attorney did not immediately return a message seeking comment. S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook. NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- All 13 New Jersey students in the 91st Scripps National Spelling Bee advanced Tuesday after correctly spelling their words in the first round. They will return to the stage on Wednesday, where any misspelling means a disqualification. Even if they again don't miss a word, they may not reach the finals, which are limited to the 50 students who scored the highest on a preliminary vocabulary and spelling tests in addition to spelling both words correctly on stage. Of the 516 students who entered, 452 moved on to the next round. Among those advancing was Christopher Serrao of Whitehouse Station, 12, a sixth grader at Readington Middle School in Whitehouse Station, who knew sciolto, which is used as a direction in music. "I was pretty nervous beforehand," he said afterwards. "You don't know what word you're going to get." Christopher also competed last year while his sister, Danielle, participated in 2016. "It's wonderful but it's also very stressful," said their mother, Matilda. "You go through the same emotion over and over again. It's anxiety. It's fun and exciting too." The other New Jersey students who advanced: -- Ishaan Akula of Colts Neck, 11, a sixth grader at Cedar Drive Middle School in Colts Neck, another returnee, advanced with coronary, relating to the heart. -- Returnee Alexandria Ciurlino of Egg Harbor Township, 14, an eighth grader at St. Vincent de Paul Regional School in Mays Landing, correctly spelled flokati, a handwoven Greek woolen rug. -- Nupur Karnik of River Vale, 13, a seventh grader at Holdrum Middle School in River Vale, hit with Zanzibar, an East African island. -- Sky Lewit of Weehawken, 11, a sixth grader at Theodore Roosevelt School in Weehawken, knew how to spell darnel, a ryegrass. -- Aashi Mishra of Watchung, 13, a seventh grader at Valley View School in Watchung, got laloplegia, a paralysis of the muscles involved in speech, correct. -- Navneeth Murali of Edison, 12, a sixth grader at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Edison, was right in spelling osphresis, having to do with the sense of smell. -- Sania Naik of Jersey City, 13, winner of the 59th annual Jersey Journal-Hudson County Spelling Bee. and an eighth grader at Academy 1 Middle School in Jersey City, hit with archimime, a Roman performer. Her oldest sister, Nisha, competed in the national bee in 2006. -- Tai Nakamura of Emerson, 12, a sixth grader at Patrick M. Villano Elementary School in Emerson, correctly spelled Barmecidal, the illusion of abundance. -- Tanay Nandan of Short Hills, 11, a fifth grader at Washington School in Millburn who also competed in 2017, advanced with theomachy, a battle among gods. -- Shruthika Padhy of Cherry Hill, 12, a seventh grader at Rosa International Middle School in Cherry Hill, correctly spelled Midlothian, an area of Scotland. She made it into the finals a year ago. -- Sharvani Vadlamani, of Dayton, 12, a seventh grader at Crossroads South Middle School in Monmouth Junction, knew how to spell synonymicon, a lexicon of synonyms. -- Zoe Wang of Warren, 13, an eighth grader at Warren Middle School, spelled enfleurage, a process of extracting perfume, correctly. Shruthika Padhy #Speller290 makes her 3rd appearance at this year's Bee. She tied for 7th last year and doled out this advice for aspiring spellers: study the newspaper. Pick out your favorite section and read it every day. #spellingbee Scripps National Spelling Bee (@ScrippsBee) May 29, 2018 The field was much larger with 516 spellers, compared with 291 a year earlier. A new policy allowed school champions who did not win regional bees to pay a fee and join the national competition. The winner receives $42,500 in cash prizes, a trophy, reference libraries from Merriam-Webster and Encyclopaedia Britannica, and trips to New York City to appear on "Live with Kelly and Ryan" and to Hollywood to appear on "Jimmy Kimmel Live." The finals will be broadcast Thursday morning on ESPN2 and then in primetime on ESPN. Two New Jersey students have taken home the grand prize. Katharine Close of Spring Lake, 13, came in first in 2006 after correctly spelling ursprache, a language reconstructed from later languages; and Jonathan Knisely of Mullica Hill, 12, correctly spelled shalloon, tightly woven wool usually used for linings of clothing, to win in 1971. Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. A New Jersey couple admitted Tuesday to stealing more than $1.4 million from Hurricane Sandy victims in a contracting fraud scheme so they could spend the cash on luxury items and gambling, authorities said. Jeffrey Colmyer and Tiffany Cimino admitted stealing more than $1.4 million from Hurricane Sandy victims through two contracting firms. Jeffrey Colmyer, 42, and Tiffany Cimino, 34, of Little Egg Harbor in Ocean County, both admitted to theft charges. Colmyer also pleaded guilty to money laundering. Colmyer is expected to be sentenced in September to seven years in state prison, while the plea deal calls for Cimino to receive probation. Colmyer gambled hundreds of thousands of dollars at seven Atlantic City casinos with the stolen cash, authorities said. The couple also bought at $17,000 diamond ring, authorities said. The couple operated the fraud scheme through Rayne Construction Management Servics and Colmyer & Sons, and targeted more than 20 Hurricane Sandy victims who paid for reconstruction, home elevations or repairs that were not started or completed. Some of the stolen funds came from government relief programs. "Colmyer and Cimino heartlessly preyed on Sandy victims whose homes had been destroyed, stealing the relief funds that were the lifeline these victims needed to rebuild in the aftermath of the historic storm," New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in a statement. "By sending Colmyer to prison, we deliver a strong deterrent message that anyone willing to sink so low as to steal disaster relief money from victims will face a stern reckoning." The plea deal also calls for the couple to pay $1.45 million in restitution and Colmyer also owes $56,472 in back taxes, authorities said. They were arrested in October 2015. President Trump is now threatening to impose a 25-percent tariff on automobile import to pressure Canada and Mexico into making concessions in the NAFTA talks, claiming the imports may threaten our national security. Which, of course, is ridiculous. The imports do not cripple our ability to produce weapons of war. Our military is the best-equipped in the world, and we export more weapons than any other country, by far. Does Trump think that those nasty Canadians are going to hide plastic explosives under the hood? No, this is a pretext, which is a polite way of saying it's a lie. The national security clause in trade agreements is designed to allow countries to break trade agreements that genuinely put their security at risk. Trump is using it cynically, as leverage to win commercial concessions from Canada and Mexico in the NAFTA talks. No doubt, many Trump supporters will embrace this latest rule-breaking, as will many in the labor movement who are hostile to NAFTA. But tactics matter. NAFTA has its own rules for resolving disputes and is part of a larger web of treaties that operate by rules established after World War II, under American leadership. If the United States breaks those rules by making phony claims about national security, then why would other nations not do the same? Trade is only the start of it. Under Trump's leadership, respect for the United States across the globe has plummeted, breaking the records set after the invasion of Iraq during George W. Bush's presidency, according to Gallup. In Western Europe, allied leaders make common cause with Trump at their own peril, given how reviled he is among their own voters. In Germany, 87 percent of voters have "no confidence" that Trump will do the right thing in world affairs, according to the respected Pew poll. In France, the number is 86, and in England, 75. Always, it seems, Trump wants to go it alone by charging in the wrong direction. We saw that when he withdrew from the Paris climate accord and offered nothing in its place, an embrace of scientific ignorance that ensures an even deeper environmental crisis in coming decades. The Pentagon now regards climate change as a security threat. We saw it more recently when Trump broke the Iran nuclear deal by withdrawing from it and re-imposing sanctions, even as his own Secretary of Defense acknowledged that Tehran was abiding by all its terms. We were the rogue notion in that episode; not Iran. All this damages our national interests by making it harder to rally other nations to our side. Suppose North Korea refuses to give up all its nuclear arms but does agree to stop nuclear tests and to limit its deployment of ballistic missiles. Suppose the United States rejects that and urges other nations to keep sanctions in place. Does our low standing in the world help or hurt? Another example: Trump announced Tuesday that he will impose tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports after all. Put aside the bizarre mixed signals that this divided administration has sent. That's an issue for another day. For now, ask yourself this: Wouldn't sanctions against China be more effective if our allies were imposing them at the same time? Most of Europe shares our concern over China's unfair trade practices, but even there, Trump goes it alone. That's the ugly truth behind the slogan, "America First." It is a formula for bleeding away American power, for isolating a nation that has always thrived by making common cause with strong allies. Bullies don't have friends. And in the end, they usually lose. More: Tom Moran columns Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or call (973) 836-4909. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook. By Jennifer Rubin It was once unseemly to question the patriotism of political opponents. These days, though, our tribal politics seem based on the noxious idea that those who disagree with us do not love our country. But hurling accusations that one's political views render one unpatriotic or un-American is a far different thing than calling out a politician who disdains our democracy, its institutions and its citizens. To avoid labeling such actions as anti-American or unpatriotic would be akin to giving the politician a pass. So: Is President Trump a patriot? Surely he wraps himself in the flag and touts his love for the military, but neither suggests he has any devotion to American ideals. Insisting that a protester not exercise his First Amendment rights but rather smile and salute the flag shows no love of American ideals. Equating neo-Nazis with anti-Nazi protesters is not patriotic; it is anti-American. Trump epitomizes nationalism (We're No. 1!) but that is quite different from patriotism. George Orwell set out the distinction in his seminal essay on the topic: "A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist - that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating - but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the up-grade and some hated rival is on the down-grade. . . . Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also - since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself -- unshakeably certain of being in the right." He certainly had Trump's form of nationalism pegged: "All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. . . . Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage - torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians - which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side. . . . Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening." By contrast, a patriot shows "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world." Since America is defined by its creed ("All men are . . ."), an American patriot, one would reason, shows devotion to its institutions, principles, historical accomplishments (actual, not imagined, and without ignoring its faults) and people, who are of no single gender, religion, race, political viewpoint, sexual orientation or ethnicity. Trump's illiberal and, yes, un-American brand of nationalism often morphs into sheer narcissism, which has little to do with America at all. His peculiar cult of personality has been on full display. It takes the form of imagining that patriotic sacrifice leads inevitably to support for him personally. He tweeted on Monday: -- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) "Happy Memorial Day! Those who died for our great country would be very happy and proud at how well our country is doing today. Best economy in decades, lowest unemployment numbers for Blacks and Hispanics EVER (& women in 18years), rebuilding our Military and so much more. Nice!" Patriots include many Americans who would abhor Trump and Trumpism, but more importantly their sacrifice has nothing to do with him and should be not invoked for self-congratulation. The Atlantic's David Frum wrote: "Donald Trump cares enormously about national symbols - the flag, the anthem - when he can use them to belittle, humiliate, and exclude." This is not patriotism but rather appropriation of patriotic sacrifice for personal glory. Likewise, his suggestion that parts of our government are "meddling" in our elections would be an abominable lie coming from a candidate. For a president, such an assertion betrays his oath and expresses contempt for our democracy, all made worse by his refusal to identify a hostile foreign power that actually is seeking to undermine those same elections. Elected officials and senior intelligence officials -- I'm looking at FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA director-nominee Gina Haspel here -- have an obligation to denounce such a vile and false allegation. In short, Trump evidences love of self, love of winning and love of patriotic symbols that he can swipe for his own glorification. His viewpoint and habits of mind denote that of a hard-bitten nationalism, but that mind-set contradicts American ideals. It is critical for politicians and citizens of all beliefs to disclaim his outbursts as un-American and anti-patriotic. Jennifer Rubin is a Washington Post columnist, writing from a conservative perspective. Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook. Roseanne Barr finally faced the music after comparing a former advisor to President Obama, who is a black woman, to an ape. Even Fox News called that racist. But another tweet the same day was widely overlooked - her anti-Semitic rant. Slander that was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. Barr accused progressive philanthropist George Soros, who survived the Holocaust as a child, of being "a Nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth." In other words, a 13-year-old Jewish boy was a Nazi. ABC cancels 'Roseanne' after Roseanne Barr's racist tweet: Social media reacts A boy who himself hid out in Hitler-occupied Hungary to escape the gas chambers was a maniacal collaborator in killing Jews and plundering their property. It's an old charge, lobbed at Soros by conspiracy theorists who believe that Jewish people control the world; even the weather. A heinous lie that the son of the President of the United States deemed worthy of sharing with his millions of followers on Twitter this week; along with another of Barr's tweets, accusing Soros of wanting to "overthrow" the United States. Trump Jr. hasn't apologized or deleted his retweets. And our president's only public reaction was to lash out at Disney CEO Bob Iger, who canceled Roseanne's show; not her bigotry, or his son's sharing of it. On Wednesday, Rabbi Clifford Kulwin of Temple B'nai Abraham in Livingston wrote in an email that Roseanne's tweets "reveal her boundless ego and paranoid racism, and also teach the world that, yes, even a Jew can be an anti-Semite!" But Trump Jr's retweet was "frightening," he added - a reminder that, "tempted as we may be to laugh Ms. Barr off, we can't." N.J. pharma company to Roseanne: Racism is not a side effect of Ambien No. Especially not as neo-Nazis are experiencing a "very fine people on both sides" resurgence. Given the uproar over Barr's racism, why so little stir about her anti-Semitism? This was not her first offense on either front. Barr compared another black woman who advised Obama, Susan Rice, to an ape in 2013. She's also long trafficked in unhinged conspiracies, including a tweet about "Jewish mind control." Her claims about Soros are particularly loathsome, given his family history. Soros' life and those of many other Jews were saved by his father, who helped secure them false identity papers, his son Alexander Soros wrote Tuesday in the New York Daily News. "I am alive because of my grandfather's heroism," he noted. Among the other people saved was the Jewish wife of a Ministry of Agriculture official, who in exchange later hid George Soros and passed him off as his Christian godson. As a teen, Soros once accompanied this official when he was sent to inventory the estate of a Jewish family that had fled the country. That's it; all it takes to inspire the crazies, for whom it is not enough to attack Soros' funding of liberal causes. Thanks to Roseanne's wild ravings, this now needs re-stating: "He did not collaborate with the Nazis," Soros' spokesman said this week. "He did not help round up people. He did not confiscate anybody's property. Such false allegations are insulting to the victims of the Holocaust, to all Jewish people, and to anyone who honors the truth." The last category should include, if not Trump Jr., then certainly the U.S. President. But we all know better. And in Donald Trump's defense: How does a man like him denounce a TV star for spreading bigoted, half-baked conspiracy theories? Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook. Before Mike Moran was a small business owner and an e-cigarette evangelist, he was a smoker. He picked up a cigarette as a teen and didn't quit until about six years ago, when he swapped it out for a Kangertech E-vod. Moran, 48, says vaping helped him do what 14 years of sheer effort and smoking cessation drugs couldn't, and he's paying it forward through his Firehouse E-Cigs & Vapors shops. He opened his store on the lot in Cherry Hill where as a teenager he used to buy and smoke cigarettes. "This is where I started smoking. So maybe if I can stop some other folks from smoking, maybe I can earn my wings back," Moran said. But Moran isn't happy with Gov. Phil Murphy these days. Borrowing from a bill that's languished in the state Legislature, Murphy's state budget anticipates raising $59 million from new taxes on e-cigarettes and tobacco products in New Jersey for cash-starved state coffers. That bill combines a 75 percent wholesale tax on e-cigarettes with a rise in the wholesale tax on tobacco products from 30 percent to 68 percent and per-ounce hikes on other tobacco products. Murphy's state Treasury Department clarified last week that its own mix is still in flux. Catherine Brennan, deputy treasurer, said the administration is reviewing how price will affect demand, and aiming at a rate that's competitive with nearby states. "There is discussion that has been ongoing making sure our tax rates are competitive with Pennsylvania," she said. "We want to make sure our rates are competitive, so we haven't finalized what that legislation is going to look like," she said. Moran argued if lawmakers cared about people's health, they wouldn't be after the money at all. "Whether they make it 75 percent or 40 percent or 30 percent, all it does is show they'd rather steal money than have people quit smoking. And to me, that's just insanity," he said. E-cigarette expert and manufacturer Mark Anton predicts these sin taxes will shutter many of the nearly 300 vaping stores across New Jersey and gouge existing customers and tobacco smokers looking to make the switch. "At this tax rate they'll eradicate our industry," he said. "Everyone is telling smokers they need to quit. They quit. They use this product now. But if you tax it at 75 percent, where are they getting their products if the stores close up?," Anton continued, adding it shouldn't be taxed any more than nicotine gum or patches should be. Pennsylvania's 40 percent levy instituted in 2016 devastated the industry, forcing more than 100 stores, more than 20 percent of the state's retail vapor shops, to close within a year, according to the vapor trade group the Vapor Technology Association. Anton said it's clear from the sheer size of the tax hikes being considered that it's meant to be punitive and not just merely out of concern for public health. Murphy, an advocate for legalization, is only pushing a 25 percent excise tax on marijuana, he noted. "Does the governor prefer New Jerseyans get high over quitting cigarettes?" he asked. State Sen. Joseph Vitale, D-Middlesex, who's behind the original bill the administration incorporated into the $37.4 billion budget proposal, says, it's actually designed to do both. "For a long time I have been interested in having some level of tax parity" between vaping and other tobacco products, he said. "It's going to raise revenue but advocates say it also serves as some level of deterrent" to smoking and vaping. Anton said supporters of this tax overlook e-cigarettes' contributions to smoke cessation. Vaporizers and e-cigarettes are billed as the healthier alternatives to tobacco cigarettes, delivering nicotine and your choice of flavors without the nasty carcinogens and lingering smell of combustible cigarettes. Most of the state's shop owners are smoking converts, Anton said. Addicts who were liberated with the help of e-cigarettes and vaporizers and want to help others quit, too. Moran, who owns shops in Cherry Hill and Deptford and a small wholesale distribution company that employ 16 people, is one of the converted. But with the wholesale tax looming, Moran said he's prepared to take his business out of state. "New Jersey is never going to see the revenue. All they're going to do is put stores out of business, make people lose their jobs and perpetuate the cycle of smoking in the state," he said, But detractors say this growing industry isn't just advertising to lifelong smokers, but to teens who've never picked up a cigarette. About 20 percent of adults 18 to 24 years old have tried e-cigarettes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The e-cigarette Juul -- known for flash drive-like shape and such flavors as mango, cool mint and creme brulee -- has come under scrutiny for its popularity with teens. The nicotine in one Juul pod is equal to a pack of cigarettes. "As much as someone can vape to reduce their tobacco use and some people have used it to quit tobacco, the vaping industrial complex is addicting a new generation of children," Vitale said. Moran tries to debunk this sort of gateway theory, saying he'd be better off if he had picked up a flavored vape pen at 14 years old instead of a Marlboro Light. "You're not going to go from vaping a strawberry-flavored vape to smoking a Marlboro Red," he said. "You're not going to go from chewing on fresh fruit to chewing on a garbage can." Karen Blumenfeld, executive director for Global Advisors on Smokefree Policy, also knowns as GASP, praised Murphy's proposed tax increases on both e-cigarettes and tobacco products. History shows that higher taxes lead to fewer smokers, she said. Including e-cigarettes and vaping paraphernalia in the tax package is critical "because of the drastic increase in their popularity," she said. In addition to boosting wholesale sales and use taxes on tobacco products from 30 percent to 68 percent, Vitale's bill includes a $2.70 tax on each cigar and 54 cents on each cigarillo at the wholesaler or distributor level. Pipe and smoking tobacco would be taxed at $4.15 per ounce. Thomas Briant, executive director of the National Association of Tobacco Outlets, which represents 60,000 stores in the U.S., said this, too, will crush retail sales -- and likely without the benefit of persuading many to quit. Steep tax hikes may discourage some adults from buying tobacco products, but "the vast majority" will simply seek them out elsewhere, driving into nearby states or ordering them online at lower prices, he said. NJ Advance Media reporter Susan K. Livio contributed to this report. Samantha Marcus may be reached at smarcus@njadvancemedia.com . Follow her on Twitter @samanthamarcus. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. Amazon Prime members will get benefits at all Whole Foods Market stores in Louisiana starting Wednesday (May 30), as part of a nationwide expansion. Those benefits include added discounts on Whole Foods sale items and exclusive weekly discounts. Whole Foods Market, which Amazon acquired a year ago in a $13.7 billion deal, announced Wednesday that Prime perks would be extended to an additional 121 grocery stores in 12 states, including California, Colorado and Texas. The expansion includes all Whole Foods Market 365 stores in the country. There are seven Whole Foods Market locations in Louisiana -- four in the New Orleans area (including one in Mandeville), one in Baton Rouge, one in Lafayette and one in Shreveport. All will now offer benefits to Prime members. Amazon Prime members pay $12.99 a month for an array of benefits, including expedited shipping on Amazon orders as well as free book downloads and movie downloads at no extra cost. Those benefits started to extend to Whole Foods stores following Amazon's purchase of the grocery chain last June. Amazon has also moved to cut prices on high-demand items like apples and avocados. What exactly are the benefits? In short, discounts on produce and some packaged goods. Specifically, Prime discounts include: Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up An additional 10 percent off hundreds of in-store sale items Prime members can access the benefits by downloading the Whole Foods Market app, signing in with their Amazon account and scanning the QR code provided at the register during checkout. Members can also give the cashier the mobile phone number associated with their Amazon account. Moving forward, Prime member deals will be more prominently featured in Whole Foods stores nationwide, according to a news release. Eventually, Amazon and Whole Foods plan to extend Prime benefits to grocery delivery, though, at this point, that service is only available in select markets. Right now, Prime members in Austin, Dallas, Denver, Sacramento and San Francisco can get free, two-hour delivery on Whole Foods orders of $35 or more. Amazon and Whole Foods intend to continue expanding that service to markets nationwide throughout 2018, according to the release. A 4-year-old girl was fatally wounded Tuesday night (May 29) in a double shooting at an apartment complex in LaPlace, according to the St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff's Office. -- Update: Dad, 4-year-old daughter killed in shooting A male was also wounded in the shooting and has been airlifted to University Medical Center in New Orleans, the Sheriff's Office said late Tuesday. Authorities did not release an age for the male victim or indicate whether he is an adult. St. John the Baptist deputies found both victims about 9 p.m., after responding to calls of shots fired on Joe Parquet Circle. The girl was taken to a hospital in LaPlace, where she was pronounced dead, authorities said. Anyone with information on the shooting is encouraged to call the St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff's Office tip line at 985-359-TIPS or Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111, or submit a tip through the Sheriff's Office website. A New Orleans man convicted of killing a teenager when they both were 16 must return to court to be re-sentenced after an appeals court found the current sentence he is serving is invalid because his defense counsel was not present when it was imposed. Joseph Morgan, 27, was convicted in August 2015 of fatally shooting Gervais "Gee" Nicholas outside the Chat Club, a now-defunct teenage nightclub at Tulane Avenue and South Lopez Street, in 2008. He was sentenced almost two years later to serve a life sentence at hard labor with the benefit of parole. Because he was under 17 at the time of the murder, Criminal District Judge Arthur Hunter had discretion to impose a life sentence with or without parole. An entry in online court records notes Morgan appeared without counsel for sentencing on Feb. 9, 2017. His attorney, Katherine Franks of the Louisiana Appellate Project, appealed the sentence. In an opinion issued earlier this month, a panel of Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judges affirmed Morgan's conviction, but vacated his sentence and remanded the case back to state court for re-sentencing. The judges wrote in their opinion there was no indication Morgan waived his right to counsel. They cited both the Louisiana and U.S. Constitutions as the basis of their ruling, the latter of which states, "Unless a defendant has made a knowing and intelligent waiver of his right to counsel, any sentence imposed in the absence of counsel is invalid and must be set aside." A new sentencing date has not been set. Morgan is currently serving his sentence at Angola. Yunnan police seize 17.58 kg of drugs From:ChinaDaily | 2018-05-28 15:24 KUNMING -- Police have detained two suspected drug traffickers and seized 17.58 kilograms of suspected methamphetamine, said authorities of Tengchong in Southwest China's Yunnan province on Monday. In early May, police received a tip that a man and a woman were planning to transport drugs from Myanmar into China. Police immediately set up an investigation team and dispatched officers to border areas. Two suspects were detained on May 25 near a gas station in Yingjiang County in Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture. Police also seized 17.58 kilograms of suspected methamphetamine. Yunnan, which borders the Golden Triangle, is a major front in China's battle against drug crime. Since the beginning of last year, the province has caught 21,000 suspects and seized about 25.54 tonnes of drugs, local authorities said. A 36-year-old woman who died in the Orleans Justice Center jail on Sunday (May 25) while jail officials say she was detoxing from opioids and alcohol has been identified by the Orleans Parish Coroner's Office as Kentrell Hurst. Hurst's mother said her daughter had five children and "had been through a whole lot" in her life -- a life that ended when Hurst was found unresponsive in her jail cell, two days after court records indicate she was arrested for allegedly stealing $56 worth of items from a Franklin Avenue grocery store. Laverne Phillips said her daughter's struggles included drug addiction, bouts with homelessness, abusive relationships and surviving a 2016 violent attack. Jason Melancon, a spokesman for Dr. Dwight McKenna, the coroner, said on Tuesday the cause and manner of Hursts death were still under investigation. Her death marks the first in-custody death of 2018 for the Orleans Parish Sheriffs Office. Six people died in 2017 while in OPSOs custody or after being taken to a hospital from the jail. The agency continues to be closely scrutinized by federal monitors and lawyers representing inmate-plaintiffs in accordance with a 2013 consent decree aimed at improving conditions at the jail. Blake Arcuri, an attorney for the sheriff's office, issued a statement Monday morning about the death at the jail, saying the woman, now identified as Hurst, was found unresponsive in her cell about 9 p.m. the previous night. Staff "immediately notified EMS" and "began lifesaving procedures," Arcuri said, but to no avail. Arcuri said in the statement that Hurst indicated when she was booked into the jail on Friday that she had been using heroin and alcohol for years and had used the drug the day of her arrest. She was on "detoxification protocol" when she died, Arcuri said, but had refused her medicine dose a little more than two hours before she was found unresponsive. Emily Washington, an attorney with the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Center for Justice, called Hurst's death "avoidable" in a statement on Wednesday. Washington's firm represents incarcerated people at the jail whose lawsuit prompted the federal consent decree. "No one should die in the jail as a result of detox from alcohol or drugs. Providing appropriate care for persons in need of detox treatment is well-known, standard corrections practice. But once again the medical and security staff in the jail have shown indifference to the safety and health of people in their care," Washington said. "Kentrell was visibly sick. The severity of her condition was ignored." OPSO contracts with a private company, Correct Care Solutions, to provide medical services at the jail. Hurst's mother, Laverne Phillips, 69, of Leesville, said her daughter had been on drugs, including heroin, for years and was at times homeless, though she sometimes stayed at the homes of family members in New Orleans. Hurst's address was listed in municipal court documents as in the 1700 block of Marais Street, in the 7th Ward. Jerry Porter, a cousin of Hurst's, said she had been through "difficult times" and was "a better person" than her end-of-life circumstances conveyed. "She was just misunderstood," he said. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Court records show Hurst was in jail at the time of her death after facing three municipal charges: two counts of shoplifting and one count of misdemeanor battery. New Orleans police arrested her Friday, court records say, after she was allegedly caught shoplifting items from a Rouses grocery store in the 6600 block of Franklin Avenue, in the Lake Terrace neighborhood. Hurst also had an outstanding summons for battery and shoplifting stemming from a May 12 incident at 2222 St. Claude Avenue, which is the address of Robert Fresh Market grocery store. Hurst was held in jail over the weekend, Arcuri said, because she was required to appear in New Orleans Municipal Court on Monday (May 29) in connection to the battery charge. One of three siblings, Hurst grew up in New Orleans' 9th Ward and was a "good child," Phillips said. She attended Alfred Lawless High School in the Lower 9th, Phillips said, but became pregnant at 17 and did not finish high school. Phillips said she has raised Hurst's oldest child, now a 20-year-old woman, since the girl was young. Hurst's youngest child is a 7-year-old boy, Phillips said. Among the difficulties Hurst faced, her family said, was losing her father - who also struggled with drug addiction - when Hurst was 12; being displaced in Hurricane Katrina; enduring multiple abusive relationships and more recently surviving being raped. Hurst testified in recent weeks in a rape case, Phillips said. A law enforcement source with knowledge of the case in which Hurst testified confirmed she was the victim of a Nov. 30, 2016, attack by 27-year-old Seandell Kelly. Court records indicate Hurst testified April 24. The following day, a jury found Kelly guilty of second-degree kidnapping in the case but deadlocked on the first-degree rape charge. His attorneys on Wednesday filed a motion seeking a new trial on the rape charge. An April 26 news release from District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's Office states the attack on the victim -- now identified as Hurst -- was captured on video. Kelly dragged the victim into an alley near the 2800 block of Florida Avenue, "where he beat her, threw her to the ground, bit her face and choked her unconscious before raping her," the release says. Ken Daley, a spokesman for Cannizzaro's office, said Wednesday prosecutors plan to retry Kelly on the rape charge. Despite her troubles, Phillips said, Hurst had "a good heart." She said the family often worried about her, and had recently debated getting her help at a drug rehab facility. The family is coping as best as they can with the difficult ending to her daughter's hard life, Phillips said. "I'm trying to get through it," she said. Hurst is the second person who has died in the New Orleans jail while on detox protocol in less than six months. Dennis Edwards, 41, died Dec. 15 in the jail's medical clinic while on detoxification protocol, the sheriff's office said then. Natalie Henderson, a nurse who was fired from her job at the jail in April, claims in a wrongful termination lawsuit that her supervisors at Correct Care Solutions ignored her complaints about the way Edwards' care was handled the morning he died. She said she asked a supervisor to send Edwards to the hospital, but her advice went unheeded. The coroner's office ruled Edwards died of natural causes from hypertensive cardiovascular disease, an autopsy report shows. It was not clear if the coroners office under McKenna, who was sworn in May 7, followed the same protocol in Hursts death his predecessor Dr. Jeffrey Rouse had established for in-custody deaths. Under Rouse, the coroners office agreed to hold off on an autopsy for about 24 hours to allow family members of the deceased to send a doctor to observe the procedure, if the family wanted to send someone. The protocol under Rouse also including inviting representatives from the FBI and sheriffs office to observe the autopsy, if those agencies chose to do so. Phillips said she was not contacted by OPSO or the coroners office after her daughter died and was not aware if anyone in her family had been contacted regarding an autopsy. A 40-year-old man was booked with armed robbery Tuesday (May 29) after authorities say he robbed an Old Metairie yogurt shop at knifepoint, according to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office. David Kaufman of Metairie was identified as a suspect in the Thursday robbery at the TCBY Yogurt in the 700 block of Metairie Road with help from an anonymous tip to Crimestoppers, said Lt. Jason Rivarde, a JPSO spokesman. The tip was submitted the same day authorities released images of the suspected robber taken from surveillance footage of the holdup. Investigators found and interviewed Kaufman, who admitted to robbing the store, Rivarde said. The robbery occurred about 2:30 p.m., when a man wearing what appears to be a white surgical face mask entered the TCBY and "had a brief interaction with the store clerk before brandishing the knife and demanding the clerk surrender money," Rivarde said. The robber then fled with a small amount of cash. NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune staff writer Michelle Hunter contributed to this report. A 21-year-old man is wanted on charges of second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder in connection with a Gentilly shooting that killed a man and injured a teen girl following a Mother's Day (May 13) second-line, New Orleans police said Tuesday. Donnell Brown III is accused of killing 35-year-old Herbert Foster III and injuring the 15-year-old girl, who received a graze wound to her leg, police said. The shooting occurred near the corner of Lafreniere and Duplessis streets, in the area of Gentilly between Dillard University and City Park. The Original Big 7 Social Aid and Pleasure Club's annual Mother's Day second-line had recently passed through the area when gunfire rang out about 5:19 p.m. At the scene, one of the club's members, who declined to give his name, said the parade was ending when he heard gunshots. NOPD officers nearby heard the shooting and found Foster fatally wounded in the middle of the 1400 block of Lafreniere, according to the NOPD. Foster was pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators later placed at least 10 green evidence cones near his body. The teen girl was taken to the hospital by EMS and listed in good condition later that day. Foster, a New Orleans native and father of five, was attending the Mother's Day parade with his eldest son, Herbert Foster IV, relatives said. The 14-year-old boy was standing nearby when his father was shot, according to Darren West, Foster's cousin. Foster had grown to "love the second-line culture" so much that it was hard to get him to do anything else on a Sunday, his younger brother, Kentrell Williams, said. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Two days after the killing, the Original Big 7 Social Aid and Pleasure Club publicly condemned the violence. "This is New Orleans, Louisiana. We have a unique culture, of music and of joyful dancing, that happens nowhere else in the world. We cannot tolerate [gun violence] anymore," Ed Buckner, the club's president, said during a May 15 news conference. During the conference, Buckner announced that the club will hold another 7th Ward Community Festival in August at the site where Foster died, with hopes to "bring some healing" to those affected by violence in New Orleans. During the conference, West said the shooting had "nothing to do with the second-line" and that his cousin's death was the result of a dispute over a woman. The May 13 fatal shooting was not the first time tragedy struck the club's Mother's Day parade. Five years ago, a shooting broke out during the second-line, injuring 19 people, including two children. One of those wounded, 52-year-old New Orleans culture blogger Deborah Cotton, died last year due to her injuries. Brown, the man wanted in this year's Mother's Day shooting, does not appear to have any prior felony convictions in Orleans or Jefferson parishes, court records show. NOPD Homicide Detective Mike Poluikis is in charge of the ongoing investigation and can be reached at 504-658-5300 with any information on Donnell Brown or the shooting. Anonymous tips can be submitted by calling Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111 or toll-free at 877-903-STOP. NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune's Marie Simoneaux contributed to this report. New Orleans police are searching for two men wanted in connection with the armed robbery of a Shell station in Mid-City on Saturday night (May 26). Just before 11 p.m., the two men entered the business at 4701 Canal St. with masks covering the bottom portion of their faces. They pointed a gun at the cashier and demanded the money. One of the men went behind the counter and grabbed the cash register. He then stole the cashier's purse and several packs of cigarettes from the shelf. Both subjects then fled eastbound on North St. Patrick Street, according to police. NOPD described the first man as approximately 5 feet 10 inches tall and wearing a gray and black hoodie and stone washed jeans. Police said the second man was approximately 5 feet 7 inches tall with a black and red coat and stone washed jeans. The armed robbery was one of many violent crimes reported over the holiday weekend. Six shootings, resulting in three deaths, were reported Memorial Day weekend in New Orleans and Jefferson Parish, along with armed robberies, a fatal hit-and-run and a death at the Orleans Justice Center. New Orleans City Councilwoman Cyndi Nguyen joined Shawn "Pepper" Bowen to talk about food memories and food policy on Wednesday (May 30) at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. Bowen was recording her new podcast series, "Green Pepper," which focuses on food issues in New Orleans, and we tagged along to see what it is all about. Bowen, the director of the Culinaria Center for food law, policy and culture at the National Food and Beverage Foundation, asked Nguyen to make a dish that evokes strong memories. Nguyen made traditional egg drop soup at the Rouses Culinary Innovation Center by Jenn-Air inside the SoFAB Museum at 1504 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd. Nguyen has six children, including triplet boys, and also works long hours, so this is a quick and easy weeknight supper she can have on the table in minutes, she said. "With my work, I can only master one dish," Nguyen said, noting her husband cooked dinner the night before because she was running late. Also, because the soup is mild and comforting, even her pickiest little eaters enjoy it. Watching her make it, one can see no recipe is needed. Nguyen brings a pot of stock to a boil, adds a bit more water. She minces fresh ginger and tosses that in. Then, she adds a bit of cornstarch to thicken the stock and soy sauce for flavor. Finally, she beats raw eggs and swirls them in the hot liquid until opaque. She adjusts seasoning and tops the soup with fresh green onion pieces. She said she makes it almost every day. And, she said, she invites the little ones to break the eggs and whisk them, getting them involved in the meal prep. "My kids love it," she said, admitting that she sometimes stops by a Chinese restaurant to pick it up on the way home. "As a working mom, this is something simple to put together when you're running late, coming home late from a meeting ... " she said. Nguyen, who with her parents and five siblings immigrated to the United States from Vietnam in 1975, said the other thing that she loves about the soup is that it is nutritious and so affordable for a big family living on a budget. "I thought it had to be complicated because it came from a restaurant," Bowen admitted as she and Nguyen sampled the hot soup. Below listen to Nguyen, who is a city councilwoman for District E, which covers the Lower 9th Ward and New Orleans East, and Bowen's wide-ranging discussion about access to locally grown food and grocery stores and the need for more reliable public transportation. On June 1, listen to the rest of their conversation on the "Green Pepper" podcast series from Bowen, a lawyer and culinary activist. The podcast is dedicated to food policy, food systems, and the laws surrounding them. It can be found at Natfab.org under "Media" or at pepperbowen.com. Bowen's next guest will be attorney and state Rep. Royce Duplessis, who, in March, won election to House District 93. Cindi Nguyen's Egg Drop Soup Food and restaurant news in your inbox Every Thursday we give you the scoop on NOLA dining. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Serves 4 4 cups chicken broth 3 teaspoons fresh grated ginger, or to taste 1 tablespoon soy sauce, or to taste 2 tablespoons water, plus more as needed 2 tablespoons cornstarch 2 eggs, beaten 3 green onions, chopped Salt, to taste Pepper, to taste In large pot, add broth, ginger and soy sauce. Bring to a boil. Mix water and cornstarch together. Add to the boiling pot and stir. Reduce heat to medium. Slowly pour in beaten egg, whisking in the same direction as you go until eggs are added. Continue whisking in same direction, adding green onions. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Nguyen likes to add the green pepper once the soup has been ladled into a bowl, but it also can be added to the pot. As New Orleans marks its 300th birthday, the city has yet to achieve health equality for all of its residents, according to a new report The Data Center issued Wednesday (May 30). The report says discrimination in the health care system throughout the city's history has had an adverse effect on the longevity and quality of life of its African-American residents. Even today, the report points out that there 25-year difference in life expectancy between people who live in New Orleans ZIP codes 70124 and 70112, neighborhoods only five miles apart, but where residents are 3 percent and 75 percent black, respectively. The report, called "Advancing Health Equity in New Orleans: Building on Positive Change in Health," also offers insight on progress, setbacks, ongoing challenges and recommendations that could also apply to growing populations, such as Hispanic, Vietnamese and LGBT New Orleanians. Healthcare inequities in history The report notes that since the city's founding in 1718, New Orleanians have faced adversities that have directly impacted their health and well-being. Despite being one of the wealthiest and most powerful cities in the U.S. following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, New Orleans was threatened repeatedly by the outbreak of diseases throughout its history. From 1830 to 1850, disease outbreaks killed thousands of residents, including a cholera outbreak that took the lives of 5,000 people in 1832, according to the report. The pattern of public health emergencies shone light on how wealth and privilege historically benefitted only a segment of the city's population. Following the last major outbreak of yellow fever in 1878, an "estimated 40,000 white residents fled the city to the North Shore seeking health clinics and natural springs available to white patrons only," according to the report. Medical specialists at the time attributed the outbreaks to race and criminality. Even greater understanding of public health by 1920 was not enough to dissociate race as a perceived cause of the outbreaks. In 1919, the Louisiana State Board of Health viewed the higher incidence of tuberculosis among black people as a "reflection on their inferior morality, civility, and capabilities as human beings rather than as a result of poor living conditions, poor nutrition and poor education about the spread of disease," according to the report. To address the systemic racism in the health care system in New Orleans, the report said, the Flint-Goodridge Hospital was built in 1931. It grew out of a training program for black nurses serving predominantly African-American patients. The hospital was especially important, according to the report, because it was the only place black nurses could receive professional training and the only private hospital in New Orleans that granted black doctors staff privileges throughout the Jim Crow era. Hospitals were forced to open their doors to black patients by the late 1960s in response to a federal requirement for hospitals to integrate in order to receive Medicaid funds. By the late 1960s, black doctors were allowed to practice in private and state hospitals in Louisiana and medical schools began to integrate. The healthcare landscape for the under and un-insured patient population in New Orleans changed dramatically after the levee failures in 2005 forced the closure of Charity Hospital. The closure left a large gap in services for some of the city's most vulnerable residents. The system has since transformed into a growing network of community-based providers and Federally Qualified Health Centers that have opened to meet those needs. Healthcare inequities today The Data Center's report also delves into some of the factors that have an effect on health access for New Orleans residents today, including education, employment, household wages and the child poverty rate. The report also found that common medical conditions such as asthma, diabetes, and hypertension are higher among black New Orleanians. The data comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although there have been some improvements in overall population health indicators since Hurricane Katrina, infant mortality rates among non-Hispanic black women remain at least two times higher than the rate among non-Hispanic white women. According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, there are approximately seven black infant deaths per 1,000 live births for every one white infant death. "Achieving health equity is beyond the scope of public health and medicine alone, but is essential to a prosperous New Orleans," the report concludes. "Our public health systems can and should be catalysts for change in a range of social determinants that impact health (in addition to catalysts for change within the healthcare system." Click here to read the full report. Maria Clark writes about health, doctors, patients and healthcare in Louisiana for NOLA.com | The Times Picayune and NOLA Mundo. Reach her at mclark@nola.com or 504.258.5306. Or follow her on Twitter at @MariaPClark1. A developer is appealing the St. Tammany Parish Zoning Commission's May 1 denial of controversial rezoning requests to allow for construction of a 272-unit apartment complex along on Strain Road north of Mandeville. Jeff Schoen, who represents the land owners and developer Black Oak Holdings LLC, filed two appeals May 11 with the parish government's Department of Planning - Development on behalf of the developer. The Parish Council is slated to consider the appeals at its June 7 meeting at the parish government complex on Koop Drive north of Mandeville. Overriding the Zoning Commission's decision requires a majority vote of the entire 14-member council. Schoen said Wednesday (May 30) he and the developer were still working out the details of their appeals. "We have not completed our thinking and our plan as it relates to what we're going to ask the council to consider," Schoen said. The commission voted May 1 to deny two separate rezoning requests sought for the Maison Trace project on Strain Road at Louisiana 59. Black Oak Holdings LLC asked the commission to rezone a 14-acre tract from I-2 (Industrial District) to A-7 (Multiple Family Residential), and rezone an abutting three-acre parcel from A-2 (Suburban District) to A-7. Schoen told zoning commissioners Maison Trace would be a $30 million-plus project that would bring central water and sewer services to the area and provide much-needed road improvements to Strain Road and Louisiana 59. A large crowd of residents attended the Zoning Commission's meeting, arguing the project would not be compatible with the surrounding area's rural atmosphere and would worsen drainage and exacerbate the major traffic problems in that area. A Slidell man whose 2016 DWI arrest was dismissed by North Shore prosecutors after questions arose over the validity of the case against him has sued the arresting deputy and St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Randy Smith. Ryan Heyd's suit, filed May 23 in federal court in New Orleans, says his civil rights were violated. It accuses former St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Deputy Ricky Steinert of fabricating the case against him. In his lawsuit, Heyd said Steinert pulled him over on Jan. 16, 2016, and administered field sobriety tests. Heyd said he performed eye and balance tests without "any evidence of intoxication,'' but that Steinert falsely said Heyd did poorly on those tests. Heyd's suit says the language Steinert used in Heyd's arrest report is identical to language Steinert used in the DWI arrest of another person. The lawsuit says a third party videotaped Heyd being administered the tests and that video further establishes that Steinert "fabricated'' the poor test results. Heyd said he was concerned Steinert was fabricating evidence against him so he refused to take a breath test. He was subsequently arrested and charged with second-offense DWI and reckless driving, the suit says. The petition says the charges against Heyd were dismissed on May 26, 2017, "after it was discovered that the defendant, Steinert, fabricated the facts used to justify the initial stop, and the facts used to support his claim that the petitioner had done poorly'' on the tests. St. Tammany top stories in your inbox A weekly guide to the biggest news in St. Tammany. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up The suit also claims Steinert falsified test results in other cases to support arrests. Steinert quit the Sheriff's Office in 2017 after being notified that he was the subject of an internal investigation into allegations that he falsified a DWI arrest report, WWL-TV and The Advocate have reported. Smith told the news outlets he didn't open a criminal investigation into Steinert because he did not believe Steinert had committed a crime. Not long after those news stories appeared, Smith's office sent out a general news release saying that said he and North Shore District Attorney Warren Montgomery "both agree that an independent review of this case by the Office of the Louisiana Attorney General is appropriate in order to put any concerns to rest that the public still may have about this and other cases." A spokesman for Smith said the sheriff would not comment on Heyd's suit, citing the pending litigation. In a news release the Sheriff's Office said the incident in question occurred under the administration of former Sheriff Jack Strain. Heyd's suit says his license was suspended and he was required to undergo three random drug tests and install an interlock device on his vehicle. Because he couldn't afford that device he was unable to drive during the court process, the suit says. As a condition of his bond, his right to travel out of state was curtailed, the suit says. The suit seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages. Police looking into claim officers beat protesting teachers From:ChinaDaily | 2018-05-28 15:38 Police in Lu'an, in East China's Anhui province, are aware of a claim that police officers beat teachers at a protest on Sunday, the city's public security bureau said on Sina Weibo. The bureau said members of the public were welcome to report any evidence the beatings occurred and any police found to have been involved would be "dealt with seriously". On Sunday morning, about 40 teachers from Jin'an and Yu'an districts gathered at the south gate of the city government headquarters to petition the authorities over a salary dispute, the bureau said. Police arrived at the scene to discourage the gathering. Some teachers refused to leave and seriously disrupted public order, it said. After repeated persuasion, the police took some teachers back to the public security bureau in accordance with the law, it said, adding that they were picked up by school officials before 3 pm. The bureau said police will investigate a WeChat article, since deleted, that was headlined "Lu'an teachers beaten by the police due to rights protection" and will announce the result in a timely manner. With the citizens of New Orleans begging for someone -- anyone -- to hold the Sewerage & Water Board accountable for its many and mind-boggling failures, the newly installed City Council stepped up with the first sign that there might finally be light at the end of the drainage pipe. Just three days after being sworn in, the seven council members put the S&WB on notice with a 10-page letter demanding the agency provide accurate and up-to-date quarterly reports on its operations. The letter helpfully pointed out that the Sewerage & Water Board was already required to do so under a law that had been on the books for almost five years but mostly ignored. The letter went on to say that "deficiencies" in previous reports "are indefensible and inexcusable." That sounds harsh only if you haven't experienced the frustrations of the S&WB's erratically dysfunctional billing system or tried to untangle the agency's bureaucratic explanations for whether pump stations were working properly during heavy rainfall. Or maybe you were repulsed by revelations that some Sewerage & Water Board employees were using fake handicap tags to avoid paying for street parking. The letter called the S&WB to account for "terrible customer service, lack of transparency and poor efforts to engage the public," which has led to "severe mistrust." City Councilman Joe Giarrusso, who drafted the original letter with input and approval from all of his fellow council members, said he was encouraged by the initial response from S&WB officials and was expecting full cooperation. But two weeks later, as NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune's Kevin Litten reports, Mayor LaToya Cantrell responded with a "Dear Joe" letter objecting to the City Council's "tone" and "demands." She begins with a suggestion that Giarrusso had not gone through proper channels and that the council needs to stay in its own lane. "Although your letter was not addressed to the Mayor of the City New Orleans," Cantrell says, "I feel it is necessary to reply in my dual capacities as President of the S&WB and as Mayor." If this means Cantrell is going to take ownership of the literal swamp that is the Sewerage & Water Board, then good for her. But if the tone of her own letter means anything, she has already hunkered down to resist real scrutiny of the S&WB operations. "As a former Councilmember," she says with a patronizing air, "I respect and appreciate your appeal for accountability and transparency for the residents of New Orleans. ... I am encouraged by your drive an fueled by your persistence. In fact, as a Councilmember, I lodged the same complaints and harbored the same frustrations over lack of information and transparency." Patting these eager, shiny-faced new council members on the head, Cantrell suggests they may want to pull back and await her wise guidance. "As President of the S&WB," she says, "I am learning even more about the S&WB's delicate operation and aging infrastructure." That's right. In her new position as mayor, Cantrell has finally gotten to the heart of the matter: our water system is old and broken. But she assures Giarrusso that "the S&WB is completely changing the way it communicates information" and will soon have a lot of really cool stuff on its website. "As we hold them to high standards, we must remember that neither the board members nor the S&WB employees are our enemies," Cantrell says. It is incumbent upon us to work with them to benefit the people of our city." So if the City Council would just stop upsetting the Sewerage & Water Board with its unpleasant tone and demands that the law be followed, we can get back to helping the agency regain a positive self-image before we get too deep into hurricane season. "One thing we can all agree on is there are tireless public servants at the S&WB," Cantrell says. "I look forward to working hand-in-hand with the New Orleans City Council and the Board to continue to create change for the people of New Orleans. The way is in our front and we will get there." Maybe that can be the new Sewerage & Water Board slogan. Tim Morris is an opinions columnist at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. He can be reached at tmorris@nola.com. Follow him on Twitter @tmorris504. Up to 150,000 households who otherwise wouldnt qualify including some with six-figure salaries are expected to apply for food stamps as qualifications are relaxed to help in the recovery from Hurricane Ida. Behold, the power of the tweet. In just a few characters, actor and comedian Roseanne Barr succeeded Tuesday (May 29) not only in torpedoing her recently rebooted ABC sitcom -- and, in all likelihood, her career -- but she also got pretty much all of America talking about the same thing at once. The rebooted "Roseanne" was, after all, one of the most successful programs on broadcast TV this past season. Its forthcoming second season was very much shaping up to be the centerpiece of ABC's fall schedule. Yet the Disney-owned network didn't blink in canceling it following a Twitter post in which Barr compared a black former senior Obama adviser to an ape -- and which the network called "abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values." Barr quickly apologized and said she was quitting Twitter. That's probably the best idea she's had in a while. Regardless, there are some things that just can't be taken back -- do not pass "go," do not collect $200. The unfortunate thing is, Barr didn't just shoot herself in the foot when she shot off at the mouth. This time, there's significant collateral damage. The whole cast of "Roseanne" -- riding high just a week ago with the show's buzzy season finale (which is now the series finale) -- are now left scratching their heads and wondering what it all means for them. That includes John Goodman, the longtime Crescent City resident who has served as Barr's on-screen better half in both the original and the rebooted series, and whose performance -- particularly in the show's recent finale -- had some people taking about a possible Emmy nomination for him. So how will the "Roseanne" fallout affect him? Honestly, you never know, but you probably shouldn't worry about John Goodman. He didn't respond Tuesday to a request for comment, but he's widely recognized as one of Hollywood's genuine nice guys -- always accommodating, always professional, always appreciative. He's basically the opposite of a diva. He's also reliably great in whatever roles he takes, whether it's helping to smooth Barr's hard edges in "Roseanne," providing the booming voice of Big Daddy La Bouff in Disney Animation's New Orleans-set "The Princess and the Frog," or performing pitch-perfectly in such Coen brothers' films as "The Big Lebowski," "Raising Arizona" and "O, Brother Where Art Thou?" Long story short: As ugly as this current controversy is, Goodman's association with "Roseanne" shouldn't dramatically affect him from a work standpoint one way or the other -- aside from the fact that he's now got an open spot in his schedule given that "Roseanne" won't be getting a second season after all. Odds are, he'll fill it soon enough. Heck, he's already doing it. Just this month, Goodman was revealed as the voice of a new campaign for ABC News touting the network's "straightforward news," one that seeks to capitalize on his image as honest, trustworthy and likable. He was also recently announced as part of the cast of the BBC and Netflix's forthcoming war-crimes drama "Black Earth Rising." In other words: He's got work. This "Roseanne" dustup doesn't change the perception of him as a top-shelf actor -- and one who has a way of steering clear of controversy. Besides, I've got a feeling Goodman's more worried about his friend Barr -- even as despicable as her words were -- than about his own career at this particular moment in time. So, looking down the road a bit, what about his Emmy chances? If you're being realistic you've got to think they've taken a hit. (Same goes for those of his "Roseanne" co-star Laurie Metcalf, who has been equally important to the rebooted show's success.) After all, does the TV Academy really want to call attention to a show that was yanked off the air for such an uncomfortable reason? Probably not. And who can blame them, really? But that doesn't mean it's out of the realm of possibility. Goodman was nominated for an Emmy seven times previously for "Roseanne" -- yet he never won for the role. This is still a prime opportunity to correct that oversight. (An interesting side note: Though he didn't win for "Roseanne," Goodman does own an Emmy, for a guest spot on the short-lived NBC drama "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" -- which, incidentally, had been canceled by the time the award was handed out. So there's precedent.) If there's a silver lining, it's that the reboot of "Roseanne" undid one of the most unpopular choices made in the original run: It resurrected Goodman's character, who was killed off in the original finale. So we've got Dan back, at least. Or, we did, anyway. And it was fun while it lasted. Along those lines, there's been a certain amount of online chatter -- much of it half-joking, one must assume -- that ABC should bring Goodman's Dan back for his own Roseanne-less sitcom. If there's one thing that you can bank on, it's that Goodman would never do that. "Roseanne" was Roseanne's show. It always was. She had considerable help from her cast and her writers, but hers was the spark of creativity that brought it to life. Goodman would be the first to tell you that he was just along for the ride and darn thankful for it. It's just a shame that the ride ended with Barr driving the whole thing into a brick wall. Mike Scott covers TV and movies for NOLA.com and The Times-Picayune. Reach him at mscott@nola.com. 'Town circles' to promote delta business From:Shine | 2018-05-29 00:29 Shanghaiis planning three town circles on the outskirts of the city and neighboring provinces for integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta region. The town circles will carry out cross-provincial general urban planning and manage local traffic, environment protection and public facilities, the Shanghai Planning, Land and Resources Administration said yesterday. A blueprint for one town circle is ready, and will incorporate Dongping Town in Shanghais Chongming District with Haiyong and Qilong towns in Jiangsu Province. The blueprint has been submitted to Chongming district government and Nantong city government for approval. Authorities are drafting plans for the other two circles, according to the planning administration. One will connect Anting Town in Jiading District and Baihe Town in Qingpu District both in Shanghai with Huaqiao Town in Jiangsu. A third one will see Jinshan Districts Fengjing Town and Songjiang Districts Xinbang Town in Shanghai linked with Jiashan County and Pinghu City in Zhejiang Province. The administration will push forward this year the work to draw up a blueprint for a city cluster around Shanghai with neighboring cities, mainly Jiangsus Suzhou, Wuxi and Nantong and Zhejiangs Jiaxing, Ningbo and Zhoushan. The plan has been spelled out in the citys master plan for 2035. Guidelines will be issued on the terms of regional cooperation on areas such as traffic, ecological environment, infrastructure, waterways and greenbelt, tourism and industry, the administration said. It also plans to issue directives on the promotion of the Yangtze River Economic Belt that is just 20 percent of the national area but contributes nearly half of Chinas economic output. The economic belt, which stretches from Sichuan Province in southwest China to Shanghai, covers Chengdu, Chongqing, Nanchang and Nanjing cities. The Yangtze River Delta is an important junction on the Belt and Road Initiative and one of the most dynamic, open and innovative regions of China, said Ma Chunlei, director of the Shanghai Development and Reform Commission. Ma said Shanghai along with Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui provinces are working on a three-year action plan to promote the integration of the Yangtze Delta Region. A regional cooperation office has been established in Shanghai, with 17 officials from the city and provinces who will draft development strategies. The three-year plan will mainly focus on traffic connectivity, energy sharing, industrial cooperation, high-speed Internet, environmental protection and public services. Over 30 cooperative events have been planned to build a credit system and create industrial clusters jointly, said Ma. The first China International Import Expo will be held in Shanghai in November. Outdoor enthusiasts are invited to celebrate National Trails Day with a free guided hike at the Pop Ash Creek Preserve this Saturday beginning at 8 a.m. A certified master naturalist will lead the 90-minute, 1.5-mile hike at this Conservation 20/20, 300-acre preserve to identify and discuss native plants, wildlife and birds. Cathy Olson, conservation lands manager, said the area consists of flat pinewoods, wet prairies and some ponds. The naturalist will explain the different communities and whatever creatures you happen to encounter and the plants they will see that will hopefully be in bloom, Olson said. Hiker also will have the opportunity to observe recent land management activities, including the removal and treatment of invasive and non-native plant species. Possible wildlife sightings include alligators, herons and the state-listed threatened Florida sandhill crane. We cant order up the wildlife, but you will see birds, which ones we cant predict. You should be able to see several types of woodpeckers, Olson said. There should be some wildflowers in bloom. It just depends on which way you go. Olson said the nature walks during season have more people, but the walks this time of year have also been popular since the weather hasnt yet become too oppressive. She does suggest wearing shoes that can get wet. No registration is required. Suggested items to bring include water, hat, sunscreen and camera. Wear closed-toed shoes appropriate for hiking, especially since the trail is likely to be wet. The hiking path is at-grade and not ADA-accessible. The Pop Ash Creek Preserve is at 9451 Nalle Grade Road in North Fort Myers. For more information, visit www.Conservation2020.org or call 204-1125. French Ambassador Yves Carmona, who came to Nepal in 2015, embarked on a journey to Langtang recently. One thing that is common between the people France and Nepal is that they both love mountains. Both countries are blessed with gorgeous mountain ranges which have a special place in the hearts of not just the local people, but also in that of people around the world. The Himalayas and Nepal have a special relationship with the French. The first-ever 8,000m expedition was carried out by a Frenchman, Maurice Herzog, when his team successfully summited Annapurna I, three years ahead of the Hillary and Norgays expedition to Everest. Herzog then went on to write a best-selling book on his Annapurna expedition called Annapurna Premier 8,000. The book was read by many French children who admired the mountains, and one of them was the Ambassador of France to Nepal, Yves Carmona. The French people have a special place in their heart for the Himalayas, says the Ambassador who in an earlier interview with Onlinekhabar said that the people of France think that the Himalayas are part of their own culture. They believe that the Himalayas are the heritage of humankind, he had said. For that reason, during his time in Nepal, Carmona made it a point to observe the lifestyle of the locals as well as the diverse culture of the country. Recently he visited the Langtang region with a group of French tourists. I had never been to Langtang but had heard a lot about it beautiful landscape, which is why I decided to go there, says Carmona, adding he also wanted to check how the travel agencies were treating their guests. Over the past year, the arrival of French tourists in Nepal has regained momentum after a sharp decline following the deadly earthquake of 2015. The Ambassador was also there to assess the damage caused by the earthquake in the region. The old village of Langtang had been completely destroyed, he adds, continuing, It was terrifying to take that into account when we are on the spot. However, he adds that it was encouraging to see the tenacity of the people and the reconstruction progress happening around the region. Ambassador Carmona trekked all the way to Kanjin Ri, the highest point most trekkers reach on the Langtang Trek. Kyanjin Ri is a small hill by Himalayan standards that sits just to the northeast of Kyanjin Gumba (3830 m). The views were amazing from 4,400 m. You could see fantastic views of the upper Langtang Valley and surrounding peaks and glaciers, he adds. As Carmona trekked with a group of 11 French tourists, he was bound to have a bit of fun. The most memorable part of the trip was the party we had on the last day. We were joined by the Sherpas and the porters who had accompanied us during our trek and we had a feast where we sang and danced and the ambience was very amicable. As his term as Ambassador to Nepal comes to an end soon, he is making the most of this time and is visiting as many places as he can. But he shares that he doesnt have a specific bucket list. Well, in Nepal, one can never have a defined list; actually my list is never ending but if I had to choose, I would love to come back to Nepal and do the Annapurna Circuit Trek and visit the Bardiya National Park. I also want to go Ilam, he is quick to add. When asked if he ever wanted to summit a mountain, in an earlier interview he said, I do not plan to reach the top of the mountain. I would, however, want to reach Base Camp. Photos courtesy: French Embassy Every summer, the Sewing Boutique, at the Hancock Bridge Square Shopping Plaza, invites kids to come for a weeks worth of sewing and fun. That tradition will continue this summer with two kids camps and a Teen Design camp that will take place in June and July. The kids camps will happen June 11 to 15 and from July 16 to 20 from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. for kids ages 8 through 12. The teen camps, for those age 13 through 17, will happen from July 9 through 13 at the same times. The kids camp theme will be Sewing Around the World, and creating unique projects from different countries and cultures. The cost is $250 for the week along with the teen camp. All supplies will be included and some of the top sewing talent in the area will be there to help. The kid will learn techniques and a little history about a certain country every day, said Wendy Fahl, owner of the Sewing Boutique. The teen camp will be about gear and gearwear like backpacks or wallets that they will get to design from scratch. Fahl started the kids camp about 15 years ago and has managed to fill them every year. The teen camp started last year, with two students, both males. Fahl said this is not a play camp, that they really have to put in work., but they will be directed in an area they will be interested in, which could result in them learning a trade. Heather Clough will teach the youth while Jackie Peppi, a graduate at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, will teach the design camp. The kids have a very good time and we include in our fee all the materials and supplies, so parents dont have to scurry around and buy anything. They just have to pack a lunch and bring their own sewing machine, if possible, Fahl said. Its a good way for them to find out what they like. For more information or to sign up, call Fahl at 656-4489. To the editor: Tough on crime and criminals with a passion for keeping us safe and helping victims is one way to describe Amira Fox, chief assistant state attorney for Lee, Collier, Charlotte, Hendry and Glades counties. Another way to describe Amira Fox would be as the most qualified person with a proven track record of results to be the next State Attorney for the 20th Judicial Circuit. Eighty-eight percent is the current conviction rate for the State Attorneys office in Lee County. Most would agree that with the lowest crime rate in the state of Florida and this incredible conviction rate the State Attorneys office is doing a great job. But Amira Fox only strives for better results to keep criminals off the street and protect the citizens of her jurisdiction. She does this by throwing the proverbial book at violent criminals and never shying away from the tough cases, having prosecuted many death penalty cases. She also employs innovative ways to catch violent criminals, like partnering with law enforcement and using RICO to end the string of terror of the Lake Boys gang. Amira has led the State Attorneys office to solve tough issues. The addiction, mental health and Veterans courts tout many stories of success by ripping off the Band-aids of revolving-door incarceration, actually providing resources and options for non-violent offenders to get their lives back on track. I have a dear friend that went through Veterans court and claims it saved their life, and their record. This person has achieved great success in life as a result of these programs. Amira Fox has a proven track record and experience to do this job. She is also the most honest, caring, ethical, no-nonsense, hard working person and the citizens of the 20th Judicial Circuit would be lucky to have her lead us into the next decade. Missi Lastra Cape Coral Home Just In Learn from our success: Oli, Dahal tell world communist leaders Kathmandu, May 30 Chairpersons of Nepal Communist PartyKP Sharma Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahaltold leaders of communist parties from various parts of the world that Nepals communist movement proved a real success and parties from other countries could learn good lessons from it. The party invited leaders of communist parties from China, India, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, South Africa, Venezuela, Australia, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka among other countries for a two-day conference in Kathmandu to mark the 200th birth anniversary of Karl Marx. The two leaders told the inaugural of conference today that Nepal did a new experiment by merging peaceful and armed struggles to fit the countrys needs and social composition, adding they would now lead Nepal towards socialism. While Oli highlighted the partys remarkable presence in federal and provincial parliaments and governments, Dahal told delegates that Nepals experience could be useful for other parties in learning how people could endorse communism and communist parties. The conference would conclude tomorrow. Kathmandu, May 29 Nepals Finance Minister Yubaraj Khatiwada presented the KP Oli governments fiscal budget before Parliament on Tuesday. Khatiwada, who is seen as a technocrat rather than a politician, had hinted since his first day in office that he was in favour of tightening the grip on the market, enforcing fiscal discipline and regulating the unregulated sectors of the economy. The same policies have been reflected in the budget along with Prime Minister KP Olis dream projects that according to him will boost the economy and help Nepal graduate from the LDC status soon. Here are we present to you the FY 2018/19 budget in 6 important announcements the Finance Minister made in his all-important speech: 1.Creating of 500,000 new jobs Finance Minister Khatiwada says the government aims to generate 500,000 new jobs in the upcoming fiscal. Although the figure sounds pretty big, it is simply not enough in the context of Nepal where thousands of young people leave the country every day in search of jobs. 2. Achieving 8 per cent economic growth The government says it wants to achieve 8 per cent economic growth in the next fiscal. The figure is higher than the growth Nepal achieved in the aftermath of the quake and the blockade, which had severely affected growth. During the current fiscal year, the economy is expected to grow by around 5 per cent. The government last year had said growth would hover around 7.2 per cent. 3. Govt hikes taxes on gas guzzling bikes, cars The government has hiked taxes on bikes that have engines bigger than 150 cc and cars 2,000 cc. The government says that these vehicles are luxury items and only drain the countrys foreign reserve. 4. Changes in income tax regime According to Finance Minister Khatiwada, there shall now be five income tax slabs in Nepal. A taxpayer earning less than Rs 350,000 per year shall only pay 1 per cent tax while anyone who earns above Rs 35,000 and below 450,000 will have to pay 10 per cent tax. Previously, the rate for the Rs 350,000-450,000 was 15 per cent. Similarly, people earning Rs 600,000 to 200,000,000 will have to pay 30 per cent tax on their taxable income. 5. Additional tax on cigarettes Finance Minister Khatiwada announced that the government will impose an extra Rs 0.25 on every stick of cigarette sold in the country as health risk tax. This is likely to push the price of cigarettes in the country. 6. Govt allocates funds to provinces The government has allocated funds to the provinces for the first time. Three different funds have been used to provide financial resources to the provinces in the form of grants, conditional grants and project finance. In addition to that, the government has set aside money for various hi-profile projects such as the East-west railway line, cable car and monorail projects in Kathmandu and new airports around the country. However, the finance minister has not made public how much money he has allocated for each project. Home Just In Nepali Embassy in Malaysia appoints lawyer to assist migrant workers Kathmandu, May 30 Embassy of Nepal in Malaysia appointed a new lawyer to provide legal assistance to Nepali migrant workers there. The post had been vacant for the past two months after the contract of previous company expired. According to the Nepali Embassy in Malaysia, Kuala Lampur-based Law Chambers of Kharen Jit & Associate was appointed the legal expert after calling for tender some two months ago. The Embassy stated that the objective behind the appointment was to provide legal assistance to Nepalis in jails and detention camps in the host country. Likewise, the Embassy said migrant workers and their families facing other issues related to labour contracts can consult the lawyer for consultation and defence. The lawyer will provide free consultation and other services on immigration issues as per the agreement signed with the Embassy. Under a marquee at Makerere Universitys rugby grounds on March 23, Democratic Party leaders from across the country gathered to talk about how to breathe new life in their organisation that has long been torn apart by warring factions. In principle, they agreed to work together as they embark on a countrywide mobilisation to strengthen its structures as well as resuscitate a grassroots support base. But there still seems to be a lot of work to do, given that some key DP luminaries such as Kampala Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago and Mukono Municipality MP Betty Nambooze Bakireke kept away. Lukwago chose to accompany former Forum for Democratic Change presidential candidate Dr Kizza Besigye to drum up support for Betty Muzanira, the FDC candidate in Thursdays Rukungiri Woman MP by-election. Nambooze, the DP vice president for Buganda region, monitored the proceedings from the comfort of her home in Mukono. There are some overlapping interests that I dont understand. A reunion championed by a person like [former Makindye East MP Michael] Mabikke raises some questions on my side yet my comrades, [Masaka Municipality MP Mathias] Mpuuga and [Butambala MP Muhammad] Muwanga Kivumbi who are involved have not found time to brief me, Nambooze told The Observer. Kivumbi is, however, understood to have driven to Namboozes home and had an almost two-hour discussion on the need to reunite. Lukwago, Nambooze, Kivumbi and Mpuuga have since 2010 been opposed to Norbert Maos leadership of Ugandas oldest political party. Under their Ssuubi 2010 coalition, they supported Col Kizza Besigyes candidature. They also sponsored independent candidates against official DP candidates at both parliamentary and local government levels. In the previous 2016 general election, the group disagreed on who to support, with some choosing to go with Besigye while others opted for former prime minister Amama Mbabazi. This will never happen again, Kivumbi said. We are no longer going to tread a middle ground; we will continue to work with all pro-change forces, be it Besigye or FDC but this time not as followers. If you want to work with us, you present yourself as our equals, not as our superior and therefore expect nothing from us but to follow you, Kivumbi said. Kivumbi spearheaded the May 23 reunion. We have come here to simply give DP and ourselves a chance to work together, and succeed together. It is not going to be business as usual; the failure to do things that we are supposed to do means keeping Ugandas political power in the hands of the Museveni family, Kivumbi said. REMORSEFUL For once, the group that has been opposed to Maos leadership recognised him as DP president general. Samuel Walter Lubega, who led the Lukwago-backed breakaway Truth and Justice pressure group; Mabikke, who had formed a breakaway Social Democrats Party (SDP); former presidential candidates Dr Abed Bwanika (Peoples Development Party); and Elton Joseph Mabirizi indicated readiness to work under one DP leadership. Some expressed remorse for their actions that could have angered colleagues and the partys leadership. But among the attendees, some still appeared contemptuous of the proceedings. For instance, Bukomansimbi South MP Deogratius Kiyingi appeared to have lost the trust of some DP leaders and supporters given his marriage to the state minister for Youth and Children Affairs, Florence Nakiwala. Others held reservations about the partys vice president Fred Mukasa Mbidde. The East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) member arrived with a group of youths who wanted to cause commotion but were subdued by a rival group of DP youths. And when it was time for him to address the gathering, some murmured but there were isolated voices that cheered Mbidde as he lectured about the need to build networks with Ugandas neighbours. Without connections to governments neighbouring Uganda, we dont have the capacity to reject the outcomes of an election, Mbidde told the gathering. Mpuuga thought otherwise, telling DP that they need to embrace action politics. Sloganeering doesnt change governments; the call of our time is to confront the problem and deal with it, Mpuuga said. With a veiled message, Lubaga South MP Paul Kato Lubwama urged the DP politicians to understand their respective political weights and leave the leadership positions to those capable of leading the party. Lubwamas message resonated well with what Kivumbi kept telling the gathering. We are not about a small war, we are about causing a change in the politics of our country. Members of DP, give yourselves a chance to lead that change, Kivumbi said. On the sidelines, Kivumbi told The Observer that he was wary of divided opinion over the strategy they must adopt to realise their dreams. This is not only in DP but in the broader opposition; we dont want messages of people saying that this is ours...we want to have harmonised messages for a common cause, Kivumbi said. NRM, FDC MPs Former FDC president Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu was among the FDC politicians in attendance. Others were Leader of Opposition in Parliament Winfred Kiiza; MPs Paul Mwiru (Jinja Municipality East), Robert Centenary (Kasese Municipality) and Odonga Otto (Aruu South). NRMs Maracha East MP James Acidri also joined his colleagues from the opposition at the meet. Among them, it was Otto and Acidri who gave speeches which could land them in trouble with their respective political parties. Otto, a former DP youth leader, threw some barbs at FDC before announcing that he will not seek re-election to parliament on the FDC card but as a DP member. I was among the needy students at Makerere University and Dr Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere hosted us and served us a good meal; I went on to become the [Uganda Young Democrats] UYD chairman for Lumumba hall, so, I am coming back home, Otto said, throwing DP supporters into a frenzy. Otto spoke after Acidri had accused his party leadership of failing to build a party ideology and resorted to using money. Where I am [in NRM], Im still struggling to understand the party ideology because you have to be paid to understand their ideology. DP has a good and clear party ideology, FDC does and UPC. What these parties need to do is unite on a common front, Acidri said. He was, however, quick to add that his presence does not mean that he had crossed to DP. Acidri broke ranks with the ruling party during the process of lifting the constitutional age limits for presidential contenders and joined the group of 24 NRM rebel MPs that openly campaigned against the amendment. As Acidri called for a united opposition front, Kyadondo East MP Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known as Bobi Wine, prayed that the current crop of opposition leaders learn to put the country ahead of their selfish political interests, which have turned them into career opposition politicians. We must learn to put the country before self, not just in words but even in action. If we know that the struggle is our life, we should not make it permanent, we should not be professional opposition politicians; dont make it a career, we should know that we are here for a purpose, Bobi Wine said. The noble duty of a leader is not to get followers but to create other leaders, the musician-cum-politician said. sadabkk@observer.ug My granddaughters kidnap was planned by her fathers neighbours who trailed his movements with the intent of demanding a ransom of Shs 30 million, Kampala Central Mayor Charles Serunjogi Musoke explains. According to Serunjogi, his granddaughter Nakitende was kidnapped on April 24, from Kiteezi, Kawempe division where Katende, his son and father of the girl, resides. Nakitende, 3, was playing in the compound with other children when she was snatched. Kampala Central Mayor Charles Serunjogi Musoke Two days later, Serunjogi says, the kidnappers cut off Nakindes hair, undressed her and put her hair and dress in a polythene bag, which they dumped near Katendes house. They also left a chit with their telephone number saying they have the child. Katende lodged a complaint with Kiteezi police station but the officers did nothing. They didnt even visit Katendes home to record statements from them or neighbours. They didnt also look at the exhibits of the cut-off hair and the dress, which the captors dropped. My inner conscience started communicating to me not to go back to Kiteezi police station since they didnt bother to investigate the case at all for about a week from the day we reported. They only recorded the case when we reported and gave us a reference number, Serunjogi says. He then went to Kira Road police station and reported a case of kidnap. After reporting the case, a police officer advised me not to put the case in the papers and cooperate with police. She said if I dont [go to the media]kidnappers will think I want to cooperate with them, he says. Serunjogi said he was advised to transfer his case to Jinja Road police station for safe investigations since the kidnappers could have accomplices at Kira Road police station. He said police told him that most kidnaps are connected to relatives, friends or neighbours of the victims. They gave me two officers from Jinja Road police station attached to Flying Squad. I cooperated with these officers, following their advice and I provided them food and transport at every place they were moving to get Nakitende, he said. The kidnappers soon asked for a ransom of Shs 30 million and gave the family one week to give them the money. If we failed, they were going to switch off their phone, and tell us where to pick Nakitendes body, he said. Police told us to keep on negotiating but dont give any money because if they get money, it will be a completed deal and they can give us the child either alive or dead. But if I dont give them money, they will have hope as police tracks them, he said. He said the kidnappers later reduced the ransom to Shs 12 million. When the agreed date to deliver the money came, the kidnappers switched off their phone. Serunjogi said police tracked the kidnappers using data collected from MTN and Airtel telephone companies. He said the data led to the discovery of who the kidnappers were on April 24. There was someone called Nsamba who moved from Bajjwe Bukerere and came to Kiteezi and travelled back to Bukerere. We highly suspected he had Nakitende. We got a group of around six people he communicated with most on the day Nakitende was kidnapped. We found out that he communicated with women most and two of them were staying in Kiteezi and another one in Kamuli, he says. Police tried to get in touch with the lady in Kamuli. The policemen pretended to be relatives trying to send her food but the women cut them off, accusing them of being conmen. The GPS took us to Bajjwe village, Wakiso district near a brick-making area but couldnt pinpoint the exact area where the suspect was hiding and we got stuck and frustrated since it was becoming dark and the internet was getting off, he says. Then, police decided to use community intelligence. They contacted the village chairman who linked them to the local defence official. The local defence official called the suspect and pretended he wanted to buy 10,000 bricks. But he [suspect became suspicious and] asked the local defence official how he knew him. The defence official explained that he knew all the people in birombe [brick-making yards] and that is why he accepted to negotiate the price for bricks, he said. Serunjogi said when the defence official reached the kirombe located on the GPS, the man wasnt there. He was about 2km away. He met him and they agreed a price and a commission upon bringing a buyer. The defence came back and picked us after confirming the suspects appearance. Then we hired a truck and boarded it pretending to be brick buyers. The police officers on the truck included the Flying Squad, Joint Anti-Terrorism personnel. There was also the local chairman, he said. On seeing us, he said, the kidnapper was excited thinking he was going to sell all his bricks. He was arrested immediately. When interrogated, he confessed to having Nakitende and he told us she was in Kiteezi with his wife who stole her to get the ransom. When we went to rescue Nakitende, we found three other kidnapped kids in their custody and we rescued all of them, Serunjogi says. We found the suspects wife near Katendes home where they rent. She was busy washing clothes and the children were locked in the house. Nakitende was found naked. We also recovered some destroyed Sim-cards in their house, Serunjogi adds. Nsambas wife who planned and hid Nakitende The suspects revealed that to stop the children from crying, they sedate them with valium. Nakitende took long to recover because she had ingested a lot of valium. Four suspects were detained at Kawempe police station. They confessed to belong to a big racket that targets rich peoples children in the village. The suspects were remanded to Luzira prison on charges of kidnap. Serunjogi attributes the rising kidnap cases to the high rate of unemployment in the country. In Kawempe division, we have had many cases of kidnaps but they are mainly due to insecurity in our area. The government has failed and neglected its citizens. Poverty has also increased cases of kidnap. The poor can do anything to survive and dont care about the charges and punishment for kidnap, he says. Police Last week, Inspector General of Police Martin Okoth Ochola said escalating kidnaps in the country are committed by individuals who want to raise money to finance terrorism. He told journalists at police headquarters, Naguru, that according to investigations, the current spate of kidnaps and murders are committed with four intentions by the culprits. These include soliciting money to facilitate terrorism activities in the country, kidnap for ritual purposes, crimes of passion and also fake kidnaps by individuals who want to extort money from relatives. The police chief said since February, police has registered 42 kidnap cases with 20 of them being self-kidnaps or fake kidnaps; seven were murders claiming eight lives. He said eight victims were rescued alive while seven are still missing. Ochola cited cases of Halima Nabawanuka of Sembabule district and Rose Nakisekka of Kalungu who were kidnapped and murdered after they were found unsuitable for ritual sacrifice. He said another victim, Brinah Nalule, was kidnapped and murdered in a crime of passion. Police has also established a 24/7 kidnap emergency centre in Naguru. It also issued toll-free phone numbers: 0800199990, 0800199991 and 0800199992 for the public to use. zuraneetah2015@gmail.com The current selfish leadership and a spate of rising crime in the country is a manifestation of broken families and wrong upbringing, family experts have said. At the Conference on the Family organized by Uganda Christian University (UCU) and Afri-Child Centre, participants last week were almost united in urging all stakeholders to do their best because, according to them, the family is under serious attack from external Western forces and influences. Broken families, they said, lead to broken societies reflected through bad leadership, increased criminality such as corruption, sexual abuse and murders because the family has the biggest impact on a childs character. The family today is under attack. This is a generation of broken relationships; sadlyWeve had HIV/Aids which has had its day - leaving us with child-headed homes. Yet still, some parents have become absentee [parents]; they work hard to provide for children they never spend time with, said UCU vice chancellor Rev Canon Dr John Senyonyi. We are yet to understand the impact of increased affluence, social media, ICT, the global village phenomenon and other modern activities on family. Many are trying to redefine family to fit individual preference. Some couples dont even want children. For them, family is husband and wife. Children somehow become an encumbrance, he added. Rev Lydia Sally Kitayimbwa of St Lukes church Ntinda drew murmurs from the participants when she called for suggestions on how to reach out to same- sex couples. While some suggested compassion in reaching out to the same- sex couples, participants insisted that the church cannot and shouldnt mince words on the definition of family as consisting of man, woman and children. UCU Africa Policy Centre visiting professor Lawrence Adams from USA, who presented a research paper on male and female union, said it is 'surprising' that now the society is beginning to redefine the roles of males and females in family and marriages. Human marriage can only be binary male and female, fatherhood and motherhood, reciprocal and mutually submissive. And this union, matrimony, is the core and foundation of the natural family Family doesnt exist for society and or the state but the state and society exist for the family. Prof Adams said. Dealing away with male and female reunion, we start to disintegrate marriages. Each individual will not experience the effects of family. But we know that it is essential to the human life. We need to ensure that nothing undermines the family life. he added. Adams said liberal western societies have developed movements and ideologies that have sought to disrupt traditional family and village patterns because they are seen to be limiting to individual freedoms. So marriage and family have become, by law and practice, whatever the participants want to define it to be, even optional and unnecessary. Therefore, in many countries it is commonplace to have multiple variations such as same-sex marriage, open marriage, no marriage, multiple or polygamous marriages, all considered viable options for human choice. Prof Adams urged African countries not to let their family setups be distorted by western influences and ideologies, saying the African family of total inclusion - where everyone is involved should be the model to the rest of the world. The church is the primary advocate for the family. In the west, education in the public schools its anti-family - thats why many Christian families are advocating for homeschooling. VALUELESS, BROKEN FAMILIES Afri-Child board chair, Margaret Kakande said it was important for parents to invest a lot of quality time in the upbringing of children because it has lifelong impacts. She said since family is the smallest unit of society, children who grow up without love will eventually lead to loveless society. Efforts invested in building emotional bonds with children during infancy are critical. Between a time the child is born to when it gets to the age of three, growth takes place rapidly and the child naturally wants to bond. So we must really show these kids love. If we have loveless children, were going to have a loveless nation. Its critical as parents that we need to build a strong bond with our children. It can be as simple as everyday acts such as reading stories for our children, playing with them and even setting time to talk to them. In addition do not forget to give respect to children, she said. We know that broken families have the propensity to result into a generation of social and psychological misgaves. Families are very important for passing on culture and religious commitments and in turn impart values and morals and character. Victim of modernity is family time. Family time together has diminished. Do families eat together, pray together, pray with each other, and talk to each other? Or is the communication is virtual on social media. You find siblings in the same building in different rooms but communicating to each other via social media. Do we miss each other or do parents live autonomous lives? said Rev Senyonyi. Keynote speaker of the conference, Rev Dr Sam Luboga said family set up is changing but not for the better. He rued the fact that while teenage pregnancies have dropped by 40 per cent in the USA they have increased greatly in Uganda, where 25 per cent of all teenage girls have either had a child or are pregnant according to research. He said he was surprised that nowadays some people choose single parenthood out of choice, citing the advantages that come with it. Family is changing but not for the better. In fact the family in this era is indeed in crisis. Nuclear family adopted especially by the widely educated and wealthier of society. Presuming that members developing self-sufficiency and independence. It feels they do not need other people besides members of their family. However theres less support for individuals when crisis strikes Rev Luboga said there is a lot of abuse in families, which is reflected in the ongoing in society today. According to him, when a child is sexually abused in childhood, they will most likely abuse others and the cycle continues. Too much love leads to selfish individuals who respect no one and do not understand that any one can be anything without being affluent. On the other hand, very strict parents bring up children that are very timid with underdeveloped cognitive abilities since they never need to think but only to obey. A 2005 Raising Voices study found that most physical violence occurred in homes at 39 per cent and 27 per cent in schools. 32 per cent had experienced at both leaving lifelong impacts. The same study found that 76 per cent of the sampled children had experienced sexual violence in form of forced sex, inappropriate touching. fkisakye@observer.ug For people living or working in and around Kampala, traffic jam is a serious concern. The worry of missing appointments or arriving late for work unsettles many Kampalans. The costs of congestion including reduced productivity are well known and need not be emphasized. Traffic congestion is not peculiar to Kampala. Almost every modern city faces this challenge. Research shows that constructing more roads or widening existing ones doesnt solve the problem, but leads to more driving. Kampalas present chaos could have been avoided if planners had taken a holistic approach to address the root causes. Unlike other countries where cities are developed for commerce and social services, Ugandas case is different. Almost everything including public services and private sector amenities are largely concentrated either in Kampala or its metropolitan area. According to the November 2017 findings by USAID, Kampala and the South Central region are the biggest contributors to the national GDP. When everything is concentrated in one place, majority of the people come to look for opportunities, resulting into congestion. So, policymakers should be pondering how to create opportunities countrywide to decongest Kampala. This entails a deliberate government policy to develop regional towns as commercial hubs. In neighboring Kenya, cities such as Mombasa, Kisumu, Eldoret, Naivasha, Nakuru and Lamu are self-sufficient in terms of commerce and infrastructure. Uganda has potential to do the same. Headquarters of some government and private entities should be relocated to regional towns. South Africa is an example. The headquarters of the executive are in Pretoria, parliament sits in Cape Town and the judiciary headquarters are in Bloemfontein. In addition, policymakers should develop an affordable public transport system in Kampala. A railway network providing affordable transport can reduce the number of people who drive private cars. Within town, government can involve private sector players to introduce and encourage the use of bicycles. This would reduce congestion and air pollution since bicycles do not emit carbon dioxide. With five more cities, rural-urban migration could be equally shared. The World Bank predicts that 21 million Ugandans will live in urban areas by 2040. It is patriotic, therefore, to address these challenges now. Leaving the mess to be cleared by our children and grandchildren is irresponsibility on our part. Denis Birungi is a lawyer, bdeniso4@gmail.com. Army should take part in saving environment On June 5 every year, the world commemorates the International Environment day. Uganda will celebrate this years event in Mbale, with President Museveni as the expected chief guest. Since many of us do not qualify to be on the list of the days speakers, I offer to write my opinion in advance. Elgon region continues to be severely affected by both natural and man-made disasters resulting into deadly landslides, floods, droughts, earthquakes, diseases and fire outbreaks. Such disasters are a threat to national peace and security. Land, which is arguably Ugandas most important resource, is increasingly becoming a source of conflict. The resulting environmental insecurity arising from mismanagement of natural resources causes loss of livelihoods and conflicts especially among pastoralists and crop-growing communities. Sometimes these conflicts spill across borders. When such conflicts emerge, the army is called in to quell them, yet the same forces consume a lot of energy in form of biomass and oil which again leads to environmental degradation. Throughout history, the environment has frequently been used as a weapon of war. Vegetation has been burnt, soil and water supplies contaminated, air fouled, land, forests and houses destroyed. One of the impacts of armed conflicts is creation of refugees which has significant environmental implications. With Uganda hosting almost 1.5 million refugees from neighboring countries, pressure on the environment is increasing. The current demand, therefore, is for the government and international agencies to pronounce strategic programmes to relocate people in risky areas. The army, instead of peasants, should plant trees everywhere as a post-conflict mechanism. Nabendeh Wamoto, simonwamoto@yahoo.co.uk. African lawyers need more skills In a recent decision by the East African Court of Justice, the East African Law Society lost a petition against Ugandas attorney general due to insufficient evidence. The law society petitioned on behalf of aggrieved Ugandans alleging that state security agencies used excessive force to disperse a series of lawful assemblies in 2011, in what famously came to be dubbed walk to work protests. The alleged force resulted into loss of lives, unlawful detentions, destruction of property and grave injuries. Evidence to support these claims consisted of sworn affidavits, a DVD and newspaper clippings. However, court maintained that without identities of the actual victims, medical records and death certificates, it could not conclude with veracity that the events happened. Losing this petition on grounds of inadequate evidence demonstrates a major challenge of pursuing domestic justice for victims of violence by non-democratic states in Africa. Weak institutions hinder independent criminal prosecutions, while private prosecutions may be unsuccessful due to inadequate resources to discharge the evidentiary burden of proof, which has to be beyond reasonable doubt. Unfortunately, the decision also reveals how complex it is to prove violations by state agencies even with a lower evidentiary burden for human rights cases. Litigants would have to prove multiple violations through producing victims as witnesses, gathering and securing forensic and other evidence, while ensuring witness protection and cooperation from relevant state agencies. These challenges are arguably similar to those experienced by prosecutors in international courts and tribunals, yet there are no significant initiatives within Africas legal fraternity to offer specialized training, human resources and funds. This need is urgent, considering the increasing levels of state violence and decline in democracy recorded in Africa. Large-scale violations require a hybrid set of skills in human rights litigation and criminal prosecution. Sylvie Namwase, sylvie.namwase@ifs.ku.dk. letters@observer.ug There is a tough interview that old man Boniface Byanyima (RIP) gave to The Observers Herbert Oluka back in 2005. Throughout the interview, Mzee Byanyima is explicit about the horrors President Museveni has meted out against this country as he is explicit about what needs to be done. At one point, the young journalist asks the legendary politician about what should be done to make things right. In unflinching terms, the old man throws the challenge at the journalist: You are a young man, why dont you go to the bush? Museveni cannot be removed by elections. Oluka responds on the side of caution, arguing that this would cause suffering to many people like happened in northern Uganda. Mzee Byanyima is even more candid this time. Going philosophical, he reminds the young man that freedom is not given on a silver platter: If you want Uganda to be a free country, you have got to fight for freedom. [Well, Oluka never took the challenge and is now in the UK for further studies]. I recalled this interview while I thought about todays activists and opposition politicians in their myriad groups: NGOs, community-based organisations (CBOs), civil society organisations (CSOs), and political parties. Ironically, without realizing it, these so-called watchers-of-public-interests have been part and parcel of the decimation of the country they supposedly fight to protect. Yesterdays activist was angry, poor and daring. In a 2012 book by Fountain Publishers, Ugandas Presidents: An Illustrated Biography, there is a family photo of Yoweri Museveni and family, taken sometime in the early 1970s. In that picture, your eyes are shocked by the sight of the skinny and emaciated brother of the president, Gen Salim Saleh, who proudly stands behind the family, with an open shirt showing his bony chest. Without reading the caption, it is difficult to tell this is the man as we know him today. A malnourished Yoweri Museveni dons some unfashionable sandals holding one of the babies. That the picture is likely to have been taken in a local studio reveals a typical middle-class family eking out an existence hustling about. To be fair, the other members of the family look well-fed. But these are fellows who dared the heights and joined the others in the forests to take the leadership of Uganda. Todays activists are the opposite of the above. They love and aggressively pursue wealth. They are often writing proposals and accounting for donor funds. They have farms in the countryside and are constantly looking for ways of expanding their estates. For them, activism is a career from which they earn a lavish existence. Since activism is often a calling for generally young people in their mid-twenties through the 40s, let me place Museveni in our time where going to the bush is not an option to make this point more vividly. If Museveni had come of age in the 1990s say finished university in 1991, married Janet three years later, got bitter with President Obotes election theft and undemocratic tendencies thereafter, he would have been a civil society activist. He would have formed a CBO, NGO or a CSO. For its name, it would have the words democracy, justice, youth, constitutionalism or human rights, either in the name or slogan. If he were 30 in 2000, he would grow with his organisation to the point that his name would stand for his organisation and the organisation would mean his name. If cunning enough as certainly Museveni is he would be rich by Ugandan standards. He would have a good house in one of the semi-posh neighbourhoods of Kampala, and cruise in Toyota Prado V8 or Jeep, depending on his tastes. He would often hold press conferences or once in a while hold executive demonstrations in the streets of Kampala. Organising workshops in Kampalas plush hotels would form a major part of his Year Planner. Certainly, Obote would not mind him much, since he would know this man as a corporate slay king. Surely, the type of Museveni I describe above would be useless to this country except himself. But that is our activists today. True, the times have changed. Museveni went to the bush before the invention of terrorism, and violent struggle was accepted in the global discourse as a mode of protest. But not anymore. My point is this: the cowardly, non-imaginative and glamorous bourgeois lifestyle of our activist is part of the problem. The author is a PhD fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research. There is a lot to fault our government for, so much that its isolated good deeds become negligible actually surprising. We are down to a level where when you meet someone happy with our government, you can confidently suspect they either eat from it or are related to someone in it and, therefore, they eat by proxy. Indeed, I would be tempted to mark as right a Ugandan student who descriptively defines government as a free feast. Well, as I wrote a few weeks back, and in echo of American journalist Edward Murrow, a nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. Yet there has developed another unseemly side to governments inadequacy. In government, we have found something or someone to blame for almost everything, including our own irresponsibility and carelessness. The Baganda say its the ugly person that is blamed for excreta found in the plantation following the last funeral rites vigil. So is government also seen to be ugly enough to own all that looks like it. Many of us have developed a tendency to wait on government to deliver almost everything, and maybe government has as well played a role in the construction of this lazy mindset. They take so much from us in taxes; so, we have learnt to expect even a little more than we should. And because they do much less than they should, we tend to think that much else is part of what they have failed to do. Soon we might start demanding government for clothes, too. We forget words of Gerald Ford, that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have. That is how they justify crazy tax increments, whose most visible impact is on their own wellbeing and government obesity. But even if government was really responsive to citizens needs, it would not pick the dead dog in front of your house. A person walks past a rotting dog in their neighbourhood three days in a week asking why government has abandoned them with the carcass. When they do not wait on government or KCCA, then each thinks it is the responsibility of the other. It is also a common sight in our neighbourhoods, on small roads outside UNRA or city council mandates, that potholes will develop right in front of ones gate. He/she then watches them grow into huge ditches, and they hit their cars on a daily basis while they complain without any personal initiative. They keep repairing their damaged car, but without fixing the cause. Again, each expects the other to sort the mess. In our neighbourhood, there are these huge old trees whose roots stretch onto the surface of the road, becoming a big inconvenience to motorists. Being one of the victims, I picked an axe together with some young man to cut them. But other people who had suffered with them for years would pass without even a mere thank you. Instead they would hoot for us to leave the road. Maybe they thought government had finally arrived to do its work. Many others may relate with this anecdote. Why should small community roads in places with so many residents be filled with potholes year in, year out? Where is our common sense, where is our sense of community? One of the things we Africans boast about in contrast with the West is our communitarian approach to public affairs. And certainly this is (was?) vividly seen in practices like bulungi bwa nsi among the Baganda. Each community member or household is expected to participate in clearing the community well, maintaining roads, and other common goods. When the drum saagala agalamidde is sounded, everyone (or representatives from each household) is expected to join the rest in such activities. When we come to the city, much of the above community responsibility is abandoned and we retreat to individualism, adopting a collective no-care attitude towards public goods except where we can demand government to help us. Even where it personally affects us, what happens outside our perimeter walls is rarely our business. Thus, without any remorse, one will dump a sack of garbage by the roadside or in the roadside trenches. Some will wait for the rains to load their waste onto runoff water to wherever it finds fitting to carry it! Yet even when we witness all this, it is often none of our business. Even LC-1 chairmen that would have pioneered such initiatives are often busy with cash-raising stamping activities or are hardly supported to do such work. It is this no-care attitude that seems to be simmering into much else of what we do, including our attitude to government. When a public official is abusing public property such as cars, houses, and funds, we often simply look on like a duck walking past a leaking tap. It is not simply on account of powerlessness that we tend to do so. This is one area where we underestimate our powers and lose the opportunity to assert ourselves. We have reduced ourselves to passive spectators both in what we should be actively doing in improving our communities and in resisting abuse of what belongs to us. We may not expect government to call us to order on this; it is already too guilty to point a finger. A skunk cant complain about stench. Having failed to do much of what they are supposed to do, they cant start asking us why we are not exercising our citizenship responsibilities for they would be setting the fire with which to be roasted. Besides, a dependent population is easy to rule. Tusaba gavumenti etuyambe! jsssentongo@gmail.com The author heads the Centre for African Studies at Uganda Martyrs University. Students at the No. 11 Middle School in Hangzhou, China, may want to think twice before dozing off or getting distracted in class as a new facial recognition system will be scanning their faces every 30 seconds to make sure they are paying attention. Called a smart classroom behavior management system, the new monitoring solution recently installed at Hangzhous No. 11 Middle School is made up of three high-tech cameras positioned above the blackboard that constantly feed information to an AI-powered software that analyzes the students facial expressions and general behavior and assesses whether they are enjoying lessons or if their minds are wandering. According to Chinese media reports, the AI is able to pick up seven different emotions, including neutral, happy, sad, disappointed, angry, scared and surprised, and will send a notification to the teacher to take action if it detects that one or more students are distracted during class. The date gathered by the surveillance system could also be used to evaluate teachers performance. So far, it has only been installed at this school in Hangzhou, but if results turn out positive, it could be rolled out across China. Installing this management system is mainly to show kids where they are concentrating the hardest, and where the problems are. one of the teachers at No. 11 Middle School told RFA. It will indicate their levels of concentration in class, and in areas where theyre not concentrating, it will make it easier for the teacher to go over sections again. Maybe some kids think that it will be watching them the whole time, but they are maybe making too much out of it, because they will feel pressured, but thats not the point of it, he added. Its about getting the children to learn properly the whole time they are in class. One thing this teacher is definitely right about is the kids being freaked out by the high-tech cameras recording their every move and facial expression. Some are already changing their behavior because of this. Previously when I had classes that I didnt like very much, I would be lazy and maybe take naps on the desk, or flick through other textbooks, one student told Hangzhou.com. But I dont dare be distracted after the cameras were installed in the classrooms. Its like a pair of mystery eyes are constantly watching me. You might think that thats a good thing, but you have to factor in the stress and the kidss ability to really concentrate in stressful conditions. And then theres the issue of privacy. The schools vice principal told Chinese media that after a long-month trial, the stundents have started to get used to the surveillance system. Chinese social media users still have a hard time getting used to it though: Is this a concentration camp? They are kids, not the target of dictatorship, one person wrote on Weibo. If I was still at school, I would not be able to concentrate on anything but that watching eye! another Weibo user commented. Home Just In New Zealands Honorary Counsel to Nepal awarded for promoting bilateral ties Kathmandu, May 30 New Zealands Honorary Counsel to Nepal, Lisa Choegyal, has been awarded the honour of being made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for contributing to the relationship between two countries. New Zealand Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy presented the award to Choegyal at a ceremony in Government House in Wellington on May 17. Her sons Sangjay and Rinchen had also attended the ceremony. Choegyal has been serving as New Zealands Honorary Consul in Nepal since 2010. In the aftermath of the devastating April 2015 earthquake, Choegyal had supported locating and helping New Zealanders caught up in the earthquake and in facilitating New Zealand assistance to Nepals recovery and reconstruction efforts. Meanwhile, visiting Nepal this week to mark the 65th anniversary of the first ascent of Mt Everest, New Zealand Ambassador Joanna Kempkers commented that the award was well deserved. Lisa has served New Zealand with distinction as Honorary Consul during the past decade and has been connected with New Zealand and New Zealanders even longer. It was gratifying to see her work promoting the good relations between New Zealand and Nepal, said Ambassador Kempkers. Jesse Duplantis, one of Americas most popular prosperity preachers has his eyes on a new $54 million Dassault Falcon 7X private jet, but he wants his followers to pay for it. Duplantis, who runs a ministry and a church in Destrehan, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans, already owns a private jet, in fact its already his third one. All of them have been paid for in cash with donations from his faithful flock, but he now wants them to once again come through for him so he can buy the three-engine Dassault Falcon 7X private jet which would allow him to fly anywhere in the world in one stop, increasing his global reach and reducing fuel costs, because he has his own fuel farm Photo: Dmitry A. Mottl/Wikimedia Commons I want you to believe in me for a Falcon 7X, the 68-year-old prosperity gospel preacher said in a video appeal to his flock. Now, some people believe that preachers shouldnt have jets. I really believe that preachers ought to go on every available voice, every available outlet, to get this gospel preached to the world. He then goes on to tell viewers how he managed to buy his three previous private jets with donations from his followers, and explain how he could just use his current jet, which he bought in 2006, but that the $54 million Dassault Falcon 7X would actually help his ministry spread the gospel more efficiently, by reaching far away places on a single fuel stop. Watch this Week with Jesse as Jesse shows the importance of using aviation as an amazing tool for evangelizing the world! Tune in each Monday at https://t.co/hnG6BhPAvH or on our JDM App. Click to watch https://t.co/PLfSYt2A3U pic.twitter.com/sAvKskmokO Jesse Duplantis (@jesse_duplantis) May 21, 2018 In the video, Duplantis claims that God told him I want you to believe in me for a Falcon 7x, and when he asked how he was going to pay for it, the preacher said that he remembered what God told him back in 1978 Jesse, I didnt ask you to pay for it, I asked you to believe for it. So hes now asking his flock to pray about becoming a partner for to it, which basically means donating money to his ministry. So pray about becoming a partner to it, if youd like to, the preacher says. And if you dont, you dont have to, but I wish you would, because let me tell you something about it all its gonna do is touch people, its gonna reach people, its gonna change lives, one soul at a time. I really believe that if the Lord Jesus Christ was physically on the Earth today, he wouldnt be riding a donkey, Duplantis added. Hed be in an airplane flying all over the world. Now, if that last line doesnt convince you to donate a bit of money for this mans new private jet, you must not be a true believer As you can imagine, Jesse Duplantis unusual crowdfunding efforts have attracted a lot of criticism from more conservative Christians, many of whom argued that the tens of millions of dollars in donations could be put to much better use than a new private jet. Some asked why Duplantis and other preachers needed private jets in the first place, when they could just jump on commercial flights instead. But the preacher clarifies that three years ago, when along with fellow televangelist Kenneth Copeland, he defended the need for a private jet. You just cant manage that today, in this dope-filled world, Copeland said. You get in a long tube with a bunch of demons, and its deadly. Both Copeland and Duplantis agreed that private jets were essential to fulfilling their ministries mission. So there you go Ujwal Pyati W2O has appointed Ujwal Pyati to the newly created position of practice lead, scientific strategy. Pyati comes to W2O from McCann Health North America, where he was SVP, director of scientific strategy. Before joining McCann, Pyati completed a postdoctoral fellowship in pediatric oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He will not only make an immediate and measurable impact on our ability to define scientific strategies and stories for our cornerstone AOR assignments, but he will also provide scientific leadership throughout the firm on everything we do for clients across the board, said Jennifer Gottlieb, president of W2O Group. Pyati will be based in W2Os Florham Park, NJ, office. Andrew Gabron Chartwell Strategy Group has brought on Andrew Gabron as lead digital strategist, in charge of its digital and grassroots advocacy efforts in Washington, across the U.S., and globally. Gabron joins Chartwell from boutique digital strategy firm Strength in Members, LLC, where he was vice president. He has also held senior business development and client management roles for Washington, D.C.-area public affairs and interactive agencies including DDC Advocacy. Chartwell, which launched in January, is led by David Tamasi, Ozzie Palomo, and Matt Epperly. The firm is focused on helping corporate and government leaders navigate high stakes policy and reputational issues. Meghan Bianco Taft Communications has hired Meghan Bianco and Tara Cadet as communications managers. Bianco comes to Taft from marketing and communications firm Zer0 to 5ive, where she was a senior strategist. Before that, she was account manager, digital strategies at Maven Communications. She will work with such clients as The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Wine Institutes Free the Grapes campaign. Cadet was previously a communications specialist at Janssen Pharmaceuticals and has served as government affairs coordinator at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey. In her new role, she will work in Tafts pharmaceutical and public issues practices. Taft has also brought on Audrey Wallendal as senior account coordinator and Julia Masse as account coordinator. Felipe M. Calderon III BoardroomPR has promoted Felipe M. Calderon III to multi-media manager. Calderon has been a multi-media specialist at Boardroom since 2016. In his new role, he will oversee the firms multi-media team, and direct all stages of video production, graphic design and website management. Agency president Julie Talenfeld said that Calderon has helped take BoardroomPRs in-house creative department to a higher level. Maril MacDonald Maril MacDonald, CEO and founder of Gagen MacDonald and past president and chairmans council member of the Arthur W. Page Society, has been named to American Universitys board of trustees. Chicago-based Gagen MacDonald has a client portfolio that includes Johnson & Johnson, The Coca-Cola Company, DuPont and Bristol-Myers Squibb. MacDonald, the parent of a 2017 American University graduate, is also the founder of Let Go & Lead, an online community dedicated to new philosophies and strategies for leadership. Joining MacDonald on the board will be Mehdi Heravi, an AU graduate and retired political science professor, who was provost of the National University of Tehran in Iran, before returning to the U.S. after the collapse of the Iranian monarchy in 1979. Richard Edelman The PR industry has entered a new era. Case in point: The top independent PR firms ranked by ODwyers this year accounted for a combined total of more than $3.14 billion in net fees, more than double the $1.4 billion recorded by this magazine a year ago. Number-one PR giant Edelman, with its 2017 earnings of nearly $894 million, is on track to break the billion-dollar mark within the next few years. CEO Richard Edelman said business at his firm was slow during the first half of 2017, but picked up as the year progressed. He noted that Edelman had outperformed the big agency networks, but refused to accept single-digit growth as the new normal, saying the independent shop must battle ad agencies and digital outfits for market share. Top 10 tops expectations Every one of the top-ten firms in ODwyers rankings this year saw gains, compared to eight in our rankings last year. Twenty-one of the top 25 firms were up in billings in 2017, with 11 revealing double-digit growth. Of the 124 PR agencies participating in the ODwyers rankings in 2018, 92 of them or 74 percent posted year-over-year gains. Bob Pearson Tech-focused independent network W2O Group took ODwyers #2 slot, accounting for $144 million in net fees in 2017, up 17.6 percent from 2016s $123 million, adding another banner year on top of the San Francisco-based marketing and communications networks 33 percent climb in 2017. W2O Vice Chair and Chief Innovation Officer Bob Pearson cited the agencys ability to scale offerings, team talent and innovation concurrently as one cause for the firms success. We expect a client leader to understand all forms of media and deliver what is required, not what is available. This approach is resulting in more opportunities, bigger and bolder ideas and attracting clients who want to make a major difference for their customers. The revenue numbers are simply the result, Pearson told ODwyers. Advances in technology and data science will influence the evolution of virtually every model of communications and marketing in the not-too-distant future, Pearson said. And he predicted that well see an emergence of search media relations and media plans that encompass earned, shared, owned and paid channels, usually in that order. Pearson specifically cited two key drivers that he sees as responsible for moving the industry forward in 2018 and beyond: technology and common sense. From a technology standpoint, machine learning is arguably the most important advance in how we measure, learn and build mechanisms to create campaigns that matter and then retain that knowledge for the next campaign, Pearson said. Common sense occurs when great client service leaders realize that a strong earned and shared strategy can impact the paid media plan or a media relations professional knows who the top influencers are for each square inch of the 1,9,90 model. New media models are enabling us to focus on what is relevant, create a wider offering of what is possible and remain agile enough to change based on the needs of our customers. That is pretty cool. Evan Kraus Washington D.C.-based PR and public affairs giant APCO Worldwide was #3 this year, topping $128 million in net fees, accounting for gains of 6.3 percent from 2016s $120.6 million. 2017 was a year of tremendous growth and progress for APCO, said APCO Global President Evan Kraus. Our growth was fueled by a recommitment to our own independence that has given us an ability to reinvest in our people like never before. Weve started and expanded exciting work helping C-Suite leaders deal with disruption and world leaders make their global mark. We entered 2018 more excited than ever about the future, and look forward to continuing this progress in the years ahead. Kraus said market is moving away from advertising-led, high polish campaigns to drive pre-packaged corporate narratives, and instead is embracing efforts to use data anthropology, insights and smart, strategic partnerships to understand audience influences and expectations. Our agency is experiencing an accelerating, high-growth period driven by increased C-Suite demand to use communications to strengthen business resilience in an era of high expectations, determined activism and complete transparency, Kraus said. This helps to shape programs that are authentic and well aligned to drive enduring and impactful results. Peter Finn Finn Partners is up six percent, from $76.7 million in 2016 to just under $81.3 last year, taking the fourth position in ODwyers 2017 rankings. Founding Managing Partner Peter Finn said that healthcare and tech were two practice areas where the global independent agency saw particularly strong gains. The agency also benefitted from a combination of recent acquisitions as well as organic growth from new accounts and expanding existing client relationships, trends that have continued into 2018. This year has started off fantastically well for us. Its the best first quarter weve ever had, with lots of big wins with new clients as well as with existing clients, Finn said. Finn also said the agency has several pending acquisitions in the pipeline that it plans to announce later in the year. Finn cited a fundamental cultural divide between independent PR firms and the shops owned by multinational conglomerates as one reason why independents have been outperforming the holding companies in recent years. Independents are founder-led and driven by common culture and a core set of values, and I think that culture and that shared sense of core values is whats really helped drive our agency forward, Finn said. The public holding companies generally dont have that. Theyre not founder-led, and theyve evolved a great deal over time and theyre not driven by a sense of shared values, and these are differentiating factors that I believe have affected our success. On the other hand, Finn said the trend toward integrated services puts a large independent like Finn Partners in a good position, because many of the smaller agencies often dont have the ability to bring in the resources or talent needed to grow in these innovative spaces. Clients are looking for solutions to their problems, and those arent just PR problems, Finn said. As a result, our agency is absolutely becoming more integrated every day, and we now have people working here who arent traditional PR pros but are experts in many aspects of the digital and creative world, be it analytics or creating websites or email marketing or any number of other digital services we now provide. Many of the smaller independent agencies cant necessarily afford to move into these spaces. But the holding companies, on the other hand, have all the resources to invest in those services, but theyre too siloed to offer truly integrated solutions. So, were in a great spot. Thomas Ryan Financial communications and investor relations mainstay ICR was #5 this year, gaining an impressive 13.9 percent from 2016s $55.6 million to $63.4 million. CEO Thomas Ryan told ODwyers the firm won more than 100 new retainer clients and performed communications work for 27 IPOs last year, compared to nine in 2016. The firms digital/social media group also outperformed nicely, as did its special situations comms. team. Finally, ICR ended 2017 with 176 team members, a seven percent increase from 2016. Client revenues were also up 30 percent. Ryan told ODwyers that the agency expects to see more of the same in 2018, and particularly anticipates growth in the agencys technology, retail, real estate and healthy living industry groups. The role of PR continues to rise in importance and increasingly, the mishandling of stakeholder communications results in reputational and valuation damage, Ryan said. As far as by product, we expect to make strides in digital media, crisis communications, general business and financial media advice and strategic investor relations. Financial firm Prosek Partners moved from #7 to the #6 slot this year, charting growth of 33.2 percent to nearly $41 million, the largest gaining firm in ODwyers top 10. Jen Prosek Managing Partner Jen Prosek cited sea changes in the U.S. financial sector, as well as growth in the agencys special situations, crisis and transactions business, as factors contributing to the agencys impressive double-digit growth. The financial sector is an emerging market for marketing. There are firms we represent who have just recently decided for the first time to allocate serious marketing dollars to communications and brand, Prosek said. Additionally, there is more demand for holistic marketing solutions paid, earned and owned among our target client base, in which Prosek can offer both marketing and communications solutions. Prosek predicted that the industry will see AI and analytics make communications more powerful, targeted and measurable. She also believes that Generation Z and Millennials will continue to have a huge impact on the expectations of how senior management communicates internally and externally on social issues, a movement that she believes will peak this year. Finally, she noted that a continued erosion of trust and a media environment rife with fake news would result in an increased reliance on communications firms as trusted advisors. Padilla ended 2017 only slightly 1.5 percent above 2016, the result of the turnover of a major client as well as slow starts to much of the new business the agency acquired last year, according to Chair and CEO Lynn Casey. Lynn Casey The Minneapolis-headquartered agency, which also owns food and nutrition consulting division FoodMinds, was #7 this year, at $40 million. Casey said all of that new business is now in full-swing, and the agency has already more than made up for its 2017 lull during the years first quarter. Casey said she expects the industry to lean into earned influence even more than ever, as well as taking advantage of the disintegrating boundaries between paid, earned, shared and owned disciplines. There is some business optimism emerging despite the geo-political uncertainty of the past 18 months. Digital engagement heavy with visual content is exploding for those firms equipped to do great work in this arena for clients. We are learning better how to compete with ad agencies, digital agencies and others for this work, and are driving more integrated programs versus tucking our traditional competencies into a program that others have created, Casey said. Its an exciting time to be in this business! Tech PR specialist Hotwire continues to rise up in ODwyers annual rankings, gaining 4.9 percent in 2017 to take the #8 position this year with $33.2 million in net fees. Heather Kernahan Hotwire North America President Heather Kernahan told ODwyers that the agency, a subsidiary of Australia-based marketing network Enero Group Limited, has innovated within the last year by evolving its business model, expanding into new geographies with pop-up offices in Minneapolis and Mexico and rebranding to better serve clients and showcase its qualities as a challenger brand. As an agency, if you stand still you fall behind. We grow by innovating and by working with innovation companies. Weve seen more non-tech companies realizing the value of being innovation brands and turning to Hotwire to help them tell the story of their business. This innovation positioning helps them hire, increase their valuation and to continue being relevant in their competitive industries. Parsippany, NJ-based Coyne Public Relations rounded out 2017 with a 2.6 percent gain to $28 million, taking the #9 spot in ODwyers ranking this year. Thomas Coyne CEO Thomas Coyne attributed the agencys growth to the hard work and attitude of the Coyne team. He predicts the industry will witness expanded business opportunities across industry sectors this year with a noted emphasis on media and influencers playing a critical role in delivering information. Other trends driving the industry include privacy and disclosure, an expansion of the marketing of American-made products and CSR efforts surrounding the fair and equal treatment of all citizens. The industry has had some very exciting growth in recent years due to the expansion into paid and owned opportunities, Coyne said. In the next year, I see the other services normalizing following some of the fast expansion into digital marketing as it evolves from a specialty to a service. PRs role will continue to expand into social media and traditional media as clients look for guidance about how to best tell brand enhancing stories and cultivate an appropriate connection to the right influencers. New Yorks 5WPR broke into ODwyers top 10 for the first time this year, gaining 13.3 percent in 2017 to $27.5 million from 2016s $24.3 million. Ronn Torossian 5W President and CEO Ronn Torossian said integration is key to PRs future success, citing the industrys ability to further implement creative strategies and storytelling through earned, owned and paid channels, crafting a cohesive narrative that connects with the consumer and evokes emotion. 5W is continually growing and innovating as the media landscape changes every day. Weve significantly expanded our digital team which includes seasoned experts from big-name companies across the media industry, Torossian said. In addition to our ability to adapt to the needs of our clients, we offer full-service PR and marketing capabilities across consumer, corporate and technology divisions. This is a key strength of 5Ws, and a big reason why brands come to us for their PR efforts. PR specialties see leaps and bounds ODwyers ranks firms by 12 PR specialties. Technology and healthcare PR remained the most popular specialties this year, ranking 69 and 68 firms, respectively. Edelman topped both of these lists with $157.3 million in healthcare PR fees and $259.8 million in technology. W2O Group was #2 in healthcare at $124.2 million, followed by APCO Worldwide at $27.5 million. Hotwire ($33.2 million) and Finn Partners ($26.4 million) rounded out the top three technology PR firms. Neil Mortine Underscoring the strength of specialities this year was the performance of Fahlgren Mortine, which ranked #12, up 10.4 percent in 2017 to nearly $27 million compared to 2016s $24.4 million. The Columbus, OH-based agency, which owns New York-based travel subsidiary Turner, also increased profit by 35 percent, added 50 new clients to its roster and grew its B2B business 10 percent in 2017 In total, those new business efforts yielded a 200 percent year-over-year increase in new revenue, not counting organic client growth in spending. President Neil Mortine said deep category experience and expertise was a factor behind much of this growth, as well as integrated viewpoints on the marketing and communications challenges presented to the agency and a dynamic staff that competes fiercely on behalf of its clients. Mortine cited a series of digital challenges facing the industry in the coming year, including how to effectively use PR as a vehicle for SEO (particularly with mobile), how to use hyper-targeting and micro influencers in an increasingly segmented media landscape, how to metricize PR/earned media that informs bottom-line business insight, and how to produce engaging content at a higher volume at a fraction of the cost. In the modern age of marketing, the role of PR is evolving, and understanding of its value is being elevated. Our challenge is to embrace and foster PRs role in an increasingly digital world, Mortine said. Jonathan Wilson Healthcare and life sciences shop Spectrum had another great year in 2017, surging 20 percent to the #16 spot with $24 million in net fees. The gains follow a similarly spectacular 2016, when the Washington, D.C.-based agency projected 34.8 percent growth with $20 million in net fees. Its the agencys third consecutive year of double-digit revenue growth, with a significant portion of those gains attributed to organic activity. Spectrum President and CEO Jonathan Wilson said this transformative growth is part of a larger trend over the past four years to create a forward-looking agency structured to meet clients future needs, now organized into practice areas, fully-integrated teams and a dedicated focus on building an extraordinary agency culture. With clients starting to ask for real-time, comprehensive strategies, were seeing being ahead of the curve in our model start to pay off, Wilson said. Wilson also cited a responsive, insights-first strategy as a requirement for successful communications programs of the future. What were seeing in market today is based on the landscape of that moment, but most are not designed to be nimble or responsive as conversations evolve. In order to engage and drive value, clients and agencies alike are realizing that programs must adapt in real-time to reflect whats happening, Wilson said. We use our marketing intelligence platform, Galileo6, to focus on media relevance. This provides the unique opportunity to take an active role in shaping campaigns and trends as they develop. Healthcare and B2B tech agency PAN Communications was the #23 firm this year, up 13.7 percent to $17.7 million in net fees after 2016s similarly impressive gains of 18.6 percent. Philip Nardone, Jr. President and CEO Philip Nardone, Jr. attributed two key factors to the agencys performance this year. The first was the agencys ability to provide truly integrated services and combine them with a sophisticated measurement platform. The second was having a well-organized HR team dedicated to attracting top talent. PAN hired 65 new staffers in 2017 across its four offices, a 45 percent year-over-year increase, which Nardone said allowed the agency to meet customers integrated marketing demands and produced results that contributed to its overall growth. The industrys continued digital transformation means PR is no longer a standalone field, Nardone said. The remainder of 2018 will focus on the further integration of marketing and PR efforts, honing in on influencer marketing and voice of the customer as drivers of brand awareness and building customer connections. Brands will learn to lean on agencies to implement influencer marketing programs and showcase how these relationships will position them as industry leaders. Agencies will respond by tuning in to customer feedback and preferences by establishing voice of the customer programs to enhance their relationships. This is where well see growth in the use of data and analytics to prove ROI of these trends, which will quickly become a commonplace for PR and marketing professionals. B2B technology PR specialist InkHouse grew by 13 percent in 2017 to $16.2 million, ranking #27 this year. Beth Monaghan CEO Beth Monaghan highlighted several contributing factors to the Waltham, MA-based agencys success, namely, a focus on growing responsibly as opposed to growing fast. This entails working with admired companies and attracting talent with diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise. Sometimes it might also mean turning down prospective business. Growth is one of those good challenges, and its all about developing an openness and comfort with constant change, said Monaghan. In the last year, it meant that we got to a size where I had to rewrite our company values and think about ways to infuse our values into our culture better. Tomorrow, it might be a better way to track our time. We are in a time of tumult when trust is at stake for every organization in America. We have fake news to go with our alternative facts and the pressure for clear communications from trusted spokespeople is intense, Monaghan continued. A byproduct of this environment is the re-insertion of businesses into the discourse on political, environmental and social good. We call this evolution of CSR purpose-driven PR because times have changed, and communications strategies must too. Raymond Crosby Annapolis, MD-based Crosby, which specializes in marketing programs for healthcare, government and nonprofits, grew an impressive 23.8 percent in the last year to $15.1 million, following the 21 percent growth the agency experienced in 2016. Crosby President and CEO Raymond Crosby listed several factors that contributed to the agencys multi-year, double-digit growth wave, including a selective client retention history and a strong focus on serving healthcare and nonprofit clients, as well as engaging the military and veteran community. Crosby also cited digital transformation and social media as being big drivers of growth, as well as a concerted effort to continue building out the agencys in-house video and multimedia facilities and further accelerate its content creation and distribution capabilities. Crosby also identified three factors that will particularly matter as the industry turns to the future: creativity, integration and integrity. Creativity because its easy to get lost in the march toward algorithms, analytics and artificial intelligence, Crosby said. Ideas and experiences are still at the heart of making human connections and moving people to action. Integration because you have to be able to deal with the never-ending complexity of audiences, media channels, content and digital transformation. Its all so interconnected that siloed approaches come up short. Earned media, while still incredibly valuable, will get harder and harder to come by. Reliance on shared, paid and owned channels will only increase. Integrity because everyone in the ecosystem (clients, agencies, media partners) needs to be held to a higher standard in an era of withering corporate ethics, fake news, and paid influencers. The communications industry can be a leader instead of a pawn in this game. Integration, integration, integration Lou Hoffman San Jose-based tech shop The Hoffman Agency was #32 this year, up 12.2 percent to $12.7 million. CEO Lou Hoffman listed investments the agency made into being good shepherds of its brand as well as the ability to win and service multi-country clients across multiple markets as factors that drove the agencys growth. Hoffman also said the agencys proprietary methodology for storytelling was an effort that delivered positive results. Every agency under the sun touts storytelling these days, but Hoffman said the inconvenient reality is that storytelling, by the conventional definition, often cant be applied in business communications. Can you imagine a company executive responding to each question from a journalist with a story that has a start, an end and something going astray in between? Our approach around storytelling techniques solves this issue, particularly for B2B clients which is our sweet spot. Many agencies talk about being a digital-first agency. I think of us as a narrative-first agency. Content is at the core of what we do. Like everyone else, Hoffman sees an increasing amount of PR work migrating toward digital and integrated campaigns that bring together earned, paid and owned media. Hoffman said hes also beginning to see communication agencies increasingly implementing more B2B campaigns with a direct tie to sales lead generation. Communicators of all stripes are beginning to realize that content is at the foundation of marketing efforts, not just PR. Lisa Ross Miami-based marketing PR firm rbb Communications shot up 23.5 percent in 2017 to $11.4 million, taking the #37 slot in ODwyers rankings, compared to #42 last year. President and Partner Lisa Ross said rbbs healthcare, professional services and travel practices saw year-over-year growth and added several new global brands. The agency also experienced high demand for integrated programs, with more than 40 percent of its clients adding digital or creative projects. When asked where she sees the industry headed in the next year, Ross answer was clear: Integration, integration, integration. Integration has reached new levels of importance with an increasing number of clients looking for discipline-agnostic strategies that play across all communication sectors from advertising to marketing and digital to public relations. rbb approaches all client programs from an integrated perspective and seeks to develop campaigns that are multi-platform to engage audiences on their preferred channel of communication. Ross said clients are searching for products and custom solutions to support brand growth and sales goals. To meet this demand, her agency has created digital storefronts for multi-location clients to review, access and purchase a range of marketing services. Data is now a critical component of marketing for most companies, she said, making insight into real-time client data that allows the agency to make better decisions paramount. Finally, the agency is advising clients to review reputation protection strategies in advance of crisis situations. David Jarrard Nashville-based healthcare specialist Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock ticked up three spots in the ODwyers ranking this year to #41, gaining 18.8 percent to nearly $10 million in net fees. CEO David Jarrard cited two important trends a transformation of the healthcare industry as well as a growing appreciation from industry leaders for taking a strategic, holistic approach to communications as factors that accounted for the firms double-digit growth last year. Its hard to overstate the disruption underway in healthcare, especially among hospitals and other providers of patient care. Our boutique firm was built from the ground to help these organizations. Its all we do, Jarrard said. Jarrard predicts that the industry will see a continued consolidation of traditional agencies this year, with management consulting firms further competing for strategic communications business and for smart, data-driven analytics to make us sharper in our work, even as it threatens traditional practices and budgets, Jarrard said. Travel, hospitality and luxury lifestyle agency J Public Relations gained 16.6 percent in 2017 to account for $9 million, moving up two positions in the ODwyers rankings to #47. Jamie Sigler and Sarah Evans J PR Partner Jamie Sigler said the agency has remained focused on the customer experience, growing relationships with existing clients by cultivating their brands through social content and paid digital campaigns. Sigler also cited the role internal innovation has played in the agencys success. Agencies get weighed down with busy work, she said, losing site of major results and often leaving teams little breathing room to connect with clients on a meaningful level. And ensuring that those meaningful connections remain sometimes results in turning down work. Being tuned into our strengths has helped define our success, and today were selective about clients who are in sync with our specificities, said J PR Partner Sarah Evans. We say no when its not the right fit and go all-in when it is. While there are more modes of communication today than ever and unlimited streams of content Evans believes relationships and face-to-face communication remain paramount. Evans said its the job of communicators to understand clients business and whats driving ROI, and to specifically target the people and outlets that make the most impact. Its no longer about being everywhere, Evans said. Because of the onslaught of content, I believe that we are going to see more niche firms thrive and become better versed in a singular industry rather than across the board, Evans said. We always say at JPR that you cant be an expert in everything. Sigler also noted that experiences remain in demand over material possessions when it comes to messaging in travel PR. Theres a desire to be part of a larger community and technology fuels travelers to seize the moment like never before, Sigler said. Matt Rizzetta New Yorks North 6th Agency, Inc. was #59 in 2018, surging in the ODwyers rankings from the #71 spot last year with an impressive 38.1 percent gain to $6 million in net fees. CEO Matt Rizzetta said N6A has invested heavily in its company culture and infrastructure, hiring dedicated department heads for various functions and breaking ground on a new office in SoHo, which has helped the agency with recruiting. Last year also marked N6As first acquisition, purchasing Atlas Communications, a top social media shop in Toronto, which enables the agency to expand into the Toronto market and improve its social media service capabilities. All of these investments have supported our strategic growth objectives and positioned us advantageously as we scale to the next level in the coming years, Rizzetta said. Rizzetta said that in the next year, he expects to see more agencies of similar size steering away from traditional billable hourly models in favor of models which place premiums on speed, efficiency and measurement. N6A has already invested heavily in building in-house software and proprietary data systems to get ahead of this future trend. Rizzetta also said hed witnessed noticeable growth in various emerging market sectors such as cybersecurity and identity, cannabis, data and analytics, travel and hospitality, recruiting and employment, financial services and cryptocurrencies. We believe we are as well-positioned in these areas as any agency of our size, and these will be critical assets for us as we execute on our strategic growth plans in the future, Rizzetta said. Lisa Hannum Beehive Strategic Communication, which specializes in consumer, healthcare, education and professional and financial services, gained 16.6 percent in ODwyers rankings this year to $3.5 million, taking the #76 slot compared to #79 last year. Beehive CEO Lisa Hannum said to watch for a surge in purpose-driven strategies from traditional businesses in the coming year, a shift that will likely influence agencies and brands alike. Hannum also believes the growth of in-house agencies will continue. Agencies will increasingly be tapped for high-level thinking that offers brands fresh insights and innovative, creative ideas designed to differentiate, both inside and outside. As a result, agencies need to be prepared to hand off activation and cheer from the sidelines. Beehive understands business first, and we move fast, which makes us a valuable partner. The pace of change is accelerating in every industry. Our clients rely on us to navigate change with clarity and then drive action for business growth. Fast, Hannum said. Expectations are rising. Employees, partners, customers and communities want to work for and buy from brands that authentically share their beliefs. Bostons Schneider Associates was #78 this year, up 20.2 percent to $3.2 million and gaining four positions in ODwyers rankings after a bumpy 2016 saw the firm dip 6.3 percent to $2.69 million. Joan Schneider CEO and Founder Joan Schneider told ODwyers the agency has implemented an aggressive transformational strategy to integrate the full spectrum of marketing and communications services into its client offerings. By investing in strategic senior executive hires, staff training and through networking across industry sectors, the agency has been able to expand its offerings to include digital advertising, paid social, lead generation and nurturing, CRM integration and marketing automation, as well as investing heavily in its digital design and analytics capabilities. We are no longer a traditional PR firm, but instead provide a suite of integrated digital marketing and communications services that directly and quantifiably, drive client success, Schneider said. In Schneiders opinion, forward-thinking PR firms are moving rapidly into the integrated marketing world. Separation between earned and paid media no longer exists. Consumers are smart. Agencies must be smarter. Were constantly optimizing to move the conversation towards action and/or purchase decisions, Schneider said. We are always testing, and perfecting our campaigns based on what the data tells us. And data analysis is now a big part of what we do. The key driver behind this tidal wave of digital marketing is accessibly to content, speed to market and the consumers desire for creative content that is to the point. While traditional PR is part of the equation, now theres so many more strategies and channels to add to the marketing mix. Lindsey Carnett Los Angeles-based Marketing Maven Public Relations gained 12.8 percent in 2017 to $2.3 million, taking the #91 spot in ODwyers rankings. CEO and President Lindsey Carnett told ODwyers that in addition to attracting more international companies in the private sector, the agency has also expanded its work in the government arena while increasing the number of influencer marketing campaigns and comprehensive marketing integration strategies it does. Carnett sees the industry becoming even more fragmented over the next year. Early adoption of new technology will be key in providing measurable results to clients and supporting media attribution. Carnett also sees natural foods, consumer technology and healthcare as some of the PR sectors gaining rapid popularity, and cited education around new markets, such as blockchain and cannabis, and services such as influencer marketing, integration of chatbots and reputation management for products relying on ecommerce sales, as some of the trends we can expect to see gaining traction in the coming year. Dan Simon New York-based Vested was the greatest gainer in ODwyers rankings overall this year, growing an incredible 73.4 percent year-over-year to account for $6,171,277 in net fees, taking ODwyers #58 slot, as well as leaping to #6 in the finance category. Vested co-founder and CEO Dan Simon said the agencys growth "reflects the approach we take to the craft, which is to intensely focus on providing real value to clients, and the energy we put into finding, employing, and retaining the best people we can." Simon also noted that finance, the sector on which the agency focuses, is uniquely exposed to regulatory, political and economic uncertainty, and as a result, "its fair to say that strong external communications strategies and diligent execution are crucial ingredients to operate in todays business climate." "Today, young consumers trust technology firms far more than they trust financial institutions and banks," Simon said. "In terms of financial brands, we may see some finance companies embrace more of a technology-first brand, particularly if their products or services serve a customer base that skews younger." Feintuch Communications is joining with tech PR firm CCgroup to promote non-bank foreign currency supplier Travelex Currency Solutions in the U.S. CCgroup, the global PR agency of record on the account, will collaborate with several international partners to execute an integrated marketing communications program for the company. The program will focus on boosting Travelexs profile in the fintech sector among traditional and non-traditional influencers, as well as using insight-led content marketing combined with a range of earned, paid and shared tactics. Feintuch Communications portfolio of fintech and payment technology clients includes Klarna, MPOWER Systems and BasisCode Compliance, and the firm has also worked for a broad range of brands including Optimal Payments (now PaySafe), FOREX.com and SimCorp. Trevelino/Keller has been engaged by SOC Telemed, a provider of hospital-based telemedicine, to create, drive and launch the companys new brand identity. Founded by physicians in 2004 as Specialists On Call (SOC), the company recently re-branded to SOC Telemed. As our name no longer aligned with our mission and position within the industry, we felt it was important to bring in a partner that understood both technology and healthcare to help us better articulate who we are today, said SOC Telemed VP of marketing Meg Hoyecki. Trevelino/Kellers other clients in the technology and health space include Ciox, Big Cloud Analytics/EVO, Aesara and Harken Health. Lou Hammond Group has brought on several clients for public relations, digital marketing and positioning. Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line bills itself as the only provider of two-night cruises and cruise & resort stays to Grand Bahama Island year-round from the Port of Palm Beach. Chartwell Hospitality is a company specializing in the acquisition, development and management of high-quality, branded, limited-service and full-service hotels. Cliff House Maine is a luxury property located on 70 oceanfront acres on the southern coast of Maine. The Boars Head Resort is an AAA Four Diamond property owned by the University of Virginia. LHG will also be representing two properties in Jerusalemthe five-star luxury hotel David Citadel and the Mamilla Hotel. Walker Sands Communications has been named global agency of record for Miller Heiman Group as it undergoes an evolution from a legacy sales training company into a modern sales consulting and technology company. The agency will oversee all strategic components of Miller Heiman Group marketing, including strategy, branding, creative services, demand generation, public relations, content development, website development and social media. In addition to ongoing demand generation and PR programs, Walker Sands will lead efforts to restructure Miller Heiman Groups product portfolio, launch a major new technology product, and develop a global website focused on B2B lead generation. 30/05/2018 - French President Emmanuel Macron and OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria opened the OECDs annual Ministerial Council Meeting with a call for countries to work harder to ensure that multilateral co-operation effectively addresses todays global challenges. The 2018 Ministerial, chaired by France, will tackle issues including co-operation in promoting inclusive growth, fostering international trade, advancing co-operation on taxation and climate change, responding to the impact of digitalisation and new technologies, and ensuring the financing of the Sustainable Development Goals. Under the theme Reshaping the foundations of multilateralism for more responsible, effective and inclusive outcomes, Ministers will discuss how to improve multilateralism and make it better serve the needs of those who feel they have missed the benefits of globalisation, while also responding to new challenges. Multilateral co-operation has led to unprecedented achievements and has greatly contributed to improving peoples lives over the past 70 years, including recent landmark agreements such as the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, many feel left behind from the benefits of a globalised economy, and perceive that the multilateral system is not delivering the expected results . Over the next two days we have an opportunity to start rebuilding the foundations of multilateralism to make it more responsible, efficient and inclusive, so that it benefits everybody, Mr Gurria told the Ministerial audience. (Full speech of the OECD Secretary-General) Multilateralism is not just a collection of bilateralisms. Its a dialogue with several voices, a chorus for action and thought, and we need to work together to build this chorus, to reinvent it and make it fair and efficient for the world we are in, President Emmanuel Macron said. The OECD has wisely placed itself in the heart of todays decisive battles, and notably the fight against inequality, and it is these efforts that I am here to recognise and support. (Full speech of the French President Emmanuel Macron) Opening session of the OECDs annual Ministerial Council Meeting Also present at the Ministerial opening were Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who participated in an official signing ceremony signalling their countries impending accession as the OECDs 36th and 37th members. Their memberships will take effect after Lithuania and Colombia have each taken the appropriate steps at national level to accede to the OECD Convention and deposited its instrument of accession with the French government, the depository of the Convention. With the accession of Colombia and Lithuania, the OECD becomes a more vibrant, pluralistic and inclusive forum for the exchange and sharing of best practices, Mr Gurria told the signing ceremony. The accession process has been a catalyst for impressive reforms, which have not only benefited the two countries, but are also inspiring learning opportunities for other OECD members and partners facing similar challenges. French President Emmanuel Macron and OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria congratulate President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania and President Juan Manual Santos of Colombia after the signing of Accession Agreements for the two countries to join the OECD. At the two-day ministerial, countries will address how to ensure effective implementation and broaden adherence to level the global playing field. They will also adopt a new OECD Framework for Policy Action on Inclusive Growth and three new OECD Recommendations exemplifying the value of international co-operation in tangible terms: OECD Recommendation on Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct. This will establish a common, international understanding and a level playing field for business regarding their responsibilities in areas ranging from mineral supply chains and the garment sector to addressing modern slavery. OECD Recommendation on Events and Local Development. This will create a framework to help countries learn how to harness the power of events like World Cups and the Olympics and evaluate their contribution to local development and well-being. OECD Recommendation on Sustainable Lending Practices and Officially Supported Export Credits. This will oblige Adherents to take due consideration of a countrys ability to take on external debt in deciding whether or not to provide export credit support to the public sector in low-income and other countries with external debt problems. Opportunities For All: OECD Framework for Policy Action on Inclusive Growth: This new framework calls for urgent and concerted effort from governments to drive more inclusive, sustainable economic growth that benefits everyone in society. It puts the emphasis on ensuring low-income groups access to quality services so that they can contribute to increases in productivity, growth, and well-being. For further information, please contact the OECD Media Office (news.contact@oecd.org; + 33 1 4524 9700) Working with over 100 countries, the OECD is a global policy forum that promotes policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. In celebration of the month of Ramadan, Qatar Airways Nepal hosted distinguished guests from the Government of Nepal, the Nepal Hajj Committee, dignitaries from different religions and delegates from different embassies to a sumptuous Iftar dinner. The iftar is the traditional evening meal when Muslims break their daily Ramadan fast at sunset. This event was arranged in line with Secular Nepal and celebrated with different religious dignitaries. The board that oversees Oregon's public pension system will introduce its top choice to lead the agency during its regular meeting this week. Now all that remains to be seen is whether Kevin Olineck can get a U.S. visa. Friday's meet and greet comes as the governor's office is having some difficulty finding replacements for two members of the Public Employees Retirement System Board, who are terming out this year. The turnover leaves the complex and underfunded system facing a brain drain going into the next legislative session, where it will once again be a hot topic. Kevin Olineck The system's $22 billion deficit is bringing successive rounds of painful cost increases to schools, state and local agencies and other public employers. The Legislature's bid to give employees some choice in directing a portion of their retirement savings has also caused administrative challenges at the agency. Olineck emerged last week as the sole finalist to replace the retiring director, Steve Rodeman, after an extensive search. Olineck has spent the last nine years with the British ColumbiaPublic Employees Retirement SystemPension Corp., where he is currently the vice president of member experience. He also worked nine years for Alberta Pensions Services. As a Canadian citizen, Olineck needs a special work visa to work in Oregon. And as it turns out, there's no guarantee he'll get it. Olineck was the finalist for a similar job with Arizona's public pension system in 2015, but ultimately dropped out because he couldn't get a visa, according to the Arizona Republic. Marjorie Taylor, head of government affairs at the agency, declined to comment on why that was the case. But she said PERS enlisted the Oregon Department of Justice's help as soon as Olineck was identified as a finalist. "Those conversations are ongoing, and we don't believe there will be a barrier for him joining us at some point," Taylor said. But PERS is looking to act quickly. Rodeman's retirement takes effect Friday, the day of its next PERS Board meeting. The board plans to introduce Olineck to stakeholders and staff at the meeting, and potentially vote on his appointment. "His acceptance was predicated on a visa," said John Thomas, a Eugene businessman who chairs the PERS Board. "This has gone through the DOJ. The governor's office has been involved" in providing letters of support for his visa. Bryan Hockaday, a spokesman for Gov. Kate Brown, said he couldn't "speak to the circumstances involving Mr. Olineck's visa application tied to employment in Arizona. However, the Governor is pleased the PERS Board is moving forward with the selection of a new director and finds Mr. Olineck to be exceptionally well qualified for the position." Meanwhile, the governor's office is looking to fill two of the five slots on the PERS Board. Thomas' term has already expired. The governor's office asked him to stay on until September after the leading candidate to replace him, Portland accountant Richard Solomon, dropped out of consideration. The final term of another board member, Krystal DeAsis, expires in September. Thomas and DeAssis are the longest serving among the panel's five members, and two of the three members with no financial connection to the system. The other members include an employee and an employer representative. - Ted Sickinger 503-221-8505; @tedsickinger Lisa Jurinka Portland vacation rental management company Vacasa says it is preparing for an initial public offering. The company said Wednesday it has named Jive Software alumna Lisa Jurinka its new chief legal officer. Before she was Jive's general counsel, Vacasa said Jurinka helped take public two other companies, Epocrates and CafePress. Vacasa hasn't made any public IPO filings and declined to comment on any preparations under way. But the company is sending signals that it believes it is headed for the public markets. "Lisa's global legal affairs background and public company experience aligns well with Vacasa and our future plans," said Eric Breon, the company's chief executive, in a written statement. Vacasa wants to consolidate the fragmented market for managing independently owned vacation properties. It's buying up local vacation rental management companies, signing up vacation property owners and using technology to make management and marketing the properties more efficient. This summer, Vacasa will move into new headquarters in the Pearl District in anticipation of adding hundreds more Portland employees. The company raised $103.5 million in funding last fall in a round led by private equity firm Riverwood Capital. A prior Riverwood investment, Latin American online retailer Netshoes, went public in 2017 just two years after raising $45 million from Riverwood. The IPO market is hot right now, with companies racing to capitalize on global economic strength and investor appetite for new offerings. Very, very few Oregon companies have held IPOs since the dot-com era, reflecting the state's inability to nurture large companies in the years following the dot-com bust. A number of tech companies Viewpoint Construction Software, Puppet and Tripwire among them started down the path to a public offering before choosing other routes. The regional economy is enjoying a long, steady expansion, however, and there are signs that homegrown businesses are beginning to reap the benefits. Shares in Clark County laser manufacturer nLight Corp. have more than doubled since its IPO late last month. -- Mike Rogoway | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699 The Oregon Department of Transportation invites the public to an open house on the Graham Road bridge replacement in Troutdale. The event will offer information about the project and about construction impacts and a chance to talk to the project team. ODOT plans to begin construction on two Interstate 84 bridges that cross over Graham Road in the spring of 2019. The work will also widen Graham to three lanes and provide additional clearance for trucks. The open house is 5:30-7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 30 at the Holiday Inn Express, 477 N.W. Phoenix Drive, Troutdale. Get more information on the project here www.i-84troutdale.org *** GOOSE HOLLOW 8:25 a.m.; Injury crash at Southwest 12th Avenue and Clay Street. *** PARKROSE 7:42 a.m.; Crash in the backup from the Banfield crash at I-84 westbound near 122nd. Update 8 a.m.; Cleared to left shoulder. *** GRESHAM 7:14 a.m.; Gresham police report a crash where a truck ran into a bridge overpass has closed Northeast 185th Drive between Sandy Boulevard and Portal Way. *** ROSS ISLAND BRIDGE 7:11 a.m.; Crash reported on the ramp from Southwest Barbur Boulevard to the Ross Island Bridge, west end. *** BANFIELD 7:02 a.m.; Crash blocks the center lane of I-84 westbound at the Lloyd exit. Traffic already backing up to 47th. Update 7:48 a.m.; Cleared to right shoulder. All travel lanes open. *** MARQUAM BRIDGE 6:55 a.m.; Stall blocks the right lane of the ramp from I-405 southbound to the Marquam Bridge (I-5 northbound). *** DOWNTOWN 6:40 a.m.; Stall blocks the right lane of the ramp from I-5 northbound to I-84 eastbound. Traffic is backing up and over the Marquam Bridge. Update 6:46 a.m.; Cleared. *** The Gresham Police Department will be conducting a pedestrian safety operation 3-7 p.m. Wednesday, May 30 at the intersection of Southeast Stark Street and 194th Avenue. These operations hope to raise pedestrian safety awareness for drivers and pedestrians through education and enforcement of pedestrian right-of-way laws. Check back throughout the morning for the latest commuting updates and follow us on Twitter: @trafficportland Portland Public Schools has once again angered parents over its plan to relocate a gifted school in a new building by communicating in a way that has people confused and suspicious. On Tuesday, the district sent out a notice that the newest plan would be made public at a Wednesday meeting and took the unusual step of stressing that a vote wouldn't happen at the meeting and the public would not be allowed to comment. What the district didn't make clear to the public: Immediately after that meeting, the board would hold a second meeting to vote on the controversial plan at which a few member of the public would be allowed to comment. The move hasn't played well with parents, who are exhausted by the tense issue that has now put students, parents and teachers on edge for almost an entire school year. On social media, parents questioned if the missives were designed to ward them off attending the meeting so that the school board could pass the plan with as little pushback as possible. School board assistant Caren Huson-Quiniones, who sends meeting notices on behalf of the board, explained that the contradictory notices were caused by a change of plan by the school board. Originally the board did not plan to take public comment during the first meeting, which it terms a work session. It now plans to accept public comment from representatives of the five schools that may be affected, she said. It will also allow three people to testify during the second meeting before the board takes its vote, she said. Access Academy must move from its current site this summer as part of a plan to give hundreds of students in North and Northeast Portland a more equitable education by opening two new middle schools. Access serves 300-plus students who are designated as highly gifted and have a need that cannot be met at their neighborhood school. The message sent out to families Tuesday said the superintendent plans to "review the challenges and opportunities of co-location with two final options: Vestal and Lane or Peninsula and Woodlawn." Vestal and Peninsula are K-8 schools, Lane is a middle school and Woodlawn is an elementary school. The move has been a thorny political puzzle for the district. The district's lack of space means Access will inevitably disrupt another school. At the start of the school year, the plan was to end a one-year lease with KairosPDX charter school and use that building for Access. But that call garnered heavy political pushback from city leaders who felt it was unfair of the district to evict a school that focuses on serving black children in one of Portland's few historically black neighborhoods. Next, Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero announced he would split Access across eight sites. That plan also backfired and caused Guerrero to apologize, just weeks into his new job, for not seeking the community's input before presenting that plan. Then, the district rolled out a plan to give Access a building used by a program for a special needs students. The optics of displacing special education students in favor of gifted students drew extreme ire, as well as a lawsuit, and that plan was also scrapped after months of protests. Bethany Barnes Got a tip about Portland Public Schools? Email Bethany: bbarnes@oregonian.com More parents are opting out of immunizing their children for the first year of school, according to new data from from the Oregon Health Authority. This year, 7.5 percent of Oregon kindergarten-aged students turned in nonmedical exemption forms, which means they did not receive at least one of the state's required immunizations. Josephine County had the largest amount of students to opt out at 10 percent. Multnomah County, which includes the biggest school district in the state, had 8 percent of students not vaccinated. That number has increased over the past three school years -- practically since Oregon mandated parents or guardians follow certain guidelines to claim that their child should not be vaccinated for a nonmedical reason. Children can claim an exemption if their parent or guardian meets with a doctor or watches an educational video and receives proof they have learned about why immunization is important. In 2015, a new law was implemented, and the rate to drop to 5.8 percent from a 7 percent high. It grew from there to 6.2 percent in 2016, and then 6.5 in 2017. Oregon Health Authority released the information Tuesday, but noted that the upshot is the vast majority of children in the state are immunized. "Most parents and guardians know that immunization is still the best way to protect children against vaccine-preventable diseases such as whooping cough and measles," said Stacy de Assis Matthews, immunization school law coordinator at Oregon Health Authority. Oregon requires students to be vaccinated against diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, chickenpox, measles, mumps, rubella and hepatitis. Some diseases are highly contagious, such as pertussis -- commonly called whooping cough -- and can spread quickly among the non-immunized in confined settings like schools. Last month, Lane County declared a whooping cough outbreak after a dozen cases were reported at Sheldon High School. Matthews, in a statement, encouraged parents and guardians to talk to a doctor about any concerns around immunization. Some parents think that vaccines can cause autism, though that theory has been debunked. Many parents also decline to immunize their children for religious reasons. -- Molly Harbarger mharbarger@oregonian.com 503-294-5923 @MollyHarbarger By Raluca Gosman and Dr. Amelia Ahern-Rindell Holding a power drill in one hand and a 1,000-year-old bone in the other, I prepared to create a hole in what may be the most valuable item I have ever held. Even though I knew this was the central focus of my genetics research here on campus, I still felt uneasy about purposely drilling into bones that somehow had remained intact for centuries -- until they encountered me. What am I doing? My research at the University of Portland consists of analyzing DNA found in ancient bones to look into their ancestral origins. As part of the Pollentia Undergraduate Research Expedition, our group along with our mentor Dr. Amelia Ahern-Rindell, traveled to Mallorca, Spain to help excavate the ancient Roman city of Pollentia. Part of our work involved exhuming bones to add to a collection of individuals who had been buried in the city. From these archives we selected individuals appropriate for our research to export to the United States. While in Spain and during our preparation for this project, we began to question and wonder about the appropriate ethical treatment of bones -- and human remains in general -- when conducting ancient DNA research. Through working with a University of Portland Dundon-Berchtold Applied Ethics Grant, my mentor and I were able to consider and further investigate some of these issues. We analyzed a similar situation by delving into the case of the Kennewick Man, an ancient Paleoamerican skeleton found in Washington, only a few hours away from Portland. This discovery and subsequent research were wrought with cultural, political and legal controversy. We used the Kennewick Man experience to inform our own project with the ancient bones from Spain. The biggest realization from the Kennewick Man situation was the importance of open communication between various groups with different objectives. The general public often doesn't see or can't access the behind-the-scenes of science. That can lead to skepticism and hostility towards socially significant studies with the potential to provide important information about the world around us. As a person uneasy with even my own project, I can understand the perceived negative connotations surrounding the study of human remains. However, by sharing our specific methods, expected results and their potential benefits, we are reassured that the research we conduct respects past individuals and works to build a better understanding of the lives they led. Research is an extensive process that we want to share with others and acting ethically and respectfully is a part of our training as scientists. Our research has made me reflect on the responsibility we have as researchers to not only act with integrity, but to also be mindful of the people who our research might affect. When we go into the laboratory to drill into bones, we know we hold in our hands a great privilege and opportunity to study history in the present, to tell the story of those without voices and to shine a light on the benefits of science for our larger community. -- Raluca Gosman is a member of the University of Portland's Class of 2018. In response to the May 24 article, "Crime increases as TriMet weighs response to fatal MAX attack," it seems adding more security hasn't worked and the proposed idea of adding more won't either. While well-intended, the reality is the massive racial disparity in policing won't be solved in the immediate future, in Portland or the country. When police arrived at the crime, Jeremy Christian, the suspected murderer, was still wielding a knife, covered in victims' blood. Imagine for a moment if this man wasn't white. How likely would he be alive to face trial? Christian had at least $1,000 in fare violations. Turnstiles at the entrance would have prevented him from being on MAX. And they can be installed without any issue of racial discrepancies. Outside of the city's inner core, stations can easily be fitted for turnstiles. There's a general aversion to accepting that Portland is becoming a bigger city, but it's time we look at how other cities deal with the problems that are already besetting us. We do ourselves no favor by denying this reality. -- Sandeep Kumar, Southeast Portland By Bill Monroe Now it's personal. In their new-found search for job security amid an administration seemingly bent on destruction of the natural world, federal budgeters again threaten salmon and habitat recovery. They've axed the Pacific Coast Salmon Recovery Fund for 2019, the second consecutive attempt to kill the main source of funding to resurrect a Northwest icon. Budget-blasting is a common ploy. The mantra: Let's just erase a bunch of funds and see if we can get away with it. I first watched it in action decades ago, as an annual saber brandished by Republican administrations (and occasionally snuck in by Democratic wonks, too) to strip Columbia River hatchery mitigation money. States, lobbyists, organizations and outraged citizens are forced to sing for their suppers in a kind of government-by-consternation. This time, however, it hits closer to home. Full disclosure: Since my retirement from full-time writing about the outdoors for The Oregonian, I've accepted a seat on the Clackamas River Basin Council. I currently have the honor of serving as chairman of this group of diverse stakeholders and dedicated staff. We all care deeply about this unique river, which is born in the wilderness and gives life to thousands of organisms between the snow and your faucet. I don't write much about it since it would be a conflict. But I get mad as, well, the dickens when I see something so blatantly wrong. The Pacific Coast Salmon Recovery Fund, created by Congress in 2000 and administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's regional fisheries division, comprises 27 percent of the annual budget of the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board. The watershed enhancement board was created in 2002 during the Kitzhaber administration to distribute lottery dollars and other funding to the state's 95 watershed councils. Two-thirds of these watersheds shelter salmon and steelhead runs, thus qualifying for grants from the recovery fund's annual $13 to $15 million contribution. Since the fund's creation, NOAA Fisheries has contributed more than $220 million to the restoration and protection of fish habitat in Oregon. The watershed enhancement board used that money to leverage matching funds from the state lottery, ultimately distributing $570 million to watershed councils. Axing the fund eliminates more than a quarter of Oregon's annual budget for habitat restoration. That's simply wrong, no matter whose administration is blowing smoke behind the mirrors. This is the second year that Trump has attempted to kill the recovery fund in his budget. The previous administration reduced it, but never wavered from a commitment to help states rehabilitate their rivers. Last year, a delegation from Oregon, Washington and Idaho traveled to Washington D.C. to emphasize the fund's critical role in recovery. Fortunately, it was effective. And may be again. Alaska and California are scheduled to join the consternation this year. Besides resurrecting neglected watersheds, federal investment also stimulates economic activity. Research from the University of Oregon suggests that for every million dollars spent on habitat restoration, between 15 and 24 jobs are created. More than 90 cents of every dollar stays put -- often in rural communities. The recovery fund also supports Oregon's $516 million sport and commercial fishing industries (most of it sport) and their attendant 17,400 jobs. There's also improved drinking and swimming water, reduced flooding and habitat improvement for the 28 salmon and steelhead populations still listed as threatened or endangered. And while the road to recovery may seem slow, consider coastal wild coho salmon, the original issue at the genesis of Kitzhaber's basin-by-basin network. Wild coho are responding to improved river systems on the coast. Slowly, perhaps, but ever so surely. "These watersheds have been impacted for 150 or more years," said Ryan Houston, executive director of the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council. "It started with trapping out the beavers, then came dams, over-grazing, channelization." One of Houston's model streams, Whychus Creek, ran dry two of every three summers from 1912 through 1999, when restoration efforts began. Renamed from Squaw Creek and with the help of Pacific Coast Salmon Recovery Fund funds, Houston said it hasn't been dry since the turn of the century. Steelhead and chinook are returning for the first time in more than 50 years. Houston calls this kind of budgeting a "panic test." His watershed council stands to lose 60 percent of its program without the federal fund and, like other councils, will face difficult decisions. Losing the fund could end the statewide momentum, he said. "If we want watershed-scale recovery, we need watershed-scale treatment," he said. "Otherwise it's like putting a band-aid on your elbow and expecting your knee to feel better." Budget shenanigans with natural resources are dire. Our survival as a race is lockstep with how we treat our environment. Reducing its recovery to political panhandling is morally unconscionable. Bill Monroe is a former columnist and regular contributor to The Oregonian. He also serves as chairman of the Clackamas River Basin Council. The city of Portland is 0-for-2 in its recent attempts to bar the public from accessing public documents. In separate cases, the Multnomah County District Attorney and a Multnomah County circuit judge overruled the city's arguments for withholding public records - one listing employees represented by one of its labor unions and another relating to the siting of a homeless shelter in Southeast Portland. So much for Portland leaders' commitment to "transparency." But the losses aren't stopping the city attorney's office from trying once again to limit disclosure of a public record. And this time, there's an even more perplexing twist. The city attorney wants to cross the Columbia River to ask a court in Washington state to ignore its own state protocol for releasing public records and adopt exemptions allowed under Oregon law instead. Portland City Attorney Tracy Reeve acknowledged the move is "unusual." But she said her office is seeking to protect the privacy rights of a child sex-abuse victim. The public record in question is a Portland Police report taken in the past from the victim and shared at some point with the Clark County Sheriff's Office, although it is unclear whether criminal charges were filed on the allegations. The person making the request for the record? The alleged perpetrator. Washington state already redacts some identifying information, such as the name, Reeve said. But her office wants to have the victim's description of what happened to be removed from the record as well, out of concern for the victim's privacy. Reeve's hope is that a Clark County judge will recognize the document as an Oregon public record and allow exemptions that are permitted under Oregon law. Oregonian editorials Editorials reflect the collective opinion of The Oregonian/OregonLive editorial board, which operates independently of the newsroom. Members of the editorial board are Laura Gunderson, Helen Jung, Mark Katches and John Maher. To respond to this editorial, post your comment below, submit an OpEd or a letter to the editor. If you have questions about the opinion section, email Laura Gunderson, editorial pages editor, or call 503-221-8378. The desire to provide any possible protection to the victim is understandable and commendable. But as difficult as it may be, the City Council should deny the city attorney's request, trust the redactions Clark County will make under Washington state law and remind the city attorney's office that even good causes don't justify public records manipulation. The request in front of City Council is more than "unusual." It defies common sense. Does the Portland City Council really believe that a judge in Washington would set aside the public-records framework set by Washington legislators, ignore the court's responsibility to Washington residents and instead adopt Oregon public-records law to recognize exemptions that don't exist in Washington? Additionally, it's worth noting that Oregon's weaker public records law is hardly a model for other states. While blanket confidentiality provisions may mean additional privacy for victims, they can also be used as a shield to deter scrutiny. While it's unclear who or what may have been involved in this case, mass redactions aren't necessarily in the public's interest. Instead, it seems the episode exposes Portland city attorneys' belief that public records are only public if they deem the information - and the person requesting it - worthy for disclosure. This same bias colored the city's refusal to share information on employee representation with the openly anti-union Freedom Foundation nonprofit last year. And it only leads to heightened suspicion of how the city does business. A real commitment to transparency doesn't play favorites. City commissioners shouldn't either. - The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board By John DeVoe A building on Second Avenue in Portland has two small markers: One says "High Water Mark - 1894." That marker is about at my shoulder level. The second marker says "High Water Mark - 1948." It is about at the height of my knee. On May 30, 1948, 70 years ago, water from the Columbia River found a way through an inadequate dike that also supported railroad traffic in the Vanport area. The flooding was not unforeseeable. Evacuation efforts prior to the dike's failure were poorly executed. The Vanport community -- at one time the second largest (and most diverse) city in Oregon -- was shattered. Many people died and many went missing, never to be found. Thousands of homes and buildings were destroyed and tens of thousands of people were evacuated, many never to return to their homes. Poorer people bore much of the brunt of the impacts. The people of Vanport felt the immediate, severe impacts of these events. Over time, however, impacts from the flood also spread upstream to the Columbia Basin. American policymakers seized on the Vanport Flood as part of the rationale for the 1964 Columbia River Treaty with Canada. Through the treaty, the two nations built dams that created gigantic lakes that flooded out huge swaths of land and changed the ecology of rivers. Today, dams hold about 37 million acre feet of flood storage in the Columbia Basin. A full two-thirds of that water is now in Canada, much of it behind dams built by the treaty. Those dams displaced thousands of Canadians, flooded three river valleys and destroyed farmland, communities and ecosystems upstream. These projects severely impacted people who depend on a healthy Columbia River as well as the streams that give life to Columbia River salmon, sturgeon and other fish and wildlife. Today, almost half the floodplain in the Columbia River Basin has been altered by channel filling and levees. The United States recently announced that negotiations with Canada to modernize the 1964 Columbia River Treaty would begin over Memorial Day weekend in Washington D.C. Treaty modernization presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset the table in the Columbia Basin and to rebalance the benefits, equities and the ecological costs of managing the river. The U.S. and Canada must modernize the treaty to allow the Columbia River to behave more like a river and to balance -- more equitably and in an ecologically appropriate manner -- the management of flood risk across the basin. In the lower basin, we need to back away from the river where we can, reduce and eliminate flood plain development and allow water to reclaim some areas that can help buffer against flooding. Upstream, treaty dams should be operated to help manage flood risk, but also to reduce impacts to Canadians communities and to allow for the higher flows that rejuvenate the river and its fish and wildlife in both the U.S. and Canada. Please remember the tragic losses at Vanport, and consider the resilience of the people affected. Please also consider one piece of the Vanport legacy -- the movement of the potential flood waters permanently upstream into the Upper Columbia Basin. As negotiations begin, please consider how this opportunity to modernize the treaty could reduce the impacts of flood management on people and on the great river that binds all of us together across the Columbia Basin. -- John DeVoe is executive director of WaterWatch of Oregon. Amtrak officials said a gay Portland State University student found injured and unconscious near a remote stretch of railroad tracks in Northern California may have attempted suicide from a moving train, pushing back on speculation by the man's friends and family that he was the victim of a vicious hate crime. Investigators believe Aaron Salazar intentionally threw himself from a passenger car May 15 outside of Truckee, said Amtrak Police Chief Neil Trugman during a news conference Tuesday. The 22-year-old economics student remains hospitalized and in a coma with severe injuries to his brain stem. Trugman said the company's in-house police have contacted 300 people as part of the investigation, including passengers who had interacted with Salazar as he traveled on Amtrak's California Zephyr train from Colorado to Oregon. "He shared with them a number of life concerns and challenges he was having," Trugman said. "There is nothing to suggest that he was involuntarily removed from the train. There is nothing to suggest criminal intent in this investigation. "All indications right now appear that it was an attempted suicide," the police chief said. Salazar's family, which has criticized Amtrak's investigation since it launched two weeks ago, called the findings a "false theory" and said they have repeatedly received vague or misleading information about the case. "They have never had medical experts examine his body to determine the cause of his injuries," his parents, Damion Salazar and Angie Barnett, said in a statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive. "Their form of investigation has been little more than a smear campaign to sweep Aaron's story under the rug." Members of Salazar's family have previously suggested he might have been brutally attacked for being gay and Latino. Authorities found Salazar along the railroad tracks about 4 miles east of Truckee, in an area police describe as remote and with no vehicle or pedestrian access points. The young man was rushed to a hospital in Reno. In addition to his brain injuries, Salazar suffered a broken pelvis and burns to the inside of his thighs. He remains unconscious and unable to communicate with police. Supporters have launched a GoFundMe campaign to help with his medical costs. Salazar's friends and family in interviews have said he never exhibited depression or signs of emotional distress. His cousin Sonia Trujillo told The Reno Gazette-Journal that Salazar was texting with his grandmother about exploring Sacramento during a scheduled layover less than an hour before he disappeared from the train. On Friday, six members of Oregon's congressional delegation called for Amtrak to "promptly investigate" the incident, suggesting Salazar might have been the target of a hate crime. Amtrak's police force, which numbers 500 nationwide, has jurisdiction over any suspected crimes committed on the company's property. -- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh skavanaugh@oregonian.com 503-294-7632 II @shanedkavanaugh A Newport mother admitted to police during the weekend that she stabbed her 6-year-old son several times and claimed he deserved it, court documents show. The son was stabbed six times on his body, possibly puncturing his liver and lung, as well as cut on his chin, according to a probable cause affidavit. Newport police said Tuesday that he is expected to survive. His 1-year-old brother was found unharmed and is under the care of the state department of human services. It's not clear from court documents or police what led to Nemoria Villagomez, 34, allegedly injuring her older son. She was arraigned in Lincoln County Circuit Court Tuesday on suspicion of attempted aggravated murder, attempted murder, first-, second- and third-degree assault, strangulation, causing another person to ingest a controlled substance and first-degree criminal mistreatment. The wounded child was covered in blood when he ran to a neighbor's apartment for help late Saturday and claimed his mother was trying to kill him, the affidavit said. He was later flown to a Portland hospital. Police officers went into Villagomez's unit and found a large pool of blood on a coffee table, a steak knife with blood on the handle and blood smeared on the walls, the affidavit said. Villagomez was found lying on a bed with the baby, the affidavit said. Both were covered in blood. She is also accused of choking the infant and causing him to ingest methamphetamine. Oregon child welfare workers found that the boy was unsafe with his mother at least once, in March 2014, court records show. DHS Case workers previous took custody of the older child after investigating his mother's alleged drug use, according to a 2014 search warrant affidavit written by a Lincoln County sheriff's deputy. The next day, Villagomez crashed her car. The same sheriff's deputy who had joined case workers responded to the crash scene. According to the search warrant affidavit, Villagomez said she was speeding to a child custody hearing and denied using drugs. Officers found several small white pills in her pocket. She was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to complete an alcohol treatment program. On social media, Villagomez often shared pictures of her two boys. In one Facebook post from October, she said described disciplining her older son for "blatant disobedience, huge fits and talking back ALL the time." She wrote that she grounded him with no electronics or toys. Molly Young of The Oregonian/OregonLive staff contributed to this report. -- Everton Bailey Jr. ebailey@oregonian.com 503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey Updated at 9:55 p.m. Officials warned residents in Salem, Turner and the surrounding areas to temporarily avoid drinking tap water after detecting low levels of toxins in the water supply. Algae blooms caused cyanotoxins found last week in the Detroit Reservoir, which supplies water to the cities of Salem and Turner, as well as the Suburban East Salem Water District and Orchard Heights Water Association. The advisory should especially be heeded by young children, pets and anyone with poor health or weak immune systems, as well as anyone pregnant or nursing, according to the city of Salem. City officials said the water is harmless to shower in, wash your hands or dishes as well as to clean or do laundry. Drinking the water could cause symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea. It can also lead to kidney and liver damage. City and state health officials are monitoring the water. It is not immediately clear when the advisory will be lifted. Officials recommend bottled water as an alternative for drinking and cooking. So, this is a Safeway near the Capitol in Salem. The stocker literally laughed when I asked if they had any bottled water. Yow. pic.twitter.com/W3eqaVSUTd Tom James (@tomjames206) May 30, 2018 Residents in Marion County as well as other areas including Clackamas, Benton, Deschutes and Yamhill counties received text alerts around 8:30 p.m. from the Oregon Office of Emergency Management declaring a civil emergency in the area until 11:28 p.m and to prepare for action. The alert has prompted cities as well as police agencies in those areas to declare there is no civil emergency and urge residents not to call 911. Cory Grogan, an emergency management office spokesman, said the alert was sent on behalf of the city of Salem regarding the water situation. He said he didn't know why the alert said it was a civil emergency or why it went out to people outside the Marion County area. A second alert was later sent by the emergency management office declaring a water emergency for the Salem area and directing people to the city of Salem's website for more information. When the second alert went out around 9 p.m., the city's website was down. It was still down a half hour later. Around 9:40 p.m., the emergency management office sent a statement attributing the widespread alert to a "technology issue," that it was still trying to determine the cause of. The "civil emergency" term used in the first alert was part of phrasing in a default notice. "OEM understands that the default message caused concern among residents and is working to learn the issues to be corrected," the statement said. THERE IS NO CIVIL EMERGENCY. The message was intended to notify those affected by the water issue in Salem. PLEASE DO NOT CALL 911. Marion Co. Sheriff (@MCSOInTheKnow) May 30, 2018 If you received this alert Woodburn area residents, please disregard. Weve learned from State OEM it was sent in error and was intended for the Salem area about water issues. @CityofWoodburn @WoodburnFireDst @WoodburnPolice @MCSOInTheKnow @Metcom_911 @MarionCountyEM pic.twitter.com/9ulkEJMTze Chief Jim Ferraris (@chiefferraris) May 30, 2018 -- Everton Bailey Jr. ebailey@oregonian.com 503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey It will be a Memorial Day weekend he'll never forget if he can remember. Police arrested a suspected drunken driver after he lost control of his speeding new Ferrari and smashed into the center median along Interstate 5, totaling the vehicle, authorities said. John Randal McCauley, 57, was cruising south in his luxury car just after midnight Tuesday when the accident occurred near the Wilsonville exit, Oregon State Police said. McCauley and his passenger, Kimberly Ann McCauley, 66, were rushed to a hospital with injuries, police said. Cops later booked John McCauley into jail on suspicion of driving under the influence of intoxicants, police said. "Maybe not the way you want to break in your brand new #Ferrari," Oregon State police wrote on its Facebook page Wednesday, along with images of the wrecked ride. -- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh skavanaugh@oregonian.com 503-294-7632 II @shanedkavanaugh Big U.S. banks snagged another big victory Wednesday as federal regulators voted to ease one of the industry's most despised regulations. The Federal Reserve approved sweeping changes to the "Volcker Rule," which was established after the global financial crisis to prevent taxpayer-insured banks from making some risky financial bets. Banks, which have complained for years that the rule is too cumbersome and time-consuming, will gain new flexibility in deciding when a trade is too risky if the proposal is finalized. "Our goal is to replace overly complex and inefficient requirements with a more streamlined set of requirements," said Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Consumer advocates worry that even a slight easing of the standards could open the door for the type of risky trading that contributed to the near collapse of the economy a decade ago. "This proposal is no minor set of technical tweaks to the Volcker Rule, but an attempt to unravel fundamental elements of the response to the 2008 financial crisis, when banks financed their gambling with taxpayer-insured deposits," Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit advocacy group, said in a statement. Sen. Jeff Merkley, who-authored the Volcker Rule, condemned the move as a "backdoor attempt to roll back financial reform laws without going through Congress." "These are not small, technical changes," the Oregon Democrat he said in a news release. "These are massive rewrites to make it easier for Wall Street banks to engage in the same types of risky bets that brought down our economy in 2008. The proposal still must be approved by four other banking regulators, but the Fed's vote is a major step and brings Wall Street closer to securing one of its biggest victories yet under the Trump administration, which has made deregulation a top priority. Already, Congress has blocked federal rules that would have made it easier for consumers to sue their banks and rescinded a five-year-old Obama-era policy warning auto lenders against allowing minority borrowers to be charged more than their white peers. Last week, President Donald Trump signed legislation to roll back banking regulations. But that law was aimed largely at helping community and regional banks. The proposed changes to the rule are expected to boost the profits of some of the industry's biggest players, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, industry analysts say. They come at a time when the banking industry is already hauling in record profits -- $56 billion during the first quarter of 2018 -- and regulators are warning that some banks have been taking on more risks. "Some banks have responded by 'reaching for yield' through investing in higher-risk and longer-term assets," FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg said last week. "Going forward, the industry must manage interest-rate risk, liquidity risk, and credit risk carefully to continue to grow on a long-run, sustainable path." The Volcker Rule was one of the complex regulations to come out of 2010's financial reform law, Dodd Frank. Regulators spent years crafting hundreds of pages of rules aimed at stopping financial institutions that make loans and offer checking and savings accounts from taking on the same type of risks as hedge funds. Restricting risky trading under the rule, which was named for Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, has made the financial system safer, supporters of the rule say. But the banking industry has complained for years about the difficulty in determining what type of trading is too risky. Regulators have estimated that the initial rule, which was finalized in 2013, cost banks billions in compliance costs in addition to their missing out on potential profits as some trading activity was eliminated. The banking bill Trump signed last week offered the industry some relief: It exempted small financial institutions with less than $10 billion in total assets from the rule. But big banks have been calling for more far-reaching changes. The proposed new rule, dubbed Volcker 2.0, would give large Wall Street banks more freedom. Big banks, for example, would have more flexibility to determine what trading is permissible. The proposal shifts the onus on proving some trades are prohibited from the bank to the regulators. After five years of experience with the rule, Powell said, "the agencies responsible for implementing the rule see many opportunities to simplify and improve it in ways that will allow firms to conduct appropriate activities without undue burden." Consumer advocates have warned that banks could exploit even a small loophole created by regulators. The rule's complexity is a byproduct of lawmakers' and regulators' attempts to accommodate the industry's initial concerns, they argue. And despite the rule's complexity, banks have rebounded from the financial crisis with record profits. "Even as banks make record profits, their former banker buddies turned regulators are doing them favors by rolling back a rule that protects taxpayers from another bailout. This kind of corruption is common in Trump's Washington," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a fierce Wall Street critic. Along with the Federal Reserve, four other banking regulators, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, must also approve any changes to the rule. The FDIC is expected to vote Thursday. The Oregonian/OregonLive staff contributed to this report. -- The Washington Post Oregon's state Office of Emergency Management is vowing to do better after mistakenly panicking residents of at least five Oregon counties Tuesday evening by sending a text message declaring an unspecified three-hour "civil emergency." Residents in Marion, Clackamas, Benton, Deschutes and Yamhill counties received the text alert around 8:30 p.m. declaring the emergency was underway through 11:28 p.m and warning them to prepare for action. The state agency had intended to warn only residents in and around the city of Salem to let them know that the city's drinking water had been found to contain low levels of toxin from algae, public information officer Cory Grogan said Wednesday. But an employee accidentally sent out the generic alert that had been programmed as the default message in the state's cell phone alert system, Grogan said. It was the first time the state emergency agency had activated that system, he said. On Wednesday, agency officials figured out what went wrong and they eliminated the default message so the mistake can't happen again, Grogan said. "When we notify the public and we send out that message, it's really important to be specific" about what the emergency is, what people should do to protect themselves and where they can turn for more information, he said. "We take accountability for it," Grogan said. "It was alarming for some people." His agency did subsequently send such a message about the Salem drinking water problem. In the meantime Tuesday evening, officials from cities and police agencies in the affected area declared there was no civil emergency and urged residents not to call 911. Grogan said his agency's mistake was regrettable but had served as a "huge" learning opportunity to get its emergency notices right in the future. It wasn't the first time an Oregon government agency scared people needlessly by sending out the wrong warning. In January, the city of Seaside meant to sent its monthly "this is only a test" message through its tsunami warning system. But it mistakenly put out a blaring message that a tsunami would strike in four hours. City officials apologized but said that's what the monthly tests are for: to make sure the system is working and find any flaws before needing to use it in a real emergency. Reporter Everton Bailey contributed to this report. -- Betsy Hammond betsyhammond@oregonian.com Portland police are searching for an alleged shooter who wounded a man at a Northeast Portland transit station. The man was found by officers just before 3:30 p.m. at the 82nd Avenue Transit Station and the emergency responders applied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding before an ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital, police said. The man, who hasn't been identified by police, is expected to survive. No one else was injured. Police have not released any description of the alleged shooter. The transit station could reopen sometime after 5 p.m., according to police. Anyone with information on the shooting is asked to contact the Portland police non-emergency line at 503-823-3333. MAX trains are still running through the 82nd Avenue Transit Station, but aren't stopping due to the police investigation, TriMet said. Shuttle buses will be used to serve the Northeast 60th Avenue, 82nd Avenue and Gateway Transit Center stations. -- Everton Bailey Jr. ebailey@oregonian.com 503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey Addison Barnes has one week to wear his "Donald J. Trump Border Wall Construction Co.'' shirt at Liberty High School before he graduates. A federal judge Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order, essentially barring the school for the rest of the school year from enforcing its earlier decision prohibiting Barnes from wearing the shirt. U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman found the Hillsboro School District could not justify its censorship. The judge said he balanced constitutionally protected speech with the orderly running of a school. The school district is entitled to be concerned about the response of other students to the T-shirt, the judge said. But the "thin" court record so far offers little support for the district's argument that the shirt could "substantially disrupt'' the school, he said. "There's not enough to go on here to show that sort of legitimate concern justifying censorship of this core political speech,'' Mosman ruled. Barnes earlier this month sued the high school, the principal and school district, arguing they violated his First Amendment rights when he was told to go home or cover up the shirt in class. On Jan. 19, the 18-year-old senior was suspended for wearing the shirt backing President Donald Trump's immigration and Homeland Security policies. The shirt reads: "Donald J. Trump Border Wall Construction Co.'' with the phrase "The Wall Just Got 10 Feet Taller.'' School officials defended their actions, saying the shirt would contribute to a "hostile learning environment'' and would make students feel insecure in school, noting that about 33 percent of the high school's students are of Hispanic descent. They also said the school has been the site of recent student walkouts and sit-ins to protest Trump's immigration policies. The district also described increased racial tensions arising from racially charged language around immigration, school officials said. "This particular school district has a population that is one-third Hispanic. This is not Lake Oswego. This is not West Linn,'' attorney Peter Mersereau argued for the Hillsboro School District. Because of the school's unique population, the court should give deference to administrators who "reasonably forecast the T-shirt would disrupt the school,'' Mersereau said. The judge interjected, asking, "So First Amendment protections vary from high school to high school?'' Barnes' lawyers urged the court to consider the context of what occurred. Barnes wore the shirt to his first-period "People and Politics" class, where the topic of discussion was immigration. During class, Vice Principal Amanda Ryan-Fear entered, removed Barnes and directed him to cover the shirt, saying at least one other student and a teacher had said the shirt offended them. At first, Barnes did what he was told but then moments later decided what he was asked to do wasn't right and uncovered the shirt in class. Later that period, the vice principal returned, saw Barnes and sent a school security officer to remove him from class and take him to the school office. There, the vice principal told him that he could be suspended for up to 10 days for "defiance,'' according to Barnes and his lawyers. Given the choice to cover his shirt or go home, Barnes went home and the school treated his absence as a suspension. After his father visited the school and met with the principal days later, the school later rescinded the suspension but told Barnes he couldn't wear the shirt again in school. Barnes said he didn't see any disruption to the class beyond his removal. "It seems particularly unfair to me that my speech is censored, when the school is open to competing political views,'' he wrote in a statement given to the court. His lawyers argued that the shirt represented "pure political speech,'' caused no disruptions, didn't interfere with the school, promote or advocate illegal activity and contained nothing obscene or vulgar. They further argued that the school can't muffle one side of the immigration debate while allowing one of Barnes' teachers to display a sign in front of a classroom that reads, "Sanctuary City, Welcome Home.'' "The First Amendment protects students' right to speak on political or societal issues including the right to express what school officials may consider unpopular or controversial opinions, or viewpoints that might make other students uncomfortable,'' his lawyers Bradley Benbrook and Ben Becker wrote in a motion for the temporary restraining order. "Through his shirt, Barnes sought to comment on a national debate about a serious political and societal issue.'' Since the era of protests against the Vietnam War, the U.S. Supreme Court has continued to hold that students don't "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,'' they wrote. The school district pointed to several factors that led to its actions: Several students in Barnes' class put their heads down on their desks when he walked in wearing the shirt; a May 2016 student walkout and sit-in at Liberty supported a statewide walkout in response to a "Build the Wall'' sign placed at another school, Forest Grove High School; about 200 Liberty students participated in a February 2017 sit-in protesting Trump's immigration policies; and Hispanic students the last two years have expressed fear to school administrators about potential deportation of some family members. Mosman said there was nothing in the record to suggest that 200 students walking out of the school was necessarily "substantially disruptive,'' or that the sit-in lasted 10 minutes or 10 hours or disrupted classes. "The T-shirt is core protected speech, and walking down the streets of Hillsboro, no state official -petty or grand would be able to do much about that T-shirt legitimately under the Constitution,'' the judge said. In a school setting, while administrators have the right to consider the effect of speech on others, there's nothing in the record to show that Barnes' t-shirt was so harmful either to a single student or a group of students, Mosman found. After the hearing, when asked if Barnes was going to wear the shirt to school before he graduated, his lawyer Benbrook responded, "Yeah, that was the idea.'' -- Maxine Bernstein mbernstein@oregonian.com 503-221-8212 @maxoregonian PORTLAND (AP) The Portland City Council plans to give developers the option of building taller buildings in the city's New Chinatown-Japantown historic district. The plan includes new height and design guidelines intended to preserve the character of the historic district, which is the state's largest Chinatown community, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported . The council previously had indicated it would set heights at 160 feet (48.8 meters) for much of the neighborhood. But the council voted last week to allow buildings up to 200 feet (61 meters) in two different places. The vote divided the council, with Mayor Ted Wheeler and others arguing that development would give the neighborhood a much-needed boost, while others argued it would effectively destroy it. "We need to infuse old town Japantown with activity," Commissioner Dan Saltzman said. "And there is none there now. We need people to live there." Commissioner Amanda Fritz appeared visibly shaken as she cast her vote and called it a sad day. "I think this is a serious mistake that is going to repeat the mistakes that previous councils made in Albina, destroying a historic district and a cultural district," she said. The council set a final vote for the plan June 6. -- The Associated Press Kasey Lebechuck was coming home Sunday evening about 6 p.m. when he noticed a homeless man setting up camp near his Northeast Portland home, his daughter said Tuesday. She said he approached the man and asked him to move. At first, he said, the man seemed willing, telling Lebechuck he was reaching into his backpack to get his cell phone. The man, later identified as 25-year-old Todd Schneider, pulled out a knife and attacked Lebechuck, police said. He suffered 17 stab wounds in the head, neck chest and torso, his daughter said. Lebechuck, who is in his mid-60s, tried to fight back, according to his daughter, but the younger man repeatedly pushed him to the ground and continued the assault. Afterward, Lebechuck was able to get to a neighbor's house, where he rang the doorbell before he collapsed. Lebechuck relayed what happened to his daughter, Shawna Lebechuck, from a bed in the Legacy Emanuel Medical Center's Intensive Care Unit on Sunday. She said her dad had made a habit of calling the city about illegal dumping and other neighborhood issues, but this was the first time he had ever been involved in a confrontation. "He was constantly working to keep the neighborhood clean and safe," she said. "Our main concern now is our dad. That he is alive at all is nothing short of a miracle." Soon after the attack, police arrested Schneider near Northeast Siskiyou Street and 122nd Avenue and he was booked into Multnomah County Jail on suspicion of assault. Lebechuck was found at a home about two blocks away, court documents show. Schneider is accused of attempted murder, first-degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon. Schneider appeared in Multnomah County Circuit Court for an arraignment Tuesday and repeatedly told a judge that he wanted to represent himself claiming he didn't want to accept any help from the government because he felt the entity had been targeting him. Standing with his arms crossed in a blue jail uniform, Schneider said he felt he stood a better chance representing himself. Schneider refused representation after Judge Marilyn Litzenberger appointed Michael Rees as his attorney, and Schneider told defense attorney Kathleen Dunn as she was standing next to him that he didn't want her representing him for the Tuesday hearing either. Schneider told Litzenberger that he hadn't represented himself before and has no prior law experience. The judge warned Schneider that he'd be at an "extreme disadvantage," acting as his own lawyer. When he insisted that it was his right to represent himself, Litzenberger said she wasn't able to make an adequate assessment Tuesday on whether he was competent enough to waive his right to an attorney. Litzenberger ordered another hearing for Wednesday morning, temporarily appointed Rees as Schneider's attorney and ordered the defendant to stay away from the man he is accused of stabbing in the event he is released from jail. Litzenberger said she'd give Schneider a two-page document that explains the challenges he'd face in representing himself. She said she could determine Wednesday whether he is competent to waive his right to have a court-appointed attorney. "Whether I read that or not, I am firm in my actions to not have a lawyer represent me in any way, shape or form," Schneider said. The judge said she'd see him tomorrow. Shawna Lebechuck and her sister Kayla McNeel set up a fundraising page to offset their father's medical costs, which had exceeded its goal by Tuesday morning. Kasey Lebechuck is in stable condition, Shawna Lebechuck said, and is expected to be transferred out of the Intensive Care Unit some time on Tuesday. "We're very appreciative of the outpouring of support from the community," Shawna Lebechuck said. "You hear about this kind of thing on the news, but until it affects you, you just can't describe what it feels like." Everton Bailey Jr. of The Oregonian/OregonLive contributed to this story. -- Kale Williams kwilliams@oregonian.com 503-294-4048 Quick action by a bystander who took a burst of photos with his phone helped police catch the 61-year-old man accused of intentionally running his SUV into three women at Portland State University last week. Police got the license plate of the blue 2005 Mazda Tribute from the photos and -- within three hours -- arrested Greg Phillip Porter as he sat in his SUV parked in Northeast Portland, according to a probable cause affidavit made public Tuesday. Prosecutors released the affidavit shortly after Porter made his first appearance in Multnomah County Circuit Court to hear nine criminal charges against him. Porter is accused of three counts of attempted aggravated murder, three counts of hit-and-run driving, two counts of first-degree assault and one count of second-degree assault. If convicted of attempted aggravated murder, he faces a minimum of 10 years in prison under the state's Measure 11 law. The affidavit identified the women who were hit Friday morning as Hannah Cline, Sabrina Vuscan and Fadra Regis. Cline is a PSU freshman and Vuscan and Regis aren't students, said university spokesman Kenny Ma. According to the affidavit, Cline was rushed into surgery with life-threatening injuries after the crash. Vuscan had a lacerated liver and spleen. Regis suffered a fractured leg. All three women are still at OHSU Hospital. Regis is in fair condition, but the hospital isn't sharing the condition of the other two based on their requests for privacy, spokeswoman Tracy Brawley said. The affidavit says the witness who shot photos of the SUV told police that the driver sounded as if he pressed the gas pedal to the floor. After the driver struck the women at Southwest Sixth Avenue and Montgomery Street, it appeared as if he tried to steer into a group of men, the witness said. But a MAX train started a turn in front of the men and prevented the driver from striking them, too. Media soon published a description of the blue SUV. A man walking his dog in Northeast Portland early that afternoon spotted a man sitting behind the wheel of an SUV with damage to its hood and front end, according to the affidavit. After going inside his home and confirming from online news reports that the suspect was still on the loose, the man called police. Officers arrived and arrested Porter. According to the affidavit, Porter admitted he was driving in downtown that day. He was booked into Multnomah County jail and denied bail because of the seriousness of the charges against him. Porter showed no emotion in court. He made no statements and didn't enter a plea. He wore a blue jail uniform and answered a few procedural questions from Judge Marilyn Litzenberger. Porter is scheduled to appear in court next on June 6 and has been assigned public defender Christopher Behre. Porter told jailers after his arrest that he has been homeless for the past year and most recently has been living in his car. He said he has a ninth-grade education, is unemployed and lives off Social Security disability checks of $1,425 a month. He didn't say what his disability is. He also said he smokes marijuana daily for pain, but claimed he hadn't used marijuana in the two days before last Friday. Authorities noted that Porters criminal history dates to the 1970s. In 1976, when he was still a teenager, he was convicted of larceny in Texas. In 1996, when he was in his late 30s, he was convicted of driving under the influence of intoxicants. Its not clear where he committed that crime. Porter told jail officials that he has never been diagnosed with a mental illness, but an administrator at a rehabilitation center said Porter suffered from delusions. Porter checked himself out of the center last year. The first page of a Portland police report also lists a warning to officers that Porter may have a mental illness, stating: "CAUTION: SUICIDAL / MENTAL HEALTH." Two of Porters former neighbors at the King City Apartments described him as confrontational or difficult to get along with when he lived there from roughly 2015 to 2017. Court records show he and his wife, Mary Porter, were served an eviction notice from the apartments in late May 2017 for failing to pay their $850 monthly rent. Neighbors say Mary Porter died that same month. Neighbors also said the couple had broken up a month earlier, and Greg Porter started living out of his car. The Porters were officially evicted last June, according to court papers. Ma, the Portland State spokesman, said university staff and students have offered support to Cline and her family while she recovers in the hospital. "The PSU community is deeply saddened by this traumatic incident," he said. "Our thoughts are with Hannah and the other victims and their families as they deal with this difficult time." Read the probable-cause affidavit here. -- Aimee Green A 26-year-old woman was sentenced Tuesday to 13 years in prison for attempting to kill her aunt and uncle. Rhyan Leigh Smith, 26, of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, apologized to her relatives. "I never would have done that if I was in the right state of mind,'' Smith said. Rhyan Leigh Smith Smith's defense lawyer Ruben Iniguez said his client suffers from schizophrenia, and she's taking medication for it now. The shooting occurred on the morning of March 16, 2016. Warm Springs police received a 911 call at 8:24 a.m. from Smith's father, who reported that his daughter had shot two people in their home. Smith was found lying on the ground, about 100 yards from the home, with an AR-15 rifle beside her, according to FBI agents. Witnesses told investigators that Smith knocked on the bedroom door where her uncle and aunt slept. Her uncle, Zack Chambers, said he talked with Smith for about 30 seconds before he went to shut the door. As he turned away, he heard a shot. Smith shot him multiple times and then fired at her aunt, Bernadette Smith, when she emerged from the bathroom off the bedroom, according to a criminal complaint. Chambers was shot five times, and his wife also was hit multiple times. FBI agents recovered at least seven 9mm bullet casings on the floor. Rhyan Smith had obtained the handgun from someone else without permission, according to the FBI. In February, Smith pleaded guilty to two counts of assault with the intent to commit murder and one count of possession of a firearm in the furtherance of a crime of violence. The Chambers both spoke in court Monday. They said they wake up every morning in pain, and are struggling financially, physically and emotionally. "This is very hard to say because Rhye is my niece, but I'm afraid she'll get out and come after us again or even send someone after us,'' Bernadette Chambers said. Prosecutor William Narus sought a 16 -year sentence under the negotiated plea deal. Smith's lawyer argued for 12 years, citing his client's mental illness. U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman said he decided on the 13-year sentence due to Smith's mental diagnosis, noting she had reported hearing delusional voices at the time of the crime. Her level of psychosis reduced her moral responsibility for the offense, the judge said. -- Maxine Bernstein mbernstein@oregonian.com 503-221-8212 @maxoregonian This story has been updated Portland adopted rules last week requiring businesses with drive-thru windows to serve customers who arrive on foot or by bicycle, under specific circumstances. Portland's Planning and Sustainability Commission decided to add language to city rules governing drive-thru facilities. The new rules appear in a May 24 document and state the business "must serve customers using modes other than a vehicle such as pedestrians and bicyclists" if the business is open and "other pedestrian-oriented customer entrances" are unavailable or locked. The rules were effective May 24. Businesses are welcome to go beyond these rules and serve customers on foot or bike whenever. But it's not a requirement. "We don't regulate whether they allow a cyclist or pedestrian to use their facilities [at all hours]," Troy Doss, a city planner said in an email. "We just regulated if they can have the facility and apply certain development standards to them." According to city documents, the rules are part of a package intended to reduce drive-thru businesses in Portland's core. "Of special concern are noise from idling cars and voice amplification equipment, lighting and queued traffic interfering with on-site and off-site traffic and pedestrian flow," according to city documents. Beyond the zoning code change, Portland is also expected to ban new drive-thru businesses throughout the central city, including the Central Eastside and Lloyd District outright. "This prohibition is intended to encourage a high density, pedestrian and transit oriented urban form and discourage lower-density land uses that are dependent upon queuing lanes," city rules say. Those rules would be effective July 9. Doss said the prohibition isn't a byproduct of the total number of drive-thrus citywide, rather it's an effort to keep more hazards from the city core. "Consider a single fast food drive-through on a single block in the Central City," he said. Lines "can go out into the street, blocking the adjacent sidewalk, bike lane, travel lane, and rail transit. Also consider how many curb cuts (an impact on pedestrian safety) might be associated with this single use." Portland enforces its zoning code based on resident complaints, so no law enforcement officials will be driving or biking around slapping drive-thru offenders with a whopper of a fine. "If the city did get a complaint," Eric Engstrom, a principal planner at the city said in an email, "usually there would be an attempt to educate and allow the operator to correct the problem." He added that fines would be "a last resort" and be issued by the Bureau of Development Services. In 2009, Burgerville changed its rules after a Portland mom went unserved and milkshakeless after riding her bike through the drive-thru window when she was unable to find parking. Burgerville ultimately changed its policy to allow for cyclists. BikePortland, which first reported on the zoning proposal this week, said the code language was first introduced into the city's comprehensive plan in 2016 by Planning & Sustainability Commissioner Chris Smith. Smith told the website the commission didn't expand its provisions for pedestrians and cyclists to all hours of the day in part to make the rules politically palatable. But not all drive-thrus are safe for people who aren't in vehicles either. "The driving public policy motivation for me was access to the service/business, which can be achieved either by providing access to the drive-thru or by leaving the front door open," Smith told the website. Jilli Detweiler, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group The Street Trust, said in a statement her group welcomes the policy shift. "There is no reason customers of retail establishments should be forced to own or use a car and this new policy is a move in the right direction," she said. -- Andrew Theen atheen@oregonian.com 503-294-4026 @andrewtheen UPDATE: This story has been updated. A previous version of the story stated the new rules on drive-thru use for pedestrians and cyclists were effective July 9. They are effective May 24. Apple has a secret in Washington County. The Silicon Valley company has hired close to two-dozen people in a hardware engineering lab there, raiding Intel and other Oregon tech employers for a variety of roles, according to job postings, social media profiles and an individual familiar with Apple's recruiting efforts. Apple didn't respond to a request for comment - the company is notoriously secretive about its research activities - so it's unclear how many people it plans to hire for the Oregon facility, what products they're working on, or the office's exact location. A person familiar with Apple's hiring says the lab is in Washington County near the border between Beaverton and Hillsboro. That's closer to the core of Oregon's hardware ecosystem than the software and web services companies clustered in downtown Portland. Apple's Oregon job postings seek design verification expertise, a specialty for ensuring a finished product meets the original specifications. LinkedIn profiles indicate Apple has been hiring for its Washington County site since November and that a number of its new employees previously held senior research or engineering roles at Intel. Apple is among several large tech companies with substantial outposts in Oregon, capitalizing on the region's concentration of high-tech skills and a less-competitive hiring market. Others include eBay, Amazon, Google, Salesforce and, of course, Intel, which has its biggest site in Washington County. Apple isn't new to the region. It has had a software development team in Vancouver since the early 1990s and operates a massive campus of data centers in Prineville. Additionally, Apple's Advanced Computation Group has a small, previously undisclosed office in a converted firehouse in Southeast Portland. An employee at the site confirmed its location Wednesday but declined to discuss operations. Another person familiar with the Southeast Portland site said Apple has been there for close to a decade. Apple's new Washington County site does not appear to have the makings of a major new Apple campus. The company has been scouting potential locations for several months for a significant expansion far from its Silicon Valley headquarters. Oregon economic development officials have said there has been no indication Apple is considering putting that large campus here, and recent reports indicate the company is focused on Northern Virginia and North Carolina. Correction: The original version of this article conflated Apple's previously undisclosed ACG operation in Southeast Portland and the new validation lab in Washington County. -- Mike Rogoway | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699 In a unique case of mistaken identity, a massive spruce tree slated to become the Redmond Christmas tree was accidentally cut down in March. Last week, the city of Redmond filed a lawsuit against Fagen Tree & Chips, a Bend-based tree removal company, alleging that employees trespassed on land owned by the city and removed a tree that was intended to be part of a park expansion near Redmond's city hall. The suit seeks $62,000 in damages, invoking an obscure Oregon statute that says that anyone who unlawfully removes a tree on someone else's property is liable for three times the cost of the damage. Wade Fagen, the owner of the tree-removal company, said the removal was an honest mistake and criticized the city for taking legal action against his small business. "I think they're just trying to profit off a bad situation," Fagen said. Still, Keith Leitz, human resources director for the city, said the approximately 40-year-old, 40-foot blue spruce in question is very difficult to replace, thanks to its size and its location near the center of town. With the city and the company unable to agree on compensation, Leitz said a suit is the city's best remaining course of action. "At this point, we're left with no other option," Leitz said. In the middle of March, Fagen Tree & Chips received a call from a property management company requesting the removal of a spruce tree with a root problem from its property, near the corner of SW 12th Street and SW Deschutes Avenue. However, Fagen said the employee tasked with removing the tree got his paperwork mixed up and accidentally went to a property three blocks to the east, where he encountered a very similar spruce tree with tape and cones around it. Consequently, his company removed the wrong tree by accident, Fagen said. "It's just unbelievable that it happened," he said. Fagen declined to name the employee in question, adding that the employee "just felt sick" about removing the wrong tree. "He's a great guy; he just made a brain fart of a mistake," Fagen said. Ironically, the city's tree was marked with tape and cones to prevent it from being removed, according to Leitz. The parcel the tree sat on, at 414 SW Ninth St., was transferred to the city as part of a plan to expand Centennial Park in downtown Redmond. As part of the expansion, a house near the tree in question was removed, but Leitz said the city was careful to keep the tree safe. Fagen said he'd heard that the tree wasn't healthy prior to being cut down, but Leitz disagreed. Leitz said the plan was to use the spruce as a Christmas tree, complete with seasonal lighting, once the park was completed in mid-2019. "It was in almost perfect shape," Leitz said. The lawsuit, filed by Steven Bryant of the Redmond law firm Bryant Emerson LLP, cites a portion of Oregon Revised Statutes that states that anyone who damages or removes a tree or shrub from someone else's land is liable for three times the cost of the damage. Fagen said the statute is designed to prevent timber theft, and said it shouldn't be applied to an inadvertent removal. "There's no value (to me); I wasn't stealing anything," Fagen said. However, Leitz said the statute can be applied more broadly, covering everything from trees in a neighbor's lawn to shrubs along a state highway. Bryant could not be reached for comment about the suit. This isn't the first time Fagen's company has inadvertently removed trees that aren't on the correct property. In 2014, Fagen's workers removed a ponderosa pine tree that was 15 to 20 feet from the edge of property belonging to the person who hired them, according to The Bend Bulletin's archives. Fagen said he was open to planting another large spruce tree for the city, but Leitz said finding a perfect replacement for the felled spruce has been a challenge. He added that the city has looked for appropriate spruces in other parts of Oregon, as well as Washington and Colorado, but they've either been too small or too difficult to transport and replant. In the meantime, Fagen, who said he found out about the suit Tuesday morning after being out of town over Memorial Day weekend, said he plans to discuss this with Redmond's City Council in the hope of coming to a reasonable compromise. "This is just one of those horrible things," he said. --Stephen Hamway/Bend Bulletin South Korea's daily new COVID-19 cases stayed in the 1,000s for the fifth straight day Wednesday as more people took virus tests after an extended weekend. The country added 1,... South Korea will consider introducing a "vaccine pass" for people's gradual return to normal life, Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum said Wednesday, as the country prepares to adopt a "l... Football is clearly a team sport. Athletes and coaches alike will tell you every chance they have that no one is bigger than the game and it takes teamwork to win. But sometimes... We have used your information to see if you have a subscription with us, but did not find one. Please use the button below to verify an existing account or to purchase a new subscription. Nippon Paper Industries to Shutdown 531,000 Tonnes of Production Capacity by Jan. 2020 May 30, 2018 (Press Release) - Nippon Paper Industries Co., Ltd. (the Company) has announced that, at a meeting of the Board of Directors held [May 28], the Company resolved to reorganize the production structure for its paper business as follows. 1. Background and Purpose of Reorganization Since the global financial crisis, domestic demand for paper in Japan has been in a state of structural decline due to development of IT. Since 2009, as the top manufacturer of newsprint and printing paper, with the aim of optimizing the balance of supply and demand, the Company has reduced its annual production capacity by approximately 1.7 million tonnes. By carrying out a further reorganization of its production structure on this occasion, the Company will seek to further optimize the balance of supply and demand, and to improve the revenue structure of its paper business by reducing fixed costs and increasing the operation rate. In shutting down the relevant production equipment, the Company will take every possible measure to ensure stable supply and quality for its customers. By implementing this reorganization of its production structure as part of its Sixth Medium-Term Business Plan (FY2018 - FY2020), the Company will seek to enhance the earning power of its paper business. Moreover, in order to accelerate the growth of the entire business, the Company will work on expansion of its business operation in growth areas (packaging, household tissues, healthcare, chemicals, energy, etc.) and early commercialization of new business. 2. Outline of Reorganization of Paper Business Production Structure (1) Hokkaido Mill (Yufutsu) is to shut down all paper production machines and related equipment for the production of paper. In addition to continuing its chemical business operations at the mill, moving forward, the Company will also advance considerations for the mill to become a location for establishing new business operations; including biomass power generation. (2) Fuji Mill (Fuji) is to shut down all paper production machines and related equipment for the production of paper. As of May 2018, the mill commenced operation of Crecia-Kasuga Co., Ltd. (President & CEO: Hirofumi Narita), producing household tissue. Moving forward, the mill will seek to utilize its location in close proximity to a major metropolitan area in order to shift towards becoming a production location for household paper products. (3) Kushiro Mill is to shut down its No. 8 paper production machine due to a decline in newsprint demand. By doing so, the mill will seek to shrink fixed costs and increase production efficiency and enhance its cost competitiveness as a newsprint production location. It is planned to transfer production of a portion of newsprint currently produced using machine No.8 to machine No. 6 at the same mill. As a result, it is planned to transfer (partial) production of heavy-sack kraft paper, unbleached kraft paper and semibleached wrapping paper currently produced using machine No. 6 to the Company's Hokkaido Mill (Asahikawa), and to Shin Tokai Paper Co., Ltd.'s Shimada Mill. Please see the full press release from Nippon Paper Industries that includes: Details of paper production machines to be shut down as part of measures (1) to (3) above are as follows. Nippon Paper Industries Production Restructuring2018 . (159k, PDF) SOURCE: Nippon Paper Industries Co., Ltd. Diehard Drag Race fans know that a world of drag exists beyond the show, that drag culture goes back decades and that countless incredible performers are slaying stages around the world every night yet so many regard snagging a spot on the show as the only route to stardom. We're not knocking the show or denying its invaluable impact on drag culture or its mainstream popularity. But the thing is, there's different kinds of fame and success; it's a subjective ambition, and not every queen wants to join the Ru Girl ranks. Besides, RuPaul's limitations on contestants leaves some performers trans queens, drag kings feeling discriminated against or excluded altogether. Related | The World According to RuPaul Let's stop assuming every drag performer wants that specific screen time, and instead celebrate them for what they've achieved already not in spite of the show, but because they've explosively talented. We've rounded up five of our favorites who've earned themselves fanbases on a level that's undeniably deserving of Drag Race acknowledgment, but who aren't standing idly, waiting for RuPaul's approval to legitimize their artistry. They're already legendary. 1. Lucy Stoole Login Instagram How many queens are out here selling sex toys? Lucy Stoole is one maybe the only one? A line of insertables in a variety of sizes as well as cock rings are available on her website, which also links to her DragQueenMerch.com shop with clever branding, like Emoji versions of the Chicago queen's mug as a graphic print and the Reddit Bitch tee. Performing in the city since 2012 after relocating from Nevada, the International Black Bearded Beauty has broken ground for Chicago's drag performers of color she's deemed legendary and revered by her community as a mother hen. As a regular host at the popular local party Queen and a performer at heaps of other events (she also DJs, by the way), Lucy Stoole delivers a cheeky mix of filth and glamour on the regular. She's stated publicly that Drag Race is a goal, and really, Ru should be so lucky; Lucy Stoole is officially an icon in her own right. 2. Biqtch Puddin Login Instagram Despite her win on season two of The Boulet Brothers' Dragula, reigning Drag Supermonster Biqtch Puddin was evidently asked about Drag Race enough times that she felt compelled to broach the subject on Facebook. In the video below, she compares her achievement to having joined the supervillains of the Legion of Doom, which she prefers to the do-gooders of the Justice League then finishes off the clip with a bout of appropriately creepy, maniacal laughter. 3. Landon Cider Login Instagram 4. Vander Von Odd Login Instagram This L.A. alt-drag leader, a seasoned spook even before snatching the first Dragula crown, has earned a reputation for blending cinematic horror and high art both in performance and editorial shoots. Whether or not she'll audition for Drag Race is a FAQ "everybody and their damn grandmother" asks Supermonster Vander Von Odd, right up there with the origins of her name and her response in a vlog shared last year was frighteningly succinct. This NYC queen created DragQueenMerch.com for performers working outside Drag Race avenues, so it makes even less sense to ask BibleGirl someone who's not only amassed a huge following without screen time alongside RuPaul, but is also elevating other entertainers like her why she hasn't auditioned for the show. She even supports RPDR queens on the regular (and several sell through her shop, both online and in Hot Topic and other stores, too), and it's possible that she may have auditioned in the past, but the BibleGirl of today is self-proclaimed internet not TV reality trash. Nevertheless, people still pose the question, and her responses are perfectly shady, and loads of fans always follow with support: BibleGirl hasn't been shy about her criticisms of Drag Race, either. Further driving the point home, last March BibleGirl hinted at the possibility of creating her own show. (Which we would definitely watch. Please do it, BibleGirl). Photo via Instagram Helmut Lang, one of the legacy innovators of what we now understand to be '90s cool, is hitting the road with its latest project, so to speak. Upon arriving in New York from Vienna in the mid-'90s, the iconic fashion brand immediately established itself at the forefront of trendsetting minimalist chic, becoming the first to spread its messaging and advertisements via the NYC taxi system. It proved to be a smart business move: Dozens of fashion brands across categories have since followed suit over the years, literally placing their ads on top of roving taxi cabs. Hong Kong The latest initiative sees Helmut Lang taking their taxi project global this summer: The taxi logo they created for New York will now get reimagined for (and an homage to) the cab transit systems of Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, and Paris. To honor cab drivers in each city, the brand has commissioned photographers in each city to capture the roles drivers play in the cities' respective cultures. The photographers are Alexandra Leese for Hong Kong, Tom Emmerson for London, Alex Lee for New York, Patrick Welde for Paris, and Kenta Nakamura for Tokyo. Related | Kanye West, Solange Star in Helmut Lang's Latest Project Like Helmut Lang's original New York taxi collection, a similarly taxi-themed limited-edition capsule of $255 hooded sweatshirts and tees ranging from $175 to $210 for each fashion capital will be for sale. The pieces are now available for pre-order on helmutlang.com, and for those of you really hankering for a nostalgia fix, the brand will also re-release their '90s New York taxi line. Photos Courtesy of Helmut Lang After months of reported back-and-forth with Jared Kushner, Kim Kardashian West will meet with President Trump today to discuss prison reform. Related | No Filter: An Afternoon With Kim Kardashian Kardashian West is allegedly planning to focus on the plight of 62-year-old Alice Johnson, who is serving a life sentence without parole for a first-time drug offense. She will apparently "explain to [Trump] that, just like everybody else, we can make choices in our lives that we're not proud of and that we don't think through all the way," she recently told Mic. The star will ask Trump to pardon Johnson, who has now spent 21 years incarcerated. Kardashian West is said to have reached out to the First Daughter Ivanka Trump, who in turn directed her to Kushner, after discovering Johnson's case on Twitter. This is not the first time Kardashian West has spoken out for those she believes have been let down by the justice system. Just last week she tweeted about a Nashville man who was mistakenly released from prison and rebuilt his life in the outside world, only to be sentenced to another decade behind bars when the prison learned of the error. Reality show KUWTK will reportedly not be shooting the exchange, nor will Kanye West be present despite his recent advocacy for the sitting present, although his own follow-up meeting with Trump is apparently in the works. Photo via Getty News and commentary on organized crime, street crime, white collar crime, cyber crime, sex crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, espionage and terrorism. Wave of Baha'i Arrests in Iran Raises Alarm at Faith's UN Office 05/30/18 Source: Center for Human Rights in Iran The Baha'i International Community (BIC) at the United Nations has expressed alarm over a spate of arrests of Baha'i faith members in three Iranian provinces by agents of the Intelligence Ministry. Diane Ala'i Baha'i International Community's representative to the UN in Geneva "Baha'is have been arrested since the inception of the Islamic Republic. But this new wave of arrests, that is taking place more rapidly and throughout Iran, raises concern for the BIC about their situation and the fate of all the Baha'is living in Iran," said Diane Ala'i, the non-governmental organization's representative to the UN in Geneva, in an interview with the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) on May 25, 2018. On May 1, Baha'i faith member Kaviz Nouzdahi was arrested at his home in Mashhad, Khorasan Razavi Province, and taken to the city's Vakilabad Prison. He had been previously arrested in 1989 and spent two years in prison, according to Ala'i. On May 3, a man identified only as "Motahhari" was arrested at his home in Isfahan, central Iran, and on May 6 four individuals were taken into custody in Karaj, west of Tehran, including Noushin Afshar, Neda Sabety and Forough Farzaneh. They were all arrested by agents of the Intelligence Ministry, which confiscated their personal items, including computers, phones and religious books. Some of the detainees were released after a few days but are facing charges because of their religious beliefs according to the BIC representative. A statement issued by the BIC in Geneva on May 25 said the systematic nature of the arrests "suggests a coordinated strategy on the part of government authorities." "In many cases, detentions have been accompanied by raids on personal homes and the seizure of religious books and writings. This upsurge in orchestrated persecution has been noted by a variety of news agencies and is the latest in the ongoing campaign of harassment against the Baha'is in Iran," said the statement. Iran's Constitution does not recognize the Baha'i faith as an official religion. Although Article 23 states that "no one may be molested or taken to task simply for holding a certain belief," followers of the faith are denied many basic rights as one of the most severely persecuted religious minorities in the country. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on April 23, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif denied that Baha'is are persecuted in Iran for their religious beliefs. "Being a Baha'i is not a crime," he said. He continued: "We do not recognize somebody as a Baha'i, as a religion, but that's a belief. Somebody can be agnostic; somebody can be an atheist. We don't go-take them to prison because they are an atheist. So this is the difference that you need to make. But being-also, being a Baha'i does not immunize somebody from being prosecuted for offenses that people may commit." Iranian Actors Boycott President's Iftar Ceremony 05/30/18 Source: Radio Farda Several famous Iranian actors and actresses say they will not attend the president's iftar (breaking fast) ceremony that will take place on Wednesday, May 30. Using the Farsi hashtag "we do not go to Iftar", the protesting movie stars said on their social media pages that they will reject Hassan Rouhani's invitation due to political, social, and economic crisis that the country is facing. # ____ The popular and outspoken actress Mahnaz Afshar published a picture of the invitation card next to the jailed human rights activist, Atena Daemi on her Twitter account and asked the president to invite Atena instead of her "who recently turned 30 in Gharchak Varamin prison and now is being held in Evin." "She is not a criminal, she has only striven for human rights," she wrote in a tweet that has been liked by more than 13000 users so far. "Due to bad economic situation and low morale of our people, some of my colleagues and I believe that such costly gatherings are unnecessary," Parviz Parastouei, another actor, famous for his roles in several blockbuster comedies, wrote on Instagram. Actors are aware that the purpose of President Rouhani's invitation is to hear their problems. "However, you know the problems better than us" and "it seems that the president is looking for someone who could solve them, like us," Parastouei wrote in a sarcastic post that has received more than 350 thousand likes. Yet, the actor emphasized that if it was not for Rouhani, Instagram, like many other social media platforms had been filtered and today, he was not able to express his opinion. I struggle with poverty, the tiniest criticism is suppressed, I cannot allow myself to attend the ceremony", an actress wrote in an angry instagram post. Many of the movie stars who have boycotted President Rouhani's ceremony, backed him during the presidential election in May 2017. Referring to this fact, another actress named Shila Khodad asked Rouhani sarcastically whether he needs their support again? People's financial hardship due to severe devaluation of the national currency and other economic failures, negligence of abused children, shortage of drugs, overflow of narcotics that easily can be accessed by the youth, are among the reasons why she has decided to reject the president's invitation. "I will not attend this dinner because I want to be able to look into the eyes of my countrymen on the next day without being ashamed," Khodadad wrote. In reaction to the boycott by the actors and their growing criticism, spokesman Mohammad Bagher Nobakht said on Tuesday that the government has done everything in its power to improve the economy. "Tell us what we could have done that we did not," asked Nobakht his audience underlining the desperate situation of Rouhani's government. The Iranian government hoped that the nuclear agreement signed between Tehran and six major world powers in summer 2015, will help it to create millions of jobs and improve the life of its citizens. However, the recent decision of the US President Donald Trump to withdraw from the deal, is about to ruin this desire. Iran's regional ambitions, widespread corruption, mismanagement, lack of transparency and proper supervision are some of the reasons for the country's dysfunctional economy. Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei Demands Punishment in New Sex Abuse Scandal 05/30/18 By Michael Lipin, VOA Iran's supreme leader has called for swift punishment of those involved in a high school sex abuse scandal that erupted Monday with revelations in a state news report and a social media video of the alleged abuser. Read related report by Ghanoon daily In a Tuesday post on his official website, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei shared a letter he had written to Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli-Larijani. In the letter, Khamenei said news of what he called the "crime" in a school in western Tehran had caused "great sorrow and regret." He instructed Amoli-Larijani to "execute the Islamic punishment (of those convicted) immediately after their trial." The scandal first emerged on Monday, with a report by the state-run Khabar Online news site saying several students of the Tehran boys' school were sexually abused by a male staff member. The report said parents of the students accused the staffer of showing pornographic videos to their sons on a mobile phone. It quoted the parents as saying the abused boys were receiving psychological treatment due to "severe mental harm." Khabar Online is affiliated to Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani. cartoon by Laleh Ziaei, Ghanoon daily Also Monday, Masih Alinejad, the freelance host of VOA Persian's Tablet program, posted a video clip on her social media profiles of the accused school staffer in handcuffs, responding to angry questions shouted at him by the parents. Alinejad said she received five minutes of video of the confrontation from a family member of one of the students Sunday. She said she verified it by communicating with several more family members before posting a shortened version on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. The clip drew thousands of comments from Iranian social media users angered by the alleged sex abuse. Alinejad said the family members, who requested anonymity, named the school staffer as Mohammad Hossein Haerizadeh, but did not disclose when or where they confronted him in the video. A report published Tuesday by another Iranian state news agency, Tasnim, said parents of the schoolchildren engaged in a confrontation with the alleged abuser Saturday, prompting police to intervene and detain the man, whom it did not name. Alinejad said both police and family members could be seen in the full version of the video she received, but not in the shortened clip that she shared online. In the online video, the school staffer says he showed the students pornographic videos on his phone for fun. Parents can be heard demanding to know if he engaged in sexual activity with the boys as well. The man denies it. Tasnim published two reports Tuesday, one quoting Tehran education officials and the other quoting the city's chief prosecutor Jafari Dolatabadi, as saying the school staffer was arrested in response to complaints from the parents and faces prosecution. The news agency is affiliated to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Alinejad said the family members with whom she communicated told her that Iranian authorities had warned them not to share the video of the school staffer with foreign media. But, she said the family members decided to send her the video to pressure the authorities to act against the alleged abuser. Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei has faced domestic criticism for his handling of a previous sex abuse scandal involving prominent Iranian Koran reciter Saeed Toosi. Toosi is known for reciting the Koran at state events attended by senior officials, including Khamenei. In January, an appeals court acquitted Toosi of sexually abusing boys whom he had taught in previous years, allegations that had prompted a lower court to sentence him to four years in prison. Iranian lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi was among the domestic critics of Toosi's acquittal. In a January 26 tweet, he said: "Evidence appears to show that the child-molesting Koran reciter has the support of a person or persons within the supreme leader's office." Toosi has denied the charges against him. This report was produced in collaboration with VOA's Persian Service. About the author: Michael Lipin covers international news for VOA on the web, radio and TV, specializing in the Middle East and East Asia Pacific. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_Lipin The Member of Parliament (MP) for Bolgatanga Central, Mr Isaac Adongo, has accused the Bank of Ghana (BoG) for weakening public confidence in the banking sector. In a letter to the Central Bank, the MP said the conduct and inactions of the regulatory body was fuelling heightened systemic risks and worsening confidence in the banking sector. He said the summary of the economic and financial data that was recently published at the Monetary Policy Meeting of the BoG clearly showed a worsening banking sector and, therefore, called for immediate steps to address the issue. Mr Adongo, who is also a member of Parliaments Finance Committee, further mentioned the delay in the release of the audited financial statements of the GCB Bank and some corporate governance issues at ADB Bank, as some of the challenges the BoG must pay attention to. Financial statement of GCB Explaining further his position, Mr Adongo said the GCB had not filed its audited financial statements with the BoG in accordance with section 90(2) of the Banks and Special Deposit Institutions Act 2016, Act 930. It is strange that the BoG has remained loudly silent in the face of this breach and has not done anything to assure the market of steps taken to avert any negative consequences of this breach on the broader banking sector, given the size and stature of GCB in the financial markets of Ghana, he noted. He added, I am aware that the GCB and not the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the BoG issued a statement somewhere in April 2018 claiming to have obtained approval from Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to file its audited financial statements at the end of May. This is clearly unacceptable as the market expects the regulators to give such assurances and not the one in breach of the law. Heightened anxiety To date, he stated that no statement had been made by the regulator to clear the air and give confidence to the market, something he argued had heightened anxiety among industry players in the face of the lack of information regarding the impact of the takeover of UT/Capital banks by the GCB, especially its liquidity situation and quality of its assets after the takeover of the selected assets and liabilities of the resolved banks. Mr Adongo said that had also led to fears in the banking sector, following requests by the GCB to the BoG for expensive liquidity support after taking over the banks. The situation, he stated, had led to significant outflows from the GCBs cheaper liquid assets to fund deposits of UT/Capital banks. This has also heightened the risk profile of the GCB in the financial sector resulting in challenges with trade-related support from correspondent and partner banks, he posited. 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. Featured Video In their bid to offer convenient banking services and provide value to both existing and potential SME clients, Fidelity Bank has organized a summit for SMEs to interact with them on how the bank can better assist their businesses grow. Held at the Accra City Hotel, the summit afforded the bank an opportunity to listen to the concerns and challenges of SMEs due to the current challenges facing the financial sector in general and how the bank is positioned to continue to support businesses. Explaining the banks interest in the growth of SMEs, Director of Commercial and SME Banking at Fidelity Bank, Nana Esi Idun-Arkhurst, stated, As one of the top 7 banks in Ghana, we are very much committed to the growth and success of SMEs since SMEs support the general economy to expand. We are ready increase support in the form of unique products, specialized services and financial & technical assistance to grow and expand Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) in the country. We want to work together with all SMEs to help them identify risks early in their businesses in order to properly manage those risks, she added. The Director of Finance of Fidelity Bank, Mr. Atta Gyan, explained to businesses why Fidelity Bank is the bank of the moment and why SMEs must continue to transact business with the bank. He educated SMEs on the factors that constitute a strong bank and how the bank is performing in terms of its capital adequacy ratio, liquidity position, quality of earnings and quality of management and staff. He added that businesses must trust local banks like Fidelity Bank since the bank has recorded consistent higher performance for over 10years now. Other directors of the bank also encouraged SMEs to utilize services like Letters of Credit, Documentary Collections, Open Accounts and Advance Payment. SMEs were also exposed to the process involved in online transactions using the banks Internet Banking Platform. Another important service, the Collections Management System, which is a dynamic collections tool that offers convenience for establishing collection agreements with businesses was also introduced to SMEs The interactive session saw most SMEs voicing out their challenges and receiving real time solutions from Relationship Managers of the bank. Source: Peacefmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Anas-Kwesi Nyantakyi issue has taken a different twist. Kennedy Agyapong is waging a campaign to discredit the man known for his impactful exposes, and the wearing of facial masks. I agree with Ken Agyapong; the alleged method of extracting information from Anas victims look unethical, and blackmailing. I am not in this case impugning that Anas is blackmailing his victims to extort money. But if you set me up to become a victim, you are blackmailing me, and I believe that must not be allowed to persist. The real investigation is when a Journalist tracks illegal activity, real time, to collect concrete evidence, in their naturally unfolding environment, and presents the evidence as prove of wrongdoing. Anas investigation into the Osu Childrens Home, where he became a worker in that facility, and filmed real time abuses, is an example of what is authentic investigation. No matter how we feel about Kwesi Nyantekyi, it is wrong for Anas to set him up, induce him with corrupt money, and turn around to accuse him of being corrupt. We are all anti-corruption campaigners. But we must uphold the dignity of those we suspect to be corrupt. We cannot, in our quest to fight corruption, present ourselves in a manner that victimizes our targets, no! We seek justice, and so in seeking this justice, we must ourselves protect our targets in manners that gives them the same justice we seek fairness that ensures justice for all. If Anas alleged method holds, in getting Kwesi Nyantakyi convicted, then he, Anas, himself, must necessarily stand accuse of bribery, because that is the law, the giver and the receiver are both guilty. So if setting up one person is good enough to achieve conviction, then the act of setting up the other person, regardless of the intention, must necessarily attract the equivalent penalty. We cannot save one, and leave the other to go, no! I did not watch the last episode on the judges. My understanding of that expose was that Anas monitored some judges, on real time cases, as the bribing occurred alongside the twisted judgments, and that caused the judges to lose their jobs. If that was not the case, then I guess I will like to agree with Kennedy Agyapong, that we need to revisit their cases. For if Anas and his Tiger Eye PI team, bribed the judges, themselves, and got the judges to twist judgment in the direction of their bribes, then we must take a look at the circumstances of the bribery, and how it might have impacted justice, or how it would have impacted justice, if those circumstances were not as artificial as it was presented. I have also heard accusations of Anas blackmailing people to acquire high rise buildings. Of course these are legitimate questions to raise, if there is a reasonable cause to suspect so. If indeed Anas is blackmailing victims to extort money from them, then it raises serious criminal questions that needs to be investigated. I expect that by now Anas would have been invited for questioning and investigations. I would have also expected that by now, if the accusations are untrue, then Anas should have issued a statement, he should have given ultimatum for retraction, and he should have been heading to court. I have seen a new video from Tiger Eye PI, where it feels as though Anas is ignoring Kennedy Agyapongs accusations, and calling his bluff. No! That is not respectful for those of us who admire your work, and who believes in you, that you hold a moral mantle, an integrity touch, and in whom we put our confidence, that you have become our bearer, to shine light on our darkest moments. It is, definitely, serious to learn of some of these allegations, especially since we are aware that you, in the past, have done some investigations that never got released. What were the circumstances that prevented the release of those investigations? Were they part of the bribe collecting allegations that Ken has raised? We need answers. If these allegations are not thoroughly dealt with, it has the potential to cast doubt on any anticorruption campaign that is waged in this country, and that will give corrupt men and women the courage to plunge our countrys resources. So dont ignore the allegations, even if you know for sure that they are untrue. You will have to go all the way to the courts, to sue Kennedy Agyapong for defamation, for libel, and for anything the law allows you, and you will have to take heavy compensation if you are proven to be innocent of the allegations. It is this way, of exonerating yourself, that will protect the rest of us, and instill the needed confidence to continue the fight against corruption. My information is that the Tiger Eye PI is a for-profit company. This raises a number of questions. If Tiger Eye was an NGO, then it has the ability to receive grants, and donations. But a for-profit company has serious limitations of receiving gifts. Which means most of the income for Tiger Eye are from charges for services they render to their clients. The question then is, who are his clients, and how much do they pay the company? There are UN guidelines for charging clients per hour, and per day. Since Tiger Eye PI is a service company, it means they will have to conform to those per hour, per day charge guidelines. So it should be easy to verify income, expenses, and to ascertain obligations. If the allegation of Anas owning several high rise buildings in prime areas in Accra, are true, then we will have to ask whether Tiger Eye has received contracts sufficient enough to acquire all those properties, especially within the spate of time the company began to operate. And as someone who is fighting corruption, I expect that Tiger Eye, and Anas for that matter, should be fatefully paying their taxes. I expect the Ghana Revenue Authority to move in quickly to assess those properties known to belong to the anticorruption fighter, to satisfy itself that the man has diligently paid all of his tax obligations to the state. If he has not, and there is a clear case of deliberate attempt to evade tax payments, then Anas has serious questions to answer, of his integrity, and questions of his Journalism. I have done it thrice in the past case or so, when under some hoax allegations, I published, fully, every single thing that belongs to me, and how I came by them although they are only a very few assets with very insignificant values, and although I do not hold any legal obligation to do so. Of course sometimes people wrongly assume that what belongs to the company, or the organization, belongs to the leader personally. So for instance, people see a giant cold store in Winneba and instantly thinks that it belongs to me personally. So those wrong attributions are common, but we cannot ignore them. We must provide answers when asked, just as we demand answers, when we ask. I am a social entrepreneur. For the avoidance of doubt, I have decided to personally own nothing, even if the thing owned is in my personal name that my children will have nothing as their inheritance from me. But beyond this resolve, and in the meantime that I am alive, and have somethings ascribed to my name, I should be able to prove to anyone, whether a stranger, or a casual man, I should be able to prove the source of every single thing that I own, and I should be able to justify those sources. I believe that is an important way for me to hold another person accountable. I cannot hide the source of my wealth from the public, even if I am a private person, but hold myself publicly in fighting public corruption, when I know that my tax obligations are inextricably linked to my moral courage to demand of the other persons accountability. We cannot present ourselves as thin gods, untouchables, just because we wear masks, we carry cameras, and we hold pens. We must hold ourselves as nothing as our calling demands, so that in presenting our nothingness, we shall be seen worthy of societys light and trust. We hold the same obligations towards society, to live our practice, in much the same way as we hold public office holders to their office. Source: James Kofi Annan/[email protected] Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Executive Director of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Prof Kenneth Attafuah has dismissed controversies about the National Identification Card registration exercise. The commencement of the registration of Ghanaians for the issuance of the national ID cards by the NIA was scheduled on Monday, May 28, 2018. The NIA suspended the exercise due to technical glitches. Speaking in an interview with host Kwami Sefa Kayi on Peace FM's Kokrokoo on Tuesday, May 29, 2018, the Authority's Executive Director has confirmed the suspension of the exercise blaming it on logistical and technical challenges. He however failed to provide an exact date to commence the exercise after the unsuccessful attempt but noted it has been postponed to a later date. The registration exercise is intended to cost Ghana $1.2 billion. Following the number of setbacks the project has suffered, the NIA has come under intense criticisms over the numerous failures that have characterized the exercise. Some critics have questioned the NIA to provide explanations to how they arrived at the specified amount for the project. Addressing the issue on Peace FM's Kokrokoo, Prof Kenneth Attafuah sought to clear the doubts in the minds of Ghanaians explaining the new card system by the current administration will give tremendous benefits to the nation. The size of the population is larger. The size and quality of the card is larger and bigger, and superior. The security features are amazing. Anyone who gets it automatically has an electronic passport for travel within West Africa . . . All the other card systems that are being talked about do not have these features . . . it is superior. It is cost effective, he said. He noted that the exercise will generate revenues for the country. He added that the project is cost effective, hence not incurring any financial burdens on Ghanaians. Touching on the $1.2 billion stipulated for the project, Prof Attafuah stated the exercise will span for 15 years, hence a justification for the amount. Its been the most transparent process . . . If the national ID project were doing doesnt become effective, Ghana stands to suffer. If the national ID project is successful, the opportunity and benefits are so immense and mind-boggling. This is, in itself, a revenue generating platform, he said. Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video A rape suspect was found not guilty after he dropped his trousers and showed his penis to a stunned jury in court. Desmond James, 26, was allowed to flash jurors in the US courtroom to prove his privates didn't match his accuser's description. His accuser said she was raped in 2012 by a stranger whose penis was lighter in colour than the rest of his skin. James was brought before New Haven court, in Connecticut, after she picked him out of a photo line up as her attacker. But his lawyer argued his privates were darker than the rest of his body and asked the judge if the defendant could prove it by showing his manhood to the jury. Judge Elpedio Vitale agreed his right to a fair trial meant the indecent exposure was necessary for the defence's case. But Mr Vitale failed to warn the two women and six men on the jury about what they were going to see - saying only the defence was going to offer evidence that is "sensitive in nature and highly personal". They were gobsmacked when James stripped off and exposed himself, witnesses said. There were a number of troubling aspects in terms of the allegation. It evoked negative racial stereotypes, Todd Bussert, defending, said. We felt in general that it didnt describe our client. Two days later, on Friday, James was cleared of three counts of sexual assault. The testimony was embarrassing for James especially because court workers suddenly filled the room to see the spectacle but worth it in the end, the lawyer said. If your liberty is at stake, he was willing to do that, Mr Bussert said. Despite being cleared of the rape, James is still serving time behind bars. He is already doing 65 years for breaking into a house and raping a 10-year-old girl, according to the New York Post. Source: thesun.co.uk Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Twenty-five companies globally, have expressed interest to build the railway to connect Ghana and Burkina Faso after the close of the international competitive tender for potential contractors submitted bids. The companies included; Power China Sino Hydro, M and J group, Frontline Capital Advisors, African Global Development, Geo Service Limited, Jet Contractors and Geo Service Limited. A joint committee from both countries, would from Tuesday, May 29, commence the evaluation processes to select the most suitable company for the project. Mr Joe Ghartey, Minister of Railway Development speaking at a short ceremony to ascertain the number of companies who have submitted their bids to the committee said the many companies who had expressed interest would make the process competitive as desired by both countries. He said the joint project marked a new era, bringing African countries to gather to undertake projects that would help develop the sub-region. The Minister said the proposed rail network was expected to pass through the Eastern Corridor of Ghana starting from the Tema Port, through Akosombo, Ho, Hohoe, Yendi, Tamale and to Paga. Mr Ghartey noted that the line would continue in Burkina Faso from Dakola going through Po along the national highway number five, integrating the pole of growth of Bagre and ends at Ouagadougou. Mr Andy Appiah-Kubi, Deputy Minister of Railways Development explained that the project was expected to be undertaken through a Public Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement with the intention to reduce the time and resources people spent transacting business between Ghana and Burkina Faso. He noted that the two governments had agreed that the project would be financed on a Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) basis. Mr Stephane Ouedrago, Special Counselor, Economic and Finance of Burkina Faso said the decision to forge an alliance with Ghana to build the rail was important to the people of Burkina due to its many benefits in the area of economic and transportation. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The EU will deploy observers to Zimbabwe's general elections, expected in July. The EU and Zimbabwe's government signed a memorandum on 28 May, which outlined the guidelines for election monitors, AFP reports. This is the first time in 16 years the EU will be monitoring polls in the country. It is also the first elections following the removal from power of long-time ruler Robert Mugabe and the death of veteran opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. President Emmerson Mnangagwa is running for office, with Nelson Chamisa - who sees himself as Mr Tsvangirai's heir - expected to be his main challenger. Source: BBC Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Work has commenced for the construction of a 20- foot monument in honour of late Major Maxwell Adams Mahama at the Airport Hills Roundabout to serve as a reminder to all Ghanaians not to indulge in mob justice. Major Mahama was part of an anti-Galamsey Task Force and was lynched by a mob while jogging at Denkyira Obuasi on May 29, 2017 on suspicion that he was an armed robber. The gruesome murder shocked the whole nation, with President Akufo-Addo promoting the soldier posthumously from a Captain to a Major. Besides, he gave him a state burial and set up a Trust Fund to cater for his wife and two children. President Akufo-Addo also made a personal donation of GH 50,000 towards the fund. At the sod-cutting ceremony for the commencement of construction, the Minister of Defence, Dominic Nitiwul, said government through the Ministry of Defence made a number of promises and had fulfilled all the promises because of the circumstances surrounding his death. He noted that the erection of the monument would serve as a reminder to the present and future generation that mob justice should not be tolerated in a civilized society. He thanked the family for having faith in the government and the people of Ghana by remaining calm to date. He also urged all to be patient while the judicial process continues for the perpetrators to get their punishment. The Chief of Defence Staff, Major General O B Akwa, in an address, said after consultations, a consensus had been reached to construct the monument at the airport hills roundabout. It is my hope that the monument when completed will remind Ghanaians of the need to seriously campaign against mob action and instant justice, he stressed. Deputy Director for Engineer Services, Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Takyei, who gave the description of the monument, said the upper side of the monument symbolizes the Late Major Mahama; the middle side of it symbolizes the action that happened at Denkyira Obuasi; and beneath are inscriptions of Major Mahama, the incident and the description of the monument. The statue is eight feet tall portrait of the late soldier with an outstretched hand asking all Ghanaians to stop mob justice while the right hand is aimed over his weapon. He noted that the idea behind the monument is to portray the late officer as a hero and an astute gentleman. The ceremony was also attended by family members of the late Major Mahama including his father, mother, wife and service chiefs (both serving and retired). The rest were Deputy Greater Accra Regional Minister, Madam Elizabeth Sackey; Member of Parliament for La Dadekotopon, Vincent Sowah Odotei; MCE of the area, Mann Dedey; the La Mantse, Nii Dr Kpobi Tetteh III; Board Chairman, Museum and Monuments Board, Mr Kwame Sowu, among other dignitaries. 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. Featured Video Member of Parliament for Assin Central, Kennedy Agyapong has cautioned the Editor-in-Chief of the New Crusading Guide Newspaper, Abdul Malik Kweku Baako not to dare him on Anas Aremeyaw Anas expose due to the respect he has for him. To him, Kweku Baako keeps defending Anas because he knows not the caliber of person he is dealing with. I respect Kwaku Baako very much but he should be very careful not to dare me otherwise I will bring out all information to show Anas Aremeyaw Anas is corrupt, wicked, evil, extortionist, blackmailer and a thief who lures people and institutions in making his so-called investigative videos if he tries defending him. I am not afraid of him, but what is fair should be fair, he said. Kennedy Agyapong insisted that he is angry and ready with all facts of prove about Anas because he has been so unfair to citizens and is about time we expose his counterfeit practices. What is going on in this country? That Anas should be given the space to be destroying people through his dubious means of making wealth. I Am so crazy about this issue even though am not in any of his videos, because I want Ghanaians to know that Anas is not genuine but keeps blackmailing people to make wealth, he added. In further explanation, he declared NDC paid Anas off not to release a video he recorded in Dubai some time ago about some NDC top officials, but they in the NPP are not afraid of him and will make him know his limit by showing him who he is. I have not been able to sleep today, just because of this Anas guy who thinks he is the only person who has the sense of investigating corrupt practices in this country, he is just getting me bored, Kennedy Agyapong noted. Speaking on Adom TVs Badwam Mpensenpensenmu programme, the Assin Central MP lamented I am not against Anas investigating a corrupt person but his procedure is completely wrong. Secondly, he who claims somebody is corrupt is the worst of all corrupt persons. Source: Elizabeth Semiheva Bedi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Audio Attachment: Listen to Kweku Baako Jnr on Peace FM's 'kokrokoo' programme. Editor in-chief of the New Crusading Guide, Abdul Malik Kweku Baako says numerous utterances and accusations been made by Assin Central MP Kennedy Agyapong against ace investigative journalist, Anas Aremeyaw Anas are all untrue and doesnt depict NPP thoughts. Kennedys accusations and attacks isnt anything new. I dont know his motive for circulating acclaimed pictures of Anas and his boys. I have seen some and I cant recognize Anas and any of his boys in the pictures. I sincerely believe at this stage that Kennedy Agyapong is not speaking for his party [NPP]. This is him talking and not the partys view. He said on Peace FMs flagship morning show Kokrokoo. According to the veteran journalist, Anas is not corrupt, evil and wicked as purported by the NPP lawmaker and also indicated that Anas is not fraud and not engaging in any fraudulent act in the country. The outspoken MP, earlier this week, described how investigative journalist, Anas Aremeyaw Anas goes about his investigative works in very unpalatable words. While discussing the latest and yet-to-be-released work of the Tiger Eye PI, the maverick politician took pains to lay bare the methods employed by Anas, describing them as unethical and unlawful. Agyapong has alleged that investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas took money to spike a scandalous investigative piece involving some persons close to Mr John Mahama in Dubai during the erstwhile Mahama administration. But Abdul Malik Kweku Baako emphatically told host of Peace FMs morning show Kwami Sefa Kayi that, There is no such video. Anas has done nothing of that sort. Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/Peacefmonline.com/ Twitter: @Washman5/ Instagram: Ambrose_wash Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Functional Executive Committee (FEC) of the NDC, has urged the National Identification Authority (NIA) to include voters ID cards to the list of required documents for the registration for the Ghana card. According to the NIA, per ACT 950 (2017), the use of only Passports and Birth Certificates will be the base documents for the creation of the Ghana Card. But Speaking on Okay FM's 'Ade Akye Abia' programme, the General Secretary of the NDC, Johnson Asiedu Nketia said they granted audience to the NIA led by the Executive Secretary Professor Ken Attafuah, in relation to the matter, indicating that implementation of the Act will deny majority of Ghanaians the opportunity to acquire the Ghana card. The FEC of the NDC has made it abundantly clear that the implementation of the provisions of the Act will deny the vast majority of the population the opportunity to acquire the Card. The NDC also expressed its deep concerns about the limitation as it will impose on ordinary Ghanaians who through no fault of theirs do not own neither Passports nor Birth Certificates as well as the fact that this current dispensation will undermine the legitimacy of the Voters ID Card as declared by the Supreme Court in its ruling vis-a-vis the Abu Ramadan case in 2016. A Copy Of The Statement Below: NDC Expresses Deep Misgivings Over Intended Ghana Card Issuance The Functional Executive Committee (FEC) of the NDC, this afternoon granted audience to Ghana Card Team led by the Executive Secretary of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Professor Ken Attafuah, in relation to issues that have to do with ACT 950 (2017), which makes the use of only Passports and Birth Certificates the base documents for the creation of the intended Ghana Card. The FEC of the NDC has made it abundantly clear that the implementation of the provisions of the Act will deny the vast majority of the population the opportunity to acquire the Card. The NDC has expressed its deep concerns about the limitation it will impose on ordinary Ghanaians who through no fault of theirs do not own niether Passports nor Birth Certificates as well as the fact that this current dispensation will undermine the legitimacy of the Voters ID Card as declared by the Supreme Court in its ruling vis-a-vis the Abu Ramadan case in 2016. The NDC is of the considered view that this new exercise will not promote the stability of the State as it will only seek to make some Ghanaians become more Ghanaian than others in direct contravention of the 1992 Constitution. While reiterating its support for the provision of Identity Cards for Ghanaians, FEC expressed concerns at certain provisions of the Act which will prevent fellow citizens from the process of registration. FEC takes note of the fact certain provisions of the Act which was passed under a Certificate of Urgency will impose limitations on ordinary Ghanaians who do not possess passports nor Birth Certificates. The FEC considers as cumbersome the process of verification for Ghanaians without the two IDs. The FEC reiterates its demand to the NIA and we wish by this Release to call for a review of the Ammendment to Act 750 (2008), and ensure that the Voters ID Card is added to the set of Identity Documents required for registration even as the NIA is working to resolve its technical issues which prevented the commencement of the Excercise yesterday. The NDC is also alarmed at the cost of $1.2 Billion that this project will cost the people of Ghana as it is not in consonance with President Akufo-Addo's often touted mantra of "Protecting The Public Purse" and we are calling on all well-meaning Ghanaians to demand answers relating to issues bordering on value for money. Johnson Asiedu Nketiah (NDC, General Secretary) Tuesday, May 29, 2018. Source: Isaac Kwame Owusu/Peacefmonline.com/[email protected] Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Leaders of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) have gone on their knees to beg the rank and file of the party to forgive them. They are now admitting that they really messed up and that led to the partys massive defeat in 2016, noting that the division in the party ahead of the polls caused them a lot. They have subsequently appealed to them to support them (leaders) to win the 2020 general election. At an event in Koforidua in the Eastern Region organized by the Tertiary Institution Network (TEIN) the tertiary institution wing of the NDC the partys MP for Sagnarigu, ABA Fuseini, said, Those of us in the leadership of the NDC in the run-up to the 2016 elections, committed many mistakes from his Excellency the President to the Vice President, to the ministers to us the MPs, the National Executives, every one of us, even including some of us in this room He added, And so like Ex-President Mahama has passionately accepted responsibility and appealed to us, I want to reiterate that we should find space in our hearts to forgive one another. We should find space in our hearts to leave what happened yesterday behind, Im not saying we should forget it; lets keep it in our memory so that we dont go back and make the same mistakes. But lets forgive and move forward. When you trip and fall, you dont look at where youre falling, you look at where you tripped so that you can draw useful lessons. After the 2016 defeat, the NDC tasked a 13-member Committee headed by former Finance Minister Prof. Kwesi Botchwey, to find out why they lost; and the findings indicated among other things, that it was due to the abuse of incumbency and the corruption tag put on Mr. Mahama and his appointees. The NDC candidate and incumbent President Mahama set record when he became the first leader in Ghanas democratic rule to lose a second term bid in an election. He was beaten with a margin of over one million votes by then opposition candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Apart from President Mahamas humiliating defeat, the NDC also lost about 49 parliamentary seats to the NPP and are now minority in parliament with only 104 seats against the NPPs 171. Since Mr. Mahama declared his intention to lead the NDC once again, a serious fight has ensued in the opposition party over who is the right candidate to be the flag bearer for 2020. Although he is the main contender to beat in the yet-to-be organized NDC primary to select a flag bearer, some of Mr. Mahamas opponents in his own party are having issues with him over the declaration. They are saying that the NDC cannot win the 2020 election with Mr. Mahama as its flag bearer because they claim they cant campaign on the sordid track record of the former president. 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. Featured Video Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Export Promotion Authority (GEPA), Gifty Klenam, has dismissed media reports that she and one of her deputies, Eric Amoako Twum, are indulging in massive mismanagement of funds belonging to the authority. According to reports, Madam Klenam and her deputy have collected $132,000 or GH580,800 for house rent, covering a period of two years in gross violation of state procurement laws. But in a press statement issued by the authority on Tuesday the allegations were denied outright with no explanation. The statement indicated that the Ghana Export Promotion Authority by this release denies the allegations as put in the media. It said, we further assure our esteemed stakeholders that the Audit Service of Ghana, as mandated by law, has as is periodically required and done, scheduled to conduct their routine audit, and the management of GEPA shall in deference to the integrity of the office of audit, await the settlement of the facts of the matter. However, even though the CEO and the authority have denied the allegations, checks by DAILY GUIDE indicated that she and her deputy actually collected the said amounts for their accommodations when GEPA is in desperate need of funds to boost its export promotion activities of non-traditional commodities. According to sources, workers at GEPA are seething with anger over the alleged reckless spending by the CEO. The amount was said to have actually been cashed from First Atlantic Bank Ghana and used for the rents, and the authority in its response failed to address the substantive issues that have been raised against Ms Klenam and her deputy. Reports have it that the CEO and her deputy, in a letter dated 23rd May, 2017, and jointly signed by the two of them, ordered the Manager of First Atlantic Bank Ghana Limited to effect the transfer of the cedi equivalent of $132, 000 from account number 0360571101014 and credit same to account number 0360571101025. The letter said Mr. Twum was to receive the money on behalf of the authority, and that the money was subsequently withdrawn in two tranches, with $100,000 withdrawn on May 23, 2017 and $32,000 withdrawn on May 26, 2017. Ms Klenam had reportedly parted with $72,000 as rent allowance at $3,000 a month for 24 months while her deputy Mr. Twum collected $60,000 at $2,500 a month for 24 months. Again, Ms. Klenam has been accused of paying herself GH 93,000 for clothing allowance, and has also been accused of paying $19,500 for a training programme at Harvard University in the United States of America. Furthermore, it is alleged that she has also authorized the purchasing of two new Toyota Land Cruiser vehicles and two new Saloon cars for herself and her deputy and a new Nissan Teana car for her assistant. 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. Featured Video Central Regional Chairman of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Bernard Allotey Jacobs has called for the immediate removal from office of the Executive Secretary of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Prof. Ken Attafuah. Speaking on UTVs Adekye Nsroma programme, he stressed that the best procedure for Prof. Attafuah who calls himself expert in the field he heads, was to first start the process from the villages, in way of testing the machines to be in good shape, before involving dignitaries. How can Prof. Ken Attafuah on two occasion set the President, his Vice and some top officials up for what he claims is caused by technical hitch? I call on President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to get him immediately out of office for incompetency, he said. According to Allotey Jacobs, the creation of the NIA with new equipment to facilitate a nationwide issuance of a national ID card, known as the Ghana Card is a waste of money to the country. Creation of the NIA is just a waste of money in this third world country . . . they could have integrated everything into one card as well as make use of the machines used by the Electoral Commission [EC] , since they are not using those machines now, he suggested. BACKGROUND The National Identification Authority, (NIA) Monday apologized to Ghanaians for being unable to start the national mass registration exercise with the selected institutions, attributing the failure to a technical hitch, which it is working feverishly to resolve. In a statement, signed by its Acting Director of Corporate Affairs, Mr. Francis Palmdeti, it stated, The National Identification System has suffered a technical hitch, which has affected the NIAs ability to commence roll-out as scheduled. Details of the technical difficulties will be communicated to the general public in due course. Our technical team is working fervently to resolve the issue for registration to begin. Under the circumstance registration was suspended today until the problem is completely resolved. Source: Elizabeth Semiheva Bedi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video KT Hammond, the Member of Parliament for Adansi Asokwa has said the decision on his motion for rescission of the 2015 AMERI deal would put to rest all disagreements over the deal. This follows media reports of a document purportedly from the Attorney-General warning the Ministry of Energy not to terminate the deal for fear of judgment debt. The Minority, on the other hand, believe this is a vindication of their long-held stance that there was nothing untoward with the 510 million dollar AMERI deal. KT Hammonds motion for the rescission of the deal is still on the table of the Mines and Energy Committee of Parliament months after the committee took up the matter. KT Hammond indicated to Citi News that the AMERI deal amounts to a gross misrepresentation which is enough bases in law for it to be terminated. It is by some chance or coincides that we got those document. I got them, and I presented them to the house to contrast to the information, we originally had on the basis of which I argued that there has been a misrepresentation and of course misrepresentation in law leads to termination, he said. In 2015,UAE-based Ameri Group LLC, in a statement denied engaging in a dubious deal with the government of Ghana, about power plants it procured for the country to solve its energy crisis. The story said Ghana is paying $510 million for ten power turbines when the market value of the turbines is $220 million. Former Head of Communications for the Ministry of Petroleum, Edward Bawa, rejected the accusations that the erstwhile government paid $150 million extra in the AMERI power plant deal. According to him, the payment was a sound investment decision by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government in a bid to end the chronic energy crisis during that time. A committee constituted by the Energy Minister to review the AMERI deal signed by the former government revealed in a report that the contract was overpriced by about $150 million. The committee advised the government to re-negotiate or abrogate the contract on the grounds of fraud. This is after it emerged that Ghana paid an extra 150 million dollars as commission to Africa & Middle East Resources Investment Group LLC (Ameri Energy) for the construction of the power plant. Source: Citi Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video A police officer in northeastern Pennsylvania has filed suit against the city she works for demanding 15 hours of overtime pay for going to physical therapy for a sprained neck on her own time. As the Citizens Voice reports, Nanticoke, Pa., police officer Kara Kroll says in the suit she missed a week of work after suffering a sprained neck while on duty on Oct. 7, 2016. Injured Nanticoke, Pa., police officer Kara Kroll Her lawsuit against the city seeks more than 15 hours of overtime pay she says she is owed because officials would not let her go to physical therapy during work, the newspaper writes, adding: The city required Kroll to schedule the doctor appointments outside of her normal eight-hour shift, according to the complaint. Her attorney says this is overtime because the ongoing physical therapy for a work-related injury was "necessary and for the benefit of (the city)." The lawsuit alleges Kroll is due an hour of overtime for each of 15 days she went to physical therapy before or after her shift. She makes about $20 an hour and is entitled to time-and-a-half pay after working 40 hours in one week, the complaint says. Nanticoke Mayor Rich Wiaterowski told the Citizens Voice said an arbitrator had already ruled on the issue in favor of the city when Kroll brought a grievance over the same matter. "We already won that case," Wiaterowski was quoted as saying. As Memorial Day approached, Sgt. Eddison Alexander Hermond took to Facebook to urge his friends to be kind to one another in honor of the holiday. "Okay kiddos, it's Friday and the start of Memorial Day weekend," the 39-year-old wrote early that morning. "Let's get the hate out of our hearts. Focus on the positives and let's all, for once, enjoy life as it's meant to be enjoyed." "We're free because people gave their lives for us to live this way," wrote the Air Force veteran and former National Guardsman. "So . . . . stop being mad for one single weekend. PLEASE." On Sunday, Hermond was heeding his own advice, drinking with his friends at a restaurant in downtown Ellicott City, Maryland, when a rainstorm outside morphed into a relentless downpour, then a torrential flood. As powerful waters ripped through the historic Maryland mill town, inundating stores, upending cars and destroying a 180-year-old stone cottage, Hermond spotted a woman outside who was caught in the rising currents. He ran toward her, pausing at the edge of an overflowing creek. He gestured at her to hold on. On the other side, Kate Bowman couldn't hear his words over the roar of the flood, but she saw him take a step toward her. Then he was gone. After two days of drones and cadaver dogs and search parties, after false reports and false hope, rescue workers pulled Hermond's body from the Patapsco River. News of his death stunned his family and many friends. "With all the people they had searching out there, we just didn't believe he'd be found dead," said his aunt Nina Cooper, who lives in Brooklyn. "We all had our hopes. But after we went down into the woods looking for him, it started to sink in." "I'm completely heartbroken now, just like so many others who loved Eddie so much," said Jennifer Mead, who served in the Air Force with Hermond and had known him for 15 years. Hermond, who had a 13-year-old son, grew up in San Diego and joined the Air Force out of high school in 1996. He served for 10 years, including as a cryptologist, and then joined the National Guard in 2009. Throughout life, most people called him Eddie, but he secretly hated that, Mead said. "He wanted everyone to call him Eddison, but by the time he told all of us that, it was way too late," she said. Some friends had another name for the strapping, 6-foot airman. "People called him Superman," she said. While in the Guard, Hermond made a living as a waiter and bartender, first at the Victoria Gastro Pub in Columbia, Maryland, and more recently at the Manor Hill Tavern in Ellicott City. "He said his life's mission was to make everyone else's life better," recalled Anna Cisternino, a friend who often drank with Hermond. He was an easygoing bartender who loved Jameson Irish whiskey but only served himself from the bottom shelf, she said. Only rarely did he mention his time in the Air Force, recounting the time he got lost in South Korea. "He said he'd been through so much crazy stuff," she said. "But he joked his death would likely be caused by something like slipping on a banana peel." Hermond, who lived in Severn, Maryland, had recently left bartending to work in human resources, Cisternino said. A selfie he posted to Facebook shows him smiling in an office. "He just felt like it was time for a change after almost 10 years of bartending," she said. "I feel like he was done doing insane dangerous stuff. It was like, 'I'm an adult now. This is how we're handling things now.' " Cooper said her nephew was looking forward to a quiet life after his National Guard service ended. She hadn't seen him in 20 years, but just happened to catch up with him on Saturday at a family event in Southern Maryland. As their time together wound down, Hermond's mother and aunts reminded him of a family reunion in August. "He assured us that he was going to be there," Cooper said. Ellicott City, Maryland, flash flooding after May 2018 thunderstorm 21 Gallery: Ellicott City, Maryland, flash flooding after May 2018 thunderstorm On Sunday afternoon, Hermond headed to La Palapa, a Mexican restaurant in downtown Ellicott City, where the owner was celebrating his birthday. As he and a group of friends celebrated inside the restaurant, just off Main Street, the waters outside began to rise. Just yards away, across the steep, stone-lined banks of Tiber Creek, Kate Bowman was inside her boutique pet store, Clipper's Canine Cafe. The 41-year-old had moved her store to the Maryland city about a year earlier. She knew about the 1,000-year flood that had killed two people in 2016, she said, "but I never thought it would happen [again] two years later." When the storm started to pick up, and the Tiber began to bubble and foam just outside her shop window, her boyfriend went out to buy sandbags. Bowman called her mom, the store's co-owner. Shortly after 4 p.m., the Tiber began rising above her shop windows. Her boyfriend was trapped by the rising waters and couldn't get back to the store. "It was like ocean waves were just splashing against my doors," she said. "It was terrifying, absolutely terrifying." Within a few minutes, the water had risen so high that she couldn't open her door. She put her cat into a carrier, climbed a table and escaped out a first-story window. She landed in waist-high water, struggling to hold onto the building as the waters buffeted her. "I was floating all over the place," she said. Bowman, who had stowed her glasses to keep from losing them, could barely see. "It was like someone was pouring buckets on my head," she said. "It was just ridiculous. It was like nothing I've experienced in my life." On the other side of the creek - transformed by the flood into a powerful river - she saw a group of people standing outside La Palapa. One of them was a man she would later learn was Hermond. He put his hands up and shouted something to her. "He was telling me to stay," she said. "He was trying to keep me calm." Hermond took a step toward her. "He just stepped over the ledge, and he was immediately washed away," she said, choking back tears. Fueled by hours of torrential rains, the waters - reportedly as high as 15 feet - were so powerful that they felled a 150-year-old tree, collapsed a major road and crumpled three cars underneath a small bridge over the Tiber. It was near that bridge that Bowman watched Hermond vanish. She was able to wend her way to higher ground with her cat, where she was helped by a group from a local wedding. Eventually, she made her way to La Palapa, where she told Hermond's friends what had happened. That evening, Cooper turned on her television and was shocked to see that her nephew was now missing in the flash flood. She called his mother, who was driving to her home in North Carolina. "She lost it," Cooper said. Hermond's mother turned around and headed back to Maryland. She, Cooper and two other sisters spent Monday night searching the woods around Ellicott City for signs of Hermond until a police officer found them about 10 p.m. and assured them that authorities were thoroughly canvassing the area. On Monday, friends gathered at the Victoria Gastro Pub to share stories about Hermond and their hopes that he had survived. That afternoon, several of Hermond's friends had just left a church near Ellicott City when the pastor texted to say that Hermond had been found alive. "I was ecstatic," recalled Kenneth Josepha, a longtime friend of Hermond's. "I was shocked. Adrenaline was pumping." He returned to the church and then headed to the police staging area. But an officer told Josepha that Hermond was not there. So the group headed to the Howard County government building, where a public information officer told them that Hermond had not been found - it was someone else, a homeless man. "We were all devastated and angry that they could confuse them," Josepha said. Bowman also heard that the "hero" who had tried to save her had, himself, been saved. "I was just crying tears of joy, I was so happy," she said. "Then they said, 'No, I'm sorry, it was a false report.' " Almost as painful were the reports by police and others that Hermond had been swept away while helping Bowman save her cat. "If he passed, I want people to know he passed trying to save a person, not a cat," Bowman said in an interview Monday. "He was trying to save me. I want his family to know that." Thousands of friends, family members and strangers shared Hermond's photo on Facebook, hoping it would aid the search. On Monday night, friends again gathered at the Victoria, where they set a shot of Jameson on the counter for him. "Eddie's," they wrote on a napkin. "Do not touch." He would never claim it. Early Tuesday afternoon, Howard County police announced that a body had been found in the Patapsco River about 1 mile below the Main Street bridge. An hour later, they confirmed its identity. A proud veteran had died on Memorial Day weekend. As rescuers - some of them fellow Guardsmen - removed Hermond from the river, his body was draped in an American flag. (c) 2018, The Washington Post * Michael E. Miller, Ian Shapira. The Washington Post's Steve Hendrix contributed to this report. WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused prosecutors working on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election of planning to meddle in this year's midterm elections, escalating his attack on the probe while offering no evidence to back up his assertion. In several morning tweets, Trump attempted to cast himself as the victim of a partisan assault, part of a pattern of political deflection in recent days where the president has made false or exaggerated statements in defending his policies or attacking his perceived enemies. Over the weekend, Trump blamed Democrats for his policy of separating migrant families at the border, falsely said that the New York Times made up a source for a story on negotiations between the United States and North Korea, and continued to claim that the FBI's use of a source to interact with members of his 2016 election team was an attempt to spy on the campaign. Trump's unsupported assertion that prosecutors working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller will affect the midterm elections to help Democrats was his latest effort to discredit the investigation, which is looking into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible coordination between Moscow and Trump's campaign. Republicans risk losing control of the House and possibly the Senate in this year's midterms as Democrats continue to feel emboldened by Trump's unpopularity. The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls. There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2018 The probe, which recently marked its first anniversary, is headed by Mueller, a longtime Republican, and overseen by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Republican and a Trump appointee. But publicly available voter-registration information shows that 13 of the 17 members of Mueller's team have previously registered as Democrats, while four had no affiliation or their affiliation could not be found. Justice Department policies prohibit discrimination in hiring for career positions on the basis of politics. In a second tweet Tuesday, Trump said the special counsel's team should instead be investigating the campaign of his Democratic opponent in the 2016 election, whom he described as "totally Crooked Hillary Clinton." Why arent the 13 Angry and heavily conflicted Democrats investigating the totally Crooked Campaign of totally Crooked Hillary Clinton. Its a Rigged Witch Hunt, thats why! Ask them if they enjoyed her after election celebration! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2018 During the campaign, Trump claimed she should have been prosecuted harshly for lax security in her government email practices when she was secretary of state. His campaign rallies frequently began with chants of "lock her up." Trump is now claiming that the FBI went easy on Clinton and that some people involved in making that decision are working against him in the Mueller probe. When polls suggested that he would lose to Clinton in 2016, Trump cast doubt on the validity of the election process and said at one point that he might not respect the outcome unless he won. In another tweet Tuesday, Trump suggested that the Russia probe was taking away some of his focus on other issues confronting the country, including trade deals and the effort to denuclearize North Korea. Sorry, Ive got to start focusing my energy on North Korea Nuclear, bad Trade Deals, VA Choice, the Economy, rebuilding the Military, and so much more, and not on the Rigged Russia Witch Hunt that should be investigating Clinton/Russia/FBI/Justice/Obama/Comey/Lynch etc. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2018 Trump has at some point attacked each person or organization on his slashmarked list. In the case of the FBI and Justice Department, that has meant assailing the credibility of elements of the federal government that are part of the Mueller effort. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked Tuesday whether Trump is trying to discredit the Mueller probe by calling it a "witch hunt." "I think the president is stating a fact," Sanders replied. "It is a witch hunt," she told reporters traveling with Trump to a campaign rally in Nashville. "He knows exactly what he did and what he didn't do, and he's been very clear from day one that there was no collusion." U.S. intelligence agencies have said they have high confidence that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election to hurt Clinton. By default, that effort would have helped Trump, but Mueller is looking into whether Trump associates played a more an active role. Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is among 19 individuals and entities indicted by Mueller. Some of Mueller's actions remain under seal. Russia denies it interfered in the election. Among those pushing back against Trump's assertions Tuesday was Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who noted the growing list of indictments and guilty pleas in the Mueller probe. "Mueller's work is that of a career prosecutor and law enforcement officer who is squarely focused on getting to bottom of Russia's meddling in our elections and any possible collusion with your campaign and a hostile foreign government," Schumer wrote in a tweet directed at Trump. Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said Tuesday that the president is attacking the Mueller probe because the tactic is working. "As an effective politician, you're not going to do something that you don't think is working," Giuliani said. Trump has taken to calling the FBI's interactions with an informant during the 2016 campaign "spygate" and has suggested without evidence that the FBI planted a mole in his campaign. "Spygate - that's the reason - he's not just ratcheted it up for no reason," Giuliani said. "He believes it is working, and he is genuinely upset about it." From what is known about the FBI effort, it arose from concerns about Russian hacking of Democrats in summer 2016. There is no evidence that the informant, former University of Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, was inserted into the campaign, but he did seek out and meet several Trump campaign advisers. Trump will not agree to an interview with the special counsel until prosecutors allow the president's legal team to review documents related to the FBI's use of the informant, Giuliani said Tuesday. "We need all the documents before we can decide whether we are going to do an interview," Giuliani said in an interview with The Washington Post, using Trump's term "spygate" to refer to the FBI actions, which former officials have said were well within bounds. Giuliani has previously said that Trump has done nothing improper and is eager to talk to Mueller. On Tuesday, though, he said he does not want to make a call on whether Trump will sit down for an interview "until they decide whether they are going to give us the documents or not." Under pressure from the White House and congressional Republicans, the Justice Department last week held an unusual pair of briefings for lawmakers on the FBI's use of the informant. Giuliani said Tuesday that Mueller's attempts to interview Trump indicated that his probe of possible coordination between Russia and the campaign are nearing its end. "I don't think they would have asked to interview him until they are pretty much finished with everything," Giuliani said. "They're only going to get one shot at him. They know that. You look pretty amateurish if you interview him and you don't have all the facts gathered." (c) 2018, The Washington Post. Written by Anne Gearan, John Wagner, and Josh Dawsey. A man accused of pointing a gun at two people inside Arooga's in West Hanover Township on Monday night was taken into custody in Illinois on Tuesday night. Illinois State Police conducted a traffic stop on 24-year-old Collin Mitchell Miller's black Hummer H3 in Du Quoin, Illinois, according to a news release. He was subsequently taken into custody without incident. Police say Miller still had the loaded handgun that was used in Monday's incident. Troopers were dispatched at 10:57 p.m. Monday to Arooga's Bar on Allentown Boulevard, West Hanover Township, for a report of a disturbance. Miller was in the bar with his brother and was harassing an old acquaintance nearby, according to police. Another patron intervened to keep the incident from escalating, and Miller is accused by police of becoming aggressive. Miller then pulled out a small black handgun, put it to the intervening patron's chest, and said "I'm a two-time felon," according to state police. A second patron then tried to smack the gun away from the victim's chest, and Miller than pointed the gun at that patron's head. The second patron then continued to push the Miller away from the initial intervening patron, and Miller then fled the scene. He is currently awaiting extradition back to Pennsylvania, and faces charges of aggravated assault, terroristic threats, prohibited possession of a firearm, carrying a firearm without a license, simple assault, and recklessly endangering another person. By Richard Martinez Kids crave structure and sometimes need a break from it, as well. Richard Martinez (Submitted Photo) As a substitute teacher, I have the best of both worlds, giving students the attention they deserve, while I explore career options that just might lead me back to the classroom. I have mainly worked in two different middle schools in the Harrisburg School District, and in both places, I've had time to get to know the students. I get to start my day hearing, "Good morning, Mr. Martinez!" A few years ago, I wouldn't have seen myself getting serious about substitute teaching, but I realize now that I have always leaned toward education. As I was wrapping up my undergraduate degree in environmental studies, I was applying to graduate schools and throwing out lines to see what stuck. On a whim, I applied to the Peace Corps, mostly to gain experience in geography. To my surprise, they offered me an environmental education position in Paraguay. I couldn't resist the opportunity, so I packed up and headed to South America. There I taught kids about reforestation, biodiversity, and waste management. I also worked with small farmers on integrated pest management, organic farming techniques and soil erosion. Even though I was there as an educator, the biggest accomplishment of my service was helping the community install a potable water system. By the time I left, 400 people had access to a steady, fresh water supply for the first time in their lives. It felt good and gratifying to be of service to my host community and to represent the U.S. abroad. I even met my wife during that time. She was raised in central Pennsylvania, and we came here to live. I knew I wanted to continue making a difference, and when I saw an ad for substitute teachers, I decided to give it a shot. The criteria is pretty straightforward. To substitute in Pennsylvania, you don't need a teaching certificate or a degree in education. You just need a bachelor's degree and security clearances. I've been at it now since January 2018, and I've discovered three great things. First, there's the flexibility. My schedule is my own. I'm still actively looking for work, and if I have a job interview scheduled on a certain day, I can turn down any substitute posting that's offered. For anyone looking for a transition gig, substitute teaching is a great fit. Second, and more importantly, I'm making a difference with the students. That's rewarding. I won't say that it's always easy, especially at the beginning. We all remember our school days when the substitute teacher was fresh meat, but once I make it clear to students that I'm there in the teacher's stead and that whatever they do affects them, not me, they get on board. I give them respect, and it strikes a spark. Consistency makes the big difference for these kids. With boundaries in place - and that's what the substitute teacher provides - they can concentrate on their classwork, and their learning continues without a gap. These days, when every hour matters, that's a crucial role. The teachers I've worked with sincerely appreciate their substitutes. Teachers want to feel confident their students will be in good hands, which is where a good substitute comes in. Finally, I've learned more about my strengths, and that will help me as I plan a career path. I've learned new levels of patience. I've even learned that I might want to teach middle school students. My goal had always been to teach at the college level but opening young minds to new concepts in science at the secondary level has been amazing. Substitute teaching has introduced me to that satisfaction, and it's a feeling that I want to carry throughout my career. Richard Martinez lives in Newport, Perry County and works as a substitute teacher in the Harrisburg School District through A+ Teachers. For more information on becoming a substitute teacher, go to www.abelteachers.com One of the greatest obstacles in the path of a denuclearized North Korea was erected by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton several years ago and half a world away in Libya. Marc A. Scaringi (PennLive file) In 2011, the Arab Spring had sprung and Islamic revolutionaries attacked the secular regime of then Libyan ruler, Moammar Gadhafi. Clinton lobbied successfully for military intervention on behalf of the Libyan rebels, who with this assistance then toppled the regime and executed Gadhafi. Clinton, in a moment of braggadocio that would make President Donald Trump blush, took credit for the slaying of Gadhafi and compared herself to Julius Caesar saying, "We came, we saw, he died." Clinton's decision, however, was a mistake that has imperiled US efforts to achieve the denuclearization of other "rogue" states such as North Korea. Once an international pariah, Gadhafi had been turned around under the administration George W. Bush. Gadhafi had dismantled his weapons of mass destruction, long range missile and nascent nuclear weapons programs. Former President George W. Bush had promised Gadhafi's "good faith would be returned" and offered a normalization of relations and security guarantees. Despite this remarkable progress, a few years later when Gadhafi was in mortal danger, Clinton couldn't resist the opportunity to bring about regime change and be lauded as the conqueror of Gadhafi. Clinton got her scalp, yet the world would pay the price. In response, the North Korean Foreign Ministry stated, "Libya's nuclear dismantlement much touted by the U.S. in the past turned out to be a mode of aggression whereby the latter coaxed the former with such sweet words as 'guarantee of security' and 'improvement of relations' to disarm and then swallowed it up by force." Later, after the U.S. reached the nuclear agreement with Iran, North Korea's ambassador to China said, "The nuclear deterrence of [North Korea] is not a plaything to be put on the negotiating table as it is the essential means to protect its sovereignty and vital rights from the U.S. nuclear threat and hostile policy." With North Korea's well-expressed and grave concerns about the Obama-Clinton bait and switch on Libya so apparent, it's a wonder why President Trump's new National Security Advisor John Bolton would raise that issue as the U.S. and North Korea were preparing for a historic summit on June 12 in Singapore. Ironically the often-bombastic Bolton was using the "Libyan situation" in the context of explaining why the Bush administration's Libyan policy was successful - the Libyans had allowed US inspectors to have direct access to their former nuclear sites. Bolton wasn't talking about how later Obama and Clinton supported the overthrow of Gadhafi. Yet the damage was done. Vice President Mike Pence then added fuel to the fire when he said, "There was some talk about the Libyan model last week, and you know, as the president made clear, this will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong Un doesn't make a deal." Asked if he was issuing a threat, Pence replied, "Well, I think it's more of a fact." This statement and the previous one by Bolton set off the North Koreans. North Korean Vice-Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui called Bolton's statements "reckless" and Pence a "politically dummy." Yet the problem is not the rhetoric; such rhetoric is part of the negotiation tactics of both sides. The problem is the past U.S. foreign policy of Obama and Clinton. The North Korean Vice Foreign Minister's statement revealed once again how deeply Clinton's decision to take out Gadhafi hurt U.S. efforts to work with the North Koreans on their denuclearization. Hui stated, "It is to be underlined, that in order not to follow in Libya's footsteps, we paid a heavy price to build up our powerful and reliable strength that can defend ourselves and safeguard peace and security in the Korean peninsula and the region." President Trump has a lot of work to do to undo the damage of Obama and Clinton's short-sightedness. Despite the media's constant chorus of condemnation, we are in much better hands under a President Trump than under any recent past US president or any of Trump's leading rivals. Unlike most other U.S. political leaders, Trump is a realist in foreign policy. Trump has recently assured the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, that if he cooperates there will be no regime change. This assurance is critically important to the success of the talks. South Korean President Moon Jae-in stated, "What's unclear for Chairman Kim...is not his willingness for denuclearization but whether he can certainly trust the U.S. saying that it'll end hostile relations and guarantee the security of his regime after his denuclearization. Let's hope Trump can overcome the failures of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and convince the North Korean leader that the U.S. will be faithful to its word. A denuclearized Korean peninsula would be a wonderful and remarkable outcome that would benefit the world. Marc A. Scaringi, of Camp Hill, is a PennLive Opinion contributor. His work appears biweekly. By Jan Jarrett "The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people." This coming Jan. 15, either Tom Wolf or Scott Wagner will raise his hand and take a binding oath to uphold the Pennsylvania Constitution. Jan Jarrett (PennLive file) Among the duties the next governor will be obliged to carry out under its provisions is the protection of our air and water and the natural beauty of the Commonwealth as required by the Constitution's Environmental Rights Amendment. Between now and Election Day, Nov. 6, both candidates need to tell Pennsylvanians how they intend to fulfill that legal responsibility. The primary season has not given us much of a preview of either of the candidates' environmental and conservation agendas. Wagner's campaign website contains no mention of environmental policy except indirectly - he pledges to roll back "overregulation." His trash hauling company, Penn Waste, has incurred fines from at least 30 violations of environmental regulations. He has publicly addressed climate change, attributing it to the earth moving ever closer to the sun and the increasing body heat from a growing population. Environmental policy took a back seat during Governor Wolf's first term. There were a few bright spots. In the politically complex forum of the Delaware River Basin Commission, Wolf voted with the governors of Delaware and New York in favor of a resolution to place a permanent ban on fracking in the Delaware watershed. He also signed bipartisan legislation that will put the Pennsylvania solar industry on an equal competitive footing with solar businesses in other states, a welcome recognition of the economic development potential of the clean energy sector. But neither candidate has laid out anything near a vision or plan for how he will protect Pennsylvania's air and water now; and what he can do to conserve our natural resources for our grandchildren. Other governors have achieved landmark conservation and environmental protections. The late Gov. Robert P Casey Sr.'s administration successfully promoted one of the first significant investments in conservation with Key 93, a $100 million conservation bond and a permanent fund, the Keystone Recreation, Park and Conservation Fund, which gets its revenue from a portion of the real estate transfer tax. Former Gov. Tom Ridge created Growing Greener, funded by a fee on garbage dumped at landfills, that provides grants to local organizations for conservation, watershed restoration and recreation projects Ex-Gov. Ed Rendell signed the first legislation requiring energy suppliers to obtain 18 percent of their power from renewable and alternative energy supplies. Rendell successfully campaigned for $625 Growing Greener II bond which was overwhelmingly approved by voters, and issued the $650 million Alternative Energy Investment bond, the largest bond for any purpose in state history. The next governor faces a daunting list of environmental challenges. The air in many parts of Pennsylvania is among the worse in the nation. We have thousands of miles of streams and rivers which do not support fish or provide clean drinking water. The legacy of unregulated historic coal mining has left us with 180,000 acres of unproductive, dangerous and ugly polluted land that holds back economic development in coal communities. And Pennsylvania remains a major global source of the pollution that is disrupting the climate. Neither Wolf nor Wagner will be able to adequately address these problems without a Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) that is fully staffed, adequately funded and independent of political pressure. The Environmental Rights Amendment puts the responsibility of safeguarding our air, water and future environmental quality squarely at the doorstep of the Commonwealth. The Department of Environmental Protection is the state agency charged with carrying out most of those responsibilities. The good news is that solutions to our environmental problems abound. Both candidates can find a comprehensive list of policy options in the Pennsylvania Common Conservation Agenda that contains ideas from 25 of the Commonwealth's environmental and conservation organizations. Both candidates for governor will be bound by the Environmental Rights Amendment to protect our air and water and leave our grandchildren an environment that is at least as good as we now enjoy. They owe the voters their plans for how they will carry out that duty. Jan Jarrett, a former head of the environmental group, PennFuture, is the principal of Ad Hoc LLC. She writes from Harrisburg. The dean of Central Michigan University's College of Education and Human Services has been named as Clarion University's next president. The State System of Higher Education's board on Wednesday hired Dale-Elizabeth Pehrsson, 63, to fill the post, starting on July 1. She will be paid $232,000 a year. The filling of this presidential vacancy leaves Edinboro and Mansfield universities as system schools in search of a permanent president. New presidents will also start July 1 at Millersville, Lock Haven and Slippery Rock universities. Pehrsson comes to the position with more than 25 years of experience in higher education. Her academic career began as an affiliate faculty member and clinical supervisor for counselor education at Idaho State University in 1991. She also has worked in the healthcare field, as a counselor and registered nurse. "Dr. Pehrsson has an extraordinary range of professional experience, as a teacher, practitioner and administrator in both higher education and healthcare," said board Chairwoman Cynthia Shapira. She has been in her current position since 2012. In that role, she serves as the college's chief executive and academic officer, overseeing a $40 million and more than 230 faculty and staff members. "Dr. Pehrsson has a unique set of tools that makes her an ideal fit for Clarion University and its focus on professional programs," system interim Chancellor Karen Whitney, who served as Clarion's president for seven years before assuming her current role in September. "They are a perfect match. I am certain Dale will be a great addition to both Clarion University and the State System. I am thrilled that she will be joining our leadership team." Pehrsson called it an honor to be chosen as the 5,200-student university's 17th president. "Clarion University has a strong reputation and I look forward to building on our long tradition of excellent teaching and service to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," she said. She holds a bachelor's degree from University of State of New York-Albany, master degrees from Idaho State University, as well as associate degrees. During the course of her career, she has worked at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Oregon State University, Portland State University, and Sam Houston State University. This photo provided by the Laguna Beach Police Department shows a Tesla sedan, left, in autopilot mode that crashed into a parked police cruiser Tuesday, May 29, 2018, in Laguna Beach, Calif. Police Sgt. Jim Cota says the officer was not in the cruiser at the time of the crash and that the Tesla driver suffered minor injuries. (Laguna Beach Police Department via AP) Packaged meat is seen at a grocery store in Montreal, Tuesday, May 19, 2015. A national study says confusing and unecessary best-by labels on food are a major cause of food waste in Canada. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz Monique Richard is seen in a gym Tuesday, April 10, 2018 in Montreal. The first woman to climb to the top of Canada's highest mountain in a solo trek says her biggest fear came when she fell into a dangerously deep crevice.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson Hassan Diab speaks with reporters in Ottawa on Wednesday Jan. 17, 2018. French authorities dropped terrorism charges against Diab who was suspected of taking part in an attack in Paris in 1980 and have ordered his immediate release. The federal justice minister has asked for an independent review of an extradition that led to Ottawa professor Hassan Diab spending three years in a French jail, only to be suddenly released. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and staff make their way to the National Press Theatre in Ottawa on Wednesday, May 23, 2018. Freeland is kicking off her two-day visit to Washington with meetings at the office of the U.S. trade representative, site of intensive NAFTA talks over the last several weeks.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick Marc Emery hugs his wife, Jodie, outside a Toronto court after being released on bail on Friday, March 10, 2017. The self-styled Prince of Pot has pleaded guilty to trafficking cannabis and will pay a $5,000 fine. The charges against Emery stemmed from the opening of a Cannabis Culture boutique in Montreal in December 2016.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young FILE - In this April 30, 2018, file photo, plaintiff Gavin Cox testifies during his civil trial against magician David Copperfield at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas. The jury is due to hear closing arguments Wednesday, May 23, 2018, in Cox's lawsuit blaming Las Vegas Strip headliner Copperfield for injuries he received taking part in a signature vanishing act in November 2013. Cox and his wife are suing Copperfield, the MGM Grand hotel and several business entities for negligence and monetary damages. (Benjamin Hager/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, File) FILE - In this April 18, 2006 file photo, Capt. Rick Quashnick, right, shares a laugh with boat engineer Blake Painter, left, as family and close friends gather at Quashnick's Warrenton, Ore., house to watch the Discovery Channel series "The Deadliest Catch." Painter, an Astoria fisherman featured on the television series 'The Deadliest Catch,' has died. He was 38. Clatsop County Sheriff Tom Bergin confirmed Tuesday, May 29, 2018, that Painter had been found in his home May 25 by a friend who visited after being unable to reach him. (Lori Assa/Daily Astorian via AP, File) Kim Chang Son (right), a top aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, is seen in a car leaving the Fullerton hotel in Singapore on 30 May 2018. A North Korean delegation led by another of Kim Jong Un's trusted aides, Kim Chang Son, flew to Singapore on Monday night for talks with U.S. officials to discuss logistical issues for the summit. Details of those talks hadn't emerged yet. (Gavin Foo/The Straits Times via AP) FILE - In this March 23, 2018 file photo, John Goodman, left, and Roseanne Barr arrive at the Los Angeles premiere of "Roseanne" in Burbank, Calif. ABC has cancelled its hit reboot of AuRoseanneAu following her racially insensitive tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, Tuesday, May 29. ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey said the comment Auis abhorrent, repugnant and inconsisten with our values, and we have decided to cancel the show.Au (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) In this Saturday, May 26, 2018, image released by the U.S. Geological Survey HVO shows an aerial view of fissure 22 looking toward the south, as Kilauea Volcano continues its eruption cycle near Pahoa on the island of Kilauea, Hawaii. Lava from the Kilauea volcano has reached a geothermal power plant on the Big Island, approaching wells that have been capped to protect against the release of toxic gas should they mix with lava. (U.S. Geological Survey via AP) This photo provided by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation shows Erika Castro-Miles who was arrested and charged Wednesday, May 30, 2018, with first-degree murder in connection to Dickson County sheriff's Sgt. Daniel Baker's death. Tennessee authorities say the sheriff's deputy was fatally shot and a suspect identified by Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Steven Joshua Wiggins, believed to be "armed and dangerous" is still at large. (Tennessee Bureau of Investigation via AP) CORRECTS NAME OF PHOTOGRAPHER - Flames of rockets fired by Palestinian militants are seen over Gaza Strip toward Israeli lands, early Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Palestinian militants bombarded southern Israel with dozens of rockets and mortar shells while Israeli warplanes struck targets throughout the Gaza Strip in the largest flare-up of violence between the sides since a 2014 war. (AP Photo/Adel Hana) Pirate offense sputters in loss The downpour of rain that drenched Pirate Field in the fourth quarter was probably an accurate representation of just how Perryville football coach Brent Roth and his team felt following the game.The Indians have fun in shutout victory over Bayless St. Vincent football coach Tim Schumer said that his team had a lot of fun on Friday night. The Indians scored early and often, then dominated on defense as they shutout Bayless 59-0 Repsol and Tullow partner for Guyana's Kanuku block By Kaieter News GEORGETOWN Petroleumworld 05 30 2018 The contract between the Government of Guyana and Repsol Exploracion Guyana has been released, along with an addendum. The addendum shows that Repsol will no longer be operating the Kanuku oil block alone. It is now accompanied by Tullow Oil. Tullow will have a 30 percent share while Repsol retains 70 percent. Repsol is an international energy company, present in 37 countries and with activity throughout the energy value chain, including exploration, production, refining, chemicals, retail sales and the development of new energy solutions. Tullow Oil, parent company of Tullow Guyana B.V. is a leading independent oil and gas exploration and production company, which has interests in 90 exploration and production licences across 16 countries that are in West Africa, East Africa and New Ventures', which include Guyana and French Guiana. Repsol has been present in Guyana since 1997. The company's current activity in Guyana is focused on the Kanuku block, 150 kilometres offshore Guyana. The company is targeting an oil prospect in the Kanuku block, where it plans to drill the first exploration well in 2019 to determine if hydrocarbons are present. The Ministry of Natural Resources has indicated that the internal and external ESHIA (Environmental, Social and Health Impact Assessment) process will begin in 2018. Last week, Repsol's Director Global New Ventures Mikel Erquiaga and a team from the company met with Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman. At the meeting, Erquiaga reiterated Repsol's commitment to its Guyana operations and an aggressive programme of activities that would move swiftly from seismic surveys to exploratory drilling. The Repsol-Tullow contract is quite similar to the other oil contracts that the Government of Guyana released. However, it features a sliding scale for the sharing of profit oil. Guyana will initially get a 50 percent share, but will eventually receive 60 percent. Guyana will only receive one percent royalty. The entire contract can be viewed online at www.nre.gov.gy. ________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Story from Kaieter News. Kaieteurnewsonline.com 05 302018 Copyright 1999-2018 Petroleumworld or respective author or news agency. All rights reserved. We welcome the use of Petroleumworld (PW) stories by anyone provided it mentions Petroleumworld.com as the source. Other stories you have to get authorization by its authors. Internet web links to http://www.petroleumworld.com are appreciated. Petroleumworld welcomes your feedback and comments, share your thoughts on this article, your feedback is important to us! We invite all our readers to share with us their views and comments about this article. Write to editor@petroleumworld.com By using this link, you agree to allow PW to publish your comments on our letters page. Any question or suggestions, please write to: editor@petroleumworld.com Best Viewed with IE 5.01+ Windows NT 4.0, '95, '98,ME,XP, Vista, Windows 7,8,10 +/ 800x600 pixels Twitter: @petroleumworld1 November 13 - 15, 2018. Gubkin University, Moscow SPE Student Chapter Guyana, don't lower your standards to attract investors Mexican Regulator By Kiana Wilburg GEORGETOWN Petroleumworld 05 30 2018 Strong environmental regulations for the oil and gas sector will not hamper investor confidence. In actuality, companies like ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron, are used to operating in environments that demand compliance with the best safety standards. As such, Guyana's authorities should not lower their standards in fear of scaring off rich oil companies. This salient piece of advice was recently provided by Executive Director of Agency for Security, Energy and the Environment (ASEA) of Mexico, Carlos De Regules Ruiz-Funes. In an exclusive interview with Kaieteur News, the Mexican official said he has noted some of the concerns regarding vague contractual terms for environmental protection. He stated, however, that from his experience, keeping a high standard and ensuring the implementation of best practices will benefit the country in the long run. The Mexican official said, If you start having considerations as to the competitiveness of your regulations, then you aren't doing your job. You will end up lowering your standards to attract investments. It really won't be good for investment decisions. In a previous life, I was the Vice President of Strategy Planning in PEMEX (Mexico's National Oil Company). I was responsible for putting together the business plan for 20 years. Ruiz-Funes continued, And one thing we looked at very carefully was the stability of the regulatory framework. We didn't want it to go down and deregulate all things concerning the environment, because in the same way you deregulate for political or commercial reasons, you over-regulate for the same Companies like Exxon, Shell, Chevron, they are accustomed to operating in global environments, and regulated environments. The Executive Director added, So for Mexico, what we did was understand the best practices in the world, and we put them in the Mexican context. It has worked fairly well. We have a regulatory model with various components to it which have proven to be adequate Ruiz-Funes said that prevention is an important aspect of Mexico's regulatory model. He said that this component allows the ASEA to be proactive. He commented, You don't want to react once the accident happens or when the pollution occurs. You want to have environmental and safety management systems in place that are mandatory for the operators and will prevent accidents from occurring. Reflecting on Guyana's clean sheet of paper with oil, the Mexican official said he cannot emphasize enough, the importance of Guyana going with best practices as opposed to thinking it will scare off investors. He reiterated, They are used to best practices. They need good regulation. The Mexican official asserted that what scares away serious investors are whimsical political changes to regulations. He said it is therefore important that Guyana's regulators are free from the influence of the political cycle, and that long term certainty resides in the regulatory body. There are many examples around the world where the governments of nations ensure that oil companies provide insurance for oil spills. Unfortunately, Guyana is not one of those nations. In the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) signed between the Government of Guyana and USA oil giant, ExxonMobil, there is no provision for insurance to compensate for any adverse effects of an oil spill. ________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Story by Kiana Wilburg from Kaieter News. Kaieteurnewsonline.com 05 30 2018 Copyright 1999-2018 Petroleumworld or respective author or news agency. All rights reserved. We welcome the use of Petroleumworld (PW) stories by anyone provided it mentions Petroleumworld.com as the source. Other stories you have to get authorization by its authors. Internet web links to http://www.petroleumworld.com are appreciated. Petroleumworld welcomes your feedback and comments, share your thoughts on this article, your feedback is important to us! We invite all our readers to share with us their views and comments about this article. Write to editor@petroleumworld.com By using this link, you agree to allow PW to publish your comments on our letters page. Any question or suggestions, please write to: editor@petroleumworld.com Best Viewed with IE 5.01+ Windows NT 4.0, '95, '98,ME,XP, Vista, Windows 7,8,10 +/ 800x600 pixels Twitter: @petroleumworld1 November 13 - 15, 2018. Gubkin University, Moscow SPE Student Chapter Lawyers wrangle at Guyana's Court of Appeal over urgency of oil contract case By Denis Chabrol GEORGETOWN Petroleumworld 05 30 2018 The Court of Appeal on Tuesday began hearing arguments, though not yet substantive, on the High Court's decision to throw out a case over whether oil companies- Hess and Nexen- are parties to the environmental permit granted to a local subsidiary of ExxonMobil to search for and extract oil offshore Guyana. Tuesday's hearing's centered over a request by applicant, Ramon Gaskin, through his lawyers for the Court of Appeal to begin hearing arguments urgently against the High Court's decision not to grant an order blocking the companies from proceeding with their exploration and production on the grounds that Hess and Nexen have not been issued separate environmental permits. Trinidad-based Guyanese Senior Counsel, Seenath Jairam sought to convince the Appellate Judges- Dr. Arif Bulkan, Dawn Gregory, and Rafiq Khan that the Court should hear the appeal urgently because it has to do with liability for environmental impact on Guyana. the Caribbean and neighbouring countries. If there is an environmental disaster, God forbid, we are saying there are grave consequences not only for Guyana but the Caribbean given where the Liza wells are near the Caribbean sea and our neighbouring countries, he said.. Jairam assured that his side did not want to humbug economic progress, but the legal challenge is about the genuine concern by the public and the liability of Hess and Nexen should there be an environmental incident. Justice Khan queried why should the case be heard urgently compared to death penalty appeals, to which Jairam countered by saying there is a moratorium on executing persons. Representing the Ministry of Natural Resources, is Senior Counsel, Edward Luckhoo, along with the Attorney General's Chambers. He told the judges that Gaskin's lawyers have not provided any evidence of flaws or technically poor systems that would lead to environmental consequences. The foundation and sub-strata for an urgent hearing have no foundation and no basis, he said. In the affidavit, there is no allegation whatever of any operative functions being carried out which may lead to any environmental consequences, he added. Luckhoo argued that Esso is named as the sole operator, and Hess and Nexen are not carrying out any operations so there is no need for them to be granted separate environmental permits. They are saying that Hess and Nexen are not subject to the environmental permit. That's a mistake, he said. Luckhoo rejected several arguments by Gaskin's lawyers including that the Environmental Protection Act does not apply to Hess and Nexen because they do not have a permit, and Hess and Nexen will be operating the enterprise. After Attorneys Jairam, Luckhoo and Melinda Janki could not readily agree to the next court date, Justice Bulkan remarked that if it is urgent, we would rather hear it in June. Justice Barnes then announced that June 28, 2018 at 9 AM has been set to rule on whether the case should be heard urgently. If we say it it is urgent, we will move on to merits and hear you orally on merits, she added. ________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Dr. Philip Mshelbila the new CEO at Atlantic LNG By TT Guardian PORT SPAIN Petroleumworld 05 30 2018 There will be a new CEO at LNG producer Atlantic from Friday. Nigel Darlow, who has been at the helm since 2011 and helped strengthened Atlantic's position as a leading global LNG business, is returning to the United Kingdom in July. He will remain in country over the next few weeks to support the transition of the incoming CEO. Atlantic is one of the best and most competitive LNG production businesses globally. It has been a real privilege to serve as Atlantic CEO, said. Darlow. Both Atlantic and Trinidad and Tobago have provided a wonderful experience for me and my family for over seven years and we are truly grateful for the time we have spent here. The incoming CEO is Dr. Philip Mshelbila of Shell, who is a global business leader with more than 20 years of oil and gas experience in board-level governance, stakeholder management, commercial operations, project management and performance delivery in both operated and non-operated joint ventures. Dr. Mshelbila is from Nigeria, and prior to his secondment to Atlantic, held the role of General Manager Gas, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) in Nigeria. He has also held a number of senior regional leadership positions in overseeing 36 countries. His other roles have included Managing Director of Shell Nigeria Gas Ltd. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Medicine and Surgery from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, a Postgraduate Certificate in Occupational Medicine from the University of Aberdeen Medical School, Scotland as well as a Master's Degree in Business Administration from the IESE Business School, the University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain. Dr. Mshelbila has a passion for motivating people to perform at their best to deliver excellent business performance. I am excited to lead a truly Trinbagonian company that is one of the best-performing LNG companies in the world, he said. ________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us How the world's biggest private equity oil and gas industry Harbor-Santos bid collapsed By Sonali Paul MELBOURNE Petroleumworld 05 30 2018 Blame it on Trump, Iran or Venezuela. Rising oil prices combined with a heavy debt load killed the world's biggest private equity oil and gas industry deal last week. Harbour Energy left Australia empty-handed after a year of chasing gas producer Santos Ltd, missing out on Santos' stakes in three liquefied natural gas projects in Australia and Papua New Guinea as it sought to become a major LNG player. The U.S. firm, backed by EIG Global Energy Partners, was forced to bid against itself five times, including twice over one weekend, until it made a final offer of $10.8 billion, up more than 50 percent from its first approach last August. The grievance runs deep and it's heartfelt, said a person in the Harbour camp. Harbour Chief Executive Linda Cook, a former senior executive at Royal Dutch Shell, was on a plane last Tuesday when she heard Santos had rejected its sixth offer, worth about A$6.95 a share. She declined to comment for this story. Harbour's disappointed chairman, Blair Thomas, was already back in Washington, DC, and didn't mince words. There was insufficient engagement with Santos on valuation, no meaningful attempt by Santos to discuss a realistic price which could supported by any reasonable set of technical and commercial assumptions, and an unwillingness by their Board to explore means of closing the gap between the offer and their expectations, he said in a two-page statement. Thomas believed by the end of a weekend of back and forth between advisers on both sides that he had a deal with Santos Chairman Keith Spence, a person in the Harbour camp said. Harbour's team were parked in Sydney, where Harbour's backer EIG has an office and advisers at JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Highbury are based, according to people involved. A couple of hundred people were involved in analysing data and conducting due diligence, they said. Cook and Thomas met Kevin Gallagher and Keith Spence, their counterparts at Adelaide-based Santos, on May 18. They felt encouraged the board would facilitate an offer going to shareholders, people in the Harbour camp said. People on both sides said talks were cordial the whole time, but the Santos board was firm on value, and Harbour failed to offer enough of a premium as oil prices marched higher. Crude prices climbed from around $52 a barrel when Harbour made its first approach in August to $80 last week, their highest since late 2014, as U.S. President Donald Trump imposed sanctions on Venezuela and pulled out of a nuclear arms control deal with Iran, both key oil producers. What hurt Harbour was the $7.75 billion in debt they had lined up from JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, which required oil price hedging against 30 percent of Santos' oil-linked LNG sales, making the deal complex, Santos, investors and bankers said. The problem is when you get high-leverage deals there are a lot of terms and conditions you have to meet and it makes it inflexible, said a veteran Australian investment banker not involved in the bid. Santos balked when Harbour tried to force the company to lock in the hedges, in order to cut costs for the banks and allow Harbour to raise its offer. Santos said it was resilient to the oil price fall, as it has slashed costs to be cash flow breakeven at $36 a barrel. The value of the Harbour bid was simply not compelling enough compared with Santos' own growth plan, the risks associated with the hedging and the reliance on Santos' balance sheet to help fund the deal, a Santos spokeswoman said. FURIOUS CHINESE Not only was Harbour jilted at the altar, but the biggest shareholders in Santos, Chinese gas distributor ENN Ecological and private equity firm Hony Capital missed out on more than doubling their combined stake to up to 40 percent in a privatised Santos. Sources said ENN and Hony were as furious as Harbour. They're deeply disappointed and angry and frustrated, a person close to ENN said. They feel that the outcome didn't reflect some of the conversations with senior Santos people. However in a statement to the Shanghai Stock Exchange last week, ENN, which has a director on the board of Santos, said: The company's future cooperation with Santos is not affected. A Santos spokeswoman said ENN is part of a united Santos board, and the company's strategic relationship with ENN and Hony remains in place. Hony said it will closely follow the further development. Swiss energy and commodities trader Mercuria, which was set to contribute 10 percent of the bid, was thwarted in its ambition to use Santos to get into LNG trading, where its rivals Glencore, Gunvor, Trafigura and Vitol are already active. A lot of time and money went into this...so it is annoying, said a person familiar with Mercuria's thinking. Mecuria declined to comment. Harbour's first approach last August was swiftly rejected by the board under then-chairman Peter Coates, who had also rebuffed a $5.1 billion takeover offer two years earlier when Santos was wallowing in debt as oil prices collapsed. The August approach was only disclosed by Santos in November after a newspaper outed Harbour. It took Harbour until March to line up funding from JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley and equity from Mercuria, ENN and Hony in order to make another approach. Top 10 shareholder Argo Investments said the deal was too complex and would have involved Santos taking on too much risk when there was a lot of uncertainty around whether it would be approved. Shareholders have faith in CEO Gallagher, who slashed costs and cut debt faster than expected over the past two years. It's fair to say that he's done a pretty good job, said Argo Investments Managing Director Jason Beddow. The proof will be in the pudding as to how Santos looks in a year or two's time - which is somewhat dependent on the oil price. ________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Brazil Senate passes bill that includes tax exemption for diesel to lower price of fuel By Reuters BRASILIA Petroleumworld 05 30 2018 Brazil's Senate passed a bill on Tuesday that includes an exemption of diesel from the PIS/Cofins payroll and social security tax, a pledge made by the government to striking truckers to lower the price of the fuel. President Michel Temer, however, is expected to line veto the diesel provision inserted by the lower chamber because it did not cut the price by the 46 cents per liter agreed upon. The government will still have to find a way to deliver the price reduction. ________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Reporting by Anthony Boadle Editing by James Dalgleish from Reuters reuters.com 05 29 2018 Copyright 1999-2018 Petroleumworld or respective author or news agency. All rights reserved. We welcome the use of Petroleumworld (PW) stories by anyone provided it mentions Petroleumworld.com as the source. Other stories you have to get authorization by its authors. Internet web links to http://www.petroleumworld.com are appreciated. Petroleumworld welcomes your feedback and comments, share your thoughts on this article, your feedback is important to us! We invite all our readers to share with us their views and comments about this article. Write to editor@petroleumworld.com By using this link, you agree to allow PW to publish your comments on our letters page. Any question or suggestions, please write to: editor@petroleumworld.com Best Viewed with IE 5.01+ Windows NT 4.0, '95, '98,ME,XP, Vista, Windows 7,8,10 +/ 800x600 pixels Twitter: @petroleumworld1 November 13 - 15, 2018. Gubkin University, Moscow SPE Student Chapter Mexico foiled a $110 million cyber bank heist, then kept it a secret IT PRO Now, its banking system is being hit by a new wave of attacks. Policy makers are being criticized for a lack of communication By Michelle Davis MEXICO CITY Petroleumworld 05 30 2018 On a Tuesday morning in early January, the computer system at Mexico's state-owned trade bank went haywire. Some of Bancomext's workers couldn't get their PCs to turn on. The internet was slow. Routine operations were taking longer than normal. Inside the lender's concrete-and-glass building on the southern outskirts of Mexico City, a mid-level technician was monitoring messages coming in on the Swift network, the air-traffic control system for sending money around the world. His job was to check fund transfers to make sure they matched the payment orders dispatched by Swift. That day, transaction volume was several times higher than normal. The worker scanned the messages from Swift until he discovered something: unusual activity at the Standard Chartered Plc account Bancomext used for international wires. Bancomext would later learn that hackers suspected to be from North Korea had tried to siphon off more than $110 million, forcing the lender to temporarily suspend operations in its international payment platform. These accounts of cyberattacks are based on conversations with individuals briefed on the details of the incidents, who asked not to be identified because investigations by authorities haven't been completed. Bangladesh Heist Worldwide, a string of attacks targeting banks' connections to the Swift network has prompted financial institutions to enact new security measures, with the most famous invasion coming in 2016 when criminals attempted to steal $1 billion from the central bank of Bangladesh. But in Mexico, details surrounding the Bancomext assault have been kept secret by government authorities and the bank, meaning the nation's sprawling financial system never got the wake-up call that could have helped guard against a new series of intrusions that authorities are still trying to contain. Just a few months after the Bancomext attack, hackers began hijacking Mexican financial institutions' connections to the country's domestic payment transfer system, known as SPEI . So far, they've gotten away with at least $15 million . While authorities don't know where the attacks originated, they suspect they were orchestrated by sophisticated parties who colluded with account holders to withdraw massive amounts of cash from bank branches around Mexico. Officials say they still aren't certain the thefts have ended. There's still a culture of reactivity when it comes to cyber risks, said Michael Rohrs, an associate director for Control Risks's information security practice in Washington. All the news around the attempt against Bancomext and the Swift incident with the central bank of Bangladesh could have been a loud-enough wake-up call for the sector. A representative for Bancomext said the lender followed all security protocols and communicated with authorities from the start. Press officials for Standard Chartered and Swift declined to comment. Cybersecurity professionals and bank executives who spoke to Bloomberg said the poor coordination among financial institutions and regulators helped propagate the recent raids targeting three lenders, a brokerage and a credit union. Knowing more about how the Bancomext assault and other cyber heists went down could have helped the firms protect themselves. A central bank spokeswoman said that information sharing is very important, but that institutions coming under cyberattacks don't always report them because of concerns about their reputation. It's a matter of great to concern to the bank, she said. Case in point: the authority didn't learn about one of the breaches until about a week after it happened because the firm didn't immediately disclose it. Workers Go Home Officials say they don't have any reason to believe the current issues with domestic payment transfers are related to the attempted heist of Bancomext funds in January. While both were man in the middle attacks, the central bank spokeswoman said, one targeted vulnerabilities in international payment systems, while the current spate of attacks affected Mexico's domestic wire system. The central bank has maintained an open line of communication with all SPEI participants since the first incident, the spokeswoman said. Back at Bancomext's headquarters shortly after the Swift abnormalities were first discovered, executives took action. The lender, which has $13 billion of loans outstanding and is charged with promoting international trade, suspended operations and sent some workers home. Desk phones were turned off and the bank shut down its email server. Officials soon discovered the unusual transactions were payments that had been disguised as a donation from the Mexican bank to a Korean church. Luckily for Bancomext, it was after 3 a.m. in Seoul and since banks weren't yet open for the day, the money hadn't gone through. That bought the lender some time to get in contact with officials at Standard Chartered, who were able to stop the transfer. Next Generation Once the central bank was aware of Bancomext's issues, it directed some other banks to double-check the security of their operations, but it didn't provide them any detail about what to look for, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is private. A spokeswoman said the level of detail the central bank provided reflected the amount of information it had at the time. Experts consulted by Bancomext would later tell the bank that hackers had managed to penetrate its Swift connection thanks to a so-called next generation virus that had probably been activated after an employee clicked on a malicious email attachment. It had likely sat undetected in the bank's systems for several months or even years, allowing hackers to assemble data on typical operations so it'd be easier to disguise the theft. Million Dollar Bank Holdups Hackers have targeted global banks' connections to the Swift network In the more recent hack involving Mexico's domestic payment system, the perpetrators have so far managed to steal about 300 million pesos ($15 million). Ultimately, the affected institutions will be the ones on the hook for that money, the central bank has said. The central bank first detected irregularities in a small financial institution's connection to the SPEI network April 17 but it didn't disclose it until 10 days later because the incident seemed like an isolated event. About a week after the initial attack, officials at Grupo Financiero Banorte noticed hundreds of irregular transactions being dispatched through SPEI, according to a person familiar with the matter. The biggest Mexican bank had been the victim of a cyberattack just like the one discovered by the central bank the previous week. Banorte spokeswoman Veronica Reynold said the lender has acted in direct coordination with the central bank. It wasn't until April 27, after the Banorte attack, that the central bank published a press release saying some financial firms had experienced incidents when operating the SPEI and that those firms would be connecting to the payment network via an alternate method that was more laborious but also more secure. Even then, the authority didn't mention a cyberattack. No Names By then, the central bank had knowledge that three firms' connections to the SPEI network had been compromised. On May 2, a fourth institution disclosed to the central bank that it had also been hacked the previous week. A week later, the number of hacked firms grew to five. The central bank still hasn't disclosed the names of the affected parties. Top executives from four lenders in Mexico complained to Bloomberg that the central bank's decision to stay silent about details of the attacks made it harder to shore up their systems. Banorte hasn't had issues since it switched to the backup SPEI connection. But the authority didn't ask other banks to enact contingency plans until the following days and weeks. In Latin America, Mexico ranks as the country with the most cyberattacks after Brazil, according to a January 2017 paper from the Wilson Center on security in the country. The financial sector has been hit with extortion attempts and denial-of-service schemes as well as trading platform disruptions, according to a 2015 Control Risks report. No Fines In the Bangladesh job, the thieves were able to get away with $81 million by sending fake Swift messages that tricked the Federal Reserve Bank of New York into wiring money to accounts in the Philippines. Swift has said its system hasn't been breached; rather security issues have originated in banks' systems. Last year, the central bank set rules related to the SPEI system that require financial institutions to have in place certain emergency response protocols for when attackers strike, among other requirements. Banxico evaluated financial institutions' adherence in January and found some banks weren't fully compliant, Governor Alejandro Diaz de Leon said in an interview May 18. So far, the authority hasn't levied any fines. While the central bank hasn't been particularly forthcoming about the attacks, neither have the banks that were targeted gone out of their way to share what happened with other lenders. Cybersecurity analysts speculate that could be because they're afraid they'll get punished for not having sufficient controls and they don't want to give competitors any information that would give them a leg up. Inside Job But experts agree that sharing information makes the whole system stronger. It's so important that these banks talk to each other, that they share the best practices, said David Schwartz, chief executive officer of the Florida International Bankers Association, a Miami-based trade association. There's not enough of that in Mexico, he said. There are plenty of theories around how the most recent hacks went down. Some suspect help from current or former central bank employees. Diaz de Leon has denied this. Others say hackers had access to the passwords to authentication tokens for accounts, which would suggest insiders at the respective banks may have helped them infiltrate their systems. Mexico is finally taking steps in the wake of the SPEI scandal to ensure authorities and banks have a better way of sharing information with each other to be able to coordinate responses the next time criminals strike, the central bank governor said. The monetary authority is also creating a new division to set policies to better guard banking information. Ignorance The idea is to have an understanding among authorities and financial entities that whenever you get some type of shock or cybersecurity event, you should share it, and everyone will have information and clarity about what's going on, Diaz de Leon said. Up until now, online security hasn't been taken seriously in Mexico's banking sector, according to Federico De Noriega, a partner in the finance group at Hogan Lovells in Mexico City. He cited his experience representing a foreign insurance company that was marketing policies to protect against cyberattacks to financial institutions in Mexico. There was a lot of ignorance, De Noriega said. That tells you people aren't aware of this risk, or they're not taking it seriously. I think they'll start taking it more seriously now. ________________________Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Canada buys Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline for $3.5 billion Bloomberg Deal includes expansion, related pipeline and terminal assets. Trudeau pledges conduit will be built, seeks new buyer - Play Video - Trudeau pledges conduit will be built, seeks new buyer By Josh Wingrove and Greg Quinn OTTAWA Petroleumworld 05 30 2018 Canada will buy Kinder Morgan Canada Ltd.'s Trans Mountain oil pipeline and its controversial expansion project for C$4.5 billion ($3.5 billion) in a bid to ensure it gets built amid fierce opposition. It must be built and it will be built, Finance Minister Bill Morneau said in Ottawa, as he and Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr unveiled the deal, which includes the expansion, related pipeline and terminal assets, and is expected to close in August. Construction will continue through the 2018 season and the federal government will sell it to one or more new owners when appropriate. The purchase marks a stunning development for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government -- effectively nationalizing the country's highest-profile infrastructure project until an operator can be found. The project has been beset by legal uncertainty and rising protests from environmental groups and the province of British Columbia. We think obviously this is very constructive for Kinder and for Canada and clearly for Canadian producers in particular because it creates a lot of regulatory certainty over the time that the Trans Mountain expansion can get done, Katie Bays, an analyst with Height Securities LLC in Washington said in a telephone interview. For Kinder this allows them to ameliorate some of the risk that they are carrying that the market doesn't like. Fiscal Impact Canada first offered this month to indemnify the expansion project before announcing Tuesday's plan. The deal includes the existing pipeline that's been in operation since 1953. Morneau said there'd be no fiscal impact of the plan -- suggesting he doesn't expect to make or lose money on the deal. He declined to say what construction costs would be for the expansion project, and downplayed concerns about finding a new buyer. Many investors have already expressed interest in the project, including Indigenous groups, Canadian pension funds, and others, the finance minister said. The government's plan has several stages. Construction will continue through the summer with a federal loan guarantee as the deal is finalized Kinder Morgan and the government will seek a third-party buyer or buyers for the project until July 22 Senior federal officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the government has the option to sell the project to private investors before Canada completes its own purchase agreement Barring that, the federal sale is expected to close in August In the event of a resale, the government would then indemnify the new owner or owners against certain costs or delays It isn't the intention of the Government of Canada to be a long-term owner of this project, Morneau's department said in a statement. Buying the pipeline outright became increasingly likely after Trudeau first pledged only to backstop it . The prime minister reiterated his intentions to get the line completed as he headed into a meeting with his cabinet Tuesday. The move will be a key test of Trudeau's bid to balance the environment and the economy by backing the C$7.4 billion pipeline expansion while pushing a national carbon price to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Political opposition is already building. Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer said Kinder Morgan wasn't asking for money but for certainty on how to build the pipeline. Using taxpayers' money is just Justin Trudeau trying to buy his way out of his own failure, Scheer told reporters in Ottawa. Extraordinary Costs The provincial government in oil-producing Alberta will create an emergency fund of as much as C$2 billion for the project, which would only be used in unforeseen circumstances. Alberta will receive value commensurate to their contribution, through equity or profit sharing in return, according to the government statement. Any extraordinary costs will be covered together with Alberta, Morneau added. Shares of Calgary-based Kinder Morgan Canada, a unit of the Houston-based parent, surged as much as 9 percent after the announcement, and were up 11 cents, or 0.7 percent, to C$16.70 at 11:26 a.m. in Toronto. The company has a market value of C$5.8 billion. This is a good day for Kinder Morgan shareholders, said Paul Bloom, president of Bloom Investment Counsel Inc. in Toronto, which owns about 300,000 shares of Kinder Morgan Canada. It got a very good price for their assets. Kinder Options Kinder Canada Chief Executive Officer Steven Kean said on a conference call the company hasn't yet decided how it will use the proceeds from the sale and it will consider options including acquisitions and stock buybacks. The company also said it still has a strong set of midstream assets in Canada and that the Trans Mountain sale will help its Edmonton terminals business. The company has put C$1.1 billion into the C$7.4 billion pipeline, including funds spent on upgrading the Westridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby, Kean said in a statement on April 9. The sides had been in talks since the company set a May 31 deadline for the government to give certainty in the face of opposition from British Columbia, which is concerned about increased tanker traffic and possible oil spills along the Pacific coast. The Trans Mountain expansion would almost triple capacity to 890,000 barrels of oil on a line running from Alberta to a terminal near Vancouver. The 980-kilometer (600-mile) expansion is seen by the oil industry as a crucial link to Asian markets, allowing producers to diversify away from the U.S., which takes the vast majority of Canadian oil exports. How much of a win is this for Canadians? That's a big question, said Bloom. The government was under tremendous political pressure to get this deal done. Did they overpay? Maybe." ________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Employees at Restore Integrative Wellness Center, a medical marijuana dispensary on Frankford Ave., listen to a presentation by a cannabis grower. Read more Philadelphia's first medical marijuana dispensary opened its doors Wednesday morning in the city's Fishtown neighborhood. Restore Integrative Wellness Center, a spa-like facility on the 900 block of Frankford Avenue, was packed with patients and caregivers shortly after 11 a.m., co-owner Vip Patel said. "We've got a full house with a good 30 people in here right now," Patel said. "And that's with the street blocked by the water department digging holes. Still, things do seem to be falling in line and working out well." First-time patients were given a cost-free 30-minute consultation with a staff pharmacist. The meeting is intended to determine the right strains of medical marijuana, the form, potency, and method of administration to treat each patient's ailments, co-owner Steven O said. He recommended that newcomers schedule an appointment. "These medications are powerful and it's important we educate people the right way," said the low-key O, a licensed acupuncturist who also operates physical rehabilitation facilities in Elkins Park and Philadelphia's Chinatown. Restore is one of about two dozen dispensaries in operation across Pennsylvania. The shops, which are open exclusively to certified patients or their caregivers, currently sell only cannabis concentrates, tinctures, capsules, and vape pens. "Flower," the dried buds of the cannabis plant, will be sold later this year at dispensaries. >> READ MORE: Buyer's Guide to Pennsylvania Medical Marijuana Products Patel, who was greeting patients on Frankford Avenue across from the Fillmore concert hall, said Restore will operate from 11 to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday and eventually add evening and Sunday hours. Restore plans to launch a second dispensary in Elkins Park "in about three months," Patel said. Photographer Kate Devlin takes the time to consider all four corners of a room. Bare or cluttered, tight or spacious, the next corner always offers a different view. Is the best photograph of a living room the one that reveals a glimpse of a stairway and not the open kitchen that lies directly ahead? Or should she shoot both angles? An online real estate listing typically has 25 photographs these days, another reason to consider multiple perspectives. Devlin recently moved about the living room in a Fitler Square rowhouse calmly and quietly. She settled her tripod in a spot where the staircase sat out of range, then found a shot that captured the width of the living room, but also the stairs in a mirror's reflection. Devlin, who lives in Fairmount, estimates that she shoots about 525 homes a year. Real estate photography isn't a new field, but it carries new clout in the internet age as searching for homes online has become a near-universal experience. According to a 2017 National Association of Realtors survey, 95 percent of home buyers used the internet to look for property; 68 percent are doing so on their phones. The new imperative? Entice potential buyers to keep swiping. Sixty percent of Realtors, according to another 2017 NAR survey, recommend leaving photos to the pros, in part, because the pictures won't be viewed solely by potential buyers. Photographer Drew Callaghan, based in Queen Village, noted that many photos survive in online databases after sales close and serve appraisers, insurance firms, and developers in their research. Callaghan, who worked as a real estate agent before shifting to photography, remembers simpler times. To prep a house for market, he recalls hiring a cleaner and setting up an open house. If a home was photographed, he said, the focus was primarily on the exterior. Realtor Mike McCann remembers this era, too, in the 1990s, with the old, printed black-and-white listings that included only thumbnails. Back then, he said, the going rate for a color brochure was $1,800. Today, while some photographers may charge hundreds, others can be commissioned for under two Benjamins. Now McCann has every livable home on his roster shot professionally. When he sits down with clients, he primes them on Devlin's work as part of a package of services they can expect. Professional photography, along with home staging, is a trend reflective of larger industry shifts to try to make homes competitive for buyers with limitless listings at their fingertips, said Jessica Lautz, managing director of survey research and communication at the NAR. When prospective homeowners show a listing they like to a loved one, Lautz said, it isn't too different from friends opening Tinder to discuss their matches. Photo-led listings can be quickly devoured, but they're also easy to share. "It makes it easier to visualize yourself in the property, but also makes [buyers] more willing to visit the house, as well," Lautz said. Devlin, 39, earned a bachelor's degree in painting at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia but had been working in restaurants before she found real estate photography about eight years ago. "A friend of mine needed somebody and said, 'Do you have a wide-angle lens?'" Devlin said, thinking back. "I've been doing it ever since." Wide-angle lenses can help make a room look spacious, but shooters must be careful not to take things too far. Realtors don't want to face angry home buyers who feel tricked when they see the space in person. With a wide-angle lens, a piece of furniture toward the back of a shot can appear distant, while a telephone near the front can look like a Buick. Even without staging, Devlin moves things around. At a townhouse in Fairmount, Devlin removed items that could appear clutter-ish, such as kids' toys and outerwear. She'll position a colorful bowl of produce to catch the camera's eye but also nix items that could be too bright, such as a bottle of blue Listerine or orange liquid soap. Trash cans, shoes, weight scales she'll hide those, too. The homeowners' job is to hide themselves. Weather has a strong effect on Devlin's output. Sometimes, Realtors want to reschedule if the light isn't right. Others tell her to go for it, but even in these cases, Devlin said, she'll often return to shoot the exterior. The sweet spot for both inside and out is a day with blue skies and light cloud cover, something she articulated while waiting for a cloud to mosey toward the sun on a recent bright afternoon. "You'd be surprised how much time I stand watching clouds." Devlin has a quietly pleasant temperament, an attribute on a job that, in theory, is supposed to be in and out, but often calls for interactions with residents experiencing major life changes. Although Devlin shoots many empty spaces, she also enters occupied homes where homeowners are going through a divorce or a tenant has just learned the landlord is selling. And she sees "a big assortment of care," Devlin said. "I've seen bongs being left out on the table, and it's, like, really?" Homeowners Sumi Maeshima and Atsushi Moriyasu in Fitler Square seemed at peace when they explained that they were returning to their home country, Japan. So did Kathie Daley in Laverock when she described how she hopes to downsize to a modest farmhouse in Bucks County. Currently, Daley and her spouse, Richard Sand, live in an 8,645-square-foot historic mansion. Realtor Rob Lamb, who works with Devlin often, asked her to capture the estate. "Anybody can have the tools," Lamb said. "But she has this slight artistic, creative touch that folds itself into the photos and becomes a part of the story." When Devlin submits photos after a shoot, Lamb and his team develop the sequence for the listing with the seller's approval. The goal is that each photo will draw the viewer to the next, Lamb said. "You want to get them deeper and deeper into a stream of photos," he said. "If you don't catch them there, on to the next house." Devlin's bread and butter continues to be wide room-length shots, but she has begun taking more details for social media. That intense closeup of carvings, tiles, or the azalea bush through the window might not work in an online listing, but it could kill on Instagram. To shoot the dining room of the historic mansion, Devlin carried in a vase of flowers to provide a centerpiece and turned off the lights. She tries to avoid the glow that light fixtures can create, relying on a combination of flash and long exposure times. She set her camera for a 1.6-second exposure time, so the details of the panoramic mural wallpaper from a series also brought to the White House would come into view. Devlin is careful to note that the work she does for listings isn't the work she'd do for Architectural Digest. Even if there is careful staging, sometimes she has to pull back and make sure that each closet is included. "Sometimes I take photos that aren't terribly pretty," she said, "but I need to show how the room works." White and red dominate in the colder months, but the return of warmer weather signals a seasonal shift toward rose wines, as evidenced by the proliferation of rose-colored glasses on tables and bars in the city's top restaurants and cafes. Shopping for roses can be frustrating, because the degree of sweetness is the most relevant deciding factor but is rarely made plain on labels. Wine lovers are left to make educated guesses based on the wine's depth of color or grape variety, but these tell us nothing about whether a given wine will be sweet or dry. Luckily, there is a useful clue tucked into the fine print. Alcohol content is often the most reliable indicator of whether you should expect a truly dry rose or one that is noticeably sweet. Generally speaking, the higher the alcohol, the heavier a wine will feel in the mouth and the drier it is likely to be. Bear in mind, though, that this pattern varies by region and climate. In cooler Europe, most roses over 12.5% alcohol will taste quite dry, but those from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere can often have a hint of sweetness even at 13.5%. M de Minuty Cotes de Provence Rose, France Grenache, Cinsault, and Syrah grapes. 13% alcohol. PLCB Item #8897. $17.99 Classically dry and quenching, the dry pink wines of Provence are the height of summer fashion. Subtle in flavor with a lengthy palate-cleansing finish, they are adept at flattering simple dishes served raw, from shrimp cocktail to tomato salad, as with this delicate cranberry-scented beauty. E. Guigal Cotes du Rhone Rose, France Grenache, Cinsault, and Syrah grapes. 13.5% alcohol. PLCB Item #4884. $14.99 The dry roses from the Rhone and its prestige village of Tavel are among the world's most robust, delivering red-wine-like traits in a chillable pink package. This example features forceful raspberry flavors and can stand up to intensely seasoned foods, from kung pao chicken to carnitas burritos. Remy Pannier Rose dAnjou, France Cabernet Franc, Grolleau, and Gamay grapes. 10.5% alcohol. PLCB Item #9501. $11.99 The flirty kiss of sweetness and modest alcohol content in the pink wines of Anjou is the perfect combo for foods with a serious spicy kick, like buffalo wings, but it's also delicious with fresh fruit and cheeses. Sweet-tart and full of fresh strawberry flavors, this affordable wine is underrated for its food-pairing potential. Josh Cellars Rose, California 12.1% alcohol. PLCB Item #2072. $14.99 California sunshine produces grapes that are lower in acidity than those of Europe, which leads its roses to taste and smell dessertlike even when the wine itself is on the drier side. That is the case with this blend, whose flavors of strawberry mousse or shortcake work well with burgers and ribs. Chateau St. Jean Rose, California 12.8% alcohol. PLCB Item #1156. $14.99 This Sonoma winery aims for milder "Provence-style" flavors in its dry rose, where shorter periods of contact between the clear grape juice and its purple skins limit transmission of "red" color and flavor compounds. With flavors of white-fleshed cherries, it pairs nicely with grilled pork and fried chicken. Beringer Main & Vine White Zinfandel, California Zinfandel grapes. 10% alcohol. PLCB Item #5235. $8.99 Sweeter rose wines, like this white zinfandel, are made by interrupting fermentation before all grape sugars are converted to alcohol, which explains the inverse relationship between the two. Full of sappy watermelon flavors, try this style with sweeter foods, like glazed ham or salmon teriyaki. Roscato Sweet Rose, Trentino, Italy Pinot noir, Croatina, and Teroldego grapes. 8% alcohol. PLCB Item #9071. $10.99 When wines feature very low alcohol, as with this example at only 8% by volume, we can guess they will be fully sweet, as is the case with this frothy moscato-style rose from northern Italy. Overtly grapey in flavor, with a candy-apple scent, it makes a great partner for desserts. Gazela Vinho Verde Rose, Vinho Verde, Portugal Borracal, Espadeiro, Amaral, and Vinhao grapes. 9.5% alcohol. PLCB Item #45882. $7.99 Vinho verde means "green wine," so this pink wine is made from grapes that are not fully ripe, resulting in alcohol and sweetness levels much lower than usual. Its tart rhubarb flavors, fierce acidity, and slight carbonation are all terrifically refreshing with cold ceviches and salads. Natura Rose, Rapel Valley, Chile Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Syrah grapes. 12.1% alcohol. PLCB Item #1595. $11.99 Made with organically grown grapes, this Chilean rose is lighter and tangier than most new world examples, despite being made with grapes known for darker reds. Featuring snappy flavors reminiscent of fresh pomegranate, it's a natural with lighter meats think chicken with pesto or veal Milanese. Crios Rose of Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina Malbec grapes. 13.5% alcohol. PLCB Item #3007. $12.99 Dark in color and high in alcohol, this is a richly textured rose that makes a great choice for red-wine lovers looking for a chillable option for lighter summer fare. It may not pack as much punch as a big red, but its black cherry flavors can easily handle a steak. Even as they celebrated clearing out two of the heroin encampments that have sprawled in Kensington for months, Philadelphia officials acknowledged they don't have the money to tackle the two remaining camps in the neighborhood, which have been growing as temperatures have become warmer. The camp at Emerald Street in particular is one of the longest-running in the neighborhood and the most difficult to clear because of its entrenched drug market. City officials have requested from $7 million to $8 million in the next fiscal year's budget for an overall opioid strategy that would include clearing that camp and its counterpart on Frankford Avenue. But City Council hasn't approved a budget yet. And so on Wednesday, city officials lauded "small successes," as Councilman Mark Squilla said at an afternoon news conference while sanitation crews sprayed down the sidewalks at the now-cleared camps on Kensington Avenue and Tulip Street. Meanwhile, protesters gathered on a street corner arguing that evicting people from the camps without enough shelter beds and without an official safe injection site could lead to more deaths in a city that had more than 1,200 fatal overdoses last year. Squilla had said Tuesday that Council would add money to the budget for more low-barrier housing, such as shelters and apartments that don't require residents to achieve sobriety before they can have a place to live. "We as a city do care, and we're not here just to move people off and move people out, we're here to get them help," he said at Wednesday's news conference. "We can make it even better as we move forward and put this pilot program into effect throughout the city of Philadelphia." City workers had been operating on a self-imposed deadline to clear the two camps by Wednesday, and only about 35 people remained there by morning. By the time trash trucks rolled through to collect abandoned tents, pallets, and other belongings, the last stragglers were carting out what they could carry. The rest of the people who had been in the camps had either left already for shelters or a family member's home. One man on Tulip told outreach workers that his mother and sister had visited him in the camps the night before and were coming to pick him up. Others said they were planning to camp elsewhere. A few said they didn't yet know where they would sleep. >>READ MORE: How the opioid crisis is changing how Philly ER doctors treat patients. "My mind is spinning," said Tiffany Prinski, 38, who lived on the streets of Kensington for three years and in the Kensington Avenue camp for the last several months. She spent Tuesday night in her tent, wide awake and anxious, running through her options. A group of protesters had plastered signs under the Kensington Avenue bridge that read, "Eviction = Death," in an imitation of the AIDS activism group ACT-UP's "Silence = Death" slogan. In addition to their concerns about aggravating the overdose rate, protesters said the city didn't have enough nearby housing to accommodate all the neighborhood's homeless, a fact city officials readily admitted. The Office of Homeless Services had set aside low-barrier shelter beds for 110 people on a list of camp residents it had compiled earlier anyone else seeking shelter would have to look for it in other facilities. "It's very painful for us to say we don't have beds for everybody, but it's part of the reality of the homeless system," said Liz Hersh, the city's director of homeless services. Her office has requested money for additional permanent housing in next year's budget. Kensington residents staged counter-protests on Tuesday night, saying that the camps were a health hazard for the neighborhood and that their children have had to pick their way past discarded needles and open drug use on their way to school. "We need our neighborhood to stop being like this," said Shannon Farrell, president of the Harrowgate Civic Association. "We are all for them getting help, but we're not in favor of them living here until they think they've gotten what they wanted." On Wednesday, police cordoned off the Tulip Street camp just after 10 a.m. and slowly walked through the train tunnel, checking inside tents for stragglers. Then sanitation workers scooped whatever had been left tents, mattresses, pallets, tables into a waiting trash truck. A couple who asked to be identified only by their first names, Mark and Sarah, walked up the block with their cat, Little Bubs, in a carrier. All three were moving into one of the city shelters on Kensington Avenue. They'd been living on Tulip since February, after shuttling between another encampment and two abandoned houses since last July. "I get what they're doing, because it is kind of insane allowing a homeless encampment under a public bridge. They're probably doing the best they can with what they have," Mark said. "But they're trying to force us into treatment because of this I feel like it's going to go really wrong. It's going to displace everyone to somewhere else, and they're going to have the same problem again in a new location." A father and son, who had been living together in a tent on Tulip for the last two months, lugged a plastic bin of belongings, headed to pitch camp elsewhere. Brian Holzworth of Somerton walked past with a shopping cart piled high with scrap. He'd gleaned every bit of metal he could from the abandoned camp to sell at the scrapyard down the block. "I figured I'd capitalize," he said. He'd been living rough for a year, including on Tulip for six months, and didn't know where he would sleep Wednesday night, he said. Another sidewalk, perhaps. On Kensington Avenue, news cameras and neighbors clustered to watch the sanitation crews work. A few advocates helped Prinski, now wiping away tears, dismantle her tent. Outreach workers in orange shirts encouraged her to walk down the block to a nurse who could treat an abscess on her forearm. "It's always uncomfortable," said Kate Perch, the housing coordinator for Prevention Point, watching the cleanup on Tulip Street. Prevention Point is running two of the city shelters that have opened to accommodate camp residents. "We knew it was coming, and felt like all of us in the initiative did the best we could to engage people. And that's not stopping just because [the camps are being cleared]." Imagine that you have a life-threatening disease and have run out of available treatments. You discover that there is a promising new medication that might work, but it is still undergoing testing. Would you want the right to try it? If so, you're in luck, because you have that right, and it has existed since the 1980s under a program known as compassionate use. To exercise it, your physician certifies that there is no comparable alternative and then requests approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA implemented a streamlined review process in 2016 and approves more than 99 percent of those requests, usually within four days. If you take the medication, the agency keeps track of any adverse effects to protect you and others who might take the drug. Despite the program's success, a movement has grown over the past several years to cut the FDA out of the process. Almost 40 states have passed "right-to-try" laws that allow patients to request experimental drugs directly from manufacturers. However, federal drug safety legislation preempts these laws, so they have had little practical effect. In response, Congress, with strong support from President Trump, recently passed a federal right-to-try law that allows patients with a life-threatening disease or condition to request an experimental drug directly from the manufacturer without first going through the FDA. What would the new federal law do for patients with terminal conditions? Absolutely nothing. In fact, it could cause them serious harm. >> READ MORE: Yardley man has terminal illness, but can't support GOP 'right to try' The law would allow patients to request drugs that have passed the first of three phases of clinical testing. That phase looks for safety concerns in a handful of subjects, sometimes as few as a dozen. It does not include any consideration of a drug's effectiveness. More than two-thirds of drugs that pass phase one fail in the second phase, which does look at effectiveness, and more fail in the third. The chance that a drug will be shown safe and effective enough for use in actual medical practice after passing only phase one is less than one in six. Many drugs that fail the testing process turn out to be not just ineffective but also dangerous. Some can make the underlying condition worse. The right-to-try law's end-run around the FDA makes it difficult for the agency to monitor those risks. And it removes the patient's physician from the equation, eliminating the traditional front-line of patient protection. What's more, manufacturers are shielded from liability for most adverse effects. Even after a request is made, a manufacturer is not required to supply the drug. In fact, it may have little interest in doing so. Right-to-try requests can pose a significant administrative burden and a distraction from the more pressing job of completing clinical trials as quickly and effectively as possible. Right-to-try requests could also siphon away the limited supply of experimental drugs that are needed for those trials. Manufacturers are also free to charge for the drugs at a price that may be unaffordable and that is not covered by insurance. These concerns are why the law is opposed by 100 patient advocacy organizations, including the American Cancer Society, and numerous medical organizations. The main pharmaceutical industry association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, has expressed concern that eliminating FDA oversight of right-to-try requests could jeopardize patient safety. Even Scott Gottlieb, the Trump-appointed head of the FDA, has expressed strong skepticism. Who supports the federal "right-to-try" law? Its main proponent is the libertarian Goldwater Foundation, which opposes most forms of government health and safety protection. It sees the law as a first step in a broader campaign to limit the FDA's authority to protect the public. It would be nice to live in a world in which oversight of health and safety by a government regulator is not needed for drugs and other medical interventions. Unfortunately, bitter experience over several decades with dangerous drugs and treatments has shown that we do not live in that world and are not likely to anytime soon. FDA regulation to prevent a repeat of those disasters has saved countless lives and prevented untold suffering. The new "right-to-try" law threatens serious harm to vulnerable patients. And it cruelly encourages false hope in unproven treatments. Patient lives should be too important to let Ideology play around with. Robert I. Field, JD, MPH, PhD, is professor of law and public health at Drexel University and is the founder and editor of the Health Cents blog. Reverend W. J. Rideout III, pastor of All Gods People Church from Detroit, uses the bullhorn to spur his congregation to chant in front of the Comcast Center in January 2017. Read more The rent-by-the-hour religious Word Network got the word on its complaint against Comcast Corp. dismissed. Comcast did not unfairly punish, or violate the government's conditions on its deal for NBCUniversal, when it dropped the Word from about 7 million homes on Comcast cable systems in early 2017. The Word leases airtime to preachers, both white and black, for sermonizing and to raise funds. The Word, based in Southfield, Mich., also claimed in its FCC filing that Comcast had sought exclusive rights to its digital content in a carriage agreement. But the FCC said there was no evidence that Comcast asked for this exclusivity. The FCC made a partial decision in Comcast's favor in late 2017 and now has dismissed the remainder of the Word's complaint. The Word could not be immediately reached for comment. Comcast said it believed the complaint was frivolous and was pleased by the FCC's decision, a spokeswoman said. In early 2017, Comcast replaced the Word with the Impact Network, another African American religious network, whose preacher, Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, of Great Faith Ministries in Detroit, was close to then-candidate Donald Trump. Comcast and Jackson said that politics did not play a part in the decision to replace the Word with Impact. "This didn't just start with Donald Trump coming to my church. It's just a coincidence of all these events," Jackson told the Inquirer in early 2017. Hundreds of Word supporters traveled to Philadelphia from the Detroit area to protest Comcast's action. The Word is still available on some Comcast systems. Rapper Meek Mill leaves the Criminal Justice Center after a hearing on whether Judge Brinkley should be removed from hearing his appeal, in Philadelphia, Thursday, May 24, 2018. Read more Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Genece E. Brinkley, who has overseen the criminal case of the Philadelphia-born rapper Meek Mill for a decade and who made international headlines last year when she sent him to prison, will remain on the case during his appeals, another Philadelphia judge ruled Wednesday. Saying he lacked the jurisdiction to remove from the case a fellow judge who sits on the same bench, Common Pleas Court Judge Leon W. Tucker denied the request from the rapper's attorneys to have Brinkley ousted. "We have a judge that wears the same robe that I wear, that has not recused herself and has not disqualified herself," Tucker said in rejecting the lawyers' arguments that Brinkley should be removed. "I don't have the jurisdiction to do that. It's as simple as that." Attorneys for the rapper argued during the hearing that Brinkley should be replaced because she has been unfair to their client by refusing to grant him a new trial even though the District Attorney's Office has said it does not oppose one. The lawyers also questioned Brinkley's fitness to preside because, they said, she stated in a federal lawsuit she filed last month in Philadelphia as her own attorney that as a result of a car accident, she was suffering mental defects and eye trauma that were affecting her ability to do her job. In her April 23 lawsuit against an Arizona woman and a man living on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, she said that while she was vacationing on the island two years ago, she was in an accident that involved the two and suffered from "severe head trauma." The suit said she also had a "concussion, dizziness, headaches, holes and tears in retina of both eyes, trauma to both hands, neck pain, lumbar spine strain and sprain, knee sprain and pain, and other orthopedic and neurological injuries." The federal court in Philadelphia ordered the case transferred to Arizona, but no other action has been taken. The two defendants could not be reached for comment. Brinkley's personal attorney, A. Charles Peruto Jr., said Wednesday that Brinkley had taken some time off from work after the accident, using vacation and personal time, but "it does not affect her ability to sit" on the bench. Mill's defense attorneys, led by Brian McMonagle, also noted Wednesday that Brinkley had claimed in an earlier lawsuit to have suffered trauma after finding a hotel housekeeper's name tag in a hotel bed. In 2014 she filed a personal injury claim against the Hotel Hershey in Dauphin County for "intense trauma" she says she endured for months after finding the name tag. That case, in which she also served as her own attorney, was settled for an undisclosed sum. Hershey declined to comment. Brinkley has declined repeated requests for comment on her lawsuits. Since her election in 1993, Brinkley, who presides primarily over criminal cases, has filed at least 20 lawsuits, making her one of the most litigious judges in recent Common Pleas Court history. "If we are to take her at her word, she has disqualified herself from this case," said McMonagle, who asked Tucker to reassign the case to Common Pleas Court President Judge Sheila Woods-Skipper. Tucker, the supervising judge of the court's criminal division, responded that Brinkley can be disqualified only by the state Supreme Court. "The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has refused to remove her from the case," he said. "For whatever reason, you are asking me to do what the Supreme Court has not done." McMonagle, at times raising his voice and then apologizing for it, stressed that in nearly 2,000 similar cases in which new trials were sought and were unopposed by the District Attorney's Office, they were granted. The Mill case is being treated differently only due to Brinkley's involvement, McMonagle and co-counsel Joe Tacopina told reporters after the hearing. "That speaks volumes of her intentions, of her fundamental fairness," Tacopina said. "We are going to seek immediate emergency relief before the Supreme Court for these reasons." McMonagle added: "Why is ours being treated differently? I think it's transparent, I think it's obvious, and the time has come to end it, and we're going to end it." Two prosecutors from the District Attorney's Office remained silent for much of the hearing, having told the court that they agree that Mill should get a new trial. Although both the prosecution and defense agree on that issue, Brinkley last month refused the request for a new trial. Mill was convicted on gun and drug charges in 2008, and has been on probation for much of the time since. Last fall, Brinkley sentenced him to two to four years in state prison, citing probation violations. The state Supreme Court ordered him released on bail in April. An evidentiary hearing before Brinkley is scheduled for June 18, but Mill's attorneys said they hope the Supreme Court will remove her before then. The rapper's attorneys believe that he was framed by former Philadelphia Police Officer Reginald Graham, who arrested him, and that a new trial should result. Graham, the only witness to testify at the 2008 nonjury trial, claimed that Mill had pointed a gun at him while he was trying to arrest the then-19-year-old for selling drugs in Southwest Philadelphia. But recently, two other officers have come forward with sworn affidavits claiming that Graham lied. Graham who retired from the force last year and has never been charged with a crime was identified in February by the Inquirer and Daily News as one of two dozen officers on a secret list compiled by the District Attorney's Office of cops the office would not call to testify. He was accused of stealing drug bust money, lying to the FBI about it, and failing an FBI polygraph test. Staff writer Mark Fazlollah contributed to this article. Matt Chin and Dana Pidliskey, of Bloomfield, N.J., had a wedding scheduled at Skybox on Nov. 3, 2018. They received notice this week from the Attorney Generals office that they will get their $3,000 deposit back. (Janae Rose Photography) Read more Four couples whose Fishtown wedding venue closed unexpectedly, leaving them scrambling to find a new location and out thousands of dollars, will recover their deposits, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office announced Wednesday. The operators of the venue known as Skybox in the 2400 block of East York Street will pay $20,250 to fully refund the couples. The business had been operating illegally, on an expired permit, and was shut down in April. Under the settlement, Skybox owner Christos Aivazoglou, also known as Chris Voz, will also refund any eligible couples who file complaints in the next 30 days. The settlement includes $2,500 spent by the Attorney General's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "Skybox accepted deposits and reservations from these Pennsylvania consumers even though the business was operating illegally," Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a statement. "When the venue was shut down, couples lost their deposit and were left scrambling to find a new wedding location." Dana Pidliskey, 29, and Matt Chin, 31, were told they will get back the $3,000 they paid for a November 2018 wedding by the end of the month. They have since found another location in Kensington, and will put the refund toward the wedding. "It was a little bit emotional, really," Pidliskey said. "But I'm just elated and happy. It feels like justice has kind of been served. We didn't know which direction it would take, but we had hope because we had so many resources helping us, so there's just relief and happiness." Several people offered venues to the couples after the Inquirer and Daily News published their stories, including the Fraternal Order of Police and developer Bart Blatstein, who said he'd open up the Mansion Ballroom at the Showboat Hotel in Atlantic City free of charge to any stranded couple. Attempts to immediately reach Voz were unsuccessful. His attorney, Jordan Rushie, said his client wanted to share his side of the story but didn't provide further information. "Chris has made right with respect to putting money in escrow for anyone who felt they didn't get the services they were provided," Rushie said. "We're very much looking forward to making a statement and getting our facts out there." Scott Janzen, one of the property owners, said Voz is no longer leasing the event space in the building, which has about 75 other tenants. The former Skybox will probably be leased as small office space, Janzen said. Anyone affected should contact the Bureau of Consumer Protection at 800-441-2555 or email scams@attorneygeneral.gov to file a complaint by June 28. When Bam Margera's best friend and fellow Jackass star Ryan Dunn (in painting, right) died in a fiery crash in West Goshen Township in 2011, he went into a deep, downward spiral. Read more Hulk Hogan meant to write a touching tribute to late Jackass star Ryan Dunn on Twitter this week, but instead, he accidentally mourned the "loss" of Dunn's Jackass costar and longtime friend Bam Margera, who is actually still alive. "Damn Bam I wish you were still with us, I sure would love to hang out again my brother," Hogan, 64, wrote in a since-deleted tweet on Monday that included a photo of himself and Margera. "Love u miss u HH." Fans corrected the Hulkster's error online within minutes, and the longtime wrestler posted a followup indicating that he got Margera and Dunn, who died in 2011, "mixed up." "Sorry Bam," Hogan added. That tweet has also been deleted. What prompted Hogan's remembrance of Dunn is unclear. The late stuntman died in a drunk driving crash on June 20, 2011 in West Goshen Township. Jackass production assistant Zachary Hartwell was also killed in the crash. Margera is currently on probation for a drunk driving incident in California earlier this year. California Highway Patrol officers arrested Margera on two counts of DUI in January after a traffic stop. Last year, he told the Inquirer's Jason Nark that Dunn's death put him on a destructive path with alcohol. "It took me four beers to even feel normal," Margera said. "Drinking helped me get paid." The pro skateboarder is also preparing to list his West Chester home, Castle Bam, on Airbnb for fans to rent this summer. April Margera, his mother, is currently renovating the property. He and wife Nicol Boyd welcomed their first child, Phoenix Wolf, in December. Hogan, meanwhile, has had Philly-area stars on the brain lately. Earlier this month, he told TMZ that he would beat Sylvester Stallone, Rocky himself, in an actual fight. Hogan played wrestler Thunderlips, the Ultimate Male, in 1982's Rocky III. That match ended in a draw. "Brother, come on," Hogan said to TMZ at the time. "Come on, brother." The scene on the Margate beach on Saturday May 26, 2018, Memorial Day Weekend. Read more MARGATE, N.J. Police in this busy Shore town say that as usual, more than a thousand visiting teenagers crowded onto the beach near Lucy the Elephant over Memorial Day weekend, but, unlike last year, when fights and loitering outside the nearby Wawa store spiraled out of control, no serious incidents were reported. "No fighting," said Police Capt. Ken Bergeron. "It was packed. The beach was taken up. They were just standing around. It is the holiday weekend." Bergeron said Margate deployed eight police officers to the beach to keep a lid on the teens. He said there were 13 overall arrests over the weekend, including one for possession of cocaine in a park near the beach and another for driving while intoxicated. There were four arrests for underage drinking, in addition to about 30 summonses for violations of ordinances, including open containers, drinking in public, and urinating in public. Bergeron said teens were kept moving outside the Margate Wawa, dubbed Club Wa for its status as a magnet for teens from Philadelphia and its suburbs during peak weekends. (Last year, teens who loitered outside the Wawa and were shown fighting in a viral video were subsequently dubbed "Shoobie Juvies.") Social media posts showed the Margate police using flashlights and, later, a loudspeaker "Move out of the parking lot" from a police vehicle to repeatedly disperse the crowds outside the Wawa. (The line inside the Wawa was estimated by one Twitter user as upward of 45 minutes "longer than lines in Disney.") Bergeron noted that the beach is "much bigger" than last year, due to sand replenishment, which let the crowds spread out more. He said the teens, many of whom were carrying backpacks but no beach chairs, were mainly from Philadelphia and its suburbs. "Most locals don't go to that beach," he said. Although he said police assume most of the teens are carrying alcohol in their backpacks, they cannot be searched without cause, he noted. Last year, a video of teens fighting on the beach went viral, but the viral video distinction of Memorial Day weekend at the Jersey Shore this year belonged to Wildwood, where a 20-year-old Philadelphia woman was punched twice by police during an altercation. On Wednesday, authorities in Cape May County released police body camera footage from that incident: Three videos that show a sometimes violent confrontation between three Wildwood police officers and the woman. In Margate, Bergeron said that Wawa hired its own security force to patrol outside its store on Washington Avenue and that Margate bicycle and other police made regular rounds. "Security kept them moving," he said. "It was a good weekend. The town was crowded, but we had no major incidents." Roseanne Barr arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of Roseanne on Friday, March 23, 2018 in Burbank, Calif. Read more After getting her ABC reboot of Roseanne canceled with a racist tweet, Roseanne Barr returned to Twitter on Tuesday night to lash out at co-stars of the show and blame her initial behavior on tweeting under the influence of the sleep drug Ambien. >> READ MORE: No, Ambien did not make Roseanne Barr a racist "I think Joe Rogan is right about Ambien," Barr wrote in a since-deleted tweet Tuesday night. "Not giving excuses for what I did (tweeted) but I've done weird stuff while on Ambien cracked eggs on the wall at 2am etc." In another deleted tweet, Barr said of the incident that "it was 2 in the morning and I was Ambien tweeting." She is scheduled to appear on comedian Rogan's podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, on Friday. In other tweets, Barr urged fans to not defend her actions, and that losing her show is "0 compared 2 being labelled a racist over one tweet." She added that fans also should not boycott ABC for canceling Roseanne. Barr also said that part-time Media resident Wanda Sykes' announcement that she was leaving the show "made ABC very nervous and they cancelled the show." Sykes announced she was leaving the show hours prior to ABC's cancellation announcement. >> READ MORE: I was surprised ABC canceled 'Roseanne' over tweet here's why I shouldn't have been >> READ MORE: With black women in power, Roseanne's show never stood a chance. Thank God As for her tweet about Jarrett, Barr claimed in other deleted tweets that she believed the former Obama aide was "Jewish and Persian." In one tweet, she admitted that her assumption was "ignorant of me for sure." Following the initial fallout of her racist tweet, Roseanne co-stars Sara Gilbert, who played Darlene and heralded the new iteration of the show to the air, and Michael Fishman, who played DJ, denounced Barr's actions. Fishman called it "reprehensible and intolerable." In response, Barr wrote that she "created the platform for inclusivity," and was surprised Fishman would "throw [her] under the bus." Gilbert wrote that Barr's comment about Jarrett was "abhorrent," which Barr said was an "unreal" statement. Barr said that she would leave Twitter as a result of the backlash she faced. She was still replying to fans' tweets as of Wednesday morning. President Donald Trump, who both Barr and her character were fans of, responded to the cancellation of Roseanne with, what else? A tweet. Just about every railroad track in SEPTA's system and PATCO's, too was placed where it is to get workers to jobs. When those systems were built, that meant getting into Philadelphia. A lot has changed since those rails were put down in the first half the 20th century; Philadelphia isn't the employment hub it was then. Now, about 232,000 people, close to 40 percent of the city's working population, leave the city each day for their jobs. And suburban employment is diffuse, decentralized, and for many of the city's poor, virtually inaccessible. >>READ MORE: The long ride While redesigning SEPTA's service and encouraging more employers to come to the city or locate near transit hubs may be long-term solutions, the Philadelphia Unemployment Project is trying to respond to today's reality. Its executive director, John Dodds, noted that about 80 percent of the region's commuters get to work by driving, but 36 percent of Philadelphians don't have a car. The PUP has created a car-pool service to get workers to suburban jobs not easily accessible by public transportation. "The way the suburbs are set up," Dodds said, "they're set up for cars." So far he has 64 people who take advantage of 13 car pools, a tiny number in the context of Philadelphia's 25 percent poverty rate, the worst of any big city in the country. He believes, though, that a scaled-up car-pool service is a viable supplement to connect the city's poor with jobs. Yet even as Dodds considers a broader service, he's facing the possibility of losing what already exists. The 12-year-old program has had multiple sources of funding over the years but more recently has relied heavily on PennDot to provide the $367,000 budget. State funding requires a 15 percent match, but the program has had trouble finding the money. It has now turned to the city, which has never contributed to the program. Dodds is concerned that Mayor Kenney has not yet committed to including in the coming year city budget the $55,000 needed to sustain the program. The program does have the support of 13 of Philadelphia's 17 Council members. At a news conference Wednesday at City Hall, Dodds, City Council members, and car-pool participants pleaded not just for the matching funds needed, but for a $250,000 commitment from the city enough money to expand the program to aid 300 people. "We've got to find a way to make this system work," said Randy Barge, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Olney. "SEPTA is not going to be able to provide bus service throughout the suburbs." The mayor's office sidestepped the question of whether Kenney would support the request for funding, saying it was working with SEPTA on projects like trolley modernization and an upgrade to the bus network to improve job access. PennDot reported that it could continue funding the program conditionally, but a municipal source of funding would have to be found. Darryl Douglass, 62, gets to a manufacturing job in Swedesboro, N.J., by meeting a car-pool driver on John F. Kennedy Boulevard about 1:15 p.m. each workday. The 30-minute commute takes a third the time it would take for him to try to get to the job by public transportation, which would involve a bus ride and walking more than a mile. "I wouldn't be going over to Jersey unless I was guaranteed a ride there and back," he said. The PUP finds riders and drivers from job-placement organizations. Drivers are selected from those who have licenses and are approved by Enterprise Rent-A-Car, which provides the vehicles. The drivers are given the vehicles to use as their own within some limits, as long as they provide rides to others, Dodds explained. Drivers and riders alike pay $6-a-day round trip. Council members Cherelle Parker and Helen Gym spoke in favor of the program. Parker described it as a tool that could boost people living in city neighborhoods at Philadelphia's borders. "This is about neighborhood preservation for me," Parker said. Whether a car-pooling service is an effective answer to the disconnect between workers and jobs is uncertain, though. Seattle offers a van share and van pool program that served about 11,000 riders in 2016, according to King County Metro. But Philadelphia's unemployment rate of about 5 percent, or close to 50,000 people, may be more significant than a pool service can effectively address. >>READ MORE: An 'uncomfortable' life: Philly still America's poorest big city "The hardest thing you can ask public transit to do is to really serve low-density and scattered locations," said Jon Orcutt, communications director for the New York philanthropic organization TransitCenter. "It's one of the things we don't do well in the United States is to sort of match up where people are to where they need to be." Gym, in an interview after the event, acknowledged that car pooling wouldn't solve the problem of unemployment and job access but said that broadening this service was a step toward getting past municipal divides and thinking of employment as a regional problem. "Programs like this help you get started," she said, "help you get started." Philadelphia Media Network is one of 19 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the city's push toward economic justice. Read more at brokeinphilly.org or follow @BrokeInPhilly Starbucks worker Jordan Crockett (right) talks about the coffee companys racial-bias training with Ashley Pasquarella (center) and Jaicee Huff during a break outside the Loews Hotel on Tuesday. Read more The training materials included a 68-page, 16-by-22-inch guide printed on newspaper, and a journal with prompts titled "My Notebook." With them, in the Loews Hotel in Center City and at individual Starbucks stores across the Pennsylvania suburbs and country, nearly 175,000 employees "partners," in company parlance would acknowledge biases, said CEO Kevin Johnson, "and disrupt them." The tools for the racial-bias training were not only procedural in scope how to handle someone asking customers for money, how to serve a patron with a thick accent but extremely personal. Here were topics more likely to land in conversations among social justice-minded millennials than in sanitized HR trainings, less corporate, more self-reflective even vulnerable: When's the first time you: Noticed how your race affected your beauty standards? Had a senior role model in your organization with a similar racial identity as your own? Went to work with your natural hair without comments and questions from others? More than a month since public outrage erupted when two black men in a Rittenhouse Square store were arrested after its manager called police because they hadn't ordered anything, Starbucks shut down 8,000 stores for the training. It was a first step, Johnson said, in the process to refocus the coffee company on its mission of being "the third place," a community space outside of home and work where everyone is welcome. >> READ MORE: An unlikely outcome of Starbucks: Kindred spirits and a social media campaign Starbucks planned to make the materials available on its website Wednesday and will incorporate the curriculum in its on-boarding process, chief operating officer Rosalind G. Brewer said. In an interview with the Inquirer and Daily News on Tuesday, Brewer acknowledged that the training, which she and Johnson underwent a week ago along with about 60 other top Starbucks executives, was "exhausting, both emotionally and physically." "I am convinced we do all have biases," she said. "I confronted some myself while sitting in that session." Malek Young, too, said it was working as he took a break from the training Tuesday evening. "I do think people are learning," said the 28-year-old black man who works in a Center City Starbucks. "And if they aren't, I am." In the meantime, customers who arrived at Starbucks to find it closed Tuesday afternoon were both bewildered and thoughtful. At the popular Starbucks in downtown Haddonfield, Norm Alger praised the company's decision. "I think it's respectful of Starbucks to take some kind of move," said Alger, 53, of Audubon. "I think it opens some people's eyes." >> READ MORE: What one start-up did when it got called out for being too white Johnson said the total cost of this training and subsequent ones would be in the "tens of millions." As for the impact the arrests had on business or the brand, he said the company was taking a "long-term view." He would not disclose any financial details on the settlement with the two men who were arrested, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, but did confirm the manager who initiated the incident with her call to police no longer works at Starbucks. Johnson said the four-hour training was designed with the help of 30 experts in neuroscience, social behavior, and civil rights, including prominent attorney Bryan Stevenson and Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. It featured video discussions among Starbucks staffers and experts from Perception Institute, a research consortium, on "racial anxiety" and the difference between personal bias and structural bias, plus numerous reflection questions that employees would discuss in smaller groups. Further trainings will be around topics such as how to handle escalation, how to judge the seriousness of an incident, and how to define "a true altercation," Brewer said. Store staff have also been given other phone numbers to call in the event of an incident, including homeless shelters and food banks, where previously, the policy was to call either the store manager or 911. Eventually, Starbucks plans to evaluate the success of the programming through customer-service scores and employee surveys. Jordan Crockett, 21, a black man who works at a Center City Starbucks, said the training was useful, but it did seem ridiculous to him that in 2018, a major corporation would have to shut down thousands of its stores to teach its employees not to discriminate. "It's a shame," he said, "but at least it's happening." Staff writers Bethany Ao, Jan Hefler, Justine McDaniel, Katie Park, and Tommy Rowan contributed to this article. The campus of United Lutheran Seminary in Philadelphia, formerly the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Mount Airy. Read more United Lutheran Seminary, a theological school with campuses in Philadelphia and Gettysburg, has received a $30 million bequest from an anonymous donor, described by school officials only as a woman who lived in the Midwest and died earlier this year. The donation one of the largest in the history of an educational institution affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will be used to fund a faculty chair and student scholarships starting in the fall of next year. It was announced May 18 on the school's website before graduation the first since Lutheran Theological Seminary in Mount Airy and its counterpart in Gettysburg merged last year after decades of failed attempts. "This [donation] will have a transformative impact on educational opportunities for future leaders of the church for decades to come," said the Rev. Angela Zimmann, vice president of institutional advancement for the 325-student United Lutheran Seminary. "We've been working to reduce their educational debt and make seminary education accessible to those who feel the call to serve, and this donation will have that impact." The bequest was made in memory of the Rev. James Franklin Kelly, a Lutheran minister who graduated from Gettysburg Seminary in 1920, and his wife, Hope Anna Eyster Kelly. Rev. Kelly died in 1983 at age 89, and his wife died in 1973. Rev. Kelly served as pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Wilmington from 1926 to 1953. He also led the congregations of Christ Lutheran Church in Erie and St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Connersville, Ind., where he moved after he resigned from the Wilmington church. According to obituaries in several newspapers, the Kellys had one daughter, Gladys Kelly Ellis, who died at age 95 in February. She had battled polio and rheumatic fever as a child and became a nurse as a tribute to the women who had tended to her. During World War II, she worked at Fort DuPont in Delaware, helping treat prisoners of war. She later married George M. Ellis Jr., a prominent physician in Connersville, and the couple worked together in his office for 40 years. Dr. Ellis died in 2010. The couple had no children. Zimmann said that she had met with the anonymous donor in December but had no idea that the bequest was $30 million until the benefactor passed away shortly after their visit. "The executrix called and said, 'Do you know how much?' " Zimmann said. "We were floored." School officials also have announced that Richard Green, who served as interim president of Lincoln University for two years ending in 2017, will become interim president of the seminary on June 4. He takes the helm following the departure of Theresa Latini, who was fired from her position as president in March after less than a year on the job. Latini was dismissed after reports that she had once led an organization that supported reparative therapy practices claiming to turn gay men and women straight. Latini had long ago repudiated the organization and such practices, but did not disclose her affiliation with the group during interviews for the position. She had told the chairperson of the school's trustee board about the association, but the official did not share the information with the remainder of the governing body until rumors began circulating on campus. Eight board members resigned during the controversy. Green, a lifelong Lutheran, is a graduate of Concordia College, an ELCA school in Moorhead, Minn. He earned his doctorate from the University of Louisville. He has served as interim provost at both St. Cloud State University in Minnesota and Albany State University in Georgia. He joins the seminary at a time when school officials are working to merge two schools, faculties, staffs, student populations, and campus cultures. The seminary is also coping with changes in theological education and religious practice and commitment that are remaking faith life. Zimmann said she expects the $30 million donation will help the school confront those changes. THE PARENTS: Amy Baker, 37 and Josh Baker, 39, of Lafayette Hill THE KIDS: Elliott Kristoff, 9; Lorelei Juliet, 5; Preston Alexander, born December 31, 2017 THEIR PRE-PARENTHOOD VOW: "One of the things we always told ourselves was that we knew kids would change our lives, but we didn't want them to change us," Josh says. During Amy's first pregnancy, there were days when all she could do was lie on the couch and gestate. Josh, who had just started a business in web design and branding, would come home a little hyped, a little ragged, only to find his queasy wife supine in the living room. "What did you do all day?" he'd ask, and she'd snark back, "I made a pancreas. What did you do?" It was the same spunk that attracted him when the two were high school students near Gettysburg. On their first date a cacophonous ride to a waterfall in Josh's Suzuki Samurai, which had a bad muffler they talked like the awkward teens they were, and then Amy splashed him with water. "I wasn't even looking for a girlfriend," Josh says. "I needed a prom date. But I realized she was smart and had ambitions and was mature, and I liked talking to her." Beneath the teasing posture, Amy says, she was actually shy a sophomore drawn to Josh's status as a senior. "He was funny and smart, and he didn't ditch me after prom." After graduation, Josh bounced from the University of Pittsburgh to Philadelphia University (now called Jefferson), where he could play volleyball, study industrial design, and be a bit closer to Amy. But when she enrolled in the physician assistant program on the same campus, they needed to recalibrate: Would Amy make new friends or cleave to Josh's crowd? How much time would they spend together? "We almost broke up, then decided we had something worth sticking out," Amy says. "I think some of the communication skills we learned then have helped us over the last couple of years." After Josh proposed on a winter hike to the same Gettysburg waterfall where they'd had their first date they planned to marry the following Christmas. Then Amy remembered she hates winter; how about a July wedding, instead? Just one glitch: she'd already planned a monthlong road trip with college friends from mid-May to mid-June. She mailed the invitations, left Josh with a to-do list, and drove a Volkswagen Jetta with her pals from Tennessee to Texas to Arizona and back. They married in Gettysburg, on National Park property; both remember Josh sobbing through the entire ceremony. Then they flew to Fort Myers, Fla. As soon as they were off the plane, both their phones blazed with messages from friends and family; one of their groomsmen had been killed in a car accident. Suddenly, their vows "for better, for worse" were achingly relevant. "It was something that really forced us to lean on one another immediately," Josh says. Amy had always fantasized about having three kids; she'd even held on to three of the savings bonds that were gifts from her grandparents, imagining she would pass them on to her offspring. But it took seven years graduate school, new jobs, an East Falls house with a basement that needed patching until they felt ready. Amy was driving to work at a family practice in Collegeville when she realized the smell of paving tar was making her nauseated. The pregnancy test she swiped from the office lit up like Christmas. Because Amy's father has twin sisters, she worried about a multiple birth. Her first words at the ultrasound appointment were, "Is everything OK?" followed quickly by, "Is there only one?" There was only one a boy, it turned out, who was still cozily in utero as Amy neared her 42nd week. After an induction, 15 hours of labor, and a brief panic because the cord was wrapped around the baby's neck, the two were gaping at their son. "They handed him to me. I probably said hi. He stopped crying for a few seconds; it was like he recognized my voice. There was that moment of: I'm holding him for the first time. He's real," Josh says. Though Elliott's personality was tranquil, his digestive system was not. The couple spent nearly two years consulting GI doctors, nutritionists, and allergists, trying to sleuth out the cause (a milk protein allergy, it turned out) of their son's vomiting and weight loss. They whipped up high-protein smoothies; they fed him, for distraction, in front of the TV. "I wanted another, but I wasn't sure I could do it again," Amy says. "It took us a long time to commit to having another kid." With Lorelei, Amy opted to work with a midwife. "It was a much different delivery, way more hands-on," Josh says. "I felt very helpless, like she was in pain and hurting and there was nothing I could do." At first, having two kids four years apart was a clumsy juggle trying to give equitable, quality attention to both a baby and a preschooler. But life grew easier. Lorelei could put on her own coat; Elliott was able to pack his lunch. Maybe, despite that third tucked-away savings bond, they were done. "But sometimes life doesn't work out exactly the way you thought," says Amy. This pregnancy was a jolt: they would need a new car, an addition to their three-bedroom house. Mostly, it meant a shift in expectations. "It took me a long time to come to grips with it," Josh says. Preston's birth was the quickest: eight minutes of pushing at Einstein Medical Center Montgomery. Now, it's the nuances of parenthood that preoccupy them: Should the older kids have to earn screen-time? How much say should they have over what they eat or what they wear? What happens if Amy and Josh disagree? When the two have conflict, Josh apologizes in front of the kids. Amy models flexibility; what works for one child may not be ideal for the others. Each tries not to contradict the other's parenting. "It's easy to love them," Amy says. "But it's hard to make sure you're raising great human beings. It's a lot harder than making a cute baby." The American Bible Society is headquartered next to Independence Mall in Philadelphia. A new policy is stirring backlash among some staff members. Read more The American Bible Society, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that translates and distributes Bibles around the world, wants employees to agree to abstain from sex outside marriage or resign. In a policy recently made public, the organization also defines marriage as only between a man and a woman. That means LGBT employees could be disqualified from working at the nonprofit. So could sexually active straight employees who live with a partner but are not married. Employees who don't commit to the terms by Jan. 1, 2019, will be told to resign. The policy is a shift for the organization, which previously did not require staffers to abide by such an agreement. Up to nine employees have already left, according to a current staffer who has worked at the nonprofit for more than a decade and would be affected because she lives with a partner outside of marriage. "It's pretty much like a firing squad going around," said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was concerned the nonprofit would reprimand her for speaking publicly. She said she is looking for other jobs: "You're being forced to fire yourself." The policy was announced to employees in December, but it came into the news this week when the Religion News Service reported on it. The Bible Society defended the policy, known as the "Affirmation of Biblical Community." "We realize everyone must live by his or her own conscience and understanding of what God calls his people to do," Roy Peterson, the nonprofit's president and CEO, said in a statement. "If staff members disagree with the Affirmation of Biblical Community, thus choosing to seek employment elsewhere, we will support their decision and continue to treat them with respect and care in their transition." Peterson added that the nonprofit enacted the policy "because we believe a staff made up of people with a deep and personal connection to the Bible will bring unity and clarity as we continue our third century of ministry." The employee who spoke to the Inquirer and Daily News on Wednesday said staffers had generally signed a core values statement that emphasized principles such as unity and integrity, but nothing that primarily affected LGBT and unmarried staffers. The nonprofit's new policy, she said, is much more extreme. The policy is carefully worded. It does not mention LGBT people but says: I will seek to refrain from sexual activity outside of the marriage covenant prescribed and exemplified in the Bible: "a man will leave his father and mother and unite with his wife, and the two will become one," symbolizing the relationship between Christ and His Church (Matthew 19:5; Ephesians 5:31). The policy also states: I will seek to treat all persons with love and respect, even if I disagree with their values, attitudes, and behaviors (1 Peter 2:17; Matthew 7:12). Philadelphia has a law that prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation. Whether the society's policy violates that law, however, is complicated. The law, known as the fair practices ordinance, has an exemption for religious institutions that hire people to perform work connected with religious activities. According to that exemption: It shall not be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to express a preference on the basis of religion, sex, or national origin in those certain instances where religion, sex, or national origin is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise. No one has filed a complaint against the Bible Society with the city's Commission on Human Relations, which enforces the law. The Bible Society, founded in 1816, is headquartered across from Independence Mall near Fifth and Market Streets. It announced last year it was building a $60 million center across from the Mall devoted to the importance and influence of the Bible in American life. HARRISBURG A onetime top prosecutor has pleaded guilty in a wide-ranging corruption case that included charges that he protected female drug dealers from prosecution in exchange for sexual favors, the state Attorney General's Office announced Wednesday. Former Bedford County District Attorney William J. Higgins Jr. pleaded guilty to more than two dozen corruption charges, including multiple counts of obstructing the administration of justice and official oppression. Higgins, a graduate of Cardinal Dougherty High School, in Northeast Philadelphia, had also been accused of tipping off dealers about confidential police informants. He resigned his position after his arrest last month, and with his guilty plea, will lose his law license and his pension, Attorney General Josh Shapiro said Wednesday. "Former District Attorney Higgins traded his power and law enforcement authority for sexual favors and he violated his oath to the people of Bedford County compromising the security of his community," Shapiro said. "As Attorney General, I will not allow any person in power to abuse their public office." According to the criminal complaint, Higgins offered favorable treatment, including lighter sentences and reduced bail, to women with whom he was having sex. In one instance, he refused to approve a search warrant for the house of a female drug dealer with whom he was involved. Prosecutors also said Higgins revealed the identities of confidential informants to known drug dealers, endangering the lives of the informants and hindering pending investigations. While under investigation, Higgins also asked three key witnesses in the case to refuse to cooperate with law enforcement, and instructed them to lie if asked about their intimate relationships with him. The case against Higgins was the result of a joint investigation between the Attorney General's Office and the Pennsylvania State Police. The case was prosecuted by Senior Deputy Attorney General Tomm Mutschler. HIAS PA attorney Elizabeth Yaeger, pictured at the agency offices in Philadelphia on Wednesday. Read more Philadelphia immigration attorney Elizabeth Yaeger spent the last several days working to separate fact from fiction, to discern the circumstances surrounding 1,475 undocumented children who were being described as "missing" after their placement with sponsor families in the United States. Now, she and other advocates have concluded that those children are likely not missing, despite the gut-jarring hashtag #WHEREARETHECHILDREN that's all over Twitter. Instead, the probable answer is that the government wasn't able to contact the children's sponsors, in part for lack of an extended effort. And some of those families, because they may be undocumented or have uncertain immigration status, might not rush to answer government queries. "They might be unlikely to respond," said Yaeger, the supervising attorney of HIAS Pennsylvania's Immigrant Youth Advocacy Project, which provides legal services to low-income children. "Many, if not most, of those 1,500 kids are likely safe." But without confirmation of the children's safety, she said, legitimate doubts and concerns remain. The issue of missing children arose from the April 26 Senate testimony of Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services. From October to December 2017, he said, the Office of Refugee Resettlement tried to contact 7,635 children and their sponsors for a safety check. Of those, 6,075 were found to be with their sponsors; 28 had run away; five had been removed from the country, and 52 had moved to live elsewhere. The resettlement office could not "determine with certainty" the whereabouts of 1,475 children, he said. That left open the question of whether those children, who came here alone, many fleeing and violence in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, could have been trafficked or taken. While one government agency has reached out to locate children, another, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has been targeting those same children and families for deportation, Yaeger said. What's definitely true, she and other experts said, is the issue of "missing" children has become conflated with a separate matter: The Trump administration's move to separate children from parents when families try to enter the United States, often while seeking asylum at the southern and southwest borders. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a "zero tolerance" policy in March, pledging to prosecute parents who previously may just have been sent home. "If you cross this border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. It's that simple," Sessions said, adding, "If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border." Attorneys for the ACLU and other advocacy organizations say there is no law requiring such separation. None of the 1,475 "missing" children are HIAS clients. But Yaeger made sure to share information about the situation with colleagues, given the public attention around the issue. In a news conference call Tuesday, hosted by the progressive-policy advocate Immigration Hub, advocates said the government appears to have made a simple phone call to each of the sponsors. "It's very likely most of them are not really lost they're not home, they didn't pick up the phone, they didn't want to talk to ORR," said Michelle Brane, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women's Refugee Commission in New York. David Leopold, a partner at Ulmer & Berne LLP and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, called the inability to confirm the whereabouts of 1,475 children "tragic" and "awful" and "agency incompetence." "But it's a completely separate issue from the issue of separating minors, children, from their mothers and fathers at the border," he said. That issue will be the focus of Friday's national "day of action" in cities across the country. In Philadelphia, the ACLU and other advocate groups plan to rally at noon outside the Center City offices of ICE. Protests are planned in Allentown and Reading on Saturday. "It's important to not conflate these two issues, and to understand the nuances," Yaeger said. "The point is keeping families together." Last week, President Trump abruptly pulled out of the planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in a bizarre letter that ominously warned of America's "massive and powerful" nuclear capabilities. (As of this writing, it appears the summit may still take place.) This came on the heels of Trump's senseless decision to rip up the Iran nuclear deal, increasing the probability of another war in the Middle East. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is seeking congressional approval for a new "low-yield" nuclear warhead, a Strangelovian euphemism for a weapon roughly as powerful as the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So much for that Nobel Peace Prize. In a sane world, Trump's escalation of nuclear dangers would provoke a much louder outcry, especially from Democratic politicians who have taken up the mantle of resistance to the president. But Democrats, with a few notable exceptions, haven't offered alternatives to Trump's calamitous, con-man foreign policy. While there are a number of explanations for the party's response, perhaps a central part of the problem is that, with less than six months until the midterms, Democrats still don't have a coherent message on national security. Without control of the White House or Congress, the moment is ripe for Democrats to rethink the failed establishment approach that has guided the party for too long. Since the 2016 election, progressives have successfully pushed Democrats to the left on several key issues. Medicare for All, tuition-free college, and a $15 minimum wage have become virtually mainstream positions. Yet there has not been a parallel shift in the debate over national security. To the contrary, hawkish Democrats seem almost emboldened. In the Senate, six Democrats, apparently without fear of consequence, sided with Republicans to confirm CIA Director Gina Haspel despite her disgraceful role in George W. Bush-era torture. Leading Democrats are cosponsoring an Authorization for the Use of Military Force that peace activists say would give Trump a "blank check for war." Last week, 131 House Democrats voted to increase defense spending for the second consecutive year under Trump, showing how little has changed since Democrats went along with Bush's request for higher defense spending late in his term. As a party, Democrats historically are fearful of being perceived as weak on national security. In today's political environment, however, their failure to advance a bold, progressive alternative to Trump's belligerent policies and bloated defense budgets is a huge missed opportunity. Americans from across the political spectrum are clearly hungry for a new course. Those who claim otherwise need only consider the debate in 2016, when Trump strained (and lied) to present himself as an opponent of America's endless wars. Indeed, as I've written before, three successive presidential elections have been won by the candidate viewed (accurately or not) as the most skeptical of military intervention. Recent polling bolsters the case for a new, robust progressive vision. A survey conducted in February by Public Policy Polling found that voters prefer investing in domestic programs over military ones, that the war on terrorism has failed, and that the United States should cut spending, not increase it, on nuclear weapons. "Democrats do not need to continue as Republicans-lite on defense," Ploughshares Fund president Joe Cirincione and former Sierra Club Foundation president Guy T. Saperstein write in the Nation. "They can stand up for tough, realistic national-security policies that protect America while cutting excessive spending and excessive weapons. By doing so, they will gain, not lose, voters." To be sure, some Democrats are working to spark a debate on these issues. For years, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has offered an alternative budget proposal that would reduce unnecessary defense spending. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hawaii) has been a staunch opponent of regime change, while Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) has been vocal about the need for a new progressive foreign policy, laying out a series of core principles. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) have called on Congress to reassert its war powers. Sen. Edward J. Markey (D., Mass.) and Rep. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) have introduced legislation to prohibit a nuclear first strike without a congressional declaration of war. And in a powerful speech at Westminster College last September, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) recalled President Dwight Eisenhower's declaration that "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." But it is long past time for Democratic leaders to take that commonsense message to heart and to voters across the country. After all, how will the party deliver on its promises on health care, education, or infrastructure with the military-industrial complex siphoning off such a disproportionate share of the federal budget? As Democrats work to advance a more progressive vision for the country, it's crucial that, on national security, they give voters a real alternative to endless war. Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation magazine, writes a weekly online column for the Washington Post. Pennsylvania school districts have saved up for a lot more than supplies. Read more You'll be happy (or maybe concerned/puzzled) to know that your tax dollars continue to pump up school district reserve funds all across the state. Yep. Despite constant complaints of inadequate resources, unfair funding, and unmet needs, districts in every region are holding/hoarding barrels of money in interest-bearing accounts. Annual data from the state Department of Education show reserve amounts increase every year. Every year I point it out. Every year nothing changes. Latest statewide reserves (for 2016-17), including funds for charter and vocational schools, approach $5 billion; for school districts alone it's $4.53 billion. To put these numbers in context, the total state appropriation for basic education is $5.9 billion. "School districts now hold enough money to cut every Pennsylvania student a $2,860 check," says Nathan Benefield, vice president of the Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative think tank that also tracks school reserve funds. How encompassing are reserve accounts? Just 14 school districts, mostly in western counties, show negative balances. That means 97 percent of the state's 500 districts have reserves. Even the ever-strapped Philadelphia School District shows a fund of $14 million. How is this possible? Why does it go on? "It's amazing, isn't it?" says state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, who, when I wrote about this last year, said he'd start looking at reserve funds as part of regular school district audits. What he found is "there's no single story. Some districts are hoarding more and some have no reserves at all." And by "some," he means very few. The Pittsburgh School District is listed with the largest reserves: $186 million. The district with the largest negative balance? Scranton. Down $30 million. The answer from school administrators, school boards, and such is always, well, it's smart to have reserves because of rising pension costs, possible strikes, planned improvements, and the risk of the legislature cutting funding. Makes sense. Except for the fact that reserves climb each year. Climbed even after 2011, the year of the infamous billion-dollar budget cut under Gov. Tom Corbett. DePasquale says there are districts that should give taxpayers their money back. He adds, "When the amount of reserves gets over 20 percent of a district's total spending, I get a little anxious." Guess he's more than a little anxious. A Commonwealth Foundation analysis shows 226 districts, or 45 percent of all districts, hold reserves amounting to 20 percent or more of spending. And the foundation identifies 13 districts in that category that also sought to raise taxes. They include two in Montgomery County: Springfield Township, $24.5 million in reserve, and Lower Merion, $56 million. Other area districts with large reserves: North Penn, $40.4 million; Central Bucks, $37.7 million; West Chester Area, $26 million; Upper Darby, $23.5 million. (You can check any district by visiting education.pa.gov. Go to the search box. Type "AFR data detailed." Click on it. Scroll down to "Miscellaneous." Click on the dates beside "General Fund Balance.") Look, reserves are smart for any enterprise, public or private. But clearly too many districts hoard too much money and nobody holds them accountable certainly not the legislature. Not its left-leaning, pro-education Democrats. Not its right-leaning, fiscal-hawk Republicans. Because every lawmaker has schools in his or her district. And, hey, it's only taxpayer dollars. Nobody wants to touch this issue. Especially in an election year. The most I can get out of top state officials is something like I got last year from state Budget Secretary Randy Albright. He said he's "not unsympathetic" to the argument reserves are too high. He said, "We could and should begin to talk about fund balances." But when I asked this week how talks are going, I got a prepared statement: "Gov. Wolf continues to make it a priority to increase the state's share of education funding and decrease the inequality between school districts by having more state funding flow through the fair funding formula." Which, of course, has nothing to do with reserve funds. Or why they annually rise. Last month, I visited Russia to learn more about the Kremlin's campaign to influence the U.S. election in 2016. But the more I learned about Kremlin techniques, magnified by social media, the more similar those techniques appeared to President Trump's modus operandi. The Kremlin has more tools, and U.S. citizens still have more independent news sources. Yet Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are both waging information wars that rely on confusing their opponents with an endless barrage of conspiracy theories and fake "facts." They push favored narratives over and over ("Spygate," anyone?) until these narratives sink into public consciousness. They are repeated not just by supporters but even by those who know them to be false. >> READ MORE: Russian troll factory hiring for new anti-U.S. operation; biggest danger is not to America | Trudy Rubin No one understands Russian techniques better than Clint Watts, a fellow at Philadelphia's Foreign Policy Research Institute, who is also a former Army officer, FBI special agent, and counterterrorism expert. He is also the author of a fascinating new book, Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News, which details the way Putin and Trump boost each other's narratives. "Russia's method represents not an information war, but a war on information itself," says Watts. "Trump has the same approach." Watts worries that "Americans still don't grasp the information war Russia perpetrated against the West, why it works, and why it continues." The KGB used "active measures" efforts to undermine the West by means other than military for decades. But the advent of social media exponentially expanded Russia's ability to amplify its "active measures" with little manpower. It's not just things you already know that Kremlin cutouts stole Democratic emails and passed them to WikiLeaks, which then strategically released them an hour after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, eclipsing Trump's "grab 'em by the pussy" grossness. The bigger danger is that Russia's cyber efforts go beyond helping one candidate or hurting another. They are more broadly aimed at exacerbating existing divisions in our democracy and spreading disruptive conspiracy theories often those put forward by Trump or the websites he promotes. Social bots false social-media accounts designed to push out high volumes of information can make such falsehoods go viral. One example: A Russian-influence account labeled @TEN-GOP and posing as a Tennessee GOP account gathered 136,00 followers while repeating bogus voter-fraud charges. Fox News quoted it, top Trump campaign officials tweeted it, every major conservative website repeated it. And this was just one of thousands of accounts operated by Russia in the lead-up to the election. Watts believes the Kremlin had no need to engage in direct collusion with the Trump team. It was easily able to find team members (Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, etc.) to do its bidding. Moreover, Trump's unending promotion of Putin has led to an astonishing shift of support to Putin on the American right. A February 2017 Gallup poll shows a 166 percent rise in Putin's favorability rating among Republicans just since 2015. Thus the Kremlin has ripe targets for disinformation on alt-right and white-supremacist websites that support Trump, along with some far-left sites. Says Watts: "They infiltrate key audiences, then direct them on strategic themes and messages." Example: Watts says he's seen "routine regurgitation of Russian propaganda" on InfoWars, one alt-right site praised by Trump that promotes the most ugly conspiracy theories like claims the Sandy Hook massacre was staged. Trump and his team often retweet claims by such sites. And here's what's really scary: It's hard to challenge the Kremlin's messaging aimed at undermining NATO, the European Union, America's role abroad, and the free Western press when Trump enhances its messages. "He echoes what Putin says on every issue, which is why we can't change the narrative," says Watts. Even more disturbing, Trump still refuses to mount a unified U.S. government pushback against Russian cyber espionage. Instead, the president's attacks on U.S. institutions (the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, the mainstream media) maximize Putin's game plan. And Trump's constant promotion of false conspiracy theories gives Putin's info warriors rich material to package for the Russian home crowd as examples of America's decline. Case in point: Trump's lie that the FBI infiltrated his campaign with spies. Even conservative Rep. Trey Gowdy said, on Fox News, that the FBI was justified in sending an informant (to check out Trump staffers who were consorting with known Russian intelligence agents). But Trump keeps tweeting "Spygate" a canard repeated by Russian TV and social media. "Before the social-media age, there was a filter on conspiracy theories from Congress and the mainstream media," says Watts, "but today people choose their information sources and Trump's conspiracy claims are repeated." Canards become accepted as reality by Trump supporters. Meantime, Trump opponents are deluged with so many fake claims that it becomes exhausting to try to refute them. These techniques, says Watts, are right out of the Kremlin playbook. But the reason Russia's information war has been so successful is not because the Kremlin is so brilliant. The answer is simpler: It's because Putin has a (witting or unwitting) helpmate in Trump. Elizabeth Fitzmaurice, 87, a sister of the Holy Child Jesus who made her mark within the Catholic community as an educator and administrator, died Friday, May 25, of cardiac arrest at the Hearth at Drexel, an assisted-living facility in Bala Cynwyd. Sister Elizabeth was a six-decade member of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, which is based in Rosemont. She entered the order right out of high school in 1949 and made her final vows in 1957. Starting in 1952, Sister Elizabeth taught at St. Edward Elementary School in Philadelphia. She moved on to schools in New York, California, and Washington, D.C., before returning to the Philadelphia area in 1963. She was the principal at Holy Child Academy in Sharon Hill from 1963 to 1971. Sister Elizabeth was well-loved and respected by her students, and many kept in touch with her throughout their lives, especially alumnae of Holy Child Academy in Sharon Hill. "Many of the students said she was an inspiration to them and impacted their lives," said a friend and colleague, Sister Carroll Juliano. Between 1962 and 1965, leaders in the worldwide Catholic Church convened the Second Vatican Council, the first ecumenical meeting of its kind in 100 years. In the sessions, Catholics dedicated themselves to spiritual renewal and to making religious life deeper and more relevant to Christians in the modern world. "It was a time of change and upheaval," said Sister Carroll. "As we moved into this time of renewal, we thought, 'Is this the best way to structure ourselves as women of the church?' " Against this backdrop in 1970, Sister Elizabeth was named to the leadership team for the Rosemont Province, or geographical division governing the religious order. Three years later, she was appointed the Rosemont Province leader. In 1976, Sister Elizabeth made history by taking the three provinces governing the order in the United States the Rosemont, New York, and Western provinces including Oregon and California and forming one American Province. She had the vision to see change was needed and played a key role in the reorganization, Sister Carroll said. The American Province is the only one covering the United States, although not all states are represented. There are about 125 sisters who are members. "She formed it into a model that still continues today," Sister Carroll said. After the reorganization was complete, Sister Elizabeth became the first leader of the American Province. At the first meeting Sister Elizabeth convened she issued a challenge: "Sisters, get up and move," she said. It was a call to action, said Sister Carroll, to embrace and make personal the changes of Vatican II. Under Sister Elizabeth's tenure, social ministries such as legal counseling, feeding the poor, helping with parish administration, offering spiritual counseling, and teaching in Catholic schools were given priority, and they remain so today. She served as the American Province leader for two consecutive terms, ending in 1983. Others led the province until Sister Carroll took over the job last June. Sister Elizabeth was born to Thomas E. and Madeline Fitzmaurice in Kenosha, Wis. At age 16, she moved to Waukegan, Ill., and graduated from Holy Child High School in 1949. She earned a bachelor of arts in history from Loyola Marymount University in 1960, and a master's degree in the same subject from Catholic University of America in 1969. Following her leadership role in the religious society, Sister Elizabeth accepted a job as dean of student affairs at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass. In 1995, she retired from the school and moved to Concord, Mass. She returned to the Philadelphia area last year for health reasons. Sister Elizabeth had a brother and sister who died earlier. She is survived by a niece, nephews, and a cousin. A Mass of Christian Burial will be at 11 a.m. Thursday, May 31, at Holy Child Chapel, 1341 Montgomery Ave., Rosemont. Burial will follow in Calvary Cemetery in Conshohocken. Memorial donations may be made to the Society of the Holy Child JesusAmerican Province, 1341 Montgomery Ave., Rosemont, Pa. 19010, or via www.shcj.org/american/donate. Philadelphia, where some 22 percent of children suffer from asthma, is the third most challenging city to live in with the disease, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. Read more Ideas We Should Steal is a regular feature of the Philadelphia Citizen, which will be holding an Ideas We Should Steal Festival in late 2018. Jefferson University pulmonary specialist Gregory Kane has some ideas: There might be lower subway fares during high-risk days, to cut down on traffic pollution; school district-wide calls to keep students with asthma inside; alerts to environmental authorities when local industry is releasing pollutants into the air. Even what Kane, chair of Jefferson's department of medicine, calls a "big hairy audacious goal": a city of the future where traffic is limited because of bad air quality, such as what happens already in Beijing. >> READ MORE: Temporary bike grids: How Macon, Ga., won the bike lane culture war | Ideas We Should Steal Jefferson's Kane, who envisions all sorts of policy changes that could come as a result of a similar project here, is clear on one thing: Philadelphia needs all the tools it can get to help asthma patients breathe better, more often. In particular, the city needs better and more support for patients in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, those who are poor and underrepresented in the medical field. Propeller's sensor would provide data, to help him better manage his patients' heath. Roxanne Patel Sheplavy is the executive editor of the Philadelphia CIitzen, where a version of this piece previously appeared. Matlacha Civic Association officials are disappointed that an overture extended to the city of Cape Coral over its plans to possibly develop the D&D boat ramp property has yet to be acknowledged Four weeks after MCA president Karl Deigert sent a letter to the Cape Coral mayor and City Council suggesting that civic supports the option to build a new boat ramp with a restaurant and other amenities and that the Board would like to meet with the Council to discuss how the (annexation) lawsuit can be resolved to expedite permitting and construction of the boat ramp, no response has been received. As a professional courtesy we would hope that the city attorney would respond, said MCA member and Washington D.C. attorney Michael Hannon. The letter also asked for a broader relationship to address some of the issues common to both Cape Coral and Matlacha. Several Matlacha Civic Association board members attended the Cape Coral City Council meeting of April 23. At that meeting, City Manager John Szerlag addressed several options for the city-owned property in Matlacha annexed by the city of Cape Coral. One option included replacing the old boat ramp with a new boat ramp plus a 3,000-square-foot restaurant. But discussion with the Matlacha group would likely not resolve issues on the table between the city and islanders. The Greater Pine Island Civic Association board opposes the Capes proposed additional boat ramp or ramps and restaurant. That organization has issued a resolution: The GPICA strongly opposes the planned construction of any additional boat ramps and any buildings on the five (5) acres that Cape Coral recently annexed from Matlacha. This opposition is based on a strong concern for public safety and environmental integrity. Of those members present, 27 approved of the resolution with 10 members opposed. The Greater Pine Island board opposes anything that will increase traffic in that area, Board member Shari Perkins said. A 3,000-square-foot restaurant will impact both car and boat traffic. That is one issue the MCA believes could be resolved. It is our understanding that Cape Coral is going to do a traffic study, Hannon said. That should do a lot to alleviate concerns about increased traffic. This Saturday, June 2. Southwest Floridas most unique fishing event for professional and non-professional anglers will begin at the German American Social Club of Cape Coral. The contest will run for the next 7 days, until June 9. In a nutshell youll spend seven days of fishing with friends and win raffle prizes for taking pictures of fish you catch, organizer Jim Griffiths said. Youre turned loose on Saturday morning June 2 with a list of 36 species of fish that can be caught in our local waters. The seven-day event is hosted by Nautical Mile Maga-zine, owned by Bokeelia resident Jim Griffiths. Youre given items that must appear in photos to show you caught the fish that week, and youll get bonus tickets if a kid appears in at least half of your photos showing you took a kid fishing, Griffiths said. Fish with a team, family and/or friends, and catch as many different species of fish as you can in a week. Fish where you like, with who you like, for an hour or all week long. Entry fees are only $100 per team to participate with an estimated $30,000 in raffle prizes. Put as many people on a team as you like, but know that youll be sharing your winnings with your team, Griffiths said. The fewer amount of people on a team, the more you can win individually. A raffle of this size takes a while so we make custom raffle tickets with your team number on them to speed things up. Event day is so exciting that even younger kids dont get bored. Why sponsor any event? An events cause is as important as your return on investment, Griffiths said. For the last couple years Ive volunteered in high school business classes designed around encouraging kids to understand the facets of a business. Im currently working with a few kids that want to develop presentation skills and theyll be hosting this years event. Theyll be making the announcements and running the prize raffle, and basically controlling a room of 500+ people! This years Fish36 is funding the foundation for this project. The Fish36 is a unique annual fishing event for professional and non-professional anglers anglers who come together for a memorable week on the water while helping to develop entrepreneurial skills in our youth. Some of the presenting sponsors are Fort Myers Marine, Diversified Yacht Services, Barnacles Restaurant, Captain Robs Bait & Tackle, TowBoatUS of Lee County, Lee County Sheriffs Office and Roger Dean Chevrolet. For additional information, visit: www.fish36.org/ KAMPALA. The Chinese community in Uganda yesterday 29th May 2018 donated 3000 U.S dollars and other items like soap and clothes to Sanyu Babies Home, a child care center where babies who have been abandoned by their parents are taken care of. Talking at the function held at the Home in Kampala, the Chinese Ambassador to Uganda Zheng Zhuqiang, said its their role as Chinese companies to give back to the communities in which they operate. The relationship between China and Uganda has been there for so long and it will always be there and if we see a need to support children, we shall not hesitate because we also need these children to have better health and life, said Zheng. Zheng and his group from Uganda Zhejiang Chinese Association were welcomed Nankya Mutagubya, the Director of Sanyu Babies Home who thanked the Chinese community for always visiting the babies and showing them care. Nankya urged the locals to also copy the good culture the Chinese have showed in helping to take care of disadvantaged babies. She revealed that home has about 49 babies and the given donation will be effectively utilised to look after babies by buying them food, repairing one of their trucks which they use to take children to hospital in case of an emergency. Related Members of Parliament from the Lango sub-region under their umbrella Lango Parliamentary Group -LPG on Tuesday decried the tragic road accident that happened on the Kampala -Gulu highway last week, claiming lives of 22 Ugandans and leaving scores injured. A joint statement signed by Hon Felix Okot Ogong, the chairperson for LPG, MPs said the challenge of road traffic incidents in the country have reached an alarming level and now want the issue investigated and rigorous inspection framework be instituted on all public service vehicles. They also want Parliament to spearhead the road safety campaign and sensitize Ugandans against the reckless driving, improper road use among others. In February this year, United Nations report 2018 noted that Ugandas roads are far below international standards making the country prone to accidents in the whole East African region. The review conducted at the request of the government with support from the UN and the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), established that the extent of the road safety challenge is serious but has failed to attract the necessary attention for appropriate interventions. The report indicated that a number of roads in the country including those in the central business district and highways leading to upcountry regions are too narrow while others reportedly substandard making their lifespan too short. Legislators also decried the sorry state of hospitals in the country saying that medical facilities are less facilitated to handle emergencies. We want to bring to the attention of this House the sorry state of our hospitals, especially when it comes to managing emergencies like this one [Kiryandongo accident], read the statement. They added that, the hospitals in Kiryandongo where victims were first hospitalised lacked the basics of facilities, equipment and medical supplies. They requested government to consider building robust capacity of public health facilities should become part of the priorities in the countrys development planning. However, Mps commended the manner in which government handled the dreadful incident on Friday night of airlifting accident victims from Kiryandongo to help them access the medical facilities in Kampala. We note with gratitude the speedy, firm and responsible manner with which government handled this tragic incident, read the statement. Mps also welcomed the contribution of Shs5 million and Shs3 million promised by government towards the burial expenses and treatment of the injured victims respectively but said they are waiting for the detailed police report on the matter. On Sunday, the Government declared three days of mourning following Fridays nasty road accident in Kiryandongo district a move that legislators applauded. Related Hartford Police Chief David Rosado credited three civiliansJacqueline Marciano, Marvin Dixon and Jose Casanovawith saving officer Jill Kidiks life. (Photo: Screen Shot from Hartford Courant Video) It began like any other Thursday morning for the property manager and the two maintenance workers, but by 9 a.m. it had pitched into a surreal, bloody scene. The maintenance men found themselves prying a knife-wielding assailant off a police officer, the property manager with her fingers pressed to the officer's throat, trying to stop the blood. On Tuesday, Hartford Police Chief David Rosado credited the three employees Jacqueline Marciano, Marvin Dixon and Jose Casanova with saving officer Jill Kidiks life after she was stabbed in the throat while responding to a landlord-tenant dispute May 17, the Hartford Courant reports. Rosado presented Marciano, Dixon and Casanova with the departments Distinguished Citizens Award, and Mayor Luke Bronin and the city council thanked the three, calling them heroes who will always be remembered in the city of Hartford. Kidik was released from the hospital last week after several rounds of surgery and is expected to make a full recovery. But without a shadow of a doubt, Deputy Chief Joseph Buyak said, had Ms. Marciano, Mr. Dixon and Mr. Casanova not taken the action they did, Officer Kidik would have died. Baltimore County police officer Amy Caprio was killed last week when she was run over. The teen suspect was supposed to be under house arrest. (Photo: Baltimore County PD) Three days before accused cop killer Dawnta Harris allegedly ran over and killed a Baltimore County police officer, juvenile caseworkers recommended house arrest for the 16-year-old as he awaited sentencing for car theft. Now state officials are investigating that recommendation by the Department of Juvenile Services. The West Baltimore teen had been convicted of stealing one car and accused of stealing three others in recent months, though two of the cases were dropped, according to court records obtained by The Baltimore Sun. The teen also missed court hearings and left an unsecure juvenile center in Montgomery County, officials said. Jay Cleary, chief of staff for the Department of Juvenile Services, says Harris should not have been a candidate for house arrest after his most recent violations. Harris had fled home detention when he allegedly struck and killed Baltimore County Police Officer Amy Caprio with a stolen Jeep last week in Perry Hall, MD. Police say Harris was waiting in the Jeep while three other teenagers were burglarizing homes in the neighborhood when Caprio arrived. Police said Caprio opened fire before Harris ran her over with the Jeep. Caprio was pronounced dead shortly after at an area hospital. Steven Wiggins is a person of interest in the killing of a Dickson County (TN) Sheriff's deputy Wednesday morning. (Photo: TBI) A Dickson County (TN) Sheriff's Deputy was shot and killed at a traffic stop Wednesday morning and a man identified by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation as a person of interest is the target of a statewide manhunt. A police source told WKRN the deputy tried to stop a driver with an expired tag around 7 a.m. before shots were exchanged during a short pursuit. The deputy's identity has not been released. Authorities are now searching for Steven Wiggins, who they said is a person of interest. Wiggins is wanted for aggravated assault and theft, charges stemming from a domestic incident that happened Tuesday evening. A Blue Alert was issued for Wiggins around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. Michael Resmans Quaker faith and professional background as a pediatric occupational therapist have been combined in his "Whispers of the Holy Spirit" series. The fourth book in the series, "Oh God, Where Are You?" has now been published, and is printed in both English and Gaelic (Irish). "I chose that because Irish children have been exposed to violence for hundreds of years," Resman said. The first three books in the series were printed with translations in Korean, Swahili and Spanish. All of the books speak to issues important to the well-being of children. "A lot of people dont think kids are interested in big questions," Resman said. "I disagree." Resman is a former pediatric occupational therapist in Rochester Public Schools. "People say, Kids cant read this," he said. "My hope is parents and adults will read the books to children. I hope it will be read by child therapists, hospital chaplains anywhere children are in pain." The book opens with a little girl asking "Oh God, where are you?" She is hurt, scared and alone. Eventually, she hears a voice tell her that "All of creation loves you." She is told that "God is everywhere" and that her pain is not her fault. The book is illustrated with photos of nature and young animals, most in warm, welcoming colors. Resman said hes been working on the series of books for nearly a decade. "It took eight years to find someone who would publish it," he said. Through his Quaker connections, he finally made contact with a small, nonprofit publisher in Belize. Finding acceptable foreign-language translations for each book has also been a challenge. "Each of them has been very difficult," he said. Still, Resman has managed to get the first four books in the series published, and anticipates the fifth, "Heaven," with translation in Russian, will come out in 2019. That will be the end of the series. "I had five issues I wanted to address," he said. "Oh God, Where Are You?" is available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble online only. Before Santa Fe. Before Parkland. Before Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois or Columbine, even, there was Winnetka, Ill. It was 1988, and Laurie Dann opened fire at Hubbard Woods School, killing an 8-year-old boy and injuring five other children, part of a violent, daylong rampage that ended after Dann walked into the family home of Phil Andrew, 20 years old at the time, and held him hostage, along with his parents, for hours. As police closed in on the house, Dann shot Andrew in the chest before killing herself. Andrew survived and went on to serve as executive director for the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence and, for 21 years, as an FBI agent. In February, Cardinal Blase Cupich appointed Andrew to a newly created position of director of violence prevention for the Archdiocese of Chicago. "Whats happened over the past 30 years," Andrew said, "is weve gotten better at responding to these acute traumas. But we havent done much to prevent them." Last week he joined Evanston, Ill., Township High School principal Marcus Campbell and Rieonna Holman and Diamond Ocasio, youth leaders from Chicago-based BRAVE (Bold Resistance Against Violence Everywhere), for a panel discussion, "Building Peaceful Communities: A Discussion About Gun Violence," at ETHS. The event, a collaboration between Family Action Network (FAN) and a group of FAN Fellows (students from ETHS, New Trier, North Shore Country Day School and Fusion Academy), had been in the works since January. "Events like Parkland and Santa Fe bring gun violence more to the forefront of peoples minds," ETHS junior Mollie Hartenstein, one of the FAN Fellows, said. "But we also want to bring awareness to the violence thats happening throughout Chicago and other urban settings that doesnt get talked about as much." At least 13 people were injured and 10 were killed, when a gunman opened fire last week at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas. Chicago frequently sees that many shot in a weekend. Its all connected, Andrew said. "This is a community problem that needs to be addressed at a community level," he said. "The solutions lie in listening to the folks who are close to the problem, and in this case, thats teenagers. Theyre on the front lines, and there is momentum for them taking responsibility for changing our communities." Hes not interested in identifying a single scapegoat: mental health, a culture of violence, Ritalin, guns. He wants to talk about all of them. "Weve got a perfect storm here," he said. "It tends to be people who are hurting that do most of the hurting. When we see somebody thats hurting, someone that needs help, how can a community wrap their arms around them." With access to quality health care mental and physical. With an eye toward restorative justice. With a culture of empathy. "This seems like such a big problem that no one knows where to start," he said. "Folks need to understand there are solutions. No question, this is big, and its complicated. But there are things we can do, and that starts with community forums." Because the longer we stay in our corners ("Its the guns!" "Its the video games!"), the further we get from a solution. "And who benefits from us not agreeing on a solution?" he asked. "Where does that point?" Where do you think it points, I asked him. "It points back to a gun industry that wants to place the blame on everything but the guns," he said. "Is it just the gun? No, its not. Does the gun play a significant role? Absolutely. "Whats really tricky is theres an industry, a very small group, that profits handsomely from the violence," he continued. "Gun manufacturers and the leadership of the NRA, which is a puppet for man to sell the easiest thing to sell: fear." When youre scared, he said, you either flee or you fight. "The notion that youre armed for that fight is very attractive," he said. "Its primordial." Teenagers are starting to examine and push back against the messages that create that fear and division within their communities, he said. Wednesdays panel discussion was a perfect example. "There are people being enriched at the expense of other peoples lives," he said. "And when that was left to teenagers to analyze, they started putting a price tag on their own lives." Andrews been in this fight a long time. A bullet shattered his sense of order three decades ago. "Were better than this," he said. "Were a better country than this. Were better communities than this. Were smarter than this, and we have not made this a priority. I am horrified." But hes also hopeful. He looks at the way the country has shifted its approach to gay marriage, a topic that seemed impossible to imagine a majority of Americans embracing a decade or so ago. "There are multiple analogies," he said. "Cigarettes were perfectly acceptable and killing a lot of people, and the science caught up with them. The industry fought the science for a long time, but the tide turned, and it turned rapidly." Maybe gun violence will finally hold our attention and challenge our capacity to imagine and engender a better way. "These are our communities," Andrew said. "How do we want to shape them?" ABC has decided to cancel Roseanne, the highest-rated, most watched television series of this past broadcast season. It cancelled the show because of this tweet by the shows star, Roseanne Barr, about former top Obama aide Valerie Jarrett: Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj. This is a truly vile statement. When I heard about it, I could hardly believe a public figure, even Roseanne Barr, would tweet such a thing. (The tweet about Jarrett apparently was part of an extended rant, but it was this comment that most clearly crossed the line). I dont blame ABC for cancelling Barrs show. Barr has a right to tweet such garbage, but ABC has the right to eschew a relationship with the author of such a sickening remark. I can well understand why ABC wanted to. There is no political content to what Barr said. Its simply an insult about Jarretts appearance, stated in highly repugnant terms. Thus, ABCs decision isnt a case of political correctness, in my opinion. Its an attempt to uphold minimum standards of decency. My question, though, is whether ABC would have cancelled the show of a leftist who made this sort of vile comment about, say, President Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or Kellyanne Conway. I dont believe it would have. Rather, it probably would have accepted an apology (which Barr provided) and slapped the offending celebrity on the wrist. Meanwhile, those on the left who demanded that Barr be sacked would not have complained about a much less severe punishment for an anti-Trumper. Last week, the Department of Justice released an updated study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) showing that 83 percent of prisoners released by states are re-arrested within nine years of their release. 44 percent of released state prisoners were arrested during the first year after release, 68 percent were arrested within three years, and 79 percent within six years. The study encompassed 30 states and accounted for 77 percent of all persons released from state prisons nationwide during the period under study. Daniel Horowitz discusses the study here. Kent Scheidegger does so here. The results of the study should deter the Senate from embracing the FIRST STEP legislation passed by the House just before the BJS figures were published. Indeed, the BJS numbers undermine FIRST STEP in multiple ways. First, it is estimated that FIRST STEP would mandate the immediate release of at least 4,000 federal felons before they serve their full sentence. Given the recidivism numbers from the BJS study, we know that a high percentage of the 4,000 will commit crimes during the period during which, absent FIRST STEP, they would be behind bars. In other words, FIRST STEP means significantly more crime. As I argued here, the FIRST STEP bill is just that a first step to the release of thousands of additional prisoners. Its also a first step to shorter mandatory minimum sentences. Thus, FIRST STEP is the first step to a crime wave. But even if there is no second step, the BJS numbers show that FIRST STEP means more crime sooner. Thats what any Senator who supports FIRST STEP is voting for. Second, the BJS study tells us that the crimes that federal drug felons will commit arent confined to drug crimes. According to the study, more than three-quarters (77 percent) of released drug offenders were arrested for a non-drug crime within nine years, and more than a third (34 percent) were arrested for a violent crime. So much for the argument we hear over and over again from Team Leniency that those incarcerated for drug crimes are non-violent offenders. As Daniel Horowitz puts it, when you let out drug offenders early from prison in this era, they will not only go back to selling even deadlier drugs, killing thousands, they will also commit other crimes including overtly violent ones. Third, the numbers undermine the rational for FIRST STEP used by certain conservative Senators such as John Cornyn. They argue that some states have made great strides when it comes to rehabilitating prisoners. Thus, the argument goes, statistics about recidivism rates among federal prisoners do not provide a sound basis for opposing sentencing reform, provided the reform also includes corrections reform. The idea is to bring model state prisoner rehabilitation programs into the federal system. This, it is said, will cause recidivism rates to plummet, making America safe for the early release of federal drug felons and for a reduction of mandatory minimums. The BJS numbers tell us that the states, collectively, are doing no better than the feds when it comes to rehabilitating prisoners. But what about model states like John Cornyns home state of Texas, so often touted by sentencing and corrections reform advocates? It turns out that Texas isnt doing any better than the feds either. The numbers that reform advocates use to calculate recidivism in Texas count only re-incarcerations, not re-arrests. By contrast, the federal system measures recidivism by re-arrests (to be sure not everyone arrested has committed a crime but then, not everyone who has committed a crime is arrested). If one compares apples to apples federal re-arrests to Texas re-arrests the recidivism rate in Texas is actually higher than the federal rate, according to the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys. FIRST STEP is thus founded on a fiction the view that enlightened states have discovered the key to the age-old problem of how to rehabilitate criminals. Conservatives, of all people, should be skeptical of such claims. Were the ones who arent supposed to believe in magic. Lets see recidivism rates plummet on a sustained basis, using apples to apples comparisons, before the first federal prisoner is released early and the first mandatory minimum is reduced. Until that happy day, the numbers warn us that early release and reduced sentences are a recipe for a spike in crime, including violent crime. No Senator, and certainly no Republican, should vote for that. Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has become the bete noir of the American and European intellectual left. Its illiberal democracy (Orban is in office because two-thirds of Hungarys electorate backed him) is the logical extension, they say, of the dangerous right-wing populism of Donald Trump, the Brexit movement, and so forth. Populist though it may be, Orbans Hungary is arguably the safest place in Europe for Jews (100,000 of them). Thats the view of the estimable David Goldman: Last Friday evening I put on a kippah and walked half an hour across Budapest to the Keren Or synagogue maintained by the Budapest Chabad. After violent attacks on Jews in German streets, the leaders of Germanys Jewish community warned Jews last month not to wear a kippah or any other visible sign of Jewish identification in public. The French community issued such warnings years ago. Belgian TV could not find a single Jew in Brussels willing to wear a kippah in public. I walked across Budapest four times (for Friday evening and Saturday daytime services), and no-one looked at my kippah twice. At services I met Hasidim who had walked to synagogue with kaftan and shtreimel, the traditional round fur hat. Whatever residual anti-Semitism remains among Hungarians, it doesnt interfere with the open embrace of Jewish life. Unfortunately, as Goldman notes, the same cannot be said of continental Europes major liberal democracies. Goldman cites several reasons for the lack of virulent anti-Semitism in Hungary. First, there are very few Muslim migrants. This is the primary reason. The left insists that European populism is anti-Semitic, but everyone understands that the real, physical threat to Europes Jews comes from Muslims. France and Germany are Exhibits A and B. Liberal Europe is doing all it can to force Hungary to accept Muslim immigrants to import anti-Semitism. According to Goldman, Hungary stands to lose up to $4 billion in EC subsidies, roughly 3 percent of the countrys GDP, if it doesnt knuckle under. Germany is leading the charge. Hasnt Germany inflicted enough suffering on Europes Jews? A secondary reason for the relative lack of anti-Semitism in Hungary is Orban himself. He maintains a close relationship with Israel, one that dates back 20 years to when then-Finance Minister Netanyahu helped Orban with Hungarys economic program. Earlier this month, Hungary, along with Romania and the Czech Republic, vetoed a European Community resolution condemning the U.S. for moving its embassy to Jerusalem. Beyond Orbans relationship with Netanyahu, Goldman finds the affinity between Israel and Hungary existential.: Hungary is a small nation at risk of demographic extinction during the next century, and the Hungarian nationalists view Israel as the paragon of a small nation that has revived itself by force of will and the grace of God. In that regard the Hungarian nationalists bring to mind the American evangelicals, whose grandfathers for the most part were anti-Semites, but who concluded after the 1967 War that a miracle had happened before their eyes, and that they were well advised to get on the right side of it. Orban has been accused of anti-Semitism because of his attacks on George Soros, who happens to be Jewish. Soros, an ex-pat, has spent enormous sums of money trying to sway Hungarian politics against Orban and his policies. As Goldman puts it: Soros, to be sure, is Jewish by descent but not by practice or affiliation; he is a left-wing utopian who thinks that dissolving national differences is the precondition for world harmony. . .[T]here is nothing inherently anti-Semitic about campaigning against a plutocrat who is trying to buy your country. Some of Orbans bad press in the West may be deserved. But much of it seems off-base, the product of a quest to paint Trumpism as part of a dangerous populist wave that threatens democracy. Claims that Orban and the Hungarian populism he represents are anti-Semitic certainly fall into that category, as Goldman demonstrates. The threat to European Jewry comes from Muslims and the continents left-leaning policy-making elites I thought I was suitably harsh about the magnitude and meaning of the Italian crisis in my post last night, but then I read the Wall Street Journals editorial about it this morning: The President has now handed the populists more evidence that the elites dont trust the Italian people. Mr. Mattarella has asked former International Monetary Fund official Carlo Cottarelli to form a government, but hes unlikely to win a parliamentary vote of confidence. The likeliest way forward is another election, probably in the autumn, and the populists will now make elitist contempt for democracy the center of their argument. Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio called Sunday for Mr. Mattarellas impeachment, while the Leagues Matteo Salvini is whipping up nationalist sentiment against Brussels and Germanys euro-dominance. It wont be an election, said the 45-year-old Mr. Salvini. It will be a referendum between Italy and those on the outside who want us to be a servile, enslaved nation on our knees. The League has won several regional elections since the March parliamentary vote, and polls show rising popular support for both parties. The left-right coalition was a risk but one the Italian people chose to take. The political result after this latest display of elitist disdain may be worse for Italy and the euro. Im struggling to keep up with developments in the counterintelligence investigation that has culminated in the project undertaken by Robert Mueller as Special Counsel. Having taken a few hours off this morning and needing to do so again today, I can only offer links and notes. The New York Times reports on the obstruction of justice branch of the Mueller Switch Project in Trump asked Sessions to retain control of Russia inquiry after his recusal, by Michael Schmidt and Julie Hirschfeld Davis. The Mueller team apparently thinks that Trump can be guilty of a crime for the exercise of one of his constitutional powers (or not!). President Trump has taken to Twitter to comment in his accustomed style. Quoting Rep. Trey Gowdy in a series of tweets, President Trump puts an exclamation point on the underlying facts. .There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else! And I wish I did! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 Rep. Gowdy has been briefed on the FBIs use of an informant to check in on several Trump campaign officials. Kyle Cheney reports that Gowdy finds nothing amiss in this astounding development. Cheneys Politico story on Gowdys comments is FBI was right to deploy informant, senior GOP lawmaker says. Cheney quotes Gowdy speaking in a FOX News interview: I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got. Gowdy added that the information also suggested that the effort had nothing to do with Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journals Holman Jenkins has not been briefed by the FBIs use of an informant, but he ventures the opinion in his column today: In surveilling Carter Page, the FBI had every reason to know it was surveilling an inconsequential non-spy, and did so based on a warrant that falsely characterized a Yahoo news article. Its suspicions of George Papadopoulos were based on drunken gossip about Hillarys emails when the whole world was gossiping about Hillarys emails. Jenkins adds a few paragraphs later: If a private informant was enlisted to feel out the Russian connections of a couple of Trump nonentities, this was at least a sensitive and discreet approach to a legitimate question when so many FBI actions were neither. We now know that Stefan Halper worked as the FBI informant, or one of them. Former Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis was the object of one of Halpers inquiries. Byron York interviewed Clovis for the Examiner column Trump campaign vet: Informant used me to get Papadopoulos. Byron quotes Halpers email inquiry to Halper: I am a professor at Cambridge University lecturing on US politics and foreign policy. I am what is called a scholar practitioner, having served in the White House and four presidential campaigns two as policy director. Over the past month I have been in conversation with Carter Page who attended our conference in Cambridge on US elections. Carter mentioned in Cambridge, and when visiting here in Virginia, that you and I should meet. I have enjoyed your comments and appearances in the media; you hit the sweet spot focusing Trumps appeal to working America. May I suggest that we set a time to meet when you are next in Washington. Meanwhile, all the best, Stefan Halper. Byron reports: Halpers note to Clovis they worked out logistics and met at Clovis hotel, the Doubletree Inn in Crystal City, Virginia, a couple of days later was premised on his approach to Page. And it seemed of a piece with Halpers approach, the very next day, to Papadopoulos. But the actual content of their meeting has left Clovis wondering what Halper was up to. What about the shadowy Joseph Mifsud? Surely you havent forgotten him. Lee Smith picks up the trail in the RealClearPolitics column The Maltese phantom of Russiagate. Back to Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal column linked above: Consider just one anomaly: Any intelligence community worth the name would get to the bottom of foreigner Christopher Steeles singular intervention in a U.S. presidential election, based as it was on the anonymous whisperings of Russian intelligence officials. Not ours. Our intelligence community is highly motivated not to know these answers because any finding that discredited the Steele dossier would also discredit the FBIs actions in the 2016 campaign. What about that? And then we have this, by the Daily Callers Chuck Ross Grassley: Fusion GPS Founder Gave Extremely Misleading Testimony About Trump Work. Ross reports on the May 24 letter by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to his Democratic colleague Chris Coons. In relevant part, Senator Grassley highlights a sliver of the testimony offered by the man from GPS Fusion, Glenn Simpson (letter embedded below via Scribd). 2018-05-29 CEG to Coons (Trump Jr Interview) by Scott Johnson on Scribd Przepraszamy! Ogoszenie na stanowisku: Operations Support Engineer wygaso z dniem 2018-05-30 Ta propozycja bya zozona przez Luxoft Poland sp. z o.o. Mozliwe przyczyny wygasniecia ogoszenia to: propozycja zamieszczona przez pracodawce zostaa usunieta z naszych zasobow rekruter zakonczy proces rekrutacji uzyskujac odpowiednia ilosc pracownikow rekruter zmodyfikowa tresc ogoszenia i jest ono dostepne pod innym adresem WWW dostawca tresci usuna ogoszenie z bazy danych nieprawidowy adres url ogoszenia Jezeli poszukujesz pracy w branzy Informatyka / Telekomunikacja, zajrzyj tutaj: Praca Informatyka / Telekomunikacja Jezeli poszukujesz pracy na stanowisku Operations Support Engineer, zajrzyj tutaj: Praca Operations Support Engineer Jezeli poszukujesz pracy w miescie: Warszawa, zajrzyj tutaj: Praca Warszawa Pamietaj, ze mozesz takze rozpoczac poszukiwanie pracy od strony gownej, kliknij tutaj. Inne oferty, ktore mogy byc w kregu Twoich zainteresowan: BANGALORE, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Excelity Global has announced the launch of Excelity HCM (Human Capital Management), a SaaS-based HR platform that addresses the core need of HR function having a simplified and configurable system. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/698357/Excelity_Logo.jpg ) Excelity HCM is a cloud-based solution. Its mobile interface and collaborative technology continues to redefine workplaces and organizations giving them new opportunities to connect and engage their workforces to drive higher productivity, efficiency and results - all at the touch of a button. Today, companies need a HR system to maintain the entire gamut of employee data, keep HR workflows seamless and foster employee engagement. This makes Excelity HCM a great value proposition to HR teams to strengthen compliance, make HR processes more efficient and improve employee experience significantly. This platform also supports integration with a large variety of third party systems along with Excelity's other HR and payroll products like ezpayroll, HRIS systems, Timesheet and more. With HCM, experience a truly frictionless collaborative experience where every employee and HR team member will benefit. Sudheer Noohu, Chief Platform and Technology Officer, Excelity Global said, "Our Excelity HCM will be the next-gen HR Operating system, that will completely reshape the way HR teams view HR functions and systems. The HCM Cloud market has seen significant growth over the last few years and our continuous investment in technology and our focus on bringing mobile first, self-service applications into a Cloud-based offering has transformed how our customers do business. Now HR teams will be able to truly realise value from advances in Business Intelligence, Analytics, AI and Machine learning - which are deeply ingrained in various modules of HCM." "Excelity HCM has evolved through scientific user research techniques and built on latest technology stack to give an efficient and engaging HR experience. With the launch of Excelity HCM, we are bringing the benefits of professional HR management to companies who can subscribe with Excelity in minutes and go live in just a few days to unlock Strategic HR benefits," said Deepkumar Varma, Head of Product Management, Excelity Global. "We are happy to announce the launch of Excelity HCM for Asia Pacific region. Our HCM reflects our deep and long-standing commitment in helping businesses to run better, grow faster and be more profitable. HCM will allow businesses to scale with their employees, efficiently and seamlessly, making it a win-win scenario for everyone" added Sudheer Noohu. About Excelity Global: Headquartered in Singapore, Excelity Global Solutions is the largest Asia based HCM solutions service provider with more than 20 years' experience, working with close to 500 clients across 20 countries in the Asia Pacific region. A leading HR outsourcing partner in the region, Excelity Global has payroll delivery centers set up in Singapore, India, China, Malaysia and Philippines;and takes pride in delivering more than 1.2 million payslips a month. Excelity Global operates its proprietary payroll platform in 14 countries in the Asia Pacific region, delivered through Managed Service & Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) models. Media Contact: Pooja Heda [email protected] +91-9811942977 Head of Corporate Marketing, Excelity Global SOURCE Excelity Global SURAT, India, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Mr. Ram Nath Kovind, Hon'ble President of India, set a precedent when he came to Surat on 29th May 2018 to attend the 'SantokBaa Humanitarian Award' presentation function, organised by SRK Knowledge Foundation (SRKKF). After conferring the 'SantokBaa Humanitarian Award' to Nobel Laureate, Mr. Kailash Satyarthi, and Former Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Mr. A.S. Kiran Kumar, along with Rs. 1 crore (equivalent to US$ 1,50,000) each, he admitted that he came to attend the award function by breaking tradition of Rashtrapati Bhavan (President House). He said that generally the President wouldn't attend functions of private organisations. "When I learnt that Satyarthi and Kiran Kumar were to be awarded, I said these two are good men. Later, after checking the credentials of the award-giver, I learnt that they are also fine. "So, I decided to break the tradition a little bit to felicitate two good people," the President said. (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/698395/SRKFF_Kailash_Satyarthi_Award.jpg ) (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/698394/SRKFF_Award_Kiran_Kumar.jpg ) Mr. Kailash Satyarthi said he was honoured to receive the award and declared that he would donate the money to Surakshit Bachpan Fund (Safe Childhood Fund) for the welfare of children. He asked the Chief Minister of Gujarat to take stern actions in eradicating child labour which still exists in some parts of the State. Mr. Kiran Kumar said he received the award not as an individual, but as a representative of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). He said he would dedicate this money to further research and development work in space science and technology. Mr. Kiran Kumar is one of the persons instrumental in taking India to the list of top 5 countries having space technology. Mr. Kovind said he was happy that Surat's business community was supportive of philanthropic and social welfare efforts. He also praised the organisers for instituting the awards. Mr. O. P. Kohli, Hon'ble Gujarat Governor, and Mr. Vijay Rupani, Hon'ble Chief Minister, were also present at the occasion. Both of them complimented the Awardees and praised SRKKF for its notable contribution to the larger good of the society. At the occasion, SRKKF also received a letter of appreciation from Mr. Narendra Modi, the Hon'ble Prime Minister of India. SRKKF Chairman Mr. Govind Dholakia, barely educated, once a farmer now a diamond baron and a great philanthropist, said, "I wanted to institute an award in the memory of my mother who taught me values of life. We have been able to recognise wonderful people who have been working for the betterment of society and impacting lives of millions." Started in 2007, the award has been conferred upon other eminent personalities from a variety of fields, including Mr. Ratan Tata, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Dr Sudha Murthy, Lord Bhikhu Parekh, Dr Verghese Kurien, Gandhian Narayan Desai, Dr. H. L. Trivedi, Mrs. Poornima Pakwasa, Father Valles, Dr. M. S. Swaminathan and Mr. Sam Pitroda. About Shree Ramkrishna Knowledge Foundation Shree Ramkrishna Knowledge Foundation (SRKKF) is a culmination of the evolution journey embarked upon, more than half a century ago, by our Founder Chairman, Shree Govind Dholakia, in 1964. His focused, resilient, visionary, passionate and innovative approach along with his belief of 'Giving back to the Society' has inspired to setup SRKKF. Our aim includes extensive contribution in the areas of health, education, agriculture and community welfare. In accord with this vision, Shri Govind Dholakia instituted the SantokBaa Award in the year 2007, in the affectionate memory and honour of his mother SantokBaa. Her selfless devotion and humanitarian values inspired him to further her mission by honouring altruists from various fields. For more information, please visit: http://www.srk.foundation, http://santokbaaaward.org/ Media Contact: Shantanu Pawar [email protected] +91-8866800776 Project Manager Shree Ramkrishna Knowledge Foundation SOURCE SRK Knowledge Foundation Median survival of top 100 patients is 40.5 months, Median survival of all 331 patients is 23.1 months, Longest survivors have exceeded 7 years BETHESDA, Maryland, May 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Northwest Biotherapeutics (OTCQB: NWBO) -- ("NW Bio"), a biotechnology company developing DCVax personalized immune therapies for solid tumor cancers, announced today the publication of interim blinded survival data from its Phase 3 clinical trial of DCVax-L for newly diagnosed Glioblastoma brain cancer. The data were collected by the independent contract research organization managing the trial, tabulated by an independent statistical firm and published with 69 co-authors in the peer reviewed Journal of Translational Medicine (JTM). The trial is ongoing while the data continue to mature, and the Company, the investigators and patients all remain blinded. The interim data set forth in the JTM publication are blinded aggregate data which include patients from both arms of the trial combined: the arm with 2/3 of the patients, who received standard of care plus DCVax-L, and the arm with 1/3 of the patients, who received standard of care plus a placebo. When the patients experienced tumor recurrence, all patients from both arms were allowed to cross over and start receiving DCVax-L, but without being unblinded as to what they had received before tumor recurrence. The patient population enrolled in the trial is similar to that in other recent trials, and more than 75% of the patients were over 50 years old (a factor associated with less favorable outcomes). Due to the crossover design, nearly 90% of the total 331 patients in the trial have received DCVax-L treatment. For the total 331 patients (both arms of the trial combined) the median survival as of this analysis was 23.1 months from surgery. With the standard of care (SOC) today (surgery, radiation and chemotherapy), median survival for newly diagnosed Glioblastoma is 15-17 months. For patients with methylated MGMT gene status (131 patients), median survival was 34.7 months from surgery. With standard of care today, median survival for these patients has been reported in the literature as 21.7 months. For patients with unmethylated MGMT gene status (162 patients), the median survival was 19.8 months from surgery. With standard of care today, the median survival for these patients has been reported in the literature as 12.7 months. (MGMT data was not available for 38 patients.) The top 100 patients (30%) of the total 331 patients in the trial showed particularly extended survival, with median survival of 40.5 months from surgery. This extended survival was not fully explained by known prognostic factors such as age younger than 50 years, methylated MGMT gene status and complete resection (surgical removal) of all of the tumor. Only 8% of these 100 patients had the favorable status on all 3 of these prognostic factors. With immune therapies, the "long tail" of the survival curve is of particular importance and focus. In this DCVax-L trial, patients who survive past certain time points, have continued onwards to substantially extended survival. The patients are continuing to move through time points based upon when they had their surgery, and only some of the patients had reached certain time points in this trial as of this analysis. For example, 223 patients were 30 months past their surgery date as of this analysis; 67 of these (30.0%) have lived 30 months and these patients have Kaplan-Meier (KM)-derived median survival estimate of 46.5 months. Also as of this analysis, 182 patients were 36 months past their surgery date; 44 of these (24.2%) have lived 36 months and these patients have KM-derived median survival estimate of 88.2 months. The administration of DCVax-L involves only an intra-dermal injection in the arm, similar to a flu shot, 3 times in the first month of treatment, 3 additional times over the rest of the first year (at months 2, 4 and 8), and twice a year thereafter. It thereby involves only a minimal burden on the patient. DCVax-L has shown an excellent safety profile in the trial. The DCVax-L product has been administered well over 2,000 times, and only 7 of the 331 patients (2.1%) have experienced a serious adverse event that was deemed at least possibly related to the treatment. The rate of total adverse events (including non-serious events) was comparable to the rate of adverse events with standard of care alone. "These are just interim data, and the data may get either better or worse as they continue to mature" commented Linda Powers, the Company's CEO. "However, the survival times we are seeing are encouraging, especially in light of how little progress has been made in decades in treatments for Glioblastoma." "We have noted a growing recognition in the immuno-oncology field of the exceptional heterogeneity and complexity of Glioblastoma, and the need for treatments to target multiple antigens on these tumors" Ms. Powers continued. "DCVax-L is designed to use Nature's system to mobilize an anti-tumor immune response, targeting the full set of antigens on a patient's tumor and doing so in a fully personalized way. We believe this approach is key to the clinical results we are seeing." "The safety profile of DCVax-L is also quite encouraging, with almost no serious adverse events related to the treatment, no necessity for additional drugs to manage side effects and no hospital in-patient stays as are often required with certain other kinds of immune cell therapies" Ms. Powers noted. "This safety profile is quite important to patients, and we believe it can also facilitate combining DCVax-L with a variety of other types of treatments." The reported data are from the most recent prior full data collection in 2017. The Company is undertaking another full data collection, which is a multi-month process and will be continuing over the coming months. The publication can be found on the JTM website at https://doi.org/10.1186/s12967-018-1507-6 . About Northwest Biotherapeutics Northwest Biotherapeutics is a biotechnology company focused on developing personalized immunotherapy products designed to treat cancers more effectively than current treatments, without toxicities of the kind associated with chemotherapies, and on a cost-effective basis, in both the North America and Europe. The Company has a broad platform technology for DCVax dendritic cell-based vaccines. The Company's lead program is a 331-patient Phase III trial in newly diagnosed Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). GBM is the most aggressive and lethal form of brain cancer, and is an "orphan disease." The Company is also pursuing a Phase I/II trial with DCVax-Direct for all types of inoperable solid tumor cancers. It has completed the 40-patient Phase I portion of the trial, and is preparing for the Phase II portion. The Company previously conducted a Phase I/II trial with DCVax-L for metastatic ovarian cancer together with the University of Pennsylvania. Disclaimer Statements made in this news release that are not historical facts, including statements concerning future treatment of patients using DCVax and future clinical trials, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "expect," "believe," "intend," "design," "plan," "continue," "may," "will," "anticipate," and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. We cannot guarantee that we actually will achieve the plans, intentions or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements and you should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in any forward-looking statement. Specifically, there are a number of important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated, such as risks related to the Company's ability to conduct ongoing patient follow-up and complete the trials on a timely basis, uncertainties about the clinical trials process, uncertainties about the timely performance of third parties, risks related to whether the Company's products will demonstrate safety and efficacy, risks related to the Company's ongoing ability to raise additional capital, and other risks included in the Company's Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") filings. Additional information on the foregoing risk factors and other factors, including Risk Factors, which could affect the Company's results, is included in its SEC filings. Finally, there may be other factors not mentioned above or included in the Company's SEC filings that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in any forward-looking statement. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or developments, except as required by securities laws. Related Links http://www.nwbio.com SOURCE Northwest Biotherapeutics 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 Burning of the "winter witch" at Fyr Bal Festival in Ephraim Welcome summer in Door County. With activities around each corner and events happening every weekend, Wisconsins peninsula is a great place for families to vacation. Visitors can plan their vacation today at DoorCounty.com or by calling the Door County Visitor Bureau toll free at 800-527-3529. June Events Explore Door Countys five state parks during Wisconsins Free Fun Weekend. All state parks are free admittance, June 2-3. Learn about Door Countys historic lighthouses at the Door County Lighthouse Festival, June 8- 10. Listen to original music at multiple venues throughout Sturgeon Bay during Steel Bridge Songfest, June 14-17. Experience Ephraims Scandinavian heritage at the Fyr Bal Festival, Saturday, June 16. Taste a variety of beer in Baileys Harbor at the Door County Beer Festival, Saturday, June 16. Sample Door County eats and drinks, enjoy live music, and celebrate the season at Uncork Summer in Ellison Bay, Saturday, June 23. For more events visit, DoorCounty.com/experience/events Did you know? Door County is a beachgoers paradise with 53-public beaches to enjoy on a warm summer day. On-Going Summer Activities Skyway Drive-In Theater Enjoy nostalgic fun at one of the last drive-in movie theaters in the state. Door County Maritime Museum Explore the newly opened, Shipwrecks of Door County exhibit. The Farm or Plum Loco Animal Farm - Interact with farm animals at two family friendly attractions. Kayak Tours Paddle the beautiful coastline of Door County with one of the many kayak companies available. County Parks Pack a picnic and explore one of Door Countys 19 county parks. Cant Miss Arts & Culture Event June 18, 2018 Enjoy the world-premiere of Dairy Heirs the family farming moo-sical at Northern Sky Theater. The show runs on select days until August 25. #### Door County is located in the northeast corner of Wisconsin. Surrounded by Lake Michigan, it is one of the top leisure travel destinations in America. Door County features 300 miles of shoreline, 34 named islands, 11 lighthouses and 5 state parks. It is known for its natural beauty, artistic offerings, outdoor recreation and local cuisine and offers scenic seaside experiences in the heart of the Midwest. 8855 Grissom Parkway, Titusville, Florida We will be combining our world class precision cleaning services and our industry-leading field operations teams under the same roof. As a result, we will be able to support our customers both on the Space Coast and throughout the southeast region with an unmatched level of efficiency and value The opening of the new Astro Pak Titusville facility marks the completion of the process that began when Astro Pak acquired Chemko Technical Services in 2016. Chemko has been meeting the needs of its clients both private and government since 1972. Astro Pak looks to continue that tradition of supporting on-site work at KSC on such projects as the ongoing work at the Mobile Launch Platform (MLP) in support of NASAs upcoming Space Launch System (SLS). The new facility offers greatly expanded capabilities enabling more services to be offered to the companys local and regional clientele. This facility represents both the completion of the Chemko acquisition and an evolutionary step forward for Astro Pak, says Jonathan Hopkins, General Manager of Chemko. We will be combining our world class precision cleaning services and our industry-leading field operations teams under the same roof. As a result, we will be able to support our customers both on the Space Coast and throughout the southeast region with an unmatched level of efficiency and value. The Titusville location more than quadruples the floor space available in its current Northern Brevard County building and joins the companys 35,000 square foot legacy facility in Downey, California. The new locations signature feature is a 15x15 tower (70 vertical) which enables the processing of hoses up to 60 in length. In addition to the larger footprint, Astro Paks capabilities in Florida are also expanding. An ISO 7 cleanroom and accompanying ISO 6 lab are joined by a shop area with a 4K ton bridge crane and large aqueous processing tanks, a pre-clean area with multiple work stations and ultrasonic units and expanded hydrostatic, hydraulic and pneumatic testing capabilities. Astro Pak made its name with precision cleaning services back in the 1960s and Titusville ensures that it will remain at the forefront of the industry. Processing in a controlled environment, cleanliness verification for particle count, TFS, NVR, vacuum sealed packaging, cold shock, and pressure testing are just a few of the cleaning, packaging and testing services available. Additionally, the Astro Pak team is able to meet numerous industry specifications including KSC-C-123J, CGA G-4.1-2009, ASTM G-93-03, IEST Std cc 1246E, MIL-STD-1246C, and many others. The facility is further supported by its brand-new, state of the art cleanroom trailer, which allows for on-site support in addition to the in-house services. Mr. Hopkins summed it up by saying, In a time of unparalleled growth in the space sector, the need for precision cleaning services on the Space Coast has never been clearer. Astro Pak is proud to demonstrate our commitment to this industry with our new, state-of-the-art cleaning facility in Titusville, FL. The capacity and capabilities of this site are simply unmatched in the industry. About Astro Pak Astro Pak has been the leading provider of passivation, high purity and precision cleaning services in North America since 1959. Astro Pak meets the critical cleaning and surface conditioning requirements for a myriad of industries such as biopharmaceutical and aerospace via our on-site services, as well as our state-of-the-art cleanroom and shop facilities. Astro Pak is privately held with headquarters in Costa Mesa, CA. For more information, please visit http://www.astropak.com. MEDIA CONTACT Mary Cheng Astro Pak Corporation Tel: 949-270-0854 Email: mcheng(at)astropak(dot)com Road2Talent has become My Marking Recruiter. The new name reflects a more industry-specific focus and emphasizes the companys rich in-depth knowledge of staffing in the Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations industry. As company founder Melissa Quist states The competitive nature of the advertising and marketing industry is no secret. It can make finding, vetting and hiring the RIGHT people a difficult task. For this reason, it makes sense for agencies to let us take on the responsibility of identifying and attracting top talent. The team at My Marketing Recruiter has decades of recruiting experience and for the past 7 years has been working with some of the largest and most prominent advertising agencies. Their previous work demonstrates an obligation to customer service and a deep understanding of the intricacies of advertising and public relations agencies. Unfortunately, a large of number of recruiting companies work only in their best interest, prioritizing their commissions instead of your business. My Marketing Recruiter has a core, long-term commitment to our clients success." Clients have raved about their services. Melissa was able to quickly establish trust and build strong relationshipsestablishing credibility and rapport immediately... I would recommend anytime, anywhere she has great radar for talent and truly shines in our industry. World Wide Executive Director, Talent Acquisition at a top global advertising agency Melissa is a rare find. Its not often you work with a recruiter whos as timely and tactful as she is. From the beginning, she was personable, knowledgeable and readily transparent. Not to mention genuine. There were no tricks or gotchas when I started my new position. Everyone and everything was as she said it would be. It was clear to me that she values developing relationships, which was why I always felt like I was working with a friend rather than a recruiter. Sr. Copywriter, at a national advertising agency. My Marketing Recruiter is focused solely on working within the marketing, advertising and public relations industry where it helps small to large companies benefit from hiring the most qualified talent. These individuals can fill a variety of roles, ranging from account management to creative services. My Marketing Recruiter will work as a true business partner to understand your unique company culture and needs. They have a thorough screening process to evaluate every candidate individually and make sure only the most qualified candidates are presented to hiring managers. About My Marketing Recruiter My Marketing Recruiter, founded by Melissa Quist, is a recruitment and staffing company bridging the gap between job seekers in marketing and the best open positions in the industry. The company, which was formerly known as Road2Talent, has worked with some of the leading global brands to help them hire the most qualified and fitting candidates for a variety of marketing/advertising/public relations positions. The company works across the United States, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York Contact Information http://www.mymarketingrecruiter.com/ info(at)mymarketingrecruiter(dot)com . Presbyterian College and Akademos have partnered on an online bookstore "I am excited about the new partnership between PC and Akademos for our online bookstore, said Don Raber, Provost, Presbyterian College. I believe students will value the variety of formats, delivery options, and flexibility on buyback that Akademos provides..." Presbyterian College has selected Akademos as its online bookstore provider to help students save on course materials. The College offers a rigorous education with a built-in support network, inspiring students to learn and value service along the way. Over one thousand students attend the College, which will launch its online bookstore to support its Fall Term 2018. Seamless integration between the Institutions student information system and the Akademos Course Materials Platform (CMP)TM will allow students to see a personalized listing of the textbooks required for each of their courses, and to order materials for an entire term in less than 5 minutes. A wide selection across new, used, rental, and eBook formats will be offered, and when using Akademos proprietary peer-to-peer Marketplace of over 100 million new and used textbooks, students will save an average of 60% off of the list price of their course materials. Additionally, students will have the freedom to use financial aid on all purchases, including significantly discounted Marketplace items. "I am excited about the new partnership between PC and Akademos for our online bookstore, said Don Raber, Provost, Presbyterian College. I believe students will value the variety of formats, delivery options, and flexibility on buyback that Akademos provides, and I am confident faculty will appreciate the ability to create custom course packs, to add ancillaries, and to have a streamlined portal for placing and reviewing orders for materials." The online bookstore will also support the Colleges faculty and administrators, who will benefit from an easy-to-use and powerful Adoption & Analytics Portal. This platform offers a step-by-step guide for course material adoptions, recommendations and adoption history, and the ability to compare real-time prices for course materials. The analytics tool will also enable faculty and the Colleges leadership to track critical data, including student purchasing and bookstore utilization, in aggregate for the entire institution and down to the individual class level that can be easily merged with the institutions student success database. Our peer-to-peer Marketplace substantially reduces the cost of course materials for students by bringing buyers and sellers together in a transparent environment, in which new and used books are bought and sold at the true market rate, said John Squires, CEO, Akademos. Were pleased to partner with Presbyterian College to offer their students lower prices, more personalized service and a wider variety of course materials. ### ___________________________________________________________________________________ About Akademos Akademos offers customized, online bookstore services and solutions that support what's most important to institutions - from full-service virtual bookstores to unique partnerships and products supporting on-campus shops. Akademos delivers cost savings on course materials for students while providing administrators and faculty with critical control over the textbook delivery process. Akademos offers an innovative textbook marketplace, best-in-class eCommerce platform, eLearning solutions, and a unique adoption and analytics portal. The companys comprehensive supply-chain solution and commitment to responsive personal service makes it the choice of leading institutions throughout the country. Akademos helps institutions deliver the right course materials, at affordable prices, on time. Learn more at akademos.com. About Presbyterian College Presbyterian College is located on a 240-acre campus in Clinton, between Columbia and Greenville, S.C. Offering challenging academics and a culture of honor, ethics, and service that prepares students to be leaders in communities, PC offers its students the benefit of engaging with an exceptional faculty who take an individual interest in their students well-being, both personally and in the classroom. The Presbyterian College School of Pharmacy is dedicated to the ideals of leadership, honor to the profession, and service to the community. For more information about Presbyterian College, visit http://www.presby.edu. City of Boise joins the Idaho Purchasing Group Vendors can register today and download documents today, and that was a real plus for us. The City of Boise has officially joined the Idaho Purchasing Group, one of BidNets regional e-procurement solutions, providing vendors throughout Idaho easy online access to upcoming solicitations. The City of Boise invites all vendors to register online at http://www.bidnetdirect.com/idaho/cityofboise. The regional purchasing group connects local governments with vendors looking to do business with public agencies. On the Idaho Purchasing Group, vendors seeking business with participating agencies can register online to gain access to a single point of entry for opportunities throughout Idaho. By posting upcoming bids and RFPs on the Idaho Purchasing Group, the City of Boise ensures an entire community of vendors can view their solicitation, download documents, and receive notification of addenda. The vendors self-register and ensure their contact information is up to date. The City of Boise welcomes all local vendors to register to receive notification to its upcoming solicitations as well as the upcoming bids and RFPs from statewide bid opportunities on the Idaho Purchasing Group. Registered vendors have the option to upgrade their service to receive these statewide opportunities. The registration is so easy and intuitive that we don't even have to include a manual on how to do this [for our vendors]. Also it's real time. Vendors can register today and download documents today, and that was a real plus for us stated Colin Millar, Purchasing Manager/Procure to Pay Manager for the City of Boise. Vendors may register on the Idaho Purchasing Group at: https://www.bidnetdirect.com/idaho. Vendors may also contact BidNets vendor support team at 800-835-4603 option 2 with any questions regarding registration or the bid system. Other local Idaho government agencies looking to switch from a manual bid process, please contact the Idaho Purchasing Group for a demonstration of the no-cost sourcing solution. About the Idaho Purchasing Group: The Idaho Purchasing Group is a part of BidNets regional purchasing groups available at no cost to local government agencies throughout the country. With years of input from procurement professionals, BidNet specifically developed the bid system to fill the need for a robust bid and supplier management solution for local government agencies. BidNet runs 30 regional purchasing groups used by over 1,200 local governments. To learn more and have your government agency gain better transparency and efficiency in purchasing, please visit https://www.bidnetdirect.com/buyers Jews of all denominations searching for a vanguard place to celebrate the High Holidays with Sim Shalom Online Synagogue will be offered a jazz services at the iconic Bitter End On Monday, September 10th and Wednesday, September 19th Jews of all denominations searching for a vanguard place to celebrate the High Holidays will be offered a jazz service with vocals led by Rabbi Cantor Steven Blane accompanied by saxophone, piano, flute, drums, bass and fiddle. The participatory service will elate the spiritual uplift of new beginnings, welcoming the Jewish New Year with the raw emotion of jazz arranged from songs of Jewish liturgy. For those who will be in New York City, tickets are available for purchase for the live service to help defray the program cost. It also functions as a fundraiser for the nonprofit organization. As with all Sim Shalom Online Synagogue programming, the services will be streamed live with worldwide participation via chat. Individuals can simply visit SimShalom.com at the scheduled times. Rabbi Blane expressed the pioneering program this way, "The Days of Awe symbolize a time to awaken our senses, a rebirth of ourselves and our relationship to each other. Music is a perfect vessel to create a world synthesizing all the beautiful diverse sounds into pure harmony and joy." Sim Shalom has brought the jazz High Holidays to New York's Bitter End before a sold out audience with online congregants participating from across the United States to Europe, Asia and South America for the last seven years. Joining Blane again this year will be Jack Glottman on piano, Carol Sudhalter on sax and flute, Frank Levitano on drums, Kevin Hailey on bass and Liz Taub on fiddle. Tickets are available at Eventbrite and can be accessed here. About Sim Shalom and JSLI: Sim Shalom is an interactive online Jewish Universalist synagogue which is liberal in thought and traditional in liturgy. Created in 2009 by Rabbi Steven Blane on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Sim Shalom offers a means of connecting the unconnected. Rabbi Blane leads accessible and short Shabbat services every Friday night using a virtual interface and additionally Sim Shalom provides online education programs, Jazz concerts, conversion and life-cycle ceremonies along with weeknight services at 7:00PM EST led by Rabbis and students of this online community. Rabbi Blane is also the founder and dean of the Jewish Spiritual Leader's Institute, JSLI, (http://www.jsli.net) a rabbinical school for professionals and one of the founding communities of the Union of Jewish Universalist Communities. "Expanding our technology-driven quality assurance operations in Decatur, Georgia created a demand for more space for the department," says company president, Robert Jacobson. Moving our HQ to Alpharetta gave us the space we needed. Newcomb Spring Corp announces that it has relocated its corporate world headquarters from Decatur, Georgia to Alpharetta, Georgia. Newcomb Spring says that the move was instituted to physically reorganize and optimize space for its quality control, manufacturing and administrative operations. Newcomb relates that the step has no impact on the company's workforce regarding jobs. Company president, Robert Jacobson, explains that by moving the headquarters to Alpharetta they opened up space in the Decatur, Georgia facility to create new workspace and offices for the Decatur plant's quality control department, as well as expand the manufacturing floor. Also, management and administrative personnel benefit from a new 2200 SF of office space better suited to intra-office communications and day-to-day administrative duties managing the company's multiple facilities. "Expanding our technology-driven quality assurance operations in Decatur created a demand for more space for the department," Jacobson explains. "Newcomb Spring is committed to constant quality improvement. Moving the headquarters to Alpharetta gave us the space we needed for new quality control initiatives, and provided advantages to our administrative operations as well. It was a win-win decision." Newcomb Spring Corp's new world headquarters is located at 3155 North Point Parkway, Alpharetta, GA 30005 USA. Visit Newcombspring.com. About Newcomb Spring Corp Newcomb Spring Corp is a worldwide supplier of compression springs, extension springs, torsion springs, wire forms, stampings, rings, hooks, and battery contact springs. The companys products meet demands in a variety of industries, including aerospace, agricultural, automotive, computer, medical, military, and telecommunications. Family-owned and operated, Newcomb Spring Corp is headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia and offers additional facilities in California, Connecticut, Colorado, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Ontario, Canada. Newcomb Spring operates with ISO 9001 certified quality systems and delivers a wide range of material capabilities in the manufacture of metal componentsspecializing in reliability, rapid response times, and stringent quality control. Additional information is available at newcombspring.com. Visit Newcomb Spring on Facebook See Newcomb Spring on LinkedIn LED grow lighting company, Illumitex, moves into a new era of fixture innovation with category leading improvements. Over the past year, each of the companys marquee lighting series have been engineered to maximize on efficiency, output, and quality. We have upgraded everything and introduced market-changing fixtures that will deliver the lowest initial cost and drive operational saving. LED should now be the primary solution for growers. John Spencer, SVP Sales and Marketing. A few highlights include: Introduced the NeoPAR 5 and NeoPAR 7 which provides the slimmest profile (3.5 inches deep), up to 2.46 mol/J, and 1400 PPF Partnered with leading LED chip supplier, CREE, to increase efficiency and quality Improved quality assurance programs such as a 24-hour burn-in for all fixture Increased efficiencies of the PowerHarvest over 30% with up to 2.3 mol/J, while dropping initial cost over 20% Improved the Eclipse series with a 25% increase in efficiency Developed the X6 full-spectrum, designed for indoor facilities that maximizes green (500-600 nm) according to the latest plant science research These are not the same Illumitex fixtures of the past. We have worked relentlessly to exceed market needs, says Jeff Bisberg, CEO of Illumitex. These improvements will reduce operational costs and grow better plants. You will absolutely see yield and quality improvements. Coupled with their industry-leading 5-year warranty on every product sold, Illumitex will continue to evaluate each product to drive down cost, drive up quality, and promote industry adoption as LED technology evolves. Media Contact Staci Young 512.568.2243 marketing(at)illumitex.com About Illumitex, Inc Founded in 2005 in Austin, Texas, Illumitex works diligently to create industry-shifting achievements in horticultural lighting. Our team of horticulture scientist and engineers have radically transformed LED lighting that influences plant benefits. Illumitex is enthusiastically committed to scientific research, cutting-edge design, and innovative engineering. We are dedicated to working with our customer to deliver world-class horticulture solutions while pushing lighting into the digital age with automated tools and services. VisitBasis Tech, the software company from Hallandale Beach, Florida, has been developing high-tech upgrades to its namesake mobile retail data capture solution. "We have been working on incorporating image recognition technology onto our software for retail audits", announces Sergey Gorbunov, CEO of VisitBasis. Image recognition technology on a retail audit application allows for the automatic capture of, for instance, information such as pricing, inventory levels, and competitor data directly from a picture of supermarket shelves. This means that, past the picture-taking stage, no human interaction is needed in inputting these critical pieces of information, greatly minimizing user errors and speeding up data collection. "Our experience tells us that it takes around one minute per product that a rep has to find on the shelf and gather pricing and availability information", adds Sergey. "We can see how this adds up when you have 20, maybe 25 products on a product category shelving at the store. With image recognition technology, our system will be able to extract that sort of information from all products - including competing ones - from one single picture". Image recognition technology is expected to be available for current VisitBasis users within the next few months. For more information on the current VisitBasis version, go to http://www.visitbasis.com. About VisitBasis Tech, Llc. VisitBasis is a B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) company specialized in the development of cost-effective, cutting-edge, and comprehensive mobile solutions that aim to increase sales and reduce costs, improving the bottom-line of businesses that rely on field professionals. The key benefit of VisitBasis mobile merchandising app is to optimize retail execution, merchandising, field marketing, mobile data collection, retail audits, territory management, sales rep planning, tracking sales, mobile staff management, electronic product catalog, sales enablement, among others, especially in the consumer product goods (CPG) and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industries. Other VisitBasis products include VisitEye and Pocady. These new services expand the opportunity for a business client to leverage economies of scale while gaining the benefit of a broader perspective to any business problem or challenge. Allen Barron, Inc., an integrated tax, legal, accounting and business advisory service provider, recently implemented dispute resolution and litigation services. These new services expand the opportunity for a business client to leverage economies of scale while gaining the benefit of a broader perspective to any business problem or challenge, said attorney Janathan L. Allen, of Allen Barron, Inc. If you are serious about business, a business dispute or litigation is likely to arise. Allen Barrons litigation and dispute resolution team is comprised of experienced and proven trial attorneys that put strength behind ones side of the equation. Opponents and opposing counsel know you mean business and your legal team can and will take the case to trial, added Barron. Mediation is another option to resolve a business dispute or litigation. Our attorneys work to protect your interests through mediation and ensure any potential settlement meets your goals and objectives for the matter, added Allen. Many contracts establish arbitration as the legal venue for resolving a dispute. The parties in any business litigation matter may also agree to settle the matter via arbitration. It is important to have expert legal representation when approaching an arbitration. Arbitration is much more formal and structured than mediation, yet less of a process than a court trial. However, the decision of the arbitrator is final and cannot be contested except in the rare instance of provable fraud or collusion, stated Allen. You want to have an expert legal team on your side when the decision is to be final. Arbitration eliminates many of the legal motions and other time-consuming processes that make a trial much more expensive and time-consuming. The matter will usually be completed within several days, and the arbitrator ultimately issues a final award or ruling. Allen Barrons dispute resolution and business litigation team assists with any business dispute or lawsuit.This includes many common issues such as breach of contract, shareholder disputes, partnership disputes, LLC member disputes, breach of fiduciary duty, and contract disputes. The addition of dispute resolution and business litigation services to our robust integrated business services ensures any business owner, executive or client can bring a problem, dispute, opportunity or business question to the table and receive advice based upon the broad perspective of our integrated professionals, concluded Allen. We help our clients to answer questions, leverage opportunities and now resolve the challenges which arise along the way. About Janathan L. Allen, APC, Allen Barron, Inc. The law practice of Janathan L. Allen, APC provides insightful business, legal and tax-related services for San Diego and U.S. businesses which require experienced and insightful counsel in order to remain competitive in an ever-changing U.S. and global business environment. The firm helps clients to assess the impact of changes in U.S. business law, tax codes and regulatory requirements, in addition to legal services such as business contract, business formation, employment and operational legal services. When combined with the business advisory, accounting and tax preparation services of Allen Barron, the firm provides a single-source business partner resulting in a more extensive and valuable advisory and service offering while leveraging economies of scale. For more information, please call (866) 631-3470 or visit http://www.allenbarron.com. Its main offices are located at 16745 West Bernardo Drive, Suite 260, San Diego, CA 92127. About the NALA The NALA offers small and medium-sized businesses effective ways to reach customers through new media. As a single-agency source, the NALA helps businesses flourish in their local community. The NALAs mission is to promote a business relevant and newsworthy events and achievements, both online and through traditional media. The information and content in this article are not in conjunction with the views of the NALA. For media inquiries, please call 805.650.6121, ext. 361. Marketing is no longer a guessing game, as there are ways to track and quantify this before you even spend a dollar. As a business owner, are you blowing your marketing dollars? asked CPA Gary Cooper, president and CEO of Cooper CPA Group, who focuses on tax planning/compliance, merger and acquisition consulting, business valuation and accounting consulting services. If you answered yes, or even maybe, you can make sure you are tracking them effectively. I have clients that are business owners and I will ask, Why in the world are you spending that much money or in some cases, so little money on marketing? Most say I dont know. You need to know. Dollars add up. Ask these questions first before you move forward in any marketing or advertising endeavor: Do I actually have a tracking system in place? Do I have an effective CRM system for future tracking? Do I understand Google Analytics? Can I quantify what it tells me? Do I measure prospect activity and attempt to quantify the revenues generated based on the advertising and marketing placed? Am I defining specific calls to action that drive business to specific revenue streams? Can I quantify and track from Google Analytics to the bank and then ultimately to the revenue line item on my income statement? Can I quantify the overall impact of advertising and marketing dollars spent on my bottom line? Many people view marketing as throwing darts at a dartboard. However, it is not. People view it just as an expense they have, but can now be very particular. Marketing is no longer a guessing game, as there are ways to track and quantify this before you even spend a dollar, noted Cooper. Gaining an understanding of ones marketing and advertising dollars spent and how they can be properly tracked through financial information is crucial for any business. Business owners need to ask themselves if they are generating future revenues with marketing dollars spent, or accumulating overhead. Are your revenues segmented by income stream where you can track the results of your advertising dollars spent? Do related expenses line up with segmented revenue streams where you can understand the net results and how each separate segment affects your bottom line? asked Cooper. Keep in mind that everything starts with revenues. A business has the purchase order, a vendors invoice and, ultimately, a disbursement. All expenses incurred should have a specific purpose to assist in generating revenues. This is especially true for marketing and advertising dollars spent, stressed Cooper. It is also imperative to have processes and procedures in place where one can track revenues and expenses correctly through the general ledger. Lining up segmented revenue streams with related expenses is important to understand how to invest ones excess profits. With this information, you should be able to compute advertising dollars spent by revenue stream to the results reported in the income statement. You can then properly measure the impact of each dollar spent by business segment and specific revenue stream, concluded Cooper. For more information about obtaining success, please visit the Cooper CPA Group blog at https://www.coopercpagroup.com/blog/. About Cooper CPA Group, PC Cooper CPA Group serves the accounting needs of Houston and the surrounding areas. It provides services for growth companies and individuals, such as tax planning/compliance, assist with setting up a newly formed business, and succession planning; businesses, including small and mid-market business accounting, succession planning; tax services, such as tax preparation, tax planning and tax controversy; and Quickbooks services. For more information, please call (713) 243-8590, or visit http://www.coopercpagroup.com. Cooper CPA Group is located at 1703 W. 12th Street, Houston, TX 77008. About the NALA The NALA offers small and medium-sized businesses effective ways to reach customers through new media. As a single-agency source, the NALA helps businesses flourish in their local community. The NALAs mission is to promote a business relevant and newsworthy events and achievements, both online and through traditional media. The information and content in this article are not in conjunction with the views of the NALA. For media inquiries, please call 805.650.6121, ext. 361. RMU Illinois alumnus Marlon Sykes, an accountant at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, addresses New ERA scholarship recipients. "The New ERA Scholarships will have a real impact on first generation students from Chicago. We are so pleased to welcome these young people to the Robert Morris family." --Mablene Krueger, President, Robert Morris University Illinois Robert Morris University Illinois celebrated the first cohort of New ERA Scholarship recipients at the downtown campus this week. Incoming freshman students and their families were invited to attend a ceremony which recognized each New ERA scholarship recipient. Over 250 applications were received for the 55 available scholarships of $5000 each, annually. The scholarship closes the remaining financial aid gap after Federal, State, and RMU grants have been awarded. New ERA is jointly funded by RMU and private philanthropists, jumpstarted by a donation from the Michael Alter family. The vision for the scholarship program is to transform lives and Chicago communities by helping to ensure graduation and employment opportunities for 300 low-income African American students from the Chicago schools over the next six years. In 2016 in Chicago, the college completion rates were 22% for African American students and 38% for Latino students. RMU has average graduation rates of 57% and 77%, respectively, for those groups of students. RMU aims to improve those graduation rates for African American students through the New ERA program. The ceremony began with a welcome by Executive Vice President Nicole Cafillio and Michael Alter, who spoke about RMUs high graduation rates, the importance of staying focused and motivated, and using the Universitys resources to help students succeed. Marlon Sykes, an accountant with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, was the RMU alumnus who spoke to the students about his college and career experiences. Faculty member Dr. Ed Dixon, is program coordinator for New ERA scholarship winners. He encouraged recipients to set a high bar for themselves as they begin their college careers and that he expects to be there when each one completes his or her bachelors degree in four years. The RMU students involved in the Peer-Mentors Program engaged the students in an ice-breaking activity that helped them to get to know one another and talk about their plans for college at RMU. The ceremony was followed by a reception in the RMU Culinary Dining Room that included a beautiful array of unique desserts prepared by RMU culinary students. The New ERA Scholarships will have a real impact on first generation students from Chicago, said RMU President Mablene Krueger. The generosity of donors and especially the Michael Alter and Kimbra Walter families, creates college and ultimately career opportunities for CPS students. We are so pleased to welcome these young people to the Robert Morris family. Chicago high schools and transition groups with New ERA Scholarship students include: ACERO-De La Cruz Charter School, Al Raby High School, Bogan High School, Catalyst Maria High School, Chicago Tech Academy, Chicago Vocational High School, Christ the King Jesuit College Prep, Collins High School, Crane Tech Prep Common School, Dunbar Vocational Career Academy, Edwin G. Foreman High School, EPIC Academy, Hyde Park Academy, Intrinsic School, John Marshall Metro, Jones College Prep, Marine Leadership Academy, Morgan Park High School, North Grand High School, North Lawndale College Prep, Paul Robeson High School, Percy L Julian High School, Perspectives Charter School, Rauner College Prep, Roberto Clemente Community Academy, Roosevelt High School, Rowe-Clark Math/Science Academy, Schurz High School, Simpson Academy for Young Women, Steinmetz Academic Centre, Tilden Career Community Academy, Wells Community Academy, Wendell Phillips Academy, West Town Academy, Whitney M Young Magnet High School, and William R Harper High School. The transition groups include: OneGoal, iMentor, KIPP, and Phoenix Pact. Robert Morris University Illinois is a not-for-profit, accredited baccalaureate and graduate degree granting institution, serving students interested in getting an education in business, graphic arts, nursing and health care, culinary and computer studies at its main campus in Chicago, as well as at locations in Arlington Heights, DuPage, Elgin, Orland Park, Springfield, Peoria, Schaumburg and Lake County. For more information, call 800-762-5960 or visit the web site at http://www.robertmorris.edu We wanted to turn around, help them and show our heartfelt appreciation. RE/MAX Traditions Realtor Tracy Graham and Brian Crowder, Mortgage Advisor with Commerce Home Mortgage recently delivered 146 boxes of Girl Scout cookies to 126 local Police Officers and Firefighters in Dacono, Firestone, and Frederick, Colorado, and rolled out a special real estate and mortgage savings program designed specifically for them. We loved supporting the Girl Scouts from Troop #60225 and Miss Annah Logan and her sister Zoey for the purchase of all the cookies, said Graham. Annah came to my office and helped me prepare some of the cookies for delivery over her spring break. The HERO real estate and mortgage savings program is designed to give back to local heroes who put their lives at risk to serve and protect us in our communities. We wanted to turn around, help them and show our heartfelt appreciation, added Graham. A police officer or firefighter could save up to $5,000 when both selling and buying a home with Graham. When a police officer or firefighter lists their home with me, I will reduce my commission by 15% (up to $2,500) upon a successful closing , noted Graham. Similarly, when a first responder utilizes my services to successfully purchase a home, I will rebate 15% of my gross commission (up to $2,500) towards closing costs. Brian Crowder will waive $1,000 of lending fees when a borrower obtains home financing through Commerce Home Mortgage. The buyer or seller must mention the program upon the initial consultation with either Brian Crowder or Tracy Graham. Loan, purchase or sale price must exceed $200,000. Only one discount is available per transaction. . The HERO discount program is for available for all of Colorados police officers and firefighters in Longmont and the surrounding areas that we service, not just Firestone, Frederick and Dacono. About Tracy Graham, RE/MAX Traditions Tracy Graham is an expert in representing both residential buyers and sellers in Boulder and Weld Counties in Colorado for over 13 years. She is a GRI, CDPE, SFR, CNE, ABR, and CRS. For more information, please call 720-272-0183, visit http://www.tracygraham.remaxagent.com, follow Tracy on FaceBook at TracySoldMine or LinkedIn. Her office is located at 2204 18th Ave., Longmont, Colorado 80501. About Brian Crowder, NMLS # 292479 / Commerce Home Mortgage Brian Crowder is the Branch Manager and Mortgage Advisor at Commerce Home Mortgage. Brian can be reached at (303) 579-6584 or at commercebtg.com/bcrowder. His office is located at 130 Old Laramie Trail, Suite 200 Lafayette, Colorado 80026. About the NALA The NALA offers small and medium-sized businesses effective ways to reach customers through new media. As a single-agency source, the NALA helps businesses flourish in their local community. The NALAs mission is to promote a business relevant and newsworthy events and achievements, both online and through traditional media. The information and content in this article are not in conjunction with the views of the NALA. For media inquiries, please call 805.650.6121, ext. 361. As a client, well know you, and youll know us on a first name basis." The popular SuperbCrew interview series features top executives of innovative companies in the tech and business world. They asked Sprocket Express, recently selected as a Top 3PL for 2018, what sets them apart from other fulfillment companies. Were a David to the Goliaths in the industry, says Dan Cence. With only one level of management in the company, Sprocket is agile and personable. As a client, well know you, and youll know us on a first name basis, said Dan. Our flattened org. structure enables us to turn on a dime. https://www.sprocketexpress.com/what-we-do/client-support Dan Cence created his company to support the many entrepreneurs emerging from over 32 Universities in the Boston area. These entrepreneurs, armed with great product ideas and solid business plans, had only rudimentary knowledge of eCommerce infrastructure. As Sprocket continues to evolve, they now assist offshore eCommerce companies who are expanding into the US market. Today, Sprocket Express hosts approximately 110 clients. This New England company has gone global, with clients from Europe, Eastern Europe, Canada, Russia, China, Hong Kong, Japan and Argentina. U.S. job growth continues and the unemployment rate dropped to near a 17-1/2-year low of 3.9 percent in 2018. To compete in the global ecommerce marketplace, more companies are considering an outsourced fulfillment solution when they outgrow their staffed capabilities. Logistics providers like Sprocket Express address this growing need and help local businesses stand out. Here is the full interview with Dan Cence, CEO of Sprocket Express: https://www.superbcrew.com/sprocket-express-delivers-a-full-range-of-ecommerce-fulfillment-services/ About Sprocket Express Sprocket Express is a local New England business with a global reach. Founded in 2005 by Dan Cence, a former Information Technology and Supply Chain executive with Polaroid Corporation, Sprocket Express was designed to support technical innovators from Harvard and MIT with an ecommerce/distribution platform to help them commercialize their start-ups. Today, Sprocket partners with small and mid-sized business from all online marketplaces and shopping carts to provide a full range of accurate and dependable fulfillment services. Combining the best of high-tech fulfillment with personal service Real people, no tickets! @SprocketExpress https://www.sprocketexpress.com/our-team About SuperbCrew SuperbCrew is a business news website covering innovative technology and internet companies sharing news, experience and knowledge from the tech and business world. The SuperbCrew community connects innovative companies and journalists. https://www.superbcrew.com/ I am proud to recognize this major milestone for a small business. Ejay Filtration, Inc. prides itself on partnering with all of its customers to design and manufacture the highest-quality solution for their needs. Developed specifically for the Aviation, Space and Defense industries, AS9100 is designed to meet the stringent, complex and unique demands of these markets. Ejay Filtration, Inc. had previously been certified to AS9100 Revision C and is proud to announce this significant achievement of being among the first manufacturers in the United States to be certified. Revision D includes several requirements to ensure that companies have robust and sustainable processes to consistently deliver quality products on time while mitigating risk. Founded in 1988 out of a small facility in Southern California, Ejay Filtration, Inc. has grown into one of the nations leading precision stainless steel filter manufacturing companies by protecting innovation through filtration. This Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) is one of a select few companies whose precision filtration products meet the rigorous quality standards required to secure manned space flight contracts with large organizations like NASA, the U.S. Military and commercial airlines. The company is also NADCAP accredited for their hydrogen atmosphere induction brazing process. I am proud to recognize this major milestone for a small business, said Ejay Filtrations President Cheryl Young in a statement. Ejay Filtration, Inc. prides itself on partnering with all of its customers to design and manufacture the highest-quality solution for their needs. Just call and youll experience the difference when you speak live to any of our employees. In this highly-demanding industry, Ejay Filtration, Inc. still values every relationship from order to delivery. In addition, for the second time since 2014 Ejay Filtration, Inc. has been nominated by the city of Riverside, CA for the Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Being recognized as a top leader among 850 small businesses in Inland Empire Southern California for their entrepreneurial spirit and workforce contribution is a great honor. Ejay Filtration, Inc.s commitment to the community is also evident as a proud participating member of the Greater Riverside Chamber of Commerce. Continued business growth can be attributed to a highly-skilled workforce, high quality standards and continuous improvements, including the integration of a LEAN manufacturing culture combined with innovative engineering. The company has a long-running reputation as a supplier of its high quality precision products with major Aerospace primes, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Triumph, GE Aviation, Honeywell and Parker Hannifin to name a few. Ejay Filtration, Inc. is also working directly with SpaceX and Aerojet/Rocketdyne on new developmental projects. For more information about Ejay Filtration, Inc.s products and services, visit the website or follow them on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Tresomega Nutrition, one of Americas fastest growing organic brands is pleased to announce they will be offering special pricing for their award winning organic, gluten-free Quinoa pasta at this Summers Fancy Food Show in New York City. If youre a buyer, retailer or distributor, dont miss out on this opportunity to provide your customers with the best tasting pasta on the market today. Tresomega Nutrition will be located at booth #6077. Make sure to take advantage of this incredible opportunity to purchase this award winning pasta at a show price you wont believe! The pasta is available in the following cuts; Penne, Elbow, Fusilli and Spaghetti. The pasta is a nutrient packed superfood made with a unique blend of organic Royal Bolivian Quinoa, organic Amaranth, a grain rich in vitamins and minerals, and organic white rice. Quinoa and Amaranth are gluten free ancient grains that have been providing health benefits since the time of Egyptian Pharaohs. Buyers from across the country will marvel at the delicious taste and simple, but healthy ingredient list. The pasta line has been awarded the prestigious American Masters of Taste Award from chefs across America. As a company, we are very proud that our pasta was honored with the prestigious American Masters of Taste Gold Award for its superior taste by the top corporate chefs in America, said Joanne Fellin, president at Tresomega Nutrition. The award separates the ordinary from the extraordinary. Tresomega Nutritions Gluten Free Organic Quinoa Pasta line offers Celiacs and health conscious consumers a wide range of sought-after health benefits that include: Pasta that is high in protein and contains all nine essential amino acids. Gluten Free Wheat Free Corn Free Plant Based Excellent source of Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium, Phosphorus, Copper, Manganese, and Zinc. Exceptional protein source for Vegetarians and Vegans. An absolute source of riboflavin (B2) necessary for proper energy production within cells. Tresomega Nutritions Organic, Gluten Free Quinoa pasta line provides consumers and their families with a healthier choice in the way they eat. The pasta line can be found at prominent retailers across the United States. About Us Tresomega Nutrition, located in New Milford, Connecticut places great importance on giving consumers the ability to attain an organic lifestyle through the use of pure organic foods while supporting sustainable organic farming methods for future generations to come. Tresomega Nutritions Sofi Award Winning Organic Virgin Coconut Oil and Award Winning, American Masters of Taste Organic, Gluten Free Quinoa pasta line provide consumers and their families with a healthier choice in the way they eat. Our farmers provide the purest of products in exchange for a fair market price. By purchasing Tresomega Nutrition products, you are supporting a viable economic livelihood for our farmers and promoting a sustainable agricultural environment. Tresomega Nutritions products are positioned for sustainable retail markets nationwide such as Supermarkets, Independent Supermarkets, Gourmet Food Stores and Club Stores that seek to provide their consumers with great tasting award winning products. Tresomega Nutritions products are also available for foodservice operators. For more information regarding Tresomega Nutrition, contact Lisa Pignatello at info(at)tresomega(dot)com. Ryan shares our vision for Ovations technology program and our passion for innovation. Ovation Corporate Travel, one of the largest independently owned travel management companies in the U.S., today announced the appointment of a new Chief Information Officer (CIO), Ryan Fauls. Ryan will partner with Ovations senior executives and be responsible for providing best-in-market technology services and support to Ovations 700+ corporate clients, 200,000 travelers and almost 600 staff members. He will report to Michael Steiner, one of the agencys partners. Ryan is a business and IT professional with over 18 years industry experience. Most recently, as CIO at World Travel, Inc., he was responsible for all aspects of information technology, including upgrades to the telephony systems to support omni-channel software, technology infrastructure and stabilization and data processing. Integrated technology, specifically in terms of user functionality, and comprehensive security, are at the center of Ovations client experience strategy, said Michael Steiner, Executive Vice President at Ovation. Ryan brings a depth of experience in the travel management and technology arenas. He shares our vision for Ovations technology program and our passion for innovation. Were thrilled to have him. Previously, Ryan spent 14 years at eMoney Advisor, a technology company focused on building software for the financial services industry. During his tenure, he held a variety of positions, including Partner and Vice President of Data Services. At eMoney Advisor, Ryan was responsible for enterprise-level integrations and proprietary data movement software. On joining Ovation, Ryan stated, I am excited to join such a collaborative, client-focused organization and look forward to leading Ovations technology team. About Ovation Corporate Travel Ovation Corporate Travel is an independently owned, $1.1 billion travel management company with travel consultants in more than 30 locations throughout the United States. Ovation is proud to provide global travel management through its affiliation with BCD Travel, one of the largest travel management firms in the world. The Ovation and BCD Travel network operates in 100+ countries, ensuring in-country local service excellence for local, regional, national and multinational corporate clients. Ovation's mission is to provide outstanding service, significant cost savings and comprehensive, convenient travel solutions to professional travel managers, administrators and business travelers. Toyota of Tampa Bay announced today this years Perfect Car For Perfect Attendance Giveaway will take place at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 5, 2018 via live stream on its Facebook page: @ToyotaofTampaBay. The Morgan Automotive Group dealer will give out keys to 15 qualifying Hillsborough County students with perfect attendance, with one lucky senior taking home a 2018 Toyota Yaris. "Hard work deserves to be rewarded," said Mark Schols, general manager at Toyota of Tampa Bay. Which is why we love giving back to students who show dedication to achieve perfect attendance. Five graduating seniors with 13 years of perfect attendance automatically qualified for drawing and were recognized at a separate event hosted by the Hillsborough School Board on Tuesday, May 15th. These five finalists were also awarded Bluetooth speakers and Google Chromebook laptops. Sarah Grabau, Newsome High School Krista Hill, Robinson High School Dakota Johnson, Chamberlin High School Joshua Quiggle, Newsome High School Carissa Stopowenko, Lennard High School The other 10 eligible seniors were chosen randomly, at the same event, from 1,869 eligible seniors who have earned at least one year of perfect attendance in high school. The winning student will be given a key that matches this years grand prize, a 2018 Yaris iA. The selection will be streamed live on the dealers page: @ToyotaofTampaBay using Facebook Live. Now in its eighth year, the Perfect Car for Perfect Attendance Giveaway began in 2011 as a partnership between Toyota of Tampa Bay and the Hillsborough School District to encourage better attendance among students. About Morgan Automotive Group Morgan Auto Group, one of the largest, privately held automotive dealer groups in the nation, recently ranked in the top 50 by Automotive News. Through its 25 dealerships, the Tampa-based business offers 15 unique brands from Honda to Lamborghini, with new, certified pre-owned, and quality used vehicles available for lease or purchase. These retail locations also sell car parts and service contracts along with maintenance and repair services. The company's famous slogan, "When You Make It Morgan, We Make It Happen" is the basis for all customer service, branding, promotions, and other key operations at its 25 locations from Columbia, Missouri to Naples, Florida. Falcone Capital Holdings, LLC While our company has grown each year, we have still been able to offer personalized service. As far as John Falcone is concerned, Atlanta is the greatest city in the world." Fantastic cost of living, friendly and welcoming communities, low taxes, great weather and a business-friendly local and state government combined with some of the best restaurants and shopping in the world, he added, make the city an ideal place to attract the top companies and talent. His Falcone Global Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Falcone Capital Holdings, has repeatedly been named one of the fastest growing companies in the metro area. This year, it is 30th on the Pacesetter Awards list and the top fastest-growing company in the transportation and logistics category. While our company has grown each year, said Falcone, CEO and managing partner, we have still been able to offer personalized service. Operating across six continents through its subsidiaries and partner offices, the Falcone brand has become a global leader in international and domestic transportation and logistics. The companys technology platform allows end-to-end tracking for any mode of transportation throughout the world. As with any company that sees rapid success, growth is a blessing and a curse. He said the companys biggest challenge is being able to grow the business while still maintaining best-in-class service personalized to all of our clients. Falcone said he remains engaged in the daily operations and works closely with all clients and employees. He also attributes the companys success to attracting and hiring the top talent in the industry, and offering them a top- tier training program that provides them with the tools to advance within the company. "Providing them the best salary and benefits packages possible helps, too," Falcone said. "An investment in the employees is an investment in the companys overall bottom line and success," according to Falcone. We use our people and technology to connect the world, stated Falcone. Tandigm Health, a value-based healthcare company supporting primary care physicians, today announced strong third-year results, further validating the model of rewarding doctors for quality of care. In its third year of operation, the company achieved profitability, improved patient health outcomes and reduced utilization costs by 11 percent by providing proactive, coordinated care in partnership with more than 1,100 local primary care physicians and specialists. In 2017, Tandigms physicians demonstrated high performance across industry standard quality measures. The majority of measures achieved the highest threshold according to national standard benchmarks. This included more than 20,000 colorectal cancer screenings, 11,000 breast cancer screenings and 26,000 assessments for high blood pressure. As a result of these quality outcomes, Tandigm was again able to provide meaningful compensation to the primary care physicians it partners with. With a commitment to engage, enable and empower its physicians with the tools and resources needed to provide the right care, at the right time, in the right place and in the right way, Tandigm was able to improve quality and patient health outcomes. When comparing calendar year 2017 to 2016, Tandigm reduced inpatient utilization costs by 11 percent for Medicare Advantage patients and 5 percent for Commercial patients. In that same timeframe, 94 percent of Tandigms Medicare Advantage patients received a comprehensive in-person assessment by their physician, improving the quality of their care and enabling Tandigm to reduce hospital admissions for that patient population by 7 percent. Hospital admissions were also reduced by 8 percent for Commercial patients. In just three years of operation, Tandigm has made incredible progress with our value-based care model, said Tandigm President and CEO Patrick Adams. By providing our network of physicians with the tools and resources they need to be successful, we have been able to deliver proactive, high-quality care for our patients while reducing costs. Our third year results are encouraging as I believe they show our value-based model is not only sustainable and profitable, but also points to the incredible promise of better patient outcomes. With more than 420 primary care physicians and over 180 full-time employees, Tandigms network of physicians now care for a population of over 110,000 patients. Collaborative relationships have been a key component for advancing Tandigms growth. In 2017, Tandigm added to its existing collaborations by signing a new agreement with Vantage Cancer Care Network. This relationship allows physicians in Tandigms network to more seamlessly coordinate care for patients with specific oncology diagnoses by strengthening relationships with Vantages 130-plus providers. In addition, Tandigm enables collaboration between their network of primary care physicians and more than 550 specialists across eight specialties. Throughout 2017, the company expanded existing programs and implemented new initiatives to ensure their high-risk patients were receiving high-quality care, which enabled Tandigm to reduce the number of days that their Medicare Advantage patients needed to spend in skilled nursing facilities by 11 percent. Tandigm also completed its first Population Health Champions program, designed to develop the next generation of population health leaders through a series of training sessions facilitated with Jefferson College of Population Health. In addition, Tandigm launched the Comprehensive Medication Management Program in collaboration with Tabula Rasa HealthCare, which allows the medication regimens of high-risk patients to be properly assessed for appropriateness, effectiveness, and safety. These programs, coupled with several other ongoing initiatives, have enabled Tandigm to enhance its value-based, physician centric model to achieve notable quality improvements. About Tandigm Health Tandigm Health is dedicated to enhancing the ability of primary care physicians to provide the finest possible care while lowering costs through a more coordinated, proactive model. By providing greater tools and resources to its network of doctors, Tandigm puts primary care physicians back at the center of patient care. To learn more about Tandigms approach to value-based health care, visit http://www.tandigmhealth.com. Morrison & Foerster, a leading global law firm, is pleased to announce that former partner David Lynn is rejoining the firms Corporate Department and Corporate Finance group; he will be based in the Washington, D.C. office. Mr. Lynn, a market leader in securities, corporate governance and public company counseling, previously served as the Chief Counsel of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissions Division of Corporation Finance. At the SEC, Mr. Lynn led the SECs efforts to implement and interpret the rules adopted by the SEC following passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Mr. Lynn also led the SECs rulemaking team that drafted amendments to the SECs executive compensation and related party disclosure rules in 2006. With his return to Morrison & Foerster, Mr. Lynn will serve as a co-chair of the firms global Corporate Finance group and will continue his market-leading public companies practice. Mr. Lynn will also continue as co-editor of TheCorporateCounsel.net and The Corporate Counsel, which are widely read sources on securities, governance and corporate law matters. Mr. Lynn served as the Chief Counsel of the SECs Division of Corporation Finance from 2003 to 2007 and was a partner at Morrison & Foerster from 2008 to 2017. Our public company and corporate governance practices are set apart by their exceptional strength, depth and breadth; Dave is a highly-respected addition to that group, said Jackie Liu, Chair of Morrison & Foersters global Corporate Department. His return to the firm as a co-chair of the Corporate Finance group reunites Daves industry-leading expertise with our market-leading practice. I am excited to rejoin my talented colleagues in Morrison & Foersters corporate department, said Mr. Lynn. Morrison & Foerster is a great home for my practice, particularly because of its well respected public company practice, its outstanding collaborative culture and exceptional lawyers. Morrison & Foerster corporate lawyers are recognized as leaders of a sophisticated, market-leading public companies practice advising public companies, their boards and management teams on complex and critical matters. The firm serves as primary outside counsel to dozens of public companies, many of them among the Fortune 500. Our practices and lawyers are ranked in the industry's leading directories, including Chambers Global, Chambers USA and Legal 500. Morrison & Foersters corporate department also continues to be named on Americas Best Corporate Law Firms list by Corporate Board Member/FTI Consulting. In addition to being a leading authority on public company issues generally, Mr. Lynn is particularly well known in the area of executive compensation disclosure, having co-authored The Executive Compensation Disclosure Treatise and Reporting Guide. Mr. Lynn also serves as chair of the American Bar Association Business Law Sections Federal Regulation of Securities Committee, co-chair of the Practising Law Institutes Annual Institute on Securities Regulation and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society. Mr. Lynn received his law degree from the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, where he serves as a member of the Board of Visitors, and his undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics and finance from Loyola University Maryland. ABOUT MOFO We are Morrison & Foerster a global firm of exceptional credentials. Our clients include some of the largest financial institutions, investment banks, Fortune 100, and technology and life sciences companies. The Financial Times has named the firm to its lists of most innovative law firms in Northern America and Asia every year that it has published its Innovative Lawyers Reports in those regions. In the past few years, Chambers USA has honored MoFos Privacy and Data Security, Bankruptcy, and IP teams with Firm of the Year awards, the Corporate/M&A team with a client service award, and the firm as a whole as Global USA Firm of the Year. Our lawyers are committed to achieving innovative and business-minded results for our clients, while preserving the differences that make us stronger. The firm also has a long history of commitment to the community through providing pro bono legal services, including litigating for civil rights and civil liberties, improving public education for poor children, advocating for veterans, promoting international human rights, winning asylum for the persecuted, and safeguarding the environment. Chris Tremont, Mike Butler and Bria Barker (EVERFI) By combining todays top-of-the-line technology with our personalized tools and the EVERFI education platform, we can provide clients with meaningful resources to learn, grow and manage their wealth, all in an easily understandable and accessible format. Radius Bank, an industry-leading virtual bank focused on providing clients with banking solutions to better their financial health, has been named a winner of the 2018 Financial Capability Innovation Award. Presented by the nations leading technology innovator, EVERFI, Inc., the award recognizes Radius Banks significant efforts to improve the financial capability of Americans through unique digital learning initiatives. We are thrilled to receive this award as recognition of our longstanding commitment to empowering our clients in their personal finance journeys, said Michael Butler, President and Chief Executive Officer of Radius Bank. By combining todays top-of-the-line technology with our personalized tools and the EVERFI education platform, we can provide clients with meaningful resources to learn, grow and manage their wealth, all in an easily understandable and accessible format. Honorees were selected based on a set of criteria that included the scale and reach of their financial education initiatives, the duration of their commitment, and unique employee volunteering activities that supplement their programs. Each year, we honor institutions that are truly dedicated to going above and beyond in service to their communities, said Ray Martinez, President of Financial Education at EVERFI. The Financial Capability Innovation Awards have given us the opportunity to share and celebrate the tremendous investment these institutions are making and continue to make in the communities where they live, work and serve. For EVERFI, our time here reminds us just how critical the role innovation continues to play in empowering Americans to pursue economic opportunity and achieve financial security for themselves, their families and their community. Radius Bank is committed to providing clients with the skills and knowledge needed to successfully navigate the increasingly complex financial world we live in. Radius Bank first partnered with EVERFI in the spring of 2017 to bring the web-based Money Management Academy to all clients. The program uses the latest in simulation and gaming technologies to bring complex financial concepts to life for todays digital generation. There are currently over six hours of courses available, spanning a variety of financial topics including credit scores, insurance, credit cards, student loans, mortgages, taxes, stocks, savings, 401ks and other critical concepts that map to national financial literacy standards. About Radius Bank With assets of approximately $1.1 billion, Radius Bank is a forward-thinking community bank offering a full complement of leading-edge personal and business products and services. The Bank serves consumers, small and middle market businesses, unions, government entities and non-profit organizations as its core clients. The Banks award-winning virtual banking platform allows clients to bank from anywhere with a computer or mobile device. Convenient features like check deposit, bill pay, person-to-person (P2P) payments and card management are all available to personal clients, with advanced treasury management and loan payments solutions available for business clients. Radius also partners with innovative fintech companies including mobile payments leader LevelUp, online investment firm Aspiration, and online marketplace lender Prosper to provide additional valuable services to its client base. Radius Bank is a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and is an Equal Housing/Equal Opportunity Lender. For further information, visit the Bank's website at http://www.radiusbank.com, or follow the Bank on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. About EVERFI EVERFI, Inc. is the education technology innovator that empowers K-12, higher education, and adult learners with the skills needed to be successful in life. The company teams with major corporations and foundations to provide the programs at no cost to K-12 schools. Some of Americas leading CEOs and venture capital firms are EVERFI investors including Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Twitter founder Evan Williams, and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. Learn more at everfi.com. Tessellation Table Were thrilled to bring this new hands-on exhibition to the Nashville community to give our guests a new way to actively engage with science, technology, engineering, and math using a toy they know and love. --Steve Hinkley, President & CEO of Adventure Science Center Exasperating, exhilarating, marvelous, and maddening, Rubiks Cube has fascinated people around the world since its inception. Witness its power when the internationally acclaimed Beyond Rubiks Cube exhibition opens at Adventure Science Center on Saturday, June 2. Through highly interactive physical and digital challenges, guests will explore how Rubiks Cube emerged from a workshop in Communist-era Hungary to become a worldwide phenomenon, fostering creativity across the fields of science, technology, engineering, robotics, the visual arts, music, film, architecture, and mathematics. The $5 million exhibition was designed by Liberty Science Center with lead creative partner Google, and the Cubes Budapest inventor Erno Rubik. It debuted at LSC in Jersey City, NJ, in April 2014 in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the worlds bestselling puzzle toy. Finding ways to showcase innovation is always at the core of our mission. We want to provide experiences you cant find anywhere else, and Beyond Rubiks Cube offers the chance to do just that. Its fun for kids and adults, especially those who grew up during the worldwide phenomenon that Rubiks Cube launched many years ago and that continues today, said Steve Hinkley, Adventure Science Center President & CEO. Were thrilled to bring this new hands-on exhibition to the Nashville community to give our guests a new way to actively engage with science, technology, engineering, and math using a toy they know and love. As guests enter the exhibition, digital projections of color and geometry dance in response to their movement, setting the tone for the immersive experience that awaits them in three discovery zones: Invent, Play, and Inspire. INVENT inspires guests to jump right into the complex and compelling world of puzzle toys with rare artifacts that show the origins of the Cube, a build-your-own puzzle challenge using 3D shapes, and an interactive touch table where guests can create visually stunning patterns. PLAY offers more opportunities for hands-on exploration through an animated cube-solving guide, computer programming and robots, and even a color match game for the youngest guests. INSPIRE encourages guests to experience the Cubes vast artistic and technological influence. From controlling a giant mechanical Rubiks Cube to engineering a musical masterpiece, guests will celebrate the Cube as a muse, metaphor, and pop culture icon. Beyond Rubiks Cube will be on display at Adventure Science Center through Sept. 3, 2018. # # # About Adventure Science Center For more than 70 years, Adventure Science Center has been bringing science to life for students, teachers and families in Middle Tennessee and across the U.S. The Science Center offers engaging learning experiences and science fun through hands-on, interactive exhibits; innovative programs; and fulldome productions in state-of-the-art Sudekum Planetarium. Adventure Science Center strives to open every mind to the wonders of science and technology, fostering a better understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Adventure Science Center is located at 800 Fort Negley Blvd. in Nashville. For more information about the exhibition, visit AdventureSci.org/BeyondRubiksCube or call Alexis McCoy, Director of Marketing and Communications, at (615) 669-5094. About Liberty Science Center Liberty Science Center (LSC.org) is a 300,000-square-foot not-for-profit learning center located in Liberty State Park on the Jersey City bank of the Hudson near the Statue of Liberty. Dedicated to bringing the power, promise, and pure fun of science and technology to people of all ages, Liberty Science Center houses 12 museum exhibition halls, a live animal collection with 110 species, giant aquariums, a 3D theater, the worlds largest IMAX Dome Theater, live simulcast surgeries, a tornado-force wind simulator, K-12 classrooms and labs, and teacher-development programs. More than 250,000 students visit the Science Center each year, and tens of thousands more participate in the Centers off-site and online programs. LSC is the most visited cultural institution in New Jersey with more than 650,000 visitors annually and the largest interactive science center in the NYC-NJ metropolitan area. Beyond Rubiks Cube was created by Liberty Science Center with Lead Creative Partner Google and the Cubes Hungarian inventor, Erno Rubik, with generous support from Google, Government of Hungary, Bank of America, Rubiks Brand Ltd, and Ernst & Young LLP. All Rubiks trademarks are exclusively licensed by Rubiks Brand Ltd http://www.rubiksbrand.com Navarro Correas, Coleccion Privada Malbec is produced from old age vines located in the foothills of the Andes mountains. August Wine Group today announced an exclusive U.S. import partnership with Grupo Penaflor, South Americas largest wine company, to import Navarro Correas, the iconic Argentine estate known for its Malbec and other premium offerings. In recent years, the Mendoza-based Navarro Correas brand reached volumes exceeding 80,000 cases in the United States. August Wine Group is importing the recently revamped Navarro Correas brand with its vibrant, new packaging, thanks to a recent redesign by Grupo Penaflor. The wines are available nationally. August Wine Group, Partner and Chief Sales Officer, Brian Erwin sees tremendous potential for Navarro Correas: Navarro Correas is a veritable icon with a long successful history. We look forward to building momentum for these exceptional wines and getting them in the hands of consumers. The Navarro Correas estate traces its origins back to 1798 when Don Juan de Dios Correas planted some of the first vines in Mendoza at the foot of the Andes. From those early days until the mid-1900s, the Correas family made wine for their own pleasure and sold their extra grapes to neighbors. In 1974 Don Edmundo Navarro Correas, a direct descendant of the founder, set out to make the finest wine possible and one of the great stories of South American viticulture was born. Today Navarro Correas specialized growing sites, with a remarkable range of soil types, altitudes, ripening patterns and vine age, yield terrifically expressive wines, including: Coleccion Privada, an emblematic Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Red Blend and Chardonnay that represent the art of viticulture; Alegoria, a Malbec with the highest varietal typicity, complexity and quality; Seleccion Del Enologo, a single vineyard Malbec; Structura Ultra, the winerys highest quality red blend; and Espumantes, a range of elegant sparkling wines. About August Wine Group, LLC August Wine Group (augustwinegroup.com) is a Seattle-based wine importer specializing in the import, distribution, branding, education and sales of high-quality wines of distinct character from the Mediterranean and South America. The company has distribution in all major U.S. markets, North America, and many major international markets. August Wine Group supports small, environmentally responsible growers, and exceptional winemaking from world-class producers in both well-established and up-and-coming wine regions. About Grupo Penaflor Grupo Penaflor (grupopenaflor.com) is one the top ten largest wine companies in the world, and owns over 6000 hectares of prime vineyard land in Argentinas premier growing regions: Mendoza, San Juan, Salta, and Catamarca. The company commands a 24 percent market share of all Argentine wine exports, with wine sales into the Unites States approaching $450 million. Editors Note: Navarro Correas vineyard and bottle images available upon request. TripAdvisor Hall of Fame Certificate of Excellence We are so pleased to be awarded this honor and to have it based on the reviews of our guests for the past 5 years, said Thomas Maxwell, Owner of the Hotel Pattee. This award is a credit to the staff that works so hard to provide a memorable stay to all our guests. Located in the small town of Perry, Iowa and about 40 miles West of Des Moines is the Historical Hotel Pattee. Known as one of the Finest Historic Boutique Hotels in the World, the Hotel Pattee is a Destination upon itself. The property boasts 40 individually decorated and themed guest rooms, a state of the art bowling center, a full- service dining room and lounge, and its own dedicated library. Additional services include the Full- Service Copper Door Spa along with many other Amenities. This year the Hotel Pattee has been awarded and inducted into the TripAdvisor Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame was created to honor those businesses that have earned a Certificate of Excellence for five consecutive years. According to Marc Charron, President of TripAdvisor for Business: Winning the TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence for five consecutive years is a remarkable feat. TripAdvisor is pleased to induct five-time award winners into the Hall of Fame. By putting a spotlight on businesses that are focused on consistently delivering great service to customers, TripAdvisor not only helps drive an improvement to hospitality standards around the world, it also gives businesses both large and small the ability to shine and stand out from the competition. Since 2011, the Certificate of Excellence honors hospitality businesses that deliver consistently great service across the world. This designation is presented only to approximately 10% of total businesses on TripAdvisor that have consistently achieved great reviews over the past year. And only a small fraction of those go on to go in the 5 x winners Hall of Fame. We are so pleased to be awarded this honor and to have it based on the reviews of our guests for the past 5 years, said Thomas Maxwell, Owner of the Hotel Pattee. This award is a credit to the staff that works so hard to provide a memorable stay to all our guests. Hotel Pattee is located at 1112 Willis Avenue, Perry, IA 50220. Additional information on the Hotel Pattee is available at http://www.hotelpattee.com, by calling 515-465-3511 or emailing info@hotelpatee.com . Everyone is invited to follow along on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. States decide their own age of consent they range from 16-18. States also determine whether crimes can be charged when two people of similar ages have sex and one is under the age of consent. Sex offenses typically arise in two scenarios, said attorney Jerry Merrill, of the Merrill Law Firm, who devotes his practice exclusively to defending individuals accused of crimes. No. 1: Force, fear, or a person unable to consent due to unconsciousness or intoxication. These are the crimes most people think of when they think of sexual assaults/rapes, noted Merrill. No. 2: Sexual relations where at least one participant is under the legal age of consent, even though both participants engage in the sexual relations willingly. A crime occurs because the law says someone under a certain age cannot legally consent, even though their actual consent (willingness to participate) was manifested through words and actions. States decide their own age of consent they range from 16-18, noted Merrill. States also determine whether crimes can be charged when two people of similar ages have sex and one is under the age of consent. For example, Missouri law allows two individuals to have sex even though one is under the age of consent (but at least 14) as long as the older person is under 21. However, Kansas has no such exception, and a 16-year-old may be charged with a sex offense (which may require sex offender registration) if they have sex with a 15-year-old because the age of consent in Kansas is 16. As a practical matter, these situations are seldom charged because prosecutors exercise discretion in charging decisions, but the law allows for such situations to be charged as serious felonies. In states with laws such as Kansas, the results can be absurd. If the age of consent is 16 and a 15-year-old has consensual sex with a 16-year-old, the 16-year-old is committing a sex crime, where the 15-year-old is not, concluded Merrill. When two 15-year-olds have sexual relations they are both committing sex crimes. The laws are written broadly enough to often encompass sexual touching along with sexual intercourse. About Jerry Merrill, Merrill Law Firm Jerry Merrill is a solo practitioner, and his clients receive individualized attention and hands-on guidance in every aspect of their criminal defense. Practice areas of the Merrill Law Firm include criminal defense, domestic violence, juvenile law, DUI/DWI and serious felonies. For more information, please call (913) 381-2085, or visit http://www.merrillfirm.com. The law office is located at 7211 W. 98th Terrace, Suite 140, Overland Park, KS 66212. About the NALA The NALA offers small and medium-sized businesses effective ways to reach customers through new media. As a single-agency source, the NALA helps businesses flourish in their local community. The NALAs mission is to promote a business relevant and newsworthy events and achievements, both online and through traditional media. The information and content in this article are not in conjunction with the views of the NALA. For media inquiries, please call 805.650.6121, ext. 361. Qorus Software SII Belgiums strong footing and experience in the professional services sector makes them the perfect fit for our program, says Michelle Revsbech, Senior Vice President of Alliances at Qorus Software. Qorus the software company that helps organizations produce business-critical documents more efficiently, welcomes Belgium-based digital solutions provider, SII Belgium to their MSP reseller program. SII Belgium is a digital solutions provider and consulting firm with over 20 years of experience. Having established themselves as the solutions provider to professional services firms, SII Belgium helps businesses adopt emerging technologies to drive efficiency and productivity. Among their services, the firm offers the development of websites, intranet, extranet, E-commerce applications, content management system solutions, enterprise content management, graphical design, and mobile applications. Were pleased to be a part of Qoruss reseller program as it aligns with our goals of providing complete and efficient digital solutions to help our clients achieve their goals, says Jamel Hajaji, Unit Business Manager at SII Belgium. SII Belgiums strong footing and experience in the professional services sector makes them the perfect fit for our program, says Michelle Revsbech, Senior Vice President of Alliances at Qorus Software. Their productivity and efficiency focus are important to Qorus and were looking forward to supporting them as they help more firms adopt and experience the benefit of our solutions. ABOUT SII BELGIUM SII Belgium is a digital consulting agency and a member of the international SII Group. SII Belgium mainly focuses on technology and business consulting for business critical digital solutions. Their digital services are categorized in 3 business units: E-commerce & Digital Marketing, Productivity & Collaboration and Actionable Insights & Smart Solutions. They operate in a variety of industries, such as retail, health, culture, banking, aerospace, automotive and a lot more. SII Belgium executes and supports projects on various levels and milestones, including: Business consulting for strategic advice about your IT project Technical consulting for technical matters Project implementation, going from scope definition to graphical design, development testing and support Resources to reinforce your projects To learn more about SII Belgium, visit: https://www.sii.be/ ABOUT QORUS Qorus helps organizations create business critical documents more efficiently and accurately. Our software is incredibly powerful but highly intuitive and very easy to use. Even the most non-technical users can quickly create accurate, personalized and compliant documents like proposals, contracts, RFPs, pitches, and reports. Qorus runs on Microsoft Azure and integrates with Microsoft Office to enhance document productivity. Our award-winning Customer Success team ensures our customers across all industries get the most value from our software. We have offices in Seattle, London and Cape Town. To learn more about the Qorus reseller program, visit: https://www.qorusdocs.com/qorus-partners Learn more about Qorus at http://www.qorusdocs.com The IHC Group, a leader in specialty health benefit products We are excited to welcome Toto to our family of pet health insurance partners and brands. As a Benefit Corp, Toto brings to the pet insurance marketplace a fresh perspective centered around a commitment to social impact, which we believe will resonate well with veterinarians and pet parents alike. The IHC Group (IHC), a leader in specialty health benefit products announced today a partnership with new pet health insurance marketing company, Toto Pet Insurance , Inc. (Toto). Under a marketing and services agreement, Toto is able to seamlessly enter the market with a new pet insurance that is supported by plans underwritten by IHCs highly rated carrier, Independence American Insurance Company (IAIC) and expert administration by PetPartners , Inc. which is also a member of The IHC Group. Totos market launch is planned for mid-summer and will feature new products, plans and competitive rates to appeal to a broad range of consumer budgets. The company, based in Richmond, Virginia, will also introduce its pay it forward TotoCares program, a radically transparent initiative that will contribute a percentage of policyholder premiums to veterinarians across the country to provide vital medical treatments to pets in need and in so doing save their lives. Rick Faucher, President of the pet health division of The IHC Group states, We are excited to welcome Toto to our family of pet health insurance partners and brands. As a Benefit Corp, Toto brings to the pet insurance marketplace a fresh perspective centered around a commitment to social impact, which we believe will resonate well with veterinarians and pet parents alike. This partnership also allows IHC to expand our reach into additional pet insurance consumer markets. Our goal is to establish Toto as the pet insurance brand with a heart by protecting pets and their parents with a simple and affordable product built on a socially conscious mission, stated Bruce Trowbridge, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Toto Pet Insurance. Its a unique proposition that IHC understands and was ready to support. Toto is very excited to make our debut in select markets in early July. IHC entered the pet health insurance space in January 2011 and has since rapidly established a vertically integrated structure for marketing, administering, pricing and retaining risk on its pet insurance products. IHCs quickly growing pet insurance division includes AKC Pet Insurance , the exclusive pet insurance provider of the American Kennel Club since 2003, and PetPlace.com , the popular pet parent destination for health, product and insurance information. The new agreement with Toto further demonstrates IHCs commitment to strengthening and growing its footprint in the pet health insurance marketplace. For more information on The IHC Groups pet health insurance products and services, please contact Rick Faucher at 602-395-7083 or Rick.Faucher@IHCGroup.com. About The IHC Group Independence Holding Company (NYSE: IHC), formed in 1980, is a holding company that is principally engaged in underwriting, administering and/or distributing group and individual specialty benefit products, including disability, supplemental health, pet, and group life insurance through its subsidiaries. The IHC Group owns three insurance companies (Standard Security Life Insurance Company of New York, Madison National Life Insurance Company, Inc. and Independence American Insurance Company), and IHC Specialty Benefits, Inc., a technology-driven full-service marketing and distribution company that focuses on small employer and individual consumer products through general agents, telebrokerage, advisor centers, private label arrangements, and through the following brands: http://www.HealtheDeals.com; Health eDeals Advisors; Aspira A Mas; http://www.PetPartners.com; and http://www.PetPlace.com. IHC creates value for insurance producers, carriers and consumers (both individuals and small businesses) through a suite of proprietary tools and products, all of which are underwritten by IHCs carriers or placed with highly rated insurance companies. About Independence American Insurance Company Independence American Insurance Company is domiciled in Delaware and licensed to write property and/or casualty insurance in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Its products include short-term medical, hospital indemnity, fixed indemnity limited benefit, group and individual dental, and pet insurance. Independence American is rated A- (Excellent) for financial strength by A.M. Best Company, a widely recognized rating agency that rates insurance companies on their relative financial strength and ability to meet policyholder obligations (an A++ rating from A.M. Best is its highest rating). About PetPartners Inc. PetPartners, Inc.s history dates back to the 1980s when British-owner and leading innovator in pet insurance, Sir. John D. Spurling, created a pet health insurance company exclusively for The Kennel Club in Great Britain. PetPartners provided pet health insurance to dogs and puppies in the United Kingdom for nearly two decades before its arrival in the United States. Since 2002, PetPartners has been the exclusive provider of pet health insurance protection to registrants of The American Kennel Club through the AKC Pet Insurance brand. In 2004, PetPartners was selected by the Cat Fanciers' Association, the largest registry of purebred cats, to provide health insurance to CFA registrants. In 2009, PetPartners began to offer its new PetPartners-branded products both to individuals and groups (such as associations, companies and credit unions). About Toto Pet Insurance Inc. Licensed in Delaware as a public benefit corporation, Toto is a for-profit company that is legally bound to not only consider the effects of its decisions on shareholders, but also the impact of its choices on employees, the community and the environment. Shortly after its market launch in July, 2018, Toto will become a Certified B-Corp, the certification granted by the nonprofit organization B Lab to for-profit companies that meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. For more information, please visit TotoPetInsurance.com. CA Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson (center) celebrating Distinguished Schools with California Casualty California Casualty is honored to support, in a small way, the amazing work being done across our great state. California Casualty joins the California Department of Education in congratulating the 287 elementary schools named 2018 Distinguished Schools. The recipients were cited for their performance and progress in a series of areas that included test scores, suspension rates and English learner progress. A ceremony was held at Disneyland in early May to honor the recipients. As the Presenting Sponsor, California Casualty was proud to attend and help celebrate the awardees accomplishments. California Casualty Assistant Vice President Lisa Almeida greeted attendees and introduced State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson. What a magical night it was celebrating Californias Distinguished Schools. California Casualty is honored to support, in a small way, the amazing work being done across our great state, she said. California Casualty CEO Beau Brown thanked the dedicated teachers, administrators and classified employees who help students reach their full potential. Your innovative leadership has helped California continue to be one of the top states preparing students for graduation, college and beyond, he said. Superintendent Torlakson added, These schools implemented outstanding educational programs and practices that help California students realize their potential, and put them on the path to achieve their dreams. Every day at these schools, teachers, administrators and classified employees, working with parents, apply their dedication, creativity, and talents toward providing a great education for all their students. The Distinguished Schools Program returned after a three-year break, replacing the Gold Ribbon Schools Program. The list of 2018 Distinguished Schools and Exemplary School Districts can be found here. As the Presenting Sponsor, California Casualty also made possible these other 2018 California School Recognition Programs: California Teachers of the Year Classified School Employees of the Year California Green Ribbon School Awards Citing its 67-year partnership with the California Teachers Association, Superintendent Torlakson noted the important role California Casualty has taken in supporting schools that have advanced excellence in education. California Casualty Field representatives are helping present special Distinguished Schools awards to the schools. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, California Casualty provides auto and home insurance to educators, firefighters, law enforcement and nurses across the country American heroes who enhance their communities. Founded in 1914, California Casualty has been led by four generations of the Brown family. To learn more about California Casualty, or to request an auto insurance quote, please visit http://www.calcas.com or call 1.800.800.9410. Mick Baumann, Director of Maintenance, Guardian Jet LLC Micks stellar aircraft maintenance experience gives us the ability to understand all the technical aspects of a clients airplanefrom avionics to the connectivity in the back of the airplane. - Don Dwyer, Managing Partner, Guardian Jet Aviation maintenance expert Mick Baumann has been named Director of Maintenance for Guardian Jet LLC (guardianjet.com), the Guilford-Connecticut-based business aviation consulting and brokerage firm. Mick Baumann Guardian Jet LLC Director of MaintenanceIn his new role, Baumann will support Guardian Jets sales, acquisition and consulting team by lending it his vast technical aircraft experience. He will also play a critical, client-facing role overseeing the myriad technical aspects of aircraft transactions for Guardian Jets client base. Baumann brings more than a decade of aviation maintenance experience to his new role with Guardian Jet. As a longtime avionics technician and airframe and powerplant mechanic, he has handled maintenance for both business aviation aircraft as well as those in general aviation. His airframe experience is particularly notable, including his work on Global XRS, 5000, 6000, Challenger 604, 605, 300, 350, Citation Excel, Falcon 2000EX and Falcon 7X aircraft. Prior to joining Guardian Jet, Baumann served as an avionics technician for UTFlight, the corporate flight department for United Technologies in Hartford, Connecticut. Previously, he worked for the Bombardier Hartford Service Center as a member of its aircraft on ground (AOG) team. Don Dwyer, Managing Partner of Guardian Jet, said he is extremely pleased to welcome Baumann to the Guardian Jet Team. To have a director of maintenance on the team is just one more example of the quality we strive to bring to our company and our clients. Micks stellar aircraft maintenance experience gives us the ability to understand all the technical aspects of a clients airplanefrom avionics to the connectivity in the back of the airplane. Micks degree of technical knowledge and professionalism really beefs up our bench strength at Guardian Jet. Baumann is a graduate of the Pennsylvania College of Technology, where he received a BS in Aviation Maintenance Technology. He also holds an Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration, and he has received maintenance and avionics training for several aircraft models. Additionally, Baumann has a FCC General Radio Telephone Operators License and a Satcom Direct AeroIT certification. For more information about Guardian Jet, visit guardianjet.com. About Guardian Jet Founded in 2002, Guardian Jet, LLC, offers business aviation brokerage, consulting and oversight services for thousands of clients worldwide. The company distinguishes itself with its focus on integrity and industry expertise, and by consistently providing business value to clients. Guardian Jets core mission has always been to earn the right to buy and sell aircraft on behalf of its clientele by providing great consulting advice, market intelligence and flawless execution. Dr. Duane Mitchell, Co-Director of the Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy at the University of Florida I applaud the EndBrainCancer Initiative. The work you are doing connecting patients with specialists, innovative drugs and therapies, and research studies is absolutely vital. You are the GPS of brain cancer. On May 17th the EndBrainCancer Initiative's 7th annual Brains Matter & Igniting Hope Celebration, Awareness and Fundraising Dinner was held in Bellevue, Washington near Seattle. In attendance were many brain cancer patients, survivors and their family members as well as individuals representing key segments of the brain cancer research and treatment community. The dinner event generated over $75,000 toward the EndBrainCancer InitiativeI's spring campaign (still going) with its goal of $100,000. The organization, originally formed as The Chris Elliott Fund, also marked its 16th anniversary. Our theme tonight is 'Igniting HOPE,'" stated Dellann Elliott Mydland, Co-founder and President of The EndBrainCancer Initiative (EBCI) in her introduction. At the EBCI, the HOPE we offer brain cancer patients is not just positive thinking or therapeutic technique per se, but rather real options based in science, awareness of new treatments, access to Centers of Excellence, and connections to promising clinical trials. Genomics and immunotherapy are such treatment areas. The Dinner's keynote speaker was Duane A. Mitchell, M.D., Ph.D., world-renowned expert in using immunotherapy in the treatment of brain cancer. Dr. Mitchell is Co-Director of the Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy and Director of the University of Florida Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program. Dr. Mitchell introduced the key findings he and his team (as well as others in the field) have discovered in how the mechanisms that already exist in our body can be utilized in various ways to fight brain cancer and prevent cancers from recurring. He highlighted the role of cytotoxic T-Cells whose purpose is to individually identify cancer cells delivering cytotoxic proteins to destroy those cells while not negatively impacting healthy cells. Amazingly, Mitchell noted, We are finding specific keys to treating brain cancer inside the patients themselves. The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) named immunotherapy 2.0 as the advance of the year in 2017 and now immunotherapy is a standard treatment option for people across a broad range of cancers. However, immunotherapy is still not a standard treatment option for brain cancer patients. The EndBrainCancer Initiative is currently focusing much of its education, awareness and outreach efforts on the role of immunotherapy in treating brain cancer. Dr. Mitchell was introduced by Sherri Millis, Senior Manager of Clinical Collaboration from keynote sponsor Foundation Medicine, who also explained her company's work in genomic profiling and building a common data set for research and treatment. Dellann Elliott Mydland further commented, Genomic profiling and related precision and personalized medicine is another key plank in emerging brain cancer approaches. At the EBCI, we actively advocate for patients to receive personalized treatment plans based on the emerging genomic data sets being developed. The EndBrainCancer Initiative currently works with 900 patients and families per year with a focus on fueling research by placing patients in clinical trials. Our approach, stated Mydland in her address, is what we call 'directive advocacy.' Brain cancer creates uniquely challenging problems. Patients and their families suffer from greater dependency and hopelessness than other cancer patients. EBCI helps patients manage their interactions with doctors, manage their emotional crisis, and help them find the right treatment options and/or clinical trials. Dr. Mitchell, a member of EBCI's medical advisory board, added in his address, I applaud the EBCI. The work you are doing in in connecting patients with specialists, innovative drugs and therapies, and research studies is absolutely vital. You are the GPS of brain cancer. The EndBrainCancer Initiative worked in such a way with Mr. Ken Whitley of North Carolina who was on hand at the event. Ken was diagnosed with a brain tumor on Super Bowl Sunday in February 2017. In the evening's mission moment, Ken credited the EBCI team with providing guidance and insight that changed his approach to treatment as well as connecting him with key doctors offering a wide variety of treatment options. EBCI gave me HOPE. I was lost and did not know which way to turn. With their help I got activated. (Ken's Impact Story) After not qualifying for a number of clinical trials, Ken enrolled last September in a clinical trial with Dr. Allan Friedman of Duke University utilizing a re-engineered, tumor-seeking bacteria. Recently, Ken got the results of his latest MRIno measurable change in the tumor with the three previous scans showing tumor reduction and dissipation. Ken Whitley was presented with the 2018 National HOPE Award, sponsored by Novocure, to the brain cancer patient who embodies HOPE in facing this disease. In receiving his award, Ken stated to the brain cancer patients in the audience and beyond, DONT GIVE UP!! THERE IS HOPE! Put one foot in front of the other; keep moving forward. Define and pursue your goals while putting your trust in God. Doctors can treat. They cant heal. God does, however, work through doctors, scientists and the EndBrainCancer Initiatives team. Dont give up! The evening event was supported by a number of industry partners and research institutions in the brain cancer arena as well as other regional companies. In her welcoming remarks, Nikki Nepomuceno, Clinical Research Associate at corporate partner Orbus Therapeutics, highlighted her firm's partnership with the EBCI stressing the value of connecting brain cancer patients to clinical trials. Dellann Elliott Mydland (whose late husband, Chris Elliott, passed away from brain cancer in 2002) further commented: This event's wide base of support is indicative of what we are trying to achieve broadly at the EBCI. Brain cancer is such a menace and insidious disease, it will literally take all of us working together to beat it. Our goal is survivorship now and cure in our lifetime. If we are to achieve that, we must embark on this fight in a brand new way, where we forge breakthrough collaborations between researchers, the medical community, pharmaceutical companies, treatment Centers of Excellence, government, and most importantly, the patients themselves. I am grateful for our partners and sponsors in supporting our initiative to truly put that common goal first. The EndBrainCancer Initiative would like to thank Novocure, sponsor of the National HOPE Award awareness and outreach initiative as well as its corporate partners and event sponsors who have made this event possible: Keynote SponsorFoundation Medicine; Educational and Event SponsorsOncLive, CURE Magazine, Oncology Nursing News, Orbus Therapeutics, STELLAR Trial, Nativis, glassybaby, University of Florida Health, The Preston A. Wells Center for Brain Tumor Therapy, The Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke, Synaptive Medical, JMS Construction, Brotherton Cadillac, Hatchbuck, Titos Handmade Vodka, and Wrecking Ball Demolition. More information and links to these companies and organizations can be found on our Dinner Event Page. The EBCI is seeking to engage eight additional industry Corporate Partners to help fuel research, increase patient outcomes and provide IMMEDIATE ACCESS to specialists, to advanced treatments, and to clinical trials. About the EndBrainCancer Initiative The EndBrainCancer Initiative (EBCI, formerly the Chris Elliott Fund) is a national brain cancer and brain tumor patient advocacy organization and national 501(c) 3 social enterprise with offices in Redmond, Washington. Established in 2002 and now celebrating 16 years of service, EBCI is committed to finding a cure for brain cancer and bringing HOPE to the lives of patients and their families through its three programs: Direct Connect Patient Services Program Brain Tumor Disease Education, Awareness, and Outreach Program Brain Tumor Patient Advocacy and Access Since its founding, EBCI has helped thousands of patients, caregivers, and their families and has become a credible and trusted resource at all levels in the brain cancer treatment community from patients to research institutions to pharmaceutical and regulatory entities. EBCI also participates as the Patient Voice in clinical trial design. Founder and President, Dellann Elliott Mydland has been published in CNS Oncology. The organization and its staff support 900+ patients and caregivers free of charge annually through the Direct Connect Program, and provide Education/Awareness/Outreach to over 8.7 million annually, including members of the Brain Tumor Community. EBCI is a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), Society for Neuro-Oncology (SNO), American Association of Neuroscience Nurses, American Association for Cancer Research, and Life Sciences Washington, among other organizations. If we can help, please contact us at WeCare@EndBrainCancer.org or 425.444.2215. Follow us on Social Media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/EndBrainCancer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EndBrainCancer/ Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChrisElliottfundOrg LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chris-elliott-fund/ About Dr. Duane Mitchell Duane Mitchell, M.D., Ph.D. is a world-renowned expert in translational research and immunotherapy. He is Co-Director of the Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy at the University of Florida. Dr. Mitchell received his medical degree and doctorate degree in immunology from Duke University. Dr. Mitchell now leads a comprehensive brain tumor program at the University of Florida focused on translational research. He also currently serves as a chartered member of the NIH study section on Cancer Immunopathology and Immunotherapy, Chair of the NCI Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium Immunotherapy Committee, and member of the NCI Brain Malignancy Steering Committee Working Group. Dr. Mitchell has more than 40 refereed journal publications, 15 textbook chapters and scientific reviews, and is inventor on five United States patents on findings from his oncological research. More about Dr. Mitchell and his work can be found on his University of Florida Bio Page. These players are the future of professional eSports and any chance we have to work with them to grow the sport is a top priority, said Brett Lautenbach, CEO of NRG eSports. High School Esports League (HSEL), the leading league for high school esports, today announced Fortnite as the leagues next title for the Summer Open season. The grand prize winner and champion of the Summer Leagues Fortnite tournament will receive two hours of playtime against Svennoss, the top Fortnite player in the USA, thanks to NRG eSports. With the explosive rise of Fortnite, and colleges starting to offer more and more scholarships, making it our Summer Open title was a no-brainer, said Mason Mullenioux, CEO of High School Esports League. So, being the first to offer Fortnite, plus working with NRG eSports and Svennoss, really takes things to the next level. Were thrilled to continue to create more opportunity and value for the students. In addition to two hours of playtime with Svennoss, the grand champion will receive a Respawn Gaming Chair and HSEL swag. Players do not need to be affiliated with their high school to participate in the Summer Open with HSELs free agent format and their individual student verification process. All students need is their student ID and an active subscription to compete. Were thrilled to team up with High School Esports League for the first-ever Fortnite tournament at the high school level, said Brett Lautenbach, CEO of NRG eSports. These players are the future of professional eSports and any chance we have to work with them to grow the sport is a top priority. Qualifiers for the Summer Open are now live and end June 17th, with the regular season starting June 18th. Fortnite will be available in the HSEL on iOS, PC, Xbox and PS4 all being separated into their own platform-specific tournament. All student looking to compete must be verified by June 15th. Students looking to sign up can go to http://www.highschoolesportsleague.com/sign-up/ to register an account and can learn more here: https://www.highschoolesportsleague.com/fortnite. About High School Esports League The High School Esports League (HSEL) is the league administrator to a network of high schools competing in 14 gaming titles across North America. HSEL currently has 800 partner clubs, making it the largest league in North America. As the leader in the high school space, we work with clubs to establish, improve, and grow their programs to create a solid foundation for healthy competition. HSEL also helps students in their scholastic life by providing scholarships and connections that further their esports careers. About NRG Esports NRG Esports is a San Francisco-based esports organization competing in nine professional video game leagues and known for its deeply engaged fan base. NRG was founded in 2015 by Andy Miller and Mark Mastrov, co-owners of the Sacramento Kings. NRG investors include Shaquille ONeal, Alex Rodriguez, and Jennifer Lopez, alongside Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The Columbus Citizens Foundation announced today that Guy Chiarello, President of First Data Corporation, a global leader in Financial Services, has been named Grand Marshal of the 74th Columbus Day Parade. Mr. Chiarello has been President of First Data since 2013, where he oversees the business and technology solutions created for First Datas clients. First Data is at the center of the global payments ecosystem, driving commerce every day by powering more than 3,000 transactions per second and $1.9 Trillion in annual transactions. A renowned global leader in Fin-Tech and Commerce, Mr. Chiarello has been at the forefront of banking, technology & innovation for more than 30 years. He has led product development and technology for three Fortune 500 companies, advised some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and is recognized around the world among the most prominent technology leaders in the industry. He has personally been recognized multiple times by Institutional Investor Magazine, Information Week, and was a NASSCOM CIO of the Year. Prior to his role at First Data, Mr. Chiarello was the Chief Information Officer at JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. Mr. Chiarello has been recognized by numerous organizations for his charitable efforts and is very active in the philanthropic community focused in the areas of Education and Cancer Research. His most recent acknowledgements include Humanitarian of the Year for Make-A-Wish Foundation, the Distinguished Leadership Award for the NY Hall of Science (NYSCI), Futures in Education, and Tuesdays Children. Additionally, he serves as an active partner to many nonprofits, including NPower, The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS), Kelly Cares and A Chance in Life. Mr. Chiarello was also inducted into the New Jersey Italian-American Hall of Fame in 2016. The annual Columbus Day Parade, the largest celebration of Italian-American heritage and culture in the United States, will take place on Monday, October 8, beginning at 11:30 a.m. As Grand Marshal, Mr. Chiarello will lead dozens of marching bands and floats and over 100 marching groups up the Fifth Avenue parade route, from 44th Street to 72nd Street. In naming Mr. Chiarello Grand Marshal, Columbus Citizens Foundation President Marian Pardo praised his success as a prominent Italian-American business leader and his contributions to philanthropy and community service. Guy Chiarello is such an esteemed leader in the technology and commerce industries where he has been on the cutting edge for many years, Ms. Pardo said. And his commitment to discovering and providing opportunities for the next generation of business leaders is truly commendable. The Foundation is honored to have him as our 2018 Grand Marshal. I am thrilled to join the ranks of the distinguished Italian-Americans who have served in this role before me. Mr. Chiarello said. I look forward to working with the Columbus Citizens Foundation in the months ahead to deliver a unifying event that the Italian-American community and the entire city of New York can enjoy. The Columbus Day Parade in New York City is organized annually by the Columbus Citizens Foundation. Previous Grand Marshals have included: Frank Sinatra; Sophia Loren; Joe DiMaggio; Justice Antonin Scalia; Lidia Bastianich; Maria Bartiromo; Joe Plumeri; Frank Bisignano and Leonard Riggio. ABOUT THE COLUMBUS CITIZENS FOUNDATION The Columbus Citizens Foundation is a non-profit organization in New York City committed to fostering an appreciation of Italian-American heritage and achievement. The Foundation, through a broad range of philanthropic and cultural activities, provides opportunities for advancement to deserving Italian-American students through various scholarship and grant programs. The Foundation organizes New York City's annual Columbus Celebration and Columbus Day Parade, which has celebrated Italian-American heritage on New York's Fifth Avenue since 1929. For more information, contact jwilson(at)columbuscitizens(dot)org LabRoots, the leading producer of interactive virtual events for research scientists, clinicians and physicians from around the world, will host the 2018 Precision Medicine Virtual Event on a new, more robust platform, allowing attendees to learn and connect seamlessly on mobile, tablet or desktop devices. Precision Medicine is becoming an integral part of research in the science community. The discipline not only involves individual genetic information, but also environmental, behavioral, and clinical data. A combination of these factors allows researchers to put together a comprehensive view of each patient that aids in their search for precision approaches to health maintenance, disease prevention, and therapies. Were excited to offer our clients and attendees a new and engaging virtual environment that guarantees each event will surpass expectations. I particularly love the new leaderboard and scavenger hunt features, allowing participants to compete with their colleagues from around the world, said Tracy Salcido, vice president over production. Attendees wont want to miss this event powered by our intuitive platform that will most definitely provide a progression in your science studies and research. Attendees of the 2018 event will learn from industry experts on a range of topics, such as NGS applications and technology development, large-scale genomics data sets, large-scale sequencing efforts, pharmacogenomics, and drug development to name a few. Presentations on developments for diagnostic and treatment for diseases such as cancer and Crohn's will also be available. Presentations will come from industry experts and thought leaders like Dr. Niall Lennon, senior director of Translational Genomics and Product Development at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Dr. David Smith, professor and consultant at the Mayo Clinic; and Dr. Christopher Mason from Weill Cornell Medicine, who has been working with the NASA twin project at the ISS. Participants who engage in webcast presentations can earn free continuing education credits, as well as points to earn one of LabRoots most popular shirts. Between presentations, attendees can visit the virtual exhibit and poster halls. The virtual event will commence June 20-21, 2018; to see the complete list of speakers, discover the continuing education credits offered, or to register for free, click here. ABOUT LABROOTS LabRoots is the leading scientific social networking website, offering top scientific trending news and premier educational virtual events and webinars. 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. We have become a primary source for trending scientific news, webinars, virtual conferences and more. Offering more than articles and webcasts that go beyond the mundane and explore the latest discoveries in the world of science, LabRoots users can stay atop their field by gaining continuing education credits from a wide range of topics through their participation in the webinars and virtual events. Join for free and become part of the largest scientific learning community in the world. Translunar One is a leading crypto hedge fund As investors look to legitimize crypto-assets by aligning with the regulatory requirements of traditional securities, the importance of custody cannot be overstated Translunar One, a leading crypto-asset hedge fund and blockchain investment company, today announces a partnership with Sterling Global Financial to provide institutional grade, third-party custody of all crypto-assets, including ERC 20 and token offerings. The partnership creates a solution for investors that require their assets be held in a custodial account capable of adhering to the same level of compliance applied to traditional equities and other securities. As investors look to legitimize crypto-assets by aligning with the regulatory requirements of traditional securities, the importance of custody cannot be overstated, said Justin Schmidt, founder and fund manager of Translunar One. By partnering with an industry leader like Sterling, were ready for clients and investors to have every crypto-asset held in an institutional-grade custodial account -- a milestone in the adoption of crypto as a real asset class. The portfolio available to Translunar One investors consists of companies that operate in a variety of verticals and have been thoroughly vetted by Translunar Ones fund manager and a team of strategic partners. The Translunar One team advises and assists portfolio companies on an ongoing basis with the goal of fostering growth and maximizing investment returns for investors. We are excited to work with Translunar One and we share their vision for the growth and maturation of crypto-backed assets, said Brandon Caruana, chief technology officer of Sterling Global Financial. Critical to that maturation will be third-party custody of all assets, and we are excited to provide institutional-grade custodial services for tokens to the companies that are creating the next generation of financial assets. For more information about Translunar One, visit http://www.translunar.one or email Justin@translunar.vc ABOUT TRANSLUNAR ONE Translunar One is a leading crypto-hedge fund with a diverse, liquid portfolio of digital assets. Founder and Fund Manager Justin Schmidt, along with his strategic partners at Venture One, a company that invests in and incubates blockchain-related companies, takes a hands-on approach to each investment, actively advising portfolio companies to foster their growth. Translunar One is based in Austin, Texas and the Cayman Islands, and has been featured in CEO Magazine, Austin Business Journal, HFM Global, Coindesk and recent investments include Lottery.com and OpenFinance Network as well as other Security Token Offerings.. ABOUT STERLING GLOBAL FINANCIAL Sterling Global Financial Limited has over 45 years of experience serving clients from around the world. With offices in the Cayman Islands and Bahamas, Sterling offers a comprehensive range of private banking, real estate investments, corporate services, trust services and directorships services to their clients, in addition to crypto-asset custody services. For more information visit http://sterlinggloballtd.com/ Listen Learn and Love, a new Mormon LGBTQ support organization (http://www.listenlearnandlove.org) will be hosting a free presentation entitled How You Can Be a Good Mormon and Support, Love and Accept LGBTQ People. It will be held 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on June 5, at the SCERA Center for the Arts, 745 State Street, Orem, Utah. Richard Ostler, founder of Listen Learn and Love will be the presenter. During his YSA assignment, Richard connected with LGBTQ people and better learned their unique, and often difficult road. He shares Christlike principals to support, respect and love our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. The presentation in not affiliated with the Mormon Church. The event is open and free to the general public. To register, please go to eventbrite.com and search Richard Ostler. Or go to the link at http://www.listenlearnandlove.org/events. Listen Learn and Love is a Mormon LGBTQ resource center. It provides a central resource with links to organizations, therapists, crisis services, articles, books, and Facebook groups. It also includes stories, blog and podcasts. Its mission statement is at http://www.listenlearnandlove.org/mission-statement. For further information, please contact Richard Ostler at 801-566-6082 or contact(at)listenlearnandlove(dot)org Listen Learn & Loves mission is to provide LGBTQ resources for the LDS community while remaining committed to the success of the LDS Church. Listen Learn & Love does not propose or advocate changes to LDS policies or doctrine. The organization supports the individual decisions for each LGBTQ person and welcomes them to share their stories. ### Orangeworm is the latest emerging cyberattack threat. IT experts and decision makers should have an action plan in place to swiftly scan, identify, and protect against attacks as they emerge. Kwampirs-based malware targeting healthcare and medical devices Top 500 healthcare and critical infrastructure cybersecurity solution provider Sensato, co-founder of the Medical Device Cybersecurity Task Force, has launched a campaign to educate medical industry executives and information technology decision makers about the risks of the emerging Orangeworm cyberattack. Full details are still emerging, but Orangeworm is known to be targeting medical devices, hospitals, and consultancies. We believe the attackers are currently performing advanced staging, said John Gomez, industry expert, CEO and founder of Sensato. The attackers have not yet identified themselves. They could be part of a criminal organization that intends to leverage this vector as an espionage-as-a-service program or a terrorist organization that may employ cyber-munitions at a later date. Orangeworm is a derivative of the earlier Kwampirs malware campaign from 2015, operating as a trojan with the goal of seizing command and control of critical medical devices. Cybersecurity Resource Available To combat this serious IT security threat, Sensato is sponsoring a multi-channel campaign, including webinar briefings, a summary intelligence report detailing preventative steps, and threat origin and educational reading. While there is a critical need for education and action concerning the Orangeworm threat, the attack underscores a larger concern, said Gomez. You cant protect an enterprise from a threat you are not aware of; IT experts and decision makers should have an action plan in place to swiftly scan, identify, and protect against attacks as they emerge. The Larger Issue: Four Key Points While the Orangeworm threat is sophisticated and requires immediate action, the larger issue is the need for industry technologists to prepare for rapid identification and threat protection from always-emerging unknown threats. Gomez notes there are four key points to an effective cybersecurity protection program: 1. Organizational embrace and development of a threat intelligence program 2. Understanding that you cannot adequately defend if the attackers are unknown 3. Creation of a vulnerability test and response plan 4. Constant monitoring and evaluation For more information, or to learn more about Sensatos MD-COP (Medical Device Cybersecurity Operations Program), designed to protect healthcare enterprises against emerging cybersecurity threats, or Sensatos Nightingale solution, delivering a high-value, isolated server that functions as a honey pot to spot and trap attackers in a fraction of normal identification time, visit: http://www.sensato.co. About Sensato Sensato is top-500 cybersecurity innovator located in Red Bank, New Jersey. Founded in 2013, Sensato provides risk assessment, penetration testing, security operations, executive guidance, and software. CEO and founder John Gomez is an internationally-known cybersecurity expert, author, and speaker. Sensatos programs, systems, services, training, and intelligence gathering are the product of designing the highest level of security for those who provide critical services that impact human health and safety: healthcare, medical, pharmacological, and related organizations; law enforcement, fire, and emergency services; clean water, power, and heat providers. Visit http://www.sensato.co. Simply put, Krystal AI is Shipwares secret sauce. Its our backend engine that drives results unmatched by anyone in the industry, said Trevor Outman, Co-Founder and President of Shipware. Shipware, leading parcel & LTL spend management solution providers, today announced the launch of its proprietary machine-learning software, Krystal AI. Krystal AI will improve operations and optimize carrier pricing by equipping customers with unique insights and customized data points generated by a combination of the industrys most robust database and over 200 combined years of insider carrier pricing knowledge. Krystal AI is the tech born from the merging of our industry-leading carrier pricing knowledge with the results from thousands of successfully negotiated FedEx, UPS and LTL contracts for our customers, said Trevor Outman, Co-Founder and President of Shipware. Simply put, Krystal AI is Shipwares secret sauce. Its our backend engine that drives results unmatched by anyone in the industry. Krystal AI provides Shipwares customers with the insights necessary to proactively reduce their distribution costs by providing a state-of-the-art user interface with cloud-based technology to display shipping data in the form of dynamic, interactive charts. Additional features of Krystal AI include: Predictive analytics Machine-learning technology Thousands of best-in-class carrier contracts Database exceeding $2 billion shipping spend Insider carrier pricing knowledge Carrier contract & rate benchmarks Cost-savings analytics Proprietary invoice audits Carrier & contract compliance World-class industry certifications 200+ years of carrier pricing expertise Proven carrier negotiation strategy Consistent delivery of 10-30% savings The ugly truth is that 99 percent of shipping invoices contain errors, causing businesses to overpay their carriers, said Rob Martinez, co-founder and CEO of Shipware. With Shipware, thanks to Krystal AI, our customers gain a better perspective and make additional cost-saving decisions that greatly impact their bottom line with no disruption to their workflow. Shipware is so confident that Krystal AI will deliver a valuable analysis of any companys shipping data, theyre offering free, in-depth analyses with a guaranteed outcome: If no savings are identified then well put a $10,000 check in the mail to you! To learn more about Krystal AI, the $10k Challenge and Shipware, please visit: https://www.shipware.com/ About Shipware Shipware provides expertise and advanced technology to help businesses reduce parcel/LTL shipping costs 10-30% with no disruption to current operations and no required change in carriers. Our team of industry experts leverages over 200 collective years of carrier pricing experience to help shippers negotiate superior shipping contract terms & pricing. Shipwares proprietary technology audits weekly carrier invoices to recover refunds on all billing errors, ensuring proactive compliance of contract rates and terms, as well as on-time service performance. Shipwares cloud-based reporting platform delivers powerful analytics for greater spend management visibility empowering clients to make intelligent cost-saving transportation decisions. https://www.shipware.com/ WesternU College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific graduates recite the Osteopathic Oath at their Commencement ceremony May 25, 2018 at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. (Jeff Malet, WesternU) Western University of Health Sciences graduates are well positioned to address the challenges of the 21st century. But they must remember to balance work and family to avoid burnout, and always put the patient first. WesternU graduated nearly 1,000 new health care professionals during five Commencement ceremonies May 23-25, 2018 in Pasadena, California. Innovative researchers and health care leaders gave inspiring and challenging speeches to graduates as they prepared to begin residencies, continue their education or enter the workforce. Richard Pitts, DO, PhD, gave the keynote address at the College of Allied Health Professions and College of Podiatric Medicine ceremony. Pitts is the vice president of Clinically Integrated Networks and senior medical director of Saint Joseph Heritage Healthcare. He explained to the graduates that the real work begins now and encouraged students to come up with a roadmap for their life. You have earned the right and respect in the eyes of friends, family, patients and students to be a trusted source for helping them understand medical information, Pitts said. What an honor. You have worked hard, and it's amazing what you have done. You need to create your own roadmaps now. Start soon. You need to protect yourself from burnout. Finally, you need to be prepared to be successful. It doesn't happen by accident. The keynote speaker for the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific and the Graduate College of Biomedical Sciences also advised graduates to avoid burnout by balancing work and home life. UC Irvine Professor of Neurology Howard J. Federoff, PhD, MD, also told them to be self-aware, bond with their team and be a provider and an advocate. Rather than harnessing the best evidence and attempting to offer your best recommendation, you should consult with your patient, the key person at the center of the medical issue, Federoff said. When knowledge is contextualized and patients are informed, we can do the best for everyone. Moreover, we learn from every patient. They inspire us to refine our craft. The patient is a vital part of our journey to learn and impart knowledge to others. College of Graduate Nursing and College of Optometry keynote speaker Daniel Weberg, PhD, BSN, senior director of innovations and leadership with Kaiser Permanente, asserted that these new graduates are fully prepared to join the changing health care environment and be the innovators the profession needs. One of the first concepts I learned in my innovation education is positive deviance. Positive deviance is the idea that you can be disruptive to create a spark for greater good, he said. Positive deviants have found ways to find good in systems in which others are failing. As health care professionals, newly-minted nurses and optometrists are positive deviants, he said. You need to partner with your colleagues in technology, in computer sciences and robotics, leadership and in practice. These groups need your expertise in systems thinking to create a future that is relevant and impactful, Weberg said. Did you know that in the last four years more than $20 billion has been spent by venture capital firms to disrupt health care? You must actively shape the future of health care. Now, even if all of this future technology stuff has you uninterested, we need your innovations at the front lines. Positively disrupting the culture of interprofessional education, patient-centered care, and evidence-based practice will be important work. Stanley M. Bergman, chairman of the board and CEO of Henry Schein Inc., served as the keynote speaker for two ceremonies, addressing the College of Veterinary Medicine and the colleges of Dental Medicine and Pharmacy. Henry Schein Inc. is the worlds largest provider of health care products and services to office-based dental, animal health, and medical practitioners, with more than 22,000 Team Schein Members and operations or affiliates in 34 countries. Bergman provided graduates with inspirational quotes, and offered some of the advice that has helped him during his career. He told them to focus on relationships, be leaders who engage and involve everyone, adopt technology and give back to society. He also told graduates to get out of their comfort zone every day. Bergman then quoted Robert F. Kennedy Some people see things the way they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not? and noted that the sentiment goes hand in hand with Eleanor Roosevelts notion of challenging yourself, Bergman said. If you have a vision and an idea, ask yourself why not. Dont let anyone stand in your way. You are so well positioned to make a difference in this world. You can advance health care. In the words of Nelson Mandela, It always seems impossible until its done. That sentiment might also describe students experiences completing their programs. Information overload, rigorous testing and late nights seemed impossible at times, so graduates were happy and relieved to finally reach this point in their careers. There were some points in between where I was second-guessing what I was doing, but now that Im here I know I have got where I wanted to go and I am where I wanted to be, said COMP graduate Levi Dodge, DO 18. On the other side of this wave, I feel like it was worth it. Several people were integral in getting Levi to the point of graduation, from a couple who gave him work painting homes and a community college counselor to his Air Force counselor. He was also able to lean on his twin brother, Jake Dodge, DO 18, who also graduated from COMP on Friday. Weve always been together and done most things together. It was really fun to be able to share that, Levi said. One thing I liked about WesternU is that I felt that they had my back through the process. That was a big thing for me, and I know my brother felt the same way, Jake said. I really felt that they went to bat for the students and I always felt at the end of the day if something happened during my rotation, the school would look into it and back me up. College of Graduate Nursing Assistant Professor Khoa (Joey) Dang, DNP 18, MSN, RN, FNP-C, earned his Doctor of Nursing Practice degree, which he pursued to make a positive impact on the nursing profession. He has worked as a nurse since 2000, and also earned his Family Nurse Practitioner certificate at WesternU. Pursuing advanced degrees is important for the nursing profession, he said. The health care landscape has become more diverse and complex, Dang said. With all these different factors pushing innovative delivery, weve had to push our own education, our own goals and our own preparation to be able to meet those needs. Family and friends play an important role in WesternU students lives, providing support, comfort and motivation. They also played an important role in Commencement. Each graduate invited someone special to join them onstage to place their new academic hood on their shoulders. Karlie Clark stood onstage to hood her husband, College of Optometry graduate Michael Clark, OD 18, and also sang the National Anthem with him to open the ceremony. They both grew up singing in high school and college choirs, and Karlie also performs in community theater. Its such a great journey culminating today, she said. Its amazing to see his growth. Hes always been really great with people, but he has developed even greater confidence in himself. He has an amazing ability to make people comfortable and calm. He has great compassion and is a great people person. College of Podiatric Medicine graduate Parth Dixit, DPM 18, said no one knew how hard the program would be, but his classmates made it through together. These are some of the best friends youre going to have. These are friends for life. Its going to be sad not to see them every day, he said. These people are in the trenches with you, studying with you 14 hours a day. They become your family. VWU Network on Portfolium We were thrilled to successfully activate the platform so quickly...The experience was black and white compared to previous implementations that took months of planning, development and execution. Virginia Wesleyan University (VWU) has chosen Portfoliums assessment and ePortfolio software to convert assessment of student learning into proof of curriculum effectiveness, competencies and employability. Portfoliums ePortfolio and assessment capabilities are part of its larger Student Success platform which provides VWU students with the ability to leverage the high-impact practice of creating ePortfolios, while giving educators the ability to conduct direct, authentic assessments of student work samples in order to measure student learning outcomes. Portfoliums assessment features include customizable rubrics, curriculum mapping and easy one-click reporting. VWU plans to utilize Portfolium to support their two specialty programs (the PORTfolio Program and Batten Honors College) and replace previous portfolio practices moving forward. Thanks to Portfoliums intuitive user interface and seamless integration with schools current learning management system (LMS), Blackboard, VWU was able to activate Portfolium campuswide in just two weeks. In less than six months, more than one third of the entire student body had already started to build their ePortfolios which are free for faculty and students to use, forever. With the excellent tech support provided by Portfolium, we were thrilled to successfully activate the platform so quickly, said Instructional Technology Director, Robin Takacs at Virginia Wesleyan, This included self-sustained training, student awareness and integration with our LMS. The experience was black and white compared to previous implementations that took months of planning, development and execution. VWU aims to integrate use of Portfolium into VWUs Career Services and Student Affairs programming. The university plans to connect campus experiences with intentional development and demonstration of competencies, while linking skills to specific internship and job opportunities for students and alumni. Portfoliums priority is facilitate a clear connection between student learning and real-world opportunity, while also providing all faculty with the most efficient tools for assessment and accreditation support, said Troy Markowitz, VP Partnerships at Portfolium. Seeing the platform successfully perform that connection at VWU is very rewarding for us. ABOUT VIRGINIA WESLEYAN: Virginia Wesleyan University is a private four-year liberal arts college inspiring intellectual integrity, student-driven discovery and social responsibility. The college employs a wide range of approaches to teaching and learning and provides opportunities to connect the study of the liberal arts with practical learning experiences on campus, in the Hampton Roads region, and throughout the world. For more info, visit: http://www.vwu.edu/ ABOUT PORTFOLIUM Portfolium is revolutionizing the way students connect learning to career opportunity by providing the only Student Success Network that connects 4M+ students, faculty and alumni with employers. By leveraging Portfoliums ePortfolios, assessment software, and badging technology, educators equip students to navigate intentional learning pathways to employment. Casepoint has a long history of working with the public sector and this award is a reflection of our deep commitment to bringing our robust eDiscovery platform to federal agencies and state, and local organizations. Casepoint LLC, a leader in providing innovative eDiscovery solutions in a single, cloud-based platform, today announced that it has been awarded a 20-year contract to provide eDiscovery products and services to federal government agencies. Effective immediately, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) approved Casepoint as an IDIQ (indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity) contractor. The GSA IT Schedule 70 contract authorizes agencies to do business with Casepoint directly, streamlining the process for federal, state and local customers to purchase Casepoints eDiscovery cloud-hosted platform and services. The contract is for an initial term of five years with three five-year options to renew and specifically authorizes Casepoint to provide services in two categories: Term Software Licenses (SIN 138 32) and Information Technology Professional Services (SIN 138 51). We are honored to be awarded this contract by the federal government, said Amy Hilbert, Vice President of Public Sector, Casepoint. Casepoint has a long history of working with the public sector and this award is a reflection of our deep commitment to bringing our robust eDiscovery platform to federal agencies and state, and local organizations. As an example, in September 2017, Casepoint was also awarded a multi-year contract to serve the Defender Services program in the United States. This multi-million-dollar contract, administered through the Defender Services Office of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, allows federal defender offices and private attorneys who accept Criminal Justice Act (CJA) appointments to use Casepoint in select federal criminal cases. This contract provides critical assistance to these attorneys who are facing increasing volumes of eDiscovery in federal cases. For access to select case studies and reference material, Casepoint has launched a webpage for our audience in the Government today: https://gov.casepoint.com. Our newly published white paper, eDiscovery at Government Agencies is also available on that page and the Downloads section of our website. According to Amy, todays announcements is just one of the many public sector initiatives the company has in process. Our proposal for GSA Schedule 36 (Office, Imaging, and Document solutions) is in review and we are working towards FedRAMP compliance in 2019. We look forward to bringing our robust, cost-effective platform and white glove service to support eDiscovery for more federal, state, and local agencies across the globe. Casepoint is a technology company focused on the digital transformation of litigation discovery. Casepoints cloud-based eDiscovery platform removes significant barriers from the discovery process, enabling legal teams to focus on the art of litigation. Features of Casepoint include a full-strength review platform with artificial intelligence pre-installed, cloud analytics and collections, and robust data processing capabilities all in a single technology platform. Based in the United States and with offices in three continents, Casepoint is repeatedly chosen by leading law firms, multinational corporations, and public sector clients for their largest, end-to-end discovery needs. Casepoint is smarter eDiscovery. Team members from the Delaware and Newark model centers attended the banquet on Friday, May 11 in Columbus, Ohio. It was an exciting evening and there was a great sense of pride among the team. Wayne Homes, an Ohio-based custom homebuilder, received several awards from the Building Industry Association (BIA) of Central Ohio Marketing and Merchandising Excellence (MAME) Awards. The winners of the BIA of Central Ohio 2018 MAME Awards were announced at a banquet on Friday, May 11 in Columbus, Ohio. Team members from the Delaware and Newark model centers attended the event. Julie Hurtt, a New Home Consultant from the Delaware Model Center, was recognized during the awards banquet and won the Rookie of the Year award. I was honored to receive the Rookie of the Year award, Hurtt said. I love my job and I enjoy meeting each and every homeowner. Being a part of building their home is an honor for me. When I received the award, I felt very thankful that I was recognized for helping so many of our homeowners make their dreams come true. New Home Consultants Julie Baumker and Angie McKinney from the Delaware Model Center and New Home Consultants Sue Crow, Sandee Barrick, and Tonya Harding from the Newark Model Center were also acknowledged with Sales Citation awards. Wayne Homes also received marketing awards for the Best Print Ad, Best Social Media/Blog Experience, and Exceptional Digital Media Campaign. It was an exciting evening and there was a great sense of pride among the team, Erin Collins, Vice President of Sales, said. The MAME Awards honor the top achievers in the new home industry. Sales and marketing award winners cross all BIA membership ranks and include realtors, interior designers, architects, landscapers, suppliers, remodelers, builders and more. For more information about Wayne Homes and the Columbus area model centers, please visit WayneHomes.com. About Wayne Homes Wayne Homes is a custom home builder in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, and West Virginia (see all Model Home Centers). We offer nearly 50 fully customizable floorplans and a team dedicated to providing the best experience in the home building industry. For more information, Ask Julie, our online sales team, by Live Chat or call us at (866) 253-6807. We are extremely excited to utilize our new space to host organizations that strive for excellence in the arena of employment law. We take this responsibility seriously, but we would also like to have fun while we learn. NOVAtime Technology, Inc. (http://www.novatime.com), a leading provider of enterprise Workforce Management / Time and Attendance solutions, announced its onsite Snack and Learn opportunity to learn about California Employment Law at NOVAtimes new headquarters in Rancho Cucamonga, CA. NOVAtimes complimentary seminar will cover best practices for organizations that strive to stay compliant within the intricacies of California employment law. Experts in the field of employment law, such as Roxana E. Verano, Esq and Ernie Braunwalder, LUTCF, will discuss best payroll practices and workers compensation insurance. Additional experts will provide information on I-9 and E-Verify from the Department of Homeland Security. Roxana E. Verano, Esq. is a Senior Attorney with the Landegger Baron Law Group, and she brings over twenty years of experience in employment law. Ms. Verano specializes in assisting businesses navigate complex law issues and avoid unnecessary litigation, and she will covering the best payroll practices to employment law issues. Ms. Verano received her J.D. from Pepperdine University School of Law, and is currently a member of the Los Angeles County Bar Association and Pasadena Bar Association. Ernie Braunwalder, LUTCF, is the President and CEO of Ernest E. Braunwalder Insurance Agency, Inc., and will speak about Workers Compensation insurance. Mr. Braunwalder holds the LUTCF designation for higher insurance education, and has served as National Committeeman for 6 years. Mr. Braunwalder is the past President of the Inland Empire Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, and obtained his Securities license in 1999, which has allowed him to help families and small business owners achieve their financial goals. It has been about six months since NOVAtime moved into its new home in Rancho Cucamonga, explained Frank Su, President of NOVAtime Technology, Inc. We are extremely excited to utilize our new space to host organizations that strive for excellence in the arena of employment law. We take this responsibility seriously, but we would also like to have fun while we learn. NOVAtime is honored to host this Snack and Learn opportunity. About NOVAtime NOVAtime is headquartered in Rancho Cucamonga, California, and has become the leader in integrating Time and Attendance Management with Human Resource and Payroll systems. Known for its scalable and leading-edge software and hardware technology, NOVAtime has been selected as the preferred Time and Attendance / Workforce Management solution provider by many of the best-managed companies in the world. Hudson Link and Mercy College are thrilled to announce that Bill Whitaker, an Emmy Award Winning Journalist and 60 Minutes Correspondent will serve as the keynote speaker at the June 6th commencement ceremony at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, where 44 students will graduate with associate or bachelor's degrees in Behavioral Science or Liberal Arts. An Emmy Award Winning broadcast journalist for the past 40 years, Whitaker has covered three presidential elections as well as wide-ranging international and domestic stories. Prior to joining 60 Minutes in 2014, Whitaker spent 20 years with CBS in the Los Angeles bureau where he filed more than 2,000 stories. His dedication to reporting on hot-topic issues affecting the nation including prison reform, the opioid epidemic, race relations, politics, banking and immigration reform have earned him numerous awards and accolades. Hudson Link is honored to have Bill Whitaker as our keynote speaker. He has been an important voice for those underrepresented in our nation and his commitment to reporting on the wrongly incarcerated has helped shed light on this important issue facing our country, said Executive Director Sean Pica. We are also proud to recognize our 44 new graduates who have earned degrees through our relationship with Mercy College and Sing Sing. Through this partnership with Hudson Link, Mercy College offers a comprehensive Liberal Arts and Science curriculum with two degrees, an AS in Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and a BS in Behavioral Science at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Since the inception of the program in 1998, Mercy College has conferred more than 400 degrees and with the support of Hudson Links Alumni services, these graduates are able to return to their communities empowered to change their lives. At Mercy College we believe higher education is a pathway to new opportunities for all students, said Tim Hall, Mercy College President. Through our partnership with Hudson Link and the Sing Sing Correctional Facility we are able to work with inmates to provide opportunities for their futures. A native of Philadelphia, Whitaker is a graduate of Hobart and William Smith Colleges with a bachelors degree in American History. He also holds a masters degree in African-American studies from Boston University and a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1997 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hobart and William Smith Colleges. About Hudson Link Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison is a 501c(3) non-profit that provides college education, life skills and re-entry support to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men and women to help them make a positive impact on their own lives, their families and communities, resulting in lower rates of recidivism, incarceration and poverty. http://www.hudsonlink.org About Mercy College Mercy College is the dynamic, diverse New York City area college whose students are on a personal mission: to get the most out of life by getting the most out of their education. Founded in 1950, Mercy is a coeducational and nonsectarian college that offers more than 90 undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs within five schools: Business, Education, Health and Natural Sciences, Liberal Arts and Social and Behavioral Sciences. With campuses in Dobbs Ferry, Bronx, Manhattan and Yorktown Heights, the vibrancy of the College culture is sustained by a diverse student body from around the region. Voyageurs National Park Quarter WHAT: The United States Mint and the National Park Service will hold a launch ceremony for the America the Beautiful Quarters Program coin honoring Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota. Event highlights include music performances by International Falls native Gavia Yount and local artist Darcy Sullivan. Additional ceremony participants include Boy Scouts of America Troop #150, Cub Scout Troop #145, Girl Scouts of America Troops #1150, 1151, 1153 and 1156 and Veterans of Foreign Wars Color Guard #2948. A coin exchange of $10 rolls of Voyageurs National Park quarters will follow the ceremony. WHO: David J. Ryder, Director, United States Mint Bob DeGross, Superintendent, Voyageurs National Park Cathy Chavers, Tribal Chairwoman, Bois Forte Band of Chippewa Ida Rukavina, Regional Outreach Director for U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar Tom Whiteside, Representative for U.S. Congressman Rick Nolan Leland Grim, Retired Professor of Ornithology, Master of Ceremonies WHEN: Thursday, June 14, 2018, at 11 a.m. CDT WHERE: Irv Anderson Amphitheater 360 Hwy 11 East International Falls, MN 56649 COIN FORUM The United States Mint will host a coin forum the evening before the launch ceremonyWednesday, June 13, 2018, 56 p.m. CDTat Kabetogama Lake Town Hall, 9707 Gamma Road, Kabetogama, MN. The coin forum is an opportunity for the public to learn about upcoming United States Mint coin programs and initiatives, and express their views about future coinage. The Voyageurs National Park quarter is the 43rd release in the United States Mint America the Beautiful Quarters Program, a 12-year initiative that honors 56 national parks and other national sites authorized by Public Law 110-456. Each year, the public will see five new national sites depicted on the reverses (tails sides) of the America the Beautiful Quarters. The United States Mint is issuing these quarters in the order in which the national sites were officially established. ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: Voyageurs National Park quarter b-roll. Interview with Voyageurs National Park quarter engraver Joseph Menna. Voyageurs National Park quarter image. Information about the United States Mint, America the Beautiful Quarters Program, and the Voyageurs National Park. # # # United States Mint Connecting America through Coins Amr Ibrahim, CEO of ULTATEL, discusses the effects of telecom issues on businesses and the economy. If a small business phone system is down for even a few hours, customers may become frustrated and, ultimately, choose to do business with someone elsewhich directly affects the businesss bottom line and, thus, the economy. New statistics from the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services (CCTS) show that the satisfaction of small and medium-sized businesses is on a sharp decline. According to this new data, complaints from these smaller businesses have risen by 15% within the last year alone, making up 10% of all complaints against telecommunication services.1 While small and medium-sized businesses cite many different reasons for their dissatisfaction with telecom providers, annoying downtime is considered to be one of the prevalent issues behind such complaints. In todays fast-paced world, telecom systems are vital to a businesss success or failure, explains Amr Ibrahim, CEO of ULTATEL and long-time supporter of small businesses. A company with a smaller employee base can be completely thrown off by telecom downtime, leading it to voice its complaints to the CCTS; telecom providers must do everything within their power to make sure their clients experience little to no service downtime. While businesses have always known that downtime has the potential to wreak havoc on a days productivity, new data is showing that downtime can do more than just frustrate employees. Small and medium-sized businesses estimate that they lose around $55,000 per year due to technological downtime.2 While this may not be much when compared with large businesses, such losses can break small organizations that are trying to get a good start in their industry.3 If a small business phone system is down for even a few hours, customers may become frustrated and, ultimately, choose to do business with someone elsewhich directly affects the businesss bottom line and, thus, the economy, said Ibrahim. What might seem like a mildly annoying two hours of downtime every few weeks could actually cost a business thousands of dollars in revenue annually. With small and medium-sized businesses comprising the backbone of the U.S. economy, downtime leading businesses to close their doors can be devastating. Rather than simply trying to recover losses after downtime, small and medium-sized businesses are being urged to avoid such losses altogether by choosing telecom systems which have a lower risk of failure. The Uptime Institute provides businesses of all sizes with a ranking system that puts data centers such as telecom systems into one of four tier categories.4 Data centers that are rated as Tier I are more likely to encounter downtime, while those in the higher categories are less likely. Tier IV-rated data centers are the least likely to encounter problems, experiencing only 26.3 minutes of downtime annually.4 For small and medium-sized businesses to perform with the least amount of interruptions, Tier III or Tier IV telecom systems are necessary. ULTATEL is a business VoIP phone service provider working hard to reduce downtime and increase satisfaction among its customers. The data center provided by ULTATEL offers 2N+2 redundancy, nearly twice as much as other standard Tier III centers to ensure that businesses using ULTATEL do not encounter unnecessary downtime with their VoIP business phone service. Unlike many other providers, ULTATELs system is monitored by on-site Operations Control Center engineers 24/7, providing its customers with total reliability. Experiencing telecom downtime can cost small and medium-sized businesses thousands of dollars every year, while also causing frustration and a lower work ethic among employees. ULTATEL stands apart from its competition in providing consistent, reliable VoIP phone service, giving businesses of all sizes the tools they need to succeed. About ULTATEL ULTATEL is a leading provider of cloud-based phone system solutions. Through its unified communications platform, companies can have all of their voice, video, fax, SMS and audio conferencing services on one affordable system. ULTATEL Business Clarity, with more than 40 enterprise-grade features, helps companies operate from a single or multiple locations seamlessly using desktop phones, softphones or mobile apps. The ULTATEL Contact Center solution satisfies the need for call center features such as advanced Interactive Voice Response (IVR), call queuing, skilled/time based routing, and advanced call analytics. ULTATELs vision is to completely change how companies conduct business by delivering the most comprehensive suite of unified cloud-based telephony services, dramatically improving responsiveness, increasing productivity, enhancing globalization efficiencies, and reducing operating costs so that businesses can most effectively compete both today and in the future. Visit https://www.ULTATEL.com/. 1. Small Businesses Now Represent 10% of All Telecom Industry Complaints: CCTS. IT Business, http://www.itbusiness.ca/news/small-businesses-now-represent-10-of-all-telecom-industry-complaints-ccts/96901. 2. How To Avoid Costly IT & Telecom Downtime. Total Communication Services Inc, 4 Oct. 2017, http://www.totalcomm.ca/avoid-costs-telecom-downtime/. 3. Martin Perlin. Downtime, Outages and FailuresUnderstanding Their True Costs. Martin Perlin, http://www.evolven.com/blog/downtime-outages-and-failures-understanding-their-true-costs.html. 4. Colocation American Staff. Data Center Tier Rating BreakdownTier 1, 2, 3, 4CLA. Colocation America, Colocation American Staff, 19 Apr. 2017, http://www.colocationamerica.com/data-center/tier-standards-overview.htm. Welcome Guest! You Are Here: Welcome Guest! You Are Here: Home Regional News East Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2018 8:00 pm For 20 years, Aaron Vallat brought rhythm to the lives of numerous Jefferson County youth through his drumming performance group. Now, he is ready to bid farewell to Rhythm Planet. My career has gotten busy and more demanding, Vallat, who works at Jefferson Healthcare, said. I have found that I havent had the energy it takes to really give that program what it needs. Rhythm Planet which has over the years performed concerts across the Olympic Peninsula and in festivals such as Bumbershoot will be playing one final concert this weekend. The concert is set for 5 p.m. June 2 at the First Baptist Church, 1202 Lawrence St. DRUMMING Rhythm Planet grew out of the now disbanded music venture and arts nonprofit, A Beat In Time, which was founded in the late 1990s. The drumming group has been operating independently for some years now. Its a music program specifically for teenagers, Vallat said. Its centered around drumming and percussion techniques from Cuba, from Haiti, from the Dominican Republic, from Brazil and from some regions in Western Africa. Those rhythms are paired with popular music from the West. For example, the program at this weekends concert includes arrangements of songs by Sublime and Aretha Franklin. The group has had up to 20 members in the past and currently has about six. While Vallat has looked for a teacher to come on to continue leading the group as its primary, hes been unsuccessful in his quest. Ive looked for someone to pick it up and keep it going, he said. I havent found anyone yet. RELAXING Over the years, numerous students have come and gone. I have a lot of students who come in at 13 and stay until 18, Vallat said. When they come in theyre a kid, and when they leave theyre an adult. Reid Zimmerman was one such student who joined in 2002 and left in 2006. Band meetings were a disarmingly relaxed environment, he recalled. I think this reflected the fact that music is not about forcing it, but instead thrives on allowing for passion and creativity. Zimmerman said it was once he left Port Townsend for city life that he began to fully appreciate the amount of arts and music activities available to PT youth. In all my conversations with friends, first in college and to this day, I have never heard of anything quite like Rhythm Planet, Zimmerman said. MENTOR Clover Coupe-Carlin, a senior in high school, is part of the group now. When she was 6, her mom took her to a Rhythm Planet performance and mentioned she could imagine Coupe-Carlin joining the group one day. She was right, Coupe-Carlin said. She joined once she became a teenager in 2013 and has been playing since. Aaron has taught me everything I know, not only about drumset and hand drums, but where the origins of the rhythms come from, she said. Those skills also helped her out when she went on to play in pep band in school. I will always look up to Aaron, as he has been my main mentor who has always pushed me and encouraged me to play at my full potential, she said. I was also encouraged by many other adults who have taught with Aaron over the years, and words cant express how grateful I am to have worked with everyone I have. STABILITY With Rhythm Planet, Vallat along with longtime teachers like Daniel Neville and Franco Bertucci aimed to create a unique environment where teachers and youth could collaborate in a positive place. Were in a band with them; were all in it together, Vallat said. (The students) get to have sort of a sense of playing with the instructor, not just being instructed. The three-hour, once-a-week session also allowed for flexibility. If theres a week where kids are having a hard time and want to talk, we can do that. If we need to take a break in the middle and have some food, we can do that, he said. I think for a lot of these kids, its really nice for them to have something that they know is going to be steady. They can rely on that stability in their lives. Coupe-Carlin, who is off to college at Cornish College of the Arts, where she plans to continue studying drumming, reflected on that stability. Even in the roughest parts of high school, I always had this group to go to, and amazing people to collaborate with, she said. This item is available in full to subscribers. Attention subscribers We have recently launched a new and improved website. To continue reading, you will need to either log into your subscriber account, or purchase a new subscription. If you had an active account on our previous website, then you have an account here. Simply reset your password to regain access to your account. If you did not have an account on our previous website, but are a current print subscriber, click here to set up your website account. Otherwise, click here to view your options for subscribing. A Tesla Model S crashed into a police vehicle in California on Tuesday morning while Autopilot was engaged. Sergeant Jim Cota, a public information officer for the Laguna Beach Police Department, posted photos of the incident's aftermath on Twitter. Cota wrote that the vehicle had Tesla's semi-autonomous Autopilot feature activated when it crashed into a parked police department vehicle. The police department vehicle was empty at the time of the collision, while the driver of the Model S sustained minor injuries, Cota wrote. The circumstances that led to the collision have not been disclosed. Tuesday's collision marks the latest in a string of crashes involving vehicles with Autopilot activated. Responding to questions at MPC press conference Monday, BoG Governor, Dr Ernest Addison said that the Central Bank will collaborate with the Lands and Natural Resources Ministry to finalise on Menzgold. What is clear to us is that they have the system that accepts deposits from the public. We are discussing with the Ministry who originally gave them their license," the Governor said. The Central Bank argued that the company was conducting business contrary to some provisions in the Banks and Specialized Deposit-taking institutions Act, 2016 (Act 930). The company at the time denied that it was taking deposits from the public insisting that they were just involved in commodity trading, buying and selling of Gold. Chief Executive of the company, Nana Appiah Mensah, in a Twitter post in December 2017 described the action by the regulator as reckless and irresponsible. Although President Cyril Ramaphosa still has to sign the bill into law, the unprecedented piece of legislation is expected to improve the wages and livelihoods of an estimated six million South Africans earning less. "The adoption of this historic National Minimum Wage bill goes a long way in protecting millions of vulnerable workers," the ruling African National Congress said in a statement. Labour Minister Mildred Oliphant hailed the move saying although small, it was crucial. "Every journey starts often with a small step. The journey to address the plight of the lowest paid workers reached a milestone," she said. The bill establishes exemption provisions for employers who cannot afford the rate. However, it was not passed without pushback from various labour unions and opposition political parties. The Democratic Alliance (DA), the main opposition party in the country, voted against the bill saying it had "not been subjected to proper public consultation and will push hundreds of thousands of people into unemployment". The leftist Economic Freedom Fighters, led by the firebrand Julius Malema also rejected the bill which will see workers earn a minimum 3,500 rand ($277) per month. Former Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett has stayed mostly out of the spotlight after ending her tenure as one of President Barack Obama's most trusted staffers. On Tuesday, however, she was thrust back into the public eye by a racist tweet from actress and comedian Roseanne Barr, in which she compared Jarrett to an ape. Barr's show, "Roseanne," was promptly cancelled by ABC. This most recent attack is far from the first time Jarrett has been the subject of criticism and vitriol at the hands of conservatives. As one of the only black women to ever serve as a senior official in the White House, she took a particularly noticeable role. Jarrett served as senior adviser and assistant to the president for intergovernmental relations and public affairs, but her access to the president allowed her to wield incredible influence on everything from economic policy and Supreme Court appointments to seating arrangements at state dinners. According to Namnso, although most people are embracing designs there is the need to pay some good attention to that. As part of Figma's sensitization on designs, it has embarked on a roadshow to launch its Global Design Community in Accra,Ghana. It further hopes to roll it out to other countries to establish a supportive global community across continents for amateur and professional designers and web designers. Our Africa launch was a tremendous success. It made sense to launch Figmas global design community in Africa first, from Lagos to Accra and Cape Town is next and then to the rest of the world, said Figma Africa lead advocate Namnso Ukpanah. Speaking to Business Insider Sub Saharan Africa during the Accra Figma launch, Africa lead advocate expressed how impressive the African continent is embracing designs. Up to 80% of Figmas users are located outside of the US and a large number of those users are based in Africa. Thats because Figma is uniquely positioned to suit the African design enthusiasts software needs it is browser-based and therefore can be used from any device with an internet connection. It is also free for individuals and small teams, so they no longer need to install and run expensive design software to be able to do their jobs. It also allows you to design for any screen size or file format, and its made for team collaboration. As a result, Figma is one of the few US software companies paying attention to the untapped potential of the growing web design industry in Africa. Touching on the benefits of designs, Namnso stated that without designs individuals will end up with products that are displeasing. He therefore made a general call for stakeholders to come up with a curriculum focused on teaching people to be good designers. According to him, every relationship that does not involve God is definitely bound to fail. In an Instagram post, the star actor said every lady must look out for a man who truly knows God when considering a relationship. He, therefore, advised women to be selective when it comes to their choice of men, saying a man who doesnt know Jesus wont know how to sustain a relationship. He added that men who do not follow the ways of God often do what know what real love is and are not fit to lead. The said post was accompanied by a lovely photo, which captured Majid with three adorable ladies. He wrote: Ladies hear this, if a man is not following God hes not fit to Lead. if he doesnt have a relationship with Jesus, he wont know how to have a relationship with you. if he doesnt know Jesus, he doesnt know real Love. The star actor has taken a relaxed role when it comes to his acting career, having decided to go into ministration of the Gospel. The Nigerian lady, Princess Josephine Uloma reportedly broke down in tears as she recalled her ordeal in the presence of a large congregation on Sunday. The woman from Orlu in Imo state said until she was introduced to Kings Chapel in Asaba, Delta state she had wandered about from one church to another in search of help to get a man to spend her life with. She revealed she had been possessed by an evil spirit of limitations, anger, and demonic measures which drove away potential suitors from her and made her completely unattractive to men, for not less than 15 years. Princess Josephine Uloma said that all the troubles she had to endure including the 48 strokes of cane she received in church proved fruitless until she was finally exorcised at Kings Chapel in Asaba. In an interview with the Daily Post, the nostalgic woman said: My life is full of testimonies, I rejected an offer of marriage from a suitor who hailed from Enugu State, and after few months, my trouble started, I was taken to several churches including one of the Pentecostal churches around Ezenei Avenue where I was flogged 48 strokes of cane by the pastor. And after I slept for twenty minutes, I took on the pastor, beat him up silly and forced him to eat from the sand. She added the situation got to a point when my parents during the process thought I did not want to marry. They organized a man who came from London to marry me, and when we got there I beat him up after a minor quarrel, and I was arrested and deported to Nigeria, I later realized I was not myself when I came into Nigeria before I was introduced to Kings Chapel. Reports say upon realizing that her account had been credited with the said amount, the woman made no effort to check with the scheme for clarification. She quickly engaged in extravagant expenditure on expensive clothing, a smartphone and partying which consumed $63,000 of the fund. The suspect reportedly qualified for 1,400-rand ($110) in monthly food allowances last year and has since been benefitting from the National Students Financial Aid Scheme. Spokeswoman for an elite police unit of South Africa, the Hawks, is reported to have told AFP that it took the scheme about three months to figure out the error. Anelisa Feni said the suspect was arrested after an invitation was extended to her to tend herself in. He observed the idea of African unity among 54 states is too big to be engineered by leaders without the passionate and active involvement of its people. He made these statements at the company's event meant to celebrate AU day as well as bond workers. Explaining the motive for the get together, he said most Ghanaians have very little knowledge of the concept of African Unity and would need gestures that affirm love and unity. "Here at Auotmationghana, we celebrate Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace every year by dressing up to represent any Ghanaian or African culture. We celebrate diversity day because we believe diversity is strength. We want inclusion for all," Mr Kwabla said. He also called on all workers of the company to put in their best of abilities for a positive growth of the company. Africa Day is the annual commemoration of the foundation of the Organisation of African Unity(OAU) now known as the African Union on May 25, 1963. Process & Plant Automation Ghana Limited is an electrical engineering solutions provider with expertise in industrial and building automation. The company was setup in 2003 in Ghana by Mr. Kweku Asmah. Together with over 120 employees, Process and Plant Automation now delivers its services across West Africa and beyond to equip industries and clients with absolute solutions. The video of the gang rape which was captured went viral thereby causing the police to arrest and investigate the matter. The other culprits who are minors and students in Junior and Senior High Schools have been referred to a District Court for sentencing. The fifth convict was found guilty of an additional charge of aiding and abetting for filming the incident which later went viral on social media. The 5 actors were arrested after an assemblyman in the area made a report when he saw the viral video on social media. Non-governmental organization American Relief Center took interest in the case and offered assistance to the police. It paid for the police medical examination, transportation and an age assessment for some of the accused. He is meeting Pulse.com.gh at an outdoor setting in Accra, and has three of his team watching on as he is interviewed. Anas is known for being unknown. Over the past 16 years he has revealed some of Africas most shocking corruption and has been a constant thorn in the side of evildoers. He has had both international acclaim and criticism, and it is generally Ghanaians who are both the heroes and the villains in his work. He has busted people in the judiciary, operators of orphanages, quake doctors, fake pastors, cocoa smugglers and corrupt officials at Tema port amongst many others. While seeing the levels of ignorance, corruption and cruelty he has been exposed to could be jading, Anas is an optimist. He has hope for the future of Ghana, and is inspired by the energy of his people. He points to the way people react to issues on social media and through civil organisations like OccupyGhana. Its fantastic. I am very, very hopeful that if we all put our hands on deck as a people we are going to move this country forward and it can be the best country in Africa. A divisive character, regardless if people agree with his methods or not, whenever one of his stories breaks, it will be the main topic of conversation in the media or on public transport. The people of Ghana, [they are] very interesting people - make a mistake they will bash you morning, afternoon, evening. Do the right thing they will praise you and make you feel like you are their darling, Anas says. With his usual mysterious air, he is reluctant to reveal his plans for 2016. Theres a new prosthetic look but the details are shrouded in mystery. On the international front a lot is happening, when you talk about Africa Investigates we have some shocking revelations that are going to come out in 2016 and I am very excited about them. "Locally we may have a few things going off, but its quite interesting, I see a lot of prospects in 2016 and whatever is going to be, is going to be to the advantage of the average Ghanaians, the village folk. My pieces are going to be driven by the people. It is these village folk Anas says he relates to, as a self-described village person. With this is mind, he says his job takes into account people in the hinterlands. Anybody who knows me very well, you can find me in the village very comfortably observing and thinking quietly. A controversial figure, Anas motto is name, shame and jail. Hes unapologetic about his style, stating extreme remedies are the most appropriate for extreme diseases. So take it or leave it, my journalism is a bit militant, it has no mercy for evildoers, it is based on hardcore evidence. Anas work in undeniably effective, and he has lost count of the number of people he has put behind bars. In saying that, he doesnt set out to take food off the table of the people he looks into. I do it because in society at a particular stage we all have to realise that we have to say that some people ought to stop what they are doing to make society genuinely better. I dont keep count but I keep saying that it's not exciting to put anybody behind bars but we have to do it to serve as a deterrent so that others won't want to do it. So we can have a better society. When Anas hits, he hits hard and his work is life-threatening, he generates enemies with his investigations. It is a hazardous profession and once you touch the fire you cannot expect it not to burn, he says. Hes quick to point that he is not alone in his work. Friends and family respect what he does and protect his identity, and Anas is not able to open up to many people. It can be difficult always hiding his identity, only allowing that of his public persona to be revealed. Sometimes its difficult when I get to introduce myself. Sometimes I want to find my real self then they ask whats your name and I want to be real I say no you can not be him, you are not him, so you get lost sometimes. Anas balances the uncomfortableness his work can create, with the outcomes it generates. Sometimes when the heat is on and you go masked its very embarrassing because these are people you grew up with, these are people you have eaten in the same pot with for a very long time and yet you are going and have some bodyguards because, at that time, its not everytime, at that time there is something at stake where if you are not careful you will be shot. These life sacrifices may not be comfortable, but it's worth it. I love what I do and I think that is very important so in spite of the difficulties I am not that person who can go out on an ordinary holiday where everybody goes out to have fun. I don't have that luxury but over the years I have learned to live it, and I learned and trained under the formidable and energetic hands of Abdul Malik Kweku Baako Jnr of the New Crusading Guide and all this was part of the training. With the path he has chosen, Anas has accepted the things he will miss, but says there is a consolation when he sees the smiles on the faces of children his work has helped, it is able to free many people who otherwise, but for your piece of work, could have died. That is what keeps us going. There have been many times in his life that Anas has been around people debating his work, unaware that the author of those investigations is in the same room, like when he was studying law, though he makes sure he learns from the conversations. I take all this in good faith because if you do your work and dont expect critique to come then it means you are not serious. We learn every single day. I alway open up to accept criticisms where you are wrong, you are wrong, I accept it in good faith and I move on. While his investigations take time, once they are released to the public, its not a closed book for Anas. I go through a lot. I am now going to go to court, I am now going to testify. I have been sued left, right, centre. "I have got to find lawyers the lawyers have to come and defend me, I have to remain consistent...you have seen the judicial scandal, I will get out of this in the next four or five years. I still have to be frequenting the court. If images of scenes he has witnessed in his investigations keep him up at night, Anas says that means he needs to work harder. Sometimes as journalists if we are not careful, grief could let us lose that story. But the whole purpose is for us to be stronger. If we are not strong, we are unable to tell the story. If you see that children are being killed and murdered and you start crying, what communication are you communicating? We need to be able to tell the world this is bad. We have got to stop it. It;s about being resolute and very fair" Anas says. "Once a touching moments comes up you need to stand firm, because you stand for those people who are being killed and butchered and your strength is what is going to make them better tomorrow. And, if Anas ends up joining his scores of colleagues whose work has taken their lives, it will be for the right reason, he says. Even if you are caught in action, the world should be able to know that you have embarked on a meaningful course, that it is important. Being killed while trying to get information out to the public is the reality of the profession, he says, and journalists should not elevate ourselves into some kind of gods who can not be killed. According to him, Anas used dubious means to entice and entrap the judges into accepting bribes, before later turning back to incriminate them. The outspoken lawmaker has been a strong critic on Anas methods of operation, having previously advocated for the investigative journalist to be stopped. Earlier this week, Mr. Agyapong hit out at Anas for his tactics used in incriminating Ghana Football Association boss Kwesi Nyantakyi, insisting he does things through wicked and evil ways. He further threatened to expose the Tiger Eye PI leader, alleging that Anas is more corrupt than people he tries to investigate. The NPP MP has once again played down the works of Anas, with a focus on the judicial scandal that was exposed by the investigative journalist three years ago. According to him, all the interdicted judges must be reinstated by the President because they were set up by Anas. I call on President Akufo-Addo to reinstate all the judges because the guy [Anas] enticed them, Mr. Agyapong said on Adom TV. He used two boys, Ahmed and Rahman, to set the judges up. If you set people up, it is not investigative journalism ... and Ill prove to the whole Ghana that the boy is so corrupt and wicked, evil from the things he has done, bringing institutions that have been built over the years, down for him to be rich. Anas is set to premier his latest investigative piece titled Number 12 on June 6, at the Accra International Conference Center. I have wanted to know the person behind the Anas moniker ever since the release of his first explosive reportand I believe almost every other person does too. However, the search for the true identity of the ace investigative journalist always intensifies prior to the release of a new report. And by all standards, Tiger Eye PI and Anas upcoming expose already promises to unearth some ground shattering discoveries about the sporting world in Ghana. And we have already seen this following the fallout from a supposed private viewing of the report at the presidency which resulting in President Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo calling for the apprehension of Kwesi Nyantakyi. And as expected, social media is rife with claims of who Anas is (and who is he not), and whereas Pulse cannot tell you who Anas is, despite our exclusive interview with him a while back, we can certainly tell you who he is not. For one, this is not Anas Aremeyaw Anas. Neither is this him. The two images are taken from a screenshot of a supposed WhatsApp chat between Hon. Kennedy Agyapong and an unnamed person. In the chat, it seems the unnamed person was bent on exposing Anas with the images which he shared. The exposer then adds that Anas had bleached to look fairer. A simple reverse image search, however, showed that the images are stock images taken from the internet - which might also point to the fact that this could be a fake WhatsApp conversation. But then again Anas shared the screenshots on his Twitter page with the caption, When evil men destroy, good men must build and bind. READ ALSO: 13 times Anas Aremeyaw Anas went viral for exposing corruption in Ghana Whats going on here? We dont know, but we do know those images are not Anas. Follow @roiskidgh In a series of Facebook posts friends of Reginald Sekyi-Brown have stated that he sent them text messages after he was arrested. It is reported that he displayed the placard when the first lady Rebecca Akufo-Addo was delivering her speech. Mrs Akufo-Addo is in Korle-bu for the sod-cutting of the Korle-bu pediatric intensive care unit by The Rebecca Foundation. It is yet to be known if the Reginald Sekyi-Brown was obstructing the event or the public at the time. The University of Ghana Medical Centre has remained closed because there is a turf war between the University and the Health Ministry over the management of the facility since it was commissioned a year ago. The Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Ministry Robert Cudjoe explained that the takeover was in the interest of the public. According to a report by Accra-based 3FM, the teachers encourage their pupils to engage in menial jobs in a bid to generate revenue for the school. The report claims that this is what happens at the school on a daily basis, denying pupils the chance to effectively learn. Some of the teachers are also reportedly into the habit of taking pupils to their respective farms to have them help out in the work. Proceeds from the errands are said to be given to the school. The children who are used for errands, are also given food and sometimes money as compensation. Responding to the issue, Assistant Headmaster of the school, James Lawrence Donkoh, confirmed that pupils indeed run errands for teachers in order to be paid. He further confirmed that sometimes pupils are made to do menial jobs during classes hours. I will not deny the fact that pupils are made to work during school hours but they are just menial jobs, he said. Chairman of the schools PTA, Mr. Bright Ankomah, also echoed the sentiments of the Assistant Headmaster, saying failure by parents to provide for their wards has accounted for some of these challenges. According to him, although the practice is not the best, the other side is that its helps the pupils to also raise money. He said on Adom TV that Kweku Baako must stop defending Anas because he does not know the caliber of person he is dealing with. I respect Kwaku Baako very much but he should be very careful not to dare me otherwise I will bring out all information to show Anas Aremeyaw Anas is corrupt, wicked, evil, extortionist, blackmailer and a thief who lures people and institutions in making his so-called investigative videos if he tries defending him. I am not afraid of him, but what is fair should be fair, he said. Kennedy Agyapong further stated that he is angry at Anas because his mode of investigation is unfair to citizens. He added that he was ready to expose him for people to know the kind of person he is. What is going on in this country? That Anas should be given the space to be destroying people through his dubious means of making wealth. I Am so crazy about this issue even though am not in any of his videos because I want Ghanaians to know that Anas is not genuine but keeps blackmailing people to make wealth, he added. He also disclosed that, when NDC was in power, some of its party officials paid Anas off to prevent him from releasing a video he recorded in Dubai some time ago about some NDC top officials. READ ALSO: Kennedy Agyapong vows to expose Anas He, however, stated that members of the NPP are not afraid of him and will make him know his limit by showing him who he is. I have not been able to sleep today, just because of this Anas guy who thinks he is the only person who has the sense of investigating corrupt practices in this country, he is just getting me bored. According to the party, the amount is alarming and in contradiction with President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's mantra of protecting the public purse. A statement signed by NDC General Secretary, Johnson Asiedu Nketia urged Ghanaians to rise and demand answers with regards to value for money. "The NDC is also alarmed at the cost of $1.2 Billion that this project will cost the people of Ghana as it is not in consonance with President Akufo-Addos often touted mantra of Protecting The Public Purse and we are calling on all well-meaning Ghanaians to demand answers relating to issues bordering on value for money," the statement stated. It added: "The NDC has made it abundantly clear that the implementation of the provisions of the Act will deny the vast majority of the population the opportunity to acquire the Card." Weeks ago, it was reported that Ghana's National Identification Card, the Ghana Card procured by the National Identification Authority (NIA) costs the country $1.22 billion dollars (or GH5.5 billion cedis) over a 15 year period. This figure came from the Executive Director of the NIA, Prof Ken Attafuah himself, spoke to the media on the registration exercise, which was to begin on Monday, June 28, but failed to take off. Below is the full statement: NDC Expresses Deep Misgivings Over Intended Ghana Card Issuance The Functional Executive Committee (FEC) of the NDC, this afternoon granted audience to Ghana Card Team led by the Executive Secretary of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Professor Ken Attafuah, in relation to issues that have to do with ACT 950 (2017), which makes the use of only Passports and Birth Certificates the base documents for the creation of the intended Ghana Card. The FEC of the NDC has made it abundantly clear that the implementation of the provisions of the Act will deny the vast majority of the population the opportunity to acquire the Card. The NDC has expressed its grave concerns about the limitation it will impose on ordinary Ghanaians who through no fault of their own neither Passports nor Birth Certificates as well as the fact that this current dispensation will undermine the legitimacy of the Voters ID Card as declared by the Supreme Court in its ruling vis-a-vis the Abu Ramadan case in 2016. The NDC is of the considered view that this new exercise will not promote the stability of the State as it will only seek to make some Ghanaians become more Ghanaian than others in direct contravention of the 1992 Constitution. While reiterating its support for the provision of Identity Cards for Ghanaians, FEC expressed concerns at certain provisions of the Act which will prevent fellow citizens from the process of registration. FEC takes note of the fact-specific provisions of the Act which was passed under a Certificate of Urgency will impose limitations on ordinary Ghanaians who do not possess passports nor Birth Certificates. The FEC considers as cumbersome the process of verification for Ghanaians without the two IDs. The FEC reiterates its demand to the NIA, and we wish by this Release to call for a review of the Amendment to Act 750 (2008), and ensure that the Voters ID Card is added to the set of Identity Documents required for registration even as the NIA is working to resolve its technical issues which prevented the commencement of the Excercise yesterday. The NDC is also alarmed at the cost of $1.2 Billion that this project will cost the people of Ghana as it is not in consonance with President Akufo-Addos often touted mantra of Protecting The Public Purse and we are calling on all well-meaning Ghanaians to demand answers relating to issues bordering on value for money. Less than 24 hours before, Ukraine said the reporter had died from three gunshots to the back in the stairwell of his apartment building in a contract-style killing in a case that provoked an outpouring of grief and a diplomatic spat. "Thanks to this operation we were able to foil a cynical plot and document how the Russian security service was planning for this crime," security service head Vasyl Grytsak said at the press conference. Grytsak announced authorities had arrested the alleged mastermind of the plot, saying a Ukrainian citizen named only by the initial G. had offered to pay a hitman to carry out the killing after being recruited by Russian special forces and paid $40,000. Put wife through 'hell' Grytsak also thanked Babchenko and his family, who he said were in the loop about the secret operation. The reporter, however, apologised to his wife for putting her through "this hell she had to live through for three days...but there was no other option". News of the "death" of the prominent Russian war correspondent and former soldier set off a series of recriminations between Kiev and Moscow, and pictures and flowers were laid by mourners at the Russian embassy in Kiev. Ukrainian officials led by Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman accused Russia of being behind the killing of the Kremlin critic, a charge that Moscow batted back. 'Pathetic stunt' After the truth of the reported assassination came to light, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said it was "great news" that Babchenko was alive. But on Twitter she slammed the "propagandistic effect" of the set-up. Reporters Without Borders also condemned the faked death. "It is pathetic and regrettable that the Ukrainian police have played with the truth, whatever their motive... for the stunt," Christophe Deloire, the head of the Paris-based media watchdog, told AFP. And Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, a former colleague of Babchenko, also questioned the value of the operation. "To me, it's crossing a line big time. Babchenko is a journalist not a policeman, for Christ sake, and part of our job is trust, whatever Trump & Putin say about fake news," he wrote on Twitter. "I'm glad he is alive, but he undermined even further the credibility of journalists and the media," he added. 'Repeated death threats' A number of Kremlin critics have been killed in Ukraine in recent years, with one gunned down on a Kiev street in broad daylight and another whose car exploded. Babchenko fought in Russia's two Chechen campaigns in the 1990s and early 2000s before becoming a war correspondent and author. He repeatedly said he faced death threats. He has contributed to a number of media outlets including top opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and is an avid blogger, accusing Russian authorities of killing Kremlin critics and unleashing wars in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere. He wrote about his experience as a young soldier in the Chechen campaigns in a book published in English under the title "One Soldier's War". Babchenko left Russia in February 2017 after receiving threats, living first in the Czech Republic, then in Israel, before moving to Kiev. He has hosted a programme on the Crimean Tatar TV station ATR for the past year. jpegMpeg4-1280x720Babchenko made a name for himself with his poignant reportages from the frontlines, including the conflict in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 10,000 people. The tariffs are due to enter into force from June 1, despite efforts by world leaders including France's Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Angela Merkel to bring the multilateral trade system back from the brink. Separately, the United States is readying trade sanctions against China over intellectual property theft. "First and foremost, an escalation in trade tensions should be avoided," the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's acting chief economist Alvaro Pereira said. "Since the world economy is much more integrated and linked today than in the past, a further escalation of trade tensions might significantly affect the economic expansion and disrupt vital global value chains," he added. Threat to growth The OECD's last-ditch appeal follows similar warnings from the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. The protectionist threat from Trump's "America First" administration is looming large over the outlook for global growth, which the OECD has put at 3.8 percent, close to the pre-financial crisis average. The organisation meanwhile voiced concern over the recent spike in oil prices. The rise in prices follows a deal reached in 2016 between the OPEC cartel and Russia to cut production following a glut that had sent prices crashing and the crude sector into disarray. The OECD's warning came as the organisation held its annual forum in Paris under the theme of "What brings us together". The 35-nation OECD was founded in 1961 and membership of the body immediately raises a country's economic profile and opens the possibility for deeper international ties on economic, educational and social matters. The forum convened as global markets felt the heat from Italy, where a political crisis following the electoral win of an anti-establishment, far-right alliance has raised fears of a fresh eurozone crisis. Without making any mention of the political turmoil, the OECD said it expected the Italian economy to grow 1.4 percent in 2018, and 1.1 percent in 2019. Nigerian lawmakers led by Lagos representative at the lower chamber, Femi Gbajabiamila have assessed the Ajaokuta Steel Company ahead of the public hearing on the move to stop the facilitys concession. In March 2018, 301 members jointly sponsored each of two bills aimed at stopping the concession of Ajaokuta Steel Company of Nigeria. The first bill seeks to provide funds for the speedy completion of the moribund Ajaokuta steel company and was titled A bill for an act to provide for the Ajaokuta steel company completion fund for the speedy completion of the project and other related matters. The second bill titled; A bill for an Act to amend the Public Enterprise (Privatisation and Commercialisation) Act to review the list of enterprises to be privatised seeks to remove the Ajaokuta steel company from the list of enterprises to be commercialised. The two bills scaled through second reading. The lawmakers made a courtesy visit to the in national facility situated in Kogi recently, ahead of the public hearing on stopping privatisation of the facility on Monday, June 4, 2018. The public hearing is scheduled to hold at Conference Room 034 inside the House of Representatives Complex, Abuja between 9 am and 5 pm. Gbajabiamila, in a tweet on Wednesday, May 30, 2018, said a team of lawmakers visited the Ajaokuta steel factory for an on-the-spot assessment of the facilities at Ajaokuta Steel Company. The Leader of the House of Representatives also said the team of lawmakers also visited the Itakpe Iron Ore ahead of the public hearing. This move is coming 39-years after the sprawling facility was built with Soviet assistance and is yet to produce a single bar, coil or rod. The Ajaokuta steel production plant was built in 1979 under President Shehu Shagaris administration to produce as much as 3 million metric tons of steel annually at full capacity. However, it has become not only a dilapidated factory complex but the $8 million investment has become a complete shadow of its envisioned glory. The Financial Times will host the 2018 FT Nigeria Summit in Lagos, tomorrow, May 31, 2018, led by its Africa editor, David Pilling. The event will take place at the Eko Hotel & Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria. The summit, in its third edition, with the theme, Dispelling uncertainty and building resilience, is aimed at exploring Nigerias huge investment potential in a recovering but vulnerable economy. The FT Nigeria Summit will shine a light on the countrys complex economic and investment climate - bringing together senior policy makers, major international investors and corporations, and multilateral organisations to put forward concrete recommendations and realistic solutions aimed at facilitating investment and overcoming the challenges the country faces, Financial Times said on its website. Business Insider Sub-Saharan Africa as a strategic media partner looks at 7 essential things you should look forward to at the summit: 1. The FT Nigeria Summit will bring together senior policy-makers, major international investors/corporations, & multilateral organisations to put forward concrete recommendations and realistic solutions. 2. The summit will showcase the policy and diversification agenda of Nigeria's Muhammadu Buhari, the priorities and progress towards inclusive growth in industrialisation and domestic production. 3. On the government front, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, Nigeria vice president, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma, Nigeria's budget minister, Audu Ogbeh, Agric minister will be reeling out figures and defending government policies as well as showcasing the potential of the country to foreign investors as well as the international community. The governor of the Central Bank, Godwin Emefiele, will be taking on the monetary angle as well as the authority's policy on Nigerian naira and the lending rates. Oscar N. Onyema, CEO of Nigerian Stock Exchange will be defending the money market and its attention to the 2019 general elections. 4. On the private sector side, Adewale Tinubu, CEO of Oando Plc. will be discussing how far and how fast investor confidence can be restored in the oil and gas sector. Others include Tonye Cole of Sahara group, financial institutions and others. 5. Keynote speakers include Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, Nigeria's vice president and Akinwunmi Ambode, governor of Lagos state. Others are Ibe Kachikwu, Senator Udoma Udoma and Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna state. 6. The summit is scheduled to begin at 8 am and would encompass over 7 keynote interviews, speeches and panel sessions over the course of the day. 7. Business mogul, experts, leading entrepreneurs and policy makers will discuss on how Nigeria can diversify away from oil dependency, deliver long-term inclusive growth and realise its ambition to become Africas economic powerhouse. In 2017, Prof Yemi Osinbajo also delivered the keynote address at the Africa Summit, with the theme What Makes Africa Work, which took place in London. Olayinka, who spoke at the 46th matriculation of the St. Augustine College of Education, Akoka, Lagos, noted that drugs generally had destroyed the lives of Nigerian youths. He said the issue of drug abuse was a global phenomenon that had impacted negatively on students academic performance. The dangers associated with the drug abuse are numerous, top of which is the academic performance that suffers greatly. A student may find himself/herself sleeping during lecture periods or unable to write examinations while under the influence of drugs. These drugs have the direct toxic effects on the brain and can sometimes lead to death. I strongly advise that you avoid the use of any of these drugs and if you have started, you should quit as soon as possible, the vice-chancellor, represented by Prof. Kolawole Akinsola, the Director, Directorate of Affiliated Institutions, University of Ibadan, said. Olayinka also admonished the matriculating students to be security-conscious and be wary of the friends they keep. Students are urged to shun cultism, violence and criminal conducts that are inimical to the development of the society. Earlier, the Acting Provost of the college, the Rev. Sr. Mary Ezeasor, restated that the college was committed to enhancing the quality of learning for sustainable national development. The college will continue to fulfill its vision and mission faithfully by enhancing the quality of teachers through focused dynamic teacher-education programmes. We will also continue to maintain academic excellence and moral training as well as adhering strictly to the high standards required by the various regulatory bodies in charge of our programmes. Our college has grown from diploma and NCE-awarding institution to a degree-awarding one in affiliation with the University of Ibadan. Currently, we offer Professional Diploma in Education (PDE) programme with the approval of the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN), she said. She advised the newly admitted students to remain focused and be determined in achieving their goals. I urge you to be focused on acquiring the training and knowledge offered by the college from the onset, Ezeasor said. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that St. Augustine College of Education also known as Project TIME (Teachers Training in Moral and Religious Education) is affiliated to the University of Ibadan. It was established in 1971 by the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) and the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). It would surprise you to know that majority of your favourite celebrities didn't post anything on their social media pages as it looked like a normal business day for them. Well, we were able to get a few of them who sent out goodwill messages to Nigerians to mark the day on their social media pages. 1. Tonto Dikeh In her message to Nigerians to mark the special day, Tonto Dikeh said we should make us of our voices and be the voice for the voiceless rather than say inciting things about the country. She went on to admonish Nigerians to get their PVCs so they can vote who their desire to take control of the affairs of the country. "GOD GAVE YOU A VOICE, MADE YOU A VOICE OF AND FOR THE PEOPLE...YOU NEITHER USE IT FOR EMPOWERMENT AND CHANGE BUT YOU COME ON THE GRAM SHOUTING NIGERIA IS BAD...DO YOU EVEN HAVE YOUR PVC? As little as that Half, the youth dont have and we have the guts to scream Nigeria is Bad...Nigeria is just a space/Land, its the people who make it great or worse.. #WE WANT A BETTER NIGERIA #THAT SHOULD START WITH YOU AND ME," she wrote. 2. Timi Dakolo Timi Dakolo just like Tonto Dikeh said Nigerians should accept Nigeria as their own and do better by being better. 3. Yul Edochie Yul Edochie who recently declared his intention to run for the seat of the president of Nigeria also joined other celebrities to send goodwill messages to Nigeria on our Democracy Day. The actor took to his Instagram page where he declared that all shall be well with the country. "All shall be well. Happy Democracy Day to you all my brothers and sisters," he wrote. ALSO READ:Kenneth Okonkwo wants to be governor of Enugu state 4. Alibaba Alibaba who is known for is long epistles on social media on the various social issues bothering the country, this time around didn't say so much. Rather he just posted a photo of the Nigeria coat of arm with an inscription "Happy Democracy Day to all Nigerians.'' 5. Rita Dominic According to a profile article written by The New Yorker, In 2015, during her pregnancy, Adichie was informed by her husband and her brother (Kene) that her father had been kidnapped during his journey from Nsukka to Aba. "Her husband told her that her father had been kidnapped, and she screamed, then vomited, then started to cry," writes The New Yorker. Two hours after the incident, her mother received a phone call from the kidnappers. They didn't say much but to confirm the elder Adichie had been truly kidnapped. The kidnappers did not make any demand till the next day. During this period of silence, Chimamanda Adichie called the Governor of Anambra state, her home state and the US consul-general in Lagos because her father is a citizen. The consul provided her with a kidnapping expert from the F.B.I. who helped her mum when the kidnappers demanded a ransom the next day. The kidnappers wanted N5M. On the third day, the ransom had gone up to N10M. "Okey drove to a point on the highway near Nsukka, then, as instructed, set off on a motorcycle taxi for the designated meeting place, carrying ten million naira in a sack. Nobody knew if he would be seen again" writes the New Yorker. ALSO READ:Chimamanda Adichie reveals how she was sexually assaulted at 17 Thankfully he was seen again and Chimamanda's father too. After the horrible ordeal, Chimamanda's parents got on a flight to America to meet their daughter. According to the article, the ordeal made Professor David Adichie look frail and jumpy. "He rambled when he spoke" further writes The New Yorker. Due to the bad experience, Chimamanda Adichie did not go to Nigeria or read news about Nigeria for six months. Chimamanda Adichie gets honorary degree from Duke University Chimamanda Adichie has done it again! This time around she has been honoured with an honorary degree from the prestigious Chimamanda was among the few recipients of the honorary degree from the university and they were all described as people making changes in the world in very extensive ways. The victim who is also battling to live through a machete attack, was ambushed alongside mother while returning from a market at Ikpoba Hill located in the capital. According to Punch News, Igiebor had a fight with his wife who reportedly refused to move into a new apartment with him. The returnee, who has been arrested by the police lived with his in-laws shortly after deportation report says. He asked the wife to follow him to a place to go and rent a place (apartment), but the woman said that she could not go to the area. The man asked why and they started fighting before the woman left. They have not seen each other for over two weeks and only he has been living in that place. The woman and the mother were coming back from the market at night, at about 9pm and did not know that the man was waiting for them. He wanted to cut off the womans head, but she defended herself with her hand and sustained a cut. He also injured his mother-in-law," a source told Punch. ALSO READ: No escape for lady married to violent police husband A petition on behalf of the victims has been submitted to the police by their lawyer, Mr. Jefferson Uwoghiren. According to Punch News, Mr Michael and Mrs Roseline Oaikhena, the parents of the infant reportedly owe the health center a sum of N650,000, as payment for treatment received over a 3-month period. Punch gathered that the baby, Ighodalo was born prematurely alongside a twin sibling who already passed away. My wife and I have been married for about two years. When she conceived, she went through a lot of stress due to the nature of her job and at a point, a doctor advised her to go for bed rest. She gave birth at the Ifako General Hospital when the pregnancy was about six months. We were unable to get an incubator at the hospital and our search for one in Lagos public hospitals proved abortive. She gave birth around 1pm and when we could not find any public hospital with an incubator, we settled for Inton Hospital. We got there around 11pm; their bill was N300,000 per week. However, after a week, we lost the female baby and we started paying N150,000 per week. "The surviving baby has now been moved from the incubator to a nursery, where he has been for over three months," Michael Oaikhena shared in a chat with Punch News. ALSO READ: Old woman disappears with baby abandoned by roadside Mr Akeem Mustapha, the Chief Medical Director at Inton denied rumours reporting that the hospital planned to surrender Ighodalo to an orphanage. The director described this as an attempt at getting pity from the press but also urged Punch correspondents to pay the outstanding balance. As one would expect, the news has drawn different opinions. In music circles, fans and commentators are interested to see if Sinzu can deliver on the levels that he once attained. In the typical Nigerian manner, there have been messages highlighting why it is important to help those in need, as the tables can so easily turn (Sauce Kid put Davido on his song "Carolina" while the latter was a relative neophyte, thus the gesture has been interpreted s some benevolent iteration of Nigerian Karma). Most of the reactions have ranged from surprise to elation. Many of Sinzu's old fans and peers have come out the woodworks to commend the rapper, offer him messages of support and basically, drum up support for what is being marketed as the second chapter in the career of a rapper who we're certain could have given so much more. There is very little mention of the issues that have plagued Sinzu for the past year, and more particularly, his stint in a US jail. #FreeSinzu The last time, we heard about Sauce Kid, it was a story of stolen credit cards, surprise arrests and court arraignments. In June 2017, Babalola Falemi, also known as Sauce Kid, was sentenced to a term of two years in jail for aggravated identity fraud. His arrest was made public on Instagram by a friend, rapper Willy Bang, who posted a 2016 mugshot of the rapper with the caption, "#FreeSinzu Miss Ma G @chiefhunnitbands." According to Idaho Statesman, a local publication, the rapper was charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud, eight counts each of bank fraud and aggravated identity theft, and possession of several fraudulent bank cards. From the moment his arrest made the news, especially to that agora of gossip that is Instablog9ja, Sinzu was vilified. You wouldn't know from the way we have accepted internet fraudsters into regular society with open arms, but Nigerians are usually very critical of criminals. Sinzu's crime is one that Nigerians are known for in many western countries; and many have been arrested, jailed or deported for in the past. ALSO READ: Sauce Kid is moving on after serving his jail term The reactions fit this context. Within the next few weeks, Sinzu was portrayed as an example; the rapper who had fallen from near-stardom into fraud. Think pieces were written about his "fall from grace"; and his name was brought up as 'evidence' for conjectures about how Nigerian musicians are actually fraudsters when the microphone gets turned off. Which is why, in many ways, the reactions to his arrest were somewhat confusing. Yet, they needn't have been. Sinzu is proof that our attitude toward crime is usually determined by a lot of things that have little to do with the crime itself. Status trumps everything... including your record Our perception of people the law has defined as criminals is usually a function of who they were before they went to jail. Sinzu has always been portrayed as the no-holds-barred bad boy, the Nigerian, who by way of the United States, had gathered street cred, a strong enough accent and dollars. It is an image that, in a sense, created the context for the activities he was eventually convicted of. It is the image that he has slipped into, upon his return. It is why, when Sinzu's deal was teased, the reactions had a tone of celebration, more than appreciation for a second chance. ALSO READ: Three things Sinzu needs to do upon his second coming It is a different approach to how we would have treated Kasali from around the way, who fresh from jail, has just been blessed with a job by a benevolent benefactor. The case could be made that this is a function of what he does. Sinzu is a musician, after all, a celebrity who will always be viewed as a function of his appeal, more than his values. Yet, there are numerous examples of Nigerian celebrities who have not been able to shake the weight of their indiscretions. What's different is Sinzu was already an elemental part of a culture that iconizes the hustler, and tweets #FREE" INSERTRAPPERNAME" when one of such is caught in the act. We should not judge ex-convicts, or refuse them the warmth and support of being a part of society. We should also be careful not to hand people free passes because of convoluted ideals that have been passed to us in the form of hashtags. Canada is home to some of the worlds most beautiful national parks, world-class ski resorts with a highly developed mixed economy. Canada by size, is the largest country in North America and second in the world. Heres a guide if youre planning a move to Canada. 1. Getting a Visa Looking to live and work in Canada? Depending on the skills you have to offer there are several visa options. The Canadian immigration website allows you to take a quick quiz to discover the right visa for you. Theres also the very popular International Experience Canada (IEC) visa which allows young people aged 18 to 30 years old from many countries around the world, to work and travel around Canada for one to two years. Applicants must have a substantial amount of savings so that officials know that you can support yourself comfortably while looking for employment. 2. Find that accommodation first To find permanent housing before you get to Canada, the two most popular websites to search are Craigslist and Kijiji. They have options for all of Canadas major cities and list sublets, rooms for rent, and entire apartments and houses. It's best to find short-term accommodation with a friend or relative until a permanent rental is secured. ALSO READ: 7 African countries you never knew you wanted to visit 3. Getting a Job Before looking for a job you need a Canadian social insurance number. Getting one is as easy as ABC. When looking for employment, double-check your visa conditions as some Canadian visas dont allow certain types of work. Oil and gas are the two biggest industries in Alberta and Saskatchewan, while tourism and hospitality jobs in British Columbia. 4. Choose the best city for yourself Whether its Quebec or Vancouver, British Columbia or Alberta, ensure your destination suits the kind of job you are looking for. If you love outdoor adventures you might want to stay in Vancouver. Edmonton, Albertas capital and the Oil Capital of Canada is affordable and offers a lot of job opportunities, particularly in manufacturing, healthcare, and energy. 5. Student pathway If youre ineligible for the immigration streams the student pathway can be an excellent choice for becoming a Canadian permanent resident. As summer approaches, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has directed financial institutions to make foreign exchange available to customers over the counter to allow travellers have easy access to dollars. The apex bank also mandated all Bureaux de Change (BDCs) to access dollars from the CBN on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays every week. Isaac Okoroafor, the apex banks Acting Director, Corporate Communications in a statement issued on Saturday, May 26, 2018, stated that in a bid to ensure that eligible travelers are able to access foreign currency and make liquidity available in the market, the CBN had issued the directives. All-Deposit Money Banks are mandated to buy and sell foreign currency to travelers (both customers and non-customers) upon presentation of relevant valid travel documents such as visa and tickets over the counter. All travelers shall be attended to immediately at the banks counters." The CBN further stated that it is compulsory that all BDCs access currency at least three times weekly which is Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The statement warned that BDCs that failed to access the FX window at least three times weekly would have their licenses reviewed by the CBN emphasising that compliance with the new directive was compulsory. On Thursday, May 24, 2018, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) also released $100 million into the Nigerian Forex market to boost liquidity in the market to operate obligations of Nigerians travelling for pilgrimage. The Central Bank of Nigeria has been making precautionary monetary policy moves by injecting more United States Dollars into the foreign exchange market to checkmate any attempt to trigger artificial scarcity of the greenback. Taking a well thought out risk The Kodak company floundered when digital cameras, tablets and smartphones with amazing onboard cameras became the preferred methods for photo sharing. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2013. Because of their recognition that the world was turning to a digital arena, the executives decided that it was time to take the Kodak corporation in a new direction. They set about to update their company image, focusing upon digital packaging and printing. Two main projects were the lifelines that the company embraced for setting the financial footing on more stable ground. KodakOne and KodakCoin projects were the hopes for recovering. The cryptocurrency platform The KodakOne project will shortly be launched by the company. It is a service for digital photographers who wish to track their rights and royalties. Kodak and Wenn Digital are collaborating though blockchain for the project. KodakCoin will be used on a specific platform, and this may be the difference that distinguishes it from faltering systems such as Ethereum, Bitcoin and Ripple which are experiencing falling prices. The trickle down effect from South Korea, China and India's threats to place restrictions on bitcoin use, coupled with Facebook's ban on cryptocucrrency are believed to be the drivers behind the market slump. Although the values seem to be lowering, Kodak is actually experiencing a huge increase in market price for shares after making the announcement. This shows that there is still hope for cryptocurrency and a definite interest in its potential in the photography industry to better control how their work is used. Plans for expanding the services Although the projects are just preparing to launch, Wenn Digital is already making plans to expand the service that the new partners have to offer photographers. Revenue share is one of the options that is on the table for consideration. This feature may be incorporated into the platform if it meets with approval. Skeptical reception Although there are strong indications that this is a good move for Kodak, there are some harsh critics rising to share their opinions. Some are even accusing Kodak of starting a new cryptocurrency scam. Perhaps most damaging for Kodak's case is the fact that several of its board members purchased derivative securities a single day before they made the announcement. It seems that they're preparing for the revenue sharing well in advance of its launch. Is it possible that this is Kodak's desperate bid to save the company or is it a legitimate enterprise? Only time will tell. In the meantime, photographers who stand to benefit from the potential protection of their intellectual property will have to decide whether they are willing to take the chance or wait and see what happens. The Commands Public Relations Officer, ASP Muhktar Aliyu told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), that the incident happened Tuesday afternoon around 2:00pm. He said that the criminals carted away some cows after the attack, but added that the police were on the trail of the rustlers. So far no arrest has been made, but we are doing everything humanly possible to arrest the suspects and recover the stolen cows. Based on the report the suspects are cattle rustlers, so the issue of eight people killed is not true, only three people were killed and four injured, he said. ALSO READ: 13 killed as cattle rustlers attack Zamfara village Aliyu appealed to residents of the area with useful information that would lead to the arrest of the suspects to volunteer such information to the police. According to a report by the Vanguard, Ukpukpen slumped while on a routine jog along Moore Road in Calabar, close to Central Bank of Nigeria, around 7am on Wednesday. After being initially taken to nearby Navy Clinic, the lawmaker was transferred to a private hospital after he was assessed to be in critical condition. He died at the hospital due to what has been reported to be sudden cardiac arrest. Speaker of the House, Hon. John Gaul-Lebo, was shocked by the development and promised to issue a statement on the incident after meeting with the family of the deceased. "I am still in shock. I do not know what to say," he said. Yero has been under investigation by the anti-graft agency over his involvement in the disbursement of N750m used by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) during the 2015 election campaign. The ex-Governor was detained on Wednesday, May 30, 2018 when he went to the Kaduna zonal office of the EFCC. Three others: a former Kaduna State Peoples Democratic Partys Chairman, Abubakar Gaya- Haruna, a former Secretary to the State Government, Hamza Ishaq and a former Minister, Nuhu Somo Way were detained alongside Yero. According to Punch, an EFCC source said that they will be arraigned in court tomorrow, Thursday, May 31, 2018. ALSO READ: Masters of love scams arrested by EFCC The source said The case is coming up tomorrow so I can confirm to you that the former governor is here with us and he will be arraigned at the courts with the three others. Ex-Gov Nyame jailed 14 years Former Taraba state governor, Jolly Nyame has been sentenced to 14 years imprisonment without an option of fine. Nyame was dragged to court by the EFCC for allegedly misappropriating N1.64 billion while he was governor from 1999 to 2007. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) recently revealed that it has convicted 603 people since President Buhari came into power. Leader of the group, Alhaji Kelani Mohammed said at a news conference in Kaduna that the crisis rocking the party in many states require the Presidents personal intervention. He said, the APC needed a united front ahead of the 2019 general elections and blamed state governors for igniting some of the crises when they allegedly hijacked party machinery and scuttling internal democracy. According to him, only Buharis personal intervention will bring about sanity in the APC before 2019. Kelani dismissed recent agitation by the new PDP, saying it was self serving. He said, There was a merger ahead of the 2015 elections, where about four or five parties came together, and every group came with its own interest. The complain the nPDP members are putting forward is that, they have not been carried along, though, in a political setting like ours, people are bound to be aggrieved, but in the case of members of nPDP, many of them got appointments. Saraki is the Senate President, Dogara is it Speaker, many of them are Governors, while some benefited from the recent board appointments, while their spokesman, Kawu Baraje is a chairman of a lucrative board. Now, I learnt that, they met the Vice President yesterday and still, they are not satisfied; they said they have to meet the President. But believe me, in a party situation, we depend solely on the masses of this country who will do the voting and that is why the government is concentrating on how to bring the masses out of their present predicament. For us, all we desire is peace, cohesion and mutual understanding for APC to move forward towards 2019. Mr Sam Olumekun, the INEC Resident Electoral Commissioner in the state, told newsmen after a meeting with the Inter Agency Committee on Election Security in preparation for 2019 elections. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that representatives of various security agencies, including Police, Department of State Security (DSS), the Nigerian Army and the Nigerian Air Force were at the closed door meeting. Others were the Nigerian Immigration Service, Nigerian Prison Service, Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, (NSCDC) the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) among others. As we speak, we still have about 1.3 million PVCs uncollected since 2015. But for the new CVR (Continuous Voter Registration) that we have been doing since the first quarter of 2017, we have taken delivery of the cards of those who registered in 2017. As I speak, we have collected 166, 575 PVCs and in the past one week, we have distributed over 4,000 and we have a balance of about 162, 000 as at Monday. People should know that these cards are available at the local government offices of INEC and they should endeavour to collect their cards in preparation for the election, Olumekun said. On bringing the cards closer to the people, the commissioner, who urged registered voters to visit the designated councils, said that the process of collection was not stressful. According to him, considering the volume of the cards, the commission will look for a way of moving into the field to bring them closer to the people. We will see how we can tackle this matter, the commission in the state will come up with a formula to improve the collection, Olumekun said. He said that the commission had taken delivery of all the PVCs of registered voters in 2017, adding that those registering in 2018 would get theirs before the 2019 general elections. The REC called on the media, political parties, civil society organisations and other stakeholders to mobilise registered voters to obtain their PVCs. The INEC boss, who noted that the commission would never subvert the will or the rights of the people during elections, said it was ready to deliver a free,fair, credible and acceptable elections. According to him, electorate should have trust in the commission and shun any form of violence, reminding them that election is not a war. He said that the CVR exercise had been on all the designated centres across the state, assuring that all registered voters would get their PVCs before the polls. On security, Olumekun said that the commission had been and would continue to collaborate with all security agencies to achieve its mandate in 2019 and beyond. The Rec said: Security is critical in any election and that is why we are meeting, interacting and collaborating ahead of 2019 general elections. The essence of today meeting is to plan so as not to fail in 2019. This is part of our planning and preparations for the general elections of 2019. We discussed preparations of INEC so far, and we sought their (security agencies) collaboration. Of course, they have always collaborated with us in the past and have done so beautifully. Election is not an event, rather, we see it as a process and we are doing very meticulous planning for the 2019 general elections and the security agencies have assured us that they are up to the task. He said that INEC was carrying all security agencies along to ensure global best practices in the conduct of the 2019 general elections. Melaye stated this upon his return to the Senate on Wednesday, May 30, 2018, after weeks of absence. He appeared at plenary in a neck collar. Melaye accused the Police of attempting to inject him with a poisonous chemical. He appreciated his colleagues and the leadership of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for their support while he was away. "The national chairman of PDP and the executive of the PDP in Kogi state I salute you. I thank Nigerians for their support. The battle to salvage this country from financial scavengers and economic canker worms, to me it is a battle of no retreat, no surrender. "We must salvage this country together. We don't have any other to call our own. As my voice gets better, it will get louder. I shall not cease to ask questions where necessary. "I want to say that the Nigerian police attempted to kill me twice; one through the application of a chemical substance and the second time through injection. They actually came with an injection but God intervened," he added. The lawmaker has been receiving medical attention after he allegedly jumped down a moving Police vehicle enroute Lokoja, Kogi state. The union made the appeal in a statement signed by its President, Prince Williams Akporeha, on Tuesday in Lagos to mark Democracy Day. He also urged the government to show concern over the rising cost of food items and ensure food security in the country. We urge the government to remain resolute in entrenching enduring democratic values and legacies. Our government must equally put on its priority list mass employment opportunities for youths in a bid to strengthen the democratic structures. According to him, such measures will help reduce poverty and other deviant behaviours among vulnerable people in the society. The NUPENG president also underscored the need for strong commitment toward securing lives and properties of the people and addressing social infrastructure deficit. According to reports, the Senator defected to the PDPduring plenary on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Melaye said that he could not sit with members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) after his ordeal with the police. Though he did not publicly declare his defection, the spokesman of the PDP, Kola Ologbondiyan issued a statement on Twitter welcoming him. He said This Morning, @Sen_Dino_Melaye crossed the aisle of the Red Chamber to the Comfortable and People-Oriented @OfficialPDPNig side. As a party, we welcome him and await his final porting to the Peoples Party. Bail Senator Dino Melaye was granted bail on May 16, 2018 by Justice Nasir Ajana of the Lokoja High Court. This is after he was denied bailby the Senior Magistrate Court 2 in Lokoja, Kogi state on May 3, 2018. In a birthday message to the duo, Tinubu described Falana and Ajibade as icons in their chosen fields, whose contributions would continue to mean much to the country. NAN reports that Falana was born on May 20, 1958, while Ajibade was born on May 28, 1958. The month of May which in 1999 heralded the rebirth of democracy in Nigeria after almost 16 years of unbroken military interregnum, is also significant in one other respect. It is the month of birth of many prominent Nigerians. As both were united in their month of birth, there is also an unmistakable meeting point in their life trajectories. Both fought against successive military regimes to facilitate the emergence of democracy in the country, Tinubu noted. `He said that Falana and Ajibade fought to ensure that Nigeria would be a citadel of social justice, rule of law and a better place for generations. There is no doubt that both Falana and Ajibade had impacted on Nigeria and Nigerians in the most profound ways. We thank them for their struggles and we thank them for their sacrifices but we are not yet in the Promised Land. We enjoin the duo not to rest on their oars but join hands with us in the All Progressives Congress, led by President Muhammadu Buhari, to make Nigeria a better place, Tinubu said. According to him, Falana and Ajibade have continued to contribute to the enthronement of democracy, good governance and rule of law in the country. I say happy birthday to them and wish them long life, continued good health and renewed energy to continue to make invaluable contributions to our country. He described the duo as close friends with whom he had interacted in the continuous struggle for enthronement of true democracy, good governance and rule of law. Mr Falana is a lawyer, pro-democracy and human rights activist, who continues to employ the instrumentality of the law to correct the ills of the society. His contributions to constitutionalism and jurisprudence know no bounds. He takes briefs from the rich to empower him to fight injustice against the poor pro bono. Ajibade is that astute journalist and celebrated author, who through his pen, fought against the military junta and was particularly a thorn in the flesh of the regime of the late Abacha. The president gave the assurance when he received the Sierra Leonean President at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on Wednesday. President Buhari congratulated Bio on the successful elections and the transition that had ushered in a new government in the country. We will continually stand by you to ensure stability in your country. We believe security in the West Coast region, Africa and the world should be a collective concern, he said. The President said Nigeria had for a long period provided security support for the country, especially during the 11 years of civil war, and would continue to assist the forces on the ground to ensure the peace and stability needed for development. According to him, he shares a lot in common with the Sierra Leonean President, which includes ruling the country as a military general, contesting several elections as opposition and winning to face the challenges of security and an ailing economy. In his remarks, the President of Sierra Leone said his country remained grateful to Nigeria for the brotherly role it had played in ensuring an end to the protracted civil war in the country and the successful political transitions since then. Melaye arrived for plenary on cervical collar after weeks of absence due to injuries sustained when he allegedly jumped down a moving Police vehicle. The Kogi lawmaker was arrestedafter two suspects linked him to a case of gun running. He was later released by the Police. Police vs Melaye But in a point of order on Wednesday, May 30, 2018, Melaye accused the Police of attempting to kill him during his arrest. "It want to say that the Nigerian police attempted to kill me twice; one through the application of a chemical substance and the second time through injection. They actually came with an injection but God intervened," Melaye announced. PDP came through He appreciated the leadership of the National Assembly, his constituents for standing by him during his recall process, and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for speaking in his favour while he was away. Melaye failed to appreciate his party, the APC in his comments. "The national chairman of PDP and the executive of the PDP in Kogi state I salute you. I thank Nigerians for their support. The battle to salvage this country from financial scavengers and economic canker worms. To me it is a battle of no retreat, no surrender. "We must salvage this country together we don't have any other to call our own. As my voice get better, it will get louder. I shall not cease to ask questions where necessary. Then this happened... Before taking his seat, Melaye requested the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, to ensure a comfortable seat is provided for him due to his health condition. He, however asked to leave the APC side of the Senate to seat beside former Senate President, David Mark, on the PDP side of the divide. Mr President, I want to seek your indulgence you will call in the sergeant-at-arms to look for a comfortable sit for me on this side of the divide I am no longer comfortable sitting here. I want to ask that you mandate the sergeant-at-arms to look for a sit for me before you do that I will take a sit close to general David Mark pending when you get a sit, Melaye said. Frenzy at Senate For few minutes, the floor of the Senate was in a frenzy as Melaye was assisted to the PDP side of the upper legislative chamber. This, many considered as cross-carpeting or decamping to the PDP from the APC. Melayes action did not go down well with the APC lawmakers. In a swift reaction, Senate leader, Ahmed Lawan appealed to Melaye to return to his allotted seat adding the seats on the APC were better, more comfortable and well arranged. But Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, who disagreed with Lawan urged more APC lawmakers to follow Melayes leading by moving to the PDP side. Minority leader, Godswill Akpabio specifically urged Bauchi lawmaker, Isa Misau, and others to move to his side. Senator Barau Jibrin protested saying Melaye acted in contrary to the provisions of the 1999 Constitution and Senate standing rules. In his remarks, Saraki wondered why Melaye had to move to another seat. . 1.6 - - 74.6 . , ... Melaye enjoyed chants and choruses from bystanders from the moment he stepped out of his car to the moment he made his way into the red chamber of the senate with a staff. And no, there was no ambulance in sight. Inside the senate, Melaye instantly became the cynosure of all eyes and the center of attention, with some of his colleagues making a beeline to pump fists with him. The senator who was wearing a white Kaftan with a brace wrapped round his neck, made it into the senate chamber unaided. Melaye has been in hospital since he reportedly jumped off a moving police truck as he was being driven to Lokoja for trial on charges bordering on gun running, criminal conspiracy and damaging of government property. Senate President Bukola Sarakihas said Melaye is asthmatic. Melaye gets dramatic When plenary commenced on Wednesday, Melaye threw a tantrum because it wouldnt be Melaye if none was thrown. The senator who represents Kogi West, plainly said he wasnt going to sit on the APC aisle of the senate. Melaye announced he would prefer to sit on the PDP side of the aislejust beside former Senate President David Mark--because he was no longer comfortable with his former sitting position. Melaye said following his ordeal in the hands of the police and his worsening healthsince he was taken into custody, sitting beside his colleagues from the APC is not something he was looking forward to doing. And then Melaye called for support as he got up, with PDP senators throwing their support behind him as he made his way to the PDP section of the aisle. As you would expect, PDP senators welcomed Melaye and applauded his change of seat. When he stood to speak, Melaye said the police tried to kill him in hospital. "We must salvage this country together. We don't have any other to call our own. As my voice gets better, it will get louder. I shall not cease to ask questions where necessary. "I want to say that the Nigerian police attempted to kill me twice; once through the application of a chemical substance and the second time through injection. They actually came with an injection but God intervened," he added. Melaye also appreciated the leadership of the PDP for their support while he was in hospital and during his trial. The senator is currently on bail. Game of seats The APC is the majority political party in a 109-member senate. The APC has 60 senators to the PDP's 49. Melaye was elected senator on the APC platform, but that hasnt stopped him from criticizing his political partys decisions in public and on his social media pages. The senator believes hes being victimized by his State Governor Yahaya Bello who is a member of the APC and close ally of President Muhammadu Buhari. The lawmaker representing Kogi West has experienced a tumultous few weeks after clashing with the police force over his criminal cases in court, and ending up in the hospital with spinal cord injuries. After he returned to the chamber on Wednesday, Melaye made a request to the Senate President Bukola Saraki to assign him a seat on the side occupied by senators of the People's Democratic Party (PDP) because he was feeling uncomfortable sitting with APC senators. He said, "Mr President, I want to seek your indulgence that you would call on the Seargeant-at-Arm to look for a comfortable seat for me on this side of the divide (pointing at the PDP side) because I'm no longer comfortable sitting here." Melaye subsequently moved to the PDP side for the rest of plenary on Wednesday, sparking speculation that he might be about to officially defect to the opposition party, with PDP senator, Ben Murray-Bruce, welcoming him to the party on Twitter. Melaye has fueled the speculations even further as he took to his Instagram account later on Wednesday to insult APC senators and ask that his seat be changed to PDP's side. Attaching a picture of him speaking on the side of APC senators, he posted, "I see lion, tiger and snakes on this sit (sic). Change my sit (sic) mbok." "The French government too can have negotiations with the US government during these 60 days for Total to stay in Iran." Total was the only western firm to finalise an investment deal in Iran's energy sector following the 2015 nuclear deal, from which Washington withdrew earlier this month. It signed the agreement last July to become the lead partner in a $4.8 billion (4.1 billion euro) project to develop the South Pars 11 gas field, alongside the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Iran's Petropars. But after Washington quit the deal and pledged to fully reimpose sanctions by November, Total has said it will be impossible to continue unless it gets a specific waiver from Washington. If the French firm fails to win an exemption, CNPC "will replace Total in this project," Zanganeh said. The oil minister did not explain why the French firm only had 60 days, with US sanctions on foreign energy companies in Iran not due to kick in until November 4. Even before Washington pulled out of the nuclear deal, Iran had struggled to attract investment into its oil and gas sector. The only other deal was a $742 million (600 million euro) deal with Russian state-owned firm Zarubezhneft to boost production at two oil fields in the western province of Ilam. Hardliners in Iran had opposed foreign investment in the energy sector despite the government saying billions were needed to realise its potential. "Iran failed to attract much energy investment, even when conditions were at their most favourable," wrote the US Center on Global Energy Policy in a recent briefing note. The man blamed by South Korea for the 2010 sinking of a warship that killed 46 sailors will become the most senior North Korean to step on US soil in nearly two decades. The meeting is the latest in a flurry of diplomacy as the two sides lay the groundwork for a historic first summit, planned for June 12. The four-star general, who is believed to be in his 70s, has been at the forefront of Pyongyang's emergence from global isolation this year. He attended the closing ceremony of the South's Winter Olympics in February, sitting just feet (centimetres) from Ivanka Trump. He was by Kim's side when the young North Korean leader met South Korean President Moon Jae-in in April, and again for the leaders' surprise second summit on May 26. But the march to become Kim Jong Un's most trusted general has been a long one requiring intellectual heft, nimble footwork and a willingness to take extreme measures. Purge Kim Yong Chol first donned the uniform of the Korean People's Army in the 1960s, when he was assigned to guard the heavily-fortified border that bisects the peninsula. A graduate of Pyongyang's elite Kim Il Sung Military University, he went on to make a name for himself as an expert on the hated South Korean regime. Kim often "explained everything about the South's political and military situation for more than an hour without looking at a script", defector and former army colonel Choi Joo Hwal told the Seoul-based Daily NK news website in 2016. He won a series of promotions under the country's founding leader Kim Il Sung and even led the North's military delegation for talks with the South in 1989. Kim "came to the attention of top leadership figures by hard work and accomplishment and not through patronage connections", the respected 38 North website reported. Kim's role as a military interlocutor in dealings with the South continued under Kim Jong Il, but it was his rise to the top job at the Reconnaissance General Bureau, overseeing foreign spying operations in 2009, that made him notorious. It was at Kim that South Korean intelligence pointed the finger of blame when the Cheonan corvette was torpedoed in 2010, and when artillery units shelled a border island, killing four people. Seoul said the military man was manoeuvring to show loyalty to the regime as the power transfer from Kim Jong Il to his son was getting under way. That shift was completed in 2011, when the untested Kim Jong Un ascended, carrying out a purge that saw many senior figures removed or even executed. It was a purge Kim Yong Chol would survive, cementing his reputation as a hawk in 2013 when he threatened to break the ceasefire that ended the Korean War and to turn the US into a "sea of fire" with a nuclear strike. But in the recent reconciliatory push he has also made efforts to paint himself as a more approachable figure. Reportedly a gifted linguist, Kim has appeared at ease in international settings, and even attempted a joke with Seoul reporters who visited Pyongyang in April for a pop concert. But it was a joke with a edge of steel, and a reminder of where his loyalties lie. Still, Kuwait, a non-permanent council member that represents Arab countries, is hoping to win a high number of votes in favor of its proposal to highlight Washington's isolation on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The revised draft drops an outright demand for an international protection mission and instead requests that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres present recommendations. The new text "calls for the consideration of measures to guarantee the safety and protection of the Palestinian civilian population" in the occupied Palestinian territories and the Gaza Strip, according to the draft obtained by AFP. It requests that Guterres present a report within 60 days on proposals for the protection of Palestinian civilians including the establishment of an international mission. France and Britain, two veto-wielding council members, have complained that the draft resolution lacked details on the scope and objective of the proposed protection mission, diplomats said. The United States meanwhile maintained that the measure was biased against Israel during two expert-level meetings held last week, according to diplomatic sources. Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon has slammed the proposed resolution as "shameful" and said it was designed to help Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas. Kuwait put forward the draft resolution ten days ago after Israeli forced killed dozens of Palestinians during protests on the Gaza border and the United States opened its embassy in Jerusalem. Negotiations however have been tough-going with the Europeans and Africans pressing for more information on the proposed protection mission, according to diplomats. Diplomats have said the Palestinians may turn to the UN General Assembly if the draft resolution on protection fails to win Security Council backing. The council is due to meet Wednesday at the request of the United States to discuss Palestinian rocket firings on Israel from Gaza. The rocket and mortar firings from the Gaza Strip were claimed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, prompting Israel to respond with air strikes on bases of the militant Palestinian groups. It was the worst flareup since the 2014 war waged by Israel in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. But the operator argues the agency is breaking the law by also capturing German domestic communications. "We have grave doubts about the legality of the current practice," said a statement Wednesday on the website of De-Cix Management GmbH, which is owned by European internet industry body the eco association. "We consider ourselves under obligation to our customers to work towards a situation in which strategic surveillance of their telecommunications only takes place in a legal manner." Its lawyer Sven-Erik Heun told German news agency DPA that "the BND has chosen the biggest pond to go fishing in". De-Cix Management launched its suit against the German interior ministry, which oversees the BND and its strategic signals intelligence. "With the lawsuit, we seek judicial clarification and, in particular, legal certainty for our customers and our company," the company said. The federal administrative court in the eastern city of Leipzig was not certain to make a ruling on Wednesday. Given the mass of daily phone calls, emails, chats, internet searches, streamed videos and other online communications, an effective fire-walling of purely German communications is unrealistic, activists argue. The De-Cix operator says its Frankfurt hub is the world's biggest Internet Exchange, bundling data flows from as far as China, Russia, the Middle East and Africa, and handles more than 6 terabits per second at peak traffic. The De-Cix, with 20 data centres, uses more electricity than Frankfurt international airport, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily reported this week. But regional prefect Michel Cadot later said that just 1,016 migrants had been removed, since many residents had fled after learning the dawn operation was imminent. They will be housed temporarily at more than 20 sites across the Paris region while the authorities check their identities, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said in a statement. The operation came just days after a young Malian was honoured with fast-track citizenship following his daring rescue of a child hanging from a balcony. It also coincided with the trial of a 72-year-old woman in the Mediterranean city of Nice for helping two Guinean teenagers cross into the country from Italy. Three other people will face trial Thursday for helping migrants enter France illegally, even as Grenoble this week honoured a farmer convicted of guiding migrants across the Alps by bestowing him with the city's official medal. Mixed messages? Two similar camps migrant camps in the capital, one along the Canal St Martin, which houses 800 mostly Afghan migrants, and another of 300-400 at the Porte de la Chapelle, are set to be evacuated soon, Cadot said. The authorities said the operation Wednesday was the 35th such evacuation in Paris in the last three years as thousands of migrants have arrived seeking a better life, hoping to settle in France or reach Britain. "We don't know if we're going to be allowed to stay in France. I would like to stay, I know that I could build a life here," a Sudanese man at the site who gave his name as Ibrahim told AFP. Many migrants may have taken hope from the accolades showered on Mamoudou Gassama, the 22-year-old Malian "Spiderman" captured on video as he scaled four storeys of an apartment building to rescue a dangling four-year-old. President Emmanuel Macron hailed the heroic act, saying Gassama -- who entered France illegally in September via Libya -- would be granted citizenship. But in a warning to other African migrants, he said he "can not give (papers) to all those who come from Mali or Burkina Faso" -- two of the countries from where thousands of migrants set out each year for Europe. The 40-year-old centrist is pushing ahead with a new immigration law, decried as too hardline by some but which he sees as essential to separating genuine asylum seekers from so-called economic migrants. "Behind a few symbolic gestures there remains a policy of repression and expulsions," said Michel Rousseau of Tous Migrants (We're All Migrants), a pro-migrant aid group in southeast France. France expelled 18,000 people last year, interior ministry figures show, compared with 100,000 asylum requests. Rousseau and other activists will be demonstrating outside the courthouse in the Alpine town of Gap on Thursday, when two Swiss nationals and an Italian go on trial for aiding a group of migrants cross into France last month. They risk up to 10 years in prison. Tensions On Wednesday a 72-year-old Amnesty International volunteer was facing similar charges in Nice, after helping two Guinean adolescents return to France after authorities sent them back to Italy. France granted 32,000 people asylum last year, official data shows, far fewer than other EU countries such as Germany, yet immigration remains a key voter concern. The far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen won a third of votes in last year's presidential election. Rather than Gassama's heroics, however, some far-right activists have highlighted a different case involving migrants this week: that of two Afghans arrested for allegedly harassing a woman they judged to be inappropriately dressed on a train. "The language of ultimatums is not something that anyone will be allowed to use when speaking to Russia," Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the council meeting. "We cannot accept the unfounded conclusion of the JIT", the Dutch-led Joint investigation Team, he added. All 298 people on the Malaysia Airlines flight en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were killed when the missile slammed into the plane as it flew over territory held by pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine in July 2014. Responding to Nebenzia, the Dutch foreign minister said his arguments were "nothing new" and again urged Russia to work with the Netherlands and Australia to identify the perpetrators. US Ambassador Nikki Haley voiced strong support for the Dutch and Australian call on Russia to acknowledge its role in the tragedy and help bring to account those responsible for the shooting down. "Despite its transparent denials, there is no doubt Russia is driving the Ukrainian conflict," said Haley. More than 10,000 people have been killed since the Moscow-backed insurgency broke out in April 2014 following Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told the council that Russia's rejection of the findings "did not surprise me at all." "We have no doubt that the downing of MH17 flight is a terrorist act," he said. Ukraine will present documents to the International Court of Justice next month showing that Russia is violating anti-terrorism agreements, he said. Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz renewed his call for a peacekeeping mission to be deployed to east Ukraine and urged Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to appoint a UN special envoy for Ukraine. "There is latent violence, violence that can be felt in the air but doesn't usually materialise into physical violence, and it's on the rise," warns Sonia Andolz, a political expert in conflict analysis at the University of Barcelona. "There is a rise in tone, confrontation between people who push or insult each other. Hate speech against others is becoming normal." Over the past weeks, this region of northeastern Spain with 7.5 million people has been the scene of a war of symbols. Independence supporters have filled streets, buildings or beaches with yellow crosses or ribbons, the colour used to protest against the jailing of separatist leaders after a failed independence bid last October. Those who want to remain in Spain then promptly remove these symbols. Early this month, police had to intervene to prevent two groups from clashing in Barcelona. Last week in Canet de Mar, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of the Catalan capital, three independence supporters were injured when a group of hooded people destroyed a "cemetery" of yellow crosses installed on the beach. On Sunday, anti-independence protesters in Barcelona tried to force a police officer to remove a yellow ribbon hanging on the city hall, and then filled a beach with Spanish flags. The conflict even reached the regional parliament where a session was interrupted on Friday because Carlos Carrizosa, a lawmaker for the main anti-independence party Ciudadanos, removed a yellow ribbon from a seat. The political situation in Catalonia remains blocked as Madrid refuses to restore direct rule in the region because its new president Quim Torra has named four jailed and exiled separatist leaders as part of his regional government. Attacks on party HQs While the independence movement is far from new in Catalonia, tensions erupted in earnest after a banned independence referendum on October 1 which was marred by police violence. The jailing of separatist leaders and a failed declaration of independence on October 27 -- rejected by around half of the population in Catalonia -- also provoked tensions. Protests on both sides of the divide then increased. While not a major force in Spain, far-right groups waded in, leaving a trail of assaults against independence supporters. Meanwhile separatist protests that had always been peaceful started getting disruptive with demonstrators clashing with police in March. Political parties have not been spared either. They have denounced acts of vandalism against their offices, from graffiti to broken windows. The office of Ciudadanos in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Catalonia's second biggest city, has been vandalised 13 times since 2015, says its manager Miguel Garcia. Some of these acts involved filling the entrance with animal faeces. "It's just another sign of the tension that Catalonia is going through, there are people who don't tolerate our ideas," says Garcia. Ciudadanos has counted around 30 acts of vandalism in the northeastern region over the past year, a similar figure to that tallied by the Catalan branch of Spain's Socialist party, also against independence. Pro-independence parties have also suffered but according to the ERC separatist party, they don't count them so as not to convert "one-off events into a category." "Some want people to think that Catalan society is becoming radical and uses violence, but that's not true," says David Bonvehi from the PDeCAT, the party of deposed Catalan president Carles Puigdemont. The PDeCAT saw one of its office in Barcelona covered in faeces on Monday. Boiling frog In an article in Catalonia's La Vanguardia daily, writer Antoni Puigverd compared the situation in the region to the boiling frog syndrome. That says if a frog is plunged into boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is put into tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will be cooked to death. "This very low intensity violence, this vandalism, these ritual clashes... are the warm water in which the Catalan frog is bathing as it tries to ignore that the fire is still on, and every day the temperature rises a little," he wrote. Andolz, who has experience mediating conflicts in the Balkans and Middle East, doubts that physical violence will become widespread but warns the situation "is more dangerous than it seems." "In conflicts, physical violence is the worst but the easiest to stop," she says. So far, just 400 have arrived -- a worrying sign of the problems that the UN mission, known by its French acronym MINUSCA, is having in coaxing countries into sending men to the flashpoint nation. Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ivory Coast and Uruguay are among the countries which were approached, but without success, a UN source said. In the end, Nepal agreed to provide 600 troops and Rwanda the other 300, the source said, adding, "They should all be there before the mission's mandate is renewed" in December. MINUSCA has been in CAR since April 2014, tasked with helping to stabilise the country after a brutal sectarian-tinged civil conflict that France helped to dampen. It currently has 11,000 troops and 2,000 police in a complement of nearly 13,500 people. But commentators question whether the mission can achieve much, given the scale of CAR's problems. The country is in disarray and most of its territory remains in the hands of rival militias, many of them claiming to protect Christian or Muslim communities. "Like many UN missions, MINUSCA presents several major weaknesses. Foremost, it is undersized and under-equipped. Up against the multiplication of 'hot spots', the mission is completely overwhelmed," the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank said at the end of 2017. Thierry Vircoulon, a specialist at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), is more blunt: "It's not just that nobody wants to go into the Central African quagmire -- it's that this quagmire is pointless." Clashes Events in recent months have heavily underscored such grim assessments. Bangui saw its bloodiest flare-up in two years on April 9-10, when 27 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded in clashes between peacekeeping troops and militias in a flashpoint Muslim enclave of the city. Muslim residents accused UN soldiers of killing 17 men, while MINUSCA said the violence erupted with an ambush of its troops during a security sweep. On May 1, religious-toned violence spread when armed men stormed a Christian church in the middle of a service, killing worshippers and a priest. In response, a mob burned a mosque and lynched two people believed to be Muslim. Twenty-four people died and around 170 were injured. Troubled record Since its deployment, MINUSCA has lost 73 people, three of them since the start of the year. Command and disciplinary problems within MINUSCA have added to the mission's woes. Accusations range from "passivity" in the face of attacks against civilians to sexual abuse and collusion with armed groups. Almost a third of the allegations of sexual abuse reported in all 15 UN peacekeeping missions worldwide in 2017 concerned MINUSCA. In March, Gabon decided to withdraw its 444 soldiers amid allegations of sexual abuse and inadequate equipment. Negotiations are in hand to persuade Gabon to keep these men on the ground. "Their departure planned for June has been postponed until September 30," a UN source said. In 2016, 120 Republic of Congo troops were dismissed after accusations of sexual assault and various forms of illegal trafficking, and last year a battalion of more than 600 of their colleagues was sent home amid similar suspicions. "The fundamental problem for the contingents of Blue Helmets (in the CAR) is not their quantity but their quality," argues Vircoulon. The UN says it is responding to these problems. In 2017, it opened internal inquiries into killings in incidents involving soldiers from the Moroccan, Rwandan and Mauritanian contingents, and appointed human-rights lawyer Jane Connors to vet allegations of sexual abuse. "You'll notice there's only one country that seems to take active steps to rebuff (such operations) or state their resentment of them, but it's international waters and a lot of nations want to see freedom of navigation, so we will continue that," Mattis told reporters as he flew to Hawaii. The US Navy periodically conducts "freedom of navigation" operations in the contested waterway, where it sails close to island features China has built into military facilities as a way of showing it rejects any territorial claims. "We are going out of our way to cooperate with Pacific nations, that's the way we do business in the world, but we are also going to confront what we believe is out of step with international law," Mattis said. Sunday's operation was conducted just over a week after Beijing flew nuclear-capable bombers to a disputed island, drawing immediate criticism from the US. Last week, the Pentagon pulled its invitation to China to join maritime exercises in the Pacific over Beijing's "continued militarization" of the South China Sea. Beijing has been building artificial islands to reinforce its claim over most of the resource-rich South China Sea, despite protests from Southeast Asian countries. Its neighbors, particularly some of those involved in maritime disputes over the waters, have expressed fears China could eventually restrict freedom of navigation and overflight. "Our diplomats are robustly engaged on this," Mattis said. "The concerns have come to me not just from American government circles, but also from foreign nations that are concerned, very concerned about this continued militarization of features in the South China Sea." Mattis was heading to Hawaii to attend a change-of-command ceremony for the US military's Pacific Command. The current head, Admiral Harry Harris, has been nominated to be the new ambassador to South Korea. He will be replaced by Admiral Philip Davidson. We are unable to interact with you as we are blocked. Cc: , read a tweet from the Kenya Police Service. The reason as to why Safaricom blocked the Police Service still remains unclear. However, at the time of publishing this story, the mobile company had already unblocked the Kenya Police Service. Reactions from Kenyans on twitter; @LindahMbaisi you know it's going down when you block the police. @StormBrian13 The guy handling this twitter handle of @PoliceKE must be a comedian comedian tupatane churchill show @MwalimChurchill on Sunday @YangErico They tried to ask for bribe and they got blocked @WabuchaGithinji why did they block you? They could be hiding something. Break in to their twitter just as you break into robbers houses. @Gichy_ But seriously @Safaricom_Care Why would you block a national police account?? @BKiruja@SafaricomPLC@Safaricom_Care are you being serious? Why would you block a Police account from viewing your tweets? They can see from their personal accounts either way. Pls get serious. @ItsBravin Now another Den of Looters has been found. SAFARICOM wamenaswa Olympians Presented With Keys To Queens Two beloved daughters of Queens took their rightful place in the pantheon of iconic borough residents on October 1, as Queens Borough President Donovan Richards,... Van Bramer Dedicates George S. Kaufman Way The man largely responsible for the resurrection of New York Citys motion picture production industry, and for the renaissance of a local neighborhood, was honored... Dromm Co-Names Street In Elmhurst After Polish War Heroes On September 18th, New York City Council Member Daniel Dromm, in partnership with Elmhurst History & Cemeteries Preservation Society, celebrated the Street co-naming of 43rd... 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! SWEDEN: Construction of the Vastlanken cross-city tunnel in Goteborg was officially launched on May 30, with a groundbreaking ceremony attended by Mattias Landgren, State Secretary at the Ministry of Industry, Trafikverket Director General Lena Erixon, Johnny Magnusson, Chairman of Vastra Gotaland region and the leader of Goteborg City Council Ann-Sofie ... Hermitage Capital CEO Browder arrested in Spain flickr.com/World Economic Forum 11:19 30/05/2018 MOSCOW, May 30 (RAPSI) Hermitage Capital CEO William Browder was arrested in Spain on Wednesday on the request of Russian authorities. Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. Going to the police station right now, Browder wrote on his Twitter account. On December 29, a Moscow court sentenced Browder to 9 years in prison in absentia for deliberate bankruptcy and tax evasion. His business partner Ivan Cherkasov received 8 years in prison. The defendants were also fined 200,000 rubles (about $3,500) each. Moreover, Moscows Tverskoy District Court granted a civil lawsuit and recovered 4.3 billion rubles (about $75 million) from the defendants in favor of the Russian Federation. The sentence was appealed and therefore did not take effect. Browder has been charged with several economic crimes, including deliberate bankruptcy and tax evasion, his lawyer Alexander Antipov has told RAPSI earlier. Investigation into Browder was completed within the shortest possible time, from February 8 to 17, 2017, the lawyer added. However, neither the defendant nor his legal team were notified about investigation. According to Antipov, this fact exemplifies secret justice and violates the law. Prosecutors claimed that the defendants caused damage estimated at over 4 billion rubles. The businessmen, residing in the United Kingdom, were put on the international wanted list. In February 2017, the Tverskoy District Court arrested the defendants in absentia. However, the United Kingdom refused to extradite its nationals on Russias request. In 2013, a Russian court sentenced Browder in absentia to 9 years in a penal colony. The court found that between 1997 and 2002, Hermitage Capital auditor Sergey Magnitsky created and applied an illegal tax evasion scheme in the interests of Browder. Magnitsky worked for Firestone Duncan and represented Hermitage Capital, which the Russian authorities accused of tax evasion. Magnitsky was arrested on fraud charges in November 2008 and found dead in a Moscow detention center in November 2009. The lawyers death provoked an international outcry. In July 2013, Moscows Tverskoy District Court found Magnitsky guilty of tax evasion and closed the case due to his death. According to the case materials, Magnitskys and Hermitage Capital director William Browders actions cost Russia over 500 million rubles (over $8 million). Council of Europe calls for rapid investigation into Russian journalists murder in Kiev TASS, Sergey Bobylev 12:42 30/05/2018 MOSCOW, May 30 (RAPSI) Council of Europe has resolutely condemned the murder of prominent Russian journalist Arcady Babchenko in Kiev and called for full and rapid investigation into the crime, according to the statement published on Twitter account of the organizations Secretary General Thorbjrn Jagland. According to Jagland, attacks against journalists and freedom of speech are on the rise in Europe. We must do all we can to stop this trend, which is a dangerous threat to democracy, the statement reads. According to preliminary data of Ukraines national police, Babchenko died after he was shot in the back. His wife turned to law enforcement saying that she found her wounded husband at their home. Reportedly, he died in an ambulance on the way to a hospital. Chairman of Russia's Presidential Council for Human Rights Mikhail Fedotov said that Babchenko was an experienced warzone journalist, who had his own worldview and critical perspective on Russian politics. His murder was a provocation, Fedotov added. Arcady Babchenko was a Russian writer, journalist and warzone reporter, who worked for leading media of the country such as the First Channel and Novaya Gazeta. According to open sources, Babchenko lived in Kiev since 2017 and was a host of a program at the Crimean Tatar TV channel ATR. Russian Justice Ministry proposes extension of undisclosed information list for lawyers 16:59 30/05/2018 MOSCOW, May 30 (RAPSI, Nikita Shiryayev) Russias Deputy Minister of Justice Denis Novak said during a roundtable conference held by the All-Russia civil forum on Wednesday that a list of information that could not be disclosed by attorneys without the consent of their clients should be extended. The law on advocacy contains provision prohibiting lawyers from disclosing information received from their clients during legal assistance. According to Novak, the law is to be amended by a norm obliging attorneys not to disclose client information taken in a different way, in particular by means of a lawyer request, if such information requires to be confidential. Russian investigators launch case over murder of prominent journalist Babchenko in Kiev -/ 10:45 30/05/2018 MOSCOW, May 29 (RAPSI) The Investigative Committee of Russia has launched a criminal case over murder of Russian citizen, prominent journalist Arcady Babchenko, who was shot in Kiev on Tuesday, the press-service of the Committee has stated. According to preliminary data of Ukraines national police, Babchenko died after he was shot in the back. His wife turned to law enforcement saying that she found her wounded husband at their home. Reportedly, he died in an ambulance on the way to a hospital. Chairman of Russia's Presidential Council for Human Rights Mikhail Fedotov said that Babchenko was an experienced warzone journalist, who had his own worldview and critical perspective on Russian politics. His murder was a provocation, Fedotov added. Arcady Babchenko was a Russian writer, journalist and warzone reporter, who worked for leading media of the country such as the First Channel and Novaya Gazeta. According to open sources, Babchenko lived in Kiev since 2017 and was a host of a program at the Crimean Tatar TV channel ATR. Spanish police release Browder after intervention of Interpol flickr.com/World Economic Forum 13:02 30/05/2018 MOSCOW, May 30 (RAPSI) The National Police of Spain released Hermitage Capital CEO William Browder, who was arrested earlier this morning on the request of Russian authorities, after intervention of Interpol, the businessman wrote on his Twitter account. According to Browder, the Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised Spanish police not to honor the new Red Notice by Russian Interpol. On December 29, a Moscow court sentenced Browder to 9 years in prison in absentia for deliberate bankruptcy and tax evasion. His business partner Ivan Cherkasov received 8 years in prison. The defendants were also fined 200,000 rubles (about $3,500) each. Moreover, Moscows Tverskoy District Court granted a civil lawsuit and recovered 4.3 billion rubles (about $75 million) from the defendants in favor of the Russian Federation. The sentence was appealed and therefore did not take effect. Browder has been charged with several economic crimes, including deliberate bankruptcy and tax evasion, his lawyer Alexander Antipov has told RAPSI earlier. Investigation into Browder was completed within the shortest possible time, from February 8 to 17, 2017, the lawyer added. However, neither the defendant nor his legal team were notified about investigation. According to Antipov, this fact exemplifies secret justice and violates the law. Prosecutors claimed that the defendants caused damage estimated at over 4 billion rubles. The businessmen, residing in the United Kingdom, were put on the international wanted list. In February 2017, the Tverskoy District Court arrested the defendants in absentia. However, the United Kingdom refused to extradite its nationals on Russias request. In 2013, a Russian court sentenced Browder in absentia to 9 years in a penal colony. The court found that between 1997 and 2002, Hermitage Capital auditor Sergey Magnitsky created and applied an illegal tax evasion scheme in the interests of Browder. Magnitsky worked for Firestone Duncan and represented Hermitage Capital, which the Russian authorities accused of tax evasion. Magnitsky was arrested on fraud charges in November 2008 and found dead in a Moscow detention center in November 2009. The lawyers death provoked an international outcry. In July 2013, Moscows Tverskoy District Court found Magnitsky guilty of tax evasion and closed the case due to his death. According to the case materials, Magnitskys and Hermitage Capital director William Browders actions cost Russia over 500 million rubles (over $8 million). Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale Buy real estate. Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale in US and Canada. Search Real Estate Petrol and diesel prices were cut on Wednesday by 1 paisa per litre each, the first reduction after 16 days of relentless price hikes. But the marginal decline had its share of excitement with state-owned Indian Oil Corp (IOC) first announcing a reduction of 60 paise -- the biggest since daily price revision was introduced in mid-June last year, only to retract it within a couple of hours citing a technical error. The oil companies this morning announced reduction in petrol price by 60 paise to Rs 77.83 a litre and diesel by 56 paise to Rs 68.75 in Delhi. This was rectified to 1 paisa a litre. "The reduction was supposed to be 1 paisa but due to a clerical error the price prevalent on May 25 was communicated as today's price," a senior official of Indian Oil Corp, the nation's largest fuel retailer, explained. After the 1 paisa cut, petrol in Delhi now costs Rs 78.42 per litre and diesel Rs 69.30. "There is a softening in international oil prices and rupee has strengthened against the US dollar, making imports cheaper. All this will reflect in reduction in retail rates in coming days," he said. Oil companies use 15-day rolling average of Singapore gasoline prices and Arab Gulf diesel prices to arrive at daily rates and so the fall in international oil rates seen in the last few days would be factored in for the revisions in the coming days, he said. The price effected on Wednesday is based on average international rate from May 15 to May 29. For Thursdays rate, the average from May 16 to May 30 will be taken. Rates had touched an all time high of Rs 78.43 per litre for petrol and Rs 69.31 a litre for diesel in Delhi on Wednesday. Prices vary from state to state depending on local sales tax or VAT. Delhi has the cheapest price among all metros and most state capitals. Later, IOC in a statement said: "There was a technical glitch in posting the selling prices of petrol and diesel. The selling prices of petrol and diesel with effect from May 30, 2018 have been rectified. Today, there is a minor reduction in fuel prices." The marginal reduction comes after 16 consecutive price increases since May 14 when fuel retailers ended a 19-day pre-Karnataka poll hiatus to pass on a spike in global oil rates. In all, petrol price was increased by Rs 3.8 per litre and diesel by Rs 3.38 in that fortnight. Economic affairs secretary Subhash Chandra Garg had on Monday stated that fuel prices are expected to cool in the next two or three days. Last week, the government had stated that it was working on a long-term solution to address the volatility in fuel prices. The BJP-led government, in June last year, junked a 15-year old practice of revising rates every fortnight and moved to daily revisions. Accordingly, domestic prices now track global oil prices each day. But these price revisions were put on hold for nearly three weeks prior to the May 12 Karnataka assembly election. While household toilets are only one part of the large challenge for the government, having liquid and solid waste management facilities, along with water delivery across the entire country, is a trickier one. Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Mission in October 2014, setting the template in place for the way the National Democratic Alliance government would launch, promote and implement its social schemes on a grand scale. The mission with two components - urban and rural - is to ensure an open defecation-free country by October 2, 2019. That required, as rightly listed from the beginning, two essential tasks to be done. The infrastructure had to be put in place - toilets in the households, and solid and liquid treatment and handling facilities at the back end. And, then a more arduous task was at hand, ensuring a behavioural and social change. The mission is well on its way on achieving one bit of it. When the programme started, 38.70 per cent rural households had toilets. The government claims that 83.71 per cent have them now. Since 2014-15, 71.96 million toilets have been built, it claims. By all measures, this is a considerable achievement. Interestingly, the government seems to have achieved this with much less money than it had envisaged. While taking a loan from the World Bank, the government projected the rural end of the programme would require $22 billion, equivalent to Rs 147,400 crore (at Rs 65 to a US$), of which Rs 100,000 crore would come from the Central government. In comparison, by 2017-18, the government had spent only Rs 37,000 crore and has allocated another Rs 15,400 crore for 2018-19. This adds up to just above half the projected expenditure. Reports earlier raised doubts over how the targets might have been achieved even though the amount of subsidy provided by the government remained fixed at planned levels. Government officials have told Parliament inadequate funding might be an obstacle to achieving targets in time. They expected Rs 55,000 crore over 2017-19 but the government provided only Rs 32,300 crore, with the possibility of an additional Rs 10,000 crore being made available mid-year. In fact, a target-oriented approach, critics have warned, might later lead to a partial repeat of the problems such schemes have faced in the past - toilets falling into disuse after a while. The government on its part has just completed its first independent verification of its data in March 2018. It claimed the data showed 77 per cent of households were found to have access to toilets and 93.4 per cent of the people who had access to toilets used them. The study was done on a sample of 15 out of 168.5 million households in 6,136 villages. In 2016, Kimberly M Noronha and Shubhagato Dasgupta of the Centre for Policy Research had investigated the weakness of such sample studies to assess the usage of toilets. In their study they noted "survey instruments are designed to measure the presence of toilets, not their usage and reasons thereof. "One of the key reasons for slippage back to open defecation is the fact that toilets are not functional - either they have not been maintained properly or essential services such as water supply to the toilets are problematic." They quoted a sample study in 2016 of 7,500 households with toilets and said that of the toilets constructed in the surveyed households, 29 per cent were found to exist only on paper, and of those built, 36 per cent were considered unusable by the surveyed households. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Rural Development, which has reviewed the programme, has voiced concern over the infrastructure and resources being made available for the use of the constructed toilets. And, the household toilets are only one part of the large challenge for the government. Having liquid and solid waste management facilities, along with water delivery across the entire country, is a trickier one the government has been tackling. And on top of that is the challenge of behaviour change, which cannot be quantified. The Union government does spend 3 per cent of its Budget on outreach and education, expecting states to top that. Naturally it is not within the capacity of a ministry or a programme to change the societal outlook of many who continue to associate handling human waste with oppressed scheduled castes. That is the biggest test of the ambitious programme and one which setting targets does not help one way or the other. Photograph: PTI Photo Indonesia is not even counted as a next-door neighbour of India, though the southern-most tip of India is less than a hundred miles away from the northern-most tip of Indonesia. Bringing Indonesia back in the mainstream of the Indian strategic calculus is a step long overdue, says Dr Rahul Mishra. IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra D Modi being welcomed on his arrival in Jakarta, May 29, 2018. Photograph: Press Information Bureau of India Millennia-old civilisational, societal and cultural linkages bind India and Indonesia together. Bali Jatra, the traditional festival of Odisha, commemorates even today the voyages of Indian sailors to the Bali island of Indonesia. More than seven decades ago, when Indonesia was emerging from the clutches of colonial rule as an independent nation, India proved itself as its strongest friend. Such was the warmth between India and Indonesia back then that Sukarno called then Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru his 'political father'. Together, these two countries strived, albeit with scant success, to anchor a regional association of Afro-Asian nations in the mid-1950s. However, India-Indonesia ties could not sustain the pressures of regional and global forces and despite repeated efforts, they drifted apart with such quantum that in contemporary mainstream discourse, Indonesia is not even counted as a next-door neighbour of India, though the southern-most tip of India is less than a hundred miles away from the northern-most tip of Indonesia. While policymakers and strategic community have made some noises about it, bringing Indonesia back in the mainstream of Indian strategic calculus is a step long overdue. Prime Minister Narendra D Modi's visit to Indonesia could help plug that gap in Indian strategic design. In a bid to underscore the salience of maritime proximity between the two countries, Modi was to embark on his visit on board a ship from Port Blair to Sabang, a port city in the Aceh province of Indonesia. However, those plans had to be cancelled due to logistics issues and bad weather in Sabang. Had Modi been able to cover some distance by ship, he would have repeated what Nehru had done in 1950 when he travelled to Indonesia on INS Delhi. Sabang is strategically located at the northern tip of Sumatra and is in close proximity to the Malacca Straits. The distance between Sabang and the Nicobar Islands is around 350 miles. With the Act East Policy, the maritime component has been reinforced in India's Indonesia policy. Both sides are forging a stronger maritime partnership. It is no coincidence that Indonesia's Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs Luhut Pandjaitan visited India just a few days ago. Interestingly, Pandjaitan mentioned giving India access to the Sabang Port. India is poised to develop the port. India's presence in Sabang also means it would have better access to Malacca. Indonesia's Global Maritime Fulcrum policy is in sync with India's Act East and the Indo-Pacific agenda. Indonesia has been one of the most pro-active Southeast Asian countries which is keen to strengthen maritime linkages with India. For one, during President Joko Widodo's visit to India in December 2016, both sides issued a separate maritime statement along with the usual joint statement. China's trillion-dollar One Belt, One Road initiative, which is both a strategic and economic initiative, has driven other major stakeholders of the region to strengthen their presence in the regional maritime domain. While India, Japan, Australia and the United States are attempting to revive the quadrilateral security dialogue, France too has expressed its interest in playing an active role in the Indo-Pacific region. During his India visit, French President Emmanuel Macron hinted that India, Australia and France should cooperate to form a 'strategic axis' in the maritime sphere to maintain the strategic equilibrium. Being the biggest country in the Indo-Pacific -- both in geographic and economic terms -- it is logical for Indonesia to play a major role in the region. Jokowi's Global Maritime Fulcrum policy, announced in 2014, is a clear signal of Indonesian strategic objectives to play a greater role in the region. Though Jokowi attended the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in May 2017, Indonesia is concerned about OBOR. As Pandjaitan said in India, 'We don't want to be controlled by the Belt and Road... We are also promoting our Global Maritime Fulcrum... It is to balance the One Belt, One Road. The GMF's 'balancing' with OBOR was to ensure that Indonesia remained non-aligned. We would like to be independent. We are too big to be leaning one way or the other.' Such statements depict that Indonesia is no longer willing to settle for a low-key role in the regional maritime and strategic architecture. These strategic priorities serve the long-term interests of both India and Indonesia -- the two major Indian Ocean littoral States. For India, Indonesia's support will bolster its Act East Policy. One also hopes that Modi's visits to Indonesia and Singapore result in India joining the Malacca Strait Patrols which comprises Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. India has been trying to join the grouping, but is yet to achieve a breakthrough. Cooperation with these countries will be a leverage for India vis-a-vis China which is perceived as a cartographic aggressor, to say the least. Indonesia is spotting itself in an increasingly adversarial position with China on the Natuna Islands. In the past few months, Indonesia has conveyed that it is open to weighing its strategic options to ensure the safety of tje Natuna Islands which have a direct bearing on its own territorial sovereignty. It has also been forthcoming in accepting the Indo-Pacific architecture propounded by Japan and the US, and actively endorsed by India and Australia to safeguard its maritime interests amidst China's growing assertiveness in the region. India and Indonesia are mindful of China's overarching presence in the region. The two democracies have repeatedly stated their preference to live in peace with China rather than getting dragged into strategic competition. India is keen on exploring cooperation with like-minded countries in the region. Modi's visit to and cooperation with Indonesia is a part of this strategy. Dr Rahul Mishra is a senior lecturer at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo make a statement after their meeting in Jakarta on Wednesday. Photograph: Courtesy @MEAIndia/Twitter India and Indonesia on Wednesday elevated their bilateral ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and called for freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region as they signed 15 agreements including one on defence cooperation after Prime Minister Narendra Modi held 'productive discussions' with President Joko Widodo. Prime Minister Modi, who arrived in Jakarta on Tuesday night on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, was accorded a red carpet welcome on his arrival at the Merdeka palace, one of the presidential palaces in Indonesia, on Wednesday morning. The meeting commenced with a tete-a-tete between the two leaders, followed by the delegation-level talks. They discussed areas of strategic cooperation, ways towards ensuring better economic ties, closer cultural relations as well as regional and global issues of mutual interest. 'Held productive discussions with President Joko Widodo. Glad that ties between India and Indonesia are gaining strong momentum. We discussed areas of strategic cooperation, ways towards ensuring better economic ties and closer cultural relations between our nations,' Modi tweeted. In a joint press statement after the meeting, Modi said India and Indonesia have agreed to elevate their ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. He said that India's Act East Policy and the vision of SAGAR (Security and Growth for all in the Region) matches Widodo's Maritime Fulcrum Vision. "As mutual partners and neighbours, our worries are similar. It is our duty to ensure maritime security and safety. This is also for the safety of our economic interests," he said. "In the Indo-Pacific region, we, as partners, have mutual interests in each other's progress and well-being and that's why we have agreed upon mutual vision and principles for the Indo-Pacific region," he said. Modi also strongly condemned the recent terror strikes on three churches in Indonesia's second-largest city Surabaya, and said India stands resolutely with Jakarta in the fight against terrorism. A joint statement issued later said the two leaders reiterated their strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations including cross-border terrorism and terror-related incidents in Indonesia and India and affirmed that perpetrators of these heinous acts must be brought to justice. They called upon all countries to work towards disrupting terrorist networks and their financing channels, and halting cross-border movement of terrorists from terror organisations as well as other terrorist groups threatening peace and security in respective region, the statement said. They also shared the view on the imperative need to eradicate radicalism and reiterated the importance of promoting peaceful pluralism. The two countries signed 15 agreements including on the cooperation in the field of defence, space, science and technology, railways and health. Modi said that India and Indonesia will double their efforts to take bilateral trade to $50 billion by 2025. Recalling the visit of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) leaders in January to attend the Republic Day parade in New Delhi, Modi said India-ASEAN partnership can become a guarantee of peace not only in Indo-Pacific region but also beyond it. Both leaders reiterated the importance of achieving a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region where sovereignty, international law, freedom of navigation and overflight, sustainable development and an open and fair trade and investment system are respected, the statement said. It said the two leaders welcomed the adoption of the 'Shared Vision on Maritime Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific between India and Indonesia' with a strong belief that the two sides could develop further cooperation in maritime which can be a force of immense stability in the region. The two countries stressed the importance of a free, open, transparent, rules-based and peaceful Indo-Pacific region, amidst China flexing its military muscles in the strategic East and South China seas. The document, the first with any ASEAN country, outlines areas of maritime cooperation and envisages security architecture in the Indo-Pacific region, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said. Noting that with a coastline of 7,500 km, India occupies a central position in the Indo-Pacific, while Indonesia as the largest archipelagic state in the world, with a coastline of 1,08,000 km, is a fulcrum that connects the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. The two oceans represent a combined maritime region which is important for global maritime trade and commerce, the document said. It highlighted the importance to adhering to the rights and obligations under the international law including the Charter of the United Nations, the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS) and the 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC). 'The two leaders welcomed the growing convergence in the political, strategic, defence, security and economic fields between the two countries,' the statement said. They reaffirmed their commitment in the field of defence, with the signing of Defence Cooperation Agreement between two sides. The pact will further strengthen and renew the existing cooperation for the mutual benefit of the two countries and the region, the statement said. They agreed to further enhance mutual trust through regular meetings and staff talks between their armies, navies and air forces. They also directed officials to expand mutually beneficial collaboration between their defence industries for joint production of equipment, technology transfer, technical assistance and capacity building as well as sourcing of defence equipment. They reiterated the shared commitment to enhance liaison between the intelligence and law enforcement agencies of both countries. Both sides agreed to work intensively for the early conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and reiterated that it needs to be comprehensive, fair and balanced with benefit to all member states. They welcomed potential cooperation in the area of peaceful use of nuclear energy and looked forward to the early renewal of an agreement on cooperation regarding the utilisation of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Both sides agreed to intensify cooperation in the fields of culture, education, tourism, films and people-to-people exchanges. Modi extended advance Eid greetings to the Indonesian people, saying, "On behalf of India's 1.25 billion people, I wish you prosperity, good health and great success." Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority country. PM Modi also announced a 30-day free visa for Indonesian citizens and invited the diaspora to travel to their country of origin to experience the 'New India'. Addressing a gathering of the Indian diaspora at the Jakarta Convention Centre, Modi said, "Not only do the names of our nations rhyme but also there is a distinct rhythm in the India-Indonesia friendship." "We will grant free of cost visa for Indonesian citizens for travel of up to 30 days," Modi said, amid applause. "Many of you may never have been to India. I invite you all to come to India for the Kumbh in Prayag (Allahabad) next year," Modi told the gathering. He said this mega event would be a new experience for the visitors who will not only realise India's ancient culture but also get a glimpse of 'New India'. Kumbh Mela is one of the largest human congregations on the Earth. Modi requested the Indian diaspora to make a habit of visiting their country of origin with friends and experience how India has been changing. Taking a dig at the previous governments, Modi said his government's first priority was to make India corruption free, citizen-centric and development friendly. "Our government, has been preparing India according to the need and expectations of the 21st century," he said. "We have gone a step ahead of Ease of Doing Business.' Our focus is Ease of Living.' Our processes are transparent and sensitive," Modi said. "We have to make a 'New India'. We have to start working to realise the dream of New India by 2022, when India will celebrate 75 years of her independence," Modi added. In the last two-and-a-half years, more than 9,000 start-ups have been registered in India, he said, adding that the world's second largest start-up ecosystem is built in India. "And my friends living in Indonesia, these are happening, laws are the same, officers are the same, offices are the same, tables and chairs are the same, only the government has changed and the country is changing," Modi said. "If the policy is clear and intension pure, then development has to happen which we have shown," he asserted. He lauded the people of Bali and Surabaya for rescuing thousands of Indian tourists stranded in these two places at the time of volcano eruption last year and making arrangements for their safe return. "For this human act, I praise you with all my heart and I thank you. Showing such gestures of human values have been an integral part of India. We are living this with the same spirit in India," Modi said. Be it an earthquake in Nepal or flood in Sri Lanka, India has been recognised as one of the countries which always come forward at the time of calamity, he said. "There is a sensitive government in New Delhi which does not see the colour of the passport. For us, an Indian is important. And in times of calamities, in the last four years in different places, we have rescued and brought back more than 90,000 people without seeing the colour of their passports," Modi said. Modi also visited the Arjuna Wijaya Chariot statue, one of the iconic monuments in the heart of Jakarta. He was accompanied by Widodo during the visit. 'Located in Central Jakarta, the Arjuna Wijaya Chariot statue is a vibrant testimony of the deep-rooted cultural relations between India and Indonesia. Delighted to have visited the statue with President Widodo,' Modi tweeted. 'A manifestation of our age-old cultural ties! PM @narendramodi and Indonesian President @jokowi at Arjuna Wijaya Chariot statue in the heart of the city,' Raveesh Kumar tweeted with a picture of the two leaders shaking hands. The imposing monument depicts a scene from the Indian epic Mahabharata where Lord Krishna is riding a chariot with Arjuna holding a bow and arrow and the chariot is being pulled by eight golloping horses. The horses as per Javenese tradition symbolise eight philosophies of leadership called Asta Brata, namely, Kisma (Earth), Surya (Sun), Agni (fire), Kartika (stars), Baruna (ocean), Samirana (wind), Tirta (rain) and Candra (month). Built in 1987, the statue, standing just next to Monas which is the National Monument of Indonesia, is one of the most famous tourist attractions in Jakarta, especially among visitors coming from India. It is a testimony to the deep civilisational link with India and cultural reach and influence of Mahabharata in Indonesia. The two leaders also flew kites as they inaugurated the first joint kite exhibition themed on India's largest epics Ramayana and Mahabharata at Jakarta's National Monument. 'Connecting through heritage...President @jokowi and I unveiled a unique kite exhibition. The kites in the exhibits were themed on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,' Modi tweeted. 'MoU was inked between the Layang-layang Museum of Jakarta & Kite Museum of Ahmedabad, which will boost cultural ties,' he said. The exhibition is themed on Hindu mythology epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata with images on kites of Lord Rama killing his rival Ravana and of demons. The Ramayana theme is designed by Indonesian organisers while the Mahabharata theme has been designed by Indians. 'Cultural connect touching the skies! Ramayana themed joint kite exhibit unveiled...Ahmedabad and Jakarta Kite Museums exchange MoU,' Raveesh Kumar said in a tweet. 'PM @narendramodi and Indonesian President @jokowi together taking the relationship to new heights!' he tweeted along with a picture of both the leaders flying their kites at the exhibition. The leaders welcomed the conclusion of the MoU between Layang-layang Museum Jakarta and Kite Museum of Ahmadabad and noted with appreciation the holding of the First Joint Kite Exhibition on the theme of Ramayana and Mahabharat at National Monument in Jakarta, Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement. The leaders also agreed to organise an interfaith dialogue in Indonesia in early October 2018, which will be followed by a similar dialogue in India next year to promote pluralism and eradicate radicalism. They shared the view on the imperative need to eradicate radicalism and reiterated the importance of promoting peaceful pluralism that would lead to true civilisation harmony, and moderation through a holistic approach, said a joint statement issued after their meeting. 'Interfaith dialogue is a reflection of the united commitment of both countries to explore a new understanding on the rise of religious identities, the dynamic of pluralism and to eradicate radicalism, terrorism, and violent extremism,' it added. Indonesian singer enthrals PM with 'Sabarmati ke Sant' at banquet Indonesian singer Fryda Lucyana on Wednesday enthralled Modi and other guests with her rendition of popular Hindi song 'Sabarmati ke Sant' at a banquet hosted by Widodo. Accompanied by musicians playing traditional Indonesian instruments, the singer presented her rendition of the song from the 1954 film Jagriti dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, who espoused non-violence. 'A wonderful rendition of 'Sabarmati Ke Sant Tune Kar Diya Kamal' sung by Fryda Lucyana at the banquet hosted by President @jokowi for PM @narendramodi,' the Prime Minister's Office tweeted. Last updated on: May 30, 2018 13:56 IST Prime Minister Narendra Modi is travelling again! The Pradhan Sevak is in Indonesia on the first leg of his three-nation tour to East Asia. This is Modis first-ever official visit to Indonesia and before the visit, the PM hoped that the meet would cement the political, economic and strategic interest of the two friendly maritime neighbours. After work, comes some fun PM Modi and and Indonesian President Joko Widodo fly kites as they inaugurated the first joint kite exhibition themed on India's largest epics Ramayana and Mahabharata at the Jakarta's National Monument. Photograph: @MEAIndia/Twitter The exhibition is themed on Hindu mythology epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata with images on kites of Lord Rama killing his rival Ravana and of demons. nThe Ramayana theme is designed by Indonesian organisers while the Mahabharata theme has been designed by Indians. Photograph: @PIB_India/Twitter Visit to a mosque For Ramzan, PM Modi and the Indonesian President visited the Istiqlal Mosque. Photograph: @MEAIndia/Twitter The Istiqlal Mosque is the national mosque of Indonesia and the largest in southeast Asia. Photograph: @PIB_India/Twitter Modi is quite the musical man. During his visit to the mosque, he also rang the bell at the mosque. Photograph: @MEAIndia/Twitter Getting down to work Productive exchange of views on bringing our two countries further closer! Tete-a-tete between PM Modi and Indonesian President Widodo at Merdeka Palace in Jakarta. Photograph: @MEAIndia/Twitter Getting down to work The two leaders at the delegation-level talks at Istana Merdeka. The two leaders discussed steps to upgrade our relationship to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Photograph: @MEAIndia/Twitter Getting down to work Paying homage Before starting his one-on-one with Indonesian President, Prime Minister Narendra Modi lays a wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes' Cemetery. Photograph: @PIB_India/Twitter "Lest we forget...Paying homage to martyrs of Indonesian independence struggle! PM @narendramodi laying wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes' Cemetery and signing the Visitor's Book, tweeted ministry of external affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar. Photograph: @MEAIndia/Twitter IMAGE: The PM paid his respects at the cemetery where more than 7,000 people who are military casualties and veterans from Indonesian War of Independence are buried. Photograph: @PIB_India/Twitter PM Modi and Indonesian PresidentJoko Widodo at the Arjuna Wijaya Chariot statue in the heart of the city. Photograph: @MEAIndia/Twitter Warm welcome PM Modi was accorded a red carpet welcome and a guard of honour on his arrival at Istana Merdeka ahead of his talks with Indonesian President Joko Widodo. Photograph: @MEAIndia/Twitter Modi and Widodo would discuss bilateral cooperation in a broad range of areas, including maritime, trade and investment. The two leaders would also attend some events, including a CEO Business Forum organised by the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and the Industry, and the Confederation of Indian Industry. Photograph: @MEAIndia/Twitter Touchdown! Wherever PM Modi goes, he is sure to have his fans! Members of the Indian community welcomed PM Modi as he arrived in Jakarta last night. Photograph: @PIB_India/Twitter This is Modi's first-ever official trip to the nation. Photograph: @PIB_India/Twitter The report states that while the national government sometimes spoke out against incidents of violence, local political leaders often did not, and at times made public remarks that individuals could interpret as condoning violence. IMAGE: According to figures compiled by local partners of international non-governmental organisation Open Doors, during the first six months of the year, Christians were harassed, threatened, or attacked for their faith in 410 reported incidents. Photograph: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters Members of civil society and religious minorities in India were concerned over minority communities feeling increasingly vulnerable due to Hindu nationalist groups engaging in violence against them in 2017, a United States report on international religious freedom said. The Congressional-mandated annual report on International Religious Freedom covering 2017 was released by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. According to the report, representatives of religious minority communities stated that, while the national government sometimes spoke out against incidents of violence, local political leaders often did not, and at times made public remarks that individuals could interpret as condoning violence. Members of civil society and religious minorities stated that under the current government, religious minority communities felt increasingly vulnerable due to Hindu nationalist groups engaging in violence against non-Hindu individuals and their places of worship, the report said. Authorities often did not prosecute violence by vigilantes against persons, mostly Muslims, suspected of slaughtering or illegally transporting cows or trading in or consuming beef, the report said. Citing some court cases such as triple talaq, it said many long-standing legal cases involving religiously motivated violence and riots continued to advance slowly. The government continued its challenge to the minority status of Muslim educational institutions in the Supreme Court. Minority status afforded these institutions independence in hiring and curriculum decisions, it said. It said on July 13, Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemned a rise in deadly mob attacks on cattle traders, consumers of beef, and dairy farmers, and said killing persons in the name of protecting cows was unacceptable. In a speech at University of Bangalore on August 7, then-Vice President of India Hamid Ansari said Dalits, Muslims, and Christians were feeling increasingly insecure, it noted. In an August 10 interview, Ansari stated there was a feeling of unease and insecurity creeping in among Muslims in the country. His remarks drew criticism from the Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindu nationalist groups, the report said. According to figures compiled by local partners of international non-governmental organisation Open Doors, during the first six months of the year, Christians were harassed, threatened, or attacked for their faith in 410 reported incidents, compared with 441 incidents in all of 2016, the report said. From January through May, the ministry of home affairs reported 296 conflicts between religious communities, resulting in 44 deaths and 892 injuries, it said. 'ISI's leverage on the Kashmir insurgency turned out less than successful...' It was a book that was bound to garner both attention and controversy as spymasters from both sides of one of the most contentious borders in the world, India and Pakistan, came together to write a book that dealt with the major issues between the two nations. While the response to the book has been fairly muted in India, it has raised hackles in Pakistan, with Lieutenant General Mohammad Asad Durrani (retd) -- former director-general, Inter-Services Intelligence -- finding himself restricted from leaving the country and being placed on Pakistan's exit-control list. Read on for a fascinating excerpt from The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI And The Illusion Of Peace on R&AW and the ISI's successes and failures: IMAGE: 'Our biggest failure was when the Kashmir uprising happened, we did not know how far it would go,' says former ISI director-general Lieutenant General Mohammad Asad Durrani (retd). Photograph: Danish Ismail/Reuters Aditya Sinha (journalist): What has been the greatest ISI failure against India? Lieutenant General Mohammad Asad Durrani (retired 3-star rank Pakistani general; former director-general, Inter-Services Intelligence; former director-general, Pakistan military intelligence division): I think my colleague should start. Amarjit Singh Dulat, former special director, Intelligence Bureau; former chief, Research and Analysis Wing; special advisor to the prime minister on Kashmir: Our biggest failure against Pakistan is that we've not been able to turn around an ISI officer or have an ISI officer working for us. Or not to my knowledge, at a level where it counts. Sinha: Even if we had a mole inside ISI, nobody would know. Dulat: Moles are easier to have than defectors. Double agents are the next best thing to defectors. If a guy is working for Pakistan and I get hold of him, then I have a chance of getting to where I'm supposed to be. So, not being able to find an ISI defector is our biggest failure. Durrani: At the operational level, the 1965 war, we could claim we got good information about the other side, how they are assembled for war. But it was a lost effort. In the 1971 war, the ISI was unable to anticipate the attack in East Pakistan. In my time we predicted that India's military build-up, after the Kashmir uprising, was not intended for war. I can pat my own back for that. But the biggest failure was when the Kashmir uprising happened, we did not know how far it would go. These things usually run their course in six months or a year. When it became lasting, we wondered how to keep a handle on it. We didn't want it to go out of control, which would lead to a war that neither side wanted. Could we micro-manage it? That was our challenge. ISI's leverage on the Kashmir insurgency turned out less than successful. Going back to the evolution of the Kashmir uprising of the 1990s, I think the formation of the Hurriyat to provide a political direction to the resistance was a good idea. Giving up handle on the movement -- letting the factions do what they bloody well wanted to -- was not. IMAGE: 'The formation of the Hurriyat to provide a political direction to the (Kashmiri) resistance was a good idea. Giving up handle on the movement -- letting the factions do what they bloody well wanted to -- was not,' says General Durrani. Photograph: Fayaz Aziz/Reuters Dulat: Let me make clear one thing. In public perception, not getting Dawood (Ibrahim, Indian gangster and terrorist believed to be living in Pakistan) or Hafiz Saeed (one of the terrorists responsible for the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, co-funder, Lashkar-e-Tayiba, chief, Jamaat-ud-Dawah) or Masood Azhar (founder, Jaish-e-Mohammed, one of the terrorists responsible for the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks and the 2016 attack on the Pathankot air base) are glaring failures. But, if instead of putting out a supari for Dawood, you 'turned' the ISI station chief in Delhi, that in intel would be a much bigger thing. About the Pakistani angle in Kashmir, they often crow about putting out somebody here, or bumping off somebody there, or forcing someone to form an organisation, or sending out diktats. It's okay, works to an extent. Kashmir is very painstaking and requires patience. That is where Pakistan has lost out. Because, after a while, the feeling was, as General Saheb said, jaane do, let them go. This is on the basis of conversations with Pakistanis over the last 10 years, since the Mumbai attack. The general response was that they can talk about Kashmir later, for now they can put it on the backburner. But it's now 'game on' again in the last three years because of the uncertainty we've created. The status quo mess we create gets Pakistan interested again. I used to tell Pakistani friends in Track-II, let's discuss your core issue, Kashmir. Even General Saheb would say, there isn't sufficient interest in Kashmir. Forget it for the time being. It's been like that. It's a typical military reaction, a typical military way of dealing with a problem. That possibly, Sir, is one of the shortcomings in the ISI. Durrani: That's in our system. Dulat: You bulldoze your way. The Kashmiri knows how to play different sides. Sinha: So the intelligence game is won by the Kashmiri even though he is suffering. Dulat: A fellow I've known for years will tell me one thing and, six months later, will tell me something else; his perception, his story, everything will change. In between, he'll bowl General Saheb a googly. But Kashmir requires time. If you want to understand it or get yourself involved then it requires time, patience, empathy. Durrani: I agree. I also agree with the point that, under the circumstances, Kashmiris or Afghans learn to live with it, which means you have to keep two or three different sides in good humour. And still survive, fighting the Indian army or the US army. Excerpted from The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI And The Illusion Of Peace by A S Dulat, Aditya Sinha and Asad Durrani with the kind permission of the publishers, Harper Collins India. Then came the electrifying climax of Tuesday's hearing. Pasbola showed Sharma copies of cheques that had been deposited at the bank with Indrani's signature on them. He accused Sharma of forging Indrani's signature and collecting the money for herself. In the back Indrani stood up in the accused box and very pointedly nodded her head up and down and mouthed, "She did!". Vaihayasi Pande Daniel reports from the Sheena Bora murder trial. Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com There is something about the word forgery that presses Kajal Sharma's buttons. Sudeep Ratnamberdutt Pasbola knows it very well. The lawyer doesn't hesitate to use the word as often as possible, as he continued with his cross examination of Indrani Mukerjea's former assistant in the Sheena Bora murder trial, taking place at CBI Special Courtroom 51, Mumbai city civil and sessions court, Kala Ghoda. Every time he referred to the Sheena Bora signatures, that Sharma ostensibly practiced and copied, allegedly at Indrani's behest, onto the resignation letter sent into Sheena's office, Mumbai Metro One and on the cancellation of the leave and license document for Sheena's flat, he always said the signature "you forged." Sometimes Kajal corrected him, when she answered, and replaced "forged" for "copied." It was a mind game that perhaps the canny Pasbola was playing. Maybe he was trying to keep her on edge. Tuesday, May 29, established once again, if you believed Sharma, that ye wicked Forgery and Sharma had never met. Nor shall the twain meet, while Sharma remained in complete denial. Copying a signature is not considered forgery, she declared on Tuesday. Copying a signature on another paper that is not "stamp paper" and not related to property is not wrong or unlawful, she said she always believed. That bald and rather original statement produced a round of laughs. That forgery means, as per the Oxford English Dictionary, 'the action of forging a copy or imitation of a document, signature, banknote, or work of art', was a definition Sharma had never encountered in her life. She further suggested that leave and license rental documents didn't have anything to do with property. Given Tuesday's 33 degrees heat and 71 per cent humidity, Pasbola didn't need to look around for any new mind games. The brutal summer heat was doing the mind bending or bheja fry, all by itself. As everyone in the courtroom watched the clock, miserably mopped their brows with handkerchiefs and looked beseechingly up at the ancient fans above them, that gave just a maddeningly delicate whisper of breeze in the sultry, stuffy room, where most of the windows were closed because of the court renovation, the only wish prevailing was: When would the hearing finish?? Let that unkind person, excuse me, who recently tweeted, asking why judges needed a summer break, come and sample an average Indian courtroom in the height of summer! Sharma, wearing a long red and gold kurta and red salwar, had placed a white handkerchief in the little shelf in front of the witness stand, and used it liberally too. The hearing was the first hearing after this courtroom's two-week summer break. The room, in the interim, had undergone a few mild, not very uplifting, changes. It was much dustier. One wonders how courtrooms get cleaned. How does the endless empire of bundles and boxes of papers get dusted? Courtroom 51 is undoubtedly immensely more dusty than what it was when I entered it first in February 2017. Over the break, four more trunks have been added to the room, one of them labelled in black marker PNB, containing with papers evidently relating to the Nirav Modi scam case, apparently to cases pertaining to his jeweller uncle Mehul Choksi's role. Shiny steel, these trunks are, excitingly, the newest items added to the room probably in the last ten years, apart from the calendars. Given their cleanliness and the state of the room's lumpy, rickety, downward-sloping chairs, they offer the prospect of more comfy seating. Two of the trunks had been parked on top of older trunks, smack in front of the accused box at the back. On Tuesday Indrani, wearing a beige and maroon handloom printed sleeveless kurta and a maroon salwar, sat in the middle, between husband Peter Mukerjea and former husband Sanjeev Khanna. Sanjeev, looking smart in a black T-shirt and jeans, who was in the corner, was all but obliterated from the room, given he was behind the imposing column of three trunks. Though she filed papers to divorce Peter, Indrani and Peter spoke off and on amicably together, during the hearing. She remains, puzzlingly, closest to these two men, it would seem, who would not be in the accused box but for her. As puzzling is Kajal Sharma. An engaging and confusing battle of wits played out in Courtroom 51 on Tuesday between Pasbola and Sharma. The opponents were well matched. Pasbola fumed and raged at Sharma. He roared too, frustrated and exasperated. But it didn't get him many of the answers he needed. Or get them any sooner either! At times his rough verbal handling of Sharma earned him CBI Special Judge Jayendra Chandrasen Jagdale's irritation. Sharma was throughout the perfect picture of worried distress, attempting to answer Pasbola's questions, but always seemingly defeated and confused by them. Or shocked and outraged. She occasionally bent her head looking down, as if the questioning was all getting too much for her. Sometimes her indignation was so vast, her eyes innocently and enormously wide, she had the room in splits, including the riled Pasbola, who had planned to finish his cross examination of Sharma on Tuesday but could not because he muttered: "Jawab nahin deti hai. Nahin toh aaj hi khatam kiya (She doesn't give answers, otherwise I could have finished it today)." For the bystander, watching Pasbola's chugging train of questions approach Sharma and she sidestep them neatly, as if they were bound elsewhere, was an adventure. The Q and A was often so much at cross purposes it was, at times, unreal and humorous, if it wasn't so hot. It took up to 5 to 10 minutes for Pasbola to get an answer to a single question, after he had rephrased it three times and repeated it once, after which Sharma wailed, "Bahut lamba question hai! (It is a very long question!)" and proceeded merrily to give an answer totally unrelated to the question, with a few extraneous asides thrown in, for good measure. Pasbola would grit his teeth and announce to the judge that he had still not got an answer. No surprise that halfway through the lawyer was like a pot put to boil, simmering at a temperature a few degrees above the already sizzling high room average. A sample: When Pasbola was asking her about some cheques he produced the xeroxes of them, as an exhibit and questioned if she had ever been shown the originals by the CBI or by the police, Sharma first asked if by cheque xerox did he mean cheque photocopy. Pasbola stumped and taken aback, irritatedly: "Why are you asking me questions?" Sharma unperturbed smoothly: "Mujhe clarify karna tha (I wanted to clarify)." She asked a few more queries about Pasbola's query, leading him to yell: "I don't need to tell you the ABCDE of it." Once again he asked her if she had been ever shown the original of the cheque. But she looked at him perplexed, "But original bank mein gaya? (But the original went to the bank?)" Pasbola, exploding: "Aap se kya lena dena? Police ja ke le aa sakte hai bank se (What does that have to do with you? The police can go and get it from the bank)." She finally answered saying she had not been shown the originals. Tuesday, in spite of the wild, time-consuming detours, uncovered a few pertinent points. Pasbola had Sharma identify, before the court, certain copies of e-mails from the agent Indrani dealt with, Mystic Travels, that showed that the secretary had booked tickets for Indrani's son from her first marriage/relationship, Mekhail Bora, although in earlier hearings she had claimed she had not. She was asked how many times she had to practise Sheena Bora's signature before she got it perfect. She couldn't remember. Nor could she remember for how long she practiced it. Or how many samples of her practising she sent Indrani, as requested, for her approval. Sharma said she had torn up the sheets she practised on. She also deleted some of the mails she sent Indrani in this connection, though which exactly she had deleted she could not remember specifically. Pasbola asked her if she didn't think what she was doing was wrong why did she delete mails and tear up papers. Sharma: "Mujhe patta nahin tha ki galat kam kar rahi thi (I didn't know I was doing something wrong)." A large laugh erupted from the back of the room when Sharma said that. Indrani stood in the accused enclosure laughing heartily as if what Sharma said was the funniest thing she had heard in a long time. Sharma: "I deleted a few mails as per Indrani's instructions." Pasbola: "You deleted them because you didn't want to keep any evidence of your wrongdoing?" Sharma, her voice rising agitatedly: "Hum ne galat kaam nahin kiya. Us waqt mujhe patta nahin tha ki galat kaam kar rahi hoon. I was not aware about Sheena Bora. Ki woh nahin hai. Mein blindly boss ke instruction follow kar rahi thi (I didn't do anything wrong. At that moment I didn't know I was doing anything wrong. I was not aware about Sheena Bora and that she was not around. I was blindly following my boss's instructions)." Pasbola reasoned with her if that was the case, why did she express initial reluctance to the idea of copying Sheena Bora's signature to Indrani. Wasn't her reluctance because she knew it was a wrong thing to do? Sharma speaking and appealing to the judge: "Nahin maloom tha, Sir (I didn't know Sir). I didn't know something wrong was going on. Legal document nahin tha. Property papers nahin thi. Indrani and she were sisters. Kaun sapna mein sochega (Who would have in their dreams thought)..." So Pasbola asked why she went ahead with the forgery. Sharma said she was told that Sheena was in the US and had no access to the Internet. Pasbola wondered how she could have believed that a country like the US did not have Internet. Judge Jagdale intervened: "It depends on each person's understanding." Pasbola: "She is not a rural person!" Sharma turned roundly on Pasbola and angrily started off like a little spitfire, "Pahela baat mein US gayi nahin hoon (Firstly, I have not been to the US)." Pasbola first mildly bemused, burst out laughing. Then she added that secondly it was about the employee-boss relationship. Pasbola with exaggerated mock patience: "And? Aur kya? Chautha? Panchva? Bolti raho! (What else! Fourthly? Fifthly? Keep talking!)" The cross-examination launched into the interpretation of the word forgery and what it meant with Sharma offering her Kajal Sharma's Dictionary of Unexpected Words version that it was forgery if it was on stamp paper only, that had the room quite amused. Sharma, like she had said in an earlier hearing, insisted amazingly: "Forgery word patta nahin tha. Abhi bahut achcha se patta chal gaya! (I didn't know this word forgery earlier. Now I know it very well!). Now I won't sign on any kind of paper for anyone!" The lawyer then proceeded to brutally tell Sharma, that all of her stories and accounts were false. Sharma let out an offended squeak, that set the room off laughing again, and, severely vexed, questioned Pasbola on how he could be saying what he was. Pasbola continued that there was never any letter that she had signed and sent to Mumbai Metro North nor leave and license documents to Sheena's landlord. And that she had concocted the whole tale from start to finish. Then came the electrifying climax of Tuesday's hearing. Pasbola showed Sharma copies of cheques that had been deposited at the bank with Indrani's signature on them. He promptly accused Sharma, in a strong loud tone, of forging Indrani's signature and signing them and collecting the money for herself. "Ye cheque par aapne signature forge karke paisa withdraw kiya. Indrani ki signature nahin hai (You forged Indrani's signature on these cheques and withdrew the money. Indrani did not sign them)." Sharma looked dazed and suitably scandalised by such an accusation and appealing to the judge she denied it with a vehement: "Completely galat ha (wrong)." She added that the bank was in constant touch with Indrani on the phone and e-mail and sent her statements and that was not possible that transactions could happen without her knowing. Pasbola relentlessly went on in a ringing tone: "The CBI knew about this. Aap CBI ke dabbao mein thi. Bachane ke liye aap ne jhoot gavai diya (You were under pressure from the CBI. To save yourself you have given this false statement in court)." Sharma's husband, sitting in the front row, who was wearing a dark T-shirt and jeans and holding her red handbag, had a blank expression on his face, his head bent, his fingers fiddling with the design of her purse. In the back Indrani stood up in the accused box and very pointedly nodded her head up and down and mouthed, "She did!" Sharma replied to Pasbola's accusations in an equally ringing voice: "Na CBI ke dabbao mein thi. Na police ke dabbao mein thi. Na media ke dabbao mein thi (I was neither under pressure from the CBI, nor from the police nor the media)." The media part of her self-righteous retort elicited a few smiles from the bench of lawyers. Sharma, whose time in the witness box will end most likely later this week, as you look into her often hurt and bewildered face, has been no less fascinating or theatrical a witness than those before her, her statements alternately baffling and convincing. Witness boxes have the unexpected and uncanny capacity to show you much more about the complexities of human character than you ever knew existed. Pasbola asked Sharma a few more questions about the bookings she made for Mekhail. Those questions too got mired in an argument between Pasbola and Sharma, as to who had sent message from the travel agency. Tuesday's hearing spread across the day. It was scheduled to start at 11 am. But by noon, the prison buses had not yet brought in the accused, with probably everyone on relaxed holiday schedule. The hearing continued in the afternoon, after lunch, with Peter having lunch with his sister Shangon Das Gupta. The sprawling, colourful behemoth that is the south Mumbai civil and sessions court was not bustling on Tuesday. Its usually vigorous corridors were quiet and empty, almost forlorn -- with even the canteen boys, who usually rushed about with meals and bottles of water, the population of over-reproducing court cats and its black dog missing -- as many of the courtrooms were on summer break. 'It made me sad that these people had to spend a minimum of 20 dirhams from the meagre 800 dirhams they get, to pray.' 'God had helped me many times in my life, it was my duty to help these people.' The incredible story of Saji Cherian. IMAGE: Saji Cherian with the mosque behind him. All photographs: Kind courtesy Saji Cherian On June 1, when the mosque Mariam, Umm Eisa (Mary, the Mother of Jesus) in Fujairah (around 170 km from Dubai), United Arab Emirates, opens its doors for the public to pray, it will create history. For it is not just another mosque, but built by a Malayali Christian businessman as a Ramzan gift to the thousands of workers living in the East Ville Real Estate complex in the Al Hayl Industrial Area, Fujairah. The Christian businessman is Saji Cherian. His journey from Kayamkulam in Kerala to Fujairah via Mumbai has all the twists and turns you see in a film. Plus, it has a fairytale ending too. He landed in Dubai with just 630 dirhams in 2003 with no job and no contacts. In fact, he was running away from Kerala to make some money so that he could repay the debt of Rs 20 lakhs (Rs 2 million) he had incurred while building a hotel. It was not like Saji Cherian has the Midas touch and everything he touched turned into gold. He has seen huge ups and downs in the last 15 years. From wandering the streets of Fujiarah hungry and tired, to building a successful business, then losing everything and falling into debt again, he has seen it all. Perhaps it is this unpredictability of life that has made him believe in the unseen power. Though born and brought up in an orthodox Christian family, Saji Cherian was not a regular church-goer till his wife came into his life. Before gifting the mosque to his fellow Muslims of Fujairah, he built a church there as well. He wants to build a Hindu temple next. This is the incredible story of 49-year-old Saji Cherian. I was running a restaurant in Kayamkulam quite successfully with two of my friends, but it was situated on my brother's land. So, when I got my own land on the side of the national highway, I decided to build a hotel there. With a bank loan of Rs 20 lakhs, along with the money I got from selling my wife's jewellery, I plunged into building a three-storey hotel. Even before I could finish the first floor, I ran out of money. It clearly showed how inexperienced and immature I was about the business. The only reality in front of me was I had to repay the bank loan and I had no money. I knew I would not be able to repay the loan if I remained in Kerala. The only place I thought that could save me was Dubai. I remembered Gopalakrishnan from Kayamkulam who ran a successful business in Dubai who had come to our restaurant once and had given me his business card. I called him and appraised him of my situation. I will not be able to forget this man and the help he offered me at a time I was neck deep in debt. He had only seen me once and he was not obliged to help me at all, but he did. He was like God to me. With just Rs 30,000 and a visiting visa to UAE in hand, I took a train to Mumbai, telling my wife that I had got a job there. My two friends were also with me as I knew if I left them behind in Kayamkulam, their lives also would be in misery. Till I boarded the train to Mumbai, I had not seen the world outside Kerala. I was under the impression that Mumbai was like the underworld I saw in films! After finding jobs for my friends in Mumbai, and dividing the Rs 30,000 equally among us, I took an Emirates flight one night from Mumbai to Dubai. I landed in Dubai on a hot day in July 2003 around 11 at night. I had no idea where to go and whom to call. I sat outside the Dubai airport till 2 in the morning. Though it was very hot even at night, I was shivering inside. The sheer size of Dubai airport intimidated me, a person who had not seen a world outside Kayamkulam. The first thing I did was I converted the rupees I had and got 630 dirhams. At 6 in the morning, I went to the taxi stand with no clear idea on what to do. I overheard two Malayalis talking about a place called Fujairah. They said it was one of the fastest growing cities in the UAE and there were a lot of opportunities there. I had no idea where this Fujairah was. Suddenly I saw a bus going to Fujairah and I bought a ticket paying 25 dirhams. And thus I started my journey to this unknown place called Fujairah. My heart raced fast thinking of what awaited me. It was a make or break trip for me. I would either succeed or fail. There was no intermediary in life, I felt. I got out at the last stop and the first shop I noticed was the Delhi Durbar restaurant. I went there and had lunch for 5 dirhams. After lunch, I just sat there, not knowing what to do next. At 2.30, I was asked to get out as they were going to close the shop till 6.30. Later I came to know that all shops closed from 2.30 to 6.30 because of extreme heat. It was 48 degrees outside, but I had no other option but sit outside. Three months passed. There I was at the mercy of many unknown Malayalis and despite wandering around in the hot sun from morning till evening, lady luck did not smile at me. I had to go back home empty-handed. But I was not ready to accept defeat. I came back again with another visitor's visa. This time I was lucky to get a visa to work in the construction business. The first work I got was to do an extension of a villa. The contract was for 50,000 dirhams and I got an advance of 10,000 dirhams. I bought two visas and brought two people over from Tamil Nadu and started my own construction company with an Arab as a partner. I worked like crazy but with meticulous planning, starting my day at 5 in the morning. I myself took all my workers to the site, bought construction materials and supervised everything. My business flourished and after three years, I had 140 people working for me. We were building 36 villas. I had 98 trailer trucks and was doing a business of 18 million dirhams a month. I sold diesel and building materials and also ran trucks. It was as if nothing could go wrong. It was during this time that my wife made a non-church goer like me a church-goer. It so happened that in 2012, a former non-church goer like me decided to build a church in Dibba, a place close to Fujairah. This happened when I found that prayer was conducted in a small house because there was no proper church there. IMAGE: Saji Cherian with his wife and sons. Then the unexpected happened. Around mid-2013, 446 cheques worth 16 million dirhams bounced and I had a debt of 16 million dirhams, which was almost Rs 50 crore. From a successful businessman, I became a man with no money and no business. Everything vanished in a day. It was like, I was back in 2003 again. Cheques deposited in my account bounced and the bank imposed a fine of 40,000 dirhams on me. I could have fled the country, but I didn't want to do that. I didn't want anyone to call me a fraudster. Almost all the Malayalis in Fujairah thought I would run away. I remembered my father who was a road contractor. He had suffered losses several times in his career, but each time, he worked hard and came up. I was his son and I knew I would come out of all the troubles one day. But I wanted my wife and children to go back to Kerala away from all the turmoil I had created, but my wife was unwilling to leave my side. She said we will face everything together. Faced with incessant phone calls and threats, anybody in my place would have committed suicide, but I tried to float though I knew I was drowning. It was like God sent this man to me. In early 2014, after almost two years of darkness, an Arab offered me a piece of land saying I could do something there. I accepted the offer and took 35,000 sq metres of land on lease, but without having a single paisa. I was penniless, but my plan was to construct something on the land as I had lots of construction material taken on credit in the shop lying unused. In 90 days, I constructed 100 rooms as a labour camp. I promised my workers that I would pay them after 90 days. I knew I would either survive or perish. The day the rooms were ready, a company took all 100 rooms on rent for its workers and gave me 1.1 million dirhams as advance rent. With that money, I started paying back my debt. In three years' time, I paid off the entire debt of 16 million dirhams. Now, in 2018, I have taken a 70,000 sq metre space on lease for 20 years and I have constructed 800 rooms along with a service station, saloon, garage, water treatment plant, recreation room, super market, laundry and a convention centre that can accommodate 1,300 people. I have rented out every single space I have constructed. IMAGE: The mosque opens for worship on June 1, 2018. Why did I decide to build a mosque? I grew up amidst a lot of difficulties and I can never forget the struggle my parents had to go through to bring us all up. So, even though I know the value of money, I know very well that it is not the end of the world. In my case also, money came in plenty and also vanished. Neither my wife nor I have any desire to amass wealth. Yes, we need money to lead a decent life, and the rest, I want to use to help people. Now, we have 4,500 labourers working for 53 companies staying in the 800 rooms I have built. Every single person who comes to the Middle East comes as a labourer, and each and every labourer comes from a very poor family. These labourers get a meagre salary of 600 to 800 dirhams a month. About 1,000 of them are Muslims from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Africa, Ukraine, etc. It made me sad to see that these people had to spend a minimum of 20 dirhams from the meagre 800 dirhams they get, to go out to pray. God had helped me in many ways at many times in my life, it was my duty to help these people. This country (Fujirah and the United Arab Emirates) has treated all people who have come here as their own and they have done all they can to make all our lives pleasant. This is a Muslim country, but they saw to it that people of all faiths have places to worship. They have built churches and temples for us to pray with their own money. I would call this God's own country. So, I decided to build a mosque inside the complex itself. After two years of work, it will be open during this Ramadan on the 1st of June with an iftar party. It will be attended not only by the 4,500 labourers who stay there, but many other important people. Because I used my own materials and my own workers did the work, I spent only 1.3 million dirhams. Otherwise, it would have cost more than 2 million dirhams. Many people came forward to help when the news spread that I was building a mosque, but I had decided earlier itself that it would be my gift to the people, for peace and brotherhood. I don't seek acceptance or appreciation from anyone except my wife. I only look for that loving look, the smile and the hug because she was the one who has been with me through all the ups and downs in my life, giving me the strength to move forward. I have one more dream. After building a church and a mosque, I want to build a Hindu temple here in the next one year. Hollywood, FL -- (ReleaseWire) -- 05/30/2018 --Saffron Investigations is a premier South Florida based private investigation agency. The prime mission of this firm is to offer their clients the best-in-class investigative services in a timely and affordable manner. Saffron Investigations has been founded by Michael Moloney, who is a retired South Florida law Enforcement Detective having approximately three decades of experience in law enforcement and military. All the investigations conducted by this firm are monitored on a daily basis by Michael. 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A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind. iStock/Thinkstock(SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico) -- A new report suggests that the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria may be more than 70 times the official estimate. Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health estimated that between Sept. 20 and Dec. 31, there were 4,645 "excess deaths," according to the report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The government's official death toll currently stands at 64. The report relied on household surveys to generate the estimate, which researchers said had a margin of error of plus or minus 3,852, meaning the actual number of deaths could be as low as 793 or as high as 8,498. However, they say about 5,000 is a likely figure. In a statement following the announcement, Carlos Mercader, the executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, said, "We have always expected the number to be higher than what was previously reported." Mercader added: That is why we commissioned The George Washington University (GWU) to carry out a thorough study on the number of fatalities caused by Hurricane Maria, which will be released soon. Both studies will help us better prepare for future natural disasters and prevent lives from being lost. The number of lives claimed following Maria remains something of a mystery on the island. A team from George Washington University is currently leading an independent effort to count the dead. Dr. Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health, told ABC News the task of counting the deaths is an exhausting one that involves interviewing people involved in the care of those who passed away. Estimating death, injuries, illness and displacement in the aftermath of a disaster can be very challenging as the very infrastructure you depend on to keep the count has been disabled, making it hard to get an accurate picture. As part of Harvard researchers' report, over 3,200 households were randomly visited and surveyed, which included over 9,500 people. This data was compared statistically with the estimated population of 3.4 million in Puerto Rico. When compared to the matching three-month span in 2016, the estimate revealed a 62 percent increase in mortality rate after Maria, which led researchers to estimate the 4,645 "excess deaths." Household members said that many of these deaths related to Maria involved not injuries caused by the storm, but rather delay or prevention of access to medical care afterward, according to the report. The 4,645 deaths may still be an underestimate, researchers said, since deaths may have continued into 2018 and would not yet be counted. San Juans Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, a critic of the federal response to Maria, said in a tweet, This should be a day of collective mourning in Puerto Rico. Thousands dead because administrations that could not get the job done. I dont think we will ever exactly know, Daguao resident Maria Lopez told ABC News. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Image credit: DPA The Board of the Diamond Producers Association has acknowledged the decision of The De Beers Group of company to enter the synthetic diamond market through its subsidiary Element Six, says a press release from the organization.DPA also states that its objective is to promote long term demand for diamonds as unique miracles of nature, and that the DPA Board, its members and its team remain fully dedicated to this important mission.Stephen Lussier, Chairman of the DPA and Executive Vice President of Marketing for De Beers Group, commented, De Beers Groups commitment to the Diamond Producers Association is stronger than ever. I am looking forward to working with my fellow DPA Board members and with the DPA team for many years to come on the promotion of the Diamond Dream.Jean-Marc Lieberherr, CEO of the DPA commented on the announcement, The DPA has always been clear that more fair and transparent practices need to be adopted by synthetic diamond producers. We are very confident that Element Six will set a new standard in disclosure and marketing of synthetic diamonds, which will in the end benefit consumers and bring much needed clarity to this new category. It is clear from the Lightbox positioning that they will market synthetic diamonds for what they are - low cost pretty stones and not for what they are not real diamonds, rare, precious and inherently valuable. Sergey Ivanov met with Aisen Nikolaev 30 may 2018 News ALROSAs CEO Sergey Ivanov had a meeting with Aisen Nikolaev, Head, a.i., of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) on Monday, May 28.The meeting took place in Moscow. Sergey Ivanov congratulated Aisen Nikolaev with his appointment in the high post and highlighted the ongoing changes in the company, its plans and key tasks of ALROSAs top management. According to S. Ivanov, constructive efforts are under way within the company and the head of the Region, which is a key region for ALROSA, in respect of both the Supervisory Board and on the targets. ALROSAs CEO also expressed his sincere gratitude to the former Head of Yakutia E.A. Borisov and assured that the company wiould continue to support the leaders of the Republic on all the matters that relate to Yakutias social and economic development, its welfare and prosperity. Sergey Ivanov said, The company is having a productive and highly constructive dialogue with the Government of Yakutia on all the matters connected to ALROSAs operations. We have common interests for ALROSA to continue as a leader in the industry not only in volume terms but also in terms of other aspects, as bringing stable income for its shareholders and fully respecting its social commitments before the workers of the company and the citizens of Yakutia. We are looking forward to fruitful cooperation and coordinated policy in terms of the increase of competitiveness of the company, its effectiveness, strengthening ALROSAs role on the global scene which help to achieve greater financial results. IRIS USA, a manufacturer and distributor of injection-molded plastic products, is building a new manufacturing plant at the Humboldt Industrial Park, Hazleton, Pa., on the Reading & Northern Railroad (RBMN). Sendai, Japan-based IRIS USA has purchased a 34-acre site in Humboldt East and soon will begin construction of its first plant on the East Coast, an $84 million, 500,000-square-foot manufacturing and distribution facility. When completed the plant, will create 95 full-time jobs. RBMN, a three-time Railway Age Regional Railroad of the Year, worked with CAN DO, a non-profit industrial/economic development corporation serving Greater Hazleton in Northeastern Pennsylvania; Penns Northeast, Northeastern Pennsylvanias regional economic development agency; and others in helping IRIS choose the Humboldt site. Reading & Northerns ability to build the necessary track infrastructure for a reasonable price and in a timely matter was critical in the IRIS deliberations, the railroad noted. We also worked with other local partners to provide economic incentives to IRIS so that it was able to choose this site. CAN DOs marketing department worked for more than one year with the Governors Action Team on the project, assisted by Hazle Twp., the Hazleton Area School District and Luzerne County, which provided vital tax incentives through the LERTA (Local Economic Revitalization Tax Assistance) program. IRIS USA is building the new plant in response to strong growth in customer demand, especially in the area of e-commerce, said IRIS President Doc Takahashi. With the exponential growth of online purchasing, we are pleased to be able to respond to commercial and consumer demand by locating our new facility on the East Coast, with such close proximity to rail lines, highways and shipping ports. IRIS USA manufactures plastic organizational products such as storage containers, pet products, kitchenware and lighting equipment for uses for the home, office, craft and hobby, and pets; and also imports small appliances and furniture items from sister factories in Asia. On behalf of the 200-plus employees of the Reading & Northern, we are delighted that IRIS has chosen to locate its newest North American facility on our tracks, said Andy Muller, Jr, Owner/CEO of Reading & Northern in welcoming IRIS as an RBMN customer. During the site search, we worked closely with the IRIS USA team to make sure their needs were met. Once operations begin, we are confident that IRIS will come to appreciate our excellent customer-oriented service, including guaranteed two hour service windows. We cant wait to work with IRIS on building its siding and beginning service. IRIS OHYAMA was established in 1958, incorporated in 1971, and has its headquarters in Sendai, Japan. It creates consumer products for both household and commercial use in domestic and international markets including Japan, China, Korea, and the Netherlands. In 1992, the company incorporated IRIS USA, and two years later opened its first U.S. facility in Stockton, Calif. Since then, IRIS USA has added facilities in Texas, Wisconsin and Arizona. In addition to the U.S and Japan, IRIS also operates in China, Korea and Europe. (Editors note: The title of this article is based on a line from the 1967 movie The Graduate, which starred Dustin Hoffman.) WellCare Health Plans Inc. (WCG) has agreed to buy Meridian Health Plan of Michigan Inc., Meridian Health Plan of Illinois, Inc., and MeridianRx, a pharmacy benefit manager, for $2.5 billion in cash. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2018, subject to closing conditions, including regulatory approvals. Meridian expects to generate more than $4.3 billion in total revenue in 2018. As a result of this transaction, WellCare will diversify its Medicaid portfolio through the addition of Michigan, deepen its Medicaid in Illinois and acquire an integrated PBM platform. "Meridian is a well-performing plan, and WellCare and Meridian share a similar commitment to serving our members through a comprehensive, integrated approach to healthcare," said Ken Burdick, WellCare's CEO. "This transaction strategically aligns with our focus on government-sponsored health plans, will strengthen our capabilities and growing business, and will meaningfully advance our growth agenda." The acquisition is expected to produce $0.40 to $0.50 of accretion to WellCare's adjusted earnings per share in 2019, $0.70 to $0.80 of accretion in 2020, and $1.00+ of accretion in 2021. WellCare expects to fund the transaction through a combination of cash on hand, the company's undrawn $1.0 billion revolving credit facility and new debt of $600 million to $1.0 billion and new equity of $800 million to $1.2 billion. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Hyundai Motor Co., Ltd. (HYMLF.OB, HYMTF.OB) said that it will invest $388 million to expand and upgrade its engine manufacturing operations in Montgomery, Alabama, and create 50 new jobs. The company noted that it will spend about $40 million to build a new engine head machining facility that will be completed in November and operational by mid-2019. The rest of the investment will go toward equipment and updating its existing engine plant to support production of Sonata and Elantra sedans. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Checkout the few notable companies that are scheduled to release their quarterly financial results on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. ADI Sees Continued Momentum Across Its Industrial Applications Analog Devices Inc.'s (ADI) strength in aerospace & defense sector, and industrial automation are likely to propel its second-quarter results. The company is set to release its Q2 results today, with analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters estimating earnings of $1.38 per share and revenue of $1.47 billion for the quarter. * Sees Q2 revenue in the range of $1.43 bln - $1.51 bln * Expects Q2 OpEx of $430 mln - $440 mln * Projects Q2 EPS, excl. items, of $1.30 - $1.44. * Expects Q2 GAAP EPS of $0.87 - $1.01. Year-Ago Numbers: * Revenue - $1.15 bln * GAAP net income - $93.6 mln * GAAP EPS - $0.27 * Non-GAAP EPS - $1.03. ** Strategic Initiatives Likely To Boost DKS' Q1 Results Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect Dick's Sporting Goods Inc. (DKS) to report earnings of $0.45 per share and revenue of $1.88 for the first quarter, which is scheduled to be released before the bell today. The sporting goods retailer continues to evaluate and adjust its business model, and is taking actions to reduce expense structure in order to fund and develop its longer-term strategic initiatives. Year-Ago Numbers: * GAAP net income - $58.2 mln * GAAP EPS - $0.52 * Non-GAAP net income - $60.3 mln * Non-GAAP EPS - $0.54 * Net sales - $1.8 bln. Edward Stack, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, "In 2018, we expect stronger product innovation from select key partners and the continued expansion of our private brands to result in less margin pressure than previously expected. We see meaningful opportunity to drive improvements across our business and will make significant investments that will continue to position DICK'S Sporting Goods as the leader in our industry." FY18 Outlook * Expects FY18 EPS of about $2.80 - $3.00; Consensus - $2.93. * Expects same store sales of about flat to low single-digit decline versus 0.3% decrease in 2017. * Expects to open about 19 new DICK'S Sporting Goods stores in 2018. ** Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein Brands Likely To Boost PVH's Q1 Results PVH Corp. (PVH) intends to post its first-quarter financial results today after the bell. What's In Store For Q1? * Expects Q1 GAAP EPS to be $2.13 - $2.18 * Sees non-GAAP EPS of $2.20 - $2.25; Consensus - $2.25/Shr. * Sees Q1 revenue to increase about 15%; Consensus - 14.80%. * Expects Tommy Hilfiger revenue to rise 19%. * Expects Calvin Klein revenue to increase 17%. Year-Ago Numbers: * GAAP net income - $70.4 mln * GAAP EPS - $0.89 * Non-GAAP net income - $130.2 mln * Non-GAAP EPS - $1.65 * Total revenue - $2.0 bln FY Guidance * Sees FY GAAP EPS of $8.76 - $8.86 * Expects non-GAAP EPS of $9.00 - $9.10; Consensus - $9.13/Shr. * Expects revenue to increase about 7%; Consensus - 7.30%. ** Portfolio Expansion May Drive KORS' Q4 Results Michael Kors Holdings Ltd. (KORS) is scheduled to release its Q4 results before the bell today. The company continues to capitalize on the fashion active trend incorporating newness into its best-selling Allie and Billie active styles. * Sees Q4 total revenue of $1.11 bln - $1.13 bln; Consensus - $1.15 bln. * Expects Q4 EPS of $0.50 - $0.55; Consensus - $0.60/Shr. Year-Ago Numbers: * Total revenue - $1.06 bln * Net loss - $26.8 mln * Loss per share - $0.17. * Net income, excl. charges - $118.0 mln * EPS, excl. charges - $0.73. FY18 Outlook * Expects FY total revenue to be about $4.66 bln; Consensus - $4.69 bln. * Projects FY EPS of $4.40 - $4.45; Consensus - $4.49/Shr. *** For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News U.K. stocks steadied on Wednesday after sharp losses in the previous session triggered by concerns over Italian and the country's future in the European Union. The benchmark FTSE 100 was up 9 points or 0.12 percent at 7,641 in late opening deals after closing 1.3 percent lower on Tuesday. Royal Bank of Scotland Group shares fell over 1 percent after Ewen Stevenson resigned from his role as Chief Financial Officer and Executive Director to take up an opportunity elsewhere. Fresnillo rose half a percent. The producer of silver and gold said it would back its guidance for the full year in the AGM to be held at noon. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Market Analysis Canadian stocks aim to get back on the winning track Wednesday after a five-day losing skid fueled by falling oil prices and the euro zone crisis. Italy's political turmoil has raised concerns about the viability of the euro zone, hurting global this week. However, crude oil prices have steadied this morning. Bargain hunting in the energy sector may ensue. Yesterday, Canada said it has bought the Kinder Morgan Canada Ltd. Trans Mountain oil pipeline and its controversial expansion project for $4.5 billion. Kinder Morgan gave up on the project after heavy resistance from British Columbia. "The project became too risky for a commercial entity to go forward with it; that's what Kinder Morgan told us," Justin Trudeau told Bloomber. "We are going to ensure that it gets built so that we can get our resources to new markets." Meanwhile, good news continues to roll in from the banking sector. Bank of Montreal (BMO.TO) beat expectations by reporting earnings of C$1.25 billion in Q2 vs. C$1.25 billion in the same period last year. National Bank of Canada (NA.TO) reported earnings came in at C$547 million, or C$1.44 per share. This compares with C$484 million, or C$1.28 per share, in last year's second quarter. CP Rail (CP.TO) workers went on strike Tuesday. Almost all Teamsters members rejected the company's latest contract proposal. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Market Analysis Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) on Wednesday reported a surge in profit for the second quarter from last year on strong revenue growth. Both revenue and adjusted earnings per share beat analysts' expectations. The company's net income for the second quarter rose to $379.83 million or $1.01 per share from $93.56 million or $0.27 per share in the year-ago period. Excluding items, adjusted earnings for the quarter were $1.45 per share, compared to $1.03 per share for the prior-year quarter. On average, analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report earnings of $1.38 per share for the quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Revenue for the quarter grew 32 percent to $1.51 billion from $1.15 billion in the prior-year quarter. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $1.47 billion. "Our focused R&D investments, targeted at the most attractive , combined with strong conditions this quarter drove revenue above the high-end of our guidance range. Revenue from our B2B markets increased double digits year-over-year led by our industrial and communications sectors," said Vincent Roche, President and CEO of Analog Devices. Looking ahead to the third quarter, the company forecast reported earnings of $0.96 to $1.10 per share, adjusted earnings of $1.38 to $1.52 per share, and revenues of $1.47 billion to $1.55 billion. Analysts expect the company to earn $1.40 per share for the quarter on revenues of $1.49 billion. The company's board of directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.48 per outstanding share of common stock. The dividend will be paid on June 19, 2018 to all shareholders of record at the close of business on June 8, 2018. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News A Tesla Model S sedan that was in "autopilot" mode crashed into a parked police patrol vehicle in southern California on Tuesday, according to police. The police SUV was unoccupied at the time of the crash. The Tesla driver sustained minor injuries, but declined transport to a hospital. The crash occurred along Laguna Canyon Road on Tuesday morning, according to the Laguna Beach Police Department. The officer was not in the police cruiser at the time of the crash. Photos of the crash scene that were posted by Police Sergeant Jim Cota on Twitter showed extensive damage to the front end of the Tesla, while the police SUV had damage to the rear side. In response to the accident, Tesla said in a statement, "Tesla has always been clear that autopilot doesn't make the car impervious to all accidents, and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that 'Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear markings." Tesla's semi-autonomous Autopilot has come under federal scrutiny following recent crashes involving its vehicles. The electric car maker has said that drivers must not rely entirely on the autopilot function. Earlier in May, U.S. safety investigators opened the third active investigation of a Tesla vehicle that crashed while the Autopilot was said to be in use. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA said it will investigate the crash that occurred in South Jordan, Utah, where a Model S sedan traveling at about 60 miles an hour rammed into the back of a fire department truck that had stopped at a red light. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News The Swiss stock market fell again Wednesday, adding to the losses of the previous session. Investors remain concerned over the political situations in both Italy and Spain. The turmoil in both countries sparked worries about the future of the European Union. Italian equities rebounded Wednesday on reports that the major parties in Italy are calling for President Sergio Mattarella to dissolve parliament immediately and conduct fresh elections as early as July. The Swiss Market Index decreased by 0.68 percent Wednesday and finished at 8,578.68. The Swiss Leader Index dropped 0.60 percent and the Swiss Performance Index lost 0.62 percent. Among the index heavyweights, Nestle declined 1.1 percent and Roche fell 1 percent. Novartis slid 0.1 percent. The company's Promacta drug will get a priority review from the U.S. FDA. Bank stocks were under pressure again Wednesday. Julius Baer dropped 1.8 percent and Credit Suisse lost 1.1 percent. UBS also finished lower by 0.4 percent. Richemont decreased 1.1 percent, while rival Swatch Group rose 0.1 percent. ABB weakened by 0.9 percent, Adecco surrendered 0.8 percent and SGS lost 0.7 percent. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Market Analysis More than 3,000 conductors and engineers of Canadian Pacific Rail went on strike on late Tuesday night. The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference said its workers walked out at 10 p.m. as negotiations continued with the company with the assistance of federal mediators. The announcement came minutes after CP Rail said a tentative deal had been reached with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for 360 signaling workers who had also called for strike on Tuesday evening. The Teamsters said it had made "best efforts to reach a negotiated settlement" and are still "willing to remain at the bargaining table during the strike." For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News (Agencia CMA Latam) - Committees from the Colombian Senate and House of Representatives passed in a preliminary vote a bill that would block the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the court that analyzes cases related to the former FARC guerrilla, from issuing orders to suspend extradition procedures. On May 17, the JEP decided to suspend the extradition procedure of Jesus Santrich to the United States. He is a leader of the FARC - which now operates as a political party - and was captured on April 9 after being targeted by an Interpol red notice, an instrument equivalent to an international arrest warrant. The United States says that Santrich is the operator of a scheme to export 10 tons of cocaine to the country. "We decided in a very clear way which treatment to apply for those that have pending extradition requests, and determined that the JEP cannot suspend of extraditions in Colombia," said Hernin Penagos, a Colombian lawmaker from the governist National Unity party. 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. Two-day nationwide bank strike begins The two day bank strike by over 10 lakh bankers demanding early wage settlement starting Wednesday has evoked good response nationwide, said a top leader of the All India Bank Employees' Association. "Around 85,000 bank branches spread across the country, including that of State Bank of India and some private banks will remain closed for two days. The response to the strike is good," C.H. Venkatachalam, General Secretary, AIBEA told IANS. Queried about the value and volume of money instruments that would not be cleared by the bank's clearing houses Venkatachalam said: "On all India basis clearance of 39 lakh instruments with a value of Rs 21,700 crore per day would be impacted. "The above value and volume were the averages of last 15 days clearance of instruments." The May 30-31 strike is spearheaded by the United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of nine unions. The bankers are striking work demanding early revision of the wages. The wage revision has been due since November 1, 2017. Venkatachalam said the unions had requested the Indian Banks' Association (IBA) to come up with better offer than the mere two per cent hike offer made earlier so that the strike could be averted. He said the IBA was also asked not to delink the wage negotiations for bank officers in the Scales 4-7. The IBA did not do anything. He said at the conciliation meeting held on Monday, the Chief Labour Commissioner (CLC) had asked the IBA not to raise new controversies like delinking the wage talks for officers in the 4-7 scale. "Though the CLC tried its best to sort out the strike issues, there is no positive developments. Hence strike on May 30 and 31 (Wednesday and Thursday) stands," All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC) General Secretary D.T. Franco had said earlier. According to Venkatachalam, with regard to the coverage of officers from Scale 4-7, the IBA said it did not get the mandate from six banks as they opted to cover officers up to Scale 3 level. However, 14 banks have given the mandate for covering the officers up to Scale 7 in wage negotiations as was done in the previous wage settlement negotiations, he said. With bank branches closed for two days, the ATM machines are being loaded with additional cash to meet any contingency. "The private banks (like HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank) are working and there is no problem there. In the case of public sector banks the strike call was known well ahead. So, we have collected cash in advance from the banks for loading in the ATMs," V. Balasubramanian, President, Financial Software and Systems (FSS), told IANS. The city based FSS manages ATMs for several banks in the country. "Generally we know the cash dispensation per day per ATM. We load the machines with cash for two days transaction value which is at an average is around Rs 6 lakh. This time we have loaded ATMs with cash of around Rs 15 lakh which would take care of the average cash dispensation for four days," Balasubramanian said. According to him, the ATMs are loaded more with Rs 500 notes. The Bank of Maharashtra MD and CEO Ravindra P Marathe has urged his customers to make the maximum use of digital banking services for their transcations as the strike might disrupt normal banking services at the branches. CBI raids Satyendra Jain's residence The CBI on Wednesday raided the residence of Delhi Health and Power Minister Satyendra Jain over alleged violation of norms in hiring of a creative team in the Public Works Department (PWD) and registered a case. The case has been registered against Jain, S.K. Srivastava, the then Engineer-in-Chief in PWD and others, a CBI official told IANS. Searches are underway at four-to-five locations in Delhi, including residences of PWD officials and others. In 2017, the Central Bureau of Investigation had initiated a preliminary probe related to the hiring of 24 architects in the PWD's creative team for various projects, including Mohalla clinics. " CBI raids my house for hiring creative team by PWD. Professionals were hired for different projects. All were forced to leave by the CBI," Jain said in a tweet. Reacting to the raids on Jain's house, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted: "What does Prime Minister Narendra Modi want?" His deputy Manish Sisodia quoted a report that said the NITI Aayog had favoured the creative team. "The only job left with the CBI, Delhi Police, Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax department is to stop the works done by the AAP in Delhi." "Our crime is that we are working to make the national capital a better place and improve the health and education here. All this is done to harass us," he added. "The Aam Aadmi Party is not going to stop with these practice," he said. India, Indonesia elevate ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership India and Indonesia elevated their bilateral ties to that of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnerhsip and issued a shared vision for maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region following a bilateral summit between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo here on Wednesday. The two sides also signed 15 agreements, including on defence and economic cooperation. Reflecting India's growing ties with Southeast Asia under New Delhi's Act East Policy, the two sides issued a joint statement on "Establishing Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Between Indonesia and India" which said that Modi and Widodo held extensive talks on bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest, and provided strategic directions that would further enhance the solid and expanding relations between the two countries. "To enhance the two countries' strategic partnership, the leaders agreed to hold annual summit meetings, including on the margins of multilateral events," the statement said. "They also stressed the importance of continuing regular bilateral consultations through the robust architecture of dialogue in place, including the ministerial and working group mechanisms." According to the statement, both leaders reaffirmed that teir countries, as strategic partners and maritime neighbours, must work to further strengthen and broaden the already robust defence cooperation. "The leaders reaffirmed their commitment in the field of defence, with the signing of the Defence Cooperation Agreement between the two countries," it stated, adding that the this will further strengthen and renew the existing cooperation for mutual benefit of the two countries and the region. Modi and Widodo also agreed to further enhance mutual trust through regular meetings and staff talks between armies, navies and air forces of the two countries. In the area of defence industry, they took note on the progress made through the joint production of military equipment and identified cooperation in defence industry and technology as areas of great potential. In terms of economic cooperation, the two sides sides agreed to work intensively for the early conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and reiterated that it needs to be comprehensive, fair and balanced with benefit to all member states. RCEP is a proposed free trade agreement between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) regional bloc and the six states with which Asean has existing free trade agreements - Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. The Asean comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. "President Joko Widodo welcomed the increase in Indian investments in Indonesia and appreciated their contribution to the Indonesian economy," the statement said. "Prime Minister Modi also welcomed Indonesian companies' participation through the Make in India initiative and invited Indonesian business to avail of the opportunities presented." The joint statement said that as maritime neighbours, the two countries underlined the importance of stronger connectivity, particularly on sea links, in order to facilitate economic cooperation and people-to-people contact. Modi and Widodo welcomed the plan to build connectivity between Andaman Nicobar in India and Aceh in Indonesia to unleash the economic potentials of both areas. "Furthermore, the two sides looked forward to the expeditious conclusion of the Asean-India Maritime Transport Cooperation Agreement," the statement said. The two leaders also reiterated their "strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations including cross-border terrorism and terror-related incidents in Indonesia and India and affirmed that perpetrators of these henious acts must be brought to justice". In a manifestation of the growing geostrategic importance of the Indo-Pacific region, the two sides issued a separate statement on "Shared Vision of Indo-Indonesia Martime Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific". "In today's changing scenario in the Indo-Pacific region, we (India and Indonesia) are geostrategically located," Modi said in a joint address to the media with Indonesian President Joko Widodo following a bilateral summit here. "Under India's Act East Policy, we have SAGAR - Security and Growth for All in the Region - that matches with President Widodo's Global Maritime Fulcrum," he said. While Modi's SAGAR initiative underscores India's engagement in the Indian Ocean region, Jokowi's Global Maritime Fulcrum seeks to capitalise on Indonesia's geographic position to make the southeast Asian nation a "fulcrum" of Indo-Pacific maritime activity. India is also part of a recently revived quad, including the US, Japan and Australia, that seeks to work for peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region. According to the statement on maritime cooperation, both sides recognised "that with a coastline of 7,500 km, with more than 1,380 islands and more than two million sq. km of Exclusive Economic Zone, India occupies a central position in the Indo-Pacific, while Indonesia as the largest archipelagic state in the world, with a coastline of 108,000 km, with 17,504 islands and features and a total of maritime area of 6,400,000 sq. km including Exclusive Economic Zone, is a fulcrum that connects the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean". "The two oceans represent a combined maritime region which is important for global maritime trade and commerce," it stated. It also called for adhering to the rights and obligations under the international law including the Charter of the United Nations, the UN Convention on the Law of Sea (Unclos) and the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC). Modi arrived here on Tuesday on the first leg of his five-day three-nation tour of southeast Asia that will also see him visiting Malaysia and Singapore. This is his first visit to Indonesia as Prime Minister. The Chamber of Commerce has raised its concerns about the number of ad-hoc public holidays in a letter to Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi. Dated 22 May 2018, a copy of the letter signed by President, Jennifer Ula-Fruean, has been received by the Samoa Observer. In it, Chamber members expressed their concerns on behalf of the private sector asking the government to consult with the business sector before making surprise decisions that cause financial loss to local private businesses. Businesses will face severe cash flow challenges due to the sudden removal of a trading day which they had not previously planned for; eliminating potential revenue for that day while the cost of staff wages and salaries remains, the letter reads. Businesses that do trade on that day are forced to continue with a trading day at higher cost per staff input (i.e. costs rise but productivity doesnt). In particular, the S.C.C.I. was referring to the ad-hoc addition of an extra public holiday this Monday 4th June for the upcoming Independence celebrations which would bring the total number of public holidays for this year to 14 days. The S.C.C.I. received the calendar from the government last year. They accepted and supported the original announcement of celebrations and planned accordingly expecting Independence Day celebrations to be held on Friday 1st June, While Monday 4th June remains as a normal working day. Further, the Chamber expressed their concern with this sudden announcement just a few short weeks before Independence Day week and stated in the letter that they are unable to support the ad hoc addition of an extra public holiday. The letter reads, Chamber is therefore surprised to learn of the added public holiday recently announced." Such ad hoc changes impacts significantly on the operational and financial planning of 1.We urge the Government to reconsider the added Public Holiday announced for Independence, and return to the original 1 day of Friday 1st June, making Monday 4th June 2018 a normal business working day. The Chambers recommendation to the government was to reconsider the added public holiday announced for Independence and return to the original day of Friday 1st June, making Monday 4th June 2018 a normal business working day. Furthermore they asked the government to not only consult with the Chamber in future decisions that will negatively impact their businesses but to also make sound decisions based on full proper and informed impacts on employers, their businesses, business activity, the economy and the community at large. We once again ask for a no-surprises approach that embraces both timely consultation as well as timely notification so that, as necessary, plans might be made. This is the letter in full: Chamber Position on Public Holidays Introduction S.C.C.I. is the voice of business in Samoa, advocating on behalf of its extensive membership base which includes 3 industry-specific private sector organizations, and over 380 individual businesses. As such, Chamber values its role as a Partner of the Government, to advance business growth for the social and economic development of Samoa. On behalf of our members, we continue to support Government initiatives, but do need to put forward positions from time to time, on areas that have specific impact business and the enabling business environment. It is with much respect that we submit this position, on the issue of public holidays. Private Sector Concerns The S.C.C.I. members will be impacted by the ad-hoc addition of an extra Public Holiday for the upcoming Independence celebrations. The added holiday will bring the total of public holidays for this year to 14 days, and this will have grave impacts on all businesses, across all sectors in Samoa. Specific Issues 1. Chamber members are unable to support the ad hoc addition of an extra public holiday for the upcoming Samoa Independence Day celebrations. 2. Chamber members do believe in celebrating our political Independence, however, we support the original announcement of celebrations held on Friday 1st June, while Monday 4th June remains as a normal working day. These were the original public holiday dates announced, and the private sector have moved their planning forward in this regard. 3. To that end, Chamber is grateful for M.C.I.L.s published listing of Public Holidays. That list creates certainty and assists greatly with proper planning for our employers, employees and community groups. 4. Chamber is therefore surprised to learn of the added public holiday recently announced. Such ad-hoc changes impacts significantly on the operational and financial planning of businesses. We fear that the element of surprise also eliminates any certainty our members will have through the published public holiday list by M.C.I.L. 5. Businesses will face severe cash flow challenges due to the sudden removal of a trading day which they had not previously planned for; eliminating potential revenue for that day while the cost of staff wages and salaries remains. Businesses that do trade on that day are forced to continue with a trading day at higher cost per staff input (i.e. costs rise but productivity doesnt). Assessment of Samoa's Public Holidays 6. In M.C.I.L.s published list of Public Holidays, eleven planned days are confirmed for Samoa which is on par with our neighbours. 7. This year, there are 3 additional Public Holidays that are not included in the publicised list, being the State Funeral, an additional day for Easter, and an additional day for Independence. After we factor in the ad hoc public holidays for Samoa, we will have had 3 additional Public Holidays before we even reach the halfway point of calendar year 2018. And there are still 4 scheduled Public Holidays left for 2018. 8. Assuming that there are no further ad hoc Public Holidays in 2018 and, none of the scheduled public holidays are cancelled, then Samoa will end up having 14 Public Holidays in 2018. 9. This number of Public Holidays in any one calendar year will stifle productivity and places in jeopardy the investments of business owners, employers and investors. This in turn leaves the employment of staff at risk. Recommendations: 1. We urge the Government to reconsider the added Public Holiday announced for Independence, and return to the original 1 day of Friday 1st June, making Monday 4th June 2018 a normal business working day. 2. We value the relationship with Government as a partner for sustainable social development and economic growth, and we ask for sound decision-making based on full, proper and informed consideration of the impacts on employers, their businesses, business activity, the economy and the community at large. 3. We once again ask for a no-surprises approach that embraces both timely consultation as well as timely notification so that, as necessary, plans might be made. Ma le faaaloalo tele Jennifer Ula-Fruean President A book titled Law Reform in Plural Societies was launched at the National University of Samoa yesterday. The book is authored by the Executive Director of the Law Reform Commission, Teleiai Dr. Lalotoa Seumanutafa. The launch was well attended by families, friends and colleagues. Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegao, who was the keynote speaker, congratulated Teleiai for a job well done. May this book be made useful as it regulates our laws not only in Samoa but also in other Pacific nations, said Tuilaepa Former Judge of the International Criminal Court, Tuiloma Neroni Slade, reviewed the book and he highlighted the importance of it. The book we are launching today is an important text and a significant contribution to constitution and legal thinking in the country, he told the gathering. It addresses the complex and nature of people and that is the co-existence of different sources and systems of the law." In the Samoan context it is about a relationship between custom and usage or customary law on hand and the formal system of law or state law on the other." Specifically this is a study of a nature of the interaction between state law and customary law and the consequences of this situation of legal or pluralism or state of policy in particular state policy of the law reform." It is common understanding of centrality of custom in our country that we all live by the custom and traditions of our land yet as the legacy of the Samoans colonial past and by the terms of the constitution we have chosen and inherited a plural system laws and governance which on critical aspect lack of centrality as the boundary line between customary law and state law and at times allowing competition or even conflict between custom and state law. Author Teleiai spoke about the reasons behind the book. My father was a teacher the late Mulitalo Ropinisone Seumanutafa together with my mother, and back in my early childhood days in the 1970s one distinct memories of my father as a teacher was that he use to collect booklets and from this started my education at home, learning English, she said. All of us eight children were subjected to reading any book available and provide a summary for our teacher parents." Speed forward to today, after ten years at the Office of the Attorney General as earlier stated I was a prosecutor and a government legal advisor for five years and parliamentary council for the other five years." My job was to draft laws for the government of Samoa and appear in front of the parliamentary committee to explain a law." In my early years I was under the supervision of two Australians Senior draft persons and every time a parliamentary committee called on arrival with my supervisors there are usually not much discussions as of course the discussions would be in the English language." Only when I appear on my own that there will be a lot of queries and questions and it made me think like this, 'if my members of parliament have a lot to say only when I a Samoan appear alone why cant I be like the Australian draft person and be able to draw up, to draft and to explain the law completely in the language that we both understand'." If laws are to benefit people why I cant I write laws in my Samoan language?" What do the tax law, international trade law and terrorism law have to do with fishing and planting, which matter more to the majority of people in Samoa." How does law making in parliament relate to law making in the village councils, what good are the laws that I was writing in the office if this cannot be understood, irrelevant and unsuitable to the context of Samoa? She also recalled when the late Tuiloma Pule Lameko encouraged her. The late Tuiloma Pule Lameko found me sitting outside the door waiting for my third parliamentary committee for the day at the parliamentary premises, she said. His committee was my first meeting and mind you these laws I did not write they were written by consultants who had left our shores and I was left to explain and even defend those laws before the committees." He said this; 'I thank the Lord for you. There is now a Samoan who can explain the laws to members of Parliament in Samoan language and I hope there will be more like you. This encouraged me further'." If this was a way to be useful to Samoa I pray hard to the Lord to let this happen and make me useful this way. About the book, she said: Now this book does not provide all the answers nor complete answers but it is perhaps a start, a start towards acknowledging the supremacy and uniqueness of both the faasamoa and western values in law making in Samoa." A holistic and a whole society of projects required as everyone in society has a responsibility into law making, the parliament, executive, judiciary, all sectors, all villages and the people of Samoa. It is also my hope that this would be useful to law makings to Samoa. Several members of the University of Samoa (U.S.P.) Samoa Alumni gathered at the I.R.E.T.A. Fale last Friday to discuss the Alumnis role and activities to celebrate USPs 50th Anniversary. The Alumni also took the opportunity to elect an Executive Committee to spearhead its activities not only for the U.S.Ps half-a-century celebrations but also for the next 12 months. The new Executive Committee include: Peseta Desmond Lee Hang as the President, Luaiufi Aiono as the Vice-President, Alice Papalii Seuseu as Secretary, and Maena Faatuuala Ah Leong as the Treasurer. The executive committee did not waste time in tackling the urgent matters in the agenda for the meeting. And the result was that this meeting was touted as the most successful U.S.P. Samoa Alumni meeting ever to be heldthanks to the efficient and professional manner with which the new President executed his duties. A follow-up meeting to this meeting is scheduled for Wednesday 30th May at 5.30pm at the Millenia Hotel to further discuss details of the U.S.P 50th Anniversary Programme. All U.S.P. Samoa Alumni are cordially invited to attend this meeting. Dear Editor, There is only one meaning and one purpose of obedience in this world as explained in the Bible. That is, obedience is submission to Gods law or giving back to God what belongs to God or the ears. Thats the reason why God put ears on the body. Ears are Gods creations. Scientists did not create ears. The Prime Minister and Members of Parliament did not create ears. God create ears and He creates them for his own purposes. God also create the ears of the Prime Minister and Members of Parliament but because of disobedience, those ears are now belonging to somewhere else. There are foundations, structures and systems of Gods creation. For example, in the beginning, God created heavens and earth. There was light and there was darkness. Light is day and darkness is night. There was morning and evening. Morning and evening is the first day and so on and on. God applied the same principle to the human being as well as His own work or the Work of God that is responsible for the spreading of Gods words around the world. Different parts of the body such as legs, hands, head, eyes, mouth, ears and other parts are all connected with a skeleton. Each part has its own specific function according to its purpose. There are many parts but one body. They work together to support each other. They are operating on systems that are inside the body. You cannot put off and reattach parts of your body because it was not created or intended to functioning like that. Similarly, God Himself in the Old Testament, He laid out the foundation of his Work, the structure of His Work and systems of His Work. He chose the Levites as priests / ministers, the Levites must not have any inheritances in Israel such as land but the only inheritances for priests are things set apart by God for God such as tithe and offerings. That system is law of God. During the times of Christ, God changed the priesthood according to His own will. And that is the truth of the law of God about priests, tithe and offerings and that is also the truth about the foundation, the structure and the systems of the Work of God. The Work of God in the New Testament is known as Church. It was established by Christ and operated upon the same foundation. Christ did not destroy the law and Prophets but fulfilled. Despite of the fact that the Official Religion of Samoa is Christianity, it does not mean that the national government of Samoa is the Church or the foundation and the structure and systems that God laid to operate His work upon. The Bible is very clear about that side. Therefore, our national government is not Church. The Members of Parliament are not priests or pastors or Church Ministers. They are not parts of the foundation, the structure and systems of the Work of God or Church. They dont conduct services at Church and they dont receive tithes and offerings that God set apart for priests. Did any one of them get purify before to become a pastor and serve full time as pastor in different missions of a Church? Did any one of them devote his or her life to go to Malua or to Piula or to any theological college and then became a pastor and a scholar of the Bible and serve different missions of the Church for both in Samoa and around the world? So for the Prime Minister and the Parliament to avoid the E.F.K.S. Churchs complaints and for them to overrule the foundation, the structure and systems that God laid with their own laws is so stupid. That is disobedience. Also, the separation of individual Church Ministers from the main Church according to the Prime Ministers desire is also very stupid. That too is disobedience. If thats what the Prime Minister has been trying to do with the structure and systems of the Church then why not try it out first with the structure and systems of his own body that God created? If he can change Gods creation by putting off his mouth and his nose from his body at home and then off for work with out those parts of his body then surely without any doubt, the E.F.K.S. Church will do the same thing with the Churchs foundation, structure and systems that God founded. Furthermore, the official religion of our country which is Christianity is a truth based religion. It is based on God because God is the truth. Gods law is the truth and therefore the word obedience is a truth based word or term. The messages and words that we learn from the Bible are all based on truth but not untruth. So when ever we use the words from the Bible such as law, judgment, righteousness, obedience, disobedience and other words, we have to be very careful. We have to make sure that we are using them correctly according to the truth. For example, the labeling of the E.F.K.S. and Church Ministers as disobedience is unnecessary. The E.F.K.S. and Church Ministers, they are obeying the truth, the foundation, the structure and the systems lay out by God to operate His work upon. They are special parts of the foundation, the structure and systems. In other words, they are the law and obedience. They are specialist of obedience and services. Thats who they are and thats where they are coming from. Considering our identity of Christianity, where do Christians get obedience from? What is obedience to us as Christians? What should we obey, Gods law or traditions of man like the new tax law to tax Church Ministers? Therefore the right parties that should label with disobedience are the Prime Minister and the Parliament. When we judge each other or when we as Christians have debates on issues such as the new tax law to tax Church Ministers, we have to look at the whole picture as explained above. Remember our ears, remember the foundations, structures and systems that God created and remember the true meanings of the words and messages that we learn from the Bible. Otherwise, reliance upon assumptions, conjecture, suppositions, personal concerns, political correctness, emotions, anger and traditions of man to prove our arguments is absolutely wrong and evil. Those types of arguments are all rubbish. The following are some of the Prime Ministers assumptions and suppositions about the issue of taxing Church Ministers and some of my explorations about those assumptions and suppositions. P.M. stands firm: Pay your taxes or face consequences (Samoa Observer 25 May 2018) 1) Have you ever heard of other churches elaborating about this issue in their conferences? All the other churches, aside from this denomination (C.C.C.S.), once they were informed, they agreed noting this is a must because even the Bible says to pay taxes. For the Prime Ministers information, the Methodist Church is one of the governments critics about the issue of taxing Church Ministers. It was reported as news several times in the past by the Samoa Observer. So that is not the meaning of they agreed noting this is a must because even the Bible says to pay taxes. Because he referenced other denominations about this issue, so it is a must for the Prime Minister to provide proof from those denominations to prove what he said that those denominations have agreed that the Bible says to pay taxes. It is so unnecessary for him to use other denominations to insult E.F.K.S. Apart from that, it is also unnecessary for him as the Prime Minister trying to turn other denominations against E.F.K.S. because there is nothing wrong between the E.F.K.S. and other denominations. 2) There is nowhere in the world the government passes a law and then waits to see whether the Church agrees. The law pertaining to taxes is quite unique and with the authority that comes with it, it does not solicit rather it enforces. For the Prime Ministers information, Samoa is not the world, Samoa is not China and Samoa is not Japan. Samoa is Samoa. In Samoa we have our Faavae the Constitution of the Independent State of Samoa It is not a Faavae of the world or China or Japan or any other country of the world. The Faavae is the faavae of Samoa and also, the Faavae is the Supreme law of Samoa as in (section 2) of the Constitution. In other words, it is the Supreme law of the land. When it comes to the enforcement of the Supreme law, the Parliament is also under enforcement. They are not exempted. We own our Faavae altogether. If the Prime Minister and Parliament violates the Faavae which is actually the real thing that was happening and it is still happening right now, the people of Samoa have the right to stand up against it and correct it because we own our government but not the other way round. The new tax law to tax Church Ministers according to the E.F.K.S. is un-Constitutional and it is also un-Biblical. That is the truth and that is the argument from the E.F.K.S. and other Churches. The Parliament was well informed about that issue when the Cabinet was still working on its plan about the new Bill for taxing Church Ministers but the Parliament denied it. The Parliament did not follow the right process of initiating and inquiry to investigate the Bill according to the arguments from E.F.K.S. in order to find out the truth. Instead of the Parliament following the right process, the Parliament followed the wrong way. They denied the E.F.K.S.s claim and passed the Bill into law. That is so unnecessary and unacceptable. That is not services. Speaking of unnecessary and unacceptable, the Supreme law is not the only law affected under unnecessary and unacceptable actions of the Prime Minister and the Parliament in relation to the issue about the new tax law to tax Church Ministers. Other laws involved under that same situation are Cabinet Handbook 2011 and Standing Orders for Parliament. Those two are sub-laws or sub sections of the Constitution (Supreme law). The Cabinet Handbook 2011 was created by the Prime Minister and his Cabinet of 2011 in 2011 as it is a Constitutional condition. However, the main Cabinet procedures in the Cabinet Handbook 2011 are against the Constitution. The main goal of those procedures is just about prioritizing first of political agendas of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. There is no specific protection for the Constitution. Under the same sub-law (Cabinet Handbook 2011), there are procedures for making of policies for the Bills. It requires factual informations or informations based on facts and truth for making of those policies. But, when the Cabinet collects informations to make policies, they ignored the Constitution, the Bible, the Churches and complaints from the E.F.K.S. and others. That is the power of Cabinet procedures as explained above. So I believe, they knew about what they have been doing is un-Constitutional but that is not their main goal, their main goal is prioritizing first of the Prime Ministers and the Cabinets agenda. The other sub-law which is the Standing Orders for Parliament is different from the Cabinet Handbook 2011 in terms of protection for the Constitution. The Standing Orders for Parliament is very clear and very specific about the protection of the Constitution under the Code of Parliamentary Ethics. Details of some specific protections for the Constitution are quoted below. It is the personal responsibility of every Member of Parliament to maintain the highest standards of ethical behaviour to protect and maintain integrity of Parliament and to make every endeavour to uphold the principles of the Constitution. Every member shall uphold the laws of Samoa and safeguard the principles contained in the Constitution. Despite of those very clear specific orders for protection of the Constitution, it did not matter with the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and the Parliament when they create the new tax law to tax Church Ministers. They did the same thing with our customary lands. So what was the point that the Prime Minister was trying to prove to us according to what he said that there is nowhere in the world the government passes a law and then waits to see whether the Church agrees? There are so many reasons as explained above that are right under the Prime Ministers nose why it is 100% necessary for him to wait. His referencing of the world and other countries as his supporters to prove his points contradicts what he said about the people of Samoa in the S.S.I.G. who are living around the world. He slammed those people about complaining against customary lands but they are living overseas. They know little about what is happening in villages in Samoa and the Faa-matai because they are not living in Samoa. So, if he was praising other countries around the world then why not do the same thing with the people of Samoa who are living around the world by valuing their Samoan identities and their voices. Also, the Prime Minister and Members of Parliament, they are not exceptional because they are not gods but just public servants. They were appointed as servants to serve the country with honor and with great respect. That also is another reason why it is 100% necessary for the Prime Minister and for the Parliament to wait and listen to the complaints from the country against them when they go to a wrong direction. The obedience and the submission of the Founding Fathers to God was the main reason why the Founding Fathers had Samoa founded on God. Thats the theme and the corner stone of our Constitution. This is not about our religions or denominations. This is not about E.F.K.S. or Methodist or S.D.A. Church or LDS Church or Assemblies of God or other different Churches. This is about the Bible the book that are share in common by all those denominations, this is about the foundation, the structures and systems of the Church, this is about the Constitution of the Independent State of Samoa that is own altogether by all those churches and finally, this also about the Parliaments mistake or the Parliaments stupidity that violates the Constitution and the law of God. Finally, the Prime Minister needs to stop beating around the bush but focus mainly on the truth and facts to support his arguments about the issue. That is the same challenge for other Christians that are still in darkness who are now calling out on Judges and the Court to lock up Church Ministers. Remember, justice is Gods righteousness. The origin of justice is God. Where there is Gods law, there is obedience as well as justice. As said before, Christianity is a truth based religion or a faith based religion. So dont use words from the Bible and messages from the Bible in the wrong way. Dont take the Scriptures out of context in order to support and to strengthen their assumptions, conjectures and suppositions. And dont enforce this country to follow those rubbish. Nanai Malonuu Lealaiauloto Nofoaiga Moananu Mafua Romeo of Salelologa is grateful to be alive. A teacher by profession, Moananu is counting his lucky stars after he was shot at early on Sunday morning. He was caught in the crossfire when young men from Salelologa set up rocks to block the road. I am fortunate to be alive and for that I am thankful to God for giving me another chance at life, he said. According to Moananu, during the wee hours of Sunday when gun shots were heard, thats when men between Salelavau and Salelologa started throwing rocks at each other. I heard the gun shots, then I walked over, he said. At that time, rocks were flying back and forth and there were a lot of men on both sides of the road." Next thing, a gun was discharged and I was injured." I fell to my knees and I felt like someone just slapped me, telling me I was just being shot." I was able to get back up and felt pain on the back part of my body, from my back all the way down." Luckily the gun was discharged from afar, and the pallets from the ammo were splattered onto my back and legs." I was able to get up and while limping to my house, which was not far, I saw our Church Minister walking towards the young men and I had to warn him." I limped over to him and then managed to get back to my house." I was treated at home and then when everything was calm, my wife then took me to the hospital in Tuvasivi, hours after I was shot, said Moananu. He told the Samoa Observer the experience of being shot at is something he never wishes on anyone. I am grateful to be alive, Moananu reiterated. After the incident, it feels like an eye opener for me. I feel as if I have been given another chance. Moananu has already moved on from the ordeal. I have already forgiven those who shot me and not because of them, I did it for me. The Samoa Observer visited his residence a couple of hours after he was discharged from the hospital after being admitted for two days. I have confidence in the Matai system that Savaii has and that is why I know this will not happen again and because of that I have moved on with my life." I will not dwell in the past and I have forgiven those who did this to me and overall I am thankful that I am able to spend more time with my son and wife, said Moananu. The Ministry of Police has expressed empathy to the families and individuals affected during the three-day reign of lawlessness in Savaii last weekend. In doing so, Police Superintendent and Media Spokesperson, Auapaau Logoitino Filipo, has also downplayed questions about the Police response. In the wake of the weekend of terror on the big island, members of the public present say the Police in Savaii were poorly equipped to stop the angry mob of men hurling rocks at each other and firing off gun shots at will. We will review our response capability for Savaii when it comes to these types of incidents, he said. In the meantime, he said the Police are happy that law and order has been restored. He acknowledged the important work of the Village Councils in helping the Police. The sequence of events in Savaii started from a regular game of billiards at Salelologa, which turned violent when a fight broke out. The Samoa Observer was told that the fight escalated to the burning of the house at Salelologa where the billiard game was held on Saturday night. Gunshots were fired and homes in Salelologa were stoned. On Sunday night, the men from Salelologa reacted by blocking the road, seeking out Salelavalu villagers. The roadblock affected innocent members of the public who were on their way to catch the ferry to Upolu yesterday morning. Still unsatisfied on Monday some men from Salelologa turned their attention to ransacking the Salelologa market yesterday morning, targeting Salelavalu villagers (see other story). Video footage captured the men harassing and smashing properties, helping themselves to whatever they could get their hands on. Local distillers and liquor distributors have been hit so hard by the Governments 100 percent increase in excise tax on liquor some of them have ceased production. The increase excise tax on liquor came into effect in April and it is responsible for recent drastic increase in the cost of spirits. Chiefs Vodka Manufacturer and prominent businessman, Vaatuitui Apete Meredith, told the Samoa Observer they have ceased production of their popular liquor products because they simply cannot compete in the local liquor market any longer. As a retailer and a distributor, Liquor Planet Owner, Talei Lesa Ah Liki predicts that this law will kill the local manufacturers of liquor as the industry adjusts its cash flow and financial forecasts to abide by the law. She said since the law came into effect, business has slowed down noticeably and that buying from local vodka manufacturers such as Talofa and Chiefs vodka has become near impossible to do because of the dramatic jump in price. To buy wholesale from Chiefs it was usually around the $30 mark and now it will be $60, which means that my customers that we do supply wholesale to are not willing to pay the price. Perhaps over time they will get used to it but its such a big increase, she said. Mrs. Lesa Ah Liki added their stock for Russian vodka and Talofa spirits vodka is not moving and so far their Chiefs range is still being used by local bars to mix their cocktails because its affordable. The explanatory memorandum for the Excise Tax rates Amendment Act (No.2) 2018 quotes that only local produced spirits are affected by the tax increase. However, according to confirmation from Liquor Planet and Chiefs vodka, the 100 percent tax increase also now applies to imported liquor. The new development came from the M.O.R. who cited compliance to a World Trade Organisation (W.T.O.) rule. In the beginning we all thought that it was only going to apply to the locally made alcohol but then we were told it applied to everyone, said Mrs. Lesa Ah Liki She adds that with the new price hikes on both local manufactured and imported liquors, Samoan brands such as Talofa and Chiefs, who make midrange premium liquor in Samoa, will struggle to compete with both cheaper liquors as well as premium imported alcohol. I spoke with some people in the bar and hotel industry who normally use Talofa and Chiefs liquor as well as imported alcohol for their cocktails and the feedback I got was that its better to buy imported than to buy locally made because youre almost paying the same price but getting a premium product." Business is slow as it is and with this 100 percent increase in tax, its just got even slower. I think the only people who continue to buy these imported products will be the bars and the resorts. The locals will think twice about it. General Manager for Taumeasina Island Resort, Nathan Bucknall told the Samoa Observer that they have not increased rates yet because they bought a lot of stock such as imported alcohol before the law change to give themselves a buffer. However, he confirms that they will inevitably have to pass on the extra costs to the consumer. I dont think it will affect the frequency of customers but it will affect how much or more so how little they will drink, which wont be too good for us. He added it would have been a good idea to consult the industry as well Chamber of Commerce. Asked how the liquor and hospitality industry would counter the losses going forward, he said: They will have to look into being a bit more innovative with their marketing perhaps changing their happy hours. As for retailer and distributor Liquor Planet, Mrs. Lesa Ah Liki says they will have to adjust by sticking to the basics and cut down on bringing in the fancy stuff because its too expensive. The problem with that, she points out, is that the businesses and consumers are losing out. We are losing out on sales because of less income and the customer loses out on the pleasure of having a choice. Its a shame that the majority of people who are responsible drinkers suffer for the actions of a few. Liquor Planet has put up their prices on the new stock that they have received but there are still some old stock selling at the original price. All retailers and manufacturers have been given until July 1 to sell the old stock before removing them from their premises. Three local business operators have spoken out on the Governments move to increase chicken price under the Customs Tariff Amendment Bill 2018. This law, according to the Minister for Revenue, Tialavea Tionisio Hunt, adds 10 percent Customs tariff on turkey tails, frozen chicken cuts and lamb flaps. Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegoi said the tax will help promote a healthy Samoa. Sunrise Takeaways and Restaurant, Operational Manager Cheemei Zhu said: I disagree with the new tax imposed on chicken prices because it affects our business greatly through our expenses. We buy 50 boxes of chicken a day, so multiply it with the new price which is $67 from Ah Liki Wholesale, then times it by six days a week." Its too expensive for us and not only that, we have to raise the prices for our meals. Our daily specials were affordable at $3 or $4, but now we have to set a reasonable price due to the increase in chicken prices. I also feel sorry for the people who buy the food because they will be affected in terms of affordability, she said. Cheemei added: There are 20-25 dishes made with chicken which we serve, if you combine the numbers from the takeaway and the restaurant at Matafele. Another worry is how expenses would also affect the income for the 75 local employees. The concerned 30-year-old said together with the increase in chicken prices is the reduction of the number of chickens in a box. The Samoan people, especially the low income families, they only buy chicken because its affordable, but thats not the case anymore. I think they should increase the prices of turkey tails instead of chicken, that is more harmful to the health of our people, she said. A solution they are looking at is trying to set up a cattle farm to try and meet the demand. Nellas Restaurant and Drive Through Owner Jermaine Stewart said: This is not the first time chicken has increased its prices. Back in 2014, the prices were this high around $66, so it stayed there for four weeks then it came back down. I dont consider that as high, I understand the fact that people are concerned with the high cost of living, he said. From a business owners perspective, the Government is trying to emphasise health awareness and initiatives through this taxation. But I think that the Government should do more." In terms of the health aspect, apparently the Ministry of Health has a programme that provide posters which focuses on facts about fat and how foods are prepared without it. Like instead of frying a chicken, you can cook it where the oil has been already removed. It is better to put more emphasis on a healthy lifestyle instead of imposing taxes, he added. He said they removed the fat from the chicken by using a pressure fry to cook meat so that the fat does not penetrate the chicken, but gives it that brown coating. However, even with the high cost of chicken, they have not resorted to increasing the prices of their meals. Mr. Stewart said the Government needs to do more initiatives in terms of preparation of foods instead of taxes. Coffee Shop with Chicken Buns, Owner Tuli Faalilo Filipo expressed her disappointment towards the increase in chicken prices. The 54-year-old rents a small shop to sell her chicken buns for six days at Vaitele. Her greatest concern is the increase of daily expenses, especially in reference to the tax imposed on chicken prices. I make 180 or close to 200 chicken buns a day. I dont buy boxes but separately by chicken legs, only because I cannot afford that. For 10 chicken legs, it costs me $21; if I want to increase the quantity it will cost me more. My income all depends on the sale I make but if cant meet the demand, I will have more expenses than profits, she said. As a business womans perspective, I have to budget wisely yet my business depends greatly on chicken. The increased prices have contributed to my never-ending worries. She pays her rent, buys so many ingredients then alongside with the income for her three workers that help during the process of cooking to meet the demands of sale, she added. She said the people of Samoa, especially low income earners depend on chicken, and now that the cost of chicken has increased, it becomes too costly. The people of our country always use chicken not only as a food supply, but also for when we cater to family commitments through funerals or weddings etc. Our people do not have the same financial situation and for those who struggle, they all depend on chicken but then take that away, they have nothing, Tuli said. She said the Government should consider that not everyone can afford the cost of living. Only days after declaring a truce in a looming trade war with China, the Trump administration on Tuesday unsheathed its sword of tariffs again as it prepares to send another high-level delegation to Beijing for talks this weekend. The administration has veered back and forth between conciliatory and antagonistic moves in its dealings with China, partly reflecting Trumps negotiating style but also clashing views inside the White House and what many analysts see as a lack of a coherent strategy and clear set of goals on trade policy. A White House statement Tuesday said it would announce by June 15 a final list of $50 billion of Chinese imports that would be subject to 25% tariffs. The duties would target Chinese goods containing industrially significant technology, the statement said, and would be imposed shortly thereafter. Additionally, the White House stated that by June 30 it would make public specific investment and related export-control measures aimed at restricting Chinas access to important U.S. technology, and that these would take effect also soon after. Advertisement The proposed tariffs and investment restrictions have been in the works since earlier this year and are in response to the Trump administrations findings that Chinese policies have pressured U.S. firms to give up their technology secrets to do business in China and that in some cases American firms have been victimized by outright theft of intellectual property. A spokesperson for Chinas Ministry of Commerce in Beijing expressed surprise at the White House statement, saying it was contrary to recent announcements by both sides after high-level talks in Washington earlier this month. Regardless, the spokesperson said, China has confidence that it would be able to defend the countrys core interests. A little more than a week ago, Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said that the planned tariffs would be suspended in the wake of Chinas pledge to buy billions of dollars more of American products, specifically U.S. farm goods and energy resources such as liquefied natural gas. Mnuchins public remarks May 20 that were putting the trade war on hold, plus Trumps recent move to ease up on severe penalties against Chinese telecom giant ZTE, drew immediate fire from Trumps supporters, who criticized the president for going back on his promise to get tough on China and bring real reform to trade policy. It was unclear whether the White House issued the statement in response to the backlash, or meant to enhance its leverage in ongoing talks with a trading partner, a familiar tack by the administration. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is scheduled to lead a delegation to Beijing for talks Saturday through Monday with a Chinese team headed by Vice Premier Liu He. Others suspect the statement may be related to the ongoing talks with North Korea. Trump has blamed China for influencing Pyongyang to take a more hard-line stance toward the U.S. as Trump tries to hold a summit with Kim Jong Un on denuclearization. Liu, Chinese President Xi Jinpings top economic advisor, has met with senior Trump administration officials on three separate occasions since February as trade tensions began mounting this year. In early March, Trump announced tariffs on steel and aluminum from China and other countries, and a month later U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer released an initial list of hundreds of Chinese imports valued at nearly $50 billion that could be hit with 25% tariffs. Dozens of U.S. firms and business groups, as well as lawmakers, have sought to restrain the White House from imposing massive tariffs that could trigger a trade war and end up hurting American consumers, companies and the broader economy. Chinas trade practices raise serious concerns, but job-killing tariffs arent the answer, Matthew Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, said shortly after the White House issued the statement. Others pressing for significant tariffs against China argue that tough punitive action is needed to get China to change. But where most everybody agrees hard-liners and those preferring a softer approach alike is that the Trump administration has not articulated or implemented a unified strategy of what it wants from China and how it will achieve those goals. Trump himself has made it a top priority to cut down the large U.S. trade deficit with China about $375 billion in goods last year. But economists widely agree that U.S. trade deficits are the result of an imbalance between American savings and investment patterns. At the same time, some administration officials have put the focus on Chinas domestic industrial policies and other mercantilist behavior. What youre seeing is a back-and-forth because various people are looking at it from different perspectives and theres no consistency, said Yukon Huang, senior fellow in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A lot of the focus is on technology transfer, so-called unfair competition, and those have to do with investment decisions and not really with trade. [Theyre] trying to reconcile this, and its chaotic because no one seems to know, and particularly at the presidents level, there isnt any consistent signal. Huang suggested it was hard to see how China would respond at this weekends meeting beyond the pledges it already has made to ramp up imports of U.S. goods to help lower the American trade deficit. Its not simply a matter of blowing hot and cold from week to week, but there are serious internal contradictions in the Trump administrations China trade policy, said Alan Tonelson, the founder of RealityChek, a blog on economic and national security policy, and a longtime analyst on manufacturing and trade. One of these problems, he said, is the administrations apparent goal of breaking down various forms of discrimination and other tactics that the Chinese employ to make it easier for U.S. companies to do business in China. But some in Trumps team dont want American companies making more investments in China. Theres a striking tension between that goal on one hand and greatly reducing the trade deficit on the other, Tonelson said. Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland and former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission, argued that Tuesdays statement from the White House wasnt inconsistent with its earlier remarks that it was putting tariffs on hold. All theyre doing is cocking the trigger, he said, noting that the administration needed to set the process in motion in case talks break down. The bigger problem, Morici said, is that theres been a pattern in the administration of backing down when it counts. Donald Trump makes big bluffs but doesnt follow through, he said. The latest from Washington More stories from Don Lee don.lee@latimes.com Follow me at @dleelatimes UPDATES: 3:50 p.m.: This story was updated with reaction from China and industry experts. This story was originally published at 8 a.m. In the wake of a rally and threats of a union-approved strike, the National School District and the elementary teachers union have reached a contract settlement, the district announced Tuesday. The main points of contention in the contract, which covers the current school year, were related to the salaries and workload of teachers. The district and the union had been at an impasse in contract negotiations since October. The negotiations began in February 2017. Last week, in the midst of a mediation phase, the union put pressure on the district to reach an agreement. First, about 88 percent of members of the National City Elementary Teachers Association voted on May 21 to authorize a strike. Two days later, teachers, joined by students and parents, rallied outside Rancho de la Nacion School before a school board meeting. The associations goal has never been to go to a strike, said Christina Benson, president of the union. We honestly have been trying to communicate what our members want. Advertisement In regards to salary for the 2017-18 school year, the proposed settlement offers teachers a 2 percent raise retroactive to January. The district plans to use funds from the 2018-19 Local Control and Accountability Plan to pay for the raises. The union had requested a 4 percent salary raise from the district, which had offered teachers a one-time 2 percent bonus, with no pay increase. Under the proposed settlement, the district increased its maximum contribution to medical, dental and vision benefits, as well as life insurance premiums, by $700, bringing the total to $13,000 per eligible, full-time employee. According to a statement released by the district, the agreement also provides for increased collaboration between the district and teachers in the areas of educational objectives, curriculum and textbook selection among other policy matters. The union had requested language in the contract to address what teachers described as an overload of work. Benson said last week that teachers wanted the contract to lay out changes to address the issue and allow them to have a say on the amount of work. We want a say on how our collaboration time with our colleagues occurs, the tools necessary in the classroom, and the curriculum to teach our students, Benson said. Not having a curriculum forces teachers to search for materials on their own time and purchase books and materials with their own money. Benson, a fifth-grade teacher at Central Elementary School, said other districts in Chula Vista, San Ysidro and San Diego include language related to workload in their teachers contracts. She was not available for comment following the announcement of the proposed contract settlement. It was unclear if the settlement includes all or some of the language the union had proposed. While the union and district appear to have settled on a 2017-18 contract, the two sides have started to negotiate a contract for the upcoming school year. The district has proposed a 5 percent salary increase for the 2018-19 school year, which will include longer workdays by 20 minutes. The union had not yet put a salary proposal on the table as of last week. Benson said she is not pleased with the districts offer. If theyre already saying that they have the money for next year, why dont they put that toward what were asking for now, and then we settle the next years contract when it comes, she said. While the board met behind closed doors at Rancho de la Nacion School last week, outside about 100 teachers, students and parents lined the north and south sidewalks of Division Street as part of a rally to bring attention to the stalemate in the salary negotiations. Teachers held signs that read, I dont want to strike, but I will. Their chants included, We cant succeed with district greed. Following the hours-long rally, the group of teachers, parents and students filled the auditorium of the elementary school for the regular school board meeting. Almost a dozen supporters spoke in favor a significant raise and reasonable workload for teachers. Without our teachers, our schools are nothing, said Marina Barraza, whose five children attended schools in the district. We are asking you to be fair with our teachers, hear their demands and take action. Benson called the districts offers insulting, ridiculous and absurd. We are ready to strike, she told the board. The time to avoid a strike and settle (on a contract) is now. Are you ready to start a new school year without teachers? The settlement will be considered for approval first by the union, then by the school district. The next school board meeting is scheduled for June 13, a week after the last day of school. Going into the summer, we are thankful for the opportunity to move forward together and put children first, Superintendent Leighangela Brady said Tuesday in a statement. Email: david.hernandez@sduniontribune.com Phone: (619) 293-1876 Twitter: @D4VIDHernandez A labor leader blocked on Facebook by National City Mayor Ron Morrison has filed a federal lawsuit, arguing the mayor violated his First Amendment rights by silencing criticisim he expressed online. In the lawsuit, Andrew McKercher, organizing director of the local union of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, claims Morrison violated his freedom of speech and right to criticize government officials. McKercher is a National City resident, according to the lawsuit. News of the lawsuit comes a week before a June 5 special election in which National City voters will consider the future of Morrisons 26-year political career. Morrison, who has reached his term limits, hopes voters will pass Measure B to set new term limits, allowing him to seek re-election in November. McKerchers Facebook page shows numerous posts against Measure B and in support of the opposing Measure C. Advertisement Morrison, who learned about the lawsuit from The San Diego Union-Tribune, did not deny the claim that he blocked McKercher a move that keeps the labor organizer from being able to view or publish comments to the mayors Facebook page. Morrison said he finally blocked McKercher two or three weeks ago because of continuous posts and comments the mayor called antagonistic and accusatory. I dont think you should be able to harass people on their page, Morrison said. I put up with this for several years. It was just getting so obnoxious. Morrison, who acknowledged his personal page is used for city purposes, said he asked McKercher to not publish posts about him on his page in the past, to no avail. Posts the mayor said he takes issue with include a picture McKercher uploaded two weeks ago of a handmade poster that read, Ron Morrison loves ICE. Hes just making this stuff up and putting it out there, Morrison said. Filed Friday in San Diego federal court, the lawsuit alleges Morrison blocked McKercher as payback for past criticism and to prevent him from publicizing his concerns in the future. Morrison said there are critics whom he does not stop from publishing comments on his page. Some are out there and obnoxious but they dont go overboard, the mayor said. (McKercher) goes overboard and wont stop. The lawsuit argues that Morrisons Facebook page constitutes a public forum and that blocking McKercher violated his constitutional rights. My client is deeply concerned that the mayor cherry-picks the feedback he is willing to consider from his constituents so that he doesnt have to face the extensive criticisms he rightly deserves, attorney Cory Briggs said in a statement. The Founding Fathers protected citizens against politicians like the mayor when they wrote the First Amendment. My client is entitled to that protection and is confident that the federal courts will agree with him. The lawsuit is similar to one filed against President Donald Trump by critics who were blocked from his Twitter account. In response to the lawsuit, a federal court judge in New York City ruled a week ago that Trumps personal Twitter account, and those of other U.S. government officials, are public forums. Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that blocking critics for voicing dissenting political views breached First Amendment rights. The lawsuit against Morrison seeks puntative, nominal and other damages, an injunction and funds to cover legal fees. Email: david.hernandez@sduniontribune.com Phone: (619) 293-1876 Twitter: @D4VIDHernandez Amid a breach of contract lawsuit, Coronado Brewing is trying to get Monkey Paw off its back. Less than 11 months after buying Monkey Paw, Coronado wants to sell the East Village brewpub and its lineup of award-winning beers. This allows us to focus our attention on Coronado Brewing, said Brandon Richards, CEO of Coronado Brewing. The move comes as Monkey Paw founder Scot Blair is suing Coronado, maintaining that the brewery owes him $33,534 and interest based on a promissory note executed in September. The next hearing for this lawsuit, which was filed in April, is scheduled for Sept. 28. Advertisement When the original sale was announced in July, everyone seemed happy. Richards maintained that Monkey Paw filled a valuable niche, making beers with a punk sensibility unlike Coronados more mainstream approach. They do a lot of different, unique beers that we dont usually do, he said then. And I think their brand reaches younger, millennial drinkers. Blair, for his art, expressed satisfaction that the larger brewery would give his beers a bigger profile in the San Diegos crowded marketplace. This accomplishes all the goals that I wanted at a much quicker pace, he said. And I still maintain control and integrity. That was then. Now? Really, Coronado Brewing can do some of the same things, if we push ourselves and push our boundaries, Richards said. We can become a little edgier. Blair was unavalable for comment Tuesday. While Blair and Coronados owners, Rick and Ron Chapman, were old friends, after the sale relations soured. Blair complained that Monkey Paw beer recipes were being changed and that there were delays in canning and distributing the beers. He eventually stopped working at Monkey Paw, choosing to focus on his other ventures, which include South Park Brewing Co. and Hamiltons Tavern. It is really hard to build a brand without the co-founders involvement, Richards said. Hes no longer involved. Founded in 2011, Monkey Paw is a tiny brewery annual production hovers around 650 barrels of beer a year that nonetheless competed on the world stage, winning awards at the World Beer Cup and the Great American Beer Festival. Located at 805 16th St., the Paw remains open and the employees will stay on Coronados payroll until a sale is completed, Richards said. You can come by tonight and have a pint, he said. Coronado is open to selling the brand, brewery, equipment and furnishings or any combination of those elements. It depends on what the buyer is looking for, Richards said. No price has been listed. Coronado acquired Monkey Paw only two months after investing in a startup, SouthNorte, which specializes in Mexican-themed beers. Unlike Monkey Paw, though, SouthNorte is not supervised by Coronado staffers and there is no talk of divesting SouthNorte. Thats part of the discussion: can we handle one brand or three brands, Richards said. Right now, two brands makes the most sense. A decade ago, Kerry Meads fell fast for Falling Slowly, and for the bittersweet film musical that birthed the song. I fell in love with the movie when it first came out, the director and Lambs Players associate artistic chief says of catching Once at a 2007 preview screening here. The story did not go where a love story normally goes, and I so appreciated that. It feels like real life. It definitely is not Disney. Where Once went after its sleeper movie success which included an Oscar win for Falling Slowly in 2008 was to Broadway, where its 2012 stage adaptation promptly earned eight Tony Awards, including best musical. Advertisement And now the show lands here for its very first local non-touring production, which Meads is directing for Lambs. Its a big deal for the Coronado theater, not in the least because its a show that asks so much of its cast: The actors play all the instruments, and several must play more than one. The musical, built around the songs from the movie by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (who also starred in the film), centers on a dispirited and lovelorn street musician and the Czech pianist he meets in Dublin. That might seem the setup for a seen-it-before romantic saga, but Once doesnt really go there its as much a story of torn allegiances and real-life complications and the tension between friendship and courtship as it is about love. Once is loosely situated in a Dublin pub that also serves as other locations. Part of the charm of the Broadway production was that audience members could step up to the onstage bar before the show to mingle with the actors as they practiced their music, and Lambs is adopting that practice as well. Just to be in the midst of that was magical, Meads says of getting onstage before a Broadway performance. I think its a really important part of the show that sets up a sense of community. RELATED Live from Broadway: Onstage with Once Once wins 8 Tonys, including best musical Meads production stars Michael Louis Cusimano and Caitie Grady, whose characters are known only as Guy and Girl. The rest of the cast for the most part stays onstage even when a scene is happening only between those two. (The full ensemble numbers 14 actor-musicians, about half of whom are newcomers to Lambs.) Its an intimate little relationship and show, and yet the entire cast is like an extension of the Guy and the Girl, of their hearts and emotions and what music does (to them), as Meads describes it. The stage adaptation, she adds, is so true in translating the purity and honesty of the movie, and really keeping the simplicity of it. Its a really pure piece. Once When: Previews begin Friday. Opens June 8. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 4 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Through July 22. Where: Lambs Players Theatre, 1142 Orange Ave., Coronado Tickets: $28-$78 (discounts available) Phone: (619) 437-6000 Online: lambsplayers.org jim.hebert@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @jimhebert Is there any time of the year better than spring? I may grow lazy about visiting the farmers market during the winter, but come springtime, I never miss a week. Its strawberry season. I never get tired of strawberries, although as a nation weve grown spoiled and blase about them and they dont seem as exciting as many other seasonal fruits. They are ubiquitous in every grocery store, but the giant, white-throated commercial strawberries bred to withstand refrigeration and longer storage times cant hold a candle to the freshly picked strawberries available straight from the farm. I spoke with a farmer from Oceanside at my local farmers market in Coronado recently, while I admired his display of berries. They were such a lovely, deep shade of crimson they seemed to vibrate with color. He told me the strawberries sold at farmers markets are varieties that wont withstand refrigeration or long storage times, so they are never grown for wide commercial use. They are fragile and must be eaten fresh or cooked within a day or two of picking. Farmers will often cultivate a different variety of strawberry every season, searching for new hybrids that are softer, sweeter and more fragrant and flavorful. I couldnt resist, and purchased an entire flat of Frontera strawberries, that could just as easily been nicknamed the Cinderella strawberry for their breathtakingly beauty and the fact that once the clock struck 12, they wouldnt be long for this world. Advertisement What do you do when you are faced with playing fairy godmother to a flat of delectable strawberries with a short shelf life? Shortcake and pie come to mind, and jam, too, of course. Shortcake doesnt necessarily mean those little sponge cakes found in the produce aisle. Almost anything can stand in for shortcake when its covered in strawberries; a flaky buttermilk biscuit, a slice of pound cake, or my new favorite, Cornmeal-Lime Cake. Its a simple, single-layer cake flavored with grated lime zest. Whole milk yogurt added to the batter keeps the cake tender, while cornmeal and almond flour give it an interesting texture. Strawberries, fresh lime juice and a little sugar make a surprisingly addictive compote, perfect spooned over the cake and served with a dollop of whipped cream. If the classic combo of strawberries and cream is your favorite, Strawberry Chiffon Pie will become your new favorite summertime pie. A perfect no-bake dessert, crushed strawberries and Grand Marnier are folded into whipped cream and set with a small amount of gelatin before they are spooned into a chocolate cookie crust and refrigerated until set. Adorned with more whipped cream and dotted with halved berries, this simple pie is dinner party perfection and can easily be made the day ahead of time. Making jam doesnt have to be a daylong endeavor, either, requiring lots of equipment and tons of little jars that need to be boiled and sealed. Small-batch jams are perfect for the cook who wants to make just enough jam for his or her personal use, or to use up the last of farmers market bounty. Before I made my jam, I followed the advice of my friend and jam-making expert Jamie Schler. She always prepares her jam the French way, in small batches, and with no added pectin. Macerating the strawberries with sugar for a few hours, or preferably overnight in the refrigerator, helps release their juices and the natural pectin in the fruit. She believes lemon juice helps with thickening as well. Making jam in small batches is also a great way to flex your creativity. Since youre only making a few jars at a time, you can experiment with unusual flavor combinations, adding vanilla beans, liqueurs or spices to the fruit. Strawberries and balsamic vinegar is a classic combination, so I added a few tablespoons of my favorite aged pomegranate balsamic vinegar to my small batch of jam for a little extra kick. No magic wand required. OConnor is a San Diego-based food writer and author of seven cookbooks. Her latest book, Cake, I Love You, was published by Chronicle Books in 2017. Jill OConnors Strawberry Chiffon Pie. (K.C. Alfred / U-T ) Strawberry Chiffon Pie Feel free to substitute a graham cracker crust for the chocolate crust. Serves 8 to 10. 4 heaped cups (about 1 pounds) sliced fresh strawberries 1 cup sugar plus 3 or 4 tablespoons 2 tablespoons Grand Marnier or Cointreau Two envelopes (about 6 teaspoons) unflavored granulated gelatin 1/3 cup orange juice 2 cups heavy whipping cream A 10-inch chocolate cookie pie crust (recipe follows) Stir the berries, sugar and Grand Marnier together in a large bowl. Let the fruit macerate together for at least 1 or 2 hours at room temperature (or overnight in the refrigerator) until the berries are juicy and fragrant and the sugar has dissolved into a rich, red syrup. Transfer the berries and their juices into a food processor fitted with a metal chopping blade and pulse 3 or 4 times until the fruit turns into a thick, chunky sauce (do not puree until smooth.) In a 2-cup measuring cup or small glass bowl, sprinkle the gelatin over the orange juice and allow it to dissolve and bloom. When the juice thickens and is slightly firm, set the measuring cup or bowl in a small saucepan of simmering water, stirring until the gelatin dissolves and the liquid is smooth. Stir the dissolved gelatin into the chunky berry sauce and refrigerate until the mixture is thickened and slightly set, but not completely firm, about 1 to 2 hours. Whip 1 cup of the cream to soft peaks and fold into the strawberry mixture. Spoon the filling into the prepared crust and refrigerate until the filling is set, at least 4 hours but preferably overnight. Whip the remaining heavy cream with 3 or 4 tablespoons granulated sugar until it forms stiff peaks. Fill a piping bag fitted with a large round tip with the whipped cream and pipe over the surface of the pie. Keep the pie refrigerated until ready to serve. Chocolate Cookie Crust 30 Oreos or other chocolate sandwich cookies 6 tablespoons melted butter Heat oven to 350 degrees. Place cookies (no need to remove the cream filling) in a food processor fitted with the metal chopping blade. Give the cookies 5 to 6 long pulses and process until they form soft, fine crumbs. Add the melted butter and pulse one or two more times to combine. Spray a 10-inch glass pie pan with nonstick cooking spray and press the moist crumbs evenly onto the bottom and up the sides of the pie pan. Bake crust for 5-7 minutes. Cool completely before filling. Jill OConnors Cornmeal Lime Cake With Strawberry Lime Compote (K.C. Alfred / U-T ) Cornmeal Lime Cake With Fresh Strawberry-Lime Compote This cake is easy to make, feeds a crowd and makes a perfect showcase for a quick and easy compote made from red, ripe strawberries drenched in a tangy lime syrup. The cake is pleasantly moist but sturdy with the addition of cornmeal and almond flour in the batter. You will need a 9-inch round cake pan that is at least 3 inches deep to accommodate all the batter, or use a 9-inch springform pan. Serves 10 1 cup all-purpose flour cup yellow cornmeal cup almond meal or almond flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon fine sea salt 1 cup (8 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature 1 cups granulated sugar 3 large eggs cup whole milk yogurt Grated zest and juice from 2 limes (about 4 tablespoons juice) teaspoon almond extract STRAWBERRY COMPOTE: 5-6 cups sliced fresh strawberries Juice from 3 to 4 limes 1/3 cup granulated sugar Whipped cream, for serving Heat oven to 350 degrees. Generously grease a 9-inch round cake pan (at least 3 inches deep) or a 9-inch springform pan, or coat with nonstick cooking spray. Line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, almond meal, baking powder and salt. Set aside. In a separate bowl, beat the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer until light and creamy, about 4 to 5 minutes. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, and then beat in the yogurt, lime zest, lime juice and almond extract. With the mixer on low speed, add the dry ingredients in two additions, beating well after each addition. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 45 to 55 minutes, until the cake is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. After baking, transfer the cake to a wire rack to cook for 10 minutes. Unmold the cake onto a cooling rack and remove parchment paper. Cool completely. Make the Strawberry-Lime Compote: Combine the sliced strawberries with sugar and lime juice and stir together. Let the berries macerate in the sugar for about an hour. The sugar will draw out the berries juices and combine with the lime juice to form a deep red, deliciously sweet-and-tangy syrup. To serve: Transfer the cake to a serving platter and sprinkle with confectioners sugar. Serve thick slices topped with a large dollop of whipped cream and a generous spoonful of berry compote. Small Batch Strawberry Jam With Pomegranate Balsamic Nothing captures the flavor of strawberries you have picked yourself, or purchased from your favorite farm stand or farmers market, better than homemade jam. You dont need to be an expert at preserves to make it, either. Small batch jam made with 1 or 2 pounds of fruit is easy to assemble and cooks quickly in less than 15 minutes. This recipe makes about a pint of jam and will last in your refrigerator for up to 3 weeks. Makes 1 to 1 pints 2 pounds ripe strawberries Juice of lemon 2 cups sugar 2 to 3 tablespoons pomegranate balsamic vinegar or other aged balsamic vinegar Stem and coarsely chop the strawberries in a food processor fitted with the metal chopping blade. Transfer the berries to a large mixing bowl and stir in 1 cup sugar, and the lemon juice. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the berries macerate for at least 2 hours at room temperature, but preferably overnight in the refrigerator. Before you start cooking, put a small plate in the freezer for testing the jam. Transfer the berries to a large saucepan or Dutch oven. Stir in the remaining 1 cup sugar. Set the pan over medium heat. Cook the berries, stirring occasionally, until the sugar dissolves. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring constantly, and cook for about 8 to 10 minutes, until the mixture starts to thicken. To test, pull the plate from the freezer and put a spoonful of the jam on the plate and leave it to sit for a minute or two. The jam is ready when it is thickened, and firm enough to hold its shape on the plate without running or becoming too watery, and your finger leaves a clean trail on the plate when pulled through the center of the jam. Remove the jam from the heat and stir in 2 tablespoons pomegranate balsamic vinegar. Taste the jam, and add more vinegar, a teaspoon at a time if desired (do not add more than 3 tablespoons vinegar, total.) Spoon the jam into two or three 8-ounce jars, let it cool to room temperature and then cover tightly and keep refrigerated for up to three weeks. Brandon Steppes life took a sharp turn in 2006 when a 16-year-old neighborhood boy named RayVaughn showed up at his garage music studio and asked to record some raps. Steppe, then an aspiring hip-hop producer, sent RayVaughn on his way but he soon returned, more determined than ever. Steppe offered him a deal: free studio time in exchange for good grades. That was the beginning of the Davids Harp Foundation, an East Village creative youth development organization that provides studio time, technical training and mentorship to more than 200 at-risk youths each year. Steppe and his team of eight part-time mentors and music and video producers work six days a week with mostly teens ages 14 to 18 who are in homeless shelters, foster care and the juvenile justice system. Advertisement The most motivated teens are invited to sign a record deal, where they can earn twice as much studio time if they bring up their grades and improve their behavior. Most kids honor their contracts. One of them is a teen rapper named Olivia who came to Davids Harp two years ago. At the time, shed been on the run from her group home for two years and hadnt been in school for a while. Within two months of signing her record deal, Olivia was a top student, earning a 3.8 grade point average at her high school. These kids have the aptitude, but nobody has ever held them accountable, said Steppe, 37. Last year, student grade point averages programwide went up 16.9 percent. Many teens in the program have moved onto college, several are recording albums and one is now a national touring artist. But for Steppe, the greatest achievement is seeing how teens like RayVaughn have been transformed through the magic of music and mentoring. When I saw how he responded to the music, it changed my life, Steppe said. When he was in the studio, the heaviness of the day just melted off him. He could be 16 again instead of just trying so hard to be 20. Joseph Mack, director of programming at Davids Harp Foundation, right, helps student David Higareda edit his rap song at the nonprofit groups East Village headquarters. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) Steppe grew up in Southeast San Diego where his family has a long record of community service. His great-grandmother Rebecca Craft was president of the local NAACP chapter and founded the Logan Heights Womens Civic League. His now-retired grandfather, Cecil Steppe, was director of the countys Department of Social Services and CEO of the Urban League of San Diego County. Brandon Steppes goal was to make his mark in the community in music. He played jazz saxophone in high school, gigged around town as a musician and did some producing on the side. In 2006, he was managing a car rental agency when his wife encouraged him to follow his dream. He quit his job, cashed in his 401(k) and set up the studio in their garage. It wasnt long before he found his calling with Davids Harp and hes never looked back. I think it has to do with my Christian faith and finding my purpose, he said. Its seeing young people transformed after coming in without a sense of hope and finding a place where we meet them right where theyre at. Steppe named his foundation after the Bible story of David, who could ward off evil spirits whenever he played his harp for King Saul. Steppe said his biggest revelation came in 2008. In the midst of the recession, his wife had to close her business, his studio bills were piling up, his COBRA gap insurance lapsed and his wife, then pregnant with their first child, was facing health problems. The upbeat attitude he practiced around his mentees cracked one day and he broke down and shared his troubles. To his surprise, the teens reciprocated and opened up like never before. This style of openness is now a cornerstone of Davids Harp, which became a nonprofit in 2009. Steppes transparency appealed to David Higareda, 19, who started at Davids Harp Foundation two years ago and is now one of four former mentees studying music and video production at San Diego City College. The aspiring filmmaker said Steppe helped me see the blueprint thats possible for my life. Brandon tells you about his struggles and you feel comfortable sharing your own, said Higareda. You feel like hes walked in your shoes and you can learn a lot from him. Davids Harp runs four programs. Shelter Nights brings children in area homeless shelters into the studio every Tuesday night. Voices for Children is a songwriting day program for children with court-appointed special advocates. Student Studio is a six-week training program affiliated with 17 local schools and foundations. And the just-launched Studio in a Backpack program takes the six-week program into the East Mesa Juvenile Detention Facility. The creative team at Davids Harp Foundation, from left, director of programming Joseph Mack, founder and president Brandon Steppe and instructor/manager Rashaad Graham. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) One of the key figures behind the growth of Davids Harp is its board chair, Brinton Miller, who is senior vice president of technology strategy and architecture for Discovery Communications, the parent company of Discovery Channel, HGTV, the Food Network and more. Through a family connection, Miller has known Steppe for nearly 20 years and calls Steppe the best person Ive ever met. Back in 2006, Steppe sought Millers technical advice in building his garage studio. Later, he asked for tips on raising a couple thousand dollars to buy a couple of cheap laptops and toy sound mixers for his mentees. But Miller grew up playing multiple instruments and knew firsthand how musical training can improve grades, focus and discipline. He urged Steppe to dream bigger. I was the one jumping up and down and saying if youre going to do it, go big, Miller said. Miller tracked down a state-of-the-art film mixing board in Hollywood that they adapted for use in a music studio. He also launched a yearslong partnership where Discovery donates its used laptops and video equipment to Davids Harp, which then re-sells the products to fund its programs. Miller has also helped Steppe arrange partnerships with Sony, Avid Technology, Adobe and other firms whose eqipment and software donations have allowed Davids Harp to build a world-class music production studio at its 16th Street headquarters, which opened in 2012. The kids are in awe when they first walk in, Miller said. The respect that they show for the facility and for the team working in the facility is so much greater. Davids Harp is run on a $250,000 budget. Miller said the boards immediate goal is to improve fundraising so the organization can expand its outreach in San Diego and hopefully open a second studio in the next two to three years. Jesus Villegas, 20, a mentee at Davids Harp Foundation in East Village, edits one of his video projects. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune) Running the onsite mentoring and music training program with Steppe are director of programming Joseph Mack and instructor/manager Rashaad Graham. Both have volunteered their time to Davids Harp since 2008 and only recently started collecting a part-time salary. Mack, a longtime local music producer, gave up his full-time corporate job in April because he feels so strongly about the mission, saying: Its inspiring to see the progress were making. Graham, a music producer and drummer, said Davids Harp has allowed him to combine his two passions of making music and working with children. Seeing the success of these kids gives us renewed focus. These kids lives are being changed, he said. Among these success stories is 20-year-old Jesus Villegas, who started at Davids Harp in high school and is now studying video production at City College. When I first came I had anxiety around other people, but they listened to me and they helped me find my passion, Villegas said. Brandon doesnt judge me. He lets me describe what I want to do and then he says, lets figure out how to get you there. For information on Davids Harp Foundation, visit davidsharpfoundation.org. pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com Defense Secretary James Mattis touched down here early Tuesday, the first leg in a journey to a major summit of Asian nations in Singapore and potential talks with North Korea over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Mattis stopped in Hawaii to conduct bilateral discussions with key Asian military leaders before presiding Wednesday at the installation of Navy Adm. Phil Davidson as the leader of the powerful Pacific Command. Davidson, the former head of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, will succeed Harry Harris, the admiral whos slated to become the ambassador to South Korea. Called PACOM, the command extends from Hollywood to Bollywood, polar bears to penguins, as Harris put it, and Mattis is expected to emphasize that by changing the name of Davidsons new post to Indo-Pacific Command. Advertisement It highlights growing American strategic interests in India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka as Chinese military and trade interests also move west while still retaining a sense of its vast geographical sweep from California to India and the North and South Poles. In a short discussion with reporters, Mattis highlighted expected talks in Hawaii with both Japanese and Indonesian leaders, calling Jakarta the geographic and diplomatic fulcrum of the Indo-Pacific region and the alliance with Tokyo the cornerstone of peace and security there. Our vision is very clear, Mattis SAID. Its been consistent over many administrations a safe and secure and free Indo-Pacific region based on the shared principles that are aligned with international law. Mattis said that means Americas abiding support for sovereign nations that have prospered with free trade, safe from military or economic bullying by regional powers; peaceful resolutions to disputes; and a steadfast adherence to international rules and norms by great and small countries. He pointed to an American-led peace that began with Japans defeat in 1945, creating the conditions for a prosperous Pacific Rim that benefited all the nations within it. Simmering in the background are ongoing talks in Geneva over the future of war-ravaged Syria, continuing attempts by Washington to resolve Turkish concerns about security along Ankaras southern border and global attempts to contain the civil war in Yemen. On Wednesday, the United Arab Emirates announced the destruction of two Houthi rebel patrol boats in the Red Sea following what the Saudi Arabian-led military coalition says have been harassing assaults on commercial shipping. Last month an anti-ship missile believed to have been supplied to the Houthis by Iran speared into a Saudi tanker west of Hodeidah, a port currently under rebel control. So the implications of this are not insignificant, if we dont get this under control, Mattis said. Also, I will tell you that theres a humanitarian catastrophe in that country thats being addressed by the UN Special Envoy with our full support. Asia is expected to dominate the secretarys agenda for the next week. In March, China condemned as a serious military provocation what it says was an American incursion on its territorial waters near the Spratly Islands. Days earlier the American destroyer Mustin conducted a freedom-of-navigation operation near the Mischief Reef. The warship intentionally sailed within 12 nautical miles of the island, challenging Chinas declaration that the rocks belong to Beijing, belying similar territorial claims by Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia. Last week, twin American warships repeated the operation near the Paracel Islands. If you notice, theres only one country that seems to take active steps to rebuff them or state their resentment of them. But theyre international waters and a lot of nations want to see freedom of navigation, said Mattis, who also accused Beijing of breaking a 2015 promise to never militarize the islands. Mattis forecast a steady drumbeat of freedom-of-navigation operations to remind Beijing about Americas position on Chinas fortification program and territorial incursions. Weve seen in the last month that theyve done exactly that, moving weaponry in that were never there before, Mattis said. Were going out of our way to cooperate with the Pacific nations. Thats the way we do business in the world. But were also going to confront what we believe is out of step with international law and out of step with international tribunals that have spoken on the issue. The United States recently barred Chinese warships from participating in the upcoming Rim of the Pacific exercises off the coasts of Hawaii and California and President Donald Trump has threatened $60 billion in trade sanctions in an ongoing effort to prod Beijing into a bilateral agreement that will trim Americas trade deficit with the rising power. Trump also has leaned on Chinese leaders to push North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un to abandon his nuclear and ballistic missile program, which experts believe can now target not only Washingtons allies in the region but also many North American cities. Mattis sidestepped discussion about an ongoing effort to salvage a nuclear summit with North Korea, saying only that diplomats continue to meet at Panmunjom in the peninsulas demilitarized zone and that hed spoken with both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump about the latest developments. Mattis said that while America would continue to pursue a diplomatic solution with North Korea, Washington also has the option of escalating global economic sanctions on Pyongyang through a United Nations Security Council resolution. Military Videos On Now D-Day paratrooper from Coronado jumps again in France at age 96 On Now Remembering war's fallen, one name at a time On Now In Ramona, an airplane and an aviator provide living lessons on World War II 1:43 On Now Video: Navy's newest vessel sails into San Diego and a new future in surface warfare On Now Video: U.S. Navy files homicide charges over warship collisions On Now Stopping Marine hazing On Now Video: U.S. Navy Air Crew Grounded After Creating Vulgar Sky Drawing On Now Navy says Asia Pacific ship collisions were avoidable On Now Hundreds of recruits get sick at Marine boot camp On Now Cutler Dawson Talks Navy Federal cprine@sduniontribune.com The emerging architecture, design, art, culinary and cultural scenes of Tijuana will take center stage on Friday in a day-long event hosted by the San Diego Architectural Foundation. We felt that people on this side of the border really dont know about this resurgence thats been taking place in Tijuana, said foundation president Margit Whitlock. Theyre building like crazy, they have an amazing culinary scene, they are making all kinds of craft beer, its kind of like South Park. The tour, called Feast for the Heart: The Tijuana Renaissance, is the foundations first in Tijuana, and is a fundraiser for the organization. It includes a VIP bus tour from San Diego for 100 people already sold out as well as a ticketed evening culinary fair reception at Tijuanas hilltop cultural center, the municipal Casa de la Cultura. It will be followed by a two-hour forum featuring speakers from both sides of the border. The organizers are stressing the cross-border ties that connect Tijuana and San Diego. According to the program, the two cities are increasingly seen as a single urban region and economic zone with diverse backgrounds and common interests. So the question must be asked: Are we really one city or two? Advertisement Speakers at the evening forum include some key actors in Tijuanas changing urban scene, including developers, architects, urban planners, as well as a historic preservationist. Whitlock said the idea for the tour came about last year after she and other members of the foundations board of directors accepted an invitation to visit the city from the Bustamante Realty Group, which represents many of the citys high-end developments. We were just blown away by the quality of the architecture, Whitlock said. Tickets for the culinary fair reception, (from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.) and for the forum, (from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.), can be purchased at the door at the Casa de la Cultura above downtown Tijuana, Avenida Paris 5, Colonia Altamira. The cost to attend both is $75; $20 for students. A ticket for the forum alone is $20. sandra.dibble@sduniontribune.com @sandradibble Prosecutors have dropped an assault charge against a former Los Angeles County sheriffs jail guard who was accused of allowing a man to be beaten by other inmates. The case against Jonathan Grijalva, 29, was dismissed on the first day of trial last week after prosecutors said they could not locate a key witness the man who had been attacked. Grijalva, a custody assistant, was working at the North County Correctional Facility in 2014 when an inmate asked him to walk to another area of the lockup so that another man could be assaulted, prosecutors alleged. The guard at the Castaic lockup was also accused of refusing to arrange for medical care after the targeted inmate, Saul Lira, was beaten by three other men and suffered a broken nose and jaw. Advertisement Grijalva, who has been relieved of duty without pay since October 2014, was charged with one count of assault in November 2016. Angel Navarro, Grijalvas attorney, said his client did nothing wrong and was a victim of the times in an era when the Sheriffs Department is trying to reform itself after a jail abuse scandal. The case followed a string of prosecutions against Los Angeles County deputies accused of assaulting inmates, lying to cover up the beatings or conspiring to obstruct an FBI investigation into misconduct by jailers. The scandal resulted in the conviction of more than 20 department officials, including former Sheriff Lee Baca. But the charge against Grijalva marked the first time since the jail abuse scandal began in 2011 that a county jail guard was charged with a crime after being accused of looking the other way while inmates ambushed someone else. I think this case is an example of overreaching. Weve seen cases where deputies beat people up. This is not one of those cases, Navarro said. Greg Risling, a spokesman for the district attorneys office, said in an email that prosecutors were convinced the evidence would prove Grijalva was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Risling said a necessary witness failed to appear in court. Risling would not identify the witness, but Lira is named in court documents as the person who could not be located. The assault on Lira, 35, was coordinated by powerful inmates known as shot callers associated with the Mexican Mafia, a gang network within the jails, according to the district attorneys office. Last week, federal and local authorities revealed a sweeping investigation into the Mexican Mafia and its control within the Los Angeles County jail system. After being held at the Castaic jail, Lira spent time in state prison on charges including firearm possession by a felon. He was released in May 2017 and placed on probation in Los Angeles County, said Bill Sessa, a spokesman for the state prison system. A county probation spokeswoman, Kerri Webb, said she could not confirm whether Lira has ever been under supervision by her agency. Liras sister, Ida De La Cruz, did not respond to queries by The Times. Grijalva could still face trial if prosecutors decide to charge him again, Navarro said. maya.lau@latimes.com Twitter: @mayalau UPDATES: 4:25 p.m.: This article was updated with additional comments from the district attorneys office. This article was originally published at 3:45 p.m. 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. FULL COVERAGE: USC former gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall accused of inappropriate behavior Advertisement The advancement of the criminal probe comes as more women lodge civil lawsuits against USC. By Tuesday, an additional six women had sued Tyndall and the university, bringing the total number of former patients with pending litigation to 27. Revelations of Tyndalls conduct in the clinic have fomented an uproar at the university, prompting trustees to announce Friday that President C.L. Max Nikias would step down. Nikias is out as USC president: A timeline of his troubled tenure Although the LAPD probe is in its early stages, three veteran sex-crimes prosecutors from the Los Angeles County district attorneys office have been assigned to assist detectives. Tyndall, who was allowed to resign last year with a financial payout, could not be reached for comment Tuesday, and its unclear if he is represented by an attorney. In previous interviews, he has denied wrongdoing. In a letter to The Times dated May 17 but received late last week, the physician said he had heard of only one patient complaint before March 2016: an allegation that he did not wear gloves during a pelvic exam. He wrote that the claim was debunked by administrators. Patients sometimes fabricate stories, Tyndall wrote. He included with his letter more than a dozen positive comments from patients who sent clinic supervisors emails from 2013 to 2015. Overall Dr. Tyndall is a great doctor and a very friendly man who shows great care for his patients, one read. LAPD Capt. Billy Hayes said that of the 52 complaints from former patients, 13 came directly to police and the rest were shared by USC. Hayes said that some of the patients who came forward were believed to be under age 18 at the time. Investigators were working to corroborate and verify the dates of when their appointments took place. The most serious crime under investigation by the LAPD is finger penetration. Witnesses to Tyndalls exams said that he frequently commented on the tightness of patients vaginal muscles, made inappropriate remarks about their sex lives, and touched patients inappropriately during breast and pelvic exams. The physician routinely inserted one to two fingers in patients after voicing concern that a speculum might not fit, and commented on their bodies as he probed them, the witnesses told The Times. In interviews with The Times, Tyndall said his use of fingers had a legitimate medical purpose and said some of his comments to patients were misinterpreted. An internal inquiry by USC in 2016 and 2017 disagreed, finding that his pelvic exams were outside the scope of accepted medical practice and amounted to sexual harassment of patients. As detectives examine the wave of reports, Hayes said that police were consulting with experts in gynecological exams, the Medical Board of California and the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center. Tracy Green, a trial lawyer who defends physicians and other healthcare professionals, said that to bring a criminal case, prosecutors will have to show that Tyndall derived sexual gratification from any alleged misconduct. Green noted that inappropriate remarks could serve as evidence of sexual intent. When you add the color commentary, according to patients, thats what makes it a little odd, she said. Leonard Levine, a criminal defense attorney who specializes in sexual abuse cases, said that part of the investigation will entail looking for potential patterns from victim statements. The civil lawsuits against USC and Tyndall have also alleged a pattern of misconduct dating to the late 1980s. A USC undergraduate said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that in 2013, Tyndall groped her breasts, penetrated her vagina with ungloved fingers and was leering at her naked body for his own sexual pleasure. Another former undergraduate said Tyndall complimented her genitalia for being beautiful, adding: You look like a model; I bet your mom looks like a model, too. Another woman alleged in a lawsuit filed late last week that Tyndall penetrated her with three fingers while pushing her to go on birth control, saying she would be great at sex. USC has said that complaints about Tyndall dating to the early 2000s reached the clinics executive director, who handled patient complaints independently. The university said it was unclear why Tyndall was allowed to remain in his position. It was only after a frustrated nurse reported Tyndall to the campus rape crisis center in 2016 that the gynecologist was removed. Top administrators have acknowledged that the system for reporting and disciplining Tyndall had broken down. But in a letter, Provost Michael Quick said he and top administrators didnt know about the complaints until 2017. USC ousted two top administrators at the clinic earlier this month. Hayes, the LAPD captain, did not rule out whether the investigation would widen to include university administrators and other USC staff familiar with Tyndalls conduct, but he cautioned that it was premature. At this point in time, the focus is on the victims to determine if there are actual victims who rise to a criminal level, Hayes said. John Manly, a civil attorney representing more than 100 former patients, said with the criminal investigation now launched, it was important that those with evidence reach out directly to the LAPD. Anyone with information about Tyndall was urged to contact the Robbery-Homicide Divisions special assault section at (213) 486-6910. matt.hamilton@latimes.com | Twitter: @MattHjourno richard.winton@latimes.com | Twitter: @lacrimes adam.elmahrek@latimes.com | Twitter: @adamelmahrek UPDATES: 7:05 p.m.: This article was updated with background and information from experts. This article was originally published at 4:15 p.m. Our home prices are astronomical and rents are reaching stratospheric heights. But one of the perks of being a San Diegan is that if you can afford to put a roof over your head, and if you can afford to take a break from the job that puts that roof over your head, you can enjoy our great outdoors on the cheap. If you can make your way to one of our many parks Balboa Park, Mission Bay Park, Mission Trails Regional Park, the San Diego Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Chula Vista you can park, wander, hike, meditate or show off for visitors, and its all free. The Torrey Pines Gliderport offers one of the most amazing views in San Diego, and its free, too. The same goes for our beaches. There is no admission fee, and if you dont mind the Blood, Sweat and Tears Tax, there is free parking, too. And now, thanks to a nationwide arts program, some of San Diegos best interiors will be as inclusive as our exteriors. Advertisement On Tuesday, six San Diego-area museums became part of Museums for All, a national initiative to provide free or reduced-price access to low-income individuals and families. The discounts which range from free to $3 access for one to four people are available with the presentation of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cards and a valid photo ID. The participating museums are the San Diego Natural History Museum and the San Diego History Center (both in Balboa Park), the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the New Childrens Museum (both in downtown San Diego), the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad and the San Diego Childrens Discovery Museum in Escondido. The Museum of Contemporary Art La Jolla is also on the Museums for All list, but it is currently closed due to a major expansion project. If you qualify for the Museums for All discounts, this means that a bounty of local cultural treasures the Natural History Museums hometown-centric Coast to Cactus in Southern California exhibit, the New Childrens Museums Zen-like Rain House, the San Diego History Centers Inside/Out rotating display of items from its vast archives are a lot more accessible than they used to be. If you are not eligible for these discounts, they serve as an important reminder of what our local cultural institutions have already done to bring their prizes to the people. Admission to the lovely Timken Museum in Balboa Park is always free, which never fails to shock visitors and locals alike. Also in the park, the San Diego History Center and the Museum of Photographic Arts have instituted flexible admission policies that allow patrons to pay what they can, even if that means just a smile on the way out. At the San Diego History Center (and its Junipero Serra Museum in Presidio Park), visitors are encouraged to make a minimum donation of $10 to give future visitors the chance to pay what they can. When the Museum of Photographic Arts instituted its Pay What You Wish policy in 2015, it was the first of its kind in Southern California. That policy still holds, with visitors asked to make a voluntary contribution in lieu of paying a traditional admission fee. There is also Balboa Parks beloved and much-utilized Free Tuesday program. Free Tuesdays offers free general admission to San Diego County residents and to active military personnel and their dependents to park museums on a rotating basis. Check the City of San Diego Parks and Recreation website (sandiego.gov/park-and-recreation) or the Balboa Park website (balboapark.org) for the schedule. And every February, Macys Museum Month offers half-off admission to more than 40 participating San Diego museums. You missed your 2018 opportunity, but 2019 will be here before you know it. On the museum-access front, San Diego will never reach the lofty heights of London, where the government has made general admission to all of the citys major museums the astounding British Museum, the eclectic Victoria and Albert Museum, the illuminating Imperial War Museum, to name just a few free. We all know that San Diego is pretty on the outside. But thanks to the Museums for All discounts and initiatives like the San Diego History Center and Museum of Photographic Arts flexible admission policies and the Free Tuesday program, more San Diegans are getting the chance to see that our beauty is more than skin deep. Sometimes one of the best views a city can offer is an open door. Twitter: @karla_peterson karla.peterson@sduniontribune.com Attorneys for the last two men accused in the Open Door Bandit home-invasion spree in northern San Diego told jurors Wednesday that their clients are innocent of the most serious charge involving a sex crime. Thomas Smith, 26, is guilty in six of the 10 alleged home break-ins in 2016, but not one in which a woman was blindfolded and sexually assaulted, Deputy Public Defender Damian Lowe said. Lowe gave his closing arguments in front of a jury as the three-week trial for Smith and Aaron Rico III, 22, wrapped up in San Diego Superior Court. Smith and Rico face life in prison if convicted of all charges of conspiracy to commit robbery, burglary and sexual assault. Advertisement Ricos attorney said his client acted as a lookout who stayed outside, but should not be held accountable for the unexpected action of one accomplice who sexually assaulted the woman. Lowe said DNA put his client at some of the homes where a robbery crew would slip through unlocked doors, awaken sleeping residents at gunpoint, tie them up, then ransack the house. The violent spree spanned three weeks in early 2016, with 12 victims inside 10 homes in Mira Mesa, Sorrento Valley, Carmel Valley Ranch, Sabre Springs, Scripps Ranch and Rancho Bernardo. Some victims were dragged from bed, pistol-whipped and forced into a closet, Deputy District Attorney Jalyn Wang told jurors at the beginning of the trial. A 2-year-old childs mouth was taped and an older child was hog-tied. Four other men, including Ricos brother, and one woman have pleaded guilty in the case. Smiths attorney told the jury that the woman who was sexually assaulted, referred to in court only as Jane Doe, gave a detailed description of her assailant, and it did not match Smith. And while Smiths DNA was found on an airsoft pistol left behind at one victims home, and on a flashlight at another home, his DNA was not found inside the sexual assault victims home or on her bindings, Lowe said. Lowe said San Diego police investigators who rounded up the seven suspects in one day fastened onto a theory that Smith must be the suspect because he was the only black man in the crew and the womans attacker was black. Deputy Alternate Public Defender Matthew Mohen told jurors they must separate what Rico did, as a lookout, from what others did entering the homes. To be found guilty of conspiracy or aiding and abetting, the attorney said, one must have expected the outcome as the natural and probable consequence of the crime. Mohen said Rico would not have expected a robbery to turn into a sexual assault. Wang rebutted their arguments, saying a lack of DNA does not prove Smith was absent from the sexual assault victims home. The most important piece of evidence in the Smith case, she said, is that the getaway driver testified that Smith was there and went inside that night. There is concrete evidence to tie Thomas Smith and Aaron Rico III to every case they are charged with, Wang said. Jurors began deliberating the case Wednesday afternoon. Other defendants in the Open Door Bandit series have been sent to prison. Jordan Hollywood Wilson, 19, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, residential burglary and robbery, and was sentenced to eight years in state prison. Victor Harvey, 20, pleaded guilty to burglary and robbery and was sentenced to five years in prison. Robin Shawver, 22, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, burglary and robbery for waiting as getaway driver at the home where the sexual assault occurred. She got three years in prison. Aaron David Rico V, 18, brother to Aaron Rico III pleaded guilty to conspiracy, burglary and robbery, and was sent to prison for 12 years. Stephen Ramon Gomez, 22, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, burglary, robbery and sexual assault, and was sentenced to 30 years, eight months to life in prison. pauline.repard@sduniontribune Twitter: @pdrepard Was she fired? Placed on leave? Simply not retained? Did he resign? Or was he pushed out? Or put on leave? Theres deep confusion, anger and mystery among faculty at San Diego State University, where two influential executives Joanna Brooks and Chukuka Enwemeka have left, or been told to leave, their jobs with little or no public explanation. In an extraordinary move, some of the faculty are asking Adela de la Torre to deal with the uproar a full month before she becomes SDSUs next permanent president. Advertisement A May 8th email distributed among faculty summarizes the problems, saying theres little trust between faculty and administrators, particularly when it comes to a historic principle in academia shared governance. The email, written by Mark Wheeler, the chair of the philosophy department, also says there have been administrative threats to faculty. He didnt specify who made the threats, or what they were. The controversy erupted early last summer when Brooks was notified that she would not be allowed to keep her position as associate vice president of faculty advancement. She was essentially a liason between faculty and management. Its unclear whether Brooks, who is 46, was sidelined by President Elliot Hirshman shortly before he left office, or by Enwemeka, or by both. None of the principals are talking. The decision infuriated much of the faculty, who say Brooks is a rare example of a teacher who moved into management and continued to strongly represent the views of educators. She also is deeply admired for her scholarship, candor and tenacity. While serving as an English professor, she has written influential books about race, faith and human justice, and has appeared as a commentator on NPR, MSNBC and the Daily Show. Brooks also is a Mormon who has chronicled her disagreements with church policy. As noted in a 2012 Union-Tribune profile, she returned her diploma shortly after she graduated from Brigham Young University, and exiled herself from the Mormon faith for nearly a decade. She also earned praise for writing Ask Mormon Girl, a blog in which she urged people with different viewpoints to consider the views of others. When word of her apparent dismissal began to circulate last summer, faculty pressed interim President Sally Roush to reinstate her. Their demand wasnt met. So some faculty members changed tactics in August and September and sought an early job performance review of Enwemeka, who some believed played a major role in her departure. Early reviews are rare in academia, especially when it involves a provost, the chief academic officer. The idea didnt go over well with Enwemeka. He came to suspect that Douglas Deutschman, a biology professor, was part of a movement to have him removed. So he sent Deutschman an email that has come to be known across campus as the Samuel L. Jackson message because it reflects the biblical tone that Jackson used in a scene in the movie, Pulp Fiction. Enwemeka wrote, in part, All said, if in the course of our time and interactions, I willfully sought to harm or perpetrate evil against you, may my Lord Jesus Christ, to whom I have given my entire life, see your action as well deserved by me ... Enwemeka says the Sept. 11, 2017 email to Deutschman. On the other hand, if all I have ever done was to promote your well-being and progress as previously detailed, and in return you willfully sought to harm or hurt me, may my Lord Jesus Christ ensure that you reap what you sowed. So that instead of blessings, you are showered with unending curse and harmed, hurt and visited by evil a million fold in everything you do throughout the rest of your life. Please note that in stating the foregoing, I am not necessarily cursing or wishing you evil. I am simply invoking the natural Law of Karma; the Law of Retributive Justice. Deutschman declined to comment about the incident. The letter surfaced publicly last week, after Enwemaka resigned his position. Or appeared to resign. He couldnt be reached for comment about what actually happened. His departure was announced by interim President Sally Roush, who wont talk about it. Several key faculty also wont publicly talk about it either, even though theyre protected by tenure. The controversy threatens to overshadow concerns about equally serious problems, notably the graduation rate. In recent years, only one-third of SDSUs bachelor degree students have earned their degree within four years. The campus also has been struggling to increase graduate student enrollment something that needs to improve if the university is to ever achieve its goal of becoming a top 50 public university in research. Publicly, comparatively few people have known about the internal fight. But in the background, the chairs of various departments were sending Roush angry emails, including one on Sept. 28th that read, in part, We collectively believe that the Provost has undermined the faculty-administrative relationship and has imperiled the campus with poor decisions. This anger led to an early review of Enwemekas job performance. A summary of the boards findings was issued in March, and the results were surprising, given the amount of anger at the provost. The review said that Enwemeka, who is 65, has generally done an excellent job since he took the position four years ago. The committee noted that Enwemeka has done especially well in fundraising, improving academic programs and meeting the needs of students. However, the review committee completed its work without formally discussing Enwemekas inflammatory letter to Deutschman. They left it out because Deutschman left SDSU for a post at a Canadian university, apparently making it a dead issue. But the uproar is not dead. Or maybe it is. Wheelers letter to faculty says (Roush) agreed to arrange a meeting between all and only faculty and herself and President-elect de la Torre. This may happen before June 28 (when she takes office), but perhaps not. The twists and turns of local campaigns in the stretch run to Tuesdays election have featured the predictable and the unexpected. Perhaps the most surprising is Gov. Jerry Brown not only endorsing Sheriff Bill Gore but working to re-elect him. Hi. This is Governor Jerry Brown. Im calling to urge you to vote for Sheriff Bill Gore on June 5th, the governor says in a recorded telephone call that has been received by some San Diego voters. Ive worked with Bill Gore; I know him to be a good man. His top priority has always been keeping the community safe. Thats what we need. California could use more leaders like Bill Gore. Thats why I urge you on June 5th to vote for Sheriff Bill Gore. Thank you. County races are officially nonpartisan, but parties often play a role. Gore is a Republican, though hes not known as much of a partisan player. Still, its notable that he gained the endorsement of the states top Democrat, whose standing is good in California and very good among Democrats. Brown had a 51 percent job-approval rating in March, according to a statewide poll by the Public Policy Institute of California. That was 20 points more than those who disapproved of his performance. His job-approval rating among Democrats was 77 percent. Advertisement The Gore campaign, which paid for the calls, declined to say who is receiving them, though some Democrats have told The San Diego Union-Tribune they have gotten the calls. Thats potentially a huge boost for Gore and a big blow to his opponent, sheriffs Cmdr. Dave Myers, who was endorsed by the local Democratic party. A poll by SurveyUSA conducted May 9-14, before the Brown calls, showed Gore leading Myers 38 percent to 28 percent, with 33 percent undecided. Among the undecided, 33 percent were Democrats. Is there anybody in Californa better to sway undecided Democrats than Jerry Brown? Myers said he doesnt believe the governor will make any difference. Jerry Brown is another career politician so invested in the status quo that hell ignore repeated scandals, in which Gore has failed to act on police brutality, sexual assault, and the violation of human rights, Myers said in a statement. With all the work weve done, I dont think a last-minute robocall is going to move the needle in this race. How Brown came to endorse Gore and help with his re-election is quite simple: They have a good working relationship. Sheriff Gore and Governor Brown have worked together for many years on public safety issues, the Gore campaign said in a statement. Governor Browns endorsement reflects his recognition of the sheriffs commitment to the community and his effectiveness in keeping San Diego safe. Gore is among the law enforcement officials Brown regularly consults around the state. Among other things, the governor has reached out to Gore to discuss potential changes in parole law and SB 54, the controversial law that limits when local law enforecment can give information to federal immigration authorities about the release of certain criminal unauthorized immigrants. In an April interview with the Union-Tribune editorial board, heres how Gore described the latter: Three or four months ago we spent probably two hours on the phone just talking about SB 54. He says, I want to make this its going to pass but I want to make it as good as we can and he kept doing amendments. Jones-Wright campaign brings up Crowe case District Attorney Summer Stephans campaign long has anticipated that the Stephanie Crowe murder case would surface. It finally has, but, at least initially, in a low-key way. The campaign of Stephans opponent, Deputy Public Defender Genevieve Jones-Wright, produced a three-minute video titled This Botched Murder Case Still Haunts San Diego and posted it on social media. Stephanie Crowe was found stabbed to death in her bedroom in 1998. At first, her brother, Michael, and two friends were charged with the killing. Stephan became the lead prosecutor against the three youths as the case headed to trial. But the high-profile case fell apart shortly before the trial when Stephanies blood was found on a shirt worn by a transient seen in the Crowe familys Escondido neighborhood on the night of the killing. Charges were dropped against the three boys. The transient, Richard Tuite, was eventually tried and convicted, but the conviction was later reversed and he was acquitted in a second trial. The video goes over familiar details and criticizes Stephans handling of the case. As of Tuesday afternoon, it appeared the Crowe case had not become a focus of the California Justice & Public Safety PAC, a committee financed by billionaire George Soros that has put more than $1.5 million into an independent campaign to elect Jones-Wright, according to inewsource and the Los Angeles Times. A twist on the Cox dynamic Much has been written about Republican hopes that Rancho Santa Fe businessman John Cox will win a place on the November ballot for governor against Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who all the polls suggest is a shoo-in to advance out of the top-two primary on Tuesday. They believe a GOP presence at the top of the ticket will energize the party and help down-ballot Republican candidates, even if hes a long-shot to win. Mike Madrid has a much different take. Madrid is a Republican consultant who specializes in Latino politics, but this time around is working for the gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa, a former Los Angeles mayor. He told Politico Republican turnout could be even higher if its Villaraigosa squaring off with the more liberal Newsom. If you have Villaraigosa, you will have millions of dollars targeting Republicans to show up and vote, Madrid said. That, to me, is a very compelling argument. . . If youve got somebody whos openly competing for those votes, arguing for the swing vote with many, many millions of dollars, I think turnout is actually no different or could increase in that instance. On the other hand, he said, Lets say its Cox and Newsom, the race is over and there will be no spend. None. Theres nobody who thinks a Republican can win. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens announced Tuesday that he will step down from office Friday, abandoning a months-long effort to stay in office as he faced felony criminal charges and threats of impeachment by the state Legislature. l love Missouri, and I love our people. That love remains, a somber Greitens, a Republican, told reporters in Jefferson City, the state capital, where legislators had called for his resignation and a legislative oversight committee was investigating the governors conduct. Greitens, who has previously said he was the victim of a political witch hunt, said Tuesday that millions of dollars in attorneys fees and what he described as legal harassment and personal attacks were starting to take their toll, including on his friends and family. Its clear for the forces that oppose us there is no end in sight, said Greitens, who did not immediately indicate why he picked Friday as the day to resign. Advertisement This is not the end of our fight, he said. I will always be a fighter for the people of Missouri. A great deal of work is left undone. For the moment, let us walk off the battlefield with our heads held high. Investigations by prosecutors and lawmakers examining possible sexual and financial misconduct by Greitens had offered the public a stark window into Missouri politics and into the private life of the governor, whose 16 months in office had also alienated many Republican leaders. Some were concerned the scandals would dampen enthusiasm for Republican state Atty. Gen. Josh Hawleys U.S. Senate bid against Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill. Republican House Speaker Todd Richardson, who had previously called for Greitens resignation, welcomed the governors announcement. We believe the governor has put the best interest of Missourians first today by choosing to resign, Richardson said in a statement. The past few months have been difficult for everyone involved, including the Governor and his family. Democratic leaders took a harsher view of Greitens announcement. Innocent people dont resign and criminals dont get let off the hook simply because they cut and run, Missouri Senate Democratic leader Gina Walsh said in a statement. Missourians deserve to know what laws were broken, what lies were told, and how deep the corruption went. Greitens, a former Navy SEAL and philanthropist who won an outsider bid for the governors seat in 2016, was a rising star in the Republican Party. Promising to shake up the political establishment, he caught national attention for firing a machine gun in one of his campaign ads. But in January, media outlets in St. Louis revealed that a hairdresser, with whom Greitens had had an affair in 2015, had privately accused him of stripping her clothes off and photographing her naked against her will. The woman also testified to state legislators that Greitens had coerced her to perform oral sex. Greitens, who admitted having the affair but denied allegations of sexually attacking the woman, was charged with felony invasion of privacy in St. Louis city circuit court. Prosecutors dropped the case after Greitens attorneys accused an investigator of wrongdoing. A Kansas City-area prosecutor has been appointed to determine whether the charge should be refiled. Our investigation continues, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said in a statement Tuesday. Our review of this case, as I have stated before, will be pursued without fear or favor. The allegations of sexual misconduct were the most explosive scandal surrounding Greitens administration, but the governor was also dogged by allegations of financial wrongdoing. He was separately charged with a felony on suspicion of stealing a list of donors from his nonprofit group for veterans, The Mission Continues, and using the list to solicit donors to his campaign after he stepped down from the charity to run for office. He previously denied criminal wrongdoing, but on Tuesday prosecutors signaled that a plea agreement had been reached. They did not provide details. I have been in contact with the Governors defense team over the past several days. We have reached a fair and just resolution of the pending charges, St. Louis city Circuit Atty. Kimberly M. Gardner said in a statement Tuesday. We will provide more information tomorrow. Greitens also caused concern among political opponents during his campaign by raising millions of dollars that were routed through advocacy nonprofits, limited-liability corporations and political action committees in a way that allowed the sources of the money to remain hidden, even today. Michael Hafner, an aide who worked on Greitens campaign, testified to state lawmakers that Greitens asked him to have conversations with donors who intended to raise significant amounts of money and conceal the identity of those donors. Hours before Greitens resignation, a Cole County judge had ordered a Greitens-linked nonprofit, A New Missouri Inc., to turn over documents to lawmakers seeking to determine whether Greitens or his supporters broke campaign-finance laws. The head of the state House oversight committee investigating Greitens, Rep. Jay Barnes, a Republican, said last week that he had also spoken to the FBI about allegations that Greitens sought donations from foreign donors. I had direct conversations regarding foreign contributions with very high net worth individuals that Eric Greitens connected me with, Hafner tweeted, disputing Greitens supporters claims that he had given dubious testimony. The legislative oversight committee has also been unable to definitively establish who gave $100,000 to a St. Louis attorney who played a key role in revealing allegations of sexual misconduct against Greitens in January. The attorney, Al Watkins, who represented the womans aggrieved ex-husband, distributed private audio recordings to local media outlets in which the woman accused Greitens of attacking her. Before the story became public, Watkins received $100,000 in cash from a Missouri newspaper publisher who said he was delivering the money on behalf of a wealthy Republican who had a personal problem with the governor, Watkins told the Los Angeles Times. Greitens attorneys have suggested that the source of the money might be housing developers a powerful lobby in Missouri who stood to lose millions of dollars after Greitens spearheaded an effort to shut down the states lucrative low-income housing tax credit program. Greitens replacement, Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Parson, is a supporter of the tax credit. In a twist that has vexed legislators, Scott Faughn, the publisher who delivered the money to the lawyer, said the cash was his own. Faughn, one of the most politically connected figures in the state, refused to reveal how he got more than $100,000 in cash. Faughns sworn testimony appeared to directly conflict with the testimony given by Watkins. I would presume that this could lead to questions of perjury, Republican Rep. Curtis Trent said during the hearing. Faughn did not respond to messages seeking comment. matt.pearce@latimes.com Matt Pearce is a national reporter for The Times. Follow him on Twitter at @mattdpearce. More national headlines UPDATES: 6:00 p.m.: This article was updated with comments by Greitens and additional developments. This article was originally published at 2:35 p.m. A Manhattan grand jury voted Wednesday to indict Harvey Weinstein for raping one woman and forcing a sex act on another, according to the Manhattan District Attorney. The formal charges for the alleged attacks in 2004 and 2013 gives the prosecutor a second shot at trying the pervy producer after raising eyebrows for passing on a groping claim against Weinstein from 2015. This indictment brings the defendant another step closer to accountability for the crimes of violence with which he is now charged. District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. said. The ex-Hollywood heavyweight, who surrendered to police last Friday on rape and sex assault charges, turned down the chance to testify before the panel. Advertisement His lawyer, Ben Brafman, said his client did not have enough time to prepare his testimony. We asked the district attorney for more time so that Mr. Weinsteins attorneys could gather the material needed to properly prepare him for his grand jury testimony but that request was denied, Brafman said. Harvey Weinstein will not testify before the Manhattan special grand jury that is investigating allegations he sexually assaulted at least two women and may have paid off victims. (Theodore Parisienne/For New York Daily News) The Pulp Fiction producer plans to fight the charges, the lawyer said. We remind everyone that an indictment is merely a formal accusation, Brafman said. Mr. Weinstein intends to enter a plea of not guilty and vigorously defend against these unsupported allegations that he strongly denies. We will soon formally move to dismiss the indictment and if this case actually proceeds to trial, we expect Mr Weinstein to be acquitted. One alleged victim is former acting student Lucia Evans, who said she was forced to perform oral sex on Weinstein in 2004. The rape accuser has not been publicly identified, but Brafman said Tuesday that the 2013 incident, which took place at the Doubletree Hotel in Midtown, was not forced. Mr. Weinstein is accused of raping someone with whom he has had a 10-year consensual sexual relationship both before and after the alleged incident, the lawyer said. After the indictment was announced, Vance slammed Brafman for the claim. Our office will try this case not in the press, but in the courtroom where it belongs, he said. The defendants recent assault on the integrity of the survivors and the legal process is predictable. We are confident that when the jury hears the evidence, it will reject these attacks out of hand. Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez told police in 2015 that the maligned mogul grabbed her breasts and tried to kiss her. She wore a wire and recorded Weinstein talking about it, but the Manhattan DAs office declined to prosecute the case, claiming the tape was inconclusive. Top prosecutor Karen Freidman-Agnifilo, who is married to a senior attorney in Brafmans firm, blamed police for botching the investigation. The seasoned prosecutors in our sex crimes unit were not afforded the opportunity before the meeting to counsel investigators on what was necessary to capture in order to prove a misdemeanor sex crime, Friedman-Agnifilo said after the recording surfaced late last year. After the portly perverts first court appearance, Brafman blamed a shift in Hollywood culture from one in which starlets plied powerful producers with sex in exchange for big roles, to the current #METOO movement. Mr. Weinstein did not invent the casting couch, Brafman said. After the indictment was unsealed, Evans lawyer addressed the dodgy defense. What Mr. Weinsteins attorneys call casting couch behavior we know is actually a sex crime, the attorney said. A movement doesnt indict. A grand jury does. As time runs out before polls open for the primary election, candidates for governor are swinging through San Diego in an effort to win over still undecided voters. On Sunday Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach, had a rally in a field near the United States border with Mexico where he spoke against sanctuary policies that protect undocumented immigrants. On Wednesday Treasurer John Chiang, a Democrat, stopped by a shelter for homeless veterans and a senior center, while former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villariagosa, also a Democrat, was meeting at Border Field State Park with members of a group that advocates for immigrants. And Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, is similarly expected to tour a San Diego Senior Center on Thursday. Theyre making stops through the county before precincts open on June 5, touching on hot button issues in a county that has the second-largest portion of independent voters in California. Advertisement As he toured Veterans Villages emergency tent shelter, Chiang received some encouragement from John Monks, an Air Force veteran who has lived at the facility since May 7. Monks didnt at first know that Chiang was running for governor, but said he was glad that the candidate had stopped by. Even though Im a registered Republican Im considering voting for you, Monk told Chiang moments after learning of his candidacy. Candidates who are meeting with veterans and homeless people need to listen to concerns, make it clear that they understand their problems and be serious about helping, Monk said. You really have to care about the little guy who isnt living in La Jolla, he said. Newsom is expected to stop by the Gary and Mary West Senior and Wellness Center on Thursday to discuss issues related to the states growing senior population. And over the weekend, Allen held a rally attended by about 100 people where he demanded that people take back California. The first step to doing this is closing our borders to criminals and reversing the illegal Sanctuary State policies currently in place that shelter those who are already here, his campaign said. In contrast, Villaraigosa spoke at the border surrounded by students who were on a field trip with Border Angels, a non-profit group that coordinates water drops in the desert, immigration advice and other support for undocumented immigrants. We can see this border just down the way as a dividing line, Villaraigosa said. Trump sees it as a dividing line, a place of conflict. I choose to see and I think most of us choose to see that border as an opportunity, as a meeting place. After touring the 200-bed emergency shelter, Chiang said he wants to make sure that Californias public policies outside the flimsy walls of homeless tents prevent homelessness. You step outside and this impacts everybody. A few weeks ago I went to visit Feeding America San Diego, and you think about the ZIP codes where people are food and housing challenged around Camp Pendleton, Chiang said in an interview. The state needs to increase its housing stock and make it easier to finance construction of new homes so that low-income families can afford to become homeowners, he said. Think about your kids, think about your grandkids, Chiang said. Unfortunately with the cost of housing many of them are departing. While Chiang was stopping by San Diego, polls generally show that hes sitting in fourth or fifth place, short of the support needed to finish in the top two in the primary and advance to the general election. Chiang said other polls, however, show hes gaining momentum and within striking distance of a second-pace finish. I think were making strong progress. If you see some of the tracking polls we are running very strong numbers. Some of those tracking polls have us third and on the heels of the number two, Chiang said. Polls have consistently placed Newsom well ahead in first place, followed by Republican businessman John Cox or Villaraigosa, who alternate for second. Twitter: @jptstewart joshua.stewart@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1841 Hearing arguments in a case that could force San Diego to overturn its six-year-old pension overhaul, state Supreme Court justices on Tuesday focused primarily on whether the cutbacks were legally placed on the June 2012 ballot. During oral arguments in San Francisco, a majority of the justices seemed sympathetic to claims by city labor unions that it was illegal for then-Mayor Jerry Sanders to place the pension measure on the ballot without labor negotiations. The justices seemed skeptical of claims by attorneys for the city and for Proposition B proponents that Sanders was not obligated to meet with the unions because he was supporting the measure as a private citizen, not as the mayor. If the justices rule that the cutbacks were illegally placed on the ballot, the city could be forced to overturn them and possibly be required to spend millions creating retroactive pensions for about 4,000 workers hired since 2012. Advertisement The justices did not ask the attorneys in the case any questions about how the court could ease the situation if it rules the pension cutback measure was illegally placed on the ballot. While the courts ruling could come quickly, it would be more typical for it to take several weeks or longer. The courts rules say that, absent extraordinary circumstances, a decision is made a maximum of 90 days after oral arguments. The 2012 measure replaced guaranteed pensions with 401(k)-style retirement plans for all newly-hired city employees except police officers. The measure, which was approved by more than 65 percent of city voters, made San Diego the only jurisdiction in California not to offer traditional pensions to new employees. The ruling could have an impact across the state as other city and county governments consider pension cuts and how they can be legally enacted. The oral arguments come 11 months after the court decided to review an April 2017 ruling by the Fourth District Court of Appeal that had upheld the pension cutbacks. The appeals court said city officials, including the mayor, dont have to confer with labor groups about ballot measures if such measures are placed on the ballot by a citizens initiative. On Tuesday, several Supreme Court justices appeared to take the opposite stance during oral arguments, which lasted just over an hour. Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye said the mayor isnt cleared of his obligation to meet with union officials just because he stated repeatedly at the time that he was acting as a private citizen in support of a citizens initiative. He may have stated it as clear as can be, but all of the surroundings showed he was acting under the mantel of mayor, she said. He does it in City Hall, he does it with the (city) seal, he does it with City Council members. Cantil-Sakauye said its a problem that Sanders wanted to have the best of both worlds: his right as a private citizen to support a ballot measure and the influence he had as the citys mayor. He doesnt get to pick and choose which parts of his title and responsibilities he gets to disregard, especially when hes surrounding himself and symbolizing that this is a mayoral act, she said. Justice Goodwin Liu offered similar sentiments. It makes a considerable difference, does it not, to have the top elected official in the city put a lot of muscle behind backing this particular initiative, he said. Justice Carol Corrigan said its crucial that the mayor said he decided to move forward with the initiative specifically to avoid labor negotiations, called meet and confer formally. He cant avoid what would otherwise be his obligation to meet and confer by saying oh, it was just a citizens initiative, Corrigan said. She also said its important that the mayor is the chief labor negotiator for the city. If the person who spoke lovingly in favor of the initiative were the fire chief or the lead auditor, that might be a different circumstance, Corrigan said. Here, the very person who has an obligation to meet and confer, who is the prime conferrer, is also taking action arguably contrary to the interests of the employees of the city. Justice Ming Chin said it would be hard for the court to ignore a news release issued by Sanders at the time that said he was opting for a citizens initiative so he wouldnt have to go through the complicated process of negotiating pension cuts with the unions. The mayor was quite up front about what he was doing, Chin said. Dont we have to take that into account? Attorneys for the city and for measure proponents argued on Tuesday that ruling Sanders had to meet with labor unions would amount to stripping him of his First Amendment free speech rights to support a citizens initiative. Justice Corrigan disagreed, saying thats not what the labor unions are arguing. Theyre not saying that he cant speak -- theyre not saying that he cant take a position to join forces with other people who have a good governmental idea, she said. Theyre focusing on when he as the chief labor negotiator has an obligation to meet and confer. Thats not to say he cant speak or he cant think or he cant take a position. A second element of the Supreme Courts review of last years appellate ruling is whether that ruling overstepped the appeals courts authority by completely overturning a 2015 Public Employment Relations Board ruling that the pension cuts were illegal. The unions and PERB contend that the appeals court only had the authority to oveturn parts of the ruling, not all of it. That element got far less attention from the justices on Tuesday than whether Sanders acted legally. Estimates of how much it would cost the city to reverse Proposition B have ranged from $100 million to less than $20 million, but even the people making such guesses have always qualified them based on a wide number of variables. A key to the citys potential cost would be whether employees without pensions would have to split the citys costs of retroactively creating pensions for them, and whether they could do that with money in the 401(k)-style retirement plans the city created in lieu of pensions. Other variables include whether the city would be forced to pay penalties and interest and how large those amounts would be, and what the city might owe in attorneys fees to the labor unions that filed the suit challenging the pension cutbacks. Creating retroactive pensions might also cost the city long-term. The citys unfunded pension debt, now estimated at $2.76 billion, would have to be re-evaluated to include roughly 4,000 employees newly eligible for pensions. david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick The campaign to be the next district attorney in San Diego County gives voters a choice between two candidates with sharply different backgrounds, platforms and experience. Current Interim District Attorney Summer Stephan is a 28-year veteran of the office who touts her experience and knowledge of the office, and her lifelong career as a prosecutor. Genevieve Jones-Wright is a deputy public defender who has worked representing indigent defendants for the county for 12 years. Stephans campaign has hammered Jones-Wright on her lack of experience, making the case to voters that someone who has never prosecuted a case and has far less experience than she cant be trusted with the office. Advertisement Jones-Wright has countered that shes had more trial experience in recent years than Stephan, who has been a supervisor since 2003, and has touted her campaign theme as a criminal justice system reformer as the major issue in the race. But how much weight should voters give to the battle over experience? In a race awash with outside money close to $1 million from billionaire George Soros supporting Jones-Wrights reform agenda, and $600,000 from law enforcement labor groups and others supporting Stephan voters will have to decide whether being a career prosecutor is a prerequisite for the position or not. The District Attorney is not an entry-level job, and the stakes are too important to learn on the job, Stephan said in an email response to questions last week. She continued to echo themes she has sounded in the campaign that she has an extensive record as a line prosecutor handling cases, as well as experience as a supervisor and administrator in the office since 2003. She contrasted that with her opponent whom she described as someone with limited experience as a junior-level deputy public defender assigned to primarily misdemeanor cases. But Jones-Wright said Stephans attacks on her experience are baseless. Jones-Wright said she has handled numerous cases involving serious and violent charges, such as assault with a firearm, kidnapping and gang cases, among others. And she pointed out she has more recent jury trial experience than Stephan. Since 2013 she has taken 28 felony cases to a jury trial, according to a compilation of trial records of both candidates requested by The San Diego Union-Tribune. The newspaper asked the District Attorneys Office to search its computerized case management system to tally the number of felony jury trials handled both by Stephan, and Jones-Wright. The DAs Office has a system that can readily track prosecutors and defense lawyers assigned to cases. The Public Defenders system does not have that capability. The system has limitations however. It did not come online until October 1999, and the names of lawyers were not regularly logged until 2004. The paper requested felony cases that went to trial, instead of being resolved by a plea, for Jones-Wright for the past five years and all trials for Stephan. That was because Stephan has not been a regular trial prosecutor since becoming a manager in 2003, and would not have a trial record over the past five years. The tally showed Jones-Wright with 28 trials, and Stephan with 42. But the number for Stephan does not include all felony trials from 1990-99, when she did the bulk of her courtroom work before moving to management. In her application last year to the county Board of Supervisors seeking appointment as the interim district attorney, Stephan said she had completed more than 100 trials in her career. Jones-Wright noted that she handled felony trials before 2013, when she was in private practice briefly, and also drew attention to her more current courtroom experience. Recent trial experience is important because I am not far removed from the practicality of trial work, she said in an email. Because of this, I am better capable to advise trial attorneys on trial and evidentiary issues. Of Jones-Wrights 28 cases, one ended with an acquittal, two resulted in lesser misdemeanor convictions, charges were dismissed in two others and the balance ended in guilty verdicts. Of Stephans trials that were compiled, one ended in an acquittal for the defendant, one resulted in a hung jury where the defendant ultimately pleaded to a lesser misdemeanor and the balance were guilty verdicts on at least one or more charges. How much does trial experience matter? George Fisher, a former prosecutor who is now a professor at Stanford Law School and co-director of the schools Criminal Prosecution Clinic, said after a certain point the differences are slight. Someone who has had 28 felony jury trials knows enough about jury trials that the difference from someone who has had 100 is small, he said. Stephan has also highlighted her work handling the most serious cases including the 1996 death penalty conviction of Brandon Taylor for the rape and murder of an elderly woman and hit Jones-Wright for not having experience in those kinds of cases. Fisher said that difference was not as crucial either. To the extent that someone with 28 trials has never done a murder case, thats a difference in degree, not in kind, he said. And that person can supervise line prosecutors. Stephan, however, contends the choice is clear for voters. What voters should care about when electing the top law enforcement official in the county is experience prosecuting the most serious and violent criminals, supporting the victims of crime and leading innovative crime prevention programs, she said. She also said that her extensive administrative experience in the office is also crucial. The District Attorneys Office has about 1,000 employees and a budget of $190 million. In an interview earlier this month, Jones-Wright said she has management experience outside the office, serving as a board member on one non-profit called Davids Harp Foundation and founding a second in 2003. She said in the interview that the management and administrative skills used in those roles were transferable to the District Attorneys Office. Fisher said the administrative experience issue breaks a couple of ways. Someone who is experienced in the office would be effective in the short term, because of their familiarity with the operations and people. But he said that edge may become less important over time. In the medium to long term, as long as the DA is a quick study and takes the time to get to know people and ask the right questions, they can be as effective as anyone in the office, and might be more effective than someone who has loyalties to people who has been there for a long time, he said. Twitter: @gregmoran greg.moran@sduniontribune.com A man with a shotgun who refused to come out of a home in Hillcrest was arrested Wednesday afternoon after an hours-long standoff. Police said officers shot the man with bean bag rounds and sent in a canine to help take him into custody after he appeared to reach for the weapon about 12:15 p.m. Officers were sent to the home on Pennsylvania Avenue near Fourth Avenue to investigate a possible kidnapping about 7:45 a.m., police Sgt. Robert Hawkins said. Soon after police arrived, two people in the residence came out, but a third person, a man in his 40s or 50s, refused to exit the home, Hawkins said. Advertisement Officers were told the man may have a weapon, so crisis negotiators were sent to the home. They tried for hours to persuade the man to come outside. At one point, he sat in an open doorway, with a shotgun that was, at times, resting across his legs, Hawkins said. During the negotiations, the man spoke to his lawyer and his sister. No one else was believed to be in the residence. A stretch of Pennsylvania shut down during the standoff. Police asked people to avoid the area. Twitter: @LAWinkley (619) 293-1546 lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.com A man who was armed with a handgun when he beat, choked and raped two women in San Diego on consecutive nights in 2016 was sentenced Tuesday to 100 years to life plus 86 years in state prison. Jeremiah Ira Williams, 26, was convicted May 1 of forcible rape, sexual penetration by force, forcible oral copulation, burglary and making a criminal threat. The defendant, who was held in county jail while his case was pending, chose not to attend the sentencing hearing on Tuesday in San Diego Superior Court. Deputy District Attorney Trisha Amador told jurors that Williams followed the first victim from a parking structure to her University City apartment about 10 p.m. on Aug. 13, 2016. Advertisement The woman, identified in court only as Jane Doe 1, was afraid when Williams asked her, Wheres your husband? as she approached her front door, the prosecutor said. With her keys in the door, she was knocked down, robbed at gunpoint and choked to a point where she thought she was going to die, Amador said. Once inside the apartment, Williams beat and bloodied the victim, then raped her and forced her to take a shower before leaving, according to the prosecutor. The next day, Williams beat and raped a woman working as a prostitute after meeting up with her at a Grantville motel, the prosecutor told the jury. Williams got on the bed and asked the woman, referred to as Jane Doe 2, Do you want to know what it feels like to die? He then choked the victim until she saw stars, then sodomized her, according to Amador, who said the woman was so terrified that she broke a window and jumped through it to get away. The woman didnt go to the hospital initially or tell police what happened to her because she has a criminal record, the prosecutor said. Williams attorney, Deputy Public Defender Thomas Bahr, told the jury that a police detective had a feeling the two sexual assaults might be connected and jumped to conclusions in an attempt to solve the initial attack . Bahr alleged that Jane Doe 2 lied throughout the investigation and said her story was riddled with inconsistencies. She denied to a doctor that she had been sexually assaulted, then told a detective she was raped and sodomized, according to the defense attorney. Bahr said Jane Doe 2 and two male compatriots may have been planning to rob a john that night at the motel. The defense attorney also alleged that Jane Doe 2 asked a detective, Can I sue him (Williams) for beating my (expletive). Bahr said Jane Doe 1 was a true victim, yet she couldnt assist police in making a composite sketch of her attacker. : , , , , : . . . . : . : , . ? , , , , , . : , -, , . , - . . . . , , . , , , , , . , , , . , , , , , . , , . , . . . , . , ? : , . : , . , , , , , . : . : . , , , . . , , . ... : , , . : , . , , . , , . , . , . , . , , , , , , . . , , , .. . , , , .. , , , , . , ? : , , , . : , . , , , . , , , , , . , , , , . . , . : ? : , . , , , , , . . , . , , , , , , . - ? , , , , - . - , , , , , , , , . , 153 , , . : ? : ? : , -, - , , , , , , , , , , , , , . . , , , , , , , . ? , , - , , , , , , , . , , , . : . ... : . , - . : . : . , ... : , ..? : , , , , , , , , , . , , , , . , . , , , , , , , , , , . . : : , . .. , . ? : , , , , , - , , , , , . , , . , , , , , . , ... : , . : : - . . : . : ? : . : , . : . : , , , 56, , . : . : , , , , . , , , , , . : . : , , ? . , , , , , : , , , . , . : . , . , . Candidates for California governor barnstormed the state on Tuesday, launching their final outreach to voters in the run-up to the June 5 primary. Front-runner Gavin Newsom, who has led the polls and fundraising since entering the race more than three years ago, urged supporters gathered on the steps of San Franciscos City Hall not to be complacent. Lets get this done and take nothing for granted over the next seven days, Newsom said before launching a bus tour that will take him to about two-dozen events over the next week. Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa and Republican John Cox are battling it out for the second spot in the primary, and on Tuesday they courted voters within miles of each other in Fresno. Advertisement Villaraigosa vowed that, if elected, he wouldnt be a big-city politician who flies over the interior of the state, rarely stopping to hear voters concerns. He noted he had been to the Central Valley dozens of times since exploring a bid for governor. Ive been here again and again and again. I need the [Central] valley to get out of the primary, Villaraigosa told business leaders and union members at a Teamsters local headquarters. When asked earlier in the day why Republicans in the Central Valley should vote for him over Cox, Villaraigosa gave a pointed response. A vote for John Cox is a vote for Gavin Newsom, he said, effectively saying that Cox had no chance of beating Newsom in the general election. Cox, campaigning at the Fresno County GOP headquarters later in the day, scoffed when asked about Villaraigosas comment. A vote for me is a vote to make sure that people have better schools, they have better roads, that we dont waste money in government, that we have a lower tax burden. A vote for me is a lower gasoline tax as well, Cox said. So I think Villaraigosa has it all wrong. Follow California politics by signing up for our email newsletter Cox, who was endorsed by President Trump in mid-May, added another $500,000 of his own money to his campaign since Saturday, bringing his total spending on his campaign to $4.9 million. Newsom has taken heat from some liberals who argue that his campaigns effort to boost Coxs candidacy to ensure an easier general election could harm Democratic efforts to regain control of Congress. He pushed back at the narrative that having a Republican at the top of the ticket on the November ballot would increase GOP voter turnout, which could help vulnerable Republican members of Congress hold onto their seats. Newsom argued that having Democrats consolidate behind one candidate in the general election would do more to unite voters than a bitter Democrat-on-Democrat battle. If you have a governors race where you can line up the Democratic agenda and support the down-ballot ticket and unite the party, and instead of spending resources attacking one another spend those very sizable resources building a war chest I think thats a lot more powerful than, with all due respect, John Cox driving huge turnout, he said. Forgive me, I dont see that. Newsom predicted $100 million would be spent against him if he and Villaraigosa emerge as the top two winners on June 5, and said the general election contest would be so ugly it would depress voter turnout among Democrats. We always win when our base shows up. The reason we dont show up is often because of the negativity and the divisiveness and the internecine warfare, he said. Major GOP donor Bill Oberndorf contributed $1.5 million and philanthropist Eli Broad on Tuesday donated $1,025,000 to an independent expenditure group supporting Villaraigosas bid, bringing the groups total raised to nearly $20.2 million. The group has spent most of its money boosting Villaraigosa but has also aired ads attacking Newsom. Villaraigosa was the focus of a new negative ad in the race. State Treasurer John Chiang, another Democrat running for governor, released an ad on Tuesday criticizing Villaraigosas work for Herbalife and Ameriquest, arguing that the companies harmed vulnerable communities. Mehta reported from San Francisco and Willon reported from Fresno. Coverage of California politics seema.mehta@latimes.com; phil.willon@latimes.com For the latest on California politics, follow @LATSeema and @philwillon on Twitter. As many as two dozen FBI agents descended on the offices of Diamond Environmental Services in San Marcos and San Diego early Wednesday morning, apparently searching for proof that the company skirted clean-air rules. The early morning raids came just seven days after owner Arie Eric De John was sentenced to five months in federal prison for illegally dumping waste from the companys portable toilets into city sewer systems across southern California. De Jong, who must report to federal prison on or before July 6, could not be reached for comment. Knut Johnson, De Jongs criminal defense attorney, said the FBI was executing a search warrant issued in an unrelated air-pollution investigation. In this case, theyre just starting an investigation, Johnson said. We dont know what all the facts are but I do believe within the last few weeks (Diamond) had their trucks inspected by an independent inspector and I think they are all in compliance. Advertisement Chief Operating Officer Warren Van Dam, who pleaded guilty and received five years probation in the earlier federal case, declined to discuss the FBI when reached by telephone. I have no comment, he said before ending the call. According to witnesses, FBI agents turned up at the East Mission Avenue headquarters of Diamond Environmental Services as early as 6:30 a.m. and began their search. Officers from the California Highway Patrol contributed to the effort. They carted off boxes of paperwork, computers and other electronic goods. They also interviewed employees, especially truck drivers, about company practices that may violate U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards. They interviewed all of the drivers, then they sent us home, said one employee, who did not want to be named due to fear he might lose his job. The employee said investigators were especially interested in whether trucks had been mechanically altered. They said they were working with the EPA, the employee said. They asked me what it was like working for them, if I had seen anything and what I knew about the DPFs. DPFs, or diesel particulate filters, are devices that are designed to remove soot from the exhaust gases emitted from diesel engines. Under state and federal clean-air rules, trucks are supposed to be equipped with the devices to reduce air pollution. FBI spokeswoman Davene Butler said she could not provide much detail on the activity, though she did say in an email that more than one site was involved. We can only confirm court authorized law enforcement activity took place at the Diamond Environmental facilities in San Marcos and San Diego facilities this morning, she wrote in a statement. The FBI raids came just seven days after De Jong and Van Dam faced criminal sentencing in U.S. District Court on an unrelated case that accused them of illegally dumping portable-toilet waste into municipal sewer systems across southern California. According to federal prosecutors overseeing the recent criminal case, De Jong and Van Dam conspired to avoid discharge permit fees and save travel time to and from plants that treat the waste by pumping the sludge into city sewer systems illegally. The scheme went on for at least four years, and saved the company at least $2 million, prosecutors and court documents said. Both De Jong and Van Dam pleaded guilty last year. A third executive was convicted of perjury for lying to a grand jury about the company disposal practices. The company agreed to pay $6 million or more in fines, restitution and illegal profits. In addition to the prison and probation terms, the company and its senior executives agreed to pay millions of dollars in fines, restitution and forfeited profits. Johnson said his clients works hard to meet all environmental regulations. They are extremely concerned about the environment, the criminal defense attorney said of his clients. Diamond Environmental Services does a fantastic job in a very dirty business in keeping the environment clean. It is not clear how the new criminal investigation might affect the sentences handed down last week. One condition of the probation sentences received by De Jong and Van Dam was for the defendants to obey all laws. Watchdog Videos On Now Sexual misconduct accusers worry deputy is being protected 6:16 On Now City funded $2-million waterfront bathroom 1:26 On Now Public water district charges customer for legal work, response to records request On Now Video: Tiny homes won't be reused amid housing, homeless crisis On Now Attorney General seeks documentation for Miss Middle East On Now Rep. Hunter probe covers possible fraud On Now Video: SDG&E delaying solar credit for some low-income housing tenants On Now Video: Former San Diego Junior Theatre teacher sentenced for sex with teen girl 0:24 On Now Video: Shelter volunteers believe they were fired for finding a dog a home 0:49 On Now McKamey Manor is leaving San Diego 3:35 jeff.mcdonald@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1708 @sdutMcDonald The feds want to keep their eyes on Superman actress Allison Mack even when shes up in the sky. Mack, who co-starred in"Smallville, is under house arrest at her parents place in California while she fights Brooklyn federal charges of being a bigshot in a salacious sex cult tucked inside the supposed self-help NXIVM organization. The terms of Macks $5 million bond put her under electronic monitoring and say she can only leave for certain reasons, like a trip across the country for a Brooklyn court date. Macks pretrial officers in California usually let defendants take off electronic monitoring bracelets during airplane trips, court papers said. Advertisement But thats not flying with the feds in this case. On Tuesday, prosecutors asked Judge Nicholas Garaufis to sign off on an order requiring Mack to keep her assigned monitoring device, even aboard a flight. Macks lawyers had no objection to the continuous monitoring, Tuesdays filing said. Mack, 35, and co-defendant Keith Raniere, the 57-year-old head of NXIVM and alleged cult mastermind, are due back in court June 12. A young boy, clad in a suit and tie, just wanted to know what the Trump administration is doing to prevent school shootings. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders couldnt give him an answer. I think as a kid and certainly as a parent, theres nothing that could be more terrifying for a kid to go to school and not feel safe, she said, her voice trembling with emotion, on Wednesday. Im sorry that you feel that way. Despite getting choked up as she responded, Sanders couldnt provide any specific details as to what President Trump has lined up to curb gun violence. Advertisement At my school we recently had a lock down drill. One thing that affects my and other students mental health is the worry about the fact that me or my friends could get shot at school, said 13-year-old Benje Choucroun, a student at Marin Country Day School in Corte Madera, Calif. Specifically, can you tell me what the administration has done and will do to prevent these senseless tragedies? The student journalist, covering an event for Time for Kids magazine, diligently grasped his pen awaiting a response from Sanders which never came. This administration takes it seriously and the school safety commission that the president convened is meeting this week again, she said. An official meeting to discuss the best ways forward and how we can do every single thing within our power to protect kids in our schools and to make them feel safe and make their parents feel good about dropping them off. President Trump, who recently spoke at the National Rifle Associations annual gathering, has done little on the federal front to reign in guns laws or improve school safety following a spate of school shootings. A young boy, in a suit and tie, asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders what the Trump administration is doing to prevent school shootings on Wednesday. (Cnn) Following the Parkland, Fla. shooting in February, Trump said he backs enhanced gun background checks, promised to raise the minimum age requirement to purchase a firearm from 18 to 21 and vowed to ban bump-stocks. The administration has made no effort on any front. He has also talked about arming teachers, a controversial proposal backed by the gun lobby. Trump will be meeting with the families of the victims of a Texas school shooting during a visit to the state on Thursday, Sanders said. Eight students and two substitute teachers were killed during the shooting at Santa Fe High School on May 18. The President will be traveling to Houston and Dallas on Thursday. President Trump and his White House ignored the Roseanne Barr racism scandal despite his past admiration for the actress and her ABC series, which was canceled Tuesday. While traveling to Nashville, Tenn., where Trump spoke at a campaign-style rally, Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeatedly changed the subject to North Korea when questioned about the Presidents thoughts on the booted revival. Thats not what the president is looking at. Thats not what hes spending his time on, she told reporters aboard Air Force One. I think we have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now. Instead, she said, Trump is more focused on a possible summit with North Korea and trade. Advertisement Trump failed to address Barrs racist tirade during the Nashville stop, a change from past comments on her career. The President gushed over the Roseanne revival ratings, applauding them as incredible during a similar rally in March. He reportedly called Barr to congratulate her. During his White House bid, Trump shared his thanks to the outspoken actress after she endorsed him. We would be so lucky if Trump won, she told Hollywood Reporter in June 2016. His social media love for Barr dates back to December 2013, when he responded to a tweet hoping that Barr would join Trumps Celebrity Apprentice cast. She would be so great, Trump said. Trumps Twitter was also absent of any reference to Barrs floundering career. California is among the worlds leaders in its commitment to using cleaner energy. A 2015 law requires the state to get half its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. But the states electric utilities have made such progress that the California Public Utilities Commission says theres a chance the goal could be met by 2020. A 2017 Los Angeles Times investigation found that so much money had already been invested in California solar power that it had created a glut that was forcing ratepayers to pay billions of dollars for power they dont need. Against this backdrop, the California Energy Commissions decision to require rooftop solar panels on nearly all new single-family homes and low-rise multi-family housing projects starting in 2020 seems hasty and daft. Amid a housing crisis, the mandate will add an average of more than $10,500 to the new homes cost. The claim that homeowners can pay this off in 10 or 15 years depends on the dubious idea utilities will be eager to buy excess solar power from homeowners instead of relying on power from far cheaper industrial solar plants. UC Davis energy expert James Bushnell credible because of his long history as a green-power advocate says the mandate is likely to have such negative fallout it will make reaching Californias climate goals possibly more difficult and definitely more expensive. Energy commissioners may have gotten the laudatory headlines they wanted. But veteran columnist Dan Walters is right to warn that their edict has the potential to be one of the greatest policy errors in the states history akin to electricity deregulation two decades ago. The commission should reconsider its decision and rescind a rash, risky mandate. Twitter: @sdutIdeas Advertisement Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion The immense success of the tech firms based in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area has made California the fifth-largest economy in the world. The regions culture of innovation has created vast amounts of new wealth and hundreds of thousands of jobs. But instead of welcoming this success, some lawmakers in the cities that are home to Apple and Google Cupertino and Mountain View, respectively want to tax it, following the lead of the Seattle City Council, which recently imposed a per-worker fee of $275 on Amazon and other big employers. The Wall Street Journal reports that some city officials now want the tech giants to ease problems tied to rapid growth, namely housing shortages and inadequate local transportation failings that are more fairly blamed on local and state lawmakers poor decisions. These local officials seem to believe that future tech growth is so inevitable that a little less wont lead to big problems. We dont want to force them out of town, but the growth has been so impactful, it wouldnt hurt if it slowed down, Mountain View Mayor Lenny Siegel told the Journal. This may appeal to populists, but it should worry everyone else. California is subject to constant poaching from other states and nations hoping to lure industries away. This economic threat is belittled by people who say that most CEOs will choose the charms of the Golden State over lower taxes and lighter regulation elsewhere. Will they? Will that still be true it tech giants are singled out for hefty additional taxes by cities that take them for granted? Thats a risky experiment that Cupertino and Mountain View may soon undertake and that all Californians could eventually come to regret. Twitter: @sdutIdeas Advertisement Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion Organizers and participants in the 16th Annual American Cancer Societys 24-hour Ramona Relay for Life invite the community to join in this years fight against cancer. The 2018 relay will begin at 9 a.m. on Saturday, June 2, at Wilson Stadium off Ninth and I streets and teams can still register. Re-lei for a Cure, this years theme, is about the Hawaiian lei that is symbolic of friendship, love or to celebrate or honor someone. This event is all about how many people can gather and make a difference with the inspiring symbolism of the lei, in a fun Hawaiian atmosphere. The 24-hour relay starts with the Color Guard from Boy Scout Troop 679, an inspiring life story from this years Survivor of Hope, Abby Reece, then off to the track with a bagpiper leading the way for survivors, caregivers, family, friends and those at the beginning of their fight against cancer. If you want to celebrate life, this is the place to be, said event organizers. Breakfast is complimentary to survivors and caregivers, and the snack bar will serve fresh food throughout the event for participants to purchase. Music will run all day, with fun music for themed laps, and live music from Steel Dawn. Dance or walk to the music, be entertained by dance groups, Ramona Martial Arts, and a Ramona High Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps performance, or join in the energetic and popular Zumba. Kidz Camp will be open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and will feature fun games and a jumpie! The evenings Luminaria Remembrance ceremony will start at 8 p.m. Many gather to remember those they have lost to cancer. The relay will feature an array of opportunity drawing prizes and themed silent auction baskets with proceeds going to the American Cancer Society. For more information or to sign up, visit relayforlife.org/ramonaca or Facebook Relay for Life Ramona ACS. Meet San Diegos new police chief during a free event next week in Carmel Mountain Ranch. City Councilman Mark Kersey is hosting a meet-and-greet event with Chief David Nisleit for District 5 residents, which includes Rancho Bernardans, at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 7 in the Carmel Mountain Ranch/Sabre Springs Recreation Center, 10152 Rancho Carmel Drive. Seating is limited. RSVPs are encouraged at bit.ly/district5_meetthechief. As a proud resident of District 5, I look forward to meeting with the community members at this event, Nisleit said. This is a great opportunity for me to learn about and discuss the issues affecting all the neighborhoods in the district. Nisleit became the citys 35th police chief on March 2, succeeding retired Chief Shelley Zimmerman. SDPD is the eighth-largest police department in the U.S. According to Nisleits online bio, he is a native San Diegan who joined the department in 1988. His father, retired Capt. Randy Nisleit, served in the San Diego Police Department for 35 years. His son, Ryan, recently graduated from the San Diego Police Academy and is now a patrol officer with SDPD. Nisleit has worked in many of the departments commands, including patrol operations; Homeless Outreach Team; special operations; robbery, gangs and homicide investigations; SWAT; narcotics; sex crimes and internal affairs. He earned his masters degree in business management from the University of Redlands and graduated from the FBI National Academy in 2014. His numerous career honors include a Congressional recognition in 2008. Nisleit is also a professor of criminal justice at the University of San Diego and Alliant University. I appreciate Chief Nisleits commitment to engage every community in San Diego, Kersey said. Well hear first-hand from the chief about public safety in San Diegos northeastern region and what the department is doing to ensure we remain one of the safest big cities in America. Email: rbnews@pomeradonews.com Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Weekly Newsletter The best of The Saturday Evening Post in your inbox! Join For more about Gay Haubners life in the North Country, read the other chapters in her serialized memoir. A cute guy I had met at the Consumer Electronics Show had asked me to California for the Fourth of July, and since I had no other invitations to picnics or barbeques, I accepted, hoping an all-American holiday with a regular guy would give my life some semblance of normal. Gerry picked me up from the Orange County Airport, kissed me, and said, Its my day to see my daughter, okay? A visit to a hitherto unmentioned daughter had not been part of my California dreaming. In the next five minutes I found out that Gerry had been married, had a baby, and had accidentally dropped that baby. Babys head hit the floor exactly on that scary soft spot, squashing her brain. When the doctor told Gerry and his wife that their daughter would never be able to feed herself or wipe her own butt, Mrs. Gerry took a powder. Subscribe and get unlimited access to our online magazine archive. Subscribe Today I had hoped that Gerrys plans included taking me to Malibu or the La Brea Tar Pits, but instead we drove out into the endless acreage of suburbia, finally pulling up in front of a big brick house, the kind that gets repurposed as a funeral parlor, nursing home, or rehabilitation center. There was no waiting in the car for me. Gerry led me by the elbow inside, nodded at the white-capped receptionist, and pulled me down a blindingly bright hallway that looked sterile, but had an undertone of piss and puke and ammonia and bleach. We went through a door marked by a cut out picture of a grey kitten, and Gerry dropped my arm to swoop in and pick up his daughter. You could say this two-year-old with her porcelain skin and Gerrys starry blue eyes and golden brown curls was pretty, except other than the ability to hold her head up, she was as limp as a rag doll. Gerry cooed at her and kissed her and introduced me to her in baby talk. Shes always so happy when you come to see her, Gerry, beamed the nurse who stood watch, I guess so that Gerry didnt drop his daughter again. And youve brought a nice new friend to meet her. The nice new friend smiled back at the nurse, wondering if she could spend the rest of the time in the ladies room and if it could possibly smell worse than the room she was currently in. I decided not to take the chance. I thought, If this is his day with her, it must mean that the next two days are not. I tried to reassure myself that I was still better off than if I were standing alone on the shore of Lake Michigan, straining my neck to catch a glimpse of the fireworks from Navy Pier, surrounded by decomposing fish. Gerry finally handed his daughter back to her nurse, and chirped at me, What do you feel like eating? For the first time in my life I had no appetite, but I was badly in need of a drink. I had several while Gerry enjoyed a cheeseburger and gossiped about his co-workers at Sanyo, none of whom I remembered. I also had no appetite for sex, but thought, Lets just get it the hell over with and see what happens in the morning. Gerry held me and kissed me and said, You were so wonderful with my little girl. I feel like I can really trust you. I made as noncommittal a noise as possible. Would you to do something for me? Would you tie me up and hit me with a belt? At this point nothing shocked me. But this just sounded like too much work. Im so tired from my trip. Can we talk about this tomorrow? I now had quite a number of things I did not want to think about. I wished I were back in Chicago, sweating and drinking cheap beer with Frank. The next day, the glorious Fourth, Gerry and I did go to a backyard barbecue, hosted by a couple who seemed perfectly normal. That night we oohed and aahed at the showers of glittering fireworks, sitting on the bleachers at the local high school. Gerry bought sparklers, and the two of us twirled them about, making patterns in the air. Anyone looking at us would think, What a nice young couple. That night, Gerrys request took on a plaintive quality, like a kid asking for a lollipop. Maybe you could scratch me, like just enough to leave a mark? If I bought you some black boots and red nail polish I said, I cant Gerry, went to sleep on the couch, and took a cab the next morning to the airport. All the way back I banged my head on the airplane window, as if I could physically dislodge the memories of the past two days, finally settling on the minor consolation that since it was the Fourth of July holiday, this bizarre excursion had not cost me any modeling bookings. Not that there was any work. There are no trade shows or conventions booked in Chicago when the temperature is a constant, daylong 95 degrees and the humidity is like a wet towel in your face. Ad agencies emptied out, and everyone took off on vacation to the cool greenery of Mackinaw Island or Door County. It was too awful outside for me to make my rounds of photographers. Showing up lank-haired, with running mascara and dark stains under my armpits would not get me cast in catalogs or commercials. I sat in Ann Geddes air-conditioned office and wailed. Its like this every summer, shrugged Ann. After Labor Day, youll see, it will pick up again. Oh, Silver and I are going to Lake Geneva for the next two weeks. But last summer I had been living with James, who paid for the rent and the utilities and our once-a-week meal. I need to work, I said. Isnt there anyone whos open, whos hiring models? Theres always Playboy, said Silver. Ann gave him one look and gave me another. Playboy was the great colossus that loomed over every Chicago model. On the one hand, Playboy was made of money: if they even agreed to look at your topless photos you were paid $500. Make it all the way to Playmate of the Month and you got a check for $25,000, which was more money than I could imagine. On the other hand, according to every model I knew, if you appeared in Playboy, even as a fully dressed background blur gazing adoringly at The Kind Of Man Who Reads Playboy while he gazed adoringly at his martini, you would never, ever again work for Ogilvy or Marshall Fields or Spiegel or Sears or any other client that valued their reputation. Cause there is something, Silver went on. Playboy needed models for an orgy scene. A lot of models. No one will be able to pick you out. Theyll pay $200 an hour, and with that many people it will take hours to shoot. Ann sighed and said, Its up to you, Gay. I swallowed hard, thought of the tiny amount remaining in my checking account, and told Ann I would do it, I would risk my career, a long shot to begin with, and pose for the photo illustrating Dan Greenburgs article, My First Orgy, a photo that also ended up on the cover of the September issue cut into the shape of a bunny head. The Playboy building featured turbo-powered air conditioning, which felt delightful on the steaming hot day when I pushed the heavy brass revolving door into the lobby; the AC immediately whisked away the Chicago sweat. But it was arctic awful up in their huge photo studio where I stripped to down to nothing along with 29 other good-looking young people, at a five-to-one female to male ratio. I was grateful I didnt recognize any of them, and no introductions were offered. We anonymous naked people were sent over to a vast stretch of black vinyl that had been pegged down on the floor. A funny bald man took over, running around us, arranging and re-arranging our nude bodies, while consulting a sheet of paper he held in his hand. No, that wont work, he finally said. Everybody stand up. We have to start over. I held my halter dress in front of my chest, wandered up to the bald guy in charge of the shoot, and peeked over his shoulder at a rough sketch of impossibly closely entwined bodies. You should arrange us so that we look like a bowl of fruit, a reverse Arcimboldo, I said. He looked up at me. Im George, the art director. Do you smoke pot? If I dont have to do it naked, I said, and slipped my dress over my head. George called a break and we snuck into a darkroom, along with the photographer and his assistant. It was very spacy pot, and made the rest of the day almost pleasant for me, as it took George hours to work our bodies into the right configuration. Silver was right: I ended the day $800 richer (minus Geddes ten percent). George caught me as I was leaving. Do you want to come to a party at my place tonight? You can wear clothes. George scribbled his address on a piece of paper. It was 155 Burton Place. I lived at 40 Burton Place. One-fifty-five Burton Place was hidden behind a pebbled wall studded with shards of multicolored tiles. An archway held an ornate black wrought iron gate, which was left ajar. I walked into yet another Wonderland, a Gaudi-inspired habitat, the two-story buildings stuccoed white and red-shingled, with ornate mosaics and stained glass windows. The apartments looked like mushrooms that had just sprung up around the cobblestone courtyard. There wasnt a square edge in the place. Staircases curled around turrets and the dark wood doors were rounded at the top, with heavy medieval knockers. If Bilbo Baggins had owned a city pied-a-terre, it would have looked like a Burton Place apartment. It was easy to find the door with the brass numeral 1. Boz Skaggs was blasting forth too loudly for a knock to be heard, so I let myself into a large living room, low-ceilinged with dark wooden beams, nubby orange sofas and ottomans, and dim lighting. Men and women were scattered about, no one over 35, everyone was drinking and smoking something. George materialized. Its Gay, right? I did have my stupid name necklace on as a reminder. Stick out your tongue. George placed a small, gritty pill in my mouth and said, Its MDA kind of like acid, which was fine with me. Like Alice with her iced cake, I swallowed it. Even with her clothes on, I recognized another model from that afternoons fake orgy and headed over to make modeling small talk. My way was blocked by a man with too much nose and not enough hair, wearing a pink bowling shirt with Carl stitched on the pocket, and the kind of black and metal eyeglasses the nerdy math boys in high school clung to after everyone else had moved on to wire rims. Im Michael Trossman, artist and resident wit. And you are? Michael was an illustrator and lived in one of those Hobbit-like apartments. He backed me into a corner and held me captive there. He was cracking wise, keeping me amused, and then the drugs kicked in. Wow, I said. Michael grinned. Dont drink too much. Ill get you a beer. Before my brain left the building, I made myself promise that I would not sleep with anyone at this party, despite the erotic feeling of oneness and love I suddenly had for all of them. It was Love Potion No. 9; I would have kissed a cop. A look around the room proved that everyone was feeling the same chemical bliss; couples were dancing, gazing into each others eyes, stroking faces and hair, preludes to a kiss and more. It was a real life version of the fake orgy I had been in that afternoon. Michael, the guy closest to me actually a little too close was not my type: those glasses, that nose, his hairline in full retreat. But the psychic tendrils of MDA wove their way from him toward me, disturbing the air. Then through the fog of drugs and the buzz of sexual arousal, up popped the memory of Gerry begging me to hit him, and my libido shriveled up and ran away. Michael picked up on this shutting of the bedroom door that the MDA had cracked open. He downed his beer and took a small step away from me. So you know George? he asked. I nodded. I guess I knew George, having spent the day naked with him. Hes a great art director. The people who live here are artists and designers, Michael said, and pointed out some of the other Burton Place residents: Ronny was a skinny French guy with long side-swept bangs, a photographer. There with his cute blonde girlfriend. Fred, a relocated California surfer, was an air-brush illustrator who had more work than he knew what to do with and a smiley, brown-haired wife who looked even more corn-fed Midwestern than I did. An older woman, the only person who was not out of her mind on drugs, was the architects daughter; she lived in the biggest, most Art Nouveau apartment. Its amazing, said Michael. She doesnt invite too many people up, but if you like, I can get you in to see it. I did a charcoal drawing of her father; its hanging above the fireplace. I did not want to be alone someplace with Michael, nor did I want to commit to a future date. Um, sure, yeah, that would be great, I murmured, and changed the conversation. Michael was 29, smart and funny, quick-witted, had read most of the books I had, had seen a whole bunch more movies, and could do dead-on impersonations. As the drug streamed through us, Michael fell into confessional mode. The folks of Burton Place had been throwing these MDA parties for months. Under the drugs woozy influence, Michael had fallen in love and slept with Ronnys girlfriend. When she broke it off, Michael fell in love and slept with Freds wife. He felt terrible about it Fred and he were friends and was trying to end the affair. Look at her. Isnt she beautiful? Michael sighed, gazing at his beloved who was sitting on her husbands lap. She had clear skin and shiny hair, I gave her that. Now that I had gone from potential bedmate to good listener, Michael babbled on. His first and truest love was his ex-wife, an actress and comedian at Second City, whom he had knocked up while he was still a student at the Art Institute. Her ogre Irish parents demanded that Michael even though he was that devils spawn, a Jew make a daycent woman out of her and shot-gunned him to the altar. His son was born, and then another son (those crazy Catholics, I thought), who he loved more than anything on earth. Then she divorced me, sighed Michael, which threw the final wet blanket on any tiny glowing ash I may have felt for him. Loose lips sink ships and they drive girls to put down their beer and stumble home alone on a night that was lit up by rainbows and stars and meteors, the drugs still coursing hot in my veins and clouding my mind. I might have been okay with the incestuous goings-on at Burton Place, but the divorce and the two kids were too much. The sidewalk wobbled beneath me as I walked the three blocks to my own front door, and a bed I shared only with my little dog Groucho, who seemed oblivious to the fact that the room was swirling about us. San Diego, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/30/2018 -- The Whistleblower Institute announces that a Tennessee Chiropractor reached a $1.45 million settlement in a whistleblower lawsuit to resolve False Claims Act Allegations. Those who have a similar case or experienced a similar situation or any other wrongdoing within a corporation have certain options and should contact the Whistleblower Institute at mail@whistleblowerinstitute.com or call: 619-4521218. There are no costs or obligations to you. According to the government, a chiropractor operating pain clinics from Lenior City, Tennessee has paid $1.45 million, plus interest, to resolve False Claims Act violations. Under the same settlement, a pain clinic nurse in Cookeville, Tennessee is to pay $32,000 and surrender her DEA registration to settle allegations that she violated the Controlled Substances Act. The whistleblower share of the settlement will be approximately $246,500. Reportedly, Matthew Anderson and his management company, PMC LLC, managed four pain clinics in Tennessee, most recently known as; Cookeville Center for Pain Management; Spinal Pain Solutions in Harriman; Preferred Pain Center of Grundy County in Gruetli Laager; and McMinnville Pain Relief Center. As part of the settlement agreement, Matthew Anderson and PMC resolved claims that from 2011 through 2014, they caused pharmacies to request for Medicare and TennCare payments for painkillers, including opioids, without valid medical purpose. In addition, it resolved allegations about Anderson's too high reimbursements for office visits, and the PMC's claims on Medicare for nurse services in 2011 and 2012 that failed to abide by the Tennessee law. Under the settlement agreement, the United States will receive $1,040,275, and the State of Tennessee will receive $163,225. In addition, Matthew Anderson and PMC agreed to be excluded from billing federal health care programs for five years. Three of the clinics will also forfeit $53,840, which the United States seized from the clinics' bank accounts. Also, as part of the settlement agreement, Cindy Scott, a nurse practitioner from Nashville, will pay $32,000 and surrender her DEA registration until October 2021. Furthermore, Cindy Scott is prohibited from prescribing medications until her DEA registration is renewed. "More Americans are dying because of drugs today than ever beforea trend that is being driven by opioids," said Attorney General Jeff Sessions. "If we're going to end this unprecedented drug crisis, which is claiming the lives of 64,000 Americans each year, doctors must stop overprescribing opioids and law enforcement must aggressively pursue those medical professionals who act in their own financial interests, at the expense of their patients' best interests. Today's settlement is a positive step that will help save lives, as well as protect taxpayers' money, in Tennessee and across the United States." The Whistleblower Institute is an information portal for current or former employees and other people having insight information about wrongdoing and other illegal activities by individuals either individually or within corporations, through company culture and or within international affairs. Whistleblowers should keep in mind that under the Dodd-Frank Act any person who provides the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") with original information that leads to a successful enforcement action with over $1 million recovered must be awarded between 10%-30% of the total amount recovered. In order to determine the total amount of the reward there are numerous factors that need to be considered. Whistleblower actions are complex and our goal is to guide any whistleblower every step of the way. The Whistleblower Institute is dedicated to partnering with any individual who have information about fraud and we work with many of the best law firms worldwide. Those who have a similar case or experienced a similar situation or any other wrongdoing within a corporation have certain options and should contact the Whistleblower Institute. Contact: Whistleblower Institute 2534 State Street - Suite 406 San Diego, CA 92101, USA Phone: +1 (619) 4521218 Facsimile: +1 (619) 785 3185 Email: mail@whistleblowerinstitute.com The material was prepared by the Whistleblower Institute for informational purposes only and is not legal or financial advice. The information is provided only as general information which may or may not reflect the most currently available public information, is not provided as a basis for any established or existing relationship, and is not intended to constitute legal or financial advice, or to substitute for obtaining such advice from an attorney or other advisor licensed in your state. Valley Cottage, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/30/2018 -- Medical tourism is one of the most dynamically growing industries today. Considered to be the direct impact of globalisation of healthcare, medical tourism certainly exhibits strong growth potential globally. However, based on FMI's research, the market of medical tourism is expected to concentrate within most of the emerging economies of the world. As developing nations are increasingly heading toward technological advancement and quality services in the medical and healthcare sector, the global medical tourism market is anticipated to witness robust growth over 2014-2020, predominantly in Asian countries. The top treatments people travel abroad for, include cancer therapy, cardiovascular surgeries, orthopaedic treatments, dentistry, cosmetic surgeries, reproductive treatments, weight loss therapies, health screenings, and medical tests and scans. In severe cases, a sizeable patient population also seeks second opinion from specialist doctors out of their countries. A sample of this report is available upon request @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-249 Key Drivers High treatment costs and lengthy waiting times for medical procedures, being the two major factors in driving medical tourism, are also supported by easier and cheaper international travel. While the U.K.'s population prefers to travel abroad for bypassing long waits, patients from the U.S. travel outside for availing of treatments at cheaper costs. Medical excellence along with international accreditation are the key factors fuelling a majority of international patient flow, eventually boosting international medical tourism. Currently, over 600 medical departments and hospitals all over the globe are accredited by the U.S. Joint Commission International (JCI). The number of accredited facilities is projected to increase almost by 20% each year. This is another important driver associated with the market growth. Developing countries, with ever-evolving innovation and demonstrable achievements in medical research are estimated to accelerate the approaching medical tourist flow over the forecast period. Growing healthcare investments by various government and private sectors are also anticipated to further bolster the market growth. Key Restraints However, medical tourists are highly prone to a wide variety of health risks after they return. The conditions may include TB, paratyphoid, amoebic dysentery, deep vein thrombosis, and more; usually caused due to poor post-operative care and inadequate rest. This could affect the market to some extent. Stringent documentation processes, issues related to visa approval, and limited insurance coverage are reportedly some of the most deterring factors for the global market. Global Medical Tourism Market: Segmentation FMI's research on the global medical tourism market offers a six-year forecast, segmenting the market on the basis of type of medical treatment and geography. On the basis of the type of treatment, the market is segmented into cosmetic treatment, cardiovascular treatment, fertility treatment, dental treatment, orthopaedic treatment, and other general treatments. On the basis of geography, the market is segmented into Asia pacific, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, North America, and South America. Regional Outlook Some of the prominent medical tourism centres across the globe include Thailand, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Israel, Brazil, Turkey, the Philippines, Dubai, Singapore, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Canada, and the U.S. According to Patients Beyond Borders, the global medical tourism market is currently growing at an impressive rate between 15% and 25%, and the flow of patients seeking cross-border treatment options will be the highest in Mexico. South and Southeast Asia are expected to dominate the global market in the near future. Based on MTA's recently released Medical Tourism Index, there are 41 countries participating in the global medical tourism market. While India broadly secures #1, Israel ranks #1 in the quality of services and facilities. India is renowned for specialist cardiac surgeries, while Singapore is a popular medical tourism destination owing to the expertise in complicated surgical procedures. Thailand has been a popular destination for medical tourism and millions of patients have travelled to Thailand since 2006. It is also the top cosmetic surgery centre globally. Malaysia offers state-of-the-art medical infrastructure and treatments by highly skilled medical professionals, making it another sought after centre among medical tourists. With economically affordable treatment options and favourable government initiatives, Malaysia is anticipated to acquire one of the top market positions in the global medical tourism market, during the forecast period. Key Players: Global Medical Tourism Market Some of the top key players in the medical tourism industry include Asian Heart Institute (India), Apollo Hospitals (India), Prince Court Medical Centre (Malaysia), Gleneagles Hospital (Singapore), Min-Sheng General Hospital (Taiwan), Samitivej Sukhumvit Hospital (Bangkok), Raffles Medical Group (Singapore), Clemenceau Medical Centre (Lebanon), Bangkok Hospital (Thailand), Bumrungrad International Hospital (Thailand), Fortis Healthcare Ltd. (India), Wooridul Spine Hospital (Korea), KPJ Healthcare Berhad (Malaysia), Anadolu Medical Centre (Turkey), and Asklepios Klinik Barmbek (Germany). To view TOC of this report is available upon request @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-249 While these players rank amongst they compete on the basis of exceptional service quality, optimum patient comfort, and relatively reasonable costs for various treatments. Several facilities are also undergoing mergers, acquisitions, affiliations, and joint ventures for delivering enhanced medical care, thereby strengthening their market positions. A few prominent examples of highly productive collaborations include the collaboration between Bumrungrad International Hospital (Bangkok) and IBM Watson for better cancer care, and the collaboration of Anadolu Medical Centre (Turkey) with Johns Hopkins Medicine (U.S.). About Future Market Insights Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centres in the U.S. and India. FMI's 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. USCG forbids foreign passenger vessels' use of their own small craft for excursions. This is considered a violation of coastwise trading rules under the Passenger Vessel Services Act. Cruise lines that operate Zodiac excursions from their ships have had to adapt to comply. In Windstar's case, it purchased US-made craft that, for Signature Expeditions in Alaska, are operated only by US citizens with US Coast Guard licenses. Taking certification to a new level 'It was a big effort,' said Capt. Ben Lyons, CEO, Expedition Voyage Consultants. 'I'm proud that we were able to deliver their full staff needsUS citizens with US Coast Guard licenses. The USCG recently clarified their interpretations for this requirement, and the expedition industry as a whole hasnt had these formalized requirements before. 'This is taking the certification up to a whole other level,' Lyons told Seatrade Cruise News. The US-made Zodiacs are staying with Star Legend and supplement the tenders the ship already had. A new storage location and crane system was installed between the funnels on the top deck to house the Zodiacs. The US requires all of the staff driving the Zodiacs for excursions in US waters have, at minimum, a USCG Operator of Uninspected Passenger Vessel license, according to Peter Butz, chief operations officer, Expedition Voyage Consultants. 'Some of our staff already had a USCG license when they were hired. Others were already skilled naturalists and Zodiac drivers, but because their Zodiac driving experience was outside of US waters, in places like Antarctica, the Sea of Cortez, the Arctic, etc., they had never been required to have a US Coast Guard license,' Butz explained. 'They already had the competency, they just needed go through the process to get the license.' This requires documenting their sea time for USCG and, most importantly, passing the USCG written exam. The exam covers such topics as 'rules of the road,' navigation and safety. Getting licensed takes time Many Expedition Voyages Consulting staff who needed to get their license were fitting their study time in while they were working, Butz said. For most, it took 'a good couple of months between starting the whole process of gathering the required documentation, studying for the test, passing the exam and submitting everything for USCG review in order to be awarded their license.' Besides guided Zodiac explorations, Windstar's Signature Expeditions offer kayak and hiking tours, all led by experts. Windstar president John Delaney has said there's been 'very strong demand' for the program, which 'embraces the natural beauty of the region, and allows for the most authentic, destination-focused experiences for our guests.' The Brazilian press reported Monday that the military said that the entrances to some ports, such as Santos, Latin Americas largest export hub, were cleared, but there were still no trucks arriving by late Sunday to the area to replenish silos and allow for ship-loading operations. Soldiers were reluctant to move against truckers, though they did serve as convoys for some fuel shipments. The conflict over operating costs and diesel prices caused Brazils largest city and economic hub Sao Paulo to decree a state of emergency, as did Rio de Janeiro. Gas stations and airports across the nation ran out of fuel, supermarket shelves went bare and hospitals said they were running out of supplies. Brazils President Michel Temer announced late on Sunday new measures to reduce operating costs for truckers in a bid to end a week-long protest that has severely hampered the flow of food, fuel and key exports in Latin Americas largest economy. Another decree ordered toll operators across the country not to charge for rear axles that are not in use, as is the case when trucks pass by the tolls unloaded. A third decree mandates the minimum fare for freight to be paid to truckers. Congress this week was also expected to debate various measures aimed at ending the shutdown. On 18 March, DP World and Andino Investment Holding announced an agreement for DP World to acquire 100% of the shares of CAM, a leading fully integrated logistics provider in Peru, for $315.7m. This also included 100% of the shares in Triton Transports and Neptunia, and 50% in Terminales Portuarios Euroandinos, in the Port of Paita, which is the second largest container terminal in Peru. Read More: DP World acquires Peru logistics agency Cosmos Agencia Maritima for $318m We are delighted to add Cosmos Agencia Maritima to our Americas region interests. Latin America is a very important market for us and this move adds value for our customers in the region with logistics services to our existing container terminal in Callao and inland container terminal in Lurin. The acquisition underlines the confidence we have in Peru and the potential of its economy. As leaders of global trade, we believe the logistic sector in the country has great potential, said DP World group chairman and ceo, Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem. Gerard van den Heuvel, ceo of DP World Peru, commented that the acquisition diversifies the revenue of our business through a wider range of logistics services. We already operate the largest container facility in the country in Callao which has rapidly become a leader for trade along the west coast of South America and this will enhance our services even further. This transaction not only expands DP Worlds footprint in Peru by adding another container terminal to the existing terminal at Callao as well as integrated logistics services including warehousing, distribution and cargo handling to provide tailor made solutions to a range of industrial sectors in the country but also shows DP Worlds commitment with doing business in Latin America. The company was quoted as saying in local reports that it would offer 561.1m shares to investors, or 30% of its stock holdings. Of this, 10% would be offered to strategic investors such large port operators in Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Malaysia. Singapore was not mentioned. PSA International already has a joint venture with Pelindo II, Mitsui and NYK Line to operate the New Priok Container Terminal One in Jakarta. "We are seeking strategic partnerships with the biggest port operators in ASEAN (countries) by offering our shares," President director Chiefy Adi Kusmargono was quoted as saying in local media. He added that 50% of the proceeds would be used for capital expenditure, 25% for long-term land lease and the remaining 25% for working capital. "We plan to build an elevated parking garage and develop car terminals in Sumatra, Java and Kalimantan," Chiefly said. Read More: Indonesia's Patimban Port on track to start operations by 2019 IKT currently mainly operates at Tanjung Priok. A new port is being planned at Patimban that will be close to Japanese automotive plants and is expected to serve their needs. Chiefy said he expected the companys 2018 revenue to grow 70% to IDR717.6bn. "We have an additional volume of between 170,000 and 220,000 units per year from the new port operated by Pelabuhan Tanjung Priok [PTP] this year so the revenue can increase significantly," he said. Press Release May 30, 2018 De Lima slams Calida's 'hypocrisy', asks him to resign Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima has criticized Solicitor General Jose Calida for his hypocrisy after he denied any conflict of interest in relation to the P150-million worth of government contracts bagged by his family-own security agency since he assumed office in 2016. De Lima, the fiercest critic of the Duterte administration's war on drugs, also backed mounting calls by her colleagues and some other quarters for Calida to vacate immediately his post as the government's chief legal counsel. "It disturbs me that Calida has no qualms to give undue advantage to his family's security business, thereby profiting from people's money. He should immediately resign from his post as Solicitor General because of this corruption anomaly," she said. "But what disturbs me the most is his hypocrisy; he has the gall to claim that there is no conflict of interest despite official records showing that his family-owned security firm bagged P150-million worth of contracts from government agencies," she added. Based on news reports, Calida's security firm, Vigilant Investigative and Security Agency Incorporated, won at least 10 government contracts between August 2016 and January 2018. Notably, two of these contracts amounting to P12.4 million, were with the Department of Justice (DOJ), which prepares the budget of the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG). Calida reportedly denied any conflict of interest as he reasoned out that he resigned as chairman and president of Vigilant on May 30, 2016, or before he worked at OSG in July of the same year. Contrary to Calida's claim, however, documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed that Calida still owned 60 percent of shares in the company as of September 29, 2016, roughly two months after he took his oath as Solicitor General. De Lima said Calida's resignation as chairman and president of Vigilant does not remove the fact that his family, particularly his wife and children, own and operate the business. "Clearly there is a conflict of interest especially when his own family is profiting from the government," she said. Apparently, the Solicitor General's wife, Milagros Calida, replaced the Solicitor General's position as president and chairperson of Vigilant. Their children are likewise appointed as vice president, corporate secretary and treasurer of the company. The Senator from Bicol also urged the government to hold Calida accountable by filing of possible charges against Calida. "Surely, Calida's immediate resignation from his post would not settle the issue. He should face the possible charges against him," she said. Press Release May 30, 2018 Drilon: Congress must ensure BBL can withstand judicial review Senate Minority Leader Franklin M. Drilon has introduced several amendments to the Senate version of the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law of (BBL) to make sure that the measure will not suffer the same fate as the Memorandum of Agreement on the Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD), which the Supreme Court declared as unconstitutional. "We must avoid the constitutional issues that led to the downfall of the previous Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain in 2008," Drilon said, as he reiterates support for the measure. "Considering the importance of the Bangsamoro Basic Law to attaining lasting and just peace in Muslim Mindanao, as legislators we must guarantee that every word in this law would survive judicial review," Drilon said. Drilon said he expects that the BBL will be elevated to the Supreme Court once enacted into law. "I want to make sure that the BBL that we will pass in Congress is 100 percent in conformity with the 1987 Constitution," Drilon said. "All our amendments are designed to cleanse it of unconstitutional provisions so it can withstand judicial scrutiny. We cannot afford a repeat of what happened in the MOA-AD," Drilon stressed. The said agreement, signed by the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in 2008, was struck down by the Supreme Court in the landmark case Province of North Cotabato vs. the Government of the Republic of Philippines (GR. 183591), as the high court said the agreement was unconstitutional and illegal, and the process through which it was commenced "whimsical, capricious, oppressive, arbitrary and despotic." "It is imperative that we learn from the past and make sure that we avoid making the same deadly mistakes all over again," he said. He added: "We must do it right this time in order that peace and stability in Mindanao will finally be realized." Hence, Drilon made several substantial amendments during the hours-long deliberations of the Senate on Senate Bill No. 1717 on Tuesday that lasted 10 hours. Among the important amendments he introduced "in order to strengthen the law's adherence to constitution" is to delete the provision on "reserved powers" for the new Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, given that the Constitution already provides for the residual powers of the National Government vis-a-vis autonomous regions. "We reiterate the Sec. 17, Art. 10 of the Constitution in this section," he added. Section 17 Art. X provides that "All powers, functions, and responsibilities not granted by this Constitution or by law to the autonomous regions shall be vested in the National Government." Drilon sees this as among the contentious provisions when the Senate and House of Representatives pass their own versions and eventually meet in the bicameral conference committee. "We did away with nomenclatures, used no specific name and simply mirrored the wording of the Constitution, and gave powers to the Bangsamoro government in keeping with the constitutional provisions on local autonomy," Drilon said. Drilon noted that it was particularly the wording of the MOA-AD which led the Supreme Court to declare it as unconstitutional, since its provisions vested the proposed Bangsamoro entity the status of an associated state which is not recognized by the present Constitution. Drilon also successfully moved for the inclusion of the provision reiterating "that the Bangsamoro people are citizens of the Republic of the Philippines." The Bangsamoro Transition Commission (BTC) opposed the said amendment, which puzzled Drilon, saying that his proposed amendment only reiterates the wordings of the Constitution on Philippine citizenship. "This was introduced to prevent any misinterpretation that that there is a 'Bangsamoro citizenship', because we are all Filipinos and we are all citizens of the Philippines," Drilon emphasized. The minority leader also moved to amend the bill to remove the province of Palawan from the list of areas considered as historically part of Bangsamoro territory. The amendment was put on a vote following opposition from the sponsor and the BTC. Drilon's amendment was carried. The senator also encountered stiff opposition to his proposal to introduce an anti- political dynasty provision for the Bangsamoro government, which was meant to reinforce the country's efforts to address political dynasties and its effect to public governance. The matter was temporarily set aside, disappointing Drilon, who insisted that the policy of anti-political dynasty must be put across. Drilon also lauded and supported efforts made by Senators Panfilo Lacson and Gregorio Honasan to ensure that the Bangsamoro police will be under the Philippine National Police in keeping with the Constitutional precept that there shall be one police force. Press Release May 30, 2018 Sponsorship Speech Confirmation of Menardo I. Guevarra as Secretary of Justice Plenary Session, Commission on Appointments Delivered by Senator WIN GATCHALIAN Chairman, CA Committee on Justice and Judicial and Bar Council Mr. Chairman, honorable members of the Commission on Appointments, good morning. Justice holds a preeminent position among the ideals that bind us, the sovereign Filipino People, together as a democratic republic. No less than the Preamble of the Constitution affirms this when it proclaims the building of a "just and humane society", and the creation of a regime of truth and justice, as fundamental considerations in the establishment of our constitutional system of government. As such, the faithful and effective administration of justice is one of the most solemn and inviolable duties of Government to the People - a duty that must be faithfully executed by the three great branches of government within their respective spheres of power. In the executive branch, it is the Secretary of Justice who plays the most important role in the administration of justice. As the head of the Department of Justice and overseer of its constituent bodies, the duties of his office requires the Secretary of Justice to function as the government's head prosecutor, legal adviser, parole officer, and jail warden, all in one. Upon him falls the burden of ensuring that the executive arm of the country's apparatus of justice functions efficiently and effectively, free from the shadow of corruption or impropriety. The responsibilities of the Secretary of Justice are certainly a lot to handle, but based on his credentials and experience, I am confident that Menardo I. Guevarra is up to the task. Secretary Guevarra is no stranger to public service. In fact, he got his start in the public sector right after college, serving as an economist at NEDA and BSP for 12 years. After graduating from law school and placing second on the 1985 Bar Examination, he served as a technical assistant with the 1986 Constitutional Commission. After many decades in private legal practice, Secretary Guevarra returned to public service - this time, as a high-level government official. He served as Deputy Executive Secretary for Legal Affairs and Commissioner of the Philippine Competition Commission under the second Aquino administration before becoming Senior Deputy Executive Secretary under President Rodrigo Duterte. Secretary Guevarra's considerable experience in government, from entry-level positions all the way to the highest levels of the executive branch, should serve him well in his new role, as will the expertise in criminal law he has amassed over decades of experience as a veteran private practitioner and law professor. Significantly, it seems that Secretary Guevarra is well aware of the challenges facing the DOJ after recent controversies, and is willing to face these challenges head-on. He has pledged to reform the DOJ's image and transform the department into a "cornerstone of our justice system," to use his own words. During his short time on the job so far, Secretary Guevarra has been pro-active in fulfilling this ambitious but worthy promise. I hope that the good Secretary will stay true to his word and pursue his vision for the Department of Justice with courage, perseverance, and integrity. Like I said earlier, the new Secretary of Justice has a difficult task ahead of him - but no challenge, no matter how daunting, should be able to stop a genuine public servant from achieving the change he seeks to create for the benefit of the people. In my humble estimation, it appears that Secretary Guevarra is more than capable of keeping his promise and making real change, as long as he stays the course he has set for himself. On that note, Mr. Chairman, as Chairman of the Committee on Justice and Judicial and Bar Council, I am honored to move for the Commission's confirmation of the ad interim appointment of the Honorable Menardo I. Guevarra as Secretary of Justice. I so moved, Mr. Chairman. Press Release May 30, 2018 HONTIVEROS: CALIDA ALREADY ADMITS GUILT After Solicitor General Jose Calida admitted that he has yet to divest himself of his business interest in a private security company that bagged more than P150 million in contracts from various government agencies since 2016, Akbayan Senator Risa Hontiveros today said that his admission already pointed to his guilt. "A fish is caught by its mouth. By saying that he has not divested himself of his majority shares from a family business that has snared millions of pesos worth of government contracts, Mr. Calida has virtually admitted to allegations of corrupt practices and conflict of interest. Case closed. Game over, " Hontiveros said. Hontiveros said that Section 3(i) of Republic Act No. 6713, or the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees, spelled out conflict of interest as a situation where a public official "is a member of a board, an officer or a substantial stockholder of a private corporation or owner or has a substantial interest in a business, and the interest of such corporation or business, or his rights or duties therein, may be opposed to or affected by the faithful performance of official duty." The opposition Senator also pointed to Section 4 (a) of Republic Act No. 3019 or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act which states that it is "unlawful for any person having family or close personal relation with any public official to capitalize or exploit or take advantage of such family or close personal relation by directly or indirectly requesting . . . pecuniary advantage from any other person having some business, transaction, application, request or contract with the government." The Senator also said that Calida violated Article VII, Section 13 of the Constitution stating that "the President, Vice-President, the Member of the Cabinet, and their deputies or assistants shall not, unless otherwise provided in this Constitution, hold any other office or employment during their tenure. They shall not, during said tenure, directly or indirectly, practice any other profession,participate in any business,or be financially interested in any contract with, or in any franchise, or special privilege granted by the Government or any subdivision, agency, or instrumentality thereof, including government-owned or controlled corporations, or their subsidiaries. They shall strictly avoid conflict of interest in the conduct of their office." "The violations are many and unmistakable. I reiterate my challenge to President Duterte to fire and file cases against Mr. Calida. Can't the President smell it? This is not just a whiff of corruption. The stench is nauseating," Hontiveros said. It was reported that records from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) show that Calida owns 60 percent of Vigilant Investigative and Security Agency Incorporated (VISAI), while the remaining shares in the company belong to his wife and other members of their family. VISAI won 10 government contracts between August 2016 and January 2018 amounting to P 150 million. Press Release May 30, 2018 Sen. Lacson's Sponsorship Speech for Ambassadors Sulpicio Confiado and Akmad Sakkam More at: https://pinglacson.net/2018/05/30/sponsorship-speech-for-ambassadors-sulpicio-confiado-and-akmad-sakkam/ Mr. Chairman... this Representation, as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, presided over a public hearing yesterday morning to deliberate on the nominations of two Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Department of Foreign Affairs. Your Committee, after deliberating on their qualifications and fitness during the said public hearing, determined that they are fit and qualified to be in the posts where they are nominated and therefore ruled to recommend to this plenary their nominations for the consent of the body. It is therefore my honor and privilege to recommend that the Commission give its consent to the nomination of AMBASSADOR SULPICIO MIGUEL CONFIADO as the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Arab Republic of Egypt, with concurrent jurisdiction over the Republic of Djibouti, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, the State of Eritrea and the Republic of Sudan, with the salaries and emoluments of a Chief of Mission, Class I. Our nominee has 24 years of experience in the foreign service. His government service, however, started even earlier in 1987 as the Chief of Production, Investigation and Research Department of the Presidential Commission on Good Government; and later, as Director of the Policy Research Support Branch and Deputy Legislative Liaison Officer of the National Security Council from 1989 to 1993. He assumed significant posts in the foreign service, particularly at the Philippine Embassies in India, Germany, Tokyo and Vienna. He has been highly credited for the active participation and representation of the Philippines in various APEC working groups in 2015. As the Consul General in Japan from 2007 to 2012, he was cited for actively organizing consular activities and dialogues with Filipino community leaders to address the pressing concerns of Filipinos based in Japan. More so, he was credited as the Deputy Chief of Mission in Vienna, Austria for his key initiatives including the consular mapping of Filipino communities and cooperative linkages with various host countries such as Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia. In July 2004, he was named one of the key personalities that organized the Secretariat on DFA Crisis Management during the abduction crisis of Angelo dela Cruz in Iraq. In his long years of service, Ambassador Confiado has exemplified an array of accomplishments with his consular experience here and abroad. To this end, Mr. Chairman and distinguished colleagues, it is my privilege and honor to recommend that this body give its consent to the appointment of AMBASSADOR SULPICIO MIGUEL CONFIADO as the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Arab Republic of Egypt with concurrent jurisdiction over the Republic of Djibouti, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, the State of Eritrea and the Republic of Sudan. I so move, Mr. Chairman. Our second nominee is AMBASSADOR AKMAD ATLAH SAKKAM. A lawyer by profession, our nominee joined the government service as a legal consultant to the Office of the Minister in 1975 and later, as Med-Arbiter at the Bureau of Labor Relations, Ministry of Labor and Employment. In 1976, he became a Labor Attache and was first posted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and later, to the Middle East and Africa. His first stint as an Ambassador was from 1986 to 1992, when then President Corazon Aquino appointed him as the Philippine Ambassador to Iraq. Under his leadership, the Embassy of the Philippines in Baghdad was given the opportunity the highly coveted Special Presidential Award of Merit. Mr. Chairman and distinguished colleagues, it is my privilege and honor to recommend that this body give its consent to the appointment of AMBASSADOR AKMAD ATLAH SAKKAM as the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan with concurrent jurisdiction over the State of Palestine. I so move, Mr. Chairman. Press Release May 30, 2018 POE TELLS DAR CHIEF: REACH OUT TO FARMERS, ADDRESS THEIR WOES As Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) Secretary John Rualo Castriciones was officially confirmed, Sen. Grace Poe reminded him to address the longstanding woes of the country's farmers and landless tillers and to use government resources judiciously. Poe, chairperson of the Commission on Appointment's committee on agrarian reform, also asked Castriciones to reach out to the farmers and fisherfolk groups, landowners and tenants, department employees and to those who opposed his confirmation, saying they raised legitimate concerns during the hearings. "Work with them in harmony. Babantayan po namin ang magiging hakbang ninyo. Maging mabuti sa lahat ng nasasakupan. Maging masinop sa salapi at pag-aari ng mamamayan at ng pamahalaan. Iwaksi ang paghihiganti," Poe said in her sponsorship speech on the official's confirmation. The members of the committee voted 13-2 in secret balloting on Tuesday to confirm Castriciones amid opposition from agrarian reform advocates, including a former agriculture secretary. "The decision to confirm Secretary John Rualo Castriciones is a majority decision. The Commission on Appointments is a collegial body and works on the basis of cooperation, democratic process of majority rule and mutual respect," Poe explained. The senator said lawmakers would keep watch on Castriciones' action on the pleas of farmers: acceleration of land acquisition, improving social services, declogging the backlog in agrarian reform cases; fasttracking the delivery of agrarian justice; and reducing the overhead of DAR to save money. "Ginoong Kalihim, nawa'y maging makatarungan, maayos at makabuluhan sa lahat ang inyong paglilingkod sa Kagawaran. Because the next time you appear here to defend your agency's budget, you will be asked of actions taken on matters we raised with you before," she stressed. Poe added, "This is my way of reminding the nominee that executive work involves constant navigation through a lot of constitutional checkpoints, the most tiring and tedious of which is during the appropriations season in front of the same Members of this body." "So those questions we asked the nominee during the past weeks will not be archived, but simply bookmarked to be raised until we meet again, and raised again and again until the answers fully satisfy us," Poe emphasized. The senator said that while doubts were raised on the qualifications of the DAR chief, she believes these weaknesses can be overcome by his strengths. "His past indiscretion is a debt repaid, but which he continues to amortize with every good deed he makes," she said. "And I happen to believe that sometimes it takes an outsider, who has not been a subject of 'institutional capture,' who is outside the box, to shake things up with his fresh and unorthodox views," Poe added. Press Release May 30, 2018 Speech Endorsing the Confirmation of Berna Romulo-Puyat as Secretary of Tourism Delivered by Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph G. Recto Mr. President, my esteemed colleagues, ladies and gentlemen : The nominee might probably break the Commission record as to the number of endorsement speeches. That the support flows from both sides of the aisle is a testament to her record of clean, competent and committed public service. If ever there was one question, it isn't why she has been appointed, but why it took so long for her to be elevated to Cabinet rank. When her value was finally rewarded, she had by then accumulated a wealth of experience that makes her extremely overqualified for the job. At a time when the last and the least, and not the best and the brightest, are dumped on agencies, DOT is fortunate to have her. It did not only get a manager, but an ad model as well. She is one Tourism secretary who can also be the national poster girl for tourism. As you can see, she has the face that could launch a thousand cruise ships. And I say that with authority having been married to the original Eskinol girl. But let us focus on the nominee's beautiful mind instead, for that is what matters most. Her two decades of government service is detailed in three pages of fine print in her CV. While her longest stint has been with the Department of Agriculture, which spanned three administrations, what is not well known is that she had served in four dozens task forces, committees, advisory councils, and corporate boards. Despite her punishing workload, at home and at work, she made time to teach fiscal policy for 20 years in that public school in Diliman. This, I believe, will serve her in good stead as she restores sense on how the billions of pesos allocated to DOT, both regular and off-budget, are spent. For one, I know that this professor - and practitioner - of fiscal discipline will not go into the carenderia business, despite the spectacular success of her farm-to-table, Manila-to-Madrid gastronomical projects which allowed the world's leading food writers to savor Filipino culinary masterpieces and their readers to salivate for them. She will not waste her time and our money in cooking up useless gimmicks which will only trigger a turo-turo or finger-pointing frenzy among the cooks. If ever, she will wisely spend bulk of the DOT marketing budget on the Korean, Japanese, Chinese markets or the so-called kimchi, sushi, dimsum markets, which account for 7 in 10 tourist arrivals. She is what is needed at a time when tourism is buffeted with many challenges, from increasing competition from abroad, to the worsening contamination of our famous beaches. Mr. President : It is my honor to endorse, second and vote for the confirmation of the appointment of Berna Tecson Romulo-Puyat as Secretary of Tourism. Press Release May 30, 2018 STATEMENT OF MAJORITY LEADER JUAN MIGUEL F. ZUBIRI Chairman, Sub-Committee on the Bangsamoro Basic Law "We are on track with the BBL. These past 2 days and nights disproved the disbelievers that the Senate can hack it. At this time, the landmark measure is being forged by Senators across party lines. The Committee Report which was drawn mainly from the work of the BTC is being rewritten by Senators who hold their legal torches aloft on their own. We must remember that the Minority Leader who propounded difficult questions headed the Justice department for many years. While it may appear that he was unfeeling in peeling away provisions that the BTC laboriously put together, Sen. Frank Drilon was in fact cutting through the verbiage to craft not just better language, but even enhanced it. "Today , we will tackle Fiscal Autonomy , which is not just about the pesos-and-cents issue, but about pumping up the future Bangsamoro Government's ability to rebuild communities ravaged by war and neglect. We expect proposals to increase provisions that will ensure transparency and public accountability. Sen. Recto promised questions & proposals in all of the 18 Chapters. If last night is indicative of how things will be today, then I think the BBL will be a better document coming out of the Plenary than when it first landed in the Senate. "Among the amendments tackled were: "Bangsamoro territory is amended to BM territorial jurisdiction. There will be further discussions. "All provisions referencing to a sub-state status has been disposed of to clarify that the BBL is about an autonomous region like any other. The Republic's flag & Lupang Hinirang shall always be flown & played along with the Bangsamoro heraldic symbols. "Sen. Lacson and Honasan polished the chapters on the Bangsamoro police. The Bangsamoro police is part of the PNP with recruitment & promotions following what is nationally implemented. "Military, national & Bangsamoro defense were also made more explicit. "The provisions on the Judiciary & system of courts took cognizance & clarified the extent of applicability of the Shariah justice system on Muslims & non-Muslims. "Land titling, management of protected areas and ancestral domains issues were also enriched and made more accurate with correlation to existing land, environment and fisheries resources laws. "Anti-political dynasty provisions were also discussed and even got support for the BTC language. We expect another long day. It's all for the better version. Coming from all failed attempts of past administrations to build lasting peace in Mindanao, I am very hopeful we can have a BBL that satisfies the concerns of Muslim Mindanao and most of all our Constitution." Plexure Group shares jumped 26 percent as the mobile voucher firm started generating positive cash flow after slashing costs and building sales momentum. The Auckland-based firm held cash of $4.1 million as at March 31, after generating a cash inflow from its operations of $2.6 million in the year through March, compared to an outflow of $4.7 million a year earlier. That means it can fund its own operation without having to go back to shareholders. Plexure narrowed its loss to $1.6 million from $6.5 million a year earlier, having boosted income 62 percent to $11.8 million and trimming 13 percent from its operating costs to $11.9 million. The shares climbed 4.9 cents to 24 cents. "The board is extremely pleased with the progress the company has made in the last 12 months," Plexure said in a statement. "The financial results, cash position and substantial reduction in loss are clear evidence that our strategic direction is positioning Plexure for sustainable growth and profitability." The mobile voucher firm, formerly VMob, was tracking ahead of expectations when reporting its first-half result in November, due largely to cost cutting by laying off staff. Separately, former chief executive and its biggest shareholder Scott Bradley resigned from the board, effective immediately. (BusinessDesk) Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process. Related News: LISTING AND QUOTATION NOTICE: NZX MAIN BOARD - GREENFERN INDUSTRIES LIMITED 13th October 2021 Morning Report Hotel Montreal: Patterson Family Buys Christchurch's Hotel Montreal Ports of Auckland: Two New Directors for Ports of Auckland Board Vital Healthcare Property Trust (NZX: VHP) Announces Acquisition and $140m Capital Raising Southwest Pacific Tropical Cyclone Outlook - NIWA Turners Automotive Group Limited (NZX: TRA) Q1 Dividend Declared Air New Zealand Limited (NZX: AIR) Awarded International Cargo Flights to March 2022 ikeGPS Group Limited (NZX: IKE) Wins $1.6m Customer Contract Extension 12th October 2021 Morning Report New Zealand shares rose, led by Auckland International Airport, Spark and Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and as buyers returned to A2 Milk. Gentrack Group fell as earnings growth disappointed some bullish investors. The S&P/NZX 50 Index rose 12 points, or 0.1 percent, to 8,647.86. Within the index, 12 stocks rose, 30 fell and eight were unchanged. Turnover was $193 million, of which A2 Milk made up about $50 million and Spark contributed $30 million. The local market shook off early selling pressures from overseas which included a sell-off on Wall Street overnight, partly on uncertainty over Italy's government and US-China trade friction. Spark rose 1.8 percent to $3.705, a seven-month high, having gained since the company said last week it was bringing forward restructuring costs and accelerating its 'Quantum Programme' to transform the company into the operator with the lowest costs. "Our market has done extremely well today, given the pressure from overseas," said Grant Williamson, a director at Hamilton Hindin Greene. With Spark, "it has been a continuation since its announcement." A2 rose 3.1 percent to $10.88, leading the market higher, having led the market lower yesterday. The stock had dropped 16 percent in the past month and there was "pretty good buying today once the Aussie market opened," Williamson said. F&P Healthcare rose 0.8 percent to $13.10, having fallen yesterday. On Monday the company posted a 12 percent gain in 2018 annual profit to the top end of its forecast range and said it expects record earnings in the coming year as it benefits from growing global demand. Among other blue-chip companies, Auckland International Airport climbed 1.5 percent to $6.65, leading the market higher. Gentrack dropped 6.7 percent to $6.95 after the utilities software developer posted an 80 percent gain in first-half earnings on returns from new projects and acquisitions made last year and said it had a strong pipeline of opportunities. "Gentrack is one of the better performing high-tech stocks but maybe is not growing as quickly as what the market wanted", given the stock's strength in the past year, Williamson said Australian & New Zealand Banking Group fell 2.7 percent to $29.40 on the NZX today. The lender announced the sale by its New Zealand unit of the OnePath Life NZ business for $700 million to NYSE-listed Cigna Corp. But Williamson said the Australian banks fell in line with financial stocks in other markets. Westpac Banking Corp fell 2.4 percent to $30.15 on the NZX today. Stride Property rose 0.6 percent to $1.78 after the group posted flat annual earnings as it beds in a new strategy and reshaped portfolio where it clips the ticket as a property manager as well as directly owning real estate. Outside of the benchmark index, Plexure shares soared 15 percent to 22 cents after the mobile voucher firm released figures that showed it is starting to generate positive cash flow after slashing costs and building sales momentum. Tilt Renewables last traded at $2.08. The company announced it had entered into an agreement with Citigroup Global Markets and Forsyth Barr Group to underwrite an A$300 million equity raising should it be successful in its bid for a 15-year power contract with the Victorian state government in Australia. Green Cross Health was unchanged at $1.67 after the medical services provider reported a 15 percent fall in annual profit as it made up the unfunded shortfall left in the government's $2 billion pay equity package for aged and residential care workers, overshadowing underlying earnings growth. "That stock has been on the weak side" amid concerns about the impact on the sector of wage negotiations with district health boards and reports a large Australian pharmaceutical warehouse is looking to expand in New Zealand. SeaDragon was unchanged at 0.5 cent after the fish oil refiner said its full-year normalised ebitda loss was $4.5 million, narrower than the year-earlier loss of $4.7 million but not as much of an improvement as it had flagged. (BusinessDesk) Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process. Related News: LISTING AND QUOTATION NOTICE: NZX MAIN BOARD - GREENFERN INDUSTRIES LIMITED 13th October 2021 Morning Report Hotel Montreal: Patterson Family Buys Christchurch's Hotel Montreal Ports of Auckland: Two New Directors for Ports of Auckland Board Vital Healthcare Property Trust (NZX: VHP) Announces Acquisition and $140m Capital Raising Southwest Pacific Tropical Cyclone Outlook - NIWA Turners Automotive Group Limited (NZX: TRA) Q1 Dividend Declared Air New Zealand Limited (NZX: AIR) Awarded International Cargo Flights to March 2022 ikeGPS Group Limited (NZX: IKE) Wins $1.6m Customer Contract Extension 12th October 2021 Morning Report New Zealand's central bank and Financial Markets Authority so far haven't seen any evidence of "systemic and widespread" misconduct in a review of New Zealand banks, FMA chief executive Rob Everett told parliament's Finance and Expenditures select committee. "On the work to date, before the current scenario, I would say we've seen plenty that we think can and should be done better, but we have not seen evidence of systemic and widespread misconduct," Everett said. There is "very little that would either constitute a breach of the law, or would require us to come up with a really urgent response," he said. The New Zealand review was launched after a Royal Commission inquiry in Australia started highlighting less than honourable practices from some banks Australian parents, something Everett said was alarming and immediately raised questions about whether there was similar conduct taking place here, given that the bulk of the sector is in the hands of the same banks. Also "our concern about the Royal Commission's s impact on confidence in our financial institutions and the risk of complacency in the New Zealand industry to these culture and conduct issues led us to respond," the regulators said. While so far the New Zealand regulators do not think a similar commission of inquiry is warranted here "the work we have initiated may test this view," the FMA and the RBNZ said. So far, the regulators have met with 16 chief executives of New Zealand banks, including the four major Australian-owned banks and sought assurance that the issues identified in Australia were not evident in New Zealand. They then wrote to 10 locally-incorporated New Zealand banks with major retail operations on 3 May, initiating a review of conduct and culture by New Zealand financial services entities. Everett said "we really challenged them to front up and confirm they didn't believe their business contain any of the misconduct we have seen in Australia and then we challenged them to explain why they reached that conclusion, what work they have done to give them that confidence," said Everett. A total of 11 banks responded and those responses are being worked through by a joint working group of FMA and RBNZ staff. The Commerce Commission is also reviewing anything relevant to its role. According to the FMA and the RBNZ, the banks have taken the exercise seriously, providing some very detailed responses. Following the initial assessment, the regulators will be requesting further information and verification where necessary, he said. The regulators have also written to 15 major life insurance companies, requesting a response by June 22. They are anticipating putting out a report in October. The Australian Royal Commission is expected to put out an initial report in September and a final report in February. (BusinessDesk) Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process. Related News: Now is the time to reassess your investments Now is the time to reassess your investments Fonterra looking to lift China's importance in new strategy A2, Synlait shares climb as takeover bid revives optimism about Chinese appetite for milk Service sector activity eases in August but still expanding Lumpy imports drive bigger July trade deficit than expected Nimbys, carparks and the status quo under threat as govt tells big cities: grow up and out Dairy manufacturers got better prices in June quarter Orr defends RBNZ rate cut, says monetary policy looks ahead, not behind RBNZ's Orr says investors need to put their money to work New Zealand's private healthcare providers including Green Cross Health are watching collective negotiations between the nurses' union and district health boards to see when and if a far-reaching pay hike will spill into the rest of the sector. The NZ Nurses' Organisation and district health boards are currently at odds over a multi-employer collective agreement (MECA), with the latest offer of three 3 percent annual increases, a lump sum plus the introduction of two new pay grades worth about $520 million over two years. The union's 27,000 eligible members this week voted to strike over pay in July while keeping the door ajar to avert industrial action if a deal can be cut, and have grumbled at the DHB's public release of the offer before putting it to members as "unhelpful". The DHBs have retained external PR firm Senate SHJ. The nurses' collective agreement is one of several the new government will have to deal with, having set aside $2.13 billion over five years as a contingency for things that crop up, including wage negotiations. Private sector health providers aren't directly a part of the DHB collective talks but will be affected. Green Cross, an integrated pharmacy and primary healthcare operator, today noted the shortfall in funding from the government's $2 billion pay equity deal for aged and residential care workers meant the firm had to foot the $1.9 million bill for leave. Green Cross's suite of businesses include Total Care Health community nursing services, and while head of the pharmacy and medical divisions Grant Bai doesn't anticipate a repeat of the leave liability hole left in the pay equity deal, he does expect any deal will have a flow-on effect. "I'm a great believer in fair pay for good work and we do have a number of nurses, but it goes to the whole structure - they changed the homecare worker package to a certain extent with some funding but a whole bunch of unintended consequences occurred with that," Bai said. Increases won't be limited to nurses, with everyone in the health sector "looking for an uplift, so it's a bit of a cascade actually." Private hospitals are also keeping tabs on the talks, with lobby the New Zealand Private Surgical Hospitals Association saying "member hospitals are closely monitoring the DHB MECA negotiations and private surgical hospitals will discuss salaries for nursing staff on an individual hospital basis. Green Cross is keen to improve the way it interacts with patients and has been investing in new technology to augment its services. In the year ended March 31, the Auckland-based company spent $7.2 million developing software, up from $4.1 million a year earlier and taking the total cost spent on software to $20.2 million. Bai said the future of healthcare is a far more proactive management system, which will be aided by the smart use of technology and using primary care operators such as Green Cross to be the first port of call for people, helping ease the pressure on "EDs (emergency departments) and hospitals, which are struggling under financial strain." The country's aging demographics are expected to become a bigger strain on the government's over a long-term horizon, with a universal pension and increased healthcare spending expected to account for 17.6 percent of Crown expenditure by 2060 from 11 percent in 2015 if nothing is changed. New Zealand's fully-funded healthcare system is often blamed for the country's low level of health insurance uptake, although figures this month show insurers are covering 1.39 million lives as at March 31, registering 12 straight quarterly gains. Bai said his personal opinion is that those macro-factors, which support the business model for an integrated healthcare firm, meant a risk-sharing model to fund healthcare could be a good option for the future and is a capability Green Cross is building into its own modelling. "It's a natural progression of a healthcare system that needs to develop with the times," he said. Health Minister David Clark this week ordered a review of the country's health and disability sector focused on a fairer future, and headed by Heather Simpson, the chief of staff to former Prime Minister Helen Clark. Primary and community care and early intervention are also chief among his goals. The draft terms of reference include considering how the system is funded and whether it could be more flexible, provide greater transparency of returns on investment, and reduce inequity by better targetting. A national infrastructure stocktake is also cited as worth considering. Private health insurance is out of scope, although how it interacts with demographic drivers is in scope. "The review should consider the overall structure, governance of the health system and distribution of resources to ensure it is fair, better balanced towards primary prevention, equitable and effective, as well as simple for people to access and navigate," the terms say. 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Related News: LISTING AND QUOTATION NOTICE: NZX MAIN BOARD - GREENFERN INDUSTRIES LIMITED 13th October 2021 Morning Report Hotel Montreal: Patterson Family Buys Christchurch's Hotel Montreal Ports of Auckland: Two New Directors for Ports of Auckland Board Vital Healthcare Property Trust (NZX: VHP) Announces Acquisition and $140m Capital Raising Southwest Pacific Tropical Cyclone Outlook - NIWA Turners Automotive Group Limited (NZX: TRA) Q1 Dividend Declared Air New Zealand Limited (NZX: AIR) Awarded International Cargo Flights to March 2022 ikeGPS Group Limited (NZX: IKE) Wins $1.6m Customer Contract Extension 12th October 2021 Morning Report Rajinikanth is visiting Thoothukudi to console the injured victims of Sterlite protest and family of the deceased. As an actor, I think my presence would bring happiness to them, said the actor. Talking about the Kaala ban issue in Karnataka, Rajinikanth said: Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce is a part of South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce so they will sit and talk to solve the ongoing issue. From Rajinikanths take on the Kaala issue, its very clear that the actor will not change his stance. Rajinikanth still wants the Cauvery Management Board and he will not be giving any option for the detractors to criticize him. Though Kamal Haasans films are also banned in Karnataka, the actor is yet to react on the decision taken by Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce. Kamals next immediate release is his long-pending spy action thriller Vishwaroopam 2. Rajinikanth: I don't want to comment more on it, but the Govt needs to be careful as the people are watching, it was a huge mistake and a big lesson. I don't want to comment more on it, but the Govt needs to be careful as the people are watching, it was a huge mistake and a big lesson. I announce Rs 2 lakhs each for the kin of victims who died in the protest: #Rajinikanth in #Thoothukkudi. #SterliteProtest pic.twitter.com/rxM0mvuxLI ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 Rajinikanth to give Rs. 2 Lakhs each to the families of those who were killed and Rs. 10,000 to those who were injured in the Tuticorin shooting. #Superstar @rajinikanth to give INR 2 Lakhs each to the families of those who were killed and INR 10,000 to those who were injured in the #TuticorinShooting.. Ramesh Bala (@rameshlaus) May 30, 2018 Rajinikanth arrives at the hopital after the 144 ban has been lifted. #superstar #Rajinikanth meeting the injured at #Tuticorin hospital now.. #ThalaivarInThoothukudi Ajith Krishnan (@ImAjithKrishnan) May 30, 2018 Rajinikanth meets the injured protesters at the hospital. Rajinikanth receives a lot of love and affection from the people of Thoothukudi. RFT1472 The moment when Patients, Ladies & Fans says "Tamilnadin CM ah Ungala Paakanum" "Tamilnadu is in your hand Thalaiva"!! "" KARAI PADATHA KARATHIN SONTHAKAARAR SIR NEENGA ""#Thalaivarinthoothukudi #rajinikanth pic.twitter.com/6FJLDh80lC Raj!n! Followers (@RajiniFollowers) May 30, 2018 Superstar Rajinikanth receives a grand welcome in Tuticorin. Page Content The Deputy Minister Plenipotentiary, the honorable Hasani Ellis along with his staff, were the hosts f a Meet and greet on the occasion of the visit of the Sint Maarten Parliamentary delegation under the firm leadership of the Chairlady of Parliament, the Honorable Sarah Wescot-Williams. Attending this event were friends and partners of Sint Maarten. Among the invited guests were young professionals, students and members of the Sint Maarten community within the Netherlands. The members of the delegation, the chairperson of the Kingdom Relations Committee, member of parliament Ms. S. Jacobs, member of parliament Mr. W. Smith and member of Parliament Mr. R. Brison were all given the opportunity to address those present. The Chairlady of Parliament Mrs. Wescot-Williams, in her greetings to those present, elucidated on the purpose and importance of the delegations presence in the Netherlands, where she re -iterated Sint Maartens position in the deliberations. Focus, being the way forward and the cooperation within the Kingdom on the various points of discussion and the presentation of the state of affairs of Sint Maarten. In her address she further emphasized the importance of having the brain potential and determined groups of persons, now studying and working and residing in the Netherlands to seriously consider returning to the island to assist in the rebuilding and strengthening of Sint Maarten. This sentiment was resonated by all the Members of Parliament. During the Meet and Greet, all invitees were given the opportunity to have one on one discussions with the members of parliament, where this gesture was very much appreciated by all present. The deputy minister wished the entire delegation a fruitful and productive period of deliberations and thanked all present for accepting the invitation to attend. In his address the Deputy stood still and paid homage to the recently departed members of the Sint Maarten community, Mr Joseph Joe Richardson, Mr. Roy Marlin and Mr Roland Paben Brison who through their exemplary works have paved the way for the island and its people. TORONTO, May 29, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In connection with the filing today by Avante Logixx Inc. (TSXV:XX) (Avante or the Company) of a preliminary short form prospectus in respect of the bought deal public offering previously announced on May 23, 2018, the Company has announced that it will re-file its unaudited interim consolidated financial statements for the three and nine month periods ended December 31, 2017, together with the notes thereto (the Fiscal 2018 Q3 Financial Statements) and the applicable managements discussion and analysis of the financial condition and results of operations of the Company, as the previously filed Fiscal 2018 Q3 Financial Statements had not been reviewed by the auditors of the Company, as permitted by applicable securities law. In connection with the review engagement with its auditors, the Company will be restating the Fiscal 2018 Q3 Financial Statements, including certain note disclosure to (i) reflect a revision to the allocation of the purchase price allocation from the acquisition of City Wide Locksmiths Ltd.; and (ii) recapture into net income the previously expensed stock options granted to the former chief executive officer that expired upon his resignation. The Company anticipates filing the restated Fiscal 2018 Q3 Financial Statements and the applicable managements discussion and analysis as soon as possible. The Company does not consider these adjustments, individually or in the aggregate, to be material. This news release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. This news release does not constitute an offer of securities for sale in the United States. The securities being offered have not been, nor will they be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and such securities may not be offered or sold within the United States absent registration under U.S. federal and state securities laws or an applicable exemption from such U.S. registration requirements. About Avante Logixx Inc. Avante Logixx Inc. (TSXV:XX) is a Toronto based provider of high end security services. We acquire, manage and build industry leading businesses which provide specialized, mission-critical solutions that address the needs of our customers. Our businesses continuously develop innovative solutions that enable our customers to achieve their objectives. With an experienced team and a proven track record of solid growth, we are taking steps to establish a broad portfolio of security businesses to provide our customers and shareholders with exceptional returns. Please visit our website at www.avantelogixx.com and consider joining our investor email list. Avante Logixx Inc. Craig Campbell CEO (416) 923-6984 craig@avantelogixx.com Forward-Looking Information All statements in this press release, other than statements of historical fact, are forward looking information with respect to Avante within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information is often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as seek, anticipate, plan, continue, planned, expect, project, predict, potential, targeting, intends, believe, potential, and similar expressions, or describes a goal, or a variation of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results may, should, could, would, might or will be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ from those expressed or implied by the forward looking information, including, without limitation, the list of risk factors identified in Avantes Management Discussion & Analysis (MD&A), Annual Information Form (AIF) and other continuous disclosure, which list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect any of Avantes forward-looking information. In connection with the forward-looking statements contained in this and subsequent press releases, Avante has made certain assumptions about its business and the industry in which it operates and has also assumed that no significant events occur outside of Avantes normal course of business. Although management believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking statements are reasonable as of the date the statements are made, forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and, accordingly, undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein. Avantes forward-looking information is based on the beliefs, expectations and opinions of management on the date the statements are made, and Avante does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, other than as required by applicable law. For the reasons set forth above, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. 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. Port au Prince Haiti:--- Brenda Maynard of the Soualiga Corporate Toastmasters Club delivered a powerful winning speech against a nominee from Haiti by explaining how she intends to lead as Club Growth Director 2018-2019 for District 81. Ms. Maynard will become one of the Districts Trio, a term used to refer to the 3 leaders at the helm of the organization in the region. She is currently serving as Division E Director which has thus far received many accolades under her leadership, despite the setbacks caused by hurricanes Irma and Maria in her Division. Ms. Maynard will officially commence her new position on July 1st 2018. Her responsibilities will include all aspects of club growth, club building and member- and club-retention efforts as well as creation of the overall marketing plan for the District. Vice President of Education for the St. Martin Evolution Toastmasters Club on French St. Martin, Vernicia Brooks, was moved to tears as she was called upon to collect the Area Director of the Year Award for the exemplary work done during her tenure as Area 29 Director 2016-2017. Immediate Past District Director, Ms. Sherry ann Batson who presented the award, thanked Ms. Brooks for her continued dedication and commitment to Toastmasters. This award is a remarkable achievement as Ms. Brooks performance stood out against Area Directors in the entire Caribbean. Immediate Past Division E Director, Kathia Magdeleine, congratulates Ms. Maynard and Ms. Brooks on their outstanding accomplishments. The Labour right wing and capitalist establishment are waging a colossal campaign to undermine Jeremy Corbyns leadership of the Labour Party and his anti-austerity policies. Particularly pernicious is the avalanche of antisemitism allegations levelled against him and the left in general. As PETER TAAFFE explains, this threat can only be answered with an all-round, class-based approach to the national question. "There exists no reliable, empirical evidence to support the motion that there is a higher prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party". This is not from an editorial in Socialism Today or The Socialist, the weekly paper of the Socialist Party, but from the cross-party parliamentary committee including Tories, Liberal Democrats and Labour MPs which explored the charge of Labour antisemitism following the publication of the Chakrabarti report into the issue in 2016. Yet it has been the Labour Party because of the threat posed to the possessing classes by Jeremy Corbyns leadership and programme which has been singled out and found guilty of the charge in the court of public opinion. An incessant chorus involving the capitalist press, the Tories and their allies, together with the back-stabbing tendency within the predominantly right-wing Parliamentary Labour Party, led a scurrilous, no-holds-barred campaign alleging widespread antisemitism in Labour. This has been followed by the expulsion of Marc Wadsworth on the flimsiest of grounds: for allegedly accusing right-wing Labour MP Ruth Smeeth of colluding with the Daily Telegraph in its pernicious campaign alleging widespread antisemitism within the Labour Party! He has vehemently denied this but was expelled nevertheless, under Neil Kinnocks anti-left, catch-all phrase of "bringing the Labour Party into disrepute". This was used in the past against Militant (predecessor of the Socialist Party) and others on the left. Marc Wadsworth has been attacked for the crime of suggesting that right-wing Labour MPs seek to discredit Labour and Corbyn as a nest of anti-Semites. Unfortunately, Jeremy Corbyn appears to have remained largely silent, after he and his advisers had apparently promised to support Wadsworth and oppose his expulsion. Corbyn has said nothing since. This is now likely to be followed by the expulsion of Jackie Walker, former vice-chair of Momentum, and others on similar charges. Meanwhile, Ken Livingstone has resigned. Moreover Ken Loach, the left-wing filmmaker who has received widespread acclaim for his work in Britain and internationally and has participated on the left and in the labour movement over decades, faced the withdrawal of an honorary degree after the intervention of the Belgian prime minister! This is because he has supported, like many others, the legitimate democratic rights of the oppressed Palestinians. He has therefore been tried and found guilty by implication, in his absence, on the same charge of antisemitism. This is all part of a calculated attempt to conflate opposition to the policies of the Israeli government and the right-wing reactionary Benjamin Netanyahu with antisemitism. As part of this campaign we see some right-wing Jewish leaders in Britain identifying the movement for boycott and disinvestment in Israel as an example of antisemitism. The Socialist Party does not support a generalised boycott of Israeli goods for the reasons that we have previously gone into (Boycotting Israel: the Socialist View, Socialism Today No.169, June 2013). But it is entirely legitimate to support the boycott of Israeli arms exports many of which have been used in repression against the Palestinian masses and others. There is undoubtedly colossal and deliberately created confusion massive dust blowing by capitalism and its representatives within Labour, the Blairite right, on the whole issue of antisemitism both historically and today. This in turn is linked to the present character of the state of Israel and how the labour movement, particularly socialists and Marxists, approach the complex issues of the different national aspirations of Palestinians and Israelis. The Middle East maze At the same time, the repercussions of the war in Syria, in what is now a multifaceted series of conflicts, have posed the possibility of a new general conflagration. This could involve Israel on one side supported by Donald Trumps regime in the US and Iran, backed up by Syria and the 100 million Shia bloc, with Russia and its armed might in the background, on the other. Trumps arbitrary withdrawal from the deal with Iran over the development of nuclear weapons has already led to an Israeli missile attack. This could be a prelude to a new war between Israel and Iran. There is a large element of the Balkans both in the pre- and post-first world war situations in the Middle East. Contending imperialist powers are scrambling for influence and possession of territory, with national rights trampled or used as small change, bargaining chips, to enhance the imperialist ambitions of the major players in the region. The national question everywhere today is like Ariadnes thread in ancient Greek mythology, complicated and difficult to grasp particularly to those who fail to adopt a rounded out, skilful approach. This is something on which most of the left have been found wanting, and which has contributed to the capitalists and their hangers-on undermining them and the labour movement. Only a consistent class, socialist and Marxist approach can allow the working class and its leadership to find a way out of this maze. This is particularly so in the Middle East, where imperialisms former domination has left a terrible legacy of multiple unresolved national questions. On top of this, new national questions have been created. The left with the exception of the Socialist Party tends to emphasise one side of the question, the national rights of a group sometimes in direct opposition to the legitimate national rights of others. Support for the present Israeli state is justified by some, particularly on the right but also on the left, because of the terrible crime of the slaughter of six million Jews perpetrated by the Nazis through the Holocaust. A Jewish homeland Leon Trotsky who was with Karl Marx, historically and politically, one of the most famous of Jewish figures originally opposed the idea of a homeland for the Jews. He saw them, as did Lenin, as a specially oppressed layer, but not possessing in the pre-second world war period the distinct attributes of a nation: clear territory, a common everyday language, etc. However, the terrible slaughter of the Jews during the second world war generated a growing clamour among them for their own homeland. Therefore, recognising the changed reality, he and the Trotskyist movement as a whole changed their position. Before his assassination in 1940, Trotsky conceded the legitimacy of a homeland for the Jews perhaps in a part of Latin America or Africa, with the agreement of the peoples of the area of course. Not in Palestine, however, because it was recognised by Marxists from the outset that a new majority Jewish state there could only be achieved through colonisation, the effective forcing out of the native Palestinian population by a growing immigration of Jewish people. This would be a formula for continued strife in the region, which Trotsky predicted could turn into a "bloody trap" precisely for the Jews themselves. A big element of Trotskys prediction was borne out from the beginning, with seemingly endless conflict and four major wars up to now. Trotsky also predicted that a Jewish state would be used by imperialism as a wedge against the growing Arab revolution. This is what transpired. Therefore, the central task of the workers movement within the borders of Israel was to seek to forge an alternative, a class alliance of the Jewish now Israeli and Palestinian working masses, linked to the socialist revolution in the state with the possibility of perhaps autonomous rights for the Jews as part of a socialist confederation throughout the Middle East. Two socialist states The demands of the Palestinians began to change under the whip of the Israeli state. The systematic, ruthless and discriminatory policies, together with the repression, land grabs and the building of Israeli settlements on land legally belonging to Palestinians, led them to begin to abandon the idea of a one-state solution in favour of two states. We therefore recognised these legitimate national aspirations of the Palestinian people, while at the same time defending the right of Israelis to their own state. Accordingly, we also advanced the idea of two states. So also did the bourgeois wing of the Palestinian movement. But their proposal for a separate capitalist state with agreed borders alongside an Israeli state was always a reactionary utopia, something which could never be realised by rotted capitalism and imperialism. The Israeli bourgeois with US imperialism in the background would always fear that such a state, starved of resources, would inevitably become a launching pad for endless attacks on Israel. However, a section of the Palestinian masses a minority at this stage now express a deep scepticism towards any two-state solution. This was reflected in the comments of one of the organisers of the recent demonstrations in the Palestinian areas to a Financial Times reporter. He said that he now believed in a shared struggle, with Palestinians linking up with sections of the Israeli population to confront the existing Israeli regime. The task, he argued, was similar to the overthrow of an Israeli version of South Africas apartheid state. However, the analogy with South Africa and Israel today does not hold. In 1990, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress leadership were able to postpone the South African revolution to the future by collaborating with remnants of the apartheid regime and holding out the prospect of black empowerment. Netanyahu and the present Israeli state are not prepared to embrace even the leadership of the bourgeois Palestine Liberation Organisation to share power in a new state. Therefore, the only way to begin to address the national demands of both the Israeli and Palestinian masses is by advancing the idea of two socialist states: one Palestinian and the other Israeli. And the only viable way to realise this goal is on the basis of a mass movement of both Israelis and Palestinians to carry through the socialist transformation of Israel-Palestine linked to the idea of a socialist confederation throughout the Middle East. Foreign policy is a continuation of home policy. However, when it comes to foreign policy in general and the Middle East in particular, the left internationally abandons this dictum, resorting to solutions which do not go beyond the framework of capitalism. At least Unite general secretary Len McCluskey, in a recent article in the New Statesman, sought to stress the key role of the working class in shaping events in Israel. We would say the same applies to the region as a whole. He wrote: "I have much admiration for those Jewish socialists inside Israel who fight against their government and for peace and justice". Lenny then went too far in his acceptance of the 1967 borders. However, all these issues would be up for discussion in a united workers movement, including the borders of whatever state forms eventually emerge. The only way to win the confidence of both sides is to discuss democratically all their grievances, many of them arising from the murderous strife which has characterised the situation in the region for almost 70 years. Firstly, it is necessary to recognise the legitimacy of the Palestinian and Israeli demands for their own states. The precise state forms will be decided in mutual discussions after capitalism has been overthrown in Israel and, in all probability, in the Arab world as a whole. It is impossible to say beforehand what the precise borders will be or whether they will even be necessary. It is possible that a victorious socialist and revolutionary movement of Israelis and Palestinians could lead them to agree to coexist in one state. On the other hand, they may decide they need separate states, the borders of which would be open to democratic discussion, debate and negotiation. Revolutionary lessons One of the greatest accomplishments of the Russian revolution in 1917 was the realisation of the national demands of former oppressed minorities and nations under the whip of tsarism. The obvious example is Finland see: Finlands Lost Revolution, Socialism Today No.215, February 2018 which was granted complete independence by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Other parts of the tsarist empire were able to realise their own state and government but then agreed voluntarily to come together in a confederation. This completely bore out Lenins arguments against those who opposed the right of self-determination. His opponents, notably the great Rosa Luxemburg, argued that this would lead to the splitting up of a unified Russia, resulting in the scattering of the economic basis of a new state. Lenin argued that by granting the right of self-determination it was possible for the Russian workers to win the confidence of the workers and peasants who tsarism oppressed, and convince them of the need for a socialist and democratic federation. Moreover, while Lenin and the Bolsheviks accepted the need for the centralisation of the productive forces, this could only take place on the basis of agreement, a voluntary decision to pool the resources of the states for the common good, through a federation. This would have been impossible without a clear, sensitive policy on the national question, without which the Russian revolution would never have been sustained, particularly in its first period of existence. Moreover, a successful struggle for socialism will not take place in the Middle East unless the workers movement, together with the small farmers, is able to convince through action the majority of the masses of the correctness of their programme and defend their legitimate national demands. Lenin argued consistently that it would be necessary particularly in the first stages of a democratic workers state to give concessions, not only to oppressed nationalities but even to small groups, in order to win their confidence and support for the revolution. Unfortunately, because of unfavourable objective factors, this sensitive policy gave way to the hooligan bureaucratic centralisation under Stalinism. In the main, this trampled over legitimate national democratic rights and created new national questions on top of those that had been inherited from tsarism. The left and the national question Ironically, the position of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI the international movement the Socialist Party is part of) on the national question particularly in Israel-Palestine has been vindicated by the furore over antisemitism allegedly running riot within the Labour Party. It is noticeable that, on this occasion, it has not been possible for the hyenas of the bourgeois press and their echoes on the right of the Labour Party to include the Socialist Party in their anti-Semitic smears. They have not been able to find formulations or loose phrasing in past articles in the Militant or Socialist newspapers, or in Socialism Today, which abandon the class criteria or where we have been seen to back bourgeois or petty-bourgeois sectarian leaders. On all occasions we fight for the independent programme and action of the working class, seeking to unite workers against the common foe of capitalism and imperialism. Unfortunately, this has not been the case with many of the organisations of the left. For example, some of them wrongly supported the Irish Republican Army in Ireland and in Britain, something which the Socialist Party has never done. On the contrary, while our comrades in Britain and Ireland have supported the aspirations and class interests of the nationalist/Catholic and the Protestant working class, we have consistently criticised the terrorist campaign of the IRA, which was based on a minority of the population and was bound to reinforce existing divisions and sectarian strife. This same approach has been applied to the struggles in Israel-Palestine, which brought us into collision with other left organisations such as the SWP in the Stop the War committee. They, along with George Galloway, gave uncritical support to Islamic organisations and groups, and rejected amendments moved by us which sought to emphasise the common class questions. This leaves these organisations wide open to attack because of their incorrect, one-sided statements on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and on other issues. Moreover, the CWI is among the very few which has managed to construct a small but nevertheless vital organisation in Israel itself, which has attracted at different stages Arab and Jewish workers and youth to its ranks. This is something that few other genuine Marxist/Trotskyist organisations have been capable of doing. This has only been made possible by a clear class programme, strategy and tactics which our comrades have put forward consistently, sometimes in a highly polarised situation. In the long run, this is the only way to be prepared to answer the attacks of the bourgeois and the Labour right wing. It will still not stop them from distorting the ideas of the Socialist Party, or the basic ideas of the labour movement for that matter. But we will be better prepared to counter the lies and distortions of the capitalists and their press and completely refute the arguments of the right within the Labour Party. Labour Party witch-hunts The current campaign around antisemitism is reminiscent of the witchhunt in the 1980s, with the expulsion of the leaders of Militant and working-class fighters, such as the Liverpool councillors and many others. We must never forget this was all orchestrated, in the first instance, by the Tories, with Margaret Thatcher boasting that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair, the conversion of Labour at its base from a workers party into another capitalist party. Moreover, some on the left chose to ignore the threat to themselves in the attack first levelled against Militant. They came for us in the morning but, as we warned, they would come for others on the left later. In the case of Ken Livingstone, it was much later. Without a full explanation of his comments on the connection between Hitler and Zionism, they were likely to be torn out of context by the capitalist class and the Labour right. Livingstone opened himself to attack because he does not have an analysis of or has not explained how the bourgeois internationally, not just the German capitalists, backed Hitler. Winston Churchill hailed and supported fascist leaders like Mussolini and Hitler. More serious for the labour movement was Livingstones decision in 1985 to break the common front established by 22 left-wing councils, including Liverpool and Lambeth, which pledged to uphold implacable opposition to the cuts which Thatcher was intending to carry through. We and others subjected Livingstone to severe criticism following the retreat of the Greater London Council, and then by other councils such as Sheffield under David Blunkett, with the subsequent savaging of jobs and services in local government. We criticised Ken Livingstone, but made no demands for his expulsion. Positive criticism, yes, but not expulsions. The same applies to the case of Jackie Walker whose issues should be answered with argument if the right-wing has any and not with exclusions. (See: Antisemitism, Labour and Momentum, Socialism Today No.203, November 2016) We maintain this principled political position despite the spiteful criticisms of Ken Livingstone in 2016, when he sought to mollify the Labour right by criticising the Socialist Party to the BBC as a "bizarre little sect". We are not opposed to expulsions from Labour or other workers organisations when it has been conclusively proved that the accused have stabbed workers in the back, resorted to undemocratic means to hold onto office, stolen trade union funds, etc. Bob Crow, the late, revered leader of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, called Livingstone a "scab" for urging RMT members to break a strike. It would have been entirely appropriate to expel Livingstone or anybody else for such a shameful act as siding with the bosses. The Blairites who exercised almost complete control of the Labour Party at the time fully supported this and Livingstones other anti-working class, anti-labour movement measures. He agreed with them on programmatic issues, such as privatisation, the acceptance of free-market capitalism, and all that flowed from this in terms of cuts and attacks on working-class living standards. Even then, we and Bob Crow preferred to answer him politically within the labour movement. State interference Now, every concession to the right wing by Jeremy Corbyn and his team the attempt still to incorporate two parties in one only emboldens the right and the capitalists to go further in their attacks on Corbyn, his policies and the danger to their vital interests they perceive emanates from him. The same kinds of threats against a Corbyn government are currently being prepared, including the completely synthetic campaign against the lefts alleged antisemitism. This must be defeated. We also reject the attempt of the capitalists and their agents in the right of the PLP to use this campaign to intervene in the internal affairs of the labour movement by having outside oversight on these kinds of issues. From the very inception of the Labour Party the capitalist state has sought to control the finances and organisational forms of the labour movement for their own ends. It has continued to do this with the attacks on the collection of trade union dues (check off), and union facility time used by shop stewards and reps to defend workers and workplace conditions, etc. The position of the labour movement should be crystal clear: no state interference in the trade unions or the Labour Party. If a disciplinary body is required for Labour it should as with the Socialist Party be made up of rank-and-file workers trusted by the membership and subject to decisions by the party conference. When we establish a democratic, socialist workers state, we would still propose that the trade unions both support the state but also remain separate. This would act as a defence for the working class against any bureaucratic tendencies of their own state! Workers in this country should support all the oppressed in the Middle East, struggling to assert their legitimate national and social demands. Only in this way could we really prepare for a socialist and democratic federation in the region. Here in Britain, there should also be an urgent counter-movement by the left involving opening up Labours ranks including the affiliation of the Socialist Party to Labour so that the full power of the working class can be mobilised to prepare the ground in Britain for socialist change. Brazil: a new era of polarisation and struggle Systemic corruption and economic downturn run alongside the parliamentary coup by right-wing political forces. Evermore authoritarian rule belies ruling class indecision ahead of Octobers presidential election amid promising initiatives on the left. TONY SAUNOIS, recently returned from the congress of Liberdade Socialismo e Revolucao (CWI in Brazil), assesses Brazil in turmoil. Brazil has entered a time of political, social and economic convulsions. The brutal assassination of Marielle Franco, a PSOL (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade) councillor in Rio de Janeiro, reflected this convulsive era and the extreme polarisation which has opened up in Brazilian society. Marielles execution, probably by right-wing militias linked to the military police in Rio, followed her struggles to expose the violence of the police against mainly black youth in the citys favelas. As a black, lesbian woman originally from the favelas she embodied the struggle. Her execution symbolises the war that has been launched on the working class by the ruling class. The right wing has moved onto the offensive in a series of repressive steps not seen at this level since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. The arrest and imprisonment of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazils former president and leader of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), is another indication of this offensive by neoliberal sections of the ruling class. This poses new challenges for the new generation of fighters who are struggling to build a left socialist alternative. In the early years of the 21st century, Brazil like many Latin American countries experienced an economic growth based almost entirely on the rise in commodity prices and which lasted from 2003-11. During this time, while the economy grew, the industrial productive sectors were increasingly hollowed out. CWI supporters in Brazil warned that this would mean that the economy would enter any new recession in an even weaker position. In the growth years the capitalist commentators and politicians got carried away. Expectations were raised as people were promised that Brazil was on the threshold of joining the first world. The ruling class was happy to allow the PT and Lula to govern on the basis of class conciliation. It could tolerate some concessions being given to the most downtrodden and oppressed. Over 29 million people were taken out of poverty and drawn into the middle class although largely on the basis of a credit boom. The bolsa familia (family allowance) provided benefits for the lowest paid, and low-cost apartments were available at favourable rates. Lula rode high in the polls. It was not all one-sided, however. Lula and the PT had swung to the right and embraced capitalism. Along with the reforms, attacks were also unleashed on public-sector workers, especially pensions and the expulsion of some PT deputies who opposed these measures. This paved the way for the formation of PSOL in 2004. World record corruption The hopes were shattered by the consequences of the global economic crash 2007/08. Although its impact was delayed, by 2014 Brazil had plunged into its worst economic downturn for more than 100 years. GDP crashed by 8.6% from 2014-16. The reforms came to a spluttering halt and were reversed as unemployment rocketed and millions were thrown back into poverty and destitution. The dramatic rise in homelessness was seen in the shocking increase in street sleepers in central Sao Paulo. Lula was barred by the constitution from seeking re-election and his PT successor, Dilma Rousseff, lacked the authority and standing he had built up. Moreover, the PT was riddled with corruption, like all of Brazils capitalist political parties. The ruling class, despite deep divisions, concluded that it could no long rely on a PT-led government to enact the brutal neoliberal agenda it was demanding in the face of the economic collapse ravaging the country. Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash) uncovered an unprecedented web of corruption that had spread like a cancer throughout the entire political apparatus and big- and medium-sized businesses. It exposed the totally rotten character of modern day capitalism. The media initially described it as the biggest corruption scandal in Brazilian history. As its tentacles were spread internationally, they dubbed it the biggest in the world! It centred on Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company, which was overpaying multiple contractors: from office construction, drilling rigs, refineries and exploration vessels. Money was lavished on politicians of all parties to secure government contracts and pay-outs. The scandal involved companies like Odebrecht, Latin Americas largest construction company. Odebrecht even established a special department to run its corruption schemes the Division of Structured Operations buying off politicians in Brazil and Latin America. This department shelled out US$800 million in illicit pay-offs for over 100 contracts in more than 15 countries. Rolls Royce is one of the companies under investigation for bribes allegedly paid to secure contracts with Petrobras. US$2 billion was siphoned off by Petrobras in bribes and secret payments. Odebrecht paid out US$3.3 billion in bribes. More than 1,000 politicians were on the take from the meat-packing firm JBS. Sixteen companies were implicated and 50 congressmen were accused of corruption. Four former presidents are under investigation. The PT was supposed to be different. Yet it too became embroiled in the corruption. After winning the election in 2002, Lula was in a minority in the congress. His chief-of-staff arranged monthly payments to politicians and parties in the congress and senate to secure a majority. When this scandal was exposed the payments stopped and Lula reached out to the capitalist PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democratico Brasileiro). The PMDB is a right-wing mishmash of different factions of rural landlords, urban politicians and evangelical church leaders. In 2015, the PTs treasurer was arrested on charges of taking money from Petrobras executives. The PMDB has been involved in every corruption scandal in Brazil. Michel Temer, PMDB leader, eventually became vice president under Rousseff. His party was given control of the international division of Petrobras and all the funds accruing from it. As the PT and Lula have now discovered, if you sup with the devil expect to pay a heavy price. The corruption revelations enraged the mass of the population. The dominant sections of the Brazilian ruling class initially accepted Lava Jato as a means of trying to clean up the system. However, they fear it has got out of control and now want to close it down. The entire political and judicial system has been discredited. Together with the economic crisis, Brazil plunged into its worst political and social crisis since the 1930s. Parliamentary coup It is against this background that the representatives of the ruling class eventually, after some hesitation, moved to carry out a parliamentary coup against Rousseff, impeaching her in August 2016. They hypocritically accused her of corruption, on extremely flimsy grounds. The coup was carried through because the Brazilian capitalist class had concluded that her government could not be relied on to carry out the neoliberal policies they demanded. They wanted a hard hand at the helm. It was also driven by the self-interest of some of the most corrupt capitalist politicians. Rousseff was not willing to shut down Lava Jato. The move to oust her was initiated in November 2015 by one of Brazils most corrupt politicians, Eduardo Cunha, a Temer ally. Cunha was one of the targets of Lava Jato he had stashed away US$5 million in secret Swiss bank accounts. When the PT refused to protect Cunha against the charges he hit back. As chairman of Brazils lower house of congress, he granted impeachment requests against Rousseff. One senator, Romero Juca, who supported deposing Dilma Rousseff, was caught on tape outlining the planned coup. Referring to Lavo Jata he said: "Weve got to stop that shit putting Michel Temer in is the easiest way" He continued: "I am talking to the generals, the military commanders. They are fine with this, they will guarantee it"! This provoked outrage clear evidence that the military was involved in plotting the parliamentary coup in a country where military rule was only ended in 1985. The increasing involvement of the military has been a tendency since Rousseff was deposed and replaced by Temer, although not in the form of outright military action. No evidence has emerged that Rousseff gained personally from corruption, although the PT had bought its way to secure a majority in the congress and senate. Temer is also under investigation for corruption. The lefts response How to respond to this coup has provoked a big debate on the Brazilian left. While opposing the policies of the Rousseff government, comrades from LSR (Liberdade Socialismo e Revolucao Brazilian section of the CWI) argued that it was a mistake to support an attempted parliamentary coup by the neoliberals. It would bring to power an even more corrupt right-wing regime with an agenda of unleashing further attacks against the working class. It was necessary to oppose the impeachment and, at the same time, fight against Rousseffs anti-working class policies and build a real socialist alternative through PSOL, the trade unions and social movements. This was broadly the position agreed by the majority of PSOL. However, some on the left, like the PSTU (Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unficado), adopted a very sectarian position. It argued, in essence, that it made no difference if there was a government led by Rousseff or by Temer. This isolated groupings like the PSTU and cut them off from big layers of workers who had voted for the PT and wanted to fight Temers PMDB. Within weeks of Temer coming to power the reality of the new government became clear. It announced a viciously anti-working class programme of privatisation, cuts, attacks on pension rights, and new labour laws. It even proposed amending the constitution to include a clause enshrining austerity packages for the next 20 years to prevent government deficits. In states such as Rio de Janeiro, public-sector workers and teachers have suffered pay cuts, attacks on pensions and, in some cases, have not been paid for months as state administrations have run out of money! This provoked furious opposition throughout the country. In April 2017 the largest general strike ever in Brazil, 40 million workers, took place. It showed the burning anger and willingness to struggle. However, the trade union leadership failed to build on it by calling an immediate 48-hour general strike in preparation for a mass movement to bring down the Temer government as demanded by the LSR. The failure to follow this general strike with further mass mobilisations gave the right wing the opportunity to prepare a new offensive. Increasingly authoritarian rule The social and economic collapse has resulted in an upturn in urban violence. In Rio de Janeiro there are more than 6,700 killings a year, according to official figures. Organised gangs the most notorious being Comando Vermelho (Red Command) are organised like military units. Often working in collusion with militias drawn from the military police renowned for brutality and killings, especially of poor young black Brazilians in the favelas effectively, they control areas of the city. Playing on the fears of many workers the government launched a campaign on this issue. As part of its more authoritarian rule, it implemented the national security plan for Rio de Janeiro, deploying 8,500 troops to the city under the pretext of fighting violent crime. The troops were sent into the poorest favelas where they carried out indiscriminate repression. This is part of a conscious attempt by the government and ruling class to normalise the use of the military. The assassination of Marielle Franco was part of the repressive atmosphere being whipped up. This has allowed local right-wing groups and individuals off the leash, resulting in the killing of activists and a PT mayor. Reflecting this menacing regime was the case of comrade Camila Campos, a member of LSR who stood for PSOL in a council election. She reported a police officer who drove a car at a demonstrator. Yet, because she did not have video evidence of this action, she was sent to prison for two days and given a community sentence! Other instances have arisen of right-wing, semi-fascistic groups openly attacking individuals in the street who are wearing left-wing or radical t-shirts or badges. It is against this background that the Supreme Court voted to prosecute and imprison Lula to prevent him running in Octobers election. The court was divided on this decision. The day before the court ruling, Eduardo Villas-Boas, commander-in-chief of the army, issued a statement "rejecting impunity and demanding respect for the constitution" It was clearly aimed at pressuring the judges and bringing the military directly into the political arena once again. The offensive by the Temer government and sections of the state apparatus has been a shock for the younger generation. They do not remember the repression dealt out by the far-right and military in the past. The killings of landless worker activists in the rural areas members of the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) appeared somewhat remote to the youth in the cities. Now, reflecting the sharp class polarisation which has opened up, such brutal struggles have returned to the cities. The lessons of past struggle, including the sacrifices and battles waged by previous generations to build the PT and CUT trade union confederation in the 1970s and 1980s, will need to be relearned. Ruling class uncertainty The authoritarian, neoliberal offensive has provoked discussion on the left on whether there is a conservative wave sweeping Brazil. The growth in support for Jair Bolsonaro, an extreme right-wing populist and former military officer who is running second in opinion polls for the presidential election, is one justification for this prognosis. Of course, the threat posed to workers and those exploited by capitalism by these attacks and the growth in support for the far-right must not be underestimated. They represent the opening of a new era in Brazilian society. Yet, instead of a conservative wave, they reflect the growing polarisation in society. The attacks by the right wing and the growth of the far-right are also accompanied by a rejection of most aspects of this neoliberal programme. A victory for Bolsonaro is not the preferred option of the ruling class. At this stage, it does not have a clear candidate. It is searching for a Brazilian Macron or Macri the presidents of France and Argentina. Various candidates are emerging who hope to play this role, such as Mariana Silva, former PT senator who stood for the Green Party in 2010. The ruling class, however, seems to be putting its hopes on Geraldo Alckmin, a former PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira) mayor of Sao Paulo. This uncertainty about who will be the preferred candidate for the ruling class only months prior to the election is an indication of the crisis it finds itself in. In fact, since the social and political crisis developed, there has been a growth in support for more radical left-wing ideas. According to one poll, between 2014-17 those who thought that poverty was linked to a lack of opportunity grew from 58% to 77%. Those saying poverty was due to an unwillingness to work fell from 37% to 21%. Seventy-six percent thought that the state should be the main force for economic growth, and an overwhelming majority supported the idea that the state should guarantee equal opportunities and protect the poorest layers of society. Eight out of ten preferred better health and education services over a reduction in taxes, and 74% defended acceptance of LGBT people. A clear majority opposed the criminalisation of abortion. The only area where there was more support for the programme defended by the right wing was on public safety and crime. This is being used cynically by the right wing to try and strengthen its support. In opinion polls for the presidential elections before Lula was imprisoned, he was on 35% for the first round, and set to win in the second round. Even after his imprisonment his support has hovered around 30%. Despite Lula not standing on a radical left programme or defending socialism as he has done in the past this support does not point to a swing to the right in peoples outlook. The decisive question is the need to build a mass, fighting, socialist alternative, rooted among the working class and poor. The formation of PSOL in 2004 represented an important step forward. However, it has not yet managed to sink the roots among the working class and poor that the PT was able to do before it swung to the right and embraced capitalism. The PT still retains significant electoral support among workers and the urban poor, including in the homeless workers movement, MTST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto). This reflects its history and the concessions it made to the most oppressed for a temporary period under Lulas presidency. One of the challenges for PSOL is to try and win the support of these workers and urban poor. The lefts new opportunity An important opportunity exists to take a big step forward in building a new mass radical left. The decision of Guilleme Boulos, leader of the MTST, the largest urban social movement which leads mass land occupations in cities like Sao Paulo, to stand as PSOLs presidential candidate is a potential point of departure which can take PSOL and the left to a new level. The candidature of Boulos offers the prospect for PSOL to reach out to wider layers of the working class and poor, and to lay the basis for building a much stronger radical socialist alternative during the election. This can become a crucial instrument in the struggles that are certain to erupt subsequently. Although Boulos has joined PSOL, most MTST members and supporters have not. He is the candidate of a left front of PSOL, MTST, Partido Comunista Brasileiro and other social movements. This represents an important step forward, although it needs to be built on and strengthened. Boulos has argued that his objective is to create a kind of Brazilian Podemos. However, the limited programme of Podemos in Spain reflected in its failure to support the mass movement in Catalonia and the absence of a democratically run and controlled mass party, are a clear warning of the dangers in such an approach. Guilleme Boulos has advocated a series of radical demands and called for a programme of radical democracy. These can serve to mobilise big sections of workers and the poor, yet it is also necessary to go further. If the demands raised by the electoral front are to be secured, they need to be linked to a programme to break with capitalism. It is important to draw on the experience of the PT governments led by Lula as a warning of what a failure to do this would mean. While Boulos and the left are correct to oppose the attacks on Lula by the reactionary right-wing capitalists, it is also necessary to raise criticism of the pro-capitalist programme defended by Lula in spite of the fact that he also implemented some reforms for the most downtrodden Brazilians. Brazil has entered a new era of polarisation and struggle. The coming presidential election opens up a new opportunity for the radical socialist left to emerge strengthened in preparation to intervene in the struggles that are certain to erupt under the new government. To do so it is important that PSOL together with the MTST and other social movements develop a fighting socialist programme to break with capitalism. The LSR is fighting in this election and in PSOL for such a programme of action. Solar Novus Today Has Been Integrated With Novus Light Technologies Today Visit Novus Light Technologies Today to see all the cutting-edge stories and products that you have come to enjoy on Solar Novus Today. In addition, you will find more information on related light-based technologies. Get the latest solar and renewable energy news delivered right to your inbox. Sign up for the Green Technologies newsletter CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO OUR GREEN TECHNOLOGIES NEWSLETTER English French Trappes, May 30, 2018 - 07:00am (CET) Press Release SHAREHOLDERS' ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING Notice of Meeting Egide hereby provides notice to shareholders of the Shareholders' Annual General Meeting to be held on June 15, 2018 at 9:00am, in the lounge of Pavillon Kleber, 7 rue Cimarosa, Paris. The agenda of the meeting and the text of the resolutions presented to the Shareholders' Meeting were published in the BALO (French official notices gazette) on May 30, 2018 (www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr ), in a newspaper for legal notices and are online on the company's website (www.egide-group.com ). Shareholders will be able to obtain any other additional information writing to EGIDE, Parc d'Activites de Pissaloup, Service Assemblee, 4 rue Edouard Branly - 78190 Trappes - France. About Egide Egide is a group with an international dimension, specialized in the manufacture of hermetic packages for sensitive electronic components. It operates in cutting edge markets with strong technology barriers to entry in all critical industry segments (Thermal imaging, Optronics, High-Frequency, Power Units.). Egide is the only pure player in this market niche with manufacturing facilities in France and the United States. Egide renews its certification as an innovative company for Innovation-focused mutual funds (FCPI) on May 9, 2018 ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2004 certified quality and environmental management systems Egide is listed on Euronext Paris(TM)- Segment C - ISIN: FR0000072373 - Reuters: EGID.PA - Bloomberg: GID Egide shares are eligible for the French tax incentivized PEA-PME and FCPI investment vehicles. To find out more about Egide: www.egide-group. com Contacts EGIDE - Finance Department - Philippe Lussiez - +33 1 30 68 81 00 - plussiez@fr.egide-group.com INBOUND CAPITAL - Investor Relations - Frederic Portier / David Chermont - +44 7802 533333 - fportier@inbound.capital FIN'EXTENSO - Press Relations - Isabelle Aprile - +33 1 39 97 61 22 - i.aprile@finextenso.fr Promacta receives FDA Priority Review for first-line treatment of SAA based on data showing 52% complete response rate and 85% overall response rate when added to standard immunosuppressive therapy (IST) Regulatory action underscores the treatment potential of Promacta for a rare and serious blood condition Basel, May 30, 2018 - Novartis announced today that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted the company's supplemental New Drug Application (sNDA) and granted Priority Review designation to Promacta (eltrombopag) in combination with standard immunosuppressive therapy (IST) for first-line treatment of severe aplastic anemia (SAA). Promacta, which is marketed as Revolade in most countries outside the US, is an oral thrombopoietin receptor agonist (TPO-RA) that is already approved for SAA in the refractory setting for patients who have had an insufficient response to IST. It is also approved for adults and children with chronic immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) for patients who are refractory to other treatments and for the treatment of thrombocytopenia in patients with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. "Promacta is a great example of our drive to develop innovative treatments in serious disease areas where few treatment options exist," said Samit Hirawat, MD, Head, Novartis Oncology Global Drug Development. "Thanks to the many individuals and organizations who have helped us to advance the development of this promising medicine. We will continue our work with the FDA to make Promacta available for this potential new indication as quickly as possible." The Priority Review for first-line SAA is based on Novartis' analysis of research sponsored by the Intramural Research Program of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and conducted under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). The study showed that more than half (52%) of treatment-naive SAA patients achieved complete response at six months when treated with Promacta concurrently with standard IST, which was an increase of 35% compared to those treated with the standard IST alone[1]. The overall response rate was 85% at six months[2]. Severe aplastic anemia is a rare, life-threatening, acquired blood disorder in which a patient's bone marrow fails to produce enough red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets[3]. As a result, people living with this serious disease may experience debilitating symptoms and complications, such as fatigue, trouble breathing, recurring infections and abnormal bruising or bleeding that can limit their daily activities[4]. Historically, SAA was nearly uniformly a fatal diagnosis due to infection or hemorrhage resulting from prolonged pancytopenia; untreated SAA can result in 80-90% mortality in 1-2 years[5]. The prevalence rates vary for aplastic anemia in the US, but it is believed that 500-1,000 new cases are diagnosed each year[6]. The standard treatment regimen for individuals unable to receive or not eligible candidates for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in the US for treatment-naive SAA is IST. With IST as first-line treatment, up to one-third of patients and approximately 40% of those unresponsive to IST die within 5 years of diagnosis[7]. According to FDA guidelines, treatments that receive Priority Review designation are those that address a serious or life threatening disease or condition and, if approved, would provide a significant improvement in treatment safety or efficacy. If a treatment is granted Priority Review designation, the goal of the FDA is to issue a decision within six months of application submission, rather than ten months for standard review. Promacta/Revolade (eltrombopag) Eltrombopag, marketed as Promacta in the US and Revolade in countries outside the US, is approved in more than 100 countries worldwide for the treatment of thrombocytopenia in adult patients with chronic immune (idiopathic) thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) who have had an inadequate response or are intolerant to other treatments, approved in over 45 countries worldwide for the treatment of patients with severe aplastic anemia (SAA) who are refractory to other treatments, and also approved in more than 50 countries for the treatment of thrombocytopenia in patients with chronic hepatitis C to allow them to initiate and maintain interferon-based therapy. Promacta/Revolade is approved in the US and in the European Union for the treatment of thrombocytopenia in pediatric patients 1 year and older with chronic immune (idiopathic) thrombocytopenia (ITP) who have had an insufficient response to corticosteroids and immunoglobulins. Important Safety Information Promacta/Revolade can cause serious side effects, including liver problems, abnormal liver function tests, high platelet counts and higher risk for blood clots, and new or worsened cataracts (a clouding of the lens in the eye). Promacta/Revolade is not for treatment of people with a precancerous condition called myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). If you have MDS and receive Promacta/Revolade, your MDS condition may worsen and become AML. If MDS worsens to become AML, you may die sooner from AML. For patients who have chronic hepatitis C virus and take Promacta/Revolade with interferon and ribavirin treatment, Promacta/Revolade may increase the risk of liver problems. Patients should tell a healthcare provider right away if they have any of these signs and symptoms of liver problems including yellowing of the skin or the whites of the eyes (jaundice), unusual darkening of the urine, unusual tiredness, right upper stomach area pain, confusion, swelling of the stomach area (abdomen). A healthcare provider will order blood tests to check the liver before starting Promacta/Revolade and during Promacta/Revolade treatment. In some cases, treatment with Promacta/Revolade may need to be stopped due to changes in liver function tests. The risk of getting a blood clot is increased if the platelet count is too high during treatment with Promacta/Revolade. The risk of getting a blood clot may also be increased during treatment with Promacta/Revolade if platelet counts are normal or low. Some forms of blood clots, such as clots that travel to the lungs or that cause heart attacks or strokes can cause severe problems or death. A healthcare provider will check blood platelet counts, and change the dose of Promacta/Revolade or stop Promacta/Revolade, if platelet counts get too high. Patients should tell a healthcare provider right away if they have signs and symptoms of a blood clot in the leg, such as swelling, pain, or tenderness in the leg. People with chronic liver disease may be at risk for a type of blood clot in the stomach area. Patients should tell a healthcare provider right away if they have stomach area pain that may be a symptom of this type of blood clot. New or worsened cataracts have happened in people taking Promacta/Revolade. A healthcare provider will check the patient's eyes before and during treatment with Promacta/Revolade. Patients should tell a healthcare provider about any changes in eyesight while taking Promacta/Revolade. Patients should tell a healthcare provider about all the medicines they take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. Promacta/Revolade may affect the way certain medicines work. Certain medicines may keep Promacta/Revolade from working correctly. Patients should take Promacta/Revolade at least 2 hours before or 4 hours after taking products such as antacids used to treat stomach ulcers or heartburn and multivitamins or products that contain iron, calcium, aluminum, magnesium, selenium, and zinc, which may be found in mineral supplements. Patients should ask a healthcare provider if they are not sure if the medicine is one that is listed above. Patients should avoid situations and medications that may increase the risk of bleeding while taking Promacta/Revolade. The most common side effects of Promacta/Revolade when used to treat chronic ITP in adults are: nausea; diarrhea; upper respiratory tract infection (symptoms may include runny nose, stuffy nose, and sneezing); vomiting; muscle aches; urinary tract infection (symptoms may include frequent or urgent need to urinate, low fever in some people, pain or burning with urination); pain or swelling (inflammation) in the throat or mouth (oropharyngeal pain and pharyngitis); abnormal liver function tests; back pain; flu-like symptoms (influenza), including fever, headache, tiredness, cough, sore throat, and body aches; skin tingling, itching, or burning; and rash. The most common side effects of Promacta/Revolade in children 1 year and older when used to treat chronic ITP are: upper respiratory tract infections (symptoms may include runny nose, stuffy nose, and sneezing); pain or swelling (inflammation) in the nose and throat (nasopharyngitis); cough; diarrhea; pyrexia; runny, stuffy nose (rhinitis); stomach (abdominal) pain; pain or swelling (inflammation) in the throat or mouth; toothache; abnormal liver function tests; rash; runny nose (rhinorrhea). The most common side effects when Promacta/Revolade is used in combination with other medicines to treat chronic HCV are: low red blood cell count (anemia); fever; tiredness; headache; nausea; diarrhea; decreased appetite; flu-like symptoms (influenza), including fever, headache, tiredness, cough, sore throat, and body aches; feeling weak; trouble sleeping; cough; itching; chills; muscle aches; hair loss; and swelling in the ankles, feet, and legs. The most common side effects of Promacta/Revolade when used to treat severe aplastic anemia are: nausea, feeling tired, cough, diarrhea, headache, pain in arms, legs, hands or feet, shortness of breath, fever, dizziness, pain in nose or throat, abdominal pain, bruising, muscle spasms, abnormal liver function tests, joint pain, and runny nose. Laboratory tests may show abnormal changes to the cells in bone marrow. Please see full US Prescribing Information, including Boxed WARNING and Medication Guide, for Promacta. Please see full EU Summary of Product Characteristics for Promacta/Revolade. Disclaimer This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by words such as "potential," "can," "will," "plan," "expect," "anticipate," "look forward," "believe," "committed," "investigational," "pipeline," "launch," or similar terms, or by express or implied discussions regarding potential marketing approvals, new indications or labeling for the investigational or approved products described in this press release, or regarding potential future revenues from such products. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations regarding future events, and are subject to significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. There can be no guarantee that the investigational or approved products described in this press release will be submitted or approved for sale or for any additional indications or labeling in any market, or at any particular time. Nor can there be any guarantee that such products will be commercially successful in the future. In particular, our expectations regarding such products could be affected by, among other things, the uncertainties inherent in research and development, including clinical trial results and additional analysis of existing clinical data; regulatory actions or delays or government regulation generally; global trends toward health care cost containment, including government, payor and general public pricing and reimbursement pressures; our ability to obtain or maintain proprietary intellectual property protection; the particular prescribing preferences of physicians and patients; general political and economic conditions; safety, quality or manufacturing issues; potential or actual data security and data privacy breaches, or disruptions of our information technology systems, and other risks and factors referred to in Novartis AG's current Form 20-F on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Novartis is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. About Novartis Novartis provides innovative healthcare solutions that address the evolving needs of patients and societies. Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Novartis offers a diversified portfolio to best meet these needs: innovative medicines, cost-saving generic and biosimilar pharmaceuticals and eye care. Novartis has leading positions globally in each of these areas. In 2017, the Group achieved net sales of USD 49.1 billion, while R&D throughout the Group amounted to approximately USD 9.0 billion. Novartis Group companies employ approximately 124,000 full-time-equivalent associates. Novartis products are sold in approximately 155 countries around the world. For more information, please visit http://www.novartis.com. Novartis is on Twitter. Sign up to follow @Novartis at http://twitter.com/novartis For Novartis multimedia content, please visit www.novartis.com/news/media-library For questions about the site or required registration, please contact media.relations@novartis.com References [1] Townsley DM et al. Eltrombopag added to standard immunosuppression for aplastic anemia. N Engl J Med 2017 Apr 20; 376:1540. [2] Novartis Data on File. [3] National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (2018). Aplastic Anemia. Available at: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/node/80148. Accessed January 18, 2018. [4] Townsley DM, Desmond R, Dunbar CE, et al. Pathophysiology and management of thrombocytopenia in bone marrow failure: possible clinical applications of TPO receptor agonists in aplastic anemia and myelodysplastic syndromes. Int J Hematology. 2013;98(1):48-55. [5] Rosenfeld S et al. Antithymocyte globulin and cyclosporine for severe aplastic anemia: Association between hematologic response and long-term outcome. JAMA. 2003;289(9):1130-1135. doi:10.1001/jama.289.9.1130. [6] National Organization for Rare Diseases (2018). Acquired Aplastic Anemia. Available at: https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/acquired-aplastic-anemia/. Accessed March 26, 2018. [7] Valdez JM, Scheinberg P, Nunez O, et al. Decreased infection-related mortality and improved survival in severe aplastic anemia in the past two decades. Clin Infect Dis. 2011; 52(6):726-735. # # # Novartis Media Relations Central media line: +41 61 324 2200 E-mail: media.relations@novartis.com Eric Althoff Novartis Global Media Relations +41 61 324 7999 (direct) +41 79 593 4202 (mobile) eric.althoff@novartis.com Michael Billings Novartis Oncology Communications +1 862 778 8656 (direct) +1 201 400 1854 (mobile) michael.billings@novartis.com Novartis Investor Relations Central investor relations line: +41 61 324 7944 E-mail: investor.relations@novartis.com Articles Sorry, there are no recent results for popular articles. By Mata Press Service India is accusing Canada of shielding drug fugitives wanted in connection with an international narcotics syndicate helmed by former Punjab police officer Jagdish Singh Bhola. It has once again approached Canada over extradition of the fugitives after filing a detailed affidavit submitted by Indian Assistant Solicitor General Chetan Mittal on May 23 before the Punjab and Haryana High Court. The affidavit stated that Canadian agencies have rejected the Indian governments request, originally made in 2016, to extradite eight NRIs linked to the case. Mittal told Indian media that Canada was making technical objections to requests each time to stall the extradition of the NRIs or Non-Resident Indians. India is seeking the extradition of eight NRIs Ranjit Singh Aujla, Gursewak Singh Dhillon, Nirankar Singh Dhillon, Sarabjit Singh Sander, Lehmbar Singh Daleh, Amarjit Singh Kooner, Pardeep Singh Dhaliwal and Amarinder Singh Chheena since 2016, according to the affidavit submitted through Rajeev Ranjan, undersecretary (extradition), Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). During Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus visit to India earlier this year, Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh had handed over a list of 11 Canada-based NRIs, allegedly involved in the drug trade in Punjab. Trudeau was also given a list of nine category-A operatives said to be involved in financing and supplying weapons for terror activities in India. The drug fugitives case is rooted in the November 2013 arrest of Jagdish Singh alias Bhola, a dismissed Punjab Police deputy superintendent and an internationally renowned wrestler. Bhola, was one of the most wanted fugitives operating the drug trafficking racket in India, which indulged in manufacturing and smuggling of pseudoephedrine, methamphetamine and heroin into Europe, US, Canada and other countries. In addition to using non-resident Indians living in Canada, Bhola, police allege hired Chinese and Vietnamese nationals for making drugs and shipping consignments to North America. At the time of his arrest police seized millions in drugs at his hideouts, 35 passports, including eight Canadian ones and a US-made visa imprint machine. Bhola was arrested after another Indo-Canadian drug smuggler, Anoop Singh Kahlon detained in early 2013, allegedly fingered him as the kingpin of the international syndicate. Police said, Kahlon, a truck driver, who attempted suicide in an Indian jail after his arrest had been in Canada with his family since 1995. He had built a strong network of drug peddlers not only in US and Canada but in some European countries. He is said to have used at least two Canadian-based Hawala operators (underground bankers) to move money. The Kahlon group also had connections with a third network run by another Punjab drug baron with links to Canada. That group led by Ranjit Singh alias Raja Kandola was operating a party-drug manufacturing operation in Punjab, real estate scams and an illegal immigration operation. Kandola managed a drug empire worth millions of rupees using top models and good-looking young women fluent in English as couriers to send and receive drug-consignments. Senior advocate Anupam Gupta, who is also associated with the drug haul case, said it is the Canadian governments policy to protect these people by imposing millions of hyper-technicalities. It is the strategic and willful stonewalling by the Canadian authorities to stall the extradition process, Gupta added. with agencies Guest Commentary By Ian Madsen There has long been a public policy battle over governments role in running enterprises. Strangely, that battle was not settled in the 1980s and 90s when many state-owned firms were privatized, since Canadian governments still own many Crown corporations. Air Canada, Canadian National Railway, Petro-Canada (now part of Suncor), PotashCorp of Saskatchewan (now part of Nutrien), Alberta Energy (now part of Encana) and Cameco are among those privatized. Analysis shows divested firms perform far better as private sector than when state-held. In general, nations with low state ownership (United States, South Korea, Australia) surpass more statist ones (France, Canada) in total and per capita economic growth. Nevertheless, hundreds of Crown corporations remain, at national and provincial levels. Some are in a mediocre, zombie-like state (e.g. Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp., or CMHC, and Canada Post). Others are in serious financial distress (Manitoba Hydro, CBC). Many are being subsidized by taxpayers. Supporters of a large, strong government sector doggedly encourage state ownership. Often these people try to block attempts to divest Crown corporations. They also defend the unfair tax, borrowing and regulatory treatment conferred on these corporations. The most dubious statist claim is that its somehow crucial that some firms are publicly owned. Many such advocates even imply that there should be little private ownership. With more than $1 trillion locked in underperforming assets and less than a quarter of that backed by equity, continued Crown ownership is a hugely important issue for public policy debate. It strains credulity that for there to be electric utilities in BC., Saskatchewan or Manitoba, Crown involvement was needed. There are many private sector utilities. And all these Crown firms are over-indebted from ill-advised expansion projects pushed by politicians. Alberta and Nova Scotia are fine without Crown utilities. Why do other provinces need them? The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. duplicates services provided by unsubsidized firms. Canada Post delivers items that could be delivered by FedEx, UPS or Purolator. CMHC provides home loans to over-extended or low-income borrowers otherwise unqualified for bank loans, fuelling excess demand and reducing affordability for everyone. Export Development Canada (EDC) guarantees loans for exporters who could not get loans from other lenders. EDC massively supports politically-favoured Bombardier. Most of the essentials of life, in fact, come from private companies. Food, clothing, transport, telecommunications, fuel and housing are integral or vital for life in Canada, and yet provided by private firms. A key positive feature of private entrepreneurs, investors and lenders is that they compete to be the most efficient and profitable possible. In the process, they satisfy the needs of millions of Canadians without putting taxpayers at risk of bankruptcy, as Crown corporations do. Government is critical in ensuring legal, security, administrative, regulatory and justice systems work well so that markets can deliver for citizens. Yet skepticism should prevail on Crown ownership of a multitude of corporations. Considerable evidence shows that most Crown corporations are actually a serious drag on countries and provinces. For Canada to succeed, governments should be divesting many of the Crown corporations they now stubbornly sustain. Ian Madsen is a senior policy analyst with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Contact: International Administration Group (Guernsey) Limited Company Administrator Attn: Mark Woodall Tel: +44 1481 723450 Eurocastle Announces Posting of Annual General Meeting Notice Guernsey. 30 May 2018 - Eurocastle Investment Limited (Euronext Amsterdam: ECT) ("Eurocastle" or the "Company") today announces that notice of its Annual General Meeting containing the full text of the proposed resolutions and a proxy statement has been mailed out to all holders on record as of Tuesday, 29 May 2018. In addition, the Company has posted the Annual General Meeting notice on its website under Periodic Reports and Shareholder Communications in the Investor Relations Section. As previously announced, Eurocastle will hold its Annual General Meeting on Wednesday, 20 June 2018, at the Company's registered office at 2:00 pm Guernsey time (3:00 pm CET). About Eurocastle Eurocastle Investment Limited is a publicly traded closed-ended investment company that focuses on investing in performing and non-performing loans and other real estate related assets primarily in Italy. The Company is Euro denominated and is listed on Euronext Amsterdam under the symbol "ECT". Eurocastle is managed by an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group LLC, a leading global investment manager. For more information regarding Eurocastle Investment Limited and to be added to our email distribution list, please visit www.eurocastleinv.com. English Finnish Herantis Pharma's Manager's Transactions Herantis Pharma Plc Company release 30 May 2018 at 9:30 am Herantis Pharma Oyj - Managers' Transactions ____________________________________________ Person subject to the notification requirement Name: Antti Vuolanto Position: Other senior manager Issuer: Herantis Pharma Oyj LEI: 743700W4CQVYAT3WKK38 Notification type: INITIAL NOTIFICATION Reference number: 743700W4CQVYAT3WKK38_20180530090744_4 ____________________________________________ Transaction date: 2018-05-29 Venue: FIRST NORTH FINLAND (FNFI) Instrument type: SHARE ISIN: FI4000087861 Nature of the transaction: ACQUISITION Transaction details (1): Volume: 400 Unit price: 6.1 EUR Aggregated transactions (1): Volume: 400 Volume weighted average price: 6.1 EUR ____________________________________________ Transaction date: 2018-05-17 Venue: FIRST NORTH FINLAND (FNFI) Instrument type: SHARE ISIN: FI4000087861 Nature of the transaction: ACQUISITION Transaction details (1): Volume: 400 Unit price: 6.2 EUR Aggregated transactions (1): Volume: 400 Volume weighted average price: 6.2 EUR ____________________________________________ Transaction date: 2018-04-09 Venue: FIRST NORTH FINLAND (FNFI) Instrument type: SHARE ISIN: FI4000087861 Nature of the transaction: ACQUISITION Transaction details (1): Volume: 300 Unit price: 5.9 EUR Aggregated transactions (1): Volume: 300 Volume weighted average price: 5.9 EUR ____________________________________________ Further information: Herantis Pharma Plc, Pekka Simula, CEO, telephone: +358 40 7300 445 Company web site: www.herantis.com Certified Advisor: UB Securities Ltd, telephone: +358 9 25 380 225 Distribution: Nasdaq Helsinki Main media www.herantis.com English Danish The distribution of this announcement in certain jurisdictions may be restricted by law, and persons into whose possession this announcement comes are required to inform themselves about, and to observe, any such restrictions. Nothing in this announcement constitutes or contemplates an offer of, an offer to purchase or the solicitation of an offer to purchase or sell any security. 30 May 2018 TDC A/S CONSENT SOLICITATIONS to holders of its outstanding EUR 500,000,000 3.75 per cent. Notes due 2022 and the GBP 550,000,000 5.625 per cent. Notes due 2023 (each a "Series" and, together, the "Notes") On 15 May 2018, TDC A/S (the "Issuer") invited holders of each Series of the Notes to consent to waive certain change of control put option rights contained in the terms and conditions (in respect of each Series, the "Conditions") of the relevant Series in connection with the acquisition by DK Telekommunikation ApS of the outstanding shares of the Issuer (the "Acquisition"), as proposed by the Issuer for approval by way of an extraordinary resolution of the holders of each such Series (an "Extraordinary Resolution"), and all as further described in the consent solicitation memorandum dated 15 May 2018 (the "Consent Solicitation Memorandum", and each such invitation in respect of a Series, a "Consent Solicitation"). Capitalised terms used in this notice and not otherwise defined shall have the meanings given to them in the Consent Solicitation Memorandum. Preliminary Results as at the Early Instruction Deadline The Early Instruction Deadline was 4.00 p.m. (London Time) on 28 May 2018. Based on Electronic Voting Instructions received as at the Early Instruction Deadline, the Issuer expects that the relevant Meetings will be quorate and that each Extraordinary Resolution will be approved. Noteholders of each Series of Notes may continue to submit Electronic Voting Instructions up to the Expiration Deadline at 4.00 p.m. (London time) on 1 June 2018 (subject to the right of the Issuer to extend, re-open and/or terminate the relevant Consent Solicitation), but such Noteholders will not be eligible to receive the Early Participation Fee in respect of those Consent Instructions. The Issuer will pay the Early Participation Fee no later than the fifth Business Day following the applicable Meeting at which the Extraordinary Resolution is passed for the relevant Series. General The Issuer may, at its option and in its sole discretion, extend, or waive any condition of, any Consent Solicitation at any time and may amend or terminate such Consent Solicitation at any time (subject in each case to applicable law and provided that no amendment may be made to the terms of the relevant Extraordinary Resolution). Details of any such extension, waiver, amendment or termination will be announced as promptly as practicable after the relevant decision is made. Save as expressly set out herein, the terms of the Consent Solicitation will continue in full force and effect. Once submitted, an Electronic Voting Instruction is irrevocable (save in certain limited circumstances as provided in the Consent Solicitation Memorandum). Further details about the transaction can be obtained from: The Solicitation Agent Nordea Bank AB (publ) c/o Nordea Danmark, filial af Nordea Bank AB (publ), Sverige Grnjordsvej 10 DK-2300 Copenhagen S Denmark Telephone: +45 61 61 29 96 Attention: Nordea Liability Management Email: NordeaLiabilityManagement@nordea.com In this announcement, references to "Solicitation Agent" shall be construed to include a reference to any of the branch offices of Nordea Bank AB (publ) and/or any successor entity pursuant to a merger or reorganisation wherein the surviving entity assumes the obligations of Nordea Bank AB (publ). The Solicitation Agent is not acting through a U.S. broker-dealer affiliate and, accordingly, will not discuss the Consent Solicitations or the contents of this announcement with any Noteholder who is unable to confirm it is not located or resident in the United States. The Tabulation Agent Lucid Issuer Services Limited Tankerton Works 12 Argyle Walk London WC1H 8HA United Kingdom Telephone: +44 20 7704 0880 Attention: David Shilson Email: tdc@lucid-is.com This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of the EU Market Abuse Regulation (EU) 596/2014. In accordance with the above and Article 2 of Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/1055, this announcement is made by Dennis Callesen, Investor Relations Manager of the Issuer. None of the Issuer, the Solicitation Agent, the Tabulation Agent or any director, officer, employee, agent or affiliate of any such person is acting for any Noteholder, or will be responsible to any Noteholder for providing any protections which would be afforded to its clients or for providing advice in relation to any Consent Solicitation or any Extraordinary Resolution, and accordingly none of the Issuer, the Solicitation Agent, the Tabulation Agent or any director, officer, employee, agent or affiliate of any such person, makes any recommendation whether Noteholders should participate in the relevant Consent Solicitation(s) or otherwise participate at the relevant Meeting(s) or whether or not to exercise the Put Option in respect of their Notes and none of the Solicitation Agent, the Tabulation Agent or any director, officer, employee, agent or affiliate of any such person, makes any representation whatsoever regarding the Consent Solicitations. This announcement must be read in conjunction with the Consent Solicitation Memorandum. No offer to acquire any Securities is being made pursuant to this notice. This announcement, the Notice and the Consent Solicitation Memorandum contain important information, which should be read carefully before any decision is made with respect to the Consent Solicitation. If any holder of Securities is in any doubt as to the action it should take, it is recommended to seek its own advice, including as to any tax consequences, from its broker, bank manager, solicitor, accountant or other independent adviser. This announcement and the Consent Solicitation Memorandum do not constitute an offer or an invitation to participate in the Consent Solicitations in any jurisdiction in or from which, or to or from any person to or from whom, it is unlawful to make such offer or invitation under applicable securities laws. The distribution of the Consent Solicitation Memorandum in certain jurisdictions may be restricted by law. Persons into whose possession the Consent Solicitation Memorandum comes are required by each of the Issuer, the Solicitation Agent and the Tabulation Agent to inform themselves about, and to observe, any such restrictions. Attachment US commerce chief warns of disruption from EU privacy rules Washington, May 30 (AFP) May 30, 2018 US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross warned Wednesday that the new EU privacy rules in effect since last week could lead to serious problems for business, medical research and law enforcement on both sides of the Atlantic. Ross said US officials were "deeply concerned" about how the General Data Protection Regulation would be implemented, while noting that the guidance so far has been "too vague." The law which took effect May 25 establishes the key principle that individuals must explicitly grant permission for their data to be used, and give consumers a right to know who is accessing their information and what it will be used for. Some US officials have expressed concerns about the GDPR, but Ross is the highest ranking official to speak on the law, and his comments address a broad range of sectors that could be affected. "We do not have a clear understanding of what is required to comply. That could disrupt transatlantic cooperation on financial regulation, medical research, emergency management coordination, and important commerce," Ross said in an opinion piece for the Financial Times The costs of the new law could be significant, to the point where it may "threaten public welfare on both sides of the Atlantic," according to Ross. "Complying with GDPR will exact a significant cost, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises and consumers who rely on digital services and may lose access and choice as a result of the guidelines," he wrote. "Pharmaceutical companies may not be able to submit medical data from drug trials involving European patients to US authorities, which could delay the approval of new life-saving drugs." He added that the US Postal Service has claimed the new rules could prevent EU postal operators from providing the data needed to process inbound mail. Ross also echoed concerns from other officials that EU requirement that personal data be restricted from the internet address book known as "WHOIS" could hurt law enforcement efforts to crack down on cybercrime and online calls to violence. "That could stop law enforcement from ascertaining who is behind websites that propagate terrorist information, sponsor malicious botnets or steal IP addresses," he said. "These important activities need to be weighed carefully against privacy concerns. They are critical to building trust in the internet, safeguarding infrastructure, and protecting the public. Our respect for privacy does not have to come at the expense of public safety." Latvian English Hereby, AS Rigas elektromasinbuves rupnica (RER) informs that on 30 May 2018 the mandatory share redemption offer made by Measurestep Enterprises Limited the shares of RER will start based on decision No 84 of 25 May 2018 of the Financial and Capital Market Commission. Information about the offer Target Company: AS Rigas elektromasinbuves rupnica, registration number 40003042006, registered address: Ganibu dambis 53, Riga, LV-1005, Latvia, telephone number: + 371 673811930, e-mail address: office@rer.lv, web page address: www.rer.lv. Offeror: Company Measurestep Enterprises Limited, registered in the Republic of Cyprus on 3 November 2004 with registration number HE153603, registered address: Ioanni Kyriakidi, 12A, Apostolos Andreas, P.C. 3067, Limassol, Cyprus. On the date of signing of the prospectus, the offeror directly and indirectly owns in total 97.23 % of the Target Company`s shares with voting rights. The buy-back price for one share is set as: EUR 6.51. The offer term is 30 (thirty) calendar days starting from 30 May 2018 until 29 June 2018 including. Attached: Prospectus of the mandatory share redemption offer of AS Rigas elektromasinbuves rupnica Top North Korean to meet Pompeo ahead of US summit Washington, May 29 (AFP) May 29, 2018 A senior North Korean official was bound for New York for high-level talks with US officials on Tuesday as preparations for a historic nuclear summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un gathered pace. General Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the central committee of the Workers' Party and right-hand man to Kim, will meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York on Wednesday or Thursday, officials said. Trump confirmed the general was on his way in a tweet and boasted that Washington would have a "great team" for the talks on resolving the old foes' nuclear standoff. The president still hopes the meeting will take place on June 12 in Singapore. "Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!" Trump wrote. Trump will also meet Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington on June 7, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said. "Since the president's May 24 letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans have been engaging," she said. "The United States continues to actively prepare for President Trump's expected summit with leader Kim in Singapore." A spokesman for the North Korean mission to the United Nations said he was unable to confirm that the general was on his way to New York but added that "preparation for the summit is proceeding at the highest level." The North Korean envoy landed at Beijing airport on Tuesday and was to meet with Chinese officials before traveling on to the United States on Wednesday, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency. Pompeo's spokeswoman said it would be the third meeting between Pompeo -- who opened contacts with the isolated Pyongyang regime when he was still CIA director -- and General Kim. "The secretary will be heading up to New York tomorrow and I believe returning some time on Thursday," she said. "We're still finalizing exactly what these meetings will look like." The trip is part of a flurry of diplomacy before the on-again, off-again summit. - Truce village - Trump briefly scrapped the talks last week, citing "open hostility" from the North, but since then both sides have dialed down the rhetoric and the process appears to be back on track. On Sunday, US negotiators, headed by Washington's ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, began meeting North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom that divides the two Koreas. "They plan to have additional meetings this week," Sanders said. She said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin and a US team are separately coordinating logistics in Singapore for the expected summit. Chung Sung-yoon, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said Kim Yong Chol would be the most senior North Korean on US soil since Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok met then president Bill Clinton in 2000. The general has played a front-seat role during recent rounds of diplomacy aimed at ending the nuclear stalemate on the Korean peninsula. He sat next to Trump's daughter Ivanka, who is also a White House aide, during February's closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in South Korea, an event that was seen as a turning point in the nuclear crisis. He also accompanied Kim Jong Un on both of his recent trips to China to meet President Xi Jinping, and held talks with Pompeo when he traveled to Pyongyang. - Yawning gap - General Kim is a notorious figure in South Korea, where he is blamed for masterminding the 2010 sinking of the Cheonan navy corvette that killed 46 sailors, an attack for which North Korea denies responsibility. From 2009 to 2016, he also headed North Korea's General Reconnaissance Bureau, the unit tasked with cyber warfare and intelligence gathering. During that period, North Korea ramped up its hacking programs, including a hugely costly penetration of Sony Pictures. General Kim is one of several North Korean officials under US sanctions, but State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said she was sure that the US had taken appropriate administrative steps to allow him to visit New York unmolested. His journey to the US caps a frenetic few days of meetings between North Korean and American officials. Japanese broadcaster NHK showed footage of Kim Chang Son, Kim Jong Un's de facto chief of staff, arriving in Singapore, escorted by three bodyguards. An AFP photographer saw Kim entering Singapore's luxury Fullerton hotel Tuesday and leaving some 30 minutes later in a three-vehicle convoy. If the June 12 date stands, officials have only two weeks to finalize details such as where in Singapore the talks will take place and how internationally sanctioned North Korean officials will travel there. The key task is to settle the agenda. The main stumbling block is likely to be the concept of "denuclearization" -- both sides say they want it, but there is a yawning gap between their definitions. Washington wants North Korea to quickly give up all its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way in return for sanctions and economic relief. But analysts say North Korea will be unwilling to cede its nuclear deterrent unless it is given security guarantees that the US will not try to topple the regime. Gunman with Islamist links kills three in Belgian city Liege, Belgium, May 29 (AFP) May 29, 2018 A gunman on a police watchlist for contacts with Islamist extremists launched a brazen suspected terror attack in Belgium on Tuesday, shooting dead two female police officers with their own weapons before killing a bystander. The bloodshed in the gritty eastern industrial city of Liege began around 10:30 am (0830 GMT) when the attacker armed with a knife repeatedly stabbed the two officers before using their own firearms to kill them, prosecutors said. Federal prosecutors said they had launched a terror investigation into the incident. Amateur video obtained by AFP appears to show the gunman shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greatest") as he attacked the police, although it was not confirmed by officials. Belgium remains on high alert after a string of attacks including twin suicide bombings in Brussels in 2016 claimed by the Islamic State group. "Armed with a knife, the suspect followed and attacked two police officers, and used their own firearms to kill them," prosecutor Philippe Dulieu told a news conference. "He continued on foot, attacking a parked vehicle where he opened fire on a 22-year-old man in the passenger seat. The young man died. "He then continued and entered the Leonie de Waha school. He took a woman working there as hostage. Police intervened, he came out firing on the police officers, wounding several before he was killed." A source close to the investigation told AFP that the gunman was on a special police watchlist because of his contacts with radical Islamists. The source named the attacker as Benjamin Herman, born in 1982, saying he had past convictions for robbery, violence and drug dealing. Herman was "already on the run" after committing another murder on Monday night in the town of On, in southern Belgium, the source said, though local prosecutors said they have not yet established a link with the Liege incident. He was reported by Belgian broadcaster RTBF to have been released from prison on Monday. "He is suspected of having been radicalised (in prison)... He has been reported or presumed to be belonging to the entourage of an Islamist recruiter," the source said on condition of anonymity. - 'Targeted police' - A Twitter user posted dramatic footage of the violent climax to the incident. As a group of armed officers approach the entrance to the school, the black-clad gunman bursts out with a gun in each hand, before collapsing under a deafening hail of police bullets. Liege police chief Christian Beaupere said it was "clear that the assassin's objective was to attack the police", He added that one of the four officers wounded in the attack had suffered a serious leg injury. Liege, a major city in Western Europe's former industrial heartland, was the scene of another bloody shootout in 2011. In that attack a former convict armed with grenades and an automatic rifle killed six people and wounded more than 120. - 'Cowardly violence' - Prime Minister Charles Michel denounced what he called the "cowardly and blind violence" of Tuesday's attack. "All our support for the victims and their loved ones. We are following the situation with the security services and the crisis centre," Michel tweeted. There was support from other European countries, with French President Emmanuel Macron condemning the incident as a "terrible attack" and expressing the "solidarity of the French people". British Prime Minister Theresa May said the UK "stands resolute with our Belgian allies against terror". A major security cordon was set up around the area, while panicked parents came to collect their children from the school complex. The governor of Liege province said all the children and staff were safe and unhurt. "All the children are fine, those of the primary and kindergarten saw nothing, they were evacuated through the back of the school," Julie Fernandez, mother of a seven-year-old at the school, told AFP. "They were cared for by staff and psychologists and high school students were cared for in a nearby park," added Fernandez, who is also an MP. - Terror alert - Belgium has been on high alert since authorities in January 2015 smashed a terror cell in the town of Verviers that was planning an attack on police. The cell also had links to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the November 2015 Islamic State attacks on Paris that killed 130 people. Belgium further raised its terror alert level after the Paris attack and placed the capital Brussels on lockdown for a week. The country was then hit itself by IS suicide attacks on Brussels airport and a metro station, which killed 32 people in March 2016. In August that same year, a machete-wielding man shouting "Allahu Akbar" attacked two policewomen in the industrial town of Charleroi before being shot dead. The country's law enforcement agencies and intelligence services came under intense scrutiny for apparently missing a series of leads after the Paris attacks that could have led to the Brussels bombers. US to keep confronting Beijing in S. China Sea: Mattis Aboard a US military aircraft, May 29 (AFP) May 29, 2018 Defense Secretary Jim Mattis vowed Tuesday that the US would keep confronting China over its territorial claims in the South China Sea, where Beijing has established a significant military presence on contested islands. Mattis's remarks came after Beijing voiced "strong dissatisfaction" Sunday after two US warships sailed by an island in the disputed Paracel Island chain. "You'll notice there's only one country that seems to take active steps to rebuff (such operations) or state their resentment of them, but it's international waters and a lot of nations want to see freedom of navigation, so we will continue that," Mattis told reporters as he flew to Hawaii. The US Navy periodically conducts "freedom of navigation" operations in the contested waterway, where it sails close to island features China has built into military facilities as a way of showing it rejects any territorial claims. "We are going out of our way to cooperate with Pacific nations, that's the way we do business in the world, but we are also going to confront what we believe is out of step with international law," Mattis said. Sunday's operation was conducted just over a week after Beijing flew nuclear-capable bombers to a disputed island, drawing immediate criticism from the US. Last week, the Pentagon pulled its invitation to China to join maritime exercises in the Pacific over Beijing's "continued militarization" of the South China Sea. Beijing has been building artificial islands to reinforce its claim over most of the resource-rich South China Sea, despite protests from Southeast Asian countries. Its neighbors, particularly some of those involved in maritime disputes over the waters, have expressed fears China could eventually restrict freedom of navigation and overflight. "Our diplomats are robustly engaged on this," Mattis said. "The concerns have come to me not just from American government circles, but also from foreign nations that are concerned, very concerned about this continued militarization of features in the South China Sea." Mattis was heading to Hawaii to attend a change-of-command ceremony for the US military's Pacific Command. The current head, Admiral Harry Harris, has been nominated to be the new ambassador to South Korea. He will be replaced by Admiral Philip Davidson. Mattis is then due to attend a regional security conference in Singapore. Israel says struck 25 more Hamas targets after rocket, mortar fire Jerusalem, May 30 (AFP) May 30, 2018 Israel said Wednesday it had struck 25 more Hamas "military targets" in air raids in the Gaza Strip overnight in response to rocket and mortar fire, part of the worst military flare-up since a 2014 war. Targets included drone sheds, a rocket-making workshop and "military compounds," a military statement said. Israel had said Tuesday it hit more than 35 militant targets in the Palestinian enclave after a barrage of rocket and mortar fire from Hamas, the Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, and Islamic Jihad. It said late Tuesday about 70 rockets and mortars had been fired at Israel throughout the day. A number of them were intercepted by air defence systems. Three Israeli soldiers were wounded. There were no immediate reports of casualties in Gaza. Sirens and explosions continued into the night after Tuesday's eruption. Late Tuesday, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad said a ceasefire agreement had been reached to restore calm, though the Israeli army declined to comment. In a rare joint statement, Hamas and Islamic Jihad declared shared responsibility for the rocket and mortar fire, saying it was in retaliation for Israeli attacks targeting their positions. The exchange of fire comes after weeks of deadly protests and clashes along the Gaza-Israel border. Three members of Islamic Jihad were killed in an Israeli strike on Sunday. Top North Korean heads to US to meet Pompeo ahead of summit Washington, May 30 (AFP) May 30, 2018 A senior North Korean official was Wednesday bound for New York for high-level talks with US officials as preparations for a historic nuclear summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un gathered pace. General Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the central committee of the Workers' Party and right-hand man to Kim, will meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York, officials said. Trump confirmed the general was on his way in a tweet and boasted that Washington would have a "great team" for the talks on resolving the old foes' nuclear standoff. The president still hopes the meeting will take place on June 12 in Singapore. "Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!" Trump wrote. Trump will also meet Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington on June 7, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said. "Since the president's May 24 letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans have been engaging," she said. "The United States continues to actively prepare for President Trump's expected summit with leader Kim in Singapore." The North Korean envoy was at Beijing airport Wednesday for his flight to New York, a day after arriving in the Chinese capital. He used the restricted VIP entrance, according to AFP journalists. Pompeo's spokeswoman said it would be the third meeting between Pompeo -- who opened contacts with the isolated Pyongyang regime when he was still CIA director -- and General Kim. "We're still finalizing exactly what these meetings will look like," she said. The trip is part of a flurry of diplomacy before the on-again, off-again summit. - Truce village - Trump briefly scrapped the talks last week, citing "open hostility" from the North, but since then both sides have dialed down the rhetoric and the process appears to be back on track. On Sunday, US negotiators, headed by Washington's ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, began meeting North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom that divides the two Koreas. "They plan to have additional meetings this week," Sanders said. Sung and a team of negotiators left a Seoul hotel Wednesday in a convoy apparently headed for Panmunjom, the Yonhap news agency reported. Chung Sung-yoon, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said Kim Yong Chol would be the most senior North Korean on US soil since Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok met then president Bill Clinton in 2000. The general has played a front-seat role during recent rounds of diplomacy aimed at ending the nuclear stalemate on the Korean peninsula. He sat next to Trump's daughter Ivanka, who is also a White House aide, during February's closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in South Korea, an event that was seen as a turning point in the nuclear crisis. He also accompanied Kim Jong Un on both of his recent trips to China to meet President Xi Jinping, and held talks with Pompeo when he traveled to Pyongyang. - Yawning gap - The general is a notorious figure in South Korea, where he is blamed for masterminding the 2010 sinking of the Cheonan navy corvette that killed 46 sailors, an attack for which North Korea denies responsibility. From 2009 to 2016, he also headed North Korea's General Reconnaissance Bureau, the unit tasked with cyber warfare and intelligence gathering. During that period, North Korea ramped up its hacking programs, including a hugely costly penetration of Sony Pictures. General Kim is one of several North Korean officials under US sanctions, but State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said she was sure that the US had taken appropriate administrative steps to allow him to visit New York unmolested. His journey to the US caps a frenetic few days of meetings between North Korean and American officials. An AFP photographer saw Kim Chang Son, Kim Jong Un's de facto chief of staff, entering Singapore's luxury Fullerton hotel Tuesday and leaving some 30 minutes later in a three-vehicle convoy. If the June 12 date stands, officials have only two weeks to finalize details such as where in Singapore the talks will take place and how internationally sanctioned North Korean officials will travel there. The key task is to settle the agenda. The main stumbling block is likely to be the concept of "denuclearization" -- both sides say they want it, but there is a yawning gap between their definitions. Washington wants North Korea to quickly give up all its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way in return for sanctions and economic relief. But analysts say North Korea will be unwilling to cede its nuclear deterrent unless it is given security guarantees that the US will not try to topple the regime. bur-jta-dc-lth/mtp Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov to visit North Korea Moscow, May 30 (AFP) May 30, 2018 Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will travel to North Korea on Thursday to discuss the reclusive state's nuclear programme and bilateral cooperation, the foreign ministry said. "Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's official visit to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea will take place on May 31," the foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. Lavrov and his North Korean counterpart will discuss bilateral ties, North Korea's nuclear programme and other key international problems, the foreign ministry said. Last month North Korea's foreign minister Ri Yong Ho held rare talks with Lavrov in Moscow as Pyongyang moves to improve strained ties with global powers. Lavrov will travel to North Korea amid preparations for a high-stakes, high-drama summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Washington wants North Korea to quickly give up all its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way in return for sanctions and economic relief. Pyongyang has a different view of denuclearization and remains deeply worried that abandoning its deterrent would leave it vulnerable, especially while the United States maintains a robust military presence in South Korea. Dublin, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Competitive Market Leaders - When and Why Vendors Win" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Who is really winning among IT Vendors? Who are customers increasing business with in 2018, when does SAP win verses Oracle verses NCR verses SalesForce/Demandware or Aptos or Toshiba? When do they lose business? What are the highest priorities for each vendor's customers? Are their customers growing faster than the market, increasing IT Spend or decreasing? Are they increasing store counts or decreasing? How fast are they moving to the cloud? Are there customers more likely to be investing in emerging technologies like AI/Machine Learning or SDWAN or IoT or Beacons or Big Data? This is just some of the data that is included in this research. This is what they said who is winning their business and why. The Insight Market View series of research studies build upon all this knowledge and add analyst insight to graphically display vendor positioning, drive for innovation and projected growth. The goal of this report, as well as the entire IHL Retail Executive Advisory Program (REAP), is to provide the retail community with the most detailed and complete picture imaginable of the retail technology landscape. We do this to assist retailers in vendor selection and to help the industry understand the trends, drivers and barriers that are fundamentally transforming our industry. Retailers are encouraged to use these charts in discussions with their vendor partners. It is our intent that they provide unique insights into vendor strategy and provide thought-provoking questions as we all move though and prosper in the Era of Intentional Innovation. Each profile is a series of charts and reviews of the data in the broader study. Here are some of the data points that you get on each vendor. Business Increasing or Decreasing Among Core Segments - This measures purchase intent among this company's customers and what percentage are increasing business, decreasing, not changing, don't work, or won't work with in 2017. How Customers View Themselves in Tech Leadership - This is a picture of the vendor's customers vs. everyone in their key segments as to whether they consider themselves a Leader, Quick Adopter, Late Adopter or Trailer in terms of adopting technology. Key Priorities - Looking at the top Priorities in the Retail Transformation Study, how do this vendor's customers prioritize these items verses the entire market. This shows where this vendor wins and doesn't win. There is great insight in this data. Customer 2017 Growth Plans - This looks at the vendor's customers vs. the market in terms of plans for growing store count, enterprise IT spend and store level IT spend. Together with the first measurement, this shows how their overall business is likely to grow, indicating potential takeover targets and updated competitive positioning. For Core Segments, % of Software Spend Cloud-Based for 2017 - By key line of business categories and in the segments this vendor operates, what percentage of software budget in 2016 is being spent in cloud technologies of total software budget. Customers Spend on Emerging Technologies - This looks at differences between this vendor customer's plans for budget growth in emerging technologies verses the overall market in their segments. Are their customers more or less bullish on Beacons, RFID and Predictive Analytics, and Data Visualization? Sales by Channel - This looks at where this vendor's customers get their business. Are they higher or lower in sales at stores, ecommerce, mobile commerce or other types of transactions? IT Spend by Type - This shows the breakout of what type of spending they are doing for the coming year. Is it going to be mostly Maintenance Upgrades, Ongoing Integration, Upgrading Existing Systems, or truly Transformative IT Spend. IT Spend Increase By Task for 2017 - Where the previous table has the breakout of spend, this looks at the growth rate of investment in the budget for 2017 for those customers. How Do Their Customers Drive Innovation? - This looks specifically at this vendor's customers and how they drive innovation in their companies. Do they look outside to Innovation Labs, Consultants, Universities, have their own team or simply rely on established technologies once they are mature. Key Topics Covered: Introduction How To Read This Report Vendor Profiles Accenture Amazon Apple Aptos AT&T Capgemini Cisco Cognizant Diebold Nixdorf Epicor Fujitsu HP Enterprise HP IBM Infor Infosys JDA Manhattan Assoc. Microsoft NCR Oracle Pitney Bowes PwC Salesforce Samsung SAP SAS Tata Consulting Toshiba Global Commerce Tyco Retail Verizon Wipro Zebra Overall Market View - Apples to Apples On Who Is Winning In Their Markets For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/352vjh/competitive_it?w=12 Top North Korean heads to US, Russian FM to visit Pyongyang Washington, May 30 (AFP) May 30, 2018 A senior figure in the North Korean regime was en route to the US on Wednesday, and Russia's top diplomat was preparing to visit Pyongyang as diplomatic preparations for a historic nuclear summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un gathered pace. General Kim Yong Chol, right-hand man to the North Korean leader, will meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York, officials said. Trump confirmed the general was on his way in a tweet and boasted that Washington would have a "great team" for the talks aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff. The US president still hopes the summit will take place on June 12 in Singapore. "Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young (sic) Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!" Trump wrote. Moscow said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would travel to North Korea on Thursday to discuss Pyongyang's nuclear programme. Last month the North's foreign minister Ri Yong Ho held rare talks with Lavrov in Moscow, part of a quickening effort to improve strained ties with global powers. Russia was a member of six-nation talks held between 2003-8 aimed at persuading the North to scrap its nuclear programme. Japan is also keenly watching summit preparations. Trump will meet its Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington on June 7, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said. "Since the president's May 24 letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans have been engaging," she said. "The United States continues to actively prepare for President Trump's expected summit with leader Kim in Singapore." Kim Yong Chol was at Beijing airport Wednesday for his flight to New York. He used the restricted VIP entrance, according to AFP journalists. Pompeo's spokeswoman said it would be the third meeting between Pompeo -- who opened contacts with the isolated Pyongyang regime when he was still CIA director -- and Kim. "We're still finalising exactly what these meetings will look like," she said. The trip is part of a flurry of diplomacy before the on-again, off-again summit. - Truce village - Trump briefly scrapped the talks last week, citing "open hostility" from the North, but since then both sides have dialled down the rhetoric and the process appears to be back on track. On Sunday US negotiators, headed by Washington's ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, began meeting North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom that divides the two Koreas. "They plan to have additional meetings this week," Sanders said. Kim Yong Chol will be the most senior North Korean on US soil since Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok met then-president Bill Clinton in 2000. The general has played a front-seat role during recent rounds of diplomacy aimed at ending the nuclear stalemate on the Korean peninsula. He sat next to Trump's daughter Ivanka, who is also a White House aide, during February's closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in South Korea, an event that was seen as a turning point in the nuclear crisis. He also accompanied Kim Jong Un on both of his recent trips to China to meet President Xi Jinping, and held talks with Pompeo when he travelled to Pyongyang. - Yawning gap - The general is a notorious figure in South Korea, where he is accused of masterminding the 2010 sinking of the Cheonan navy corvette, which killed 46 sailors, an attack for which North Korea denies responsibility. From 2009 to 2016, he also headed North Korea's General Reconnaissance Bureau, the unit tasked with cyber warfare and intelligence gathering. General Kim is one of several North Korean officials under US sanctions, but State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said she was sure the US had taken appropriate steps to allow him to visit New York unmolested. His journey to the US caps a frenetic few days of meetings between North Korean and American officials. An AFP photographer saw Kim Chang Son, Kim Jong Un's de facto chief of staff, in Singapore Tuesday for preparatory discussions there. The key task is to settle the agenda. The main stumbling block is likely to be the concept of "denuclearization" -- both sides say they want it, but there is a yawning gap between their definitions. Washington wants North Korea to quickly give up all its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way in return for sanctions and economic relief. But analysts say North Korea will be unwilling to cede its nuclear deterrent unless it is given security guarantees that the US will not try to topple the regime. bur-jta-dc-lth/sm/hg Kim's right-hand man comes to US to prep summit New York, May 30 (AFP) May 30, 2018 Kim Jong Un's right-hand man was due in New York on Wednesday for talks with President Donald Trump's top diplomat as officials scramble to organize next month's historic nuclear summit between the North Korean and US leaders. Kim Yong Chol, a veteran power player and a member of the young autocrat's inner circle, was due to arrive on an Air China flight from Beijing at 2:20 pm (1820 GMT), becoming the most senior North Korean official to visit the United States in 18 years. He was due to meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was travelling up from Washington, for talks later Wednesday and on Thursday to finalize planning for a June 12 summit designed to end a nuclear stand-off that once threatened to plunge Korea back into war. US and North Korean envoys have also been meeting in Panmunjong in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, and an American "pre-advance" team is in Singapore to make logistical arrangements for the rapidly planned meeting. But with 13 days to go, the talks between General Kim and Pompeo, the former CIA chief who pioneered the latest round of face-to-face meetings, are the highest-level effort to stabilize the on-again, off-again process of getting two unpredictable leaders to the table. "If it takes place on June 12th, we'll certainly be prepared. If it for some reason takes place at a later date, we'll be prepared for that as well," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Tuesday. Earlier this month, Trump suddenly but only briefly announced an cancellation of the summit after a North Korea issued a sharp rebuke of what it saw as threatening language for the US side, and Sanders warned talks could be postponed if Kim is not serious about disarmament. "Again, denuclearization has to be on the table and the focus of the meeting. And the president has to feel like we're making progress on that front. And the only one that will make that determination will be the president," she said. But the summit appears increasingly likely to go ahead, amid a flurry of international diplomatic activity. Moscow said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would travel to North Korea on Thursday to discuss Pyongyang's nuclear program. Pompeo, meanwhile, called his South Korean and Singaporean counterparts over the weekend. Japan is also keenly watching summit preparations. Trump will meet its Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington on June 7. On Sunday US negotiators, headed by Washington's ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, began meeting North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom that divides the two Koreas. "They plan to have additional meetings this week," Sanders said. Kim Yong Chol will be the most senior North Korean on US soil since Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok met then-president Bill Clinton in 2000. The general has played a front-seat role during recent rounds of diplomacy aimed at ending the nuclear stalemate on the Korean peninsula. He sat next to Trump's daughter Ivanka, who is also a White House aide, during February's closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in South Korea, an event that was seen as a turning point in the nuclear crisis. He also accompanied Kim Jong Un on both of his recent trips to China to meet President Xi Jinping, and held talks with Pompeo when he travelled to Pyongyang. - Yawning gap - General Kim's journey to the US caps a frenetic few days of meetings between North Korean and American officials. An AFP photographer saw Kim Chang Son, Kim Jong Un's de facto chief of staff, in Singapore Tuesday for preparatory discussions there. The key task is to settle the agenda. The main stumbling block is likely to be the concept of "denuclearization" -- both sides say they want it, but there is a yawning gap between their definitions. Washington wants North Korea to quickly give up all its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way in return for sanctions and economic relief. But analysts say North Korea will be unwilling to cede its nuclear deterrent unless it is given security guarantees that the US will not try to topple the regime. bur-dc/ec Taliban, Afghan officials in ceasefire talks: US general Washington, May 30 (AFP) May 30, 2018 Senior Taliban officials have been secretly negotiating with Afghan officials on a possible ceasefire, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan disclosed Wednesday. "A lot of the diplomatic activity and dialogue is occurring off the stage, and it's occurring at multiple levels," General John Nicholson said in a teleconference with reporters at the Pentagon. He would not identify the figures involved in the negotiations, except to say that they included mid- and senior-level Taliban officials. "I should point out they met in secret. This is how they were able to advance the talks," he said, adding that the success of the effort depends in part on the "confidentiality of the process." Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in late February proposed peace talks with the Taliban, saying they could be recognized as a political party if they accepted a ceasefire and recognized the country's 2004 constitution. The Taliban have not officially responded, but deadly attacks have proliferated since then, particularly in Kabul, which has become the most dangerous place in the country for civilians. On Wednesday, militants launched a gun and bomb attack on the Interior Ministry in Kabul, killing a policeman in another demonstration of their ability to strike at the heart of the Afghan capital. The Taliban also claimed responsibility for a predawn attack on a police station in the capital of Logar province, about 70 kilometers (45 miles) southeast of Kabul. Six police officers were killed and eight civilians were wounded, provincial police spokesman Shapoor Ahmadzai said. But Nicholson, who has sought to drive the Taliban to the negotiating table by bringing to bear increased US military pressure, maintained that violence and progress can coexist. He likened the situation in Afghanistan to that of Colombia where the fighting continued up until the FARC guerrilla group and the government signed a peace accord in 2016. In nod to India, US military renames its Pacific Command Pearl Harbor, United States, May 30 (AFP) May 30, 2018 The Pentagon is renaming its oldest and largest military command to reflect the growing importance of the Indian Ocean in US strategic thinking, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Wednesday. From now on, the storied US Pacific Command, or PACOM, which was formed after World War II, will be known as the Indo-Pacific Command. The name change is largely symbolic for now, and won't immediately result in any shifts in the command's boundaries or assets across the vast area stretching from the western part of India to America's Pacific coastline. "In recognition of the increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, today we rename the US Pacific Command to US Indo-Pacific Command," Mattis said in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. "Over many decades this command has repeatedly adapted to changing circumstance and today carries that legacy forward as America focuses west." The name change is part of Washington's efforts to counter China's growing influence across the Asia-Pacific domain, even though critics say President Donald Trump has ceded considerable regional leadership. Trump has pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreed in 2015 by a dozen nations that accounted for 40 percent of the global economy. The remaining 11 countries are moving forward with the deal without Washington, leaving America with a diminished say on regional trade rules and creating an opening for Beijing. - New commander - Recent years have seen China emerge as a major regional power. In 2017, it opened its first overseas naval base in Djibouti and has strengthened ties with several regional countries including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. And Beijing is pursuing its "Belt and Road" global infrastructure initiative that invests in Southeast Asian countries but which US critics say is based on "predatory" economics. "The Indo-Pacific has many belts and many roads," Mattis said. "America continues to invest vigorously in Indo-Pacific stability, bolstering the free and open rules-based international order." Mattis was in Hawaii for a ceremony marking the departure of Admiral Harry Harris as PACOM's head. He has been nominated to be ambassador to South Korea and is being replaced by Admiral Philip Davidson. Mattis in February unveiled the US National Defense Strategy which made clear America will focus on Asia in the context of China's growing military might. China "seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future," Mattis wrote. Pentagon officials say the command's new name also recognizes India's growing role in providing regional security and forces military thinkers to consider the broader region. The Pentagon chief visited India in September in an effort to further strengthen growing military ties, saying at the time that the world's largest democracy is "clearly a pillar of regional stability and security." In 2016 the United States designated India a "Major Defense Partner" with the aim of improving military cooperation, increasing information-sharing and cutting red tape to ease defense deals. Kim's right-hand man in US to prep nuclear summit New York, May 30 (AFP) May 30, 2018 Kim Jong Un's right-hand man flew into New York on Wednesday for talks with President Donald Trump's top diplomat amid a scramble to organize next month's historic nuclear summit between the North Korean and US leaders. Kim Yong Chol, a veteran Pyongyang power player and a member of the young autocrat's inner circle, arrived on an Air China flight from Beijing, becoming the most senior North Korean official to visit the United States in 18 years. He was to meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who saw Trump before setting off from Washington, for dinner on Wednesday and talks Thursday to finalize planning for a June 12 summit designed to end a nuclear stand-off that once threatened to plunge Korea back into war. US and North Korean envoys have also been meeting in Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, and an American "pre-advance" team is in Singapore to make logistical arrangements for the rapidly planned meeting. "So far the readout from these meetings have been positive and we'll continue to move forward with them," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said, confirming the plan is still for the leaders to meet in Singapore on June 12. But with 13 days to go, the talks between General Kim and Pompeo, the former CIA chief who pioneered the latest round of face-to-face meetings, appeared to confirmed that the process of getting two unpredictable leaders to the table is now on track. "As the president says, if it happens, we'll certainly be ready," Sanders said. Earlier this month, Trump suddenly but only briefly announced a cancellation of the summit after a North Korea issued a sharp rebuke of what it saw as threatening language for the US side, and the US side warns talks could be postponed if Kim is not serious about disarmament. "Again, denuclearization has to be on the table and the focus of the meeting. And the president has to feel like we're making progress on that front. And the only one that will make that determination will be the president," Sanders had said Tuesday. But the summit appears increasingly likely to go ahead, amid a flurry of international diplomatic activity. Moscow said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would travel to North Korea on Thursday to discuss Pyongyang's nuclear program. Pompeo and Lavrov spoke by telephone for the first time Wednesday, but their offices' accounts of the call made no mention of Korea. Pompeo called his South Korean and Singaporean counterparts over the weekend and Japan is also keenly watching summit preparations. Trump will meet its Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington on June 7. On Sunday US negotiators, headed by Washington's ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, began meeting North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom that divides the two Koreas. "They plan to have additional meetings this week," Sanders said. Kim Yong Chol will be the most senior North Korean on US soil since Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok met then-president Bill Clinton in 2000. The general has played a front-seat role during recent rounds of diplomacy aimed at ending the nuclear stalemate on the Korean peninsula. He sat next to Trump's daughter Ivanka, who is also a White House aide, during February's closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in South Korea, an event that was seen as a turning point in the nuclear crisis. He also accompanied Kim Jong Un on both of his recent trips to China to meet President Xi Jinping, and held talks with Pompeo when he travelled to Pyongyang. - Yawning gap - General Kim's journey to the US caps a frenetic few days of meetings between North Korean and American officials. An AFP photographer saw Kim Chang Son, Kim Jong Un's de facto chief of staff, in Singapore Tuesday for preparatory discussions there. The key task is to settle the agenda. The main stumbling block is likely to be the concept of "denuclearization" -- both sides say they want it, but there is a yawning gap between their definitions. Washington wants North Korea to quickly give up all its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way in return for sanctions and economic relief. But analysts say North Korea will be unwilling to cede its nuclear deterrent unless it is given security guarantees that the US will not try to topple the regime. bur-dc/ia SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nominations are now open for the inaugural Super Women in Flash Leadership Award at Flash Memory Summit (FMS), held August 7-9, 2018 at the Santa Clara CA Convention Center. The award is a new addition to the successful FMS award categories and is a complement to the annual Super Women in Flash session held at FMS. The Super Women in Flash activities at Flash Memory Summit celebrate our industry, its diversity in all categories, and creating a path for success for women in the industry, said Camberley Bates, Managing Director at Evaluator Group and co-organizer of the event. The Super Women in Flash Leadership Award will honor a woman who has made unique and invaluable contributions to the success of memory technologies, serving as a role model to all who aspire to continued success. The Super Woman in Flash Leadership Award is open to women who currently or in the past have played a leadership role in the flash storage ecosystem. Both individuals and companies can nominate a candidate. Nominations are open until June 29, 2018 and may be completed via this link. An independent panel of judges will review all submissions and select a winner, who will be announced and awarded at an FMS mainstage session on Thursday, August 9, 2018. In related activities, all are invited to join the Super Women in Flash session at Flash Memory Summit on August 7, 2018 from 3:45 pm to 5:15 pm in the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara Cypress room. The session will feature a panel discussion with IBM, Intel, and Weka.IO; networking; and refreshments; with a reception in the Intel pavilion in the exhibit hall to follow. Interested individuals are encouraged to register for this popular event at https://www.evaluatorgroup.com/super-women-flash/. Thanks to our sponsors Evaluator Group, IBM, and Intel for their support of Super Women in Flash activities at FMS. Now in its 13th year, Flash Memory Summit is the worlds largest event showcasing the trends, innovations, and influencers driving the multi-billion dollar non-volatile memory and data storage industry. Supporting Resources Visit FMS: FlashMemorySummit.com Follow FMS on LinkedIn.com/groups/4129499 Follow FMS on Twitter.com/FlashMem Follow FMS on Facebook.com/FlashMemorySummit About Flash Memory Summit Flash Memory Summit, produced by Conference ConCepts, showcases the mainstream applications, key technologies and leading vendors that are driving the multi-billion dollar non-volatile memory and SSD markets. FMS is now the worlds largest event featuring the trends, innovations and influencers driving the adoption of Flash Memory in demanding enterprise storage applications, as well as in smartphones, tablets, and mobile and embedded systems. Media Contacts: Dan Chmielewski +1. 949.231.2965 Suzanne Tuchler +1.408.307.6900 Press@FlashMemorySummit.com Optimization Are you frustrated with a slow pc or a hard disk not performing as it should? Try SLOW-PCfighter to speed up boot time on a slow PC, or try a free scan of FULL-DISKfighter to recover space on a full disk. The latest offering is DRIVERfighter to update your driver updater. Get complete PC optimization and extend the life of your PC with these must-have software tools. 'There Was No Crash' Flight Investigator Claims Murder-Suicide on MH370 Canadian accident investigator Larry Vance claims to have solved the mystery of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. In an interview, he explains why he believes the plane's captain deliberately ditched the aircraft. Maseru (Lesotho), May 30, 2018 (SPS) - The Saharawi President, Secretary General of the Frente POLISARIO, Mr. Brahim Gali, has arrived to the capital of Maseru Ozoto on a three-day working visit. The President was received at the Moshoeshoe I International Airport by the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, Mr. Muniani Mueliki as well as several ministers of the ruling coalition and other personalities. Gali was received with military honors in a solemn ceremony where the notes of the national anthems of the two countries were played. The Saharawi delegation, before heading to their residence, visited several facilities, historical sites and cultural museum of the host country where they received explanations on the different stages of the history of the Kingdom of Lesotho. President Gali will meet with the King of Lesotho and the members of the government of the ruling coalition and pay a courtesy visit to both the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. The presidential delegation consists of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mohamed Salem Ould Salek, the Minister of Cooperation, Bulahi Sid, the Secretary of State for Security and Documentation, Brahim Ahmed Mahmud, Sukeina Larabas, Minetu Larabas, Abdati Breika, Councilor of the Presidency and Maleinin Lakhal, advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. SPS 125/090/TRA Maseru (Lesotho), May 30, 2018 (SPS) - The King of Lesotho, Letsie III, has received at the Royal Palace, the President of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR),Brahim Gali , reiterating during the meeting, the firm support of his country to the right of the Sahrawi people to self-determination. At the reception, the monarch of Lesotho, who is considered the symbol of unity of the kingdom, expressed his understanding of the challenges facing the Saharawi people on their way to independence, clarifying that his country supports the efforts of the United Nations and the African Union, concerning the search for a solution. For his part, the President Brahim Gali, has expressed his thanks to the King Letsie III, for his country support to the cause of the Saharawi people. In the same regard, the head of state, who will have other meetings with the prime minister and the president of the legislative chambers, underlined the will of the Saharwi Republic to deepen, even more, the bilateral relations between both countries. SPS 125/090/TRA Nearly 70 years after the countrys National Parks were first established, opening up the countryside and allowing more people to connect with nature, an independent panel will look at how these iconic landscapes meet our needs in the 21st century including whether there is scope for the current network of 34 AONBs and 10 National Parks to expand. The review, led by writer Julian Glover, will also explore how access to these beloved landscapes can be improved, how those who live and work in them can be better supported, and their role in growing the rural economy. Weakening or undermining their existing protections or geographic scope will not be part of the review, which will instead focus on how designated areas can boost wildlife, support the recovery of natural habitats and connect more people with nature. Undertaking a review is one of the key commitments of the governments 25 Year Environment Plan, which outlines our vision for improving the environment over a generation by connecting people with nature and helping wildlife to thrive. Environment Secretary Michael Gove said: The creation of National Parks almost 70 years ago changed the way we view our precious landscapes helping us all access and enjoy our natural world. Amid a growing population, changes in technology, and a decline in certain habitats, the time is right for us to look afresh at these landscapes. We want to make sure they are not only conserved, but enhanced for the next generation. Sir Arthur Hobhouses landmark report in 1947 paved the way for the creation of Englands network of designated landscapes, with the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act passed in 1949. The Act, described at the time as a recreational gift to Britains returning Second World War service men and women, set out to recognise, conserve and enhance access to landscapes deemed to be of national importance and quality. These days the rugged mountains, unspoilt coastlines and vast moorlands of the nations 34 AONBs and 10 National Parks attract more than 260 million visitors a year from at home and abroad. Julian Glover, who will lead the review, said: Our protected landscapes are Englands finest gems and we owe a huge debt to past generations who had the wisdom to preserve them. The system they created has been a strength, but it faces challenges too. It is an honour to be asked to find ways to secure them for the future. I cant wait to get started and learn from everyone who shares an interest in making Englands landscapes beautiful, diverse and successful. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TSO Logic, a leading analytics platform for discovery and cloud planning, today announced that its predictive analytics platform now supports Google Cloud Platform. TSO Logic has long been a top-tier partner with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, helping enterprises identify the best-fit, lowest-cost options when migrating from on-premise to public and private cloud. With the addition of Google Cloud Platform, TSO Logic now extends that support to all three of the worlds leading public clouds. The TSO Logic platform uses algorithmic analysis to discover the costs and utilization of an organizations on-premise compute, including storage and licensed software. It then automatically identifies the optimal placement for each operating system (OS) instance from millions of possible cloud options. These capabilities are extremely valuable for companies trying to identify what their true cost of cloud will be. With the Google Cloud Platforms custom configurations, there are theoretically infinite options to customize cloud configurations, making an analytics-driven approach extremely beneficial. TSO Logic launched its support for Google Cloud Platform in beta several months ago. Already, organizations using the platform to model future-state costs with Google Cloud Platform are seeing an average 36% savings over their current on-premise costs. One of Google Cloud Platforms competitive advantages is the ability to create custom instance sizes based on your needs, says Aaron Rallo, Chief Executive Officer of TSO Logic. We worked closely with the experts at Google Cloud to ensure that our algorithm produces the optimal hardware and software configuration, at the best price, to fit your workload patterns while maximizing savings. Using the TSO Logic platform, organizations can quickly zero in on the Google Cloud Platform configurations that best meet their resource needs at the lowest cost. Companies will be able to quickly analyze all of Google Clouds unique attribute configurations. The platform automatically accounts for extended memory options, stateless software licenses that are only billed while in use, and monthly sustained use discountsanalysis that would be enormously difficult, if not impossible, using spreadsheets or other manual tools. Using the industrys most accurate directional costing analysis, enterprises will then be able to build a data-backed business case for cloud and continually validate that their migration plan is delivering the results they expect. The TSO Logic Platform is available directly to organizations to support their cloud migration planning. Google Cloud Platform funding may be available for qualified accounts. About TSO Logic TSO Logic provides the most accurate data-driven recommendations to right-size and right-cost compute. We show the actual performance, utilization and TCO of your current environments and cloud alternatives, so you can optimize spending and develop a data-backed business case for change. Organised by LEAF (Linking Environment And Farming), Open Farm Sunday will see hundreds of farmers across the country opening their gates to the public to help them discover the world of farming, from how farmers grow crops for food, clothing, medicine and fuel through to the science and technology behind British agriculture. Since its launch in 2006, Open Farm Sunday has seen two million people visit a farm and learn about the vital work farmers do. Last year, 91 per cent of visitors surveyed said that they were more appreciative of the work farmers do, and 89 per cent said they felt more connected to the farmers that produce our food. Critically for farmers, 73 per cent said they now actively look for British produce to buy since visiting a LEAF Open Farm Sunday event. A series of Open Farm School Days also run throughout June. They provide thousands of school children with the opportunity to visit a farm to learn more about where their food comes from and how it is produced. This was the message from Ian Ohnstad, Milking Technology Specialist from The Dairy Group, who addressed delegates attending the recent MEA (Milking Equipment Association) conference in Birmingham. The average UK herd size is now over 140 cows, and as herds increase, the costs of breakdowns have greater financial implications on a dairy farm business, as well as significant disruption to daily routines. Down time between milkings can be minimal in todays modern units, and therefore how we ensure consistent parlour performance needs to adapt. There will always be an essential need for a on-farm parlour testing service, however as part of their support service going forward, technicians will need to have access to data looking at milking information and parlour and component performance to analyse, diagnose and resolve problems, without a physical visit. From a farmers perspective, this also illustrates the need for an industry accreditation Parlour Safe in the UK so we have total confidence in the ability of the technician when advising. This is recognised throughout the world, as dairy farms become larger and the demand on the milking equipment becomes higher. On many large-scale operations, there simply isnt the capacity in the system to allow for a breakdown. Also, the implications of a poorly operated machine are significant. Teat damage has health and welfare implications, can affect milk quality and also increase mastitis incidence. So, we need to address this we need to avoid defective machines and breakdowns. There are many aspects in dairy farming that are out of our control, and I am aware that milk price volatility and Brexit are causing concern amongst farmers. However, I encourage farmers to focus on what they can control. Look at costs AHDB report the top 25% farmers have an average cost per litre of 25.2ppl, whereas the bottom 25% are over 34ppl. Obviously, there are many variables to consider, such as labour, machinery, vet and med for example. However, a cost often overlooked is parlour running costs, which vary hugely between farms. Ranging from 0.1ppl to 0.87ppl (Kingshay 2016), farmers could make some noticeable savings by simply improving the efficiencies of their parlour. And this is where a qualified technician can advise. Remote consultations offer a great opportunity for future efficiencies and I must stress the need for farmers to utilise data capture to improve parlour performance. FORM 8.5 (EPT/NON-RI) PUBLIC OPENING POSITION DISCLOSURE/DEALING DISCLOSURE BY AN EXEMPT PRINCIPAL TRADER WITHOUT RECOGNISED INTERMEDIARY ("RI") STATUS (OR WHERE RI STATUS IS NOT APPLICABLE) Rule 8.5 of the Takeover Code (the "Code") 1. KEY INFORMATION (a) Name of exempt principal trader: HSBC Securities (South Africa) (Pty) Limited (b) Name of offeror/offeree in relation to whose relevant securities this form relates: Use a separate form for each offeror/offeree Sibanye Gold Ltd (c) Name of the party to the offer with which exempt principal trader is connected: Sibanye Gold Ltd (d) Date position held/dealing undertaken: For an opening position disclosure, state the latest practicable date prior to the disclosure 29-May-2018 (e) In addition to the company in 1(b) above, is the exempt principal trader making disclosures in respect of any other party to the offer? If it is a cash offer or possible cash offer, state "N/A" YES - Lonmin plc. 2. POSITIONS OF THE EXEMPT PRINCIPAL TRADER 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(b), 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: (2) Cash-settled derivatives: 2,735,610 0.121 5,196,040 0.229 (3) Stock-settled derivatives (including options) and agreements to purchase/sell: TOTAL: 2,735,610 0.121 5,196,040 0.229 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 EXEMPT PRINCIPAL TRADER Where there have been dealings in more than one class of relevant securities of the offeror or offeree named in 1(b), 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 Purchases/ sales Total number of securities Highest price per unit paid/received (ZAR) Lowest price per unit paid/received (ZAR) Ordinary Shares Purchase 3,000,000 771.000 c 770.000 c Ordinary Shares Sale 3,000,000 771.000 c 770.000 c (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 (ZAR) Ordinary Shares Swap Reducing a Short Position 1,138,277 766.750 c Ordinary Shares Swap Increasing a Short Position 57,531 769.270 c (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 exempt principal trader making the disclosure and any party to the offer or any person acting in concert with a party to the offer: Irrevocable commitments and letters of intent should not be included. If there are no such agreements, arrangements or understandings, state "none" (b) Agreements, arrangements or understandings relating to options or derivatives Details of any agreement, arrangement or understanding, formal or informal, between the exempt principal trader making the disclosure and any other person relating to: (i) the voting rights of any relevant securities under any option; or (ii) the voting rights or future acquisition or disposal of any relevant securities to which any derivative is referenced: If there are no such agreements, arrangements or understandings, state "none" (c) Attachments Is a Supplemental Form 8 (Open Positions) attached? No Date of disclosure: 30-May-2018 Contact name: Sukant Roy Telephone number: 0207 088 2000 Public disclosures under Rule 8 of the Code must be made to a Regulatory Information Service. The Panel's Market Surveillance Unit is available for consultation in relation to the Code's disclosure requirements on +44 (0)20 7638 0129. The Code can be viewed on the Panel's website at www.thetakeoverpanel.org.uk. In the June 2018 issue of Hoof Beats, USTA President Russell Williams outlined the USTAs opposition to the proposed legislation, H.R.2651, being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives. The USTA is calling on everyone in the harness racing industry to contact their local legislators to express their opposition to the bill. Read on to find out how and why. If you need further information or have any questions, please contact USTA Director of Marketing and Communications Dan Leary at [email protected] and put H.R.2651 in the subject line. Dont We Have Better Things to Do? (by Russell Williams, USTA president) Proposed House bill H.R.2651 is federal legislation that isnt good for harness racing State governments, through their racing commissions, have regulated medication in horse racing for about 60 years. The Horseracing Integrity Act of 2017, or H.R.2651, now pending in Congress, would preempt long-established state regulatory authority, add about three new layers of regulation at the federal level, and impose the costs of it all on horse racing. H.R.2651 proposes a private, independent, self-regulatory, nonprofit corporation to be known as the Horseracing Anti-Doping and Medication Control Authority (HAMCA). HAMCA would be charged with developing and implementing a medication control program for Thoroughbreds, Standardbreds, and Quarter Horses. It would operate under the ultimate authority of the Federal Trade Commission rather than the Department of Agriculture. At the next level down, HAMCAs board would be composed as follows: the chief operating officer of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), six USADA members, and six members that USADA would appoint. The odds on whether any of the 13 members of this board might have any connection with harness racing are impossible to calculate, partly because at no point has anyone representing harness racing been consulted in the preparation of this legislation, with the possible exception of three harness tracks all controlled by the same person. H.R.2651 is the brainchild of the Coalition for Horse Racing Integrity (CHRI), which alleges failure to finalize an interstate compact on racing medication as the reason this federal legislation is needed. The Jockey Club, along with a number of Thoroughbred entities that The Jockey Club guides for purposes of this legislative enterprise, leads CHRI. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is also a member of CHRI. Contrary to law and policy existing today in every racing state, H.R.2651 bans all race-day medication. Frank Stronach asked for this as a precondition to the Stronach Group (which owns six Thoroughbred tracks across the country) joining CHRI. This clause in the federal bill would ban the use of furosemide (marketed under the brand names Lasix or Salix). But the American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP) opposes such a ban, observing that there is no evidence that furosemide either enhances performance or masks substances that might do so, and that using the only medication proven to alleviate exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage is simply the humane way to race horses. Also on the humane front, in the September/October 2017 issue of its magazine, HSUS describes the use of furosemide, the only medication currently permitted on race day, as follows: Currently, a patchwork of state laws enables trainers to give horses drugs that mask pain, allowing the animals to race even when injured. As a revealing aside, in April 2018, HSUS condemned anyone who would call for a heavy-handed government to impose its will from Washington. HSUS used those words in opposing a separate piece of federal legislation. But HSUS evidently supports heavy-handed government in the case of H.R.2651. Unfortunately, by spreading among its many members (HSUS has claimed to have millions of members) an opinion that is unfounded and contrary to the official position of veterinary medicine, HSUS is only darkening the future of all types of horse racing. The federal bill disregards any differences between the racing models of different breeds. State racing commissions, on the other hand, and the Association of Racing Commissioners International (ARCI) do recognize the importance of these differences in regulating racing medication. Historically, Congress has appropriated federal anti-doping funds and granted them to USADA to help cover the cost of drug testing in human sports, which is USADAs sole area of expertise. But H.R.2651 contains no provision for federal funding for HAMCA. Instead, it imposes assessments on state racing commissions as its basic funding mechanism. HAMCA can also borrow money, and the bill states that assessments on state commissions can be used to liquidate loans. Yet HAMCA gets to determine its own budget, giving it a blank check to impose unlimited new costs on racing. It is only reasonable to project that the operating costs that HAMCA would impose on racing would be substantial. For example, in calendar year 2016, state racing commission expenditures in Pennsylvania alone exceeded $16 million. If more money is to be spent, instead of supporting a redundant, inexperienced, and uncontrolled new federal spending organization, we should consider supporting existing medication research as well as any of the other efforts that are already being made to support and improve the sport. Contact your legislators and ask them to oppose H.R.2651 and any companion legislation that may emerge in the Senate. You can find your representative in the House at www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative and your senator at www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_correspond_senators.htm. Following is a sample letter that you can use to send by email or regular mail to your Congressman/Congresswoman. Or as an alternative, you are encouraged to call your representative to express your opposition to H.R.2651. Date Honorable XX XX [OFFICE BUILDING] House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 Dear Congressman/Congresswoman XX [Last name]: As you know, several states support and host pari-mutuel wagering on horse racing. On the other hand, in some states that do not host such betting, there are significant horse breeding and training businesses throughout the state, along with county fair racing, for example. Many of our states residents, including myself, enjoy and are supportive of the horse industry. In that context, I and many others who are supportive of the horse industry are very concerned about, and have strong feelings against, H.R.2651, the Horse Racing Integrity Act of 2017. If enacted, H.R.2651 would be significantly burdensome to the horse industry in that it would create a new, duplicative regulatory bureaucracy at the federal level, on top of an existing state regulatory structure that is operated in 34 state racing jurisdictions around the country -- a system that has functioned well for over 100 years. Moreover, it is likely that this new bureaucracy would create a new structure of fees and taxes to cover some of the federal costs of the new regulatory structure, and those fees and taxes would come from horse owners and the industry at-large. In addition to the regulatory burdens noted above which would be created under H.R.2651, the bill seeks to ban the drug Lasix, or Furosemide. This drug is used in horses to control or prevent Exercise Induced Pulmonary Hemorrhages (EIPH), or bleeding. Horses often experience EIPH during intense exercise, such as during races. Lasix is recognized as an effective, preventative treatment for bleeding in the lungs of horses, which is the reason its use is recognized by the North American Association of Racetrack Veterinarians and the American Association of Equine Practitioners as safe and effective. These veterinarians believe that the use of Lasix to treat bleeders is in the health and welfare interests of the animals. According to a recent American Horse Council study, the horse racing industry contributes some $36 billion annually to the national economy and provides about 240,000 direct jobs. Any measure which will add further regulatory and cost burdens will only harm those state and local economies that depend on the industry. Accordingly, I urge you to oppose H.R.2651 or any identical or similar companion measure. Sincerely, Albany, NY, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to a new market report published by Transparency Market Research titled Power Banks Market Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 2018 2026, the global power banks market is expected to reach a value of US$ 15,334.2 Mn by 2026. The market is estimated to expand at a CAGR of 6.7% during the forecast period from 2018 to 2026. Asia Pacific dominated the power banks market in 2017 owing to the rapid adoption of power banks among consumers over the years. With growing consumer preference for frequent charging options and huge market potential, the power banks market is expected to witness considerable growth in the coming years. Request to View Sample of Report - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=4105 In this report, the power banks market has been segmented on the basis of product type into portable power banks, solar power banks, and phone charging cases. Portable power banks dominated the market owing to the rise in adoption of power banks over the years. However, solar power banks are expected to witness the fastest growth rate during the forecast period. On the basis of power rating, the market has been segmented into up to 3,000 mAh, 3001 mAh to 8000 mAh, 8001 mAh to 20,000 mAh, and above 20,000 mAh. The market has been further segmented on the basis of different port types, applications, and distribution channels. On the basis of different port types, the market has been segmented into two and more than two. Power banks with multiple ports dominated the market due to the rising number of gadgets used by people across the globe. On the basis of application, the market has been segmented into industrial and consumer electronics. By distribution channel, the market has been segmented into online distribution channel and offline distribution channel. Offline distribution channel has been further segmented into supermarkets and hypermarkets, exclusive stores, multi-brand retail stores and others. Online distribution channel is expected to witness the fastest growth during the forecast period. Request PDF Brochure of Report: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=4105 By geography, Asia Pacific held the largest share in the power banks market in 2017. Increasing disposable income in Asia Pacific has increased the sale of smart phones, which is directly related to the demand for power banks. The Asian market however is driven by Li-ion batteries which are anticipated to remain dominant. Moreover, the consumer buying for power banks is majorly for charging mobiles and tablets and thus is expected to generate the highest revenue in terms of end use. Consumers in China, Thailand, Japan etc. have shifted their buying preference toward quality buying and also believe in brand loyalty. The buying of power banks is increasing rapidly in the region owing to two major drivers, the increased number of smartphone users and also the inconvenience caused by power cuts. Major trends driving North American consumers are the mobility and versatility of the device. Consumers prefer devices or portable power banks that have sleek design and are lightweight, which makes them easy to carry. Request For Discount On This Report: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=D&rep_id=4105 Additionally, consumers also seek versatility such as smartphones, laptops, tablets etc. with multiple charging ports. The European market is highly driven by technology and like the North American market is attracted toward sleek and stylish designs, with high power and versatile support. However, with growing income amongst the population, the market is attracted toward brand names and is often brand loyal. Thus, in order to cater to the European market, manufacturers are constantly trying to make technological advancements and new product innovations. Consumers prefer power banks with increased battery life and multi-port configurations. Due to the brand loyalty of consumers, brands often provide products with additional promotions and offers that result in the rise in demand for power banks. The online buying trend in Europe is anticipated to dominate the portable power bank as well as the electronics consumer goods market in the region. All these above mentioned factors have propelled the growth of the power banks market in this region. Other regions such as Middle East & Africa (MEA) and Latin America are expected to witness rapid growth during the forecast period. The report also provides company market share analysis of key players operating in the power banks industry. Request For Custom Research: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=CR&rep_id=4105 Key Players Some of the key players in this market include Anker Technology Co. Limited, Apacer Technologies, Inc., Braven LC INCIPIO Technologies, Inc., EasyAcc.com, Inc., Goal Zero Corporation, GP Batteries International Ltd, IEC Technology, LLC, Maxell Holdings, Ltd., MiPow Limited, Mophie, Inc, Panasonic Corporation, RavPower, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Sony Corporation, and Xtorm BV. The key players operating in the power bank market adopt numerous strategies to sustain in the market. Product development, acquisition, and partnership are some of the key strategies adopted by key players to gain competitive advantage over their competitors. More Trending Report by Transparency Market Research - North America Power Bank Market: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/north-america-power-banks-market.html Power Cable Accessories Market: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/power-cable-accessories-market.html About TMR Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge. Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement. Contact LAUSANNE, Switzerland and CAMPBELL, Calif., May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bestmile, the leading mobility services platform used to operate, manage, and optimize highly automated vehicle fleets, today announced it has joined mobility operating system (OS) maker Renovos AWare Ecosystem. The integration of Bestmiles Mobility Services Platform makes highly automated vehicles using Renovos AWare OS fleet ready, as Bestmiles platform can be used to deploy, manage and optimize automated mobility on demand robotaxi services using these vehicles regardless of type or the automated driving system used. For new mobility services to deliver on their promise to transform transportation, highly automated vehicles must be able to work together and use data from multiple sources to intelligently optimize performance, said Raphael Gindrat, CEO of Bestmile. We share Renovos vision of an open, interoperable, on-demand ecosystem where best-in-class technologies combine to bring about optimized automated mobility safely, quickly and economically, and are pleased to be a part of this ecosystem. Bestmiles technology enables highly automated vehicles to work together as intelligent fleets, delivering on-demand services with automated dispatching, traveler communication, route optimization, pooling, and energy and maintenance management. Advanced matching algorithms process traveler, vehicle and third-party data to send the right vehicle to the right place at the right time. Data intelligence and machine learning constantly improve system performance. Service providers use the platform to configure service areas, define key performance metrics such as vehicle utilization and wait times, and monitor services in real time. Renovos AWare OS offers an open ecosystem of best-in-class technologies to make the deployment of highly automated vehicles in fleets safer, more secure and more efficient, said Chris Heiser, co-founder and CEO of Renovo. With Bestmile joining this ecosystem, our customers deploying automated mobility fleets now have access to Bestmiles technology which offers a leading comprehensive technology suite to manage them. We will be using Bestmiles Mobility Services Platform to help manage the Renovo fleet in California. Renovos AWare OS allows diverse mobility technologies to work together to enable automated vehicles to operate safely and efficiently. This is important as automated mobility providers need to integrate with a wide range of embedded and external technologies such as onboard sensors, cameras, 3D mapping, remote access and control, and more. The results of Bestmile and Renovos integration partnership will be shown later this year in San Jose, Calif., when Renovos double-digit fleet of highly automated vehicles will be demonstrated, managed by Bestmile, in a configuration delivering on-demand, door-to-door robotaxi services. The Bestmile platform has the tools mobility operators need to manage their mobility services, including a control center operator dashboard for autonomous fleet management and apps that travelers need to book rides, view vehicle locations and ETAs, and reach their destinations via optimized routes. The joint activities will provide valuable data for Renovo, Bestmile and its partners on the performance of passenger management, routing, vehicle tele-operation, sensors and lasers, 3D mapping, real-time traffic detection and response, and more. AWare is already powering highly automated vehicle fleets including Renovos own on public roads today, and Bestmiles technology is managing fleets on public streets and private sites on three continents. Bestmile joins the AWare ecosystem along with a growing list of leading companies in the automated mobility sector including Samsung, Verizon, Velodyne LiDAR, Parsons, INRIX, Argus Cyber Security, CARMERA, Affectiva, Phantom Auto, Metamoto, Civil Maps, Understand.ai and others. About Bestmile Bestmile empowers mobility providers to deploy, manage and optimize autonomous and human-driven vehicle fleets, supporting fixed-route and on-demand services, regardless of the vehicle brand or type. Bestmiles mobility platform allows operators to support multi-modal, multi-service offerings in a safe and efficient manner by integrating autonomous vehicles in the existing transportation ecosystem. Bestmiles autonomous mobility service platform is being used daily in shared electric autonomous vehicles in pedestrian areas and public roads. Incorporated in 2014, Bestmile has global offices in San Francisco (USA) and Lausanne (Switzerland). For more information, visit www.bestmile.com. About Renovo Renovo builds AWare, an Operating System for Automated Mobility. AWare merges software, data analytics, and automotive-grade safety systems into a unified platform that enables a growing range of technologies and services to be combined in Automated Mobility fleet deployments. Renovo is accelerating the commercial realization of Automated Mobility at scale by enabling AWare compatible technologies and services across the widest range of vehicles, fleets, and the cloud. Renovo combines Silicon Valley agility with proven automotive capabilities with a singular commitment to transform the way people and things move. For more information visit: renovo.auto Media Contacts Bestmile Alison Flood +1 (415) 317-4089 bestmile@10fold.com Renovo Mike West +1 (415) 698-8574 Renovo@codewordagency.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/70529f15-c717-4285-bb66-85995ba5f357 CALGARY, Alberta, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FLYHT Aerospace Solutions Ltd. (TSX-V:FLY) (OTCQX:FLYLF) (the Company or FLYHT) is pleased to announce the receipt of the Canadian Patent for their real-time data streaming technology, FLYHTStreamTM. The Canadian Patent for the Companys commercially available emergency data streaming technology was granted by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and will add to FLYHTs existing patents for this technology in China and the United States. FLYHT is the industry leader in real-time data streaming and recently demonstrated the functionality for cockpit audio and flight data streaming as part of the Boeing EcoDemonstrator Program, remarked FLYHTs CTO Derek Graham. This patent protects our intellectual property which we believe will ultimately be adopted throughout all of commercial air transport. FLYHTStream is used during an emergency or abnormal situation onboard an aircraft. It sends flight data recorder information to the airline immediately, through a real-time communications network, so airlines and investigators know the status and exact location of the aircraft. Data streaming is initiated either automatically during an unsafe condition, by the pilots through an event button in the cockpit or by the operations team on the ground through the UpTimeTM server. Key airline personnel are notified immediately, and essential data is streamed from the aircraft. This technology meets industry requirements. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has passed a performance-based requirement for new aircraft type designs to make the flight recorder data available in a timely manner by 2021. The intent of ICAOs Timely Access to Flight Recorder Information is to resolve problems recently encountered when aircraft and their black boxes cannot immediately be accessed. See more on the requirement in the June 5, 2017 edition of the FLYHT CEO Letter. This patent number 2,796,119 is titled Automated Aircraft Flight Data Delivery and Management System with Demand Mode and was issued on May 1, 2018. Visit FLYHTs website for a video of the FLYHTStream technology. About FLYHT Aerospace Solutions Ltd. FLYHTs mission is to improve aviation safety, efficiency and profitability (located in Calgary, Canada; publicly traded as: FLY:TSX.V; FLYLF:OTCQX). Airlines, leasing companies, fractional owners and original equipment manufacturers have installed the Automated Flight Information Reporting System (AFIRSTM) on their aircraft to capture, process and stream aircraft data with real-time alerts. AFIRS sends this information through satellite networks to the UpTimeTM cloud-based data center, which provides aircraft operators with direct insight into the operational status and health of their aircraft and enables them to take corrective action to maintain the highest standard of operational control. Contact Information FLYHT Aerospace Solutions Ltd. Alana Forbes Chief Financial Officer 403-291-7437 aforbes@flyht.com Adelaide Capital Markets Inc. Deborah Honig 647-203-8793 deborah@adelaidecapital.ca Join us on social media! www.facebook.com/flyht www.twitter.com/flyhtcorp www.slideshare.net/flyhtcorp www.youtube.com/flyhtcorp www.flyht.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. Dublin, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Global HPV Vaccine Market: Analysis By End-User (Male, Female), By Age Group (Adolescents, Adults) - By Region, By Country (2017-2022)- By Region (North America, Europe, APAC and RoW), By Country (US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, China, India, Japan)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Global HPV Vaccine Market Report has covered and analysed the potential of Global HPV Vaccine Market and provides statistics and information on market size, shares and gro wth factors. The report intends to provide cutting-edge market intelligence and help decision makers take sound investment evaluation. Besides, the report also identifies and analyses the emerging trends along with major drivers, challenges and opportunities in the global HPV vaccine market. Additionally, the report also highlights market entry strategies for various companies across the globe. The segment of Female HPV vaccine market witnessed growth at a noteworthy rate over the past few years and is expected to grow in the forecast period on the back of rising awareness regarding HPV related fatal diseases, rising healthcare expenditures along with rising disposable incomes. Amongst the regions, North America accounts for the largest regional share in the global HPV vaccine market in 2017. Key factors driving the robust growth rate of North America region include emergence of second generation of HPV vaccines with lower dosage schedule and increasing HPV vaccination recommendation for male adolescents and adult population, increasing number of patients diagnosed with anogenital and oropharynx cancers as well as rising prevalence of HPV virus. Key Topics Covered: 1. Research Methodology 2. Executive Summary 3. Strategic Recommendations 4. HPV Vaccine Market: Product Outlook 5. Global HPV Vaccine Market: Growth and Forecast 5.1. Global HPV Vaccine Market, By Value (2012-2016) 5.2. Global HPV Vaccine Market, By Value (2017-2022) 5.3. Global HPV Vaccine Market - By End-User, By Value 5.3.1. Global HPV Vaccine Market, By Value, % (2016) 5.3.2. Global HPV Vaccine Market, By Value, % (Forecast 2022F) 5.4. Global HPV Vaccine Market, By End-User, By Value (2012-2022) 5.4.1. Male, By Value (2012-2022) 5.4.2. Female, By Value (2012-2022) 5.5. Global HPV Vaccine Market, By Age-Group, By Value (2012-2022) 5.5.1. Adolescent, By Value (2012-2022) 5.5.2. Adult, By Value (2012-2022) 6. North America HPV Vaccine Market: Growth and Forecast 7. Europe HPV Vaccine Market: Growth and Forecast 8. Asia-Pacific HPV Vaccine Market: Growth and Forecast 9. ROW HPV Vaccine Market: Growth and Forecast 9.1. ROW HPV Vaccine Market, By Value (2012-2016) 9.2. ROW HPV Vaccine Market, By Value (2017-2022) 10. Market Dynamics 10.1. Increasing healthcare awareness about Sexually Transmissible Disease 10.2. Development of Healthcare Infrastructure 10.3. Rising global healthcare expenditure and favorable reimbursed policies 11. Market Restraints 12. Market Trends 13. SWOT Analysis - HPV Vaccine Market 14. Porter's Five Forces Analysis 15. Policy and Regulatory Landscape 16. Company Profiles 16.1. Merck and Co 16.2. GlaxoSmithKline For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/vkgfsb/global_hpv?w=12 TO VIEW MORE NEWS STORY, PLEASE CLICK ON NEWS TAB ON MAIN MENU BAR CAPITALIZATION TSX Symbol: STGO Total Basic Shares O/S (M): 42.9 BOARD OF DIRECTORS MATTHEW WOOD Chairman, President and CEO BATAA TUMUR-OCHIR Director and Vice President Mongolia ANEEL WARAICH Director and Executive Vice President JEREMY SOUTH Director PATRICK MICHAELS Director DR. ZAMBA BATJARGAL Director BOARD APPOINTMENT TORONTO, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Steppe Gold Limited (TSX:STGO) (the Company or Steppe Gold) is very pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Lewis Marks to the Companys Board as a Director. Mr. Marks has lived and worked in Asia for 37 years with a residence and business operations in Mongolia for most of the last 18 years. Mr. Marks currently serves as a Director of CWT Mongolia, importing diesel into Mongolia from Russia; is a shareholder of Bayandari LLC, a Mongolian agriculture company focused on wheat production from approximately 24,000 hectares outside of Ulaanbaatar; and is a Director of Tsast Impex LLC, the second largest construction company in Mongolia. Mr. Marks also serves as Member of the Board of Directors of the LIM Japan Fund, a role hes had since 2002. From 1980 to 1993 he was with Marc Rich & Co. AG (purchased by Glencore International AG in 1993) and remained with Glencore International AG from 1993 to 2000, where part of his responsibilities included selling Mongolian copper into China. Prior to that, from 1997 until 1980, he practiced law at Yanagida & Nomura in Tokyo, Japan (formerly Yanagida & Sakuragi). Mr. Marks earned his Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and his Juris Doctor from the School of Law, State University of New York at Buffalo. The Company is fortunate to be able to add someone of Mr. Marks' experience and expertise and it is expected that Mr. Marks will be of great assistance in the successful development of the Companys ATO project. On behalf of the Board Matthew Wood Chairman, President and CEO Steppe Gold Limited ABOUT STEPPE GOLD Steppe Gold is a precious metals exploration and development company with an aggressive growth strategy to build Steppe into the premier precious metals company in Mongolia. The Company owns the advanced staged Altan Tsaagan Ovoo (ATO) gold project, where first gold production is targeted for late 2018, and the exciting Uudam Khundii (UK) gold exploration project. Mongolia is open for business, pro mining development and one of the last great frontiers where giant mineral deposits can be found and developed. CONTACT INFORMATION THE COMPANYS HEAD OFFICE: Shangri-La office, Suite 1201, Olympic street 19A, Sukhbaatar District 1, Ulaanbaatar 14241, Mongolia Tel: +976 7732 1914 TORONTO OFFICE: 90 Adelaide Street. W, Suite 400 Toronto, ON M5H 3V9, Canada Tel: +1 647 697 0577 TRANSFER AGENT: Lori Winchester Senior Relationship Manager, Client Management Phone: +1 416 607-7898 Cell: +1 416 671-4558 Email: lori.winchester@tmx.com Blog Archive Apr 2010 (22) May 2010 (25) Jun 2010 (8) Jul 2010 (12) Aug 2010 (18) Sep 2010 (19) Oct 2010 (29) Nov 2010 (30) Dec 2010 (18) Jan 2011 (13) Feb 2011 (21) Mar 2011 (23) Apr 2011 (19) May 2011 (31) Jun 2011 (36) Jul 2011 (46) Aug 2011 (26) Sep 2011 (12) Oct 2011 (15) Nov 2011 (17) Dec 2011 (7) Jan 2012 (18) Feb 2012 (4) Mar 2012 (12) Apr 2012 (18) May 2012 (10) Jun 2012 (21) Jul 2012 (8) Aug 2012 (15) Sep 2012 (7) Oct 2012 (17) Nov 2012 (20) Dec 2012 (10) Jan 2013 (58) Feb 2013 (59) Mar 2013 (60) Apr 2013 (98) May 2013 (135) Jun 2013 (204) Jul 2013 (293) Aug 2013 (351) Sep 2013 (363) Oct 2013 (348) Nov 2013 (374) Dec 2013 (442) Jan 2014 (547) Feb 2014 (476) Mar 2014 (526) Apr 2014 (527) May 2014 (469) Jun 2014 (408) Jul 2014 (472) Aug 2014 (522) Sep 2014 (443) Oct 2014 (472) Nov 2014 (497) Dec 2014 (536) Jan 2015 (539) Feb 2015 (520) Mar 2015 (582) Apr 2015 (658) May 2015 (679) Jun 2015 (673) Jul 2015 (728) Aug 2015 (803) Sep 2015 (923) Oct 2015 (924) Nov 2015 (802) Dec 2015 (791) Jan 2016 (782) Feb 2016 (835) Mar 2016 (929) Apr 2016 (866) May 2016 (947) Jun 2016 (1044) Jul 2016 (882) Aug 2016 (1035) Sep 2016 (967) Oct 2016 (918) Nov 2016 (854) Dec 2016 (885) Jan 2017 (879) Feb 2017 (777) Mar 2017 (896) Apr 2017 (872) May 2017 (850) Jun 2017 (851) Jul 2017 (971) Aug 2017 (1040) Sep 2017 (998) Oct 2017 (1144) Nov 2017 (1046) Dec 2017 (838) Jan 2018 (873) Feb 2018 (769) Mar 2018 (885) Apr 2018 (809) May 2018 (827) Jun 2018 (820) Jul 2018 (840) Aug 2018 (854) Sep 2018 (844) Oct 2018 (851) Nov 2018 (870) Dec 2018 (912) Jan 2019 (919) Feb 2019 (827) Mar 2019 (957) Apr 2019 (913) May 2019 (1007) Jun 2019 (935) Jul 2019 (950) Aug 2019 (936) Sep 2019 (910) Oct 2019 (920) Nov 2019 (874) Dec 2019 (908) Jan 2020 (941) Feb 2020 (849) Mar 2020 (898) Apr 2020 (848) May 2020 (822) Jun 2020 (789) Jul 2020 (819) Aug 2020 (858) Sep 2020 (841) Oct 2020 (873) Nov 2020 (812) Dec 2020 (780) Jan 2021 (765) Feb 2021 (716) Mar 2021 (819) Apr 2021 (805) May 2021 (815) Jun 2021 (824) Jul 2021 (830) Aug 2021 (832) Sep 2021 (791) Oct 2021 (319) IRVING, Texas, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Beyontec a provider of core administration software for property/casualty insurance, is pleased to make two announcements in conjunction with the 2018 IASA Educational Conference & Business show. First, 2018 is Beyontecs 10th year in business. Formerly known as B2-USA in the United States and Beyontec Solutions elsewhere in the world, the brands were consolidated under Beyontec in 2016. And the companys product, formerly known as EZ*Insure, was re-branded as the Beyontec Suite. Beyontec is planning a number of celebrations throughout the year, particularly in its offices in Texas, USA; Dubai, UAE; and Chennai, India. Second, to help insurers increase efficiency and productivity, reduce time and cost, and write more business, we now offer robotic process automation (RPA) to any organization in the industry regardless of the software or technology used. By robotically automating business and routine decision-making processes, RPA improves operations and outcomes. It runs 24x7, making it highly reliable and increasing the scalability of the organization. And by preconfiguring our bots to the specific business rules of any organization, our bots can be deployed in just four to six weeks. This is an amazing year in our history, said Vivek Sethia, cofounder and CEO at Beyontec USA. Being able to roll out new capabilities, even as were marking the 10th year since our founding, isnt something we might have imagined a decade ago. But weve worked very hard. Weve found loyal customers whove invested their faith in us. Weve grown the kind of creative, responsive organization about which we were only dreaming 11 or 12 years ago. Were grateful and humble for everything weve been able to achieve. And we look forward to our next 10 years of service to the insurance industry. About Beyontec Beyontec, with U.S. headquarters in Irving, TX, is a privately held company that provides its workflow-driven, fully configurable software, the Beyontec Suite, to the property/casualty insurance industry. The fully configurable Beyontec Suite gives insurers the independence and self-sufficiency they want, letting them configure products, processes, and workflows to suit their needs and preferences. For more information, please visit www.beyontec.com, e-mail sales@beyontec.com, or call 940-294-8080. Media contact: JoAnna Bennett 860-333-5009 joanna@obriencg.com VIENNA, Austria, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- APEIRON Biologics AG, a company focused on cancer immunotherapy, today announced it would present data on two of its key programs in three poster presentations at the 2018 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, being held on June 1-5, 2018, in Chicago, IL. ASCO is the worlds largest conference in the field of clinical oncology and attracts approx. 39,000 oncology professionals from around the world to discuss state-of-the-art treatment modalities, new therapies, and ongoing controversies in the field. In the first presentation, APEIRON will present data in the session: "Developmental Therapeutics Immunotherapy." (June 4, 8:00am - 11:30am CDT). These data summarize the results of a Phase I study with APEIRONs innovative project APN401, a first-in-class cellular checkpoint blockade therapy. The poster is titled: "Adoptive cellular immunotherapy with APN401, autologous cbl-b silenced peripheral blood mononuclear cells: Data from a phase I study in patients with solid tumors" (abstract #3055; H.Loibner et al). The therapy modifies isolated patients' own blood cells (mononuclear cells of peripheral blood), by ex vivo silencing of the intracellular "master checkpoint" protein cbl-b. The activated immune cells are re-administered to the patient within one day and should help to fight the cancer. Data from the completed Phase I study in patients with advanced and metastatic solid tumors show a good tolerability profile and initial signals of immunological activation and clinical activity. In the second and third presentations, APEIRON is co-author of two abstracts on its monoclonal antibody ch14.18/CHO (Qarziba) for the immunotherapy of pediatric neuroblastoma. In 2017, APEIRON received marketing approval in the European Union (EU) for ch14.18/CHO. EUSA Pharma Ltd licensed the global rights to the product in 2016 and is responsible for worldwide marketing, distribution and further approvals. Details for the two presentations, both of which will be on Saturday, June 2, 2018 at 8:00 am 11:30 am CDT, are as follows: Immunotherapy with anti-GD2 antibody ch14.18/CHOIL2 within the HR-NBL1/SIOPEN trial to improve outcome of high-risk neuroblastoma patients compared to historical controls. (abstract #10539; R.Ladenstein et al) Association of regulatory- and helper-T- cells with inferior survival of neuroblastoma patients treated with long-term infusion of ch14.18/CHO combined with interleukin-2. (abstract #10530; H.Lode et al) The Company will be available at booth #21099 to meet with interested individuals and answer questions. About APEIRON Biologics AG Apeiron is a private biotech company based in Vienna, Austria, engaged in innovative immuno-oncology projects. APEIRON is working on cancer immunotherapies, based on two different approaches, targeted, tumor-specific approaches and targeted activation of the immune system by novel "checkpoint-blockade mechanisms." APN401 is a first-in-class individual cellular immunotherapy for the treatment of various forms of cancer, based on the "Master Checkpoint" protein Cbl-b. For additional information please go to www.apeiron-biologics.com and follow us on Twitter @apeironbio. For further information please contact: APEIRON Biologics AG Peter Llewellyn-Davies, CFO/CBO Email: investors@apeiron-biologics.com www.apeiron-biologics.com Investor Relations LifeSci Advisors, LLC Chris Maggos T +1 (646) 597 6989 Email: Chris@LifeSciAdvisors.com Media Relations international MC Services AG Dr. Claudia Gutjahr-Loeser T +49 89 210 228 0 Email: apeiron@mc-services.eu Media Relations Austria: PR&D - Public Relations for Research & Education T +43 1 505 70 44 Email: contact@prd.at LOS ANGELES, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AgEagle Aerial Systems, Inc. (NYSE American:UAVS), an aerial drone imagery collection and analytics company, today announced that it will be presenting at the 8th annual LD Micro Invitational on Monday, June 4 at 5:00 PM PST / 8:00 PM EST. Bret Chilcott, CEO, will be giving the presentation and meeting with investors. The event is slated to be our largest Invitational to date, stated Chris Lahiji, President of LD Micro. When the fires caused the cancellation of our Main Event back in December, we vowed to come back even stronger. This event showcases our firms ability to attract the most unique and exciting names in micro-cap. The conference will be held at the Luxe Sunset Bel Air Hotel, will feature 230 companies in the small-cap / micro-cap space, and will be attended by over 1,000 individuals. View AgEagles profile here: http://www.ldmicro.com/profile/UAVS Profiles powered by LD Micro About AgEagle Aerial Systems, Inc. Founded in 2015, AgEagle designs, produces, distributes and supports technologically-advanced small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) that it supplies to the precision agriculture industry. The companys line of automated flying drones collects valuable information for farmers by flying over large fields of corn, soy beans, wheat and other types of crops, collecting thousands of ultra-high-resolution pictures using sophisticated near-infrared sensors, or cameras. These aerial images are ultimately utilized to enhance yield and promote sustainability. The company is based in Neodesha, Kansas. For more information, please visit www.ageagle.com. About LD Micro LD Micro was founded in 2006 with the sole purpose of being an independent resource in the microcap space. The firm hosts several influential conferences annually (Invitational, Summit, and Main Event). In 2015, LDM launched the first pure microcap index (the LDMi) to exclusively provide intraday information on the entire sector. LD will continue to provide valuable tools for the benefit of everyone in the small and micro-cap universe. For those interested in attending, please contact David Scher at david@ldmicro.com or visit www.ldmicro.com for more information. Contact: Analysts and Institutional Investors Liolios Investor Relations Cody Slach Sean Mansouri P: 949-574-3860 Individual and Retail Investors Integra Consulting Group Jeremy Roe P: 925-262-8305 Source: AgEagle Aerial Systems, Inc. via LD Micro PHOENIX, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Todd Denkin, COO of Digipath, Inc. (OTCQB:DIGP) (the Company) was recently interviewed on Uptick Newswires Stock Day podcast. COO Todd Denkin describes Digipath, Inc., as a service-oriented independent testing lab and media firm focused on the burgeoning cannabis industry. Digipath Labs is lauded as a leading cannabis testing lab in Nevada, a status that Denkin credits to Great science and unmatched customer service are the key as growth in the cannabis industry mandates that consumers know that the products they buy are safe from pesticides, mold and other potentially harmful compounds. The data that we collect today will be very helpful in the future. The company offers a diverse array of services, from laboratory testing services and plant genomics to site audits, product development, and more. Expansion plans are in the works, with a site in California being prepped for construction to launch another cannabis testing laboratory. The potential to spread internationally is there as well; Cannabis is really a global industry, says Denkin. "Canada, Israel, and Colombia are all ideal countries to work with for the export of cannabis and related products. Denkin believes that the future is bright for Digipath Inc. As a pioneer and market leader in the cannabis lab testing market, we are now leveraging our experience to pursue targeted acquisitions and joint ventures that drive strategic and financial value for our company and our shareholders. The company is currently trading at 18.5 cents per share, with a 7.6 million dollar market cap. The trading experts at Uptick Newswire believe this is extremely undervalued. To learn more about Digipaths expansion plans and long-term company goals, please listen to the full interview at the link below. https://upticknewswire.com/featured-interview-ceo-todd-denkin-of-digipath-inc-otcqb-digp-2/ About DigiPath, Inc. Digipath, Inc., is an independent cannabis testing and media firm that supports the cannabis industrys best practices for reliable testing, and delivers unbiased cannabis news coverage and education about the cannabis industry. Digipaths two business units are Digipath Labs and TNM News Corp. Digipath Labs is working to set the industry standard for testing all forms of cannabis-based products using FDA-compliant laboratory equipment and proprietary SOPs to ensure product safety and efficacy. TNM News Corp. has pioneered the nations first and only unbiased marijuana news network, The National Marijuana News; that delivers news, interviews and education on all things cannabis. Visit us at: http://www.digipath.com Safe Harbor Act This press release contains "forward-looking statements" that include information relating to future events. Forward-looking statements should not be read as a guarantee of future performance or results and will not necessarily be accurate indications of the times at, or by, which that performance or those results will be achieved. Forward-looking statements are based on information available at the time they are made and/or management's good faith belief as of that time with respect to future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to differ materially from those expressed in, or suggested by, the forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause these differences include, but are not limited to: Digipaths need for additional funding, the demand for Digipaths products, governmental regulation of the cannabis industry, Digipaths ability to maintain customer and strategic business relationships, the impact of competitive products and pricing, growth in targeted markets, the adequacy of Digipaths liquidity and financial strength to support its growth, and other risks that may be detailed from time-to-time in Digipaths filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. For a more detailed description of the risk factors and uncertainties affecting Digipath, please refer to Digipaths recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings, which are available at www.sec.gov. Contact Harrison Phillips Viridian Capital Advisors, LLC (212) 209-3086 hphillips@viridianca.com About Uptick Newswire and the Stock Day Podcast Uptick Newswire is a private company reaching out to the masses keeping investors and shareholders up to date on company news and bringing transparency to the undervalued, undersold, micro-cap stocks of the market and is the sole producer of the Uptick Network Stock Day Podcast. The Uptick Network Stock Day Podcast is an extension of Uptick Newswire and has recently launched the Video Interview Studio located in Phoenix, Arizona. Investors Hangout is a proud sponsor of Stock Day, and Uptick Newswire encourages listeners to visit the companys message board at https://investorshangout.com/ Uptick Newswire provided the above as a paid service, for further information regarding disclosed services purchased by companies, visit https://upticknewswire.com/investor-central/ It is understood that investing in micro-cap securities is highly speculative and carries an extremely high degree of risk. Any suggestions made by Uptick Newswire staff regarding companies featured on upticknewswire.com is solely that a suggestion, nothing more. It is our expectation that investors will do their own due diligence. We recommend that readers use the information found within as a starting point for conducting their own research on the featured company in order to determine their own personal opinion of the company before investing. Uptick Newswire is not liable for any investment decisions made by our readers. Readers should investigate and fully understand all risks before investing. Contact: Uptick Newswire, LLC Dana Peters, Communications Director 602-441-3474 dana.uptick@gmail.com Ingenico Group enters into exclusive negotiations with Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe to combine BS PAYONE with Ingenico Retail assets in DACH Press Release Paris, May 30th, 2018 Ingenico Group, (Euronext: FR0000125346 - ING), the global leader in seamless payment, today announced it entered into exclusive negotiations regarding the combination of BS PAYONE owned by DSV (a subsidiary of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe) with Ingenico Retail assets in DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). This non-cash business combination would be 52% owned and consolidated by Ingenico Group. The joint-venture would create the clear market leader in the attractive German market with the broadest offering in-store and online covering the specific needs of all types of merchants. Both parties would become long term partners in the DACH region. Current BS PAYONE shareholders would maintain meaningful minority rights in line with their 48% stake. Headquartered in Frankfurt, BS PAYONE is a leading full-service payment provider offering instore and online payment solutions and employing around 700 people. Serving more than 250,000 merchants in various industries, from small and medium-size businesses to large international accounts, BS PAYONE is the second largest international card acquirer in Germany and a major Network Service Provider (NSP). BS PAYONE benefits from close partnerships with a large number of savings banks in Germany. The parties intent to sign definitive agreements in Q3 2018. About Ingenico Group Ingenico Group (Euronext: FR0000125346 - ING) is the global leader in seamless payment, providing smart, trusted and secure solutions to empower commerce across all channels, in-store, online and mobile. With the world's largest payment acceptance network, we deliver secure payment solutions with a local, national and international scope. We are the trusted world-class partner for financial institutions and retailers, from small merchants to several of the world's best known global brands. Our solutions enable merchants to simplify payment and deliver their brand promise. Learn more at www.ingenico.com twitter.com/ingenico About BS PAYONE BS PAYONE GmbH is one of the leading omnichannel-payment providers in Europe. As a full-service payment service provider, the company offers both standardised and individual payment solutions for point of sale and e-commerce transactions on all devices and across all channels in line with each customer's requirements. Companies that wish to offer cashless payments to their customers receive from BS PAYONE all products for automated processing of all payment processes from a single source. This includes the acceptance of all common national and international credit and debit cards, alternative payment methods (APMs), POS and self-service terminals for stationary trade and the automated and holistic processing of e-commerce and mobile payments. The company provides its customers with the highest degree of quality through the most modern network operations ensuring the highest level of security for the processing of payment data. The payment-service provider is a subsidiary of the Deutsche Sparkassenverlag, making it part of the Sparkassen Finance Group. BS PAYONE GmbH is licensed by and falls under the oversight of Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin), and processes more than one billion transactions every year. About DSV Group / Deutscher Sparkassenverlag The DSV Group, consisting of Deutscher Sparkassenverlag and its subsidiaries and associated companies, generates annual sales of EUR 900,1 million (source: 2017 temporary balance sheet). As a specialized solution provider, the DSV Group provides the institutions and associations of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe (Savings Banks Finance Group) with both analog and digital media content. Electronic forms and advisory systems, technical equipment, and bank cards round out this product range. The spectrum of products and services is enhanced by IT-supported services, payment solutions, Web sites, and all-around agency services, including communications plans and PR events. The company has approximately 2,150 employees, and its headquarters are located in Stuttgart. The DSV Group also operates a large number of offices in other cities across Germany. Contacts / Ingenico Group Investors Laurent Marie VP Investor Relations & Financial Communication laurent.marie@ingenico.com (T) / 01 58 01 92 98 Investors Kevin Woringer Investor Relations Manager kevin.woringer@ingenico.com (T) / 01 58 01 85 09 Communication Coba Taillefer External Communication Manager coba.taillefer@ingenico.com (T) / 01 58 01 89 62 Upcoming events 2018 half year results: 25th July 2018 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: INGENICO via Globenewswire Resolutions of the Nokia Annual General Meeting 2018, Nokia Board of Directors established a Technology Committee Nokia Corporation Stock Exchange Release May 30, 2018 at 17:15 (CET +1) Resolutions of the Nokia Annual General Meeting 2018, Nokia Board of Directors established a Technology Committee Espoo, Finland -The Annual General Meeting ("AGM") of Nokia Corporation was held on May 30, 2018 and adopted the following resolutions: Dividend The AGM resolved to distribute a dividend of EUR 0.19 per share for the financial year 2017. The ex-dividend date is on May 31, 2018. The dividend record date is on June 1, 2018 and the dividend is expected to be paid on or about June 13, 2018. The actual dividend pay date outside Finland will be determined by the practices of the intermediary banks transferring the dividend payments. Members of the Board of Directors and Board Committees elected, Board's Technology Committee established The AGM resolved to elect ten members to the Board of Directors of Nokia ("Board"). The following members of the Board were re-elected for a term ending at the close of the Annual General Meeting in 2019: Bruce Brown, Jeanette Horan, Louis R. Hughes, Edward Kozel, Elizabeth Nelson, Olivier Piou, Risto Siilasmaa, Carla Smits-Nusteling and Kari Stadigh. In addition, Sari Baldauf was elected as a new member of the Board for the same term. The qualifications and career experience of the elected Board members are available at http://www.nokia.com/en_int/investors/corporate-governance/board-of-directors/meet-the-board. In an assembly meeting that took place after the AGM, the Board elected Risto Siilasmaa as Chair of the Board, and Olivier Piou as Vice Chair of the Board. The Board also elected the members of the three existing Board committees. Carla Smits-Nusteling was elected as Chair and Jeanette Horan, Louis R. Hughes, Edward Kozel and Elizabeth Nelson as members of the Audit Committee. Bruce Brown was elected as Chair and Sari Baldauf, Elizabeth Nelson, Olivier Piou and Kari Stadigh as members of the Personnel Committee. Risto Siilasmaa was elected as Chair and Sari Baldauf, Bruce Brown, Carla Smits-Nusteling and Kari Stadigh as members of the Corporate Governance and Nomination Committee. The Board also established a Technology Committee primarily as an advisory forum and for the purpose of reviewing Nokia's high-level innovation and technology strategies which are formulated and executed by the management of the Company. Consequently, Edward Kozel was elected as Chair and Bruce Brown, Jeanette Horan, Louis R. Hughes, Olivier Piou and Risto Siilasmaa as members of the Committee. The Charter of the Technology Committee is available at https://www.nokia.com/en_int/investors/corporate-governance/committees-of-the-board. The AGM resolved the following annual fees to be paid to the members of the Board for the term ending at the Annual General Meeting in 2019: EUR 440 000 for the Chair of the Board, EUR 185 000 for the Vice Chair of the Board and EUR 160 000 for each Board member. In addition, the AGM resolved that the Chairs of the Audit Committee and the Personnel Committee will each be paid an additional annual fee of EUR 30 000, and other members of the Audit Committee an additional annual fee of EUR 15 000 each. Furthermore, the AGM resolved to pay an additional annual fee of EUR 20 000 to the Chair of the Technology Committee. The AGM also resolved to pay a meeting fee of EUR 5 000 per meeting requiring intercontinental travel and EUR 2 000 per meeting requiring continental travel for Board and Committee meetings to all the other Board members except the Chair of the Board. The meeting fee would be paid for a maximum of seven meetings per term. The AGM resolved that the members of the Board of Directors shall be compensated for travel and accommodation expenses as well as other costs directly related to Board and Committee work. In addition, the AGM resolved, in line with Company's Corporate Governance Guidelines, that approximately 40% of the annual remuneration will be paid in Nokia shares purchased from the market, or alternatively by using treasury shares held by the Company. The Board members shall retain until the end of their directorship such number of shares that corresponds to the number of shares they have received as Board remuneration during their first three years of service in the Board (the net amount received after deducting those shares needed to offset any costs relating to the acquisition of the shares, including taxes). The meeting fee and costs directly related to Board and Committee work will be paid in cash. Other resolutions of the Annual General Meeting The AGM re-elected PricewaterhouseCoopers Oy as the auditor for Nokia for the fiscal year 2018. The AGM authorized the Board to resolve to repurchase a maximum of 550 million Nokia shares. The shares may be repurchased under the proposed authorization in order to optimize the capital structure of the Company and the Board expects them to be cancelled. In addition, shares may be repurchased in order to meet obligations arising from debt financial instruments that are exchangeable into equity instruments, to settle the Company's equity-based incentive plans, or to be transferred for other purposes. The authorization is effective until November 30, 2019 and it terminated the corresponding repurchase authorization granted by the Annual General Meeting on May 23, 2017. The AGM also resolved to authorize the Board to issue a maximum of 550 million shares through issuance of shares or special rights entitling to shares in one or more issues. The authorization may be used to develop the Company's capital structure, diversify the shareholder base, finance or carry out acquisitions or other arrangements, settle the Company's equity-based incentive plans, or for other purposes resolved by the Board. Under the authorization, the Board may issue new shares or shares held by the Company. The authorization includes the right for the Board to resolve on all the terms and conditions of the issuance of shares and special rights entitling to shares, including issuance of shares or special rights in deviation from the shareholders' pre-emptive rights within the limits set by law. The authorization is effective until November 30, 2019 and it terminated the corresponding authorization granted by the Annual General Meeting on May 23, 2017. The authorization did not terminate the authorization by the Extraordinary General Meeting held on December 2, 2015 granted to the Board for issuance of shares in order to implement the combination of Nokia and Alcatel Lucent. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS It should be noted that Nokia and its businesses are exposed to various risks and uncertainties and certain statements herein that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding: A) our ability to integrate acquired businesses into our operations and achieve the targeted business plans and benefits, including targeted benefits, synergies, cost savings and efficiencies; B) expectations, plans or benefits related to our strategies and growth management; C) expectations, plans or benefits related to future performance of our businesses; D) expectations, plans or benefits related to changes in organizational and operational structure; E) expectations regarding market developments, general economic conditions and structural changes; F) expectations and targets regarding financial performance, results, opeRating expenses, taxes, currency exchange rates, hedging, cost savings and competitiveness, as well as results of operations including targeted synergies and those related to market share, prices, net sales, income and margins; G) expectations, plans or benefits related to any future collaboration or to business collaboration agreements or patent license agreements or arbitration awards, including income to be received under any collaboration or partnership, agreement or award; H) timing of the deliveries of our products and services; I) expectations and targets regarding collaboration and partnering arrangements, joint ventures or the creation of joint ventures, and the related administrative, legal, regulatory and other conditions, as well as our expected customer reach; J) outcome of pending and threatened litigation, arbitration, disputes, regulatory proceedings or investigations by authorities; K) expectations regarding restructurings, investments, capital structure optimization efforts, uses of proceeds from transactions, acquisitions and divestments and our ability to achieve the financial and operational targets set in connection with any such restructurings, investments, capital structure optimization efforts, divestments and acquisitions; and L) statements preceded by or including "believe", "expect", "anticipate", "foresee", "sees", "target", "estimate", "designed", "aim", "plans", "intends", "focus", "continue", "project", "should", "is to", "will" or similar expressions. These statements are based on management's best assumptions and beliefs in light of the information currently available to it. Because they involve risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially from the results that we currently expect. Factors, including risks and uncertainties that could cause these differences include, but are not limited to: 1) our strategy is subject to various risks and uncertainties and we may be unable to successfully implement our strategic plans, sustain or improve the operational and financial performance of our business groups, correctly identify or successfully pursue business opportunities or otherwise grow our business; 2) general economic and market conditions and other developments in the economies where we operate; 3) our dependence on the development of the industries in which we operate, including the cyclicality and variability of the information technology and telecommunications industries; 4) uncertainty related to the amount of dividends and equity return we are able to distribute to shareholders for each financial period, as well as the risk factors specified on pages 71 to 89 of our 2017 annual report on Form 20-F published on March 22, 2018 under "Operating and financial review and prospects-Risk factors" and in our other filings or documents furnished with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Other unknown or unpredictable factors or underlying assumptions subsequently proven to be incorrect could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. We do not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except to the extent legally required. About Nokia We create the technology to connect the world. Powered by the research and innovation of Nokia Bell Labs, we serve communications service providers, governments, large enterprises and consumers, with the industry's most complete, end-to-end portfolio of products, services and licensing. We adhere to the highest ethical business standards as we create technology with social purpose, quality and integrity. Nokia is enabling the infrastructure for 5G and the Internet of Things to transform the human experience www.nokia.com Media Enquiries: Nokia Communications Tel. +358 (0) 10 448 4900 Email: press.services@nokia.com Jon Peet, Vice President, Corporate Communications Investor Enquiries: Nokia Investor Relations Tel. +358 4080 3 4080 Email: investor.relations@nokia.com 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: NOKIA via Globenewswire 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. Master blender Don Pepin Garcia is, without question, prolific. Aside from producing his own eponymous brand, this Cuban-born entrepreneur currently crafts cigars for such clients as United Tobacco, 5 Vegas, and Tatuaje, among others, from his perch at El Rey de Los Habanos in Miami. It goes without saying that much of his work is highly acclaimed. Before he became a major commercial success, Ashton hired Garcia in 2007 to make a new line of cigars called San Cristobal (he also makes La Aroma de Cuba and Benchmade for Ashton). Constructed entirely from Nicaraguan tobacco, the blend consists of eight sizes. My colleague awarded the torpedo-shaped Fabuloso four stogies for its complexity and profile of earth, spice, and bitter chocolate. Still going strong with Ashton, this summer Garcia introduced a San Cristobal offshoot at the IPCPR Trade Show in New Orleans. It is called Seleccion del Sol (Spanish for Selection of the Sun) in honor of the sungrown wrapper that surrounds this three-vitola line of Nicaraguan puros. The leaf is worthy of distinction because it is from Garcias Estrella farm in Esteli. Estrella sits on a picturesque plot of land surrounded by green hills, where sunlight abounds and the soil is as thick and as dark as coal, says Ashtons website. Pepin and his son, Jaime, hand-selected these beautiful wrappers from the first crop of tobaccos harvested from Estrella explicitly for this cigar. Beautiful may not be the best word to describe Seleccion del Sol. Once you remove both flamboyant bands, youre left with a dry, somewhat listless leaf, a rough cap, and prominent veins and seams. But beauty does not a good cigar make. To determine this cigars real value, I smoked three Robustos, each of which cost $6.50 at my local tobacconist. These five inch by 52 ring gauge sticks start with pre-light notes of cocoa and coffee creamer. After lighting, they yield a profile of dry cedar, honey, and an undertone of spice. The overall effect is one of a mild- to medium-bodied smoke thats more traditional-tasting than the bold cigars for which Garcia is known. Rather than being disappointed, though, Im pleasantly surprised. And the physical propertiesincluding a solid white ash, a perfect burn, and an effortless drawmake the Seleccion del Sol even easier to like. The delightful aroma of the resting smoke is an added bonus. So even though this Robusto bears little resemblance to other Garcia smokes (or other sungrown-wrapped cigars, for that matter), count me as a fan. Im going to pick up more of these to stash in my humidor. For its sweet and enticing flavor and excellent construction, Im happy to award the new Seleccion del Sol Robusto four stogies of out five. [To read more StogieGuys.com cigar reviews, please click here.] Patrick A photo credit: Stogie Guys NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Daxor Corporation (NYSE MKT: DXR), an innovative medical instrumentation and biotechnology company focused on blood volume measurement, announced that Michael Feldschuh, chief executive officer of Daxor, will be a featured presenter at the LD Micro Invitational Conference on Monday June 4, 2018 at 4:30 PM Pacific Time. The conference is being held at the Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel in Los Angeles, CA. Mr. Feldschuh will provide an overview of the companys business model and growth strategy, and will be available for one-on-one meetings. Interested investors may request a meeting time by contacting Bret Shapiro, at COREIR, either by calling 516-222-2560 or via brets@coreir.com. About Daxor Daxor Corporation is an innovative medical instrumentation and biotechnology company. We manufacture the BVA-100 Blood Volume Analyzer, the first instrument cleared by the FDA to provide rapid direct measurement of a patients blood volume and optimal volume. Since its introduction the BVA-100 Blood Volume Analyzer has been used in over 40,000 clinical cases and numerous research studies highlighting its potential to transform therapy in a broad range of surgical and medical conditions The companys mission is to help hospitals and physicians incorporate DAXORs advanced technologies to significantly improve the quality of patient care. For more information please visit our website at http://www.daxor.com/. Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements in this release may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including without limitation, statements regarding the impact of hiring sales staff and expansion of our distribution channels. Forward-looking statements are predictions, projections and other statements about future events that are based on current expectations and assumptions and, as a result, are subject to risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this release, including, without limitation, those risk associated with our post-market clinical data collection activities, benefits of our products to patients, our expectations with respect to product development and commercialization efforts, our ability to increase market and physician acceptance of our products, potentially competitive product offerings, intellectual property protection, FDA regulatory actions, our ability to integrate acquired businesses, our expectations regarding anticipated synergies with and benefits from acquired businesses, and additional other risks and uncertainties described in our filings with the SEC. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date when made. Daxor does not assume any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Four days ago Pakistan finally abolished the colonial era administration of the FATA Pushtun tribal areas along the Afghan border. FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) are now merged into the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Until 2010 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was known as NWFP (North-West Frontier Province) and largely consisted of tribal peoples who preferred to be treated as another province of Pakistan and not a tribal area. Despite that when the 2010 name change took effect the Pushtun majority in NWFP violently protested and demanded that the renamed NWFP be called just Pakhtunkhwa which means Land of the Pushtuns. The NWFP minority tribes who wanted their own small provinces. Khyber refers to the Khyber Pass near the Afghan border. For thousands of years, this has been the most convenient route for travelers, and invaders, coming from Central Asia to India. The government compromised with the awkward name Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. FATA increases the population of Khyber (the short term for the province) about 14 percent and nearly all of those new people are Pushtuns. Before the merger, Khyber was 74 percent Pushtun and after the merger that goes up to 78 percent. This is likely to encourage support for establishing Pushtunstan (a new nation combining the Pushtun populations of Pakistan and Afghanistan). That will never happen because Afghanistan and Pakistan oppose it and the Pushtuns have never been united enough to pull it off and that has not changed. The merger of FATA into Khyber is the latest of many recent changes for FATA and the Pakistani Pushtuns. For example in 2009 Pakistan changed the rules in the seven federally administered tribal areas (FATA), allowing political parties for the first time. FATA is about 27,000 square kilometers in size, and containing 5.6 million people (mostly Pushtun) and is where the Pakistani Taliban have been strongest. Because of the Pushtun influence, Khyber was always a close second. FATA has always had a separate set of laws, which depend more on tribal leaders than elected officials (thus the ban on political parties, which would be a direct challenge to tribal elders.) But even many tribal elders have sought the authority to establish political parties, thus the change. This did not solve the problems in FATA. By 2013 a decade of post-2001 anti-terrorist operations in the tribal territories (as demanded by the enraged Americans after September 11, 2001) led to the Pakistani government finally make an effort to fundamentally change the way things were run in the tribal areas. The century old agreement (between the British colonial officials and the Pushtun tribal chiefs) gave the tribes a lot of autonomy, in exchange for peace. This was continued when the new Pakistani government replaced British control in 1947. Over a decade of Taliban unrest pushed the government to face the problem (of tribal governance) head on and begin to tear up the 1901 agreement. Not all the tribal people, and their leaders were unhappy with this. The Taliban terrorism had exposed the weakness of tribal government. Many believed that change couldn't be any worse than what was already happening in the Pushtun areas of the northwest. The government found itself caught in a tribal civil war (between reformers and traditionalists) and the militarys own desire to protect the terrorists who work (more or less) for the generals. The continued existence of North Waziristan as a terrorist sanctuary forced more Pushtun tribes to protest this arrangement because most of the Taliban terror attacks were in FATA and Khyber province. Its more difficult for the Taliban to carry out terror attacks outside the tribal territories (more police, fewer sympathetic civilians) but all those attacks in the tribal territories killed a lot of innocent Pushtun, including women and children. According to Pushtun traditions, this is considered very bad manners. So even many Pushtun were hostile to the army support for Islamic terrorists in North Waziristan. In 2014 Pakistan began a military campaign in North Waziristan that killed or chased away most of the Islamic terrorists there and forced most of the civilians out for over a year. This campaign was supposed to be over by 2016 but it continues, with much of the fighting moved to Khyber province. The elimination of North Waziristan as an Islamic terrorist sanctuary denied groups like al Qaeda any hope of finding a refuge in Pakistan. As those North Waziristan refugees returned they found that much had changed. As has happened elsewhere in the tribal territories, when the Islamic terrorists are chased out, things changed, usually for the better. This is a pattern that goes way back. Pakistan's problems along the Afghan border are mostly about the difficulty of integrating its Pushtun and Baluchi tribes into the nation of Pakistan. In southwest Pakistan (Baluchistan) there are the Baluchi, and in the northwest, there are the Pushtun. Both groups are very territorial and hostile to outsiders. But people from Punjab (48 percent of the population) and Sindh (29 percent) are better educated and possess technical skills lacking in the Pushtun tribal territories (16 percent, FATA and Khyber) and Baluchistan (seven percent), and must be brought in to do work requiring education and experience. While Sindh province has economic development levels similar to India, the tribal territories are more similar to the less developed nations in Africa. What the tribes lack in economic development they make up for in terms of aggressiveness and hostility towards the more numerous and wealthier lowlanders. For thousands of years, these mountain tribes raided and plundered their lowland neighbors. But the last time that happened was nearly a century ago when Pushtuns from Afghanistan joined tribal brethren on the other (British India) side of the border and headed for the lowlands. The tribesmen didn't make it far and spent three months trying. Folks along the border still talk about that one. When Pakistan was created in 1947, the tribes were still not pacified and were a sixth of the population. Ever since then a growing number of Pushtun and Baluchi moved into the lowlands (especially the cities, like Karachi) while many lowlanders moved into the tribal areas, bringing needed skills and a veneer of government and modern civilization. But the tribal leaders and their ancient form of government persisted, as did the custom of most adult males being armed, and ready to fight (or turn into a bandit). This, as much as the corrupt and self-serving Pakistani military has defined and defiled the history of Pakistan. But one major aftereffect of the North Waziristan campaign was that the government assured everyone that henceforth the security forces would have a lot more presence in this area and tribal power would be forever limited. Many Pushtun dont like this, but a majority did or didnt care. As bad as the Taliban and Pushtun political pressure is the threat of all Pushtuns in the region uniting is worse. This is complicated by the fact that Pakistan considers Afghanistan a client state and many Pakistanis support that attitude because of the Pushtun threat. That threat is getting worse inside Pakistan. The Afghans are considered a collection of fractious tribes pretending to be a nation. With no access to the sea, most Afghan road connections to ports are with Pakistan. The Afghans resent this, especially since for thousands of years invasions of northern India (which, historically, lowland Pakistan was a part of) came out of Afghanistan where many Pushtun tribesmen would join the invaders. Pakistan and India are well aware of this, and still, consider the Pushtuns a bunch of bloodthirsty savages from the mountains. Afghanistan has only been around for a few centuries and Pakistan was carved out of British India in 1947. Before that, it was a collection of feudal states and tribal territories. When you get right down to it, Pakistan's big problem is that it contains two-thirds of the Pushtun people (who are 15 percent of Pakistan's population) while Afghanistan contains the other third (who are 40 percent of Afghanistan's population.) "Pushtunstan" is a nation of 30-40 million Pushtuns caught between Pakistan (still over 170 million people without the Pushtuns) and northern Afghanistan (with about 20 million non-Pushtuns) Without Pushtuns, Afghanistan would become yet another Central Asian country with a small population (neighboring Tajikistan has 7.7 million and Uzbekistan has 30 million). But Pushtunstan is never going to happen because the Pushtuns have long been divided by tribal politics and cultural differences. When the Pushtun aren't fighting outsiders, they fight each other. The violent and fractious Pushtuns are a core problem in the region and have been for centuries. There is no easy solution to this and now more Pushtuns are openly calling for the establishment of a Pushtunstan and are making common cause with the Baluchis to the south (in Baluchistan) who have long fought to establish an independent Baluchistan. Both tribal separatist groups want to be rid of the Pakistani military and the Islamic terrorist organizations the military supports. Meanwhile, Pakistani Pushtuns are uniting to oppose the mistreatment of Pushtuns in general. For example, since mid-May leaders of the PTM (Pashtun Tahafuz Movement or Pashtun Protection Movement) have gone public with complaints that the security forces (controlled by the military) are kidnapping PTM leaders. So far the kidnappings have not escalated to murder but the PTM leaders taken were interrogated, threatened, beaten and released. PTM fears their leaders will start to disappear and at that point, things could get violent. The Pakistani military is aware of that as well and is reluctant to play rough with Pushtuns who have a reputation for pushing back even harder. PTM is a growing Pushtun nationalist movement in Pakistan that seeks peaceful resolution of issues. Pakistani Generals Expand Their Target List In addition to increased attacks on uncooperative journalists, the Pakistani military and ISI (military intelligence) are also making life more difficult for American diplomats in Pakistan. In addition to legal and media based harassment, Pakistani hackers have been found going after the online activities of Western, especially American, diplomats. Both these efforts are generating more pushback than expected. While the military now has a dominant position in the Pakistani economic, media and political life it is also encountering growing resistance from within the military and the population as a whole. The core problem is that the enormous power and wealth of the military is based on a lie. Actually, there are several lies but the one that has gotten the generals into the most trouble at home and abroad is their insistence that they do not support Islamic terrorist groups who are willing to follow orders from Pakistani general. These are the groups, like Haqqani Network, the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar e Toiba. The first two carry out terror attacks in Afghanistan, as a way to keep the Afghan government weak and Pakistani influence strong. The Afghans do not like this at all. The third group is one of the main military sponsored Islamic terror groups that attack India and other nations in the region the Pakistani generals feel they are unofficially at war with. The victims are angry about these losses. The victims' list is long and includes Afghan and Pakistani Pushtuns, Pakistanis and Afghans in general and thousands of Indians who have died from this violence and the millions who still live in fear from actual or potential Pakistani sponsored Islamic terrorism. Pakistan has always been reluctant to discuss the army decision in the 1970s to sponsor Islamic terror groups to attack India and control Afghanistan were the source of most of this continuing mayhem. The Pakistan military blames all the Islamic terrorism losses in Pakistan on India, Israel, the United States, Afghanistan and anyone else who will resonate with Pakistani public delusions. What Pakistan plays down is the damage done by something else it supports in Afghanistan; the drug trade. The opium and heroin coming out of Afghanistan (now the major source of it) results in 18 times more Pakistanis dying each year from drug addiction than from terrorism. When there are deaths from terror attacks there are headlines. The larger number of drug related deaths get little attention, nor does the notorious Pakistani support for the drug trade. Pakistan is the source of chemicals and other supplies needed to convert opium into heroin. Pakistan is the main export route for heroin (via Karachi) and many politicians and security officials have grown rich by taking bribes to let the heroin and opium move around the country. This is the main reason why over six million Pakistanis are addicts, a statistic that, like the many drug related deaths, is kept in the shadows. The Pakistani military uses the lies about India sponsoring Islamic terrorism inside Pakistan to justify an aggressive, and technically illegal policy towards India which includes ordering troops to constantly fire across the border (usually into Indian Kashmir) and insist that the Indians fired first. This has justified the military acquiring control over so much of the economic and political life. The army has the guns and the determination to protect their power and privileges. More importantly, the military has control of a large chunk of the economy and the loyalty of much of the population. This is due to military control of many media outlets and journalists, and decades of propaganda that has turned India into a threat that it is not and the Pakistani military into a national asset, which it is not. More Pakistanis are turning against the military, including senior officials who spent decades as part of the military operation they are now exposing and condemning. A majority of Pakistanis were always hostile to all the corruption and violence (especially inside Pakistan) the military generated to achieve their current power. The current effort to suppress news is all about a recently published book by former (three times) prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Even closer to home the military is trying suppress news of a recent book by Asad Durrani, a former (1990-92) head of ISI (military intelligence) that was written with a former head of RAW, the Indian equivalent of ISI. These two intel experts compare perspectives and it does not look good for the Pakistani military. Durrani was recently barred from leaving the country for any reason. Durrani and Sharif are but the latest (and among the most senior) Pakistani insiders to go public with details of how the Pakistani military operates. While the Pakistani military is gradually losing its power due to relentless and growing opposition inside Pakistan, the military still controls nuclear weapons. Worse there are a growing number of generals who are true believers in Islamic radicalism (some have even joined Islamic terror groups after retiring). These true believers are a minority in the military leadership but that fact that they exist and the fact that Pakistan was able to build nuclear weapons via corrupt practices (and then secretly offer some of the tech for sale) makes a lot of people inside and outside Pakistan nervous. This makes many senior generals uncomfortable as well. The current head of the Pakistani military, Qamar Javed Bajwa, has expressed an interest in moving away from this unofficial support for Islamic terrorism. Bajwa seems to recognize that he cannot run Pakistan (via another military government) and that the growing tensions with India are indeed dangerous. The Indians have nukes and a track record of defeating Pakistan every time the two nations get into a war. China has openly proclaimed that it is not a military ally of Pakistan so Bajwa realizes he actually is in a weak position that is liable to get worse and end very badly for Pakistan, Bajwa and the Pakistani military. China also openly urges Pakistan to make peace with India. As open to peace talks as Bajwa says he is he cant even admit that he has imposed on himself a lot of difficult restrictions. He cannot admit that Pakistan is sponsoring Islamic terrorism anywhere. In private discussions with Chinese and American officials Bajwa is called out on the reality of the military still supporting Islamic terrorism. Bajwa can deny the accusations from the Americans but the Chinese cannot be lied to. The Chinese support Pakistani lies publicly but privately urge the Pakistanis to face reality before they trigger a nuclear war that would destroy a lot of valuable Chinese investments. To help this peace effort along the Chinese openly deny they are any kind of military ally of Pakistan. Casualties The Pakistani military continues to reduce Islamic terror violence in Pakistan while increasing it in Afghanistan and India. In 2014, when the Pakistani army finally decided to shut down sanctuaries for Islamic terror groups not under military control, there were 5,496 Islamic terror related deaths in Pakistan and the Pakistani public was enraged at the military. In 2015 that Islamic terror related deaths in Pakistan dropped to 3,682, then to 1,803 in 2016, 1260 in 2017 and so far in 2018 it looks like these deaths will fall to under 600. India, with six times as many people, has had terror related deaths under a thousand a year since 2012 and most of those have nothing to do with Islamic terrorism. That trend continues, despite increased Pakistani efforts in Kashmir. India will have more terrorism related deaths but still under a thousand. In 2017, for the first time in many years, India had more terrorist fatalities from Islamic terrorism than from leftist rebels in eastern India and tribal separatists in the northeast. This Pakistani aggression in Kashmir is pushing the two nations towards war, despite the possibility of both sides using nukes. This has brought more pressure on the Pakistani military to behave. Despite the growing popularity (among Moslems) of Islamic radicalism in the last three decades, Moslem majority Bangladesh has been largely free of it. Compared to Pakistan (with a ten percent larger population) Bangladesh still had only six percent as many terrorist deaths as Pakistan during 2017. So far it looks like Bangladeshi terror related deaths will decline even more in 2018, to less than three percent of the Pakistani total. Not So Quiet On the Northwest Front In response to the continued Pakistani border violations India has agreed to expand its bunker construction program along the Pakistani border, especially the Kashmir portion. A year ago India began building a hundred bullet and shell-proof bunkers in villages that have experienced the most from increased Pakistani firing across the border. Each bunker can accommodate 20 or more people. These bunkers were an experiment and if they did significantly reduce civilian casualties. They did but it was clear that smaller bunkers were needed for individuals or small groups of people working in areas frequently hit by Pakistani fire. These are usually farmlands or pasture area where herds are often tended by one shepherd. The latest plan is to build at least 14,000 bunkers. About ten percent of the bunkers will be the larger ones the rest will be smaller ones that hold a few people. So far in 2018 Pakistani forces have violated the ceasefire on the border over 200 times a month. May 24, 2018: Pakistan has agreed to buy 30 ATAK (T129) helicopter gunships from Turkey. The T129 is a license built version of the Italian A-129. The Pakistan purchase is partly driven by Turkish purchase, exactly a year ago, of 52 Pakistani MFI-395 Super Mushshak training aircraft. This was the largest export order to date for Pakistani built aircraft. May 23, 2018: The U.S. accused Pakistan of deliberately harassing American diplomats as a form of retaliation for cuts in American financial aid. May 21, 2018: In Pakistan the military escalated its use of coercion against uncooperative Pakistani media. In this case it was blocking the distribution of the Dawn newspaper which first printed an interview with a former prime minister who admitted that the 2008 Islamic terror attacks on India in Mumbai were the work of a Pakistan based Islamic terrorist group that has long, and still does, receive support and sanctuary by the Pakistani military. Dawn has continued to report on that interview, the book and the reaction of readers inside Pakistan and worldwide. Details of the 2008 Mumbai attack are well documented and widely accepted worldwide and were included book Dawn gave a lot of attention to. But to discuss this in inside Pakistan can get you into trouble. Sometimes fatal trouble. Dawn is the oldest and most read English language newspaper in Pakistan. The military had suspended distribution of Dawn in areas that the military controls (because of military bases, military operations or because the military controls much of the local economy.) This sort of thing backfires because the military cannot control the Internet and as the news gets through anyway people are eagerly seek it out and embrace it. Among those embracing this news are many Pushtuns in the northwest who are openly blaming the military for all the Islamic terrorism and chaos in the Afghan border areas where most Pushtun live. May 18, 2018: China has openly praised Pakistan for how well its security forces, especially the army, have kept thousands of Chinese working in Pakistan on major construction projects safe from Islamic terrorist attack. This public praise is also a warning that any loss of security for those Chinese and their massive buildings projects would result in China reducing its economic activity in Pakistan. China has done this before, in Afghanistan and Burma and thus this is no hollow threat. This is more important now that the United States has been cutting economic and military aid to Pakistan because Pakistan refuses to curb Islamic terrorist groups it controls. These Chinese interests are colliding with the growing international pressure on Pakistan to halt what it is doing to support Islamic terrorist activity in Afghanistan, India and elsewhere. The UN has been trying to address that issue and censure Pakistan but China has been blocking those efforts. This is becoming more difficult for China to do as the evidence against Pakistan (especially from former senior government and military officials in Pakistan) continues to accumulate. May 17, 2018: In southwest Pakistan (Quetta, capital of Baluchistan) soldiers halted a major attack on one of their bases. The attack consisted of a suicide bomb truck, containing another four Islamic terrorists armed with rifles and wearing explosive vests. Troops guarding the base detected and fired on the bomb truck and killed the Islamic terrorists before they could do much damage. Four soldiers were wounded. Further north in Khyber province a suicide truck bomber attacked a military convoy and wounded ten soldiers. These two attacks were the work of LeJ (Lashkar e Jhangvi), a Sunni Islamic terror group that has long carried out attacks on Pakistani Shia. These two LeJ attacks were retaliation doe security forces killing local LeJ commander Salman Badeni, who was responsible for attacks that have killed over a hundred Shia. May 16, 2018: American officials confirmed that on April 23rd the top leader of AQIS (Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent) was killed by an American airstrike i n the eastern Afghanistan (Nangarhar Province) near the Pakistan border . Technically Afghanistan is not part of AQIS territory but it has become a more secure base area (for training camps) than Pakistan or anywhere else in South Asia. AQIS was created in 2014 and initially tried to establish its headquarters in Karachi (Pakistan), long a haven for all sorts of criminal activity and forged alliances with the major Islamic terrorist organizations there. Yet AQIS has been responsible for very few terror attack in Pakistan or anywhere else. AQIS was created to manage and support operations in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India and Burma. Islamic terrorism experts believe this was largely a publicity stunt by al Qaeda to counter the growing popularity of the more radical ISIL. Indian Moslems have produced some recruits for Islamic terrorism, but not enough to produce the level of mayhem Islamic terrorists wanted. Lacking a lot of radical clergy and religious schools India has simply not produced a lot of radicalized young men willing to kill and be killed. Similar recruiting problems were encountered elsewhere but other Al Qaeda groups have continued to provide enough cash and other assistance to keep AQIS going and barely visible. Afghan training camps, destroyed at the end of 2017, were a major AQIS asset and that loss was one reason AQIS agreed to work with the Pakistani Taliban. May 1, 2018: In southwest Pakistan (Quetta, capital of Baluchistan) senior army officers met with leaders of a Hazara Shia, who are preparing for a major protest against the security forces inability to halt the growing number of Islamic terrorist attacks on Hazara Shia. Some 20 percent of Pakistanis are Shia and that comes to ten times as many Shia as Afghanistan has. The Hazara are easier to spot as they are the descendants of Central Asian Mongols and Turks who invaded and occupied Afghanistan centuries ago. Nearly half a million Afghan Hazara (nearly all of them Shia) have fled to Pakistan since the 1980s to escape the violence, including Afghan Sunni Islamic terrorists who see the Hazara Shia as heretics. Since early 2016 a growing number of Hazara have died in Baluchistan because those anti-Shia Sunni groups exist in Pakistan as well. Iran is also pressuring Pakistan to crack down on these anti-Shia groups. That crackdown was more of an emergency once it became apparent that that Pakistani Sunni Islamic terror group LeJ was not only the main source of these attacks but had recently joined ISIL, a group that has had a difficult time establishing itself in Pakistan (and an even harder time in India and Bangladesh). Pakistan is also getting pressure from China, which has thousands of its citizens in Baluchistan working on major infrastructure projects. China has impressed on the Pakistani military that importance of these Chinese being safe from Islamic terrorist attack. Since groups like LeJ consider Chinese legitimate targets the Pakistani military can tell their Shia, and especially the Hazara, that maximum efforts are being made against LeJ and similar groups. That has worked for the Chinese in Baluchistan but less well for the Hazara. In early May 2018 two carrier based U.S. Navy F-18E fighters made an emergency landing in Turkey after pilots complained of air supply problems and showed symptoms of hypoxia (insufficient oxygen) All models of the F-18 have been suffering intermittent (and persistent) air supply problems and no single cause (or cure) has been found. Installing new air supply monitoring equipment and improved maintenance procedures seems to have helped but nothing has eliminated the problems. Worse, it is unclear what is causing the persistent hypoxia incidents. And it isnt just naval aviation. In May 2017 there were similar hypoxia problems with U.S. Air Force F-35A fighters at an Arizona air base. It all began in early May and by June 8th five F-35 pilots had reported signs of hypoxia and F-35As at the base were grounded for two weeks as the aircraft were checked out. Nothing definitive could be found and training flights were resumed, with altitude restrictions (stay under 11,300 meters) in late June. Still, nothing conclusive but a new set of safety checks was developed that could catch the problem before it occurred again. At the end of August, all restrictions on F-35A operations at the Arizona airbase were lifted. There has been a lot of this sort of thing since 2002 with several different types of aircraft developing mysterious problems with hypoxia. For example, earlier in 2017 there were hypoxia problems with U.S. Navy trainers and on April 5th the navy grounded all its T-45C jet trainers for three days to interview pilots and instructors about air supply problems. It turned out the problem was real and the trainers remained grounded until April 17th. But the aircraft resumed flying only after some changes were made to the pilot oxygen system to bypass the OBOG (OnBoard Oxygen Generating). This limited how high the aircraft could fly. The T-45s will fly at lower altitudes until the Navy can determine what was wrong with the OBOG or something else in the pilot air supply system. This restriction will prevent the T-45s from performing about a quarter of the training they normally provide but it averted a threatened pilot strike over the issue. The T-45 problems have yet to be diagnosed, understood and fixed. In late 2017 and early 2018, there was a similar outbreak of air supply problems with T-6 trainers and flight restrictions were imposed in January. There have been some air supply issues with A-10s but not enough to limit operations. While the F-35 is the most recent jet fighter in American service the T-45 is a nine ton, single engine two seat aircraft that has been used since the early 1990s to train pilots who will eventually fly jet fighters. The T-45 can also be armed and used for ground attack. In this mode, they can carry up to three tons of weapons, including a pod with a 30mm autocannon. In comparison, the F-35A is a 31 ton single-engine stealth fighter-bomber that entered service in mid-August 2016. OBOG problems are not new, nor are problems in general with oxygen systems. The U.S. Navy has had numerous such problems with its F-18s. There were 64 incidents in 2002-9, resulting in two dead pilots. The Navy found that the main problem was carbon monoxide getting sucked into the aircraft air system. The Navy modified the oxygen system, eliminating most of the problems. Similar failures continued with the major difficulty finding out exactly what was going on so it could be fixed. After 2009 the air force looked into the Navy experience, to see if there was anything similar going on with the newly introduced F-22 stealth fighters. The air force looked into a lot of potential causes, without a lot of success. In 2012 the air force admitted that its rate of "pilot air supply" incidents for its 187 F-22 fighters has reached the rate of 26 per 100,000 flight hours. For most other aircraft, the rate is closer to 2-3 incidents per 100,000 hours. All aircraft have occasional problems with their air supply but nothing like what the F-22 was going through. The air force woes began when it appeared that the F-22 might be having a problem with its OBOG system. OBOGs have been around since the 1950s but its only since the 1980s that OBOGs have become compact, cheap, and reliable enough to replace the older compressed gases or LOX (liquid oxygen) as a source of breathable air for high flying aircrew. Each aircraft, especially the F-22 and F-35, gets an OBOG tweaked for space, weight, or other conditions specific to that warplane design. It's this custom design that was also closely studied, to find out how the toxins got in. One recent solution is to constantly monitor the air quality and enable the OBOG to adjust its operation to cope or, failing that, alert the pilot. Another common feature of modern aircraft (and many other vehicles) is a performance monitor that notes and records certain performance data. Sort of a black box, but with a longer memory. These devices have been useful in diagnosing and fixing the hypoxia problems. One problem is that aircraft have been staying in the air longer (because of in-flight refueling) and carrying enough compressed oxygen became untenable, often making OBOGs mandatory to deal with the problem. Since the 1990s, most American military aircraft have replaced older oxygen systems with OBOGs. Most Western nations and Russia have followed, at least with their latest model aircraft. Most OBOG systems work by using a chemical reaction to remove carbon dioxide from the air taken into the OBOG and then sending out air with the proper amount of oxygen to the aircrew. The F-22, F-35. F-15E and many other modern aircraft were designed to fly long distances and spend long periods of time in the air. Thus an OBOG is mandatory. But OBOGs proved to be the culprit only part of the time and it has become quite a puzzle to unscramble these air supply problems that keep showing up. It seems to be an American thing because there have been far fewer hypoxia incidents in foreign (European, Russian, Chinese) made fighters. by Austin Bay May 30, 2018 Think of it as a revived Silk Road, Chinese President Xi Jinping said in 2013 when he announced China would proudly sponsor a multi-decade international commercial and infrastructure development project -- notionally running from China through Central Asia and connecting to points beyond. Yes, a benign Silk Road where all prosper. The project would have a maritime development component as well. India, however, was immediately suspicious. China and India are rival powers, militarily and economically. They have unresolved territorial disputes in the Himalayas that occasionally involve gunfire between their armies. Indian military planners, however, saw more threatening scenarios. China is an ally of India's foremost enemy, Pakistan. Highways and railroads serve commercial purposes -- like shipping silk -- but they are military assets. China might use improved highway and rail links in Central Asia to quickly deploy Chinese military forces in Pakistan. China's illegal artificial island-building campaign in the South China Sea is a maritime development project encroaching on other nations' sovereignty In 2018, we know a lot more about China's Belt and Road Initiative. The BRI has an expanded official name, one adorned with silk: "The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st century Maritime Silk Road." Yes, land and sea. The land component, which Beijing refers to as simply "the Belt," consists of highways, railroads, pipelines and other infrastructure projects built within a very broad Central Asian corridor and connecting to Europe, Southwest Asia and the eastern Mediterranean littoral. The BRI's Maritime Silk Road links China by sea to Africa and southwest Asia and, via the Suez Canal, Europe. On the BRI's sea leg, China will help build seaports, improve old ports and port facilities and improve the ports' regional land transportation infrastructure. China is interested in developing a sea shipping route through the Arctic Sea to connect China to Europe. The Road might reach Norway's ice-free port at Kirkenes. The BRI will be completed by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the Communist takeover of China. BRI benefits don't stop with building big things. Cash-rich China promises to invest in nations that participate in Belt land and Road sea projects. What developing country could turn down this no-strings-attached offer? India suggests potential BRI participants unwrap the silk camouflage and carefully consider a Chinese Road project where Beijing is pouring concrete, the deep-water port of Gawdar in Pakistan's Baluchistan province (which borders Iran). China is building a huge navy. Gawdar is a perfect base for China's blue water fleet -- an Indian Ocean Chinese base challenging the Indian Navy. Nevertheless, India sees some projects as potentially beneficial and has signed a BRI Memorandum of Understanding with China Xi is trying to allay suspicion. In April, at a BRI conference held in the Chinese city of Boao Xi said the BRI is "...neither the Marshall Plan after World War II nor a Chinese conspiracy." The BRI "may be China's idea, but its opportunities and outcomes are going to benefit the world." However, Xi has not convinced analysts at the Washington, DC-based Center for Advanced Defense Studies that the BRI is benevolent. In 2017 two CADS analysts published a paper title "Harbored Ambition," which examined 15 Chinese-funded seaport projects. They concluded "Chinese (project) analysts unofficially discussing port investments routinely prioritize China's national security interests over the objective of mutually beneficial economic development, contradicting the position of official policy documents." Many BRI projects are expensive and not economically viable for private construction firms, so they are built by Chinese state-owned companies. How much will the BRI cost? No one knows; two to three trillion dollars is the rumored estimate, but it is unclear if even the three-trillion figure accounts for Chinese state subsidies. Should China insist on providing Chinese "security assistance units" to protect construction operations in dangerous areas, some countries might see that as violating their sovereignty. AN AMBITIOUS bid to bring Channel 4 to Warwickshire has failed. The county was not included on a shortlist that was published by the publicly-owned channel earlier on Wednesday. Warwick District Council had submitted the bid for Leamington to be home to one of its two new creative hubs. The West Midlands has, however, made it onto the shortlist for the new Channel 4 headquarters or one its two creative hubs, as part of the channel's move away from London. Cllr Andrew Mobbs, leader of Warwick District Council, said: Although we are disappointed not to be going further, for Leamington to even be in a position to submit a credible and competitive bid against much larger UK cities is testament to the great spirit of innovation and creativity inherent in our town. "I would like to congratulate team Leamington for their hard work and dedication in putting this bid together. "We would like to thank Craig Spivey Creative, all the local creative companies and our local universities and colleges for their support with the bid. We believe it truly represents the creative strength and diversity of our district. There were 30 bids in all and the shortlisted locations will now have to submit further details of their plans to Channel 4, with the winner expected to be announced in October. On the shortlist for either the HQ or a creative hub are: Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Greater Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, and West Midlands, and to become a creative hub are: Belfast, Brighton, Newcastle/Gateshead, Nottingham, Sheffield, and Stoke-on-Trent. Channel 4s chief commercial officer, Jonathan Allan, who is leading the pitch process, said: Weve been incredibly impressed both by the number of pitches we received and by the high quality of the submissions, which has underlined the huge amount of creativity, innovation and talent right across the UK. However we have to move to a shortlist phase and, after careful consideration by the Channel 4 Executive team, weve selected 13 cities that are best able to meet our vision for our new hubs in the nations and regions. "We look forward to visiting all those on the shortlist as part of our second phase, but we will also be continuing to work with all cities and regions as part of our strategy to increase investment and support creative businesses, jobs and growth across the UK. Broadpeak 2018 ANGA COM Show Exhibitor Preview At ANGA COM 2018, Broadpeak will demonstrate its multicast ABR solutions and cloud PVR, which are transforming video distribution across both managed and unmanaged networks by providing superior quality of experience (QoE) and an efficient content delive COLOGNE, Germany( ) The OTT SVOD market in Europe is expected to grow steadily over the next five years, with revenues soaring to $6.8 billion by 2022, according to research from Kagan. Content providers and pay-TV operators in the region have a tremendous opportunity to drive new revenue. Yet, they need scalable, cost-effective content delivery solutions that ensure a flawless quality of experience across all screens. At ANGA COM 2018, Broadpeak will demonstrate its multicast ABR solutions and cloud PVR, which are transforming video distribution across both managed and unmanaged networks by providing superior quality of experience (QoE) and an efficient content delivery approach. Make Multiscreen Video Delivery Truly Scalable With nanoCDN Multicast ABR Solution ABR multicast technology is trending across the global video delivery industry thanks to the incredible scalability that it provides. At ANGA COM, Broadpeak will demonstrate its nanoCDN multicast ABR solution, which makes live HTTP video delivery to any device scalable by turning millions of broadband gateways, cable modems, Wi-Fi routers, and STBs into active components of an operators content delivery infrastructure. As the first provider of ABR multicast technology, Broadpeak is revolutionizing live multiscreen video delivery. Broadpeaks solution leverages home networks, allowing operators to cost-effectively manage the consumption peaks of live multiscreen services for millions of simultaneous viewers using only a few megabits per second from their network. nanoCDN has been successfully deployed by leading operators worldwide for live television delivery to any screen. Several use cases for nanoCDN will be shown, including ultra-low latency for live video streaming and quick start, which prevents the buffering at the beginning of a live content stream to ensure the highest quality of experience (QoE) for end users. Photo Link: www.202comms.com/Broadpeak/Broadpeak_nanoCDN.jpg Photo Caption: Broadpeak nanoCDN Multicast ABR Solution Deliver Petabytes of TV Recordings and Playback On Every Screen With Cloud PVR Broadpeaks Cloud PVR solution is used by some of the largest pay-TV operators globally to deliver time-shifted TV services. Providing operators with a simple, scalable, and flexible solution, it allows subscribers to launch multiple recordings on various channels simultaneously without any constraint on the available bandwidth or the number of tuners on the reception device. With Cloud PVR, service providers can deliver start-over and catch-up TV, as well as impulsive recording, using a shared copy or private copy model. The recorded content can be processed on the fly to be viewed on any device type. Photo Link: www.202comms.com/Broadpeak/Broadpeak-CloudPVR.jpg Photo Caption: Broadpeak Cloud PVR Solution Visit Broadpeak at the 2018 ANGA COM Show in booth 7/B73. Company Overview: Broadpeak designs and manufactures video delivery components for content providers and network service providers deploying IPTV, cable, OTT, and mobile services. Its portfolio of solutions and technologies powers the delivery of movies, television programming, and other video content over managed networks and the internet for viewing on any type of device. The companys systems and services help operators increase market share and improve subscriber loyalty with superior quality of experience. Broadpeak supports all of its customers worldwide, from simple installations to large delivery systems reaching capacities of several million of simultaneous streams. The company is headquartered in Cesson-Sevigne, France. Link to Word Doc: www.202comms.com/Broadpeak/180523Broadpeak.docx All trademarks appearing herein are the property of their respective owners. Cloud is no Broadcast Cure All: Telestream Favors Hybrid Approach to Workflow Deployment In broadcasting, cloud-based workflows have been in vogue for a number of years, and many technology companies are focusing so strongly on cloud deployments that it almost seems that the answer is cloud, but no one is sure of the question! Nevada City, California ( ) In broadcasting, cloud-based workflows have been in vogue for a number of years, and many technology companies are focusing so strongly on cloud deployments that it almost seems that the answer is cloud, but no one is sure of the question! The $64 million question for the broadcast industry is: how cloud should figure in to the future? According to Telestreams Chief Marketing Officer, Chris Osika, very often the answer is not found in pure cloud. Whilst he sees cloud as an empowering technology for organizations of all sizes and in many different industry sectors, there is an absolute need for it to be employed strategically and judiciously based on real business need. Today, the cloud continues to evolve as companies use of it evolves. Workloads such as disaster recovery, HR, CRM are no-brainers for cloud deployment, Osika comments. One of the key advantages of cloud is its ability to let entrepreneurial organizations match revenues to expenses and hence allow them to be more success-based in their growth. At Telestream, we see numerous core broadcast workflows that dont transfer easily to the cloud, such as live transcoding workflows. At the current stage of clouds evolution these are not optimized within cloud-based environments. We believe that working in a hybrid environment leads to a more efficiently optimized infrastructure environment, he affirms. Broadcast under siege Today, broadcasters are under siege from agile competitors such as online video providers, who are much more cloud-centric. More recent entrants to the market can afford to take a more nimble cloud approach since they were established as greenfield installations. In comparison, broadcasters have big legacy issues in their technology infrastructures. They cannot simply throw everything out and start from scratch, but this is exactly what their competitors can do. When applied to broadcasters, the supposed cheapness of the cloud suggested to be as much as a 40 percent reduction in costs can be a misleading assessment. Broadcasters cannot look at the cloud in isolation as a cure-all, but instead must look in holistic fashion at each of the areas where the agility they afford makes cloud-based solutions the right answer. Chris Osika is a big supporter of cloud-based broadcast operations when used in the right way. Cloud deployment can be disruptive to traditional broadcast business models in a number of ways, he states. Cloud significantly increases speed to market for new ventures. What used to take 90 days to get off the ground, now takes just a fraction of that time. In a fiercely competitive market where companies are fighting tooth and nail to win new eyeballs, bringing new products to market with speed is incredibly important. Cloud also significantly lowers the threshold for entry in terms of up-front costs. Once again, cloud-based launches represent a fractional cost since upfront infrastructure expenditure can be small. This makes companies business plans much more agile they can take more risks, getting to market fast and relatively cheap. This single issue can revolutionize business development strategies for traditional broadcasters, comments Chris Osika. Thirdly, organizations can scale-up and scale-down their new operations very rapidly. Whether you are a broadcaster or a service provider, you have much more freedom and flexibility to change your business model. In a crowded market, you can get much more creative and even experimental - with the way that you sell media products to your core audience. As a media company, cloud deployment can provide more flexibility in terms of the numbers and combinations of channels that you sell. As the head of a major traditional broadcaster this kind of business agility is critically important to be competitive in todays market. Transformation is a journey, not a light switch Telestream believes that however appealing the cloud sounds, it is critical that companies employ the technology platform that best suits their workflows at the right time. The companys solution models do not assume that customers will wholesale move all their production and distribution capabilities to the cloud at once. At Telestream, we employ a flexible, conservative approach, explains Chris Osika. The cloud is valuable, but there are a number of potential weaknesses in cloud strategies that need to be factored into your decisions. Most customers are brownfield sites with considerable legacy infrastructure issues. We can help them along a path of sensible transformation. Our technology does not require we advocate a wholesale infrastructure switch-out. Transformation is a journey, not a light switch: we act as a trusted partner and as such we would not help by suggesting that customers throw everything into the cloud, he explains. According to Telestream, private-cloud, virtualized data centers can be a first stage. Once business operations have been established and have proven successful, they can be transitioned to the public cloud. However, numerous large media entities are sufficiently uncertain about the public cloud that they have brought their operations back to private cloud. It is helpful to employ technology like that of Telestream which can support workflows no matter where and how theyre deployed. There are lots of instructive lessons about cloud that have been learned outside of the broadcast industry it is wise to observe these closely before making major strategic moves that will have a long-term impact on core business profitability, and even on the ability to survive in a fierce commercial market, concludes Chris Osika. Telestreams approach to the cloud is different from other companies in this sector: hybrid approaches afford flexibility to capture the advantages of cloud, while mitigating the constraints. This approach allows for truly agile business strategies, accommodating all the variants of cloud, from public and private, and on-premise which ever works best for an organization. This press release is issued pursuant to Multilateral Instrument 62-104 Take-Over Bids and Issuer Bids and National Instrument 62-103 The Early Warning System and Related Take-Over Bid and Insider Reporting Issues. NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Electrum Strategic Opportunities Fund II L.P. (Electrum) announces that pursuant to a private placement of Constantine Metal Resources Ltd. (the issuer) which closed on May 29, 2018 (the Closing) Electrum has purchased, pursuant to the terms of a unit purchase agreement dated May 29, 2018 (the Purchase Agreement), 6,459,661 units (Units) of the issuer for an aggregate subscription price of CDN$4,392,569.48 (the First Tranche Financing), or CDN$0.68 per Unit. Each Unit is comprised of one common share (each, a Common Share) in the capital of the issuer and one Common Share purchase warrant (each, a Warrant). Each Warrant shall entitle the holder thereof to purchase one Common Share at a price of CDN$1.00 at any time until the date that is five years from the date of issuance of the Warrants. As a result of the Closing, Electrum owns 6,459,661 Common Shares and 6,459,661 Warrants representing approximately 15.5% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares or 26.84% upon the exercise of the Warrants (assuming that all of the Warrants owned by Electrum immediately following the Closing are exercised and that no other securities, including those convertible into, or exercisable for, Common Shares, are issued, converted or exercised). Prior to the Closing, Electrum Global Holdings L.P., a joint actor (as such term is defined in National Instrument 62-103 The Early Warning System and Related Take-Over Bid and Insider Reporting Issues) of Electrum, owned 250,000 Common Shares representing 0.85% of the Common Shares of the issuer. In addition to the First Tranche Financing, the Purchase Agreement provides that, following the Closing, and subject to certain terms and conditions set forth in the Purchase Agreement, including the receipt of requisite regulatory approvals, Electrum will subscribe for and purchase an additional 2,363,868 Units (the Second Tranche Financing) for an aggregate subscription price of CDN$1,607,430.24, or CDN$0.68 per Unit. The Purchase Agreement contains customary representations, warranties, covenants, closing conditions and indemnification provisions for a transaction of a similar size and nature. The Purchase Agreement further provides Electrum with the right to designate: (i) one individual as nominee to the issuers board of directors (the Board) so long as Electrum holds more than 10% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares; and (ii) subject to the closing of the Second Tranche Financing, a second individual as nominee to the Board so long as Electrum holds more than 10% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares. The Units referred to above were acquired for investment purposes and Electrum and/or one or more of its affiliates may, depending on market and other conditions, increase or decrease its beneficial ownership of Common Shares or other securities of the issuer whether in the open market, by privately negotiated agreement or otherwise. Electrum is an accredited investor (as such term is defined in National Instrument 45-106 Prospectus Exemptions adopted by the Canadian Securities Administrators (NI 45-106)) because Electrum is a person (as such term is defined in NI 45-106) in respect of which all of the owners of interests, direct, indirect or beneficial, except the voting securities required by law to be owned by directors, are persons that are accredited investors. The issuer is located at 320-800 West Pender Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6C 2V6. Electrum is located at 535 Madison Avenue, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10022, USA. A copy of the early warning report to which this news release relates can be obtained from Michael Williams (646-365-1600) or on the SEDAR profile of the issuer at www.sedar.com. JOPLIN, MISSOURI, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TAMKO Building Products, Inc. is proud to announce that Building Products Inc. (BPI) is distributing Envision composite decking at their new branch in Watertown, Wisconsin, which was opened this year. TAMKOs Executive Vice President, Tim Whelan, says the longtime manufacturer is excited to join forces with BPI. BPI is a high caliber distributor with an appreciation for the differentiated nature of our Envision product line. We are very pleased with their initial success in launching Envision in their markets and look forward to significant growth with them, said Whelan. J.J. Robson, General Manager of the BPI Iowa and Wisconsin Divisions, said, We are excited about this new partnership between BPI and Envision Decking by TAMKO. With our recent expansion to Wisconsin, we were looking for a trusted decking solution to offer to our customers and we believe we found that with TAMKO. According to TAMKOs Director of Decking Sales and Marketing, Shara Gamble, TAMKO aligns well with BPI in terms of company values like integrity and respect for individuals. Knowing that BPI prides itself on responsible business operations that lead to meaningful relationships - practices which are also held in high-esteem by TAMKO we are thrilled with this distribution agreement, said Gamble. James Gonzalez, General Manager of TAMKOs Lamar, Missouri manufacturing plant where Envision composite decking is made, said Envision decking is crafted in the heartland of the USA by a team of honest, intelligent, hard-working, women and men who reflect TAMKOs core values. With BPIs appreciation for similar character traits, TAMKOs decking team is enthusiastic for this venture. BPI recently opened a new branch in Wisconsin located in Watertown, which among other products, stocks TAMKOs Envision and EverGrain composite decking products and will service the Green Bay area south of Chicago and the area west of Madison, Wisconsin. About Building Products Inc. Building Products Inc. (BPI) is headquartered in Watertown, South Dakota. With branches in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin, BPI is a growing distributor of building products such as roofing, lumber, engineered wood, windows, exterior doors and millwork products. Maintaining a customer focus along with values of respect and dignity are top priorities for BPI. For more information, visit www.BPI.build. About TAMKO Composite Lumber From decking to railing, TAMKOs composite lumber offerings provide homeowners with exceptional options to create a beautiful outdoor space where beautiful things happen. These offerings include Envision Distinction, Envision Inspiration, Envision Expression, EverGrain, Marquee Railing and TAM- RAIL. For more information, visit our website at www.EnvisionDecking.com. Note to editors and writers The correct capitalization of the company name is TAMKO, due to the fact that it is an acronym. The letters stand for Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma the companys original trade area when founded in 1944. TAMKOs trade area is now all 50 states. # # # Attachments SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. and NEWARK, N.J, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Technology-based education start-up Woz U, announced today a partnership with the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), one of only 32 polytechnic universities in the United States. The partnership will enable NJIT to offer Woz Us refined Cyber Security and Software Developer programs to companies so they can upskill their workforces and remain up-to-date with the latest computer programs, practices and procedures. NJIT President Dr. Joel S. Bloom said of the partnership, During the early 1980s, NJIT became one of the first public research universities to embrace economic development as core to its mission. Since then, we have been at the forefront of partnership with industry, collaborating with IBM, Panasonic, Hackensack Meridian, and countless other firms of all sizes. Our agreement with Woz U will expand our capabilities in the area of workforce development within the critical sector of cybersecurity. The agreement brings software and cyber security training to corporations with online courses that provide a mentored, immersive and project-based experience. The partnership emboldens NJIT to directly address the challenges companies face to remain current in the latest technology advances. NJIT now can facilitate tailored programs with Woz Us curricula to equip individuals with the resources needed to prepare for innovative technology initiatives at their company. The collaboration will prepare companys staffers to grow into technology leaders in their organization and cultivate a more in-depth, tech-minded workforce as businesses enter the next era of computing. The partnership with NJIT enables the university to elevate the knowledge of workers on the latest computer-based programs as the tech sector constantly evolves, said Chris Coleman, president of Woz U. Our Education as a Service model empowers us to customize the curriculum NJIT offers companies with educational programs that advance the computer skills of staff members that align with the direction of the business. The association between Woz U and NJIT brings software and cyber security training to incumbent and future members of organizations with proven online courses to add a wealth of expertise internally in those tech categories. The Cyber Security and Software Developer programs are designed to enrich and expand the technology programs offered by companies to employees. The Cyber Security course covers areas including: security foundations, network defense, cryptography and access management, web application security and project management. While, the Software Developer course will cover web technologies such as: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, RESTful Services with Java, C#, JavaScript or Ruby, relational and NoSQL databases. The program also focuses on instructing individuals on topics including: front-end frameworks with Angular or React, responsive design, cloud deployment, agile project management and web application security concepts. NJIT is committed to provide sustainable, thought invoking programs with Woz U. Software development and cyber security acumen is vital as companies continue to expand their workforce in the technology-dependent economy, says Dr. Gale Tenen Spak, associate vice president, Continuing Professional Education of NJIT. Our partnership with Woz U emphasizes the importance for business to formulate an offering that encourages their personnel to expand their knowledge and remain current with the newest advancements in the tech industry. Enrollment in the first Cyber Security and Software Developer program commences in July 2018. For more information about Woz Us NJIT technology training programs, visit http://continuing.njit.edu/woz-u. About Woz U: Apple Computer co-founder Steve Woz Wozniak, known for changing the world with the invention of the personal computer, now wants to revolutionize how individuals are educated, trained and prepared for technology careers with Woz U. Woz Us Education as a Service (EaaS) curriculum model is a new personalized approach to technology education designed to get students into the workforce faster and with less debt. Offering both online and campus-based programs, Woz U provides lifelong educational resources for students with all levels of experience. Woz U also has training initiatives that support businesses and K-12 schools. Learn more at www.woz-u.com. About New Jersey Institute of Technology: One of only 32 polytechnic universities in the United States, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) prepares undergraduate and graduate students and professionals to become leaders in the technology-dependent economy of the 21st century. NJITs multidisciplinary curriculum and computing-intensive approach to education provide technological proficiency, business acumen and leadership skills. NJIT has a $1.74 billion annual economic impact on the State of New Jersey, conducts approximately $140 million in research activity each year, and is a global leader in such fields as solar research, nanotechnology, resilient design, tissue engineering and cybersecurity, in addition to others. NJIT is ranked #1 nationally by Forbes for the upward economic mobility of its lowest-income students and is among the top 2 percent of public colleges and universities in return on educational investment, according to PayScale.com. DALLAS, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Calyx Software, a leading provider of comprehensive mortgage software solutions for banks, credit unions, mortgage bankers, wholesale and correspondent lenders and brokers, today announced that David McLeod has joined the company as National Sales Manager. In this role, McLeod will lead the companys sales team, as well as develop and implement effective sales strategies for Calyxs product line, including its flagship loan origination system, Point/PointCentral. He will report to Bob Dougherty, Vice President of Business Development. McLeod brings 25 years of sales and management experience to Calyx, having held sales management positions in the automotive, financial services, and mortgage industries. Prior to joining Calyx, he was President and CEO of The M.K. Everest Companies (M.K. Everest Mortgage, M.K. Everest Realty, and M.K. Everest Homes). He began his career in the mortgage industry as a Branch Sales Manager at Provinet Mortgage Corporation of Minnesota. Davids extensive sales experience will be an asset to our team, said Dougherty. He has a proven track record of success and we are confident he will help us identify new opportunities that will strengthen our partnerships and make our clients more successful. About Calyx Software Calyx Software is a provider of innovative solutions to help streamline and simplify all phases of the loan process. The companys loan origination software offerings include Point and PointCentral for banks, credit unions, mortgage bankers and brokers; INK-it, a secure electronic signature solution; WebCaster, a website development tool; and Zip, the most affordable, easy-to-use loan interview conveniently accessible to borrowers via a personalized URL. For more information call (800) 362-2599 or visit www.calyxsoftware.com. ROAD TOWN, British Virgin Islands, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Aura Minerals Inc. (TSX:ORA) announces the results of the votes held at the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders held on May 28, 2018 in Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands. Votes at the Meeting For additional details on these matters, please see the Management Information Circular of the Company dated April 27, 2018. To Set the Number of Directors at Five. On a show of hands, voting results for the number of Directors are as follows: Outcome For % For Against % Against Carried 25,599,173 99.94 15,084 0.06 Election of Directors. On a vote by ballot, voting results for the election of Directors are as follows: Nominee Outcome For % For Withhold % Withhold Paulo Brito Carried 25,602,094 99.95 12,163 0.05 Rodrigo Barbosa Carried 25,500,061 99.55 114,196 0.45 Stephen Keith Carried 25,523,032 99.64 91,225 0.36 Roberto Fonseca Carried 25,493,032 99.53 121,225 0.47 Philip Reade Carried 25,500,032 99.55 114,225 0.45 Appointment and Compensation of Auditors. On a show of hands, voting results for the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chartered Accountants, and to authorize the Board to fix their remuneration, are as follows: Outcome For % For Withheld % Withheld Carried 27,250,803 99.96 11,458 0.04 About Aura Minerals Aura is a mid-tier gold and copper production company focused on the development and operation of gold and base metal projects in the Americas. Auras assets include producing gold mines in Brazil and Honduras. The Company is working towards completing the necessary steps to enable the restart of operations at its Aranzazu mine in Mexico including but not limited to: (i) completing a comprehensive technical study covering key areas of the project such as geology and resource estimates, mining plan and reserves, process engineering, metallurgy, OPEX and CAPEX as well as the associated financial modelling; and (ii) hiring experienced and highly qualified personnel. In addition, the Company has two additional gold projects in Brazil, Almas and Matupa, and one gold project in Colombia, Tolda Fria. For further information on Aura, please visit Auras web site at www.auraminerals.com or contact: Ryan Goodman VP, Legal Affairs and Business Development 305-239-9332 The Memorial Day service in Sidney was well-attended Monday. Following the service, many people took the opportunity to view markers of friends and family. The hillside grasses were green of a mid-spring day, accented by seemingly appropriate overcast sky and the numerous markers. The Sidney community took time from the holiday weekend to remember those who have gone on, specifically those in military service who gave the ultimate sacrifice. The event was well-attended by family, friends and community members remembering the sacrifices made. The service started with Disabled American Veterans (DAV) Commander John Schaffner welcoming the community, followed by the opening prayer by Holy Trinity Lutheran Pastor David Hall. The National Anthem was sung by Cora Tobler. Cheyenne County Sheriff John Jensen was the special speaker for the Memorial Day service. "I'm greatly honored to be here today," Sheriff Jensen said. He talked about his 23 years in law enforcement and the increasing lack of value on human life. He said people need to honor military servicemen, and first responders including law enforcement. "As I look around, we are so blessed and I am blessed to be around so many heroes," he said. He closed by encouraging people to never forget the commitments and sacrifices of previous generations. "I would encourage everyone to never forget where you came from," he said. Carla Lutz spoke about the coming Chautauqua World War 1 program scheduled for June 14-17. She said the program is a way to recall important events of World War 1, and to learn what we were never taught. Memorial Day traces its history to the early years after the Civil War. In the years following the end of the Civil War, America celebrated "Decoration Day." The last Monday of May was dedicated as a day to honor men and women who died while serving in the U.S. Military. It became an official holiday of the U.S. In 1971. The Cheyenne County Commissioners met in a special meeting Tuesday to discuss hiring a new Tourism Director and to consider approval of a revised Ambulance Agreement with Regional West Medical Center. The commissioners and County Attorney Paul Schaub interviewed one more candidate at the state of the meeting. At the end of the interview, the candidate asked who the tourism director answers to, what the relationship is between the director and the board and why the last director left the position. At the close of the meeting, Commissioner Randal Miller moved to go into executive session regarding the selection of a new tourism director. The board also approved changes to the agreement with Regional West Medical Center for ambulance service to Cheyenne County. Regional West will be required to maintain two ambulances, staffed and equipped, to meet or exceed state regulations, ensure one ambulance is in the county at all times, be on call for and complete transports on a 24-hour, seven day per week basis, transport inmates and patients under law enforcement custody to the nearest appropriate health care facility and bill the appropriate agency, provide EMS services for the Cheyenne County Fair, and transport services as requested. Cheyenne County is to provide dispatch services at no cost to Regional West, and assist Regional West in locating a suitable site for house duty crew and ambulances. The agreement is affective July 1. Schaub said it is a two-year agreement reviewed annually. Imagine that you've saved money for that big trip to Central America and you're making plans to travel in areas you've never been and to relax on pristine, tropical beaches. Yes, most of the people do not speak English, but you figure you won't have any problems since you had four years of Spanish back in high school, and received pretty good grades, too. Then, on your first day of vacation, you're about to check out groceries from a local store, and realize that you can't understand the cashier. She's speaking so quickly, and not using complete sentences, or at least you think she's not using complete sentences. You stand there, dumbfounded, and have to resort to pointing at items and using hand gestures to communicate. After taking four years of Spanish in high school, you find that you can barely communicate when in a "real-world" situation. This is the reality many people, especially Americans, have faced for generations when trying to communicate in languages they've learned in school. Unless you live in certain areas, or have a specific job that requires you to speak another language often, most people never really get a chance to effectively speak and understand a foreign language, even if they've taken many years of the language in school. At Sidney High School, Spanish teacher Brett Avila has been instrumental in bringing the World Language Program, an innovative and exciting system for effectively learning foreign languages, into the school system with immediate and impressive results. A few years ago, the Nebraska International Language Association (NILA) contacted Avila about the World Language Program, he sent his curriculum to NILA, and was approved. Avila and student Mitch Porter then attended training for the program, which focuses on "language acquisition", using techniques that use real world examples that help the learner understand the language in a "meaning based" program. Too often language instruction focuses on translation, usually word for word, but the new program uses a series of real-world exercises to ensure students are proficient in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Avila's teaching methods and dedication have earned him multiple awards including the 2017 New World Language Teacher Award, and the 2016 Best of Nebraska NILA Session Award. Most importantly, his students are earning their Bi-Literacy Certifications in about half of the time it usually takes thanks to the World Language Program. The program focuses on understanding the language outside of a classroom, in actual situations people will find themselves. For example, students read actual articles from Spanish speaking countries about subjects as varied as agriculture, climate change, even locally produced cheese products. Then the students listen to audio recordings from actual everyday events, like the announcements a flight attendant makes on an airplane, a hurricane warning, a radio advertisement informing the listener of a carnival that's coming to town, or a cell phone message with specific instructions for the listener to comprehend. These efforts are tested then measured, applying the results against the "Literacy Bar", which uses steps within the "Novice", "Intermediate", and "Advanced" levels to determine real-world levels of literacy and fluency in the language being learned. Student Zach Higginson commented on the differences between learning with the new program versus the traditional Spanish instruction he had in the past. "I just feel like the old way was about memorizing vocabulary for the test, about food or clothes or whatever, but when you actually would try to use (Spanish) it was gone because you just crammed for the test and after you passed, it was all gone. What we're doing now is real-world learning." Brett Avila added, "I can't tell you how many times I've run into people and they find out I'm a Spanish teacher and say, "Oh, I took Spanish in high school...I remember my "Spanish Name", but that's pretty much all I remember, or maybe "Where is el bano?", and that's it."" The effectiveness of the World Language Program is inarguable, and the students that have participated in the program offer the evidence of its' success. This is an intensive courseload, so not all students who take Spanish immediately qualify for the program. Students must take a test and receive a minimum rating of "Intermediate-Low" (level 4) to participate in the program. The program is relatively new to the school district, so last year only four students qualified for the program, and all four were "Heritage Speakers", meaning they grew up in households where Spanish was spoken. This year, the program had 10 students enrolled. Three seniors, Mitch Porter, Kollyn Weimer, and Charlie Brockhaus, have all received the Seal of Bi-literacy by the State of Nebraska. Most importantly, the students in the program plan on using their mastery of Spanish to build their own futures and to help their communities. Senior Kollyn Weimer said, "I'm going to be attending Creighton, and they have a program for pre-Med students who are interested in Spanish that's a study-abroad program where you go to the Dominican Republic at one of their sister campuses and you're there for an entire semester teaching people basic medical procedures while attending classes and being immersed in the language by living with the people." Senior Mitch Porter, who will be attending Johns Hopkins University in the Fall commented, "They have a program where they send you to a certified institution in another country where they have Johns Hopkins professors teaching Spanish while being immersed in the culture of the country you go to. I'm definitely going to study abroad." Senior valedictorian Charlie Brockhaus said, "I don't know where yet, but I'm going to study abroad and take Spanish to keep up with it and eventually become bilingual." Mike Motz World Language Program students, Jenna Thies, Alec Johnson, Chesly Lara-Mendez, Sebastian "Dallas" Trujillo, Lauren Beatty, Haile Christofferson, Caleb Luptak, Zachary Higginson benefit from the innovative program taught by Brett Avila. Sebastian "Dallas" Trujillo commented, "If you speak more than language there's more opportunity be it traveling, or getting a job in another country, or being able to communicate with people who don't speak English." The program has been extremely effective for the students who participate in the annual Journey Through Our Heritage program by Metropolitan State University in Denver. This year, Sidney's students earned 4 first place and 2 second place awards in areas ranging from a Quiz Bowl competition in Spanish, Group Interviews, Art, and Cultural Expressions via PowerPoint. Sidney High School is very fortunate to offer such an effective language program for its' students. For additional information on the program you can contact NILA at http://www.nebraskalanguages.com, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) at http://www.actfl.org, or Mr. Brett Avila directly through Sidney High School. LAS VEGAS, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Galaxy Gaming, Inc. (OTC:GLXZ), announced today the acquisition of a portfolio of intellectual property developed by students participating in UNLVs Center for Gaming Innovation. The portfolio consists of a variety of table games and table-game apparatus which was further prepared for commercialization and sold to Galaxy Gaming, Inc. by Big Bet Gaming, LLC. Mark L. Yoseloff, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Center of Gaming Innovation at UNLV, heads up a semester-long course connecting students with established gaming leaders who serve as guest lecturers and mentors. In its fifth year, classes focus on gaming commercialization concepts and technology, the patent process, marketing, and successful business strategies. At the end of each semester, students participate in a gaming design contest judged by industry executives. Cash prizes are awarded to seven top students whose unique inventions are commercially viable. Commenting on the acquisition, Yoseloff stated, I am extremely pleased to put these products in the hands of this major player in the table-game space. Galaxys new management team and aggressive growth plans should provide the perfect home for our students products. I applaud Galaxy for their foresight in this important addition to their product offerings. I am very proud of what this acquisition represents for Galaxy Gaming, said President and CEO Todd Cravens. Showcasing the talents and entrepreneurial spirit of our Las Vegas communitys future leaders in the casino gaming industry will be an honor. About Galaxy Gaming Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, Galaxy Gaming, Inc. (galaxygaming.com) develops, manufactures and distributes innovative proprietary table games, state-of-the-art electronic wagering platforms and enhanced bonusing systems to land-based, riverboat, cruise ships and online casinos worldwide. Through its iGaming partner Progressive Games Marketing Ltd., Galaxy Gaming licenses its proprietary table games to the online gaming industry. Galaxys games can be played online at FeelTheRush.com. Connect with Galaxy on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Contact: Media: Dana Rantovich 702-938-1753 Investors: Harry Hagerty 702-938-1740 SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Three men have been been arrested for an extortion scheme in which they called victims, told them family members had been abducted and threatened to shoot the loved ones unless a ransom was paid, according to the New York Attorney General's Office. Giovani Ayala-Rodriguez, 27, of Puerto Rico, Eligio Jiminez-Correa, 40, of Syracuse, and Orlando Gonzalez-Rivera, 26, of Syracuse, were charged in a 20-count indictment, court documents show. If convicted of all charges, Ayala-Rodriguez and Jiminez-Correa face 10 to 20 years in prison, and Gonzalez-Rivera faces 7 1/3 to 20 years in prison, officials said. An investigation found 55 victims spread across 10 counties: Cayuga, Cortland, Genesee, Kings, Madison, Nassau, Niagara, Oneida, Onondaga and Oswego, AG officials said. The indictment filed in Onondaga County Court details three times on Feb. 28, April 9 and May 10 that scams targeted five people. It shows how the three men pulled off each scam, including fake car crashes, fake kidnappings, money drops or wire transfers. Each scam followed a similar pattern: Ayala-Rodriguez would call a victim and claim that vehicles driven by his nephew and the victim's family member had collided, AG officials said. He'd claim his nephew didn't have insurance and that he'd abducted the victim's family member, officials said. First Ayala-Rodriguez would threaten to harm the victims' family members if the victims didn't pay him a ransom he'd set, AG officials said. When victims refused to pay him, he'd threaten to shoot their family members, officials said. Those who acquiesced to Ayala-Rodriguez's demands were directed to drop the money at specific locations or use Walmart-to-Walmart wire transfers, AG officials said. Once they'd paid the ransom, the victims were directed to area hospitals to pick up their relatives, officials said. Only then did the victims find out they'd been duped, AG officials said. Ayala-Rodriguez used the scam on Feb. 28, calling a person identified as Witness 1, court records show. He told Witness 1 that Witness 4, a family member, had been abducted, court records said. He also called Witness 4 and told Witness 4 he abducted Witness 1, running the scam on both family members, court records show. Ayala-Rodriguez directed Witness 1 to send $990 to Gonzalez-Rivera using a Walmart-to-Walmart transfer, court records said. The wire was sent from an East Syracuse Walmart and was picked up by Gonzalez-Rivera and Jiminez-Correa, court records said. In the scheme on April 9, Ayala-Rodriguez threatened a person identified as Witness 2, court records show. Witness 2 was directed to drop off $500 at the intersection of Westcott Street and Lexington Avenue in Syracuse, where Jiminez-Correa picked up the money, court records said. On May 10, Ayala-Rodriguez used a similar tactic on Feb. 28, extorting people identified as Witness 3 and Witness 5, court records said. Ayala-Rodriguez had Witness 3 send $910 via a Walmart-to-Walmart transfer at a Walmart in Cicero, court records said. Ayala-Rodriguez was arrested Friday in the Bronx after he flew to New York from Puerto Rico, the attorney general's office said. On Tuesday, Ayala-Rodriguez was arraigned in Onondaga County Court, AG officials said. He is being held on $500,000 bail and $1,000,000 bond, surrendered his passport and will appear in court again on June 21, officials said. Jiminez-Correa and Gonzalez-Rivera were arrested in Syracuse and will be arraigned May 31, AG officials said. The charges Giovani Ayala-Rodriguez, 27, of Puerto Rico Second-degree grand larceny (three counts) Second-degree attempted grand larceny (three counts) First-degree coercion (three counts) Fourth-degree conspiracy (one count) Eligio Jiminez-Correa, 40, of Syracuse Second-degree grand larceny (two counts) Second-degree attempted grand larceny (one count) First-degree coercion (two counts) Fourth-degree conspiracy (one count) Orlando Gonzalez-Rivera, 26, of Syracuse WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Donald Trump and Democratic critics traded outraged, sometimes plainly false accusations about immigration Tuesday as the debate over "lost" children and the practice of separating families caught crossing the border illegally reached a new boiling point. False charges flew on both sides. The White House wrongly blamed Democrats for forcing his administration to separate children from parents. Liberal activists and others, including some from media outlets, tried to highlight the issue by tweeting photos of young people in steel cages that actually were taken during the Obama administration. Others seized on reports the government had "lost" more than 1,000 children, though that wasn't quite the case. It all comes just in time for the midterm elections as Republicans and Democrats try to rally core voters by pointing fingers at one another. Trump won the presidency promising to build a wall along the southern border and end illegal immigration, and the White House believes stressing the same issues will drive voters to the polls and help the GOP hang on to their majorities in the Senate and House. The White House is "really beating the immigration drum in the lead-up to the midterm elections as a rallying cry and as a way of mobilizing voter support for Trump and the candidates that he chooses," said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute and former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration. "It does seem to provoke a ratcheting up across the board." Indeed, the situation grew so hostile over the holiday weekend that the president's eldest daughter, White House adviser Ivanka Trump, came under fire for tweeting a photo of herself and her youngest son in their pajamas Sunday morning. "Focus on what is before you, on what you can control and ignore the trolls!" she later wrote. During a White House conference call on Tuesday, senior adviser Stephen Miller contended the "the current immigration and border crisis" is "the exclusive product of loopholes in federal immigration law that Democrats refuse to close." That was after Trump lit up social media over the weekend by falsely claiming there was a "horrible law" that separates children from their parents after they cross the border illegally. He had said previously that "we have to break up families" at the border because "the Democrats gave us that law." But there's no law mandating that parents must be separated from their children, and it's not a policy Democrats have pushed or can change alone as the minority in Congress. The tactic's increased use is being driven by Trump's own administration, which recently announced a new "zero-tolerance policy" in which it will press criminal charges against all people crossing the border illegally, even if they have few or no previous offenses. More children are expected to be separated from their parents as a result. A Customs and Border Protection official told lawmakers last week that 658 children had been separated from their parents at the border from May 6 to May 19 as the parents face charges. That's in addition to hundreds more who were estimated to have been removed from their parents since October. The practice has drawn condemnation from Trump critics, who have long accused him of supporting inhumane policies in his efforts to crack down on illegal immigration. "He actually called the practice horrible. If he thinks it's so horrible then he ought to just end it and not make the children a negotiating tool," said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project. Michelle Brane, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women's Refugee Commission, said in a statement: "Family separation is NOT required by any law, this is a Trump administration policy clearly designed to punish parents, who are just trying to get their children to safety." But Trump foes made their own missteps. Over the weekend, some critics of the policy tweeted photos of young-looking immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in steel cages and blamed the Trump administration for separating immigrant children from their parents. The problem: The photos were taken by The Associated Press in 2014, when Barack Obama was in office, and the photo captions reference children who crossed the border as unaccompanied minors. How or why the story resurfaced on social media four years after it was published was unclear. But Trump seized on the error. "Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama's term showing children from the Border in steel cages. They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires," Trump tweeted Tuesday. "Dems must agree to Wall and new Border Protection for good of country ... Bipartisan Bill!" It's unclear what "Bipartisan Bill!" Trump might have been referring to. Congress is heading toward an immigration showdown in the House, as Republican moderates force a June vote on legislation to protect young "Dreamer" immigrants and beef up border security. GOP leaders are trying to stop the bill, which has robust support from Democrats and some Republicans. They're worried any legislation that smacks of "amnesty" for immigrants in the U.S. illegally would dampen conservative enthusiasm ahead of the midterms. Instead, House Speaker Paul Ryan and his leadership team are trying to put together an alternative approach that most Republicans would support. But finding common ground remains difficult. Trump so far has not engaged in the Capitol Hill debate, even as he repeatedly insists Congress must act. Also making the rounds on social media over the holiday weekend: Allegations that children placed in custody have been "lost" by federal authorities, which officials say isn't the case. The allegation, which sparked the hashtag "WhereAreOurChildren," grew out of testimony in April by a federal official that the government had lost track of nearly 1,500 unaccompanied minor children it placed with adult sponsors in the U.S. An official from the Health and Human Services Department told a congressional hearing last month that his department placed follow-up phone calls from October to December to U.S. households that were sponsoring minors who crossed the border without their parents. They reached 86 percent of the children or sponsors, but the department could not verify the whereabouts of 1,475. In some cases, sponsors simply didn't respond to the follow-up phone call, not surprising because many are themselves in the U.S. illegally and reluctant to speak to authorities. "If you call a friend and they don't answer the phone, you don't assume that they've been kidnapped," Health and Human Services' Steven Wagner said. Officials also Tuesday they are planning more thorough screening of both minor children and their sponsors, including a fingerprint background check of every sponsor. Washington, D.C., May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The increasing incidence of colorectal cancer in younger adults is an epidemic within the cancer community. By 2030, 10.9 percent of all colon cancers and 22.9 percent of all rectal cancers will be diagnosed in patients younger than age 50. Together we must defy and redefine the odds. We fully endorse American Cancer Society's new proposed guideline that colorectal cancer screening should begin at age 45 for people at average risk. If this new guideline is adopted, lives will be saved. The Colorectal Cancer Alliance established the Never Too Young Advisory Board so we may all join forces and take action around the issue of young-onset colorectal cancer. We plan to invest $10 million in critical research by 2021, which will include learning why we are seeing an increase in young-onset colorectal cancer, doubling the number of constituents we serve, and saving 100,000 lives by 2026 through increased screening. Across America, our Never Too Young Advisory Board will work tirelessly to educate primary care physicians and gastrointestinal medical professionals around symptoms of young-onset colorectal cancer. We will challenge insurance companies to step up to the plate and protect the young-onset population. Today's action by the American Cancer Society does not mean colorectal cancer screening tests will now be covered by insurance plans. We commend the American Cancer Society and fully endorse their commitment to saving lives. Michael Sapienza, CEO Colorectal Cancer Alliance Attachment 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 ... NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Varick, an audience-centric digital marketing company, announced today that it has welcomed Paul Dolan as its first ever Chief Executive Officer. Dolan brings over twenty years of industry leadership experience to Varick, with a track record of building and leading technology-enabled, data-driven media businesses. As Chief Executive Officer, Paul will oversee the corporate strategy, technology roadmap and employee development at Varick, while also focusing on the growth and success of its clients businesses. Paul is joining Varick during a monumental time. Not only are we coming off a record breaking close in 2017, but we are also gearing up to celebrate our 10th anniversary in August, says Walt Cheruk, President at Varick. The addition of Paul to our senior leadership team will allow Varick to continue to provide cross-channel performance for clients today, while also preparing for the next stage of its evolution. His expertise in bringing new programmatic opportunities to the market will drive growth for our clients, our platforms and our people. Prior to joining Varick, Dolan launched and led multiple innovative businesses that brought better targeting, more insights and increased ROI to clients. Most recently, Paul launched Light Reaction, WPPs outcome-based programmatic media platform, and served as its global General Manager across 25 countries. Prior to Light Reaction, Paul was a key member of the founding team at GroupMs Xaxis, the industrys largest agency trading desk. As Managing Director of North America, he led all sales, marketing, client services and operations, while opening offices in New York, Toronto and Miami. He later launched Xaxis Latin America with offices in Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires and Bogota. In 2008, he co-developed B3, the first data-driven media trading platform for 24/7 Real Media and WPPs Media Innovation Group. Im thrilled to be a part of the Varick team. As the original programmatic company, Varick has developed strong technology in Alveo, our audience planning, insights and analytics platform. We have fast-growing client relationships with independent agencies and digital-first brands who are looking to unlock the power of programmatic inside their organizations. And as early adopters across the Amazon platform, we enable clients to access the full potential of the e-commerce giant, says Dolan. While Im delighted to have joined in time to celebrate Varicks 10-year anniversary, Im especially looking forward to leading this dynamic company into its next 10 years. About Varick Varick is an audience centric digital marketing company that uses state of the art technology to provide agencies and brands with full funnel, cross-channel strategies to drive brand marketing objectives. Varick, a pioneer in the programmatic space since 2008 was originally founded on New Yorks historic Varick Street. As part of the recently formed Yes and Company, a consortium of specialist partners designed to serve modern brand marketers, Varick continues to bring the fast paced spirit of the digital world to a global audience. Thanks to the combination of its optical heart rate sensor and health app, an Apple Watch surprisingly has warned a UK man of his potential condition. Nothing Out Of The Ordinary In a surprising turn of events, a man's smartwatch warns him that something might be wrong with his heart. Kevin Pearson, a 52-year-old from Cockermouth in the north of England, was reportedly just relaxing and reading a book until an alert from his wearable kept begging for his attention. According to the owner, the device kept telling him that his resting heart rate was going up as high as 161 bpm. Health experts explain that the value is actually higher than what athletes experience during their workouts. Regardless of what the readings implied, Pearson did not feel anything out of the ordinary, yet he followed the instructions given out by the application to sit down and monitor his heart rate for the next few minutes. The biometric sensor kept recording values ranging between highs of 135 and lows of 79 beats per minute. As Luck Would Have It Pearson claims that the first thing that came to his mind was that the Apple Watch could be defective and that the readings were inaccurate. It was fortunate that he was already at a hospital since he took his father there for an appointment. He then requested doctors to perform an evaluation of his cardiac health and got the results right after. "I've used my Apple Watch for calendar events, to complete its targets by exercising, and using it to lose weight," explained Pearson. "The heart rate wasn't really of any particular value, and I didn't even know it could alert you if it was too high," he said. It was discovered that he was suffering from atrial fibrillation and was immediately instructed to visit another hospital to have specialists monitor his condition. After another round of tests, the doctors confirmed that it was indeed the diagnosis. The owner believes that his wearable was a potential lifesaver that made him aware of his condition. He was so relieved that he wrote a letter to Tim Cook, Apple CEO, to thank him. Questionable Accuracy Like most fitness wearables with optical heart rate sensors, the accuracy of the Apple Watch's readings might be unreliable. Even though the data collected by its sensors can give users a quick overview of their health, owners should still take the time and request a yearly checkup from their healthcare providers. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Tesla has delayed the rollout of Tesla Model 3 vehicles in 2019, CEO Elon Musk has revealed. Launches for the left-hand drive Model 3 variants in Asia and Europe are now tipped for the first half of 2019, several months later than the original 2018 release target. Those living in the UK or other countries where the steering wheel is located on the right side will have to wait a bit longer. Musk says the Model 3 will probably not arrive until the middle of 2019. "Model 3 was designed for min engineering & tooling change for RHD. Note left/right symmetry. LHD for Europe & Asia first half of next year. RHD probably middle of next year," Musk confirmed in a tweet. Tesla's Production Goal For a company like Tesla, which has spent months overcoming production woes, the delay doesn't come as much of a surprise. Most likely, the company is still trying to fulfill orders in the United States before venturing out into other countries. After all, its original goal of making 5,000 cars per week is still unachieved but well within reach, according to its recently released earnings report. Electrek speculates that Tesla is maximizing its release strategy to optimize the Federal tax credit in the United States. The $7,500 tax credit is cut in half in the next quarter once the company delivers the 200,000th car, which means timing is extremely important for Tesla. If the company hits its target of 5,000 cars produced per week, its tax credit savings could go as high as $240 million. The good news is that when Tesla finally becomes ready for a large-scale international release, it will have the production capacity required to deliver Model 3 orders quickly, including performance variants and the anticipated "entry" Model 3 that costs $35,000. Also, demand is likely to fall significantly once the U.S. tax credit starts to phase out, so Tesla will be able to focus on higher production rates for deliveries in international markets. Tesla Model 3 The Model 3 is Tesla's smaller, simpler, and more affordable electric car. It has a range of up to 310 miles and can seat up to five adults. It also boasts the much-talked-about Autopilot feature, which lets the car drive on its own without human intervention. Thrilled for the international launches for the Tesla Model 3? As always, if you have anything to share, feel free to sound off in the comments section below. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Finnish company HMD Global, which holds the rights to launch Nokia-branded smartphones, has just released three new Nokia Android devices that offer good value for money. The affordable smartphone market has greatly evolved in recent years and budget handsets now have more to offer. The latest Nokia smartphones are part of this category, as the Nokia 2.1, Nokia 3.1, and Nokia 5.1 bring some premium aspects to the budget segment of the market. Nokia 2.1 Specs, Features, Price The new Nokia 2.1 comes as a refresh of the Nokia 2. Just like its predecessor, it delivers a solid two-day battery life on a single charge thanks to its 4,000 mAh battery. The Nokia 2.1 now has a 5.5-inch display, 20 percent bigger than that of the Nokia 2, with an HD resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels. Under the hood, the device packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 processor, 2 GB of RAM, and 8 GB of storage. Just 4 GB of storage will be actually available to the user, but the smartphone runs Android Oreo Go, which is specifically designed for smartphones with low storage and specs. Android Oreo Go apps are lighter and more compact, so they don't need as much storage space as fully-fledged Android apps. The Nokia 2.1 also features microSD support, so users can just add a memory card for extra storage space. The handset will target emerging markets mostly, launching in July at a $115 price point. Nokia 3.1 Specs, Features, Price The Nokia 3 succeeds the original Nokia 3, which has been a hit for HMD. The refreshed model features a 5.2-inch HD display with an 18:9 aspect ratio, an octa-core MediaTek processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, 2 GB or 3 GB of RAM, and 16 GB or 32 GB of native storage space. Other specs include a 13-megapixel rear camera, an 8-megapixel front shooter with a wide-angle lens, an aluminum frame, and a 2,990 mAh battery. The device runs Android One, which guarantees a secure and up-to-date experience for three years, with monthly security updates. The Nokia 3.1 is set to go on sale in June starting at $160 for the base model with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage, and roughly $195 for the version with 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. Nokia 5.1 Specs, Features, Price Lastly, the Nokia 5.1 comes with a sleek design, a 5.5-inch display with a full HD+ resolution, an 18:9 aspect ratio, and a pixel density of 443 ppi. The smartphone packs an octa-core MediaTek processor clocked at 2 GHz, 2 GB or 3 GB of RAM, 16 GB or 32 GB of storage, microSD card support for up to 128 GB of additional storage, and a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner. Other specs include a better 16-megapixel main camera, an 8-megapixel wide-angle lens front shooter, up to 19 hours of talk time, and up to 9.4 hours of 1080p video playback. On the software front, the Nokia 5.1 runs Android One. The smartphone will launch in July starting at roughly $218 for the base version with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage space, going up to $252 for the model with 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. For the first time, scientists from Switzerland have separated the two less-known forms of water and proved that molecules of H2O undergo different chemical activities. People are familiar with the chemical composition of water: a lone oxygen atom bound to two hydrogen atoms. What is less familiar to people is that the water they drink actually comes in two forms: the ortho-water and para-water. Now, a team of scientists from the University of Basel in Switzerland is able to accurately differentiate the two by observing them at a molecular level. They found that ortho-water and para-water differ depending on the direction by which their hydrogen atoms are stimulated by what is scientifically called as "nuclear spins." The movement of nuclear spins changed when water molecules are cooled to freezing point. The freezing point with which hydrogen atoms reacted differently is similar to the temperature found in outer space. Therefore, the current study could provide new insights on how building blocks of life interact with one another in the interstellar portion of the universe. Ortho-Water And Para-Water There had been many attempts in the past to pinpoint the exact difference between ortho-water and para-water. The separation of ortho-water and para-water was made difficult by their almost indistinguishable physical properties. The team, led by Stefan Willitsch from the University of Basel's Department of Chemistry, succeeded in their attempt by looking into the water's ability to endure certain chemical reaction. To overcome the hurdle, Willitsch and his team employed the method developed by Jochen Kupper from the Hamburg Center for Free-Electron Laser Science. The team cooled the water molecules at a freezing point close to absolute zero. Their findings, published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, stated that while both ortho-water and para-water have a similar chemical composition, the nuclear spins of their hydrogen atoms differ greatly. Specifically, the nuclear spins of the ortho-water move in a parallel direction, while nuclear spins of para-water moved in opposite direction. The team also observed that para-water chemically behaved about 25 percent faster than ortho-water. This makes para-water more capable of undergoing more rapid chemical reactivity. The Taste Of Ortho-Water And Para-Water The accurate differentiation between the two forms of water will not create a significant impact in the field of chemistry, according to Willitsch. Neither will people get the chance to try whether ortho-water tastes differently from para-water. Willitsch explained that molecules of both ortho-water and para-water, once stored at room temperature, will always be bound to mix together. This suggests that separation will only be possible under laboratory environment. Nonetheless, he believed that their discovery provides an interesting insight into the water that people drink. "It's one of the most fundamental molecules on this planet in the entire universe, so this is quite an important piece in the whole puzzle," Willitsch said. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. One of Britain's best-known surgeons is now under investigation after his patient, 58-year-old Lucinda Methuen-Campbell, killed herself after a botched operation. Surprised To Learn Her Ovaries Were Removed During Surgery Anthony Dixon, who has built an international reputation for fixing his patients' bowel problems with vaginal mesh implants, reportedly removed Methuen-Campbell's ovaries during an operation without the latter's knowledge. Methuen-Campbell, who sought treatment for a bowel disorder at the Spire Hospital in Bristol, England in 2016, claimed to have been surprised when she learned after her surgery that the doctor had removed her ovaries. Methuen-Campbell said that the removal of the ovaries was never discussed prior to her operation. She said that the doctor thought he was doing her a favor when he removed the organs. When she asked the doctor why he removed her ovaries, the surgeon reportedly said that they were getting in the way. "He said he thought he'd done me a favour." Methuen-Campbell related. "I said 'Why did you remove them?' and he just said 'They were in the way'." Suffered From Agonizing Pain After Operations The procedure left Methuen-Campbell in agony. She experienced pain, which got worse over time. She had a follow-up operation but things became worse. She was later found hanged in her attic. Swansea assistant coroner Aled Gruffydd said that the death was a suicide, and cited that the operation made the pain worse and affected Methuen-Campbell's mental health. Methuen-Campbell's ex-partner, Philip Chatfield, said Methuen-Campbell thought there was no way out of the pain. She was desperate to find a solution to her pain, which continued despite seeing other doctors. Methuen-Campbell's 19-year-old son Angus said that his mother suffered a great deal of pain after her operations and that she was upset about the removal of her ovaries. Suspended From Two Hospitals Dixon is now under investigation by the National Health Service and has been suspended from two hospitals. The General Medical Council has also stopped him from performing another form of a corrective surgical procedure called the Starr procedure until November this year. On his part, Dixon had acknowledged that all operations have potential problems but these were done in good faith and most of these were successful. Medical Malpractice Doctors' actions and decisions during surgeries have been the subjects of medical malpractice lawsuits. In 2016, a woman sued a surgeon for a phone conversation while operating on her. A Pennsylvania man, on the other hand, was awarded $870,000 after his doctor removed the wrong testicle during surgery. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Snapchat is preparing to increase its relationship with developers as it begins to release a new platform that would increase users. Introducing The SnapKit Media outlet TechCrunch noted that Snapchat is launching the SnapKit and is looking to offer developers the opportunity to "login with Snapchat." In addition to logging in, Snap Inc. is also providing software creators the chance to use several of its tools, including access to the Bitmoji avatar. Other sources stated that Snap Inc. is open for third-party developers to incorporate a version of Snapchat's camera tool into their apps. The camera tool would also come equipped with pre-made augmented reality features. This maneuver could save app developers time and money as they would not have to create AR features from scratch. Risks And Rivals Launching SnapKit could be risky for the social media company. By inviting third parties to use the SnapKit, it might mean that the organizations have access to user data. Snap Inc. would also have to persuade their partners that they would be able to have more opportunities to use company tools over several of their rivals such as Facebook and Google. Several media outlets reported that Snapchat struggled against Facebook. The Mark Zuckerberg-founded social media company found success through cloning Snapchat's Stories. In addition to Facebook, both WhatsApp and Instagram have their version of stories. Also, Mashable reported that Messenger is looking to replicate Snapchat's "shoppable" lenses. Snapchat Updates Snap Inc. developers updated the social media app to appease the 1.2 million users who voiced through a petition their outrage regarding the first redesign. The controversial changes were initially made to the app's iOS version. The new layout returned both the Chats and Snaps features to chronological order. It also allowed Stories to occupy the right-hand side of the screen. Media outlet Digiday revealed that the social media company had announced that it would begin testing six-second unskippable ads. These ads were part of Snap Inc.'s plan to generate revenue for the app. The company noted that the ads were not in either users' personal stories page or the Discover section. The ads would involve several original Snapchat shows. Earlier this year, Snapchat added a Do Not Disturb feature onto the app. If users do not want to see any messages from a group or individuals, they can tap and hold on their icons. The people that users have muted are not blocked, and users can remain with the group. Tech Times reached out to Snap Inc. for a comment on this story. They declined to comment. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Manhattanhenge is the phenomenon in New York City where the sunset lines up with the space between city blocks. It occurs four times a year on days that frame the summer solstice at the end of May and in the middle of July. One day is already over but people in New York City can still watch the second day of Manhattanhenge and its next occurrence in July. Manhattanhenge 2018 The first day of Manhattanhenge 2018 already occurred on Tuesday, May 29, at 8:13 p.m. Eastern standard time. Those in New York City can still catch the sunset on Wednesday, May 30, at 8:12 p.m. Those who will not be able to catch the second day don't need to fuss. There will be another Manhattanhenge sunset occuring on July 12 at 8:20 p.m. and July 13 at 8:21 p.m. The best places to watch Manhattanhenge is along 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, and 57th and the various cross streets that run adjacent to them. People need a clear view along the horizon across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Many missed out on being able to share images for Manhattanhenge on May 29 due to the cloudy weather that day. There are more favorable conditions for the May 30 Manhattanhenge event. Origin Of Manhattanhenge The origin of Manhattanhenge can be traced to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. In 2001, Tyson wrote an article for the American Museum of Natural History in which he described the phenomenon occurring in New York City. Tyson also posted a picture of what the sunset looked like from a view of 34th Street. In the post, he describes what future civilizations would think when they find that New York City's streets were laid out in a grid network. By just examining the grid network and comparing it with the sunset, they may presume that the layout had some sort of astronomical significance. He then compares the layout of the streets to the prehistoric rocks at Stonehenge. Though this occurs in Stonehenge when the summer solstice happens, the dates when it occurs in New York City frame the summer solstice. Tyson describes the event as a "rare and beautiful" sight. Tyson says that the event happens on these dates in New York City because the street grid is rotated 30 degrees east from the geographic north. If the street grid was perfectly aligned with the geographic north-south line, then Manhattanhenge would occur on the equinoxes. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. LAS VEGAS, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Via OTC PR Wire -- South American Gold Corp (OTC:SAGD) provided a market update regarding the two cannabis related acquisition targets with whom SAGD has been negotiating. With both acquisition targets having existing operations with current revenue, and both having business models that are centered around value-added products within the cannabis sector, the Company has decided to pursue both opportunities with the hopes of securing financing and stock to complete both transactions. Gary Austin, director of South American Gold Corp, commented on this news, Our goal is to complete a transaction that will enable us to begin creating strong revenue with little out of pocket money on the front end. One of our targets has already agreed in principal with our offer and we are working on the final terms to move towards a final agreement. Based on recent conversations with the principals we are hopeful that we will close on this first acquisition in June. The second opportunity is still in negotiations, but we feel very confident we are getting close to a solution that makes sense for everyone involved. Mr. Austin continued, Our Company is sitting on a wealth of very strong technology assets that are built around the cannabis industry. Our board feels strongly that we can unlock the full potential of those assets by combining them with the strength and longevity of a couple of very strong tangible products that support the same sector. We have made that our goal and we are moving aggressively to complete that goal. We have a good team in place and I feel encouraged that we will get the job done. About SAGD: South American Gold Corp (SAGD) is an operational management company focused on enhancing shareholder value by acquiring and operating under valued cannabis and tech assets. Corporate Website: www.sagdcorp.co Media contact: info@sagdcorp.co General contact: info@sagdcorp.co Disclaimer: This release contains forward-looking statements that are based on beliefs of South American Gold Corp. management and reflect South American Gold Corp.'s current expectations as contemplated under section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. When we use in this release the words "estimate," "project," "looks," "believe," "anticipate," "intend," "expect," "plan," "predict," "may," "should," "will," "can," the negative of these words, or such other variations thereon, or comparable terminology, are all intended to identify forward looking statements. Such statements reflect the current views of South America Gold Corp. with respect to future events based on currently available information and are subject to numerous assumptions, risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to, risks and uncertainties pertaining to development of mining properties, changes in economic conditions and other risks, uncertainties and factors, which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievement expressed or implied by such forward looking statements to differ materially from the forward looking statements. The information contained in this press release is historical in nature, has not been updated, and is current only to the date shown in this press release. This information may no longer be accurate and therefore you should not rely on the information contained in this press release. To the extent permitted by law, South American Gold Corp. and its employees, agents and consultants exclude all liability for any loss or damage arising from the use of, or reliance on, any such information, whether or not caused by any negligent act or omission. This press release may incorporate by reference the Company's reports and other filings. Investors are encouraged to review all filings. There is no assurance South American Gold Corp. will identify projects of merit or if it will have sufficient financing to implement its business plan. There is no assurance that the Company's due diligence on the potential projects and/or acquisitions will be favorable nor that definitive terms can be negotiated. Investors should consult their financial advisor before making an investment in a company. Wikisoft Corp. is about to launch the worlds largest wiki portal for business. Built on MediaWiki software the new portal called wikiprofile.com, will be the largest in the wiki universe with over 200 million published articles and profiles on companies, top brands and corporate influencers. Users will be able to freely search the portal and all content will be collected, updated and fact-checked in real-time. Wikipedia, the most well-known wiki in the world, was founded on January 15, 2001 by Dr. Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. In a recent press release, Dr. Sanger states, In an era of misinformation, the world stands to benefit enormously from a transparent, immutable and decentralized protocol for accessing and sharing knowledge." Wikipedia is the largest and most popular general reference work on the internet and still remains one of the most visited sites in the world. Wikiprofile.com has a similar vision of providing the largest non-biased resource of business information in the world. Increasing Market Demand for Credible Information In line with the increasing globalization and trade across countries, there has been a growing demand for access to credible business, product, and employee information worldwide. This is where wikiprofile.com will be a powerful solution for businesses to find valid information quickly and easily. Also, wikiprofil is built on the same software as Wikipedia (MediaWiki), which will enable thousands of people to update and edit information daily. As of now, wikiprofile.com contains information on millions of companies and their key employees and will soon also incorporate information on millions of products worldwide, thus closing the information gap for people doing business around the world. Wikisoft will create new standards for validating professional profiles worldwide and will change the way we trust digital information states Rasmus Refer, Chairman of the Board for Wikisoft Corp. Wikiprofile.com is launching in beta version and expects to officially launch in mid-August 2018 when WikiSoft will also be listed on the OTC Stock Exchange in the United States. Shares can be reserved on a first-come, first-serve basis with a closing date on June 18th 2018. Read more at investor relations: http://www.wikisoft.com/wiki/Wikisoft_Investor_relations The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2018 - Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principals for news reporting and research purposes. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA news reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement, agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement WHISTLER, British Columbia, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Whistler Medical Marijuana Corporation (WMMC or the Company) officially announce that they have been issued a Dealers License by Health Canada under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA). The License adds to the Companys existing operational permits including the cultivation and sale of medicinal cannabis, production and sale of cannabis resin and oil, and the sale of cannabis plants to medical patients within Canada. The Dealers License enables the Company to export certified organic medical cannabis resin and oil internationally. WMMC is currently the only Licensed Producer in Canada to make certified organic cannabis oils, and now these oils will be available to the international community. CEO Chris Pelz commented We are excited at the news and the opportunity to directly distribute internationally. Our organic certified products receive much interest globally and having a Dealers License will allow us to expand our reach into other emerging medical markets. The Company is currently preparing shipments of oil destined for Australia and the Cayman Islands. In addition to export capabilities, the licence will allow the importation and storage of cannabis derivatives not currently covered under the Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations (ACMPR). About Whistler Medical Marijuana Corp. WMMC is one of Canadas original medical cannabis producers. Certified Organic by the Fraser Valley Producers Association, the Company remains the only Licensed Producer who is selling organic medication to Canadians. Locally owned and operated, WMMC is proud to be an independent company operating from Whistler, British Columbia. Learn more at www.whistlermedicalmarijuana.com Contact: Sophie Rivers +1 604 962 3440 sophie@wmmc.ca Brett Favre and Lindsay Lohan could tell you that not all comebacks are successful. But sometimes, when they are, they can surpass the origina Purchases made via links on our site may earn us an affiliate commission ALAMEDA, Calif., May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Verific Design Automation , the recognized leader of SystemVerilog, VHDL and UPF Parser Platforms in production and development use throughout the semiconductor industry, today announced full integration of INVIO with its flagship parser platforms. This follows an earlier announcement that it acquired from Invionics Software the INVIO platform, with its high-level application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable Verific users to simplify and streamline their design environment, accelerating tool development. INVIO is SystemVerilog- and VHDL-language agnostic and offers a high of abstraction that semiconductor company CAD support departments need for their SystemVerilog and VHDL flows. The integration included the addition of C++ APIs to INVIO, and porting of Verifics native Liberty and UPF parsers to INVIO. The combined product line, named Verific with INVIO, was rolled out earlier this year and is in production use at five semiconductor companies to date, including IBM. Our users are pleased with the additional capabilities provided by INVIO to develop their next EDA product or custom tool development, notes Rob Dekker, Verifics founder and chief technology officer. We credit a capable R&D and applications engineering group who joined Verific as part of the acquisition and did excellent work integrating INVIO with Verific and supporting the customers. As early adopters of Verific with INVIO I am happy to report that we were able to deliver two internally used EDA tools on time under an aggressive schedule, affirms Wolfgang Roesner, IBM fellow, functional verification. Verific continues to sell its SystemVerilog, UPF and VHDL parsers as standalone solutions. INVIO is marketed and sold as an add-on. Verifics parsers are in production and development flows throughout semiconductor companies worldwide, from emerging companies to established Fortune 500 vendors. Applications range from analysis, simulation, formal verification and synthesis to emulation and virtual prototyping, in-circuit debug and design for test. Verific distributes its Parser Platforms as C++ source code and compile on all 32 and 64 bit Unix, Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems. Pricing is available upon request. Verific will demonstrate its SystemVerilog, VHDL and UPF Parser Platforms, and Verific with INVIO at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Booth #2311 from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. June 25-27. DAC will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. About Verific Design Automation Verific Design Automation, with offices in Alameda, Calif., and Kolkata, India, provides SystemVerilog, Verilog, VHDL and UPF Parser Platforms that enable project groups to develop advanced electronic design automation (EDA) products quickly and cost effectively. Since 1999, Verific has shipped more than 60,000 copies of its software used worldwide by the EDA and semiconductor industry. Corporate headquarters is located at: 1516 Oak Street, Suite 115, Alameda, Calif. 94501. Telephone: (510) 522-1555. Engage with Verific at: Email: info@verific.com Website: www.verific.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/810695 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Verific-Design-Automation-100448363329771/ Verific Design Automation and Efinix acknowledge trademarks or registered trademarks of other organizations for their respective products and services. For more information, contact: Nanette Collins Public Relations for Verific (617) 437-1822 nanette@nvc.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/10d55175-4c9e-4c2a-8f03-340e4f493dbe Louisiana has to devise ways to get more women into leadership positions in education, state Superintendent of Education John White said Wednesday morning. "If we are to elevate, we must recruit more men into our profession," White said. "And we must see more women at the highest ranks of our profession." He added, "A profession that is 75 percent women cannot be run largely and exclusively by men," White said. "We must make that change." White was the keynote speaker at the 6th annual Teacher Leader Summit at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Nearly 7,000 teachers from around the state are holding and taking part in professional development training. Not long after White's comments the state announced the nine finalists for state Teacher of the Year and Principal of the Year. Seven of the nine teacher finalists are women. Eight of the nine finalists for Louisiana's top principal are women. White made his comments at a time when teachers in Oklahoma, West Virginia and other states have walked off the jobs to protest what they call low pay. Leaders of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers announced earlier month that, according to an online survey of about 4,000 teachers, more than 60 percent favor a statewide walkout or strike to land what they called a significant pay hike. What that is was not spelled out. 'Fed up': Louisiana teacher questionnaire finds support for mass protests, walkout; see full survey About 60 percent of teachers surveyed said they favor a statewide walkout or strike to land a "significant" pay raise, leaders of the Louisian White got the biggest reaction of his speech when he said the state has to find ways to be competitive in teacher pay. "Nobody in teaching got into it to be rich," he said. "But they certainly didn't get into it to work a second job." The state's roughly 50,000 teachers are paid an average of $49,244 per year. Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Louisiana's average teacher pay has slipped below the regional average set by the Southern Regional Education Board, which is $50,949. The national average is $58,064. The state's high school graduation rate is 78.1 percent for the Class of 2017, the latest figures available. White noted that figure means more than 20 percent of students failed to earn a diploma. Also, Louisiana remains near the top nationally in the number of adults 16-24 who are neither in school nor working. "We also know that that group, that group of kids, they are disproportionately with disability," he said. "They are disproportionately those that do not speak English at home." White said the state has shown notable gains since less than 1,000 teachers gathered for the first teacher summit held five years ago in Lafayette. Louisiana's high school graduating class is about 4,000 students larger, he said, and 3,000 more students have qualified for the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, known as TOPS, than did so in 2012. "You see what you do, what we do as a community, it matters," White said. "We are helping more Louisiana kids achieve their fullest potential, to go out and live out their dreams." "Our job, at its essence, is not about test scores and not just about guide books and not just about SPS," White said, a reference to annual School Performance Scores that determine annual letter grades for public schools. "It is not ultimately about any of that," he said. "It is about getting Louisiana children, all of them, to a point where they have experienced and manifested their full potential given to them by God." Out of the hundreds of Louisianas dysfunctional drinking water systems, the governors kitchen cabinet has found the 10 worst on which they plan to focus first. Mostly in central Louisiana with a couple in St. Tammany Parish and Acadiana, the top 10 the governors office prefers to call them most distressed rather than worst have deteriorating pipes and pumps, problems with managing the system, insufficient financing for maintenance, and water quality threats, said Leslie Durham, who heads the water infrastructure task force created by Gov. John Bel Edwards on March 22. Edwards panel, for the first time, put in one place representatives from different state and federal agencies dealing with drinking water. Hopefully, Durham said, the task force working across jurisdictional lines can use their experiences dealing with the first 10 to develop procedures and protocols for the rest of the troubled systems. +5 Governor's task force targets small towns with old pipes in quest for clean drinking water Shortly after the governors new kitchen cabinet on drinking water issues decided to form a kind of SWAT team to swoop in when emergencies aro Of the states roughly 1,300 drinking water systems, about half operate infrastructure that is more than 50 years old. Other systems have some of the problems and they will be on a list eventually but the 10 are the closest to crisis. The governors task force plans to work with these 10 systems before they get to the emergency level that the northeast Louisiana town of St. Josephs did in 2016, when dangerous levels of lead and copper required the total replacement of the pipes, filters and equipment at a cost to taxpayers of $9 million. Eight of the targeted 10 systems are under state administrative orders for not addressing the problems inspectors have found. The state has issued 300 administrative orders to systems over the past three years. Four of the 10 systems on the list have found traces of lead in single or multiple tests and didnt properly inform the water customers. But lead findings alone didnt get the systems on the list. Louisiana has 20 drinking water systems since 2015 that had at least 10 percent of their multiple tests show that lead exceeds 15 micrograms per liter of water. Lead affects the part of the brain responsible for abstract thought, attention and memory. Findings arent unusual given that lead pipes and lead-based solder repairs were common into the late 1970s. They can be dealt with using anti-corrosion chemicals. The real problem is when the pipes are so old and ill-maintained that the treatment doesnt work, said Dr. Jimmy Guidry, the states health officer. There was no way to put in enough corrosion chemicals to correct the lead because the pipes were so leaky, Guidry said about St. Josephs lead problem in 2016. Lead is something you can do something about if you have a system that works. New water system opens in St. Joseph Tuesday, ending year-long public health emergency After more than a year of having their drinking water trucked in because of lead contamination, Gov. John Bel Edwards cut the ribbon Tuesday o The common thread among the 10 systems on the governors list is rickety infrastructure coupled with little money or expertise to fix the problem. The unincorporated community of Enterprise, in Catahoula Parish, has problems keeping chlorine levels high enough to protect against bacteria. University testers have found lead in the drinking water. The Town of Melville, in St. Landry Parish, has been through several boil advisories. Both systems operate old pipes and leak a lot of water. Weve been fortunate in that people arent getting sick, Guidry said. Sooner or later theyre not going to be able to treat the water because of so much water loss. Amanda Laughlin, the Louisiana Department of Healths chief engineer, says Ozone Pines, a subdivision near Slidell, is on the list for its poor infrastructure, lack of funding and because nobody owns the water system. Theres no meters; no billing; no one responsible, Laughlin said. Its one those situations where we hope to find a solution and quickly. The scoop on state politics in your inbox Get the Louisiana politics insider details once a week from us. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Many of Louisianas troubled water systems are in small rural towns that have become less viable as residents move to larger cities leaving a smaller base of customers to pay for maintaining increasingly aging pipes, tanks, filters. But a good number of problem systems serviced real estate developments and failed to evolve with the neighborhood. Back in the early 1970s, a physician subdivided a cattle run near the cloverleaf where Interstates 10, 12 and 59 intersect in Slidell. He sold lots for 25 homes. He connected pipes from a well that had been on the property since the 1950s. The system has no meters and all the homes are linked one after another on the pipes, so shutting off a nonpayer requires shutting off the entire system. When the developer disappeared, a retiree volunteered and kept the pumps running for about 25 years. When the volunteer died a little more than a decade ago, Ken Clark jumped in to help. Its a mess. The sheds falling down, said Clark, adding that the pump is held together with prayer and duct tape using whatever money his neighbors contribute to the effort. Ive been paying the electric bill. State inspectors thought Clark owned the facility and went to court hoping a judge would force an upgrade. But Clark doesnt own the facility. Hes just a volunteer fix-it guy. As new Slidell subdivisions have grown up around what 30 years ago was a cluster of houses at the end of a gravel road, Laughlin said one solution would be to connect Ozone Pines with one of those systems. Its an idea Dr. Guidry likes, arguing that small systems dont have enough customers to raise the money needed to keep up with maintenance. But thats not as easy as it sounds, even where new subdivisions have grown up on all sides of the older Ozone Pines. Extending a connection across bayous or under an interstate can be expensive. And then theres the cost of upgrading the distribution lines, replacing the old pump and installing new meters. The elderly, fixed income residents of Ozone Pines cant afford it and neighboring systems arent rushing to pick up what likely will be a considerable expense for 25 accounts. A member of the governors task force, Laughlin said she is hoping experts from the dozen agencies that are members can come up with a patchwork of grants, loans and technical assistance that no single one of them could develop individually. Thats one of the purposes of the committee, bringing together all these different expertises to try to find solutions, Laughlin said. Durham, the groups chair, recently drove out of cellphone range to the town of Rogers, near the Kisatchie National Forest, northeast of Alexandria. Rogers, which is on the list, had a hole in their water tower and is under a Louisiana Department of Health boil advisory. The town council didnt know what to do. But Rogers cant afford an engineer and it doesn't know how to repair the hole at the top of the 80-foot-high water tower. Durham is the governors designee to the multi-state Delta Regional Authority, which was established by the U.S. Congress to work on economic opportunities over eight states. Delta would be one of the agencies a small town would have called. But the task force allowed Durham to bring in officials from different agencies to brainstorm the problem. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has money but needs a match. My department could help with a match, Durham said. Something we can do is leverage our resources. With all the agencies at the table, town officials were able to start applying for grants right then and there. The Louisiana Rural Water Association is trying to find the leaks and the Planning Commission is looking for grants. Were literally trying to get started, she said. Were cautiously moving forward. Ed Buckner, President of the Original Big 7 Social Aid and Pleasure Club, hugs Barbara Lacen-Keller after a press conference against gun violence at the intersection of Duplessis and Lafreniere streets, where Herbert Foster was fatally shot nearby during the Mother's Day Second Line, in New Orleans, Tuesday, May 15, 2018. Twilight falls back in the French Quarter due to daylight savings time, filling the city with dazzling hues that can be admired earlier than last week in New Orleans, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2017. A new search for developers to revitalize the vacant former Charity Hospital building has left the process pretty much where it was three years ago, with essentially the same three firms that were then the front-runners once again seeking to be chosen to redevelop the giant building on Tulane Avenue. The companies 1532 Tulane Partners, HRI Properties and Matthews Southwest were picked as finalists in a process that is now being overseen by LSUs Real Estate and Facilities Foundation, an affiliate of the fund-raising LSU Foundation, the organization announced Tuesday. Those firms were also the main contenders to redevelop Charity in 2015, when then-Gov. Bobby Jindal sought proposals for reusing the more than 1-million-square-foot art deco building. It has been vacant since the basement flooded during Hurricane Katrina, but the rest of the 20-story structure remains largely intact. The selection process was restarted by Gov. John Bel Edwards when he took office the following year. The project management committee thats currently leading this is very encouraged by the responses to its recent request for qualifications, said Sara Whittaker, a spokeswoman for the LSU Foundation. The foundation declined to provide details on the firms submissions Tuesday, and it was not immediately clear who else may have applied. The first round of the latest process was aimed simply at selecting firms to work up proposals for the site. It did not ask them to submit any plans. The actual proposals will be submitted at an undetermined later date, Whittaker said. JLL, the consulting firm hired by the foundation, did not review any of the previous proposals submitted to redevelop Charity before settling on their short list, Whittaker said. But the previous submittals by the three firms could provide a window into their ideas for the site. The group 1532 Tulane Partners is made up of the El Ad Group, the U.S. arm of an Israeli firm, and CCNO, a New Orleans developer with several projects around the city. A 2015 proposal from El Ad and CCNO, then working together as CHR Partners, would have paid the state $30 million and spent $245 million converting the former hospital into apartments, a hotel, stores and biomedical facilities. The firm does not yet have a detailed proposal worked out for the latest selection process, said Joseph Stebbins, of CCNO. But, he said, any plans submitted by any of the firms are likely to have some things in common. Itll be a modern, vertically integrated development no matter who does it. Youre going to have residential pieces, and youre going to have an affordable (housing) piece, he said. HRI is a prolific local firm responsible for the redevelopment of the former Iberville and St. Thomas housing complexes and creation of many Warehouse District condo buildings, among many other projects in New Orleans and nationwide. HRIs $194 million plan in 2015 involved an apartment complex, artist lofts, a daycare center, retail and a medical research facility. The plan put forward in 2015 by Matthews Southwest, a real-estate development company headquartered in Lewisville, Texas, called for spending $232 million on affordable apartments, a hotel, offices and retail space. The firm, which has done projects across the country and in Canada and the United Arab Emirates, did not respond to a request to discuss its current vision for the property. Matthews Southwest is also partnering with local developers Darryl Berger and Joe Jaeger on a proposal for a $558 million, 1,200-room Omni hotel on land owned by the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. The redevelopment of the Charity building has long been an elusive goal. Former Mayor Mitch Landrieu proposed turning the building into a municipal complex by moving City Hall and the Civil District Court into the nearly 80-year-old structure. But that plan faced opposition from the judges and sputtered out due to a lack of funding. Soon after that, Jindals administration announced it would start taking bids to redevelop the property. After he was sworn in, Edwards went back to square one, with officials in his administration saying they hoped to cast a wider net that would yield better proposals. That eventually landed the buildings fate in the hands of the LSU Real Estate and Facilities Foundation. That group brought in the Urban Land Institute to provide advice on how to reuse the building and has also convened a committee named the Spirit of Charity to guide the redevelopment process. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION OR RELEASE, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR INTO THE UNITED STATES OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION IN WHICH THE DISTRIBUTION OR RELEASE WOULD BE UNLAWFUL. PLEASE SEE THE IMPORTANT NOTICE AT THE END OF THIS COMMUNICATION In connection with the employee share purchase programme of Aker ASA (the "Company"), the Company's employee bonus scheme, as well as for other corporate purposes, the Company hereby launches an offer to all shareholders in the Company to buy back up to 50,000 shares in Aker ASA. The offer will be carried out through a bookbuilding process with an offer price of up to NOK 597 per share. The maximum price per share is the closing price of the Company's shares on 30 May 2018 and a premium of 2.5 per cent. Per 30 May 2018 the Company owns 15,733 own shares. The bookbuilding period commences immediately and is expected to close at 08:00 (CET) on 31 May 2018. The Company reserves the right to accept acceptances received after the end of the bookbuilding period, as well as to extend or close the bookbuilding period at any time in its sole discretion. Acceptances of the offer are irrevocable and cannot be withdrawn, however if the bookbuilding period is extended, acceptances can be withdrawn up to the expiry of the extended bookbuilding period. Arctic Securities AS is engaged as financial advisor and receiving agent in connection with the Offer. Shareholders who wish to sell their shares can call Arctic Securities AS on +47 21 01 31 85. In the event that the total number of received acceptances exceeds 50,000 shares (or the increased amount of shares the Company wishes to purchase), the Company will determine criteria for the allocation of the acceptances in accordance with the best interest of the company and the equal treatment of the shareholders. Allocation and pricing will follow before 09:00 (CET) on 31 May 2018. The trade date will be 31 May 2018 and settlement will take place on 4 June 2018. If the bookbuilding period is extended, the dates will be postponed correspondingly. For further information, please contact: Investors: Per Kristian Reppe, Investment Manager & Head of Investor Relations Phone: +47 24 13 00 67 Mobile: +47 90 03 32 03 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. *** The Offer and the distribution of this announcement and other information in connection with the offer may be restricted by law in certain jurisdictions. Aker ASA does not assume any responsibility in the event there is a violation by any person of such restrictions. Persons into whose possession this announcement or such other information should come are required to inform themselves about and to observe any such restrictions. The offer is not being made directly or indirectly in, or by use of the mails of, or by any means or instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce of, or any facilities of a national securities exchange of, the United States of America, its territories and possessions, any State of the United States and the District of Columbia (the "United States"). This includes, but is not limited to, facsimile transmission, internet delivery, e-mail, telex and telephones. Accordingly, copies of this release and any related documents are not being, and must not be, mailed, e-mailed or otherwise distributed or sent in or into the United States and so doing may invalidate any purported acceptance. After news surfaced Tuesday that a Louisiana televangelist was asking for donations to fund the purchase of a new private jet, it didn't take long to whip social media into a frenzy. Nowhere was that more evident than the official Facebook page for the Destrehan based preacher. Angry comments flooded most of the recent posts on the page, especially a post quoting a bible verse that was sent out about 2 a.m. Wednesday. As of 8:30 a.m. the post had garnered 132 comments, many of which were griping about the preacher asking for help from followers to buy the jet -- his fourth -- that retails new for at least $54 million. Some comments: -- -- -- Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up The fiery reaction comes in response to a video, posted May 21, in which Duplantis explains his need for a new jet. He guided viewers through his history of owning private jets, noting that his current Dassault Falcon 50 is 12 years old and no longer serves his needs. He tells viewers that God spoke to him and told him to "believe" on a Dassault Falcon 7X. He said the new jet will allow him to make longer trips without stopping, saving on refueling costs. "Some people believe that preachers shouldnt have jets," he says. "I really believe that preachers oughta go on ... every available outlet to get this gospel preached to the world." While the reaction was largely negative, his supporters also made their voices heard on the message board. One person pointed to the fact that Duplantis said in the video that donating was optional. -- Despite the media attention, no official statement has been made regarding the jet or its funding. Watch the video of Duplantis' request below. Can't see video? Click here. Gov. John Bel Edwards has vetoed a bill that would have blocked so-called inclusionary zoning policies in Louisiana cities. Those policies require housing developers to set aside some units for low-income residents. But the governor won't oppose a future law banning the policies if parish governments fail to enact them by 2019, he said which means New Orleans, Baton Rouge and any other cities considering such requirements must act fast to finalize their plans. If parishes don't do so within the next year, "I will conclude that it is not their will to utilize these strategies and I will be inclined to sign a similar piece of legislation in the 2019 regular session, Edwards said in a Saturday letter to Sen. John Alario, the Senate president, vetoing Senate Bill 462. Louisiana lawmakers gave parish governments the green light to create inclusionary zoning policies in 2006, with the goals of boosting stocks of affordable housing, after the destruction caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and reducing concentrations of poverty in certain neighborhoods. But no parish has yet enacted such a zoning policy. The latest effort to do so in New Orleans was stymied amid strong opposition from some developers and after City Council members could not agree on which incentives to offer to developers for creating affordable units. The plan that has been under discussion in New Orleans would require developers to reserve 12 percent of their housing units for low- or moderate-income residents in in-demand neighborhoods. The city would, in exchange, give developers some sort of incentive. In Baton Rouge, Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome is exploring a similar plan. But developers argue that such a mandate has not worked well in other states, and that forcing them to lower their charges for certain low-income people would mean they would have to charge more for their market-rate units, which could actually compound the shortage of affordable housing. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up The Home Builders Association of Greater New Orleans and other opponents lobbied state lawmakers in each of the past two years to kill the law allowing such mandates. They failed in 2017 but this year won passage of a bill in the House and Senate. The head of that organization said Thursday that Edwards "turned his back on" homebuilders across the state. The move "will either have a chilling effect on new home construction and renovation, or increase the costs of housing beyond many of our citizens reach," Jon Luther said. But the heads of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center and the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance, who had urged a veto of the bill, praised Edwards' action. Weve obviously thrilled, said Andreanecia Morris of the Housing Alliance. Now, we look forward to working with local officials to pass and implement the 'smart housing mix' policy so that workers can continue to live and thrive in our cities, said Cashauna Hill of the Housing Action Center. Editor's note, 5/31/18: This story was updated after publication with comments from the Home Builders Association of Greater New Orleans. When Pearl River throws its second town festival this weekend, one resident is explicitly not invited: Police Chief JJ Jennings. A string of emails among the Police Department, Mayor Dave McQueen and the owners of the private property where the Honey Island Swamp Festival will be held on Friday and Saturday make it clear that Jennings is persona non grata. In fact, if Jennings does show up, the emails suggest he'll face arrest for trespassing. Jennings said he doesn't know what prompted the ban. A letter to McQueen from Kelley Barber and Milton Marshall, who own the property on Pump Slough Road, said that the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office will handle "any and all law enforcement services on the above-mentioned property" for the duration of the festival. "Due to the lack of cooperating and unwillingness to provide adequate law enforcement services by Chief Jennings to certain town events ... we feel it necessary to have (the Sheriff's Office) handle those services," the April 24 letter said. Barber did not return a call for comment; Marshall could not be reached. But Jennings said he's always provided services when called upon to do so. The sole exception, he said, was a "Trunk or Treat" event last Halloween, and the department didn't provide officers for it because he was not approached. He did require the Honey Island Swamp Festival to close down last year when it ran past its scheduled ending time, he said. Festival organizers had paid the band to play an extra hour, but Jennings said he was concerned about police who were volunteering their time. "Last year, it was supposed to end at 11 ... it went on until almost midnight. At 10 minutes to 12, I had to shut it down. I was waiting for the last song. I was ridiculed for shutting them down for having a good time," he said. Jennings said he plans to go to this weekend's event, despite the ban. He believes it's his job to do so because his department could be called upon to respond if a large fight or other incident breaks out. The possibility of the Pearl River Police Department working the festival was broached in the email exchanges. St. Tammany top stories in your inbox A weekly guide to the biggest news in St. Tammany. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Deputy Chief Daniel Hunter wrote to the mayor, saying that town attorney Tim Mathison told him that since the festival is on private property, Jennings could be arrested for trespassing. "With that being said, I would like to ensure that if any of the other members of the Pearl River Police Department, to include myself, provide security for this event, we will not be faced with the same outcome of a possible arrest for criminal trespassing," he wrote on March 26. Town Clerk Madeline Campbell responded on March 27, writing, "Mayor McQueen asked me to assure you of a few things regarding your correspondence this morning. The intent of the restriction is ONLY for Chief Jennings." It then asked Hunter to attend the next festival meeting. The mayor did not respond to a call for comment. One member of the town's Board of Aldermen, Lora Cutrer, said she will not be attending the festival because a taxpaying citizen is being excluded. Cutrer said she was shocked to learn that Jennings had been singled out for a ban. "I have no problem with the property owners saying they do not want a certain person on their property, because that's their property," Cutrer said. "I do not agree with my mayor to the fact that he said it was still OK to use that property" for the festival under those circumstances. She said $8,000 in public money is spent for the event, which is a joint effort of the town government and the Lions Club. Proceeds from the festival are used for Lions Club charities. "I dont believe we can enter an agreement, using tax dollars," when the police chief is excluded, she said. McQueen did not consult the council or provide a reason for banning Jennings, Cutrer said, adding that she doesn't know if there were arguments behind the scenes. But she said her basic concern remains. "Who will make that list next year?" she asked. After a fiery crash claimed the lives of four people and injured a dozen more on Interstate 12 near Covington on Saturday, north shore citizens have been abuzz about what can be done to improve the congested roadway. St. Tammany Parish President Pat Brister weighed in on Tuesday afternoon with a letter to Governor John Bel Edwards. Among other things, Brister asked that expansion work on the interstate be fast-tracked in an attempt to curb accidents such as the one over the weekend. Can't see video below? Click here. The accident began when an 18-wheeler hauling avocados failed to stop as the driver approached stalled traffic, Louisiana State Police said. A State Police spokeswoman on Sunday identified three of the dead as Yoland Simmons and Keland Simmons, both of Baton Rouge, and Mandeville resident Rachel Lehmann. The driver of the 18-wheeler hauling avocados also died in the crash, according to trooper Melissa Matey, but that person's identity hasn't yet been confirmed. Following is the content of Brister's letter to Edwards. Dear Governor, It is with great sorrow that I write to you regarding a fatal car accident that occurred Saturday, May 26, 2018, in St. Tammany Parish. This horrific and tragic incident took the lives of four people, and injured ten others traveling Interstate 12, between Louisiana Highway 21 and the I-12 Tchefuncte Bridge. This accident, however unthinkable to the citizens of this Parish and our State, pales in comparison to the unthinkable grief that has consumed the families that have lost their loved ones. Our thoughts and prayers are with them, and we can only hope that those prayers can lighten the burden of loss they are consumed with now. The horrific images of this accident heightened awareness of the need to make this stretch of roadway safer. The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development offers data that proves the car count near the accident location has 50 percent more vehicles travelling through this portion of roadway than the section between Walker and Satsuma which is currently under construction. Theres no way to know if an expanded I-12 from the intersections of LA Hwy 190 through LA Hwy 1077 would have prevented the traffic congestion that led to the fatal crash. The events of Saturday, May 26 only magnify the severity of traffic concerns in one of Louisianas fastest growing parishes. The amount of traffic that travels through this section of highway is significantly greater than traffic over other sections that are currently expanding to a minimum of six lanes with capacity for more. Its time to immediately solve the need for I-12 expansion in St. Tammany. Governor, I am hopeful that you will accelerate expanding this part of our interstate roadway, a need that has been validated by your own data and administration. The solace of knowing that we have taken steps to prevent another family from going through the same devastating loss of a loved one, may help, in some small way, to ease the pain of this tragedy, and offer our commuters a little more piece of mind. I urge you to fulfill this request, not because I am asking or because it is a priority supported by your own data, but mostly because we owe our citizens and travelers the assurance that we as elected officials are doing everything we can to provide a safe transportation system. I became involved in government because I wanted to make a difference in peoples lives. I cant think of a more important responsibility that protecting the lives of those we serve. Please lets not wait until 2023 as currently scheduled to begin construction on this expansion. Lets speed the funding and timeline to address the need for expanding this roadway now. Thank you so much for considering this heartfelt plea. Sincerely, Pat Brister A New Orleans lawyer who served briefly as a prosecutor before rising to a top position on the staff of the state Supreme Court will be the new chief of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana. Alanah Odoms Hebert, 36, will begin work as the organization's executive director on Monday, seven months after the retirement of Marjorie Esman. The leadership shift comes at a pivotal time for the activist organization, which played an important role in the successful push for criminal justice reform at the Louisiana Legislature last year. Odoms Hebert said she hopes to further chip away at Louisianas status as a top incarcerator, as well as to expand the groups efforts on issues like gay rights with new staff members. You cant ever rest on your laurels and say were finished, Odoms Hebert said. Were not done. This is an ongoing struggle. A New Jersey native, Odoms Hebert is the first African-American to lead the ACLU of Louisiana in its 62-year history. She also arrives with an unusual background for the group, which typically spars with prosecutors. After graduating from the Rutgers School of Law-Newark in 2008, she moved to Louisiana to work as an assistant district attorney under Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro. She began with idealistic hopes that she could push for a more lenient approach to criminal justice, she said. Instead, by the end of her tenure, she felt complicit in pursuing harsh penalties for minor offenses. She recalled one instance when she prosecuted a man as a habitual offender on a marijuana possession charge. He received a lengthy sentence, she said. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up He looked like my brother, she said. He was convicted, and it was the most devastating day of my life. I realized at that moment the limitations of trying to work within a system. Still, Odoms Hebert said she has no interest in demonizing Cannizzaro, who is now the target of an ACLU lawsuit over his offices use of bogus subpoenas to try to get reluctant witnesses to talk to prosecutors. I respect him as a person, she said. I believe you can assail practices and policies without assailing the person. After she left the District Attorneys Office in 2010, Odoms Hebert became an associate at the law firm Gauthier, Houghtaling and Williams LLP, where she represented Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Bernette Johnson in her successful legal battle with another justice to become the courts chief justice. Odoms Hebert then became the Supreme Courts deputy general counsel. She also served as Johnsons liaison to the Justice Reinvestment Task Force, a group of legislators, lawyers and criminal justice system leaders who drew up the blueprint for the criminal justice reform package. Former U.S. Attorney Kenneth Polite said he was impressed by her ability to build bipartisan support on a separate task force to reform Louisianas felony sentencing laws. I think anybody that meets her realizes that she is a formidable voice here in this state, and I suspect with this new platform across the country, on these issues of criminal justice reform, he said. Odoms Hebert said she aims to involve more people of color in the ACLU's work. Sometimes certain groups have felt left out, and to the extent that we can, we want to bring them back in, she said. I bring all of me to this work. I bring the stories that I have learned, and I bring the family experience that I have coming from an inner city in Jersey City. A 4-year-old girl and her father were killed when a gunman ambushed them outside their apartment in LaPlace on Tuesday night, according to the St. John the Baptist Sheriff's Office. The father was carrying his daughter and groceries up the stairs to their apartment on Joe Parquet Circle shortly before 9 p.m. when the gunman fired at them, the Sheriff's Office said. The child was pronounced dead after a deputy drove her to the Ochsner Health Center in LaPlace. First responders airlifted her father to University Medical Center in New Orleans, but he died by Wednesday morning, the Sheriff's Office said. Authorities did not immediately identify any possible suspects in the slayings. They haven't yet identified the victims. Joe Parquet Circle loops around a public housing complex in LaPlace. A child's bicycle could be seen lying outside a building at the complex where crime scene technicians combed for evidence. Deputies asked anyone with information to call Crimestoppers at (504) 822-1111. Tipsters may be eligible for a cash reward. At least 11 people were robbed or fell victim to attempted robberies throughout New Orleans on Memorial Day and overnight, according to reports from the NOPD. Below are details from the incidents, according to preliminary reports: A 20-year-old woman housesitting in East Carrollton said she was awoken by a noise in the home Monday morning and found a man in the home. The incident was reported to have occurred about 11:18 a.m. in the 1200 block of Lowerline Street. The man allegedly struck the woman with his hand multiple times before jumping out of a bedroom window, according to the report. A 50-year-old man said he was struck in the head and robbed at the edge of the French Quarter Monday evening. The incident occurred about 6:56 p.m. near the intersection of Conti and Basin streets, according to a report. The man said he was robbed of cash. A 25-year-old man said he had parked in a McDonald's parking lot in New Orleans East when his vehicle was stolen early Tuesday morning. The incident occurred about 1:01 a.m. in the 10000 block of the N. I-10 Service Road. The man said he walked to the restaurant's front door and found it be locked. When he returned to his vehicle three men were standing there, one of whom demanded his keys. The three men then fled the scene in the vehicle. Four men and a woman said they were robbed in the St. Bernard are after a group of armed men approached in the back of a truck. The incident occurred about 1:06 a.m. near the intersection of St. Bernard Avenue and Senate Street. The group that was robbed, between the ages of 17 and 21, complied and the men fled the scene. A 55-year-old woman said she was sitting in her vehicle in New Orleans East when two men attempted to rob her. The incident occurred about 2:03 a.m. in the 13900 block of Dwyer Boulevard, according to a report. The woman said the men demanded her vehicle, at which point she refused and started honking her horn. The man fled in an unknown direction. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up A 34-year-old man said he was walking in the French Quarter when he was knocked to the ground from behind and a man attempted to rob him. The incident occurred about 2:25 a.m. in the 800 block of Bourbon Street, according to an NOPD report. A man attempted to take items out of the pockets of the victim, but he was scared off by passersby, according to the report. A 23-year-old man said he was walking in the French Quarter when three men approached and robbed him. The incident occurred about 4:24 a.m. in the 700 block of Toulouse Street, according to an NOPD report. The man said his wallet and phone were stolen. In other matters recently handled by local authorities: The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office on Tuesday released a surveillance camera photo of a man suspected of robbing a TCBY store in the 700 block of Metairie Road at knifepoint five days earlier. The man's mouth was covered with what appeared to be a surgical mask. Dwayne Finch, 19, fired bullets at multiple homes in the 1600 block of Elizardi Boulevard in Algiers about 8:40 a.m. May 8, New Orleans police said Tuesday. Finch, whose car also had bullet holes from the incident, surrendered to police on Monday and was jailed on counts of illegal use of a weapon, aggravated criminal damage to property and being a felon in possession of a firearm. The Orleans Parish Coroner's Office on Tuesday identified the man who was fatally shot in the 3000 block of Copernicus Street in Algiers two days earlier as 27-year-old Diamond Jackson. Ramstein, Germany , May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The U.S. Air Force issued a solicitation for a transportable containerized accommodation kennel system (TCDA). This equipment will be used for housing working military dogs in Germany. Quotations for this solicitation need to be submitted by Friday, June 29, 2018, at 4:00 p.m. CEST. For assistance meeting this deadline with proper registrations and a strong offer, businesses may use third-party government registration firm, US Federal Contractor Registration (USFCR). In total, the Air Force is ordering just one TCDA of a G3Systems brand or one of an equal build. The exact specifications to fulfill their needs are found on the Advanced Procurement Portal from USFCR. For solicitation information, contact Svetlana A. Allendorf (svetlana.allendorf.ru@us.af.mil) or Tyler Groves (tyler.groves.1@us.af.mil). Contracting officers will be unable to assist with specific contractor requirements such as registration in the System for Award Management (SAM). SAM is the mandatory registration that all federal contractors must complete before making offers to perform any work for the government. This system can be tricky to handle, especially when trying to meet a deadline and put a quote together. For assistance with all of these matters, US Federal Contractor Registration is standing by to provide. US Federal Contractor Registration (USFCR) is the world's largest third-party government registration firm. They have helped thousands of entities translate their capabilities into the U.S. Government's language and systems with the Simplified Acquisition Program, bid training, and proposal writing services. They not only register companies on their behalf in SAM, but also have pioneered the Advanced Procurement Portal (APP). APP shows active and historical federal business opportunity information in the same place, simplifying market research. Active federal buyers and vendors are not only cataloged in APP but also are also using the system, creating a powerful network. Businesses who partner with USFCR will be able to dedicate their complete effort toward their performance on a contract, rather than the acquisition of it. if the people of Biafra want Republic of Biafra, it will be a reality during my administration. ----Donald Trump Donald Trump I wi... JD Davids: So, there's now the bilingual website for HIVenas Abiertas, plus your presence on Facebook and Twitter . Tell us more about this national network of Latinx immigrants living with HIV. We asked Castro-Bojorquez to talk more about how the current time affects the lives of Latinx immigrants with HIV, and about his vision for the network. Anyone awake in the U.S. right now knows that Latinx immigrants are increasingly marginalized from social and economic opportunities that can make a huge difference in a person's ability to stay healthy. Now, Marco Castro-Bojorquez, a community leader and filmmaker living with HIV, has put out the call for support for HIVenas Abiertas , a national network of Latinx immigrants living with HIV, telling TheBody, "We are going to be a network of people that are going to celebrate on a daily basis who we are, despite everything that comes to us in the shape of hatred messages." Marco Castro-Bojorquez: The idea is very simple, JD: We want to get together. We relaunched the network on May 1 with our statement targeted to the HIV movement about their work on immigration. It's a renaissance, or the relaunching, of a network that I started back in Alabama; we made the announcement at HIV Is Not a Crime II. My idea was to bring together Latinx immigrant people living with HIV and form a network, so we can have a seat at the table where our fate is decided. We never have really been asked for our opinion, or what we think, or what we want. I just felt, as soon as I joined the HIV movement, that there is a big gap, that hasn't been filled in all these years that I've been working, where we do not address the issues that are specific to that population. JD: What might a person living with HIV be facing in the U.S. right now because of the social neglect of being an undocumented immigrant or a loved one of undocumented people? MCB: It's incredible. Families are being broken, are being fractured ... and so rapidly that sometimes you feel that it's like a movie, you know? Because people living with HIV that are Latinx are part of families, however you want to define those families. The new administration has targeted immigrants, first and foremost, because we are the most vulnerable population in the U.S. And so they chose, with DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], the program that for me was, from all the activist campaigns in the U.S., the one with most clarity. DACA people, they were children that were brought to this country, and they wanted to just be part of the whole society -- plurality, right? They wanted to do that in a cultural, in a religious, in an economic way. And there was nothing wrong with the program. There are people who were a part of DACA who are dealing with HIV. It was destroyed by the president and his administration. Related: Rates of HIV Are Rising Among Latinx Gay Men in the U.S. Are Anti-Immigration Policies to Blame? And then, there is this stigma and the discrimination -- which are not the same thing -- that folks experience. One of the most damaging parts of this social neglect is that people get isolated, greatly. I lived that isolation for almost three years, and it almost killed me. When we isolate ourselves, we get immobilized by the stigma and the fear to go and get health care, and go and see a doctor, talk to a therapist, get some food stamps so you are not hungry or become diabetic in a year by eating what you can and when you can. And all of these aspects that we see are on top of on how inaccessible these programs are to begin with, and then, on top of that, you have this incredible amount of stigma and hate messages that we get from everywhere. You get up in the morning as a Latinx person and turn on the TV and, within seconds, you're being insulted, to say the least, and misrepresented, and completely misjudged. And receiving all this hate cannot be good for anybody's soul, you know? JD: And now there's the new proposed federal "public charge" rule that is already creating a chill effect on immigrants accessing vital services out of fear that they will then not be allowed to get permanent residency. Amanda Lugg from African Services Committee has explained the change: Under U.S. immigration law, a person seeking a green card through a family relationship must show that they "are not likely to become a public charge," which under current law is someone who is unable to support themselves and thus likely to depend on government benefits for income. Historically, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has only excluded applicants based on continuous receipt of cash benefits or long-term institutionalization at government expense, so as not to "inhibit access to non-cash benefits that serve important public interests." On March 29, the Washington Post received a leaked draft of proposed changes to the law showing that the DHS is now seeking to redefine "public charge" to include mere "use" of any public subsidy rather than "dependency." MCB: Yes, the new rules would actually include not only people that are receiving cash, but also food stamps or even Medi-Cal or Medicaid. And there are other actions that you can combine with this potentially very damaging rule. For example, the administration just took away the temporary protective status for people from Honduras. Honduras is one of the most violent countries in the whole world, specifically for people that are queer, or living with HIV, or transgender. The rates on homicides there and the violence against our community are incredibly high. A lot of our people, a lot of our sisters and brothers that are queer who try to come here, are running away from violence. And these types of actions, if you combine them with the potential public charge rule, devastate communities that already have so much to deal with. Sometimes when I think about it, JD, I get lost in a sense of anger and pain, because I've experienced a lot of difficulty for the past couple years. And there were moments that I felt that nobody really cared about what was going on with me -- which was my perception, right? But when I think about folks that [do not] have the privilege that I have, I wonder how do they deal with it. So, I hope that HIVenas Abiertas will be a space for people to at least make sure that we know what is really happening with the folks that are experiencing so much discrimination and violence targeted at us on a daily basis. JD: What are your top priorities for the network? MCB: My first goal is basically to gather folks and just to ask, "How are you doing today?" Because we don't really know how people are doing, period. None of the organizations that I work with on a local, state, and national level have made that basic inquiry to our communities that are dealing with immigration, and with HIV. I'm really, really curious, and I want to be mindful and just start by asking, you know, "How are you doing today, Sister? How are you doing today, Brother?" That's the very beginning. The very first issue that I consider, that englobes everything, is a social neglect that is taking place for people living with HIV who are immigrants -- especially those who are undocumented, those who are sex workers, those who are transgender people, people that are living with mental health [challenges], folks who are struggling with drugs (which is also mental health), and women and younger folks. The incidence of people who are getting HIV has not decreased within the Latinx community. That worries me a lot. Although there are efforts around, led by incredible people, we are really missing a more robust prevention effort with the folks that are getting HIV. And if you look at the numbers of people that actually have access to PrEP [pre-exposure prophylaxis], for example, it's -- I'm not going to talk about numbers, but I think it's just ridiculous, not only with Latinos, but with black folks, as well. JD: How can the network function and create space when, for some, it's at times literally not even safe to go outside because of being targeted for deportation, or due to the fear that someone from your family will be taken away? In what ways will you be moving forward to help people connect for support when they are so isolated? MCB: The first thing is that it's not going to be my decision or my vision -- it's going to be a collective vision. The network hopes to gather a core group of people that are interested in moving forward with the dissemination of our potential work. HIVenas Abiertas is a name that can be also changed if that's what folks want to do. I am just interested in facilitating this to take place. We are going to do a national conference call in the next couple weeks. Then, we are going to create a core group of organizers that really mirrors our community to join an in-person retreat for us to set the basics and the structure of our organization of our network. And then, we're going to -- with a lot of sabor, with a lot of flavor -- we're going to sail away into our movement, in the HIV movement. I'm also interested in decolonizing how we do potentially manage a network, or do network organizing. In my vision and in my dreams, I think of embracing our cultural heritage, our racial and language richness. We are going to be a network of people that are going to celebrate on a daily basis who we are, despite everything that comes to us in the shape of hatred messages. I know that Latinx people, immigrant folks that are here in the U.S., have the potential to do that. I've worked with family acceptance in the past, and I have witnessed this incredible amount of potential for transformation -- not only personal but also on a community level. I'm betting all that I have for the transformation of our Latinx immigrant people living with HIV community. Because it is so clear to my heart, and in my mind, that is actually possible. To create such sense of pride, a sense of pride and empowerment -- I find that our colors, our sounds, our smells, and our flavors are going to be powerful enough to dispel those shadows. And then, furthermore, to make sure that that takes place, we need to invite, and hold space, and provide leadership for those most marginalized within our community. JD: When you say "family acceptance," what are you referring to? MCB: Besides doing HIV work, I've been working for over 10 years on family acceptance within the Latinx community, which I've done with advocacy, with education, and also with my films. I've created films where we actually explore with parents, both moms and dads of Latinx queer people, their unconditional love for their children. My films, I consider them anti-racist, as well. Because I find it racist that people assume or say that Latinx men, for example, or Latinx families are homophobic and transphobic by nature. The years I have working with the families have taught me the complete opposite. It has taught me that parents love their children, no matter what, first, and that the Latinx community is as -- or less -- homophobic or machoistic or transphobic than other cultures. Therefore, we should not be stereotyped as something that we're not -- or that we are, but in the company of the rest of the society. What I witness with my family acceptance work is that we sometimes are the target of practices by people in power, where they utilize our culture and our identity against us to oppress us. We need to remind each other how great, and how powerful and resilient, we are as a community and as individuals. And also, [we] need to go back and look at the South for inspiration and knowledge. By that, I mean our pueblos in Latin America. Because, first of all, there has been amazing work on HIV/AIDS in the rest of the continent. Also, our cultures, our indigenous cultures, for the longest time have embraced gender and differences that are very empowering for some of us. We rarely ever hear, or see, or use any of these images as we do education on HIV/AIDS. JD: Any final thoughts as you prepare to move forward with this network? MCB: On the website, there is a saying that we're going to "organize our anger and defend our happiness." I am going to bet my life that Latinx people living with HIV have all the potential to transform our lives and our communities, one day at a time. For that, we need true and powerful solidarity from the rest of the movement. We need for folks that are in power and have resources to trust that we are leaders that are capable, that we know what we need and how to get there. We just need some resources to do it. And I would appreciate it if organizations that are established, that have resources, would reach out to us and provide us with support for us to actually become a reality. We need them to step aside and let us walk. Let us walk. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Hoersholm, Denmark, May 30, 2018 - today, an extraordinary general meeting Medical Prognosis Institute A/S was held. A summary of the resolutions adopted follows below. All resolutions were adopted with the required majority of votes. Resolution to implement merger with Oncology Venture Sweden AB (publ), including increase of the Company's share capital and other amendments of the Company's articles of association In accordance with proposal from the board of directors, the general meeting approved the Company's merger with Oncology Venture Sweden AB (publ) with the Company as the continuing entity and Oncology Venture Sweden AB (publ) as the discontinuing entity as further described in the joint merger plan signed by the boards of directors of the Company and Oncoloy Venture Sweden AB (publ) respectively. As part of the merger, the shareholders of Oncology Venture Sweden AB (publ) will receive consideration in a way where each share of nom. SEK 0.14 in Oncology Venture Sweden AB (publ) is exchanged for 1.8524 new shares of nom. DKK 0.05 in the Company that will be provided by means of an increase of the share capital in the Company from a nominal value of DKK 1,232,377.75 to a nominal value of DKK 2,513,563.90. The joint merger plan and the merger prospectus may be downloaded on www.medical-prognosis.dk This information is information that Medical Prognosis Institute A/S is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact person set out above, on May 30 2018 TORONTO, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Colour of Poverty Colour of Change (COP-COC) is releasing its 2018 Racial Justice Report Card for Ontario, showing where the three main Ontario political parties stand on issues affecting racialized communities. As a group, racialized communities experience higher rates of poverty, homelessness, school push out, and health inequities, while having greater difficulties accessing justice and the human rights system to address these various forms of discrimination. The COP-COC 2018 Racial Justice Report Card examines the records and platforms of the three parties represented in the provincial legislature in Access to Justice, Education and Learning, Employment, Health and Well-being, Housing and Homelessness, Human Rights, Newcomer Settlement and Integration, Justice and Policing, and Poverty. The Report Card ranks the parties in each of these policy areas by how responsive they are to the needs of racialized communities both Indigenous Peoples and peoples of colour. Scoring ranges from A for the most responsive to C for the least responsive. The NDP received an A for: Education and Learning, Employment, Health and Well-being, Housing and Homelessness, and Newcomer Settlement and Integration. The Liberal Party received an A for Access to Justice. The NDP and Liberals both received A for Human Rights, Justice and Policing and Poverty Reduction The PC party received a C in all policy areas in the Report Card, either because it does not have a position on the issue or because the party or platform commitments stated so far fail to address the needs of racialized communities. Issues impacting racialized communities have received little attention in the 2018 Ontario Elections, apart from some media speculation on which party would receive the most number of votes from so-called `ethnic communities. Regardless of who forms the next Government of Ontario, Colour of Poverty Colour of Change urges all parties to adopt policies that will have the greatest positive impact on the members of Ontarios ethno-racially diverse communities. To read the full press release, please go to: https://colourofpoverty.ca/2018/05/30/copc-ontario-election-report-card-media-release/ To read the full Report Card, please go to: https://colourofpovertyca.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/racial-justice-report-card-ontario-provincial-election-2018-final.pdf For further information, please contact: Amy Casipullai, OCASI- Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants 416-524-4950 Avvy Go, Chinese & South East Asian Legal Clinic - 416-971-9674 Shalini Konanur, South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario - 416-487-6371 English French JCDecaux wins the renewal of its exclusive advertising contracts for Hong Kong MTR* Paris, May 30, 2018 - JCDecaux SA (Euronext Paris: DEC), the number one outdoor advertising company worldwide, announced today that JCDecaux Pearl & Dean, a 100% subsidiary of JCDecaux (hereinafter called "JCDecaux Transport") has won the renewal of its exclusive advertising contracts with MTR Corporation for the operation and management of outdoor advertising across seven MTR lines** and the Airport Express. These renewed contracts are effective since January 2018 for up to 6 years. JCDecaux Transport, the number one out-of-home media company in Hong Kong*** and 3 consecutive years award winner of the "Market Leadership Award" from the Institute of Marketing, has held the MTR advertising contract for over 35 years. These seven lines reach 85% of the Hong Kong population of over 7 million in a month**** and dominate transport advertising in Hong Kong. This win not only maintains JCDecaux Transport's portfolio in Hong Kong, but also its market leader position in metro advertising in China. MTR advertising in Hong Kong is widely recognized as the world's leading metro advertising medium in terms of innovation, professionalism and service quality. For the new contract, JCDecaux Transport plans to introduce together with MTR Corporation new advertising formats and progressively implement a digital transformation strategy. This includes deployment of additional digital displays, an automated media planning system and contextually relevant ad contents to maximize impact and create engagement with passengers, which will reinforce MTR advertising as a leader in metro advertising around the world. Jeny Yeung, Commercial Director, MTR Corporation, said: "We are pleased to extend our commercial partnership with JCDecaux Transport. This partnership reflects our confidence in the company's expertise and ability to drive further innovation through our advertising business. With the continued commitment of JCDecaux Transport, we look forward to our next succeeding cooperation, collaborating to enhance the passenger experience and strengthen MTR advertising by employing more digitalized and innovative technologies." Jean-Charles Decaux, Chairman of the Executive Board and Co-CEO of JCDecaux, said: "JCDecaux is honored to be chosen again as the exclusive advertising operator of MTR's urban network and the Airport Express. These contracts illustrate our longstanding dedication and commitment to MTR Corporation and we are devoted to further harnessing the digital opportunity and using available technology to enable advertisers to make intelligent, audience planning ad buys across the network, which will surely take the passenger experience to the next level." * Mass Transit Railway ** means the Lines: Tsuen Wan, Island, South Island, Kwun Tong, Tung Chung, Tseung Kwan O and Disneyland Resort. *** JCDecaux Transport holds the largest market share among Outdoor media in Hong Kong according to admanGo. **** source: Nielsen Media Index (Jan-Dec 2015). Key Figures for JCDecaux 2017 revenue: 3,493m* JCDecaux is listed on the Eurolist of Euronext Paris and is part of the Euronext 100 and Euronext Family Business indexes JCDecaux is part of the FTSE4Good and Dow Jones Sustainability Europe indexes N1 worldwide in street furniture (543,050 advertising panels) N1 worldwide in transport advertising with more than 218 airports and 250 contracts in metros, buses, trains and tramways (356,320 advertising panels) N1 in Europe for billboards (141,630 advertising panels) N1 in outdoor advertising in Europe (672,220 advertising panels) N1 in outdoor advertising in Asia-Pacific (216,290 advertising panels) N1 in outdoor advertising in Latin America (77,190 advertising panels) N1 in outdoor advertising in Africa (26,770 advertising panels) N1 in outdoor advertising in the Middle-East (18,650 advertising panels) Leader in self-service bike rental scheme: pioneer in eco-friendly mobility 1,074,113 advertising panels in more than 80 countries Present in 4,033 cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants 13,040 employees * Restated from the retrospective application of IFRS 15, applicable from January 1st, 2018 Communications Department: Agathe Albertini +33 (0) 1 30 79 34 99 - agathe.albertini@jcdecaux.com Investor Relations: Arnaud Courtial +33 (0) 1 30 79 79 93 - arnaud.courtial@jcdecaux.com English French Press Release Paris, May 30th, 2018 Ingenico Group, (Euronext: FR0000125346 - ING), the global leader in seamless payment, today announced it entered into exclusive negotiations regarding the combination of BS PAYONE owned by DSV (a subsidiary of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe) with Ingenico Retail assets in DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). This non-cash business combination would be 52% owned and consolidated by Ingenico Group. The joint-venture would create the clear market leader in the attractive German market with the broadest offering in-store and online covering the specific needs of all types of merchants. Both parties would become long term partners in the DACH region. Current BS PAYONE shareholders would maintain meaningful minority rights in line with their 48% stake. Headquartered in Frankfurt, BS PAYONE is a leading full-service payment provider offering instore and online payment solutions and employing around 700 people. Serving more than 250,000 merchants in various industries, from small and medium-size businesses to large international accounts, BS PAYONE is the second largest international card acquirer in Germany and a major Network Service Provider (NSP). BS PAYONE benefits from close partnerships with a large number of savings banks in Germany. The parties intent to sign definitive agreements in Q3 2018. About Ingenico Group Ingenico Group (Euronext: FR0000125346 - ING) is the global leader in seamless payment, providing smart, trusted and secure solutions to empower commerce across all channels, in-store, online and mobile. With the world's largest payment acceptance network, we deliver secure payment solutions with a local, national and international scope. We are the trusted world-class partner for financial institutions and retailers, from small merchants to several of the world's best known global brands. Our solutions enable merchants to simplify payment and deliver their brand promise. Learn more at www.ingenico.com twitter.com/ingenico About BS PAYONE BS PAYONE GmbH is one of the leading omnichannel-payment providers in Europe. As a full-service payment service provider, the company offers both standardised and individual payment solutions for point of sale and e-commerce transactions on all devices and across all channels in line with each customer's requirements. Companies that wish to offer cashless payments to their customers receive from BS PAYONE all products for automated processing of all payment processes from a single source. This includes the acceptance of all common national and international credit and debit cards, alternative payment methods (APMs), POS and self-service terminals for stationary trade and the automated and holistic processing of e-commerce and mobile payments. The company provides its customers with the highest degree of quality through the most modern network operations ensuring the highest level of security for the processing of payment data. The payment-service provider is a subsidiary of the Deutsche Sparkassenverlag, making it part of the Sparkassen Finance Group. BS PAYONE GmbH is licensed by and falls under the oversight of Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin), and processes more than one billion transactions every year. About DSV Group / Deutscher Sparkassenverlag The DSV Group, consisting of Deutscher Sparkassenverlag and its subsidiaries and associated companies, generates annual sales of EUR 900,1 million (source: 2017 temporary balance sheet). As a specialized solution provider, the DSV Group provides the institutions and associations of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe (Savings Banks Finance Group) with both analog and digital media content. Electronic forms and advisory systems, technical equipment, and bank cards round out this product range. The spectrum of products and services is enhanced by IT-supported services, payment solutions, Web sites, and all-around agency services, including communications plans and PR events. The company has approximately 2,150 employees, and its headquarters are located in Stuttgart. The DSV Group also operates a large number of offices in other cities across Germany. Contacts / Ingenico Group Investors Laurent Marie VP Investor Relations & Financial Communication laurent.marie@ingenico.com (T) / 01 58 01 92 98 Investors Kevin Woringer Investor Relations Manager kevin.woringer@ingenico.com (T) / 01 58 01 85 09 Communication Coba Taillefer External Communication Manager coba.taillefer@ingenico.com (T) / 01 58 01 89 62 Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin C Raja Mohan and Ankush Ajay Wagle (The Jakarta Post) Singapore Wed, May 30, 2018 15:13 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6c67ea 3 Opinion India,Indonesia,maritime-security,maritime-sector,Narendra-Modi,Jokowi,bilateral-relations Free The similarities between Indian Prime Minister Modi, who is visiting Indonesia this week, and his host President Joko Jokowi Widodo are well known. Both have risen from humble origins. Modi sold tea at a railway station and Jokowi exported furniture. Both were rank outsiders to the establishment but fought their way to the top of the political heap. But there is probably a more important but less noticed similarity between the two leaders: an unusual commitment to their nations maritime future. Although India has a huge coastline and Indonesia is a massive archipelago, their modern rulers barely looked to the sea. Jokowi and Modi seem determined to change it. In late 2015, Jokowi unveiled the ambition to turn Indonesia into the maritime fulcrum between the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. A few months earlier, Modi travelled to the Indian Ocean islands states Mauritius and Seychelles to outline independent Indias first ever policy for the Indian Ocean. It was called SAGAR security and growth for all. In Sanskrit, Sagar also means the ocean. To be sure, Indias turn to the seas inevitably followed its economic reform and opening up in the early 1990s. But it was Modi who sought to lend greater energy to Indias ocean policy. Modi has sought to strengthen domestic maritime infrastructure through the idea of port-led development. Externally, Modi has also encouraged a more aggressive bid for port development in other countries. The first visible success of this policy has been Indias participation in the development of the Chabahar port in Iran. Modi has also sought an end to the India of as a lone-ranger in the Indian Ocean, made it more amenable to maritime multilateralism through such regional institutions as Indian Ocean Rim Association and the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium. He also shed Indias ambivalence about security cooperation with major powers like the United States. Modi has also been eager to promote maritime cooperation with key regional actors like France, Japan, Australia and Indonesia. Although Modi and Jokowi have a hard time getting their bureaucracies to think maritime, there is no doubt that they have begun to end the sea-blindness in both countries. This has also opened the door for India and Indonesia to end their prolonged neglect of the possibilities for maritime cooperation in the ocean spaces that they share. That both Modi and Jokowi have embraced the new geopolitical construct called the Indo-Pacific suggests that the stars for a productive maritime partnership between India and Indonesia are finally in alignment. The notion that Delhi and Jakarta have a duty to advance maritime cooperation was articulated by Indonesias Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs, Luhut Pandjaitan, during his visit to Delhi earlier this month. He also affirmed that greater security and economic partnership between the two nations was critical for the balance of power in Asia and the Indian Ocean. It is a view that is fully shared by Modis foreign policy advisers. That the Indian Ocean frontier between India and Indonesia demands maritime cooperation was recognized quite early on by the post-colonial leaders in Delhi and Jakarta Jawaharlal Nehru and Sukarno. It has now fallen on Modi and Jokowi to translate that vision into reality. Way back in 1951, Delhi and Jakarta signed a peace and friendship treaty. In 1958, the two navies signed an agreement for cooperation that included provisions for training, attachment of naval officers and naval exercises. In 1974 the two sides signed a maritime boundary agreement demarcating the Greater Nicobar and Sumatra islands. But the political alienation in the following decades limited all bilateral cooperation, let alone maritime engagement. Indias Look East Policy of the early 1990s and its progressive inclusion in the ASEAN structures opened the door for all round engagement between India and South East Asia, including the renewal of maritime contacts. Indonesias navy participated in the Indian navys inaugural MILAN exercise of the 1995 and has since participated in several editions of the biennial multilateral exercises in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. India and Indonesia have conducted coordinated naval patrols (CORPAT) in the Andaman Sea since 2002. The Act East Policy articulated by Modi and the growing strategic turbulence in the waters of Southeast Asia saw a fresh emphasis on maritime cooperation between India and the ASEAN. The joint declaration issued at the end of summit between India and Southeast Asian leaders held in Delhi during January 2018 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Indias association with the ASEAN, underlined the shared goals in the ocean spaces and the urgent need to intensify cooperation in the maritime domain including in the areas of security, transport, commerce, education, research, development and innovation. The realization of the full potential of maritime cooperation between India and the ASEAN would necessarily depend on the depth of bilateral engagement between Delhi and Jakarta. As Modi and Jokowi sought to develop ocean-based strategies for their nations, the idea of maritime cooperation has inevitably taken the center stage. During Jokowis state visit to New Delhi in December 2016, the two sides released a statement of intent on maritime cooperation. It affirmed that India and Indonesia are maritime neighbors whose relations are rooted in civilizational contacts developed through the seas and who share similar perceptions of the evolving maritime environment in the region and the world at large. Delhi and Jakarta also agreed to concrete steps to accelerate economic and security cooperation in the maritime domain. Modis return visit this week will hopefully clinch some specific steps. There have been media reports that the two sides could agree on the joint construction of ports, facilitate direct shipping links, promote cruise tourism in the Bay of Bengal, and strengthen shared maritime domain awareness in common sea spaces. These are valuable first steps. But the renewed awareness that they are close neighbors, the new imperatives for the sustainable use of the oceans, and the responsibility to contribute more to the maintenance of the regional security order in the Indo-Pacific demand that Modi and Jokowi think boldly on their shared maritime future. *** C. Raja Mohan is director and visiting research professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore. Ankush Ajay Wagle is a research assistant at ISAS. The views expressed are their own. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Editorial Board (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 08:13 1232 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6a84a6 4 Editorial #Editorial,Narendra-Modi,state-visit,Jokowi,diplomacy,India,bilateral-relations Free Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Jakarta on Wednesday has been much -awaited, and not just by President Joko Jokowi Widodo, who has visited him twice. Indonesians like to greet those whove just returned home or those visiting with a rather annoying phrase only reserved for close friends and family: Mana oleh olehnya? (Where are your gifts?) The Indian leader should be impressed by Jokowis seriousness about expanding their bilateral relationship. They are leaders of the worlds largest and second-largest democracies, having both come into power in 2014. Jokowis two visits to India in just 14 months in December 2016 and in January 2018 reflect his ambition to restore the close friendship formed between the two countries in the 1950s and 1960s under leaders Jawarharlal Nehru and Sukarno. As a gesture of appreciation for his host, the Indian leader is expected to bring memorable oleh oleh (gift). Modi is traveling here by sea, following the route taken by Nehru from the Nicobar Islands in India to Sabang in Aceh. Jokowis gestures may be seen as part of a strategy to counterbalance not to contain Chinas power, the worlds second-largest economy and practically the second superpower after the United States. We should surely become closer to India, which can provide abundant sources of lucrative cooperation in the economy, defense, science, education, human resources and culture. What oleh oleh are we hoping for from our guest? Modi is expected to personally assure Jokowi that India will vote for Indonesia in the 2018 United Nations Security Council election. The UN General Assembly will decide which country will get the two-year mandate for a non-permanent seat on the council. However, even if Modi fails to meet Indonesias expectations, the election is minor compared to the bilateral ties between the two nations, which are both members of the G20. For Indonesia, driven by Jokowi to become a global maritime axis, India is a strategic partner in the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA). His ambition to play a leading role in the Indo-Pacific cooperation framework also needs solid support from his Indian counterpart. Indonesian-Indian trade reached US$12.9 billion in 2016, while trade volume increased 28.7 percent in 2017. Indonesian exports stood at $14.08 billion, including from palm oil and coal, and imports at $4.05 billion. Indonesia wants India to scrap trade barriers for its main commodities, while India wants Indonesia to reduce its huge trade deficit. Many do not realize how close the countries are. Nicobar and Andaman islands are about a seven-hour flight from Aceh. Andaman was also badly hit in the 2004 tsunami and earthquake. India is keen on boosting naval cooperation with Indonesia, with hopes of gaining access to Sabangs deepwater port to enable easier access to the Malacca Strait. Indonesia hopes such cooperation could help boost Sumatras growth and provide new gates for our palm oil and coal exports to India. Welcome to Jakarta PM Modi. Wheres the oleh-oleh? Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin - (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia Thu, May 31, 2018 Staying healthy is something you always want for yourself and your family. But no matter how much you eat well, sleep right, exercise regularly and maintain hygiene, there will always come a time when you or a loved one falls ill. When that time comes, having immediate access to the best doctors and healthcare facilities available is important. The last thing you want as you or someone close to you falls ill is to worry about not having a place to go to seek medical treatment. Cigna Global Health Indonesia guarantees customers the peace of mind they need as they go about their daily lives. It is a health and life insurance provider that offers a wide range of protection based on consumer needs. Its network is global, its cashless system, its services global and its annual limits provide a higher maximum than any other provider of its kind. Its Global Health Assist program provides round-the-clock access worldwide to Cigna's network of doctors as their health consultants. The program also covers second opinions for their treatment. Not only are the healthcare services always available, Cigna's customer service is also constantly at your command. You have access to the company's hotline and Customer Care team which is always available to speak day and night. Perhaps you are an expatriate living in Indonesia, or an Indonesian national who is living either within Indonesia or as an expatriate elsewhere in the world. You may find the local healthcare system confusing or a struggle in the times you may need it. You also dont want to worry about the expense of high quality care. Whatever your circumstances, Cigna Global Health Indonesia plans are here to see you through the good times, as well as the crunch times. Cigna's cashless treatment network spans 700 healthcare facilities in Indonesia alone, alongside over 12,000 hospitals, clinics and health facilities across the globe. Customers have access to the best doctors anywhere they go. The company has provided global health insurance for many years. Today it has over 90 million customer relationships in over 200 countries and jurisdictions. Looking after them is an international workforce of 40,000 people, plus a medical network comprising over 1 million partnerships, including 96,000 behavioral healthcare professionals, and 12,500 facilities and clinics, including 2,000 cashless medical facilities in Indonesia. For your protection, PT Asuransi Cigna, the company's local branch in Indonesia, is an insurance company that has been registered and supervised by the Financial Services Authority (OJK). Ever since it was established in 1990, PT Asuransi Cigna has become one of the most respected insurance companies in Indonesia. Health insurance plans at Cigna can be tailored with the flexibility to come up with a cost-effective plan to meet the needs of you and your family. Its plans comprise three levels of cover: Silver Health, Gold Health and Platinum Health. Each plan includes international medical insurance. Customers can select optional modules, including: International Outpatient; International Medical Evacuation; International Health and Wellbeing; International Vision and Dental; and International Mother and Baby Care, which gives you the flexibility to create a health insurance plan that suits your unique needs. You can choose to pay for your premium on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. You can make payments by debit or credit card, or standing instruction or alternatively you can pay by bank wire transfer. An online claims submission system is available with a 10-working-day claim process. The payment process itself is quick and hassle-free. When it comes to staying well - physically, financially, emotionally Cigna is with you all the way. It does not just want you to feel better. It wants you to stay that way. Yogyakartas vibrant art fair ARTJOG is currently being held for the 11th time. Themed "Enlightenment" and open from May 4 to June 4 at the Jogja National Museum, this year's event presents more than 100 works by 54 national and foreign artists. Since its inception in 2008, ARTJOG has grown to present Indonesian contemporary art to a global audience, while being the prime event on the national art scene. The event continues to grow in stature, attracting more and more national and international attendees, while improving the quality of its presentation and artwork. ARTJOGs educational programs, the Curators Tours and Meet the Artist, are annual highlights, reaching new levels of popularity each year. ARTJOG has had a successful first decade -- an important test of time. Now past its infancy and into its teenage years, the events brand consciousness becomes increasingly essential. It is not only the event publications and marketing that are important in the promotion of ARTJOG, but also the fairs content. And this is the most challenging aspect, said ARTJOG director Heri Pemad when asked how ARTJOG could evolve, becoming increasingly vital and important during the coming decade. Read also: ARTJOG: Standing tall, on path of excellence The strength of the ARTJOG exhibition themes, which highlight topics of discussion we wish to raise, is increasingly essential to attract top-class Indonesian and international artists, along with public attention. We need to continually focus on issues that are globally relevant, Heri stated. Read also: ARTJOG 2018 kicks off with new, fresh look 'Perseverance 3 series' by Hendra (JP/Richard Horstman) This year, the event has attracted important international collectors, including the Filipino husband and wife duo Lito and Kim Camacho, who made their first visit to Central Java to attend ARTJOG and other events held in the region as a part of the Jogja Art Weeks (JAW) program. We are astonished by both the city of Yogyakarta and ARTJOG, said Kim Camacho, who, along with Lito, has accumulated one of the most impressive private art collections in the Southeast Asian region. Influential and visionary, they are renowned as prolific collectors, with a unique eye for quality, identifying artists and works before they gain popularity. The Camachos first collected Gutai pieces, an influential Japanese post-war contemporary art movement, well before they became recognized, and were quick to pay special attention to Yayoi Kusama. They began buying art in 1980, and their collection, which started with Filipino genre art, then grew to include Filipino masters and other Southeast Asian art. It has since evolved into a truly international assortment. Collecting art in the Philippines is a much older tradition than in other Southeast Asian countries, said Lito, who was quoted as saying that he and his wife preferred artists of global importance that had a place in art history. Given that it is an artist-based event, ARTJOG is incredibly well organized, featuring excellent presentation, along with artworks of high quality, Kim said. We are amazed by the number of artists and art communities that have thrived in Yogyakarta and the standard of exhibitions we have visited during the Jogja Art Weeks program. Read also: ARTJOG: Fashion show a reminder of golden age of natural dye Attracting important international collectors adds credibility to the ARTJOG brand, Heri stated. It's not only proof of our success, but we need them to help promote our brand to a larger audience, and to entice more collectors from other countries to attend ARTJOG. It is important that new international buyers not only collect the artworks, but also develop greater appreciation for the wealth of Indonesian art, culture and history. 'Night with Frank L. Wright' by Patricia Untario (JP/Richard Horstman) We have purchased many pieces during our visit to Yogyakarta, said Kim Camacho. Works that speak to us, not just as unique Indonesian contemporary artworks, but works that are relevant within the global context." We were captured by the beauty of Night with Frank L. Wright at ARTJOG by Jakartan artist Patricia Untario and purchased her work. We were also very impressed with the JAW exhibition Bakaba #7 - Zaman Now by the Sakato Art Community. Outside of the event we loved the rich textural works by senior artist Aming Prayitno. We have recently collected a work by Yogyakarta artist Eddie Prabandono, and our first Indonesian purchases are works by contemporary Balinese master Made Wianta, Kim stated, and continued, Indonesian art is incredibly under-priced for works of such excellent quality. Other important collectors that attended ARTJOG include the president & CEO of Time International, Irwan Danny Mussry, Dr. Oei Hong Djien of the OHD Museum in Magelang, Haryanto Adikoesoema, the founder of Jakartas new international-standard museum MACAN, and Iwan Lukminto, who recently opened the new Tumurun Museum in Solo, Central Java. (kes) ________________ ARTJOG Enlightenment Opening dates: Continuing through to June 4, daily from 9 a.m. 5 p.m. Place: Jogja National Museum, Jl. Prof. Ki Amri Yahya No. 1, Yogyakarta www.artjog.co.id Indonesia and Japan are set to hold a joint concert in Osaka in June to celebrate 60 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries. As reported by Antara news agency, the Indonesian Consulate in Osaka said the concert would involve student music groups from both countries. Two Indonesian groups, the Resonanz Children's Choir and the SMA 3 Bandung High School Angklung Group, are set to be special guests of the event, which will be held at the Sofia Sakai building in the city of Sakai. The concert will be co-hosted by Sakai Mayor Osami Takeyama and Indonesian Consulate-General in Osaka Mirza Nurhidiyat. Read also: How to explore Tokyo on tight budget It was first initiated during Mirza's official visit to the Sakai Mayor's Office, when the consulate-general first arrived for duty in April. In addition to organizing the concert, the two officials also agreed in a recent meeting to strengthen cooperation in various fields, especially in economic and inter-community relations, to benefit the people of both countries. (liz/wng) English French GAZTRANSPORT & TECHNIGAZ Societe anonyme with a share capital of 370,783.57 Registered office: 1 route de Versailles - 78470 Saint-Remy-les-Chevreuse, France 662 001 403 R.C.S. Versailles Main terms and conditions of the share buy-back programme adopted by the Board of directors of GTT on May 17, 2018 and published in accordance with the conditions and obligations set by Articles 241-1 and seq. of the General Regulations of the Autorite des marches financiers (AMF) Implementation of the share buy-back programme authorised by the Combined Shareholders' meeting on May 17, 2018 Issuer: GTT / ISIN code: FR 0011726835 (compartment A) Stock concerned : Ordinary shares Implementation authorized by: Combined Shareholders' meeting on May 17, 2018 Implementation decision date: May 17, 2018 Maximum proportion of the share capital that may be acquired pursuant to the Shareholders' authorization: 10% of the number of ordinary shares composing GTT's share capital, or, for indicative purposes 3,707,835 shares on the basis of the capital as at December 31, 2017. It is specified that: (i) the acquired shares for the retaining and later delivery (in exchange, payment or other) as part of an acquisition transaction, limited to 5% of the capital; (ii) when the shares are bought back to stimulate trading as part of a liquidity contract, the number of shares taken into account for the calculation of the 10% limit corresponds to the number of shares purchased, less the number of shares sold back over the period of the authorization; (iii) the Company may not directly or indirectly own more than 10% of its capital. Maximum purchase price: 80 per share (fees not included). Maximum amount of purchases authorized by the programme: 27,000,000. Objectives of the programme: the allocation or sale of shares to employees or corporate officers of the Company or Group companies under the conditions and in accordance with the procedures allowed by law, notably with respect to company profit-sharing, or the allocation of free shares, or in the case of share purchase options, or as part of a group savings scheme or any other company savings scheme existing in the Group; the delivery of shares upon the exercise of rights attached to securities giving right to repayment, conversion, exchange, presentation of a warrant, or any other means of allocating shares of the Company; more generally, to honour the obligations linked to share option programs or other plans for allocation of shares to employees or corporate officers or those of an associated company; the retaining and later delivery of shares (in exchange, payment or other) as part of an acquisition transaction, limited to 5% of the number of shares comprising the share capital; the cancellation of all or a part of the shares bought back; and the stimulation of the secondary market or the liquidity of the shares by an investment services provider acting under a liquidity contract in compliance with the code of ethics recognised by the AMF. This share buyback programme would also be intended to allow the Company to operate for any other authorised purpose or purpose that would be authorised by any applicable laws or regulations in force and to implement any practice that would be allowed by the AMF. In such event, the Company would inform its shareholders through a press release. The Board of Directors may use this authorisation at any time, within the limits authorised by legal and regulatory provisions and carry out the share buyback programme in the case of a public offering in strict compliance with the provisions of Article 231-41 of the General Regulation of the AMF and of Article L. 225-209 of the French Commercial Code. The acquisition, transfer or disposal of shares could be carried out, on one or more occasions, by any means authorised by applicable laws or regulations, including over-the-counter transactions, the trading of blocks of securities for all or part of the programme and the use of any derivative financial instrument. Programme duration: from the release of this description of the programme and until November 16, 2019, i.e. a period of 18 months as from the date of the Shareholders' Meeting dated May 17, 2018. Breakdown of the treasury shares held as at May 18, 2018 by objective: At May 18, 2018, the Company held 11,674 GTT shares, representing 0.03% of the share capital pursuant to a liquidity agreement signed with Exane to make a market in GTT shares, and compliant with the AMAFI ethical charter recognised by the AMF, and 21,690 shares, representing 0.06% of the share capital pursuant to a share buy-back agreement. This document is published, in accordance with the AMF General Regulations, on May 30, 2018 prior to the implementation of the programme. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Djemi Amnifu (The Jakarta Post) Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara Wed, May 30, 2018 15:56 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6c9f33 1 National Kupang,Kupang-Police,East-Nusa-Tenggara,kidnapping,prosecutors,Prosecutors-Office Free The Kupang Police in East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), with support from its provincial counterpart, have recovered the abducted son of Kupang prosecutor Kundrat Mantolas and arrested his alleged kidnappers, some 30 hours after the 4-year-old was first taken. Two men were arrested at different locations in relation to the case. One of the suspects was arrested in Kupang, while another one was apprehended outside the city. We also found the kidnapped child in Malaka regency, Kupang Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Anthon Nugroho told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday. The suspects have been identified as 38-year-old CN and 40-year-old RK. Kundrats son Richard was reportedly abducted in front of his home in Kupang on Tuesday. The two suspects are residents of Kefamenanu district. They reportedly kidnapped the child as RK was about to be named a suspect in a bribery case related to a project that is being handled by Kunrad, the childs father, who heads the special crime investigation division at the Kefamenanu Prosecutors Office, Anthon said. Meanwhile, CN is reportedly part of a gang based in Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta, which was allegedly hired by RK to kidnap Richard. The police rescued Richard from the house of one of RK's relatives in Malaka regency and returned him to his family on Tuesday evening. Both suspects will be charged with Article 83 of Law No. 35/2018 on child protection, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 15 years. (dpk/ebf) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Prasiddha Gustanto (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30 2018 Cross-cultural performance: Indian dance and yoga teachers from the Jawaharlal Nehru Indian Cultural Center (JNICC) perform dance and yoga along with their Indonesian students during the Indian Republic Day commemoration on Jan. 26 in Jakarta. (JP/Arief Suhardiman) Whether its in dance, language, or other art forms, Indonesia and India have long shared a strong cultural affinity with each other. Indian epics such as Ramayana and Mahabharata, for instance, are considered inseparable elements of Indonesian culture and the performing arts. Words from Hindi and Sanskrit can also be found in Indonesian. Two of the worlds major religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, both of which originated in India, have also had a strong impact on Indonesian cultural life. A glimpse of Indonesias many historical artifacts reflects these influences. Centuries old stone statues can be found in temples depicting Hindu deities like Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Fadli (The Jakarta Post) Batam, Riau Islands Wed, May 30, 2018 17:41 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6ce31a 1 National Bakamla,Communications-and-Information-Ministry,looting,fiber-optic-network,Riau-Islands Free The Maritime Security Board (Bakamla) has reached out to telecommunication companies to help with its investigation into the theft of fiber optic cables that had been found in the possession of eight alleged looters. The cables, which stretch 3.2 kilometers long and ran from the Riau Islands to Singapore, is believed to be worth Rp 5 billion (US$ 357,858), but no one seems to know who they belong to. We have called several communication providers that are known to have underwater fiber optic cables and asked them to check whether the stolen cables belong to them, Bakamla head Vice Admiral Arie Soedewo told The Jakarta Post on Monday. The providers include telecommunication companies Telkom, Matrix and Transmitra. (Read also: Bakamla foils underwater fiber-optic cable theft in Bintan) The fiber optic cables had been cut into 800 pieces weighing around 12 tons. "The perpetrators said they were going to sell [the pieces] to a buyer in Bangka Belitung. We are still investigating the matter by involving the National Police's Criminal Investigation Department [Bareskrim]," said Arie. As previously reported, Bakamla personnel arrested eight people in the waters of Tanjung Berakit, Bintan, Riau Islands, on Saturday after discovering undocumented fiber optic cables on their ship. During their search, Bakamla personnel also found compressors, diving gear and a hose. Anton, one of the suspects, said he and his crew were paid Rp 2,500 (18 US cents) for each kilogram of cable they delivered. We did not receive a salary, but we got paid based on how much cable we manage to steal, he said. (dpk/ebf) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Fadli (The Jakarta Post) Batam, Riau Islands Wed, May 30, 2018 13:24 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6bdbd9 1 National Jokowi,Joko-Widodo,Bakamla,Arie-Soedewo Free President Joko Jokowi Widodo is still considering whom to appoint as the replacement of Maritime Security Board (Bakamla) head Vice Admiral Arie Soedewo, who is about to retire. Arie told The Jakarta Post on Monday that he would officially retire on June 1. However, the name of his replacement remains unknown, as the matter is still being processed by President Jokowi. Normatively, Im retired now, but the appointment process of my replacement is still being worked on by the government, Arie said on a visit to Bakamlas western base in Batam. He said his replacement would be a three-star Indonesian Navy general. I dont know who my replacement is, he said. Arie played down speculation that his replacement might be one of three officials previously discussed as successors of Indonesian Navy Admiral (ret.) Ade Supandi. They are Navy deputy chief of staff Vice Adm. Achmad Taufiqoerrochman, TNI chief of general staff Vice Adm. Didit Herdiawan Ashaf and the military's Staff and Command Schools (Sesko) head Lt. Gen. (Mar) RM Trusono. I cannot mention any name, Arie asserted. He expressed hope that his replacement could cooperate with other stakeholders so as to strengthen the role of Bakamla as a maritime security coordinator. Arie had been implicated in a bribery case related to the procurement of an observation satellite in 2016. Arie was accused of having lured Commodore Bambang Udoyo, a Navy officer who was appointed to Bakamla as its data and information director, and other Bakamla officers to accept portions of the illicit money. Bambang was sentenced to four years and six months of imprisonment in December last year. Arie was questioned last year by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) as a witness in the case. (ebf) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 13:14 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6bc90c 1 City school-zoning,Education,jakarta,school-admission,new-academic-year Free The Jakarta administration has set up a service post at SMKN 1 vocational high school in Sawah Besar, Central Jakarta, to receive complaints from parents whose children are facing difficulties in registering online for the new academic year, from elementary to senior high schools. The post is open from May 28 to June 16. The post is prepared to offer a solution to those who face administrative problems during registration, said Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan, as quoted by beritajakarta.id. Read also: City applies zoning system to school enrollment The governor said that he expected a broad awareness campaign to be carried out, so parents would know where to go when they faced admission problems. The latest Culture and Education Ministry decree encourages students to register at schools in their area of residence to eliminate the "favorite school" reputation that has pooled high-performing students at only a few schools in an area, leaving many seats empty at other schools. (fac/wit) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 13:38 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6bf3f6 1 National First-Travel,umrah-scam,umrah-pilgrims,umrah-business Free The Depok District Court in West Java has sentenced First Travel bosses Andika Surachman and Anniesa Hasibuan to 20 years and 18 years of imprisonment, respectively. In a hearing on Wednesday morning, the judges also ordered Andika and Anniesa to pay Rp 10 billion (US$714,643) in fines. The defendants face an additional eight months in prison as an alternative if they refuse to pay the fine, the judges said on Wednesday, as quoted by kompas.com. (Read also: 20-year prison sentence demanded for First Travel bosses) Andika and Anniesa are the main suspects in a scam amounting to Rp 848 billion from 56,682 would-be pilgrims, who had bought umrah tour packages from First Travel. Offering a cheap package for the minor haj at Rp 14.3 million, the defendants had promised to send the umrah hopefuls to Mecca a year after they paid the fee. Both defendants were charged under articles 378 and 55 of the Criminal Code on fraud and Article 3 of Law No. 8/2010 on money laundering. On May 7, First Travel manager Siti Nuraida Hasibuan, or Kiki, had been sentenced to 18 years in prison and Rp 5 billion in fines or another year in prison. (dpk/ebf) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 19:26 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6d1e16 1 City Jakarta-administration,Supreme-Audit-Agency,BPK,Jokowi,ahok,Sumber-Waras Free Although the Jakarta administration was recently awarded an unqualified opinion for its financial report, it has admitted that the status of several assets still hangs in the balance. Jakarta Inspectorate head Zainal said the city administration had not succeeded in getting its money back from botched land procurements in West Jakarta. We are still asking [related parties] to return the money, Zainal said on Tuesday as quoted by tempo.co. The Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) gave an unqualified opinion on Jakartas 2017 financial report on Monday, the first one in four years. The agency had cited the troubled procurement of land in Grogol and Cengkareng, both in West Jakarta, as the reason for the poor reports. Read also: After irregularities in Jokowi-Ahok era, Jakarta now gets 'clean' status In an effort to sort out its accounting system, the Jakarta administration listed some of the money in the land purchase in Grogol, which the BPK found be inflated, as the money owed to the administration. This is despite the fact that the Sumber Waras Foundation, the lands previous owner, had refused to pay back the money that had been deemed by the BPK to be an overpayment. In 2015, the BPK suggested that the foundation return Rp 191 billion (US$13.65 million) to the administration, saying that it had paid more than the lands taxable value of property. For the land in Cengkareng, Zainal said the city administration would file a lawsuit against Toeti Noezlar Sokearno who had claimed ownership rights over the land. The BPK discovered that the land, which the administration bought from Toeti, in fact belonged to the city administration. Despite the unresolved issues, both plots are registered as assets of the administrations. (cal/wit) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Nezar Patria (The Jakarta Post) Copenhagen Wed, May 30, 2018 08:35 1232 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6aabfa 1 Business discourse,ignasius-jonan,energy-and-mineral-resources-ministry,renewable-energy,clean-energy,geothermal-plant,WindFarm,solar-energy,biodiesel,electricity-tariff Free Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Ignasius Jonan has knocked on the doors of foreign counterparts in Scandinavian countries as part of Indonesias efforts to meet the target of having a 23 percent renewable energy mix. Last week, Jonan met Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen to propose cooperation in renewable energy on the sidelines of the 2018 Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) forum in Copenhagen. Prior to his visit to Denmark, Jonan also held back-to-back meetings with Czech Republic Energy Minister Tomas Huner in Prague and Finish Energy Minister Kimmo Tilikainen and Economic Minister Mika Lintilla in Helsinki in a bid to explore technology cooperation and investment opportunities. The Jakarta Posts Nezar Patria joined the Indonesian delegation to Denmark and sat down for an interview with Jonan in Copenhagen to talk about the challenges of energy security in Indonesia, from business to politics. Following are the excerpts. Question: What are Indonesias expectations from the CEM forum? Answer: We attended two annual roundtables on renewable energy the Clean Energy Ministerial and Mission Innovation in Denmark. In addition, we also toured several places in the country to explore new ideas on clean energy. This visit was made to reciprocate the visit of the Danish prime minister to Indonesia last year. Both Indonesian President Joko Jokowi Widodo and the Danish prime minister shared a strong commitment to renewable energy partnership. What is your view on problems that may impede clean energy production? Renewable energy relies on local natural resources. For Denmark, the use of solar energy only stands at 2 percent. For Indonesia, the application of solar energy may become an option, since the country is blessed with abundant sunshine throughout the year. Another potential source is wind power as Denmark has huge wind power resources thanks to strong winds. The development of technology to produce energy is crucial as in the instance of our Sidrap wind farm project in Sindereng Rappang regency in South Sulawesi, where we manage to use an average wind speed of 8 meters per second to generate electricity. With the latest technological developments, we might be able to produce electricity using weaker wind farm speed. Currently, we are constructing wind farms in Tanah Laut, South Kalimantan, and in Jeneponto, South Sulawesi, tapping into a wind speed of 5 meters per second. If we can build wind farms using between 2 and 3 meters per second speed, then we might build more wind farms across the country, such as in Gunung Kidul, Yogyakarta; Pangandaran, West Java; and Tanah Gayo, Aceh, or even in Papua. Will renewable energy be cheaper? In Europe, particularly in Scandinavian countries, energy prices stand at 4 to 5 US cents per kilowatt hour (kWh). Indonesia should be able to have a lower price. Denmark has made a huge investment by building offshore wind farms, and although no cost for land acquisition is involved, the investment is massive. For Indonesia, onshore wind farms might appear to be more competitive. The Sidrap project produces electricity at 11.4 cents per kWh. Now, Sidrap is about to expand further and has therefore agreed to sell the power at below 7 cents per kWh. Referring to our road map, we should achieve the 23 percent renewable energy mix by 2025. This target is also part of our commitment to the 2015 Paris Agreement. Currently, our renewable energy mix stands at 13 percent. Do you think we can achieve the target in seven years? It might not be easy, but it is achievable. The worst-case scenario is to achieve at least 20 percent from the 23 percent target. There is potential with other untapped geothermal energy resources. We have geothermal plants in Rajabasa in Lampung province and Muara Labo in West Sumatra. The two plants alone can generate 150 megawatts (MW). Both have been constructed and are up and running. We also have huge hydropower potential. The Poso plant produces 500 MW of electricity while the plant in Merangin, Jambi, produces 600 MW. President Jokowi has encouraged us to pay attention to three energy potentials: solar, geothermal and hydropower. In addition, we are also looking into the development of wind power. In our estimate on existing development contracts, we can add between 4,000 and 5,000 MW within the next 10 years. Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Ignasius Jonan after a meeting with Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen during the Clean Energy Ministerial, Copenhagen, May 24 2018. (Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry/File) Is there any forecast on national electricity demand in 2025? Currently, we have a total installed capacity of 62,000 MW, of which 8,500 MW is renewable energy. We hope to reach between 75,000 and 80,000 MW by 2019 or 2020 and raise the capacity further to between 95,000 MW and 100,000 MW by 2025. Based on that assumption, we need to secure at least 23,000 MW from renewable energy resources by 2025. Currently, we have secured 8,500 MW from the total capacity of 62,000 MW. If we can ramp up production to 20,000 MW from renewable energy resources by 2025, then it would be an extraordinary achievement. Does it sound like a mission impossible? No. It is still possible given that we have several geothermal plants, including those in Rajabasa, Muara Labo, and Geureudong in Aceh. Those plants will add extra capacity of 4,500 MW by 2027. With our current capacity of 2,000 MW, we will be able to achieve the 6,000 MW target. Besides, we expect extra flow of electricity thanks to signed contracts for the development of hydropower plants that will add between 2,000 MW and 3,000 MW, to bring combined geothermal and hydropower electricity production to between 7,000 and 8,000 MW. What is Indonesias interest in the CEM roundtable? The conference discusses clean electricity and clean transportation. We are pushing for an energy mix. Indonesia will raise its biodiesel mix to 25 percent this year and to 30 percent by 2020. We are asking European countries to give fair treatment by purchasing Indonesias biodiesel. Of course, it is up to them whether they transport the fuel to Europe for refinement. We are also requesting other developed countries to commit to investing more in renewable energy projects in Indonesia. Development should take into account peoples purchasing power. The electricity should be affordable, otherwise it would not have any impact. Currently, our electricity expenditure is US$30 billion, or 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) of $1 trillion. Considering the rate of inequality within our society as reflected in our current gini ratio of 0.39 points, should we raise the price of power by 10 percent, most people would still find it affordable. However, those in the low-income bracket would not be able to purchase the electricity. We have to take care of this to ensure social justice. In that light, we will go ahead with the policy of injecting more subsidies, especially for poor households availing of the 450VA and 900 VA electricity packages. This year, we expect a surge of 1 million households to start availing of the lowest 450VA subsidized package as part of our village electrification program, then how much subsidy would we be able to provide? If electricity rates continue to increase, the subsidy would be enormous. Thats why we try to keep electricity rates at affordable levels. However, we are also considering electricity provision from the business perspective. Businesspeople can have a breakeven point after 10 to 12 years of operation as their contracts are for 20 to 30 years. Of course, those businesspeople should not hope to gain profits after only five or seven years of operation. That would be too soon. With volatile global oil prices, how does Indonesia manage its electricity rates? In past few years, our fuel consumption has been 10 to 11 percent of our electricity production. However, the portion is currently even as low as 5 percent, so that in the case of rising global oil prices, we would only need to calculate the impact on the 5 percent fuel use. However, the largest consumption we need to control is coal, since coal-fired power plants comprise 53 to 55 percent of Indonesias power generation capacity. We have decided to set a fixed price for coal supplied to state-owned electricity firm PLN under the domestic market obligation (DMO). We have set a ceiling of $70 per ton for coal supplied under the DMO, which means that even if coal prices rise higher than the price ceiling, PLN would still be able to get coal for $70 per ton. You have been campaigning about energy for all. What do you mean by that? I dont see that people oppose the governments effort to provide cheap energy for all citizens. Some protest, although it is relatively minimal. There has been no rejection to installing solar panels in thousands of remote villages as part of our village electrification program. We might find some noise about the $70 ceiling for coal for domestic use, but it can be tackled promptly. The policy was made in accordance with a presidential regulation requiring coal businesses to slightly lower their profit margin in order to maintain electricity rates. What are the political reasons behind the governments decision not to raise fuel prices this year? Im not a political person and I dont understand what activities are counted as politics. The President has instructed us to pay attention to peoples purchasing power. If we raise fuel prices, other expenses, such as for transportation, food and other basic commodities, would also skyrocket. Thats why we anticipate the situation by not adding further burden to peoples purchasing power. With our economy expected to grow by 5 percent, we will do our utmost to provide a subsidy to the needy with all we have, but at the same time we would not let Pertamina suffer losses. We handed the Mahakam gas block to Pertamina for a small price, besides giving it the offshore northwest Java block and eight small other blocks. In coming weeks, we will hand over the Merang and Pendopo Raja blocks, which according Pertaminas assessment, could yield net revenue before tax of approximately $24 billion within 20 years, or about $1.2 billion per annum. This is a new revenue source for Pertamina. It could use this revenue to ease the impact if it has to deal with a worst-case scenario of global oil prices soaring to $100 per barrel, in which case some say Pertamina would suffer Rp 25 trillion in losses. At the end of the day, we expect Pertamina and PLN to become more efficient. In my estimate, they could reduce their operational costs by 5 to 10 percent. I have told the two companies about cost efficiency. I will leave them two options either they introduce efficiency measures by themselves or we enforce some regulations. The choice is theirs. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Agnes Anya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 19:57 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6d31d3 1 World Indonesia,Israel,Middle-East,Visa,tourism,pilgrimage,travel-agents,travel,ban Free Israel has reportedly barred Indonesian passport holders from entering the country in possible retaliation for Jakartas alleged decision to bar entry to Israelis in response to the ongoing violence in Gaza. The Indonesian Foreign Ministry said it had received the information about the ban, but declined to comment on the policy. Every country indeed has its own visa policy, ministry spokesperson Arrmanatha Nasir said on Wednesday. The spokesman also stopped short of confirming whether Indonesia had barred Israelis from entering Indonesia following the recent violence in Gaza in which dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers. Indonesia and Israel have no diplomatic relations. Indonesians, however, have been able to visit Israel for religious pilgrimages, while Israelis can also visit Indonesia on what is referred to as a calling visa or limited stay visa. The report about Israels move was widely circulated among travel agents offering trips to the Middle East on Wednesday. On May 29 we received a circular from the Israeli Ministry of Interior that was sent from our partners in Israel, saying that after June 9 Indonesian passport holders will not be able to enter Israel, a message issued by a travel agent in Surabaya, East Java, said. The report quoted a notification issued by the Israeli Border Control Department based on an order from the countrys Foreign Ministry. Meanwhile, the website middleastmonitor.com quoted an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman on May 23 that Indonesia had banned Israelis from entering the country in response to the massacre in Gaza. The spokesman, Emmanuel Nahshon, said that the Israeli government was trying to reverse Indonesias decision, the website reported. (ahw) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 18:10 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6cec9a 1 City EcstasyPills,smuggling,drug-dealer,drug-network,drug-smuggling,drugs-distribution Free The Jakarta Police have foiled an attempt to smuggle ecstasy pills from Germany to Jakarta and Surabaya, East Java. Each pill weighs 0.4 grams; they usually weigh 0.2 grams each, Sr. Adj. Comr. Dony Alexander from the Jakarta Polices Narcotics Division said on Wednesday as quoted by kompas.com. Police discovered the drugs after receiving a tip from officials at the headquarters of state-owned postal service company PT Pos Indonesia and the Customs and Excise Office. The latter suspected that a packet of what looked to be snacks, which had been sent from Gambir, Central Jakarta, and addressed to a location on Jl. Ahmad Yani in Surabaya, actually contained drugs. We immediately checked the package and found 25,000 ecstasy pills, Dony said, adding that the pills have an estimated street value of Rp 500,000 (US$35) each. Investigators then tracked down and arrested two suspects, FS and SNL, in relation to the case, which led them to AD, BKN and LKT. The alleged Surabaya drug ring is believed to be affiliated with a Jakarta syndicate that had been on the polices radar since February. The Jakarta Police have arrested five people suspected of being part of the latter, including a married couple. They have smuggled drugs twice. We missed the first shipment, Dony said, adding the Narcotics Division would continue to investigate the case and track down other members of the alleged drug rings as well as the supplier from Germany. (iwa) English French Paris, 30 May 2018 No. 07-18 General Meeting to be held on June 20, 2018: Preparatory documents The company Etablissements Maurel & Prom (the "Company") informs its shareholders that a combined shareholders' General Meeting (ordinary and extraordinary), convened on first call, will be held on Wednesday, June 20, 2018 at 3 pm at the Palais Brongniart - 16, Place de la Bourse - 75002 Paris. The notice of meeting including the agenda and draft resolutions proposed to the General Meeting was published in the Bulletin des Annonces Legales Obligatoires ("BALO") no. 57, notice 1801935, on May 11, 2018. Subsequently, the convening notice was published on the date hereof in the BALO, no. 65, notice 1802625 and in the journal of legal notices "Les Petites Affiches" no. 108, section "Avis de convocation". The notices published in the BALO are also available on the Company's website (www.maureletprom.com.fr, section "Investors", sub-section "General Meeting 2018"). The preparatory documents for the General Meeting referred to in Article R. 225-73-1 of the commercial Code are available, as from today's date, on the Company's website, on the abovementioned address. In addition, the preparatory documents for the General Meeting referred to in Articles L. 225-115, L. 225-116 and R. 225-83 of the commercial Code are available, as from today's date, at the Company's registered office (51, rue d'Anjou, 75008 Paris). Any holder of registered shares may request, at the latest five days prior to the General Meeting, to be provided with the documents and information referred to in Articles R. 225-81 and R. 225-83 of the commercial Code. This request shall be sent by post to the Company or to CACEIS Corporate Trust (CACEIS Corporate Trust, Service Assemblees Generales, 14, rue Rouget-de-Lisle, 92862 Issy-les-Moulineaux Cedex 9). The holders of bearer shares may also be provided with these documents by filing a request with CACEIS Corporate Trust, whose contact details are abovementioned, with evidence of their shareholder status through a shareholding certificate (attestation d'inscription en compte) provided by their authorised financial intermediary. Finally, please note that any shareholder able to prove its status can attend the General Meeting in person, grant a proxy or vote by post. The applicable rules for attending the General Meeting are described in the notice of meeting and the convening notice published in the BALO. These documents are available on the Company's website (www.maureletprom.fr, website section "Investors", sub-section "General Meeting 2018"). For more information, visit www.maureletprom.fr Contacts MAUREL & PROM Press, shareholder and investor relations Tel.: +33 (0)1 53 83 16 45 ir@maureletprom.fr NewCap Financial communications and investor relations Julie Coulot/Louis-Victor Delouvrier Tel.: +33 (0)1 44 71 98 53 maureletprom@newcap.eu Media relations Nicolas Merigeau Tel.: +33 (0)1 44 71 94 98 maureletprom@newcap.eu This document may contain forward-looking statements regarding the financial position, results, business and industrial strategy of Maurel & Prom. By nature, forward-looking statements contain risks and uncertainties to the extent that they are based on events or circumstances that may or may not happen in the future. These projections are based on assumptions we believe to be reasonable, but which may prove to be incorrect and which depend on a number of risk factors, such as fluctuations in crude oil prices, changes in exchange rates, uncertainties related to the valuation of our oil reserves, actual rates of oil production and the related costs, operational problems, political stability, legislative or regulatory reforms, or even wars, terrorism and sabotage. Maurel & Prom is listed for trading on Euronext Paris CAC Mid & Small - CAC Small - CAC All-Tradable - CAC Oil & Gas - Eligible PEA-PME and SRD Isin FR0000051070 / Bloomberg MAU.FP / Reuters MAUP.PA Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 15:53 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6c9744 1 Business Jokowi,Narendra-Modi,meeting,palm-oil,Tariff-rise Free President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has called on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to reduce the import tariff for palm oil products from Indonesia. "I beg PM Modi's attention regarding the increased tariffs on palm oil products," Jokowi said on Wednesday during a joint press conference after a meeting between the two leaders at the State Palace in Jakarta. In February, the Indian government had raised the import tax for crude palm oil to 44 percent from 30 percent. The government also raised the tax for refined palm oil products to 54 percent from 40 percent. According to the Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association (Gapki), palm oil exports to India reached 7.6 million tons in 2017, up 32 percent from 2016. In 2017, the Indian market accounted for 24 percent of Indonesias total palm oil exports. Last year, Indonesia increased its palm oil exports by 23 percent year-on-year to 31.05 million tons. The Indian government subsequently raised its import tariff on palm oil. Before the hike, in November 2017, it had raised the tariffs for crude palm oil to 30 percent from 15 percent and for refined palm oil to 40 percent from 25 percent. Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution said India had raised its tariff on palm oil three times in one-and-a-half years, which was a heavy burden for Indonesian exports to India. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 13:56 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6bfbe4 1 World Indonesia,India,Narendra-Modi,Jokowi,Merdeka-Palace Free President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has received Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta on the latter's first state visit to the country. The two leaders had a tete-a-tete on Wednesday, before holding a bilateral meeting, during which they discussed their countries strategic partnership, including economic and defense matters. Speaking during the opening of the bilateral meeting, Jokowi said Modi's visit, which also marked the Indian premier's first visit to Indonesia, was very timely, as it came at a time of many uncertainties in the world. "It is the time for us to have a comprehensive strategic partnership [characterized] by concrete cooperation," Jokowi said on Wednesday. "Such cooperation can be realized only by improving engagement, including at the leaders level." Jokowi went on to express his hopes that Indonesia and India, which celebrate 70 years of bilateral ties next year, could further enhance a partnership that contributed to global peace and stability. After the meeting at the Merdeka Palace, Jokowi and Modi departed for the National Monument complex to inaugurate a kite festival organized jointly by Jakarta's Museum Layang-Layang and the Ahmedabad Kite Museum. The two leaders were also expected to visit Jakartas Istiqlal Mosque. The volume of trade between Indonesia and India increased 28.7 percent in 2017. Indonesian exports amounted to US$14.08 billion, including from palm oil and coal, while imports were valued at $4.05 billion. (ahw) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 11:18 1232 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6b7f7d 1 City soekarno-hatta-airport,Terminal-3,Terminal-3-Ultimate,airport-security,luggage-theft Free A series of luggage thefts at Soekarno-Hatta Airports Terminal 3, in which a teenager allegedly stole items from the baggage claim area, has revealed a significant security flaw at the national hub airport. Analyst Arista Atmadjati of the Arista Indonesia Aviation Center (AIAC) said that the airport's security system should be improved, pointing out that security at the Terminal 3 baggage claim exit was too sparse and left many areas unsupervised. Officers should check the tags of any luggage that passengers take out of the terminal. We cant rely on random searches anymore, he told The Jakarta Post. Arista said the airport security switched to conducting random searches of luggage after passengers complained that the search disrupted flow. Soekarno-Hatta Airport Police have arrested 15-year-old DV for allegedly stealing passengers' luggage. Read also: Teenager nabbed for allegedly stealing suitcases at Soekarno-Hatta airport The police were alerted by a Garuda Indonesia passenger who reported on May 12 that his suitcase had been stolen while he was waiting at the Terminal 3 baggage claim area. The incident took place at around 7 p.m. after the passenger had disembarked from a Bali flight. The police identified DV from an image caught on CCTV, tracked him down and arrested the teen at his parents house in Tigaraksa, Tangerang. The police said DV had entered the baggage claim area through its exit gate. He reportedly pretended to be a passenger by carrying a suitcase of his own and gained entry by telling security officials that he had left some luggage behind. DV has allegedly stolen 10 suitcases from illegally gaining entry to the baggage claim area on several occasions. (ami/wit) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 17:11 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6cde1e 1 City Alfian-Tanjung,Twitter,hate-speech,communist,PDI-P Free Alfian Tanjung, a Muslim preacher and former lecturer charged with spreading hate speech for calling the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) members communists on Twitter, was acquitted of all charges, as he had only "copied and pasted" information from dubious sources. The Central Jakarta District Court ruled on Wednesday that what Alfian had done was not a crime. Alfian had tweeted on his account last year that "85 percent of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle members are [members] of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The PKI was disbanded after being accused of being responsible for the putsch against president Sukarno and the killing of six Army generals in 1965. Presiding judge Mahfudin argued that Alfian had just copied an unverified statement from a news portal that apparently was not registered with the Press Council. "The defendant just copied and pasted the information on his social media account," he said, as quoted by tribunnews.com. Read also: Lecturer apologizes for calling Press Council member PKI cadre Alfian was arrested in September last year, after a PDIP member reported him to the police for allegedly spreading hate speech against the party. (fac/ahw) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 15:06 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6c61bf 1 City Aman-Abdurrahman,terrorism,TerroristAttacks,SurabayaBombings,death-penalty,Thamrin-bombing Free Prosecutors at the South Jakarta District Court have refuted Aman Abdurahman's defense plea and insisted that judges hand down the death sentence on the radical cleric for his alleged role in several terror attacks. "We beg your honor [judges] to reject all pleas presented by Aman Abdurahman and his lawyers," prosecutor Anita Dewayani read out her response in front of the panel of judges on Wednesday, as quoted by kompas.com. She said Aman had been proven guilty of violating Article 14 of Law No. 15/2004 on terrorism. Aman has been accused of inciting others to commit at least five terror attacks in Indonesia from 2016 to 2017, including the bombing and shooting near the Sarinah shopping area on Jl. M. H. Thamrin, also known as the Thamrin attack, in Central Jakarta in 2016, which left four people dead. Read also: Aman denounces church attacks, calls perpetrators 'mentally ill' In a previous hearing, Aman admitted that he had encouraged more than 1,000 of his followers to travel to conflict-stricken Syria and become militants. However, he denied that he had instructed them to carry out attacks on their home soil. Aman asserted his conviction that the government and its apparatus were infidels but claimed he had not ordered his followers to attack security personnel. Aman denounced terrorist attacks in Indonesia, particularly those that involved children and women. Despite claiming he was not afraid to face the death penalty, he refused to be linked with recent terror attacks in Indonesia, perpetrators of which included a family of six. (fac/wit) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Suherdjoko (The Jakarta Post) Semarang, Central Java Wed, May 30, 2018 12:43 1232 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6bb76e 1 National Ahmad-Yani-International-Airport,eco-airport,environmentally-friendly-airport,angkasa-pura,Angkasa-Pura-I,Idul-Fitri,Idul-Fitri-2018,IdulFitri,#IdulFitri,#IdulFitriExodus Free Dubbed Indonesias first environmentally friendly airport, the expanded Ahmad Yani International Airport in Tambakharjo, Semarang, Central Java, will be ready to operate on June 6. Construction of new facilities for the airport began in June 2017. The new facilities will replace old ones located in the southern part of the area. The revamped airport will be wider than before and have a higher capacity to accommodate both more passengers and more aircraft. The runway has also been extended. State-owned airport operator Angkasa Pura (AP) I president director Faik Fahmi said the inaugural flight at the revamped airport would be held on June 6. We will move from the old terminal on June 5, he told journalists on Tuesday evening. Faik said construction activities for the new airport, which was built with a total Rp 2.2 trillion (US$157.26 million) in investment, were 95 percent complete. The inaugural operation of the airport will also mark the start of the homebound travel season for Idul Fitri this year, he said. According to AP I data, the new terminal covers 58,652 square meters, roughly nine times more than the existing terminal. The runways length has been extended to 3,000 meters from 2,560 m. The apron at the new terminal measures 61,334 sq m and is connected to a 72,552 sq m taxiway, which can accommodate 13 narrow body aircraft or a combination of 10 narrow body aircraft and two wide body cargo aircraft. Faik said it was hoped that, once construction activities were fully completed in 2019, the new terminal could accommodate 19,000 passengers a day or 7 million per year, up from the current capacity of 810,000 per year. (ebf) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Agnes Anya (The Jakarta Post) Siem Reap, Cambodia Wed, May 30 2018 Round robin: Ten youngsters from ASEAN member states and several officials from the European Union and environmental organizations enjoy bird watching in Siem Reap, Cambodia, on Wednesday, May 23, to commemorate International Biological Diversity Day. (Courtesy of EU Mission to ASEAN) A recent report published by the European Union has urged governments in Asia to give priority to six conservation areas in the region, as the continents rich biodiversity comes under increasing threat from rapid population growth and urban development. Among the six conservation sites, three cover vast areas in Southeast Asia mostly in Indonesia. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, May 30, 2018 14:48 1231 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6c5364 4 Business tax-office,Immigration-Office,agreement,travel-ban Free The Finance Ministrys Taxation Directorate General and the Law and Human Rights Ministrys Immigration Directorate General have signed an agreement aimed at preventing suspected tax evaders from going aboard. Under the deal, the two institutions agreed to exchange information about taxpayers, with the tax office to provide the immigration office with taxpayer data, while the immigration office would provide the tax office with data on passports, visas and stay permits as well as with information on people that have crossed the border. Directorate General of Taxation Hestu Yoga Saksama said in Jakarta that, with the agreement, the tax office could ask the immigration office to prevent tax evaders from leaving the country. This type of [cooperation] for tax collection and for investigation into tax crimes has already been going on. With this agreement, there is an improved procedure for greater transparency and accountability, Hestu said on Wednesday, as reported by kompas.com. He said there was no new regulation on the issue, as the necessary rules were already stipulated in Government Regulation No. 31/2013 on the implementation of Law No. 6/2011 on immigration. Under that regulation, there are two situations in which taxpayers can be prevented from traveling abroad. First, if the taxpayers owe unpaid tax amounting to Rp 100 million or more, and second, if the taxpayers are being investigated for tax crimes. According to the Criminal Law Procedures Code (KUHAP), investigators can impose a travel ban on taxpayers that are being investigated, he added. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Liege Wed, May 30, 2018 09:19 1232 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6b00a3 2 World Belgium,police,attack,radical-group,death Free A gunman killed two female police officers and a man in a parked car in the eastern Belgian city of Liege on Tuesday, before he was shot dead by police. The assailant is suspected of being radicalized in prison by Islamist militants. As more information emerges about the incident, here is what we know: - The attack - - At around 10:30 am (0830 GMT), a man followed two female police officers in Liege, stabbed them several times, then grabbed their firearms and shot them both dead. They were 45 and 53 years old. - Officials said the officers were "executed" in a targeted attack. - He then travelled on foot before opening fire on a 22-year-old man in the passenger seat of a parked car, killing him. - The assailant later entered the Leonie de Waha high school in the French-speaking city, where he took an employee hostage. - The high school pupils were evacuated from the rear of the building and none were injured. - Police officers arrived at the school and the assailant opened fire, wounding several of them in the legs. Officers killed him about 30 minutes after the assault began. - Four police officers were hospitalised with gunshot wounds, including one who was hit in the femoral artery. His life now appears to be out of danger, while another officer has been released from hospital. - The school will be closed on Wednesday and possibly on Thursday. Students will be given psychological counselling. - The case has been classified as a suspected "terrorist offence" and handed to the Belgian federal prosecutor's office, which investigates terror cases. - The assailant - - The attacker has been identified as Benjamin Herman, according to a source close to the investigation. Born in 1982, he had served prison time for robbery, assault and battery and drug dealing, the source said. - Amateur footage aired by Belgium's state broadcaster showed the gunman shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greatest") as he walked through the streets during the rampage. In another video, a short and intense burst of gunfire is audible, after which the man lies on the ground. - He was last in prison at Marche-en-Famenne, in the French-speaking Wallonia region. Some unconfirmed reports say he had been granted several hours of leave from prison, reportedly to seek work. - The assailant was flagged by the police for having been in contact with Islamic militants in prison where he was radicalized, the source said. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Aman Rochman (The Jakarta Post) Malang, East Java Wed, May 30, 2018 09:59 1232 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e6b4350 1 National Batu,Malang,East-Java,Buddhism,Buddhist,Buddhist-Day-of-Enlightenment,Buddhist-monks,Muslims,ramadhan,Ramadhan-2018 Free Buddhist monks and novice monks, also known as samanera, celebrated Vesak in Batu, Malang, East Java, on Tuesday, by giving food and drink to Muslims. Standing in front of the Dammadipa Arama Vihara on Jl. Raya Ma, they distributed packages of sugary delicacies for breaking the fast, known locally as tajil, to people passing through the area on Tuesday afternoon. Vesak celebration organizing committee head Yudi Murdana said a string of events were held for a whole day prior to a ceremony to celebrate Tri Suci Waisak, the Buddhist Day of Enlightenment, at the Dammadipa Arama Vihara on Tuesday evening. He said the committee had canceled a cultural parade usually held to celebrate the Vesak holiday, because it coincided with the Ramadhan fasting month. Motorcyclists passing the Dammadipa Arama Vihara on Jl. Raya Ma, Batu, Malang, East Java, get packages of sugary delicacies for breaking the fast, known locally as tajil, from Buddhist monks during the celebration of Vesak on Tuesday. (JP/Aman Rochman) During a cultural parade, we usually carry the statue of Buddha walking around villages near the vihara and stage traditional cultural performances. The cultural parade was first held in 2014, and it is the first time in 2018 that Vesak Day coincides with Ramadhan, said Yudi. To show our tolerance and respect to our Muslim sisters and brothers, we canceled the cultural parade and replaced it with the distribution of tajil for motorists and motorcyclists, he went on. Yudi said Tri Suci Waisak peaked at 9:19:13 p.m. local time on Tuesday. Eko Setiadarma, a samanera from Palu, Central Sulawesi, praised the event. Ive studied at Dammadipa Arama Vihara for just one year, and this is my first experience to distribute food packages to fasting Muslims. Im happy that we can help followers of other religions. This is part of Buddhas teachings, which encourage Buddhists to keep showing goodness to other people, regardless of their ethnicity, religion and social background, said Eko. (ebf) TORONTO, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cerro Grande Mining Corporation (the Company or CEG) (CSE:CEG) (OTCQB:CEGMF) reported its unaudited results for its second fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2018 compared to the same quarter in 2017 and results for the six months fiscal period ended March 31, 2018 compared to the same six months period in 2017. These financial statements and MD&A have been filed on SEDAR and the Company refers the reader to those materials for additional information. Cerro Grande Mining Corporation is an exploration and development company with properties and activities currently focused in Chile. Cautionary Statement on Forward-looking Information: This news release contains "forward-looking information", which may include, but is not limited to, statements with respect to the future financial or operating performance of CEG. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", or "believes" or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases, or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of CEG to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements contained herein are made as of the date of this press release based on current expectations and beliefs and CEG disclaims, other than as required by law, any obligation to update any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, results, future events, circumstances, or if management's estimates or opinions should change, or otherwise. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Singapore Airlines is set to offer its economy class passengers in-flight snack boxes designed by artists with special needs in June. The product is a result of collaboration between the airline and SG Enable, an agency set up by Singapore's Social and Family Development Ministry, and the Autism Resource Center (ARC), a Singapore-based non-profit charity to help people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ARD), which aims to bring the artists artwork onto the global stage through in-flight products. The partnership was officiated on May 25. The first snack box will feature local food artwork designed by Aaron Yap, an artist from the Artist Development Program (ADP), as an initiative under the ARCs program, Pathlight School. It will contain satay, claypot rice and kueh lapis. The carrier also seeks to encourage people to support inclusiveness and visit Enabling Village, a community space for people with special needs in Singapore. Read also: Singapore Airlines to absorb SilkAir after upgrade Additionally, Singapore Airlines KrisShop.com will establish KrisShop Cares to support those in need by providing products and artworks from partner communities who will receive benefits from the sales. The ARC is said to be the first partner of KrisShop Cares, which will offer a series of products like Roaring Merlion by ADP artist Gavin Rodringuez. Singapore Airlines recognizes the importance of giving back to the communities that we serve. We believe that this partnership with SG Enable and ARC will be a wonderful platform for people with disabilities to showcase their talent to the global audience that we carry and to build awareness of their potential, said Yeoh Phee Teik, the airline's acting senior vice president for customer experience in a press release. (wir/kes) As reported by Kompas.com, Indonesian Ambassador to India Sidharto R Suryodipuro said on Tuesday that the resort island already attracted many Indian tourists, welcoming around 485,000 in 2017, around 28 percent more than in the preceding year. "But many Indians still do not know there are places like Borobudur and Prambanan," Sidharto said, referring to the Buddhist and Hindu temples, respectively, both on the island of Java. The ambassador specifically invited Indians, most of whom are Hindu, to visit religious sites in Indonesia. Sidharto also promoted destinations across Sumatra island, which is the archipelago's region closest to India. Read also: Indonesia eyes Indian tourists visiting Malaysia, Singapore Transportation remains a challenge for travelers between the two countries. Currently, there are 28 direct flights a week that connect several cities from India and Indonesia. However, many Indian travelers still need to transit in neighboring countries, such as Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, before reaching Indonesia. "The challenge is how [to ensure] they can come directly to Indonesia with better connectivity. Increasing connectivity is currently being discussed by the two countries," Sidharto said. Previously, Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister Luhut Pandjaitan had invited Indian airlines to serve direct flights to and from Indonesia. Several destinations offered include Silangit in North Sumatra, Labuan Bajo in East Nusa Tenggara, Batam in Riau Islands and Yogyakarta. (liz/kes) In May 2016, Lewis Christman was flying from Chicago to Rome when he suffered a bout of acute pancreatitis. He curled into a fetal position on the floor. He spent the next seven hours in agony while the plane flew on. The next three months, he spent in hospitals. This month, Christman sued, accusing United Continental Holdings Inc. of ignoring a recommendation from a doctor on board to divert the flight and failing to contact medical consultants on the ground. It was another round of bad publicity for United and one that draws scrutiny to how U.S. air carriers treat passengers in distress and the pressure to keep flights in the air. Obviously, there is a significant cost to landing the plane, said David Axelrod, Christmans lawyer. Were looking for all the information about this incident, where my poor client is doubled over in pain and hes vomiting and theyre not landing this plane." A medical emergency sets in motion a high-altitude calculation with human lives in the balance. While pilots are the ultimate decision-makers, airlines have earth-bound medical consultants that help bypass on-board volunteers -- reducing expensive emergency landings, but with the potential of providing expert decisions in real time. Washing hands Christmans suit seeks information about the incident from Phoenix-based MedAire Inc., which provides in-flight medical advice to more than 100 airlines. Company spokeswoman Mandy Eddington declined to comment on the lawsuit or any relationship with United. Read also: No bomb jokes in airports, airplanes: Authorities Paulo Alves, MedAires global medical director of aviation health, said in an interview before the suit was filed that his company provides help from doctors with extensive experience. Just 1.6 percent of flights in which MedAire is called are diverted. He said airlines see the value in bypassing medicos who happen to be aboard. If the model was not financially interesting for them, then they wouldnt hire us, Alves said. Doctors, they tend to recommend diversions more than we do, because of course they dont want to assume the long-term responsibility. A medical emergency occurs once every 604 flights and 7.3 percent led to diversions, according to a 2013 New England Journal of Medicine study. It also found that 0.3 percent of emergencies on planes end in deaths. Accounting aloft Its fairly expensive to divert an aircraft, and so a captain has to take into account a whole host of issues," said Jose Nable, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Georgetown University Hospital and co-author of a 2017 paper on in-flight emergencies. Perry Flint, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association airline trade group, said his organization estimates that a diversion can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $200,000. Erin Benson Scharra, a United Airlines spokeswoman said the company is investigating Christmans claims, but declined to speak further about medical diversions or consultants it employs. Read also: Five things not to do on an airplane to reduce germ exposure Companies like MedAire, housed in the emergency unit of the Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix, play a key role in diversion decisions. STAT-MD Inc., which offers a similar service and uses doctors from the University of Pittsburgh, works with around 20 national and international air carriers. It says it reduces landings that would otherwise be recommended by nervous and out-of-their-element doctors in the sky. Theyre going to revert to divert, said T.J. Doyle, the medical director for STAT-MD. The medical volunteer should be a data-gatherer and a procedure-doer. They should not be a decision-maker. Special snacks The emergencies encountered by medical professionals on flights vary in severity. Internal medicine doctor Gina Jabbour of New York revived an elderly woman who fainted after using the bathroom. The flight continued on schedule and Jabbour was rewarded by a flight attendant with secret cookies. Scott Schoifet, an orthopedic surgeon, was dozing on a flight from Japan to New York in 2006 when he was awakened to help a fellow passenger with chest pain. Flight attendants asked Schoifet whether it was safe to continue flying. Read also: United to compensate people on flight when man dragged off It was stressful first because theyre looking at me like, What do you want to do? Schoifet said. I cant make this decision. Theres 350 people on the plane. He checked in with the woman for the rest of the flight until she disembarked at a stop in Detroit, and then the plane continued on. High-level help This month, a Delta Air Lines Inc. passenger passed out before takeoff at Fort Lauderdales airport. The person was treated by none other than U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who was traveling from Florida to Mississippi for a discussion on the opioid epidemic. The plane was still on the tarmac, and Adams helped evaluate the traveler, who ended up going to the hospital. Medical emergencies on planes set in motion a chain reaction. Elise May, the manager of inflight safety and regulatory compliance for Southwest Airlines Co., said flight attendants first protect themselves. Then they page for a medical professional on board. Southwests flight attendants are trained in basic care, and are equipped with iPads that have manuals and headsets to contact ground-based consultants. The decision on whether to divert is ultimately made by the pilot and dispatcher, but it is dependent a lot on our medical consultant and what they feel is the danger of the situation, May said. Theres all sorts of things to take into consideration. Doctors are protected by a federal law that protects air carriers and individuals from liability while providing assistance in the air. But the Hippocratic oath remains their lodestar. Ethically, I feel like there is this responsibility for me to intervene, said Meera Shah, a New York doctor who helped revive a woman passed out on a plane this year. What if I wasnt there? I always think about that. Riau province has attracted many tourists from neighboring Malaysia to visit during Ramadhan this year. Tour leader Mohd Rezwan bin Alias told Antara news agency in Pekanbaru on Monday that the enthusiasm of 13 Malaysian visitors to visit the archipelago, especially Riau, had not waned despite recent terrorist attacks and a travel advisory issued by the Malaysian government. "Following the [terror] tragedy, we initially felt doubtful. But after we arrive in Riau, we felt safe and [happy] to receive such a friendly welcome from locals," said Rezwan. According to the Tourism Ministry, at least 14 countries had issued travel warnings against traveling to Indonesia. The 14 countries were Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Rezwan said the group visited Riau to explore Pekanbaru city and Siak regency. "I encourage other foreign tourists to visit Indonesia, especially Riau, as it is home to very interesting and safe destinations. This activity is held during Ramadhan to receive the blessings of the holy month," he said. Read also: Historic spots of Pekanbaru The group visited An-Nur Grand Mosque in Pekanbaru and attended the dzuhur (noon) prayer on the first day of their trip on Saturday. As they were continuing their journey to Siak regency, they dropped by the Pompa Angguk oil monument in Minas. After arriving in Siak, the group visited the Tengku Agung Sultanah Latifah Bridge, broke the fast and then attended the tawarih (evening Ramadhan) prayer at the Siak Sri Indrapura Islamic Center. On the second day, Sunday, the group visited the As Shidiqie orphanage and Madrasah Masjid Sultan Islamic school and then headed to the Siak Palace, marveled at a Kato ship, the Sultan mosque and tomb, Balai Kerapatan Tinggi, Kampung Tionghoa Chinese village and Sungai Jantan Plaza. After returning to Pekanbaru, the tourists visited Alam Mayang recreational park, the Soeman HS library, attended the ashar (afternoon) prayer at An Nur Grand Mosque, visited Balai Adat Melayu Riau cultural park and then broke the fast together followed by tarawih prayers at An Nur mosque. On the third day, the group were scheduled to visit Bawah Market to shop for souvenirs, Pekanbaru Grand Mosque, explore a heritage area (home to Hinggap Palace, the old seaport, Syah Bandar house, Pekanbaru Zero Point Monument, a weaving house and the sultan's holiday house), then broke the fast with orphans at the Hikmah orphanage and conducted the tarawih prayer. On Tuesday, the tourists' itinerary was to start the day by attending subuh (dawn) prayers at a mosque and then shop for souvenirs before going to the airport to catch their flight to Kuala Lumpur. (kes) Officials with New Yorks three library systems have launched a campaign to boost funding in next years city budget. They say cuts in service could be inevitable if the mayor and City Council cant find $16 million for the upcoming fiscal year. In 2016, Mayor de Blasio provided the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Library with a larger operating budget than in past years ($344 million), and allocated funds for capital improvement projects. The budget this year is not being reduced, but it also hasnt been increased to keep up with rising costs. The library systems anticipate a shortfall due to the increased minimum wage and paid family leave, among other factors. According to a press release, we are hoping to get a little help spreading the word to New Yorkers that without a relatively small increase to our expense budgets, libraries will have serious trouble maintaining current service levels and may need to make tough choices around hours, collections, and other resources. Representatives from the library systems are urging anyone concerned about service cuts to visit investinlibraries.org. Theyve made it easy to send a letter to the mayor and key members of the City Council, including your own local representative. The site also includes a collection of sticky notes from library users. Here are a few samples from Lower East Side branch libraries: The library enables me to feed my young daughters appetite for a wide variety of books that I would otherwise not be able to afford.Tamera, Seward Park Library When I was at my lowest, I could always count on the library where I could indulge in my writing and reading. Libraries are not an add on, they are an absolute essential for free societies. Edward-Yemil, Seward Park Library My library, Hamilton Fish, Lower East Side, is a lifeline to the neighborhood. The librarians here go above and beyond providing after school resources to the many students in the area. Maureen, Hamilton Fish Park Library. Seward Park Library is my home away from home. Priceless. Dalia, Seward Park Library The mayor and Council must agree on a budget by the end of June. A spokesperson in the mayors office noted that the librarys budget has been increased by 24% over a five-year period. The mayor has also provided $485 million in capital funding for libraries. The citys libraries are run as separate non-profit organizations. In addition to city funding, they rely on private donations and federal and state funding. Branches on the Lower East Side include the Seward Park Library, Chatham Square Library, Hamilton Fish Park Library and Tompkins Square Library. Atlanta, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Incumaker, Inc. (OTC Pink: QMKR) provided a shareholder update on the progress of the Agreement and Plan of Merger with uBid Holdings Inc. (UBID). As previously announced, UBID would merge with and into Incumaker and Incumaker would be the surviving corporation. Under this Alternative Public Offering, or APO transaction, shareholders of UBID would own 90% of the issued and outstanding shares of the newly combined company. Incumaker will seek to change its name to uBid Holdings Inc. as well as its ticker symbol post-merger to better reflect the companys new technology related business model. Under the terms of the merger agreement, UBIDs current officers and directors would become the officers and directors of the newly combined company. Ketan Thakker, UBIDs Chief Executive Officer, stated: Due to the complexity and the magnitude of this type of merger, the financial audit is taking a bit longer to complete than anticipated. Accordingly, both companies have mutually agreed to extend the merger timeline through July. We remain excited about the planned merger, and our focus continues to be taking the necessary steps to close the contemplated transaction, Darren Bankston, CEO of Incumaker, commented. Under the initial terms of the Agreement and Plan of Merger, Incumaker and UBID were to close the merger by May 31, 2018. This has now been extended to July 31, 2018. The closing of the transaction is subject to UBID completing the acquisition of Sky Auction and having the financing to consummate a second acquisition, and other customary conditions, including approval by the shareholders of both companies. .. About uBid Holdings, Inc. uBid Holdings, Inc. (uBid or the Company) is an e-commerce company focused on operating a growing number of online auction and bargain-sale e-commerce marketplaces offering thousands of products to both consumers and businesses. uBid provides a unique shopping experience that offers buyers the opportunity to either set their own prices or receive competitive fixed prices on popular, brand name products at a significant discount to prices found at bricks-and-mortar stores and large internet retailers. The Companys online marketplaces provide manufacturers, retailers, distributors and other suppliers with an efficient and economical channel for maximizing revenue on their merchandise while at the same time moving new, overstock, close-out and recertified products and providing consumers and businesses with a convenient method for obtaining this merchandise virtually anytime and anywhere at substantial savings. uBid currently operates through its internet site, uBid.com, which the Companys management believes was one of the first and remains one of the most recognized names among auction sites and currently features a rotating selection of computer products, consumer electronics, watches, jewelry and gifts, sporting goods, collectibles, home goods, travel and fashion products, which typically sell at significant discounts to prices found through traditional retailers. The Company operates its online auction and bargain-sale marketplace 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, currently offering unique merchandise on its sites. About Incumaker Incumaker, Inc. (QMKR: OTC PINK) is a diversified holding company whose strategic plan is to acquire interests in young businesses, and provide financing, advice and guidance to assist them in realizing their potential. Incumaker continues to identify and evaluate other potential acquisitions to create shareholder value and return. Additional information about Incumaker is available in its filings on otcmarkets.com. For additional information please email Incumaker@gmail.com. Press Releases may include forward-looking statements. In particular, the words believe, may, could, should, expect, anticipate, estimate, project," "propose," "plan," "intend," and similar conditional words and expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Any statements made in this news release about an action, event or development, are forward-looking statements. Such statements are based upon assumptions that in the future may prove not to have been accurate and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Such statements are subject to a number of assumptions, risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the control of the company. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Although the company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that its forward-looking statements will prove to be correct. Investors are cautioned that any forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected. The forward-looking statements in this press release are made as of the date hereof. The company takes no obligation to update or correct its own forward-looking statements, except as required by law or those prepared by third parties that are not paid by the company. Statements in this press release that are not historical fact may be deemed 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. Although Incumaker, Inc. believes the expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, Incumaker, Inc. is unable to give any assurance that its expectations will be attained. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations include the companys ability identify a suitable business model for the corporation. Formerly "dead" Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko has appeared alive and well at a news conference this afternoon. Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko turns up at a news conference less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed. The country's security services said his death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. https://t.co/ff14YjK4RA The Associated Press (@AP) May 30, 2018 Ukrainian officials said Babchenko faking his death was part of a sting operation to catch and arrest people who really had threatened his life. As a result of this plot, one person has been captured. Special apologies to my wife, Olechka. I am sorry, but there were no options here, Babchenko said at the news conference. His wife apparently did not know about the plot. Following reports late Tuesday night that he was killed, many news outlets wrote articles about his "death". Ukrainian police confirmed his alleged death to media last night. He was reported to have been shot on his porch in Kiev. Police told reporter that his murder was likely tied to his reporting. Babchenko, 41, appeared to have been shot several times in the back outside his home and was found by his wife. He died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. His work was highly critical of the Russian government and military. He is a war correspondent, as well as a war veteran. This plot also served to highlight the danger Russian journalists critical of the government face. This murder fit into a pattern of Russian journalists who have truly died for their reporting and politicians who have died for their work. In the past few years, people including politician Denis Voronenkov, journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya and journalist Anastasia Baburova have all been killed in Kiev. Babchenko posted on Facebook in 2016 about a Russian plane carrying a military choir that crashed on its way to perform in Syria. In this post, Babchenko called Russia an aggressor and criticized Russias bombings in Aleppo. He also wrote a piece for the Guardian last year about this post and the effects it had on his life. He said many people in Russia considered this post to be highly unpatriotic, with politicians, court officials and propaganda outlets calling for action to be taken against him. A change.org petition was also circulated, gaining more than 179,000 signatures. Additionally, Babchenko said he had received many death threats. As a result, he wrote that, Like many dissidents I am used to abuse, but a recent campaign against me was so personal, so scary, that I was forced to flee. After fleeing Russia, he moved first to Prague and then Kiev in 2017. Shall is studying for their PhD at the University of Bristol. In their crowdfunding page, Shall explained that they wrote the open letter 'asking the university to take a stand against the infamously transphobic group, A Woman's Place.' Shall alleges that they are 'facing possible expulsion as an outcome of the disciplinary meeting.' A university spokesperson said that concerns were raised 'about the actions of one of our students in relation to their protesting of a talk by A Woman's Place. This talk was not hosted by the University. A University academic chaired the event in a personal capacity, and we understand several of our students attended.'The spokesperson further stated that Bristol 'strongly defend[s] the right of students to protest,' but that there had been complaints that the form of the protest infringed freedom of speech. The University said it had a duty to investigate these complaints and secure freedom of speech within the law. According to a statement published on the university's site, Professor Nishan Canagarajah said the event ' took place without incident .' Nonetheless, the disciplinary board process may potentially result in Nic's expulsion since calls to ban the event were 'expressed by some in a manner which may have caused others to fear their own right to meet and speak freely about matters of concern to them' and the manner in which they expressed their desire for a ban 'is not protected by the University.' Canagarajah is Chair of the University's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Group.As the university will have legal representation at the disciplinary board, Nic is seeking 2,500 in order to retain legal representation of their own.According to Nic's crowdfunding campaign , the University is accusing them of spreading 'false information,' trying to 'suppress fellow students' freedom of speech,' and having '[bringing] the University into disrepute.' The money raised will also be matched in donations to the Empty Cages Collective , a prison abolition campaign group, to cover legal and medical fees for transgender prisoners whom they support. An open letter a ddressed to Vice-Chancellor Hugh Brady has been signed by academics at a number of universities. The letter argues that the disciplinary action 'represents an attack on the democratic right to free expression' and that students and staff should have the right to oppose bigotry and discrimination. It further demands the Vice-Chancellor's Office to 'dismiss the disciplinary... and apologise for the hurt caused to trans students and staff.' Speaking to TNS, Natacha Kennedy, a trans lecturer at Goldsmiths College and one of the signatories, told us that Nic's case presents a serious freedom of speech issue: "In my opinion, Bristol University's attempt to discipline Nic is unreasonable. The right of a minority group to oppose those they regard as oppressing them is probably the most important form of free speech. "Every trans person I know regards the activities and material produced by the anti-trans campaigners as profoundly transphobic and misleading, yet they have had their "free speech" protected by the university. If trans people are going to be silenced while transphobes get to say whatever they like, we are in a truly Orwellian New World." Nic Shall has been referred to the Disciplinary Committee, as of now, no penalties have been imposed as the committee has not yet been held. Which destinations are at the top of your travel bucket list at the moment? Im guessing Mozambique probably doesnt feature...but it should. Being relatively unexplored, you can really get off the beaten track and experience the real Africa here. So here are 5 reasons why you need to visit this stunning country: 1. Its home to some of Africas best scuba diving Mozambique is home to some of Africas best scuba diving. Known for its megafauna - aka ocean giants - Praia do Tofo, on Mozambiques southeast coast, is one of the few places in the world you can see whale sharks and manta rays year-round. From June to October you have a good chance of seeing humpback whales passing through too! 2. You can help marine conservation efforts... even if youre not a diver! When you think of Africa, one of the first things you think of is probably a safari. But how about mixing things up with an ocean safari? Hop on a boat and head out in search of some of the oceans most captivating creatures, including whale sharks, manta rays, dolphins, turtles and mobula rays. If you come across one of these magnificent animals, you can jump in and snorkel with them. Whats more, if you have a camera and manage to take a photo of a whale shark or a manta ray, you can help legit scientific research. All you need to do is upload your snap to the global sightings databases WhaleShark.org or Manta Matcher and researchers will look at the animals spot patterns (which are unique to each whale shark or manta ray) to identify the individual and track its movements. This information is used by researchers to help further the conservation of the species. When I headed out on ocean safari with Peri-Peri Divers in Tofo Beach we swam with manta rays and a 5m whale shark (and he was just a juvenile - these mammoth creatures can grow up to 20m when they reach adulthood!). Not only that but we spotted a turtle and two pods of dolphins from the boat - it was a truly unforgettable experience. Luckily for me, a research assistant from the Marine Megafauna Foundation was on the boat with us to explain all about the marine life we saw and the role the charity is playing in their conservation. 3. Experience authentic African life Making matapa with Tofo Life Mozambique is a relatively undiscovered holiday destination, which means it hasnt been overrun by tourism and youll still be able to enjoy an authentic experience. Whilst staying in Tofo I visited the community-run ecotourism project Tofo Life, where we learned about what life is really like in the village and had the opportunity to help cook the countrys traditional dish: matapa (which is made from cassava leaves, peanuts, garlic and coconut milk). Think you can carry a bucket of water on your head without spilling it? The Tofo Life ladies can teach you how - its harder than you think! Grating coconut for matapa 4. Surfs Up! Catch some great waves The country might not be well known for its surf, but Mozambiques 2,500km of coastline boasts waves suitable for total beginners as well as intermediate and advanced surfers. Being a lesser known surf destination, though, is an advantage because youll find uncrowded waves in fun, friendly towns. 5. Enjoy stunning National Parks Bazaruto Archipelago Mozambique is home to several national parks and reserves including the group of islands in the Bazaruto Archipelago - home to a population of dugongs - which became a national park in 1971, the impressive Marine Protected Area of the Quirimbas Archipelago, which was nominated to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 20018; and the Gorongosa National Park, which is considered a biodiversity hotspot. Whether youre a surfer, an ocean lover or want to head out on safari and explore the real Africa, why not consider Mozambique for your next holiday? PESHAWAR, Pakistan, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In response to the reported militant attack that tragically claimed the life of UNITED SIKHS Volunteer Charanjeet Singh, 52, the global nonprofit organization today urged United States and Pakistan government officials to provide necessary security measures for the local Sikh community. Immediately after news of the crime broke, UNITED SIKHS reached out to Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Peshawar Mayor Muhammad Asim Khan, the U.S. Consulate, Dept. of State and Commission on International Religious Freedom to address the heinous violation of human rights. We call upon the government to urgently implement additional security measures to protect the Sikh community, as we are in a state of shock at this horrific crime," said UNITED SIKHS Pakistan Coordinator Herdyal Singh, who is related to the victim. Our International Civil and Human Rights Advocacy legal division is actively working with local authorities to ensure the perpetrators are apprehended swiftly and justice is served. We ask anyone with any information on the attack to come forward. A father of three (one daughter, 16, and two sons, 18 and 20), Charanjeet Singh opened his shop in Peshawar to provide for his family. He volunteered with UNITED SIKHS on a number of international relief efforts, including assistance programs for Pakistans internally displaced people. He is being remembered by the community as a beloved human rights and interfaith activist. In light of this tragic news, UNITED SIKHS also remind the global Sikh community to be vigilant against hate crimes and report them immediately to our ICHRA legal team via the online reporting form: http://www.unitedsikhs.org/hate_crime/usa/hc.php ABOUT UNITED SIKHS UNITED SIKHS is a United Nations-affiliated, global charity that advocates for civil and human rights. Our International Civil & Human Rights Advocacy helps advance the economic, social and spiritual empowerment of minorities and other marginalized groups and individuals in need, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social status, age or ability. We achieve this by protecting and enforcing the civil and human rights of minorities and marginalized groups in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Attachment Beneath the picture-perfect Instagram-reel and wanderlust-provoking articles, there is another side to travelling rarely explored: dangerous or embarrassing decisions, careless mistakes, and the falling victim to crime. Inspired by travel experts confessional stories from The Telegraph s that prove even the most experienced travellers are prone to mistakes, I have compiled a list of the worst mistakes students have made on holiday, ranging from painful hangovers and angry park rangers to stolen passports and life-threatening illnesses. 1. An accidental detour into the Belgian countryside In the summer of 2016, I embarked on my first backpacking trip across Europe. A few weeks into the trip, convinced by my perfect track-record navigating the European rail, I confidently boarded a train from Brussels to Amsterdam. An hour into the trip and after stopping for the twentieth time at a tiny countryside station, I logged into Google Maps only to realise that I was bobbing further and further away from my destination into the Belgian countryside. At the next station, a small two-platformed station surrounded by stretches of green fields, I leapt from the train and began to devise a route back to Brussels using four different regional trains. At least the views were good. 2. Squatting behind a tree in Yosemite On her gap year, one University of Birmingham student travelled for the first time to the breath-taking Yosemite National Park in California, famed for its spine-tingling waterfalls, ancient sequoia trees, and towering mountains. While exploring the park, she became desperate to release her bladder and had to resort to squatting behind a tree attracting a very angry park ranger. When she carried on with her hike, it turned out a block of toilets was only 100 metres away. 3. A last minute dash to the British Embassy Aspiring blogger and University of Stirling student Jo Elliott had a travel nightmare when her bag was stolen on her final day in Greece. After making a last-minute dash to the British Embassy with a faithful friend, she was thankfully able to fly home the next morning. 4. An uninvited visitor in Jerusalem This story dates back to the 1970s when my mother travelled to Jerusalem in her gap year to work on a farm. Sharing a first-floor hotel room with another female student, the two students made the decision to leave the balcony windows open in an attempt to combat the sticky heat. In the middle of the night, they were woken by a young man scaling the building to climb through their open balcony windows. Luckily, the commotion the pair raised scared the unwanted visitor back out of the window. Needless to say, they kept their windows securely locked for the remainder of the trip. 5. Typhoid scare The National Students very own assistant travel editor Caitlin Clark had a big scare on her year abroad in East Africa after making the mistake of drinking contaminated water from a boat. After falling ill, Caitlin had to be flown from Zanzibar to a private hospital in Nairobi by AMREF Flying Doctors to be treated for typhoid fever. After a long two weeks in hospital, she was flown back to the UK by her insurance. 6. A loved-up hostel dorm On a lighter note, Caitlin once made the mistake of staying in a 5-bed hostel dorm in Lisbon with two loved-up couples. It wasnt the smartest decision. 7. A hungover boat party On a lighter note, student Lee Thomas worst travel mistake came about on a lads holiday in Ayia Napa in Cyprus. After a wild night out, Lee made the mistake of boarding a boat party which combined seasickness and a hangover from hell. After managing not to chunder as the party-boat sailed to its location, the DJ organised a competition for the best dive from the boats 10 metre diving board. Despite having no experience and a relentless hangover, he attempted a double front-flip only to belly-flop miserably, resulting in a gigantic bruise all down his right side. Needless to say, he didnt win any prizes but the DJ gave him a shout-out in the most Cockney accent going: Oi! This geezer has the biggest fackin bruise Ive ever seen! 8. Safes, not always so safe Youd think a locked safe would be the best option to guard expensive and important items on holiday. However, these two stories demonstrate why we shouldnt always count on them. Cardiff Universitys Anisah Hussain stored her passport in a safe overnight only to forget the combination just was due to depart for the airport. After two hours trying to open the safe, she luckily remembered the correct combination and made her flight in time. Becca Barnes, a student at the University of Southampton, was not so lucky. After storing her passport and valuable jewellery in a safe to go for a drink with her friend, she returned to find the entire safe and its contents, including jewellery and passport, had been carried out of the hotel. Moral of the story: dont store your valuables in a safe small enough to be carried away. 9. A long wait at McDonalds The National Students opinion editor, Gursimran Hans, spent four and a half hours outside a McDonalds nearby Southend airport in the early hours of the morning after finding the airport was closed. Unfortunately, the McDonalds drive-thru was the only 24-hours facility, meaning that he had to order a taxi to make a food order. Desperate times call for desperate measures. 10. Birmingham mix-up University of Birmingham student Georgie Rowe found herself in a pickle after mixing up UKs Birmingham with Birmingham Alabama when booking an upcoming holiday to Canada. With only a one-letter difference in their airport codes, this mistake is easier to make than youd think. Luckily, Georgie avoided a nasty surprise by realising her mistake and thanks to a friendly Delta support person on Twitter was able to rectify her mistake before it was too late. Unfortunately, The Content Is Not Here You have arrived at this page because the page or post you were looking for no longer exists. Please check our main navigation pages for other content: Home Page Hamilton Bermuda May 30, 2018 Dear shareholders and investors, As announced in our press release of May 3, 2018, the company indicated a possible sale of two vessels. Today, we confirm the sale of two vessels, adjusting the fleet from 33 to 31 suezmaxes in the short term. The sale of vessels is, however, a part of the company's plan to expand as NAT has three newbuildings coming from a Korean yard. The newbuildings are joining our fleet during the second half of 2018. The commercial life of a suezmax could be 20 years or more. Therefore, such transactions are a natural part of our business. The total cash to NAT from the sale of these two vessels is between $9 million and $10 million per vessel. This message is an indication of the commercial and financial flexibility of NAT. As communicated earlier, further sales of vessels may be expected in the process. We can assure you that we will prioritize dividend payments as in the past. At the time of this message, there are optimistic views on the tanker market. CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Matters discussed in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides safe harbor protections for forward-looking statements in order to encourage companies to provide prospective information about their business. Forward-looking statements include statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events or performance, and underlying assumptions and other statements, which are other than statements of historical facts. The Company desires to take advantage of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and is including this cautionary statement in connection with this safe harbor legislation. The words "believe," "anticipate," "intend," "estimate," "forecast," "project," "plan," "potential," "will," "may," "should," "expect," "pending" and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements in this press release are based upon various assumptions, many of which are based, in turn, upon further assumptions, including without limitation, our management's examination of historical operating trends, data contained in our records and other data available from third parties. Although we believe that these assumptions were reasonable when made, because these assumptions are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and contingencies which are difficult or impossible to predict and are beyond our control, we cannot assure you that we will achieve or accomplish these expectations, beliefs or projections. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Important factors that, in our view, could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements include the strength of world economies and currencies, general market conditions, including fluctuations in charter rates and vessel values, changes in demand in the tanker market, as a result of changes in OPEC's petroleum production levels and world wide oil consumption and storage, changes in our operating expenses, including bunker prices, drydocking and insurance costs, the market for our vessels, availability of financing and refinancing, changes in governmental rules and regulations or actions taken by regulatory authorities, potential liability from pending or future litigation, general domestic and international political conditions, potential disruption of shipping routes due to accidents or political events, vessels breakdowns and instances of off-hires and other important factors described from time to time in the reports filed by the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the prospectus and related prospectus supplement, our Annual Report on Form 20-F, and our reports on Form 6-K. Virginia, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Virginia Beach, VA May 31, 2018 StarChase LLC, a leading GPS public safety technology company in the law enforcement and defense market, is pleased to announce that Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office as a 2018 StarChase Center of Excellence (COE) recipient. StarChases COE program celebrates agencies that have made outstanding contributions to improving law enforcement and community safety during high-risk vehicle events and providing multi-jurisdictional impact while also utilizing StarChase technologies. It also identifies agencies that execute innovative and effective public safety programs devoted to addressing crime, mitigating risks, and positively impacting their community. The COE program is designed to be a collaborative effort between StarChase and law enforcement. As a member, agencies benefit from technology, training, and advocacy; and have ultimately demonstrated they have been a resource for multi-jurisdictional impact. Chosen COE agencies recognize the importance of implementing law enforcements best practices using progressive technology and enhanced officer tactics and training. We are excited to welcome Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office into StarChases Center of Excellence Program. The leadership from Sheriff Gonzales to the deputies on the street show the departments commitment to public safety for the city. Coupled with the agencies participation in Governor Martinezs recently established Auto Theft Prevention Authority the program will continue to have a multi-jurisdictional impact, said Bryan Stone, Vice President of Business Development and Sales, StarChase. Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office has been a model law enforcement agency for encouraging both local and regional responsive efforts and was the first in the State of New Mexico to adopt the technology. The department's overall commitment to spearheading their force-multiplying practices cooperatively with neighboring departments is essential to maintaining public trust and strengthening community relations. View coverage here. Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office Mission: The Primary Mission of the Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office includes the protection of life and property; resolution of conflict; creating and maintaining a feeling of security in the community; pro-actively reducing the opportunities for the commission of crime; identification, apprehension and prosecution of offenders of the laws; and the preservation of peace. Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office accepts as part of their mission, the responsibility to provide for a quality of life in their community. About StarChase: StarChase provides GPS tracking technology tools and solutions to public safety and government agencies worldwide. Our patented force multiplying technology empowers law enforcement, mitigates risk and protects communities. Technology solutions include multi-platform GPS tagging, tracking and locating technology (TTL), pursuit management, fleet and asset tracking and web based command, control solutions. The company has become a resource for agencies in over 40 states as well as internationally. StarChase is a privately held company based in Virginia Beach, VA. Learn more by visiting www.starchase.com or follow the company on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Lauren Cohan is only set to appear in six episodes as well. Source: Collider The Walking Dead hasn't been doing too hot lately as a property. The series is seeing near-record low ratings. Chandler Riggs was killed off to everyone's surprise. Lauren Cohan had a public contract dispute, which will see her only appearing in six of the eight episodes of the first half of season nine. Then there's Andrew Lincoln. The actor who has been with the show since its launch will only be in six episodes as well, with Lincoln confirming season nine will be his last. It's rumored that AMC has offered substantial compensation to Norman Reedus to both stay with the series and to take over the leading role. Season nine of The Walking Dead is likely to air this October. TORONTO, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Beneplan Employee Benefits Co-operative Inc. has issued patronage dividends in the sum of $2.3 million to its participating member-owners. Member-owners are employers who manage benefit plan funds for small & medium Canadian employers. This is the largest patronage dividend, which represents the co-operatives growth in 2017. The dividends represent any surplus premium left over after employee health benefit claims are paid, after administrative expenses. The Beneplan Co-operative pays this surplus back to its member-owners (who are also its policyholders) in proportion with each owners actual claims experience in 2017. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the group benefits industry, where insurers or third-party administrators actually keep the profit left over in the plan, says Yafa Sakkejha, General Manager of Beneplan Inc, the management firm administering the co-operative. Thats why were seeing a rapid uptake in growth as a result of dividends being delivered every year since our co-ops inception. Of patronage dividends issued, the average small business received a $9,943 return of premium on an average annual premium of $72,788. The groups dividends represented an average of an 11% return of premium. On average, 4 out of 5 employers received a dividend due to low claims history, where 1 out of 5 did not receive a dividend but was not charged for the deficit that their group incurred in the pool. Beneplan is noticing a trend in Canadians joining co-operatives and other mutual-insurance models in an effort to curb pricing and find bespoke service not found at larger insurers. About Beneplan Beneplan Inc is the administrator of the Beneplan Employee Benefits Co-operative Inc, a buying group formed in 2000 to help Canadian employers reduce costs on employee benefits, without cutting coverage. Since 2000, Beneplan has paid $14 million in dividends to its small business members who choose fully-insured plans and are too small to self-insure their corporate benefits. Beneplan also offers complimentary services, such as drug advocacy, HR advice and policy templates, nutritionist visits, paramedical fraud solutions, mental health prevention strategies, and universal coverage for pharmacogenetic testing. www.beneplan.ca Media contact: Sufyan Shaikh sufyan@beneplan.ca CARLSBAD, Calif., May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Via OTC PR Wire -- V Group, Inc., (OTC:VGID) along with the Company's previous incubation partner, Fernhill Beverage, Inc. (OTC:FHBC ) is excited to update current shareholders and potential shareholders to the record breaking start of Summer 2018. V Group Inc's current incubation partner, Leaf of Faith, is entering the summer months in a full sprint. On Memorial Day weekend, Leaf of Faith attended the "Great Socal Smoke Out" in San Bernardino, Ca. The event was hosted by Michael Boris (AKA Medi-Mike) and was attended by more than 30,000 participants. Leaf of Faith featured The Company's flavored CBD Beverage, Patience CBD. Demand for the unique CBD Beverage was outstanding. The Company entered the weekend event anticipating sales of between 3,000 and 4,000 bottles at a sale price of $2.50 per bottle. Demand was so exceptional that The Company developed orders totaling nearly 30,000 bottles at an average sale price of $3.00 per unit. The Company generated nearly $90,000.00 in revenue over the event as well as opening more retail accounts with attendees that own and operate retail locations. Many customers enjoyed the product so much they requested to purchase the product by the case. Leaf of Faith will also be prominently featured at Hempcon 2018. Hempcon is the largest Business Expo in the Hemp industry. The event will be located in Phoenix and will be taking place between June 15 to June 17. Leaf of Faith has secured 2 booths in which to display and sell its Patience CBD drinks. The event will be attended by business professionals as well as consumers. Fernhill Beverage Inc. (OTC:FHBC), is starting the summer of 2018 on a record pace. May 2018 has proven to be very fruitful for Fernhill's RK Super Kid's Drink. During the month of May, Fernhill sold and shipped over 62,000 12-pack cases to The Company's distribution partners totaling revenues in excess of $340,000.00. "Filling our 7-11 commitment has a lot to do with the outstanding revenue but what pleases us more is the fantastic job our distributors are doing getting the product in thousands of other stores outside the 7-11 family of locations," states Larry Twombly, Chairman; Fernhill Beverage, Inc. Fernhill Beverage also continues to grow its distribution base. In May, Fernhill Beverage signed a distribution agreement with Haralambos Distributing Co. in Los Angeles, Ca. Mr. Twombly states: "We are very excited to be working with the great team at Haralambos. They are among the very best at what they do. We have admired them and have openly solicited them as a distribution partner for years. They currently sell millions of cases of very popular products such as Snapple per month. We think RK Super will compliment their outstanding portfolio of brands." Both V Group, Inc. and Fernhill Beverage, Inc. will be conducting an investor Conference Call hosted by Lawrence Twombly on Thursday, May 31, 2018. The call will begin at 5:00 PM West Coast Time (8:00 PM East Coast Time). The Conference Call will address the workings of both companies as well as the status of the Leaf of Faith "spin-off". We invite all interested parties to join the call. There will be time to ask the Chairman questions after he completes the agenda. Both V Group Inc and Fernhill Beverage Inc. would like to thank their distribution partners, vendors, customers and share holders for assisting the companies and allowing all parties to succeed. "We know this is a team effort. We can't be successful without the assistance of many," Larry Twombly says. Source: V Group, Inc. Web Sight: www.anddrinks.com Phone: (760) 613-8828 PAOLI, Pa. and LOS ALTOS HILLS, Calif., May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sedor Pharmaceuticals, LLC (Sedor) and Los Altos Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Los Altos) announce that Sedor has granted Los Altos an exclusive license for Captisol-enabled (CE) Meloxicam for the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Los Altos, located in Los Altos Hills, CA, has received exclusive development, manufacturing and commercialization rights for the Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau and will collaborate with Sedor on the development of CE-Meloxicam. Sedor is currently in development with IM/IV CE-Meloxicam for the treatment of acute post-surgery, trauma and cancer pain. If approved, IM/IV CE-Meloxicam would offer an alternative to opioids and their associated side effects. Barry Frankel, Chief Business Officer and co-founder of Sedor, commented, Following the earlier licensing of our lead development product, CE-Fosphenytoin for the treatment of status epilepticus, in the Chinese market, we are delighted to report this expansion of our licensing presence in this major territory with our second differentiated product, CE-Meloxicam. These new formulations of medicines will provide health care providers effective solutions to unmet needs of patients that improve their quality of life and clinical outcomes. We are looking forward to advancing these programs for the Peoples Republic of China. We are very pleased to be partnering with Sedor for this Captisol-enabled program. Sedor executives have three decades of expertise with biologics and pharmaceuticals, and a track record of success in bringing development-stage programs through to commercialization to benefit patients and providers, said Zhijian Xi, Founder and CEO of Los Altos. We look forward to bringing CE-Meloxicam to the Greater China market and offering advantages to hospitalized patients. About Sedor Pharmaceuticals, LLC Sedor Pharmaceuticals, LLC identifies and acquires acute care hospital pharmaceutical assets and applies its teams deep development, operational, manufacturing and commercialization expertise to create global clinical and economic value. The company is led by John Sedor as Chairman and an experienced team of pharmaceutical professionals with a proven track record building pharmaceutical companies and shareholder value. The companys lead program, CE-Fosphenytoin, has been filed with the FDA for the treatment of status epilepticus offering, if approved, the potential to shorten the seizure and improve outcomes. The companys second program, CE-Meloxicam, is preparing for Phase I development for the treatment of acute post-surgical pain and, if approved, offers the potential to replace or delay the use of IM/IV opioids. Both products were licensed from Ligand Pharmaceuticals. CE-Fosphenytoin is available for licensing in North America, Europe, and other territories except for the Peoples Republic of China, where it has already been successfully licensed. Sedor is also in the process of seeking additional financing for pipeline development. About Los Altos Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Los Altos Pharmaceuticals, Inc. specializes in bringing the best pharmaceutical products to the Chinese market, and in making drugs developed in China available to the world. Los Altoss goal is to build a leading pharmaceutical company in China that competes on the world stage. With the licensing of CE-Meloxicam to the Greater China market, we seek to bring the best standard of care of pain medication to China and benefit the largest surgical population in the world. Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties and reflect the parties judgment as of the date of this release. Words such as plans, believes, expects, anticipates, and will, and similar expressions, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding: growth in the number of products in Sedors portfolio, the research and development expenditures of Sedors partners, including Sedors and Los Altoss future revenues and other projected financial measures, and the timing and results of Sedors clinical trials and clinical trials to be conducted by Sedors partners, including Los Altos. Actual events or results may differ from Sedors expectations. For example, Sedor and its partners, including Los Altos, may not be able to timely or successfully advance any product(s) in its internal or partnered pipeline. In addition, there can be no assurance that results of any clinical study will be timely, favorable or confirmed by later studies, that products under development by Sedor or its partners will receive regulatory approval, that there will be a market for the product(s) if successfully developed and approved, or that Sedors partners will not terminate any of its agreements or development or commercialization of any of its products. Also, Sedor and its partners, including Los Altos, may experience delays in the commencement, enrollment, completion or analysis of clinical testing for its product candidates, or significant issues regarding the adequacy of its clinical trial designs or the execution of its clinical trials, which could result in increased costs and delays, or limit the ability to obtain regulatory approval. Further, unexpected adverse side effects or inadequate therapeutic efficacy of Sedors or its partners product(s) could delay or prevent regulatory approval or commercialization. This caution is made under the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Contacts For Business Development Inquiries, please contact Geller Biopharm Inc. Avi Holchendler, MD avi@gellerbp.com 212-315-0600 For General Inquiries, please contact Sedor Pharmaceuticals, LLC Christy Troiano, 610-455-2180 ctroiano@sedorpharmaceuticals.com or Los Altos Pharmaceuticals, Incorporated Zhijian Xi, 650-353-6800 zhijianxi100@qq.com Montreal, CA (H4T1V6) Today Cloudy with occasional light rain. High 20C. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.. Tonight Steady light rain in the evening. Showers continuing late. Low near 16C. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 90%. WASHINGTON, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SETDA, the principal membership association of the U.S. state and territorial educational technology leaders, today announced the launch of Navigating the Digital Shift 2018: Broadening Student Learning Opportunities. As states and districts continue to shift to implement digital instructional materials, the report highlights how state policies and guidance are supporting the transformation, specifically the policies and processes around the selection, curation, accessibility, procurement and funding of digital instructional materials. With the continued shift to digital instructional materials, state leaders embrace the potential for personalized learning for all students, stated Tracy Weeks, Executive Director, SETDA. In the report, SETDA shares how states are balancing this shift considering equity of access, accessibility for all students, interoperability, and student data and privacy issues." "For Michigan to become a Top 10 education state in 10 years, digital instructional materials, including openly licensed educational resources (OER), are the key to ensuring equitable access to relevant, up-to-date curriculum resources. Districts, Intermediate School Districts (ISDs), strategic partners and state leadership are essential components of this shift. The guidance in the report helps Michigan and the state's strategic partners better implement digital instructional materials." Venessa A. Keesler, Ph.D., Deputy Superintendent, Division of Educator, Student, and School Supports, Michigan Department of Education. Shifting to digital materials is a process and requires state leadership in all aspects including the vetting and procurement process. Texas school districts rely on the state's leadership to assist them in selecting high-quality instructional materials. This report not only highlights individual states but also examples of digital learning in action via school and district exemplars. Lori Gracey, Executive Director, TCEA. SETDAs research reveals that federal and state policies increasingly support the shift to digital. States are providing guidance, definitions and vetting policies and practices for digital materials to help ensure that digital materials are available to learners via devices anywhere, anytime. Join the release webinar on May 30 at 4pm ET. Registration is available at https://home.edweb.net/webinar/digitalcontent20180530/ The Full Report and Document will be available on SETDAs website. Complementing this paper is the updated Digital Instructional Materials Acquisition Policies for States (DMAPS) online portal, which provides full profiles for each states instructional materials policies and practices and an interactive map to view national trends. The DMAPS site is available here: http://www-setda-org.www.setda.org. In addition, SETDA hosts the Essential Elements for Digital Content, a free online community to encourage dialogue about the shift to digital including the vetting process, accessibility, professional learning, OER, procurement, implementation and infrastructure. About SETDA Founded in 2001, the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) is the principal non-profit membership association representing U.S. state and territorial educational technology leaders. Our mission is to build and increase the capacity of state and national leaders to improve education through technology policy and practice. For more information, please visit: setda.org. CONTACT Tracy S. Weeks, Ph.D. Executive Director SETDA 202-715-6636 x700 tweeks@setda.org remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. LOS ANGELES, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- City National Bank, Americas Premier Private and Business Bank, announced today that it has pledged $100,000 for the historic restoration project for Bridalveil Fall, a California icon and one of the most important landmarks in Yosemite National Park. City Nationals commitment to the Bridalveil Fall restoration project will help enhance the visitor experience and protect the surrounding habitat. Plunging 620 feet down a granite cliff, Bridalveil Fall is one of the most iconic waterfalls in the Yosemite Valley. More than 400,000 visitors stop to marvel each year, and for many it is their first stop when they get to Yosemite National Park. While many of the Valleys waterfalls are seasonal, Bridalveil Fall flows throughout the year. Current trail conditions and parking facilities cannot accommodate the popularity of Bridalveil Fall, and overgrown vegetation has obstructed the waterfalls viewpoint. To fix this problem, the restoration of Bridalveil Fall will enhance the visitor experience with redesigned parking and upgraded pathways and restrooms. The project, which will include a public process and shared vision for the area, will also reclaim the natural beauty and habitats as well as the rustic heritage of the area. We are so pleased to support these important preservation efforts of Yosemite Conservancy and the National Park Service, said Scott Witter, executive vice president of personal and business banking at City National, which has supported the Yosemite Conservancy for more than a decade. Visitors to Bridalveil Fall deserve a world class experience, and this restoration project will ensure that future generations can enjoy the beauty and splendor of this incredible Yosemite icon. We are eternally grateful for the years of support that City National Bank has provided Yosemite and the Conservancy, said Bob Bennitt, Yosemite Conservancy Board Chair. The banks contribution to the restoration of Bridalveil Fall is heartwarming and very generous. Heres a video with more: https://www.yosemiteconservancy.org/restoration-bridalveil-fall About City National Bank With $48.8 billion in assets, City National Bank provides banking, investment and trust services through 71 offices, including 19 full-service regional centers, in Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, Nevada, New York City, Nashville, Atlanta, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. In addition, the company and its investment affiliates manage or administer $64.9 billion in client investment assets. City National is a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), one of North Americas leading diversified financial services companies. RBC serves more than 16 million personal, business, public sector and institutional clients through offices in Canada, the United States and 34 other countries. For more information about City National, visit the companys website at cnb.com. About Yosemite Conservancy Yosemite Conservancy inspires people to support projects and programs that preserve Yosemite National Park and enrich the visitor experience. Thanks to generous donors, the Conservancy has provided $119 million in grants to the park to restore trails and habitat, protect wildlife, provide educational programs, and more. The Conservancys guided adventures, volunteer opportunities, wilderness services and bookstores help visitors of all ages connect with Yosemite. Learn more: yosemiteconservancy.org or 415-434-1782. Media Contact: Debora Vrana, City National Bank, 213-673-7631 Debora.Vrana@cnb.com There is concern in Jerusalem over the possible sale of US-manufactured state-of-the-art F35 fighter planes to Turkey. The matter is being discussed and clearly, from Israels perspective, it would prefer to remain the only country in the region with the advanced fighter planes. At present, Israel remains the only nation in the world, including the United States, that has used the planes in combat in recent aerial strikes against terrorist objectives in Syria. At the very least, Israel expects the United States to withhold upgrade capabilities as part of the conditions of the sale, which includes the performance-enhancing software used by Israel. If the US agrees to this, at the very least, it will permit Israel to maintain its edge over neighboring Arab nations. According to a Haaretz report, sources in Washington are confirming there is discussion of such a sale. In line with its agreement with the United States, Israel in July 2018 is scheduled to receive the performance-enhancing software package. Should this same package be approved for Turkey, it would significantly change the realities in the region for Israel as Turkey of late has become a hostile nation despite having once enjoyed good relations, including joint military exercises. The report adds there is some opposition to the sale to Turkey in the US congress, with opponents pointing to Turkeys behavior of late. Senator James Lankford (Rep. Oklahoma) is a leading voice in opposition to the sale bases on current events. Lankford added that the once NATO ally has strayed, and today, holds and American citizen as a bargaining chip. The senator speaks on an ongoing transition taking place in Turkey, citing the countrys shift in policies vis-a-vis Israel and drawing closer in its policy statement to a Muslim fundamentalist nation. An AIPAC spokesman is quoted anonymously explaining the organization is not talking a position on the matter at this time. (YWN Israel Desk Jerusalem) The womanwho objected to a Chabad chossid putting tefilin on someone in Ben-Gurion Airport a few days ago, has been identified as a well-known Israeli professor and lecturer. According to a Channel 20 News report, the woman is Professor Penina Peri, wife of Yoram Peri, a professor of sociology and a former president of the New Israel Fund from 1999-2001. The video went viral on social media. Arutz-7s Ben Zeigdon contacted Yoram Peri, who explained he was unaware of the incident. However, he did confirm his wife left Israel. Peri also served as a senior lecturer in Sapir College and Levinsky College. She is said to be an expert on multi-cultural theories and is known to have published books such as Education in a Multicultural Society: Pluralism and Meeting Points between Cultural Rifts. The Peri family has been living in Maryland for the past few years, and this is why she was flying after the incident captured on video. Today, she heads the Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland. Head of the Chabad House in Pisgat Zeev, the man in the center of the storm, Rav Meir Herzl, told Channel 20 that he was a bit early at the airport and decided to use the time to merit other Yidden with putting on tefilin. He approached persons and asked them if they wished to put on tefilin. One responded, gladly. Rav Herzl added, Suddenly, a woman approached us and began screaming and insisting we leave the area and not daven in proximity to her. I did not pay attention to her. I continued putting tefilin on the man, who asked the woman to permit him to daven in quiet for a few minutes, but she would not hear of it. She shouted as seen in the video. When asked how he kept his cool, Rabbi Herzl explained I did not see cause to get into it with her and respond. This is how we carry out Mivtzaim, as the Rebbe instructed us, to engage in and see the light exclusively, to bring additional light into the world and this blocks out the darkness on its own. (YWN Israel Desk Jerusalem) Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had plenty to say just weeks ago as Israel fought to protect its borders from Gaza terrorists seeking to infiltrate. As reported on YWN, Hamas actually admitted that 50 of the 62 Palestinians killed on that day of violence were actually its members, many of whom were paid to engage in acts of terror against of Israel. But that didt sway Sanders, who is Jewish and lived on an Israeli Kibbutz in 1963. As reported on YWN, in an interview with Deconstructed, Sanders said: Instead of applauding Israel for its actions, Israel should be condemned. Israel has a right to security, but shooting unarmed protesters is not what it is about. Sanders also tweeted Hamas violence does not justify Israel firing on unarmed protesters. However, the self-appointed defender of the innocent and expert on Middle East conflicts has chosen to remain silent as thousands of innocent Israelis were targeted by more than 100 rockets fired by Hamas terrorists from Gaza. As reported on YWN, one of the rockets landed in front of a kindergarten, just minutes before the children were due to arrive. Dozens of rockets were fired late at night, forcing thousands of Israelis to spend the night in protective shelters. Several rockets landed in peoples front yards, just feet from a catastrophe RL. Do the lives of innocent Israelis matter less than those of Palestinians engaged in acts of violence? Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus is reporting from the Israeli kindergarten that was hit by several mortars earlier this morning. The kindergarten is located in a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip pic.twitter.com/vZBa0y0UJm IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) May 29, 2018 Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus is reporting from a civilian home that was hit by a rocket earlier this morning pic.twitter.com/3HsEyAO9ie IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) May 30, 2018 This illustration depicts the rockets and mortars that terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip fired at Israeli civilians pic.twitter.com/kZvxyq5NkW IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) May 30, 2018 (Robert Hirsch Cedarhurst, NY) NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN. This post has been edited by YWN editors to appear better in publication. DO YOU HAVE AN OPINION YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE POSTED ON YWN? SEND IT TO US FOR REVIEW. (YWN World Headquarters NYC) English Dutch Regulated Information 30 May 2018 at 20.00 CEST Nyrstar NV ("Nyrstar" or the "Company") announces that it has refinanced the 3 year zinc metal prepay that was originally entered into in December 2015 with a remaining balance of USD 61.7 million with a new zinc metal prepay for USD 125 million. The net cash benefit for Nyrstar from the new zinc prepay agreement is approximately USD 63 million. As per the previous agreement, the prepay agreement was arranged by Deutsche Bank and is linked to the physical delivery of refined zinc metal to Trafigura under the terms of a 3-year offtake agreement. The zinc metal prepay has an amortising structure with a 3-year tenure and a 12 month grace period following which the facility will be repaid in equal monthly instalments over a period of two years concluding in May 2021. The interest cost for the prepay funding is LIBOR plus 425 basis points versus the previous agreement that was at LIBOR plus 450 basis points. About Nyrstar Nyrstar is a global multi-metals business, with a market leading position in zinc and lead, and growing positions in other base and precious metals, which are essential resources that are fuelling the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation of our changing world. Nyrstar has mining, smelting and other operations located in Europe, the Americas and Australia and employs approximately 4,100 people. Nyrstar is incorporated in Belgium and has its corporate office in Switzerland. Nyrstar is listed on Euronext Brussels under the symbol NYR. For further information please visit the Nyrstar website: www.nyrstar.com. For further information contact: Anthony Simms - Head of Investor Relations T: +41 44 745 8157 M: +41 79 722 2152 anthony.simms@nyrstar.com Franziska Morroni - Head of Communications T: +41 44 745 8295 M: +41 79 719 2342 franziska.morroni@nyrstar.com The full press release can be downloaded from the following link: Stock markets are volatile on Wednesday in a continuation of the fretting over whether political strife in Italy will develop into a financial crisis for the whole eurozone. In companies news, Royal Bank of Scotland has announced that finance chief Ewen Stevenson has resigned from his role to take up a post elsewhere. Budget retailer B&M saw its annual profits rise by 25.4 per cent to 229.3million, as cash-strapped consumers turned to the chain for everyday essentials. In the year ending 31 March, the group's revenues increased by 22.4 per cent to 3billion. The company's billionaire boss, Simon Arora, said the group was performing well because it is 'highly relevant for the current difficult economic environment.' Growing fast: Budget retailer B&M saw its annual profits rise by 25.4 per cent to 229.3million He added: 'The business is well placed for continued profitable, long-term growth. In a retail sector beset by structural challenges B&M's unique, disruptive model stands out as a success story.' B&M, which is listed on the FTSE 250 index, has seen its share price rise 1.23 per cent or 4.60p to 377.60p. In the first quarter of its current financial year, B&M said its like-for-like sales had risen by 3.1 per cent. During the last year, B&M opened 48 stores across the UK and closed eight. It plans to open a further 45 over the next year. In total, B&M now boasts 576 stores and is growing rapidly in the home counties and further afield in Europe. In its latest results, B&M posted a chart purporting to show its revenue growth against its competitors Openings: During the last year, B&M opened 48 stores across the UK and closed eight Last year, B&M, which is chaired by former Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy, spent 152million to acquire Heron Food Group, which B&M claimed had boosted its annual figures. B&M said shoppers spend an average of 13.85 at its stores and live around a 10 minute drive away from their shop. The group said: 'We can have multiple stores only 10 minutes apart, and still generate healthy returns. 'Clustering stores has benefits for logistics, area management and brand recognition.' The group has ploughed 44million into developing a new 1million sq ft warehouse in Bedford. Amisha Chohan, an equity analyst at Quilter Cheviot, said: 'Today's prelims are in line with expectations and the confident outlook should reassure the market. 'The strategy remains intact a structurally well positioned discounter, with a strong UK and international store roll-out story and the valuation remains attractive, with a 2.2% dividend yield. 'B&M is structurally well-positioned, as real disposable income in the UK continues to decline. With a best in class management team, we believe B&M is an impressive business, as one of the market leaders in a structurally growing market. It has a strong track record with precedents for future growth potential.' A profit warning wiped more than 151million off the value of Photo-Me. The British firm, which operates photo kiosks and ID card booths, has been hit by flagging demand for its services in Japan. There has been a boom in photo booths in Japan since its government rolled out an ID card scheme two years ago, which has put pressure on commissions. But the scheme is not compulsory and has not gained the momentum photo booth operators initially anticipated, the company said in an update. As a result Photo-Me has been forced to restructure its Japanese business, which will hit profits. The firm says that it will make a pre-tax profit of around 44million in the year to April 30, below analysts expectations. Photo-Me has been forced to restructure its Japanese business, which will hit profits. The firm says that it will make a pre-tax profit of around 44m in the year to April 30 Shares nosedived 26.6 per cent, or 40.2p, to 111.2p. The FTSE 100 rallied after Tuesdays global sell-off, which was prompted by political turmoil in Italy and Spain. The blue-chip index rose 0.75 per cent, or 56.93 points, to 7689.57, while the FTSE 250 was up by 0.37 per cent,or 75.91 points, at 20,822.67p. Bodycote raced to the top of the FTSE 250 after the heat treatment specialist revealed better-than-expected revenue for the first four months of the year. It reported sales of 243million in the four months to April 30, up 7 per cent on the year before. Shares motored 7 per cent, or 64.5p, higher to 989.5p. JP Morgan downgraded Dunelm to neutral following the soft-furnishing retailers shock profit warning last week. Stock Watch - Falcon Media House Falcon Media House shares crashed after it announced plans to cancel its listing on Londons stock exchange. The digital media group, which specialises in streaming video, says its listing is stopping it from raising cash it desperately needs to invest in its technology. In a statement, it said: The continued listing of the shares incurs significant cost while presenting an obstacle to potential sources of funding. Shares tanked 44.4 per cent or 1.2p to 1.5p. In a note to investors, JPM said: We believe that the UK consumer environment is uncertain and that big ticket spending in particular remains weak. Dunelm shares edged 0.4 per cent, or 2p, lower to 543p. Go-Ahead shares fell after analysts at Liberum downgraded the owner of Southeastern railway to hold. The broker said that disruption at its GTR rail franchise following recent timetable changes mean caution is warranted. Shares slid 5.3 per cent, or 98p, to 1741p. Phoenix Group shares rose 1.5 per cent, or 11.5p, to 783.5p after it raised 950million from shareholders to pay for the insurance arm of Standard Life Aberdeen. Shares in Pressure Technologies dived after the specialist engineering firm issued a profit warning. It says full-year results are likely to fall substantially below market expectations as it struggles to sign up new clients to its alternative energy division. Its shares plunged 22.6 per cent, or 42p, to 144p. Clontarf Energy painted a bleak picture for small oil companies as it posted a 2.8million loss for 2017. In a gloomy update, it said: The shares of listed oil exploration companies are generally friendless. Their share prices have almost all fallen and remain in, many cases, more than 90 per cent below their peak. It is virtually impossible to raise serious money. However, it added that the rising price of oil means there are huge returns on offer to successful explorers. Shares plummeted 29.4 per cent, or 0.1p, to 0.24p. The board of Fishing Republic insisted turnaround plans were under way as the fishing supplies firm swung to a 2.3million loss in 2017 from a 402,000 profit the year before. Shares dropped 16.7 per cent or 2.05p to 10.2p. Keywords Studios has bought the London-based creative games agency Fire Without Smoke in a deal worth up to 5.2million. Fire Without Smoke makes video game trailers and marketing art for major publishers such as Sony, Riot Games, Sega, Capcom, and Ubisoft. Analysts at Peel Hunt raised Aim-listed Keywords target price by 50p to 1900p on the back of the announcement. Keywords edged 1.1 per cent, or 18p, lower to 1700p. British supercar maker McLaren has been handed the keys to its new 50million factory in Yorkshire. The plant, built on the site of an old coal mine, will manufacture the carbon fibre tubs or chassis for its cars, such as the 570S. The firm is shifting manufacturing of this vital component from Austria to Sheffield, home of the University of Sheffields advanced manufacturing research centre which helps develop McLaren cars. Lightweight: The new McLaren plant, built on the site of an old Sheffield coal mine, will manufacture the carbon fibre tubs or chassis for its cars More than 200 highly skilled jobs will be created by the opening of the McLaren Composites Technology Centre. The finished tubs will be sent to the main factory in Woking, Surrey, where vehicles have been hand assembled since 2011. The building will be fitted out over the next few months, and new equipment will be installed. This will include a giant press that will be imported from Germany this summer. The goal is that by 2020 the factory will churn out around 3,000 tubs every year. McLaren hopes the new factory will give it more control over the manufacturing process, and more insulation from tariffs if they are introduced as and when Britain leaves the EUs customs union. Once the factory is up and running it will mean almost 60 per cent, by value, of McLarens cars will be made in England, up from around half. This means it imports fewer parts, making it less vulnerable to tariffs. Furious shareholders attacked branch closures at bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland as its finance chief quit. RBS was criticised by investors at its annual meeting for axing more than 420 branches this year alone a move campaigners claim is ripping the heart out of isolated towns and villages. It came as finance director Ewen Stevenson stands down to take up another job elsewhere. RBS was attacked by investors at its annual meeting for axing more than 420 branches this year alone - a move which critics claims is ripping the heart out of isolated towns and villages The 52-year-old has been at RBS for four years and will not leave until a successor has been found. Seen as a possible successor to boss Ross McEwan, Stevenson would not say where he is going but it is thought to be another top role at a big bank. Share Sale Warning Falling stock markets across Europe could delay a long-awaited sale of taxpayers stake in the Royal Bank of Scotland, bosses have warned. Finance director Ewen Stevenson said that now is not the best time for a sale of the states 70.5 per cent holding. Markets have been struck by political turmoil in Italy, with bank shares particularly under pressure due to fears of a fresh crisis in the eurozone. Stevenson said: I would be surprised if now is an optimum time to sell stocks. The Government hopes to sell 15billion of shares by 2023, around two-thirds of its stake. However, it is facing a near-26.2billion loss as the lenders shares are now well below the average 502p price paid. It came as shareholders blasted closures. RBS has shut more, more than 40 per cent of its branches 1,000 in the past decade. Investor James Caldwell, an accountant, told the meeting in Edinburgh he had encouraged clients to switch to RBS after their nearby Clydesdale and Lloyds branches shut. But RBS then axed its own final outlet in his part of rural Scotland. Theres a lack of consideration on behalf of the bank when it doesnt engage with customers and staff regarding potential closures, he said. Shareholder Mary Alexander said: Its not clear that RBS fully appreciates the damage closures will do to those communities and businesses which rely on branches. In Scotland, RBS has pledged to reconsider plans to shut ten branches after pressure from MPs, and vowed not to announce any new Scottish closures. But McEwan insisted that there could be no change of course overall at RBS, which is still 70.5 per cent-owned by the state. It will this year axe more than 420 branches across the UK, around a third of its remaining network, leaving 850. RBS claims customers are flocking to the internet, abandoning branches. But campaigners argue the lender is driving users online by cutting faster than necessary and spending millions of pounds promoting its internet services. McEwan said: We realise this is difficult for our customers, it is difficult for our colleagues and for the communities who have grown up with these branches. But we must respond to changing customer trends. Trade union Unite protested outside, with Scottish secretary Pat Rafferty saying: Communities are built around things like banks, and when you start taking these fundamental parts of the community away then the communities themselves are taken away. RBS shares fell 1.4 per cent, or 3.9p, to 276.1p yesterday. Some Trent 1000 engines powering Boeing 787s started deteriorating Rolls-Royce is ramping up efforts to fix aircraft engines, to stave off growing frustration from airlines. It has trebled the amount of engines it can fix at any one time to 20 and is racing to complete checks on hundreds of planes around the world ahead of a June 9 deadline. The engineer is under huge pressure after some Trent 1000 engines powering Boeing 787s started deteriorating. Some airlines changed routes to keep planes closer to airports, while around 34 are on the ground waiting to be fixed. Around 200 engineers have been redeployed to work on the problems, which could cost Rolls 750million. A power struggle has broken out among top UK fund managers in a row over fees A major power struggle has broken out among top UK fund managers in a row over fees. Invesco Perpetual is trying to oust the chairman and another board member at Invesco Perpetual Enhanced Income trust. It ran the trust for nearly 20 years but has stepped down despite having allegedly agreed in April that the trust could pay lower fees. Invesco which manages around 107billion, owns 16 per cent of the trust, and wants a general meeting to boot out the trust chair Donald Adamson and management engagement committee chair Richard Williams. But Adamson, who is set to step down in any case, demanded it withdraw calls for change. He said: 'I think its out of touch with modern requirements of transparent, open governance.' The trust has paid Invesco more than 12million in fees between 2007 and 2017. It said Invesco agreed in April to reduce fee rates of 0.9per cent of net asset value to 0.77per cent. Thousands of Currys PC World customers have complained about sneaky monthly payments leaving their bank accounts. Customers say they have been charged between 1.99 and 22 a month for product support after buying a TV or computer. This is insurance that promises to repair or replace a faulty item. But some say they turned down the offer of cover - or were never told about it. Thousands of Currys PC World customers have complained about sneaky monthly payments leaving their bank accounts One says he was told the insurance was free when he bought a 400 laptop. But it, in fact, cost 5.99 a month after an introductory period. In some cases, these fees have gone unnoticed for years, costing one customer almost 1,500. Another says Currys has continued to take money even after they asked for the cover to be cancelled. Almost 2,300 complaints have now been posted on the consumer website aspokesmansaid.com. Currys PC World was forced to apologise in March after customers said they had been pressured into paying 40 more than the ticket price for laptops. Meanwhile, last year, Money Mail found customers were refused refunds for damaged goods unless they were returned within 48 hours. A spokesman says: We are disappointed by these complaints and are taking them seriously. Our colleagues are trained to provide accurate and useful information about Care Plan. Has Currys taken money out of your account for product support without telling you? Write to us at moneymail@dailymail.co.uk or Money Mail, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mr. Gordon Driedger, P.Eng, President and COO of Gen III Oil Corp. (Gen III or the Company) (TSX-V:GIII) is pleased to announce the selection of Koch Modular Process Systems, LLC, ("Koch Modular") as the Companys preferred Engineering, Procurement and Fabrication subcontractor for the Performance Guaranteed Stage 2 Extraction and Distillation Process System. Koch Modular has agreed to expand their role on the Gen III project team to develop the Process Design Package and enter into a Design Build contract for Stage 2 of the Companys patented 3-stage ReGen re-refining process. Koch Modular will be providing the Company with a fixed price lump sum proposal for the design and fabrication of the Performance-Guaranteed Stage 2 of the Bowden project. In addition to the Stage 2 work, Koch Modular is prepared to assist Gen III with evaluation, leadership and input on the overall (Stage 1 3) process design and process integration. Further, Koch Modular is able to bring valuable experience during the module installation, commissioning and process start-up phases of the project. Company President and COO, Mr. Gordon Driedger stated, We are very pleased to have a company of such a high caliber and valuable subject matter expertise as Koch Modular working more closely with our team. I have had the opportunity to work with Koch Modular during the preliminary phase of design where they have demonstrated their expertise and ability to perform. They have a highly skilled team that brings a wealth of specific industry knowledge to the project team. They were selected after a careful review of shortlisted leading Design-Build proponents. Koch Modular Vice President of Business Development, Mr. Brian Loftus stated, We are extremely pleased to be part of Gen IIIs team working on such an exciting project. We are especially proud to be part of a sustainable project that will be the first of its kind in Alberta. We look forward to working with their talented team of professionals and providing Gen III with a Stage 2 Process Design Package and a Design-Build turnkey contract. Under this Agreement, Koch Modular is available to work more closely with Gen IIIs project team to assist with both design and project delivery services. About Koch Modular Process Systems Koch Modular Process Systems, LLC (Koch Modular) specializes in the process design, detailed engineering and manufacturing of modular reaction and mass transfer systems for the chemical process industry. Headquartered in Paramus, New Jersey, Koch Modulars highly-skilled team combines a unique blend of single-source capabilities that, together, provide a true step-change in process, product and project delivery in the chemical process industry. Koch Modular was established through a joint venture with Koch-Glitsch LP, one of the worlds most prominent suppliers of mass transfer equipment. Koch-Glitschs parent company is Koch Industries, one of the largest privately held corporations in the United States. Koch Modulars construction company partners can be found in strategic areas of the US and Canada in order to best serve our clients world-wide. Koch Modular regularly invests in R&D, both their own, and on behalf of their clients, through a pilot plant facility located in Houston, Texas. About Gen III Oil Corporation Gen III Oil Corporation is an innovative oil processing company with a highly advanced re-refining technology in the industry. The Companys patented ReGen technology process combines proven refining technologies into a proprietary process that is able to extract a higher quantity of high quality base lubricating oils than traditional re-refineries, including greater than 50% Group III production of synthetic grade motor oil in a commercial scale re-refining operation. The Company currently holds 4 patents issued in North America and has several patent applications, patents pending or under review in strategic countries around the world. The Companys first full-scale facility is currently under development in Bowden, Alberta, 100km north of Calgary, with targeted production commencing in Q1 of 2019 (the Project). With a fully executed off-take marketing agreement in hand with Elbow River Marketing Ltd., a subsidiary of Parkland Fuel Corporation, the Company has in place agreements for the sale of all of its finished products when commercial production begins at its Bowden facility. The Bowden facility is being designed to process 2,800 bpd of used motor oil into a range of base stocks and related petroleum products. For more information about the Company, please visit www.geniiioil.com. On Behalf of the Board of Gen III Oil Corporation Gordon Driedger Gordon Driedger President and Chief Operating Officer For further information, contact Gordon Driedger at (604) 806-5275 Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Certain information set forth in this news release may contain forward-looking statements that involve financial projections, substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond the control of the Company. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as plan, continue, expect, project, intend, believe, anticipate, estimate, may, will, potential, proposed and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions may or will occur. These include, but are not limited to, the statements regarding the quantity and quality of the re-refined products that might be produced; the cost of construction of the first ReGen re-refinery; raising sufficient capital to support the construction of the Project; the estimated operating costs for the Project; the market for the finished products; negotiating off-take agreements for those finished products; and the anticipated annual recurring revenue and EBITDA derived from those operations. Actual results may differ materially from the forward-looking information contained herein. Readers are cautioned that the assumptions used in the preparation of such information, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. The Company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable law. Readers are cautioned that the assumptions used in the preparation of such information, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. MBABANE Big platforms for big songs! After making great strides and making it to the number one spot on BBC Xtra Music Charts, being selected as the runway music for the 2018 Mercedes Fashion Week Russia, the highly anticipated Jika video is set to debut on MTV Base tomorrow. The debut will air between 7am and 11 am and repeated again between 4pm and 11pm. The Jika music video is a track by three talented locals, DJ and music producer Tendeness in collaboration with Bholoja and LO. It will be debuted in a programme known as MTV #SpankingNew in their exclusive edition. The video was shot in South Africa, Johannesburg and all the artists in the song were present. Also present in the video is socialite and MC Bianca Coster. This is not the first time for the song to make international strides. Two months ago, it made it to the Mercedes Benz Russia Fashion Week song for the runway session. Also, it was used as a song in the Delush Wine advert. Delush Wine is a winery company in South Africa which sells over 50 types of wines and is internationally recognised. Tendaness management team member Sibusiso Simelane confirmed that the video would debut tomorrow. Simelane said what motivated the video to be shot in Johannesburg was that the story line needed that dense urban city background. MBABANE I have no words which can express my appreciation. Sylvia Bennett said these words when describing all the help she had received from different people, for her and her son Eric Silindane (19), who has a disability. Bennett and her son did not have a place to sleep or food to eat when they were found in the Raleigh Fitkin Memorial (RFM) Hospital premises by a good Samaritan. The woman explained that they survived on handouts from patients who came to RFM. Some of the nurses at the hospital had given her a corner to sleep in at night with her son. After their sad story appeared in this publication, the hospital took her in and the son was admitted, giving them a place to sleep. Another good Samaritan donated E1 500 to her so she could be able to purchase whatever she needed for her and Eric. I am very thankful for everything that has been done for me. God will bless all the people who have helped me and my son, as a way of gratitude for me, she said. Bennett explained that the money she got has helped her as she has to buy her own food as the hospital only provides for her son. MBABANE Employees of Swaziland Beverages (SB) have every reason to smile. Global brewer, AB InBev, which is the parental company of Swaziland Beverages Ltd, has introduced a new parental leave policy for its salaried employees in 52 countries. The new policy will see employees of the different subsidiaries receiving a maximum four months (16 weeks) of time off at full pay. SBs Corporate Affairs Manager Mpumelelo Makhubu confirmed that the companys employees were also accommodated in the newly introduced policy. This policy certainly applies to Swaziland Beverages employees and we have made the announcement to our people, Makhubu said. An overview of the new global parental standard provides that all primary caregivers will receive a minimum of 16 weeks of time off at 100 per cent pay. Secondary caregivers will receive a minimum of two weeks of time off at 100% pay. This applies to both new mothers and fathers. It has been stated that the parental standard was inclusive of all types of families. Caregivers can be either a mother or father with a new child, whether welcomed naturally or through adoption or surrogacy. The policy also includes vitro fertilisation (IVF) leave to support our colleagues going through fertility treatments, reads part of the overview which the subsidiaries have received. As if to prove that AB InBev was determined to ensure that all its employees were well taken care of, the company announced that it had also introduced new return-to-work transition programme, which it said would support its new parents after having a child, whether welcomed naturally or through adoption or surrogacy. MBABANE Free Primary Education (FPE) will not be a far-fetched dream for about 4 600 pupils whose education was in limbo due to the lack of PINs. PIN is an acronym for personal identity number. This is because the Ministries of Education and Training and Home Affairs will, with effect from next week, register the pupils from various schools around the country. According to the Principal Secretary (PS) in the Ministry of Home Affairs, Anthony Masilela, both ministries have decided to visit the schools with the aim to register the pupils and further give them birth certificates. Masilela said through collaboration, the two ministries had already compiled a list of children without PINs and would be registering them from next week. He said they had selected 10 schools per region and would start in Lubombo, followed by Shiselweni, Manzini then end with Hhohho. There was no specific time frame given on the duration of the exercise. The PS said the country was faced with a challenge of children who did not have PINs, meaning that they did not have birth certificates and were not counted in the countrys population register. He stated that a lot had been said on the issue and the ministries criticised for shortcomings, but the problem was solely with those who had not taken the children for registration. It is a childs right to be registered within 60 days after birth, Masilela said. According to Masilela, the Ministry of Education and Training was also at fault by enrolling children without the necessary documentation. However, he said the problem had been identified and a solution was to be provided. Working together with the Ministry of Education and Training, we will be visiting the schools to provide services to children who needed it, said Masilela. According to Masilela, parents were expected to be at the schools on the registration dates to be announced. With married couples, one parent is expected to accompany their child, however, with children born out of wedlock, the mother of the child should accompany them, he said. Masilela said if parents had challenges, a relative from the mothers side could accompany the pupil with all the relevant information about the child. The PS said orphaned children would be accompanied by their guardians. Acting PS in the Ministry of Education and Training Dr Sibongile Mtshali said schools were frustrated by the issue of pupils who had no PINs. Mtshali commended the partnership with the Ministry of Home Affairs on the registration of PINs, following concerns on the issue. She said there were instances where PINs were needed, including school trips, where pupils needed to secure travel documents. Mtshali said it was an obligation for Grade VII pupils to have a PIN as it was required when sitting for the Swaziland Primary Certificate (SPC) Examinations. She said they had requested regional education officers (REOs) to assist in working with the schools in their regions during the registrations. According to Mtshali, REOs would be working with the schools head teachers on the specific dates. Swaziland Principals Association (SWAPA) President Welcome Mhlanga said they welcomed the initiative by the two ministries. However, he said they would have been happier if the ministries visited the schools at the beginning of the school term when they realised there was a challenge. By this time, all schools would have received the funds and operating smoothly but instead, they have to wait a little longer for the process until the funds are released, Mhlanga said. He said schools faced challenges when operating without the requisite resources and the difficulties would persist as money made a school function. The Kingdom of Eswatini is ranked eighth among the countries of the world with the highest murder rates. This is according to international homicide rate statistics made by the United Nations office on Drugs and Crime. It is calculated based on the number of murders per 100 000 people. In the region, we are worse than South Africa (10th) and only one better than Lesotho (7th). However, recent killings around the country suggest that we may soon surpass the murder capital of the world, Honduras, if we dont curb this spree. Not a second day seems to go by without a citizen killing another. The spike in killings is partly attributed to rituals propagated by the naive thinking that human body parts provide a lottery winning ticket at the national elections. This is disgraceful, to say the least, for a country celebrating 50 years of independence but still stuck in archaic witchcraft beliefs. The law and law enforcement agencies are evidently failing to stop these killings, despite security consuming the second highest allocation in the national budget. For what? This should raise the red flags to the populace that unless we begin to vote with integrity for people of good moral standing in our society, we will soon die like flies. The worst we could ever do for our own safety is to place murderers and thugs in our Parliament who have no value for a human being. We need MPs who value the life of our women and children; the type that would have long seen to it that the Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Bill becomes law. WASHINGTON, D.C., May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM), the international advocacy organization for the cell and gene therapy and broader regenerative medicine sector, announced it will hold its annual Cell & Gene Meeting on the Mesa this year on October 3-5, 2018 in La Jolla, California. This years event is expected to attract more than 1,000 attendees, including senior executives from leading cell therapy, gene therapy and tissue engineering companies worldwide, large pharma and biotech, institutional investors, academic research institutions, patient foundations and disease philanthropies, life science media and more. This meeting provides a valuable chance for representatives and stakeholders from across the sector to convene and discuss opportunities for collaboration, innovation and the next steps forward, said Janet Lambert, CEO of ARM. Organized by ARM and the UC San Diego Health Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center, this three-day conference features two distinct parts: the programs two-day Partnering Forum and a full-day Scientific Symposium. More than 750 participants are expected to attend the events 8th annual Partnering Forum on October 3-4, featuring industry executives leading in-depth, interactive panels and workshops to discuss critical commercial, scientific, regulatory and reimbursement issues facing the sector. More than 70 prominent publicly traded and emerging private companies will highlight their clinical and commercial progress to interested partners and investors. In addition, more than 1,500 meetings will be scheduled using an online system to connect attendees. This is the largest partnering meeting organized specifically for the cell and gene therapy and regenerative medicine industry, providing the opportunity for participants to establish key relationships and accelerate business development. The 13th annual Scientific Symposium will take place on October 5 at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Attending scientists, clinicians, life science business executives, patient advocates and government officials will examine various near-term scientific challenges facing cell and gene therapy research today, including panel discussions and keynote presentations from world-renowned researchers; nearly 600 attendees will be present to hear the most exciting technical developments happening in the field, and more than 30 posters featuring the latest scientific discoveries will also be on display throughout the day. Additional event details will be updated regularly on the event website www.meetingonthemesa.com. Registration is currently open, with discounted early-bird rates available through July 1. Registration is complimentary for investors and credentialed members of the media. To learn more and to register, please visit www.meetingonthemesa.com. For members of the media interested in attending, please contact Lyndsey Scull at lscull@alliancerm.org. For interested organizations looking to increase exposure to this fields top decision-makers via sponsorship, please contact Laura Parsons at lparsons@alliancerm.org for additional information. About The Alliance for Regenerative Medicine The Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM) is an international multi-stakeholder advocacy organization that promotes legislative, regulatory and reimbursement initiatives necessary to facilitate access to life-giving advances in regenerative medicine worldwide. ARM also works to increase public understanding of the field and its potential to transform human healthcare, providing business development and investor outreach services to support the growth of its member companies and research organizations. Prior to the formation of ARM in 2009, there was no advocacy organization operating in Washington, D.C. to specifically represent the interests of the companies, research institutions, investors and patient groups that comprise the entire regenerative medicine community. Today, ARM has more than 290 members and is the leading global advocacy organization in this field. To learn more about ARM or to become a member, visit http://www.alliancerm.org. Loveland, Colorado, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pinnacle Agriculture Distribution, Inc. (Pinnacle), a leading agriculture retailer, is pleased to announce Jen Molnar has been named as its Executive Vice President, Human Resources effective June 5, 2018. In this role, Molnar will be responsible for leading Pinnacles human resources operations and ensuring that human resources play a key role in our overall strategic direction along with CEO, Rob Marchbank. Jen has a strong track record of transforming organizations through a strategic and thoughtful approach to human resources, Rob Marchbank, President and CEO of Pinnacle Agriculture said. We are committed to taking care of our employees. The addition of Jen furthers that commitment by putting a keen focus on our human resources efforts including investing in training and developing our employees, building out our performance management program and ensuring employees are actively engaged. Molnar brings 20 years of human resources experience with an extensive background in employee engagement, talent acquisition, strategic planning, performance management, learning and development, and labor relations to Pinnacle. Prior to joining Pinnacle, Molnar served as VP Human Resources for a global business segment at Tenneco, a global manufacturing company in the transportation arena. Prior to Tenneco, Molnar held human resources leadership positions throughout her 13 years at Eaton Corporation, a multinational power management company. Molnar received her bachelor's degree in communication and masters degree in labor relations and human resources from Michigan State University. I am very excited to join the Pinnacle team, Molnar said. The company is comprised of talented leaders and employees across the board. They have all worked hard to put Pinnacle on a path to drive profitable growth by taking care of our customers and the future opportunities are abundant. I look forward to building strong partnerships throughout the organization to continue to refine and drive the Pinnacle culture with a strategic emphasis on employee engagement ensuring our employees continue to be committed to Pinnacles success. ### About Pinnacle Agriculture Pinnacle Agriculture is a first-in-class agricultural retail and wholesale distribution business created through acquisitions and greenfield establishments. The company operates through its Sanders, AgVenture Pinnacle, and Meridian Agriculture Distribution serving growers across 27 states. Pinnacle is multifaceted in its operations, which include seed production and sales, agricultural chemical distribution, bulk handling of fertilizer, precision agriculture services and general merchandise for farming. To learn more about Pinnacle, visit our website at https://www.pinnacleag.com/. Betty Crum of Parker Hill Road found this insect near her home. After research, Herald staff believe the bug to be a European Hornet, which is the only hornet species found in North America. A battery has been placed near the hornet for scale reference. CHICAGO, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dresner Partners, a leading FINRA-registered, middle-market investment bank and IMAP member firm, is pleased to announce that Ejaz Elahi has rejoined the firm as a managing director to support the continued growth of Dresner Partners award-winning healthcare practice. Prior to rejoining Dresner Partners, Mr. Elahi spent six years as a managing director with top-tier management consulting firms including Deloitte and PwC where he provided strategic advisory services to a wide spectrum of healthcare industry participants, including hospital systems, payers and alternate-site providers. Previously, Mr. Elahi was a founding partner of Life Sciences Group, Inc., a diagnostic imaging provider, and spent four years at Ponder & Co. where he co-established the firms healthcare merger and acquisition (M&A) practice. Mr. Elahi also spent six years as an M&A banker, initially with Citicorp and Salomon Smith Barney in New York where he focused on the utilities and energy industries, and later with ABN AMRO in Chicago where his primary role was M&A transaction management in the healthcare industry. Dresner's tradition of providing comprehensive investment banking and specialized advisory services to the healthcare services and product sectors is unique in the industry, and this is my primary reason for returning to the firm, said Mr. Elahi. We are focused on long-term relationships with health systems, post-acute and alternate-site providers, and product manufacturers and payers that are founded on providing solutions across a broad spectrum of client needs. Additionally, our deep understanding of the evolving structure of the industry and its interrelationships, particularly as manifested in recent unconventional M&A activity, allows us view each assignment from an uncommonly unique perspective. We are very pleased to have Ejaz Elahi rejoin the firm. His return is true testament to the lasting relationships Dresner strives to foster with its employees and clients, said Steven M. Dresner, President of Dresner Partners and Vice Chairman of IMAP. Ejazs extensive industry knowledge and transaction experience will help maximize the value our talented investment banking team provides to our clients. Mr. Elahi has participated in over 60 M&A transactions, including the $1.1 billion sale of the 14-hospital Health Midwest system to HCA. Other notable transactions Mr. Elahi completed while at Dresner included the restructuring and subsequent sale of Medical Resources, Inc. (a 60-site outpatient diagnostic imaging provider) to 10 separate buyers, and a series of non-core asset sales for the Carle Foundation (a large community hospital system). He also has experience in other highly regulated industry sectors including electric utilities and telecommunications. Mr. Elahi holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. About Dresner Partners / IMAP Dresner Partners is a FINRA-registered, middle-market investment bank headquartered in Chicago, with offices in New York City, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Irvine and Palo Alto, Calif. For nearly 25 years, Dresner Partners has provided financial advisory services to middle-market companies throughout the world, including institutional private placements of debt and equity, merger and acquisitions advisory, financial restructuring & corporate turnarounds, valuations and strategic consulting services. Dresner Partners is a member of IMAP, the worlds leading global mergers and acquisitions partnership focused on the middle market. Founded in 1973, IMAP has more than 60 offices across the globe that work together seamlessly to deliver exceptional value to its clients. An affiliated company, Dresner Corporate Services, is a strategic communications firm specializing in public and investor relations. More information is available at www.dresnerpartners.com or http://www.imap.com/city?city=Chicago . You can also follow Dresner Partners on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DresnerPartners. For Media Inquiries David Gutierrez, Head of PR and Corporate Development, (312)780-7204, dgutierrez@dresnerco.com For Investment Banking Inquiries Steven M. Dresner, President, (312)780-7206, sdresner@dresnerco.com Ejaz Elahi, Managing Director, (630)430-9002, eelahi@dresnerco.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/0f18f91c-33de-4660-89ff-ab70fd6fe512 FREDERICTON, New Brunswick, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Trius Investments Inc. (Trius or the Company) (TSXV:TRU) is pleased to announce that on May 26, 2018 it entered into a definitive purchase and sale agreement (the Agreement) with an arms length purchaser, PVR Holdings LLC (the Buyer), whereby Trius will sell its 100% membership interest in its wholly-owned subsidiary (the Subsidiary Sale), TRU Investments LLC (TRU LLC), to the Buyer for gross cash proceeds of US$725,000 (approximately CAD$941,000), subject to certain pre-closing adjustments for working capital and inter-company liabilities. Trius holds all of its U.S. real estate investments through TRU LLC. The Subsidiary Sale excludes proceeds already received from Trius divestiture of its membership interest in GS Chicago LLC, as previously announced on May 18, 2018. The Subsidiary Sale is also proceeding independently from the proposed asset sale by Trius investee MV Property LLC, as previously announced on March 8, 2018. Trius has inquired as to the status of that asset sale and has been informed that, upon closing of same, MV Property LLC intends to retain the net proceeds thereof for re-deployment into other real estate investments, rather than distributing such proceeds to its members, in order to minimize tax consequences. Joel Freudman, President and CEO of Trius, said: Were excited to announce the Subsidiary Sale, which is the result of a nearly year-long process to market and sell Trius existing investments. Weve done our best to reposition the Company with a clean slate, both in terms of leadership and balance sheet. We managed to source a motivated, arms length bidder whose offer both on pricing and structure was competitive and relatively straightforward to execute. The Subsidiary Sale clears out Trius legacy investments in a timely manner, significantly adds to our cash balance, and gives us flexibility to seriously pursue new investments or a corporate transaction that will deliver greater liquidity and value to our longstanding shareholder base. The Subsidiary Sale remains subject to customary closing conditions and receipt of all necessary approvals, including those of the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV) and the Companys shareholders, after which closing is expected to occur within 10 days thereof. The Company expects to call a shareholder meeting (the Meeting) to be held on or about July 30, 2018 to approve the Subsidiary Sale, among other matters. North American Management, LLC (NAM), the Manager of TRU LLC, has advised the Company that it will charge a 3.5% (US$25,375) administrative transaction fee in connection with the Subsidiary Sale. NAM is an associate of John Robertson, a Director of Trius. The Subsidiary Sale and related administrative fee were reviewed by the Companys Special Committee and approved by its Board of Directors (with Mr. Robertson abstaining) as being in the best interests of the Company, since this step is necessary to complete the Companys repositioning. Mr. Robertson has advised Trius that he does not intend to stand for re-election to its board of directors at the Meeting. However, he has agreed to remain available to Trius, without compensation, for a transitional period following completion of the Subsidiary Sale to assist with post-closing matters. Mr. Freudman commented, We thank John for his nearly 20 years of dedicated service to Trius, and appreciate his efforts in facilitating our complex asset divestiture program. Following completion of the Subsidiary Sale, the Company will not have any active business operations or assets other than cash and receivables. As a result, the Company will cease to meet the listing requirements of the TSXV, including the requirement to carry on an active business. Accordingly, the Companys listing may be transferred to NEX, a separate board of TSXV that provides a trading forum for listed companies that have fallen below the TSXV's ongoing listing standards. About Trius Investments Inc. Trius is an Investment issuer that currently owns interests in several real estate investments in the United States. Trius common shares trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol TRU. For further information, please contact: Joel Freudman President and Chief Executive Officer Trius Investments Inc. Telephone: (647) 880-6414 Cautionary Statements Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release. This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of words and phrases such as plans, expects, continues, estimates, intends, anticipates, or believes, or variations of such words and phrases indicating that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might or will be taken or occur. Forward-looking information in this press release includes, without limitation, statements regarding the Subsidiary Sale and proceeds therefrom, the asset sale by MV Property LLC, Trius future plans, timing and receipt of various approvals, and Mr. Robertsons future role with Trius. This forward-looking information consists of disclosure regarding possible events, conditions or results and is based on numerous assumptions that management believes to be reasonable in the circumstances, including that the Subsidiary Sale will be completed as currently contemplated and Trius will be successful in identifying new investments or business opportunities. The forward-looking information in this press release is subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause Trius actual results or performance to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to: inability to complete the Subsidiary Sale; fluctuations in foreign exchange rates; difficulty in sourcing and executing new investments and transactions on favourable terms or at all; failure to obtain necessary approvals for the Subsidiary Sale; difficulty in retaining qualified personnel; and other risks described in the Companys continuous disclosure documents. There can be no assurances that the forward-looking information in this press release will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events may differ materially from those anticipated by such information. Accordingly, investors should not place undue reliance on such forward-looking information. Trius does not undertake to update any forward-looking information in this press release, except as may be required by applicable securities laws. The Lawrence Police Department is investigating an officer-involved shooting where at least one person has been hurt. Lawrence police said that incident happened near Sixth Street and Vermont Street. At least one person was rushed to an area hospital with unknown injuries. This story is developing. Refresh this page for updates. Teen fatally shot in Grandview KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A 16-year-old boy in Grandview, Missouri was killed from an apparent gunshot wound Tuesday afternoon. Grandview police say officers were called to a shooting at about 4:15 p.m. on the 11900 block of Holiday Drive. The teen was taken to a nearby hospital but later died. Inner-suburban deadly crime overlooked by most news-watchers who are more concerned with politics and the consequences of sexy workouts rather than gunfire targeting the NEXTGEN. Take a look: Today I'm announcing that I will resign as Governor of Missouri effective Friday, June 1st 5pm. I came to office to fight for the people of Missouri. To fight for the forgotten. I love Missouri and I love our people. That love remains. I am thankful to all those who have worked beside me, sweated beside me - Those who gave their time, their energy and their precious resources so that we could pursue our mission of taking Missouri in a new and better direction. We have accomplished a lot together. I am proud of you and I am proud of all of our work. The last few months have been incredibly difficult for me, for my family, for my team, for my friends and for many, many people that I love. This ordeal has been designed to cause an incredible amount of strain on my family. Millions of dollars of mounting legal bills, endless personal attacks designed to cause maximum damage to family and friends. Legal harassment of colleagues, friends and campaign workers - And it's clear that for the forces that opposes us there is no end in sight. I cannot allow those forces to continue to cause pain and difficulty to the people that I love. I know and people of good faith know that I am not perfect. But I have not broken any laws or committed any offense worthy of this treatment. I will let the fairness of this process be judged by history. It has been a great honor and privilege to serve as your governor. Traveling this state I have talked to many of you who harbor extraordinary anger at this ordeal and for those who have pushed and promoted it. For those who would be moved to vengeance, let us allow history and God to bring justice. We must, as we have always done, work to improve the lives of those around us. This is not the end of our fight. I will always be a fighter for the people of Missouri. A great deal of work is left undone. The time has come though, to tend to those who have been wounded and to care for those who need us most. So, for the moment, let us walk off the battlefield with our heads held high. We have a good and proud story to tell our children. Let's love them and each other every day. May God continue to bless you and to bless the great state of Missouri. THIS WAS ALWAYS A BEEF BETWIXT MISSOURI GOOD OL'BOY REPUBLICANS VS. GREITENS AND THE MISSOURI DEMOCRATIC PARTY ONLY SERVED TO SCREW THINGS UP!!! The Super-minority did nothing but offer a bunch of bumbling statements and a prosecution so incompetent that it only served to incriminate himself. STL Public Radio: Greitens resigns as governor of Missouri Statement from Jackson County Democratic Committee leadership regarding Eric Greitens: "Good." And he didn't even bother to wear a tie whilst he did it.In a saccharine statement that still cast blame on others for hot mess. Eric Greitens cited efforts "designed" to put pressure on him, his family and others for his resignation.################A few things . . .He's still blaming other people for his drama. He talks about an ordeal "designed" against him but nobody forced him into alleged "sexy workouts" with some hairdresser in his basement. In his final statement and throughout this episode the Guv has never really accepted personal responsibility for his failings.Weird line about people taking "vengeance" -- From what we've seen there are very few people other than anonymous trolls or paid staff willing to stand up for the Guv.Here's the most important part . . .Greitens attempted to play the bully with GOP colleagues and that was the start of his downfall. Blaming everybody from George Soros to the victim of his alleged "sexy workout" was nothing more than a desperate tactic of a dude who knew he didn't have a lot of options other than resigning given public speculation about the sordid deets of an admitted adulterous affair.Links:Developing . . . he town of Livadia in Viotia Prefecture, Central Greece has entered the Guinness Book of Records with the longest souvlaki ever. This area of Greece is famous for its great rotisseries and on Monday, May 28th, locals gathered in the centre of the town, where 30 volunteers lit the fire and placed the meat on the skewers, which was then cooked over charcoal. Representatives from the Guinness World Records were in attendance and measured the souvlaki at 201 metres, before handing over the new record to the city. Longest souvlaki For the success of this event, there were 30 people who helped cook the meat along with 150 kilos of charcoal and 300 kilos of meat, which was used to break the record. The chairman from the Chamber of Commerce of Viotia noted this was a huge event for Livadia, with global interest. Now the small town of Livadia was heard worldwide, we broke the Guinness record and we are proud of it, he said. The previous record was held in China at 194 metres long. Read more at greekcitytimes.com 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: pixabay.com This year's rise comes after a 35% hike in Chinese tourists visiting Greece last year The number of Chinese tourists visiting Greece this year is expected to grow by more than 50 percent, Tourism Minister Elena Kountoura told Athens-Macedonian News Agency on Tuesday. "We are giving a large emphasis on the tourism market of China. We support the European Union-China tourism year and are taking advantage of the common European operational framework for the boosting of new Greek products, the promoting of their competitive advantages and the promotion of Greece as a top destination that offers unique travel experiences 365 days a year," noted the minister. 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: pixabay.com The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) on Tuesday announced what it called its biggest equity investment in the tourism sector to date by signing agreement that render it a shareholder in D Marinas B.V., a holding company exploiting 10 marinas Croatia, Greece and Turkey. The marina network is operating under the brand name D-Marin. The EBRD will invest 70 million euros for a 25% stake of the holding company. According to a relevant press statement, EBRD describes D Marinas B.V. as the largest and only international chain of marinas in the eastern Mediterranean, and with approximately 8,000 berths under its management. The companys ultimate beneficial owner is Dogus Holding A.S., one of Turkeys leading business conglomerates and a long-standing ERBD partner of the EBRD. The investment comes under the new EBRD Inclusive Tourism Framework for the eastern Mediterranean, which aims to promote local tourism sectors to grow and upgrade through investments in hotels and tourism operators. EBRD First Vice President Jurgen Rigterink, who signed the investment in Zagreb on Tuesday, later noted that "...with this investment the EBRD is demonstrating its long-term commitment to supporting the progress of Croatias economy. Tourism is a major driver of growth for the country and we expect this investment to open up new opportunities for local businesses as well as create new jobs. The beginning of the tourism season is the right time to sign such an important investment where the EBRD can provide much-needed capital for the next steps of development in the tourism sector which is so important for Croatia, Greece and Turkey. We are proud that Dogus Groups long-term strategy of investing in the tourism and specifically the marina business has been recognized by such an important institution such as the EBRD. This agreement is testament to D Marinas success, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean basin where the potential for tourism is still rising and accordingly our strategy is to expand further in the region," Ferit F. Sahenk, the chairman of the board of Dogus Group, added. Read more at naftemporiki.gr 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 The Dubai Department of Economic Development (DED) has urged firms in the Emirate to benefit from the decree, which exempts them from the fines imposed on them, and facilitate the procedures for renewing licenses by the end of 2018. This will add to the financial benefits of the owners of expired business licenses, restore legal records and licenses, and help the business community in Dubai enhance their competitiveness, said Sami Al Qamzi, director general, DED. Omar Bushahab, CEO, Business Registration & Licensing Sector in DED, said: This decree is a positive step in promoting economic growth and consolidating Dubai's position as one of the important commercial and economic centres internationally. It reaffirms to investors and businessmen around the world that Dubai effectively addresses various economic variables with a forward-looking vision by adopting best practices and regulations. It also helps to remove concerns among investors and entrepreneurs looking to expand their business. Bushahab urged the owners of business licenses to expedite all necessary procedures to benefit from the exemptions to renew their licenses before the grace period until the end of 2018. The decree is part of the initiatives launched by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed to reduce cost of doing business and facilitate inward investment in the emirate. The Department of Economic Development is implementing four initiatives to stimulate competitiveness and achieve sustainable economic development in Dubai. These are related to exempting businesses from fines and trade violations, reducing operational cost in the retail sector, supporting local production and procurement, as well as attracting the best startups to Dubai and promoting them. TradeArabia News Service China, India and Indonesia are anticipated to play a key role in attracting higher FDI (foreign direct investments) inflows to the developing Asian region between 2017 and 2020, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company. FDIs are segregated into greenfield and brown field investments. Projects built by a parent company in a foreign land from scratch are referred to as greenfield investments. Brown field investments represent the acquisition of existing facilities for new production. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Developments (UNCTAD) 2017 World Investment Report, FDI inflows in the developing Asian region are estimated to rise by 15 per cent over the previous year to $515 billion in 2017. Arnab Nath, Economic Research analyst at GlobalData, said: With the liberalization of the high growth nations, greenfield investments in the developing Asian nations witnessed over an 8 per cent rise in 2016. This, coupled with a significant improvement in the economic outlook, is expected to spur the investor sentiment over the next three years. An increase in globalization and urbanization is resulting in a shift from the primary (mining, quarrying and petroleum) and manufacturing industries to services in the developing Asian region. Of the total greenfield investments in 2016, 60.2 per cent were in the services sector followed by manufacturing (38 per cent) and the primary sector (1.8 per cent). The liberalization of major economies in the region resulted in greenfield investments in the services and manufacturing sector to rise by 13.6 per cent and 1.6 per cent respectively in 2016 whereas greenfield investments in the primary sector witnessed a decline of 29.3 per cent during the same year due to lower global commodity prices. India liberalizes FDI in key sectors In early 2018, the Indian government relaxed the FDI policy for key sectors such as construction & real estate, civil aviation and retail. Foreign investments in the real estate sector were prohibited until the Government amended its FDI policy and allowed 100 per cent FDI without any government approval. Goods are sold to individual customers under the same brand in single brand retail trading (SBRT), which has been revised from 49 per cent to 100 per cent FDI without any government approval. In the civil aviation sector, foreign airlines were not allowed to invest in the government owned Air India until the policy was relaxed recently. As per the latest amendment, foreign airlines can invest up to 49 per cent of their paid up capital in Air India. Complementing all these developments, India jumped 30 spots in the World Banks 2018 Ease of Doing Business ranking, thereby drawing further attention for the country from foreign investors. The countrys rank among 190 countries has improved from 130th in 2017 to 100th in 2018. Indias score of 60.76 out of 100 in the doing business report is ahead of the South Asian nations average of 53.64 in 2018. A significant improvement has been witnessed in the parameters of resolving insolvencies (136th out of 190 countries in 2017 vs 103rd in 2018), paying taxes (172nd vs 119th), getting credit (44th vs 29th), enforcing contracts (172nd vs 164th), protecting minority investors (13th vs 4th), and construction permits (185th vs 181th). China becomes investor friendly to tap more inflows China has emerged as one of the top destinations for inward foreign investments over the last decade, which has played a key role in the countrys growth. In January 2017, the State Council issued a new circular to improve the business environment and boost investments in the country. The Ministry of Commerce confirmed plans to reduce restrictions on market access in the areas of manufacturing, services, mining and green industries. Under the Made in China 2025 initiative, China is encouraging foreign investment in the fields of infrastructure construction and green manufacturing. The countrys fiscal and taxation support policy makes the country more investor friendly with more authority given to Chinas national-level development zones (these are special areas where foreign investment is encouraged) in investment management. Regional economic partnership to trigger investment impetus The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which delivers a free trade agreement among ten ASEAN economies (Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Vietnam, Brunei, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, and The Philippines), is expected to be signed this year. The agreement will provide a stimulus for investment across ASEAN countries. TradeArabia News Service Saleh Abdullah Al Mahana, a Saudi-based contracting company, has been awarded a contract to build a long-stay care centre in the Muharraq area of Bahrain. The project is part of an integrated medical complex comprising also a maternity hospital and a proposed centre for multiple sclerosis patients, in addition to the existing elderly care centre, reported the BNA. The project, which is implemented, following directives from HRH Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, aims to meet the citizens needs and improve medical services in the kingdom, remarked Works, Municipalities Affairs and Urban Planning Minister Essam bin Abdulla Khalaf after signing the deal. The project is within the first phase of projects of the Gulf Development Programme, which is based on the agreement signed between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in March 2014, covering the centres construction costs, construction of a central services building and all other facilities, external works, consultancy services, furniture, medical equipment, electrical and mechanical tools, non-medical and information system related requirements. Work on Phase One of the Saudi Development Fund-funded project will begin in the third quarter of this year, and is due to be completed by the end of 2020, said the BNA report. Besides the long-stay care centre, the medical complex will also boast a central building for non-medical services serving the medical complex and a 50-bed maternity hospital, it added. Bahrain's government has started the handover of 5,000 new housing units built under the Umm Al Hassam Housing Project to citizens, said a report. This comes following the order of HRH Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and First Deputy Prime Minister, for the speedy delivery of the housing units, in line with the directives of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa to meet the citizens needs marking the holy month of Ramadan, and in line with the efforts of the government, led by HRH Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, to continue implementing its action plan, reported BNA. Housing Minister Bassim bin Yaqoob Al Hamar, said that the ministry had intensified its efforts to prepare the distribution timetable immediately after the issuance of HRH the Crown Princes order, affirming that all potentials will be harnessed to ensure the distribution process is completed within the shortest period possible. He stressed that all the projects that are distributed are among the strategic projects currently carried out by the Housing Ministry within the 25,000-unit programme included in the Government Action Plan, and emanate from His Majestys directives to build 40,000 units, stated the report. The units of Umm Al Hassam housing project are designed according to the D11 model, which consists of two floors and four rooms, said the BNA report. The units owners may build an additional floor and undertake the legal expansion stipulated by the Housing Ministrys regulations, it stated. The project also features key amenities including a mosque, commercial outlets and open areas, it added. Highlights successes under the leadership of Stephen Roman and his team Warns shareholders about Greyling Investments motivations: Dont let opportunists steal the company Urges fellow shareholders to vote their white proxy today SEATTLE, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Brian Lawrence, owning or exercising control or direction over 3.5MM shares of Global Atomic Corporation (Global Atomic or the Company), (TSX-V:GLO), has issued an open letter to fellow shareholders, criticizing the attempt by a self-interested, opportunist to seize control of the Company at a critical juncture and outlining why he is supporting the Companys management and Board of Directors (the Board). The full text of Mr. Lawrences letter is included below: To my fellow Global Atomic Shareholders, My name is Brian Lawrence and I have been a long-term investor, not only in Global Atomic and its predecessor entities for over a decade, but of other companies that have been led by this management team. I currently own approximately 3.5MM shares of Global Atomic which would make me one of the top 10 investors in the Company. As a long-term investor in Canadian resource stocks, I have made good returns understanding asset values and, more importantly, I know the importance of having the right team to execute on a strategic plan to develop the asset values. I know Stephen Roman and his team to be the best at what they do. I also know when someone is trying to hoodwink me with diversionary smoke screens in an attempt to steal my companys assets. That is precisely what is going on here, fellow shareholders. I invested in both Silvermet and Global Atomic Fuels Corporation because I saw the fundamental asset potential in those businesses and had confidence in Stephen Roman and his team to turn that potential into actual value. My confidence comes from having invested in Gold Eagle, which Stephen discovered, developed and sold to Goldcorp for $1.5 billion winning Stephen and his team a PDAC award for Prospector of the Year. Verena Minerals, now known as Belo Sun Mining, went from a start-up private company to a $250M market cap with a 10MMoz resource that is in final stages of permitting prior to construction. Harte Gold under Stephen and his team has gone from a market value of less than $5MM to over $250MM and is poised to begin production at its high grade Sugar Zone gold mine in Ontario. As a top 5 shareholder in Harte Gold, I am naturally pleased with this investment. Likewise, Global Atomics uranium asset in Niger started as a private start-up by Stephen Roman and a partner to now being without doubt a world class deposit as recent off scale drilling results have shown. Now at a late stage resource definition / early mine planning, an ore sales agreement is already in place with Frances national uranium company, and it is only a matter of time until we see this asset deliver significant shareholder value. Similarly, the Silvermet business of processing and concentrating industrial zinc, has been profitable and is growing with recent announcements for investments to nearly double production. Time and again, this management team has proven its ability to create value. The most recent quarterly results were received very favourably by the market. In my view, the unwarranted attack by Greyling on the current management team and the Board is nothing short of an attempt to steal the Company from underneath us as shareholders, after much of the hard work has been done, without so much as a change of control premium that we are entitled to. The dissidents are opportunists slinging mud but they have no credible plan that a) increases our zinc processing capabilities or b) outlines a faster path to production on our uranium asset. Given these are our businesses, their so called plan is financial and operational vapour. I have voted all my shares FOR the incumbent Board and I urge you to do the same. Sincerely, Brian Lawrence Contact: Brian Lawrence GLOshareholder@gmail.com Otokar, the largest privately owned company of Turkish defence industry, is showcasing its ARMA 8x8 armoured vehicle at the ongoing Hemus Exhibition 2018, being held in Bulgaria. The event which opened today (May 30) will run until June 3, in Plovdiv. Otokars ARMA 8x8 is a modular multi-wheeled vehicle with superior tactical and technical features. Due to its superior mobility, high mine and ballistic protection, medium and high calibre weapon system integration options. It is capable to serve modern armies in the real battlefield, peace keeping and human relief operations in most difficult terrain and climatic conditions, said a statement from Otokar, a Koc Group company. The ARMA 8x8; is available in various types of configurations such as personnel carrier, infantry fighting vehicle, fire support vehicle, mortar carrier, short and medium range air defence, mobile gun carrier, command and control vehicle with optional amphibious capability, it said. ARMA is suitable for integration of various weapon systems from light machine gun weapon stations up to 25-30 mm medium calibre cannon and 105 mm cannon, it added. Serdar Gorguc, general manager, Otokar, said: Our strength in the defence industry is driven by our experience, engineering and R&D capabilities, and successful use of technology. Today over 30,000 Otokar military vehicles are in service in many different parts of the world. The success of our vehicles has always been a reference for new orders, he said. Our company as a registered NATO and United Nations supplier is ready to meet Bulgarian Armed Forces needs with its wide product range. Apart from our displayed ARMA 8x8 we are well aware the further potential in the country for our 6x6 and 4x4 vehicles. With the advantage of having such wide product range, we also desire to contribute to Bulgarian economy through creating added value in the country, he added. TradeArabia News Service Bahrains capital Manama broke into the top 10 globally this year in the UBS Global Wealth Managements purchase power index. Los Angeles boasts the worlds best buying power for the average workers salary. The index is part of UBS' Prices and Earnings study that covers 77 cities across the globe. For each city it measures how much people earn and how much the items in their average shopping basket costs, and compares the two to come up with the purchasing power index. Put simply, it's a ranking of earnings versus prices. The higher the city is in the ranking, the more people in that city can afford. Manama rises from its 17th rank in the purchase power index of 2015. Another Middle Eastern powerhouse, Dubai has been placed at 14, having risen 12 spots since UBS 2015 ranking. While it's one of the most expensive expat destinations, it's pretty affordable when it comes to millennial must-haves, said UBS's Prices & Earnings report. Qatar's capital Doha also rose from its 37th rank in 2015 to 19th position in 2018. Global financial capitals New York and London rank 10th and 23rd respectively. Zurich has retained its position as the most expensive city, followed by Geneva and Oslo. The study, first launched in 1971 and now in its 17th edition, compares 128 prices of various goods and services as well as average earnings of 15 professions representing the average working population. Mark Haefele, chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, said: "Purchasing power matters to all of us as individuals and as investors. Whether you are planning your next vacation or trying to understand long-term shifts in economic power, our study provides a detailed analysis of prices around the world." According to the studys Purchasing Power Index, residents of European and North American cities typically enjoy the best buying power overall, with Manama and Hong Kong the only non-transatlantic contenders in the Top Ten. Daniel Kalt, chief economist and chief investment officer for Switzerland, UBS Global Wealth Management, and lead editor of the study, said: "As in our previous edition, Zurich tops the list as the worlds most expensive city, closely followed by Swiss rival Geneva. However, our Purchasing Power Index clearly indicates that we are beginning to see stronger competition from overseas with only three European cities left in our Top Ten, all of which lost ground compared to the reports 2015 edition." By isolating just one of the 128 prices analysed, global purchasing power differences become clearly visible. For example, a standard haircut for women costs $94.32 in Zurich (Switzerland), compared to $22.60 in Kiev (Ukraine), $12.17 in Mexico City and $7.50 in Cairo (Egypt). However, while a woman in Zurich typically only has to work 3.05 hours to afford this service, the same expenditure requires 12.09 hours of work in Kiev, 5.86 hours in Mexico City and 6.11 hours in Cairo. TradeArabia News Service Bahrain plans to issue 10-year self-sponsorship residence permits to foreign investors, as part of its long-term strategy to promote the kingdom as a global economic destination, reported the Gulf Daily News, our sister publication, citing the Interior Ministry. For further details visit http://www.gdnonline.com Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia), the national flag carrier of the Kingdom, flew more than 130 guests on the first commercial aircraft to depart from the New King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The first flight, an Airbus A320, flight number SV 1291, was to Gurayat, a northern domestic airport in Saudi Arabia. The flight departed Jeddah at 05:15 hrs local time yesterday (May 29) and arrived at 07:10 in Gurayat. The new Jeddah International Airport opened to operate a select number of flights as part of a soft-opening phase. Saudi Arabian Airlines vice president Corporate Communications, Abdulrahman Altayeb said: The opening is a highly momentous occasion for the nation, the airline, and for the 137 valued guests that flew to Gurayat on SV1291 yesterday. The entire airline operations team has been preparing for and anticipating this important milestone, which marks a new era for Saudias operations out of Jeddah, Continued Eng. Altayeb: The gradual transition of the Saudia fleet to the New Jeddah International Airport means that capacity will significantly increase, and the overall guest experience will be transformed with the state-of-the-art technological systems that are now in place and ready for our guests. The existing airport in Jeddah and the new terminal will continue to operate concurrently, with a majority of the Saudia network set to remain operating from the existing main airport. A phased transition will take place, with flights gradually moved and starting operations from the new airport. Passengers will be notified and tickets will be clearly marked, indicating which terminal the flight will be operating out of. As of May 1 this year, Saudia also opened the new Al Fursan domestic lounge at the new airport, available and ready for use for its loyalty club members and premium guests. The airline is currently on an accelerated transformation track, revitalizing every aspect of its airline business, from operations, to fleet management, network growth and optimization; guest experience and expanding Hajj and Umrah capacity. The SV2020 Transformation Plan is tracking steadily ahead of schedule, and the opening of the new Jeddah International Airport is a key enabler for Saudia to achieve its network, fleet and passenger growth targets for the coming years. In 2017 the airline carried more than 32 million passengers, registered over 200,000 flights and travelled more than 320 million kilometres. Saudia Catering served over 35 million meals; the airline grew its international transit traffic figures by double-digits over last years figures, and added 30 new aircraft to its fleet in a single year. Saudia currently flies to 90 destinations across four continents with a fleet of 147 narrow and widebody aircraft and is the Global Launch Customer and Operator of the Airbus A330-300 Regional. TradeArabia News Service A Qatar Airways plane bound to Tunisia was forced to make an emergency landing in Baku yesterday (May 29) due to engine failure, a report said. The Airbus A330 aircraft, carrying 137 people on board, made a successful landing at 12:16 (GMT + 4) and all passengers were evacuated to safety, said a report in Azer News. The Heydar Aliyev International Airport provided all necessary assistance to passengers and crew members, as well as necessary technical support for the aircraft, it said. Pragma's Mechner Comments on Access Fee Pilot David Mechner, CEO of Pragma Securites has plenty to say about the access fee pilot. Mechner said in a note to Traders Magazine that his firm views the SECs current pilot measurement methodology risks missing out on the key benefits of the fee cap for pension funds and asset managers because the proposed pilot doesnt track execution quality (the cost of a trade) but only market quality. Capping fees will likely lead to wider bid-offer spreads as the incentives for market makers to provide liquidity decrease. Counterintuitively, this could actually reduce overall execution costs for asset managers and pension funds, he said. This is because institutions which use patient passive (price making) algorithmic strategies (a significant proportion of asset managers trade this way) see more of their orders filled as their passive order will now be higher up the queue for execution. This would reduce the number of times orders would need to be re-pegged in order to be filled and as a result could actually lead to better execution costs for these passive strategies and overall benefit asset managers and pension funds. The current proposal risks concluding that capping fees is not in the interests of buy-side institutions if it results in wider spreads, when in fact these institutions are seeing better overall execution quality as more of their passive orders get filled. Pragma has called on the SEC to introduce further measures to better understand the effects of their pilot on execution quality for asset managers and pension funds. The full comment letter to the SEC is below: May 14, 2018 Mr. Brent J. Fields Secretary Securities and Exchange Commission 100 F Street, NE Washington, DC 20549-1090 Re: Release No. 34-82873; File No. S7-05-18 Dear Mr. Fields: Pragma Securities appreciates the opportunity to comment on the Commissions proposed rule concerning a transaction fee pilot for NMS stocks. Pragma is an algorithmic trading technology provider. Our customers - mostly banks and brokers - use our software services to execute directional trades efficiently and with minimal shortfall. We dont act as an executing broker, but rather provide trading software which our customers use to control the moment to moment pricing and routing decisions when executing orders. We have a strong quantitative research focus, and have published a series of research notes since 2012 explaining and providing data illustrating various market structure issues, including the conflict brokers face as a result of the exchange fee structure. All are available for download from our website at www.pragmatrading.com/research. Though our customers are strictly institutional, our focus when looking at market structure issues is always the perspective of how market structure affects investors the individuals whom our customers are ultimately (if indirectly) serving. In general we are pleased to see the Commission moving to act on this issue, and support the Commissions proposal. However: 1) The pilot should directly measure execution quality 1 2 3 4 5 6 next For more information on related topics, visit the following channels: ON THE MOVE: IEX Promotes Furber; DAM's Bellaro Retiring The Investors Exchange has promoted Sara Furber to Chief Financial Officer. Furber duties expand to include leadership of corporate development and IEX Ventures. Before joining IEX in 2016, She held senior roles over her 20-year career in investment banking and finance, including serving as the Chief Operating Officer of Wealth Management at Morgan Stanley. IEX also hired Dan Cummings to lead its Corporate Advisory group, which oversees the listings business. Previously Executive Vice Chairman at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Cummings will use his deep global capital markets expertise, including leading over 400 book-run deals and 100 IPOs, to drive and build key corporate relationships. He reports to IEX co-founder and President, Ronan Ryan. Deutsche Asset Managements global head of equity trading and buy-side industry veteran Mike Bellaro is retiring after 30 years with the firm, The TRADE News reported. Bellaro is set to leave the firm in the Summer and Deutsche Asset Management will find his replacement in due course, a spokesperson confirmed. Bellaro joined Deutsche Asset Management in 1988 and held senior positions across the business including head of equity, derivative and FX trading in Frankfurt. He also oversaw the US equity and derivative trading for Deutsche Asset Management in New York. If you have a new job or promotion to report, let me know at jdantona@marketsmedia.com Fenergo, a provider of Client Lifecycle Management software solutions for financial institutions has hired Conor Coughlan as its Global Head of Marketing. Conor has over 19 years of experience in the banking, financial services and insurance sectors. Most recently, Conor led the award-winning marketing function for Thomson Reuters risk division. In addition, Greg Watson has been appointed Global Head of Sales. He previously held the role of Fenergos Head of Partnerships. Before joining Fenergo in 2017, Greg worked at HSBC as the Managing Director and Global Head of the Client Management Group for the Global Banking and Markets division. Hes held various other senior positions within HSBC, including Global Head of Client Onboarding and COO for COBAM. Previously, Greg worked in Business/Product Management for UBS Investment Bank and in various IT and transformation roles for Centrica, Reuters, as well as a management consultancy. Both Watson and Coughlin will report directly to Fenergos CEO, Marc Murphy, and will also be part of Fenergos executive leadership team. Eisler Capital recruited veteran FX salesman Andrew Pena. Pena joined Eisler in an investor relations capacity this month according to his LinkedIn profile. He previously spent 21 months as head of institutional FX sales for EMEA at Morgan Stanley. Before that, he made his name as head of commodities hedge fund sales at Goldman Sachs, where he spent nearly 17 years in Hong Kong, London and New York. Alpima, the specialist front-office platform for institutional and professional investors, said it has appointed Anastasia Bikou as Managing Director of Sales. In this newly created role, Bikou will report to Ilan Heimann, Head of Sales and Partnerships. She joins Alpima from Goldman Sachs in London where she spent nine years and was most recently responsible for FX distribution to institutional clients across Europe. Before that, she worked as a Derivatives Trader for the National Bank of Greece and a Financial Analyst at Merrill Lynch in New York. 1 2 3 next For more information on related topics, visit the following channels: In the context of Creta Maris Beach Resorts Social Responsibility Program, on Thursday, June 29th, 2017, the annual Blood Donation Day was organized for 26th consecutive year. (TRAVPR.COM) GREECE - May 30th, 2018 - Putting into practice the message "Give blood, save lives", 40 employees and the resorts management team, after receiving the final approval of the responsible physician, participated in the annual blood donation that was held under the auspices of Venizelio Pananeio - General Hospital of Heraklion. Creta Maris Beach Resort management introduced for the first time the Blood Donation Day in 1992, with the aim to encourage as many employees as possible and the local community, to become volunteer blood donors. The strong response of the staff resulted in the annual establishment of the blood donation program and the creation of a Blood Bank, in Venizelio Hospital of Heraklion that serves dozens of surgeries and serious incidents. About Creta Maris Beach Resort: Creta Maris Beach Resort with a capacity of 680 rooms, has been originally launched in 1975 and is situated next to Hersonissos, just 25 minutes (24km) from the Heraklion Airport. With a capacity of 680 rooms, suites and bungalows, 6 restaurants, 7 bars, 7 swimming pools, gym, Hammam spa, Asterias Childrens Club, and a great space for outdoor and indoor activities, Creta Maris is a blend of tradition and luxury together on a beautiful beach with crystal clear waters where guests can experience the authentic Cretan hospitality. Please find pictures of the event on high resolution on the below link: https://we.tl/d2azz6d5jy Please find pictures of Creta Maris Beach Resort on high resolution on our site: https://www.cretamaris.gr/media-and-photo-gallery-crete-hotel/photos ### TORONTO, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rupert Resources Ltd (Rupert or the Company) reports that on May 30th 2018 it filed a technical report prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") on the Pahtavaara Gold Project (the "Report"). The Report supports the disclosure made by the Company in its news release on April 16th, 2018 entitled "Rupert Resources reports NI 43-101 Inferred Resource for the Pahtavaara Project in Northern Finland" and there are no material differences in the mineral resources contained in the Report from those disclosed in the news release. The Report entitled "NI 43-101 Technical Report: Pahtavaara Project, Finland" was prepared by independent "Qualified Person" (as the term is defined in NI 43-101) Brian Wolfe, Principle Resource Geologist of International Resource Solutions Pty Ltd, Perth, Australia. The Report is available for review on both SEDAR (www.sedar.com) and the Company's website (www.rupertresources.com). About Rupert Rupert is a Canadian based gold exploration and development company that is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol RUP. The Company owns the Pahtavaara gold mine, mill, and exploration permits and concessions located in the Central Lapland Greenstone Belt in Northern Finland (Pahtavaara) (see the Companys November 9, 2016 press release). Pahtavaara has an Inferred mineral resource at a 1.5 g/t Au cut off grade of 4.6 Mt at a grade of 3.2 g/t Au (474 koz) (see Companys release from April 16, 2018). The Company also holds a 100% interest two properties in Central Finland, Hirsikangas and Osikonmaki; the Gold Centre property, which consists of mineral claims located in the Balmer Township, Red Lake, Ontario; and the Surf Inlet Property in British Columbia. 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 This press release contains statements which constitute forward-looking statements, including the statements with respect to those that address potential quantity and/or grade of minerals, potential for minerals, completion of the proposed Transaction, deadlines, regulatory approvals, business activities and operating performance of the Company. The words may, would, could, will, intend, plan, anticipate, believe, estimate, expect and similar expressions, as they relate to the Company, are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements are based on the opinions, assumptions and estimates of management considered reasonable at the date the statements are made, and are inherently subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other known and unknown factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. These factors include the general risks of the mining industry, as well as those risk factors discussed or referred to in the Company's annual Management's Discussion and Analysis for the year ended February 28, 2017 available at www.sedar.com. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein as intended, planned, anticipated, believed, estimated or expected. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements except as otherwise required by applicable law. National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects The above mineral resource estimate used Inferred Mineral Resources, which is a category per CIM Definition Standards (2014) as required by National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. This news release or other disclosure provided by the Company may use the terms measured mineral resources, indicated mineral resources and inferred mineral resources. While these terms are recognized and required by Canadian regulations (under National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects), the SEC does not recognize them. United States investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of the mineral deposits in these categories will ever be converted to reserves. In addition, Inferred Mineral Resources have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an Inferred Mineral Resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian securities legislation, estimates of Inferred Mineral Resources may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies, although they may form, in certain circumstances, the basis of a preliminary economic assessment as that term is defined in National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. U.S. investors are cautioned not to assume that part or all of an Inferred Mineral Resource exists, or is economically or legally mineable. For further information, please contact: James Withall Chief Executive Officer jwithall@rupertresources.com Thomas Credland Head of Corporate Development tcredland@rupertresources.com Rupert Resources Ltd 82 Richmond Street East, Suite 203, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1P1 Tel: +1 416-304-9004 Web: http://rupertresources.com/ SINGAPORE, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Jadestone Energy Inc. (TSXV:JSE) (Jadestone or the Company), formerly Mitra Energy Inc., reported today its condensed consolidated interim unaudited financial results for the three months ended March 31, 2018. The Company has moved to reporting its financial information based on a calendar year end, from January 1, 2018. For this reporting period, comparative financial information is provided for the three months ended March 31, 2017. First Quarter Highlights Both the Stag Oilfield and Ogan Komering reached new safety milestones of 5.6 years and 2.3 years without a lost time incident respectively; Record quarterly sales revenue of US$21.0mm, increased from US$16.5mm in the same quarter a year ago; Positive cash flow from operations of US$0.1mm, increased from a net cash outflow of US$6.5mm in the same quarter a year ago; Total liquids production of 322,896 bbls for the quarter from the Stag Oilfield and from the Ogan Komering PSC, and natural gas production of 277,122 mmbtu from Ogan Komering, for a total average production of 4,101 boe/d (net working interest) for the quarter, an increase of 6% over the same quarter a year ago; Production costs of US$12.8mm in the quarter, down 40% from US$18.0mm in the same period a year ago. We continue to demonstrate that our strategy is working, commented Paul Blakeley, President and CEO, Comparing this quarter to the same period a year ago, production is modestly higher with costs dramatically lower. This is a testament to our low-cost mentality and the depth of experience our team brings to bear, particularly with producing assets like Stag and Ogan Komering. While higher oil prices had a positive impact on revenue generated, our performance was bolstered by our progress in streamlining both operations and the organisation itself, a reduction of 15% in the combined production cost and staff cost, compared to the same quarter last year. We are less than two years into the Jadestone transformation, and see ourselves poised to replicate this success many times over with more investment opportunities, both organic and inorganic. Material Developments Subsequent to the end of the quarter, the Company also announced material developments with its Indonesia and Vietnam assets. A new Gross Split PSC covering the Ogan Komering working area in Indonesia was awarded to Pertamina effective May 20. This step helps to define the next phase for Ogan Komering, and is a precursor to Jadestone finalising its ongoing participation in the licence. Direct business-to-business negotiations with Pertamina are now well underway, as directed by Indonesias upstream regulator. Late last week, Jadestone received the Ministry of Industry and Trades approval of the Companys outline development plans for its U Minh and Nam Du gas fields in Vietnam. This serves as a formal kick-off to FEED, field development plan studies and the negotiation of a gas sales agreement. Paul Blakeley commented, We are looking forward to continuing our relationship with Pertamina in the next phase of the Ogan Komering asset, with early investment in two new gas discoveries at Jatung Baru and North Meraksa, and are pleased to see the process to confirm our participation falling into place as expected. At the same time, Vietnams approval of our Outline Development Plan for the U Minh and Nam Du fields is a strong vote of confidence for Jadestone. We have begun FEED and gas sales agreement discussions, with a view to development sanction in 3Q 2019. This will be the first greenfield development under the Jadestone Energy banner, a further key development in our growth in Asia Pacific. The Company continues to pursue its strategy of deploying its proven operating capability, in select areas in the Asia Pacific region, to create value through multiple strands of re-investment activity, including organic growth by investing to reduce costs at its producing assets, increasing production, and moving its existing discovered resources to production, as well as via inorganic growth through acquiring assets with production or discovered resources. Operations update Crude oil production at Stag averaged 2,654 bbls/d during the quarter to March 31, 2018, increased by approximately 11% from the same quarter a year ago, but decreased by 12% from the prior quarter. Aside from the expected lower production at this time of year due to heightened cyclonic activity, operations at Stag in the March quarter were negatively impacted by the knock-on effect of marine breakaway coupling (MBC) activations during the prior quarter. As reported in our December 2017 results, there were three MBC incidents in the December quarter. The last of these incidents also affected production volumes in the March 2018 quarter, and the repeated interruptions caused damage to three of the facilitys electric submersible pumps, which required unplanned well workovers during the March Quarter, to restore production rates. The combined effect of production interruptions and downtime to repair the damage resulted in deferment of approximately 67,000 bbls, or 745 bbls/d during the quarter. The Company has been in discussion with the operator of the FSO, in relation to these failures, and a number of initiatives have been implemented to eliminate the risk of future MBC failures and to improve operational performance of the FSO. This has involved working very closely with the FSO operator and includes new installation techniques, extensive testing, and operational adjustments with a newly installed MBC. In recent weeks, production at Stag has been restored to approximately 3,500 bbl/d. Production at the Ogan Komering PSC averaged 934 bbls/d liquids and 3,079 mmbtu/d gas (net working interest) during the quarter to March 31, 2018. Production rates remain broadly flat, with the impact of natural declines in the producing fields, being largely offset by ongoing efficiency gains and reactivations of older wells. Jadestone generated adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depletion, depreciation, amortisation and exploration expense (EBITDAX) of US$0.9mm for the quarter ended March 31, 2018, compared to a negative EBITDAX of US$6.5mm in the same period a year earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Company reported a net loss before tax of US$15.9 million, compared to a net loss before tax of US$15.7 million for the same period a year earlier. Earnings were affected by a one-time non-cash impairment charge of US$11.9 million associated with the Companys decision to relinquish its 100% working interest in Vietnams Block 127 at the end of the current exploration phase, on May 24, 2018. This relinquishment is consistent with the Companys ongoing strategy to transform the asset portfolio by exiting the long-dated and non-carried exploration-only assets, particularly those in deep water, originally held by Mitra Energy. In connection with the Companys commodity hedges, during the three months ended March 31, 2018 total non-cash charges of US$1.8 million were booked to the income statement and other comprehensive income to reflect current market values at March 31, 2018. In the same period a year earlier, the Company had no commodity hedges. The Company reported total book costs of production of US$12.8mm during the quarter including non-cash depletion and amortisation costs of US$2.8mm; or US$34.70 per barrel of oil equivalent production, net of non-cash depletion and amortisation costs. Investing activities for the quarter amounted to a cash outflow of US$0.5mm, comprised of payments for intangible exploration assets and payments for property, plant and equipment. The Company has US$9.7mm cash, plus a further US$10.0mm of cash in support of a bank guarantee, and another US$13.0mm undrawn on the Companys convertible bond facility. Selected financial information The following table provides selected financial information of the Company, which was derived from, and should be read in conjunction with, the consolidated audited financial statements for the period ended March 31, 2018. Quarterly & year to date comparison Mar 2018 Qtr Mar 2017 Qtr Change (%) Production, mboe 369.1 260.1 41.9% Sales, mboe 333.0 307.4 8.3% Avg realised liquids price, US$/bbl 67.34 57.12 17.9% Sales revenue, US$mm 21.0 17.3 21.4% Capital expenditure1, US$mm 0.5 2.7 (81.5%) Quarterly comparison Mar 2018 Qtr Dec 2017 Qtr Change (%) Production, mboe 369.1 402.0 (8.2%) Sales, mboe 333.0 363.8 (8.5%) Avg realised liquids price, US$/bbl 67.34 60.39 11.5% Sales revenue, US$mm 21.0 20.9 0.5% Capital expenditure1, US$mm 0.5 0.6 (16.7%) 1 Payment for oil and gas property, plant and equipment and intangible exploration assets. Excludes acquisition related capital expenditure 2 Comparable reporting period for the current transitional period for the nine months ended December 31, 2017 Conference call and webcast The management team will host an investor and analyst conference call at 9:00 p.m. (Singapore), 2:00 p.m. (London), and 9:00 a.m. (Toronto) on Thursday, May 31, 2018 , including a question and answer session. The live webcast of the presentation will be available at the below webcast link. Dial-in details are provided below. Please register approximately 15 minutes prior to the start of the call. The results for the period ended December 31, 2017 will be available on the Companys website at: http://www.jadestone-energy.com/investor-relations/ Webcast link: https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/1677165/599C108D612D7D77F397081B9B9F58D0 Event conference title: Jadestone Energy Results Briefing (Quarter ending March 31, 2018) Start time/date: 9:00 a.m. Toronto time, Thursday May 31, 2018 Confirmation code: 7082439 Participant ITFS Dial-In Numbers: Australia 1800287011 Canada (888) 231-8191 France 0800917449 Hong Kong 800-901-563 Japan 00-53-11-60-858 South Korea 00308131987 New Zealand 0-800-450-745 Singapore 8008526506 United Kingdom 0-800-051-7107 United States (888) 231-8191 Other International (Canada toll) +1 (647) 427-7450 Area access numbers are subject to carrier capacity and call volumes. For further information, please contact: Media and General Enquiries Email: contact@jadestone-energy.com Phone: +65 6342 0359 Investor Enquiries Email: IR@jadestone-energy.com Phone: +1 (403) 975-6752 About Jadestone Energy Inc. Jadestone Energy Inc. is a TSX-V listed oil and gas company headquartered in Singapore. The Company is currently engaged in production, development and exploration and appraisal activities in Australia, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Following a recent strategic review, the Company is focusing on acquiring assets with production in the near term, and where significant follow-on reinvestment opportunities exist to enhance value, as well as undeveloped discoveries which may be rapidly brought to production. Cautionary Statements A barrel of oil equivalent ("boe") is determined by converting a volume of natural gas to barrels using the ratios of six thousand cubic feet ("mcf") to one barrel. Boes may be misleading, particularly if used in isolation. A boe conversion ratio of 6 mcf:1 boe 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 oil as compared to natural gas is significantly different from the energy equivalency of 6:1, utilising a conversion on a 6:1 basis may be misleading as an indication of value. Certain statements in this press release are forward-looking statements and information (collectively forward-looking statements), within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation, as well as other applicable international securities laws. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are forward-looking and not historical facts. Some of the forward-looking statements may be identified by statements that express, or involve discussions as to expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, through the use of phrases such as will likely result, are expected to, will continue, is anticipated, is targeting, estimated, intend, plan, guidance, objective, projection, aim, goals, target, schedules, and outlook). In particular, forward-looking statements in this press release include, but are not limited to statements regarding the ODP for Nam Du/U Minh, the early stages of FEED and related work, Jadestones continuing discussions with its partners and the regulators on a new contract for Ogan Komering, the potential for business development opportunities or acquisitions, and investment or re-investment options, whether organic or inorganic. Because actual results or outcomes could differ materially from those expressed in any forward-looking statements, investors should not place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve numerous assumptions, inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, which contribute to the possibility that the predicted outcomes will not occur. Some of these risks, uncertainties and other factors are similar to those faced by other oil and gas companies and some are unique to Jadestone. The forward-looking information contained in this news release speaks only as of the date hereof. The Company does not assume any obligation to publicly update the information, except as may be required pursuant to applicable laws. 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. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service New Delhi, May 30 AirAsia Indias non-executive director R Venkataraman on Wednesday said he had been wrongly named as an accused by the CBI in the case it has registered against AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes and others over alleged violation of norms for getting international flying licences. In a statement issued on Wednesday, Venkataraman said, In my capacity as non-executive director of AirAsia India Limited, I have been wrongly named as an accused by the CBI on operational matters where I had little or no role to play. He said he had been named in the FIR filed by the CBI as a result of the revenge game allegedly being played by Cyrus P Mistry against the Tata Trusts Trustees. It is commonly known that the present accusations qua Air Asia India find their root in baseless allegations made by Cyrus P Mistry and the Shapoor Pallonji Group against Tata Trusts Trustees (me included) and Tata Sons in his revenge legal actions, Venkataraman said. The CBI on Tuesday registered a case against AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes and others over alleged violation of norms for getting international flying licences. The investigative agency said officials related to AirAsia colluded with unknown government officials during the UPA rule and tried to lobby with civil servants later to have the 5/20 rule amended. PTI editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Chandigarh, May 30 Banking services in the northern region comprising Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh and J&K were crippled on Wednesday as around one lakh employees, primarily from public sector bank, went on a two-day strike, protesting against a meager 2% salary hike offered by the Indian Banks Association (IBA). The northern region has around 10,000 branches of public sector banks. With banks closed and employees on strike, operations like deposits, withdrawals through cheques, fixed deposit renewals and government treasury operations were hit by the strike. However, the operations of private sector banks such as ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and Axis Bank, were almost normal except cheque clearances. Since the strike coincides with the month-end, salary withdrawals, especially by the government employees from branches, are likely to get affected. According to bankers, many of the ATMs are likely to go dry tomorrow as cash flow has been disrupted due to the strike. The United Forum of Banking Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of nine bank unions, observed strike across the country against the proposed wage hike of 2% as against 15% given last time, said Deepak Kumar Sharma, joint general secretary, All India Bank Officers Confederation. The strike will continue tomorrow and there will be more rallies and demonstrations all over the country. In the past five years, the business of banks has doubled, the operating profit has more than doubled and the staff expenses have come down. The prices of all essentials have gone up. Hence, we are seeking hike in wages from the IBA, he added. editorial@tribune.com Vijay C Roy Amidst soaring petrol and diesel rates, the automobile manufacturers are contemplating to raise prices of passenger cars by 2-3 per cent to absorb a spike in the input cost. Chandigarh and Delhi-based auto dealers have confirmed The Tribune that they have indications from the automakers about an imminent price revision to offset the impacts of weak rupee, increase in customs duty, high steel prices and freight rates. Dealers expect many automobile manufacturers, including Maruti and Honda, to announce a hike in the range of 2-3 per cent in the near future. The countrys second largest manufacturer Hyundai Motor India Ltd. (HMIL) is all set to increase prices up to 2 per cent depending on the variants from the next month. Tata Motors and M&M have also raised rates of their products. Maruti, the country largest carmaker, is planning to increase the prices of its entire portfolio, including Ciaz, Baleno, S-Cross and Ignis between Rs 5,000 and Rs 25,000. A company source, however, said that the management has not yet taken a final decision. A senior executive of Honda said the company is also contemplating to increase the prices, but not in June. There has been an increase in customs duty for the auto industry few months ago but we have been absorbing it at the company level and it has not been passed to the customer as yet, Honda Cars India Senior Vice President & Director Sales & Marketing Rajesh Goel said. The company does not want to disturb the pricing structure as its Amaze is in the launch phase. So while we may consider increasing prices, we do not plan to increase prices from June as of now, he told The Tribune. He spoke about the imminent price hike after the launch of All New Amaze in Chandigarh on Tuesday. Immediately after the launch Amaze has attracted 10,000 bookings. Automobile manufacturers are hit by the double whammy of customs duty hike in the Budget 2018-19 and depreciation of the Rupee against Yen and Dollar. In the Budget, customs duty on specified parts and accessories of motor vehicles, motor cars were raised from 7.5 per cent to 15 per cent. A week Rupee means costly import of components. The Rupee, which was at Rs 65.07 per dollar on April 1, is currently valued at Rs 67.87. Besides, automobile raw materials such as steel, aluminium and copper have been increasing consistently in last six months. The carmakers have, however, registered a healthy growth in the past six months. According to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) data, the passenger vehicle sales rose by 7.5 per cent in April to 298,504 units from 277,683 units sold during the corresponding period in 2017. The Northern region comprising Punjab, Chandigarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir including Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, contributes 30 per cent of the total all-India sales. 2-3% increase likely vermaajay1968@gmail.com Tribune News Service Panchkula, May 30 A 15-year-old girl died under mysterious circumstances at Nada village here. The police on Wednesday booked Mukesh Kumar, a resident of the same locality, on a murder charge. The girl, Sahiba, had injury marks on her neck and wrist. The exact cause of the death will be known after the postmortem. DSP Noopur Bishnoi said a case of murder was registered on a complaint of the parents of the victim. She said when the victims parents reached home around 5.30 pm, the room was locked from inside. They forced open the door. When they went inside, the boy was found unconscious and the girl was lying in a pool of blood. It is learnt that Sahibas parents wanted to take her back to their native place in Uttar Pradesh and had gone to book the tickets. Finding her alone at home, Mukesh Kumar went to meet her. The accused is hospitalised. He probably took poison. He is a major, said Bishnoi. She refused to comment on the relationship between the two as the accused is hospitalised and his statement is yet to be recorded. Asked whether both had tried to commit suicide together, Bishnoi clarified that the case was registered on a complaint of the victims parents and the probe was on. Nirmal Sandhu Nirmal Sandhu The Punjab Chief Minister lost no time in condemning last weeks blast in an Indian eatery in Canada. He called it an act of terror even though the police there had ruled it out. The Tribunes sub-headline of the news report said it unambiguously: No proof of terror or hate crime yet, say police. Capt Amarinder Singh spoke before any of Canadas leaders and proceeded to enlighten the world on the dangers of terrorism. A day later, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada also spoke not on terror, but to express solidarity with the victims. It is recognised the world over that overreaction and publicity fuel terror and serve the goal of terrorists. Terror or extremism is not an issue in Punjab and the Chief Minister alone speaks about it. Neither Congressmen nor Opposition leaders talk about it. At his meeting with Trudeau in February, the Captain raised the issue of Khalistan-related militancy which got wide publicity, at home and abroad, much to the delight of separatists. Recently, he met the Union Home Minister to seek a strategy to deal with the revival of extremism in Punjab. The meeting got nationwide media coverage. Official briefings are held whenever Khalistan or terror-linked arrests are made. A content-starved media splashes such reports, creating a sense of fear and uncertainty. On the one hand, the Chief Minister announces concessions to attract industry, on the other, he gives the impression the state is far from peaceful. If there are any threats to peace, it is the job of the police to go after the subversive elements quietly, without rushing to the media for credit-seeking or scare-mongering. The Chief Minister may be whipping up the fear of terror revival for a political purpose: to consolidate the Hindu vote. Besides, the preoccupation with militancy deflects attention from issues of drug trafficking, unemployment, agrarian distress, low growth and financial mess. The establishment has another reason for keeping militancy in the centre stage. A recent three-part Punjabi Tribune report carried a long list of VIPs who have got not just gunmen and Gypsys in the name of security, but also luxury cars with unlimited free oil. It could be in the interest of the privileged few travelling in expensive cars at state expense to keep the terror threat alive, even if it means scaring away potential industrialists, investors, tourists or tarnishing the reputation of Sikhs. Punjabs political and police leadership can draw a lesson or two from Canadas low-profile handling of the blast and an earlier incident in which a van driver ploughed his vehicle into a crowd in Toronto, killing 10. Unlike the police, the political class and media here, multicultural Canadians, known worldwide for peaceful coexistence, downplay and refuse to acknowledge acts of terror, if any. Cops dont immediately name crime perpetrators or their community. Politicians dont try to politicise crime or polarise society. There are no instant shouting exchanges on television. The police is allowed to do its job without media/public/political pressure for quick results. The comparison with the state of affairs in Punjab is stark. Militancy and crime thrive, among other factors, on a sense of grievance, hurt and injustice, which happens when the law is not applied uniformly and some are treated more equally than others. If a religious leader threatens to eliminate a rival, the police does not file a case and arrest him. Instead, the Chief Minister issues a counter threat. Back-seat driving by a Chief Minister is bound to demoralise the police. Police bosses have willingly surrendered their operational autonomy. Under the Badals, they even allowed tehsil-level Akalis to run police stations. An SHO registers an FIR against the Congress candidate during the Shahkot byelection for illegal mining. His superiors and the Election Commission do not see if the FIR is prima facie evidence-based. They join hands to punish him. His mental condition and subsequent conduct are separate issues. The Chief Minister rushes to the rescue of the tainted candidate, declaring him not guilty without evidence or inquiry. Addressing a rally the day Congress nominee Hardev Laddi filed his nomination papers, Capt Amarinder Singh said: I have known him (Laddi) for long. His uncle, Darbara Singh, was the Speaker of the Vidhan Sabha. He has a very clean heart. The implication is: Since I know him, since he is a nephew of a former Speaker and since I am saying this, he is innocent. However, the law the Chief Minister is sworn to uphold gives a judge the right to declare a person guilty or innocent based on evidence. Countless ordinary citizens are hauled up for minor offences or on suspicion or false complaints. They languish in jails while others with connections get away, despite apparent evidence of guilt. The justice system in Punjab does not treat everyone fairly and equally. Here is another instance of the Chief Minister moving swiftly to bail out a suspect a judge. Last November, the Amarinder government did not just give a clean chit to a high court judge accused of bribery in a sting video released by an opposition MLA, but also passed an Assembly resolution against the two Lok Insaaf Party MLAs who had hinted at a conspiracy to fix the Leader of the Opposition. Any pragmatic politician at the helm would leave such an issue to the Chief Justice. The Captain has his unusual ways of governance. The Assembly resolution, passed in November 2017, accused the two MLAs of impairing the majesty of law, obstructing the administration of justice and of public at large. It will be of interest to know what the CM has to say about his own partys top leadership moving an impeachment motion against the Chief Justice of India over issues on which legal experts are divided. It is possible the CM may be genuinely worried about the revival of militancy and is unwittingly fanning the terror fire. But it is unthinkable the two-time Chief Minister-cum-Home Minister of Punjab does not understand what siding with suspects and coming in the way of the law means. By placing himself on the side of possible law-breakers, he is jeopardising the Congress victory chances in 2019 and the political future of younger party colleagues. It may be unfair to expect Canada-type first-world governance from political leaders Punjab has, but it should not be difficult to learn, at least, one basic lesson of policing and governance: respect for the rule of law, a key ingredient of a civilised life. nirmalssandhu@gmail.com shalender@tribune.com Soon after Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa took charge as Punjab Jail Minister last month, he had a shock realisation of what he was up against: a couple of gangsters called him up from prison! Ever since suffering that embarrassment, he seems determined to check irregularities and illegalities indulged in by both prisoners and jail staff. Just in the month of May, The Tribune carried at least six reports regarding mobiles being seized in the states prisons. The most recent case was of a prisoner going live on Facebook from Faridkot. There was even a violent protest by prisoners in Gurdaspur over frequent raids to seize phones. It may yet be too early to conclude whether the seizures reflect a greater effort to impose discipline, or it just shows the lax administration within the high walls. Several jail officials, including superintendents, have indeed been suspended following inquiries. But the minister needs to assess how far just cracking the whip is going to work. There was also a jailbreak in Ludhiana recently, which is a serious security lapse. The foremost defence the jail staff would present is the acute shortage of hands; and that is valid. The reasons behind that are complex, including that people are not prepared to take up a job in jails. Some are known to have quit after joining. The work conditions are not the most attractive; lack of personal growth avenues is another factor. The most daunting, of course, is the kind of people jailors have to deal with criminals. Various ways tried by the government to overcome the challenge have failed to yield results. Attention thus needs to be paid to making prisons the reformatory institutes they are supposed to be. Basic human needs of prisoners should be addressed on priority, which will also keep them from enticing warders into corruption. Also, all staffing, training and motivational issues have to be looked into with a professional approach. Prisons serve to shut criminals away, but we cant afford to shut them away from our minds. The prison bluebook needs a drastic overhaul. AJAX, Ontario, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Environmental Waste International Inc. ("EWS") (TSX VENTURE:EWS) (the "Company"), announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with a North American company for the sale of a TR4000 waste tire system, which uses EWSs patented Reverse Polymerization technology. The system, which is expandable, will initially be capable of processing 4,000 tires a day (12,000 metric tons per year). Besides Syngas, which is used to generate power to run the plant, the facility will produce 5.4 million kilograms of reclaimed Carbon Black and 5.2 million liters of oil. Each of these commodities can be sold back into industry to produce rubber, plastic, coatings and many other valuable products. The sale is subject to completion of definitive documentation, including a technology licensing contract and customary closing conditions. There is no guarantee that the sale will close. Bob MacBean, CEO said This is an important milestone and exciting time for EWS. We believe our technology is uniquely positioned to deal with the worldwide waste rubber problem in a profitable and environmentally friendly manner. We are currently in various stages of discussion with prospective customers or partners in countries around the world, which underscores the global nature of the problem and the attractiveness of our technology solution. The signing of this MOU comes after extensive due diligence conducted by this customer who concluded that our technology was superior from both an economic and environmental perspective. As with most emerging technologies, and almost all regulated industries such as waste management, there is a long lead time associated with business development initiatives. Nonetheless, I am pleased with the activity we are seeing in our sales pipeline. About Environmental Waste International Inc. Environmental Waste International, Inc. specializes in eco-friendly systems for the breakdown of organic materials, including tires. EWS has spent over 15 years engineering systems that integrate the EWS patented Reverse Polymerization process and proprietary microwave delivery system. EWSs unique microwave technology safely processes and recycles waste tires, while creating a highly valuable commodity output for industry, including carbon black, oil and steel. Each unit is designed to be energy efficient and where possible, create an economically positive model for the recovery of various hydrocarbon oil and gases. For more information please visit, www.ewi.ca. Forward-Looking Statements This news release includes certain forward-looking statements that are based upon current expectations, which involve risks and uncertainties associated with the Company's business and the environment in which the business operates. Any statements contained herein that are not statements of historical facts may be deemed to be forward-looking, including those identified by the expressions "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "intend", and similar expressions to the extent they relate to the Company or its management. The forward-looking statements are not historical facts, but reflect the Company's current expectations regarding future results or events. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations, including the matters discussed under "Risks and Uncertainties" in the Companys most recent Management Discussion & Analysis, which can be found on the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. The Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements. 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: Environmental Waste International Inc. Bob MacBean, CEO (905) 686-8689 or (800) 399-2366 Bob.macbean@ewmc.com www.ewi.ca editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Ambala, May 30 Amid the controversy over former President Pranab Mukherjees decision to attend an RSS meet, Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij on Wednesday said it should be mandatory for everyone to spend time with the organisation. The RSS is a nationalist organisation. It should be mandatory for all countrymen to go to the Sangh for some time. Many problems of the country will be resolved, he tweeted. Later in a statement, Vij welcomed the former President Pranab Mukherjees decision to accept invitation to the RSS invitation in Nagpur. The RSS is a nationalist organisation that develops a persons character, he said. The outspoken BJP minister is not new to controversies. On Wednesday, he had compared Congress president Rahul Gandhi to Nipah virus that left more than 10 dead in Kerala. Rahul Gandhi is like Nipah virus. Any political party that comes in contact with him will be destroyed, he had tweeted. Earlier this month, he had backed a demand by several groups to ban namaz at public places and in the vicinities where the majority is of Hindus. On April 24, Vij took to Twitter to attack the Congress. He wrote that the partys flag should be red in colour as it was soaked in the blood of millions of innocent people. editorial@tribune.com Panipat, May 30 Residents of Sanoli Khurd village protested against Mahender Chawla, a key witness in the cases against Asaram and his son Narain Sai, at the Mini Secretariat here on Wednesday. They alleged that Mahender Chawla was harassing villagers and creating problems in development. Protesters also submitted a memorandum to the Deputy Commissioner and the Superintendent of Police against him. Priyanka Sharma, village sarpanch, alleged that Chawla had threatened a contractor and misbehaved with villagers. She alleged that he was trying to harass her by filing an RTI against her. The sarpanch also alleged that he had demanded money for dissolving the RTIs. She said a case had also been registered against him on May 21 for harassing her. On the other hand, Mahender Chawla refuted the allegations and said the sarpanch and her father-in-law had lodged a false case against him. He demanded a CBI inquiry into the property and assets of the sarpanch and her family. TNS editorial@tribune.com UNA, MAY 30 On a call by the United Forum of Bank Unions, the staff of all nationalised bank in Una district staged a protest. The employees gathered in front of the State Bank of India branch in Una and raised slogans against the bank managements. District coordinator of the United Forum of Bank Unions Umesh Thakur said their demands included early decision on the pay scale revision, besides better service conditions. OC editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Shimla, May 30 Congress councillors under Kasumpti MLA Anirudh Singh on Wednesday created a ruckus in the General House of the Shimla Municipal Corporation, seeking removal of Mayor Kusum Sadret and Deputy Mayor Rakesh Sharma. They staged a walkout, blaming the BJP for the ongoing water crisis here. The councillors sat on a dharna at the Talland junction on the circular road, bringing traffic to a halt for 30 minutes. They raised anti-CM and anti-Mayor slogans, saying that the Mayor had been in China for a week while the residents were reeling under the worst-ever water crisis. According to source, the councillors had planned a no-confident motion against the Mayor and Deputy Mayor. But the BJP planned a countermove and the party issued a whip, directing them to leave the House before such motion was moved in. As per the BJPs game plan, of the 19 councillors, 17 were present. They disappeared from the House when the Congress councillors were staging a dharna in the floor of the House. Congress has 14 councillors while one councillor is from the CPM. There were talks that the motion would pass as certain members of the anti-Mayor group in the BJP would vote for the motion on the water crisis to avoid the public ire, revealed insiders. The Congress said the Mayor had no moral authority to be in office. CPM councillor Shelly Sharma, who also joined the chakka jam with the Congress councillors, said many areas in 34 wards were not getting water even after nine days and the distribution system had collapsed. They also charged that the MC shifted the meeting from Bachat Bhawan to Palika Sadan at the last moment as part of the BJPs strategy to thwart Congress game plan. The BJP government and the MC had failed to provide water to the residents. The Mayor should quit now, Anirudh Singh said after the walkout. On the other hand, Deputy Mayor Sharma, who chaired the meeting in the absence of the Mayor, said the House was adjourned. MC Commissioner Rohit Jamwal was also present. editorial@tribune.com Amir Karim Tantray Tribune News Service Jammu, May 30 As both India and Pakistan have agreed to maintain the 2003 ceasefire on both the International Border (IB) and the Line of Control (LoC), border dwellers continue to remain apprehensive about Pakistans approach towards the agreement. They hope that peace should prevail on the IB so that they can live their lives without any fear but going by the past experiences, they dont trust the word from the Pakistani side. On Tuesday, the Director General of Military Operations (DGMOs) of both the countries talked on hotline and agreed to maintain the 2003 ceasefire. Residents of Changia village, situated on Zero Line in the Arnia sector, have suffered during the recent border skirmishes between the BSF and Pakistan Rangers from May 15 to 24. Most of the people, whose houses were damaged partially or fully, are yet to return to their village. We have seen in the past how Pakistan violated the ceasefire pact despite agreeing to maintain it. This time too, they might have agreed to maintain the ceasefire but their word cant be trusted, said Ramesh Chander, former panch of Changia village. During the recent shelling, 11 people, including two BSF jawans, were killed and more than 60 people were injured. Around two lakh people were left homeless and some of them stayed in relief camps while others went to the houses of their relatives at safer places. After 2010, the border dwellers have been exposed again to the pre-2003 situation when it was raining shells on the entire 198-km-long IB of Jammu frontiers. The initiative taken by former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf to agree to maintain the ceasefire in 2003 is losing its sheen. Now, the situation is back to square one and people suffer whenever firing and shelling happens. We cant trust Pakistan and its forces anymore. There is no surety that Pakistan will abide by this agreement and maintain peace. If there will be any provocation from the other side, our forces will retaliate, as said by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, said Ashwani Sharma, senior BJP leader and former Bishnah MLA. Meanwhile, the Opposition parties have attacked the Central government of not speaking a word on the issue and failing to help the border people. There is no hope among the border residents. The talks happened between the armies of the two countries and there was no involvement of the governments. Neither the PM nor any of his ministers from the Centre or state spoke about the border people and maintaining peace. The BJP government, both at the Centre and the state level, has failed miserably, said Vikas Dutt, a Congress leader from Bishnah. uttara@tribuneindia.com Ishrat S Banwait Tribune News Service Chandigarh, May 30 Twelve years after video tapes exposed a sex scandal in Jammu and Kashmir, a special court on Wednesday held five persons guilty of rape. They are former Border Security Force (BSF) Deputy Inspector General (DIG) KC Padhi, former DSP Mohammad Ashraf Mir, Shabbir Ahmed Laway, Shabbir Ahmed Langoo and Masood Ahmed. It let off two of the accused, former Additional Advocate General of Jammu and Kashmir Anil Sethi and businessman Mehruj-ud din Malik, giving them the benefit of doubt. The prosecution failed to prove charges against the two with the victim refusing to identify them in court. The other two accused, Sabeena, who ran a brothel, and her husband Abdul Hamid Bullah, died during the course of the trial. All were booked under Section 376 of the Ranbir Penal Code and Section 5 of the Immoral Trafficking Act. Langoo, who was also booked under Section 67 of the Information and Technology Act, was acquitted of the charge. The quantum of punishment will be pronounced on June 4. The scam came to light in 2006 after the police were handed two CDs showing minor Kashmiri girls being sexually exploited for money. The police questioned two girls, including the prosecutrix, and brothel owner Sabeena, who named 56 persons. The case was taken over by the CBI and the trial shifted by the Supreme Court to Chandigarh. The CBI unearthed a sex racket involving ministers and influential persons. With senior PDP leader Muzaffar Hussain Baig pointing an accusing finger at then CM Omar Abdullah, the latter resigned in 2009. A complaint in the case was lodged by then president of Samaj Sudhar Committee and supplementary cases were filed against several hoteliers and guest house owners. In seven such cases, the accused have already been acquitted, the last one being Muhammad Yusuf Mir, former Superintendent of Police of the J&K Police. In April last year, Riyaz Ahmed Kawa was acquitted for running a brothel at Imperial Hotel. Among others acquitted were former Chief Secretary Muhammad Iqbal Khandey, former ministers Raman Mattu, police official Absar Ahmed Dar, Ghulam Ahmed Mir and Hilal Ahmed Shah. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Jammu, May 30 Choudhary Lal Singh, former minister and BJP leader, called upon people of Jammu to stay united to fight the final battle against conspirators who were defaming the Dogras. He called upon people to join Maha Swabhiman rallies in Jammu in large numbers to demand a CBI probe into the Kathua case. He was addressing a series of public gatherings in Kharote, Patyari, Janglote and Krishna Colony in Kathua district. The BJP leader said the Central leadership of the BJP had accepted that the demand for a CBI probe into the case was justified. I met Central leaders of the BJP and apprised them of the pain and agony of the people of the Jammu region over the deliberate denial of a CBI probe. I told them how things were manipulated and an impression was created that Dogras of the Jammu region were trying to sabotage the probe being done by the crime branch of the J&K Police. We were called pro-rapist. I made it clear that I could not remain silent when my honour was being attacked, said Lal Singh. He further said the Dogra Swabhiman rally of May 20 was just the beginning of a mass movement in the Jammu region against the highly communal, discriminatory and irresponsible attitude of the party leading the coalition in Jammu and Kashmir. We are not demanding something legally impossible. A lie is being spread that the case is pending before the Supreme Court and cannot be handed over to the CBI. I understand these tricks of the ruling party. Let people understand that the Supreme Court has not restrained the state government from ordering a CBI probe into the case. All those spreading lies on behalf of the government should bear in mind that their fate would be decided by the people of the Jammu region and not by the party leading the coalition government, said Lal Singh. shalender@tribune.com Geetu Vaid With the business environment becoming global, the popularity of business management degree from foreign university has also increased over the past few years. The coveted MBA degree becomes all the more prized if pursued at a university abroad. Several top global business universities are cashing in on the rising interest of Indian students for this degree, whether it is the intake schedule or the subject combinations offered. The visit of a high-level delegation from La Trobe Business School, Melbourne, to Chandigarh last week was a part of the universitys initiative to reach out to more and more Indian students. The delegation led by Prof Jane Hamilton, Dean and Head of La Trobe Business School (LBS), apprised students of the new intake schedule as well as new courses designed to suit their needs.La Trobe University has jumped about 200 places in the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities. It is placed 301 in the world and it means the university is placed in the top 400 in the world in all three recognised International Rankings of Universities, said Professor Hamilton. Giving information about the popular courses at the business school, she mentioned that Indian students are particularly interested in PG programmes and the very popular courses include Master of Management with project management and Master of Business Analytics, and Master of Professional Accounting. Talking about the new intake schedule she mentioned that Indian students could apply for a January intake from 2019. That will give them a head start and they will be able to complete their programme in an accelerated time. This will mean that their cost of living will be less. Students who want to join in March and July or November can do so. Our programme is accredited by EPAS and recognised by CEO Magazine as a Tier One Global Programme. A feature of the course is an opportunity for students to participate in an Enterprise Learning Project within an Organisation, she added. Mentioning industry focus and practicality as the mainstays of business programmes at LBS, Professor Hamilton said that the fast changing business dynamics create need for new skills and areas. Keeping the industry demand in mind LBS has also introduced new courses like Big Ideas in Business and Digital Business in the UG degree. Scholarship avenues Talking about the scholarships being offered to students, Professor Hamilton said: The Excellence Scholarship is there to help bright Indian students to benefit from the expertise and cutting-edge facilities at La Trobe Business School. Depending on the prior academic performance of a student, we offer 15, 20 and 25 per cent of the total tuition fee for the complete duration of the course. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM Nonika Singh On the surface, he seems like an unlikely proponent of Hinduism. But then, the incredibly eloquent and erudite author of some brilliant books, like The Great Indian Middle Class and Being Indian; Inside The Real India, politician-author Pavan K Varma doesnt see atheism as a prerequisite for being secular. Or rootless cosmopolitanism as an answer to the growing intolerance. Besides, once he begins talking, punctuating his conversations with shlokas, which he clearly remembers by heart, you can only nod; who else but he can defend Hinduism in the face of Hindutava forces hell-bent to shake its very foundation. In Chandigarh, at the invitation of Chandigarh Literary Society, for the release of his latest book on the seer Adi Shankarcharya, titled so, rather simply with an equally succinct tagline Hinduisms Greatest Thinker, Varma underlines the deep philosophical underpinnings of the religion. When the former diplomat and todays full-time politician reiterates, Hinduism is a way of life, its not just another catch-phrase to capture vote-banks. He decodes, the grand edifice of Indian thought and spells out many keywords like anant, anaadi and atal. Words of wisdom Nothing in Hinduism, he asserts is random, provided you dont reduce it to a ritual. In short, to its lowest common denominator, an assertion he uses often enough to drive home his point. To the ultra-right who take pride in their ancient wisdom and whose zeal is in direct correspondence with their ignorancehe advises, if not admonishes, Understand your religion before you go out to spread its glory, none of which lies in divisiveness. Of course, the book is as much aimed at the misinformed as the youth whose feedback has gladdened his heart. And if you are wondering about the timing of the book, well, it has nothing to do with reaping political dividends. But, yes, the need for it, he believes, could not have been more topical or relevant. As the book traces the timeline of the seer and unveils many known as well as unknown facets about the thinker; personally he stands wonderstruck by the life of the great who created Indias civilisational map with the establishment of four maths. How in a short span of 32 years, the saint born in Kerala possessed such cerebral compression of energy and vigour of thought. And the real revelation for Varma was, The link between his philosophy and the latest discoveries of quantum physics, cosmology and neurology. And this, he reminds you emphatically, is not Dinanath Batra school of Hinduism, which trivialises and devalues the actual profundity of ancient thought. Big debate Debate he insists was/is intrinsic to Hinduism when in the forest academies the philosophers professed - truth is one but called by many names, good thoughts come from different directions and impressed upon the spirit of enquiry. Indeed, misinterpretation is the bane of other religions too, but when it happens to a religion rooted in freedom of thought, he deems, the travesty is much greater. Varma can go on and on to put up a spirited defence of Hinduisms metaphysical foundation, as also the great need to learn from the past without chauvinism and xenophobia. But then, he, we all know, is a man of many shades and seasons. So he regales us as much with anecdotes related to the former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and how he came to translate his poems, as well as how he refused point blank to translate the patriotic ones. Next muse If you think a seminal book like Adi Shankaracharya has sapped his energy, the man, who believes, if you love something you will find time for it, has already moved on. Tulsidas Ramayana, which he upholds for sheer linguistic dexterity, is his next muse. While his only fictional book, When Loss is Gain, is ready to be adapted as a movie, his pen, sorry computer keys, will once again move to translate selected poems of Kaifi Azmi and Jan Nisar Akhtar sieved by Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi. And in case, if you have any questions about how this official spokesperson of JDU reconciles the mind of an intellectual with the murky world of politics, he answers simply, I always have the choice and the freedom to move out. But I feel politics is the biggest platform to stand up for what you believe in. Does that also answer how he takes on feisty motor-mouth anchors in incessant debates that he is a regular part of? Well, if you still have doubts, let you be reminded that he was one hell of an orator back in his St. Stephens College days. Armed with his latest well-researched volume, you bet his adversaries will find it difficult to beat him at their game. They may have started it, but he intends to have the last word; on Hinduism or any other subject, right now its advantage Varma. Listen to him, or better still, read him. nonikasingh@tribunemail.com editorial@tribune.com Manav Mander Tribune News Service Ludhiana, May 30 With only two weeks left for the ongoing measles-rubella (MR) campaign the Health Department has found itself in a quandary. The department had set a target to vaccinate 12.5 lakh kids in Ludhiana district, however, 6 lakh children have not been vaccinated yet. As aresult, the private hospitals have been roped in to vaccinate the kids and conduct outreach camps. The department faced harrowing time in convincing parents of the school going students as rumours about side effects of MR vaccination spread like wild fire on social media. District immunisation officer Dr Jasbir Singh said, Till date we have vaccinated 6 lakh students. Schools which were earlier reluctant have now given their nod for vaccination. He said, The vaccination drive is also going on at private hospitals. Nearly 35 private hospitals have been roped in to administer MR vaccination free of cost to the children. If need arises we can extend the drive as well. The department had set a target to vaccinate 85 per cent kids before summer vaccations, however, it is almost 35 per cent short of the target. Ludhiana was divided into nine zones for the vaccination drive. Other than couple of zones, the department could hardly vaccinate 40-45 per cent students. Now, the department has asked schools to hand over the list of the students who refrained from vaccination earlier. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Trevali Mining Corporation (Trevali or the Company) (TSX:TV) (BVL:TV) (OTCQX:TREVF) (Frankfurt:4TI) announces that Mr. Gerbrand van Heerden has been appointed Chief Financial Officer of the Company, effective June 1, 2018. Gerbrand most recently served as Trevalis Senior Vice President Business Initiatives/Development. Gerbrand joined Trevali in 2017 following the Companys acquisition of the Perkoa and Rosh Pinah mines. He is both a Chartered Accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of South Africa and a Chartered Professional Accountant in British Columbia (CPABC) and has over 18 years of experience in various senior management roles in the mining industry. He commenced his career with Deloitte in South Africa, after which he joined Metorex Limited, a listed mining company as Group Financial Controller in 2004. He assumed increasing levels of responsibility over time, including involvement in numerous green and brownfield projects through commissioning and into operational readiness. In 2013, Gerbrand was appointed as Chief Financial Officer of Rosh Pinah Zinc Corporation and was instrumental in the turn-around and modernization of the operation, with a focus on establishing a continuous improvement culture. Gerbrands appointment comes following the retirement of Anna Ladd-Kruger who served as Trevalis CFO since 2011. The Board would like to take this opportunity to thank Ms. Ladd-Kruger for her service as the Company's CFO for the past seven years. I would like to welcome Gerbrand in his new role as Trevalis CFO, stated Dr. Mark Cruise, Trevalis President and CEO. His extensive base metals and finance experience will provide a solid foundation to the Company as it continues to evolve into a global, mid-tier miner. I would also like to thank Anna for her valuable contribution as CFO over the past seven years, where she helped Trevali transition from an exploration and development stage company to a top-10 global zinc producer with four operating mines. ABOUT TREVALI MINING CORPORATION Trevali is a zinc-focused, base metals company with four mines: the wholly-owned Santander mine in Peru, the wholly-owned Caribou mine in the Bathurst Mining Camp of northern New Brunswick, its 80% owned Rosh Pinah mine in Namibia and its 90% owned Perkoa mine in Burkina Faso. For further details on Trevali, please refer to the Companys website (www.trevali.com) and to its Canadian regulatory filings on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. On Behalf of the Board of Directors of TREVALI MINING CORPORATION Mark D. Cruise (signed) Mark D. Cruise, President Contact Information: Steve Stakiw, Vice President - Investor Relations and Corporate Communications Email: sstakiw@trevali.com Phone: (604) 488-1661 / Direct: (604) 638-5623 gspannu7@gmail.com Panaji, May 30 The Goa Police on Wednesday arrested 11 tourists, who had come to the coastal state from Pune in neighbouring Maharashtra, for allegedly assaulting and molesting two minor siblings at a beach near here. The siblings 17-year-old boy and his 16-year-old sisterwere sitting yesterday in a shack on the Baga beach, located in North Goa district, while their parents were having food nearby. At that time, a group of 11 visitors from Pune started clicking pictures of the girl, Calangute police stations Jivba Dalvi said, adding that this amounts to outraging her modesty. When the boy objected to the group taking photos of his sister, they allegedly slapped and beat him, he said, quoting a complaint filed by the victims parents. The Calangute police subsequently nabbed all the accused before they could leave the state, he said. Two of the 11 accused were juveniles, aged 15, and they were sent to a state-run protection home, Dalvi said. During the course of investigation, the police recorded statements of the minor siblings in the presence of members of an NGO working for child rights, he said. The mobile phone used to click pictures of the girl was confiscated and will be sent to a forensic laboratory for analysis, he said. Based on a complaint, the police registered a First Information Report (FIR) and arrested the visitors, he said. Offences were registered against all the accused under IPC Sections 354 (molestation), 143 (unlawful assembly), 147 (rioting) and 323 (causing hurt), and relevant provisions of the Goa Childrens Act, he added. PTI shalender@tribune.com Tribune News Service Mumbai, May 30 Unlike in the past four years, BJP leaders in Maharashtra are attending Iftar and Sehri parties this time and are letting the whole world know about it. The partys media cell is aggressively pitching pictures of various BJP leaders attending the event in what could be the last Ramzan before the next General Election. Last week, photographs of Maharashtra Governor Ch Vidhyasagar Rao attending the Ramzan Iftar at the Sunni Noori Masjid in suburban Bandra were released by the BJP showing him offering prayers with Muslim leaders and joining them in breaking the fast. Other pictures showed Mumbai BJP chief Ashish Shelar joining prominent Muslim businessmen for Sehri or the pre-dawn meal before the fast. Even the RSS has felt the need to tone down its attacks on rival parties for their minority appeasement and join in. The Muslim Rashtriya Manch (MRM), an affiliate of the Sangh, announced here that it would host an Iftar party at government guest house Sahyadri at Malabar Hill. The event scheduled for June 4 will have diplomats of various countries and prominent citizens of Mumbai in attendance. BJP sources say CM Devendra Fadnavis would be the main host at the event. pardeepdhull@gmail.com Bareilly (UP), May 30 Police in Bareilly is probing the complaint of a 19-year-old woman who has charged BJPs Bisauli legislator Kushagra Sagar with raping her on the pretext of marriage, a senior official said on Wednesday. Sagar has refuted the allegation as baseless. In a written complaint to the senior superintendent of police (SSP), the woman alleged that Sagar had an affair with her in 2014, when she was a minor, and she was kept in his house in Bareilly for two years on the promise of marriage and raped. Bareilly SSP Kalanidhi Naithani told PTI that an inquiry in this connection has been handed over to Circle Officer Niti Dwivedi and action will be taken on getting a report. The woman said she started going to his house in Bareillys Green Park area, under the Baradari police station area, in 2014 along with her mother who worked there. She claimed she had complained to the police earlier. But at the time, Sagars father Yogendra Sagar had promised her that he would get the two married when she became a major, she said. Kushagra, now an MLA of the Uttar Pradeshs ruling party, is planning to get married to somebody else, she has told the SSP. Dismissing the allegation, Sagar said, The girl used to work in our house and at that time her family had raised the charge which was found to be false during police investigation. They had also given a written apology, which we still have. The allegation is baseless, he told reporters here. His father, a former legislator, added that the charges were aimed at hindering the upcoming marriage of his son. The girl, who has threatened to commit suicide if she is denied justice, alleged that she is being defamed by the MLAs father who claims she has taken Rs 20 lakh and reached a compromise. The controversy comes soon after another BJP legislator, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, was jailed in connection with the alleged rape of a minor girl in Unnao district. PTI monicakchauhan@gmail.com New Delhi, May 30 The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) booked Delhi Minister Satyendar Jain in an alleged corruption case on Wednesday, and conducted searches at his residence, drawing angry reaction from Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. Jain, who holds the health and PWD portfolios, is accused of violating norms in hiring architects for the public works department (PWD). He is already facing a CBI case related to alleged money laundering. In the new case registered on Tuesday, the agency also named then officials of the PWDengineer-in-chief SK Srivastava, principal director (projects) Manu Amitabh, deputy director (admin), AK Pait, project manager P C Chanana as accused. CBI teams carried out searches at various locations, including the residences of Jain and other accused in the matter. In a tweet, the minister said the agency was carrying out searches at his residence. "Professionals were hired for different projects. All were forced to leave by the CBI," he said on the social media site. The CBI had registered a preliminary enquiry in the matter on April 5 last year and converted it into a regular case after it claimed to have found "prima facie" evidence. During a year-long preliminary enquiry, the CBI said it found that Jain had allegedly entered into a criminal conspiracy with the officials of the PWD to award the tender to Soni Detective and Allied Services for hiring the creative team for the department's works. It alleged that the accused abused their official position to change the terms and conditions of the notice inviting the tender to bring within the eligibility criteria the company, which had no prior experience of such work. Linking the CBI action to the proposed new norms for private hospitals "to end profiteering" announced by Jain on Monday, Kejriwal alleged that BJP wanted them scrapped but the AAP will go ahead with the policy. "What does PM Modi want?" he tweeted on the CBI raid. "Jain announced policy against profiteering by private hospitals and today raids were conducted at the behest of Modi government. "BJP wants this policy scrapped. It is a revolutionary policy and will help common people. We are not afraid of CBI. The policy will continue no matter how many raids are conducted," Kejriwal tweeted. Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said the AAP dispensation was stopping "loot" of private hospitals, but the "Centre gets pain, and it gets raids done by CBI". AAP leaders Ashish Khetan and Raghav Chaddha alleged the CBI, Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) and Delhi Police were being used to divert the attention of public from the good work done by the Delhi government. Our MLAs have been acquitted by courts in all cases registered against them. Raid is conducted on us so that an elected government is not allowed to work. In the history of democracy in 70 years, such harassment of an elected government has never been done by central agencies," Khetan told reporters. Opposition BJP attacked the Kejriwal government, asking why Jain was continuing in the Cabinet despite facing corruption case. "Chief Minister Kejriwal cannot take any action against him (Jain) because he is the accountant of all the black deeds of Delhi government and if he reveals the truth then legal action will certainly be taken against the APP leaders including Kejriwal," Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari said in a statement. According to the CBI, the order, issued by OSD to Jain, D C Goel, had proposed hiring of the creative team for PWD works for elaborate brain storming and planning not only architectural designs of government buildings, but also developing cost-effective methods of construction. In September 2015, it was proposed that young professionals from reputed institutions such as the IITs, NITs, NID, SPA and IIMs could be hired with monthly emoluments ranging from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh for the creative team as the PWD did not have such in-house capacity, the enquiry report said. "No minutes of any meeting held by Satyendar Jain, Minister of PWD, are available based on which this decision to hire the creative team was purportedly taken. Similarly, there was no request from the PWD for hiring of such a creative team," the agency alleged. The CBI alleged that the funds that were to be spent for the team from the department of the accounting head of the elevated corridor for the Barapullah-III project were "dishonestly" changed for the purpose of Mohalla clinics on February 19, 2016. Funds for architects and consultants could be met from savings of a project as per the CPWD manual but only in case of urgent requirement, while in this case no such urgent requirement was part of the records, it alleged. The condition for hiring professionals from the IITs and similar esteemed institutes was gradually diluted and finally omitted from the notice for the tender issued on March 15, 2016, it claimed. No market survey was done prior to the fixing of remunerations of the consultants, the agency alleged. PTI WATCH: Deputy CM of Delhi Manish Sisodia reacts on searches conducted by CBI at the residence of Delhi Minister Satyendra Jain in connection with the hiring of a creative team by PWD pic.twitter.com/nme7srOjgE ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 shalender@tribune.com Jakarta, May 30 India and Indonesia today elevated their bilateral ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and condemned terrorism in all its forms, including cross-border terror, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi held productive discussions with President Joko Widodo. India and Indonesia also signed 15 agreements, including those to boost cooperation in defence, space, science and technology, railways and health sectors, and called for freedom of navigation in the strategic Indo-Pacific region. Prime Minister Modi, who arrived in Jakarta last night on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, was accorded a red carpet welcome on his arrival at the Merdeka Palace, one of the presidential palaces in Indonesia, this morning. The two leaders discussed areas of strategic cooperation, ways towards ensuring better economic ties, closer cultural relations as well as regional and global issues of mutual interest. In a joint press statement after the meeting, Modi said Indias Act East Policy and the vision of SAGAR (Security and Growth for all in the Region) matched Widodos Maritime Fulcrum Vision. Both leaders reiterated the importance of achieving a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region where sovereignty, international law, freedom of navigation and overflight, sustainable development and an open and fair trade and investment system were respected, the statement said, amidst Chinas flexing of its military muscles in the East and South China seas. Modi also strongly condemned the recent terror strikes on three churches in Indonesias second-largest city Surabaya, and said India stood resolutely with Jakarta in the fight against terrorism. The PM said India and Indonesia would double their efforts to take bilateral trade to USD 50 billion by 2025 from USD 18 billion in 2017. Recalling the visit of ASEAN leaders in January to attend the Republic Day parade in New Delhi, Modi said India-ASEAN partnership could become a guarantee of peace not only in Indo-Pacific region but also beyond it. The joint statement said the two leaders welcomed the adoption of the Shared Vision on Maritime Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific between India and Indonesia with a strong belief that the two sides could develop further their cooperation in maritime sector, which could be a force of immense stability in the region. The document, the first with any ASEAN country, outlined areas of maritime cooperation and envisaged security architecture in the Indo-Pacific region, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said. They reaffirmed commitment in defence, with the signing of Defence Cooperation Agreement between two sides. The pact would further strengthen and renew the existing cooperation for the mutual benefit of the two countries and the region, the statement said. PTI shalender@tribune.com Aditi Tandon Tribune News Service New Delhi, May 30 In a move that could bring a ray of hope to people infected with Nipah virus disease in Kerala, the Centre has granted regulatory waivers for emergency import of an anti-NiV drug developed by an Australian researcher. A 50-dose consignment of Monoclonal 102.4 antibodies developed by Dr Christopher C Broder of Australia reached India today and will be dispatched to Kozhikode Government Medical College for further administration to NiV patients. These antibodies have reported a 90 per cent success rate among NiV patients in Bangladesh. On the recommendation of ICMR, Indias apex medical research body, Drug Controller General of India S Eswara Reddy issued a no-objection certificate for customs clearance of the consignment of whats believed to be a wonder drug. Regulatory waiver by Health Ministry means the drug will not have to go through clinical trials mandated for all imported medicines before they can be administered to the local population. The ICMR, in its letter to the Ministry seeking NoC for import of anti-Nipah Monoclonal 102.4 antibodies, wrote, Nipah is a potentially fatal infection with a mortality rate of 70 to 100 per cent. As of now, more than 90 contacts of the primary and secondary cases of Nipah have been listed and will be closely followed for 42 days. There is no licensed vaccine or drug for NiV across the world but after extensive review of literature and discussions with global stakeholders, we found that Monoclonal 102.4 antibodies against Nipah virus have been developed by Dr Christopher C Broder of Australia. The antibodies have shown promising results. The government of Queensland has maintained a stockpile of m102.4 antibodies for emergency use on compassionate grounds and has agreed to send us 50 doses based on 1.5 gram per 75 kg person free of cost. Top Health Ministry sources said they had satisfied themselves with the value of the drug at a time when no other licensed treatment for Nipah was available anywhere globally. We studied the results of monoclonal 102.4 antibodies and found it has had 90 per cent success rate among Nipah patients in Bangladesh. Nipah outbreak in Kerala is an emergency situation and we consider it fit to approve urgent import of the Australian anti-Nipah drug to try and save lives at home, a top ministry official said. The government has allowed import of the drug on the condition that ICMR clinicians and pharmacologists will supervise the operation of drug delivery in Kerala and emergency facilities will be made available at Kozhikode Government Medical College while administering the said product. Nipah has so far claimed 14 lives in Kerala, and remains contained in the state. Soldier dies of suspected NiV infection amansharma@tribunemail.com Mumbai, May 30 Queen Maxima of the Netherlands on Wednesday met Mumbai's famed dabbawalas (tiffin-box carriers) and was apprised of how their impeccable delivery system, which has won global acclaim, works. Queen Maxima visited the Andheri railway station here this afternoon and interacted with dabbawalas, Mumbai Dabbawalas Association spokesperson Subhash Talekar said. "The queen met the dabbawalas at their duty switch point near Andheri railway station. She was welcomed in the traditional Maharashtrian way," he said. Queen Maxima, 47, arrived in India on Monday in her capacity as the UN Secretary-General's Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development. "She met over 150 dabbawalas for around 30 minutes and got to know how we operate. We had planned to welcome her with dhol-taashe (drums) but her office advised her against it," another Association functionary said. "She was given a replica of the large wooden crate we carry on our heads (tiffins are packed in this crate). It had miniature tiffins too," he said. "She was eager to know how our delivery process works. Our 5,000 dabbawalas deliver over two lakh lunch boxes all over Mumbai every day. She wanted to know what makes this system run smoothly without any glitches," Association president Ulhas Muke said. Association secretary Vitthal Sawant briefed the queen on how the dabbawalas negotiate overcrowded suburban trains and roads. Sawant also clicked a selfie with her. Earlier this month, the dabbawalas celebrated the wedding of Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan Markle by distributing sweets to relatives of patients outside government hospitals. The dabbawalas, whose representatives had attended Prince Charles's second marriage some years ago, also sent a salwar kurta and a 'pheta' (turban) as wedding gift to Prince Harry and a 'Paithani' saree to his bride. - PTI monicakchauhan@gmail.com United Nations, May 30 India has lost the highest number of its peacekeepers in various UN peacekeeping operations in the last 70 years, with 163 military, police and civilian personnel from the country laying down their lives in the line of duty. According to the UN, of the 3,737 peacekeepers who have died since 1948, 163 have been from India, the highest total from any troop contributing country. India is currently the third largest contributor of military and police personnel to UN peacekeeping, with 6,693 now deployed in Abyei, Cyprus, Congo, Haiti, Lebanon, the Middle East, South Sudan and Western Sahara. However, the UN owes India USD 92 million for troops, formed police units and contingent-owned equipment as at April 30, 2018. The UN commemorated the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers yesterday, paying tribute to the service and sacrifice of peacekeepers around the world. Currently, more than 96,000 uniformed personnel from 124 troop and police-contributing countries serve under the blue flag, alongside more than 15,000 international and national civilian staff and nearly 1,600 United Nations Volunteers. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of United Nations peacekeeping, the flagship enterprise of the Organization described by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as "a proven investment in global peace, security and prosperity". "We express our gratitude to the more than one million men and women who have served under the UN flag, saving countless lives. We honour the more than 3,700 Blue Helmets who have paid the ultimate price. And we pay tribute to the 14 peacekeeping missions working around the clock to protect people and advance the cause of peace," Guterres said in Mali to mark the International Day of UN Peacekeepers. The north-west African country is the most dangerous place in the world to be a UN 'blue helmet' and last year 21 troops serving with the UN Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) lost their lives, together with seven civilians. Upon his return from Mali, the Secretary-General will preside over the observance of the day on June 1. He will lay a wreath to honour those who lost their lives while in the service of peace and will also officiate at a ceremony to posthumously present the Dag Hammarskjold Medal to 132 military, police and civilian personnel from 37 countries who lost their lives in peacekeeping operations during 2017. No peacekeeper hailing from India was killed while serving in any UN peacekeeping mission in 2017. In 2016, two Indian peacekeepers - Rifleman Brijesh Thapa who served with the UN Organization Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and Private Ravi Kumar who was deployed with the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) - died in the line of duty and posthumously received the Dag Hammarskjold Medal. At a time of increasingly complex conflicts and rising peacekeeper fatalities, the Secretary-General said, "as we recognise a legacy of service and sacrifice around the world, I am also committed to taking Action for Peacekeeping action to make our operations more effective and safer in today's challenging environments". Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix said the service and sacrifice of UN peacekeepers inspired "us to work harder to support a sustainable peace in some of the world's most complex and challenging places". Under-Secretary-General for Field Support Atul Khare said the international community owed a "debt of gratitude" to the brave men and women who risk their lives every day in service to others. "We grieve with the families and nations of our fallen colleagues. But beyond gratitude, we owe our peacekeepers all the support we can muster to ensure they are well equipped, well trained and well prepared to complete their missions successfully," Khare said. The General Assembly established the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers in 2002 to pay tribute to all men and women serving in peacekeeping, and to honour the memory of those who have lost their lives in the cause of peace. The Assembly designated May 29 as the Day because it was the date in 1948 when the first United Nations peacekeeping mission the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation began operations in the Middle East. PTI shalender@tribune.com Aditi Tandon Tribune News Service New Delhi, May 30 Disrupting the Rajya Sabha may become difficult in future with Vice-President and House Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu set to receive the report of the expert committee set up to review rules for conduct of business in the Upper House. Addressing a gathering after releasing Congress leader Abhishek Singhvis book Straight Talk, Naidu said the committee, he formed to review the Rajya Sabha rules to enable better functioning of the House, had started its work and would submit an interim report next month. He also took the occasion to argue that political parties should stop viewing each other as enemies and should be tolerant to diverse ideologies. Political parties are not enemies, they at best are rivals. By sitting with each other, you dont get converted, Naidu said lamenting lack of social courtesies in Tamil Nadus Dravidian parties DMK and AIADMK. The people of one party in Tamil Nadu do not attend weddings and funerals of the people of the other party. This is not good. We are not enemies, he said with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress leaders P Chidambaram and Jyotiraditya Scindia and DMKs M Kanimozhi gracing the dais. The remarks came at a time of debate on whether former President Pranab Mukherjee should have accepted an RSS invitation to address the Sangh cadres in Nagpur. The Vice-President also seconded radical suggestions Singhvi has made in the 63 articles he wrote over the years and has now collated as a book. Singhvi argues that the party whip should not apply to legislation issues to enable bipartisan legislations to be enacted. He speaks of mandatory judicial impact assessment of laws and disqualification of MPs at the stage of framing of charges. The author argues for fast track courts to dispose of election pleas. I agree to these suggestions as also to another one related to the establishment of a Ministry of Excellence. The thrust of Naidus address at the event which Union Minister Prakash Javadekar, an invitee, skipped, was The ruling and Opposition parties divide that is becoming increasingly manifest in our legislatures does not inspire confidence in the people... At the end of the day, the best possible legislations should follow which further the peoples aspirations. Tell RSS whats wrong with it: PC to Pranab In a panel discussion that followed the book release, P Chidambaram, responding to former President Pranab Mukherjee's decision to address the RSS, said, "Sir, now that you have accepted the invite, please go and tell them (RSS) what's wrong with their ideology". gspannu7@gmail.com Jakarta, May 30 Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday announced a 30-day free visa for Indonesian citizens and invited the diaspora to travel to their country of origin to experience the New India. Addressing a gathering of Indian diaspora at the Jakarta Convention Centre in the Indonesian capital, Modi said, Not only do the names of our nations rhyme but also there is a distinct rhythm in the India-Indonesia friendship. We will grant free of cost visa for Indonesian citizens for travel of up to 30 days, Modi said amid applause. Many of you may never have been to India. I invite you all to come to India for the Kumbh in Prayag next year, Modi told the gathering. Kumbh Mela is one of the largest human congregations on the Earth. Taking a dig at the previous governments, Modi said his first priority as a government was to make the country corruption free, citizen-centric and development friendly. Our government has been making India ready according to the need and expectations of the 21st century, he said. We have gone a step ahead of Ease of Doing Business. Our focus is Ease of Living. Our processes are transparent and sensitive, Modi said. We have to make a New India. We have to start working to realise the dream of New India by 2022, when India will celebrate 75 years of her independence, Modi added. In the last two-and-a-half years, more than 9,000 start-ups have been registered in India, he said, adding that the worlds second largest start-up ecosystem is built in India. And my friends living in Indonesia, these are happening, laws are the same, officers are the same, offices are the same, tables and chairs are the same, only the government has changed and the country is changing, Modi said. If the policy is clear and intension pure, then development has to happen which we have shown, he asserted. Prime Minister Modi, who arrived in Jakarta last night on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, earlier met President Joko Widodo at the Merdeka palace, one of the presidential palaces in Indonesia. PTI CALGARY, Alberta, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PHX Energy Services Corp. ("PHX Energy" or the "Corporation") (TSX:PHX) announces that its Board of Directors (the Board) has approved an increase to the Corporations 2018 capital expenditure program (the program) by $8 million to $18.5 million. The increase to the 2018 program is expected to be principally directed to the expansion of PHX Energys fleet of performance drilling motors, including its proprietary high performance 7.25" Atlas motor (Atlas), to support increasing activity in the Permian basin region of the Corporations US operations. The majority of the additional performance drilling motors being purchased will be dedicated to a new performance drilling motor rental business, branded Atlas Power. This division was recently engaged by a prominent operator in the Permian basin to provide an exclusive performance drilling motor rental fleet, which includes the Atlas high performance motor. Atlas powerful performance and the resulting operating advantages were a key factor in PHX Energy securing this opportunity, as was the Corporations extensive performance drilling motor expertise and sophisticated motor servicing facility. Management is optimistic that the Atlas Power division will see expanded activity and a growing client base during the course of the 2018-year. The high margin division will mainly target operators in the Permian basin where there are a large number of rigs operating, but could be scalable to any basin throughout North America. The 2018 program will also support growth within PHX Energys full service operations, which is placing greater demand on the Corporations fleet. With the continued strengthening of crude oil prices driving industry rig counts upward, PHX Energys US operations are gaining more work from both new and existing clients, again primarily in the Permian basin, and Management anticipates its Canadian operations to be more active coming out of spring break-up. As the Corporation expands its operations, it will continue to take a disciplined approach toward this growth and believes the increase to the 2018 program will aid in further improvements in profitability and strengthen PHX Energys financial position. The 2018 program is expected to be financed from a combination of cash flow from operations and the Corporations unused credit facilities. About PHX Energy Services Corp. The Corporation, through its directional drilling subsidiary entities, provides horizontal and directional drilling technology and services to oil and natural gas producing companies in Canada, the US, Russia and Albania. PHX Energy also provides EDR technology and services. Forward Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this document constitute "forward looking statements" and/or "forward looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws (collectively referred to as "forward looking statements"). When used in this document, the words "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect", and similar expressions, are intended to identify forward looking statements. Such statements reflect the current views of PHX Energy with respect to future events, programs and operating performance and speak only as of the date of this document. In particular, this document contains forward looking statements pertaining to the Corporation's 2018 capital expenditure program, including the increase to the program and the anticipated resulting expansion in the performance drilling motor fleet, the source of funding for the program, the allocation of the program, the potential impact of the Atlas Power division on the Corporations operations and profitability, and the anticipated increase in 2018 activity and growing demand for the Corporations fleet. Forward looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties, should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results and will not necessarily be accurate indications of whether such results will be achieved. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these statements as a number of factors could cause actual results to defer materially from the results discussed in these forward looking statements, including but not limited to those factors referred to under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Corporation's Annual Information Form ("AIF") for the year ended December 31, 2017 and the Corporation's management's discussion and analysis for the year then ended and the three-months ended March 31, 2018. Although forward looking statements contained in this press release are based upon what the Corporation believes are reasonable assumptions, the Corporation cannot assure investors that actual results will be consistent with these forward looking statements. The forward looking statements in this press release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. Unless otherwise required by law, PHX Energy does not intend, or assume any obligation, to update these forward looking statements. For further information please contact: John Hooks, CEO; Michael Buker, President; or Cameron Ritchie, Senior Vice President Finance and CFO PHX Energy Services Corp. Suite 1400, 250 2nd Street SW Calgary, Alberta T2P 0C1 Tel: 403-543-4466 Fax: 403-543-4485 www.phxtech.com editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Chandigarh, May 30 The Aam Aadmi Party on Wednesday demanded a special Vidhan Sabha session on the issue of polluted water in the state. Hundreds of AAP workers carrying polluted water in bottles assembled at the Punjab MLA hostel. The protesters, under the leadership of AAP co-president Balbir Singh and MP Sadhu Singh, then marched towards the CMs house but were stopped by the police on their way. They raised slogans against Capt Amarinder Singh-led Congress government, accusing it of shielding those responsible for polluting the water of Punjab. The Officer on Special Duty (OSD) to Chief Minister, Capt Sandeep Sandhu, informed the protesters that the CM was not available at that time but they would be given an appointment to meet him soon. The AAP leaders handed over the memorandum to the OSD. Balbir Singh, while addressing the media, said the bottles would be handed over to all MLAs and MPs of the state so that they could raise the issue in the Assembly and Parliament. He said AAP would always stand by the people to fight against the problems being faced by them and would not let them down. Earlier in the morning, AAP leaders MLA Sarabjit Kaur Manuke, MLA Kultar Singh, Daljeet Singh Bhola Grewal along with party workers went to the Buddha Nullah in Gauspur village of Ludhiana. editorial@tribune.com Tribune news service Chandigarh, May 30 Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh on Wednesday ordered a crackdown on polluting industrial units in the state, with stringent enforcement of laws and regulations governing the discharge of effluents into the rivers. His government will not allow pollution to affect the health of people at any cost, whether in towns or villages, the CM asserted, issuing a series of directives to the Punjab Pollution Control Board (PPCB) and other departments to take action against any violation of laws in this regard. Chairing a meeting to review the situation in the wake of the recent incident of spillage of molasses into the Beas, the CM said neither the industry nor the municipalities would be allowed to flow any effluents into the rivers without treating them. Lambasting AAP and its leader Sukhpal Singh Khaira for playing political games over such a serious issue, he said his government was seriously tackling the issue of pollution in a systematic manner. Lashing out at the previous SAD-BJP government for making a mess of the state during the 10 years of their misrule, Capt Amarinder said it would take time to streamline things, but all problems were being tackled one by one. Wants quick redress of public grievances The CM has expressed concern over the poor grievance redress mechanism in most government offices and has issued instructions to officers to ensure that public complaints are dealt with expeditiously. The instructions to revive the grievance redress system have been conveyed to all departmental heads, DCs, SSPs and Commissioners of police after party MLAs raised the matter before the Chief Minister. Several civil rights organisations, too, have been complaining that officers are neither willing to lend a patient ear to public nor do they initiate any action against their juniors. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM Aman Sood Tribune News Service Patiala, May 29 Acute shortage of labour and a shift in the paddy transplantation date has meant a windfall for potential migrant workers, who are demanding 25 per cent advance payments through phone-based apps from farmers if they want them to even start from their home states. With younger members of their own families not prepared to work in the scorching sun, farmers in Punjab are desperate to arrange labour, as the window to complete the transplantation work has been reduced to a month. Earlier, the date to begin the work used to be June 1, and later it was shifted to June 15. This year, it has been pushed further to June 20. The government restricts the period to save the dwindling ground water in the state. Cashing in on the situation, labourers are not only demanding advance payments, but also want liquor every day, on the house, as some of them are coming from a dry state (Bihar). Groceries are also on the list. Radhay, a labourer from Bihar who has received advance payment from Jaskaran Singh, a farmer of Raungla village, has assured him of bringing along 21 members of his family for work. Radhay is a regular with this farmer, but could not come last year due to floods in Bihar. Jasdeep Singh Garcha, a farmer in Doraha, says in addition to Rs 2,350 per acre, he will also be providing CDs of Bhojpuri movies and television sets. Earlier, we used to provide bhang and ganja too, but fearing police action, we have stopped that, he says. In case it rains during the transplantation period, the rates could go even higher as some working days will be lost. Another farmer, Diljot Singh, says his labour contractor in UP had asked him to deposit the advance through mobile payment or in his bank account. He obliged by transferring 25 per cent of the total sum. But what if the workers dont turn up? Diljot Singh says he has known the contractor for more than 20 years. His cousin is working in a plywood unit in Ludhiana. So there is a certain level of trust. Also, men from UP usually keep their word, the farmer adds. Agriculture officials say the shortage of labour can be addressed by shifting to transplantation machines that cost Rs 10 lakh, but very few farmers can afford that. Around 25 lakh hectare of paddy is expected to be sown in the state. editorial@tribune.com Parvesh Sharma Tribune News Service Sangrur, May 29 Students at the Government Middle School, Bharur, are forced to urinate in the fields as for 32 boys, the school has no toilet while for 25 girls, there is just one washroom. Five more schools of Sunam subdivision do not have proper toilets and students face similar problems. Repeated requests of the school authorities for funds have fallen on deaf ears. Our school is located on a busy road. It is always risky to go outside to urinate. Sometimes, stray dogs try to attack us, said a Class VII student of Bharur. Similarly, the Bharur Village Primary School has 79 students. The boys washroom has no door while the girls washroom has no drainage and water arrangements. At the Tunga Government Senior Secondary School, there are 244 students of which 131 are girls. But there are just two washrooms and they are without proper drainage and water facilities. In a ray of hope, with the effort of AAPs Sunam MLA Aman Arora, two NRIs from California Satnam Singh and Dr Gurinder have come forward and started the construction of toilets in six schools of Dhadrian, Buggran, Togawal, Ghasiwala, Bhrur and Tunga. In each school, both of them will spend Rs 1.25 lakh to construct toilets. Education Officer (Secondary), Sangrur, Harkanwaljit Kaur did not pick the phone despite repeated attempts. laxmi@tribune.com New Delhi, May 30 The National Green Tribunal has rapped the Uttarakhand Government for not demolishing illegal structures in Kalagarh, the most sensitive core area of the Jim Corbett Tiger Reserve, saying it was trying to frustrate its directions. A Bench headed by acting Chairperson Justice Jawad Rahim slapped a penalty of Rs 3 lakh on the state government for not filing an affidavit on demolition and asked it to file the document within a week. The green panel said it had ordered the demolition of the illegal structures inside Kalagarh. However, the state government was trying to delay compliance on the pretext that land for rehabilitation was not available. From the narration of the facts as stated, the intention of the state appears not honest. The order has not been complied on one pretext or the other and now the ground created is about want of land for rehabilitation before the demolition could take place. In the circumstances, we are justified in concluding that unless a serious view is taken, the state will again frustrate the directions of the tribunal, the bench said. The state government on September 21 last year had assured the tribunal that inhabitants would be removed and structures would be demolished as expeditiously as possible from the Jim Corbett National Park and in any case not more than one year. It had also said that the Deputy Commissioner of the area would file status-cum compliance report, every three months before the tribunal, to show progress in compliance of directions. However, no status report has been filed despite assurance. While permitting the state to file the affidavit, the tribunal said, Be that as it may, even though we may permit filing of undertaking to give a timeline no further indulgence will be shown. Hence for defaults committed, the State of Uttarakhand is directed to pay compensation of Rs 3 lakhs for default committed within a period of one week from now. Affidavit be also filed within one week subject to deposit of cost. The NGT had earlier also criticised the Uttar Pradesh government, whose irrigation department has a residential colony in Kalagarh constructed before Uttarakhand was carved out of the state, for non-compliance of Supreme Court order directing eviction of residents from these colonies. PTI The case The NGT had ordered the demolition of illegal structures in Kalagarh, the most sensitive core area of the Jim Corbett Tiger Reserve. The state is trying to delay compliance on the pretext that land for rehabilitation is not available. laxmi@tribune.com Tribune News Service Dehradun, Ma 29 Two persons were killed and three others were injured when a car fell into a gorge in the Pokhri development block of Chamoli district on Tuesday. Subhash Rana and his family were going to Pokhri when their vehicle fell into a gorge killing Subhash and Deepak on the spot. The injured were rushed to the Community Health Centre, Pokhri, where the condition of a person is stated to be serious. The police and the State Disaster Response Force conducted the rescue operation. gspannu7@gmail.com Gaza, May 30 Gazas dominant Islamist Hamas movement said on Wednesday that Palestinian armed groups in Gaza have agreed to a ceasefire as long as Israel also ceases fire, after the most intense flare-up of fighting since a 2014 war. Following dozens of rocket and mortar launches at Israel throughout Tuesday and overnight, and Israeli tank and air strikes in Gaza, there were no reports of violence more than two hours after the announcement of a truce by Hamas. Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz sidestepped questions on Wednesday on whether Israel had agreed to a ceasefire but said it was not interested in an escalation towards war. It all depends on Hamas. If it continues (to attack), I dont know what its fate will be, Katz said on Israel Radio. Authorities in southern Israel, where rocket warning sirens have sounded frequently since the Palestinian barrages began on Tuesday morning, said schools would open as usual. The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the firing, saying it was in response to Israels killing of dozens of Palestinians since March 30, most of them in Gaza border protests. Israel has long said it would not tolerate such attacks from Gaza. After the resistance succeeded in confronting the (Israeli) aggression ... there was a lot of mediation in the past hours, Hamas deputy chief in Gaza, Khalil al-Hayya, said, in apparent reference to Egyptian efforts to end the fighting. An agreement was reached to return to the (2014) ceasefire understandings in the Gaza Strip. The resistance factions will abide by it as long as the Occupation does the same, he said in a statement, using militant groups term for Israel. Condemnation By late on Tuesday, Israeli aircraft had hit 55 facilities belonging to militant groups in Gaza, including a cross-border tunnel under construction, in response to the Palestinian barrages, the military said. Such potential targets are usually abandoned by militants when violence with Israel flares, and there were no reports of Palestinian casualties. Israel said some 70 rockets and mortar bombs were fired from Gaza and three of its soldiers were wounded by shrapnel. Several of the projectiles were shot down by Israels Iron Dome rocket interceptor system, others landed in empty lots and farmland. One exploded in a kindergarten yard, damaging walls and scattering debris and shrapnel around the playground, about an hour before it was scheduled to open for the day. Violence had soared along the Gaza frontier in recent weeks, during which 116 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire at mass demonstrations calling for Palestinians right to return to ancestral lands now in Israel. Amid international condemnation of its use of lethal force at the mass demonstrations that began on March 30, Israel said many of the dead were militants and that the army was repelling attacks on the border fence. Palestinians and their supporters said most of the protesters were unarmed civilians and Israel was using excessive force against them. A Hamas spokesman had defended Tuesdays attacks as a natural response to Israeli crimes. An Islamic Jihad spokesman said the blood of our people is not cheap. More than two million Palestinians are packed into the Gaza Strip, a narrow coastal enclave. Israel withdrew its troops and settlers in 2005 but, citing security concerns, maintains tight control of Gazas land and sea borders, which has reduced its economy to a state of collapse. Egypt also restricts movement in and out of Gaza on its border. Reuters. pardeepdhull@gmail.com Kiev, May 30 A Russian dissident journalist who was reported murdered in Kiev dramatically reappeared alive and well on Wednesday in the middle of a briefing about the killing by the Ukrainian state security service. The head of the security service said it had received information about a Russian plot to kill Kremlin critic Arkady Babchenko and managed to prevent it. Babchenko thanked the Ukrainian security service for saving his life. Reuters ATLANTA, GA, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- We are advised by Bemax Inc. that journalists and other readers should disregard the news release, "Bemax Inc. Considering $5.5M Buyout Offer" issued May 30, 2018, over GlobeNewswire. CALGARY, Alberta, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Eguana Technologies Inc. ("Eguana" or the "Company") (TSX-V:EGT) (OTCQB:EGTYF) today announced results for its second quarter ended March 31, 2018. Highlights Continued shipments into the Hawaiian residential market resulted in energy storage system revenue of $2.4 million CAD, representing a +400% increase for the six months ending March 31, as compared to the same period in 2017 Achieved 15% gross margin on product sales for the first half of the year as compared to (11%) for the same period in 2017 Launched the Elevate and Evolve commercial and residential energy storage product lines into the US market Broadened relationship with German automotive partner to expand Eguana distribution network into key global markets Outlook for 2018 Launch of the Enduro all-in-one product for the European market, to be showcased at Intersolar Munich Evolve Energy Storage product launch in Australia with select distribution partners Completion of the Commercial AC Battery certification with initial shipments to Southern California Expand distributor partnerships in key global markets for Evolve, Enduro, and Elevate product lines Complete partnership with renewable energy power company to put Evolve product line into solar financing channels Expand sales and marketing, and after sales support teams to coincide with expanding global presence Eguana maintained deliveries into Hawaii as planned, which resulted in a first half revenue increase of 400%. The Company expects increased growth and additional sales orders as the Hawaiian residential solar market continues to recover from a series of regulatory changes and consolidation during the past two years. Product margins for the Evolve product line continue to track upwards as compared to 2017, hitting 15% through the first half of the year. The Company is currently launching products in Australia, Europe, and the United States and as a result will rapidly expand its distribution coverage in key global markets. All products will be on display at the Munich Intersolar show in June. With fully integrated product solutions, including the energy management system (EMS), currently launching in multiple markets with multiple channels we expect to see significant revenue growth in North America and international markets across the balance of the 2018, commented Justin Holland, Chief Executive Officer of Eguana Technologies. The development team has done a tremendous job designing and certifying a suite of products that are installer friendly, have advanced features, are easily aggregated for fleet management and grid services applications and importantly, available globally. With current sales projections and planned cash sources the Company confirmed it has sufficient resources to finance the business well into 2019 without a new equity issuance. About Eguana Technologies Inc. Eguana Technologies Inc. (TSX.V:EGT) (OTCQB:EGTYF) designs and manufactures high performance power controls for residential and commercial energy storage systems. Eguana has more than 15 years experience delivering grid edge power electronics for fuel cell, photovoltaic and battery applications and delivers proven, durable, high quality solutions from its high capacity manufacturing facilities in Europe, Australia and North America. With thousands of its proprietary energy storage inverters deployed in the European and North American markets, Eguana is one of the leading suppliers of power controls for solar self-consumption, grid services and demand charge applications at the grid edge. To learn more, visit www.EguanaTech.com or follow us on Twitter @EguanaTech Company Inquiries Justin Holland CEO, Eguana Technologies Inc. +1.416.728.7635 Justin.Holland@EguanaTech.com Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking information and forward-looking statements (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable securities laws that and are based on certain assumptions and analysis made by the Company's management as of the date of this press release. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements with respect to strategy, the development plans of the Company, availability of customers, market penetration, the Company's intentions, business prospects and opportunities, extent of solar resource usage and future growth and performance opportunities. The words "believes", "expects", "expected", "plans", "may", "will", "projects", "anticipates", "estimates", "would", "could", "should", "endeavours", "seeks", "predicts", "intends", "potential", "opportunity", "target" or variations of such words of similar expressions thereto and the negatives thereof, identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon managements perceptions of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as a number of specific factors and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the Company as of the date of such statements, outside of the Company's control and are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies which could result in the forward-looking statements ultimately being entirely or partially incorrect or untrue. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based on various assumptions, including, but not limited to the following: (i) the Company's ability to achieve its growth strategy; (ii) the demand for the Companys products and fluctuations in future revenues; (iii) the Company's business model and assumptions; and (iv) expectations of growth in the industry in which the Company operations and the markets in which the company's products are sold. By their nature, forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's control, that may be general or specific and which give rise to the possibility that expectations, forecasts, predictions, projections or conclusions will not prove to be accurate, that assumptions may not be correct and that objectives, strategic goals and priorities will not be achieved. The reader is cautioned to consider these and other factors, uncertainties and potential events carefully and not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Forward-looking statements are provided for the purpose of providing information about managements expectations and plans relating to the future. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and such forward-looking statements, except to the extent required by applicable law. All of the forward-looking statements contained in this press release are qualified by these cautionary 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. EL PASO, Texas, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Smithfield Foods, Inc. joined forces with Albertsons to donate more than 34,000 pounds of protein to El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank. Smithfields contribution was part of the companys 2018 Helping Hungry Homes donation tour. Now in the programs 10th year, Helping Hungry Homes is Smithfields signature hunger-relief initiative focused on alleviating hunger and helping Americans become more food secure. The donation, equivalent to more than 138,000 servings, will help families fight hunger across Texas. Our mission is to fight the hunger crisis in our region by supplying nutritious food with help from likeminded allies and partners, said Susan Goodell, CEO of El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank. We are thankful for this donation from Smithfield Foods and we are motivated more than ever to continue the fight against hunger, because no one should go hungry. Smithfield and Albertsons representatives presented the donation to El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank during the grand re-opening event at a local Albertsons store. This event corresponded with Albertsons celebration of their newly remodeled location with a spectacular event which took place alongside the donation. Members of the organizations discussed food insecurity in the local community and the significance of this donation, which will provide protein throughout the food banks service area, and reaches more than 91,000 food insecure individuals. At Albertsons, we are dedicated to bettering the lives of our neighbors in need, said Lori Raya, Southwest Division president of Albertsons. It is a privilege to partner with Smithfield Foods for this donation to El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank and help to impact the lives of the many residents we serve in our community. This is the 26th large scale protein donation made by Smithfield to food banks across the country during its 2018 Helping Hungry Homes tour. Since the programs inception in 2008, Smithfield has provided more than 100 million servings of protein to food banks, disaster relief efforts, and community outreach programs nationwide. At Smithfield, we are devoted to helping communities eliminate food-insecurity by providing for those in need, said Dennis Pittman, senior director of hunger relief for Smithfield Foods. With help from partners like Albertsons and El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank, we are able to continue our battle against hunger throughout numerous communities across the country. For more information about Smithfield Foods Helping Hungry Homes initiative and a list of upcoming donation events, visit helpinghungryhomes.com. About Smithfield Foods Smithfield Foods is a $15 billion global food company and the world's largest pork processor and hog producer. In the United States, the company is also the leader in numerous packaged meats categories with popular brands including Smithfield, Eckrich, Nathan's Famous, Farmland, Armour, Farmer John, Kretschmar, John Morrell, Cook's, Gwaltney, Carando, Margherita, Curly's, Healthy Ones, Morliny, Krakus and Berlinki. Smithfield Foods is committed to providing good food in a responsible way and maintains robust animal care, community involvement, employee safety, environmental and food safety and quality programs. For more information, visit www.smithfieldfoods.com. About El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank (EPFH) is El Paso's only food bank and a member of Feeding America, the nations largest hunger relief network. We currently serve more than 91,000 food insecure individuals unsure of where their next meal will come from. EPFH works with more than 120 partner agencies to distribute as much as 12 million pounds of food a year in 3 county areas: El Paso, Hudspeth and Culberson. These are the food pantries, shelters, churches, and social service agencies that, together with EPFH, provide service to the hungry. The mission statement of EPFH is "to combat the hunger crisis in our region by strategically procuring and distributing nutritious food through community partners . . . because no one should go hungry." Visit us at www.elpasoansfightinghunger.com to learn more. Media Contacts: Several services were held throughout the area Monday, in honor of Memorial Day. In Middlebourne, the Auxiliary and Post Unit #48 were responsible for Mondays services. The event featured the West Virginia Council Vietnam Veterans of Americas Mobile Wall. Dave Simmons, a veteran himself, is one of the main organizers of the traveling WV Vietnam Veterans Wall. Simmons noted the wall lists 732 names of West Virginians who made the ultimate sacrifice during the Vietnam War; 17 Prisoners of War are still missing. Simmons said Tyler is the 48th county the Mobile Wall has visited. Simmons marked his visit by presenting Cathy Post, of the American Legion Auxiliary Unit #48 with several Vietnam prints for the Tyler County Museum. Middlebournes services also featured remarks by Jim Waybright, the late Gary Weekleys Company Commander. Weekley was a Tyler County soldier who was in Vietnam for only six weeks when he was struck by an explosion ordinance on April 4, 1970 in Binh Hinh Province. Commander Waybright noted that Weekleys grave still has quarters on its headstone. A coin left on a headstone lets the deceased soldiers family know that somebody stopped by to pay their respect. Quarters on a headstone are to mean that the person leaving the quarter was with the soldier when he died. Waybright noted the goodness of Tyler County, in that the quarters on Weekleys headstone have not been removed. Of Weekley, Waybright noted, Sorry we couldnt bring him home. First District Commander Robert Doc Pope also spoke Monday. He said he was proud to be invited to Middlebournes services. He noted because of veterans sacrifices, we are free. Commander Pope noted when the country called, soldiers left the paths of peace to spring to arms. Susan Wade, of Paden City Auxiliary Unit #86, read the History of the Poppy, and Bill Dawson spoke of what Memorial Day means to him, as well as the History of Heroes Day, which he started in West Virginia. Remarks were also heard by veterans Denny Longwell and Charles Clements. Jace Glover and Bella Camerlin read their American Legion scholarship winning essays, while Juanita Williams, Katie Pratt, and Alaina Thompson Girls State attendees read poems. The Tyler Star News hopes to feature these writings, in their entirety, in a future edition. Pastor Troy Guild led invocation at the beginning and end of the ceremony. Middlebournes event also featured a parade. Sistersville held a Memorial Day service on Monday, May 28 to recognize those brave men and women who have faced battle for the honor of our nation. The introduction and speech was given by Don Pickett, Commander of Sistersville VFW Post 6327. Pickett welcomed all the guests to the Declaration Day Ceremony, a day where graves are decorated with flowers to recognize those that have given the ultimate sacrifice by serving in the United States Military. A prayer was spoken for prisoners of war and those missing in action. The Sergeant of Arms then commanded the Color Guards to stand in attention while Danny Henthorn recited the National Anthem which was then followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Pickett continued, Today is a day of solemn day of remembrance for those who have died serving the United states Military. Picket explained that the holiday was started after the Civil War to honor those killed in that conflict, both confederate and union. The 30th of May was originally designated for this memorial because flowers were most likely to be in bloom across the country at that time. Congress later officially changed the date to the last Monday in May. Pickett then gave staggering list of numbers of those who have fallen in war, those that are fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters: The Civil War 215,000; WWI 53,000; WWII 292,000; Korean War 33,000; Vietnam 58,000; Iraq and Afghanistan 9,300 and that number is growing. Add those numbers to with those missing in action and the number becomes staggering. In WWII alone, over 671,000 were wounded and 115,000 are missing. Comrades continue to serve the ultimate sacrifice for us and our nation and we must continue to show support and gratitude for these sacrifices.We are assembled here to pay a lasting tribute of respect to our departed comrades stated Pickett. He continued, When the call of our country was heard, they answered, sacrificing themselves for the greater good. These men and women left their families and marched for the freedom of every member of the United States of America. In Paden City, veterans Colin Doig, John Hopkins, and Richard Gallagher were presented with handcrafted patriotic-themed quilts. Auxiliary member Susan Wade was responsible for placing the wreath in the river, in remembrance of those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Wade was escorted by Paden City Mayor Ken Stead. Services were also held at Pine Groves Knights of Pythias Cemetery, as well as in New Martinsville and Hannibal, Ohio. Khusida (middle) and Rumana (right) are two among the 79 Rohingya refugees who arrived in Bireuen, Aceh. They left Myanmar earlier in April to find peace outside of the country. UNHCR/Ardi Sofinar BIREUEN, Indonesia For several days last month, the local fishermen of Aceh, Indonesia, threw offerings of rice and water buffalo bones into the sea, part of their yearly ritual called khanduri laot, during which they recite prayers thanking God for the bounty of the ocean and seeking safety from its dangers. Weeks earlier, the fishermen themselves had been protectors of the sea. In separate incidents in April, Acehnese fishermen guided two boats carrying 84 Rohingya refugees to safety on Indonesias shores, where they were allowed to disembark, in accordance with the law of the sea and Indonesias landmark 2016 Presidential Regulation Concerning the Handling of Foreign Refugees. Delays in the disembarkation of several thousand refugees and migrants led to dozens of deaths at sea. They were among the first confirmed maritime movements of Rohingya refugees through the Andaman Sea since May 2015, when interceptions and delays in the disembarkation of several thousand refugees and migrants led to dozens of deaths at sea. Indonesias 2016 Presidential regulation has helped mitigate that risk, as demonstrated by the lives saved by the Indonesian governments support of the rescue, disembarkation and reception of these two recent groups. To prevent loss of life, said James Lynch, UNHCRs Regional Representative and Regional Coordinator for South-East Asia, UNHCR calls on all governments in the region to uphold their maritime obligations and the spirit of the 2016 Bali Declaration by rescuing refugees, disembarking them to the nearest places of safety, and refraining from risky interceptions at sea not intended to save lives. Kushida*, 57, was among 79 Rohingya refugees who stepped on dry land in Aceh on 20 April, weeks after fleeing in an open boat from her home in Sittwe, the capital of Myanmars Rakhine State, where over 120,000 Rohingya are internally displaced. Denied citizenship and basic rights in Myanmar, an additional 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since August last year, when violence consumed Rakhine State. Resting in temporary accommodation provided by the local authorities in Bireuen, a city on the northern coast of Aceh, Kushida watches carefully over her 11-year-old granddaughter, Rumana. The girl's mother Kushidas sole surviving child wanted Kushida to take Rumana to Malaysia, where Rumanas older brother has sought refuge. Kushida agreed; in her mind, the boat journey, even with all its risks, was the only chance to protect Rumana from further violence and persecution. Kushida had already lost five of her sons to the inter-communal violence that first erupted in Sittwe in 2012. 'The people in Aceh have reminded me that God will take care of my innocent sons.' Soon after Kushida and the other refugees in her boat landed, they were taken to a nearby training centre, where they have been welcomed by the local community and government. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has registered Kushida, Rumana, and the 77 other Rohingya refugees they travelled with, as well as five refugees in a separate boat who were rescued by Indonesian fishermen on 6 April, but only after as many as 10 people on their vessel had died or gone missing at sea. See also: Rohingya refugee volunteers trained to help others in distress UNHCR is currently working with local government bodies, the national Red Cross Society Palang Merah Indonesia and a host of other partners to provide aid to the refugees in Aceh and restore their links to family members in other countries. UNHCR is also advocating for the Government of Myanmar to take measures to address the root causes that compel Rohingya refugees to embark on such dangerous journeys. In the meantime, local Acehnese in Bireuen have embraced the refugees with donations of food, clothing, and medication, just as they did when nearly 1,000 Rohingya refugees arrived in Aceh in May 2015. The people in Aceh have reminded me that God will take care of my innocent sons, said Kushida, taking a deep breath. My grandchildren are my only hope now. *Names have been changed for protection reasons. Name: Kelly T. Clements, from United States of America Job title: UN Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees You went to Bangladesh in 1992 to work with Rohingya refugees, very early in your career. Can you tell me about that? My experience (in 1992 with UNHCR) in Coxs Bazar is the reason that I'm sitting and talking with you today. People had come across from Myanmar in considerable numbers. It was very crowded, quite chaotic. We had near riots at some points in terms of food distribution. We had to change the system to ensure that the most vulnerable were in fact getting fed. I remember people standing for hours in the sun, with black umbrellas. It was overwhelming at times. Is there one conversation you had back then that you cant get out of your head? There was one family, a woman with three or four very young children. In the melee, she had lost her food ration card. And she had not been able to feed her kids for over two weeks. She was in tears when we talked. It took a long time but we were able to get her another card. Going back on a repeat visit, she heard I was in the camp and she came and found me. I remember her face quite vividly. She had tears and she said, These are tears of joy. And she said, I'm not sure what I would have done without UNHCR. UNHCR Deputy High Commissioner Kelly T. Clements meets Rohingya refugees during a visit to Kutupalong camp in south-east Bangladesh. UNHCR/Andrew McConnell You have recently been back to Bangladesh, and saw the work of UNHCR helping the Rohingya today. How did it feel to return to a situation that is so similar? It was quite emotional for me to go back. So many people have come, not just in this emergency, but in the last 25 years. It was emotional to see colleagues still dedicated to protect them and to provide relief. Kutupalong - over 500k new Rohingya arrivals in this refugee camp alone from #Myanmar - drastic change from 19k registered 4 years ago when I was last in #Bangladesh pic.twitter.com/Lxh1wVovit Kelly T. Clements (@KellyTClements) December 4, 2017 Before this emergency began, I think there was a real hope that UNHCR could work itself out of a job in Bangladesh, but this of course changed everything. How do we equip people to be able to help themselves? Do you ever feel despair? It's easy to feel despair and to be quite frustrated, particularly in the last couple of years when things have become so difficult and borders are closing and policies are becoming more restrictive and people are treated as inanimate objects as opposed to human beings. That makes me angry. But then there's resolve to really make a difference. I'm a rather optimistic person. I try to live to see the silver lining. We will see solutions. We will see the possibility of people returning or rebuilding their lives. I was in Guinea in 2003 when Liberians were returning and I met this young mother and her newborn baby, who were about to return. The joy on their faces was just remarkable and it really stayed with me. Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees Kelly T. Clements plants a mango tree to mark her visit to Nakivale settlement, Southwest Uganda. UNHCR/Frederic Noy What concerns you about your work? We are incredibly stretched as an organization. When we can't get the funding, the relief supplies and the people to an emergency situation fast enough, that keeps me up. What do you hope for? I want a future for our children. And I want a world that is not broken up, at war, with people unwilling to talk to each other and not treating others humanely. Its about how we prepare our kids to contribute to that peaceful world we need. Lucknow, May 30 (UNI) The 13th edition of bilateral annual military Exercise Surya Kiran, between India and Nepal Army commenced at Pithoragarh on Wednesday. Over 300 soldiers from both the countries will take part in this exercise, which will ensure better coordination between armies of both the countries in disaster management, anti-terrorism operations and strengthening of the bi-lateral relations. The aim of exercise is joint training of troops in counter insurgency, counter terrorism operations in both jungle and mountainous terrain and disaster management. Surya Kiran can be termed as the facade of long standing strategic ties between India and Nepal. With the focus on implementation of key India-assisted projects and building the trust between two countries Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Nepal, after which it was assumed that battalion level military exercise will strenthen the Indo-Nepal relations in many aspects. As part of the exercise important lectures, demonstrations and drills related to counter insurgency, terrorism operations and disaster management will be conducted. Both the Armies will also share their valuable experiences in countering such situations as also refined drills and procedures for joint operation wherever the needed. It would be first time when women soldiers of Nepal army will join the Surya-Kiran in Pithoragarh. Over 10 women soldiers lead by their officer will focus on special drill designed to counter terrorist activities and disaster management in not so favourable conditions. The culmination of exercise will be done with a 72 hours joint exercise which will show the joint skills of soldiers while conducting any counter terrorist operation. UNI JDM RSU SNU 1241 VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Avalon Blockchain Inc. (formerly, World Mahjong Limited) (the Company) (CSE:AVLN) announces that it has reached an agreement with Avalon Life S.A. (the Vendor) to unwind the acquisition of certain cryptocurrency mining assets and digital currencies (the Transaction Assets) previously acquired by the Company (the Transaction). Despite efforts on the part of both the Company and the Vendor, the parties were unable to reach a consensus surrounding the holding, conversion, trading and arbitrage of digital currencies acquired in the Transaction. As a result, the Company is unable to execute on its proposed business plan involving the Transaction Assets. In accordance with the agreement reached with the Vendor, the Company will return the Transaction Assets to the Vendor, and will arrange for the return to treasury and cancellation of 120,000,000 common shares issued by the Company in consideration for those assets. In connection with completion of the Transaction, Avalon Projects Canada Inc., now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Company, completed the offering of 37,154,502 subscription receipts, at a price of $0.50 per receipt. In light of the unwinding of the Transaction, the Company intends to offer subscribers the opportunity to rescind their subscriptions. The offer to rescind will be made to all subscribers to the offering, and any subscribers electing within the prescribed timeframe will be entitled to a full refund of all subscription proceeds tendered to the Company. The Company will be contacting subscribers directly to make arrangements for rescission. For further information, contact Anthony Alvaro at 604-763-5388. On behalf of the Board, AVALON BLOCKCHAIN INC. Robert Cross, Chief Executive Officer 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. Such statements represent the Companys 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. UNODC's Model UN guide tested and praised in first training exercise 30 May 2018 - Around the globe, it is estimated that over 1,500 Model United Nations (MUN) conferences are held every year, involving up to half a million learners from primary school to university. To promote the rule of law to students through this academic simulation phenomenon, UNODC's unique Model UN Guide was the first of its kind to support the integration of crime prevention and criminal justice issues into an MUN when it was launched earlier this year. To explore the Guide's potential for wider dissemination in established MUN arenas, the Education for Justice (E4J) initiative hosted a three-day training workshop last week, engaging with educators, university student leaders and staff from the numerous UNODC offices around the world. Over 30 representatives from the vibrant global MUN community, with many years of practice running these conferences at different education levels, shared experiences and perspectives on how to best utilize the Guide to give students a taste of the many facets of rule of law, and its applications. On one of the days, the veteran conference organizers took the place of the students and became temporary delegates of various Member States themselves, for a simulation of a debate on the trafficking of firearms, one of the many crime-related topics falling under the remit of UNODC. The exercise was meant to show how the consensus procedure (also known as the Vienna Formula) is applied in order to agree on and adopt a draft resolution, following a line by line review process involving all the participants. By all accounts, the exercise demonstrated the success of E4J's Resource Guide in enriching the MUN experience, and in creating a format which attracts student interest and involvement - an important factor voiced by several participants. By the end of the workshop, there was unanimity on the desire to incorporate UNODC's various endeavours on rule of law - including a simulated Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ) - into upcoming MUN conferences. #E4JMUN Resource Guide provides valuable information to teachers & students organizing a Model UN conference addressing #crime prevention, criminal #justice & other aspects of the #RuleOfLaw. Available at https://t.co/EiiWq5Rt1W pic.twitter.com/yaD1f8rbFe Doha Declaration (@DohaDeclaration) 26 May 2018 Of particular importance to the participants was the degree of direct support offered by E4J, through the interaction of its experts with conference organizers and educators, helping them draw students to topics ranging from crime prevention and corruption to terrorism and transnational organized crime, and other elements relating to the pursuit of Sustainable Development Goal 16. Laurabeth Goldsmith, Director of Partnerships at Best Delegate and one of the workshop trainers, commented that "it is one of the first times we have seen such a direct involvement of a UN office for an MUN, so it's very exciting because MUNers are already passionate about it." While students around the world are often eager to discuss topical international news, they may initially know less about topics which are nevertheless interesting and important. For Salam Kedan, Programme Director from the Salam Centre for Peace, wider discussions were key: "I will take this back home and try to educate others because we have a lot of corruption, but we can raise awareness to interest the younger generation into doing something about it." All the participants expressed their intention to conduct UNODC-related MUN events, using the Guide, at the earliest possible opportunity. After brainstorming in different regional sub-groups about how to roll this out in their respective areas, some participants estimated the new Guide could potentially impact around 10,000 students around the world over the course of the following year, after which it was hoped this would have a ripple effect and exponential growth. Bill Yotive, Model UN Coordinator from the World Federation of United Nations Associations, decided to integrate UNODC's MUN model immediately: "We've done some UNODC topics before, but I would like to do a full CCPCJ, like we've seen here, at our next flagship conference. "There are many elements to building a culture of lawfulness, and educating children and youth about crime prevention and criminal justice, and UNODC's contribution with the MUN Guide is just one of its many projects. As THIMUN Qatar's Director Lisa Martin summed it up, "attending MUN can impact kids, who decide they want to have action and engagement and do something. This is more than a debate, it is something that changes people's lives." Additional information: UNODC Resource Guide for Organizing Model United Nations Conferences that Address Crime Prevention, Criminal Justice and Other Aspects of the Rule of Law VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NetworkWire Sunniva Inc. ("Sunniva" or the Company") (CSE:SNN) (OTCQX:SNNVF), a North American provider of cannabis products and services, today released its financial results and managements discussion and analysis for the three months ended March 31, 2018. All figures are reported in Canadian dollars ($). Sunniva's financial statements are prepared in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards. Message from the CEO We are pleased with our Q1 2018 revenue results from our two operating entities, Natural Health Services and Full-Scale Distributors. We are seeing strong momentum in both NHS and FSD in 2018, and these operations will complement our manufacturing businesses currently being developed in California and British Columbia. We are continuing to build our capabilities in all areas, to meet anticipated Canadian and US demand, said Dr. Anthony Holler, CEO, Sunniva. The completion of our $27.8 million bought deal public offering, securing all the necessary State of California temporary licenses for Phase one and two for our purpose built state-of-the-art greenhouse cultivation facilities in California, and our recent Confirmation of Readiness from Health Canada, site selection and commencement of construction on our Canadian facility demonstrates our ability to progress our business plan and corporate objectives. Financial Highlights Three Months Ended March 31, 2018 Consolidated Financial Highlights Expressed in 000s of CDN$, except per share amounts Three Months Ended March 31, 2018 2017 Change Revenue 5,164 2,374 2,790 Cost of Goods Sold 3,071 1,159 1,912 Gross Margin 2,093 1,215 878 Selling, General and Administrative 5,557 1,715 3,842 Share-based Payments 2,169 - 2,169 Amortization Expense 702 441 261 Loss from Operations (6,335 ) (941 ) (5,394 ) Net Loss (6,268 ) (962 ) (5,306 ) Basic Loss Per Share ($0.23 ) ($0.04 ) ($0.19 ) Weighted Average Number of Shares 27,399,250 22,347,325 5,051,925 Operating Highlights - Three Months Ended March 31, 2018 Key operating highlights for the Company for the period included: On January 10, 2018, the Company began trading its common shares (Common Shares) on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol "SNN". On February 15, 2018 the Company began trading its Common Shares on the OTCQX Market, operated by OTC Markets Group, under the symbol "SNNVF". On February 15, 2018, the Company repaid the secured convertible promissory note (the FSD note) related to the acquisition of Full-Scale Distributors, LLC (FSD) in cash of $2.8 million (US$2.2 million), plus accrued interest, and the remaining portion through the issuance of Common Shares at the conversion price of US$2.55 per share. On February 21, 2018 Sunniva Medical Inc. (SMI) and Canopy Growth Corporation (Canopy Growth) entered into a take or pay supply agreement. Under the terms of the initial two-year agreement, which includes the distribution of Sunniva branded products, Canopy Growth will purchase approximately 45% of SMIs annual production capacity; representing 45,000 kgs of dried cannabis annually, commencing Q1 2019 or shortly thereafter. The Company and Canopy Growth will share in the revenues as product is sold through Canopy Growth's distribution network including its online marketplace, Tweed Main Street and via provincial distribution channels. The revenue share will be based on the strain, sales channel and other relevant factors. The agreement is subject to SMI receiving its license from Health Canada, which SMI has received its Confirmation of Readiness, and completing the Sunniva Canada Campus (defined below). On March 27, 2018 the Company completed a bought deal public offering for aggregate gross proceeds of $27.8 million. A total of 2,850,900 units ("Units") and 50,000 Warrants (as defined below) were sold at a price of $9.75 per Unit and $0.02 per Warrant. Each Unit consisted of one Common Share in the capital of the Company and one-half of one Common Share purchase warrant (each whole warrant, a "Warrant") of the Company. Each Warrant entitles the holder thereof to acquire one Common Share at an exercise price per Common Share of $12.50 for a period of 24 months. Results of Operations Three Months Ended March 31, 2018 During the period ended March 31, 2018, the Company generated $5.2 million in revenue from its two subsidiaries, Natural Health Service Ltd. (NHS) and FSD, which contributed $2.7 million and $2.5 million, respectively. Net loss for the period ended March 31, 2018 was $6.3 million as compared to $1.0 million during the period ended March 31, 2017. The key components contributing to the change in net loss from the three months ended March 31, 2018 compared to the three months ended March 31, 2017 comprise the following: Revenue increased from $2.4 million to $5.2 million due to NHS and FSD being acquired mid-way through the comparative period ended March 31, 2017 and stronger Q1 2018 results from FSD. Costs of goods sold increased from $1.2 million to $3.1 million resulting from the increase in revenue. Gross margin increased from $1.2 million to $2.1 million due to the increase in revenue. On a percentage-basis, gross margin decreased from 51% to 41% due to the higher proportion of FSD sales, which realize lower margins than NHS. Selling, general and administration expenses increased from $1.7 million to $5.6 million due to NHS and FSD operating for the full three-month period in 2018 and the Companys overall growth. Share-based payment expense increased from $nil to $2.2 million with the introduction of the Companys stock option plan mid-way through fiscal 2017. The Company realized a non-cash gain of $1.0 million on settlement of the FSD note. Fair value changes in derivative instruments due to the revaluation of secured convertible promissory notes and warrants increased from an expense of $0.1 million to $0.9 million due to the increase in the Companys share price. Amortization and depreciation expense increased from $0.4 million to $0.7 million due to NHS and FSD operating for the full three-month period in 2018. Recent Operating Developments Subsequent to March 31, 2018 For a comprehensive overview of Sunnivas recent developments, please refer to the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis of the Financial Condition and Results of Operations for the Three Months Ended March 31, 2018. Highlights include the following: Sunnivas US subsidiaries received all the necessary State of California temporary licenses for Phase one and two of construction at its purpose built state-of-the-art greenhouse cultivation facilities in Cathedral City, California (the Sunniva California Campus). The Company selected the location to build its Sunniva Canada Campus in Okanagan Falls, British Columbia (the Sunniva Canada Campus). The Companys wholly-owned subsidiary, SMI, has entered into a purchase and sale agreement to acquire the entire 126-acre industrial zoned property for a purchase price of $7 million. Closing is expected to occur on or about June 15, 2018. SMI has received development approval from the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen for construction of the Sunniva Canada Campus. SMI received the Confirmation of Readiness for a license under the Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations (ACMPR) from Health Canada. This represents acceptance of our detailed application with the next step being an inspection upon site readiness in order to commence cultivation. Copies of our interim financial statements for the three months ended March 31, 2018 and related managements discussion and analysis of financial results are available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. About Sunniva Inc. Sunniva, through its subsidiaries, is a vertically integrated medical cannabis company operating in the worlds two largest cannabis markets Canada and California where we are committed to delivering safe, high-quality products and services at scale. Our vision is to become the lowest cost, highest quality cannabis producer in the markets we serve by building large scale purpose-built greenhouses, offering better quality assurance with cannabis products free from pesticides, providing better patient and doctor access to cannabis education and sourcing better therapeutic delivery devices. Sunnivas management and board of directors have a proven track record for creating significant shareholder value both in the healthcare and biotech industries. Sunniva operates through its wholly owned subsidiaries: Sunniva Medical Inc. (SMI) SMI is building the Sunniva Canada Campus, a 740,000 square feet of purpose-built greenhouse facilities located in British Columbia. The facility will produce pesticide free products and will convert trim to extracted products such as cannabis oil. The oil can be used for drug delivery formats such as capsules, dissolvable strips, vaporization cartridges, tinctures and creams. Sunniva has commenced grading work on property. As the facility is not complete, revenue and costs are not known, therefore, profitability cannot be assured. CP Logistics, LLC (CPL) Through CPL, Sunniva has commenced construction of the Sunniva California Campus, state-of-the-art, purpose-built greenhouse facilities in Cathedral City, California. The Sunniva California Campus is planned in two phases. Phase 1 is designed to be 325,000 square feet and phase 2 will be 164,000 square feet. At this facility, it is estimated 30% of all product will be used for higher margin extracted products and all products will be produced free from the pesticides commonly used within todays industry. As the facility is not complete, revenue and costs are not known, therefore, profitability cannot be assured. Natural Health Services Ltd. (NHS) NHS owns and operates a network of 7 clinics in Canada specializing in medical cannabis under ACMPR. NHS connects patients with safe and effective medical cannabis products through Licensed Producers (LPs). NHS has in-house physicians and nurse practitioners specializing in the endocannabinoid system providing expert consultation, education, and recommendations for patients. NHS proprietary technology infrastructure assists physicians, patients and LPs to comply with the rules of Health Canada. NHS has more than 150,000 active medical documents outstanding and 95,000 active patients. Full-Scale Distributors, LLC (FSD) FSD, through its brand, Vapor Connoisseur, is a provider of custom, private-label vaporizers and accessories. FSD currently serves the needs of over 80 brands in the North American marketplace. Vapor Connoisseur is recognized for its high quality and innovative vaporization devices. Products are tailored to client needs, ensuring both safety and reliability and FSD will continue to provide these services in coordination with the large supply from both Sunniva Campuses. For more information please visit: www.sunniva.com Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements that are not historical facts, including without limitation, statements regarding future estimates, plans, programs, forecasts, projections, objectives, assumptions, expectations or beliefs of future performance, statements regarding Sunniva and Canopy Growths future actions under their supply agreement, the estimated timing of closing the acquisition of the property in Okanagan Falls, British Columbia for the Sunniva Canada Campus, Sunnivas plan to cultivate, produce and distribute a broad range of solutions focused on patients needs and Sunnivas plans, timing and estimates of production for its facilities, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as plans, expects or does not expect, is expected, estimates, intends, anticipates or does not anticipate, or believes, or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might or will be taken, occur or be achieved. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, events or developments to be materially different from any future results, events or developments expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, among others, the risk factors included in the Sunnivas continuous disclosure documents available on www.sedar.com. These factors should be considered carefully and readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. Although Sunniva has attempted to identify important risk factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other risk factors that cause actions, events or results to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in forward-looking statements. Sunniva assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, even if new information becomes available as a result of future events, new information or for any other reason except as required by law. Contact Information: Dr. Anthony Holler Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Investor Relations Contact: George Jurcic Manager, Investor Relations 587-430-0680 ir@sunniva.com Corporate Communications Contact: NetworkNewsWire (NNW) New York, New York www.NetworkNewsWire.com 212.418.1217 Office Editor@NetworkNewsWire.com May 30 2018 Cullross Ltd and Caledonia Housing Association have fleshed out their plans for a development of 57 affordable homes in the Hilltown area of Dundee Supplanting a disused engineering works off Alexander Street the residential development is being spearheaded by JM Architects who recenbtly filed a planning application following close of consultations. Emma Garry development director at Cullross said: We recently completed homes at the end of Alexander Street on Dens Road, so we know the area well and are keen to contribute in any way we can to the regeneration of Alexander Street. Andrew Kilpatrick, asset director at Caledonia Housing Association added: The site provides an ideal location for a mix of low cost home ownership and high quality affordable rent homes and reaffirms Caledonias commitment to work with Dundee City Council to provide homes and services that make life better. Subject to planning approval the new homes could be on-site this winter for completion by spring 2020. May 30 2018 Furniture and design specialists Alpha Scotland are moving up in the world having set up shop in an 11 storey office block in Glasgows Finnieston. Boasting panoramic aspects across the River Clyde the new base gives the firm more space to showcase their work with floor to ceiling windows allowing staff and visitors to soak up the famed Glasgow sunshine. To celebrate the move to new premises the firm is offering the chance to win a fortnights residency in the lofty space in a competition open to all self-employed homeworkers who want a taste for the high-life. Alpha Group chief executive, Paul Black, said: The team at Alpha Scotland specialise in creating environments that encourage more effective working. We want to give someone, who wouldnt normally get the chance, the opportunity to experience first-hand the difference this expertise makes. Online entrants are invited to submit photos of their home working environment alongside a short paragraph outlining what they feel a change of scenery would do for their productivity. Estimados amigos, Les doy cordialmente la bienvenida a este Blog informativo con articulos, analisis y comentarios de publicaciones especializadas y especialmente seleccionadas, principalmente sobre temas economicos, financieros y politicos de actualidad, que esperamos y deseamos, sean de su maximo interes, utilidad y conveniencia. Pensamos que solo comprendiendo cabalmente el presente, es que podemos proyectarnos acertadamente hacia el futuro. Gonzalo Raffo de Lavalle Las convicciones son mas peligrosos enemigos de la verdad que las mentiras. Quien no lo ha dado todo no ha dado nada. Helenio Herrera History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Karl Marx If you know the other and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. Sun Tzu We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity. Paulo Coelho UW Bus Driver to Compete in National Roadeo Competition UW transit bus operator Jody Sullivan will represent Wyoming at the Community Transportation Association of America National Bus Roadeo in Pittsburgh, Pa., June 9-11. He won the best overall title at last summers WYTRANS Bus Roadeo to earn a trip to the national competition. (UW Photo) Jody Sullivan is eager to demonstrate on the national level the driving and safety skills he has learned as a University of Wyoming transit bus operator. Sullivan will represent Wyoming at the Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) National Bus Roadeo in Pittsburgh, Pa., June 9-11. He won the best overall title at last summers WYTRANS Bus Roadeo to earn a trip to the national competition, where he will compete against nearly 80 other bus drivers. He received $1,000 for winning the state competition. I am very excited to have a chance to represent the University of Wyoming, says Sullivan, who has been driving for UW Transit and Parking Services for nearly three years. We have high standards for our transit operators, and I am excited to show the level of skill we have. Sullivan started as an assigned route driver for UW Transit and Parking, but is now a full-time floater, meaning that he can fill in and cover any route. I took the step into that to gain more responsibility and also to provide extra leadership to our part-time floater staff, he says. Sullivan also drives for current route drivers, covering for morning breaks as well as for lunches. For the state competition, Sullivan drove a 16-passenger bus and competed against 20 other drivers. The competition for nationals will be the same, with four different required tests for all drivers. Drivers will be given a written exam covering general driving rules, followed by the hands-on portion of the competition that includes: -- A pre-trip inspection to find faults with the bus. Competitors have a set time limit of seven minutes to perform a complete pre-trip inspection. -- Wheelchair securement. Drivers are required to properly load and secure a passenger in a wheelchair. Once that task is completed, the judge will check to see if the chair is properly secured and the seat belt in place. -- The driving course, composed of 10 obstacles and scoring on smoothness of operation during a seven-minute time limit. The course is marked with cones, and each has a point value assigned. Drivers are assessed lost points if a cone is hit. Sullivan is working with UW safety and training Manager Kevin Colman in preparation for the national competition. We have a mock course set up in our practice lot, and we run through the course multiple times, Sullivan says. We will be running through pre-trips and wheelchair securement as many times as we can. I also will study the general rules of the road pamphlet. The 29th annual CTAA Roadeo draws drivers from around the country to compete for top scores on a course that tests skills on every level of the drivers' abilities, with a primary focus on safe operations and passenger sensitivity. An awards banquet will follow the competition, and an expo is held in conjunction with the CTAA Roadeo. Social media can help fight corruption one like at a time Success in mobilising public opinion against dishonest leaders offers lessons Anne-Marie Slaughter Armenian anti-corruption protesters march in Yerevan. Likes and retweets tell ordinary citizens their voices are being heard Reuters This month has seen the unexpected and extraordinary toppling of Najib Razak in Malaysia after a massive corruption scandal. Last month the Armenian prime minister was forced out by protesters demanding justice, the rule of law, and clean government. In the past 18 months, we have seen corruption issues upset governments and even lead to imprisonment for presidents in Peru, Romania, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Israel and South Korea. Voters on every continent are fed up. Corruption is as old as politics itself, as are citizens efforts to root it out. But today anti-graft campaigners have new tools powered by technology. This phenomenon shows us the upside of mass data collection and social media, both of which are facing regulatory crackdowns and public scrutiny. The Open Government Partnership, an interstate compact created by eight countries in 2011, invites members to make anti-corruption commitments in broad categories that include measures to fight political, bureaucratic, private sector and cross-border wrongdoing. Changes to law enforcement can make the biggest difference as a fresh generation of prosecutors and judges drive investigations and convictions. Equally important, however, are public attitudes: fatalism versus resistance and activism. Communications scholars are well familiar with the phenomenon of a majority believing itself to be in the minority, or vice versa. A related concept is the spiral of silence.People fear isolation and tend to express their views only if they conform with the prevailing climate of opinion, at least within a particular group. This can affect election outcomes and opinion polling. But social media can be a useful antidote. Posts, likes and retweets are all things that tell ordinary citizens not only that their voices are being heard, but that their fellow citizens are marching alongside them. Think about the framing of the #MeToo movement as a statement of support to women brave enough to out themselves as victims of something often seen as shameful and even dangerous to admit. It is a message of solidarity and strength in numbers. We saw the same power of social media in the political uprisings that started in Moldova, the first Twitter revolution in April 2009, and was followed by the Iranian Green revolution a month later, through the upheavals of the Arab spring. Each harnessed the power of individuals realising they were not alone, and not in fact a minority but a majority, or at least a significant plurality. Scholars who focus on systemic corruption including Raymond Fisman of Boston University and Miriam Golden of the University of California, Los Angeles focus on how to shift from a corrupt equilibrium to a clean one. As they point out, residents of corrupt countries are certainly aware of the wrongdoing. But they are not aware of their fellow citizens determination to fight it. Quite the contrary; when corruption is systemic, it is rational even for individuals who would prefer to be honest to engage in wrongdoing so as not to avoid the suckers pay-off, in the language of game theory. Social media can shift that equilibrium one like and one share at a time. The example of how to confront systemic government corruption suggests that the best answers to other urgent problems fake news and the deliberate dissemination of manipulative disinformation to disrupt democracy, for example may not be to crack down on the perpetrators. Instead, we must show beleaguered citizens, who feel that they are at the mercy of political forces beyond their control, that they are in fact the majority. Turn the spiral of silence into a wave of affirmation. The writer is president of New America and an FT contributing editor Start your day with Sunrise, a roundup of B.C. news and opinions delivered straight to your inbox Start your day with Sunrise, delivered straight to your inbox Sign up now> Illustrative image. The VPNFilter virus has affected over 500,000 routers and storages in many countries, including Vietnam.-Photo vov.vn The virus has affected over 500,000 routers and storages in many countries, including Vietnam, it said. The most vulnerable devices are Internet-connected routers and storages produced by popular brands like Linksys, Mikro Tik, Netgear, and TP-Link. A research by the Cisco Talos group run by Cisco showed VNPFilter as a multi-phrase cyber-espionage virus capable of stealing information from websites and spying on the industrial command domain, such as those of power networks or industrial infrastructure. An effected device will be restarted and reset, during which the /var/run/vnpfilterw link will be created. The Authority said users should reset their devices to default mode to erase the malware while updating the firmware as soon as possible if they think their devices have been infected by the virus. The Authority has warned about lopes and weaknesses in the information security sector over the past few years. Last week, international organisations announced they have discovered at least 327 security holes that could spark attacks affecting Vietnamese users. Photo of AirAsia's CEO Tony Fernandes taken in March 2015. (Photo: AFP/Peter Parks) The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said it was probing allegations that Fernandes lobbied Indian officials for favourable treatment regarding licences for his low-cost carrier. "We have filed a case against Air Asia chief Tony Fernandes, his colleagues and government officers over procuring licences illegally," CBI official R.K. Gaur told AFP. Officers had raided AirAsia offices in major Indian cities as part of its investigation, he added. Fernandes was accused by investigators of campaigning to have aviation regulations relaxed in his favour, the Press Trust of India (PTI) reported. One of these was the so-called 5/20 rule stipulating that companies must have five years of domestic experience and a fleet of 20 aircraft before being eligible to operate abroad. Besides Fernandes, investigators also named an AirAsia director, an aviation consultant and unidentified Indian government officials in its preliminary case, PTI reported. AirAsia and its local joint venture partner Tata Sons launched domestic flight operations in India in 2014 by offering eye-catching promotional fares to lure budget travellers. Fernandes, a millionaire ex-music executive, has styled himself as Asia's answer to British tycoon Richard Branson. The company ran into trouble this month when Air Asia India's CEO Amar Abrol stepped down, citing personal reasons. The no-frills airline currently operates flights from its bases in Bengaluru and Delhi to several cities including Goa, Jaipur and Kochi. Bloomberg, citing the companys India unit director Shuva Mandal, said Air Asia denied any wrongdoing and is cooperating with authorities. In an emailed statement the company said it began criminal and civil proceedings against a former chief executive officer in 2016 and hopes to bring an early resolution to all such issues, according to Bloomberg. Shares of AirAsia Group Bhd fell as much as 4.2 per cent early on Wednesday. Malaysia's wider market was down 1.9 per cent. President Tran Dai Quang visits Koganei Seiki Company Ltd in Gunma Prefecture where 39 Vietnamese engineers work.- VNA/VNS Photo Nhan Sang At a reception for Gunma prefectures Governor Masaaki Osawa, Quang said he appreciated that Osawas selected Vietnam as the first country to visit after he was re-elected Governor of Gunma in 2015. He called on Gunma to enhance co-operation with Vietnamese localities in order to effectively utilise the potential of both sides by increasing people-to-people exchanges and stepping up collaboration in tourism and investment, especially in high-tech agriculture, farm produce processing and preserving industry, and manufacturing and supporting industries. The President also suggested Gunma prefecture receive more Vietnamese trainees and workers in the fields of agriculture and construction. Osawa briefed President Quang on the results of co-operation between Gunma and Vietnam over the recent past, saying that 12 businesses from the prefecture have invested in Vietnam. Gunma is also assisting nearly 40 enterprises which plan to invest in the country in the time to come, according to the governor. Gunma prefecture wants to receive more highly-skilled Vietnamese workers and trainees. At the reception, many local firms expressed their wish to increase educational co-operation with Viet Nam, particularly with Vietnamese universities, to create qualified human resources, thus meeting cooperation needs in economy, trade and investment between Vietnamese and Japanese localities. Later on the same day, Quang visited Koganei Seiki Co, which specialises in manufacturing aircraft and formula one cars. There are 39 Vietnamese out of 240 engineers working in the company. Quang and his spouse are on a State visit to Japan until June 2, at the invitation of the State of Japan. An official welcome ceremony for the Vietnamese leader is scheduled to take place on Wednesday morning at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo under the chair of Emperor Akihito. Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko are scheduled to meet with and hold a state banquet in honour of President Quang and his spouse. During the visit, President Quang will also hold talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. General Kim Yong Chol (centre), who is in charge of inter-Korean affairs for North Korea's ruling Workers' Party, arriving at the inter-Korea transit office in Paju on Feb 27, 2017. (Photo: AFP/Korea Pool) General Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the central committee of the Workers' Party and right-hand man to Kim, will meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York on Wednesday or Thursday, officials said. Trump confirmed the general was on his way in a tweet and boasted that Washington would have a "great team" for the talks on resolving the old foes' nuclear standoff. The president still hopes the meeting will take place on Jun 12 in Singapore. "Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!" Trump wrote. The White House is prepared for the planned summit to take place on Jun 12, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on Tuesday. The president thinks ongoing discussions are going very well ... and that the meetings taking place over this week ... certainly are signs of progress," Sanders told reporters travelling with Trump on Air Force One to Nashville, Tennessee. "Were going to be prepared if it takes place on June 12. Well certainly be prepared if it for some reason takes place at a later date - well be prepared for that as well." Trump will also meet Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington on Jun 7, Sanders said earlier. "Since the president's May 24 letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans have been engaging," she said. "The United States continues to actively prepare for President Trump's expected summit with leader Kim in Singapore." A spokesman for the North Korean mission to the United Nations said he was unable to confirm that the general was on his way to New York but added that "preparation for the summit is proceeding at the highest level." The North Korean envoy landed at Beijing airport on Tuesday and was to meet with Chinese officials before travelling on to the United States on Wednesday, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency. North Korean general Kim Yong Chol (left) also attended an inter-Korean summit at the truce village of Panmunjom last month. (Graphic: AFP ) Pompeo's spokeswoman said it would be the third meeting between Pompeo - who opened contacts with the isolated Pyongyang regime when he was still CIA director - and General Kim. "The secretary will be heading up to New York tomorrow and I believe returning sometime on Thursday," she said. "We're still finalising exactly what these meetings will look like." The trip is part of a flurry of diplomacy before the on-again, off-again summit. TRUCE VILLAGE Trump briefly scrapped the talks last week, citing "open hostility" from the North, but since then both sides have dialed down the rhetoric and the process appears to be back on track. On Sunday, US negotiators, headed by Washington's ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, began meeting North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom that divides the two Koreas. "They plan to have additional meetings this week," Sanders said. She said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin and a US team are separately coordinating logistics in Singapore for the expected summit. Chung Sung-yoon, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said Kim Yong Chol would be the most senior North Korean on US soil since Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok met then-president Bill Clinton in 2000. The general has played a front-seat role during recent rounds of diplomacy aimed at ending the nuclear stalemate on the Korean peninsula. He sat next to Trump's daughter Ivanka, who is also a White House aide, during February's closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in South Korea, an event that was seen as a turning point in the nuclear crisis. He also accompanied Kim Jong Un on both of his recent trips to China to meet President Xi Jinping, and held talks with Pompeo when he travelled to Pyongyang. YAWNING GAP General Kim is a notorious figure in South Korea, where he is blamed for masterminding the 2010 sinking of the Cheonan navy corvette that killed 46 sailors, an attack for which North Korea denies responsibility. From 2009 to 2016, he also headed North Korea's General Reconnaissance Bureau, the unit tasked with cyber warfare and intelligence gathering. During that period, North Korea ramped up its hacking programs, including a hugely costly penetration of Sony Pictures. General Kim is one of several North Korean officials under US sanctions, but State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said she was sure that the US had taken appropriate administrative steps to allow him to visit New York unmolested. His journey to the US caps a frenetic few days of meetings between North Korean and American officials. Japanese broadcaster NHK showed footage of Kim Chang Son, Kim Jong Un's de facto chief of staff, arriving in Singapore, escorted by three bodyguards. An AFP photographer saw Kim entering Singapore's luxury Fullerton hotel on Tuesday and leaving some 30 minutes later in a three-vehicle convoy. If the Jun 12 date stands, officials have only two weeks to finalise details such as where in Singapore the talks will take place and how internationally sanctioned North Korean officials will travel there. The key task is to settle the agenda. The main stumbling block is likely to be the concept of "denuclearisation" - both sides say they want it, but there is a yawning gap between their definitions. Washington wants North Korea to quickly give up all its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way in return for sanctions and economic relief. But analysts say North Korea will be unwilling to cede its nuclear deterrent unless it is given security guarantees that the US will not try to topple the regime. In April, the NYPD arrested three Spanish nationals for allegedly vandalizing subway train cars with "European style graffiti" in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. The three taggers have now pleaded guilty, with one insisting he had no idea tagging was illegal: "In Spain, it is normal and not a serious crime." When two subway cars were found vandalized in the storage area of the 168th Street subway station in Manhattan on April 11th, the MTA got in touch with the NYPD. Investigators "determined that the subway trains were vandalized with European style graffiti," the NYPD said in a statement. "A conferral with Interpol in Spain confirmed that the graffiti was of Spanish origin." The NYC Transit Authority's Eagle Security Teamwhich was formed in 2007 to help combat graffiti and vandalismgave the NYPD's Special Projects unit a vehicle license plate number. An MTA guard had seen three men wearing masks inside of a vehicle near the 148th Street station train yards that very day, and the car had been rented from Newark Airport. Eventually, the car was tracked down to Brooklyn, near the Utica Avenue subway station. On April 15th officers followed three men into station's train storage area, where they allegedly painted several train cars with the tags ORUS, SEN/JABATO, and TATE/ASIA. Ricardo Espinola-Martinez, 36; Ignacio Dominguez-Robles, 39; and Manuel Cobano-Pareja, 40 were charged with criminal mischief, making graffiti, possession of a graffiti instrument, and criminal trespass. The Post reported details from the arrest documents, which included Dominguez-Robles claiming, "In my country [it] is not illegal to do graffiti," while Cobano-Pareja insisted, "I am not a terrorist and I dont know any. In Barcelona, [graffiti] is not as serious as it is in New York City." Investigators subsequently determined that the three suspects' tags were also on more train cars in Queens and the Bronx. According to the Post, the three men, who were staying in an Airbnb in the Bronx, have "cut plea deals in Manhattan, and the Bronx, copping to misdemeanor graffiti and mischief charges in exchange for time served and fines totaling $7,500" but "still [face] various graffiti, trespassing and criminal mischief charges" for the incidents in Brooklyn and Queens. Those behind the SEN and ORUS tags have been in NYC before, making their mark on some trains in the Bronx in 2014. Here are the tags in Berlin: Back in 2006, it was estimated that 70% of subway graffiti was made by Europeans. The MTA has gotten faster at taking tagged trains out of service, as most of the "bombings" are done in rail yards, but some occasionally slip through. Subway graffiti expert (and Gothamist co-founder) Jake Dobkin has previously noted, "Europeans do love to come to NYC and try to get up on a train. Most New York writers don't, because they know how quickly the trains will get buffed." The NYC Parks Department spent the holiday weekend strictly enforcing a recently announced closure of a prime stretch of Rockaway Beach, stationing Park Enforcement Patrol officers along the beach to prevent anyone from so much as setting foot on the sand. Surfing is still permitted along the stretch from Beach 91st Street to Beach 102nd, but aside from a small section by the concessions at Beach 97th, the 11-block section is completely off-limits. In a surprise announcement made last week, just days before the opening of public beaches for the summer, the city said that beach erosion "means that there is not enough beach area to safely operate swimming and recreation activities in this area." The suddenness of the announcement angered local residents and business owners, many of whom said they had been warning the city about the beach erosion for over a year. On the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend, some Rockaway residents held a mock funeral for the beach, and Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver was heckled at a press conference announcing the start of the beach season. Only In Rockaway. FUNERAL FOR A BEACH. After Parks say some beaches are being closed for the summer some locals say RIP to the dead beaches. pic.twitter.com/fuVJFPJDpu Rockaway Times (@Rockawaytimes) May 25, 2018 Local business owners protested the closure of a stretch of Rockaway beach by staging a funeral and I cant stop thinking about this image! pic.twitter.com/lM213Ym4H1 aditi (@oatmilkmotel) May 29, 2018 Although the boardwalk remains open to pedestrians, some beachgoers and local residents were surprised that the Parks Department was preventing them from even walking along the beach, which is now cordoned off by fencing. Over the weekend, some visitors were observed climbing over a protective dune in order to access the blocked-off section of beach. Rockaway resident Matt Johnson says he was walking on the beach Sunday afternoon when he was shooed away by Parks Department staffers. "I was wearing shoes and socks, did not have a bathing suit, towel or even a bag, so I believe it was clear to any observer that I was not intending to enter the water," Johnson said. "I was stopped by the two Parks staff members on the beach, who told me that I could not continue walking on the beach past that point. I asked them whether the section of the beach closed to swimming was also closed to pedestrians and they confirmed that it was." Johnson said he told the staffers that he had walked along the same stretch of beach on Saturday morning, and during that stroll had informed several Parks personnel about a large object that had washed up on the beach, and had not been told to leave. "We had a calm, respectful discussion, during which they suggested I file a complaint with 311 regarding this policy change, as well appeal to my local community board," Johnson said. "They agreed with me that the policy of barring pedestrians from the closed beach was flawed. In course of our conversation, I learned that they were ordinarily posted in Manhattan but had been reassigned to Rockaway to help manage the beach closure." The Parks Department says that in May experts took final measurements of the distance between the toe of the dune and the high and low tide lines to estimate how much space could be available for recreational use. After consulting with lifeguards, Parks officials said they decided it would not be safe to allow access to the section, which can become largely submerged at high tide. This stretch of beach will be off limits through next year and likely beyond. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Senator Chuck Schumer have called on the Army Corps of Engineers to accelerate their timeline for adding new stone groynes to help slow down the erosion, and dump more sand to the beach. But that project is not expected to begin until after the 2019 beach season, the NY Times reports. The Parks Department stresses that 4.5 miles of Rockaway beach are still open for swimming, a fact that former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe also noted on Twitter. Sympathetic--to a point--with #RockawayBeach residents complaining about City shutting a half-mile eroded stretch for safety reason. But they still have 4.5 miles of beach & boardwalk restored at massive expense, and at worst a 5-minute walk to an open section. @NY4P @NYCParks (((Adrian Benepe))) (@Adrian_Benepe) May 28, 2018 A Queens Community Board 14 Parks and Public Safety meeting is scheduled for June 11th at 6:30. Funeral Announcements A daily list of current funeral annoucements as heard on KXRA 1490 AM/100.3 FM News Updates The daily news, sports, and events delivered daily from Voice of Alexandria. Sports Update This current sports headlines delivered daily from Voice of Alexandria. Upcoming Events This email is the events of the area delivered daily from Voice of Alexandria. Breaking News The big news. Sent only as it happens. Spencer Platt/Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- Lawyers for President Donald Trumps longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen are racing to review millions of files seized by the FBI in last months raids of his home, office and hotel room, but they say they are running out of time. In a hearing in Manhattan on Wednesday, Judge Kimba Wood of the Southern District of New York set a deadline of June 15 to complete their review, despite strenuous objections from Cohens legal team. Cohens lawyers said they have about 3.7 million files to sift through, but they are only about a third of the way to completion. We are moving heaven and earth, said Todd Harrison, one of Cohens attorneys. We have people sleeping on couches. We are working around the clock. Steven Ryan, Cohens lead counsel, told the judge I need more time and lobbied unsuccessfully for a mid-July deadline. The judge said she needed to balance the need for a careful review with the need to move the case forward and noted that the special master, who is also reviewing documents as they are produced by the government, had no problem speeding up as necessary. If Cohens legal team is unable to complete their review, Judge Wood said she would assign any remaining material to a government taint team, a group of federal prosecutors not directly involved in the case, to decide what if any material is subject to the attorney-client privilege. Federal prosecutors also revealed for the first time that among the items seized Cohen last months was a shredding machine, the contents of which are among the only items that the government has not yet turned over to the special master or Cohens legal team. Federal prosecutors declined to comment on whether they would try to reassemble the contents of the shredder before turning them over or whether the very existence of a shredding machine necessitated the search warrant out of fear Cohen was attempting to destroy evidence. In defending the raids, the Justice Department has previously expressed concern that absent a search warrant, these records could have been deleted without record, and without recourse for the law enforcement. The hearing was otherwise dominated by Michael Avenatti, the firebrand attorney who represents adult-film star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. Avenatti has taken to Twitter in recent weeks to accuse both Cohen and Trump of various forms of corruption unrelated to the civil case Daniels filed against Trump in California, and he has sought to intervene in the federal case against Cohen in New York while using court appearances to continue his public crusade against them. Avenatti is not admitted to the bar in New York State, so he filed paperwork asking the judge to allow him to appear in court specifically for this case, but the judge made it clear that would she would not tolerate any attempts by Avenatti to seek publicity from his appearance in her courtroom. You will not be able to use this court as a platform, Judge Wood said. Until you are admitted here I dont expect you to be heard. I cant control what you do outside. Cohen's attorney Ryan accused Avenatti of self-interested grandstanding, saying Avenattis release of some of Cohens financial records amounted to a premeditated drive-by shooting of Cohens rights. He is involved in ways that call attention to himself, Ryan said in opposition to Avenattis motion to be admitted. This is about the aggrandizement of a single attorney. An attorney for President Trump, Joanna Hendon, joined Cohen's in seeking to keep Avenatti out of the case, saying Avenatti is prepared to be not straightforward with the court and accusing him of being cute with the facts. Avenatti denied doing anything improper and complained about audio recordings of a conversation between Cohen and Daniels prior lawyer Keith Davidson that were leaked to the Wall Street Journal. Ryan, however, assured the judge that any audio tapes in his possession remain under lock and key. Shortly after the hearing, Avenatti withdrew his application for admission without prejudice, meaning he could choose to renew the motion at a later time, though he does not appear to be stepping back from the case. He took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon, promising to continue to bring the facts and evidence to the American people. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Minister Isola Welcomes International Firm Huobi to Gibraltar Minister for Commerce, Albert Isola said he was delighted to meet with Mian Manoff a key member of the senior management team of the Houbi Group. Also present at the meeting were Joey Garcia of Isolas and Paul Astengo the Co-Chair of the DLT Working Group and who leads on technology initiatives for Gibraltar Finance. The meeting was held at the Token Summit in New York and follows a recent visit to Gibraltar by the firms senior executives who were welcomed to Gibraltar by Chief Minister Fabian Picardo QC and Minister Isola. The team were in Gibraltar to meet with the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission in relation to their DLT licence application. Huobi, one of the largest firms in this sector in Asia with some 800 staff were attracted to Gibraltar because of the supportive DLT Regulatory Framework which came into effect in January 2018. Huobi Global is a world-leading cryptocurrency financial services group. In 2013, the founding team saw the great potential of the blockchain industry to revolutionize the future of the global financial system. They founded Huobi.com with a mission to both make the financial industry more efficient, and to make wealth more accessible to everyone. Huobi Global has offices in Singapore, the United States, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and is prevalent in over 130 countries across the globe. Advising Huobi Group are Gibraltar Law Firm Isolas. GP Specialising in Alcohol and Substance Misuse and Addictions Government and the Gibraltar Health Authority have today announced that a General Practitioner with Special Interests will be starting work at Bruces Farm from 30 May 2018. Dr Chimene Taylor is a highly experienced and well trained local GP, who has recently returned to Gibraltar. She has Royal College of General Practitioners training in alcohol and substance misuse, which is the highest level of recommended UK qualification for a GP working in substance misuse management. Dr Taylor is already providing excellent general patient care in the Primary Care Centre (PCC), and will also be working closely with the Drug and Alcohol Awareness and Rehabilitation Services to significantly improve medical care and recovery from substance and alcohol addiction. She will dedicate one morning a week to working at Bruces Farm for general medical care for residents and will also be providing a community detox service to clients from her medical clinic in the PCC. This aspect of her role will be invaluable in continuing care for those who have completed a programme at Bruces Farm and will also provide confidential detox care. The Director of Primary Care, Dr Krishna Rawal said: It is entirely my intention to create a far more comprehensive level of primary care to provide the truest sense of community care for all of Gibraltar. This involves recruiting GPs with Special Interests in areas such as alcohol and substance misuse so we can care for a part of our community that perhaps does not access care as easily or as effectively as others. Minister for Health, Care and Justice, the Honourable Neil F. Costa MP added: The recruitment of a GP with Special Interest in alcohol addiction and substance misuse is an excellent example of how my Ministry and the Gibraltar Health Authority is working in close collaboration with other Ministries to serve our community in the best possible way. I am extremely proud of all my GPs, who provide a truly excellent service to this community. By developing specialist skills, they are able to show how adaptable and crucial a General Practitioner is as part of any healthy and well cared-for community. I am eager to encourage all health care professionals to develop higher in specialist interests, in order to progress further in their careers, and to always strive for the highest standards of healthcare. Photo: Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic Is Keanu Reeves on a mission to revive romantic comedies? More likely than you think! In addition to Destination Wedding, his rom-com with Winona Ryder due this summer, Reeves has signed on to Netflixs Always Be My Maybe (which we demanded they make), according to The Hollywood Reporter. Ali Wong and Randall Park will star as a pair of childhood sweethearts who reunite years after a falling out. Sasha (Wong) is a celebrity chef with a restaurant in San Francisco, while Marcus (Park) is a musician living at home and working for his dad. Its unclear who Keanu will play Sashas mysterious older boyfriend? A sous chef with a temper? A dashing doctor that randomly shows up to sweep everyone off their feet? but he has joined the comedy, along with Daniel Dae Kim, Deadpool actress Karan Soni, and Charlyne Yi. Always Be My Maybe will be directed by Fresh Off the Boat showrunner Nahnatchka Khan. Watch it in 2019. The Curse of Frankenstein. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Hammer Film Productions, the iconic British film studio, has always been synonymous with sex and violence. Its a fact that many modern horror film fans either downplay or overlook, since many of their better titles are more than just showcases for blood and skin. But the promise of gore and nudity was central to Hammers production and advertising campaigns from the mid-1950s on. By todays standards, Hammers popular and now-iconic gothic horror films stylish Technicolor (or Eastmancolor) updates of Universal genre staples like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man seem quaint. But many of their best movies are united in one way: Theyre simultaneously bloody and titillating, haunting and atmospheric. On May 30, Manhattans Quad Cinema kicks off their gob-smacking Hammers House of Horror program, a 32-film survey of films produced by the studio. The program is the first in a two-part series, and focuses on Hammers output from 19561967. Featured films range from Hammers still-unnerving monster movies like The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), and their increasingly graphic sequels to a fantastic selection of equally sensational Hammer highlights from other genres, like war films and science-fiction flicks. To celebrate the Quads upcoming survey, Vulture has compiled a brief Hammer Horror primer, detailing the many titles, artists, and trends that helped make Hammer such a vital institution. Family Business: James and Michael Carreras In 1934, jeweler turned music-hall performer William Hinds officially patented the business name Hammer Productions. Hinds initially used the company whose name was taken from his William Hammer stage name to import B pictures and some of Hindss own films. This initial outing didnt go so well for Hinds, but Hammer bounced back in 1948 after Hinds teamed up with movie-chain owner Enrique Carreras and his ambitious son James. Initially, Hammer focused on lightweight comedies, and melodramatic adaptations of stage plays and successful BBC serials, including dated and creaky comedies of manners like What the Butler Saw (1950), Life With the Lyons (1954), and Up the Creek (1958), the last of which co-stars Peter Sellers as a crooked navy officer. James became the driving force of Hammer Productions during its most commercially successful period (until 1970) by actively securing distribution and financial deals with all of the major Hollywood studios, including United Artists, Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, Columbia Pictures, and Universal Pictures. Unfortunately, James also had a big hand in leading the company to financial ruin. In 1966, he sold off Bray Studios a palatial country manor that served as the companys primary shooting location, thereby allowing them to significantly reduce production costs after trying to sell the property for four years. In 1970, James almost singlehandedly nuked the companys vital relationship with Warner Brothers-Seven Arts: Resentful of the fact that Taste the Blood of Dracula was released in the U.S. as half of a double feature with the dismally kitschy Joan Crawford vehicle Trog, he boasted about how Scars of Dracula was financed exclusively with British money (i.e., he couldnt convince any American backers). Enter: Michael Carreras, Jamess son, who stopped his father from selling off Hammers name and film catalogue. Michael tried to focus the studios output on horror movies, though he himself would direct a couple of non-horror titles, including the ill-fated, Shaw Brothers co-produced action-thriller, Shatter (1974). Michael was also as business- and trend-savvy as James, and chose to continue his fathers initiative of leaning more heavily on sex and nudity, especially in the sexy vampire Karnstein trilogy of The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), and Twins of Evil (also 1971). Future Worlds: Aliens, Clones, and Yetis The Quatermass Xperiment, based on the 1953 BBC television series The Quatermass Experiment written by Nigel Kneale, was one of Hammers first major successes. Hammers board of directors went so far as to celebrate the films ten-year anniversary in 1966 despite knowing, by this time, that fans enjoyed the film more for its horror elements than its science-fiction tropes. Still, Hammer did initially follow-up The Quatermass Xperiment which follows macho professor-cum-adventurer Bernard Quatermasss encounters with a fungus-like alien with more science fiction. Frequent Hammer contributor Jimmy Sangster penned the sturdy homage/rip-off, X The Unknown (1956), a project that started out as a Quatermass sequel, but then had to be changed because of Kneales objections. This was preceded by the silly two-men-for-one-girl clone melodrama The Four-Sided Triangle (1953) followed by the decent Quatermass 2 (1957), and then the classic Quatermass and the Pit (1967). Kneale also directly worked with Hammer on the understated creature feature The Abominable Snowman (1957) and the gorgeous-looking supernatural yarn The Witches (1966). After that, Hammer produced science-fiction curios like the sometimes great space oddity Moon Zero Two (1969). But the best of Hammers sci-fi offerings has to be the combustive mods versus the military versus evil kids drama, These Are the Damned (1962), a troubled but strong production helmed by Joseph Losey. Universal Monsters: Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy Hammer soon found great success with Gothic horror films that starred public domain characters previously made famous by Universal from the 1930s through the 1950s. Carreras and Hammer knew that Universal could potentially sue for, uh, ripping them off, so they tasked Sangster with making significant, lawsuit-proof changes in his script and approach. As a result, the engrossing The Curse of Frankenstein originally conceived as a black-and-white remake with a monster that more closely resembled Boris Karloffs flat-topped monster reportedly grossed 70 times its (admittedly low) budget during its initial theatrical run, after Sangster shifted his focus to Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) and not his creation (Christopher Lee). Curse was followed by a handful of sequels of varying quality: The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), both of which hold up quite nicely, since they complicate Frankensteins comparatively straightforward characterization in Curse. Hammer also hit pay dirt with Horror of Dracula and The Mummy, and tried and failed to kick off a werewolf series with the sprawling but enjoyable The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), which is mostly notable today for its high production values and characteristically nervy lead performance from Oliver Reed, who plays the sweaty, self-loathing title character. Hammers Dracula films are generally the most consistently rewarding of their horror series: Even a disreputable later entry like Scars of Dracula (1970) is somewhat compelling, though many fans understandably prefer the moody, and far less combustive The Brides of Dracula (1960). So its not surprising that the studios other vampire flicks Twins of Evil, Vampire Circus (1971) and Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter (1974) are some of the best films that Hammer has produced to date. Other noteworthy semi-traditional Gothic horror productions from the 1960s include The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), The Reptile (1966), and The Plague of the Zombies (1966). Double Act: Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee Cushing and Lees star power gave immediate popularity and sustained longevity to Hammers Dracula, Frankenstein, and Mummy films. They both invested a lot of care and sensitivity into their performances: Cushing went so far as to study brain surgeries before playing Victor Frankenstein in several films. He also brought his impressive knowledge of Holmesian lore to his leading performance in the still somehow underrated The Hounds of the Baskervilles (1959), and applied himself in ways many actors would not (ex: he smoked a pipe during the filming of Baskervilles, despite hating the taste of tobacco). Both men put up with a lot of mediocre scripts, personal illnesses and losses, unfortunate costumes (Hello, The Pirates of Blood River!), and grueling production schedules. Cushing struggled through the illness and death of his wife Helen while shooting a couple of Hammer films, and Lee put up with everything from debilitating physical injuries (including a bone-deep dog bite during the shooting of The Hound of the Baskerville and falling into a freshly dug grave on Dracula: Prince of Darkness) to underhanded salary negotiations. Cushing and Lees contributions to Hammers colorful history cannot be overstated. Women in Early Horror: Playmates, Stunt Doubles, and Bette Davis Cushing and Lees female co-stars played an equally integral part in the making of Hammers films. Unfortunately, many of these women were regularly and unabashedly exploited, even before the films were promoted with hand-painted posters that emphasize heaving and disproportionately large bosoms. Some of these women were beauty-pageant contestants, fashion models, or Playboy Playmates; some were international starlets like Ursula Andress (She), Ingrid Pitt (Countess Dracula), and Yvonne Monlaur (The Brides of Dracula). Some had stunt doubles for their nude scenes, but were dubbed over in order to appeal to a wider male-dominated audience (many by voice-over actress Nikki van der Zyl). Related Stories An Introduction to Spanish Horror: 15 Movies You Need to See Many of Hammers female stars walked away unhappy: Andress was replaced by Olinka Berova for the lousy Vengeance of She (1968), while Bette Davis was shooed away after starring in the fantastically creepy thriller The Nanny (1965) and the winningly deranged farce The Anniversary (1968). Other actresses walked away confident that they had the power to make or break these films: Raquel Welch left Hammer on a high note after headlining the cavewoman-and-dinosaur blockbuster One Million Years B.C., while Joan Fontaine used her influence to force Hammers board of directors to hire director Cyril Frankel (who made the devastatingly unnerving pedophile thriller Never Takes Sweets From a Stranger) to helm her in The Witches, her last feature film. Odds and Ends: Cavewomen, Pirates, Psychos, and Soldiers Monster movies may have been Hammers biggest and most consistent money-makers, but the company often tried to glom onto existing trends. They made a handful of fun swashbucklers, like Captain Clegg (1962) and The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964), and a couple of worthwhile entries in the ignoble canon of Historic and Barely Clothed Women films, including One Million Years B.C. (1966) and The Viking Queen (1967). Hammer also made a pair of stand-out WWII war-crime dramas: the effectively shocking (and, at the time, rather profitable) The Camp on Blood Island (1958) and its relatively classy (and BAFTA-nominated!) follow-up, Yesterdays Enemy (1959). But Hammer always did well with thrillers, particularly the subgenre of, in James Carrerass words, mini-Hitchcocks that Hearn has aptly described as suspense thrillers, which often cast a confused and vulnerable heroine as the victim of a Machiavellian scheme. The best of this subgenre includes the excellent, Sangster-scripted Taste of Fear (1961) as well as the loopy, locked-room mystery The Snorkel (1958) and the tense Oliver Reed vehicle Paranoiac (1963). Be sure to check out the excellent black magic/devil worship frightfest The Devil Rides Out (1968) and the equally great heist caper Cash on Demand (1961), which features a gripping performance from Cushing as a ruthless bureaucrat who is held hostage during a bank robbery. Before the Collapse: Greatness at the End of an Era Many critics and fans including Marcus Hearn author, of The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films admit that the general quality of Hammers post-60s output was generally inferior from 1970 onward. But Hearn is at least fair-minded enough to give credit where its due and sometimes where its not (hes somewhat fond of The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the underwhelming, disreputable final entry in the Lee-starring Dracula films). Even some of Michael Carrerass more outlandish attempts at keeping the studios lights on including the unnerving Rosemarys Baby/satanic panic riff To the Devil a Daughter (1976) and the wonky but fun martial arts/horror hybrid The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974) are worth a look. Adventurous viewers may want to seek out Hammers more-hit-than-miss TV horror anthology, Hammer House of Horror (1980), particularly Visitor from the Grave, The House That Bled to Death, and Rude Awakening. After the Fall: Hammer Horror in the 21st Century In 2007, Dutch producer John de Mol purchased the rights to Hammers titles and name. Executives Simon Oakes and Marc Schipper now manage the studio, and have since released a handful of Gothic chillers of varying quality. The surprisingly excellent vampire remake Let Me In (2010) stands out as the best of this bunch, but Irish pagansandbirth-control-themed horror film Wake Wood (2011) and WWI ghost story Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2015) are both fitfully brilliant. Heres to many more years of lurid Hammer glory. Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for NARAS Hailee Steinfeld earned her Oscar nomination playing a scrappy frontier girl in True Grit, and shell be pulling that petticoat out of mothballs for her first lead television role. Steinfeld has been cast as Emily Dickinson in the newly ordered Apple series Dickinson, about the American authors coming-of-age years. Its being billed as a comedy that explores the constraints of society, gender and family from the perspective of a budding writer who doesnt fit in to her own time through her imaginative point of view, and will be set in the 1800s with a modern sensibility and tone. So, True Grit style meets Edge of Seventeens awkward-years trials and tribulations sounds like its right in the Hailee wheelhouse. Kendrick Lamar. Photo: Bebeto Matthews/AP/REX/Shutterstock The recipients of this years Pulitzer Prizes were honored today in New York City, and the belle of the ball was rapper Kendrick Lamar, whose album DAMN. was recognized for the 2018 prize in music. Other stars at the luncheon included Annabella Sciorra and Rosanna Arquette, who have both made public accusations of sexual misconduct against disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, and who accompanied Ronan Farrow to the ceremony. Farrow received the Public Service prize for the sprawling New Yorker story that lit the fuse on both the Weinstein bomb and the #MeToo movement. Here are some looks from inside the event. Farrow with Arquette and Sciorra, who both contributed to his investigative report. And Farrow with his mother, Mia, who could not be beaming at him any harder. And even though Arquette was there to support Farrow, there was apparently a long enough lull in the fete for her to dip over to the New York Public Library and register for a library card. Knowledge is power, kids. But then there was Kendrick Lamar, who apparently had everyone acting up when he arrived. Kendrick Lamar just showed up at the Pulitzer luncheon and everyone is freaking out, taking pictures, etc. Pete Vernon (@byPeteVernon) May 30, 2018 He fielded selfie requests on his way into the venue: And selfie requests from CNNs Don Lemon: A still from the @PulitzerPrizes livestream: CNN's Don Lemon snaps a selfie with Pulitzer winner Kendrick Lamar. pic.twitter.com/HtwG2heIMP Ellie Hall (@ellievhall) May 30, 2018 Even fellow honoree Farrow wanted in on the selfie game with Lamar, and they were joined by New Yorker editor David Remnick. #MomsForKendrick Also we got to meet @kendricklamar and he was absolutely lovely! #PulitzerPrize2018 pic.twitter.com/99iwoCXN93 Mia Farrow (@MiaFarrow) May 30, 2018 New York Magazines Jerry Saltz, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, even ended up with Kendricks name tag and may or may not have performed a cut from DAMN. A scene from Rosanne. Photo: Adam Rose/ABC Less than 24 hours after ABC cancelled the Roseanne revival, the writers are still scrambling to figure out what comes next. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Roseanne writer and executive producer Dave Caplan recounted how yesterdays news went down in the writers room, and said that no one has clarified how or if the writers will be compensated for the shows 11th season. Everybody is still in shock at how quickly this all went down, Caplan said. Its unfortunate because the writers did pass on other jobs to take this job and nobody really knows yet what kind of compensation theyre going to get. Everybody is a little bit on edge about how its going to turn out. But we all know its a wasted opportunity to write more episodes. Roseanne was cancelled after star Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet about Obama administration adviser Valerie Jarrett. Barr later apologized and said she was ambien tweeting. Uma Thurman. Photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Uma Thurman has secured another TV gig. Deadline reports that Netflix has tapped the actress to star in Chambers, a previously ordered drama that focuses on a young woman whose life is saved by a heart transplant, but who then starts exhibiting some unsavory traits that belonged to her mysterious donor. Thurman will play the mother of the girl whose heart was used to save a life, and she strikes up a relationship with the recipient of her daughters vital organ and also learns that her daughter might not actually be totally dead. So thats a lot to unpack! The first season is slated for ten episodes. Roseanne Barr is blaming Ambien for her racist tweets and telling her fans, "I'm not a racist, just an idiot who made a bad joke." Sanofi, the maker of Ambien, responded with a statement full of shade: "While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication." Barr's Ambien explanation was part of an hours-long tweetstorm reacting to ABC's cancellation of her hit show "Roseanne." She had said on Tuesday that she was leaving Twitter, but she just can't seem to log off. She zig-zagged between apologizing for her foul Twitter behavior and retweeting memes that made her apology sound insincere. She retweeted fans who portrayed her as the victim of a liberal media double standard. All told, she posted more than 100 times. Later in the day, President Trump joined her on Twitter. His first public reaction to the show's cancellation was a tweet criticizing Disney CEO Bob Iger. Related: Trump breaks silence on Roseanne Barr scandal Trump and Barr have been prominent supporters of each other. They both delight in attacking Democrats. In this case, Barr was fired for her Tuesday tweet about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett. But she kept it up on Wednesday, retweeting photos of Jarrett side by side with an ape. It was Barr's earlier tweet about Jarrett that caused outrage and ultimately led to the show's cancellation. In a response to a comment about Jarrett, Barr had said: "Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj." Barr still claims she was just joking when she compared Jarrett to "Planet of the Apes" and the Muslim Brotherhood in a tweet on Tuesday morning. In a reply to one of her fans, she said "I honestly thought she was Jewish and Persian-ignorant of me for sure, but...i did." She also said she had been on Ambien, a medication used to treat insomnia, at the time. She tweeted, "guys I did something unforgiveable so do not defend me. It was 2 in the morning and I was ambien tweeting -- it was memorial day too -- i went 2 far & do not want it defended -- it was egregious Indefensible. I made a mistake I wish I hadn't but...don't defend it please." She cited Ambien again in a later tweet, saying, "Not giving excuses for what I did(tweeted) but I've done weird stuff while on ambien -- cracked eggs on the wall at 2am etc." Oddly, she later deleted all of her references to the medication. Nevertheless, Ambien became the #1 trending topic on Twitter on Wednesday morning, leading to Sanofi's public rebuke. Barr's explanation was deemed laughable. "I have only taken Ambien once ... but I don't remember one of the side-effects being racism," CNN's John Berman tweeted. Related: The inside story of how ABC fired Roseanne Barr In one of her other deleted tweets, Barr said "I'm sorry 4 my tweet, AND I will also defend myself as well as talk to my followers. so, go away if u don't like it. I will handle my sadness the way I want to. I'm tired of being attacked & belittled more than other comedians who have said worse." Some of her replies to fans clearly expressed how she feels. At one point she said she believes she was fired because of fears over a potential boycott of the show's advertisers. She also lashed out at co-stars Michael Fishman and Sara Gilbert. "You throw me under the bus. nice!" she said in a tweet directed at Fishman. Her Twitter account had a manic feel throughout the morning. Through her selection of retweets, Barr implied that she was fired over her support for President Trump. One of the posts she shared said, inexplicably, "they brought the show back so they could inevitably cancel the show when she said something they didn't like." But then she deleted her retweet of that post. Another retweet, still up as of 7 a.m. ET, quoted Herman Cain on Fox saying "I believe they were looking for a reason to cancel #Roseanne and here's why. Even though the show was a ratings success, forces within ABC didn't like the fact that her conservative defense of certain things was so popular." Barr also continued to tweet about George Soros, a liberal donor who has been painted as the villain in many right-wing conspiracy theories. One message she re-tweeted on Wednesday falsely accused the Hungary-born Jewish billionaire of collaborating with the Nazis. Barr also said her firing "worked out" because she "would leave when they started to try to censor me." After a head-spinning 24 hours, there are several outstanding questions: -- What will ABC schedule Tuesdays at 8 p.m. this fall in place of "Roseanne?" -- Is there any possibility of a "Roseanne" sitcom without Barr? A way to keep the cast and crew together in some way? -- Will there be any measurable backlash from her fans? -- Will President Trump comment at all? -- What will Barr do next? Tom Werner, her longtime producing partner, told Deadline.com that he supported ABC's decision. He said he hoped "Roseanne seeks the help she so clearly needs." A Tesla that was in autopilot mode crashed into a Laguna Beach police patrol vehicle Tuesday morning, totaling the SUV and leaving the sedan's driver injured, an official said. The crash occurred along Laguna Canyon Road shortly after 11 a.m., according to Laguna Beach Police Department Sgt. Jim Cota. The officer was not in the police SUV at the time but handling a call for service about 1,000 yards away, Cota said. The Tesla driver, a 65-year-old man, sustained minor injuries, but declined transport to a hospital, the sergeant said. Photos from the scene showed the Tesla with front end damage. The police SUV had damage to the rear driver's side, the photos showed. "Thankfully there was not an officer at the time in the police car," Cota told the Los Angeles Times. "The police car is totaled." A Tesla on autopilot crashed into a semi-truck in the exact same area on April 10, 2017. Police are now looking into whether the location's topography, lane markings or other factors are creating a problem for the semi-autonomous technology, Cota told KTLA. "It's something that we're going to have to work on, whether it be with Tesla themselves, or we're going to have to get into more specifics and find out why this is occurring," he said. The same traffic investigator who responded to last year's incident also responded to Tuesday's incident, Cota said. He added that the incidents involved different drivers. It is unclear what led up to the latest crash, but Tesla emphasizes that drivers are expected to remain engaged when using autopilot mode. The company said in a statement that "Tesla has always been clear that autopilot doesn't make the car impervious to all accidents, and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that 'Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear markings.'" Earlier this year, a Tesla driver was killed in a crash on Highway 101 in Mountain View that occurred while autopilot was engaged, but the company says the driver was to blame in that incident. KTLA's Jennifer Thang contributed to this story. WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on preparations for a possible summit between President Donald Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un (all times local): 7:50 p.m. Russia's U.N. ambassador says Moscow supports a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un but adds, "Every side has to be realistic about it." Vassily Nebenzia stressed Tuesday that a meeting between the two leaders is "the start of a long and winding road." The White House says it is continuing to "actively prepare" for an "expected summit" between Trump and Kim in Singapore which had been scheduled for June 12. As for results, Nebenzia told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York, "Don't expect that it happens overnight." But he says a Trump-Kim meeting is "a move in the right direction at least." He says Russia "will support it of course, and especially meaningful agreements to be reached there." __ 7:30 p.m. Japan's U.N. ambassador says "maximum pressure" should be maintained on North Korea until it takes concrete actions toward eliminating its weapons of mass destruction. Koro Bessho told a small group of reporters Tuesday that Japan would like to see "comprehensive, verifiable, irreversible, dismantlement" of North Korea's nuclear weapons as well as its chemical and biological weapons. He says Japan also wants to see Pyongyang's ballistic missiles dismantled and the abduction of Japanese citizens to North Korea addressed. Bessho says Japan is "working with the United States very closely." Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is scheduled to meet President Donald Trump at the White House on June 7, ahead of Trump's expected meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12. __ 4:10 p.m. The White House says it is continuing to "actively prepare" for an "expected summit" between President Donald Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un in Singapore. Trump has confirmed that a top North Korean official, Kim Yong Chol, is headed to New York for talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In addition, teams of U.S. officials have arrived at the Korean demilitarized zone and in Singapore to prepare for the meeting. The summit had been scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, but Trump wrote a letter to Kim Jong Un last week saying he had decided to "terminate" the meeting. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says that since the letter, "the North Koreans have been engaging" with the U.S. __ 11:20 a.m. The White House says President Donald Trump "continues to actively prepare" for the president's "expected summit" with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un (kim jawng oon) in Singapore. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Trump will meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (shin-zoh AH'-bay) at the White House on June 7. She says Kim Yong Chol, North Korea's vice chairman of the Central Committee, is traveling to New York and will meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo later this week. Sanders says a U.S. delegation is meeting with the North Korean delegation at the DMZ. Plans for the high-stakes summit have been in flux for days. Last week, Trump withdrew from the meeting, only to announce a day later it could still get back on track. __ 6:40 a.m. President Donald Trump has confirmed that top North Korean official Kim Yong Chol is heading to New York for talks on an upcoming summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump tweeted early Tuesday: "We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!" South Korea's Yonhap News said Tuesday it saw the name of Kim Yong Chol on the passengers' list for a flight Tuesday from Beijing to Washington. They later reported that Kim changed his flight to go to New York on Wednesday. Kim is a former military intelligence chief and now a vice chairman of the North Korean ruling party's central committee tasked with inter-Korean relations. (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.) 5/29/2018 7:00:37 PM (GMT -5:00) Two people from Collinsville are facing federal charges after being arrested Sunday on meth and marijuana trafficking charges. Ismael Acevedo-Rodriquez, 28, and Krystal Fatima-Gallegos, 27, were arrested at a home on County Road 22 in the Mount Vernon area after what DeKalb County authorities said was a lengthy investigation into drug activity at the home. The DeKalb County Sheriff's Office said drug task force agents found more than three pounds of methamphetamine, three pounds of marijuana, various prescription drugs, 20 firearms, drug paraphernalia and more than $30,000 in cash in the home. Three children also were in the home, authorities said. They were turned over to the county Department of Human Resources. Acevedo-Rodriquez and Fatima Gallegos both were charged with trafficking meth, trafficking marijuana, five counts of drug possession, possession of a forged instrument and possession of drug paraphernalia. The sheriff's office said federal charges are also pending on the two. Police in Florence want your help finding a vandal who mocked president Trump, and what was written could be considered hate speech. On this billboard on Tennessee Street and Florence Boulevard, you can see someone painted a caricature of the president, wrote the words "DACA, "ILLEGALS" and MISSED THE CURVE". We blurred out the expletive written in Spanish. The owner of the billboard asked we don't identify them because it's not involved in the crime. But police have a strong message for the criminal. "It sends a negative message to visitirs when you see graffiti up everywhere you kind of think of a trashy area. No matter how pretty or artistic the work is, you still think of it in a negative light," Sargeant Greg Cobb told WAAY 31. The billboard has already been taken down. Police told us painting negative comments or pictures about someone can be considered a hate crime. Paint Rock Valley school is asking for help identifying four people that broke into the Jackson County school. The school's principal, Kevin McBride, told WAAY 31 the vandals left behind thousands of dollars worth of damage. "They were dancing and having a good time as they were vandalizing. Especially one of the perpetrators she was very sporadic in her actions. You could she was under the influence," he said. He showed WAAY 31 surveillance video that shows them walking around the school and entering through a window. However, what they did in every room they entered is unclear. "We were able to walk around and see the cameras and how they tore them off the walls," he said. The destruction of thousands of dollars worth of surveillance cameras isn't the only damage they left behind. McBride told us they sprayed the fire extinguishers in the hallways, and used them to break the glass on the vending machines. "They did take some drinks from the vending machines and snacks. The snacks they didn't eat, they threw them down the halls. Scattered the food down the hallways. There was vandalism. It was senseless," he said. McBride told me the school district's decision two weeks ago to close the school was difficult on the community, and the mess they now have to clean up while clearing out the school isn't making it any easier. "It broke my heart and made me angry. I'm not trying to harbor anger. I forgive them for their ignorance, but I think they should be held accountable for their actions." McBride told us they plan to press charges against the people responsible. If you have any information about the vandalism you're asked to contact the Jackson County Sheriff's office. Sheffield police are searching for an escaped inmate. They say it's unclear if he's still in the Shoals, but believe he planned his escape. William Taylor escaped from the Sheffield City jail around 8:30 Tuesday night after pushing a guard and making a run for it. Sheffield police tell WAAY 31 they went to Taylor's parents house and found evidence that lead them to believe he had stopped by. His family said they haven't seen him. Police tell us they believe Taylor took the family dog and met up with his girlfriend and could be anywhere in north Alabama. "Now he's going to be in a lot of trouble because he's going to have a feloney warrant on him for escape," Sheffield's interim police chief Rickey Terry tells us. William Taylor was in jail for misdemeanor drug charges. He says Taylor was in a holding cell with other inmates when he asked a guard for a hole of toilet paper. When the guard went to give it to him that's when he made his escape. "Mr. Taylor pushed that inmate out on the officer causing the officer to stumble," Terry says the officer tried to use his taser. "When he was off balance he missed the suspect because also he head to go back and secure the door." Terry believes Taylor planned the whole thing. Taylor was last seen running a few blocks from the police department. His escape has some residents concerned he could still be in the city, which police say is a possibility. "It is concerning especially because I am right here and it's right there where he escaped from so like not even a few blocks down," Chloe Sparks told us. Police do not consider Taylor to be armed and dangerous. They have sent a Be On The Look Out alert to surrounding police departments. If you see Taylor, please call the police. DICKSON, Tenn. (AP) - The Latest on the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy (all times local): 4:45 p.m. Authorities have identified the Tennessee sheriff's deputy who was fatally shot while responding to a call by a resident about a suspicious car. Dickson County Sheriff Jeff Bledsoe said Sgt. Daniel Baker was killed early Wednesday. Bledsoe said Baker had been with the Dickson County sheriff's office for 10 years and worked his way up the ranks quickly. Baker is survived by his wife and a daughter. Bledsoe said his agency has lost a brother, and the community has lost a hero. Authorities are still searching for suspect Steven Joshua Wiggins. They consider him armed and dangerous. ___ 1:45 p.m. Authorities say the reward has increased to $7,500 for information leading to the arrest of a man sought by police in the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives helped increase the reward for information on Steven Joshua Wiggins. Authorities have said the Dickson County deputy was shot and killed early Wednesday after a responding to a call about a suspicious vehicle. They have not released the deputy's name. They say Wiggins remains at large and is believed to be armed and dangerous. State, federal and local authorities have launched a manhunt. ___ 1:20 p.m. Authorities say a Tennessee sheriff's deputy who was shot and killed was responding to a call by a resident about a suspicious car. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Susan Niland said at a news conference that the Dickson County deputy couldn't be contacted Wednesday for some time after responding to the call. The deputy's car was then tracked by GPS to a location 2 or 3 miles (3 to 5 kilometers) away, and the deputy was found dead inside of it. The deputy's name has not been released. Niland says the suspect was captured on video. Authorities have identified him as Steven Joshua Wiggins. They say he's still at large and is believed to be armed and dangerous. State, federal and local authorities have launched a manhunt, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has announced a reward of up to $2,500 for any information leading to his arrest. Niland says a female is being interviewed in the case. ___ 12:40 p.m. The man sought by police in the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy was charged the previous day with aggravated assault of a woman and vehicle theft. A report from the Kingston Springs Police Department says Steven Joshua Wiggins slapped the woman in her face and pulled out some of her hair Tuesday. The report says the woman stated that Wiggins put a gun to her head and threatened to kill her if she called the police, then he grabbed her car keys and took the car without her permission. The woman also told police Wiggins was "doing meth all night and smoking marijuana." The report says the woman plans to press charges. Authorities say Wiggins is at large and believed to be "armed and dangerous." ___ 11:10 p.m. Tennessee authorities are offering a monetary reward for information leading to the arrest of a suspect in the fatal shooting of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation tweeted Wednesday that it has placed Steven Joshua Wiggins on its Top 10 Most Wanted list and is offering a reward of up to $2,500 for information leading to his arrest. The bureau believes Wiggins fatally shot an unidentified sheriff's deputy during a traffic stop early Wednesday in Dickson County. The agency also has sent an alert about the suspect to cellphones in the area. __ 10:20 a.m. Tennessee authorities say a sheriff's deputy has been fatally shot and a suspect believed to be "armed and dangerous" is still at large. A Tennessee Highway Patrol spokesman told news outlets the suspect was involved in an altercation with the Dickson County deputy early Wednesday after a vehicle was reported stolen. The Humphreys County Sheriff's Office identified the suspect as Steven Wiggins, who is described as a white male with balding brown hair. (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.) CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - One of the most liberal politicians seeking national office in conservative Wyoming in recent years is running again but has switched parties, from Democrat to Republican. Former Roman Catholic priest Charlie Hardy is mounting a long-shot bid against U.S. Sen. John Barrasso in the GOP primary. Hardy said Tuesday that he's now an "Eisenhower Republican," referring to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, who warned against out-of-control military spending. The 79-year-old supports universal health coverage and a steep increase in the federal minimum wage but is now pessimistic he can be successful as a Democrat in heavily Republican Wyoming. Hardy lost to Ryan Greene in the Democratic primary for U.S. House in 2016. Hardy was the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in 2014, getting 17 percent of the vote against Republican incumbent Mike Enzi. (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.) 5/29/2018 2:45:24 PM (GMT -5:00) THE road to the classroom is to be made safer and easier for four Waterford primary schools. They have been selected for inclusion in... HOT on the heels of Waterford City being named the Best Place To Live, it was announced this week that 27m is to be... WATERFORD is the most sunny city in Ireland and the county is second in the sunshine league, being pipped to first place by our... Further to the WCOs continued commitment to mitigate Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT), a range of Trainthe-Trainer and Accreditation Workshops is conducted under the auspices of the WCO Inama project. The project aims to strengthen the enforcement capacity of targeted Customs administrations in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the illegal trade in wildlife and in particular on the species listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The second Train-the-Trainer and Pre-Accreditation Workshop took place in Lusaka, Zambia, between 15 and 25 May 2018. The event was attended by 13 selected Customs officers, representing 11 Member Customs administrations from English and Portuguese-speaking Sub-Saharan African nations. The Customs Administration of the Zambia Revenue Authority acted as host and the course was officially closed by the Commissioner for Customs, Mr. Sydney Chibbabbuka. The purpose of the Workshop was to raise awareness regarding Illegal Wildlife Trade within the participants, to build their technical capacity and knowledge in relation to CITES and to enhance their training skills. Furthermore, the national Customs training frameworks have been evaluated and proposals to further include CITES and IWT were developed. These proposals will be submitted to the respective management teams for their consideration. Accreditation and Trainings to enhance regional capacity As a result of the Workshop, some participants were pre-accredited as WCO IWT experts and shall be fully accredited at a later stage. All attendees were also invited to become CITES diplomats within their administrations. This Train-the-Trainer and Accreditation Workshop is the second out of 3 planned events that will be conducted under the WCO Inama Project. A similar training has already been delivered in Asia, and the next training is scheduled to take place in Burkina Faso with the attendance of French-speaking Sub-Saharan African Customs officers. The WCO Inama project is currently funded by the US Department of State and Sweden. This particular activity was sponsored by the US Department of State Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. For more information on the Inama project, please contact Roux Raath, Environment Programme Manager, WCO Compliance and Enforcement Sub-Directorate, roux.raath@wcoomd.org. From 23 to 27 April 2018 in Port Vila (Vanuatu), the World Customs Organization (WCO) held a National Workshop to raise awareness of and prepare for the Time Release Study (TRS). This five-day Workshop was organized, with financial support from the Korea Customs Co-operation Fund (CCF/Korea), for the benefit of managerial staff from the Vanuatu Department of Customs and Inland Revenue and the stakeholders. The Workshop was led by two Experts from the WCO Secretariat in Brussels and from the Indian Customs Administration. The Workshop, conducted in English, provided TRS training to 20 Customs officials and representatives of the stakeholders involved in the goods clearance process and enabled them to discuss an initial draft of the procedures for releasing Goods. This major Workshop included, among others, a presentation of the TRS methodology, following the WCOs Guide, and also gave participants the opportunity to work with the WCOs TRS software and draft an action plan. According to the draft action plan, it is expected that Vanuatu Customs Administration and the stakeholders will conduct, on their own, the first TRS in the near future so as to establish a baseline for further appreciation of progress. It should be indicated that, a Consultant hired by the Asian Development bank (ADB) has recently conducted a TRS in Vanuatu and the results of this exercise will be available soon. In his closing speech to the Workshop, Mr. George Pakoa, representing the Director of Customs and Inland Revenue, stressed the importance of this activity, which will enable his Administration and the stakeholders to identify procedural bottlenecks affecting the release and clearance of goods and, above all, to work together on solutions to facilitate trade and improve the business climate. Vanuatu is working hard at the implementation of trade facilitation measures and provisions included in WCO instruments and tools. Therefore, carrying out its TRS will enable this Country to comply with the requirements of Article 7.6 of the WTO TFA for which WTO Members are encouraged to measure and publish their average release time of goods periodically and in a consistent manner, using tools such as, inter alia, the Time Release Study of the World Customs Organization (WCO). Participants regarded the Workshop as a great success that significantly enhanced their understanding of the WCO TRS guide and methodology. The WCO looks forward to continuing to provide his support to the Vanuatu Department of Customs and Inland Revenue. Hetq recently wrote about salmonella-tainted poultry entering the Armenian market. This time, we present other violations by the Armenias State Food Safety Service(SFSS). When goods enter Armenia, border inspectors are the first to deal with them. They evaluate the risk of the product and decide if its required to send the goods for laboratory examination. After all these actions, the importer either gets an import certificate, or does not. However, our research on the SFSS violations indicates that there are cases when hazardous products are sent to a second examination, where dangerous products are recognized as safe. For example, in April 2017, the Standard Dialog laboratory tested 15 tons of frozen chicken, imported by the Ukrainian company Ptitsecomplex Gubin, and found it contained salmonella. The poultry was found to be dangerous and had to be destroyed. Later, however, the SFSS granted Ptitsecomplex Gubin a N 00007217 certificate, allowing the import of the hazardous poultry. Product recognized safe based on an expired BRC certificate In June 2017, American Pilgrims Pride imported 102 tons of frozen poultryto Armenia. When importing, the company presented an outdated BRC certificate, which was accepted by a SFSS border inspector. As a result, the poultry was not sent for testing and got a safety certificate allowing the import. Issuing import certificates without waiting for laboratory test results On February 9, 2017, some poultry was imported from Brazil. Evaluating the product's risk level, SFSS inspectors sent it for testing. However, four days later, on February 13, when the results of the examination were still not ready, the SFSS provided the company with an import certificate, while the results of the laboratory examination were received only on February 24, 11 days later. A similar case was registered earlier that year, in January, when the SFSS issued an import certificate for another 103.8 tons of poultry before getting testing results, and in November 2016, for marinated cucumbers. Thus, the SFSS repeatedly violated government Decision N 1442 of October 21, 2010, regulating the import of cargo with a safety certificate, which has to be issued based on testing results. There are no animal registration and numbering systems Several days ago, Hetq wrote about the slaughter of 509 pigs in Tavush province. The SFSS does not provide any justification for the incident, claiming that the slaughter was performed on the owner's initiative and denying that there is plague in Armenias Tavush Province. The owner, however, notes that his animals were not documented and had never been vaccinated. The Control Chamber report of 2017 notes that the documentation and disease detection resulting from epidemiological surveillance of animals do not reflect the current situation, as there are no mechanisms for registering and counting animals. The absence of such mechanisms hinders eliminating animal diseases and increasing the effectiveness of preventive measures at the expense of the state budget, since animals should be numbered and have veterinary passports for proper vaccination. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili met today in Tbilisi and discussed the current state of bilateral relations and prospects for their development, this according to an Armenian government press release. Greeting his Armenian counterpart, the Prime Minister of Georgia again congratulated Nikol Pashinyan on his election as Prime Minister, as well as on the 100th Anniversary of the First Republic of Armenia. Kvirikashvili stressed that his government is prepared to take steps to expand the ongoing cooperation between the two countries and give a strong impetus to Armenian-Georgian relations. We closely followed the recent developments in Armenia. The friendly people of Armenia displayed solidarity, which resulted in a peaceful transfer of power through the democratic way. I want to assure you that we will do everything to add momentum to our relations and tap the full potential. We have a good chance to start a new round of relationships between the two friendly nations, the Georgian Prime Minister said. Thankful for the warm reception, Nikol Pashinyan noted that friendship between Armenia and Georgia is deeply rooted in history. It is no mere coincidence that my first official foreign trip is being made to brotherly Georgia, with which we have close historic ties, long-standing friendship and mutual respect. I am convinced that as anchored on warm relationships between our two countries and peoples, the interstate dialogue will help build a solid foundation for our cooperation, the Prime Minister of Armenia said, noting the two heads of government shared the same views as regards bilateral relations. Nikol Pashinyan congratulated Giorgi Kvirikashvili on the 100th anniversary of reinstatement of Georgias sovereign statehood. Prime Minister Pashinyan availed himself of the opportunity to evoke Armenias political developments, noting that the non-violent change of power was the manifestation of our peoples will and had no geopolitical implications. The Prime Minister emphasized that the further development of relations with Georgia will continue to be one of the priorities of Armenias foreign policy. The Prime Ministers of Armenia and Georgia discussed a wide range of issues related to Armenian-Georgian cooperation in the spheres of trade and economy, energy, transport, agriculture, tourism and culture. The parties expressed satisfaction with the current level of cooperation in the energy sector, highlighting the prospects for further development of transport communications. In conclusion, Nikol Pashinyan invited Giorgi Kvirikashvili to visit Armenia at his convenience. Top photo: Pashinyan, escorted by Kvirkashvili, lays wreath at Heroes Memorial in Tbilisi Fort Polk, LA (71446) Today Cloudy skies early, followed by partial clearing. High 87F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Partly cloudy skies early will become overcast later during the night. Low 71F. Winds light and variable. Georgia new No. 1 in AP football poll; Kentucky vaults to 11 Email To : Multiple e-mail addresses must be separated with a comma character(maximum 200 characters) Email To is required. Your Full Name: (optional) Your Email Address: Your Email Address is required. Residents of Pine Grove say they are dealing with a potential health crisis due to raw sewage. Meanwhile, town officials are crossing their fingers that the town will receive much-needed grant funding to complete the remaining phases of the replacement of an out-dated vacuum collection sewage system with a conventional gravity collection system. In the meantime residents say raw sewage, due to a malfunctioning sewage system, is coming from drains into their yards and basements. Residents say the issue has been going on for the past few years; they say they are now experiencing difficulty breathing and are suffering sore throats, eye infections, and even heart problems. These residents say they feel their health concerns are being taken lightly by town officials, and not enough is being done to correct the ongoing conditions. This is not something that cannot be overlooked any longer, said resident Gary Davis at a gathering of concerned residents, held at Masons Depot last week. I worked for the town, and I know this can be corrected. Yet, (town officials) continue to deny the problem; they say it will all be taken care of when phase three of the sewer system is finished. I dont think we can wait that long. At this point it is not even started, and as far as we know, no plans are even in the works to get it started. Mary Huggins said she has not dealt with sewage issues at her residence; however, her concern lies with her father, who is 87-years-old and lives next to Valley High School. I have pictures to prove what is happening. His kitchen and living area is in the bottom of his home; its where I grew up, and we spent all of our time as a family. Huggins said raw sewage comes into her fathers home via the commode. She said her family first believe a faulty commode seal was causing the problem but soon learned residents all over the town were experiencing issues. Huggins family replaced the commode seal on her fathers toilet, and they also utilized a sewer snake. However, the line was clear. Huggins said every few days the sewage comes back. She is highly concerned about her fathers health. He uses the downstairs commode, and he has a bed downstairs. I am afraid the sewage smell and sewage gas is making him sick. Huggins said her father still has to pay his sewage bill in full, though she has requested a discount due to the lack of service. This reporter toured some of the areas where residents claim the problem is the worst. In the Alley Addition area of town, it appeared sewage was seeping out of the sewage pits and onto the streets. There was an odor, which was burning to the eyes, nose, and throat. Going into the basement of a residents rental home, one could observe about two inches of what appeared to be sewage. The property owner said an elderly couple rents the home from her and her parents. She said both individuals had currently become ill and were in the hospital recovering. The property owner said she was unable to find a solution to the sewage, and she said the town doesnt seem to care. This is not the first time the sewage woes have been reported. In August 2017, Pine Grove Mayor Barbara King had told the Chronicle she wants to make sure the towns then-malfunctioning sewer and water systems were properly fixed. Id rather it take a long time and have it done right, she said. I want to make sure it is up and running the way it is supposed to be, she had said. During that time, help for Pine Grove had come from several directions. Dominion Energy Transmission Inc. purchased a new pump for the town after one of the towns sewage system pumps quit working. Also, in August 2017, five members of Hurricane, W.Va.s Mobile Infrastructure Response Team worked on the sewage system, while Mark West personnel assisted the town with building controllers for the sewer pits. Mayor King had also reported that she had been keeping the Department of Environmental Protection updated of the situation. Jacob Glance, of the WVDEP, was asked May 24, 2018 if the WVDEP is aware of the situation. He noted, Yes, the WVDEPs Environmental Enforcement (EE) section is aware of the ongoing issues with the sewer problems in the Town of Pine Grove. Our EE inspectors have been on site several times just in the last couple months performing inspections. Pine Grove was issued a consent order that detailed the steps that will need to be taken to address these issues. One of those steps is to provide EE a Plan of Corrective Action that will show how the town plans to fix these problems. EE is currently working with the Town as they develop an acceptable POCA to address these ongoing violations. In the meantime, EE continues to monitor the situation in Pine Grove. The 2017 WVDEP Order to Pine Grove references issues dating back to 2016. The Order states that on October 20, 2016, WVDEP personnel conducted an inspection of Pine Groves sewage collection and treatment system for the direct discharge of treated wastewater. Several violations were observed and documented, including the following: failure to implement a program to identify and eliminate sources of inflow and infiltration; failure to perform a daily inspection of the ultraviolet disinfection facilities, which includes maintaining a written log; failure to properly operate and maintain the facility. It was also noted that the town failed to report any noncompliance which may endanger health or the environment immediately after becoming aware of the circumstances by using the designated spill alert telephone number. Also, two Orders were issued in 2017 by the Public Service Commission in response to two separate complaints submitted by two separate Pine Grove residents who alleged raw sewage in their yards. In each case, the PSC ordered that Pine Grove do the following: isolate the vacuum pit from the surrounding field to prevent outside water from entering the pit chamber; install gaskets (o-ring) on the pit lid to seal off water from entering the pit; repair the spare control sensors to have available for emergency use in the affected areas; cross train its operators with the training provided by experienced operators/manufacturing facility, and have its operators inspect the affected areas during heavy rain events to ensure its system is working. It was also ordered that the town prioritize and make urgent obtaining funding to complete the remaining phases of the replacement of the vacuum collection system with a conventional gravity collection system. Currently, residents say they make calls to the city building daily concerning sewage overflow and are told someone will arrive to work on the problem. These residents claim no one arrives. Residents claim they have also contacted political representatives and other government entities but have not seen any help. This is not a new problem, we have been fighting this for four or five years. At one point my family went 138 days without a working sewage system. We went in buckets for all that time, and it then went into the creek. We washed our bodies and our hair outside with a water hose, resident Kathy Watson said. John Watson, Kathys husband, said his family is now hooked to the new, gravity feed sewage system. Our problems, so far, are over, he said. We would walk into our home, and it would smell like sewer gas to bad you couldnt breathe. I cleaned gallon after gallon of raw sewage out, because it was up to the floor in my basement. I couldnt put it down the drain, he said. I can still smell it, Kathy commented. Tabatha Mason, of Masons Depot, said she has begun keeping track of the days her business has sewage-related problems. She said there are days she and her employees cannot use the restroom, due to the issue. There are only three hours of the day we have two people working. Sometimes, if a worker needs to go to the restroom, they will have to lock up the store and leave. They will try not to drink things all day long They should be able to use the restroom. Resident Jennifer Parker said the smell from the raw sewage is horrendous. I had my entire family in for Mothers Day. We were going to have a cookout, but we had to go inside, she noted. This past week, the Pine Grove Post Office experienced sewage issues. The employee working behind the counter said he was filling in for the Post Master who was off for the day. When I came in on May 21 both toilets had completely overflowed, and (sewage) had come out of both the men and womens sinks and our utility sink, which is our mop sink. It is still in it. I can literally show you it. He said as soon as he opened the doors to the post office, he could smell an odor. It looked like a murder scene, he said Several of Pine Groves residents described problems with the towns workers. Mr. Watson noted the workers would claim the problem was with the Watsons system, even though Mr. Watson had utilized a sewer snake to ensure his line was clear. Watson also stated instances of when the town was allegedly offered help from outside sources yet declined. Laci Streets said she was told by town officials that workers were at her home, working on her sewage system. They were not there. They never showed up, Streets said of the workers. Streets said she shares a sewer pit with neighbor Melanie Utt. Within hours, we are full again. Weve been clogged for a year. Fellow residents noted that Streets sewage causes a traffic hazard in the winter, as the liquid flows into the Streets driveway and further, into the road. Kristy Bassett is experiencing raw sewage in her backyard. She said she was told by three different council members that the issue should be fixed, because they charged overtime to get it fixed. Meanwhile, Huggins said town workers removed a device from her fathers sewage system and stated Maybe it will work on another pit. Resident Darlene Cross, though she wants quick action like the other residents, wasnt completely critical of town officials. She noted Mayor King and council are in over their heads, big time. When Barbara took that job as mayor, she really thought she could make a difference. She had no idea what she was getting into. Mayor King herself said the town is in an emergency situation. We dont have any city workers; they have resigned and as of now, we are doing what we can to alleviate the problem. We have a combined sewer board and council meeting set for June 11, but until then we will continue to battle the problem. She acknowledged there are sewage problems and said town officials are doing all they can to comply with the agencies orders, but without workers and funds its next to impossible. As for the allegations the town has refused help from outside agencies, King said this is not true. We will accept any legitimate help we can get, but it has to be from people who know what theyre doing. We dont have the expertise or the funds to just start redoing the whole system. People have to understand there will have to be a rate increase, and Phase Three (the replacement of the vacuum system) will need completed before the problem will be completely resolved. Right now we have hired, back on a part-time basis, one of our past town workers, and he and another of our employees are out cleaning out the sewer pits and getting things flowing like they are supposed to. We have also had some hard rains, and when that happens, the run-off comes into the sewer lids and overflows the system. King said she was never made aware there was a problem at the post office, and will certainly look into the issue. I will have someone check it out. She noted, I am not going to take responsibility for all the problems. I inherited most of this, and I will try my best to get the town of Pine Grove back to the way it used to be. According to Marshall County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Herman Lantz, the criminal case involving John Michael Howell, 49, will be retried. This development comes from the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, which issued a memorandum decision, ordering that John Michael Howells guilty plea and conviction are vacated and set aside. According to the April 13 issued memorandum, the case is remanded to the circuit court, where the parties are to be returned to their respective positions post-indictment but prior to the entry of the plea agreement. Jury selection will begin July 9 at the Marshall County Courthouse. Howell was indicted by the Wetzel County Grand Jury in January 2011 on four criminal charges: kidnapping, attempted sexual assault in the second degree, sexual assault in the first degree, and malicious assault. Howells proceedings began in Wetzel County, but the case was moved to Marshall County in July 2014 after Howell spat on Wetzel County Prosecutor Timothy Haught during a hearing. Howell was then required to wear a spit guard in court for the next several proceedings. Due to the kidnapping charge carrying a possible life sentence, Howell was entitled to two lawyers. He requested new lawyers more than a dozen times following his initial arrest, causing several delays. His trial then began in January 2016, and after a recess during jury selection, counsel announced a plea agreement had been reached. Howell pleaded guilty to kidnapping and was sentenced to life in prison with mercy. It is noted in the Supreme Court documents that the written plea agreement said Howell would be eligible for parole after 15 years in prison. However, after his plea and receiving the plea and sentencing order, Howell argued he should be eligible for parole consideration after 10 years of incarceration. Howell cited the state kidnapping statute, which provides an inmate sentenced for life may not be paroled until he or she has served 10 years, and an inmate sentenced for life who has been previously twice convicted of a felony may not be paroled until he or she has served 15 years. The state objected to Howells protests, noting Howell serving at least 15 years in prison was the essence of the plea agreement. The circuit court, after a hearing, declined to amend the order to reflect parole eligibility after 10 years of incarceration. The circuit court then entered an Amended Entry of Plea and Sentencing Order Amended, which included the courts ruling on the parole eligibility period. Howell, however, then filed an appeal with the WV Supreme Court of Appeals. On October 23, 2017, the WV Supreme Court of Appeals affirmed the circuit courts May 2016 sentencing order. Howell filed a petition for rehearing, which was granted in February 2018. The Supreme Courts documents state the Court received supplemental briefs and heard oral arguments of the parties. The State has argued Howell is bound by the 15-year parole eligibility provision because it was discussed no fewer than five times during the January 2016 plea/sentencing and the 15-year parole eligibility was also set forth in the written plea agreement. Howell said that although the 15-year period was specified, no one ever told him the parole statue only requires 10 years. The Court has agreed with Howell, ruling Howells guilty plea was not knowing, intelligent, and voluntary. Is is noted the rehearing was granted and concurred in by the following Justices: Robin Jean Davis, Menis E. Ketchum, Allen H. Loughry II, and Elizabeth D. Walker. Chief Justice Margaret L. Workman dissented, stating It is like swatting flies with a sledgehammer to decimate an entire plea agreement when a simple modification that complies with the law would suffice. Workman said the error was made by the judge and both lawyers, not the defendant. Prosecutor Lantz noted, All I can say is the state felt the plea shouldve been upheld. (Howell) appealed it, saying he did not know. We feel he knew what he was pleading to. Embed from Getty Images Robert Lewandowski has told Bayern Munich that hes had enough and wants to move on to pastures new this summer. The Polish poacher is contracted at the Bundesliga champions up until 2021 thanks to a renewal signed a couple of seasons ago, but it would appear that he has no intention of seeing that out. The big update comes from journalist Christian Falk, whose record with all things Bayern is nigh-on shatterproof. Exclusive: The agent of @lewy_official confirmed in @SPORTBILD that @lewy_official wants to leave @FCBayern this summer. He already informed the bosses of the club @altobelli13 Christian Falk (@cfbayern) May 30, 2018 Lewandowski has recently retained the services of super agent Pini Zahavi (the man who took Neymar from Real Madrid to PSG), who has been tasked with negotiating the 29-year-olds exit. Speaking to Sport Bild, Zahavi quoth: Robert feels he needs a change and a new challenge in his career. The managers of Bayern know about it. Word on the wire is that a Premier League switch may well be viable with Chelsea leading the pack, though Real Madrid are almost certain to come wading in and throwing their weight around too. Given that hes quite probably the best true No.9 striker in the world, the competition to woo him is likely to be fierce and quite possibly ugly. Ivan Tenchev from Bulgaria has been announced the winner of FESPAs World Wrap Masters Series at FESPA Global Print Expo 2018 in Berlin, Germany. Second and third prizes went to Casper Madsen and Jan Edelgaard, both from Denmark. All three winners received cash prizes. World Wrap Winner, Ivan Tenchev Wrap Masters, European winners. The FESPA World Wrap Masters Series is sponsored by Hexis and ran throughout the year, concluding with two events at FESPA 2018 between 15 and 18 May. The competition began on 15th and 16th May with the last regional qualifying competition, the World Wrap Masters Europe. 42 international competitors, including entrants from Japan and Australia, battled it out in a series of timed tasks, including wrapping vehicle sections, chairs and lockers. Stan Cosmin from Romania won the European competition, with Martynas Bertulis from Ireland and Casper Madsen from Denmark coming in second and third place. On Thursday 17th and Friday 18th May, the World Wrap Masters Series Final took place. Here the three finalists from the European competition were joined by winners from previous World Wrap Masters Series events including: Wrap Masters Asia, Mexico and Eurasia, Speedwrap at FESPA Africa, Cambea at FESPA Brasil and national wrap events in Denmark and Finland. Finalists were challenged to wrap Suzuki Ignis cars and challenging objects such as curved chairs and square locker cubes. This is the first time Ivan Tenchev has been crowned World Wrap Master, but it is his second FESPA Wrap Masters title, having won Wrap Master Eurasia in 2016. He joins a select group of FESPA World Wrap Masters including Jonas Sjostrom of Sweden (WWM17), Jim Miller of USA (WWM16), Kiss Lajos of Hungary (WWM15 and WWM14) and Piotr Cinski of Poland, who was the first World Wrap Master in 2013. Ivan comments: After a lot of hard work and a busy week at FESPA 2018, I am extremely pleased with the happy ending and never thought that with all of the talent in this years competition, I would win. The FESPA World Wrap Masters is a great platform where you continue to learn and share experiences with each of the other installers. World Wrap Masters judge Jeremy Conner comments: Congratulations to Ivan! Every round of the competition eliminated highly skilled wrappers who should all be proud of their achievements and progress, and the very last round was closer than I have ever seen, with only a few points difference between the winner and the other two finalists. As an installer with 26 years experience, it was my honour to see these wrappers perform under the pressure of the tight time limits we gave for each task and in full view of an audience. The spirit of the FESPA World Wrap Masters is the camaraderie among us all and the opportunity to learn new tricks, improve our performance and advance the industry as a whole. FESPA www.fespa.com Williamson, WV (25661) Today Areas of patchy fog early. Mostly cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy in the afternoon. High near 80F. Winds light and variable.. Tonight Partly cloudy early with increasing clouds overnight. Low around 65F. Winds light and variable. By: Paige Cline The hills are still green for the most part, but a little[Read More] As protests continue to erupt in the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, and across the world in outrage against the horrific shooting of Jacob Bla Read more Wits students at CERN meet with Science Minister and UN ambassador Students rub shoulders with Minister of Science and Technology and the Head of the Mission of South Africa to the United Nations in Geneva. Wits students working at the European laboratory (CERN) in Geneva, have had two high-level visits in the last month, with meetings with both the Minister of Science and Technology and South Africas Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. The Minister of Science and Technology, Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane, dropped in for a visit on Tuesday, 15 May, while a group of Wits students, who are part of the SA-CERN Consortium funded by the DST, attended the Freedom Day Celebrations, which were hosted in Geneva by Nozipho Joyce Mxakato-Diseko, Head of the Mission of South Africa to the United Nations on 3 May. A group of Wits students, who are part of the School of Physics at the University, are currently working at the ATLAS experiment at CERN. As part of the SA CERN Consortium, they are involved in projects such as searching for new bosons, as well as the software and hardware upgrades of the ATLAS detectors. Speaking at her visit to CERN, Minister Kubayi-Ngubane highlighted that the government participation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields is increasing significantly. She said that the government has set aside mechanisms that would assist in further participation of women in these fields, including a fixed quota of women to receive National Research Foundation (NRF) funding, as well as different awards to women who are excelling in their scientific fields. She also highlighted that she would like to see an increase in the number of young women participating in science expos. Minister Kubayi-Ngubane was encouraged to see the South African youth at CERNs engagement with science. There were concerns, however, about the level of science and mathematics education at school level, which significantly reduces the number of students that continue into studies of STEM subjects at University. Hosting the Wits students at her Freedom Day celebrations, Mxakato-Diseko was surprised and impressed with the number of South Africans doing research at CERN, and the large span of activities that they are involved in. She invited the South African researchers to engage with various forums and activities within the space of the international organisations in Geneva to enhance South Africas profile there. South African students are enthusiastic about their training at CERN. I am working with the ATLAS collaboration and searching for new bosons. Working at CERN means being exposed to new software, working with streamlined data, physics, beautiful mountains, research, atom smashing with machine learning and so much energy (pun-intended). This makes an absolutely enthralling experience! says Onesimo Mtintsilana, who is working on her MSc and plans to pursue a PhD as well. The South African participation at CERN is being successful in delivering human capacity development and technology transfer, so much needed in the country. says Professor Bruce Mellado, the National Contact Physicist of South Africa at the ATLAS experiment. The Trump administration is all over the place on trade with China. Just 10 days ago, the two parties called a temporary truce. Both sides said they had agreed not to impose new tariffs on one another as talks continued, and that China would increase purchases of American goods and services to reduce the $375 billion trade imbalance. Then, on Tuesday, the White House abruptly changed its tune. The United States announced that it would move forward with tariffs on Chinese goods worth $50 billion, as well as restrictions on investment in critical technologies. The Chinese government said the announcement "is obviously in violation of the consensus reached in Washington recently by both China and the United States." Related: Companies become bargaining chips in US-China trade turmoil One of President Donald Trump's chief tactics in negotiations has been unpredictability. He's also made a habit of threatening unilateral action to try to gain leverage in trade disputes. But his strategy on China is baffling trade experts, who think the whiplash could ultimately hamper the United States' ability to get what it wants from Beijing. "If we're trying to change Chinese behavior, these noisy signals aren't going to get us there," said Phil Levy, senior fellow on the global economy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former senior economist in the George W. Bush administration. Some of the irresolution comes from lasting divisions within Trump's team, which have complicated trade talks from the start. When Trump first directed US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to levy tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese exports in March, following a months-long investigation into intellectual property theft, the move was hailed as a victory for trade hawks in the Trump administration. But in subsequent weeks, negotiations with China focused on narrower concerns, such as the bilateral trade deficit. Related: Analysis: China is playing the long game against Trump Earlier this month, both countries said they had reached an initial agreement, and that China would "significantly increase" purchases from the United States, in part by buying more agriculture and energy exports. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin went on Fox News to say the trade war was "on hold." Almost immediately, Lighthizer put out a statement warning that major issues between the two sides remain unresolved, and that tariffs, investment restrictions and export regulations remained on the table. China has no reason to address issues brought up by the United States if the government's priorities appear to be constantly in flux, said Eric Altbach, senior vice president at Albright Stonebridge Group and former deputy assistant US trade representative for China under President Barack Obama. "When the leadership of the trade agenda is oscillating between Mnuchin and Lighthizer, it doesn't motivate anyone - particularly the Chinese - to start making major concessions," Altbach said. The mixed messages also weaken the US position by reducing opportunities for cooperation, Levy said. If the fight is truly about intellectual property theft, the United States could likely recruit some of its allies to help apply pressure. But they won't join in if they think the United States is going to suddenly shift gears and just focus on reducing the trade deficit, he said. Related: 'Chinese trade secret theft nearly killed my company' There are a few tactical reasons the Trump administration may have decided on Tuesday to go ahead with tariffs and investment restrictions. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is scheduled to travel to China this weekend for further discussions. This could be an attempt to gain influence ahead of those talks, said William Reinsch, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who also served in the Clinton administration. An advance team representing the US delegation arrived in Beijing on Wednesday to lay the groundwork for Ross' visit. Additionally, Trump has faced significant political pressure to be tough on China from Capitol Hill in recent days. The Commerce Department informed Congress on Friday of a plan to ease penalties on ZTE, the Chinese phone and telecom equipment maker that was crippled by an export ban issued in April as punishment for what the United States said were violations of its sanctions against North Korea and Iran. That plan was met with fierce bipartisan resistance over the weekend. Related: ZTE will suffer lasting damage even if Trump lifts ban The message behind the tariffs on Tuesday could be "directed as much to a domestic political audience as it is to the Chinese government," Altbach said. Either way, repeated changes to the US strategy on China may only bog down talks with Beijing moving forward, Reinsch said. "Our priorities depend on what day it is, which is not a good way to conduct a negotiation," he said. Italy is paying a high price for the political chaos of the past few days. The heavily-indebted nation found buyers for nearly -6 billion ($7 billion) of its bonds on Wednesday, a sign that market fears that Italy could ditch the euro may be receding. But investors demanded higher rates of interest for taking on the risk of holding Italian government debt given a political outlook that remains deeply uncertain. The government will pay 3% on 10-year bonds sold Wednesday, almost double the rate it agreed to pay in April. Italy's main stock market index was 2% higher in afternoon trading, having lost 5% since Friday, with the successful auction helping to reassure investors. Fears that new elections in the world's eighth largest economy could bolster radical parties and result in a clash between Rome and the European Union sent Italian stocks and bonds plunging on Tuesday and triggered a sell-off in global markets. Short-term Italian bonds suffered their worst day since 1992 on Tuesday, according to Reuters. Two populist parties failed to form a government on Sunday after Italy's president refused to accept their euroskeptic nominee for the post of finance minister. A former International Monetary Fund official was instead asked to become interim prime minister at the head of a caretaker administration that would hold office until new elections could be held later this year. But what happens next is still far from clear. A source at the presidential palace with direct knowledge of the talks said discussions were underway on a government that would include representatives from the populist parties. Meanwhile, at least one of the parties feared by investors struck a conciliatory tone on the euro. "If the markets fear that Italy will exit the euro, it's because someone spread the news," said Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the Five Star Movement. "But we never wanted that." Related: Italy crisis rocks markets. Here's why investors are worried Most analysts believe Italy will remain a member of the eurozone. "A spot forecast assumes things are bad for the summer and into the autumn but that Italy doesn't ditch the euro or adopt policies that doom it to leaving before too long," said Societe Generale strategist Kit Juckes. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Tuesday that he was "convinced that Italy will continue on its European path." "Italy's fate does not lie in the hands of the financial markets," he said. "Regardless of which political party may be in power, Italy is a founding member of the European Union that has contributed immensely to European integration." Italy's central bank governor Ignazio Visco echoed that message. "The delicateness and exceptionality of these times is clear to everyone," he said on Tuesday. "We are part of a very large and deeply integrated economic area, whose development determines that of Italy and at the same time depends on it." He also warned that Italy "must never forget the very serious risk of losing the irreplaceable asset of trust." -- Delia Gallagher contributed reporting. Facebook is set to build a new data center in Eagle Mountain that will span nearly one million square feet and represent a $750 million investment in the city. "I want to thank God for this opportunity. God bless Eagle Mountain, God bless the state of Utah and God bless America," said Eagle Mountain Mayor Tom Westmoreland as he fought back tears during a press conference where city and state officials revealed the name of the company Wednesday morning. Eagle Mountain has worked for nearly a decade to lure data centers to the city - a plan officials say works well for the more isolated area. While Eagle Mountain can't competitively draw other industries, the city - geographically the third-largest in the state - is a perfect fit for data centers that require a lot of land but not too many new employees. Attracting Facebook is a victory, officials say. "Eagle Mountain has gone the distance," said Theresa Foxley, president and CEO of Economic Development Corporation of Utah during the press conference. While the data center, which is set to be completed by 2020, will most likely only bring in about 30 to 50 jobs, officials say that low number is best for the city so there is no significant impact on local resources like schools, police services or traffic. The city will also see a 1,000 percent return on investment, according to a fiscal impact study commissioned by the city. "It's good to see that things are happening not just on the I-15 corridor," Utah Gov. Gary Herbert said during the press conference, noting that projects like the data center can help develop areas that wouldn't otherwise be developed. "(But) Utah doesn't just give money. The company has to give something back," he said. Facebook has promised to spend at least $100 million to expand the city's infrastructure to accommodate the project. This investment would, in turn, expand infrastructure in all of Cedar Valley and increase the county's power grid by an anticipated 48 percent. The data center will be powered by 100 percent net-new renewable energy through utilization of Rocky Mountain power renewable energy tariffs, and Facebook will purchase its own water rights and construct the required water infrastructure with money from its own pocket. "After a thorough search, we selected Eagle Mountain for a number of reasons - it provides good access to renewable energy, a strong talent pool and a great set of partners," said Facebook's vice president of data center strategy Rachel Peterson. "Facebook is in it for the long game." The state would grant Facebook an estimated $150 million in tax breaks for the project's first phase, with taxes waived for up to 20 years per phase. Those tax breaks may include hundreds of millions of more dollars if the company decides to continue to build on its lot. The officials who voted on the project chose to approve it if the state could implement a 40-year cap on the agreement. The data center in its first phase would increase property taxes currently collected for the 490-acre site by 12,000 times. The project will benefit the city, county, Alpine School District, Central Utah Water Conservancy District and Unified Fire Service Area, officials said. The data center is set for construction at the Sweetwater Industrial Park between a mink farm and water treatment facility. The announcement comes almost two years after West Jordan lost out to New Mexico for a massive $2.5 billion Facebook data center. Utah representative and speaker of the house Greg Hughes joked during the press conference that all he heard about from New Mexico officials since that time was how great Facebook was for their state. "I am being hazed by New Mexico, so you can't imagine my joy (over this announcement)," he said. The data center is the largest to land in the Beehive State. "This deal has been brought to fruition through cooperation and hard work across multiple agencies and stakeholders, setting an example for the rest of the nation in how to create a win-win economic benefit for our state both now and in the future," Herbert said in an emailed statement. ROME The Defense Finance and Accounting Services office in Rome is finding itself in the middle of a political debate between rivals for the 22nd Congressional District seat. Wednesday morning, State Assemblyman and Congressional candidate Anthony Brindisi stood outside of DFAS and said the House of Representatives passed the National Defense Authorization Act, a bill that would potentially cut the DFAS operations budget by 25 percent. The cuts could affect up to 200 local civilian jobs. Though there is an amendment to the bill that says Congress has no intention of cutting DFAS jobs, Brindisi and DFAS union representative Ed Abounader believe the amendment won't stop the job cuts. So essentially what the Poliquin amendment says is Congress has no intention to harm DFAS, but the problem that we have is that the amendment is in a different section of the bill. It doesn't address the 25 percent cuts that are still within the defense authorization act, said Brindisi. When reached for comment, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, DFAS Rome is an economic anchor with a thousand good-paying jobs and I will ferociously fight to block this harmful House of Representatives provision because it puts these precious jobs at risk. Brindisi says he is working along with Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio to convince members of the U.S. Senate to amend the bill and take the cuts to DFAS out. A move would have a larger impact in Ohio. There are 2,600 jobs in Cleveland and 6,000 in Whitehall that could be affected. U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee, said she is against this bill. "I strongly oppose any attempts to cut the civilian workforce at DFAS," she said. "The provision that was included in the House defense bill places critical jobs of at risk, and I will work with my colleagues in the Senate to help make sure that it is not in the final version of the National Defense Authorization Act." WKTV reached out to Rep. Claudia Tenney's office and heard from Tenney live on the phone on NEWSChannel2 at Noon. Click on the video player to listen to that phone interview. Tenney's office says the House version of the NDAA does not include any cuts to DFAS jobs, this is actually because of an amendment Rep. Tenney co-sponsored that passed the House. In a separate email, Tenney's office added: "To say that the amendment has no teeth is incorrect. The amendment clearly lays out Congressional intent which is a directive agencies and the judiciary use to interpret the intent of a provision in law. Agencies - including the Department of Defense - are required to follow Congressional intent when creating regulations based on laws passed by Congress. Any violation of congressional intent is unconstitutional and can be challenged in court." Here is a link to the amendment, provided by Tenneys office. It's a classic he said/she said, with 'he' being a NYS Assemblyman and Congressional candidate, and 'she', the Congresswoman he seeks to unseat. Assemblyman Anthony Brindisi says if the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act is passed, DFAS, in Rome, stands to lose 25% of its workforce-up to 200 jobs. Brindisi says the Poliquin amendment, named for a Maine Congressman, won't protect the jobs. "I think you'll find that members in the house who supported the NDAA will hold up this Poliquin amendment and say, 'don't worry; becaue of this amendment, DFAS is prrotected. But like I said earlier, this amendment is nothing more than a toothless amendment," said Brindisi, outside DFAS on Wednesday, alongside Edward Abounader, who represents DFAS union workers. Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, who voted for the NDAA, says just a week ago, Abounader was expressing gratitude to her for her advocacy regarding the bill. "Please let the congresswoman know how much we appreciate her efforts on behalf of DFAS in rome. We're grateful and he writes, this is great, that we've put this amendment in," said Tenney. "All of a sudden turns around and says our amendment doesn't have any teeth." The U.S. Senate has yet to take up the NDAA. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says, "I will ferociously fight to block this harmful House of Representatives provision because it puts these precious jobs at risk." UTICA -- A minivan crashed through the front windows and wall of a Fastrac gas station in South Utica. According to Utica police, an elderly woman was behind the wheel. They say she likely mistook the gas pedal for the brake. No one in the store was hurt. Utica police said the woman was taken to the hospital for minor back pain. The Fastrac, on the corner of Genesee Street and Shephard Place, is back open, but was closed until about 8:00 p.m. Tuesday. It's time to meet the newest members of our mornign mug club...brought to you by Holland Farms Bakery and Deli. On Saturday, June 2nd it's the First Presbyterian Church in Utica is hosting their Flea Market and Craft Fair to benefit the First Nursery School in Utica. There will be antiques and collectibles, jewelry, clothing, household items crafts and more. Admission is Free. ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - The New York State Police remembered three troopers at their annual memorial service. The service was held Wednesday at the New York State Police Academy in Albany. "The most important thing is that we never forget, and we want them to know that. We never forget the sacrifice that their loved ones have made for us," said George Beach II, New York State Police Superintendent. State Police are remembering Trooper Joel Davis, who was shot and killed in July while responding to a domestic disturbance near the Canadian border in Teresa, New York. Davis was from Jefferson County. They also are honoring troopers Darryl Burroughs Sr. and Michael Anson, who died from illnesses after their assignments at the World Trade Center site following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Burroughs died in 2016 and Anson died in January from cancer. UTICA, NY-- With the potential for rain and thunderstorms on Friday, there could be changes made to the 22nd Annual Ride for Missing Children. "In the event that we think there's going be possible rain, heavy rain, or possible thunderstorms, lightning... we would look into a plan B," said Wendy Fical, program director for the Mohawk Valley branch of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. This annual bike ride promotes awareness to stop child predators and bring missing children home safely. It began in 1995 when a group of seven men rode their bicycles from Utica, to Washington, D.C. for Sara's Ride in honor of Sara Ann Wood. Two years later a group of 43 riders rode their bicycles 100 miles from Albany, to Utica. Over the last 22 years the ride has grown to include 500 riders. In order to make sure everyone is safe, organizers stay in contact with WKTV meteorologist, including chief meteorologist Bill Kardas, who will be participating in the ride for the third year. "What were looking at on Friday is the potential of showers and thunderstorms, for Friday afternoon," Kardas said. "What we're tracking is in the Gulf of Mexico right now, it's Alberto, it's a tropical system. By the time it gets here Friday it's not going be very organized, but it may be enough to cause some showers and some thunderstorms Friday afternoon." Fical said canceling the event is a last resort, if it's possible the ride will be altered in length or have riders sheltered from the outdoors for a short period of time. "As we get closer we start to do a plan B logistically and we will work between our stops," she said. "We will look into what buildings there might be in between, for instances location A then location B to see what would house as many people that we have, so that if we are mid-route we could possibly stop at that location and stay there until the storm passes." Fical said riders will be notified via email if and when changes are made. Organizers will also make announcements of any changes on Friday, prior to the start of the ride. MIAMI COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI) One of the two suspects in a Miami County homicide investigation have been taken into custody in California. Arrest warrants for Ethan D. Cain, 21, Marion, IN, and Joshua C. Kean, 23, Lafontaine, Indiana were issued after an investigation into a body found in a wooded area on the Okie Pinokie Trail, near State Road 124 and Miami County Road 510 East. According to Indiana State Police, 21-year-old Ethan Cain was taken into custody after the Imperial County Sheriffs Department SWAT Team raided a campground to arrest Cain and Kean on the warrants from Indiana. Cain was taken into custody but Kean was not captured. Earlier, the pair had been seen together when they had contact with an Imperial County Sheriffs Deputy. They were not taken into custody at that time because the officer received a delayed response revealing the warrants for their arrests. Cain faces criminal charges for murder, obstruction of justice, and theft. Kean faces charges for assisting a criminal, obstruction of justice, and theft. Cain is incarcerated in the Imperial County Jail awaiting extradition proceedings. The Indiana State Police is seeking the publics help in locating Joshua Kean: Kean is a six foot tall and weighs approximately 250 pounds. He has blonde hair and blue eyes. Kean should be considered armed and dangerous. If he is sighted do not approach him, call law enforcement and report his location. Anyone with information about this case is encouraged to contact Indiana State Police detectives by calling the Indiana State Police Peru Post at 1-800-382-0689 or 765-473-6666. On May 19, 2018 around 10:20 a.m., officers from the Indiana State Police, the Miami County Sheriffs Department, and conservation officers from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources responded to a possible death, on the Okie Pinokie Trail, near the area of State Road 124 and Miami County Road 510 East. The preliminary investigation by Indiana State Police detectives revealed that two men were mushroom hunting, in a wooded area on the Okie Pinokie Trail, near State Road 124 and Miami County Road 510 East. The men allegedly found the body of a deceased male. The deceased male was identified as Drake Allan Smith, 22, Summitville, IN. An autopsy revealed that Smiths death was a homicide. LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) In a meeting held Wednesday, the Lafayette Police Civil Service Commission announced it accepted the proposal to discipline Lafayette police officer Daniel Sells. Not only will he serve a suspension, he's also been demoted from technician to patrolman. His take home car privileges have also been taken away. In March, Chief Patrick Flannelly said Sells was pointing his TASER at a dispatcher during a debriefing call at St. Elizabeth East. Witnesses describe it as "horseplay." However, Sells neglected to remove the cartridge from his TASER and shot a dispatcher in her foot. The merit board found him to be negligent of using a weapon and misusing department equipment. They also found him to exhibit unsatisfactory performance. "It's very important to us to maintain high levels of standards," said Flannelly. "We take our trust with the public very seriously. Just like any organization, if we have an employee that is not following the rules or they do something wrong, we need to hold them accountable for it." Those weren't the only violations. In a separate case, Sells was found to have unbecoming conduct, unsatisfactory performance and mishandling evidence. Flannelly said these charges stem from an ongoing criminal investigation. Flannelly said because the criminal investigation is in the hands of the prosecutor, he wasn't able to give News 18 much information. Sells has already served his five day suspension for the TASER incident. He now has to serve ten days for the other violations. Related: LPD officer faces misconduct allegation BUNKER HILL, Ind. (WLFI) An inmate was severely injured after a stabbing Tuesday afternoon at the Miami Correctional Facility, according to Indiana State Police. ISP said evidence shows 27-year-old Arthur Andrews of Indianapolis was stabbed multiple times with a homemade knife by another inmate. At this time, the suspect is still unknown. Andrews was flown to an Indianapolis hospital and is currently in intensive care. State police said Andrews is serving a sentence on a burglary charge. The case is still under investigation. China News on Women Sorry, the page you requested was not found. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Womenofchina.cn, try visiting the Womenofchina Home page Police say 2-year-old injured in a northeast Omaha collision Monday has died from his injuries. Devon Morris was among three injured passengers in a car crash Monday evening. He was rushed from the scene, but later died at Nebraska Medical Center. He and a five-year-old child were unrestrained in the backseat when the crash occurred. The crash was reported around 5:30 p.m. Monday. Mar'keshia Devers was driving her Buick Lucerne north on Fontenelle Blvd. through a green light at Curtis Ave. when a 2004 Chevy Trailblazer hit the passenger side of her car. Witnesses confirmed that Devers had the green light. Police said the driver and a passenger in the Trailblazer ran from the crash, westbound on Curtis Ave. The other victims have been identified as 16-year-old Talesha Glover-Flakes and five-year-old Stephen Russell. Glover-Flakes suffered a head injury that is considered non-life threatening. Russell is being treated for a broken leg. Family has created a GoFundMe to help cover medical costs, If anyone witnessed this crash or has information about it, please call the Omaha Police Traffic Accident Squad at 402-444-5626 or Crime Stoppers at 402-444-(STOP). This eight-part series first appeared on the World Socialist Web Site during MayJune 2008, on the 40th anniversary of the general strike in France. We are presenting it here unchanged, but with a new Introduction in light of intervening events. Part 1, posted May 29, deals with the development of the student revolt and the general strike up to its high point at the end of May. From 20 May, 1968 France is at a standstill. Two thirds of all wage earners participate in the general strike; students occupy the universities. At this point, the fate of de Gaulle and his government lies in the hands of the French Communist Party (Parti communiste francaisPCF) and the CGT trade union (Confederation Generale du TravailGeneral Confederation of Labor) it controls. It is they who guarantee President Charles de Gaulles political survival and save the Fifth Republic. In 1968, the PCF is still a considerable political force with some 350,000 members, and it receives 22.5 percent of the vote in 1967. Although the number of CGT members has fallen since 1948 from 4 million to 2.3 million, it remains the dominant union in the key sectors of the economy. Its secretary-general, Georges Seguy, sits on the Politburo of the PCF. As we have already seen, the PCF and CGT reacted with unconcealed enmity towards the student protests. The notorious article of May 3, in which Georges Marchais derided the students as troublemakers and Gaullist agents, is not the exception, but the rule. The PCF daily lHumanite does not tire in its tirades against the left radicals (gauchistes)among whom it includes everyone who opposes the right-wing line of the PCF. The CGT refuses to hold joint demonstrations of workers and students, and instructs its members to keep the studentswho are trying to forge contacts with the workersaway from the factories. The factory occupations and general strike have developed against the wishes of the CGT and outside its control. The occupation of Sud aviation, which becomes a model for all the other occupations, arises through an initiative of the trade union Force Ouvriere, which has influence among the lowest groups of wage earners and is led in Nantes by a Trotskyist, OCI member Yves Rocton. Although the CGT does not prevent the occupations, it tries to keep them under control and limit them to purely industrial demands. It opposes the establishment of a central strike committee and rejects any collaboration with forces outside the factories. It refuses to sanction the detention of the leading management personnel. On May 16, the leadership of the competing trade union CFDT (Confederation Francaise Democratique du TravailFrench Democratic Confederation of Labour) issues a declaration, in which it tries to exert its influence over the wave of occupations. In contrast to the CGT, it is positive towards the students revolt, which, it says, is directed against the encrusted, stifling class structures of a society in which they cannot exercise their responsibilities. The CFDT directs the slogan of self-management ( autogestion ) towards the factories: The industrial and administrative monarchy must be replaced by administrative structures based on self-management. CGT leader Seguy reacts with a fit of rage and publicly attacks the CFDT. He rejects any attempt to give the growing movement any common orientation, no matter how limited. The demand of the CFDT, which at this time is under the influence of Michel Rocards left-reformist PSU (Parti Socialiste UnifieUnified Socialist Party), leads to a dead end as well. It questions neither capitalist rule nor the dominance of the capitalist market. On May 25, the CGT finally hurries to directly aid the besieged government. At 3 p.m., representatives of the trade unions, employers associations and government meet in the Ministry of Labour on Rue de Grenelle. Their goal is to ensure order in the factories as quickly as possible. Although all the unions are represented, the negotiations are conducted almost exclusively by two men: Prime Minister Georges Pompidou and CGT head Georges Seguy. Seguy wants a linear wage increase, without reducing the gap between different wage categories, as the workers in many factories demand. In addition, the position of the unions is to be strengthened. On this issue he has the backing of Pompidou against the employers associations. The government is convinced that the integration of the working class through the trade unions, which have the necessary training and appropriate influence, helps the smooth running of the factory, is the formulation that appears in the minutes of the meeting. Alongside Georges Pompidou, on the government side of the negotiating table sits another future president, Jacques Chirac, as well as a future prime minister, Edouard Balladur. Like the present incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, they all adhere to the agreement at the time and utilise the unions to integrate the working class. The term Grenelle has since become a synonym for such high-level conferences between government, unions and employers. In barely two days, the negotiating partners are agreed. Early Monday morning, on May 27, they sign the Grenelle accord. It includes a 7 percent wage increase, a rise in the minimum wage from 2.22 to 3 francs an hour, and the legal anchoring of the unions in the factories. The CGT abandons its original demands for a sliding scale of wages, full payment for strike days and the withdrawal of government regulations concerning social security. After learning that Rocards PSU, the CFDT and the UNEF (Union Nationale des Etudiants de FranceNational Union of Students of France) are planning a demonstration, without any previous agreement with the PCF and CGT, Seguy pushes for an immediate deal, which he secures in the early morning in a one-on-one discussion with Jacques Chirac. At 7:30 a.m., Seguy and Pompidou appear before the press and announce the Grenelle agreement. Seguy explains: Work can begin again without delay. He goes personally to Billancourt, in order to try to sell the agreement to the workers at the Renault plant. But they regard the agreement as a provocation and are not prepared to be bought off for a few francs. Seguy is booed down and faces a chorus of cat calls. The message spreads like wildfire throughout the country and nobody is inclined to break off the struggle. Le Mondes headline the following day reads: CGT unable to induce strikers to resume work. The question of power is posed The political crisis now reaches its high point. The whole country is in an uproar. The government has lost its authority and the CGT has lost its control over the workers. Nobody can have any doubt that the question of who exercises power in the country is now being openly posed. The social democrats, who so far have kept themselves cautiously in the background, now raise their voice. Since it is questionable whether de Gaulle can cling to power, preparations for an alternative bourgeois government are made. Francois Mitterrand organizes a press conference on May 28, which is reported on television in detail. He expresses his support for an interim government, as well as for new presidential elections, in which he will be a candidate. Mitterrand heads the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left (FGDS), an alliance of liberal and social-democratic parties that had discredited themselves in the Fourth Republic and lack any mass basis. In 1965, he had challenged de Gaulle in the presidential elections and was also supported by the PCF. The PSU, the CFDT and the UNEF student federation pin their hopes on Pierre Mendes-France. In 1936, Mendes-France, a member of the Radical Socialists, a purely bourgeois party, had joined Leon Blums popular front government. During the war, he supported General de Gaulle. In the Fourth Republic, he organized the withdrawal of French troops from Vietnam as head of government in 1954, earning the enmity of the right-wing. In 1968 he is close to the PSU. Mendes-Frances pronounced orientation to the West means the PCF regards him as an arch-enemy. The alarm bells sound in the PCF headquarters on May 27, when he is sighted at a big meeting of the PSU, CFDT and UNEF in Paris Charlety stadium. The PCF fears that Mitterrand and Mendes-France could form a new government, without them having any influence on it. On 29 May, the PCF and CGT organize their own demonstration in Paris; several hundred thousand march in the capital under the slogan: For a popular government. The PCF does not even dream of a revolutionary seizure of power. Its demand for a popular government is an attempt to appease the revolutionary sentiments in the factories, without challenging the institutions of the Fifth Republic. The CGT underlines its rejection of revolutionary action by stressing the need for democratic change. The Paris chief of police later reports that he had no concerns regarding the CGT-PCF demonstration; he expected a classic, disciplined trade union demonstration, which is what took place. But the government is not sure whether the organisers have the situation under control. Army paratroopers are placed on standby and tanks are stationed in the Paris suburbs as a precaution. On May 30, the PCF Central Committee meets to discuss the situation. A tape recording of this meeting confirms that the party rejects any ambitions to assume power itself and is exclusively concerned with preserving the existing order. Six months later, a Central Committee statement justifies this attitude with the words: The balance of forces did not permit the working class and its allies to seize political power last May. At the May 30 meeting, Secretary-General Emile Waldeck-Rochet declares his readiness to participate in an interim government under Francois Mitterrand, if he grants the PCF sufficient influence. Such a government should fulfil three tasks, he says: get the state functioning again, respond to the justified demands of the strikers, and carry through presidential elections. However, the holding of immediate parliamentary elections is the preferred option of the PCF. A party speaker sums up the general attitude: We can only profit from a general election. The situation this day is on a knifes edge. General de Gaulle has disappeared the previous evening without trace, having set off to Baden-Baden, where he holds talks with General Massu, commander of the French troops in Germany. Massu is notorious for his role in the Algerian war. Whether de Gaulle was planning his escape or just seeking support is still disputed to this day. In his memoirs, Massu later states he advised de Gaulle to return to Paris and publicly address the French people. On the afternoon of May 30, de Gaulle then delivers a speech on the radio. The Republic is in danger and must be defended, he says. He announces the dissolution of parliament and calls new elections for June 23 and 30. At the same time, several hundred thousand of the generals supporters are demonstrating on the Champs Elysees under the French national colours. The PCF supports de Gaulles decision the very same evening and presents it as the successful result of its own policy. It professes its support for the legal framework of the Fifth Republic and seeks to ingratiate itself with the Gaullists by proclaiming the unity of the red flag and the tri-colour flag of the nation. On May 31, CGT leader Georges Seguy announces his agreement with the elections. The CGT will not obstruct the conduct of the elections, he says, which in view of the paralysis gripping the country amounts to abandoning the general strike. It is in the interest of the workers to express their desire for change. The CGT now uses all its energy to end the strikes and occupations well before the date for the elections, something it is only able to do with difficulty. But gradually the strike front crumbles. Workers return to work following the conclusion of factory agreements, the most militant sections are isolated, and the police begin to evacuate the universities. On June 16, workers at Renault-Billancourt resume work one week before the election; the same day the Sorbonne is evacuated. However, it still takes weeks until the last strikes and occupations are ended, and the country does not really return to calm in the following months and years. But the working class has missed an opportunity to seize political power. Michel Dreyfus, author of a history of the CGT, summarises the attitude of the most influential trade union at the high point of the general strike as follows: The CGT intentionally avoided confrontation with the state in May 1968, when the balance of forces seemed in its favour. The right-wing counteroffensive In the first weeks of May, the political right wing has been completely paralysed and isolated. Now, thanks to the aid of the PCF and CGT, it gradually recovers the initiative and its self-confidence. With the beginning of the election campaign, the struggle shifts from the streets and factories to the ballot box, benefiting de Gaulle and his supporters. They are now in a position to bring the more passive and backward sections of society into play, appealing to the fears of the silent majority. The first efforts in this direction can already be seen in May. The government exercises strict censorship over the state-controlled media (there are no private broadcasters at this time). On May 19, it bans television from spreading information that could be useful to the opposition. On May 23, it shuts down the frequencies, used by foreign broadcasters, which can be received in France, and whose journalists are reporting live from the demonstrations. On May 22, the government withdraws Daniel Cohn-Bendits residency permit. The student leader, who has a German passport, comes from a Jewish family that had fled to France to escape the Nazis. The end of the Nazi regime lies only 23 years in the past, and the symbolism of this measure can be seen by all. There is massive anger and the student protests become more radical. Again there are violent street battles. Since the CGT continues to isolate the students, and rejects any joint action with them, the students often act without the protection of the workerswhich only serves to escalate the situation. On May 24, the violent struggles claim two victims. In Lyon, a policeman dies, and in Paris a young demonstrator is killed. The shock is great and the media begins a deafening campaign against the perpetrators of student violence. Some Gaullists create a Committee for the Defence of the Republic (CDR), which collaborates with far-right elements from the milieu of the Algerian French. The latter regard de Gaulle as a traitor, since he granted Algeria independence, but the danger of revolution serves to unite the different right-wing fractions. On May 30, shouts of Algerie francaise (Algeria is French) combine with the symbols of Gaullism on the Champs Elysees. The first large demonstration supporting de Gaulle had been prepared jointly. On June 17, de Gaulle pays back by pardoning General Raoul Salan as well as 10 other members of the OAS terrorist organization, who in 1961 had organised a putsch in Algeria against him. With the beginning of the election campaign, the state organs of repression begin to act with more self-confidence. On May 31, Interior Minister Christian Fouchet is replaced by Raymond Marcellin, who is welcomed by de Gaulle with the words: At last, a true Fouchea reference to Joseph Fouche, who, following the decline of the 1789 French Revolution, became minister of police under the Directorate and Napoleon, creating a widely feared apparatus of oppression. Marcellin acts with extreme harshness. On the day he is appointed, pickets are cleared from the streets outside fuel depots, in order to secure fuel supplies and get traffic moving again. On June 12, he bans all street demonstrations during the election campaign. On the same day, he issues a decree dissolving all revolutionary organizations and expelling two hundred suspect foreigners from the country. The prohibition affects the Trotskyist OCI, its youth and student organizations, Alain Krivines JCR (Jeunesses communistes revolutionnairesRevolutionary Communist Youth), the anarchist March 22 Movement of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, as well as Maoist organizations. The Renseignements generaux (domestic secret service) is ordered to observe and collect information about every member. Marcellin remains in office for six years and in this time is able to develop the police, the secret service and the CRS (specialist riot police) into a highly prepared civil war apparatus. He doubles expenditures on the police force, equips it with modern technology and weapons, and recruits 20,000 new police officers. The Gaullists conduct an election campaign based on fear. They highlight the danger of a civil war, warn of a totalitarian, communist seizure of power and profess the unity of the republic and the nation. Opposition parties and trade unions join in this chorus. The continuous agitation of the PCF against left radicals is grist for the propaganda mills of the right wing. On television on the eve of the election, Francois Mitterrand protests: From the first day on, and despite the attacks, we have only thought of the unity of the fatherland and the preservation of peace. The election is a disaster for the official left. The Gaullists and their allies receive 46 percent of the vote, the PCF, as the strongest opposition party, wins only 20 percent, far less than one year previously. The first-past-the-post election system means that when it comes to the allocation of seats, the result is even more devastating. Four fifths of the seats go to right-wing bourgeois parties59 percent to the Gaullists, 13 to the liberals and 7 to centre parties. Mitterrands FGDS (Federation de la gauche democrate et socialisteFederation of the Democratic and Socialist Left) gets 12 percent of the seats and the PCF only 7 percent. Above all, the conservative rural areas vote by a massive majority for the right; while many of the most active elementshigh school students, university students, young workers and immigrantsare not entitled to vote. The official voting age is 21 and the electoral rolls have not been updated before the hastily called election. Two months after the beginning of the revolutionary crisis, the bourgeoisie has once again restored its grip on power. It now has the time to calmly replace de Gaulle and develop a new political mechanism, with which it can secure its rule and keep the working class under control in the coming decadesMitterrands Socialist Party. For this it must pay an economic price. The Grenelle agreements finally come into force and working people experience a clear improvement in their standard of living over the coming years. These improvements, however, do not last and have now been largely taken back. To be continued At an annual meeting of doctors at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Michigan, a resolution was reportedly adopted declaring that henceforth Hurley doctors would collectively stop using the term lead poisoned, instead would use lead-exposed when referring to the water crisis in the city. This was announced on the Hurley Medical Center Facebook page and reported by local media. According to the post on Facebook, As advocates for their patients they collectively resolved for a more proper communication so as to reduce the further stigmatization of a generation of children growing up in the City of Flint. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha was not in attendance at the meeting. The next day, she expressed her opposition to the resolution: FYI, I completely disagree with this resolution (which I understand did NOT pass) and with these ongoing and misguided efforts to minimize the crisis. She also was cited in the local media, Our water was poisoned. That is scientifically proven. Hanna-Attisha is the Hurley pediatrician who conducted the September 2015 study of the spike in Flint childrens blood-lead levels during the state-mandated water source switch to corrosive Flint River water. Her findings eventually forced the governor to return the city to its original water source. The doctors meeting took place on Wednesday, May 16 and was reported in the press on May 18. Dr. Hernan Gomez from the University of Michigan, Flint presented a report based on a paper published in the June Journal of Pediatrics. This paper, titled, Blood Lead Levels of Children in Flint, Michigan: 2006-2016, claimed among other things, that changes in GM BLLs [geometric mean blood lead levels] in young children in Flint, Michigan, during the Flint River water exposure did not meet the level of an environmental emergency. Gomez conclusion in the papers abstract states: These findings suggest that the 11 year trend of annual decreases in BLLs in children in Flint, Michigan, reversed to a degree consistent with random variation from 2010 to 2011, and again during the exposure to Flint River water in 2014-2015. Historically, public health efforts to reduce BLLs of young children in Flint have been effective over the 11-year period studied. In plain English, Gomez praises state officials who enforced and covered up the criminally negligent decision to pump Flint River water without proper treatment into the homes of 100,000 residents, for their efforts to reduce the blood-lead levels of young children. For close to two years, these officials responded with indifference and outright lies to the complaints and protests by residents about the foul water coming from their taps. On the face of it, the broader timeframe of the data Gomez presentsfrom 2006 to 2016would seem to present a more objective picture of lead poisoning in Flint. But what it actually does is give the doctor a pretext to call the spike in the number of children with elevated blood-lead levels that Hanna-Attishas study uncovered merely a random fluctuation. This is almost the textbook definition of a smokescreen. To understand what has happened, one needs an even broader historical context of lead poisoning in America. Blood-lead levels in the US have fallen drastically since the removal of lead from gasoline and paint. The WSWS wrote on this two years ago: It is true that recent years have seen a reduction in the blood-lead levels of childrenthe most vulnerable of the population to lead poisoningdue largely to the efforts of Dr. Herbert Needleman of the University of Pittsburgh. Through his research, Needleman became alarmed and animated when he discovered the extent of the deleterious and irreversible effects of lead poisoning, especially when exposed to children. Needleman was instrumental in ending the use of lead in gasoline after testifying before Congress in 1979. The banning of lead in paint and in plumbing followed later. In a 1991 appearance before Congress, Needleman warned that the danger wasnt over. Pointing out that 17 percent of Americans had a blood-lead level of 15g/dL and higher, he insisted that more work must be done. He compared the fight against lead poisoning to the elimination of smallpox, insisting that lead poisoning could be eliminated if it were attacked with similar determination. In a late March op-ed piece published in the Detroit Free Press, Hanna-Attisha asks, How many children have to be poisoned for something to become an environmental emergency? When it comes to lead, a potent, irreversible neurotoxin that is proven to have no safe level, even one child is too many. Answering Gomezs use of the statistical evidence showing blood-lead levels dropping in 2016, Hanna-Attisha writes, Of course it has. This is largely because of our response to the water crisisalerting the public in September 2015, switching the water source back from the Flint River to the Lake Huron water source in early October and beginning to provide filters and bottled water the same month. Gomez paper appeared in the June issue of Journal of Pediatrics, with an accompanying op-ed written by Dr. William Banner titled, Toxicohistrionics: Flint and the Lead Crisis, endorsing Gomez paper. In his op-ed, Banner asserts that the Flint water crisis entered the public realm through news outlets rather than the scientific literature. On September 24, 2015 [the day Hanna-Attisha announced the results of her study], data released to the public triggered a media firestorm. Assuming the mantle of a reasonable scientist opposing the mob of public opinion is a complete reversal of reality. If it was not for the outraged public outcry that found expression in the media, the so-called scientists in the state agencies responsible for health and safety of the public would be continuing to poison the population. These are clearly designed to minimize what happened in Flint, Dr. Bruce Lanphear told the World Socialist Web Site. Banner earns much of his income as a rented white coat, he said, using a term for industry-funded scientists who produce studies and papers that in one way or another serve corporate interests. Dr. Lanphear is a professor in the Health Sciences faculty of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. For 25 years he has studied the effects of neurotoxins including lead, pesticides, mercury, alcohol, PCBs and environmental tobacco smoke on fetal and early childhood health. Through his work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Lanphear is responsible for the federal agencys determination that there is no safe level of lead in childrens bloodstreams. Lanphear explained, Banner testified on behalf of Sherwin-Williams Paint Company in a 2005-06 trial in which he said that there is no evidence that lead in childrens blood led to neurological damage. Its common to give testimony in court cases. Ive done it many times, but I either do it pro bono or if there is payment involved, it goes into a fund where it will benefit children who are harmed, Lanphear said. Id recommend that you ask William Balistreri, editor-in-chief of the Journal if there is a financial conflict of interest. Balistreri himself receives grants from Gilead Sciences, Abbvie, and Merk; serves on a data and safety monitoring board for Otsuka; and serves as a consultant for Alexion. [from The Journal of Pediatrics conflicts of interest page] When it [Journal of Pediatrics] is purported to be a scientific journal, yet articles are funded by industry, its a problem, Lanphear said. There is no question that there is immense political pressure to move on from the disaster in Flint. For a medical doctor, a toxicologist and a scientist to be focused on combatting reinforcement of stereotypes that already exist, under the pretense that he is protecting children has the character of a wolf in sheeps clothing. This is really an attempt to change the narrative and downplay the significance of what was done to Flint and is being uncovered in water systems all over the country. In order to further the rewriting of the lead poisoning episode in Flint, sleight of hand is used by Gomez. For example, he calls the action level for elevated blood-lead level of 5 g/dL a reference range and not an indicator of poisoning. This is false. The 5g/dL level is considered elevated. Studies such as Hanna-Attishas base themselves on comparisons of the number of children/patients with an elevated blood-lead level (EBLL). That threshold is exactly a measurement of lead poisoning. Another false premise is that Past studies demonstrating that lead poisoning had effected IQ or criminal behavior were studies that measured lead levels, IQ and criminal behavior over the entire lifetime of a child. It cant be ascertained from a single point in time due to an exposure to lead. Hardly a better example could be made up of minimizing the danger of lead poisoning! In fact, this is the argument put forward by Dr. Banner, the expert witness for Sherwin-Williams paint company. Following from that premise is spun the most bare-faced of lies: Not a single child in the City of Flint has been lead poisoned from the water switch. Rather, they were lead exposed. [our emphasis] To the people of Flint, that is beneath replying to. Tell that to LeeAnne Walters, Keri Webber, Nakiya Wakes and the thousands of other Flint residents and their children who have suffered the effects! Dr. Lanphear added, Yes, it is true that blood lead levels have come down. But it is proven that every six years, 24 million IQ points are lost at the lowest level of exposure to lead. While children of two-to-three months are the most vulnerable, children arent the only ones vulnerable to lead poisoning. In the US, 400,000 premature deaths occur every year as a result of lead. Of those, 250,000 are cardiovascular-related. And of those, 185,000 are coronary-related. The idea that the public can be protected by playing these dangers down is just false. Despite the relatively recent drop in blood lead levels touted by many, today the average blood-lead levels of children are 10 to 100 times higher than our pre-industrial ancestors. The resolutions claim that telling the truth somehow stigmatizes a whole generation of children is utterly false, and repeats the assertion made by President Obama in May 2016 when he declared that the children of Flint would be just fine and that every one of the presidents generation got some lead in their system when they were growing up. He added, I dont want anybody to start thinking that somehow all the kids in Flint are going to have problems for the rest of their lives, because thats not true. The belittling of the scope of public health disaster by the president and other officials served to justify their continued indifference and refusal to provide the necessary lifelong resources needed to address the consequences of this social crime. See: Dr. Lanphears video Little Things Matter: The Impact of Toxic Chemicals on the Developing Brain. Emmy Butlin is part of a group that has maintained a solidarity vigil in defence of Julian Assange for six years outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The WikiLeaks editor was forced to take asylum there in June 2012. On June 19, the Julian Assange Defence Committee is holding a vigil to mark the sixth anniversary of the date Assange entered the building. The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party is backing the vigil and working to secure maximum attendance. Emmy spoke to WSWS reporter Robert Stevens about the work of the group and the Julian Assange case. Robert Stevens: Can you tell us about your group and its work? Emmy Butlin Emmy Butlin: I want to emphasise that we are not affiliated with any political organisation. Some of us have had experience with activism before. We have not worked in human rights work, we are not lawyers, we are not involved with Amnesty. We are ordinary people. We have become experts in this case over a very long time and we want to assist in any way we can. The lady who owns the website we have is based in Wales. Shes done work with Chelsea Mannings family and put together a family fund to assist relations of Chelsea who travel to the US. Another is Ciaron OReilly. He did a 25-day non-stop vigil at the Embassy from March 28 to highlight Assanges case and urge people to be vigilant because we expected the worse. When the communications were cut off from Assange [by the Ecuadorian government], we tried to support Ciaron, going to accompany him two hours at a time. We have a Twitter page, and Facebook account. Julian Assange needs defending to be able to continue his work. We support the work of WikiLeaks. We focus specifically to the circumstances of his detainment, and his confinement in the Ecuadorian Embassy, the role of the police and the surveillance. Then there is the mindlessness of the persecution of this man over a long period of time and the corruption of the legal process. RS: Can you tell us about your background? EB: I was born in Greece in 1970, in the middle of the seven-year junta, which was a police state. Greece had had a lot of political instability in the century, full of war and political repression. The geopolitical game that was played in Greece led to the most horrendous civil war, after the end of World War Two. My own family suffered from the division and the conflict in the civil war. In 1967, the colonels overthrew the legally elected government. As I was growing up democracy was taking its first steps and I was fully aware that it was a painful and slow process. My parents during the dictatorship found themselves in trouble with the police because they were active in the early sixties in Munich in Germany as students. They were active in the peace movement there, and they knew that the local Greek consulate was collecting information on them. They returned to Greece in 1966. Soon after that the dictatorship took place, and very quickly they found themselves being taken in for questioning. My father was imprisoned for two weeks, in the same place people were being tortured. For the entire seven years they had to undergo surveillance, and this affected their life profoundly. They became founding members of the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party (PASOK). I became politically aware of what was going on there and took part in demonstrations, marches, etc. People became political in this period. After the return to democracy, there was jubilation, and people felt they could demand openly and without repercussion social demands for equality within the law, between men and women. They could demand workers rights, so you had the trade unions organising marches. There were debates and intellectual discussion. There was the role of the US taking over from Britain. You had the role of the CIA in the invasion of Cyprus. I left Greece in 1990 to come over here to study at university and I got married. In April of 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video, and this affected me profoundly as both myself and my family were against the Iraq war. I was really shaken because the invasion of Iraq was a horrible event. When Julian Assange was arrested in December 2010, I knew it was wrong. At the same time, in November 2010, they did the Afghan war logs and in December 2010 they started publications of the diplomatic cables. I was waiting for the Greek stuff to come out. I was following what was going on with Assanges case in Sweden, and the open warfare against him with politicians and dignitaries in the media. Then there was the case of Chelsea Manning, at the time Bradley Manning. I could not be left untouched by the stories of these two people. It was not until he entered the embassy in 2012 that I felt I needed to do something and began participating in the solidarity vigil. RS: What did you think about what the British judicial system did to Assange in trampling on his democratic rights? EB: When they started the extradition process, I realised that this was a very unfair system. I investigated the European Arrest Warrant [EAW] system and it was the British government that had pushed this forward, because of terrorist attacks in 2007. But this system was abused. It was not used to extradite terrorists. The question came up, why are we witnessing this? Is there not another way of questioning Julian Assange? Are there other ways of accommodating the process that started in Sweden? Then I started to investigate in more detail, the sexual misconduct, or assault. And its not easy to do this, as you can imagine. Accusations of sexual misconduct have a stigma. I found that the whole process had been politicised. Britain was not interested in furthering this case. The Swedish prosecutor responsible for the case, Marianne Nye, was sitting on her hands. Julian Assange was never charged. After a while, the European Parliament did a review of the EAW out of which the UK Parliament passed an amendment that said no person should be extradited on an EAW unless charges have been laid down. So, I thought thats it. They will now be forced to go down the route of Mutual Legal Assistance with Assange. But no, this didnt happen. The amendment was not retroactive. Julian Assange did not benefit from the law, but everyone else after him did. A couple of years later, the Supreme Court decided on another case, and they looked at the decision that the judges applied in the Assange case and they threw it out. But there was no appeal allowed for Assange. Every time there was a development you thought would move things forward, no one is interested. Finally, when the UN in 2016, after looking at the case for 18 months, deemed Assange was arbitrarily detained, we thought this would be the catalyst. But no. The Conservative government said that the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention were lay people and didnt know what they were talking about. Whatever happens to Julian Assange, his work is lasting, and it has changed the world. Whereas these ideas have always been around about accountability and knowledge, through the technology available with the Internet, he has catapulted this idea to a level never seen before. Its extremely inspiring and hes not alone. I dont think Assange will be forgiven by our rulers because he educated the world. Original documents which he published can be used in court, they can be used as sources for writing books, for telling the story as it is. So, among the many functions that WikiLeaks plays, its a contemporary historian. RS: What support have you had for Julian Assange outside the Embassy? EB: Overwhelmingly positive. Most people know about the case and they want to know the latest. Im surprised at how wise people are to immediately grasp whats going on. They have seen it happen again and again where dissent to the status quo, especially in international affairs, provokes a backlash that can be devastating for people. Politicians think people are fools, but I dont think so. Even if you are not entirely educated in international affairs, you grasp that there is an injustice going on. Of course, he is in there because the US want him. All these years Ive heard this again and again. Public opinion can be manipulated, but only up to an extent. There is a dichotomy between the politicians and what people think. Look at Brexit. Thats an alert for the establishment that people feel very differently. Whoever is part of the establishment is out of touch. Again and again, I come across British people who say about Julian Assange, Enough is enough. Let this man go. A lot of the people who we come into contact regularly are drivers, because Harrods is next to the Embassy. There are a lot of wealthy individuals who shop there and their drivers will park in the local area. The drivers are international, from a lot of Middle Eastern countries. They are behind Julian Assange absolutely. Its the same with continental Europeans. They recognise the importance of free speech and democratic rights. I spent some time talking to a German lady outside the Embassy about the case. Before she left, she pulled her jumper up on her arm and she showed me that she had, from her elbow to her hand, a WikiLeaks hourglass logo as a tattoo. So, I thought I was informing her, but she had the WikiLeaks tattoo on her arm. Thats how important it was to her. Particularly young people are inspired by WikiLeaks, inspired by [Edward] Snowden. We have marched in London on the Pride event for Chelsea Manning and there was so much support for her. Weve only recently being doing some marches for Julian, as we thought this is a crisis. We went on the May Day march on May 1. Some of us joined that and the TUC May 12 anti-austerity march with our Assange banner. I knew nothing about Ecuador, but have learnt a lot more since learning about the Assange case. Because of their experience of dictatorship, they have strengthened the laws and constitution for the protection of people who are persecuted politically. For a long period, they have been supportive and tried to unlock the situation and get him to Ecuador safely. Then a year ago there was a change of government in Ecuador. Mr. [President Lenin] Moreno is from the same party as Mr. [former president Rafael] Correa and he said initially that he would support Julian Assange. But we saw that he didnt have the same commitment. His government is seeking a rapprochement with the United States and is going to renew military cooperation. I know from my own country, Greece, what that means. When you align yourself militarily with a powerful country, you sign up for a lot more. We are very concerned, particularly now that Assanges communications have been cut off. We do not hear his voice. Julian Assange has been in there for coming up to six years and its inhumane and is taking its toll. You have horrifying reports from doctors on him. This must be sorted. He cant die in there. The UN is the final arbitrator in international conflict. The UN Group on Arbitrary Detention look at the facts. Its an adversarial process. The UK put forward its case and Julian Assanges lawyers put forward their case. And the UN group gave their expert opinion that ruled in his favour. They said very simply: free him and compensate him. Under international law its rulings are binding. The UK and Sweden in rejecting the ruling are degrading the institution that all countries turn to for arbitration and resolution of conflict. You dont have to be an expert on human rights. Over the last six years, Julian Assange has had no sunlight. No access to health care, no outside exercise. He has medical care where it can be accommodated within the embassy. But has no possibility of having an MRI scan, for example. He has a heart condition and needs root canal treatment. The doctors also said that because of the level of surveillance that he was experiencing, he was unable to openly speak with his doctors about his medical problems. Intrusive surveillance, 24/7, over a period of six years, with every conversation he has recorded, isnt that intolerable? Isnt that what nightmares are made of? Its an abomination. Then you see the response of the politicians to him. Recently in Westminster, Conservatives minister Alan Duncan referred to Assange as a miserable little worm. What sort of statement is that from a minister of government? Its not just arrogance against Julian Assange. It is arrogance against the people. I find again and again that peoples stance on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, its like the bar against how you judge who they are. Everyone has the right to health care. People in prison have access to it and we recognise their right to sunshine, physical exercise and fresh air. When we find that prisons are failing, often heads will roll. Here you have a situation where none of this matters if your name is Julian Assange. Now its Julian Assange, tomorrow its someone else and then someone else and someone else. RS: The Australian government has refused to defend Assange, including the previous Gillard Labour government, and here Labour and the unions have done nothing to defend him. Can you speak about that? EB: I think he is being ostracised by them because its convenient to do so. He exhibits tremendous courage in the simple determination to publish material, but its telling how little courage those you mention have. Its very disappointing and I dont really have an answer. I think in part its because they feel threatened. A few years ago, when Jeremy Corbyn was bidding for the Labour leadership, it was a bit like Assange. There was a torrent of attacks in the media. WikiLeaks at the time made a call for any leaks on this, calling for Labour leaks, and in response there was complete silence, even from Corbyns own supporters. I also think their response has to do with foreign policy and issues of war. WikiLeaks leads to a strengthening of anti-war sentiment. And this is an area that cuts across political parties. They act in the same way, whether it is Australia or the UK. What is the big difference between the foreign policy of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party traditionally? So perhaps when someone is a strong advocate for peace and against military interventions, and lets call it the old-fashioned word, imperialism, then perhaps thats why national institutions are buying into the attacks on Assange. What is the objective here? What is the next step? Detention in a UK maximum security establishment? How can this be justified on a flimsy arrest warrant, over bail conditions, over an extradition case that has been abandoned and has cost the taxpayer millions. Its important we act. People should come down to the embassy to participate in solidarity events. Journalists should research and report what is going on. WikiLeaks recently published a video showing a car with individuals who were surveying the embassy way into the night. Who are these people? They were there around the clock, with a 24-hour presence for three weeks in April. Up to October 2015, there were overt police with a 24/7 presence. You could see them at specific locations. After that the Metropolitan Police said they were increasing the covert operation, which was always taking place anyway. I have written to the London Assembly about it. Its the elected body that controls mayoral spending and of course Sadiq Khan is responsible for the police spend in London. I have asked the assembly to confirm or deny, but they couldnt because the police said they dont comment on operational matters. WikiLeaks invited people to try to figure out what one of the people was reading in the car. Out of that it came out that there were instructions on a piece of paper and the name Op KudoOperation Kudo. One of the people who investigated this on the WikiLeaks Twitter thread confirmed that is the name of the operation to snatch Assange. It must have been going on for years and must have a budget. Stefania Maurizi is an investigative journalist with La Repubblica and she has been trying through Freedom of Information requests to get documents pertaining to the case from Sweden. She also has documents from the UK, but they were redacted. She took the government to court last year and she unearthed that, back in August, the UK Crown Prosecution Service deleted a large number of emails pertaining to the case while it was still active. RS: We recently held a series of meetings in Australia and the UK to demand Assanges freedom and young people were very responsive. How important do you think international campaigns and protests are? EB: I think its a wonderful thing. First, its inspiring for others and activists around the world, and that is what we need to hear, the publics voice. That is where the wisdom lies. This is exactly my experience speaking to people on the streets of London. People recognise the role that WikiLeaks has played. They know the way Assange is being treated is because of the work he has done. It is humbling to say, but some people congratulate us for being there. Some people clap. We express their own feelings. But what is missing, this is what your organisation can providethe linking up with others. This is how we can change the world. Individual contributions are great, but we change society as a group, acting together. We need a Julian Assange Defence Committee of the world, if you like, that will bring people togetherworkers, students, housewives. RS: We have initiated an international coalition to fight Internet censorship of socialist, anti-war, left-wing and progressive websites, organizations and activists. And we have insisted that any serious campaign cannot be carried out while Julian Assange is silenced and is incarcerated. Our campaign demands the freedom of Julian Assange and is organising internationally to achieve that goal. EB: I think thats wonderful. It is spot on. That is excellent work. Emmys group operates the vigil outside the Ecuadorean Embassy on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, 3-5 p.m. People can sign up to the mailing list of the Julian Assange Defence Committee: Grassroots solidarity for the WikiLeaks editor at www.WiseUpAction.info. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are competing to secure a multi-billion-dollar Department of Defense contract to build and oversee the US militarys Cloud computing infrastructure, which will be used to control every aspect of the Pentagons global operations. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project will transfer the large number of separate data control centers currently being run by the Pentagon into a centralized Cloud network that will be administered by one of the technology giants. The contract is reported to be worth up to $10 billion over the next decade. The winning bidder is expected to be announced in September. The company that secures the contract will be completely integrated into all of the US militarys fighting operations. According to Nextgov, Brigadier General David Krumm, the deputy director for requirements for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described JEDI as a global fabric that will connect the headquarters with active combat forces, from an F-35 fighter jet pilot to a Pacific submarine captain to an Army platoon leader. This is going to make a difference like few things have to get information to our warfighters, Krumm said. The Department of Defense hosted an industry conference on the project on March 7 in Arlington, Virginia, attended by technology companies, including representatives from Amazon and Microsoft. Krumm told the audience that JEDI would change the way that this nation, its soldiers, its sailors, its Marines and its airmen fight and win our nations wars. The Cloud network will be required to hold data at all security classification levels, meaning security officials with top secret security clearances will be working at the facilities. On May 16, Bloomberg Government published images of the advertisements produced by Amazon and Microsoft on electronic billboards in the Pentagon railway station about how their companies technology could support the military in battle. Microsofts ad featured an image of a special operations soldier and the caption, The cloud gets actionable insight while the action is still unfolding. An Amazon Web Services ad included the statement, Time to launch: months minutes, to underscore that the cloud infrastructure will help coordinate missile launches. The JEDI program was first announced in September 2017, a month after Trumps Defence Secretary James Mattis carried out a tour of Silicon Valley boardrooms. Mattis met with Googles Founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, as well as executives at Facebook and Amazon, to discuss further integrating their technologies into the US armed forces. The Defense One website reported on April 12 that Brin in particular was eager to showcase how much Google was learning every day about AI and cloud implementation, citing an anonymous senior Defense Department official. Mattis returned to Washington, D.C., convinced that the US military had to move much of its data to a commercial cloud providernot just to manage files, email, and paperwork but to push mission-critical information to front-line operators, the article noted. Significantly, the article notes that while Amazon and Microsoft have publicly expressed their desire to secure the contract, Google has kept its own interest ... out of the press. Company leaders have even hidden the pursuit from its own workers, according to Google employees Defense One reached. Googles integration into the militarys operations has triggered widespread opposition among its employees. A letter published in April written to Googles CEO Pichai and signed by more than 3,000 Google workers, demanded that the company cease its collaboration with the Pentagon. The letter was a response to Google admitting in March that it is providing the military with artificial intelligence software that can be used to detect objects in video surveillance footage, under what is called Project Maven. This technology can be directly used to develop automatic targeting for the US drone murder operations in the Middle East and North Africa. The Defense One article stated that Maven is more than either Google or the Defense Department has admitted publicly, according to the senior defense official who called it a pathfinder project, a starting point for future collaboration between the Pentagon and Google. Media reports indicate that the company most likely to secure the JEDI contract is Amazon. The company is considered to have an edge because it is already operating a Cloud network for the US intelligence agencies, under a $600 million contract reached in 2013. Since September 2016, Amazon has been providing facial recognition technology called Rekognition to police forces and private intelligence contractors. Rekognition is able to process video footage from police body cameras, surveillance cameras and CCTV to identify persons of interest against a collection of millions of faces in real-time, enabling timely and accurate crime prevention (see: Amazon providing facial recognition technology to police agencies for mass surveillance). The distinction between the technology corporations and the state has become almost entirely blurred as they become ever-more integrated into the military-intelligence apparatus. This takes place as Washington is working to outpace its major geostrategic rivals, above all China and Russia, in the arena of advanced warfare technology and artificial intelligence, in preparation for a catastrophic war that would inevitably involve the use of nuclear weapons. As they integrate themselves into the American military build-up, the technology giants are collaborating in mass political censorship of left-wing and anti-war websites, above all the World Socialist Web Site, in order to suppress mass opposition to war. Since April 2017, Google has altered its search result algorithms in order to censor the WSWS and other left-wing and anti-war websites. The author also recommends: Google, drone murder and the military-intelligence-censorship complex [19 May 2018] Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has begun to form the countrys new cabinet, following the historic defeat of Prime Minister Najib Razaks United Malays National Organisation (UMNO)-dominated Barisan Nasional coalition government (BN) in the May 9 election. The 92-year-old Mahathir leads the Pakatan Harapan (PH) four-party coalition. The PH received 47.92 percent of the popular vote, winning a clear majority in the 222-member lower house of the parliament. This compares with 33.8 percent for the BN and 16.99 percent for the Islamist Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS). UMNOs electoral defeat was the outcome of immense discontent over social inequality, entrenched ruling nepotism and corruption, and the suppression of the democratic aspirations of the mass of the population. Six-decade-old mechanisms to maintain virtual one-party rule in Malaysia failed to deliver victory to UMNO and its coalition, for the first time since the country gained independence in 1957. These included the use of race and religion to divide the electorate, the flagrant channelling of state funds to business cronies, tight control of the media, political control of the courts and massive gerrymandering. The PH coalition, however, is far from a homogeneous political grouping. It consists of Mahathirs United Malaysian Indigenous Party (PPBM), which has 13 seats; Anwar Ibrahims Peoples Justice Party (PKR), with 47; the ethnic Chinese-based Democratic Action Party (DAP) with 42; and Amanah, a breakaway from the Islamist PAS, with 11 seats. The PH is a disparate collection of ruling-class elements whose interests clashed with UMNOs predatory rule. The only unifying position they have is the fear that Najibs brazen corruption, expressed most clearly in the billions of dollars looted from the state-owned investment fund 1MDB, was fuelling the underlying social discontent and threatening the ruling class as whole. Mahathir was the BN prime minister and UMNO leader from 1981 to 2003. Anwar Ibrahim was his deputy prime minister until they fell out over the economic response to the 19971998 Asian financial crisis. At the time, to silence Anwars opposition to his policies, Mahathir presided over the frame-up of his deputy on fabricated sodomy charges. Anwar was arrested in September 1998 and sentenced in 2001 to nine years imprisonment. He was not released from solidarity confinement until 2004. New charges were laid against him in 2008 under Najibs government, which ultimately resulted in his re-imprisonment in 2015. The ruling coalition is wracked with conflicts over major domestic and international issues. On May 10, Mahathir was supposed to announce 10 of the up to 25 ministers to join himself and Wan Azizah, the PKR leader and deputy prime minister, in the cabinet. Mahathir was able to name only three: Muhyiddin Yassin (PPBM) as home affairs minister; Lim Guan Eng (DAP) as finance minister; and Mohamad Sabu (Amanah) as defence minister. On May 13, Mahathir declared that while deliberation would take place inside PH, he could appoint the cabinet at his discretion. More than a week later, only 13 ministers from the four parties had been sworn in. Among the positions still not filled was that of foreign minister. Mahathir quickly established a 12-member Council of Elders, stacked with some close political and business associates, operating independently of the parliament. It is drawing up the governments plans to implement various populist measures that PH pledged to carry out in its first 100 days in office. These include the abolition of the unpopular goods and services tax, an increase in the minimum wage, with an automatic review every two years, and the prosecution of Najib and others over the 1MDB scandal. Mahathir claimed his return as prime minister would have a transitional character. In a pact worked out in January, Anwars PKR agreed to support Mahathir on the condition that Mahathir would move immediately to have the Anwar pardoned and released. After an interim period, Anwar, now 70, would re-enter the parliament and take over the premiership. King Muhammad V, the head of state, pardoned Anwar on May 16. Anwar told the media upon on his release he was happy with the transition period. He said he would give complete support to the government on the understanding that we are committed to the reform agenda, beginning with the judiciary, media and the entire apparatus. Both Anwar and Mahathir have declared that their feud, which erupted in 1998, is over. But the two represent rival sections of the Malay ruling elite. In 199798, Anwar supported the demands of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the United States that Malaysia dismantle the various means it employed to protect national-based corporations and exclude foreign competitiona decades-long regime denounced by global finance as crony capitalism. His PKR continues to advocate the end of economic protectionism. Mahathir only broke with UMNO after his faction of the party failed to remove Najib. Mahathir and his supporters formed the PPBM in 2016. Far from denouncing protectionism, the PPBM attacked Najib for making too many pro-market concessions, including the agreement to join the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). In demagogic and nationalist fashion, Mahathir said the TPP would see Malaysia colonised again by US imperialism. The PPBM remains committed to the defence of the New Economic Policy, which for decades has served the interests of a thin layer of ethnic Malay capitalists, at the expense of the mass of the population, as well as the ethnic Chinese and Indian business elite. Mahathir also made it clear that he will seek closer relations with China and align with Beijings efforts to counter Washingtons influence in the region. On May 24, he sent Council of Elders member Robert Kuok, Malaysias richest man, to the Chinese embassy to discuss cooperation between the two countries. The next day, Mahathir met with Chinese ambassador Bai Tian. US interests have expressed concern. In a May 11 article, the Pentagon-connected Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS) declared that Mahathirs anti-American track record creates a risk for bilateral relations. In contrast, the think tank stressed that Anwar Ibrahim enjoys deep and warm ties in Washington and the US had supported him throughout his travails. In reality, the Bush and Obama administrations supported Najib and did nothing to oppose the persecution of Anwar. Nevertheless, the CSIS assessment is that the PKRs economic outlook pushes it to politically lean toward Washington, and against China. Beside its military predominance in the region, Washington still has immense economic clout, despite Beijings growing trade and investment. The American total stock of foreign direct investment in the southeast Asian economies is $US226 billionmore than China, the European Union and Japan combined. Differences over foreign policy, fuelled by the intrigues of the US, China and other powers, are likely to mesh with domestic issues and cause ruptures within the fragile coalition. At the same time, the inability of the Malaysian ruling class and its new government to meet the economic and political demands of the working class portends the eruption of massive social struggles. On May 25, the World Socialist Web Site reported on an anonymous email it had received that alleged that a debate held in February at the Oxford Union: Whistleblowing: exposing injustices or undermining institutions? had been censored. The censorship was said to have been carried out to suppress remarks made by panellist Heather Marsh against David Shedd, a former CIA operative. The WSWS had no way of independently verifying this, other than the lack of any trace of transcripts or audio/video recordings. It is normal practice for the Oxford Union to upload recordings of all debates to YouTube. Marsh, a human rights activist and administrator of WikiLeaks Central between 2010 and 2012, has now responded to an inquiry sent by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), confirming that the entire debate was censored. In her email, Marsh states, You are correct that the panel was censored, in breach of the contract Oxford Union offered to its speakers and despite YouTube release forms being signed by all involved. Marsh continues: Journalists were also ignored and given a very disrespectful and inconsiderate runaround by the Oxford Union committee, despite journalists labour being the exchange they are offering as their part of the contractual agreement. She also sent the WSWS a transcript of her contribution. Marsh began the February debate by declaring, My focus has always been human rights and horizontal governance. Of the human rights atrocities I have worked to expose, a very large number are associated with David Shedd and the organizations and allies he represents. She told the audience of Canadian citizen, Omar Khadr who was abducted at 15 years old, subjected to the most horrific torture at the CIA black site Bagram, then trafficked and tortured for another decade at Guantanamo before enduring a show trial of invented court, invented evidence, invented experts and retroactively applied, invented crimes The hell this Canadian child went through for 12 years was conducted by the organizations represented by David Shedd. It is deeply uncomfortable for me to be here today, on the same panel as someone whose work has established and worked to normalize ever-increasing drone murders, black site disappearances and torture and I hope it is uncomfortable for all of you as well, and for him, Marsh explained. Beware of your contribution to the growing banality of evil lest you yourself become a cog in the machinery of terror. Marsh said that Shedd wants to crush whistleblowers. Warning against laws being passed against whistleblowers, that she defined as anyone who challenges and speaks out against or exposes the powerful, she said these would eventually be used against anyone seeking to bring those in power to justice for crimes committed. Referencing the torture and detention camp run by the US, she explained [I]t is the people in Guantanamo and every other prison who we should never have allowed to be silenced in the first place and those are the voices we need to make sure we hear we already have so many international laws protecting our human rights, our rights to freedom of expression, our right to knowledge, our rights to not be tortured and murdered, our right to a fair trial, and these are all being ignored (emphasis in original source). Responding to a comment by Shedd that our men and women in uniform are heroic, Marsh presented a devastating summation of the antidemocratic and unaccountable CIA: David Shedd belonged to the most powerful, well-funded, weaponized, international, organized crime syndicate the world has ever seen. Not even counting the other organizations he is affiliated with or those he calls his alliesjust looking at the CIA by itselfthey are in the business of assassinations, they manage black sites for torture, they work with local mafias, cartels and militias all over the world, they run operations trafficking weapons, drugs and people all over the world, they have ongoing programs of human experimentation these are just a few of the things the CIA itself has done, not counting their network of allies. They are part of a vast criminal network that is now planning even greater expansion, more torture, far more disappearances, far more murder. So, when these men talk about whistleblowers threatening national security, we need to ask three obvious questions: what is security to them, who is their nation and who are the whistleblowers? So, given that we are dealing with criminals and members of criminal organizations, what they mean by security is immunity from criminal prosecution. And we have seen that. They do not keep us safe, we have plenty of evidence of that, but they certainly do keep themselves safe. The US military bombed an MSF [Medecins Sans Frontieres] hospital. Can we investigate? No, we cannot, they have bulldozed the evidence. They tortured some folks and they plan on torturing a lot more, but thats classified. During the debate, Marsh asked Shedd why, given his professed concern for Latin Americans, are you not doing anything about ICE internment camps in the United States Shedd replied by asking Marsh what camps she was referring to. When he described US security and military personnel as our brave men and women, Marsh interrupted to call them torturers. Shedd asked what torture, to which Marsh replied, Have you not read the Torture Report? Obama declassified part of it, didnt you know? Shedd then told Marsh to stop interrupting him and returned to his theme of our brave men and women, devoting their lives. Marsh again interrupted to state that they were torturing people. Shedd reiterated, I asked you to stop, to which Marsh replied, I asked you for twelve years to stop torturing my friend and you didnt stop. On Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director and now Trumps secretary of state, Marsh said he is a man who talks about a bureaucracy that slows down the CIAthat bureaucracy is our human rights and that is how they see our livesas bureaucracy. If they kill too many of us at once they have to fill out a form. And that slows them down. Pompeo wants agile assassins. Marsh referred to Erik Prince, a former US Navy SEAL and founder of the Blackwater firm providing security and military services for the US military and State Department, who had spoken at the Oxford Union prior to this debate, as the crown prince of military contractors. She weighed in against other powerful figures, noting that there is impunity for anyone above a certain social strata, protected by official secrets and taxpayer funded NDAs [Non-Disclosure Agreements] justified by claims of maintaining security. The IYSSE reiterates its demand to the Oxford Union and in particular the president at the time, Laali Vadlamani, and the current president, Gui Cavalcanti, to comment on this matter and to answer the question, on whose authority and on what grounds was reporting of the whistleblowers panel was censored? The WSWS will continue to pursue this matter as part of its broader campaign against censorship, the assault on democratic rights and the drive to war. For nearly six years, Julian Assange, who exposed the crimes of the US military and intelligence apparatus, has been imprisoned in London, trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy under increasingly onerous and precarious conditions. For more than two months, he has been denied any contact with the outside world, unable to receive visitors, make phone calls or access the Internet. The perpetrators of this crime are not the governments routinely denounced as rogue regimes by imperialist powers and targeted for military aggression, but the imperialist powers themselvesprincipally the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. Now, the Ecuadorean government of Lenin Moreno is in active negotiations with the UK to push Assange out. Following last years elections, Moreno has moved to seek a rapprochement with the US, which would involve handing the journalist over to the torturers and war criminals in Washington. Assange is being attacked because he exposed before the world military atrocities, assassinations, the murder of journalists, and CIA plots to sabotage and subvert democracy all over the world. He took seriously his calling as a journalist by asserting the right of the people to know what their governments are up to. Assange faces enormous odds. He confronts a conspiracy of some of the most powerful states and the most reactionary interests in the world. In the United States, the Democratic Party has placed the persecution of WikiLeaks and Assange at the center of its anti-Russia campaign, which has been used to demand an escalation of war in the Middle East and aggression against Russia, and to censor the Internet. In the attack on Assange, these two aims are combined. Leading Republicans, meanwhile, have openly called for Assanges transfer to Guantanamo Bay and even his assassination. However, as the United States and Britain are making Assanges detention all the more draconian and intolerable, a new force has entered the arena of world politics: the international working class, which has opened up new possibilities for his defense. From teachers in the US, to the masses of North Africa, to truck drivers in Brazil, rail workers and youth in France, airline workers in Germany and auto workers in Romania, the international working class is engaged in an expanding wave of social struggle. This movement by masses of workers against inequality, oppression and class exploitation is, by its very logic, bound up with the fight to defend democratic rights and the struggle against war. The recent strike wave by teachers in the US has demonstrated that access to the Internet and the exchange of information is a critical condition for the development of the class struggle. It is not only that the working class is important to the defense of democratic rights, but democratic rights are vital to the working class! In order to organize and take forward their struggles, workers must be able to freely communicate, express their views, and, most importantly of all, know the truth. This connection must be made conscious, and thus the basis for a struggle. As the working class has been drawn into struggle, an opposite phenomenon has emerged among organizations that initially praised Assange as a hero and lionized him as an international celebrity, but have since treated him as a pariah. Characteristic of these forces is the International Socialist Organization, which quintessentially expresses the outlook of the upper-middle class pseudo-left. After Assange was accused by Swedish prosecutors on trumped-up charges of rape in November 2010, the ISO issued a defense of Assange entitled Why we stand with WikiLeaks. It denounced the accusations of rape levelled against him as cynical and opportunistic. The article went on to cite a statement in the Guardian by the group Women Against Rape that declared: There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with womens safety. In the South of the US, the lynching of Black men was often justified on grounds that they had raped or even looked at a white woman. It concluded that the prosecution of Assange is part of a government war on dissent. This statement now stands as an indictment of the ISO, which has totally abandoned Assange to the mercy of the American and British states. By 2012, the ISO had changed its tune, declaring Julian Assange must face rape charges and accusing Assange and his supporters of having refused to take the rape allegations seriously. And that has been the ISOs position ever since. For the past six years, the ISO has not issued a single statement on Assanges detention. A similar assessment can be made of the New Anti-capitalist Party in France, the Left Party in Germany, the Democratic Socialists of America and countless other pseudo-left organizations. Even the Intercept has published scurrilous attacks on Assange, accusing him in February of 2018 of not only sexism and misogyny, but also of anti-Semitism. The Guardian, which worked closely with WikiLeaks in 2010 and in 2013 published the leaks from Edward Snowden, has been at the forefront of a lying campaign to eject Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy. What accounts for this transformation? The inflexion point came with the Libya war and the beginning of the US regime-change operation in Syria. Those events heralded a shift in the politics of the affluent upper-middle class parties that had previously claimed to oppose the war in Iraq, and, as in the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, paid lip service to social inequality. In the ensuing period, pseudo-left groups such as the ISO have become the most vocal proponents of US regime-change operations in the Middle East and have fixated on issues of lifestyle and sexual identity. This has culminated in the reactionary #MeToo campaign, which in many ways has its origins in the frame-up of Assange. Identity politics became a means of establishing an ever more direct alliance between the affluent upper-middle class and American imperialism. Australias Socialist Alternative publicly denounced knee-jerk anti-imperialism, while the left academic Juan Cole pronounced NATOs efforts at getting rid of Qaddafis murderous regime to be worth the sacrifices in life and treasure, declaring, If NATO needs me, Im there. The struggle to defend Julian Assange, and the defense of all democratic rights, must be waged in opposition to all such middle-class propagandists for imperialism. If Assange is to be free, it is the working class that will secure his freedom. Assange will find in the masses of workers and youth throughout the world far more dependable allies. To this end, a critical initiative has been taken by the Socialist Equality Party of Australia. It is calling for a renewal and expansion of the fight for Assanges freedom in a demonstration on June 17 in Sydney, which will be followed by a vigil organized by WikiLeaks supporters in London and other cities on June 19. The June 17 demonstration will demand that the Australian government extend to Assange the rights that should be available to him as a citizen and secure his return to Australia with guarantees against indictment and extradition to the US. We call on workers and youth all over the world to promote, publicize and take part in the international initiatives in defense of Julian Assange. A new Harvard University study published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that the real death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico could be over 4,600 people. This estimate is 70 times the official government count of 64 recognized deaths, the absurdly low number upheld by officials in San Juan and the Trump administration. The leading cause of death according to the study was from disruptions to medical services. This finding was consistent across all categories irrespective of the remoteness of the location, with 31 percent of households reporting a medical issue. The study found that the most frequently reported problems were an inability to access medications (14.4 percent of households) and the need for respiratory equipment requiring electricity (9.5 percent), but many households also reported problems with closed medical facilities (8.6 percent) or absent doctors (6.1 percent). In the most remote category, 8.8 percent of households reported that they had been unable to reach 911 services by telephone. In the end researchers calculated that 4,645 more people died in the final months of 2017 than in the same time frame a year prior, an increase of 62 percent. The study concluded, the official death count of 64 is a substantial underestimate of the true burden of mortality after Hurricane Maria. As harrowing as the results of the study are, the researchers note that their estimate is likely too conservative. They explain that subsequent adjustments for survivor bias and household-size distributions increase this estimate to more than 5,000. The statistical data from the report provides important scientific backing to what everyone on the island and around the world already knows: that the true scale of fatalities is far beyond the number claimed by government officials. It also underscores the fact that the Trump administration and both the Republicans and Democrats have been engaged in a cover-up to justify their criminal response to the ongoing public health catastrophe. In the aftermath of the storm, devastating reports emerged of residents who relied on electricity for treatment such as dialysis dying in their homes in the weeks and months that the longest and largest blackout in US history unfolded on the island. Scores of people lost their lives in mudslides that ran through towns and residents across the island were faced with dire living conditions, as exemplified by Dorado, where residents out of desperation drank contaminated water. The Harvard study not only provides the most comprehensive look at the death toll, but also begins to document in empirical terms some of the daily hardships of everyday life since the storm. In the course of their study, researchers found that, on average, households went 84 days without electricity, 68 days without running water and 41 days without cellular telephone coverage in the period between the hurricane on September 20 and December 31, 2017. The study also found that in the most remote areas, 83 percent of households were without electricity for the entire time period they were evaluating. The researchers noted that many survey respondents were still without running water and electricity at the time of the sampling. To this day, roughly 150,000 homes and businesses are still waiting for electricity, with blackouts regularly taking out electricity for huge swaths of the island, and in some cases the entire island. The Harvard study is only the latest in a series of independent investigations into the real death toll. Shortly after the storm, CNN conducted a survey by phone of funeral homes and reported 499 hurricane-related deaths. The New York Times compared official death records from September and October of 2017 and found that there were more than 1,000 excess deaths compared with the average for 2015 and 2016. Researchers at Penn State University as well as a team at the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico counted death certificates, all producing figures that towered above the official government toll. While valuable in exposing the absurd official government count, these previous studies were extremely limited in the type of data they were able to collect. Reports from funeral homes could not account for those who buried their dead without assistance due to lack of electricity or blocked roads. The study conducted by Penn State was done based on death certificates. However, in Puerto Rico, every disaster-related death must be confirmed by the Institute of Forensic Sciences. This requires that bodies be brought to San Juan or that a medical examiner travel to the local municipality to verify the death, often delaying the issuance of death certificates. What is most unique and valuable about the new Harvard study is that it is the first which provides data drawn from on-the-ground research. Without a doubt, the Harvard study is the most accurate to date. The methods used to gather the data are the same as those used to assess deaths in war-ravaged Mosul by Dr. Gilbert Burnham, a professor of international health at Johns Hopkins University. The study was conducted by randomly selecting 3,299 households in Puerto Rico, varying the houses proportionally between rural and urban communities. Residents were asked in person about all deaths and causes of death from the time Hurricane Maria made landfall on September 20 to the final day of the study in December 2017. The evidence put forward in this study highlights just one feature of the ongoing humanitarian crisis. The exposure reveals more starkly the corrupt and criminal role of the government of the US territory, headed by Governor Ricardo Rossello, and both parties in Washington. Together they have done everything in their power to paper over the destruction of Puerto Rican society and facilitate its plundering by corporate interests and the banks. In his trip to the island last October, President Trump could hardly contain his indifference to the working class, telling the people of Puerto Rico that the destruction from Hurricane Maria did not constitute a real catastrophe like Katrina because the death count was so low. At that point the government had certified only 16 deaths. In fact, the real death toll in Puerto Rico far surpasses the 1,833 killed by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding in 2005. TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - We have new details on the murder of Alice "Anita" Oswald. She's the woman who was reported missing on November 10th of last year. Three days later, police say an arsonist burnt her house down. Moving forward to last Friday, the Las Vegas Police arrested Kenneth Pitts, Jr. LINK | ARRESTED: LAS VEGAS POLICE ARREST KENNETH PITTS, JR. IN NEVADA CAMPSITE He has now been charged with Oswald's murder. Back in January of 2017, police arrested Pitts on theft charges. He was accused of stealing cash from Oswald. Oswald called police often to receive updates on the case, telling police she now carried a gun and wasn't afraid to use it. According to the report, Oswald would back up those words in what turned out to be her final actions. According to the probable cause affidavit filed in Pitts' murder case, Terre Haute Police believe Oswald came home on November 9th to find at least three people in her basement, and one on lookout. Police believe Oswald confronted Pitts and shot him in the face, but she did not kill him. LINK | YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE NAME KENNETH PITTS BEFORE, HERE'S WHY That's when police say they think Pitts beat Oswald to death with a hatchet handle. Pitts allegedly put Oswald's body in her maroon Honda CRV and dumped both into a rural pond in eastern Vigo County, not far from his home. Another witness told police that back in April, he last saw Pitts driving a maroon van that was missing a rear window. He was said to also have changed his appearance and had fake identification. Pitts reportedly said he was planning to leave town because the police were onto him. In the end, the Las Vegas Police were the ones who found him. Pitts was set to go before a fugitive judge on Tuesday morning, but court records have not updated. PARKE COUNTY, Ind. (WTHI) - You might use these hot days to have some fun in the water, but if you're not watching your children closely enough, the fun instantly disappears. A scary situation unfolded on Memorial Day at Turkey Run State Park. Thats where Whitney and Kenny Bower spent their holiday on the water. But their day trip from Illinois quickly turned into more than they bargained for. Whitney shares, "We ended up paddling down river, we got off for a little while and we played in the sand and we played on the banks. And then, we got back in, and that's when we ran into the children." Their relaxing family canoe trip turned dangerous in minutes. Kenny says, "She said, Kenny look, help, help!' She heard somebody yelling. I didn't see the baby, I was on the back of the boat, I saw everybody that was over there, they all looked of age. They all had their heads above water." But Whitney had spotted a baby with the group of kids, which was under water. Whitney shares, "He instantly jumped in and the second he jumped in all 5 children like ran to him and like swarmed to him and pushing him under which scared me. And Im like no, the baby's drowning, he has to get the baby." The rescue unfolded right before Whitneys eyes. Whitney recalls, "He finally got her to me she was lifeless as he grabbed her and kept her above water. But when I was able to get her upright, she immediately started coughing and crying and I was so concerned with her I wasn't fully paying attention. He threw the four-year-old in the boat as well and was able to push us to the side.'" Most safety officials say that you're actually supposed to try and throw a rope or reach out to somebody before jumping in. But the bowers say that it happened so fast, that they couldn't help but just go after the kids. Kenny shares, "Afterwards I told Whitney, I should've just thrown my life jacket out there. I didn't think about it though because there was no time." Whitney says, After that happened, I told Kenny, I said, 'God had us here for a reason. He wanted us to be here. He wanted us so that we could save that child.' Because I fear that if we weren't there, I really do not believe that she would've made it out alive." Whats most shocking about the incident is the kids were not under parent supervision. The situation rattled both Kenny and Whitney. They walk away thankful they could help, but with a message for all. Kenny says, "Watch your kids. I have two, and I can't believe that the parents werent even anywhere near. Like I said, if I wasn't there, I feel like those babies could've, would've died." Besides keeping an eye on your children, officials say one of the easiest things is to make sure your kids are wearing life jackets that are the right size. The Bower's say that none of the children in the incident were wearing life jackets. CBS NEWS - Allergan is recalling almost 170,000 sample packs of birth control pills because placebo and active capsules were packaged out of order, heightening the risk of unwanted pregnancy. The drugmaker on Tuesday said the physician sample packs of Taytulla were intended to have 24 active pink pills, followed by four inactive maroon capsules, taken daily for 28 days. An Allergan spokesperson confirmed to CBS MoneyWatch that there were 168,768 units in the lot involved. "The packing error was detected in a single pack," the spokesperson added. The packs are marked with the lot number 5620706 and carry a May 2019 expiration date. The company issued its nationwide recall after a physician reported a sample pack containing the first four days of therapy as having the non-hormonal placebo pills instead of the actives ones, Allergan said in a statement. "The reversing of the order may not be apparent to either new users or previous users of the product, increasing the likelihood of taking the capsules out of order," according to the recall posted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. "If patients have concerns regarding the possibility of an unintended pregnancy they should consult their physician." Allergan said it was notifying consumers by letter of the potential trouble. Shares of the publicly traded company fell almost 2% on Tuesday to about $151. NOBLESVILLE, Ind. (AP) School officials say a 13-year-old student who was critically wounded during a shooting at her Indiana middle school is improving. The principal of Noblesville West Middle School said Monday that student Ella Whistler is doing better. The school district's superintendent says Ella is making progress in her recovery while hospitalized in Indianapolis. Authorities say Ella was shot Friday morning when an armed student walked into her seventh-grade classroom at the suburban Indianapolis school. Her family said she was hospitalized in critical but stable condition. Science teacher Jason Seaman tackled the armed student and is being credited with stopping the shooting. Seaman was shot but not seriously injured. Speaking publicly for the first time since the shooting, the teacher said Saturday that Ella's courage is "nothing short of remarkable." OBLONG, Ill. (WTHI) - Harmon's Drug Store in Oblong, Illinois has been open since the 1940's. But a new state policy is causing some issues for this small town business. The program is called HealthChoice Illinois. HealthChoice Illinois offers Medicaid users five health plan options. News 10 spoke with Brad Harmon with Harmon's Drug Store. He says when Medicaid users get a prescription filled, the pharmacy receives a reimbursement from the state. The reimbursement covers the cost of the drug, as well as the costs to fill the prescription. Since the program has been in place, Harmon tells News 10 reimbursements from the state have declined drastically. Harmon believes the fix is house bill 3479, which is currently in the Illinois Senate. The bill would work to provide a fair reimbursement rate to pharmacies. Harmon says, "In Medicaid, that was one of the best paying plans in the state. We would get approximately six dollars per prescription to fill. After the first month, we're seeing approximately 85 cents on a prescription. So we've seen a pretty significant change." TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - A partnership will help keep families fed in the Wabash Valley. The local Catholic Charities and Meijer have announced a continued effort to fight hunger. It's part of the Simply Give Campaign. The program encourages customers to buy $10 donation cards. Those cards are then converted into food only gift cards. After that, Meijer will give the cards to food banks, like Catholic Charities. Meijer will match your donations. Catholic Charities will benefit from these cards through June 17th. TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - The State of Indiana is celebrating students and the accomplishments in the classroom and beyond. John Dalloul made Governor Eric Holcomb's STEM Team. He's a senior at Terre Haute South. On Tuesday, Holcomb honored Dalloul and three other students. They each represented a letter in STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Dalloul was honored for science. He hopes to attend Stanford or Princeton to study medicine. All four winners received a scholarship and a special jacket. PRENTISS COUNTY, Miss. (WTVA) - An undercover drug investigation landed a Corinth woman behind bars in Prentiss County. Corie Danielle Nanney, 25, was arrested on Sunday, May 20 by Prentiss County deputies. Prentiss County Sheriff Randy Tolar says this arrest was the result of a long investigation by the sheriff's department, Booneville police and the North Mississippi Narcotics Unit. Nanney was arrested on a secret indictment, Tolar said, after having been indicted by a previous Prentiss County grand jury. Tolar says the investigation netted several suspects. He says Nanney was one of the last to be located and arrested. She was charged with the sale of meth, possession of meth and contempt of court. She was released on a $10,000 bond. Editor's Note: This article has been updated since its publication. CHOCTAW COUNTY, Miss. (WTVA) - New details are coming out following a fatal shooting in Choctaw County. Jerry Lee Robinson | Photo: File from Choctaw County Jail Jerry Lee Robinson | Photo: File from Choctaw County Jail On Tuesday, May 29 at approximately 3:21 p.m., Choctaw County deputies responded to a shooting at 297 E. Smith Road. When officers arrived, they found Jerry Lee Robinson on the front porch of a house. He was non-responsive and had suffered a single gunshot wound to his chest. Robinson was later pronounced dead. Choctaw County Chief Deputy Lee Upchurch says the shooter is a juvenile. The name of the juvenile is not being released because of age. Upchurch says the juvenile shooter was home alone when Robinson attempted to enter the house with a hatchet in his hand. The juvenile had a .270 rifle and met Robinson at the door. Upchurch says Robinson made an aggressive move toward the juvenile and the juvenile fired one shot at Robinson. Robinson had reportedly made threats against the family as recently as two weeks ago. No charges are currently being filed against the juvenile. The case will be presented before a grand jury in August. OXFORD, Miss. (WTVA) - Five Venezuelans accused of having evidence of credit card skimming have been detained following a detention hearing in federal court in Oxford. A traffic stop by the Mississippi Highway Patrol two weeks ago in Lowndes County led to them being taken into federal custody. A criminal complaint states in the early morning hours of May 18 and May 19 two cars were pulled over during a driver's license check point on US 45 alternate near Askew Road. All five passengers proved to be from Venezuela but after suspicious activity by some of them, troopers searched the vehicles. They found skimming devices, two stacks of American Express credit cards, gift cards, pinhole cameras, electronic equipment and more. The five returned to federal court Tuesday afternoon after a language barrier between the group, their attorneys and court officials led to their initial hearing last week to be challenging and continued. After listening to evidence presented by federal prosecutors, US Magistrate Judge David Sanders ordered the five remain held in the custody of the US Marshals. Tupelo Mostly Cloudy 77 Hi: 87 Lo: 69 Feels Like: 79 More Weather Columbus Clear 73 Hi: 85 Lo: 69 Feels Like: 73 More Weather Oxford Partly Cloudy 73 Hi: 84 Lo: 59 Feels Like: 73 More Weather Starkville Clear 73 Hi: 86 Lo: 68 Feels Like: 73 More Weather For the most part high pressure will control our weather forecast for the next few days. However, isolated showers may undercut some of the dominance over the next few days. Better chances later in the week for some showers and thunderstorms due to a cold front. CORINTH, Miss. (WTVA) - Corinth police arrested Shakoa Walker, 21, on Tuesday in the shooting death of a Corinth man. On May 21, George Earl Harris, 57, was found dead on his porch at his home. It appears he had been shot in the back of the head. According to police, Walker was implicated by the other suspects, Shaquavia Gunn, 18, and Darius Deen, 20, and was also identified in surveillance video at an event after the shooting. All three suspects are charged with capital murder. No bond has been set for them at this time. Stay with WTVA for the latest on this developing story. CORINTH, Miss. (WTVA) - A Korean War soldier is coming home following his discovery 68 years later. Julius E. McKinney, known as "Junior," was born Feb. 1, 1927, in Brilliant, Alabama. He enlisted in the U.S. Army at the age of 21. He was later deployed to North Korea. He later engaged in battle at the Chosin Reservoir in 1950. He became unaccounted for and was declared Missing in Action. The search for his remains lasted until March 2018 when the U.S. Army confirmed bone findings of McKinney. His remains will be brought to Corinth for burial. Charles Palmer with the Patriot Guard says the Guard will meet McKinney's remains at the Memphis International Airport and escort him to Corinth. Corinth's Magnolia Funeral Home will host a visitation on Thursday, June 7 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. and the funeral service will take place on Friday, June 8 at 11 a.m. Interment will follow at 1 p.m. in the National Cemetery in Corinth. The funeral home says one sibling was a resident of Corinth, as well as several family members remaining in the area. McKinney received the Purple Heart, Combat Infantryman's Badge, Korean Service Medal, United Nations Medal and the National Defense Service Medal. CORINTH, Miss. (WTVA) - A woman is accused of exploiting an elderly woman in Corinth. Corinth police confirm the arrest of Sherry Lynn Day-White, 53. Police say she was the victim's caregiver. She's accused of using the victim's bank account and opening a cellphone account in the victim's name. Day-White is out of jail on a $10,000 bond. ORANGE CITY, Fla. (AP) - A Florida police officer is charged with threatening to kill a woman and her 5-year-old brother, and to rape her sister if she didnt send him nude photos of herself. The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports that 25-year-old Orange City officer Joshua Fancher resigned Tuesday after his arrest by Volusia County sheriffs deputies on charges of making terroristic threats. He had been an officer since December. An arrest warrant from Lowndes County, Georgia, says Fancher began threatening the woman in January through Instagram and text messages. Local media reports Fancher was being held without bail at the Volusia County jail. It could not be determined if he has an attorney. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Dozens of people gathered at the Florida Capitol to speak out against militarism and gun violence. This event is apart of the Poor People's Campaign: 40 Days of Moral Action which is being held in 30 states across the country. Members, veterans and others shared testimonies about how war and gun violence has impacted their lives. "Our goal is to break through the tweets. Our goal is to get more folks in our country acknowledging that 140 million people are living in poverty in our country," said Rachael Reichenbach, who works with the campaign. "That's more that's half of our population." The 40 Days of Moral Action will go on through June 23. The Poor People's Campaign for Florida will back at the Capitol next week to lobby about healthcare and protecting the environment. WASHINGTON COUNTY, Fla. (WTXL) - The Washington County Sheriff's Office is looking for any information on a missing 45-year-old woman from Caryville, Fla. Deena Zimmerman was reported missing by family members Tuesday after she reportedly had not been seen or heard from since leaving for work on Sunday evening. WCSO says Zimmerman was last seen leaving her job in Graceville, wearing dark blue nursing scrubs, just after 12:00 a.m. on Monday. WCSO Investigators says they have uncovered information which leads them to believe Zimmermans last known location was in Washington County. She was last seen driving a silver 2012 Toyota Camry with the Florida plate HVWA60. Zimmerman is a white female, with brown hair and eyes, who is 5-foot-2 and weighs 145 lbs. WCSO is asking for the public to report any sightings of the vehicle or information concerning the whereabouts of Zimmerman by contacting them at 850-638-6111. They say you can also contact them anonymously by calling 850-638-TIPS (8477) or by email at tips@wcso.us. Updated : 2018-05-30 (chinadaily.com.cn) Wuxi embroidery. [Photo/js.ifeng.com] Three of Wuxi's intangible cultural heritages have been included in the first selection from the national catalog of traditional crafts jointly released recently by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Alongside another 383 traditional craft projects from 14 categories, Wuxi embroidery, Yixing purple clay pottery and Yixing Jun-glazed pottery were selected for their historical significance and development potential. As an important component of The Plan on Revitalizing China's Traditional Crafts, which calls for more effective industry management and increased market competitiveness, Wuxi's government will focus on promoting the continuation of these three intangible cultural heritages. The plan was drafted by the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and Ministry of Finance, and approved by the State Council in March 2017. The plan aims to accelerate the protection of traditional Chinese culture and heritage. It calls for substantial industry-wide improvements to be made by 2020. Yixing purple clay art work. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] Traditional crafts are set to play a significant role in the plan, creating job opportunities with incomes set to increase as industrial structures become increasingly diversified. Strides will be taken to improve the design, production and quality of traditional cultural products with the introduction of higher-quality materials and a modern management system. The plan also encourages enterprises and traditional craftspeople to guard their secret techniques, apply for relevant trademarks and understand their intellectual property rights. Further efforts should be made, the plan detailed, to enhance the promotion and sales of traditional products, with displays and roadshows at popular tourism sites a strong recommendation. First, they came for Juanita's. Texan snack-food megacorporation Frito-Lay looks to be fighting a proxy war against Oregon's own homegrown, family-run Juanita's tortilla chips, unofficial tortilla chip of the Willamette Week offices. Perhaps you have noticed the La Cocina De Josefina Mexican Restaurant Style Tortilla Chips, front and center in some of the most valuable real estate at your local grocery store? The bags show a woman lovingly smashing corn flat with a roller, presumably somewhere in Vancouver. "Made right here in the Pacific Northwest," says the promotional copy, "we care greatly about the product we create for you, and make sure to only use quality ingredients." The label also says, more than a little creepily, that the chips were made out of "corn, oil, salt... and love" by a company called Cocina Autentica. But while the chips are indeed made in the Northwest, they're manufactured at the Vancouver Frito-Lay plant at 4808 NW Fruit Valley Rd., the Columbian first reported, and Frito-Lay is listed nowhere on the packaging because, in the words of a spokesperson, "this is a specialty brand in the Northwest. We wanted it to have that local feel." Some stores display the chips with "Made in Vancouver" signs. Juanita's president Luis Dominguez says his company is well aware of the knock-off chip brand. "Word on the street is they're coming after Juanita's," Dominguez tells Willamette Week, adding that it's part of a national strategy by Frito-Lay to target popular local brands. "At nationwide industry meetings, they said they'll go after regional companies that are strong in their area," he says. "Go after regional companies in the Midwest, California, and compete that way." Dominguez also thinks the packaging is suspiciously reminiscent of his own. "They copied the label," he says. "Our customers are very smart. You think they're gonna fool them? Yeah. The first time." Nonetheless, Dominguez says he's not going to change what his company is doing. "But they scare me a little bit, don't get me wrong," he says. "They're on top of the world, the rest of us are way down below." But Frito-Lay probably doesn't know about Juanita's secret weapon, the almighty ChilipeAo, greatest grocery store chip ever invented by man, brought out only in times of greatest need. We called Frito-Lay's Cocina de Josefina customer line to warn them their struggles were futile. But they answered in Spanish. WWeek 2015 CHEYENNE The U.S. Department of Agriculture in the administration of President Donald Trump could be very good for farms and ranches in the Cowboy State, a Wyoming official said recently. CHEYENNE The U.S. Department of Agriculture in the administration of President Donald Trump could be very good for farms and ranches in the Cowboy State, a Wyoming official said recently. Commodity prices in the agriculture sector have put Wyoming farmers and ranchers in difficult positions in the last several years. Following a period of prolonged, extraordinary profits where commodity... WORLAND The railroad crossing at Fifth and Big Horn that is offline will be closed to traffic next week from June 5-7, according to the Wyoming Department of Transportation. WYDOT district spokesperson Cody Beers said there will be a total closure at the intersection from June 5-7 and no one will be able to cross the highway at the intersection. Beers said they will be direction traffic to... KIGALI, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Health Experts on Tuesday said that efforts to prevent HIV/AIDS infections in Africa must focus more on young people because they are at high risk due to peer pressure, drug abuse and alcoholism. They made the call at the 12th International Workshop on HIV Treatment, Pathogenesis, and Prevention Research in Resource Limited Settings that opened on Tuesday in Rwandan capital Kigali. The small central African country hosts the event from May 29 to June 1 with a focus on sharing knowledge and experiences in the diagnosis and treatment of HIV in Africa and beyond. "Youth in Africa are at risk of acquiring new HIV infections owing to various factors, among them being poverty peer pressure, drug abuse and alcoholism. Prevention efforts must focus more on these young people," said Mark Dybul, co-director of the U.S.-based Center for Global Health and professor in the Department of Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center. He said the Africa's 15 to 24-year-old population engage in high risk sexual behaviors, noting an urgent need for behavioral interventions targeting young Africans living in the most economically disadvantaged areas. The forum has brought together about 740 people including health scientists involved in HIV treatment, pathogenesis, and prevention research in Africa to share pivotal findings, promote collaboration, and transfer experiences across several fields regarding prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in Africa and beyond. "African leaders and policy makers must do more to protect all young people and empower them to protect themselves and their health. In fact, we cannot end the HIV epidemic without a global movement to end AIDS-related deaths and new HIV infections among adolescents," said Elly Katabira, professor of Medicine in the School of Medicine, Makerere University College of Health Sciences, Uganda. He called on African parents to get more involved and to help educate their children about sexuality and the risk for HIV. Less than 50 percent of both young men and women in majority African countries have attained a comprehensive knowledge about the spread of HIV and its prevention, said Karusa Kiragu, UNAIDS Uganda country director. Young women are at a higher risk of acquiring HIV because they are more vulnerable to violence, including sexual violence, teenage pregnancy, forced marriage and human trafficking, said Kiragu. Adolescents and young people represent a growing share of people living with HIV worldwide, according to UN Children's Fund (UNICEF). In 2016 alone, 610,000 young people between the ages of 15 to 24 were newly infected with HIV, of whom 260,000 or 43 percent were adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19, it said. KAMPALA, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese community in Uganda on Tuesday made donation to Sanyu Babies Home, a child care center where babies who have been abandoned by their parents are taken care of. Chinese Ambassador to Uganda Zheng Zhuqiang, who attended the function held at the Home in the capital Kampala, said Chinese companies have a responsibility to give back to the communities in which they operate in. He expressed hope that the donation of more than 3,000 U.S. dollars and other items would help improve the babies' well-being. "The relationship between China and Uganda has been there for many years and it will always be there and if we see a need to support children. Chinese will always give support because we also need these children to have better health and life," said Zheng. About 15 members from Uganda Zhejiang Chinese Association joined the ambassador to deliver their donations to the Home. Nankya Mutagubya, the Director of Sanyu Babies Home, hailed the Chinese community for always visiting the babies and showing them care. She urged the locals to also copy the good culture the Chinese have showed in helping to take care of disadvantaged babies. Mutagubya said the home has about 49 babies and they will use the Chinese donation to look after babies by buying them food, milk and repairing one of their trucks which they use to take children to hospital in case of an emergency. KAMPALA, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The Ugandan government on Tuesday directed that digital speed limiters be installed in all commercial vehicles in a new move aimed at reducing road carnage in the east African country. Frank Tumwebaze, minister for information said in a statement that drivers of commercial vehicles will also be required to undergo refresher courses. He said the ministry of works and transport will sensitize the public about road safety. The announcement comes after a fatal accident over the weekend that left 22 people dead and 19 others injured in the Midwestern part of the country. Uganda registers at least 20,000 accidents with over 2,000 deaths each year, making it one of the countries with the highest road accident fatalities in the world, according to police figures. by Qiao Jihong, Xu Yang BERLIN, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The German region of Ruhr in North Rhine Westphalia has traditionally been a key industrial region of Europe. However, starting from the 1970s, coal mining in the region was threatened by cheap oil, causing a steep decline in the local economy. In recent times, authorities have tried to revive the economy of the Ruhr region, as part of what has been described as "a long, gradual process" by Axel Schoelmerich, rector of Ruhr University Bochum. In a recent exclusive interview with Xinhua, Schoelmerich said he saw structural change in the Ruhr area "as an ongoing process." "We (Ruhr area) are still behind of the rest of Germany in terms of economic productivity. We still have lower economic growth rate," said Schoelmerich. "The process (of transition) isn't over." GOV'T SUBSIDIES Over the last almost 50 years, the German government has been propping up the declining coal mining industry despite intense criticism. In 2017 alone, the German government spent 2.6 billion euros (3.01 billion U.S. dollars) on subsidies to promote coal sales, according to a study by German think tank Kiel Institute for the World Economy. According to the rector, alone in coal mining there were 600,000 jobs in the Ruhr region at risk of being lost. The last mine in Germany -- also located in Ruhr -- will operate until the end of this year. "We cannot let the Ruhr area fall apart completely, so we need to take tax money and invest it into a gradual and slow process of change," Schoelmerich said. Government subsidies may help achieve a "soft" structural change, but are of course "very costly", he added. "But good thing for Ruhr is that it [the subsidies] have managed to save and create jobs with relatively low social unrest and managed to build a science-based economy," Schoelmerich said. ECONOMIC TRANSITION The economy in Ruhr has shifted largely from a coal and steel-dominated one to the one with a lot more start-up culture. "Before, if your father worked in a factory, you would probably also work in the same one. But, nowadays, you could start your own company," which in the rector's opinion signals a huge shift in the region and its mindset. "If somebody thinks about founding a startup, having universities nearby is very helpful," he added. Founded in 1962 as the first new comprehensive public university after WWII, Ruhr University Bochum offers degrees in different fields of science, coupled with engineering, which typical traditional German universities do not have. Some 43,000 students study in the Ruhr university Bochum, and have contributed to improving the educational level and catalyzing the structural transition in the area. "Back in the 1960s, there were simply no university graduates who were local," Schoelmerich said, adding that now, many local school graduates have access to colleges. SPARKING CHANGE Universities like Ruhr University Bochum not only serve as big employers, but also spark innovation to help talents find scientific solutions to aid the process of economic diversification. Schoelmerich said his university worked very closely with Bochum city in IT security cooperation. Every year, the university supplies at least 250 graduates with majors in IT security, who help the city develop IT security. Ruhr University Bochum, together with other two universities in the area, is a member of InitiativKreis Ruhr, an association with 75 firms that aims to create more economic opportunities in the area. "They made us members because they understood that for the future you need science to be able to compete with the rest of the world," the rector said. Talking about his university's special connection with small- and medium-sized enterprises, Schoelmerich said the university can help companies with digitalization and attracting the right personnel. "It's promising when you have industry and science graduates work together in the process of economic transition," the rector said. KIEV, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his visiting German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Tuesday discussed the situation in Ukraine's conflict-hit eastern region of Donbas, Poroshenko's press service said in a statement. While speaking at the joint briefing after the talks, Poroshenko said that the escalation of the situation in Donbas was one of the key topics on the agenda. "It is totally unacceptable that during the last few weeks the intensity of shelling has sharply increased," Poroshenko was quoted as saying by his press service. He said that other themes of the talks were the implementation of the Minsk agreements and the prospects for the deployment of the UN peacekeeping troops in Donbas. For his part, Steinmeier stressed the importance of avoiding further escalation of the tensions and voiced his hope for the restoration of the work in the Normandy format. The Normandy format is a diplomatic group comprising of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France, which was set up to resolve the conflict in Donbas in accordance with the Minsk deals. The Minsk peace agreements, reached in September 2014 and February 2015 respectively, envisage a ceasefire, a withdrawal of heavy weaponry from the contact line, a prisoner exchange and local elections, among other measures. Steinmeier arrived in Ukraine earlier on Tuesday for a two-day official visit. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 02:54:43|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The top UN official for humanitarian affairs on Tuesday expressed concern over the security and humanitarian situation in Syria's Idlib. "The situation in Idlib is alarming, with airstrikes, clashes between armed groups, overcrowding and severely stretched basic services deepening the suffering of both displaced people who have fled to Idlib and host communities," Mark Lowcock, UN undersecretary-general and emergency relief coordinator, told the Security Council. More than 80,000 newly displaced people have arrived in Idlib since March. Keeping pace with the increase in needs in the northwestern governorate has involved redirecting resources from other activities, he said. Many of the most recent new arrivals in Idlib have come from northern rural Homs. Some 35,000 people were evacuated from this area in the south earlier this month, after a significant escalation of conflicts, said Lowcock. The UN special envoy for the Syria crisis, Staffan de Mistura, has warned against escalation in Idlib as clashes between Syrian government forces and rebel militias became imminent. If Idlib repeats what has happened in Eastern Ghouta, the consequences would be much worse, de Mistura told the Security Council on May 16. The Syrian government's offensive on the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta near Damascus resulted in massive displacement of people before government forces recaptured the territory last month. "If we see a Ghouta scenario in Idlib, this could be six times -- I repeat -- six times worse, affecting 2.3 million people there, of which half of them are already IDPs (internally displaced persons), who will have nowhere to go because there is no other place to go once they are up there," said de Mistura. He also warned that escalation in Idlib or in other areas of the northwest may incur risks not only to Syrian civilians but also to international peace and security, as many of the areas contain external, international forces. Lowcock said Tuesday that the humanitarian situation in and around Afrin in Aleppo governorate remains "highly complex." The United Nations and others continue to provide assistance, including food, nutrition, shelter, water, sanitation, hygiene and protection services, to people displaced from Afrin to Tal Refaat and elsewhere. Inside Afrin, humanitarian assistance provided from across the border has been critical for many people. Findings from a recent needs assessment show that most health facilities in rural areas remain closed, many medical personnel have fled, and many schools, markets and bakeries are not functional, said Lowcock. Yarmouk Camp and surrounding areas in southern Damascus saw fierce fighting last month, resulting in loss of life and the displacement of an estimated 6,000 people -- most of them Palestinian refugees, he said. Last week, combatants and civilians began to be evacuated from Yarmouk. The UN aid agency for Palestiniann refugees (UNRWA) reports that as few as 100 refugees may now remain in the camp, said Lowcock. Humanitarian organizations have not been able to access Yarmouk, but UNRWA was allowed to carry out a rapid needs assessment in neighboring Yalda on Monday. An inter-agency convoy to the area is now a key priority, said Lowcock. He highlighted attacks on medical facilities and medical workers. "Violence against health care and health personnel remains a grim hallmark of the conflict in Syria," said Lowcock, noting that 92 attacks have been documented over the first four months of 2018 that led to 89 deaths and 135 injuries. He stressed the need to help more than 2 million people in hard-to-reach areas. People in places like northern rural Homs, Douma and southern Damascus are some of the most desperate in the country, he said. "Just six inter-agency convoys have reached those areas so far this year, helping 169,000 people. That is less than 20 percent of the people we would like to be reaching." Lowcock also asked for humanitarian access to Eastern Ghouta, which has returned to government control. The United Nations is providing assistance through the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, but the world body itself has not received authorization to visit Eastern Ghouta since mid-March, he said. The authorities report that more than 10,000 people have returned to Eastern Ghouta. This, and the needs of almost 200,000 people believed to have remained throughout the violence, makes access to the area even more critical, he said. The Syrian government has already approved an inter-agency convoy to bring assistance to 70,000 people in Douma, Eastern Ghouta. But that convoy has not gone, because facilitation letters have not been provided, he said. "So, I reiterate our request to the government of Syria to facilitate access to Eastern Ghouta, so that needs can be assessed, and assistance and protection scaled up." ZAGREB, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The Croatian Ministry of Labor and Pension System, and the Croatian Employment Service launched on Tuesday a campaign to boost employment of domestic labor force. The aim of the campaign "Find a job in Croatia" is to inform the general public of the possibilities of using employment policy measures and programs co-funded by the European Social Fund. The Croatian government has provided more than 2.6 billion kuna (410 million U.S. dollars) in 2018 to boost employment. It is the largest amount ever allocated to the employment in Croatia, the Ministry of Labor and Pension System stated in a press release. With the campaign "Find a job in Croatia", the Croatian Employment Service is presenting its new model to unemployed people. It is based on an individualized approach and concrete measures that could meet jobless people's needs. According to the Croatian Employment Service, the unemployment rate in Croatia fell to 10.4 percent in April from 11.5 percent in March. In April 2017, the rate stood at 13.2 percent. Despite the big drop in unemployment in a year, experts say that part of the reduction in unemployment is due to the reduction in workforce. Since the country joined the European Union in 2013, many Croatian citizens have emigrated in search of better work opportunities. Citing a recent Eurostat survey, Croatian daily Jutarnji list reported on Tuesday that almost 350,000 people aged between 20 and 64 with Croatian citizenship are living in other EU countries. It is 31 percent more than in 2013. Croatia currently has a labor force of 1.54 million among the total population of about 4.2 million people. BUDAPEST, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The Hungarian government submitted its anti-migration law package called "Stop Soros" to the parliament here on Tuesday, targeting "organizers of illegal migration", the Hungarian parliament informed on its official website. Citing national security concerns, the bill would let tribunal to put in jail those found guilty of "organizing illegal immigration". According to the draft text published on the parliament's website, helping asylum-seekers to acquire refugee status could result in a jail term of up to one year if those persons were not in immediate danger, or entered Hungary illegally. Csaba Domotor, State Secretary of the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minster Viktor Orban said in a press conference before the submission of the draft: "Hungary is ready to do battle in debates over the legislation." Hungarian citizens deemed guilty could also be banned from entering within 8 kilometers of border areas, while foreigners could be handed expulsion orders, Domotor also said. When asked about a recent warning of the German CDU-CSU party to the Hungarian government, Domotor said that the planned "Stop Soros" laws should take into account the recommendation of the Venice Commission. In March the EU's rights watchdog the Venice Commission started a probe into the laws' compliance with EU values, and is due to give its official opinion in June. Germany's CDU-CSU party's deputies are the main force of the EPP faction of the European Parliament, where Orban's Fidesz party is also a member. Since Orban's main subject of the electoral campaign has been a fierce anti-immigration policy, opposed to the EU's relocation scheme, the government considers it has received a renewed and strong mandate from Hungarian people in order to fight the EU in this matter. "Hungary's security interests must come first," said Domotor, adding that the laws reflected the will of the people expressed at the parliamentary election. Orban has regularly accused foreign-funded NGOs, more specifically those receiving funds from Hungarian-born American billionaire George Soros, of meddling in Hungary's internal affairs. The draft shall be debated next week by the new parliament, in which Orban's Fidesz party obtained 133 seats from the 199 with his junior coalition partner KDNP (Christian democrat). This gives Orban a so-called supermajority, which enables him to alter the Constitution. Drafts of the "Stop Soros" laws published earlier this year had been criticized by rights groups in both Hungary and abroad, mainly in the European Union. Soros' Open Society Foundation told earlier in May that it was closing its operations in Hungary and would be moving to Germany in response to the "repressive" policies of Orban's government. Supporters attend a rally celebrating incumbent President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi's re-election as Egyptian president, April 2, 2018. (Xinhua/Meng Tao) CAIRO, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi will be officially sworn in at the parliament for a second four-year presidential term after he won the recent election in April, Egypt's state-run Al-Akhbar newspaper said Tuesday. It will be the first presidential swearing in to be held in the parliament in 13 years, since ousted President Hosni Mubarak was sworn in for a fifth presidential term in 2005, according to Al-Akhbar. In early April, Sisi was announced winner of the presidential election by getting over 97 percent of valid votes amid some 41 percent turnout of nearly 60 million eligible voters. His sole rival in the presidential race, a little-known liberal party chief, garnered less than 3 percent of the valid ballots. Sisi's re-election came five years after he, as the army chief then, led the ouster of former Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, currently in jail, in response to mass protests against Morsi's one-year rule and his now outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group. Since Morsi's ouster, Egypt has been suffering terrorist activities that killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers as well as civilians, with most of them claimed by a Sinai-based group affiliated with the regional Islamic State (IS) terrorist group. Meanwhile, the Egyptian security forces have killed hundreds of terrorists and arrested thousands of suspects during the country's anti-terror war declared by Sisi following Morsi's ouster. CHICAGO, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Eric Greitens, the U.S. governor of the Midwest state of Missouri, resigned on Tuesday amid expanding investigations of a sexual misconduct scandal and potential violations of campaign funding. "Today, I am announcing that I will resign as governor of Missouri effective Friday, June 1st, at 5 p.m.," Greitens said from the governor's office during a hastily-arranged news conference. Greitens previously had said he would not quit his post despite the allegations against him. He was facing possible impeachment. The 44-year-old Rhodes scholar has been accused of taking and transmitting a non-consensual, partially nude, photo of a woman with whom he was having an affair. In February, St Louis prosecutors indicted Greitens on a felony invasion-of-privacy charge in connection with the incident, which he said was consensual. That charge was dismissed in the city of St. Louis on May 14, but prosecutors in Kansas City said they still plan to pursue the case, either through a special prosecutor or an appointed assistant. Greitens faced his second charge in April for allegedly misusing a veterans charity's donor list to raise money for his 2016 campaign. At Tuesday's news conference, he cited the incredible strain of his current legal woes, mounting legal bills and the calls for his resignation to announce his departure. "This ordeal has been designed to cause an incredible amount of strain on my family," Greitens said. "Millions of dollars of mounting legal bills; endless personal attacks designed to cause maximum damage to family and friends; legal harassment of colleagues, friends, and campaign workers; and it's clear for the forces that oppose us, there's no end in sight." Greitens maintained that he had "not broken any laws, nor committed any offense worthy of this treatment." Greitens, a onetime Navy SEAL, assumed office in January 2017, defeating Democrat and former Attorney General Chris Koster. MINSK, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Belarus and Russia expressed concern about the intensified NATO activities in the Baltic states and Poland, local media reported. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made the statement in Minsk on Tuesday after having talks with his Belarusian counterpart Vladimir Makei. "We are alarmed by an increase in NATO's activities, which we've been recently noticing in close proximity to our borders, primarily in the Baltic states and Poland," Lavrov said. "Such actions to unilaterally build up the military infrastructure, deploy forces and assets near our borders are destructive and undermine trust and mutual understanding," he said. Talking about the situation on the European continent and in the Euro-Atlantic space, Lavrov stressed that Belarus and Russia are interested in advancing equal, mutually beneficial relations with the European Union and via a dialogue with the North Atlantic Alliance. "We've agreed to continue working towards fixing the relations in line with the political documents adopted at the top level at the end of the Cold War," he said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 16:44:26|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close In June, Qingdao, the coastal city in east China's Shandong Province, will host the 18th summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the world's most populous regional organization. Since the creation of the SCO in 2001, the summit had been held in China three times, twice in Shanghai and once in Beijing. Qingdao is the third host city. Home to Tsingtao Beer and home appliance giant Haier, Qingdao is becoming a more attractive place to run important multilateral events. The summit will not only boost Qingdao's tourism, trade and convention and exhibition industries, but will also promote new growth sources and improve the quality of the city's development. Modern City Photo taken on May 26, 2018 shows a night view of the Qianhai area in Qingdao, a coastal city in east China's Shandong Province which will host a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization next month. (Xinhua/Wang Haibin) Aerial photo taken on May 4, 2018 shows a night view of the Fushan Bay in Qingdao, east China's Shandong Province. The coastal city will host the 18th summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in June. (Xinhua/Zhang Cheng) Photo taken on April 14, 2018 shows the night view of Fushan Bay in Qingdao, a coastal city in east China's Shandong Province. Home to Tsingtao Beer and home appliance giant Haier, Qingdao is becoming a more attractive place to run important multilateral events. In June, the coastal city will host the 18th summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). (Xinhua/Guo Xulei) UNITED NATIONS, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The United States has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the latest attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip, the U.S. mission to the United Nations said Tuesday. The meeting is expected to take place on Wednesday afternoon, said the U.S. mission in a press release. "The recent attacks out of Gaza are the largest we have seen since 2014. Mortars fired by Palestinian militants hit civilian infrastructure, including a kindergarten," the press release quoted U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley as saying. "The Security Council should be outraged and respond to this latest bout of violence directed at innocent Israeli civilians, and the Palestinian leadership needs to be held accountable for what they're allowing to happen in Gaza," said Haley. UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Nickolay Mladenov, also blamed the attacks on Tuesday. "It is UNACCEPTABLE to indiscriminately fire at civilian communities! I am deeply concerned by today's rockets fired by #Palestinian militants towards Southern #Israel, one of which hit close to a kindergarten. Such actions undermine efforts to improve the situation in #Gaza," Mladenov tweeted. Later on Tuesday, Israel reported that four of its people were injured sequently, including one civilian. After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to launch a military response, Israeli fighter jets and aircraft struck at least 35 sites in Gaza on the same day. The violence followed a serious escalation in the area of the fence separating Gaza and Israel over the past months. Israeli forces have killed at least 121 Palestinians in Gaza since weekly demonstrations started on March 30. WASHINGTON, May 29 (Xinhua) -- After recent twists and turns and the whirlwind of diplomacy over the weekend, Washington Tuesday said there were "signs of progress" for the expected meeting between the leaders of the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). "The president (Donald Trump) thinks that the ongoing discussions are going very well," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Tuesday afternoon. The meetings taking place this week were "certainly signs of progress," the spokeswoman added. Earlier in the day, the White House announced that Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the DPRK's ruling Workers' Party of Korea Central Committee, is heading to New York and will meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The U.S. State Department later said that Pompeo will travel to New York on Wednesday for the meeting, which will be the third meeting between the two senior officials, following their talks during Pompeo's visits to the DPRK in April and May. "They've had obviously very deep conversations," State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said at a briefing on Tuesday. Meanwhile, a U.S. delegation, headed by U.S. veteran diplomat Sung Kim, was meeting with the DPRK officials at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), with more meetings expected later this week, according to a White House statement on the same day. The statement also noted that a U.S. pre-advance team, led by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, is currently in Singapore coordinating the logistics of the expected meeting between Trump and the DPRK top leader Kim Jong Un. "I think there is a reasonable chance the summit will take place," Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua, saying that the DPRK, South Korea, the United States, and China "have invested considerable time and effort in making the summit possible so each has an incentive to keep the conversation open." For Trump, it's also an opportunity to "make a historic foreign policy breakthrough," Dan Mahaffee, senior vice president and director of policy at the Center for the Study of Congress and the Presidency, told Xinhua. The latest positive progress for the summit, originally scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, came after Trump canceled the meeting in a letter to Kim Jong Un on Thursday, citing "tremendous anger and open hostility" displayed by Pyongyang recently. Pyongyang had warned Washington that it might cancel the summit because of provocative anti-DPRK remarks by top U.S. officials. In response to Trump's letter, the DPRK's First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan said early Friday that the country is ready to sit down with the United States any time in any manner for talks to solve the problems existing between them. Trump then reversed course, saying both sides wanted the meeting to happen and it could still go ahead after productive talks. He also confirmed on Sunday that a U.S. official team had arrived in the DPRK to talk about the preparation for talks. "Hopefully, despite the statements of President Trump and other administration officials, dialogue can continue to lessen tensions, but with a realistic understanding of what are likely outcomes," Mahaffee said. Amid certain optimism, Washington also remained alert for any possible future reverse. "We're moving forward, and we'll be prepared either way," Sanders told reporters. HAVANA, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Four people have died in Cuba over the last two days due to heavy rains associated with subtropical storm Alberto, which led to massive floods in the island nation's central provinces as well as damage to roads, bridges, houses and state institutions. According to a Cuban state television report, the four victims died due to their imprudence such as walking in flooded areas and swimming in rivers with strong currents. "We have four people dead so far, two in the province of Ciego de Avila, one in Sancti Spiritus and another in Villa Clara due to reckless behavior," said Interior Minister Julio Gandarilla in a meeting on Tuesday. Over the last four days, heavy rains have affected the island nation's central provinces, as flood left thousands of homes under water. Over 51,000 Cubans have been evacuated in the area. Vehicles are seen in flood water in suburban areas of Colombo, Sri Lanka, on May 23, 2018. (Xinhua/Gayan Sameera) COLOMBO, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka's Disaster Management Center (DMC) on Tuesday said the tri forces along with the police and relief teams had begun a massive clean-up campaign in several districts affected by the monsoonal rains as water levels receded. DMC spokesperson Pradeep Kodippili said 24 people had been killed and over 75,000 displaced, as heavy winds and rains lashed out across the island over the past 10 days. Deaths had been reported due to lightening and drowning. Those displaced were all housed in safe shelters and with more heavy winds and rains expected in some districts in the coming days, Kodippili said, adding that those evacuated were urged not to return home. A landslide warning issued by the National Building and Research Organisation remained for the districts of Kalutara and Galle, in the south, Ratnapura and Kegalle in south central and in the Central Hills of Nuwera Eliya. Kodippili also warned the naval and fishing communities against going out to sea as wind speeds from Mannar, in the north to Colombo and Galle in the south, was expected to increase. More than 4,000 houses have been partially or fully damaged or inundated by the rains. Sri Lanka's Disaster Management Ministry said it would compensate the families of those who had been killed and affected by the floods. The Meteorological Department in its latest weather alert said windy conditions over the island and around the sea areas could be expected until May 31. Fairly strong gusty winds up to 50 km per hour could also be expected over the island, particularly in the Western, Sabaragamuwa, Central, North-Western and North-central provinces and in Galle and Matara districts. YANGON, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar State Counselor and Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi has stressed the imperatives to promote the education sector to protect children's rights, Myanmar News Agency reported Wednesday. Aung San Suu Kyi made the remarks when meeting with Virginia Gamba, special representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict in Nay Pyi Taw Tuesday. Suu Kyi also emphasized the need to avoid occurrence of violence and abuse against the weak, who are mostly women and children, and to focus on taking preventive measures. Gamba called for successful implementation of the joint action plan being implemented by Myanmar with the Country Task Force on monitoring and reporting on prevention of the recruitment and use of under-aged soldiers. Gamba also expressed the UN's desire to further cooperate with Myanmar in the promotion and protection of children's rights, requesting Aung San Suu Kyi to help adopt expeditiously the Child Rights Bill which is before the parliament. Meanwhile, Myanmar also called for UN's cooperation to eradicate child labor, saying that child labor issue is not only a big challenge to Myanmar but also a global issue related to poverty and natural disaster. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 10:56:35|Editor: mmm Video Player Close by Farid Behbud KABUL, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Faisal, 14, has spent half his life making kites inside a room specially designed for the youngster to conduct his business in the family home. Living in a rental house, the seventh grade school student's work is beyond a full-time business, as he gets up at 6 a.m. every morning to get prepared for school which starts at 7 a.m.. After school, he regularly starts working at 10 a.m. and continues until 10 p.m. at night. "I am at school in the seventh grade. After school, I make kites at home and take them to the market to sell to make some money to support my eight-member family," Faisal told Xinhua shyly. When asked about International Children's Day, which falls on June 1 every year, Faisal said he had no idea about the day, but he would have to work on that day as usual. International Children's Day has become an important occasion in Afghanistan in recent years, with festivities and celebrations being held in most primary schools and kindergartens across many cities every year. Sitting on a small poorly made mattress, surrounded by colorful kites of different sizes, Faisal said while deeply focusing on his work that his total monthly income was only 250 to 300 afghani (less than 4 U.S. dollars) from selling each kite from 3 to 5 afghani, every day. His father, Mohammad Aziz, helps as much as he can for his age, and his older brother who has just graduated from school also pitches in with the making of kites, to help earn enough money to meet all of their needs. Unlike other Afghan children who are forced into child labor, such as brick making, construction work, mining, farming, with many others resorting to begging, collecting garbage or selling trinkets on the street, Faisal cooperates with his father and brother to make enough money to pay for their monthly 10,000 afghani (140 U.S. dollars), provide school equipment and buy daily necessities. Raw materials for making kites are mostly imported from Pakistan, but they fix, assemble and prepare them for sale inside the country. In Afghanistan, child labor is common, despite written laws that prohibit children younger than 18 from work considered hazardous or dangerous to their health, but, because of resistance from their needy families, the laws are widely ignored. "Anyhow, I love this profession as it provides fun for other children," said Faisal. Zalgai, who owns a shop full of colorful kites with different designs and the necessary materials, like unbreakable strings and spools, and usually buy kites from Faisal, looked very satisfied with Faisal's hard work to make quality kites, but advised him of making kites with a different array of designs. He shows Faisal a few kites with new designs and encourages him to follow the examples, to help generate more customers. "I am happy with your work and hope you progress more than ever, but you should change the design of your kites," said Zalgai, who added he was an entrepreneur and a job provider for numerous children in the nearby area making kites. Kite flying is really popular here and one of Afghanistan's national outdoor sports. Zalgai said people have been flying kites for more than 100 years in Afghanistan. Autumn, with its gusty winds, is the best season to fly kites, not only in Afghanistan but, also in India and Pakistan. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 11:31:43|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close HAVANA, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Four people have died in Cuba over the last two days due to heavy rains associated with subtropical storm Alberto, which led to massive floods in the island nation's central provinces as well as damage to roads, bridges, houses and state institutions. According to a Cuban state television report, the four victims died due to their imprudence such as walking in flooded areas and swimming in rivers with strong currents. "We have four people dead so far, two in the province of Ciego de Avila, one in Sancti Spiritus and another in Villa Clara due to reckless behavior," said Interior Minister Julio Gandarilla in a meeting on Tuesday, chaired by the country's president Miguel Diaz-Canel. Over the last four days, heavy rains have affected the island nation's central provinces, as flood left thousands of homes under water. Over 51,000 Cubans have been evacuated in the area. Some 1,384 homes have been affected, with 174 totally collapsed, according to the meeting. Over 43,000 people remain without electricity in several provinces. An oil spill was caused by heavy floods at one of the nation's main oil refineries in Cienfuegos. It has been controlled by local authorities. Damage has been substantial in the agricultural sector, with crops such as rice, beans, tobacco and bananas particularly affected. "We must work together and come out of this stronger," said the president. "Our experience tells us that with climate change these situations are going to occur frequently, therefore we must be prepared and be able to respond to each one of them." Alberto, which passed through the Gulf of Mexico and hit the U.S. state of Florida and beyond, claimed the lives of two journalists on duty in the U.S. state of North Carolina on Monday, local media reported. Last year, Cuba was severely affected by hurricane Irma, which left 10 dead, and caused an estimated damage of 13 billion U.S. dollars. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 11:41:46|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close Boys ride bicycle in the rain in Yangon, Myanmar, May 30, 2018. Strong wind, coupled with torrential rain, has destroyed over 500 houses in Shwe Pyi Tha township, Myanmar's Yangon region, the official Global New Light of Myanmar reported Wednesday. (Xinhua/U Aung) YANGON, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Strong wind, coupled with torrential rain, has destroyed over 500 houses in Shwe Pyi Tha township, Myanmar's Yangon region, the official Global New Light of Myanmar reported Wednesday. The severe wind, which blew for just several minutes on Tuesday before dawn, knocked down trees and destroyed many houses, cutting power supply in the township. However, no casualties were reported. Yangon Region Chief Minister U Phyo Min Thein rushed to the scene and led in clearing debris and restoring electricity. Temporary shelters are being set up to accommodate the homeless victims with aid provided. On the same day, heavy rain and strong wind also blew off tree branches in Hmawbi, Dagon Myothit-north and other townships. Meanwhile, Myanmar's Meteorology and Hydrology Department issued a red-code emergency alert warning Tuesday afternoon that a deep tropical weather depression was occurring over middle-east part of the Bay of Bengal and a cyclone storm was set to make landfall in coastal area of Rakhine state near Ann within the next 12 hours. Rescue teams are making preparations in 17 townships in Rakhine state including Maungtaw and Buthidaung following the storm warning. The local authorities have suspended the waterway of Angumaw-Sittway for three days. 5 killed in explosion, ensuing gunfight in Afghan police station Source: Xinhua 2018-05-30 11:46:47 KABUL, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Five people, including four assailants and a police officer, were killed and 12 others wounded after Taliban militants attacked a police station in Afghanistan's eastern Logar province on Wednesday, an Interior Ministry spokesman said. Editor: Liangyu NEW YORK, May 29 (Xinhua) -- A former U.S. agricultural official called China an important market for the Midwestern U.S. state of Iowa, highlighting the significance of furthering relations with China. Iowa is an export state and China is one of its top four trade partners, Patty Judge, who served successively as Iowa's secretary of agriculture and lieutenant governor between 1998 and 2010, told Xinhua in a recent interview. As an agricultural state, Iowa raises more corn, soybeans and hogs, and produces more eggs than any other U.S. state, according to Judge. "We have to export ... Export markets are critically important to our economic viability. China is an important market, one we want to nourish, and hope that (the relationship) will last for many years," she said. Judge has made several trips to China, with the first one taking place around 20 years ago. Over the years, she has noticed tremendous changes in both rural and urban parts of the country. "China has moved so much farther forward ...The country has so much potential." China's rapid growth also promises a vast array of opportunities for China-U.S. cooperation, including agricultural and industrial cooperation, said Judge, who is now working with the local Chinese community to translate some of the opportunities into reality. She has been assisting with some projects to promote business trips and educational opportunities for the Chinese youth. By doing so, Chinese and Americans will hopefully have better understanding of each other's culture, Judge said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 12:41:58|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close WASHINGTON, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A new study by a team of international researchers has shown for the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) performs better than most dermatologists at detecting skin cancer. The study, published Monday on the journal Annals of Oncology, trained a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN), a form of AI, to identify skin cancer by showing it more than 100,000 images of malignant melanomas as well as benign moles. They then compared its performance with that of 58 international dermatologists. On average, human dermatologists accurately detected 86.6 percent of melanomas from a set of 100 images, while the CNN algorithm detected 95 percent of melanomas, according to the study. "The CNN missed fewer melanomas, meaning it had a higher sensitivity than the dermatologists," said Holger Haenssle, first author of the study and a professor at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. The study also showed the CNN algorithm misdiagnosed fewer benign moles as malignant melanoma, which means it had a higher specificity. "This would result in less unnecessary surgery," said Haenssle in a statement published on EurekAlert, a news release website under the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Each year, there are an estimated 232,000 new cases of malignant melanoma worldwide and around 55,500 deaths from the disease, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a specialized cancer agency of the World Health Organization. It can be cured if detected early, but many cases are only diagnosed when the cancer is more advanced and harder to treat. Although the CNN algorithm will not replace human doctors, the researchers believe that it can be used to aid doctors to diagnose skin cancer faster and better. However, they also admitted that there is much more work to be done to implement this AI technology safely in routine clinical care. NEW DELHI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- At least seven people were killed and 22 injured in a head-on collision between a truck and a bus in southern Indian state of Telangana, police said Wednesday. The collision took place in Chenjerla village near the state's Karimnagar town Tuesday night. "The accident occurred around 9 p.m. (local time) when the speeding truck tried to overtake another vehicle and hit the bus, carrying some 30 people," a police official said. While seven people died in the impact of the crash, those injured have been admitted to a government hospital, where the condition of some five are said to be serious, he added. The bus was going to Warangal from Karimnagar town when the accident occurred. Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao has condoled the loss of lives and directed officials to provide medical assistance to the injured. A probe has been ordered into the incident, the official said. "A case of rash and negligent driving has been registered against the truck driver and a manhunt on to nab him," he added. India has the highest number of road fatalities in the world. Road accidents occur mostly due to poor driving or badly maintained roads and vehicles. KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, May 30 (Xinhua) -- At least eight people, all civilians, were killed or injured in a blast that rocked Afghan southern Kandahar city on Wednesday, a local official said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 12:57:03|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close RIO DE JANEIRO, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The Brazilian government said Tuesday that it was not considering a tax hike to pay for diesel price cut that aimed to end a nationwide strike by truck drivers. "President (Michel) Temer is not considering a tax hike," said Eliseu Padilha, chief of staff of the Brazilian presidency, after a cabinet meeting. The government is considering reviewing fiscal benefits granted to some sectors as part of a package of compensation measures, which will be announced soon, Padilha said. Truckers have been staging a massive protest for nine days in Brazil, which has paralyzed many sectors in the country, demanding a drop in fuel prices. Although the government announced on Sunday a decision to cut the diesel price by 0.46 real (0.001 dollar) per liter, or about 13 percent of the current price, and to suspend two taxes on fuel, the truckers have not decided to end the strike. On Monday, Finance Minister Eduardo Guardia said the government considered the possibility of a tax hike to compensate the loss from the diesel price cut, causing uproar in the country. Guardia said later that the government was no longer considering a tax hike as an option. Meanwhile, Speaker of the House of Representatives Rodrigo Maia said the Congress will not approve any tax hike to compensate the fall in diesel prices. HANOI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam' Hanoi capital on Wednesday officially launched a double-decker bus route which runs through its 25 streets full of tourist attractions. Passengers on double-decker buses, which serve the Hanoi City Tour Hop on - Hop off service, can access audio guide systems in different languages, including Chinese, English, French, Japanese, South Korean, Russian and Spanish, and use wi-fi connections free of charge. Double-decker buses are expected to run in more cities and provinces in Vietnam to transport tourists to places of interests and between the localities and airports. Vietnam hosted over 6.7 million international arrivals in the first five months of this year, up 27.6 percent on-year, with the highest growth of 62.1 percent in the number of visitors from South Korea, followed by Finland, up 39.1 percent, and China, up 37 percent, said the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 14:12:21|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close TAIYUAN, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A county court in north China's Shanxi Province has sentenced convicts in five tomb-robbing cases to prison terms ranging from eight to 20 years. According to the court of Wenxi County, the criminals had been robbing protected ancient tombs around the province. One of them, who had served prison sentences for similar crimes before committing the crime again, was sentenced to 15 years in prison and fined 300,000 yuan (46,675 U.S. dollars). Shanxi is home to 452 cultural relic sites under state-level protection and more than 28,000 ancient architectural sites -- the highest among all provincial regions. The province recently held an exhibition featuring 4,431 recovered stolen cultural relics. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 14:32:25|Editor: mmm Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, May 29 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday condemned the attack that killed two police officers and a civilian in Liege, Belgium. Guterres extended his condolences to the families of the victims, the people and government of Belgium and wished those injured a speedy recovery, said his spokesman Stephane Dujarric in a statement. The United Nations stands in solidarity with Belgium in its fight against terrorism and violent extremism, it said.h A man killed two police officers and a passerby in the eastern Belgian city of Liege on Tuesday. The attacker was shot dead by police. The Belgian authorities did not rule out the incident as a terrorist act. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 14:37:30|Editor: mmm Video Player Close CANBERRA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- An Australian study has shed new light on the mystery of how the solar system formed in a cloud of gas and dust in space billions of years ago. The joint study, led by The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Crete in Greece, unravelled the mystery when examining a star-forming cloud called Musca, which appears as a needle in the southern sky. Lead researcher Dr. Aris Tritsis, from the ANU, said the study visualised the 3D shape of Musca, which lies hundreds of light years away from Earth. The large gas cloud, formed mainly of molecular hydrogen and dust, stretches 27 light years across the plain of the sky, with a depth of about 20 light years and width up to a fraction of a light year. "We were able to reconstruct the 3D structure of a gas cloud in its very early stages of making new stars and planets, which will ultimately take millions of years to form," said Tritsis, from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. "Knowledge of the 3D shape of clouds will greatly improve our understanding of these nurseries of stars and the birth of our own solar system." The study, which was part of Tritsis' PhD thesis, has made use of data from the European Space Agency's Herschel space telescope. He said scientists could now use Musca as a model to learn how stars and planets formed. "With its 3D shape now determined, Musca can be used as a laboratory for testing star formation, astrochemical and dust-formation theories," Tritsis said. "We see, for the first time, that this cloud is not a thin, static streak of gas in space, but a vibrating, complex structure. Despite its needle-like appearance, Musca actually resembles a sheet viewed edge-on." Musca is surrounded by ordered hair-like structures called striations, which are produced by trapped waves of gas and dust caused by the global vibrations of the cloud. The research team was able to determine the shape of Musca by analyzing the spatial frequencies of these vibrations, which were then converted into ringing tones to reveal the "Song of Musca". "This is a cloud in space that is singing to us - all we had to do was listen. It's actually quite awesome," Tritsis said. In addition to providing new insights into star and planet formation, the model of Musca cloud also be used to see how molecules form in gas clouds. Co-researcher Dr. Konstantinos Tassis, from the University of Crete, said Musca was the largest structure in the Milky Way galaxy found to be vibrating as a whole. "There's a whole range of new things we can learn from this model," Tassis said. The team's research is published in the journal, Science. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 14:42:31|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close A Starbucks logo is pictured in Manhattan, New York, the United States, May 29, 2018. Starbucks closed about 8,000 company-owned stores in the United States on Tuesday afternoon to offer nearly 175,000 employees a mandatory anti-bias training. (Xinhua/Li Muzi) SAN FRANCISCO, May 29 (Xinhua) -- U.S. top coffeehouse chain Starbucks closed more than 8,000 stores across the country Tuesday afternoon to train around 175,000 employees about racial bias following an incident last month that sparked an outcry. Starbucks workers at each location broke into small groups to receive racial bias education so as to prevent discrimination at stores. During the Tuesday session, the employees at different stores and its headquarters in Seattle in Washington state received training from a "tool kit" that focused on understanding prejudice and the history of public accommodations in the United States. Starbucks said the training curriculum was developed with guidance from several national and local experts confronting racial bias and discrimination. The company's workers were taught how to address implicit bias, promote conscious inclusion, prevent discrimination and ensure everyone inside a Starbucks store feels safe and welcome, it said. The training is part of Starbucks' efforts to rebuild its image and reputation after the April incident involving the arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia store. In the incident, a store manager called the police because the two men did not buy anything while sitting in the store. They were asked to leave after one was denied access to the bathroom. Then they were arrested for trespassing. Starbucks and the police apologized later after a video about the story went viral on the Internet and caused an outcry across the country. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson called the arrests "reprehensible" and promised to take action to prevent such incidents from happening again during an interview with ABC TV channel in April. "My responsibility is to ... ensure that this never happens again," he said. Starbucks said in a statement last month that it will make the anti-bias education available to other companies, including its licensee partners, for use with their employees and leadership. Future training will address "all aspects of bias and experience," it said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 14:47:33|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close SAO PAULO, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Chinese investment in Brazil is growing more diversified and has brought advanced technologies to the Latin American country, Secretary for International Affairs of Brazil's Ministry of Planning, Development and Management Jorge Arbache said here Tuesday. The relationship between Brazil and China in terms of investment has become more mature, Arbache told Xinhua on the sidelines of the 2018 Investments Forum. The relationship is good for Brazil-China relations as well as Latin America-China relations as a whole, Arbache said. The secretary is responsible for a bi-monthly report on Chinese investments in Brazil. In its latest issue, investment totaled 54 billion U.S. dollars. The reports have registered a growing trend of diversification of Chinese investment in both areas of manufacturing and service, including transportation, technology, banking and insurance, Arbache pointed out. In addition, Arbache said, the participation of Chinese private companies is increasing. "(China's ride-sharing company) DiDi recently entered Brazil through the acquisition of a Brazilian company, 99, a start-up which became a unicorn and provides urban transportation services, such as taxis," Arbache said. MOSCOW, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will pay a visit to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Thursday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Wednesday. "The talks of the heads of foreign affairs departments are planned, during which it is expected to discuss topical issues of the bilateral agenda, as well as exchange views on the situation around the Korean Peninsula and other key international and regional issues," the ministry said in a press release. PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Wednesday that the time has come for Malaysia to stop the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, after a three-month search carried out by an America-based firm officially ended on Tuesday without making major progress. "We have not found any evidence yet, so we have to come to a stage where we cannot keep searching for something we really cannot find," Mahathir said at a press conference held after the weekly cabinet meeting. He added that the new government will consider resuming the search if somebody can provide any information, but at the moment it must stop. "We regret it very much, and we understand the feelings of the relatives, but we cannot keep on searching for this MH370 forever," he said. The search led by Ocean Infinity, which agreed to a "no cure, no fee" agreement, started in January and officially stopped on Tuesday. The company, by deploying multiple autonomous underwater vehicles along with the search vessel Seabed Constructor, searched and collected high quality data from over 112,000 square kilometers of ocean floor, successfully overcoming both challenging conditions and terrain, according to a statement released on Tuesday. "Part of our motivation for renewing the search was to try to provide some answers to those affected. It is therefore with a heavy heart that we end our current search without having achieved that aim," said Oliver Plunkett, Ocean Infinity's CEO in the statement. But it also left the possibility of restarting the search open. "We sincerely hope that we will be able to again offer our services in the search for MH370 in future," Plunkett said. MH370, carrying 239 on board, went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. SAN FRANCISCO, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Governor Jay Inslee of the U.S. western state of Washington has sharply rebuked a Canadian pipeline project, calling it "profoundly damaging" to the endangered southern-resident killer whale population, a media report said Tuesday. The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project would increase by seven times the oil-tanker traffic in the waters between Washington state and Canada, a prime habitat of orcas or killer whales, The Seattle Times newspaper said. The project was included in a deal between the Canadian government and Houston-based Kinder Morgan of the U.S., which was being built to ship bitumen oil from Canada's Alberta province to the West Coast for sale to Asian markets. The increased traffic will raise noise levels underwater that have already interfered with the whales' foraging time for scarce chinook salmon, said the newspaper. It quoted Inslee as saying in a statement that it is not the "time to hinder our efforts to protect our already endangered orcas." "The effects of increased noise pollution from oil tanker traffic is significant. Noise is one of the reasons the southern resident orca population is at a 30-year low," he said. When large tankers cruise over the waves, the sound blankets the undersea world for miles, drowning out a whale's ability to find food and communicate with other whales, said the governor. The population of the southern-resident killer whales has dwindled to only 76 animals in the wild, according to the report. "The proposed pipeline expansion would take us backward in profoundly damaging ways. It does not have the support of Washington state," Inslee said. The Canadian government agreed Tuesday to buy the pipeline system and expansion project for 4.5 billion Canadian dollars (about 3.46 billion U.S. dollars). The project has also drawn extensive criticism back in Canada. More than 250,000 people have signed a petition against the project, with an additional 24,000 pledging to "do whatever it takes to stop the project," said the newspaper. TALUQAN, Afghanistan, May 30 (Xinhua) -- At least two policemen and five militants loyal to the Taliban have been killed in a clash in northern Afghanistan's province of Takhar, an official said Wednesday. The clash erupted Tuesday night and lasted till Wednesday morning in Dasht-i-Qala district of the province, resulting in the death of five militants and two Afghan Local Police (ALP) personnel, provincial police spokesman Abdul Khalil Asir told Xinhua. Four militants and two ALP policemen have been injured in the incident, according to the spokesman. The government established the ALP, or community police, in 2010 to protect villages and districts around the country where army and police have limited presence. Fighting has escalated in Afghanistan as the Taliban insurgency spreads from its traditional strongholds in the south and east to the once peaceful northern regions, where Taliban have been recruiting from the youths. LOS ANGELES, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said Tuesday that it has launched a criminal investigation into accusations against Dr. George Tyndall, a former gynecologist at the University of Southern California (USC). The LAPD has received allegations from 52 victims, of whom 13 directly contacted the police, while the other 39 were referred from the USC, said Captain William Hayes in a press conference. The LAPD urges more students, both past and present, who believe they are victims of Tyndall's misconduct, to come forward by calling the Special Assault Section. "LAPD stands ready to listen, respond, investigate, and ultimately work with prosecutors where the facts may lead us," said Assistant Chief Beatrice Girmala, who called Tyndall's behavior and practices "beyond the norms of medical profession and gynecological examinations." Hayes said Tyndall may have seen more than 10,000 students during his 30 years of tenure at USC, adding that some of the victims might be minors since the age of enrolled students ranges from 17 to 22. Allegations against Tyndall's misconduct date back to 1990. Though numerous complaints were brought to the attention of the school, the USC failed to act. C.L. Max Nikias, president of the USC, announced his plan on Friday to step down amid the scandal. According to the LAPD, over 200 victims have contacted the USC via the hotline set up by the school. However, only 39 of them agreed to disclose their information to the police. Asked how international victims can file complaints, Deputy Chief Justin Eisenberg said the best way to contact the police is by phone or email, and the police may arrange a video conference with the victims if necessary. The USC is a leading private research university located in Los Angeles in the U.S. state of California. A total of 45,500 students were enrolled in the 2017-2018 academic year, including around 5,400 from China's mainland. According to the Los Angeles Times, some of Tyndall's colleagues feared that the gynecologist has been targeting the university's growing population of Chinese students in recent years. Those Chinese students often had a limited knowledge of the English language and American medical norms. USC Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Michael Quick denied the report of Tyndall's targeting Chinese and other international students. "Although this was alleged, there is no evidence that any one group of students was affected more than others," Quick said in a message sent to his faculty and staff colleagues last week. The USC has been sued by some former students over the scandal. The Consulate General of China in Los Angeles expressed its concern over the scandal on May 16, requesting the university to take serious action to investigate the issue and protect Chinese students from illegal acts. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 15:12:43|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, May 29 (Xinhua) -- China on Tuesday called for a balanced solution to the Ukraine crisis by taking into account the legitimate concerns of all parties. The Ukraine issue is a complex one and should be tackled by addressing the root causes, Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, told the Security Council. China believes that the settlement of the issue should take into account the legitimate rights and aspirations of the various regions and ethnic groups within Ukraine, and at the same time address the legitimate concerns of all the relevant parties in order to strike a balance, said Ma. China holds that the parties should implement Security Council Resolution 2202, stop the violence, implement the Minsk Agreements and seek a comprehensive, lasting and balanced solution through dialogue and consultations, he said. The international community should continue to support diplomatic efforts of relevant parties. Discussions in the Security Council should be conducive to a mitigation of the situation and to the resolution of the issue, he said. China has been following the developments in eastern Ukraine and is concerned about the clashes and civilian casualties, he said. The conflict in Ukraine's eastern region of Donbas started in April 2014, after government forces launched offensives to regain control of the cities and towns seized by armed groups which had declared independence from Kiev. The situation in the region has escalated in recent weeks, with civilians killed and injured in conflicts. ULAN BATOR, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A Mongolian ban targeting civil servants on the use of social network sites including Facebook, Twitter and Youtube while at work has come into force, according to the government on Wednesday. The government decision was made on May 23 and took effect Tuesday. It is intended to prevent cyber attacks and to ensure the safety of government information networks, according to a statement released by the Communications and Information Technology Authority. Mongolia's General Intelligence Agency will help monitor the ban's implementation. Personal PAC, the pro-abortion political action group that financially supports radical pro-abortion lawmakers and candidates, said women are not Breen's "bargaining chips" and called on lawmakers to #SAVEHB40. HB 40 is the measure Democrats alone passed to Governor Rauner's desk, were he signed the bill into law setting women on Medicaid and state employee health plans for free, unrestricted abortions. State Rep. Peter Breen (R-Lombard) suggested earlier this week that taxpayer funding of abortions be separated out of the state budget for a vote on its own. The amount that has not yet been appropriated by the currently negotiated state budget would pay for approximately 30,000 abortions. The idea to block the funding was backed by fellow House members Tuesday while it was blasted by the abortion lobby - which attacked Rep. Breen on Twitter: SPRINGFIELD - The idea of standing firm against Illinois' latest taxpayer subsidy for women on Medicaid and state employee health care plans is meeting angry resistance from the abortion lobby in Springfield. Tuesday, Rep. Breen was joined by Republican House members Tom Morrison (R), Jeanne Ives (R) Allen Skillicorn (R), Mark Batinick (R), Margo McDermed (R), C.D. Davidsmeyer (R), Sheri Jesiel (R) and Jerry Long (R), as well as three Democrat House members Jerry Costello (D), Monica Bristow (D) and Natalie Phelps-Finnie (D), to state their united opposition to the inclusion of taxpayer funds for elective abortion services in the FY 2019 budget. This is an issue we feel very strongly about, said Morrison. We have been talking with our respective leadership and budget negotiation teams for weeks about this, and we are asking that our objections and moral convictions be respected. Forcing taxpayers to pay for elected abortions in spite of all of our other budgetary priorities is something we felt we needed to raise attention to. Specifically, Morrison and his colleagues suggested various ways that a budget could be formulated in a manner that would allow pro-life lawmakers to vote their moral convictions while still voting on the integrity of the rest of the budget. Solutions included an up or down vote on a single item appropriation of taxpayer funding for abortions, separating the budget into several different silos, or including language similar to the federal Hyde-amendment to the budget implementation (BIMP) bill. Rep. Jerry Costello (D) said he would not vote for a budget that includes funding for abortions and that he did not support HB 40 when it passed the Illinois House. "This is a moral issue for me," Costello said. The abortion funding is not reimbursed by federal taxpayer money, and the number of out-of-state abortions is increasing, according to a recent Chicago Tribune report. Personal PAC is launching a public effort to squelch any such budgetary process. MANILA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The poverty rate in the Philippines has declined by 5 percent but the World Bank (WB) stressed on Wednesday the need to provide more well-paying jobs especially to the 22 millions Filipinos who still live below the poverty line. The World Bank says in a new poverty assessment report released on Wednesday that robust growth in the Philippines over the past decade has helped reduce the national poverty rate. Despite the generally good economic performance, the report however says poverty remains high and the pace of poverty reduction has been slow. From 2006 to 2015, the latest available data, the report says that robust economic growth helped the poverty rate in the Philippines to fall by 5 percent. The report says poverty declined from 26.6 percent in 2006 to 21.6 percent in 2015, due to factors like the expansion of jobs outside agriculture, government transfers, in particular to qualified poor Filipinos through the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (a conditional cash transfer program), and remittances. The report finds that increased wage income and the movement of workers out of agriculture, transfers from government social programs, and remittances from domestic and foreign sources were major forces in the poverty decline over the past decade. These gains were tempered by growth that was slower and had a less pro-poor pattern than in many other East Asian countries, as well as the high inequality of income and wealth and the adverse impacts of natural disasters and conflicts, the report says. "This experience gives us hope that the Philippines can overcome poverty," said Mara Warwick, WB country director for Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. "With a strong economy, the country is well-placed to end the vicious cycles of unequal opportunity that trap people in poverty, set in place measures to improve service delivery, and boost job opportunities," Warwick said. In 2015, some 22 million Filipinos, or more than one-fifth of the population, still live below the national poverty line. Constraints to achieving faster poverty reduction, according to the report, include the less pro-poor pattern of growth; high inequality of income and opportunities; and the adverse impacts of natural disasters and conflict. Most poor Filipinos have low levels of education and live in large households headed by individuals who are self-employed or work in agriculture as laborers or smallholder producers. The poorest households are those dependent on agriculture as their main source of income and most of them live in the countryside, in areas prone to disasters or in the conflict-affected areas of Mindanao in southern Philippines. "Making a difference in Mindanao makes a big difference to the Philippines. Increasing public investment in Mindanao to boost development there would expand opportunities for conflict-affected communities, broaden access to services and create more and better jobs," said Xubei Luo, senior economist at the World Bank's Poverty and Equity Global Practice. Inequitable investment in human capital and insufficient well-paying job opportunities trap the poor in poverty across generations, the report explains. High concentrations of wealth constrain equal opportunities and access to services, which are necessary for inclusive growth. Natural disasters disproportionately and repeatedly batter the poorest regions of the country, miring them in higher levels of poverty. The government has prepared strategic plans focused on reducing poverty, specifically AmBisyon 2040, a long-term vision to bring down poverty and improve the lives of the poorest segments of the population, and the Philippine Development Plan (PDP) from 2017 to 2022. The PDP 2017-2022 spells out strategies and priorities to lay down a solid foundation for more inclusive growth. These plans target reducing poverty to 13 to 15 percent by 2022. "The assessment provides us an opportunity to strengthen our collaboration in addressing poverty," Economic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia said. MOSCOW, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Talks have completed on the Russian supply to India of S-400 air defense missile systems worth 400 billion Indian rupees (5.93 billion U.S. dollars), the RIA Novosti news agency reported Wednesday. The Russian media report said parties are now working on ways to bypass U.S. sanctions against countries and companies cooperating with Russia. The official conclusion of the deal may be announced before the meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in October, the report said. The S-400 air defense missile system is considered the most advanced of its kind in Russia, with a range of as far as 400 km and as high as 30 km. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 15:37:52|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close MANILA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- China's battery and electric vehicle maker BYD announced on Wednesday that it will provide the Philippines with the first-ever 10 electric buses, which are expected to ply Manila's roads in July. Two of the 10 electric buses have been delivered while eight more are expected to be delivered next month. Liu Xueliang, vice general manager of the BYD sales, told Xinhua that BYD and Columbian Motors Corporation(CMC), one of the Philippines' largest bus manufacturers, signed the agreement in October 2017 to purchase the 10 e-buses from BYD. Arsenio Yap, CMC president, said the 10 electric buses will be the first in the Philippines. Yap said there are about 9,000 buses plying Manila's roads every single day. "With the all-electric buses, we will make the transportation in Metro Manila more environment-friendly, more convenient, healthier and safer," Yap said. The 80-passengers buses can cover up to a 250-km trip on a single charge. Manila is the capital and largest city in the Philippines with more than 12 million people. According to studies, the traffic congestion in the Metro Manila is getting worse and is costing 3.5 billion pesos (roughly 70 million U.S. dollars) in lost opportunities every day, highlighting the need for new and modern infrastructure to ease the congestion. The jeepneys remain the main transport for millions of people in Metro Manila. However, old and rickety jeepneys are being blamed for polluting the air and causing traffic jams. The Philippine government vowed to push through with its plan to ban jeepneys that are older than 10 years from the streets and replace the diesel-fuelled passenger cars with the electric jeepneys. Liu said BYD has rich experiences in manufacturing electric vehicles and hopes to contribute to the Philippine government's efforts to modernize the jeepneys. "We are working with our Philippine partners to help them develop battery-operated or electric-operated jeepneys provide," Liu said. BISHKEK, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Kyrgyz Prime Minister Mukhammedkaliy Abylgaziyev met Tuesday with World Bank Regional Director for Central Asia Lilia Burunciuc to discuss promising areas of cooperation, the Kyrgyz government's press service reported. The Kyrgyz prime minister explained the new government's priorities to Burunciuc, which include improving the efficiency of public administration, the digitalization of the economy, and the development of regions and support for small and medium-sized businesses. The current government led by Abylgaziyev took the oath of office in April. Abylgaziyev said it was important to synchronize the government's priorities with the main directions of the new cooperation strategy developed by the World Bank. Burunciuc said the financing of the domestic economy will be included in the draft of the new cooperation strategy between Kyrgyzstan and the World Bank. She also said that after the meeting between Kyrgyz President Sooronbai Jeenbekov and World Bank Vice President for Europe and Central Asia Cyril Muller in January this year, the financing of projects aimed at the country's development was identified as a priority. Abylgaziyev said he was ready to strengthen cooperation and had instructed the relevant state bodies together with representatives of the World Bank to work out the draft for the new cooperation strategy. Israeli security forces fire tear gas toward Palestinian protesters along the barrier between Gazaand Israel near Nir Oz, on May 15, 2018. (Xinhua/Gil Cohen Magen) JERUSALEM, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Israeli officials said on Wednesday that no agreement with Hamas on a cease-fire in Gaza has been reached yet. Khalil al-Haya, a senior Hamas official, said on Wednesday that Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire "after the resistance succeeded in warding off (Israel's) aggression." He said that militant groups in the Gaza Strip will follow the agreement as long as Israel does. The Israeli government did not officially announce that it agrees to the terms and a military spokesperson told Xinhua that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would not comment on the reports of a possible cease-fire. Israel's Education Minister Naftali Bennett, also a member of security cabinet, told Israel's Army Radio that no such agreement has been achieved yet. Commenting on the possibility of a cease-fire, Israel's Intelligence Minister Israel Katz said "it all depends on Hamas. If it continues (to attack), I don't know what its fate will be." Overnight, Israel launched a new airstrike on the Gaza Strip, attacking dozens of Hamas sites. A statement released Wednesday by the military said fighter jets, combat helicopters and other aircraft struck some 25 sites belonging to Hamas, an Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip. "The targets included drones warehouses, a workshop for manufacturing of rocket and rockets engines, an advanced naval weapon, military compounds, training camps, and sites for weapons manufacturing," the statement read. Overall, according to the Israeli military, 65 targets across Gaza were struck since the attack began on Tuesday. Sirens were heard in several locations across southern Israel. The military said its Iron Dome anti-missile system downed most of the projectiles but a rocket hit a home in a community in the regional council of Eshkol, without causing injuries. The violence was part of a serious escalation in the area of the fence separating between Gaza and Israel over the past months. Israeli forces have killed at least 121 Palestinians in Gaza since weekly demonstrations started on March 30. Militants attack gov't building in Kabul Source: Xinhua 2018-05-30 16:18:02 KABUL, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Militants armed with guns and rockets attacked the building of the Afghan Interior Ministry on Wednesday with casualties feared, sources and witnesses said. Editor: Li Xia Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 16:43:06|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close Photo taken on May 29, 2018 shows the rock paintings discovered in Bailong Village of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, northwest China's Qinghai Province. Rock paintings over 2,000 years old, depicting animals, human figures, nature and constellations, have been found in the Tibetan prefecture in Qinghai Province. (Xinhua/Tian Wenjie) XINING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Rock paintings over 2,000 years old, depicting animals, human figures, nature and constellations, have been found in a Tibetan prefecture in northwest China's Qinghai Province. The government of Chindu County, Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, confirmed on Wednesday that 609 rock paintings have been discovered. Wei Jian, deputy director of Chinese Society of Rock Painting, said that the paintings were created over a wide time span with the oldest dating back 2,000 years. Villagers discovered the paintings on May 5, and immediately reported the finding to the local authorities. Wei said one of the paintings is of a human figure waving something like a flag with left hand, and using the right hand in gesture like a salute. The county is located near the source of the Yangtze River. Rock paintings by ancient Qiang people during a period from 1,000 B.C. to the late Tang Dynasty (618-907) have been found in neighboring areas. The paintings depict various activities, including hunting, herding, sexual intercourse and sacrifices. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 16:43:06|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Burkina Faso's resumption of diplomatic ties with China was the right choice, made with the interests of the West African country and its people, a Chinese mainland spokesperson said Wednesday. "The one-China principle is a universal consensus of the international community," said An Fengshan, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, at a press conference. An stressed that the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations was "the right path to maintain peace, boost common development, and bring more benefits for compatriots on both sides, and the only right choice for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration." He urged the DPP administration to recognize the 1992 Consensus as soon as possible, and recognize that Taiwan and the mainland belong to one China, so that the cross-Strait relations will get back to the right direction of peaceful development, An said. Last Saturday, China and Burkina Faso announced the resumption of diplomatic ties in a joint communique signed by Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and Burkina Faso's Foreign Minister Alpha Barry in Beijing. The government of Burkina Faso now recognizes that there is but one China in the world, that the government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China, and that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory. The African nation announced a decision to sever its "diplomatic" relationship with Taiwan last Thursday. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 16:48:07|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close Police are seen near the attack site in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 30, 2018. Militants armed with guns and rockets attacked the building of the Afghan Interior Ministry on Wednesday with casualties feared, sources and witnesses said. (Xinhua/Rahmat Alizadah) KABUL, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Militants armed with guns and rockets attacked the building of the Afghan Interior Ministry on Wednesday with casualties feared, sources and witnesses said. "We heard a huge blast at the first gate of the ministry which is located near Charahi Shaheed Square. The blast occurred at midday. The whole place has now been sealed off," eyewitness Farhad Mohammadi told Xinhua. "The initial information found that a suicide bomber detonated his explosive jacket in the front gate of the compound. Another group of the militants tried to breach the facility," a police officer who declined to be named told Xinhua. "But the militants failed to reach the main building which is at the center of big open yard with high-profile security system." "We still cannot provide details on causalities. There is fear of possible causalities," he added. The number of the attackers also remained unknown and sporadic gunfire still could be heard as of 1:00 p.m. local time, he said. The security forces have cordoned off the area for precautionary measures. A four-line road which connects the Kabul airport with the city's Intercontinental Hotel passing the area was blocked for traffic after the attack. Illinois State Rifle Association executive director Richard Pearson said those lawmakers that gun control activists convinced SB 337 would help stop gun trafficking are sorely mistaken about the measure's long term effects. SPRINGFIELD - A growing number of Illinois Republican appear to be softening on Second Amendment rights just as tougher stands are needed in state legislatures nationwide. Tuesday, a vote in the Illinois House attempting once again to require gun dealers in Illinois to not only be licensed by the federal ATF, but also state agencies, passed with the help of seven Republican House members. "SB337 is touted as an anti-gun trafficking bill," Pearson wrote in his weekly address . "That is baloney; SB337 is an attack on gun owners, dealers, distributors, wholesalers, and anyone else in the firearms industry that use and enjoy the Second Amendment. SB337 is designed to appeal to the hysterically uninformed and misinformed." Among those "misinformed" Republican House members that voted for SB337 were GOP Leader Jim Durkin, GOP Floor Leader Peter Breen, bill co-sponsors David Olsen and Steve Andersson, Deborah Winger, Patti Bellock and Mike McAuliffe. The measure passed 65 to 49. It will return to the Senate for consensus because it was amended in the House. UPDATE x1: State Rep. David Olsen (R-Wheaton) explained his reasoning for co-sponsoring and voting for SB 337: SB 337 as amended represents improvements to the gun dealer licensing bill that was previously passed by the General Assembly and vetoed by the Governor (SB 1657). The new language maintains the priority of requiring gun dealers to follow common-sense safety practices while cracking down on businesses that are enabling or engaging in illegal gun trafficking practices. The amendment also responds to concerns that the original bill required an undue amount of time, money and resources in order for businesses to become and remain compliant, and worries about the strain it would place on the State agency charged with implementing the new changes. As a result, the new language removes much of the bureaucracy and red tape without affecting the desired result. In addition, the new language would apply to all who sell guns, including big box stores that were excluded from the original bill. It also includes strict consequences for non-compliance, especially for straw purchasers (those who purchase a gun for an individual who is by law forbidden to purchase a weapon). However, most of the Illinois House Republican caucus opposed the measure. State Rep. Allen Skillicorn (R-East Dundee) confirmed his opposition on the House floor saying, "We believe that day-to-day safety and security in our local communities is critical. Therefore, we strongly endorse and support the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states, in part, 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.' As a result, we oppose any efforts by the state or municipalities to impede the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms. Skillicorn told Illinois Review Wednesday SB 337 was "worse" than the measure Governor Rauner vetoed earlier this year. "This one included a back door gun registration," he said. In the Illinois Senate on May 16, several Republicans joined the super-majority Democrats in supporting SB 337 on the first vote, including Republican Senators Chris Nybo, John Curran and Tom Rooney. Senator Jim Oberweis voted present, and three GOP senators - McConnaughay, McConchie and Schimpf - did not vote at all. SB 337 roll calls for House and Senate: HARARE, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Wednesday proclaimed July 30 as the date for national polls. He made the proclamation in a government gazette published Wednesday. The notice fixed "Monday, the 30th day of July, 2018, as the day of the election to the office of President, the election of members of the National Assembly and election of councilors." Mnangagwa also fixed Sept. 8, 2018 as the day of the runoff election to the office of president should there be no clear winner with 50 percent plus one vote. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 17:23:17|Editor: ZX Video Player Close Representatives of the Lao Ministry of Public Works and Transport and Chinese construction company take part in a signing ceremony of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to carry out a survey, feasibility study and detailed design of the Vientiane-Pakxe Expressway in Vientiane, Laos, on May 29, 2018. (Xinhua/Liu Ailun) VIENTIANE, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The Lao Ministry of Public Works and Transport and China's Yunnan Sunny Road and Bridge Company (YSRBC) have signed a memorandum of understanding on a feasibility study of constructing a section of the expressway linking capital Vientiane and southern Laos' hub Pakxe. The document was signed on Tuesday by the Lao ministry's Road Department Director General Pheng Douangngeun and YSRBC's Deputy General Manager Liu Faliang. YRSBS is scheduled to begin work soon and will spend one year on the assignment after signing a contract with the ministry, the coordinator of the expressway project Bounyavath Nilaxay said at the signing ceremony, held in Vientiane. After the company's completion of survey and feasibility study, Bounyavath said the government would authorize them to invest in the construction of the expressway. The YSRBC section of the Vientiane-Pakse Expressway extends from Pakxan district in Borikhamxay province to Thakhaek district in Khammuan province of over a distance of 164 km, which will be on the lines of the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model. "The expressway is a priority pilot project of the government and will attract more foreign investment and tourists to Laos upon its completion," Bounyavath said. Liu said the expressway would help to spur the socio-economic growth of Laos and would enable the country to connect with others in the region, with the aim of turning the landlocked Laos into a regional economic hub. The expressway will be crucial to reducing traffic jams and enabling faster and more efficient transport of goods and people. It will generate income for the country, and benefit local areas in particular by helping to bring foreign investors to the region, Liu said. The road will be built to specifications laid down under ASEAN Expressway Standard Grade One and will be able to carry loads of up to 11 tonnes per axle. The 585-km expressway, running from Vientiane to Champassak province, will have four lanes, with a total carriageway width of 23 meters. At present it takes about 10 hours by car to travel from Vientiane to Pakxe. When the expressway is built, travel time could be reduced to less than seven hours. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 18:08:29|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close TRIPOLI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Experts and officials hold diverge views on the Paris meeting that gathered the Libyan parties on solutions to the political crisis, as some considered it an opportunity while others expressed pessimism. "We have reached a stage where we need resolute international political intervention to pressure the Libyan parties to stop dodging and wasting time," parliament member Mohamed Abdullah told Xinhua, mentioning previous failure in implementing the 2015 political agreement signed in Morocco's Skhirat, which aimed to unify rival governments. Abdullah called the meeting a "great opportunity" for the Libyan actors to overcome the dispute towards new elections, ending the threats to the country from home and abroad. He also stressed that the opportunity is vital as the country is politically divided and economically suffering, with terrorism still poses a threat despite its losses in Sirte and Benghazi. The Paris meeting on Libya held Tuesday brings the opponents together in a bid to end the political division and unite Libya's sovereign institutions after years of conflict between Libya's east and west. The meeting was also attended by the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union and the League of Arab States, as well as more than 20 representatives of Arab and foreign countries, in an attempt to rally wide international support around it. Disagreeing with Abdullah, parliament member Mosbah Wahida described the Paris meeting as "an attempt to abort the political agreement to serve specific interests." Wahida said the meeting called for "imposition of guardianship," adding that the final communique called on the UN Mission in Libya to determine the election date, terms and conditions, as if the mission is "the ruler in Libya." "We should be the ones to decide what we want without dictates. We do not need an agreement of another kind that violates the agreement of Skhirat, which might further confuse the already confused scene," Wahida told Xinhua. The parliament member stressed that "the parties should have activated the UN-sponsored political agreement, which includes the executive authority, unification of the sovereign institutions, adoption of a constitution, on which the elections are based, and the transition to a permanent phase." In the meeting's final communique, the UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez Serraj, head of the Libyan High Council of State Khalid al-Meshri, the eastern-based Parliament Speaker Agila Saleh and the eastern-based army commander Khalifa Haftar pledged "to work constructively with the UN to hold credible and peaceful elections and to respect election results." The rival Libyan factions also agreed to hold "credible" presidential and parliamentary elections on Dec. 10. The final communique also stipulated that all parties must accept the results of the elections and provide security needs to protect the elections process. Italy has expressed alarm and lack of support for the Paris meeting. Giuseppe Perrone, the Italian ambassador to Libya, tweeted one day before the meeting that "disagreements and unorganized initiatives will contribute to the return of death boats (illegal immigrant flows to Europe)." The Italian ambassador added that "the goal is not to increase commitments, but to implement what has been committed to on Libya," referring to the unimplemented UN-sponsored 2015 political agreement that the international community has supported. "A lasting solution to the Libyan crisis must come out of Libyans themselves. Holding parliamentary and presidential elections requires internal steps for the Libyans to take, while engaging in a true, inclusive dialogue at societal level," Perrone tweeted. The political agreement signed by the Libyan parties in December 2015 in Morocco faces serious obstacles in implementation of its provisions due to differences between the parties. In a briefing before the UN Security Council last week, UN envoy to Libya Ghassan Salame stressed that it is time to focus on holding the elections rather than amendment of the agreement. Salame's call was considered by many to be a clear declaration by the international community to abandon the stalled political agreement and an attempt to quickly move towards international initiatives and support that would push the Libyan parties to hold elections directly. "The French initiative is a golden opportunity for all Libyan parties to confirm their sense of responsibility and willingness to make concessions to reach a consensus that will bring back the political momentum and bring the crisis in the country to an end," said former Libyan ambassador to the United Nations, Ibrahim al-Debashi. As for the difficulties facing the initiative, the Libyan diplomat believes "there is no doubt that its success is not easy." He said firstly, the initiative combines the army's commander with the head of the Libyan State Council, who do not recognize each other despite the great difference between them in terms of legitimacy and influence. Secondly, he said it is "not easy for Italy to accept an active French role in the Libyan issue, because the (Italian) colonial mentality sees Libya as its main area of influence. It is still nestled in the minds of the politicians of Rome. It is not excluded that Italy and Britain would work with the Libyan party that prefers to thwart the initiative." Head of the Libyan High Council of State Khalid al-Meshri said on Saturday that Khalifa Haftar, the eastern-based army commander, should not be included in the meeting on Libya as he is "not a party of the political agreement." However, Haftar did take part in Tuesday's meeting and was one of the most important military parties involved. Meshri and Haftar have major differences, as Meshri is a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya, which is conducting ongoing defamation campaigns against Haftar's army, accusing him on numerous occasions of trying to restore military rule to Libya and overthrow the country's civil order. "The success of France in bringing together the Libyan parties is an important step towards breaking the stalemate. Therefore, it is a positive attempt to impose international pressure on all parties that the time has come to end the division in Libya," Ali Sweih, member of the High Council of State, told Xinhua. "We are waiting for the French initiative to be presented to us in a formal session, so that it can be reviewed, discussed, and voted on," he added. The four Libyan leaders who participated in the Paris meeting did not sign an agreement to accept the initiative, waiting for returning to Libya and holding consultation with their respective institutions. They will then set a date for signing the agreement regarding the French initiative, the French President Emanuel Macron said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 18:28:36|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close KATHMANDU, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFPA) on Wednesday distributed school bags and stationery items to nearly 500 students in the outskirts of Kathmandu. As part of its regular school love-package project, the Chinese organization made the distribution to students of Pharping Secondary School, located in Dakshinkali municipality, 15 km south from the Ring Road. The school bag, comprising notebooks, geometry box, color box, water bottle and other stationary item, was distributed to students from Grade Nursery to 10. "We are thankful to the assistance of China and Chinese people. Being a public school, the school bags and stationeries will support our efforts to deliver quality education to students as in private boarding schools," Krishna Kumar Shrestha, principal at Pharping Secondary School, told Xinhua at the ceremony. Established in 1917, this oldest school in the area has been providing education to around 600 students up to higher secondary level. According to the officials, most of the students hail from remote villages and from the marginalized communities with poor family backgrounds. Mohan Basnet, mayor of Dakshinkali municipality, said, "The Chinese support has arrived at the right place where many students have to walk up to two hours just to reach school. We expect continuation of such assistance to help our students get good education for the better future." According to the CFPA, the love-package project, which has a history of 9 years in China, started in Nepal in 2016 and more than 4,000 students have already received this gift. Sanjita Tamang, a grade 10 student, said, "I am very happy to receive new school bag and necessary stationeries. It has encouraged me to work hard and to get good results in exam." The CFPA, which started works in Nepal right after the devastating earthquake of 2015, has been focusing on health, education and community development programs. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 18:28:37|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close HARBIN, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese farmer in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province unearthed from his vegetable field three bombs left by the Japanese invaders during World War II. Liu Chengyuan lives in Hulin City along the China-Russia border in Heilongjiang. He grows spinach, eggplant and beans on a small patch of land. "I was not scared when I found the bombs. I picked one up 30 years ago when I was swimming with my friend in the Wusuli River. We did not know what to do with it. We sold it to a waste collection station, which I now know was not the safe way to dispose of it," he said. Liu handed over the bombs, each measuring 30 cm long, to the museum of the Hutou Fortress Relics of Japanese Aggression Against China. Zhang Shanlin, an official with the museum, said that before 1943, there were over 200,000 Japanese soldiers stationed in Hulin. A lot of ammunition and military equipment remained after the war. The bombs will be exhibited at the museum. NAIROBI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The UN human rights experts on Wednesday urged Kenya to urgently take measures to protect defenders who have faced harassment and intimidation after they testified against a local lead smelter accused of environmental pollution. The four UN rights experts said Alfred Ogola, Wilfred Kamencu, Anastacia Nambo and Kavumbi Munga and several others have been subjected to threats following the first hearing against the plant on May 17. "Unknown people have visited their homes at night repeatedly banging on their doors, yelling at them to come out of their house. One of them had been attacked with an unknown substance which caused eye problems and swelling," said the experts in a joint statement. John H. Knox, Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, Michael Forst, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Baskut Tuncak, Special Rapporteur on the implications for human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes, and Anita Ramasastry, chair of the UN Working Group on human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises said cases of lead poisoning have been reported in the area near the smelter. The UN experts said the four Kenyans are due to testify again in a class action lawsuit against the government and the lead smelter for violating the right to a healthy environment guaranteed under Article 42 of the Constitution of Kenya. This is the third time UN experts have called on Kenya to protect and promote the rights of the environmentalists. The UN experts said they officially relayed their concerns to the government in 2014, 2017 and again last week but the government has not responded on any occasion. "These environmental defenders should not face threats, harassment, and intimidation when they are exercising their rights legitimately through a legal action. On the contrary, they should be championed for upholding the Constitution of Kenya," the experts said. The UN rights experts called on the government to urgently launch a proper investigation and bring those who are responsible to justice. Many of them have reported these threats to police, the experts said, however investigations appear slow and inadequate. The defenders fear for their safety and life, and are seeking for help to be relocated. RIGA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A lawyer involved in a notorious high-profile bank insolvency case was shot dead in Riga on Wednesday morning, public television reported. Lawyer Martins Bunkus was killed as he was driving past the Riga Brethren Cemetery in the quiet suburb of Mezaparks, according to the TV report. Police representatives confirmed that a murder was committed there at around 8:40 a.m. Wednesday and that the victim was a man who had been driving a white SUV. It is thought that the killer fired the shots from a van also seen in the area. Vendors selling flowers at the cemetery said they heard several shots. Investigators were working at the crime scene which has been closed to traffic. A prosecutor who had also arrived there declined to give any comments. Latvian public television reported in March that Bunkus was one of the lawyers hired as assistants to Armands Rasa, the administrator of the notorious insolvency process of Latvia's Trasta Komercbanka. Under Rasa's leadership, the costs of the bank's insolvency process grew to nearly 3 million euros in half a year. The insolvency administrator said the money was spent also on other lawyers he had hired as his assistants. A criminal investigation into the murder is under way. NAIROBI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Kenya said on Wednesday it will start exporting oil in December as an early oil pilot scheme is due to start next week. Andrew Kamau, the Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum, told journalists in Nairobi that 2,000 barrels of oil will be transported daily via insulated tanktainers from the oil fields in the Lokichar Basin in northwest Kenya to the port of Mombasa. "Once we have accumulated 400,000 barrels of oil which we estimate will occur in December, we will then sell it to the international oil markets via a tender process," Kamau said. The East African nation struck oil in 2012 and has so far confirmed approximately 750 million barrels. Kenya is currently undertaking the Early Oil Pilot Scheme (EOPS) before full field oil production commences in 2021. Kamau said that the EOPS will help Kenya become a crude oil exporter while providing valuable information on the international market for Kenyan crude. He added that Kenya is currently finalizing commercial agreements with both the upstream and midstream oil firms in order to pave way for commercial sale of crude oil. Kamau noted that during the pilot scheme stage Kenya is not expected to make any profit from the sale of crude oil. "However, it (EOPS) is an important step towards full scale commercialization of the oil deposits because it will provide important technical data on the oil well performance over time," Kamau said. Kamau said EOPS will also allow national and county governments to gain enabling technical experience and capability as oil sector transitions from exploration and appraisal into development and production. He noted that current production at the Amosing and Ngamia fields is between 400 to 500 barrels per day and production will be ramped up to 2,000 barrels per day next year. The PS said that once the crude oil pipeline is built, production will reach between 80,000 to 100,000 barrels per day. The oil was previous stored at storage tanks next to the oil fields but will from June be evacuated to the port of Mombasa storage facility. The EOPS is being undertaken by the Kenyan government and the Kenya Joint Venture Partners comprising of Tullow Oil, Africa Oil and Total Oil who own the Blocks 10BB and 13T. Martin Heya, Secretary of Petroleum at the Ministry of Petroleum, said that Kenya's oil is likely to sell at a discount as the global oil markets are yet to be familiar with quality of Kenya's oil. Heya said that up to June 2012, 32 wells were drilled in four Kenya's sediment basins but none were discovery oil wells. "Between 2012 and 2017, oil firms drilled 40 exploration and appraisals wells in the South Lokichar basin and made ten discoveries," he said. Heya said Kenya landmass which has potential oil deposits covers approximately 500,000 square kilometers, yet only 23 percent of that has been surveyed. He said that East Africa is fast becoming a key player in the global oil and gas scene as Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Sudan have already made hydrocarbons discoveries. The official noted that Kenya is currently undertaking discussions with international pipeline construction firms that have expressed interest in building an oil pipeline from Lokichar oil fields to the Lamu port in the Indian Ocean coast. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 18:48:45|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close Afghan security force members stand at the site of an attack in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, on May 30, 2018. At least one policeman and 10 assailants were killed in an attack against building of the Afghan Interior Ministry on Wednesday, a ministry's spokesman said. (Xinhua/Rahmat Alizadah) KABUL, May 30 (Xinhua) -- At least one policeman and 10 assailants were killed in an attack on the compound of the Afghan Interior Ministry on Wednesday, a ministry's spokesman said. "The initial intel found that one police personnel and 10 assailants were killed after gunmen launched a coordinated attack on the interior ministry's main office at around noon local time," spokesman Najib Danish told local Tolo News TV. The first attacker detonated his explosive vest at the front gate and the second group of gunmen tried to storm the facility, he said. The attackers were disguised in military uniform. "We heard a huge blast at the first gate of the ministry which is located near Charahi Shaheed Square," eyewitness Farhad Mohammadi told Xinhua. "But the militants failed to reach the main building which is at the center of big open yard with high-profile security system," he said. "Situation is now under control and further details will be shared with media later on the day," spokesman Danish added. He said that five police were also wounded in the clash. "There is fear of civilian casualties. A probe is still on. But our police said that at least two civilians were either killed or injured in today's attack," he said. A four-line road which connects the Kabul airport with the city's Intercontinental Hotel passing the area was blocked for traffic after the attack. No group has claimed responsibility yet for the attack, but the Taliban insurgent group routinely claims responsibility for such attacks. KIEV, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on Wednesday strongly condemned the murder of well-known Russian journalist and writer Arkady Babchenko in Ukraine. Harlem Desir, the OSCE representative for media freedom, called on the Ukrainian government to conduct an immediate investigation into the murder. "I call on the authorities to swiftly and thoroughly investigate the circumstances of this assassination and to bring the perpetrators and those who ordered it to justice," said Desir in a press release. Babchenko, a journalist with the Ukrainian TV channel ATR, was shot in his apartment building on Tuesday evening and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko told local media that Babchenko's professional activities as a journalist would be examined in the investigation to seek the motive of the murderer. Babchenko, 41, had worked as a war correspondent in Moskovsky Komsomolets and several other Moscow-based media. He moved from Moscow to Prague, capital of Czech Republic, in February 2017, citing unspecified threats. In August 2017, Babchenko moved to Kiev. Babchenko is known as the author of several books on military themes, which have been translated into 16 languages. The Kremlin has also condemned the murder of Babchenko in Ukraine and hoped for a comprehensive investigation into this criminal case. A Kremlin spokesman said that Ukraine was becoming an increasingly dangerous country for journalists. "We believe that this should be a subject to a very harsh international reaction that will encourage the Ukrainian authorities to take effective measures to improve the situation," Sputnik quoted the spokesman as saying. The participants of the International Conference on Libya listen to a verbal agreement between the various parties regarding the organization of a democratic election this year at the Elysee Palace in Paris on May 29, 2018. (AFP photo) TRIPOLI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Experts and officials hold diverge views on the Paris meeting that gathered the Libyan parties on solutions to the political crisis, as some considered it an opportunity while others expressed pessimism. "We have reached a stage where we need resolute international political intervention to pressure the Libyan parties to stop dodging and wasting time," parliament member Mohamed Abdullah told Xinhua, mentioning previous failure in implementing the 2015 political agreement signed in Morocco's Skhirat, which aimed to unify rival governments. Abdullah called the meeting a "great opportunity" for the Libyan actors to overcome the dispute towards new elections, ending the threats to the country from home and abroad. He also stressed that the opportunity is vital as the country is politically divided and economically suffering, with terrorism still poses a threat despite its losses in Sirte and Benghazi. The Paris meeting on Libya held Tuesday brings the opponents together in a bid to end the political division and unite Libya's sovereign institutions after years of conflict between Libya's east and west. The meeting was also attended by the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union and the League of Arab States, as well as more than 20 representatives of Arab and foreign countries, in an attempt to rally wide international support around it. Disagreeing with Abdullah, parliament member Mosbah Wahida described the Paris meeting as "an attempt to abort the political agreement to serve specific interests." Wahida said the meeting called for "imposition of guardianship," adding that the final communique called on the UN Mission in Libya to determine the election date, terms and conditions, as if the mission is "the ruler in Libya." "We should be the ones to decide what we want without dictates. We do not need an agreement of another kind that violates the agreement of Skhirat, which might further confuse the already confused scene," Wahida told Xinhua. The parliament member stressed that "the parties should have activated the UN-sponsored political agreement, which includes the executive authority, unification of the sovereign institutions, adoption of a constitution, on which the elections are based, and the transition to a permanent phase." In the meeting's final communique, the UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez Serraj, head of the Libyan High Council of State Khalid al-Meshri, the eastern-based Parliament Speaker Agila Saleh and the eastern-based army commander Khalifa Haftar pledged "to work constructively with the UN to hold credible and peaceful elections and to respect election results." The rival Libyan factions also agreed to hold "credible" presidential and parliamentary elections on Dec. 10. The final communique also stipulated that all parties must accept the results of the elections and provide security needs to protect the elections process. Italy has expressed alarm and lack of support for the Paris meeting. Giuseppe Perrone, the Italian ambassador to Libya, tweeted one day before the meeting that "disagreements and unorganized initiatives will contribute to the return of death boats (illegal immigrant flows to Europe)." The Italian ambassador added that "the goal is not to increase commitments, but to implement what has been committed to on Libya," referring to the unimplemented UN-sponsored 2015 political agreement that the international community has supported. "A lasting solution to the Libyan crisis must come out of Libyans themselves. Holding parliamentary and presidential elections requires internal steps for the Libyans to take, while engaging in a true, inclusive dialogue at societal level," Perrone tweeted. The political agreement signed by the Libyan parties in December 2015 in Morocco faces serious obstacles in implementation of its provisions due to differences between the parties. In a briefing before the UN Security Council last week, UN envoy to Libya Ghassan Salame stressed that it is time to focus on holding the elections rather than amendment of the agreement. Salame's call was considered by many to be a clear declaration by the international community to abandon the stalled political agreement and an attempt to quickly move towards international initiatives and support that would push the Libyan parties to hold elections directly. "The French initiative is a golden opportunity for all Libyan parties to confirm their sense of responsibility and willingness to make concessions to reach a consensus that will bring back the political momentum and bring the crisis in the country to an end," said former Libyan ambassador to the United Nations, Ibrahim al-Debashi. As for the difficulties facing the initiative, the Libyan diplomat believes "there is no doubt that its success is not easy." He said firstly, the initiative combines the army's commander with the head of the Libyan State Council, who do not recognize each other despite the great difference between them in terms of legitimacy and influence. Secondly, he said it is "not easy for Italy to accept an active French role in the Libyan issue, because the (Italian) colonial mentality sees Libya as its main area of influence. It is still nestled in the minds of the politicians of Rome. It is not excluded that Italy and Britain would work with the Libyan party that prefers to thwart the initiative." Head of the Libyan High Council of State Khalid al-Meshri said on Saturday that Khalifa Haftar, the eastern-based army commander, should not be included in the meeting on Libya as he is "not a party of the political agreement." However, Haftar did take part in Tuesday's meeting and was one of the most important military parties involved. Meshri and Haftar have major differences, as Meshri is a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya, which is conducting ongoing defamation campaigns against Haftar's army, accusing him on numerous occasions of trying to restore military rule to Libya and overthrow the country's civil order. "The success of France in bringing together the Libyan parties is an important step towards breaking the stalemate. Therefore, it is a positive attempt to impose international pressure on all parties that the time has come to end the division in Libya," Ali Sweih, member of the High Council of State, told Xinhua. "We are waiting for the French initiative to be presented to us in a formal session, so that it can be reviewed, discussed, and voted on," he added. The four Libyan leaders who participated in the Paris meeting did not sign an agreement to accept the initiative, waiting for returning to Libya and holding consultation with their respective institutions. They will then set a date for signing the agreement regarding the French initiative, the French President Emanuel Macron said. COLOMBO, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka's Health Ministry warned on Wednesday that diseases such as dengue, leptospirosis and skin-related disorders could spread in districts affected by the recent floods and urged the public to take precautions. The Government Information Department quoting medical experts said that with flood waters receding in several districts, epidemics caused by animals could also spread in addition to skin diseases and respiratory disorders. The districts of Puttalam, Galle, Matara, Kalutara and Ratnapura were severely affected as a result of the recent monsoonal rains. Provincial epidemiologists said that diseases could spread faster in these districts since they were the worst affected. Director of Health Services in the Sabaragamuwa Province Kapila Kannangara said urgent medicines were needed in the affected areas. Medical officers further urged the public to only drink cooled boiled water, refrain from consuming raw vegetables and fruits, consume cooked meals, keep food items in closed containers, wash hands with soap, refrain from walking in flood waters, and destroy possible dengue breeding areas, in order to prevent the spread of diseases. Sri Lanka's Disaster Management Center (DMC) said on Tuesday said the military, along with the police and relief teams, had begun a massive clean-up campaign in districts which were affected by the monsoonal rains as the water levels receded. DMC Spokesperson, Pradeep Kodippili said 24 people had been killed and over 75,000 displaced, as heavy winds and rains lashed out across the island over the past 10 days. JAKARTA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The Indonesian police have arrested four alleged militiants in East Java province in a crackdown against terrorists after a spate of suicide assaults, police said on Wednesday. Police chief in Probolnggo Senior Commissioner Fadly Samad said the arrests were made on Tuesday night days after the country passed a tougher anti-terrorist law, which allows the police to take pre-emtive actions to prevent terrorist attacks. "There were arrests on Tuesday evening. But we could not give further details," he was quoted by local media as saying. During the raid on the hideouts of the alleged militants, the police have seized scores of evidences including, laptop, pipes and a bag, according to him. Suicide attacks in Surabaya city of East Java and Riau province left 32 dead and dozens of others injured. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 19:03:49|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close COLOMBO, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka and China signed a contract on Wednesday to construct new underwater sewage and pipelines in Colombo to prevent the threat of floods. Sri Lanka's Megapolis and Western Development Minister Champika Ranawaka told reporters that his ministry had signed a contract with the China Petroleum Pipeline Engineering (CPPE) company to construct the New Muttuwal and Torrington Tunnels. The 760-meter New Muttuwal Tunnel will lead through some of the most populated areas in Colombo, which are at a heavy risk of floods, and will successfully lead the rain waters into the sea. The 1.1-km Torrington Tunnel will also lead the rain waters into the ocean, preventing future flooding. "It is very important that these two underground tunnels are constructed as Colombo has been facing devastating floods in the recent years. The government has also launched a beautification program for Colombo city, and for that to succeed, constructing these tunnels will be of utmost importance," Ranawaka said. The minister explained that many of the underground pipelines in Sri Lanka were built under the British rule and were over 150 years old. With the annual monsoonal rains, and with a threat of major rivers overflowing, Colombo had no proper tunnels in place to drain out the rain waters, Ranawaka added. The New Muttuwal and Torrington Tunnel projects are part of the Colombo Development Project which is funded by the World Bank. The cost of the project is estimated at 31 million U.S. dollars. General Manager of CPPE Xu Dong said the Chinese company presently operated in 46 countries and the New Muttuwal and Torrington Tunnels were the first project it signed in Sri Lanka. The tunnels are expected to be completed by 2020. HANOI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Some 500 tons of idle gold worth billions of U.S. dollars are estimated to be held by Vietnamese people, which would be very useful if converted into money and other assets to invest in the economy, Vietnam News Agency reported on Wednesday. The State Bank of Vietnam, the country's central bank, said in a report to Vietnam's top legislature that the conversion of idle gold into other assets may help reduce the dependence of people on gold. Turning idle gold into other assets will change the habit and demand of people regarding gold ownership, making gold less attractive and preventing the development of a gold-dominated economy. The central bank has been studying and working with other sectors and ministries to develop the plan on preventing a gold-dominated economy, as well as planning how to turn gold into resources for Vietnam's socioeconomic development by 2020. Since 2014, gold has become much less attractive and the demand-supply leverage on the Vietnamese market has been quite balanced. Gold trading has been on the downtrend and companies have mostly purchased gold from individual clients. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 19:18:56|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Health experts have applauded China's latest cabinet restructuring as the National Health Commission (NHC) has been granted the leadership role in the work related to tobacco control. According to the institutional reform of the State Council unveiled in March, government work on tobacco control and the implementation of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) of the World Health Organization (WHO) will be led by the NHC. Before the reform, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which administers the state tobacco monopoly bureau, took the leadership role in the work. Speaking ahead of World No Tobacco Day, which falls on Thursday, Gauden Galea, WHO representative in China, said the leadership shift for WHO FCTC implementation will make China's tobacco control more effective. "We look forward to working with the leadership and to doing so with renewed energy," he said. According to the Healthy China 2030 guideline issued by the central authorities in 2016, the country plans to reduce the smoking rate among people aged 15 and above from 27.7 percent in late 2015 to 20 percent by 2030. Since China ratified the FCTC in 2005, the country has made a number of tobacco control efforts, including banning tobacco advertisements, increasing tobacco taxes, and banning smoking in public places through local legislation. Many cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, have imposed smoking bans in public places. Galea spoke highly of the progress in local legislation, calling for more efforts under the leadership of the NHC. Wu Yiqun, former head of the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, said shifting the institutional leadership on tobacco control is "a huge progress," as it marks termination of the MIIT undertaking the dual role of governing both cigarette sales and tobacco control. "Tobacco control has finally been freed from the impact of the tobacco industry," she said, adding the move has cleared the way for China to achieve the smoking rate target as set by the Healthy China 2030 guideline. Jiang Yuan, director of the tobacco control office of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), said the NHC takes public health as its supreme responsibility, and will help toughen tobacco control in China. She advised the NHC take the lead in establishing a five-year plan based on the target set in the guideline. Apart from the NHC and the MIIT, the Ministry of Finance responsible for tobacco tax, and the State Administration of Industry and Commerce in charge of the commercial brands and tobacco advertising, are also involved in the FCTC implementation, said Yang Gonghuan, former deputy head of China CDC. Yang made eight suggestions in her new book released last week, including legislation at national level on smokefree indoor environments and putting graphics onto cigarette packages to warn smokers of the specific risks of smoking. China has over 300 million smokers and 740 million people exposed to second-hand smoke. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 19:23:57|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa addresses a meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe, May 30, 2018. President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced Wednesday that Zimbabwe will hold general elections on July 30. (Xinhua/Shaun Jusa) HARARE, May 30 (Xinhua) -- President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced Wednesday that Zimbabwe will hold general elections on July 30. He made the announcement in a government gazette where he also set June 14 as the date for the sitting of the nomination court for prospective candidates to register. He set Sept. 8, 2018 as the date for the election runoff in the event that no presidential candidate gets an outright win of 50 percent plus one vote. In the notice, Mnangagwa said he had fixed "Monday, the 30th day of July, 2018, as the day of the election to the office of President, the election of members of the National Assembly and election of councilors." The elections will be the first without former President Robert Mugabe and his fierce opponent for 20 years, Morgan Tsvangirai who died in February this year from cancer. Mugabe resigned in November last year after a military intervention, ending his 37-year stay in power. The proclamation of the election date comes a day after Mnangagwa signed the Electoral Amendment Bill into law. The enactment was published in an extraordinary government gazette on Monday night. The election date also follows the closure of the 11-day provisional voter's roll inspection on Tuesday. The new Electoral Act gives effect to the Statutory Instrument on the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) that was undertaken by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) through the Presidential Powers (Temporary Measures) Act, which had a lifespan of six months. The law amends some sections of the Electoral Act of 2004 to complete the alignment of certain provisions of that Act with the new Constitution and enhance ZEC's independence. It also gives ZEC more control over the accreditation of election observers, authority to allow accredited observers to monitor all electoral processes, and to provide more clearly for polling station voters rolls. The new Act also makes voters' rolls more accessible, removes ZEC's monopoly on the provision of voter education, and obliges ZEC to enact codes of conduct to be observed by traditional leaders, members of the security services and civil servants, among other things. Mnangagwa has promised to deliver free, fair and credible elections and his government has since invited 46 countries from across the world to observe the general elections. The observer countries include some from the West that had not observed Zimbabwe's elections since 2002 when relations with Harare soured. Since the beginning of the year, several regional groupings in Africa and the European Union, among others, have sent pre-election observer missions to Zimbabwe. Mnangagwa, 75, will face the 40-year-old leader of the opposition MDC-Alliance Nelson Chamisa in the presidential poll. TIRANA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Albania and Germany on Wednesday signed an agreement to conduct preliminary studies on water and sanitation investments in 11 municipalities in Albania. Albanian Minister of Economy and Finance Arben Ahmetaj and Director of KfW -- German Development Bank Bjorn Thies signed the agreement, which allocates 1.95 million euros (around 2.26 million U.S. dollars) to feasibility studies for a future water supply and sanitation program in Albania. Ahmetaj praised the role and support of KfW in financing development projects in Albania, which directly improve the delivery of community services. In his speech, Thies underlined the successful cooperation with the Albanian government to improve the water supply for about 1 million Albanian citizens. Moreover, he said that the next program will bring this cooperation to a new level, as it supports Albania on its path to European standards in this sector. These grant funds are allocated by the German government through German Development Bank KfW as part of the preparatory phase of a new project, the Water Performance and Investment Program (WPIP). Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 19:34:02|Editor: ZX Video Player Close KUNMING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Police in southwest China's Yunnan Province caught two suspects for trafficking 11.5 kg of methamphetamine and heroin, local authorities said Wednesday. Police in Menglian, Yunnan, received information that several people were planning to transport drugs from Myanmar into China in early May. Police intercepted two suspects on May 15 in Lancang County and seized 16 bags of drugs in their vehicle. Further investigation is underway. Yunnan is a major front in China's battle against drug crime, as it borders the Golden Triangle known for drug production and trafficking. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 19:44:07|Editor: ZX Video Player Close WUHAN, May 30 (Xinhua) --China Southern Airlines Wednesday launched a direct air route between Wuhan City in central China's Hubei Province and London. The first flight departed from Wuhan Tianhe International Airport at 2:20 p.m. Wednesday Beijing time and will arrive in London less than 12 hours later, the Hubei airport group announced. China Southern Airlines will use an Airbus A300-200 for the service. The outbound flight will depart from Wuhan at 2:25 p.m. Beijing time and arrive in London at 6:45 p.m. local time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The return flights will leave London at 10:10 p.m. local time and arrive in Wuhan at 3:35 p.m. Beijing time. Passengers from Wuhan to London used to have to transfer from Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou city, creating a journey of at least 20 hours. The new flight will save time and money for passengers. The new air route is also expected to further boost cooperation and communication between Wuhan City and Britain. Currently there are 310 British companies doing business in Wuhan, with a total investment of 5.25 billion U.S. dollars. by Alessandra Cardone ROME, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Italian Prime Minister-designate Carlo Cottarelli and President Sergio Mattarella on Wednesday continued mulling options to seek a way out of the political crisis engulfing the country. Economist Cottarelli was seen entering the presidential palace in early morning, and leaving without comment. According to Ansa news agency, citing a presidential source, he had a short informal talk with the head of state to update him on the situation. The two had an official meeting on Tuesday as well, when Cottarelli was expected to unveil the line-up of a technocrat cabinet he was tasked to form one day before. Yet, he did not hand in his list of technical ministers to the head of state, having failed so far to secure the necessary support in parliament for such an executive. Meanwhile, major parties have called for snap elections as early as on July 29, over four months only after a national vote held on March 4 proved inconclusive. Cottarelli's mandate followed an aborted attempt by two populist parties -- anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and far-right League -- to form a coalition. The two populist parties had received the majority of votes in the last ballot. Their attempt failed after president Mattarella nixed the nomination of a Eurosceptic economist as finance minister, as M5S and League wanted, and the two parties refused to change their pick, dropping their bid on Sunday. Having already explored in vain any other chance of coalition, during long consultations with all parties, the head of state on Monday gave mandate to Cottarelli -- a top economist with a long experience in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- to select a caretaker cabinet. As the perspectives for Cottarelli were still very unclear on Wednesday, major Italian newspapers reported three different options to exit this stalemate might now be on the ground. The first and most drastic solution was for the president to immediately dissolve parliament and call for elections in late July, as most parties have asked. A second one would be to let Cottarelli form a cabinet, and give him only a "technical confidence" in parliament in order to pass a 2019 budget only, and then go to polls in October. A third more unexpected alternative could be a revival of the M5S-League coalition. A political government would be formed, in this case, but putting guarantee figures in key economic posts -- such as the treasury ministry -- to reassure European partners and international markets on the stability of Italy's public finances and adherence to the euro currency. A partial confirmation to this option came by Cottarelli, according to Repubblica newspaper. "During his activity as Prime Minister-designate, some new possibilities for the formation of a political government have emerged," the daily quoted Cottarelli's staff as saying in a message. "This circumstance -- also considering the tension on the markets -- led him (Cottarelli) to wait for possible further developments, in agreement with the president," it added. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 19:59:12|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BALANGA CITY, the Philippines, May 30 (Xinhua) -- China's electric vehicle maker BYD inked a deal on Wednesday with the local government of Bataan province to build a monorail transit system in this northern Philippine city northwest of Manila. Liu Xueliang, the general manager of BYD Asia Pacific Auto Sales Division, told Xinhua that the monorail will be built in Balanga city as soon as a feasibility study is completed. Balanga city, about 120 km northwest of Manila, is the capital city of Bataan province in Luzon Island. According to BYD, the first phase of the monorail, circling Balanga city, is seven km. A statement issued at the signing of the BYD-Bataan-Balnga Multi-layered Electrified Transportation said the project is expected to ease the traffic congestions and optimize the transportation conditions in the city. "Committed to achieving lower carbon and sustainable development, both the BYD and the provincial government of Bataan are working closely to introduce the first batch of 10 units of BYD electric buses for operations before Dec. 31 this year," Balanga City Mayor Francis Garcia said. "With the cooporation with BYD, the city will build a public transport system that will optimize the transportation conditions both in the Balanga city and the rest of Bataan province," Garcia said. He expressed hope that the monorail transport system will not only address the traffic congestion but also build a green and environmentally friendly public transport system. The monorail in Balanga city is the second monorail that BYD will build in the Philippines. In August last year, the Chinese auto company also signed a memorandum of understanding with Iloilo city in the central Philippines for building the country's first monorail. Now BYD is proceeding to the feasibility study of the 20-km monorail in Iloilo city which deals with the project cost and financing, among others. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 20:09:13|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese mainland spokesperson on Wednesday criticized the Taiwan authority's moves to obstruct and restrict cross-Strait exchanges, saying that such acts were "bound to be opposed by compatriots on both sides of the Strait." An Fengshan, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, made the remarks at a press conference in response to a question about the island's cross-Strait affairs authority's recent statement that it would conduct "strict scrutiny" of visits and other activities of people from the mainland. "Enhancing cross-Strait exchanges and cooperation and promoting cross-Strait peaceful development accords with the common will and fundamental interests of compatriots on both sides of the Strait," An said, noting that the mainland side had been working to expand and deepen such exchanges to bring more benefits to Taiwanese compatriots and enterprises. "However, the island's Democratic Progressive Party administration has been continuously thwarting relevant exchanges and communications," An said, adding that such acts were "undermining the welfare of Taiwanese compatriots." "When it comes to the cross-Strait issue over the recent period, it is completely clear among the general public which side is using an open-minded attitude to bridge exchanges and which side is conducting self-seclusion," An said. The spokesperson said that despite the grave and complex situation for cross-Strait relations, the mainland's principles and policies toward Taiwan had always been clear and consistent. "We will continue to uphold the one-China principle and the 1992 Consensus, and resolutely oppose and deter 'Taiwan independence' separatist attempts and activities," An said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 20:19:14|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The armed forces of China and Russia held their 20th round of strategic consultation in Beijing on Wednesday. The two sides exchanged views and reached broad consensus on current international and regional hotspot issues and on further deepening China-Russia military cooperation under the new circumstances. They pledged to firmly implement the important consensus reached by leaders of the two countries, boost bilateral military cooperation and make new contributions to pressing ahead with military strategic cooperation. Li Zuocheng, member of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and chief of staff of the CMC Joint Staff Department, met with the Russian delegation during the consultation. CAIRO, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The illiteracy rate among Egyptian females has declined over the past decade from 37.3 percent in 2006 to 30.8 percent in 2017, Egypt's official statistics authority revealed in a report Wednesday. Females constitute to about 49 percent of Egypt's 104-million population. "Elementary-school dropout rate among females decreased from 41.9 percent in 2006 to 22.4 percent in 2017," said the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) in the report. "There is a noticeable improvement in the illiteracy rate among females compared to that of males in the period between 2006 to 2017," it added. The report emphasized that highly educated females, particularly university graduates, increased from 7.9 percent to 10.8 percent over the past decade. The CAPMAS report noted that 89.5 percent of Egyptian children are enrolled at schools while 10 percent did not join or dropped out for various reasons including the desire of the family or the child, the family's financial conditions or the remoteness of schools. Generally, illiteracy in the most populous Arab state declined from 29.7 percent in 2006 to 25.8 percent in 2017 according to a previous CAPMAS report. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 20:29:19|Editor: ZX Video Player Close Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan (R) meets with International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Peter Maurer in Beijing, capital of China, May 30, 2018. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling) BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan on Wednesday met with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Peter Maurer, pledging to firmly support the ICRC humanitarian cause. Wang said the ICRC made positive contributions to protecting human life and health as well as promoting world peace and development. However, the current humanitarian situation in the world remains grim, he said. Wang called on the international community to enhance humanitarian assistance, and developed countries, in particular, to substantially fulfill their obligations on assistance. He said the Chinese government would, as always, support the ICRC humanitarian cause, and encourage the Red Cross Society of China to enhance practical cooperation with the International Red Cross under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. For his part, Maurer hailed China's contribution to the international humanitarian cause and said he appreciated China's support for the ICRC. He expressed hopes to deepen cooperation with Chinese side in various areas including the construction of the Belt and Road. Iraqi supporters of Sairun list celebrate after results of Iraq's parliamentary election were announced in Baghdad, Iraq May 14, 2018. (REUTERS) BAGHDAD, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The Iraqi Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) Wednesday said it has cancelled the ballots of 1,021 polling stations inside and outside Iraq after checking complaints over irregularities in the May 12 parliamentary election. A statement by IHEC said that its technical and legal committees abolished votes of 954 polling stations inside Iraq, including 102 polling stations which were labelled "red" (serious complaints that affect results of polls), in the provinces of Erbil, Anbar, Baghdad-Karkh, Salahudin and Nineveh. The 102 stations included votes from the early voting of security members, voting of refugee camps and some of the general polling stations, the statement said. IHEC committees checked some 2,000 polling stations across the country, which are believed to have witnessed irregularities and forgery, but were not labelled red, and cancelled 852 of them in the provinces of Erbil, Anbar, Sulaimaniyah, Baghdad-Risafa, Baghdad-Karkh, Dohuk, Diyala, Salahudin, Nineveh and Kirkuk, according to the statement. As for outside Iraq, the committees abolished the votes of 67 polling stations in the countries of Germany, Jordan, the United States, Sweden, Britain and Turkey, it said. The electoral commission said "it is working diligently on all complaints and objections submitted by parties and candidates and continues to receive appeals and will not hesitate to address any violations and take legal action against the wrongdoers," it added. On May 21, the commission cancelled the ballots of 103 polling stations in five of the Iraqi provinces after checking complaints over irregularities in May 12 parliamentary election. The latest measure by the electoral commission came two days after the Iraqi parliament approved manual recounting of 10 percent of votes in the May 12 parliamentary election amid allegations of fraud, forgery and irregularities. According to the parliament draft, if one quarter of the 10-percent votes are found with irregularity, the recounting would be carried out for all the votes across the country. The parliament decision also demanded cancelling the votes of the polling centers outside Iraq if irregularities were found, as well as the results of the "conditional voting" in the refugee camps, according to a statement issued by the parliament. The "conditional voters" refer to those who showed any IDs to prove their Iraqi citizenship instead of valid voting cards. Many Iraqi parties, especially in the Kurdistan region and the disputed areas including Kirkuk province, have complained about irregularities and forgery in the parliamentary election. The complaints put the electoral commission under pressure, as it has not carried out manual recounting of many ballot boxes and depended only on the electronic counting of the votes. Earlier, Riyadh al-Badran, head of the electoral commission, told a press conference that "there is no justification for a manual recount yet," despite many complaints about voter fraud. On May 17, UN Special Envoy to Iraq Jan Kubis issued a statement calling on the IHEC to carry out an immediate and thorough investigation into all complaints concerning the election. The Iraqi parliament also called on May 19 for measures to instill confidence in the election process after receiving complaints from political entities about alleged irregularities. On May 24, the Iraqi Council of Ministers (cabinet) met with top judicial and intelligence officials and the IHEC's security committee to discuss immunity of the electronic devices used in casting and counting the votes for the first time in the Iraqi election, a government statement said. The cabinet appointed a special committee to investigate the allegations, whose results would be handed to the council of ministers, high judicial council and the federal court, according to the statement. On May 12, Iraq held the first parliamentary election since defeating the Islamic State (IS) militant group in last December. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 20:44:24|Editor: ZX Video Player Close Nurses inject human papilloma virus (HPV) 9-valent vaccine for Shi Jiayu from Beijing at Boao Super Hospital United Family Boao Clinic in Boao, south China's Hainan Province, May 30, 2018. The first batch of HPV 9-valent vaccines in Chinese mainland are put into injection on Wednesday. (Xinhua/Guo Cheng) BOAO, Hainan, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A hospital in south China's Hainan Province started giving a human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine Wednesday, the first on the Chinese mainland. The vaccine, developed by Merck & Co., Inc (MSD) to protect against nine viruses that can lead to cervical cancer, is available for women aged between 16 and 26. "We have 6,000 doses, which can supply 2,000 patients. Around 1,000 women have made appointments," said Guo Ying, with Boao Super Hospital in the island province. There are three types of HPV vaccine which cover different kinds of viruses and different age groups from nine to 45 years old. The new vaccine can help prevent 92.1 percent of all kinds of cervical cancer, while the other two can help prevent 84.5 percent. Cervical cancer is caused by sexually acquired infection with certain types of HPV. There is also evidence linking HPV with other cancers affecting both male and female genitals. In 2013, the central government introduced a batch of favorable policies to accelerate the development of Hainan Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone, including fast approval of imported medical apparatus and medicine. Boao Super Hospital started operation in Hainan Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone in late March. Last month, China announced the decision to support Hainan in developing the whole island into a pilot free trade zone, and gradually exploring and steadily promoting the establishment of a free trade port with Chinese characteristics. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 20:44:25|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Facial recognition will assist the safeguarding of campuses, according to emergency management experts on Wednesday. Tang Jun, director of the Institute of Emergency Management at Renmin University of China, said at a seminar in Beijing that AI including facial recognition had the advantages of high precision and early intervention in protecting safety in and around the campuses. "The facial recognition can push forward the efficiency of campus safety management," Tang said. The report on the work of the government, released in March this year, said the country needs to use the Internet and other IT-based approaches to strengthen oversight over childcare at preschools, making sure parents have peace of mind. The State Council mapped out measures in April 2017 to ensure safety on campus, stating that schools must have necessary security personnel as well as CCTV systems and alarms should conditions allow. Facial recognition has not yet been widely applied in protecting the safety of China's campuses, especially in primary schools, secondary schools and kindergartens. "The technology has sound prospects for preventing campus accidents, preventing the abduction of children and assisting anti-terrorism actions," said Zhou Xi, chief executive officer of CloudWalk Technology. The Ministry of Education in April this year issued a detailed action plan saying that Chinese universities should have optimized systems that fit both scientific innovation, especially new-generation AI development and disciplinary growth, by 2020. BERLIN, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Bayer AG cleared a critical regulatory hurdle in its takeover of U.S. agrochemical firm Monsanto by winning approval from local antitrust authorities, the German chemicals company told press on Wednesday. Chief executive officer Werner Baumann confirmed that regulators in the European Union (EU), China, Brazil, Russia and the U.S. had now all approved the Bayer-Monsanto merger, leaving Mexico and Canada as the final jurisdictions where decisions were still pending. "With the approval of the (U.S.) Department of Justice we are now close to the finishing line," a statement by Baumann read. Bayer will become the world's largest producer of seeds, pesticides and herbicides following the acquisition of Monsanto for 62.5 billion U.S. dollars with combined gross revenue of 23 billion euros (26.75 U.S. dollars) recorded from agriculture-related business alone. A spokesperson for the Leverkusen-based company noted that the volume and character of divestments promised to U.S. authorities to allay their antitrust concerns were in line with announcements made earlier. In order to meet regulatory requirements, Bayer has already agreed to sell business units with combined revenue of 2.2 billion euros to German rival BASF. The U.S. Department of Justice accepted this step as being sufficient to prevent Bayer-Monsanto from becoming too dominant in any of the markets of the merged entity. The final volume of divestments is higher than initially anticipated by Bayer when it launched its takeover bid, forcing the firm to downgrade its estimate for resulting synergy effects from 1.5 billion euros to 1.2 billion euros per year. Nevertheless, Baumann defended the transaction at Bayer's recent annual general meeting as being "just as attractive today" as it did at the start of the acquisition process. Meanwhile, the EU Commission has chosen to recognise BASF as the appropriate buyer for all of Bayer's divested units. The formal integration of Monsanto into the corporate structure of Bayer can only commence under U.S. regulatory requirements once the Bayer-BASF deal is complete. Bayer expects to finalize this process within two months. The Bayer-Monsanto merger is not just the largest ever acquisition made in Bayer's history but also the most expensive foreign takeover ever conducted by a German company in general. The company is seeking a capital increase to finance the deal and has recently succeeded in attracting the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek as a new major investor. Founded in 1863, Bayer is one of the world's largest chemicals manufacturers and employs over 99,000 staff across the world. The publicly-listed company recorded annual gross revenue of 35 billion euros in 2017. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 20:54:30|Editor: ZX Video Player Close WUHAN, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A crayfish festival has begun in a county in central China's Hubei Province. The festival is being held in Jianli County, known as China's top county in terms of crayfish production. The event will include crayfish competitions, trade fairs and related seminars, according to the organizer. Various e-commerce platforms will sign deals with the county government to cash in on the crayfish business during the festival. The crayfish cultivation area in Jianli will exceed 70,000 hectares this year, with more than 130,000 tonnes of crayfish to be produced, according to the county government. China is the world's largest crayfish producer, according to a 2017 report by the then Ministry of Agriculture, now known as the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Its output skyrocketed to 852,300 tonnes in 2016 from 265,500 tonnes in 2007. Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa addresses a ZANU-PF youth league national assembly in Harare, Zimbabwe, on March 7, 2018. (Xinhua/Shaun Jusa) HARARE, May 30 (Xinhua) -- President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced Wednesday that Zimbabwe will hold general elections on July 30. He made the announcement in a government gazette where he also set June 14 as the date for the sitting of the nomination court for prospective candidates to register. He set Sept. 8, 2018 as the date for the election runoff in the event that no presidential candidate gets an outright win of 50 percent plus one vote. In the notice, Mnangagwa said he had fixed "Monday, the 30th day of July, 2018, as the day of the election to the office of President, the election of members of the National Assembly and election of councilors." The elections will be the first without former President Robert Mugabe and his fierce opponent for 20 years, Morgan Tsvangirai who died in February this year from cancer. Mugabe resigned in November last year after a military intervention, ending his 37-year stay in power. The proclamation of the election date comes a day after Mnangagwa signed the Electoral Amendment Bill into law. The enactment was published in an extraordinary government gazette on Monday night. The election date also follows the closure of the 11-day provisional voter's roll inspection on Tuesday. The new Electoral Act gives effect to the Statutory Instrument on the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) that was undertaken by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) through the Presidential Powers (Temporary Measures) Act, which had a lifespan of six months. The law amends some sections of the Electoral Act of 2004 to complete the alignment of certain provisions of that Act with the new Constitution and enhance ZEC's independence. It also gives ZEC more control over the accreditation of election observers, authority to allow accredited observers to monitor all electoral processes, and to provide more clearly for polling station voters rolls. The new Act also makes voters' rolls more accessible, removes ZEC's monopoly on the provision of voter education, and obliges ZEC to enact codes of conduct to be observed by traditional leaders, members of the security services and civil servants, among other things. Mnangagwa has promised to deliver free, fair and credible elections and his government has since invited 46 countries from across the world to observe the general elections. The observer countries include some from the West that had not observed Zimbabwe's elections since 2002 when relations with Harare soured. Since the beginning of the year, several regional groupings in Africa and the European Union, among others, have sent pre-election observer missions to Zimbabwe. Mnangagwa, 75, will face the 40-year-old leader of the opposition MDC-Alliance Nelson Chamisa in the presidential poll. MOSCOW, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The Kremlin said Wednesday that Moscow expects Ukrainian authorities to thoroughly investigate the murder of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko and punish those responsible. "We strongly condemn this murder and we hope that a real and not fictitious investigation will identify those who are behind it," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at a daily briefing. He said Ukraine is becoming a "dangerous place for journalists to work in" and called on Ukrainian authorities to take effective measures to rectify the situation. Babchenko was shot dead on the stairs of his apartment building in Kiev on Tuesday, the Ukrainian National Police's first deputy chief Vyacheslav Abroskin said on Facebook. He said that policemen and investigators were working on the site of the murder and had already compiled a picture of the suspected killer. Kiev police chief Andriy Kryschenko told local media that Babchenko's professional activities as a journalist would be examined in the investigation to seek the motive of the murderer. Babchenko, 41, had worked as a war correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, Moskovsky Komsomolets and several other Moscow-based media and had written a book about his war experiences. He moved from Moscow to Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, in February 2017, citing unspecified threats. In August 2017, Babchenko moved to Kiev. The journalist is survived by his wife and six adopted children. In 2016, Pavel Sheremet, a journalist with Ukraine's online investigative newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, was killed by a car bomb in central Kiev. In 2015, Oles Buzina, editor-in-chief of Ukraine's Segodnya newspaper, was shot dead by two masked gunmen in Kiev. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 21:04:33|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese mainland will continue to carry out more and better preferential measures for students from Taiwan in the future, a mainland spokesperson said Wednesday. "The mainland will create better environments and more opportunities for Taiwan students to study, undertake internships, obtain employment or start up businesses in the mainland," said An Fengshan, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, at a press conference. "It's a natural choice and an irresistible trend for Taiwan students to apply for mainland colleges," An said, noting that Taiwan students were going after better chances to realize their dreams, and their parents also wanted them to have better educational opportunities. "As the mainland develops its economy and carries out preferential policies for Taiwan, an increasing number of Taiwan youngsters are willing to explore opportunities on the mainland," An said. "We have always encouraged communication and cooperation in various fields across the Taiwan Strait, including educational exchanges," An said. An noted that the mainland had achieved prosperous development and made significant progress during the past decades of reform and opening up, which had changed Taiwan compatriots' view on the mainland. "As a result, more and more residents of Taiwan, especially those from the grassroots, are willing to come to the mainland for future development," An said. Photo taken on Jan. 9, 2017 shows East Africa's largest port Mombasa Port in Mombasa, Kenya. (Xinhua/Sun Ruibo) NAIROBI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Kenya said on Wednesday it will start exporting oil in December as an early oil pilot scheme is due to start next week. Andrew Kamau, Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum, told journalists that 2,000 barrels of oil will be transported daily via insulated tanktainers from the oil fields in the Lokichar Basin in northwest Kenya to the port of Mombasa. "Once we have accumulated 400,000 barrels of oil which we estimate will occur in December, we will then sell it to the international oil markets via a tender process," Kamau said. The East African nation struck oil in 2012 and has so far confirmed approximately 750 million barrels. Kenya is currently undertaking the Early Oil Pilot Scheme (EOPS) before full field oil production commences in 2021. Kamau said that the EOPS will help Kenya become a crude oil exporter while providing valuable information on the international market for Kenyan crude. He added that Kenya is currently finalizing commercial agreements with both the upstream and midstream oil firms in order to pave way for commercial sale of crude oil. Kamau noted that during the pilot scheme stage Kenya is not expected to make any profit from the sale of crude oil. "However, it (EOPS) is an important step towards full scale commercialization of the oil deposits because it will provide important technical data on the oil well performance over time," Kamau said. Kamau said EOPS will also allow national and county governments to gain enabling technical experience and capability as oil sector transitions from exploration and appraisal into development and production. He noted that current production at the Amosing and Ngamia fields is between 400 to 500 barrels per day and production will be ramped up to 2,000 barrels per day next year. The PS said that once the crude oil pipeline is built, production will reach between 80,000 to 100,000 barrels per day. The oil was previously stored at storage tanks next to the oil fields but will from June be evacuated to the port of Mombasa storage facility. The EOPS is being undertaken by the Kenyan government and the Kenya Joint Venture Partners comprising of Tullow Oil, Africa Oil and Total Oil who own the Blocks 10BB and 13T. Martin Heya, Secretary of Petroleum at the Ministry of Petroleum, said that Kenya's oil is likely to sell at a discount as the global oil markets are yet to be familiar with quality of Kenya's oil. Heya said that up to June 2012, 32 wells were drilled in four Kenya's sediment basins but none were discovery oil wells. "Between 2012 and 2017, oil firms drilled 40 exploration and appraisals wells in the South Lokichar basin and made ten discoveries," he said. Heya said Kenya landmass which has potential oil deposits covers approximately 500,000 square kilometers, yet only 23 percent of that has been surveyed. He said that East Africa is fast becoming a key player in the global oil and gas scene as Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Sudan have already made hydrocarbons discoveries. The official noted that Kenya is currently undertaking discussions with international pipeline construction firms that have expressed interest in building an oil pipeline from Lokichar oil fields to the Lamu port in the Indian Ocean coast. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 21:34:37|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close KAMPALA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- As the world prepares to commemorate World No Tobacco Day on Thursday, Uganda is striving to fight against the use of the substance which is a source of income to some people and yet a drain to the economy in terms health care. World Health Organization (WHO) in a statement issued on Wedneday said in Uganda the cost of tobacco use constitutes 0.5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while expenditure on treating tobacco induced illness is 2 percent of the National Health Expenditure. The statement noted that tobacco causes over 1 in 10 heart diseases, including stroke. This year's theme, 'Tobacco and heart disease,' focuses on tobacco use as a key risk factor for developing heart and related diseases, including stroke. A study, "The Health Cost of Tobacco in Uganda," released last year shows that the total cost of tobacco use including the direct cost of treatment and the indirect costs of loss of income and productivity from death and disability is 126.48 million U.S. dollars. The study indicates that the total health cost outweighs the market value (81.22 million dollars) of tobacco products or the assumed benefits of tobacco use in the east African country. Global annual costs from tobacco use, according to WHO, is 1.4 trillion dollars in health care expenditure and lost productivity from illness and premature death. The health body says there is need to highlight the dangers associated with using tobacco, and to press for policies to reduce its use. Uganda enacted a Tobacco Act about three years ago spelling out stringent measures to curb the produce, import, use and promote tobacco products. The law banned advertising, promotion and sponsorship by tobacco manufacturers, distributors and sellers. Government also banned importation, manufacture and sale of tobacco products which do not conform to standards. The country's tax body, Uganda Revenue Authority, recently destroyed contraband cigarettes worth 410,000 dollars. The law also made it illegal to smoke in public places. Diana Atwine, the permanent secretary ministry of health recently told reporters that whereas the country has a good law, it needs to be implement to realize the desired results. Atwine said government would embark on sensitizing young people on the dangers of smoking. "The percentage of young people with mental illness is associated with drug abuse. Young people fancy smoking shisha -- this is dangerous," she said, noting that in their campaign against smoking, they will target university students. She said the ministry would also destroy at 40-feet container full of shisha pots and related apparatus that were confiscated from bars and restaurants across the country. Civil society organizations are also pushing companies to have in place regulations against the use of tobacco. Primah Kwagala, an official of The Center for Health, Human Rights and Development, a civil society organization, told reporters recently that companies which fail to protect employees from smokers will face civil litigation. Tobacco farmers, however, protest the increased pressure to stop tobacco use arguing that their household income is reducing. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 21:41:57|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close A Jordanian woman protests against government's income tax draft law in Amman, the capital of Jordan, on May 30, 2018. Doctors, journalists, teachers, lawyers, pharmacists and other representatives from more than 33 associations, unions and societies in Jordan take part in a nationwide strike on Wednesday, in rejection of the government's income tax draft law which has been submitted to the parliament recently, aiming to widen the base of tax payers. (Xinhua/Mohammad Abu Ghosh) Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 21:39:39|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- All 31 preferential policies for Taiwan released in February will be fully implemented soon, An Fengshan, spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, said at a press conference Wednesday. "Many of the policies have already taken effect, bringing solid benefits to Taiwan compatriots and Taiwan-funded enterprises," An said. "As more policies are being implemented, Taiwan compatriots and Taiwan-funded enterprises will enjoy more opportunities and greater space of development on the mainland." Taiwan compatriots could take job qualification exams for inspectors of civil nuclear safety equipment, operators of civil nuclear facilities and certified nuclear safety engineer in accordance with current regulations, An said. They could also take the job qualification exam for banking professionals for the second half of the year, he said. The rules for Taiwan compatriots to take job qualification exam for quarantine inspectors will be issued soon by the General Administration of Customs, according to An. Exams for patent agents, performing brokers, engineering consultation, among others, are already open to Taiwan compatriots. Noting that Taiwan-funded companies were encouraged to participate in government procurement in Fujian Province, An said the province had so far purchased 1,303 vehicles produced by Taiwan-funded enterprises worth 155 million yuan (24 million U.S. dollars), and the province's banking system had purchased around 30,000 displays produced by Taiwan-funded companies. According to their practical needs, An said the mainland would come up with more policies granting equal treatment to Taiwanese compatriots. He also briefed on financial cooperation between the island and Fujian Province under the plan for the development of the Fujian pilot free trade zone. "This year marks the 40th anniversary of the reform and opening-up policy, and the mainland will take measures to speed up the development of the free trade zones, further open up its service sectors, and ease access restrictions in the financial market," An said. "All these measures will apply to Taiwan-funded enterprises as well." File Photo: China's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Ma Zhaoxu (Front) addresses a Security Council emergency meeting on Syria at the UN headquarters in New York, on April 14, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Muzi) UNITED NATIONS, May 29 (Xinhua) -- China on Tuesday called for a balanced solution to the Ukraine crisis by taking into account the legitimate concerns of all parties. The Ukraine issue is a complex one and should be tackled by addressing the root causes, Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, told the Security Council. China believes that the settlement of the issue should take into account the legitimate rights and aspirations of the various regions and ethnic groups within Ukraine, and at the same time address the legitimate concerns of all the relevant parties in order to strike a balance, said Ma. China holds that the parties should implement Security Council Resolution 2202, stop the violence, implement the Minsk Agreements and seek a comprehensive, lasting and balanced solution through dialogue and consultations, he said. The international community should continue to support diplomatic efforts of relevant parties. Discussions in the Security Council should be conducive to a mitigation of the situation and to the resolution of the issue, he said. China has been following the developments in eastern Ukraine and is concerned about the clashes and civilian casualties, he said. The conflict in Ukraine's eastern region of Donbas started in April 2014, after government forces launched offensives to regain control of the cities and towns seized by armed groups which had declared independence from Kiev. BERLIN, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Embattled carmaker Opel announced on Wednesday that it will shortly present concrete plans for fresh investments in its German plants. Speaking at Opel's Ruesselsheim headquarters, chief executive officer Michael Lohscheller said that his company would "invest in all German plants." Lohscheller expanded guarantees offered to staff about future production when it was announced that the new Opel "Grandland" model would be built at its Eisenach plant. Following its acquisition by the French PSA Group, Opel managers have been locked in a long-standing dispute with workers sparked by far-reaching corporate restructuring plans. Lohscheller emphasized that concessions recently offered by staff which finally resolved the widely-publicized conflict over the future of the carmaker formed the basis for Wednesday's announcement. "We keep all plants in Germany and Europe and make all plants competitive," Lohscheller said. "Opel will stay German." Among others, the basic framework for restructuring measures agreed by employer and employee representatives includes plans to reduce staffing levels by 3,700 out of a total of 18,000 Opel jobs in Germany and temporarily postpone wage increases. In exchange, the remaining staff have been offered employment guarantees until 2023. Wolfgang Schaefer-Klug, the president of the Opel workers' council, described the compromise as acceptable to staff and "irrevocably binding." He highlighted that 3,600 out of the planned 3,700 job loses had already been achieved on a voluntary basis through part-time arrangements and severance payments. As a consequence, Schaefer-Klug expressed confidence that the restructuring of Opel was "nearly complete." The concrete details of the investment plans would be set out in collective wage agreements as is usual under Germany's "social partnership" model of industrial relations. MANILA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The House of Representatives of the Philippines approved on third and final reading the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) on Wednesday. A total of 227 lawmakers voted for the bill, while 11 voted against it. Two lawmakers abstained. The BBL seeks to establish a proposed new autonomous political entity for Filipino muslims in the southern Philippines. The BBL provides a basic structure of government focusing on the rights of the Bangsamoro people, described as "natives or original inhabitants of Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago and its adjacent islands including Palawan." The measure paves the way for the creation of the Bangsamoro, the successor to the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) established in 1989. President Rodrigo Duterte has certified the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) as urgent, his spokesperson Harry Roque said Tuesday. Once both chambers have reconciled and finalized the version, Roque said Duterte will sign the Bangsamoro Basic Law. In a forum in February, Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) chair Al Haj Ebrahim Murad stressed the need to pass the proposed bill into law within the year, warning that failure to pass the proposed BBL may trigger a renewed war in the Mindanao region. Mindanao continues to be under martial rule. Duterte placed the entire Mindanao under martial rule after local terrorists, with the help of their foreign comrades, attacked Marawi City in May last year, triggering a five-month intense fighting that ruined the city and claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people. The MILF is currently talking peace with the government, and the BBL is an important component of the peace agreement that seeks to end decades of fighting in the southern Philippines' Mindanao region. SINGAPORE, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement Wednesday that Singapore told the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that it agreed with Malaysia's request for discontinuance of the case of Pedra Branca. It was reported that Malaysia had informed the ICJ on Monday that it would stop the proceedings that it had brought forward in February and June 2017 to revise an earlier judgment that awarded Singapore the sovereignty of Pedra Branca, a small but strategic island located about 40 km off Singapore's east coast. Singapore told the ICJ the following day that it agreed with Malaysia's request. Then the ICJ informed the two countries that it had removed the cases from the court's list, before the public hearings on both cases which were originally scheduled for next month. "Both Malaysia and Singapore had gone through the due legal process and put this matter to rest," Singapore's Minister for Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan said. The ownership of Pedra Branca was in dispute between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur since 1979 and was brought to the ICJ in 2003, which ruled in May 2008 that Singapore had sovereignty over the small island. SKOPJE, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Macedonia police stopped 43 illegal migrants on Tuesday evening hidden in a bakery van travelling on Kumanovo-Tabanovce highway, the police informed on Wednesday. According to the police, among the 43 illegal migrants, 8 of them are underage. 14 migrants are from Pakistan, 16 from Iraq and 13 from Afghanistan. The migrants were sent to Tabanovce transit center, whereas the driver is under home arrest for 30 days. On mid-May, Defense and Security Committee in Macedonian Parliament decided to extend the state of emergency along the southern and northern border until Dec. 31 to prevent a possible influx of migrants. NAIROBI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Commercial banks in Kenya are on the spot over their role in multi-million corruption scandals that have rocked the East African nation. The banks are said to have aided corruption suspects to launder close to 90 million U.S. dollars of dirty cash from the National Youth Service (NYS). The money, according to police investigations, was wired from the accounts of the state youth agency at the Central Bank and withdrawn at different commercial banks. Police have flagged down at least six banks that handled the cash, with the Director of Public Prosecutions noting bank officials would not be spared in the ongoing probe. On Tuesday, the government rounded up at least 40 suspects linked to the scandal and charged them in court. The judge ruled that the suspects should remain in police custody until June 5 when the court would determine if they will be released on bail. However, missing among the suspects were bank officials and employees that handled the cash, prompting public outcry. Without the banks, analysts have argued that the money would not have been transferred and pilfered. The banks are, therefore, deemed to have been at the center of the corruption scandal. "How come these banks did not flag down the transactions involving millions of U.S. dollars yet the rules say the Central Bank must be notified in case of suspicious cash movement," Martin Munene, a pharmacist in Nairobi, wondered on Wednesday. Munene noted that when ordinary citizens seek to transact even 5,000 dollars or 10,000 dollars, the banks ask several questions, including source of the cash. "The failure to stop such transactions can only point to collusion," he observed. On Tuesday, the Central Bank asked the commercial banks linked to theft of public resources to carry their own cross. Central Bank governor Patrick Njoroge said that commercial banks which were used to process and ship out the cash must prepare for consequences. He said laws on handling the proceeds of graft were clear to all chief executive officers thus the top officials of institutions that flouted the rules are personally liable. "The chief executives are under oath that they understand and are compliant with these laws. There cannot be any excuse that one does not understand them," said Njoroge, noting the apex bank and the Director of Criminal Investigations are probing the NYS transactions. Citizens have called for arrest and prosecution of the bank officials involved to end corruption. They noted the banks are being treated as 'sacred cows' yet their officials are at the center of the crime. "Kenyans must shelve all these praises for the ongoing investigations until police go for the big fish. We are tired of this small fish drama. So long as the bank officials are still free and the Cabinet Secretary, we are headed nowhere in curbing graft," said Triza Omore on Twitter as the scandal continues to hog debate on social media. "I cannot even withdraw 0.10 dollars from my mobile account without my Identity Card yet some criminals withdrew million of dollars of stolen taxpayers money from commercial banks, and the institutions have not paid for it. What is happening?" posed Simon Kameni on Twitter. In 2016, at least two commercial banks were fined 30,000 dollars each by the Central Bank for aiding theft of 10 million dollars in the first scandal at the NYS, which has seemingly become a gravy train for the corrupt. Analysts, however, observed that such fines are too little for commercial banks, therefore not a deterrent enough. "What is 30,000 dollars to a bank that makes millions of dollars in profits? Bank officials need to pay the highest price for the crimes if the country is to decisively fight graft," said Henry Wandera, an economics lecturer in Nairobi. Kenya has a vibrant banking industry with a total of 42 financial institutions. ISLAMABAD, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The Pakistani army said on Wednesday that a roadside bomb killed at least two soldiers while three others were injured in North Waziristan region. An army statement said that a security forces' vehicle struck an improvised explosive device planted on track by terrorists near Datakhel area in North Waziristan, bordering Afghanistan. The injured were evacuated to a military hospital in northwestern city of Peshawar. No group claimed the attack yet. Pakistani Taliban groups controlled the region till June 2014. Major military offensive by the army cleared the areas but the militants take advantage of the free movement of the people and carry out terrorist attacks occasionally. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 22:49:59|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close GENEVA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The unemployment rate in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) has risen to the world's highest level, at 27.4 percent in 2017, the International Labor Organization (ILO) said Wednesday. The ILO's annual report says that women and youth are particularly affected. Unemployment rates among Palestinian women are now approaching the 50 percent mark, with rates for youth not far behind. "The absence of a political and diplomatic process on the basis of the Oslo Accords cements the occupation and impedes Palestinian development," said ILO Director-General Guy Ryder in his preface to the report. He said the Palestinian labor market has deteriorated to lows which should be a deep concern to all involved. "It is plain to see that the absence of opportunity for young people drives them to desperation," Ryder noted. Due to the severe lack of job opportunities, it is not surprising that a growing number of Palestinians, particularly the young, are disengaging from the labor market, the report said, adding that labor force participation rates in the OPT are among the lowest in the world. The report submitted to the ILO's International Labor Conference details the multiple restrictions on economic activity arising from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank,including East Jerusalem. Most of the occupied land remains effectively off-limits for Palestinians, settlement building is intensifying, and East Jerusalem is cut off from the rest of the West Bank, said the report. While confrontation is on the rise overall, the report also notes encouraging signs of cooperation regarding work in Israel by Palestinians from the West Bank. Palestinian employment in the Israeli economy increased again in 2017, by more than 11 percent from the previous year, boosted by additional permits issued by the Israeli authorities, said the ILO. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 22:55:03|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close MOGADISHU, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The Somali government on Wednesday evacuated 151 migrants from Libya who had been held in areas controlled by militia. The latest evacuation brings to 176 the number of Somalis who have been returned home since the government launched the return-to-home exercise backed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the EU in December last year. Somali Ambassador to EU Ali Faqi who received the returnees at the airport in Mogadishu said the registration and repatriation of other Somalis still stranded in Libya is still ongoing. He said they have managed to bring back 151 Somalis out of 300 who had been registered. Faqi said the first batch of 11 Somalis arrived in the country in February followed by 13 others in March and a similar number in the same month. He said the efforts are underway to bring back more Somalis who are still stranded in the North African nation, noting however that some are not willing to return. The Horn of African nation's government has returned prisoners and Somali migrants back from Ethiopia, Seychelles and India earlier. Photos and videos of Somalis tortured in smugglers' camps have outraged the public in Somalia, prompting President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed to order evacuation of Somali migrants allegedly enslaved in Libya. According to reports, Libya's Bani Walid is a hotspot for smugglers moving migrants from sub-Saharan countries to the coast, where they then board boats in dangerous sea journeys to Italy. Enditem Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 23:00:06|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close CAIRO, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The Cairo-based Arab League (AL) on Wednesday condemned the recent Israeli approval of building thousands of new settlements in Jerusalem. "This constant aggression on the Palestinian people is violation of all resolutions of international legitimacy and all the signed laws, treaties and agreements," Saeed Abu Ali, AL assistant secretary general for the occupied Palestinian and Arab lands, said in a statement. Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently approved the construction of 3,900 settlement units in the occupied West Bank including the disputed holy city of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the Israeli planning council approved the building of 2,500 units to expand West Bank settlements. The Israeli settlement expansion is being carried out "amid absence of international accountability and encouragement of the U.S. government in defiance of the will of the international community," said Abu Ali. He also slammed the recent ruling of an Israeli high court to demolish the Bedouin community in Khan al-Ahmar, east of Jerusalem, which will forcibly displace 35 Palestinian families as Israel plans to build 92 new settlement units nearby. The ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict has continued since the Western-backed creation of Israel by occupying Palestinian territories in 1948. The deadlock of the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis is largely attributed to Israel's settlement expansion policy, which is rejected even by its strongest ally the United States. The U.S. recently moved its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem despite regional and international outcry, after President Donald Trump declared Jerusalem as the capital of Israel last December. The Palestinians seek to establish an independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital along the pre-1967 borders in the light of the UN-proposed two-state solution. File Photo: The wreckage of an exploded minibus is seen close to Maryinka town, near Donetsk, Ukraine, Feb. 10, 2016. Four civilians were killed and another one was severely injured when a minibus hit a landmine in Ukraine's troubled eastern Donetsk region, authorities said. About 30,000 square kilometers of battlefields in eastern Ukraine are littered with explosive devices following almost two years of fighting between government troops and pro-independence insurgents. (Xinhua/Alexander Ermochenko) UNITED NATIONS, May 29 (Xinhua) -- UN Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Ursula Mueller on Tuesday lamented the humanitarian situation in Ukraine, calling on all parties to respect international human rights and humanitarian law. Briefing the Security Council members, Mueller said over 2,700 civilians have been killed and up to 9,000 injured since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine about four years ago. Landmine is a major cause to the casualties. "The conflict-affected area is one of the most mine-contaminated in the world. Landmines maimed or killed 238 civilians in 2017," she said. Civilians risk shelling, sniper-fire and landmines as they make "the arduous journey" through the five official checkpoints where processing time can range from hours to days, she added. Dangerous as it is, the journey is a must for many Ukrainian IDPs, or internally displaced persons, because they need to reach the government-controlled area to register their IDP status every 60 days to get their monthly pensions of 30 to 60 U.S. dollars, Mueller said, noting Ukraine has the highest proportion of elderly people affected by conflict in the world. About one million crossings take place over the 457-km contact line that divides eastern Ukraine, according to the UN Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The UN assistant chief commended the Ukrainian government for adopting a national IDP plan to address the situation of the 1.5 million registered IDPs. Enhanced protection of civilians is called for, as over 600,000 people are regularly exposed to hostilities along the contact line, Mueller said, adding over 100,000 children attend schools with windows lined with sand bags. Despite repeated appeals, water treatment workers and facilities have been targeted on 34 occasions in 2018, and a filtration station in Donetsk supplying water to over 345,000 people has come under fire eight times in the last 40 days, she added. The health situation is also severe. Millions of people have limited access to health care, she said. "Measles and hepatitis outbreaks are frequent. HIV/AIDS prevalence among pregnant women is unacceptably high. Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis is often undetected or untreated." While humanitarian efforts aim to reach 2.3 million people in 2018, Mueller underscored "immense access and funding challenges," noting "we have only received 13 percent of the 187 million U.S. dollars that we have appealed for." Concluding her briefing, she urged "the world" to stand in solidarity with the Ukrainians who urgently need support and the political leaders to make efforts to end the Ukraine conflict. KIEV, May 30 (Xinhua) -- China and Ukraine share great potential for cooperation in green energy, a senior Ukrainian energy sector official said Wednesday. "Ukraine and China have significant prospects for strengthening cooperation in clean energy, garbage processing and energy efficiency," Sergiy Savchuk, head of Ukraine's State Agency for Energy Efficiency, said on Facebook. Ukrainian companies must learn from the successful experience of their Chinese partners, who are now among the world's leaders in renewable energy, said Savchuk. Besides, Ukraine is interested in a joint implementation of green energy projects with China, he added. Currently, Ukraine can offer cooperation in about 100 potential projects, which require an investment of about 3.4 billion euros (3.95 billion U.S. dollars), said Savchuk. In December 2017, China's National Energy Administration and Ukraine's State Agency for Energy Efficiency signed a memorandum to promote partnership in green energy. In August last year, the Ukrainian government developed the country's energy strategy, setting a target to increase the renewable part of the energy mix from the current 4 percent to 25 percent by 2035. NICOSIA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A project for the creation of a 1-million-euro crocodile park in Cyprus has been foiled after strong opposition by local people and environmentalist groups, a statement said on Wednesday. The statement by the Achna village local council said it voted on Tuesday night to withdraw support for the creation of the park by Israeli TSA Crocopark firm because of public opposition to the project. It said that six of its members voted for the scrapping of the project while two supported it. The local council of the economically depressed village had originally voted for the creation of the crocodile park, which would host 100 crocodiles and would also boast a souvenir shop, a canteen and walking paths in a forested area, much of which forms a lake. Environmentalists and other groups, including agricultural organizations and the state University of Cyprus, plus a large section of the local population, objected to the project on the grounds that it would need too much water which would be a big burden on the meagre water supplies available for the village. They also said that it would potentially be a source of mosquitoes and infection with the deadly West Nile virus hosted by crocodiles. Two other communities in the area had before rejected the proposal. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 23:30:13|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close KUNMING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A villager was injured by a wild Asian elephant while picking mushrooms in southwest China's Yunnan Province, local authorities said Wednesday. The 52-year-old victim, surnamed He, called police after the incident on Sunday afternoon in the mountains four kilometers from Nanmanhe Village, in Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, according to the local forest police. The adult elephant was about two meters tall, according to the bureau. Wild adult asian elephants weigh about 2,000 kg on average. "I was heading home after collecting mushrooms in the mountains when I met the elephant," He said. According to He, the elephant was also surprised to see him. "It rushed towards me, knocked me down with its tusk, and walked over my body before disappearing into the forest," he said. He was sent to hospital and doctors said he suffered several injuries to his knees, legs, and arms. The local forestry bureau has strengthened monitoring of elephants in the vicinity. In China, wild Asian elephants mainly live in three prefectures in Yunnan, with Xishuangbanna home to the biggest population. The species is under Class A protection in China and is listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Enhanced protection has seen the elephant's population rise in recent years, but cases of interactions with humans have also increased, according to the local government. It is estimated that about 300 Asian elephants currently live in China, up from about 170 in the 1990s. In April, an wild elephant walked through the city of Pu'er for about six hours before heading back into the forest, while a man was trampled to death by another wild elephant in Xishuangbanna. Since 2014, Yunnan has purchased commercial insurance for residents of the province. The government pays the premiums, and the insurance companies compensate the residents if wild animals attack them. BRUSSELS, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) on Wednesday launched a new platform to increase the efficiency and rapidity of its civilian missions, according to a EU press release. The new logistical platform, or called the CSDP (Common Security and Defense Policy) warehouse, will ensure the rapid deployment of key equipment and assets for EU crisis management missions to any area of operation within 30 days. The warehouse, which is located in Sweden, will improve the logistic support to EU crisis management, such as vehicles, IT and communication equipment and medical equipment. It will also provide technical maintenance and repair facilities and maintain a strategic stock of assets. The EU's 10 civilian CSDP missions will benefit from these support services. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 23:45:18|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close TEHRAN, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Iranian security forces dismantled a terrorist cell in the southeast province of Sistan-and-Baluchestan, seizing a considerable amount of weapons and munitions, Press TV reported on Wednesday. The terrorist cell was disbanded in Saravan region near Pakistan border following the clash between security forces and terrorists, the police chief of the province said. "During this operation, significant amounts of light and heavy weapons, several booby traps and suicide vests, and significant amounts of ammunition were confiscated from terrorists," Brigadier General Mohammad Qanbari was quoted as saying. The suicide attacker of the terrorist group was also killed, but police forces suffered no casualty, he said. The report did not specify the time of clash and the affiliation of the group. HARARE, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwe's Constitutional Court on Wednesday ruled that Zimbabweans living outside the country cannot vote in elections set for July 30 this year. This comes after some Zimbabweans based in the Diaspora, represented by the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), had brought an application before the court arguing that the new Constitution adopted in 2013 entitled them to vote from outside the country. But Deputy Chief Justice, Elizabeth Gwaunza, in the presence of the full Constitutional Court bench, said she did not find any merit in the application. "I found that the application could not succeed. It is ordered that the application is dismissed with no order as to costs," she said. Belinda Chinowawa of the ZHLR said they were "naturally disappointed" with the verdict. "We believed that as long as our clients, who are Zimbabwean citizens over the age of 18, who were not convicted of any electoral offences, firmly had a right to vote and that their residence in other countries should not have denied them that right. "We are disappointed but we will only be able to form a proper opinion after reading the full judgment of the court," she said. Zimbabwe's current voting system is polling station based and demands that voters be resident in the country and cast their ballot at a specific polling station allocated in terms of where they reside. It also allows those on government service outside the country to vote. Proponents of the Diaspora vote had been arguing that this same right should be extended to those not in government employment but living in the Diaspora. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-30 23:55:23|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close Chinese President Xi Jinping (R), also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, holds talks with his Laotian counterpart Bounnhang Vorachit in Beijing, capital of China, May 30, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Xueren) BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- China and Laos on Wednesday agreed to advance the building of a community of shared future to achieve new outcomes. The agreement was reached during the talks between Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, and Laotian President Bounnhang Vorachit, also general secretary of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) Central Committee, in Beijing. Xi recalled his meetings with Bounnhang in the past few years, saying that many consensuses reached between the two sides are being implemented actively and effectively, bringing tangible benefits to both peoples. Xi said the two sides have reached important consensus on building a community of shared future with strategic importance, which has played a leading role in the development of relations between the two parties and two countries. Noting that bilateral relations are at their historical best and stepping into new development stage, Xi urged both sides to concentrate on the building of China-Laos community of shared future and promote its transformation from concept to action, from vision to reality. He suggested that both sides strengthen strategic communication and consolidate the political foundation of China-Laos community of shared future. The two sides should carry out comprehensive, multi-level and institutional dialogues and exchanges and raise the level of mutual trust, Xi said. He called on both sides to deepen pragmatic cooperation and tighten the bonds of China-Laos community of shared future. The two sides should make great efforts to promote cooperation in major projects under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, improve people's livelihood and strengthen cooperation in poverty alleviation, and work together to form a new pattern of China-Laos cooperation, Xi added. Xi suggested that the two countries strengthen security cooperation to ensure safety of China-Laos community of shared future. The two sides should strengthen coordination and cooperation in multilateral mechanisms such as the United Nations, East Asian cooperation and the Lancang-Mekong cooperation, and effectively safeguard the common interests of both countries, he said. He hoped that the two sides can actively engage in cultural and people-to-people exchanges to consolidate the public foundation of China-Laos community of shared future. Xi also suggested the two sides attach importance to ecological protection and promote the sustainable development of China-Laos community of shared future. The two sides should strengthen exchanges and mutual learning in ecological and environmental protection and explore new ways to build a green community, he said. Calling Xi "a reliable and close friend of the LPRP, the Lao government and the people," Bounnhang said that the various consensuses reached during Xi's visit to Laos last year are being implemented comprehensively, which has guided bilateral ties to a new height. "I completely agree with Xi's idea on advancing the building of Laos-China community of shared future," Bounnhang said, pledging to maintain regular high-level exchanges between the two parties, and strengthen exchanges of experience in party building and state governance. He also vowed to beef up pragmatic cooperation between the governments in all areas, speed up big-project cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, and strengthen coordination in international and regional affairs, so as to build an unbreakable socialist community of shared future and benefit the two countries and people in the region. Xi expressed his congratulations to Bounnhang on the new achievements made by the Lao people under the leadership of the LPRP and introduced to him the achievements and experiences of China's reform and opening-up, stressing that China will take more active actions to promote a higher level of opening-up to the outside world and make greater contributions to the prosperity and development of Asia and the world. China has been continuously scoring new achievements in economic development, social harmony, reform and opening-up as well as building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, under the guidance of the Communist Party of China Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core, Bounnhang said. Hailing China's important role in international and regional affairs, and prominent contribution to peace and development of Northeast Asia and the world, Bounnhang expressed gratitude to Xi for China's long-standing support and help to Laos. After the talks, the two heads of state attended the signing ceremony of a number of cooperation documents. JUBA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- South Sudanese President Salva Kiir on Wednesday travelled to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for a one-day State visit, the presidency said. President Kiir was accompanied by the country's chief peace negotiator and government ministers for talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. The South Sudanese leader is expected to brief the Ethiopian prime minister about South Sudan's position on the peace talks led by the East African regional bloc, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). "The president of the republic would discuss with the new Ethiopian Prime Minister the government's position on the recent IGAD proposal on the revival of the country's peace," the presidency said. It is Kiir's first visit to Ethiopia since the resignation of former Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn. Ethiopia is hosting peace talks aimed at reviving South Sudan's stalled 2015 peace deal. The second round of the High Level Revitalization Forum ended last week without any deal after the warring parties rejected a proposed power sharing deal developed by IGAD. IGAD is yet to announce the next date for the negotiations. KIGALI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Health experts on Wednesday called for concerted efforts to accelerate investments and funding in global scientific HIV vaccine research and engagement towards a cure for HIV/AIDS. They were speaking during the 12th International Workshop on HIV Treatment, Pathogenesis, and Prevention Research in Resource Limited Settings which opened on Tuesday in Rwandan capital Kigali. The small central African country hosts the event from May 29 to June 1 with a focus on sharing knowledge and experiences in the diagnosis and treatment of HIV in Africa and beyond. Increased global investments and funding in HIV cure and vaccine research is key as the whole world puts its attention to the deadly virus, said Linda Gail Bekker, deputy director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Center and current President of the International AIDS Society, South Africa. It is clear that success in the search for a cure for HIV will require sustained funding over the next couple of years, said Bekker. She called on the global economies and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) to support the scaling up of HIV vaccine and cure research to stop new infections. Channeling more investments in HIV cure and vaccine research, and attracting the best scientists from around the world to engage in the research could become a reality, according to Carolyn Williamson, head of division at National Health Laboratory Service, one of the largest diagnostic pathology services in South Africa. In 2016, around 1.8 million people were newly infected with HIV and although the number of new infections has declined in recent years, the world is still far from achieving the UNAIDS Fast-Track Target of reducing new HIV infections to fewer than 500,000 by 2020, UNAIDS said in a statement earlier this month. For the past decade, investments have remained steady, at around 900 million U.S. dollars per year, which is less than 5 percent of the total resources needed for the AIDS response. NAIROBI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta vowed on Wednesday to continue with the fight against rampant corruption, saying his government will spare no efforts to recover all resources stolen from Kenyans. Kenyatta whose government arrested more than 50 suspects linked to the 90 million U.S. dollar scandal and charged them in court, said all resources and monies recovered will be redirected to the original development purposes they were intended for. "There will be no mercy for the thieves. Their days are numbered. They will be prosecuted and jailed," he said at a public forum in Nairobi. Kenyatta reaffirmed his message on corruption, saying all culprits will be prosecuted and jailed. His warning comes after the country's Director of Public Prosecution Noordin Mohamed Harji said more than 50 public officials and over ten private sector individuals would be investigated for their involvement in a suspected theft of 90 million dollars from the country's National Youth Service (NYS). NYS is the country's premier vocational training institute for under-privileged youth involved in some of its flagship projects. The organization is populated by volunteers who receive government stipends while undergoing technical training and assisting with government projects. Kenyatta cautioned Kenyans to stop using tribal sentiments to defend individuals caught in the web of corruption. He said all corrupt Kenyans must be identified as individuals irrespective of the tribes they came from. "I do not want to hear anybody defending those caught in corrupt dealings. A thief is a thief irrespective of the tribe he/she comes from," said the President. Meanwhile, eighteen Western envoys have lauded Kenya's renewed commitment to fight corruption and pledged to support the efforts. The envoys from Britain, the United States, EU and Germany said they will stand with the East African nation in its quest to deal with the scourge and called for fair trial process. "We urge that Kenya's judiciary take swift action, consistent with the rule of law, to ensure fair trials and justice. Corruption has long undermined Kenya's prosperity, security, and democracy," they said in a joint statement issued in Nairobi. The foreign diplomats said corruption requires strong Kenyan political leadership, a commitment to zero tolerance for corruption, and all government and law enforcement agencies working together. The diplomats welcomed the recent action by the Director of Public Prosecutions, working with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, to charge officials and others in connection with reports of widespread corruption at the NYS. "We also welcome President Kenyatta's statements and actions to address the corruption scourge. When there is evidence of corruption, those responsible should be prosecuted regardless of political party, social stature, or personal connections," said the envoys. VILNIUS, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Lithuania is to conduct the largest national military drill in its history Thunder Storm 2018 amid ongoing security tensions in the region, the country's Defense Ministry announced on Wednesday. Thunder Storm 2018 starts on Friday and will continue for two weeks. Almost 9,000 local soldiers and officers from the country's interior security authorities are to attend the military training, according to the Defense Ministry. During Thunder Storm 2018, Lithuanian Armed Forces will be joined by allied military force from NATO's Enhanced Forward Presence (EFP) battalion. Thunder Storm 2018 is held in the middle of intensive schedule of national and international military drills taking place in Lithuania and the Baltic States. "Every training has its own task, however it is important to Lithuania that the assurance of security of the country and the region is what connects all these trainings," the Chief of Joint Staff Major General Vitalijus Vaiksnoras told local press conference on Wednesday. All of the exercises are strictly defensive in character and oriented at ensuring the allies remain sovereign, claimed the Lithuanian defense authorities. In recent years, Lithuania, a small Baltic State with a population of less than 3 million and the Eastern-flank member country of NATO, has stepped up its military training, increased defense spending and asked for an increased presence of allied armed forces citing security tensions in the Eastern Europe. DAR ES SALAAM, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Tanzanian Minister for Defense and National Service, Hussein Mwinyi, said on Wednesday the government was taking measures aimed at resolving land conflicts between villages and military camps. Mwinyi told the National Assembly in the capital Dodoma that the government was worried over the increasing wave of land conflicts between villagers and military camps. "We have planned to undertake nationwide surveys to establish the magnitude of the problem and take corrective measures," the minister told the House. "The conflicts have been reported in many parts of the country, thus the need to intervene," added Mwinyi. Mwinyi was responding to a question asked by the Morogoro Urban Member of Parliament, Abdul-Aziz Abood, who had wanted to know when the government will resolve land conflicts between residents of Kauzeni and Luhongo villages in Morogoro region and the Tanzania People's Defense Forces (TPDF). The MP said the residents in the two villages had been left without land for farming as the army has installed beacons in what used to be their farming land. Abood argued that it was the TPDF that encroached on the land villagers have been farming, calling on the government to reverse the situation and hand over the portion of land to the villagers. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-31 00:40:35|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe and Othmar Commenda, Chief of the General Staff of the Austrian Armed Forces, pledged to strengthen cooperation between the two militaries during their meeting in Beijing on Wednesday. The Chinese military is willing to work with the Austrian side to build a community of shared future for the humanity and build the Belt and Road Initiative, said Wei, noting that Austria is an important partner of China in Europe. He also expressed the willingness of the Chinese military to deepen the development of mutual military exchanges and cooperation, as well as help develop the Sino-Austrian friendly strategic partnership. Austria looks forward to promoting fruitful cooperation between the two countries and militaries, and is willing to make joint efforts with China to bring their pragmatic cooperation to a new high, said Commenda. JOHANNESBURG, May 30 (Xinhua) -- South Africa's Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry Bulelani Magwanishe has led an investment road show in China in a bid to attract Chinese investment for South Africa's special economic zones (SEZs). The South African Department of Trade and Industry said on Wednesday that the Chinese business community showed some interest in the country's SEZs during the road show which was held in Shanghai this week. "The trip presented officials from our SEZs with a golden opportunity to interact directly with the Chinese companies and present to them the value-propositions of our special economic zones," said Ikhraam Osman, CEO of Free State Development Corporation. "There is a logistics company that showed interest in investing in the SEZ. This was the first contact and it means we need to have follow-up meetings to exchange more technical information that will assist them to make a decision about investing in our SEZ," said Osman. The South Africans briefed their Chinese counterparts on the country's special economic zones and the opportunities and incentives, said Osman. The project executive for the North West-based Platinum Valley SEZ, Davis Sadike, said that the trip was successful, and that the trip made him understand the success of the Chinese SEZ model and how it led to the country's economic growth. "The interaction with the Chinese companies gave us a better understanding of their needs when it comes to investment in foreign projects," said Sadike. "We managed to share specific information of our SEZ with two companies who are operating in the renewable energy and locomotives sectors," said Sadike. "A good foundation has been laid for us to explore future discussions with these companies and others that we met," said Sadike. BRATISLAVA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The date for the completion of the D1 highway between Bratislava and Kosice is set for 2025, local media reported Wednesday. "The processes are set realistically rather than optimistically, so that the deadline can be managed," stressed Ladislav Dudas, National Highway Company (NDS) investment manager. The last stretch on the D1 highway to Kosice, the eastern city of Slovakia hasn't been started and for which no tender has yet been launched. This particular D1 stretch is expected to cost between 870 and 880 million euros (1.35-1.37 billion U.S. dollars). Slovakia has been waiting for a highway linking the Eastern and Western parts of the country for years, and the deadline for its completion has changed several times. The first one was set for 2006. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-31 01:10:46|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close Wang Yang (R), chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), meets with Ivan Brajovic, speaker of the Parliament of Montenegro, in Beijing, capital of China, May 30, 2018. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing) BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- China's top political advisor Wang Yang met with Ivan Brajovic, speaker of the Parliament of Montenegro, on Wednesday. Wang, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), said China and Montenegro had carried out exchanges and cooperation under the guidance of mutual respect and trust, equality, mutual benefit and win-win results, making positive contribution to the world peace and development. "At present, the two countries have frequent high-level visits, solid political mutual trust, and continuously enhanced communication and cooperation in various fields, and bilateral ties have entered a new stage of rapid development," Wang said. Wang said China was willing to work with Montenegro to link their development strategies and deepen cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative to promote bilateral ties. He said the CPPCC was ready to have more friendly exchanges and cooperation with the parliament of Montenegro to contribute to the development of bilateral ties. Brajovic said Montenegro paid high attention to its ties with China and the parliament of Montenegro was willing to cooperate more with China, support pragmatic cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative and the 16+1 cooperation framework to promote Montenegro-China ties, as well as Europe-China relations. BRATISLAVA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The proposal for the cohesion fund for Slovakia for 2021-2027 period includes 13.3 billion euro (15.5 billion U.S. dollars) at current prices, less than the previous period, Slovak Deputy Premier for Investment and Informatisation Richard Rasi announced on Wednesday "The decrease in EU funds for Slovakia should only be about 10 percent in the next programme period," he said, adding that the decrease for Slovakia is the lowest among the Visegrad Four (V4) countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). "We see a fall of 10 percent at current prices to be a success," stressed Rasi. According to Rasi, with 310 euros (360 U.S. dollars), Sloakia has the second highest rate of aid per inhabitant after Estonia. The average in the European Union is 106 euros (123 U.S. dollars). According to Rasi, Slovakia will focus by drawing funds to transport, science, research, innovation, the environment, informatization, digitization and social affairs. BUCHAREST, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Romania's Constitutional Court ruled on Thursday that the country's president must dismiss the chief prosecutor of National Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA) to resolve the institutional conflict. The ruling noted "the existence of a legal conflict of constitutional nature" between the minister of justice and the president, generated by the refusal of the latter to green-light the proposal to revoke from office DNA Chief Prosecutor Laura Codruta Kovesi, and asked Romania's President Klaus Iohannis to issue the decree for revoking the chief prosecutor. Kovesi and the DNA led by her have been accused of abuses and the prescription in some corruption cases. Yet, the chief prosecutor called all these attacks attempts to discredit the justice system, as her institution has sent to court over 68 top-level officials in last five years. In late February, Justice Minister Tudorel Toader called for the dismissal of Kovesi, accusing her of "excess of authority, discretionary behavior, defying the Parliament, challenging the Constitutional Court's decisions and authority." "For these acts and facts that are intolerable in a rule of law, I start the procedure to revoke the DNA Chief Prosecutor," stressed the minister. The country's president has repeatedly said he was satisfied by the activity of DNA and its leadership and rejected the request from the justice minister to sack the DNA chief in middle April. In response to the president's decision, the government decided to take the issue to the top court. The referral formulated by Prime Minister Viorica Dancila, upon the president's refusal to remove from office the head of DNA, was tabled with the Constitutional Court on April 23. Laura Codruta Kovesi, 45, was appointed DNA chief prosecutor in 2013. Prior to this, she was the Prosecutor General of Romania, attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-31 01:40:55|Editor: ZD Video Player Close A visitor views assault rifles made in Bulgaria at the 13th International Defence Equipment Exhibition "Hemus 2018" in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, May 30, 2018. The 13th International Defence Equipment Exhibition "Hemus 2018" opened on Wednesday in Plovdiv, the second largest city of Bulgaria. (Xinhua/Zhan Xiaoyi) SOFIA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The 13th International Defence Equipment Exhibition "Hemus 2018" opened on Wednesday in Plovdiv, the second largest city of Bulgaria. Rumen Radev, President of Bulgaria, said at the opening ceremony that the exhibition, which drew 69 exhibitors from 17 countries, once again showed that the Bulgarian defence industry was not only a high-tech sector offering products with high added value, but also a competitive sector on a global scale. He said cooperation between the business, education and science sectors was a sure guarantee for Bulgaria's efforts to fully participate in the European Defence Fund, and the integration of European defence industry and science. Krasimir Karakachanov, deputy prime minister and defense minister of Bulgaria, also addressed the participants. The exhibition's 13th edition happens at a symbolic time for Bulgarian defence, he said, noting that the projects for modernizing the Bulgarian Army and Air Force have already been put to the vote, while the one for the Navy is expected to be ready within a couple of weeks. The infantry fighting vehicles made in France, the surface-to-air missiles made in Lithuania, the assault rifles made in Italy, as well as the unmanned aerial vehicles of DJI made in China, were displayed in the exhibition which would last four days. JUBA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- South Sudan said Wednesday the U.S. targeted sanctions against its government officials will not derail the government's drive to achieve peace in the country. Government spokesman Michael Makuei told Xinhua in Juba that the government is committed to ushering in peace despite threats from Washington to sanction President Salva Kiir's senior officials. His remarks come as the UN Security Council is due to vote on Thursday to impose sanctions on senior government officials including former army chief. The proposed measures include freezing of assets and travel ban for the six officials on both sides of the conflict for obstructing peace efforts in South Sudan. "Yes, we know that our people are suffering but we are working collectively to build peace. Peace building is just like building a house, you keep on bringing something every day until you come up with final building," he said, dismissing sanctions as political. South Sudan's conflict has now entered its fifth year. The conflict erupted in 2013 after forces loyal to President Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar engaged in combat. The 2015 peace agreement to end the violence was again violated in July 2016 when the rival factions resumed fighting in the capital, Juba, forcing Machar to flee into exile. Millions of South Sudanese civilians have sought refuge in neighboring countries as the conflict rages on despite attempts by international players to end it. SKOPJE, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Macedonian will hold a referendum on the name deal with Greece when both countries reach an agreement, Macedonian Prime Minister (PM) Zoran Zaev said on Wednesday. Speaking during a press conference on the occasion of the 1st anniversary of the government, Zaev emphasized that talks between Macedonia and Greece on Macedonia's name are in a "delicate" and "final" phase, adding that if a final deal is reached soon, the country plans a referendum in autumn this year. "We all agree that a referendum will be held in September or October when we expect the citizens to give us directions for our future moves," said Zaev. Zaev expressed belief that the Macedonian citizens will follow the decisions of the Government, decisions that are in the best of the state and all the citizens living in the country. Zaev stated that he expected to have an important telephone call soon with the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras over a final deal. "Today, tomorrow or on Friday at the latest, I will speak with PM Tsipras, after which I expect a breakthrough in the talks," Zaev said. Moreover, Zaev pointed out that before the referendum is held, he expected agreement would be put to parliament for ratification in order not to waste any time in order for Macedonia to get an invitation to join the alliance during July NATO summit. On Monday, Macedonia and Greece declared that they had reached a framework for a possible compromise in the name dispute. Macedonia is formally called Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) at the United Nations. Macedonia is also the name of a northern province in Greece and Athens is worried that the use of the same name by the neighboring state could lead to territorial claims. The solving of name row that exists between two countries is seen as main obstacle that Macedonia has to overcome in order to make progress towards the European Union and NATO integration. During the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, Greece vetoed FYROM's application to enter the alliance without having solved the name issue. As Skopje has renewed efforts to join the EU and NATO, Greece has signaled that its position remains unchanged. (File photo)A general view taken on June 30, 2015 shows the ancient Roman amphitheatre in the Jordanian capital, Amman. (AFP photo) AMMAN, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Jordan's capital Amman was ranked the most expensive city in the Arab world and the 28th worldwide, according to a recent report by Intelligence Unit of The Economist. The city exceedes some of the main Gulf, European and North American cities such as Dubai, London, Rome, Washington. The report titled "Worldwide Cost of Living Survey," which compared the prices of over 150 items in 133 cities around the world, indicated that Madrid and Barcelona both ranked 34th, compared with Amman, which seized the 28th place. Economist attributed the rise in living cost in Amman to increasing taxes and low salaries. "Salaries in Amman are much lower than that in Dubai, for example, yet prices of some commodities in Amman are higher," economist Wajdi Makhamreh told Xinhua. "The recent measures by the government to increase sales tax on several items played a role in increasing living cost in Amman as the tax increased prices of commodities, which eventually affected residents of the country," said Makhamreh. Makhamreh was echoed by economist Hosam Ayesh. "The government has been increasing prices of fuel over the past months although sometimes the price of oil barrel dropped at the global level, therefore the rise in cost of fuel increased the cost or production on factories and all commercial stories, which in turn resorted to increasing prices of items," said Ayesh. "One of the key challenges is also the low economic growth. The country's economy grows by about 2 percent annually, which is insufficient to create jobs and provide some sort of income to Jordanian families who are facing a challenging situation," he said. "For example, a large amount of salaries goes for public transportation. If there is a good public transport system, people will not be forced to spend a big amount of their income on taxis and commuting," Ayesh said. The economists said the presence of a large number of Syrian refugees is also a factor that increases pressure on the economy. According to official figures, there are some 1.3 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, representing some 20 percent of the population. NAIROBI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan police on Wednesday offered 30,000 U.S. dollars bounty for any information that will lead to the arrest of three terror suspects. Police spokesman Charles Owino who issued the security alert also circulated photos of Mumina Eroba, Abdiwahab Osman Ahmed and Ahmed Dabar whom he said are planning to stage attacks during the holy month of Ramadhan. "In particular, a group of terrorists led by one Ibrahim Mohammed alias Shariff Lin Kulul, has been hiding in the mountainous region of Gedo within Somalia and may be planning to stage attacks on the Kenyan side," Owino said in a statement. He said Kulul has in the past sent Debar to look for targets to attack in Mandera and Wajir counties in northeast Kenya including government employees, warning that others are trying to cross over to Kenya and stage attacks. Owino said Dabar was a Madrasa student before joining al-Shabab. He was also involved in the February attacks on teachers at a school in Wajir. He urged all Kenyans to exercise caution especially around public institutions and public gatherings and report any suspicious individuals to the police. "We equally wish to reassure the public that the police have enhanced security measures across the country during this season and are closing in on the militants," said Owino. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-31 02:41:13|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close TEHRAN, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Iran urges French energy firm Total to seek waiver from the United States to remain in Iran's South Pars 11 (SP11) development project, Press TV reported on Wednesday. Total and the French government can talk with the U.S. government over the next two months to see whether the French company would stay in the project, Iranian Petroleum Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh was quoted as saying. Otherwise, Iran will replace Total with China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) in this project, he added. On May 16, Total said it might not be able to continue its gas development project in Iran, unless it gets a waiver from the United States to protect it from reimposed sanctions. The SP11 project is a gas development project dedicated to the supply of domestic gas to the Iranian market, which was executed on July 4, 2017. On May 8, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal and reinstate sanctions that were in force before the implementation of the landmark agreement. An Iraqi woman living in Iran votes at an overseas polling station for Iraq's parliamentary elections in southern Tehran, Iran, on May 11, 2018. Thousands of Iraqis living in Iran casted their ballots in the country. The 2018 parliamentary election is the first one since Iraq's historical victory over the Islamic State group. (Xinhua/Ahmad Halabisaz) UNITED NATIONS, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The top UN envoy in Iraq on Wednesday asked for the swift formation of an inclusive government in Iraq following the May 12 parliamentary elections. "The post-election phase represents a crucial time for Iraq," Jan Kubis, the UN secretary-general's special representative for Iraq, told the Security Council. "We urge political leaders to prioritize inclusive, non-sectarian dialogue, and to ensure the swift formation of a new truly national government that reflects the will of the people of Iraq." It is essential that the new government works as one across the sectarian and ethnic divides in pursuing much-needed political, economic and social reforms, while working to improve the economy, public services delivery and social justice, said Kubis. Such a new government will guarantee the future of Iraq as a stable, prosperous, united, democratic, fully sovereign and independent federal state with good relations with all its neighbors based on mutual respect, non-interference, and common interests as a factor of stability, cooperation and prosperity, also in the region, he said. He also urged political leaders to ensure the full participation of women in negotiations on the formation of the next ruling coalition and the government, and their representation at the highest levels in Iraq's political and decision-making structures in Parliament and government. The May 12 elections were held in a generally calm and stable environment, but were marked by a low voter turnout of only 44.52 percent, said Kubis. The decision by more than half of the voting population not to exercise their democratic right sends a strong signal to the elites ruling the country since 2003, he said. "I urge the Iraqi political elites to draw the necessary conclusions on the need for improved representation, justice for all, democratic accountability and good governance void of corruption, sectarian quota system, nepotism and patronage." Kubis urged the independent electoral management bodies to adjudicate all appeals with regard to electoral results properly, fully and in time, to enable corrections of the problems, justice and the timely certification of the final election results. He said the humanitarian crisis in Iraq continues with more than 2.1 million people remaining displaced and in need of humanitarian assistance. Funding to provide the most vulnerable with emergency assistance is at critically low levels. Out of the world body's appeal for 569 million U.S. dollars, only 18 percent was met by May 15, he said, adding that demining and stabilization efforts are also underfunded. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-31 02:56:18|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta (Front) delivers a speech during the inauguration ceremony of the City Centre 220KV Gas Insulated Sub-Station in Nairobi, Kenya, May 30, 2018. Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta on Wednesday commissioned one of the energy projects that feeds into his four-point legacy agenda of driving manufacturing through cheaper and high quality power in Nairobi. (Xinhua/Wang Teng) NAIROBI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta on Wednesday commissioned one of the energy projects that feeds into his four-point legacy agenda of driving manufacturing through cheaper and high quality power in Nairobi. The president who is on his second and final five year term has set to nearly double the growth of manufacturing sector, provide new affordable houses, provide universal health insurance and support farmers to increase food yield in the next five years under the Big Four Agenda. Kenyatta commissioned the City Centre 220KV Gas Insulated Sub-Station that will enable the country's manufacturing hub of Industrial Area in Nairobi, the entire city including Nairobi's financial district of Upper Hill to get uninterrupted high quality electricity. "This project will greatly improve the quality of power in Nairobi's City Centre, serving the Industrial area, Mombasa road, Upperhill, the entire Central Business District (CBD), Lower hill and Kilimani area," Kenyatta said. The substation, will handle the power coming from the Olkaria Geothermal Power Station and will create an alternative power chain for the city. The project is being implemented by TBEA of China at a cost of 132 U.S. million dollars, funded by the Exim Bank of China through a twenty-year concessional loan. "It therefore creates additional contingency in electricity supply thus enhancing the reliability of power in this area," he added. Kenyatta said the improvement of power supply in the city is aimed at creating a conducive environment for business and industry so that they can in turn create more jobs for Kenyans. "This initiative feeds into one of the key pillars of the Big Four Agenda, enhancing manufacturing, to create quality jobs for Kenyans," said Kenyatta. NAIROBI, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta held talks on Wednesday with visiting Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo focusing on security issues, the presidency said. Kenyatta's office said the two leaders discussed bilateral issues and security matters including the continued support for African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) in which Kenyan forces play a big role. "The two leaders updated each other on shared security concerns as well as progress in regional efforts to bring peace and stability back to Somalia with the help of Kenya and other nations," it said. President Mohamed arrived in the country early Wednesday accompanied by a high-level delegation of ministers and senior government officials. State House said Kenyatta and Farmajo also discussed multilateral issues including Kenya's push for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. WASHINGTON, May 30 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Treasury announced on Wednesday it has imposed sanctions on three Iran-related entities and six Iranians, accusing them for involvement in human rights abuses. It was the latest round of sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on Iran following the U.S. withdrawal from the landmark Iran nuclear deal earlier this month. The designated entities were Tehran's Evin prison, Ansar-e Hezbollah group and the Hanista programing group. Three individuals related to Ansar-e Hezbollah and director of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting were also included on the designation list. "Treasury is taking action to hold the Iranian regime accountable for ongoing human rights abuses, censorship, and other despicable acts it commits against its own citizens," said U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a statement. The sanctions would freeze any assets that a blacklisted person or entity holds under U.S. jurisdiction and ban any U.S. individuals or companies from making business deals with them. The United States exited the Iran nuclear deal in early May and began re-imposing U.S. sanctions that had been lifted under the deal. Washington's move has been criticized widely by the international community. BERLIN, May 30 (Xinhua) -- One person was dead and two others seriously injured following a stabbing incident at a train station in Germany's northern town of Flensburg, local media reported on Wednesday. Two police officers tried to intervened in the stabbing and then the attacker stabbed one of the two police officers before being shot by the other police officer, reports said. The station was cordoned off. Police and rescue workers were seen on the site. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-31 04:01:46|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close DAMASCUS, May 30 (Xinhua) -- As the next targets for the Syrian army, the rebel-held provinces of Qunaitera and Daraa in southern Syria could witness either a large-scale war or a peace settlement, activists and local media said Wednesday. The military campaign against the rebels in Daraa and Qunaitera is apparently drawing near as the Syrian army has recently sent reinforcements there, just after rebels were completely defeated in the capital Damascus earlier this month. Having anticipated the imminent Syrian military offensive, the rebels have started to consolidate positions and stockpile ammunition in case of a failed settlement. Some of them in Daraa even unite in the name of "Salvage Army." The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor group said the rebels in Daraa attacked Syrian military vehicles after midnight Wednesday, while moving from government-controlled areas in the countryside to the province's capital city that bears the same name. Meanwhile, the Syrian army is sending reinforcements to the countryside of Daraa and Qunaitera as a prelude to the military offensive against rebel groups, despite the fact that these areas are part of the de-escalation zones in the Russia-backed deal reached in July 2017. The Syrian helicopters have been dropping leaflets over Daraa recently, urging rebels to accept a reconciliation offer and lay down their weapons. "You have two choices: to leave your arms or the definite death," one of the leaflets read. The Syrian army hopes for the reconciliation because it will enable the government to wrest control over Daraa and Quniatera, as well as the entire borderline with Jordan, since the truce established last July allows the rebels to stay where they are. A day earlier, Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Russia, Jordan and the U.S. are in contact regarding the southern Syrian region, adding that there will be a tripartite meeting over the issue. In addition, the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement between Syria and Israel may be reactivated for Qunaitera, according to the pro-government al-Watan newspaper. For Iranian-backed forces, they won't be allowed near the southern borders if this solution was to see the light, as Israel has made it clear that it won't tolerate the presence of Iranian forces near the border with Syria. Maher Ihsan, a political expert, said reaching a peace solution in Daraa and Qunaitera are more likely as Russia is also makng military preparations in case of any failure. "The rebels in southern Syria have seen what happened with their comrades who were either defeated or dislodged from the capital Damascus this month. They have no other option," he said. The expert noted that a deal similar to the one reached in Damascus or in Homs Province in central Syria could see the evacuation of rebels who don't want to be reconciled with the government toward rebel-held areas in the northwestern province of Idlib. Those who want to remain would be offered a reconciliation deal, which would see their criminal records cleared as part of the pardon. However, it's still not easy to reach a settlement given the presence of Islamic State-linked militants in the Yarmouk Basin in Daraa countryside, who are fighting with other rebel groups in areas out of the government hand. Ahmad al-Ashqar, another expert, said both Daraa and Qunaitera are very important for military operations in Syria due to their strategic locations. Both are considered key areas linking Syria's southern and central regions, in addition to their proximity to the capital Damascus. NEW YORK, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Young Chinese American writer Rebecca F. Kuang is to sign her new book "The Poppy War" on Saturday at the BookExpo at Javits Center, New York City. The historical fiction, picked up by HarperCollins in May 2016, was set in a mythical land inspired by 20th century China. The book follows a young orphan's entry into an elite military school and her discovery of shamanic power as a war brews in the background. "It's about the domestic politics, military strategy and interpersonal dynamics of the most important figures of 20th century China, but everything is transposed to a Song dynasty setting just because I thought the culture, weapons and aesthetic were so much cooler to write about," said Kuang, 22, a Georgetown University senior, in an interview with the university's newspaper The Hoya. Kuang, who immigrated to the United States from Guangzhou, China in 2000, plans to continue to pursue Chinese history at the University of Cambridge next fall. She was one of 43 U.S. recipients of 2017 Marshall Scholarship, an award that funds up to three years of graduate study at any university in the United Kingdom. "The Poppy War" will be followed by two sequels. Kuang said she will finish this trilogy before she moves to England. BookExpo runs from Wednesday till Friday featuring more than 150 exhibitors at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, followed over the weekend by the fan-based BookCon. File Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump displays a signed presidential memorandum at the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, on May 8, 2018. U.S. President Donald Trump said that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, a landmark agreement signed in 2015. (Xinhua/Ting Shen) WASHINGTON, May 30 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Treasury announced on Wednesday it has imposed sanctions on three Iran-related entities and six Iranians, accusing them of involvement in human rights abuses. It was the latest round of sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on Iran following the U.S. withdrawal from the landmark Iran nuclear deal earlier this month. The designated entities were Tehran's Evin prison, Ansar-e Hezbollah group and the Hanista programing group. Three individuals related to Ansar-e Hezbollah and director of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting were also included on the designation list. "Treasury is taking action to hold the Iranian regime accountable for ongoing human rights abuses, censorship, and other despicable acts it commits against its own citizens," said U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a statement. The sanctions would freeze any assets that a blacklisted person or entity holds under U.S. jurisdiction and ban any U.S. individuals or companies from making business deals with them. The United States exited the Iran nuclear deal in early May and began re-imposing U.S. sanctions that had been lifted under the deal. Washington's move has been criticized widely by the international community. DAR ES SALAAM, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Tanzania and the United States on Wednesday marked 15 years of partnership in the fight against HIV/AIDS through the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). U.S. Acting Ambassador to Tanzania, Inmi Patterson, said PEPFAR recently passed an important milestone enabling it to provide lifesaving treatment to more than one million Tanzanians living with HIV. "During this campaign, we will work with you all and with people living with HIV across the country. I encourage Tanzanians to get tested and learn their health status," she said in the commercial capital Dar es Salaam. Ummy Mwalimu, the east African nation's Minister for Health, said through the U.S.-funded program, HIV/AIDS related deaths in the country decreased by 70 per cent, from 110,000 in 2003 to 33,000 in 2016. According to statistics by the Tanzania Commission for AIDS, Tanzania has an estimated 1.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS, but only 52 percent of them are aware of their condition. The disease has mostly affected the youth aged between 14 and 25 years, according to the commission. ALGIERS, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A terrorist surrendered on Wednesday to the Algerian military in the southernmost province of Tamanrasset, said defense ministry in a statement. Another armed militant was shot dead Tuesday in the northern province of Ain Defla, the statement said. "In the context of the fight against terrorism and following an ambush set up in the woods of the province of Ain Defla, counterterrorism troops shot dead a terrorist and retrieved his Kalashnikov-type machine gun and a quantity of ammunition," said the statement. A terrorist laid down his arm on Wednesday morning to the military authorities in Tamanrasset, near the border with Mali and Niger, as he had in his possession a Kalashnikov-type machine gun and a loaded magazine, it said. A week ago, five armed militants also laid down their arms to military authorities. 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. The North African nation has also opened safe routes along its southern border, to encourage Algerian militants who joined terrorist fiefs in the Sahel, to lay down arms, in exchange of fair trials. The statement further noted that counterterrorism troops in the eastern province of Skikda discovered and destroyed two terrorist bunkers containing 700 kilograms of chemicals used in the manufacture of explosives, three homemade bombs, detonation tools, and foodstuffs. Located in a region plagued by unprecedented security and political instability, Algeria faces ongoing terrorist threats. HAVANA, May 30 (Xinhua) -- After a severe drought lasting more than three years, Cuba now faces a new climate challenge. Over the last week, intense rains from subtropical storm Alberto have saturated the soil while dams in the central zone of the country are close to overflowing. This situation has killed at least four people and more than 51,000 people have been evacuated in the central provinces of Cienfuegos, Villa Clara, Sancti Spiritus and Ciego de Avila. Official figures also warn of damage to more than 1,000 homes as well as key infrastructure and roads, leading to several towns being cut off. Damages have been substantial in the agricultural sector, with crops such as rice, beans, tobacco and bananas being particularly affected. "Hurricane Irma last year left a favorable situation in dams and reservoirs in terms of accumulated water. But these rains have transformed the landscape and the concern is how much damage this will cause," Gloria Perez, a Havana resident, told Xinhua. The senior citizen said Cuba is undergoing the consequences of climate change with its drastic changes, with the people suffering. "Irma left substantial damages that the country hasn't recovered from. Now these rains and floods have created more havoc, houses need repair, people have lost their assets," Perez said. According to local media reports, more than 100 reservoirs throughout the island are saturated and have opened their floodgates, releasing water to the ocean. The Zaza dam, the largest in Cuba, has accumulated over 1 billion cubic meters of water. It is currently at 103 percent of its full capacity and its six floodgates have been opened. The floods have also halted operations at Cuba's main oil refinery in the southern province of Cienfuegos and caused a localized oil spill in the local bay. Jose Marin, a bus driver in Havana, said that while the government is allocating funds to attend to immediate emergencies, the full economic impact will be felt in the coming weeks and months. "Inevitably, it is going to affect our lives. What worries me the most is the amount of lost crops which will lead to shortages and rising prices for vegetables and fruit," he said. Lizandra Flores, an elementary school teacher, highlighted that despite an improvement in weather conditions on Wednesday, the heavy rains and floods of the last few days represent "new difficulties" for Cubans. "Today the sun came out in Havana after almost a week, we are not accustomed to so much rain in Cuba," she said. On Tuesday, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel met with his cabinet and officials from the affected territories to try and speed up recovery efforts. Around 58,000 people remain without electricity and dozens of communities are flooded and without communication. For Ines Chapman, president of the country's hydraulic resources institute, the dams are of particularly pressing concern. Roberto Morales, minister of public health, also said the country needs to prioritize epidemic control measures to prevent the outbreak of disease. The latest information from the island's weather service indicates that rainfall would decrease on Wednesday, allowing authorities to speed up recovery efforts. Alberto, which passed through the Gulf of Mexico to hit Florida and beyond, claimed the lives of two journalists on duty in North Carolina on Monday, local media reported. Last year, Cuba was severely affected by hurricane Irma, which killed 10 people, and caused an estimated damage of 13 billion U.S. dollars. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-31 05:22:07|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, May 30 (Xinhua) -- UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov on Wednesday condemned the latest escalation in Gaza. The past two days have seen the most serious escalation in Gaza since the 2014 conflict between Hamas and Israel, Mladenov told the UN Security Council. "They have been a warning to all of us how close we are to the brink of war every day." Between Monday and Wednesday, 216 projectiles, rockets and mortar shells were fired from Gaza toward Israel, he quoted the Israeli Defense Forces as saying. Although most of the projectiles were intercepted by the Iron Dome system, one hit a kindergarten yard in a kibbutz near the Gaza border and at least another damaged a house, he said. In response to those rockets and mortars, the Israeli Air Force carried out strikes on 65 Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza and destroyed a 2-km tunnel near the Kerem Shalom crossing, said Mladenov. Fortunately, there have been no casualties on either side, he said. He condemned the indiscriminate targeting of civilians. "Such attacks are completely unacceptable. The firing of rockets and mortars against civilians cannot be justified under any circumstances. I take this opportunity to call on the international community to join me in unequivocally condemning these indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the dangerous escalation in Gaza," said Mladenov at an emergency meeting of the Security Council that was requested by the United States. He noted that the situation has calmed down since the early hours of Wednesday. Smoke rises from Gaza Strip on May 29, 2018. Palestinian militants fired dozens of mortars, projectiles and rockets into Israel throughout Tuesday before Israel launched a wide-scale airstrike on Gaza, as tensions rise following weeks of lethal Israeli fire at Gaza protestors. (Xinhua/JINI) UNITED NATIONS, May 30 (Xinhua) -- UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov on Wednesday condemned the latest escalation in Gaza. The past two days have seen the most serious escalation in Gaza since the 2014 conflict between Hamas and Israel, Mladenov told the UN Security Council. "They have been a warning to all of us how close we are to the brink of war every day." Between Monday and Wednesday, 216 projectiles, rockets and mortar shells were fired from Gaza toward Israel, he quoted the Israeli Defense Forces as saying. Although most of the projectiles were intercepted by the Iron Dome system, one hit a kindergarten yard in a kibbutz near the Gaza border and at least another damaged a house, he said. In response to those rockets and mortars, the Israeli Air Force carried out strikes on 65 Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza and destroyed a 2-km tunnel near the Kerem Shalom crossing, said Mladenov. Fortunately, there have been no casualties on either side, he said. He condemned the indiscriminate targeting of civilians. A Palestinian protester uses a slingshot to hurl stones at Israeli troops near the Gaza-Israel border, east of Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, on May 25, 2018. At least 25 Palestinian protesters were injured on Friday during clashes with Israeli soldiers along Gaza's eastern border with Israel, the health ministry in Gaza said. (Xinhua/Khaled Omar) "Such attacks are completely unacceptable. The firing of rockets and mortars against civilians cannot be justified under any circumstances. I take this opportunity to call on the international community to join me in unequivocally condemning these indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the dangerous escalation in Gaza," said Mladenov at an emergency meeting of the Security Council that was requested by the United States. He noted that the situation has calmed down since the early hours of Wednesday. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-31 06:02:16|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close KIEV, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Artists from central China's Hunan Province are participating in the 3rd Kiev International Youth Festival of Circus Art "Golden Kashtan," which kicked off in the Ukrainian capital on Wednesday. The acrobatic troupe from Hunan Acrobatics Art Theatre is among dozens of participants, who came to the festival from 12 countries. During the three-day festival, circus professionals and amateurs aged no more than 25 years old will give a total of 52 performances. On the first day of the festival, the acrobatic troupe from China charmed the public with a stunning contortion performance. On Thursday, the young Chinese artists are due to demonstrate their famous hand-stand show. Zhao Shuangwu, director general of Hunan Acrobatics Art Theatre, said her theatre has decided to participate in the festival to introduce Chinese arts and cultural features to Ukrainian public. "It will help to strengthen cultural exchanges between the two countries. In addition, thanks to this platform, we can show the world the circus art and culture of Hunan Province," Zhao told Xinhua. During the inauguration of the festival, Hunan Acrobatics Art Theatre has signed a memorandum with the National Circus of Ukraine and China's Cultural and Arts Center in Ukraine on promoting their cooperation and deepening the exchanges. "Thanks to this, in the future we will be able to further promote the culture of China and Hunan Province in Ukraine," Zhao said. Meanwhile, Lyudmila Shevchenko, director of the National Circus of Ukraine, spoke highly of the Chinese circus culture, saying it already enjoys popularity among Ukrainian young artists. "The Chinese circus is considered to be one of the best circuses in the world. When Chinese actors come here, everyone knows that they will win the gold. It has always been the case. Now, our children are also learning and growing to this level," Shevchenko told Xinhua. She said that Ukraine and China carry out frequent exchanges in the sphere of circus art, which helps the people of the two countries to better understand each other. "This interpenetration of ties, friendship and learning brings the nations closer," Shevchenko said. Founded in 1959, the Hunan Acrobatics Art Theatre has travelled to dozens of countries, introducing Chinese traditional culture and art to foreign audience and promoting friendships with the peoples of different nations. CAIRO, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian Prosecutor General ordered on Wednesday four officials to be held in custody pending further investigations over bribery charges. The prosecution accused the four officials, already arrested on Tuesday, of receiving bribes up to two million Egyptian pounds (about 112,000 U.S. dollars) from major suppliers of food commodities to help secure orders and facilitate payments, state-run MENA news agency reported. The four officials busted by the Administrative Control Authority included the supply minister's adviser and the head of Food Industries Holding Company, a state-run company responsible for importing food commodities. Egypt has launched a massive anti-corruption campaign over the past few years that led to the arrest and imprisonment of officials and senior employees as well as retrieval of large amounts of public funds. Source: Xinhua| 2018-05-31 06:22:26|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, May 30 (Xinhua) -- UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov on Wednesday condemned the latest escalation in Gaza. The past two days have seen the most serious escalation in Gaza since the 2014 conflict between Hamas and Israel, Mladenov told the Security Council. "They have been a warning to all of us how close we are to the brink of war every day." Between Monday and Wednesday, 216 projectiles, rockets and mortar shells were fired from Gaza toward Israel, he quoted the Israeli Defense Forces as saying. Although most of the projectiles were intercepted by the Iron Dome system, one hit a kindergarten yard in a kibbutz near the Gaza border and at least another damaged a house, he said. In response to those rockets and mortars, the Israeli Air Force carried out strikes on 65 Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza and destroyed a 2-km tunnel near the Kerem Shalom crossing, said Mladenov. Fortunately, there have been no casualties on either side, he said. He condemned the indiscriminate targeting of civilians. "Such attacks are completely unacceptable. The firing of rockets and mortars against civilians cannot be justified under any circumstances. I take this opportunity to call on the international community to join me in unequivocally condemning these indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the dangerous escalation in Gaza," said Mladenov at an emergency meeting of the Security Council that was requested by the United States. On Tuesday, Hamas' Qassam Brigades and the Islamic Jihad's Saraya al-Quds claimed joint responsibility for the rockets and mortars fired at Israel, said Mladenov. Their joint statement blamed Israel for targeting their fighters and military positions during the preceding 48 hours, cautioned against attempts to "dictate new equations" on the status quo, and warned that they would reciprocate "shelling with shelling and blood with blood," said the UN envoy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed, meanwhile, that Israel would "respond with great force" to the rocket attacks as for more than 24 hours Israeli communities around Gaza lived with the fear having mere seconds to seek shelter from incoming rockets, said Mladenov. He noted that the situation has calmed down since the early hours of Wednesday. He called on all sides to uphold all understandings and prevent the recurrence of any incidents that jeopardize the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike. "It is imperative that this period of calm be preserved at all costs. No one in Gaza can afford another war. No one has the right to play with the lives of 2 million people who have lived through hell in the last decade. No one should live in fear of an indiscriminate rocket attack." Everyone has a responsibility to do their part to de-escalate and step back from the brink in the interests of their own people and the future of their own children, he said. "As demonstrations and protests in Gaza continue into the month of June, I am concerned that we may experience further violence and further risks of escalation," warned the UN envoy. MOSCOW, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discussed bilateral relations in a phone conversation Wednesday, the Russia Foreign Ministry said. "They exchanged views on several aspects of the joint agenda, including bilateral relations, and efforts to resolve the Syrian crisis and overcome the conflict in Ukraine based on the Minsk agreements of February 12, 2015," the ministry said in a press release. They agreed on the need to work to fulfill the task, set in a telephone conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump, of overcoming existing differences through professional dialogue in the interests of normalizing the atmosphere of Russian-U.S. interaction, it said. It is the first phone call of Pompeo as U.S. Secretary of State with Lavrov. MINSK, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Martin Sajdik, special representative of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), urged conflicting parties in Ukraine on Wednesday to pay special attention to the safety of children. "I call on the parties to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, and pay special attention to the safety of children," Sajdik said following the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) meeting in Minsk. Compared with the beginning of the year, the number of civilian casualties has sharply increased over the past two months, especially the fact that there are children among the dead, he said. Noting that this is absolutely unacceptable, Sajdik said that all parties are responsible for ensuring that the children in holidays are really safe. The TCG is a group of representatives from Ukraine, Russia and the OSCE that was formed to facilitate a diplomatic solution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Budapest will join European Mobility Week for the 17th time this year, with a car-free day and mobility weekend along Andrassy Avenue in September. European Mobility Week, held each year between September 16 and 22, aims to encourage local authorities to introduce and promote sustainable forms of transport and call public attention to alternative transport options. Budapest transport authority BKK will present its past achievements in the field, as well as already available and planned alternative forms of transport. A series of events will help to attract attention to the importance of a clean and livable city. Click here to learn more about European Mobility Week Hungary is ready for debates about its Stop Soros package of bills, a senior government official said on Tuesday, before the package was submitted to parliament. The Stop Soros package criminalises the organisation of illegal migration, making it punishable by imprisonment. In the debates about the bill, the Hungarian government will consistently prioritise the countrys security interests, Csaba Domotor, the state secretary of the Cabinet Office, told a press conference. Domotor said the bill reflected the result of last months general election, arguing that on April 8, Hungarians had voted to protect Hungary from illegal migration. Photo: Arvai Karoly/kormany.hu Larry Holcombe/Daily Globe MICHIGAN ATTORNEY General and Republican candidate for governor Bill Schuette speaks to a group at Jacquart Fabric Products in Ironwood Tuesday morning. The group included Jacquart employees, as well as some invited community leaders. Schuette heard concerns ranging from health care to education to gun control. The Midland native said he hopes to continue a life of public service after 12 years as attorney general, leading an effort to rebuild the state as governor. By RICHARD JENKINS [email protected] HURLEY With the company already onsite working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Iron County Board of Supervisors awarded the contract for its share of the Saxon Harbor marinas dredging to Roen Salvage Tuesday. The company based in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. was awarded the $2,779,533 contract to dredge approximately 21,100 cubic yards of sediment deposited in the portion of the marina the county is responsible for during the July 2016 storm that destroyed the harbor. Along with the dredging, the contract includes repairs to the... ALL THE chairs are full at Wakefield city council's Tuesday electric rate hearing. By P.J. GLISSON [email protected]e.com WAKEFIELD - A Tuesday public hearing on electric rates resulted in the Wakefield city council voting to retain current rates. Council member Pat Mann read a short statement concluding, "I feel I do not have sufficient information to make a recommendation at this time." "We just got information this weekend," said mayor pro tempore Amy Tarro, who added she wished they'd received it well in advance of the hearing. Council member Jim Anderson described the new intelligence as "a lot of data." After the hearing, Mann told the Globe the new information wa... Washington: More than 5,000 complaints of H-1b visa fraud and abuse have been received by a federal agency on a dedicated email helpline that was launched by the Trump administration last year, an official said. "As of May 21, 2018, the USCIS has received over 5,000 tips to the dedicated H-1B email address," Philip Smith, a Spokesperson for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) told PTI. After US President Donald Trump Signed "Buy American, Hire American" executive order last year, Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) established email addresses dedicated to receiving information about suspected H-1B and H-2B fraud or abuse. FDNS leads USCIS's efforts to combat immigration benefit fraud. Anyone (including both American workers and workers who suspect they or others may be the victim of H-1B or H-2B fraud or abuse) can email ReportH1BAbuse@uscis.Dhs.Gov or ReportH2BAbuse@uscis.Dhs.Gov to submit tips, alleged violations, and other relevant information about potential fraud or abuse, Smith said. The USCIS, however, did not provide any other details with regard to the nature of complaints, the companies involved and which country's high-tech professionals were the victims of H-1B visa fraud and abuse. "Pursuant to the Buy American, Hire American Executive Order, FDNS has helped the agency investigate the H-1B program to protect American workers," Smith said. In April 2017, USCIS FDNS created and implemented the Targeted Site Visit and Verification Program (TSVVP) as part of its continuous efforts to enhance the integrity of the immigration benefit process, he said. "This targeted approach focuses on H-1B dependent employers (those who have a high ratio of H-1B workers as compared to US workers, as defined by statute); Cases that we cannot validate the employer's basic business information through commercially available data; and employers petitioning for H-1B workers who work off-site at another company or organization's location," Smith said in response to a question. FDNS officers resolve background check information and other concerns that surface during the processing of immigration benefit applications and petitions. Resolution often requires communication with law enforcement or intelligence agencies to make sure that the information is relevant to the applicant or petitioner at hand and, if so, whether the information would have an impact on eligibility for the benefit. FDNS officers also perform checks of USCIS databases and public information, as well as other administrative inquiries, to verify information provided on, and in support of, applications and petitions. Smith said administrative inquiries may include targeted site visits ? Inquiries conducted in cases where fraud is suspected. FDNS uses the Fraud Detection and National Security Data System (FDNS-DS) to identify fraud and track potential patterns, he said. The USCIS has formed a partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in which FDNS pursues administrative inquiries into most application and petition fraud, while ICE conducts criminal investigations into major fraud conspiracies, he said. According to the USCIS, the H-1B visa program should help US companies recruit highly-skilled foreign nationals when there is a shortage of qualified workers in the country. "Yet, too many American workers who are as qualified, willing, and deserving to work in these fields have been ignored or unfairly disadvantaged," the USCIS says on its webpage. Employers who abuse H-1B visa program may negatively affect US workers, decreasing wages and opportunities as they import more workers from abroad, it said. Highly popular among Indian technology professional, the H-1B visa is normally issued for three years and renewed for another three years. The US Congress has a cap of 65,000 H-1B visas per year. It also issues another 20,000 H-1B visas to those who have masters and higher education from a US academic institute. New Delhi: Shah Rukh Khan is currently shooting for his upcoming romantic-sci-fi drama 'Zero' along with actress Anushka Sharma. The team, which is currently in the USA on a straight 45-day schedule, will be filming the climax of the film in coming days. According to Bollywoodlife.com, Shah Rukh and Anushka along with actor R Madhavan will be filming the climax at a NASA facility in Alabama. They will not only use the inside of this NASA facility but also a few rocket models in its premises to shoot certain sequences. It is to be noted that Shah Rukh has a previous shooting experience at NASA. Khan, who played a NASA scientist in Ashutosh Gowariker's 'Swades' in 2004, had shot for few sequences at the aerospace research centre. In fact, it became the first Indian film to be shot inside the NASA research centre at the Launch Pad 39A of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In the meantime, Anushka will be seen playing the role of a failed scientist in 'Zero' who tried to come to terms with her failures. Directed by Aanand L Rai and written by Himanshu Sharma, 'Zero' is romantic drama and also features Katrina Kaif in a pivotal role. Shah Rukh, who will be seen as a dwarf in the film, will fall in love with Katrina, who plays a superstar. The film has special appearances by Salman Khan, Rani Mukerji, Deepika Padukone, Kajol, Karisma Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Juhi Chawla. It also marks the last on-screen appearance of late veteran actress Sridevi, who died in February this year, shortly after completing the film. 'Zero' is scheduled to release on December 21 this year. NEW DELHI: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday carried out searches at the residence of Delhi minister Satyendar Jain in connection with the hiring of consultants in Public Works Department (PWD). Jain took to Twitter to inform about the raid. He said: "CBI raids my house for hiring creative team by PWD. Professionals were hired for different projects. All were forced to leave by CBI." Cbi raids my house for hiring creative team by PWD. Professionals were hired for different projects. All were forced to leave by cbi. Satyendar Jain (@SatyendarJain) May 30, 2018 Visibly annoyed at the development, Delhi Chief Minister attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the move. "What does PM Modi want?," the Delhi CM tweeted. What does PM Modi want? https://t.co/3vN1MVxPqk Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) May 30, 2018 The CBI is probing the role of Jain, Delhi's PWD Minister, in connection with the alleged irregularities in the hiring of professionals in the PWD. The hiring of 24 architects was allegedly done through a detective agency which had no prior experience but was tasked with finding the "best brains" in architecture colleges across the country to be inducted in the creative team of the PWD. It is alleged that the creative wing floated by the Delhi government on September 1, 2015 was without the requisite approval or knowledge of the Lieutenant Governor. It is also alleged that the hiring of the 24 professionals was done for two years on which Rs 5.74 crore were spent. The preliminary enquiry was registered on the complaint from Vigilance Department of the Delhi government. NEW DELHI: The Indian Air Force on Wednesday conducted Bambi operations to douse the massive fire that engulfed an area in Delhi's Malviya Nagar. The MI 17 helicopter of the Air Force was deployed to douse the fire which has been raging on for nearly a day. #SavingLives : Indian Air Force launches a #MLH class helicopter for Fire Fighting Operations with Bambi Buckets from AFS Palam to contain fire at #MalviyaNagar , New Delhi, Today. @SpokespersonMoD @nsitharamanoffc @DefenceMinIndia pic.twitter.com/4QAa2uIgXP Indian Air Force (@IAF_MCC) May 30, 2018 The IAF helicopter filled water from Yamuna reservoir and dropped over the site thrice to contain the fire. This is the first time that the IAF conducted Bambi operations done in an urban area. Approximately 8,000 litres of water was dropped by the IAF helicopter to control the blaze. "Around midnight a request was received at HQ Western Air Command for containing a fire at Malviya Nagar in Delhi. A MLH class helicopter airborne from Sarsawa did a recce and landed at Palam. Thereafter heptr got airborne with Bambi Bucket to contain the fire. The heptr filled water from Yamuna reservoir and dropped over the site. This had to be repeated thrice to contain the fire. This was the first time the Bambi ops was done in an urban situation wherein the nitty gritties of drop are very precise owing to high rises around and chances of collateral damage. The operations started this morning wherein helicopter flown by Wing Commander Pradeep Bhola of the Mighty Armours was successful in dousing the fire. A total of approx 8000 lts of water was dropped in this incident," the IAF said in a statement. A massive fire had broken out in a rubber factory in Malviya Nagar at around 5 pm on Tuesday. Firefighting operations are underway and are likely to continue for a few more hours. Several vehicles were gutted in the fire that broke out at an auto pond of the police in the area on Tuesday evening. Several shops in the locality have also came in contact with the devastating fire. A call regarding the fire was received at Saket police station at 5.16 PM. "On reaching the spot it was found that the fire broke out at an auto pond in Sector 5 of Pushp Vihar," DCP (south) Romil Baaniya said. The auto pond houses case property of the police's south district. "It was found that many vehicles have caught fire," he said. No casualties have been reported however a lot of vehicles were damaged in the fire, said the officer. Police said that it was found that a truck was being loaded with rubber sheets at the warehouse situated at Khirki Extension area when the vehicle suddenly caught fire and it was also spread to the building, where more rubber sheets were stored. NEW DELHI: A massive fire that broke out in a rubber factory in Delhi's Malviya Nagar has not been doused until Wednesday morning. Firefighting operations are underway and are likely to continue for a few more hours "Fire is under control now. 15 fire tenders are currently at the spot. It will take 3-4 more hours to completely douse the fire," a fire officer said. Several vehicles were gutted in the fire that broke out at an auto pond of the police in the Saket area on Tuesday evening. Several shops in the locality also came in contact with the devastating fire. Fire broke out in a truck, which then spread to a rubber godown in Malviya Nagar, 15 fire tenders present at the spot #Delhi pic.twitter.com/1axxrwACfo ANI (@ANI) May 29, 2018 A call regarding the fire was received at Saket police station at 5.16 PM. "On reaching the spot it was found that the fire broke out at an auto pond in Sector 5 of Pushp Vihar," DCP (south) Romil Baaniya said. The auto pond houses case property of the police's south district. "It was found that many vehicles have caught fire," he said. Delhi: Firefighting operations still underway at Malviya Nagar where fire broke out in a rubber godown yesterday. Deputy Chief Fire Officer says 'Fire is under control now. 15 fire tenders are currently at the spot. It will take 3-4 more hours to completely douse the fire'. pic.twitter.com/qu29YLjNu6 ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 No casualties have been reported however a lot of vehicles were damaged in the fire, said the officer. Police said that it was found that a truck was being loaded with rubber sheets at the warehouse situated at Khirki Extension area when the vehicle suddenly caught fire and it was also spread to the building, where more rubber sheets were stored. New Delhi: The two-day nationwide strike by employees of public sector banks (PSBs) may affect customer transactions worth up to Rs 20,000 crore, industry body Assocham said on Wednesday, urging the United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU) to call off the strike. The chamber also urged the government to come up with a stimulus plan for restoring the health of public sector banks. State-owned lenders are grappling with high levels of bad loans and as per reports their losses for the quarter ended March 2018 are set to hit a record Rs 50,000 crore which is more than double the losses of Rs 19,000 crore in preceding quarter ended December 2017, Assocham said in a statement. "Considering such a precarious situation, we at Assocham would urge the government to come up with a stimulus plan which must include restoring the PSBs to health," Assocham Secretary General D S Rawat said. "With about 10 lakh bank employees going on strike, banking operations such as cheque clearances, cash withdrawals and deposits at PSB branches across India will be affected," he added. The UFBU, an umbrella body of nine bank unions, has gone on strike against the proposed wage hike of 2 percent as against 15 percent given last time, All India Bank Employees Association general secretary C H Venkatachalam said. Consequently, banking activities in public sector banks across the country have been interrupted. However, operations in the new-generation private banks like ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank were almost normal, barring few activities including cheque clearance. Since the strike coincides with the month-end, salary withdrawals from branches are likely to get affected. Some ATMs may also take a hit. Besides, deposit in branches, FD renewal, government treasury operation, money market operation would see the impact of the strike. Madras High Court on Tuesday ordered the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to direct schools to not give homework to students of class 1 and class 2. The court also asked the board to set up flying squads to check any violation of the order. The Madras High Court further directed the CBSE to issue directions to schools across the country to stop use of non-prescribed books. A report has been sought by the court from the central government and National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) within four weeks. The court also asked the central government to instruct state government to ensure that weight of school bags do not exceed 10 per cent of the weight of a child. It observed that children are neither weightlifters nor school bags loaded containers. Justice N Kirubakaran, while referring to the government orders (GOs) issued by governments of Telangana and Maharashtra, directed the Centre to direct the state governments and governments of Union Territories to formulate a "Children School Bag Policy" reducing the weight of the satchels in line with the guidelines issued by either state. Besides, the court directed the Central Board of School Education (CBSE), the regional officer of CBSE and the Association of Management of Private Schools to prescribe and use (NCERT) books alone. Justice N Kirubakaran was passing an interim order on a petition from M Purushothaman, an advocate, seeking a direction to CBSE schools to purchase only books published by NCERT and to prescribe syllabus of NCERT. With regard to homework, it was specifically stated in the counter affidavit filed by secretary, Department of School Education and Literacy of Human Resource Development Ministry that "there is no homework upto class II and (homework can be given) two hours a week from class III." Therefore, no school affiliated to CBSE can prescribe or give homework to class I and class II students. The judge, referring to various research experts and a parenting psychologist, said: "Many experts find that homework is beneficial only to older kids whereas young children are notably lacking in "executive control", the ability to concentrate, to follow directions, to control impulses and keep the details in mind. Therefore, it is unrealistic to expect the KG students, first and second class students to do homework, assignment on their own and homework for class I and II children have to be prohibited. The judge, referring to various experts in the medical field, in his order, said, "The doctors say that on an average five- or six-year-old needs about 11 hours of sleep each night and if they leave for school early in the morning, they should have early bed time. (With PTI inputs) New Delhi: For decades, Shimla has been one of the most preferred holiday destinations for people from across the country. Each year, hundreds escape the hustle and bustle of city life - especially during the summer months, to take cover in the cooler climes of Himachal Pradesh's capital. But now, the Queen of Hills - as it is popularly called - has fallen ill and perhaps all it needs is for tourists to steer away. An appeal on social media websites asking tourists to stay away from Shimla this year has gained momentum in the last few days. The reason? Shimla has been reeling from water shortage for several years but the past few months have been far worse than ever before. Rare rainfall during previous monsoon months and much lower precipitation during the winter months has led to the already falling water supply to crumble. Local media reports highlight that residents are having to wait almost a week to get clean water into their homes. Tankers being arranged for hotels, restaurants and other tourist attractions too are woefully less than what is required. "Give Shimla some time to breathe and recover. There is a massive water crisis here. If you love Shimla, please don't visit," reads the message circulating on Facebook and WhatsApp. With tourist influx more in the summer vacation months of May and June, pressure on resources always goes up during these times. This year though, it is an outright crisis. Several hoteliers have cancelled bookings and issued refunds to avoid the ire of tourists devoid of water. "The months of May and June are our brisk business months but this year, we just cannot cope with the shortage in water available," says Pankaj Ahuja who runs a BnB in a village close to Shimla. "We have had tankers supplying water in previous years but this year, even these are a rare sight. They are looking at keeping the supply up in VIP areas and to five-star hotels." While authorities maintain that there is no preferential treatment, locals are lining up daily to collect clean water from tankers - when tankers are available - to meet their daily needs. It is learnt that the situation in villages around Shimla is even grimmer with people walking far and wide to fetch water. As such, while the tourism industry will take a massive hit, it is the state of the local population that is currently being given top priority. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday registered a case against Delhi Minister Satyendar Jain and others in connection with alleged irregularities in hiring of creative teams in the Public Works Department (PWD). The agency also registered case against SK Srivastava, then engineer-in-chief of the PWD. This came after the CBI conducted searches at Jains residence in the national capital. Reacting to the move by the central agency, Jain took to Twitter hitting back at the CBI. He tweeted, "CBI raids my house for hiring creative team by PWD. Professionals were hired for different projects. All were forced to leave by CBI." Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the issue. Retweeting Jains post, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief asked, What does PM Modi want? The CBI is probing the role of Jain, Delhi's PWD Minister, in connection with the alleged irregularities in the hiring of professionals in the PWD. The hiring of 24 architects was allegedly done through a detective agency which had no prior experience but was tasked with finding the "best brains" in architecture colleges across the country to be inducted in the creative team of the PWD. It is alleged that the creative wing floated by the Delhi government on September 1, 2015 was without the requisite approval or knowledge of the Lieutenant Governor. It is also alleged that the hiring of the 24 professionals was done for two years on which Rs 5.74 crore were spent. The Special investigation team formed to probe journalist Gauri Lankesh's murder case on Wednesday submitted a 650-page charge sheet in which 131 statements have been mentioned. These statements also include those of the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) officers and accused KT Naveen and Praveen. While Naveen was arrested in February, the Karnataka police team recently arrested four more people in connection with the murder. The 37-year-old Naveen had told the cops during interrogation that he paid Rs 1000 for each bullet for the murder which was sourced from Uttar Pradesh. Kumar, who hails from Birur town in Chikkamagaluru district, was arrested on February 18 by the SIT of Karnataka Police after he was identified with the help of CCTV footage. The preliminary findings of the Forensic Sciences Laboratory had suggested that Lankesh and noted Kannada scholar MM Kalburgi were possibly killed with the same weapon, a 7.65 mm country-made pistol. Kalburgi was gunned down by unknown assailants in August 2015 at his Dharwad residence. Lankesh was shot dead by unknown by assailants outside her residence in Bengaluru on September 5 last year. She was the editor of the Gauri Lankesh Patrike, a tabloid known for "anti-establishment" views. The suspect wearing a black helmet, was captured by the two CCTV cameras facing the road - Gauri's house has two other cameras - first at 3.27 pm. He was seen wearing a white formal shirt with long sleeves and riding a motorcycle, in the footage. The footage showed the man arriving from the right side of the road, and making a U-turn about 10 feet from the gate. On his third visit, the suspect had a black sling bag in which he possibly carried the murder weapon, according to the investigators. The sensational murder of the journalist had sparked outrage across the country and triggered several protests across the country and especially in prominent parts of Karnataka. Indian Air Force (IAF) frontline fighter Sukhoi Su-30MKI will soon be equipped with indigenous "eyes" to detect even a radar-evading stealth aircraft possessed by India's adversaries in day and night conditions. The Sukhoi Su-30MKI already has a radar that can detect and track the supposed stealth Chinese fighter Chengdu J-20 but with the government deciding to develop a Long Range Dual Band Infrared Imaging Search and Track System (IRST) for the aircraft under Make II sub-category, the IAF jet will be able to locate any plane with stealth characteristics. The IRST can detect and track fighter jets, helicopters and missiles which emit infrared radiation. The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), chaired by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, on Monday approved the procurement of equipment for the Defence Forces valued at over Rs. 6,900 crore including the development of the IRST for Su-30MKI. "The DAC also accorded approval for undertaking Design and Development of the Long Range Dual Band Infrared Imaging Search and Track System (IRST) for SU-30 MKI aircraft under Make II sub category and subsequently, for procurement of at least 100 IRSTs under Buy (IndianIDDM) category. The system will be able to operate in day and night conditions and will substantially enhance the capabilities of the aircraft," the government press release said. In November 2017, the IAF had issued a questionnaire on the IRST and asked: Can the equipment be installed in the Su-30 MKI aircraft without making any structural changes in the aircraft? What is the cooling requirement of the equipment? What is the search range of the equipment in terms of the field of view? Can the equipment undertake automatic tracking? If yes, in what zones of search? Can the equipment undertake air target ranging? What is the maximum track range? Can the ground target detection and ranging be done by the equipment? Ifyes, what are the ranges? What are the detection ranges in RHS and FHS with respect to the target? Can the equipment undertake multi target tracking? If yes, how many targets can be tracked simultaneously? Here is the full list of 30 questions asked by the IAF: 1. Whether the company/Association of Persons (AoP) is eligible as per provisions of DPP 2016? (Eligibility of Participation: Indian vendors only). 2. Whether the vendor can provide an assessment of its capability (Financial and Technical)? If so provide the necessary documentation for verification. 3. Whether 40% Indigenous Composition (IC) can be ensured? 4. Does the vendor envisage the feasibility of achieving future exports? 5. Whether the vendors proposal would be eligible for Make-I or Make-II subcategory of Chapter III of DPP 2016? 6. Whether R&D or ToT through foreign collaboration is proposed by the vendor? 7. Estimated cost of development in case indigenous R&D is proposed? 8. Estimated tentative time period of completion of R&D or ToT. 9. Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) cost of 100 IRST units to be manufactured in India. Technical Aspects 10. Can the equipment meet following broad classification? Long Range Dual Band Infrared Imaged Search and Track System (IRST) for Su-30 MKI aircraft 11. Can the equipment be installed in the Su-30 MKI aircraft without making any structural changes in the aircraft? 12. What is the cooling requirement of the equipment? 13. What is the search range of the equipment in terms of the field of view? 14. Can the equipment undertake automatic tracking? If yes, in what zones of search? 15. Can the equipment undertake air target ranging? What is the maximum track range? 16. Can the ground target detection and ranging be done by the equipment? If yes, what are the ranges? 17. What are the detection ranges in RHS and FHS with respect to the target? 18. Can the equipment undertake multi target tracking? If yes, how many targets can be tracked simultaneously? 19. Can the equipment output the video data? If yes, what is the information content in the video and what is the signal format of the video output? 20. Will be equipment be single dome configuration? Will the equipment have stowing capability? 21. Can the equipment be matched with aircraft mission computer software? What are the ICD requirements of the equipment to ensure full exploitation of capabilities of the equipment? 22. Can the equipment be interfaced with video conversion unit of the aircraft so that the equipment video is directly connected to the Multi Function Display of the aircraft? 23. What are the wavelengths of the laser used in the equipment? 24. What is the maximum range for laser ranging? 25. What is the maximum time that the equipment can be switched ON in air? Is there any restriction on switching ON time in air? 26. What is the maximum power requirement of the equipment? 27. What are the maintenance activities recommended on the equipment before daily use and also the periodic servicing? 28. What are the weight and transport specifications of the equipment? 29. What is the extent of testing of the equipment when mounted in aircraft by using the test equipment? 30. What are the reliability figures of the equipment? A couple of months back, the IAF revealed that the Sukhoi Su-30MKI radar can see the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) operated Chengdu J-20 hundreds of kilometres away IAF chief Air Chief Marshal Birender Singh Dhanoa had said the "Su-30 radar is good enough and can pick it (J-20) up from many kilometers away". He made the comment when asked if the J-20 which was "invisible to the radar" could be a threat. Jakarta: India and Indonesia on Wednesday agreed to upgrade their ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and called for freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region as they signed 15 agreements including one on defence cooperation after extensive talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Joko Widodo. Prime Minister Modi, who arrived in Jakarta on Tuesday night on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, was accorded a red carpet welcome on his arrival at the Merdeka palace, one of the presidential palaces in Indonesia, on Wednesday morning. PM Modi and Widodo had a tete-e-tete before the delegation-level talks. The two leaders highlighted potential areas of cooperation in marine, economy, and socio-culture as well as discussed regional and global issues. In a joint press statement after the talks, PM Modi said India and Indonesia have agreed to upgrade their ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. He said that India's Act East Policy and the vision of SAGAR (Security and Growth for all in the Region) matches President Widodo's Maritime Fulcrum Policy. "As mutual partners and neighbours, our worries are similar. It is our duty to ensure maritime security and safety. This is also for the safety of our economic interests," the prime minister said. "In the Indo-pacific region, we, as partners, have mutual interests in each other's progress and well-being and that's why we have agreed upon mutual vision and principles for the Indo-pacific region," he said. Modi also strongly condemned the recent terror strikes on three churches in Indonesia's second-largest city Surabaya, and said India stands resolutely with Jakarta in the fight against terror. "Such tragic incidents give a message that it is the need of the hour to strengthen the efforts being taken on the global level to combat terrorism," Modi said. The two countries signed 15 agreements including on the cooperation in the field of defence, space, science and technology, railways and health. PM Modi said that India and Indonesia will double their efforts to take bilateral trade to USD 50 billion by 2025. Recalling the visit of ASEAN leaders in January to attend the Republic Day parade in New Delhi, Modi said India-ASEAN partnership can become a guarantee of peace not only in Indo-Pacific region but also beyond it. A joint statement issued later said that the two leaders discussed the shared vision of the two countries on maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific and expressed their willingness to strengthen it for promotion of peace, stability and bringing in robust economic growth and prosperity to the region. They reiterated the importance of achieving a free, open, transparent, rules-based, peaceful, prosperous and inclusive Indo-Pacific region, where sovereignty and territorial integrity, international law, in particular UN Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS), freedom of navigation and overflight, sustainable development and an open, free, fair and mutually beneficial trade and investment system are respected, the statement said. The two sides also acknowledged the need to maintain maritime safety and security for peace, stability and sustainable economic growth and development in the maritime waters of the Indo-Pacific region. With a coastline of 7,500 kms and more than 1,380 islands and over two million sq. Km of Exclusive Economic Zone, India occupies a central position in the Indo-Pacific, while Indonesia as the largest archipelagic state in the world is a fulcrum that connects the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean, the statement said. "The two oceans represent a combined maritime region which is important for global maritime trade and commerce," it added. The two sides welcomed the elevation of bilateral relationship to the level of Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and creation of new mechanisms like bilateral security dialogue, trilateral dialogue, signing of an enhanced defense cooperation agreement and agreement on cooperation in outer space. Noting that free and open seas are essential for peace, stability and prosperity of the region and the international community, the statement said the two leaders underscored the importance to address the emerging maritime security issues facing the Indo-Pacific region including the smuggling of people, arms, drugs and money; illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing; and the movement of terrorists. The two leaders agreed to a shared vision for maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region to harness the opportunities and to meet the challenges together as Comprehensive Strategic Partner. They also agreed on enhancing trade and investment cooperation, promoting sustainable development of marine resources, expanding cooperation in disaster risk management, fostering tourism and cultural exchanges, promoting maritime safety and security and strengthening academic, science and technology cooperation. Modi also extended advance Eid greetings to the Indonesian people, saying "on behalf of India's 1.25 billion people, I wish you prosperity, good health and great success." Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority country. New Delhi: Praising former President Pranab Mukherjee's decision to accept an invite for an RSS event, Haryana Minister Anil Vij said on Wednesday that it is a nationalist organisation and that every citizen should compulsorily join it - even if it is for some time. Known for making controversial remarks - he had recently compared Rahul Gandhi to Nipah Virus, Vij said that joining RSS should be made mandatory. "Pranab Mukherjee's decision to accept invitation to RSS event is really appreciable. RSS is a nationalist organisation that develops a person's character. It should be made mandatory for every citizen of the country to join RSS for some time," he told news agency ANI. Former Pres Pranab Mukherjee's decision to accept invitation to RSS event is really appreciable. RSS is a nationalist organisation that develops a person's character. It should be made mandatory for every citizen of the country to join RSS for sometimes: Haryana Minister Anil Vij pic.twitter.com/60Tm8EflOc ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 Netizens almost immediately countered Vij by saying 'mandatory' has a forceful connotation and that if at all, parents sending their children in school should be made compulsory. Some even suggested that joining the Indian Army for some time instead of RSS can better help the country. MSBSHE HSC Result 2018: The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary & Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) is all set to announce the Maharashtra Board Class 12 results 2018 on Wednesday at 1 pm. Candidates can check their Maharashtra Result 2018 scorecards at mahresult.nic.in, results.maharashtraeducation.com, examresults.net/maharashtra and maharashtra.indiaresults.com. The Maharashtra Board was held from February 21 to March 20. The Maharashtra Board MSBSHSE is expected to announce the following results: Maharashtra HSC Class 12th Arts Result 2018 Maharashtra HSC Class 12th Science Result 2018 Maharashtra HSC Class 12th Commerce Result 2018. Steps to check Maharashtra Board Class 12 HSC 2018 exam results online Step 1: Visit official website one of the following websites: mahresult.nic.in results.maharashtraeducation.com examresults.net/maharashtra maharashtra.indiaresults.com Step 2: Click on the link which says Maharashtra Board Class 12th Results OR Maharashtra HSC Result 2018 Step 3: Enter your roll/registration number and other required details and hit submit. Step 4: Results will be displayed on the screen. Candidates are advised to download the MSBSHSE Maharashtra HSC Class 12th Results 2018 and take a print out of the same. Steps to check Maharashtra Board Class 12 HSC 2018 exam results via SMS Candidates can see their Maharashtra Board Result 2018 via SMS. To receive results via SMS, type MHHSCSEAT NO and send it to 57766. Over 14 lakh students appeared for the exams which were held in 9,486 junior colleges and 2,822 centres across the state of Maharashtra. A total of 5,80,820 students registered for Science, 4,79,863 students for Arts, 3,66,756 students for Commerce, and the 57,693 students for the vocational stream. MUMBAI: The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) has announced the MSBSHE HSC Result 2018 on Wednesday morning. However, the board will upload the individual subject-wise results post 1 pm on the websites: mahresult.nic.in results.maharashtraeducation.com, examresults.net/maharashtra, maharashtra.indiaresults.com. Steps to check Maharashtra Board Class 12 HSC 2018 exam results online Step 1: Visit official website one of the following websites: mahresult.nic.in results.maharashtraeducation.com examresults.net/maharashtra maharashtra.indiaresults.com Step 2: Click on the link which says Maharashtra Board Class 12th Results OR Maharashtra HSC Result 2018 Step 3: Enter your roll/registration number and other required details and hit submit. Step 4: Results will be displayed on the screen. Candidates are advised to download the MSBSHSE Maharashtra HSC Class 12th Results 2018 and take a print out of the same. Steps to check Maharashtra Board Class 12 HSC 2018 exam results via SMS Candidates can see their Maharashtra Board Result 2018 via SMS. To receive results via SMS, type MHHSCSEAT NO and send it to 57766. Over 14 lakh students appeared for the exams which was held in 9,486 junior colleges and 2,822 centres across the state of Maharashtra. A total of 5,80,820 students registered for Science, 4,79,863 students for Arts, 3,66,756 students for Commerce, and the 57,693 students for the vocational stream. The passing out parade of the 134th course of the National Defence Academy was held on Wednesday in Khadakwasla, near Pune. The parade was reviewed by President Ram Nath Kovind. Speaking on the occasion, the President said the Armed forces are a symbol of excellence and dedication for the entire country. "This parade comprises cadets from all parts of India and from a variety of communities. Its harmony speaks for our essential unity as much as for our pluralism as a society," he said. A soldier or an officer in uniform, irrespective of whether he or she is from the Army, the Navy or the Air Force, evokes admiration and trust everywhere in the country #PresidentKovind pic.twitter.com/IK8Gp5QcDO President of India (@rashtrapatibhvn) May 30, 2018 Applauding the men and women in the uniform, he said: "a soldier or an officer in uniform, irrespective of whether he or she is from the Army, the Navy or the Air Force, evokes admiration and trust everywhere in the country. If a fellow citizen sees a member of the Armed Forces at a railway station or a market or at any other place, there is an immediate emotion of pride and reassurance. This is due to the unparalleled and unquestioning service to the nation in times of war and peace, on the border or within the country during a natural calamity." He also added that the Armed Forces are not merely about doing a job but about answering a calling. "Today, the cadets have become role models for our young people, guarantors of our peace and prosperity, and guardians of our nation." He expressed confidence that the graduating cadets would prove worthy successors to the unflinching and fearless officers who have preceded them. Earlier, the Convocation Ceremony of 134th course was held in Pune on Tuesday with Chief of Integrated Defence Staff to the Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee (CISC) Lt Gen Satish Dua as the Chief Guest. Cadets of National Defence Academy (NDA) showcased an impressive Physical Training & Equestrian Display today as part of the events to mark the Passing Out & Convocation of 134th NDA course. Lt Gen Satish Dua, CISC was the Chief Guest at this function. pic.twitter.com/egWgiO9oGG HQ IDS (@HQ_IDS_India) May 29, 2018 336 cadets got the degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University which included 81 cadets in Science stream, 191 cadets in Computer science stream and 64 cadets in Arts stream. Eight cadets from friendly foreign countries were also awarded degrees during the programme. Lt Gen Satish Dua, CISC, an alumnus of 55th National Defence Academy (NDA) Course himself, laid a wreath and paid homage to the Martyrs at the Hut of Remembrance at NDA in a poignant ceremony to mark the passing out of 134th NDA Course. pic.twitter.com/SbpdDSABb2 HQ IDS (@HQ_IDS_India) May 29, 2018 Academy Cadet Adjutant GK Reddy won the Chief of the Army Staff Trophy presented by General K Sundarji for standing first in Science stream. CSM SS Bisht got the Admiral's Trophy presented by Admiral Sureesh Mehta for standing first in BSc. (Computer Science). Cadet PM Kiran bagged the Chief of the Air Staff trophy presented by Air Chief Marshal NC Suri for standing first in Social Science stream. Mumbai: Shiv Sena's verbal assault on BJP seems to have no end with Sanjay Raut of the party on Wednesday charging the Election Commission of failing to act against BJP workers accused of distributing money in the recent Palghar bypoll. Raut claimed that his party workers had caught BJP workers distributing money during the Palghar bypoll and the matter was reported to the EC. "(But) The EC did not take any action. If similar inaction is shown by EC all over India, then it means EC is acting like a 'Tawaif' (Mistress) of a political party," he told news agency ANI. Like Raut, several Shiv Sena leaders - including chief Uddhav Thackeray - have taken sharp pot shots at the BJP. Earlier this week, Thackeray called the party 'murderous' in an editorial in party mouthpiece Saamna. "Today, the BJP has become a mad murderer that stabs anybody coming in its way," he wrote, before adding that he felt like hitting UP CM Yogi Adityanath with his own footwear because he had not removed his chappal when putting a garland around a photo of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. Adityanath had promptly returned fire. Shiv Sena and BJP have always had a love-hate relationship. The two parties had entered into an uneasy alliance to form the government in Maharashtra but Shiv Sena eventually pulled out and has now said it would fight the 2019 Lok Sabha elections on its own. Many of its leaders have since also voiced support for prominent members of the opposition whom the BJP has targeted for one reason or the other. New Delhi: Senior Congress leader and former union minister, P Chidambaram said on Wednesday that former president Pranab Mukherjee should tell the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as to what was wrong with their ideology. "Now that he has accepted invitation there is no point debating why he accepted it. The more important thing to say is, sir you have accepted the invitation, please go there and tell them what is wrong with their ideology," he was quoted as saying by ANI. The RSS has invited Mukherjee to address newly recruited sangh workers on June 7 in Nagpur. Mukherjee has given his consent to participate in the programme, RSS' Akhil Bhartiya Prachar Pramukh Arun Kumar had told PTI. Mukherjee will be the chief guest at the valedictory session of the 'Tritiya Varsh Varg' or the Third Year Course organised by the RSS. "We have invited the former President of India and it is his greatness that he has given his consent for participating in the programme," Kumar had said. Earlier in 2018, Mukherjee had invited top sangh leaders at the launch of the Pranab Mukherjee Foundation. On the other hand, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had also called on Mukherjee during the last days of his tenure as president. Meanwhile, senior Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala on Wednesday sent a letter to Mukherjee requesting him to refrain from attending the RSS function. In the letter, he said Mukherjee's decision to attend the function had come as a "rude shock" to secular minds of the country. Chennithala, a leader of the opposition in Kerala Assembly, alleged that RSS has been trying to divide the country on religious lines and to run the incumbent government by remote control. "Being one of the tallest leaders of the great Indian National Congress, which has been responsible for preserving the secular fabric of this country, your decision has invited unparalleled disgruntlement among the rank and file of the Congress party," the letter said. "As a person who has served as the first citizen of our country and the greatest ambassador of secularism, I request you to reconsider your decision to attend the RSS meet on June 7, 2018," it added, PTI reported. Another Congress leader and West Bengal party chief Adhir Chowdhury on Wednesday expressed surprise over Mukherjee's decision to attend the RSS event. "My question is does he (Mukherjee) think his previous comments against RSS were wrong ... We still remember how Pranab Mukherjee, as a senior leader of the Congress, had criticised RSS as a communal and a divisive organisation," he said. Congress leader V Hanumantha Rao too said on Wednesday that Mukherjee should withdraw his decision to attend an RSS event as chief guest "in the interest of secularism". The AICC secretary and former Rajya Sabha member said that Mukherjee has been held in high esteem by former PM Rajiv Gandhi, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Congress president Rahul. "Their (RSS) thinking is Hindutva. They are not secular. They want 'Hindu desh'. How can he (Mukherjee) go? In this country, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, everybody is there... So my request is he should rethink (his decision to attend the RSS meet) and he should not go," he said. (With Agency inputs) Mumbai: Seven people were injured when a refrigerator exploded in a house in Maharashtra's Kolhapur district this morning, a police official said. The blast occurred around 7.30 am in the rented house in Kolhapur's Shiroli area, located about 370 km from here, apparently due to a short-circuit behind the fridge, he said. Those who sustained injuries included two women and a minor girl, he said. The victims were admitted to a local hospital and they were reported to be out of danger, the official said. The MIDC Police has initiated a probe into the incident, he added. TN HSC Plus One Result 2018: Over 91 per cent students cleared Tamil Nadu HSC Plus One Results 2018, results of which were declared by the Directorate of Government Examinations (DGE) Tamil Nadu earlier on Tuesday. The pass percentage of girls stood at 94.6 while that of boys 87.4. The overall pass percentage is 91.3. Over eight lakh students appeared for the Tamil Nadu HSC +1 exams this year 2018. The exam was held from March 1 to April 16. Candidates can view their HSE (+1) First Year results on the official websites tnresults.nic.in, www.dge.tn.nic.in and www.dge.tn.gov.in. Steps to check TN HSC Plus One Result 2018 Step 1: Visit one of the following websites tnresults.nic.in dge.tn.nic.in dge.tn.gov.in indiaresults.com examresults.net Step 2: Now click on HSE (+1) First Year - Examination Results March 2018 link Step 3: On the new page, enter your Registration number and date of birth. Click on 'Get Marks' Step 4: Your result will be displayed on the screen Candidates are advised to download the TN HSE (+1) First Year results and take a printout for future reference. This is the first time that the Directorate of Government Examinations held Class 11 standard board exams Tamil Nadu HSC Plus One results 2018 declared, Check here CHENNAI: TN HSC Plus One Results 2018 will be released by the Directorate of Government Examinations (DGE) Tamil Nadu in a matter of minutes. Moments before the results, the websites started responding slowly as several students logged on to check their results. Candidates can view their HSE (+1) First Year results on the official websites tnresults.nic.in, www.dge.tn.nic.in and www.dge.tn.gov.in. A notice on the official website states, HSE (+1) First Year - Examination Results Expected on 30th May 2018 at 09:00 Hrs. TN HSC Plus One exam was held from March 1 to April 16. The board has already announced the results for Tamil Nadu plus two (Class 12) examination on May 16, 2018. Steps to check TN HSC Plus One Result 2018 Step 1: Visit one of the following websites tnresults.nic.in dge.tn.nic.in dge.tn.gov.in indiaresults.com examresults.net Step 2: Click on HSE (+1) First Year March 2018 results Step 3: On the new page, enter your roll number/registration number and other required details. Click on submit Step 4: Your result will be displayed on the screen Candidates are advised to download the TN HSE (+1) First Year results and take a printout for future reference. The result for SSLC Class 10 was declared on May 23, 2018 in which around 94.5 per cent students had cleared the examination. New Delhi: A favourite among tourists and accorded the UNESCO World Heritage status, the toy train in Darjeeling derailed on Wednesday en route to Siliguri. The train was making its way from Darjeeling to Siliguri when one bogey came off the track at the Kurseong railway station, according to news agency ANI. While no casualties were reported, officials quickly reached the spot and passengers were safely escorted out. The services, it is learnt, are currently halted. Running on narrow gauge tracks since 1880, the toy train - operated by Darjeeling Himalayan Railway - connects several parts of Darjeeling with the plains. Promising breath-taking views of the hills and valleys, the train now makes use of diesel although steam power is employed in certain sections. FEROZPUR: Unable to marry his girlfriend, a dejected Pakistani national decided to walk up to the Indian side of the international border hoping to get killed by a BSF bullet but was instead arrested and put behind bars. According to reports, 32-year-old Mohammad Asif was apprehended by 118 Battalion of the Border Security Force on Monday near the Mabboke border post. Asif was later handed over to the Mamdot Police by the BSF officials. During his interrogation, Asif told officials that he walked towards the Indian border hoping that a bullet from the BSF jawans would pierce his heart and end his sufferings. He initially wanted to hang himself but changed the plan as that would not have been the right thing to do during the holy month of Ramzan. Asif, a resident of Jalloke village in Pakistan's Kasur district, was madly in love with the sister-in-law of his eldest brother Atik-ur-Rehman. Asif decided to end his life after twice being denied permission by the woman's family to marry her. Both Asif and the woman's family strongly disapproved of their relationship, which forced him to think of ending his life. Asif claimed that he and his girlfriend wanted to get married but the woman was forced to marry someone else. The woman got divorced sometimes back. Asif again pleaded with his family to let him marry her, but they refused this time too. Asif comes from a well-off family that owns around 25 acres of land and has also cleared his senior secondary exams. Asif has been booked under the Indian Passport Act and the Foreigners Act, according to Station House Officer (SHO) of Mamdot Police Station, Rashpal Singh. (With PTI inputs) JAKARTA: On the second day in his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was filmed flying a kite with Indonesian President Joko Widodo. The two leaders with broad smiles on their faces flew kites in a kite exhibition in Jakarta. Watch the video below: #WATCH PM Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo fly kites at a Kite exhibition in Jakarta pic.twitter.com/pQg39OgvOZ ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 PM Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo at a Kite exhibition in Jakarta pic.twitter.com/RpILedrIOF ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 PM Modi landed in Indonesia's capital Jakarta, in the first leg of the ongoing of three-nation tour of Southeast Asia. This visit will further the convergence of our political, economic and strategic interests, tweeted PM Modi. PM Modi held talks with President Widodo, also visited various places. Both Leaders held extensive talks on bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest, and provided strategic directions that would further enhance the solid and expanding relations between the two countries, said a release from Ministry of External Affairs. On May 31, Modi will make a brief stopover in Malaysia on his way from Indonesia to Singapore to meet newly elected Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Mahathir, who governed for more than two decades became, at the age of 92, the world`s oldest elected leader earlier thius month. On June 1, Modi will call on Singapore President Halimah Yacob and then hold a summit with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Later in the evening, he will deliver the keynote address at the Shangri-La Dialogue, becoming the first Indian Prime Minister to do so in the Track I annual inter-governmental security forum. With Agency Inputs Jammu: A group of unidentified terrorists hurled grenade on a joint checkpoint of CRPF and the Jammu and Kashmir Police in the Pulwama district of South Kashmir on Wednesday. The grenade, however, missed its target and fell in a nearby orchard and exploded. #SpotVisuals: Terrorists hurled grenade towards a joint checkpoint of CRPF and Police in #Pulwama, however the grenade fell in a nearby orchard & exploded there. More details awaited. #JammuAndKashmir (visuals deferred by unspecified time) pic.twitter.com/K1XpG2sLe0 ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 No one was `hurt in the incident. Reports said that the joint checkpoint near Circle Road PCR in Pulwama was attacked by the terrorists who fled from the scene immediately. A manhunt has been launched and the entire area has been cordoned off by the security forces. In a related development, a massive protest erupted in Jammu and Kashmir`s Pulwama district after the grave of a slain Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) commander was desecrated allegedly by security forces. Protests broke out in Drabgam village after the area residents found that the tombstone on Sameer Tiger's grave damaged and banners and flags put up at the graveyard torn up. The protesters accused the security forces of desecrating the grave. Sameer Tiger, one of the most wanted Hizbul Mujahideen commanders, was killed in a gunfight with the security forces on April 30. (With Agency inputs) Bengaluru: Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy said on Wednesday that saving farmers was the priority of his government. He also promised to honour his commitment to waive farm loans within 15 days. Kumaraswamy, under attack from the BJP over the alleged delay in fulfilling his pre-poll assurance to the farming community, met representatives of farmers groups and progressive peasants to discuss the problems faced by them. "We will come to a decision in 15 days. In 15 days, it will get completely implemented... Whatever may be the difficulty, our government is committed to maintaining fiscal discipline, and also saving you (farmers)," he told the meeting after listening to farmers for about three hours. Kumaraswamy said he and Deputy CM G Parameshwara will discuss the issue with Congress president Rahul Gandhi. He added that he would call a meeting of representatives of nationalised banks in 2-3 days and seek information about farm loans extended by them. The meeting was attended by Parameshwara, deputy leader of opposition in the Assembly Govinda Karajola (BJP), and senior officials of the state government. In the run-up to the Assembly polls, the JD(S) leader had promised to write off agricultural loans totalling a whopping Rs 53,000 crore within 24 hours of coming to power. I am committed to waiveoff farmers' crop loans. As promised within 6days of assuming office, I have called the farmers to deliberate on the issue. Today inthe meeting farmers have given me their suggestions&insights on how, for whom, and to what extent loans should be waived.1/n CM of Karnataka (@CMofKarnataka) May 30, 2018 I am taking #Farmers into confidence &will go by their suggestions onthe issue. I have directed officials to frame modalities accordingly in 15days. I assure the decision will be inline with farmers'demands, and I will not do somersault like the former CM @BSYBJP onthe issue.2/n CM of Karnataka (@CMofKarnataka) May 30, 2018 Not just me, even farmers will not accept or agree any politician's attempt to politicise this issue. 3/3#farmloanwaiver CM of Karnataka (@CMofKarnataka) May 30, 2018 Meanwhile, BJP's Karnataka unit chief and Leader of Opposition in the Assembly, BS Yeddyurappa, on Wednesday threatened to launch a stir against the state government accusing Kumaraswamy of "betraying" farmers on the farm waiver loan issue. He said that the CM told a meeting of farmers that he would waive loans of small and marginal farmers in 15 days and think about the rest in the second phase, but "he had promised to waive Rs 53,000 crore loan. Is he playing political drama?" CM @hd_kumaraswamy has betrayed the farmers of Karnataka by going back on his promise of waiving the farm loans of 53,000 crore completely in one go. @BJP4Karnataka will leave no stone unturned in ensuring that the govt waives off every single farm loan of our Annadatas. B.S. Yeddyurappa (@BSYBJP) May 30, 2018 Yeddyurappa was invited to attend the meeting chaired by Kumaraswamy with farmers' organisations today, but he had deputed Karajol on his behalf. Yeddyurappa asked, "If you (CM) had to ask Rahul Gandhi, why did you announce Rs 53,000 crore farm loan waiver ahead of the election? Why did you say in Delhi that you will resign if you can't waive the loan? You are trying to betray people. No farmer will believe you, I condemn your act of betrayal..." (With PTI inputs) New Delhi: The mutual fund industry is betting big on IT firms as its equity exposure to the sector climbed to all-time high of nearly Rs 71,000 crore in April amid depreciating rupee and market volatility. Since January, MF houses have increased weight on the sector, which gets a major chunk of its revenues in US dollars. MF's allocation to software stocks stood at Rs 70,773 crore as on April, accounting for 7.37 percent of their total equity assets under management (AUM) of Rs 9.6 lakh crore, according to data available with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi). In comparison, the exposure was at Rs 64,265 crore in March. It was at Rs 42,023 crore in April 2017. At current levels, the MF industry has the highest exposure to software sector since August 2009. Data is not available for sector-wise exposure before that time, when the equity funds had deployed Rs 11,913 crore (6.71 percent) in software shares. This year has seen a consistent growth in investment in software stocks by equity fund managers with fund infusion growing from Rs 29,937 crore in January to Rs 70,773 crore in April. Industry experts said that fund managers raised their allocation to software stocks due to declining rupee against the US dollar. Like exporters, IT companies earn majority of their revenue in dollars. Depreciating rupee means exporters get more rupee per US dollar. Indian rupee is currently hovering at around 68-level against dollar. The BSE IT index jumped sharply by over 18 percent percent so far this year, while the BSE's benchmark Sensex grew by just 2.5 percent during the period under. Among others, MFs have an exposure of Rs 96,727 crore in finance space, followed by consumer durables (Rs 64,476 crore), auto (Rs 55,370 crore), construction project (Rs 43,224 crore) and petroleum products (Rs 37,143 crore). New Delhi: Legendary actress Sridevi breathed her last on February 24, 2018, in Dubai where she had gone to attend a family wedding. Her loss created a huge void which can never be filled again. Sridevi's elder daughter Janhvi Kapoor is all set to make her Bollywood debut with 'Dhadak' which is produced by Karan Johar. Janhvi featured in her first ever magazine cover for 'Vogue India' recently. Mentor Karan Johar interviewed her for the magazine and the budding actress opened up on how life changed overnight after Sridevi left. She revealed that noted actress Sridevi had actually seen 25 minutes of Janhvi's debut film 'Dhadak' and made some keen observations. She said in the interview, She (Sridevi) was very technical about it. The first thing she told me was the things I needed to improveshe felt the mascara was smudged and it really bothered her. The second half has to be different, she told me, You cant wear anything on your face. Thats all she told me but she was happy. Janhvi also opened up on how life changed after Sridevi's demise. She said, Of course. I could always be the baby with her. When Id wake up, the first thing Id do was ask for her. Id need her to put me to sleep sometimes and she literally had to feed me. The day before she (Sridevi) left for the wedding, I had to shoot, but I couldnt sleep, so I was like, I need you to come and put me to sleep. But she was packing, so by the time she came to me I was half asleep. But I could feel her patting my head. Further, adding on how younger sister Khushi is more maternal towards her she said, Ive always been very bad at that. Khushi is very maternal with me. I am a full baby. She takes care of me. Now she comes and puts me to sleep sometimes. 'Dhadak' is directed by Shashank Khaitan and is hitting the screens on July 20, 2018. It stars Ishaan Khatter opposite Janhvi Kapoor in the lead roles. The film is Hindi remake of Marathi superhit 'Sairat'. Japan reported killed at least 333 minke whales in 2017/18 for research-related purposes, according to a report released by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Of these, 122 were reportedly pregnant when they were hunted down. The IWC has said that two vessels were fitted with whaling canons, which fire spears at high velocity, and sent out to hunt whales. It is alleged that the canons were also equipped with grenades. In all, 344 whales were targeted but 11 are believed to have managed to escape. The rest were not so lucky. And although the official reason for the endeavour was deemed research, critics say it is a hollow defence because the whales would eventually be sold for their meat. Japan is one of several countries that have signed IWC's whale hunting moratorium, according to newshub.nz. This means Japan has committed itself to not hunt whales for commercial purposes. Animal and whale activists however strongly suspect the country of conducting commercial hunting expeditions on the sly. In a meeting of IWC in 2010, countries like Japan, Norway and Iceland asked for the ban on commercial whaling be lifted. The appeal has been strongly opposed as also has been a compromise solution which could allow whaling for commercial purposes of smaller species. TUTICORIN: Tamil superstar Rajinikanth on Wednesday blamed anti-social elements for the anti-Sterlite protests last week that resulted in the tragic death of at least 13 people in police firing in Tuticorin. "The attack on the collector's office and setting on fire (Sterlite) quarters was not done by the common people. Some anti-social elements infiltrated... (the protesting locals). It is their handiwork," he said. ''If you undertake protest for each and everything, Tamil Nadu will be turned into a cemetery,'' the actor said. The entire problem started after anti-social elements attacked police & burned down Collector's office, as a result peaceful protesters were killed. If you undertake protest for each and everything, Tamil Nadu will be turned into cemetery: Rajinikanth on #Thoothukkudi violence pic.twitter.com/Nmw6RWWCjb ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 The iconic actor also expressed grief that 'this noble protest' had ended on a bloody note. He made these remarks while interacting with media after meeting those injured in the police firing. Rajinikanth, however, rejected demands for Chief Minister K Palaniswami's resignation over the issue. The actor, who gave away Rs 10,000 relief to each of the 48 injured persons, said pro-Jallikattu protests in Tamil Nadu last year also saw infiltration of 'anti-social elements'. He had earlier announced a relief of Rs two lakh each to the families of the 13 deceased. The veteran Tamil movie star also called for a Jayalalithaa-style 'iron fist' policy to crush such people in the best interest of Tamil Nadu. "The government should crush such anti-social elements with an iron fist. On that front, I laud Jayalalithaa as she kept such persons under check with an iron fist. They should follow her policy and keep them under check, as otherwise, it will result in great danger for Tamil Nadu," he said. He also called for action against those who attacked policemen during the May 22 protest. Thirteen people were killed in police firing on May 22-23 when violence broke out at the protest by locals, demanding the closure of Sterlite Industries in this district over pollution issues. On the Opposition's demand for resignation of the chief minister, Rajinikanth sought to know how quitting could be a solution. "If you demand resignation for everything, what (is the purpose)... I don't want to talk about that," he said. To a question, Rajinikanth said that he had "no confidence" in the state government appointed one-man inquiry commission under retired Madras High Court judge Aruna Jegadeesan to probe the Tuticorin violence. The actor, who has announced plans to join politics, said constant agitations may not yield solutions and added that one should move courts for redressal of their grievances. Agitations often happen in the state, sometimes for "genuine reasons," he said, adding that people should be careful against being incited. ''Too many protests could dissuade trade and investors from coming to Tamil Nadu, affecting employment opportunities,'' he said, adding agriculture has already been hit due to water scarcity. The actor cautioned Vedanta Ltd, which runs Sterlite Industries, against moving court over the Tamil Nadu government's closure order of the copper smelter unit, saying "they are not humans if they do so." "With so many deaths and injuries, they should not even think of doing that," he said, adding, nothing can stand before people's power. Rajinikanth faulted the police intelligence for its 'big mistake' in failing to detect the presence of anti-social elements in the protests. At the hospital, the actor spoke to the injured and was seen holding hands of some of them. Earlier, speaking to reporters in Chennai ahead of his visit, Rajinikanth expressed regret that his visit to Tuticorin had come at a very "difficult time" and added that going there was his 'goodwill gesture.' To a question on the war of words between the AIADMK and the DMK over the May 22 incident, he said there should be no blame game on such matters and the focus should be on moving ahead. (With PTI inputs) LUCKNOW: Repolling at 73 booths in Kairana Lok Sabha constituency passed off peacefully on Wednesday with an estimated voter turn out of 61 percent, the state election commission officials said here. The Election Commission had yesterday ordered repolling at these polling stations in view of technical snags in EVM-VVPAT machines during the bye-election on Monday. Around 80,000 voters were eligible to cast their votes at the booths where the repolling was held today. Opposition Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal, as well as the ruling BJP, had complained of electronic voting machines (EVM) malfunctioning at these booths. The repoll began at 7 am and ended at 5 pm in 23 polling stations at Nakur, 44 in Gangoh and one station at Thana Bhawan in Saharanpur and five in Shamli. On Monday, 54 percent polling was recorded in Kairana seat, which fell vacant following the death of BJP MP Hukum Singh, whose daughter Mriganka Singh is the saffron party candidate in the bypoll. Mriganka Singh is contesting against Rashtriya Lok Dal's Tabassum Hasan, who is also supported by the Congress, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party. Counting of votes will take place tomorrow. Bareilly: Barely two months after Unnao gang-rape case involving BJP legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar came into the limelight, yet another Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA has been accused of raping a woman. Kushagra Sagar, a BJP MLA from Badayun, allegedly raped his house help's daughter for more than two years on the pretext of marrying her. The victim has alleged that the legislator is set to marry another woman on June 17 and that he tried to settle the matter by paying her Rs 20 lakh. "I will commit suicide if I don't get justice, said the victim. I have been receiving threats as well and have become a subject of ridicule in society, she added. According to local authorities, the victim's mother worked as a house help in the legislator's house. The victim filed a complaint on Tuesday. An investigation has been initiated in the matter. The accused MLA's father, former BSP MLA Yogendra Sagar, is in jail for gang-raping and abducting a college student in 2008. The victim later died in a road accident and Yogendra was later booked under murder charges in 2016. Earlier this month, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) booked rape accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar for allegedly framing the father of Unnao gangrape victim in an Arms Act. The BJP MLA came under fire after an 18-year-old woman alleged that Sengar and his associates raped her in June 2017 and that authorities had refused to register her complaint. UNNAO: A 17-year-old girl died after suffering burn injuries, with her family alleging that she was set afire by a jilted lover in Uttar Pradeshs Unnao district. The girls family said in a police complaint that the accused barged into her house and put vermillion on her forehead before pouring kerosene. A 17-year-old girl died after suffering burn injuries, with her family alleging that she was set afire by a jilted lover at Achalganj police station area in Uttar Pradeshs Unnao district. The girl, identified as Neha, was allegedly set ablaze by Vikas, a resident of the same village. He barged into her house and put vermillion on her forehead before pouring kerosene, the family said in a complaint. The girl was rushed to a hospital by villagers where doctors pronounced her dead, police said. A case was lodged on the complaint of the father of the deceased and investigation is on, they added. Superintendent of Police Harish Kumar, however, said preliminary investigation suggest that it could be a case of suicide as the girl was in a relationship with the man and was unhappy as his marriage had been fixed somewhere else. China recognises that the future of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) depends much on the political stability that Islamabad can ensure and the country's financial climate in the time to come. Pakistan's political stability has been a matter of international spotlight for years and critics of CPEC have repeatedly pointed towards it as one of the biggest risks in CPEC. It is a risk that experts in China too are well aware of, apart from the obvious shortcomings of the economy. "In the past few years, investors from both China and Pakistan got too excited about the CPEC, and they overlooked the problems with the Pakistan economy," Mei Xinyu, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Cooperation, told the state-run Global Times. "Now, they need to carefully assess potential risks in some projects, and Pakistan's ability to repay its debts." (Also read: CPEC now threatens to destroy our industry by lifting import tariffs, say Pakistani officials) Earlier this week, Pakistan-based Dawn reported that the country had asked China for fresh loans worth up to $2 billion. In April, Chinese banks had already lent $1 billion to Pakistan. With the International Monetary Fund already expressing concern over the country's macroeconomic future, the concerns may well be rubbing off on the Chinese as well. The added possibility of political instability does not do much to help either. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, widely seen as only a caretaker Prime Minister, is expected to face a stiff challenge when Pakistan holds elections in July. The suspected role of the military behind the wings may further dent the process of democracy here. Add rampant corruption and it makes for a cocktail possibly too deadly for the Chinese to gulp. "Political instability and widespread corruption are still serious issues in Pakistan, and it is crucial to strike a balance between political strategy and business profitability," Global Times quoted Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University of China, as saying. Nontheless, China has attempted to highlight that there are more advantages than disadvantages associated with CPEC and are firm that it would help in regional stability. Profitability, however, may well be a differnt ball game - one much riskier. A prominent Russian journalist and critic of President Vladimir Putin was shot dead in Ukraine where he had fled into exile following threats, police said on Tuesday. Arkady Babchenko, 41, died of his wounds in an ambulance after his wife found him covered in his blood in their home, police said, adding they suspected the murder was due to Babchenko`s professional activities. Babchenko, a former soldier in the Chechen war who became one of Russia`s best-known war correspondents, had left his homeland fearing for his life after criticising Russian policy in Ukraine and Syria. He had been denounced by pro-government politicians in Russia over comments on social media about the Russian bombing of Aleppo in Syria`s war, and over his characterisation of Russia as an aggressor towards Ukraine. "The first and the most probable version is his professional activity," Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko said at a televised press briefing when asked what police suspected lay behind the murder. Babchenko`s wife is in a state of shock and police are unable to speak to her, he said. Ukrainian authorities released a drawing of the man they suspect is Babchenko`s assassin, around 40-45 years old, with a grey beard and wearing a cap. Two years ago, Pavel Sheremet, a Belarussian journalist known for his criticism of his home country`s leadership and his friendship with the slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was blown up in a car bomb in central Kiev. "Putin`s regime takes aim at those who cannot be broken or intimidated," Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and adviser to the interior minister, wrote on Facebook. Babchenko`s house had run out of bread and he had gone to the shops to buy some, Gerashchenko said. He was gunned down on Tuesday by someone waiting for him in the stairwell at the entrance to his home. He shot him in the back several times. "Today in Kiev on the threshold of the apartment where he lived, famous Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was shot and killed, a consistent opponent of the Putin regime and a friend of Ukraine." In a statement, the Russian foreign ministry said journalists were being killed with impunity in Ukraine. "Bloody crimes and total impunity have become routine for the Kiev regime. We demand that the Ukrainian authorities make every effort to promptly investigate," it said on Facebook. The Investigative Committee of Russia said it had opened a criminal case into Babchenko`s death. Babchenko took part in the war in Chechnya as a soldier. He then he became a war reporter for several Russian newspapers. On Feb. 27 last year, he wrote on Facebook that he had left Russia. He reported on Russia sending private military contractors to Syria and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17 in July 2014 in eastern Ukraine, for which investigators last week held the Russian state responsible. Russian authorities again denied any connection with the plane`s downing over an area of Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatist forces. In his last Facebook post before he was killed, Babchenko recalled an incident four years ago when he was meant to fly in a Ukrainian military helicopter in Ukraine`s embattled Donbass region. The helicopter was overloaded and he was not permitted to fly. It was shot down and 14 people on board were killed. "And I was lucky. Second birthday, it turns out," he wrote. Read the original text at 112.ua. As a result of the brilliant special operation conducted by Ukrainian law enforcers, the killer who received the order to murder Arkadiy Babchenko and the organizer of the murder were detained. In order to better document those who ordered and the organizers of the crime - representatives of Russian special services - they had to be assured that the hired killer had successfully completed the order. Only a very limited circle of people knew that the murder of Arkadiy Babchenko was staged. This was done to prevent the slightest possibility of information leakage. According to Babchenko himself, he earned his living in emigration (he left Russia in 2017) with reports and feuilletons. He wrote posts and asked readers to send him money. "In the age of forty, I am sticking around the world with one suitcase it is not what I was exactly expecting. But I would handle it. It is enough to live on," Babchenko said in an interview. Babchenko's posts were mostly about Russia. Very critical posts. Here are a few quotes from Arkadiy Babchenko concerning Russia and Ukraine. * * * Are you a Russophobe? - Yes, this country made me a Russophobe. * * * There is no Russophobia in Ukraine, no one is afraid of the Russians. There is hatred for the Russian state, no matter what your nationality is: Russian, Komi, Buryat, Jew or someone else. Now this is called a zaporebrik (derogatory word for Russia Ed.), the word katsap (term of abuse used by Ukrainians of Russians Ed.) is practically not used. This is what Leo Tolstoy wrote about in Hadji Murat: no one talks about hatred, this feeling is stronger than hatred. * * * Do not treat Ukraine as a zoo in which wild bears live. They understand from the very first word that we have Russian dialect, and everyone clearly understands that we are Russians, nobody touches us, nobody kills. If you behave like a man, you will be treated like a man. If you come here, then probably you are not the enemy. But if you now put on a St. George ribbon and go to the metro station, then you will get a bash on the bonce immediately. * * * Now Ukraines focus is directed on Europe, it does not want anything to do with Russia at all. Here is a ditch with crocodiles, and live as you wish. Understand yourself who is to blame - Putin, the intelligentsia, 86%, Buryat tankmen no one cares. 2700 portraits of the dead are placed in Kyiv at the Mykhailivska Cathedral wall. There you come and see how people are stoned. And you will not explain anything to anyone, although no one will shout aloud about it. * * * As a citizen of the aggressor state, I am absolutely not ready to discuss the Ukrainian government, this is a sovereign state, and what is happening in the Ukrainian government is the affairs and problems of the Ukrainians. Russianss problem here is to take our tanks out of here, to prevent more people from coming here and killing the others. I do not think it is possible to say something about Poroshenko. * * * What is it like to criticize Russia from abroad? Try to move away, my friends. Attain the age of forty years, and then find yourself abroad without documents, apartment or property. Try whether it is good or bad. * * * What happened to me resembles situation with Ukraine. I lived, did not touch anyone and just wanted to have a law-based state where the law and human rights are respected, where people are not killed, and the oppositionists are not shot on the bridge, and people are not put into jail for four years for a Facebook post. I did not come to the Russian state, the Russian state came to me, killed and imprisoned my friends, and I was squeezed out of the country. And now you are asking me: is it good for me to criticize Russia from here? Yes, it is freaking awesome, because I just simply hate this state, it broke my life and life of the neighboring country, where more than two million people became IDPs. * * * All that Russia should do is de-occupy Crimea, get out of there with its troops, and what will happen to Crimea is not our business, because Ukraine is a separate independent state. * * * Of course, there were some preconditions for the civil war in Donbas. But I am sure that nothing would happen there if Russia and Strelkovs detachments did not intrude. In my opinion, this is the first war in history, which was unleashed solely through the means of propaganda. At the drop of a hat. * * * I would give an opportunity to make Russian a second state language in Ukraine. I do not see any problems in this. People already speak Russian. Why should we reinforce the situation? Why do we raise this issue? Why should we impose a situation if people do not want it? You still will not make them learn the Ukrainian language. *** Propaganda in Russia has created some kind of paranoid, schizophrenic reality, in which two or even ten mutually exclusive postulates coexist. You're driving with some taxi driver. He says: "Oh, Ukrainians did everything right, they threw off Yanukovych.Good for them." You sit and think: "This driver must be an advanced thinker." And then he adds: "Yes these "Jews-Banderites" kill the Russians." Such mutually exclusive postulates fit into the mind of a huge number of Russians. * * * Russian society, of course, is sick. Xenophobia, hatred, rejection of dissent. All these things are curable. The easiest way is to cure it by war and by casualties. The fastest way to make society soberly comprehend the reality. But I still hope that, perhaps, this will all end by itself, without such catastrophic cataclysms. * * * The society is really going crazy. What has happened in 1937in Germany is happening now. He had some sort of general schizophrenia. All this was achieved by television - it turned out to be a powerful propaganda tool. We underestimated it. * * * As a rule, there is no public opinion in Russia. Everything will happen as the TV says. In principle, this is a usual state of a developed society. * * * Russia is not Mordor, after all. * * * Putin does not have 80% of support in Russia * * * Annexation of Crimea was really supported by the majority. But war is a completely different matter. It is supported by a minority in Russia (even by sociological surveys). Because Afghanistan, Chechnya, Transnistria, Georgia - the society still remembers these coffins and generally it does not want to fight. But there is a small stratum of some absolutely mad personalities, raised up by the state itself. They have the control levers, and they are capable of different things. * * * Russia is not Ukraine. The authorities are insanely afraid of the Maidan. And I am sure that an order will be to shoot. The 1993rd year has already shown everything: the tanks shelled their own parliament. And this was under Yeltsin, who is considered the most democratic ruler in the last 100 years. Under Putin any attempt of the Maidan will be flooded with blood, no doubts. * * * Any war goes beyond its borders. And this war will necessarily go beyond Donbas, towards Russia. This process has already begun. I think that in the medium term, the whole of Russia will turn into Donetsk Peoples Republic (DPR). * * * Ukraine entered Donbas in the same state as Russia did it in Chechnya in the 94th. Destroyed economy, incompetent army. But still a great hope in Ukraine is connected with the fact that the society has risen. The formation of the state proceeds in a normal, natural way: not from above, but from below. Now society is building a state. And this gives great hope that Ukraine will not become authoritarian, but nevertheless it should be followed. And each time to slap on the wrist any attempt to cultivate hatred. * * * From my egoistic point of view, the more Russians are buried in the sands of Syria, the less they will come to Donbas. Therefore, I have nothing against it. Ertugrul Apakan, the head of the mission also reported over 100,000 violations of the ceasefire Open source Since the beginning of the year, Russian militants violated the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine more than 100,000 times. OSCE Special Monitoring Mission Head Ertugrul Apakan said this at the UN Security Council session. 'Since January this year, OSCE SMM has reported over 100,000 ceasefire violations, after a brief pause in the combat activity; then, the action resumed. Since the year began, the Mission confirmed 107 civilian deaths; most of these people walked on landmines or other sorts of explosive devices. Most of the cases were observed in April and May', Apakan said. On May 29, the OSCE SMM in Donbas reported an attack on their observers in Donetsk region. According to the Facebook post on the official page of the OSCE, two incidents occurred on Tuesday. 'The adversary rudely violated the international agreements, opening fire on the observers of SMM of the OSCE in Ukraine. When OSCE representatives launched a drone near Nelipovka, not far from Toretsk (Donetsk region), a mine exploded not far from OSCE transport - about 250 meters away,' the message said. No casualties were reported. According to the OSCE, the fire was opened from the residential quarters in Horlivka, Donetsk region. The Ukrainian side insisted it never fired on the inhabited localities. The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine told about the changes in Donbas that took place during the first month of the Joint Forces Operation. According to the speaker of Defense Ministry Dmitro Hutsulyak, there are changes - first of all, the militants started to fear. He said this at a briefing, as 112.ua reports. "The Joint Forces Operation has been going on for 30 days already. After changing the format of the operation from the ATO on the JFO, we see significant differences...Firstly, the militants of the Russian-occupation forces are afraid, and this is understandable, of the Ukrainian military - liberators of Donbas. At the same time, Russia continues to provide forces and resources to the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions under the guise of "humanitarian convoys" that are not humanitarian at all, through the uncontrolled sections of the state border. The number of shelling from heavy weapons on the positions of joint forces and peaceful cities in order has significantly increased to provoke the Ukrainian defenders. All the while, the occupiers are attacking from the territory of these towns and villages, " Hutsulyak said. According to him, the Ukrainian Army does not respond to such attacks, so as not to endanger the civilian population. "On the whole, the coordination and interaction of the forces and means of the JFO have changed," the Defense Ministry Speaker summed up. As it was reported earlier, the Joint Forces Operation in Donbas replaced the Anti-Terrorist Operation on April 30 this year. A new format is designed to replace the anti-terrorist operation that has lasted four years. Ukraine's claims about Russia's involvement in the murder of reporter Arkadiy Babchenko are just the 'top of cynicism'. Dmitriy Peskov, the press secretary of the Russian leader Vladimir Putin said this while talking to the press on Wednesday, as RIA News agency quoted him. 'This is the top of the cynicism. Given such a brutal murder, they just go for a Russophobic wish-wash, instead of talking about a comprehensive investigation', he stressed, answering a reporter's question how the Kremlin reacts to Ukraine's statement on Babchenko's murder. Earlier, the counselor of Ukraine's interior minister Anton Herashchenko said that the Ukrainian police will investigate the possible involvement of Russian special services in this case. 'It is clear that one of the lines of enquiry is the actions of Russian special services, aimed at eliminating those getting in the way of poisoning people's minds with the truth about what actually takes place in Russia and Ukraine', he wrote. Arkadiy Babchenko is the Russian journalist, war-time correspondent and the writer. He served with the Russian regular army, surviving the combat action in both Chechen wars (the 1990s and 2000). Later, he prepared a number of reports during the armed conflict in South Ossetia in 2008. Since 2012, the Russian government has been prosecuting him for critical reports against the incumbent authority. In 2017, he and his family left Russia due to constant threats. Since August 2017, he lived in Kyiv, working as a TV host. Moscow has always considered him its enemy, Ukraine's foreign minister says It is too early to say who's behind the high-profile murder of Russian reporter Arkadiy Babchenko; however, Russia has been involved in the similar assassinations in the past. Ukraine's foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin said this at the UN Security Council session on late Thursday. 'Understanding similar cases makes us think that Russia has been using other kinds of tactics to destabilize Ukraine - terrorist acts, acts of sabotage and political murders', Klimkin said. The minister added that Babchenko kept on struggling for democratic Russia, staying in Ukraine, which is why 'Moscow has always considered him its enemy'. As is known, Russian reporter Arkadiy Babchenko was shot dead in Kyiv. Ayder Muzhdabayev, the deputy CEO of ATR TV channel, posted this on Facebook. 'They shot Arkadiy in his back, at his own place', he wrote. The critically wounded man passed away in the ambulance. According to the police, the message came in from Babchenko's wife who found him lying on the floor with the gunshot wound to his back. The operatives and forensics arrived on the crime scene; the investigation is underway. An action to commemorate the journalist Arkady Babchenko, who was shot dead last night, started in Kyiv at the Russian embassy. Radio Liberty broadcasted it on Facebook. Many journalists gathered in front of the embassy. People carry photographs of Arkadiy Babchenko to the Russian embassy and past them at the entrance to the diplomatic institution. As the correspondent of 112 Ukraine TV channel reports, the gates of the embassy were pasted with photographs, and the flowers were laid. There were no clashes so far. There are National Guard who watch the order at the embassy, there are no conflicts. Journalist Chrystyna Bondarenko in Facebook urged to gather and bring flowers to the ATR television channel, where Babchenko worked as the presenter. Also today at 19:00 the action of memory of the killed journalist will take place on Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv. As is known, Russian reporter Arkadiy Babchenko was shot dead in Kyiv. Ayder Muzhdabayev, the deputy CEO of ATR TV channel, posted this on Facebook. 'They shot Arkadiy in his back, at his own place', he wrote. The critically wounded man passed away in the ambulance. According to the police, the message came in from Babchenko's wife who found him lying on the floor with the gunshot wound to his back. The operatives and forensics arrived on the crime scene; the investigation is underway. Vasyl Hrytsak, the Head of SBU, at the briefing said that the death of Russian journalist was staged The organizer of the murder of Babchenko was detained in Kyiv a few hours ago, as Vasyl Hrytsak, the Head of SBU, said at the briefing, 112 Ukraine reports. At around three hours ago the organizer of this crime (Babchenkos murder, - ed.) we detained in Kyiv. The investigative procedures with this citizen are still being conducted along with the searches in his place of residence and temporary state, Hrytsak stated. At the briefing, Vasyl Hrytsak, the Head of SBU, stated that the death of Russian journalist was staged. This was a special operation. He has also stated that the murder of Russian journalist Arkadiy Babchenko was ordered by Russian special forces. Ukrainian citizen was enlisted for that. Arkadiy Babchenko is the Russian journalist, war-time correspondent and the writer. He served with the Russian regular army, surviving the combat action in both Chechen wars (the 1990s and 2000). Later, he prepared a number of reports during the armed conflict in South Ossetia in 2008. Since 2012, the Russian government has been prosecuting him for critical reports against the incumbent authority. In 2017, he and his family left Russia due to constant threats. Since August 2017, he has lived in Kyiv, working as a TV host. Russia reacted to the staged murder of Babchenko: the Investigative Committee of Russia opened a criminal investigation , Russias Foreign Ministry demanded that Ukraine conducts an on-the-spot investigation of the journalists murder. Later, Vasily Nebenzya, Russias Permanent Representative to the UN, doubted Ukrainian jurisdiction. I promised to die in 96 dancing on Putins grave and making a selfie with M1 Abrams on Tverskaya, Arkadiy Babchenko wrote on his Facebook page. This became his first publication after the staged murder conducted within SBU special operation. I guess, that is my fate, to resuscitate once in four years, the journalist joked. Yesterday, on May 29 it was reported that Arkadiy Babchenko, a Russian journalist, was murdered in Kyiv. He was allegedly shot in his apartment. Ukraines police suggested that the murder of the journalist was connected with his professional activity. There were also reports on Russias connection. Vasyl Hrytsak, the Head of SBU, at the briefing stated that the murder of Russian journalist Arkadiy Babchenko was ordered by Russian special forces. Ukrainian citizen was enlisted for that. Arkadiy Babchenko is the Russian journalist, war-time correspondent and the writer. He served with the Russian regular army, surviving the combat action in both Chechen wars (the 1990s and 2000). Later, he prepared a number of reports during the armed conflict in South Ossetia in 2008. Since 2012, the Russian government has been prosecuting him for critical reports against the incumbent authority. In 2017, he and his family left Russia due to constant threats. Since August 2017, he has lived in Kyiv, working as a TV host. Russia reacted to the staged murder of Babchenko: the Investigative Committee of Russia opened a criminal investigation, Russias Foreign Ministry demanded that Ukraine conducts an on-the-spot investigation of the journalists murder. Later, Vasily Nebenzya, Russias Permanent Representative to the UN, doubted Ukrainian jurisdiction. Open source The shares of the companies of Russian gas pipelines Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 were frozen after the decision of the Stockholm Arbitrage in favor of Naftogaz Ukraine in a dispute with the Russian Gazprom. This was reported by Interfax with reference to a source in the industry. There is no official confirmation of the arrest of shares of the project companies. The press service of Gazprom has so far told that they are investigating this issue. As it was reported earlier, Russia's energy monopolist Gazprom refused to abide by the decision of Stockholm arbitrary court. Gazprom's delegation offered the Ukrainian side to either submit amendments to the gas deal or to break it. Naftogaz considers such actions a violation and disrespect for the decision made by Stockholm arbitrary court. Naftogaz refuses to accept Gazprom's offers. The Russian company's denial to obey the decision of the international arbitrary questions Gazprom's reliability as European gas industry's partner', the message said, quoting Naftogaz's Chief Commercial Officer Yuriy Vitrenko. Two arbitrary disputes between Gazprom and Naftogaz at the Arbitration Institute lasted for over three years: the dispute on the gas debt from June 2014 to December 2017, on the transit agreement from October 2014 to February 2018. There are less than two years left until both agreements terminate (at the end of 2019). The Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce has granted the lawsuit of Naftogaz as to compensation for the volumes of transit gas that had not been delivered by Gazprom on February 28. According to the decision of the court, Naftogaz got a $4,63 billion compensation for the transit gas that had been agreed on, but not delivered by Gazprom. Ambassadors of these countries expressed their condolences in connection with the death of the journalist Open source Sweden and Lithuania called to bring to justice to the murderers of journalist Arkadiy Babchenko. Ambassadors of these countries, Margot Wallstrom and Linas Linkevicius, expressed their condolences in connection with the death of the journalist and posted relevant statements on Twitter. One more voice has been silenced. Horrified by murder of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kyiv - only the latest among oppositional journalists who have been killed in RU and abroad. Important that the responsible are brought to justice. My thoughts are with his family, she wrote. One more voice has been silenced. Horrified by murder of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kyiv - only the latest among oppositional journalists who have been killed in RU and abroad. Important that the responsible are brought to justice. My thoughts are with his family. Margot Wallstrom (@margotwallstrom) 30 2018 . At the same time Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius expressed his condolences to the family and friends of Babchenko. Shocked to learn about the killing of Russian oposition journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kyiv tonight. Deepest condolences to his family and friends. Those responsible for this brutal crime must be brought to justice, the message says. Shocked to learn about the killing of Russian oposition journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kyiv tonight. Deepest condolences to his family and friends. Those responsible for this brutal crime must be brought to justice. Linas Linkevicius (@LinkeviciusL) 29 2018 . As is known, Russian reporter Arkadiy Babchenko was shot dead in Kyiv. Ayder Muzhdabayev, the deputy CEO of ATR TV channel, posted this on Facebook. 'They shot Arkadiy in his back, at his own place', he wrote. The critically wounded man passed away in the ambulance. According to the police, the message came in from Babchenko's wife who found him lying on the floor with the gunshot wound to his back. The operatives and forensics arrived on the crime scene; the investigation is underway. PLEASE NOTE! Due to the March 23, 2020 NM DOH Public Health Order, These Event Listings Are Not Accurate! All non-essential businesses are closed, public gatherings are prohibited! (One day some of these events will be rescheduled or will resume, but they are not happening now!) YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Rector of the Yerevan State University (YSU) Mr. Aram Simonyan has been hospitalized, according to the universitys spokesperson. Gevorg Emin-Teryan, head of the press service of YSU, did not give further details. Earlier yesterday students were protesting outside the university, demanding the resignation of the rector. Other demands included an independent internal audit, dissolution of the board of trustees and temporary suspension of the student council and the union. The rector and the protesters subsequently held a meeting, but it failed to give any result. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Human Rights Defender of Armenia Arman Tatoyan on May 29 met with President of the European Court for Human Rights (ECHR) Guido Raimondi in Strasbourg, the Ombudsmans Office told Armenpress. The meeting was also attended by judge appointed from Armenia Armen Harutyunyan and ECHR Registrar Roderick Liddell. During the meeting the officials attached importance to the practice of presenting specific opinions to the Constitutional Court, developing legislative drafts, presenting special opinions by the Ombudsman over the ongoing cases in the European Court and etc. According to the ECHR partners, these new initiatives of the Human Rights Defender are an example of the best international experience and will further contribute to introducing the Courts legal standards. The quality of the Ombudsmans reports was highly appreciated. In his turn Arman Tatoyan thanked the ECHR President for appreciating his work and stated that it will be constantly directed for introducing the courts legal standards in the Armenian legal system. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Minister of transport, communication and information technologies Ashot Hakobyan on May 29 received Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Kazakhstan to Armenia Timur Urazayev, the ministry told Armenpress. During the meeting the Kazakh Ambassador congratulated minister Hakobyan on his appointment. The officials discussed the commercial ties between the two countries, the cooperation programs in transportation, communication and IT spheres and the future actions, including the ongoing joint steps within the EAEU agreement. The Kazakh Ambassador highly valued the joint efforts with Armenia in the digitization process within the EAEU cooperation. He introduced their policy in the development of IT, in particular, the technological startups in Kazakhstan. Cooperation opportunities on this direction were also discussed during the meeting. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan The leading conference for MSPs in the telecom and IT space announces it will accept speaking proposals for the 2019 Fort Lauderdale, Florida event. Trumbull, CT May 30, 2018 TMC today announced it has opened the call for speakers for MSP Expo held January 29 February 1, 2019 at the Greater Fort Lauderdale / Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. MSP Expo brings together telecom and IT MSP professionals and thought leaders to network and explore the latest innovations and business practices. MSP Expo is collocated with ITEXPO, the communications and business transformation event where influential buyers gather to make their purchase decisions. After two incredibly successful events in 2018, we are excited to begin planning MSP Expo 2019, said Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC and conference chairman. This is an unmatched opportunity for industry leaders to get in front of hundreds of MSPs looking for the education they need to grow their businesses. We are eager to see this years speaker submissions and look forward to building another must-attend conference program. To submit a proposal, interested speakers should complete the online form by June 29, 2018 here: http://www.mspexpo.com/east/call-for-speakers.aspx#form. Speakers must adhere 100% to TMCs no commercialism policy. If speakers cannot avoid commercialism, please do not submit a proposal. Questions regarding speaking opportunities at MSP Expo should be sent to Dave Rodriguez at 203-852-6800 x146 or Paula Bernier at 203-852-6800 x114. For more information email events@tmcnet.com. For media inquiries, contact Jessica Seabrook. Companies interested in exhibiting, sponsorship or advertising packages for ITEXPO should contact TMC's Joe Fabiano at 203-852-6800 x132 or Maureen Gambino at 203-852-6800 x109. For the latest MSP Expo news, updates and information follow the event on Twitter at @MSPExpo. About TMC Through education, industry news, live events and social influence, global buyers rely on TMC's content-driven marketplaces to make purchase decisions and navigate markets. As a result, leading technology vendors turn to TMC for unparalleled branding, thought leadership and lead generation opportunities. Our in-person and online events deliver unmatched visibility and sales prospects for all participants. Through our custom lead generation programs, we provide clients with an ongoing stream of leads that turn into sales opportunities and build databases. Additionally, we bolster brand reputations with the millions of impressions from display advertising on our news sites and newsletters. Making TMC a 360-degree marketing solution, we offer comprehensive event and road show management services and custom content creation with expertly ghost-crafted blogs, press releases, articles and marketing collateral to help with SEO, branding, and overall marketing efforts. For more information about TMC and to learn how we can help you reach your marketing goals, please visit www.tmcnet.com and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, @tmcnet . Media and Analyst Contact: Jessica Seabrook Marketing Director TMC 203-852-6800 x 170 jseabrook@tmcnet.com Share this Page Edited by Maurice Nagle YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. The Nagorno Karabakh conflict should be settled exclusively through peaceful means, Armenias Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in an interview to the Russian service of Deutsche Welle, Armenpress reports. During the meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, we have discussed the Karabakh conflict in addition to other issues. It was very important to state that the peaceful settlement of the conflict is the only solution to the issue. Here there is no option of solving the issue by force. This is not only Armenias, but also Russias stance. I have also raised the issue of arms sale by Russia to Azerbaijan. In my opinion we had a constructive discussion, PM Pashinyan said. He stated that he has a friendly attitude both towards the Russian President and the leaders of the remaining EAEU member states. Armenia is a peaceful country, the Armenian people are peace-lovers. But at the same time we derive from our countrys interests. We have close relations with Russia, and I hope these relations will further deepen, the Armenian PM said, adding that Armenia also has very good ties with the European Union, the US, Iran, Georgia and all countries that wish and are ready to develop the partnership with Armenia. Talking about the Sochi summit of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), Nikol Pashinyan said there was a positive environment. I think at this stage very good personal relations have been established. I am confident that these relations will become better, the PM noted. The Armenian PM informed that he discussed with Putin the Armenia-Russia ties, as well as issues relating to the multilateral cooperation within the EAEU and the CSTO. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Recently, the 4th Media Content 2018 three-day forum was held in Jermuk at the initiative of Ucom. Issues related to the technical and legal, as well as rebroadcasting matters of the media content field were discussed during the conference. Ucoms international partners got acquainted with the technical capabilities of the companys current fixed and mobile networks, their development prospects in Armenia and the world, the new formats of content delivery through those networks, the current state and development trends of media market in Armenia, as well as with Ucoms innovation strategy, Ucom told Armenpress. We have discussed a number of topical issues and also wanted to show our partners that our network is the only one in Armenia that is ready to deliver content not only to the end users in Armenia, but throughout the world. We have built the most up-to-date network in Armenia, and now our task is to upgrade our OTT-solutions like MediaRoom, U!Pay and etc. for the benefit of end-users, Hayk Yesayan, Co-Founder and Director General at Ucom, said. The existence of the modern network gives us, the Ucom partners, a chance to broadcast our channel and its content in various formats, both as the base packages and in a video-on-demand format, with the help of mobile television in phones, smartphones and tablets, and in HD quality in the nearest future. If Ucom hasnt had created ways to deliver content to the end-users, we would not have been able to reach our potential audience, including youth, Sergey Piriev, the head of foreign regional broadcasting at , said. The presentation of Ucoms capabilities was informative. The development can go in different directions, including the IPTV, OTT and VR-solutions, the opportunities are truly vast. We will be able to broadcast our TV content not only in classic Russian and English, but also in French, German, Spanish and Arabic languages. This means having television pavilions in these countries, having not just a direct translation of the events, but the alternative view of the news broadcasting, noted Mariana Zhukova, representative of Russia Today TV Distribution Network Development Service. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Reporters and journalists from Armenia, Artsakh and the Diaspora from over 70 countries are taking part in the 9th Pan-Armenian Forum. The forum kicked off today in the Diaspora ministry HQ in Yerevan. The forum will focus on the media coverage of the latest events in Armenia, the role of reporters in the events and journalism and press of the First Armenian Republic. Armenia celebrated the centennial Republic Day on May 28 the 100th anniversary of establishment of the First Armenian Republic. ARMENPRESS Editor-In-Chief Mrs. Narine Nazaryan is also participating in the forum. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. The Yerevan Police Department (YPD) has launched a search for a missing minor. On May 28, a woman reported to police that her 14-year-old daughter Susanna Movsisyan has gone missing. The woman said that the girl left their house and didnt return. YPD said that the girl is average built, with a height of about 155-160 cm, with long black hair and black eyes. YPD asked anyone possessing any information about the whereabouts of the girl to contact police or visit the nearest police station. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. In Armenia the people should decide who must be in power and who not, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in an interview to the Russian service of Deutsche Welle, stating that everything will be done for that, reports Armenpress. The problem of oligarchy exists not only in Armenia, but also in many countries. We should guarantee the peoples right to free expression of will. And we also should guarantee that all decisions of the government are in accordance with the interests of the people, rather than any person or a group. If we manage to create such a reality, the problem will be automatically solved. We do not plan to fight against anything, we are going to fight for the sake of something. We plan to ensure the peoples power, it will definitely happen, PM Pashinyan said. The journalist asked the PM why he called on the citizens to stop civil disobedience campaigns, and in response Pashinyan said the disobedience campaigns have a meaning only when there is no power in the country which acts based on the interests of the people. Now there is a leadership in Armenia which has the peoples support. I think when people have a leadership which can really act on behalf of them, all issues can be solved by that leadership, the Prime Minister said, adding that all corrupt officials should leave. Talking about the necessity to hold snap parliamentary elections, the Armenian PM said elections were not held in Armenia for a long time so that the people will feel themselves as winners. For us its very important to organize such elections that people will feel that they have won. We are sure that our problems started when the election results started to be falsified, Nikol Pashinyan said. As for the question regarding the repatriation, the PM said the first step on this path has already been taken. According to him, this revolution is a great signal for Armenians since many of them left Armenia not only due to social issues, but to the fact that many of them didnt accept the atmosphere, the situation existing in Armenia. The Prime Minister said now the situation has changed. He expressed confidence that Armenia will be an interesting country both for Armenians living abroad and investors. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan TBILISI, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Georgia and Armenia are linked with centuries-old friendship and good relations which is reflected in their partnership, Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili said at a joint press conference after the meeting with his Armenian counterpart Nikol Pashinyan on May 30, Armenpress correspondent reports from Tbilisi. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and gaining independence we managed to develop a mutually beneficial cooperation based on mutual trust, the Georgian PM said. He added that Armenias stability and democratic development are strictly important for Georgia. We were closely following the recent developments in friendly Armenia when the Armenian people should the whole world a vivid example of adherence to unity and democratic principles. I congratulate my dear guest on being elected Prime Minister of Armenia, the Georgian PM said. Giorgi Kvirikashvili said he once again reaffirms the Georgian governments and his readiness to conduct a productive work aimed at deepening the cooperation with Armenia. Today we discussed the main cooperation directions, highlighted our aspirations to have an intense political dialogue, touched upon the commercial ties, the cooperation issues in transport, energy, culture and tourism. Despite the high-level cooperation, there is a great potential to further deepen it, he said. The Georgian PM said during the meeting with the Armenian PM they focused on the regional threats and highlighted the importance of regional peace and stability. During the visit Armenias Prime Minister will also visit Georgias southern regions where he will meet with the local people. Ethnic Armenians of Georgia are actively involved in the countrys development process which is an evidence of Georgias multinational unity. Our population, regardless of the national identity, serves for one goal Georgias strengthening and development of regional ties, the Georgian PM said, once again expressing readiness for future cooperation. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan arrived in Georgia on a two-day official visit on May 30. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate Doctor Tom Catena will arrive in Yerevan on May 31. Doctor Tom Catena, 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate, will visit Armenia ahead of the 2018 Aurora Prize Award Ceremony and a series of special events. This year, the special weekend of events will take place on June 8-10, culminating with the announcement of the 2018 Aurora Prize Laureate. A highlight of the weekend of events is the annual Aurora Dialogues, an international forum where leaders from the humanitarian and business communities will convene to discuss ways the global community can take meaningful action to solve some of the worlds most pressing problems, reports Armenpress. Tom Catena will arrive in Yerevan on May 31 and will start his tour of Armenia and Artsakh. On June 4 he will pay tribute to the victims of the Armenian Genocide at the Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial where he will also plant a tree in the Memory Alley of Tsitsernakaberd complex. On the same day Catena will attend the presentation and First Day of Issue Ceremony of a special postage stamp featuring him as the 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate. Doctor Tom Catena arrived in Sudan as a Catholic missionary from Amsterdam, New York. He has since saved thousands of lives as the sole surgeon permanently based in Sudans war-ravaged Nuba Mountains where humanitarian aid is restricted. It is for this service that he received the Aurora Prize, granted by the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, created on behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and in gratitude to their saviors. On June 5Tom Catena, who is the only surgeon treating people in the Nuba Mountains, will arrive in the town of Sisian, in Armenias southern Zangezur region, where he will stop over in the Garrison hospital to meet fellow doctors. The meeting will be followed by a conversation with the local healthcare workers and other professionals at the Sisian House of Culture.The film Armenian Doctors in Nuba will also be screened there. The film depicts the activities of three Armenian doctors who went to Nuba to substitute for doctor Catena in May 2017, to allow him to visit Armenia and attend the Aurora Prize Weekend. He will have an opportunity to enjoy the gems of Southern Armenia visiting Goris, Halidzor, Tatev Monastery complex and the Tatever ropeway. After the meeting with local community he will head to Artsakh, where he will meet with youth, students, representatives of local NGOs and the medical community as well as state officials. During a similar visit last year, Doctor Catena said, Ive never been exposed to such hospitality in my life. Im very touched by the people here. I feel like Im with my own family when I come here. Everywhere I go, its the same reception. Really, you have something very special here. I want the Armenian people to know you have something very special in this country. Dont lose that. Following this visit, he will return to Sudan and continue his work. YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. ARMENPRESS has adopted a policy on providing reliable, valid and operative information committed to its mission, Narine Nazaryan Editor-in-Chief of ARMENPRESS state news agency, said in her remarks at the 9th Pan-Armenian Forum of Journalists in the ministry of Diaspora on May 30. She said the news agency has been guided by these principles while covering the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the 2016 April Four-Day War, key events for the country, as well as the recent domestic political events in Armenia. Moreover, the Armenpress coverage of the recent events in Armenia has been widely cited by leading foreign media outlets, such as CNN, BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times. I am happy to welcome you here in a symbolic year for Armenia, the 100th anniversary of the First Republic. I welcome you with a special proud as I am representing a news agency that is on the same age as the First Republic the first news agency of Armenia, Narine Nazaryan said. Touching upon the past, present and future vision of the news agency, Narine Nazaryan said that the telegraphic agencies in the world have been established later than the print press, in the first half of the 19th century in connection with the invention of telegraphic technique. They found their places as first informers about the events taking place in different parts of the world. According to her, the birth of such agency in Armenia was a significant event, the agency had a key role to play in the countrys public-political life. The adoption of the first law on its establishment is mentioned in the December 18, 1918 protocol of the National Council of Armenia. According to this document the countrys all state and public structures are obliged to provide information to the agency, moreover, they were banned to provide that information to a private individual or other structures before reporting the news agency. The Armenian Telegraph Agency has been founded by renowned political figure Simon Vratsyan whose name is written in the agencys archival documents as the first manager, Narine Nazaryan said. The agency was named ARMENPRESS in 1972. Narine Nazaryan stated that ARMENPRESS provides news in four languages - Armenian, Russian, English and Arabic. She highlighted the importance of the Arabic newsline from the perspective of presenting key events taking place in Armenia, Artsakh, the Diaspora and the world for the Middle East and the whole Arab-speaking world at this important era. The news agencys English and Russian newsfeeds are also highly appreciated by partners. ARMENPRESS is a member to 4 international media organizations. The agency presents Armenia in CIS Information Council, Black Sea Association of National News Agencies, Council of national news agencies of Southeastern Europe and the Balkan countries (observer) and News Agencies World Congress. ARMENPRESS chaired over the Black Sea Association of National News Agencies in 2014-2016, the sessions of which and the CIS Information Council were held in Yerevan in 2014. ARMENPRESS has signed agreements on bilateral partnership with over 20 leading news agencies nearly 1/3 of which have been signed during the last 5 years. TASS, Reuters, Xinhua, IRNA, MENA, BTA, AGERPRES, BELTA, Kazinform and many other media outlets with which information and photo exchange is conducted are among our partners. Narine Nazaryan informed that recently Director of ARMENPRESS Aram Ananyan has signed a news exchange and cooperation agreement with the president of Cubas state news agency Prensa Latina in St. Petersburg, Russia within the framework of the media summit as part of the 2018 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. ARMENPRESS provides comprehensive assistance to the news agency of Artsakh - Artsakhpress aimed at its development and strengthening. An agreement of cooperation has been signed with Artsakhpress which assumes internationalization of Artsakhpress and awareness raising about Artsakh through the canals of ARMENPRESS. Narine Nazaryan said the ARMENPRESS press conference hall is one of the active, modern and leading press conference platforms of Armenia. Several events are being held live in the press center in a week. We proudly announce also the implementation of ARMENPRESS: History project within the frames of which 10.000 photos from the news agencys archive have been digitized. All digitized photos are available at history.armenpress.am. The ARMENPRESS team spares no effort to keep the agencys leading role in the Armenian media field and creates firm basis at regional and international media platforms to ensure the agencys presence and develop it. The agency has actively covered, mainstreamed and presented in leading international media outlets all the developments of key importance for the Republic of Armenia, the Editor-in-Chief of the news agency said, stating that the good reputation of reliable partner is valuable for ARMENPRESS. Narine Nazaryan stated that ARMENPRESS will continue its mission on reporting valid and operative information. She expressed hope that the news agency will be as reliable as now for the Diaspora partners, as well as for foreign media outlets. This year ARMENPRESS marks the 100th anniversary of its establishment. We are planning to hold events on the news agencys past path, valuing its importance in the countrys life. The past 100 years only add wisdom and experience in our vision to build the agencys future. We are committed and determined to adequately react to the challenges facing the media outlets, to use the opportunities of the latest technologies in the work, to fight fake news, to increase the readers media literacy, to differentiate fake information in social networks and build the news agency of the future, Narine Nazaryan said. The 9th Pan-Armenian Forum of Journalists has kicked off in the Diaspora ministry on May 30. The Forum is attended by media representatives from Armenia and Artsakh, as well as Diaspora-Armenian reporters from 70 countries. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who is in Georgia on an official visit, visited the Heroes Square in Tbilisi, laid a wreath at the memorial and then departed for the government seat. After the official welcoming ceremony, PM Nikol Pashinyan and his Georgian counterpart Giorgi Kvirikashvili held a one-on-one meeting, the governments press service said. An expanded format meeting with participation of delegations took place after the one-on-one meeting. At the meeting the Georgian PM welcomed the Armenian delegation and once again congratulated Nikol Pashinyan on being elected Prime Minister and the 100th anniversary of establishment of the First Republic of Armenia. The Georgian PM emphasized that his government is ready to take steps to expand the relations between the two countries in various directions and to boost the ties. We were following the latest developments in Armenia with great attention. Our friendly Armenian people displayed unity, which resulted in a democratic peaceful transfer of power. I would like to assure, that we will do our utmost for boosting our relations and for realizing the entire existing potential. We have a good chance to begin the new phase of relations of the two friendly peoples, Georgias Prime Minister said. The Armenian PM thanked for the warm reception and mentioned the deep historic roots of Armenia and Georgia. It is not a coincidence that I am carrying out my first foreign trip to friendly Georgia, with which we are tied with close historic ties of millennia, friendship and mutual respect, Nikol Pashinyan said, adding that the current warm relationship will lead to more strengthening of cooperation. Pashinyan congratulated his Georgian counterpart on the 100th anniversary of Independence Day and spoke about the political developments in Armenia, stressing that the non-violent velvet revolution was the manifestation of the peoples will without any geopolitical context. He said that the development of ties with Georgia will continue to be one of the priorities of Armenias foreign policy. I am sure that our relations will continue being guided with the principle that there are no unsolvable issues, he added. The prime ministers discussed a wide range of issues relating to cooperation in the fields of energy, commerce, transportation, agriculture, tourism, culture etc. Both sides also attached importance to maintenance of security and stability. They also attached importance to preservation of cultural heritage. Pashinyan invited his Georgian counterpart to visit Armenia. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. National security agents are currently working in the head office of Yerevan City supermarket chain. Yerevan City is owned by the family of MP Samvel Aleksanyan. Samson Galstyan, head of the press center of the national security service, refused to give further details to ARMENPRESS. He said additional information will be provided later. Earlier certain media reports said that the state revenue committee has launched operations in the Yerevan City head office, a report which was denied by the committee itself later on. The report said that masked agents of the SRC have stormed into the head office of Yerevan City as well as MP Samvel Alexanyans home. But the SRC said that it has nothing to do with the operations. A security van can be seen parked outside the head office. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan on May 30 received Shane Rosenthal, Asian Development Bank's Country Director for Armenia, the government told Armenpress. Shane Rosenthal congratulated Mher Grigoryan on his appointment, expressing hope that his past path and experience will help to carry out an effective activity for the benefit of Armenia. During the meeting the ADB Country Director for Armenia introduced the process of ongoing programs in partnership with the Armenian government in the fields of infrastructure development, education and energy. The officials also touched upon the construction process of North-South highway and seismic resistant schools. The deputy PM highlighted the need to quickly and effectively implement these projects as an important contribution to Armenias future development. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan met with Speaker of the Parliament of Georgia Irakli Kobakhidze on the sidelines of his official visit in Tbilisi, the PMs Office told Armenpress. The Speaker of the Parliament welcomed the Armenian PMs official visit to Georgia and expressed confidence that it will give new impetus to further developing the bilateral relations at different directions. Irakli Kobakhidze highlighted the active cooperation between the governments and parliaments of the two countries and stated that it will contribute to further strengthening and expanding the ties between the Armenian and Georgian peoples. The Armenian PM said he knows with his experience working as MP in the Armenian Parliament for a long time how important is the parliaments role for developing democratic principles in the states structures. Nikol Pashinyan said the inter-parliamentary dialogue has a unique place in the bilateral relations. Taking into account the fact that Armenia transitions to a complete parliamentary system, it obliges us to raise the bilateral parliamentary cooperation to a new level, PM Pashinyan said. The officials expressed confidence that the regular meetings of the Armenian and Georgian parliamentarians have their contribution to the development of good relations between the two countries. Nikol Pashinyan and Irakli Kobakhidze stated that Armenia and Georgia are able to quickly solve all issues via intensive dialogue, find new partnership formats and opportunities for new mutually beneficial joint projects. Armenias Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan arrived in Georgia on May 30 on a two-day official visit. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Deputy Prime Minister of Armenia Mher Grigoryan received on May 30 the delegation led by Sylvie Bossoutrot, World Banks Country Manager for Armenia, the government told Armenpres. The meeting participants praised the Armenia-World Bank cooperation level and touched upon the past and ongoing projects in different sectors. The deputy PM highly appreciated the consulting and research services provided by the World Bank and assured that they contribute to the development of Armenias socio-economic systems. During the meeting the sides also exchanged views on the conditions created for the activities of SMEs in Armenia and prospects and opportunities for their gradual improvement. Deputy PM Grigoryan said the issues of the effective activities of SMEs are in the governments spotlight, but there is a great potential in general, and the government expects cooperation with the international partners to utilize that potential. The deputy PM and the World Bank representatives expressed readiness to continue the close and productive cooperation aimed at creating favorable conditions for Armenias economic development. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had a one-on-one meeting with Georgias President Giorgi Margvelashvili in Tbilisi as part of the official visit, the governments press service said. At the meeting, President Margvelashvili praised the results of the meeting which took place between the governments of the two countries and mentioned that the discussed issues and initiatives will boost the further development and strengthening of relations. I am glad to meet the democratic Prime Minister of Armenia. I hope that your visit will give new impetus to the Armenian-Georgian relations, which have a history of many centuries, the Georgian president said. Nikol Pashinyan noted that he is happy to have the chance to meet the Georgian president and to discuss the prospects of development and further deepening of relations of the two countries. I am happy that my visit to Georgia is taking place on the background of the ongoing democratic developments in our country, I am convinced that democracy has vital significance for our countries. The conviction of our peoples in bilateral relations is based on love and solidarity, and we wont spare effort to boost them, he said. The PM noted that 2018 is a rather busy year for Armenia from the point of view of large scale events. PM Pashinyan expressed hope that he will have another chance to meet the Georgian president during the 17th La Francophonie summit in Yerevan in October. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, 30 MAY, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 30 May, USD exchange rate down by 0.15 drams to 482.83 drams. EUR exchange rate up by 3.31 drams to 560.81 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate up by 0.04 drams to 7.74 drams. GBP exchange rate up by 0.52 drams to 640.76 drams. The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals. Gold price down by 130.47 drams to 20110.49 drams. Silver price down by 3.10 drams to 255.75 drams. Platinum price down by 66.47 drams to 14033.1 drams. YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol PAshinyan met with the representatives of the Armenian community of Georgia near St. George Armenian Church in Tbilisi, who met him with great enthusiasm. ARMENPRESS reports the Armenian gave a speech, emphasizing that Armenians living in Georgia have full rights to benefit from the peoples victory registered in Armenia, because that victory took place in your Motherland and we always felt your support during the entire process of that victory, Pashinyan said. We call the revolution that took place in Armenia a revolution of love and solidarity. And today I have come here with a message of love and solidarity. I want to say that I love each of you, all together and one by one. I am proud of you, I am proud of your willpower, and I am proud to see in your eyes the pride of being Armenian, the Armenian PM said. He added that he is also proud for the Armenian-Georgian relations. I am proud with a conviction that the relations of our countries will deepen more and more and Armenians will feel better in Georgia and Georgians will feel better in Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan said. Pashinyan also spoke about the concerns that the people can get disappointed, ruling out the possibility of disappointment among the people. The Armenian people will never again be defeated, because the Armenian people are victorious, Armenians are a people of pride and people of the God, Pashinyan concluded. Before meeting with the representatives of the Armenian community in Georgia, PM Pashinyan had visited Khojivank Pantheon, laid flowers at the tombs of Hovhannes Tumanyan, Raffi and Gabriel Sundukyan. English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian received on Amy 30 the students and teachers of students and teachers of Rose and Alex Pilibos Armenian School located in USA, California. Member of the office of California State Senate President, Community figure Baydzar Thomasian was also present. As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Presidents Office, during the meeting the students noted that they have come to the Motherland on a pilgrimage and that they have already been to Artsakh. The President talked with the Diaspora-Armenian students, listened to their opinion and standpoints, answered different questions that mainly referred to the strengthening and development of the Motherland, as well as the involvement of the potential of the Diaspora. The President urged the students to visit Armenia next year again. Each of you should know that he or she has a home here. This is your home and there is no better home in the world as Armenia. You are brilliant young people and you should be proud to be Armenian, President Armen Sarksisian said. At the end of the meeting Baydzar Thomasian conveyed to President Sarkissian the congratulation of the California State Senate President. Rose and Alex Pilibos Armenian School in los Angeles was opened in 1969 and has nearly 1000 students. Photos by Mkhitar Khachatryan English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. Foreign Minister of Armenia Zohrab Mnatsakanyan, who is in Georgia as part of the Armenian delegation led by PM Pashinyan, met with Georgias Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign minister Mikheil Janelidze on May 30, ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the MFA Armenia. Greeting the guest and congratulating on the occasion of assuming the post of the Foreign minister, the Georgian FM noted that he is glad to meet in Tbilisi his counterpart from friendly Armenia. Assessing the fact that the first official visit of the Armenian FM is to Georgia as symbolic, Mikheil Janelidze expressed confidence that it will give new impetus to the development of the friendly relations between the neighboring countries. Thanking for the warm reception, the Armenian FM noted that during his tenure he will take all the possible measures for further developing the Armenian-Georgian relations. Minister Mnatsakanyan noted that there is bilateral readiness for deepening and expanding the existing cooperation, based on mutual understanding and respect. During the meeting the ministers discussed in detail a broad scope of issues referring to the Armenian-Georgian agenda. The expansion of political dialogue, deepening of trade and economic relations, partnership in international platforms and other issues were in the focus of the ministers. The Armenian and Georgian FMs exchanged views on issues of concern for Georgian-Armenians, as well as referred to regional and international pressing issues. Zohrab Mnatsakanyan presented the efforts aimed at a peaceful settlement of Nagorno Karabakh conflict in the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chairs format, reaffirming Armenias commitments to an exclusively peaceful settlement of the conflict. English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, MAY 30, ARMENPRESS. A reception dedicated to the 100tha anniversary of the First Republic of Armenia took place at Tbilisi City Hall organized by the Armenian Embassy in Georgia. The Correspondent of ARMENPRESS reports from Tbilisi that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Margvelashvili and diplomats accredited in Georgia participated in the reception. Armenian PM Pashinyan gave a speech during the event. He emphasized that the Georgian capital Tbilisi is really a city full of energy of joint history of the Armenian and Georgian peoples with deep rooted links. Pashinyan mentioned that todays Republic of Armenia is first of all a republic of love and solidarity. Our peoples must achieve new and new victories and establish joint happiness in the peaceful, free and happy region. This region has to become such, PM PAshinyan said. Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Armenia to Georgia Ruben Sadoyan reminded in his speech that 100 years ago the foundations of the independence of Armenia were laid by the decision of the Armenian National Council in Tbilisi. The Armenian people that passed through the atrocities of genocide restored independent statehood. What was impossible for many became possible for Armenians. It became possible at the cost of the blood of many Armenian patriots who sacrificed the most valuable thing, their lives for the sake of the freedom of the Motherland during the May heroic battles. The May heroic battles once again proved that the will of our people is unshakable, the Ambassador said. Photos by Gevorg Perkuperkyan English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan Not so. Had the "different time and place" Atlantic Yards promises been adhered to, that building--and its similar sibling, "100% affordable" 38 Sixth , which is still accepting tenants--would have aaffordable configuration, without half the units aimed at middle-income New Yorkers who have other options.Original project developer Forest City Ratner in 2005 signed a Memorandum of Understanding with advocacy group New York ACORN (then led by Bertha Lewis) for 2,250 income-linked, "affordable" rental apartments, among 4,500 total rentals and 6,430 overall units. The below-market apartments, as of then, were to be all in "50/50" rental buildings containing 50% market-rate units.Among "affordable" units overall, 900 (40%) would be for low-income households, earning up to 50% of AMI. Three tranches of 450 units (20% each, of the total) would go, respectively, to moderate- and middle-income renters earning up to 100%, 140%, and 160% of AMI. (For the latter group, rents would be set at 150% of AMI.)Then-Council Member deBlasio cheered that plan. The MOU was incorporated that year into the much-promoted Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement , but it remained aspirational.It would not be locked into the governing Development Agreement signed in 2010 with Empire State Development, the state authority overseeing/shepherding the project. While that document does require 2,250 below-market apartments, it doesn't prescribe levels of affordability, just that the units fall within city or state regulatory guidelines.The mayor seems to have forgotten how his administration finessed a media coup. In 2014, as Atlantic Yards faced delays and Forest City was about to sell a majority share (excluding the Barclays Center arena and the modular tower, 461 Dean) to Greenland USA, a subsidiary of a huge corporation owned significantly by the government of Shanghai, the Mayor's office stared down a threatened fair-housing lawsuit from local advocates.The lawsuit--which would've argued that delays in the project left affordable units further out of reach of black Brooklynites being displaced--was averted with a new 2025 deadline for the project's overall affordable housing.In a departure from the long-planned template, there'd be two new "100% affordable" buildings, heralded in a New York Times exclusive, Plan Expedited for Affordable Housing Near Barclays Center in Brooklyn So de Blasio declared victory: "And whats remarkable is that weve secured nearly twice as many affordable unitscompared to 461 Dean, the first Atlantic Yards tower, with 50% below-market apartments"for our city investment. What he didn't say was that the affordability would differ dramatically from that long promised.(Also unmentioned: two all-affordable buildings would ultimately be countered by towers with disproportionate market-rate units, since the original plan was for the 4,500 rentals all to be in 50% market/50% below-market buildings.)Relying on a new, middle-class-focused city housing program --yes, part of "our plan"--called M2 , the 535 Carlton tower would have 50% of its units in the highest income "band." The income ceiling is 165% of AMI, with rents set at 160% of AMI. (That's how 535 Carlton contains "affordable" studios at $2,137 and one-bedrooms at $2,680.)If the administration had followed thel Atlantic Yards promise, only 20% of the building's affordable units would have been in that highest-income band, and with slightly lower income ceilings and rents. Moreover, the income ceiling for low-income units would have remained 50% of AMI, not rising to 60%.I've pointed out these discrepancies regularly in my coverage. A few other journalists and housing analysts have ventilated criticisms. It didn't stick.Because de Blasio, responding at that December interview, continued, "But the essence of what was going on at the time at Atlantic Yards is you have an area that gentrification had essentially saturated, and if you didnt put in some type of housing affordable to low-income people, working class people, middle-class people or any kind of combination thereof, you would have essentially nothing in the surrounding areait would all go upper income."The mayor's not wrong that it's important to have mixed-income housing at such a site, bringing diversity of class (and race) to a gentrifying area. But his argument is essentially a straw man, with de Blasio time-traveling back to restate his general Atlantic Yards support without acknowledging the 2014 affordability switch. Moreover, his description was simplistic.Sure, it makes sense to require below-market housing in exchange for a vast increase in allowable bulk. But most of the site's 22 acres wouldhave instantly gentrified, because housing wasn't allowed in a manufacturing zone, and the allowable housing density in residential blocks was significantly capped.A rezoning--not unlike the plans his administration now pursues--would have been required. So the Atlantic Yards deal was essentially a privately-negotiated rezoning."I still think that was the right impulse," the mayor continued in the interview. "If what was done ended up not reaching the income levels it should in todays terms, lets see if we can re-calibrate it."de Blasio sounded like someone erased his memory card. He'dre-calibrated it. Worse, ever-rising AMI--the calculation of which involves wealthier suburban counties--floats affordable housing even further out of reach of the average Brooklynite.To counteract that, the city could have designate income bands atpercentages of AMI--say, 50%, not 60%. But lower rents, which diminish project revenues, surely were resisted by the developer.In the interview, de Blasio stated, not inaccurately, that the middle-income category is "not the core of what were doing." Indeed, it represents only 9.5% of his administration's housing goals (yet 13% of the units delivered as of the Housing New York 2.0 reboot in November).However, he's been celebrating 535 Carlton throughout, from a groundbreaking pageant through the grand opening , coordinating with developer Greenland Forest City Partners and their consultant, BerlinRosen, which also happens to have advised him, formally and informally.His performance suggests two unflattering explanations. Either de Blasio hasn't bothered to understand a key project or he's chosen to remain obtuse.Until recently, he's faced limited scrutiny and criticism. If and when he decides to pursue higher office, though, presumably he'll have to answer more critical questions about not-so-affordable "affordable housing." Wednesday, May 30, 2018 Ignoring The Polls: Apo and Cervantes Finishing Strong In Uphill Guv Derby, Plus: Tales From The Trail And What Now For Davis? Apo and Cervantes He's a cancer survivor who beat the odds and Jeff Apodaca is bringing that same determination to the final hours of his chase for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, even if the polling insists his dream is out of reach. In one of his final New Mexico is at a crossroads. Do we change direction or continue falling behind? Grisham, Cervantes, Pearce. The politicians who have brought us to last in jobs and education. . . Jeff Apodaca. He'll bring major change to New Mexico. He'll invest part of our $23 billion in investment funds to create jobs, fight crime and fix our schools. Major change or more of the same?You decide. Pretty strong stuff and perhaps effective with the undecided voters who are looking for an outsider. It reminds us a bit of the campaign of Apodaca's Governor father, Jerry Apodaca, who in 1974 ran on the slogan: "The Man Nobody Owns." Meanwhile, observers also credit Cervantes with growth as a candidate during the course of the campaign but question why he waited so long to flip the switch. TRAIL DUST Dem State Auditor candidate Bill McCamley gets the endorsement of his hometown newspaper but his rival Brian Colon turns around and gets the endorsement of Las Cruces Mayor Miyagishima. Which is worth more?. . . Appointed State Auditor Wayne Johnson is unopposed for the GOP nomination. Will the GOP put the necessary money into his race to take on probable nominee Colon?. . . There's not many GOP contest primaries this year but WHAT NOW? Davis, who withdrew from the ABQ Dem US Congress chase this week and Deb and I know that, together, we have the grassroots support to overcome the millions of Republican dollars being spent on the leading opponent. And I know that in the City Council and in Congress, well make a good team, too. Davis won election to the council with 67 percent of the vote in a three way race in 2015. The district is all Dem all the time so it would have to be a strong D to take Davis on in '19. MORE MO? Working to add some momentum to Haaland's endorsement by Davis, the campaign also rolled out the endorsement of liberal icon and ABQ state Senator Cisco McSorley. His senate district overlaps that of Davis' council district. He tells us he is especially impressed with Haaland's strong stance in favor of marijuana legalization, a matter near and dear to his heart. McSorley has served in the legislature for 33 years. We support Damon Martinez for Congress. In 2011 our son, Christopher, was tragically killed by two APD officers in what became an established pattern of excessive use of force. The recent ad attacking Damon Martinez is misleading and disingenuous. The truth is that the 27 instances of deadly use of excessive force by APD, cited in the Department of Justice report, occurred before he was appointed U.S. Attorney for New Mexico. Once appointed, he demonstrated a strong interest and a willingness to listen to community groups and the families of the police shooting victims. We felt that we had a strong advocate who was going to work towards desperately needed reform and sustained change that would be achieved in a collaborative manner. Martinez has also picked up the support of ABQ Westside State Rep. Moe Maestas and ABQ City Councilor Klarissa Pena. THE BOTTOM LINES He was a Republican until June of 2015, but supporters of of Dem land commissioner candidate Garrett VeneKlasen point out that doesn't mean the GOP is secretly hoping he'll win. One of them checks in with this: The GOP calls Garrett a "watermelon" which means that he's green (environmental) on the outside and pink (communist) on the inside. What happened to a communist being a "Red?" Why the downgrade to pink? Oh, that's right, "pinko commie." Hey, even us boomers haven't heard that one in a while. This is the home of New Mexico politics. Interested in reaching New Mexico's most informed audience? Advertise here. ( c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN 2018 He's a cancer survivor who beat the odds and Jeff Apodaca is bringing that same determination to the final hours of his chase for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, even if the polling insists his dream is out of reach. In one of his final TV ads he takes on his two Dem rivals as well as Republican Steve Pearce:Pretty strong stuff and perhaps effective with the undecided voters who are looking for an outsider. It reminds us a bit of the campaign of Apodaca's Governor father, Jerry Apodaca, who in 1974 ran on the slogan: "The Man Nobody Owns."Meanwhile, observers also credit Cervantes with growth as a candidate during the course of the campaign but question why he waited so long to flip the switch.Dem State Auditor candidate Bill McCamley gets the endorsement of his hometown newspaper but his rival Brian Colon turns around and gets the endorsement of Las Cruces Mayor Miyagishima. Which is worth more?. . . Appointed State Auditor Wayne Johnson is unopposed for the GOP nomination. Will the GOP put the necessary money into his race to take on probable nominee Colon?. . .There's not many GOP contest primaries this year but the one in the East mountains of the metro for a state legislative seat is drawing late attention. Greg Schmedes, a UNM physician is running to the right of Merritt Hamilton, painting her as an "establishment" candidate as he tries to lure Trump supporters. Hamilton says Schmedes is trying to talk about national issues that are not central to representing the district. Both have been well financed. Hamilton is favored but we'll be watching that one closely Election Night. The seat became open when GOP Rep. James Smith resigned when he was appointed to the BernCo Commission. The winner of the primary is likely to take the seat in the GOP leaning district in November. After taking a major political hit for his failed congressional campaign, the question now is whether ABQ City Councilor Pat Davis will draw a strong challenger if he seeks re-election next year to his SE ABQ seat.Davis, who withdrew from the ABQ Dem US Congress chase this week and endorsed Deb Haaland , indicated in his endorsement that he plans on staying on the council, saying:Davis won election to the council with 67 percent of the vote in a three way race in 2015. The district is all Dem all the time so it would have to be a strong D to take Davis on in '19.Working to add some momentum to Haaland's endorsement by Davis, the campaign also rolled out the endorsement of liberal icon and ABQ state Senator Cisco McSorley. His senate district overlaps that of Davis' council district. He tells us he is especially impressed with Haaland's strong stance in favor of marijuana legalization, a matter near and dear to his heart. McSorley has served in the legislature for 33 years. And Damon Martinez is firing back at the Emily's List super PAC TV ad accusing him of dropping the ball when he was US Attorney by not prosecuting any APD officers for 27 fatal police shootings. ABQ's Steve and Renetta Torrez, whose son was one of those police fatalities, came with this:Martinez has also picked up the support of ABQ Westside State Rep. Moe Maestas and ABQ City Councilor Klarissa Pena.He was a Republican until June of 2015, but supporters of of Dem land commissioner candidate Garrett VeneKlasen point out that doesn't mean the GOP is secretly hoping he'll win. One of them checks in with this:What happened to a communist being a "Red?" Why the downgrade to pink? Oh, that's right, "pinko commie." Hey, even us boomers haven't heard that one in a while.This is the home of New Mexico politics. E-mail your news and comments. (jmonahan@ix.netcom.com) Nearly two years after unveiling their proposed merger, German chemicals firm Bayer and US agricultural giant Monsanto are on the cusp of finalizing the deal following conditional US government approval. The Justice Department's antitrust division Tuesday announced it was ready to approve the massive transaction once the two companies break off key units where they overlap. The government said the $9 billion in divestitures was necessary to address competition concerns. "This comprehensive structural solution to significant horizontal and vertical competition concerns -- the largest merger divestiture ever required by the United States -- preserves competition in the sale of these critical agricultural products and protects American farmers and consumers," assistant attorney general Makan Delrahim said. The mandated asset sales cover areas of overlap between the two companies including Bayer's cotton, canola, soybean and vegetable seed business and a Bayer herbicide that competes with Monsanto's Roundup product. The companies also must sell key intellectual property and research programs to address competitiveness worries. "Without the agreed-to divestitures, the proposed merger would likely result in higher prices, lower quality, and fewer choices across a wide array of seed and crop protection product," the US agency said. "Under the terms of the proposed settlement, Bayer must divest those Bayer businesses that compete with Monsanto today." The German company, which has been chasing approval from antitrust regulators on both sides of the Atlantic ever since it launched the bid in September 2016, cheered the announcement. "Receipt of the DOJ's approval brings us close to our goal of creating a leading company in agriculture," Bayer CEO Werner Baumann said in a statement. Monsanto, contacted by AFP, sent Bayer's statement. The settlement still must win approval from a US court. The agreement also is subject to public comment under US government administrative procedures. - BASF deal approved - The EU approved the buyout, which is to create the world's biggest integrated pesticide and seeds company, in March. Bayer was previously told by competition authorities, including the European Commission, to sacrifice existing activities in seeds and pesticides worth 7.6 billion euros ($8.8 billion) to homegrown rival BASF in exchange for approval of the Monsanto deal. That means there will be less overlap and fewer savings when Bayer assumes the US firm's product range of genetically-modified seeds and compatible pesticides. The EU Commission said separately on Tuesday that it approved BASF as a suitable buyer for the assets. Environmentalists are unhappy with the deal, fearing it will give too much power to the world's leading manufacturers of GMOs and the controversial weedkiller glyphosate. When launching the bid, Bayer said it would not introduce genetically modified crops in Europe. The deal was part of a wave of consolidation in agriculture that included combinations between Dow Chemical and DuPont and ChemChina and Syngenta. Prior to the US announcement, Bayer had received approval from numerous other regulators, including in China and Brazil. Shares of Monsanto rose 0.7 percent to $127.38, a rare gainer in a down day for global stocks. US authorities said German pharmaceutical giant Bayer and US conglomerate Monsanto can proceed with their merger afer executing $9 billion in divestitures Canada's justice minister on Wednesday ordered an independent review of the extradition of a Lebanese-Canadian academic to France where he was wanted in a deadly 1980 Paris synagogue bombing. Hassan Diab was extradited from Canada in 2014 to face prosecution in France but French magistrates leading the investigation in January dismissed the case for lack of evidence and ordered his release. By then, Diab had spent a decade in jail or under strict bail conditions, most of it in Canada as authorities mulled whether to extradite him. In a letter, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said Diab "was afforded all of the procedural safeguards" provided under Canadian extradition law. Nonetheless, she has asked for an "independent external review" of the matter, she said. With the backing of civil rights groups, Diab had asked for a public inquiry into the role of Canadian justice officials in his "wrongful extradition." Diab and his supporters allege that Canadian officials intervened "to patch up the (French) case to ensure (his) extradition," misled the extradition hearing and suppressed fingerprint analysis that may have helped clear him. Diab's "ten-year ordeal was the direct consequence of actions of senior officials of the Canadian Department of Justice," said the group, which includes Amnesty International and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. The October 3, 1980, bombing of a synagogue on Rue Copernic in Paris, which killed four people and injured about 40, was the first fatal attack against Jews in France since the Nazi occupation in World War II. Diab was accused of planting the bomb inside the saddle bag of a motorbike parked outside the packed synagogue near the Champs-Elysees, where hundreds of people had gathered for Sabbath prayers. The only suspect in the case, Diab was arrested at his home in an Ottawa suburb in 2008 at the request of French authorities who alleged he was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He has insisted that he was in Beirut at the time of the attack to take university exams, which witnesses have corroborated. French prosecutors, meanwhile, have appealed Diab's discharge. A decision is expected on July 6. Canada extradited Hassan Diab to France in 2014 to face accusations he was involved in a deadly synagogue bombing in Paris in 1980 but the case was later dismissed for lack of evidence China on Wednesday lambasted "sudden flip-flops" in US policy after President Donald Trump said he was moving to finalise trade sanctions against it -- even as a US delegation arrived in Beijing for talks. Ten days ago the White House announced a truce in trade hostilities with China, with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin saying that threatened tariffs on Chinese goods were "on hold". But on Tuesday evening it said that sanctions announced in March -- largely focused on China's theft of US intellectual property -- were still in the works and details would be announced in the coming month. The announcement is another apparent change of course for Trump, who veers from harsh threats to promises of compromise and back again on trade and other sensitive issues. It comes as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross prepares to travel to Beijing this week for another round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict. Six members of his delegation had already arrived in Beijing as of Wednesday evening, the US embassy confirmed to AFP. Speaking at a regular press briefing on Wednesday, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying slammed the latest development. "In international relations, every sudden flip-flop and contradiction of one's word depletes and squanders a country's credibility," she said. She urged the US to "follow the spirit" of the recent consensus reached between Washington and Beijing, to abandon trade wars and back off imposing tariffs on each other. "We on the Chinese side do not want to fight but are not afraid to fight a trade war," she said. "We will counteract whatever comes our way, and if the US insists on acting recklessly, China will inevitably adopt firm and forceful measures." The commerce ministry said earlier Wednesday that Beijing "has the confidence, capability and experience to defend the interests of Chinese people and the core interests of the country" -- no matter what measures the US plans to take. The US trade sanctions proposed in March include restrictions on Chinese investment, export controls and 25 percent tariffs on as much as $50 billion in Chinese tech goods. The final list of Chinese imports covered by the tariffs list will be announced June 15 and imposed shortly thereafter, while the proposed investment restrictions and enhanced export controls will be announced by June 30, according to the White House. Trump has also threatened to impose tariffs on an additional $100 billion in Chinese goods if Beijing retaliates. Trade tensions between Washington and Beijing are likely to generate uncertainty with potentially serious consequences for the Chinese economy, Alfred Schipke, senior resident representative in China of the International Monetary Fund, told a press briefing. While US tariffs would have a direct impact on China's economy, such uncertainty would likely have an even greater indirect impact as it came to affect consumption, investment confidence and financial markets, he explained. "It is important that both sides try to collaborate," he said. "These trade tensions are not beneficial for anybody." Containers are transferred at the port in Qingdao: China is hitting out at US flip-flops over trade The chief negotiator of Colombia's ELN guerrillas said Tuesday he is ready to continue talks with the government even if the hardline rightist candidate wins next month's runoff presidential election. Colombia's last active rebel force, the leftist National Liberation Army (ELN), resumed preliminary peace negotiations with the Bogota government in the Cuban capital Havana earlier this month. President Juan Manuel Santos is trying to conclude a peace agreement with the ELN similar to the one signed with the larger FARC guerrillas in November 2016. The FARC has since become a political party. But Santos steps down in August and has admitted that any peace deal with the 1,500-strong ELN will likely come too late for him to sign. On Sunday, hardline conservative candidate Ivan Duque won the first round of Colombia's presidential elections and is favorite to defeat leftist Gustavo Petro in the June 17 runoff. Duque has vowed to rewrite the FARC deal, which he believes is too lenient on the former guerrillas, and has expressed reservations about the negotiations with the ELN. "We have received an order: we cannot leave the (negotiating) table," the ELN's chief negotiator Pablo Beltran told AFP. "If Duque wins, he will find us here. He can put together his delegation and we can continue. "We live in a world of 'fake news'... All this media war has an effect on people. We must continue to persevere so we can turn a page on war." Cuba stepped in to host the talks after Ecuador -- which hosted several rounds over a 15-month period since February 2017 -- pulled out last month over an upsurge of violence on its border with Colombia. In Havana, both sides have expressed a willingness to reach a deal for a longer ceasefire than the one which ended in January after 101 days. That fell through amid mutual accusations of breaches, and a spate of rebel attacks on the military. "We have made progress on pre-accords on the issue of a bilateral ceasefire," said Beltran. "We hope it will be in place for the investiture of the new government on August 7." The ELN announced a ceasefire for the period covering the first round of the elections. The group's leadership will make a decision on whether to do the same for the second round, but Beltran said he believed it is "very probable." The ELN and FARC were formed in 1964 to fight for land rights and protect poor rural communities. ELN peace negotiator Pablo Beltran said he is ready to continue talks even if the rightist candidate wins Colombia's presidential runoff An armed man has surrendered following a 2.5-hour standoff with police after the CBD of a central Queensland town went into lockdown. Police negotiators were called following reports of an armed man firing shots into the air near a licensed premises at Mackays Gregory Street around 5.20pm on Wednesday. No threats were made to any other person, and there were no reported injuries, police confirmed. Detective Inspector Brendan Smith told reporters a 48-year-old Mackay man, who is known to police, was in possession of a number of firearms. Police were negotiating with him in the middle of Gregory Street in the CBD until he peacefully surrendered about 8pm. Police negotiators were called following reports of an armed man near a licensed premises at Mackays Gregory Street. Source: 7 News Hell be taken to hospital for an assessment and we will decide after that what the next steps will be, Detective Inspector Smith told reporters. A number of shots were fired earlier in the day, he said, adding it was possible opening fire into the air was part of the mans plan to draw police into the city. No other person is at risk. Speaking with the media Wednesday evening, Detective Inspector Smith said police had been speaking to the mans parents to glean a possible motive, and he was confident the matter would be resolved peacefully. Police advised those inside the declared zone to seek shelter in a secure place. Source: Queensland Police An emergency situation was declared just after 5.30pm, under the Public Safety Preservation Act, with a declared zone stretching through a significant part of the city. This comprised the area from the intersection of River and MacCallister Streets, to the intersection of River and Wood Streets, and from Wood and Gordon Streets to Gordon and MacCallister Streets, Queensland Police confirmed in a statement. Detective Inspector Brendan Smith told reporters a 48-year-old Mackay man was in possession of a number of firearms. Source: 7 News Victoria Street was also blocked at Wood and MacCallister Streets. Police advised members of the public inside the zone to seek shelter in a secure place, and those outside the area were urged to avoid those streets until further notice. We ask the public not to come down to the CBD of Mackay, Detective Inspector Smith said. We ask people who are inside the buildings for their patience at this stage. Famous for its cocoa and coffee, the Ivory Coast has drawn up an ambitious five-year plan for the cashew industry, seeking to modernise production in a sector where it is already the world's number-one exporter. "We have shown that we know how to produce the nuts -- now we have to demonstrate that we can sell them and above all process them," Adama Coulibaly of the national Cotton-Cashew Council told AFP. From tiny harvests two decades ago, the West African country now holds the cashew crown, supplanting India as the biggest producer of the nut. Helped by price guarantees for farmers, its harvest doubled from 380,000 tonnes in 2013 to 711,000 tonnes in 2017, amounting to 22 percent of global output. This year's production of the nut -- known locally as "grey gold" -- is expected to attain 750,000 tonnes. Curvy, rich in taste and filled with protein, the cashew is a familiar ingredient in salads, stir-fries and other meals. But it also features in a widening range of other food products, including cashew butter and cheese, and its oil has found uses in medicine, industrial resins and cosmetics. - $200 mn boost - Ivory Coast has a problem, though: the processing side of its cashew sector is puny -- it is currently equipped to handle only six percent of production. This is a classic dilemma for African countries, struggling to get out of the rut of dependence on primary sourcing. "It's in food processing that the real added value lies... which can generate employment. Ivory Coast cannot allow itself to be merely an exporter of raw materials," Coulibaly told AFP. In March, the World Bank announced funding of $1 billion (866 million euros) for development purposes in Ivory Coast, including $200 million set aside to support programmes to modernise the cashew sector. Coulibaly hopes that with finance on this scale, the country might in the coming five years attain "a 50 percent rate of product transformation and 80 percent within the next 10 years." At present, the sector includes 250,000 producers grouped into a score of cooperatives and employs some 1.5 million people, directly or indirectly. The government plans to build agro-industrial zones at four population centres -- Bouake in the centre, Korhogo in the north, Bondoukou in the east and Seguela in the northwest. Economist Yves Ouya said the poverty-mired north and centre of the country had to be beneficiaries of the boom. "This is extremely important for the government in its fight against endemic poverty in these zones," he said. - 'A working business' - The cashew's extraordinary success sometimes leads to speculation -- by traders who buy nuts below the floor price fixed by the state and hope to sell it on at a profit -- and to smuggling to neighbouring countries. According to official estimates, between 20,000 and 50,000 tonnes of production is diverted this way each year. The authorities recently responded by ramping up the legal arsenal to deal with such offences, which also affect the cocoa industry. Kouadio Djedri, a planter in his 60s at N'Zere village near the capital Yamoussoukro, likes to talk about how profitable the cashew business can be. "I started out growing cashew nuts 20 years ago, when the product sold for 50 CFA francs (0.07 euros/$0.08) per kilo," the farmer, wearing a cowboy hat and green boots, said. "From a harvest of 200 kilos -- two bags -- in my early days, this year I've grown 13 tonnes for sale at 500 CFA francs per kilo," he said. Djedri, who is also village chief, has a cashew plantation of 11 hectares (27 acres) and plans to expand over a further 13 hectares. "I tell young people to go into growing cashew nuts. It's a working business that has enabled me to send my children to school," he said. Ivory Coast is the world's biggest grower of cashews -- it now hopes to develop the processing side of the industry, to create jobs and wealth Cashew nuts are peeled by hand at a factory in Bouake, then batched for export around the world Not just nuts: Ivory Coast is hoping to meet the growing demand for cashew oil and other spinoffs Six months ago, the UN Security Council agreed to send an additional 900 troops to the Central African Republic (CAR), reinforcing one of its biggest peacekeeping missions in one of the world's most dangerous countries. So far, just 400 have arrived -- a worrying sign of the problems that the UN mission, known by its French acronym MINUSCA, is having in coaxing countries into sending men to the flashpoint nation. Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ivory Coast and Uruguay are among the countries which were approached, but without success, a UN source said. In the end, Nepal agreed to provide 600 troops and Rwanda the other 300, the source said, adding, "They should all be there before the mission's mandate is renewed" in December. MINUSCA has been in CAR since April 2014, tasked with helping to stabilise the country after a brutal sectarian-tinged civil conflict that France helped to dampen. It currently has 11,000 troops and 2,000 police in a complement of nearly 13,500 people. But commentators question whether the mission can achieve much, given the scale of CAR's problems. The country is in disarray and most of its territory remains in the hands of rival militias, many of them claiming to protect Christian or Muslim communities. "Like many UN missions, MINUSCA presents several major weaknesses. Foremost, it is undersized and under-equipped. Up against the multiplication of 'hot spots', the mission is completely overwhelmed," the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank said at the end of 2017. Thierry Vircoulon, a specialist at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), is more blunt: "It's not just that nobody wants to go into the Central African quagmire -- it's that this quagmire is pointless." - Clashes - Events in recent months have heavily underscored such grim assessments. Bangui saw its bloodiest flare-up in two years on April 9-10, when 27 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded in clashes between peacekeeping troops and militias in a flashpoint Muslim enclave of the city. Muslim residents accused UN soldiers of killing 17 men, while MINUSCA said the violence erupted with an ambush of its troops during a security sweep. On May 1, religious-toned violence spread when armed men stormed a Christian church in the middle of a service, killing worshippers and a priest. In response, a mob burned a mosque and lynched two people believed to be Muslim. Twenty-four people died and around 170 were injured. - Troubled record - Since its deployment, MINUSCA has lost 73 people, three of them since the start of the year. Command and disciplinary problems within MINUSCA have added to the mission's woes. Accusations range from "passivity" in the face of attacks against civilians to sexual abuse and collusion with armed groups. Almost a third of the allegations of sexual abuse reported in all 15 UN peacekeeping missions worldwide in 2017 concerned MINUSCA. In March, Gabon decided to withdraw its 444 soldiers amid allegations of sexual abuse and inadequate equipment. Negotiations are in hand to persuade Gabon to keep these men on the ground. "Their departure planned for June has been postponed until September 30," a UN source said. In 2016, 120 Republic of Congo troops were dismissed after accusations of sexual assault and various forms of illegal trafficking, and last year a battalion of more than 600 of their colleagues was sent home amid similar suspicions. "The fundamental problem for the contingents of Blue Helmets (in the CAR) is not their quantity but their quality," argues Vircoulon. The UN says it is responding to these problems. In 2017, it opened internal inquiries into killings in incidents involving soldiers from the Moroccan, Rwandan and Mauritanian contingents, and appointed human-rights lawyer Jane Connors to vet allegations of sexual abuse. "We have acknowledged the problem and now we are going to do our best, we are doing our best, to reply to this key issue," UN chief Antonio Guterres told AFP during a visit to Bangui, the CAR capital, last October. A woman weeps near a UN armoured vehicle outside Minusca headquarters during a demonstration in April by people from a flashpoint Muslim district who accused UN troops of killing civilians. Residents of a Muslim district in Bangui protest on April 11 in front of the UN mission base. They laid out the bodies of 17 men who they claimed were killed by Blue Helmets. A member of an armed group whose base in Bangui was attacked by UN troops and soldiers of the Central African armed forces (FACA), an army in disarray. Kuwait on Tuesday circulated a watered-down draft UN Security Council resolution on setting up an international protection mission for the Palestinians in a bid to win European support in a vote expected this week, diplomats said. The council could hold a vote, possibly on Thursday, on the draft resolution that is expected to face a US veto, the diplomats said. Still, Kuwait, a non-permanent council member that represents Arab countries, is hoping to win a high number of votes in favor of its proposal to highlight Washington's isolation on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The revised draft drops an outright demand for an international protection mission and instead requests that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres present recommendations. The new text "calls for the consideration of measures to guarantee the safety and protection of the Palestinian civilian population" in the occupied Palestinian territories and the Gaza Strip, according to the draft obtained by AFP. It requests that Guterres present a report within 60 days on proposals for the protection of Palestinian civilians including the establishment of an international mission. France and Britain, two veto-wielding council members, have complained that the draft resolution lacked details on the scope and objective of the proposed protection mission, diplomats said. The United States meanwhile maintained that the measure was biased against Israel during two expert-level meetings held last week, according to diplomatic sources. Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon has slammed the proposed resolution as "shameful" and said it was designed to help Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas. Kuwait put forward the draft resolution ten days ago after Israeli forced killed dozens of Palestinians during protests on the Gaza border and the United States opened its embassy in Jerusalem. Negotiations however have been tough-going with the Europeans and Africans pressing for more information on the proposed protection mission, according to diplomats. Diplomats have said the Palestinians may turn to the UN General Assembly if the draft resolution on protection fails to win Security Council backing. The council is due to meet Wednesday at the request of the United States to discuss Palestinian rocket firings on Israel from Gaza. The rocket and mortar firings from the Gaza Strip were claimed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, prompting Israel to respond with air strikes on bases of the militant Palestinian groups. It was the worst flareup since the 2014 war waged by Israel in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Washington has circulated a draft council statement that would condemn the firing of rockets by Palestinian militants in Gaza, but it remains unclear whether it will be approved. Palestinian relatives of 23-year-old Ahmed Qutoosh, who died of his wounds endured during clashes with Israeli troops, mourn during his funeral in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip on May 25, 2018 A grieving mum has thanked hospital staff and paramedics for giving her family one last chance to say goodbye to their baby boy after he mysteriously died in Queensland. Kathy Wockner and her husband Scott said their goodbyes to nine-month-old Lucas on Friday. The baby boy was found unresponsive in his cot the day before at his Toowoomba daycare. The cause of his death is still unknown. Ms Wockner told Yahoo7 while the family are heartbroken over the loss of Lucas, and there are no answers or reasons for the death of the healthy boy, they want to focus on the amazing efforts of emergency crews who tried to save him. While Lucas was found unresponsive on Thursday, the team at Lady Cilento Childrens Hospital in Brisbane managed to resuscitate him before he died on Friday giving the entire family one last chance to say goodbye. The family of little boy Lucas Wockner have thanked paramedics for trying to save him and giving them one last chance to say goodbye. Source: Supplied It was an absolutely amazing gift that will be cherished for so long, Ms Wockner said. The team were amazing. At any given time, we had 18 members of the family in the hospital. They made us all feel welcome. She added on Facebook, that while nothing more could have been done for Lucas, he died surrounded by family, for which Ms Wockner is so grateful for. Ms Wockner told Yahoo7 Lucas was bubbly, cheeky, loving and outgoing. He had a special bond with his three-year-old sister Elouise. Lucas with dad Scott, mum Kathy, father Scott and sister Elouise. Source: Supplied They always hugged and kissed each other, always wanted to be together and it was genuinely mutual, the mum said. Lucas was also so strong, so loving. Ms Wockner described the extended family throughout the state as all very close. Many of them have spent the past couple of days supporting Lucass mum and dad in Toowoomba. Ms Wockner said she now wants to give back and raise awareness of the hard work of medical professionals. We dont want pity and sympathy, she said. Story continues We dont need financial support. The family want any money intended for flowers or bereavement gifts to instead go to the Queensland Ambulance Service, Toowoomba Base Hospital, Life Flight, Lady Cilento ICU and Ronald McDonald House via a GoFundMe page. We can never truly repay them for the time we spent with our dearly loved boy and the opportunity to share more love, showering him with kisses, embracing him with cuddles and sharing our appreciation for the all the time he shared with us, Ms Wockner wrote on Facebook. Any contribution you can make to assist us in giving back to the amazing organisations who made it possible for us to spend some precious time with our special baby boy would be greatly appreciated. Nicaragua's richest and most influential businessman appealed Wednesday for presidential elections to be moved forward from 2021 in a bid to calm unrest that has left scores dead since last month. The comments by Carlos Pellas came as a surprise as the powerful industrialist and other business leaders have traditionally supported President Daniel Ortega. "From my point of view, and it is something largely shared in the private sector, we must find an orderly way out of this, in a constitutional way, which implies reforms including a (presidential) election moved forward" from 2021, he said in an interview with newspaper La Prensa. At least 87 people have been killed and almost 900 wounded since protests began on April 18 against Ortega and his party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front. The protests were initially triggered by now-aborted reforms to the near-bankrupt social security system, but the unrest quickly broadened into a rejection by many Nicaraguans of Ortega and his wife and vice-president, Rosario Murillo, who are seen as autocratic. The government and opposition agreed overnight Monday to resume church-mediated peace talks that stalled amid fresh violence last week. Pellas, Nicaragua's first billionaire and who controls the vast Grupo Pellas empire, proposed that a new election date be decided during that dialogue. He called for members of the national electoral council, which is controled by judges close to Ortega, to "resign immediately." Ortega must "show the willingness to dialogue and accept fundamental changes", said Pellas, 65, who has not previously spoken out publicly about the crisis. Ortega, a former guerrilla who first ruled between 1979 and 1990 before returning as president 11 years ago, has kept power by maintaining leftist rhetoric while ensuring an accommodation with powerful private industry and keeping up trade with the United States. "I am outraged and very hurt by the more than 80 lives sacrificed and by the more than 800 wounded caused by the disproportionate violence with which the government responded to the demands of students and the general population," said Pellas. "These crimes cannot go unpunished." Pellas, seen here on the right with Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim (C), has called for early elections in Nicaragua The unrest that began last month has left at least 87 people dead Teenage twins have been orphaned after their police officer mother was killed by a gunman in a terror attack in Belgium. Soraya Belkacemi, 53, was one of two female officers shot dead on Tuesday during the shooting in Liege by a gunman, a prison inmate on 48-hour leave, who grabbed the service weapons of the officers, Police Chief Christian Beaupere revealed. Officer Lucile Garcia, 45, was also killed alongside a passer-by while two other police officers were injured, Belga news agency said. Soraya Belkacemi, 53, (left) was one of two female officers shot dead during the shooting in Liege. Lucile Garcia (right) is understood to be the second officer killed. Source: Sunrise Belkacemis death means her 13-year-old twin daughters have been orphaned, after they previously lost their father who was also a police officer. Belgian media have identified the suspect in Tuesdays attack as Benjamin Herman, a Belgian national born in 1982, though in keeping with standard procedure authorities declined to confirm his identity. Prime Minister Charles Michel says Herman was indirectly mentioned in state security reports on radicalisation, but did not have his name on a list maintained by an anti-terror assessment group. The suspect was shot dead by police. Prime Minister Charles Michel says the suspect had been indirectly mentioned in security reports. Source: AFP via Getty Emergency services cordon off the scene of the shooting in the Belgian city of Liege. Source: AFP via Getty Images on social media showed people scurrying for safety on Lieges central boulevard dAvroy with shots and sirens being heard in the background. Liege, an industrial city close to the German border in a French-speaking region, was the scene of a shooting in 2011, when a gunman killed four people and wounded more than 100 others before turning the gun on himself. Belgium has been on high alert since a Brussels-based Islamic State cell was involved in attacks on Paris in 2015 that killed 130 people and Brussels in 2016 in which 32 died. With AP US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke by telephone to Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for the first time on Wednesday and warned Moscow against interfering in America's domestic politics. Relations between Washington and Moscow have plunged to historic lows after tit-for-tat expulsions of alleged spies, the closure of diplomatic missions, and Russia's interventions in Syria and Ukraine. But President Donald Trump -- who campaigned for office in 2016 pledging to improve ties with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin -- has been reluctant to acknowledge Kremlin election meddling. US intelligence believes Putin ordered agents to covertly undermine Trump's 2016 presidential rival Hillary Clinton in order to help elect the tycoon, and a special prosecutor is probing claims that his campaign colluded in this. Trump angrily dismisses this allegation and the investigation as a "witch hunt," but ties remain under strain. Former CIA chief Pompeo appears to have raised the issue with Lavrov in their call. "The two discussed issues and concerns related to the bilateral relationship, Ukraine, and Syria," Pompeo's spokeswoman Heather Nauert said after the phone call. "Secretary Pompeo reiterated that though the United States seeks an improved relationship with Russia, achieving that will require Russia to demonstrate that it is prepared to take concrete actions to address our concerns, including interfering in US domestic matters." In Moscow, the Foreign Ministry said the call had been organized at US request and that the pair had agreed "on the need to work together ... to overcome the existing disagreements through a professional dialogue." US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov that Moscow must stop interfering in US domestic politics Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko on Thursday defended faking his own murder with the cooperation of the Ukrainian security services, after the shock operation was criticised by fellow reporters. Kiev has come under fire after it admitted staging the killing in a bid to foil what it said was a real assassination plot by Moscow against the anti-Kremlin journalist. Babchenko made a scarcely credible reappearance at a press conference in Kiev on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the Ukrainian authorities reported he had been shot dead at his home in a contract-style killing. "My goal was to stay alive and ensure the safety of my family. That is the first thing I am thinking about. Journalist standards are the last thing I am thinking about now," the Russian said at a second press conference on Thursday. After initial expressions of relief that Babchenko was alive, many fellow journalists have sharply criticised the staging of his death for undermining the credibility of the profession. "Friends, I couldn't care less. I don't care whether you believe it next time... as when I'm dead it won't matter to me anymore," Babchenko replied. The Kremlin earlier Thursday said the story was "at the very least bizarre" and dismissed accusations that it had attempted to assassinate Babchenko. Babchenko's staged killing fooled the world's media and led to press freedom groups raising fears about the impact it could have on the work of journalists around the globe. Some said the staged death could only lead to more accusations of "fake news", at a time when the distinction between credible and non-credible sources is becoming ever more crucial. - 'Line between truth and fiction' - "By spreading false evidence about his murder, Ukrainian authorities have seriously eroded the credibility of information," the president of the International Federation of Journalists, Philippe Leruth, said in a statement. Reporters Without Borders described the faked assassination as a "pathetic stunt". An editorial in Russian daily Vedomosti argued that the Babchenko operation "blurred the border between truth and fiction" and would lead to more distrust of the media. A number of Kremlin critics have been killed in Ukraine in recent years, with one gunned down on a Kiev street in broad daylight and another whose car exploded. Several Western commentators and reporters said it would also be difficult to trust official statements from the Ukrainian state again. Ukrainian law enforcement officials were due to hold a closed-door meeting with Western diplomats on Friday to present them with information about the operation, a Ukrainian source told AFP. Babchenko, who told the press he had been preparing to stage his death with secret services for several weeks, dismissed the criticism. "I wish all these moralisers could be in the same situation -- let them show their adherence to the principles of their high morals and die proudly holding their heads high without misleading the media," he wrote on Facebook. Other commentators urged the media to focus on the fact that Babchenko is alive. "The main thing is that the killing of a journalist was foiled, the organisers are caught and the journalist is alive," said Russian political commentator Evgeny Roizman. - 'Foiled cynical plot' - Kiev sought to justify Babchenko's "murder" that provoked an outpouring of grief and a diplomatic spat with its former masters in Moscow. "Thanks to this operation we were able to foil a cynical plot and document how the Russian security service was planning for this crime," security service head Vasyl Grytsak said when he reintroduced Babchenko, alive and well, to the world. Grytsak said the authorities had arrested the alleged mastermind of a plot against Babchenko, saying a Ukrainian citizen had offered to pay a hitman to carry out the killing after being recruited by Russian special forces and paid $40,000. A Kiev court on Thursday evening decided to hold the man in custody for 60 days, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported, naming him as Boris German, head of a Ukrainian-German weapons firm. It said he had claimed to be working for Ukrainian security services to unmask Russian agents. - 'Tired of burying them' - At the press conference on Thursday Babchenko said he "hated" Russian President Vladimir Putin. "This person is responsible for several wars, this person is responsible for thousands of deaths. I have buried acquaintances, I have buried colleagues, I have buried friends, I am tired of burying them," said Babchenko, who fought in Russia's two wars in Chechnya before becoming a war journalist. Babchenko left Russia in February 2017 after receiving threats. He has contributed to a number of media outlets including top opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and is an avid blogger, accusing Russian authorities of killing Kremlin critics and unleashing wars in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere. Babchenko recounted details of the operation to dupe the world into thinking he was dead, including donning a t-shirt with holes made to look like they were from gunshots and smearing himself with pig's blood. burs-ant/rl/ecl Anti-Kremlin Russian reporter Arkady Babchenko defends against criticism from fellow journalists over faking his own murder Flowers and pictures of anti-Kremlin journalist Arkadi Babchenko were left at the Russian embassy in Kiev after his reported death -- which Ukraine has since admitted was faked Arkady Babchenko left Russia in 2017 living first in the Czech Republic, then Israel, before moving to Kiev The treasurer of Nicolas Sarkozy's successful 2007 run for the French presidency has been charged as part of an investigation into suspected illicit financing of the campaign with Libyan money, his lawyer said Tuesday. Eric Woerth, who was budget minister and later labour minister in Sarkozy's government, is facing charges of "complicity in illegal campaign financing", said his lawyer, Jean-Yves Leborgne. "This indictment is based on the discovery of cash sums, very small if not outright ridiculous considering the cost of a presidential campaign," Leborgne said. He added that Woerth had told investigators that cash payments totalling some 30,000 euros ($35,000) had been given to campaign workers. Woerth, a prominent rightwing MP who heads parliament's finance committee, has previously admitted the campaign received cash payments which he said were anonymous donations received by post, a claim contested by others questioned in the case. Sarkozy has denied claims that he accepted millions of euros from the former Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi, some of it delivered in cash-stuffed suitcases. After two days of questioning in March he was charged with corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of Libyan public money, though he was vowed to clear his name. - 'Cash in suitcases' claims - The allegations that Sarkozy took money from Kadhafi -- whom he welcomed to Paris in lavish style shortly after his election -- are the most serious out of several investigations that have dogged him since he left office. The claims first emerged in 2011, as NATO-backed forces led by France and Britain were preparing to intervene in support of rebels seeking to end Kadhafi's brutal 41-year rule. Ziad Takieddine, a Franco-Lebanese businessman also charged in the inquiry, has claimed he delivered three suitcases containing a total of five million euros to Sarkozy and Claude Gueant, his associate and later chief of staff, in 2006 and 2007. Woerth's lawyer said investigators were implying a link between the cash payments made to campaign staffers and the suspected millions in Libyan funds. "Eric Woerth firmly contests this reasoning and denounces the claims against him," Leborgne said. Yet a French TV interview with Bashir Saleh, who ran Libya's sovereign wealth fund under Kadhafi, has heightened investigators' focus on Sarkozy's lavish 2007 campaign. Saleh has long refused to be questioned by French investigators, but in the report broadcast last week he appeared to confirm payments to the former French leader. "Yes, it's true. But with who? Me? That's not my job," Saleh said in an interview carried out last September. "Kadhafi had a special budget for people he wanted to support," Saleh said, claiming it totalled 350 million euros, though without providing details on recipients. Documents belonging to a second senior Kadhafi loyalist, former oil minister Shukri Ghanem, refer to three payments in 2007 to Sarkozy for at least 6.5 million euros. Ghanem was found drowned in the Danube river in Vienna in 2012. Eric Woerth was treasurer for Nicolas Sarkozy's successful 2007 run for the French presidency Calm returned to the Gaza Strip and nearby Israeli communities on Wednesday after the worst military flare-up since a 2014 war raised fears of yet another full-blown conflict in the beleaguered Palestinian enclave. At the United Nations, envoy for the Middle East Nickolay Mladenov warned the Security Council that the escalation showed "how close to the brink of war we are every day." The exchange of fire on Tuesday and into the early hours of Wednesday began with a barrage of rocket and mortars into Israel from Gaza. Israel said it targeted some 65 militant sites in the Gaza Strip. It also said around 100 rockets and mortars fired from Gaza either exploded in Israel or were intercepted by air defences. Three Israeli soldiers were wounded, one moderately and two lightly, the military said. There were no reports of casualties in Gaza. Late Tuesday, an Islamic Jihad spokesman said a ceasefire had been reached, and on Wednesday senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya also spoke of an accord. Though Israeli officials denied being part of a ceasefire, calm was maintained on Wednesday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel's military had delivered the "harshest blow" in years to Gaza militants. "Since yesterday, the army has responded forcefully to fire from the Gaza Strip with attacks against dozens of targets of terrorist organisations in the harshest blow that we have dealt them in years," Netanyahu said, according to his office. - 'Should be outraged' - Tuesday's violence followed weeks of deadly unrest along the border between Israel and the blockaded Palestinian enclave. In a rare joint statement, Hamas and Islamic Jihad declared shared responsibility for the rocket and mortar fire, saying it was in retaliation for Israeli attacks targeting their positions. Three Islamic Jihad members were killed in an Israeli strike Sunday, and the group vowed revenge. Islamic Jihad is the second-largest armed group in Gaza after Hamas. The United Nations Security Council convened on Wednesday to discuss the violence, following a US request for an urgent meeting. "This latest round of attacks is a warning to all of how close to the brink of war we are every day," said UN envoy Mladenov, speaking via video link from Jerusalem. But Kuwait, a non-permanent council member, blocked a US-drafted statement that would have strongly condemned Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza. The Gulf nation said it was blocking the statement to allow for consideration of a draft resolution it has put forward on the protection of Palestinian civilians. The United States, which has veto power in the council, will oppose such measures, Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon told reporters. US Ambassador Nikki Haley said "the people of Gaza do not need protection from an external source. The people of Gaza need protection from Hamas." Early Tuesday, some 28 mortar shells were fired toward Israel from the Gaza Strip. Israel said most were intercepted by its air defence systems but put residents in the area on high alert, ordering them to stay within 15 seconds of shelters. One mortar shell exploded near a kindergarten building, a military spokesman said, damaging the structure. No children were present at the time. Israel's military began air strikes soon after. Later in the day, further rockets and mortar rounds from Gaza were intercepted or exploded in Israel, the army said. It said some of the mortars fired were supplied by Iran. On Tuesday night, a rocket hit an Israeli home near the Gaza border, but no one was hurt, the military said. - 'Any upcoming escalation' - Israel's military said it hit "military targets" including a tunnel stretching into its territory, weapons stores and militant bases. Hamas said in a statement Tuesday that "what the resistance carried out this morning comes within the framework of the natural right to defend our people". The military flare-up followed weeks of deadly demonstrations and clashes along the Gaza-Israel border, beginning on March 30. The protests demanded that Palestinians who fled or were expelled in the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation be allowed to return to their former homes, now inside Israel. They peaked on May 14, when at least 61 Palestinians were killed in clashes as tens of thousands of Gazans protested the US transfer of its embassy in Israel to the disputed city of Jerusalem the same day. Low-level demonstrations and clashes have continued since. At least 122 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the unrest. No Israelis have been killed. Israel says its actions are necessary to defend its borders, accusing Hamas of encouraging thousands of Palestinians to break through the border and attack Israelis. But Israel has faced international criticism and calls for an independent investigation over its use of live fire during the protests and border clashes. A man inspects the damage at a site targeted by an Israeli air strike in the southern Gaza strip The United Nations Security Council convened to discuss the violence, following a US request for an urgent meeting An Israeli army tank patrols along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip on May 29, 2018 Zimbabwe announced on Wednesday it would choose a new president and parliament on July 30, in the country's first electoral test since the removal of its autocratic leader Robert Mugabe. His successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, unveiled the date in the official Zimbabwe Government Gazette. "Monday, the 30th day of July, 2018 (is) the day of the election to the office of President, the election of members of the National Assembly and election of councillors," Mnangagwa said in a proclamation. Once a right-hand man to Mugabe, Mnangagwa dramatically succeeded the 94-year-old veteran leader in November after nearly four decades in charge when troops swarmed the streets and briefly seized key sites. Mnangagwa, 75, will square off against the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, now led by 40-year-old Nelson Chamisa following the death of Morgan Tsvangirai in February. Mnangagwa tweeted following the announcement that "what unites us as Zimbabweans is far greater than anything that could ever divide us". "I look forward to engaging with my fellow citizens on the campaign trail," he wrote. - 'We will win' - The MDC said it accepted the date but called for "electoral reforms (to be) implemented before the elections are held". "We are prepared to fight and we know we will win," said MDC spokesman Douglas Mwonzora. He added that the party wanted external scrutiny of the voter roll and impartial media coverage for parties. If no candidate receives a simple majority in the first round of the presidential election, a run-off will be held on September 8. Elections under Mugabe were marred by corruption, intimidation and violence, but Mnangagwa has vowed to hold a free and fair vote. In a move that could deter many opponents of ZANU-PF rule living in self-imposed exile overseas, the country's top court ruled Monday that non-resident Zimbabweans would be unable to vote from abroad. The MDC has called for voters living abroad to be permitted to vote in their own countries. "The tone and the conduct of the forthcoming election will be different from elections held since the year 2000 in that the government will want to ensure that the poll appears free and fair," said Maplecroft analyst Charles Laurie. The election will be the first to be monitored by Western observers in many years. On Monday, Harare and the European Union announced that observers from the bloc would monitor polls in the southern African country for the first time in 16 years. - Western observers - The head of the last EU observer mission, Pierre Schori, was thrown out of Zimbabwe in 2002 on the eve of presidential elections that were condemned as flawed. Following the high-profile spat, Zimbabwe barred the EU and other Western observers from sending further missions to monitor polls in the country as Mugabe grew more and more defiant of foreign criticism up until his downfall. And in a further sign of Zimbabwe's growing efforts to mend fences with former foes following Mugabe's resignation, the country has applied to re-join the Commonwealth, the bloc of former British colonies said Monday. Harare's membership was suspended in 2003 over the violent and graft-ridden elections the previous year. Zimbabwe left the Commonwealth at the height of violent land seizures, when white farmers were evicted in favour of landless black people -- a policy that wrecked agriculture and triggered economic collapse. Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland confirmed that the organisation would also send observers to the elections. Mugabe sent shockwaves through the ruling ZANU-PF, the party he dominated for decades, when he recently posed with a retired general who will take on the government in this year's election. Despite a slew of reformist pledges and announcements it is unclear whether Mnangagwa, who was a vital cog in the ZANU-PF party and helped Mugabe to retain power for 37 years, has won the support of ordinary Zimbabweans. Following the announcement of the poll date, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) called on voters "to conduct themselves in a peaceful manner". "Let us be peaceful and tolerant to each other," said ZEC spokeswoman Priscilla Chigumba. Mnangagwa unveiled his party manifesto on May 4 -- the election will be a crucial test of his legitimacy A prospective voter, left, checks her details with officials who have been updating the electoral roll ahead of the historic ballot Mugabe, seen here in one of his last speeches while in power, presided over a regime criticised for rights abuse and economic incompetence Profile of former Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe Chele Farley received the support of another member of the New York Republican congressional delegation in her bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. U.S. Rep. John Katko endorsed Farley, a Republican, for U.S. Senate. Farley is challenging Gillibrand, a Democrat who has been office since 2009. The endorsement followed the pair's appearance at the Cayuga County Women's Republican Club's annual spring brunch earlier this month. At the breakfast, Katko recalled being asked by the club's president, Roberta Massarini, to contact Farley about being the keynote speaker for the event. Farley, Katko said, immediately accepted the invitation. On Wednesday, Katko said he is "thrilled" to support Farley for Senate. "I left a 20-year career as a federal prosecutor to run for Congress because I was fed up with the gridlock in Washington and believed our community deserved better representation," Katko said in a statement. "Since coming to Congress, I've worked to fight through that gridlock and be an effective representative for hardworking families in central New York." He continued, "Chele shares that passion and is committed to standing up for communities across New York state to achieve results. I am confident that she will join me in being a strong voice for central New York families, small businesses, farmers and veterans in Washington." Farley won the GOP nomination at the state party's convention in March. She is a first-time candidate, but she isn't new to politics. Before entering the race, she was New York City finance chair for the state GOP. A managing partner at a private equity investment firm, Farley holds engineering degrees from Stanford University. A main issue for her is New York's status as a donor state. Reports indicate that the state pays over $40 billion more in taxes than it receives in federal funding. Katko is the latest member of the state's GOP congressional delegation to support Farley for Senate. She has been endorsed by other Republicans, including U.S. Reps. Elise Stefanik and Claudia Tenney. "Congressman Katko is one of our state's most effective and toughest legislators," Farley said. "I'll always prioritize the best interest of central New Yorkers in Washington, and I'm grateful for Congressman Katko's support in my race." Love 2 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 1 John Mannion has the support of an influential minor party in his bid to succeed state Sen. John DeFrancisco. The Working Families Party has endorsed Mannion in the 50th Senate District race. The party chose Mannion, an Advanced Placement biology teacher at West Genesee High School in Camillus, over DeWitt Town Councilor Joe Chiarenza. Mannion, who won the Democratic designation in late April, will likely face Chiarenza in the Democratic primary in September. Ken Warner, the upstate region political director for the Working Families Party, called Mannion "the ideal candidate" for the district. "He has a long history in the region and ties to neighborhoods large and small," Warner said. "He'll be able to help bring issues to the floor that are important to all New Yorkers when the new Senate convenes in 2019!" In a statement, Mannion pledged to advocate for working families in the district. He noted that he and his wife are teachers, his father worked for New York Central Railroad and his mother worked at New York Telephone. His grandfather was an employee at Franklin Automobile. "I've witnessed central New York's working families cope with challenges my entire life and will fight to ensure that good paying jobs and quality education are there for the next generation," Mannion said. The 50th Senate District race is viewed as a crucial contest in the fight for majority control of the state Senate. Republicans currently hold the majority because a Democrat, state Sen. Simcha Felder, caucuses with the GOP. Not counting Felder, there are 31 Democrats and 31 Republicans in the chamber. The seat is open for the first time since 1992, when DeFrancisco, R-DeWitt, was first elected to the state Senate. He opted to not seek re-election this year after an unsuccessful bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Before the general election, there will likely be primaries for both parties in the 50th district race. Chiarenza has said he plans to pursue a primary against Mannion for the Democratic nomination. On the Republican side, Onondaga County Comptroller Bob Antonacci is expected to win the party's designation. But Rick Guy, a Syracuse attorney and former city councilor, will challenge him in a primary. To appear on the primary ballot, candidates must circulate petitions and collect 1,000 valid signatures from voters in their respective parties. The petitioning process begins next week. The primary election will be held Thursday, Sept. 13. The 50th Senate District includes a portion of the city of Syracuse and several towns in Onondaga County. It also contains most of Auburn and the towns of Brutus, Cato, Ira and Sennett in Cayuga County. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Few things in life make Penny Stoffle happier than nature and smiling children. Stoffle will see plenty of both as the new director of Camp Caspar Gregory in Aurora. A retired teacher with over 25 years of experience at the Jordan-Elbridge Central School District, Stoffle still works as a substitute teacher for the district. She had also worked with the Brutus Recreation Commission for over 20 years. Working with children has been a longtime commitment for Stoffle, one she plans on doing for as long as she can. She believes the five-week summer camp's rustic environment and focus on activities is "geared toward bringing them out of electronics and bringing them into nature and making friends," she said. "I like to see them happy. I like to see them enjoying themselves and I like to see them outdoors," she said. It took Judy Jordan, the camp's programming chair, years to get Stoffle involved with the camp, she said. But she said she wouldn't have recruited Stoffle if she didn't think her friend could do it. Jordan, a retired Jordan-Elbridge art teacher, has known Stoffle for about 20 years. Stoffle acted as a substitute teacher for Jordan while the latter recovered from surgery. Afterward, Jordan was convinced she could trust Stoffle with anything. Jordan praised Stoffle's ability to adapt to whatever is thrown at her. The Citizen's 2018 summer camp guide: Classes, camping and more School is almost out for summer, and several camps in the Cayuga County area will offer chil "She can walk into any room and there's no chaos, and that's what we wanted," Jordan said. Once Stoffle checked out the camp, a walk around the area was all it took to hook her, she said. She hasn't taken on anything of the camp's scale before, she added. The area has six cabins three for boys, three for girls with two counselors stationed at each. Children can sign on to be at the camp during the day, or to stay overnight. Ten international students will also be at the camp to teach the other children environmental conservation techniques. The idea is for students to learn each other's cultures as well, Stoffle said. Activities such as crafts, boating, swimming, archery, bird identification and fossil identification will be available at Camp Caspar Gregory. A full-time chef, health officer, camp assistant director, aquatics director and two lifeguards will be present. Stoffle hopes the camp helps children enjoy nature, learn skills and become more comfortable with spending time apart from their parents. The camp is named after a minister who intended to create a Christian camp, though he passed away before the camp opened in 1941. Stoffle said the camp is not a Christian camp. "This camp has been here forever, and it's kind of like a best-kept secret," Stoffle said. Stoffle is excited for the season to start. "My goal is to provide the kids with a safe environment where they can learn," she said. Staff writer Kelly Rocheleau can be reached at (315) 282-2243 or kelly.rocheleau@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @KellyRocheleau. Love 1 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Over the past few months we have looked back at 1973 and 1968, and we even had a glimpse of 1918, but now we are going back even further. To 1868. As far as I know, the graduates of the class of 1868 are not having a reunion. At least not here on earth. But there is a connection between 1868 and one of our local educational institutions: On Saturday, May 19, Wells College in Aurora held its 150th commencement ceremony. The college takes its name from its founder, Henry Wells, who was also the founder of American Express in 1850 and Wells Fargo in 1852. His original mansion, called Glen Park, is still used by the college today. An 1875 prospectus of Glen Park describes the building as a Tuscan villa with outer walls made of blue limestone, but that description is inadequate. It really should be seen by anyone who appreciates art in architecture. This building and the others that make up the Main Street campus sit on 20 scenic acres overlooking Cayuga Lake. The village of Aurora has its own origins dating as far back as 1789, when soldiers who had fought in the Revolutionary War were given land as an incentive to settle here and develop the area. The village became an important connecting point for transporting grain, wool and livestock to the Erie Canal. When Henry Wells wanted to open a college for women, one possibility was for the campus to be part of Cornell University. Wells declined that offer and established the school on its current site instead. The college operated exclusively for women until 2005. Some notable alumni of the school are Frances Folsom Cleveland, wife of President Grover Cleveland, Anne Goddard Carter, an author and environmentalist, Margaret Pericak-Vance, a pioneer in genetics research, and Pleasant Rowland, creator of the American Girl doll line. Another alumni of the college, Christin Schaaf, gave the 150th commencement address. Schaaf, currently the senior global learning consultant with Cargill, the largest private company in the United States, said she had been laid off twice after graduation, but found the strength to not give up in part due to the support she received from classmates and other contacts she had made at Wells College. She, in turn, continues to help other Wells students by serving on college committees, fundraising and other volunteer efforts. Annabelle Lee, who was part of this graduating class, gave the student commencement address. She acknowledged the support she received from both classmates and staff: What did we find here? Love, friendship, courage and hope. I cant wait to see how far we go. According to a written statement, Wells College operates with the understanding that, since it stands on traditional land belonging to the Cayuga Nation, it recognizes our collective responsibility to acknowledge our colonial history. The college also promotes access for students and staff with disabilities of any kind, and supports the contributions and efforts of the LGBT community. With a motto of Arrive curious, graduate prepared, Wells College now offers bachelors degrees in more than 50 academic programs with internships and opportunities to study abroad, as well as financial aid and scholarships. An alumni reunion is scheduled for May 31 through June 3, and that will include banquets, campus tours, lectures and activities and even a group photo. I would like to thank Chris Pollock, the director of communications and marketing, for the information he provided and for allowing me to walk around to see the historic buildings on this beautiful campus. Joe Sarnicola is retired from the Auburn Enlarged City School District. He can be reached at joesarnicola@yahoo.com. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Imagine having a list of tasks and telling your boss that you're just not going to be able to get them done. And imagine telling your boss in the same conversation that you plan to add an extra week onto your upcoming vacation since you won't be doing those tasks. Most of us would likely be out of a job if we tried to pull such a move. But then again, most of us wouldn't be trying to get out of the work we were hired to do in the first place. Such a brazen disregard for honoring workplace commitments is brewing in the state Legislature, notably the Republican-controlled state Senate. The Daily News reported over the weekend that some Senate GOP officials are pushing to cut this year's state legislative session short by a week. The thinking is that because one of the Republican senators has been called to military duty, thus removing their one-person hold on power in the Senate, that nothing can get done. Therefore, everyone might as well go home early. A Senate spokesman told the Daily News that "once that work is done, we will adjourn. Anything else is a waste of taxpayer money." For starters, the presumption that no important matters can get done is a sad reflection of how inept Albany has become. Important legislation on issues such as voting and ethics reforms, child crime victims and incinerator siting laws all have yet to come to fruition despite strong support from the public on all of them. And don't believe the talking point about leaving early in order to save taxpayer dollars. Lawmakers will still collect their full yearly salary and they'll get their extra stipends for serving in leadership positions. State government will continue to grind on even if the elected lawmakers aren't in the Capitol. Giving up a couple of days of legislator travel reimbursements won't lead to some windfall for the state. The truth is that many lawmakers have wanted to be done with this year's session since the budget got approved two months ago. This is an election year, and they have fundraisers to hold and campaigning to do. The whole business of actually governing is an inconvenience. We hope that such an attitude is not held by our representatives in Albany: state Sens. John DeFrancisco, Pam Helming and James Seward and Assemblymen Gary Finch and Robert Oaks. We urge each of them to call on their colleagues and leaders to do better for New Yorkers. The Citizen Editorial Board includes publisher Rob Forcey, managing editor Mike Dowd and executive editor Jeremy Boyer. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Donald Trumps personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen made tapes of conversations about Stormy Daniels, and some of those tapes have Trumps voice on themat least according to Daniels lawyer Michael Avenatti, who made the announcement following a hearing Wednesday morning regarding Cohens criminal case, which is being heard in a New York federal court. As a result of our efforts, there was a shocking admission made in court today, Avenatti said in a statement to the media following the hearing. Just like the Nixon tapes, we now have what I will refer to as the 'Trump Tapes'. According to Avenattis account of the hearing, Cohens lawyer Stephen Ryan admitted that there are audio recordings that Michael Cohen was taping for years... Not only do they exist but they are under lock and key, and some of them relate to my client and her attorney-client privileged communications. Later on Wednesday, Avenatti said that it was his understanding that Trumps own voice is recorded on the secret tapes. But while Daniels herself is not recorded on the tapes, potentially improper conversations about her between Cohen and Daniels previous attorney, Keith Davidson may be present in the recorded material. These tapes relate directly to the conduct of the presidents right-hand attorney, relate directly to issues considering my client, attorney-client privileges that were disclosed by Mr. Cohen improperly by her prior counsel, Avenatti said during an appearance on the MSNBC cable news network. We have every reason to believe that the tapes include communications between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen that dont have anything to do with the rendering of legal advice. So those are not privileged communications. Avenatti called for the secret tapes to be released to the public. The Trump Tapes that were just disclosed in court as a result of our efforts should be released immediately, Avenatti wrote on his Twitter account following the hearing. Not tomorrow, not next week or next month. Now. But Avenatti also suffered a setback during the Wednesday hearing, withdrawing his motion to become a part of the Cohen criminal case, to make sure that Daniels interests are protected, after Judge Kimba Wood told him that in order to be admitted to the case, he would be required to curtail his publicity tour. I say 'publicity tour' not in a derogatory sense, the judge told Avenatti. Youre entitled to publicity; I cant stop you. Unless youre participating in a matter before me. Photos by Max Goldberg/Gary/Wikimedia Commons MONTREAL, QCIcon Male, Mile High Media's award-winning gay studio, has just released the second chapter of its younger/older series Daddy Issues on DVD. Michael DelRay, Max Sargent, JD Phoenix, Tobias and Michael Roman star in Daddy Issues 2, written and directed by acclaimed filmmaker director Nica Noelle and featuring two tales of young college men on the prowl for big daddies. The DVD features four hardcore sex scenes shot in HD along with exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, a photo gallery and more. To view box art and product information, click here. Nica combines great storytelling with a solid cast of performers in this second edition of the new series, said Mile High Media Vice President Jon Blitt. Daddy Issues 2 features all the exuberance and lust of young men giving in to their passion for mature men. Daddy Issues 2 suggests that sometimes young guys need a little extra help working out their daddy issues, and luckily there are hot older men that are up for the task. The movie opens with vacation home landlord Max Sargent playing host to young studs Michael DelRay and JD Phoenix, but he soon learns the two sex-starved college boys want more than just a continental breakfast. Meanwhile, sexy young brothers Tobias and Michael DelRay compete for the attention of the new neighbor, recently divorced straight guy Michael Roman. Big daddies with big baskets are just the therapy these young studs need to work through their daddy issues. The latest Icon Male trailers can be seen on IconMale.com. For Icon Male sales and distribution contact [email protected]. For the latest news and BTS previews follow Icon Male on Twitter. Unlike anything else before it, Jersey Shore was a reality TV series which ran for six seasons on MTVand it's been recently rebooted as Jersey Shore: Family Vacation on the same channel. It's about eight housemates in a summer share at, oddly enough, the (New) Jersey Shore. One of the original castmembers was Sammi Sweetheart Giancola, an American actress, model, and businesswoman. The series made her and the others very famous in the U.S. The reboot of the MTV series premiered on April 5, 2018, without Giancola because she has decided not to return to the show. She said that her life now is different from her former life and that shed rather focus on her relationship and her businesses now. Sammi also posted on her Instagram account that she would like to avoid toxic situations while insisting that she is forever grateful to the producer and the casts of Jersey Shore, and her fans for their support. Therefore, Sammi Sweetheart Giancola was not included in this MTV production, but that doesnt mean the cast is reduced to seven. That's because Sammi has been replaced by a sex doll, which the production company ordered from HotSexyDolls.com. The production people were in a hurry, and requested the owner, Doug Weldon, to fabricate a replica doll of Giancola to meet the taping schedule. Weldons allowable time to copy Sammis face was very short, so the staff simply purchased a sex doll body, and Doug Weldon reduced the breast cup to a C. Then he provided two female heads that were made to resemble Giancolas face. He also included four different style wigs to the order. The box containing the sexy doll replica of Sammi Giancola was shipped to Miami Beach, where the taping was moved from the Jersey Shore. In the shows trailer, the cast members are shown opening the box. The entire content, however, was revealed in the first episode which premiered on April 5. The cast is very happy that even though Sammi was not with them in the flesh, at least the sex doll made it appear that she is still a member of the group. Those familiar with sex dolls will have noticed that their physical appearances today have achieved the resemblance to a real woman. It means that the dolls look quite real and definitely more realistic than they did beforeand who knows? If news of the Giancola replica gets wide enough coverage, will other celebrities give their permissions for sex dolls in their own images? Several adult actresses and even anime characters already have dolls in their own images, so isn't it time for mainstream celebs to get a piece of that action? One thing's for sure, when/if they decide to do it, HotSexyDolls.com is ready and willing to supply them! 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. I plan on writing a more extensive report on the teacher walkout in downtown Raleigh Wednesday for the June print edition of NC Capitol Connection. There will be more content on the teachers coming soon at Civitas, including video interviews. Readers can also check out Matt Caulder's reporting from his time on scene. In the meantime, I wanted to share some brief thoughts of my own firsthand experience.First off, the crowd was substantial. A little better turnout than I anticipated considering the weather. Some media estimates put it at 19,000, and if it was less than that, it probably wasn't by much.None of the teachers I talked with should be described as radicals or hyper-charged ideologues. One mentioned she was conservative for what its worth. Unlike the NCAE, they did not mention throwing Republicans or conservatives out of power in North Carolina. In fact, I believe there is a disconnect with some of the teachers that attended and their union, particularly when it comes to politicizing the rhetoric and event. With their internal email, the NCAE made it clear it was about mobilizing a political movement, while some of the teachers I talked to stressed it wasn't about the politics. It's possible I was turned down for conversations by the more ideologically rigid teachers, but I can only speculate on that. I was surprised that a little more refused to speak than were willing to talk to me.I spoke with one very bright teacher from Guilford County named Nina Sumpter. She expressed some frustration from lack of respect for education and teachers and said she has spent $700+ on school supplies annually.declared Sumpter.A couple of teachers admitted it was about more than salary or funding. They told me they have to take on more and more aspects of care and direction over a child's life. I think part of that could reflect more of a cultural problem than political. There is little doubt that family breakdown has placed more pressure and stress on teachers today.Gloria Lawrence, a retired teacher in Surry County, brought up an important point.said Lawrence.Lawrence showed up to support her fellow teachers who did not walkout. She said Surry County "wanted to focus on the kids" and remained open. Lawrence said "Surry County does more with less [funding]. She noted that teachers "work morning, noon, and night, and that it puts a lot of stress on family life." I had a long and fruitful conversation with Lawrence, who is in support of more funding, and I will highlight more of that in print.I pressed some on what they thought the average salary should be. No teachers wanted to offer up a dollar figure for what they thought that should be for North Carolina Public School teachers, which perhaps shows the savviness of either the PR skills of teachers or the NCAE.Overall, I really enjoyed going downtown and meeting educators, especially Gloria Lawrence. I think if there were any lawmakers who purposefully dodged them, they missed an opportunity to at least glean some insights because many just have fascinating stories to tell.I certainly disagreed with those who thought more funding would solve problems that go far beyond the material, but most of their answers were more nuanced and less about political partisanship. I did not concur with teachers that were opposed to school choice, but at least I learned more about their own frustrations. After my conversations, merit pay models definitely make a lot of sense to me.In my mind, I saw a lot of teachers who are in need of help. And just spending more is not going to solve that. We've done that ad nauseam. From a policy perspective, there needs to be more innovation and school choice. So-called conservatives who want to spend more, but just not quite as much as Democrats will not solve the problem either. It not only entraps taxpayers, but it traps children too. Growing government will not grow or improve education, if it did, most of these problems would have been solved by now. True education develops and uplifts the whole person and doesn't just grow the state.If anything, I saw beyond the political in the walkout and rally and saw a pressing need to be much more innovative when it comes to education. Contact: Ford Porter Ford Porter govpress@nc.gov RALEIGH: Though Subtropical Depression Alberto is weakening, the threat of additional rain means North Carolinians need to remain vigilant and watch for area flooding in low-lying areas and landslides in the mountains, Governor Roy Cooper said today.Flash Flood Watches remain in effect for portions of the state along and west of the I-77 corridor and west, as well as far southeastern North Carolina. An additional one-half to two inches of rain is expected across the state today with ranges of two to four inches and locally higher amounts possible in the southern mountains through Thursday evening. Rainfall could cause additional landslides across western NC where some of the greatest accumulations are expected.Gov. Cooper said.The storm has already caused two deaths in North Carolina, when a vehicle carrying two journalists covering the storm was hit by a falling tree in Polk County on Monday.Governor Cooper plans to tour storm damage in western North Carolina later this week.State and local officials are coordinating to respond to any resource needs while keeping a close watch on minor flooding expected today along the Roanoke River near Roanoke Rapids and along the French Broad River at Fletcher and Blantyre later this week. Flooding at Blantyre could approach moderate flooding on Thursday. Officials continue to monitor the French Broad River at Asheville, the Neuse River at Smithfield, the Roanoke River at Williamston, and the Northeast Cape Fear River near Burgaw for potential flooding concerns.The State Highway Patrol urges drivers to stay away from flooded roads and to be especially cautious when driving in the mountains where the potential for landslides and road washouts continues.State Transportation officials said a portion of U.S. 176 in Polk County where the fatality occurred will remain closed between Harmon Field Road in Tryon and Ozone Road in Saluda. NCDOT officials are assessing conditions to determine when the road will reopen. In Avery County, U.S. 221 remains closed while repairs are being made from damage caused by heavy rains earlier this month.Several secondary roads are closed in Transylvania County due to flooding including Wilson Road, Davidson River Road, Island Ford Road and Cascade Lake Road; each is expected to reopen later this week.Some roads in eastern North Carolina are closed as well. In Sampson County, West Mount Gilead Road south of Clinton is closed to due flooding, and Kornegay Town Road, north of Clinton, is closed in both directions due to washed out shoulders. Transportation crews remain on standby to begin repairs as soon as the rain stops.Information is also available at ReadyNC.org and at the ReadyNC mobile app which can be downloaded for free. Contact: White House White House Press Office President Trump signed an Executive Order requiring agencies to negotiate better union contracts in a more efficient and transparent manner. The order directs agencies to negotiate better contracts with Federal unions, holds down costs, promotes performance and accountability, and creates a Labor Relations Working Group. It will eliminate years of costly drawn-out bargaining by encouraging agencies to conclude labor negotiations in less than a year. Agencies pay for union negotiators' salaries, so it hurts taxpayers when bargaining drags on for years. The salaries for union negotiators cost $16 million in 2016 alone. Americans will now be able to gauge for themselves whether they got a good deal. The order requires union contracts to be published in a public online database, promoting transparency.The President's Executive Order reducing spending on taxpayer-funded union activities will ensure Federal employees prioritize work for the American people. The order directs agencies to work on renegotiating contracts to cut taxpayer-funded union time by an average of two-thirds, reducing union business interfering with agency operations. The Social Security Administration estimates it could complete 135,000 more retirement applications or 17,000 more disability determinations annually, if taxpayer funding for union activities were redirected to public service functions. Those Federal employees authorized to act on behalf of unions will be permitted to spend no more than 25 percent of their time on union business. Over 470 Veterans Affairs employees spend 100 percent of their duty hours working for a labor union instead of serving veterans. This includes 74 full-time nurses. The order cuts back on lobbying or pursuing a grievance against an agency on taxpayer-funded union time. Taxpayers should not pay for unions to sue or lobby the government. Agencies will charge rent to employees that use Federal office space for non-agency business and stop covering travel expenses for non-agency business. This order will save taxpayers at least $100 million a year, when fully implemented.Through Executive Order, President Trump is making procedural changes to strengthen the merit system and streamline the removal of poor performers. The current system makes firing bad employees prohibitively difficult, undermining the Federal Government's merit principles that call for removing poor performers. It takes 6 months to 1 year to remove a tenured Federal employee for poor performance, plus an average of 8 more months to resolve appeals. Tenured Federal employees are also 44 times less likely to get fired or laid off than private sector workers. Tenured Federal employees have stolen agency property, run personal businesses from work, and been arrested for using drugs during lunch breaks and not been fired. The order facilitates the efficient removal of bad employees and makes it hard for those employees to mask adverse employment information when seeking re-employment at another agency, while upholding Federal merit principles. Agencies will be required to report information on disciplinary actions and management of poor performers to the Office of Personnel Management for publication. Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Above. More evidence has surfaced about the disturbing political coverup of grave national security violations committed by the Pakistani who ran House Democrats' information technology. His name is Imran Awan and last year he was arrested on bank-fraud charges at Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C. while trying to flee to his native Pakistan.Even after getting fired by some members of Congress for stealing computers and data systems, Florida's Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, kept him and let him have access to her emails and files as well as the password to the electronic device she used for DNC business.At one point, Awan had access to the computers of dozens of members of Congress, including those on the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees. Judicial Watch has launched an investigation and is pursuing public records.The government's bizarre failure to prosecute Awan for the national security violations he appears to have committed points to a political coverup that's dangerous, craven and borders on traitorous. A House Office of Inspector General investigation determined earlier this year that Awan and his relatives committed numerous violations of House security policies, including logging into the House Democratic Caucus server thousands of times without authorization.The same news agency that reported that story published alarming new revelations in the case this month, concluding that "Democrats appear to want to keep the case out of court" because "a trial could expose their reckless IT practices."It turns out that, not only has Capitol Police failed to make any arrests, it inadvertently gave evidence to defense attorneys that was supposed to go to prosecutors. It gets better; prosecutors appear to be sharing information with someone on Capitol Hill who in turn is leaking it to Awan's lawyer.Here is an excerpt from the news article published just a few days ago: "The Capitol Police turned over a trove of evidence in the alleged Imran Awan House cyberbreach and theft case to the defense attorneys when they were supposed to deliver it to prosecutors instead, according to court documents and a source." Someone inside government apparently tipped off Awan's lawyer, Chris Gowen, that a reporter was digging around for information on the Capitol Police's suspicious mistake involving the mishandling of evidence.Gowen, a former public defender in Miami Florida, worked for Bill Clinton and on Hillary Clinton's failed 2008 presidential campaign. The exchange of information (known as discovery) in a federal criminal case occurs between prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office and defense lawyers by either registered mail or a third-party copy service. Law enforcement is never involved, according to federal law enforcement sources contacted by Judicial Watch.Legal experts and veteran federal agents contacted by Judicial Watch say something smells rotten in this case. The so-called inadvertent disclosure to Awan's defense team by Capitol Police was intentional for one of two reasons, the experts assert. Perhaps the prosecution is alerting the defense of particular facts of the case to generate cooperation and further the probe into political figures."This is possible because prosecutors are always gun shy when it comes to prosecuting political figures, especially the figures who may be culpable in the case," said a longtime Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official who has worked on similar cases. "They do not want to go to trial for a number of reasons, so they are showing their hand to induce a plea with cooperation."The second reason, according to Judicial Watch's sources, is that there is corruption and the inadvertent disclosure was purposeful to help bolster the defense without being obvious and backing down in court. "Either way, something is up," a longtime federal agent told Judicial Watch."I have never heard of anyone at the federal level inadvertently handing over documents to the defense en mass like this, never happens." Chris Farrell, Judicial Watch's Director of Investigations and Research, maintains that "the Awan case has all the characteristics of a major national security crime, specifically, 18 USC Sec 793(f)," which carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison. A former military intelligence officer specializing in counterintelligence and human intelligence, Farrell added that treating the Awan case as anything less than a major national security crime is either negligence or complicity. "The bungled handling of evidence is disgraceful and amateurish," Farrell said, adding that "the effort to bury, constrain and minimize the Awan case is deeply disturbing, and points to the need for a legitimate, full investigation by a competent law enforcement agency with substantial experience in counterintelligence and cyber-crime arenas." Philadelphia's WHYY radio reports that visitors to the city's hospital emergency room are blitzed for weeks with ads for personal injury lawyers, thanks to "geofenced ad" brokerages. These brokers buy location data from companies that harvest it via location-tracking apps (like the notorious flashlight app that also continuously logged your location); these apps also collect personal identifiers, which are merged with the location data, building a picture of who went where. This data is turned into a variety of "geofenced ad" products, such as "advertise to people who came near your store" (notoriously, one broker sold "advertise to people who went into Planned Parenthood" services to anti-abortion groups that operated fraudulent "crisis pregnancy centers" that masqueraded as abortion clinics but were actually hard-sell, anti-abortion storefront cons). The existence of a geofenced ad product is reportedly a boon to personal injury lawyers, who struggle to find ways to target potential clients. By nonconsensually collecting your sensitive health information, the digital advertising broker Tell All Digital is able to help them reach clients with more precision. In talking to people coming in and out of emergency rooms, one thing becomes clear fast: Some see these kind of targeted ads as preying on people when they are the most vulnerable. Take Joe Finnegan, 40, of Northeast Philadelphia. He recently had an appointment at a hospital in Center City and says he wouldn't want that fact shared without his knowledge. "It's supposed to be your privacy as a patient," Finnegan says. Seeing law firm ads tied to his recent hospital visit, he says, would be enraging, since he had no idea he was crossing into the geotargeted zone. "I mean, you can't just put a physical fence up, why would you be able to put a cyberfence up?" he says. "I don't get it." Digital Ambulance Chasers? Law Firms Send Ads To Patients' Phones Inside ERs [Bobby Allyn/NPR] (via Ars Technica) In a world that all too often heaps accolades on those who claw and manipulate their way to the top with cruelty and hate, it feels so good to chase a story about someone being praised for being a decent human being. Earlier this week, our Rusty Blazenhoff shared the story of Mamoudou Gassama: a 22-year old Malian living in Paris, France, who climbed four floors, on the outside of an apartment building, to save a young child from falling. Gassama was in France as an undocumented immigrant a fact that quickly changed after saving the child's life. He was called to meet with the French President who immediately fast-tracked his application for citizenship. Amidst all the hubbub of his good deed, Gassama mentioned two things: That he loves children and that he wants to be a firefighter. The first, because of his selfless deed, is pretty obvious. The second is being taken care of by the people of the city he lives in. From The Guardian: After Gassama's immigration papers were fast-tracked on Tuesday morning, he visited a fire station to sign up for a 10-month internship with the fire and rescue services, which is expected to pay around 600 (525) a month. He will receive French citizenship within around three months. Is France perfect? No. Are they seizing on the opportunity for some great optics in light of their less-than-stellar treatment of migrants who come to their nation looking for a better life? Maybe. In any case, I don't care. It could be the new meds that I'm on making me feel more open to emotions that I haven't had to handle in decades, or that I'm getting older and can finally appreciate beauty when I see it. When I read about what Gassama had done, breaking cover as an undocumented immigrant to save a life, it tugged at my coat, just a little. Seeing this in The Guardian today, however, moved me to tears. Apparently I'm a huge suck, now. More of this sort of thing, please. The world is far too dark. More light is needed to drive it back. Image: Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5, Link Jessica Pressler's long, gripping profile of con artist Anna Sorokin (AKA Anna Delvey) has all the making of a first-rate grifter novel, where the likable, unflappable rogue is revealed by inches to be a sociopath, a broken person who can't herself tell truth from fiction. All the more remarkable is "Delvey"'s virtuosity at the con: she tricked the finest hoteliers, finance industry luminaries, restauranteurs, commercial landlords, and even Martin Fucking Shkreli into thinking that she was a German heiress about to inherit an uncountable fortune. She ran up bills good for tens of thousands of dollars at New York hotels, hired the world's leading consultants to help her plan to establish a Soho House-style members' club in a fashionable Manhattan building, even tricked private jet companies into chartering planes for her use. She went to every party and every scene, and flashed around cash she conned out of one mark to seduce the next. Delvey was impersonating a trust-fund kid, a kind of limited Turing Test that is much easier to pass than a full-blown impersonation of someone with skills, perspective and native intelligence. Indeed, one of the early clues that her marks had that she was a scammer was that she was actually trying to do things, rather than just frittering away her unearned, bottomless Gilded Age inheritance. Delvey's story is a kind of parable about the perils of Norman Vincent Peale's positive thinking gospel, whose exponents (including Donald Trump and his father) are told to simply act as though their desires had already been realized, declaring victory even before the battle is joined. These people distinguish themselves from the boring farts in the "reality-based community" who insist that (for example) one's inauguration crowd does not grow larger than your predecessors' if you just claim loudly enough that it is so. Anna was preparing to launch a business, a Soho Houseish type club, she told Neff, focused on art, with locations in L.A., London, Hong Kong, and Dubai, and Neff became her de facto secretary, organizing business lunches and dinners at restaurants like Seamore's and the hotel's own Le Coucou. ("That's what they do in the rich culture, is meals," said Neff.) On occasion, when Delvey showed up while the concierge desk was busy, she would stand at the counter, coolly counting out bills until she got Neff's attention. "I'd be like, 'Anna, there's a line of eight people.' But she'd keep putting money down." And even though Neff had begun to think of Anna as not just a hotel guest but a friend, a real friend, she didn't hesitate to take it. "A little selfish of me," she admitted later. "But yeah." Who can blame her? This was Manhattan in the 21st century, and money is more powerful than ever. Rare is the city dweller who, when presented with an opportunity for a sudden and unexpected influx of cash, doesn't grasp for it. Of course, this money almost always comes with strings attached. Sometimes you can barely see them, like that vaudeville bit in which the pawn dives for a loose bill only to find it pulled just ahead. Still, everyone makes the reach. Because here, money is the one thing that no one can ever have enough of. Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It Somebody had to foot the bill for Anna Delvey's fabulous new life. The city was full of marks. [Jessica Pressler/The Cut] (via Naked Capitalism) I'm starting a petition to have Arkady Babchenko henceforth referred to as "Journalism Jesus," Because holy shit, he just returned from the grave. Less than 24 hours after it was reported that the vehemently anti-Putin journalist had died on the way to hospital after being shot in the back outside of his apartment in Kiev, Ukraine, Babchenko strolled into a press conference being thrown by the Ukrainian government, like a boss of all bosses. It seems that a hitman, hired by the Russian government to permanently silence Babchenko for the sum of $40,000, decided that instead of pulling a trigger on the contract, he'd let Ukraine's security intelligence people in on what was supposed to be happening. I say "supposed to," because things definitely did not go down the way that Mother Russia allegedly wanted them to. From the New York Times: Mr. Babchenko created a sensation in Kiev on Wednesday by appearing at a news conference, billed as a police briefing about his assassination, at which he was greeted by whoops of surprise and scattered applause. It came less than 24 hours after his wife said she had found him bleeding to death on the floor of their apartment, shot in the back. "First of all, I would like to apologize that all of you had to live through this, because I know the horrible feeling when you have to bury your colleagues," Mr. Babchenko, 41, told the stunned room. "Separately, I want to apologize to my wife for all the hell she had to go through." Holy crap. At the press conference, Vasily Gritsak, who heads up Ukraine's security service, announced that his agency had faked Babchenko's death to catch people who were trying to kill him, using the intelligence gleaned from the Babchenko's would-be hitman. According to Al Jazeera, Ukrainian authorities arrested an individual they believe was responsible for planning the plot against Babchenko earlier today. Babchenko had been aware of threats to his life for some time. The operation with Ukraine's security service had been going on for close to two months. Babchenko is a former Russian solider who saw, most likely, some pretty horrific action in Chechnya during the 1990s. After leaving the military, he became one of Russia's most renowned war correspondents. All that changed when he came out against the Russian military's policies on social media in recent years. In 2017, afraid for his life, he left Russia to set up shop in Kiev. Apparently, he didn't run quite far enough. There's been a rash of murdered journalists in Kiev in recent years that have gone unsolved. Happily, for the time being, at least, Babchenko isn't among them. Image via Wikipedia Commons A Canadian man born in Kazakhstan has been sentenced to five years in prison for crimes connected to the massive Yahoo security breach that U.S. federal agents say was directed by Russian government spies. "Karim Baratov, an FSB go-to guy for webmail hacking, was sentenced to 5 years in prison this morning, less than the nearly 8 years sought by the Justice Department," says Daily Beast's Kevin Poulsen. Below, why 5 years in prison is actually a good outcome for Baratov, who is 23. Excerpt: Karim Baratov, a Canadian citizen born in Kazakhstan, pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy and identity theft charges last November in connection with a black market no-questions-asked hacking service he operated from 2010 until his arrest in March 2017. Baratov charged customers about $100 to obtain another person's webmail password, using phishing attacks that tricked users into entering their passwords into a fake password reset page. He cracked more than 11,000 accounts in Russia and the US before he was caught. One of Baratov's clients was an officer with Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB, who used an alias to commission hacks on 80 targets in all, including people in other Russian agencies, and government officials in neighboring Eastern European nations. Prosecutors had sought a sentence of seven years, 10 months in prison, in part to make other hackers think twice about offering their skillsknowingly or unknowinglyto hostile intelligence agencies. () Only eight of the FSB-related hack attempts were successful, and the government and Baratov's defense team agree that the hacker did not know that the commissions were coming from the Russian government. Baratov was fined $250,000, in addition to the prison sentence. More from Poulsen: Dmitry Dokuchaev, the former FSB officer who allegedly hired Baratov, is charged as a coconspirator in the case, though he's unlikely to wind up in a San Francisco courtroom. Dokuchaev was arrested by his own agency in December 2016 and charged with treason, under circumstances that remain shrouded in mystery. Another FSB officer, Igor Sushchin, is also charged in the same indictment for allegedly overseeing the email hacking, as is a long-notorious Russian hacker named Alexsey Belan who was already wanted in two states for conventional cybercrime. The three Russian nationals are accused of conspiring to commit a massive 2014 data breach at Yahoo that compromised account information on 500 million users. They allegedly turned to Baratov to fill the gap when they encountered an FSB target that used Gmail, or another provider, instead of Yahoo where they had complete access. And from an earlier piece by Poulsen on the Baratov case, this gem Pre-sentencing wrangling focused largely on the mercenary flavor of Baratov's business. Defense lawyers said Baratov generally assumed his clients were jealous lovers or spouses spying on their significant others, and they argued that Baratov's neutralityhe'd work for anyone with the money to spendrendered him less culpable than defendants in otherwise similar cases who performed their intrusions as part of a financial fraud scheme or for voyeurism. "Karim is a very different type of hacker," Mancilla told The Daily Beast. "He didn't intend to personally harm people." PHOTO: Karim Baratov poses in front of his house in Ancaster, Ontario, in an undated photo. (Facebook) To call Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn [R-TN] a shill for Big Cable is to insult honest, hardworking shills everywhere: she is so deep in hock to Verizon that she has toshill for new subscribers on weekends at a folding table on the sidewalk in front of the Grand Old Opry. She's also a creationist and climate denier. Now she wants to be a Senator, and Trump wants you to vote for her. "[Blackburn] is a great woman," Trump told a crowd at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium. "We need Marsha in the Senate to continue the amazing progress and work that we've done over the last year and a half. There has never been an administration, and even some of our enemies are begrudgingly admitting this, that has done what we've done in the first year and a half." Rep. Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is one of the most outspoken opponents of strict net neutrality rules in the House of Representatives and chairs a key subcommittee that oversees telecommunications. She is seeking the Republican nomination for one of Tennessee's Senate seats. Blackburn and Democrat Phil Bredesen, a former Tennessee governor, are the favorites to win their respective parties' nominations ahead of the general election in November. Bredesen has a small lead in some polls, but the race appears to be a toss-up. Trump hits campaign trail to endorse key foe of net neutrality rules [Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica] In "design fiction" and "speculative design," designers and science fiction writers create fictional products and services, which go on to inform real engineering and product design processes. Sometimes these designs are meant to inspire (see, for example, the Catalog of Missing Devices), sometimes they're designed as a warning (see, for example, my story The Knights of the Rainbow Table) and sometimes they're meant to do a little of both (for example, Future Not Made in EU). One of the foremost practitioners of design fiction is Near Future Labratory, co-founded by Julian Bleecker and Nick Foster, who now works for the secretive Google/Alphabet division called "X" whose mission is to "think outlandish thoughts and to turn them into reality." Foster and his group created a now-notorious video depicting a Black Mirror-ish product called The Selfish Ledger. Because it was leaked from such a secretive division without any context, and because Google is so big, a monopolist, and has helped normalize surveillance capitalism, The Selfish Ledger was interpreted as a suggestion that X was making to its product teams, rather than a warning about how things might go if they failed to pay sufficient attention to the privacy and other risks of their designs. Writing in Wired, Felix Salmon calls the process "creepy," though he's a little muddy about what part of it is creepy given the current clamor for technologists to think about the ethics of their work, design fiction and its dystopian commercial brethren like Black Mirror are a seemingly welcome intervention, an explicit inquiry into the ethical dimension of technology. Salmon seems to agree, and locates at least some of the problem in X's secretiveness, which I'll go along with. Salmon namechecks the work of Genevieve Bell, the Intel anthropologist whose groundbreaking work was open to the public. I'd certainly welcome a future in which that was the ethos of all design fiction. Was The Selfish Ledger Foster's attempt to warn Googlers of the possible dystopian consequences of their actionsan Alphabet version, if you will, of the famous Boz memo at Facebook? Did Foster really want to call his video "The Ugly," and warn the company he worked for (confidentially, internally) that there was a risk it would go too far? That's the impression X is trying to give, when the company talks about the video as a piece of speculative design. But it's not a Black Mirror episode, it's not self-evidently horrific, and to many Googlers, it might even be an exciting harbinger of technological possibility. What's more, the video is not some kind of ancient history, as X's "from years ago" phrasing might imply: it was created at the end of 2016, right around the time that Donald Trump was being elected president. The Selfish Ledger, then, is clearly a piece of design fiction more than it is a piece of speculative design. It wasn't really designed to be disturbing, it just is disturbing. And it's particularly disturbing by dint of the fact that it was made by Google, in secret, for internal distribution only. Some speculative design thinkers, like Genevieve Bell, are very happy to talk in public and in detail about what they do. She does it now, at Australian National University, and she did it in her previous job, too, when she worked as a vice president at Intel. The Creepy Rise of Real Companies Spawning Fictional Design [Felix Salmon/Wired] News / National by Byo24News News Rwandan President Paul Kagame has exposed Zimbabwean opposition leader Nelson Chamisa for lying that he helped him with the ICT policy.Chamisa told a rally last week that he met Kagame in Geneva and the East African nation's President was impressed with his clarity of ideas on ICT matters.However, Kagame came to twitter to set the record straight saying he doesn't even know Chamisa.This was after a phathom social media character @matigary tagged him."I don't know this man & no discussion ever happened with him anywhere."Rw's ICT policy, projects & progrm started before mdc formation and politics!"Kagame conclided by wishing "the people of Zim well!"Addressing supporters at a campaign rally in Beitbridge Saturday, Chamisa - who was ICT minister in the former coalition government - said he had helped the Rwandese leader turn his country around."Look what my brother Paul Kagame (Rwandan leader) is doing for his country," he told the cheering supporters."I helped him on his ICT policy, on how to turn around the country when we met in Geneva, Switzerland and he was happy with my presentation."He (Kagame) asked and enquired about me from former president Robert Mugabe and he told him that I belonged to his party Zanu PF, but I told him (Kagame) there and there that I belong to MDC party led by the late Morgan Tsvangirai."So Kagame is doing a wonderful his job for his country because he started his planning from a local level and, because of that, Rwanda has never been the same; it has changed completely." News / National by Staff reporter A PESKY goblin called Mike Maqobola is allegedly leading invisible beings to terrorise Cowdray Park residents, assaulting, sodomising and sleeping with women.Sources from the suburb said they had called the goblin Maqobola, which is IsiNdebele for "hit with an object like a stone," because it has developed a penchant for stoning residents.Terrified residents last week each contributed $1 to hire wafa-wafas, goblin hunters from the Zion Church, from as far as South Africa to get rid of the randy "supernatural beings."Some residents shed tears after the wafa-wafas failed to deal with Maqobola and his alleged gang after a battle spanning about nine hours.Goblins have, since 2015, been allegedly tormenting residents living in the Garikai section of Cowdray Park by stoning their houses or anyone who walks in the streets at night and "raping" women.In October last year, Cowdray Park residents were relieved after a prophet, Lazarus Siziba destroyed a goblin named 'Ernest Ndlovu.'However, the peace was short-lived as Maqobola surfaced this year and forced some residents to flee their houses after allegedly vandalising their property.The attacks are said to be happening at anytime of the day, with most of the action occurring at night.Five women have reported the incidents at Luveve Police Station under RRB number 3270731."Prophets hired from South Africa on Monday failed to destroy the goblins and fled from the scene without solving anything," a resident said yesterday.Residents have since hired prophet Siziba who destroyed Ernest Ndlovu to help destroy the goblins.When a Chronicle news crew visited the suburb yesterday, inexplicable banging sounds were heard on the roofs and walls, with residents alleging that it was the goblins.Some were dodging stones but no one could tell the direction they were coming from.In the afternoon tempers flared as residents gathered with the hope that a cleansing ceremony would be conducted by prophet Siziba since the South Africans had failed.Prophet Siziba said he would cleanse the area this morning after an all-night vigil of prayer and singing."I will have a vigil with a few interested residents as we try to trap these goblins and consult the spirit. Tomorrow (today) morning we will then perform a ceremony to destroy the goblins so that people may live peacefully," he said.Residents who spoke to The Chronicle said the globins resurfaced on May 17."It all started on May 17; at first we thought it was children playing outside who were throwing stones but at night the sounds continued. Our asbestos sheets are being damaged and our windows are broken by the goblins. In some houses you find a huge stone inside even if doors were locked and we always wondered where they were coming from," said Mr Thabisani Ngwenya.Women said they were not at peace as the goblins were taking turns to "have sex with them.""I have known no peace in my life. Every night the goblins have sex with me. I can actually feel the penetration but cannot tell where it will be coming from. I have had to flee my house late in the night to consult prophets for help," said a woman who cannot be named for ethical reasons.She said the goblin would at times sodomise her.Some residents said food was mysteriously disappearing and their children cried non-stop every night."In some cases our food disappears and we cannot tell where the food is gone. For example, the mealie meal I usually buy to last us more than two weeks now lasts less than that. We need people to help us cleanse this place. We don't have peace in our homes. Our children cry every night for no reason," said another resident who preferred anonymity.The residents' association chairman Mr Johannes Nyoni said the 'fake' prophets who were hired from South Africa on Monday failed to destroy the goblins and fled from the scene after falsely accusing a number of residents of being the owners of the goblins."The prophets who came here seem to have been after money. They kept pointing to people's houses claiming that's where the goblins where but when we got to the houses nothing was found. An altercation ensued between one of the men who was said to have goblins and the prophet when they found nothing at his house," he said."The prophets ended up leaving without even doing anything as the goblin kept attacking people even during the cleansing ceremony."Cowdray Park Councillor, Collet Ndhlovu said residents had contributed money to hire the South Africans to cleanse the area."Each household contributed $1 for us to hire 'wafa-wafas' (also known as tsikamutandas) to try and find a solution to our problem. We hired a number of them, with some coming from South Africa and some from Kezi but they failed," he said.He said Siziba was suitable for the cleansing as he had experience in destroying goblins. News / National by Staff reporter MDC-T president Nelson Chamisa's lies have been exposed again after Rwanda President Paul Kagame disputed his claims that he assisted the country in crafting its ICT policy.Mr Chamisa made the claims while addressing a rally in Beitbridge last Saturday that he assisted Mr Kagame to craft his nation's ICT policy when they met in Geneva, Switzerland after the Rwanda President was impressed by his ideas when he was then Minister of Information and Communication Technology during the inclusive Government era.President Kagame however, disputed Mr Chamisa's claims on his twitter handle."1st my name is Kagame not kagama 2- I don't know this man & no discussion ever happened with him anywhere 3rd Rw's ICT policy,projects & progrm started before mdc formation and politics! I wish the people of Zim.well !" said President Kagame.In his address during the rally Mr Chamisa said President Kagame had been referred to him by former President Mugabe."Look what my brother Paul Kagame (Rwandan leader) is doing for his country," he said."I helped him on his ICT policy, on how to turn around the country when we met in Geneva, Switzerland and he was happy with my presentation."He (Kagame) asked and inquired about me from former president Robert Mugabe and he told him that I belonged to his party Zanu PF, but I told him (Kagame) there and there that I belong to MDC party led by the late Morgan Tsvangirai."So Kagame is doing a wonderful job for his country because he started his planning from a local level and, because of that, Rwanda has never been the same; it has changed completely."This is not the first time that Mr Chamisa has been caught lying after the US government disputed his allegations that they had promised the MDC Alliance US$15 billion in aid if they win the forthcoming elections. News / National by Plaedian Mnangagwa Dear Paul KagameFrom Concerned Zimbabwean!Allow me to correct a few misleading comments from your response to a fake news article involving a man called Nelson Chamisa who is set to become the youngest African president in a few months of time!1/Chamisa calls you "Kagame"!2/This man Chamisa did contribute ideas at the ITU Telecom World 2009 dynamic "discussions" & roundtables focused on knowledge-sharing for framing & implementing ICT visions & strategies used by global leaders to shape their existing ICT policies!You did meet Chamisa(ICT Min)3/Africa can develop if it starts appreciating a man's contributions! Never has any political party in ZW claimed to had crafted Rwanda's ICT policy, mentions were merely based on how we have always shared knowledge & core strategies necessary in shaping already existing policies4.The ITU Telecom World 2009 which was attended by over 2,250 delegates, it would'nt had been easy for any president to actually remember every ICT Minister who had attended. But #Fact is its incorrect that you never met him, you indeed had discussions with him on roundtables! 5.Lastly @PaulKagame as president try to make sure your facts stand imperative, Rwanda actually launched its ICT policy in 2001. The MDC formation was in 1999! Wishing the people of Rwanda.well ! 11 Women's Rights Activists Arrested and Jailed in Saudi Arabia Eleven Saudi women's rights activists, most of them women who were fighting for the right to drive, have been detained since last week in Saudi Arabia, reports CNN. The arrests come just weeks before the countrywide ban on women driving is scheduled to end. King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, announced last year that the ban on women driving would be lifted on June 24, 2018. The decision caused many Saudi women's rights activists, including those who have been imprisoned for defying the ban, to celebrate. However, the activists also vowed that they would continue working against other sexist laws, including a strict dress code for women, a law separating women from unmarried men they are not related to, and a law requiring women receive written permission from a male guardian to work or access healthcare. ADVERTISEMENT The crown prince seemed to support the activists, stating during an interview with CBS News, "Saudi women still have not received their full rights. There are rights stipulated in Islam that they still don't have. We have come a very long way and have a short way to go." But last Friday, Saudi authorities confirmed they had recently arrested seven prominent women's rights activistsfive women and two men, who were taken from their homes reports the BBC. On Saturday, the Presidency of the State Security said the activists faced charges for "suspicious contact with foreign parties" and undermining the "security and stability" of the country. Pro-government newspapers and social media accounts are calling them "traitors". Kristin Smith Diwan, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington said "They were taken from their homes. It's a relatively new way of imposing order in Saudi Arabia, as is the quick willingness to name these women. I think the way they were publicly shamed speaks to a new Saudi Arabia, to get society behind the moves the government has taken." Human Rights Watch cited Saudi activists as saying at least another four other women's rights defenders were now being held, bringing the total number to at least 11. An image circulated by pro-government social media in Saudi Arabia labeling arrested womens rights campaigners as traitors. Photo Twitter These actions are being condemned by Western human rights organizations and some supporters of the kingdom. For example, Ali Shihabi, founder of the Arabia Foundation, a Washington think tank close to the Saudi leadership who said "It's a very surprising development. Mistakes are inevitable, and this sure looks like one." The Associated Press reported that the activists have not been given access to lawyers, based on information received from people who are familiar with the arrested and that they were allowed just one telephone call to their families a week ago. One of the women is reportedly being held without the ability to communicate with anyone. Activists also told the Associated Press that seven of those detained had recently submitted a request to the government to establish a non-governmental organization called "Amina" that would offer support and shelter to victims of domestic abuse. The U.N. human rights office said the government should ensure the women and other campaigners in custody have due process. It is also an important magnitude of arrests and we dont know where [the activists] are, and the conditions of release for the ones who were released. This is very worrying, said Kareem Chehayeb, a Saudi Arabia researcher at Amnesty International. We too are worried and deeply troubled by these events and we continue to follow the story as it unravels. The activists who have been imprisoned include: Image courtesy of Loujain Hathloul Alhathloul/Facebook Loujain al-Hathloul, a 28-year-old outspoken women's rights activists who was detained for more than 70 days in 2013 after live streaming herself driving and for trying to cross the border. Eman al-Nafjan, an assistant professor of linguistics and mother of four who runs the blog "Saudiwoman." Walaa Al-Shubbar, an activist in her late 20s who has been fighting for the end of guardianship rules and appeared on Arabic news programs to discuss issues of patriarchy in the kingdom. Image courtesy of Youtube Aisha Al-Mana, director of Al-Mana General Hospitals and the Mohammad Al-Mana College of Health Sciences who protested the driving ban in 2011 and 2013. Image courtesy of Madeha Alajroush/Facebook Madeha Al-Ajroush, a psychotherapist in her mid-60s who runs a private therapy practice in the capital which specializes in gender orientation. Image courtesy of Elles Olaire Hessah Al-Sheikh, an activist who took part in early protests in 1990, a professor at King Saud University and a volunteer with Saudi-based charities focusing on women and children. Image courtesy of Aziza al Yousef: Human Rights Activist/Facebook Aziza al-Yousef, a mother of five and grandmother of eight who has worked for years to help women escape abusive marriages and homes Mohammed al-Rabea, a writer in his 20s who has worked with some of the activists to push for greater women's rights. Abdulaziz Al-Meshaal, a businessman, and philanthropist who was a board member on the application for "Amina," an organization to protect women survivors of domestic violence. Ibrahim al-Modaimeegh, a human rights lawyer. More From BUST Haifaa Al-Mansour Tells Saudi Women's Stories: 52 Weeks Of Directors This Saudi Man Was Jailed For Campaigning Against Male Control Of Women Will Saudi Arabias Massive Investment In Uber Make It Harder For Saudi Women To Get The Right To Drive? Byshera Williams is an English Major at Drexel University. She is an associate editor at The Smart Set. 'I thank him for my own life': Swiss diplomat used legal ruse to save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews On New Year's Eve 1944, six-year-old Andras Spiegel watched as Nazi troops stormed the former glass factory where he, his parents and 2,000 other Jews had taken shelter in Budapest, Hungary. They were all marched outside, lined up and told to hold their hands in the air. They stayed there for three hours until a man in a foreign diplomat's car arrived. The man argued with the soldiers and soon Spiegel and the others were allowed back inside, but not before some had been killed. Spiegel, who is now known as Andrew Simon, recalled seeing three dead bodies. "And what I know now, what I didn't know then, is that we were about to be marched to the Danube [River] to be shot because they had no other way of getting rid of us," Spiegel, now 80 years old, said in an interview. Spiegel and his family survived the Nazi occupation and in 1950 escaped what was by then Communist Hungary by "sneaking through a barbed wire fence at night with the aid of a generously bribed border patrol officer" and enter ed Austria, he said. Once in Canada, Spiegel became Simon. He spent most of his working life at the CBC in radio and television. He was the founding producer of the radio program Cross Country Checkup. He wants more recognition for the man he believes saved his life and the lives of tens of thousands of others. "I thank him for my own life and my parents' lives. All the thousands of Jews he saved," he said at his home in suburban Toronto. 'Swiss Schindler' That man was Carl Lutz. Known informally by some as the Swiss Schindler, Lutz was the diplomat who arrived on the scene in Budapest and ensured Simon and others were not killed that night. Historical accounts credit Lutz with saving between 40,000 and 60,000 Jews. Yet unlike German businessman Oskar Schindler, whose heroism was depicted in the Oscar-winning film Schindler's List directed by Steven Spielberg, or Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who was given honorary Canadian citizenship for his role in saving Jewish lives, Lutz has remained relatively little known. Story continues A room was named in Lutz's honour in a palace in Bern. But for some survivors, it is not nearly enough recognition. Survivor testimonies A new book, Under Swiss Protection, includes testimonies from some of those who survived because of Lutz's actions. The book was edited by University of Victoria professor Charlotte Schallie and Lutz's daughter, Agnes Hirschi. There have been other accounts of Lutz's actions through the years, including one from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Israel. Upon declaring Lutz "righteous among the nations" in 1964, it noted he had risked his life many times and that is actions jeopardized his diplomatic career. By 1944, the Nazis had surrounded Budapest, working in co-operation with Hungarian troops known as the Arrow Cross, who were loyal to Adolf Hitler. As a boy, Simon saw and heard the bombings. He and his friends tried to make a game of it. "We would stand on the balcony and watch the skies to see if there were any enemy planes and scream, 'Air raid,'" he said. "We thought it was a big gag. It was fun to run down to the air-raid shelter." But the attacks, both from the air and on the streets, intensified. That's when Lutz stepped in without orders from Switzerland. According to the new book, Lutz, who was vice-consul and head of the foreign interests division in the Swiss legation in Budapest, led a risky operation to save Jews between March 1944 and February 1945. Co-editor Schallie, who specializes in Holocaust education, has tried to uncover why this quiet bureaucrat would take on such a mission. "He was a deeply religious man," she said in an interview. "But he was also a great humanitarian. And so I think it was a combination of deep sense of justice and a deep religious commitment." Negotiations with Nazis By October 1944, Budapest was seeing repeated raids on Jewish homes and executions on the banks of the Danube before bodies were dumped in the river. Lutz negotiated with the Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi official and member of the SS who oversaw the rounding up and deportation of Jews in Hungary and elsewhere to death camps. He obtained authorization to issue "protective letters" that gave the individuals named within them permission to emigrate. It was, according to the book, a legal ruse. Lutz only had authorization for 7,000 individuals but expanded the protection to entire families. He is said to have issued 50,000 such documents. Lutz then persuaded authorities in Hungary to let the holders of the letters move into special safehouses where residents had diplomatic immunity, according to the book. Inside the Glass House One of them, an old glass factory known as the Glass House, became the largest Swiss-protected safehouse in the city. It's where Simon turned up with his mother in the fall of 1944. "I go with her, and she knocked on the door and said, 'Please let us in because my child and I need protection, and we are Jewish,'" he said. "Initially, they didn't let us in because they said it was overcrowded. She somehow persuaded them." Conditions inside were horrendous, according to another survivor, Gabor Mate, a physician who now lives in Vancouver. "You can imagine toilet facilities were completely overwhelmed," he said. "There were feces and manure on the floor. Food was very uncertain. A lot of disease." Mate was not yet one year old when he and his mother entered the Glass House. She kept a diary and told him about their lives in later years after they, too, escaped to Canada. Even with the protection offered by the Glass House, Mate said his mother fell into despair as he became sickly. She already knew her parents had been killed in a death camp and her husband was in a labour camp. "My mother decided to actually give me away because she didn't think she could guarantee her life let alone mine," he said. "And so she handed me to a passing Christian woman on the street and said, 'Please get him out of here.'" The woman delivered Mate to his mother's relatives, who were in hiding underground and therefore less likely to be caught, he said. Mate and his mother were reunited after the Glass House was liberated on Jan. 18, 1945. His family eventually escaped Hungary and moved to Canada. Mate, 74, is one of Canada's leading authorities on childhood trauma and addiction. He has no doubt his choice of work is linked to what he experienced in Budapest. He also has no doubt Lutz is a hero. "I want to say thank you," he said. "I can't imagine where you found the resourcefulness and the sheer wit and the sheer chutzpah, the sheer guts." Mate said the Canadian government should give Lutz honorary citizenship, as it did to Wallenberg. "Certainly, Carl Lutz belongs in the same ranks," he said. 'It was a most dangerous and difficult task' Lutz died in Bern, Switzerland, in 1975. In the new book, there is a copy of a letter he wrote in 1970. It is one of the few times he shared any insight into what he did in Budapest. By that time, word had spread that he was struggling financially. "I feel sorry that I could not save more of my fellow beings," Lutz wrote to one couple who sent him $50 US with their thanks. "But it was a most dangerous and difficult task to negociate (sic) with SS. Eichmann as I did." In February, the Swiss government formally honoured Lutz's memory by naming a room in the Swiss Federal Palace in Bern after him. But Switzerland initially reprimanded Lutz for taking the actions he did. That still bothers Simon. "This guy was a great man," he said. "We should never forget his name." If you watched the televised leadership debates ahead of the June 7 Ontario election, youve likely missed out on hearing about a fourth partys platform the provincial Green Party. Before the deadline for Ontarians to head to the polls and cast their vote for the provinces next premier, Yahoo Canada News spoke to Green Party leader Mike Schreiner and asked him your questions about his party, his platform and his competitors. The Green Party of Ontario, which receives public funding, has heavily criticized the media consortium for excluding the party from televised debates. At the provincial leaders debates, Green Party supporters arrived with green tape over their mouths, calling for fair debates that give the Green Party an equal opportunity to participate. Green Party supporters arrived and had green tape on their mouths suggesting they are voiceless at the debate/Getty Images I think its a slap in the face of the people of Ontario and its a slap in the face of our democracy, Schreiner told Yahoo Canada News. Despite their exclusion in these public forums, Schreiner has used social media to answer questions live as they are asked to his Liberal, NDP and Progressive Conservative competitors on television. Yes, we need more funding for hospitals, but we need to get to the root of the problem. #MikeAtTheMic #OnElxn #ONDebate pic.twitter.com/63US3eLmeJ Mike Schreiner (@MikeSchreiner) May 28, 2018 Our plan on childcare: We support $12 per day childcare and we would apply it to all age groups. But it needs to be available along a range of options so that people can choose safe and licensed providers. #onelxn #ondebate #MikeAtTheMic pic.twitter.com/rjYv0MA53y Mike Schreiner (@MikeSchreiner) May 28, 2018 The provincial Green Partys platform outlines their commitment to creating jobs in the clean economy and its plans to cancel the current Liberal governments unFair Hydro plan for low cost water power. Schreiner also promises to invest $4.1 million in mental health services and will lower payroll taxes for local businesses and nonprofits. With party leader Schreiner at the helm, poll projections currently have the Ontario Green Party sitting around five per cent support. The only way were going to change the political status quo at Queens Park is to vote for a new party, with a new vision and a new way of doing politics, Schreiner said. Newly released documents related to the murder trial of Christopher Garnier include letters from the convicted killer's father and girlfriend appealing for leniency in the case. While the final sentencing arguments failed to go ahead as scheduled on Monday, the documents surrounding the murder case, including written submissions from both the Crown and defence, are now a matter of public record. Garnier was convicted of second-degree murder by a jury on Dec. 21, 2017. He was found guilty of killing Catherine Campbell, an off-duty Truro police officer, on Sept. 11, 2015. After he killed her, Garnier placed Campbell's body in a green compost bin, wheeled her remains through the streets of Halifax, and dumped her body down a slope under the approaches to the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge. Police discovered Campbell's body on Sept. 15, four days after she was dumped under the bridge. Garnier was arrested on Sept. 16. 'Very proud of him' "I was, and still am, so very proud of him. With the utmost sincerity, Chris was, and is, my life," wrote Garnier's father, Vince Garnier, in a letter to Justice Josh Arnold, who presided over Garnier's trial and parole eligibility hearing. "The tremendously tragic event on September 16, 2015, caused Chris to developed post-traumatic stress disorder, consequences of which have caused him to have night terrors, flashbacks, difficult sleeping, hypervigilance and more," Vince Garnier wrote. Christopher Garnier's common law spouse also wrote to Arnold. "I consider myself incredibly lucky to call Christopher my significant other," Brittany Francis wrote in her letter to the judge. "He truly is the best kind of person inside and out. He has saved me from me and given me something to look forward to for the future our future." The Crown read Francis's letter to the court on Monday and countered it with text messages she exchanged with Garnier around the time of the murder. Story continues "What you did was inexcusable and I need to figure out if it's something I'm willing to carry with me," she texted at one point. Francis told court on Monday that the texts didn't tell the full picture. She testified that she was angry with Garnier because he lied about smoking marijuana. In a later text, Francis wrote, "I am having a really hard time with the lies and the cheating. I don't trust you chris. And this is not a way to be in a relationship." Francis testified that Garnier was never physically violent with her and the only lie he told her was about the marijuana. She told court she didn't consider his failure to talk about Campbell's murder before his arrest to be a lie. Sentencing recommendations The Crown is recommending that Garnier serve a minimum of 16 years in prison before he can begin applying for parole. That sentence would be for both the murder and the separate offence of improperly interfering with human remains. The Crown compared what Garnier did to the Nova Scotia case of Jason MacRae, who murdered his wife, school teacher Paula Gallant, and concealed her body in the trunk of her car. The Crown also cited the case of Paul Calnen, who murdered his girlfriend Reita Jordan and burned her body. The defence said Garnier should only serve 10 years for both offences. In his letter to the judge, Vince Garnier asked if his son could be sent to a medium- or minimum-security prison, arguing he wouldn't get the help he needs for his post-traumatic stress disorder at a maximum-security facility. "Your Lordship, Chris and our family think about Catherine and her family daily," Vince Garnier wrote. "When Chris says (repeatedly) to us that he would gladly give his life to have her back with her family, I know that he is truly sincere." Victim impact statements, expert testimony from two defence witnesses who have examined Garnier and sentencing arguments will all be presented when the case returns to court for two days at the end of August. A Newfoundland and Labrador provincial court judge has dismissed a police request for a rare type of peace bond restricting the movements of a man once accused of being the so-called Halifax "sleepwatcher." Judge Mike Madden made the ruling in a St. John's courtroom Tuesday morning. Madden described what police sought as a "rather unusual recognizance" against Barry Edward Sinclair. 'Deviant sexual behaviour' in past but not recently That type of peace bond applies to someone who has not yet committed a crime, but who police believe will. "The issue here is not whether (Sinclair) is sexually well adjusted," Madden said. While Sinclair had exhibited "deviant sexual behaviour" in the past, the judge noted that he has not committed those types of crimes in nearly two decades. Madden said he cannot conclude at this point that Sinclair will commit a "serious personal injury offence," as it was defined in this case namely, a break and enter with a voyeuristic component, watching women sleep for sexual gratification. "I cannot find it is imminent that such an offence will be committed," Madden said. So he dismissed the police application. RNC filed application in February 2017 The peace bond process had been ongoing for 15 months before Tuesday morning's decision. The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary initially filed documents all the way back in February 2017 expressing concern that Sinclair "will commit a serious personal injury offence" against a woman. Four months ago, police outlined for the judge why they were seeking continued restrictions on Sinclair's movements. RNC Const. Stephen Picco said in court on Jan. 5 that Sinclair needs "conditions placed upon him to keep him and to keep the community safe." Last month, Sinclair told the judge that he's a changed man and won't get in trouble with the law again. "I don't want to go to prison," he said in April. "Those days are over. Nobody has to fear [anything] from me, or that I'm going to harm them in any way. It's not going to happen." Story continues Long criminal history Sinclair's criminal history dates back to 1980, and includes five federal prison terms. His prior convictions include property offences, impaired driving, four counts of being unlawfully in a dwelling, three counts of trespassing at night, breaking and entering, sexual assault and criminal harassment. Sinclair's most recent sentence ended last year. He was found not guilty in 2012 of voyeurism-related charges linked to the so-called "sleepwatcher" case in Nova Scotia. But a judge there convicted Sinclair of another break-in, and in early 2013 sentenced him to five years less time served. He has been living in the St. John's area since his release. Sinclair had been subject to an interim set of more than a dozen conditions while the peace bond application made its way through the court system. In earlier testimony, Sinclair told the court that he was subjected to constant police attention, and 2 a.m. visits by officers to make sure he was abiding by his curfew. KABUL (Reuters) - More than 50 senior Taliban commanders were killed in an artillery strike on a meeting in Afghanistan's southern province of Helmand, a U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday, as fighting continued across the country. Details of last week's operation emerged as fighting continued in other parts of Afghanistan, where the Taliban, aiming to restore their version of hardline Islamic law, launched their annual spring offensive last month. Gunmen in Kabul, the capital, attacked the heavily fortified interior ministry, battling security forces for more than two hours before the assault was suppressed. There were also serious incidents in Takhar province in the north, in Loghar, east of the capital, and Kandahar in the south, keeping up a pattern of attacks across the country. The U.S. military said the May 24 meeting in Helmand's district of Musa Qala involved commanders from a number of Afghan provinces, including neighboring Farah, where Taliban fighters this month briefly threatened to overrun the provincial capital. "We think the meeting was to plan next steps," said Lt. Col. Martin O'Donnell, spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. While the strike by an artillery rocket system would disrupt Taliban operations, it would not necessarily mean any interruption to the fighting, he said. However, the attack in one of the heartlands of the Taliban insurgency was a significant blow to the insurgents, he said. "It's certainly a notable strike," he said, adding that several other senior and lower level commanders had been killed during operations over a 10-day period this month. The Taliban dismissed the report as "propaganda" and said the attack had hit two civilian houses in Musa Qala, killing five civilians and wounding three. "This was a civilian residential area, which had no connection with the Taliban," spokesman Qari Yousaf Ahmadi said in a statement. In the northern province of Takhar, Taliban fighters in the Dasht-e Qala district center captured the governor's compound and police headquarters on Wednesday but heavy fighting was continuing, police spokesman Khalil Aseer said. In Loghar, the Taliban claimed an attack on a police station in the provincial capital, Pul-e Alam, which killed three police and wounded 12, among them four police and eight civilians. Shahpoor Ahmadzai, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said three attackers who sought to enter the police station in the early morning hours triggered a three-hour gunbattle that ended when all three were killed. Elsewhere, three civilians were killed and 13 wounded by an explosion in the southern city of Kandahar that appeared to have targeted a mechanics' workshop repairing Afghan army vehicles, a spokesman for the provincial governor said. (Reporting by James Mackenzie, Samiullah Paiwand, Qadir Sediqi; Editing by Clarence Fernandez) In my line of work; as a software engineer, I often come across the need to launch system updates. Typically for me, this involves the process of taking one web backed service and launching a major update. The process of such update can be quite complex. The Plan As a major update reaches completion an upgrade plan is normally created to plan and manage the changeover process. This plan usually contains: - Stakeholder management - informing users of the change to the system so they know what is going on - managing any concerns stakeholders have with any of the changes (before changes go live) - A risk analyses and mitigation documentation: - Documenting what could go wrong, the likely hood of what could go wrong and mitigation and fullback strategies - Instructions on how the upgrade should be performed often these instructions are tested in a mock upgraded on similar hardware to ensure that they contain no mistakes. - Back up instructions for any database data and privacy management stratify to avoid the back up from being compromised or leaked The Rollout Strategy There are two major styles of upgrade strategies. The first is where you roll out the new system alongside the old one. The new system is tested by real users and feedback/bugs are addressed before the old system is decommissioned. This strategy is more expensive and time heavy than its alternatives however it tends to be preferable as users are never left without a working system if the new system fails. Another strategy is turning the old system off and turning the new one on. This strategy is the usually the cheaper of the two but has a higher risk of failure. If the new system doesn't work or has issues then the end users are left with no system or an incomplete/buggy system. This risk, however, is normally managed by a stricter testing before the new system is launched. An alternative to the above strategy is taking the existing system of line updating the system before the new software online. This process carries a much larger risk because the process to revert the system back to its original state often involves completely resetting the system from scratch (which can often be a long and involved process). Data Migration Making changes to a production database is risk heavy process. Before any change are made a back up is typically made so that on the off chance the migration process fails there is a complete back up of all the data. Management of the backup normally involves ensuring that the back up is secured in a way that prevents it from being modified or redistributed. The complexity of these measures largely depends on the sensitivity of the data being backed up or legal requirements surrounding nature of the data (ie medical, personal, records, transactions). In some situations, a database back up may not be part of the strategy due to an automated or pre-existing data backup strategies. As part of the development process, a set of migration files are created. These files contain code that makes changes to the database schema: - Table additions/deletions - Column additions/deletions - Cullum type modifications - Column integrity modifications The second set of files used in the migration process are called seeds. These files contain code that fills in any gaps in data or adds default data required for the update to work. Typically, one would want to avoid having to interpolate seeded data but depending on the updates requirements this may not always be possible. Zach Radloff lives on the Gold Coast and works as a software engineer for a software development agency. Someone gives you a drink, and they tell you its poison. Do you drink it? Of course you dont. At least I hope that would be your response. We know poison is bad for us. We know if we put it into our body it will cripple our insides. We understand it is not good for us. It will make us incredibly sick physically, and could have dire consequences if we dont seek medical help to rid our body of it. So why do we drink the toxic substance when it comes to unforgiveness? That is, unforgiveness is the poison we hold within our bodies when we dont extend forgiveness to others who have hurt us. Someone will hurt us, whether it be intentionally or not, and we hold on to our response. We get angry, bitter, sad, disillusioned and feel let down. Remember how you said you wouldnt drink the poison? Why do you hold on to unforgiveness? Unforgiveness is simply drinking the poison and expecting the other person to die. We have all found ourselves in situations where we have needed to forgive someone, or be forgiven ourselves for our wrongdoing. Easier said than done. Imagine the father who has abandoned their child, imagine the victim of sexual assault, imagine the person on the receiving end of vicious bullying. Unfortunately for some, you dont have to imagine. Its a real scenario that has grasped the depths of your being. It causes you to hold onto something within yourself. That anger, bitterness, sadness can cripple other aspects of your life. It stops you from entering all that you dream of doing. How do we overcome this? Fortunately we have a teacher who understood the depths of rejection and abandonment, but was also on the receiving end of very harsh words and plots to take his life. Jesus meets us where we are at. If youve ingested the poison many years ago and are still feeling the effects, he can bring full healing and restoration. If youve recently ingested the poison and youre only starting to feel the effects of unforgiveness he can help you there as well. Remember, Jesus is the true healer. Our actions and behaviours come in obedience to his teachings, which certainly put us on the right road toward restoration. What do we do? Acknowledge the pain. If youve ingested the poison, simply take note of it. What poison did you drink? Was it anger, was it abandonment? Were you rejected? What is actually in your body at the moment? The doctor cant help you if they dont know whats hindering you. Repent and make right. Acknowledge you need forgiveness. Ask God for forgiveness, forgive the person who hurt you, forgive yourself for letting it happen. Think of it as 360 degree forgiveness. Dont miss anyone, remember, its 360 degrees! Making right isnt reclaiming what is yours. Making right is a learning experience. Take the medicine that will heal you from the effects of the poison. Youve forgiven yourself, but you need to bring your mind, body and soul back into alignment. It will all seem too tough. Weve chosen to drink the poison. Surely there is no coming back from this. Is there a way we can experience healing? If we are being realistic, we will continue to drink the poison. We will continue to be hurt and carry unforgiveness in our hearts. But we have a choice. The choice to forgive. The choice to feel better and experience healing after ingesting the poison. Acknowledge the pain. Feel the force of it. Ask for forgiveness, forgive those youve hurt, and forgive yourself. Do what you need to get healthier, to bring your body back to equilibrium. Each of us can do it! Fiona Mackenzie is doing her best to figure life out. Along the way, she enjoys the odd coffee and exploring the great outdoors. She hails from Newcastle, NSW, making the most of the beach and coastal lifestyle. More of her thoughts can be found at www.thefightback.net WEDNESDAY, May 30, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Exposure to triclosan -- a chemical in some shampoos and toothpastes -- might raise the risk for colon inflammation and colon cancer, at least in mice, researchers say. New study results "suggest that triclosan could have adverse effects on gut health," said study leader Guodong Zhang, a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Triclosan is a common antibacterial agent. It's often used in hygiene and cosmetic products. Triclosan is also found in some clothing and kitchenware, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA no longer allows triclosan in hand soaps, but it's still present in other household products, such as dish soap. Working with laboratory mice, Zhang and his colleagues concluded that triclosan could alter gut microbiota, or the types of bacteria living in the intestines. These changes could lead to inflammation, more severe colitis symptoms and colitis-associated colon cancer cell growth in mice, the study authors said in a university news release. Colitis refers to colon inflammation. The team warned that triclosan should be monitored more closely. Study co-first author, Haixia Yang, a postdoctoral fellow at UMass Amherst, said, "Because this compound is so widely used, our study suggests that there is an urgent need to further evaluate the impact of triclosan exposure on gut health." It's important to note, however, that the results of animal studies aren't always applicable to humans. In several mouse models, the researchers found that triclosan triggered inflammation and tumor formation in the colon. Triclosan also increased development of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in the mice, suggesting that IBD patients may need to reduce exposure to this compound, the researchers said. Triclosan had no effect, however, in models involving germ-free mice or mice that were genetically engineered to lack a specific receptor that is critical for gut bacteria communications, the investigators found. According to Zhang, "This is strong evidence that gut microbiota is required for the biological effects of triclosan." Just how common is triclosan? It's in more than 2,000 consumer products. And the chemical was detected in roughly 75 percent of urine samples tested in a U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the study authors noted. It's also one of the leading pollutants in rivers in the United States. The study was published May 30 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. More information The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has more on triclosan. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram Bogota, May 30, 2018Nicaraguan authorities should investigate an attack on a pro-government radio station in Managua, the capital, hold the perpetrators to account, and ensure that journalists covering ongoing unrest in the country can work safely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. A mob armed with Molotov cocktails and homemade mortars attacked the Tu Nueva Radio Ya station on Monday, setting fire to the entrance of the building amid ongoing protests against the government of President Daniel Ortega, according to news reports. Firefighters extinguished the flames, which caused extensive damage to the station. About 20 employees were inside the building but were not hurt, according to news reports. Station manager Dennis Schwartz said the attackers also stole equipment. We are evaluating our losses, Schwartz told reporters. They stole consoles, computers, a refrigerator, and televisions. These people are delinquents. Nicaraguas journalists should be free to cover the ongoing protests without facing threats or harassment from either the state or civilians, CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna said from New York. Nicaraguans deserve access to diverse news sources, and all parties should respect the right of journalists to work freely and safely, regardless of political affiliation. The attack occurred during a day of violence that began when riot police moved against anti-government demonstrators holed up at the National Engineering University in Managua. Two people, including one police officer, were killed and at least 40 people were injured, according to news reports. The unrest in Nicaragua, which began on April 18, was sparked by the Ortega governments decision to reform the social security system by increasing contributions and reducing payouts to pensioners. Amid rising violence, the government scrapped the plan. But protesters are now demanding that Ortega, who has held the presidency for the past 11 years and also headed a Marxist government in the 1980s, leave office. Amid clashes between protesters, police, and pro-government mobs, 81 people have been killed and 868 wounded, according to Amnesty International. In addition, Nicaraguan authorities have cracked down on protest coverage by independent media outlets, censoring news broadcasts and blocking TV broadcasts. Multiple journalists have been injured and one has been killed while covering the protests, according to CPJ research. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram Beirut, May 30, 2018The Committee to Protect Journalists today expressed concern about the arrest of Abdel Hafez al-Houlani, a reporter for the Syrian pro-opposition news website Zaman al-Wasl. Four men in plainclothes on May 24 entered al-Houlanis tent in the Wafa al-Umani refugee camp in the northeastern Lebanese city of Arsal, 77 miles (123 km) northeast of Beirut, identified themselves as members of the Lebanese intelligence service, and took al-Houlani to an unknown destination, according to his employer, news reports, and the Syrian Journalists Association. Although charges have not been filed against al-Houlani, news reports citing an anonymous Lebanese intelligence official said that the journalist was arrested because of his media activities. According to an article from the journalists employer, al-Houlani was transferred to the Defense Ministry prison in Beirut, but the article did not specify when he was transferred. CPJ was unable to verify independently al-Houlanis whereabouts. We are concerned about the detention of Syrian journalist Abdel Hafez al-Houlani and call on Lebanese authorities to release him immediately, said CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney from New York City. Rather than arresting correspondents, Lebanese authorities should do everything in their power to guarantee journalists safety. The Lebanese General Security and Internal Security Forces did not immediately reply to CPJs emailed request for comment. In 2012, al-Houlani began contributing to Zaman al-Wasl, which was founded in 2005 by activists in Homs opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and became a staff reporter in 2013. He mainly covered human interest stories and social issues involving refugees; he did not cover Syrian or Lebanese politics, Mohammad Hamdan, Zaman al-Wasls managing editor, told CPJ. Hamdan also said that, following al-Houlanis detention, the Lebanese military intelligence seized the journalists car from the Wafa al-Umani camp and interrogated a man close to al-Houlani. Al-Houlani, who is originally from Homs and moved to Lebanon in 2012, also works as a social worker and runs a small care center for elderly people in Arsal, according to news reports. [EDITORS NOTE: This article has been updated to correct the quote from CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney in the sixth paragraph.] Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has implored Centre for granting Special Category Status for the state. He asserted Special Category status to the state will it will enhance availability of resources by lowering states contribution in centrally sponsored schemes, improve access to external resources. It will act as catalyst for private investment and will boost employment generation and improve life quality of people in the land locked state. Special Category status The concept of SCS was first introduced in 1969 by Fifth Finance Commission. It has been not mentioned in Constitution. The rationale for special status was that certain states were historically disadvantaged in contrast to others, because of their inherent features, low resource base and cannot mobilize resources for development. The decision to grant special category status was earlier with former Planning Commission body called the National Development Council (NDC). NITI Aayog, which had replaced Planning Commission has no power to allocate funds for states falling under this category, therefore, now it is discretion of ruling party at Centre to dole out special favours to states. Criteria for Special Category States Earlier, NDC accorded this status to states having hilly and difficult terrain, low population density or sizeable share of tribal population, strategic location along borders with neighbouring countries, economic and infrastructural backwardness and non-viable nature of state finances. The 14th Finance Commission also had recommended variables such as forest cover for devolution, with weightage of 7.5 in criteria to benefit north-eastern States. What Special Category States have in common? They are special in the sense that they have special socio-economic, geographical problems, high cost of production with less availability of useful resources and hence low economic base for livelihood activities. States under this category have low resource base and are not in position to mobilize resources for their developmental needs even though their per capita income may appear high. Which are Special Category Status States? NDC had accorded Special Category Status only to 11 states, out of 29 states to target fund flow for better balanced growth. These states includes are seven states of North-East (Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura), Sikkim, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Other states are referred as General Category States (GCS). Benefits to Special Category Status States Special Category Status states are given favored treatment in respect of plan financing and financial devolutions as compared to General Category States (GCS). According to Gadgil-Mukherjee formula for devolution of Central assistance for States plan as approved by NDC, 30 % of total funds is earmarked for Special Category States. Special category States receive 90% central assistance as grant and just 10% as loan in composition of Central assistance as compared to central assistance of 30% grant and 70% loan for Special Category States. Moreover, these states get favored treatment from hands of Finance Commission in respect of devolution of Central tax revenues. Present position of Centre After establishment of NITI Aayog and recommendations of 14th Finance Commission, Central plan assistance to SCS States was subsumed in increased devolution of divisible pool to all States (from 32% in 13th Finance Commission recommendations to 42%). Many states such as Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha are craving for Special Category State status because of nature of benefits these states are getting. In response to demand of these states, Central Government held that 14th Finance Commission has effectively removed concept of Special Category States after its recommendations were accepted in 2015 and it has restricted it only to north-eastern and three hilly states. Rashmi Lakhapate, Sinjini Banerjee, Prasanthi Aripirala and Suvarchala Madireddy performing Mathuri dance at the House of Lords on World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development. World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development was observed on May 21 at the British Parliament. Among the people who showcased their talents at the event was dancer Ragasudha Vinjamuri. She managed to turn the British and Asian diplomats in attendance into fans of Telanganas Mathuri folk dance. A native of Hyderabad, the Bharatanatyam exponent currently resides in London. She has performed traditional Indian dances on a variety of occasions and has been a recipient of the coveted Asian Media Honorary Award for her contribution to the fields of culture and language. Talking about the event where she had her most recent performance, she says, The event was organised at the House of Lords by the London-based Sanskruti Centre for Cultural Excellence, and hosted by Baroness Sandip Verma. Diplomats from the High Commissions and Embassies of India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives were invited to speak on various aspects of cultural diversity. Members of British Parliament Lord Jitesh Gadhia and Seema Malhotra, entrepreneur Umesh Perera, and senior Indian philanthropist and politician Vijay Jolly highlighted the importance of cultural diversity for socio-economic development. The programme included presentations of indigenous dance forms from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. On this occasion, the Mathuri dance of Telangana state was performed for the very first time in the United Kingdom. It was presented by Suvarchala Madireddy, Prasanthi Aripirala, Rashmi Lakhapate and Sinjini Chakrabarty. The other Indian dances presented were Natti from Himachal Pradesh and Kathputli from Rajasthan. The entire programme was conceived and choreographed by me to celebrate unity in diversity, Ragasudha says. The dancer did not want to miss the opportunity to familiarise global audiences with a dance form that they had never seen before. I learned about the Mathuri dance form when I was studying folk dance in Hyderabad. All folk dances are very dear to me and I never miss an opportunity to showcase them and highlight the rich cultural heritage of our country. This time was no different. I chose the Mathuri dance as I come from Telangana and I thought it would be appropriate to present the states dance forms on an international platform, she says. Ragasudha, as well as the four women who performed the dance, are part of the Sur Bharti Womens Collective which aims to empower women through the arts. The organisation currently has about 2,800 members. The Mathuri dance was performed by two Kuchipudi dancers, a Kathak dancer and a Bharatanatyam dancer. All of them expressed an interest in learning and performing the dance form. Two of them are Telugu-speakers, one is a Bengali, and one is a Maharashtrian, but they are equally passionate about all the folk art forms of India be it Mathuri or Lambadi. We held our rehearsals on weekends as two of the dancers are IT professionals who live outside London and have young children," she says. The dancer is happy to have been able to contribute to Telanganas global image. The occasion has been a milestone for us Indians, and Telugu people in particular, Ragasudha concludes. Riyadh/New Delhi: A 27-year-old Air India pilot was found dead at a Riyadh hotel in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday morning, officials said. Rithwick Tiwari, a first officer with the state-run airline, died reportedly of a heart attack while working out in the hotel gym, according to crew sources. Tiwari's colleague Captain Renu Maulay identified the body after police broke open the door of a small toilet room inside the health club of Hotel Holiday Inn where it was found lying sideways, they said. Indian Embassy officials in Riyadh have confirmed the pilot's death. "He had collapsed in the wash room of the hotel gym this morning. He was then taken to a hospital, where the doctors declared him dead," Counsellor (Community Welfare) Anil Nautiyal told news agency PTI over the phone. He said the embassy is yet to study the detailed hospital report but it appeared to be a case of heart attack. Nautiyal said the embassy officials are in touch with the pilot's family. "We are in touch with the family but there are a lot of formalities that need to be completed before the mortal remains could be sent back to India," he said. Meanwhile, an Air India spokesperson in New Delhi said the airline's manager in Riyadh was coordinating the matter and they are awaiting the nod from the embassy before the body is flown to India. Even as a direct US presidential directive relocated the American embassy from Tel Aviv to the disputed city of Jerusalem, symbolically acknowledging it as the de facto capital of Israel, thick clouds of toxic black smoke from burning rubber tires billowed over Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, ignited by crowds waving Palestinian flags surging forward towards border fences in the Gaza Strip, signalling the commencement of another Arab intifada. The Israeli responses were immediate and harsh. Smoke from volleys of rifle fire aimed into crowds by the Israeli Army, mingled with vertical contrails of teargas canisters dropped from above by Israeli drones. Media pictures of injured Palestinians being carried away on makeshift stretchers filled television screens all day. To a watching world it was a graphic demonstration of iron-fisted crowd control by the Israeli security forces, circa 2018. Other events, unconnected in themselves, also occurred almost in tandem elsewhere in the world during the same approximate timeframe. Most significant among these was the tectonic presidential decision by the United States to unilaterally walk away from the existing nuclear agreement with Iran, and reimpose economic sanctions earlier lifted from that country, peremptorily waving off anxious remonstrations by its European allies. In Washington, sharp divisions within the US Senate emerged during the public hearings of the House Intelligence Committee examining Gina Haspel, President Donald Trumps choice as the director of the CIA. The proceedings were remarkably candid for their revelations of Americas quasi-official acceptance in the national interest of rendition and torture by its operatives at black sites in foreign countries to gather intelligence and launch covert dirty war operations against countries like Russia, Iran, China and North Korea, which are perceived as the current axis of evil. These events, whether in the Gaza Strip or the US Senate, were all disquieting to Americas allies and opponents alike, and collectively contributed to an atmosphere of heightened international tension reminiscent of the Cold War, which has undoubtedly touched India as well. This is the background against which the Government of India, on the urgent representation from chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, ordered the Indian security forces operating against separatist militants there to ease up their operations while yet another offer was made for a month-long Ramzan ceasefire in the Kashmir Valley. In making the offer, the government had to consciously override strong objections and opposition from the Indian Army as well as its own intelligence community, who strongly felt that going by past experience, this would only offer a breathing space for jihadi groups to recuperate, rest and regroup. And this is exactly what happened. Across the Line of Control, the ceasefire was rejected by Sayeed Salahudeen and the United Jihad Council based at Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The Indian Army was also not too unhappy because it allowed opportunities to follow up hot trails before they got too cold. Successful operations had already eliminated a large number of militants in the current year and the Army wanted to continue and follow up the hunt. The vivid media images of the Palestinian intifada in the Gaza Strip, projected on television screens worldwide, were watched by audiences on the subcontinent too, including in the Kashmir Valley. Some whose heart beat for Pakistan may choose to take inspiration from the pall of black smoke over the Gaza Strip. But the lessons to be drawn really pertain to India. The offer of a Ramzan ceasefire aside, will the Government of India respond to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in Kashmir with a matching maximally calibrated minimum force if an escalated intifada is ordered by Sayeed Salahudeen and his cohorts, the United Jihad Council? There may also be a possibility that Pakistan will again seek to exploit the Palestine intifada and attempt to reopen the Kashmir issue with the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC). This had occurred earlier, and was bluntly rejected by India before the same body. On its own part, India must remain wary and be prepared for Pakistan attempting an updated replay of its 1965 Operation Gibraltar, combining massive intifada-style civil disobedience inside Kashmir, with trans-LoC violence by the Lashkar, Hizbul, Jaish, the newest entrant Islamic State, together with other similar assorted derivatives. At the other end of the spectrum was the unequivocal reiteration at the hearings by Gina Haspel, (since confirmed as the director of the CIA) that under her leadership the CIA would continue to pursue undeterred its national responsibility of protecting the American people by conducting intelligence and covert activities across the world. CIA activities within the country are of course nothing new for India, but an issue which reminds the government of the need for constant vigilance amongst Indias counter-intelligence agencies to protect the Indian people, even at a time when the countrys political leadership is desperately attempting to become a natural ally of the US. Intelligence is a black art regarded by some as almost akin to witchcraft. When spymasters of yesteryears choose to co-author a book, it is likely to be an explosive money-spinner, which the market would eagerly lap up, particularly if the authors in their time headed RAW and ISI the opposing covert agencies of India and Pakistan respectively. Two such personalities have chosen to co-author a book, The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace. In intelligence circles, much value is placed on spycraft, but speaking from a purely Indian perspective, such bonhomie, however grudging, between opposing intelligence professionals might be difficult to explain to the ranks of the special forces who carried out the retaliatory surgical strike in the wake of the Uri incident or the Rashtriya Rifles who stalked and eliminated Burhan Wani in Sopore. There are many things which are best left unsaid. Ukraine to retain status of gas transit state: Poroshenko-Steinmeier talks Ukraine is making every effort to convince European partners that Nord Stream'2 pipeline is purely political rather than economic project aimed at breaking up EU unity. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Russian companies halt coal transit via Ukraine media Coal transit from Russia through Ukraine was estimated at 1 to 1.8 million tonnes per month. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Ukraine Cabinet decides on space budget spending The State Space Agency of Ukraine is the main administrator of budgetary funds and responsible executor of the budget program. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Municipal nanny and baby-box: Cabinet comes up with initiatives to raise birth rate PM Groysman says more steps are to be taken to this end. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Naftogaz starts recovering $2.6 bln debt from Gazprom across Europe The recovery process has already been launched in UK, Switzerland and the Netherlands. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Ukraine-Netherlands trade hits US$1.5 bln in 2017 Farm produce supplies to the Netherlands increased by 80% in 2017 against 2016. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter What do you think about our new website? Share your opinion National joint-stock company Naftogaz Ukrainy has started recovering a debt of $2.6 billion from Russia's Gazprom in foreign courts to execute the award of the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, a source in the Ukrainian government has told Interfax-Ukraine. He said that the company is working in Switzerland, the Netherlands and the U.K. under Article 5 of the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. "It is likely that Gazprom would challenge arrests in local courts. If the court rejects [Gazprom's counterclaims], then one can say that assets are arrested," the source said. Earlier a source in the sector told Interfax that the arbitration proceedings between Russian gas giant Gazprom and Naftogaz Ukraine over their transit contract could affect shares in the project companies for the offshore gas pipelines Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2. The source said that this refers to the imposition of injunctions on shares in Nord Stream AG and Nord Stream 2 AG. These shares have already been frozen, the source said. Interfax does not have official confirmation of the reported freeze on shares in the project companies. Gazprom's press service only said that it is clarifying this issue. Naftogaz Ukraine has not responded to questions, while the representative of Nord Stream 2 was unavailable for comment. It was reported earlier that a Stockholm arbitration court ordered Gazprom to pay Naftogaz Ukraine a penalty of $4.7 billion. Gazprom has filed a challenge in the Svea Court of Appeal to overturn this ruling. The arbitration proceedings between Russian gas giant Gazprom and Naftogaz Ukraine over their transit contract could affect shares in the project companies for the offshore gas pipelines Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2. An industry source told Interfax this refers to the imposition of injunctions on shares in Nord Stream AG and Nord Stream 2 AG. These shares have already been frozen, the source said. Interfax does not have official confirmation of the reported freeze on shares in the project companies. Gazprom's press service only said that it is clarifying this issue. Naftogaz Ukraine has not responded to questions, while the representative of Nord Stream 2 was unavailable for comment. It was reported earlier that a Stockholm arbitration court ordered Gazprom to pay Naftogaz Ukraine a penalty of $4.7 billion. Gazprom has filed a challenge in the Svea Court of Appeal to overturn this ruling. Businessman Vasyl Khmelnytsky plans to create a Ukrainian-Chinese enterprise to assemble tractors. "A small contract has been signed for $4 million. We expect that next year there will be $20 million," the businessman said in a video shot on his Facebook page. Khmelnytsky said that China expressed their interest in cooperation with Ukraine. He also said that the readiness of the Chinese business to partially localize production in Ukraine is a big advantage. "If China wants to produce something in our country, then this is, of course, good... This is definitely a step to economic growth... They say: we will partially supply products to you, if we see that the market is big and there is demand, we are ready to partially produce these goods in Ukraine," the businessman said. Khmelnytsky said that at present it is a question of semi knocked down (SKD) assembly. "Subsequently, the share will grow and may well reach 100%. In Ukraine, there is an annual demand for 20,000 tractors. Producing 1,000 tractors a year is interesting for sure, and then the European market will be opened," he said. In his opinion, Ukraine needs to create its own "Chumatsky Shliakh" route. "We must produce our own products and supply them to Europe, and maybe to China," he said. Gazprom's debt to Naftogaz grows almost $50 mln in three months of non-execution of arbitral award A debt of Russia's Gazprom to national joint-stock company Naftogaz Ukrainy in three months of the non-execution of the award of the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce to pay $2.56 billion to the Ukrainian company has expanded by almost $50 million, according to calculations by Interfax-Ukraine. According to the arbitral award, the penalty is imposed on the Gazprom's debt, being $526,000 a day. Thus, in the period from March 1 through May 30, the debt of the Russian company grew by $47.866 million (around UAH 1.25 billion). As reported, a Stockholm arbitration court ordered Gazprom to pay Naftogaz Ukraine a penalty of $4.7 billion. Earlier a source in the Ukrainian government has told Interfax-Ukraine that Naftogaz Ukrainy has started recovering a debt of $2.6 billion from Russia's Gazprom in foreign courts to execute the award of the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce. The source said that the company is working in Switzerland, the Netherlands and the U.K. under Article 5 of the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. Brussels Airlines (Belgium) from October 17, 2018 will launch regular flights between Kyiv and Brussels, the airline has said. "Due to visa liberalization in Ukraine and the policy of the country close to the EU, during the last two years the demand for flights between Kyiv and Brussels has increased significantly. In order to meet the growing demand, Brussels Airlines launches direct air connection between Kyiv and Brussels and offers four flights a week," the report says. According to the press service of the air carrier, flights will be performed on board Airbus aircraft four times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Brussels Airlines is the largest airline and national air carrier of Belgium. It is a subsidiary of Lufthansa, which owns 45% of SN Airholding, which owns Brussels Airlines. Russian opposition journalist Arkady Babchenko has been shot dead in Kyiv's Dniprovsky district, Kyiv police press service reported. "The 102 emergency line received a report from doctors: a woman called them and said that she had found her husband at home in a pool of blood. The man died from a wound, presumably to the back," Kyiv police spokesperson Oksana Blyschyk said in a post on her Facebook page. Kyiv police believe that professional activity is the first most likely reason behind the death of Babchenko, Kyiv police chief Andriy Kryschenko said. "The first the most apparent theory is his professional activity," Kryschenko told Interfax-Ukraine. However, it is too early to speak about certain theories, he said. Asked what other theories are being looked into, he said, "it is his personal life and conflict not related to his work." The murder took place at Babchenko's home, he said. "This is definitely not a suicide. This is a murder," Kryschenko said. According to Kryschenko, several shot were fired at Babchenko, who later died in an ambulance. A criminal case on charges of a premediated murder was opened. Babchenko was killed right at the entrance to his apartment, Ukrainian MP Anton Gerashchenko said. "There was no bread at home. Arkady went to a store. The murder waited for him at the staircase. When Arkady opened the door, the murderer meanly shot several rounds at Arkady's back," Gerashchenko wrote on his Facebook page. "The best investigators are probing this cruel murder," he said. "One of the theories would be actions of Russian special services to eliminate people who poison Russians with the truth about what indeed is happening in Ukraine," he said. A composite portrait of Babchenko's murderer was made, Ukrainian National Police deputy chief Viacheslav Abroskin said on his Facebook page. The murderer is a man aged 40-45, his height is 175-180 centimeters, white beard, wearing a dark blue cap, a jeans coat and jeans, he said. Arkady Babchenko, 41, was a Russian opposition journalist. In February 2017, Babchenko said that he had left Russia over threats to him and his family. He lived in Prague and Israel. He has lived in Kyiv since August 2017. U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN Nikki Haley has said that the United States has no doubt that it is Russia that caused the conflict in Donbas and called on the Russian authorities to accept responsibility for actions in eastern Ukraine and for the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. "Despite its transparent denials, there is no doubt Russia is driving the Ukrainian conflict," she said at a UN Security Council briefing on Ukraine on Tuesday, May 29. Haley added that the conflict in Donbas was the result of the actions of the Russian military. "[Russia] has permitted if not instructed its forces to detain, threaten, and even shoot at [OSCE] monitors, their vehicles, cameras, and observation drones. In short, Russia has created a catastrophe of suffering in Ukraine," she said. She also urged Russia to admit its guilt for the crash of Flight MH17 in the sky over Donbas. "We strongly support Australia's and Netherlands's call on Russia to acknowledge its role in the tragedy and cooperate in bringing to account those responsible for shooting down MH17. And like its role in the MH17 tragedy, we ask Russia to acknowledge another reality that everyone here knows to be true: Russian soldiers are in Ukraine," Haley said. She clarified that sanctions against Russia would remain in place. Russian-backed militants have fired 36 times at the positions of the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) in Donbas, wounding four Ukrainian servicemen, the press center for the JFO headquarters has reported. "The situation in the area of the Joint Forces Operation remained has remained under control over the past 24 hours, on May 29. [...]Russian occupation forces fired 36 times at our positions, using heavy weapons nine times," reads a report as of 07:00 on Wednesday, which was published on the Facebook page of the JFO headquarters. Fighting continued near Novotoshkivske in Luhansk region, as well as on the outskirts of Zaitseve and Pivdenne near Horlivka. Ceasefire violations were also recorded near Avdiyivka and Maryinka in the Donetsk sector, and near the settlement of Shyrokyne in the Mariupol sector. "Four of our defenders were wounded in the fighting. They were provided with qualified medical assistance. Their lives are not in danger," the report says. According to Ukrainian intelligence, three militants were killed and three more wounded. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin has said that it is too early to make conclusions who is behind the murder of Russian opposition journalist Arkady Babchenko, but the Kremlin earlier resorted to various means of destabilizing the situation in Ukraine, including political murders. "It is too early to say who is behind it [the murder of Babchenko]; however, the understanding of similar cases makes us think that Russia is also using other tactics to destabilize Ukraine, in particular carrying out terrorist attacks, sabotage activity and political murders," Klimkin said at a UN Security Council briefing on Ukraine on Tuesday, May 29. He added that Ukraine's law enforcement bodies had already started investigative actions. "Before arriving in Ukraine, he was forced to leave Russia. After attacks and threats against him and his family, he went to Prague and then to Kyiv. He continued to fight for a democratic Russia, for Ukraine and, of course, Moscow has always viewed him as an enemy," Klimkin said. Observers of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine have recorded more than 100,000 ceasefire violations and 107 deaths of civilians in Donbas since the beginning of 2018, OSCE SMM Chief Monitor Ertugrul Apakan has said. He said at a UN Security Council briefing on Ukraine on Tuesday, May 29, that a meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group, in particular the subgroup on security, would be held in Minsk on May 30. He noted that the SMM was recording the shelling of civilian infrastructure and deaths of civilians. Apakan said that the OSCE SMM had recorded deaths of 107 civilians since the beginning of the year, most of them killed as a result of artillery attacks or blown up on mines or improvised explosive devices. Most of the cases occurred in April-May, he said. OSCE calls on Ukrainian authorities to investigate murder of journalist Babchenko OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Harlem Desir has called on the Ukrainian authorities to conduct a full investigation into the murder of journalist Arkady Babchenko. "Horrified by report that well-known Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was shot and killed in his home in Kyiv. I call on Ukraine authorities to conduct immediate and full investigation. My thoughts are with journalist's family," Desir wrote on his page on Twitter on Wednesday. As reported, a Russian citizen, ATR television channel host Arkady Babchenko, was shot dead near his home in the Dniprovsky district of Kyiv late on May 29. A criminal case on charges of a premediated murder was opened. Kyiv police chief Andriy Kryschenko said that professional activity is the first most likely reason behind the death of Babchenko. The police also made a composite portrait of Babchenko's murderer. Conflict will end as soon as Moscow decides to stop violence in Donbas Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has called on Russia to take a decision to stop violence in Donbas. "In a nutshell, as everyday developments show, Russia and its ongoing military activity in the occupied territories of Donbas remain the obstacle to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. As soon as Moscow takes the decision to stop violence, the conflict will end. I urge Russia to take this decision," Klimkin said at a UN Security Council briefing on Ukraine on Tuesday, May 29. The minister also expressed confidence that a UN peacekeeping force in Donbas can help achieve progress in the implementation of the Minsk agreements. "As a first step, it has to support deployment of a full-fledged UN mandated peacekeeping force throughout the whole occupied territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions," Klimkin added. Another Kremlin critic assassinated abroad - U.S. Embassy in Kyiv about Babchenko's murder The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv says a full and impartial investigation in the assassination of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kyiv is needed. "Another Kremlin critic is assassinated abroad, once again in Ukraine. We offer our deepest condolences to Arkady Babchenko's family and colleagues, and we join the government of Ukraine in support of a full and impartial investigation that will bring those responsible to justice," the Embassy wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, May 30. As reported, a Russian citizen, ATR television channel host Arkady Babchenko, was shot dead when entering his apartment in Kyiv's Dniprovsky district late on May 29. A criminal case on charges of a premeditated murder (Article 115 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) was opened. Kyiv police chief Andriy Kryschenko said that professional activity is the first most likely motive for Babchenko's murder. The police also made a composite portrait of Babchenko's murderer. Ukrainian ombudsperson says to keep probe into Russian journalist Babchenko's killing under control Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada Human Rights Commissioner Liudmyla Denisova called for setting up a state security system guaranteeing protection of journalists. "The state should set up an efficient security system guaranteeing protection of journalists' rights while they perform their professional duties," Denisova said in a statement posted on her website in the wake of the killing of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kyiv. "Society expects efficient steps from the authorities in investigating Arkady Babchenko's killing and other high-profile cases dealing with the violation of journalists' rights. This is a challenge both to the entire law enforcement system and civil society. We should prove today that our state can stand out in fighting for freedom of speech," the ombudsperson's press service quoted her as saying. Denisova said she would keep the probe into Babchenko's killing under her personal control. The statement also cites some information on violations of freedom of speech in Ukraine. In particular, it says that, based on the Institute of Mass Information's data, 293 violations of freedom of speech were recorded in Ukraine in 2017, including 29 instances of assaults and beatings of journalists and 37 instances of open threats. The Prosecutor's Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea has begun about 140 criminal proceedings on the facts of illegal detentions and searches at activists' homes on the peninsula, annexed by Russia, Ihor Ponochovny, head of the Main Department of the Prosecutor's Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea has said. "The Crimean prosecutor's office reacts to any facts of illegal actions on the part of the occupation authorities and illegally created law enforcement agencies in particular. On the facts of the illegal detention of Server Mustafayev and Edem Smailov, criminal proceedings were commenced in accordance with Part 2 of Article 146 - illegal deprivation of liberty and in fact illegal penetration of these citizens of Ukraine into the housing. We have about 140 such criminal proceedings on similar facts, which contain about 250 episodes of illegal detention, penetration into housing," he said at a press conference in Kyiv on Tuesday. According to the representative of the prosecutor's office, these criminal proceedings have already been reported in absentia about the suspicion of committing crimes to 18 people. "There are already about 18 suspects in these proceedings, who are notified in absentia of suspicion. Every day such people are established from media reports, social networks. We are trying to find as much as possible workers of the so-called law enforcement bodies of the occupation authorities and judges," Ponochovny added. As reported, on May 21, searches were carried out in the homes of Mustafayev and Smailov, after which Mustafayev was arrested and taken out by the FSB officers, and Smailov was still at home with employees of the FSB. Later, the press service of the Crimean Chief Department of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation announced the "disclosure of the activities of an extremist group created by Assistant to the Verkhovna Rada deputy Mustafa Jemilev, Erol Veliyev, organized on the orders of wanted person Chubarov with the support of the Security Service." Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who was killed in Kyiv on May 29, did not apply for temporary or permanent residence or asylum in the Czech Republic, the Czech Interior Ministry has said. "The Ministry of the Interior clearly states that Babchenko did not apply for temporary or permanent residence or asylum in the Czech Republic in the past. We regret the death of the journalist who was shot dead in Ukraine the day before, but we categorically reject the connection of this event with the Interior Ministry," reads a statement posted on the website of the Czech Interior Ministry in response to some media reports regarding Babchenko's residence in the Czech Republic. The ministry also rejected the assumption that Babchenko's death could be connected with the alleged weakness of the Czech Interior Ministry and called for stopping personal attacks on some Interior Ministry employees in social media. "Every death, and the death of a journalist, is a sad and delicate matter, but we ask journalists and the public in this context not to refer to false information in the context of the Interior Ministry and its specific employees," the statement says. Previously, Czech online portal Aktualne wrote that Babchenko arrived in the Czech Republic in February 2017, but left a little less than six months after he lost the hope of obtaining a residence permit. As reported, a Russian citizen, ATR television channel host Arkady Babchenko, was shot dead near his home in the Dniprovsky district of Kyiv late on May 29. A criminal case on charges of a premeditated murder (Article 115 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) was opened. Kyiv police chief Andriy Kryschenko said that professional activity is the first most likely reason behind the death of Babchenko. The police also made a composite portrait of Babchenko's murderer. The primary task for resolving the conflict in the east of Ukraine is the introduction of a peacekeeping contingent into the region, cochairman of the Opposition Bloc Yuriy Boiko said, while advocating direct negotiations between Ukraine and the Russian Federation and representatives of certain regions of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the party's press service said. "Ukraine needs multilateral settlement formats. The success of the negotiations in the Normandy format, within the framework of the U.S.-Russian mediation mission, will speed up the peace process. First of all, it is necessary to support the decision of the UN Security Council to introduce a peacekeeping contingent to Donbas. This is certainly an important step, but it is not enough to establish peace in Ukraine. Kyiv should conduct direct negotiations with Moscow, Donetsk and Luhansk," Boiko said on the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, on Tuesday. At the same time, he noted that the Ukrainian government was unable to settle the conflict in the east and "does not make a step to set up direct talks with the second parties to the conflict." The politician recalled that Ukraine itself has been a peacemaker country for a long time - beginning from 1992 Ukrainian servicemen participated in many international peacekeeping missions of the United Nations - but at present Ukraine itself needs peacekeeping assistance of the international community. "The first and foremost task today is the introduction of peacekeepers, which is the only mechanism capable of stopping armed confrontation, preserving human lives and providing the beginning of a political process for resolving the conflict," Boiko said. The next stage, in his opinion, should be the adoption of laws on the special status of Donbas for three years to restore peaceful life, the adoption of an amnesty law for those who have not committed serious crimes, and only after that - the restoration of economic cooperation and control over the Ukrainian-Russian border by Ukrainian border guards. "And after three years of holding local elections there under Ukrainian law, this is the only real step for restoring peace in our country, preserving the united Ukraine," Boiko said. The issue of introducing a visa regime with the Russian Federation needs to be put to the vote of the parliament, Ukrainian parliamentarian Leonid Yemets (People's Front faction) has said. "The introduction of a visa regime with Russia is part of our survival: as a state as a whole, and every citizen personally. Perhaps, this will not stop the professional killer, but will definitely facilitate his identification. Why do we refuse self-defense!? I think this issue should be put to the vote of the parliament," Yemets wrote on his Facebook page on Wednesday. He stressed that "it is dementia at the level of high treason to have open borders with the enemy during the war." In the evening of May 29, a Russian citizen, journalist Arkady Babchenko, who was working in Ukraine, was shot near his apartment in Kyiv's Dniprovsky District. On this fact, criminal proceedings were opened under Article 115 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (premeditated murder). Head of the Main Department of the National Police in Kyiv Andriy Kryshchenko said that the first obvious version of the murder is the professional activity of Babchenko. The police have released a sketch of the shooter. Head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Vasyl Hrytsak said that an organizer of the "murder" of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was detained in Kyiv on Wednesday and that the suspect is a Ukrainian citizen. "I would like to inform you that about three hours ago, we detained the organizer of this crime in Kyiv. Investigatory actions are underway right now and searches are continuing in several places," Hrytsak said at a press briefing on Wednesday. According to Hrytsak, the organizer offered $30,000 to an acquaintance of his who had participated in the military operation in eastern Ukraine and gave him $15,000 to commit the crime. The acquaintance agreed. "Citizen G. offered a man that he knew, a former ATO 9Anti-Terrorist Operation) soldier, to commit an act of terror to kill Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko in exchange for $30,000," Hrytsak said. Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko has said that Russia is responsible for the war and the organization of terrorist attacks and assassinations in Ukraine. "It's time to appeal to the Russian Federation. We have repeatedly exposed Russian spies and terrorists in direct and indirect organization of terrorist attacks and murders in Ukraine. I think that today we can say that if earlier 'all roads led to Rome,' today all the roads of war and terrorist attacks lead to Moscow," Lutsenko said at a briefing in Kyiv on Wednesday. He also said that he was disappointed by the reaction of most of Ukrainian politicians to the "killing" of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko." TEHRAN, Iran (AP) A top adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is proposing Iran resume its uranium enrichment in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal between world powers and Tehran. Ali Akbar Velayati was quoted Wednesday by the semi-official Tasnim news agency as saying Iran is "capable to spin centrifuges for enrichment" to higher levels should it choose to do so. Velayati says Iran should also accelerate production of nuclear propulsions and also research on advanced centrifuges. He claimed this wouldn't violate the nuclear deal which put limits on Iran's atomic program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions. In the wake of President Donald Trump's decision to pull the United States out of the deal, several Iranian officials have indicated Tehran could resume its nuclear program. The 2015 murder of an Iranian-born man living in the Netherlands under an assumed identity and thought to be responsible for a deadly 1981 terrorist attack in Tehran is raising questions about the Islamic Republics ability to carry out political assassinations in Europe. A man known as Ali Motamed was gunned down in front of his home in the dutch town of Almere in December 2015. The Dutch daily Het Parool cited court documents stating that the mans true identity was Mohammad Reza Kolahi Samadi, and that he was most certainly the man accused by Iranian authorities of perpetrating the most deadly terrorist attack the country has ever seen. The mysterious circumstances of Samadis murder have lead to suspicion it could have been a hit ordered by Irans intelligence services in retribution for the attack. After the May 25 arraignment of two men accused of Samadis murder, Iranian-Dutch lawyer Ulis Ellian called upon the officials of Almere municipality to investigate whether or not the killing could have been a political assassination ordered by Iran. Samadi reportedly entered the Netherlands under the false identity of Ali Motamed as a refugee in the 1980s, having fled Iran after the June 28, 1981 bombing of the Islamic Republic Party headquarters which left more than 70 dead, including the nascent regimes Chief-Justice Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, who was considered the number 2 man of the newly established Islamic Republic after its founder Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini. Tehran initially accused Irans pro Moscow Communist Tudeh party of the attack, but later pointed the finger at one of its former allies, an armed dissident group, the Peoples Mujahedin Organization (MKO). The man behind the massacre was officially named as nineteen-year old student and MKO member, Mohammad Reza Kolahi Samadi. Samadi reportedly joined MKO immediately after the downfall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the establishment of the Islamic Republic in February 1979, initially serving as one of the notorious Komitehs agents, a squad that terrorized officials affiliated with the previous regime. Later, MKO clandestinely paved the way for Kolahi to infiltrate the ruling Islamic Republic Party, serving first as the manager of sound and audio systems, but quickly rising in the party ranks. On the day of the deadly attack, Samadi reportedly carried a powerful bomb hidden in his personal briefcase into the partys headquarters in the heart of Tehran, where almost all of the partys top officials had gathered. Samadi left minutes before the bomb went off, and after hiding for a time in an MKO safe house, fled Iran through its western border with Iraq and then made his way to Europe. Samadi was sentenced to death in absentia by the Islamic Republic. According to Het Parool, while living in the Netherlands Samadi lead a peaceful life as an electrician in the city of Almere, near Amsterdam, where his friends describe him as a trustworthy and punctual individual. Samadi married a dutch woman who says she only found out her husbands true identity a few years ago. They have a seventeen-year-old son who attends university in the Netherlands. Two men suspected of killing Samadi have been identified as 28-year-old Anouar A.B. and 35-year-old Moreo M, Het Parool reported, adding, Both suspects have a criminal record and come from the same Bijlmer neighborhood of Amsterdam. Bijlmer is known as a pool for hiring hit-men and elements for criminal attacks in and around the dutch capital in recent years. Based on their names, neither of the suspects are of Iranian origin. However, according to security experts, Iran has a record of hiring foreigners, mainly Lebanese and Palestinians, to eliminate exiled enemies around the world. People practicing faiths other than Shia Islam continued to face discrimination and harassment in Iran in 2017, says the U.S. State Departments International Religious Freedom Report released May 29. According to multiple sources, non-Shia Muslims and those affiliated with a religion other than Islam, especially members of the Bahai community, continued to face societal discrimination and harassment, and employers experienced social pressures not to hire Bahais or to dismiss them from their private sector jobs. Bahais reported there were continued incidents of destruction or vandalism of their cemeteries, the U.S. State Departments annual assessment read. The report noted that the Iranian government continued to execute individuals on charges of moharebeh, or waging war against God, including four prisoners at Rajai Shahr Prison on December 20, 2017, and four men charged with that crime in the Kerman Province last September. The Iranian penal code specifies the death sentence for proselytizing and attempts by non-Muslims to convert Muslims, as well as for moharebeh and sabb al-nabi (insulting the prophet), the report explained. Based on these laws, the Islamic Republic has convicted an executed dozens of dissidents, political reformers, and peaceful protesters. Quoting the Iran Prison Atlas compiled by US-based NGO United for Iran, the report said that during 2017 at least 102 members of minority religious groups remained imprisoned for their religious activities, 174 individuals on charges of moharebeh, 23 on charges of insulting Islam and 21 for corruption on earth. The report also observed that former UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran highlighted in her March and August 2017 reports the large number of executions of the largely Sunni Kurdish prisoners on moharebeh charges. Meanwhile, the Council of Sunni Theologians of Iran (CSTI), which represents Sunni clerics based in the northwestern Kurdish-populated provinces, suspended its operations on July 13 in response to ongoing intimidation from the Intelligence Ministry, said the report, citing the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). Furthermore, the Iranian government reportedly denied building permits for places of worship for members of religious minorities and confiscated or restricted their access to religious texts. Security officials continued to raid underground Sunni prayer sites and prevent the construction of new ones, the report said. The report reviewed the long list of violation of religious freedom rights by the Iranian government highlighting harassment of Christians and Sufis. An Iranian Christian news websites reported in October that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had arrested several Christians in Tehran, Rey, and Pardis, and Sufi websites published extensive reports on the harassment and violent treatment of Gonabadi dervishes in Iran, the report observed. According to the report, although the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with the country, and therefore did not have regular opportunities to raise concerns directly with the government over its religious freedom abuses and restrictions, the U.S. government continued to call for Iran to respect religious freedom and continued to condemn its abuses of religious minorities in a variety of ways and in different international forums. This included public statements by senior U.S. government officials and reports issued by U.S. government agencies. Mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, the International Religious Freedom Report details the status of religious freedom in nearly 200 foreign countries and describes U.S. actions and policies in support of religious freedom worldwide. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered judiciary chief Sadeq Amoli Larijani to hold a trial for the perpetrators in a sexual abuse scandal that has shaken a boys high school in Tehran. The news of the criminal act at a West Tehran high school has caused sorrow and regret. You are required to quickly arrange trials for those accused and carry out the punishment called for by God, Khamenei wrote in his order. Iranian media, including Khabar Online news agency, reported on May 28 that a head teacher at a West Tehran high school had been arrested on charges of sexually abusing several students. Tehran Prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi told the press that the parents of 15 students had complained that their children were raped or otherwise sexually abused by the head teacher. The man accused of the crime has confessed to showing pornographic films to students on his phone but rejects other accusations, Dolatabadi said. Meanwhile, an Education Ministry official told the Iranian Labor News Agency that the ministry is considering shutting down the school where the abuse allegedly took place. The agency quoted another official as saying that the ministry had suspended the principal. In another development, Tehran MP Parvaneh Mafi told reporters that the education minister had been summoned to the Iranian Parliament for questioning. The Tehran governors office has announced plans to train children to be aware of the threat posed by sexual predators. Previously, Irans hardliners had ruled out a government plan to spread awareness about sexual abuse at schools. Reports of sexual abuse of children at schools are not unprecedented in Iran. In a major case in 2015, a head teacher was suspended for two years after being lashed based on a court order. In another case, which has remained inconclusive, a famous Koran teacher was accused of raping and molesting several pupils, but his trial was suspended and he was reportedly acquitted after an official linked to Khameneis office intervened. Parents of the pupils are still pursuing the case, and some of the victims have released videos on social media accusing the teacher of sexual abuse. MOSCOW (Reuters) Lukoil, Russias second biggest oil producer, said on Tuesday it had decided not to go ahead with plans to develop projects in Iran at the moment due to the threat of U.S. sanctions, a company official said. The United States plans to impose new sanctions on Iran after pulling out of a 2015 agreement between Iran and major world powers to limit Tehrans nuclear ambitions. Considering the latest developments, I guess, its too early to say what our plans (about Iran) will be. For the moment, basically, we have everything on hold, the official told a conference call which followed publication of Lukoils first-quarter results on Monday. Lukoil said on Monday its first-quarter net profit rose to 109.1 billion rubles ($1.8 billion), up 75 percent on the previous year with the help of rising oil prices. The official said that companys focus remained on its domestic business. We dont plant to do anything material on the international M&A side, he said. Lukoil has been in talks with Iran over development of Abe Timur and Mansuri oilfields. The U.S. Treasury has imposed sanctions on six Iranians and three Iran-based entities, including the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran, for human rights abuses and other ill-treatment of Iranian citizens. The Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on May 30 said that along with the prison, sanctions were imposed against the Ansar-e Hezbollah organization and the Hanista Programing Group. "Todays actions target the Iranian regimes repression of its own people and the suppression of their freedoms of speech, expression, and peaceful assembly," the Treasury said. Under OFAC regulations, sanctions generally make it more difficult for a person or organization to interact with U.S. and foreign financial institutions. The Treasury had previously sanctioned the Tehran Prisons Organization and a top official in connection with "serious human rights abuses" in Iran, including at its Evin Prison. In its latest statement, the Treasury said "prisoners held at Evin Prison are subject to brutal tactics inflicted by prison authorities, including sexual assaults, physical assaults, and electric shock." At least three of the individuals facing the new sanctions were listed as having links to Hezbollah, also identified as Ansar-I Hizbullah and Supporters of the Party of God, "for its role in serious human rights abuses in Iran." "Ansar-e Hizballah has been involved in the violent suppression of Iranian citizens and has collaborated with the Basij [paramilitary force] to violently attack Iranian students with knives, tear gas, and electric batons," it said. It also linked the group to "acid attacks" against women in the city of Isfahan. Abdolhamid Mohtasham, a founding member and key leader of the group, was also sanctioned, the Treasury said. The statement said Hanista Programing Group was responsible for "the operation of, information and communications technology that facilitates computer or network disruption, monitoring, or tracking that could assist in or enable serious human rights abuses by or on behalf of the government of Iran." The latest move comes some three weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and vowed to reinstitute tough sanctions against Iran. On May 24, the Treasury said it was imposing sanctions on nine Iranian individuals and entities for helping to supply export-controlled parts and services to sanctioned Iranian airlines. Two days before that, the Treasury announced sanctions targeting Iranian officials associated with the hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force and Irans ballistic-missile programs. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: NATO encourages the sides of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to continue path to a negotiated solution, a NATO official told Trend May 30. The unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is a matter of concern. It is clear that there is no military solution to this conflict, said the official. NATO has no direct role. We continue to support the work of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs. We also encourage both parties to continue the path to a negotiated solution and avoid any new escalation. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Leman Zeynalova - Trend: The co-chairmanship of the OSCE Minsk Group has its own approaches regarding settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which have been repeatedly voiced, including by Russian representatives, the Russian Foreign Ministry told Trend on May 30. The ministry made the remarks commenting on the recent statement of the Armenian side, which alleged that direct involvement of the illegal regime established in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan would allow ensuring a lasting peace. Armenia argued that the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs also allegedly spoke of this. "Armenia, just like Azerbaijan, is a member of the OSCE Minsk Group. Statements on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict's settlement made by its officials are a position of one of the parties of the negotiation process. The Minsk Group co-chairmanship has its approaches, which have been repeatedly voiced, including by Russian representatives," the ministry said. Azerbaijani Foreign Ministrys Spokesman Hikmet Hajiyev previously told Trend that for the international community, Armenia's such frivolous and unreasonable statements once again prove that Armenia pursues a destructive policy in the process of the conflict settlement, and is engaged in populism and political adventure. "Armenia - which bears international legal responsibility for the use of force against Azerbaijan and the military occupation of its territories - is the party to the conflict, and the fact that Azerbaijan has been negotiating with the aggressor Armenia for more than 25 years, is the biggest concession to the aggressor country. Termination of the policy of occupation and ethnic cleansing and withdrawal of troops from the occupied Azerbaijani lands in accordance with the requirements of the UN Security Council resolutions will ensure establishment of peace and security in the region," Hajiyev 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. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: A solemn ceremony of hoisting the flag of Azerbaijan was held at the Wall Street in New York with the participation of Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov on May 29, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in a message on May 30. The event was attended by the Permanent Representative of Azerbaijan to the United Nations Ambassador Yashar Aliyev, Ambassador of Azerbaijan to the US Elin Suleymanov, the officials of the New York City Mayor's Office, representatives of the Azerbaijani Diaspora and community in the United States. Speaking about the establishment of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and the country's achievements, Mammadyarov, who addressed the ceremony of hoisting the flag of Azerbaijan, noted that the founders of the Republic would be proud of the modern Azerbaijan Republic if they were alive today. During the visit, Mammadyarov met with President of the UN General Assembly Miroslav Lajcak. The sides exchanged views on cooperation between Azerbaijan and the UN. Lajcak, remembering his visit to Azerbaijan to attend the Ministerial Meeting of Non-Aligned Movement held in April in Baku, expressed his satisfaction with the visit and the meetings. Referring to the issues on the agenda of the UN General Assembly, Mammadyarov briefed about the priorities of Azerbaijan's chairmanship in the Non-Aligned Movement in 2019-2022. The successful implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals by Azerbaijan at the national level was also noted during the meeting. Referring to the UN General Assembly agenda item on the situation in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, the minister briefed about the current situation in settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict and noted that the status quo of occupation was unacceptable and unsustainable, as noted by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries. He stressed the need to ensure rule based approach in inter-state relations, fulfill commitments enshrined in the UN Charter by all member-states and noted the unacceptability of the use of force to change the internationally recognized borders of states and acquire territory by force. On the same day in New York, Mammadyarov participated in the event on the occasion of the 100th jubilee of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and Republic Day. The reception was attended by UN officials, heads of diplomatic missions of the UN member states-ambassadors, public and political figures, representatives of New York City Mayor, members of the Azerbaijani Diaspora. Addressing the event with the opening remarks, Yashar Aliyev said the independent and sovereign Azerbaijan is a worthy and responsible member of the UN. The ambassador said the national anthem, which was adopted in period of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, is an extraordinary masterpiece and that the anthem is sensed by each and every Azerbaijani, embracing the path of independence of Azerbaijan through musical harmony. Then he gave the floor to Mammadyarov. Mammadyarov pointing out that the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was the first parliamentary republic in the Muslim East, spoke about the progressive work done - establishing state institutions in the ADR, founding the Baku State University, sending young people to leading universities in the world to study under state scholarships, securing fundamental rights and freedoms, and granting women the right to vote. He noted that the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was de-facto unanimously recognized at the Paris Peace Conference. The minister stressed that Azerbaijan restored its independence as a worthy successor of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, despite the aggression of neighboring Armenia and the occupation of the country's territories, and successfully develops on the basis of legacy of national leader Heydar Aliyev under the leadership of President Ilham Aliyev. Addressing the event, Lajcak congratulated the people and state of Azerbaijan on the Republic Day and the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. He noted that Azerbaijan plays an active role in international relations and the UN system, contributes to the strengthening of dialogue among civilizations and promoting multiculturalism. The event continued with presentation of national cuisine and culture of Azerbaijan. Mammadyarov continues his working visit to the United States. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: Azerbaijans prolific oil fields bring stability to world energy markets, says a letter by US President Donald Trump to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Congratulations to you and the people of Azerbaijan on the 25th anniversary of the International Caspian Oil and Gas Exhibition and the first gas flowing into the Southern Gas Corridor, Trump said in his letter. I join you in celebrating a major milestone in three decades of cooperation between Azerbaijan and the United States. As you also mark the 100th anniversary of your first independence, Azerbaijan is more prosperous and connected to the global economy than ever before. Your gas production will help ensure the energy security of Turkey and Europe. I encourage Azerbaijan to advance your economic and judicial reforms that will build on the success of your energy project, Trump said. I look forward to working together to make our great countries and the Caucasus region more prosperous, peaceful, and secure. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (PA) George Tsereteli sent a congratulatory letter to President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev. He congratulated President Aliyev on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Azerbaijan's independence, and wished success and prosperity to Azerbaijan and its people. Tsereteli voiced hope for continued fruitful cooperation between Azerbaijan and the OSCE. He assured that the OSCE PA intends to further strengthen the ties and to closely cooperate with Azerbaijan in expanding reforms, eliminating the challenges that impede peace and prosperity in the region. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: President of Afghanistan Mohammad Ashraf Ghani sent a congratulatory letter to President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev. Ghani expressed his sincere congratulations to President Aliyev and Azerbaijan on the occasion of the national holiday, the Republic Day. Azerbaijan has achieved a great and significant development after independence, he said, voicing gladness that the two nations stand by each other as close friends. Expressing hope for even greater expansion of the ties between the two countries, he voiced belief that Azerbaijan will develop even more under President Aliyev's wise leadership. Ghani wished health and success to President Aliyev and well-being and progress to the friendly people of Azerbaijan. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: Political consultations were held between the foreign ministries of Azerbaijan and Belgium, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in a message May 30. Deputy Foreign Minister Khalaf Khalafov from Azerbaijans side and Director General for Bilateral Affairs of the Foreign Ministry Anick Van Calster from Belgiums side took part in the political consultations. During the consultations, Khalafov stressed that a solemn celebration of the 100th anniversary of Azerbaijans state independence was held on May 28. He also emphasized that the country is committed to democratic traditions and is successfully developing in this direction. Khalafov stressed the importance of holding mutual days of culture to further strengthen contacts between the peoples of the two countries. He added that Azerbaijan is interested in developing relations with the EU and appreciated Belgium's efforts in developing these relations. The Belgian diplomat conveyed sincere congratulations on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Azerbaijans state independence. Calster stressed that Azerbaijan is a strategic partner of the EU, in particular, Belgium. He added that there is effective cooperation in the energy sector between the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan and the companies of Belgium. Calster said that Belgiums position on the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has not changed. He also added that Belgium supports the settlement of the conflict peacefully through the OSCE Minsk Group. During the meeting, the sides expressed interest in cooperation in renewable energy, tourism, agriculture and other sectors. The issues of promoting cultural ties and simplifying the visa regime were also considered. During the meeting, the sides discussed issues of cooperation and development of interparliamentary relations within the international organizations, regional and international issues of mutual interest. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Diplomacy Sandra Oudkirk participated May 29 in a first gas ceremony at BPs Sangachal Terminal, inaugurating the beginning of gas flows from Azerbaijans Shah Deniz II natural gas field into the $40 billion Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) and the opening of the 25th International Caspian Oil and Gas Exhibition and Conference, the US Embassy in Baku said May 30. DAS Oudkirk congratulated the many countries and companies involved for achieving this monumental milestone, which will not only help underpin Turkey and Europes long term energy security by diversifying their gas supplies, but also bring to the Caspian region the benefits of greater integration into European and global energy markets. DAS Oudkirk reiterated the US governments commitment to the long term success of the SGC and expressed the hope that other countries in the region will use it to benefit from trade with Europe while further diversifying Europes gas imports. In her remarks during the ceremony, DAS Oudkirk cited President Trumps letter to President Aliyev, which congratulated Azerbaijan on the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. President Trump noted that the United States decades of cooperation with Azerbaijan on energy matters have culminated in the incredible achievement of first gas moving through the Southern Gas Corridor to boost energy security in Europe. The US has strongly supported the Southern Gas Corridor project across multiple administrations because of the important contribution it could make to Europes energy security while benefiting a range of possible suppliers from the Caspian region to Iraq and the Eastern Mediterranean. During her visit to Baku, DAS Oudkirk met with President Aliyev and with energy companies to discuss Azerbaijani and regional energy security developments. She also participated in the annual US-UK COGS Reception, a networking event hosting energy professional and stakeholders from the region. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: Azer Turk Bank launches new campaign for corporate and individual clients on occasion of the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic from May 28 to June 28. As part of the campaign, existing clients of the Bank can open additional current accounts, get checkbooks, bank statements relating to their accounts, account report copies, and MasterCard Business payment card, costing 30 manats, charge free. Also, during the campaign the Bank will not collect minimal monthly payment for servicing POS-terminals. In frames of the campaign, new corporate clients of the Bank can hold cash withdrawal operations with commission 0.3 percent instead of 0.5 percent, and cashless exchange operations for 0.4 percent instead of 0.5 percent till December 31, 2018. During the campaign customers can also hold money transfers within the country for 0.1 percent (min 1 manat, max 100 manats) and abroad for 0.3 percent (min. 30 USD, EUR, GBP, max. 400 USD, EUR, GBP). New clients can also open current accounts and receive checkbooks charge free as the part of the campaign. More information is available at www.azerturkbank.az, the Banks corporate pages at social networks or at (012) 945 Call Center. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: 115 years. That is exactly how long ago the first flight in history took place. During those 12 seconds aloft, could the Wright brothers have expected that in a little more than a century the plane would have become one of the most important means of transporting people and goods? European and global cargo volumes are growing The aviation market is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy. As reported by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), global cargo traffic in the first half of 2017 increased by 10.4%, the most dramatic shift in the last seven years. According to the IATA, two thirds of the positive results were driven by carriers in Europe and the Asia Pacific region, who transported 6.1% more goods than in 2016. The strength of the air transport sector is largely thanks to the improving global economy. Demand for transport services is growing at a faster pace than any point since the global financial crisis. Rates are rising Karol Baranczuk, Deputy COO for Partial Loads and the companys air freight management team leader at international transport and logistics provider AsstrA-Associated Traffic AG, points out that since June last year there have been capacity shortages in airplanes operating from Western, Central, and Eastern Europe to the USA, Canada, and South America. He also emphasized that over the same period rates have been up, rising until November 2017 and having stabilized there. "It is worth noting that rates have remained at current levels for some time and not just in the opinions of shippers. Many General Sales Agents (GSAs) and airlines operating in Europe have suggested the same. Freight rates have increased in some cases by 80-90% depending on the service level. It is worth noting that many customers are opting to pay more for higher-quality services and shorter transit times, notes Karol Baranczuk. The exception is Russia. Freight rates from the Russian Federation to the USA, Canada, and South America generally have not increased. What is more, from day to day you can reserve airplane cargo space with a hundred percent guarantee that the goods will be shipped. The import of cargo from the USA to Russia also does not currently involve any problems," concludes the Deputy COO for Partial Loads. According to AsstrA experts, the improving European economy has led to a stronger exchange rate which stimulates exports. Low weight, high value It should be emphasized that airlines are posting good results not only with respect to cargo. Most passenger carrier operations are also in good condition. Ryanair is the market leader in Europe. The short-haul cargo market is directly related to and dependent on passenger transport, which accounts for about 50% to 80% of overall airline activity, depending on the country. Intercontinental flights are less of a factor, with the weight of cargo carried on long-haul flights amounting to only 1% of all goods in international trade. However, cargo carried this way is lightweight and expensive such as electronics or medicines and constitutes more than one third of the value of all international trade. On board courier AsstrA-Associated Traffic AG delivers small loads via on board courier offering, an innovative express logistics solution for transporting certain types of cargo including spare parts, display samples, prototypes, personal items, and important documents. This service enjoys popularity among companies around the world, ranging from individual entrepreneurs to multinational producers and importers. According to Karol Baranczuk, "Our on board courier service enables the express delivery of small loads to any place in the world. Specially trained AsstrA couriers collect parcels from senders and forward them to recipients literally hand-to-hand. It is worth noting that the weight of cargo carried as part of an express courier delivery can be up to 11 kg and the invoice amount should not exceed 5,000 USD." Thanks to this service, the customer saves time and costs on customs clearance, which is necessary for other types of transport. The consignee may receive his cargo immediately after the aircraft has landed, an important benefit when it comes to loads with a short expiration date or in the case of tight delivery deadlines. Karol Baranczuk also points out that the carriage of some classes of goods via an international courier is not allowed. These include cargoes banned on air transport, i.e. dangerous substances belonging to specific hazard classes of DGR, corrosive substances, toxic substances, and explosives. Air transport of such goods can cause damage to the airplane and threaten the lives of passengers. AsstrA Aerospace Aiming to provide high quality services and meet individual customer needs, AsstrA formed the Aerospace Division. It specializes in the transport of components and spare parts for aviation and aerospace companies. Highly qualified AsstrA specialists are well aware of all aspects of this type of transport, as more than half of the projects we implement for the industry are connected with shipping aviation components. Currently, AsstrA is the only company active in the CIS countries which belongs to the Aerospace Logistic Group, an association of international forwarders. Thanks AsstrAs membership in this network, aerospace customers can be confident that they receive services of the highest level at affordable prices. Spreading our wings AsstrA-Associated Traffic AG provides air transport on practically any route. As Karol Baranczuk notes, "The total turnover in 2017 increased by 84% compared to the previous twelve months. It is a good result. Also, the total weight of freight carried in 2017 increased by 61% compared to 2016. Such results are very motivating. We do not intend to rest on our laurels. We are spreading our wings." About the company: AsstrA-Associated Traffic AG leads an international group of logistics and transportation companies from its head office in Zurich. It has an excellent reputation and more than 20 years of industry experience. The company is represented in 18 countries across the CIS, Europe and Asia. AsstrAs wide range of offerings includes the organization of international transportation by various modes of transport, import and export support, cargo insurance, project logistics, as well as trade, warehousing and customs services. Thanks to wide geographical reach and cooperation with professionals, AsstrA offers optimal, attractively priced logistics solutions that take into account the needs of each client and partner. AsstrA is a member of FIATA and ASMAP and holds ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and OHSAS 18001 certificates. Contact us: Email: [email protected], .: +994 55 813 59 74 WhatsApp & Viber: +48 576147796 Website: http://www.asstra.com Fb: https://www.facebook.com/AsstrAsia/?ref=bookmarks Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Fikret Dolukhanov Trend: The European-Uzbek BENKAM JV, a division of the AKFA company, specializing in the production of aluminum and plastic profiles, will participate in the Messe Dusseldorf Aluminum 2018 exhibition in October 2018, the press service of the company said. At the 2016 exhibition, BENKAM created a client base of 127 companies and concluded a number of large contracts on supply of products to European countries. In January 2018, export to the CIS countries, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, USA, Canada and other countries began. In October 2018, the company will participate in the exhibition again, but with expanded production facilities and an advanced logistics system. We show the world that Uzbekistan has high-quality products with reasonable prices, thus creating interest to the country. That puts new tasks in front of us, the press service said. BENKAM JV was founded in 2015 and is a division of AKFA, engaged in production of aluminum and plastic profiles. The new company is a joint Uzbek-European project designed to manufacture and export aluminum profiles to the countries of Central Asia, Europe and America. The company has a fully automated production of aluminum profiles of various complexities, including extrusion, anodizing and painting, and an ISO quality assessment system, which results in products of the company being labeled by quality certificates. The company is located in the Navoi Free Economic Zone in Navoi region of Uzbekistan. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @FDolukhanov Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Ali Mustafayev - Trend: The Brussels Court of First Instance lifted a preliminary arrest from the assets of the National Fund of Kazakhstan worth $21.5 billion, the press service of the Ministry of Justice of Kazakhstan said in a message. The National Fund of Kazakhstan was also informed about the possibility of lifting the arrest of the remaining funds in the amount of $530 million in UK courts. Moldovan businessmen Anatol and Gabriel Stati launched lawsuits against Kazakhstan in 2010. Stati demanded $4 billion from Kazakhstan through arbitration in Sweden. "This is another unsuccessful attempt of two Moldovan businessmen Anatol and Gabriel Stati, who started legal proceedings against Kazakhstan in 2010. Although the Swedish court did not essentially consider the fact of fraud, the High Court of UK examined the evidence, concluding in June 2017 that there was sufficient initial evidence that the arbitration award in Sweden was obtained by fraud and, therefore, appointed a hearing on the substance of the fraud in October 2018," the press service said. The London court ruled that the trial should continue in October 2018 and awarded considerable legal costs to Kazakhstan. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Ali_Mustafayev Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Azad Hasanli - Trend: Companies from Russia's Bashkortostan Republic can set up production of oil equipment and caustic soda in Azerbaijan. The members of the delegation from Bashkortostan discussed this issue with the Deputy Minister of Economy of Azerbaijan Niyazi Safarov, the website of the Government of Bashkortostan said in a report. The delegation from Bashkortostan headed by Deputy Prime Minister Farhad Samedov is in Baku to participate in the 25th Anniversary Caspian International Oil & Gas Exhibition. During the meeting, the parties stressed the need for pharmaceutical and chemical products in Azerbaijan. The head of the delegation Farhad Samedov stressed that Bashkortostan has a strong production and scientific potential in petrochemistry and pharmaceuticals. Members of the delegation also met with the Minister of Energy of Azerbaijan Parviz Shahbazov. Representatives of the delegation discussed the prospects of cooperation in this area. The Azerbaijani side is interested in energy equipment produced in Bashkortostan and technological innovations in the field of petrochemistry. It is noted that the minister also accepted the invitation to attend the Russian Energy Forum, which will be held in Ufa city in October 2018. According to the data of the State Committee of the Republic of Bashkortostan for Foreign Economic Relations, the volume of trade between Bashkortostan and Azerbaijan at the end of 2017 amounted to about $18 million. Bashkortostan supplies Azerbaijan with wood products, chemical products, equipment for oil and gas industry, ferrous metals and products made of it, glassware, agricultural products and food products. At the same time, the share of non-raw non-energy exports amounted to 96.6 percent of the total volume of goods delivered to Azerbaijan. Agricultural products, food and other goods are imported from Azerbaijan. Six enterprises with Azerbaijani capital in the sphere of agriculture, hotel business, catering, construction and trade operate in Bashkortostan. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @AzadHasanli Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Ali Mustafayev Trend: Kazakhstans SCAT airline made its first flight to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, which, at the same time, is the company's first flight to a EU country, Kazakh media outlets reported. The companys flights to the EU became possible due to authorization as a third country operator (TCO) by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) in 2017. SCAT became the second Kazakh airline, receiving admission for flights to the European Union, after Air Astana. The company will launch flights between Astana and Vilnius twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays, on Boeing 737 aircraft. The airline plans to launch 14 new routes, including Astana-Milan, Astana-Vienna and Astana-Prague. In 2015, the carrier was included in the IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) register, and in March 2018 it was accepted as a full member of the International Air Transport Association (IATA). SCAT uses mainly Boeing aircraft, including Boeing 767-300, Boeing 757-200, B-737CL and B-737NG. The airline's fleet also includes Bombradier's CRJ200 aircraft. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Ali_Mustafayev Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Maksim Tsurkov, Azad Hasanli - Trend: The investment decision on the new petrochemical complex of SOCAR in Turkey will be made at the end of 1Q2019, Director of SOCAR Turkey Enerji Company Zaur Gahramanov told reporters. He noted that, currently Petkim complex is the only petrochemical enterprise in Turkey. "Its products cover the needs of the Turkish market by only 17 percent, and the complex is not physically able to produce more than these volumes. For this reason, a year ago, we made a decision about the project of the complex, which will increase the volume of petrochemical products. Engineering work on the new project continues and will be completed by the end of this year. We are preparing to make an investment decision at the end of 1Q or April next year," Gahramanov said. He noted that negotiations on all licenses were held with BP and Axens companies, and the necessary licenses were purchased. "In addition, the complex will produce approximately one million tons of purified terephthalic acid (PTA) and polypropylene. Last year, $11.5 billion deficit in Turkey's trade balance fell to the share of petrochemical products. The new complex will allow for closing this deficit by 40 percent. For this reason, the Turkish government is providing great support in this matter. We are negotiating the creation of a private industrial zone on the Aliaga Peninsula. Both Petkim complex together with STAR refinery, and a new complex will be covered by this project, and a new industrial zone will be created. It may be opened by the end of this year," Gahramanov said. He said that it is too early to talk about the volume of investments, and the negotiations with companies are underway. "According to initial estimates, investments in the range of $1.6 $2.2 billion will be required. Many large petrochemical companies are interested in partnership regarding this project because Turkey is a very interesting market. However, even in the absence of partners, we are determined to implement the project. Our investment decision does not depend on the availability of a partner. Of course, if there is one, we will share the investment risks, and the costs will decrease. SOCAR Turkey's internal resources and revenues from Petkim's activities allow for not referring to the parent company. This is a project that can be invested in, we do not see any problems," Gahramanov said. He added that the construction is planned to start soon after the adoption of the investment decision, possibly in the middle of next year. "All engineering works will be completed by that time. It is planned that by the end of 2022 the complex will be built, and in 2023 it will be put into operation, which corresponds to the investment program of SOCAR until 2023, and will be launched by the centenary of the Republic of Turkey. This is a wave-like market, and we believe that by that time we will be able to catch a wave," Gahramanov said. It is expected that in 2018, SOCAR Turkey Enerji's consolidated turnover will reach $ 15 billion and the company will become the second largest industrial company in Turkey with 5,000 employees and $3 billion dollars of export potential. It aims to become the largest Turkish industrial company by 2023. The company also owns a controlling stake (51 percent) in the petrochemical complex Petkim on the Aliaga Peninsula. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @MTsurkovTrend Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Leman Zeynalova - Trend: The Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) project, which envisages transportation of Azerbaijani gas to Europe, is over 72.5 percent complete, TAP President Walter Peeraer said in an interview with Trend. "The Trans Adriatic Pipeline is on schedule. In terms of overall project progress, as of the end of April 2018, we are more than 72.5 percent complete including all engineering, procurement and construction scope," he said. Further, Peeraer talked about the progress of the work on TAP in each country through which it will pass. "In Greece, as of mid-May, 539 km of our right of way have been cleared, approximately 525 km line pipes strung, over 514 km welded, 434 km back-filled and approximately 331 km are being reinstated," he said. As for Albania, approximately 193 km have been cleared and graded along TAP route, 186 km line pipes strung, 180 km welded and approximately 162 km back-filled, he said, adding that circa 120 km are being reinstated. TAP president said this means that between Greece and Albania, TAP has now cleared and graded 95 percent of its corridor (approximately 733km out of 765km). "Additionally, we have welded 90 percent of steel line pipes and around 78 percent pipes are already in the ground (back-filled)," Peeraer added. He pointed out that in Italy, in line with the Single Authorization permit granted by the Ministry of Economy on 20 May 2015, TAP continues to progress its secondary permitting activities. Further, he said that TAPs contractor, Italys Saipem, is currently working in the micro-tunnel area. "Following the completion of most of the preparatory works, they are now about to finish the digging of the pit, so as to enable the building of the micro-tunnel," added TAP president. TAP is a part of the Southern Gas Corridor, which is one of the priority energy projects for the European Union. The project envisages transportation of gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz Stage 2 to the EU countries. The pipeline will connect to the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) on the Turkish-Greek border, run through Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea, before coming ashore in Italys south. TAP will be 878 kilometers in length (Greece 550 kilometers, Albania 215 kilometers, Adriatic Sea 105 kilometers, and Italy 8 kilometers). TAPs shareholding is comprised of BP (20 percent), SOCAR (20 percent), Snam S.p.A. (20 percent), Fluxys (19 percent), Enagas (16 percent) and Axpo (5 percent). --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend: The Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) serves Europes strategic interests in energy security sphere, Azerbaijani Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov said at the 25th International Caspian Oil & Gas Exhibition and Conference in Baku May 30. The minister reminded that the launching ceremony of the SGC, which turns Azerbaijan into a serious player in energy geopolitics, took place May 29. The Azerbaijani gas is a new source, and the SGC itself is changing the energy map of Europe, said Shahbazov. The EU needs new sources and routes to solve its energy goals and achieve security, and the SGC meets these strategic goals. The project will allow Europe to diversify its energy supply. The minister also noted that a large number of countries are involved in the project and this shows its scale. The official opening ceremony of the Southern Gas Corridor was held in Sangachal terminal, Baku May 29. The Southern Gas Corridor, worth over $40 billion, is considered as one of the priority energy projects for the EU, which strives for diversification of gas sources. The project envisages the transportation of gas from the Caspian region to the European countries through Georgia and Turkey. At an initial stage, the gas to be produced in 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). --- Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Ali Mustafayev - Trend: The Ministry of Energy of Kazakhstan has prepared a draft law on freezing the import of Russian gasoline by rail for three months, Kazakh media outlets reported. The document was sent for parliamentary discussion, which should finish on June 6. The Department of Oil Industry Development of the Ministry of Energy was also instructed to prepare a notification for the border guard service of the National Security Committee of Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan Railways, as well as notification for the Ministry of National Economy of Kazakhstan about the need to inform the Eurasian Economic Commission. Despite the document does not explain the reasons for the temporary ban, previously Kazakh Energy Minister Kanat Bozumbayev said that the completion of modernization of the Pavlodar and Atyrau refineries will lead to a significant decrease in the share of import-dependence of the countrys fuel market. The demand of Kazakhstans domestic market is presently being covered by 90 percent. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Ali_Mustafayev Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Maksim Tsurkov Trend: Turkey imported 7.8 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia in January-March of this year, as compared to 7.94 billion cubic meters delivered a year earlier, reads the report posted on the website of the Turkeys Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA). Turkey imported 28.64 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia in 2017 against 24.54 billion cubic meters delivered in 2016. According to the report, in the first quarter, Turkey imported 15.4 billion cubic meters of gas, of which 10.96 billion cubic meters were imported through pipelines, and 4.57 billion cubic meters fell on LNG imports. The share of Russia in the total import of gas by Turkey in January-March 2018 amounted to 50.6 percent. Russian gas is supplied to Turkey via the Blue Stream gas pipeline and the Trans-Balkan gas pipeline. Blue Stream is a gas pipeline with a capacity of 16 billion cubic meters per year, laid on the bottom of the Black Sea and providing direct gas supplies to Turkish consumers. Follow the author on Twitter: @MTsurkovTrend Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend: Details added (first version published at 10:46) OPEC expects to continue close cooperation with Azerbaijan within the framework of OPEC+, said the Secretary General of the organization, Mohammed Barkindo, within the framework of the 25th Anniversary Caspian International Oil & Gas Conference in Baku. OPEC General Secretary noted that he visits Baku, which he calls the cradle of the world oil industry, for the second time in two months. "The visit to Baku is a pilgrimage for any oilman. This is where the first oil well was drilled more than 150 years ago. Azerbaijan has come a long way of development and continues to grow. In 1994, after signing a contract with an international consortium, investments began to flow in Azerbaijan. These achievements would not have been possible without local labor force," Barkindo said. OPEC Secretary General also noted the implementation of projects "Shah Deniz-2" and "Southern Gas Corridor". "The Southern Gas Corridor is changing the energy landscape of the region. Its further expansion will strengthen Europe's energy security guarantees, which also means national security," Barkindo said. OPEC Secretary General also expressed hope that close cooperation with Azerbaijan will continue and expanded in the future. "We are working on this issue. Azerbaijan has played a leading role in reaching an agreement on reducing oil production, which was signed 16 months ago and which united 24 oil-producing countries. This unprecedented historical agreement, which allowed for achieving stability in the market, helped to create a transparent platform for all producers, to develop mechanisms to help governments to avoid shocks and volatility of oil prices," Barkindo said. OPEC Secretary General noted that it is necessary to continue cooperation within OPEC+ for provision of support to this industry and for prosperity of the world economy. "According to forecasts, it is necessary to invest $10.5 trillion in the oil industry by 2040. We face a serious challenge to meet the growing demand for oil. I invite global producers to join the cooperation with OPEC within our format to achieve economic growth for future generations," Barkindo said. Details added (first version posted on 12:19) Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Anvar Mammadov - Trend: In 2019, BP will start exploration drilling on two contracts signed with Azerbaijan, BP Regional President for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey Gary Jones said at the 25th International Caspian Oil & Gas Exhibition and Conference in Baku May 30. The contracts envisage drilling at the Shafag-Asiman block of fields and the shallow water area around the Absheron Peninsula, he said. Speaking about the Shafag-Asiman structure, Jones noted that exploration drilling at this block is scheduled to begin in mid-2019. By early 2012 the Gilavar seismic vessel completed the planned 3D seismic acquisition on the structure, the first 3D seismic conducted over the contract area, he said. The data was then processed in Azerbaijan, the largest 3D survey processed in-country. Our teams are now planning an exploration well, with the view to start drilling in mid-2019. If we make a commercial discovery, this can be the next Shah Deniz. Gary Jones also spoke about the work regarding the potentially promising structures in the shallow water area around the Absheron Peninsula. In October 2017, after interpreting the seismic data, BP and [Azerbaijans state oil company] SOCAR agreed to drill exploration wells in three prospective areas, he said. So now our teams are working on well planning, with the aim to start drilling in early 2019. SOCAR and BP signed a contract on the Shafag-Asiman block of fields for a period of 30 years in October 2010. The exploration period is four years with possibility of extension for three more years. Two wells are to be drilled within the first phase. Two more wells will be drilled within the second phase, if necessary. In the operational period the sides will implement joint operatorship within the project. Shared participation in the contract between BP and SOCAR is 50 to 50 percent. The forecasted reserves of the Shafag-Asiman block stand at 500 billion cubic meters of gas and 65 million tons of condensate. The block is located 125 kilometers to the south-east of Baku. Exploration work has not been conducted on the block yet. It is located at a depth of 650-800 meters with the depth of the reservoir at 7,000 meters. The contract for exploration and development of potential structures in the shallow waters of the Absheron Peninsula was signed in December 2014 between SOCAR and BP Company and was ratified in April 2015. The territory covered by the agreement extends along the southern part of Absheron Peninsula and covers an area of about 1,900 square kilometers. On this territory, the depth of the sea is up to 25 meters, and the depth of the potentially productive strata - 3000-5000 meters. BP owns the 50 percent share in the agreement, and the other half is the share of SOCAR. The technical operator of the project is BP Company. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Anvar_Mammadov Details added (first version posted on 13:26) Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend: The Southern Gas Corridor CJSC plans to attract an additional $1.6 billion by 2020 for the SGC project (excluding expenses for dealing with existing debts), Director General of Southern Gas Corridor CJSC Afghan Isayev said at the 25th Anniversary Caspian International Oil & Gas Conference in Baku on May 30. "In addition to the funds raised so far, $1.6 billion needed to finance the Azerbaijani share in the SGC project by 2020," Isayev said, adding that $1.4 billion will be needed in 2019, and another $200 million - in 2020. "As for the current year, $500 million have already been allocated during January-April. Until the end of the year, it is planned to direct another $ 0.8 billion for financing, "Isayev said. He said that the negotiations are currently underway with a number of financial institutions to lend the project. "Following the negotiations with Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) on allocation of $750 million for TANAP for 15 years, a club of four banks was formed. The Budgetary Committee of the Federal German Parliament (Bundestag) approved guarantees for the allocation of a loan worth $1.5 billion in the UFK format for TANAP and Shah Deniz-2 for 15 years by a syndicate of banks, including the German development bank KfW and Citibank," he said. The official opening ceremony of the Southern Gas Corridor was held in Sangachal terminal, Baku May 29. The Southern Gas Corridor, worth over $40 billion, is considered as one of the priority energy projects for the EU, which strives for diversification of gas sources. The project envisages the transportation of gas from the Caspian region to the European countries through Georgia and Turkey. At an initial stage, the gas to be produced in 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). --- Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Anvar Mammadov - Trend: The cost of the Southern Gas Corridor project is currently estimated at more than $40 billion, Afghan Isayev, Director-General of the Southern Gas Corridor Closed Joint Stock Company (CJSC) said during his speech at the 25th Anniversary Caspian International Oil & Gas Conference in Baku May 30. Some $11.5 billion from the volume of this funding falls to the share of Azerbaijan. To date, $9 billion have been allocated from this amount. "The cost of the "Shah Deniz-2" project is $22.7 billion. To date, $17.7 billion have been financed from this amount, and the project itself is 99 percent complete. The cost of expanding the South Caucasus Pipeline is $4.6 billion, of which $4.2 billion has been allocated. The project as a whole was implemented by 97.3 percent. The cost of TANAP is estimated at $8 billion (compared to the initial $9.5 billion). To date, $5.4 billion has been spent, and the project has been completed by 94 percent. TAP is estimated at 4.5 billion euros, of which 2.9 billion euros have already been allocated. Progress is estimated at 72.9 percent," Isayev said. Isayev added that the delivery of the first commercial gas to Turkey will begin on July 1, 2018. He said Azerbaijan's share in the project was financed from several sources. "In 2014, Eurobonds were issued in the amount of $2.5 billion in the domestic market, which was purchased by the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ). In 2015, a capitalization of $2.4 billion was carried out. In 2016 and 2017, two emissions of Eurobonds were carried out on the Irish Stock Exchange in the amount of $1 billion," Isayev said. "Also, loans from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, part of the WB group) in the amount of $400 million (fully disbursed), from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in the amount of $600 million (fully disbursed), two loans from the Asian Development Bank in the amount of $500 million (fully disbursed) and $524 million were acquired. In addition, a loan amounting to $500 million was acquired from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which is also fully utilized," Isayev said. The commissioning ceremony of the first stage of the Southern Gas Corridor project was held in Baku May 30. 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). Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Maksim Tsurkov Trend: Construction of the offshore section of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) designed to transport Azerbaijani gas to Europe will begin in 2019, TAP President Walter Peeraer said at the 25th Anniversary Caspian International Oil & Gas Conference in Baku on May 30. He said that TAP is ready by 72.7 percent. "More than 90 percent of the pipes have been welded, while 78 percent of the pipes have already been laid. As for the construction of the offshore section, it will start in 2019. This will be a 105-kilometer stretch at a depth of 820 meters," Peeraer said. He noted that the Italian Saipem is engaged in preparatory activities for construction of micro-tunnels in southern Italy and Albania. Peeraer added that TAP plans to invest 55 million euros in Greece, Albania and Italy in the framework of social projects. TAP project, worth 4.5 billion euros, is one of the priority energy projects for the European Union. The project envisages transportation of gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz Stage 2 to the EU countries. Connecting with the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) at the Greek-Turkish border, TAP will cross Northern Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea before coming ashore in Southern Italy to connect to the Italian natural gas network. The project is currently in its construction phase, which started in 2016. Once built, TAP will offer a direct and cost-effective transportation route opening up the vital Southern Gas Corridor, a 3,500-kilometer long gas value chain stretching from the Caspian Sea to Europe. TAP shareholders include BP (20 percent), SOCAR (20 percent), Snam S.p.A. (20 percent), Fluxys (19 percent), Enagas (16 percent) and Axpo (5 percent). -- Follow the author on Twitter: @MTsurkovTrend Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Ilkin Shafiyev - Trend: The Southern Gas Corridor project will play an important role in ensuring the energy security of the region and Europe, Gulmira Rzayeva, 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 (OIES) and expert/adviser of the World Energy Councils Global Gas Center, told Trend. She said the project will bring great benefits to Azerbaijan and increase Baku's role in the region. "Azerbaijan is the project's initiator. Thanks to the work done and political support of the country's leadership, the first stage of the project was successfully launched in a timely manner. The Southern Gas Corridor is a very complex project from a technical point of view and is implemented in a region with a difficult political situation. Nevertheless, nothing could obstacle its implementation, which is a huge success for Azerbaijan. After all, most of similar projects remain on paper," Rzayeva noted. She stressed that the project will help diversify supply sources for European countries, primarily for the countries of Southeastern Europe. "Bulgaria, for example, today depends almost entirely on one supplier. One billion cubic meters of gas to be supplied by Azerbaijan will allow that country to cover one third of its gas demand. The same can be said about Greece and Italy. So, the project is able to change the energy map of the region and Europe. In addition, do not forget that other countries suppliers can join the Southern Gas Corridor," Rzayeva said. The official opening ceremony of the Southern Gas Corridor was held in the Sangachal terminal, Baku, May 29. The Southern Gas Corridor, worth over $40 billion, is considered as one of the priority energy projects for the EU, which strives for diversification of gas sources. The project envisages the transportation of gas from the Caspian region to the European countries through Georgia and Turkey. At an initial stage, the gas to be produced in 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). --- Follow the author on Twitter: @IlkinShafiyev Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: Russia welcomes diversification of gas supplies to the European market, as this creates market conditions for work, said Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking about the launch of the Southern Gas Corridor by Azerbaijan, RIA Novosti reported. "As for the Southern Corridor from Azerbaijan, we welcome any economic activity in this area. We welcome diversification of energy supplies to the European market, because this creates market conditions for work. We are interested exactly in creation of market conditions, said Putin at a press conference following the talks with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov. The official opening ceremony of the Southern Gas Corridor was held in the Sangachal terminal, Baku, May 29. The Southern Gas Corridor, worth over $40 billion, is considered as one of the priority energy projects for the EU, which strives for diversification of gas sources. The project envisages the transportation of gas from the Caspian region to the European countries through Georgia and Turkey. At an initial stage, the gas to be produced in 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). Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Huseyn Veliyev - Trend: Lenovo will create a center of expertise and R&D laboratory on the basis of "High Technology Park" LLC of the Ministry of Transport, Communications and High Technologies of Azerbaijan, the Head of the Department of Lenovo Data Center Group for work with partners in Azerbaijan and Central Asia Rasim Bakhshi told Trend. Bakhshi noted this lab would allow to develop various kinds of high-tech solutions, including software products. "This project is more connected with our partner - the American company Nutanix. Since Lenovo represents the interests of this company in Azerbaijan, we are also involved in this process," Bakhshi said. In addition, he said Nutanix has several different programs, including educational programs, R&D programs, and separately Lenovo has a program of support to startups and business incubation. "We cannot say that all these programs will be implemented here, but we plan to implement some of them," Bakhshi said. Regarding the plans of Lenovo to invest in promising startups, Bakhshi noted that the company has its own venture capital funds which are invested in interesting projects. "Lenovo does not bind itself geographically to a specific market. We determine for ourselves, for example, whether there is a resource, whether there is a product or a team that can work with it, and we are ready to support it and bring it to a more global level," Bakhshi said. As previously reported, the executive staff of "Hi-Tech Park" LLC visited to the US in early May, within the framework of which a Memorandum on cooperation in the field of IT was signed with the American Chamber of Commerce - AmCham, which stipulated the formation of a road map for long-term strategic cooperation of the parties. In the course of negotiations with the senior officials of Lenovo, an agreement was reached on the establishment of R&D labs in the "High Technology Park" and provision of local startups with the benefits of incubation and venture program of Lenovo. In turn, Nutanix proposed to create an academy for the exchange of scientific experience in one of the universities of Azerbaijan and expressed its readiness to assist in arrangement of regular visits of local startups to Silicon Valley. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @h_veliyev Kyrgyz Prime Minister Mukhammedkaliy Abylgaziyev met with World Bank Regional Director for Central Asia Lilia Burunciuc to discuss promising areas of cooperation, Xinhua with reference to the the Kyrgyz government's press service reported. The Kyrgyz prime minister explained the new government's priorities to Burunciuc, which include improving the efficiency of public administration, the digitalization of the economy, and the development of regions and support for small and medium-sized businesses. The current government led by Abylgaziyev took the oath of office in April. Abylgaziyev said it was important to synchronize the government's priorities with the main directions of the new cooperation strategy developed by the World Bank. Burunciuc said the financing of the domestic economy will be included in the draft of the new cooperation strategy between Kyrgyzstan and the World Bank. She also said that after the meeting between Kyrgyz President Sooronbai Jeenbekov and World Bank Vice President for Europe and Central Asia Cyril Muller in January this year, the financing of projects aimed at the country's development was identified as a priority. Abylgaziyev said he was ready to strengthen cooperation and had instructed the relevant state bodies together with representatives of the World Bank to work out the draft for the new cooperation strategy. Ambassador of Tajikistan to Saudi Arabia Zarobiddin Kosimi held talks with Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Saudi Arabia Adel Mirdad, AKIpress with reference to the Tajik Foreign Ministry reported. The talks focused on a wide range of cooperation issues between the two countries. Both sides following the meeting confirmed their readiness to expand relations, including in the field of economy, investment, culture and tourism. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: Dushanbe will host the International High-level Conference on International Decade for Action Water for Sustainable Development 2018-2028", the Embassy of Tajikistan in Baku told Trend. The conference will be held at the initiative of the Tajik government and in cooperation with the UN and other partners June 20-22 to promote action and policy dialogue on water for sustainable development. It is expected that more than 1,000 guests from 100 countries, including heads of state and government, heads and high-ranking representatives of foreign policy and other relevant ministries will take part in the event. Leaders and representatives of international and regional organizations, such as the UN, OSCE, EU, CSTO, SCO, CIS, the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS), etc., international financial institutions and development partners, river basin organizations, the civil society and the scientific and technological community, as well as research institutes will also participate in the conference. The main objectives of the Conference include raising awareness of the timely and effective implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 6 and other water-related SDGs, as well as to discuss further steps to implement the International Decade for Action 2018-2028 at the global, regional and country levels. Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, May 30 By Huseyn Hasanov Trend: The representative of the State Migration Service of Turkmenistan took part in the regional seminar in Almaty, held with the participation of the UN and dedicated to the issues of safe migration and reduction of the risks of radicalization among migrants, the Turkmen Ministry said in a statement. The event was attended by representatives of state structures, public organizations from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and representatives of specialized UN agencies, international and donor organizations, and experts. The participants discussed strengthening the capacity of government agencies, non-governmental organizations and media representatives from the region to raise awareness of migrants about the risks of violent extremism. The parties noted the importance of regular regional training seminars for further expansion of cooperation and study of best practices, the message said. Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, May 30 By Huseyn Hasanov - Trend: Turkmenistan's national organization for bar coding will become a member of GS1 AISBL, an international organization for creation and implementation of common standards, the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Turkmenistan said in a statement. The activities of GS1 Turkmenistan laboratory are aimed at the introduction of a world-wide multi-industry system of identification, bar coding and electronic communications based on GS1 international standards. "The opening of the verification laboratory allowed controlling the compliance of bar codes with international standards, which also contributes to the smooth promotion of goods from Turkmenistan abroad, and its competitiveness in the international market," the message says. The services of GS1 Turkmenistan laboratory are used by hundreds of public and private sector enterprises, and individual entrepreneurs, which are provided with a set of high-quality services that contribute to implementation of global standards. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev will hold meetings with leaders of Russia, China and India on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit, scheduled for June 9-10 in the Chinese City of Qingdao, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uzbekistan Abdujabar Abduvakhitov said in an interview with Podrobno.uz agency in Tashkent City on the backstage of the presentation of the upcoming summit. Within the framework of the SCO, all the meetings (of Shavkat Mirziyoyev) with the heads of states that have been planned will be held on the sidelines of the summit. For example, meetings with the Russian President, the Indian leader, as well as Mr. Xi Jinping have been scheduled," said Abduvakhitov. Abduvakhitov clearly replied to the question of whether Uzbekistan plans to sign any bilateral documents in Qingdao that, this had not been envisaged. "Uzbekistan has not envisaged signing interstate documents within the framework of the SCO, after all, cooperation in this organization is multilateral cooperation. I think that our bilateral contacts, including on the part of the president, are of the nature of continuing interaction between the countries," the official said. He stressed that about 20 documents will be signed within the framework of the SCO Summit, and all of them are aimed at multilateral cooperation. The main document of the summit will be the Qingdao Declaration. It will consolidate the final decision of the SCO member states on the regional situation. During the meeting, the members of the organization plan to discuss issues of regional security, trade and economic cooperation and the humanitarian sphere. In addition, a reception and a light show will be held in honor of the guests. Tehran, Iran, May 30 By Kamyar Eghbalnejad - Trend: Mohammad Meshkin-Fam, the managing director of Pars Oil and Gas Company (POGC), said Phase 14 of South Pars (SP) Gas Field will be jointly developed by eight domestic firms. "Eight Iranian firms will cooperate on the development of Phase 14 of South Pars Gas Field," Meshkin-Fam said on May 27 as quoted by ILNA news agency. He added that three out of the eight firms will help with the refining process and drilling and exploration activities will be done by the rest. The world's largest gas field is known as South Pars in Iran's territory with its Qatari extension referred to as the North Dome. Officials expect all 24 phases of South Pars to become up and running by March 2019, the end of the next fiscal year. SP Phase 14 is aimed to produce natural gas from four offshore platforms with output to be transported to onshore processing facilities through a pipeline stretching over 100 kilometers. Upon completion, Phase 14 will also produce 75,000 barrels of gas condensate and 400 tons of sulfur per day as well as 2 million tons of liquefied gas annually. In fiscal 2016-17, gas production from South Pars increased to 520 mcm/d, up more than 150 mcm/d compared with the previous year. Irans total gas output is above mcm/d, according to published reports. Tehran, Iran, May 30 By Kamyar Eghbalnejad - Trend: Engineering and Construction Company of Machine Sazi Arak (MSA), in Iran's Markazi province, and Russian manufacturer RM Rail have signed an agreement for joint production of rolling stock. RM Rail is a Russian conglomerate that consists of industrial and engineering divisions and produces mechanical engineering products including motor vehicles, car parts, rail cars, wagons, and refinery equipment, Jafar Safari, MSA managing director, told IRNA news agency on May 30. RM Rail has inked agreements with Iranian companies on construction of 1,000 freight wagons, he said. While the value of the contract was not given, he added that part of the project would be implemented by MSA. Safari further said that RM Rail and MSA also plan to cooperate on development of refinery and energy plants as part of their cooperation contract. Iran has announced about plans to splurge up to $25 billion over the next 10 years in the modernization and expansion of its railway network. Under its vision plan, the country seeks to stretch out the nationwide railroad line to 25,000 kilometers by 2025 from under 15,000 kilometers now. Tehran, Iran, May 30 By Kamyar Eghbalnejad - Trend: The 13th edition of Asia Pacific Regional Conference will be held in Tehran in late November, an official with Iran Chamber of Cooperatives said. The 13th Asia Pacific Regional Conference will be held in the Iranian capital for the first time in cooperation with Iran Chamber of Cooperatives on November 28-29, Alireza Banaeifar told Iran's Young Journalists Club website on May 30. The last round of the event was organized in India, where Iran was given the right to host the next edition, he added. Thirty countries from Asia and the Pacific, as well as 250 managers are planned to attend the event, Banaeifar said. He added that representatives from Australia, South Korea, China, Japan, India, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Philippines, and Singapore will be among the participants. Banaeifar said the event could be a good opportunity for all to exchange experience and knowledge and improve the quality of their countrys products. The regional conference will offer the participating nations the opportunities to work together, learn, celebrate successes and develop partnerships and joint projects. Tehran, Iran, May 30 By Kamyar Eghbalnejad - Trend: The seventh cargo train from China to Iran arrived in Iran in recent days, the deputy head of Islamic Republic of Iran Railways said. The train, carrying 50 containers measuring 40 feet each, left the Chinese city of Lin'an and arrived in Iran via the border town of Incheboron (in Gorgan province), Babak Ahmadi told the FARS news agency on May 30. The first train set off from Yiwu City in Chinas Zhejiang Province on January 28. It covered 10,399 km, passing through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, to reach the border station of Sarakhs in Irans Khorasan Razavi Province after 14 days. The route, better known as the New Silk Road, was first proposed by He Huawu, the chief engineer of China Railway Corporation in late 2015. From Tehran, the grand project will join Irans East-West network leading to Turkey and eastern Europe. It could also open a way to Europe via a developing rail route from southern Iranian ports to Azerbaijan and Europe. The second freight train departed from Yinchuan South Railway Station on Sept. 5, 2017, carrying some 560 tons of cargo, including mechanical equipment, ceramic tableware, crystalware and automobile accessories, worth around $1.6 million. The Belt and Road initiative, put forward in October 2013 by Chinese President Xi Jinping, includes several corridors through land and sea, including the New Silk Road rail route, which will serve as a tailwind for the transport of goods and energy between Iran and China. China signed a contract in Tehran back in July 2017 to finance the electrification of a strand of the New Silk Road in Irana 926-km railroad from Tehran to the eastern city of Mashhad in Khorasan Razavi Province with a $1.5 billion loan. According to Maziar Yazdani, the deputy head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Railways, the electrification of Tehran-Mashhad railroad will take four years. The route is already double-tracked and both tracks will be electrified as part of the deal with the Chinese side. This will raise the speed of the line from the current 160 kph to 200 kph, significantly reducing the duration of a trip between the two cities. For Iran, the electrification of Tehran-Mashhad line is part of its wider rail development plan to electrify all railroads by 2025. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Umid Niayesh - Trend: The head of the Iranian Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR) said Baku and Tehran are willing to enhance bilateral relations in various fields, including medical education and research. Given the existing good relations between Iran and Azerbaijan, we are exploring business opportunities here and [in the meetings] discussed ways for joint production of products needed by both Azerbaijan and CIS countries, Seyed Hamid Reza Tayyebi, who is currently in Baku, told Trend on May 30. Heading a delegation, Tayyebi is in the Azerbaijani capital to attend the 25th International Caspian Oil & Gas Exhibition and Conference underway in Baku. The Iranian official added that he may also sit down with Azerbaijani officials to study how Tehran and Baku can mutually cooperate on medical education and research. Mutual cooperation on breast cancer, woman infertility, cell sciences and cell therapy is also on the agenda, he said. Yesterday, we held talks with Azerbaijani Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov and briefed on capabilities in the sector of power, Tayyebi said. Today, we also held a meeting with Rovnag Abdullayev, the head of the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR), he said. We can help them revive and preserve the environment, Tayyebi said. Tomorrow, we will meet with the Azerbaijani health minister. About the future of Tehran-Baku ties, the Iranian official said, Since long time ago, we have been seeking to forge closer ties with Azerbaijan. I am optimistic that there is a good opportunity for joint cooperation between the two sides as the presidents of the two countries are favor the continuation of cooperation. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: Irans special police forces have dismantled an armed terrorist group in the south eastern city of Saravan, near the Pakistan border. One suicide terrorist was killed during the armed clash with the police, said police commander of Sistan and Baluchestan province, Brigadier General Mohammad Ghanbari, IRNA news agency reported May 30. The security forces seized significant amounts of light and heavy weapons, one suicide vest and several explosive traps as well as significant quantities of ammunition, he added. Sistan and Balouchestan province, bordering with Pakistan, has been the scene of frequent clashes between extreme militants and the Islamic Republics forces in recent years. Irans security forces also frequently clash with drug traffickers in the area, which is located on a major drug smuggling route between Afghanistan and Europe, as well as the Persian Gulf states. Tehran, Iran, May 30 By Kamyar Eghbalnejad - Trend: A senior Iranian lawmaker said there are still doubts if Europe would be able to stand up to impending US sanctions on Iran. I think Europe has the necessary resolve to stand up to the US sanctions against Iran, Mostafa Kavakebian, a reformist parliamentarian, told Trend on May 30. He, however, noted that there are still doubts that European nations would have the ability and capability to resist the sanctions. Asked about the fate of the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers following Washingtons withdrawal from it, he said, We need to wait until June 21 to see what kind of package the three European nations (UK, France and Germany) will propose." I do believe that Irans decision to either remain in the deal or not all depends on the package, Kavakebian said. US President Donald Trump announced on May 8 that Washington was walking away from the nuclear agreement, which was reached between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the US, Britain, France, Russia and China - plus Germany. Trump also said he would reinstate US nuclear sanctions on Iran and impose "the highest level" of economic bans on the Islamic Republic. Iran has asked OPEC to support it against new U.S. sanctions and signalled it is not yet in agreement with Saudi Arabias views on the possible need to increase global oil supplies, creating potential problems for OPEC at its meeting next month, Reuters reported. Iran, the arch-rival of Saudi Arabia, has a history of being difficult at OPEC meetings including in 2015 when the country refused to sign up to OPEC policies, saying it needed to raise output due to the easing of sanctions following Tehrans accord with major world powers. U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this month pulled out of that nuclear deal with Iran and announced the highest level of sanctions against the OPEC member. Iran is the third-largest oil producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries after Saudi Arabia and Iraq. I would like to ... seek OPECs support in accordance with Article 2 of the OPEC Statute, which emphasises safeguarding the interests of member countries individually and collectively, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said in a letter seen by Reuters. Zanganeh also suggested in the letter that Iran was not in agreement with some OPEC ministers recent comments on the oil market. He said some OPEC ministers have implicitly or unwittingly spoken for the organization, expressing views that might be perceived as the official position of the OPEC. The energy ministers of Saudi Arabia and Russia said last week they were prepared to ease output cuts to calm consumer worries about supply. Raising output would bring an end to about 18 months of strict supply curbs amid concerns that oil price have risen too far. Oil price have hit their highest since late 2014, rising above $80.50 a barrel this month, but have since eased.[O/R] Since the original sanctions were lifted, Iran has struggled to raise production above 4 million barrels per day due to a lack of new projects and the caution of Western investors. So if OPEC decides to increase supplies, Iran is likely to benefit less than Saudi Arabia because it would struggle to raise output while it would also be hit by lower oil prices. Zanganehs letter was addressed to the United Arab Emirates Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei, who holds OPEC presidency in 2018. Zanganeh also said that if the latest U.S. sanctions threat was resolved Iran reserves the right to return to its oil market share in the shortest possible time and resumes its normal production-level and will not accept any limitations in this regard. Zanganeh asked Mazrouei to include a separate agenda item for the June OPEC meeting entitled OPEC Ministerial Conference support to the Member Countries that are under illegal, unilateral and extraterritorial sanctions. In a separate letter, Mazrouei replied that there were two options available to discuss this issue. The first is for the OPEC governors to review the request and include it for discussion in OPECs meeting later this year, which could be held in November, according to the letter seen by Reuters. The second option is to include it in the June meeting under any other business as a Request from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mazrouei said, suggesting it will not be on the main agenda for the ministers. OPEC governors meet next in October. Tehran, Iran, May 30 By Kamyar Eghbalnejad - Trend: Iranian culture minister Abbas Salehi said giving more leeway to foreign media and their coverage of issues and events can help nations have more interaction with the world. The more support and attention for foreign media, the better interaction with the world, Salehi said on May 30, according to Trend correspondent in Tehran. This can help bring up an opportunity for a better interaction with the world, he added. Salehi further called for the facilitation of various foreign media outlets activities in Iran. More needs to be done with respect to this, he said. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: NATO is committed to continue working with Azerbaijan in all areas, a NATO official told Trend May 30. NATO and Azerbaijan have a long-standing cooperation. We are grateful for Azerbaijans continued contributions to the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission to train, advise and assist the Afghan security forces and institutions. Azerbaijani troops are serving with distinction. We are also grateful for Azerbaijans contribution to the financial sustainment of the Afghan security forces, through the NATO-run Afghan National Army Trust Fund, said the official. Further, NATO representative pointed out that Azerbaijan continues to make full use of the existing frameworks to enhance the level of inter-operability of its forces with Allied forces, including through the Individual Partnership Action Plan and the Planning and Review Process. Today our practical cooperation covers many areas, from capability development to energy security, and safe disposal of unexploded mines and ammunition from the former Soviet Army. We encourage Azerbaijan to step up the reform process of its security institutions, including by taking full advantage of our Building Integrity program to help fight corruption, noted the NATO official. NATO representative noted that the organization welcomes Azerbaijans work on finalization of a national action plan on UN Security Council Resolution 1325 by the end of 2018, and encourage Azerbaijan to continue to implement the overall Women, Peace, and Security agenda. We are committed to continue working with Azerbaijan in all areas chosen by the Azerbaijani authorities and to take our cooperation further, added the official. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 Trend: Artak Gevorgyan, a son of Armenian MP from the Republican Party of Armenia, Nahapet Gevorgyan, was taken to the Central Police Department following an incident at one of Yerevan restaurants, Armenian media reported on May 30. Reportedly, a conflict arose between Gevorgyan and the waiter. A verbal exchange led to a fight, as the waiter broke a plate on Gevorgyan's head. The MP's son, in turn, hit the waiter several times. Police officers who arrived at the scene detained Artak Gevorgyan. The detainee was previously convicted. A senior North Korean official arrived in New York Wednesday to salvage a highly anticipated summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Yonhap reported. Kim Yong-chol, a vice chairman of the ruling Workers' Party's Central Committee, arrived at JFK International Airport, becoming the highest-ranking North Korean to visit the U.S. since 2000. He is due to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to finalize the details of what is expected to be a June 12 summit in Singapore between Trump and Kim on dismantling the North's nuclear weapons program. Known as the North Korean leader's right-hand man, the former spy chief is expected to carry a personal letter from Kim amid reports of his commitment to denuclearization and a meeting with Trump. The U.S. president called off the summit last week, citing Kim's "open hostility," but has since put it back on track following a conciliatory statement from the regime. If held, the Trump-Kim meeting will be the first summit between the two countries that have long been at odds over the North's pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, which are now believed to be capable of striking the U.S. mainland. Officials from both sides have been scrambling to make the summit happen, with separate teams dispatched to the inter-Korean border and Singapore to discuss the substance of any denuclearization agreement and logistical issues, respectively. In New York, Kim Yong-chol and Pompeo are expected to push for a deal that will satisfy U.S. demands for complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization (CVID) and North Korean demands for CVIG, where G stands for security guarantees for the regime. Police began evacuating hundreds of migrants living in makeshift camps in Paris on Wednesday, as European politicians continue to tackle the issue of refugees, which has fueled the rise of far-right parties in the continent, Reuters reports. Reuters Television pictures showed scores of migrants, from the Millenaire camp next to a canal in northeast Paris, waiting to be escorted to temporary accommodation centers. Riot police were also on standby as the evacuation took place. France has undertaken previous measures to clear out migrant camps in Paris, only for new camps to spring up again. Europe has faced a migrant crisis since 2015 following wars in Libya and Syria, and more than 1 million people from Africa and the Middle East have tried to reach the continent via Turkey or by sea. French President Emmanuel Macrons government has said it wants to be both firm and fair on immigration but it took a tougher stance lately, with parliament approving a bill that tightens asylum rules. More than 50 senior Taliban commanders were killed in an artillery strike on a meeting in Afghanistans southern province of Helmand, a U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday, as fighting continued across the country, Reuters reports. Details of last weeks operation emerged as fighting continued in other parts of Afghanistan, where the Taliban, aiming to restore their version of hardline Islamic law, launched their annual spring offensive last month. Gunmen in Kabul, the capital, attacked the heavily fortified interior ministry, battling security forces for more than two hours before the assault was suppressed. There were also serious incidents in Takhar province in the north, in Loghar, east of the capital, and Kandahar in the south, keeping up a pattern of attacks across the country. The U.S. military said the May 24 meeting in Helmands district of Musa Qala involved commanders from a number of Afghan provinces, including neighboring Farah, where Taliban fighters this month briefly threatened to overrun the provincial capital. We think the meeting was to plan next steps, said Lt. Col. Martin ODonnell, spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. While the strike by an artillery rocket system would disrupt Taliban operations, it would not necessarily mean any interruption to the fighting, he said. However, the attack in one of the heartlands of the Taliban insurgency was a significant blow to the insurgents, he said. Its certainly a notable strike, he said, adding that several other senior and lower level commanders had been killed during operations over a 10-day period this month. The Taliban dismissed the report as propaganda and said the attack had hit two civilian houses in Musa Qala, killing five civilians and wounding three. This was a civilian residential area, which had no connection with the Taliban, spokesman Qari Yousaf Ahmadi said in a statement. In the northern province of Takhar, Taliban fighters in the Dasht-e Qala district center captured the governors compound and police headquarters on Wednesday but heavy fighting was continuing, police spokesman Khalil Aseer said. In Loghar, the Taliban claimed an attack on a police station in the provincial capital, Pul-e Alam, which killed three police and wounded 12, among them four police and eight civilians. Shahpoor Ahmadzai, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said three attackers who sought to enter the police station in the early morning hours triggered a three-hour gunbattle that ended when all three were killed. Elsewhere, three civilians were killed and 13 wounded by an explosion in the southern city of Kandahar that appeared to have targeted a mechanics workshop repairing Afghan army vehicles, a spokesman for the provincial governor said. Cubas President Miguel Diaz-Canel flew into in Caracas on Wednesday for his first foreign visit as head of state, a show of solidarity for Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro whose controversial re-election this month drew fire in the West, Reuters reported. Venezuela now needs our solidarity, Diaz-Canel told Venezuelas Constituent Assembly, a pro-government legislative superbody set up last year. The aggression against Venezuela harms all of America. The United States, the European Union and major Latin American nations have condemned Maduros May 20 re-election, saying it did not meet democratic standards. Two of his rivals were barred from standing and the election board is run by loyalists. The U.S. government imposed new sanctions on the crisis-stricken oil-producing country. But China and Russia have warned against meddling in the socialist-run nation, and fellow leftist governments in the region from Cuba to Bolivia have offered warm support. Your words express the best of the Cuban people, and we are forever grateful for the support you have given us, said Delcy Rodriguez, a senior Maduro ally who heads the assembly, which has been criticized by foes for undermining the opposition-controlled National Assembly legislature. Maduro was the first foreign leader to meet with Diaz-Canel last month after he succeeded Raul Castro to become president of the communist-run island. Venezuela, which holds the worlds largest oil reserves, exchanges crude for Cuban medical and other technical services, though deliveries have dropped over the past few years during an economic implosion in the OPEC member of 30 million people. We felt (Maduros) victory as our own, Diaz-Canel said. Venezuela has supported Cuba in many ways throughout its history. We have a debt of gratitude. Diaz-Canel flew to Venezuela with his wife Liz Cuesta as first lady, in a break with custom during the nearly 60 years rule by the Castro brothers Fidel and Raul who generally traveled without their wives. He was later expected to meet with Maduro at the Miraflores presidential palace. Diaz-Canels visit came as Cuban authorities faced the chaos of flooding in the wake of subtropical storm Alberto that has killed four people and prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands. The recent outbreak of violence on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip destroys even the slightest hope for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation in the near future, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. "Moscow expresses its deep concern over this escalation of violence, which deserves condemnation," the ministry said, adding that those tensions "cross out even the slightest hope for a soonest reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians." The ministry said Israeli and Palestinian civilians are most affected by the situation. "The perspective of establishing the Israeli-Palestinian negotiation process on the well-known international legal basis is becoming more and more distant," the statement reads. "We again call on the Israelis and the Palestinians to break this vicious circle of destructive confrontation." End This MSM Glorification From NRATV, May 2018 Colion Noir - "It's time to put an end to this glorification of carnage in pursuit of ratings because it's killing our kids. It's time for Congress to step up and pass legislation putting common sense limitations on #MSM's ability to report on these school shootings." From downtrend.com - Obviously Colion isn't actually saying that the press should be banned from reporting on mass shootings, he's calling out their hypocrisy. Liberals clearly missed the snark of this video because, as I mentioned, they are dumb." JPFO says - "Too many news outlets relish the chance to sink to the lowest common sensational interest. This now includes displaying names and images of the most heinous mass murderers they can find -- which they now help create. This is not "news," it is a corrupt financial misuse of the public trust. Media outlets that do it deserve scorn, boycotts and recognition for encouraging copycat murder and societal decay." "You don't have to be Jewish to fight by our side." You just have to love freedom. 2018 JPFO All rights reserved. jpfo@jpfo.org 1-800-869-1884 Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership 12500 NE 10th Pl. Bellevue, WA 98005 USA "America's most aggressive defender of civil rights" We make the NRA look like moderates Join JPFO Back to Top Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expects that his upcoming visit to Pyongyang will help him understand North Koreas attitude to the Korean Peninsula issue, as he himself said at the Primakov Readings conference on Wednesday, TASS reports. "This visit, just like any other, is aimed at discussing bilateral relations with our partners, as well as the situation in the region," Lavrov noted. "I received an invitation and was glad to accept it. It will be useful for me to understand our North Korean neighbors attitude to all the issues [concerning the Korean Peninsula]," he added. Lavrov pointed out that Russia was involved in the six-party talks on the North Korea issue - a mechanism that was still there. "In accordance with the logic that this mechanism is based on, we support the current changes in relations between the two Korean states, as well as between Pyongyang and Washington," the Russian top diplomat pointed out. "We very much expect that the planned talks, which have been once again confirmed lately, will not result in ultimatums," he said. According to the Russian top diplomat, the Korean Peninsula cannot be denuclearized in one move. "It will require step-by-step actions, consistency and patience," Lavrov noted. "At the final stage of the process, multilateral talks involving all the six countries will become inevitable, which is what the Russian-Chinese road map implies," he said. "The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula should be supported by mechanisms ensuring peace and stability in Southeast Asia," the Russian foreign minister concluded. Participants of the 20th strategic dialogue between the Russian Armed Forces and the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) have reached agreement to boost cooperation in the military sphere, according to a statement released by the Chinese Ministry of Defense on Wednesday, TASS reports. Head of the Main Operations Directorate, first deputy head of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Colonel General Sergei Rudskoy and Major General Shao Yuanming, deputy chief of staff of the Joint Staff Department of China's Central Military Commission, took part in the consultations. "The sides exchanged their opinions on thorny international and regional issues, as well as on closer cooperation between China and Russia in the military sphere. The sides reached broad consensus," the document says. The sides also confirmed their intention to increase the level of cooperation and undertake constructive steps for further renewal of strategic cooperation between the armed forces. The Chinese Ministry of Defense said in the statement that head of the Joint Staff Department of China's Central Military Commission Li Zuocheng held a meeting with the Russian delegation. Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: The Turkish air forces eliminated a particularly dangerous terrorist, a member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, Turkish media wrote May 30. The name of the liquidated terrorist has not been revealed. It is reported that he was the organizer of attacks on military units in a number of Eastern provinces of Turkey. The anti-terrorist operation was carried out in the Eastern Turkish province of Tunceli. The conflict between Turkey and the PKK, which requires the creation of an independent Kurdish state, lasts more than 25 years, and has claimed more than 40,000 lives. The PKK is recognized as a terrorist organization by the UN and the EU. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: Ankara police are conducting a large-scale anti-terrorist operation, Turkish media reported May 30. The police are carrying out raids at 64 city addresses. More than 100 people, whose names are not disclosed, have been detained as part of the operation. Other details of the operations have not been disclosed either. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: Turkish Ambassador Serdar Kilic may return to the US this week, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said, Turkish media reported on May 30. He noted that Turkey did not recall its ambassador from the United States, but only summoned him for consultations. On May 14, Turkey summoned its ambassadors in Washington and Tel Aviv for consultations because of Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip, which resulted in death of more than 150 Palestinians. Later, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim announced that Turkey is calling on Muslim countries to reconsider relations with Israel. Yildirim noted that Turkey sharply condemns Israel's actions against Palestinians. Turkish Foreign Ministry also urged the Ambassador and Consul General of Israel to leave Turkey, after which the Israeli diplomats left Turkey. On May 18, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) held an emergency meeting on the situation in Palestine. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Baku, Azerbaijan, May 30 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: Turkey welcomes the ceasefire agreement reached between Palestine and Israel, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said, Turkish media reported on May 30. Cavusoglu noted that Turkey from the first day stands for a ceasefire in the region, further adding that at the same time, the ceasefire does not mean a full peace. "No one can guarantee that tomorrow Israel will not resume military operations in the Gaza Strip," Cavusoglu said. Earlier, HAMAS and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad announced a ceasefire agreement with Israel, Palestinian media reported. The Palestinian side stated that the armistice was reached with the mediation of Egyptian representatives. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu The driver of a Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) Model S crashed into an unoccupied, parked police vehicle in Laguna Beach, California, on Tuesday and the driver told investigators the Tesla was in Autopilot mode at the time, police said, Reuters reported. The driver suffered minor injuries, Laguna Beach Sergeant Jim Cota said, who posted photos of the crash scene showing extensive damage to the front end of the Tesla and the rear side of the police vehicle. Autopilot is a semi-autonomous technology that the company says is a form of advanced cruise control. Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesnt make the car impervious to all accidents, the company said in a statement after the accident and could not immediately confirm the drivers report that the vehicle was in Autopilot mode. Several crashes and fire incidents involving Tesla vehicles this year has been a near constant headache for Chief Executive Elon Musk, who boasts that his companys vehicles are among the safest in the industry. Earlier this month, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it was sending a team to investigate the crash of a Tesla vehicle in South Jordan, Utah. The driver was traveling at 60 miles (97 km) per hour when the Model S smashed into a fire truck stopped at a red light, according to police. Police in Utah said data from Tesla showed that the driver enabled Autopilot about 1 minute and 22 seconds before the crash. The report said she took her hands off the steering wheel within two seconds of engaging the system and then did not touch the steering wheel for the next 80 seconds, until the crash happened. NHTSA is also investigating a fatal crash in March that involved a Tesla Model X using Autopilot that struck a highway divider. The agency is also probing the January crash of a Tesla vehicle apparently traveling in Autopilot that struck a parked fire truck. Both of those incidents were also in California. The National Transportation Safety Board is also probing four Tesla crashes that have occurred since last year, including three under review by NHTSA. Teslas Model S owners manual warns some Autopilot functions cannot detect all objects and may not brake/decelerate for stationary vehicles or objects especially when traveling over 50 mph (80 kph) and when a vehicle ahead of the driver moves out of your driving path and a stationary vehicle or object is in front of you. A meeting between representatives from the US, Russia and Jordan to discuss the situation in the de-escalation zones in Syria will take place in Amman, Russian Special Presidential Representative for the Middle East and African Countries, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov told reporters on Wednesday, TASS reports. "The meeting will take place in Amman," he said. "We are ready at any level." "We are ready to hold such a meeting at any level acceptable to our partners," Bogdanov continued. The senior diplomat noted that the Jordanian side initially suggested a ministerial level. "Our minister was fully ready for this contact," he added, specifying that a response from the American side is currently expected. The U.S. military on Wednesday renamed its Pacific Command the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, in a largely symbolic move underscoring the growing importance of India to the Pentagon, U.S. officials said, Reuters reported. U.S. Pacific Command, which is responsible for all U.S. military activity in the greater Pacific region, has about 375,000 civilian and military personnel assigned to its area of responsibility, which includes India. Relationships with our Pacific and Indian Ocean allies and partners have proven critical to maintaining regional stability, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in prepared remarks. In recognition of the increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, today we rename the U.S. Pacific Command to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Mattis said. He was speaking during a change of command ceremony. Admiral Philip Davidson was assuming leadership of the command from Admiral Harry Harris, who is President Donald Trumps nominee to be ambassador to South Korea. The renaming does not mean additional assets will be sent to the region at this time, but rather recognizes Indias increasing military relevance for the United States. In 2016, the United States and India signed an agreement governing the use of each others land, air and naval bases for repair and resupply, a step toward building defense ties as they seek to counter the growing maritime assertiveness of China. The United States is also keen to tap into Indias large defense market. It has emerged as Indias No. 2 weapons supplier, closing $15 billion worth of deals over the last decade. Mattis has been pushing for a waiver for countries like India, after Trump signed a law last year which said that any country trading with Russias defense and intelligence sectors would face sanctions. I think India and the relationship with the United States is the potentially most historic opportunity we have in the 21st-century and I intend to pursue that quite rigorously, Davidson, the incoming head of the command, said last month. However, experts said the name change would mean little unless it was tied to a broader strategy. Renaming PACOM is ultimately a symbolic act ... (it) will have a very limited impact unless the U.S. follows through with a significant array of initiatives and investments that reflect a wider aperture, said Abraham Denmark, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia under President Barack Obama. KYODO NEWS - May 30, 2018 - 14:46 | All, Japan, World Visiting Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang met with Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko on Wednesday, as the two countries mark the 45th anniversary of diplomatic ties this year. Quang could be the last state guest to a banquet hosted by the emperor at the Imperial Palace as the 84-year-old emperor is scheduled to abdicate on April 30 next year -- the first living monarch to do so in about 200 years. Emperor Akihito asked Quang during their meeting whether Vietnamese people in Japan are "living happily," to which Quang responded many people are studying and working actively, according to the Imperial Household Agency. "Such exchanges, I believe, are extremely important," the emperor was quoted as saying. A welcoming ceremony for Quang was held in the morning at the palace, attended by the imperial couple, Crown Prince Naruhito, who will take over as emperor from May 1 next year, his wife Crown Princess Masako, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other members of his Cabinet. The visit by Quang, which started Tuesday, is a reciprocal move after the imperial couple visited Vietnam as state guests in February last year. Quang is scheduled to meet with Abe and attend a ceremony in Tokyo celebrating the diplomatic anniversary before heading home on Saturday. (Emperor Akihito, R, hosted Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quangon Wednesday.) KYODO NEWS - May 31, 2018 - 10:38 | World, All U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a senior North Korean official met in New York on Wednesday, as the two nations sped up the pace of preparations for a possible summit between their leaders. The official, Kim Yong Chol -- a vice chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea -- is the highest-ranking North Korean official to visit the United States in almost two decades. (Mike Pompeo) [Getty/Kyodo] Wednesday's dinner meeting between Pompeo and Kim, who both arrived in New York earlier in the day, will be followed by further discussions on Thursday, with expectations mounting for a historic summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June. Prior to Wednesday's meeting, Pompeo reiterated Washington's eagerness to dismantle Pyongyang's nuclear program. "We are committed to the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," he said in a Twitter post. Senior officials of the two states, which have no diplomatic ties, were separately dispatched to the truce village of Panmunjeom, which divides the two Koreas, and Singapore for meetings to narrow down substantive and logistical issues ahead of the planned summit. The negotiations are taking place on multiple tracks after Trump revived plans for the direct meeting with Kim, initially slated for June 12 in Singapore, but which the U.S. president called off last week. "The conversation is going to be focused on denuclearization of the (Korean) peninsula," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters in Washington. "As long as that is part of the discussion, we're going to shoot for the June 12th, and we expect to do that." Sanders said ongoing U.S.-North Korean talks at the demilitarized zone along the border between North and South Korea are running smoothly. "The U.S. delegation, led by Ambassador Sung Kim, met with North Korean officials earlier today as well...So far, the readout from these meetings has been positive, and we'll continue to move forward in them," she said. (Kim Yong Chol leaves his hotel in New York for dinner with Mike Pompeo) Kim Yong Chol, who previously headed the country's spy agency, has played a prominent role in negotiations with South Korea and the United States in recent months. He held talks with Pompeo in North Korea in April and May, during which they agreed to proceed with preparations for the summit. As Pompeo, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, met also with the North Korean leader on those two occasions, it is being closely watched whether Kim Yong Chol will see Trump. He is the only North Korean official who attended all of Kim's meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae In and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Kim held two meetings with Xi in March and May in China and two others with South Korean President Moon Jae In in Panmunjeom in April and May. The last known top meeting involving a North Korean official in the United States dates back to October 2000 when U.S. President Bill Clinton met with Jo Myong Rok, a vice marshal who was sent as a special envoy of then North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, at the White House. Kim Yong Chol, who is suspected of being behind deadly attacks on a South Korean warship and border island in 2010, is subject to sanctions that prevent him entering South Korea or the United States. The Trump administration is believed to have granted him a temporary waiver this time to allow him to visit New York, where North Korea has a diplomatic mission to the United Nations. (Kim Yong Chol, right, arrives at a hotel in New York) KYODO NEWS - May 30, 2018 - 17:35 | All, Japan In a sign the country is opening up its insular job market, the Japanese government decided Tuesday to welcome more than 500,000 foreign workers through fiscal 2025 to offset the labor shortage in industries such as agriculture and construction. The move will be written into Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's new economic policy outline due out in mid-June, with the necessary legal revisions to be submitted to parliament this autumn. Foreign workers will be allowed to stay in Japan for five years under a new framework that covers five industries -- agriculture, construction, lodging, nursing and shipbuilding. They will be required to pass a test demonstrating proficiency in the relevant field and the Japanese language. Those who go through the country's foreign trainee program will be exempt from the test and can stay for a total of 10 years. The framework will make inroads into solving a severe labor crunch in Japan while creating jobs for foreign workers, which have thus far been limited to highly specialized positions due to concerns that an influx of immigrants could lead to a rise in crime. Lawmakers within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party continue to harbor such worries, with Abe saying in February that he does not intend to open the country up to immigrants. Reflecting this, the framework will include the five-year limit as well as barring foreign workers from bringing family members with them. Companies that hire foreign workers will be required to submit a plan of support that includes assisting the workers find housing and take language classes. Small businesses will be able to ask a government-certified organization for help. A record 1.28 million foreigners were working in Japan in 2017, more than double the 480,000 in 2008. Nearly a third of them, at 29 percent, were from China, followed by 19 percent from Vietnam, 12 percent from the Philippines, 9 percent from Brazil and 5 percent from Nepal. Meanwhile, the country is suffering from a severe labor shortage as postwar baby boomers leave the workforce, with businesses reporting the worst conditions since the early 1990s in a Bank of Japan survey conducted in March. KYODO NEWS - May 30, 2018 - 12:30 | All, World U.S. President Donald Trump will meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the White House on June 7, spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday. The announcement came after the two leaders agreed in a telephone conversation Monday to meet before a planned summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12. On Wednesday in Tokyo, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a press conference the two governments are arranging the talks between Abe and Trump. "It is important to prepare for the U.S.-North Korean summit so that it will be an opportunity that leads to the resolution of the issues of nuclear, missile and abduction" of Japanese nationals by the North decades ago, the top government spokesman said. Abe's trip to Washington will also happen just prior to a summit of leaders from the Group of Seven industrialized nations in Canada on June 8 and 9. (Vehicles belonging to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul head to Panmunjeom on Wednesday) Trump and Kim separately expressed over the weekend their readiness to meet as originally planned, although the U.S. president had called off the summit on Thursday. After Monday's phone talks, Abe said he and Trump agreed to cooperate to make the summit between the U.S. and North Korean leaders meaningful. Tokyo and Washington share the requirement for Pyongyang to dismantle all weapons of mass destruction and missiles in a complete, verifiable and irreversible way. Since taking office, Abe has been seeking to bring back Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, making it a top priority for his administration. Abe is expected to ask Trump to take up the matter during the president's meeting with Kim. KYODO NEWS - May 30, 2018 - 12:18 | Urgent, All, Japan A man serving a jail term for the attempted murder of a female high school student was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of killing a 9-year-old girl in 2004 in western Japan. While Kunihiko Katsuta, 39, admitted to strangling Yukiko Tsutsushio, a third-grade elementary school pupil in Tsuyama, Okayama Prefecture, he denied his intent to kill the girl, and also denied stabbing her, police said. Local police believe Katsuta choked and stabbed her to death at her home between 3:15 p.m. and 3:35 p.m. on Sept. 3, 2004. He is suspected of stabbing her multiple times with a knife, which is yet to be found. Katsuta told investigators that he had never met with the girl before the incident, according to the police. The police began questioning Katsuta in September as he emerged as a potential suspect after they expanded the search area and scrutinized crimes with similar tactics. (Katsuyoshi Tsutsushio with a photo of his daughter Yukiko in August 2010) Earlier in the day, the police transferred Katsuta from a prison in Okayama Prefecture to police cell for questioning and raided his home in Kakogawa in neighboring Hyogo Prefecture for clues as to his motive. The girl was found bleeding on the floor of her home by her sister, who returned home at about 3:35 p.m. on the day of the incident. She was taken to hospital with multiple injuries to her chest and abdomen, but was pronounced dead shortly afterward. Katsuta was arrested in 2015 for stabbing a female junior high school student in the stomach with a knife on a street in Himeji, Hyogo Prefecture. At the initial trial, the Himeji branch of the Kobe District Court noted in its ruling that Katsuta had developed an interest in animation while at high school and a taste for seeing girls' shirts soaked in blood, which later grew into an urge to stab girls in the abdomen. The Osaka High Court subsequently sentenced him to a 10-year prison term in 2016. In 2010, Katsuta was also sentenced to four years in prison for assaulting and injuring five girls on a street, including elementary and high school students. KYODO NEWS - May 30, 2018 - 09:15 | All, World Japan intends to hold a foreign ministerial meeting with North Korea in Singapore in early August if progress is made on Pyongyang's nuclear weapons and missile programs at an expected U.S.-North Korea summit, government sources said Tuesday. Tokyo has conveyed its intention to arrange talks between Foreign Minister Taro Kono and his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong Ho on the sidelines of an international security conference, they said. (North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho) Japan hopes to pave the way for a summit with North Korea and advance long-stalled negotiations over the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by Pyongyang decades ago, according to the sources. The countries last held a foreign ministerial meeting in Malaysia in August 2015, at which they made no progress on pending issues. The United States and North Korea are currently arranging a summit in Singapore on June 12. The envisioned meeting between Japan and North Korea would likely take place between Aug. 1 and 4 when the two ministers are expected to be in Singapore for the ASEAN Regional Forum, the sources said. Japan would not go ahead with the meeting if the planned summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is called off or fails. (Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono) Now, all six accused will have to appear before the court on November 22. |Written by Muzamil Jaleel| New Delhi |May 30| Almost half the recruitments into militant ranks in the Valley after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani came from within 10 km of the residences of killed militants or encounter sites and these recruitments took place within 40 days of the encounters. These are among the findings of security agencies in J&K, part of a report on militancy and recruitment in the region that set the stage for the Ramzan ceasefire. After the killing of Burhan Wani on July 8, 2016, 121 militants have been killed and 216 local youths joined militancy. The report analysed 43 encounters since November 5, 2016, until April 26 this year, in which 77 militants were killed while 104 were recruited and this recruitment was directly linked to the killing of militants in their area or a killed militant belonged to their area. Consider the key findings of the report, which analysed the circumstances around these 104 recruits: * Each encounter sets off a surge in recruitments and new inductions into militancy far exceeds militants killed in operations rendering even successful counter-insurgency a zero-sum game. * Militant killings anywhere trigger emotions across the Valley but in most cases, there is a strong correlation between the area of recruitment and number of militants killed from that area. * No wonder then that 67 of the 104 recruitments took place within 15 km from a killed militants residence, 48 of these were within a radius of 10 km. * 41 per cent of all new recruits were within 10 km of the encounter site, 27 per cent within 11 and 20 km and 18 per cent between 10 and 15 km. *Recruitment and proximity to militants residence has also been extablished. 47 percent of recruitment has taken place within ten kms of the residence of the killed militant, 35 percent recruitment has taken place within 11 to 20 kms of the residene of the killed militant. * During an encounter in Rajpora (Pulwama) when Jehangir Khanday of Keller was killed, his friend joined the militant ranks on spot. India pakistan ceasefire, indian army, Jammu and Kashmir, ceasefire violation, J&K security, LOC, Kashmir militancy, terrorist recruitment, Ramzan ceasefire, Kashmir unrest, Indian express * Recruitments between 2010 and 2018 into different militant organisations came from 354 villages, including nine from one village Brath Kalan Sopore and seven militants each from three villages Heff Zainpora, Redwani Bala and Arwani Bijbehara. * 94 local militants were active in the Valley in early 2016, which rose to 113 in 2017 and at the beginning of 2018, there were 149 active militants. * In 2016, 33 militants were killed while 88 youths were recruited and in 2017 while 80 militants were killed, 131 were recruited into militancy. * Of the 461 local youth who joined militancy since 2010, 331 came from South Kashmir. Inspector General of J&K Police, Kashmir zone S P Pani told The Indian Express that the increase in local recruitment into militancy has been the biggest challenge. We have been trying to dissuade local recruitment. Until now, 11 youngsters (who had joined militant ranks) have come back. Five (new recruits) were caught alive during encounters, he said. It is imperative that local recruitment is contained. The report on the trends in local militancy since 2016 suggests that there are a host of circumstances that draw a correlation between the militants killed in encounters and the corresponding new inductions. According to the report, the killing of local militants in encounters is part of a circle that acts as a catalyst to push further recruitment. The killing of civilians, who gather at encounter sites to protest, adds to the anger. A single encounter in an area today draws severe law and order situations ending up many a time in the attack on the encounter site. (and) the deaths of protesters, states the report. These protesters are usually residents of adjoining areas and also sometimes from areas not necessarily close to the encounter site. The deaths of these protesters further trigger protests supplemented by large funeral processions. Such a charged environment is a perfect blend of emotions and anger that is required to attract militant recruitment. Security agencies also indicated that funerals of killed militants witnessed pledges to join militancy. It has been observed that many a time, friends of killed militants manifest a tendency of pledging to join militancy on seeing the dead bodies and funerals of their friends. During the Bamnoo encounter, which took place in Rajpora, Pulwama where Jahangir Khanday of Keller was killed, his friend joined militant ranks on spot at the encounter site, says the report. Large funerals of militants have also witnessed the presence of active militants who give gun salutes to their killed associates. The presence of militants in these funerals not only eulogises the deaths of militants but at the same time brings active militants into open interaction with civilians. Such an interaction is one of the first and important steps in facilitating recruitment. The data shows an uptick in recruitments after encounters. While in some instances the reaction to the encounter in the form of recruitment is brisk, there are instances where it might take a few months to see the after-effects. Such a tendency may be attributed to the paucity of weapons and inability to get into contact with active cadres, says the report. The report indicates that while there have been successful operations, militancy in no way seems to have taken a back seat. From month to month the number of militant killings has been followed up by further recruitment outnumbering the killings and thereby raising the graph of the total number of militants each year. Even in the face of successful counterinsurgency operations, 94 local militants were active in the valley at the beginning of 2016 which rose to 113 at the beginning of 2017 and finally at the beginning of 2018, the number stood at 149, states the report. In 2018, 26 militants were killed while 46 fresh recruits were reported. Four were killed in January against 15 recruitments. None killed in February but five joined militant ranks and seven were killed in March against ten new recruits. In April, 18 militants were killed and 16 local youth joined militancy. What is noteworthy is that while from January (2016) up to July (2016) an average 4 militants were killed monthly and six would get recruited, but post Burhan Wanis killing in July (2016), 35 militants got inducted into the militant ranks in the following three months of August, September and October, says the report. In 2016, whereas an average of fewer than 3 militants was killed each month in the year, more than 7 at an average got recruited. It is evident that the killing of HM Commander Burhan Wani created a surge in militant recruitment across the valley in general and South Kashmir in particular. After Wanis killing, security agencies have found that 35 youth became militants influenced by his killing in next three months. Except for three youth (two from Bandipore and one from Handwara), all of them belonged to South Kashmir. The analysis of the data related to local militancy in Kashmir between 2010 and 2018 has also shown the militant presence concentrated in 29 clusters. The Pulwama cluster (comprised of 29 villages) and Tral Awantipora cluster (28 villages) has had the largest militant recruitment with 37 militants each since 2010. Courtesy: Indian Express Budget shines light on energy, hydropower sector Breaking the silence over the construction modality of 750MW West Seti Hydropower Project, the government has decided to build the project with domestic resources. PHILADELPHIA (May 29, 2018) - About 70 percent of all variations in health care outcomes are explained by individuals' social conditions including housing, neighborhood conditions, and income, data show. In order to establish community cultures of health where people are empowered to live healthier lives, health care providers and community sector leaders in transportation, government, schools, and businesses must collaborate to address the social conditions that affect population health. New research points to the types of skills necessary for nurse leaders to encourage such collaborations. The study, Promoting a Culture of Health Through Cross-Sector Collaborations, has been published in the journal Health Promotion Practice. The study focused on the experiences of members of the American Academy of Nursing's Edge Runner program, which recognizes nurses who have designed and/or are leading care models that have demonstrated positive clinical and financial outcomes. By studying the experiences of these innovative nurses who have developed cross-sector collaborations that promote a culture of health, the researchers discovered four key skills that enable leaders to successfully manage such collaborations. "Health care providers can be important leaders and 'bridgers' in collaborations, but they must possess the knowledge, attitudes and skills of facilitators, partners, and relationship-builders," says Antonia Villarruel, PhD, RN, FAAN, Professor and the Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing), one of the authors of the study. The four key themes discovered to be relevant to cross-sector collaborations that develop a community's culture of heath include: Being bilingual - Edge Runners found they needed to be able to speak the language of both the community and the institutions of power. Neighborliness and trust - Successful Edge Runners are able to demonstrate to community leaders their long-term commitment to the communities they serve and a willingness to listen and understand community needs. Having a business sense - Ensuring continued support often requires Edge Runners to make a business case for their programs, particularly in explaining how to sustain or expand these programs. Shared vision and language - Being able to communicate shared visions with potential collaboration partners is an essential way Edge Runners gain trust and engagement. "The study results have a number of important implications for policy and health professional education," explains Villarruel. "It also provides initial insights into how health care providers can collaborate with both health and non-health entities, on the ground at community level and at the funder level, to benefit local communities and populations." ### Co-authors of the study include Grant R. Martsolf, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN, of the University of Pittsburgh and the RAND Corporation; Jennifer Sloan, MPH, of the Rand Corporation; Diana Mason, PhD, RN, FAAN, of the George Washington University School of Nursing; and Cheryl Sullivan, MSES, of the American Academy of Nursing. About the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing is one of the world's leading schools of nursing. For the second year in a row, it is ranked the #1 nursing school in the world by QS University, and has four graduate programs ranked number one by U.S. News & World Report, the most of any school in the United States. Penn Nursing is currently ranked # 1 in funding from the National Institutes of Health, among other schools of nursing. Penn Nursing prepares nurse scientists and nurse leaders to meet the health needs of a global society through research, education, and practice. Follow Penn Nursing on: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram & YouTube. PHILADELPHIA - A radiotherapy drug that treats the rare neuroendocrine cancers pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma can be both effective and safe for patients, according to the findings of a multi-center trial led by researchers in the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The study showed AZEDRA (ultratrace iobenguane I131) led to a significant reduction in the cardiovascular side effects that are associated with these cancers while also stopping tumor growth. The drug is designed to treat malignant, recurrent, or unresectable forms of the cancers - cases for which there are currently no approved non-surgical treatments. Progenics Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures AZEDRA, recently submitted the findings of this trial as part of an application for approval to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The study's principal investigator Daniel A. Pryma, MD, an associate professor of Radiology and Radiation Oncology, and Chief of Nuclear Medicine and Clinical Molecular Imaging at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine, will present the results at the American Society of Clinical Oncology 2018 Annual Meeting in Chicago as an oral abstract (Abstract #4005). "This represents real hope for patients, since as of right now, there are no anti-tumor therapies available for patients with these tumors who are not candidates for surgery," Pryma said. Pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma are neuroendocrine tumors that form from the same type of tissue. Pheochromocytoma forms in the adrenal gland, while paraganglioma forms outside of the gland. There are an estimated 650 to 2600 new cases in the United States each year, with between 10 and 35 percent of cases metastatic or locally invasive at diagnosis. In addition, when the disease returns, it may not be resectable surgically. The five-year survival rate of unresectable cases can be as low as 12 percent. AZEDRA is a radiotherapy drug that attacks these tumors with a high, specifically-targeted dose. The FDA gave it an Orphan Drug designation, Fast Track status, and Breakthrough Therapy designation in the U.S. In the Penn-led trial, 68 patients received at least one therapeutic dose of AZEDRA. Twenty-five percent of patients who received at least one dose met the trial clinical benefit endpoint, and the number jumped to 32 percent in patients who received two doses. That clinical benefit was measured by a 50 percent or greater reduction in the amount of hypertensive medications these patients took lasting at least 6 months as high blood pressure and associated cardiovascular side effects are a major cause of harm from these cancers. Additionally, 92 percent of evaluable patients who received at least one dose achieved a partial response or stable disease. "Our data shows this therapy provides a dual benefit to patients by not only controlling the tumor, but also the debilitating symptoms caused by their excess hormone production," Pryma said. The drug was generally well-tolerated, with the most common side effects being consistent with what a patient would experience with radiation such as decreased blood counts, fatigue, nausea, and dizziness. ### The trial was supported by Progenics Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $7.8 billion enterprise. The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top medical schools in the United States for more than 20 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $405 million awarded in the 2017 fiscal year. The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center -- which are recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report -- Chester County Hospital; Lancaster General Health; Penn Medicine Princeton Health; Penn Wissahickon Hospice; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional affiliated inpatient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, a partnership between Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network and Penn Medicine, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, a leading provider of highly skilled and compassionate behavioral healthcare. Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2017, Penn Medicine provided more than $500 million to benefit our community. PHILADELPHIA - Genetic counseling for cancer patients has become standard of care at academic medical centers, but patients cared for at community-based medical practices across the United States may not have access to these resources. Video and phone sessions can close that gap and bring genetic counseling to patients who would not otherwise have the chance to receive it, according to a new study from the Basser Center for BRCA at the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center. Researchers conducted a randomized, controlled trial to determine whether patients at community practices would undergo genetic testing after a remote phone or video counseling session and found 77 percent of patients chose to do so, compared to just six percent in the group of patients that were offered usual care options for genetic testing, such as driving to a center with genetic counselor or having genetic testing with their doctor and without the assistance of a genetics professional. The study's lead author, Angela R. Bradbury, MD, an assistant professor of Hematology-Oncology, will present the findings at the 2018 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting in Chicago (Abstract #6506). Germline genetic testing helps doctors identify patients at increased risk for cancer who may benefit from additional or early screening or other cancer prevention interventions. This testing includes detection of BRCA mutations, which are linked to a drastically increased lifetime risk of breast and ovarian cancers, as well as pancreatic and prostate cancer. Genetic counselors work as part of a patient's healthcare team and can help patients and providers understand how genetic and familial risk contribute to cancer risk, they can make recommendations for the most appropriate genetic testing and provide guidance on how to understand genetic results and what they mean for a patient's healthcare. Currently, only 37 percent of patients who undergo testing meet with a counselor beforehand. Bradbury and her team randomly assigned 115 patients who were candidates for genetic testing into two groups - one that received a phone or video counseling session and one that were provided information on how they can get genetic testing. All participants were patients at primary care practices throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Of the 71 patients in the group offered remote genetic counseling services, 55 of them (77 percent) went on to complete the counseling. Just two of 36 patients (six percent) in the usual care group completed genetic counseling. In addition, 55 percent of patients in the remote services arm proceeded to actual genetic testing, leading to the identification of four genetic carriers. Only 17 percent of patients in the usual care arm underwent testing, and no carriers were identified. "The data definitively show the impact of remote genetic services, and it's clear from this study that this telemedicine approach improves on what community practices can do on their own," Bradbury said. "That said, it's noteworthy that just 56 percent of patients who underwent remote counseling went on to undergo genetic testing. It shows we still have work to do to help equip patients with this information, which can be life-saving in some cases." Bradbury also noted another important area to address: the discrepancy between patients in the usual care arm who underwent counseling and those who underwent testing. "The data confirm that some people in community practices are getting testing without going through counseling first, and previous studies have shown that patients have lower levels of knowledge and lower satisfaction when that happens," Bradbury said. The study also compared the effectiveness of the two telemedicine options and preliminary findings suggest that videoconference leads to a greater increase in knowledge and a greater decrease in depression when compared to baseline than phone sessions. The authors note this finding is preliminary and points to a need for further research. Susan M. Domchek, MD, executive director of the Basser Center for BRCA, was a co-investigator on the study, which was supported by the Basser Center for BRCA. Bradbury will present the findings as an oral abstract in the Health Services Research, Clinical Informatics, and Quality of Care session on Friday June 1st at McCormick Place in Room S404 at 4:45 Central. ### Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $7.8 billion enterprise. The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top medical schools in the United States for more than 20 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $405 million awarded in the 2017 fiscal year. The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center -- which are recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report -- Chester County Hospital; Lancaster General Health; Penn Medicine Princeton Health; Penn Wissahickon Hospice; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional affiliated inpatient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, a partnership between Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network and Penn Medicine, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, a leading provider of highly skilled and compassionate behavioral healthcare. Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2017, Penn Medicine provided more than $500 million to benefit our community. Steel pipe to be used in the oil pipeline construction of Kinder Morgan Canada's Trans Mountain Expansion Project sit on rail cars at a stockpile site in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada May 29, 2018. REUTERS/Dennis Owen By David Ljunggren and Rod Nickel OTTAWA/WINNIPEG (Reuters) - Canada will buy Kinder Morgan Canada Ltd's (KML.TO) Trans Mountain pipeline for C$4.5 billion ($3.5 billion), the government said on Tuesday, hoping to save a project that faces formidable political and environmental opposition. Finance Minister Bill Morneau said purchasing the pipeline was the only way to ensure that a planned expansion could proceed. The pipeline, running from the oil sands of Alberta to a port in the Pacific province of British Columbia, would allow Canadian crude to gain greater access to foreign markets and higher prices. Kinder Morgan Canada gave Ottawa until May 31 to come up with reassurances it could press ahead with plans to more than double the capacity of the existing pipeline amid efforts by British Columbia to block construction. The company also faced opposition from environmentalists and aboriginal groups who worried about the pipeline spilling its tar-like heavy oil. "When we are faced with an exceptional situation that puts jobs at risk, that puts our international reputation on the line, our government is prepared to take action," Morneau told reporters. He said the pipeline purchase provided the federal jurisdiction needed to overcome British Columbia's opposition, but gave no details of how this would work. The federal government can in theory step in and disallow any provincial laws that British Columbia might use to block the pipeline, but this provision in the Canadian constitution has not been used since the 1940s. Ottawa could also deploy the police and troops to maintain a barrier between protesters and construction workers. Although Ottawa has taken stakes in struggling energy projects, Tuesday's announcement marked the first time Ottawa has bought an entire pipeline. It does not intend to own the project for long. "There is a very strong business case for this pipeline," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Bloomberg Television, saying the government takeover meant "a lot of the legal barriers and a lot of the challenge points actually disappear". Story continues Kinder Morgan Canada shares initially jumped as much as 8.5 percent before ending down 3 percent, while the broader Canada share index fell 0.6 percent. The move drew immediate criticism from both sides of the political spectrum, and could hurt Trudeau's popularity in the key British Columbia battleground in a 2019 federal election. The decision represents "a massive, unnecessary financial burden on Canadian taxpayers," Canadian Taxpayers Federation Federal Director Aaron Wudrick said. The government will also offer federal loan guarantees to ensure construction of the expansion continues through the 2018 season as part of the deal with the company, a unit of Houston-based Kinder Morgan Inc (KMI.N). Morneau sidestepped questions about how Ottawa will deal with opposition from environmentalists and aboriginal groups, who cite the risk of a catastrophic spill. "It's a mess out there," said a Calgary industry source not authorized to speak publicly. "Given it will be stuck in court for a while, I don't think we will see this pipe built anytime soon." Morneau said more spending would be needed to complete the expansion, but gave no precise financial details, and stressed he felt the project should be returned to the private sector. Canada's oil sector has been stung in the past year as foreign energy companies retreated amid concerns about the environmental toll, high production costs and a risky regulatory regime. "We have agreed to a fair price for our shareholders," said Steve Kean, chief executive officer of Kinder Morgan Canada and Kinder Morgan Inc. 'CAN'T MESS WITH ALBERTA' Kean did not say why he decided to sell rather than absorb the risk of further delays. Kinder Morgan Canada will continue to own the remaining assets, including crude storage, rail terminals and a condensate pipeline, and look to expand. "I think the transaction is a win-win. It's actually better for Kinder Morgan than it is for Canada. They are getting a very good value," said Paul Bloom at Bloom Investment Counsel Inc, which owns about 300,000 shares in Kinder Morgan Canada. The fact the federal government needed to buy Trans Mountain to ensure the project goes ahead does not bode well for the industry, said Chris Bloomer, CEO of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association. Trans Mountain stirred an unusual public fight between neighboring provinces. Alberta threatened to halt crude and fuel shipments to British Columbia, where consumers already pay high gasoline prices, and briefly halted imports of the coastal province's wines. Alberta will contribute up to C$2 billion toward unforeseen costs, payable once the project is complete, Premier Rachel Notley said. The contribution will convert into equity in the pipeline. British Columbia Premier John Horgan said the province would push ahead with a court case to establish its right to restrict increased shipments of crude oil to its coastal waters. (Reporting by David Ljunggren in Ottawa and Rod Nickel in Winnipeg; Additional reporting Leah Schnurr in Toronto, Nicole Mordant in Vancouver and Nivedita Bhattacharjee in Bangalore; Writing by Andrea Hopkins, David Ljunggren and Rod Nickel; Editing by Denny Thomas, Jeffrey Benkoe and Lisa Shumaker) Binod Ghimire covers parliamentary affairs and human rights for The Kathmandu Post. Since joining the Post in 2010, he has reported primarily on social issues, focusing on education and transitional justice. xi jinping Xi Jinping, the President of China, arguably the most powerful politician in the world today, has said at the annual academic conference hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences that blockchain technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) are reshaping the global economic structure. Ever since the start of the 21st century, a new generation of industrial revolution is substantially reshaping the global economic structure with artificial intelligence, internet of things and blockchain constantly making application breakthroughs, said President Xi. Didnt China Ban Cryptocurrency Trading? In September 2017, the Chinese government and local financial authorities led by the Peoples Bank of China (PBoC) officially banned cryptocurrency trading, shutting down local cryptocurrency exchanges and ordering commercial banks to prevent transactions to cryptocurrency brokerages. However, even after prohibiting cryptocurrency trading, the Chinese government and local conglomerates such as Alibaba and Tencent have continued to focus on developing the blockchain and decentralised platforms that have the potential to improve the economy and the global financial structure. On May 26, CCN reported that the State Council of China ordered local financial authorities and government-funded research centres to allocate more resources in developing, deploying, and commercialising the blockchain. To build a regional equity market in Guangdong, according to the opening up of the capital market, timely introduction of Hong Kong, Macao and international investment institutions to participate in transactions. We will vigorously develop financial technology and accelerate the research and application of blockchain and big data technologies under the premise of legal compliance, the State Council of China said, maintaining a pro-blockchain attitude. China The statement of the State Council of China was released merely a month after Hangzhou city government decided to spend $1.6 billion on funding blockchain startups. Story continues Most recently, ZhongAn, an insurance giant in China founded by Alibaba and Tencent founders Jack Ma and Pony Ma Huateng, partnered with more than 100 hospitals to utilise the blockchain in processing healthcare records, financial information, and payments. Local analysts have stated that the ban on cryptocurrency trading does not reflect the governments stance on the blockchain as an innovative technology. The Chinese government prohibited cryptocurrency trading because it led to local investors and businesses moving the Chinese yuan out of the country to other leading economies. China has continued to impose strict capital controls since early 2000, and the ban on cryptocurrency trading was a part of the countrys capital control policies. The Chinese government and the countrys President Xi still remain optimistic in regard to the long-term adoption of the blockchain, as seen in the governments blockchain initiatives and large allocation of funds into the blockchain sector. Chinese blockchain projects such as Qtum and VeChain have demonstrated massive success over the past year in the global market as well, with support from local authorities and the government. Chinas Own Blockchain China has a strong history of replacing dominant platforms and companies such as Google, Facebook, and YouTube with local platforms to boost its economy. WeChat, Youku, and other domestic products replaced Western platforms. The Chinese government is wanting to remain at the forefront of blockchain development, with local blockchain projects and networks leading the global market. Images from Shutterstock The post Chinese President Xi Jinping: Blockchain Reshaping Global Economic Structure appeared first on CCN. Cryptos were higher on Wednesday. Investing.com - Cryptocurrencies were higher on Wednesday, while South Koreas legislature has proposed lifting an initial coin offering ban. Bitcoin was trading at $7,545.20, rising 1.65% the Bitfinex exchange, as of 8:40 AM ET (12:40 GMT). The digital currency was still down 4% over the week, compared to a fall of 10% week-over-week on Tuesday. Bitcoin had fallen to a a six-and-a-half week low last week amid reports that the U.S. Justice Department is looking into whether traders are manipulating the price of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies. In South Korea, the national legislature proposed allowing domestic ICO offerings, which would effectively lift a ban imposed in September 2017. Some lawmakers are also working on a bill that would legalize ICOs that meet certain conditions and would be under regulatory supervision. Meanwhile, Bitcoin could become the next fear gauger of the market, Brian Stutland of Equity Armor Investments told CNBC on Tuesday. "Bitcoin is sort of becoming the new VIX, in sort of getting ahead of credit risk in the banking industry," he said. The VIX is a measure of volatility that is often used as a fear gauge for the market. The rise in popularity of virtual currencies is a way for investors to de-risk themselves from the banking industry, Stutland said. The cryptocurrency market has rebounded in the last few days after steep declines last week. The total market cap was at $331 billion at the time of writing, compared to $323 billion on Tuesday. Other digital coins were up slightly, with Ethereum, the worlds second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, rising 2.48% to $571.82 on the Bitfinex exchange. Ripple, the third largest virtual currency, increased 3.56% to $0.61581 while Litecoin was at $121.84, up 0.70%. Related Articles Top South Korean Crypto Exchange Bans Trading In 11 Nations Swiss Aviation Services Company Launches Blockchain Pilot for Cargo Handling Bank Shutout Forces Major Polish Crypto Exchange to Move to Malta BOJA vs. SBUX: Which Stock Should Value Investors Buy Now? BOJA vs. SBUX: Which Stock Is the Better Value Option? GlaxoSmithKline plc GSK and partner Innoviva, Inc. INVA announced the submission of a regulatory application in Japan seeking approval for their once-daily, single inhaler triple combination therapy, Trelegy Ellipta for the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in adults. The therapy is already approved and marketed for the treatment of COPD in the United States and Europe. Trelegy Ellipta brought in sales of 10 million in the United States and 1 million in the EU during the first quarter. Trelegy Ellipta is a combination of fluticasone furoate, an inhaled corticosteroid (ICS), umeclidinium, a long-acting muscarinic antagonist (LAMA) and vilanterol, a long-acting beta2-adrenergic agonist (LABA). The therapy will be available in a single Ellipta inhaler, the first of its kind. Typically, the ICS/LAMA/LABA amalgamation is delivered via two or more inhalers for the treatment of COPD patients. The product is expected to bring in blockbuster sales. GlaxoSmithKlines shares have gained 12.1% so far this year against 4.9% decline of the industry during the period. The filing included data from the Phase III IMPACT study, evaluating the safety and effectiveness of Trelegy Ellipta in comparison to existing COPD therapies. The study revealed superiority of the closed triple combination over ICS-LABA combination, Relvar/Breo Ellipta, and LAMA-LABA combination, Anoro Ellipta, in improving lung function and health-related quality of life, and reducing exacerbations in COPD patients. Per the companys press release, COPD is a progressive serious lung disease, which affects over five million patients in Japan. A potential approval by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare is likely to boost the prospects of the drug. Please note that Theravance Biopharma, Inc. TBPH has an economic interest on the royalties that Glaxo will pay to Innoviva on global sales of Trelegy Ellipta. Story continues Glaxo is well poised on back-to-back launch of three new products Trelegy Ellipta, Shingrix and Juluca and the agreement to buy out Novartis NVS stake in the Consumer Healthcare JV. GlaxoSmithKline plc Price GlaxoSmithKline plc Price | GlaxoSmithKline plc Quote Glaxo currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Today's Stocks from Zacks' Hottest Strategies It's hard to believe, even for us at Zacks. But while the market gained +21.9% in 2017, our top stock-picking screens have returned +115.0%, +109.3%, +104.9%, +98.6%, and +67.1%. And this outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. Over the years it has been remarkably consistent. From 2000 - 2017, the composite yearly average gain for these strategies has beaten the market more than 19X over. Maybe even more remarkable is the fact that we're willing to share their latest stocks with you without cost or obligation. See Them Free>> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Novartis AG (NVS) : Free Stock Analysis Report GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK) : Free Stock Analysis Report Innoviva, Inc. (INVA) : Free Stock Analysis Report Theravance Biopharma, Inc. (TBPH) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Billionaire Jeff Bezos shed some more light on his plans to take us to the moon. At the Space Development Conference in Los Angeles, Bezos said that his Blue Origin space venture will play a critical role in this so-called lunar settlement. We will have to leave this planet, Bezos told Geekwire. Were going to leave it, and its going to make this planet better. Well come and go, and the people who want to stay will stay. He thinks the Earth should be zoned for residential and light industrial use, while much of the heavy industry will move to other planets or the moon. He predicts this will happen in the next 100 years. As Gizmodo described it, humans will ultimately use the functionally unlimited expanse of space as a giant solar powered manufacturing sector slash garbage dump. Bezos did say that the exploration and eventual settlement of the moon wont be done by one company. He noted a desire to collaborate with NASA or the European space agency, but said it will ultimately require thousands of companies working in concert over many decades. The private space race has been heating up in recent years with Bezos and fellow rocket billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson. Over the weekend, Branson said that he and Bezos are neck and neck as to who will put people into space first. But, he added, they have to do it safely, calling it a race with ourselves to ensure that they each build a shuttle that is safe enough to send people to space. Dont hold your breath for private space travel to go mainstream anytime soon. To put things in perspective: Fewer than 600 people, nearly all from the public sector, have ever gone above the Karman linethe point about 62 miles above Earth that marks the beginning of space. Italy has been in the spotlight since its election on Mar 4 that has led to a hung parliament, with no major political group being able to form the majority. This has left the euro zone's third-largest economy without a government. Now, the latest news out of Italy has escalated the ongoing political crisis. This is especially true as an effort to form the first populist government in Western Europe has collapsed after president Sergio Mattarella rejected the choice of a euro-skeptic as finance minister, which could provoke "Italy's exiting of the euro. The leader of the two parties anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the far-right League were in talks to form a coalition for weeks (read: Negative News Flow Puts Eurozone ETFs in Focus). The move has led to calls for Mattarellas impeachment. Thus, a former International Monetary Fund economist Carlo Cottarelli was officially appointed as an interim prime minister in a bid to restore political order and end an 11-week deadlock after inconclusive national elections. Cottarelli might hold elections in autumn or early next year. The likelihood of another election reignited fears of a populist rise in Europe once again. Market participants fear that another election campaign could focus on Rome's continued membership of European institutions. The election will likely resemble a referendum, de facto, on the European Union and the euro. Per the Frankfurt-based Sentix research group, a gauge measuring the likelihood of Italy leaving the single currency bloc within the next 12 months jumped to 11.3% from 3.6% in April. The latest polls also show that the far-right League has gained support since winning 17% of the vote in inconclusive Mar 4 elections, climbing as high as 24%. The Five Star has been drawing about the same 32% it got two months ago. Market Impact Italys FTSE MIB index dropped nearly 2% on May 28 to its lowest level since early March after tumbling 4.5% last week. FTSE Italia All-Share Banks Sector Index, which acts as a proxy for political risk due to their big government bond holdings stole the show, plunging 4.1% on the day -- the biggest one-day drop since Feb 2017. In particular, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena led declines with a drop of as much as 7.8% (see: all the Europe Equity ETFs here). Meanwhile, the yield on Italy 10-year sovereign bonds surged to over 2.60%, the highest in nearly four years. iShares MSCI Italy ETF EWI This fund offers exposure to a broad range of companies in Italy by tracking the MSCI Italy 25/50 Index and holding 24 stocks in its basket. It is heavily concentrated on the top four firms with a combined 42.8% share while other securities hold less than 5% of total assets. Further, about 33.2% of the funds portfolio is allotted to financials while energy, utilities, consumer discretionary and industrials round off the top five with a double-digit exposure each. The fund has AUM of $557.8 million and trades in heavy volume of more than 1.1 million shares a day on average. It charges 49 bps in annual fees and has shed about 4.3% in a week. The product carries a Zacks ETF Rank #3 (Hold) with a Medium risk outlook. iShares Currency Hedged MSCI Italy ETF HEWI This ETF seeks to reduce the impact of the euro relative to the U.S. dollar on Italian allocation. The fund follows the MSCI Italy 25/50 100% Hedged to USD Index and is a play on the unhedged fund (EWI) with a hedge to strip out the euro currency exposure. It has amassed $3.5 million in its asset base and trades in a paltry volume of 2,000 shares a day. The fund charges 49 bps in annual fees from investors and has lost 3.3% over the past week. It has a Zacks ETF Rank #3 with a High risk outlook (read: Top-Performing ETF Areas of April). Franklin FTSE Italy ETF FLIY This fund provides exposure to large- and mid-sized companies in Italy and follows the FTSE Italy Capped Index. Holding 39 stocks in its basket, it is heavily concentrated on the top four firms that collectively make up for 40.2% share. Others hold no more than 5.61% of assets. From a sector look, financials take the largest share at 35.3% followed by energy (18.7%), consumer discretionary (15.6%) and utilities (14%). The product is unpopular with AUM of $2.5 million and average trading volume of 2,000 shares. It charges 9 bps in annual fees and has plunged 5.7% in a week. Want key ETF info delivered straight to your inbox? Zacks free Fund Newsletter will brief you on top news and analysis, as well as top-performing ETFs, each week. Get it free >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report ISHARS-ITALY (EWI): ETF Research Reports FL-FTSE ITALY (FLIY): ETF Research Reports ISHARS-CHM ITLY (HEWI): ETF Research Reports To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report TipRanks As Q4 gets into full swing, we can take a moment to look back over our shoulders at where weve come from. The sustained upward trend of the markets is obvious from this view, and the recent downturn in the market appears as a bump against some otherwise solid gains. Even so, there are reasons for concern right now. The COVID pandemic hasnt gone away and it doesnt look like it will go away either. The September jobs numbers were weak, and unemployment only fell because too many people left t Education budget fails to match governments lofty goals The budget allocated to education and technology does not match the lofty goals set by the government. The return of the Nokia brand in phones rolled forward on Tuesday, with a series of updated devices. HMD Global, the Finnish startup run by former Nokia execs that makes the branded phones under license, introduced three new Nokia smartphone models running Googles Android software at an event in Moscow. The upgraded phones get the Google Assistant for the first time. Leading the pack is an update of the companys Nokia 5, dubbed the Nokia 5.1. The device this year has a slightly larger 5.5-inch screen in a slightly thinner body. HMD says the phones MediaTek Helio P18 processor offers 40% faster performance than last years Snapdragon 430 chip from Qualcomm. The back camera has also been improved with higher resolution on the phone, which will start at 189 euro, or $218. In the middle tier, last years Nokia 3 gets upgraded to the Nokia 3.1. It also gets a slightly larger screen, now up to 5.2 inches, a faster processor and upgraded camera. HMD said last years Nokia 3 was its most popular selling smartphone, and the new model will likely do just as well at a starting price of 139 euro, or about $160. Get Data Sheet, Fortunes technology newsletter. And at the bottom, HMD upgraded its Nokia 2 phone, only seven months after it was introduced, to the Nokia 2.1. The new model gains a larger 5.5-inch screen and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 processor, giving it a 50% speed boost over the original. It is priced at $115. All three new phones are scheduled to hit the markets initially in July. Only the 2.1 and 3.1 are expected for the U.S. market, likely by August, an HMD spokesperson said. The startup reignited the once dominant Nokia brand last year with a series of all-new smartphones and revived simpler phones from some years back. In a $100 million fundraising round last month, HMD was valued at more than $1 billion. CEO Florian Seiche, who worked at Nokia, HTC and Microsoft before helping found HMD, has said the company aims to rank among the top smartphone makers worldwide. HMD had a net loss of $77 million on sales of $2.1 billion last year after shipping 70 million phones, and plans to use the cash infusion to expand its device portfolio and retail reach. It was a week where oil prices slumped below $70-a-barrel. However, natural gas futures edged closer to the psychologically important $3 level. On the news front, energy major Royal Dutch Shell plc RDS.A made a significant discovery in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, while natural gas exporter Cheniere Energy, Inc. LNG took the final investment decision to construct a third liquefication unit at its Corpus Christi export terminal in Texas. Overall, it was a mixed week for the sector. While West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures lost about 4.9% to close at $67.88 per barrel, natural gas prices rose some 3.2% to $2.939 per million Btu (MMBtu). (See the last Oil & Gas Stock Roundup here: TOTAL's Oman MOU, Rex Energy's Bankruptcy & More) The U.S. oil benchmark posted its first weekly loss in almost a month on fears of supply increase, bearish EIA inventory numbers, and soaring rig count. Oil futures fell after reports emerged that Saudi Arabia and Russia were in discussion to step up output amid reduced supply from Iran and Venezuela. The commodity was also spooked by the federal governments EIA report that revealed crude stockpiles climbed by 5.8 million barrels, contrary to market expectations for 1.7 million barrels decline. On a further bearish note, the report revealed that U.S. output edged up 2,000 barrels per day last week to nearly 10.73 million barrels per day the most since the EIA started maintaining weekly data in 1983. Data showing the number of U.S. oil rigs climbing this time by 15, the most in more than three months brought further downside. Meanwhile, natural gas prices moved northward last week. Apart from the weekly inventory release showing a smaller-than-expected increase in natural gas supplies, the commodity got a leg up from warm weather forecasts. Recap of the Weeks Most Important Stories 1. Royal Dutch Shell recently discovered a large deepwater well in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico (GoM), providing a breather to the offshore oil industry of the United States, which has been gasping for breath since the crude downturn. The Dover well in the Norphlet geologic play in the U.S. GoM marks the sixth oil and natural gas find that Shell has struck in the region. Story continues The company has been focusing on exploration opportunities in the prolific Norphlet play, which will be moored by its multibillion-dollar offshore project Appomattox, production from which is expected to commence before 2019 end. The Dover well, drilled in Mississippi Canyon about 170 miles offshore southeast of New Orleans, is located in 7,500 feet of water. It was drilled to a depth of 29,000 feet vertically. The prospect lies 13 miles from the Appomattox project that was completed and launched into GoM earlier this month. The new discovery is thus poised for further drilling and development through potential tiebacks to Appomattox rather than building new platforms, which will in turn result in cost savings for the company. Notably, Appomattox is the first major deepwater project authorized by Shell since the oil slump. In fact, since then only two other projects namely Mad Dog Phase 2 and Vito have been going forward in the Gulf platforms. (Read more Offshore Industry Gets Respite from Shell's New GoM Find) 2. Cheniere Energy recently gave its final approval regarding the construction of its third liquefaction unit or Train 3 at its Corpus Christi export terminal in Texas. The approval of the project marks the first final investment decision on the new LNG project in the United States since 2015. Building of the third train will be handed over to contractor Bechtel Oil, Gas and Chemicals, Inc., which had started with its initial construction in late 2017. Notably, under the Corpus Christi LNG project, the company intends to develop three trains each having a nominal production capacity of 4.5 million metric tons per year of LNG. The first two trains are expected to come online next year. However, the cost and timeline of the third train has not yet been disclosed and its construction is likely to take around four years. Chenieres wholly-owned subsidiary, Cheniere Corpus Christi Holdings has credit facilities worth $6.1 billion, which are likely to be utilized to finance a portion of the construction and operation of the trains. Further, Cheniere Energy intends to develop seven midscale liquefaction trains adjacent to the Corpus Christi project. The company has also initiated the regulatory approval process regarding the same. The total production capacities of these trains are expected to be approximately 9.5 million tons per annum. (Read more Cheniere Green Lights Train 3 of Corpus Christi Project) 3. Halliburton Company HAL recently inked the unconventional gas stimulation services three-year contract with Saudi Aramco, in a bid to unleash a natural gas revolution in Saudi Arabia. Per the deal, the oilfield services major will provide project management, hydraulic fracturing and well intervention services to meet Saudi Aramcos production targets and improve the economics of its unconventional resources program. The program mainly covers three regions, namely Northern Kingdom, South Ghawar and Jafurah Basin. Though Saudi Aramco is the worlds top exporter of oil, Saudi Arabia also has a huge natural gas potential, holding the worlds fifth-largest gas reserves. By 2026, the government aims to produce some 651 billion cubic meters of natural gas per day -- almost double its current output. However, much of it is difficult to recover from shale rock and tight sand. Hence, the company intends to utilize Halliburtons specialized technological services to tap into those resources. The contract will boost Saudi Aramcos efforts to spur natural gas production for meeting the domestic needs as well as shoring up its evolving chemical industry, by providing the essential raw materials. The state-run company also intends to reduce its practice of burning oil for domestic power, thus freeing up more barrels for exports. Notably, over the past year, Saudi Aramco has awarded $4.5 billion worth contracts to international oil service companies, for increasing the countrys gas output. 4. Cimarex Energy Company XEC has inked a purchase and sale agreement with Callon Petroleum Company to divest oil and gas properties located in Ward County, TX. The sale is expected to raise cash proceeds of about $570 million. Production from these properties, majority of which has been derived from the Bone Spring formation, is about 6,831 barrels of oil equivalent per day (73% oil). Net Wolfcamp acreage of about 18,925 is undeveloped. The transaction is likely to close in the third quarter of 2018. This sale reflects Cimarex Energys strategy to consistently upgrade and optimize its portfolio. Cimarex Energy was among the first horizontal operators in the Bone Spring formation in Ward County. The area has delivered good returns over the years. However, the remaining Wolfcamp prospects require more capital compared with other projects. (Read more Cimarex Energy to Divest Ward County Assets for $570M) 5. Enterprise Products Partners L.P. EPD has signed a natural gas liquids (NGL) transportation deal with Apache Corp. APA. Per the accord, the Shin Oak pipeline of Enterprise Products will likely be utilized by Apache for carrying NGL from the Alpine High project to the storage facility of the partnership in Mont Belvieu, TX. In the Delaware Basins Alpine High discovery, Apaches presence spreads over 336,000 net acres. The company is willing to transport all produced NGL from the resources through the Shin Oak pipeline. The partnership has committed to transport at least 205,000 barrels of NGL daily through the pipeline. Investors should know that the Shin Oak pipeline, which is being built by Enterprise Products, will spread over roughly 658 miles to the NGL fractionation and storage unit in Mont Belvieu, TX, from Reeves County. The construction of the Shin Oak pipeline will likely close by the second quarter of 2019. Enterprise Products projects the initial daily liquid transportation capacity of the pipeline at 550,000 barrels. The latest transportation commitment will likely provide Enterprise Products with steady fee-based revenues. Apache will also gain as the pipeline will help the company to persistently transport its growing production from the prospective Alpine High prospect.(Read more Enterprise Products, Apache Sign NGL Transportation Accord) Price Performance The following table shows the price movement of some the major oil and gas players over the past week and during the last 6 months. Company Last Week Last 6 Months XOM -3.2% -4.3% CVX -4.4% +4.3% COP -5.9% +28.7% OXY -3.5% +17.9% SLB -7.7% +10.4% RIG -10.1% +23.6% VLO -1.5% +42.5% MPC -3.2% +34.3% Reflecting the weeks negative oil market sentiment, the Energy Select Sector SPDR a popular way to track energy companies generated a -4.5% return last week. The worst performer was offshore drilling powerhouse Transocean Ltd. RIG whose stock slumped 10.1%. But longer-term, over six months, the sector tracker is up 9.5%. Independent refiner, Valero Energy Corporation is far and away the major gainer during this period, experiencing a 42.5% price appreciation. Whats Next in the Energy World? As usual, market participants will be closely tracking the regular releases i.e. the U.S. government statistics on oil and natural gas - one of the few solid indicators that comes out regularly. Energy traders will also be focusing on the Baker Hughes data on rig count. More Stock News: This Is Bigger than the iPhone! It could become the mother of all technological revolutions. Apple sold a mere 1 billion iPhones in 10 years but a new breakthrough is expected to generate more than 27 billion devices in just 3 years, creating a $1.7 trillion market. Zacks has just released a Special Report that spotlights this fast-emerging phenomenon and 6 tickers for taking advantage of it. If you don't buy now, you may kick yourself in 2020. Click here for the 6 trades >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (EPD) : Free Stock Analysis Report Halliburton Company (HAL) : Free Stock Analysis Report Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDS.A) : Free Stock Analysis Report Transocean Ltd. (RIG) : Free Stock Analysis Report Apache Corporation (APA) : Free Stock Analysis Report Cimarex Energy Co (XEC) : Free Stock Analysis Report Cheniere Energy, Inc. (LNG) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Oil prices steady ahead of U.S. supply data Investing.com - Crude prices were little changed in early action on Wednesday, halting their recent decline, as investors turned their attention to fresh data on U.S. commercial crude inventories to gauge the strength of demand in the worlds largest oil consumer. Industry group the American Petroleum Institute is due to release its weekly report at 4:30PM ET (2030GMT). Official data from the Energy Information Administration will be released Thursday, amid forecasts for an oil-stock gain of 2.2 million barrels. Both reports come out one day later than usual because of the federal Memorial Day holiday on Monday. U.S. West Texas Intermediate WTI crude was up 8 cents, or around 0.1%, at $66.81 a barrel at 4:10AM ET (0810GMT), after settling $1.15 lower on Tuesday. Brent crude futures were down 2 cents at $75.47 a barrel, after settling up 9 cents in the last session. Oil prices slid to their lowest levels in around six weeks on Tuesday amid expectations that Saudi Arabia and Russia would pump more oil to ease a potential shortfall in supply. The two oil-producing nations recently discussed raising OPEC and non-OPEC oil output by 1 million barrels per day (bpd) to counter potential supply shortfalls from Venezuela and Iran. OPEC is scheduled to hold its next meeting in Vienna on June 22. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and non-OPEC producers led by Russia have been curbing output by about 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) to prop up oil prices and reduce high global oil stocks. The pact began in January 2017 and is set to expire at the end of 2018. A relentless increase in U.S. drilling for new production has also dampened sentiment. The number of rigs drilling for oil in the U.S. is back to the highest level since March 2015, underscoring worries about rising U.S. output. Domestic oil production - driven by shale extraction - has already surged by more than 27% in the last two years, to an all-time high of 10.73 million bpd. Story continues Only Russia currently produces more, at around 11 million bpd. Related Articles Gold Risks Dereliction of Duty Charge as Turmoil Sees No Reward Oil bulls scurry for protection against a wave of OPEC supply Oil Prices Dip On Growing Supplies Oil prices jump 1% as West Texas recovers part of a $5 decline Investing.com - Oil prices rebounded ahead of inventory data to be released later on Wednesday and Thursday, after recent concerns over possible increases in output by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia sent the U.S. benchmark tumbling for over a week. New York-traded West Texas Intermediate crude futures jumped $1.19, or about 1.8%, to $67.92 a barrel by 10:49AM ET (14:49GMT). Meanwhile, Brent crude futures, the benchmark for oil prices outside the U.S., was last up $1.63, or 2.2%, to $77.13. Despite Wednesdays recovery, the U.S. benchmark was still off more than $5 on reports last week that OPEC and Russia were considering easing production curbs in order to meet shortfalls from Iran and Venezuela. Russian energy minister Alexander Novak said Saturday that a return to oil production levels that were in place in October 2016, the baseline for the current deal to cut output, was one of the options being discussed. OPEC and non-OPEC producers led by Moscow have been curbing output by about 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) to prop up oil prices and reduce high global oil stocks. The pact began in January 2017 and is set to expire at the end of 2018. Novak stipulated that any decision would be made at the meetings of OPEC and non-OPEC countries in Vienna on June 22-23. With a strong rebound underway on Wednesday, investors turned their attention to fresh data on U.S. commercial crude inventories to gauge the strength of demand in the worlds largest oil consumer. Industry group the American Petroleum Institute is due to release its weekly report at 4:30PM ET (2030GMT). Official data from the Energy Information Administration will be released Thursday, amid forecasts for an oil-stock gain of 2.2 million barrels. Both reports come out one day later than usual because of the U.S. Memorial Day holiday on Monday. In other energy trading, gasoline futures rose 1.3% to $2.1671 a gallon by 10:51AM ET (14:51GMT), while heating oil climbed 1.7% to $2.2180 a gallon. Story continues Lastly, natural gas futures fell 0.4% to $2.892 per million British thermal units, extending losses seen in the previous session as weather forecasting models continued to predict that milder temperatures will cover the eastern part of the United States by the second week of June, potentially limiting early summer cooling demand for the fuel. Related Articles Gold Inches Up as Political Worry in Italy Continues Natural Gas Futures Slump Further As Eastern U.S. Seen Milder Oil bulls scurry for protection against a wave of OPEC supply (Adds statement from Canadian Pacific, shares) By Yashaswini Swamynathan and Rod Nickel May 30 (Reuters) - Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd said a strike by more than 3,000 workers over employment terms ended on Wednesday after the railroad operator reached tentative agreements with labor union Teamsters. About a quarter of Canadian Pacific workers staged a walk-out on Tuesday night, throwing industries dependent on its transportation into disarray. The second-largest Canadian railroad operator said https://reut.rs/2xs4QjL it had reached four- and five-year agreements with its employees. The company did not provide further details on the agreements but Teamsters Canada in a statement said operations at the company's affected facilities would resume on Thursday. CP's shares rose as much as 2.8 percent to a record of C$247.65 after the agreement was announced. The strike came at a time of tight rail capacity in Canada, with CP and rival Canadian National Railway facing strong demand for shipments of grain, potash and other commodities. Canadian oilseed processors weighed production cuts while miner Teck Resources said it was drawing up contingency plans anticipating delayed shipment of product through CP's systems. Canada is the world's biggest grower of canola, also known as rapeseed. Crushers process it into vegetable oil for foods such as salad dressings and margarine, and into meal to feed cattle. CP railroad workers, whose collective agreement expired late last year, were asking for more predictable schedules to combat crew fatigue, among other demands. The company, which employs 12,500 workers, is a leading shipper of grain, crude oil and frac sand in North America. Earlier on Wednesday, industry bodies representing the mining, aluminum and fertilizer industries had urged the government to intervene in the issue. "Large railroads are necessary building blocks of a country's economy and it is worse right now because the other railroad operator, Canadian National, has had very tight capacity," Loop Capital analyst Rick Paterson said. Story continues Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday that his government supports the right to strike and would not intervene, as his predecessor had, "early and often" in labor disputes. "We believe in working things out at the bargaining table... and we'll use all sorts of levers to enforce that," Trudeau told Bloomberg. Labor Minister Patty Hajdu's office also said that the Liberal government believes in "the collective bargaining process." CP reached an agreement with unions in April to postpone a strike, which would have been the third in six years at the railroad. (Additional reporting by Rishika Chatterjee in Bengaluru, Allison Lampert in Montreal, Anna Mehler Paperny in Toronto; writing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta, Dan Grebler and Maju Samuel) On the balance of it, the bears took the week, while Tron stole the show. More losses could be on the horizon should the majors not move early. While Japans crypto exchange bitFlyer has formed a partnership with an insurance firm known as Mitsui Suitomo to offer the product, Coincheck has partnered with Nichido Fire Insurance and Tokyo Marine. Earlier in the year, Coincheck which is based in Tokyo was the victim of a hacking where virtual coins valued at more than half a billion U.S. dollars were stolen. Wild fluctuations According to the secretary general of Thailands Office of Insurance Commission, Suthipol Taweechaikarn cryptocurrency insurance products are not allowed due to the fact that their prices fluctuate wildly and this could expose insurance companies to high risks and this could expose the insurance firms to financial harm. Mr. Taweechaikarn, however, expressed hope that in future such products could be introduced once cryptocurrency regulations are put in place. Besides Mitsui Suitomo Insurance and Tokyo Marine other insurers offering insurance products for cryptocurrencies include Chubb, XL Catlin, and Great American Insurance Group. In the case of Mitsui Suitomo Insurance, the cryptocurrency insurance product offers compensation for both internal as well as external threats. Mitsui Suitomo Insurances cryptocurrency cover, for instance, will compensate policyholders for employee theft, unauthorized access, and mistakes. Amounts covered range between ten million Japanese yen and one billion Japanese yen. Preventive measures The preventive measures that the Japanese insurer takes in a holder to mitigate losses include conducting employee background checks of the partnering exchange as well as performing a security diagnosis audit. Great American Insurance Group, on the other hand, provides insurance cover for businesses which accept virtual currencies such as bitcoin (BTC) as a means of payment. However, the unit of American Financial Group does not cover external threats such as hacking. Some insurance firms will also offer cryptocurrency insurance to virtual currencies which are stored offline or in cold storage and avoid those that are in hot storage or online. This is because of the high risk of hacking that the coins in hot storage are exposed to. One of the worlds leading digital currency exchange, Coinbase, claims on its website that only less than 2% of its customers virtual coins are held in hot storage and these are already insured. It is understood that Lloyds of London is Coinbases insurer. Story continues Currently, the global commercial insurance business is worth approximately $720 billion but the business generated by virtual currencies is only a tiny figure. However, insurers are hoping that as digital currencies get more popular this income stream will grow. Per CB Insights, a venture capital data provider, in 2017 over $5 billion was raised in digital coin sales with close to 800 deals being conducted. Estimates are not available indicating what fraction was insured or the value of premiums which were collected. This article was originally posted on FX Empire More From FXEMPIRE: Experts take on budget Economists and the private sector leaders have termed the governments budget for fiscal year 2018-19 as cautious, social sector oriented and not friendly to private sectors. The Kathmandu Post talked with a number of these stakeholders to pick their thoughts on the budget. Roseanne Barr, star of the rebooted ABC sitcom Roseanne, apologized to former Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett for a racist and since deleted tweet that alleged a connection to the Muslim Brotherhood. Barr, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump wrote in a tweet, Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj. The initials vj are a reference to Jarretts initials. Barrs tweet was a reply to a tweet that accused Jarrett of helping to cover up alleged misdeeds by the Obama administration. Users commented that the tweet seemed racist. Muslims r NOT a race, Barr replied. Barr did delete the tweet. In a subsequent tweet, Barr said it was a joke. The comedian and TV star pivoted again and did apologize. I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me-my joke was in bad taste. Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) May 29, 2018 About five minutes later, Barr posted another tweet announcing she was leaving Twitter. I apologize. I am now leaving Twitter. Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) May 29, 2018 What leaving Twitter means is unclear. Barrs Twitter account was still active as of noon ET on Tuesday. The apology and deleted tweet werent enough to stem the damage. A few hours after Barrs tweet, Wanda Sykes, a consulting producer on the Roseanne show, tweeted she will not be returning. I will not be returning to @RoseanneOnABC. Wanda Sykes (@iamwandasykes) May 29, 2018 See original article on Fortune.com More from Fortune.com FILE - This Mar. 6, 2016, file photo provided by the U.S. Navy, shows the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam (CG 54) sails in the South China Sea. China says it dispatched warships to identify and warn off a pair of U.S. Navy vessels sailing near one of its island claims in the South China Sea. A statement on the Defense Ministrys website said the Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS Higgins and Ticonderoga class guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam entered waters China claims in the Paracel island group without the permission of the Chinese government. The US Navy sent two warships to a disputed archipelago in the South China Sea on May 28 in its latest symbolic protest against Chinas claims there. Reuters first reported that the USS Higgins and the USS Antietam ventured within 12 miles of the Paracel Islands in a demonstration the Pentagon calls a freedom of navigation operation or FONOP. The move signals US rejection of Chinas claims of political control in the South China Sea. The objective of their sail-by was a speck of land called Woody Island, where China has developed airstrips and port facilities in recent years as part of a broader strategy of establishing bases in these islands to demonstrate and exercise its political claims. This spring, China landed strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons on the island, a symbolic display of its deterrent power, and satellite imagery showed the arrival of surface-to-air missiles this month. The Vietnamese government protested Chinas move as a violation of its sovereign claim to the islandsexactly the language used by China to protest US actions today after sending its own warships to warn away the Americans. You can see the expansion of the Woody Islands roads and buildings in this time-lapse provided to Quartz by satellite-imaging company Planet: The island is one of many that lay behind the nine dash line, a diplomatic term of art for Chinas political vision for the South China Sea, which is at the center of a web of claims by nearby nations: China's claim over the South China Sea is different from its neighbors' interpretations. Complicated. In March, the US sent a destroyer on a FONOP to the Spratly Islands. In response, China increased its naval activity there, including a parade of warships that was also captured by Planet satellites. Consistency is key. Doves captured Chinese naval exercises in the South China Sea on 3/26, 3/31, 4/1, and 4/12. pic.twitter.com/BuqH3c28nn Planet (@planetlabs) April 12, 2018 Tensions in the South China Sea have been simmering for years, but are now complicated by Chinas role in North Korean nuclear talks and growing trade disputes with the Trump administration. Story continues Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief, our free daily newsletter with the worlds most important and interesting news. More stories from Quartz: [caption id="attachment_29161" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Barbara Jones A 17-year veteran of the Southern District of New York, Bracewell partner Barbara Jones was tapped to handle the review of privilege claims by President Donald Trump, the Trump Organization and Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen.[/caption] Bracewell partner and former Manhattan federal Judge Barbara Jones submitted a $47,390 invoice, her first, to U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood of the Southern District of New York Tuesday for the work Jones did in April as special master reviewing material seized from Michael Cohen's home and offices by federal authorities in April. The invoice, which covers work done in April, notes an hourly rate of between $670 and $700 per hourwell below the $1,000-plus rates often charged by many Big Law partners. The first date bill in the invoice is April 24, two days before Wood named Jones during a hearing as special master to review material seized by the government for potential privilege issues. The initial days of the review, according to the descriptions attached, involved preparing background materials, review of filings and conferences with Jones' team membersmembers who don't appear in the invoice is directly billing. The invoice ends on April 30, the same day as a scheduled meeting with the parties involved in the suit, including Cohen and the government, but also attorneys for President Donald Trump, for whom Cohen worked as a personal lawyer, and the Trump Organization, both of which Wood has allowed into the case as intervenors. As stated in a May 4 letter from Jones to the court, the government agreed to cover half of the special master's compensation, while the other parties collectively will cover the remainder. The invoice comes a day before the parties are scheduled to be back in court before Wood. On May 25, the government filed a proposed schedule outlining what those involved expect to address. These include an update on the production of materials, both from the government to Jones and from Cohen to the two previously approved intervenors, and the status of non-privileged material returned to the government by Jones. Also taken up will be a number of matters regarding the request to intervene by Stephanie Clifford, the adult film actress who goes by Stormy Daniels, and her attorney Michael Avenatti, who's pro hac vice application before Wood is currently being challenged by Cohen's counsel, McDermott Will & Emery partner Stephen Ryan. TOTAL S.A. TOT announced that it signed agreements with Sonangol, covering certain upstream and downstream operations in Angola. These agreements will further strengthen TOTALs operation in the country. TOTAL has been operating in Angola for the past seven decades and is the leading oil operator. The company produced 229,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (Boe/d) in 2017 from Angola. The agreement with Sonangol will allow TOTAL to operate Block 48 ultra-deepwater resource offshore Angola and jointly develop a network of service stations in the country. Operation in Africa TOTAL has operation throughout the globe, and Africa is a major contributor to its total liquids and gas produced on a global scale. During the first quarter of 2018, 673,000 Boe/d was produced from Africa, reflecting a year-over-year improvement of 6%. Nearly 24.9% of its total production of 2,703,000 Boe/d in the first quarter came in from Africa. Earlier this month, TOTAL entered into an agreement with Sonatrach to expand its operation in Algeria. Both will jointly invest $1.4 billion to develop a propane dehydrogenation unit and a polypropylene production unit, with an output capacity of 550,000 tons per year. Tie-ups like this along with other upcoming startup of projects will help TOTAL achieve its target of 750,000 boe/d production from Africa in 2020. TOTAL has a wide presence in resource-rich Africa and plans to develop in different regions of the continent, to hold its leadership position in the oil and gas production in Africa. Huge Oil & Gas Reserves in Africa Africa at present has in excess of 500 trillion cubic feet of proved natural gas reserves and more than 130 trillion barrels of oil reserves. Given the huge reserve potential, the big oil and gas companies are braving the risk of poor infrastructure, security threats, regulatory uncertainty and political turmoil to invest in Africa. No doubt, Africas oil and gas reserves have been drawing international giants like Exxon Mobil XOM, BP Plc. BP, and Chevron Corporation CVX among others to this continent. Price Movement Year to date, TOTALs shares have returned 5.9% compared with the industrys growth of 1.2%. Story continues Zacks Rank TOTAL currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can seethe complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Today's Stocks from Zacks' Hottest Strategies It's hard to believe, even for us at Zacks. But while the market gained +21.9% in 2017, our top stock-picking screens have returned +115.0%, +109.3%, +104.9%, +98.6%, and +67.1%. And this outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. Over the years it has been remarkably consistent. From 2000 - 2017, the composite yearly average gain for these strategies has beaten the market more than 19X over. Maybe even more remarkable is the fact that we're willing to share their latest stocks with you without cost or obligation. See Them Free>> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report BP p.l.c. (BP) : Free Stock Analysis Report Chevron Corporation (CVX) : Free Stock Analysis Report TOTAL S.A. (TOT) : Free Stock Analysis Report Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research 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. The U.S. Investor Behind the Magnitsky Act Was Arrested in Spain on a Russian Warrant Bill Browder, the American financier who was an active investor in Russia before becoming a Kremlin critic, was arrested in Spain on Wednesday morning on a Russian warrant. The Hermitage Capital CEO tweeted on Wednesday morning that he was just arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. Urgent: Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. Going to the police station right now. Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) May 30, 2018 However, the international crime-fighting agency denied having anything to do with it. There is not, and never has been, a Red Notice for Mr Bill Browder, Interpol said in a statement. Mr Browder is not wanted via Interpol channels. Browder subsequently tweeted that the Spanish police had released him, after Interpol told them to do so. Good news. Spanish National Police just released me after Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised them not to honor the new Russian Interpol Red Notice. This is the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case pic.twitter.com/ZonzXizvIJ Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) May 30, 2018 The Russians have repeatedly tried to get Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for Browder. The Kremlin has convicted Browder in absentia for tax evasion, and he faces nine years in prison there. Browder has been a driving force behind the U.S.s Magnitsky Act sanctions against Russian oligarchs, and his book, Red Notice, alleges corruption that goes up to the highest levels of the Russian government, including Vladimir Putin himself. Sergei Magnitsky was an auditor who represented Hermitage, which the Russian authorities had accused of tax evasion and fraudBrowder himself was expelled from the country in 2005. Story continues After Hermitages offices were raided in 2007 and documents relating to a Hermitage-administered company called Kamaya were seized, Browder had Magnitsky investigate what happened. The auditor found that the authorities had given the documents to organized criminals, who used them to take over some of Hermitages companies and fraudulently reclaim $230 million in taxes that Hermitage had paid. When Magnitsky alerted the government, he was arrested and, after refusing to testify against Hermitage and drop his allegations, he died in prison in 2009. He had reportedly been tortured and denied medical treatment for a life-threatening condition. The U.S. Magnitsky Act sanctioned Russian officials who were connected with his death. Canada has passed a similar law, and the European Unions parliament has also censured those individuals. And Browder has been the one pushing for this pressure. In the back of the Spanish police car going to the station on the Russian arrest warrant. They wont tell me which station pic.twitter.com/Xwj27xC7Zd Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) May 30, 2018 Meanwhile, a Russian journalist called Arkady Babchenko was gunned down in Kiev, Ukraine, on Tuesday. He was also a Kremlin critic, and the Ukrainian government has accused the Russians of being behind his murder. This article has been updated to include Interpols denial that it issued a warrant for Browders arrest, and Browders subsequent tweet about his release. Shares of financial giants JPMorgan Chase JPM and Bank of America BAC were down nearly 5% through late afternoon trading Tuesday after comments from representatives of both companies caused investors to hesitate. For JPMorgan, selling was inspired by the Q2 outlook shared by Daniel Pinto, the banks head of corporate and investment banking, at a conference in New York. Overall, markets revenue as we see it today will be flat year on year, Pinto said. The core activities will be up let's say mid single digits. Then we have a series of one-offs that overall take that back down to flat. Pinto did mention that performance in the companys rates, commodities, and corporate credit business was doing fine, but JPMorgan will apparently be hit with a $100 million quarterly charge related to the tax-oriented investment unit within its fixed income segment. Meanwhile, Bank of Americas head of global corporate banking, Alastair Borthwick, shared his companys outlook for lending demand for the year. The executive said that although companies are more optimistic about the economy, Bank of America feels it is too early to predict lending for the remainder of 2018. Economic optimism is typically a good sign for loan growth, but the companys outlook for lending demand is complicated by the fact that many firms already have extra income thanks to lower U.S. tax rates, Borthwick said. Bank of America shares slumped as much as $1.46, or 4.8%, to touch an intraday low of $28.70 shortly after these comments were made. Shares of JPMorgan sunk 5.1% to $104.96 before bouncing slightly off their lows in late afternoon trading. Want more market analysis from this author? Make sure to follow @Ryan_McQueeney on Twitter! More Stock News: This Is Bigger than the iPhone! It could become the mother of all technological revolutions. Apple sold a mere 1 billion iPhones in 10 years but a new breakthrough is expected to generate more than 27 billion devices in just 3 years, creating a $1.7 trillion market. Story continues Zacks has just released a Special Report that spotlights this fast-emerging phenomenon and 6 tickers for taking advantage of it. If you don't buy now, you may kick yourself in 2020. Click here for the 6 trades >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) : Free Stock Analysis Report Bank of America Corporation (BAC) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Govt missed opportunity for economic development, prosperity: NC on Budget The main opposition party Nepali Congress (NC) has argued that the government missed on the opportunity to take the nation towards economic development and prosperity as the budget presented on Tuesday increased the burden of tax and loan on general people. Grain production to be doubled to 20 million tonnes in next five years Food grain output will be doubled to 20 million tonnes in five years, the government said in its budget statement presented to Parliament on Tuesday. The plan also aims to double farmer incomes. OSLO, -- The girl who represents Afghan hopes for a peaceful, stable, and prosperous future hides herself from public attention in her hometown. Whenever Fatemah Qaderyan, 16, steps out of her house in Afghanistans western city of Herat, she wears an all-enveloping veil. As the head of Afghanistans internationally applauded teenage robotics team, Qaderyan represents a new generation of Afghans determined to overcome the countrys recent history of division, violence, and oppression against women. But, in Herat, she has to watch out for herself because of threats by hard-line Islamic extremists. We will do everything we can for the future of our country, she told RFE/RLs Gandhara website. Qaderyan is participating in the Oslo Freedom Forum, which brings together activists from Cuba, Venezuela, China, and Russia. Dubbed as one of the biggest gatherings of human rights activists in the world, the forum is a global platform for dissidents of all stripes. She sees education as the path to equality and freedom for Afghan women. With the help of Afghan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, she became part of the Digital Citizen Fund, which aims to empower women and children with the latest technological tools by enrolling students for courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Qaderyan says her countrys social, economic, and political challenges can be solved with the help of the latest technology and modern education. Now we know what getting an education means, and we will not stop, she told the audience at Oslos oldest theater, Det Norske Teatret. In Afghanistan, Islamist militant groups oppose girls education. They have destroyed hundreds of schools during the past 15 years and impede children, particularly girls, from getting an education in the regions they control. Patriarchy, poverty, corruption, regional strongmen, and conservative customs pose additional barriers. Girls in my country are not allowed to be curious, she said. Qaderyan and her all-female robotics team attracted global attention when they were twice denied visas to participate in a robotics competition in the United States last July. But after they made it to the contest in Washington, D.C., they won a medal. The six-member team was awarded a silver medal for "courageous achievement," which noted their can-do attitude under daunting circumstances. The team received a heros welcome when they returned home. Their success shows that Afghan girls, despite the challenges, can be good inspirations in the field of knowledge and technology, President Ashraf Ghani said in a congratulatory message. But her jubilation over the achievement was short-lived. In August, Fatemahs father, Mohammed Asef Qaderyan, was killed in an attack claimed by the Islamic State militants. The, 54-year-old was among the 36 Shiite worshippers killed in an attack targeting a Herat mosque. The tragedy, however, did not stop her journey. In December, Qaderyan and her robotics team brought home a top prize from Robotex, Europe's largest robotics festival. That was the happiest moment of my life. We were all overjoyed, she said. She says her dedication to knowledge and learning is helping her fill the void left by the death of her father. It is education and my thrust for knowledge that still empower me to stay strong, she said. My father showed me this way. I will follow it until I attain my goals. Qaderyan now wants to change the image of her country from a place where women are oppressed and even lynched to one where women can contribute as equal citizens. My team and I know the danger in the water. There are sharks. But we know there are pearls, too, she said. And we will swim in the deepest waters to harvest them. Her generation, however, has to overcome many obstacles. Domestic violence in Afghan homes is common. A report by the United States of Peace think tank noted that at least 87 percent of Afghan women have experienced domestic abuse at least once. Most women in Afghanistan are economically and socially dependent on male family members, and this patriarchal control prevents women from attaining equality and rights. Qaderyan says digital literacy specially targeting women could precipitate the radical changes needed for their empowerment. It is only possible if women are financially independent, and thats only possible if they have access to education, she said. Seventeen years after the U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan ousted the hard-line Taliban regime, an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school. Qaderyan says providing Afghan girls with education will change the countrys destiny. If every girl is educated, nobody can stop Afghanistan from becoming a developed and a peaceful nation, she said. Kiyya Baloch is a freelance journalist who reports on the insurgency, militancy, and sectarian violence in Balochistan. Afghan forces have killed nine people, mostly civilians, by mistake during a raid on a house in the eastern province of Nangarhar, officials say. Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the provincial governor, told RFE/RL on May 29 that eight people, including a child and a woman, were also wounded in the operation carried out by Afghan special forces in the Chaparhar district overnight. An investigation was being conducted into the incident, Khogyani said. Some reports said a local police commander and a number of relatives of Fazilhadi Muslimyar, the chairman of the upper house of parliament, were among those killed. Provincial Governor Hayatullah Hayat said Afghan forces raided a house where gunfire had been coming from, but the casualties were identified as mostly civilians once the operation ended. Nangarhar Province, on the border with Pakistan, has seen growing violence this year. Earlier this month, the provincial governor was dismissed over deteriorating security in the province. Both Taliban and the Islamic State group are active in eastern Afghanistan. With reporting by AP, Khaama Press, and Pajhwok The United States says religious persecution continues to be widespread around the globe as it unveiled its annual report on religious freedom, with violations cited in Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, among other countries. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the 2017 International Religious Freedom Report "is critical to our mission to defend religious liberty," as he presided over the release of the report at the U.S. State Department in Washington on May 29. The United States remains "committed to protecting religious freedom around the world, both now and in the future," Pompeo said, noting that the report "documents across 200 countries and territories reports of violations and abuses committed by governments, terrorist groups, and individuals so that we may work together to solve them." In Russia, the report notes that, although the constitution provides for religious freedom and the right to worship and profess one's religion, "the government prosecuted individuals of many denominations for unauthorized missionary activity under the amendments to antiterrorism laws passed in 2016, known as the Yarovaya Package." The report singles out the situation of the Jehovahs Witnesses, whose activity was criminalized, after the Supreme Court ruled in April 2017 that the sect was an extremist organization and prohibited them from operating in the country. The court upheld the ruling on appeal in July. 'Physical Assaults' The sect has been operating in Russia and across the former Soviet Union since the early 1990s and claims some 170,000 adherents in Russia. The report notes that, although "there were fewer instances of violence based on religious identity than in prior years, there were also reports of physical assaults on Jehovahs Witnesses and Muslims, as well as other attacks on individuals, "possibly based on both their ethnicity and religion." In Ukraines Crimean Peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, Russia-led forces continued to control parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts and to detain and imprison religious leaders, said the report, noting that a military tribunal in Donetsk sentenced an academic specializing in religious studies to 32 months in prison. The academic was later released in a prisoner exchange with the Ukrainian government. In Iran, which the United States in 1999 designated as a Country Of Particular Concern (CPC) under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, the penal code provides for the death sentence for "proselytizing and attempts by non-Muslims to convert Muslims, as well as for moharebeh (enmity against God) and sabb al-nabi (insulting the prophet)," the report notes. Iran continued to execute people charged with enmity against God, "including four prisoners at Rajai Shahr Prison in December 20, and four men charged with waging 'war on God' in Kerman Province in September [2017]," the report said, adding that authorities "continued to harass, interrogate, and arrest Bahai's, Christians (particularly converts), Sunni Muslims, and other religious minorities." In Afghanistan, "conversion from Islam to another religion is considered apostasy and is punishable by death, imprisonment, or confiscation of property," the report says. According to the Afghan Supreme Court, the Baha'i faith "is a form of blasphemy and is punishable by death. However, there were no reported prosecutions for apostasy or blasphemy," the report noted. The Afghan branch of the Islamic State group and the Taliban "continued to target and kill members of minority religious communities." Neighboring Pakistan continued to enforce blasphemy laws, "whose punishment ranges from life in prison to the death sentence for a range of charges, including 'defiling the Prophet Muhammad.'" The report says that at least 50 individuals were imprisoned on blasphemy charges,"at least 17 of whom had received death sentences." The document singles out an incident in April 2017, when a mob shot and beat to death student Mashal Khan at Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, "following an accusation of blasphemy later deemed by investigators to be false, which prompted widespread condemnation in the country." TORONTO, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BELGRAVIA CAPITAL INTERNATIONAL INC. (CSE:BLGV) (OTCQB:BLGVF) (Belgravia Capital, Belgravia, or the Company) is pleased to announce that it has acquired 10.03% of the outstanding common shares of R&D Pharma Corp. (RDP). RDP is a Canadian corporation developing a vertically integrated medicinal cannabis business in Jamaica. Belgravia has acquired four million (4 million) common shares of RDP at a price of twenty-five (25) cents per share. Belgravia has the right to appoint an independent director to the Board of RDP. Mr. Kevin Strong, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Belgravia, has been appointed CFO of RDP. The funding of the acquisition was by way of Canadian $500,000 (five-hundred thousand dollars) and 5,000,000 (five million) common shares of Belgravia. RDP, through one of its subsidiaries, holds a Tier 3 Cultivators Licence in Jamaica. This licence is one of only three Cultivators licences awarded by the Cannabis Licensing Authority (CLA). The CLA is an agency of the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries of Jamaica that was established in 2015 with the mandate of creating and regulating Jamaicas legal Cannabis and hemp industry. In addition to being a holder of the Tier 3 Cultivators Licence, RDP also has been awarded conditional processing, herb house, spa and dispensary licences. Jamaica is known to have a world-renowned medical cannabis community with recognized landrace plants in their natural environment. A Cannabis landrace is a plant grown in its natural environment and developed through traditional agricultural practices. This results in superior products that are internationally desired by markets. The consistent flowering light cycles of Jamaica, constant air flow, and other advantageous agronomic and economic conditions of the island, allows RDP to be an internationally low cost efficient producer of plants and medicinal products, for use in both the domestic and medical tourism industry, and for international export. Mr. Mehdi Azodi, President and Chief Executive Officer of Belgravia stated: We are excited to have completed our acquisition of 10% of RDP. Under the leadership of its Executive Chairman, Yohan Chin, President, Richard Bailey, and Chief Executive Officer, Derrick Lewis, RDP is one of only of only three companies to have been awarded a Tier 3 Cultivators Licence by the Government of Jamaica. This is a testament to the quality of the management team. The Tier 3 licence allows for the cultivation of over five acres of land with plants for medical, scientific, and therapeutic purposes. About Belgravia Capital Belgravia Capital International Inc. is focused on its three core business divisions: Incubation, Investments and also Royalties. Belgravia will also develop new companies with a focus on the legal medical cannabis industry. The incubation division will provide services to support the development of early-stage companies in the legal Cannabis space and other technologies as well as mineral and resources. Belgravia Holdings, the Investments division, invests in various private and public companies with a focus on legal medical cannabis, technology, and on an opportunistic basis, resources. Forward-Looking Statements Certain information set forth in this news release may contain forward-looking statements that involve substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include statements that use forward-looking terminology such as may, will, expect, anticipate, believe, continue, potential or the negative thereof or other variations thereof or comparable terminology. Such forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding planned investment activities & related returns, trends in the markets for fertilizers and medicinal or recreational use of cannabis, the timing or assurance of the legalization of recreational cannabis, the timing for completion of research and development activities, the potential value of royalties from water and other resources, and other statements that are not historical facts. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond the control of the Company, including, but not limited to, changes in market trends, the completion, results and timing of research undertaken by the Company, risks associated with resource assets, the impact of general economic conditions, commodity prices, industry conditions, dependence upon regulatory, environmental, and governmental approvals, the uncertainty of obtaining additional financing, and risks associated with cannabis use for medicinal or recreational purposes. Readers are cautioned that the assumptions used in the preparation of such information, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. For More Information, Please Contact: Mehdi Azodi, President & CEO Belgravia Capital (416) 779-3268 mazodi@blgv.ca Indian govt offers Rs 555 million grant to develop Postal Highway India has released Rs555 million for the construction of two road packages under the Postal Highway Project. Ministers who cant operate laptops within 6 months will be sacked: PM Oli Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has said that the Prime Ministers Office will be made paperless within six months. Any career that you find outside of agriculture can be found in the field of agriculture. The sad reality of today is that many students who enjoy attending their agricultural classes do not realize that they could make a career out of what they are learning. So many students love their ag classes and the projects that derive from them, but few of them realize that they can make money doing what they love as adults. I aim to change that. A few years ago I had the opportunity to start what is now called The Ag Career Expo. The Ag Career Expo is an event that gives students in high school and college the opportunity to meet with businesses, colleges, and trade schools that are based in agriculture so that they can get a grasp of what careers are available to them now and in the future. At the same time, the businesses and schools get to meet with students who are interested in working in the agricultural community. Its a match made in heaven! By the end of the day the students will not only have a greater understanding of agriculture, but an idea of how to plan for their future. So how does the Ag Career Expo work? It is a four-hour event held during the school day that begins with students and teachers getting a little ag swag, which is donated by agricultural businesses from around the area. As the students make their way to their seats, they will find three blank business cards. The students are encouraged to fill them out and use them at the event. The cards have two purposes: One is to serve as a contact card, but the second reason they have the cards is so they can practice the lost art form of breaking the ice and introducing themselves to potential employers and teachers. After a keynote speaker, the students get the opportunity to explore a variety of booths that are hosted by businesses, colleges, and trade schools. The attending businesses set up booths that they feel accurately represent the careers they have to offer, now and in the future. Some businesses have gone as far as bringing large machinery and trucks! I love the Ag Career Expo for this simple reason: We are educating and mentoring our future workforce while helping them find careers that they love. If you would like more information or are interested in starting an Ag Career Expo in your area, feel free to contact me at tylerribeiro@gmail.com. Tyler Ribeiro is a fourth-generation dairy farmer born and raised in California. He is currently partners with his father at Rib-Arrow Dairy in Tulare where they proudly ship their milk to Land OLakes. Tyler is actively involved in the dairy industry, holding leadership roles in various organizations locally and across the United States. Remember when Yahoo seemed to have been beset by hack after hack after hack? In September 2016, Yahoo revealed that the personal data of over 500 million users had been stolen by hackers in 2014. As if that wasnt bad enough, three months later the firm revealed that an even larger hack had occurred a massive security breach had seen hackers access data belonging to up to billions of Yahoo user accounts. That mega-hack took place in August 2013, with the attackers creating forged cookies that could permit access to users accounts without needing any passwords whatsoever. But Yahoo didnt go public about the breach until December 2016, advising users to be cautious of unsolicited communications and to ensure that they were not using the same passwords and security questions/answers on any other online accounts. The timing for the company couldnt have been worse, as it was in the process of trying to sell itself to Verizon. But it was hard to feel too sorry for Yahoo, as it was revealed that some of its staff had known since 2014 that its systems had been compromised by what it believed to be a state-sponsored attacker. And its also hard to feel too much sympathy for Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev and Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, both officers in Russias FSB, who the FBI believes directed and paid the hackers involved in the 500 million user account heist. Nor does my heart cry out for another Russian, Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan (also known as Magg), who the US Department of Justice claimed had gained access to the Yahoo User Database (UDB) and details of how to create account authentication web browser cookies. According to US authorities, the fourth member of the gang was Karim Baratov, a resident of Canada who was extradited to the United States, and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer fraud and identity theft. According to prosecutors, Baratov was paid by FSB officer Dokuchaev to hack into at least 80 webmail accounts, including at least 50 belonging to Google users. Baratov had been compromising webmail accounts, charging customers $100 per hack, since he was a teenager. Specifically, Kazakhstan-born Baratov advertised his services to Russian language speakers across the globe. In all, Baratov is believed to have made more than US $1.1 million through his hacks, using his illegal income to purchase a house and expensive cars such as a Lamborghini, Porsche, Aston Martin, Mercedes, and BMW. This week Baratov has been sentenced to five years in prison, avoiding the 94-month sentence that prosecutors asked for because US district judge Vince Chhabria accepted that Baratov had not been one of the gangs ringleaders. The last 14 months have been a very humbling and eye-opening experience, Baratov told the court. There is no excuse for my actionall I can do is promise to be a better man. And as for Dokuchaev, Sushchin, and Belan? The three other men the United States would like to question about the Yahoo hack? Theyre not expected to see the inside of a US court any day soon. Nembang appointed NCPs deputy PP leader, Gurung chief whip The Nepal Communist Party (NCP) has appointed Subash Chandra Nembang as the Parliamentary Party deputy leader and Dev Gurung has been appointed the chief whip of the newly formed party. 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 NRA budget up 3.35pc to Rs151.08b The government allocated Rs 151.08 billion, for the fiscal year 2018-19, to reconstruct buildings damaged by the earthquake on April 25, 2015, an increase by 3.35 percent compared to the current years budget of Rs 146.18 billion. Swarajs Indians in Janakpur comment unfortunate: MoFA The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday said the statement made by Indias External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj about Jankapur during her annual press briefing on Monday in New Delhi, was unfortunate. Three is company Nepal can unleash the Greater Himalayan Regions true potential only if it adopts trilateralism Les recos des analystes : Les recommandations des analystes : LVMH, Airbus, ArcelorMittal, Teleperformance, Elior, Air France-KLM, Aperam | investir.fr Pas de changement de recommandation de la part des analystes ce mercredi... Many believed that he would pull out of the deal, especially seeing as he had been threatening to do so since taking office. However, the European signatories of the deal pleaded with Trump to keep the deal intact and they scrambled to come to a solution that would keep Trump happy. But it was all for nothing. Since announcing his decision to exit the deal, Trump has warned that the US is going to get tough on Iran. His Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has listed 12 conditions that Iran must meet if relations between the two countries are to improve. Iran presents a major threat to not just its neighbours in the region, but also to the United States and the international community as a whole. The 2015 nuclear deal did nothing to curb these threats. That is why Pompeos demands seem to be attempts to rectify the major flaws of the deal. The Iranian regime is under pressure internationally and domestically and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seems to have acknowledged that it is in an impossible situation. There are rumours that Afghan militias fighting on Irans behalf in Syria are starting to abandon their units. Houthi militia units in Yemen are also being told to withdraw from the Western area of the country. The Supreme Leader has given the European Union six conditions to meet with regards to the US. He wants the EU to issue resolutions against the US so that Irans influence in the Middle East and its ballistic missile program cannot be brought up. He also wants trade to be guaranteed via EU banks and to ensure that it can sell oil without restrictions. He has also asked the EU to recompense its pledges that he feels it has not adhered to and would like it to denounce US sanctions. His words are desperate but it is understandable given the situation he is in. Already, large enterprises and international companies are pulling out of deals with Iran. Switzerland-based Stadler has put a stop to a wagon construction contract worth over a billion US dollars because of the return of US sanctions. Knowing that deals with the West are unlikely to go much further, Iranian officials are turning to China and Russia, but there too it is looking dire. Both China and Russia do not want to get involved or make promises. This is why Iran is trying to create a rift in the international community. It is a tactic that the Iranian regime uses time and time again create chaos and stick around to take advantage of it. It is a tactic that is becoming increasingly difficult to pull off now that the regimes true colours have been exposed. A group of handpicked students participated in a show in which they visit the Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They are given the opportunity to voice their opinions and ask questions from him who is according to the Reporters Without Borders a Predator of Press Freedom and is ruling a regime with holds one of the worst records in violations of Human Rights in the world according to U.N. and Amnesty International. The students apparently did not sugar-coat their criticisms of the leadership of the country and they spoke about the concerns that they, and many other people in the country, have with regards to the countrys flailing economy and the consequences of the United States pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal. Irans state media reported about the meeting that took place earlier this week. The Supreme Leader usually holds such meetings every year during Ramadan period. Normally the state-controlled media does not report on anything that shows the Supreme Leader in a negative light. Sahar Mehrabi, a university student, spoke about the various different crises that are going on in the country at the moment. Once such crisis, she said, is the inequality in social classes that is getting worse, and the decline in public trust. During her speech she also mentioned the environmental situation that is on the decline and the issues with growing numbers of shantytowns. he prejudice shown to minorities in all areas of life is unacceptable and the high unemployment rate is very discouraging, she added. With regards to peaceful activists exercising the right to voice their concerns, Ms. Mehrabi said that the hardliners within the regime and its security and judiciary system are brutal, especially in their practice of fabricating charges against individuals. When she had finished listing the issues and concerns that are shared by many across the country, she asked the Supreme Leader what his response is to all of this and the protests that have been held across the country in recent days, weeks and months. Supreme Leader Khamenei hypocritically recognised that some of the issues she brought up are indeed problems that require attention, but he said that it is easier said than done to resolve them. He said that a potential solution would be to integrate more revolutionary, motivated and committed young people into governmental agencies. The Supreme Leader also acknowledged that if society is to grow and progress, freedom of expression is a must! His Twitter account also mentioned Mehrabis criticisms. Mehrabi said that she would like to see the concept of democracy deepened in Iran. Democracy is a concept that does not currently exist in Iran. The theocracy ruling the country does not allow for it! While the nationwide protests are escalating every day and people are chanting: Death to Dictator and Death to Khamenei and want Regime Change, the above mentioned show only adds to the hatred and fury of the Iranian people. The leadership in Iran is far from united and the different factions cannot hide the internal disputes that are causing major rifts. The only display of unity that we can see in Iran is among the people who are battling together for regime change. Lawmakers or project managers? MPs must stick to their job of monitoring government activities, not managing them Applications Now Accepted for Little Miss African American Scholarship Pageant Lisa Ruffin, Founder/Producer of the 25thLittle Miss African American Scholarship Pageant, announces that applications are being accepted for the 2018 nationwide registration. Only 50 young participants, between the ages of 6 and 12 years old for the pageant. The Pageant will be held in August. The Little Miss African American Scholarship Pageant is an educational program. The girls learn to wear their C.A.P. which stands for Confidence, Awareness and Pride. Selected participants undertake a cultural enrichment program designed to promote teamwork, self-esteem, and heighten cultural awareness. They take classes in public speaking, science, technology and etiquette and are taught performances by award winning choreographers. The young ladies make new friends and learn about their rich African American history. By fostering these universal attributes at such a tender age, our girls grow to be leaders in their communities and help to change the world. Says Ruffin. The pageant will award over $10,000 in scholarships and prizes this year. ADVERTISEMENT Submit your application for participation at www.LittleMissAfricanAmerican.org The last day to register is Sunday, June 3, 2018. About Little Miss African American Scholarship Pageant For the past 24 years, dozens of girls between the ages of 6-12 years old have participated in this program, hundreds of scholarships have been awarded, and lasting memories have been created for these young Academic and intellectual princess. While some of them come from strong supportive families, the majority of them come from under-served, single family homes. The pageant provides an early introduction to the arts and training in public speaking, while promoting individual creativity and stimulating a heightened cultural understanding. For more information visit our website: www.littlemissafricanamerican.org Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @LMAApageant. About Lisa Ruffin Lisa Ruffin is a multi-talented performer and choreographer. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she entered Carnegie Mellon University at age sixteen then went on to New York to complete her education at The Julliard School of Music. The first video she choreographed,JoAnna won an American Music Award. Her choreography credits include, UPNs Moesha, and The Steve Harvey Show. Lisa is the youngest African American woman to choreograph a Broadway Stage production, Up Close and Personal at the Lunt Fontaine Theatre. Among many other achievements, she has also performed on Broadway, and had 2 Billboard Top 20 R&B hit record. ADVERTISEMENT Her acting credits include, Him and Us, Seth, The Raven, and her very memorable role as Deena on the long running soap All My Children. Lisa has made appearances on The David Letterman Show and Saturday Night Live, and has graced the covers and interiors of respected magazines such as Essence, Ebony and Black Enterprise. She had numerous commercials, including her Secret commercial, directed by award winning director, Jessicia Yu. Lisa has been a national judge& Choreographer for the NAACPs ACT-SO competition. Lisa created an non-profit, educational program called Little Miss African American Scholarship Pageant, for young girls 6-12 years.They are celebrating their 24thyear of teaching how to create beauty and be Presidents of everything. Jurors deliberated for about six hours before finding Alberto Hinojosa Medina (dob 9/15/93) guilty of one count of first-degree murder and the special circumstance allegation of murder during a burglary was found to be true. Medina also was convicted of one count of arson of an inhabited structure, two counts of first-degree burglary and one count of animal cruelty. Sentencing is set for July 20 when Medina faces life in state prison without the possibility of parole. ADVERTISEMENT Deputy District Attorney Victor Avila of the Major Crimes Division prosecuted the case. Medina burglarized an apartment in the 10900 block of Roebling Street on Sept. 21, 2015, and then entered a second apartment where he fatally stabbed Andrea DelVesco and set her apartment on fire before fleeing. DelVescos body was found by firefighters inside her apartment. She was a fourth-year UCLA student from Austin, Texas, and a member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority. In December 2017, Eric Marquez (dob 5/12/93) pleaded guilty to one count each of first-degree burglary and accessory after the fact. He is scheduled to be sentenced on June 7 when he faces a possible maximum sentence of two years and eight months in prison. Case SA091348 was investigated by the Los Angeles Police Departments Robbery-Homicide Division. Dr. Martin Luther Kings final mission was to build and launch a Poor Peoples Campaign across lines of race, religion and region. He called for a revolution of values to address the triplets of evil militarism, racism and economic injustice. People should not die from poverty in the richest nation in the world, he argued. It was time to speak out; silence was a betrayal. What Dr. King taught 50 years ago is even more relevant today. Thats why I joined with Rev. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and their allies as they build a new Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, calling for nonviolent, moral direction action in state capitols across the country. ADVERTISEMENT The campaign is a moral imperative. Inequality in this country has reached obscene extremes, with the richest three individuals having as much wealth as 50 percent of the country combined. Incomes have stagnated for most Americans, while they have soared for the top 1 percent who have the resources to rig the rules to help themselves. Most Americans struggle with rising costs and stagnant incomes. According to a survey by CareerBuilder, more than three out of four Americans 78 percent live paycheck to paycheck. Three in four are in debt; most think they will never get out of it. More than one-third of Americans have no retirement plan beyond Social Security. Thirty-two million Americans go without health insurance. Medical bills are the No. 1 cause of bankruptcy. More than half of minimum wage workers must work more than one job to make ends meet. According to the official Supplemental Poverty Measure, 140 million Americans live in poor or low-income households, including 38 million children. We see the toll in the shocking reality of declining longevity, as drugs, suicide and despair wreak a rising toll among the struggling. We see the toll in the deaths of young people shot in their own schoolrooms, or on their streets as they go to school. Even as inequality has grown worse, and the incomes of most Americans havent kept up, weve witnessed a harsh purposeful reaction, playing on our fears, using race and religion to divide us and blind us to the reality of our shared struggles. We see that in the hateful language that insults immigrants, slanders Muslims, extolls neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate race groups. We see it in the systematic efforts to use voter repression, gerrymandering and big money politics to keep power in the face of majority demands for change. We see it in the priority given to military spending and endless wars to police the world while our infrastructure grows decrepit, depriving more and more people of affordable water, public transport, safe roads, modern communications. ADVERTISEMENT This reality is too often ignored in the posturing about Americas greatness, or the bragging about the low unemployment rate. We need a moral revival in part because we need to see and speak the truth, and act together to make America better. If we turn from racism to embracing each other and loving one another as God has loved us, if we will share together and sacrifice together, we can create an army for justice, a coalition of conscience. We can become the heartbeat of our nation leading a true revival. The new Poor Peoples Campaign is not a closed organization. It is an open movement, calling each of us to stand up, to speak out and to act. The reality we face is not written in stone. It is the result of the power of special interests and the passivity of the true majority. If we come together, and act together, Dr. King taught us, we can create a better world. Now is the time to act. The Poor Peoples Campaign at https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org calls us to complete the mission Dr. King began so long ago. Earlier this May, Chinese President Xi Jinping said Hong Kong scientists could seek government money to fund their research. It is the first time since 1997 that Hong Kong researchers have been permitted to request money from the Chinese government. But the official Xinhua news agency said those seeking such support must show they love the country and Hong Kong. Some Hong Kong researchers are worried the requirement is a patriotism test that could interfere with their work. More than 20 individuals and education groups started a petition protesting the measure. The petition said the term love the country and Hong Kong was unclear. And, it said, making researchers show their loyalty could limit freedom of thought and study. Signers to the petition also worried the order could be extended to people working in other areas the law, for example, or history and written works. But Hong Kongs top official, Carrie Lam, said people had misunderstood the order. Lam told reporters: Of course, in Hong Kong we do expect, whether you are a scientist or researcher, or government official like myself, to love our country and love Hong Kong. So that is nothing unusual. Lam aims to help make Hong Kong a worldwide center for research and discovery. As of this Monday, some researchers said they still were not sure whether evidence of patriotism was required to seek government money. They also noted that past Chinese government attempts to establish patriotism among Hong Kongs people had failed. For example, six years ago more than 100,000 protesters objected to a proposed school program designed to make Hong Kong children feel good about China. In time, the Hong Kong government cancelled the program. Im Kelly Jean Kelly. Suzanne Sataline reported this story for VOA News. Kelly Jean Kelly adapted it for VOA Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story petition - n. a written document that people sign to show that they want a person or organization to do or change something We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page. A Russian journalist who was reportedly murdered turned up alive in the middle of a televised news conference in Ukraine about his own killing. Im still alive, Arkady Babchenko said to reporters at the news conference at Ukrainian Security Service headquarters in Kyiv. On Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said Babchenko had been shot dead and that his wife had found him in a pool of blood. He is a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his policy in Ukraine and Syria. The report of his murder started a war of words between Ukraine and Russia. It also brought condemnation from the United States and European countries. But on Wednesday, Babchenko appeared before reporters saying he had been part of a special Ukrainian operation to stop a Russian attempt on his life. Babchenko apologized to his wife for the hell she had to go through in the past two days. He said she did not know about the operation in advance. Neither he nor Vasyl Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, provided details of how they staged Babchenkos injuries or made his wife believe he was dead. The surprise came as Gritsak held the news conference to announce that Ukrainian police had solved the reported killing. Before Babchenkos appearance, Gritsak said investigators had identified a Ukrainian citizen who allegedly was paid $40,000 by the Russian security service to kill Babchenko. Gritsak also said killing Babchenko was part of a larger terror plot by Russian security services in Ukraine. Babchenko said he was approached by the Ukrainian Security Service a month ago to set up the operation. The important thing is my life has been saved and other, bigger terrorist attacks have been thwarted, he said. Babchenko is one of Russias best-known war reporters. He fled the country in February 2017 after receiving death threats against him and his family. He said his home address was published online and the threats he received were made by phone, email and social media. Im Mario Ritter. Hai Do adapted the story for VOA Learning English from AP and Reuters reports. Mario Ritter was the editor. ________________________________________________________________ Words in This Story hell n. (figurative) a very difficult or unpleasant experience in advance phrase, before something stage v. to arrange for a purpose allegedly adv. said to have happened but not proven thwart v. to prevent something from happening We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page. Since the start of 2017, Boko Haram militants have launched at least 12 attacks on the University of Maiduguri. The university sits in Maiduguri, the same Nigerian city where Boko Haram was formed. The group has launched attacks against Nigerias central government since 2009. Boko Haram has also attacked the University of Maiduguri. Yet the university remains open, and thousands of students continue to attend its classes. More than 20,000 students officially attend the school, and those numbers continue to grow. Growing in the face of threats Muktar Muhammed produces a music show for the universitys radio station. He begins each broadcast with a cheerful Good Morning message to keep students calm. We have to make it a pointto keep them positive. Of course, to try and stay relaxed and focused on their studies, he told VOA. Muhammed said students were still frightened a few weeks ago after suspected Boko Haram militants invaded the city. But the militants left after they were driven away by government troops. Third-year student Tasiu Hassan was at the school in January 2017 when a suicide attacker exploded a bomb, killing a professor. Later, Boko Haram released a video claiming responsibility for the attack. "I found myself in a very terrible situation in such a way that I had even thought of going back home," Hassan told VOA. But he still stayed at school, like many other students. Since then, the university has been attacked at least 12 times by suicide bombers, university officials told VOA. In July 2017, suspected Boko Haram supporters kidnapped 10 members of the university's geology and surveying department. The Nigerian military later rescued them. Resisting terrorists The University of Maiduguri is the largest and most famous public education center in northeastern Nigeria. Its students are resisting Boko Haram's message that condemns Western education as sinful. Throughout Boko Haram's rebellion against the government, the university never closed. "To show how resilient we are, to show how much sacrifice we are making and that is the true reflection of the Maiduguri spirit -- we are here because we have a responsibility to keep the system going. Those are the words of Danjuma Gambo, a mass communications professor and a spokesman for the university. Someone has to be around no matter how bad the situation is, he added. Gambo said that the university was too important to close, even for a day. He said it provides a lot to the local economy, to the business, to the finance, to even social activities in Maiduguri. That is why city and state officials said they would do anything in their power to keep the university open. The commissioner for the Borno State Ministry for Education, Musa Inuwa Kubo, told VOA the university has helped create a sense of self-respect in the community. "Most of us are products of that institution, he said. He added that the resiliency of the university during the Boko Haram attacks should be respected by everybody. Last year, workers dug a 27-kilometer-long trench around the university, mainly on its eastern side. This side faces the border with Cameroon, where many Boko Haram fighters operate. The hole is designed to slow down attacks from the militant group. Its fighters often invade cities on motorcycles. Every day, dogs trained to smell bomb chemicals and weapons perform inspections at two entrances to the university. No other public university in the area has this level of security. That is one reason why Esther Clement continues to attend the university. She has one more year of studies before she will receive a degree in mass communication. "I want to become a reporter, so I can inform people about Boko Haram," she added. Im Phil Dierking. Chika Oduah wrote this story for VOANews.com. Phil Dierking adapted the story for Learning English. George Grow was the editor. Do you know of other schools that stay open despite danges? Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story commissioner - n. an official who is in charge of a government department or part of a government department degree - n. an official document and title that is given to someone who has successfully completed a series of classes at a college or university focus - v. to direct your attention or effort at something specific motorcycle - n. a vehicle with two wheels that is powered by a motor and that can carry one or two people positive - n. thinking about the good qualities of someone or something reflect - v. to cause people to think of someone or something in a specified way relax - v. to become or to cause (something) to become less tense, tight, or stiff resilient - adj. able to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens sinful - adj. wrong according to religious or moral law survey - n. an act of measuring and examining an area of land trench - n. a long, narrow hole that is dug in the ground For hundreds of years, visitors to Scotland's Loch Ness have described seeing a creature that some people believe lives deep in the lake. But now the story of Nessie -- the Loch Ness Monster -- may have no place to hide. A New Zealand scientist is leading an international team to the lake next month. They plan to take some of the water and study genetic material from the lake to see what species live there. Neil Gemmell is a professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. The 51-year-old researcher says he does not believe all the stories about Nessie. But he said he wants to take people on an interesting trip and communicate some science to them along the way. Besides, he added, his children think it is one of the coolest things he has ever done. One of the more unusual theories is that Nessie is a long-necked dinosaur that somehow survived after other dinosaurs died out. Another theory is that the creature is actually a large fish, such as a sturgeon or giant catfish. Many people believe the claims of sightings are tricks or can be explained by trees floating in the water or strong winds. Gemmell said that when creatures move in water, they leave behind small pieces of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. DNA is found in the cells of all animals and plants. It carries their genetic information. DNA comes from their skin, hair and waste fluids. The New Zealand researcher said his team will take water from different points around the lake and at different depths. After removing the organic material, they will take the DNA, and sequence it by using technology created for the human genome project. The goal of that project was the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes of human beings. Gemmell said the results of his teams DNA tests will then be compared against all known species. He said they should have answers by the end of the year. "I'm going into this thinking it is unlikely there is a monster, but I want to test that hypothesis," Gemmell said, adding that the results will also show the biodiversity of the Loch Ness." He noted that the real discoveries may come in finding things like the number of invasive species. Gemmell said he first visited Loch Ness when he was in his late 20s. Like thousands of visitors before him, he looked out over the lake trying to see a monster. He said he first came up with the idea of testing DNA from the lake a few years ago and many people liked it, including his children. Graeme Matheson, chief of the Scottish Society of New Zealand, said he, too, had visited Loch Ness and looked for a monster. "I hope he (Gemmell) and his cohorts find something, although I think they'll be battling," Matheson said. "Still, it's a good way to get a trip to Scotland." Gemmell said that even if his team fails to find any monster DNA, it won't stop some Nessie believers. He said they have already been offering him theories. One idea is that Nessie might have left the lake and, after a lot of swimming, gone somewhere else for a rest. Another theory is that the monster might be an extraterrestrial, perhaps coming may another planet, and not leave behind any DNA. "In our lives we want there still to be mysteries, some of which we will solve," Gemmell said, adding that sometimes we find what we were not expecting to find. I'm Susan Shand. The Associated Press reported story. Susan Shand adapted it for VOA Learning English. George Grow was the editor. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story species n. a group of animals or plants that are similar and can produce young animals or plants dinosaur n. one of many reptiles that lived on Earth millions of years ago sequencing v. to determine the order in which things happen or should happen hypothesis n. an idea or theory that is not proven but that leads to further study or discussion biodiversity - n. the existence of many different kinds of plants and animals in an environment cohort n. a friend or companion extraterrestrial n. coming from or existing outside the planet Earth cool adj. very good or excellent Guyana Goldfields Inc. provides exploration and production of gold. It engages in the acquisition, exploration, development, production, and operation of gold mineral properties. The company also owns and operates gold drilling rights. The company was formerly known as Chiboug Copper Company Limited and changed its name to Guyana Goldfields Inc. in January 1995. Guyana Goldfields Inc. was incorporated in 1994 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. As of August 25, 2020, Guyana Goldfields Inc. operates as a subsidiary of Zijin Mining Group Company Limited. Read More Eighteen people were arrested over the weekend as part of a crackdown on human smuggling, the Judiciary Police (PJ) said at a press conference. They were arrested on suspicion of being involved in a human smuggling gang which assisted Vietnamese workers in finding work in several construction sites in Macau. The PJ was working in collaboration with the Macau Customs Service and relevant local authorities of the Chinese mainland, the spokesman, added. Authorities believe the scheme had been running for at least two years. According to the PJ spokesperson Leng Kam Lun, the suspects assisted the Vietnamese nationals to travel from Vietnam to Guangxi Province, and then transferred them to their stronghold in Zhuhai. They were given a little break over there and then, with the help of other suspects, they were arranged to swim into the SAR. The Vietnamese started working after successfully landing onshore near the Pearl of the Orient, in Avenida da Amizade, Leng said, as cited in a TDM report. Whats special about this case is that, apart from boarding a boat, the Vietnamese actually swam from Zhuhai to Macau. This is a big challenge to the Macau Customs [service] because its very difficult to detect them, even with the help of a radar, said Macao Customs services operations manager Chiang Kin Chong. Mainland police have also arrested the masterminds of the criminal group in Guangxi and Guangdong province. MDT/Xinhua Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is leading the purchase of 10 percent of Chinese delivery service ZTO Express (Cayman) Inc. for USD1.38 billion, a deal thatll augment the e-commerce giants ability to ship packages around the globe. The Alibaba-led investor group includes its own logistics arm Cainiao, the company said in a statement that didnt specify other buyers. Under an agreement, Cainiao and U.S.-listed ZTO will collaborate on everything from delivery and warehouse management to technology. Chinese express delivery has ballooned in past years alongside a boom in online shopping, as consumers increasingly demand faster and more reliable shipping. Alibaba and arch-rival JD.com Inc. are spending billions not just to shore up their networks and shorten delivery windows to a day or less, but also on expensive forays into old-fashioned retail and data computing. The growth of e-commerce and new retail in China demands more efficient express delivery and expanded logistics services, Meisong Lai, ZTOs founder and chief executive officer, said in the statement. This partnership will enable us to expand our selection of high quality service offerings both in China and internationally. The cash infusion will bolster ZTO as it expands its network to keep pace with fast-growing rivals. Chinese express-delivery operators are looking to counter rising labor costs in part through automation and more effective use of capacity. The company was among local services that raised freight charges last year to try and end an intense price war thats hurt profit margins. ZTO, which debuted in an initial public offering in October 2016, has been a longstanding partner to Alibaba and at one point relied on Alibaba for about three-quarters of parcel volume. But the company, just one among a coterie of players including SF Express and Shanghai Yunda Express Co. in a fragmented market, is looking to invest in automation and its international reach. Neither Alibaba nor ZTO outlined specific projects they might explore jointly. The Chinese e-commerce leader already operates a massive logistics player in Cainiao, created with partners with the aim of supporting Alibabas online operations. Its now a provider of same-day and next-day delivery in nearly 1,500 Chinese districts and counties and operates Cainiao Post: a network of last-mile stations covering neighborhoods in the top 100 cities and around 1,800 university campuses across the country. Bloomberg Maverick lawmaker Sulu Sou narrowly avoided permanent disqualification from the Legislative Assembly yesterday after the Court of First Instance found him guilty of the lesser crime of unlawful assembly and sentenced him and fellow democratic activist Scott Chiang to fines worth 120 days. The controversial case had threatened to permanently bar Sou from the legislature if he was found guilty and sentenced to more than 30 days in prison. With a lesser penalty, the young democrats path back to the Legislative Assembly is now, in theory, wide open. But questions remain over how his return will be digested by the powers that be. Most critically, it is unclear whether Sou will have his lawmaker status automatically reinstated, or whether his return will require the consent of his peers in the Legislative Assembly. Macau analysts were divided yesterday in their view of the Courts decision, what it says about the citys judiciary and how Sous reinstatement might play out. Social affairs commentator Larry So hailed the decision as balanced and as a sign of judicial independence in Macau. The decision of the courts was quite balanced; Sou did make an offence but the judge came to a rational, independent view of the case, he told the Times yesterday. Im not saying that [the sentence] was a surprise, but I am really glad that the outcome shows we still have judicial independence in Macau. As a consequence, the government also emerges from the case a winner, added So, even if the governments ultimate objective is to DQ Sou, he said, referring to Cantonese slang widely used in Hong Kong media to mean disqualify. But legal expert and academic Antonio Katchi holds a contrary view, describing the decision as frightening. It indicates the judiciary is adhering to an authoritarian attitude towards demonstrations and minor incidents that naturally occur during demonstrations, he explained. A peaceful attempt to resist police orders in such a heated atmosphere, especially when those orders are perceived as arbitrary, is something so natural that it is usually tolerated in a free society. Of course everybody is disappointed in the most liberal camp in Macau, added political scientist Eric Sautede. Nobody felt that Sulu was guilty of anything. It would have been really outrageous if he had been [sentenced] to prison, so I think it shows some kind of restraint. [] Of course, justice must prevail [and] it is for the judge to decide. But ultimately there is this sense [] of relief that he wont be suspended. After the sentence was delivered early yesterday evening, Sulu Sou told reporters that he expects his suspension from the legislature to be automatically revoked, providing that there is no appeal and that the 120-day fine is settled in a timely manner. He will have to wait 20 days for the appeal period to conclude and then a further 10 days in which the fines may be settled. This was also the legal view of Katchi, who told the Times that he believes Sou may retake his seat in the Legislative Assembly as soon as the courts decision becomes final. However, given the unprecedented nature of a lawmakers return after suspension, it is not entirely clear how and if the suspension will be lifted. This is especially the case since the courts decided earlier this year that they have no authority to rule on political acts undertaken by the Legislative Assembly. For example, social affairs commentator Larry So believes that the ultimate decision will rest with the other 32 lawmakers of the Legislative Assembly. Asked about the process in an interview with Times yesterday, Sou reasoned that the lawmakers will have to vote on whether Sou can return. Sautede said he would expect some form of resistance should this turn out to be the case. There is a general feeling that [Sou] was so disruptive to the status quo of the [Legislative] Assembly that there is [now] a kind of coalition of interests that will try to prevent him returning, the political scientist said. There is also the question of several other criminal cases that Macau police authorities claim to hold over Sou. In order to bring him back to the courtroom, Sous lawmaker immunity would have to be revoked once more via suspension. If the pro-establishment lawmakers want to suspend him again due to the other cases pending against him, they will have to initiate a new procedure to that end, argued Katchi. However, should an appeal be lodged at any point within the next 20 days, then the question of Sous return will have to be postponed. That appeal is perhaps most likely to come from the prosecution, who in earlier court sessions were pleading with the judge to apply the maximum penalty of a prison sentence. There is the possibility that the Prosecutor-General might appeal and that might look very vengeful, said Sautede. I think that would be a mistake, because even among the younger generation in Macau, there is a feeling of unfairness and injustice. This is what triggered the massive [anti-compensation bill] demonstration of 2014 the idea that things were so disproportionate. A short hike from the fishing village of Brijesta, where the Croatian mainlands rocky coastline across the bay melts into the Adriatic, a four-story concrete pier scrapes the blue horizon. The hulking eyesore is part of an abandoned bridge project, an ever-present reminder of how the forces of history and squabbling politicians failed a region of about 100,000 people. It now has become a new symbol: where the benefits of European Union membership converge with Chinas expanding influence. Thanks to Croatias EU entry, the 526 million-euro (USD621 million) plan is being revived. State-owned China Communications Construction Group Ltd. plans to restart the project halted in 2007 this year. The 28-nation bloc agreed to provide 85 percent of the financing, with the Croatian government pitching in the rest. The four-lane bridge, which will cut travel time by several hours to some parts of the Peljesac peninsula, is set to open in 2021. The bridge is our salvation, said Zdravko Lazic, 38, as he tossed freshly harvested oysters into salt-encrusted buckets on Brijestas small stone dock. Itll probably be less quiet once the bridge is built, but it will bring tourists and keep people from leaving. China is already deeply embedded in Europe, owning everything from ports in Spain, Greece, and Belgium to a German airport. Its also pushing into the continents former Communist East, with investment ranging from wind farms in Poland and a brewery in the Czech Republic to software engineering in Bulgaria and car-part manufacturing in Hungary. Infrastructure projects have been especially popular, including the international airport of the Albanian capital Tirana, a shipping terminal in the Romanian port city of Constanta and a high-speed rail upgrade linking the Hungarian and Serbian capitals. The bridge project focuses on the Peljesac peninsula, part of the Croatias southernmost county, most of which is separated from the main bulk of country by a 9-kilometer coastal stretch that gives sea access to Bosnia. What was an administrative quirk when the neighbors were partners within Yugoslavia became a pain after independence and a major headache after Croatia joined the EU in 2013. Were not an island, but we do feel like one, said Vedrana Kelleher, the owner of Savills Plcs Croatian unit who focuses on real estate in the county. We feel were not really part of the European Union, were so aware of this territorial disconnection. DIFFICULT ACCESS Its not that the entire region is a sleepy backwater. The county seat is Dubrovnik, a historic city where tourism is booming in part thanks to its role as Kings Landing in HBOs Game of Thrones and Canto Bight in Star Wars VIII. Even the bustling world heritage site is difficult to reach by car from the rest of Croatia, through ferries and international borders and its still a sharp contrast to the 40-mile-long Peljesac peninsula. Home to 8,000 people and some of the countrys best vineyards, its also the least developed part of Croatias winding Adriatic coast, held back by the difficulty of access. The town of Trpanj, for example, is about 10 kilometers the mainland, but visitors have to drive more than 10 times as much along the coast, dipping in and out of Bosnia, or catch a ferry that runs four times daily and has limited capacity, which could mean being stranded overnight. Traveling through two border crossings makes it unpredictable, and in the summer it can take hours, Dubrovnik Mayor Mato Frankovic said. The bridge will change all that. ECONOMIC BOOST The oversea link will provide instant access. It will add 7.2 percentage points to the regions economic growth over 15 years while raising employment by increasing trade and tourism, according a government study done in 2006 officials havent been able to provide a more recent estimate. Croatias drive to join the EUs borderless Schengen zone will get a boost and there are benefits to the environment by diverting millions of cars each year away from the congested single-lane Bosnian border. It will also complete a plan decades in the making. The project first surfaced in the 1990s after Yugoslavia broke up, but there was little progress because of a bloody war that devastated much of the region, including Dubrovnik. Construction finally began in 2007, with the first two support piers erected on either side. The global economic crisis started the following year, sending Croatia into years of recession, and funding dried up. Im absolutely frustrated that we have waited so long, said Nikola Dobroslavic, the head of Dubrovnik county. But Croatia at the time didnt have the financial abilities to build the bridge by itself. On the mainland, the construction is already bringing business to the village of Komarna. Restaurants are expanding, new ones are opening, ready to cater to the builders. Across the bay, it will take a while longer, though the first signs of progress have appeared. The owners of Saints Hills bought an abandoned stone winery in the center of a lush Peljesac valley in 2006, a year before the first attempt at bridge construction began. Its added climate-controlled cellars, oak casks and stainless-steel machinery and is now pouring money into hospitality for the time when the winery will be more accessible. But more needs to be done. At Trpanj, the hotel next to the ferry to the mainland has barely changed since the socialist days. Up the peninsula, upscale eateries are scarce even though fresh oyster is abundant. Peljesac has remained undeveloped because it was out of an easy reach, said Kelleher of Savills. When tourists arrive, investors will, too. James M. Gomez & Jasmina Kuzmanovic, Bloomberg The IFT Cafe has been closed for business since yesterday. Inaugurated in June 2016, and located next to Nam Van Lake, the cafe was being run by the IFT as a training center for its students. In 2016, the citys cultural authorities decided to prepare a public tender to hand the cafe over to a private operator. The first round of tender was opened by IFT in March 2017 to invite interested parties from the food and beverage industry to rent and operate two spaces at the lake. The tender culminated in successful leases for two shops in August 2017. One of the bidders started their business in January 2018 while the other is under the licensing process. IFT proceeded to the second round of the open tender from October 2017 to February 2018 for five other shops designated for food and beverage. There were also two successful bidders in this round of the open tender. The shop, in which the IFT Cafe was located, will be handed over to the successful bidder on June 1 to run a leisure cafe, while the other shop will be turned into a restaurant offering burgers, pizzas and similar cuisine. However, the owners of the two restaurants will need to apply for the relevant license before beginning operation, according to a statement issued yesterday. The remaining shops will be included in the third round of the open tender to call for lease and operation in the near future, possibly starting from next month. The project task force expects to bring a brand new recreational experience to residents and tourists by enriching the food and beverage options in the area and combining them with other facilities, such as the shops selling cultural and creative products and pedal boats. Exiting from the court building yesterday evening, the lawyers representing Sulu Sou and Scott Chiang, Jorge Menezes and Pedro Leal respectively, expressed unhappiness and surprise at the sentence given to the defendants. Questioned on the outcome, Leal said, I was not expecting this, in a negative sense. I was expecting for an acquittal [of the accused], followed by Menezes who expressed unhappiness over the result. To the Times Menezes added, I was expecting a not-guilty verdict, and I am disappointed with the ruling: because of its possible impact on the defendants and its possible impact on Macaus civil liberties and rule of law, he said. I will not comment on the content of the case. The lawyers also said they will study with their clients the possibility of appealing the sentence; a possibility that is not yet decided. As the lawyers mentioned, We have to see in detail the ruling, noting that the one given yesterday by the court was written in Chinese language only. The lawyers also noted that at moment there are several possible scenarios, including the fact that the Public Prosecutor might not [want to] appeal the sentence. Information confirmed to the journalists present by both defendants confirmed that they havent yet decided if we will or not appeal [the sentence], adding, we will still to discuss this with the lawyer team. Sou added that they need to analyze first the document [ruling] from the court. Questioned on the sentence from the court Sou said, from the beginning we always said and we continue to think we are not guilty, we were just exercising a fundamental right. Scott Chiang said he had no expectations concerning the outcome of the process. We were just seeing what happened and we all know this [decision] might not be final, adding, this is a not [just] a battle; it is a lifelong struggle. Questioned on the possibility of an upcoming sentence on other cases that would aggravate their situation, Chiang said, we know we are [always] more or less on the verge at all times [of facing a jail term]. This was just a realization that such risks could become real. Taking the same Chinese proverb previously mentioned by top-lawyer Neto Valente, Chiang said, We believe that we are the chicken killed to scare the monkey. We could not care less about what happens to the chicken; what we care is that the monkey is not afraid. RM The head of a U.S. technology company that scoured the Indian Ocean seabed for more than three months looking for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 said yesterday he was disappointed the hunt failed to find wreckage and hoped to take part in some future search. Malaysia said last week the search by Texas-based Ocean Infinity would end this week after two extensions of the original 90-day time limit. Ocean Infinity chef executive Oliver Plunkett said the search would soon end after covering more than 112,000 square kilometers of remote ocean floor an area more than four times larger than the zone targeted by experts as the most likely crash site. I would firstly like to extend the thoughts of everyone at Ocean Infinity to the families of those who have lost loved ones on MH370. Part of our motivation for renewing the search was to try to provide some answers to those affected, Plunkett said in a statement. It is therefore with a heavy heart that we end our current search without having achieved that aim, he added. Plunkett said he was pleased to hear the new Malaysian government had made finding the Boeing 777 that vanished with 239 people aboard a priority. Whilst clearly the outcome so far is extremely disappointing, as a company, we are truly proud of what we have achieved both in terms of the quality of data weve produced and the speed with which we covered such a vast area, Plunkett said. We sincerely hope that we will be able to again offer our services in the search for MH370 in the future, he added. Malaysia signed a no cure, no fee deal with Ocean Infinity in January to resume the hunt for the plane, a year after the official search in the southern Indian Ocean by Australia, Malaysia and China was called off. Ocean Infinity stood to be paid $70 million if it had found the wreckage or black boxes. No other search is scheduled. Australian Transport Minister Michael McCormack said the four-year search had been the largest in aviation history and tested the limits of technology and the capacity of experts and people at sea. We will always remain hopeful that one day the aircraft will be located, McCormacks office said in a statement. Australia, Malaysia and China agreed in 2016 that an official search would only resume if the three countries had credible evidence that identified a specific location for the wreckage. Flight 370 vanished on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. The original search focused on the South China Sea before analysis revealed that the plane had made an unexpected turn west and then south. Australia coordinated an official search on Malaysias behalf that scoured 120,000 square kilometers and cost 200 million Australian dollars (USD150 million) before it ended last year. Experts used drift analysis of wreckage found washed ashore on the west coasts of the Indian Ocean to define the new search area that Ocean Infinity. The most likely crash site was only 25,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of Vermont. Ocean Infinity ship Seabed Contractor made quick progress operating up to eight remotely controlled underwater sonar drones. Danica Weeks, an Australian resident who lost her husband on Flight 370, urged Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to call on Malaysias new government to be more transparent about what they knew about the mysterious disappearance. Thereve been so many theories and rumors and [] we dont know what is true and what isnt, Weeks told Australian Broadcasting Corp. I want Julie Bishop to say to the Malaysian counterparts now: What do you have? Where is the investigation at? she added. The director of the official seabed hunt that ended last year, Peter Foley, told an Australian Senate committee hearing last week that he still hoped that Ocean Infinity would be successful. If theyre not, of course, that would be a great sadness for all of us, Foley said. Jiang Hui of China, whose mother was on board the plane, said he appreciated Ocean Infinitys efforts but still hoped for more information on the possible reasons for the disappearance. The recent seating of a new Malaysian government under Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad could offer the prospects of new data becoming available, Jiang told The Associated Press last week. I dont believe a corrupted government can be efficient or fair, he said, referring to the administration of Najib Razak, who was Malaysias prime minister when the flight disappeared and who has been questioned by police in a money-laundering scandal that tainted his government. Rob McGuirk, Canberra, AP The absence of Portuguese experts in Chinese music in Portugal remains a challenge, and will continue to be a setback if its institutions dont establish networks with experts in this field. Enio de Souza, a scholar currently based in Lisbon, said that Portuguese universities that have music departments dont have any seminars or courses on Chinese musical instruments. Enio de Souza spoke at a seminar and book launch about Chinese Musical Instruments in Albergue SCM last week. The researcher, current organizer and coordinator of the education department of the Macau Scientific and Cultural Center Museum (CCCM) in Lisbon, kicked off his research in November 2011 and continued until February 2015, discovering over 400 Chinese musical instruments held across six collections in Lisbon. According to the scholar, the significant number of instruments present in Portugal was due to the five centuries of politics, trading and cultural relationship growth between Portugal and China. Alongside this research framework, the group also found iconography of Chinese instruments depicted in several Chinese objects, including terracotta, stone, bronze and porcelain. This material has great potential for research but it looks like [its been] neglected from the point of view of studies, the scholar expressed. Enio de Souza remarked that if Portugal is to be up-to-date in the field of Asian Studies, with a particular emphasis on China as well as its music and organology, the country should work on establishing scientific networks with Asian and western countries that have known competence in the field. Speaking on the role of the SAR in promoting Chinese instruments in Portugal, he noted, Macaus [role] was very important because it was [] the last Portuguese administration that started to send Chinese musical instruments to Portugal. The scholar recalled that the Macao Chinese Opera performed in many cities in Portugal back in 1987 until its latest performance in the country in 2014, where it held a total of four concerts. The Portuguese administration developed and promoted Macau in the West and Asia because many people dont know about this, he said. Later on, [since] China had economic power [in] the early millennium we had many Chinese citizens in Portugal leading to further development of Chinese instruments in Portugal, de Souza explained. Enio de Souza was responsible for launching and organizing the first and second editions of the Chinese Music and Musical Instruments: Lisbon Conference, held in 2016 and 2017. Just this month, he also co- organized the 21st Chime international conference on Chinese Music Research held in Lisbon. LV The Court of First Instance (TJB) found suspended lawmaker Sulu Sou and activist Scott Chiang guilty of a co-authored act of unlawful assembly, which was charged under the framework of aggravated disobedience. The two defendants were sentenced with a 120-day fine each. That amounts to a fine of MOP40,800 for Sou and MOP27,600 for Chiang, with the difference explained by a one-third reduction for Chiang because of his current financial situation. The sentence was known yesterday evening when the court gathered to present the conclusion and sentence after the trial. It took approximately one hour for the judge in charge of the process to explain the conclusions reached by the court, which considered the large majority of the accusations as proved, with the exception of a few details. During the reading of the sentence, the judge repeatedly referred to the intentions of the defendants to have the demonstration take place close to the Santa Sancha Palace, the official residence of the Chief Executive (CE). Judge Cheong Weng Tong said it was clear since Chiang applied for the demonstration to the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau that he aimed to reach this location. Besides the intentions of the defendants, the judge also noted that both Chiang and Sou were already experienced in organizing demonstrations and they should be well aware of the law and the fact they were breaking it by changing the route of the protest and by not following the orders of the police. In fact, and as mentioned also by Judge Cheong, the crime for which Sou and Chiang were sentenced relates to the organization and leadership of an unlawful assembly at the area of the CEs official residence, as opposed to the more broad charge of aggravated disobedience. They knew it and they continued, she said, recalling that previous sentences from the Court of Final Appeal have already defined clearly the concept of unlawful assembly. The awareness of the unlawful nature of their activities, together with their intentions, show some premeditation. This led the court to conclude that there was a willful misconduct from the leaders of the protest who, during the process, urged other participants even if in a veiled way. As for the justifications given by the defendants, Judge Cheong said they infringe on the principles of common sense and are not acceptable by the court. During the reading, and while Chiang remained standing and looking up, Sou, on several occasions, expressed his disapproval by shaking his head. In the end and while noting that the attitude of the defendants is not praiseworthy, the court also took into account that both had never been convicted for any crimes and that the conduct was not violent and didnt last for a long period of time. For these reasons that the court considered the penalty of deprivation of liberty disproportionate, opposing the proposal of the prosecution that asked for a prison sentence for both. Closing the session, Judge Cheong left a last piece of advice, delivered in a maternalistic manner. We have to accept our own conducts, she said, even when we are acting with the purpose of protecting the population of Macau, we must do that in accordance with the law. Three other new macau members to be investigated ALMOST CLOSING the court session at the TJB yesterday, it was revealed that three other members of the New Macau Association, including the president, Kam Sut Leng, will face an investigation and possible prosecution following the case of Sou and Chiang. As the judge of the case mentioned, a court certificate has been extracted from this case and after this process [it] will be delivered to the Public Prosecutions Office that will open an investigation procedure. That will fall on Kam and two other New Macau members that have been identified in the process as participants of the illegal protest. Commenting on the situation, Sulu Sou said, we are worried that freedom of speech or of opinion will be tightened [restricted] after this case and that everyone [will feel] they are in a risky [situation] when they express their opinion without permission from the authorities. Starbucks is closing more than 8,000 stores nationwide to conduct anti-bias training, the next of many steps the company is taking to try to restore its tarnished image as a hangout where all are welcome. After the arrests of two black men in Philadelphia last month at one of its stores, the coffee chains leaders apologized and met with the two men, but also reached out to activists and experts in bias training to put together a curriculum for its 175,000 workers. That has put a spotlight on the little-known world of unconscious bias training, which is used by many corporations, police departments and other organizations to help address racism in the workplace. The training is typically designed to get people to open up about implicit biases and stereotypes in encountering people of color, gender or other identities. The Perception Institute, a consortium of researchers consulting with Starbucks, defines implicit bias as attitudes positive or negative or stereotypes someone has toward a person or group without being conscious of it. A common example, according to some of its studies, is a tendency for white people to unknowingly associate black people with criminal behavior. Many retailers including Walmart and Target said they already offer some racial bias training. Target says it plans to expand that training. Nordstrom has said it plans to enhance its training after issuing an apology to three black teenagers in Missouri who employees falsely accused of shoplifting. Anti-bias sessions can incorporate personal reflections, explorations of feelings and mental exercises. But one expert says training of this kind can have the opposite effect if people feel judged. According to a video previewing the Starbucks training, there will be recorded remarks from Starbucks executives and rapper/activist Common. From there, employees will move into a real and honest exploration of bias where, in small groups, they can share how the issue comes up in their daily work life. Starbucks has described it as a collaborative and engaging experience for store partners to learn together. Developed with feedback from the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Perception Institute and other social advocacy groups, Yesterdays four-hour session gave workers a primer on the history of civil rights from the 1960s to present day. Workers also viewed a short documentary film. Alexis McGill Johnson, Perceptions co-founder and executive director, says anti-bias training is about awareness. The work that we want to do is not say youre a bad person because you have a stereotype about a group, but say this is why your brain may have these stereotypes, she said. Johnson declined to elaborate on the details of the Starbucks training. But she said Perceptions workshops typically include mental exercises to show participants how bias creeps into situations. A session can include personal reflections, she said, such as, I was socialized to think about a group this way. Johnson said the real work is for employees to apply what they learn in their everyday lives. She likened it to exercising a muscle. Some ways to practice counter-stereotyping, she said, are to look for something unique about a person that is beyond their social identity. It could be having a question that elicits something more interesting than, say, the weather or the traffic, Johnson said, stressing the need to go well beyond the superficial. In the Philadelphia incident, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson were asked to leave after one was denied access to the bathroom. They were arrested by police minutes after they sat down to await a business meeting. The incident was recorded by cellphones and went viral. Nelson and Robinson settled with Starbucks this month for an undisclosed sum and an offer of a free education. They also reached a deal with the city of Philadelphia for a symbolic $1 each and a promise from officials to establish a USD200,000 program for young entrepreneurs. Starbucks has since announced anyone can use its restrooms even if they are not buying anything. According to documents Starbucks sent to store workers, employees should also think carefully when dealing with disruptive customers. A guide advises staff to consider whether the actions they take would apply to any customer in the same situation. They should dial 911 only if the situation seems unsafe. Starbucks said the arrests never should have occurred and announced the mass closures of its stores for the afternoon of training. Calvin Lai, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, said people should not place high expectations on this one day. We find that oftentimes diversity training has mixed effects, and in some cases it can even backfire and lead people who are kind of already reactive to these issues to become even more polarized, Lai said. One afternoon wouldnt really be moving the needle on the biases, especially when its a company with as many employees as Starbucks, he said. A lot of those employees wont be here next year or two years or three years down the line. Starbucks has said yesterdays sessions serve as a step in a long- term journey to make Starbucks even more welcoming and safe for all. It is working with volunteer advisers including Heather McGhee, president of social advocacy organization Demos, and Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. One of the things Starbucks has to wrestle with is how to incorporate this kind of training into the onboarding of every employee, Ifill said. That takes a sustained effort, McGhee added. We have really made it clear that one training is not enough, and this needs to be part of an ongoing review of their policies, McGhee said. They really need to commit. MDT/AP President Donald Trumps hard-line views on trade, a staple of his message long before he entered politics, are beginning to collide with the cold realities of global geopolitics. Trade talks on China and the North American Free Trade Agreement have hit stumbling blocks, posing a challenge for a president who vowed to make trade deals more equitable for the United States during his 2016 campaign and who famously tweeted that trade wars are easy to win. Trumps trade agenda at least lately has not been so easy. Trumps administration announced plans yesterday to slap USD50 billion worth of tariffs on Chinese technology while taking steps to impose new investment restrictions and export controls, aimed at pushing China to remove trade barriers that make it difficult for U.S. companies to do business in China. The new action came after the administration said earlier this month that it had suspended plans to impose $150 billion in tariffs for now and the president tweeted last week that a different structure would be needed in the trade talks involving the worlds two largest economies. The president has bemoaned the massive U.S. trade deficit with China USD337 billion last year as evidence that Beijing has been complicit in abusive trading practices and outsmarted his predecessors. Pointing to a pause in the trade dispute, the administration had pointed to Chinas plans to significantly increase its purchases of U.S. goods and services and make meaningful increases in U.S. exports of agriculture and energy products. Financial markets, wary of a calamitous trade war, were relieved. But Beijing did not agree to any specific dollar amounts, despite the Trump administrations push to lower the U.S. trade deficit by at least $200 billion. And doubts remain about whether China will address allegations the Chinese engage in cybertheft of trade secrets, force U.S. companies to transfer some of their technology in exchange for market access or back away from its China 2025 plan to dominate emerging technologies. Separately, on Friday, the U.S. reached a deal on ZTE Corp. that will allow the Chinese telecommunications giant to remain in business. Under the deal, ZTE will oust its management team, hire American compliance offers and pay a fine on top of the $1 billion its already paid for selling equipment to North Korea and Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. In return, the U.S. Commerce Department will lift a seven- year ban on ZTE buying components from U.S. companies. The ban, imposed this month, threatened to put ZTE out of business. Trump said earlier that a resolution would help U.S. firms that supply ZTE with components, but members of Congress, including several Republicans, warned that the U.S. is being too lenient on a company that has violated U.S. sanctions. ZTE presents a national security threat to the United States and nothing in this reported deal addresses that fundamental fact, said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat. If President Trump wont put our security before Chinese jobs, Congress will act on a bipartisan basis to stop him. Trumps team, meanwhile, has hit an impasse with Canada and Mexico on negotiations over NAFTA. The president has sought to overhaul NAFTA as a way of returning automobile production to the U.S. and reduce Americas trade deficit with Mexico. Ken Thomas, Washington, AP Diplomacy accelerated yesterday ahead of a potential summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as a team of American diplomats involved in preparatory discussions left a Seoul hotel, possibly to continue talks with their North Korean counterparts. Meanwhile, in Beijing, South Koreas Yonhap news agency reported that senior North Korean official Kim Yong Chol planned to head to the United States, potentially for more talks to set up the summit over the future of North Koreas nuclear weapons program. He would be the most senior North Korean official to visit the United States in 18 years. Its possible the trip could be a reciprocal visit after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Pyongyang, North Koreas capital, twice in recent weeks for meetings with Kim Jong Un, after which he said there was a shared understanding between the two sides about what they hope to achieve in the summit. It remains unclear whom Kim Yong Chol would meet in the United States if he goes. South Korean media also reported that a North Korean delegation arrived in Singapore on Monday night for likely summit preparations with U.S. officials. Seoul did not confirm reports that the North Korean officials were headed by Kim Chang Son, Kim Jong Uns close associate, and that his American counterpart would likely be White House deputy chief of staff for operations Joe Hagin. South Koreas Foreign Ministry said Washington and Pyongyang were engaging in working-level talks to arrange the possible summit, but said it couldnt confirm specifics. Ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-duk also did not say whether Seoul knew of any U.S. plans regarding Kim Yong Chols possible visit, such as whether he and Pompeo have plans to meet. Yonhap said Kim Yong Chols name was on the passenger list for a flight today from Beijing to New York. It earlier reported that he was heading straight to Washington, but later said he changed his flight to New York. South Korean officials couldnt immediately confirm the report. Kim was seen in the Beijing airport yesterday by Associated Press Television. Kim is a former military intelligence chief and now a vice chairman of the North Korean ruling partys central committee tasked with inter-Korean relations. A visit to the United States would be the highest- level North Korean official visit since 2000, when late National Defense Commission First Vice Chairman Jo Myong Rok visited Washington, South Koreas Unification Ministry said. In South Korea, it wasnt immediately clear whether the American officials, including Sung Kim, the U.S. ambassador to Manila, were heading to the Korean village of Panmunjom, which straddles the border inside the Demilitarized Zone, where they met with North Korean officials on Sunday. Sung Kim is a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea and was a top negotiator with North Korea in past nuclear talks. Trump withdrew from a planned June 12 summit with Kim Jong Un last week, citing hostile North Korean comments, but has since said the meeting in Singapore could still happen. South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has lobbied hard for nuclear negotiations between Trump and Kim, met with the North Korean leader in a surprise meeting on Saturday in an effort to keep the summit alive. In their second meeting in a month, Moon said Kim expressed willingness to cooperate to end confrontation and work toward peace for the sake of a successful summit with Trump. But Kim also said he was unsure whether he could trust the United States over its promise to end hostile policies against North Korea and provide security assurances if the country does abandon its nuclear weapons, according to Moon. At their first meeting on April 27, Kim and Moon announced vague aspirations for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula and permanent peace, which Seoul has tried to sell as a meaningful breakthrough that increases the chances of successful talks between Kim and Trump. Their second meeting came after inter-Korean relations had chilled in recent weeks, with North Korea canceling a high-level meeting with Seoul over South Koreas participation in a two-week military exercise with the United States that ended last week. The Koreas have agreed to put high- level discussions back on track with a meeting on Friday. But that did not stop North Koreas state media from continuing its criticism of allied military exercises, saying if Washington sincerely hopes for the talks, it should stop the acts of threatening its dialogue partner by force. Since the 1970s, the United States and South Korea have been holding a major summertime exercise called Ulchi Freedom Guardian that involves tens of thousands of troops. South Koreas Defense Ministry said there have been no discussions yet between Washington and Seoul on modifying the drills, which usually take place in August. Despite Kims apparent eagerness for a summit with Trump, there are lingering doubts about whether he will fully relinquish his nuclear weapons, which he may see as his only guarantee of survival. Moon has insisted Kim can be persuaded to abandon his nuclear facilities, materials and bombs in a verifiable and irreversible way in exchange for credible security and economic guarantees. U.S. and South Korean officials havent confirmed the details of the pre-summit negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang at the border. The officials may discuss bridging the gap between the two sides on what a deal on the Norths nuclear weapons would look like. Theres also speculation that American officials are trying to persuade the North Koreans to export a certain number of their nuclear warheads overseas at an early stage as proof of their commitment to denuclearize. U.S. officials have talked about a comprehensive one- shot deal in which North Korea eliminates its nukes first and receives rewards later. But Kim, through two summits with Chinese President Xi Jinping in March and May, has called for a phased and synchronized process in which every action he takes is met with a reciprocal reward from the United States. Seoul has been advocating an alternative approach in which the Norths comprehensive commitment and credible actions toward denuclearization are followed by a phased but compressed process of inspection and verifiable dismantling. Before he canceled the summit, Trump did not rule out an incremental approach that would provide incentives along the way to the North. Kim Tong-Hyung, Seoul, AP China and the U.S. are presenting themselves as exemplars of opposite models of political governance. China has laid out its vision for a rejuvenated nation: a socialist planned economy, built on data and analytics, that will displace market economies. The U.S. is taking the opposite route: withdrawing government from the marketplace, deregulating the economy through executive orders, starving regulators of funds, and appointing agency heads with records of antagonism to their own agencies missions. With both economies breaking away from what was formerly a broad consensus on market governance, the concept of compliance is suddenly in question as are systems of governance designed to prevent fraud. The recent documentary The China Hustle laid bare the impact of Chinese fraud on U.S. markets. The film made much of backdoor listings, which apply lax standards of review to companies looking to capture capital from public investors. When the companies are Chinese, they fall into a regulatory gap between two systems: Chinese regulators abdicate responsibility, since the investors are American, and U.S. regulators do not have standing to access records in China that might disclose fraud. The move in March to allow Chinese depositary receipts will exacerbate the problem by creating new ways for companies registered in the no mans lands of the Caymans and British Virgin Islands to collect capital from Chinese investors. What The China Hustle failed to do was draw the obvious connection between the blatantly fraudulent Chinese reverse mergers exposed in the 2009 to 2012 period and the practices of the Chinese tech giants and unicorns who are being embraced by investors around the world today. These unicorns have raised marketing exuberance to a scale that could hobble markets by subtracting hundreds of billions and even trillions in value in days if checked against more familiar measures of value. Their misrepresentations are of a different type, more like Enrons and less like Crazy Eddies. These companies exploit variations in reporting standards that open up opportunities to mislead investors without technically breaking the law: by creating new, unauditable claims, such as gross merchandise value; by obscuring corporate control with structures such as variable interest entities; by hiding ultimate beneficiaries via partnership structures; by using the fig leaf of national security to thwart efforts to verify data; and by turning standards for determining income, cash flow, and even cash and cash equivalents into debatable issues. Regulatory arbitrage now allows entities exposed as frauds to fold up their tents and go raise capital elsewhere. Think about it: Not only is there no penalty for bilking public-market investors, but frauds are actually rewarded, because the trail of audited reports a company leaves behind becomes a foundation for a new listing, while the forensic analysis, regulator queries and class-action suits that got them delisted from one market are not even reviewed by the next one. Classic examples include Focus Media, which delisted in the U.S. after devastating revelations of fraud, then relisted at a higher valuation in Shenzhen. Among the widest regulatory gaps that support Chinese unicorns and decacorns such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. is lax acquisition accounting, exacerbated by poor access to financial and ownership records across territories. How purchase prices for acquisitions are calculated and how their receipt is verified are almost entirely opaque and, when acquisitions fall below the line of materiality, investors learn nothing at all about them. Companies such as Alibaba have taken advantage of this by marking up the value of their acquired companies even as those companies lose money. Untested asset value claims on their balance sheets constitute a rapidly growing fraction of their balance sheet assets. National governance systems are ill-adapted to these challenges, and yet the international order for managing trade and investment has largely broken down, as its biggest champion, the U.S., has demonstrated a clear lack of interest in complying with rules it was instrumental in writing. Investors seem eerily comfortable with the lack of stabilizing institutions and the predictability for trade and investment norms they provided. It may be that the breakdown of international institutions and the low regard the U.S. government has for its international commitments is, in fact, the next evolutionary stage of globalization. The long post-colonial process of emergence of the worlds largest populations would always have challenged the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, as they were created by developed nations and long served their interests. The Great Game of this century finds its closest analog in the world of social media: beyond regulation, largely invisible from any single viewpoint, shattered into small domains of interest and participation, and brutally competitive for advantage in a world without a recognized, institutional authority. As the worlds largest economies realign before our eyes, a question worth pondering for investors is this: In the new Great Game, who will be the referees? Anne Stevenson-Yang, Bloomberg Nevsun Resources Ltd. engages in the mining and development of mineral properties in Europe, Africa, and North America. It explores for gold, copper, zinc, and silver deposits. The company's principal assets include Timok project, a copper-gold development project in Serbia; and Bisha copper- zinc mine in Eritrea. It also holds exploration licenses and permits in Serbia and Macedonia, as well as in the Bisha mining district. The company was incorporated in 1965 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. As of January 7, 2019, Nevsun Resources Ltd. operates as a subsidiary of Zijin Mining Group Company Limited. Read More China Hydroelectric Corporation is a developer, owner and operator of small hydroelectric power projects in China. The projects are located in Zhejiang, Fujian, Yunnan and Sichuan. As of December 31, 2012, wholly owns 22 operating hydroelectric power projects and have controlling interests in three operating hydroelectric power projects. In March 2012, the Company sold 100% of the Yuanping hydroelectric power project. In April 2013, the Company sold the Yuheng hydroelectric power project, a 30 megawatt (MW) project located in Fujian province. In July 2014, the Company announced that it has completed the merger with CPT Wyndham Sub Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of CPT Wyndham Holdings Ltd. Read More Mettler-Toledo International, Inc. is a supplier of precision instruments and services. The firm manufactures weighing instruments for use in laboratory, industrial, packaging, logistics, and food retailing applications. It also manufactures several related analytical instruments and provides automated chemistry solutions used in drug and chemical compound discovery and development; and also, metal detection and other end-of-line inspection systems used in production and packaging and provides solutions for use in certain process analytics applications. Its operations are conducted by the following segments: U. S. Operations, Swiss Operations, Western European Operations, Chinese Operations and Other. The U.S. Operations segment represents certain of the company's marketing and producing organizations located in the United States. The Swiss Operations segment includes marketing and producing organizations located in Switzerland, as well as extensive R&D operations that are responsible for the development, production, and marketing of precision instruments, including weighing, analytical, and measurement technologies for use in a variety of industrial and laboratory applications. Th Read More 2 hours ago EXPLAINER: Why Social Security COLA will jump next year WASHINGTON (AP) Rising inflation is expected to lead to a sizeable increase in Social Security's annual cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, for 2022. Exactly how much will be revealed Wednesday morning after a Labor Department report on inflation during September, a data point used in the final calculation. Over the last 10 years, the Social Security COLA has averaged about 1.7% annually as inflation remained low. Read Article Irans foreign ministry has dismissed a report that some Iranian officials recently met with Israeli intelligence agents in the Jordanian capital over involvement in the Syrian conflict of forces aligned with the Iran-backed Lebanon Shia movement Hezbollah. The dismissal came from the ministrys spokesperson Bahram Qassemi. Qassemi was outright. No talks were held he is quoted as saying. Report of the clandestine meeting came from London-based Arabic-language news outlet Elaph. The media, owned by a Saudi businessman, on Sunday cited an alleged participant at the meeting who said that Irans ambassador to Jordan, along with several Iranian security officials, had met with Israeli intelligence agents in Amman. The meeting addressed the presence of Hezbollah forces and other Shia fighters in Syria. Israelis reportedly want the fighters to stop taking part in any future conflict between the Assad regime and opposition forces near the Jordan-Syria border. The report came amid high tensions between Iran and Israel. Israel early this month raided alleged Iranian military positions in Syria after the Jewish state claimed forces belonging to Irans Revolutionary Guards fired a barrage of missiles into Israel. Iran has been involved in the Syrian conflict where it is shoring up, along with Russia, President Bashar al-Assad. May 30, 2018 14:49 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate Doctor Tom Catena will arrive in Yerevan on May 31. Doctor Tom Catena, 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate, will visit Armenia ahead of the 2018 Aurora Prize Award Ceremony and a series of special events. This year, the special weekend of events will take place on June 8-10, culminating with the announcement of the 2018 Aurora Prize Laureate. A highlight of the weekend of events is the annual Aurora Dialogues, an international forum where leaders from the humanitarian and business communities will convene to discuss ways the global community can take meaningful action to solve some of the worlds most pressing problems. Tom Catena will arrive in Yerevan on May 31 and will start his tour of Armenia and Artsakh. On June 4 he will pay tribute to the victims of the Armenian Genocide at the Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial where he will also plant a tree in the Memory Alley of Tsitsernakaberd complex. On the same day Catena will attend the presentation and First Day of Issue Ceremony of a special postage stamp featuring him as the 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate. Doctor Tom Catena arrived in Sudan as a Catholic missionary from Amsterdam, New York. He has since saved thousands of lives as the sole surgeon permanently based in Sudans war-ravaged Nuba Mountains where humanitarian aid is restricted. It is for this service that he received the Aurora Prize, granted by the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, created on behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and in gratitude to their saviors. On June 5 Tom Catena, who is the only surgeon treating people in the Nuba Mountains, will arrive in the town of Sisian, in Armenias southern Zangezur region, where he will stop over in the Garrison hospital to meet fellow doctors. The meeting will be followed by a conversation with the local healthcare workers and other professionals at the Sisian House of Culture. The film Armenian Doctors in Nuba will also be screened there. The film depicts the activities of three Armenian doctors who went to Nuba to substitute for doctor Catena in May 2017, to allow him to visit Armenia and attend the Aurora Prize Weekend. He will have an opportunity to enjoy the gems of Southern Armenia visiting Goris, Halidzor, Tatev Monastery complex and the Tatever ropeway. After the meeting with local community he will head to Artsakh, where he will meet with youth, students, representatives of local NGOs and the medical community as well as state officials. During a similar visit last year, Doctor Catena said, Ive never been exposed to such hospitality in my life. Im very touched by the people here. I feel like Im with my own family when I come here. Everywhere I go, its the same reception. Really, you have something very special here. I want the Armenian people to know you have something very special in this country. Dont lose that. Following this visit, he will return to Sudan and continue his work. Follow NEWS.am Medicine on Facebook and Twitter May 30, 2018 21:07 Do you have tiny yellow spots in the eye? Watch out, it could be an early indicator of dementia, a new study suggests. According to the researchers, the spots known as hard drusen are made of fat and calcium deposit that form in a layer underneath the retina and can be seen in scans. According to The Indian Express, common signs of ageing, the spots have long been thought to be harmless. But, the findings showed that 25 per cent of people with Alzheimers have more number of such spots compared to four per cent of healthy people. We found that there were more areas associated with drusen deposition in Alzheimers disease, lead author Imre Lengyel from Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was quoted as saying to the DailyMail. The results also showed that people with Alzheimers had thicker blood vessels which may slow down the blood flow. Thus, scanning for the spots and examining the eyes blood vessels could be a valuable tool in Alzheimers disease monitoring, the researchers said. A brain disease is difficult to diagnose through the eye. But we can use ophthalmologic imaging to chart progression of the disease and monitor the effectiveness of medications used to combat it, Lengyel added. An eye imaging session would comprise 20 seconds of time and is very non-invasive. Its exciting. We really hope that eye imagining will be a powerful tool in monitoring Alzheimers progression. In the study, published in the journal Ophthalmic Research, the team conducted eye test on 117 patients aged between 60 to 92 years. The researchers hope that the study may be helpful in early detection of dementia so that early precaution is taken in order to combat the disease. Follow NEWS.am Medicine on Facebook and Twitter Children in Europe are exposed to higher levels of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) in cities, but the total average exposure remains well below the limit reference values. These are the main conclusions of a study led by the Barcelona Institute of Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by "la Caixa" Foundation and published in Environment International. In recent decades, new mobile communication technologies have been developed and are rapidly evolving. Today, they represent the main source of RF-EMF to which the population is exposed. There is growing concern regarding possible adverse health effects of long-term exposure to RF-EMF, particularly at a young age when organs and the brain are still developing. Therefore, studies characterizing RF-EMF exposure in children are a priority for the World Health Organisation. The goal of this study was to measure the environmental exposure to RF-EMF in 529 children between eight and 18 years of age in five European countries: Denmark, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Switzerland and Spain, between 2014 and 2016. Personal exposure measures to RF-EMF (ranging between 87.5 MHz and 6 GHz) were collected using portable "exposimeters" carried by the children for up to three consecutive days. The meters were worn around the waist or carried in a backpack during the day and placed close to the bed at night. In addition, the use of handheld devices (eg. mobile phones) and indoor RF-EMF sources was determined by activity diaries and questionnaires. Six types of frequency bands were defined: total and those related with cordless phones; television and radio antennas; mobile phones; mobile phone antennas (also known as base stations); and WiFi. Results show that the average total personal exposure was 75.5 microWatts per square meter (W/m2), a value well below the reference levels of 4.5 to 10 W/m2 established by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). Mobile phone antennas contributed the most to the total exposure, followed by television and radio antennas (mainly FM radio frequency). WiFi and cordless phones contributed very little. Overall, exposure was higher in urban environments, outdoors, while traveling, and during the day (versus night). Monica Guxens, senior author of the study, says, "We are not measuring doses that the child receives, for example, by holding a mobile phone next to the head during a call, and which are likely to be higher." The results also indicate that measurements for total environmental exposure, television and radio antennas, and mobile phone antennas bands were reproducible from one year to another. Laura Ellen Birks, ISGlobal researcher and first author of the study, emphasizes that, "scientists need to continue assessing RF-EMF exposure in children as the use of devices and the sources are likely to vary with the coming years." Explore further France says no known health impact from mobile phones More information: Laura Ellen Birks et al, Spatial and temporal variability of personal environmental exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic fields in children in Europe, Environment International (2018). Journal information: Environment International Laura Ellen Birks et al, Spatial and temporal variability of personal environmental exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic fields in children in Europe,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2018.04.026 Provided by Barcelona Institute for Global Health MRI images from a patient homozygous for a rare variant in the EPT1 gene, which synthesizes phosphatidylethanolamine. The patient suffered severe seizures from birth and failed to reach most developmental milestones. Scans were taken at the age of 3 weeks (A-B), 1 year (C-D) and 4 years (E-F) and show an absence of myelin where expected (arrows) and increasing atrophy (asterisks). Researchers traced the myelin deficiency to EPT1-induced shortages of the phospholipid plasmalogen, a downstream product made from phosphatidylethanolamine. Previously, EPT1 was not known to be essential for plasmalogen biosynthesis. Credit: Ayelet Eran and coauthors The baby looked healthy at first. But within two hours, he was having severe seizures. Hospital staff at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, were performing a routine check when they realized that the baby was unwell. They transferred him to the neonatal intensive care unit right away and began conducting tests, hoping to reach a diagnosis. But every test came back negative. His results looked normal. The question was simple: What ails this baby? The answer would take years to figure out. Researchers from Rambam Medical Center, Japan's RIKEN Brain Science Institute, and other institutions in both countries announced their solution to the medical mystery in an article in the June issue of the Journal of Lipid Research. A mysterious genetic ailment Dr. Hanna Mandel, a metabolic disease specialist, was head of the team that assessed the infant in the NICU back in 2011. Seizures in newborns may stem from a variety of causessome more common than others. Nothing in this baby's general appearance provided clues for the cause of his seizures. More than a dozen routine tests came back normal. The child had no infection, no problem with known metabolites, no clues in his urine or cerebrospinal fluid. After completing a battery of routine tests as well as extra metabolic workup, Mandel said, they found nothing that could explain the child's illness. So the medical team sent the child, by this time three weeks old, for brain scans. The images showed a lack of myelin, the essential fatty coating around nerves. Myelin works like the plastic insulation around an electrical wire. If the insulation isn't there, the wiresin this case, the neuronscannot carry electrical signals as far or as fast as they should. This deficiency, they thought, may have affected the boy's development. As he grew older, the child missed milestones, never even moving on his own. Follow-up scans showed that his myelin was still not developing, and other parts of his brain were beginning to atrophy. When the child was 4 years old, Dr. Orly Elpeleg, a specialist in rare genetic diseases at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem, led a team that sequenced and analyzed much of the boy's genome, looking for genetic mutations that he might have inherited from both of his parents, who are cousins. Elpeleg identified 13 sites in the boy's genome where he had inherited very rare coding variants from both parents. By examining his healthy family members' genes, the team could rule out many of these sites as causing the child's problems. The mutation the researchers found responsible for the disease affected a gene called EPT1. Compared with a healthy control, the patient's mRNA encoding the EPT1 protein was abnormally shortened. This was the first time a patient was diagnosed with EPT1 mutation. When the geneticist found identified the mutation, Mandel went straight to PubMed, a database housing medical and biological research. She was looking, she said, "for someone who would be interested in studying the pathogenicity of the EPT1 mutation." She found the world experts on the gene in question. Establishing an international collaboration Several years earlier, Yasuhiro Horibata had been a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Yoshio Hirabayashi, who studies lipid physiology at the prestigious RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. The two had discovered that the EPT1 gene codes for an enzyme that puts the finishing touches on the production of a lipid called phosphatidylethanolamine, or PE for short. PE makes up about a fifth of all the phospholipids in the brain. They published their findings in a 2007 paper in the Journal of Lipid Research. Mandel found that paper and wrote to Hirabayashi. Soon, she, Hirabayashi and Horibata, by then an assistant professor at Dokkyo University, hatched a collaboration by email, and the Israeli team shipped a tissue sample from the child to Japan. The Japanese team measured enzyme activity in the child's cells, and confirmed that it was very low compared with a healthy control, because the erroneously shortened protein was immediately destroyed by the cell's quality-control systems. They looked for changes in the child's skin cells, measuring all the lipids the cells produced. To their surprise, the lack of EPT1 only slightly reduced the amount of PE in the child's tissue. This was unexpected, since PE was the main known product of EPT1 activity. However, the shortage of EPT1 dramatically reduced the amount of another molecule, plasmalogen, a lipid product made from PE which is abundant in myelin. It seemed that the child's cells were able to employ other enzymes to compensate for PE production; however this did not rescue the lower plasmalogen synthesis. The researchers concluded that, even though its PE-manufacturing work is duplicated by the action of another enzyme, EPT1 is essential for making myelin in the normal brain. This work is described in the team's new JLR paper. Hope for the future The researchers solved the genetic piece of the mystery underlying the boy's puzzling disease. Last year a British team reported on a patient with similar symptoms and a similar mutation, making the Israeli boy the second patient with EPT1 disorder ever to be reported in the medical literature. As for many people living with rare genetic diseases, the boy's treatment options are limited. Today, the patient is paraplegic, blind and deaf, and his seizures have worsened. Nevertheless, Mandel emphasizes the positive aspects of the child's life. "He lives in a beautiful Arab village in Northern Israel, in a beautiful house with his parents and his sister," she said. "During the day, he attends a rehabilitation center near his home village, where he receives all the paramedical support one could think of." Meanwhile, the doctors have offered the boy's parents genetic counseling based on their research findings. "The couple is aiming for preimplantation genetic diagnosis for future pregnancies," Mandel said. Explore further New testing provides better information for parents of children with form of epilepsy More information: Yasuhiro Horibata et al, Ethanolamine phosphotransferase 1 (selenoprotein I) is critical for the neural development and maintenance of plasmalogen in human, Journal of Lipid Research (2018). Journal information: Journal of Lipid Research Yasuhiro Horibata et al, Ethanolamine phosphotransferase 1 (selenoprotein I) is critical for the neural development and maintenance of plasmalogen in human,(2018). DOI: 10.1194/jlr.P081620 Four years ago, a team of Monash psychologists began working on a smartphone app to help combat the growing spectre of anxiety and depression. Now there are two such apps, with one the winner of multiple awards. That app MoodMission has been downloaded 50,000 times with no paid marketing. In June, the first of the two apps, MoodPrism, is being re-released into the market with added extras. "It'll be fresher for the users," says Adjunct Associate Professor Nikki Rickard of the Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences (MICCN). "It will feel squeaky-clean." Once that new version is out, MoodMission may also be rebuilt and re-released, but that depends on funding. The apps were born of the frustration at many of the mental health apps on a flooded market having little or no real science built into them. The MoodMission project began when Adjunct Associate Professor Rickard began supervising doctor of clinical psychology student David Bakker. He'd come to Monash from working as a mental health outreach worker. When he began his doctorate, Adjunct Associate Professor Rickard had just started work on MoodPrism, but soon her team of doctoral candidates began developing it and the subsequent MoodMission app together. Complementary apps MoodPrism is primarily a research app, while MoodMission has clinical applications for the user. One grew out of the other. "Mental health apps weren't providing focused, evidence-based support in a really hands-on way," says Mr Bakker, who now also works as a registrar in a psychology clinic in Melbourne. "Some tried to engage patients in cognitive behaviour therapy [CBT] in unstructured ways, some would be great to use with a psychologist but not really so useful outside of therapy. There were none that answered the question: 'Hey, I'm feeling anxious right now what do I do?' That's how the idea for MoodMission got started." Adjunct Associate Professor Rickard says young people were a focus of the team's work because they were at risk of leaving potential mental illnesses untreated. They also had high use of smartphones and instinctively knew their way around apps and in-phone games. "We were interested in capitalising on this technology to fill a gap in mental health support," she says. "One million people in Australia have depression and two million suffer from anxiety and around one third of that total, especially young people, never seek professional help. The apps are for anyone, but there's a focus on young people." She said that in general, the 'Mood' apps have three main aims: Connect users through MoodPrism to relevant support services. Raise emotional awareness in individual users. "People don't seek help because they think they don't need it," she says. Make them simple to use. "Some mental health apps can be daunting with a lot of details and homework. If you look at MoodMission, it's intentionally built from very small units that are easy to use." MoodPrism was made with funding from the mental health body beyondblue and looks and feels like a digital mood diary that asks users how they're feeling day-by-day. It then converts the data into a 'mood history'. It was primarily a research app, but has been rebuilt to take in more users' experiences. MoodMission is slightly different. It offers tailored suggestions as to how the user could improve their mental health, such as by walking or doing some physical exercise, calling a friend or meditating. It gives awards and badges, like a game. Users complete 'missions'. The app works," says Dr Bakker. "We've seen changes in outcomes for wellbeing by using it for 30 days. It's absolutely a success." MoodMission was initially paid for by crowdfunding, but the app's rebuild was awarded funding by a Monash University accelerator program for startups called The Generator. Commercialisable features are being built into it. Mr Bakker said some in psychology were hesitant to use or promote apps, but "this is an adjunct tool, a preventative tool and a low-intensity tool, but it's definitely not the psychologist. It's completely different. It's all part of the pursuit to try help people with these sorts of issues. "Apps can do things that psychologists can't," he says. "They can be with you while you're having a panic attack on the bus, they can learn things throughout the day based on what actual thoughts you're having while you're experiencing depression or anxiety." Safety net For Associate Professor Rickard, technology or, at least, a phone app can never replace one-on-one therapy. "The primary purpose is a safety net, filling the gap. We acknowledge that the majority of young people will not get one-on-one support, so one aim is to get them to realise they might need help. We'd like to show that some strategies might help, and linking with support might give them that one further step." Despite both apps' popularity and the 2018 rebuilds, they'll remain free of charge. "We always wanted it to be a free resource for vulnerable people," Mr Bakker said. Explore further Student developing smartphone app to prevent and treat anxiety and depression Credit: CC0 Public Domain So much for, "See? That wasn't so bad." If your child thinks the needle is going to hurt, that expectation ensures it's going to hurt. That's the finding of first-of-its-kind research from UC Riverside psychologist Kalina Michalska. For the first time, researchers have looked at how expectation influences pain experience in children. "We know that expectation affects pain experience in adults; we don't know whether this is also true for children," said Michalska, who studies children's reaction to distresstheir distress and others'- in her Kids Interaction and Neuro Development Lab. This bears out what pediatricians know. Dr. Adwoa Osei, who is a practicing pediatrician and a faculty member in the UCR School of Medicine, said prepping children for inoculations ahead of time doesn't help. Penicillin shots are the worst. The medicine to be delivered is thick in consistency, and takes a while to deliver. It hurts more. "If I don't say anything before, they might limp a little leaving the office," Osei said. "But if I tell them it's going to be painful, afterward they say, 'I can't walk!' or 'You have to carry me out of the room.'" In Michalska's experiment, researchers applied thermal heat and asked the subjects to rate levels of pain: low, medium, highhigh being about the temperature of very warm tap water. But during the experiment, only one temperaturethe one each subject rated mediumwas used. The difference was the cuesthe tone they heard before the heat was applied. One tone meant low heat, the other, high. So, even though the subject heard a cue indicating high pain, the pain was only medium. The study's subjects included 21 healthy children, 27 children with an anxiety disorder, and 25 adults. One aspect of the findings surprised researchers: All three groups experienced a similar relationship between pain expectation and experience. Researchers expected the strongest expectation-experience correlation among anxious children, followed by healthy children, then adults. That's because research historically finds children are highly suggestible; by what they see in the media, by what peers tell them, etc. Michalska said her efforts to reassure the children may have impacted results. It's an ethical paradox; reassuring children there is nothing to be afraid of is the right thing to do, but might impact the results. "We took great care to reassure children and make them feel comfortable. There were always two experimenters in the room with them and a nurse who saw them before and after to ensure they were OK," Michalska said. "We did not take as great a precaution with adults." These ethical considerations have long been an impediment to the research Michalska conducted. It's why there hasn't been similar research, Michalska said. Nonetheless, Michalska said, the study reinforced that pain expectation informs pain experience, significantly. "What we learn is that both healthy and anxious children's experience of pain is influenced by what they are told about it. If we tell them they will experience a lot of painor they tell themselves thisthey will actually experience more pain and greater negative emotions as a consequence," she said. Michalska said the study reinforces the necessity of not "hyping up" painful experiences, and of discouraging children from ramping up the experience up in their heads. In practical terms, there is value in distracting children beforehand. And giving them a new, less frightening frame of reference, such as: "This is going to feel like a branch scraping against your skin." The research appears online in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Explore further Study finds children pay close attention to potentially threatening information, avoid eye contact when anxious Credit: CC0 Public Domain Biological Psychiatry has published a new study revising the outdated estimates of the prevalence of eating disorders in the United States (US). The new estimates were based on a nationally-representative sample of 36,309 adultsthe largest national sample of US adults ever studied. The findings estimate that 0.80 percent of US adults will be affected by anorexia nervosa in their lifetime; 0.28 percent will be affected by bulimia nervosa; and 0.85 percent will be affected by binge eating disorder. Importantly, the study provides the first prevalence estimates using the current definitions of eating disorders. Although the diagnostic criteria for several common eating disorders were changed with the 2013 publication of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-5", the rates of eating disorders hadn't been studied since 2007. "Our study confirms that eating disorders are common, are found in both men and women and across ethnic/racial groups, occur throughout the lifespan, and are associated with impairments in psychosocial functioning," said first author Tomoko Udo, Ph.D., of University at Albany, New York. Dr. Udo conducted the study alongside Carlos Grilo, Ph.D., of Yale University School of Medicine. "The prevalence and impact of eating disorders continues to be underestimated in society. This definitive study should guide both research and policy development," said John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. The data analyzed in the study were from the 20122013 National Epidemiologic Survey Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC-III). In addition to lifetime estimates, the study found that 12-month estimates for anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder were 0.05 percent, 0.14 percent, and 0.44 percent, respectively. The rates of anorexia nervosa were similar to previous estimates, but the researchers were surprised to find the rates of bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder were lower than previous estimates. "Many researchers and clinicians expected higher estimates than earlier studies as a result of 'loosening' of diagnostic criteria for eating disorders," said Dr. Udo, referring to the changes made to criteria in the DSM-5. She added that more large-scale epidemiological studies will be needed to explain the reason for these unexpected findings and to better understand the impact of changes in diagnostic criteria. The disorders occurred across different ages and were persistent, lasting for years. The study also reported that the eating disorders included in analysis often interfere with normal daily activities and social relationships. According to Dr. Udo, the findings show that eating disorders represent an important public health problem and demonstrate the importance of screening for eating disorders across all socio-demographic groups. "Binge eating disorder, a new 'formal' diagnosis in the DSM-5, is especially important to screen for and identify, as it is associated with substantially increased risk for obesity yet often goes unrecognized," she said. "In many communities, specialty treatment for eating disorders is not as easily accessible as for other psychiatric and medical conditions, and thus improving access to care is an important priority for healthcare systems," said Dr. Udo. Explore further Eating disorders linked to increased risk of theft and other criminal behavior More information: Tomoko Udo et al. Prevalence and Correlates of DSM-5Defined Eating Disorders in a Nationally Representative Sample of U.S. Adults, Biological Psychiatry (2018). Journal information: Biological Psychiatry Tomoko Udo et al. Prevalence and Correlates of DSM-5Defined Eating Disorders in a Nationally Representative Sample of U.S. Adults,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2018.03.014 Credit: University of Oregon A new report from University of Oregon researchers shows bias-based bullying and violence is on the rise in Oregon schools, especially aimed at LGBT students, who experience twice as much verbal, physical, psychological and sexual violence as their peers. The "State of Safe Schools Report," a collaboration between UO researchers and the Oregon Safe Schools and Communities Coalition, analyzed survey results from 600 schools and 27,000 students to assess school safety and student well-being in Oregon. The report indicates that LGBT youths face unsafe conditions at school due to high rates of bullying, violence, sexual assault and suicide ideation. Those students also report higher rates of fear-based absences from school and mental health risks. "In 2017, bias-based bullying, violent harassment, sexual assault and fear-based absences were at alarming rates among our LGBT youth," said Julie Heffernan, graduate director of teaching and licensure at UO's College of Education and co-chair of the Oregon Safe Schools and Communities Coalition. "We've known these are issues for a long time, but this is the first time we've had Oregon data that highlights just how bad conditions can be in our schools." The primary reason the data has not existed until now is because most surveys don't include enough questions to capture a complete picture of student gender identity and sexual orientation. To address that deficiency, Heffernan and colleagues from across the state crafted new language for the Oregon Health Authority to use in its biannual Oregon Healthy Teens Survey. That change allows the agency to collect deeper demographic data and gain a better understanding of students' learning environments and communities. The 2017 survey was the first time the new language was utilized. "This survey gave us rich information about school climates," Heffernan said. "We're now compiling some of the best data in the country for school safety related to gender identity and sexual orientation. And that data confirms that there is an immediate imperative to address school climate for LGBT youth in Oregon." One of the data points Heffernan points to as among the most urgent and troubling is the number of youths who were threatened with a weapon at school, which was 1 in 5 among transgender youth and 1 in 10 LGBT students. Another is the rise in suicide ideation and suicide attempts among all youth, with one-fifth of Oregon youth considering suicide in 2017, including close to half of Oregon youths identifying as transgender and just under half of LGBT students. Some relevant data was getting captured prior to the new survey results, but Heffernan said it was primarily on the crisis end of the issues. She hopes the recent survey results will help localize the problems and spur policymakers and school administrators to implement new practices and support services that will help address underlying issues and improve the learning environment and safety for all students. "The focus on the well-being of LGBT youth has impacts for all young people," Heffernan said. "The treatment of LGBT youth in schools is one clear hot spot impacting the overall climate in our schools, but past research has shown that when Oregon schools and communities are inclusive of LGBT diversity, there are mental health improvements for all students as well as a decline in school bullying and violence directed at all students." The report includes a number of policy recommendations to improve school climates and adolescent well-being. These recommendations include administrative oversight for anti-bullying policies, inclusive curriculum, trauma-informed classrooms, educator training and student support through groups like gay-straight alliances, which help underrepresented students connect with others from their communities. One of Heffernan's top recommendations for educators is to focus on community-based outreach to raise awareness and address bias-based bullying. Locally, the College of Education is implementing those practices in Lane County through a number of different events and programs. They include an LGBT inclusive Pink Prom, which was attended by 200 students from 12 regional high schools this spring, and an annual TeachOUT youth leadership summit that hosts hundreds of students from 29 different schools to promote confidence and expression in education. "We need to create inclusive spaces for these students that build community and provide positive narratives for LGBT youth," Heffernan said. A Duckfunder crowdsourcing campaign is underway to help support the youth leadership summits for regional LGBT middle and high school students and their allies. The campaign hopes to raise $8,000 to help pay expenses. Heffernan and other UO faculty and students are also involved in advocating for inclusive literature in the Oregon Battle of the Books, which has faced pressure in some schools to ban or drop a book about a transgender child from its 2018-19 reading list. "Unfortunately, this kind of silencing of a minority group is not unusual in our country right now, which may be associated with a rise in bias-based bullying and unsafe conditions for our LGBT youth," said Heffernan. "The findings and recommendations included in this report are urgent, given our current political climate where we're seeing many public challenges to civil rights and troubling examples of bullying and violence aimed at marginalized communities." Some key findings from the State of Safe Schools Report are: LGBT youth were twice as likely to experience bullying and harassment at school. LGBT youth were twice as likely to have been threatened with a weapon. LGBT youth were three times as likely to miss school because they were afraid for their safety. One half of LGBT youth expressed suicide ideation during 2017. One quarter of LGBT youth reported attempting suicide during 2017. Explore further Supportive high schools help sexual minority males (HealthDay)Many doctors have internet portals to help patients manage their care. But that doesn't mean older folks will use them. A University of Michigan poll found only about half of patients 50 to 80 years old have set up an online account with their health care provider. "The health care system has provided patient portals as an efficient way for patients to communicate with their providers. But many older adults are uncomfortable with electronic interactions substituting for a phone call or in-person conversation," co-associate poll director Sarah Clark said in a university news release. Researchers found that better educated patients with higher incomes are most likely to use these systems. But poorer people with less education often have more health-related needs, the researchers said. People over 65 were more likely than those in their 50s and early 60s to say they don't like using the computer to communicate about their health. They were also more likely to voice discomfort with technology in general. Among those who hadn't linked up to a patient portal, 52 percent cited concerns about using the internet to monitor their health information. Half said they didn't see the need for this kind of access to their health information. And about 1 in 4 said they hadn't gotten around to setting up their account. These folks tended to be in their 50s and early 60s. The poll included more than 2,000 older adults. Over the past several years, the U.S. government has required hospitals, health systems and other health care providers to offer patient portals to patients if they want extra funding from Medicare. This gives patients access to records and test results that are part of electronic medical records. Of those who have set up online accounts, 84 percent have viewed results from blood or other tests, the researchers found. Far fewer patients use other functions available online. For instance, only 43 percent refilled prescriptions online, 37 percent scheduled an appointment online and just over a quarter used the portal to get advice about a health problem. Nearly half of patients said speaking with their doctor was a better way to explain their problem. "Many older adults still prefer telephone contact with their providers," said poll director Dr. Preeti Malani, a professor at the university's medical school. "We hope providers, and health systems, will take these findings into consideration when designing the ways patients can interact with them." More information: The U.S. National Institute on Aging talks about The U.S. National Institute on Aging talks about doctor-patient communication Copyright 2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved. Genetic counseling for cancer patients has become standard of care at academic medical centers, but patients cared for at community-based medical practices across the United States may not have access to these resources. Video and phone sessions can close that gap and bring genetic counseling to patients who would not otherwise have the chance to receive it, according to a new study from the Basser Center for BRCA at the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center. Researchers conducted a randomized, controlled trial to determine whether patients at community practices would undergo genetic testing after a remote phone or video counseling session and found 77 percent of patients chose to do so, compared to just six percent in the group of patients that were offered usual care options for genetic testing, such as driving to a center with genetic counselor or having genetic testing with their doctor and without the assistance of a genetics professional. The study's lead author, Angela R. Bradbury, MD, an assistant professor of Hematology-Oncology, will present the findings at the 2018 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting in Chicago (Abstract #6506). Germline genetic testing helps doctors identify patients at increased risk for cancer who may benefit from additional or early screening or other cancer prevention interventions. This testing includes detection of BRCA mutations, which are linked to a drastically increased lifetime risk of breast and ovarian cancers, as well as pancreatic and prostate cancer. Genetic counselors work as part of a patient's healthcare team and can help patients and providers understand how genetic and familial risk contribute to cancer risk, they can make recommendations for the most appropriate genetic testing and provide guidance on how to understand genetic results and what they mean for a patient's healthcare. Currently, only 37 percent of patients who undergo testing meet with a counselor beforehand. Bradbury and her team randomly assigned 115 patients who were candidates for genetic testing into two groupsone that received a phone or video counseling session and one that were provided information on how they can get genetic testing. All participants were patients at primary care practices throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Of the 71 patients in the group offered remote genetic counseling services, 55 of them (77 percent) went on to complete the counseling. Just two of 36 patients (six percent) in the usual care group completed genetic counseling. In addition, 55 percent of patients in the remote services arm proceeded to actual genetic testing, leading to the identification of four genetic carriers. Only 17 percent of patients in the usual care arm underwent testing, and no carriers were identified. "The data definitively show the impact of remote genetic services, and it's clear from this study that this telemedicine approach improves on what community practices can do on their own," Bradbury said. "That said, it's noteworthy that just 56 percent of patients who underwent remote counseling went on to undergo genetic testing. It shows we still have work to do to help equip patients with this information, which can be life-saving in some cases." Bradbury also noted another important area to address: the discrepancy between patients in the usual care arm who underwent counseling and those who underwent testing. "The data confirm that some people in community practices are getting testing without going through counseling first, and previous studies have shown that patients have lower levels of knowledge and lower satisfaction when that happens," Bradbury said. The study also compared the effectiveness of the two telemedicine options and preliminary findings suggest that videoconference leads to a greater increase in knowledge and a greater decrease in depression when compared to baseline than phone sessions. The authors note this finding is preliminary and points to a need for further research. Susan M. Domchek, MD, executive director of the Basser Center for BRCA, was a co-investigator on the study, which was supported by the Basser Center for BRCA. Bradbury will present the findings as an oral abstract in the Health Services Research, Clinical Informatics, and Quality of Care session on Friday June 1st at McCormick Place in Room S404 at 4:45 Central. Explore further Counseling patients at risk for cancer over the phone reduces costs and access burdens If you look at whats happening with trade in China, it hasnt been fair for many, many years. When President Trump rails against China, he says things like, Our country is being taken advantage of, or, We lost years ago by presidents and others allowing this to happen. Hes probably referring to the past four decades, when China has grown faster than any major economy in history and gone from a poor, developing country to an economic powerhouse that is challenging Americas spot at the top of the international food chain. Its emergence as a global power was so sharp and so extreme, faster than the world can handle, in some ways faster than China can handle. The U.S. and other Western nations kick-started much of Chinas rise by opening up trade. What they havent figured out is how to get this fundamentally different economic system to play by free market rules. A pivotal moment came in 2001 after 15 years of negotiations. China joined the World Trade Organization, which sets the rules for free and fair trade between member countries. All of the countries that were in the club at the time put enormous demands on China for what they needed to do. The Chinese committed to sharply lower tariffs and reduced some of the governments role in how business gets done. But they argued then, as they still do now, that China is a developing country and so should be held to less stringent free trade standards. The hope was that these first steps would lead to even more sweeping changes. Why did we assume that? The experience of communism was through the lens of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, which was ultimately not a success. And so the presumption was, Chinas going to want to become like us, more market oriented. After China joined the W.T.O. in 2001, you saw this enormous surge of Chinese exports to everywhere in the world, and to the United States in particular. They were kind of an elephant hiding behind mice with respect to other countries in global trade negotiations at the time. The U.S. and other countries complained that China was not opening its markets enough, and keeping the value of its currency artificially low to make Chinese exports more attractive. China has been making great strides using tools that are really not acceptable under the global trade system. China has continued to operate as a centrally planned economy. The government owns, influences or subsidizes major industries, giving them an artificial competitive edge. There are heavy restrictions on foreign investment, and foreign companies are pressured to share their technologies. China has become more market oriented, but dating back to probably 2007, 2008, I think it was recognized that China wasnt on the path to become more like us. And so then countries began to think about, well, what do we do instead? Some view the rise of Asia-Pacific with suspicion and fear. America doesnt. Enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership, initiated by Bush, signed by Obama. When implemented, It wont just boost trade and support jobs in our 12 countries. It will help set stronger rules for trade across the Asia-Pacific. Put less politely, It was also supposed to be a bulwark to Chinas growing economic power. The idea was that China would want to join this great trading pact, and so they would have this incentive to reform their economy. This is the one that President Trump ripped up on his third day in office. The first one is withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I had seen the erosion of popular and congressional support for trade for many years. But Id never seen anything like Donald Trump. Our founding fathers understood trade much better than our current politicians, believe me. Trade is generally accepted by economists as win-win for countries on the whole. But Trump says that China is winning and the U.S. is losing. He and people in his administration argue that past approaches to dealing with China havent worked. Its not actually that profitable to negotiate with them. We need to focus on this much bigger trade measure, and then we can really hit them with a very aggressive, forceful action. He seems intent on generating a moment of crisis. We put a $50 billion tariff on, then we put a $100 billion tariff on. And you know at a certain point, they run out of bullets. But dynamics have changed. Today, China sees its economy as strong enough to withstand almost anything the U.S. can throw at it. WASHINGTON By the time Attorney General Jeff Sessions arrived at President Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort for dinner one Saturday evening in March 2017, he had been receiving the presidential silent treatment for two days. Mr. Sessions had flown to Florida because Mr. Trump was refusing to take his calls about a pressing decision on his travel ban. When they met, Mr. Trump was ready to talk but not about the travel ban. His grievance was with Mr. Sessions: The president objected to his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Mr. Trump, who had told aides that he needed a loyalist overseeing the inquiry, berated Mr. Sessions and told him he should reverse his decision, an unusual and potentially inappropriate request. Mr. Sessions refused. The confrontation, which has not been previously reported, is being investigated by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, as are the presidents public and private attacks on Mr. Sessions and efforts to get him to resign. Mr. Trump dwelled on the recusal for months, according to confidants and current and former administration officials who described his behavior toward the attorney general. The special counsels interest demonstrates Mr. Sessionss overlooked role as a key witness in the investigation into whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct the inquiry itself. It also suggests that the obstruction investigation is broader than it is widely understood to be encompassing not only the presidents interactions with and firing of the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, but also his relationship with Mr. Sessions. Over the past two years, you may have seen new signs in cellphone store windows Cellvault. Cellvault was developed in response to mall robberies where cellphone stores were increasingly targeted. In 2015, the year of Cellvaults patent, there were over 650 robberies targeting retailers, such as cellular and jewellery shops. Security personnel at the mobile operators told MyBroadband at the time their stores were an attractive target, as smartphones are high-value and portable. While stolen phones could be blacklisted locally, provided accurate records are kept, that doesnt prevent thieves from fencing their stolen goods elsewhere in the world. Timed-release lockers The idea behind Cellvault is to only expose high-value smartphones when you expect to sell them. Cellvault is a keyless, locker-like safe where the unlocking of compartments is handled off-site. Individual lockers are opened on a time delay, and are monitored. The vaults are manufactured in South Africa and go through extensive testing before they are installed. We are constantly making improvements and changes to the machine to stay one step ahead, a Cellvault spokesperson told MyBroadband. Video surveillance on the machines is linked to offsite surveillance sites, operated through the best independent surveillance companies in South Africa. The price of a Cellvault unit depends on the size of the machine, the order volume, and if extras like asset tracking and smoke solutions are included. Samsungs help Samsung South Africa aided in the development of Cellvault, and said it felt a moral obligation to help its partners deal with the scourge of store robberies. Cellvault gave us the opportunity to provide a solution to protect frontline retail staff as well as partners from risk exposure. This was a national campaign which we were able to roll out in partnership with our network operators, said Samsung. While this may sound utopian, it was really to assist the industry and our partners to enable us to give back. The company said it would not be where it is today were it not for its partners. Cellvault has delivered on every one of their promises, which has helped us to deliver on ours, said Samsung. Robberies Samsung and Cellvault told MyBroadband that the lockers have been extremely successful in preventing robberies. To date, Cellvault has prevented or minimised loss in over 90 incidents, including daytime robberies and burglaries. There have also been numerous incidents when the robbers have left a store after seeing the Cellvault signage. Thanks to the success of the product, a decrease in insurance premiums for stores which use the technology has also been seen. Any store that has the Cellvault solution in place will receive a substantial decrease in insurance, both in terms of premiums as well as excess. Some stores have decreased their insurance by over 70%. Cellvault said that following its success in South Africa, it showcased its product at the International Security Expo in Las Vegas. The response for the product was phenomenal and Cellvault is currently looking to expand into other regions and verticals. 19292018 Rose Marie Horst, 89, passed away peacefully at Queen of the Valley Hospital on May 13, 2018, with family by her side. Rose was born April 20, 1929 in Cheyenne Wyoming and was the eldest of eight children. She met Leonard, her husband of 53 years, in Santa Cruz and they began their life together in Stockton, before later moving to Napa to raise their family. Through hardship Rose remained a strong, yet nurturing, figure and found her greatest pleasure in life through caring for others. As the eldest of eight kids she spent most of her childhood helping to raise her brothers and sisters before having children, and later grandchildren, of her own. She cared deeply for her children: Her youngest son Doug, who passed at the untimely age of 16; her daughter Anne, with whom she visited weekly; and her older son Philip, whom she raised and supported through a challenging developmental disability. Rose was deeply committed to her faith in God and the knowledge of her salvation through Jesus Christ. Her faith gave her much peace to know her path would lead her to heaven, where she would be reunited with her departed husband and youngest son. It makes me cringe that there is a stigma in society where people dislike math so much, he said. But he tells his students: Theres so much beauty to it if you really just take your time and focus on it. Eick, 41, has been teaching for about 10 years. He previously worked in banking and served four years in the U.S. Air Force. A native of Chicago, the military brought him to California, where he was stationed at Travis Air Force Base. The other jobs Ive had, they were good jobs, but they didnt really give me a sense of meaning, he said. I love teaching. I love the challenge of it. It constantly keeps me moving and growing as a person, said Eick. Youre also learning as youre teaching. Its the most rewarding job Ive ever had. Eick doesnt have children of his own. But, he says, he thinks of his students as his family. When they win awards, I feel like its my own kid, he said. I get very emotional because of that. Recently, Eick recommended one of his students for a $4,000 math scholarship, and he won it. Eick was overcome by the news. It was like my own son won the honor, he said. A 25-year-old Fairfield woman was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence after the car she was driving crashed into a telephone pole along Wooden Valley Road on Tuesday night, according to California Highway Patrol. Isle D. Hernandez was driving a 2009 Toyota Corolla eastbound on Wooden Valley Road, east of Highway 121 at about 8:10 p.m. when she allowed the vehicle to hit the pole "due to her intoxicated state," CHP Officer Marc Renspurger said. Hernandez was transported with minor injuries to Queen of the Valley Medical Center. One of Hernandez's passengers, Ruby Bonilla, 24, of Suisun City, was transported with moderate injuries to NorthBay Medical Center in Fairfield. Three other passengers were not injured. All occupants were wearing seat belts, police said. After being treated at the Queen, Hernandez was booked at the Napa County jail on suspicion of DUI causing injury. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Both candidates are going door-to-door, allowing them to gauge voters concerns. Dillon has heard people talk about road conditions, Upvalley traffic and Measure C, the watershed and oak protection initiative. For this election, almost everyone asks about Measure C, Dillon said. Theyre confused. These are serious voters who are uncertain how to vote. Perez has heard questions on issues ranging from Measure C to winery hospitality to traffic to affordable housing. The affordable housing isnt just for low-income, Perez said. Its a lot of having to do with the average workforce thats here in the county. For the record, Dillon is neutral on Measure C and Perez supports Measure C. Most city of Napa residents are seeing little of the Dillon/Perez contest, whether it be mailers or signs. The 3rd District includes only a small portion of the northeast part of the city. Still, whoever is elected will help decide countywide policies on the five-person Board of Supervisors from January 2019 through 2022. Supervisor Brad Wagenknechts 1st District seat, which includes a sizeable portion of the southwest and central city of Napa, is also on the ballot. Wagenknecht is running unopposed. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The Napa County Sheriff's Office is seeking the public's help with a vandalism investigation that began after a sculpture at a residence in St. Helena was spray-painted over Memorial Day weekend, according to the department's Facebook page. Officials said that they are investigating the vandalism of a 10-foot marble sculpture, which holds "significant family history." A crude word was written all over the sculpture in green spray-paint, officials said. The crime occurred sometime between 9 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday. The residents are offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the suspect or suspects. Anyone with information is being asked to call Napa Dispatch at 707-253-4451 and refer to case #NSD18-2276. Anonymous tips can be left with Napa Valley Crime Stoppers by calling 1-800-450-9543, or by texting 274637 with NVCS at the beginning of the tip. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. California this week could take a step closer to having its own net neutrality rules. The state Senate may vote as soon as Tuesday on a bill by State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, which is being touted as the most comprehensive state net neutrality bill in the nation. The Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal Obama-era federal rules protecting net neutrality the principle that all internet traffic should be treated equally in December. The U.S. Senate voted to overturn the FCCs repeal this month, but the effort faces an uphill battle in the House and would have to be approved by President Trump. Trump named Ajit Pai, who led the repeal of the Open Internet Rules, to the chairman position at the FCC. Tragically, after decades of work (on net neutrality)... Donald Trump comes into office and his FCC wipes everything away, Wiener said during a press conference at the Capitol in Sacramento Tuesday, where he was joined by one of the bills co-authors, State Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, and representatives from various advocacy groups that support SB 822. An underwater museum in Turkey gives a glimpse into the fierce battles that took place during WWI, beaches in California are closed after an o In justifying his charge of corruption, Issa described the $800 billion bank bailout launched in 2008 under President George W. Bush as Obamas $800 billion worth of walking-around money with no guidelines. It was an intriguing use of language. Walking-around money, as dictionary.com points out, is also known as street money. Its what Democratic city political machines used to hand out to entice voters think black voters to the polls. Issas inference was that the massive bailout for banks, by some fantastical Obamafied machination, had ended up being spread around city neighborhoods with no guidelines. Yet the FBI was unbothered. Then things got worse. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was accused of dispatching Americans to their deaths in Benghazi. Years of hearings and Republican outrage resulted. Yet not one person was ever charged not even with a misdemeanor. The Republicans piled up mounds of accusations of malfeasance and negligence. Yet where was law enforcement? Why would Dodd act on behalf of Palmaz family? Remember, it was the Palmaz family who made a half million dollar donation for the renovation of Dodd Stadium almost 10 years ago. Add to that the fact that Christian Palmaz donated $8,300 to Dodds campaign fund . Looks like Dodd obviously favors the interests of the wealthy Palmaz family over the rest of us, which is why his arguments should be taken with a grain of salt. Dont be fooled join me and vote yes on D. Daryl Roberts Retired Napa Deputy District Attorney Editor's note: The Register asked Bill Dodd about the matters referred to by the author and he sent the following statement: "Mr. Robert's emotional attachment to Measure D is impacting his memory. In nearly 20 years of public service I've demonstrated my independence. In fact, I voted to levy the largest settlement in Napa's history, $550,000, against Palmaz. When Mr. Roberts has no legitimate arguments, he resorts to personal attacks. The fate of City Hall, the library and other public facilities is now in the hands of the City Council. After seven months of study, the St. Helena Asset Planning Engagement (SHAPE) Committee approved its report to the City Council on May 23. The 117-page document evaluates 11 properties and describes seven possible configurations for four closely interrelated sites: the current City Hall site, the library, the Adams Street property, and the former CDF building/Teen Center on Railroad Avenue. The City Council is scheduled to receive the committees report at its next meeting at 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 14, at Vintage Hall. Instead of making a specific recommendation, the committee agreed to lay out multiple options for the councils considerations. The report gives the council a rough idea of how much each of the seven packages would cost. Each package would produce some revenue to partially offset the cost of construction. Heres a summary of the seven packages for the key properties, including the net amount of new funding that would be required for each one: Package A1 Those who attend this weekends Auction Napa Valley (ANV) will experience something every bit as luxurious and exciting as they could hope for, and a handful of lucky bidders will go home anticipating the experience of a lifetime VIP trip to Dubai, anyone? But for the rest of us, the Napa Valley Vintners (NVV) gala fundraiser promises even richer, more lasting rewards: healthy families, well-educated kids, and a network of nonprofits with the funding and expertise to help us in our times of greatest need. Alycia and Angelina Mondavi, two of the four sisters serving as honorary co-chairs of this years auction, and Patsy McGaughy, communications director for the NVV, gave us a preview of the event, which runs Thursday, May 31 through Saturday, June 2. The Mondavis, the youngest people to ever chair the event, display all the youthful energy youd expect. They come across as smart, hard-working, down-to-earth young women whove organized an event that blends a contemporary sense of style and fun with a deep respect for their own family heritage. Saturdays post-auction dinner, prepared by Chef Nancy Oakes of Boulevard restaurant in San Francisco, features dishes inspired by the Mondavis great-grandmother Rosas own recipes, hand-written in Italian. In its continuous crusade against drug trafficking, Bangladesh security forces have gunned down more than 100 alleged drug peddlers during the last fortnight. In the latest crackdown at least 10 alleged traffickers were gunned down in the wee hours of Tuesday. Also read: Bangladesh launches Philippine-style war against drugs smuggling Bangladesh has launched a major offensive on drugs dealing since mid-May with a view to curb the menacing trade of yaba, a pill combining methamphetamine and caffeine. Yaba tablets are quite popular among the youths in metros of India where it is extensively consumed as a party drug. The Northeast has lately turned into a major corridor for smuggling of this party drug from both Bangladesh and Myanmar. Major consignments are smuggled into Tripura from Bangladesh and the same is then smuggled into major cities across the country. On the other hand, around 12,000 accused dealers have been arrested and tried in special courts since the crackdown began. However, the killings have not gone down with the human rights bodies. The National Human Rights Commission has issued an warning against alleged extrajudicial killings. Bangladesh has been finding it tough to contain the illegal trade in yaba tablets, with the consignments in large quantities sneak into the country from Myanmar. Authorities last year seized a record 40 million yaba tablets. Armenias Pashinyan says Moscow meeting with Russias Putin was productive World oil prices falling Armenia Central Bank announces issuance of collector coin dedicated to 150th birth anniversary of Alexander Spendiaryan Pentagon wants to reduce cost of hypersonic weapons Newspaper: Armenia authorities put forward new notion regarding Artsakh Newspaper: Armenia Special Investigation Service has noteworthy document in criminal case against ex-official Amirabdollahian to Bayramov: Iran, Azerbaijan must block path for misconceptions Catholicos of All Armenians meets with Patriarch Kirill I of Moscow and all Russia Erdogan's spokesperson confirms news about Ankara considering purchasing F-16 fighter jets from US Iran says it has documents confirming transfer of terrorist groups to Azerbaijan Armenia Parliament Speaker receives UNDP "Modern Parliament for a Modern Armenia" Program representatives Iran's Prosecutor General is in Armenia, received by Armenian counterpart Patriarch Kirill: Political interests are disturbing parties to Nagorno-Karabakh conflict from reaching agreement Opposition "Armenia" faction hosts members of AGBU Canada India FM arrives in Yerevan Ceremony commemorating National Hero of Armenia Vahagn Avetisyan was held Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia Armenia Parliament Speaker receives head of ICRC Delegation Digest: Pashinyan is on working visit to Russia, Malkhas Amoyan declared world champion Armenia education, science, culture and sport minister receives newly appointed French Ambassador Putin-Pashinyan meeting kicks off at the Kremlin Armenia high-tech industry minister receives Iran Ambassador Dollar holding relatively steady in Armenia Armenia Parliament Speaker sends condolence message to Georgian counterpart Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II: Armenia will overcome difficult times with Russia's support Putin to hold online meeting with heads of security agencies of CIS countries Andrea Wiktorin: EU ready to be mediator between Armenia and Azerbaijan, if they wish Armenia Parliament Speaker on opening of roads and return of Armenian POWs Displaced residents of Karabakh hold demonstration in front of Russia Embassy in Armenia Turkey President's spokesperson: Biden, Erdogan to discuss Nagorno-Karabakh Taliban says NATO should speak to movement only in language of diplomacy Armenia Parliament Speaker receives Syria Ambassador Historical houses of Armenians in Igdir are perishing Texas governor bans forcing residents of state to vaccinate against COVID-19 Armenia parliamentary opposition boycotts standing committee session Speaker: Only those vaccinated against coronavirus will have right to enter Armenia legislature building Armenias Pashinyan in Russia on working visit Kremlin: Format of Putin-Pashinyan talks implies conversation and working lunch Armenia delegation head: PACE called on Azerbaijan to return all Armenian POWs immediately Armenia ex-Deputy PM and now opposition MP's attorney leaves courtroom as protest against judge's actions Bloomberg says Erdogan will persuade Biden to allow Ankara to buy US military aircraft Armenia former deputy PM and now MP Gevorgyan: Court is holding me captive Armenia opposition MP: PM not guaranteeing Kashatagh, Shushi regions villages will not be under Azerbaijan control Armenia ex-deputy PM, now lawmaker Gevorgyan's lawyer submits 2 motions to court Armenia ex-president Kocharyan, former deputy PM and now MP Gevorgyan criminal case court hearing resumes Pashinyan to Spains Sanchez: I appreciate your country's support for expansion of Armenia-EU partnership Armenia, India FMs to meet Wednesday 903 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Artsakh displaced residents again protesting outside Armenia government building Armenia President in Vatican, meets with head of Pontifical Council for Culture of Holy See Russia citizen stabbed to death in Yerevan Armenia convict, 40, dies in hospital Russia peacekeepers escort Azerbaijan convoys via Karabakh Armenian Assembly of America urges US to reject Turkey request to purchase F-16 fighter jets Armenia, Russia defense ministers discuss Armenian-Azerbaijani border situation Newspaper: Mandatory coronavirus testing of unvaccinated Armenia employees to become 3 times a month instead of 2? Newspaper: Arrested Armenia ex-defense minister Tonoyan keeps silent to save PM Pashinyan Armenia ombudsman: During war Azerbaijanis incurred in border area near Tsav village of Syunik Province ECtHR denies Azerbaijan appeal on blogger Lapshins case Armenia Journalists Union issues statement on Constitutional Court declaring law on insult/defamation constitutional Aravot.am: Gyumri woman who killed her mother with psychotropic drugs, attempted suicide is arrested for 2 months Spiritual leaders of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan to discuss peacemaking initiative in South Caucasus Iran test-launches 'Majid' short-range and low-altitude air defense system Putin, Merkel and Macron discuss Ukraine Karabakh Prosecutor General's Office on case of murder of citizen by Azerbaijani side Court renders decision on Armenia Police's unlawful actions against Armenian citizen Argishti Kiviryan Armenia PM's Chief of Staff attends event dedicated to International Architects' Day The ARARAT Museum of the Yerevan Brandy Company hosted the Awards Ceremony of the Golden Apricot Participants of motorcade of six cars in Moscow start firing gunshots, Armenia citizens arrested Political consultations between the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Armenia and Denmark Armenia ruling faction MP: Turkish textiles need to be replaced with Russian ones Armenian deputy minister: There are companies in Armenia that manufacture items for Russian military planes Armenia justice minister says government will remove unjust judges from the judiciary Karabakh President signs law on making amendments to legislation on weapons Armenia President visits St. Peter's Basilica at Vatican, lays flowers at statue of St. Gregory of Narek Armenia President meets with Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin Armenia President meets with Pope Francis Iran's Prosecutor General to arrive in Armenia at invitation of Armenian counterpart Armenia high-tech industry minister receives Sweden Ambassador Armenia Deputy PM Suren Papikyan to leave for Moscow Digest: Pashinyan and Putin scheduled to meet, more on COVID-19 in Armenia Armenia State Revenue Committee chief meets with UAE State Audit Institution president Superior command inspects engineering work at Armenia army positions Iran MFA spokesman: We have never closed our airspace to Azerbaijan Artsakh ombudsman: Occupied Hadrut undeniable proof of Azerbaijan hatred, ethnic cleansing policy against Armenians Azerbaijan, Turkey FMs confer on regional situation Armenia to host French-Armenian Scientific-Medical Conference to help those affected by the war Iran FM to visit Azerbaijan, media report One dollar falls below AMD 479 in Armenia Union of Banks of Armenia has new board chairman Russian architect: Old Yerevan is about to perish, while Gyumri is being reborn 3 Azerbaijanis cause mass deaths of residents of Russia's Orenburg Karabakh Armenian architect: It's impossible to cooperate with Azerbaijan in culture sector UAE State Audit Institution president arrives in Armenia at invitation of justice minister Mutalibov: Karabakh Armenians will have right to live there if they adopt Azerbaijan citizenship Ambassador to finance minister: Sweden ready to continue assisting in Armenia reforms Russia architect: Many monuments in Karabakh are now under threat of destruction Turkey court orders interior ministry to pay close to $112k to Hrant Dinks family Catholicos of All Armenians heading for Moscow, will meet with religious leaders of Russia and Azerbaijan Armenia prosecutor's office to be consistent in investigating Artsakh residents murder, gross violation of ceasefire Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/TNS via Getty Images(ST. LOUIS, Mo.) -- According to local reporters, Missouris lieutenant governor Mike Parson told a crowd last month, No one elected official is larger than the state of Missouri. None." This week, it seemed Parson was right. Missouris current governor Eric Greitens, facing escalating criminal investigations into his campaign and personal life and possible impeachment, announced his resignation Tuesday, leaving Parson to be sworn in to lead the state at the end of the week. It takes hard work and sometimes you have to work a little harder to get through tough times, Parson went on at that event last month, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune. With the scandals, controversies and charges that have swirled around the statehouse during Greitens tenure, the next few months and years for Parson, a Republican like Greitens, will undoubtedly be tough, but James Harris, who consulted for Parsons 2016 campaign, said he is up for the task. He is the kind of person you throw into the deep end of the pool, Harris told ABC News Wednesday, complementing Parson. He will lead the state. Unlike Greitens, who was brand new to politics and governing when he took the helm, Parson is a seasoned and more traditional politician. He is often described as a "true conservative" and hard-worker. He served as a state legislator for a dozen years before assuming his current role. He was the Sheriff of Polk County from 1993-2005 before running for the statehouse and served six years in the U.S. Army as a younger man. Parson was raised on a farm and still currently owns and operates a cow and calf operation, according to his official biography. The Kansas City Star reported that that the lieutenant governor was out on his farm Tuesday when he received official word that Greitens was stepping down. Whereas Greitens was seen by some as combative and, at times, confrontational, Parson has a reputation for being more of a dealmaker. Gregg Keller, a Republican political strategist in the state, said Parson still maintains strong relationships with state legislators on both sides of the aisle. Keller, who was not shy on the phone about his thoughts of Greitens ( he said he thought the outgoing governor struggled with a serious personality disorder) described Parson as humble. Parson and Greitens ran separately in 2016, as governors and lieutenants always do in the state. Missouri has a history of even electing top officials from two different parties in years past. Still, though pressure had been mounting for months for Greitens to resign and other Republicans in the state were called for him to step down, Parson largely remained quiet and tried to put his head down. It could be hard moving forward for him to shake the shadow of his predecessor while he finishes the term that extends through 2020. Democrats have already made clear that they plan to continue to run against Greitens, his shortcomings and issues, and try to tie those close to his administration to the allegations against him. There is frankly, a lot of relief that the Greitens debacle is behind us, strategist Keller continued. There has been a sense with some Republicans in Missouri and in Washington that Greitens resignation may now help clear the road for other members of the party on ballots in the state in November who had been dogged by all the drama. That sigh you hear is Republicans in Missouri and elsewhere rejoicing at Greitens unexpected decision to quit, Dave Helling, a columnist for the local Kansas City Star wrote after Greitens announcement Tuesday. In his column, headlined, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens resignation a relief for beleaguered Republican,' Helling said Parson seemed ready for the task at hand. Parson will assume office as the states General Assembly is finishing up a budget and bill review process. Republicans have supermajorities in both state legislative chambers. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. I can describe this as a process of the return of the power to the people. Also, this was a change of power at the will of the residents of the country, as well as a nonviolent velvet, peoples revolution. The process and my election to the post of Prime Minister have been within the framework of the Constitution and laws of Armenia. New Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan stated the aforesaid in an interview with Deutsche Welle (DW) TV and radio company of Germany, and when asked how can one describe what has happened in Armenia in recent times. Though, this revolution cannot be called [a] color, [revolution], Pashinyan added. Its assumed that there is a great geopolitical subtext behind such a change of power, whereas in our case this was an internal process that started in the Republic of Armenia by the will of the people. For us this is a matter of national dignity, and for meof personal dignity. And I dont believe that someone from outside () should have resolved the internal political matters of Armenia. In response to the query as to whether the revolutions that have taken place in the past in the other republics of the ex-USSR were different, Pashinyan noted as follows: Of course. After those revolutions we saw changes in the foreign policy of those countries. But we said that we will continue Armenias [current] foreign policy (). And to the question as to why in Armenias case Russian President Vladimir Putin did not get involved in the events taking place in the country, the new Armenian PM responded as follows: Armenia is Armenia. I believe the main peculiarity of our country is that we treat our sovereignty with great concern. Armenia is a peaceful country, we are a peace-loving nation, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told DW. "I hope that you haven't noticed any aggression towards, for example, the European Union, the US, Iran and Georgia and other countries. Of course, when it is required, we can protect ourselves. But we have close relations with Russia, and I am sure that they will become deeper. We have good relations with the EU which we intend to develop further. Also we intend to develop our relations with the US, Iran, Georgia and with all countries which are interested in it," Pashinyan noted. Asked about the impression that Russian President Vladimir Putin left during the Eurasian Economic Union Summit in Sochi on May 14, Pashinyan noted, that there was very pleasant atmosphere. "We spoke only about the Armenian-Russian relations and about the multilateral relations within EAEU and within contracts of the CSTO organization. But we didn't speak about those questions which are related to the relations of Armenia and the European Union, Armenia and the United States and the third countries". The new Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, was the guest of a Russian-language interview program on Deutsche Welle (DW) TV and radio company of Germany. Below is an abridged version of a part of the text of this talk. You visited Nagorno-Karabakh [(Artsakh)] on May 9. Did you raise the topic of Karabakh conflict settlement with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin [in Sochi, Russia]? Of course; we spoke about that too. Its important to stress that the pacific way to resolve the matter is the only avenue which can realistically bring to a resolution. (). Did you reflect on the topic of delivery of arms to Azerbaijan by Russia? Of course yes. We had a constructive discussion in this regard. [But] I cant say what Putin has said about it. What will be your priorities for the development of Armenias economy? (). First, [is] information and high technology development in Armenia. (). The second phase is tourism development. And the third: agriculture. () Do you intend to fight against [Armenias] oligarchs? We intend to guarantee the power of the peopleand not of a group of people; and no one shall obstruct that. But we will not fight against anyone. If we can create such a reality, the problem will be resolved in itself. (). [Snap] parliamentary elections are soon to be held in the country. Parliamentary majority now belongs to the [now former ruling] Republican Party of Armenia, which is opposed to you. How important is it to you who will win? I came to power in a situation when the Republicans had the majority, but they couldnt do anything. And its very important to us: to organize, to have such elections that despite the results, citizens have a sense that they won in those elections. (). If the United States does not supply F-35 stealth fighter jets to the Turkish Air Force, Ankara will satisfy its need for such warplanes "somewhere else," Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Wednesday, Sputnik reported. Turkey may close Incirlik air base for the US, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said. "As regards the F-35 jets, I have no concerns, this contract is legally binding, it cannot be easily terminated. But if these jets are not supplied to Turkey, we will satisfy our needs somewhere else," Cavusoglu said, as quoted by the NTV broadcaster. "There are no reasons why the US will not supply F-35s to us. We do not want to spoil relations with our US ally. The F-35 aircraft should be delivered to Turkey as planned. But in case of problems, Turkey will not be left without an alternative. It may buy [aircraft] both from Russia and from a NATO country. There is an agreement on F-35s, and if one side withdraws from it, the necessary steps will be taken," the minister added. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is on his first official visit to Georgia. At the Tbilisi airport, Pashinyan and his wife, Anna Hakobyan, were met by Mikheil Janelidze, Vice PM and Foreign Minister of Georgia. Pashinyan met with Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili. He also held talks with his Georgian colleague, Giorgi Kvirikashvili. The sides stressed importance of deepening Armenian-Georgian ties. Georgian PM assured that stability and democracy in Armenia are very important to Georgia, and thats why they were closely following the recent events unrolling in Armenia. During the visit, Pashinyan will meet with representatives of the Armenian community of Tbilisi and will attend the events devoted to the centennial of the declaration of the First Republic of Armenia. Protesters demanding resignation of the Yerevan State University rector decided to stop protest actions. We wish health to rector Aram Simonyan, and in support, we are stopping the protest actions, organizer Davit Petrosyan said. A day earlier the students blocked the rectors office, and Aram Simonyan had felt ill. Later it became known that he was hospitalized. If the United States does not supply F-35 stealth fighter jets to the Turkish Air Force, Ankara will satisfy its need for such warplanes somewhere else, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said. He warned Turkey may close Incirlik air base for the United States. In case of problems, Turkey will not be left without an alternative, as it may buy [aircraft] both from Russia and from a NATO member country. Head of Armenian food safety service Ishkhan Karapetyan has handed over his resignation. Representatives of the service said it has not been signed yet. During the governments Cabinet meeting last week, PM Nikol Pashinyan had reprimanded Karapetyan for receiving letters from Rosselkhoznadzor, but he was not aware of that. In response, the SSFS chief had noted that they receive numerous such letters periodically during the year. 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate Doctor Tom Catena will arrive in Yerevan on May 31. Doctor Tom Catena, 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate, will visit Armenia ahead of the 2018 Aurora Prize Award Ceremony and a series of special events. Tom Catena will arrive in Yerevan on May 31 and will start his tour of Armenia and Artsakh. A senior North Korean official was bound for New York for high-level talks with US officials on Tuesday ahead of a possible historic nuclear summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. Trump confirmed the general was on his way in a tweet and boasted that Washington would have a great team for the talks which he still hopes will take place on June 12 in Singapore. YEREVAN. Consultations between the Armenian and Latvian Foreign Ministries were held in Riga. The Armenian delegation was headed by the Deputy Foreign Minister Garen Nazarian, Latvian State Secretary of the Foreign Ministry Andrejs Pildegovics. Armenias Ambassador to Latvia Tigran Mkrtchyan also participated in the meeting. The parties discussed a wide range of issues related to the development of bilateral relations. The sides also stressed the importance of expanding the dialogue in the political and cultural spheres. The importance of intensifying trade and economic relations, as well as ensuring the duration of the work of the intergovernmental Armenian-Latvian commission was emphasized. In the context of Armenia-EU relations, Nazarian noted the fact that the Latvian parliament was one of the first to ratify the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement, expressing hope that in other EU countries the ratification process will go smoothly. He noted that the implementation of the agreement among the priorities of the Armenian government. Nazaryan presented the position of the Armenian side on the Karabakh settlement. Although the constitution of Armenia states that everyone has freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, religious minority groups stated they were particularly concerned with the potentially negative effect on minority religious groups of a draft law on religious freedom, the report by State Department said. On Wednesday the U.S. State Department released the 2017 International Religious Freedom Report. Representatives of Christian minority religious groups said they continued to worship freely; however, some Christians said they felt obligated to practice their religion discreetly, particularly while serving in the military. Human rights activists continued to express concern about the governments concurrence with the Armenian Apostolic Churchs dissemination of teaching in schools that often equated AAC affiliation with national identity. According to minority religious groups and NGOs, government statements equating national identity to affiliation with the AAC continued to fuel both governmental and societal discrimination against religious organizations other than the AAC, the report says. Unlike the previous year, the Jehovahs Witnesses reported no instances of societal physical harassment against its members; there were 10 instances of verbal harassment, down from 17 the previous year. Jehovahs Witnesses attributed the decrease to prompt police action. According to a Pew Research Center survey published in May, 82 percent of respondents agreed with the statement It is important to be part of the AAC to truly share the national identity of the country. According to Christian minority religious groups and NGOs, the media climate continued to improve for minority religious groups compared with previous years, becoming more balanced and accurate; however, Jehovahs Witnesses reported instances of negative reports in the media. The U.S. Ambassador and other embassy officials continued to promote religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue during meetings with government officials. Embassy officers met with AAC leaders to engage the AAC in supporting the rights of religious minorities to practice their faith without restrictions. SIU hosts the 2018 Illinois Cooperative Council Youth Conference next week by Hannah Erickson CARBONDALE, Ill High school students from across the state will gather next week at Southern Illinois University Carbondale to learn about and gain first-hand experience with a variety of cooperative businesses. The College of Agricultural Sciences, in collaboration with the Illinois Cooperative Council, hosts the 2018 Cooperative Youth Conference on June 7-8. This event will give students a behind-the-scenes look into several cooperative businesses, along with practical training to equip them for future careers. The Illinois Cooperative Council is proud to continue its tradition of partnership with SIU and the College of Agricultural Sciences in hosting students on campus to learn more about the cooperative business model. For two days, high school students from mainly rural areas of the state participate in group activities and visit local cooperative businesses to better understand how co-ops contribute to local economies and provide a variety of products and services based on the needs of the members, Beth Bolger, co-chair for the Illinois Cooperative Council, said. A variety of activities and experiences With the help of many generous sponsors, the camp will feature a variety of interesting events which include: Scavenger hunt across the SIU Carbondale campus. Scheduled Student Recreation Center time. Live wire demonstration from the Southern Illinois Power Cooperative. Guided tour and teaching through the Neighborhood Co-op Grocery. Group presentations on the eight fundamentals of cooperatives. Various events to win co-op dollars. A taste of college life The camp will also allow students to experience a bit of the college life by exploring the area and staying in campus housing. Present and past SIU students will chaperone during these times, while faculty and staff serve as instructors. Camp is also for high school agriculture teachers While the students are learning new things, high school agriculture teachers from across the state will also gather for special trainings and workshops. This will allow students to continue their education regarding cooperatives when high school classes resume in the fall. Students from schools including Mount Vernon Township High School, Carbondale Community High School and other more rural areas of the state will participate. Registration is still open, but spots are filling fast. You can find more information on the Southern Illinois University website or register directly online at http://illinois.coop/youth-conference/2018-registration/. To learn more For additional information, contact Jackie Welch at 618/536-7751 or email jackiew@siu.edu. 1. Yes. The medical data shows it will be beneficial to get one. The sooner the better. 2. Yes. Theres no rush, but I plan to get one sometime in the next few months. 3. No. Im not sold on the need for a booster. Besides, the case numbers are falliing. 4. No. I havent been vaccinated for COVID-19, and I dont plan to get the booster, either. 5. Unsure. It may be smart to wait and see how beneficial the booster shots prove to be. Vote View Results Killeen, TX (76540) Today Cloudy skies this evening followed by scattered showers and thunderstorms overnight. Gusty winds and small hail are possible. Low 73F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%.. Tonight Cloudy skies this evening followed by scattered showers and thunderstorms overnight. Gusty winds and small hail are possible. Low 73F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%. THE vj??? Reply Thread Link I know how you can fix racism in america Reply Thread Link Ah damn, Henry with a moustache Reply Parent Thread Link Plus that stance walking into the whole thing. Good lawd, the vapors...... so fucking hot. Reply Parent Thread Link i can't tell if this gif is supposed to be facetious. i see a white man punching an asian man. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Im watching. It's pretty interesting. Reply Thread Link Lol. Even trump didnt defend rosanne in his rally tonight. Hope she feels sad and alone! Reply Thread Link I'm genuinely surprised he didn't mention it lol whelp Reply Parent Thread Link Of course he didnt mention it, he thinks the exact same thing. Not speaking about it is Trumps way of co-signing it. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I dunno, it's still early. And we know how much he loves late-night tweeting. Reply Parent Thread Link Um... what??? Joy Reid Miss Homophobia??? Why the fuck is she on here? WHAT!?!? Reply Thread Link lmao mte Reply Parent Thread Link she said she was hacked repeatedly and gave some wack excuse/apology i guess people bought it Reply Parent Thread Link lmao i can't believe people bought it like just say 'yeah i was dead ass wrong and i'm deeply sorry for what i said and the hurt i caused. i am not that person any more and now i advocate for the rights of LGBT individuals'. Reply Parent Thread Link that was the russians Reply Parent Thread Link it's okay, she hates trump so being a homophobic boot licker is fine Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I really thought there was some good dialogue during this Reply Thread Link Yeah, there were definitely some very sad moments. But it was very real to life, and I appreciated that POC were leading the dialogue. It was also a very multi-faceted discussion, going in depth about how racism is built into this country's institutions. I really hope it opened up some eyes and that the stories resonate Reply Parent Thread Link Yeah but what Im really waiting for on ONTD is the Drake post. Lets go, yall. I love the tweet unless you got laid off today, Drake definitely had a worse day than you lmfao Reply Thread Link Wait what happened??? Reply Parent Thread Link Did you see the blackface????? Reply Parent Thread Link pusha TEA sjsjsjs Reply Parent Thread Link Her son is a shit stain as well. Reply Thread Link ABC canceled Roseannes show over a racist tweet. Her feed has been full of racism and conspiracy theories for a decade. https://t.co/qL3iYUI7s9 Vox (@voxdotcom) May 29, 2018 Reply Thread Link I still cannot reconcile how she was able to make the original Roseanne so progressive and have these views. I wonder did she always hold these views? Or did this develop after? Reply Thread Link Like someone else pointed on Twitter, it's easy to be progressive when you have a writer's room, turning her shit into gold by adding nuance. You could see the shift in her materialism during the last couple seasons. Roseanne, the character, stopped struggling quite as much. It was still not great but having the restaurant seemed to make the character less internal, less self-reflection. Reply Parent Thread Link She was super liberal back in the day. Dont know what the hell happened. Reply Parent Thread Link I remember her cameo on the good wife. Im going to be honest, I didnt realize she was black. Also very random for Roseanne to mention her in the first place right? Its so crazy to me how right wingers decide which liberal to make villains of.... at least when liberals do it about trump admin officials there is a crime trail... Reply Thread Link Ok guys this is slightly OT. My black friend is convinced Roseanne isnt a racist because she has black people on her show. She also is convinced everyone says racist things. I was like what the fuck. Reply Thread Link I get what she's saying but it's still so fucking sad that she or any other black woman always has to be some teachable moment for a racist POS. I've been at home all night watching the news and it's every leading story. They should tie this into how Trump has only emboldened racists and tie it into what is probably about 5000 deaths in Puerto Rico that Trump does not give a fuck about. Reply Thread Link Its breaks my heart that people still dont care about Puerto Rico. Reply Parent Thread Link I'll try to check this out. I've got my white lady at work who's all up in arms about this, but has said casually racist stuff since we started working together. I love when things like this happen because then I can be all "just another day with racism" and finally shut her up. Reply Thread Link I guess Reply Thread Link fuck them both Reply Thread Link Oh I'm sure that this will go well and things will change. Reply Thread Link like her sister ended police violence, kim is the perfect person to consolidate trump on prison reform jfc.. Reply Parent Thread Link khloe changed the cosmetics industry bc she took it to capitol hill! Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Maybe Kim will starting trying to get her followers to wear the Ivanka Trump line. Reply Parent Thread Link Really? Really? Both these scamming heffas are not the people who need to speak about prison reform. Kim save your money on this trip and just donate to The Charity Formerly Known as Donda's House Reply Thread Link Seriously. what fucking planet alignment can i blame this day on? Reply Thread Link Gemini season Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Aw man, you beat me to it. Reply Parent Thread Link woah! back up! dont blame us!! Reply Parent Thread Expand Link yep Reply Parent Thread Link America, since it is apparently a planet/the world. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Uranus just entered Taurus Reply Parent Thread Link This is the America we deserve! Idiocracy has never felt more real or relevant than it does now :/ Reply Thread Link IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE A DOCUMENTARY Reply Parent Thread Link ITS ALL TOO MUCH, WTF IS HAPPENING? Reply Parent Thread Link nobody deserves this. this is what happens when we suffer fools for too damn long. Reply Parent Thread Link Whew Reply Thread Link She should take Kris with her tho! If anyone knows how to deal with an egomaniacal reality tv star its her.. Reply Thread Link SLIMTEA AND APPETITE SUPPRESSING LOLLIPOPS FOR EVERY INMATE Y'ALL!!! America's truly digging it's own grave deeper and deeper every damn day smh Edited at 2018-05-30 07:25 am (UTC) Reply Thread Link Oprah 2020 tho Reply Parent Thread Link Yes lets have more billionaires that are out of touch with the real world running the White House that sounds like a great plan Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Girl no. Reply Parent Thread Link she said she doesn't have the dna for it. which sounds kind of creepy because if she does a 180 and decides to run, imma be like... "so where'd you get the dna from?" Reply Parent Thread Link This is the bad place Reply Parent Thread Link lmao it was a bad timeline when these were your options Reply Parent Thread Link ACCURATE Reply Parent Thread Link REVEALED: June cover star @YaraShahidi is a millennial on a mission. Read our interview with the teenage actor and activist who uses her platform to connect communities and foster equality https://t.co/at4vq2IKkz #HarpersBazaarArabia #YaraShahidi pic.twitter.com/LqEcvZPRKh HarpersBazaarArabia (@BazaarArabia) May 29, 2018 - The author praises her depth of knowledge, vocabulary, poise, intelligence. Describes Yara as "playful and carefree, contemplative and considered."- Her parents have taught her about her heritage through literature, television, and conversation, providing a strong sense of self and community for Yara- Comments on being expected to be a representative of her entire community; was asked to explain the Iran nuclear deal to someone when she was only 14- She set up Yaras Club in partnership with The Young Womens Leadership School that brings high school students together to discuss social issues and how to take action, and launched Eighteenx18, a platform to encourage her peers to vote for the very first time in the upcoming US midterm elections on November 6.- Feels connected to the global community and speaks a lot on inclusivity, representation, and the intersections of humanity- Yara's cousin is Anousheh Ansari, the first Iranian-American astronaut and the first female private space explorer. "My Iranian relatives have reaffirmed the idea that the sky is the limit but in fact, my cousin proved that the sky isnt even the limit because she went to space!"more pics at the source sources that thumbnail Reply Thread Link this gif always makes me laugh, he's so cute here. Reply Parent Thread Link it was a choice Reply Parent Thread Link I want some fun new nail polish but the cheap brands I've been buying are not cutting it. I wish we had Barry M here. That lewkI want some fun new nail polish but the cheap brands I've been buying are not cutting it. I wish we had Barry M here. Reply Thread Link minus Snow those were all my faves growing up too. Mulan is probably my favorite "princess" movie Reply Parent Thread Link Aurora was always my favorite because of her beautiful blonde hair! I'm a brunette so I was always so jealous. Reply Parent Thread Link She looks ridiculous. Reply Thread Link This sure is...something Reply Thread Link So... I'm a guy and I don't want to wear make-up but I have very fair, delicate skin that gets red really easily. Any advice for me, ONTD? Reply Thread Link get you some centella asiatica/cica products -- super good at dealing with redness l'oreal's cica cream is p decent I'm enjoying it also, SUNSCREEN UP Reply Parent Thread Link Never heard of this, I'm gonna have to go to Sephora tomorrow lol And yeah, sunscreen. Trust me, I'm almost a redhead so I learned reaaaal young to use sunscreen and avoid the sun at all cost lmao Reply Parent Thread Expand Link BB cream, sunscreen Reply Parent Thread Expand Link can try a green primer. I think smashbox carries one. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link you could try a green color correcting primer, that might help. try looking for products that help decrease redness. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I second the Centella Asiatica rec and would also suggest you look at other anti-redness creams. That and sunscreen first and if that doesn't help then I would say buy a tube of concealer. You don't need to put foundation everywhere, just a few spots is what you could start with. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I use Bare Minerals (Im a boy) and its the perfect coverage, doesnt look like I have anything on, and takes 90% of the red out of my skin! Its also made for delecate/sensitive skin and doesnt break me out. If you go to sephora theyll probably give you a sample! Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Also of course a proper skincare routine is #1 key if you want to actually get the red out of your face. I use Drunk elephant products. Bare minerals is also spf 15 <3 Reply Parent Thread Expand Link This just makes me uncomfortable Reply Thread Link Go away. Reply Thread Link omg I thought it was a drag queen tutorial when I saw a clip of it on my instagram. didn't know it was kim kardashian Edited at 2018-05-30 07:44 pm (UTC) Reply Thread Link The eyebrows make me feel weird. She looks like she might cry Reply Thread Link she looks like she's being held hostage in the last few seconds of the video Reply Parent Thread Link Yeah thanks Kim for going to the white house and getting your photo op and press while trump/sessions still push racist policies. Reply Thread Link Is she racially ambiguous enough to be Jasmine? Are Armenians Persians and/or Arabs? And is it really what she wants to do when she's all about prison reform and Aladdin was a street rat and a lying thief? I have so many questions. Reply Thread Link nah they're not persian or arab but kim did look super persian before all her surgeries imo Reply Parent Thread Link I get what you're saying but I've never been able to view those corny Disney musicals as anything other than ultra American Reply Parent Thread Link She looks vaguely Persian/Middle Eastern, sure. But she ain't. Reply Parent Thread Link There are a lot of Persian Armenians out there, I'm one of them but her dad is straight up from Armenia. Reply Parent Thread Link lol why did she made her eyebrows like that?? Reply Thread Link lol Reply Parent Thread Link OH JEEZ Reply Thread Link Ghostbusters' Harold Ramis Fathered a Secret Daughter with Director of Clueless, Book Claims https://t.co/TSQRfJnQIz People (@people) May 30, 2018 Violet Ramis Stiel, daughter of Harold Ramis, claims in her bookthat her father had another child while still married to her mother Anne Plotkin. Though the couple was separated at the time, Ramis had already begun a relationship with Erica Mann (not the baby's mother), whom Ramis later married and had two additional children with.Violet was 8 years old when Ramis took her to meet Amy Heckerling (director,and) at the hospital where she had given birth to Violet's half-sister, Mollie Heckerling. Amy was married towriter Neal Israel at the time of Mollie's birth.It was Israel who later told Mollie the truth about her biological father.Mollie connected with Ramis as an adult and said they had great rapport and "were so alike in so many basic ways our tastes, our mannerisms, our outlook on things, so it really was kind of nice."Her only regret is not being more present in his life before he died in 2014; she did not fight to be with him as much as she could have because "you feel as though youre kind of a reminder to them of something that they did that theyre not proud of." Japan is weighing high-level, direct talks with North Korea, potentially an August meeting between the two countries' foreign ministers, local media said Wednesday. The idea, which Tokyo officials declined to confirm, was reported by major local media as preparations appear back on track for an unprecedented summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The talks could take place on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum in August in Singapore, the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper said citing unnamed government sources. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga declined to confirm the reports. "We are aware of the media reports. Nothing has been decided, including whether or not the minister would attend the ASEAN related meetings," he told a regular press conference. Kyodo News agency, also citing unnamed sources, said Tokyo has sounded out Pyongyang on a proposal for Foreign Minister Taro Kono to meet his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong Ho. Japanese officials, however, would first evaluate the outcome of the expected US-North Korea summit before pushing for the potential ministerial talks, Kyodo and Mainichi said. The last ministerial-level talks between Tokyo and Pyongyang were in 2015, also on the sidelines of an ASEAN meeting. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has maintained a hard line against the North, calling for continued sanctions and a maximum-pressure campaign on Pyongyang. But he has also said Japan will need to eventually hold direct talks with North Korea to resolve an emotional row over abductions of Japanese nationals by Pyongyang. Trump had been scheduled to meet Kim in Singapore on June 12, but the meeting was thrown into doubt after the US leader said he was cancelling it. Since then, meetings to prepare for the talks have resumed. Abe will meet Trump on June 7 to discuss the talks and stress the importance of the abduction issue for Tokyo. Phuket, 30 May 2018 Breeze Spa at Amari Phuket welcomes the green season with an Exclusive Spa Deal for Two promotion available from 1 June to 31 July 2018. The promotion is priced at 4,500 THB nett for two persons (the normal price is 5,800 THB nett). Each guest will enjoy a 90-minute spa treatment with two options a 90-minute mood massage or a 30-minute body scrub and a 60-minute mood massage. There are five signature mood massages Dreamy, Serene, Rejuvenated, Invigorated and Energised. There are also two body scrubs available to select, namely Jasmine N Melon Scrubbing Mask and Mango Sticky Rice Body Scrub. With these treatments, guests will have a satiny smooth skin and smell and feel refreshed. Amari Phukets Breeze Spa is open daily from 11:00 to 21:00. For more information, please call +66 (0) 7634 0106-14 ext. 8809, email phuket@breeze-spa.com or visit www.breeze-spa.com/amari-phuket. Address: Amari Phuket, 2 Muen-ngern Road, Patong Beach, Kathu, Phuket 83150 Infographic showing study sites. Credit: Bob Wilder/University at Buffalo When and how did the first people come to the Americas? The conventional story says that the earliest settlers came via Siberia, crossing the now-defunct Bering land bridge on foot and trekking through Canada when an ice-free corridor opened up between massive ice sheets toward the end of the last ice age. But with recent archaeological evidence casting doubt on this thinking, scientists are seeking new explanations. One dominant, new theory: The first Americans took a coastal route along Alaska's Pacific border to enter the continent. A new geological study provides compelling evidence to support this hypothesis. By analyzing boulders and bedrock, a research team led by the University at Buffalo shows that part of a coastal migration route became accessible to humans 17,000 years ago. During this period, ancient glaciers receded, exposing islands of southern Alaska's Alexander Archipelago to air and sunand, possibly, to human migration. The timing of these events is key: Recent genetic and archaeological estimates suggest that settlers may have begun traveling deeper into the Americas some 16,000 years ago, soon after the coastal gateway opened up. The research will be published online on May 30 in the journal Science Advances. "People are fascinated by these questions of where they come from and how they got there," says lead scientist Jason Briner, Ph.D., professor of geology in UB's College of Arts and Sciences. "Our research contributes to the debate about how humans came to the Americas. It's potentially adding to what we know about our ancestry and how we colonized our planet." "Our study provides some of the first geologic evidence that a coastal migration route was available for early humans as they colonized the New World," says UB geology Ph.D. candidate Alia Lesnek, the study's first author. "There was a coastal route available, and the appearance of this newly ice-free terrain may have spurred early humans to migrate southward." University at Buffalo Ph.D. candidate Alia Lesnek works at Suemez Island. Credit: Jason Briner The findings do not mean that early settlers definitely traversed Alaska's southern coast to spread into the Americas: The project examined just one section of the coast, and scientists would need to study multiple locations up and down the coastline to draw firmer conclusions. Still, the work is exciting because it hints that the seafaring theory of migration is viable. The bones of an ancient ringed sealpreviously discovered in a nearby cave by other researchersprovide further, tantalizing clues. They hint that the area was capable of supporting human life at the time that early settlers may have been passing through, Briner says. The new study calculates that the seal bones are about 17,000 years old. This indicates that the region was ecologically vibrant soon after the ice retreated, with resources including food becoming available. Co-authors on the research included Briner; Lesnek; Charlotte Lindqvist, Ph.D., an associate professor of biological sciences at UB and a visiting associate professor at Nanyang Technological University; James Baichtal of Tongass National Forest; and Timothy Heaton, Ph.D., of the University of South Dakota. A landscape, touched by ice, that tells a story To conduct their study, the scientists journeyed to four islands within the Alexander Archipelago that lie about 200 miles south/southeast of Juneau. The team traveled by helicopter to reach these remote destinations. As soon as the researchers arrived, Briner knew that the islands had once been covered by ice. "The landscape is glacial," he says. "The rock surfaces are smooth and scratched from when the ice moved over it, and there are erratic boulders everywhere. When you are a geologist, it hits you in the face. You know it immediately: The glacier was here." To pinpoint when the ice receded from the region, the team collected bits of rock from the surfaces of boulders and bedrock. Later, the scientists ran tests to figure out how long the samplesand thus the islands as a wholehad been free of ice. University at Buffalo geologist Jason Briner collecting rock samples on Dall Island, Southeast Alaska. The samples, collected from mountain summits directly facing the Pacific Ocean (pictured in the background), were used to determine when Ice Age glaciers retreated from the area, making it available as a migration route. Credit: Charlotte Lindqvist The researchers used a method called surface exposure dating. As Lesnek explains, "When land is covered by a glacier, the bedrock in the area is hidden under ice. As soon as the ice disappears, however, the bedrock is exposed to cosmic radiation from space, which causes it to accumulate certain chemicals on their surface. The longer the surface has been exposed, the more of these chemicals you get. By testing for these chemicals, we were able to determine when our rock surfaces were exposed, which tells us when the ice retreated. "We use the same dating method for huge boulders called erratics. These are big rocks that are plucked from the Earth and carried to new locations by glaciers, which actually consist of moving ice. When glaciers melt and disappear from a specific region, they leave these erratics behind, and surface exposure dating can tell us when the ice retreated." For the region that was studied, this happened roughly 17,000 years ago. The case for a coastal migration route In recent years, evidence has mounted against the conventional thinking that humans populated North America by taking an inland route through Canada. To do so, they would have needed to walk through a narrow, ice-free ribbon of terrain that appeared when two major ice sheets started to separate. But recent research suggests that while this path may have opened up more than 14,000 years ago, it did not develop enough biological diversity to support human life until about 13,000 years ago, Briner says. That clashes with archaeological findings that suggest humans were already living in Chile about 15,000 years ago or more and in Florida 14,500 years ago. The coastal migration theory provides an alternative narrative, and the new study may mark a step toward solving the mystery of how humans came to the Americas. "Where we looked at it, the coastal route was not only openit opened at just the right time," Lindqvist says. "The timing coincides almost exactly with the time in human history that the migration into the Americas is thought to have occurred." Explore further Spear points prove early inhabitants liked to travel More information: A.J. Lesnek el al., "Deglaciation of the Pacific coastal corridor directly preceded the human colonization of the Americas," Science Advances (2018). Journal information: Science Advances A.J. Lesnek el al., "Deglaciation of the Pacific coastal corridor directly preceded the human colonization of the Americas,"(2018). advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/5/eaar5040 Two nestmates of the temperate genus Formica sharing food. Most ant species live in the tropics, but understanding why has been a challenge. Credit: Benoit Guenard It's a puzzle that has confounded biologists for centuries: the earth's tropical regions are home to an enormous variety of plant and animal species, but as you travel north or south, away from the equator, the level of diversity dwindles. Scientists don't know why biodiversity tends to concentrate around tropical regions, but they have put forward several hypotheses. One states that higher latitudes cannot support high biodiversity because of a lack of sunlight and heat. Another proposes that increased solar radiation in tropical latitudes could result in higher mutation rates there. Yet a third points out that the colder ecosystems of earth are younger than their equatorial equivalents. During a period of rapid global cooling called the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, which occurred 34 million years ago, the planet's tropical habitats shrank dramatically toward the equator, while ice sheets grew at the poles. These newer, colder habitats have simply not existed long enough for as many species to accumulate as they have in the tropics, some scientists say. A global map showing the number of ant species (SR- Species Richness) that can be found in different areas of the world. Tropical areas around the equator have higher numbers of ant species than cooler parts of the planet. Red indicates the highest diversity while dark blue shows lowest diversity. Credit: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University - OIST Attempts to study this puzzle have involved comparing the number of species in several plant and animal groups, such as trees, birds and mammals, across distinct regions of the planet. But tallying species from Borneo to Belgium has yet to deliver concrete answers about why regional differences in diversity exist at all. A team led by Prof. Evan Economo of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) set out to address this discrepancy with ants. While most studies up to now have focused on vertebrates like mammals and birds, ants offer a global, closely related group to examine. "They're found almost everywhere on the planet, they're ecologically dominant, and they are well-documented, at least for an insect group," said Prof. Economo. "This makes them a good example of invertebrates to compare with other vertebrate groups." Specimens like this played a key role in identifying what species of ants are found in different areas of the planet. Credit: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University - OIST In a recent study published in Nature Communications, he and his colleagues painstakingly catalogued the global distribution of all 14,912 ant species. The process took years and involved poring through more than 9000 publications, museum databases and online repositories to define which ant species occur where in the world. Prof. Economo is leading this effort along with Dr. Benoit Guenard, a former postdoc in his lab who is now an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong. "Benoit was very determined to get these data together," said Prof. Economo. "He supervised a team of assistants digitizing data from papers during workdays, and spent his own nights, weekends, holidays entering data. It was an obsession, but the job couldn't have gotten done otherwise." Complementing this mammoth task, the researchers also recreated a phylogeny of all the ant species that maps how current species and their ancestors are related to each other. To do so, they combined all the available genetic data and used computational models to infer a "tree of life" diagram that shows the ancestral relationships between species. Additional data were gathered from 500 extinct species of ants that had been identified from fossils preserved in amber or compressed in rocks. This allowed the authors to date ancestors of modern tropical and temperate ant species and gain insight into past levels of diversity and the latitudes at which they occurred. (You can check out the data yourself on their website, antmaps.org) These analyses revealed that the rate at which new species arise is highly variable, but is not higher near the equator. Rather, the paper suggests, tropical areas have had a much longer time to accumulate the diversity we see today, and given enough time, we could expect to see the same happen in other parts of the world. "This new data from ants can help to test theories about large scale patterns in ecology," said Prof. Economo. Economo and Guenard also want to use it to guide conservation efforts by identifying important areas for insect biodiversity. Says Economo, "We are just now getting a first look at large-scale patterns of insect diversity." Explore further Unravelling the costs of rubber agriculture on biodiversity More information: Evan P. Economo et al. Macroecology and macroevolution of the latitudinal diversity gradient in ants, Nature Communications (2018). Journal information: Nature Communications Evan P. Economo et al. Macroecology and macroevolution of the latitudinal diversity gradient in ants,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04218-4 Irish soft-coated wheaten terrier. Credit: Lohi research group A gene for canine congenital eye disease has been identified by a collaborative research led by Professor Hannes Lohi's research group in the University of Helsinki. Defective RBP4 leads to vitamin A deficiency and abnormal eye development during pregnancy. The study defines a novel recessive mode of maternal inheritance, which may underlie other types of birth defects. Collaborating research groups from the University of Helsinki, UC Davis and the University of Jyvaskyla describe a new genetic cause for canine congenital eye disease in Irish Soft-Coated Wheaten Terriers. The affected dogs suffer from bilateral microphthalmia i.e. very small eyes and anatomical defects, resulting in incurable blindness. Similar findings are seen in the Microphthalmia-Anophthalmia-Coloboma (MAC) spectrum of human congenital eye malformations, which are important causes of childhood blindness. "This is the first dog model for MAC disorder and may help to understand the human disease," says DVM Maria Kaukonen, first author of the study and a Ph.D. student in the University of Helsinki. RBP4 defect leads to vitamin A deficiencya known risk factor for eye diseases The genetic and functional analyses revealed a deletion mutation in the RBP4 gene. The encoded protein (RBP) binds vitamin A and transfers it from liver to other tissues. Vitamin A transport is essential during the pregnancy, as the lack of this nutrient causes abnormal eye development. During pregnancy, the fetus receives vitamin A through the placenta. "The mutation changes RBP structure, so that the protein is secreted abnormally from liver and does not function. This greatly reduces RBP and vitamin A levels in bloodstream," says Professor Tom Glaser from UC Davis, a co-corresponding author of the study. RPB4 has been implicated in human MAC disease. The study demonstrates once again the clinical and genetic similarity of human and canine eye disorders. Unprecedented mode of maternal inheritance The study demonstrates a novel recessive mode of genetic inheritance, which has not described before. The researchers discovered that the dam's genotype determines the puppy's disease risk as both the dam and puppy must be homozygous for the mutation to manifest the disease. "Interestingly, the disease is apparent only when both the puppy and mother are homozygous for the RBP4 mutation. Normally, recessive diseases in mammals depend only on the individual's genetic make-up. Our findings highlight the delicate interaction between the mother and fetus during pregnancy. It is possible that there are similar birth defects with this type of genetic relationship," explains Professor Hannes Lohi, the lead corresponding author of the study. New genetic test for breeding and diagnostics As a part of the research, a DNA test has been developed for veterinary diagnosis and breeding purposes. DNA testing is important for breeders to avoid producing more blind dogs. The test can identify carriers and allow better breeding plans. Veterinarians can also use the test for differential diagnosis and to confirm the genetic basis of a suspected condition. So far, the mutation has been found in Irish Soft-Coated Wheaten Terriers but according to Kaukonen it might be present in other breeds too. Explore further Genetic cause of deadly skin condition afflicting bull terriers discovered More information: Maria Kaukonen et al, Maternal Inheritance of a Recessive RBP4 Defect in Canine Congenital Eye Disease, Cell Reports (2018). Journal information: Cell Reports Maria Kaukonen et al, Maternal Inheritance of a Recessive RBP4 Defect in Canine Congenital Eye Disease,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.04.118 NASA Photographer Bill Ingalls's camera after it was caught in brushfire caused by the launch of the NASA/German GRACE-FO from Vandenberg Air Force Base on May 22, 2018. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls NASA photographers have always understood that taking pictures of space launches is a risky business. No one is more familiar with this than Bill Ingalls, a NASA photographer who has taking pictures for the agency for the past 30 years. Both within the agency and without, his creativity and efforts are well known, as his ability to always know exactly where to set up his cameras to get the perfect shots. Which naturally begs the question, what happened to the camera featured in the image above? This photograph, which shows one of Ingalls remote cameras thoroughly-melted, has been making the rounds on social media of late. As the accompanying gif (seen below) shows, the camera was not far from the launch pad and was then quickly consumed by the resulting fire. As Ingalls explained in a recent NASA press release, the destruction of the camera was the result of an unexpected brush fire that was triggered when flames from the launching rocket set some of the nearby grass on fire. What Really Happened to that Melted NASA Camera? https://t.co/kg3wFBCUlm pic.twitter.com/kBdT6OGjjq NASA HQ PHOTO (@nasahqphoto) May 25, 2018 "I had six remotes, two outside the launch pad safety perimeter and four inside," he said. "Unfortunately, the launch started a grass fire that toasted one of the cameras outside the perimeter." The event he was photographing was the launch of the NASA/German Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-on (GRACE-FO) satellite, which took place at Vandenberg Air Force Base on May 22nd, 2018. As part of a partnership between NASA and the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ), this satellite is the successor to the original GRACE mission, which began orbiting Earth on March 17th, 2002. NASA Photographer Bill Ingallss remote camera setup before the NASA/German GRACE-FO launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on May 22, 2018. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls Unfortunately, the launch triggered a brush fire which engulfed the camera and cause its body to melt. Firefighters reported to the scene to put out the fire, who then met Ingalls where he returned to the site. Luckily for Ingalls, and the viewing public, he was able to force open the body and retrieve the memory card, which had not been damaged. As a result, the footage of the fire as it approached the camera was caught. Oddly enough, this camera was the one posted furthest from the launch pad, about 400 meters (a quarter of a mile) away. The four other cameras that were set up inside the perimeter were undamaged, as was the other remote camera. But before anyone starts thinking that this remote was the unfortunate one, the "toasty" camera, as Ingalls calls it, is likely to put on display at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. In the meantime, Ingalls will be traveling to Kazakhstan to photograph the June 3rd landing of the International Space Station's Expedition 55 crew. He anticipates that that assignment, unlike this last one, will have no surprises! Credit: Northeastern University The idea is deceptively simpleoffset 100 percent of your car's carbon emissions by volunteering to pay an extra 10 cents a gallon at the pump. It may sound like a pipe dream, but Klye Kornack believes that in an era of government inaction, there's a hunger for this type of DIY social responsibility. "With 40 million people fueling up at the pump each day, we envision gas stations as hubs of environmental advocacy," said Kornack, who graduated from Northeastern in 2013 with a degree in environmental studies and philosophy. He cites a 2017 AP poll that suggests 74 percent of the U.S. population believe climate change is important, with 53 percent saying it's "very important." "People recycle their trash, change all their light bulbs, and use public transportation whenever they canand yet when then they hop in their car, they have no choice but to use fossil fuels," Kornack said. "It's an outlier in their lives, and there's lots of frustration." Kornack and his two partnersLiam Madden, who received a degree in international affairs in 2012, and David Cooch, a biology major who graduated in 2013set out to ease this frustration by founding Green Gas, a company that makes it easy for drivers to erase their carbon footprint. The company offers environmentally conscious motorists two options. In March, the partners launched a special debit card that automatically pays an extra 10 cents per gallon, which goes directly to several certified carbon offset programs. This summer they will launch as second option that allows drivers to push a button on the pump touch screen (the same screen that asks if you want a car wash today) to make a similar donation. The touch screen option will be piloted this summer at 15 Sunoco stations around New England. Kornack said the pilot program will give the start-up an opportunity to prove it's concept and hone it's message. "It's a visceral experience because we're asking them to donate at the moment they're pumping gas, and smelling the fossil fuel," said Kornack. "It's the moment when they feel the strongest need to act." Green Gas has demonstrated the resonance of its message. In March 2017, Kornack made a presentation at the United Nations, and won a competition that resulted in the company being designated as a members of the MIT Solve Initiative. "By embedding carbon offsets at point of purchase, we're making the right thing to do, the easy thing to do," he told the committee. The company also won $10,000 in gap funding from Northeastern and a $130,000 fellowship from a yet-to-be announced source. As for the 10-cent-per-gallon donation, only one penny goes to running the company, Kornack said. The remaining 90 percent goes directly to Certified Emission Reduction programs. For example, money from the gas station pilot program will go to GreenTrees, a reforestation program along the Mississippi River. Not only has the program planted 120 acres of trees so far, there are a host of other environmental benefits. "Absorbing carbon is just the tip of the iceberg," said Kornack. "This project is also restoring habitat needed by migratory waterfowl, creating a natural buffer zone to reduce pesticide runoff into the Mississippi River." Another project, Taking Root, is paying Nicaraguan farmers to reforest depleted land with coffee threes and other crops that will generate income while absorbing carbon emission. Closer to home, Green Gas is contributing to a project in New Bedford, Massachusetts, that is converting methane emissions from the landfill into energy. "Methane has 75 times the carbon emissions as fossil fuels," said Kornack. "It's a greenhouse gas on steroids." Kornack emphasizes that Green Gas doesn't require large percentage a majority of Americans to participants in order to to make a substantial impact. "If just 2 percent of the people participate, that's 3,000 people per gas station per year," he said. "There are 150,000 gas stations in the U.S. "The people who are going participate in this initiative feel a responsibility to clean up after themselvesto reduced their carbon footprint. We're making it easy for them to do it with the push of a button." Juvenile California sea lion from central California. Credit: Elliott Hazen Historically, fisheries and the conservation community have struggled to find common ground. The tension between one's desire to turn a profit and the other's to preserve endangered or protected marine species that can be killed as bycatch has made it difficult to find solutions that satisfy both. Now, a new online tool developed by researchers at San Diego State University in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other universities could win support from both groups. EcoCast, developed with funding from the NASA Applied Sciences Ecological Forecasting Program, provides computer-generated maps to help fishermen target productive fishing spots while alerting them to areas likely to harbor protected species. "This is a really different way of approaching fisheries management," said Rebecca Lewison, a lead scientist on the project from San Diego State University and senior author of the new paper. "EcoCast pioneers a way of evaluating both conservation objectives and economic profitability. Instead of trying to shut down U.S. fisheries, EcoCast is trying to help U.S. fishermen fish smarter, allowing them to meet their set quota of target catch and avoid unwanted bycatch." Current protection zones for species are static, meaning authorities declare a zone off-limits to fishermen for some duration of time. But weather and oceanic conditions are ever-shifting, with species constantly moving in and out of protected areas. When protection zones are out of sync with the animals they're designed to protect, both fisheries and conservation lose. What's needed is a more dynamic tool that shifts protected areas in response to species' movements, Lewison said. Enter EcoCast. The new tool works like this: Every day, EcoCast pulls in data from the NOAA CoastWatch program, which uses satellite imaging to monitor ocean conditions around the world. Then it combines that with existing data on where both target fish populations and endangered species are likely to be found under various ocean conditions. The result is a probability model that can predict where different marine species are likely to be found that day. Example of EcoCast fishing forecast from May 29, 2018. Credit: http://oceanview.pfeg.noaa.gov Each morning, fishermen can receive an up-to-date report based on the day's ocean conditions letting them know where the fish they want areand where endangered species are likely to be, too. In doing so, EcoCast aims to improve the economic and environmental sustainability of fisheries that have inadvertently caught and killed sensitive species. "We're harnessing the field of big data so that information on ocean conditions can be of use to fishermen are likely to find the swordfish they want to catch while also avoiding the species that they do not want to catch," said Elliott Hazen, a research ecologist at NOAA Fisheries' Southwest Fisheries Science Center and lead author of the new paper. Right now, EcoCast provides bycatch warning locations for leatherback sea turtles, blue sharks and California sea lions, Lewison explained, and is currently focused on a region off the coast of California. But she hopes the team behind the program can expand the number of species and even to other fisheries in the near future. "This program can be modified to meet the future needs of fishermen and the conservation community," she said. "It can take into account new types of fishing gear, new regulations and new fishing areas that might open up." Schematic of the EcoCast process: from fisheries data analysis and risk prediction to creating a product map that optimizes catch quality. Credit: Drew Briscoe In addition to Lewison, the team includes scientists and managers from NOAA; NOAA CoastWatch West Coast Regional Node, the University of California, Santa Cruz; Stanford University; Old Dominion University; University of Maryland; and the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. A number of fishermen also contributed to the design of and data collection behind the program. When the researchers modeled how use of the EcoCast might play out under real fishing conditions, they found they could adequately protect endangered species while making off-limits areas between two and 10 times smaller, providing fishermen dramatically more space to fish for target species. These findings were published this week in the journal Science Advances. "EcoCast is an example of Fisheries scientists working with our academic colleagues to promote sustainable commercial fishing opportunities through efficient catch and bycatch avoidance, maximizing fishing opportunities while ensuring the sustainability of fisheries and fishing communities, " said Toby Garfield, director of the Environmental Research Division at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center. Gillnet fishing boat off the California coast. Credit: Craig Heberer This means that fishermen are likely to embrace and use EcoCast for a couple of reasons. For one, their own fish hauls and profits benefit from the reduced size of areas closed to fishing. But just as importantly, EcoCast demonstrates the importance of industry-science partnerships. The EcoCast team worked with fishermen from the beginning to help design and develop the program, acknowledging the critical role that fishermen play in the future of sustainable fisheries. "EcoCast represents a new approach to dynamically manage our ocean resources, which is an exciting advance in fisheries management, "Lewison said "By working directly with fisheries, we can develop tools that can help US fleets to fish smarter." Explore further Study finds that ending overfishing would stop the population declines of endangered bycatch species about half the time More information: E.L. Hazen el al., "A dynamic ocean management tool to reduce bycatch and support sustainable fisheries," Science Advances (2018). advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/5/eaar3001 Journal information: Science Advances E.L. Hazen el al., "A dynamic ocean management tool to reduce bycatch and support sustainable fisheries,"(2018). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar3001 This artist's impression shows the evolution of the Universe beginning with the Big Bang on the left followed by the appearance of the cosmic microwave background. The formation of the first stars ends the cosmic dark ages, followed by the formation of galaxies. Credit: CfA/M. Weiss Astronomers have proposed a new model for the invisible material that makes up most of the matter in the Universe. They have studied whether a fraction of dark matter particles may have a tiny electrical charge. "You've heard of electric cars and e-books, but now we are talking about electric dark matter," said Julian Munoz of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who led the study that has been published in the journal Nature. "However, this electric charge is on the very smallest of scales." Munoz and his collaborator, Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., explore the possibility that these charged dark matter particles interact with normal matter by the electromagnetic force. Their new work dovetails with a recently announced result from the Experiment to Detect the Global EoR (Epoch of Reionization) Signature (EDGES) collaboration. In February, scientists from this project said they had detected the radio signature from the first generation of stars, and possible evidence for interaction between dark matter and normal matter. Some astronomers quickly challenged the EDGES claim. Meanwhile, Munoz and Loeb were already looking at the theoretical basis underlying it. "We're able to tell a fundamental physics story with our research no matter how you interpret the EDGES result," said Loeb, who is the chair of the Harvard astronomy department. "The nature of dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in science and we need to use any related new data to tackle it." The story begins with the first stars, which emitted ultraviolet (UV) light. According to the commonly accepted scenario, this UV light interacted with cold hydrogen atoms in gas lying between the stars and enabled them to absorb the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. This absorption should have led to a drop in intensity of the CMB during this period, which occurs less than 200 million years after the Big Bang. The EDGES team claimed to detect evidence for this absorption of CMB light, though this has yet to be independently verified by other scientists. However, the temperature of the hydrogen gas in the EDGES data is about half of the expected value. "If EDGES has detected cooler than expected hydrogen gas during this period, what could explain it?" said Munoz. "One possibility is that hydrogen was cooled by the dark matter." At the time when CMB radiation is being absorbed, the any free electrons or protons associated with ordinary matter would have been moving at their slowest possible speeds (since later on they were heated by X-rays from the first black holes). Scattering of charged particles is most effective at low speeds. Therefore, any interactions between normal matter and dark matter during this time would have been the strongest if some of the dark matter particles are charged. This interaction would cause the hydrogen gas to cool because the dark matter is cold, potentially leaving an observational signature like that claimed by the EDGES project. "We are constraining the possibility that dark matter particles carry a tiny electrical charge equal to one millionth that of an electron through measurable signals from the cosmic dawn," said Loeb. "Such tiny charges are impossible to observe even with the largest particle accelerators." Only small amounts of dark matter with weak electrical charge can both explain the EDGES data and avoid disagreement with other observations. If most of the dark matter is charged, then these particles would have been deflected away from regions close to the disk of our own Galaxy, and prevented from reentering. This conflicts with observations showing that large amounts of dark matter are located close to the disk of the Milky Way. Scientists know from observations of the CMB that protons and electrons combined in the early Universe to form neutral atoms. Only a small fraction of these charged particles, about one in a few thousand, remained free. Munoz and Loeb are considering the possibility that dark matter may have acted in a similar way. The data from EDGES, and similar experiments, might be the only way to detect the few remaining charged particles, as most of the dark matter would be neutral. "The viable parameter space for this scenario is quite constrained, but if confirmed by future observations, of course we would be learning something fundamental about the nature of dark matter, one of the biggest puzzles that we have in physics today," said Harvard's Cora Dvorkin who was not involved with the new study. Lincoln Greenhill also from the CfA is currently testing the observational claim by the EDGES team. He leads the Large Aperture Experiment to Detect the Dark Ages (LEDA) project, which uses the Long Wavelength Array in Owen's Valley California and Socorro, New Mexico. A paper describing these results appear in the May 31, 2018 issue of the journal Nature. Explore further 3 knowns and 3 unknowns about dark matter More information: Julian B. Munoz et al. A small amount of mini-charged dark matter could cool the baryons in the early Universe, Nature (2018). Journal information: Nature Julian B. Munoz et al. A small amount of mini-charged dark matter could cool the baryons in the early Universe,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0151-x Credit: CC0 Public Domain A team of researchers at Delft University has found that while the number of floods across Europe over the past century and a half has increased, the number of resulting deaths has decreased, as have financial losses. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes studying flood records and what they found. Brenden Jongman with the University of Amsterdam offers a Comment piece on the work done by the team in the same issue. Europe, like most other places on Earth, has a long history of flooding due to a variety of circumstances. That trend has changed only slightly, the researchers with this new effort note, as even more flooding has occurred over the past 150 years. To learn more about flooding trends in Europe, the researchers conducted searches on a database called the Historical Analysis of Natural Hazards in Europe. It holds information about floods going back to 1870, among other things. In all, they found information on 1,564 floods and the impact of those floods on the people that experienced them. The researchers found that the number of floods has been climbing, though they were not able to confirm whether that was due to better reporting. They also noted that Europe's population has increased substantially over the past century and a half. They found that in spite of such increases, the number of people killed in floods has actually been decreasing. From the period 1870 to 1950, they found that the number of people dying in floods decreased by approximately 1.4 percent each year. From 1950 to 2016, the percentage improved more, decreasing by 4.3 percent each year. They note that along with an expanded population came a huge increase in wealth, but still, financial losses due to floods fell, most particularly since 1950. The researchers suggest the reasons for the decline in deaths and property damage are likely due to people moving to cities and living in much sturdier structures. They note that their data does not take into account regional variations or small floods that may not have been reported. More information: Dominik Paprotny et al. Trends in flood losses in Europe over the past 150 years, Nature Communications (2018). Dominik Paprotny et al. Trends in flood losses in Europe over the past 150 years,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04253-1 Abstract Adverse consequences of floods change in time and are influenced by both natural and socio-economic trends and interactions. In Europe, previous studies of historical flood losses corrected for demographic and economic growth ('normalized') have been limited in temporal and spatial extent, leading to an incomplete representation of trends in losses over time. Here we utilize a gridded reconstruction of flood exposure in 37 European countries and a new database of damaging floods since 1870. Our results indicate that, after correcting for changes in flood exposure, there has been an increase in annually inundated area and number of persons affected since 1870, contrasted by a substantial decrease in flood fatalities. For more recent decades we also found a considerable decline in financial losses per year. We estimate, however, that there is large underreporting of smaller floods beyond most recent years, and show that underreporting has a substantial impact on observed trends. Journal information: Nature Communications 2018 Phys.org Phase transition from insulator to metallic phase in VO2 as a function of the temperature. Credit: ICFO Controlling the flow of electrons within circuits is achieved through the appropriate choice of materials. Metals allow electrons to flow freely and insulators prevent conduction. In general, the electrical properties of a material are determined when the material is fabricated and cannot be changed afterwards without changing the material. However, there are materials that can exhibit metal or insulator behaviour depending on their temperature. Being able switch their properties, these materials could lead to a new generation of electronic devices. Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is one such material. It can switch from an insulating phase to a metallic phase just above room temperature, a feature already exploited for sensors. However, the reason that its properties change so dramatically has been a matter of scientific debate for over 50 years. One of the challenges in understanding why and how this switch occurs is a process called phase separation. The insulator-metal phase transition is similar to the ice-liquid transition in water. When ice melts, both liquid and solid water can coexist in separate regions. Similarly, in VO2, insulating and metallic regions of the material can coexist during the transition. But unlike water, in which the two phases are often large enough to see with the naked eye, in VO2, this separation occurs on the nanoscale, and it is thus challenging to observe. As a result, it has been hard to determine if the true properties of each phase, or a mixture of both phases, are being measured. X-rays are a key tool for understanding the properties of materials, but it is hard to build lenses for microscopes that can detect them. However, in a recent study published in Nano Letters, a team of researchers from ICFO and ALBA in Barcelona, the Technisch Universitat and Max-Born Institute in Berlin, and Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, has finally been able to probe the phase transitions that occur in thin films of VO2 using resonant soft X-ray holography. This technique is capable of imaging the electronic and structural changes in this material with an unprecedented resolution at the nanoscale without the need of a lens. By looking at the material with 50 nm resolution, the scientists were able to observe that defects in the material play an important role in initiating the phase transition from the insulator to the metal. However, more importantly, the authors also observed a third intermediate state formed during the phase transformation. While some regions transformed directly from the insulating to the metallic phase, others transformed into a second, different insulating state before becoming metallic at higher temperatures with the exact pathway taken depending on the defects present in the material. The coexistence of three phases has radically changed the views of previous studies that assumed the presence of only two states during the transition. Even more, the study presents new ways in which the transition could be controlled. In addition to the results obtained on the phase transition in VO2, the work also highlights the possibilities that X-ray holography offers for studying materials on the nanoscale. The technique is the only method that can image real-time nanoscale dynamics and is now being used to study the properties of other intriguing materials such as high temperature superconductors. Explore further Phase transition discovery opens the door to new electronics Credit: Cardiff University A Cardiff University academic has spent two years embedded with the teams working on the International Space Station (ISS) programme to compile the most comprehensive study of its work. Dr. Paola Castano, of the School of Social Sciences, is a Newton International Fellow funded by The Royal Society, The British Academy and the Academy of Medical Sciences. She has travelled the world investigating every aspect of the orbiting laboratory, researching the people and processes behind it. Located 254 miles above the Earth's atmosphere, the ISS is inhabited by astronauts from Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan and Russia, working on hundreds of experiments in biology, physics, medicine, materials science, education and technology. Dr. Castano has focused on a group of experiments on human health (a study of twin astronauts in the field of genomics and other studies of physiological deconditioning in response to the space conditions), plant biology (comparing US and Russian plant growth studies), and the study of particles in the Universe (NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and JAXA's Calorimetric Electron Telescope), researching how they are executed and evaluated at every stage of the process. Next to examining the actual processes of conducting the tests, Dr. Castano is interested in how science on the ISS is evaluated. She said: "Since it became fully operational in 2010, the ISS has certainly enabled hundreds of experiments across disciplines, but the question of whether it has fulfilled its scientific ambitions remains contentious. "As the most expensive effort to put humans in space, the ISS must respond to diverse and often competing interests and criteria of evaluation ranging from the most political to the most technical. These cover aspects ranging in terms of international cooperation, commercial development, public support, educational inspiration, technological advancement, and, of course, scientific research. "Additionally, space agencies commission independent studies to measure the 'research performance' of the ISS and justify the science to diverse audiences, with reference to 'real world benefits' and to its enabling role for sending humans beyond Low Earth Orbit in the next decades. "In all of these settings, enthusiasts and critics with varied types of involvements, ideas and qualifications selectively highlight aspects of the broad portfolio of experiments to make their case. "My work will provide a framework to understand how experiments are assessed in terms of success or failure by scientists, political stakeholders and the media." She added: "The ISS is a microcosm of contemporary science. It is a unique setting from which to analyse how science as a whole is evaluated by different social institutions." In collecting her research, Dr. Castano has become a familiar face at NASA, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Freie Universitat Berlin in Germany, and Waseda University in Japan. She has carried out 87 interviews, which include astronauts, scientists, technical staff and policy makers. A highlight of her research process was being present at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in the days leading up to the launch of the Soyuz rocket MS-03 carrying Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, American astronaut Peggy Whitson and French astronaut Thomas Pesquet to the ISS. As well as writing a book on her research, Dr. Castano aims to present relevant findings of her work to the UK Space Agency. She said: "The recent expedition of the first UK/ESA astronaut to the ISS, Tim Peake, launched an unprecedented set of science education initiatives in the UK. "The 2015 National Space Policy and the 2017 launch of a 10 million scheme of incentives to develop a commercial spaceflight market, pose a unique opportunity to discuss the role of science in the efforts to expand the UK space sector." She added: "From a very young age, I have been fascinated by the possibilities and potential of space exploration. It has been a real privilege getting to know the people who work on the ISS and through them, to gain deep and unique insights about the workings of scientific knowledge." Explore further Video: Horizons mission Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab, denies ties to the Russian government A Washington judge on Wednesday rejected a lawsuit by Russian computer security company Kaspersky Lab against the ban on use of its anti-virus software by government agencies. Kaspersky had complained that the banannounced after officials said Russian intelligence was able to hack the software for espionage purposeswas in effect a "punishment" of the company without it having given it any kind of hearing. Federal court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly rejected the argument, saying the US government had the right to institute the ban to defend its computer security. The ban "does not inflict 'punishment' on Kaspersky Lab," Kollar-Kotelly said in her ruling. "It eliminates a perceived risk to the nation's cybersecurity and, in so doing, has the secondary effect of foreclosing one small source of revenue for a large multinational corporation," she said. She also rejected the global cybersecurity giant's complaint that it had been illegally denied the "right" to sell a product that is legal, and that the ban harmed its reputation. While the company can still market its products, she said, the government has no obligation to buy them. In addition, she said, as the ban is legal and will remain in place, nothing can be done about any harm to its reputation. The ban began with a directive in September 2017 from the Department of Homeland Security for government agencies to remove Kaspersky software from their computing systems. That has since been followed by a provision set by Congress in a budget bill prohibiting agencies from using Kaspersky software. Both came after the National Security Agency, the US signals intelligence body, determined that Kaspersky software on an NSA employee's private computer allowed hackers, believed to be from Russian intelligence, to steal top secret NSA materials. US officials have also expressed concern about alleged ties between Kaspersky and the Russian government, which the company denies. The impact on the company has been heavy. Most US companies have moved to stop using its software, and most major stores have stopped selling it. While the private company does not report its earnings, sales internationally have also reportedly been hurt. Explore further Kaspersky to transfer infrastructure out of Russia 2018 AFP An asteroid impact 66 million years ago wiped out life across the planet, but microorganisms quickly rebounded. New research has found evidence for a diverse array of plankton and other organisms inhabiting the crater only a few years after the extinction-causing impact. The three hair-covered forms (left) represent species of plankton found inside the crater. The geometric form (bottom left) is a species of algae. Small organisms like these moved into the crater so quickly that bones from animals that were killed by the impact, such as the mosasaur pictured here, may have still been visible. Credit: Original art by John Maisano, University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences. About 66 million years ago, an asteroid smashed into Earth, triggering a mass extinction that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and snuffed out 75 percent of life. Although the asteroid killed off species, new research led by The University of Texas at Austin has found that the crater it left behind was home to sea life less than a decade after impact, and it contained a thriving ecosystem within 30,000 yearsa much quicker recovery than other sites around the globe. Scientists were surprised by the findings, which undermine a theory that recovery at sites closest to the crater is the slowest due to environmental contaminantssuch as toxic metalsreleased by the impact. Instead, the evidence suggests that recovery around the world was influenced primarily by local factors, a finding that could have implications for environments rocked by climate change today. "We found life in the crater within a few years of impact, which is really fast, surprisingly fast," said Chris Lowery, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) who led the research. "It shows that there's not a lot of predictability of recovery in general." The research was published May 30 in the journal Nature. UTIG research scientists Gail Christeson and Sean Gulick and postdoctoral researcher Cornelia Rasmussen are co-authors on the paper, along with a team of international scientists. UTIG is a research unit of the Jackson School of Geosciences. The core containing the first signs of life after the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was recovered from the crater by a 2016 scientific drilling mission conducted from the Lift Boat Myrtle (pictured here), a boat raised above the seafloor by three legs. Credit: Chris Lowery, The University of Texas at Austin The evidence for life comes primarily in the form of microfossilsthe remains of unicellular organisms such as algae and planktonas well as the burrows of larger organisms discovered in a rock extracted from the crater during recent scientific drilling conducted jointly by the International Ocean Discovery Program and International Continental Drilling Program. The tiny fossils are hard evidence that organisms inhabited the crater, but also a general indicator about habitability in the environment years after impact. The swift recovery suggests that other life forms aside from the microscopic were living in the crater shortly after impact. "Microfossils let you get at this complete community picture of what's going on," Lowery said. "You get a chunk of rock and there's thousands of microfossils there, so we can look at changes in the population with a really high degree of confidence ... and we can use that as kind of a proxy for the larger scale organisms." The scientists found the first evidence for the appearance of life two to three years after impact. The evidence included burrows made by small shrimp or worms. By 30,000 years after impact, a thriving ecosystem was present in the crater, with blooming phytoplankton (microscopic plants) supporting a diverse community of organisms in the surface waters and on the seafloor. In contrast, other areas around the world, including the North Atlantic and other areas of the Gulf of Mexico, took up to 300,000 years to recover in a similar manner. The core containing the fossil evidence was extracted from the crater during a 2016 expedition co-led by the Jackson School. In this study, scientists zeroed in on a unique core section that captures the post-impact seafloor in unprecedented detail. Whereas core samples from other parts of the ocean hold only millimeters of material deposited in the moments after impact, the section from the crater used in this study contains more than 130 meters of such material, the upper 30 inches of which settled out slowly from the turbid water. This material provides a record that captures the seafloor environment days to years after the impact. Parvularugoglobigerina eugubina, a type of plankton, was one of the first new species to appear in the aftermath of the end Cretaceous mass extinction. This specimen was found in the core drilled by International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 364 to the Chicxulub impact crater. Credit: Chris Lowery, The University of Texas at Austin "You can see layering in this core, while in others, they're generally mixed, meaning that the record of fossils and materials is all churned up, and you can't resolve tiny time intervals," said co-author Timothy Bralower, a micropaleontology professor at Pennsylvania State University. "We have a fossil record here where we're able to resolve daily, weekly, monthly, yearly changes." Ellen Thomas, a senior research scientist in geology and geophysics at Yale University who was not part of the study, said that although she thinks the paper makes a strong case for a speedy recovery, she expects that the larger scientific community will be interested in digging into the data for themselves. "In my opinion, we will see considerable debate on the character, age, sedimentation rate and microfossil content ... especially of the speculation that burrowing animals may have returned within years of the impact," Thomas said. The relatively rapid rebound of life in the crater suggests that although the asteroid caused the extinction, it didn't hamper recovery. The scientists point to local factors, from water circulation to interactions between organisms and the availability of ecological niches, as having the most influence on a particular ecosystem's recovery rate. The findings indicate that recovery after a global catastrophe could be a local affair. Explore further Expedition will sample crater left by dinosaur-killing asteroid More information: Christopher M. Lowery et al. Rapid recovery of life at ground zero of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, Nature (2018). Journal information: Nature Christopher M. Lowery et al. Rapid recovery of life at ground zero of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0163-6 A bat-eared fox engaging with a puzzle box an example of testing animal cognition. Credit: PJ Jacobs South African researchers contribute more than 3% of the global literature on mammalian behavioural ecology, with a strong focus on the broader themes of mating, social and foraging behaviour. The large number of protected areas and mammalian guilds in South Africa provide unique opportunities for the study of behavioural ecology a sub-discipline of zoology that has evolved and grown significantly since the start of the 20th century. Researchers link behaviour to genetics, evolutionary trends, and fast adaptation to a rapidly changing world. Le Roux reviewed over 1000 papers published from 2000 to 2015 and determined the South African contributions to this multidisciplinary field. Although South African researchers contribute more than 3% of the global literature, some important themes within behavioural ecology such as animal cognition and personalities that are gaining rapid international traction are not studied locally. Explore further Prehistoric teeth dating back 2 million years reveal details on ancient Africa's climate Provided by South African Journal of Science Aerial photographs from 1953 (left) and 2015 (right) show rapid growth in Jerash, once the site of the ancient city of Gerasa. Credit: PNAS How do you study ancient cities when they're hidden from view, covered with hundreds or thousands of years of human development by the growth of towns and cities? For archaeologists like us, it's a constant dilemma. Recently, we joined forces with archaeologists and geoscientists in Denmark and Germany to tackle this challenge. For the first time, we have mapped archaeological and non-archaeological features of the ancient city Gerasa (modern-day Jerash in northern Jordan) with extreme accuracy and precision. We combined historical images with state-of-the-art aerial photography and modern airborne laser scanning, to turn back time and reconstruct the landscape and archaeological features no longer visible due to modern urban development. This combination of older and new data reveled lost monuments, which until now have not been recorded firmly in the archaeological record, including possible aqueducts and water channels. And suggests that ways of managing water in ancient Gerasa changed profoundly over time, as a result of changing settlement patterns and ways of managing the hinterland. An important city destroyed by an earthquake Gerasa was an important city in the eastern Roman Empire, until it was destroyed by a devastating earthquake in 749 CE. It held splendid monuments and structures, which testify to a vivid urban life influenced by many cultures over the course of centuries. The ancient city covered an area of approximately 90 ha, encircled by more than 4 kilometres of city walls. After the earthquake, life diminished in the city and only in the Middle Islamic period (starting in the 12th century CE) did settlement take place on a larger scale once again. The new study maps the water infrastructure of the ancient city of Gerasa, in Jordan. We identified features such as possible aqueducts, channels, springs, and cisterns, and mapped them in relation to possible areas of water supply. Credit: PNAS A popular site for 19th century archaeology enthusiasts The first excavations are documented to have taken place in Gerasa in 1907. These early excavations uncovered a splendid mosaic, which today is spread across the world in a number of collections, including the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. It testifies to the level of craftsmanship in Roman period Gerasa. Many European travelers visited the site in the 19th and 20th centuries and several descriptions of many lost monuments are to be found in accounts of these travels, which give an insight into contemporary society and life in and around Gerasa. The first major excavations in Gerasa were, however, undertaken as late as the 1920s and 1930s by an American-British archaeological mission headed by the Yale scholar C. H. Kraeling. Since then, several teams have worked in Gerasa, but still large parts of the city remain archaeologically unexplored and are now threatened by modern destruction, such as looting and modern developments around the site. A puzzling site In 2011 we established the Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project. And from day one, we were puzzled by several of the archaeological findings at Gerasa. Monumental water cisterns were found closed off and falling out of use indicating urban decline or at least significant changes in the management of public works, while at the same time domestic habitation flourished in the Late Antique and early Islamic periods. These archaeological finds indicated that crucial changes were taking place in the landscape around ancient Gerasa (modern Jerash) in the 5th to 8th centuries CE, but we couldn't pinpoint them through the excavated finds alone. Wanting to explore the area around Gerasa, we teamed up with Sren Munch Kristiansen from the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions and GeoScience at Aarhus University, Denmark, as well as David Stott from Archaeological IT and Moesgaard Museum, and we also paid a visit to the Royal Jordanian Geographic Society. We learned that LiDar data for use in archaeological projects could be accessed through the Department of Antiquities of Jordan. So, with permission in hand, we bought the LiDar data, and the team began to collect historical photographs dating back more than a century. We also obtained satellite images documenting modern day development at Jerash. Newly identified archaeological features (grey shading) and previously mapped structures (light blue outlines). The newly identified features are complex to interpret. The bottom right box shows a probable road network and urban subdivisions (bright blue and green lines), along with a large number of subrectangular features likely indicative of building foundations. Credit: PNAS By combining the LiDar data with the satellite images and the historical photographs, we were able to identify previously unknown structures, including possible aqueducts, channels, springs, and cisterns, and map them in relation to possible areas of water supply within the city. We lacked the "big picture" of change in Gerasa The Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project started as a large-scale interdisciplinary excavation to explore the approximately 4 ha large Northwest Quarter, located on the highest bedrock point within the walled city. Since then, we have systematically recorded evidence of the city's urban development, and we've now published several studies as part of the project, which focus on a variety of aspects of urban life in antiquity and beyond in the city of Gerasa. But so far, none had managed to paint an accurate 'big picture' looking at the city in a more holistic way. These most recent results based on integrating historical aerial photos and modern technology offer further insights into the urban layout and infrastructure of Gerasa. For example it has become clear that the ways of managing water in the hinterland around Gerasa had changed dramatically over time, and that these changes may have been due to climatic factors. Such changes are often attributed to the 8th century CE as outcomes of the devastating earthquake of 749 CE, but our new data suggest that they actually began centuries earlier than previously thought. A high-tech approach can help preserve ancient sites The novelty of our approach is that it integrates World War I photos, contemporary mm-precise 3-D-laser scanning, and decades of scattered archaeological excavation data to produce a detailed map of how an entire ancient city in the Middle East appeared before modern destruction and urban encroachment began. In many parts of the world, population growth and climate change pose urgent risks to cultural heritage sites. Archaeologists and heritage workers are in a race against the clock to document and understand the life of past societies before the historical remains are irreversibly destroyed. Non-invasive approaches to map archaeology is a crucial part of this endeavor, allowing us to turn back time and document destroyed and lost monuments that connect us with the past. Furthermore, they offer access to document multi-layer and multi-temporal sites, giving credit to all periods. Our study shows that bringing scholars and experts together from a variety of disciplines is one important way forward, especially at sites where modern urban development is taking place rapidly and partly uncontrolled. Such an interdisciplinary approach offers a particularly important support for on-going or planned archaeological work. Explore further High-definition archaeology reveals secrets of the earliest cities More information: David Stott et al. Mapping an ancient city with a century of remotely sensed data, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018). Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences David Stott et al. Mapping an ancient city with a century of remotely sensed data,(2018). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1721509115 This story is republished courtesy of ScienceNordic, the trusted source for English-language science news from the Nordic countries. Read the original story here. Mesoscience focuses on complexity across a wide spectrum of systems. Credit: HUANG Wenlai You may complain about the unpredictability of the weather that spoiled your vacation, or worry about whether your job will be taken by highly intelligent robots in the near future, or whether the chemical plant near your residence is safe enough, but you may not realize that these seemingly unrelated problems may share a solution deeply rooted in an emerging science. In fact, scientists in various areas have long been puzzled by mysterious missing links in their knowledge chains. No matter how much they know about the details of the systems they study and how familiar they are with the behavior of these systems, they know little about the complex structures usually present at the scale between the whole system and its elements. These structures may include violent tornadoes, weird neural networks, fluctuating reactant patterns, or many others. Surprisingly, structures in seemingly unrelated areas display intriguing complexities with underlying similarities. Describing, forecasting and manipulating such complexity is very challenging in almost all scientific disciplines and is the bottleneck in industry. Is there a way to crack such a hard nut? Chinese scientists are searching for answers and may have found a powerful tool. They have, for the first time, developed the concept of "mesoscience"a methodology for discovering common principles governing all such complexity. Models and computational paradigms derived from mesoscience have proved successful in chemical engineering and have been quickly adopted by enterprises around the world, including TOTAL, BASF, Shell, BP, Sinopec, PetroChina, Baosteel and Unilever, to name a few. However, mesoscience offers broad potential beyond the field of chemical engineering. "Mesocience is considered a general approach for tackling various complex systems in the real world and has an unprecedented future," said LI Jinghai, member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who proposed the concept. Mesoscience is attracting increasing attention from the world scientific community. Over 30 top scientists from the USA, UK, Australia, China, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Hungary are teaming up in Beijing for a three-day meeting from May 27-29 to focus on the future development and application of this new concept. The participants are from many different disciplines, including chemistry, mathematics, psychology, and chemical engineering, etc. Many of them are members or fellows of prestigious national scientific organizations, as well as industrial researchers. New, challenging materials are emerging with superior and often multiple functionalities, such as battery materials, printing inks, catalysts, cosmetics or pharmaceutical formulations. "These kinds of materials have to be formulated on different levels ranging from molecular scale to particles in the micro-size regime," said Bernd Sachweh, vice president of Chemical & Process Engineering Asia of BASF. "In order to achieve the targeted properties, the key process and reaction parameters often have to be controlled, especially in the mesoscale." Any object, large or smallfrom an elementary particle to a galaxycan act as an element to form a system with many such elements. Mesoscale complexity exists widely and mesoscience can be applied widely, as well. That is why it can help solve problems not solved by traditional methods. We see the world from the microscale to the macroscale. Traditional theories have been used to tackle macroscale or microscale problems, thus dividing scientists into the two camps of holism and reductionism. However, there are unknown gaps between individual elements and system behavior, as reflected in the saying: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." The key point lies in the mesoscale, or interactions between elements of the system. "[Mesoscience] provides common principles to consider in S&T to respond to grand challenges with advanced high level research solutions," said Professor Augusta Maria Paci from the National Research Council of Italy. The National Natural Science Foundation of China initiated a major research program in 2002 called "Mechanism and Manipulation of Meso-Scales in Multi-Phase Reaction Processes." The program has lasted for five years and total funding has reached RMB 200 million. "Mesoscience not only has far-reaching scientific implications but also wide industrial significance," said GE Wei, director of the Mesoscience Research Division of the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. "It has been found to be a key to addressing the long-lasting scaling problems that lie between laboratory apparatuses and commercial facilities." "This approach should be adopted not only in scientific research, but also in training next generation," said Professor Raffaella Ocone, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Yet "more work is required in this area in order to sway the wider scientific community," said Robin Batterham, former president of Austrilian Academy of Technological Science and Engineering. Explore further How can we share solutions to complex systems problems across domains and application areas? A life scene in the Dolomites region, Northern Italy, about 240 million years ago, with Megachirella wachtleri walking through the vegetation. Credit: Davide Bonadonna Scientists said Wednesday they had tracked down the oldest known lizard, a tiny creature that lived about 240 million years ago when Earth had a single continent and dinosaurs were brand new. Scans of the fossilised skeleton of Megachirella revealed the chameleon-sized reptile was an ancestor of today's lizards and snakes, which belong to a group called squamates, an international team wrote in the science journal Nature. This finding dragged the group back in time by 75 million years, and means that "lizards inhabited the planet since at least 240 million years ago," study co-author Tiago Simoes of the University of Alberta in Canada told AFP. That, in turn, suggested that squamates had already split from other ancient reptiles before the Permian/Triassic mass extinction some 252 million years ago, and survived it. Up to 95 percent of marine- and 75 percent of terrestrial life on Earth was lost. Megachirella, discovered some 20 years ago buried in compacted sand and clay layers in the Dolomites mountain range in northeast Italy, was initially misclassified as a close lizard relative. But Simoes had questions. "When I first saw the fossil I realised it had important features that could link it to the early evolution of lizards," he said. The story behind the paper. The authors explain the key discoveries of the study. Credit: MUSE - Science Museum, Trento, Italy So he hooked up with colleagues to perform a more detailed analysis of the tiny skeleton, which included CT scanning. The scans revealed previously unseen physical features, including the underside of the fossil, embedded in rock. The team found a tiny bone in Megachirella's lower jaw that is unique to the squamate family. 'Virtual Rosetta Stone' "I spent nearly 400 days visiting over 50 museums and university collections across 17 countries to collect data on fossil and living species of reptiles to understand the early evolution of reptiles and lizards," Simoes explained. "I used this dataset... to conduct the phylogenetic analysis presented in this study." Phylogenetics is the study of how different species relate to one another in the tree of life. Preserved specimen of Megachirella wachtleri Credit: MUSE - Science Museum, Trento, Italy Simoes' colleague and study co-author Michael Caldwell likened the Megachirella fossil to "a virtual Rosetta Stone in terms of the information it gives us on the evolution of snakes and lizards." The stone, dug up in Egypt, allowed scientists to decipher hieroglyphics. There are 10,000 modern squamate species alive today, Caldwell added, "yet we've really had no real understanding of where they came from in terms of their evolutionary history". Until now. For Simoes, the study is about more than the history of lizards. "We currently suffer a crisis in the world of lack of confidence in scientific evidence and facts. Denial of scientific information has been increasing and replaced by alternative facts not backed up by science. "This study, along with others that try to understand fundamental aspects of evolution... will hopefully draw back people's curiosity and attention to the natural world and how it has been changing for hundreds of millions of years." Explore further Burrowing into the inner world of snake evolution More information: Tiago R. Simoes et al. The origin of squamates revealed by a Middle Triassic lizard from the Italian Alps, Nature (2018). Journal information: Nature Tiago R. Simoes et al. The origin of squamates revealed by a Middle Triassic lizard from the Italian Alps,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0093-3 2018 AFP According to research, the combination of food, lighting, colours, furniture, table setting, atmosphere, sound and environment create a multisensory experience that has an effect on consumers' behaviour and general feeling of comfort. The preliminary results show that sounds of nature that were played in the fruit and vegetable section of a grocery shop had a clear impact on the shop's sales. The sales of fruit and vegetables showed an increase of 20 percent compared to the previous week and 13 percent compared to the week that followed. A two-year project was conducted in Finland to find out how factors such as presentation of the food, the built environment and characteristics of the space can influence customers' experiences and choices of foods in restaurants and grocery shops. The research combined methods from the fields of music research, food science, sociology, architecture and business economics. The project aimed at producing results that could be utilised for business purposes in the nutrition industry and in the planning of different food and eating environments. The Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki (Uniarts Helsinki) was in charge of examining how music and environmental sounds could be used in supermarkets, fine dining restaurants and in a lunch restaurant. "By determining the optimal sound design for a grocery shop, we were able to influence consumers' personal and social behaviour. We assessed the premises and the appliances together with the customers to see if there was something that was lacking or in need of improvement in terms of acoustic design," says researcher Heikki Uimonen, who was in charge of Uniarts Helsinki's contribution in the research consortium. Researchers discovered that the volume of music and the acoustic features of the space, the multisensory experience involving the space and sounds, the interaction between the senses, and emotional experiences induced by music performances played a major role in the sound design for a restaurant. The research also showed that lunch time is largely defined by its social aspect, which can be either boosted or reduced by different features in the surroundingssuch as music. Explore further Cheeseburger or salad? How music volume impacts your decision Provided by University of the Arts Helsinki NASA's Terra satellite captured an infrared image of Subtropical Depression Alberto on May 30 at 12:15 p.m. EDT (1645 UTC) in the Ohio Valley. Its center was near Indianapolis, Indiana. Terra showed strongest storms (yellow) had cloud top temperatures as cold as or colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius). Credit: NASA/NRL NASA's Terra satellite provided infrared data on Subtropical Depression Alberto when it was centered over Indiana and as it moved through the Ohio Valley. On May 30, The National Weather Service (NWS) was issuing Flash Flood Warnings for portions of western Kentucky as well as from extreme northeast Georgia to western North Carolina. Flash Flood Watches are in effect for portions of the southern Appalachians and Lower Ohio Valley. At 11 a.m. EDT the center of Subtropical Depression Alberto was located near latitude 38.7 degrees north and longitude 87.4 degrees west. That's about 80 miles (129 km) southwest of Indianapolis, Indiana. The depression is moving toward the north-northeast near 17 mph (28 kph) and this motion is expected to accelerate today. Maximum sustained winds are near 30 mph (45 kph) with higher gusts. The NWS Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland said the system will transition to an extratropical wave cyclone as the remnant circulation comes under the influence of an upper level trough moving across the Great Lakes and southern Canada through Thursday. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured an infrared image of Subtropical Depression Alberto on May 30 at 12:15 p.m. EDT (1645 UTC) in the Ohio Valley. Terra showed strongest storms had cloud top temperatures as cold as or colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius). Storms with cloud tops that cold have been shown to generate heavy rain. NWS said "Additional rainfall of 2 to 4 inches, with isolated higher amounts, will be possible northward along the Illinois/Indiana border into the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. Flash flooding and rapid water rises on creeks and streams will remain a possibility across these areas." Explore further NASA and NOAA satellites track Alberto in the US south An artist's impression of the photonic quantum simulations. The photonic chip, comprised of waveguides controlled through gold electronic wiring, is seen as a film projector. The light of the projector is quantum and the movie is the frame-by-frame evolution of an ammonia molecule vibrating. In this movie, the initial vibrational state of the ammonia molecule leads to a very high probability that it will lose one of its hydrogen atoms at the end of the movie. The girl is a scientist of the future who will use the simulator as a tool for molecular modeling. The pile of reels on the floor beside her signifies that capability of the photonic chip to be reprogrammed to simulate any molecule. The painting is by Credit: Eleonora Martorana, a graduate of the Rome Academy of Fine Arts. Scientists have shown how an optical chip can simulate the motion of atoms within molecules at the quantum level, which could lead to better ways of creating chemicals for use as pharmaceuticals. An optical chip uses light to process information, instead of electricity, and can operate as a quantum computing circuit when using single particles of light, known as photons. Data from the chip allows a frame-by-frame reconstruction of atomic motions to create a virtual movie of a molecule's quantum vibrations, which is what lies at the heart of the research published today in Nature. These findings are the result of a collaboration between researchers at the University of Bristol, MIT, IUPUI, Nokia Bell Labs, and NTT. As well as paving the way for more efficient pharmaceutical developments, the research could prompt new methods of molecular modelling for industrial chemists. When lasers were invented in the 1960s, experimental chemists had the idea of using them to break apart molecules. However, the vibrations within molecules rapidly redistribute the laser energy before the intended molecular bond is broken. Controlling the behaviour of molecules requires an understanding of how they vibrate at the quantum level. But modelling these dynamics requires massive computational power, beyond what we can expect from coming generations of supercomputers. The Quantum Engineering and Technology Labs at Bristol have pioneered the use of optical chips, controlling single photons of light, as basic circuitry for quantum computers. Quantum computers are expected to be exponentially faster than conventional supercomputers at solving certain problems. Yet constructing a quantum computer is a highly challenging long-term goal. As reported in Nature, the team demonstrated a new route to molecular modelling that could become an early application of photonic quantum technologies. The new methods exploit a similarity between the vibrations of atoms in molecules and photons of light in optical chips. Bristol physicist Dr. Anthony Laing, who led the project, explained: "We can think of the atoms in molecules as being connected by springs. Across the whole molecule, the connected atoms will collectively vibrate, like a complicated dance routine. At a quantum level, the energy of the dance goes up or down in well-defined levels, as if the beat of the music has moved up or down a notch. Each notch represents a quantum of vibration. Dr Laing's laboratory where the experiments were performed. Single photons of light are generated using a powerful Ti-Sapphire laser, to pump a series of nonlinear crystals, operated by Ph.D. student and co-author Nicola Maraviglia (left). The single photons are collected into optical fibres and injected into the photonic chip, next to Laing (right). Inset top left is a close up of the photonic chip taken by NTT scientist and co-author, Nobuyuki Matsuda. Credit: University of Bristol "Light also comes in quantised packets called photons. Mathematically, a quantum of light is like a quantum of molecular vibration. Using integrated chips, we can control the behaviour of photons very precisely. We can program a photonic chip to mimic the vibrations of a molecule. "We program the chip, mapping its components to the structure of a particular molecule, say ammonia, then simulate how a particular vibrational pattern evolves over some time interval. By taking many time intervals, we essentially build up a movie of the molecular dynamics." First author Dr. Chris Sparrow, who was a student on the project, spoke of the simulator's versatility: "The chip can be reprogrammed in a few seconds to simulate different molecules. In these experiments we simulated the dynamics of ammonia and a type of formaldehyde, and other more exotic molecules. We simulated a water molecule reaching thermal equilibrium with its environment, and energy transport in a protein fragment. "In this type of simulation, because time is a controllable parameter, we can immediately jump to the most interesting points of the movie. Or play the simulation in slow motion. We can even rewind the simulation to understand the origins of a particular vibrational pattern." Joint first author, Dr. Enrique Martin-Lopez, now a Senior Researcher with Nokia Bell Labs, added: "We were also able to show how a machine learning algorithm can identify the type of vibration that best breaks apart an ammonia molecule. A key feature of the photonic simulator that enables this is its tracking of energy moving through the molecule, from one localised vibration to another. Developing these quantum simulation techniques further has clear industrial relevance." The photonic chip used in the experiments was fabricated by Japanese Telecoms company NTT. Dr. Laing explained the main directions for the future of the research: "Scaling up the simulators to a size where they can provide an advantage over conventional computing methods will likely require error correction or error mitigation techniques. And we want to further develop the sophistication of molecular model that we use as the program for the simulator. Part of this study was to demonstrate techniques that go beyond the standard harmonic approximation of molecular dynamics. We need to push these methods to increase the real-world accuracy of our models. "This approach to quantum simulation uses analogies between photonics and molecular vibrations as a starting point. This gives us a head start in being able to implement interesting simulations. Building on this, we hope that we can realise quantum simulation and modelling tools that provide a practical advantage in the coming years." More information: Simulating the vibrational quantum dynamics of molecules with photonics, Nature (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0152-9 , Journal information: Nature Simulating the vibrational quantum dynamics of molecules with photonics,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0152-9 , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0152-9 The Bangladeshi island of Thengar Char in the Bay of Bengal has been identified as a possible relocation site for Rohingya refugees. Information from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission has been used to show that the island is particularly susceptible to inundation. At times, flooding has reduced the island from 76 sq km to less than 40 sq km. Credit: EO4HumEn+ In what the UN describes as the world's fastest growing refugee crisis, almost 700 000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar for neighbouring Bangladesh since August 2017. With the Bangladesh government proposing a vulnerable low-lying island as a relocation site for thousands, Sentinel-1 data have shown how unsuitable this site would be. While the Rohingya have faced decades of repression, this recent mass exodus is blamed on large-scale atrocities committed by the Myanmar military. Not only has the pace of arrivals in Bangladesh made this the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world, but the concentration of displaced people now in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar is amongst the densest in the world. Even before the crisis, Bangladesh was hosting more than 200 000 Rohingya from Myanmar. For a country already struggling to cope with challenges of its own, this has turned into a huge humanitarian tragedy. Desperate to find solutions, the Bangladesh government was prompted, unsurprisingly, to revive a much criticised plan to move thousands to Thengar Char, one of several uninhabited and unstable islands in the Bay of Bengal. Based on 178 archived satellite radar images from 1991 to 2018, this image shows how often a pixel was identified as land. During this time, the island of Thengar Char mostly varied between 30% and 80% of its mean extent. This shows how vulnerable the island is to flooding. Credit: EO4HumEn+ The area is particularly prone to cyclones, with coastal zones and islands at highest risk. Some nearby islands have a tidal range as high as 6 m, meaning that they are at risk of being completely submerged. Regardless of cyclones, the region is often inundated by heavy rainfall during the South Asian monsoon, which lasts from June to October. Information from satellites is often used during humanitarian crises to map, for example, the extent of camps and other temporary settlements. In this case, however, the Earth Observation-based Services for Dynamic Information Needs in Humanitarian Action project used data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar mission to show exactly how precarious Thengar Char is. Andreas Braun from Germany's University of Tubingen said, "As well as using data from Sentinel-1, we also used data from ESA's old ERS and Envisat satellites to work out how the size of the island has changed since 1991. In what the UN describes as the worlds fastest growing refugee crisis, almost 700 000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar for neighbouring Bangladesh since August 2017. While the Rohingya have faced decades of repression, this recent mass exodus is blamed on large-scale atrocities committed by the Myanmar military. Not only has the pace of arrivals in Bangladesh made this the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world, but the concentration of displaced people now in Bangladeshs Coxs Bazar is amongst the densest in the world. Credit: Tasnim News Agency, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO "It turns out that this set of islands has only been there since 2009, and were formed from silt washing down from the Himalayas into the Bay of Bengal. "We calculated how big the island has ever been, how small it has ever been and how big it is on average. "Importantly, we could report that since Sentinel-1 became operational in 2014, the island, which is currently about 60 sq km, has been inundated several times and at the worst, the land area was reduced to 39 sq km." The notion of placing vulnerable people on an inhospitable island that has no existing infrastructure and is two hours away by boat from the mainland is obviously questionable, but thanks to Sentinel-1, the authorities have hard evidence as to its risk of flooding. It remains to be seen whether the government of Bangladesh will move forward with their plan, although construction work has apparently begun. Explore further Diphtheria kills nine in Bangladesh Rohingya camps Comfortably leaning on a thumb's nail, the new Spinosaurus fossil is only 21 mm long. The flat palmar side and the feebly curved profile of this ungual bone are highly diagnostic and show the same adaptation seen in the foot of adult specimens. Credit: G. Bindellini Spinosaurus is the longest, and among the largest predatory dinosaurs, and possesses many adaptations for a semiaquatic lifestyle. A tiny claw phalanx of the foot, discovered in Cretaceous-aged sandstones of the Sahara, shows a peculiar shape compatible with an early juvenile Spinosaurus. As reported in PeerJthe Journal of Life & Environmental Sciences, the fossil is from the smallest known individual of this giant, sail-backed theropod. The findings suggest the small specimen retains the same locomotor adaptations as the large versionsuch as traversing soft substrates or paddlingduring the entire lifespan. Collected in Morocco in 1999, a 21 mm-long pedal ungual phalanx (a phalanx supporting a claw of the foot) remained unnoticed in the Paleontological Collection of the Natural History Museum of Milan, until the recent discovery (2014) of a new partial skeleton of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, that preserves an almost complete right foot with peculiar morphology in the phalanges. The striking similarities with the claw phalanges of the foot of Spinosaurus allowed palaeontologists Simone Maganuco and Cristiano Dal Sasso to identify the tiny bone to a very small and young specimen of the sail-backed Spinosaurus, the smallest individual reported up to today. "Besides the rarity of the fossils belonging to juvenile theropod dinosaurs, and the rarity of Spinosaurus bones, this finding is even more remarkable if we consider the dramatic size attained by some large specimens of Spinosaurus, which are possibly the longest, and among the largest predatory dinosaurs ever found"- says Maganuco. Size-comparison of relevant Spinosaurus specimens from Morocco: the baby MSNM V6894 (documented by the new fossil), the neotype FSAC-KK18888 (published in 2014), and the largest known individual MSNM V4047 (snout, published in 2005), compared with Homo (1.75 m tall). Spinosaurus was a semiaquatic, mainly piscivorous dinosaur with crocodile-like jaws Credit: Marco Auditore and Prehistoric Minds Assuming the juveniles looked like smaller versions of the adults, the 21 mm-long claw phalanx from this small specimen would pertain to an early juvenile individual, 1.78 m-long, only just a little bit longer than the estimated length of the sole head of the largest adult Spinosaurus known to date, which is also housed at the Natural History Museum of Milan. According to recent studies, the broader than deep unguals in Spinosaurus with their flat plantar surface are reminiscent of the flattened pedal shape of shorebirds that do not perch, and the whole foot may have been adapted to traversing soft substrates or webbed for paddling. "This find indicates that in Spinosaurus the foot of early juveniles had the same locomotor adaptations observed in large individuals, that were probably achieved early in ontogeny and retained for the entire lifespan", remarks co-author Cristiano Dal Sasso. Face to face, the largest and the smallest specimens of Spinosaurus known to date. The reconstructed head is based on the 1-meter-long snout MSNM V4047, the baby is based on the tiny claw phalanx MSNM V6894. Both fossils are deposited at the Natural History Museum of Milan. Credit: D. Bonadonna More information: Simone Maganuco et al, The smallest biggest theropod dinosaur: a tiny pedal ungual of a juvenile Spinosaurus from the Cretaceous of Morocco, PeerJ (2018). Journal information: PeerJ Simone Maganuco et al, The smallest biggest theropod dinosaur: a tiny pedal ungual of a juvenile Spinosaurus from the Cretaceous of Morocco,(2018). DOI: 10.7717/peerj.4785 Artist impression of the Sentinel 3A satellite. Credit: ESA International scientists, including researchers from the University of Leicester, are using space sensors to monitor the health of land around the River Ganges in India, home to approximately 500 million people. The Ganges flows through India and Bangladesh. UK and Indian scientists are using sensors on space-borne and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms to map an areaa new Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) - on the banks of the Ganges Basin. The CZO encompasses agriculturally-rich land, however climate unpredictability combined with ground-water depletion and high levels of poverty are directly threatening the livelihoods of farming communities living within the Ganges Basin. The project, funded by UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) through the UK's Global Challenges Research Fund, will bring together UK and Indian expertise to generate new scientific observations which will advance our understanding of sustainable land-use, secure and resilient food systems and water security. The CZO was set up by Rajiv Sinha and colleagues from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) as part of an international effort to determine how land and atmosphere interactions within the CZO ecosystem are impacted by human-induced and environmental disturbances. The CZO, supported by the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), has a network of hydro-meteorological instrumentation with data being collected for more than a year. The CZO will be augmented with high-resolution thermal infrared sensors and measurements through the STFC project. IITK researcher's Surya Gupta and Mithun Krishnan install thermal infrared radiometers to monitor land surface temperature at the critical zone observatory. Credit: Surya Gupta Space scientists Harjinder Sembhi and Darren Ghent, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester, will monitor the CZO using land surface temperatures (LST) derived from data collected by the SLSTR (Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer) instrument, flown on board the European Sentinel 3A mission and calibrated at the STFC RAL Space Centre Calibration Facility. Project leader Harjinder Sembhi said: "This project is about using high-quality SLSTR observations to characterise how vegetation is impacted by agriculture practises (such as irrigation regimes and crop rotation) and identify how the changing climate is impacting the landscape. With our NGO partners, The Flow Partnership-UK and The Energy and Resources Institute, we will disseminate information through stakeholder engagement with policy-makers and farming communities and co-develop evidence-based strategies to make future policy recommendations." The Leicester team and IITK scientist Sachidanand Tripathi will install high-quality radiometers at the CZO to provide the first opportunity to assess the quality of SLSTR measurements in the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP). Co-investigator Darren Ghent, who leads the SLSTR LST activities within the Sentinel-3 Mission Performance Centre, says this validation will strengthen the capability within the UK to assess the performance of the Sentinel-3 operational LST data product and facilitate the evaluation of the instrument and algorithms in higher temperature environments which can inform the STFC calibration team. Co-investigator Martin Wooster from King's College London will work with IITK to generate the first in-depth mapping of CZO vegetation, crop residue burning and surface properties using high-resolution thermal and hyperspectral cameras flown on UAVs. The scientific observations collected during a dedicated measurement campaign will be implemented into land and hydrological models to derive downstream flux and emission estimates. In addition to significant scientific outputs, this project will provide opportunities for researcher exchange that will boost capacity building in the area of space sensors for monitoring of the land and atmosphere. Thermal infrared radiometers to monitor land surface temperature at the critical zone observatory. Credit: Surya Gupta Explore further Copernicus Sentinel-3B delivers first images More information: STFC STFC stfc.ukri.org/index.cfm Switzerland is embracing innovation in its response to the global refugee crisis, becoming the first country to place asylum seekers in different parts of the country using artificial intelligence. Beginning this fall, the Swiss State Secretariat for Migration and the Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) will test a new, data-driven method for assigning asylum seekers to cantons across the country. Asylum seekers in the pilot program will be assessed by an algorithm designed to maximize their chances of finding a job. The algorithm will allow officials to send individuals to the canton that best fits their profile, rather than allocate them randomly, as under the current system. The program will then follow these asylum seekers over the next several years, comparing their employment rates to those of others who entered the country at the same time. It will include two thousand people, half placed in cantons with the guidance of the algorithm and half placed randomly. The algorithm's recommendations take into account constraints such as the limited space in a canton, and placement officials make the final decision in each case. The placement algorithm was developed by the Immigration Policy Lab, which has branches at Stanford University and ETH Zurich, and an affiliated researcher from Dartmouth College. IPL researchers aimed to give countries around the world a tool to improve refugee integration that could easily be implemented, at low cost and without overhauling their existing systems. Their first step: harnessing many years of underused data on refugees and their outcomes. The historical data used to develop the algorithm for Switzerland included information on where refugees were sent, whether they found work, and their age, country of origin, gender, and time of arrival. The algorithm uses this complex history to calculate refugees' probability of employment at each possible resettlement location, and then allocates them in a way that gives each person the best possible match. In Switzerland, only 15 percent of refugee arrivals from 2013 found a job within three years. Using the algorithm could have increased that to 26 percent, according to initial tests on the historical data. As these results show, refugees' destination can be highly consequential for their long-term integration and quality of life. "It's important to carefully test and refine the algorithm before implementing it at a large scale, so the Swiss government's decision to pilot this approach is a natural next step", says Kirk Bansak, an IPL data scientist and Stanford Ph.D. student who co-developed the algorithm. To implement the algorithm, the IPL team designed a customized software and user interface for placement officers. The beta version of the software provides a seamless way to integrate AI into the assignment process, and it can be adapted to work with any country's unique data and allocation systems. If successful, the pilot program could point the way toward a solution that improves refugees' lives and helps Swiss cantons and cities make the most of their resources at a time when asylum applications are projected to remain high. "The Swiss State Secretariat for Migration is taking an essential step toward breaking new ground in refugee integration policies", says Joelle Pianzola, IPL's executive director at ETH Zurich. "We are grateful for their partnership and look forward to setting it in motion." The results could also encourage other countries to take a data-driven approach to refugee integrationfor example, furthering the effort by using the IPL algorithm to improve outcomes beyond employment. Explore further An algorithm for refugee resettlement could boost employment and integration More information: Kirk Bansak et al, Improving refugee integration through data-driven algorithmic assignment, Science (2018). Journal information: Science Kirk Bansak et al, Improving refugee integration through data-driven algorithmic assignment,(2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aao4408 Experimental results from the XENON1T dark matter detector limit the effective size of dark matter particles to 4.1X10-47 square centimeters--one-trillionth of one-trillionth of a centimeter squared--the most stringent limit yet determined for dark matter as established by the world's most sensitive detector. Credit: XENON Collaboration Experimental results from the XENON1T dark matter detector limit the effective size of dark matter particles to 4.1X10-47 square centimetersone-trillionth of one-trillionth of a centimeter squaredthe most stringent limit yet determined for dark matter as established by the world's most sensitive detector. The results, presented Monday in a seminar in Italy at the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory (LNGS), were produced using an active target volume of 1,300 kilograms of Xenon, the first search for dark matter that has monitored the equivalent of one ton of xenon for an entire year. "We now have the tightest limit for what is known as 'the WIMP-nucleon cross section,' which is a measure of the effective size of dark matter, or how strongly it interacts with normal matter," said Ethan Brown, a member of the XENON Collaboration, and assistant professor of physics, applied physics, and astronomy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "With these results, we have now tested many new theoretical models of dark matter and placed the strongest constraints on these models to date." Dark matter is theorized as one of the basic constituents of the universe, five times more abundant than ordinary matter. But because the dark matter particles known as "weakly interacting massive particles," or "WIMPs," cannot be seen and seldom interact with ordinary matter, their existence has never been confirmed. Several astronomical measurements have corroborated the existence of dark matter, leading to a worldwide effort to directly observe dark matter particle interactions with ordinary matter. Up to the present, the interactions have proven so feeble that they have escaped direct detection, forcing scientists to build ever-more-sensitive detectors. Since 2002, the XENON Collaboration, incorporating 165 scientists from 12 countries, has operated three successively more sensitive liquid xenon detectors in LNGS in Italy, and XENON1T is its most powerful venture to date and the largest detector of its type ever built. Particle interactions in liquid xenon create tiny flashes of light, and the detector is intended to capture the flash from the rare occasion in which a dark matter particle collides with a xenon nucleus. The results analyze 279 days of data, according to Elena Aprile, a professor at Columbia University and project lead. During that time, only two background events were expected in the innermost, cleanest region of the detector. However, no events were detected, suggesting dark matter particles must be even smaller than previously thought. A portion of the data analysis was conducted at Rensselaer, as scientists from collaborating institutes around the world convened at the Institute late in 2018 to review data and finalize analysis routines that would eliminate irrelevant information from the collected data. The sensitivity of the detector is a function of its size and its "silence." Although dark matter interactions are rare, interactions with other forms of matter are common, and a sensitive detector is designed to minimize those interactions. To shield it from natural radioactivity in the cavern, the detector (a so-called Liquid Xenon Time Projection Chamber) sits within a cryostat submersed in a tank of water. A mountain above the underground laboratory further shields the detector from cosmic rays. Even with shielding from the outside world, contaminants seep into the xenon from the materials used in the detector itself and, among his contributions, Brown is responsible for a sophisticated purification system that continually scrubs the xenon in the detector. As the size of detectors have grown, so has the complexity of the purification systemnot only is there more xenon to clean, but it must be kept cleaner so that light and charge may move through the greater volume of the detector. In the current phase, Brown said his team "scaled up, adding more pumps and more purifiers" to the system. "Our work has maintained a high level of purity for the largest quantity of xenon over the longest period of time ever," said Brown. "It's an accomplishment that allows other experiments to build on the performance of this purification system." In the next phase, Brown will introduce a new solution, a newly designed pump built with ultra clean parts in his laboratory at Rensselaer in collaboration with researchers at Stanford and at Muenster University in Germany. Where the current pumps contribute one-third to one-half of the total radon in the experiment, the new pumps will be essentially radon-free, removing one of the largest contributions to background. Explore further A silent search for dark matter The photography of Emmanuel Panagiotakis reveals a love of light and form. With technical intricacy, he captures images that transform spaces. Panagiotakis is a native of Chios, Greece, but has called Pittsburgh home for almost 30 years. His photography takes him all over the world, yet its the beauty of his adopted city that never ceases to inspire him. He purchased his first digital camera in 2004 and shot his way through the owners manual in order to understand its capabilities. And as he did, a passion for photography emerged. Panagiotakis attributes the vibrancy of his images to his mentor and friend, San Francisco photographer Jeff Chen Kuo Chin. The two met by chance, cameras in hand, on a Pittsburgh incline. View more of Panagiotakiss work in his black and white exhibit opening June 1 from 58 p.m. at his gallery located at 100 Seventh St. in the Cultural District. As almost all newspaper or magazine readers know, Canada figured prominently in the turbulent U.S. debates over health care reform in the early Clinton presidency. Furthermore, future news analysts and policymakers will undoubtedly again use Canada to cite the good and the bad aspects of single-payer national health insurance. Beyond the debate about the desirability of Canadian-style health care reforms, Antonia Maioni sees another question: Why did the United States and Canada, alike in so many ways, part at the crossroads to produce such different systems of health insurance? She answers this previously neglected query so interestingly that her book will hold the attention of anyone concerned with health care in either country or both. The author explores the development of health insurance in the United States and Canada, from the emergence of health care as a political issue in the 1930s to the passage of federal health insurance legislation in the 1960s. Focusing on how political institutions influence policy development, she shows that Canadas federal structure and its parliamentary institutions encouraged a social-democratic third party that became pivotal in demonstrating the feasibility of universal, public health insurance. Meanwhile, the constraints of the U.S. political system forced health care reformers to temper their own ideas to appeal to a wide coalition within the Democratic party. Even readers previously unfamiliar with Canadian politics will find in this book important clues about the realm of the possible in the uncertain future of U.S. health care. WASHINGTON -- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) contributor Saparmamed Nepeskuliev has been released from a Turkmen prison after serving a sentence on narcotics charges that numerous international observers have condemned as a brutal attempt to silence a journalist. Saparmamed should never have been put behind bars in the first place, said RFE/RL President Thomas Kent. The rights of journalists are protected by international conventions to which Turkmenistan is a signatory. The crime here is Saparmameds imprisonment, not his reporting. Nepeskulievs imprisonment drew protests from seven U.S. lawmakers, who sent a letter to Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov in 2016 calling the reporters detention "unlawful" and urging his immediate release. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared Nepeskulievs custody "arbitrary" in December 2015, finding that he had been "deprived of liberty for having peacefully exercised his right to freedom of expression." The European Union, OSCE, and numerous media advocacy and human rights groups denounced his detention as politically motivated. Nepeskuliev was released on May 19 after serving a three-year sentence that Turkmen authorities handed down in a closed session, after holding him incommunicado in an undisclosed location for seven weeks beginning in July 2015. Throughout his imprisonment, authorities failed to confirm either his whereabouts or his well-being. His arrest followed an intimidation campaign directed against RFE/RLs Turkmen Service in 2014-2015 that forced the resignations of six of nine of its local correspondents. Nepeskulievs imprisonment, RFE/RL said at the time, was only the most ruthless part of a campaign by the authorities to systematically destroy the countrys only independent reporting network. The targeted attacks have continued well into 2018, with veteran correspondent Soltan Achilova suffering no fewer than eight physical assaults over the last 12 months. Contributor Khudayberdy Allashov was subject to severe beatings and slapped with a three-month prison stint on bogus charges in December 2016. Turkmenistan is tied with North Korea as the worst country in the world for media freedom, according to Freedom Houses 199-country Freedom of the Press 2017 survey; according to Reporters Without Borders 180-country 2018 World Press Freedom Index, Turkmenistan ranks 178, ahead of only Eritrea and North Korea. Known locally as Azatlyk Radiosy, RFE/RLs Turkmen Service has for 65 years provided Turkmen audiences with accurate and uncensored news and information as an alternative to the state-run media monopoly. In the past year (through April 2018), its website has been visited an average of 1.2 million times every month, while more than 421,000 videos were viewed on the Services Facebook page. ---- May 30, 2018 in Accessories (E) [prMac.com] Berkeley, California - With 15 years of experience in creating innovative Apple accessories, Rain Design launches a new assortment of laptop stands - the mBar, mBar pro and mBar pro . mBar is a lightweight, minimalist aluminum stand for elevating laptops. mBar pro and mBar pro have the added feature of foldability and thus portability, with different elevation heights of 3 inches and 5.5 inches, respectively. mBar: See better. Touch better. mBar raises and tilts your Macbook, makes viewing, typing and swiping on the Touch Bar easier. mBar's minimal design with clean lines and subtle curves complements your Macbook and enhances your workspace. Features: * Elevates laptop by 3 inches * Lightweight: 0.22 pound * Macbook matching anodized aluminum * Increases airflow around laptop for better cooling * Fits most laptops mBar pro: Take it easy. Designed to let you work comfortably, on the go. mBar pro raises and tilts your Macbook, makes viewing, typing and swiping on the Touch Bar easier. mBar pro's minimal design complements your Macbook. It's so portable, lightweight and easy to use that you will be happy to bring it with you anywhere. Features: * Portable folding stand * Lightweight and slim: 0.3 pound and 0.5 inch when folded * Precision aluminum unibody, anodized to match Macbooks * Elevates laptop by 3 inches * Includes svelte carrying sleeve * Increases airflow around laptop for better cooling * Fits most laptops mBar pro+: Take it easy. Designed to let you work comfortably, on the go. mBar pro+ raises and tilts your Macbook, makes viewing, typing and swiping on the Touch Bar easier. mBar pro+'s minimal design complements your Macbook. It's so portable, lightweight and easy to use that you will be happy to bring it with you anywhere. Features * Portable folding stand * Lightweight and slim: 0.45 pound and 0.5 inch when folded * Precision aluminum unibody, anodized to match Macbooks * Elevates laptop by 5.5 inches * Includes svelte carrying sleeve * Increases airflow around laptop for better cooling * Fits most laptops The mBar series are available in both silver and space gray. Shipping now. Patents pending. Rain Design was founded in San Francisco by friends from different backgrounds with the same vision of creating cool, original and user-friendly products. Since 2003, Rain Design has been creating patented, award-winning accessories, designed for Apple iMac/Macbook/iPad/iPhone and compatible with all devices. Rain Design ergonomic stands are No.1 Best Seller worldwide. Rain Design sells through global distribution channels and have office/fulfillment centers in California (USA), Netherlands (Europe) and Singapore (Asia). All Material and Software (C) Copyright 2003-2016 Rain Design Inc. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, OS X, iPhone, iPod, iPad and Macbook are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks and registered trademarks may be the property of their respective owners. ### CALmatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California's state Capitol works and why it matters. For more stories by Dan Walters, go to Commentary. (PHOTO: SCDF) UPDATE: This story has been updated with statements from MOM and BCA. A construction firm and five men including the firms managing director suspected of being responsible for the collapse of an under-construction viaduct near Upper Changi Road East last year have been charged for their roles in the incident, which left one worker dead and 10 others injured. The charges come after the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) completed its investigations into the 14 July 2017 accident and submitted its findings to the Attorney-Generals Chambers. Construction firm Or Kim Peow (OKP) Contractors, its group managing director Or Toh Wat, employees Yee Chee Keong and Wong Kiew Hai, and consultants Robert Arianto Tjandra and Leong Sow Hon, were charged on Wednesday (30 May) for breaches under the Workplace Safety and Health Act and the Building Control Act. Both the firm and Or face charges of failing to take measures to ensure the safety and health of the firms employees by failing to adequately assess risk when they became aware of cracks that had formed on support structures known as corbels. As OKP has been previously convicted of a similar offence which also led to a persons death, it faces an enhanced maximum fine of $1 million if convicted of the latest charge. Or faces a jail term of up to two years and a maximum fine of $200,000 if convicted. They had also allegedly failed to stop all work on the viaduct after discovering fresh cracks had formed on the corbels, which led to the fatal incident. OKP and Or were also both charged for allegedly carrying out unauthorised strengthening works on a corbel without the approval of the Commissioner of Building Control, and for failing to notify the Commissioner of the contravention of a section the Building Control Act. Two other OKP employees, project director Yee Chee Keong and project engineer Wong Kiew Hai, were also charged for breaches under the same acts. Yee and Wong were each charged with one count of recklessly committing an act which endangered the safety of others. They are accused of failing to halt all works on the viaduct section when cracks were discovered in the corbels supporting the section upon which the workers were casting a deck slab. Story continues Both men were also charged with one count of intentionally obstructing the course of justice by deleting a WhatsApp conversation between each other which contained photographs and information potentially relevant to criminal investigations. Yee also faces one count of permitting unauthorised strengthening works without the approval of the Commissioner of Building Control. Consultants implicated Separately, Tjandra, a professional engineer from CPG Consultants who approved the design and supervision of the viaduct construction works, and Leong, an executive from Calibre Consulting Singapore, were also charged. Tjandra faces one count of recklessly committing an act which endangered the safety of others. He allegedly put up structural plans without checking on the design assumptions made for the cracked corbels. He also allegedly did not carry out the necessary remedial works to rectify the inadequate design, even after knowing that the corbels could not support the deck slab while it was being concreted. Tjandra was also accused of failing to ensure that the building works relating to the permanent corbel structures were designed in accordance with the provisions of the Building Control Act and regulations, and accused of failing to notify the Commissioner of Building Control of the contravention of a section in the act. He is also accused of authorising strengthening works without approval from the Commissioner of Building Control and of falsely certifying that the structural plans and design calculations were prepared in accordance with the Building Control Act and regulations. Leong, the accredited checker for the structural works, was charged with one count of failing to evaluate, analyse and review the structural design in the plans and perform original calculations for the permanent corbels and one count of falsely certifying that he had carried out an evaluation, analysis and review of the plans of the building works in accordance with the building regulations. All parties involved were represented by lawyers and will return to court on 11 July. Yee and Wong were each offered bail of $20,000 while Tjandro was offered $15,000 bail. In an announcement issued on 16 May, OKP Holdings said its subsidiary, OKP Contractors, along with Or, Yee and Wong had received summonses from the MOM and/or the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) in relation to the accident on 15 May. On 14 July 2017, the Pan Island Expressway viaduct, which was along Upper Changi Road East, collapsed at around 3.30am. Preliminary investigations said that the brackets that helped to support its beams had given way, causing a section of the viaduct to collapse. The accident killed one worker Chinese national Chen Yinchuan and injured three of his compatriots, an Indian worker and six Bangladeshi workers. A Stop Work Order was issued subsequently by the Ministry of Manpower, which commenced investigations into the project. Separately, the Building and Construction Authority and Land Transport Authority also conducted investigations. According to media reports, the Stop Work Order was partially lifted on 21 March after MOM was satisfied with OKP contractors proposals to address safety risks and hazards for these works. However, the lifting was in relation to rectification works and an MOM spokesman has since clarified that the Stop Work Order on progressive works relating to the viaduct structures is still in force. A BCA spokesperson added that works to the viaduct structure cannot be carried out until new plans have been submitted to the BCA, approved by it, and a permit is issued. In a separate statement on Wednesday, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) said it would be demolishing all the crossheads on the uncompleted sections of the viaduct as a safety precaution. It said that an independent professional engineer has been appointed to assess the viaducts structural integrity. Any other sections which are assessed to be unsafe by the professional engineer will be demolished. LTA is studying its options carefully and reviewing the viaduct project with OKP, said the authority. Related stories: Structure on highway under construction collapses near PIE, leaving 1 dead, 10 injured PIE site accident: Construction firm fined recently over separate fatal accident PIE site accident: LTA officers carry out inspections Flooding caused by climate change could cost China US$389 billion over the next two decades, far more than any other country, but the ripple effect of those natural disasters on global trade could see the United States coming out as a major loser too, a recent study has suggested. In a report published in Nature Climate Change on Monday, researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Columbia University in the US said the cost of flooding to China in the 2016-35 period was set to rise by 82 per cent from the previous 20 years. In contrast, the US, which has a similar land mass to China, would face an economic hit of US$30 billion from river flooding in the years through 2035, while the damage to members of the European Union would fall somewhere between the two. Although the initial cost to China of the flooding which damages property, infrastructure, and agricultural and industrial production will be significantly higher than elsewhere in the world, the strength of its trade networks should allow it to withstand the economic impact, the study said. While the EU is similarly well equipped to rebound from the effects of extreme weather events, the US, with its increasingly protectionist stance on trade, is less so, the research said. Why fewer dirty factories in China is bad news for climate change Professor Anders Levermann, the lead author of the study, said the United States trade policy under US President Donald Trump made it more vulnerable to the knock-on effects of natural disasters. Free trade allowed nations to exchange goods and services to overcome temporary shortages or disruptions to production activities in regions hit by severe flooding, he said. Trump, however, instead of supporting liberalisation, was doing the opposite, he said. The aggressive measures taken by Washington to redress its trade imbalance with China, for instance, has pushed the worlds two largest economies to the brink of a trade war. Story continues It is true that the US needs balanced trade relations, but that only helps if it results in more trade, not less, Levermann told the South China Morning Post. Trade is necessary to compensate for the impact on local economies caused by extreme weather such as hurricanes, heatwaves or floods. Xi Jinping pushes China to become tech self-reliant after ZTE wrangle The conservative stance taken by the US on trade could cost it US$170 billion over the next 20 years, the research said. The forecasts were made using a new mathematical model that calculates the risk of flooding for each country and the international impact of those disasters on trade. Christian Otto, the studys co-author, said that in some countries, including India, Malaysia and Russia, flooding could result in more benefits than losses because of its impact on trade. More intense global trade can help to mitigate losses from local extreme events by facilitating market adjustments, he said. By 2030, flooding could cost South Asia US$215 billion every year When a supplier is impacted by a disaster hampering its production, international trade increases the chance that other suppliers can jump in and temporarily replace it. Interestingly, the global increase of climate-induced river floods could even cause net gains for some economies such as India, Southeast Asia or Australia. The researchers said also the projections were based on the assumption that nations did nothing to counter the effects of climate change. If countries, including China, opened more of their economies to the world, the net losses would likely decrease, they said. Wang Zhonggen, a researcher at the Key Laboratory of Water Cycle and Related Land Surface Process under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, said he was not surprised by the findings. Chinas rainfall is concentrated in the summer monsoon season, which means the risk of flooding is always higher than in countries where precipitation is more evenly spread throughout the year. While China has developed one of the worlds largest water management systems, comprising giant dams and reservoirs, this was not enough to protect every city located near a major river, like the Yangtze, Yellow or Pearl, Wang said. Chinas economy will continue to grow, so the losses caused by floods will increase even if the extreme weather remains the same as it is today, he said. China leads Asia in quake preparedness after Sichuan disaster, says UN Li Binglong, an economics professor at China Agricultural University in Beijing, said high levels of imports also had a negative impact on local efforts to mitigate climate change. Too many imports hurt local production, he said. If our farmers and factories cant make money, how do you expect them to support the governments efforts to combat climate change? This article Climate change to cost China US$389 billion, but impact on trade will make US a big loser too, study says first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. More from South China Morning Post: Colombian former rebel movement FARC said 24 of its ex-combatants had been killed since the beginning of the year, sounding a warning over continued violence threatening Colombia's fragile peace agreement. The movement, which transformed itself into a political party last year after signing the agreement in 2016, said three of its members were killed last week in the country's southwest while in the process of reintegrating into society. In total "this is 24 killings of ex-combatants" since early 2018, according to the party's count. A total of 40 ex-FARC militants had been murdered since the agreement was signed, according to a report president by President Juan Manuel Santos last week. FARC has repeatedly criticized the government for failing to fulfill its commitments under the deal, particularly regarding protection of former rebels, their families and party activists. It has voiced fears that extreme right-wing groups were targetting ex-FARC combatants with the complicity of government security forces. FARC called on both candidates in the June 17 presidential runoff to ensure "the abolition of weapons in politics." "We are not going to allow the continued murder of those who have laid down their arms to enter in to legal political activity," the group said. Conservative Ivan Duque, who won Sunday's first round, has based his campaign largely on rewriting the deal on the grounds it was too lenient on former rebels who have waged a five-decade war of terror on Colombians. His leftist rival Gustavo Pedro, a former member of the M-19 guerrillas, has defended the agreement. By Deisy Buitrago and Andreina Aponte CARACAS (Reuters) - Cuba's President Miguel Diaz-Canel flew to Caracas on Wednesday for his first foreign trip as head of state, a show of solidarity for Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro, whose controversial re-election this month has drawn condemnation in the West. "I pledge to you that no matter how big the challenges, you can count on Cuba today and forever," Diaz-Canel said after meeting Maduro in the Miraflores presidential palace. "Venezuela now needs our solidarity," he earlier told Venezuela's Constituent Assembly, a pro-government legislative superbody. The United States, the European Union and major Latin American countries have condemned Maduro's May 20 re-election, saying it did not meet democratic standards. Two of his rivals were barred from standing and the election board is run by loyalists. The U.S. government imposed new sanctions on the crisis-stricken oil exporter. But China and Russia have warned against meddling in the Socialist-run country, and fellow leftist governments in the region from Cuba to Bolivia have offered their support. "Your words express the best of the Cuban people and we are forever grateful for the support you have given us," said Delcy Rodriguez, a senior Maduro ally who heads the Assembly, which critics say has undermined the opposition-controlled legislature, the National Assembly. Maduro was the first foreign leader to meet with Diaz-Canel last month after he succeeded Raul Castro to become president of the Communist-run island. Venezuela, which holds the world's largest oil reserves, exchanges crude for Cuban medical and other technical services, though deliveries have dropped in recent years during an economic implosion in the country of 30 million people. "We felt (Maduro's) victory as our own," Diaz-Canel said. "Venezuela has supported Cuba in many ways throughout its history. We have a debt of gratitude." Story continues Venezuelan opposition politicians say bilateral relations with Cuba are deeply unfavourable. "Maduro did not sell the country, he handed it over. NATIONAL SHAME!" tweeted opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido, posting a picture of Diaz-Canel wearing a sash with the yellow blue and red Venezuelan colours on Wednesday. Diaz-Canel flew to Venezuela with his wife Liz Cuesta as first lady, in a break with custom during the nearly 60 years' rule by the Castro brothers Fidel and Raul who generally travelled without their spouses. Diaz-Canel's visit came as Cuban authorities faced the chaos of flooding in the wake of Subtropical Storm Alberto that has killed already four people and prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands. (Additional reporting by Nelson Acosta in Havana and Vivian Sequera and Alexandra Ulmer in Caracas; writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Luc Cohen; editing by David Gregorio and G Crosse) Dont stress the China trade deficit for now. Focus on getting a level playing field, say US business leaders American business leaders in China have urged policymakers in Washington and Beijing to focus on issues such as fairness and reciprocal treatment rather than putting too much emphasis on cutting the trade deficit in their next round of talks. Foreign governments and companies operating in China have long complained about problems such as forced technology transfer, state support for domestic companies, rules that restrict their operations and weak protections for intellectual property. US President Donald Trump has frequently highlighted his desire to cut the trade deficit with China, but some members of his trade team and the US business community are more concerned about issues such as Chinas state-sponsored plans to make the domestic hi-tech sector a world leader while freezing out foreign companies. US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross will lead a delegation to Beijing on June 2-4 to continue negotiations as the two sides try to avert a trade war. China has previously agreed to cut its trade surplus with the US by buying more American agriculture and energy products but the details of this have yet to be clarified. William Zarit, the chairman of the US Chamber of Commerce in China, said it would be a disappointment if the latest round of talks continued to focus on the trade deficit or prioritised the needs of certain sectors without getting to the essence of the difference in our systems. In its latest white paper on American business in China released on Wednesday, the chamber said Chinas economic development has progressed along a unique path as a product of historical tradition, technological context and government intervention. It continued that how to reconcile Chinas government funding and protection of state-owned and state-influenced enterprises versus the American model based on market forces was the most significant challenge between the two countries in the past 40 years. Story continues The chamber said in its report that a fifth of its member companies said they had moved or planned to move capacity out of China due to rising costs and changes in the regulatory environment, while one third of member companies planned to expand investment in China by more than 10 per cent this year. The chamber suggested that the Chinese government should build trust through clarity and consistency in the regulatory environment an area listed as the top concern in the survey because the gap between policy as stated and as enforced remains significant. It also urged Beijing to improve investment access for foreign companies to ease discontent about the much freer access their Chinese counterparts enjoy overseas. Particularly, it encouraged Beijing to open the digital sector to stimulate innovation by allowing the free flow of information. Zarit said members of the chamber wanted the US government to carry out sustained communication with the Chinese authorities on regulatory compliance, hi-tech trade, legal services and energy. Lester Ross, chairman of the chambers policy committee, said: China, as the worlds second largest economy, is the market that the American firms have to compete with to maintain their global leadership and competitiveness. The emphasis on the trade deficit was not the smartest way to tackle friction between the two sides, he said, adding that the main efforts of the US administration should concentrate on the structural imbalance. We dont want to see the transactional issues preclude progress on structural issues. Ross said issues of fairness and reciprocal investment had come to the forefront of trade talks more than under previous US administrations, but difficulties remained on reaching an agreement. He said he also expected that a deal on Chinese telecoms company ZTE would be reached in a way that does not drive China even further along the path of separation of Chinas technology market from the rest of the world, but said the business had to abide by US regulations in the way that American companies have to do in China. The telecoms giant has been banned from importing American components for alleged breaches of sanctions on Iran, although Trump has hinted at easing these restrictions. Zarit said the US negotiating team needed to reach a consensus among themselves on how to approach the talks following reports of clashes between trade hawks and those seeking a compromise. He said that Wilbur Ross was not the major negotiator in the bilateral trade talks, therefore his upcoming visit was not expected to be hugely significant in the longer term and ruled out the likelihood of the US loosening hi-tech export controls for China. He warned that American companies operating in China were looking to other countries to diversify their supply chains out of concerns that recent the trade tensions would affect them. Anecdotally I heard about companies that are already thinking about diversifying their supply chains have now been speeding up their activities, he told a small briefing ahead of the release. This article Dont stress the China trade deficit for now. Focus on getting a level playing field, say US business leaders first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. Fox & Friends contributor Kayleigh Mcenany is calling Michelle Wolf an angry and militant so-called feminist after the comedian mocked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on her Netflix special. Fox News contributors are questioning Michelle Wolf commitment to feminism. (Photo: Getty Images) On Sunday, Netflix debuted Wolfs new show The Break With Michelle Wolf during which Wolf raised the question, Do women have to support other women? in reference to President Trump naming Gina Haspel the first female CIA director, a controversial hire due to Haspels previous involvement in the torture of suspected terrorists. Who knew you could waterboard a glass ceiling til it broke! joked Wolf. .@kayleighmcenany: Michelle Wolf says shes for womens rights, but yet she tears down women who are on the right pic.twitter.com/rQHB8cng7f FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) May 29, 2018 During her show, Wolf also disparaged a May 5th tweet from her best friend Sanders which read, There is no one more qualified to be the first woman to lead the CIA than 30+ year CIA veteran Gina Haspel. Any Democrat who claims to support womens empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite. Wolf said of the tweet, Well if anyones an expert on hypocrites, its Sarah Huckabee Sanders. And for the record, that was not a looks-based joke that was about her ugly personality. There is no one more qualified to be the first woman to lead the CIA than 30+ year CIA veteran Gina Haspel. Any Democrat who claims to support womens empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) May 5, 2018 Wolf was alluding to her White House Correspondents Dinner speech during which she said, I actually really like Sarah, I think shes very resourceful. She burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe shes born with it, maybe its lies. The bit earned Wolf mass disapproval for mocking Sanders appearance. Story continues .@JessicaTarlov: Conway, Sanders, and other women in the GOP support policies that hurt women, so its okay to attack these women for that pic.twitter.com/DIYUU64hJo FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) May 29, 2018 On Tuesday, during Fox & Friends, Mcenany attacked Wolfs Netflix special. Michelle Wolf represents a very angry, militant-type of feminism thats very hypocritical. You know, she says shes for womens rights but yet she tears down women who are on the right. She added, And we see this on the left repeatedly.why arent they celebrating women on the right? Mcenany, the national spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, provided examples: Sanders, the first mother to assume her role and Kellyanne Conway, the first woman to win a presidential campaign. She added that liberals tear them down in a malicious, angry, vile way. Fox guest Jessica Tarlov responded that the aforementioned women support policies that hurt women, with examples such as not raising federal minimum wage (adding that two-thirds of people who earn it are women) and attempting to restrict affordable healthcare. This administration doesnt want to give women choices and control over their own body, and thats why its OK to attack these women, said Tarlov. .@kayleighmcenany: The Republican Party is the party for women pic.twitter.com/t2WwhWEUmc FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) May 29, 2018 Mcenany argued, We are the party for women and this is a presidency for women while slamming the Hollywood elite, including Wolf, for their lack of support. Feminism, defined as the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, is a sticky subject when it comes to politics many argue that its impossible for conservatives who oppose abortion, contraception, and the gender wage gap, to identify as such. And some conservative women have expressed disappointment in movements such as the Womens March which ignores their party by focusing on these issues. Others, like Conway, have rejected the term feminism altogether calling it very pro-abortion and very anti-male. Theres an individual feminism, if you will, that you make your own choicesI look at myself as a product of my choices, not a victim of my circumstances, she said in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Thats really to me what conservative feminism if you will, is all about. However, some disagree in 2016 when asked on The View, Do you believe you can be pro-life and a feminist? Hillary Clinton said, Yes, I do, absolutely, adding, I respect the opinions and beliefs of every woman. The reason why being pro-choice is the right way to go is because it is a choice, and hopefully a choice that is rooted in the thoughtfulness and the care that women bring to this decision, so of course you can be a feminist and be pro-life. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. NGO workers in Hungary could soon face prison after Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government tabled what it calls the "Stop Soros" laws to parliament Tuesday, targeting "organisers of illegal migration". According to the text of the legislation, helping asylum-seekers to acquire refugee status could result in jail for up to one year if those persons were not in immediate danger, or had entered Hungary illegally. "Hungary's security interests must come first," said state secretary Csaba Domotor, adding that the laws reflected the will of the people expressed at a parliamentary election April 8. Since the vote last month, which Orban's ruling Fidesz party won by a landslide, the fiercely anti-immigration premier has vowed to accelerate a clampdown on NGOs funded by liberal US billionaire George Soros. Orban, in power since 2010, has long accused the 87-year-old financier, of facilitating migration, and called NGO staff "Soros mercenaries". Hungarian citizens deemed to have broken the laws could also be banned from going within 8 kilometres (5 miles) of border areas, while foreigners could be handed expulsion orders. The package is set to be debated next week by the new parliament, in which Fidesz enjoy a powerful two-thirds majority. Rights groups in Hungary had denounced draft versions of the package published earlier this year as an effort to stigmatise and intimidate voices critical of Orban's hardline anti-migration policies that include border detention camps for migrants. Brussels and the European Parliament grouping that Fidesz belongs to -- the European People's Party -- have also expressed concerns about the Stop Soros proposals. The UN's refugee agency the UNHCR urged Hungary Tuesday to "withdraw" the laws, as they "would significantly restrict the ability of NGOs and individuals to support asylum-seekers and refugees". In March the EU's rights watchdog the Venice Commission began a probe into the laws' compliance with EU values, and is due to give its opinion next month. Domotor said Tuesday while the government will listen to the Strasbourg-based body's verdict "no-one can give an ultimatum to Hungary". In a speech in Paris on Tuesday, Soros said Orban had based his election campaign on "falsely accusing me of seeking to flood Europe, Hungary included, with Muslim refugees". His Open Society Foundation said this month it was closing operations in Hungary begun in the 1980s and relocating to Germany in response to the "repressive" policies of Orban's government. A Mexican journalist was found beaten to death Tuesday in the northern state of Tamaulipas, on the US border, prosecutors said, at least the fifth reporter murdered in the country this year. Hector Gonzalez Antonio, a correspondent for national daily Excelsior and local radio and TV stations, was found bludgeoned to death on a road in the state capital, Ciudad Victoria, the state prosecutor's office said in a statement. "An investigation has been opened to identify and locate those responsible for this homicide," it said. Pictures from the crime scene showed the journalist's bloodied body, shirtless and missing a shoe, abandoned on a narrow dirt road on the outskirts of Ciudad Victoria. Gonzalez, 40, had been kidnapped in a carjacking on Monday, said watchdog group Reporters Without Borders. A married father of two, he covered politics and general news, including stories on the wave of violence that has engulfed Mexico in recent years -- which has hit particularly hard in Tamaulipas, the scene of bloody turf wars between rival drug cartels. Tamaulipas is "a black hole as far as the freedom of the press, so it's very likely he was killed because of his work as a journalist," said Balbina Flores, head of Reporters Without Borders in Mexico. Flores called for a full investigation and government protection for Gonzalez's family. Racked by violent crime linked to the multibillion-dollar narcotics trade, Mexico posted a record number of homicides last year: 25,339. That included at least 11 murdered journalists, making the country the deadliest in the world for the profession after Syria, according to Reporters Without Borders. Asking questions about powerful drug cartels or government corruption can be a deadly job in Mexico. Including Gonzalez, at least five journalists have been murdered so far this year in the country in possible retaliation for their work, and another is missing, according to the rights group. More than 100 have been murdered in the country since 2000. - 'Dangerous to publish here' - The vast majority of the cases have gone unpunished -- as do more than 90 percent of violent crimes in Mexico. "When journalists are murdered or threatened for doing their jobs, freedom of expression is threatened," said Giancarlo Summa, director of the United Nations Information Center in Mexico. "We demand the authorities investigate what happened (to Gonzalez) immediately and arrest those responsible. The impunity must end." A colleague and friend of Gonzalez, who asked not to be named out of fear for his safety, said the late journalist's death did not appear to fit the profile of a typical drug cartel execution. "It's strange that he was beaten to death and not shot," he said. He said Gonzalez had not mentioned receiving threats, but was "very careful about what he wrote and said." "It's dangerous to publish or comment on what happens here" in Tamaulipas, Gonzalez's friend told AFP. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Wednesday he wants to develop an island on a cluster of rocks previously disputed with Singapore, a move that could anger its neighbour. The strategically located area has long been a flashpoint between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, and they previously took a territorial dispute to the United Nations top court. The International Court of Justice in 2008 awarded two rock clusters, called Middle Rocks, to Malaysia while a nearby island was deemed to be Singaporean territory. Malaysia launched a challenge to that ruling last year but Singapore's foreign ministry said Wednesday it had been withdrawn by Kuala Lumpur. However, at the same time Mahathir announced Malaysia wanted to develop an island on Middle Rocks, at the eastern entrance of the strategic Singapore Strait. The 100-kilometre (60-mile) strait is one of the world's busiest commercial shipping routes, with vessels using it to access the city-state's port. "It is our intention to enlarge Middle Rocks into a small island for us," the 92-year-old -- who started his second stint as premier this month after a surprise election win -- told a press conference. He gave no more details about what the proposed island would look like or how long it would take to build. Mahathir added that Malaysia had already built a structure on Middle Rocks. Reports said Malaysia inaugurated a maritime base there last year. James Chin, a Malaysia expert from the University of Tasmania, told AFP that Singapore would see the move as "hostile". "Among the Singapore elite, they will see it as part of Mahathir's anti-Singapore stance," he said. It came after Mahathir announced this week that he was scrapping a planned high-speed railway between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, as he seeks to improve the nation's finances. Both developments are likely to alarm the Singapore government, already wary of Mahathir's return as ties between the neighbours were famously stormy during his first stint as premier from 1981-2003. Still, Kuala Lumpur's decision to drop its case at the ICJ could assuage fears. Malaysia had lodged its challenge in February 2017, calling for the court to overturn its earlier ruling granting its neighbour sovereignty over the disputed island. The Malaysia startup is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange and owns 15 online properties across the developing world Frontier Digital Ventures (FDV), a Malaysian online classified portal listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, announced today it has raised AUS$11.2 million (US$8.4 million) via an Entitlement Offer. FDV will also release AUS$3.2 in a retail offering that will be open on Thursday, May 31. Because the Entitlement Offer was oversubscribed, FDV expects to fill the order which will bring the total fund raise to AUS$14.4 million (US$10.8 million). An entitlement offer is a financing strategy whereby the company issues corporate shares at a set price to existing investors. The purchaser then cannot transfer the shares to another party. A retail offering is the traditional buying/selling of shares on a public market. FDV is able to raise money in this manner because it is a public company. The strong demand by the institutional and professional investor community is a clear vote of confidence in the FDV team and our business model, said Founder and CEO Shaun Di Gregorio in a statement. Also Read: Who are the big winners during seasonal e-commerce campaigns? Not retailers, for sure FDV is not a consumer facing brand but rather has gathered under its umbrella a host of classifieds websites. It also is hyper focussed on frontier markets and includes websites that sell cars in Myanmar, property in Pakistan and general classifieds in Panama. In total, it has an ownership stake in 15 brands across the world. Since our IPO, we have established a portfolio of 15 leading online classifieds operating companies and are progressing them towards profitability, with a goal to create and return significant value to our shareholders, said Di Gregoprio. Also Read: Blanja CEO Aulia E. Marinto resigns, returns to Telkom Group The money will be used to increase its ownership in top-performing properties, accelerate growth amongst its portfolio companies and bring its companies into profitability. The post Malaysia online-classifieds umbrella raises US$8.4M, targets an additional US$2.4M appeared first on e27. Belgium on Wednesday paid emotional tribute to two policewomen and a student shot dead in the eastern city of Liege as investigators probed the gunman's transition from years of petty criminality to "terrorist murder". Prosecutors confirmed they were treating Tuesday's bloodshed as an act of terrorism, saying the shooter Benjamin Herman was also suspected of another murder the night before. The Islamic State group claimed one of its "soldiers" was behind the attack, the jihadists' Amaq propaganda agency said later Wednesday. Across Belgium, flags were flying at half-mast as Prime Minister Charles Michel led a minute's silence in Liege where around 1,000 people had gathered to pay their respects, among them many police officers. Belgium's national football squad also halted a training session ahead of next month's World Cup to observe a minute's silence for the victims. As police scrambled to unpick the gunman's motive for the attack, a dramatic account emerged of Tuesday's bloodshed, which began when the 31-year-old attacked two policewomen with a knife. After repeatedly stabbing the policewomen, he grabbed their weapons and killed them in a modus operandi which has been encouraged online by extremists from the Islamic State group. The two victims were identified as Lucile Garcia, 54, who had recently become a grandmother, and Soraya Belkacemi, 44, a mother to 13-year-old twins. He then shot dead a 22-year-old student sitting in a parked car in the city centre before entering a nearby school where he briefly took a female cleaner hostage. Speaking to the Derniere Heure newspaper, the cleaner, who gave her name only as Darifa, said he had asked her whether she was Muslim and if she was fasting for Ramadan. When she answered "yes" to both questions, Herman said he would not harm her. She then urged him to give himself up, telling him: "You shouldn't be here, this is a school, there are children!" after which he burst out for his final confrontation with police. - 'Terrorist murder' - Investigators are trying to understand how Herman, a drifter who spent a decade in and out of prison for violence and drug offences, came to carry out such a bloody attack. "The facts are qualified as terrorist murder and attempted terrorist murder," prosecutors' spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt told a news briefing in Brussels. He pointed to the fact that "the perpetrator shouted several times 'Allahu akbar'... and information from state security according to which the perpetrator was in touch with radicalised persons." But he said information about Herman's contacts with extremists dated "from late 2016, early 2017" and had not been confirmed since. Amateur footage obtained by AFP showed the gunman shouting "Allahu akbar" -- "God is greatest" -- as he walked through the streets. In another video, Herman darts out of the school before a short and intense burst of police gunfire, after which he collapses on the ground. Interior Minister Jan Jambon urged caution over the extremist angle. "There are signals that there was radicalisation in the prison but did this radicalisation lead to these actions? There, too, we can ask ourselves a lot of questions," he told RTL radio. Investigators are also examining whether Herman acted alone or had accomplices. - Gruesome hammer murder - Investigators are paying special attention to the gruesome killing of an alleged heroin dealer linked to Herman who was battered to death with a hammer late Monday in a village near the Luxembourg border. They found the hammer in Herman's car on Tuesday. Jambon said police believed he had carried out the killing just hours after getting temporary release from prison on Monday morning. Liege, a major city in Belgium's blighted industrial rustbelt, was the scene of another bloody shootout in 2011 when another former convict killed six people and wounded more than 120 before turning the gun on himself. Belgium has been on alert since January 2015 when authorities smashed a terror cell near Liege that was planning an attack on police. That cells had links to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the November 2015 attacks on Paris that killed 130 people and was claimed by IS. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to visit North Korea on Thursday to discuss nuclear stand-off and bilateral ties Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will visit North Korea on Thursday at the invitation of counterpart Ri Yong-ho, according to the reclusive nations state news agency. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrovs official visit to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea will take place on May 31, the foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. It said Lavrov and the Norths Minister of Foreign Affairs Ri will discuss the reclusive states nuclear programme, bilateral cooperation and other key international problems during the meeting. Lavrov later confirmed the meeting, saying it would help him understand North Koreas position on the nuclear settlement. It will be very useful for me to understand how our North Korean neighbours relate to all issues [concerning the situation on the Korean peninsula], Lavrov was quoted as saying by TASS. Its the second time in as many months that the pair will meet, after Ri flew to Moscow in May for talks with the Russian foreign minister. Lavrov at the time floated the possibility of a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sometime in the future. We really hope these talks do not end up in ultimatums Sergei Lavrov on Trump-Kim summit Lavrovs trip on Thursday comes amid preparations for a high-stakes summit between US President Donald Trump and Kim set for June 12. Washington wants North Korea to quickly give up all its nuclear weapons in return for sanctions and economic relief. Pyongyang has a different view of denuclearisation and remains deeply worried that abandoning its deterrent would leave it vulnerable, especially while the US maintains a military presence in South Korea. Lavrov said he hoped the meeting between Kim and Trump would not degenerate into a trading of accusations. We support the changes happening now in relations between the two Koreas, between Pyongyang and Washington, Lavrov was quoted as saying by RIA news agency. Story continues We really hope these talks do not end up in ultimatums. News of Lavrovs visit came after Putin called for restraint to keep Kim at the negotiating table for the Trump meeting. Russia is a traditional ally of North Korea, along with China. Putin said on Friday that finding a solution to the North Korea nuclear tensions is of great importance to Russia and North Koreas sovereignty should be guaranteed. A full denuclearisation of North Korea should involve giving North Korea a guarantee of their sovereignty and inviolability, Putin said. If you dont behave aggressively and if you dont corner North Korea, the result that we need will be achieved faster than many would think, and at less cost. Russias diplomatic efforts will also follow South Korean President Moon Jae-ins meeting with Kim on Saturday to discuss the North Korean leaders possible upcoming summit with Trump, the South said, the second inter-Korean summit in as many months. The meeting with Trump looked uncertain last week, after a turbulent few days of diplomatic brinkmanship that culminated in a letter by Trump to Kim, saying he would abandon the summit because of Pyongyangs open hostilities towards US Vice President Mike Pence. Trump then said on Friday that his administration is in contact with North Korea and that a June 12 summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, might still take place. More recently, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on Tuesday the White House was prepared for the summit to take place on June 12 as originally planned. Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse, Associated Press and Reuters This article Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to visit North Korea on Thursday to discuss nuclear stand-off and bilateral ties first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. More from South China Morning Post: Singapore Airlines said on Wednesday that it will relaunch the world's longest commercial flight in October, a journey of almost 19 hours from the city-state to New York, but it will not be available to economy travellers. The daily, non-stop journey from Changi to Newark Airport will cover about 16,700 kilometres (10,300 miles) and take about 18 hours 45 minutes, the airline said in a statement. The current record holder is Qatar Airways Flight 921 from Auckland to Doha, which takes 17 hours 40 minutes. The Singapore Airlines (SIA) flight will use the long-range Airbus A350-900ULR, which will be configured to carry 161 passengers -- 67 in business class and 94 in premium economy. "The two-class configuration... was a business consideration to meet market demand. "This configuration will also provide our customers with greater comfort on non-stop flights," an SIA spokesperson told AFP. The airline had flown a similar route from 2004 until 2013 but cancelled it as it fell short of revenue expectations. However, its latest decision comes as carriers look for new sources of revenue in a competitive environment, while long-haul flights often make more cash than those that require stops. There are also plans for a non-stop route from Singapore to Los Angeles using the same plane, the airline said. Analysts said the decision to have no economy class was an attempt to promote the airline to wealthy customers. "It's about SIA marketing themselves as a premium service provider," Brendan Sobie, chief analyst at the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, told AFP. - Safety concerns - But there have been concerns that such long flights might pose safety risks, particularly for cabin crew. Britain's largest union, Unite, alleged this month that Qantas had tried to "silence" crew members who wanted to discuss concerns about health and fatigue on their Perth to London route, one of the longest flights in the world at 17 hours and 20 minutes. However, Sobie noted that SIA pioneered the ultra long-haul route and had done a lot of research. "In the early 2000s when this first started, SIA did all the testing they needed to and what they have come up with has set the industry standard today," he said. SIA said cabin crew operating ultra-long-range flights such as the non-stop route to New York will be allowed one more hour of rest than those on long-haul flights. Shukor Yusof, an analyst with aviation consultancy Endau Analytics, said it was unlikely SIA could make money from the new service. "The global premium market has eroded," he told AFP. "Operating costs are higher on ultra long-haul flights too, erasing any profits an airline might make." The new route comes as the city-state's flag carrier faces tough challenges. Last year, it consolidated its low-cost units TigerAir and Scoot into a single entity in a streamlining exercise. And this month it said it will absorb its struggling premium regional wing, SilkAir, into the broader group following a multi-million-dollar upgrade as part of reforms to stay competitive. Singapores Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan Yahoo News Singapore file photo Singapore is happy to agree with Malaysias decision to drop its challenges to the International Court of Justices (ICJ) ruling on the sovereignty of Pedra Branca and its surrounding territories, said Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan on Wednesday (30 May). In a Facebook post, Balakrishnan revealed that Malaysia had informed the ICJ on Monday that it was discontinuing proceedings in the two cases it had brought against Singapore relating to the ICJs original judgment on 23 May 2008 concerning sovereignty over Pedra Branca, Middle Rocks and South Ledge. Singapore agreed with Malaysias request the following day, said Balakrishnan. We were confident of our case, and the correctness of the original ICJ decision. When Malaysia requested to discontinue the cases, without them being argued, we were happy to agree. Both Malaysia and Singapore had gone through the due legal process and put this matter to rest, he said. Balakrishnan added that Singapores legal team, including Attorney-General Lucien Wong and led by former home affairs minister S. Jayakumar, had put forward clear and compelling arguments against the submissions advanced by Malaysia. Earlier on Wednesday, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told a media conference that the country would reconsider its challenge to the ICJ judgment on Pedra Branca. He added that the government was thinking of expanding Middle Rocks and developing it into a small island. The latest development appears to have drawn the decades-long dispute over the tiny but strategic Pedra Branca, which lies off 14km off Johor on the eastern approach to the Singapore Strait from the South China Sea, to a close. In 2008, the ICJ ruled that the island belonged to Singapore. Middle Rocks, a rocky outcrop close to Pedra Branca, was deemed to belong to Malaysia, while a low-tide bank called South Ledge was deemed to be in overlapping territorial waters. Related stories: UNs top court to hear Malaysia vs Singapore island row ICJ Pedra Branca judgement: Singapore files observations on Malaysias request Malaysias new facts in application to overturn ruling on Pedra Branca revealed US President Donald Trump said Friday he will meet North Korea's Kim Jong Un as originally scheduled on June 12 for a historic summit after extraordinary Oval Office talks with a top envoy from Pyongyang. After more than an hour of discussion with Kim Yong Chol, Trump told reporters that denuclearization -- and a formal end to the decades-old Korean war -- would be on the table in Singapore. But the US president warned he did not expect to immediately sign a deal to bring a halt to the reclusive regime's nuclear program. "I never said it goes in one meeting. I think it's going to be a process, but the relationships are building and that's very positive," he said, after waving farewell to the North Korean leader's right-hand man. - Ending the war - The Korean War has been largely frozen since an armistice ended hostilities, but not the underlying conflict, in 1953. Since then, there have been occasional clashes on the divided peninsula. "We talked about ending the war," Trump said. "Historically it's very important, but we'll see. We did discuss that, the ending of the Korean War. Can you believe we're talking about the ending of the Korean War?" Washington is determined that Kim should agree to what US officials call the "complete, verifiable and irreversible" end of North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs. Kim says he is committed to "denuclearization" in some form, but he is expected to demand security guarantees in return. Most expert observers are skeptical of a rapid breakthrough, and Trump admitted it would be a long and difficult process. "We're not going to go in and sign something on June 12. We never were. I told him today, 'Take your time'," he said, adding nevertheless that he expects "a really positive result in the end." Kim Yong Chol, the most senior North Korean to visit the United States in 18 years, spent almost 90 minutes in the Oval Office. Afterwards, Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo walked the North's delegation to their cars, smiling and shaking hands in front of the media before the motorcade pulled away. - Security guarantees - Meanwhile, discussions between US and North Korean officials continued in Singapore and in the Demilitarized Zone dividing the Korean peninsula. On Thursday, Kim Jong Un told Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that his commitment to denuclearization remains "unchanged and consistent and fixed," but experts warn he will seek concessions from Washington. In addition to an end to the war, he is likely to want international recognition as well as guarantees against any strike by the US forces stationed in South Korea. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, however, said Saturday that the presence of American troops in South Korea is not "on the table." For the North, denuclearization has long been code for the withdrawal of US troops from the peninsula and the end of its nuclear umbrella over the South -- something unthinkable in Washington. Pyongyang has previously insisted that it needs nuclear weapons to defend against a US invasion. But it remains to be seen if either side has changed its position following the whirlwind diplomacy of the last few weeks. As expected, Kim Yong Chol handed Trump a letter from Kim that may clear up some of the questions. The US leader said the missive was "very nice" -- but then admitted he had not yet read it. An aide later confirmed he did after the talks. It came only a week after Trump threatened to consign the entire process to history, abruptly cancelling the summit in a sharply-worded letter, only to revive preparations shortly afterwards. Trump said that, after Friday's talks, the parties are "totally over that and now we're going to deal and we're going to really start a process." Since the short-lived boycott threat, diplomats from both countries have conducted an intense flurry of talks, culminating this week when Pompeo sat down in New York with Kim's envoy. - 'Their decision' - Pompeo said on Thursday that, after what have now been two meetings with Kim Jong Un and three with Kim Yong Chol, he believes the North is at least ready to consider addressing US demands for denuclearization. "I believe they are contemplating a path forward. They can make a strategic shift. One that their country has not been prepared to make before. This will obviously be their decision," he said. There has also been a recent rapprochement on the Korean peninsula, with the two Koreas holding high-level talks Friday at the border truce village of Panmunjom. The meeting followed two landmark summits between the leaders of North and South Korea in the last five weeks. Seoul welcomed Trump's meeting with Kim Yong Chol. "The delivery of a letter from Chairman Kim Jong Un to President Trump has apparently broadened and consolidated the road to the North Korea-US summit," said Kim Eui-gyeom, spokesman for South Korea's presidential Blue House. China also welcomed the development, with foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying saying that Beijing hoped the two nations "will continue to move towards each other, to demonstrate sincerity, and to actively promote the preparations for the leaders' meeting." Japanese premier Shinzo Abe meanwhile said, "I am determined to do my best so that it will be a historic summit." burs-dc/sst/qan/amu United Nations chief Antonio Guterres praised Tuesday an agreement endorsed by Libya's rival leaders to support elections as a "significant and welcome step forward" in the North African country's political transition. Four powerful players in Libya, including UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj and military leader Khalifa Haftar, agreed during a meeting in Paris to work toward holding parliamentary and presidential elections by December 10. "The declaration is a significant and welcome step forward in Libya's political transition," said a UN statement released hours after the meeting was held. Also present were Aguila Saleh Issa, the parliament speaker based in the eastern city of Tobruk, and Khalid al-Mishri, head of the High Council of State in Tripoli. "The meeting recognized the importance of developing a constitutional basis for elections," said the UN statement, adding that the four leaders had agreed to work with the United Nations on a proposal and timeline to adopt a constitution. The Libyan players "committed to work constructively with the United Nations to realize parliamentary and presidential elections in a secure environment by 10 December 2018 at the latest and to respect the results of the election." A UN conference will be held to follow up on the Paris meeting, the statement said, without specifying a date. The United Nations has launched a plan to bring stability to Libya through elections this year that are meant to turn the page on years of turmoil since the 2011 ouster of Moamer Kadhafi. Libya remains divided between the UN-backed government in Tripoli and a rival administration in the east that enjoys support from Egypt, Russia and the United Arab Emirates. Photo: Pixabay Singapore, which has stepped up its anti-smoking drive this year by raising the excise duty on all tobacco products by 10 per cent and banning electronic cigarettes and other vaporisers, has plenty to cheer about this World No Tobacco Day on Thursday (31 May). On 1 July, when all public areas within the Orchard Road precinct are designated smoke-free, another measure in Singapores multi-pronged approach to curb smoking will come into effect. Singapores comprehensive tobacco control policies have helped bring down its smoking prevalence rate from 18.3 per cent in 1992 to about 13 per cent at present. The government aims to reduce this rate, among the lowest in the world, to 12 per cent by 2020. The Tobacco (Control of Advertisements and Sale) Act was amended in November 2017 and the first phase of amendments came into force in February 2018 when it became illegal to buy, use and possess emerging and imitation tobacco products such as electronic cigarettes/pipes/cigars as well as chewing tobacco and shisha in Singapore. Photo: Pixabay Other measures under the amended Act include raising the minimum legal age for the purchase, use, possession, sale and supply of tobacco products from 18 to 21. This will be done in three phases, from 18 to 19 years on 1 January 2019, to 20 years a year later, and eventually to 21 on 1 January 2021. The National Environment Agency (NEA) has announced that from 1 July this year, smokers visiting Orchard Road will only be allowed to smoke at designated smoking areas (DSAs). NEA says, From 1 October 2018, enforcement action will be taken against all offenders who smoke within the smoke-free zone, other than at DSAs. Singapores Ministry of Health strongly urges smokers to quit smoking to reduce the risk of developing smoking-related illnesses. It says, Individuals seeking to quit smoking should use methods proven to be safe and effective. These methods include going cold turkey, undergoing smoking cessation counselling and using licensed nicotine replacement therapies (NRTs). Story continues Related stories: Smoking in public areas of Orchard Road prohibited from July 2018 Parliament: Legal age for sale of tobacco products to be raised to 21 from 18 E-cigarettes Helped Me Cut Down On My Smoking Habit. Its been a long, long time since the UK has seen an arena-based skateboarding happening anywhere near the scale of last weekends Street League London event. Sure, there was the Nike European Am series relatively recently, which brought a bunch of European heads over to the capital and made a hell of a noise, but those were held inside a pre-existing skatepark and due to their very nature, didnt attract international pros in the numbers that were once an annual event back in the late 1990s. Weve tried hard to think but were pretty sure that the last thing on this kind of scale, both in terms of the skaters in attendance and the furore it caused, was probably the Generation 97 event held nearly 20 years ago at Wembley Arena. Brazils Pamela Rosa smashed it all weekend then took one hell of a slam leaving her wincing in pain for the finals. Frontside lipslide whilst grimacing. Photo: Griff Looked at from that perspective, its easy to see how much those of us who grew up skating in the 1990s took Radlands and its series of international contests for granted. That generation, who watched skateboarding shrink from the vert-driven 80s behemoth and survive as the inward-looking, almost invisible anomaly of the early 90s, were fortunate in many regards, (well if you forget about the Goofy Boy costumes and the 38mm wheels), as we got to experience the era where nobody gave a fuck about skateboarding outside of the people doing it. Rose-tinted spectacles can be a dangerous accessory if operated incorrectly, but it wouldnt be over stating the issue to say that one of the most culturally significant and fondly remembered aspects of said era were the Chris Ince-led contests in Northampton that allowed the UK skate scene to meet, watch and skate with pros from all over the world. And that is something that hasnt happened in this country for nearly 20 years since Chris and co tried to make the jump from tacitly allowing 100s of skaters to sleep in a Lidl carpark in Kingsthorpe to a major arena event at Wembley. It is within that context that last weekends inaugural British leg of the traveling circus also known as Street League took place. Head sets? Yeah, sets, for your head Photo: Griff The internet has been in an absolute tizzy after Roseanne Barrs racist tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett caused ABC to ax Barrs wildly successful Roseanne reboot. Though plenty of people (especially Black Twitter) are thrilled to see the show go, the reboot did offer a fascinating look at middle-class life in Trumps America. As a result, weve all been holding our breath waiting for the presidents inevitable Twitter reaction. And folks, here it is, in all its narcissistic glory: Advertisement Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that ABC does not tolerate comments like those made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didnt get the call? Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Theres a lot going on here. Not only is The Donald taking this opportunity to rehash a year-old beef with Iger, hes making a landmark cultural moment about his favorite thing in the world: himself. (Its unclear exactly which HORRIBLE ABC statements Trump is referring tolate-night host Jimmy Kimmel regularly goes in on the president, as does The Views Joy Behar.) Iger left Trumps financial advisory panel in June 2017, saying that, after Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, his participation in the administration became a matter of principle. Given that Roseanne was, for many, a cultural landmark of the Trump era, its somewhat surprising that the president didnt express solidarity with Barr. Its also unclear what the difference is between making and saying a statement. But, at the end of the day, Trumps gonna Trump. 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. Everyone sweats, obviously, and perspiring is a sign that our bodies are healthily regulating our internal temperatures. But some of us perspire a lot, and it doesnt take much for us to get there. Hyperhidrosis is the clinical term for abnormally excessive sweating, but theres also a middle ground of people who find themselves breaking a sweat more easily, and for longer, than most. For us, the difference between a 70- and 75-degree day can be the difference between arriving at work looking like a speckless professional, ready to tackle the day, and something that crawled out of the Hudson. Advertisement As a card-carrying member of the excessive-sweating community, I rely on a handful of products Ive gathered over years of navigating fifth-floor walk-ups, subway platforms, and other oppressive conditions of summer in the city. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement I borrowed this toner from my fiancees skin-care routine. She applies it in the morning with cotton pads, and Ive started to do the same. Its helpful for keeping my foreheadwhere the beads of sweat always seem to develop firstdrier for much longer (witch hazel is a known astringent). It does dry the skin a bit, so I add a light facial moisturizer after. BUY: Thayers Alcohol Free Rose Petal Witch Hazel $11, Amazon Advertisement Advertisement Gold Bond powder is a staple of locker rooms everywhere, but its messy. This relatively new aerosol spray gives the same tingly sensation and, crucially, is easy to apply without creating a mess. I use it after a shower, before putting on any deodorant or moisturizer. BUY: Gold Bond No-Mess Powder Spray $9, Amazon Advertisement I was recommended this by a friend in the military who swears by it when hes in the field. It was made for guys to apply down south during workouts to prevent chafing. Its a lotion that transforms into a drying powder upon application. My fiancee has even taken to using it on her feet while wearing sandals and heelsit beats slathering on Vaseline to prevent rubbing and the resulting blisters. Advertisement BUY: Anthony Sweat Body Defense $20, Amazon Advertisement Advertisement Some occasionsAugust weddings, saycall for a closer. These antiperspirant wipes are marketed for use on the underarms, but have taken on a sort of cult status among excessive sweaters, for when nothing else works. Ive found the best way to use these is to spot treatI wipe my lower back when I know Im going to be running around all day and still need to look presentable, or pretty much any time I am forced to wear a suit between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The active ingredient is aluminum chloride, which is what most antiperspirants use to block sweat, but some people find it irritating to the skin. In my experience, using these the night before a big day, on a specific part of the body that produces a lot of perspiration (the back in my case), will keep that area dry in most real-world scenarios. Advertisement BUY: SweatBlock Antiperspirant Wipes $19, Amazon I have a college friend, a fellow sweaty traveler, who wont use antiperspirants because he finds them irritating. He has a simple routine: twice-daily showers and white undershirtsall the time, no matter what. This tee, which comes in mens and womens styles, is designed specifically for heavy underarm sweaters, so its ideal for someone who has a big meeting or presentation and knows their armpits will be in overdrive. I also like the Uniqlo AIRism undershirts for when it gets humid; theyre the least bulky of anything Ive tried. Ill often forget I am wearing one until I have to peel it off at night. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement BUY: Thompson Tee $27, Amazon Finally, when all else fails, theres the simple bandanna. From about April to October, I keep one on me, either in my bag or back pocket. Its a low-tech way to have some relief at the ready. There are a ton of these online, but make sure you choose one thats 100 percent cotton, never nylon or polyester blend. I like these from Hav-a-Hank. BUY: Hav-a-Hank Bandanna $5, Amazon One recent evening, struggling to fall asleep, I decided to listen to some sleep stories: essentially short podcasts that are custom-built to help you snooze. It wasnt until the next morning that I realized sleep stories are perfect little opuses of tedium, just boring enough to lull you into a stupor without distracting you with the absurdity of their boringness. Many of them involve train journeys. They describe, in surgical detail, things like the rhythm of the wheels and the look of the leaves outside your window. They feature sentences like Inexplicably those deep lines in your furrowed brow one by one unfurl. Their vapid inchworm plots do the exact inverse of what normal story plots are supposed to do. Advertisement Phoebe Smith is a sleep-storyteller-in-residence for the Calm app, which features a gallery of bedtime tales narrated by assorted sedative voices. She has written many of the apps most popular stories, including Blue Gold, a benumbing riff about some lavender fields in Provence in which, for 24 minutes, absolutely nothing happens at all: Youll smell it before you even see it, it begins. That unmistakable aroma that fills your nose and seeps into your senses, instantly mellowing into a smooth and soothing scent. In this conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, Smith discussed how the experts go about writing stories that are specifically designed to put listeners to sleep. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Laura Bennett: How did you start writing sleep stories? Advertisement Phoebe Smith: Im a writer by tradeI write travel stories. One of my best-selling books is called Extreme Sleeps, which is all about my sleeping in strange places. I basically sleep in strange places for a living. What kind of strange places? Like hanging from a portiledge in a tree, sleeping in a cave, sleeping inside a glacier. Wow. So how did you get from there to writing stories intended to put people to sleep? Id written a piece on the Trans-Siberian Railway for a travel magazine, and Michael, one of the co-founders of Calm, contacted me out of the blue and said, I absolutely love this story, I wonder if youd write a sleep story for me. I was skeptical at first because I thought: What?? You want me to write a story that will make people fall asleep? Normally when you write a story you think, I want people to stay until the end. So this goes against all those instincts. Advertisement Was any part of you offended? Well, no, because I always like things that are a little bit weird. So I was totally intrigued by the idea. Advertisement I started to think about it, about how when we were kids, that was how we fell asleepwe had stories read to us in bed. So I realized, yeah of course, why wouldnt that work for grown-ups? If youll forgive the indelicate question, were you offered lots of money to write this sleep story? Hah, no. He did offer to pay me. But it was enough money and my curiosity was piqued. Now Im officially one of their sleep storytellers in residence. Can you tell me about your process when you sit down to write one of these? Advertisement Advertisement Its not the kind of thing you can knock out quickly. If theres any action, it has to start in the beginning. And then it has to slow down. You are putting people to sleep, you are not writing a gripping thriller. I realized the python was gonna freak some people out when they were trying to drift off. Phoebe Smith So how specifically is writing a sleep story different from, say, writing for a travel magazine? When youre writing for a travel magazine, you are starting somewhere really dramatic and pulling people along. But in a sleep story, its about making them feel like they are there, relaxing them as they go. Anything remotely exciting happens in the beginning. In a travel story, say youve been on the trail to find a lion in Africa, and finally you see it and its a really dramatic moment. In a sleep story, you cant do that. Because seeing that lion would wake someone up. Advertisement Advertisement How do you write something that is so perfectly boring as to be sleep-inducing, but not distractingly, ridiculously boring? Obviously you cant be like: You are on a train. You sit still for 14 hours and stare at the wall. [Laughs.] You know, I get so many emails from people who are like, Can you send me the script for your story? Im really interested in it but I never make it to the end. And thats a fantastic accolade as a writer of sleep stories, for someone to say I cant get to the end of your story. I dont generally worry about writing sentences that are too boring, but sometimes I have to go back and delete sentences that are too exciting. Say, I did a recent story about the jungles of Madagascar. I was walking through the forest and I remember near where I wanted to end the story, Id seen a really beautiful python. To me as a travel writer, thats amazing. I wrote it in the story. And then I was like, oh no. Thats gonna freak some people out when they are trying to drift off. So I had to edit out that snake. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Do you ever listen to your own stories when youre trying to sleep? Its funny, they sent me the first one before they posted it. I listened to it and fell asleep before I got to the end of it. With my own story. Where I knew what was going to happen. People who write to me all seem to say they fall asleep somewhere between five and 10 minutes. So at least they might not notice if I accidentally throw the snake in or whatever. What is your favorite sleep story youve ever written? I do like the Trans-Siberia one. I love Erik Braa [the narrator]s voice, its almost like treacle, really soothing. I love Blue Gold too, because Stephen Fry is so good as a narrator also. I also like the one I wrote on Scotlands hidden hideways, which is narrated by someone who has a Scottish accent. Advertisement Do you ever now read normal fiction or nonfiction and find that it just seems so insanely fast-paced and suspenseful to you? Are you ever like, Oh my God, there are so many pythons in this story. Hah, only if Im trying to get to sleep. Advertisement Advertisement How many sleep stories do you write in a given period of time? I write one story a month. Im a regular now because it turns out mine have proved to be very popular. Do you have to pitch ideas for stories? Yes, and sometimes if the people at Calm are skeptical Ill just need to provide more details. Instead of just saying I did this really cool thing in Sweden, Ill need to say When you go on this trip in Sweden, everything slows down, you have to collect your own water, theres no electricity, you light your own fire, and then theyll be persuaded. When youre traveling now, do you find yourself thinking: This experience would make a perfect sleep story? All the time. Whenever Im somewhere where you can go slow, where youre observing and thinking and not just racing through. So youd never do one on the new 14-hour direct flight from London to Perth, Australia. That would be too boring. I would fall asleep trying to write it. Better Life Lab is a partnership of Slate and New America. As labor rights advocates anxiously await Supreme Court judgment in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31which would bar unions from automatically deducting dues for fair share fees and drastically reduce the ability of unions to support their effortsjust last week, on May 21, the Supreme Court unveiled a decision that bans class-action lawsuits for violations. Justice Ginsburg, writing for the dissenters in last weeks case, argued that the result will be a continued underenforcement of the very laws that are meant to help workers. Unions have been a critical aspect of upward mobility and building an American middle class, making blue-collar jobs well-paying, with good benefits and sufficient time off. But lax enforcement of labor laws and a hostile business environment have made it difficult for unions to maintain their membership and keep up with the changing structure of the labor market. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement None of this has stopped a swelling of actions by workers in recent months. Highly visible labor actions, particularly by public school teachers, have been taking place across the United States in the early part of 2018. Remarkably, many of these teachers strikes have been in so-called right-to-work states, where the legal framework makes it difficult for unions to collect membership dues in order to support organizing efforts. Among the teachers demands is, of course, pay increases to address long-term wage stagnation and improved funding for schools. But, more broadly, these actions have demonstrated the social-justice roots of the labor movement: In addressing economic inequality, the direct impact of wage stagnation for teachers, and how the underfunding of public education affects future generations, its clear how union organizing attempts to intervene in inequality. Advertisement This connection between unions and inequality is not just aspirational, as new research published as a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research shows. Economists Henry Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu have compiled survey data from a variety of historical sources to expand on what we knew previously about rising and declining union density over the 20th century. Advertisement Using Gallup polling data that asked about union representation in households starting in 1937, the researchers show union density (the percentage of the workforce that belonged to a union) was more than 10 percent before the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act the following year. That number went up to almost one-third of households in 1950 and has been slowly declining since then. (The data are confirmed by the Census, which began collecting data on union membership in its Current Population Survey in 1973.) That unions have been declining in their size and power is nothing new. Heres where it gets interesting. Advertisement Advertisement The inverted U of union density (from its slow rise from 1937 to its peak to its drop) is matched by its inverse in economic inequality as measured by the top 10 percent and top 1 percent shares of family income over time from 19202016. The correlation between unions and economic inequality is undeniable. Advertisement Advertisement But is there causation? Over this long time period, the economy has also gone through significant structural shifts, like increased adoption of technology, outsourcing, and a better-educated workforce. In 1976, only 14.7 percent of adults over the age of 25 had a college degree, and this rose to 23.6 percent by 1996, then further to 33.4 percent by 2016. Many economists, led by the work of David Autor, have argued that growing income inequality can be explained by a concept called skill-biased technological change, or SBTC. Autors theory around SBTC holds that the rise of high-skilled workers has caused job polarizationwith more demand for very high-skill jobs and some demand for low-skill jobs and a hollowing out of midskill jobsleaving those with less education behind, resulting in the inequality we see today. Advertisement Advertisement The decline of unions was thought to be another effect of SBTC: Since unions have historically represented workers with lower levels of education, and as more educated workers became paid more, they would opt out of joining a union, or so the logic went. In this sense, the decline of unions is not inherently a bad thing, because it means fewer Americans need the bargaining power afforded by unions, since increasing their skill is presumably giving them the ability to command higher wages without collective bargaining. Advertisement The problem is the evidence that education will help workers get higher wages has not borne out for many. For example, women and black Americans get lower returns to education compared to white men, so increasing their education level has not been able to fully address pay inequality. Advertisement While SBTC is not accepted as unquestionable truth in economics, its message permeates in economic policy. It has led to policies, like $300 billion for questionably effective worker-training programs, that put education and workforce development above any systematic improvements to the jobs workers currently occupy and improvements in workers agency to demand more vis-a-vis their employers. Promoting education as the tool to overcoming economic inequality is convenient because it puts the onus on individuals to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and doesnt call into question structures and barriers that limit economic opportunity. But the new data from Farber, Herbst, Kuziemko, and Naidu throws a wrench in the SBTC explanation of rising inequality. They find that the education level of union members also followed a U-shape curve from 19362016. Early in the American labor movement, union households tended to have higher education levelsthink of the guild model of union membership, with only very highly skilled craftsmen. But as union membership increased, beginning in a period where labor activism was a social movement, unions started representing more workers with lower levels of education, a more working class population. The correlation between years of education and union membership declined from 1940 to the height of the labor movement in the 1950s and 60s. But beginning in the mid-1960s, the same time as union density was beginning to decline, unions increasingly represented workers with more education. Thats probably because of the combination of exerted attacks on unions ability to organize with the overall restructuring of our labor marketoutsourcing and subcontracting isolated low-skill workers. Unions were not able to maintain their representation of the workers who would benefit the most from collective bargaining. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement What does this mean for the theory that low education and a lack of skills explain growing wage inequality? It means that while education and skills training matter to worker productivity, theyre not sufficient to ensure economic security without workers power to bargain for better wages too. The recent teachers strikes are emblematic of the modern labor movement. Teachers are by and large an educated workforce. However, even these highly educated workers are now also facing the pressure of wage stagnation and economic insecurity. Likewise, teachers are predominately women, and women face an even greater wage gap at higher levels of education. Unions have helped women close the gender wage gap, but their declining power limits their ability to do so. (The same is true for black Americans, who face greater wage gaps at higher levels of education, and for whom unions have been crucial in closing racial wage gaps.) Greater education and the need for more workers to receive it are not adequate explanations of inequality. The decline in union density is. Providing opportunity to American families will require a robust labor movement that balances corporate power and pushes back against the wage stagnation affecting most workers. This post is part of Outward, Slates home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. Read more here. Last September, Mansfield Independent School District in North Texas put art teacher Stacy Bailey on administrative leave. The reason: Bailey showed her fourth-grade class a photograph of herself and her fiancee dressed up as characters from Finding Nemo. In introducing herself to students with a slide-show presentation about her life and family, Bailey was doing the same thing many other teachers at Charlotte Anderson Elementary School do at the start of school year. She alone was suspended for doing so. Advertisement The administrative reaction to Baileys slide show was swift. Mansfield ISDs Associate Superintendent, Kimberly Cantu, told Bailey that a parent complained she had shown sexually inappropriate images in class. This parent accused Bailey of promoting a homosexual agenda. Formally, the school district alleged that Bailey had violated guidelines requiring controversial subjects be taught in an impartial and objective manner. In October, school officials asked Bailey to resign. When she refused, they reassigned her to teach at a local high school. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Bailey has worked at Charlotte Anderson Elementary since 2008. Since then, students voted her Teacher of the Year twice. Local parents and students have spoken out on Baileys behalf and requested that the school district return her to the classroom, to no avail. Advertisement Despite recent gains in LGBTQ rights, most notably the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage nationwide, Baileys case reveals how desperately all LGBTQ workers and LGBTQ teachers, in particular, need employment discrimination protection. On May 8, Bailey and her lawyer filed a lawsuit against Mansfield ISD in federal court in Dallas, accusing the school district of discrimination and demanding Baileys reinstatement at the school. But Texas lacks statewide employment nondiscrimination policy for LGBTQ workers. As a result, Baileys chances of winning her case and making it back to Charlotte Anderson Elementary are slim. Baileys story is part of a longer history of discrimination against gay and lesbian teachers in the United States. Over the past 60 years, anti-gay activists have argued that having a closeted or overtly homosexual teacher increases the likelihood that that a child will become gay. They have repeatedly used this argument to contest gays and lesbians demands for full civil rights and social equality. Advertisement Advertisement This history of discrimination stretches back to at least the 1950s, when an investigative committee of the Florida Legislature waged a campaign to purge its schools and universities of gay and lesbian teachers. In a widely read and controversial report, Floridas legislature claimed that homosexuals endangered students because of their desire to recruit and seduce young people. An untold number of teachers lost their positions and their state teaching credentials as a result of this attack. In the late 1970s, a panic around gay and lesbian teachers re-emerged in former beauty queen Anita Bryants Save Our Children campaign. Bryants campaign began in 1977 as a local effort to repeal a nondiscrimination ordinance in Dade County, Florida, that protected people from discrimination in housing, public accommodations, and employment based on their affectional or sexual preference. Key to Bryants campaign against this ordinance was the fact that it protected gay and lesbian school teachers, whom she alleged would seek to convert their students to homosexuality. According to Bryant, homosexuals cannot reproduceso they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks they must recruit the youth of America. Advertisement Advertisement Save Our Children spurred attacks on gay rights in a number of cities across the country. In 1978, state legislator John Briggs succeeded in placing an initiative on Californias ballot that, had it passed, would have prevented gay and lesbian teachers from teaching in the state schools. Advertisement Much has changed since the 1970s. The discrimination that Bailey confronts today differs from the discrimination that gay and lesbian teachers faced in the past. Mansfield ISD has not alleged that Baileys lesbianism in and of itself disqualifies her from serving as a grade school teacher, as it would have in the 1950s. In fact, Mansfield ISD claims it has been an inclusive, supportive environment for LGBTQ staff for decades, and that there has never been a problem before with Baileys open sexual orientation. Furthermore, no one has alleged that Bailey is out to recruit children to homosexuality. Advertisement The school districts concern in Baileys case is that she talked with students about her own sexual orientation, the sexual orientation of artists, and their relationships with other gay artists. In other words, Mansfield ISD is concerned that Bailey has discussed homosexuality as a normal facet of human sexuality and culture. Despite this shift in the imagined threat LGBTQ teachers posefrom teachers status as LGBTQ to their speechthe underlying concerns that motivate this discrimination have remained largely the same. That is, many parents continue to fear that exposure to LGBTQ teachers will put their children at greater risk of becoming LGBTQ themselves. Today this fear is less explicit than it once was. None of the parents of Baileys former students have come forward to declare, as Anita Bryant once did, Id rather my child be dead than be a homosexual. But the anxiety that sparked parental complaints against Bailey is the same. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement LGBTQ teachers have tended to respond to these fears by denying that we are any different than straight teachers. But the truth is, we are different, and we should positively affirm this. LGBTQ teachers belong in the classroom, not simply because we are just as good as straight teachers, but also because of the particular perspectives that we can bring, and the particular meanings that our presence can have. Openly LGBTQ teachers can show children and young adults that it is OK to be different, and that there is more than one way to live, to love, and to build a familywhich, of course, is a realization that could be helpful, even life-saving, for those students in the room who are already queer. This embodiment of difference is what frightens those in favor of maintaining the status quo. It is also what makes us such potentially powerful forces of social change. Advertisement It is no accident that parents and administrators have targeted Bailey for attack when she is so beloved among her students. Mansfield ISD and the homophobic parent who complained about her find Bailey threatening precisely because she has proven herself to be an effective teacher and community advocate. A month before her suspension, Bailey contacted the school district about adding protections for LGBTQ students and staff to existing anti-discrimination policies. Since then, others have continued her effort. In March they presented the local school board with a petition in favor of such a change. Today, that petition has nearly 5,000 signatures. Bailey has already made a difference in her students lives, and she has inspired change in her community. Whether or not she is reinstated at Charlotte Anderson Elementary, Bailey has already won. On April 23, Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama, a 74-year-old Alabama man chose to reject the state-endorsed celebration of white supremacist symbolism by instead protesting the statue of a doctor who conducted cruel experiments on female slaves. As his form of protest, the man put on an eight-minute skit in front of the statue. The man used ketchup in his skit. Some of that ketchup was smeared on the statue. The man was thrown in jail. Advertisement Jon Broadway was a member of a group of Montgomery, Alabama, residents who wanted to generate discussion on racial issues, according to the Alabama Media Group, which reported Wednesday on Broadways arrest. The Navy veteran and retired environmental engineer arrived at the grounds of the Capitol the morning of the 23rd with a fellow protester who has not been named. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement They arrived to protest a statue of 19th-century doctor J. Marion Sims, considered the father of modern gynecology. Sims invented the vaginal speculum and perfected the technique to repair vesicovaginal fistula, which usually appears as a dangerous complication of childbirth, but he did so by experimenting on female slaves, who, because of the nature of enslavement, cannot truly grant consent. In the 1840s, he operated on slaves in Montgomery without anesthesia. One woman named Anarcha endured more than 34 surgeries on Sims path to his medical discovery. Advertisement In the skit, Broadway, who is white, plays the part of Sims and dresses in green surgical scrubs. A black woman, whom Broadway would not name, kneels next to him, dressed as Anarcha. The front of her smock is stained dark. From ketchup, Broadway said. About 15 people gathered to watch the skit, Broadway told the Alabama Media Group. Behind the two protesters, a layer of ketchup drips from the base of the statue, which was just across the Capitol lawn from a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Broadway begins by narrating Sims life in character, recounting his move from South Carolina to Montgomery and his decision to begin using female slaves for his experiments, before his rise to prominence as a respected authority in the field. Advertisement Advertisement So Im a famous doctor, he says. But youll also notice, I have blood on my hands from what I did. He dips his fingers into the ketchup on the statues pedestal and shows it to the audience. And what I would ask you to do, each one, is to look at history, look at the tough part. Toward the end of the skit, after exchanges between Broadway and the female protester, who spoke of the pain Anarcha suffered, the female protester presses her hand into the ketchup and presses it down in streaks. Advertisement He was a butcher, she said. He didnt try to save black babies; he just used us like guinea pigs. She called on the statue to be removed and replaced with one of Martin Luther King Jr. Put something positive here, she said. Is this a true reflection of what Alabama is? Advertisement According to Broadway, he had no indication that there would be any trouble until after the skit ended, when he was speaking with the small crowd that had gathered. By his account, according to the Alabama Media Group, a crowd of 15 to 20 police officers made their way toward him. The female protester escaped their attention and left in her car. Advertisement In the affadavit obtained by the Alabama Media Group after, two of the officers said they noticed a wet red substance on both the protesters costumes, then noticed a strong odor of vinegar and saw the substance on the statue. Broadway was handcuffed and charged with criminal tampering for putting ketchup on the monument. At the county jail, he was placed in a holding center, where he sat in his underwear, as the police had confiscated his scrubs costume as evidence. He stayed that way for eight hours, until his wife could obtain the money for a bond, and left the jail still in his underwear. His trial is scheduled for September. Unlike some other states that are pushing to strip the white supremacist symbolism of the Confederacy from official spaces, Alabama has moved to enshrine it. The Alabama Memorial Preservation Act of 2017, signed as confederate statues around the country were coming down, requires state permission for the alteration or renaming of buildings and monuments 40 years or older. Sims statue is not a Confederate statue, but it is certainly in the same category of those the law was not-so-subtly trying to protect. Child shelters near the border are nearing capacity, a Health and Human Services spokesperson said Tuesday, as the number of migrant children held in custody without their parents has climbed dramatically in the past month. According to a report from the Washington Post, the number of children held on their own has grown by 21 percent from the month before, an increase that is likely largely attributable to the new policy that prosecutes parents criminally and separates their children from them at the border in hopes of deterring them from attempting to enter the U.S. Advertisement According to the Post, there are now more 10,773 migrant children in U.S. custody, as of Tuesdayalmost 2,000 more than the number in custody at the end of April, according to numbers from the Department of Health and Human Services. While its not known how much of that difference is attributable to the influx of children separated from their parents by the U.S. government versus an increase of unaccompanied children arriving at the border, it does appear that the new zero tolerance approach, implemented last month, played a major role. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Children separated from their parents under this policy are usually sent to HHS shelters, while their parents are sent off to federal jails to await prosecution. Those shelters are at 95 percent capacity, according to the Post. Advertisement To alleviate the problem, HHS plans to add new beds to the shelters. But it is also still considering housing children on military bases, an option that was first reported earlier in May and that was also used by the Obama administration during an surge in the numbers of unaccompanied children arriving at the border. Using military bases is considered a last option, according to the Post. The children separated from their parents and held in these shelters are not connected to the recent story circulating on social media about 1,475 children that the U.S. government has lost track of since they arrived at the border. That numbermostly from unaccompanied children who are placed with relatives and other sponsorshas to do with the degree to which HHS monitors children no longer under their custody and the degree to which sponsors, many who are undocumented themselves, do not respond to calls. The New York Times reported in April that the Department of Homeland Security had already separated roughly 700 children from their parents since October. According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, between May 6 and 19, 658 children were separated from the 638 adults they traveled with, all of whom were referred for prosecution. Donald Trump is planning to spend a lot of time in red states with competitive Senate races this year, according to a New York Times report about the presidents relatively low-risk strategy for the midterms. On Tuesday, Trump traveled to Tennessee to stump for Rep. Marsha Blackburn, the GOPs pick to replace retiring Sen. Bob Corker. The president hit his usual midterm message: that a vote for the Democrat is a vote for Chuck Schumer and a vote against Donald Trump. Advertisement Marshas very liberal Democratic opponent, Phil BredesenIve never heard of this guy. Who is he? Who is he? Trump said of a popular former governor who has drawn praise for his ability to work across the aisle from conservatives like Corker. Hes an absolute total tool of Chuck Schumer. The crowd laughed at the word tool and then cheered Trumps message. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement It was the same line of attack he used earlier this month against Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly at a rally in Indiana. And its the same one hes expected to use in the coming weeks against Democrats in a half dozen or so other key Senate races that could decide control of the upper chamber. Its a one-size-fits-most approach designed to appeal to Trump voters in a year when his name wont be on the ballot. Advertisement But the president is already having trouble sticking to the script. Trump has made no secret of his affection for at least one of the Democrats hes supposed to be focused on oustingNorth Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkampand on Wednesday, he praised another, Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, just a few weeks after lambasting him at a campaign stop. In North Dakota, the president has arguably done more to help Heitkamp than he has to hurt her in a state he won by more than 35 points two years agosomething increasingly frustrated Republicans have noticed. His embrace of Heitkamp has allowed her to run ads hyping her own conservative streak and touting her willingness to work with the Republican in the White House. Several of her fellow red-state Democrats have taken the same tackincluding Bredesen, Montana Sen. John Tester and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, to varying degreesbut Trump has declined to play along. Advertisement Trumps latest gift to Heitkamp came just last week, when the White House invited her to attend the signing of a bank deregulation bill she cosponsored along with a dozen other Democrats, including Donnelly, Tester, and Manchin. Heitkamp accepted, and was the only Democrat in the room for the perfect photo-op to help her to make her case back home. Advertisement Advertisement Trump gave Donnelly a similar gift on Wednesday, when he hosted the senator at the White House for the signing of a bill to allow for experimental drug treatments. Senator Donnelly, thank you very much, Trump said to Donnelly, as he sat in the front row. Thats really great. Appreciate it. Thank you. The praise came just a few weeks after Trump mocked Donnelly as Sleepin Joe at a rally in Indiana. Advertisement Trump and Heitkamps unlikely affinity for each other began even before Trump was sworn in. She made the pilgrimage to Trump Tower in 2016 to discuss a possible Cabinet position. And last fall, Trump gave her a ride on Air Force One on his way to North Dakota, where he then unexpectedly brought her up on stage and called her a good woman in front of a group of Republicans that included Rep. Kevin Cramer, a long-time Trump supporter who would eventually launch his campaign to unseat Heitkamp at Trumps personal request. Trump is expected to make a return trip to North Dakota to stump for Cramer in the near future, but even Cramer isnt so sure Trump will turn on Heitkamp. Politically, North Dakotas a pretty nice state, he told Politico this week. So I dont know that turning it on her is necessarily politically helpful to me. Not that Trump appears particularly concerned with that. On May 22, Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini wrote a column drawing attention to the 1,475 children that the U.S. government has lost track of since apprehending them at the border as unaccompanied migrants. What happened in the following days was a case study in how a false story can thrive on social media, shared by prominent journalists and celebrities because it satisfies the constant thirst for outrage that characterizes the Trump era. The number in Montinis column wasnt newsit had been revealed in congressional testimony in April, and reported by PBS and othersbut Montini used it as evidence to support a newsier point: The Trump administration should reconsider its new policy, announced earlier this month, of separating children from their parents when families are found illegally crossing the Mexican border. In fact, the New York Times reported in April, the Department of Homeland Security has already separated some 700 children from their parents since October 2017. That policy has been widely decried as a human rights violation. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement But as news outlets have clarified in recent days, the 1,475 children who have slipped off the radar of the Office of Refugee Resettlement were not separated from their parents by the U.S. governmentthey arrived alone, the latest members of a wave of unaccompanied minors fleeing violence in Central America who crossed the Southwest border beginning in 2014. According to ORR, 49 percent of those minors who arrived alone in FY 2017 were placed with parents in the U.S., 41 percent with close relatives, and 10 percent with other-than-close relatives or non-relatives. Headline: The Feds LostYes, Lost1,475 Migrant Kids. Montini did distinguish between those two groups, but his readers werent so careful. The story went viral on Thursday, after a Republic reader in Arizona posted a screenshot of Montinis print column on Twitter. Advertisement Today's paper. AZ Republic. P 3. I was wrong. It's 1475 kids not 1424. Some were released to human traffickers. pic.twitter.com/smXLz8Kis1 lehimesa (@lehimesa) May 25, 2018 That was quickly misinterpreted in a subsequent flight of conspiratorial fancy by the techie Yonatan Zunger, who wrote: Heres the underlying news story. 1,475 of the over 7,000 children which ICE has seized from their parents are missing and unaccounted forand will probably never be reunited with their parents. I do not have words for how I feel right now. Advertisement Advertisement Here's the underlying news story. 1,475 of the over 7,000 children which ICE has seized from their parents are missing and unaccounted for - and will probably never be reunited with their parents. I do not have words for how I feel right now. https://t.co/UXdWjb8TEV Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) May 25, 2018 The tweet, phrased as a data-based distillation of the news with a dose of contrition, was in turn shared by writers Sarah Kendzior and Philip Gourevitch, the actor John Leguizamo, director Judd Apatow, and tech leader Ellen Pao (combined concerned followers: more than 3 million). By Saturday, it was all over your Facebook: ICE had stripped 1,500 kids from their parents, lost them, and possibly let them fall into the hands of human traffickers. Advertisement Advertisement That was not what happened. If someone wants to consider the numbers seriously, Zunger continued, the program could mean 35,000 children taken in the next year. In reality, more than 40,000 children were apprehended crossing the border by themselves in FY 2017 and referred by the Department of Homeland Security to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which placed them with their families or, in a small minority of cases, foster parents. Extrapolating from the ORRs (very cursory) phone survey, a fifth of those kids whereabouts might now be unknown to the federal government. This alone has been received as a scandal. North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp said in a statement that ORR losing track of the children was negligence, and an outrage. (The agencyunder Obamawas investigated and criticized for loopholes in its resettlement practices after it unwittingly funneled Guatemalan teenagers to an Ohio egg farm where they worked long hours for low pay.) Advertisement Advertisement But this particular situation might not be such bad news. In a statement on Monday, Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan criticized the way the issue had been reported. These children are not lost; their sponsorswho are usually parents or family members and in all cases have been vetted for criminality and ability to provide for themsimply did not respond or could not be reached when this voluntary call was made, the statement read. This wasnt a Trump administration talking point. Cecilia Munoz, who advised Obama on immigration policy, explained to Steve Inskeep on NPR on Tuesday morning that families not picking up the phone makes a lot of sense: 90 percent of those (undocumented) kids are released to family, who are likely to also be undocumented. They would have good reason not to keep the feds updated on their addresses. In many cases parents and kids have been reunited and gone off the grid, they dont want to be contacted by a government agency, Munoz said. Advertisement Advertisement The cycle wasnt over yet. To complicate matters, the viral video factory Now This used 4-year-old, Obama-era photos and descriptions of undocumented child migrants in the Nogales Placement Center to criticize President Trumps separation policy. A widely shared photo of a prison bus for babies turned out to be, well, a prison bus for children aged 4 to 17but one purchased more than two years ago to provide field trips and medical appointments to kids in detention centers run by President Obamas DHS. This is Trumps America, the musician Moby offered (1.35 million followers), sharing a photo of the bus. (Fact-check: It was Obamas America first.) A land of belligerence and cruelty and unspeakable heartlessness. (Fact-check: true.) Advertisement Advertisement The hashtag #WhereAreTheChildrenwhich Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro used on Friday to refer to the administrations separation policy, as reported in the Houston Chroniclewas soon an all-purpose viral hashtag for both the real story and the fake one, and a talking point for Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic politicians. Two stories had, as far as trending topics go, officially become one. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Federal agencies have lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children who were taken from their parents at the border. Where are the 1,500 children, @realDonaldTrump? https://t.co/WeFCIkykmm Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) May 25, 2018 When I think about the 1500 lost children and those who are systematically separated from their mothers at the border, I come back to the same thought: If we cant stop this in America we wont stop it anywhere. #WhereAreTheChildren Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) May 27, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement With callous disregard, children are separated from their families when attempting to seek refuge and asylum in this country. 1.5k kids are unaccounted for, and neither their parents nor the government know where they are. #WhereAreTheChildrenhttps://t.co/msyW0IRTVy DSA (@DemSocialists) May 26, 2018 1500 innocent children ripped from their mothers arms at our border. Lost in Trumps system. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddle masses yearning to breathe free -- and we will torture them for wanting a better life. From Shining City to Evil Empire in under 500 days. pic.twitter.com/Qg07vb0aBg Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) May 27, 2018 So to sum up: Is the U.S. government breaking up families during border crossings? Yes, and thats an outrage. Is the U.S. government losing track of migrant kids who have been placed with family members in the U.S.? Also yes, and that might beunder the circumstancesOK. Are those two stories the same? No. Should it matter? Yes. Last week, a supermajority of Irish citizens voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the countrys constitution, which effectively banned almost all abortions. Though polls predicted victory for womens rights activists, the outcome still came as a shock to those who were too cautious to hope that the overwhelmingly Catholic country would join the rest of Europe in decriminalizing the procedure. The past few years have seen a far more socially liberal Ireland emerge from a rather punishing past. Gay people got legal civil unions in 2011 and equal marriage rights in 2015; two years later, Ireland elected its first openly gay prime minister. Abortion seemed to defy this progress. The Eighth Amendment was ratified by referendum in 1983, but as recently as 2013, major legislation was passed affirming that abortions were only legal in Ireland in cases where the pregnant woman was at risk of death, as confirmed by between one and three doctors, depending on her condition. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement That makes the 66 percent of voters who elected to legalize abortion on Friday a powerful statement about the current landscape for reproductive rights in the country. The hundreds of Irish citizens dwelling in foreign countries who flew back for the voteIreland doesnt allow absentee ballotsformed a symbolic phalanx that mirrored the more than 3,000 women who must leave the country each year to terminate their pregnancies. Women seeking abortion care in the future will enjoy more bodily autonomy and protection from avoidable medical complications than their forebears because of this historic vote. But U.S. advocates for reproductive rights should see the Ireland win as a long-overdue coda to a national tragedy, not any sort of replicable victory. As it did with gay marriage in 2015, Ireland put human rights up to a vote. One of the bedrocks of a mature democracy is a principled balance between giving voice to the masses and protecting minority or historically oppressed populations. Sometimes, majority rule is kind to marginalized classes. Other times (remember Prop 8?), it isnt. Either way, to subject the lives and livelihoods of these people to the will of the majority, and to determine their rights based on the strength of their get-out-the-vote efforts, is to reduce their humanity to a mere matter of opiniona legally binding opinion. Advertisement Advertisement Thats why I worry when abortion-rights advocates attempt to bolster the cause with claims that most Americans support legal abortion. The views of a womans fellow Americans should have no bearing on her ability to decide when and how her body bears children. Public opinion on abortion is also famously fickle and never so clear-cut. A 2017 Gallup poll found that a plurality of Americans (49 percent) think abortion is morally wrong, while 43 percent think its morally acceptable. There was just a 3-point gap, within the polls margin of error, between those who say theyre pro-choice and those who self-identify as pro-life. According to a 2017 Pew survey, 57 percent think abortion should be legal in all or most cases; 40 percent say it should be illegal. Unlike support for gay marriage, which saw a rapid and steady rise from 37 percent in 2009 to 62 percent in 2017, public opinion on abortion rights has bounced around over the past couple of decades: 60 percent supported legal abortion in all or most cases in 1995, but only 47 percent did in 2009. Theres no established arc toward justice here. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Touting public support for abortion rights makes sense when its to remind far-right politicians who are pushing extreme anti-abortion legislation that they are acting against the will of their constituents, as they have in gerrymandered Ohio, or when legislators are trying to ban Planned Parenthood from accepting Medicaid dollars, a measure large majorities oppose. But public opinion shouldnt serve as a baseline argument for abortion rights, especially when it has already been weaponized to great effect against them. A small majority of people support the Hyde Amendment, the bit of legislation that prevents low-income women from using Medicaid and other federally funded health programs to pay for abortion care. Conservatives love to cite this statistic when the amendment comes up for renewal and when state legislatures vote on using state funds for abortions. They use the unwillingness of everyday Americanseven some 4 in 10 Democrats!to extend the right to abortion access to low-income women to argue discrimination into law. Advertisement Even if a referendum could explicitly enshrine abortion rights in the U.S. Constitution, I would never wish the Irish model on us. To get to a place where two-thirds of voters would cast a ballot to repeal the Eighth Amendment, Irish women had to pay a terrible price. Since 1980, more than 168,000 women have left the country in secret, shrouded in shame, to get abortion care in England and Wales. Women unable to travel because of financial constraints, immigration status, or familial obligations were compelled against their will to carry pregnancies to term and give birth. One suicidal immigrant woman was forced to have a C-section at 25 weeks pregnant after being denied an abortion at Week 8. Savita Halappanavar, whose death at age 31 in 2012 is widely considered to be an impetus for Fridays successful repeal, lost her life while waiting for her health to deteriorate enough that a doctor would rule her blood infection sufficiently life-threatening to warrant an abortion. Ireland had to witness decades of female indignity, suffering, and death before granting women the right to reproductive self-determination. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Here in the U.S., women are already being jailed for self-induced abortions and stillbirths, and theyre coping with shuttered abortion clinicsa result of heightened restrictions on the procedureby attempting to terminate their own pregnancies with potentially injurious results. One recent poll found that 50 percent of Americans want abortion to be either totally illegal, only permitted to save a pregnant womans life, or only permitted in cases of rape, incest, or to save a pregnant womans life. The poll was funded by Marist College with the anti-abortion Knights of Columbus, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. But, for the sake of argument, its worth noting that if the U.S. legislated abortion by the will of these poll respondents, it wouldnt be so far removed from the state of affairs Ireland is leaving behind. When women must depend on a benevolent, motivated public for their basic rights, the demise of those rights is only a whim away. Tributes and obituaries had poured in for Arkady Babchenko after news that the Russian journalist had been shot and killed Tuesday in the Ukrainian capital. Babchenko had fled Russia in February 2017 fearing for his safety as he became one of the most prominent critics of the Russian government. So as soon as authorities said Babchenko had been killedallegedly shot in the back three times as he left his apartment to buy breadsuspicion immediately fell on the Kremlin. Turns out though, Babchenko wasnt killed at all. Advertisement In a plot twist seemingly no one saw coming, Babchenko showed up at a news conference Wednesday where journalists were expecting to get an update on the investigation of the journalists murder. Amid gasps and applause from those gathered at the news conference, officials explained Babchenko staged his own death in a highly coordinated effort with Ukrainian law enforcement as part of an investigation into threats made against his life. Babchenko apologized to his friends and wife, who was apparently unaware of the whole operation. I have buried many friends and colleagues many times and I know the sickening feeling, he said. I am sorry you had to experience it. But there was no other way. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Video of the moment Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko 'comes back from the dead' https://t.co/oaxS7nw3XH Via @MetroUK pic.twitter.com/jSjOLWzVJ5 Richard HP (@richardhp) May 30, 2018 Advertisement It seems the ruse required a highly skilled level of acting from Babchenko who apparently played dead in front of his wife. The whole staging took place in Babchenkos apartment in Kiev. His wife allegedly heard gunshots and saw him lying on the floor, covered in what she thought was blood. She called the police and an ambulance and officials later said Babchenko died en route to the hospital. Olechka, I am terribly sorry, he said, addressing his wife, but there were no other options. It is far from clear how the faked assassination helped authorities catch perpetrators but police say they have made one arrest. Vasyl Hrystak, head of the Ukrainian security service, said Kremlin officials had recruited a former fighter in east Ukraine and offered him $40,000 for the murder. The assassination was ordered by Russias security forces, Hrytsak said. The organizer was talking about killing another 30 people in Ukraine. We know some names but I wont name them. Advertisement Needless to say, this movie-plot twist wont do anything to improve relations between Kiev and Moscow. The Russian foreign ministry issued a statement saying it was happy that Babchenko was alive. It is a shame that Babchenko participated in the Ukrainian security services provocation. I include this staging in the series of nonsensical actions on the Russian track carried out by the Ukrainian authorities, Konstantin Kosachyov, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Russian Senate, told Interfax. Advertisement Whatever was gained by this stunt, I fear far more was lost. Triumph of hall-of-mirrors, fake-newsification of everything, which by definition can only harm trust in media, police, everybody. https://t.co/8JxXuSJmeD Joshua Yaffa (@yaffaesque) May 30, 2018 Advertisement The Kremlin has been fighting for a long time to undermine the idea of truth and reality. Ukraine just helped them along. Miriam Elder (@MiriamElder) May 30, 2018 Advertisement Amid the joy of seeing Babchenko alive, many were quick to criticize Kiev for a stunt that some are saying will only increase skepticism about both the media and the government. Whatever was gained by this stunt, I fear far more was lost. Triumph of hall-of-mirrors, fake-newsification of everything, which by definition can only harm trust in media, police, everybody, wrote The New Yorkers Joshua Yaffa. Some said the Kremlin was the real winner of this high-profile stunt. The Kremlin has been fighting for a long time to undermine the idea of truth and reality, wrote BuzzFeed editor Miriam Elder. Ukraine just helped them along. The Financial Times Max Seddon couldnt quite make up his mind about what to think: I cant decide if this is the most brilliant or spectacularly moronic thing Ive ever heard. I think its both. Others had a bit less trouble coming to a conclusion: My first reaction to the Babchenko stunt was that it was a stupid idea. After further reflection, I now think it was a really stupid idea. Advertisement Advertisement I can't decide if this is the most brilliant or spectacularly moronic thing I've ever heard. I think it's both. Up there with the guy in Guatemala who set up his own murder to make it look like someone else had done it max seddon (@maxseddon) May 30, 2018 Did voter fraud swing New Hampshire away from Donald Trump in the 2016 election? Absolutely not, according to an exhaustive investigation conducted by the states attorney general and secretary of state, which, counter to Trumps persistent allegations, turned up no evidence of serious voter fraud. Instead, the inquiry provided further evidence that the tools Republicans use to detect voter fraud are fatally flawed, churning out a huge number of false positives. And while the New Hampshire investigation ultimately debunked Trumps paranoia, it came perilously close to disenfranchising thousands of lawful voters. Advertisement Republicans have seized upon New Hampshire as the putative epicenter of American voter fraud for two reasons. First, elections there are often quite closein 2016, for instance, Hillary Clinton carried the state by fewer than 3,000 votesmeaning a relatively small amount of fraud could have a huge effect. Second, the state allows same-day voter registration under a deal with the federal government that exempts it from the stringent requirements of the National Voter Registration Act. Unlike most states, New Hampshire is not obligated to let voters register at the Department of Motor Vehicles; instead, they can register when they show up at the polls on Election Day. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Some Republicans have asserted that same-day registration is especially susceptible to fraud, and though theres no actual evidence that it is, this fear has taken hold among many conservatives. A number of GOP officialsincluding state legislators, Gov. Chris Sununu, and Trumpclaim Democrats bus in out-of-state voters to cast illegal ballots. The Democrats [are] very sly, Sununu said shortly before winning the 2016 gubernatorial election. We have same-day voter registration, and to be honest, when Massachusetts elections are not very close, theyre busing them in all over the place. Advertisement Not true, New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner and Associate Attorney General Anne Edwards declared on Tuesday. Edwards explained that while political parties sometimes rent buses from neighboring states to transport voters to the polls, the people riding the buses were legitimate New Hampshire voters. Each time we have sent an investigator out to the polling place, Edwards said, they have been able to determine that the bus company is from Maine or Vermont or Massachusetts, but not the voters on the bus. She also noted that DOJ officials sent investigators to Salem following reports that the polls were full of cars with Massachusetts tags. It turned out Massachusetts residents simply came up to hold signs in New Hampshire. Advertisement Gardner has quashed one of Trumps favorite talking pointsand undermined the case for draconian voter-suppression measures that he still supports. The myth of rampant voter impersonation proved more complicated to dispel. Gardners office began by using Crosscheck, a tool favored by Kris Kobach that has a 99.5 percent false positive rate. Crosscheck is supposed to locate individuals who are registered to vote in multiple states; although multistate registration isnt illegal, it could indicate that the voter is no longer active in one of those states. Kobach has insisted that the program helps states clean up their voter rolls by removing inactive voters. In reality, it has led election officials to try to purge thousands of lawful voters from the rolls. Advertisement Gardnerwho is nominally a Democrat, but served on Trumps voter-fraud commission and now supports disenfranchisement measuresdecided to use the tool despite all of those documented problems. In New Hampshire, Crosscheck initially flagged a whopping 94,610 individuals as possible double voters by matching first names, last names, and birthdays. Gardners office eliminated most of those matches by weeding out people who voted in one state and not the other, or who didnt vote at all. That left 4,579 possible double voters, of whom 3,624 were ruled out because they had different middle names or initials. Gardners team whittled down the remaining 955 names to 142 possible matches by examining Social Security numbers, death records, post-office data, and other publicly available information. His office referred 51 of those cases to the attorney general and will continue to narrow down the final 91partly by comparing their signatures, a notoriously unreliable method. Advertisement Advertisement In all, the state had found five cases of actual wrongful voting, though not all were the voters fault. One college student voted in the wrong location on the faulty instruction of an election official. An elderly woman appears to have filled out her recently deceased husbands absentee ballot. Two people cast a ballot in Dixville Notchs famous midnight primary without establishing domicile there. Just one person actually voted twice; he was fined $2,500 and threatened with criminal prosecution if he ever did it again. Bradford Cook, chairman of the states Ballot Law Commission, described these cases as a bunch of idiosyncratic issues rather than massive voter fraud, a characterization Edwards, the associate attorney general, agreed with. Yet Gardner isnt yet willing to concede that voter fraud is a nonissue. Advertisement For the first time, we really have an idea about this, the New Hampshire secretary of state declared, And so it raises the question of, what does someone mean by widespread voter fraud? Does this come anywhere near that? And thats a judgment call that people individually have to make. He also used the meeting to promote a controversial poll tax bill that would compel out-of-state college students to register their cars in New Hampshire if they choose to cast ballots there, costing them hundreds of dollars in fees. The GOP-controlled state legislature has already passed the bill; Sununu is awaiting an advisory opinion from the state Supreme Court before deciding whether to sign it. Advertisement Advertisement Civil rights groups breathed a sigh of relief upon the release of Tuesdays report, as it was not at all clear that the secretary of states office would conduct this investigation responsibly. When Gardner introduced Crosscheck, his office presented the program as a tool to expedite an immediate purge of voters. In September, election officials were instructed to strike from the rolls each voter flagged by the programbefore eliminating false positives. And they were explicitly told they did not have to notify each voter before purging them. Advertisement Emails obtained under the states Right to Know law by Colin Van Ostern, who wants to replace Gardner as secretary of state, demonstrate that officials balked at the command. After Crosscheck flagged 859 names in Manchester alone, assistant city clerk JoAnn Ferruolo chose a random sample of 34 matches to study more closely. She quickly found that 15 of those 34 were obvious false positives. I do not feel comfortable, she wrote a superior, removing 859 voter records where 44% of the sample was found to be an active voter in Manchester. When the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire challenged the states legal authority to purge these voters, the secretary of states office backed down. (State law expressly requires the government to notify voters before canceling their registration.) Gardners office claimed the purge instructions were a miscommunication, pure and simple, though it did not persuasively explain exactly how its miscommunication came about. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement This early skirmish raised the possibility that, like Kobach before him, Gardner would use Crosscheck to disenfranchise thousands of perfectly eligible voters. For now, at least, that has not come to pass. To the contrary, the secretary of state has quashed one of Trumps favorite talking pointsand undermined the case for draconian voter-suppression measures that he still supports. Even as New Hampshire concludes that voter fraud is vanishingly rare, its governor is seriously considering signing a bill to address that nonexistent problem. Thats no surprise. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, nearly half of Republicans have convinced themselves that up to 5 million people voted illegally in 2016. For many in the GOP, the existence of voter fraud is more than what Gardner termed a judgment call. Its an unshakeable article of faith. Today in Conservative Media is a daily roundup of the biggest stories in the right-wing press. Roseanne Barr torpedoed the popular 2018 revival of her sitcom Rosanne Tuesday with an explicitly racist tweet about former senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. In a tweet that was later deleted, Barr, the co-creator and star of the show, wrote of Jarrett, who is black: muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj. The fallout from ABC was swift. The network announced the shows cancellation, pulled a repeat episode scheduled to air Tuesday night, and set about scrubbing the networks website of the shows presence. Barr later apologized; it didnt matter. Advertisement The latest iteration of the sitcom featuring a middle American family was seen as a barometer of the tastes and perhaps even growing influence of Trump voters on American pop culture. The show drew large but diminishing audiences two decades after it went off the air, which set off a series of think pieces on what its popularity demonstrated about the state of America and Americans. Upon the shows cancellation, media on the right weighed in largely with newsy posts about the Twitter remarks and subsequent sacking. Some longer, more substantive evaluation on the right pointed out that: A) Barrs comments were abhorrent; and B) they were nothing new. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement David French at National Review outlined how the actress and vocal Trump supporters venom sprayed every which way in his post Roseanne and the High Cost of Embracing Craziness. If Roseanne Barr is a poster child for anything, shes a poster child for cultural brokenness, French writes. Barr is batty even by internet standards, French points out, as shes a birther, a 9/11 truther, and every other form of -er. First, ABC shouldnt have brought her back. She was, quite obviously, one of the more toxic and troubled personalities in American public life, French writes. Second, Trump World shouldnt have embraced her new show. Advertisement Remember when President Trump called Roseanne to congratulate her on her ratings? I know that Republicans are starved for Republican-friendly television, but can we ever reach a time when the stakes are low enough to draw lines based on character? I know people voted for the low-character president because of the Flight 93 election and all that. I know folks turned out for Roy Moore because of judges. But wheres the sitcom emergency necessitating the love for Roseanne? French then addressed the residual question that simmers on the right: What about the other side? Advertisement Third, hypocrisy and double standards abound. So, where are the lines for acceptable speech? Even now, Twitter is lighting up with examples of progressive celebrities saying terrible things and keeping their jobs. ESPN is expanding Keith Olbermanns role at the network despite a Twitter feed full of hysterical, profane insults and unhinged commentary. Fire one celebrity and you can dredge up six more whove posted their own deranged rants. At the same time, does the Right really want to turn Roseanne into a poster child of political persecution? We all know that progressives get more grace than conservatives, but where does Roseanne fit? Were left with a mess. To argue that companies should err on the side of free speech as I do all the time is not to argue that companies cant have any standards at all. Advertisement Advertisement Im not troubled by Roseannes termination, French concludes. Sometimes, a story fits no ones political narrative cleanly. Sometimes, the story is the confusion and brokenness of our times. In the Weekly Standard Jonathan Last writes in his post Trumpism Corrupts: Roseanne Edition that Roseanne wasnt a conservative, and conservatives should have known better than to be seduced into vouching for her just because her fictional character at times resembled them. [T]he seduction of Roseanne is understandable, Last writes. It was a sitcom that got people to pay attention because it treated Red America Trump voters as normal (-ish) human beings. People on the right were desperate to see Republican types portrayed with any sort of sympathy by Hollywood. And so, they latched onto her, and her show, despite the fact that Roseanne Barr isnt any sort of conservative. They should have known better, because Roseanne isnt just not any sort of conservative. She is, at best, a vulgarian and, at worst, a cretin. Advertisement Advertisement Last also links the intellectual and moral drift of Roseanne viewers to that of Trump voters: You start out thinking, Hey, this is kind of sketchy. But then you see the overnight numbers and you forget all about crotch-grabbing and conspiracy theories. But that stuff never really goes away. So eventually, Roseanne is calling Valerie Jarrett a Muslim Dr. Zaius and then conservatives find themselves defending her brave free speech or whatever. (And by the by, the Valerie Jarrett comment was only the second-worst thing she said today.) In that way, Roseanne was a lot like Trumpism. You start out thinking, I know hes said some weird stuff and has a shady past, but illegal immigration is a real problem! And the next thing you know, youre defending a president who plays footsy with white supremacists and accuses a former president ofliteraltreason. Advertisement Advertisement Elsewhere, Sarah Rumpf* at RedState penned an eye roll post on The Transparency of Hollywoods Fauxtrage Over Roseanne. Predictably, Hollywood celebrities are stampeding over each other in an utterly ridiculous contest to see who can express the highest degree of moral outrage, Rumpf writes. Roseanne Barr is obnoxious and controversial and horrible and yes, sometimes racist. Thats what she does and who she is. She is a comedienne who has traded on controversy and outrage. None of this is new. Advertisement What is new, Rumpf writes, is Trump. And that, she says, is why the show got cancelled. So whats different now? Why did ABC jump to cancel a profitable show that was getting sky-high ratings? Why did her talent agents, ICM Partners, drop her as a client today? Both ABC and ICM Partners are willingly forgoing lucrative future income by severing ties with Barr, Rumpf wonders. Its hard to logically explain this as based on anything more than Barrs support for President Donald Trump, both personally and as incorporated in the plot of the reboots pilot episode. The foul-mouthed, abrasive Roseanne and her squabbling brood were hardly a conservative show by any means other than the title characters 2016 vote for Trump. Advertisement Amanda Prestigiacomo at the Daily Wire, on the other hand, blames liberal Hollywood for making the overwrought Trump connection to the shows cancellation. Hollywood quickly came out in support of the shows cancellation, some tying the incident to racism surrounding President Donald Trump and chalking up the ABC backlash as a win for the #resistance, she writes. Independent Journal Review covered a panel discussion on Fox News debating whether Barrs comment was, in fact, racist or just kinda mean. Advertisement Advertisement IJR also covered the far rights Twitter-wonderings comparing Barrs comments and firing to MSNBC anchor Joy Reids old homophobic blog posts that she now says was the result of a hacker. Circa rounded out the days conservative media coverage offering up the potential ways the show could make another comeback online. A 33-year-old transgender woman from Honduras who was part of what became known as the refugee caravan that arrived at the border a few weeks ago died while she was detained by immigration authorities. Immigration and Customs Enforcement identified the woman as Jeffry Hernandez but the Transgender Law Center and other activists identified her as Roxana Hernandez. ICE said Hernandez was being held in the transgender unit at the Cibola County Detention Center in Milan, New Mexico when she began suffering symptoms of pneumonia, dehydration and complications associated with HIV. She was admitted to the hospital on May 17, when she was placed in the intensive care unit until she died on May 25. Advertisement Hernandez had sought asylum on May 9 and was first held in what are known as iceboxes because of how cold they are, according to Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which organized the caravan. A 2015 report by the American Immigration Council said the iceboxes are inadequate for overnight detention and official policy states detainees shouldnt be held there for more than three days. In addition to the fact that there are no beds in the holding cells, these facilities are extremely cold, frequently overcrowded, and routinely lacking in adequate food, water, and medical care, notes the report. Pueblo Sin Fronteras said Hernandez didnt get adequate food or medical care. Roxy died due to medical negligence by US immigration authorities. In other words, she was murdered, the group said in a statement. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement A transgender woman who was part of the migrant caravan has died in custody from what appeared to be cardiac arrest https://t.co/9jKp0RC9Kr BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) May 30, 2018 An immigrants rights activist cites a friend of Hernandez who claims officers yelled at her for being sick and didnt give her access to a doctor. Paired with the abuse we know transgender people regularly suffer in ICE detention, the death of Ms. Hernandez sends the message that transgender people are disposable and do not deserve dignity, safety, or even life, said Isa Noyola, Deputy Director at Transgender Law Center. Advertisement "When she ate she would vomit and had diarrhea from the food. The ICE officials yelled at her for being sick. She asked to the see the doctor but they didn't give her access." - Stacy, trans woman, on her friend Roxana who died in ICE custody.@TransLawCenter @PuebloSF @aflores pic.twitter.com/VELFLaK9DH Alex Mensing (@alex_mensing) May 30, 2018 BuzzFeed News interviewed Hernandez last month and she said part of the reason why she decided to flee Honduras was to escape the violence she faced for being transgender. Hernandez said she was gang-raped by a group of MS-13 gang members about four months before she joined the caravan. Four of them raped me and as a result I got HIV, Hernandez said. Trans people in my neighborhood are killed and chopped into pieces, then dumped inside potato bags. President Donald Trump is making clear what we all already knew: He regrets his decision to pick Jeff Sessions as his attorney general. In a series of tweets in which he quoted Rep. Trey Gowdy from South Carolina, who had earlier said that Trump could have picked somebody else, Trump wrote, I wish I did! Rep.Trey Gowdy, I dont think so, I think what the President is doing is expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward. If I were the President and I picked someone to be the countrys.... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement ....chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, oh by the way Im not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated too...and thats how I read that - Senator Sessions, why didnt you tell me before I picked you..... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 ....There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else! And I wish I did! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement Gowdy was talking to CBS News about a New York Times report that claimed Trump asked Sessions in March 2017 to reverse his decision to recuse himself from the Russia probe. Gowdy criticized Sessions for recusing himself and said Trump had lots of options to lead the Justice Department. Trump has long expressed frustration about Sessions decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation after it was revealed that he met with the Russian ambassador twice during the 2016 presidential campaign. Advertisement Trump, who had told aides that he needed a loyalist overseeing the inquiry, berated Mr. Sessions and told him he should reverse his decision, an unusual and potentially inappropriate request, the Times wrote. That request is now reportedly part of the obstruction of justice case that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating. Advertisement This was not the first time Trump expressed frustrations with Sessions recusal. In a July interview with the New York Times, Trump had said that he would have picked somebody else for the job if he had known Sessions was going to recuse himself from the investigation. Although Trump quoted that portion of Gowdys interview approvingly, chances are he wasnt a big fan of another portion of the lawmakers TV appearances. In an earlier apperarnce on Fox News, Gowdy said the FBI was justified in using a secret informant to get to the bottom of the Russia investigation. Advertisement .@TGowdySC: "I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with @realDonaldTrump." #TheStory pic.twitter.com/hD35CyMzx4 Fox News (@FoxNews) May 29, 2018 Advertisement President Trump himself in the Comey memos said if anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it, and it sounds to me like that is exactly what the FBI did, Gowdy said on Fox News on Tuesday night. I think when the president finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard. He repeated that message on CBS on Wednesday morning, refusing to criticize the FBI for what Trump has dubbed spygate. When the FBI comes into contact with information about what a foreign government may be doing in our election cycle, I think they have an obligation to run it out, Gowdy said. Advertisement Advertisement President Trump asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to rescind his recusal from the Russia investigation in the early days Trumps presidency, the New York Times reported Tuesday. Trumps explicit request to his attorney general, who was also one of his earliest supporters, is part of the larger obstruction of justice case being amassed by special counsel Robert Muellers investigative team. The previously unreported request came in March 2017, just weeks in to the Trump presidency, during a dinner meeting at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, the Times reports, had essentially frozen Sessions outand largely continues toafter he announced his recusal from the Russia investigation when it was discovered he failed to disclose during his confirmation hearing several contacts with Russian representatives during the 2016 campaign. At the Florida resort, Trump, who had told aides that he needed a loyalist overseeing the inquiry, berated Mr. Sessions and told him he should reverse his decision, an unusual and potentially inappropriate request, according to the Times. Sessions refused to reverse his decision, which was made on the advice of the Justice Departments lawyers. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement While pressure was mounting over Sessions confirmation omissions, Trump deployed White House counsel Donald McGahn to try to keep Sessions on the job, one the president deemed critical to keeping a handle on the growing investigation into Russian election meddling. The special counsels interest demonstrates Mr. Sessionss overlooked role as a key witness in the investigation into whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct the inquiry itself, according to the Times. It also suggests that the obstruction investigation is broader than it is widely understood to beencompassing not only the presidents interactions with and firing of the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, but also his relationship with Mr. Sessions. Trumps new lead lawyer on Russia-related matters, Rudolph Giuliani, told the Times he had not discussed Sessions recusal with the president, but that a request that Mr. Sessions reassert control over the Russia investigation would be within the bounds of the presidents authority. Unrecuse doesnt say, Bury the investigation, Giuliani said. It says on the face of it: Take responsibility for it and handle it correctly. Last week, Consumer Reports dealt Tesla a blow when it declined to recommend the electric car makers long-awaited new sedan, the Model 3. Today, it changed its mind. In an unusual move, Consumer Reports said Wednesday that it will recommend the Model 3 after all, after Tesla rolled out a software update that addressed a significant problem with the vehicles braking system. Its a reminder that electric power isnt the only thing that separates Tesla from other car companies. Advertisement Consumer Reports initial review found that the Model 3 took longer to stop than any other car on the market, a serious safety hazard. In the nonprofits testing, the vehicle required an average of 152 feet to stop from 60 mph, which is more than even a heavy-duty pickup truck. But Tesla quickly rolled out a software fix that reduced its emergency stopping distance to 133 feet, putting it on par with other vehicles in its class. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement A Tesla spokeswoman told Consumer Reports that the new software adjusted how the anti-lock braking system responded to different situations and environmental conditions. The braking improvement raised the Model 3s Overall score enough for the car to be recommended by CR, the updated review said, although there remain other areas of concern. Those include clunky touch-screen controls, a stiff ride, and wind noise at high speed. Consumer Reports added that Tesla has indicated it may be able to address some of those via over-the-air updates as well. Advertisement "This is really an industry first." Jake Fisher of Consumer Reports The quick fix highlights one of the less-appreciated ways in which Tesla is reshaping the automotive industry. Historically, automakers have dealt with problems in their vehicles by recalling them and making adjustments at dealerships. Tesla has issued a few recalls itself, but it has designed its vehicles software in such a way that it can often change how they work without touching them, just by tweaking the code and remotely updating each vehicles software. Other car companies are just beginning to move in this direction. Consumer Reports director of automotive testing, Jake Fisher, told CNBC that hes never seen a car company fix a major performance problem this fast. This really is an industry first, he said. Advertisement Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has been railing against the media for what he perceives as unfair coverage, played nice with Consumer Reports on Twitter after it announced the recommendation. Really appreciate the high quality critical feedback from @ConsumerReports. Road noise & ride comfort already addressed too. UI improvements coming via remote software update later this month. https://t.co/ZMLPJxmPlM Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 30, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement The company has deployed similarly timely updates in the past, such as when it pushed out new software in 2016 to address a major safety shortcoming in its Autopilot software. Tesla has been struggling lately on multiple fronts, including its production costs and timetable for the Model 3; claims of unsafe working conditions and underreporting of injuries at its factory; and a handful of accidents potentially implicating its Autopilot software. (Musk argues media coverage has sensationalized these accidents and failed to put them in the context of the many human-caused car wrecks that happen every day.) That the Model 3 is evidently imperfect shouldnt be a surprise, given the (mostly self-imposed) pressure the company has faced to ramp up production. Given all that, its reassuring to see how quickly Tesla was able to address the braking problem, and the Consumer Reports recommendation should assuage some Model 3 buyers concerns. Tesla has also apparently found solutions to some of the problems that have dogged his assembly line, such as a malfunctioning flufferbot that it ultimately deemed superfluous. Elon Musk is always pushing the envelope, but at least he has some nifty tape on hand for when it bursts. Greetings, Future Tensers, Whats faster than free two-day shipping? Amazons object and facial recognition software, which the company claims offers real-time detection across tens of millions of mugs, including up to 100 faces in challenging crowded photos. After its launch in late 2016, Amazon Web Services started marketing the visual surveillance tool (which it dubbed Rekognition) to law enforcement agencies around the countryincluding partnering directly with the police department in Orlando and a sheriffs department in Oregon. But now, as April Glaser reports, civil rights groups are pushing back. Last week, a coalition including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, sent an open letter expressing their profound concerns that governments could easily abuse the technology to target communities of color, undocumented immigrants, and political protestors. Though Amazon may not be the first contractor to partner with police on surveillance, its one of the first major tech companies to do soand has us watching out for what the Amazon-ification of law enforcement may bring us next. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Rekognition wasnt the only thing keeping Amazon in the news cycle. Last week, an Amazon Echo also made headlines after it was reported to have recorded a private conversation between a couple in Portland, Oregon, and then sent the recording to someone on their contact list. Though the incident seemed to come down to the A.I. misinterpreting a series of commands, Rachel Withers explains how it should be a reminder to Echo owners that their digital assistant Alexa is always ready to listen. Surveillance and A.I. also play a big role in the latest installment of Future Tense Fiction, Safe Surrender. In it, Meg Elison tells the story of a hybrid human searching in the collective memories of a cityits inhabitants, its politics, its surveillance systemsto try to discover why their parents surrendered them when they were 3 days old. In response to the story, tech privacy expert Laura Moy explores the ways technology can be used to promote equityor to preserve an unequal status quo. Advertisement Other things we read while thinking about Twitters good old days: Spring cleaning: The EUs General Data Protection Regulation may have flooded your inbox with privacy policy updatesbut dont delete them just yet, writes April Glaser. Instead, take the opportunity to delete accounts from the institutions you may have forgot were sitting on your data (looking at you, email from the sushi restaurant I ate at twice in 2016). Advertisement California Dreamin: Aaron Mak reports on states like Vermont and California that, rather than waiting for Congress, are starting to take data privacy regulation into their own hands. Block on blocking: Slates Mark Joseph Stern explains why a judges ruling that President Trump cant block Twitter users represents an extraordinary victory for free speech on the internet. Musk vs. media: Elon Musks attempts to discredit reporting about Teslas poor worker safety standards, assembly line delays, and Autopilot crashes represent some dangerous gaslighting, argues April Glaser. Russians in your router: Josephine Wolff knows you didnt restart your homes router like the FBI asked. She explains why such an easy task might seem so arduousand what that means for your cybersecurity. Not yet a creeped-out owner of an overpriced paperweight, Mia Armstrong For Future Tense Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University. Weve known for a long time that there are racial disparities in health outcomes. For about as long, weve tried to chalk this fact up to recalcitrant socioeconomic issues. But a recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine pointed out why this is too easy a dismissal. Economic issues cannot explain all of the disparity: At any given level of income, maternal and fetal outcomes are worse for black American women and their babies than for their white counterparts. This holds true even for the most affluent groups who all, presumably, had access to excellent medical care. Advertisement The conclusion of many experts is that just living as a black person in America creates a toxic level of physiological stress that increases the risk of conditions like hypertension and pre-eclampsia, among others. Weve known about toxic stress, but weve always lumped it in with poverty, not necessarily with race. This article made me re-think the role medical professionals play in creating this toxic environment and consider what we can do to alleviate it. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement A recent paper caught my eye because it captured one of the more subtle aspects of the brew: how we write about patients in the chart. Mary Catherine Beach and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins University were curious about whether our choice of language transmits bias from one medical professional to another. The researchers created a hypothetical case of an African American man with sickle cell disease, a condition that typically requires opiate medications for control of painful flares. They wrote two versions of the medical chart, one with neutral language and one with languagetaken from real chartsthat could be viewed as more stigmatizing. Medical students and residents were randomized to read one of the charts and then asked about their attitude toward the patient and how much pain medication they would prescribe. Advertisement Those trainees who read the chart with the more stigmatizing language exhibited more negative attitudes toward the patient and elected to give less aggressive pain treatment. This result is probably not surprisingwe know that black patients tend to receive lower rates of pain treatment. But what is intriguing is how subtle the differences in language were between the two charts. In the first chart, the patient was described as a 28-year old man with sickle cell disease and in the second chart as a 28-year old sickle cell patient. Before the symptoms occurred the patient spent yesterday afternoon with friends versus was hanging out with friends outside McDonalds. This sort of language covertly signals to other members of the team that this is a person who isnt trustworthy or deserving. For the physical examination, the doctor observed in the first chart that the patient is in obvious distress, and in the second that the patient appears to be in distress. A nursing note in the first chart reported that the patient is not tolerating the oxygen mask and still has 10/10 pain, and in the second chart that the patient refuses to wear his oxygen mask and is insisting that his pain is still a 10. Advertisement Advertisement The descriptions in the second chart werent necessarily inaccurate, but together they subtly paint the patient as a less reliable person, someone who perhaps is trying to game the system for drugs. According to Beach, this type of language not only discredits the patients report of pain, but highlights details that reinforce negative stereotypes. Medical charts are the primary means of communication among medical professionals, so this sort of language covertly signals to other members of the team that this is a low class person who isnt trustworthy or deserving. As soon as Beach put it this way, I could see that our supposedly objective medical records contain racially laden dog whistles of the sort that we regularly decry in political speech. In the last two years weve gotten more adept at noticing and calling out references to inner cities, illegal aliens, international bankers, Sharia law, and locker-room talk, but we doctors like to think that we treat all our patients equally. We would never think of ourselves as racist or marginalizing. Yet, its there in our language. During my internship, there were always some patients who elicited a particularly negative response, usually from some combination of drug addiction, homelessness, abrasive personality, and perceived overuse of the system. Id sometimes hear a staff member mutter about them as not a citizen. The message was: Dont expend your efforts on these patients. Advertisement Advertisement Beach and her colleagues demonstrate how the medical chart can be used to communicate this message between staff members. Whether done consciously or unconsciously, this dog-whistle language plants seeds of doubt in the mind of the next person who reads the chart, and can influence subsequent medical care. The factors that perpetuate the disparities in medical care are varied. Some require government intervention. Some require shifts in societal attitude. Some require restructuring parts of the medical system. But some are within our power as individuals. One thing we doctors and nurses can do is to take a minute to think about how we are writing. We can choose to write that a patient declines treatment rather than refuses treatment. We can write that a patient doesnt drink alcohol rather than the patient denies alcohol use. We can write that a patient has pain rather than that he or she claims to be in pain. The substandard quality of care that some of our patients receive is a stain on the medical profession. Individual doctors and nurses cant solve it all, but we should be on forefront agitating for change. And we can begin with the words we write in the chart. The gift of a piano paved his way from a Roma settlement to the stage Not all gifted children have the opportunity to develop their talents. There are various ways we can help those who are growing up in socially disadvantaged families. Wild poppies grow differently. Theyre special, interesting, and fragile, but they easily attract other peoples attention. Thats what our children are like, says Maria Potocarova Rybaricova, Senior Manager of Dive maky (Wild Poppies), an organization that supports children from socially disadvantaged families. Stanko Harvan is one of them. He enjoys playing the piano and would like to make a living off of it. However, he comes from a poor family that cannot give him the support he needs to develop his talent. Stanko and his seven siblings live in a small cottage at the edge of the Roma settlement in Helpa. Initially, Stanko learned how to play the piano on his own. After a while, he started attending an elementary art school, where the full extent of his talent became evident. Since he didnt have a piano at home, he came to art school every day to practice. However, we have managed to collect enough money from our donors to buy him a piano of his own, explains Rybaricova. Stanko is currently attending the second grade of the conservatory. He is a talented student with an unusual determination to work on his skills and a great love of classical music, says the principal of the Helpa Elementary Art School. What makes Stankos story stand out is his decision to focus on a different musical genre than most Roma musicians. He is most interested in classical composers and their works. If you want to see his piano talent for yourself, you can come to the annual festival of Roma culture titled Cigansky Basavel, which will take place on 19 August at the Eurovea promenade in Bratislava. Of course, Stanko is not the only Wild Poppy. The organization is currently working with approximately 40 Roma children with a variety of different talents. We support children who are talented musicians, theater actors, dancers, athletes, and even students, explains Rybaricova. They attend high schools and universities, but their families are unable to cover all costs associated with their studies. In order to help them, the organization has established a scholarship program used to cover various expenses, such as dorm fees, transport costs, and school supplies. The program is also used to finance regular meetings aimed at developing the social skills of Roma children. One such event is titled Mladi romski lidri (Young Roma Leaders). This program aims to show its attendees how they can help their friends and other Roma children. It basically helps us see what kind of atmosphere prevails in schools, and we can find out whether Roma children have sufficient information about their study options, adds Rybaricova. The members of Young Roma Leaders are trying to change the social climate. Not only do they want to motivate Roma children all over Slovakia to study, but they also communicate with local authorities and institutions that work with Roma communities. The Wild Poppies want to continue working on projects like this to help improve the life of Roma people in Slovakia. Dobra Krajina (Great Country) is giving you an opportunity to lend a helping hand, too. Childrens Day is one of the most joyous days of the year. These children will be happiest if they are able to continue doing what they enjoy and care about. You can provide financial help by clicking on the I will donate button. The Slovak Spectator has teamed up with Dobra Krajina (Great Country) to create a space for stories of people and communities who need our help. Each article in the For a Great Country series will give you the opportunity to support a specific project and actively contribute to building a great country. 30. May 2018 at 14:15 | Viktor Hamsik, The Pontis Foundation Nationalism connected to sugar Ilona Nemeths exhibition on the sugar industry in Slovakia reminds us that we lost a crucial battle. Font size: A - | A + Homola or a loaf, in English is the name for the sweet white cone, the form in which sugar once used to be distributed among consumers. If you stop by in the Kunsthalle (Art Hall) in Bratislava soon, you can have one too. Despite the bad rep sugar now gets, the message of the vast exhibition called Eastern Sugar is important. In it, visual artist Ilona Nemeth connects the sugar industry to several fundamental layers of life in our modern society, from progressive ideas to jobs to backstabbing. From the rich history and global importance of the sugar industry on Slovak territory to the miserable fate of Slovak sugar factories at the break of the millennium, she got to the issue of how the culture of business and economic earthquakes in society are related to the issue of nationalism. Repute and glory For Zuzka Banyaszova, now already deceased, it was impossible to get sugar where she lived in the Lower Land, i.e. the historically southern part of Great Hungary where ethnic Slovaks have lived outside their home territory. Each single lump they could get was a special treat and highly appreciated. Her young son did not know sugar until their family relocated following the Benes decrees to one of the villages in southern Slovakia in 1947, when he tasted sugar for the first time. (Benes decrees were a series of laws of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in the absence of the Czechoslovak parliament during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in World War II, dealing with many aspects of peace-time life. In journalism and political history, these refer mostly to the decrees concerning the status of ethnic Germans, Hungarians and others in postwar Czechoslovakia which represented Czechoslovakia's legal framework for the expulsion of Germans from the country, ed. note.) Suddenly, we got so much sugar per one person that we had plenty of it; we had never experienced anything like that before, she said a few years ago in an interview for Sme. By that time, sugar factories on Slovak territory had long been famous worldwide. In Upper Hungary, they had already started to mushroom in the second half of the 19 th century. The first ones appeared in Sered, Surany and Trnava, and spread from there. The industry expanded considerably also thanks to successful experiments with cultivating sugar beets and the refining process. The sweet children of revolution Starting in the 19th century, sugar production became one of the most important industries in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Fueled by orders from Emperor Franz Joseph I. of Austria, those owning sugar production became wealthy. Several sugar tycoons from the now Slovak territory invested huge property into regional development, getting the title sugar barons for the production of a commodity called white gold. As know-how gradually started to be exported abroad, sugar plants similar to the Slovak ones were built elsewhere, including in several Asian countries. Still, after World War II ten sugar factories operated on the territory of Slovakia. Currently, only two of them are in operation; the death of the remaining ones came after 1989 when the reform of the sugar industry arrived. The former white halls became black holes. Sweet mirror of the post-revolutionary Slovakia One of the perished sugar factories is one in Dunajska Streda. Originally called Juhocukor (South-sugar), it was established in 1970 and was among the biggest in the country. After the arrival of majority foreign shareholders in 1993, it was re-named Eastern Sugar and was promised investment, revitalisation, international involvement and an overall boom of sugar production in Slovakia. However, the plant only lasted until 2007; after it was privatised, its fate was clear. Ilona Nemeth was irritated by the demise of the factory as a citizen and also as an artist. The towns on Zitny Ostrov (Rye Island) in southern Slovakia, including her hometown, were palpably impacted by the loss of the plant. Moreover, the fall of the factory reflected the bleak approach of power in the whole country. I have always been annoyed that not only the dominant structure disappeared from the town silhouette, but also from the industry map of Zitny Ostrov. It ceased to exist despite us all knowing that it was a modern, functional sugar factory, she said about the Dunajska Streda plant. Initially, she only knew funny stories about how it was levelled to the ground but later, these legends were tainted with the bitter taste of Slovak business reality: the factory was closed due to a one-time compensation. The company that bought the sugar factory and signed contracts, got 753 for each ton of sugar not produced, with the approval of the Slovak government and the European Union. Then, the EU was pressured by China and India to reduce sugar production and it introduced quotas and paid factories for sugar not produced, in exchange for pledge never to re-open again. When the quotas on sugar production were lifted in October 2017, mere two - instead of ten - factories remained in Slovakia. Of course, none of this money remained in the region. This makes only more lamentable the fact that decisions resulted from bilateral agreements between state and private businesses. In the interactive installation located a huge production hall in Kunsthalle, visitors can make a loaf of sugar on their own, assisted by those registered as unemployed at the Labour Office. They are live references to the consequences of ending an enterprising culture. What is private, is natio In her work, Ms. Nemeth has already previously focused on various forms of nationalism; its wave has resonated in her for years. She asserts that nationalism is a product of frustration caused by scrapping production, loss of jobs, and giving up the structure of responsible enterprising. Slovak-Hungarian relations were very turbulent around 2010, the artists recalled. In both parliament and media, the impossibility of coexistence was mentioned all the time, and Hungarians were the enemies. For years, she tried to understand the reasons for growing nationalism and extremism, despite the theoretically improvement in life conditions. Though she was invited to do a solo exhibition at the Bratislava City Gallery, the atmosphere was so unbearable for her that she chose to rather cooperate on a joint exhibition on nationalism with artists Martin Piacek and Janos Sugar. Shortly afterwards, she was invited as curator to the international project Private Nationalism. Her seven-year efforts culminated in two international exhibitions Universal Hospitality, shown in Vienna and in Prague. Empty maps In her new project Eastern Sugar, she perceives the sugar industry in Slovakia as one way that people can identify with their region, and which can even make them feel responsible towards it. Lost opportunities When an employer with a long tradition disappears from the locality, this empty space can be filled with ideology, the author of the project opined. Nationalism, extremism and populism start to address the most vulnerable points of society, and re-focus its dissatisfaction and energy in another direction: the direction which better suits those in power. We can see this now very strongly in Hungary. However she looks at the problem, she cannot oversee the lost opportunities behind it. Not to mention the lost culture of enterprising and culture of innovative ideas as such, she added. She has split the sugar exhibition into several parallel blocks, together with curator Nina Vrbanova. In the big production hall, the central part of the venue, she interactively involves not only visitors but also the unemployed from the Labour Office who assist them in hand sugar production. To make a sugar loaf in Kunsthalle, you need a bowl, sugar, sweet molasses, and a conic formed mould. After drying, you can chop pieces of sweetener from it as our ancestors did until lump sugar was invented in the Czech town of Dacice 1841. She also works with large-format photographs by Olja Triaska Stefanovic. Through them, she asks why we let our sugar plants dilapidate, pointing to their architectural value and top-of-the-world level interiors. She offers authentic statements of sugar factory owners abroad whom she also talked to. In one part of the space, a pilot version of the non-existent Museum of Sugar has been installed. The artist established it in cooperation with the Town Museum in Surany, which specialises its exceptional collection in the history of sugar production in Slovakia. A museum is excellent, for sure; but if you need to found one, this means that something is dead here, Ilona Nemeth opined. She makes present and palpable a whole branch of industry that has vanished from the map of Slovak industry. The need to establish a museum of sugar-production industry, not a single sugar plant, means we have already lost the fight. 30. May 2018 at 19:05 | By Eva Andrejcakova Jaguar will kick off its production in early September The company has recently opened a training academy to educate its future staffers. Carmaker Jaguar Land Rover will launch its operation in the industrial park close to Nitra in early September. While its operational director Alexander Wortberg did not want to specify the date, the information from the carmakers employees indicate the date might be September 3, the TASR newswire reported. At the same time, the company plans to train its employees in the new Training Academy, opened directly at its Nitra premises. Investing 7.5 million, the company wants to avoid the lack of qualified labour force in the future. The academy, occupying 3,000 square metres, is expected to prepare the plant for the launch of operation in autumn. Jaguar Land Rover currently employs 1,300 people, 97 percent of whom are Slovaks. The share of women working for the plant is 30 percent. The age average is 36 years, the SITA newswire reported. The work proceeds The most completed part of the plant is currently the body shop, occupying 90,000 square metres. The plan is to launch a testing operation for the Land Rover Discovery during summer. Altogether 624 robots will be working in the hall, while the body works will be comprised of 350 parts, SITA wrote. Jaguar Land Rover plans to start production of another car model in Nitra in two years. The plant will also have a paint shop, occupying 53,000 square metres, an assembly hall with 134,000 square metres, and a logistics part. The investment in Nitra will total 1.4 billion, while the government provided aid of nearly 130 million, TASR wrote. Training to start at secondary schools The Training Academy will consist of six-level programme, which includes training in a classroom and a production line. New employees do not necessarily need previous experiences with working in the automotive industry. The Training Academy enables us to offer a strong programme tailored to the plants needs and, at the same time, address the obvious lack of qualified workforce in Slovakia, said Nicci Cook, HR director at Jaguar Land Rover, as quoted by SITA. Moreover, the carmaker wants to educate its future staffers already from secondary school. In cooperation with the Secondary Vocational School Polytechnic DSA in Nitra they plan to open four-year specialisation mechatronics as of 2019. Jaguar Land Rover plans to employ 2,800 people in its Nitra plant by 2020. The average monthly wage of qualified workers and production workers will oscillate between 900 and 1,800 based on position and experience. It is expected that the carmaker will create a further 22,000 indirect jobs, TASR reported. 30. May 2018 at 13:55 | Compiled by Spectator staff More tax documents against President Kiska surface The opposition SaS party says that Kiska is the scapegoat in a smear campaign initiated by ex-prime minister Robert Fico. Font size: A - | A + President Andrej Kiska has recently been accused of speculations concerning potential tax fraud that dates back to 2013, the Pravda daily wrote. Kiskas company KTAG started correcting its book-keeping last autumn, after suspicions concerning the dubious financing of his presidential campaign emerged. This happened shortly before the arrival of tax officers, according to Pravda. Kiska, the co-owner of KTAG, could have benefited from the tax dodging. Without the wide publicity, it is possible that the books would have contained unauthorised tax expenses amounting to nearly 476,000, which are actually the expenses on the presidential campaign in the years 2013 and 2014. The company removed them from the records only after four years. To avoid criminal responsibility, KTAG voluntarily paid nearly 145,000 on corporate taxes and VAT last year. The company also corrected a total of 17 tax returns, Pravda wrote on May 30. Question of timing The question is why the company had not made these steps earlier, as tax officials had found some discrepancies already by the end of 2014. The presidents spokesman Roman Krpelan said on May 29, as quoted by Pravda, that KTAG acted immediately after the tax audit found the discrepancy. Based on internal checks, the firm corrected its tax returns retroactively. However, KTAG received the tax audit results in October 2014 and it only corrected its tax returns by the end of 2017, according to Pravda. These steps only surfaced after the police and a parliamentary committee for incompatibility of functions started scrutinising the issue. A smear campaign? The opposition party Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) points out to police and Financial Administration that Andrej Kiska has been the target of smear campaign initiated by the compromised politicians under Robert Fico. Its members are also calling on the president to publish the documents from the presidential campaign. We think that the police and the prosecutors office are not protecting president and are inactive since they should have long opened a criminal prosecution in this matter, SaS chairman Richard Sulik, and party vice-chairs Lubomir Galko and Jana Kissova wrote in joint statement, quoted by the Dennik N daily. SaS wrote that the public now does not know whether the documents from his presidential campaign reaching the media now are fake or copies of the original ones. We do mind that the institute of the president of the Slovak Republic is losing its importance and dignity, they further wrote as cited by Dennik N, adding that in this situation, Andrej Kiska should publish all orders for the work he asked KTAG to carry out within his unofficial and official campaign, as well as all invoices KTAG sent to Andrej Kiska afterwards, and all documents proving the payment of these invoices from Kiskas private resources. This is the right way, according to SaS, to end the reckless denigration of the head of state by the absolutely compromised politicians led by (ex-PM and chairman of the ruling Smer party, ed. note) Robert Fico. 30. May 2018 at 14:00 | Compiled by Spectator staff PM Pellegrini announces investment in health care Most of the money to go into health care had already been proposed and some even introduced by the previous health minister (a Smer nominee) Tomas Drucker, analyst points out. Font size: A - | A + Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini announced the biggest investment ever in the University Hospital in Bratislava on May 29. The sum of 30 million, which he presented as almost one billion Slovak crowns to stress its sheer volume is nothing new, although he tried to describe it as such, the Sme daily commented on May 30. Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini and Health Minister Andrea Kalavska announced the massive investment at the May 29 news conference. The Ministry will invest 15 million in the reconstruction work planned for the University Hospital Bratislava, while an additional 15 million will go into medical technology. Pellegrini noted that over the past 20 years, almost nothing has been invested in the hospital at Kramare in Bratislava. Walking a path that has already disappeared A bigger portion of the sum has been already sent to the hospital by ex-health minister Tomas Drucker (a nominee of the ruling Smer party), the daily wrote, adding that the some parts of the impressive money package have already been planned or even used. The University Hospital in Bratislava (UNB), the biggest but also most indebted medical facility in Slovakia, is to use the money to purchase medical technologies and reconstruct its premises. The UNB facility at Kramare, slated to be closed after the currently unfinished structure at Razsochy is finished, shall be renovated and operate for several years. Thus, part of the 30 million will go for the highly deprived UNB complex at Kramare. Patients shall be receiving hygiene packages containing toilet paper, sanitary tissues, toothbrush and toothpaste, Health Ministry spokesperson Zuzana Eliasova told Sme. This step will be introduced as of autumn. Smer has been in charge of health care for ten years with one break but despite repeated complaints about the insufficient hygiene equipment patients receive in hospitals, the solution is only arriving in the mid-term of the third Smer cabinet, Sme wrote. Pellegrini refused to comment on the issue, responding that these were typical questions looking toward the past, instead of looking at the present or future. In privately-owned hospitals, toilet paper and tissues are commonly available to patients, while the state-owned health insurer VsZP had already introduced hygiene packages for patients in 2015 scrapping them in 2016, however, allegedly due to organisation and financial difficulties. Analyst comments on the health-care move Health analyst Dusan Zachar of the INEKO think-tank said that it is the task of journalists and maybe also experts to point out that it is nothing new. Hospitals can acquire a three-fold higher sum than the one presented by Pellegrini from European Union funds, he explained, as quoted by the daily. In that case, though, they cannot have the debts which are a reality in many state hospitals, and they cannot be based in Bratislava since the capital cannot draw money from EU coffers for health care due to its high incomes. Dusan Zachar (Source: Sme) Smer is extinguishing fires with packages maybe after the twelfth hour, Zachar opined for Sme. He added that introducing the hygiene packages is good for patients; but rather than a standard systemic solution, this is more of a marketing move destined to result in a lot of ineffectiveness. Moreover, the manner in which this measure is to be introduced and in which it has been announced is unworthy of the 21st century, Zachar summed up for Sme. 30. May 2018 at 14:07 | Compiled by Spectator staff When I realised Id been wrong about the Cervanova case, I couldnt sleep Our failure was that the theory about the innocence of the condemned men was introduced to us by people who had already been their friends. Martin Hanus is deputy editor-in-chief and commentator of the Conservative Daily Postoj. He started as a journalist in 2002 at Domino Forum, in December 2004 he was one of the journalists who started the .tyzden weekly. He served as its deputy editor-in-chief between 2008-2014. He is married with three children, lives in Bratislava. (Source: Sme) Font size: A - | A + Martin Hanus is deputy editor-in-chief and commentator of the Conservative Daily Postoj. He started as a journalist in 2002 at Domino Forum, in December 2004 one of the journalists who started the Tyzden weekly. He served as its deputy editor-in-chief between 2008-2014. He is married with three children and lives in Bratislava. When journalist Martin Hanus found out that his knowledge about the Cervanova case had been incomplete, he started looking at the archives. The things he found were enough to persuade him that he had been wrong all along. He now published a book to share what he found. Why have you started investigating again, after years when you were convinced that the seven men from Nitra in connection to the Cervanova case were innocent? MH: When I returned from Italy in 2015, the book by Peter Toth, Cervanova Case I, was published. I refused to read it at first. Read more in this interview: -how did Hanus come to terms with the realisation that he had been wrong about the Cervanova case? -are journalists in Slovakia able to maintain critical distance from their sources? -why are Slovak journalists more activist than their German colleagues? Why? MH: I felt like it was a closed issue for me. I felt like Toth, who as a journalist served as a secret service agent and had had contacts, for example, with businessman Marian Kocner, only wants to settle his dues with the media and that it was a biased book. In early 2017, someone gave me the second book by Peter Toth. I read it. It caught my interest and I started reading the first one. I was devastated. Suddenly I saw that my perception of the story was distorted. That I did not know some important things. For example, the story of Viera Zimakova as I knew it, was completely untrue. I realised that we were probably completely wrong at Tyzden. I started studying the Ludmila Cervanova case. I got access to the investigation file and my feeling from the book, that it was our huge failure, was confirmed. How did you feel when you found that everything was the other way around? MH:I was shocked. I could not sleep for a several nights. Why did you need to present your errors in the public? 30. May 2018 at 15:17 | Jan Krempasky Lucansky will replace Gaspar in top police post Watchdogs point to the new police president's past contacts and property issues. Gaspar does not rule out a future in politics. Font size: A - | A + Milan Lucansky will be the new Police Corps president. Lucansky, who served as director of the police inspectorate running under the Interior Ministry, will take over on June 1, after Tibor Gaspar leaves the post by the end of this month. He will only serve as interim president of the Police Corps, until the new man or woman is selected for the post under the new rules, which are expected to be passed this autumn. In line with her earlier statements that the changes in the top police management will go beyond the presidental post, Interior Minister Denisa Sakova also announced the names of new deputy Police Corps presidents, Robert Bozalka and Jana Maskarova, who will become the first woman in the top police leadership. Who is Lucansky "While others were afraid, he faced organised crime," Sakova said about Lucansky when she announced his nomination to journalists on May 30. Lucansky has been a member of the Police Corps since 1990. He served in one of its top posts between 2012 and 2016 as deputy Police Corps president. Afterwards, he led the police inspectorate running under the Interior Ministry, which deals with suspicions of unlawful conduct of police officers and has faced independence concerns from the previous ombudswoman in the past. During his early career, Lucansky worked in the field. Minister Sakova stressed while presenting him as the new Police Corps president that it is thanks to him and his team that big names in organised crime, like the Banska Bystrica underworld boss Mikulas Cernak, are in prison. Lucansky, however, also faced allegations of links to people from the underworld in the past. He was reported to have met with the late mafia boss Ludoit Sator in Hungary. He is dodging the allegations by saying that the people who accuse him of contacts with criminals have also had links to criminals in the past. Along with his colleagues, Ivan Sefcik and Jozef Micieta, Lucansky left the police corps during the 2010-2012 government of Iveta Radicova, and rejoined the forces only after the March 2012 elections, which brought Smer back to power. The three men filed a libel lawsuit and a criminal complaint against their former boss, Jaroslav Spisiak, demanding damages of 300,000, alleging that Spisiak committed libel when he told the media that when they were in their positions in the polices Office for Fight against Organised Crime, the international fugitive Karol Mello remained at large. Spisiak also reportedly stated that after these three individuals left the police corps, Mello was arrested in Poland. Spisiak faced charges based on their complaint, but the charges were dropped in 2014. Property in Florida Earlier this year, opposition MP Lucia Duris Nicholsonova claimed she had proof Lucansky blackmailed entrepreneurs in the Zilina Region and acquired an apartment in Florida in an unlawful way. 30. May 2018 at 23:05 | Michaela Terenzani Reconstruction of Kuciak murders took place in Velka Maca The parents of both victims and lawyer Daniel Lipsic were present; police refuse to reveal details. Font size: A - | A + on May 29, police returned to the murder site of Slovak investigative reporter Jan Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kusnirova to reconstruct the crime. Kuciaks father Jozef and Kusnirova's mother Zlatica were at the crime site, too, the Sme daily wrote, citing the Topky.sk website. They were joined by lawyers Daniel Lipsic and Roman Kvasnica, who is the Kusnirovas family lawyer. Police refused to comment in detail on the operation. In the criminal case, steps which we wont specify have been made, and we will not comment on them in more detail, Special Prosecutors Office spokesperson Jana Tokolyova said, as quoted by Sme. Murder circumstances are checked Police enclosed the street in Velka Maca in which the house of the engaged couple stands; neither the public, nor media were allowed to enter. Police and firefighter cars were at the crime site. Reconstruction of a murder is not performed in every case as it is demanding from an organisational and financial point of view but is used only if the investigation requires it, associate professor of criminal law Peter Kovac told the TASR newswire. During the reconstruction, circumstances of the crime are checked on the site, while the possible movement of the perpetrator and the information from testimonies is examined. Murdered in February Two dead bodies were discovered by police in Velka Maca on February 25 but they were probably killed several days earlier. Jan Kuciak was shot twice in his chest, while Martina Kusnirova was shot once in the head. The double murder launched a wave of civic protests which rocked the political scene in Slovakia, causing the resignations of the prime minister, culture minister, and interior minister (all from the ruling Smer party). The prime minister's resignation was the condition of the coalition partner, Most-Hid, which would otherwise not stay in the cabinet with Smer and SNS, Sme wrote. 30. May 2018 at 23:32 | Compiled by Spectator staff The Hershey Co. engages in the manufacture and market of chocolate and sugar confectionery products. The firm operates through the following geographical segments: North America; and International and Other. The North America segment is responsible for the traditional chocolate and non-chocolate confectionery market position of the company, as well as its grocery and snacks market positions, in the United States and Canada. The International and Other segment is the combination of all other operating segments which are not individually material, including those geographic regions where the company operates outside of North America. Its brands include Hershey's, Reese's, and Kisses. The company was founded by Milton S. Hershey in 1894 and is headquartered in Hershey, PA. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of The Procter & Gamble: "Procter & Gamble Services" LLC, "Procter & Gamble" LLC, Agile Pursuits, Agile Pursuits Franchising, Arbora, Arbora & Ausonia, Arborinvest, Billie, Braun (Shanghai) Co., Braun GmbH, Braun-Gillette Immobilien GmbH & Co. KG, Celtic Insurance Company, Compania Procter & Gamble Mexico, Compania Quimica S.A., Corporativo Procter & Gamble, Cosmetic Products Pty. Ltd., Detergent Products B.V., Detergent Products SARL, Detergenti S.A., Eurocos Cosmetic GmbH, FPG Oleochemicals Sdn. 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China, Procter & Gamble (L&CP) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Procter & Gamble (Manufacturing) Ireland Limited, Procter & Gamble (Shanghai) International Trade Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Procter & Gamble Acquisition GmbH, Procter & Gamble Administration GmbH, Procter & Gamble Algeria EURL, Procter & Gamble Amazon Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Amiens S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Argentina SRL, Procter & Gamble Asia Pte. 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Ltda., Procter & Gamble Egypt, Procter & Gamble Egypt Distribution, Procter & Gamble Egypt Holding, Procter & Gamble Egypt Supplies, Procter & Gamble Energy Company LLC, Procter & Gamble Espana, Procter & Gamble Europe SA, Procter & Gamble Export Operations SARL, Procter & Gamble Exportadora e Importadora Ltda., Procter & Gamble Exports, Procter & Gamble Fabricacao e Comercio Ltda., Procter & Gamble Far East, Procter & Gamble Finance (U.K.) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Finance Holding Ltd., Procter & Gamble Finance Management S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Financial Investments LLP, Procter & Gamble Financial Services Ltd., Procter & Gamble Financial Services S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Finland OY, Procter & Gamble France S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Germany GmbH, Procter & Gamble Germany GmbH & Co. Operations oHG, Procter & Gamble GmbH, Procter & Gamble Grundstucks-und Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH & Co. 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Ltd., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Belgium N.V., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Berlin GmbH, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing GmbH, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing SA (Pty) Ltd, Procter & Gamble Marketing Romania SRL, Procter & Gamble Marketing and Services doo, Procter & Gamble Maroc SA, Procter & Gamble Mataro, Procter & Gamble Mexico Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Mexico Inc., Procter & Gamble Middle East FZE, Procter & Gamble Nederland B.V., Procter & Gamble Netherlands Investments B.V., Procter & Gamble Netherlands Services B.V., Procter & Gamble Nigeria Limited, Procter & Gamble Nordic, Procter & Gamble Norge AS, Procter & Gamble Operations Polska Sp. z o.o., Procter & Gamble Overseas India B.V., Procter & Gamble Overseas Ltd., Procter & Gamble Pakistan (Private) Limited, Procter & Gamble Partnership LLP, Procter & Gamble Peru S.R.L., Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals France SAS, Procter & Gamble Philippines, Procter & Gamble Polska Sp. z o.o, Procter & Gamble Portugal - Produtos De Consumo, Procter & Gamble Product Supply (U.K.) Limited U.K., Procter & Gamble Production GmbH, Procter & Gamble Productions, Procter & Gamble Productos de Consumo, Procter & Gamble RHD, Procter & Gamble RSC Regional Service Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble Retail Services BVBA, Procter & Gamble S.r.l., Procter & Gamble SA (Pty) Ltd, Procter & Gamble Satis ve Dagitim Ltd. 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Uber announced recently that its preparing to launch a flying taxis technology center in Paris. The center will facilitate the movement of people around the cities by flying them in and out. The firm is devoted to its Elevate program known as the Advanced Technologies Centre in Paris (ATCP) and plans to inject over $23.4 million into the project for a period of five years. The center is expected to open soon in the autumn. The move becomes the first attempt for the company to develop a site outside the US. The firm will partner with various companies including the Ecole Polytechnique to contribute specified research activities. Get alerts: Why France? According to Eric Allison, Head of Aviation at Uber, the idea of launching Uber services was born in Paris and thats why the company is considering Paris for its potential program of developing flying taxis products and services. Furthermore, France is a potential place for the project since there are plenty of world-class engineers and expertise. France is popular for producing high tech Artificial Intelligence (AI) graduates and its attracting foreign firms to the region. For instance, Google recently revealed its plans to build a deep learning team in France. Also, Facebook is planning a similar project in the country. The company intends to bring on board various groups of experts and researchers who will apply the most advance technologies to determine the dynamics of the unique transport systems. The company is working closely with the European regulators including the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and other experts to develop the systems. However, Uber may not find it easy to penetrate France particularly in attracting potential graduates and researchers due to the negative publicity and pending court cases against the firm over various social conducts. For instance, Uber faces a cases of sexual harassment, and other unacceptable behavior. The Focus is on Advanced Technologies The latest development for Uber joins a list of sites owned by the company including the leading research centers in Toronto, Pittsburg and San Francisco centers. Currently, the company plans to focus on advancing its machine learning and simulation systems that will enable it control the flying taxis. The Paris research center would be used specifically for development of smart grids that will support the moving of flying fleets of electric transport both on the ground and in the air. Uber recently discarded the idea of developing self-driving car testing following a fatal crash on one of its new autonomous vehicle. Yahoo's User Database (UDB) a database containing personal information about all Yahoo users. The Account Management Tool an administrative tool used to make alterations to the targeted accounts, including their passwords. A 23-year-old Canadian man, who pleaded guilty last year for his role in helping Russian government spies hack into email accounts of Yahoo users and other services, has been sentenced to five years in prison.Karim Baratov (a.k.a Karim Taloverov, a.k.a Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov), a Kazakhstan-born Canadian citizen, was also ordered on Tuesday by United States Judge Vince Chhabria to pay a fine of $250,000.Baratov had previously admitted his role in the 2014 Yahoo data breach that compromised about 500 million Yahoo user accounts. His role was to "hack webmail accounts of individuals of interest to the FSB," Russia's spy agency.In November, Baratov pleaded guilty to a total of nine counts, including one count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and eight counts of aggravated identity theft.According to the US Justice Department, Baratov and his co-defendant hacker Alexsey Belan worked for two agentsDmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchinfrom the FSB (Federal Security Service) to compromise the accounts.The Justice Department announced charges for all of the four people in March last year, which resulted in the arrest of Baratov in Toronto at his Ancaster home and then his extradition to the United States.However, Belanwho is already on the FBI's Most Wanted Hackers list and both FSB officers currently reside in Russia, due to which they are unlikely to face the consequences for their involvement.Baratov ran an illegal no-questions-asked hacking service from 2010 until his arrest in March 2017, wherein he charged customers around $100 to obtain another person's webmail password by tricking them to enter their credentials into a fake password reset page.According to the court documents, Baratov managed to crack more than 11,000 email accounts in both Russia as well as the United States before the Toronto Police Department caught him.As part of his plea, Baratov admitted to hacking thousands of webmail accounts of individuals for seven years and send those accounts' passwords to Russian spy Dokuchaev in exchange for money.The targeted attack allowed the four to gain direct access to Yahoo's internal networks , and once in, co-defendant hacker Belan started poking around the network.According to the FBI, Belan discovered two key assets:Belan then used the file transfer protocol (FTP) to download the Yahoo's UDB, which included password recovery emails and cryptographic values unique to each Yahoo account, eventually enabling Belan and Baratov to access specific accounts of interest to the Russian spies.According to Baratov's lawyers, at the time of the crime, Baratov had no idea he was working with Russian FSB agents. Google said Tuesday that it will finance a project to offer 10,000 hours of gratis lessons in programming to young students in Ho Chi Minh City and several areas of Vietnams Mekong Delta region, as a way to benefit their thinking and enjoyment of computing. Google Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., a subsidiary of Google, is supporting the programming education for over 1,200 children and 30 teachers in state-run primary schools in Ho Chi Minh City, Vinh Long and Tien Giang Provinces, in a plan that is slated to last between May and August. Kids are expected to learn and play with Scratch, a visual programming language in which users can easily create interesting products by arranging given blocks that contain comprehensible codes. Googles collaborator in the project, the Mekong Community Development Center, will sent computers to the schools, many of which lie in remote or suburban areas. The educational effort, named Programming your future with Google, tries to kindle the kids interest in computer science, give them basic programming skills and sharpen their critical, logical and creative thinking as well as the competence to solve problems. They will also have the chance to improve their skills in group work and idea communication while acquiring some qualities needed in information technology settings. Ha Lam Tu Quynh, director of communications and public relations at Google Asia Pacific, said the company focuses on plans of raising public awareness and enhancing the personal ability in information technology in Vietnam, in order to help the country successfully develop in the direction of Industry 4.0. Were in the belief that children are the most wonderful creators in the future. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Singapore will continue to invest in many sectors in Vietnam in the future, Singapores Ambassador to Vietnam Catherine Wong affirmed. On the occasion of the 45th anniversary of Vietnam Singapore diplomatic relations, the ambassador sat down for an interview with Tuoi Tre News on the sidelines of the Singapore Food Festival in Ho Chi Minh City on May 26. The two-day festival was part of the activities to celebrate the anniversary, featuring nearly 20 booths selling Singaporean delicacies. The conversation below has been edited for cohesion, clarity, and concision. Singapore is one of the top investors in Vietnam, could you please provide more information on the sectors where Singapore may increase investment in Ho Chi Minh City in the future? Singapore is one of the earliest investors in Vietnam in the early years when the Vietnamese economy first started to open. We have been here for many years. Traditionally, we have a very strong place in real estate, in manufacturing, also in services, but going forward were trying to increase our investments in some new areas. Some of the areas were looking at are renewable energy, IT, hi-tech, and smart cities, which Vietnam is also interested in during the past years. Were also looking at companies that are providing urban solutions. Urban solutions can be anything from water management, traffic management to waste management and others. These are areas where Singapore companies have some expertise and I think we are able to contribute. Last but not least, were also looking at bringing more of our food and beverage sector companies in, so we have more restaurants of Singaporean food put up first in Ho Chi Minh City and subsequently maybe in other cities like Hanoi. Singaporean Ambassador to Vietnam Catherine Wong and guests are seen making popiah, a Singaporean dish, at the Singapore Food Festival in Ho Chi Minh City on May 26, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre News You have just addressed smart city development in which Ho Chi Minh City also takes an interest. What are some of the strengths, in your point of view, Ho Chi Minh City has to turn into a smart city? And is there any lesson from Singapore that Ho Chi Minh City can learn from? I think the biggest advantage is the fact that you have a very young and large population. You know young people are very talented, thats a strength that Vietnam can take advantage of. Thats also a potentiality which both Singapore and other foreign investors have seen and been encouraged to invest in. I think the similarities between Ho Chi Minh City and Singapore are the needs and both are very much urban cities, but Singapore is smaller compared to Ho Chi Minh City, and our population is also smaller. So I think when it comes to lessons, it really depends. Its not possible to take everything we are doing in Singapore and apply it in Ho Chi Minh City. It needs to be adjusted according to your conditions, your needs and what people here want. This year marks the 45th year of Vietnam Singapore diplomatic relations, what do you think of the two countries diplomatic achievements? The anniversary is a nice touch, and something that we celebrate. But I think the reality is that there is a very close relation between the two countries at political level among the leaders, at business-to-business level where there is a lot going on, and then also people-to-people relations. There are a lot of Vietnamese children going to Singapore to study, so a lot of these sections are ongoing and I think they will continue to happen. And now we have more and more Singaporean tourists coming to Vietnam, as well as more and more Vietnamese tourists to Singapore. Our foreign policy is to make friends with everyone in the region and Vietnam has always been a very good partner for us, both bilaterally and within the ASEAN region. I think thats basically the importance and value of our relationship. Singapores Ambassador to Vietnam Catherine Wong is seen during an interview with Tuoi Tre News in Ho Chi Minh City on May 26, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre News How has the special occasion been celebrated to boost the ties between the two countries? This year is the 45th anniversary of our diplomatic relations, so were planning on a series of activities throughout the year, not just in Ho Chi Minh City but also in Hanoi. For instance, in January, we organized a friendship charity run in Hanoi with Vietnamese partners, and the charity run managed to raise US$80,000 to build schools in the northern province of Tuyen Quang. One celebratory thing is that our activities have been supported by not only Singaporean companies but also Vietnamese enterprises. This makes it more meaningful because at the end of the day, we want to profile the bilateral relationship and want to be able to build the ties, the link between the two nations. In the latter half of the year, I think there will be more cultural and social activities, all targeting to celebrate 45 years of our relations. The chief of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) has sent a letter of apology to a female visitor from Australia, expressing his regret for her horror trip in Vietnam. Director General Nguyen Van Tuan issued a message in attention to Lynne Ryan, the Australian victim who had unfortunately experienced poor services provided by a Vietnamese tour operator and reported it on her Facebook. The Australian lady booked a two-day-one-night trip for six people to Ha Long Bay earlier this month after being shown a glossy brochure of a luxurious cruise ship, but it turned out to be a nightmare and thrilled the tourist group. Headlining her experience Horror trip, Halong Bay, Ryan said she had a junk boat riddled with rats, cockroaches, filthy toilets, broken doors and air-con and 'rock hard' beds. Furthermore, Vietnam's authorities found the Australian travelers were actually taken to Hai Phong's Cat Ba Island to the south of Ha Long since the cruise had been banned from the bay since August 2017 and moved to nearby waters in neighboring Hai Phong City. Ryans post also drew the attention from many news outlets who published the story later, causing the reputation of Vietnamese tourism to be damaged. In the letter, Tuan firstly addressed his gratitude to Ryan for timely giving an account of her trip. The official apologized on behalf of the Spring Travel Angecy, based in Hanoi, which sold Ryan the luxury cruise package. Tuan also informed the Australian holidaymaker that VNAT has suspended the cruise ship and penalized the illicit tour operator with strict punishment. We [VNAT] have conducted inspections on cruise ships to prevent any incident like yours from happening, one line from the letter reads. At the end of the message, Tuan expressed his hope to welcome Ryan and her friends back to Vietnam with an offer of a cruise to Ha Long and other tourist destinations. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! An official ceremony has been organized to welcome Vietnamese State President Tran Dai Quang in Japan, within the framework of his state visit to the East Asian nation from May 29 to June 2. President Quang and the First Lady were welcomed by Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo on Wednesday morning. The Vietnamese leader also met with other members of the Imperial Family, as well as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his spouse. The ceremony reflects the special respect Japan has for Vietnam, as the Japanese Emperor and Empress only welcome a few state visits from foreign leaders on a yearly basis. State President Tran Dai Quang, the First Lady, and Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko at the ceremony. Photo: Tuoi Tre The visit falls on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the two countries diplomatic relationship. President Quang and the First Lady then joined talks with Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, before exchanging their gifts. The Vietnamese head of state is scheduled to meet major Japanese corporations and convene a meeting with President of the House of Councilors Date Chuichi on Wednesday. They will also join a state banquet hosted by the Japanese Emperor and Empress on the evening of the same day. President Tran Dai Quang at the welcome ceremony. Photo: Tuoi Tre Upon his arrival in Tokyo on Tuesday afternoon, President Quang came to Gumma Prefecture, where he was received by Governor Masaaki Osawa. During their conversation, the president called on Gunma to enhance cooperation with Vietnamese localities in tourism, investment, high-tech agriculture, manufacturing, and supporting industries. The Vietnamese leader then visited Koganei Seiki Company, specializing in manufacturing aircraft and Formula-One car engines. There are 39 Vietnamese out of 240 engineers working at the company. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! HANOI -- A Vietnamese court is set to make a key ruling in the countrys biggest-ever fraud case, in a trial that has spotlighted Vietnams ability to tackle financial crime at a time when foreign banks are heeding government calls to invest. The Ho Chi Minh City Peoples High Court is expected to rule by Tuesday on whether to uphold a judgment that the central perpetrator of a 4.9 trillion dong ($215 million) theft is responsible for returning some of the stolen money, rather than the individuals employer at the time, state-controlled VietinBank. The ruling comes as financial firms such as investment banks and global buyout funds flock to Vietnam, hoping to capitalize on a period of privatization and capital-raising deals in the fast-growing emerging Southeast Asian economy. The chief executive of one victim, depositor Saigonbank Berjaya Securities JSC (SBBS) - a unit of Malaysias Berjaya Corporation Bhd - told Reuters that if the ruling was upheld, she had little hope of recouping her banks $10 million from the perpetrator, who was sentenced to life imprisonment. We cant afford to lose the case. This represents 70 percent of our capital. Our business may get suspended, Josephine Yei said in an interview. VietinBank, formally Vietnam Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Industry and Trade, and majority owner State Bank of Vietnam - the countrys central bank - did not respond to emailed requests for comment. In many economies, banks can be liable for embezzlement of depositors funds if negligence of the bank is established. In Vietnam, interpretation of liability law becomes more open when the perpetrator goes beyond their responsibility, a lawyer said. Different understandings lead to different decisions, said Nguyen Thanh Ha, chairman of Hanoi-based SBLAW. Vietnam doesnt have case laws for such cases so it depends completely on the mind of the jury. Court documents showed indebted Huynh Thi Huyen Nhu and 22 accomplices were convicted in 2014 for misappropriation of funds from 15 victims in 2010 and 2011. Nhu used her title as a senior VietinBank manager to encourage customers to deposit funds at a particular branch. She and accomplices used fake official documents to appropriate the funds, according to the indictment. SBBS Yei said her company had 210 billion dong deposited at VietinBank at the end of August 2011, and was shocked when two months later just 1 percent of the money remained. She said she has spent the intervening years trying to recover the funds and that SBBS and four other victims brought the latest appeal. The appeal covers only 1 trillion dong of the broader case. Its judgment day for us, said Yei, whose firm employs 55 people and has 94 investors, 93 of whom are Vietnamese. VietinBank is Vietnams second-largest listed bank by market value. It is 64.46 percent state-owned, with its next-biggest shareholder Japans Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, a unit of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc, with 19.7 percent. This case should be handled under international practices, otherwise it could have a bad effect on Vietnams investment and business environment and then investors will lose trust, economist and former government advisor Le Dang Doanh told Reuters by phone. We have to avoid that. We have to create trust. Check out news you should not miss today, May 30: Politics -- President Tran Dai Quang and his spouse arrived in Tokyo on Tuesday, beginning a state-level visit to Japan which will last until June 2. Society -- Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper's Uoc mo cua Thuy (Thuy's Dream) charity program for cancer children will give gifts and hold activities to celebrate Children's Day (June 1) for around 170 child patients in nine hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City, Hue, Da Nang and Hanoi, with the total budget of more than VND1.2 billion (US$52,500) from Tuoi Tre readers contributions. -- Nguyen Van Tuan, director general of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, has sent a letter of apology to Australian tourist Lynne Ryan, who had complained about the bad service of her 2-day boat tour around Ha Long Bay. Business -- Vietnams coffee exports rose an estimated 1.8 percent in January-May from the same period a year ago, while rice shipments surged an estimated 20.4 percent during the same period, Reuters cited Vietnamese government data on Tuesday. -- Renewable energy, IT, hi-tech, smart city and urban solutions are among the sectors that Singapore may put more investment in Vietnam, Singapores Ambassador to Vietnam Catherine Wong told Tuoi Tre in a recent interview on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of Vietnam Singapore diplomatic relations. Lifestyle -- A nude photo exhibition is expected to be organized in late July this year in order to distinguish between art nude photos and nude photos which impersonate art, said Vi Kien Thanh, general director of the Authority for Arts, Photography, and Exhibition. Education -- Google on Tuesday announced its three-month educational program called Lap trinh tuong lai cung Google (Programming your future with Google) which offers 10,000 hours of studying programming for 1,200 elementary students, and training for 30 teachers at 10 public schools in Ho Chi Minh City and southern provinces including Tien Giang and Vinh Long. Fish populations in the terminal stretch of the Mekong River running through southern Vietnam have considerably declined over the past few years chiefly due to recent dam constructions, jeopardizing the livelihood of poor local fishermen. When floodwaters seasonally submerged the Mekong basin in Vietnam, numerous boats and canoes ran on rivers and on flooded rice paddies to catch various fish, which were found aplenty. Fishermen had a good haul, earned satisfactory sums of money, and fermented tiny dead fish in multiple ceramic pots to make fish sauce. But this happy picture is part of the past, as floods with high water levels have not returned to southwestern Vietnamese provinces, which are crossed by the Mekong River, since 2011. Even when they did, fish did not come in their heyday abundance. The number of fish caught yearly has dramatically decreased after more than a decade, with the figure reaching 22,000 metric tons in 2016 and 2017, compared with 40,000 to 60,000 metric tons in the 2000s, according to Tran Phung Hoang Tuan, director of the Department of Fisheries in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang. There are no records of how much of the fish stocks has diminished since new hydropower plants on the upstream Mekong River were constructed, but impacts on Vietnamese fishermen are clear, Tuan said. Bui Thi Suong, a woman who has spent over 40 years fishing in An Giangs neighbor Dong Thap Province, wistfully recalled that she and her husband used to make a large amount of money from catching fish in the flood season. It was not an easy job, since we had to stay up late, get up early and wear wet clothes most of the time. But we loved it because we got lots of money, Suong said. But now, she left her sentence unfinished with a sigh, implying her precarious situation of modest daily fish hauls. Boats are moored along the Mekong River in Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre Nguyen Van Hoa, a Vietnamese national residing in Cambodia, said the depletion of fish populations is present both at home and abroad for his compatriot fishermen. Several Vietnamese crossing the border to catch fish in a privately hired portion of the Mekong River in Cambodia returned home empty-handed, he said. In the past, it was normal for one to make several dozens of millions of dong [US$800-2,000] at the end of the flood period. But now it would be lucky to able to scrape by after the time. A senior fisherman in An Giang, Huynh Van Be, described as desolate a vast expanse of flooded rice fields near his house on which canoes of poor residents would cruise at night to net fish when he was young. Many affected residents who relied on inland fishing in the province are switching to fish farming or agriculture as the main source of income. Tuan, of the An Giang fisheries department, attributed the severe fish stock decline to production activities in the upstream stretches of the Mekong mainstream, the impediment to fish migration and habitat loss, and shrinking spawning grounds due to dam building at these locations. China, Laos and Cambodia have planned on hydropower dams along the river, with the first country completing eight and the second expected to build its third-largest amidst opposition from neighboring nations, according to domestic news media. At present, local authorities in the Mekong Delta are taking proactive measures to deal with the limited fish population. The government in Dong Thap, for instance, has banned residents from fishing during a certain period of the year and imposed punishment on fishermen who use small-hole nets, electrofishing equipment and explosives. But a local official said that is not enough. Help should be extended to residents in the transition from fish catching to other jobs, and traders in young fish should receive penalties, he suggested. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Police in the central Vietnamese province of Thua Thien-Hue have saved a woman after she was held hostage by an armed man who was reportedly high on crystal meth. The incident happened at the Thua Thien-Hue Water Supply JSC, situated on Bui Thi Xuan Street in the provincial capital of Hue at around 8:00 am on Tuesday. Ngo Thanh Tinh, 28, entered the headquarters of the firm, bringing along a knife and a pair of scissors. He first headed to the security guard office, where he smashed multiple objects. Courtesy of a Tuoi Tre reader The security guards did not stop him but backed off instead. Tinh then went inside the building and held a female employee named Phuong hostage, threatening to stab her if anyone came close. Witnesses stated that the suspect was showing signs of mental problems, which could be the effect of crystal meth. The weapons that Tinh brought along with him. Photo: Tuoi Tre Police officers later arrived at the scene to persuade Thinh to let the victim go. They managed to distract Thanh so that the victim could escape in a split second. Many people took part in the apprehension of Thinh, while an officer also had to fire a warning shot. Phuong was later brought to the hospital for a health check. Ngo Thanh Tinh is held at the police station in this photo supplied by officers. Local residents gather at the Thua Thien-Hue Water Supply JSC. Photo: Tuoi Tre Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A 66-year-old woman in Vietnam has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for causing the death of her newborn granddaughter and staging a kidnap to hide her body. The provincial Peoples Court on Tuesday handed down the sentence to Pham Thi Xuan, 66, for murder as per Article 93 of the Penal Code. Xuan was found guilty of causing the death of her grandchild, 23-day-old L.M.A., and attempting to hide and dispose of her body. According to the indictment, the elderly woman came from her hometown in the northern province of Thai Binh to her sons house in Bim Son Town, Thanh Hoa Province to help take care of A., his daughter, in November 2017. On November 25, Xuan was holding A. in her arms when she tripped and fell. The baby was weak and wheezing after the fall. Le Van Thuan, Xuans son, was picking up his eldest son from a martial art class, while his wife was at home cleaning their bedroom at the time of the incident. Instead of calling for help, Xuan assumed the child would not survive and planned to hide the truth as she feared her son and daughter-in-law would be mad at her. The woman then wrapped a blanket around the newborn, put her in a plastic bag, and hid her in a bush about 30 meters from the house. She returned and pretended to be unconscious, later claiming that a strange man and woman had attacked her and kidnapped the child. The following day, the grandmother put the bag containing the babys body among other bags of rubbish so that it would be taken away by garbage collectors. On November 27, the corpse was found at the landfill. Xuan turned herself in to police on the afternoon of the same day. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Since debuting on Sunday 9GO!s Love Island has generated comments and media articles that it exists purely to show Reality TV contestants having sex on TV. But as Richard Lyle, Nines Chief Classification Officer tells TV Tonight, the show is under daily scrutiny to ensure it meets its MA classification. Execs view rushes from Spain every morning, just as they did for Big Brother, on a similar 24 hour turnaround. We met with the ITV guys and the brief was they wanted to be sexy not sleazy, racy not raunchy, says Lyle. They are coupled up but not hooking up. The boys could have penis-shots but no erections which is seen as a sexual act In its MA classification the show can be more explicit than the teasing tone producers have set thus far. Technically, full frontal nudity is allowed in a non-sexual context. The girls could go topless, and skinny dipping. The boys could have penis-shots but no erections which is seen as a sexual act, he explains of the MA limits. One thing leads to another, as your mother might have warned you. Adult language is also allowed, so far the show has freely used F-bombs. You could have c*** language but unless it was an unusual circumstance, such as in a humorous way, I cant imagine them wanting to use it, he continues. At first they were watching their Ps and Qs and Fs and Cs but once they got to know one another they became more relaxed, using it conversationally, as an adjective or an adverb. It can be implied but not directly shown. So how far is too far? Big Brothers infamous Turkey Slap (technically never broadcast at the time) is generally perceived as an example of the limits of acceptable content. David Mott was TENs programming boss at the time and is now the ITV Studios Australia boss responsible for Love Island, fully across how far the show can go. So far Lyle has had no cause to censor, with producers in Majorca, Spain, keeping the show above the hips. Night cameras have filmed couples in bed kissing before some dive under the doona for privacy. It can be portrayed as low level as kissing and cuddling, but they might go under the doona covers getting more and more carried away, which is why you have a lot of shots of that big moon. The producers at their own discretion can choose to cutaway, says Lyle. It can be implied but not directly shown. Coercing someone to do something sexuallly they didnt want to do would also be problematic. If there was one person who was seen to be much weaker or was being bullied by the others it would be a real problem. But if you have seen the line-up they all come out of the gate with equal fighting weight and stature. Love Island, was commissioned for 9GO! to hit the younger demos. The show isnt rating well in Total Viewers but is stronger in the demos. However Nine describes it as a multi-platform hit, with some YouTube clips at over 300,000 views and one at 1.4 million. OzTAM VPMs have shown up to a third of the audience is viewing through digital not broadcast. But can a show with such an expensive production layout, including filming in Spain, succeed only on digital and not broadcast? Yesterday Nine moved Big Bang Theory repeats into 9GO!s 7:30 slot to give the broadcast a fighting chance. I cant believe how seriously they take this idea that they are couples. Lyle, who isnt in the target demographic, still finds enjoyment from his daily viewings (including on Sunday). I cant believe how seriously they take this idea that they are couples. Theyve only been there for 4 days and Im sure the experience is intense, but you would think they were couples who had been dating for 6 months! So its much more about human relationships and how you are in your 20s with your emotions. Natasha was talking to Charlie in the hot tub and said, What would happen if one of us had to go, what is your Plan B? And the thought hadnt even crossed Charlies mind bless his cotton sox! Given he is Nines longest-running full-time employee, such variety is the spice of a censors life. I came here thinking I would be here a few years and they put me on as a cadet in 1968 on a temporary basis. And Im still here! he recalls. My friends who have retired, even at executive levels all say their job became the same day after day. But I said You ought to try working in commercial television, its not the same day after day! Thats the one thing I can certainly say about it. But the brother of the late renowned producer David Lyle, hints at change. Sadly I thought when David retires properly I might do the same so we can do a couple of world travels. We used to do them a lot when we were much younger, he reveals. Im slow to make change. I know David has gone but I cant quite get my head around it entirely. But I do have to start making other plans. He didnt indicate whether a trip to Majorca was on the cards Love Island airs 8:30pm Sunday Thursday on 9GO! Commercial TV networks have hit back at criticism by Screen Producers Australia that using New Zealand content is making a mockery of local content obligations. FreeTV CEO Bridget Fair said: Commercial television broadcasters are proud of our commitment to Australian content. Our members invest over $1.5 billion annually in making great Australian content that is loved by millions of Australians. Over 80 per cent of total program expenditure by commercial broadcasters is spent on Australian content. This is an unrivalled commitment to telling local stories, entertaining and informing Australians and giving them access to all the major sporting codes, live and free. The ACMA report shows that in 2017 all networks easily exceeded the requirement to show 55% Australian content on the primary channels between 6am and midnightwith some exceeding 75%. Our networks broadcast nearly 600 hours of first run Australian dramas and documentaries in 2017. In total across the primary and multi-channels, 23,000 hours of Australian content was broadcast by the commercial free to air sector. FreeTV notes programming from New Zealand makes up less that 2% of all Australian content, but this does include hours bolstered by News and Sport. SPA points to concerns about NZ content in Drama, Documentary and Childrens genres, at a time when networks have pushed to lower or abolish Childrens obligations. While Free TV cites 600 hours of first run Australian dramas and documentaries, 44 of those hours were from NZ. SPA is calling on the government to close a loophole in the Trade Australia-NZ Economic Trade Agreement. The debate has caused some friction this week. Contrary to incorrect claims made today, programming from New Zealand makes up a small fraction of the networks schedules, says FreeTV. When Mamoudou Gassama, a migrant from Mali, saw a four-year-old boy dangling from the balcony of a building, he didn't hesitate to scale the four floors from the outside to reach him before he fell. The incident happened in Paris on Saturday 26 May, when the little boy was left alone in a sixth-floor apartment by his father who had gone shopping. During that time, his son fell from the balcony. After falling two floors, he grabbed ahold of the fourth-floor balcony railing. The neighbours tried to help him, but they weren't able to pull him up. Mr Gassama quickly climbed up, pulling the child safely onto the fourth-floor balcony. The video of this incident went viral soon after and Mamoudou Gassama was nicknamed 'Spiderman of the 18th' referring to the 18th arrondissement where the drama unfolded. He was also awarded a certificate of courage and dedication by Paris police as well as French citizenship. The four-year old's family thanked him for saving their child. Where were the child's parents? It was reported that the child's father was playing Pokemon Go while the incident unfolded. The boy had recently started living in the city with his father instead of living in Reunion with his mother and grandmother. His mother and sibling were to join them in the city in June. The boy's mother said to Antenne Reunion TV that the father was not used to looking after the boy on his own. She also stated that the father had left him alone before. The father is now facing charges of failing to look after his child and the mother will be questioned by social workers in Reunion. Both the mother and the grandmother thanked Mr Gassama for saving their boy. When asked about his thoughts during climbing, Gassama said "I like children, I would have hated to see him getting hurt in front of me. I ran and I looked for solutions to save him and thank God I scaled the front of the building to the balcony." Who is Mr Gassama? Mamoudou Gassama is a 22-year-old immigrant who had left his homeland Mali in 2013. He travelled through the Sahara desert, using the migrant route through Burkina Faso, Niger and Libya. He spent a year working in Libya. He then crossed the Mediterranean to Italy in 2014, successfully reaching Europe on his second attempt. He journeyed on to France because he didn't know anyone from Italy and had family in France. His brother had been living in France for many years, which was one of the reasons why he travelled there. He was living illegally in France when the incident happened but after his heroic act, he received praise from French leaders and he was granted French citizenship with sincere thanks from French President Emmanuel Macron. Mr Gassama said about his long journey "I suffered a lot. We were caught and beaten but I did not lose hope." The Local Government Association (LGA) has released an analysis of data produced from the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) which has found that over 22,000 of those aged 10 and 11 are severely obese. Severely obese is the most serious category on the scale of obesity. Those whose BMI falls into that category are at risk from several grave Health problems including heart disease and high blood pressure. The NCMP is a government-run programme of measurement of all primary school-aged children in England and Wales. A record of their height and weight is taken at Reception age and also when they leave Primary School. The findings indicate that between starting and leaving school, average percentage rates of schoolchildren in the severely obese category, almost doubles from 2.4% to 4.1%. Figures further show that there is a gender difference in obesity with boys having higher obesity levels than girls. Ethnicity is also a factor where a difference is seen with those from black minority ethnic groups having a higher percentage of child obesity. Moreover, with regard to deprivation levels, the most deprived areas have the most severely obese children while the least deprived areas have the lowest. The LGA comments that future efforts to lower obesity need to take into account these differences when being created. What is the government doing to tackle the issue? In 2016, the government issued a document on childhood obesity Childhood obesity: a plan for action which received an update in January 2017. A more up-to-date strategy to combat obesity is due to be released later this year. One of the components of the plan was to impose a sugar levy and this went into action earlier this year. It was done in an attempt to encourage drinks manufacturers to lower the amount of sugar used in their products. There has been criticism that the sugar tax only pertains to soft drinks and excludes milk-based drinks. Since milk-based drinks can have a high sugar content, the tax may not be as effective as it could be. The governments 2016 plan does, however, mention that drinks without the remit of the sugar tax will be tackled before 2020. More should be said when this years update is released. An ongoing issue Childhood obesity is an ongoing issue with chefs, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstail pushing for more to be done to combat childhood obesity when they met with the Health and Social Care Committee in London earlier this month. This session gave a number of experts the opportunity to voice their opinions on what they thought would be important for the next part of the government's aforementioned Childhood obesity: a plan for action. Oliver called obesity a massive problem and argued that every single minister should have a part to play in tackling the issue. Fearnley-Whittingstail, further, called for the next childhood obesity plan to be the lets fix it now plan. Moreover, the London Mayor, Sadiq Khans, proposal to ban all advertisements of junk food from Public Transport in London in an attempt to tackle childhood obesity creating more discussion on the matter. Obesity costs the NHS over 5 billion a year In yesterdays report, the LGA, which represents 370 councils across England and Wales, called on the government to make a U-turn on cuts to public health grants in addition to more reforms to combat obesity in children. The Chairman of the organisations Community Wellbeing Board, Councillor Izzi Seccombe, has said that Cuts to councils public health grants by the government are having a significant impact on the many preventions and early intervention services carried out by councils to combat child obesity. This short-sighted approach risks causing NHS costs to snowball due to the ill health consequences of obesity in our younger generation. In response to the report by the LGA, a Department of Health spokesman, quoted by the BBC, has said: Our childhood obesity plan is among the most comprehensive in the world [] However, we have always been very clear that this is not the final word on obesity, and we have not ruled out further action if the right results are not seen. For improvement to be made, concrete action will need to be taken. Kim Yong Chol, a North Korean senior official is traveling to the US. The purpose of the trip is to engage in talks with US officials, that will hopefully further strengthen the chances that the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un will take place. The historic meeting was set to take place in Singapore on 12 June, but due to some tension between the two leaders, President Trump cancelled the meeting on 24 May. Trump's decision caused both confusion and deep concern among leaders worldwide, who had hoped to see this as the first step in bringing peace to the Korean peninsula. South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, called an emergency meeting with his security advisers shortly after Trump had made the public announcement, and told reporters he was "very perplexed," about the whole thing. South Korea has been acting as intermediary between the two countries. The leaders of both North- and South Korea met at the borders on 27 April to discuss further collaboration, something that was seen as being a historic move on both parts. Both leaders are still open to discussions. According to Aljazeera, Kim Yong Chol is a former North Korean spy chief. He is also one of the most influential people in North Korea and has been involved in several talks with South Korean officials over the last few weeks. In his formal newsletter, President Trump stated that due to North Korea's hostility he felt it was inappropriate to have the meeting at all. He did, however, seem to leave the door open for Kim Jong-un, should he change his mind, stating that although he didn't feel as if the meeting should take place, Mr. Jong-un was more than welcome to call or write, if he still wanted to talk. Last Friday, officials in Pyongyang responded by having a meeting with the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, on Saturday. Kim Jong-un, is said to have declared his commitment and willingness to continue with any negotiations. President Trump expressed his delight in a tweet, saying, "We have put together a great team for our talks with North Korea. Solid response to my letter, thank you!" Should the meeting take place, it would be historic. It would be the first time in history that a sitting US president and a North Korean leader would sit down and have a discussion. According to CNN, it would be a diplomatic triumph since the two countries are technically still at war. Both countries want to work things out Kim Yong Chol's visit confirms that both Washington and Pyongyang have a direct line of communication and are keeping the option for a meeting open. Although several North Korean officials have travelled to New York already, Kim Young Chol's visit is regarded as significant as he is considered to be highly important in North Korea. According to John Deluray, a university professor at international relations, the visit is an incredible act, as it shows willingness to work together on fundamentally change the relationship between North Korea and the US. 'Britain's Got Talent' opened spectacularly, with a fantastic circus-themed opening. The performance was choreographed by Ashley Banjo, who in 2009 won 'BGT' with his street-dance group Diversity. The opening was inspired by the 2017 musical "The Greatest Showman" with the song "The Greatest Show." The camera followed the directions of circus performers as they led the viewers at home to the stage, while the audience in the theatre cheered. The audience cheered even louder when Dec made his first solo appearance. He was lowered down to the stage on a hula hoop and was as confident as ever. Any nerves that Dec may have had were soon gone when the audience showed how much support they had for him. He carried himself well as he stepped onto the stage for the first time this year, to present the show. 'BGT' also had a new home this year, with performances now taking place in London's Hammersmith Apollo. The night was an overall success, minus a few technical hitches. Some viewers lost transmission early in the show, with Dec apologising for "Technical problems" that had been caused by the weather. Of course, Ant's absence did not go unnoticed with Simon Cowell joking "Ant you're coming back next year, don't do that!" after the show came back on after its technical difficulties. Dec also made reference to his friend at the start of the show. He told the audience and viewers how the new venue was the only change to the show, before looking to his right, causing the audience to laugh. 2018's first semi-finalists This year's first semi-final had a great variety of performers, who all fought for their place in the final. The first performance came from a young dance group, Cali Swing, who wowed the audience in their blue and yellow attire. Unfortunately, it was shortly after their performance that the more than ten-minute technical issues occurred. Next was Lifford Shillingford who sang his own rendition of The Beatles' 1965 song "Yesterday." Originally Alesha Dixon's golden buzzer, his live performance received mixed reviews. He seemed disappointed by the judge's reactions, but took it in his stride. After Dec gave out the number to vote, Lifford Shillingford quickly left the stage looking unhappy. Close-up magician Maddox Dixon once again impressed the judges and viewers with his Rubik's Cube, as well as a slight of hand trick in front of the judges' table. However, the most impressive was the floating woman, an act that allowed Dec and a member from back stage to become involved in the trick. This left the judges and Dec wondering how the trick was done. Ellie and Jeki, who pleased judges with their instant costume changing audition, failed to do the same in the live show. The judges seemed unimpressed with last night's performance and made comparisons to the audition. Last night's performance had fewer changes, that took longer than the ones in their audition. All of the outfits seen in both the audition and live show were designed by Ellie. Dancer Shameer Reyes received four 'yes's' at his auditions. His brother Shaquille, who sang an original song also got four 'yes's'. But, it was only Shameer, the younger of the two, who made it through to the live show. He gave a great, energetic performance that started out in the audience. But he again received mixed reviews on his routine. Lost Voice Guy had the judges and audience in stitches again. He had a fresh routine that made light of his cerebral palsy, while also educating people on his disability. He even managed to get in a dig about Simon Cowell and put him on mute. Lost Voice Guy brings a new outlook to disability, and could hopefully promote a deeper conversation in the future. Following the comedy came the most dramatic act of the night: Matt Johnson. Amanda Holden summed up many viewers reactions when she said, "I was holding my breath along with you," after Matt Johnson successfully escaped once more. It was shared in his VT that his act was inspired by his brother, who suffers from seizures that cause him to struggle to breathe. Both the audience and judges were impressed. To finish the show came the most patriotic performers The D-Day Darlings who sang "Britannia rule the waves" with great pride. The judges and audience were all equipped with small United Kingdom flags, that they swung in tune to the song. At the end of the performance, the girls stood back to reveal a group of veterans. The veterans brought both a sense of pride and emotion to those watching. First finalists decided The final three contestants were, in no particular order Lost Voice Guy, Maddox Dixon, and The D-Day Darlings. As Dec had told the judges at the start of the show that the highest voted performer would be through to the final. The next two highest votes would go down to the judges' vote. Once the final three had been decided, it was announced that Lost Voice Guy would be the first through to the 2018 'BGT' finals. He received cheers and applause from the audience, and he smiled with joy at his achievement. He, of course, had a thank you prepared, before leaving the stage. That meant that Maddox Dixon's and The D-Day Darling's fate was left down to the judges' vote. In the event of a tie, the winner would be decided by the public vote. But this was not the case with three out of the four judges voting to send The D-Day Darlings through to the final show. Alesha Dixon was the only judge who voted for Maddox Dixon stating that she wanted to "Keep it fair." The 'BGT' 2018 first semi-final was spectacular. It showed the importance and significance of the show to the general public. Dec also impressed viewers with his solo hosting, still keeping the same upbeat and funny atmosphere that 'Ant and Dec' are known for. But perhaps it was just the massage that David Walliams gave Dec that really did it. A shooter in Belgium has opened fire in what is suspected to be an Islamic State terrorist attack targeting the police. He killed two female police officers and a civilian, in addition to injuring a further four police officers, before being killed by the cops. On Monday, the shooter was released from prison, where had been doing time for drug-related charges, on a temporary basis and it is being assumed that he was radicalised while on the inside. As it turns out, the shooter had already been on a police watchlist for having some Islamic extremists in his address book anyway. Since early 2015, actually, the whole country of Belgium has been on high alert for terrorism. Thats why the police have been on the lookout for anyone with potential links to Islamist sources. Shooter is thought to belong to an entourage of terrorists According to one source close to the case, the shooter who carried out yesterdays attack was thought to have been a part of the entourage of an Islamist recruiter. The source did not disclose whether the terrorist was the Turtle or the Johnny Drama of this entourage, but he certainly wasnt the Vince. So, they suspected that he had been radicalised in prison and belonged to a group of Islamist terrorists, but they let him out of prison anyway. A male shooter in the Belgian city of Liege has opened fire and killed three people, including two female police officers and a civilian. He also took a cleaning woman as a hostage before being killed by the cops. Four police officers were also injured in the chaos of the attack, which is suspected to be a terrorist act in which the police were the targets. Liege is located in the eastern region of the country. Today, a vigil will be held at the town hall in Liege at 1:00pm local time (which is 11:00am on our time) to mourn and remember the victims of this attack. The deaths that came from the tragic shooting were confirmed in a public statement at a press conference by Willy Demeyer, the Mayor of Liege, who also added that the police department were definitely the target of this attack. He said that in any matters, especially ones like this, his administration would be forever on the polices side. He also promised that the families of the victims of the shooting would be provided with physical and psychological support as they deal with their sudden and unexpected losses. The shooters exact motive has yet to be determined by the investigating police officers, but authorities are treating this incident as an act of terrorism and they have taken it that the police were the targets. Apparently, the shooter was on temporary release from prison. He was only let out on Monday and hes already gone and opened fire on the police. He had been serving time in jail on drug charges. It is thought that while he was in prison, he was radicalised by some people with extreme views. The shooter was heard yelling, Allahu Akbar! According to initial reports from the scene, the shooter was heard shouting out, Allahu Akbar! while he was massacring Belgian police officers. This should be a familiar term to anyone who knows anything about Islamic State terrorism. Its an Arabic term that roughly translates to God is greatest. The terrorist group ISIS have yet to take credit for the attack, but the investigators have nonetheless assumed that, thanks to the Allahu Akbar! chant, this terrorist was probably operating as an Islamic extremist. The attack in Liege did not begin as a shooting. The attacker did not have any guns of his own, in fact. It began as a stabbing attack, as he came at the police officers he killed armed with knives. He stabbed them several times before removing their guns from the holsters and murdering them with their own firearms. Its not yet clear if he was trying to make some kind of political statement by doing this, but he was taking a specifically anti-police stance with the attack, rather than just mindlessly killing people. Federal prosecutors have launched a terror investigation After the local police dealt with the attack itself, killing the shooter, and the initial fallout, federal prosecutors have been brought in to further investigation the attack and get to the bottom of it to determine a motive, who planned it, how it could have potentially been prevented etc. They have determined that it was, as suspected, a terrorist attack and they have subsequently launched a terror investigation and put the terrorism-related protocols into place in order to figure out what happened and get the details. Mayor Demeyer says that at todays vigil, there will be a book placed in the town hall, where the remembrance service is set to take place, in which well-wishers and mourners will be able write their condolences to the families of the victims. Furthermore, he has pledged that all flags on municipal buildings will be reeled down to half-mast as a sign of respect for the dead. President Erdogan is a man who the Americans don't feel happy about. Ever since he came to power he has been following an independent policy which at times clashes with American interests. Erdogan feels that the last coup attempt had the blessings of the CIA and has been demanding the handing over of his opponent Gulen, noted the GroundTruth Project. The cleric is in exile in the USA and is a known opponent of Erdogan but he has denied any hand in the coup against the Turkish president. The Americans have not obliged and this is one of the causes of Erdogan's ire. Global Security has reported that close on the heels of buying the S400 Russian missile system, Erdogan may go in for the Russian Su 57 multi-role fighter. This was after the US house committee passed a bill that in summary would bar countries like Turkey which buy Russian weaponry, from being sold the F-35. NDAA The bone of contention is an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This has been proposed by Democratic Senator from Michigan, Jeanne Shaheen, and Thom Tillis the Republican senator for North Carolina.This amendment bars countries like Turkey from being beneficiaries of the F-35 program for buying Russian weaponry like the S-400 missile system. Turkey has already signed the deal and accelerated delivery of the weapon system is expected to commence by late 2019. Russia has given very favourable terms to Turkey and it is reported that Turkey will pay 45 percent of the total cost and the rest will be financed by Russia with a soft loan. Sanctions The Russians and Putin are obviously delighted as it means a chink in NATO. Turkey has been a member of the alliance for decades. Another country which could also face sanctions is India which is going ahead with the purchase of the S-400 system, the Sputnik International reported. This was confirmed after the recent meeting between Narendra Modi the Indian prime minister and Putin at Sochi last week. The S-400 is a highly effective anti-missile system and many countries in the world including China, have opted to buy the shield. The SU-57 is supposed to be the Russian answer to the F-35. It is a cost-effective alternative to the American plane and costs half the price of an F-35, according to Yani Safak, a Turkish language Newspaper. Trump President Trump has tried to make amends with Erdogan but despite talking to him directly, the Turkish president continues to follow an independent agenda. President Trump will have to think of something else to keep Turkey in the American orbit. FILE PHOTO: BHP Billiton Chief Executive Andrew Mackenzie is silhouetted against a screen projecting the company's logo at a round table meeting with journalists in Tokyo, Japan June 5, 2017. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo (Reuters) - Global miner BHP Billiton said on Wednesday that its joint venture with a unit of Mitsubishi Corp <8058.T> would sell a coal mine in Queensland in Australia to Japan's Sojitz Corp <2768.T> for A$100 million (56.5 million pounds). The Gregory Crinum hard coking coal mine had ceased production by the end of 2015. BHP said its annual capacity was 6 million tonnes prior to that. "(The BHP-Mitsubishi alliance) made the decision to sell the mine after a detailed review that concluded there is potential for another party to realise greater value (there)," BHP said in a statement. BHP's Australia-listed shares were 0.8 percent lower on Wednesday, in line with the broader market. (Reporting by Rushil Dutta in Bengaluru; Editing by Joseph Radford) By John O'Donnell and Gederts Gelzis RIGA (Reuters) - Latvia is investigating whether its banks acted as conduits for Russian funds used to interfere in elections and politics elsewhere, after it received a warning from the United States, officials have told Reuters. The allegations, which highlight the country's role as a stepping stone for Russian money on its way to the west, come after Latvia's third largest bank was shut in February after being accused by the United States of money laundering. Foreign affairs minister Edgars Rinkevics told Reuters that citizens from Russia and former Soviet states, including people subject to U.S. sanctions, had put money in Latvian banks and some of it may have been used for political manipulation. "There is also the connection to ... hybrid warfare that money being transferred or kept in (the) Latvian financial system can be used to undermine ... the political systems of other countries," Rinkevics said. "Currently, our law enforcement authorities are investigating some leads that we have been provided that are related to hybrid warfare," he said, referring to campaigns to influence political developments. Latvia's finance minister, Dana Reizniece-Ozola, confirmed that the government had launched such an investigation after receiving credible information from "our strategic partners", referring to the United States. "This is the issue topical ... for the whole of Europe especially if it comes true that money has been used for manipulating election results in several European countries," Reizniece-Ozola told Reuters. When asked about possible Russian-sponsored campaigns to influence politics, she said: "If our financial sector might be used for financial crime ... especially if it is used for political goals, that is a no go." The ministers did not give details of which cases were being investigated but three senior Latvian officials said that one concerned the movement of funds from Russia through a Latvian bank to support an attempted coup in 2016 in Montenegro. Story continues Late that year, as Montenegrins voted in an election, authorities arrested 20 people from neighbouring Serbia on charges of planning armed attacks against the state. Serbia later said it had uncovered evidence including 125,000 euros (108,846 pounds) in cash and stashed uniforms. Montenegro's Special Prosecutor later accused Moscow of involvement in the plot, which he said was aimed at halting the integration of the former Yugoslav republic into NATO. The Kremlin has dismissed such claims as absurd. "The money which flowed through Latvia was possibly used to finance the coup in Montenegro," said one of the Latvian officials, who all asked not to be named, describing the ongoing investigation into the case. "It might have been divided into parts, payments like $15,000 (11,332), so that no one would notice." Russia has also been accused of interfering in elections from Germany to the United States although Moscow denies any such action. Reuters asked the Kremlin whether Russia had used Latvia to move funds that were used for political interference in Europe, whether it had been involved in an attempted coup in Montenegro and whether people from Russia now on the U.S. sanctions list had accounts with banks in Latvia. A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said, in a comment passed to Reuters by his office: "The answers to all the questions are no." A spokesman for the government in Montenegro did not comment. POLITICAL INFLUENCE The latest warning from the United States that Latvian banks may have played a role in manipulation by Russia highlights the continued pressure from Washington on the Baltic state to tighten its controls. Earlier this year, U.S. authorities accused Latvia's third biggest bank, ABLV, of money laundering and breaking sanctions on North Korea, prompting its closure and Latvia's worst financial crisis in a decade. The suspicion that large flows of Russian funds could also have been used for political interference has underlined the need to change the Swiss-style banking offered by about a dozen Latvian banks to Russians and citizens of former Soviet states. Foreign minister Rinkevics said the country's change of tack with regards to this business was also due to more aggressive Russian foreign policy, such as in Ukraine. "There has been quite ... a change in Russia's behaviour," he said. "There is connection between money laundering and the possibility of use of the black money also to influence ... the political system of our allies." "There was this concept that Latvia can be the bridge between the west and the east," he said. "We need ... to say goodbye to the whole bridge concept." Since securing independence from Russia in 1991, more than a dozen Latvian banks have promoted themselves as a gateway to Western markets for clients in Russia and former Soviet states such as Ukraine - and promised Swiss-style secrecy for clients. At the peak in 2015, Latvian banks held deposits of about 12 billion euros ($15 billion) for foreign customers. Bankers and officials have said much of the money came from Russia. Changing its approach to banking presents Latvia with a difficult balancing act. Washington is an important military ally for the former Soviet-ruled state of 2 million people on the EU's eastern flank. It also has close historical and trade ties with Russia. (Additional reporting by Margarita Popova and Christian Lowe in Moscow; Writing by John O'Donnell; Editing by Giles Elgood) (Adds quotes, background) By Lefteris Karagiannopoulos OSLO, May 30 (Reuters) - Norway's gas production in 2018 is expected to match or just lag last year's record, the chief executive of pipeline system operator Gassco told Reuters on Wednesday. "For the total of 2018, we will be approximately at the same level as 2017, or maybe it could come slightly below," said CEO Frode Leversund, adding the final outcome would depend on the delivered volumes of July as well as the demand from Oct (Shenzhen: 000069.SZ - news) . 1. Norway last year produced 124.2 billion standard cubic metres of gas, of which 117.4 billion was exported via pipelines to Europe and 5.6 billion was shipped as liquefied natural gas (LNG). In 2019, production was also seen at around 2017-2018 levels, Leversund said. Gassco's yearly maintenance schedule, which started in April, is so far on track, and any additional needs that may arise will be handled during the summer window, the CEO said. Gassco will also conduct preventive maintenance at its Kollsnes processing plant to avoid a recurrence of last winter's outage, when the 'Beast from the East' cold snap shut the plant for days just as demand spiked. At Nyhamna, a major processing plant that will start receiving additional gas from the new Aasta Hansteen field in late 2018, Gassco is in final negotiations with electricity grid operators to boost the security of its power supply. "We are in very tight dialogue with Statnett and other local grid operators ... There is work ongoing. There are several options, we are running a project now to conclude on the option we will decide to take on," said Leversund. Separately, Gassco has also been contacted by companies that want to transport natural gas from the Arctic Barents Sea, and is currently making an infrastructure plan for the remote region, he added. (Editing by Terje Solsvik and Nerijus Adomaitis; Editing by Mark Potter) A man attends a protest rally in reaction to the murder of Slovak investigative reporter Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova, in Bratislava, Slovakia April 5, 2018. The placard shows portraits of Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova and reads "Not enough". REUTERS/Radovan Stoklasa By Tatiana Jancarikova BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - A veteran officer became Slovakia's new police chief on Wednesday, a pick that angered protesters who had called for an outside figure to guarantee an independent investigation of the murder of a journalist who exposed high-level graft. Journalist Jan Kuciak was found shot dead along with his girlfriend at their home in February. They were both 27. The murder exacerbated worries about media freedom in ex-communist eastern Europe, and led to protests that forced the departure of previous police chief Tibor Gaspar as well as Prime Minister Robert Fico and interior minister Robert Kalinak. Milan Lucansky, who will take office as police president on June 1 after being appointed on Wednesday by the interior minister, joined the police in the 1990s. Having served as deputy police chief and head of police inspection in recent years, he worked closely with Kalinak. Asked at a press conference whether he would focus on alleged corruption cases uncovered by Kuciak, Lucansky listed "terrorism and migration" as his main challenges. "I will take a complex look at the police force... people care about different things not just these specific cases," Lucansky said. Slovakia has not been a major transit or destination country during Europe's migrant crisis. With Fico keeping the reins of power as chief of the ruling Smer party, the appointment Lucansky to head the police led civic activists to believe that personnel changes have been more cosmetic than substantial. New Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini and new interior minister Denisa Sakova were both senior figures in the previous administration. Organisers of the biggest protests since the 1989 fall of communism, united under the 'For a Decent Slovakia' alliance, said the nomination was a missed opportunity for real change. "Interior Minister Denisa Sakova remains nothing but the right hand of former minister Kalinak, and Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini proves he still has to do as former PM Fico and the former interior minister say," the opposition alliance said in a statement. Story continues No new public protests have been called for now. No one has been charged with the murder of Kuciak and his fiancee, which a prosecutor has said was probably a contract killing. The police also faced criticism last week from Kuciak family's lawyer who said they may have inadvertently destroyed evidence through negligence at the scene of the murder. The special prosecutor's office said "some failures were detected during initial actions at the crime scene". Kuciak had, among other things, investigated fraud cases involving businessmen with Slovak political ties. He had also looked into suspected mafia links of Italians with businesses in Slovakia. (Reporting By Tatiana Jancarikova; Editing by Toby Chopra) Palestinian boats carrying people wounded in recent demonstrations in the Gaza Strip have been intercepted by Israeli naval vessels during a desperate effort to break the blockade of the coastal territory. The main boat in the flotilla is carrying around 20 passengers, accompanied by several smaller vessels, AFP reported. Passengers include students wishing to study abroad, those wounded in recent protests in the Gaza Strip and patients suffering from long-term conditions. The flotilla was intending to reach Cyprus. According to the We Are Not Numbers organization, the flotilla's lead ship sailed past the limit of the blockade while being shadowed by Israeli warships, with other boats stopped around 6 nautical miles from the coast. The lead vessel is now being towed to Israel, the group reported. Trending: Southwest Airlines Employee Allegedly Confronts University Basketball Coach Over Biracial Son RTX66MRV REUTERS/Mohammed Salem The organization said that some of those accompanying the flotilla set fire to an Israeli monitoring buoy during the breakout effort. In the past, Israeli vessels have fired warning shots at Palestinian fishing boats approaching the limit of the blockade. A website linked to the flotilla said organizers had warned passengers that the boats could be attacked by the Israeli navy or that they could be arrested. The names of those sailing with the flotilla have been kept secret to protect their safety. According to organizer Salah Abdul-Ati, the trip will carry the hopes and dreams of the Palestinian people for freedom. Another organizer, Alaa Al-Battah, said the protest is designed to shed light on the suffering of Gazans and to send out a message to the world that we have a right to our land, sea and ports. Story continues Don't miss: Elizabeth Warren Says Children Being Torn Out of Mothers Arms is on Donald Trump's Head Related: Humanitarians on the high seas: Freedom Flotilla sets sail for Gaza The launch of the boats marks the eighth anniversary of the 2010 Gaza Flotilla Raid. As an international fleet of activist ships attempted to reach Gaza in spite of the naval blockade, Israeli commandos raided the Turkish Mavi Marmara and killed nine activists; a tenth later died from their wounds. The organization behind the 2010 flotilla has already launched its 2018 effort, with the boats expected to push for Gaza in mid-July. The flotilla posted a statement to its website saying it salutes this humanitarian mission and calls on the governments and the peoples of the world to act to ensure safe passage of these boats and the civilians on board. RTX66O05 (1) REUTERS/Amir Cohen Most popular: Iran Says 'No One Can Destroy Our Missile Power,' Not Even the U.S. Military Last week, Israeli airstrikes targeted Palestinian vessels to be used either in todays flotilla launch or to greet the international fleet attempting to break the blockade in July. The strikes were part of an operation to degrade the underground terror infrastructure of Hamas, the Israeli Defense Forces said. The launch of the Palestinian flotilla follows several days of tensions and violence that culminated in a large mortar barrage launched from Gaza toward southern Israel on Tuesday, allegedly by the Islamic Jihad group with permission from Hamas. In response, Israeli airstrikes have been targeting Hamas and Islamic Jihad positions in the Gaza Strip. Amid such escalation, the challenge for the flotilla is even more daunting. Gaza has been under blockade by Israel and Egypt since 2006 to stop Hamas diverting imported materials to military use. Israel has now started work on breakwater fortifications to help seal off the maritime approaches to the Gaza Strip. The new and impenetrable barrier will effectively prevent the possibility of penetrating Israel by sea, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Khadim Faye walks into the Great Mosque of Touba to pray in Touba, Senegal April 9, 2018. Picture taken April 9, 2018. To match Feature EUROPE-MIGRANTS/AFRICA REUTERS/Mikal McAllister Thomson Reuters By Sofia Christensen and Edward McAllister DAKAR (Reuters) - When Fatou Kine's failed attempt to reach Europe left her jobless and penniless in Algeria, she turned to an agency she had heard helped migrants return home. The United Nation's International Organization for Migration, or IOM, did that and more. It flew her back to Senegal in January last year and gave her more than $1,000 to start a tailoring business in the seaside capital Dakar. But one year on, Kine is struggling. After paying the rent for a 25-square meter storefront, she takes home about 16,000 CFA ($29) in a good month not much more than she did as a hospital cleaner before she left for Algeria. The IOM and the European Union are ramping up efforts to return African migrants home, after thousands have died making the perilous sea crossing to Europe and governments in some countries push for tougher rules to stem the numbers arriving. The migrants are often returning from places like Algeria and Libya, where many get stuck en route to Europe, as well as from Europe itself. Efforts have accelerated over the past six months following revelations of migrant slave markets in Libya. But interviews with migrants like Kine reveal the shortfalls of repatriation even for those lucky enough to receive a grant to start a business. In countries like Senegal, where local economic activity can be slow, many struggle to survive. At her shop in a busy Dakar suburb last month, surrounded by three sewing machines and two mannequins sporting the colorful boubous (robes) she makes there, Kine said she wants to try again to get to Europe because of the difficulty in making ends meet. "With my two children, I can't make it," the 26-year-old said. The IOM acknowledges that migrants face similar challenges on their return to those that prompted them to leave their home country in the first place, and that often they try to leave again. In such cases, the migration agency "seeks to ensure migrants receive accurate information about the migration journey and potential risks," said IOM spokeswoman Florence Kim. Story continues The organization produces pamphlets translated into several languages informing would-be migrants of what they might be getting themselves into. "NO SILVER BULLET" In late 2016, the EU and the IOM launched their biggest repatriation project yet: a 174 million euro ($203 million) fund to help bring back migrants and jump-start their lives in a way that would remove the need to head for Europe. It was launched amid pressure from European member states worried about immigration levels and a growing death toll of Africans trying to cross the Mediterranean in overcrowded boats. The IOM recorded 171,635 arrivals by boat from Africa in 2017, which does not include the likely thousands of others that tried and failed. The new program has so far returned more than 25,000 people to 14 African countries. Of those, 2,700 received money to set up a business or community project. Other migrants have returned during that time with the help of funds from pre-existing projects, including Kine, but the IOM did not have a total number. IOM spokeswoman Kim said it was too early to judge how well its latest program was working, but acknowledged that repatriation alone was not enough and that the returnees must be able to survive financially. But experts have expressed concerns about the long term effectiveness of the strategy, especially as the African workforce grows in the coming decades, increasing demographic pressures. "These projects are very important and much needed. But ... we don't really know what happens to these people," said Camille Le Coz, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Brussels who has looked at the new initiative. She said that not enough research is done to make sure a migrant's business is viable. One individual who is struggling despite receiving $2,400 from an Italian aid agency to set up a hardware store in Senegal is Khadim Faye. He had been in Italy for some 15 years, picking fruit and sending what money he did not spend back home, when his papers expired and he was forced on to the street. The grant in early 2017, which was separate from the IOM program but funded by the EU, went toward buying materials and renting a premises in Touba, back in Senegal. He has struggled to compete with local competitors ever since. Aged 43, with three young children and a sick mother, Faye is considering shutting the shop and returning to his family village to farm peanuts. "It's not working," said Faye in his small hardware store in Touba, a remote, dusty town 200 km (124 miles) inland from Dakar. "Today you sell, but tomorrow you won't sell anything." The IOM said it kept track of migrants' progress by taking phone numbers of people who returned with its assistance. It said it often took months for migrants to truly feel like they were home again. An EU spokeswoman said the approach "enables migrants to return in a safe, dignified and voluntary way." But she added that sending migrants home is tough and that people often want to return to Europe. "The context is a difficult one. There is no silver bullet, and there is no quick fix," she said. SOME SUCCESS Many who are returned home find themselves falling through the cracks, bewildered after a long time away. Others said they heard rumors about possible aid, but did not know how to reach out. The IOM flew Khadim Diaw, 43, back from Munich, Germany, in 2017. He said he was desperate to work there legally, but was unable to gain asylum. The IOM gave him 400 euros on arrival and another 400 euros six months after returning home. Despite the help he said he struggles in the same way he did before leaving for Europe in 2010. The money he makes from his small poultry farm in the town of Pikine goes toward paying debts. Unable to afford his own house, he lives with his sister. He said that he was unaware there were business grants available and would have applied if he'd known. "Seven years in Europe and you return to your country without anything - it's difficult." The IOM spokeswoman said the agency recently increased efforts to inform migrants of opportunities available to them on their return. She added that under the joint initiative with the EU it wanted to try and focus not just on individual projects, but on ones that helped whole communities. This approach has shown some success. After being repatriated to Senegal from Libya in late 2016, Matar Khoudea Ndiaye joined a poultry farm with a group of other migrants last year. For his team of five, the IOM paid for 2,000 chicks, feed, a freezer and three months' rent. In three months, Ndiaye made 3 million CFA francs ($5,205). With that money he started an online business selling clothes, music and accessories. The 27-year-old has built his own chicken coop in his home town Linguere with 1,500 chicks. He works for the IOM, persuading others not to leave for Europe. "I have friends in Italy and they say on Whatsapp that they have no money, they sleep on the street," said Ndiaye, sitting on a mattress in his sparse bedroom on the outskirts of Dakar. "If they had known they were going to live like that, they say they wouldn't have wasted the time." (Reporting By Edward McAllister and Sofia Christensen; Editing by Cassell Bryan-Low) See Also: The old adage that one must not look a gift horse in the mouth apparently does not apply to donkeys in Burundi, as the African nation reacted with outrage at France's donation of ten such animals to a local non-governmental organization. The donkeys, which are not indigenous to Burundi, were brought from Tanzania. They were to be donated to a community in the province of Gitega, home to the country's second-largest city, to support local residents with agricultural efforts and transport of water and other materials. An unnamed presidential advisor said the project was "an insult to the nation," according to Agence France Press. A spokesperson for Burundi's Senate, Gabby Bugaga, said France should take back the animals. "No thanks for the donkeys, prepare to ship them," he wrote on Twitter on Sunday. Trending: Who Is Valerie Jarrett, the Former Obama Adviser Targeted by Roseanne Barr? Along with the tweet, Bugaga shared a letter from the minister of agriculture Deo Guide Rurema, who ordered the donkeys to be quarantined because they were not distributed according to "technical procedures" pertaining to "exotic animals in the countryside." 05_29_Donkey Seyllou/AFP/Getty Images Bugaga explained the outrage in a subsequent tweet addressed to French ambassador to Burundi Laurent Delahousee. "Let's be honest, is the donkey a symbol of a quality or a flaw?" he wrote. As in the U.S., the French word for donkey "ane," is often used as a derogatory term. Don't miss: U.S. Military Will Leave Syria Base in Deal With Russia, Reports Say Delahousee rejected the accusations as coming from "some trolls" from the country's urban centers. "This nice project introducing donkeys displeases some trolls of the Burundian cities. Ask the women of the hills what they think, who today provide with their families the driving force of the Burundi agriculture," he wrote on Twitter in response to the criticism. Story continues The ambassador, who had previously hailed the project on Twitter as introducing "the Land Cruiser of the animal kingdom" to the country, also said the French embassy did not look for the donkeys, but simply financed a project that was submitted by the Burundian NGO. "It's not France that introduced the donkeys to Burundi. To my knowledge, all procedures have been followed," he wrote. Most popular: Russian Journalist Who Criticized Kremlin Shot Dead In Ukraine's Capital A source with knowledge of the situation told Newsweek, on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, the authorities' outrage at the gift has less to do with the donkeys and more about politics. The source specifically mentioned "the thawing of relations between France and Rwanda and the French statement on the referendum," referring to a controversial vote held on May 17 that changed the constitution allowing for current president Pierre Nkurunziza, who was first elected in 2005, to potentially stay in power until 2034, as well as the visit of the leader of neighboring Rwanda, with which Burundi shares an uneasy relation. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek FILE PHOTO: Logo of Shell is seen at the 20th Middle East Oil & Gas Show and Conference (MOES 2017) in Manama, Bahrain, March 7, 2017. REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed/File Photo Thomson Reuters LONDON (Reuters) - Friends of the Earth plans to file a lawsuit against Royal Dutch Shell, accusing the oil company of failing to act on climate change, the environmental activist group said on Tuesday. Shell has set out "ambitions" to halve carbon emissions by 2050 and expand in renewables, but the Anglo-Dutch company has come under pressure from investors and activists to reduce its carbon footprint and comply with the 2015 international Paris climate agreement. Friends of the Earth informed the oil and gas company last month it planned to take legal action if Shell did not reduce investment in fossil fuels and cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. In response, Shell Company Secretary Linda Szymanski said in a letter, dated May 28, seen by Reuters, that the company did not believe that these claims had merit. "Nor do we consider that the courts provide the right forum to advance the global energy transition." A Shell spokeswoman confirmed the letter had been sent and its content. Sam Cossar-Gilbert of Friends of the Earth International said in a statement: "Yesterday Shell rejected our demands, so now we will take them to court, formal summons will be issued shortly." The lawsuit will be filed in the Netherlands. (Reporting by Ron Bousso. Editing by Jane Merriman) See Also: FILE PHOTO: Yemeni soldier walks on a mountain on the frontline of fighting with Houthis in Nihem area near Sanaa FILE PHOTO: A Yemeni soldier walks on a mountain on the frontline of fighting with Houthis in Nihem area near Sanaa, Yemen January 27, 2018. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser/File Photo By Parisa Hafezi and John Irish ANKARA/PARIS (Reuters) - Iran and European powers have made good progress in talks to end the conflict in Yemen as Tehran has shown itself willing to push for a ceasefire and ease the humanitarian crisis there, according to officials on both sides. The talks were launched in February as part of efforts to avert President Donald Trump's decision to pull the U.S. out of a 2015 nuclear deal and reimpose sanctions on Tehran. Created on a separate track to the nuclear negotiations, they are meant to address U.S. concerns over Iran's regional role and show Washington that Europe could prise compromises from Tehran. The focus has mainly been on the conflict in Yemen, where arch foes Shi'ite Iran and Sunni Muslim kingdom Saudi Arabia are fighting for influence. Iran denies Saudi accusations of giving financial and military support to Yemen's Houthis in a civil war and blames the deepening crisis on Riyadh. "Because of the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, we have agreed to work with Britain, France and Germany to end the conflict in Yemen," a senior Iranian official told Reuters. "The aim is to secure a ceasefire to help those innocent civilians. We will use our influence to bring our allies to the negotiation table." Three European diplomats said the talks had progressed significantly and were going in the right direction. A Saudi-led coalition backed by the West has carried out air strikes against the armed Houthi movement in a war since 2015 to restore Yemen's internationally recognised government. More than 10,000 people have been killed and 3 million have been displaced internally and unleashed the world's worst humanitarian crisis, the U.N. says. Iran's regional rivals, Israel and Saudi Arabia, welcomed Trump's decision to drop the deal on May 8, saying that the pact failed to curb Iran's "malign behaviour in Syria, Yemen, and other places all around the world". Story continues CHICKEN & EGG SCENARIO In November, Iran for the first time acknowledged being involved in the Yemen conflict when Mohammad Ali Jafari, the head of its elite Revolutionary Guards, said Iran provided advisory assistances to its allies in Yemen. To shield Iran from new U.S. sanctions, the European powers have been pressing Tehran to be less aggressive in the region, including in the civil war in Yemen. "The Iranians have given indications that they are now willing to offer their services to liaise with the Houthis to move forward," said a European official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The Iranians are now at least recognising there is a channel. They obviously aren't saying they control the Houthis and they never will, but they recognise they have a certain influence on them and ready to use those channels. That's new." Iran's senior nuclear negotiator Abbas Araqchi said talks on the Yemen conflict were being held in parallel to the nuclear talks with the European signatories of the accord, under which Iran accepted to curb its nuclear work in return for the lifting of international sanctions. "The nuclear deal is not linked to the regional issues ... Iran will not hold talks on its influence in the region, except for Yemen because of the humanitarian crisis there," Abbas Araqchi told state TV on Sunday. A second European official said the discussions with Iranians on Yemen were going "very well". "They (Iranians) are telling us they are ready to work on the ceasefire, but they say the Saudis aren't ready. So it's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. We need this now to get into something concrete," said the second official. Neither Saudi, Yemeni or Houthi officials responded to requests for comment. Washington, Paris and London all back Riyadh in its intervention in Yemen and all supply weapons and intelligence to Saudi Arabia. "This is a humanitarian effort ... The issue has almost been solved. We are working on a framework," said another Iranian official. Araqchi said Iran and European powers will meet in mid-June in Brussels to further discuss the Yemen conflict. France, which has stressed the importance of supplementing the nuclear deal with substantive talks on other issues, is due to co-host an international conference on Yemen with Saudi Arabia in Paris in June to assess aid needs for the country and possibly contribute to reviving U.N.-backed peace talks. However, it is unclear how talks between Iran and the European parties of the deal would fit into the U.N. Yemen mediator Martin Griffiths' efforts. Griffiths said in April he wanted to present a plan for negotiations within two months to end the conflict, but warned that any new military offensives could "take peace off the table." (Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky) A Russian journalist who had been critical of the Kremlin appears to have been assassinated after being shot several times in the back at his apartment building in Kiev. Arkady Babchenko was going out to buy bread when he was gunned down on the staircase of his building, Ukrainian politician Anton Gerashchenko said. The 41-year-old died in an ambulance on the way to hospital after his wife found him covered in blood. Police, who said he had multiple gunshot wounds in his back, are working on the theory that he was killed because of his work. "The first and the most probable version is his professional activity," Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko said. Detectives have been unable to speak to Mr Babchenko's wife because she is in a state of shock, Mr Kryshchenko added. A drawing of Mr Babchenko's possible assassin has been released, showing a man aged been 40 and 45, with a grey beard and wearing a cap. Investigators will look at "Russian spy agencies' efforts to get rid of those who are trying to tell the truth about what is going on in Russia and Ukraine", Mr Gerashchenko said. :: 'Serious concern' about death of Russian journalist Maxim Borodin He wrote on Facebook: "Putin's regime takes aim at those who cannot be broken or intimidated." Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said the "Russian totalitarian machine" had not forgiven Mr Babchenko for his "honesty and principled stance". He added that Mr Babchenko was a "true friend of Ukraine who was telling the world the truth about Russian aggression... His murderers should be punished". But Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said such comments were "sad". "The Ukrainian prime minister is already talking about how it was done by Russian secret services." Mr Lavrov commented. "An investigation has not yet begun... This fashion of conducting international affairs is very sad." Story continues The Kremlin added that Ukraine had become a "very dangerous place" for journalists - and criticised Kiev for failing to protect them Another well-known reporter, Pavel Sheremet, was killed in a car bombing in central Kiev in July 2016. The case remains unsolved but he was also a critic of Russia, Ukraine and his native Belarus. UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson tweeted that he was "appalled to see another vocal Russian journalist murdered". "We must defend freedom of speech and it is vital that those responsible are now held to account," he added. :: MI5 boss Andrew Parker accuses Russian state of 'criminal thuggery' Mr Babchenko, a former soldier in the Chechen war, became one of Russia's best-known war correspondents. He had been heavily critical of Moscow's annexation of Crimea, its alleged support of separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine, and Russia's involvement in Syria's civil war. He left Russia in February 2017 after saying he had received threats. He was concerned he might be jailed. After moving to Kiev last autumn he had been working as a host for Crimean TV station ATR. In April this year, news website Novy Den said its reporter Maxim Borodin died in hospital after falling from his fifth-floor balcony in Yekaterinburg, east of Russia's Ural mountains. Mr Borodin had written about the death of people said to be Russian mercenaries in Syria. It is claimed they were from the Wagner Group, a private army Moscow is said to be using in Syria. FILE PHOTO: Puna Geothermal Venture is seen near a lava field from the Kilauea Volcano in the Leilani Estates near Pahoa, Hawaii, U.S., May 24, 2018. REUTERS/Marco Garcia Thomson Reuters By Jolyn Rosa HONOLULU (Reuters) - Lava from Hawaii's erupting Kilauea volcano on Sunday covered a potentially explosive well at a geothermal power station and threatened another, after flowing onto the site, officials said. The Hawaii Civil Defense Agency said the wells "are stable and secure," and Hawaii Governor David Ige said that the plant was "sufficiently safe" from the lava that has plowed through backyards and streets and burned dozens of homes. But lava has never engulfed a geothermal plant anywhere in the world and the potential threat is untested, according to the head of the state's emergency management agency. Local residents fear an explosive emission of deadly hydrogen sulfide and other gases should wells be ruptured. The molten rock was expected to continue to flow across the Puna Geothermal Venture (PGV) facility, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Since Hawaii's Kilauea volcano began a once-in-a-century-scale eruption on May 3, authorities have shutdown the plant, removed 60,000 gallons of flammable liquid, and deactivated wells that tap into steam and gas deep in the Earth's core. Magma has drained from Kilauea's summit lava lake and flowed around 25 miles (40 km) east underground, bursting out of about two dozen giant cracks or fissures near the plant. Residents have complained of health hazards from plant emissions since it went online in 1989. PGV has been the target of lawsuits challenging its location on the flank of one of the world's most active volcanoes. The Israeli-owned 38 megawatt plant typically provides around 25 percent of electricity on the Big Island, according to local power utility Hawaii Electric Light. Operator Ormat Technologies Inc last week said there was no above-ground damage to the plant, but it would have to wait until the situation stabilized to assess the impact of earthquakes and subterranean lava flows on the wells. Story continues Over the weekend, there were more than 250 earthquakes at Kilauea's summit, with four explosions on Saturday sending ash as high as 12,000-15,000 feet, officials said. Winds are set to shift on Monday and Tuesday, causing higher concentrations of ash and volcanic smog that will spread west and northwest to affect more populated areas, said National Weather Service meteorologist John Bravender. U.S. Marine Corps and National Guard helicopters are on standby for an air evacuation if fissure activity cuts off Highway 130, the last exit route for up to 1,000 coastal residents. (Reporting by Joyln Rosa in Honolulu; Additional reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Darren Schuettler) See Also: The father of the young boy who was dramatically rescued from a Paris balcony by a Malian migrant was not watching his child because he was out playing Pokemon Go, prosecutors said. The father of the 4-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of "failure to meet parental obligations" after a video of Mamoudou Gassama, dubbed "Le Spiderman," scaling the apartment building's front to rescue to boy was seen around the world. Gassama, 22, who was living in Paris illegally at the time, was later granted French citizenship by President Emmanuel Macron and offered a job as a firefighter, thanks to his heroics. Trending: Bernie Sanders Considering 2020 Run Against Donald Trump, Former Campaign Manager Reveals Paris prosecutor Francois Molins told the BFM television network that the child's father had gone grocery shopping but was delayed in coming home because he decided to play the smartphone game after leaving the store. "He is devastated because he realizes what he did and the tragic consequences that it could have led to, Molins added. The boys mother was not in Paris at the time, as she was with family members on France's Reunion Island, in the Indian Ocean. The boy had left the island to join his father in the French capital a few weeks ago, with the mother and couple's second child due to join them in June, the BBC reported. Don't miss: Megyn Kelly Questioned If Starbucks Wants to 'Deal With a Mass of Homeless People' With New Store Policy The boys mother told TV channel Antenne Reunion that the father was not used to looking after the 4-year-old. "I can't justify what my husband did. People will say it could have happened to anyone, and it has happened to other people. My son was just lucky," she said. RTX66KUR TAREK DANDACH/via REUTERS Story continues The father, who has not been named, is due to appear in court in September to face neglect charges. Most popular: Mummified Body of Woman Found in Apartment Four Years After She Disappeared Following the rescue, Gassama was invited to the presidential Elysee Palace by Macron, where he received a gold medal for courage and devotion. You have become an example because millions of people have seen you. It is only right that the nation be grateful," Macron told Gassama, before informing him that his immigration status would be put in order, Agence France-Presse reported. Gassama told Macron that God "helped me" during the rescue. When I started to climb, it gave me courage to keep climbing, he said, according to the Associated Press. Gassama had been working in construction after he arrived in France illegally to join his brother, who has been in the country for decades. He had been granted the right to live in Italy after landing in 2014 following a hazardous journey across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya. RTX66IBP Thibault Camus/Pool via Reuters This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Scientists who cant afford to jet off to Mars are staying terrestrial and studying the next best thing: volcanic flow from Hawaiis Mount Kilauea. The surface of Mars is mostly covered in basaltic rock. When lava cools rapidly, it becomes basaltic rock, similar to that on Mars. Biologists, volcanologists, astronauts and other scientists hoping to better understand the geology of the red planet have traveled to the Big Island of Hawaii, donned space suits and acted as extraterrestrial scientists, observing and taking measurements on the lava flow. Basalt USGS via Getty Trending: Who Is Valerie Jarrett, the Former Obama Adviser Targeted by Roseanne Barr? Before the eruption of Mount Kilauea, geophysics students observing the island had noticed abnormalities, according to a UCLA press release. Now that the volcano is in the slow process of erupting, more students will fly to the island and study the eruption. Later they will compare the data they collected to draw conclusions about the volcano and possibly Mars. The NASA-funded project studying the eruptionand cluing us in as to whether there is life on Marsis called Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains, or BASALT. According to The New York Times, accessing the eruption of Kilauea is akin to accessing a portal to Mars. Perhaps this portal can help us understand the possibility of life on Mars. The reason why there continue to be questions, and programs like ours that go out and try to answer the questionsWas Mars habitable? Is it currently habitable?is that nobody really knows, the projects leader Darlene Lim told the Times. Kim is a geobiologist at the NASA Ames Research Center in the Silicon Valley. Some of the chemicals on basaltic rock could provide energy for bacteria, meaning that the mineral could be integral in the formation of life. Scientists have even found bacteria more than 4,000 feet deep in volcanic rocks in Hawaii, indicating that some life-forms can and do live in seemingly inhospitable environments similar to that of Mars. Story continues This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek FILE PHOTO - U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis testifies before the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on funding for the Department of Defense, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., May 9, 2018. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas By Idrees Ali ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY AIRCRAFT (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Tuesday that the United States would continue to confront what Washington sees as China's militarization of islands in the South China Sea, despite drawing condemnation from Beijing for an operation in the region over the weekend. Reuters first reported that two U.S. Navy warships sailed near South China Sea islands claimed by China on Sunday, even as President Donald Trump seeks Chinese cooperation on North Korea. The operation, known as "freedom of navigation," was the latest attempt to counter what Washington sees as Beijing's efforts to limit freedom of navigation in the strategic waters, where Chinese, Japanese and some Southeast Asian navies operate. China expressed its anger, saying it had sent ships and aircraft to warn the U.S. warships to leave. "You'll notice there is only one country that seems to take active steps to rebuff them or state their resentment (to) them, but it's international waters and a lot of nations want to see freedom of navigation," Mattis told reporters while enroute to Hawaii, where he will oversee a change of command for U.S. Pacific Command. While the Sunday operation had been planned months in advance, and similar operations have become routine, it comes at a particularly sensitive time and just days after the Pentagon disinvited China from a major U.S.-hosted naval drill. Critics have said these operations have little impact on Chinese behaviour and are largely symbolic. Pentagon officials have long complained that China has not been candid enough about its rapid military build-up and using South China Sea islands to gather intelligence. Recent satellite photographs showed China appeared to have deployed truck-mounted surface-to-air missiles or anti-ship cruise missiles at Woody Island. Earlier this month, China's air force landed bombers on disputed islands and reefs in the South China Sea as part of a training exercise in the region. Story continues "When they (Chinese) do things that are opaque to the rest of us, then we cannot cooperate in areas that we would otherwise cooperate in," Mattis said. Mattis said U.S. diplomats were engaged on the issue and he had heard concerns about Chinese actions not just from within the United States government, but also from regional allies. He will have strong words for China when he travels to Singapore for the Shangri-la dialogue, a security forum, later this week. China's claims in the South China Sea, through which about $5 trillion (3.77 trillion) in shipborne trade passes each year, are contested by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. (Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Leslie Adler) The latest search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, known as MH370, has ended without locating the plane and there are no current plans for any further investigation. Efforts by Ocean Infinity, a U.S.-based marine technology company, in its search for MH370 will end after it collected high quality data from over 112,000 km2 of ocean floor in a little over 3 months of operational days, but to no avail. The Malaysian government had offered a $70-million reward. Mystery surrounds the disappearance of MH370, which vanished from the radar somewhere over the Indian Ocean on March 8, 2014, part way through its journey from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China. Air traffic control lost contact with the flight around an hour after take off and no distress signal was sent by the pilots. Trending: 'Roseanne' Canceled For 'Abhorrent, Repugnant' Racist Tweet, ABC Says All of the 239 passengers and crew on board are presumed dead but nobody knows why MH370 disappeared or what happened to the plane, only parts of which have been found in the intervening four years, including wing fragments. MH370 REUTERS/Thomas Peter I would firstly like to extend the thoughts of everyone at Ocean Infinity to the families of those who have lost loved ones on MH370, said Oliver Plunkett, Ocean Infinitys CEO. Don't miss: Bernie Sanders Considering 2020 Run Against Donald Trump, Former Campaign Manager Reveals Part of our motivation for renewing the search was to try to provide some answers to those affected. It is therefore with a heavy heart that we end our current search without having achieved that aim. Plunkett said the outcome is extremely disappointing but said his company is truly proud of what we have achieved both in terms of the quality of data weve produced and the speed with which we covered such a vast area. There simply has not been a subsea search on this scale carried out as efficiently or as effectively ever before. Story continues Plunkett added: We sincerely hope that we will be able to again offer our services in the search for MH370 in future. The Malaysian government does not currently plan any further searches of its own for the missing flight, despite pressure from the families of those who were onboard. The governments of China and Australia have also suspended their search efforts. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek friends drinking beer Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Guinness If you're planning a trip to Manila or Prague, you're in luck those cities have some of the cheapest prices for beer around the world. Deutsche Bank analysts collected data on how much it costs to buy a pint of beer in a neighborhood pub in the expat area of a major cities for its latest report mapping the world's prices. Beers are the cheapest in Manila, Philippines, at $1.50. Prague, Czech Republic, is close behind, where buying a beer will set you back about $1.60. On the flip side, you're going to have to shell out more for the same sized beer in cities like Oslo, Norway ($10.30), Singapore ($8.30), and Hong Kong ($8.90). Prices for beers in major American cities tend to be on the higher end compared to cities around the world. New York City lists the most expensive prices stateside at $7.70 a beer, but San Francisco isn't far behind at $7.40. Check out the full list of beer prices in major cities below. cost of pint beer around the world Shayanne Gal/Business Insider Elena Holodny contributed reporting. NOW WATCH: This blacksmith makes bespoke kitchen knives that cost 700 using traditional methods See Also: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched seven satellites on May 22including two from NASAfrom the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The rockets nine Merlin engines roared to life, blasting the Falcon up toward space and spewing intense heat below. A quarter of a mile away, NASA photographer Bill Ingalls had set up a remote camera to catch the action. But when he returned to retrieve it, firefighters were waiting. What was once a fancy camera was now a lump of charred and twisted plastic. 5_29_NASA Camera Bill Ingalls/NASA Trending: Russia Is Arresting Jehovahs Witnesses and Holding Them in Lengthy Pre-trial Detention, Group Says "I had six [remote cameras], two outside the launch pad safety perimeter and four inside," Ingalls told NASA. The destroyed camera was the farthest from the launch site, some 400 yards away from the pad and outside the safety perimeter. However, Ingallss other cameras survived the launch without a scratch. Although its body was scorched, the camera's memory card remained intact. It had managed to preserve the camera's last, blazing moments, which you can see in the GIF below: Bill Ingalls/NASA Don't miss: Who Is Garrett Yrigoyen? Becca Kufrins Bachelorette Frontrunner Accused of Liking Controversial Posts A bed of vegetation, NASA revealed, was to blame for the damage. "Unfortunately, the launch started a grass fire that toasted one of the cameras outside the perimeter," Ingalls said. The intense heat from the launch set the arid California flora alight, causing a brush fire. Flames ripped through the plants and engulfed the camera, melting its plastic body. Story continues What's left of the camera will likely end up on display at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., the agency reported. The Falcon 9 was carrying two NASA Grace-FO mission satellites, among others. Short for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On, Grace-FO will track how masses on Earth are moving around the planet. In most cases, this mass will be water, in the form of lakes, rivers, ice sheets and sea levels, for example. The Grace-FO, a joint venture with the German Research Centre for Geosciences, continues the work of the original Grace mission. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek The pH scale that is widely accepted and used by scientists didnt actually exist until 1909. Before then scientists had to rely on using adjectives to describe the acidity or basicity of a substance they were working with. That scale was created by S. P. L. Srensen, a Danish chemist who was working in Copenhagen at the time of his creation. The chemist was honored with an interactive Google Doodle Tuesday. The doodle shows Srensen surrounded by his pH scale and allows users to guess the pH of certain items like a tomato, soap and a lemon. What is the pH scale? The pH scale is used to classify the level of acidity a basicity of a substance. The scale is numbered from zero through to 14, and on modern scales each number has a corresponding color on a spectrum. Today we have pH strips, pieces of paper that react with a substances acidity or basicity and change color when they come in contact with one of them. The color the strip turns to after it comes in contact with the substance corresponds to a spot on the pH color spectrum. Trending: U.K. Parents Convicted of Luring Teen Daughter to Bangladesh for Forced Marriage Water is usually neutral, right in the middle of the scale, assigned the number seven. On a pH strip, water is white. To the right of neutral are the numbers eight through 14 that represent a pH of a basic substance, with 14 representing the most basic. Water from the ocean, ammonia and lye all have spots along the scale of basic substances. To the left of where water is on the scale are more acidic substances, such as vinegar and lemon juice. Six facts about S. P. L. Srensen: S. P. L. Srensen's full name was Srensen Peter Lauritz Srensen. In 1901 he took on the role of the director of the chemical department at the Carlsberg Laboratory, the lab of the beer company Carlsberg. Don't miss: Aly Raisman's Ex-boyfriend Colton Underwood Is Competing on 'The Bachelorette' for Becca Kufrin His wife, Margrethe Hyrup Srensen, helped him with his research into the thermodynamics of protein chemistry during his time as director. Story continues The pH scale is a means to measure the hydrogen ion concentration in a solution or liquid. Before it existed there was no way to do so. Srensens creation allowed brewers at the Carlsberg lab to follow the fermentation process in beer production to make sure it was on track. Most popular: Southwest Airlines Employee Allegedly Confronts University Basketball Coach Over Biracial Son He originally planned to study medicine, but changed career paths when he was in school. ph test Jaime Reina/Getty Images This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek By Raquel Castillo MADRID (Reuters) - British businessman Bill Browder, a prominent Kremlin critic, was detained and then released by Spanish police on Wednesday, after a warrant from Russia for his arrest for tax evasion was found to be invalid, police said. The head of investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, Browder led a campaign to expose corruption and punish Russian officials he blames for the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, who he employed as a lawyer. A Russian court sentenced Browder to nine years in prison in absentia in December after finding him guilty of deliberate bankruptcy and tax evasion. Browder said on his Twitter account that Interpol had advised Spanish police not to honour a Russian Interpol red notice - a request to locate and provisionally arrest someone pending extradition. "This is the sixth time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case," he tweeted, following his release from a Madrid police station. Browder had been held in police custody for the "minimum necessary time" and was released because the warrant issued by Russian authorities was invalid, Spanish police said in a statement on Twitter. The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Browder was in Madrid to give evidence to Jose Grinda, a Spanish prosecutor who spearheads investigations into organised crime, about money from the Magnitsky case that has flowed to Spain, the British businessman said on Twitter. He later posted a tweet and photograph of himself at Madrid's Barajas airport saying he had cleared Spanish immigration without problems and was on his way back to London. Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 shortly after alleging that Russian officials were involved in large-scale tax fraud. His death nearly a year later while awaiting trial caused an international uproar. Browder has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of a personal vendetta over the businessman's efforts to get other countries to impose so-called Magnitsky sanctions against Russian individuals. Story continues British foreign minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday he had spoken to Browder and was glad he had been released. "Moscow should concentrate on bringing those responsible for the murder of Magnitsky to justice," Johnson said in a tweet. (Writing by Paul Day; Editing by Sonya Dowsett and John Stonestreet) BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Syrian army has completed preparations for an imminent offensive against rebel-held areas in southwestern Syria, a non-Syrian commander in a military alliance that backs Damascus said on Tuesday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights separately reported that rebels in the Deraa area of the southwest were reinforcing their positions as government forces arrived there. The comments underline a government plan to target the area near the borders with Jordan and Israel despite a U.S. warning to take "firm and appropriate measures" in response to any violations of a ceasefire it brokered with Russia in that area. "The Syrian army will wage all the battles and has now become strong and capable," the commander told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss military plans. The southwest is one of the big chunks of territory that still remains outside the control of the Syrian government, which has recovered swathes of territory with the support of the Russian military and Iran-backed Shi'ite militias. Fighting in southwestern Syria has been contained since last year by a "de-escalation" agreement brokered by Russia, the United States and Jordan. A senior Jordanian official told Reuters on Monday the three countries that signed last year's deal to create the zone "saw eye to eye" on the need to preserve it as a key step to boosting efforts to reach a political solution in Syria. Russia said on Monday that only Syrian army troops should be at the southern border with Jordan and Israel, which has waged air strikes in Syria to curb what it fears is Iran's expanding influence. Syrian government forces have in recent weeks crushed the last insurgent enclaves near Damascus and a besieged area north of the city of Homs. The commander said this had relieved pressure on the Syrian army. An article published in the pro-Damascus al-Watan newspaper on Tuesday said signs "on the horizon" indicated the southern battle was near, and the final touches were being put to the battle plan. Story continues (Reporting by Laila Bassam and Tom Perry; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Angus MacSwan) See Also: New satellite tracking of hawksbill turtles has revealed the critically endangered species use the Coral Sea as a highway to travel from Papua New Guinea to the Great Barrier Reef. This exacerbates concerns over the Australian governments draft plan to reduce the Coral Seas protected areas by 50 per cent, WWF said. The WWF stated that the findings were alarming. Hawksbills turtle numbers were depleted by almost 90 per cent over 100 years due to tortoiseshell trade, prior to a worldwide ban on the activity in 1977. The species never managed to make a recovery. The satellite trackers were attached to 10 hawksbills between December 2017 and January 2018 as part of a research expedition in Papua New Guineas Conflict Islands, conducted by WWF Australia, the University of the Sunshine Coast and the Conflict Island Conservation Initiative. Credit: WWF Australia via Storyful Publishing business Time Out Group has entered into a management agreement with real estate company Ivanhoe Cambridge to open a new Time Out Market in Montreal, it announced on Wednesday. The AIM-traded firm said that would allow further global expansion of Time Out Market with no capital expenditure to the group. Under its first management agreement, Time Out Market's partner Ivanhoe Cambridge would invest to provide a complete environment for Time Out Market to operate. The group said it would receive a guaranteed management fee and a share of profit in return for operating Time Out Market Montreal, with primary responsibility for branding, curation and day-to-day management. The first Time Out Market opened in Lisbon in 2014, and was now that country's most popular attraction with 3.6 million visitors in 2017. Following that success in Lisbon, Time Out Group said it was rolling out the concept globally and now jad five new sites in the pipeline over the next 18 months. Time Out Market Montreal would be located in the Centre Eaton de Montreal on Sainte-Catherine Street. At the centre of downtown Montreal, the location was described as a popular retail and business hub, attracting millions of locals and visitors every year. Time Out Market Montreal would occupy 36,000 square feet, accommodating around 550 seats. There would be a curated mix of 16 food offerings, two bars, a demo kitchen, a cooking academy, a retail shop and a cultural stage. We are delighted to announce our first management agreement for Time Out Market, said group CEO Julio Bruno. It allows us to accelerate our global expansion, grow our brand and drive additional revenue. The fact that Ivanhoe Cambridge chose us as strategic partner and will make a significant investment to bring Time Out Market to Montreal is proof of the strength of the format and the brand. China lashed out against the surprise statement from the White House overnight on Tuesday saying it will go ahead with tariffs and restrictions on Chinese imports and block investments in sensitive technologies. That prompted an angry response from China's Commerce Ministry, which said it was ready to fight if Washington wanted to start a trade war, Reuters reported on Wednesday. On Tuesday, Washington announced the administration would impose 25% tariffs on $50bn worth of goods from China and set limits on Chinese investments in US high-tech industries in a move to protect American intellectual property. A final list of imports subject to tariffs will be published 15 June. The announcement came just 10 days after both countries had put the trade war on hold while implementing a "framework" to reduce Beijing's surplus and defuse tensions, with China open to analysing ways in which it could narrow its $375bn surplus with America. Wednesday's news came ahead of a 2- 4 June visit by US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to Beijing, and just days after a speech from President Xi Jinping that emphasised the importance of building a self-sustained high-tech industry. Analysts at ING believe the speech might have hit a nerve in the US administration: "Xi would have known that the US would react to his speech. We believe, therefore, that China is prepared to put sizeable investments into the high-tech sector to achieve its target so it doesn't need to depend on US tech products." In a statement, China's Commerce Ministry said: "This is obviously contrary to the consensus reached between the two sides in Washington not long ago." The Global Times said the United States "delusional" and that the 2trade renege could leave Washington dancing with itself." "The Chinese government will have the necessary measures in place to deal with a U.S. withdrawal from any settled agreement. If the U.S. wants to play games, then China would be more than willing to play along and do so until the very end," it said. Konstantinos Anthis, head of research at ADS Securities said: "US President Donald Trump announced his intention to impose tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imported goods, re-escalating his trade spat with China. The continued uncertainty is forcing investors to look for safer havens with the yen, gold and US Treasuries leading the gains." "With the re-escalation of the US-China trade traders should remain cautious and not get carried away from any early gains," he added. 1700:Close The Footsie finished the session comfortably higher, as a rebound in Italian stocks helped steady traders' frayed nerves, at least for the moment. Big gains for oil after Reuters reported that Saudi was likely to stand by its pledge to curb oil supplies until the end of 2018 also helped, stoking big gains in crude oil futures. Most base metals prices also ended the day higher, even after White House trade adviser Peter Navarro chided the Treasury's Mnuchin for having claimed the China-US trade war was now "on hold". Three-month LME copper did however drift down by 0.15% to $6,900 per metric tonne. For some analysts, the White House's decision to push ahead with possible tariffs on Chinese goods was criticism in Congress that Trump may have been too quick to roll-back the threat of sanctions on China's state-owned ZTE. As regards the price of copper, there was some analyst chatter on Wednesday regarding slowing growth in China. As one example of that, analysts at BoA-ML wrote to clients saying: "We believe China's underlying fiscal policy stance has tightened since 2017, with lower augmented fiscal deficit to GDP ratio and stabilizing government debt ratio. We believe such trends could continue in the near term, given policymakers' still sanguine view on the growth outlook and the emphasis on controlling leverage especially related to local governments/SOEs. "Especially with lower risks from US-China trade disputes, we believe Chinese policy makers will maintain their appetite for tighter regulations on local government debt management in the near future. That implies fiscal expenditure would be increasingly financed by official funding sources, and local governments' borrowing capability via various indirect channels would be contained. As a result, infrastructure investment growth will likely be under pressure." FTSE 100 up 0.75% or 56.93 points to 7,689.57. 1601: At least some analysts remain quite cautious as regards the outlook for Italy: BoA-ML: "A populist government in Italy, given its focus on fiscal reflation, was always going to collide with the European rule-book, but the decision by the President to block the nomination of a Eurosceptic finance minister, opening the door to new elections, makes the Italian debate about the euro even more binary. "The timing is very uncomfortable, as this political crisis is taking place while the ECB's arsenal is already depleted. [...] It does not help that political noises are emerging from Spain as well, even if there we remain more constructive." Capital Economics: "The fallout from the latest political turmoil in Italy has so far been contained, with limited impact on other euro-zone countries financial markets. There are good reasons to expect this to remain the case in the near term. But the size of Italys debt stock means that if fears of an Italian euro exit continue to build, the risks of contagion would jump." Meanwhile, in Spain, local observers are openly speculating with the possibility that PM Mariano Rajoy might step down of his own accord if it looks as if either the Citizens party or the Basque nationalist PNV might be about to back the vote of no confidence, in order to block Socialist leader, Pedro Sanchez, from automatically taking his place. 1544: Front month Brent crude futures are 1.64% higher to $76.65 barrel on the ICE, giving London-listed BP, Shell and Tullow a good lift. Boosting oil prices, citing a Gulf source familiar with Saudi thinking, Reuters reported that the Kingdom, other OPEC states and allies from outside the cartel were set to stick to stand by their deal to cut supplies until the end of 2018. However, they reportedly stood ready to increase supplies gradually in order to compensate for any shortage. 1543: The impact on the US economy of the White House's proposed tariffs on $50bn of Chinese goods would be "minimal", Oxford Economics says. "However, an escalation of tensions with the US imposing tariffs on $150 billion of imports 30% of total merchandise imports from China would more significantly curb activity. If such tariffs were implemented, and China retaliated, the cumulative loss of GDP over 2018-2019 could reach over 0.3% in each economy. "The tariffs also come a few days after President Trump was heavily criticized (including by US Republicans) for agreeing to keep telecom equipment-maker ZTE in business. The Chinese company had been banned from buying components from US businesses and was on the brink of collapsing. "Looking ahead, we assume some tariff imposition between the US and China, and simmering tensions surrounding industrial policy and technology transfer. With both economies viewing the other as not playing fair, the risk of tension escalation is real." 1330: US second quarter gross domestic product revised down from a preliminary print of 2.3% annualised to 2.2%. 1330: US trade deficit comes in at -$68.19bn (consensus: -$71.1bn). 1315: US ADP employment report for May prints at up by 178,000 (consensus: 195,000), a negligible miss. But April's reading has been marked down from 204,000 to 163,000. 1300: Harmonised consumer prices in Germany jump from a 1.4% pace year-on-year for April to 2.2% in May (consensus: 1.8%). 1151: Hearing and reading this by a couple of persons regarding Italy, when you least expect it they tend to pull an ace out of their sleeves. Let's see. 1150: Italian 10-year BTP yield down 19 basis points to 2.97%. Changing subjects, the Journal is apparently reporting 2-4 June trade talks between US-China might be derailed. 1137: Things can't be too good if you're monitoring the results of euro area debt sales again? The Continent's main stockmarket gauges are climbing off their session lows after what appears to have been a roughly successful auction of Italian government debt. The Treasury in Rome sold 1.75bn of five-year debt at an average yield of 2.23%, versus 0.56% the last time around, with the bid-to-cover ratio improving from 1.36 to 1.53. Another 1.82bn of 10-year debt was sold at 3.0% (Previous: 1.7%), with a b/c of 1.48 against 1.38 last time. Analysts at TD Securities said demand was "decent". "We would like to observe the market reaction in the next couple of hours to assess how well the curve absorbed this supply," they said. "Marginal support for BTPs also comes from Italy benefiting from significant end month-end index extensions. In addition, Italy also sees bond redemptions of 18.5bn on June 1." FTSE 100 up 17.33 points to 7,649.47. 0955: Some reports cite Italian League's Salvini as saying he does not see any chance of forming a coalition government at present. 0954: Stocks have started the morning flitting in and out of the green amid news that parties from across Italy's political spectrum are trying to work out an 11th hour deal for a caretaker government until new elections are held. Nevertheless, traders are still very much on their guard, given the previous day's price action. Miners and Financials are weakest in early trading. Also weighing on sentiment, apart from Italy, are the latest headlines around the ongoing trade talks between China and the US. Overnight, the White House said it was still moving ahead with tariffs on $50bn-worth of Chinese made goods, with a list set to be published on 15 June and the levies due to come into effect "shortly thereafter". According to the US administration, restrictions on Chinese investment in sensitive technology would follow on 30 June. That has reportedly prompted an angry response from China, who said it would respond in kind. The news comes ahead of a 2-4 June visit to Beijing by US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and a 12 June summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump. FTSE 100 down 0.07% or 5.35 points to 7,626.84. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has called on the government to use its position as majority shareholder of Royal Bank of Scotland to block planned branch closures. McDonnell said the government should use its stake to force RBS, which holds its annual shareholder meeting in Edinburgh on Wednesday, to act in the public interest and accused it of dancing to the tune of the banks board. Earlier in May RBS revealed plans to close 162 branches in England and Wales with the loss of nearly 800 jobs. The bank said the move was a response to more people using online banking. Guardian Business directors could be personally fined up to 500,000 if they fail to prevent nuisance calls, under a government consultation on the issue. While there has been a big recent increase in the fines issued to companies last year one was fined 400,000 for making almost 100m automated calls in 18 months there is concern this has not been a sufficient deterrent. The data protection watchdog said that in several cases directors had escaped fines by declaring their companies bankrupt and starting again under a different name. Guardian Marks & Spencer is poised to narrowly escape a humiliating relegation from the FTSE 100 in the indexs quarterly shake-up after investors rallied behind the troubled high-street icons turnaround plan. The retailer was left close to the FTSE 100 trapdoor after its shares plunged to a nine-year low last month as it struggled to generate growth in its core clothing and food divisions. Telegraph Sir Martin Sorrell is set to make a dramatic return to the London stock market tomorrow, taking the helm of cash shell Derriston Capital and pivoting its operations towards marketing. Sir Martin, who stepped down from advertising giant WPP just last month, will become the executive chairman of London-listed Derriston Capital. The appointment will be revealed as part of an announcement by Derriston on the proposed acquisition of Sir Martin's newly-incorporated business S4 Capital. The news was first reported by Sky News. Telegraph The Japanese pharmaceuticals company seeking to complete a 45 billion acquisition of Shire is coming under pressure from shareholders. Twelve investors have raised concerns about the cash-and-shares takeover before Takedas annual shareholder meeting next month. They have told the board that the deal carries overly high risks and that there is a danger of causing a great disadvantage to existing shareholders. The Times President Trump has raised the stakes again in his trade dispute with China by pledging to make good on a threat to impose $50 billion of tariffs on imports within weeks. The White House said yesterday that it also would restrict investment and exports by Chinese companies and individuals if they related to industrially significant technology in America. The Times Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com and Blue Origin, made another announcement at the recent International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles. Besides saving the show The Expanse, Bezos proposes to go back to the moon. He has a plan about how to do it and a vision as to why it should be done, according to Geek Wire. Blue Moon to the lunar surface Bezos stated that his space company Blue Origin has a vehicle on the drawing board called Blue Moon that can deliver five tons to the lunar surface. The capacity would be quite enough to deliver either cargo or people to the moon. Blue Origin already has plenty of experience with vertical takeoff and landing vehicles with its New Shepard rocket. Given support from NASA, Bezos suggests that Blue Moon could be ready to fly by the mid-2020s. What to do when we get back to the moon Bezos ruminated about using robots to build a lunar base. He is very keen on the European concept of a Moon village, in which various space agencies and private companies collocate their habitats for mutual support. Bezos, by the way, is not just looking at NASA as a potential partner. He recently invited the newly minted Australian Space Agency to come along with him back to the moon. Indeed, his short-term vision seems to be to form the go-to transportation line for anyone to go to the moon. He will, no doubt, find himself with competition as things develop. The long-term vision for the moon Bezos has made no secret of his long-term ambitions. He would like to remake human civilization so that the Earth is zoned for residential and light industry and space becomes the venue of heavy industry and a lot of people, a trillion when all is said and done. Factories in space would use raw materials mined from the moon and asteroids and would be powered by 24/7 solar energy. Industrial pollution would become a thing of the past on Earth, but human prosperity and standards of living would continue to grow and spread. Bezos vision is indeed more potent than the traditional flags and footsteps of the Apollo program. The Amazon and Blue Origin entrepreneur suggests that the alternative is not altogether agreeable. He does not, as others have done, argue that the alternative to going out into space is the end of civilization. However, he does posit that without the boundless space and resources of the high frontier, human beings are doomed to live a life of stasis, in which freedom and happiness have self-imposed limits. Sen Bill Nelson, D-Florida, who is in a tough reelection fight for his Senate seat against Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, has released his first digital ad for the campaign, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The ad touts his adventure in the mid-1980s as a space shuttle astronaut, which he arranged to have as a House member. The ad is already facing pushback from the right-leaning Sunshine State News. The history behind Nelsons space shuttle ride and his record concerning NASA may cause the ad to backfire on the senator. How Bill Nelson got to fly in space As NASA Watch pointed out, Nelson got his space shuttle ride on the Columbia STS-61C mission in January 1986 not because of any flight experience or scientific expertise, but because he was an influential member of Congress with control over NASA spending. Nelson took advantage of NASAs initiative to fly non-astronauts, starting with the first teacher in space Christa McAuliffe, who ironically died on the next shuttle mission when the Challenger was destroyed on launch. Nelson, a lawyer, was nicknamed ballast by his fellow astronauts. Nelson as a guardian of the space coast. The Sunshine Space News points out that Nelsons self-appointed role as the guardian of space spending for Florida has often been more rhetorical than successful. When President Barack Obama canceled the Constellation space exploration program at the same time that the space shuttle program was winding down, the Kennedy Space Center was stricken economically. Nelson was mostly ineffective in stopping the end of the Bush era space exploration program and did little to advance the commercial crew program that is due to replace the space shuttle. KSC is only now beginning to recover, mainly thanks to commercial launches being conducted by companies such as SpaceX. The Bridenstine affair The ad does not mention Nelsons attempt to stop the confirmation of Jim Bridenstine as administrator of NASA. Nelson and his Democratic allies accused Bridenstine of being a climate change denier, and a homophobe because of his opposition to same-sex marriage and, most laughably, a politician. Nelson managed to delay Bridenstines confirmation for months, throwing NASA into a leadership crisis when then acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, decided to resign earlier this past spring. Nelsons fellow senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, a Republican, saved the situation when he threw his support behind Bridenstine, assuring his confirmation. By all accounts, Bridenstine is doing a spectacular job, even winning over former Democratic opponents. The bottom line By trying to tout his ultimate space junket, taken at taxpayer expense, Nelson has opened himself up to attacks by his opponent Rick Scott, should he choose to take the opportunity. In any case, the matter may well backfire. Vicki Gunvalson is shutting down any swirling rumors in regard to the potential neglect of her grandchildren. Weeks after the "Real Housewives of Orange County" star was put on blast by her son-in-law, Ryan Culberson, who accused her of ignoring the calls of his two sons, Gunvalson posted a photo of herself on Instagram as she celebrated the Memorial Day holiday with her two grandsons. "I love spending time with my two adorable grandsons, [Briana Culberson] and [Ryan Culberson]," Gunvalson wrote in the caption of her photo. "Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone." The longtime reality star also confirmed that she was visiting her family in North Carolina, where they moved months ago to get away from the fame they had in Southern California. Earlier this month, after Gunvalson shared a message about missing her family online, Ryan Culberson called her out, alleging that Gunvalson had ignored a number of FaceTime requests sent to her by the boys, Troy and Owen. In turn, Gunvalson blocked Culberson from sharing any further messages on her account. Vicki Gunvalson's daughter has moved on a number of occasions in recent years Around the time that the 12th season of "The Real Housewives of Orange County" came to an end, Briana and Ryan Culbertson revealed that they had purchased a home in North Carolina, where they were looking forward to raising their children in a more laid back neighborhood than the one they lived in when they resided in Orange County. Briana and Ryan Culberson moved to Southern California to be close to her family after he was stationed in Oklahoma but ultimately, Briana felt it was best to leave town and enjoy east coast living. Vicki Gunvalson is filming 'RHOC' Season 13 Gunvalson and her co-stars have been filming the upcoming season of "The Real Housewives of Orange County" for the past few months and for the last several weeks, rumors have been swirling in regard to who might replace the Bravo TV reality stars who left after season 12, including Meghan King Edmonds, Peggy Sulahian, and Lydia McLaughlin. To see more of Vicki Gunvalson and her co-stars, including Tamra Judge, Kelly Dodd, and Shannon Beador, don't miss the return of "The Real Housewives of Orange County" later this year. Although a premiere date for the show's upcoming 13th season has not yet been set, rumors are swirling on Twitter that suggest that a trailer will be released by the end of next week. Roseanne Barr is sorry, but that sorry is just not going to cut it as an entire cast and crew is out of a job stemming from one nasty tweet sent out by the comedian. That one tweet is at the root of "Roseanne" the show, becoming a short-lived reboot as ABC has decided to cancel the works. One of the first to express their disdain for this incident was Sara Gilbert, who plays Roseanne's daughter on the show. Barr's first apology came shortly after the uproar over the tweet on Tuesday and while it was meant to convey she was sorry, it was her tweet later in the day that seemed extremely genuine. In it she was telling her fans that what she did was "unforgivable" and she does not want anyone to defend her actions. Leaves cast and crew without a job As "Fox & Friends" discussed on their Wednesday morning show, Barr has essentially rendered a few hundred people jobless with her tweet. Apparently, that is how many people depend on paychecks from the "Roseanne" show and now no longer have a job. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Barr sent out an apology to the "hundreds" of talented people who worked in various capacities to put "Roseanne" on the air. From the actors to those behind the scenes, Barr cited "hundreds" of people now without a job and she is sorry about this. Roseanne Barr blames sleep aid Ambien for racist tweet https://t.co/5AeEBLMfsG pic.twitter.com/UCYstGONxP Reuters Top News (@Reuters) May 30, 2018 'Ambien tweeting' According to Reuters, Roseanne Barr has continued to send out tweets since having her show canceled and she blamed the sleep-aid Ambien for her racist tweet in one of her posts yesterday. She called it "Ambien tweeting" at "2 in the morning." Co-worker peeved Sara Gilbert made dang sure that the public heard her when she passed along how the rest of the crew and cast were not affiliated with that racist tweet. Gilbert made sure to let the public know her feelings about what Barr did. She tweeted: "I am disappointed in her actions, to say the least. On Tuesday morning Barr sent out a tirade via Twitter and she described Obama's former advisor, an African-American woman named Valerie Jarrett, as being a spawn of the Muslim Brotherhood and "Planet of the Apes." Gilbert called this tweet "abhorrent" when posting her Twitter statement. Hollywood weighs-in Emma Kenney, who is also a star of "Roseanne" said she was hurt, embarrassed, and disappointed. She contacted her manager to tell them she was quitting the show and this is when she learned the show was already canceled, according to Too Fab. Kenny also said that "bullies do not win. Ever." Right on @poniewozik - the battle against bigotry is not just about bigots. Its about those who reap the benefits of ignoring bigots... https://t.co/WfvNPzkOM9 Ken Burns (@KenBurns) May 30, 2018 Actress Wanda Sykes, who worked on the program, had already said she wouldn't be coming back when the show was canceled by ABC. Hollywood voiced their opinions and they were not nice when it came to Roseanne Barr's ugly attempt at comedy. One of those stars has a history of being a bit outspoken themselves, and that would be Charlie Sheen. 'Good riddance' Sheen was happy to see "Roseanne" go, saying "good riddance." He now claims they left a space for his own reboot, "Charlie Harper Returns." Minnie Driver took to social media to say she is proud of ABC for booting "Roseanne." Despite the gold mine that comes along with the show, ABC did the right thing Driver conveyed to her followers online. The stars were quoted on Too Fab, with others saying they felt bad for the rest of the cast and crew who basically just lost a job over a co-workers actions. He world implodes Roseanne Barr was fired by the talent agency who handles her as a client, as well as being nixed from ABC, according to the Fox News live broadcast on Tuesday afternoon. It is too bad that Barr had to take all the other hard working actors down with her by getting "Roseanne" shut down. Her actions rippled across the lives of hundreds today, who were employed in front of and behind the camera on the "Roseanne" show. The announcement of the Z2 series at the Global Sources Mobile Electronics Fair was the first step. UMIDIGI just announced the presale subscription and will start the presale of the UMIDIGI Z2 series on June 11. The campaign to kick-start the sale of the smartphone will start at a price of $249.99. The price of the UMIDIGI will be at a discount during the presale period. Afterward, the Z2 series will be priced at $299.99. Reports by UMIDIGI and Gizmo China presented the details used in this article. There have been several phases for UMIDIGI to promote this phone. It used the mobile fair to unveil the device and has revealed specifications over time. Now, it has set a date when the UMIDIGI model goes on sale. Specs, and highlights of the Z2 series So, what does the UMIDIGI Z2 series come with? For starters, it has a 19:9 full HD screen display. It comes loaded with the Helio P60 chip, which comes integrated with AI. On top of the powerful processor chip, it comes with a front and two dual cameras. The front resolution on the front-facing camera is set at eight megapixels while the rear cameras are 16 megapixels. UMIDIGI Z2 Flagship Series announced with notch display and gradient color! (video) https://t.co/s9L3UaOOmu pic.twitter.com/13ZQgXRmdQ GizmoChina (@GizmoChina) May 6, 2018 The device also supports seven internet modes. In addition, the UMIDIGI supports 36 global bands, the NFC and Android 8.1 OS. When you combine the wireless charger, UMIDIGI Q1 can be fully charged within 100 minutes. Giveaway of the UMIDIGI Z2 series and the wireless charger The presale subscription is just the beginning before the official sale. According to Gizmo China, 10 trial users will give away 10 pairs of UMIDIGI Z2 Pro. Furthermore, participants of the giveaway will also receive the UMIDIGI Q1 wireless charger. As reported by Gizmochina, every trial user will receive one unit of each product for free and winners will be announced when the presale starts on June 11. If you want to participate go to the UMIDIGI Z2 series page and enter to win. To date, there have been 4792 participants who have entered. There are 18 days left to claim your UMIDIGI prize. When you visit the company page make sure to read the instructions. You will have to subscribe to the page and fill out a form at the end to enter. The brand has a presence on multiple social media channels, so make sure you carefully inspect the guidelines to enter to win. Takeaways from the Z2 series prizes It will be fun to watch how the presale campaign performs for UMIDIGI. Also, how many units they will be able to sell will be important. How users report back o the performance and its functionality will be crucial for sales moving forward. The summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is important to bring peace to the Korean peninsula. Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, had taken the initiative to arrange for the summit in Singapore on 12 June. However, due to subsequent developments, Trump pulled out and conveyed his decision to Kim who is now sending a senior official to resolve the issue, CNN reported. Sky News reports that Kim Yong Chol, a top North Korean official, will be arriving in New York in a bid to revive the summit. This has been confirmed by South Korean media because his name was among the list of passengers on a flight from Beijing. CNN also reported his arrival at the Beijing airport. Peace has to return Donald Trump seems satisfied with the way things are shaping up, although CNN points out time is limited. He also appears happy that Kim Jong-un has sent his most senior official to handle sensitive issues. We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2018 Kim Yong Chol is the former military intelligence chief and vice-chairman of North Korea. He is also a very senior Pyongyang official to travel to the US. He also coordinated the North Korean president's two meetings with Mr. Pompeo in April and May. Kim Yong Chol will be arriving in response to the letter Trump had written to the North Korean leader indicating his decision to withdraw from the summit. However, the clouds appear to have receded and the White House has confirmed that preparations are on for the 12 June summit. Incidentally, a visit of Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the White House is planned on June 7 prior to the summit. Trump is hopeful for the outcome of the summit. In a tweet before canceling the summit, he indicated he expected North Korea could be an economic success. The summit must deliver North Korea is tied down by global sanctions because of its determination to pursue with its nuclear programs in spite of international condemnation. There were fears of a possible nuclear war and the proposed summit is expected to reduce tensions. CNN adds Kim Yong Chol and Kim Yo Jong, have been two of the most visible and important players in Pyongyang's push for the rapprochement with South Korea and the United States this year. The latter is Kim Jong-un's sister who was present at the Winter Olympics. The recent developments reveal that Washington and Pyongyang have direct lines of communication which is a positive sign. The world is waiting to see Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un at the Singapore summit and wants to see a deal that will put an end to nuclear weapons in the Korean peninsula. Such a deal will help the revival of North Korea. It will also add a feather to the cap of Trump because he would have succeeded where others have failed. Chen-Ching Liu, professor of electrical engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, was named the American Electric Power Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors. The American Electric Power professorship was established to recognize excellence in the field of electrical power systems. Liu, who joined the Virginia Tech in January, was the Boeing Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Washington State University. He has also served as professor of electrical engineering and associate dean of engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle; the Palmer Chair Professor at Iowa State University; and professor and acting/deputy principal of the College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Physical Sciences at University College Dublin, Ireland. At Virginia Tech, Liu serves as the director of the Center for Power and Energy and will further grow the power system program in the College of Engineering that has a long tradition of accomplishments and worldwide reputation. He is internationally recognized for his pioneering research in intelligent system methodologies for power systems. Lius work on power system restoration in transmission and distribution systems led to practical tools for the power industry through Electric Power Research Institute and Pacific Northwest National Lab. Liu has 142 publications in major technical journals, 28 invited book chapters, 162 conference papers, and three edited books. In his 34 years as a professor, he has supervised 36 Ph.D. students and more than 50 masters degree students. In 1994, Liu was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He received the Presidential Young Investigators Award from the National Science Foundation in 1986 and the IEEE Power and Energy Society Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award in 2004. He also received an honorary doctorate from the Polytechnic University Bucharest, Romania, in 2013 and was inducted as a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences in 2014. Liu has served in leadership positions in several international communities of power system engineering, including as a member of the Governing Board of the IEEE Power and Energy Society, founding president of the International Council of Intelligent System Applications to Power Systems, and as chair of the IEEE Power and Energy Society Fellow Committee and Technical Committee on Power System Computing, Analysis, and Economics. Liu received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. The following companies are subsidiares of Lloyds Banking Group: A G Finance Ltd, A.C.L. Ltd, ACL Autolease Holdings Ltd, ADF No.1 Pty Ltd, Addison Social Housing Holdings Ltd, Alex Lawrie Factors Ltd, Alex. 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Giorgia Guglielmi in Nature: Bertrand Routy earned a lamentable reputation with Parisian oncologists in 2015. A doctoral student at the nearby Gustave Roussy cancer centre, Routy had to go from hospital to hospital collecting stool samples from people who had undergone cancer treatments. The doctors were merciless. They made fun of me, Routy says. My nickname was Mr Caca. But the taunting stopped after Routy and his colleagues published evidence that certain gut bacteria seem to boost peoples response to treatment1. Now, those physicians are eager to analyse faecal samples from their patients in the hope of predicting who is likely to respond to anticancer drugs. It was an eye-opener for a lot of people who couldnt see the clinical relevance of gut microbes, says Routy, who is now at the University of Montreal Health Centre in Canada. Cancer has been a late bloomer in the microbiome revolution that has surged through biomedicine. Over the past few decades, scientists have linked the guts composition of microbes to dozens of seemingly unrelated conditions from depression to obesity. Cancer has some provocative connections as well: inflammation is a contributing factor to some tumours and a few types of cancer have infectious origins. But with the explosive growth of a new class of drug cancer immunotherapies scientists have been taking a closer look at how the gut microbiome might interact with treatment and how these interactions might be harnessed. After preliminary findings in mice and humans revealed that gut bacteria can sway responses to such drugs, scientists started trying to decipher the mechanisms involved. And researchers are launching a handful of clinical trials that will test whether the gut microbiome can be manipulated to improve outcomes. Some proponents say that strategies to mould the microbiome could be game-changing in cancer treatment. Its a smart place to be, says Jennifer Wargo, a surgeonscientist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. But others are worried that the move to the clinic is premature. William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, calls the idea phenomenally interesting, but adds: I have some anxiety about the notion that only beneficial effects are possible. More here. Annie Zaidi in Scroll.in: There is nothing solid or pragmatic about happiness, grief, love. A successful business, however, has to be run along sensible lines, and a businessman must be able to count on his employees just as he can count on the food on his plate actually being there. It is at this junction of reason, driven by the evidence of ones physical senses, and the other, intangible, unbelievable world that Tabish Khair places his new novel. A slender, brisk narrative, it takes its title, Night Of Happiness, from Shab-e-baraat, a festival when some Muslim sects visit graveyards, light incense and consecrate halva in memory of ancestors and other departed family members. Naturally, a reference to the dead suggests a paranormal setting. This is, however, not so much a paranormal tale as it is a story about the struggle to retain ones sense of reality, to remain centred, and about trust. The narrator is an import-export businessman, Anil Mehrotra, who boasts a company several employees and an international clientele. His right hand man is Ahmed, a man who is both dignified and dependable, reticent and hard-working almost to an extreme. An unhurried, deeply self-respecting man, and therefore also commanding respect. He has unusual linguistic abilities, and is at ease with cultural differences. But he will no more bow to a mullahs dictates than he will give up on his own faith. More here. Shortly after I arrived in Tokyo on a visit this spring, I went to a bank to get some money. As I was filling out a withdrawal slip, I noticed a pair of reading glasses left behind on the counter. So I took them up to the window and said, Somebody forgot their glasses. The teller was too polite to laugh in my face, but I saw the amusement in her eyes as she set me straight. Oh, those glasses arent forgotten, she explained. We provide reading glasses on the counter because so many of our customers need to use them. We have three different strengths so we can fit everybody. Sure enough, at every bank, post office or hotel counter I passed, I saw boxes of reading glasses bearing friendly labels like Feel free to use these. And I noticed that many customers routinely did just that. Readily available reading glasses are one of countless ways that Japan is adapting to the everyday needs of the worlds oldest population. With a higher percentage of older people than any other country and among the worlds highest life expectancy rates the nation is taking steps to accommodate the needs of senior citizens, or koreisha (a word formed from three Chinese characters meaning upper, age and person). Books, magazines, train schedules and telephone directories are routinely printed in both normal and large-print editions. At major crosswalks, next to the button that pedestrians push to get a walk signal, theres a second button that can be pushed to get extra time to cross. Virtually every hotel, department store and train station prominently displays bright orange defibrillator machines with instructions for their use in emergencies. In buildings that have a bank of elevators, there is often one priority elevator for people with wheelchairs or walkers. Escalators, too, have been modified to take wheelchairs. As befits a Confucian culture, theres a national holiday (Sept. 17) called Respect for the Aged Day. Aberdeen couple celebrates 75 years together Calvin and Oriole Nelson were both born and raised in Aberdeen and married at the old Bethlehem Lutheran church in 1946. What could be better than kayaking around scenic Lake Maloya, swimming in the blue waters of Bottomless Lakes, cruising Navajo Lake in a houseboat or hiking through the high-elevation, forested Cimarron Canyon when the heat of summer strikes New Mexico? Those destinations are among the New Mexico state parks little-known gems that offer mountain getaways, water adventures and more. We have a little bit of something for everybodys interests, says State Parks Director Christy Tafoya. She adds that with 34 parks and 19 lakes, theres so many great places that people can go. Among the best-kept secrets are Morphy Lake in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains northeast of Santa Fe and Villanueva State Park southwest of Las Vegas both excellent summer destinations, says Beth Wojahn, spokeswoman for the state Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, which includes state parks. Morphy Lake offers primitive camping on a first-come, first-served basis, and the journey there is beautiful, Wojahn says. The lake, at 8,000 feet, is stocked with rainbow trout, and canoeing is popular. Nearby Coyote Creek is Morphys companion park. It is nestled along a mountain stream amid forest of spruce and pine. You can bring your family, go camping, go fishing along the stream, Tafoya says. Its a darling little park. Tafoya says Villanueva also is a lovely park with great camping and hiking in a sandstone bluff-lined canyon along the Pecos River. The park is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Many parks offer special events and programs, including star parties, ranger-led hikes, fishing derbies, bird walks and even ukulele lessons at Heron Lake. Some parks will have Fourth of July fireworks, Tafoya says. A calendar listings all events is posted online. More good bets SUGARITE CANYON: Butting up against the Colorado border just east of Raton, this park has wildlife and wildflowers among lakes, creeks and meadows. Visitors can fish, boat, hike, hunt, camp and go horseback riding. Thats the wonderful thing about Sugarite there are so many different aspects to the park, says Interpretive Ranger Pat Walsh. Visitors also can explore the remains of the historic Sugarite Coal Camp, which operated from 1912 to 1941. The visitor center, which is housed in the former postmistress house and office, features photos, tools and artifacts. A trail marked with interpretive signs leads to the mine level and a sandstone block building that served as the dynamite shed, Walsh says. In all, the park offers 20 miles of trails, including a new four-mile trail from the visitor center to Lake Maloya and a hike to the top of Little Horse Mesa. The views are to die for, Walsh says. We have amazing hiking here. NAVAJO LAKE: The newly revamped marina at Navajo Lake is a destination in itself. We wanted to create a resort feel where it didnt matter if you owned a boat or not, says co-owner Jarrett Johnson, adding that families can spend a day enjoying the lake at a reasonable cost. The $3 million renovation opened just last summer with about half an acre of floating platforms with a restaurant and patio, a new store, a fishing hole surrounded by railing and benches and a splash area where nine jets shoot water out of the deck. Those attractions all are free to the public. New this year are eight bumper boats and an expanded boat rental operation that is now the largest in New Mexico, Johnson says. We have over 30 powered water craft, including two 48-foot houseboats that go up the lake, he says. We replaced our entire kayak and paddle boat fleet. Also part of the park is the scenic stretch of the San Juan River below the dam that is known as the quality waters and attracts fly fishermen from around the world. HYDE MEMORIAL: Just minutes from the Santa Fe plaza, hikers and campers can enjoy temperatures about 7 to 10 degrees cooler than in town. Its always cooler in Hyde Park than it is in Santa Fe, says park Superintendent Eric Ytuarte. If youre looking to go hiking, the temperature is nicer. A trio of new yurts is giving overnight visitors another option to roughing it in a tent. If you dont know how to camp, why dont you just rent one of our yurts? Wojahn says. Thats a great new fun way to get out in the great outdoors. The yurts, which can be reserved at the introductory price of $40 a night through June, are 20 feet in diameter and furnished with six bunk-style cots and a clear dome in the roof for star gazing, Ytuarte says. CLAYTON LAKE: Step back in history at this park in the rolling grasslands of northeastern New Mexico. Visible from a boardwalk on the lakes spillway are more than 500 fossilized footprints made by at least eight kinds of dinosaurs. The tracks were embedded in mud more than 100 million years ago when most of New Mexico was covered by a vast sea. The park also offers boating, camping and hiking, and fishing is popular as well, Tafoya says. HERON LAKE: Set among the tall pines of northern New Mexico, Heron is a quiet or no-wake lake, making it a good choice for paddle craft and sailing. Its also popular with anglers who catch record-size trout and kokanee salmon in quiet coves. Several campgrounds line the shore. Near the dam, a dramatic caprock stairway offers access to a 5.5-mile trail, which crosses the Chama River by suspension bridge and affords panoramic views. You can hike all the way to El Vado, Wojahn says. BOTTOMLESS LAKES: Near Roswell, this park has a lifeguard on duty during summer months, making it a good choice for family swimming. Swimming is always a good thing to do in New Mexico, but we want people to know that our lakes and the outdoors are different from a swimming pool, Wojahn says. We want people to be safe and wear a life vest. The unique lakes are sinkholes, ranging from 17 to 90 feet deep. They have the appearance of much greater depth thanks to the waters greenish-blue color created by aquatic plants. Kayaking and canoeing, fishing and even scuba diving are popular. CITY OF ROCKS: Although it doesnt offer an escape from the summer heat, City of Rocks is a great place to be when the sun goes down. The park has an observatory with a roll-off roof that allows visitors to see distant galaxies and night sky objects on video monitors or through telescopes. The geology of the park itself is stunning and fun to explore. A cluster of boulders standing as high as 40 feet rises up out of the surrounding plains and is dotted with small caves and huge, flat rocks that appear impossibly balanced. The rhyolite tuff formations were created by a volcanic eruption about 35 million years ago. The park boasts a visitor center with a friendly staff and 7.5 miles of hiking and biking trails. MESILLA VALLEY BOSQUE STATE PARK: Like the Rio Grande Nature Center in Albuquerque, Mesilla Valley Bosque is an urban park on the Rio Grande. Just a mile and a half from Mesilla near Las Cruces, it offers self-guided nature trails and a beautiful visitor center. The park also is an Audubon-designated Important Birding Area and is part of the New Mexico Birding Trail. BLUEWATER LAKE: Fishing for tiger muskie, which can reach 40 inches long, is a big attraction at this lake between Gallup and Grants. People come from all over the world to fish these tiger muskie, Wojahn says. Theyre huge. The park also offers camping, hiking, birding and horseback riding. MANZANO MOUNTAINS: Within two hours, campers can get from Albuquerque to a quiet campground nestled in wooded foothills and with great hiking trails. If you want to unplug and disconnect, Manzano Mountains is the place to go in the summer, Wojahn says. CAMPING: Hyde Memorial, Elephant Butte, Murphy Lake, Bluewater Lake, Heron Lake, Coyote Creek, Manzano Mountains HIKING: Sugarite Canyon, Cerrillos Hills, Villanueva, Oliver Lee Memorial, Hyde Memorial Best parks for Go to nmparks.com or 888-NMPARKS NIGHT SKIES: City of Rocks, Clayton Lake, Leasburg Dam, Cerrillos Hills FISHING: Navajo Lake, Bluewater Lake, Cimarron Canyon, Conchas, Ute Lake, Eagle Nest Lake, El Vado Lake, Fenton Lake, Heron Lake, Clayton Lake, Coyote Creek, Morphy Lake, Sugarite Canyon, Villanueva BOATING: Navajo Lake, Elephant Butte, Bluewater Lake, Caballo Lake SWIMMING: Bottomless Lakes, Heron Lake, Elephant Butte ON THE NEW MEXICO BIRDING TRAIL: Pancho Villa, Rockhound, City of Rocks, Leasburg Dam, Percha Dam, Caballo Lake, Elephant Butte, Mesilla Valley Bosque Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico recalled a daylong horseback ride into the Sabinoso Wilderness last year with U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke that ultimately got Zinke to retreat from his marching orders to shrink national wilderness and monument acreage. In fact, after the horseback tour, Zinke approved the donation of an additional 4,100 acres into the wilderness area, which created the public access acreage necessary to make the Sabinoso available for outdoor recreation. Up until then, the pristine Sabinoso was the only legally inaccessible wilderness area in the nation, being surrounded by private land and with no legal road or trail to access it. On Tuesday, representatives of organizations supporting conservation efforts gathered at Petroglyph National Monument Visitor Center to thank Udall and Heinrich for their leadership in Washington, D.C., on conservation issues. In addition to announcing major gains in improving access to public lands in New Mexico, including the Sabinoso Wilderness, the two senators and others spoke of the importance of reauthorizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is expected to expire at the end of September. The end goal, they said, is to get Congress to fully fund the LWCF in perpetuity. The LWCF is one of the oldest and most successful conservation programs in the country, said Andrew Black, director of community relations for the New Mexico Wildlife Federation. It is funded by offshore oil and gas royalties that have brought more than $312 million to New Mexico. Beneficiaries have included Bandelier National Monument, Petroglyph National Monument, the Valles Caldera, Tent Rocks and all five of New Mexicos national forests. In addition, Black said, more than 1,000 LWCF grants have been matched with state and local funds to construct and enhance local parks, playgrounds, trails, ball fields and pools in every county in the state. New Mexico is crucially located in the Congress on the committees to protect wilderness, parks and monuments, said Udall, who noted that he sits on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, and Heinrich sits on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Udall said that he and Heinrich are working on a strong bipartisan effort to make sure that the LWCF gets at least $425 million in funding. That compares with $1 billion a year that was originally sought. Still, he said, in Congress, the House and the Senate, we have very strong bipartisan support on conservation. Heinrich said that when everybody is pulling in the same direction and you have a really engaged local group of advocates and a delegation that is close in touch with them, even in these tough times you can get things done, or at least team up so when the moment comes and you have a little bit better political situation, you can get them over the finish line. A new attack ad accuses Democratic congressional candidate and former U.S. Attorney Damon Martinez of failing to prosecute Albuquerque police officers who shot and killed 27 people over a 4-year period, ending in 2014. But the 30-second advertisement fails to mention that Martinez wasnt actually the top U.S. attorney in New Mexico during most of the shootings. In fact, he became acting U.S. attorney in March 2014 and was confirmed later that year. The ad also fails to mention Martinezs role in responding to the shootings. As acting U.S. attorney in April 2014, he was co-author of the Department of Justice letter that found Albuquerque police had a pattern and practice of violating peoples civil rights through the use of force. Martinez was also part of the team that negotiated a 106-page settlement agreement requiring APD to carry out a series of reforms. The negative ad was paid for by Women Vote!, a group affiliated with EMILYs List, which backs Democratic women. EMILYs List hasnt endorsed a candidate in the race, though Martinezs two main rivals are women, retired law professor Antoinette Sedillo Lopez and former Democratic Party Chairwoman Deb Haaland. In response, the Martinez campaign released statements Tuesday from several people involved in the effort to overhaul the Albuquerque Police Department. Stephen and Renetta Torres, whose son was killed by Albuquerque police in the backyard of the family home, called the ad misleading and disingenuous. Martinez campaign manager Abigail Collazo said that only an out-of-state group would be so out-of-touch as to try to pin responsibility for police violence on a progressive prosecutor who took on the APD and changed the system. In New Mexico, guns have played an integral role in our states history, and they continue to be an important part of many peoples lives, for both hunting and for personal protection. And yet, despite the great respect most of our citizens have for the firearms they possess, we have not been immune to school violence. Both Roswell and Aztec have grieved following deadly school shootings, Clovis suffered a fatal shooting in its public library, and this month there was an initial panic that the Santa Fe tragedy was occurring in our own capital city. The United States Supreme Court, in the 2007 Heller vs. DC case, found, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms. The court found this right to protect those weapons typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes. However, the Supreme Court also reminds us that no right is unlimited, and that nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or . . . laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. I was raised by two teachers and was a teacher myself. I am married to an educator, and our daughter will soon be entering school. For us, the safety of children and the school community is paramount. As a state, we can do better, and we must. No student should live believing that a school shooting is inevitable. It is possible to respect the constitutional right of law-abiding adults to bear arms while also providing a safer environment for our children. Accordingly, in the next session of the Legislature, I will sponsor or support the following: Legislation to create a red-flag rule, which is an extreme risk protection order to authorize court-ordered firearm prohibitions against persons who are found to present a substantial and imminent danger to themselves or others. In place in over a half dozen states, these protection orders permit a judge to evaluate specific, articulable concerns raised about an individual who may pose a threat. The ACLU has cautioned that such laws should provide proper due process protections. Done correctly, however, extreme-risk protection orders can be an important tool in temporarily removing firearms from volatile situations and keeping our community safe. Legislation that extends existing lawful background checks to commercial sales. This will continue to protect law-abiding citizens Second Amendment rights. However, for those whom the Supreme Court has found are not protected by the Second Amendment, it will make it more difficult to purchase a firearm. Such legislation should also provide protections for those responsible gun owners and dealers who make use of such background checks. Legislation that establishes a hot line available to students where reports of early warnings can be reported. While the early reports are that the latest school shooter did not evince clear signs of impending violence, most school shooters have communicated signs of the violence they wrought. These hot lines must be professionally staffed and permit students to communicate by voice or text. There is no perfect solution. But we owe it to our children to take reasonable and constitutional measures to ensure their safety. One of the students who died in Santa Fe, Texas, was a foreign-exchange student whose parents entrusted their daughter to study in the United States. Showing remarkable composure, her father stated: One should not lose his heart by such kind of incidents. One must go for education undeterred. But controlling such incidents is the responsibility of the respective governments. He is right on all counts. NEW YORK Donald Trumps recurring criticism of his predecessor is that he just didnt know how to make a deal. Obama is not a natural deal maker, he tweeted in 2016, complaining that there was no accord on Syria. Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly, he predicted incorrectly back in 2013. Trump was scathing about President Obamas lack of legislative success, pronouncing him unable to negotiate w/Congress. We need leaders who can negotiate great deals for Americans, Trump tweeted in 2015, and the implication was obvious he was the ultimate deal-maker. It is almost 500 days into the Trump administration. Where are the deals? Where is the renegotiated NAFTA, the bilateral trade agreements that were going to replace the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the new and improved Iran nuclear pact, the China trade deal? Trumps record in Congress is even less impressive. He has not been able to strike an accord with Democrats on anything, from immigration to infrastructure. The world is laughing at us, as he would say. Well, what must the world be thinking now, as it watches the Trump administration careen wildly on everything from North Korea to China? What must it have thought as it watched the master negotiator in a televised session with congressional leaders on immigration, where he seemed to agree with the Democratic position, then agree with the incompatible Republican position, all the while asserting that they were going to make a deal? They didnt. By now it is obvious that Trump is actually a bad negotiator, an impulsive, emotional man who ignores briefings, rarely knows details, and shoots first and asks questions later. Consider how the administration has handled the North Korea summit. First, the meeting was announced with great fanfare, with Trump soon lavishing praise on Kim Jong Un. Agreeing to the meeting was an enormous symbolic concession to the North Koreans, while getting almost nothing in return. This was to be a head-of-state summit, though there was little preparation and no determination that the two sides were close enough to have a serious negotiation at that level. Trump got excited enough to start hyping the prospects for a breakthrough agreement despite little evidence of any movement in the North Korean position. Next, Trumps advisers embarked on a strange series of comments that seemed designed to threaten, scare and intimidate North Korea. Was this the plan? Did the administration regret its early overtures? Or was this all just incompetence? Is it any wonder that the whole thing has collapsed? Trump has been even more ham-handed in his dealings with China. Just before entering the White House, he dangled the possibility of recognizing Taiwan. Beijing quickly shut down contact with the United States and, humiliatingly, Trump had to walk back his comments in a phone call with President Xi Jinping. The current trade talks with China are a case study in bad negotiations. Its hard to know where to begin. The U.S. government does not seem to know what it wants. Some days it appears that Washington is fixated on the size of the trade deficit. Other days it focuses on technology transfer and the theft of intellectual property. The White House began its attacks by imposing tariffs on steel, which mostly affected American allies, ensuring that it had no partners in its attempt to pressure the Chinese. After insisting that no countries would be exempted, the administration once again reversed course and doled out exemptions to the top five steel exporters to the U.S, though it threatens to reverse itself again. American negotiators leak furiously to the press to undermine each others positions and even squabbled among themselves in front of a Chinese delegation earlier this month. Trump himself seems to switch gears repeatedly. After his administration announced that it would punish ZTE, a huge Chinese tech company that committed serious trade violations, Trump suddenly changed his mind, citing concern for the impact on Chinese jobs. Imagine the outcry if Obama had backed away from pressure on the Chinese to help their economy! On the legislative front, Trump chose to begin his presidency with the divisive issue of health care rather than a unifying one like infrastructure and failed to get Obamacare repealed anyway. Oh, and dont forget, he and son-in-law Jared Kushner were going to broker the ultimate deal, peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Hows that going? As talks fail, deals collapse and negotiations founder, Trump continues to tweet triumphantly about his great success. It makes one realize the presidents true talent. He has the confidence, bravado and skill to market failure as success. He can take a mediocre building, slap some gold paint on it and then convince people its a super-luxury condominium. Call it the Art of the Spin. Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal SANTA FE Just sitting inside a vintage B-25 at the Santa Fe Airport took Maj. Bernie Armstrong decades into the past. Though the World War II pilot mostly flew fighter planes and never spent much time in the back of a military plane like he did Tuesday he said the noises, even the smell, of the restored 1943 bomber dubbed Maid in the Shade were nearly the same as he remembers from his three years based on Pacific Ocean islands. The Michigan native and 40-year Cerrillos resident, now 92, went into the Army Air Corps at age 17 before getting his high school diploma and eventually flew P-40s and P-51s single-engine fighter planes. You didnt hear quite as much noise, he said, comparing the fighters with what was going on inside the double-engined B-25 over Santa Fe on Tuesday. But we were doing 8-hour missions sitting there as a fighter pilot, he said. Couldnt get up and move around. He did escort B-25s and similar bombers, recalling a mission in which he accompanied a B-29 from his post in Iwo Jima to Tokyo. We were in the only fighter plane that could fly that long of a distance, he said of his P-51. Armstrong was among a handful of veterans and the only World War II vet to take a ride in Maid in the Shade as part of a special veterans flight Tuesday morning. The plane was brought to Santa Fe as part of the Arizona Commemorative Air Force Museums summer Flying Legends of Victory tour. The nonprofit takes three World War II aircraft to various cities across the U.S. and Canada. The Santa Fe show is open to the public for ticketed tours and flights through next weekend. Tours end Saturday and flights on Sunday. Armstrong was in high spirits throughout the morning, making a joke about checking the aircraft for oil drips while waiting for take-off and smiling throughout the 20-minute flight. Armstrong, who was recalled to fly in the Korean and Vietnam wars, didnt delve too deeply into his memories of wartime. Im trying to forget a lot of that, he said, adding that there were both good and bad times. Following his service, he was a pilot for state government and flew five New Mexico governors: David Cargo, Bruce King, Toney Anaya, Jerry Apodaca, and Garrey Carruthers. Armstrong retired in 1990. He continued flying on his own until just a couple of years ago. The Arizona museum spent almost 30 years restoring Maid in the Shade for new flights. In World War II, it was stationed on the French island of Corsica, just off the coast of Italy. It made 15 missions during 1944, according to the aircrafts load master Tim Thorstad. Thirteen were in Italy, a couple were in Yugoslavia, he said. We (the U.S.) bombed railyards and bridges. After 1944, the plane was returned to the U.S. where it took on more utilitarian roles, including as a fire ant insecticide sprayer over farms in Texas up to the 1970s. Once it was donated to the museum, workers named it Maid in the Shade because it was reassembled in a hangar rather than outdoors in the Mesa, Ariz., sun. An outline of Corsica and a scantily-clad woman were painted on its nose. Armstrong said its important to him that Americans remember the historical importance of World War II, something he says they can do by seeing or riding in planes like the B-25. Stan Jarocki, a 88-year-old Korean War veteran from Albuquerque, was also on Tuesdays flight. He said citizens need to be cognizant of veterans sacrifices through history. Most people today will thank veterans for their service if theyre wearing a hat or shirt indicating where and when they served, Jarocki said. But he said that wasnt always the case, especially during and just after the controversial Vietnam War. They forgot what these guys had done in the war for them, (and) all the ones that never came home, said Jarocki. It took two tries, but the Santa Fe school board on Tuesday postponed decisions about which of three elementary schools the school district should rebuild and at which of the other two sites Turquoise Trail charter school should occupy after its lease expires in 2021. After hearing a presentation about the facility conditions and boundary and enrollment options at Chaparral, E.J. Martinez and Nava elementary schools and impassioned pleas from mostly Turquoise Trail parents and students during the meetings public comment period, board member Kate Noble made a motion to postpone any decision. She did so after identifying three reasons why: there was no urgency to make a decision that night, the full board wasnt present because Lorraine Price has absent due to illness, and because of changing conditions, including that a new governor who may be more interested in funding education will be in office in seven months. The board was considering the changes due to declining enrollment and deteriorating conditions at each school, as well as its previous decision not to renew the lease at Turquoise Trail. Noble also said her decision was impacted by parents that she said helped her understand that if we close E.J. and Nava, its taking the middle out of the Santa Fe school district. The comment was a reference to the economic gap between the wealthier families on the east side and lower income families on the south side where the citys population is growing. Nobles motion was first defeated by a 2-2 vote, with board president Steven Carrillo and Maureen Cashmon voting against it. But after some discussion Carrillo asked Noble to make another motion. When she made the same motion again, Carrillo voted along with her and board secretary Rudy Garcia to postpone. Nobles motions came after motions by Carrillo to identify Chaparral as the school to be rebuilt and worry about the other schools later and Cashmon to rebuild Chaparral and close both E.J. Martinez and Nava died for lack of a second. Cashmon said after the vote that she hoped the matter wouldnt come up ever again. She said it was unfair to keep asking staff to present the plans and unfair to the families whose students attend the schools to be put through the turmoil. She noted that there was talk a year ago about closing E.J. Martinez and repurposing Nava in an effort to close a budget gap. Lets be honest and take this whole thing off the table, she said. Lets be fair to the community and end the turmoil. Carrillo wanted to at least identify Chaparral as the school to be rebuilt so district officials can start planning for it. He said an analysis by a consultant provided facts that overwhelmingly supported keeping it. Albuquerques gross receipts tax revenue from business activity during the first quarter of the year rose to $94.9 million, a 4 percent increase compared to the same time last year, according to New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department figures. In May alone, the city received a $35 million check from the department resulting from March business activity, an increase of 6.8 percent from last year. The department distributes tax collections two months after the business activity month. We are up from last year, City Council President Ken Sanchez said. Based on projected revenues in the budget, were still running behind, but I think its a real asset to the community as a lot of this money, especially the tax increase, will be going to public safety. The GRT has been a challenge over the last several years, especially dealing with the recession, he said. Weve been in the negative for so many years, its good to see theres light at the end of the tunnel. That optimism includes a coming tax hike. The City Council in March approved and Mayor Tim Keller signed legislation to raise the citys gross receipts tax rate by three-eighths of a percentage point. It takes effect July 1. Councilors also approved an amendment that stipulates no less than 60 percent of the revenue generated by the increase go toward the citys public safety budget goal priorities. Separately, Bernalillo County continues to benefit from its own tax increase, which went into effect last July. The county has received about $49.9 million from first-quarter business activity receipts, an increase of about 23.9 percent compared with a year earlier. Gross receipts tax revenue is the total amount of money or value of other consideration received from selling property, leasing or licensing property, granting a right to use a franchise, performing services and selling research and development services performed outside New Mexico, the product of which is initially used in New Mexico. Although the gross receipts tax is imposed on businesses, according to the Taxation and Revenue Department, it is common for a business to pass the GRT on to the purchaser either by separately stating it on the invoice or by combining the tax with the selling price. DALLAS Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday called for schools to have more armed personnel and said they should put greater focus on spotting student mental health problems but he proposed only a few small restrictions on guns following a shooting at a high school near Houston that left 10 people dead. The Republican and staunch gun-rights supporter released a 43-page report following three days of mostly closed-door meetings last week organized with school district officials, shooting survivors and groups on both sides of the gun-control debate, among others. The recommendations are voluntary and some would require changes to state laws that would need approval from the Legislature, which doesnt come back into session until 2019. School districts wishing to make some of the changes could begin doing so, such as sending staff for free gun training this summer. The lack of major gun control measures is not surprising in a state that embraces its gun-friendly reputation and has more than 1.2 million people licensed to carry handguns. The only significant gun-related proposal was a possible red flag law, although Abbott gave it a tepid endorsement, asking leaders of the Legislature to consider the merits. Eight states have red flag laws that allow family, law enforcement and others to file a petition to remove firearms from a potentially dangerous person. Florida, Vermont and Maryland passed such laws after the mass school shooting in Florida in February. Abbotts report does not appear to depart much from the playbook of the powerful National Rifle Association following school shootings. Alice Tripp, legislative director for the NRA-affiliated Texas State Rifle Association said Abbotts proposals wouldnt lead to weapons being seized without some protections for gun owners. Gov. Abbott has pledged due process. Hes a gun owner himself, Tripp said. Abbott is proposing a change to the state law that says guns cant be accessible to children under 17, with exceptions such as hunting or parent supervision. Hes encouraging the Legislature to consider making the law also apply to 17-year-olds. Authorities have charged a 17-year-old student, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, with capital murder in the May 18 attack at Santa Fe High School. Pagourtzis is accused of using a shotgun and .38 revolver that belonged to his father. Abbott also wants a new law that would require gun owners to report a lost or stolen firearm within 10 days. The report says the state will have access to nearly $70 million through federal funding and state grants for the proposals. The state also expects to compete for an additional $40 million from federal programs, and Abbott says hell ask state lawmakers for a further $30 million. We all share a common bond: And that is we want action to prevent another shooting like what happened at Santa Fe High School, Abbott, who is campaigning for re-election, said during a news conference at Dallas school district headquarters. Abbotts Democratic opponent for governor, Lupe Valdez, said its astounding how few of the proposals directly address gun violence. So far, the governor has not been enthusiastic about calls for a special legislative session on gun laws a sharp contrast to the response in Florida following the February high school shooting there that killed 17 people. Florida lawmakers, who were already in session, passed a gun-control package three weeks later, thanks in part to a lobbying campaign led by student survivors of the attack. In Texas, any attempts to create a mechanism to seize weapons is likely to be met with skepticism in a Republican-controlled Legislature that has expanded the rights of gun owners in recent years and made it easier and cheaper to be licensed to carry a handgun. Also unlike the students in Florida, several students at Santa Fe High School have been vocal opponents of increased gun control, including some who were invited to meet with Abbott last week. Kris Brown, the co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said: The answer to preventing school shootings isnt some deep-seated secret. Its guns. Its the fact that its frighteningly easy for dangerous people to get access to a gun, and this proposal does little to stop that. Texas State Teachers Association President Noel Candelaria said he strongly objects to arming more teachers. Teachers are trained to teach and to nuture, not double up as security guards, Candelaria said. Abbotts recommendations include measures to harden campuses such as creating vestibules where doors must by remotely unlocked before visitors enter, installing metal detectors and having an alarm that would signal theres an active shooter. Abbott is also recommending an expansion of a program that identifies students at risk of committing violence and provides help for them. He also wants to increase the number of people trained to identify signs of mental illness and increase awareness of a state system that allows people to report people who may be a threat and suspicious activity. __ Associated Press reporter Jim Vertuno contributed to this report from Austin. KIEV, Ukraine To the gasps, whoops and applause of stunned colleagues, Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko walked into a news conference Wednesday, less than a day after police in the Ukrainian capital said he had been assassinated. Authorities said his death had been staged to foil a plot on his life by Moscows security services and one arrest was made. Russia denounced the faked killing as an outlandish attempt at defamation by its neighbor and foe. Even Babchenkos wife was unaware of the deception, and the 41-year-old Kremlin critic who fled to Ukraine 15 months ago apologized to her for the hell she had to go through in the past two days. There was no choice there, either. Neither Babchenko nor Ukrainian Security Service chief Vasyl Gritsak gave details of the sting operation or how they made his wife believe he was dead. Kiev Police Chief Andriy Krishchenko had announced Babchenkos death Tuesday, saying the journalists wife found him bleeding at their apartment building in Kiev but that he died en route to the hospital. Lawmaker Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the interior minister, said the assailant had waited on a staircase in the building and shot Babchenko in the back as he was going to buy bread. Just hours before the shooting was reported, Babchenko wrote on Facebook that he considered the day a second birthday because it was the fourth anniversary of his missing a flight on a Ukrainian military helicopter that later was shot down in the conflict between Ukraine and Moscow-backed separatists in the eastern part of the country. At the start of Wednesdays news conference, Gritsak announced the journalists murder had been solved and called the day Babchenkos third birthday. Babchenko, clad in a black sweatshirt, walked into the room as other reporters gasped and exclaimed their surprise, then broke into applause. Im still alive, an uneasy-looking Babchenko said with a straight face. Then he apologized for the deception. I know that sickening feeling when you bury a colleague, he added. The news conference produced mixed emotions. I was shocked. But then a feeling of happiness rose up, said Serhii Nuzhnenko, a freelance journalist. Babchenko said he was not allowed to go into the details of his false death. He said Ukraines law enforcement had been aware of a contract on his head for two months. He said he was approached by the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU, a month ago. The important thing is my life has been saved and other, bigger terrorist attacks have been thwarted, he said. It also was unclear why authorities decided to go to such lengths to make it look as if Babchenko was dead. Gritsak said investigators had identified a Ukrainian citizen who allegedly was paid $40,000 by the Russian security service to organize and carry out the hit. The unidentified Ukrainian man in turn allegedly hired an acquaintance to be the gunman, he added. The suspected organizer of the alleged hit plot was detained Wednesday, Gritsak said, suggesting the bogus killing was aimed at flushing him out, and he showed a video of the arrest. Killing Babchenko was part of a larger alleged plot by Russian security services, Gritsak said. The Ukrainian man also was supposed to procure large quantities of weapons and explosives, including 300 AK-47 rifles and hundreds of kilos of explosives, to perpetrate acts of terror in Ukraine, he said. The Russian Foreign Ministry said the Ukrainian government was fanning anti-Russian hysteria. Were confident our foreign partners and the relevant international agencies will draw correct conclusions from the whole situation. Konstantin Kosachev, head of the international affairs committee of the upper house of the Russian parliament, compared Ukraines actions to Britain accusing Moscow of being behind the nerve gas poisonings of a Russian former spy and his daughter in England. Russia vehemently denies poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal. The logic is the same to defame Russia, Kosachev told the state news agency Tass. Ukraine also faced a backlash from international journalism figures. I deplore the decision to spread false information on the life of a journalist. It is the duty of the state to provide correct information to the public, said Deniz Yazici of the media freedom office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Reporters Without Borders director Christophe Deloire tweeted his deepest indignation at the discovery of the manipulation of the Ukrainian secret services. It is always deeply dangerous for states to play with the facts. Some wondered if the ruse would ultimately backfire, harming Ukraines credibility or undermining concern about violence against journalists. Theres one nuance if somebodys shot now, nobody will believe it, noted journalist Mustafa Nayyem, who became a parliament member, told The Associated Press. Babchenko, one of Russias best-known war reporters, fled the country in February 2017. He spoke and wrote about needed to leave Russia because of threats against him and his family. He said his home address was published online and the threats he received were made by phone, email and social media. Moscows annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine were topics on which the journalist was scathingly critical of the Kremlin. His flight from Russia came several months after he wrote in a Facebook post that he wasnt sorry that members of a military band and state TV journalists died in a plane crash on their way to Russias military base in Syria. Several Russian lawmakers said at the time that Babchenko should be stripped of his citizenship over the comment, and Russian state media called him a traitor. Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian lawmaker who also moved to Ukraine, said Babchenko continued being threatened after he settled last fall in Kiev, where he worked as a host for the Crimean Tatar TV station. ___ Vasilyeva reported from Moscow. Jim Heintz in Moscow, Ayse Wieting in Istanbul, Turkey, and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed. DALLAS A man who spent 15 years in prison for the 2001 killing of a teenager was freed on Wednesday after a judge agreed with prosecutors that he didnt commit the crime. Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson said Quintin Lee Alonzo, 38, was freed after the judge agreed with a petition from prosecutors declaring him innocent in the 2001 death of Santos Gauna, who was killed when a fight broke out at a party celebrating his high school graduation and decision to join the Marines. Although Alonzo was freed because prosecutors and the judge believe hes innocent, due largely to the confession of a condemned man the day before that mans execution, Alonzo would still need the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to formally exonerate him to be eligible for state compensation for being falsely imprisoned. That ruling could take months. Officials say an exhaustive investigation corroborated the 2015 confession that Licho Escamilla gave to investigators from the district attorneys offices conviction integrity unit right before Escamilla was put to death for the killing of an off-duty Dallas police officer. He was facing execution the next day, said Cynthia Garza, who heads the unit. We believe he was doing this to make peace with God and make things right for him. Escamilla was a suspect in Guanas killing. But a person identified Alonzo as the shooter from a photo lineup, and Johnson said the jury at his 2003 trial relied heavily on that identification to convict him. Alonzo was sentenced to life in prison. Escamilla, meanwhile, was convicted in 2002 in the death of officer Christopher Kevin James, who was among four uniformed Dallas officers working off-duty security at a club when a brawl broke out and James was shot multiple times by Escamilla. Prosecutors say that before Escamilla was convicted in James killing, he confessed to killing Gauna and that he also confessed later to his appellate attorneys. Johnson acknowledged that rumors circulated after the teens death that Escamilla was responsible, but she said Alonzos attorney argued this point at Alonzos trial and jurors didnt buy it. PHOENIX A holistic approach is needed to battle the opioid crisis that has gripped many parts of the country, fueled in part by the high volume of drugs that come across the southern border, Arizona officials said Wednesday. Members of the states congressional delegation along with Gov. Doug Ducey and top law enforcement officials made the comments during a Homeland Security congressional subcommittee hearing in Phoenix. Rep. Martha McSally, an Arizona Republican running for the U.S. Senate, hosted the hearing. She said 90 percent of the nations illegal drugs come through ports of entry, often hidden in car compartments. McSally said it takes more than just law enforcement to battle drug abuse. But some Democrats at the hearing criticized Republicans for their past support of legislation that would curb Medicaid and programs to treat addiction. How can we fight opioid addiction, how can Arizona take it seriously, while at the same time were taking efforts to gut Medicaid? U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego asked Ducey. The Republican governor said he doesnt think the two issues are mutually exclusive. Ducey on Tuesday said he was ending the public health emergency declaration he issued last year in an effort to combat opioid abuse. The initiative helped create a new reporting and information-sharing system on abuse while also providing training on use of a drug that reverses the effects of an overdose to 1,000 police officers around the state, according to a news release. McSally lauded the governors efforts, but said border security was also an important component. McSally said a shortage of Customs and Border Protection officers at the states port of entries is at a crisis level even as officers from elsewhere in the country have been sent to Arizona to assist. Its critical, as we talked about today, for our border security because a lot of these drugs are coming through the ports of entry on people or in deeply concealed compartments that are very difficult to detect, McSally said. Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal Its a long way from the finish line, but a proposed path forward exists for the much-maligned Albuquerque Rapid Transit system to begin interim operation as soon as the fall, Mayor Tim Keller said Wednesday. Keller told the Journal that ART could start with a limited route using fewer electric buses than originally planned. The entire nine-mile Central Avenue route using a combination of the electric buses and compressed natural gas or clean diesel buses could be in operation as soon as winter. Theres no doubt that ART has been a challenge for the heart of our city, in that weve taken a hit in many ways in the construction, Keller said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon at the Yale Bus Depot with one of the electric buses as a backdrop. It remains a hardship but we actually have our shoulder to the wheel, and we are working very hard to progress steadily to get this project completed. The proposed plan, Keller said, is contingent on negotiations with Build Your Dreams, the Chinese company that is contracted to deliver at least 20 fully electric, 60-foot articulated buses. The city wants to amend the contract to reduce that number due to the many delays and problems it has had with the company, and seek additional buses from another manufacturer. The plan would call for the city to conduct a bidding or request-for-proposals process with other bus manufacturers to deliver the remaining buses needed to operate the entire route. The additional buses would be natural gas buses or clean diesel, instead of the electric buses BYD is building. The BYD electric buses, worth nearly $23 million, were originally scheduled for delivery last year. But so far the city only has received 15 of the 20, and Keller said some of those buses must be sent back due to issues. Keller said the city has looked into severing the contract with BYD, sending back all of the buses and starting over. But that could endanger federal funding and cost the city millions of dollars. Another option was to keep working with BYD and wait for full delivery of 20 buses from BYD. However, Keller said that option might delay delivery until winter 2019, as federal funding rules require the electric buses undergo testing at the Altoona Bus Research and Testing Center in Pennsylvania. Under the contract, the city does not have to pay until final delivery of buses. Bus problems Many of the delays and problems surrounding the project center on the electric buses. Albuquerque had been projected to become the first city in the nation to run all-electric 60-foot buses as part of a proven technology. Keller said the city and company have been addressing most of our major concerns that we raised in our first reality check with them. But, the buses are still not up to standard for what they were contracted for, he said. One of the biggest issues is the battery life. This is something where at least we agree there is a problem. BYD is now being fairly straightforward with us. The issue is the buses still dont hold a charge that they were spected for. This is the reality. The contract calls for buses that can operate for 275 miles, but city officials have claimed the buses cant go more than 180 miles before they need recharging. That means adding more charging stations, adding more buses or both, Keller said. Other problems have ranged from cracks in exterior panels and battery casings to leaking wheel hubs. ART has been billed as a project that would transform Central Avenue into a rapid transit corridor with a stretch of bus-only lanes and stations. The project, including associated utility and road work, comes at a cost of $135 million. The city has been counting on $75 million from the Federal Transit Administrations Capital Investment Program for the project. Keller said the administration remains optimistic that the city will receive federal funding through the FTA, but no funds have been promised yet. He said Congress has appropriated the money for the grants and he hoped for an answer on funding from the federal government sometime during the summer. The project meets funding criteria, and everything is in DCs hands as far as information required for the funding, he said. The funding question is no longer in our court, Keller said. Its exclusively the feds decision at this point. We have crossed every t, dotted every i and we have met every criteria for that project. He also said federal funding is not contingent on having all buses and the entire system running. Driver training Major construction on bus stops and road work is complete. According to Lawrence Rael, the citys chief operating officer, some minor work will take place over the next couple of months. That work includes installation of mobility signage that makes it easier for pedestrians to cross the street after exiting the bus, and the completion of striping. Crews will also install video monitors and surveillance cameras to increase the level of security on platforms, Rael said. Those systems will soon be plugged into the Real-time Crime Center, so that law enforcement can have eyes on Central Avenue for the entire route, which is a nice amenity as it relates to passenger safety, Rael said. Weve also determined that the traffic and bus signals in the corridor, integral to the transit system, were not implemented, so were working now on a critical path with the contractors to ensure that the timing of the lights and signals works so the buses can operate properly through the corridor. Bernie Toon, director of the citys transit department, said motorists on Central Avenue can soon expect to see drivers training on the new equipment. In the coming months, our drivers are going to start going though a 12- to 14-week training program that will teach them to use the ART corridor and the bus platforms, Toon said. That means youre going to begin to see more buses in the lanes come mid-summer. While buses are on those training routes, well be working on the timing of the lights, so that we can make sure the traffic patterns are as efficient as possible. Toon also said the department will begin working on an education campaign that will help motorists and pedestrians stay safe and learn how to use the new traffic lanes and transportation platforms. WASHINGTON There is no evidence that the FBI planted a spy on President Donald Trumps 2016 campaign, a senior House Republican said Wednesday, contradicting Trumps repeated insistence that the agency inserted a spy for political reasons and to help Crooked Hillary win. Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Oversight Committee and a longtime Trump supporter, was briefed last week by the Justice Department and FBI following reports that investigators relied on a U.S. government informant in their probe of Russian election meddling. I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump, Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, told Fox News on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Gowdy said he had never heard the term spy used and did not see evidence of it. Informants are used all day, every day by law enforcement, he told CBS This Morning. Asked about Gowdys comments, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president still has concerns about whether or not the FBI acted inappropriately having people in his campaign. Sanders declined to say who in the campaign the president might suspect of providing information to the FBI. She said Trump also has concerns in general about the conduct of the FBI, citing the firing of former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. There are a number of things that have been reported on and that show, I think not just for the president, but for a number of Americans a large cause for concern, and wed like to see this fully looked into, Sanders said. Gowdys comments that undermine the presidents claims are particularly striking because of his role as a powerful GOP watchdog who took on Democrat Hillary Clinton in his committees investigation into the 2012 attack on an American mission in Benghazi, Libya, while she was secretary of state. The probe unearthed the existence of Clintons private email server, which triggered an FBI inquiry and crippled her 2016 presidential campaign against Trump. Trump has repeatedly pointed to, and at times embellished, reports that a longtime U.S. government informant approached members of his 2016 campaign during the presidential election in a possible bid to glean intelligence on Russian efforts to sway the election. He has tweeted that it was starting to look like one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. He has also rejected conclusions by Americas intelligence agencies that the Russian government was trying to help him beat Clinton. Several news outlets including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News have identified an FBI confidential source as Stefan A. Halper. Halper, an academic at the University of Cambridge who served in past Republican administrations, was not a part of Trumps campaign, but the news outlets have reported that he reached out to some Trump advisers to gather information as part of the Russia investigation. Trumps legal team has expressed interest in seeing classified information about the origins of the FBI investigation to prepare the president for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is now leading the federal investigation into possible ties between Trumps campaign and Russia. The folks who have seen the information have the same perspective, Gowdy said. The folks who have not seen the information, I dont know what informs their perspective. Gowdy, who plans to retire from Congress at the end of the current term, did express support for Trumps frustration with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself in May 2017 from the Russia probe based on a possible conflict of interest. The recusal of Sessions, an early backer of Trumps presidential bid, followed the revelation that he had two previously undisclosed interactions during the 2016 campaign with the Russian ambassador. Gowdy told CBS that Trump is just expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job. Not afterward. Trump tweeted out Gowdys comments on Sessions, including his saying that there are lots of really good lawyers in the country and that the president could have picked someone else for the top Justice Department job. And I wish I did! Trump wrote. Trump did not reference Gowdys comments that there was no evidence of the FBI planting a spy in his campaign. ___ Associated Press writer Ken Thomas, Zeke Miller and Chad Day contributed to this report. Cartoon Network and Korean game developer SundayToz have launched We Bare Bears Match3 Repairs, a new global match-3 puzzle game based on Cartoon Networks hit animated series We Bare Bears, about three bear brothers trying to get by in the world of humans. Help Grizz, Panda and Ice Bear fix up their cave with fun and challenging match-3-style gameplay and unique missions like rescuing seals, finding hidden wildlife, activating drones and more. Use power-ups like crabs, skunks and Ice Bears Vacuum Pal to rack up huge combos. Build up the bears cave and other areas like the Campground and the Food Truck Park, decorating them with special items and objects you collect throughout the adventure. Launched in Korea in January 2018 as We Bare Bears: The Puzzle, the mobile game was #1 overall in both Apple App store and Google Play at release, has amassed nearly 3 million downloads in the region, and remains in the top ten for puzzle games. We Bare Bears Match3 Repairs is free to download with in-app purchases today on iOS devices via the App Store, as well as Android smartphones and tablets through Google Play. Click for related news. NIIT, a global leader in skills and talent development, has signed up Indigo Consulting, Publicis Communications specialist digital agency, as its strategic digital partner. NIIT offers multi-disciplinary learning management and training delivery solutions to corporations, institutions, and individuals in over 40 countries. The business was won post a multi-agency pitch, and Indigos Gurugram office will handle the account. As part of the mandate, Indigo will create and execute the new immersive website for NIIT, in line with new age digital native and the increasing e-learning, ed-tech and e-commerce trends the industry is witnessing. Speaking about bringing Indigo Consulting on-board as its strategic digital agency, Kshitij Jain, Vice President Marketing & Sales, Career Education Business, NIIT said, We embarked on this overall brand transformation journey a couple of months ago. Digital is a critical pillar within our overall blueprint because of its potential to exponentially impact transformation. We are looking at a combination of velocity, reach and immersive experience delivery that will enhance talent development across India. Hence, it was absolutely critical for us to partner the right agency to build a digital customer journey and deliver it in a way that enhances consumer experiences, and continues to position NIIT as a leader in the space of training. Indigo demonstrates the right blend of the art and science of digital solutions to target the digital native. We look forward to a fruitful association with Indigo Consulting. On the new partnership, Jose Leon, President, Indigo Consulting said, India is likely to have the worlds largest workforce by 2027 with a billion people aged between 15 and 60. NIIT has value to offer to this entire spectrum right from enabling the youth identify its skills and enhance them formally in a structured environment, to senior working professionals getting certified from premier institutes to explore better career opportunities. Digital Transformation experts at Indigo Consulting are crafting a strategy to create and deliver an immersive experience for all target users of NIIT, and we are excited about this partnership and the positive impact this can deliver for the brand. In a first-of-its kind academia-industry partnership, Asias premier Film, Commmunication and Creative Arts institute, Whistling Woods International (WWI), has come together with Reliance Jio for a Development Lab dedicated for the Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality industry. The lab, named Whistling Woods Jio VR Lab, will be set up at the Whistling Woods International campus in Filmcity, Mumbai. The Lab will commence operations in mid-May 2018. The Lab will undertake several activities including building a state-of-the-art, always-current, technology pipeline for VR & AR workflows. The Lab will also play a meaningful role within the global VR community through its membership of the global VR Industry Forum and participation in global conclaves like NAB, IBC & CES. Further, the Lab will work with the Indian film & media industry in many ways including conducting monthly seminars & workshops for them as well as introducing new tech-workflows to the industry. The lab will undertake all these activities in a structured manner to create a curriculum for Cinematic VR, which will be taught to all students of WWI, making them Indias first generation of VR Filmmakers . Speaking on the occasion, Jyotindra Thacker, President, Reliance Jio said that We strongly believe VR will be the 4th content platform after Film, TV & Digital and this lab will create VR filmmakers who will kickstart Indias VR content ecosystem. Reliance Jio, through its leadership in the digital & content ecosystem, will support VR content creation & distribution and make cutting-edge experience available for its customers. Speaking about the new collaboration, Meghna Ghai Puri, President, Whistling Woods International said, It gives us immense pleasure to have Reliance Jio as our strategic partner in launching the Virtual Reality Lab at our campus. Whistling Woods International has always been in the forefront to embrace and introduce latest technological & creative innovations in the Film, Media and Creative Arts domain and the Whistling Woods Jio VR Lab is yet another step in that direction. Today, WWI alumni are Film-ready, TV ready & Digital ready. Our goal is to make them VR ready as well. We see this as a first-step towards a larger engagement with Jio for future labs & content partnerships. Customer Logins Obtain the data you need to make the most informed decisions by accessing our extensive portfolio of information, analytics, and expertise. Sign in to the product or service center of your choice. Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier? Sign up to receive news and updates from this site directly to your desktop. Breaking News Columbia Breaking News Greenville Breaking News Myrtle Beach Breaking News Aiken Breaking News N Augusta Breaking News Click on the bell icon to manage your notifications at any time. Success! Please click the 'Allow' button in the 'Show Notifcations' alert in your browser if one is available. Thank you for signing up! Please enable notifications in your browser and reload the page. The four Republicans jostling to replace S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster landed in Aiken Tuesday afternoon, hopping on stage to answer education, energy and campaign questions alike. The forum, hosted by the Aiken Republican Club, ran for an hour-and-a-half and was held at the AECOM Center for the Performing Arts. McMaster was invited but elected not to attend, according to the club's president, John Massie. One of the first questions asked to candidates Kevin Bryant, the state's lieutenant governor; Yancey McGill, a long-standing state politician; Catherine Templeton, a former state health department director; and John Warren, a Marine veteran and businessman was about education reform. How would you fix the state's lackluster school rankings, one of three moderators, all representing local media, asked. McGill answered first, advocating for teacher-first listening as well as resource and spending audits. The audits, he added, would be the priority. "The moneys have been sent to the districts. There needs to be some accountability of that money," McGill said. Templeton said South Carolinians "our children," she said need to take South Carolina jobs. And that could involve bringing vocational instruction back into fashion. "My grandfather was a plumber, and he did really well by five children. We need to bring shop back to our high schools and our technical colleges," Templeton said. "And then we need to make sure that we let our teachers teach." Warren said he supports making the superintendent of education "cabinet-level" an appointed position. The superintendent of education is currently elected. He said getting "more money to the classroom" is crucial, as is workforce readiness. Bryant said micromanagement from Columbia and beyond, Washington D.C., he noted, needs to stop. The lieutenant governor then reviewed his record in the Legislature, later saying he, too, supports putting the education superintendent position under the governor's purview. On the topic of the Savannah River Site, most notably the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, the four candidates were relatively uniform. MOX, a roughly 70-percent complete facility at SRS, was designed to turn weapons-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel. On May 10, U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry submitted a waiver to Congress that effectively terminates the facility and the project as a whole. S.C. officials lash out at MOX decision; lawsuit filed A big-league band of Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility supporters spoke together Friday evening in Aiken County, criticizing the U.S. Depa Warren said he would "strongly support" SRS, including the continuation of MOX and the state's ongoing U.S. Department of Energy litigation. He said it's a matter of jobs and national security. Bryant said he'd do whatever he could for SRS, citing its importance at numerous levels. He then slammed McMaster's Site-centric follow through. McMaster who Bryant called "the absentee governor" sent a letter to Perry on May 2 that threatened litigation should the DOE try to again shutter MOX. On May 25, legal action, which targets the DOE and the National Nuclear Security Administration, was filed. That day, S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson said the lawsuit is winnable. McGill said he and his team would "fully support" SRS. Templeton said she has SRS experience with liquid waste, the national lab and more and can handle the situation better than anyone else. "We have a fight about MOX, what, every six months? Every year?" Templeton said. Three candidates, when asked, said they have yet to pick a lieutenant governor. Templeton announced her running mate, solicitor Walt Wilkins, earlier this month. As parliamentarians in Baghdad work to form a new governing coalition in the wake of this months elections, their counterparts in Washington are seeking to sanction more than a dozen of the Iraqi legislators over their links to Iran. The House of Representatives unanimously voted last week on legislation requiring President Donald Trump to sanction persons that are officials, agents, affiliates of or owned and controlled by two prominent Iran-backed militias that operate in Iraq and Syria. The amendment from Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, to a must-pass annual defense authorization bill targets Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, both of which are part of the Shiite-led Popular Mobilization Units battling the Islamic State. Both militias joined with other Iran-backed military forces as part of the Fatah, or Conquest, political coalition, which came in second in the May 12 elections with 47 out of 329 parliamentary seats. Asaib Ahl al-Haq won 14 of those 47 seats, according to Iraq analyst Kirk Sowell, while Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba did not field any candidates. The US Department of Treasury will ultimately determine if the political wing constitutes an affiliate or entity controlled by Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a Poe aide told Al-Monitor. Congressman Poe believes [Asaib Ahl al-Haq] will likely be subject to these penalties unless it completely breaks all ties with the armed wing, renounces violence and acts solely as [an] Iraqi political party with no backing from Iran. Political parties are about engaging in peaceful civil discourse, not about representing armed thugs who commit violent atrocities to achieve political ends, the aide added. The Trump administration has taken an increasingly hawkish approach to Iran following the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal earlier this month, vowing to go after Irans proxies throughout the region. If it so chooses, however, the administration has some wiggle room to avoid sanctioning the 14 new Asaib Ahl al-Haq lawmakers as Iraqi law requires political parties to formally separate themselves from the militias. However, the parties retain the same names as their respective militias and Asaib Ahl al-Haqs leader, Qais al-Khazali, has landed a seat in parliament. The Iraqi Embassy did not respond to Al-Monitors inquiries about its positions on the provision. After Poe introduced similar legislation last year, a Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba spokesman denounced the bill as a conspiracy and victory for the Islamic State and all other terrorist organizations supported by Washington. Despite the conspiratorial rhetoric, both the Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba militias formed an alliance of convenience with the United States during the fight against the Islamic State. Previously, both groups had battled US forces following the 2003 invasion of Iraq with the backing of Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The United States has sanctioned the leader of Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, Akram al-Kaabi, since 2008. Despite Washingtons fear of growing Iranian influence in Iraq, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadrs nationalist Sairoon Alliance won the most seats. He is now working with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadis Nasr (Victory) coalition in an attempt to establish a new government, even as disgruntled parties are demanding a recount. While Sadr previously directed the Mahdi Army against US troops following the 2003 invasion, he is also critical of Iranian influence in Iraq. This has prompted IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani to coordinate with pro-Tehran parties in Baghdad as a bulwark against Sadr. Other than potential sanctions on the 14 Iraqi parliamentarians, it remains unclear how much of an impact such measures would actually have on Washingtons ability to do business with Baghdad as Iraqi politicians attempt to create a new coalition. The most meaningful impact of sanctions like these is often less on the direct targets and more on their environment, Nathaniel Rabkin, the managing editor of the newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics, told Al-Monitor. The more Iraqi entities and persons you sanction, the more US businesses will be cautious about doing business in Iraq more generally and the more carefully theyll be vetting Iraqi partners. The Senate Armed Services Committee advanced its own draft of the annual defense bill last week, but has not publicly released the text. While Egyptian officials argue that a new bill requiring restaurant and shop owners to install cameras will hinder terrorism and boost security, critics counter that the true targets are opponents of the government. Egypts parliamentary committee on local administration met May 15 in the presence of representatives of the Ministries of Local Development, Justice, Tourism and Health and approved a draft law on shops and restaurants, commonly referred to as the draft law on commercial shops. The bill merges and amends three existing laws on shops and restaurants and includes a special provision forcing the owners of cafes and shops to install indoor and outdoor surveillance cameras to obtain a license for their enterprises. The bill is expected to be passed into law in June. Parliament member Ahmad al-Sigini, who heads the local administration committee, said that some time ago, the parliament discussed a bill forcing the owners of shops and cafes to install surveillance cameras. In the meantime, the Ministry of Interior proposed adding an article to the draft law on commercial shops imposing the installation of surveillance cameras. Sigini told Al-Monitor in a telephone interview that Article 27 of the bill requires shops and restaurants to install indoor and outdoor cameras in order to obtain a license. Any facility not fitted with cameras will not see its license renewed. He said that this article outlined general rules imposing the electronic camera surveillance system in line with international security systems, pending the issuance of separate legislation on cameras. The new legislation on this issue will be more detailed and determine the number of required cameras according to the size of the shop. It will also cover other matters related to the surveillance process, said Sigini. Article 29 of the bill defines the cases in which shops will be closed and their licenses revoked. It states that shops shall be closed in case of violation of several articles, notably Article 27, requiring the installation of electronic surveillance cameras. Parliament member Anisa Hassouna was the first to propose a draft law forcing cafes and public shops to mount surveillance cameras on March 29, 2017. In a press statement on July 18, 2017, Hassouna argued that her proposal was necessary in light of the numerous recent terrorist attacks hitting Egypt. On Nov. 20, 2017, a parliamentary committee approved a draft law submitted by the government on the installation and use of surveillance cameras and recording devices. This bill, which has yet to be passed into law, consists of 11 articles determining where cameras and recording devices are permitted or prohibited, as well as the penalties in case of violation of its provisions. The governments bill amended some of the articles contained in Hassouna's proposal, extending penalties from three to seven years in prison and inflating fines from 500 Egyptian pounds ($28) to 5,000 ($280). On Feb. 22, 2017, Cairo Gov. Atef Abdel Hamid instructed the governorate's shops, hospitals, churches, mosques, police departments and all state institutions to install surveillance cameras in the name of general security. Mohamed Sayed, a member of the opposition Dostour Party, told Al-Monitor that obliging public shops to install surveillance cameras is contrary to the Egyptian Constitution. Article 57 states, Private life is inviolable, safeguarded and may not be infringed upon. It asserts that means of communication are confidential and may only be examined or monitored by a justified judicial order. Such a law would violate personal privacy of citizens and their fundamental rights, he said. Sayed said its unimaginable to sit in a public cafe and find a camera watching over you, adding, All shops, even small stalls opposite the Egyptian High Court of Justice have been forced to use surveillance cameras. Sayed believes that the forcing all shops across the country to mount surveillance cameras will result in a surveillance state. Egyptians would be monitored and watched 24 hours a day in public places, he said. He suspects that the main purpose of this draft law is tracking state opponents and politicians rather than deterring theft and other crime. Egypts political activists are known to meet in cafes and restaurants in central Cairo, especially since the January 25 Revolution. Judge Refaat al-Sayyed, the former head of the Criminal Court of Cairo, justified the need for the law, including Article 27. These mainly aim to anticipate terrorism or criminal acts by surveilling vital public places that have been a favorite target of jihadist and radical movements in recent times, he told Al-Monitor. He explained that obliging all cafes and private enterprises to use surveillance cameras does not conflict with the principle of privacy. The new draft law stipulates that cameras may not be installed in places intended for housing, public baths, treatment rooms or fitting rooms, and other places that naturally should not be surveilled. Responding to the questions raised by many observers, Sayyed asserted that the state will not bear any implementation costs. The draft law requires owners of public shops, cafes and commercial enterprises to cover the expenses related to surveillance cameras, he said, noting that installing these devices is a necessary safety procedure. He pointed out that the government sought to submit the draft law on commercial shops in light of the several terrorist operations that targeted different areas in Cairo and the governorate, mainly vital areas in central Cairo. The Isaaf intersection on July 26 Street in Central Cairo, for example, has been the site of several bombings. On June 29, 2015, Egypts Public Prosecutor Hisham Barakat was assassinated by members of the Ansar al-Quds organization in the Misr al-Jadida quarter in Cairo. On May 30, in an internal election over the speakership of Iran's parliament, moderate Ali Larijani defeated the leader of the main Reformist parliamentary faction, becoming the speaker for the 11th time in a row a record in the history of Islamic Republic. This was the second time that Mohammad Reza Aref, who is the chairman of the Reformists' Hope faction in parliament, entered the competition and refused to reach a consensus with moderates. Iran's parliament is broadly made up of three main camps: independents, or moderates; the Hope faction, or Reformists; and Followers of the Leader, or hard-liners. The vote was held twice, because, based on internal law of parliament, if no one gains the absolute majority of votes, the voting goes to a second round. During the first round, Aref managed to obtain more votes than Larijani, but it wasnt an absolute majority. In the next round, hard-liner Hamid Reza Haji-Babai, who had won 54 votes, withdrew from the competition in favor of Larijani. The total number of parliament members is 290. Larijani was elected to be parliament speaker once again by earning 147 votes. In reaction to the results and the reason behind Aref's victory in the first round of the internal speakership election, moderate parliament member Gholam-Ali Imanabadi argued that hard-liners' anger with Larijani led them to vote for Aref. "A famous hard-line parliament member told [me] 'I prefer Aref to Larijani.' A number of the parliament members of Followers of the Leader faction voted for Aref. However, this doesnt mean that they had formed a coalition; it is due to them being upset with Larijani," said Imanabadi May 30. Hard-liners are critical of Larijani as he played a significant role in pushing approval of the 2015 nuclear deal through parliament. He has been also slammed by ultra-conservatives for throwing his weight behind Rouhani in the 2017 presidential election and supporting him in different crises. Meanwhile, Masoud Pezeshkian and Ali Motahari, who are both members of the Hope faction, were re-elected as deputies of the speaker. Motahari is known in Iran as an outspoken parliament member who has repeatedly slammed the hard-liners and judiciary. He has also called for the release of the leaders of the Green Movement who remain under house arrest despite pledges of their release. Motahari's candid positions have turned him into one of the usual targets of hard-liners. During the internal election of parliament, hard-liners were also seeking to prevent Mohtahari's re-election. During the past two years, Reformists have become suspicious of Reformist-backed President Hassan Rouhani's administration turn toward moderate conservatives. Reformist outlets claimed in 2017 that Rouhani's chief of staff had lobbied in favor of Larijani's speakership. The same rumors have now resurfaced, leading Rouhanis parliamentary deputy to deny it. "The government has had no intervention in this field," said Hossein-Ali Amiri May 30, referring to Larijanis re-election. TEHRAN, Iran Iran's numerous tourist attractions, many of which stem from its rich history and civilization going back thousands of years, have the potential to transform into revenue streams far more sustainable than the country's vast oil and natural gas reserves. But this potential has remained largely untapped due to unyielding restrictions that deprive visitors of a number of basic liberties, Irans troubled foreign relations mostly with the United States and lackluster development caused by mismanagement. As such, while Iran's tourism sector has grown, it has done so at a much fainter rate than those of neighboring countries such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, which have conversely become magnets for scores of Iranian tourists. In this vein, even as 4.9 million foreign tourists visited Iran in the Iranian year ending March 20, 2017, the country's tourism balance is still heavily in the red since more than 9 million Iranians spent their money abroad during the same period. Tourism is projected to have a 3% direct share of Iran's economy in 2018, while its indirect and induced impacts will drive up that share to higher than 7%. The sector's contribution to employment is forecast to rise to more than 1.65 million jobs or 6.2% of total employment this year. But with the US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and its pledge to reimpose stringent sanctions on Iran, a long shadow has been cast on the countrys tourism sector. While the other signatories to the JCPOA have been unanimous in voicing support for keeping the landmark deal alive, this has failed to reassure Iranian businesses. "We cannot definitively decide on what we're going to do tomorrow," Saeed Azam-Vaghefi, a product and promotion manager at Iran Doostan Tours Co., told Al-Monitor. "We really don't know what can be done." "We are a business enterprise and a subordinate of the country's political conditions. I'm not sure of the future of my business, and we have predicted no particularly clear scenarios even as our country is among the safest for the presence of foreign travelers," added Azam-Vaghefi, whose employer was recognized as Iran's best tourism services exporter last year. Younger Iranians who work in the tourism sector also share these concerns, perhaps even more emphatically as they find themselves working in a highly unstable environment with fewer experiences to draw on. Nasrin Tahernejad, a millennial tour leader, said the prospect of US sanctions will in general have a negative impact on Iran's image abroad. "Sanctions will make people think that even basic safety and security are scarce in Iran because they will just have a general view that things are bad in the country," she told Al-Monitor. Tahernejad said her own tour leader friends and peers who have become friends with foreign tourists over time are increasingly being asked questions about how safe Iran is to visit, noting that even returning tourists are expressing grave concerns. However, not everyone is short on optimism. Hamid Athari, a quinquagenarian whos been working as an inbound tour guide since the July 2015 signing of the nuclear deal, doesnt view impending US sanctions as the biggest threat to Irans tourism sector. These sanctions are unilateral, whereas the previous ones [which were lifted under the JCPOA] were multilateral, Athari told Al-Monitor. I think things will remain roughly as they are [for the tourism sector] and any psychological effects will be short-lived. Athari opined that Irans ongoing currency crisis, which induced the government to unify the dual exchange rate regime on April 10, has a bigger impact but that this impact will not necessarily be wholly negative. Since the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) on April 11 capped the amount of foreign currency that travelers are allowed to purchase at the new unified exchange rate 1,000 euros once a year and 500 euros once a year for distant and neighboring countries, respectively many have had to rethink their usual holiday travels. Foreign currency beyond these amounts is available at a much higher rate on the black market, though such purchases are technically against the law. Against this backdrop, the CBI has reportedly reached an agreement with the tourism organization which is finally set to turn into a tourism ministry as the general outlines of its transformation bill have been approved by parliament to extend foreign currency to the tourism sector at the official rate. On the other hand, for foreign visitors, the weakened rial means cheaper travels to a country that was already ranked first in the world in a 2017 World Economic Forum (WEF) report in terms of price competitiveness. Thus, should the government manage to succeed in terms of managing the new exchange rate regime, Irans tourism balance might stand to benefit. But in addition to all major problems that have challenged Irans tourism sector for years, including but not limited to lackluster tourist service infrastructure and health and hygiene the abovementioned WEF report ranked them at 116th and 93rd in the world, respectively the foreign currency issue has raised the creativity bar for speculative activities. Recently, most of the people around me looking to purchase dollars call and say that they want to buy [hard currency] from foreign travelers because money exchanges dont sell it to us, Nooshin Hashemi, a 23-year-old inbound travel consultant and tour manager told Al-Monitor in reference to the CBIs ban on the sale and purchase of banknotes by money exchanges on April 14. Hashemi said reimposed US sanctions, on the other hand, will most likely translate into lesser prospects of Iran re-establishing direct banking channels with other countries, meaning that inbound tourists will have to continue carrying cash with them. She also said the number of foreign tourists will decrease. Hashemi noted the negative image of Iran that goes hand in hand with the reimposition of US sanctions, saying that foreign tourists may wonder why Iran is sanctioned, and that the answer to such a question may misguidedly be because theyre terrorists or because of their nuclear power. All in all, the return of US sanctions will not, at least in the short term, be without detrimental effect to Irans tourism sector. Nonetheless, it would also be premature to completely write off Irans long and ambitious goal of attracting 20 million foreign tourists per year by 2025 and earning as much as $25 billion from tourism just yet, especially as senior officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani, have emphasized development of the tourism sector. BAGHDAD A group of war correspondents announced May 20 the formation of an association to defend the rights of war correspondents and journalists. Association leader Mustafa Latif told NRT TV on May 20, We will announce the formation of the association officially June 1 during a conference that will be held in Baghdad. Iraqi journalists who covered the battles against the Islamic State (IS) in recent years created their own association independent of the two syndicates of journalists in Iraq the Iraq Journalists Syndicate and the National Union of Iraqi Journalists and of the institutions that defend journalistic freedom. War correspondents who were sent to the battlefronts to cover battles against IS over the past four years have formed the National Military Information Association, which will defend the rights of wounded and slain journalists who were not treated fairly by their media corporations during war coverage. Mujahed Abu al-Hill, the head of the Iraqi Media Network, met with the constituent committee of the association May 2 and promised to help it become a platform documenting the achievements of correspondents who work for various Iraqi national media outlets and who covered Iraqi forces' battles against terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and IS. The Iraqi Media Network is an independent public organization in charge of a number of TV, radio and other media operations, including Al-Iraqiya TV. The war correspondents association began forming a seven-member constituent committee in April and elected correspondent Ali Mtayar as president and his colleagues Latif and Ali Rashid as deputies. The group has 120 war correspondents as members. Mtayar told Al-Monitor that governmental red tape is delaying necessary paperwork in the cases of slain and wounded journalists. "We want to put more pressure to help our colleagues who have sacrificed their lives to relay the truth to get their rights, Mtayar said. Latif said, Our priority is to guarantee the rights of those killed and wounded from the media corporations where they worked. The association was established a year after the battles in the country ended and most war correspondents returned to peaceful cities to practice their profession. However, it seems that when some wounded journalists did not receive proper treatment and when some slain journalists' families did not receive compensation, their colleagues decided to form a body to defend the rights of those affected. The association will be part of civil society and will work in partnership with the Iraqi Media Network and the Iraq Journalists Syndicate. It will be registered with the nongovernmental association department affiliated with the general secretariat of the Iraqi Cabinet. Before 2013 and the rise of extremist groups in western Iraq, the term war correspondent was not common. But it spread widely after IS took over Mosul in June 2014 and media teams began accompanying governmental forces to battlefronts. Iraq is among the most dangerous journalistic environments in the world, and in recent years many local and foreign journalists have been killed in the country. Iraq lost 50 local journalists over four years at battlefronts, and more than 100 journalists were wounded. Some of them still are suffering from critical injuries. Investigative reports have shown that some war correspondents were sent to battlefronts under unprofessional conditions in terms of their safety and without social security coverage in what is being called a violation of their rights. Members of the association said its formation was long overdue. They blamed the delay on the intervention of governmental groups. Constituent committee Haidar Shakour told Al-Monitor, The disbanded Military Information Cell that was affiliated with the premiership pressured war correspondents and discriminated against them to control the news and military correspondence. This is one of the reasons the formation of the association was delayed, but we have managed to be independent and form our own entity. The association put in place an annual work plan related to several issues, including training Iraqi journalists on covering conflict zones and on professional safety. Projects related to how the media cover the military and journalists' role in helping societies receive news during war are to be carried out. The association is compiling cases of journalists who were killed and wounded in battles but where proper compensation was not provided. The cases will be submitted to the Iraqi government in cooperation with the Iraq Journalists Syndicate. A program in coordination with the government is also planned in order for those suffering from major injuries to be treated outside Iraq. The war correspondents association is not directly funded by any governmental or nongovernmental party. But the Iraqi Media Network made promises to offer it some logistical aid to provide headquarters and office stationery for its members. Amal Sakr, vice president of the National Union of Iraqi Journalists, told Al-Monitor, I believe this association is not necessary. It is an addition to the list of other associations that offered journalists nothing. Sakr said legislation in parliament guaranteeing rights of journalists is more important than an abundance of associations raising the banner of defending journalists. Senior Labor Party member Eitan Cabel recently published a new plan that he qualified as a sobering-up initiative. According to his proposal, which he presented in a May 24 Haaretz editorial, Israel should not wait for the Palestinians to negotiate a two-state solution, but should instead proceed with unilateral steps. Cabels plan has caused a commotion within Labor, but he is not surrendering to the right as many of his fellow party members claim. He is an important voice on the center-left who wants to introduce a pragmatic and relevant new agenda. As one of the longest-serving Knesset members, Cabel has long been a steady and enthusiastic advocate of separation from the Palestinians in the form of a two-state solution. Now, in his Haaretz piece, he calls on Labor members to wake up. The plan that he laid out is not an attempt by Cabel to turn his back on his own vision. Rather, he simply proposes postponing it, because it is impossible to achieve for the time being. That is why the attacks on Cabel seem to make no sense. Within Labor, he has been subjected to aggressive responses and even calls to suspend him. His fellow party members should instead be celebrating that there is one among them trying to initiate an internal ideological discussion so that a party that has failed time and again at the ballot box can regain its relevance and win back public trust. Instead, that one person is being denounced and condemned. We dont need to open our eyes, Labor Party member Itzik Shmuli wrote in a Haaretz editorial of his own. We need to be convinced that we are on the right path. Meanwhile, party chairman Avi Gabbay clarified that Cabels proposal is his own and not representative of the party. Cabel in his editorial calls on his fellow party members to stop clinging to old ideas so as to prevent an irreversible situation in which Israel becomes a binational state, instead of a Jewish and democratic nation. If Israel annexes the West Bank, Palestinians will one day become the majority population. Cabels starting point is that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is not interested in negotiations, and with no one to negotiate with, it is up to Israel to take its fate into its own hands. He claims that the right-wing government is perpetuating the existing situation and doing nothing to prevent a binational state, a scenario that he considers almost inevitable. Instead, Cabel proposes that Israel annex the major West Bank settlement blocs, which are home to 300,000 of the 400,000 settlers. This will determine the status of settlers living in Gush Etzion, Maaleh Adumim, Karnei Shomron, Ariel and the Jordan Valley. At the same time, there would be a complete freeze on construction outside the blocs, and negotiations with the remaining settlers to evacuate their homes in exchange for financial compensation. Cabel believes that these moves will make it possible for Israel to determine its future borders unilaterally, instead of waiting for the Palestinians. Cabel wrote, I am not for a moment giving up on the desire for peace, but I also believe that given the reality that emerged in the past decade, Israel must open its eyes. We cannot wait for the Palestinians, because Mahmoud Abbas has already given up on the idea of a two-state solution. Cabel claims that his party is making a mistake in refusing to let go of the ideas behind the Oslo Accords (1993, 1995), which he says collapsed long ago. The party, he believes, is ignoring the new situation in the region. Cabel asserts that the Oslo paradigm assumes that it is possible through peace treaties to arrive at a Middle East with open borders like Europe. He also contends that this ideal collapsed once it became clear that is impossible for the security forces to rein in the terrorist organizations. Oslo is a very loaded term in Israeli society. The Oslo agreement signed a quarter of a century ago between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat are synonymous with the two-state solution and separation from the Palestinians. They are also the legacy of Rabin, who paid with his life assassinated by a far-right Israeli Jew in 1995 to reach a peace agreement. That is why the ideas presented by Cabel seem, at first glance, unjustifiably heretical and a betrayal of the diplomatic vision that distinguishes Labor from the right. Despite the arguments against him, Cabel has not become an agent of the right-wing HaBayit HaYehudi within the Labor Party. In fact, he is far from it. Anyone with an open mind who reads his plan in depth will discover that all it really proposes is a pragmatic and contemporary approach based on the recognition that separation between Israel and the Palestinians is inevitable. Cabels plan is reminiscent of the convergence plan of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on the eve of the 2006 election. Convergence referred to a unilateral move that Olmert wanted to initiate in the belief that Israel must determine its own borders instead of waiting for the Palestinians. According to Olmert's plan, the major settlement blocs would be incorporated into the State of Israel, while isolated settlements would be evacuated. Neither then, nor now, was Olmert suspected of lacking political daring or of groveling before the right. In fact, it was the exact opposite. There are grounds for debating Cabels ideas. In fact, it would be worthwhile for Labor to discuss them. There is no reason to fear that the party has lost its way and is kowtowing to the right. There have always been diverse opinions within Labor. It was known for its penetrating ideological debates between its more security-oriented members and the pragmatists, that is, the hawkish camp and the more dovish camp. Israels first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, was a member of the former as was Rabin. The debate itself is essential. Only a debate can help a party that has failed in election after election. A debate of this kind would show the public that Labor is a vibrant, democratic party with many different ideas, as befits a large party that wants to come to power and as it was when it held power. Cabels plan is an attempt to set an inner-party dialogue in motion and make the party relevant when it confronts the right. Cabels diagnosis is correct. Israelis are not convinced that it is necessary to cling to the ideas of Oslo. These ideas belong to a different time and different circumstances. Some people see the release of Cabel's plan as the greatest proof that Labor and the left have lost their way, that they are desperate and chaotic, that they are trying to imitate the right. In fact, the opposite is true. Cabels plan is not fully formulated. It lacks answers to many important issues, such as the citizenship of Palestinians living in the major settlement blocs. On the other hand, it breathes life into the party by forcing its members to debate the best ways to remain relevant while adhering to the framework of a two-state solution. As Iraqi Kurdistan fighting forces, collectively known as peshmerga, began their three-year battle against the Islamic State (IS) in 2014, members of the Iraqi Kurdish public came to perceive them as one nationalist force defending their land. Even the lower ranks of the force came to believe they were fighting IS for Kurdistan and not for any political party. There were high hopes that the peshmerga forces would finally become an apolitical force under one unified command. But the recent electoral campaigning and related violence dashed these hopes and showed once again that the two ruling parties the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) see the peshmerga forces as nothing but militias protecting the parties' power and interests. If you dont have shaq [kick] and para [money], you cant achieve anything here is a common saying in Iraqi Kurdistan, meaning no political force can change anything without the power of a militia and a pool of cash. This is often a veiled reference to the main opposition party, the Movement for Change (Gorran), which lacks its own militia. After the polls closed May 12, a senior PUK commander ordered an attack on Gorran headquarters in Sulaimaniyah. Since then, many in Iraq's Kurdistan region are questioning whether the peshmerga fighters and other politicized security forces can be trusted with maintaining order. An armed force led by a member of the PUK leadership attacks Gorran headquarters with heavy guns without facing any legal consequences from the government and the [PUK] party, Shorsh Haji, a senior Gorran official, pointed out May 21. Therefore, in this jungle [Kurdistan] Gorran should think about another way of defending itself. Though Gorran has no organized militia, it does have many armed followers and can mobilize them quickly, as it did on the night of the attack. There is tremendous pressure on the Gorran leadership from its support base to set up a defense militia in case of another attack. Since that night, delegations from the US government, the United Nations and the British parliament have visited Zargata Hill (also called Gorran Hill), where the Gorran party is based, to discuss the formation of Baghdad's future government, as well as to inspect the scene of the attack. The United States provides almost $400 million annually to the peshmerga forces, which at times have feigned a unified front to maintain that funding. We said it is imperative that this assistance is made conditional upon [actually] unifying the force," said Hoshyar Omer, a Gorran official who met with the American delegation. Since 1992, when the Kurdish region in northern Iraq became semi-autonomous, the leadership has claimed it wants to unify forces and establish one command. Such efforts have met with fleeting success, at best. Nawshirwan Mustafa, who was the main PUK peshmerga commander for more than two decades, said in 2005 that the PUK and KDP militias posed the main threat to democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan. In 2010, Massoud Barzani, who at that time was president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), echoed Mustafas warning when he met with the peshmergas' top brass, stating that the political parties should have no influence over the peshmerga. The future of Kurdistan depends on the peshmerga forces, Barzani said. That's why this force needs to be reorganized on a new footing. The more this force is institutionalized, the more influential we [the Kurds] will become, and unless these two forces are unified, the people will live in trepidation. Barzani went one step further and said the Kurds have been promised many things by their Western partners, but the fulfillment of these promises depends on the reorganization of the peshmerga forces." Many have questioned whether some PUK and KDP senior peshmerga commanders have ever been genuinely interested in unification. Their interests would be jeopardized if the forces became more transparent and unified. Unification would mean "significant political collaboration on the part of the KDP and PUK, whose relationship is marked by animosity, suspicion and competition, wrote US Ambassador Ryan Crocker in July 2007. The PUK and the KDP managed to unify 12 brigades from late 2010 until 2013, but then the process stopped. In the aftermath of the Kurds' independence referendum in September 2017, Baghdad clashed with the peshmerga forces and most of the unified brigades simply fell apart. The Kurdish security forces are highly fractured, with loyalties to the two ruling parties and powerful individuals within these parties. The lack of proper oversight and accountability created this fractured force brewing with corruption. Some corrupt commanders even reportedly conducted business with IS, but it appears they faced no punitive measures. The KRG's Peshmerga Ministry, which consists of PUK and KDP commanders and officials, adopted a 35-point reform package last year that is to be implemented with the help of US, British and German military advisers. The war with IS, the corruption of some senior peshmerga officials and the miserable conditions many peshmerga still live in have made the rank and file realize the only way forward is to unify their forces under one command in the hope of making them more transparent. All the low-level peshmerga fighters and even the midlevel peshmerga officers want to come under one command, a captain in KDP's Zervani police force told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. What happened May 12 on Gorran Hill should be a warning call to the Kurdish officials. The jury is still out on the reform package that the Peshmerga Ministry is trying to implement with the help of the coalition advisers, but the fractured nature of the force can only bring more incidents like the one on May 12 at Gorran Hill and with that comes more instability unless PUK and KDP officials come to their senses and establish a truly integrated and unified force. As Russia tries to wrap things up in Syria, its moving ahead with plans for Libya. Managers of top international companies, national leaders and opinion-makers of all sorts gathered last week for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia. Among a dozen public and closed panels, one session was dedicated to Libyas reintegration into the world economic system. The panel brought together the foreign minister for the Libyan Government of National Accord, Mohamed Siala, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and the head of the Russian contact group for intra-Libyan resolution, Lev Dengov. The meeting is perhaps indicative of Russias changing perception of Libya and its lengthy civil war. Moscow has long seen Libyas situation as one of chaos resulting from the NATO-led intervention in 2011; as a result, Libya is unable to be integrated into the world economy. All this means that economic connections cannot be built and that high-level foreign officials generally cannot discuss anything substantial with Libyan representatives. If Libya is serious about building its future, and if Russia is to become a partner in that endeavor, they both must start working toward stability to develop trade and re-establish economic ties with others. Libyan leaders appeared to be making progress in this effort at a May 29 summit in Paris. Moscows changing attitude is evident in the latest statistics for trade between the countries. The 2011 revolution had almost ceased economic cooperation between the two countries. More than a dozen major projects in oil production, construction, nuclear energy and health care halted. In 2016, the countries trade fell to $74 million, and exclusively involved Russian agricultural exports. The next year, however, although the assortment of goods remained virtually the same, trade almost doubled, reaching $135 million. In the first quarter of 2018, Libyas grain imports from Russia dropped 54% from the same period in 2017. In 2018s first quarter, grain made up 46% of total Russian exports to Libya, but the range of products grew. Metals made up about one-third of Russian exports to Libya, and chemicals, about 10%; Russia previously exported neither of these commodity groups to Libya. According to Dengov, major Russian corporations, mostly oil and gas companies such as Tatneft, are interested in returning to the Libyan market. Due to security issues, operating in the country is difficult, requiring constant interaction between Russian entrepreneurs and local Libyan authorities, including government officials, tribal chiefs and municipal leaders. It appears that on Russias end, these issues are most likely to be settled in part by Dengov himself. Dengov also mentioned that last month, representatives of Libyan security services visited Moscow to meet with their Russian counterparts. The Libyans expressed interest in deliveries of Russian security systems, Dengov said, but gave no details. Some other countries also appear to be changing their views of Libya. Some Western countries, UN officials and Libyans themselves expect the instability to end soon through evolving discourse. This emerging optimism is only partly driven by hopes of implementing the peace plan drawn up by UN Special Envoy Ghassan Salame. As shown in a May 2018 report by Russias Valdai International Discussion Club (to which this author contributed), analysts believe the transformative period in the Middle East is over, and current trends in political, social and economic development will determine the regional picture for the years, if not decades, to come. Moscow believes that even before political conflicts are resolved, all parties have an opportunity to revive their economic relations with Middle Eastern countries, including first and foremost through economic reconstruction in Syria and regular trade with Libya. The main problem here is that reviving economic relations calls for adapting to the current situation. And if adaptation turns to complacency and the situation grows stagnant, paradoxically, it can impede conflict resolution and political normalization. Such danger exists now in Libya. Today, there are at least three main potential approaches to settling the conflict. The first is the aforementioned UN plan, which involves organizing a National Conference this summer, holding elections later this year or in early 2019 and adopting a constitution most likely after the election. The second approach is what Egypt proposes: consolidating Libyas military groups as a first measure preceding the countrys political unification. The third idea, promoted mostly by numerous foreign nongovernmental organizations, implies grass-roots consolidation building the government structure from the basic level of local communities and tribes, and rebuilding the countrys social and economic integrity. Obviously, all three visions complement one another. But skeptics ask: What happens if none of the proposals works? After all, grass-roots consolidation is time consuming, considering Libyas vast experience with failed elections and broken agreements. So is unifying the military, a process that constantly turns out to be dependent on politics and unable to break any deadlock. In this situation, maintaining a balance between the countrys demands for economic development and the need to preserve Libyas national interests is crucial. Its also important to note that while such reconstruction is a positive idea, it cant be easily implemented in a number of areas, including the financial system, education, health care and food security. Here, Russia sees a role for itself, particularly in education and health care. When Moammar Gadhafi led Libya, Russian companies signed an agreement with the government to create an integrated system of telemedicine: using telecommunications to remotely diagnose illness and prescribe treatment. Currently, this project is likely to be restarted, as the necessary international laws were created in recent years and Russian specialists have received important experience by working in politically unstable regions. As for education, Russias government declared last year that it aims to have 710,000 foreign students from various countries enrolled in Russian universities by 2025, compared with 220,000 in 2017, and foreign students taking Russian online courses should grow from 1.1 million to 3.5 million. Moscow will invite Libyan students to Russia and, depending on the security situation, might open university branches in Libya. Russia also is developing large-scale remote education programs to implement in both countries schools. Moscow believes cooperation in health care and education can allow Russia to promote its long-term interests in North Africa. This would also help Libyan leaders address the challenges of reintegrating their country internationally, which in the long run is likely to become an important tool for building peace. The Syrian regimes position on southern Syria, in particular the rebel-held Daraa province that is part of a de-escalation zone, remains vague following reports last week that Damascus was preparing to launch a major military operation there. Jordan, one of three signatories in addition to the United States and Russia to an agreement adopted in November that imposed a cease-fire in southern Syria, is closely following up on developments. Jordan wants the de-escalation zone created in [the] south of Syria to remain intact, and we believe that these zones have led to positive results and helped reach a cease-fire in Syria, an unnamed government source told the Jordan Times on May 27. On May 28, Reuters quoted an unnamed Jordanian official saying that Jordan is confident that Russia will not allow President Bashar al-Assads government to wreck a cease-fire in southern Syria. He said that Russia, the United States and Jordan still see eye to eye on the need to preserve the cease-fire. The Jordanian position followed a strong warning May 25 by the US State Department that the United States was ready to take firm and appropriate measures in response to cease-fire violations. The statement was made following news reports that the Syrian army was preparing to move south after a series of victories that ended rebel presence in areas surrounding the capital, Damascus. On May 25, Agence France-Presse reported that the Syrian air force had dropped leaflets over Daraa province warning of an imminent military operation and calling on fighters to drop their weapons. The leaflets also gave fighters a choice between dying and surrendering, and called on rebels to embrace reconciliation while offering to protect civilians. Jordan and Israel, which share borders with southern Syria, have repeatedly warned that they will not allow the deployment of Iranian militias and Hezbollah fighters close to their borders. Israel wants all pro-Iran militias to leave Syria. On May 28, Russias Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was quoted by Haaretz as saying that only Syrian government troops should be deployed on Syrias southern border. His statement came a day after the same paper reported that Israel believes Russia is ready to talk about a significant distancing of Iranian forces and allied Shiite militias from the Israeli-Syrian border. Irans Ambassador to Amman Mojtaba Ferdosipour told Jordans Al-Ghad newspaper May 23 that Iran has no military presence in southern Syria or along the borders with Jordan and Iranian forces and militias will not take part in any military operation by the Syrian army there. Ferdosipour said Iran supports the de-escalation zone in the south. On May 22, a pro-opposition Syrian news site Enab Baladi claimed that Shiite militias, including Hezbollah, have withdrawn fighters from Daraa province and regular Syrian army troops have been deployed in their place. Iran has denied a May 27 report by Saudi news site Elaph that claimed Tehran was negotiating indirectly with Israel through a Jordanian mediator. Elaph said it has learned that secret negotiations between the two countries have resulted in an Iranian commitment not to participate in military operations in southwest Syria. But on May 28, Irans Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasimi described the report as fabricated, adding that Tehran does not recognize the Zionist and terrorist entity. While the Damascus government has not commented on its operations in southern Syria, a Syrian diplomat in Amman announced May 26 that the regime does not need to launch a military operation against militants in southern Syria. Ayman Alloush, charge daffaires at the Syria Embassy in Amman, was quoted by a local news site as saying the problem in southern Syria can be solved peacefully through dialogue, thanks to Jordanian efforts with rebel groups. Aloush said that according to the de-escalation agreement, armed groups will be allowed to remain in southern Syria. Fayez al-Duwairi, a retired Jordanian army general and military analyst, told Al-Monitor that following the US warning to Syria and reports that Iranian militias have withdrawn from the southern parts of the country, the possibility of a major military operation has subsided. But he added that there could be still an agreement by the United States, Russia, Jordan and Israel to allow the Syrian army to extend its control so that it can reopen the border point of Nasib between Jordan and Syria. Jordan has an interest in the reopening of borders with Syria and in concluding a peaceful agreement between the rebels and the regime in Daraa, Duwairi said. A possible breakthrough could still happen as Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov announced May 29 that Russia, the United States and Jordan will hold a meeting on Syrias southern de-escalation zone. No date and location were set. With Russias assurances that only the Syrian army will be allowed to deploy in southern Syria and reports that Iranian militias have pulled back, it is difficult to see how the US position can be justified. A peaceful deployment should spare Daraa carnage and destruction, which in the long run is in the interest of Jordan, according to Duwairi. DIYARBAKIR, Turkey As the June 24 presidential and parliamentary polls approach, Turkeys opposition parties are concerned about possible foul play in the critical race, which is looming as the toughest election battle for the government yet. The polls will mark Turkeys transition to a super-presidency system tailor-made for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose victory, many fear, would seal the demise of Turkish democracy, making election integrity all the more critical. The new system was narrowly approved in a controversial referendum last year. International observers said at the time that up to 2.5 million votes almost double the winning margin of the yes vote might have been manipulated, as the Higher Electoral Board (YSK) made a last-minute decision to validate ballots unstamped by election officials. The YSKs decision and subsequent changes to election rules in March have stoked misgivings over the fairness of the upcoming polls, in which small margins could be of big significance. In a move that further fueled concerns, the YSK said May 28 it had decided to relocate polling stations in predominantly Kurdish areas that would affect 144,000 voters, citing security reasons. The move, made possible by the March amendments, infuriated the pro-Kurdish Peoples Democratic Party (HDP), which claims the authorities are maneuvering to push the party below the 10% threshold required to enter parliament. This has nothing to do with security; rather it is a move to break the will of voters, HDP lawmaker Mithat Sancar told Al-Monitor. HDP spokesman Ayhan Bilgen told a press conference that the decision involved moving ballot boxes from villages where the HDP gets around 75-80% of votes to villages where the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) gets 75-80% of votes. The head of the YSK said the ballot boxes would be moved to a walking distance of 5 kilometers [3.1 miles] at most. The HDP worries that, in remote, impoverished areas in the mainly Kurdish southeast, even such distances could discourage or prevent villagers from voting. According to Bilgen, the 144,000 affected voters represent a significant numeric quantity that could sway the outcome of the election. Polls currently show the HDP slightly above the threshold. In Turkeys electoral arithmetic, a strong showing by the HDP could strip the AKP of its parliamentary majority, as it happened in the June 2015 polls. Alternatively, if the party fails to overcome the threshold, the AKP would sweep most constituencies the HDP would have otherwise won. Pollsters see Kurdish voters as kingmakers in the presidential vote, especially if it goes into a second round. The nationwide state of emergency, in place since the 2016 coup attempt, is another source of concern in the southeast. The region has been under heavy security presence since a military crackdown on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that preceded the putsch. The aftermath of the coup saw a ferocious clampdown on oppositional quarters across Turkey, including the Kurdish political movement, which had its municipal administrations seized and many of its leaders and activists arrested. Metin Bakirhan, who has served as an election officer in Diyarbakir, the largest city of the region, in previous years, has bitter memories of what voting under emergency rule could be. Recalling the 1990s, when the southeast was under a state of emergency as clashes between the PKK and the security forces raged, he said people were so intimidated that few would agree to even serve as observers in polling stations. Everybody was under psychological and physical pressure, he told Al-Monitor. Sometimes security and administrative officials would gather people in coffeehouses, hurling threats to burn down neighborhoods if they voted for certain parties. For Bakirhan, Election security under a state of emergency is unconceivable. The PKK has also been accused of bullying and influencing voters in the past. Besides moving ballot boxes, the March amendments allow unstamped ballots to be admitted, formalizing the YSKs controversial measure during the referendum. Against all odds, the opposition is determined to prevent any vote rigging attempts. A comprehensive effort is underway to mobilize civic groups, lawyers and volunteers to keep tabs on the vote, in addition to measures to crosscheck the count. The main opposition Republican Peoples Party has put in place a smartphone app, called Fair Election Mobilization, to communicate swiftly with its election officers and keep track of counts in polling stations across the country. The HDP will use a similar online system to crosscheck the count, Mehmet Tiryaki, the partys representative at the YSK, told Al-Monitor. The party is seeking to get as many members as possible into ballot box committees and mobilize volunteers as observers, he said, adding that training was already underway. Tiryaki stressed that the HDP was in talks with other opposition parties to enhance cooperation against vote rigging, hailing significant progress in the effort. For Recep Ozel, the AKPs representative at the YSK, the oppositions alarm is unfounded and aims to discredit the ruling partys expected victory. Voters will go the polls in a relaxed atmosphere. We are confident that the YSK, the [district] election boards and ballot box committees will duly perform their duties and that the security forces will take the necessary precautions, he told Al-Monitor. Some opposition parties are trying to pin the blame [of their expected defeat] on regulations and measures, hence they keep talking about election security. The HDPs challenges do not end with election security. The partys presidential candidate, Selahattin Demirtas, remains in prison, pending trial on terror-related charges, despite mounting calls for his release. The courts, meanwhile, issued back-to-back convictions in long-running trials of Kurdish activists last week. Under the rulings, a prominent HDP candidate lost his eligibility to run for parliament, while four others risk losing their parliamentary seats in the longer run, if elected. If one is to go by leaks to the media as well as official statements out of Ankara, Turkey and the United States have essentially worked out a road map for Washington-backed Kurdish fighters to leave the northern Syrian city of Manbij near the Turkish border. Accordingly, once the Peoples Protection Units (YPG) which Turkey considers a terrorist organization and an existential threat to its security evacuate Manbij, Turkish forces would move in and work with US forces already there to provide stability and security in the city. The next stage would be to negotiate the YPG's expulsion from lands east of the Euphrates River along Turkeys border with Syria. The only problem with this optimistic scenario is that the details are flowing from the Turkish side, while Washington is holding its cards close its chest. A joint statement issued following technical talks May 25 was shorter on specifics than what reporters are being told in Turkey. The statement read, The Turkish-US Working Group on Syria met today in Ankara to continue ongoing conversations regarding Syria and other issues of mutual interest and cooperation. The two sides outlined the main contours of a Road Map for their further cooperation in ensuring security and stability in Manbij. It also noted that Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will consider the recommendations of the working group when they meet June 4 in Washington. News that the two countries had produced a road map is not new, of course. Cavusoglu had referred to one on a number of occasions, but his remarks needed clarifying. When he suggested in March that the sides had arrived at an agreement, it was not fully corroborated by Washington. Cavusoglu had to backpedal, saying he did not mean an agreement was reached, but that an understanding had been reached. Cavusoglu also mentioned the road map in April, after meeting with Pompeo on the sidelines of a NATO foreign ministers meeting, adding a telling caveat when informing reporters about their talks. Cavusoglu said the YPG would leave Manbij according to the understanding arrived at with Washington, but warned that Turkey would intervene unilaterally, as it had done in Afrin and Qandil previously, if the YPG did not depart. Regarding the latter part of the statement, Cavusoglu was referring to Operation Olive Branch, mounted by Turkey in January against the YPG in the Syrian city of Afrin, and the frequent operations Turkey conducts against the Kurdistan Workers Party in the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq. Cavusoglu's remarks thus indicated that Ankara was retaining the military option in Manbij, which clearly suggests that nothing had been finalized with Washington. Western diplomats remain doubtful despite the joint statement following the May 25 talks. Arriving at an arrangement over Manbij and the lands east of the Euphrates would mean that Turkey and the US have recalibrated their relationship and restored mutual confidence, a diplomat told Al-Monitor, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to his sensitive position. He went on to note the multiple problems that continue to overshadow Turkish-American relations and the less-than-friendly climate between the two capitals. Its unlikely that Washington would want to appear to have caved in to Ankara, especially in light of Turkish military threats, without gaining substantial concessions in return, the source said. Many diplomats also argue that Washington will not commit to a concrete position before the Turkish presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for June 24. Most opposition commentators in Turkey believe promises by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to send the military to Manbij to expel the YPG, with or without US support, had merely been populist bluster. For instance, Can Atakli of the opposition daily Sozcu wrote that all the talk out of Ankara about an operation against Manbij has been toned down in the lead-up to the elections. Until the snap elections, Manbij was our red line, and the presence of American soldiers there was not important. We would enter one night and get rid of them all [the YPG], Atakli argued in his column, before going on to question why no one mentions this anymore. Was it that we knew all along we could not go there, even if we wanted to, and the decision to call snap elections provided an excuse [to downplay this topic]? There is also growing agreement among Turkish analysts that a military option in Manbij would be difficult for Turkey to pursue. Many say the favorable conditions in Afrin for Operation Olive Branch which got the green light from Moscow while the United States looked away because it had no forces there do not exist in Manbij. In an article for Gercek Gundem, Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Naim Baburoglu pointed to what Turkey was up against. The operation against the YPG in Afrin may have been highly successful but Ankaras ultimate aims in Syria will only be fulfilled if Turkey can extend its reach to Manbij and lands east of the Euphrates, Baburoglu wrote. He added, however, that the front against Turkey had grown larger following the Afrin operation, with the express determination of France and Britain Washingtons partners in Syria as well the EU, to support the YPG. As Turkey heads fast toward more isolation in the West, it has to produce new strategies and avoid steps that will also cast a shadow on its success in Afrin, Baburoglu said. Oytun Orhan, coordinator for Syrian studies at the Ankara-based Middle East Strategic Research Center, also underlined the difficulty facing Turkey in northern Syria. He wrote recently that the discrepancy between the Turkish and US positions on the YPG can only be overcome if a formula is found that enables Washington to maintain its zone of influence in Syria while also addressing Turkeys concerns. Orhan believes that even if such a formula can be found, it will still be difficult for Turkey to sever the link between the United States and the YPG, because Washington does not want to lose the YPG to Iran. Orhan also does not believe Turkey will mount a military operation against Manbij. Nevertheless, Turkey will want to turn Manbij and [land] east of the Euphrates into a long-term arena for conflict by cooperating with Iran and Russia, he wrote. Turkeys hand will be stronger in such a conflict because the US will be left confronting a large number of challenges in the region. Even if Turkey were to choose this path, it is still not evident that it would get its way with regard to the YPG. This leaves a political settlement with Washington as the only viable option. The two sides are currently in the throes of such a deep and unprecedented crisis of confidence in their relationship that it will take much diplomacy for them to arrive at a mutually beneficial arrangement in Syria. If they can overcome the crisis, it will spell a new dawn in ties and have implications for Syria, too. That, however, remains a big assumption for now. Meanwhile, acrimonious statements by Erdogan and members of his government indicating the United States is more of an enemy than a friend, and similar sentiments coming from Washington especially Congress, where talk is of slapping sanctions on Turkey do not suggest that the sides are on the verge of a major breakthrough anytime before Turkey's elections. GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip The Ministry of Religious Endowments and Affairs in the West Bank decided May 25 to ban mosque preacher Walid al-Hodali from taking to the pulpit on Fridays. This decision sparked controversy about the policy to punish and exclude mosque preachers who criticize the Palestinian Authoritys (PA) policies during the Friday sermon. These preachers are accused of provocation and stirring strife. Hodali, who is from Ramallah, told Al-Monitor, On May 25, I received a verbal decision over the phone from the Ministry of Endowments in Ramallah and al-Bireh stating that I was banned from giving the Friday sermon under the excuse of offending high authorities and stirring strife among worshippers. But Hodali said he received formal notice that he was banned because he strayed from the sermon topic specified by the Ministry of Endowments in Ramallah. The topic was about road traffic safety. He said, They want preachers to turn into traffic police on pulpits, knowing that there are several important national issues that should be highlighted such as supporting the Great March of Return in Gaza and tackling the repercussions on the Palestinian cause of moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Ministry of Endowments in the West Bank often chooses a theme for all preachers to follow during the Friday sermon, and it issues a written circular that includes the topic of the sermon for the upcoming week as well as themes and Quranic verses to be mentioned. Preachers who stray from this circular are verbally notified that they are banned from taking to the pulpit on Friday and are told what sanctions will be imposed on them. Hodali considered the decision unjust and said it aimed at undermining the role of clerics in supporting national issues and nurturing worshippers national and religious culture. He said he thought the real reason his sermons were banned was more along the lines of what was cited in the phone call, namely that he had criticized the PA. Security sources in Ramallah told Al-Monitor that the PA-affiliated security institution is deploying its officers in all West Bank mosques to monitor preachers compliance with the Friday sermon circulars. The names of violating preachers are sent to the ministry to impose sanctions, mainly financial ones, by deducting part of the monthly salary, banning the preacher from taking to the pulpit until further notice or suspending his work. Sources added that any violation committed by the Friday preachers against the PA, its head, symbols or policies in dealing with Israel is considered a punishable one. The same security sources said that the Ministry of Endowments has banned seven preachers since the start of 2018 because they criticized PA policies during the Friday sermon. Sheikh Muhammad Abahira, who has worked as an imam at the Grand Mosque in Jenin in the south of the West Bank for two years, told Al-Monitor, Punishing Friday preachers who criticize the PA is a form of dictatorship and oppression against anyone opposing its policies. On Feb. 25, the Ministry of Endowments banned Abahira from taking to the pulpit for Friday sermons and deducted part of his salary after he gave a sermon Feb. 23 under the title Treason. Abahira said, The topic of my sermon was treason, and I talked about the need to reject it. I also tackled national treason, which includes security coordination with Israel. I did not point fingers at anyone in my sermon. I only criticized policies. He added, The Ministry of Endowments in Jenin summoned me and notified me of the ban without any convincing justification or reason. Former Minister of Endowments Nayef al-Rujoub, who is also a member of the parliamentary Change and Reform Bloc affiliated with Hamas, condemned the policy of banning Friday preachers from taking to the pulpit if they diverge from the unified sermon topic or criticize the PAs policies. He told Al-Monitor, Punishing Friday sermon preachers has become a phenomenon in the West Bank targeting anybody who opposes the PA. He believes the ban is directed against the freedom of opinion and expression. He said the Ministry of Endowments not only determines the topic of the sermon but also warns preachers to avoid certain themes, such as criticizing the security institution when it clamps down on a protest defying PA policy. Amer Mortada, a citizen from Jenin, criticized the PAs policy and told Al-Monitor, If the ministry posts on Facebook the sermon topic, themes, texts and Quranic verses for the preacher to abide by, why then would we need to go to the mosque at all? He wondered, Why arent preachers given the liberty to choose the topic of the Friday sermon and give their opinions without restrictions? Baraa Jarra, a citizen from Nablus in the north of the West Bank, advocated unifying the Friday sermon in all mosques and punishing violators. He told Al-Monitor, The Friday sermon should be framed to avoid turning it into a platform for political opinions and whims and to prevent repetition. He added, Many preachers stir strife during the Friday sermon by inflaming the internal Palestinian rift between Fatah and Hamas or calling for revolt against the PA. This is blatant provocation and an attempt to undermine civil peace. Therefore, the authorities should take punitive measures against the violators. Minister of Endowments and Religious Affairs Yousef Adeis said his ministry punishes any preacher who sparks strife in his sermon before worshippers or who strays from the unified Friday sermon topic. He told Al-Monitor, Any Friday preacher who diverges from the specified sermon topic or recites texts that cause confusion will be considered outside the national flock. We will not allow him to be a preacher among us. Adeis said the Friday preachers must call for unity rather than incite division and enmity among citizens or between the PA and citizens. The situation seems different in the Gaza Strip. Undersecretary of the Hamas-led Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowments in Gaza Hassan al-Saifi told Al-Monitor, The ministry in Gaza does not impose specific topics on mosque preachers and leaves them the freedom to pick whichever topic they want. But, exceptionally, the ministry forces preachers to adopt a unified topic during national occasions or emergencies like when [US President Donald] Trump declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel on Dec. 6. Saifi criticized the Ministry of Endowments in the West Bank for excluding mosque preachers and banning them from taking to the pulpits. He said the ministry in Gaza does not impose such sanctions on preachers who express their own opinions. Adeis, however, said he believes it is necessary to impose a unified sermon on preachers and punish violators because mosques are pivotal in forming public opinion and provide a social education for Palestinian citizens. German grocery chain Lidl has halted plans to open its first Alabama store. Lidl US announced last September it was opening its first Alabama location in Decatur. This week, however, city officials said the chain had pulled out of a deal to purchase 4.4 acres of property currently owned by Calvary Assembly of God at Beltline Road and Glenn Street in the southwest part of the city. The decision was first reported by the Decatur Daily. The Calvary property is back on the market for $2.85 million. Lidl (the word rhymes with "needle") made its first foray into the American market last year when it opened nine stores along the East Coast and announced an aggressive expansion plan of 100 locations by mid-2018. It quickly opened 20 stores in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia but plans for the additional 80 slowed. Fifty percent of the stores that were slated to open have not yet done so, Business Insider reported. The grocery is often compared to Aldi, also a German chain, which opened its first American store in 1976. Aldi now has 1,600 stores in 35 states, including 20 locations in Alabama. This article is part of the Black Magic Project, which is a series of stories focusing on those who do inspiring things in the black community. If you're a Facebook user, you can join our Black Magic Project group, where we talk about stories and issues concerning black Alabamians. Raised in Prichard, Alabama, 26-year-old Cierra Glaude, says she never could imagine taking her passion for filmmaking from Alabama to television and film sets, working on large-budget projects. "Growing up in Mobile, or just as a young, gay, black girl in the South, I never knew that filmmaking could be a thing. I thought it was always going to be that I'd have to get a 'good job' and go to school and get an M.B.A.," she says. With an interest in film that began with a morning announcements show at McGill-Toolen Catholic High School in midtown Mobile, Glaude says she started her tenure at the University of Alabama with no real idea how she could make a living once finishing her degree. "I was working two and three jobs, trying to get myself through college. I was working on films and stuff over the weekend. But, I thought, 'This is fun. This ain't no work!'" However, her passion led to a chance encounter which rerouted her entire journey, landing her a spot as a pupil of one of the film industry's most coveted entities. And, under the tutelage of a director-producer powerhouse, the young Alabama filmmaker is on a fast-track to success behind-the-scenes. Glaude's fate changed when she helped organize the University of Alabama's first Black Warrior Film Festival in 2014, under the direction of Dr. Rachel Raimist. Raimist, a tenured instructor at the university, invited her friend and colleague, esteemed film director Ava DuVernay to come to the festival. "Now, I was already enthralled with this lady," Glaude says. "I had watched her speeches. I knew her company. I'd watched her films. I was a fan. So, the fact that I was going to meet this lady, I was like, 'Damn!'" Coincidentally, an eager Glaude showed up to the festival early on opening day, giving her the chance to pick DuVernay up from the airport. "So, I go to the airport, and Ava is asking all these questions," Glaude remembers. "She asks, 'Does anyone know what AFFRM (pronounced like 'Affirm') is?' I said, "Yes, ma'am. It's your independent film and distribution company.'" DuVernay took a wristband she was wearing, which represented the company, and gave it to Glaude. "I was like, 'Oh my gosh!' I'm like anointed, already." "She's always had a level of care for me - even going way back." Though Glaude had an engagement that took her away from the closing day of the festival, she made sure to check in with DuVernay, with whom she'd begun to hit it off, on her way out. "I was like, 'Hey. I'm the one you need, and I'm fenna work on your films. So, what I gotta do?'" Glaude says. "She looked at me, and she was like, 'Send me your stuff Saturday!'" Glaude contacted DuVernay, who brought her on to become apart of the crew of her period piece "Selma". The two kept in touch, crossing paths at the UrbanWorld and Sundance Film Festivals, until Glaude built up the nerve to e-mail DuVernay when her weekend work on films, between school days, started to dry up. "I was like, 'Whenever. Wherever. I'm down.'" Glaude says. "About an hour-and-a-half later, I got a call from an L.A. number." The person on the other end was one of DuVernay's representatives. DuVernay wanted to offer Glaude a job as her assistant in New York. Glaude ran out of class on a Wednesday, and immediately to her film professor's office, bursting into a meeting. "I spilled the beans, and she screamed and threw her hands in the air. When her hands came back down, they landed on the phone and she said, 'I'm dropping all your classes.'" On Thursday, she was completing paperwork to transition into a role at CBS Studios as DuVernay worked on a pilot. By Friday, DuVernay called Glaude to ask if she was serious about leaving school for the opportunity. "I told her, 'I done already left! I done already dropped my classes!'" The next week, she was in New York, working with her idol. Glaude admits she got off to a rough start, even going as far to pull DuVernay aside to tell her, "I don't know what I'm doing. I've never done this before." "She was like, 'It's okay. We gon' figure it out.'" After her tenure as an assistant on the pilot, Glaude pulled double duty as a teaching assistant for Dr. Raimist and a liaison for DuVernay's AFFRM offices in Los Angeles. "Half the time, Ava didn't even know I was there," she says. "When she did come in, she'd be like, 'Hey! You are really in here gettin' it! You are really 'bout this life.'" Soon, DuVernay brought her new protege in to work on her television series "Queen Sugar", tasking Glaude with shooting her own short feature, with the hopes of building enough skill to one day direct on the show. Glaude mentioned the opportunity within earshot of one of the show's starring actresses Rutina Wesley, who offered to be in her short. The budding filmmaker struggled to find an idea for her film, but a conversation on the set of "Queen Sugar" struck a chord with a moment from her own past. "A big part of my disposition is the fact that I lost my brother when I was 16," Glaude says. Her elder brother, Kriston, was killed in a motorcycle crash in Mobile. A tragic turn of coincidence, the collision took place as he was headed out on a ride to clear his mind after the death of a close friend. While Glaude recounted the story on-set, a makeup artist interjected with her own story of loss. She told Glaude that she had to perform the makeup duties for her own brother, after losing him to suicide. "I remember, in that moment, thinking, 'That is heartbreaking. How could you? I could barely look at my brother when he was laying on a hospital table, but you sat with him and groomed him?'" Glaude says. With permission from the makeup artist, Glaude co-wrote and directed an adaptation of the story. The film, "Last Looks" premiered to much fanfare at the UrbanWorld Film Festival in 2017 and was released to the public as a part of Issa Rae's "#ShortFilmSundays" YouTube series. "One of my favorite comments (under the video) was when somebody said, 'Wow. Me and my brother aren't close, but I'm about to go call him right now and fix that.'" In addition to directing her short film, Glaude has kept her hand in DuVernay's other projects, including Disney's "A Wrinkle in Time". "It was crazy. All the VFX, all the blue screen, all the green screen. Also, just always knowing that I am living and operating in a historical moment, because this is the first black woman with a $100 million film." And, on the set of "Queen Sugar", which DuVernay has joked is Glaude's personal film school, of sorts, the Alabama filmmaker has taken on a bigger role, moving into the writer's room. Being that the show is based in Louisiana, Glaude takes an express interest in making sure the language is authentic to the colloquialisms of the South. Glaude has also taken up other personal ventures, such as shooting her first music video, right around the corner from home in New Orleans. "I have some ideas for Mobile, because I love home. Sometimes I can't get out of L.A. quick enough to get home. I have Alabama tatted on my arm," Glaude says. "I'm proud to be from Mobile, Alabama. It's just I couldn't stay there to do what I needed to do as a filmmaker. In my career. I hope to be able to change that. And not just for a production at a time." "Ava told someone on set once, 'This is my friend Cierra, she's a director.' If she can be able to call me a director, I sure better be able to say it," Cierra goes on. "She told them, 'She dropped out of school to be here.' I said, 'Correction: I got drafted to the league. Why would I continue to pay tuition for the opportunity to do what you're paying me to do?'" "I don't regret that for a half-a-second." The Rev. Michael D. Moore, senior pastor of Faith Chapel Christian Center in Wylam, told city leaders from across the country they should do more to help the homeless. Moore was a keynote speaker Thursday at the Neighborhoods USA Conference, which opened Wednesday and continues through Saturday. "There is a spiritual connection between city revitalization and the eradication of homelessness," said Moore. "I believe we can eradicate homelessness in our cities." The Bible teaches that those who are generous will receive God's blessing, Moore said. "There is revenue in the poor," Moore said. He had city leaders chant that phrase repeatedly. By helping the homeless, God will help them in return, he said. "I'm speaking on the authority of the living God," Moore said. "God will bless your city." After the keynote speech, Moore answered a question from AL.com about the Church of the Highlands announcing a plan to start a new urban church. The proposal had drawn criticism, and some support, from other black pastors. "Anything anybody is doing that's a blessing, I'm supporting," Moore said. The Rev. John Cantelow III, senior pastor of Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, was also at the conference and gave an invocation. Cantelow said he had no problem with the Church of the Highlands starting a branch in west Birmingham. "There were some pastors who thought it meant they were not doing their job, and that's not true," Cantelow said. Two men are in custody and two other males - including a teen boy - are safe after a reported kidnapping at gunpoint in southwest Birmingham. The incident began shortly before 2 p.m. in the 2400 block of Mayfield Avenue, confirmed Birmingham police Lt. Pete Williston. Authorities said two brothers - ages 21 and 15 - were abducted at gunpoint during an apparent robbery. Birmingham police issued a lookout bulletin for the car. A short time later, said Bessemer Police Chief Mike Roper, officers were dispatched to Arlington Avenue in that city on a report of shots fired. When Bessemer officers got to that scene, the vehicle described in the shots fired call matched the description of a lookout bulletin in the Birmingham case. Officers turned on their blue lights but the suspect vehicle fled. It crashed on Berkley Avenue and two suspects then fled. They were taken into custody after a short foot chase. The kidnapping victims were recovered unharmed. It wasn't immediately clear whether any of those involved know each other. Williston said the suspects and the victims are being questioned at police headquarters. Both Birmingham and Bessemer police expect to file charges against the suspects. Their names are being withheld pending formal charges. A convicted felon is being held without bond, accused in the rape, robbery and stabbing of a woman in Birmingham. Courtney Karrone Austin, also known as Courtnee Austin, was arrested on May 24, according to court records made public Tuesday. The 39-year-old east Birmingham man is charged with first-degree rape, first-degree sodomy, first-degree robbery and attempted murder. Birmingham police said the attack happened on Wednesday, May 23, at an unknown location in north Birmingham. The victim was stabbed multiple times and her injuries at the time were considered life-threatening, said Lt. Pete Williston. Efforts to obtain an updated condition on her Wednesday were unsuccessful. UAB Hospital said she is not listed as a patient there. According to court records, Austin tried to steal the young woman's vehicle at knife-point. At some point she was raped, sodomized and stabbed but no additional details were made public through court records or police. The victim and the suspect were acquaintances but were not in a relationship. Austin's bond on the charges is $420,000 but he is being held without bond because of a parole violation. He was convicted in 2008 of felony burglary and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Several Irondale business owners spoke out against an occupational tax Tuesday evening saying the 1 percent tax will be felt by their employees. "One percent is substantial to a lot of my employees," said Tim Le Roy, chief executive officer of Peak Season, an outdoor furniture manufacturer. He told the three Irondale city councilman present at Tuesday's public hearing on the proposed tax that many employees live paycheck to paycheck, and they will notice a 1 percent decrease in their take-home pay. Following a public hearing, the Irondale City Council voted 3-to-0 to approve a 1 percent occupational tax to make up a $1.6 million budget shortfall. The tax will be paid by everyone who works in the city of Irondale. That shortfall was projected to hit $2.1 million in fiscal year 2019. After most of the public left the chambers, Marino changed his vote from a no to yes on the tax. Following the meeting, Marino said he changed his vote after learning from the city attorney that the measure would have failed with only two council members voting in favor. He said the tax isn't something that he wanted to vote for, but it is something the city has to do to fill the budget shortfall. Marino said he hopes the tax can be repealed at a later date. The city hasn't released an estimate on how much revenue the tax will generate. Council President Steve Marino and Councilmen David Spivey and Terry Bearden voted for the tax. Councilors John London and Bobby Joe Wilson weren't in attendance at the meeting. Irondale's budget took a big hit when Sam's Club closed earlier this year. The warehouse generated revenues of around $1.4 million annually for the city in the form of sales taxes, property taxes and business licenses. The city looked to increase revenues by about $900,000 by raising the property tax by 6 mils. The measure failed in a special election on April 10. Spivey said he would love to see this repealed or reduced as soon as possible. Bearden said he isn't in favor of raising a tax if they didn't have to. The city hopes to have the tax in effect by Aug. 1. Irondale City Clerk James Stewart said as part of the implementation process, the city has to identify all of the businesses with employees including non-profits such as churches and schools that don't typically pay taxes. He said employees of churches, such as Church of the Highlands, and public and private schools will be affected by the tax. During the public hearing, David Bates of Bates, Roberts, Fowlkes & Jackson Insurance suggested that Irondale raise the property tax on vacant buildings instead. "By increasing the property taxes, it would encourage vacant building owners to sell their property to someone who can redevelop it and get a tenant to fill the vacancy," he said. Bates said the city should also make cuts to its budget. He pointed out consulting fees totalled $375,000 in the last fiscal year and legal fees were over $300,000. Mike Chapman, controller at Abramson, a concrete construction company, said an occupational tax is an "anti-business tax." "A 1 percent tax to our employees is a large number," he said. Chapman said employees are already saying if the tax passes, then they are going to need a raise. "I would much rather see a property tax increase," he said. "We didn't get to vote because we don't live here. It is more fair to do a property tax increase than to tax employees because some (employees) will go somewhere else." Bryan Ratliff, president and CEO of Collateral Properties, the largest office space owner in Irondale, said the tax won't be a good thing for the city. "The lack of an occupational tax has always been an advantage in recruiting businesses to come here," he said. "This is obviously going to remove that amenity." Another man who works at EWTN said he works in Irondale but moved to Pell City where it is cheaper to live. "What are you going to do with the money that is taken out of my children's mouth?" he asked. Mayor Charles Moore said he doesn't like taxes. He said he and his wife pay occupational taxes in the cities where they work. "I haven't one example ... where a company has or hasn't come due to an occupational tax," he said. The city of Leeds has an occupational tax, and they are growing, Moore said. The city has added 60 businesses and 1,000 jobs since they implemented the tax in 2012. He said the city has to make the decision that is best for Irondale. Moore said the new revenues from the taxes will go towards the budget shortfall, restoring the city's reserve funds and improving and expanding the services that residents, employees and employers expect. The mayor said the city has made cuts. He said 15 to 20 vacancies in the city haven't been filled. If more revenue isn't generated, Moore said the city is getting to the point where it will have to cut services. Updated at 8:18 p.m. with information from Irondale City Clerk James Stewart. Jefferson County and the city of Bessemer are set to consider incentives packages for a potential Amazon fulfillment center. Amazon is considering building an 855,000-square-foot fulfillment center on 133 acres of U.S. Steel-owned property off Powder Plant Road near Bessemer City High School and Alabama Splash Adventure. The fulfillment center could create up to 3,000 jobs. The Jefferson County Commission will consider paying an amount not to exceed $3.3 million to fund certain roadway improvements and/or reimburse Amazon.com Services for a portion of its capital investment if it decides to locate on the Bessemer property, according to a public notice. The incentives will be considered at a regular commission meeting at 9 a.m. on Thursday, June 7. The development of the property includes installing and equipping certain items of machinery, equipment, furniture, fixtures, and other personal property at the facility necessary for Amazon to conduct customer fulfillment operations, the notice stated. The Bessemer City Council at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, June 12 will consider incentives that include reimbursing Amazon for a portion of its capital investment by making quarterly payments to the company over a 10-year period, according to a public notice. The payments would be based on the number of Amazon's full-time employees, and the occupational tax collected by the company from these employees and remitted to the city of Bessemer. If approved, the incentive would be calculated as follows: 50 percent of the occupational tax revenues earned on up to one to 2,000 full-time employees; 55 percent earned on 2,001 to 3,000 full-time employees; 60 percent earned on 3,001 to 4,000 full-time employees; and 65 percent earned on 4,000-plus full-time employees. In the deal, Bessemer would also limit all of its permit fees for Amazon to $200,000 and cap its annual business license tax at $5,000, according to the public notice. The city would also agree to partner with Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority to construct and operate an additional transit stop near the site. The city would also agree to provide certain recruitment, screening, and training services. The state of Alabama is also said to be considering incentives for Amazon. Josh Gluskin, regional manager for ONIN Staffing said, should Amazon come into the Bessemer market, "We are prepared to provide staffing services as we have with Amazon Distribution Centers in other markets in the U.S. Our offices in Alabama can work to see that there is a ready-workforce on hand. "This could surely be a great game changer for the Bessemer market and the state," he said. Headquartered in Birmingham, ONIN Staffing is the largest staffing firm in the state, and one of the largest industrial staffing firms in North America. Of Alabama's neighbors, Florida and Tennessee have five fulfillment centers, while Georgia has three. Last year, Amazon opened a $30 million, 362,000-square-foot sortation center in west Mobile off Interstate 10, which promised to employ up to 1,000 seasonally. Kim Kardashian West is headed to Washington, D.C. to try to get a woman out of an federal prison in Alabama. According to a report from Vanity Fair, West and her personal attorney will visit the White House on Wednesday before 4 p.m. to meet with Senior Advisor Jared Kushner and then with President Donald Trump to discuss prison reform. West intends to ask Trump to pardon a 62-year-old woman who is serving a life sentence after being convicted of a first-time drug offense in 1996. Alice Johnson was convicted by a jury in the Western District of Tennessee of eight charges of selling controlled substances, court records show. She was sentenced to life without parole and currently resides in Alabama's Aliceville Federal Correctional Institution. According to Vanity Fair, West learned of Johnson's story on Twitter earlier this year. She reached out to Ivanka Trump, and was connected to Kushner. Since his time in the White House, Kushner has also focused on prison reform. His father, Charles Kushner, spent more than a year in a federal prison camp in Alabama on charges of tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering, the magazine reported. In an interview with Mic, West said what she would tell Trump about Johnson. "I would explain to him that, just like everybody else, we can make choices in our lives that we're not proud of and that we don't think through all the way," she said. Johnson's case gained national attention in 2017, when Mic published a video of Johnson talking about her case and her life behind bars from inside the prison. "It's like an unexecuted sentence of death," the great-grandmother said. "Out of desperation, I made one of the worst decisions of my life to make some quick money." The Alabama Republican Party Candidate Committee has voted unanimously to censure Alabama Public Service Commission candidate Jim Bonner and urged voters not to vote for him in Tuesday's primary. "Mr. Bonner's recent comments on his social media as well as radio shows are not condoned by the Alabama Republican Party," Republican Party Chair Terry Lathan said in a press release. "Mr. Bonner is welcome to his opinions and his First Amendment right of free speech. The Alabama Republican Party is welcome to our opinion as well, and we reject the egregious comments Mr. Bonner continues to spew." Bonner faces incumbent Jeremy Oden in Tuesday's primary in the race for Public Service Commission, Place 1. In its press release, the GOP did not mention any specific comments or social media posts by Bonner. Alabama Political Reporter wrote about Bonner's social media posts, which have been called racist, sexist and anti-Semitic. Bonner, who lives in Phil Campbell, said his social media posts have been taken out of context. "Many of these egregious comments I've made are at the end of a long conversation or taken completely out of context," Bonner said. "They might be a 500-word essay and they've taken the closing line or the punch line out of it." Bonner, who turns 65 on Thursday, said the party took action against him because it's getting bad publicity. "We have the party of Bentley saying that a guy who doesn't have any money to fight them is some sort of a problem," Bonner said. "They're afraid that I'm going to win. "It is what it is. I can't buy this kind of publicity, so I'll take it." Bonner said the party has a hearing at its Birmingham headquarters on Thursday to determine whether votes for him will be counted in Tuesday's primary. The Democratic Caucus in the Alabama House of Representatives will hold its second annual "Alabama Pro-Growth Policy Conference" in Florence next week. Rep. Anthony Daniels of Huntsville, the House minority leader, said in a press release that the two-day conference at the Marriott Shoals is intended to help develop ideas and solutions to meet some of the state's biggest challenges. "This conference connects Alabamians from across the state while encouraging discussion of innovative solutions that will allow Alabama to move forward for the good of all our citizens," Daniels said. The event begins Thursday with a program on awareness and access to care for sickle cell disease. Also on Thursday, Ryan Hankins, executive director of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, will give a presentation called "Alabama Priorities." Thursday's topics also include a presentation on prison reform and a panel discussion on "Bridging the Digital Divide." Friday's program includes discussions on health care and mental health, college affordability and workforce development. On Friday afternoon, a panel will discuss the state of education in Alabama. The panelists will be Alabama Community College Chancellor Jimmy Baker; Jay Love, finance chairman of the Business Education Alliance; Allison Muhlendorf, executive director of the Alabama School Readiness Alliance; and Gayle Satchel, superintendent of Colbert County schools. U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, will be the keynote speaker Friday afternoon. More information on the conference can be found here and on the House Democrats' Facebook page. Jim Bonner has never enjoyed this level of publicity before, and he's thrilled. The 65-year-old former community college teacher from the small town of Phil Campbell, Ala. made headlines this week after the Alabama Republican Party Candidate Committee formally censured him for comments on social media. "I'm absolutely ecstatic" said Bonner, whose Facebook posts have been called racist, anti-Semitic and sexist. "This is going to have a definite positive effect on my campaign...and now the establishment is trying to shut me up." "I couldn't buy this publicity." Bonner is running as a Republican for a seat on the Alabama Public Service Commission, a statewide office that regulates the rates that utility companies are allowed to charge customers. The Alabama GOP urged voters not to vote for him in Tuesday's primary. In a statement, Republican Party Chair Terry Lathan said the party rejects "the egregious comments Mr. Bonner continues to spew." Bonner, a former Alabama at-large delegate to the Republican National Convention, said he's been on the ballot in Alabama in every election cycle for the past decade. "The only difference this time is their polls say I'm going to win and they've got to stop me," he said. Indeed, recent polling shows Bonner is leading incumbent Jeremy Oden. He shares a similar name with former U.S. Rep. Jo Bonner, who served in Congress from the Mobile area for more than a decade, and with former University of Alabama Chancellor Judy Bonner. Bonner describes his Facebook page, on which he typically posts multiple times a day, as personal, though his posts are visible to the public. In one post from 2017, Bonner shared a picture of a card reading "my love 4 u burns like 6,000 jews" with a picture of Adolf Hitler. He captioned it, "Awwwww I got a Valentine!!!" In a post this week, he shared a meme of a doll wearing a head covering similar to a hijab, with the text, "No one knows what she says yet. We haven't had the courage to pull the cord." In March, under a video he posted of a dog wearing a mask with exaggerated lips and a curly black wig, a friend commented that the dog favored California Rep. Maxine Waters. Bonner replied, "If it was black (it) would be her twin." Bonner insists his posts have been taken out of context and that some of them are inside jokes with friends, such as one where he called a male friend a "fat stripper." "When you talk to people on Facebook, it's like you're on a big bus," Bonner said. "People overhear what other people say. I think things have to be taken into context." He said that despite a blog post in which he appeared to defend the use of the n-word, "I have never used the word in a derogatory sense." He dismisses the idea that he's ahead in the polls solely because of his name. "To suggest that people in North Alabama know more about Jo Bonner than me is absurd," he said. "I'm popular in groups that these people who say I can't win don't move in." Most recently, Bonner ran for State School Board in 2016. He nearly won the Republican primary outright, collecting 45 percent of the primary vote and forcing a runoff with incumbent Jeff Newman. He lost the runoff. He said he was also called to a hearing with the Alabama Republican Party during that race for offensive social media remarks. Prior to that race, he ran for the Alabama House in 2014, Colbert County Probate Judge in 2012, and the Alabama Senate in 2010. "I am fairly direct and I really feel throttled when people come out and say you're not allowed to say those words, when they really mean you're not allowed to think what you think," he said. Bonner said he's headed to a hearing Thursday evening with the Alabama Republican Executive Committee in which the committee could make a decision about whether votes for him will be counted in Tuesday's primary. The third and final debate of the Republican primary gubernatorial campaign included only half the field and had no fireworks between the two participants. In fact, the only on-stage interaction between Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle and Mobile state Sen. Bill Hightower was friendly banter that had none of the characteristics of a debate between rivals one week before voters go to the polls. The American Legion Boys State hosted the debate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. A Democratic debate is set for Wednesday night. The strongest exchange in the GOP debate came between the panel and the candidates - Hightower was pushed for explanation after stating he believed voter fraud was an issue in Alabama and Battle on whether some guns should be prohibited to the public. But perhaps most intriguing was a question about minority communities, who generally identify as Democrats. Both Battle and, more explicitly, Hightower said the legislature needs more Democrats to offset its Republican supermajority. "One of the saddest things I've seen is the lack of women in the legislature and the lack of the Democratic Party," Hightower said. "It's shrinking. You would think, 'Wait a minute, you're a Republican.' We need the Democratic Party. We need a two-party system. You've got to have that. If you don't, there's not this tension that holds the bad things back. We need that tension. "But regardless of the two-party system, I've already demonstrated I can work across the aisle. I've done it. And I'm already out in the minority population in the community. Why? Because I love them. They are a part of who we are in Mobile. If they're not working right, we're not working right." Battle said that government has to be "all-inclusive." "As governor, I plan on reaching across aisles," he said. "I plan on talking to people of the other party. I plan on talking to people throughout the House, the Senate and across the state so that we can reach out and touch people. We've got to reach across aisles if we're ever going to get a state moving forward, we've got to move forward together. "A divided house doesn't stand. And if we're a divided out, we're not going to make the progress we need to make." Birmingham evangelist Scott Dawson was listed as a confirmed participant in the debate when it was announced last week. Campaign spokeswoman Hannah Ford told AL.com after the debate Tuesday night that Dawson dropped out about two weeks ago because his scheduled changed with a statewide bus tour that kicked off Tuesday. Gov. Kay Ivey was invited by debate organizers but, as she had done for two previous debates, she opted not to attend. Ivey's name came up only once during the debate when the candidates were asked if she has done a good job cleaning up corruption in Montgomery as she has claimed in campaign ads. "That's no bull," Battle answered, mocking a kicker line from one of Ivey's TV commercials. "I think (the ad) starts with mountain oysters and then we start talking about cleaning up ethics." Following the debate in an interview with AL.com, Hightower brought up Ivey's absence unprompted. "I was disappointed Kay Ivey wasn't here," Hightower said as he turned to students attending Boys State this week. "Were you guys? Why isn't she showing up for these things?" When one student responded that he saw Ivey at an event about three months ago, Hightower said, "But she doesn't answer any questions." Hightower's comments about voter fraud came in response to a question about "opening the ballot" and doing away with "voter suppression ideas like voter ID." "The reason we have to have IDs is because of the fraud we've experienced in Alabama elections," Hightower said. "We want safe, sound elections ... The issue is keeping our electoral process full of integrity. Because of our history, we've had to take actions like that." In a follow-up, panelist Joey Kennedy pressed Hightower on his claim of at-the-poll voter fraud where a photo ID is required. "We have had none," Kennedy said. "There is no history of voter fraud at the polls. So when you said there is, were you just misspeaking or what?" "You just told me there was voter fraud at the polls with absentee ballots," Hightower answered. "I'm talking about on voting day at the polls," Kennedy said. "There is no voter fraud." "I'm talking about our voter process," Hightower said. "And you assure me that 100 percent is good when we know there are people still on the voter rolls that are not even living?" "And you think those people are going to vote?" Kennedy said. "Somebody's voting for them," Hightower said. "Just cite me your ..." Kennedy said. "Cite me yours," Hightower said in cutting the panelist off. After moderator Art Franklin intervened in the back-and-forth, Hightower said, "We need to have strong voter laws. Why not have a license with your picture on it to make sure it's you? You have to do that for everything else. Is that outlandish?" Battle said he also agreed with the photo ID law, which requires voters to have a valid photo identification card to present when voting. The legislature passed the controversial bill in 2011 and former Gov. Robert Bentley signed it into law. On a question about limiting certain types of guns, such as semiautomatic weapons that be turned into automatic weapons with bump stocks, neither candidate expressed support for outlawing specific types of guns. "I'm not for limiting certain type weapons," Battle said. "I think we have the right to bear arms, we have the right to keep arms. But I do work very closely with our police, with our sheriff and with our prosecutors. And we make sure we have laws that fit the community and fit what we need to do." In a follow-up from panelist Tom Gordon, Battle was asked if he thought citizens should be able to own any type of weapon. "You're mostly talking about AK-17s, AR-15s?" Battle said. "People buy those rifles because they want to have those in their collection at home. Some people look at it like, 'Am I ever going to have to protect my home? And if I do, I want to have the best I can get to do that. And they have that right to protect their home and have those guns in their home." It only took two bottles of ketchup to land Jon Broadway in jail. Broadway, a 74-year-old Montgomery native, had never been behind bars before. But by the end of the day on April 23, he would emerge from the Montgomery County Jail in his underwear, charged with criminal tampering for getting ketchup on the monument to a gynecologist who advanced medicine by experimenting on slave women. What happened that day, as police intervened in the wake of protest skit, marks yet another strange chapter in the national debate over Confederate monuments and which parts of history deserve to be preserved. It all started on Confederate Memorial Day, celebrated this year on April 23. Alabama is one of two states that recognizes it as an official holiday. (State offices also close on Jefferson Davis' birthday in June.) That morning, Broadway arrived early to the grounds of the Alabama State Capitol. He and a fellow activist planned to perform a skit in front of a statue of 19th Century gynecologist J. Marion Sims. They weren't sure who was going to show up to watch, but they wanted to finish before the main Confederate Memorial Day festivities began around 9:30. Broadway, a Navy veteran and retired environmental engineer, is part of a loosely-connected group of Montgomery citizens who want to generate discussion on racial issues. "How do you get white people to acknowledge there are deep (racial) wounds that have not been addressed?" said Broadway, who is white. "The Sims issue is an example of the kind of thing that needs to be discussed." J. Marion Sims is best known as the "father of modern gynecology," credited for inventing the vaginal speculum and developing a surgical technique for correcting a devastating complication of childbirth called vesicovaginal fistula. But Sims has been a lightning rod for controversy, particularly in recent years. He perfected his techniques by experimenting on black slave women, without the use of anesthesia, in Montgomery in the 1840s. Three of those women were named Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey; the others' names are lost to history. Sims performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone. His defenders, including physician and scholar L.Lewis Wall, have said Sims followed social norms of the time and that his work ultimately improved the lives of the women whose fistulas he corrected, including slave women. But there is no record of whether Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy consented to the surgeries, or what they thought about them. Their consent wasn't required; just that of their owners. Monument debate A statue of Sims used to sit in New York City's Central Park, across from the New York Academy of Medicine. In early April, city officials relocated it to the Brooklyn cemetery where Sims is buried, and there are plans to add a plaque explaining the statue's history. But in Alabama, a relatively new state law prevents the removal of Sims' statue. The Alabama Memorial Preservation Act of 2017 prohibits local governments from moving historical monuments on public property that have been in place 40 years or more. Removal requires approval from a committee. Breaking the law can result in a $25,000 fine. It's still a popular issue in Alabama politics. Gov. Kay Ivey put it front-and-center in one of her campaign ads last month, saying outsiders "should not instruct Alabama on what it should do with historical monuments." Birmingham city went so far as to erect a wooden barrier around a Confederate monument in one of its downtown parks, as the city was not allowed to tear it down. Alabama's statue of J. Marion Sims is not obscured. It sits beneath the branches of a magnolia tree, across the Capitol lawn from the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Sims himself never fought in the Civil War; he moved to Europe during those years. AL.com has not been able to find an organization that has stepped forward to publicly defend the Sims statue. It does not have any direct connection to the Confederate cause. Doctor and slave The morning of Confederate Memorial Day, Broadway said around 15 people gathered at the statue to watch his skit. He had dressed in green surgical scrubs splattered with ketchup, to represent blood, and gave a monologue as J. Marion Sims. Beside him was a woman who is black and was dressed as a slave, portraying one of the women on whom Sims had operated. Her costume was also splattered with ketchup. (The woman later avoided arrest and Broadway declined to give out her name until she chooses whether to speak publicly about the incident.) Ketchup was smeared on the pedestal of the statue behind them. The skit lasted around 8 minutes, during which Broadway and the woman both spoke. "(Sims) was a butcher. He didn't try to save black babies; he just used us like guinea pigs," the woman said near the end of the skit, in the video, as she rubbed ketchup on the base of the statue. "Know your history. This statue needs to be removed." Broadway said he'd seen some police in the area but they left the group alone during the skit. 'A wet, red substance' After the skit was over, Broadway said he was standing around talking with a handful of spectators when they saw a large number of law enforcement headed toward them. He estimated there may have been 15-20 officers. According to court records, Lt. Philip Taylor and Cpl. Nathan Mills of the state police had noticed "a wet red substance" on Broadway's green scrubs and on the woman's costume as they were leaving the area of the Sims statue. The woman left in her car before they could approach her. According to their affidavit, Taylor and Mills "noticed a strong odor of vinegar and saw that the front of the statue was cover(ed) in a wet red substance." They then went to the front of the Capitol building to stop Broadway from driving away. They asked him why he was there and what the purpose of the skit was, Broadway said. He said the interaction with the officers had been cordial, but "at some point there was a tone change." According to the affidavit, the officers asked what was on Broadway's clothes and on the statue, and he told them it was ketchup. "Cpl. Mills asked how the ketchup got all over the front of the statue, and Mr. Broadway stated he put it there," said the affidavit. The Capitol Building Manager was called to wash off the ketchup. The affidavit ends: "It is unknown at the time of signing this warrant any amount of damage caused by this substance." Long johns Broadway was cuffed and taken to the county jail where he was booked and placed in a holding cell. He was charged with criminal tampering, a class B misdemeanor. He spent about eight hours in jail until his wife was able to secure a bonding company to post the $500 bond for his release. A jail employee handed him the plastic bag containing his personal effects. When he went into a dressing room to change back into the scrubs he'd been wearing when he was arrested, he realized they weren't in the bag. "I asked where they were," he said, "and they said, 'We need those for evidence.'" A jail spokesperson confirmed that the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency confiscated the scrubs. Broadway said he asked for a robe or some other covering, but said the person at the desk denied him extra clothes. Broadway left the jail, clad in his long john underwear. In this image taken from Montgomery County Jail video footage, Jon Broadway is seen waiting to be released, clad in a shirt and longjohn-style underwear. (Courtesy of the Montgomery County Jail) 'An uncomfortable truth' Broadway's trial is scheduled for September. The deputy district attorney prosecuting the case, Sean McTear,said he could not comment on a pending case. Sen. Hank Sanders of Selma held a press conference a few weeks after the incident and called for the removal of the Sims statue. He helps lead a group called the Save OurSelves Movement for Justice and Democracy. Sanders said Broadway displayed "courage and fortitude" to show how "damaging" it is to have a statue on the Capitol lawn that celebrates someone with a history like Sims'. "You can't wait for folks to be ready" to hear an uncomfortable truth, he said. AL.com contacted Save Our South, a group dedicated to preserving "Southern heritage and historical monuments across the United States" and which has previously sued to keep a Confederate soldiers monument in Birmingham from being taken down. "While a museum would be an ideal place for many of these statues and monuments, removal of any such artifact that would cause irreparable damage is not condoned," said a spokesperson for Save Our South in a statement. For his part, Broadway is not concerned so much with the Sims statue specifically as he is about getting white and black people across the state to have difficult conversations about race and their shared history. "Black people see (our history) completely differently and that is something white society hasn't a clue about and hasn't tried to get a clue," he said. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals has upheld the conviction of an Oneonta man for the 2014 machete murder of Bernie Wayne Clark in DeKalb County. David Wooten David Wooten, 46, appealed his conviction and sentence, arguing the jury should have been instructed to consider a self-defense claim. Wooten was convicted at trial in April 2017. Circuit Judge Jeremy Taylor sentenced Wooten to life in prison. Clark suffered about 100 wounds during the fatal attack, a medical expert testified at trial. Clark was 45. His injuries included numerous chop and incised wounds to the head, throat, arms and hands, plus fractures to his skull, facial bones and jaw, according to authorities. A Fort Payne police officer found Clark's body in his DeKalb County mobile home off Gault Avenue the morning of Nov. 15, 2014. "There was blood everywhere," Officer David Smith testified at trial. "In my 10 years, it's probably the most gruesome scene I've ever observed." Wooten admitted killing Clark but claimed he did it in self-defense. Wooten testified that Clark invited him over to his trailer and they got into a fight. Wooten told the court that Clark had first attacked him with the machete. In his appeal, Wooten argued that the court should have instructed the jury on Alabama's Stand-Your-Ground law. But the Appellate Court ruled that Wooten wasn't lawfully in Clark's trailer at the time of the killing. To argue self-defense, Wooten would have needed to be lawfully in the home. "Further, Wooten was the aggressor in the fatal confrontation with Clark," the Appellate Court wrote in its decision "As such, the circuit court did not abuse its discretion in denying Wooten's requested jury instruction on the stand-your-ground law." Wooten was prosecuted by Dekalb County District Attorney Michael O'Dell's Office. The appeal was handled by Assistant State Attorney General Madeline Lewis. Attorney General Steve Marshall commended Lewis' work in a news release today. Decatur police are investigating after a person was found dead under a car at a Southeast Decatur gas station Friday night. At 10:39 p.m. Friday, Morgan County 911 received a call regarding a person found dead under a car at the Texaco gas station at 1829 Somerville Road Southeast, police said in a statement. Police later determined the person was lying in the roadway before a passing vehicle struck the person. The body was sent to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences in Huntsville to determine the victim's cause of death, police said. More information will be released after the autopsy is complete. Police did not identify the victim. Police have not filed any charges related to the death. The investigation is ongoing. Gov. Kay Ivey signs a memorandum creating the Alabama Sentry Program with state Superintendent Eric Mackey, left, and Alabama Law Enforcement Agency Secretary Hal Taylor. (Mike Cason/mcason@al.com) Gov. Kay Ivey, state Superintendent Eric Mackey and Alabama Law Enforcement Secretary Hal Taylor announced today a program to authorize certain administrators to undergo training and have firearms stored on school campuses. Ivey said the Alabama Sentry Program will begin immediately with the goal of being in place to start the 2018-2019 school year. Ivey said it is the best way to protect schools now until the Legislature can reach consensus on a plan to put a school resource officer in every school. "Now is the time to act and that is exactly what I am doing today," Ivey said during a press conference at the Capitol with Mackey and Taylor. The program will be voluntary, require local approval and can only be used in schools that don't have a school resource officer. Ivey appointed the Securing Alabama's Facilities of Education (SAFE) Council in March in response to the mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Valentine's Day. The SAFE Council issued its report earlier this month. Another mass school shooting has rocked the nation since then. Nine students and one teacher were killed at Santa Fe, Texas, High School on May 18. Ivey has previously announced some directives she issued on recommendations from the SAFE Council, including a determination of how many schools do not have a resource officer and how much it would cost to put one in every school. The governor's office is still waiting on that number. Ivey said today it is the goal to place a school resource officer in every school. But she said the Alabama Sentry Program is a way to protect schools until that happens. Here are some of the guidelines for the Alabama Sentry Program. It will only be used in schools with no school resource officers. Administrators approved as sentries will store weapons in a safe and could only use them in response to an armed intruder. To be a sentry, an administrator will need approval of the local superintendent, local school board and county sheriff. A sentry must have a concealed carry permit and be approved as a reserve deputy sheriff. A sentry will have to pass training, drug screenings, a mental health evaluation and stress test. A sentry's duties will include "the use of lethal force to defend the students, faculty, staff and visitors of his or her school from the threat of imminent bodily harm or death by an armed intruder." During a shooting incident, a sentry will wear a distinctively marked bullet-proof vest known to law enforcement. Mackey was asked if local school boards support the plan. The superintendent said local school officials are on heightened alert because of school shootings. "They're looking for solutions and this is an answer to a question that many of them have had," Mackey said. "Especially those, as the governor pointed out, who cannot afford or do not have access to their own SROs. So this gives them another answer." Mackey said rural school districts are particularly interested in more protection from armed intruders. "We all know there are places in the state that may be 20 minutes from a sheriff's deputy or state trooper, the nearest law enforcement person," Mackey said. "They may not have an SRO in that school. So this gives them an opportunity to have somebody on site who's highly trained, who has access to a weapon, who will be ... very noticeable who that person is during a shooting because they'll have this vest on. So, we think it answers a lot of the questions that they have." ALEA Secretary Taylor said plans are in the works for a training program for sentries, which he said will likely be at the State Trooper academy in Selma. Taylor said ALEA is in contact with other states with similar programs. He said the training will be "second to none." "They're going to know everything they need to know in how to use a weapon, how to handle a threat, how to handle an active shooter and how to handle any situation," Taylor said. Alabama lawmakers proposed a number of bills in response to the Parkland, Fla., massacre including a bill to allow training and arming teachers. That bill did not pass and drew opposition from some state education organizations, including the Alabama PTA, Council for Leaders in Alabama Schools, School Superintendents of Alabama and the Alabama Association of School Boards. But Sally Smith, executive director of the Alabama Association of School Boards, said this today about the Alabama Sentry Program: "School boards overwhelmingly view trained SROs as the optimal first line of defense against school violence and do not believe arming school personnel is a long-term solution; however, we recognize the governor's desire to move quickly to ensure the safety of Alabama's schoolchildren. The Alabama Sentry program appears to be a reasonable, interim solution with some sensible safeguards until the legislature can address this issue and identify a long-term plan to fund SROs." A Gallup poll released in March showed that most Americans opposed arming teachers. One of the concerns raised about the proposal to arm teachers in the Alabama Legislature is that it would complicate actions for police responding to a school shooting. Police would have to be ready to encounter and identify an armed teacher while trying to stop the shooter. Taylor said the bullet proof vests worn by sentries will identify them for law enforcement who will know what to look for. "There will be something on there to differentiate," Taylor said. "And all police officers, all locals, first responders, will know what that is. They'll know good guy from bad guy." Ivey did not support the idea of arming teachers when the legislation, by Rep. Will Ainsworth, R-Guntersville, was introduced in February. "Teachers have got their hands full being teachers and instructors and I just think there's some other way to provide protection," she said at the time. Today, Ivey drew a distinction between teachers and administrators. "School administrators have complete access to all rooms in a school," Ivey said. "And unlike teachers, administrators are not responsible for the immediate custodial care of students during the day." Sentries or their local school system would be responsible for acquiring and maintaining the firearms, ammunition, safe and bullet-proof vest. The names of administrators, schools and school systems participating in the program will not be released to prevent undue influence from affecting an administrator's choice to participate, the governor's office said. A school's participation in the Alabama Sentry Program stops immediately if the school hires an SRO or if the local school board or county sheriff terminates it. In the memorandum to Mackey and Taylor, Ivey asks for an implementation plan by June 15. Two weeks ago, Ivey requested that the six SAFE Council recommendations that don't require legislative action be started as quickly as possible. Among those are implementing an "evidence-based threat assessment" to spot warning signs from students; creating a chain of communication to report threats via an app to the Alabama Fusion Center, a state agency that routes them to the appropriate agency; enforcing a requirement of two "code red" drills at schools every year; and creating 11 regional school safety training and compliance teams to serve K-12 schools. The training and compliance teams will train the sentries with a program designed by ALEA. AL.com reporter Trisha Powell Crain contributed to this report. Heavy rain overnight and this morning is causing flooding in multiple areas in central Alabama on Wednesday morning. And a rarely used flash flood emergency was declared for Greene, Hale, Perry, Chilton and Bibb counties. This morning's rain comes on top of torrential downpours from Subtropical Depression Alberto, which moved through the region on Tuesday. The National Weather Service in Birmingham is very concerned and has gotten multiple reports of flash flooding across central Alabama. Forecasters said that based on radar trends "this could become a very serious situation" in parts of Greene, Hale, Perry, southern Bibb and Chilton counties. Multiple flash flood warnings are in effect as of Wednesday morning. Greene County Emergency Management and law enforcement in Hale County have reported widespread flash flooding in Greensboro and Eutaw, the weather service said. "Numerous roads are now flooded, along with evacuations ongoing at an apartment complex in Greensboro. Businesses in Eutaw are now being flooded. This is a life- threatening situation! Once again, a FLASH FLOOD EMERGENCY for Greene and Hale Counties, is in effect. This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!" A flash flood warning is in effect for Greene and Hale counties until 3:30 p.m. Another flash flood warning is in effect for southern Bibb, Chilton and Perry counties until 3:15 p.m. "Emergency management and law enforcement in Perry County reported numerous state roads and county roads are now flooded across the county," the weather service said. "Numerous roads in the City of Marion are impassible, including reports of residents trapped in a home. This is a very serious, life-threatening situation." A flash flood warning is also in effect for northern Tallapoosa and Coosa counties until 12:30 p.m. A flash flood warning is in effect for Autauga, southern Perry, Lowndes and Dallas counties 1:45 p.m. A flash flood warning is in effect for Elmore, central Tallapoosa and northern Montgomery counties until 1:45 p.m. A flash flood watch has also been issued for a wider swath of central Alabama. It will be in effect until 7 p.m. The weather service said these slow-moving storms could produce 1-3 inches of rain -- that's in addition to what fell on Tuesday. The soil in many places is saturated and it won't take much to cause flooding, forecasters said. The weather service urged those who see flooded roadways to not attempt to drive on them, noting that most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Alabama Power Company said gate operations have begun at Martin Dam. There is now one gate open, according to the weather service. Tuesday's rain was enough to set a record in one central Alabama city. Montgomery got 2.58 inches of rain on Tuesday, breaking the record of 2.39 set in 1959. Authorities are searching for an inmate who escaped from Sheffield police custody Tuesday night, officials said. William Anthony Taylor Jr. escaped police custody around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sheffield police said in a Facebook post. Taylor is a white male, weighs approximately 150 pounds and stands 5-feet 6-inches tall, police said. He was wearing a dark colored tank top and "unknown pants or shorts," police said. He was last seen heading westbound on foot from the Sheffield Police Department in the 600 block of North Montgomery Avenue, police said. Anyone who contacts Taylor should call Sheffield police at 256-386-5630 or call 911. A South Carolina man accused of killing his five children will use an insanity defense in his upcoming death penalty trial, his lawyers say. News outlets report that attorneys for Timothy Ray Jones Jr., 36, have notified prosecutors of their intent for his trial, which is set to begin October 15 in Lexington County, South Carolina. His attorneys have long suggested that Jones suffered from mental problems. The children's mother said he had been smoking synthetic marijuana and that she repeatedly tried to warn social workers that he posed a danger to them before they were killed. Authorities said the father killed his children at his Lexington home in August 2014, after picking them up from school and day care. At the time, their mother, Amber Jones, was living apart from him due to marital problems. Six days later, she reported them missing and authorities began a search. Police found Jones in Mississippi, where he was stopped for driving under the influence. In his vehicle, officers found a "large amount of blood and handwritten notes with directions" on how to kill and mutilate bodies. Authorities determined that he had been driving around the Southeast for nine days with their bodies in plastic garbage bags. Jones later led police to a hillside in a rural area near Camden, Alabama, where he left their remains. Court records show four of the children - Merah, 8; Elias, 7; Gabriel, 2; and Elaine, 1 - were strangled. Nahtahn, 6, was beaten to death. Jones told investigators he thought his children planned to kill him and then "chop him up and feed him to the dogs." Amber Jones is suing the state Department of Social Services, alleging the state agency failed to safeguard her children despite repeated reports that Jones posed a danger to them. She also has filed a second lawsuit seeking damages from Lexington County retailers, alleging they sold him the synthetic marijuana product that he was under the influence of when he killed the children. President Donald Trump has endorsed U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks in his re-election bid for the 5th Congressional Seat representing North Alabama, the congressman announced this morning. Brooks said at a press conference this morning in Huntsville that he was a Trump supporter, despite what his opponent in the race has said. Trump called him on Tuesday to say that he was giving his support, Brooks said. According to a statement Brooks handed out Trump said: "Mo Brooks is a fighter! He fought by my side to secure our border, rebuild our military, cut our taxes, repeal ObamaCare, and build the wall!" Brooks is facing Huntsville businessman and Iraq veteran Clayton Hinchman in the GOP primary next Tuesday. Brooks is seeking a fifth term in Congress representing north Alabama. Alabama congressman Mo Brooks press conference Wednesday May 30th. President Trump endorses Mo Brooks. Posted by al.com on Wednesday, May 30, 2018 "Yesterday, President Trump called me from Air Force One to personally tell me he is endorsing me in this Republican primary election," Brooks said. "Listen to the message President Trump wants me to share with you that explains why he endorses Mo Brooks for re-election to Congress." Brooks then read a message he attributed to Trump. "Mo Brooks is a fighter! He fought by my side to secure our border, rebuild our military, cut your taxes, repeal Obamacare and build the wall! He supports my Make America Great Again agenda. We need more people like Mo Brooks in Congress. Vote for Mo Brooks for Congress." Asked following the press conference if Trump would be making any ads or robocalls on his behalf, Brooks said there would probably be "some follow-up." Brooks said that according to polling data he received on Tuesday night, he has a 30-point lead over Hinchman. Given that advantage, Brooks was asked why Trump's endorsement was significant. "To set the record straight," Brooks said. "It's as simple as that." President Trump endorses Mo Brooks 11 Gallery: President Trump endorses Mo Brooks That record, Brooks said, is to counter attack ads that linger from last year's U.S. Senate campaign by Luther Strange and the political action committee close to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as well as those run in the congressional campaign by Hinchman. "Luther Strange and Mitch McConnell and now Clayton Hinchman have all run attack ads that they know are designed to give the public the impression that Donald Trump and I right now don't get along," Brooks said. "Each of those people know those attack ads are false because each of those people know that I wrote a $2,500 check to help Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. "That's more than Luther Strange or Clayton Hinchman did. President Trump, thankfully, he knows how much I have supported him in Washington, D.C., on the Make America Great Again agenda. And he does not want to lose a rock-solid conservative that he can count on in the face of tremendous pressure from the establishment wing of the Republican Party to do the wrong thing." Hinchman has aired radio ads in his campaign with sound bytes from Brooks criticizing Trump. Those comments, Brooks said, were made during the presidential campaign when the congressman was chairing the Alabama campaign for presidential candidate Ted Cruz. "Those are all in the Republican (presidential) primary (in 2016)," Brooks said. "And if you recall, the presidential primary, there were some pretty strong things that all of the candidates were saying and all the campaigns were saying. And that's the norm. The key is for everybody to come together after the primary is over with and that's what I did -- as evidence by the $2,500 check I wrote to help Donald Trump win and beat Hillary Clinton." Updated today, May 30, 2018, at 12:47 p.m. with new information throughout. Piedmont police are looking for a gorilla-masked man who allegedly robbed a convenience store late Friday night. Photos from the store's security cameras show a man who appears to be a white male wearing a dark-colored shorts, a green sweatshirt and a gorilla mask, police said in a statement. Witnesses told police the man was about 5-feet 10-inches tall and likely weighs between 200 and 220 pounds, police said. A man wearing dark shorts, green sweatshirt and a gorilla mask allegedly robbed a convenience store in Piedmont Friday night. Police responded to a robbery call at Discount Food Mart on Memorial Drive at 10:45 p.m. Friday. Witnesses told police the man had a handgun and took some cash from the store. The offender left the store running south on Anniston Avenue, police said. An eyewitness lost contact with the offender at the intersection of Anniston Avenue and Calhoun Street, police said. Police do not know if the suspect got later fled in a vehicle. Anyone with information please contact Piedmont Police Dept at (256) 447-9091. Steven Joshua Wiggins, a man sought in connection with the killing of Dickson County Sgt. Daniel Baker, is on the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's 10 Most Wanted list. Steven Joshua Wiggins, a person of interest in the killing of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy, is shown in this 2017 arrest photo. TBI is offering a reward for information leading to the arrested of Wiggins. Wiggins is a person of interest in the shooting death of a Baker during a traffic stop this morning, authorities said. -- TBI (@TBInvestigation) Wiggins is described as 6 feet 1 inch and weighs about 220 pounds, according to TBI. "He may be on foot and should be considered armed and dangerous," TBI officials said. UPDATE: Thanks to the generosity of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (@ATFHQ), the reward for information leading to the arrest of Steven Wiggins stands at $7,500. pic.twitter.com/d7Go19iK9N TBI (@TBInvestigation) May 30, 2018 Wiggins was involved in an altercation with the deputy after a car was reported stolen in Cheatam County, officials told The Tennessean newspaper. State law enforcement issued a Blue Alert, which is similar to an Amber Alert. The Blue Alert is used in cases in which a law enforcement officer has been killed or seriously injured in the line-of-duty. Jesse Duplantis, the Destrehan-based prosperity gospel televangelist with a global reach, is asking disciples for money to buy a jet that costs $54 million "so we can go anywhere in the world in one stop." He seeks the donations in a video posted last week on his ministry's website. "I really believe that if the Lord Jesus Christ was physically on the Earth today, he wouldn't be riding a donkey," Duplantis says in the video. "He'd be in an airplane flying all over the world." Watch "this Week with Jesse" as Jesse shows the importance of using aviation as an amazing tool for evangelizing the world! Tune in each Monday at https://t.co/hnG6BhPAvH or on our JDM App. Click to watch https://t.co/PLfSYt2A3U pic.twitter.com/sAvKskmokO Jesse Duplantis (@jesse_duplantis) May 21, 2018 He says his 40-year-old Jesse Duplantis Ministries has paid cash for three private jets and been "just burning them up for the Lord Jesus Christ." The most recent purchase was in 2006, he says. Now he has his sights set on a Dassault Falcon 7X, a three-engine jet with a range of 5,950 nautical miles. Its customizable cabins accommodate 12 to 16 passengers. A 2017 write-up on SherpaReport.com, a website focused on private aviation, said the list price for a new Falcon 7X was $54 million. In the video, Duplantis says God told him, "I want you to believe in me for a Falcon 7X." He tells viewers: "Pray about becoming a partner to it." Duplantis' solicitation comes four months after another televangelist, the Newark, Texas-based Kenneth Copeland, announced he had bought a new Gulfstream V jet. That aircraft, when first sold in 1998, carried a $36 million price tag, The Christian Post reports. In 2015, Duplantis and Copeland defended their use of private jets. In a segment on Copeland's television program, they argued that commercial planes were full of "a bunch of demons" that will bog down their busy schedules with prayer requests, The Washington Times reported. . . . . . . . Watching the video requires registering on the Jesse Duplantis Ministries website. Once registered, select Media>This Week with Jesse>Week 21 air date May 21, 2018. Angry over U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recusal in the Russia investigation, President Donald Trump urged Sessions to reconsider the move just days after the former Alabama senator made the announcement in March 2017 - and the interaction has made Sessions a key witness in the special counsel probe, the New York Times reported Tuesday. Sessions, the paper said, has been interviewed exhaustively by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office, an indication that Trump's behavior toward Sessions is being looked at with similar interest as the president's action to fire former FBI Director James Comey, who had been investigating Russian meddling until Trump gave him a pink slip. Of the roughly 50 questions that the special counsel wants to ask of Trump, eight pertain to Sessions, the Times reported. One of those questions is what actions Trump took to try and get the attorney general to reverse course on his recusal in the Russia investigation. A spokeswoman for Sessions declined to comment to the Times; she could not immediately be reached for comment by AL.com. Trump's animosity toward Sessions over the recusal had been previously reported - including the president disparaging his attorney general by calling him an "idiot" and encouraging him to resign - but Trump's suggestion that Sessions make an about-face on his recusal is a new development. Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giulaini, told the Times that he did not discuss the matter with the president but said Trump would have been within his rights to get Sessions to undo the recusal. "'Unrecuse' doesn't say, 'Bury the investigation.' It says on the face of it: Take responsibility for it and handle it correctly," Giuliani said. Sessions announced his recusal on March 3 following a Washington Post report that found he met with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the campaign. The report contradicted Sessions' statement during his confirmation hearing that he had no contact with Russian officials during the campaign. But Sessions' office has disputed the characterizations of the meetings with the ambassador. Sessions has maintained that the interactions were made in his capacity as a senator, not as an adviser to the Trump campaign. Update: President Trump has commuted the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson. You can read more here. Earlier story: Kim Kardashian West, the reality television star and gossip column favorite, will meet with President Donald Trump today to discuss a pardon for Alabama prisoner Alice Marie Johnson. The high-profile meeting has propelled Johnson's case back into the spotlight. Johnson, 62, has been imprisoned for 21 years after being convicted of drug conspiracy and money laundering in 1997. According to a 2013 profile by Mic, Johnson was married and had her first pregnancy at age 15. She went on to graduate from high school in Olive Branch, Mississippi and had four more children. Johnson and her husband divorced in 1989 and she lost her long-time job at FedEx due to a gambling addiction. She filed for bankruptcy, lost a house to foreclosure and then, in 1992, her youngest son Cory was killed in a scooter accident. At this point, Johnson became involved with people who were dealing drugs. She began working for an operation that transported cocaine to Memphis, Tenn. In 1993, she and 15 others were arrested on various drug and money laundering charges. Ten of her co-conspirators testified against her in exchange for reduced sentences, even though Johnson said she was only a go-between and never made any deals or sold drugs. The co-defendants who testified against her were given sentences ranging from probation without jail time to 10 years; Johnson received life in prison without parole, plus 25 years, Mic reported. It was her first conviction. She is currently being held in Alabama's Aliceville Federal Correctional Institution. Johnson's case has been highlighted by the ACLU as an example of abuses of life sentences for non-violent, first time offenders. Her bid for freedom has garnered support from celebrities and elected officials. She herself said her punishment is akin to a death sentence. "It feels like I am sitting on death row. Unless things change, I will never go home alive," she told the ACLU. While in prison, Johnson has maintained a clean disciplinary record, is a hospice volunteer and helps coordinate the prison's Special Olympics event for inmates with disabilities. She has also become an ordained minister. A Change.org petition launched by her children to call for her freedom has garnered more than 260,000 signatures. President Trump tweeted out a photo of Kardashian at the White House. Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing. pic.twitter.com/uOy4UJ41JF Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018 Taebryanna Sims is a culture fanatic. In high school at McGill-Toolen, she fell in love with the United Kingdom. She then became consumed by all things French. Besides it being "one of the coolest sounding languages in the world," the diversity of the French people and their culture inspired Sims to obsession. When it came time to pick a college, she chose the University of Alabama over Duke, New York University and others because of its international studies program. Her goal was to travel abroad and she saw Tuscaloosa as her best entryway. This month, the 22-year-old Sims received a prestigious Fulbright grant that is paying for, and facilitating, her trip to South Korea in July to teach English for two years. Fewer than 2,000 of the grants are awarded nationwide. "It was the best decision I ever made," Sims says of heading to Alabama, where she graduated in early May. 'Important time' Sims, whose father was a U.S. diplomat, spent her youth in Sri Lanka and Virginia before moving to Mobile when she was entering eighth grade. Reflecting on her years in Sri Lanka, she says, "It was pretty much the most important time in my life." Sims lived in Sri Lanka between the ages of 7 and 9, and says she flourished in her international school under the British and Australian teachers who led her classes. "We learned new practical and applicable skills monthly," she says, adding that her teachers presented ideas and concepts that she didn't see in the U.S. until high school. The international school in Sri Lanka also showed her ways to address her personal life and emotions, Sims says. And it sparked an interest in multi-dimensional education that sticks with her still. At McGill-Toolen, Sims took Advanced Placement classes. And she credits her AP government teacher, Mark Tenhundfeld, with inspiring her interest in political science. "I absolutely loved his class and he taught us everything from domestic policy to how America looks to the international community," she says. Tenhundfeld was "amazing," she says, "in helping me figure out what I want to do with my life." 'Test all that' News from the Korean peninsula -- and saber-rattling -- can command the headlines on any given day, but Sims feels no trepidation, only excitement. She can't wait to experience the myriad festivals, concerts and other events that the region is known for. And she says that she's been a fan of K-Pop music for years. In fact, popular Korean culture in all forms has been her go-to source for learning the Korean language and customs. But above everything, she's looking forward to teaching elementary school. "A lot of my experience has been theoretical, based in a classroom setting," Sims says. "And now I get to test all that abroad." She'll be building and executing lesson plans, teaching 20 hours a week and learning with, and from, the other teachers. And if she's seeking advice or a listening ear, she says, a large community of previous Fulbright grant winners is at her disposal who flourished in South Korea and elsewhere. There will be a lot of self-discovery, too. She expects this next chapter to help her determine if she truly wants to pursue a future in teaching. Back in Mobile, one goal remains to be accomplished. Sims says that she's always wanted to serve on the royal court of the Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association. Her father, Isadore Sims, is a MAMGA officer. In fact, she's been crafting a Mardi Gras lesson plan for her future students in South Korea. "I am so excited to teach them about it, although I'll have to make it a week-long experience," she says. "You can't share it all in one day." Wednesday, Esquire released its 2018 list of the "21 Best Bars in America", which featured an overwhelming majority of Southern watering holes. Of course, within the bunch of "exemplary places to start a tab", is an Alabama favorite. Although the list isn't exactly numbered, coming in near the top of the entries is Manci's Antique Club, a lively, little joint found on the Daphne side of the Mobile Bay. The bar has grown a great deal of recent fanfare due to its live music schedule and accessible American-styled pub food menu. However, as Esquire contributor Beth Ann Fennelly acknowledges, Manci's has a storied history in the area, dating back to Prohibition times. Beyond great drinks, great food and great company, the restaurant and bar is a stimulating sight to behold, as well. The bar is filled with delightfully kitschy tchotchkes, good for an awe-inspiring "Look at that!" from across the room. For a closer look at Manci's and the many other bars chosen alongside the historic site on the list, read Esquire's full article. Clete Wetli is a liberal political activist living in Huntsville and a regular contributor to AL.com. Email Clete at decaturclete@gmail.com or visit cletewetli.com. Rep. Mo Brooks' recent embarrassing comments about falling rocks raising sea levels might be reluctantly excused if he didn't have such a long history of gaffes and ludicrous public statements. Who can forget when he infamously declared that there was a "war on whites" or that war refugees who've lost everything just want to come to America for a "paid vacation"? Whether it's his view that poor sick people don't deserve affordable healthcare or referring to domestic abuse allegations as "soap opera news", it's become increasingly clear that North Alabama can't afford Mo Brooks. He's talked a great game about fiscal responsibility, but voted for Trump's reckless tax cut scam that has only benefitted the wealthiest and promises to add trillions to our nation's deficit. That's an interesting position from a congressman whose big pitch is that America is fiscally insolvent. Brooks' divisive rhetoric has always catered to extremist conservatives who believe in white nativism and religious intolerance. His message appeals to those who feel threatened by demographic and cultural diversity. Brooks has masterfully catered to this type of resentment since he first stumbled into the political swamp of identity politics and hyper-partisanship decades ago. There are voluminous statements of all the things he's against, but it's almost impossible to articulate a position he's for. It would help if he would hold townhall meetings, but he tends to skip them or bar people from attending if he thinks he'll have to face any type of dissent or answer difficult questions. In fact, he's even famously run away from reporters to avoid taking a stand on certain issues. Remember, Brooks was against Trump, claiming, "Nobody knows what Donald Trump would do with any degree of certainty because Donald Trump is all over the map on every issue", but now Brooks claims he supports the Trump agenda even though it's about as clear as mud as to what that means. Although, to be fair, Brooks has never wavered on his anti-immigration stance saying, "...I will do anything short of shooting them" and threatening a government shutdown if Trump's unnecessary border wall wasn't funded. His extremist base must have been delighted to learn that he hates immigrants more than he hates deficits (which, he now seems to love). However, for the non-extremists, this is just another example of Brooks ignoring real issues in favor of scoring cheap political points. People in Alabama need access to affordable healthcare and Brooks has done nothing to help. People in Alabama need to see economic growth in rural communities and Brooks has no vision to make that happen. People in Alabama want their natural resources protected and Brooks is in favor of haphazardly eliminating environmental regulations that protect us all. So, as Brooks campaigns by showing how us how he's more ideologically conservative than his rivals, he doesn't have much of a record to run on, unless one counts obstructionism and pandering as accomplishments. It looks like the Republican primary is all about who's more Christian, who loves guns more, who hates immigrants the most, and who is the biggest Trump sycophant. In North Alabama, we can do better and we deserve better. Democratic candidate, Peter Joffrion has a sensible platform that's pro-growth and practical. Joffrion isn't ramping up extremist rhetoric to pander for a vote, instead, he's focused on the issues that matter and he proposes workable, realistic solutions. When Brooks voted with Trump to explode our nation's deficit, it was the epitome of hypocrisy and the latest example of why we can't afford Mo Brooks. It's time for Mo to go. Maybe, he can use that time to brush up on some math or science. Despite being widely celebrated, the Ebola vaccine might not prove as effective as it is advertised to be. In early May 2018, when the ninth Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo threatened to spread to Mbandaka, a city of 1.2 million people, the global health public relations machine went into overdrive. Unlike previous outbreaks in the country, or unlike the 2014-16 West African outbreak, international responders quickly announced their support for efforts to contain Ebola. This rapid response by African and Western experts has been heralded as a direct consequence of lessons learned from the West African outbreak, which by 2016 had killed more than 11,000 people, mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. By their own report, efforts to assist Ebola response by multilateral agencies like the UN and the African Union have not only been quick, but impressive. The World Bank and the World Health Organization have committed $12m and $2m respectively to help the fight against the outbreak. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, established in 2017, have deployed its emergency response team and committed up to $2m. Among the highlights of this rapid response is the use of the investigational rVSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine. Beside two vaccines developed and approved by Russia and China, this one has gone the furthest in its development: it has been tested for safety, for its ability to elicit sufficient immune response to fight off Ebola, and for efficacy. However, the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine, which is currently produced by US-based pharmaceutical giant Merck, is unlicensed by health authorities. It is being administered in the DRC under compassionate use protocol, which allows unlicensed, but possibly effective, drugs to be used in the event of an emergency. The vaccine will be offered through ring vaccination, which means that only close contacts of Ebola patients, contacts of contacts, healthcare workers, and other front-line responders will be vaccinated in the three affected areas of Mbandaka, Bikoro, and Iboko. Experts estimate each ring will consist of up to 150 contacts, with an estimated 10,000 who will possibly be vaccinated by the end of June 2018. Most media coverage about the vaccines deployment to the region has been triumphalist, referring to the vaccine as a game-changer and a paradigm shift. But these reports should be viewed with caution. During the West African Ebola outbreak, the vaccine underwent phase two and three clinical trials, for safety, immunogenicity, and efficacy. A December 2016 final report by the investigators running the trial in Guinea suggested that the vaccine is 100 percent effective against Ebola. This figure has been widely reported and continues to be used in reports touting the arrival of the vaccine in the DRC. But there have been reports also questioning the high level of efficacy reported in the trial. {articleGUID} Referring to the Guinea clinical trials, a panel of experts convened by the US National Academy of Medicine, reported the following: We concur that, taken together, the results suggest that the vaccine most likely provides some protection to recipients possibly substantial protection, as stated in the final report. However, we remain uncertain about the magnitude of its efficacy. Further, they expressed some concern that early positive results might make it difficult to justify, on an ethical basis, controlled clinical trials of the vaccine in the future. It also has to be made clear that people who already carry the virus are likely to develop an infection, even if they receive the vaccine. Other concerns arise when new pharmaceuticals are tested in settings among vulnerable populations. As noted by Liberian academic Robtel Neajai Pailey, there is a history of medical experimentation among vulnerable populations in the US and parts of Africa. Informed consent by research participants requires a complex negotiation under any circumstances, but the history of experimentation Pailey and others describe too often intensify community concerns and negative responses to certain medical interventions. How will the questions about its efficacy be properly explained? Under what conditions can an Ebola contact refuse the vaccine? Under what conditions will the vaccine be contraindicated for people who have been close contacts with Ebola sufferers, and how will this be explained? Recently, I sought personal accounts from clinical trial participants in Sierra Leone, where I work as an anthropologist. During those conversations, I learned second-hand about participants inability to report concerning side effects of the vaccine swollen joints and joint pain; skin lesions; and fever to the research team. How will those vaccinated understand their risk of infection and how will this shape their actions if the disease continues to spread? Who among close contacts will be missed through other means, if reports of Congolese communities evasion of health workers are true? In an interview with The Atlantic, Seth Berkley, the director of the NGO Gavi, which has supported the vaccination campaign, expressed concern that people who learn about possible Ebola infections among the vaccinated would lose confidence in the vaccine. {articleGUID} Confidence in the vaccine, however, may very well be the least of the global health communitys problems. If serious, careful efforts to inform communities about the risks and pitfalls and limitations of the vaccine and knowledge about all of these are not made, lack of confidence in and mistrust of the health system may be difficult to overcome during future health campaigns like this one. The introduction of this experimental Ebola vaccine whatever its efficacy and potential risks will inevitably shape the landscape of care and communities trust of the health system, more generally. The current narrative has prioritised the vaccine, even as basic public health measures will still be needed to deliver and administer it. Carrying out ring vaccination requires bread-and-butter public health functions: tracing contacts; documenting timing, intensity and location of their exposure to the disease and so on. The ring vaccination strategy has also caused confusion among the affected communities. In a recent AFP report, MSF officials noted that some people have heard about the vaccine and expect mass immunisation to take place, as is the case with other diseases with which they are familiar. Others allegedly refuse care at the hospital because they are waiting for the vaccine. Although it is not clear how widespread these beliefs are, these allegations suggest that responders are not communicating and receiving buy-in for their strategies. Perhaps health officials have too narrowly focused on the game changer potential of the vaccine to a vaguely defined audience in the West, with too little recognition that these triumphalist messages also travel and circulate in the very places where they work. They starkly contrast with the messages that need to be communicated to the communities facing an imminent threat from Ebola. That is: this vaccine is likely highly effective in the current formulation, but this element is still under investigation; only close contacts will receive the vaccination; and it is possible that some people will fall ill after they have been vaccinated. But these do not make for catchy, succinct press releases. They do not fit neatly into an outbreak narrative of heroic rescue and scientific progress. Yet the people of DRC deserve better. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. After months of political deadlock following an inconclusive election, Italy is on the verge of a major political crisis with global implications. Earlier this month, the far-right League party and the Five Star Movement which practices a new breed of centrist populism proposed a new government that European Union officials saw as a threat. On May 27, Italian President Sergio Mattarella vetoed the appointment of a Eurosceptic finance minister in an attempt to reassure financial markets and dispel the risk of Italy abandoning the euro, the EUs single currency. But his decision might deliver just that. While it is customary for Italian presidents to oversee government formation and to intervene to block a minister deemed unfit for the role, Mattarellas decision marks the first time that a veto is used because of a candidates political views on the economy. It is to be noted that Mattarella had no qualms about accepting Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League, as an interior minister, despite his calls for the deportation of up to half a million migrants and refugees and his racist views. The Five Star Movement and the League have refused to propose an alternative name for the finance ministers position. In a clear sign of the state of confusion Italian politics is in, the two parties are oscillating between demanding that the president is impeached and asking him for another chance to form a government. Italy has traded a Eurosceptic finance minister today for a much more vehemently anti-euro government tomorrow. In the meantime, Mattarella has responded by appointing a technocratic cabinet with no chance of securing a parliamentary majority. If confirmed, its task would be to lead the country to early elections. Regardless of what happens, the presidents veto has led to further polarisation of the political scene, with Italians being compelled to join one of two radically opposed camps. On one side, there are the parties supporting the president, defending Italys Eurozone membership and advocating continuity in political and economic policies. They are perceived to be part of the the establishment and gravitate around the Democratic Party, which was previously in power. Their victory would lock Italys commitment to the EU and guarantee business as usual on the economic front. Unfortunately, for many Italians, business as usual means a stagnating economy and enduring double-digit unemployment within an unsustainable Eurozone. The alternative, however, is worse. On the other side, the League and the Five Star Movement cry out against the excessive influence of international financial markets and the EU bureaucracy over the Italian democracy. They demand that Italy regains its sovereignty and stops being a colony of the Germans or the French. A reckless EU establishment has admittedly helped these ideas gain much traction in the Italian society. On Monday, EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger sparked outrage after saying that the whip of the financial markets should dissuade Italians from voting for populists. The financial markets have reacted in horror, with Italian government debt under pressure and a plummeting stock exchange. And the reason for all this is simple: The upcoming elections will be perceived as a referendum on Italys membership in the Eurozone, while Mattarellas actions have given an immense boost to the nationalist camp and have further radicalised its positions. The latest polls show that the League has nearly doubled its popularity, with 27 percent of respondents saying that they would vote for the party (the League gained 17 percent in the March 4 election); the Five Star Movement is holding steady at 30 percent. Italy has traded a Eurosceptic finance minister today for a much more vehemently anti-euro government tomorrow. More fundamentally, the ongoing crisis in Italy is part of a broader global trend: the division of the political space into two apparently opposed, but ultimately symbiotic, fields. One is the new wave of nationalism nurtured by an establishment clinging to an obsolete economic model generating inequality and injustice and depriving a growing number of people of their right to a decent life. The so-called Washington consensus promoting neoliberal globalisation, unfettered financial flows and booming international trade is dead in the water. And the attempt of a discredited political class to cling to it is creating political monsters. On the other side, the establishment needs the nationalists to ground its last attempt to remain in power. Remember Hillary Clintons statement during the 2016 US election campaign: I am the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse? This is project fear, the last trick of the elites. In Italys case, the establishment is using the danger of a Eurozone break-up to scare the electorate. And so the establishment praising continuity and the nationalist-populist backlash end up feeding off and reinforcing each other. It is no coincidence that the EU finds itself at the centre-stage of this crisis. Its policies combine elements of unbridled neoliberalism for instance, in the form of a Central Bank indifferent to the plight of the unemployed with elements of international solidarity in the form of structural funds for the poorer areas of the continent. The common currency was meant to bring its peoples closer together and nurture the beginning of a transnational democracy. But a currency without political oversight has achieved, just like Mattarellas actions, a result opposite to the intended one. The euro is setting nations and peoples apart. Without deep reform, and without a real democratisation of the EU, the Eurozone is ultimately bound to disintegrate. This would be a disaster of immense proportions. But while Europe would need urgent, serious, committed political and institutional change, all that seems to be on offer is a false choice between suicidal continuity and nationalist implosion. What is happening in Italy today has global implications. An Italian exit from the Eurozone would trigger a crisis without precedent, dragging the EU into political and financial mayhem and possibly plunging the world back into recession. But, more importantly, Italy is a canary in a mine foretelling an imminent political crisis sweeping across the globe, from India to the US, from the Philippines to Hungary. It remains to be seen whether a world faced with a discredited establishment and resurgent nationalism will find the strength and vision to reform a dying international order. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. A letter the Catholic Archbishop of Delhi sent to all parish priests working in Indias capital city has created a furore in the countrys already charged political scene. In the letter dated May 8, Archbishop Anil Couto requested parish priests to start a year-long prayer campaign to save India from the turbulent political atmosphere, which poses a threat to the democratic principles enshrined in our constitution and the secular fabric of our nation. The ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) immediately jumped to criticise the letter, calling it a divisive move and saying it was akin to calling people to vote along communal lines. BJP President Amit Shah also condemned the letter and warned people not to mobilise masses on the basis of religion. Giriraj Singh, a senior minister of the BJP government who is known for his controversial statements about Indias minority communities, responded to the letter by saying every action has a reaction. If the archbishop asked his people to pray, people from other religions would also start praying in their own way, he said. The only Christian minister in the central cabinet, K J Alphons, said the archbishop was not the entire church and was an isolated voice in the community. Calling the letter unfair to the government, he advised the bishop that Godmen should stay away from politics. Home Minister Rajnath Singh also felt compelled to respond to the letter, and claimed that India is a country where there was no discrimination on the basis of religion. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent body of the BJP, also criticised the archbishops call to prayer. Prominent RSS ideologue Rakesh Sinha called the letter a direct interference of the Vatican in the affairs of India and said that it was an affront to the secular character of India. It was interesting to see the BJP and the RSS treat the letter as an attack on the government. The letter does not mention the BJP nor does it mention the current government. The only thing the letter does talk about is the turbulent political atmosphere in the country. Inciting religious hatred The archbishops letter was not the only statement that has been issued by concerned Indian Christians in the past month. Barely a week after Archbishop Coutos letter became public, the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC) put out a statement condemning the appointment of a known RSS man Kummanam Rajasekharan as a governor of Mizoram, which is a Christian-dominated state. Christians in Mizoram in particular, and those of the country in general, feel disturbed and very much let down after the appointment of a hardcore Hindutva fundamentalist as the new Governor of Mizoram where 87 percent of people are Christians, the Council said. The organisation also alleged that Rajasekharans appointment was a deliberate move to create disharmony in a state that has won awards in the last few years for being the most peaceful state in the country. There are now fears that both the archbishops letter and the GCICs statement could be used by the BJP to further polarise Hindus in forthcoming elections in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. In the past, BJP officials presented such letters and statements as evidence of an international conspiracy against a party that defends Hindu interests. Last November, prior to the Gujarat state assembly elections, Archbishop Thomas Macwan of the Archdiocese of Gandhinagar issued a letter calling parish priests to organise prayer sessions to help people who would remain faithful to the Indian constitution get elected. BJP treated the letter as a call to vote against it, and a BJP leader even called for the archbishops arrest for inciting religious hatred. In India, participation in politics of Hindu godmen and women is seen as normal, but when Muslim or Christian religious personalities speak on politics, they are accused of dividing people. The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh is the head of an old and very powerful Gorakhnath Math (temple) in Gorakhpur. There are ministers and members of parliament who themselves claim to be godmen and women and yet are seen as fit for office within the secular polity of India. Increasing discrimination against minorities The letter of Archbishop Cauto needs to be seen in the context of the growing anxiety and unrest religious minority communities of India have been feeling. In a column for the Times of India, Julio Ribeiro, a retired police commissioner and well-respected Christian public figure, voiced the concerns of many when he wrote: I should be prepared for second class citizenship that denies top jobs like that of a judge in the Supreme Court, a governor of a state, the chief of defence staff or the intelligence bureau. What I will not accept is being accused falsely of being anti-national and pilloried on that count. In this years Open Door World Watch List, which ranks the 50 countries in which Christians face the worst persecution for practising their faith, India came 11th. The country was ranked 31st in the same list only five years ago. According to the United Christian Forum (UCF), more than 700 cases of attacks on Christians across India were reported to their toll-free helpline number between 2014 and 2017. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian NGO, publishes a periodical report on the cases of discrimination or attacks against Christians in India. In its 2017 report, the organisation said: According to a statement made by the Government in the Indian Parliament on the 7th of Feb. 2017 over the last three years, over 278 persons have been killed, and over 6,500 people were injured due to communal violence in over 2000 incidents. {articleGUID} According to the ADF, discriminatory incidents and hate crimes experienced by Christians in India include cases of Ghar Wapsi (religious conversion activities), refusal to grant permission to establish and run places of worship, false accusations of forceful and fraudulent religious conversions, physical and verbal assaults on church pastors and members, false and divisive propaganda, damage, desecration and arson of places of worship, disruption of prayer services and restrictions on religious gatherings. Moreover, BJP leaders and ministers regularly invoke anti-Muslim and anti-Christian symbolism to garner Hindu support. Representatives of the ruling party repeatedly talk about Muslims outnumbering Hindus in India or Christian missionaries luring poor people to their fold through their educational institutions. After creating sufficient fear within Hindu communities, they suggest that they can be the voice and protector of Hindus in India. In his public addresses, Prime Minister Narendra Modi very cleverly uses a language that derides and mocks minorities and presents the Congress and other political parties in India as anti-Hindu forces. In the recently concluded and much discussed parliamentary by-election at Kairana, Uttar Pradesh, BJP representatives used a similar us vs them discourse, pitting Hindus against Muslims to garner votes. Many members of minority communities in India, as well as many secular Indians, believe that if the BJP wins next years general election, the subversion of the institutionally secular character of India would be complete. This is why opposition parties are keeping their ideological differences aside and trying to forge a grand alliance. The letter of the archbishop needs to be read and judged in this context. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. Athens, Greece Flags and banners fluttered above a steady stream of protesters, who chanted anti-austerity slogans as they marched through the streets of the Greek capital. On Wednesday, thousands of Greek workers, union members, migrant labourers, students, pensioners and unemployed people flooded Athens city centre to hold a general strike against the governments ongoing austerity regime. Organised by labour unions, the 24-hour nationwide strike paralysed public transportation in much of the country, disrupted flight schedules and prevented many ships from setting sail. Subways and metros were halted, and several flights were grounded. Shops, restaurants, offices and schools were shuttered throughout the capital, and public services were paused for the day. Nikos Papageorgiou, a member of the communist-linked PAME unions executive committee, stood in front of a massive crowd of striking union members in Omonia Square. This is our ninth year of crisis, and the general picture for the working class in Greece is terrible, with high unemployment and low wages, he told Al Jazeera. Behind him, hundreds of PAME flags trembled above the protesting workers. Our demands arent just higher salaries but basic human rights for workers, Papageorgiou added. During Wednesdays strike, demonstrators marched to Syntagma Square, where the Greek parliament is located. Down with taxes, let the capitalists pay, one banner read. {articleGUID} Brief clashes between protesters and riot police broke out in parts of the city. Pavlos Alexandros, the head of a union representing construction workers, carried a banner along with fellow protesters as they made their way to the parliament. Wages have shrunk a lot for construction workers [throughout the crisis], he told Al Jazeera. We are here fighting against this. Normal country Throughout the nine-year economic crisis, Greece has received several bailouts from European lenders. But the conditions of Greeces debt relief have been the source of widespread anger among many Greeks. In January 2015, the left-wing Syriza party came to power after campaigning on promises to support crisis-burdened workers and end austerity. Although the austerity measures started years before Syrizas meteoric rise, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his left-wing government have continued to introduce new steps, including slashing public-sector wages, raising taxes and cutting pensions. On June 14, the Greek parliament is slated to vote on the next round of economic reforms. Meanwhile, unemployment hovers above 20 percent and youth unemployment sits at more than 45 percent. Thousands rallied in central Athens against ongoing austerity measures [Nick Paleologos/SOOC/Al Jazeera] With workers struggling more and more to make ends meet and many former Syriza voters feeling betrayed by the partys reneging on its promises, support for Tsipras and his party have declined. The next national elections are scheduled to take place in 2019. According to a poll published by Greeces Skai TV last month, Syrizas support was 21.5 percent, putting it 10 points behind the right-wing New Democracy, the largest opposition party in the parliament. The centre-left Movement for Change was polling at nine percent, while the neo-fascist Golden Dawn held eight percent and the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) sat just above six percent. {articleGUID} Despite New Democracys lead in that poll, the survey also suggested that a growing number of Greeks more than 40 percent were disillusioned with both the centre-right party and Syriza. During a visit to the southeastern European country last month, European Commission President Jean Claude-Juncker claimed Greece was on track to become a normal country by the end of the summer. We want those jobs back Although Greeces bailout is expected to end in August, many workers and cash-strapped Greeks fear their economic crisis is far from over. Argiri Erotokritou, who sits on the steering committee of a union representing public healthcare workers in Athens, said the burden of exiting the memorandum has been placed on the working class. Today, we want to send a clear message to the government that exiting the memorandum should also mean the end of austerity, she told Al Jazeera at Wednesdays demonstration. Mihaili Zervos, a union organiser, said workers will fight until the end [Nick Paleologos/SOOC/Al Jazeera] Explaining that tens of thousands of workers have been laid off from public hospitals in the last eight years, she added: If they want to say that the crisis is over, then we want those jobs back. Along with several others, Mihali Zervos, an organiser with a union of short-term workers in Greeces culture ministry, held a banner that read: Say no to unpaid work! {articleGUID} As the crowd advanced through the capital, Zervos explained that short-term contracts have become increasingly common for workers in the cultural industry. We cant plan our lives on a series of short-term contracts, he told Al Jazeera. We want work for everyone not temporary work, just the permanent work that they deserve. Zervos concluded: Todays strike is about everybody And we will fight until the end. ABC cancels Roseanne show after stars abhorrent tweets Network issued a statement condemning Barrs racist comments towards ex-Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, calling them abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values. Ukrainian Security Service says it faked Arkady Babchenkos death to catch those who were trying to kill him. Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who had been reported shot and killed in the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday, has shown up at a news conference alive. Vasily Hrytsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, told a news conference in Kiev on Wednesday that the agency faked Babchenkos death to catch those who were trying to kill him. He added that the staged death was part of a special operation to pre-empt a real plot to kill him. The organiser of this alleged plot was arrested in Kiev earlier on Wednesday, according to Hrytsak, who said that investigative actions are under way. He accused Russian security services of recruiting a Ukrainian national to carry out the murder for a fee of $40,000. Kiev and national police had said Babchenko, a strong critic of the Kremlin, was shot multiple times in the back at his apartment building and found bleeding by his wife. He showed up at a news conference on Wednesday and thanked everyone who was mourning his death. He also thanked the Ukranian Security Service for saving his life. Babchenko said he was not allowed to go into the details of his false death. He said Ukraines law enforcement had been aware of a contract on his head for two months. He said he was approached by the Ukrainian Security Service a month ago. Al Jazeeras Rory Challands, reporting from Moscow, said that Babchenko used the news conference to apologise to those closest to him, including his wife, who had not been informed of the operation. We had heard reports since the shooting yesterday or what seemed to have been a shooting that it was his wife that found him bleeding on the floor of their apartment and called an ambulance and that he died on his way to hospital in the ambulance. She, it seems, did not know that he was not dead and so, in this press conference, earlier in Kiev, he sent his apologies to his wife saying, Im sorry about this but this is the way it had to be done.' F anning anti-Russian hysteria News of the death of Babchenko set off a series of recriminations between Kiev and Moscow, and pictures and flowers were laid by mourners at the Russian embassy in Kiev. Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said on social media on Tuesday that he was convinced the Russian totalitarian machine had not forgiven Babchenko for what Groysman called his honesty. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had rejected allegations that Moscow was behind the murder of the journalist, calling it part of an anti-Russian campaign, the TASS news agency reported on Tuesday. Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russias Federal Security Service (FSB), said Ukrainian allegations the FSB was behind the killing of Babchenko were nonsense and a provocation, the Interfax news agency reported earlier on Wednesday. Following Wednesdays press conference where Babchenko appeared alive, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it was happy the journalist was alive but spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the operation was done for propagandistic effect, according to Interfax, a Russian news agency. The foreign ministry added that Ukrainian government was fanning anti-Russian hysteria. Were confident our foreign partners and the relevant international agencies will draw correct conclusions from the whole situation. Ukraines President Petro Poroshenko said on Twitter on Wednesday that he had given an order to provide Babchenko and his family with protection. Pathetic stunt Babchenko, one of Russias best-known war correspondents, left his country in February 2017, saying he was receiving threats and he was concerned he might be jailed. He served in the Russian army during the first separatist war in Chechnya during the 1990s and later became a journalist. He worked as a military correspondent for several Russian media outlets. In the autumn, Babchenko moved to Kiev, where he worked as a host for the Crimean Tatar TV station, ATR. Reporters Without Borders condemned the staged event, calling it a pathetic stunt on Wednesday. Christophe Deloire, the head of the Paris-based media watchdog, told AFP news agency that while he was relieved that was still alive, it is pathetic and regrettable that the Ukrainian police have played with the truth, whatever their motive for the stunt. Brazil: Oil workers threaten strike action amid truckers protest A Petrobras oil workers union has said it plans its own 72-hour walkout starting on Wednesday Demonstrations continue as action against poor public services, high living costs, and political corruption is demanded. Sao Paulo, Brazil Truck drivers continue to protest nationwide with services such as fueling at petrol stations halted and the delivery of crucial goods screeching to a halt. What began as a strike last week over rising fuel prices has now turned to other long-standing complaints about poor public services, high living costs, and political corruption. We are fighting for everything. The price of fuel is the main thing, but we need better roads, better healthcare, better public security, Cicero Aparecido da Silva, 47, a Sao Paulo trucker, told Al Jazeera. The demonstrations led to serious fuel shortages and scarcity of fresh produce and medicines, and caused public transport reductions in Brazilian cities along with airports shutting down. Key sectors of the Brazilian economy such as livestock, agriculture and industry have been strangled, threatening the countrys already fragile economic recovery after gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by more than seven percent since 2015. Unemployment remains near record high at 12.9 percent, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Calling in the troops? President Michel Temer has conceded to the demands of the protesting truck drivers twice already and said he would put the countrys armed forces into action to assist with removing trucks blocking highways. Most recently, he announced on Monday he would reduce the price of diesel by 46 Brazilian cents (13 US cents) per litre for 60 days. But for many, the concessions are not enough. Brazils Federal Highway Police counted 616 truck driver protest points across the country on Tuesday evening, though with just a few remaining blockades, according to the G1 news site. Al Jazeera visited one of the protests at a petrol station on the Regis Bittencourt highway with parked trucks lining both sides of the road. Many protesters called for the removal of Temer, whose approval rating hovers at about five percent, according to the latest polls. This is also about overthrowing the Temer government, which everyone wants, Alexandre Molina, 39, from Brazils Rio Grande do Sul state, told Al Jazeera. Molina had been at the gas station protest since last Wednesday. Corrupt politicians Like the majority of demonstrators, he also expressed sympathy for military intervention to deal with the crisis. We need to get the military in to take out all of the corrupt politicians, Molina said. From 1964-1985, Brazil was governed by a military dictatorship, during which time thousands of people considered political subversives were tortured, killed or disappeared. A recently uncovered CIA memo showed for the first time in 1974 that then-President General Ernesto Geisel knew of and approved political assassinations. In recent years, however, a glut of high profile corruption scandals, rising violence, and a tanking economy has seen support for democracys fall, according to opinion polls. In October, Brazil will hold general elections that promise to be the most unpredictable in years. Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, the wildly popular former president and current frontrunner, was recently jailed for 12 years on corruption charges, making it unlikely he will run. Polling second is hardline right-winger and former army captain Jair Bolsonaro, himself an avid supporter of Brazils military dictatorship. Crackdown before the lifting of a driving ban on women casts doubt over Saudis approach to reforms. Human rights organisations voiced their concern over the detention of womens rights activists in Saudi Arabia, a month before the kingdom removes a ban on female drivers. The lifting of the ban on women drivers is part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmans reform programme. It is shocking that Saudi Arabia is detaining prominent womens rights defenders the real champions behind the lifting of the driving ban just before they allow all women the right to drive, Human Rights Watchs Rothna Begum told Al Jazeera on Wednesday. The comments came a day after the United Nations called on Saudi Arabia to provide information about nearly a dozen prominent activists mostly women who for years urged reforms that are now being implemented arrested this month. It is shocking that Saudi Arabia is detaining prominent women's rights defenders - the real champions behind the lifting of the driving ban - behind bars just before they allow all women the right to drive. Rothna Begum, Human Rights Watch The UN human rights office said the government should ensure the women and other campaigners in custody receive due process. Amnesty International voiced similar concerns. We are extremely worried about the overall human rights situation in Saudi Arabia, despite the womens driving ban being lifted in less than a month, Kareem Chehayeb, the groups Saudi Arabia researcher, told Al Jazeera on Wednesday. The recent sweeping crackdown on human rights activists this month is sadly not an anomaly. Amnesty International has documented continued arrests and harsh prison sentences of human rights activists for their peaceful activism. We fear these activists will be given trumped-up security-related charges. Riyadh announced the arrests last week and accused the activists of suspicious contact with foreign parties, as well as providing financial support to hostile nations and attempting the undermine the kingdoms security and stability. Those detained were also branded traitors and agents of embassies by state-affiliated media. The activists, who represent several generations of Saudi feminists, could face up to 20 years in jail if found guilty. Hypocritical With the crackdown on womens rights activists coming weeks before the much-hyped lifting of the driving ban, doubts about Bin Salmans approach to reforms in the kingdom have been revived. While Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman continues to present himself as a reformer, peaceful human rights activism that calls for reforms continues to be criminalised. It simply doesnt make sense, Chehayab said. Begum agreed. Its not real reform if rights defenders are locked up for asking for simple basic human rights. While Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman continues to present himself as a reformer, peaceful human rights activism that calls for reforms continues to be criminalised. Kareem Chehayeb, Amnesty International Speaking at a Geneva briefing on Tuesday, UN human rights spokeswoman Liz Throssell said six women and three men are known to remain in custody and face serious allegations that could lead to draconian sentences. Their exact whereabouts are unknown and most of them have only been permitted to make a single telephone call to their families since they were arrested. Throssell called on Saudi authorities to reveal their locations and ensure their rights to due process are guaranteed. If, as it appears, their detention is related solely to their work as human rights defenders and activists on womens issues, they should be released immediately, she said. Interior ministry says all 10 attackers killed in Kabul following assault on its compound claimed by the ISIL group. A coordinated assault on the interior ministry building in Afghanistans capital ended with all 10 attackers killed. Two blasts went off outside the ministry compound before assailants attempted to storm the building, triggering fierce clashes with security forces that lasted for hours. At least one policeman was killed in the assault, and five others were wounded. The explosion happened very close to the building, and the fighters were attempting to go inside, Najib Danish, interior ministry spokesman, told Al Jazeera. The assault is over now, and a search operation is under way. Initial findings by the ministry said six attackers were killed. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group claimed responsibility for the attack. Al Jazeeras Jennifer Glasse, reporting from Kabul, said it was a complex attack as fighters attempted to enter the heavily fortified ministry. There are very high blast walls around the compound to protect it from attacks. There are guards on 24 hours a day, she said. Security around Kabul has been on high alert in recent days with more checkpoints and patrols as the government warned of attacks by the Taliban on government installations. Both the Taliban and ISIL have stepped up attacks on Kabul, making it the deadliest place in the country for civilians in recent months. Last week the Taliban called on Kabul residents to keep away from military and intelligence centres in the city, saying the group had more assaults planned as part of its annual spring offensive. Palestinian faction says it has agreed to a ceasefire with Israel to end largest flare-up of violence since 2014 war. A ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel appears to be holding following one of the worst days in violence in the Gaza Strip since the 2014 Gaza war. Hamas said on Wednesday that armed groups in the Gaza Strip had agreed to a deal with Israel following a night of air attacks targeting several Hamas and Islamic Jihad positions in the coastal enclave. The Israeli government had yet to comment on the offer but Khalil al-Hayya, Hamass deputy chief in Gaza, said the group was committed to a truce as long as Israel was. A number of mediators intervened in the past hours, and an agreement was reached to return to a ceasefire in Gaza, Hayya said in a statement. Hours earlier, a Hamas-affiliated Twitter account announced that the group had agreed to return to an understanding on a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip so long as the occupier did the same. https://twitter.com/hamasinfo/status/1001639952088788992?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Al Jazeeras Bernard Smith, reporting from Gaza, said Egyptian security officials had helped broker the deal after Israel warned of tougher retaliation measures against the groups leadership. The truce came about after Israel conveyed a message to the Egyptians that if the Palestinian factions didnt stop, Israel would react in a stronger, harder way and target the leadership of those groups. Its 10am local time (07:00 GMT), and the ceasefire appears to be sticking for now, it started at 4am local time, he added. The Palestinians are projecting this image that they brokered the ceasefire. Israel will not admit that they agreed to one. But however its happened its worked and kept things quiet for the time being. Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz sidestepped questions on whether Israel had agreed to a ceasefire, but said it was not interested in an escalation towards war. It all depends on Hamas. If it continues [to attack], I dont know what its fate will be, Katz told Israel Radio. The Israeli army said it struck 60 targets belonging to Palestinian resistance groups after a barrage of projectiles were fired from Gaza into southern Israel on Tuesday. The firing of rockets and mortar rounds came as Islamic Jihad vowed to avenge a deadly attack against its members last week. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas slammed Israel for the burst of violence, accusing it of escalating tensions. Difficult days have passed in the West Bank, Jerusalem and especially in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli occupation launched a fierce aggression on the Gaza Strip today with rockets and aircraft. This indicates that the occupation does not want peace. However, we want peace, and we demand peace. Debilitating siege Tuesdays exchange of fire came after weeks of deadly unrest in the enclave. Since March 30, at least 121 unarmed Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in protests near the Israeli fence between Gaza and Israel. Palestinians are demanding their right to return to the homes and land their families were expelled from during the establishment of Israel in 1948. Gaza a territory of more than two million people has been under a devastating Israeli-imposed blockade for the past 12 years, which has severely restricted the movement of Palestinians in and out of the territory. On Tuesday, a group of Palestinians set sail from Gaza in an attempt to breach Israels naval blockade. The vessel, carrying patients needing medical care, students and job-seeking university graduates, was later captured by Israeli warships and towed to Israel. {articleGUID} Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 but, citing security concerns, maintains tight control of its land and sea borders, reducing its economy to a state of collapse. Egypt also restricts movement in and out of Gaza through its border. US-brokered peace talks have been stalled since 2014, and Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories have expanded. Gaza experienced its most significant conflict in 2014 when at least 2,251 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians, were killed. At least 66 Israeli soldiers and six civilians were also killed. Irans oil minister, Bijam Namdar Zanganeh, says Chinas CNPC will take over if Total fails to get exemption. French energy company Total has two months to secure an exemption from US sanctions if it wants to remain as an investor in Irans offshore gas exploration, the countrys oil minister said. Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) would take over if the US Department of Treasury failed to issue a waiver for Total. During these 60 days, the French government can negotiate with the US government over the fate of Totals investment in Iran, the Tehran-based Mehr news agency quoted Zanganeh as saying on Wednesday. On May 16, Total announced that it might pull out of its investment in the South Pars gas field if it cannot secure a waiver from the US government. US secondary sanctions against Iran are expected to snap back after President Donald Trump declared the countrys withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. Trump also warned that even foreign companies doing business in Iran could face punitive measures in the United States. That includes Total, which signed a deal to invest more than $2bn in Iran in July 2017. CNPC owns an estimated 30 percent of the project, while the rest is owned by Irans Petropars. If completed, the project will generate 56 million cubic metres of natural gas per day, according to Irans Financial Tribune. Total is a publicly listed company in the New York Stock Exchange, and its revenue in 2017 was reported at $171.5bn. {articleGUID} The latest development on Total comes as Russias second oil producer, Lukoil, announced on Tuesday that it was putting its plan to invest in Iran on hold due to threats of US sanctions. Considering the latest developments, I guess, its too early to say what our plans (about Iran) will be. For the moment, basically, we have everything on hold, a company official was quoted by Reuters as saying. Russia is one of Irans closest allies. European powers still see the nuclear accord as the best chance of stopping Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and have intensified efforts to save the pact. Zanganeh also said on state television that an agreement with Europe would inspire other potential buyers of Iranian oil. Europe is buying only one-third of Iranian oil, but an agreement with Europe is important to guarantee our sales, and find insurance for the ships ferrying the crude. Other buyers would also be inspired by this, he said. Elections commission says a probe has been launched with a view to holding violators accountable. Authorities in Iraq have annulled votes cast at more than a thousand polling stations, following allegations of fraud, including those in the Sunni-predominant provinces of Anbar, Saladin and Diyala. Iraqs Independent High Electoral Commission said in a statement on Wednesday that the decision was taken following the verification of several red complaints, wherein gross violations affecting the outcome of elections are deemed to have taken place. The commission added that it annulled votes cast at 1,021 of the countrys 53,000 ballot boxes, and that a probe had been launched with a view to holding violators accountable. While emphasising the reliability of electronic vote-counting, the commission said it intended to address all matters related to parties and candidates complaints. Politicians, who have until Thursday to formalise their complaints, voted on Monday to annul all votes cast overseas and recount about 10 percent of votes cast overall. If the results differ by more than 25 percent from those announced by the electoral commission, the move would force a manual recount of nearly 11 million ballots. The May 12 vote saw cleric Muqtada Sadrs electoral alliance with Iraqs communist party emerge victorious, coming ahead of Iran-aligned Shia parties that took the lead in the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS). Official results showed Sadrs Sairoon coalition come out with 54 seats, followed by a coalition linked with Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in close second with 47 votes. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadis Nasri coalition gained 42 seats. Parliamentarians from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Kirkuk planned to lodge an appeal with Iraqs Federal Court against the decision to annul some poll results. Parliaments decision to annul some poll results is unconstitutional and bypasses the appropriate judicial authorities, Rebwar Taha, a PUK MP from Kirkuk told reporters on Wednesday. Iraq: Vote fraud allegations trigger recount, fear of turmoil Electoral commission cancelling results from more than 1,000 polling stations used in this months parliamentary vote. Draft resolution circulated at the UNSC calls for safety guarantees for the Palestinian civilian population. Kuwait has circulated a draft UN Security Council resolution on setting up an international protection mission for Palestinians. The proposal, submitted on Tuesday, aims to win support in a vote expected this week, diplomats said. According to the draft obtained by AFP news agency, the new text calls for the consideration of measures to guarantee the safety and protection of the Palestinian civilian population in the occupied Palestinian territories and Gaza Strip. Kuwait first put forward the idea 10 days ago after condemning Israeli forces killing of dozens of Palestinians during protests on the Gaza border. The Security Council may hold a vote, possibly on Thursday, on the resolution, which is expected to face a US veto, diplomats added. {articleGUID} Highlighting Washingtons isolation on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Kuwait a non-permanent Security Council member representing Arab countries hopes to win a high number of votes in favour of its proposal. The revised draft outlines demands for an international protection mission and asks UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to present recommendations. France and Britain have criticised the draft resolution for lacking specific details, diplomats said, adding that the US viewed it as biased against Israel. Danny Danon, Israels permanent representative to the UN, blasted the proposed resolution, calling it shameful and crafted to help Hamas, the group governing Gaza. Diplomats have said the Palestinians might turn to the UN General Assembly if the draft resolution on protection fails to win Security Council backing. The council is to meet on Wednesday at the request of the United States to discuss Palestinian rocket and mortar shells fired into Israel from Gaza. Body of Hector Gonzalez Antonio dumped in Tamaulipas, taking toll of slain media workers to six this year in Mexico. A journalist with the national newspaper Excelsior has been killed in Mexico, the sixth media worker murdered in the country this year and the third this month. The body of Hector Gonzalez Antonio was found on Tuesday morning on a street in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of the northeast border state of Tamaulipas, the state prosecutors office said in a statement. As the correspondent for a national outlet, Antonios most recent stories reflected the violence and corruption present in Tamaulipas. Authorities responded to a call about a dumped body and later identified Antonio, who was beaten to death. Tamaulipas state attorney general said authorities are opening an investigation to identify and locate those responsible for the homicide. {articleGUID} Confirming the killing, Pascal Beltran del Rio, editorial director of the newspaper, said: Its with immense pain that I share the news of the murder of my colleague, Hector Gonzalez Antonio, a magnificent person, a correspondent for Excelsior and Grupo Imagen in Tamaulipas. A big hug in solidarity with his family. I also call for immediate answers in this case and for justice, del Rio said on Twitter. Journalists under fire Antonios killing comes less than a week after the murder of economics reporter Alicia Diaz Gonzalez, who was found dead in her home in Monterrey in northern Mexico. She had also been beaten to death. Earlier this month, radio journalist Juan Carlos Huerta was shot dead as he left his home in a suburb of Villahermosa in southeast Mexico. At least six journalists, including Antonio, have been killed in Mexico in 2018. At least two were killed as a direct result of their work, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). {articleGUID} Every murder of a journalist, photographer, blogger, social media commentator or media worker confirms that our Mexican colleagues continue to face constant violence and near complete impunity in attacks against the press, Jan-Albert Hootsen, Mexicos CPJ representative, tweeted. Mexico is the second deadliest country for journalists after Syria, according to a Reporters Without Borders (RSF) report. RSF ranks Mexico 147th out of 180 countries on its World Press Freedom Index. Since President Enrique Pena Nieto assumed his office in 2012, at least 42 journalists have been killed and there have been about 2,000 attacks on reporters. Since 2000, more than 100 reporters have been killed in the country, with most of those crimes still unpunished. Senior official Kim Yong-chol arrives in New York as Russias FM Lavrov arrives in North Korea for talks. The North Korean leaders right-hand man Kim Yong-chol met Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for a steak dinner at a Manhattan apartment to discuss plans for a historic summit planned for next month. Two more meetings between Kim North Koreas former spy chief and Pompeo the ex-head of the CIA take place on Thursday. Leader Kim Jong-uns top envoy touched down on Wednesday in New York City. The 72-year-old is known as one of the most powerful people within North Korea. He played a central role in a recent summit between Kim Jong-un and his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in. The series of meetings come ahead of a highly anticipated summit scheduled for June 12 in Singapore between US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Russias role Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov arrived in North Koreas capital, Pyongyang, for talks on Thursday. Lavrov will meet his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong-ho to discuss the situation around the Korean Peninsula and other key international and regional issues, a statement issued by the Russian foreign ministry said. Ri invited Lavrov to visit Pyongyang during his visit to Moscow in April. I received an invitation and was glad to accept it. It will be useful for me to understand our North Korean neighbours attitude to all the issues, Lavrov was quoted as saying by Russian news agency TASS. Last Thursday, Trump cancelled the landmark summit in a letter to Kim citing anger and open hostility on the part of Pyongyang. But a day later, he said the meeting might still go ahead. On Tuesday, Trump tweeted that Kims trip to the US was a solid response to his letter. We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2018 White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters on Wednesday we are preparing and expect [the summit] to take place on June 12. Reporting from New York City, Al Jazeeras James Bays said there is still a substantial gap between US and North Korean positions on the issue of denuclearisation. Thats one of the main sticking points thats going to have to be worked out when Pompeo comes here in New York, Bays said. Kims trip is part of a flurry of diplomacy before the on-again, off-again summit. On Sunday, US negotiators, headed by Washingtons ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, began meeting North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) that divides the two Koreas. A team of US officials was also in Singapore for preparations. Kim Yong-chol, North Korean leaders right-hand man, to told high-level talks in the US on a possible June 12 summit. North Koreas former top spy was bound for New York City and will reportedly meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday. General Kim Yong-chol, the right-hand man of North Koreas leader, will hold high-level talks as preparations for an historic June 12 nuclear summit in Singapore between US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un gather pace. Pompeos spokeswoman said it would be the third meeting between Pompeo who opened contacts with the isolated Pyongyang regime when he was still CIA director and General Kim. Were still finalising exactly what these meetings will look like, she said. The North Korean envoy was at Beijing airport on Wednesday for his flight to New York, a day after arriving in the Chinese capital. Pompeo has travelled to Pyongyang, North Koreas capital, twice in recent weeks for meetings with North Koreas leader, and has said there is a shared understanding between the two sides about what they hope to achieve. US officials familiar with the planning said Kim was scheduled to meet Pompeo on Thursday, The Associated Press reported. Meanwhile, Russia announced Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit North Korea on Thursday and hold talks with his counterpart about the situation on the Korean Peninsula. Flurry of diplomacy Chung Sung-yoon, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said General Kim would be the most senior North Korean on US soil since Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok met then-President Bill Clinton in 2000. The trip is part of a flurry of diplomacy before the on-again, off-again summit. On Sunday, US negotiators, headed by Washingtons ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, began meeting North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) that divides the two Koreas. A team of US officials was also in Singapore for preparations. General Kim is a notorious figure in South Korea, where he is blamed for masterminding the 2010 sinking of the Cheonan navy vessel that killed 46 South Korean sailors an attack for which North Korea denies responsibility. From 2009 to 2016, he also headed North Koreas General Reconnaissance Bureau, the unit tasked with cyber warfare and intelligence gathering. During that period, North Korea ramped up its hacking programmes, and even managed to wage a largely successful effort to infiltrate the computer network of Sony Pictures Entertainment, a major Hollywood studio, to block the 2014 release of a movie that satirised Kim. Warm welcome? General Kim is one of several North Korean officials under US sanctions, but State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said she was sure appropriate administrative steps had been taken to allow him to visit New York undisturbed. {articleGUID} If the June 12 date stands, officials have only two weeks to finalise details such as where in Singapore the talks will take place and how internationally sanctioned North Korean officials will travel there. The key task is to settle the agenda. The main stumbling block is likely to be the concept of denuclearisation both sides say they want it, but there is a widening gap between their definitions. Washington wants North Korea to quickly give up all its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way in return for sanctions and economic relief. But analysts say North Korea will be unwilling to cede its nuclear deterrent unless it is given security guarantees the US will not try to topple the regime. Pacific nation says it will shut down the social media site as it identifies phoney accounts and blocks fake news. Papua New Guinea (PNG) will ban Facebook for a month while the government identifies fake accounts and attempts to block fake news. Communications Minister Sam Basil said on Wednesday the one-month shutdown would allow information to be collected about people using the social media site for nefarious purposes. Users who upload pornography and defamatory information will be identified and removed from the networking site, he said. This will allow genuine people with real identities to use the social network responsibly, said Basil. He also said tech experts in PNG were capable of developing a local alternative to Facebook. If there need be then we can gather our local applications developers to create a site that is more conducive for Papua New Guineans to communicate within the country and abroad as well, Basil was quoted as saying by local media. {articleGUID} No timeframe was given on the shutdown, although some reports suggested it could coincide with the capital, Port Moresby, hosting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit later this year. A spokesperson for Facebook told AFP news agency the US company had reached out to PNG authorities and were working to address their concerns. Bans and blocks The social network giant has been rocked by revelations that it improperly shared the personal data of 87 million users with British consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica. It is not the first time a country has either banned or blocked Facebook. China blocked the social media platform following the July 2009 Urumqi riots after it was perceived that Xinjiang activists were using Facebook to communicate and plan. In April 2016, North Korea announced it was blocking access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as the secretive country sought to further control access to outside information. Iran routinely blocks Facebook during major anti-government protests. During the 2011 street protests that brought down the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, authorities in Cairo blocked the site for several days. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Ethiopia, Cameroon, and Togo have recently blocked Facebook following anti-government demonstrations. Police begin clearing out 1,500 refugees and migrants from Millennaire camp in French capital for security reasons. Police in Paris began dismantling the largest makeshift camp housing refugees and migrants in the French capital. Authorities moved in on Wednesday to clear out as many as 1,500 people, mostly Africans from Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia, from the Millennaire camp in the northeast of the city. The evacuees, who will now be relocated to 20 shelters across the Paris region, are being moved out of the camp for general welfare and security reasons, French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said in a statement. Police services will be fully committed to preventing such camps being built again, Collomb said. The evacuation was the 34th to take place in the French capital since June 2015, he added. Al Jazeeras Natacha Butler, reporting from Paris, said the peaceful clean-up operation, which was still ongoing at noon (10:00 GMT), began at 6am local time (04:00 GMT). The camp is next to a canal where two migrants drowned earlier this month. There were tents all along on both sides of this canal, Butler said. The conditions were really quite appalling no sanitation and everyone relied on the kindness of strangers and charities for food handouts. Undocumented migration Police have cleared out about 28,000 people from Paris camps in the city over the past three years, but many continue to travel to the French capital. President Emmanuel Macron has pushed a new immigration law still being debated in parliament that would speed up the asylum process and lead to increased deportations of people seeking work in France, rather than those fleeing war or persecution at home. In his statement, Collomb said evacuees who are eligible for asylum would be supported. About 2,700 undocumented migrants live in the Paris area, according to officials and NGOs. As millions of refugees and migrants arrived in Europe in recent years after fleeing war and economic devastation, France has welcomed only a fraction of the newcomers. This government is really speeding up deportations and detentions of illegal migrants, said Butler. What it wants is to try and reduce the number of people coming to France and reduce camps like these, which are becoming a very visible symbol of Frances immigration problem. Muslim community, still coping with last years deadly shooting, calls for outright ban on assault rifles in Canada. Montreal, Canada Boufeldja Benabdallah knows the shooting at his mosque could have been much worse. When a gunman entered the largest mosque in Quebec City on January 29, 2017, with an assault weapon and a handgun, he intended to kill as many people as possible, said Benabdallah, president of the Quebec Islamic Cultural Centre. But Alexandre Bissonnettes assault weapon jammed. Its a weapon of war; it wasnt a toy or a hunting rifle, said Benabdallah. If it hadnt jammed, he would have created a carnage 10 times worse because he would have killed everyone inside [the mosque]. Bissonnette began his attack with a .223-calibre VZ58, a semi-automatic, Czech rifle that is legal in Canada and can be equipped with large-capacity magazines. He also had two 30-cartridge magazines in his possession, which are illegal. Canadian laws currently limit magazines to five or 10 bullets, depending on the firearm. When the weapon jammed on the first shot, Bissonnette switched to a nine-millimetre handgun, which he reloaded four times with 10-bullet magazines. Bissonnette ultimately killed six men, seriously injured five others, and left the Muslim community in Quebec and Canada in shock. Bissonnette pleaded guilty to six first-degree murder charges and six attempted murder charges in March. The shooting lasted less than two minutes. {articleGUID} He fired 48 [bullets], said Benabdallah, who, along with the Muslim community in Quebec City, is now calling on the Canadian government to pass a law banning assault weapons outright across the country. In a letter sent to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this month, the community also demanded a prohibition on the sale of large-capacity magazines, which can be easily modified to allow a shooter to discharge them in their entirety. As a community, we experienced this tragedy. We dont want our society Canadian and Quebec society to experience the same thing with these weapons of war, Benabdallah told Al Jazeera. New gun law proposed Last week, Canadas public safety minister, Ralph Goodale, told reporters the federal government would look into the mosque attack survivors proposal. However, Goodale said including an outright ban on assault rifles in the federal governments new gun-control legislation, proposed in March, would mean a complete change to the firearms classification system in Canadas Criminal Code. All guns are currently classified as either non-restricted, restricted or prohibited in Canada. What they would be proposing is a fourth category, which would be not just a prohibition or a restriction, but an outright ban. That would take a complete revision of that whole approach in the Criminal Code, Goodale said. Im prepared to hear out their argument, and obviously, were interested in improving public safety in every way we can, but that would restructure the whole system. Currently, Canadian residents must obtain a licence to buy any type of gun or ammunition. Most long guns are categorised as non-restricted, while handguns and semi-automatic firearms that have a barrel less than 470mm long are restricted. Automatic weapons, as well as rifles and shotguns that have had their barrels sawed off, or are otherwise modified, are prohibited. Restricted and prohibited firearms must be registered separately, under what is called a firearm possession and acquisition license (PAL), which is valid for five years. These licenses are only issued for specific purposes, including target practice, shooting competitions, or as part of a collection. Applicants must be over 18 and have passed additional firearms safety courses and background checks carried out by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). A man attends a tribute to victims killed at a Quebec City mosque [File: Youssef Boudlal/Reuters] Earlier this year, Trudeaus Liberal government introduced new legislation that would mandate stricter background checks for people seeking to purchase guns in Canada and force vendors to keep proper records of gun inventory and sales. The government said Bill C-71 would help stem an increase in gun crimes, which it said jumped by 30 percent between 2013 and 2016. With this legislation and our other measures, we are taking concrete steps to make our country less vulnerable to the scourge of gun violence, while being fair to responsible, law-abiding firearms owners and businesses, Goodale said at the time. Criticised for going too far and not far enough Heidi Rathjen, a survivor of a 1989 shooting at Montreals Ecole Polytechnique that left 14 women dead, said Bill C-71 is a step in the right direction. Now a member of gun control advocacy group Poly Se Souvient [Poly Remembers], she welcomed many provisions of the bill, but said it does not include a requirement to register private firearms sales, which gives people the opportunity to divert guns to criminals. She added that the biggest disappointment is that it does not ban assault weapons outright. We find ourselves today in a situation where virtually all the assault weapons used in recent mass killings in the US are all legally available in Canada for private possession for recreational purposes, Rathjen told Al Jazeera. Since non-restricted firearms are not registered in and of themselves the gun owners need a permit, but permits are not linked to a specific weapon Rathjen said the firearms currently circulate and nobody knows about it. Theres no information about how many there are, what kind, who owns them, where theyre circulating, whos selling them to whom. Theres, for all intents and purposes, no control on these weapons, she said. Wendy Cukier of the Coalition for Gun Control, which was also established after the Polytechnique killings, also welcomed the stronger licensing provisions and checks on firearms sales included in Bill C-71. However, Cukier said stronger measures are desperately needed, in a statement after the bill was introduced. According to an online survey conducted by H+K Strategies in February, 47 percent of Canadians believed licensing regulations and rules over access to guns were not strict enough. Eighty-three percent of people said they supported a ban on the personal possession of military assault weapons and sniper rifles, while 62 percent said they supported banning civilians from owning handguns. Still, while Rathjen and Cukier say Bill C-71 doesnt go far enough, the legislation has also been criticised by pro-gun lobbyists. This bill is an all-out attack on firearms owners and users, said Sheldon Clare, president of the National Firearms Association, in a statement. The NFA, which says it counts more than 70,000 members across Canada, has vowed to defeat parliament members who vote in favour of Bill C-71. We will be putting pressure on them to do the right thing and vote against Trudeaus new firearms bill, Clare said. Erosion of Canadas gun laws While Canada is often lauded on its gun control laws when compared with its southern neighbour, the United States, Rathjen said the country remains behind where it was only a decade ago. Under Stephen Harper, who was prime minister for nearly 10 years until his Conservative government was defeated in the 2015 elections, Canada eliminated several gun control measures that had been in place since the late 1970s. The Conservatives ended registration requirements for rifles and shotguns (unrestricted firearms) under a 2012 law, and they also destroyed data on millions of long guns that were previously registered under a federal Long Gun Registry. The registry, which linked licensed owners to their firearms, was established after years of public pressure following the Polytechnique shooting. In 2011, just before it was scrapped, 7.8 million guns were registered in Canada, the vast majority of which were non-restricted, CBC reported at the time. The result is that today a licensed gun owner can purchase dozens of unrestricted firearms and no record is kept of purchased guns, Canadian public policy experts David Rodier and Elliott Gauthier recently explained. The Harper government also transferred the decision-making power over the classification of firearms from the RCMP to the public safety minister, raising concerns over possible political interference in Canadas gun laws. It was a huge loss to see the dismantling of what was built, Rathjen said about the Harper government. Ultimately, she said Ottawa should make sure its gun laws do not allow people to have access to deadly weapons, as was the case in the mosque attack. Its up to the government to find a solution and fix this. All we know is these weapons shouldnt be in the hands of ordinary civilians, she said. Thats a sentiment that was echoed by Benabdallah in Quebec City, who called on the government to take gun control more seriously and enact an assault weapon ban immediately. These are extremely dangerous weapons, and we dont need them in Canada, Benabdallah said. Never, never, never. Raped Rohingya women due to give birth in refugee camps UN expects 25,000 babies will be born in May-June at refugee camps after 700,000 Rohingya fled Myanmars crackdown last year. The forecast is for an average rainy season but distribution of rain and intense thunderstorms will be uneven. The Southwest Monsoon has burst in southern India at least four days ahead of schedule. This is unlikely to be significant in the long run, but India is a largely agrarian society, and the crop-planting diary is based on these expectations. This years monsoon rain forecast from the Indian Met Department, drawing in part on the influential factors of surface water temperatures in the Indian and Pacific oceans, shows a bias towards a normal monsoon. The margin of error, plus or minus five percent, doesnt allow much to be made of this information and nothing can be said about the rate of fall of monsoon rains. A trend forecast, as the climate warms, shows the intensity of rainfall in thunderstorms should increase worldwide. Evidence so far has supported this with flash floods being a now-common staple of TV news. The monsoon trough advances north through South Asia, arriving with a burst of intense, thundery rain. This initial downpour has also been intensifying. Mangalore suffered 188mm of rain in six hours and 310mm in 24 hours on Tuesday as the monsoon trough crossed into Karnataka. This puts the monsoon rains a full six days ahead of the long-term average. The northeastern arm of these seasonal rains is across the Bay of Bengal and Myanmar. In Rakhine, a coastal state of Myanmar bordering Bangladesh, the forecast rainfall over the next three days is 250mm. That is just a little less than the long-term average for the whole month of May. Most of Indias Kerala can expect the same, but itll be another month before the heat eases further north. In this increasing pre-monsoon heat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh have all seen high temperatures during the last month. Chandrapur in Maharashtra has a hot and dry climate despite being built on a river confluence. Nevertheless, the temperature on Wednesday, at 47.8C was nearly five degrees above normal, and only a degree below the all-time record high temperature. During the monsoon rains, the temperature drops to the low 30s Celsius. Major coffee chain trains 175,000 employees but critics question whether such an exercise will tackle underlying issues. Coffee chain Starbucks has closed more than 8,000 stores in the United States to train around 175,000 employees against racial bias. The move comes after the April 12 arrest of two black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks, which sparked outrage, protests and calls for boycott. Outside the same store on Tuesday afternoon, some passersby questioned if the exercise would really solve underlying issues of racial bias. Anti-bias trainings dont cover the full scope of complexity when it comes to addressing white supremacy, one of them told Al Jazeera. Al Jazeeras Gabriel Elizondo, reporting from Philadelphia, said that critics argue that one day of racial bias training without any sort of measurable benchmarks is simply not enough. He added that the company, which has 25,000 coffee shops in 70 countries, promised to integrate further training in the US and around the world. We realise that four hours of training is not going to solve racial inequity in America or anyone coming into our stores who may have a problem, Starbucks executive chairman Howard Schultz said in an interview with CNN. But we have to start the conversation. Necessary but has to continue Starbucks employees watched a film from documentary maker Stanley Nelson on African American history and the civil rights struggle, before discussing in groups their own experience of racial discrimination. The curriculum, to be made available at a later date, was drawn up in consultation with US President Barack Obamas former lawyer general Eric Holder and civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, among others. Estimated to cost Starbucks $12m to $14m in lost sales, the exercise was criticised by some as virtue signalling, but has been cautiously welcomed by black officials and activists. 8,000 Starbucks are closing today for racial sensitivity training Which means, by this time tomorrow, your local barista will be better equipped to combat bigotry than the Executive Branch of our Government Cyrus McQueen (@CyrusMMcQueen) May 29, 2018 Its something thats necessary and its a good place to start, but the main issue here is that it has to continue and keep evolving, Doug Sloan, analyst and senior activist at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil rights group in the US, told Al Jazeera. Starbucks closed its stores for "implicit bias" training. Heres what that means:pic.twitter.com/50PzdSXbLz AJ+ (@ajplus) May 29, 2018 Starbucks announced the training on April 17 as it battled to contain outrage over the arrest of Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, apologising and adopting an open-bathroom policy to non-paying customers. After Nelson and Robinson stepped into the cafe, one of them asked to use the toilet while waiting for a third person to arrive for a business meeting. Staff refused, on the grounds that he was not a customer. After the pair sat down to wait, the manager called the police. A video that went viral showed uniformed officers questioning then handcuffing the two men, who put up no resistance, while a white client repeatedly asks an officer, Whatd they do? Whatd they do? But US social networks have been rocked by a slew of other recent examples of racial discrimination going viral. A student called the police in May when a black graduate student at Yale University fell asleep in a common room. Earlier this month, a 22-year-old black man was choked by police at a Waffle House in North Carolina after taking his sister to prom, the fourth incident at outlets of the restaurant to attract national attention in less than two weeks. Other large companies have also adopted racial bias training, albeit with less fanfare. Target introduced its first unconscious bias sessions in 2017, which it says are being rolled out across the company. A third of the storm-related deaths on the island was caused by issues over access to healthcare, researchers say. Hurricane Maria killed directly or indirectly more than 4,600 people in Puerto Rico, more than 70 times the toll recorded by officials, a new study has suggested. In the 102 days since the hurricane hit the island, an estimated 4,645 people died, according to the study published on Tuesday by US-based The New England Journal of Medicine. A third of the deaths were caused by delayed or interrupted access to healthcare, said the Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria study, which was compiled by Harvard University researchers. The overall figure dwarfs the government count of 64 people. It also follows earlier independent studies which placed the death toll at around 1,000 in the 40 days since the hurricane struck. {articleGUID} Hurricane Maria, the strongest storm to hit the US territory of Puerto Rico in 90 years, made landfall on the island in September 2017. It caused an estimated $90bn of damages, destroyed more than 70,000 homes and leaving many people with limited access to electricity, fuel, mobile phone coverage and basic supplies. On average, households went 84 days without electricity, 64 days without water, and 41 days without cellular telephone coverage after the hurricane, the study said. Official toll under review The latest estimate was based on interviews conducted with more than 3,000 randomly selected Puerto Rican households in January and February this year. Experts alleged the disruption and widespread devastation hampered attempts to accurately record the number of people killed by the storm. Puerto Rico officials have not shared any new data on hurricane-related deaths since December 2017, when Governor Ricardo Rossello ordered a review of the official toll. The study, however, said mortality rates on the island increased 62 percent from September 20 when Hurricane Maria made landfall to December 31, compared with the same period in 2016. {articleGUID} The report used criteria from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to determine if a persons death could be blamed on the hurricane. Deaths can be attributed to a cyclone if they are caused by forces directly related to the event or unsafe or unhealthy conditions resulting from it, according to CDC criteria. Accurate recording of the deaths is vital, the study said, for future risk reduction and preparedness planning. At least one independent expert questioned the methods and the number in the new study. This estimate could be off by thousands. Easily, Donald Berry, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, told The Associated Press. Hurricane Maria was the second Category 5 storm to affect Puerto Rico home to 3.4 million people within the space of two weeks last year, after Hurricane Irma killed three people earlier in September. Hend Ayari says she now believes the incident took place in May 2012, not March as previously stated. A woman who has accused Tariq Ramadan of sexual assault has changed her account of the events that led up to the incident, French daily Liberation reported on Wednesday. Hend Ayari, the first of four plaintiffs to have accused the Muslim scholar of rape, initially told judges that her encounter with Ramadan took place in March 2012 at the Crown Plaza hotel in Paris Place de la Republique. Ayaris latest testimony stated she met Ramadan on May 26, 2012, in a different part of town, namely the Holiday Inn hotel near the Gare de lEst train station in eastern Paris. The 41-year-old womens rights activist said she had thoroughly reviewed all documentation, including a diary she kept which led her to believe the incident had taken place in May and not March. Ramadan, who has consistently denied the charges, affirmed in previous accounts that he had briefly spoken to Ayari on April 6, 2012, during a Muslim community congress at the Bourget, on the outskirts of Paris. Asked to comment on the latest revelations, Ramadans lawyer, Emmanuel Marsigny called on French justice to react. Weve changed hotels, weve changed the date, and soon well change the perpetrator. This is not serious Justice should open its eyes and deduce the consequence, Marsigny said. These revelations came about a week after a French court rejected Ramadans appeal for early release ahead of his trial. Following the courts decision, Ramadans lawyers said that their clients presumption of innocence had been trampled underfoot. Ramadans significant support base in France maintains that he is the victim of a smear campaign and is unfairly being targeted due to his religious convictions. Born and raised in Switzerland, Ramadan went on to become one of the most influential scholars of Islam in Europe. Once hailed as a religious reformer by Western media outlets, the Oxford University professors career has been brought to a halt by his arrest in France over sexual assault accusations. The human rights activist was convicted of using his social media accounts to publish false information. An Abu Dhabi court has handed Emirati human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor a 10-year jail sentence for using his social media accounts to publish false information and spread hatred and sectarianism. Ahmed Mansoor, 48, was also fined Dh1 million (about $272,000) for insulting the status and prestige of the UAE and its symbols, including its leaders, Abu Dhabi-based English daily the National reported on Wednesday. The court cleared Mansoor of conspiring with a terrorist organisation, the paper said, adding that the ruling can be appealed through the Federal Supreme Court following a recent change in the law. Mansoor, who was arrested on March 20 last year, had voiced support for fellow activist Osama al-Najjar when Emirati officials did not release him after the completion of a three-year sentence for tweeting about human rights abuses in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to Amnesty International, prior to his arrest, Mansoor faced repeated intimidation, harassment, physical assault, and death threats from the UAE authorities or their supporters. In 2015, Mansoor won the Martin Ennals award for human rights defenders for his work in the UAE. The awarding body described him as one of the few voices within the United Arab Emirates who provides a credible independent assessment of human rights developments in the country. Joe Odell of the International Campaign for Freedom in the UAE told Al Jazeera earlier this year that Mansoor should not be standing trial in the first place. In reality, all that Ahmed is guilty of is raising awareness of the systematic human rights violations in his country. Venezuela presidential challenger calls for new election as Canada slaps new sanctions on the Latin American country. President Nicolas Maduros closest challenger in this months presidential polls, Henri Falcon, is asking the Supreme Court to order a new vote. Today we are presenting before the Supreme Court of Justice the proper foundation of our case which demonstrates that such an electoral process is invalid, Falcon told journalists on Wednesday. Nicolas Maduro was re-elected as Venezuelas president on May 20 in an election marred by low turnout, a boycott by the main opposition and allegations from rival candidates of several voting irregularities. The scope of this challenge must be the call for new elections in Venezuela, he told the court, adding that the May 20 ballot did not exist and must be declared null and void. Falcon, an ex-army officer, scored 21 percent of the ballot, from which more than half the electorate abstained. Falcon argued that Maduros ruling socialist party unfairly influenced the election by setting up kiosks near voting centres and giving poor residents bonuses. Bribery is punished, said Falcon. It is punishable by law and you cannot appeal to the social policy of a state to buy votes. He also denounced the use of state media to promote Maduros campaign, and claimed pressure and coercion was used against opposition monitors in polling stations. The Supreme Court rarely votes against Maduro. International rejection The legal challenge comes as Canada slapped 14 Venezuelan leaders with sanctions on Wednesday, condemning the election as illegitimate and anti-democratic. The regulation imposed asset freezes of the individuals and bars Canadians from having property or providing financial services to those on the list. Cilia Flores de Maduro, Venezuelas first lady and a member of the National Constituent Assembly is among those hit by the sanctions. Last September, Canada imposed sanctions against 40 Venezuelan senior officials, including the president. Earlier this week, the European Union also called for fresh presidential elections in Venezuela, as it prepared to impose targeted sanctions against officials in the South American country. The US had already imposed penalties barring US companies or citizens from buying debts issued by the government and state-run oil company PDVSA. The Lima Group, a bloc of countries from the Americas recalled their ambassadors to protest against what it said was Venezuelas failure to hold a free and fair election. One of Maduros supporters, Cubas President Miguel Diaz-Canel, flew into in Caracas on Wednesday for his first foreign visit as head of state. Venezuela now needs our solidarity, Diaz-Canel told Venezuelas Constituent Assembly, a pro-government legislative superbody set up last year. The aggression against Venezuela harms all of America. Voluntary organisations played key role to meet victims needs in the days after deadly London blaze, report says. Voluntary organisations and local volunteers in the UK filled the void of emergency response by authorities in the immediate aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire that killed 72 people in London last year, charities say. A new report released on Wednesday by the non-profit Muslim Aid group and its partners highlights the critical role played by NGOs, as well as individuals, who stepped up to meet the needs of victims where officials fell short. The spirit of humanitarian action displayed mainly by the community itself and supported by an array of local organisations and businesses, as well as individual volunteers and representatives from external organisations, filled the void where there was a lack of official direction, coordination and information, said Muslim Aids CEO Jehangir Malik in a statement. Volunteers initially helped with distributing food, donating clothes, finding overnight accommodation and providing psychological support to victims and their families, the report said. Faith organisations and Muslim volunteers also played an important role, meeting the needs of the Islamic community during the holy month of Ramadan, it said. Public inquiry The UK government has faced intense criticism for its conduct after the blaze last June and its purported failings leading to the tragedy. Survivors complain it has failed to provide them with adequate information on what happened in the building, and on where and when they will be rehoused. A series of protests have been held over the past year, with demonstrators demanding more answers and justice. An independent public inquiry into the disaster was launched earlier this month. Muslim Aids Malik criticised disaster preparedness and response systems, which were exposed after the blaze. The utter mayhem was a shock, he said. I would have expected this chaos in a developing country, because almost always there is poor infrastructure. We are now asking for lessons to be learned and for greater coordination of the voluntary organisations with local authorities, including as part of national emergency response structures. Community is among the poorest in the country and the Taliban takeover in August has only exacerbated their hardships. U.S. intelligence services (under the leadership of the Obama administration) considered themselves the true rulers of the country. They noted with satisfaction that they had achieved impressive successes ever since the origin of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. In fact, in 2016, for the first time in American history, the election had not one, but both presidential candidates under investigation by intelligence services. The FBI conducted a criminal investigation against Hillary Clinton as well as a case of counter-espionage against Donald Trump. To date, the criminal case of Hillary Clinton is closed. But most of America understands perfectly well that Special Prosecutor Mueller's investigation of the Trump campaign is not a means to an end, but a well conceived cover-up operation aimed at shielding Obama, Clinton, and their closest associates. So far, there is not a bit of proof of collusion between Trump and Vladimir Putin. Instead, everything points to cover up the criminal collusion between Obama and his intelligence services, which began in London. In addition to American and British intelligence services, Australian, Estonian, Russian, and Ukrainian intelligence services participated in the American elections in 2016. The efforts of all these intelligence services pressed against Trump, but only Russian intelligence services worked simultaneously against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (see details in the article "Protocols of the Elders of Spydom"). The flow of information on Obamagate has now turned into an avalanche. Just a few weeks ago, we knew that there were five Trump employees under the surveillance of the FBI, and there was one of Obama's spies inside Trump campaign. But now this information is outdated. Now we know about the seven employees of Trump under the surveillance, and four spies embedded by the Obama administration into Trump's campaign. Perhaps this information will become obsolete by the time of this publication. Two spies are well known Stefan Halper and Joseph Mifsud. Moreover, Halper, as it turned out, after the penetration into Trump campaign, tried to infiltrate Trump's administration after his inauguration. The third is an unknown person, referred to as "NSA agent." Suspicion of espionage is falling on Anatoly Samochornov as a fourth, the "interpreter" of the Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya, who was, in fact, the FBI agent who accompanied her at the meeting with Trump's son, Manafort, and Kushner. Of course, the FBI kept Veselnitskaya in the dark. Her saga with the U.S. visa is a story by itself. Her visa was overdue. However, someone high enough from Obama's Department of Justice made several calls. Veselnitskaya not only received a visa, but also had the opportunity to defend her client in an American court, even though she does not have a license to practice law in America. By the way, 97% of political donations by employees of the Department of Justice in 2016 were for the campaign of Hillary Clinton! Now we know that the surveillance of General Flynn was conducted at least six months before his ill fated telephone conversation with the Russian ambassador in December 2016. That is, the entire house of cards is falling apart, based on the fact that Flynn allegedly discussed with Kislyak the secret communication channel between Trump and Putin. This phone call (or rather, the scandal associated with it) was used by the Obama administration and served as yet another smokescreen to cover up the administration's criminal activities. Now we know what "national security letters" are. They are tricks of the U.S. intelligence services to track down Trump, which allowed them to organize surveillance without FISA court authorization. These "national security letters" are a legitimate method of espionage business a method that has never been used before to track domestic political opponents. Finally, now we know (from the text message of FBI agent Strzok) that President Obama was behind this covert operation against Trump. The propaganda has already convinced practically everyone that these ill fated text messages were sent by Strzok to his mistress. But something tells me that the "mistress," Lisa Page, is yet another smokescreen, skillfully created by the FBI. The active phase of the operation of U.S. intelligence agencies against Trump and his campaign took place from approximately March 2016 to September 2017. That was about eight months before the elections, plus three months before the inauguration, plus about eight months after Trump took office as president. U.S. intelligence services have all the documents of the Trump campaign (all emails, all phone calls, all texts) and, finally, reports of numerous "confidential human sources." There is enough material to answer this question unequivocally "was there a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Putin or not?" A quick answer to this question contradicts the primary task of Mueller's investigation the protection of Obama and his accomplices. It was not the first time Obama's intelligence services performed political espionage. As we now know, the Obama administration conducted surveillance, including spies, during the elections in France in 2011 and 2012. Obama's spies infiltrated the campaign of the Socialist Party of France, the National Front, and the Union for a Popular Movement. In other words, Obama's agents were inside the campaign of Hollande (who won the election), former French President Sarkozy, and Marine Le Pen that is, in the campaigns of candidates who took the first three places in the first round of voting. As in the case of Trump, the infiltration of agents began about eight months before the election. It seems that Obama's CIA had a unique political spy protocol tied to the election calendar, which it followed scrupulously. In the socialist Soviet Union, as is known, there was not only an external intelligence service (First Main Directorate of KGB), but also domestic (that is, political) intelligence service (Fifth Main Directorate of KGB). The same services existed in the national-socialist Third Reich external intelligence (V.I. Department of the RSHA) and domestic intelligence (I.V. Department of the RSHA), also known as the Gestapo. There had never been anything like this before Obama. All 17 U.S. intelligence organizations have always focused on working mainly outside the country. Obama has every reason to add one more to his impressive list of leftist titles the founder of American domestic political intelligence. Thanks to Obama, America came to the point of political bifurcation. In physics, a bifurcation is a point after which motion can occur along one of two incompatible but almost equiprobable trajectories. In other words, this is a fork in the road. What road will America choose? America can turn to the right, and then our federal republic will return to the ideas of the U.S. founding fathers enshrined in the Constitution. America can turn to the left and then, using the state apparatus for spying on the political opposition, will become a de facto norm. Then we will quickly degenerate into one of the totalitarian one-party countries of the Third World. Gary Gindler is a conservative Russian-American blogger at Gary Gindler Chronicles. The strategy is famed. If you can't beat your opponents on the military field, or with facts, beat them with the law. The strategy is an axiom of the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). Having finished the commemoration of the nakba (catastrophe) day on May 15, the day in 1948 when five Arab armies tried but failed to destroy the State of Israel created a few hours earlier, the P.A. is continuing the battle by the weapon of international law. The foreign minister, Riyad Maliki, on May 22, 2018 at The Hague, called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open an "immediate investigation" into the alleged "crimes" committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. The chief prosecutor at the ICC, Fatou Bensouda, a Gambian lawyer, has said she will take "any action warranted" to prosecute crimes. At the start, there are three problems. The ICC has jurisdiction over allegations of international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. A case must be referred to it either by the U.N. Security Council or by a state that has ratified ICC jurisdiction. The first problem that arises is whether the ICC has jurisdiction in the P.A. complaint because of two legal factors. One is clear: Israel has not ratified and is not a member of the ICC. The other, more controversial issue is whether "Palestine" can be considered a state and therefore eligible to bring a suit. This is arguable, though Palestine was admitted on October 31, 2011 to UNESCO by a vote of 107-14-52 as a member-state, became in 2012 a non-member observer state at the U.N. and accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC in 2014. However, it is doubtful that "Palestine" meets the criteria of the Montevideo (Uruguay) Convention of December 26, 1933 that defines the criteria of "statehood." Essentially, the criteria cover four factors: permanent population, defined territory, government with effective control over a territory, and capacity to enter into relations with other states. The absence of these factors in "Palestine" is palpable, especially as Hamas continues its civil war with rival Palestinian faction Fatah. The introduction against Israel of the charge of apartheid, absurd though it is, is a shrewd move by the P.A., not only because of the obnoxious significance of the concept, but because it has relevance to a crucial international case involving apartheid South Africa. There is no consensus in international law on the exact meaning of "belligerent occupation," but most analysts agree that principles concerning it involve a number of factors: the occupier will not annex any part of the occupied territory, the rule is on a temporary basis, and the occupier governs in compliance with directives of the United Nations and of international law in general. However, the cases of South Africa and Israel are totally different, politically as well as physically and economically. The country of Namibia has a territory of 318,000 square miles, a population of 2 million, a GDP of $27.4 billion, and per capita GDP of $11,800, while Israel has 8,000 square miles, a population of 8.5 million, GDP of $334 billion, and GDP per capita of $37,600. Politically, there are at least two major differences. The first is that the apartheid nature of South Africa not only existed, but was not accepted by any other state, while Israel, in which apartheid does not exist, is seen by all objective observers as the only democratic country in the Middle East and is supported as such internationally. The other difference is that South Africa refused to negotiate with the Namibian minority, while most Israelis are anxious to reach a negotiated agreement, and the P.A. created by the Oslo Accords of 1993 has limited self-government in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip over Palestinians. Instead of negotiations, attacks against have continued. A report based on official data calculates that between 1948 and 2018 Palestinian terrorist attacks killed 3,705 Israelis and injured 14,736. Suicide attacks began in 1989. Because of increasing casualties, Israel in 2003 began building a physical barrier, a "security fence," that Palestinians called a "wall." Their arguments also asserted that the barrier was not simply built for security reasons, but also is intended as a land grab, the future border line. In October 2003, a UNSC resolution passed by 14-1 and opposed by the U.S. concluded that construction of a "wall in the Occupied Territories" was illegal. After an emergency special session of the UNGA, ES-10/14, the issue was brought before the ICJ. The advisory opinion of the court was that the West Bank is occupied territory and that Israel had ways other than the barrier to defend itself, though the court did not mention what they were. The international bodies held that construction of a barrier in the "Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem," constituted breaches of obligations of humanitarian law and human rights. Their findings are unbalanced in that they refused to condemn the terrorist attacks, still continuing, and suicide bombings, that made the barrier necessary in the first place. They also refused to recognize that the barrier, though it has caused some problems, has been successful in preventing or limiting terrorist attacks. International tribunals, including the ICJ, dispensing impartial jurisprudence, have an easy task in rejecting charges of "apartheid" against Israel, but a more difficult one in discussing and challenging the charge of legality or illegality of Israel activity and presence in disputed areas. The task is one of balancing the legitimate security interests and the safety of the State of Israel, and the needs and human rights of civilians in an area held under belligerent occupation. Again, as in so many of the issues concerning Israel, the question is that of proportionality, a difficult problem that has to be resolved by reasonableness and good faith. Underlying this is the concept that there should be a clear relationship between the goal sought, in this case peace, security, and the right of self-defense for Israel, and the least harmful means employed to do this, and for Palestinians a right to self-determination. The courts should concentrate on how benefits and costs should be balanced, not on absurd issues. Real issues must be examined by international bodies. The ICC should reject both the absurd P.A. charge of the commission by Israel of "systematic crimes" or "grave crimes," and also any Palestinian political pressure on the court. Bringing the issue to the ICC is harmful and counterproductive to any peace process. It contradicts the essence of UNSC Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967: every state is entitled to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries, free from threats or acts of force. It is still true: let the punishment fit the crime. To better understand the European Union and its likely prospects for the future, it is important to delve into the relationship between its two main players: France and Germany. In many ways, their relationship since the founding of the E.U. has seemed like a happy marriage. But as in some marriages, there are a number of irreconcilable difference percolating below the surface that could well lead to trouble down the road. The most significant point of divergence is perhaps how each country views the meaning of "Europe." The Germans and not just their elite, but much of the general public as well are sold on the idea of a Europe free of nationalism. Such an attitude is no doubt highly influenced to the unhappy ending to their WWII experience. According to Wolfgang Streeck of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, the concept of "Europe" has a sacred aura to it in Germany where it connotes "all that is virtuous and pleasant from peace, human rights, tolerance, and an openness to international labor marker and convenient travel across borders." German pro-European sentiment is the vehicle whereby Germany intends to lose its national sovereignty by blending into a Greater Europe and become respectable. At some subconscious level, this is an escape mechanism from the country's Nazi past. Such a mood has so affected German thinking that they view anyone who is less than enthusiastic about a deeper integration of the E.U. as proof positive of a moral defect. Psychologically speaking, the Germans are projecting their feelings onto others who do not necessarily share their views. That can be dangerous. France's view of Europe is diametrically different. The French are always hyper-sensitive to any encroachment on their national sovereignty. Since the end of WWII, their prime objective has been to bind Germany's economic power to French interests. The united Europe that the French espouse is actually an extension of the French national state, just as the Brussels Commission was conceived as a sub-department of French technocracy. Berlaymont building in Brussels, headquarters of the European Commission. Photo credit: Nuno Nogueira via Wikimedia Commons. Streeck sums of the difference between the German and French visions of Europe as such: From a French perspective, there is no conflict between a 'sovereign France' and a 'sovereign Europe,' as long as Europe is properly constituted on universal, i.e., French principles and governed out of Paris, as an extension of French sovereignty. While in Germany a sovereign Europe is the desirable termination of national, including German, sovereignty, in France it is a condition, or a contemporary vision, of a sovereign France. That being the case, it sounds as though a unified Europe is a French empire by another name. Observing the situation, Streeck writes: For a long time, differences were papered over by the German's happy acquiescence to the French habit of ritualism, including nuclear testing, and the conjuring up of their imperial tradition. But this can't go on. Adding to the latent instability of the E.U. is the fact that other countries in the E.U. do not have a desire to submerge their national identities and sovereignty into a unified Europe, as does Germany, and none wants to be subjugated to French "universal" values. This is especially true for the countries in eastern Europe which have only recently escaped domination under the communist USSR. The European Union project has gotten as far as it has for two reasons. (Actually, there's a third reason: the U.S. covering much of the defense bill for Europe and allowing unfair trade practices to exist between America and the E.U. This has been going on for longer than most people have been alive, and it has allowed Europe to attain a level of wealth and prosperity that it never could have obtained otherwise. But for the purposes here, the focus will stay on the internal dynamics within Europe.) First, whenever the "European idea" came up for discussion among the Europeans, it was always defined in vague and bureaucratically ambiguous language. This was deliberate, for it allowed all parties to read whatever they wanted into the pronouncements. And so they did. This worked as a unifying tactic, but it's hardly a way to build a solid foundation that can stand the test of time. And secondly, upfront money and benefits helped foster the delusion that many member-states had of what to expect from the E.U. The E.U. was sold on the idea of peace and prosperity; prosperity would flow to all who signed on forever and ever. But that promise has already rung hollow in the Mediterranean area of the E.U. And whether Europeans chose to acknowledge it or not, the fact is the peace the Continent has enjoyed since 1945 was conditioned on U.S. protection and not so much on wise polices by the European elite. The euro was introduced in 1999 to bring the countries in the E.U. closer together. But it didn't work out that way. Rather, due to it, a significant part of southern Europe's industrial base was sucked up into the German industrial machine. Accordingly, the Germans are the ones who have reaped the bulk of the advantages from the common euro currency. This has left countries like Greece, Italy, and others with high unemployment rates and debts that can never be repaid. And because of the common currency and the European Central Bank, these laggard countries are without the monetary means to ease their suffering. To use the vernacular, such countries are screwed. To address the debt and unemployment problem, the Germans first prescribed strong doses of austerity. Greece is the poster child of this intra-E.U. abuse. This in turn has led to strong anti-German feelings throughout the southern part of the E.U. In response, countries heavily in debt claim that the E.U. should cover their liabilities. "We're all one family," they say. This discontent has fueled the rise of populist parties throughout Europe. To try to counter this trend, Angela Merkel made certain informal and off-the-record promises to the E.U. elite that Germany would aid in "structural repairs to the European edifice." Ambiguity strikes again. Whatever Merkel might have had in mind when she made her non-public promises, many interpreted her as saying Germany would be willing to cover the debt of others one way or another. As Herr Streeck notes, this is both politically and economically not possible. Ominously, he adds: "Nothing is so destructive in international relations as unrealistic expectations." Another unrealistic expectation that leaders in the E.U. had is that the United States would continue to tolerate in Bush-Clinton-Obama-like fashion the intolerable status quo between us and Europe in terms of defense and trade. With the ascendancy of Donald Trump, that bubble has popped. So where are we? Any Good Time Charley can tell you that all parties eventually end. Or as Barack Hussein Obama's longtime spiritual adviser would put it, the chickens are coming home to roost in the E.U. The facts emerging in the ongoing investigations into the apparent abuses of the FISA warrant process by the Democrats to spy on Donald Trump raise grave questions about those involved. The outline taking shape is of a well orchestrated plot to elect Hillary Clinton and, failing that, to delegitimize Donald Trump's presidency. The conspirators involved in this effort to subvert our Republic used the legal and technological apparatus of the state, as well as outside smear merchants, in their effort. One question that arises is what should happen to those found guilty of participating in such a plot. And in hindsight, we should ask ourselves if Hillary Clinton telegraphed her own concern over her fate during the presidential campaign. On September 7, 2016, Hillary took part in an interview with then-NBC host Matt Lauer in something called the "Commander-in-Chief Forum." Lauer asked Clinton some apparently unexpected questions about her judgment in using a personal, unsecure email server to traffic highly classified information. Clinton reportedly flew into a rage at Lauer's impertinence and turned her wrath on her campaign staff members. An executive from Comcast (which owns NBC) reportedly recounted a description of Clinton's explosive outburst provided to him by NBC executives who were on the set and claimed to have witnessed the tirade. Clinton reportedly threw a water glass at an assistant and excoriated then-top Democratic National Committee official Donna Brazile, saying, "I'm so sick of your face. You stare at the wall like a brain-dead buffalo, while letting that [f] Lauer get away with this." Mrs. Clinton felt she had been sandbagged by Lauer's question on the email server, which had not been pre-approved by Clinton's campaign staff. Most tellingly, for the purposes of this discussion, Mrs. Clinton reportedly said to her aides during her rant: "If that [f] bastard [Trump] wins, we all hang from nooses!" I attempted, unsuccessfully, to track down and obtain the original email in which this account was related by reaching out to the somewhat fringe media outlets in which it was being reported. None of those contacted was able to produce the documentation. But whether this anecdote is true or apocryphal, it raises an important question, which might well have prompted an upset Mrs. Clinton to speculate that she and her associates might "hang from nooses." If the congressional and DOJ inspector general's investigations eventually turn up irrefutable evidence of a coordinated conspiracy among Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, Glenn Simpson, and others to throw the presidential election to Hillary Clinton in what is amounting to a frame-up, can a case be made for seditious conspiracy? All indications are that top Obama administration officials obtained a FISA warrant to spy on a Trump campaign official based on knowingly unverified evidence in the Fusion GPS-manufactured "Steele dossier." They also leaked the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Carter Page to the media before the election. And we recently learned that the FBI was using informants to spy on the Trump campaign. Now Robert Mueller and his team are conducting a special counsel fishing expedition based on some alleged collusion with Russia, zero evidence of which has been provided. Seditious conspiracy is defined in federal law as follows: If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both. Did Hillary's cabal "conspire to overthrow" the government? Certainly, force was not used, but does the statute require force? Hillary's purported outburst following the Matt Lauer interview may have reflected a deep-seated fear that should Trump win, her conspiracy would be uncovered. If so, she may be comforted to know that rather than hanging, she and her cohorts may be looking only at twenty years in prison. Admittedly, many caveats must necessarily accompany this discussion. The above story about Hillary's tirade is reliant on hearsay apparently second- or thirdhand hearsay. The email was reportedly written by a Comcast executive who in turn was reportedly summarizing what was told to him by an NBC executive who allegedly witnessed Mrs. Clinton's outburst. It was then reported by media outlets. Nonetheless, as facts continue to emerge in this political melodrama, some astute analysts, such as CTH's "Sundance," are putting together the pieces of a disturbing puzzle. It suggests that one of the gravest attacks on our republican form of government that has ever occurred was undertaken by James Comey, Sally Yates, Andrew McCabe, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Glenn Simpson, John Brennan, James Clapper, Christopher Steele, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, and possibly other Obama administration figures, as well as a host of British and Australian government officials, which Mark Steyn has brilliantly dissected in an analysis of those foreign officials' involvement. Very knowledgeable and experienced prosecutors, like the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Joe diGenova, have insistently called for the empanelment of a grand jury to investigate these individuals for various violations of federal law, such as obstruction of justice and violating Americans' civil rights through their actions. As diGenova told Tucker Carlson on January 23, 2018: [T]he Attorney General needs to appoint a special counsel, and if he doesn't want to do that, he needs to make sure the criminal division of the Justice Department impanels a grand jury immediately and starts putting in that grand jury, under oath, Comey, Strzok, Page, Baker, McCabe, everybody. And senior Justice Dept. officials Sally Yates, Bruce Ohr, and others John Carlin, the head of the national security division. All of these people need to be in front of a grand jury. An attempt to rig an election using falsified evidence as the basis for an investigation is a most serious crime against our form of government and cannot go unchallenged or unpunished. An attempt to frame Donald Trump and oust him from the presidency is even more grave. Benjamin Franklin was famously asked by some Philadelphia citizens, according to lore, what the Framers of the Constitution had created when they emerged with the Constitution. Franklin's response was: "A Republic, if you can keep it." The question in the wake of this latest, and most colossal, Clinton scandal is this: can we keep the Republic? William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private and non-profit sectors for over thirty years. Presently he is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc. (The views expressed are the author's alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.) Hillary Clinton is either the gift that keeps on giving or else like houseguests who overstayed their welcome, depending on your perspective. For Republicans, her continued presence in the public eye, whining and complaining about the election, providing a new excuse each week, is an electoral gift, as she is one of the faces of the modern Democratic Party. Along with Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi, these three are the witches of Macbeth, circled around a CNN microphone chanting, "Double, double, toil and trouble, Trump's a pig, stole the election, and should be impeached." Sorry for the non-rhyme; maybe Jesse Jackson can help with that part of the incantation. If Democrats hope to beat Trump in 2020, or take either house of Congress in November, they need fresh ideas besides Russia and Stormy and a new face of the party rather than a two-time loser who is quite unlikeable. And there is still the nagging issue about her health. The media are willing and eager to look in every nook and cranny for evidence of Trump-Russian collusion, and to date, they have come up with nothing. But which journalists have investigated Mrs. Clinton's health? The presidency is a demanding job with a similarly vigorous campaign required to earn the votes to become president. Mrs. Clinton failed in the campaign. How would she have done as president? Let's go back to 2012, when she suffered a traumatic brain injury. I wrote about this four years ago, describing her "terrible concussion," as her husband described it; prism glasses used to correct double vision; and blood-thinners to prevent clots. The media were incurious at the time, and anyone who raised the issue was labeled a sexist loon for even thinking something was wrong with Mrs. Clinton. Fast-forward to 2016, when she was actually running for president. Remember the 9-11 tribute in New York City that she attended? Both she and candidate Donald Trump were in Manhattan on a pleasant 80-degree day along with thousands of others. Mrs. Clinton collapsed getting into her van, needing to be dragged into it, like a side of beef, by her bulky handlers. Here is a good review of that memorable moment. Don't forget her coughing fits, lasting several minutes, during campaign speeches and her episodes of head-jerking seizure-like movements when taking questions from reporters. During the campaign, there were reports of Hillary's "low energy and lack of stamina" such that she took days off from campaigning, while the similar-aged Donald Trump was holding rallies in multiple states on a single day. She personified the old adage, "Winners never quit and quitters never win." Did she quit simply because she believed the bogus polls declaring her coronation a fait accompli? Or was she too ill for the rigors of a presidential campaign? Post-election, rather than being a graceful loser and devoting her efforts to causes greater than herself, she is desperately trying to remain relevant. She is certainly relevant to the GOP, providing reinforcement that America chose wisely in November 2016. Her health issues continue. Earlier this year, she stumbled down a short flight of stairs in India, needing to be hauled along just as she was at the 9-11 event. There are persistent rumors of her affinity to alcoholic beverages, including leaked emails from her communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, telling John Podesta to "sober her up some." Her drinking rumors persist to this day, bolstered by her statement at a commencement address last year describing getting over her electoral loss: "I won't lie chardonnay helped." Now there is the issue of her back brace. Photos show an unusual protrusion under her clothes, highly suggestive of a back brace. She is also wearing heavy and warm clothing and a scarf around her neck, bundled up for winter despite being in summer-like heat. Some postulate that she is wearing a Kevlar vest, which she didn't seem to need as a presidential candidate but supposedly does need as a private citizen. I suspect that the only serious threats to Hillary are from the Democrat establishment who wish she would go away. There was also the wrist cast and ankle boot, both worn recently all pointing to a woman who is literally falling apart. She is 70 years old, and health issues are common in that age group. She is also in good company. Elizabeth Warren is 68, Nancy Pelosi is 78, Bernie Sanders is 76, and Donald Trump is 71. Yet these four are still operating at a high level, with no obvious health issues, except for Nancy Pelosi and concerns over her mental status. Imagine if Hillary Clinton had been elected. How could she handle the rigors of the presidency? President Trump is everywhere rallies, commencement speeches, hoping on and off Marine One and Air Force One, impromptu press briefings, and all the other activity behind the scenes. Would Huma, Podesta, and Mills be running the country while Hillary drank chardonnay and napped? Would her randy husband be dragged away from chasing women to run the White House? Would Obama and Jarrett be re-enlisted to preside over the Deep State when Hillary couldn't drag herself out of bed? Could Hillary have given an inspiring commencement speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, then shaking over a thousand hands, standing in the hot sun, during the graduation ceremonies? Could she even serve out her presidential term? We have been down this road before. In 1992, Senator Paul Tsongas from Massachusetts ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for president. He claimed to be cancer-free from his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma when in reality he was not. His doctors at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston were in on the charade, implying he had been cured, which was not true. If elected, he would not have been able to complete his presidential term, as he died just short of what would have been his first term, after years of treatment and infirmity. Tsongas did eventually acknowledge his error in not fully disclosing his cancer recurrence. This is a good precedent for such an important job. Should it not apply to Mrs. Clinton as well? America dodged a bullet in November 2016. It's a shame the media continue to enable Mrs. Clinton's self-serving excuse-laden pity tour, rather than encouraging her to retire gracefully advice they would certainly give to their elderly parents or grandparents in a similar situation. Republicans should be grateful, however, that Mrs. Clinton remains the Democrat face and torch-bearer as they head into another election season. Brian C Joondeph, M.D., MPS is a Denver-based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Chuck Schumer and other Democrats collude with most of the media every day to target President Trump with talking points. They are searching for some mud to stick. Democrats don't have a set of policies that are popular, so they must throw mud. Now he's all upset about gas prices. According to the New York Post: Chuck Schumer slammed President Trump on Wednesday for soaring gas prices blaming his decision to reimpose sanctions on Iran for higher costs that he said will burn away the GOP tax cut. "Gas prices will roughly cancel out the 2018 consumption boost from the tax cuts," Schumer said at an Exxon gas station on Capitol Hill. "That's right, whatever meager benefit working families may have seen from Trump's tax scam for the rich has been wiped out by the gas prices that President Trump is responsible for." Schumer argued that Trump's move earlier this month to reinstate economic sanctions on Iran spooked oil markets sending prices through the roof. In 2009, when Obama took office, the gas price was below $1.90 per gallon. By 2013, despite the slowest economic recovery in seventy years, the price had soared to $3.57, and by 2014, the price was $3.70 per gallon. Not once do I remember Schumer or other Democrats blaming Obama's policies for the high prices or caring that they were high. Yet today, with a much faster economy and lower taxes and an average gas price of $2.97 (much lower than 2013 or 2014), Schumer is pitching a fit because Trump put sanctions back on Iran that Obama shouldn't have lifted. Obama did everything he could top push prices of fossil fuels up, blocking pipelines, writing regulations, bankrupting coal companies, and blocking drilling. "Under my cap and trade plan, electricity prices will necessarily skyrocket," he smugly told a San Francisco Chronicle interviewer on YouTube. Schumer, the media, and other Democrats supported him every step of the way. Trump, on the other hand, is doing everything he can to increase the American supply of fossil fuels, and here is Schumer complaining. What a crock. He is just searching for another piece of mud since nothing else is sticking. Here is what they're reporting now: According to the federal Energy Information Administration, as of Monday, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline reached $3.70. That's 13 higher than a year ago at this time, and it matches the previous high thus far in 2014, set in late April. Schumer obviously never minded high oil prices under Obama, just as he never cared about high taxes on the rich. Not once did I ever hear him complain about rich taxpayers paying more or the limitation of itemized deductions under the previous tax code. The first time I ever heard Schumer complain about high taxes on the rich or that high taxes might slow the New York economy is when Trump reduced the subsidy to taxpayers in high-tax states, and then Democrats and the media had a cow. None of these stories is sticking, so Schumer blamed Trump putting sanctions on the sweet and lovable Iran for the rise in oil prices. Schumer opposed the Iran deal when the Obama administration was selling the lies, but now he is all for continuing to build up Iran. Schumer and the media know that it wasn't an actual treaty approved by Congress and signed by Iran, but they pretend it was to the public. It's all part of an agenda. It's not about principles. They have been hitting Trump with the false Russian collusion story for almost two years, and it just isn't sticking. They have hoped the fake Russian story would bring down Trump and lead to his impeachment, but the impeachment narrative isn't approved by the public. They said the tax cuts and reform would be a disaster or Armageddon, and instead, the cuts and reductions in regulations have led to a faster economy, record low unemployment rates, and a tremendous spike in consumer and business confidence. (It is tremendously sad for Democrats when people get more opportunities to move up the economic ladder.) The Stormy Daniels-Michael Avenatti circus has almost run its course. The majority of public doesn't approve of sanctuary cities and also doesn't have a problem calling people animals who maim, murder, and rape people at will. Most people don't think the MS-13 gang members deserve to be treated humanely. Somehow, one killing with a gun is too many for Democrats, but a huge number of killings by illegal aliens who are MS-13 members doesn't get a rise out of the leftist media. I hope Schumer and other Democrats go around the country saying how great it is that Obama gave Iran hundreds of billions of dollars to continue to spread terrorism, build weapons, support Assad, and continue chants of "death to America" and "death to Israel." That should be a winning issue, especially in the Jewish community. There will be more mud stories and talking points soon because big government, high taxes, and more regulations is a hard agenda to run on. The media haven't cared about facts for a long time, and they won't now. They have a party and agenda to support, and facts certainly aren't going to get in the way. Image credit: Edward Kimmel via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Democrats, including the media, are on offense, attacking and seeking to destroy President Trump and his agenda every day. Sometimes Democrats have to play defense to defend and lie about the Obama administration's truly scandalous acts, the latest of which was his inserting spies into the Trump campaign back in 2016. Instead of admitting the problem, they are pretending that spying isn't spying. It is now "intelligence-gathering" to "help" Trump and protect Americans from the Russians. As if we are supposed to believe that helping Trump is just part of their agenda. Democrats, it must be remembered, worked with Russia and Russians to develop the fictitious Russian dossier. They blamed the Russians for breaking into their computers. (Somehow the Justice Department and intelligence agencies took their word for it instead of examining the computers themselves, which Democrats would not allow them to do. Isn't it stupid for Justice officials to take the DNC's word for who hacked their computers? Were they scared of the truth?) Hillary Clinton, the Podestas, and others obviously had plenty of contacts with Russia, yet somehow no spies were embedded with the Hillary campaign, no phone calls recorded, and there was no unmasking. I would think that if the Obama administration had been actually worried about Russian infiltration of our system, it would have been gathering information from both campaigns, but it wasn't, which shows that it didn't care about Russia. It was just seeking to destroy Trump. I understand why there were no U.S. spies embedded in the Clinton campaign. FBI director James Comey pretty well said that Hillary and her aides were too stupid to have the intent to break the law. Comey essentially found them all innocent by reason of mental incompetence prior to an actual investigation. Hillary and her team could use the defense if she was actually charged. Democrats, including Obama and the majority of the media, never cared whether Bill, Hillary, or their aides followed the law, so how were they supposed to learn right from wrong? They had never been held to account, and no one was about to start, no matter how many laws they broke. They were above the law, yet we constantly hear Comey, Democrats, and others say no one is above the law. Back in the good old days, the media, especially the Washington Post, cared if a campaign was gathering intelligence on its opponent, but now they don't care even as the president used the Justice Department, the Defense Department, and the intelligence agencies to gather intelligence to destroy an opponent. That is extremely dangerous to our freedom and democracy. The media and other Democrats treat us as if we were ignorant. They act as if the fictitious Russian collusion story were true, and they treat the spying story as false. I guess they are using the Bill Clinton line. It depends what the definition of "is" is. Here are a couple definitions of "spy": noun a person who secretly collects and reports information on the activities, movements, and plans of an enemy or competitor. synonyms: secret agent, intelligence agent, double agent, undercover agent, counterspy, mole, sleeper, plant, scout verb work for a government or other organization by secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors. Doesn't this look exactly like what the Obama administration did to Trump and his campaign? I would have thought by now that some of the media would actually be embarrassed that they are being used to push an agenda and a party while seeking to destroy the other party. The media are supposed to hold the powerful to account, but instead they are protecting the powerful at the expense of the people. The collusion between the media and Democrats to elect Hillary and destroy Trump by using all the resources of the taxpayers was much more dangerous than anything the Russians did or could have done. The fact that the media don't care is atrocious. A study by the U.S. Department of Justice found that fully 83% of prisoners let out on early release programs were re-arrested within nine years. Overall, 68 percent of released state prisoners were arrested within three years, 79 percent within six years and 83 percent within nine years. The 401,288 released state prisoners were arrested an estimated 2 million times during the nine years after their release, an average of five arrests per released prisoner. On an annual basis, 44 percent of prisoners were arrested during the first year after release, 34 percent were arrested during the third year and 24 percent were arrested during the ninth year. Five percent of prisoners were arrested during the first year after release and were not arrested again during the 9-year follow-up period. For most of the 20th century and into the 21st, prison "reform" has been a political issue of varying importance. The do-gooders want shorter sentences and more support for released inmates. Realists want many criminals locked up for long stretches and punished. The conclusions we can reach from numbers like this are that nothing is working and a whole different approach to what to do about criminals in and out of prison must be created. Conservative Review: Part of why the "tough-on-crime regime" from the Reagan era through the last decade had so much success in lowering crime rates is because most of the criminals were involved in drugs and property crimes. Whether you are a hawk or a dove on drugs is immaterial to the fact that most of those trafficking drugs are involved in many other crimes and account for most of the crimes committed. Thus, getting them off the streets worked wonders. It didn't stop the spread of drugs (although I would argue that is because we never went after the source via our foreign policy and immigration policy), but it absolutely did stop a lot of the violent crime and property crimes. When you let out drug offenders early from prison in this era, they will not only go back to selling even deadlier drugs, killing thousands, they will also commit other crimes. New York City's "broken windows" policy was largely credited with making the city safer. When you arrest a career criminal and he goes to prison even for a short time for a lesser offense he can't commit any crimes while incarcerated. The question for liberals isn't whether the program worked. It's how "fair" it was to minorities. Indeed, the notion that there are "too many blacks in jail" is animating the current push for prison reform. The House-passed "First Step Act," which is the first step to the broader agenda of its proponents to dismantle the Reagan crime agenda, does not make any exceptions for heroin and fentanyl traffickers for early release programs. And yes, they absolutely are early release programs. Ironically, proponents of the bill, who also support getting rid of mandatory sentencing on the front end of the system, insist that I am mischaracterizing the bill as a sentencing bill. No, it's not a sentencing bill, but it is a jailbreak bill on the back end of the justice system, offering multiple avenues for early release. I don't think anyone, right or left, has satisfactory solutions to the recidivist problem. I don't think there's any doubt that prisons today are factories for making career criminals. But how best to intervene so that kids, who might be getting into minor trouble "broken glass" crimes don't graduate to more violent crime after spending time in prison? Does a kid caught with the wrong amount of coke or heroin deserve to be locked up for years? And what happens to him while in prison? I am not a big "rehabilitation" proponent except for younger prisoners who have a better chance of turning things around with a little education and local programs that target these kids before they get to prison deserve local support. But these early release programs that let career criminals out of jail due to some misguided sense of "fairness" will never work and should be scrapped. CNBC reports that some blue-state governors are now concerned that since their states' high taxes can no longer be fully deducted from federal income taxes, some of their wealthy residents will leave. Thus, millionaires are the new minority in need. One of the core beliefs of the Democratic party is fairness. Tax the rich, help the poor and spread the gains of a growing economy more widely. It has been a consistent message by federal and state lawmakers alike. Until now. On the heels of the new Republican tax law, blue state Democrats, who until recently were advocating higher taxes on the rich, are suddenly fighting to protect their own members of the top 1 percent from higher taxes. Some Dems are even proposing both raise taxes on the wealthy with one hand and help them with the other. According to CNBC, a number of states have passed laws that allow the well heeled to make tax-deductible charitable donations to groups that support government activities, such as education. The irony is rich. All of these special laws are aimed squarely at helping the wealthy. It's chiefly the high earners and affluent who suffer from the SALT deduction cap of $10,000. According to one analysis, nearly 60 percent of the added revenue from the SALT changes will come from the top 1 percent. While the Democratic politicians still say they're fighting for fairness, the gap is more political than economic the red-state rich will get a big tax cut while many of the blue-state rich will pay more. Among the victims of this discrimination is House minority leader and multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi. The Washington Free Beacon highlighted her personal efforts to save her family's $137,000 deduction on their three luxury homes. Like many taxpayers with big property tax bills across the country, the Pelosi's in late December prepaid the second half of their 2017-2018 property tax bills for their $7.2 million estate in San Francisco's tony Pacific Heights and Napa vineyard and residence worth more than $4 million, according to San Francisco city-county and Napa county property records. The couple paid the full annual property taxes on their luxury Washington Harbor condo on the Georgetown waterfront before the tax bill became law. Paying the taxes earlier than the 2018 bills require is a smart accounting move that could save the Pelosi's tens of thousands of dollars. However, it also illustrates a Republican talking point about the tax bill: that the new law is eliminating tax breaks that primarily benefit the wealthy. These shenanigans, however, may be the germ of an interesting conservative concept. By selecting charities that support specific government activities, donors are indirectly earmarking their taxes. There's a thought: a federal budget built around the activities of government that are most popular a "People's Budget." That's exactly why the courts will likely strike these plans down. Now pretty much every American is, in some way, shape, or form, "Hey, Big Brother, can you spare a dime?" People do change, but the corrective rate is uncommonly slow and subject to regression. Starbucks's presentation of a national anti-racial bias training webinar did not see any river washings followed by congregants professing their newfound faith, but then we are way too sophisticated for that sort of thing. Still, there remains more than a clammy whiff of that Old Time Religion wafting through the tent as liberalism immodestly codifies its sacred precepts. First on the hymn board is "Hey, Morgan Freeman, Come to God." Then Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson, who ordered the anti-racial bias training session after a painstakingly distilled drop of implicit bias was found in one of the millions of gallons of coffee his thousands of employees serve daily, will probably kick off the day's training activities. These activities are mostly online, so everybody can be certain that this is all way more modern than it might look. Starbucks will not allow members of the general public to see the eye-opening event. This redaction is explained by one Dr. Nsenga K. Burton. He said, "An important part of discussing sensitive topics like race, class, gender and sexuality is creating safe spaces for open dialogue. You cannot accomplish that goal with people external to the exercise disrupting these safe spaces." Dr. Burton is an "expert on the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality and media." You have to admit, that's a big intersection. When you were young and were implicitly reading Huckleberry Finn, did you ever wonder why Miss Watson took Huck into the closet to clean his soul? Here is the passage: "Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn't so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn't any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool." Today we know that Miss Watson was a pioneering intersectionalist and that Dr. Burton may be utilizing her best practices. But Huck was the fool. Watson and Burton would both say so. Every wise ruler needs a fool to slap around. This Memorial Day weekend, some 28 people in Chicago were fooled into thinking they were shot, and nine of them were foolish enough to die. On Tuesday, the Starbuckians weren't engaging in an open dialogue about what happens when a loaded implicit bias intersects with a verifiably non-safe space. That's because you can't make sense of what's senseless by loading on another helping of senseless. When Tommy Robinson was arrested for live-streaming a report outside the Leeds courthouse where members of an alleged Muslim grooming gang who allegedly forced young British girls into prostitution, and the court quickly imposed a gag order on U.K. media reporting it, outrage (and an overseas legal defense fund) quickly followed. (See my writing about it here, here, and here.) In the words of Washington Post writer Avi Selk: The gag order backfired, turning English Defense League founder Tommy Robinson into a sort of free-speech martyr to conservatives such as Donald Trump Jr. and Roseanne Barr before the gag order was lifted Tuesday. Selk's report, incidentally, drips with contempt toward Robinson, calling him "[o]ne of Britain's most notorious anti-Muslim campaigners" (emphasis added). Robinson wants to halt Muslim immigration and focuses on the crime statistics and the violent jihad activity that have resulted from large scale Muslim immigration. Selk presents the rationale for gagging reporting: It's illegal in Britain to report the details of some trials before they conclude a long-standing law designed to prevent the news from biasing juries and causing prosecutions to collapse, according to Leeds Live. Oddly enough, even though the Washington Post's motto, "Democracy Dies in Darkness," appears at the top of the web page featuring Selk's article, he nowhere discusses this concept with regard to the gag order. Not everyone thinks arresting someone for speaking and then forbidding any media discussion of the arrest is consistent with a free society. Zerohedge has collected some of the overseas support for Robinson and outrage at the gag order: Free speech advocates and supporters of Robinson's movement from Melbourne to Berlin came out by the thousands to protest the Friday arrest outside of Leeds Crown Court while Robinson was reporting on a pedophile grooming trial via Facebook livestream. Within six hours of his detention, Robinson was slapped with a 13 month prison term for violating a prior suspended sentence for a similar offense. ... Mass protests broke out following Robinson's arrest the largest of which was a crowd of thousands in the UK, demonstrating at the gates of Downing Street to demand the release of the conservative activist. ... Thousands protest the instant jailing of citizen-journalist Tommy Robinson, while social media goes dark after take-down notices. Is he out of order? Or does he have a point to make on free speech? Interesting Times for the UK. #FreeTommy #citizenjournalist pic.twitter.com/yk5qxCF3zT John Leet (@JohnLeetAuthor) May 27, 2018 The protests were not limited to the English-speaking world. The problems associated with mass Muslim immigration have sparked protest movements in many European countries: Parliamentary questions to the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs about the arrest and safety of Tommy Robinson.#TommyRobinson #FreeTommy #FreeSpeech pic.twitter.com/4fSq94WoI8 Geert Wilders (@geertwilderspvv) May 26, 2018 ...including Europe's economic giant, Germany: Ein guter Tag fur Deutschland. Ein Albtraum fur die #antifa. Fur die #ZukunftDeutschland|s waren heute >5.000 Patrioten auf Berlins Straen. Die Botschaft ist angekommen: die #AfD gibt unser Land nicht auf. @AfDimBundestag #AfDdemo #AfDwirkt pic.twitter.com/dcToRWOSHa Petr Bystron (@PetrBystronAfD) May 27, 2018 The Google Translate version: And even in Israel: Tommy Tommy Tommy Tommy Robinson Tel Aviv #FreeTommy pic.twitter.com/NK5FKOpGU1 Dr Brian of London (@brianoflondon) May 28, 2018 The U.K. major media reports, now allowed, do not exhibit much sympathy for Robinson. See the Guardian, the BBC, and even the Daily Mail (which to its credit does mention Robinson's fears of a "price on his head" in prison). The thing feared most by the U.K. political and media establishment (and those of other E.U. nations, notably including Sweden) is widespread discussion of the problems associated with mass immigration of adherents of a religion that teaches jihad as the obligation of its adherents, and which specifically sanctions violence to that end. They now have that. I hope they do realize that the death of Robinson while in custody would make him a global martyr and keep him isolated from the general prison population. By July 15, we will know who will be the next presidents of Mexico and Colombia. Americans usually don't care about these elections, but 2018 may be one of those years when results matter in two of the largest GDPs in Latin America. Let's go to Colombia. The first round is over in Colombia, and here is where we are: With 98 percent of the votes counted, conservative 41-year-old Ivan Duque nailed down 39 percent of the vote, according to Colombia's national electoral agency. He was followed by the progressive 58-year-old economist and ex-mayor of Bogota, Gustavo Petro, with 25 percent. Duque is in a strong position for round 2, but 36%, the ones who did not vote for #1 or #2, will now have to choose between the two finalists. I am not familiar with the other candidates and whom they will endorse. Nevertheless, this is now down to Duque and Petro. The big question is this: which one can persuade a majority of Colombians? Stay tuned, but I like Duque's chances. Down in Mexico, conventional wisdom was that leftist Andres Lopez-Obrador was going to win. He may, but don't bet on that "caballo," or horse, just yet. A couple of weeks ago, a Mexican friend explained what he called "Plan B," an effort for voters to vote for whoever is #2 or rising in the polls. According to my friend, Mexican voters are planning to wait until the last moment to cast their ballots, when they have a good sense of who is #2. It is their hope that #2 gets the support of #3 and #4 and overthrow Lopez-Obrador. "Plan B" may be a Mexican dream, but it appears to be working. "Numero 2," Ricardo Anaya, a right-center candidate, is gaining and closing the gap against Lopez-Obrador. The latest polls show that the lead is narrowing: Less than two months before Mexicans vote, Lopez Obrador's support grew to 39 percent from 38 percent in the previous poll at the end of March, according to polling firm Parametria, but his lead narrowed to 14 points from 18. The possibility of a victory by Lopez Obrador, who has threatened changes to the country's landmark reform to lure private investment to its energy markets, has spooked some investors, helping send the peso currency down more than 3 percent in April. Support for Ricardo Anaya, the candidate of the "For Mexico in Front" coalition of three parties from the right and left, grew to 25 percent from 20 percent the month before. In a recent TV debate, he portrayed himself as the only alternative to the frontrunner. So far, Mexicans, specifically the large middle class and business sector, are turning to Anaya as the alternative. Unlike Colombia, where a runoff is coming between right-center Duque and left-center Gustavo Petro, Mexicans have one chance to stop leftist Lopez-Obrador. My guess is that Duque will win in Colombia and bring back ex-president Alvaro Uribe's successful policies. As for Mexico, I am not sure that Anaya will close the gap, but lots of candles are burning in Mexican homes, hoping it is so. It would be a great summer for the U.S. if right-center candidates win in Mexico and Colombia! PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter. Google has announced that it began to transition all G Suite users from the Hangouts video chat solution to the Hangouts Meet service for enterprise application. The migration started on May 29 and it is expected to conclude sometime in June. Once the transition is complete, all the new Calendar invites created by G Suite users will be automatically connected to the Hangouts Meet video meeting, though old meetings will still use the old Hangouts regardless of this change. Users will also still be able to join video calls in the classic Hangouts version even if Hangouts Meet has been enabled on their domain. Hangouts Meet was officially launched in March of last year, along with Hangouts Chat, as an enterprise version of Googles video chat service. More to the point, Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat are the products of Googles move to split Hangouts into two group communications tools. For the uninitiated, Hangouts Meet is focused more on enterprise video conferencing, allowing people to participate in a video call on a variety of platforms such as mobile devices or laptop computers through a link which can be shared via email or through Calendar events. Hangouts Meet then works to extract information related to a meeting from Calendar. For users who still want to stick to the original Hangouts version since some classic features are not yet available on Hangouts Meet, Google stresses that they can opt out of the transition by turning off the New meeting experience option in the Meet Settings under Apps > G Suite > Google Hangouts. Hangouts Meet is also compatible with Firefox version 60 without the need for an application download or plugin installation as the tool uses built-in WebRTC protocols. While the Hangouts Meet transition for all G Suite users is still optional, Google says that the solution is expected to achieve full parity with the original Hangouts during the second half of this year. That means Hangouts Meet will then add support for Internet Explorer and Safari browsers. By that time, Google says that it will automatically turn on Hangouts Meet for all users and domains, with no chance of opting out of the migration. Hangouts Meet also started taking over for G Suite Video Meetings last month. Google has now officially opened up the applications process for participants in 2018s Jump Start VR program, giving creators around the world a chance to create their own VR films. For those who may not already be aware of the program, Google effectively uses Jump Start as a platform to loan VR filming equipment out to content creators. This is the second year the program has run and, so far, more than 100 creators have taken part. Those are used to create VR films, first and foremost, but can also be used to create interactive experiences and Google encourages the creation of Daydream content. Applications will be accepted through June 11. So those who are already well aware of the program may want to jump to the button at the bottom to get the details and an application turned in. With regards to exactly what selected participants are given access to, Google ships out quite the bundle. Of course, the kit includes a YI HALO VR camera which retails at around $17,000 along with a top ring cover and Pelican-branded case, along with an internal battery for the camera, charging cables, and adapters. But that wouldnt be much of a kit if they didnt also receive no fewer than 20 64GB SanDisk Industrial micro SD cards, two spare cameras for the YI HALO, a high-speed card reader, and a Bluetooth remote. That kit can be used to create as many projects as the participant likes, as long as they dont loan the equipment out. The only real caveats to the program are primarily down to how content is published and when projects shot with the kit are published. Namely, the camera and other gear also need to be returned by August 22 and content needs to be published on YouTube, Daydream, or both by the end of 2018. Creators are free to publish the content elsewhere, as well, once its been published to either of those platforms. Google pays to ship both ways for the program, so theres almost no burden on content visionaries except for the above-mentioned caveats. It goes without saying that the purpose of the project is to get content creators involved in VR, without having to make the substantial investment for equipment. That, as a result, should help grow the media platform and help it move more into the mainstream. Whether or not that is successful has yet to be seen but Google is, at least, making a laudable effort. For more information and to get signed up, interested parties just need to click the button below. Google has formed a partnership with Xiaomi to introduce the search giants ARCore platform to mobile devices in China through the Xiaomi App Store. The first mobile phone in the Far Eastern country to receive the ARCore technology is the Mix 2S handset, allowing the device to analyze its environment and interact with data. For the uninitiated, the ARCore platform is designed as an ecosystem for developing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences using a wide variety of application programming interfaces (APIs). The technology relies on its capabilities to track motion, understand the surroundings, and estimate the environments lighting conditions in order to combine the real world with virtual content as seen through a phone camera. Last March, Google launched a number of new ARCore-based apps on the Play Store. The Mountain View, California-based internet giant first announced its plan to bring ARCore to devices in China back in February during the Mobile World Congress. Its worth pointing out that Xiaomi is just the first in a number of Chinese companies set to forge an alliance with Google for the ARCore platform. Google previously said that Huawei and Vivo will update their devices to support ARCore later this year, along with other companies such as Motorola, Sony, and HMD Global. ARCore officially exited its experimental phase of development last February. The mobile augmented reality platform initially added support for the Google Pixel and Pixel 2 range of devices, the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S7 series, Galaxy Note 8, LG V30 and V30 Plus, ASUS ZenFone AR, and OnePlus 5. It is also important to remember that eligible Android phones that are compatible with the ARCore platform include those devices running Android 7.0 Nougat or later. Most recently, Google rolled out ARCore integration to Samsungs Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus devices, though the platforms support for the Galaxy S9 lineup was already a given when the flagships debuted last February. It is understood that the launch of ARCore technology on the mobile phones in China is part of Googles efforts to build up its presence in the country, where the majority of its core services such as Gmail, Google Search, and Google Drive remain censored. The Galaxy S10 lineup may feature a Sound on Display solution that would allow it to relay audio through its screen, with Samsung Display recently demonstrating a prototype of the technology at SID Display Week 2018. The system appears to be somewhat similar to what Redux has been offering for some time now, though its presently unclear whether Samsung developed it in collaboration with any third party. Redux, a British resonance audio startup, has been acquired by Google this January for an unspecified sum, prompting speculation that the Pixel 3 series of Android flagships may also be capable of relaying audio through a mobile screen, though recent leaks are pointing to the two handsets having conventional front-facing stereo speakers. Samsung Display hasnt shared many details on how SoD works but has explicitly stated the solution was designed for smartphones, having suggested it will be commercialized in the near future. As the latest technological breakthroughs from any consumer-focused unit of the South Korean conglomerate are usually implemented into its own products before possibly being licensed to third parties, thats likely to be the case with SoD as well. The Galaxy S10 lineup is the most obvious candidate for the solution, with recent reports indicating Samsung is planning on positioning the product family as a major step forward compared to the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus. While the overall aesthetic of the handsets may not be changed in a radical manner, the flagships are rumored to boast in-display fingerprint readers, 3D cameras akin to the one found on Apples iPhone X, and 5G modems, among other improvements and novelties. SoD generates sound solely through vibrations, though its presently unclear how the technology fares against traditional dual-stereo speakers in terms of quality; while Samsung isnt advertising its audio setup on the Galaxy S9 in a particularly aggressive manner, the system is widely considered to be among the very best in the industry, especially with the addition of Dolby Atmos support. The Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10 Plus are expected to be announced in early 2019, most likely at the next iteration of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. San Franciscos City Attorney, Dennis Herrera, has officially subpoenaed both Uber and Lyft to determine whether or not drivers for the two ride-hailing platforms qualify as independent contractors or employees. The underlying goal is to determine whether the companies are following San Francisco ordinances pertaining to worker protection, wages, and benefits and follows a recent ruling by the California Supreme Court. Namely, the court ruled that a company needs to affirmatively prove that its workers are independent contractors before being able to deny them those. Following that ruling, Herra has set out to ensure that both companies are, in this case, operating lawfully since drivers seem to be internally classified and treated as independent contractors. To that end, Herra has requested that Uber and Lyft provide several pieces of documentation, including a full list of drivers who have begun or ended a ride within San Francisco between 2015 through the date of the subpoena. Moreover, the companies also need to show how they classify workers and provide documentation of hours, wages, benefits, and healthcare payments. Finally, Uber and Lyft have been asked to supply the attorney with proof that all drivers classified as independent contractors meet the criteria set by the California Supreme Court. Specifically, as of April 30, companies in the state must be able to prove that a worker works outside of the companys control and direction. Meanwhile, the worker must also be shown to perform work outside of the usual course of the companys business. Last but not least, that worker needs to have an independent trade, occupation, or business of the same nature of work that is being performed for both startups. Whether or not either Uber or Lyft could classify all of its drivers as independent contractors under those rules remains to be seen but Herra seems determined to find out. In the meantime, Uber has declined to comment on the subpoena, according to several sources. For its part, Lyft has stated that it is more than willing to work with Herra to ensure he understands the business model it follows. The company has also claimed that its drivers make between $21 and $22 per hour, after expenses, on average. Aside from requirements for benefits provided to employees, that level of wages if true would place Lyft within operating limitations under state law. However, its not always clear whether wages of workers in these kinds of positions are stable enough to meet requirements. Furthermore, there is likely a split between which workers can be classified as either an employee or independent contractor. So both companies still likely have a long way to go in terms of assuring the state that the law is being followed to the letter. Snap Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel threw shade at Facebooks insistence to continue copying Snapchat features across its product portfolio encompassing Instagram, WhatsApp, and the worlds largest social media platform itself. While speaking at the latest edition of Recodes annual Code conference on Tuesday, the 27-year-old maintained Facebooks copycat strategy is flattering, implying the company must be doing something right in order to be so closely followed by the most powerful player on the market. Mr. Spiegel remains largely unconcerned about the threat posed by Facebook, having argued how the two arent that similar despite many investors believing so and in spite of Facebooks attempts to mimic Snapchat-made functionalities. Our values are hard to copy, the entrepreneur said, adding that Facebook is presently struggling to change its DNA, highlighting that issue as the main reason why he doesnt believe the Menlo Park, California-based firm will ever be able to replace Snapchat in any shape or form. The DNA of their (Facebooks) company is all about having people compete with each other online for attention, Mr. Spiegel asserted, claiming Snapchat is a fundamentally different platform thats all about communicating with friends and not having to worry about oversharing or embracing other online activities that one might end up regretting in the future seeing how the bulk of the content posted with the app disappears after a short period of time (usually 24 hours) by default. In other words, Snapchat is being pitched to users as a more relaxed digital experience thats focused on interactions with close friends and doesnt come with any kind of social pressure. That sentiment is similar to the one Mr. Spiegel expressed in late 2017 while announcing Snapchats controversial redesign, having described the move as an attempt to separate the social aspect of its service from the media one. The app revamp is now being reversed to a degree, having apparently failed to achieve its purported goal, though Mr. Spiegel still appears to be pursuing the overall philosophy behind the change. Snap had a difficult first year on the public market, with its stock presently trading at under $11, more than $16 down its IPO price. About a week before its imminent launch, the Xiaomi Redmi Y2 has appeared on a popular benchmarking website, Geekbench. Based on the listing, the mid-range phone will include 3GB of RAM and will come pre-installed with Android 8.1 Oreo, possibly with a layer of MIUI on top of it. An unnamed octa-core Qualcomm processor running at 2.02GHz can also be seen mentioned in the listing with some previous leaks have suggested that a Snapdragon 625 SoC will be powering the device. The Redmi Y2 scored 843 points in the single-core test and 4,196 in the multi-core test of the benchmarking tool. Apart from the above-mentioned information, and the fact that the Android phone will be called Redmi Y2, the Geekbench database doesnt have anything else to reveal about the device at the moment. Xiaomi has already sent out invites for an event scheduled for June 7 in New Delhi where it is expected to launch the Redmi Y2. The handset is said to succeed the Redmi Y1 budget smartphone launched last year in the South Asian market. The minimal invite from the company shows a partial camera lens completed by a dotted image of a human face, probably depicting the cameras AI-based features. Some reports have claimed that the Redmi Y2 will indeed be a rebranded Redmi S2 launched in China earlier this month. The latter comes with a similar set of specifications as mentioned in the Geekbench listing, including the OS and RAM variant, and includes a taller 18:9 display with thin bezels on the front. At a glance, the budget-smartphone looks similar to the newly launched Mi 6X, thanks to its thin bezels, metal body, and its vertically aligned two rear cameras. A 5.99-inch HD+ display is placed on the phones front while the fingerprint scanner sits on the back, where the dual-camera setup can also be found. Besides being powered by a Snapdragon 625 processor, the handset comes with two RAM and storage variants one with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of flash memory and another with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of flash memory. The dual-SIM phone has a dedicated slot for both a second SIM card and a microSD card, while a 3,080mAh battery is also a part of the package. In China, the phone starts at 999 yuan (~$156) for the base 3GB RAM variant, while the pricing for the Indian model should be announced next week at its launch event. A new YouTube Red Original is being promoted via Google Assistants streaming capability. The series is called Impulse and focuses on a 16 year-old girl who happens to be the new girl in town, but also ends up with newly discovered powers. The show is due to start on June 6, but YouTube is letting people have access to the pilot episode early and for free if they happen to have a phone with Google Assistant or a smart speaker like Google Home. While the series will be a YouTube Red Original and require a subscription going forward to access the remainder of the series first season, people can ask Google Assistant to talk to Impulse then give the required password, which is Henry, and the user will be sent a link to the video through their connected Google account. Its an interesting way to not only promote the upcoming show, but also a way to promote Google Assistant and its feature that lets you talk to it to stream content just by speaking to it. While the feature itself is not new, this serves as a good way to remind people of all that their Google Assistant devices can do, and even if people dont end up choosing to subscribe to YouTube Red after watching the first episode of this new show, it at least gets them access to the first episode which could be considered a cool little freebie. Worth noting is that this only seems to be supported in certain countries like the U.S., with multiple reports from users stating that its not available in parts of Europe like the Netherlands and Italy, the UK, and India. Its also possible that this may be a U.S.-only availability at the moment though the tweet from YouTube Red promoting this feature doesnt say as much. If youve got the necessary equipment and you feel like giving it a try, you can check it out using the phrase and password mentioned above. BrusselsIn a statement on Monday, once again the European Commission stood up for the way European Arrest Warrants (EAW) work and sent a message to Spains Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena: We trust that the member states will use the European arrest warrant in a proper, lawful, transparent way, replied Vera Jourova, the EUs Justice Commissioner, when reporters asked her specifically about the EAWs issued against Catalan political leaders. She added that this is what we expect of all the actors involved in this particular case. Jourova denied that there is a lack of mutual trust between the judiciaries of different member states and asked Spain to overcome the problems of its justice system. We expect the Spanish government and judiciary to overcome the difficult situations. That way others will be able to trust them, she remarked, clearly referring to the criticisms levelled at Belgiums justice system by its Spanish counterpart after a Belgian court dismissed the warrants issued for the arrest of Toni Comin, Meritxell Serret and Lluis Puig [who currently reside in Brussels]. Spains subpar judicial independence On Monday the European Commission published a report about justice which shows that Spain is not doing very well. The general publics perception of Spains judicial independence has improved in the last year, but the country is still at the bottom end of the list. According to the ranking published by Brussels, Spain is the sixth member state where more people feel that judicial independence is either bad or very bad. The only countries whose score is lower than Spains are Slovenia, Italy, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary. Germany, the UK and Belgium all of which have either turned down or are considering an EAW against Catalan leaders rank within the top ten nations where people perceive a greater separation between the judiciary and the executive branch. Spain does better than last year The data included in the report by Brussels were gathered by means of a survey conducted in January this year. Compared to last years results, the perception of judicial independence in Spain has improved slightly, bringing up the country from the bottom third place to the sixth. The survey shows that Spaniards believe that the main problem with the independence of their justice system has to do with governments and politicians meddling with the judiciary. As many as 40 per cent of respondents reported this in Spain, whereas only 12 per cent did so in Germany and the UK, and 15 per cent in Belgium. In Germany the public feels that the main problem is to do with businesses not politicians putting pressure on the justice system. BarcelonaOn Monday former French president Francois Hollande spoke about the political situation in Catalonia and stated that its singularity must be recognised. Speaking for French media before the presentation of his latest book, Les lecons du pouvoir [The Lessons of Power] in Perpignan, Hollande made an appeal to resolve the crisis by democratic means. Even though he warned that he was not authorised to intervene in the affairs of a country that is close to France, he emphasised the need to respect democratic rights. The only message I can bring is to respect rights, territorial integrity and diversity through the rule of law, said the socialist leader in answer to a question from a reporter from Northern Catalonia. Hollande had declined to comment on Catalonias independence process while he was in office, claiming that this was an affair that concerned Spains sovereignty and it was not for France to pass judgement. When asked what he thought about Manuel Valls hypothetically running for mayor of Barcelona with the backing of Ciudadanos, Hollande was clear: Nothing. Valls, who is also a socialist and was prime minister under Francois Hollande, has stated that mid July he will reveal whether he will run as the Ciudadanos candidate for Barcelona city or not. The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the Philippines and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) will enter into force for Switzerland and the Philippines on June 1, 2018. In March this year, the Philippines Senate ratified the FTA with the EFTA as part of the countrys strategy to gain a stronger foothold in the European market. The EFTA comprises of some of the worlds wealthiest nations Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland. Once implemented, the agreement will be the Philippines second bilateral FTA after the Japan-Philippine Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) in 2008. Key advantages Custom duty exemption Once the FTA takes effect, the EFTA states will abolish all customs duties on imports of industrial products including fish and other marine products from the Philippines. In addition, the Philippines will gain from significant concessions on agricultural products that are currently being exported to the EFTA market. The Philippines, on the other hand, will gradually eliminate customs duties for the said products originating from EFTA states. It will also provide agricultural market access to the EFTA member states on a number of goods including temperate fruits, mineral and aerated waters, food preparations, chocolate, cheese, and wine, among others. Liberal requirements under rules of origin To facilitate the export of goods and the claim for preferential treatment, the agreement simplifies procedures for exporters, dispensing with the requirement to secure a certificate of origin from the customs authorities. Instead, the exporters can make use of the self-declaration system. The parties involved in the trade can provide advance rulings on tariff classification, applied rates of duty, valuation method, fees and charges, port of entry requirements and rules of origin. Improved market access As the EFTA requires the same standards as the European Union (EU), Philippine exporters to Europe will gain from economies of scale through improved market access in both EU and EFTA. In addition, the agreement will open access for Philippine exporters to a vast global network of preferential trade agreements outside the EU as the EFTA currently comprises 25 agreements with 35 countries and territories. Further, noting the similarities between the products that the Philippines and other ASEAN neighboring countries export to the EFTA, the FTA will improve Philippines position as EFTAs primary import source of these products. From 2009 to 2013 the Philippines accounted for about 4 percent of ASEANs total exports to EFTA. With the onset of the agreement, the Philippines can significantly improve its market share vis-a-vis the other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states in the EFTA market. By Dezan Shira & Associates The Lao government has increased the countrys monthly minimum wage from Kip 900,000 (US$108) to Kip 1,100,000 (US$132) with effect from May 1, 2018. An increase of 11 percent, the wage increase will apply to all businesses and factories established in the country. This is the third such raise in the last eight years. In early 2012, the minimum monthly wage doubled from Kip 348,000 (US$41.5) to Kip 626,000 (US$74.7). In 2015, it rose to Kip 900,000 (US$107.4). RELATED: Payroll and Human Resources Services from Dezan Shira & Associates According to the Lao government and the Lao Federation of Trade Unions (LFTU), that had petitioned for the minimum wage to be increased, the hike will help improve the labor standards in Laos and address the rising cost of living in the country. Besides, the government hopes the wage increase will motivate a large number of Laotians working in neighboring countries such as Thailand and Vietnam, to return and contribute to its manufacturing sector. The revised wages, however, are still significantly below those in neighboring countries; the current minimum daily wage in Thailand ranges from Baht 308 (US$9.6) to Baht 330 (US$10.28), depending on the province, which is approximately Baht 9240 (US$288) to Baht 9900 (US$308.5) a month. For Laos low-cost manufacturing sector which remains at a nascent stage of development, the increase in the minimum wages means narrower profit margins, increased competition from cheaper producers elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and perhaps, prospective laying off of low-skilled workers. The raise also significantly impacts the operating cost of business units. Businesses in Laos are now also liable to pay an additional wage of Kip 200,000 (US$23.8) per month or Kip 2,400,000 million (US$286.4) per annum per employee, lowering Laos appeal for foreign investors. COP26 may be a cop-out in the making COP26 is just about a month away. Delayed for a year by the Covid-19 pandemic, the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference has built up even more expectations and momentum during the intervening months One concern about the proposed Carbondale-to-Crested Butte corridor plan, or trail, is how it will further impact the Penny Hot Springs near Redstone. The springs has experienced a significant uptick in visitors in recent years and the negative effects on the surrounding area have been palpable, according to both trail supporters and critics. Afterpay develops technologies used in the sector, servicing about 1.8 million customers via more than 14,000 retail merchants that use Afterpay products. McGrath was supported by lawyer Andrew Slucky and graduate Sarah Lee on the deal. Baker McKenzie said that McGrath also led the team that recently advised NAB in its role as sole lead manager on the $41.2m notes issue by Kooragang Island Tank Terminals. In January, Baker McKenzie acted for Afterpay on its $20m placement to American venture capital firm Matrix Partners. The firms team on the deal was led by partner Guy Sanderson, who was assisted by senior associates Tharani Dharmaraj and Lana Tian. Baker McKenzie was NABs legal adviser in one of the largest ever investment fund floats on the ASX. The global firm also advised Afterpay on its $600mn merger with Touchcorp last year. He said that BCLP has been a great owner, client, and partner and that the new capital infusion is the logical next step for LOD to take. Neville Eisenberg, BCLP partner responsible for LOD, said that the firm is extremely proud to be a pioneer in the alternative legal services market. The firms recent merger gives it more scale and a wider international presence to fuel its innovation program, he said. Nurturing the creation of LOD over 10 years ago and supporting its growth and considerable influence over the legal market as a high-quality provider of flexible legal services has been an extraordinary journey for us all, he said. We believe that LOD is ideally placed for further growth and that this new investment by Bowmark will help facilitate LODs ambitious plans. In 2006, co-founder Simon Harper, then a partner at legacy BLP, thought of the idea for LOD. He would develop the idea with co-founder Jonathan Brenner, who was the firms head of recruitment. The firm began recruiting lawyers to the service in 2007. In 2008, Ken Jagger, who was a partner at legacy Freehills, established Balance Legal in Perth. That same year, John Knox, who was the former Allen & Overy business development head in Hong Kong and New York, founded Advent Lawyers in Sydney. Japanese automotive component maker Aisin Seiki and Toyota Motor Corporation have announced a new PhP1.2 billion share swap deal which effectively makes their current Toyota Autoparts Philippines, Inc. (TAP) joint-venture a new Aisin subsidiary. TAP will be renamed Toyota Aisin Philippines, Inc. with Aisin leading the new company's management after increasing its stake from 34 to 61 percent. With the new development, Toyota's regional transmission hub, aims to to be even more competitive with the consolidation of Aisin's manual transmission (MT) production to the Laguna based plant. Aisin will also invest in automatic transmission ("AT") component production lines by utilizing TAP's 26 years of operation experience and technologies TAP currently produces 5-speed and 6-speed MT gearboxes for the popular Toyota models such as the Innova, Hilux and Fortuner. It also produces Constant Velocity Joint (CVJ) used for the Corolla Altis and Vios. About 95% of its production is exported to Toyota affiliates in the Asia Pacific region. TAP has produced high quality MTs as one of Toyota's global MT supply bases. In 2008, TAP invested approximately 5.6 billion PHP to increase its production capacity and an additional 2.5 billion PHP in 2015 to start producing new 6-speed MTs, making a steady contribution to creating investment and employment opportunities in the Philippines, as well as expanding its business in the country. Through the organizational change, TAP is confident that it will offer better transmissions to customers and continuously make a positive contribution to the Philippine society and economy as the "best-in-town company." Toyota and Aisin will further strengthen their collaboration through the optimization of the powertrain production system and new product development. The Aisin Group as a whole aims to improve its competitiveness in the powertrain business. During the launch of the Terra, Nissan's top brass, marketing people and engineers were all too eager to share details about their new model. The Terra, after all, is easily the most anticipated new vehicle of 2018. But there was one detail that they didn't announce quite so proudly during the actual launch: the water wading depth capability of the Terra. Prior to our test drive to take it on the expressway and into the lahar beds in the general vicinity of Mount Pinatubo, the new Chief Vehicle Engineer for the Terra, Mr. Hinori Awano, finally let us in on what the Terra can do. We can guarantee that the Nissan Terra can go through 450mm of water, said Nissan's Hinori Awano. If that number sounds exceptionally low, that's because it is. The low number is also unusual given that the category is largely banked on the water wading capability of the SUVs in flood prone Philippines. It's also interesting to note that the official water wading depth of the Terra is the same as the Navara's. At 450mm, the Terra is the lowest in the class that includes the Isuzu mu-X (600mm), Toyota Fortuner (700mm), Mitsubishi Montero Sport (700mm), Chevrolet Trailblazer (800mm) and Ford Everest (800mm). Later in the day, we caught up with Nissan's CVE again, and we asked for a clarification of his statement, especially since smaller models like the EcoSport is officially claimed by Ford as capable of wading through 550mm of water. The 450mm wading capability is what we guarantee that the Terra can handle without problems, continued Mr. Awano. The Terra has been tested to handle deeper water, but we cannot officially state what that maximum number is because there are too many factors involved. In other words, Nissan is being conservative with their numbers. It's not uncommon for a major Japanese automaker to be conservative; often, they're hesitant to reveal numbers like top speeds or 0-100 km/h times. Awano continued that they cannot release an absolute maximum number because a lot of factors affect maximum water wading such as a moving current and even the driver's technique (never overtaking the bow wave). That means the number that Nissan released as the Terra's official water wading capabiliy is regardless of driver skill (unless they're being silly while wading through water) and factors such as water currents. So if you see marketing information stating that the Terra is only capable of going through 450mm of water, take note that's the conservative, guaranteed number, not the actual or absolute maximum. Also, given the conservative nature of Nissan in this case, where other carmakers one-upping each other by releasing maximum numbers without considering external factors? Tecnam, BRP-Rotax and Siemens have begun work on the High Power High Scalability Aircraft Hybrid Powertrain (H3PS) project, a joint venture whose stated objective is to put the basis for the development, manufacturing and in-flight test of a parallel hybrid powertrain for General Aviation The kickoff meeting for H3PS was held on May 17 at Tecnams headquarters in Capua, Italy. The project will allow broadening the horizons of knowledge in the field of parallel hybrid propulsion systems, said Tecnam head of R&D, Fabio Russo, who is also the project manager for H3PS. By developing electrical components, including a parallel hybrid drive system for GA segment, the project will introduce the most advanced technologies for all-electric aircraft and thus stimulating innovation. H3PS, which will run for 36 months, was selected by the European Commission and INEA Agency from among 31 proposals. Funding for the project comes from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. H3PS is not the first project to explore GA hybrid powertrains. The EU-funded Hypstair project, which began in 2013 and was led by Pipistrel, designed a serial hybrid propulsion system for small aircraft. The hybrid-electric powertrain ran for the first time in February 2016. Hypstair underwent ground testing but never flew. Although Hypstair concluded in July 2016, Pipistrel has moved on to the Modular Approach to Hybrid-Electric Propulsion Architecture (MAHEPA) project. MAHEPA is working on two different models for small and regional passenger aircraft one a gas/electric powertrain and the other a fuel cell hybrid. Unlike Hypstair, MAHEPA is planning to flight-test both models. The project has also received Horizon 2020 funding. North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp is one of the more vulnerable Democrats up for re-election this year, but Republicans are the ones worrying about her race, Politico reports. Battle lines: President Trump recruited her challenger, Rep. Kevin Cramer, but he invited Heitkamp to a bill signing last week and hasn't attacked her (yet.) Just last night at a rally in Tennessee he said, referring to Heitkamp and other red-state Democratic senators, "Democrats running for office, many of them, are saying great things about me in fact, I think they're Republicans." Why it matters: President Trump needs Heitkamp's vote given the GOP's narrow Senate majority, but Republicans are worried that by not attacking her, he could make them lose out on an otherwise winnable seat. Big picture: Heitkamp is a bit of a unicorn she's a Democrat who's had more than a dozen meetings with President Trump since the election, ridden on Air Force One with him, and was even considered for a cabinet position. And the North Dakota Democratic Party is using her close relationship to POTUS as a selling point to voters. But she's campaigning in a way that makes sense for a Democratic incumbent in a state President Trump won by 36 points in 2016. Her latest ad touts praise from her GOP colleagues. One theory, Rep. Kevin Cramer suggested, is that POTUS isn't attacking Heitkamp because of her gender: "They may just be concerned that shes a woman and maybe that has an impact. I just dont know," he told Politico. Heitkamp's Press Secretary Sean Higgins told Axios: "Heidi is always willing to work with President Trump when it's good for North Dakota," adding that voters "deserve and expect an independent voice in their senator not somebody who's just going to toe the party line." Bottom line: They might have a good working relationship now, but it's likely President Trump will campaign for Cramer in North Dakota in the coming months. President Trump urged Attorney General Jeff Sessions last year to reverse his decision to recuse himself from the ongoing investigation into Russian election interference in the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times reports. Why it matters: Trump, in March of last year, made the request to Sessions who is a key player in special counsel Robert Muellers investigation that is determining whether the president has tried to obstruct justice. Per the Times, the confrontation is being investigated by Mueller's team. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment to the Times. Halfway through his second year as commander-in-chief, President Trump has yet to visit U.S. military servicemembers on the ground in the Middle East though he has visited them domestically and internationally and wants a military parade to show off America's might. Flashback: A few months after the invasion of Iraq, Bush visited troops on the ground in Iraq in total, he made two trips to Afghanistan and four to Iraq. And, in April 2009, three months after his inauguration, Barack Obama visited troops in Baghdad. He also made four trips to Afghanistan. Since taking office, the Trump administration has been challenging Iran to break the terms of the nuclear deal by denying its full economic benefits and casting uncertainty over the reimposition of sanctions. Now that the U.S. has withdrawn unilaterally, Washington still appears to be counting on Iran's eventual withdrawal to apply a policy of maximum pressure on Tehran. The big picture: Conversations with individuals familiar with administration thinking suggest that there's no real strategy for renegotiating the deal. Secretary of State Pompeos recent Plan B was a political mission impossible that Iran absent radical regime change could never accept. And so far, the maximum pressure strategy has met with resentment from the United States' European and Asian allies. It's telling that no Trump administration official has been named to lead the alleged renegotiation effort, as Wendy Sherman did under Obama. Talk of building a new coalition against Iran beyond Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE remains just talk. What's next: With the U.S. focused on the possible June North Korea summit, Iran is decidedly on the back burner. The Trump administration has yet to fully specify how it will reimpose sanctions. Countries that import Iranian oil are unsure to what extent they will need to reduce purchases, especially in a tight market with rising prices. Interestingly, their deadline to trim imports by a significant amount is November 12, a week after the U.S. midterm elections could overturn GOP congressional control. The bottom line: Iran, which has threatened to withdraw from the nuclear deal following U.S. action, should stick with the deal at least until November. Then it will be better able to gauge the Trump administration's power and the international community's willingness to continue to buy Iranian oil. Barbara Slavin directs the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council. The White House announced this morning a plan to levy a 25% tariff on $50 billion worth of Chinese tech goods with the exact list to be announced next month as well as tech investment limits for Chinese nationals and entities. It also plans to pursue litigation at the World Trade Organization relating to Chinese intellectual property abuses. The big picture: Its a show of force that has surprised some sources close to the White House who believed Trump would defer any aggression towards China until after the North Korea summit. A source close to the White House who has a keen understanding of the internal dynamics on China told me that this is an "initial move in a long negotiation that shows the Chinese Trump is very serious and a move to balance the criticism that he was soft on ZTE. Another source close to the White House highlights these key takeaways: This makes clear that investment restrictions, which were not vetted or ready at the time of the original announcement on tariffs, are part of the negotiating dance. In some ways, these are even more harmful to Chinese interests and a bigger deal in the negotiations than the tariffs. The tariffs and the rest is what we already knew. Whats interesting is the timing. Trump is seeking to accelerate the negotiations even amidst the North Korea dance. Worth noting: The White House statement provides timelines for announcing the final tariff list and investment restrictions, but it doesnt give a hard timeline for their implementation. That gives Trump the flexibility to keep negotiating with the Chinese. Go deeper: U.S. panics over China tech threat. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross criticized the European Union on Wednesday for not negotiating on trade thanks to the United States' steel and aluminum tariffs, citing China as a counterexample, CNBC reports: "China are paying their tariffs ... China hasn't used that as an excuse not to negotiate ... It's only the EU that is insisting we can't negotiate if there are tariffs." The big picture: Dutch Foreign Trade and Development Minister Sigrid Kaag said at an economic forum in Paris on Wednesday that EU lawmakers are open to trade talks, but won't "negotiate under threat," per CNBC. By Laman Ismayilova YARAT Contemporary Art Space, a not-for-profit non-governmental contemporary art organization in Baku, for the first time has presented an exhibition of works by leading Azerbaijani painters. The exhibition opened at the 20th-21st Century Azerbaijani Painting Museum on May 26, Trend Life reported. This exhibition brought together works of such talented painters as Mikayil Abdullayev, Rasim Babayev, Sattar Bahlulzade, Gennady Brijatyuk, Nadir Abdurahmanov, Kamal Ahmed, Ujal Hagverdiyev, Igor Zhuk, Javad Mirjavadov, Boyukagha Mirzazade, Ashraf Murad, Toghrul Narimanbekov, Nadir Gasimov, Eldar Gurban, Maral Rahmanzade, Altay Sadigzade, Ogtay Sadigzade, Tahir Salahov, Khalida Safarova, Mahmud Taghiyev, Taghi Taghiyev, Farhad Khalilov, and Gayyur Yunus. Aida Mahmudova, the founder of "YARAT" Contemporary Art Space, prominent public figures, representatives of diplomatic missions accredited in the country, representatives of culture and art attended the event. In her welcoming speech, the exhibition curator Suad Garayeva-Maleki stressed the exhibition "Labor, Rest and Dreams: 1960-1980s through the eyes of Azerbaijani masters" brought together the work of the coryphaeuses of Azerbaijani painting. It was noted that the exposition included 65 works performed in different art styles, but united by a common theme. The exhibition is divided into three parts - work, rest and dreams. So, the realities of the life of Soviet people could be divided into three stages: they worked, rested, and then plunged into dreams. The presented works transfer the audience at that time. Chairman of the Union of Artists of Azerbaijan, People's Artist Farhad Khalilov, whose works also entered the exposition said that the artists created their works under the influence of the circumstances of that time. The national artist emphasized that the exhibition presents works by prominent artists of the brush, noting the importance of the exposition for the young generation, who have a wonderful opportunity to view the paintings of famous artists. Further, guests were presented concert program with participation of Shahriyar Imanov's trio. The virtuosic performance of the musicians, the heartfelt sound of tar captivated the audience. The musicians were greeted with a storm of applause. Notably, the exhibition brings together works by leading Azerbaijani painters who together defined a key period in Azerbaijan's Soviet art. After the death of Stalin in 1953, there was a new wave of freedom of expression across the Soviet Union and the artists were the first to benefit. Having been suddenly exposed to two pivotal shows of the time, the 1956 Picasso exhibition at the Pushkin Museum and the American National Exhibition in 1958, which for the first time showed works by Abstract Expressionists to the Soviet public, the new generation of Azeri artists heralded a new direction in painting. Away from the dogmatic prescriptions of Socialist Realism they developed their own distinct styles, unique in terms of their use of bright color, daring subject matter, bold brushstrokes, heavy impasto, and adoption of folklore elements. While some artists, such as Tahir Salahov, pushed the technique of Realism, to add more expressive lines and emotive renderings, forming the famous Severe Style, others abandoned it altogether. Led by Mirjavad Mirjavadov they adopted a bold palette and a heavily layered technique both in form and content. Often adding basic, earthly materials to their works these artists, who together founded the Absheron School of Colourists, used a language often borrowed from Oriental symbolism and folk-tales to express their discontent with the status quo. Still others, such as Boyukagha Mirzazade and Maral Rahmanzade, perfected their technique of realistic depictions of the changing lifestyle around them portraying a new era of openness and progress. How does one navigate such distinct styles and worldviews? What brings together such different artists as Sattar Bahlulzade and Toghrul Narimanbekov? This exhibition follows three popular themes largely preoccupying Azerbaijani painters in the period between the thaw of 1960s up until the perestroika at the end of 1980s. Labour, Leisure and Dreams suggests an existence structured by the Soviet realities, yet deconstructed, repurposed and re-imagined through art. It proposes a new vantage point to view, analyse and appreciate the masters of the Golden Period in Azerbaijani painting of the 20th century. It is an invitation to momentarily enter the world that they inhabited and to envision the ideas and fantasies that moved them. Curator: Suad Garayeva-Maleki Research: Farah Alakbarli Location: Museum of Azerbaijani Painting of the XX-XXI Centuries Bayil District / National Flag Square, Baku, Azerbaijan Dates: 26 May 6 January 2018 Exhibition open: Tuesday through Sunday, from 11:00 until 20:00. Admission is free About YARAT YARAT is an artist-founded, not-for-profit art organisation based in Baku, Azerbaijan, established by Aida Mahmudova in 2011. YARAT (which means 'create' in Azerbaijani) is dedicated to contemporary art with a long-term commitment to creating a hub for artistic practice, research, thinking and education in the Caucasus, Central Asia and surrounding region. YARAT comprises YARAT Art Centre, ARTIM Project Space, YARAT Studios, YAY Gallery and an extended educational and public programme. YARAT Art Centre, a 2000m converted Soviet-era naval building, opened in March 2015 and is the organisation's main exhibition space. The exhibition programme features new commissions by artists responding to the region. It supports and provides access to artists from the region, while engaging and introducing established, international artists. In October 2015, YARAT opened ARTIM, a central, accessible and dynamic space in Baku's Old City. ARTIM (meaning 'progress' in Azerbaijani) shows experimental practices and new work by emerging Azeri art professionals (selected through open call) and the international artists from the residency programme. It features multiple small-scale projects each year and hosts ARTIM LAB, a programme enabling young artists to engage in workshops and daily studio practice to generate new ideas and works. In 2016 YARAT launched a renewed residency programme. Aimed at developing young Azerbaijani voices and emerging international artists, the focus is on new, innovative practices and artists with an interest in the region. The residency programme hosts 6 international and 4 local artists a year at YARAT Studios spaces. Education has been at the heart of YARAT's activities since its creation. With a dedicated public programme that includes courses, workshops, lectures, screenings, festivals, literature and theatre clubs and family weekends, YARAT aims to give access to broad audiences of all ages. The public programme invests proactively in building communities and nurturing a wider understanding of, and participation in, contemporary art. About the Museum of Azerbaijani Painting of the XX-XXI Centuries Situated on the National Flag Square the Museum of XX-XXI Century Azerbaijani Painting was founded by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation. The Museum was inaugurated in June 2015 by the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev and the First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva. It presents works by both prominent and lesser-known Azerbaijani painters from State Collections, such as the National Picture Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art. From 2018 onwards YARAT was commissioned to present a series of exhibitions with the works from the collection and to organize a public programme of events running throughout the year. --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Rashid Shirinov Armenian Armed Forces shooting at a combine harvester and its driver, who was carrying out agricultural work in the sowing area, from the positions located in the direction of the occupied Gorgan village of Azerbaijans Fuzuli region, once again shows the inadmissibility of maintaining the status quo in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Spokesman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Hikmat Hajiyev told Trend on May 29. He noted that Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry strongly condemns this attack and regards it as another provocation by Armenia. It is very easy to spot a combine harvester, working in the field, because of its size and appearance, Hajiyev said. However, it is obvious that the goal of the Armenian Armed Forces is to attack these civilian objects. The spokesman added that Armenia deliberately targets civilians, including young children, and civilian facilities, and this is of systematic nature. This latest incident once again shows that the status quo, based on the continuation of the illegal presence of the Armenian Armed Forces in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan and the occupation of Azerbaijani territories, is inadmissible and continues to be a serious threat to regional peace and security, Hajiyev said. He added that to change the status quo, Armenia must withdraw its troops from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan. Armenia broke out a lengthy war against Azerbaijan by laying territorial claims on the country. Since a war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities. To this day, Armenia has not implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding regions. --- Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Azay Guliyev, chairman of the Council on State Support to Non-Governmental Organizations under the Auspices of the President of Azerbaijan, will pay a visit to Slovenia on May 30, the Council said in a message May 29. As part of the visit, Guliyev will attend the opening ceremony of the commemorative plaque dedicated to the Khojaly genocide on the territory of the Dobrava Memorial Park complex in Maribor city. The plaque was prepared with the financial support of the Council. The ceremony will be held on May 31 and is organized with the direct support of the Azerbaijani embassies in Austria and Slovenia. The president of Slovenia and chairman of the Upper House of the Slovenian Parliament are expected to take part in the ceremony along with other officials and public representatives. The visit will end June 1. 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. On Feb. 25-26, 1992, the Armenian armed forces, together with the 366th infantry regiment of Soviet troops, stationed in Khankendi, committed an act of genocide against the population of the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly. As many as 613 people, including 63 children, 106 women and 70 old people were killed in the massacre. Eight families were totally exterminated, 130 children lost one parent and 25 children lost both. Some 1,275 innocent residents were taken hostage, while the fate of 150 people still remains unknown. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend The UK will further expand cooperation with Azerbaijan in a number of priority projects in both energy and non-energy sectors, UK Prime Ministers Trade Envoy Baroness Emma Nicholson told reporters in Baku on May 29. Nicholson stressed that today she had the honor to read a letter from British Prime Minister Theresa May addressed to President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, in which she congratulated the government and the people of Azerbaijan on the launch of the Southern Gas Corridor. The UK values cooperation with Azerbaijan and is ready to expand participation in large-scale projects in Azerbaijan, Nicholson said. She further noted that presently 500 British companies operate in Azerbaijan. Nicholson stressed that the UK is ready to support Azerbaijan in diversifying the economy, which is an important factor in the country's development. The future plans for developing cooperation include projects in such areas as education, healthcare, agriculture and others, Nicholson added. She also reminded that the British Embassy supported Azerbaijan in organization of the Formula 1 and is ready to continue supporting the country in organizing similar projects. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Rashid Shirinov The Mexican Petroleum Institute intends to establish exchange of experience and technologies with oil companies operating in Azerbaijan, General Director of the Institute Ernesto Rios Patron said at a press conference in Baku on May 29. In general, Azerbaijan and Mexico have ample opportunities for expanding cooperation in the oil and gas sector. In particular, we intend to study Azerbaijans experience in the development of the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli block of fields, and, to this end, we will meet with BP representatives on May 30, he said. Patron added that meetings with Total and SOCAR oil and gas companies are also planned, and the possibilities of mutual investment may also be discussed there. He further noted the importance of the Southern Gas Corridor project: This is a major project, which is very competently implemented, both economically and technically. It provides opportunities for establishing direct energy supplies from Asia to Europe. The Southern Gas Corridor is one of the priority energy projects for the European Union, which aims to diversify routes and sources of energy supplies and thereby improve the energy security of the EU. The official opening ceremony of the Southern Gas Corridor was held in Sangachal terminal in Baku May 29. The cost of the project is over $40 billion. Gas as part of the Shah Deniz 2 field development will be exported to Turkey and the European markets through the expansion of the South Caucasus gas pipeline and the construction of the TANAP and TAP gas pipelines. --- Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Rashid Shirinov Companies from the Bashkortostan Republic of Russia may establish production of oil equipment and caustic soda in Azerbaijan. This issue was discussed at the meeting of the republics delegation members with the Deputy Economy Minister of Azerbaijan Niyazi Safarov. The delegation headed by Deputy Prime Minister Farhad Samedov is in Baku to participate in the 25th International Caspian Oil & Gas Exhibition. During the meeting, the parties stressed the need for pharmaceutical and chemical products in Azerbaijan. Samedov noted that Bashkortostan has a strong production and scientific potential in petrochemistry and pharmaceuticals. The delegation also discussed the prospects of energy cooperation with the Energy Minister of Azerbaijan Parviz Shahbazov. He noted that Azerbaijan is interested in energy equipment produced in Bashkortostan and technological innovations in petrochemistry. The volume of trade between Azerbaijan and Bashkortostan amounted to about $18 million in 2017. Bashkortostan supplies Azerbaijan with wood and chemical products, equipment for oil and gas industry, ferrous metals and their products, as well as glass, agricultural and food products. Azerbaijan, in turn, exports agricultural products, food and other goods to Bashkortostan. Currently, there are six enterprises with Azerbaijani capital in the sphere of agriculture, hotel business, catering, construction and trade operating in Bashkortostan. --- Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Sara Israfilbayova Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR has turned into a global transnational corporation that has become competitive in foreign markets. President of the company Rovnag Abdullayev made the remarks at the 25th International Caspian Oil & Gas Exhibition and Conference in Baku on May 30. He noted that the signing of the contract for the development of the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) block of fields in 1994 became the main milestone that preceded these achievements of SOCAR. Since the beginning of the ACG development, Azerbaijan has received a net profit of more than $132 billion, from which it produced 446 million tons of oil, 91 billion cubic meters of gas and 23 million tons of condensate were extracted from another large Azerbaijani Shah Deniz field, Abdullayev said. The President of the State Company also spoke about the importance of launching the Southern Gas Corridor to strengthen the position of SOCAR. Phase 0 of the TANAP gas pipeline will be launched in June, and Phase 1 will be ready by the end of 2019. Europe is the most promising gas market, and in 2020, with the launch of the TAP gas pipeline, Azerbaijani gas will reach this market, Abdullayev said. During the event the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC) and SOCAR agreed to conduct joint seismic and geological research on prospective oil and gas blocks in Azerbaijan. The memorandum was signed by SOCAR President Rovnag Abdullayev and JOGMEC President Tetsuhiro Hosono. Japan expects to receive preferential rights for exploration in Azerbaijan, according to the memorandum. The document also provides for joint development of technologies. Moreover, SOCAR and the Norwegian Equinor will sign two agreements as part of Conference, which envisage a 50/50 share distribution. In particular, a risk-service agreement on the Karabakh field and a production sharing and exploration agreement on the Dan Ulduzu, Ashrafi and Aypara promising structures will be signed. The contract for developing Ashrafi Dan Ulduzu block of structures, signed in 1997 between SOCAR (20 percent), BP (30 percent), Unocal (25.5 percent), Itochu (20 percent) and Delta HESS (4.5 percent), lost validity on March 7, 2000. Hydrocarbon reserves in the amount of 20-40 million tons were discovered at the Ashrafi field. Initial oil reserves of the Karabakh oil and gas field, discovered in 2000, amount to 100 million tons. SOCAR operates Karabakh fields development. SOCAR is a wholly state-owned national oil company headquartered in Baku, Azerbaijan. The company produces oil and natural gas from onshore and offshore fields in the Azerbaijani section of the Caspian Sea. SOCAR includes three production associations, one oil refining and gas processing enterprise, an oil flotilla, a deep-water base plant, two trusts, one institute, and 23 structures. SOCAR established joint companies (including Georgia and Turkey), alliances, operating in various sectors of oil and gas spheres. SOCAR has representative offices in Georgia, the U.S., Turkey, Romania, Austria, Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Great Britain, Iran, Germany, Ukraine, Belgium and Canada. In total, in 2017 38.69 million tons of oil was produced in Azerbaijan, 7.42 million tons of which accounts for SOCAR. --- Sara Israfilbayova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Sara_999Is Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas says Berlin is prepared to help Iran improve its economy and business ties while Tehran remains committed to a landmark nuclear agreement it signed with major powers in 2015, Press TV reported. "We will continue to make efforts to fulfill Iran's hopes for economic recovery and good trade relations as long as Iran is ready and able to prove that it adheres to its obligations under the nuclear deal," Maas said on Tuesday. He was speaking at the Global Solutions Summit in Berlin three weeks after the United States pulled out from the landmark nuclear accord, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). US President Donald Trump announced on May 8 that Washington was walking away from the nuclear agreement, which was reached between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the US, Britain, France, Russia and China - plus Germany. Trump also said he would reinstate US nuclear sanctions on Iran and impose "the highest level" of economic bans on the Islamic Republic. Since the US president pulled Washington out of the historic nuclear deal, other signatories, including Germany, have been scrambling to ensure that Iran gets enough economic benefits to persuade it to stay in the deal. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Third edition of a conference on measures to ensure and improve the Caspian Seas safety ended its work on May 29 in the Iranian capital city of Tehran. Representatives from Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan attended the two-day conference, Trend's correspondent reported from the event. Maritime safety, promoting interaction mechanisms on inspection and rescue affairs and taking advantage of legal capacities were among the topics discussed at the event. At the conference, the sides agreed on a draft document submitted by Tehran as a basis to discuss and prepare regulations for maritime safety in the Caspian Sea. The parties also agreed to establish specialized expert working groups in their countries to study the issues and share the results with other littoral countries in the next edition of the conference. It was also agreed that two working groups be formed to simultaneously work on controlling and inspecting ships and studying the international standards and conventions. The sides expressed hope that a memorandum of understanding would be signed soon on safety regulations for vessels in the Caspian Sea. The fourth round of the conference is scheduled to be held in early August in Tehran. Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan participated in the second round of the conference in 2017 in Turkmenistan. The largest inland body of water, the Caspian Sea is shared between five countries: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Russia and Iran. The ancient inhabitants of its coast believed the Caspian Sea was an ocean, presumably due to its saltwater and vastness. Apart from its rich resources of oil and gas and significant diversity of aquatic animals, it provides Iran with a perfect opportunity to increase its revenue through expanding maritime tourism industry on its coasts - a prospect that has not been fully explored so far. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Turkmenistan's extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador to Morocco Ishanguly Amanlyev has handed a letter of credence to Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the Kingdom of Morocco Mohammed Ali Lazreq, the Turkmen Foreign Ministry said in a message May 29. The diplomat is also leading the diplomatic mission in Turkey. In a letter to President Berdimuhamedov, in October 2017, King of Morocco Mohammed VI expressed confidence that the existing relations of brotherhood and mutual respect between Morocco and Turkmenistan will continue to strengthen and develop on the basis of mutually beneficial cooperation in the interests of the two peoples. Stressing the important role of cooperation with African states earlier, the Turkmen Foreign Ministry expressed its commitment to development of relations with the African Union. The African Union, established on July 9, 2002, is an international intergovernmental organization uniting 55 African states. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Kamila Aliyeva Russian company Gazprom and Uzbekneftegaz signed an additional agreement No. 2 to the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) on the development of the Shakhpakhty field. The document provides for the continuation of gas production until 2024, according to the press service of the Russian company. Shakhpakhty is a gas condensate field discovered in 1962 in the southeastern part of the Ustyurt plateau in Uzbekistan. Within the framework of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum - 2018, a working meeting between Alexey Miller, Chairman of the Management Committee of Gazprom, and Alisher Sultanov, the Uzbek Deputy Prime Minister, Chairman of the Board of JSC Uzbekneftegaz was held. The parties noted the positive dynamics of development of cooperation in the gas sector. They discussed the current status of joint work and further plans in the field of geological exploration and production of hydrocarbons in the territory of Uzbekistan. In this regard, in particular, the additional agreement No. 2 to the PSA on the development of the Shakhpakhty field was discussed. During the meeting, attention was also paid to the topics of cooperation in the development of Uzbekistan's gas transportation infrastructure, underground gas storage in the country, scientific and technical cooperation, as well as training and retraining of personnel. In 2017, the volume of purchase of natural gas in Uzbekistan by Gazprom amounted to 5.5 billion cubic meters. The main partner of Gazprom in Uzbekistan is Uzbekneftegaz, which is engaged in the exploration, production, processing, transportation, storage and sale of oil and gas. In 2006, Gazprom and Uzbekneftegaz signed an agreement on the basic principles of geological exploration of the subsoil of investment blocks in the Ustyurt region. In 2017, an Agreement on Strategic Cooperation was signed between Gazprom and Uzbekneftegaz. --- Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Kamila Aliyeva About 82 percent of financing approved by international development banks in the first quarter of this year for Tajikistan falls on the Asian Development Bank (ADB). In Tajikistan, the bulk of investments are accounted for the ADBs $90 million loan in the transport sector, according to the international development banks investment review for the first quarter of 2018 published by the Eurasian Development Bank. It is noted that a grant of $90 million is sent for the rehabilitation of a 40-kilometer section of the road linking the capital of Dushanbe and the city of Bokhtar (Kurgan-Tyube) in Khatlon region. In addition, the review highlights that in the first quarter ADB approved technical assistance to Tajikistan in the amount of $700,000 to improve the comprehensive care for maternal and child health. Moreover, the World Bank approved funding for two projects totaling $18.37 million in Tajikistan. In particular, $16.57 million are allocated for the implementation of the Zarafshan irrigation rehabilitation and management project, and $1.8 million for the project to strengthen the network that provides social security in the country. The review also noted the investments of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) approved in the first quarter of this year in the amount of $2 million to finance the working capital needs of Tagero Ltd (a trading company specializing in the import and distribution of food and household chemicals). ADB is the main international donor of Tajikistan. ADB is celebrating 20 years of development partnership with Tajikistan in 2018. To date, ADB has approved around $1.6 billion in concessional loans, grants, and technical assistance to the country. ADB and Tajikistans development partnership, which began in 1998, has restored and built the countrys new transport and energy infrastructure, supported social development, expanded agricultural production, and improved regional cooperation and trade. ADB, based in Manila, is dedicated to reducing poverty in Asia and the Pacific through inclusive economic growth, environmentally sustainable growth, and regional integration. Established in 1966, it is owned by 67 members, with 48 being from the region. In 2017, ADB operations totaled $32.2 billion, including $11.9 billion in co-financing. --- Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz Trippy Tidbits of N. Oregon Coast History You Didn't Know Published 05/30/2018 at 5:35 AM PDT By Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff (Seaside, Oregon) The darnedest things can be revealed by the tiniest details. In the case of the north Oregon coast resort town of Seaside, thats bound to be the case. Its been a tourist hotspot since the 1880s. Three funky finds in the town are a particularly delightful, if not quirky, trip back in time. The first: Head down to the Prom where it meets Lewis and Clark Way (and the Saltworks memorial site), and you may find something a little head-scratching (above). The Prom itself has opened up to a pleasant stroll past grassy, shrubbery-filled areas and little groves between the concrete and the dunes, and there are various pathways darting off towards the beach. Some are paved. Some are not. One of those, right near the Lewis and Clark historical marker, simply dead-ends in an odd way. Theres a narrow paved path, a small circle at the end of it, and thats it. Plus, even more eye-catching if you bother to notice there are hints of a stone wall here. Something was here. But what was it? It looks as if there was once a home here, and this mightve been its doorway. In a spot like this one on the north Oregon coast, where history weaves in and out of half of what you see, this one has gotten history buffs intrigued. If it looks like the ruins of something, it is. And it was the product of an overreach by a homeowner decades ago. According to City of Seasides Dale McDowell, its the remnants of someones patio area they built where they shouldn't have. They constructed the sidewalk and retaining wall as a patio area to sit in the sun, McDowell said. The original property was surrounded by Shore Pines, giving the house considerable shade. At the time the patio was built, permits were not issued. Currently, this would not be allowed by ordinance. Essentially, it was built on this public land without permission, by the owners of a home that existed directly across from it. That original home is no longer there, but it was constructed in 1928. Exactly when the sidewalk and patio were created is unknown. McDowell also said he had no access to information about what happened to that original house. A quirky mystery solved. Another surprising bit of north Oregon coast history exists around this area as well, although there are no remnants of it. Local historian Nate Burke has uncovered another remnant of the town that no one knows about: there used to be a big fishing pier here. It was called a cantilever fishing pier because of the way it was anchored to the ground but had cables that allowed it some movement with the tides. Burke said it was located somewhere near the pavement curiosity, but a bit closer to the Cove. Keep in mind, this was the 1920s, and Seasides beach was not quite the same as it is now. Certainly the Cove was very different: over 1000 feet of the very southern section of town did not exist until 1987, when a landslide create yards of extra beach. So this fishing pier served its purpose for a short period. A very short period. There used to be an old cantilever fishing pier down by the south end of town right before the cove started, Burke said. Burke said if the photo makes it look like a recipe for disaster thats because it was. Apparently there was a traditional fishing pier out there in the 20s, Burke said. It lasted a few years, but got pounded into sand during the winter. A short time later, this second attempt was made using this cantilever pier approach where the majority of the load bearing was on the cables that were affixed to a point on land (thereby avoiding the need for pilings set further out in the larger surf). Burke did a bit of research and discovered just how short-lived this wacky contraption was. What I found was this cantilever pier didnt even last a full year, Burke said. It looked like this cantilever pier was constructed in spring of 1930 - and was promptly destroyed by surf in late Winter 1931. Another quaint of example of history in Seaside you dont know is the Hillcrest Inn and Hillcrest House. Manager Ruth Swensen said one part of the building goes back to 1931, while another part all the way back to 1921. Part of this lodging biz is the Hillcrest House, a vacation rental with a major historic vibe. And for good reason. It was built in 21 by a Colonel Dunne, who was a merchant marine stationed in Astoria. Later, the family sold it and it became a boarding house with the different rooms being rented out. Somewhere down the line it became a vacation rental, somewhere after when the biz first began operating as a motel. Parts of the motel were built in 1931: a series of eight cottages. In 1989, two were torn down to make motel rooms, and a year later two were razed to add to the motel. That still leaves four cottages, which retain that old Oregon coast vibe. Its become a tradition with numerous families. We have a family staying with us thats been doing that since at least the 50s, Swensen said. Every August for a week. The great grandma is in her 90s now, but she was four years old when they first started coming. Its the very same week, every year. I just think thats the coolest thing. 118 North Columbia. Seaside, Oregon. (503) 738-6273. www.seasidehillcrest.com -------- Lodging in Astoria/Seaside - Where to eat - Map and Virtual Tour More About Oregon Coast hotels, lodging..... More About Oregon Coast Restaurants, Dining..... Coastal Spotlight LATEST Related Oregon Coast Articles Back to Oregon Coast Contact Advertise on BeachConnection.net All Content, unless otherwise attributed, copyright BeachConnection.net Unauthorized use or publication is not permitted (Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said he wishes hed never made Jeff Sessions his attorney general because the former Republican senator recused himself from the probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Trump endorsed remarks Wednesday by House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy about Sessions even as he ignored Gowdys strong dismissal of the presidents claim that the FBI planted a spy in his campaign. In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Trump approvingly quoted Gowdys television appearance criticizing Sessions for removing himself from oversight of the probe thats now being run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. He said Trump had many other options for the nations top law enforcement officer. There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else! Gowdy said. Citing the lawmakers comments in a Twitter posting, Trump added: And I wish I did! Rejecting Spygate In the same TV interview, however, Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, defended the Justice Department and FBI. When the FBI comes into contact with information about what a foreign government may be doing in our election cycle, I think they have an obligation to run it out, Gowdy, a member of the House Intelligence panel, said on CBS This Morning. I think the FBI, if they were at the table this morning, would tell you Russia was the target and the fact that two people loosely connected with the Trump campaign may have been involved doesnt diminish that Russia was the target and not the campaign. Asked why Trump persists with his Spygate claim, Gowdy -- whos not running for re-election for his South Carolina seat and has made a point of keeping his distance from the White House on the Russia probe -- said, Ive never met or talked to the president. On Sessions, Trump has expressed similar sentiments before, but the attorney general hasnt taken the hint to step down. A political firestorm would erupt of Trump fired Sessions or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whos supervising the Russia probe, in an effort to remove or rein in Mueller. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Trump asked Sessions in March 2017 to reverse the decision to recuse himself and that Mueller is investigating the request as part of his inquiry into whether Trump sought to obstruct the Russia probe. --With assistance from Shannon Pettypiece. To contact the reporter on this story: Terrence Dopp in Washington at tdopp@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Derek Wallbank at dwallbank@bloomberg.net, ;Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert 2018 Bloomberg L.P. WASHINGTON At a West Virginia rally on tax cuts, President Donald Trump veered off on a subject that likely puzzled most of his audience. Nine of your people just came up to me outside. Could you talk about 202? he said. Well be looking at that 202. You know what a 202 is? Were trying. One person who undoubtedly knew what Trump was talking about last month was Jeff Miller, an energy lobbyist with whom the president had dined the night before. Miller had been hired by FirstEnergy Solutions, a bankrupt power company that relies on coal and nuclear energy to produce electricity. His assignment: push the Trump administration to use a so-called 202 order named for a provision of the Federal Power Act to secure a bailout worth billions of dollars. Although Trump didnt agree to the plan he still hasnt for Miller, a presidents public declaration of interest amounted to a job well done. How a single lobbyist helped carry a long-shot idea from obscurity to the presidential stage is a twisty journey through the new swamp of Trumps Washington. Rather than clearing out the lobbyists and campaign donors that spend big money to sway politicians, Trump and his advisers paved the way for a new cast of powerbrokers who have quickly embraced familiar ways to wield influence. Miller is among them. A well-connected GOP fundraiser, he served in the past as an adviser to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, also a close friend. He ran Perrys unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2016. And when Trump tapped Perry to lead the Energy Department, Miller shepherded his friend through confirmation, sitting behind him, next to the nominees wife, at the Senate hearing. When Perry came to Washington, Miller did, too. He launched his firm, Miller Strategies, early last year and began lobbying his friend and other Washington officials. Besides Perry, Miller is close to other Trump-era power players. He is among House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthys best friends, their relationship dating back decades to Millers days in California. In more recent years, Miller developed a friendship with Vice President Mike Pence adviser Marty Obst. Obst says the two began working closely together when Perry and Pence held leadership roles at the Republican Governors Association several years ago. Hes very influential in Washington, a leading fundraiser, Obst said of Miller in a brief interview. Now, after 14 months in business, the 43-year-old has collected more than $3.2 million from a roster of clients that includes several of the nations largest energy companies, among them Southern Co., a nuclear power plant operator headquartered in Atlanta, and Texas-based Valero Energy, according to federal filings. Miller also has continued to raise money for GOP politicians. He contributed nearly $37,000 of his own over the past year to Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Greg Pence of Indiana, whos seeking the congressional seat once held by his younger brother, the vice president, according to federal campaign records. He is an active supporter of America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC that raised $4.7 million in the first three months of 2018. That work earned him a spot at dinner with Trump, McCarthy and other GOP donors in the upscale City Center complex blocks from the White House. What happened to draining the political swamp? asks Dick Munson with the Environmental Defense Fund, who said he sees FirstEnergy and other coal operators grasping for bailouts to solve problems of their own making. It seems when you dont have solid arguments, you hire well-paid lobbyists and make huge political contributions. Miller declined to comment for this story. Brian Walsh, president of America First Action, said Miller raises money for the group on a volunteer basis. Miller, who lives in Texas, spent years outside of Washington independently developing an amazing network of connections, Walsh said. He described Miller as a straight shooter and rejected the notion that he is cashing in on Trumps election and Perrys ascension to energy chief. He doesnt play games with people, Walsh said of Miller. But Tim Judson, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an activist group, called Millers involvement in the bailout request the ultimate Washington swamp situation. We have a special-interest appeal by FirstEnergy, a top lobbyist dining with the president, and that same lobbyist is raising money for a pro-Trump super PAC and asking for emergency action from someone whose presidential campaign he ran, Judson said. Miller registered as a lobbyist in Washington in February 2017, just after Trump took office. He was hired by FirstEnergy in July 2017. Lobbying disclosure records show he was paid to target the highest levels of American government: the White House to include the offices of Trump and Pence and Perrys Energy Department. Miller has earned $330,000 from FirstEnergy since last year, making him one of the companys highest-paid outside lobbyists. The coal industrys top priority at the time was seizing on the campaign promises Trump had made he pledged repeatedly to bring back coal jobs to ask for unprecedented federal assistance. Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp., the nations largest privately owned coal-mining company, and its largest customer, FirstEnergy, pushed the Energy Department for an emergency order, a measure typically reserved for war or natural disasters. Among other measures, the intervention would have exempted power plants from obeying a host of environmental laws and would have spent billions to keep coal-fired plants open, an unprecedented federal intervention in the nations energy markets. CEO Robert Murray and Charles Jones, CEO of FirstEnergys parent company, met with Trump in West Virginia to discuss the request, informing the president that the power company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Despite the high-powered lobbying, Perry rejected the request in August, saying the emergency order wasnt the right mechanism. He offered another option, asking federal energy regulators to approve a plan that would reward nuclear and coal-fired power plants for adding reliability to the nations power grid. But the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected the plan in January, saying theres no evidence that past or planned retirements of coal-fired power plants pose a threat to grid reliability. Soon after, FirstEnergy began pushing anew for the 202. Miller has visited the Energy Department at least twice since June, including on the day Trump delivered a speech on his energy agenda at the agencys Washington headquarters. The company argues the emergency order is needed to prevent premature retirement of coal and nuclear plants that cannot operate profitably under current market conditions. The proposal would allocate money to subsidize the company and other coal operators an outcome the company says would avert thousands of layoffs and help ensure reliability of the electric grid up and down the East Coast. The Ohio-based company filed for bankruptcy in late March, days after announcing it would shut down three nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania within three years. The announcement followed the planned closure of a West Virginia coal-fired plant, one of a series of closings as the coal and nuclear industries struggle to compete with electricity plants that burn natural gas. FirstEnergys bid for the emergency request is widely opposed by business and environmental groups as an unfair tipping of the scales in favor of faltering energy sources. An independent wholesaler that oversees the power grid in 13 states and the District of Columbia has said the Eastern grid is in no immediate danger. FirstEnergy can shut down its three nuclear power plants within three years without destabilizing the power grid, according to a report last month from the wholesaler, PJM Interconnection. Still, the push for a bailout continues. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., recently suggested that Perry consider using a Korean War-era defense law to prevent the retirement of ailing coal and nuclear units. The Defense Production Act of 1950 is intended to prioritize industries deemed vital to national security. President Harry Truman used the law to cap wages and impose price controls on the steel industry. FirstEnergy said it supports the premise, although it says it has not specifically urged Perry to use the defense law. Perry said the administration is looking at the defense law very closely, one of several options being considered. Grab your water shoes and coolers. The Comal River is now open! The river, which runs through New Braunfels, reopened May 2 for all recreation activities, according to the New Braunfels Police Department's Facebook page. If you've floated the river before, you know that you will bump into a wild range of characters. But who are these people, these "river rats?" Some are allies with useful abilities while others are sinister and should be treated with caution, but all are part of a balanced social ecosystem that make up the river experience. Below are the 10 types of tubers you find on Texas waterways. The sleeper: These people fall into two categories: those who are in such dire need for rest and relaxation that they recline as soon as they get into their tube (or river chair), and those who are too drunk and sunburned to move any of their limbs. TOM REEL/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS The busy-body: They jump off the banks, swing on ropes, climb trees and generally try to be as physically active as possible doing an activity that is based off of doing as little as possible. TOM REEL/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS The high and dry: They love the idea of tubing and everything that comes with it drinking, smoking, partying but aren't very big fans of the water, so they stay on the land. TOM REEL/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS The party animal: They are here to drink and do other mind altering things and don't care about anything else they may even end up sleeping in someone else's tent. It doesn't matter if they have a tube or not, and they don't even care if they lose their wallet, sunglasses or other possessions, as long as there is alcohol. Nicole Fruge/San Antonio Express-News The keeper of the cooler: The keeper needs to be responsible, so this isn't the job for a party animal because they may drink it all and lose everything tied to it. The keeper tends to keep a slower pace and is basically the deciding factor in managing your group's pace. Eric Gay/Associated Press The recruiter: With "the more the merrier" as their mission statement, this person goes to the river with a big group and then continually tries to get more people to join the party. A well-seasoned recruiter will only target groups with lots of river resources beer, food, etc. while a recruiter with poor judgement will attract groups that will leech off of your supplies. TOM REEL/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS The moocher: They brought a tube and nothing else. And they did it on purpose so they could mooch sun lotion, beer, food and anything else off everyone on the river. TOM REEL/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS The DJ: While it's great to get out and get away from technology and TV, who doesn't love some tunes to keep the party going? The DJ takes this river responsibility seriously and will take requests for a beer. The sinker: He or she can't swim and thought they would be just fine as long as they stay in their tube. But sooner or later, that person ends up falling in and making a big scene. LISA KRANTZ/Lisa Krantz/Express-News The survivalist: They came overly prepared with a fisherman's hat, dry-bags, water shoes, Croakies, loads of sunscreen, a first aid kit and an iron to navigate tough terrain. Authorities have identified a man whom they say has been stripping down and walking around naked inside stores across north Houston as a registered sex offender. Police said they are asking for the public's help in locating the suspect, 57-year-old Steven Dale Brazeal of Tulsa, Okla. Lt. Scott Spencer of the Montgomery County Sheriffs Office told the Woodlands Villager on Wednesday that Brazeal was arrested in Oklahoma for failure to register as a sex offender on May 23, but was released on $10,000 bond. WANTED: Houston arrest warrant issued for World Series streaker Montgomery County authorities, including from the sheriffs office and the Oak Ridge North and Shenandoah police departments, are working with the Tulsa Police Department to find Brazeal so he can be brought to Texas. Three warrants have been issued for his arrest, according to a news release from the Montgomery County Sheriffs Office. In 2009, Brazeal was convicted of two counts of indecent exposure in Oklahoma. In Texas, Brazeal is accused of going into multiple stores between May 15 and May 17 in both Montgomery County and north Harris County, stripping naked and walking past patrons before putting his clothes back on and driving off in his truck, Spencer said. Oak Ridge North Police Chief Andrew Walters said the man is suspected of walking in to two other stores in north Harris County, including the Kirklands in Spring and a Cilantros Mexican Restaurant inside a shopping center on Rayford Road. Both incidents took place May 16, Walters added. Detective Brandon Rogers of the Oak Ridge North police said Brazeal is also suspected of walking around nude at a Posh Salons on Sawdust Road in south Montgomery County, inside an Ann Taylor store in north Harris County, and inside a Pier 1 Imports in Conroe off Interstate-45 North. Spencer said the effort of law enforcement officials working across jurisdictional lines made it possible for authorities to identify Brazeal so quickly. Brazeal is wanted through the Montgomery County Sheriffs Office, Shenandoah Police Department and Oak Ridge Police Department on indecent exposure. Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Steven Dale Brazeal is asked to contact the Montgomery County Sheriffs Office at 936-760-5800 or the Tulsa Oklahoma Police Department at 918-596-9328. A Louisiana man is accused of shooting a Port Arthur man at an apartment complex in September, according to an affidavit from PAPD. Abraham Emanuel Washington, 29, of Rayne, Louisiana, was indicted on a first degree felony charge of murder Wednesday. Screws recovered from an explosive device that detonated at a Beaumont church earlier this month were bought at Home Depot the same store where authorities on Tuesday said suspected bomber Jonathan Matthew Torres worked. Torres, who was arrested last week on federal criminal charges, made his first court appearance on Tuesday. He is charged with use of an explosive to damage property, mailing a threatening communication and possession of an unregistered destructive device. During Tuesday's hearing, Torres said he worked part-time at the Home Depot store on Eastex Freeway and received money through the GI Bill. Based on his income level, Magistrate Judge Zack Hawthorn decided Torres was eligible for court-appointed counsel. Torres will be represented by Beaumont-based attorney Ryan Gertz, according to Hawthorn. Gertz has led the defense on a number of recent high-profile cases, including last week's sentencing of Walter Diggles, a Jasper pastor and former executive director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments convicted in August 2017 of taking more than $1 million of hurricane relief money. A bail hearing is scheduled for 2 p.m. Thursday for Torres, who has been held on no bond since his arrest last week. If convicted at trial, he faces 5 to 20 years in federal prison. Authorities executed a search warrant last Thursday at Torres' home in the 4400 block of El Paso Street in Beaumont. Torres, a divorced military veteran, said Tuesday that he lived with and took care of a mentally ill family friend. While searching Torres' home, federal agents found "multiple containers of the same type of explosive material" used in devices left at the Dowlen Road Starbucks on April 26 and St. Stephen's Episcopal Church May 10, according to the affidavit for Torres' arrest. "Based on what we found inside the suspect's home, this suspect had the resources and the ability to continue building these devices and the incidents were increasing in their destructive impact," U.S. Attorney Joseph Brown said during a news conference on Friday. Torres sent four threatening notes to the Beaumont Police Department, including immediately following the discovery of the two explosive devices, according to the affidavit. On April 27, one day after an explosive device was discovered outside Starbucks, BPD received a note, stating, "DO YOU WANT BMT TO BECOME ANOTHER AUSTIN," signed "J HANCOCK." A second note was sent to BPD after officers discovered an explosive device had detonated overnight at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, the arrest affidavit said. "There's many different indicators when someone becomes disenfranchised with society before they mobilize toward some type of violence," FBI Agent Ed Michel said last week. "At this time, we don't know what the specific indicators were, what his intents were." The package left at Starbucks, which did not detonate, contained explosive material, a mouse trap and a note written in peel-and-stick letters that read, "HAJI DIE USA - JH," according to the affidavit. Remnants of the device that detonated at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, which broke one window and caused minor exterior damage when it exploded, included a mousetrap and small nails and screws. That led authorities to believe the two devices were connected, the affidavit said. On May 11, BPD received a postcard with a DC Comics image of "V for Vendetta," asking "WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME? JH." Police received a third postcard three days later with an image of the "Creature from the Black Lagoon." The postcard read, "There were two others Did you not get them? JH." Another postcard mailed on May 17 quoted a BPD news release that stated, "'None of these have been deemed a credible threat' JH" and pictured "The Atom" from DC Comics. While searching Torres' house last week, authorities said they found postal boxes, zip ties and packing tape similar to the type used in the device found at Starbucks, and a receipt for the type of string used in the device. psuy@beaumontenterprise.com DALLAS Beefing up armed security, expanding the program allowing armed teachers and enhancing mental health services are among the options Gov. Greg Abbott offered to schools Wednesday in his effort to make Texas schools safer amid a rash of mass shootings. Abbott's plan also includes a gun lock giveaway, a social media strategy to encourage people to safeguard firearms, a new school safety app and an expanded program to help identify and remove dangerous students. The FBI issued a warning May 25 that Russian hackers infected hundreds of thousands of home and office routers with malware, which could collect user information or shut down network access, according to Reuters. The agency is urging owners of several brands of routers to mitigate the threat by powering them off and turning them on again, as well as downloading manufacturer updates. The warning followed a court order in which the FBI seized a website that hackers planned to use to provide instructions for the hack. Although malicious communication was disabled, a number of routers were left infected. The Justice Department, which obtained the court order, said the hackers were part of a group called Sofacy, which goes by several monikers including Fancy Bear and has been tied to the Russian government. An FBI official said affected devices were likely purchased at electronic stores or online, though it is not ruling out routers provided by internet service companies. Cisco Systems said the hacking campaign likely targeted devices from Belkin International's Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear Inc, TP-Link and QNAP, according to Reuters. The FBI is also encouraging people to consider disabling remote-management settings, changing passwords and upgrading to the latest firmware. More articles on cybersecurity: HITRUST releases certification program for NIST cybersecurity framework 1 in 3 healthcare organizations have suffered a cyberattack, 1 in 10 paid ransom: 6 things to know UK hospital fires employee for viewing Ed Sheeran's patient information Four of the top vendors hospitals use to participate in the Medicare EHR Incentive Program are Allscripts, Cerner, Epic and Meditech, according to July 2017 ONC data. Here are 16 hospitals and health systems that posted job listings during the past two weeks seeking EHR and IT expertise: Editor's note: This is not an exhaustive list. Job listings were compiled from job seeker websites. Allscripts 1. Ellis Hospital (Schenectady, N.Y.): Seeks a clinical application analyst 2. Ellis Hospital (Schenectady, N.Y.): Seeks a clinical informatics analyst 3. Saline Memorial Hospital (Benton, Ark.): Seeks a clinical analyst for information systems 4. St. Joseph Health (Irvine, Calif.): Seeks a regional manager for clinical documentation integrity Cerner 1. Ranken Jordan Pediatric Bridge Hospital (Maryland Heights, Mo.): Seeks an IT director 2. Shriners Hospitals for Children (Springfield, Mass.): Seeks a regional director for information services 3. Silver Cross Hospital (New Lenox, Ill.): Seeks a security analyst 4. Wood County Hospital (Bowling Green, Ohio): Seeks a CIO Epic 1. Ann & Robert H. Lurie Childrens Hospital of Chicago: Seeks a senior application analyst for Epic Beacon 2. Mount Sinai Health System (New York City): Seeks an IT director 3. NorthShore University HealthSystem (Evanston, Ill.): Seeks a senior applications analyst 4. NYU Langone Health (New York City): Seeks an Epic MyChart analyst Meditech 1. Good Samaritan Hospital (San Jose, Calif.): Seeks an advanced clinical applications director 2. Grand View Health (Sellersville, Pa.): Seeks a chief medical information officer 3. St. Joseph Health (Irvine, Calif.): Seeks a regional manager for clinical documentation integrity 4. Tidelands Health (Georgetown, S.C.): Seeks a CIO Medicare payment cuts under the 340B Drug Pricing Program pose a potential financial threat to nonprofit hospitals serving vulnerable patients, according to a report from S&P Global Ratings. The $1.6 billion reduction in Medicare payments, put in motion Jan. 1, was part of CMS' 2018 Medicare Outpatient Prospective Payment System Rule. The reduction is reached by paying hospitals 22.5 percent less than the average sales price for drugs purchased through the 340B program. While many larger 340B hospitals and systems won't see direct effects from the cuts due to their size and scope, smaller participating providers and rural hospitals could see a greater financial effect, according to S&P. "The impacts of the cuts to the 340B Drug Pricing Program on nonprofit hospitals that rely on 340B drug savings will likely weaken their operating performance at a time of already tightening margins," the agency wrote. "This could lead to negative rating actions if hospital-specific funding reductions were material and not offset by other management actions." If the Medicare cuts result in insufficient cash flow for some hospitals, they likely will serve fewer patients, prompting more patients to seek treatment in other hospital emergency rooms or clinics, S&P stated. The American Hospital Association, Association of American Medical Colleges, America's Essential Hospitals and various health systems have challenged the cuts in court. Judge Rudolph Contreras in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the lawsuit in December, saying it was brought prematurely. But S&P said it expects the case to continue, as a federal appellate court was considering reviving it. S&P also noted calls for 340B reform at the federal level. This includes a proposal by federal lawmakers requiring 340B hospitals to report their low-income utilization rates for outpatient and inpatient services, as well as further 340B reform proposed as part of the Trump administration's proposed major drug pricing changes. Even if a legal challenge to the cuts is revived, "additional proposed program reforms at the federal level could further negatively affect these providers' finances," S&P concluded. More articles on healthcare finance: 10 hospitals seeking RCM talent For-profit hospital stock report: Week of May 21-25 Healthcare spending reduced when people get help with social needs, study finds Sixty-plus state healthcare pricing websites existed in 2012. The Government Accountability Office commanded CMS to prioritize price transparency in 2014. Increased interest in making healthcare prices available is apparent, but what remains unclear is whether that has incentivized hospitals to provide more price information, according to a research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers from the University of Toronto, Boston University School of Medicine and New York City-based Mount Sinai Health Network returned to their 2012 survey of 122 hospitals' ability to provide pricing for a hip replacement surgery to compare how the hospitals performed in 2016. Twenty of the original hospitals were ranked as top orthopedic hospitals by U.S. News & World Report in 2011-12, and 102 were not top ranked, with two pulled from each state and the District of Columbia. Of the original 122 hospitals, 120 remained open and independent in 2016. From June to August 2016, the researchers phoned each hospital up to five times posing as a granddaughter seeking price information for a hip replacement for her 62-year-old grandmother. Researchers asked hospital staff for the lowest cash bundled price for the procedure, including all hospital and physician fees. Hospitals only able to provide hospital-specific fees were asked for the name of an orthopedic surgery practice the researchers could contact to verify physician fees. Researchers were able to obtain the bundled price for a hip replacement surgery from eight hospitals in 2016, down from 19 hospitals in 2012. By contacting the hospital and physician separately, the researchers obtained complete price estimates from 25 hospitals in 2016, down from 57 in 2012. There was an increase in the number of hospitals that could provide partial price estimates to researchers: 34 in 2016 compared to 27 in 2012. However, the number of hospitals unable to provide any price estimate more than tripled to 53 in 2016, compared to 17 in 2012. "We found no evidence of improvement in hospitals' ability to provide price estimates or reductions in the estimated price for [total hip arthroplasty] between 2012 and 2016," the researchers concluded. "Our results provide sobering evidence that substantial efforts from government and industry to improve pricing transparency have had little tangible effect on availability of prices." More articles on healthcare finance: $1.6B in Medicare payment cuts likely to cripple struggling hospitals, S&P says Medicare readmission rates vary widely among BPCI Advanced conditions: 4 takeaways Senator calls for federal investigation into Missouri hospital's billing practices Bethlehem, Pa.-based St. Luke's University Health Network filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Lancaster (Pa.) General Hospital on May 22, alleging Lancaster General submitted hundreds of inaccurate and overstated claims to the state's Extraordinary Expense Fund, which compensates hospitals for their charity care. According to the complaint, the Pennsylvania Auditor General found approximately 75 percent of all claims Lancaster General submitted to the EE program were invalid from fiscal year 2010 through fiscal year 2012. This rate of invalid claims was about 7.5 times higher than at other hospitals. St. Luke's alleges Lancaster General was overpaid by nearly $9 million from the EE program between fiscal years 2010 and 2012. "Given that only about $32.5 million in EE Program funds were distributed to hospitals during those three years, this means that more than one out of every four dollars disbursed during the relevant time period was improperly disbursed to Lancaster General," states the complaint. The alleged overpayments to Lancaster General lowered reimbursements to other hospitals, including those in St. Luke's system. Lancaster General told Law360 St. Luke's allegations are meritless. More articles on healthcare finance: Vanderbilt University Medical Center points to Epic rollout for 60% drop in operating income Texas Children's operating income nearly triples in first half of fiscal year Banner Health's net income plunges 55% in Q1 Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., has asked HHS to examine questionable billing practices and a possible kickback scheme operated by Putnam County Memorial Hospital, a 15-bed hospital in Unionville, Mo. Ms. McCaskill requested the investigation after Missouri State Auditor Nicole Galloway found Putnam County Memorial Hospital received $92 million in insurance payments in less than a year for lab services that were performed at other facilities across the country. Hospital Partners, a Florida-based management company, took over operations of Putnam County Memorial Hospital in September 2016. The management company is co-owned by Jorge Perez and David Byrns, who became the hospital's CEO. Within days of the takeover, another company, called Hospital Laboratory Partners, which also has ties to Mr. Perez, was incorporated in Florida and began billing health insurers for laboratory work through Putnam County Memorial Hospital, including some tests that were not performed at the facility, according to an investigation by Side Effects Public Media, KCUR and KBIA. According to Ms. Galloway's report, Putnam County Memorial Hospital acted as a shell company by submitting claims for other labs and funneling the insurance payments through the hospital. Hospital Laboratory Partners said the auditor's report mischaracterizes the payments. The company said Putnam County Memorial Hospital, a critical access hospital, is authorized to bill for off-site lab work. Ms. Galloway said the questionable billing at Putnam County Memorial Hospital highlights a national issue. "It has become clear that these billing schemes extend well beyond Putnam County Memorial Hospital, and impact healthcare costs for all of us," she told the Kirksville Daily Express. "I will continue to get to the bottom of this matter to protect Missouri taxpayers, and my office will work with Sen. McCaskill and others in federal government to aid their investigation." More articles on healthcare finance: Texas Children's operating income nearly triples in first half of fiscal year Vanderbilt University Medical Center points to Epic rollout for 60% drop in operating income Texas man receives $7,924 surprise bill after going to an in-network ER A Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society subsidiary recognized Chicago-based Cook County Health and Hospitals System for its EMR initiatives. CCHHS earned Stage 7 on the eight-stage HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model, which measures the degree to which a hospital or health system uses its EMR functions. Six percent of U.S. hospitals have reached Stage 7, the highest designation. CCHHS officials have worked to improve patient care using various EMR functions, including patient portals. For example, physicians leveraged the electronic message center within the health system's patient portal to monitor patient care without requiring multiple follow-up appointments. This system proved particularly useful for low-income patients with chronic conditions. In the past, CCHHS required patients with chronic conditions to visit the hospital for blood work and again to discuss results. Today, these results can be released via patient portal, reducing a patient's time spent away from work. "This recognition supports our embrace of health IT and demonstrates how Cook County Health leverages EMRs to improve clinical outcomes for an individual patient and also the health of our community through data," John Jay Shannon, MD, CEO of CCHHS, said in a May 22 statement. IBM laid off an undisclosed number of employees from its Watson Health group, with at least 40 workers cut from its Cleveland office, according to cleveland.com. Online commenters at TheLayoff.com and a Facebook page called Watching IBM said nearly 50 to 70 percent of staff had been affected, noting Watson Health's Dallas office employs 230 people, but its Cleveland office and its health analytics unit the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Truven Health Analytics likely staff more. Although the actual scope of the cuts is unclear, some online commenters shared their experiences. Many posted anonymously and said the company told them the layoff was the result of a resource action. Others suggested this is only the first wave of layoffs. Posting anonymously to the Facebook page May 25, one former employee wrote, "Part of Watson Health layoff today. Over 50 years old. IBMer over 30 years. The message was that there are about 7,000 people in Watson Health today and this was a cost-cutting exercise. 90 days notice with 30 days severance." Another former employee wrote May 29 on TheLayoff.com that he or she had been "axed last week" from Watson Health. "They are keeping about 15 people to close the shop, will happen in early 2019. ... This round of cuts is much bigger than anyone is reporting, they [are] cutting deep and wide, there is no recovery from this one. ... We all knew it was coming but nobody expected it'll be this fast and rampant," the poster wrote, although it is not clear which location he or she had been cut from. In March, the company announced plans to scale back staffers in certain areas, including Watson, cloud and sales, but no specific numbers or timelines were provided at the time. Becker's Hospital Review reached out to IBM Watson Health for confirmation. This story will be updated as more information becomes available. More articles on health IT: Alphabet's investment arm funnels $7M into startup using AI to improve medical research For first time, AI beats experienced dermatologists in detecting skin cancer Cook County Health and Hospitals System in Chicago reaches HIMSS Analytics Stage 7 As hospitals and physicians navigate today's healthcare challenges, conflicts are bound to arise due to the limited resources at stake, as well differing views and opinions. For instance, physicians at CHI St. Alexius Williston (N.D.) Medical Center and their colleagues at CHI St. Alexius Bismarck (N.D.) Medical Center are together calling for a leadership change in CHI's Fargo Division. Physicians at the Bismarck hospital threatened to resign unless a leadership change takes place, alleging the current leadership was leading to declining physician engagement and lower care quality. Physicians at the Williston hospital joined the Bismarck physicians in solidarity. CHI St. Alexius Health officials said they are discussing the issues with physicians, but had not announced any leadership changes within the Fargo Division as of May 22. In another example, conflict arose regarding the affiliation of two children's hospitals in California. Although San Francisco-based UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital and the Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland (Calif.) finalized their affiliation four years ago, physicians in Oakland are still upset about the partnership. Some physicians in Oakland specifically argue UCSF has prioritized the children's facility at UCSF Medical Center's Mission Bay campus in San Francisco, and located most of its specialists and leadership in San Francisco instead of Oakland, according to The Mercury News. The physicians overall claim the affiliation has negatively affected care at the Oakland facility even declaring a vote of "no confidence" in the institution's integration plan last March. However, UCSF Health officials argue the affiliation has improved care and helped the Oakland facility's financial situation. Disagreements like these are common, according to Rick Sheff, MD, CMO of The Greeley Co., a Danvers, Mass.-based healthcare solutions company serving more than 700 healthcare organizations nationwide within the past three years. "We're seeing increasing numbers of incidents of conflict, as well as the severity of the conflict and intensity," he said. Dr. Sheff has seen disputes arise in various forms. He said sometimes disagreements occur between an employed group practice and either the employing group or the hospital or system. He has also seen allegations of inappropriate competition either physician to physician, group to group, or between medical staff and the hospital. Additionally, he has seen allegations on all sides of acting in bad faith and undermining trust, as well as disagreements over priorities such as whether quality of care or cost of care is most important. Why conflicts occur He attributed the rising number of conflicts to pressures hospitals and physicians are facing. "Both physicians and hospitals are being squeezed today. We are heading into a time of more restricted resources, and in our experience working around the country, the best way to put it would be: When the amount of food at the table goes down, table manners tend to deteriorate," said Dr. Sheff. He argues it is also attributable to differences between how physicians approach challenges compared with hospital managers and leaders. He described it as "a Mars-Venus experience." "They use different language. They have different ways of making meaning of what they see. They have different priorities. They have different perspectives. And, we [Greeley] get called into these all the time," he said. There is a common thread between each situation, however. In each instance, Dr. Sheff sees the frequency and intensity of conflict rising and trust between parties deteriorating. He said how each side decides to address the conflict will determine the potential resolution. To address each situation, Greeley begins by listening to the perspectives of all parties, and from there, work can be done to try to resolve the conflict. "It's best approached in phases because in the beginning they've gone to war or they're about to go to war. The first step is to get the parties to be willing to come back to the table," said Dr. Sheff. Advice As a first step, when facing the kinds of disagreements seen in healthcare, Dr. Sheff referenced advice from the late American educator, author and businessman Stephen Covey: "Seek first to understand, then to be understood." Dr. Sheff also recommended involved parties listen to each other "deeply and effectively," and noted sometimes it is necessary to get a third party to facilitate a resolution process. "In every setting we've been asked to come into, there's the potential for addressing the underlying problem and getting parties back together, and we've been successful in many settings," he said. "But, the parties have to be willing to engage and be willing to change, and that's up to them. They also have to be patient with the process." More articles on leadership and management: Dr. Anthony Tersigni: Innovative care models are new catalysts to transforming healthcare Kindred, Massachusetts General Hospital to lay off 152 workers 10 thoughts on the healthcare business In this special Speaker Series, Becker's Healthcare caught up with Lisa Stump, senior vice president and CIO of Yale New Haven Health and Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut. Ms. Stump will speak on a keynote panel during the Becker's Hospital Review 4th Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference title "Population Health, Consumerism, Digital Health and More," at 11:30 a.m. Friday, Sept. 21. Learn more about the event and register to attend in Chicago. Question: Can you share your best advice for motivating your teams? Lisa Stump: I start by focusing my team on why we are here: to enhance the lives of those we serve, our patients, our communities and the caregivers who support them. Motivating my teams is much easier when that focus is clear. Then, we focus on what is possible: defining what it will take to get it done. The focus on what it will take to get it done balances what is possible with a realistic focus on the resources such as time, people, training, dollars, technology we need to be successful. By identifying the positive actions we can take, setting real milestones and tracking progress to those milestones, we channel our energy into action rather than getting stuck in all the reasons why we can't. This motivates the team and our customers! Q: What is your No. 1 dealbreaker when it comes to evaluating vendor partnerships? LS: Vendor partnerships are critical to achieving our goals. Not every vendor is a partner and I don't use the term vendor-partner lightly. A vendor who can't be trusted is our biggest deal breaker. Using dishonest tactics to get an audience, pricing models that don't reflect a partnership in achieving our goals, or misrepresenting experience with us or with others are just a few of the things that make it clear that the vendor doesn't share our values and that's a big dealbreaker. Q: What's the best thing you've read lately? LS: Gender equity is a crucially important issue, and I dedicate time and energy to understanding its impact on women in our workforce, on the quality of our business and on my own impact and influence. One of the best things I've read recently is a book called The Influence Effect: A New Path to Power for Women Leaders. With the majority of our healthcare workforce comprised of women, and the majority of health decisions made by women in our society, enhancing the number of women leaders in healthcare is an important mission. And the book is not just for women men can gain some real insights into workplace dynamics that will serve our organizations and our communities well. Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare announced May 29 the company appointed two new independent directors to its board. Tenet appointed the two board directors Lloyd J. Austin III and Meghan M. FitzGerald, DrPH as part of a plan the company announced last August to "refresh" its board. "We have been steadfast in our commitment to accelerate change across the company," said Ron Rittenmeyer, executive chairman and CEO of Tenet. "This applies to all facets of operations and all levels of leadership including adding five new directors to our board in the last seven months." Here are six things to know about the new directors: 1. Mr. Austin is a retired four-star general who served 41 years in the U.S. Army. 2. From March 2013 through March 2016, Mr. Austin was commander of the U.S. Central Command, responsible for military strategy and joint operations throughout the Central Region, which includes Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and 12 other countries. 3. "As a retired four-star general whose career spans more than four decades in the U.S. Army, Lloyd has demonstrated a powerful commitment to service and leadership with integrity," said Bob Kerrey, lead director of Tenet's board. 4. Dr. FitzGerald is a managing partner at L1 Health, a New York City-based investment fund specializing in healthcare. She is also an assistant professor of health policy at Columbia University in New York City. 5. From May 2015 to October 2016, Dr. FitzGerald served as executive vice president of strategy and policy at Cardinal Health, a healthcare services and product company. She previously served as president of Cardinal's specialty solutions division. 6. "Meg has an impressive background that combines experience across different aspects of healthcare, including policy, innovation, business development and strategy," said Mr. Kerrey. More articles on leadership and management: Dr. Anthony Tersigni: Innovative care models are new catalysts to transforming healthcare Kindred, Massachusetts General Hospital to lay off 152 workers 10 thoughts on the healthcare business Physicians and other clinicians are called upon to help passengers during in-flight medical emergencies, but airlines often prefer the guidance of on-the-ground consultants in order to avoid diversions, according to Bloomberg. A medical emergency occurs once every 604 flights, with 7.3 percent leading to diversions that ground the plane, according to a study The New England Journal of Medicine. While it is standard protocol to first find out if a medical professional is on board before calling a consultant, a diversion can cost as much as $200,000, and airlines look to avoid these diversions whenever possible. Passenger clinicians are more likely to recommend diversions, so airlines rely on contracted consultants on the ground, who are less likely to recommend such action, to guide pilots. Though the final decision rests with pilots and dispatchers, they rely heavily on the advice of consultants. "It's fairly expensive to divert an aircraft, and so a captain has to take into account a whole host of issues," Jose Nable, MD, an assistant professor at Washington, D.C-based MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, told Bloomberg. Paulo Alves, MD, global medical director of aviation health for Medaire, which provides in-flight consulting for over 100 airlines, acknowledged that his consultants recommend fewer diversions than on-board clinicians, but said these passengers are often overly cautious. "If the model was not financially interesting for [airlines], then they wouldn't hire us," Dr. Alves told Bloomberg. "Doctors, they tend to recommend diversions more than we do, because of course they dont want to assume the long-term responsibility." Englewood (N.J.) Hospital and Medical Center nurses are bringing a federal mediator to the bargaining table. Nearly 700 nurses represented by the Health Professionals and Allied Employees Local 5004, previously authorized their negotiating team to issue a 10-day strike notice to the hospital, according to a union news release. But instead of issuing a notice, they want a federal mediator to help as they work to reach a labor deal before their contract expires May 31. Union officials said nurses seek enhanced staffing levels, opportunities for more educational growth, and "to protect the rights of unionized nurses and their ability to advocate for themselves and their patients in the future." "Nurses are bargaining for improvements in patient safety and workers' rights, yet management has failed to reach an agreement that nurses will find acceptable," said Alice Barden, president of HPAE Local 5004. "Our demands have been rejected at every turn, but as nurses, we are unified in protecting all that we have established in our contract and to protect our community hospital." Hospital officials said they remain hopeful for an agreement. "We continue to negotiate in good faith with the union bargaining committee with the hope that we will come to an agreement before our contract expires. The guiding philosophy in all our contract proposals is what's in the best interest of our patients, our hospital and the communities we serve," they said in a statement to NJBIZ. More articles on human capital and risk: Shuttle drivers at St. Louis hospital, university vote to unionize McLaren Lapeer Region nurses to picket over staffing Stony Brook University Hospital nurses protest over pay In a study of over 83,000 hospital admissions for acute stroke, men were more likely to get better care than women, according to findings presented at the 2018 European Stroke Organisation Conference cited by Medscape Medical News. The findings stem from 83,484 admissions for acute stroke between April 2016 and March 2017. All admissions were prospectively recorded in the Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme, a national quality stroke register in the U.K. The patient population was 49 percent women. Men were more likely to experience door-to-needle time of less than 60 minutes; arrival at a stroke unit before four hours; and use of thrombectomy, a surgical procedure to remove a blood clot from an artery or vein, than women were, the findings revealed. Men also were more likely to receive a physiotherapy assessment within 72 hours and early supported discharge when compared to the women in the study. "There were no quality measures that favored females," George Dunn, senior project coordinator of the audit programme at the Royal College of Physicians in London, told Medscape Medical News. The findings are "worrying," Mr. Dunn said. "We think more research should be done to make sure the data are consistent, and if so, steps should be taken to rectify the situation, because clearly this is unfair." An attorney representing a nurse who lost her license over accusations that she infected at least two patients with hepatitis C, said a blood test shows the former nurse does not have the virus, according to Kiro 7 News. "The blood test concluded undetective for hepatitis C virus," said attorney Bryan Hershman. "That means she does not have hep C." The 31-year-old nurse, Cora Weberg, quit her job in the emergency room at Puyallup, Wash.-based MultiCare Good Samaritan Hospital earlier this year after hospital officials accused her of infecting patients with the virus, possibly by using needles on herself to inject narcotics and using those same needles on patients, the TV station reported. Ms. Weberg denied these actions during a May 8 news conference. "I want everyone to know that I never intentionally or unintentionally stuck anyone with a needle with which I'd previously stuck myself," she said. "Of all the allegations that have been made against me, this is the most awful." An investigation by the Washington Health Department revealed numerous controlled substance discrepancies involving Weberg, who reportedly admitted diverting injectable fentanyl and hydromorphone for her personal use,'' Kiro 7 News reported. Ms. Weberg was stripped of her nursing license as a result of the allegations but was never charged with a crime. There was never strong evidence against Ms. Weberg, her attorney said. He cited a letter he obtained from the CDC, which tested antibodies found in Ms. Weberg's blood against blood from two Good Samaritan Hospital patients who tested positive for hepatitis C after receiving treatment at the facility. "There is almost no chance to link the respondent [Ms. Weberg] with the patients, except that she's the only nurse common to both patients," Mr. Hershman said, quoting the letter. A MultiCare spokesperson told Kiro 7 the hospital still is investigating an outbreak of hepatitis C at the facility. Physicians and computer scientists are installing depth sensors and various monitors in hospital hallways, near patients' bedsides and in operating rooms to monitor staff 24/7 and improve hand hygiene compliance, The Wall Street Journal reports. Seven things to know: 1. The sensors produce video images resembling blurry silhouettes to protect patient privacy, but can train computer algorithms to identify movements, such as a staff member stopping to use a hand sanitizer dispenser. The technology, called computer vision, would allow hospitals to monitor workers 24/7 across an entire hospital ward. The researchers aim to use the data from the algorithms to influence staff behaviors and rethink how they administer care. 2. Even the most attentive physicians and nurses may be unaware when they skip steps in care, particularly when that can involve hundreds of small tasks in a day, said Arnold Milstein, MD, professor of medicine and director of the Clinical Excellence Research Center at Stanford (Calif.) University. To address this issue, Dr. Milstein and his colleagues created a series of pilot studies to determine whether computer vision could tell if staff used hand sanitizer dispensers before entering and leaving patient rooms. 3. The researchers installed sensors above the hand-sanitizer dispensers in a hallway of an acute-care ward at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. They collected thousands of images and annotated about 80 percent of them, noting whether someone did or did not sanitize their hands when entering or leaving a patient's room. 4. The researchers fed the annotated images into an algorithm to teach it to distinguish whether someone was washing hands. They used the remaining images to see whether the algorithm could identify handwashing without using the annotations. 5. The algorithm was then applied to images gathered at an intensive care unit of Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare. Although the hospital's hallway was different than the other hospital's, the algorithm identified hand sanitization roughly 85 percent of the time. When the algorithm was further trained on images Intermountain Healthcare captured, its accuracy jumped to 98 percent, Serena Yeung, a PhD student in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, told WSJ. 6. Now, the researchers are determining how the data can be used to promote vigilance in handwashing. One idea includes having an alert on the sanitizer dispensers to remind staff to wash their hands before entering patient rooms. Another idea is to design a digital dashboard to track compliance across the unit.. "People would know how they are performing as a group and hopefully be motivated to improve," Ms. Yeung said. She suggested training programs or rewards for units with the best compliance records. 7. Additionally, researchers aim to use computer vision to study handwashing protocols inside patient rooms to determine whether current practices, such as washing hands after touching a patient, are effectively fighting harmful bacteria or if different steps should be considered. Although national guidelines assume all patients diagnosed with sepsis in the emergency department will be admitted to the hospital for more treatment, a recent study suggests significantly more patients are treated and released for outpatient follow-up than formerly realized. "We found that many more emergency department patients with sepsis are discharged from the ED than previously recognized, but by and large these patients had fairly good outcomes," principal investigator Ithan Peltan, MD, a pulmonary and critical care medicine specialist and researcher from Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Medical Center, said in a news release. The research suggests physicians may be able to identify a subset of sepsis patients who would see good outcomes with outpatient management. "Outpatient management of sepsis is likely not automatically 'wrong,'" Dr. Peltan said. "But wide variation in care provided by different physicians suggests there's room to identify criteria and develop and test tools clinicians can use to guide and optimize sepsis triage decisions." The researchers gathered clinical data from Intermountain Healthcare's Enterprise Data Warehouse at two referral hospitals and two community hospitals in Utah between July 2013 and January 2017. The study identified nearly 16,000 adult ED patients who met clinical sepsis criteria. After excluding repeat ED visits, trauma patients, patients who left the ED against medical advice or on hospice, or those who died in the ED, 12,002 of 13,419 eligible ED sepsis patients were included in the analysis. The researchers classified patients who transferred to another acute care facility as admitted and patients who transferred to non-acute care as discharges. The findings revealed patients who were discharged were significantly less ill than admitted patients. However, after the research team took illness severity and other factors into account, they found discharged sepsis patients had about the same chance of dying in the next 30 days as admitted patients. Some ED physicians admitted all or nearly all of the patients they treated. Other ED physicians discharged up to 39 percent of their sepsis patients. "Physicians seem to do a good job of knowing who can be discharged," Dr. Peltan said. "However, there was quite a bit of variation between physicians regarding how many of their patients get discharged, which suggests it may be important to give clinicians guidance to ensure patients who need it are admitted to the hospital, and to identify patients who can be considered for outpatient management and potentially avoid the inconvenience, expense and risks of hospitalization." Calvin Lin, president of United Orthopedic Corporation USA, shared his insights with Beckers Orthopedic and Spine Review on how the company is adapting to bundled payments and the role orthopedic companies can play in supporting evidence-based care. 1. How is United Orthopedic Corporation adapting to bundled payment models for knee and hip replacements? We believe as bundled payment models are a growing trend in the orthopedic industry, UOC is uniquely positioned to innovate and lead. We are deeply committed to helping providers, payers and patients improve outcomes at lower total costs. UOC has an inherent understanding of the value proposition evidenced by CMS Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR). We have invested a great deal in research and quality management systems to deliver products and services that demonstrate value through efficiency, reduction of episode of care costs, and overall improvement to the patient experience. For example, a significant portion of surgery costs include reprocessing instrument trays, inventory management, training, and preparation time. The average total knee replacement procedure uses six to nine trays and the estimated cost of reprocessing a tray can range from $100 to $300.1 Since 2017, we have successfully reduced the number of trays to 1.5 for every total knee replacement performed with our U2 Knee System and have made the trials disposable. As a result, this has cut hospital costs associated with preparing, storing and reprocessing trays, as well as the training and turn time for OR staff. Eliminating trays also has the potential to reduce the risk of infection. We believe the saved cost and time will allow providers to perform more procedures in the same OR on the same day. We also offer educational support to surgeons interested in learning about bundled payments. At the recent American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting, we hosted a lecture by Mark Froimson, M.D., evaluating the keys to success with respect to bundled payments. The presentation emphasized engaging patients and families to optimizing patient preparedness, delivering each procedure efficiently, and engaging the clinical team to utilize best in class clinical protocols. UOC is aligned with Dr. Froimsons Principles of Care, including patient engagement, support outside of the hospital and elimination of unnecessary resources. As a vertically integrated orthopedic company, we design and manufacture our products in-house and are able to transfer efficiency and cost-savings to our customers. 2. What role can orthopedic companies play in advancing evidence-based care models? Evidence-based care models offer providers a way to achieve the "Triple Aim's" objectives improve the experience of care, improve the health of populations, and reduce healthcare costs, per capita. It is important for orthopedic companies like UOC to play a proactive role in evidence-based care. It all starts with asking customers what their pain points are. By conducting first tier and second tier market and clinical research, we gain insight into how best to address those pain points and come up with a product or service that improves the patients outcome or reduces the healthcare cost (ideally both at the same time). For example, we've observed an increase in demand for rapid recovery total hip replacement using the direct anterior approach. This approach requires a longer learning curve for surgeons who werent trained on this technique.2 Thats why we developed our UTS Stem, a bone-preserving shorter hip stem, to ease insertion through smaller incisions and potentially shorten the learning curve. We noticed one of the top three known reasons for total hip replacements failures is dislocation. Findings from clinical studies demonstrate that a bigger femoral head can reduce the risk of dislocation. To address this, we launched the extension line of our U-Motion II which can accommodate a 36mm femoral head with a 50mm acetabular cup. It provides our surgeons with more options to treat patients with a high risk of dislocation.3 Both products were showcased during American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting in New Orleans and are anticipated to be commercially available in November 2018. 3. What trends do you see in bundled payment models for orthopedic care? Bundled payment has incentivized providers and device companies to work together, encourage efficiency, and ensure a level of engaged follow-up care. Studies demonstrate Medicare bundled payments have reduced joint replacement costs by more than 20 percent.4 We believe the bundled payment models are here to stay, so it is our mission to help providers succeed in the world of bundled payment. References: 1Slamin J, Parsley B. Evolution of customization design for total knee arthroplasty. Current Reviews in Musculoskeletal Medicine. 2012;5(4):290-295. doi:10.1007/s12178-012-9141-z. 2Bergin PF, Doppelt JD, Kephart CJ, et al. Comparison of Minimally Invasive Direct Anterior Versus Posterior Total Hip Arthroplasty Based on Inflammation and Muscle Damage Markers. The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery American volume. 2011;93(15):1392-1398. doi:10.2106/JBJS.J.00557. 3Plate JF, Seyler TM, Stroh DA, Issa K, Akbar M, Mont MA. Risk of dislocation using large- vs. small-diameter femoral heads in total hip arthroplasty. BMC Research Notes. 2012;5:553. doi:10.1186/1756-0500-5-553. 4Navathe AS, Troxel AB, Liao JM, et al. Cost of Joint Replacement Using Bundled Payment Models. JAMA Intern Med. 2017;177(2):214222. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.8263. Northern Ireland rockers Snow Patrol return to the Belfast stage for an intimate gig at the Ulster Hall on Sunday, May 20. (Liam McBurney) Snow Patrol will perform a free gig at Belfast's flagship HMV store this week. The Northern Ireland band are set to appear at the Donegall Arcade site on Thursday, May 31st at 5.30pm. To gain entry, fans can obtain wristbands for the event by purchasing the group's latest album Wildness from HMV in person. Wristbands are limited to one per person while stocks last from 12noon on Wednesday, May 30. We decided we couldnt wait for the arena dates, so were announcing some additional acoustic performances. Info: https://t.co/BH8wNWJPNJ pic.twitter.com/pJye2R37Sq Snow Patrol (@snowpatrol) May 29, 2018 Details of the intimate gig come one day after Snow Patrol announced they would be returning to Belfast later this year for a huge show at the SSE Arena. They will perform in the city on December 7, as well as the 3Arena in Dublin on December 11. The band also recently performed a sold out show at the Ulster Hall. Read More Gary Lightbody, Nathan Connolly, Paul Wilson, Johnny McDaid, and Jonny Quinn hailed the gig an "incredible night" as they return to the music scene. Snow Patrol's seventh studio album Wildness has received rave reviews and earned the accolade of being named the Sunday Times album of the week. It was also one of the Evening Standard's albums of the week. Magazine Hot Press hailed the band's seventh album, describing it as "arguably the most ambitious opus" of Snow Patrol's 25-year career. Belfast TV presenter Eamonn Holmes has revealed he has told his family to "take me to Switzerland and press the red button" rather than allow him to live with dementia. Eamonn (58) said he would "rather die than lose his dignity". He said he had watched too many relatives battle the degenerative condition. "It's what everyone dreads. It's a long, lonely walk - one I would never want to go on," he told the Daily Mirror. "I genuinely say to all my children and my wife, 'Take me to a suicide clinic and press the red button'. That's what I want. "I have no desire to lose my dignity. I just don't want that to happen to me. However controversial that may sound, that is my genuine wish." Eamonn (right) has four children, including three from his first marriage, and son Jack (16), who he shares with his wife Ruth Langsford (58). But he admitted that Ruth, his co-host on ITV's This Morning, is not quite so matter-of-fact about things. "Ruth puts her fingers in her ears when I talk about it," he said. "Would they ever carry out my wish? I don't know. But they know it's what I would want." Last week Eamonn revealed he had lost 30% of his hearing at the age of 50, and he has also discovered that his chances of developing dementia could be higher due to his hearing issue. The fact that he watched many relatives deteriorate slowly has led him to think about his own mortality: "Ruth's dad, Dennis, passed away after battling dementia and I'm pretty sure two of my uncles, my grandfather on my dad's side, and my aunt Phyllis - who died last year - all had it," he said. "You watch them deteriorate. I watched my aunt for 10 years. The law in the UK should be changed to allow for assisted suicide. I don't understand this country. The constant excuse not to let people die as they want. "The questions asked are to protect the few: 'What about the weak?' 'What about the vulnerable?' "What about the rest of us? Everyone has the right to live as they like, but when it comes to death we put restrictions on that. "If you have at least two doctors who agree with the diagnosis, it should be your choice." Speaking of his own health, he added: "I've had both hips done, but at least I still have my mind. "My hearing has been a problem since I was in my 30s. Crowded restaurants were awful because all I could hear was a load of babble. "Parties were just as bad. Watching movies was terrible. There are only so many times you can wind back a film and try to lip-read, or meet someone and say, 'Pardon, what did you just say?'." If you are affected by any issues in this article contact the Samaritans on 084 5790 9090 or Lifeline on 080 8808 8000. It may have taken seven years to write, but Snow Patrol are on course for their first UK number one album in over a decade. The Northern Ireland band's latest record, Wildness, has received rave reviews and earned the accolade of being named the Sunday Times album of the week. It was also one of the Evening Standard's albums of the week. Magazine Hot Press hailed the band's seventh album, describing it as "arguably the most ambitious opus" of Snow Patrol's 25-year career. In an 8/10 review, it described Wildness as "a stylish, sometimes surprising comeback that will firmly re-establish Snow Patrol in the charts and hearts of the world", adding "Welcome back, boys". The Washington Post described the opening track, Life on Earth, as "majestic and grand", and summed up the album as a "triumphant Snow Patrol return". It also seems that fans agree with the critics as Wildness was yesterday soaring ahead at the summit of the chart during the midway stage. If it hits top spot, it will be Snow Patrol's first number one album since Eyes Open, released in 2006. But to secure the number one spot, it will have to knock hugely popular The Greatest Showman down to number two while Shawn Mendes' eponymous album is also in line for a top three finish. Biffy Clyro's MTV Unplugged: Live At Roundhouse is in line for number four, while Chvrches' Love Is Dead is on course for a top five finish - a career high for the band. Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph earlier last week, Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody revealed he has been sober for two years after one drunken night almost ended his life. The 41-year-old said he almost died in 2000 after falling down a flight of steps in Glasgow following a three-day bender. "I was out of control," he said. "I was a giant ass, running all over the place. "Looking at myself in the mirror that day was, literally, a sobering experience. That was the first time I quit the booze." Snow Patrol yesterday announced UK and Ireland tour dates, which includes gigs in Belfast and Dublin. The band will play the SSE Arena in Belfast on December 7 and the 3Arena in Dublin on December 11. Tickets will go on sale at Ticketmaster next Friday, June 8, from 9am. The band is also set to perform and greet fans at HMV in Belfast at 5pm tomorrow. Fans can attend by obtaining a wristband, available by purchasing Wildness from HMV Belfast in person from 12pm today, subject to availability. The team of specialist craftsmen who turned the barge into a luxury floating holiday home with two apartments Gillian Campbell, owner and designer of the barge that has been renovated into a luxury apartment A decaying barge destined for the scrapyard has been reborn as a chic new luxury holiday let for Northern Ireland. With stunning views overlooking Titanic Belfast and boasting two lavish "apartments" inside, Nolly now stands proud as a unique addition to the familiar seascape of yachts and boats in the city's marina. The old barge was rescued a year ago and transformed by local couple Gillian and David Campbell, who live in Strangford. The couple enlisted a team of local craftsmen to carry out the painstaking transformation from rusted shell to sumptuous retreat. It has been a long and challenging task but also a labour of love for Gillian, who had dreamed of owning her own long boat for over 10 years. The couple have spent the past 25 years living all over the world with David's job as a vice president with technology giant IBM. In every country they lived, they bought property which needed renovating and Gillian has enjoyed carrying out extensive projects on the numerous houses they have lived in over the years - so the challenge of working on the barge was always going to appeal. Gillian (53) and David (54) have three grown-up children - Natasha (26), Marcus (24) and Ellie (21). When David retired two years ago the couple decided to settle back in their native Northern Ireland and shortly after returning home Gillian began her search for a barge to bring back to life. She explains: "We've lived in a few countries including America, Singapore and Denmark, and my favourite city by far was Copenhagen. I loved the long boats there and I used to peer inside and see how cosy they were. "I always thought I would love to have one. When David retired we didn't know what to do, but we kept coming home to Northern Ireland and loving it. It had changed so much in the years that we had been away and we were really lucky to get a house in Strangford. "When I saw the Titanic Quarter in Belfast I was blown away. I just thought it was world class and how lovely it would be to have a long boat in the marina there." The couple went to the south of England last year to look for a boat. "I knew exactly what I wanted," says Gillian. "Then, while we were there, we heard about a charity in Glasgow selling a barge and I knew the second I saw it that I wanted it. It was lovely and wide and had a lovely feel to it, even though it was an absolute wreck and looked like a piece of junk." The first challenge was getting Nolly out of the canal in Scotland and over to Northern Ireland. She was in such a poor state of disrepair that the couple couldn't risk sailing her here. It took a 100-ton crane - and a sizeable chunk of their budget - to very slowly lift the ancient barge out of the water on to the back of a lorry bound for Bangor, where she would be restored. Nolly was given a full police guard as she made her way from Glasgow to the docks at Cairnryan for the journey to her new home, where she arrived on May 6 last year. Gillian says: "Nolly was being looked after by a man called David Alexander on behalf of the charity and if it hadn't been for him she would have been in the scrapyard or the bottom of the canal. We will be forever grateful for the help and advice Davy gave us throughout the project. "One of the biggest challenges was getting her out of the water to bring her here. The crane was huge and took up about 15% of the whole cost. "Getting her over was also very expensive and cost about a quarter of the budget." And once the couple had Nolly safely ensconced in her new home, they realised they didn't know where to begin with the ambitious project. Gillian adds: "When we finally got her here we had no idea how to go about renovating her or what was needed. We didn't even know what questions to ask. We went to East Belfast Yacht Club and they were just brilliant. They couldn't do enough to help us and we wouldn't have been able to do it without their continued guidance and expertise. "They knew everything and everybody and thanks to them we got the most amazing team to work on Nolly. Our team was so central and so key to making it happen" In her previous life, Nolly had been kitted out to provide a 'home from home' for disadvantaged kids in Glasgow. The boat is huge, measuring 56ft long by 15ft wide. Originally Gillian intended to preserve as much of the interior as possible, but as the facia was stripped back it revealed rotting wood and rust, making it necessary to strip it right back to the bare steel. Months were spent angle grinding the hull and treating it to ensure it was rust proof. Gillian then decided to add another level to the structure, which involved cutting the roof off, lifting it 8ft and welding it to steel joists. The interior design was all-important to Gillian, who wanted to create a luxurious Scandinavian look. She says: "I knew I wanted cedar wood inside and we had to go for PVC windows to cut out condensation. "There was a big thought process in how we were going to lay out the inside and in the end we opted for two apartments, and we soundproofed them and gave them each their own entrance. It's a bit like a semi-detached home. It has been designed with a hidden door in the middle so that they can become one. "Right from the start I wanted a luxury finish and I had gathered things up from all over the place during my travels, in the hope that one day I would get the opportunity to have my own barge. The result is an interior that is a cross between Scandinavian and New England styles. "One of the most important things for me was light and being able to see the sea from the interior and know that you are on a boat and that's one of the lovely things about it, as no matter where you are on it, you can always see the water." Sailing Nolly from Bangor nine miles to her new home in Belfast recently was a triumphant if also nerve-wracking day. Choosing a calm day, they set off at 8.30am and with a top speed of four knots they expected the journey to take between four and six hours. Gillian freely admits: "That was the most nervous day of the whole project. We rocked home in two-and-a-half hours, practically surfing into the harbour. The journey was great apart from a few run-ins with the Stena ferry - size does matter." Now that Nolly has a permanent home, the couple plan to let visitors enjoy her classy and comfortable interior, which includes a living room with a projector, a beautiful outdoor deck, master bedroom, full bathroom with "onshore" style toilets and shower, a bunk room and kitchenette. Each of the two apartments comfortably accommodates four people. Luxury bedding, sofas and all-important accessories complete the look. Gillian says that it was essentially about creating a home for herself and her family. "Boats can be a wee bit claustrophobic, but this one isn't. It has been a real labour of love for me and the most important thing for me was that it was going to be my home and we intend to spend time in it and then let it out for two to three nights a week. We haven't really pushed it yet as a holiday, but already we have had very strong interest. "I don't think there is anything like it in Northern Ireland and the location here in Belfast marina is just beautiful. Sitting in it in this weather you could be in the south of France, it is just so gorgeous here. "I'm delighted with how it has turned out and I hope we have brought a little bit of European chic to Belfast." Gillian has enjoyed transforming the barge so much that she and her husband are now considering setting up a new business manufacturing long boats. It's not a venture that she had ever considered floating in the past, so at the minute she says they are just dipping their toes in the water to see what opportunities there are. "The artisan skills here are just fantastic and we've had so many inquiries since we set up our website that we are now thinking about making our own boats right here in Northern Ireland," Gillian adds. "That is something that we did not think of, but the interest has been huge and we are certainly seriously considering it." For the full details of Nolly's rescue and renovation, visit the couple's website, www.bargeattitanic.com. A night in the smaller four berth apartment costs 180 while the larger one costs 220 After my regular appointment at the renal unit last week, mum and I made a detour along Donegall Avenue heading to Windsor Park. It seemed strange not heading directly home as we usually do, but we were heading to the holy of holies for a Northern Ireland fan - and as all of you will know I am literally 'obsessive' in my support for the team. Ironically my consultant Aisling Courtney mentioned at the beginning of my appointment that my blood pressure was high which, for a fleeting moment, caused concern until mum explained that we were going to Windsor Park afterwards and that was the obvious explanation. Another team that I won't be able to join, however, this year is dad's silage team on the farm which is 'making hay while the sun shines' across Co Armagh as we prepare the silage for our cattle. All I can do is look on as our New Hollands are prepared and getting to work across our fields as they bring in the first cut. Every cloud has a silver lining though as at least I won't have to do the heavy lifting of covering the silo with half tyres any more. Leaving behind the fields and getting back to the pitch, I have only missed one Northern Ireland home match and that was when I was having my transplant - although I was looking down on the match from the 11th floor of the City Hospital which has to count for something. While I have done my fair share of 'dreaming bigger' with my team over the years with a lot of crossed fingers, toes and frantic shouting from the stands, I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would be sitting in Windsor Park, a former 'fan of the month', and speaking about what a difference organ donation has made to my life. The 'Dream Bigger' motto of the team could almost become the motto of everyone waiting on a transplant - every day they dream of living a new life post-transplant. Arriving through the gates of the East Stand entrance we were the guests of the IFA who had invited us along to promote our passion - organ donation. While I avidly support Northern Ireland, I am also the recipient of amazing support from the IFA, the team and the fans, which has helped me so much through my transplant surgery and beyond. We entered an absolutely deserted stadium (and given the amount of sand it resembled a desert too) where we were taking part in a little bit of filming with their communications team. Mum and I were interviewed about the impact of the support we received from the team and the fans while I was on dialysis, over our transplant surgery period and during recovery. However, it really means so much to me that they are also getting behind organ donation in a massive way by allowing mum and I to promote the message among my fellow fans as well. I got the chance to mention all the amazing support I have been receiving from the Green and White Army, whether its tweets, pms or emails and, of course, that wonderful good luck video message sent to me from Niall McGinn. Something I will never forget! Mum also spoke about her new role as Kidney Care UK ambassador in which she is getting out and about across Northern Ireland to share our journey with so many people and organisations. Encouraging them to think about organ donation and to get behind those amazing charities and volunteers who are helping to support patients every single day. As mum said at the end of the interview: "We all have it within us to be a lifesaver, you can help someone live after your death. The more people that sign up to the organ donor register and have that conversation, the more hope it gives people and means that not everyone is sentenced to a lifetime on dialysis." Organ donation has saved my life twice, first in 2009 and then again from mum just 10 weeks ago - so I should know that everyone has it within us to be a lifesaver. You can watch the interview with Mark and his mother Jo-Anne by following the below link: https://www.irishfa.com/news/2018/may/kidney-patient-mark-dobson-praises-support-from-gawa The former head of maths at St Colmans College in Newry, described by a judge as a persistent, predatory and opportunistic offender who abused young people, has been jailed for 13 years. Ordering the sentences for each of his six victims to be served consecutively to each other, Judge Brian Sherard told 75-year-old Patrick James Carton he had stood back from the case to consider the totality principle but that having done so, I still consider that the global sentence is entirely in keeping with your course of persistent offending". Standing in the dock of Downpatrick Crown Court, sitting in Antrim, Carton appeared shocked at the sentence while his relatives close by in the public gallery held their head to their faces and cried at the sentence. Jailing the pensioner and imposing a Sexual Offences Prevention Order to run alongside the prison sentence, Judge Sherard told Carton that while he had been a beacon of respectability, had devoted his career to teaching maths to children with some considerable success and was held in high esteem". He added all of this contributes to make your fall from grace even greater and ostensibly a man of good character until 75, its clear that you have been offending from middle age. Police welcomed the sentencing praising the "great strength" of the six victims who gave evidence during the trial. "I hope todays result has lifted a huge weight from their shoulders," said Inspector Michelle Shaw. She also urged anyone who had been victim of a sexual offence to contact officers saying the PSNI had the expertise to offer them the proper support. "The PSNI Public Protection Branch takes every report of sexual offences extremely seriously, whether or not they are recent." At the end of his seven week trial last March, the jury of seven women and five men deliberated for three hours and 40 minutes over two days before finding Carton unanimously guilty on 28 counts of indecent assault and by a majority decision of 11 to one on a further count of indecent assault, all of which were committed on various dates between 17 February 1983 and 30 June 2007. The jury heard that Carton, from Marguerite Close in Newcastle and who taught at St Colmans in Newry and De la Salle in Downpatrick, had given private maths lessons to the six victims, abusing them in their own bedrooms. The jury heard similar testimony from each of the six victims, each of them teenagers at the time of the abuse, that Carton had a star system of discipline with three stars serving as a warning, four resulting in a smack, five stars got a smack over underwear and six stars meant the pupil was smacked on his or her a bare bottom. The victims gave evidence that on occasions, Carton instructed them to lie on their bed where he smacked them but that in other incidents, they were put across Cartons knee. One of the females repeatedly assaulted by Carton told the jury she had repeatedly told Carton to stop but that it was very hard for a teenager to challenge a then 50 year-old man. She said that when he first told her if his methods she was shocked and thought her tutor was joking". I told him I didnt want to get smacked. I didnt like it. It was not right, she said. He said this would make me pass my maths. It would make my parents proud. She outlined how, when she was in lower sixth and before she got her A level results, the abuse escalated to sexual touching with Carton telling her it was her award for doing well in her lessons. One woman gave emotional testimony the abuse she suffered at the hands of Carton had ruined her life while other victims told the court how they remembered their tears falling onto their work sheets and how the smacking left them unable to concentrate. The male victim recounted how Carton pulled his pants down to smack him while being taught maths at his home in the 1980s, describing one specific incident where he had to fight him off with his pants around his ankles because the Carton would not stop hitting him. During his police interviews Carton told police the various families had asked him to tutor their children through word of mouth, claiming that he did not smack the children to punish but in his mind it was to challenge the children and had always been done with the parents consent. He denied gaining any sexual gratification or any criminal wrongdoing, telling police it was the most effective method that led to the best results. In court on Wednesday prosecuting lawyer Laura Ievers submitted there were numerous aggravating features to the case including breaching the trust that was placed in Carton in that he exploited the tutoring arrangements in order to abuse the teenagers as well as the sheer number of victims with the offences spanning some 24 years. She said it was also an aggravating feature that the offences happened not just in the victims homes but in the privacy of their bedrooms where they were entitled to feel safe and the incidents have had a significant impact on them. Defence barrister Mark Barlow conceded that although Carton is going to custody, its as simple as that, he submitted that his offences were at the bottom of the scale. As a result of the multiple convictions, he has lost everything, Mr Barlow told the court, his standing in the community that he has served....and now he will be portrayed as a serial sexual offender who abused young teenage girls and a young teenage boy". The lawyer said while Carton has always accepted the smacking aspect of his offences, he denies and continues to maintain his innocence regarding the more serious sex abuse aspect of the case which leads to an absence of remorse". Mr Barlow submitted it was not necessary to impose a draconian Sexual Offences Prevention Order (SOPO) as at 75-years-old, Carton has been assessed by probation not to pose a risk. In his lengthy sentencing remarks however, Judge Sherard said it was his view, having read the reports and heard weeks of evidence, that despite his years Carton are nothing less of a danger now than when you committed these offences so while SOPOs are draconian with breaches carrying a maximum of five years in prison, he believed such an order was proportionate and necessary to protect the public and young people particularly. Having recounted briefly how each of the victims was abused, Judge Sherard said Cartons offending was persistent and unrelenting, committed across three different decades when he used their naivety with your manipulation and deception to facilitate the abuse. As well as the jail sentence, Carton was orders to sign the police sex offenders register for the rest of his life. Belfast could have its youngest ever Lord Mayor, as speculation grows about who will become the citys new First Citizen next week. City Hall newcomer Orla Nic Biorna, who only became a Sinn Fein councillor in October last year, has been tipped for the nomination, according to council sources. Alliances Emmet McDonough-Brown has already been selected be his party to become the next Deputy Lord Mayor at the annual general meeting on June 4. Ms Nic Biorna was aged just 19 when she was co-opted onto the Sinn Fein benches to replace veteran republican Janice Austin late last year. She is currently studying at St Marys in west Belfast and is a former pupil of Irish language school Colaiste Feirste. Hailing from a family of Irish speakers, the St Marys student was made a councillor at a time when Sinn Fein leaders were negotiating for an Irish Language Act at Stormont and she frequently speaks the language in council chambers. Belfast City Council has only recently launched its language strategy, which includes an Irish language strand, and are currently in the process of recruited two council language officers, one for Irish and another for Ulster Scots, Sign Language and others. Orla Nic Biorna has been a party activist since the age of 16 and spoke at Sinn Feins historic Ard Fheis in Dublin in November last year - less than a month after becoming a councillor. Belfasts current Lord Mayor, Alliances Nuala McAllister, will officially step down at Mondays meeting at City Hall, just as an Ombudsmans report into her alleged misconduct in 2016 is in its final stages, according to officials. In 2011, the council decided to start using the dHondt system to allocate positions of responsibility, such as Lord Mayor and committee chairs, based on the number of councillors elected from each party. Expand Close Speculation: Orla Nic Biorna / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Speculation: Orla Nic Biorna This year is Sinn Feins turn to select one of its 19 representatives for the post, having previously nominated Councillor Arder Carson for the position last time round in 2015. Sinn Fein do have form in selecting young candidates for the top council job, however. If selected, Ms Nic Biorna would become Belfasts youngest ever Lord Mayor, beating her party colleague Niall O Donnghaile, who was 25 when he took the chain of office in 2011, by five years. Other representatives to hold one of the councils most high-profile positions was the DUPs Guy Spence, who was 23 when he served as Deputy Lord Mayor in 2015. Sinn Fein did not respond for a comment on who they will be officially nominating for Lord Mayor in the coming days. Alliance Councillor Emmet McDonough-Brown will be taking over the reigns as Deputy Mayor from the Ulster Unionist Partys Sonia Copeland. The south Belfast Councillor said he was delighted and proud to have been selected by his party for a role he will take on with enthusiasm and positivity. Belfast has a great story to tell and Im naturally pleased to be taking on this important civic role. I look forward to working closely with the Lord Mayor in the year ahead to highlight the best of Belfast, he added. I plan to champion progressive causes and charities in my time as Deputy Lord Mayor, highlighting the challenges women still face in our society, asserting the positive role the Irish language plays in Belfast, and showcasing the progress we are making right across our city. Patients and family and friends protest in support of Dr Michael Watt in Belfast yesterday Patients of Dr Michael Watt, the consultant neurologist at the centre of Northern Irelands biggest ever recall, have called on the Belfast Health Trust to explain the reason for the move. Members of the We Support Dr Watt group gathered outside the BBCs Blackstaff studios yesterday morning to highlight their campaign calling for Dr Watts immediate reinstatement as their consultant. The groups organiser Christine Lynch told the Belfast Telegraph: We need the Trust to issue a statement immediately telling us exactly why they initiated this recall. Is this really about misdiagnosis as they have led the public to believe? We have been left with over 2,500 seriously ill people having the added stress of dealing with this recall and not knowing exactly why. The past four weeks have been a nightmare. As a group weve dealt with scores of patients who are traumatised by the belief they may have been misdiagnosed or given incorrect treatment, and that they may have to undergo repeated painful and intrusive investigations. Im shocked by what is happening to an outstanding neurologist. It all looks like a witch hunt. Responding to the concerns again raised by the supporters of Dr Watt, the trust said: We understand the strength of feeling surrounding the recall of patients. This decision was not taken lightly. It was based on an independent and expert review carried out by the Royal College of Physicians, which was unequivocal in its recommendation that the diagnosis and care and treatment provided to patients should be reviewed. A further trust statement said: We are very conscious that a number of patients are full of praise for Dr Watt, and indeed we very much hope that our review of his patients will provide reassurance to many of them (and to ourselves) that his care and treatment was appropriate. However, it is also important that we ensure that any patient who may not have received the appropriate care and treatment now does so. The Trust also revealed that the full report has now been shared in confidence with Dr Watt and the Public Health Agency (PHA) and the General Medical Council. The recommendations and conclusions in the report were also shared in confidence with the Ulster Independent Clinic and Hillsborough Private Clinic, the clinics where Dr Watt was practising at the time restrictions were put in place. This was so that those organisations could ensure appropriate action in relation to those patients within Dr Watts practice at the time of the restrictions. The report contains personal information relating to the doctor. The report also contains personal information relating to the care and treatment provided to individual patients and arrangements have been made for those patients to receive the details of their own individual case review. The Electoral Commission has confirmed it is investigating money paid by Mid and East Antrim Council for a table at an event hosted by Ian Paisley. Last September, the North Antrim MP hosted the event at the Tullyglass Hotel in Ballymena. Questions have been raised about a 1,500 payment made by Mid and East Antrim Council to sponsor a table at the event, with both the Council and Ian Paisley saying the money went directly to the hotel. In a statement on Wednesday, the Electoral Commission said it had "opened an investigation into the donation from Mid and East Antrim Council to Ian Paisley MP". "We cant go into further detail as this is now a live investigation," it added. Environment Secretary Michael Gove was the guest speaker at the event. Sinn Fein Mid and East Antrim Councillor Patrice Hardy welcomed the investigation. "I very much welcome todays confirmation that a formal probe has now been launched," she said. The ratepayers have a right to know whether the DUP benefited financially from the councils money, and if so, what is going to be done about it." Last month Northern Ireland's local government auditor confirmed it would review the Council's payment. In a statement, the Northern Ireland Audit Office said it was "aware of that particular issue" and will "specifically review that transaction as part of our audit procedures when we come to review the accounts". Mid and East Antrim Council has previously said the decision to purchase the table was made by council members, and the event was attended by representative from various parties and representatives from the agri-food sector. A Council spokesperson said: "Council paid The Tullyglass Hotel via electronic payment. No money was exchanged between Council and the DUP. Council will fully co-operate with any investigation." The event last September was sponsored by by Belfast International Airport, which also sponsored the DUP's annual North Antrim constituency dinner in February, where former Conservative minister Priti Patel was interviewed by Ian Paisley about Brexit. Figures for donations released by the Electoral Commission on Wednesday show Belfast International Airport was the highest sponsor in the first quarter of 2018, having paid 4,000 to the DUP. After questions were raised about sponsorship by the airport in February, a spokesperson said: "Belfast International Airport is a privately owned company and doesnt receive Government subsidies or assistance. "We support all our political parties where it is clear the events they organise, or are a part of, are to the benefit of the airport." The DUP has been contacted for comment. A new flags protocol has been agreed for the Ormeau Road in south Belfast. It is set to see only Union flags and Ulster flags being flown from June to September. The move, announced by the Ballynafeigh Unionist Forum yesterday, comes after a similar protocol was agreed for the nearby Ravenhill area. DUP MLA Christopher Stalford welcomed it, saying he believes it will improve community relations. He said yesterday on BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback programme that if any paramilitary flags go up in the area, he will call for their removal, and if necessary stand at the bottom of the ladder while they are taken down. The protocol was agreed after talks between a number of political parties, including the DUP, PUP and Green Party, as well as South Belfast ACT Initiative, UPRG, members of the Loyal Orders, bands and the wider Ballynafeigh community which have been going on since Christmas. It sparked a mixed reaction politically yesterday, with Green Party MLA Clare Bailey calling it a "positive development". However, SDLP MLA Claire Hanna said questions remain and Alliance councillor Emmet McDonough-Brown said it was a "slap in the face to Ormeau residents", adding that he believes it "does nothing to build community in our shared space". Ms Bailey defended her support, describing the Ormeau Road flags protocol as a "common sense approach to an issue that had a really negative impact on community relations over the last number of years". Sinn Fein MLA Mairtin O Muilleoir said the protocol would "bring no comfort to those who wish to see an end to the use of flags to harass and intimidate the majority nationalist community in the district". The agreed Ormeau protocol consists of five points, including flags should go up in the middle of June and be taken down no later than early September. It also says the only flags to be displayed should be the Union flag and the Ulster flag, and that no flags associated with paramilitary groups should be displayed and that there should only be one flag per lamp post. The fifth point says that "out of respect" no flags should be placed on the lamp post closest to the entrance to the Catholic Church near Rosetta roundabout. The Ballynafeigh Unionist Forum said they have made efforts to understand other people's traditions, and hope people will respect theirs. The Electoral Commission has released figures showing Northern Ireland's political parties received over 275,000 worth of funding in the first quarter of 2018. (stock photo) The Electoral Commission has released figures showing Northern Ireland's political parties received over 275,000 worth of funding in the first quarter of 2018. A total of 277,039 was given to parties in the province, with 271,039 coming from public funds and 6,000 from donations. Northern Ireland's political parties receive public funds from the Assembly depending on their number of MLAs. Between January and March of this year, the DUP and Sinn Fein were the only parties with MPs - making them the only parties eligible for funding from the House of Commons. The DUP was the biggest recipient of public funds, with 103,848 (55,627 coming from the Commons). They were followed by Sinn Fein which received 80,327 (40,412 coming from the Commons). The SDLP received 27,481; the UUP received 23,926; Alliance Party received 18,615; and the Green Party received 16,842. Expand Close The public funding received by Northern Ireland political parties / Credit: Electoral Commission / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The public funding received by Northern Ireland political parties / Credit: Electoral Commission Only the DUP and the UUP reported donations to the Electoral Commission, with 2,000 given to the UUP's North Down Association by an individual, and 4,000 given to the DUP by Belfast International Airport. Read More Sinn Fein failed to meet the deadline for reporting donations for the first quarter of 2018, which the Electoral Commission will now consider in line with its enforcement policy. The only other party which failed to meet the deadline for reporting donations was the United Kingdom Veterans' and People's Party, which does not have any elected representatives in Northern Ireland. Ann Watt, head of the Electoral Commission in Northern Ireland said: "This is the second time that we have published data on how much funding political parties in Northern Ireland are receiving. We welcome the public scrutiny and transparency this allows within our democratic process. However on this occasion it is disappointing to report that two parties failed to deliver their returns on time. Where there is no reasonable explanation for such a failure we will take a robust approach in line with our Enforcement Policy. The publication of political donations in Northern Ireland comes after the passing of the Transparency of Donations and Loans (NI Political Parties) Order 2018 was passed in Parliament. Theresa May should allow a free Commons vote on abortion law reform in Northern Ireland, senior Tory MP Dr Sarah Wollaston has said. Following last weeks overwhelming vote in favour of legal abortion in the Republic, the PM has faced cross-party calls to deliver similar rights to women north of the border. The Prime Minister faces a political headache over the issue however because her fragile administration depends on the support of 10 Democratic Unionist Party MPs, who strongly oppose any reform to Northern Irelands strict laws. Dr Wollaston, speaking to Channel 4 News, argued that the deal with the DUP would not be affected as however as the supply and confidence arrangement does not extend to social policy in matters such as this. Expand Close Jacob Rees-Mogg said he was saddened by the result of the referendum (Stefan Rousseau/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Jacob Rees-Mogg said he was saddened by the result of the referendum (Stefan Rousseau/PA) Dr Wollaston, who chairs the Commons health and social care committee, went on to say that the forthcoming domestic violence bill offered a real opportunity to give Northern Irish women the same rights other British women have enjoyed since the abortion act was passed in 1967. She said: We feel that this is an opportunity for the Prime Minister to make it clear that there will be a free vote on this issue and that she welcomes a cross-party amendment so that we can actually make sure that there is fairness across the whole of the United Kingdom. Devolution is extremely important but human rights are not a devolved matter, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for the Prime Minister to allow this to go forwardSarah Wollaston What were seeking from the Prime Minister is an assurance that she wont delay the domestic violence bill and that she will make sure that it is a free vote. The pattern has always been for things like this, that are matters of conscience, they are not whipped votes along party lines. Dr Wollaston accepted health was a devolved matter, but added: Devolution is extremely important but human rights are not a devolved matter, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for the Prime Minister to allow this to go forward. Her comments are in marked contrast to fellow backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg, a staunch Roman Catholic who opposes abortion as a matter of principle, who said he was saddened by the referendum result in Ireland. Expand Close Yes campaigners in Ireland celebrate (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Yes campaigners in Ireland celebrate (Niall Carson/PA) He insisted it should be a matter for Northern Irish politicians to decide whether to relax the current restrictions. He urged Mrs May to encourage all parties in Northern Ireland to restore devolved institutions including the Assembly, which has been suspended since January 2017. This issue is really one of devolution, the North-East Somerset MP told LBC radio. This responsibility is devolved to Northern Ireland and if you respect our constitutional settlement then these issues ought to be decided in the right place. Im aware that the Assembly isnt currently sitting, but this is one of the reasons for encouraging Northern Irish politicians to bring their Assembly back together, so that they can settle these issues that are their responsibility. Downing Street believes that any reform in Northern Ireland is an issue for Northern Ireland, a source said, adding it shows one of the important reasons we need a functioning executive back up and running. I think once you start picking and choosing on the devolution settlement, you might find that you do great damage to the UnionJacob Rees-Mogg, Tory MP Restating his personal opposition to abortion, he said: I believe that life starts at the point of conception and life within the womb is worthy of protection. I was saddened by the result in the Republic of Ireland. The heartbroken sister of a man knocked down and killed in a hit-and-run in Co Tyrone has made an emotional appeal for information. Edmundas Cizauskas (46), who was originally from Lithuania, died after being struck by a car Killyman Road in Dungannon on January 30, 2018. The car fled the scene and police have yet to find the driver - more than four months after the tragedy. His sister, Ligita Lukosiene, said: "My brother was very friendly, good, joyful, honest. He was working. My brother was born and grew up in Lithuania. Eight years ago we came to Dungannon. Every day we talked to each other on the phone. I miss him so much. "I had only him here in this country. Please help me find out what happened that night. Maybe somebody saw what happened that night. Maybe somebody saw or heard something about what happened. Please contact the police. Help. Thank you so much. Four months ago Edmundas Cizauskas lost his life to a hit and run driver in Dungannon. Today his sister is making an emotional plea for help in identifying the car and driver responsible. If you can help police, please call 101. pic.twitter.com/mNbSmGLgTc Police Mid Ulster (@PSNIMidUlster) May 30, 2018 Mr Cizauskas was a production operative who worked at the Dunbia meat factory. He had been living in Dungannon for several years after moving from Siauliai in northern Lithuania. Senior Investigating Officer Inspector John McKenna, said: I am appealing for the driver of that vehicle or anyone who has any information regarding the driver or the identification of that vehicle to come forward and help police with their enquiries. "Please come forward and speak to us. Help us to give the family some sort of closure and justice regarding this incident. The investigating team can be contacted on 101 with the reference 1263 30/01/2018. Motion will be tabled at Belfast City Council next week to commemorate the Srebrenica genocide of 1995. The move, proposed by Alliance councillor David Armitage and seconded by the DUPs George Dorrian, comes ahead of a series of events across Belfast to remember the massacre. More than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces on July 11, 1995 and 20,000 more civilians were displaced from the Srebrenica area in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. What took place at Srebrenica almost 25-years-ago would go on to be remembered as one of the worst cases of ethnic cleansing Europe has ever seen. On July 8, Crescent Arts Centre will be screening Fog of Srebrenica - a documentary telling the stories of the survivors of the genocide. Belfast City Hall will host a commemoration event on July 10, and an inter-faith walk will take place from City Hall to St Annes Cathedral on Sunday July 15. The series of events have been organised with the help of Remembering Srebrenica NI, the Northern Ireland arm of the UK charity Remembering Srebrenica. Councillor Armitage said he is bring the motion before BCC to combat hate crime and to remember the genocide so that history does not repeat itself. Forget the ethnic origin, the religious outlook. These are people. Fathers, brothers, sons. Murdered, he said. These could have been the postman, shop owner, cafe owner. Sometimes numbers can hide the reality. 8,000 is the size of Magherafelt. Courage is needed now. To remember the genocide. As Serbs are trying to whitewash this from history. Saying many died trying to flee the area and got caught in the crossfire. Courage is needed from us to remember and tell their story. So violence will not happen there again and so those who are guilty will be brought to justice. The Srebrenica commemoration motion will be table the annual meeting of Belfast City Council next Monday, June 4. Theresa May will not intervene to help lift Northern Irelands ban on abortion, Downing Street has said. Pressure on the prime minister to act has grown in the wake of the Republic of Irelands referendum, which saw the country vote for reform of its abortion laws. Senior Conservatives such as Sarah Wollaston, the chair of the Commons Health Committee, and Anne Milton, the education minister, have backed calls for a free vote in parliament on lifting the Northern Irish ban, while cabinet ministers such as Penny Mordaunt are also said to be ready to push for change. Read More However, Mrs Mays spokesperson said the government believed the issue was a matter for the Northern Ireland Assembly, which has not sat since January last year after power-sharing collapsed. The spokesperson said: This is a devolved matter. It is important to recognise that the people of Northern Ireland are entitled to their own process which is run by elected politicians. Our focus is restoring a democratically accountable devolved government in Northern Ireland so that locally accountable politicians can make decisions on behalf of the public they represent. Asked whether Conservative MPs would be given a free vote on the amendment, the Downing Street spokesperson said: Where Westminster has had votes in relation to this in the past there has been a free vote, but Im not going to comment on hypothetical amendments. Calls for a change to the law pose a headache for Mrs May as she relies on the DUP to prop up her government. DUP leader Arlene Foster has already warned the prime minister against intervening on the issue, saying: Fridays referendum has no impact upon the law in Northern Ireland, but we obviously take note of issues impacting upon our nearest neighbour. A referendum was held in the Republic of Ireland because of the constitutional prohibition on abortion that existed there. No such constitutional bar exists in Northern Ireland. She added: The legislation governing abortion is a devolved matter, and it is for the Northern Ireland assembly to debate and decide such issues. Some of those who wish to circumvent the assemblys role may be doing so simply to avoid its decision. Labour MP Stella Creasy has said she will table an amendment to the Domestic Violence Bill that would standardise abortion law across the UK in effect making it legal in Northern Ireland. She claimed more than 150 parliamentarians have already expressed support for the change. Rosalind and John Handcock with Lisa, Grace, Joseph and Nigel Street in Belfast yesterday From visitors stepping off the luxurious Royal Princess cruise ship to budget backpackers - tourists exploring Belfast for the first time yesterday were treated to yet another day of glorious sunshine. Posing for a selfie beside the Big Fish sculpture by the River Lagan, tourists shared their thoughts on the city. Nigel Street, from Stoke-on-Trent, is on a four-day visit with his family. "We've been really impressed, we've just been around the City Hall and we're going to the Titanic Museum this afternoon," he said. "It's been very welcoming. "We were told on the open top bus tour there's been no government here for over 500 days - it does seem strange. "Our typical spend for the trip between four adults and two children would be about 1,000 to 1,500 for the four days." Lisa Street added: "The weather has made it for us, it feels very continental and like we're properly abroad. "It is strange that there's no government, but there has been a lot of topsy turvy goings on at Stormont. "But tourism-wise, it seems to us like it's business as usual." John and Rosalind Hancock, who were with the Street family, were also equally impressed. "Apart from the good luck we've had with the weather, everything seems really well organised," said John. "We're looking forward to the Titanic Museum and the Giant's Causeway tomorrow, it's all been very easy to do and to get around. "I've only ever been to Dublin before in Ireland on a boozy weekend when I was younger, so it's nice to come here on a family trip." Rosalind said: "The weather's so beautiful, it has been really nice. "There's lots of nice places to eat, Stormont was impressive to see yesterday even though I don't think anyone was in it!" Colchester couple Azeem Thahir (28) and Federica Bonsignore (26) are in Belfast for the first time and are staying for four days. "We're just checking out the city centre today and the Titanic Quarter," said Azeem. "Tomorrow we're going to go on a Game of Thrones tour and visit the Giant's Causeway." Federica said: "To me it's really about seeing the city centre as we're only here for a few days." Neither knew that Stormont had been collapsed for so long. "We had no idea there's no government here to be honest, we did hear all about the referendum in the south though," said Azeem. He added: "Your overall spend depends on your hotel and lifestyle, but for a couple away for a few days I think we'd spend about 1,000." Sally Henning, in her 60s and from Australia, had just stepped off the Royal Princess for a day visit to Belfast. "It's interesting," she said. "We've mainly been up where the murals are along the peace wall so I did like hearing the guides talk about that time in your history. "It's interesting and it orientates yourself to the city. "Now we're just going to enjoy exploring the city centre." She added: "I was aware there's no government here, but you're not the only country in the world this happens to, if you think of Italy this week. "Spending wise, I'm not sure, because we haven't had lunch yet. We've had morning tea and we'll have to buy a few gifts and postcards. "I have until 8.30pm to be back on board so we'll see how the day goes." Teodorico Paucar (30) from Peru and Yulia Sherban (36) from Ukraine both work on board the Royal Princess, and had just a few hours to take in the city. "We've managed to see the Titanic museum, it was nice and very impressive, especially all the 3D technology," said Yulia." Teodorico added: "We'll go for a cup of coffee and some lunch and that's all we have time for. So the museum tickets and the lunch price is all we'll get to spend." Yulia said: "We don't know anything about the politics here if we're being honest, as we're always on the move." Renee Lau (22) and Lee Shokyan (22) are both from Malaysia but live in Carlow. Yesterday, they made the 150-mile journey to Belfast by train to visit their friend Wee Ling (22) for two days. Renee said: "The main purpose for us coming up is the Giant's Causeway, that's such a big draw for us and I can't wait to see it." Lee said: "We've just arrived off the train so we haven't got started yet but we did have lunch at the famous Crown Bar." Like most visitors, the fallout at Stormont made little impression. Wee said: "They're not really political types, just up to enjoy themselves." Both Renee and Lee said their budget for the mini-break was about 50 per day. Glaswegian backpackers Gemma Spence (24), Campbell Kerr (24) and Kirstie Brown (23) are finishing off a 10-day tour of Ireland with two days in Belfast. "We're camping just outside the city centre so we thought we'd just pop in and see what's going on," said Campbell. "We saw the Titanic Museum but for us it was a bit too expensive to go inside and visit so we thought we'd just try to explore the city. "We've been all over Ireland, down the west coast and up to Dublin before heading here. "We've not seen too much of Belfast yet." Gemma said: "I had no idea there's been no government here for so long. We're here to enjoy ourselves more than anything." Kirstie said: "We've made it a budget trip so we're trying to stick to just spending 20 a day." Making their way into the city centre, the group prefer not to make too many plans but their first stop is a tour of Belfast City Hall and possibly a black taxi tour. Women from Northern Ireland could be able to have abortions in the Republic when its new laws are introduced, the Taoiseach has said. Leo Varadkar said he could not imagine why women from Northern Ireland would not be able to receive treatment for crisis pregnancies, when Northern Irish people can already access healthcare in the Republic. The Taoiseach made the comments as Prime Minister Theresa May comes under increasing pressure to make changes following the resounding Yes vote in the Republic. Abortions are outlawed in nearly all cases in Northern Ireland. Once legislation is passed in the Republic, Northern Ireland will be the only part of the UK or Ireland where prohibition is maintained. "We do have people who already come to our hospitals from Northern Ireland for healthcare so I imagine it will be treated as a normal part of our health service," Mr Varadkar said. But he added it would have to be examined as legislators draft a bill in the coming months. Opposition TD Micheal Martin called on the Irish Government to ensure women in Northern Ireland can access abortion services in Irish GP surgeries and hospitals. "It's our obligation and mandate to ensure the passage of this legislation because of the urgency of the issue for many women in our society," Mr Martin said. Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald said the issue is very important as Brexit is looming. Mr Varadkar told the Dail yesterday that the Irish Government wanted to legislate for abortion as quickly as possible. However he said it should not be rushed because some people do not accept the referendum result and may legally challenge the legislation. Mr Varadkar added it is likely to be January before parliament will be able to give full effect to the will of the people. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCog) said women in Northern Ireland should be able to access abortion care services within their own country. Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close People attend a protest calling of for provision of abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. Pic: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) Getty Images BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) Getty Images People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) Getty Images A pregnant woman holds a sign outside Belfast City Hall, during a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) Getty Images People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA A woman holds a poster of Savita Halappanava at Belfast City Hall, during a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) Getty Images BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) Getty Images BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: A pregnant woman takes part in the campaign group Solidarity with Repeal as it holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) Getty Images Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Maeve McGaughey attends a rally organised by Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal, for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Maeve McGaughey attends a rally organised by Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal, for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp People attend a protest calling of for provision of abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. Pic: Niall Carson/PA Wire RCog president Professor Lesley Regan said following the referendum outcome women in Northern Ireland now face one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world. "The current legal situation means healthcare professionals in Northern Ireland struggle to provide support for women requesting an abortion or safely manage any post-abortion complications," Prof Regan said. "We recognise that this is a highly politicised issue but the current situation is unacceptable and leaves doctors, nurses and midwives working in a precarious legal vacuum in this core part of women's sexual and reproductive healthcare." She added that while the decision by the English and Scottish Governments to fund abortions on the NHS for women from Northern Ireland was an important step forward, it remained unacceptable that these women must travel overseas when faced with an unwanted pregnancy. Health Minister Simon Harris brought a memo to Cabinet yesterday morning to begin drafting the detailed legislation. He is to draft legislation that would allow abortions within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, subject to medical advice and a cooling-off period, and up to 24 weeks in some circumstances. Speaking before the cabinet meeting, he said: "It will take until the end of the year because it's not just about the law - we have to have the law, we must have the clinical guidelines drawn up by medical practitioners. "We also have to have the regulation of medication in Ireland - so there's three, I suppose, big bodies of work we have to do over the coming weeks and months. "Now that the people have voted Yes, we very much have the green light for them to do that." Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Maeve McGaughey attends a rally organised by Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal, for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Maeve McGaughey attends a rally organised by Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal, for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 28/05/2018 Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal hold a rally for abortion rights in Northern Ireland at Belfast City Hall on Monday. The Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country's abortion ban in a landmark referendum on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: A pregnant woman takes part in the campaign group Solidarity with Repeal as it holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire A woman holds a poster of Savita Halappanava at Belfast City Hall, during a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) A pregnant woman holds a sign outside Belfast City Hall, during a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire People attend a People Before Profit protest calling of for provision of Abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. See PA story IRISH Abortion. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND - MAY 28: Campaign group Solidarity with Repeal holds a rally calling for abortion rights outside Belfast City Hall on May 28, 2018 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The rally follows the Irish referendum result at the weekend which saw a landslide victory for the Yes campaign which sought the amendment of legislation laws regarding abortion rights in the south. Women in Northern Ireland have to travel to England, Scotland or Wales to have an abortion and can still be prosecuted under the existing laws should they buy abortion pills on the internet. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) People attend a protest calling of for provision of abortion in Northern Ireland, at Belfast City Hall. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday May 28, 2018. Pic: Niall Carson/PA Wire Hundreds call for easing of Northern Ireland abortion laws at pro-choice Belfast rally [Photos] Close A prominent Catholic publication has declared "Ireland has fallen" in its latest edition. The Catholic Herald reports on the "devastating" referendum result in the Republic at the weekend which saw over 66% of the vote in favour of repealing abortion laws. Read More For the cover of it's June edition it features the grim reaper standing over the island of Ireland under the headline: "Ireland has fallen". "As long as you aren't over-reacting then," was one response. This week's cover: Ireland has fallen Jon Anderson on a devastating referendum result pic.twitter.com/PSbyOKphX1 Catholic Herald (@CatholicHerald) May 30, 2018 The London-based subscription publication describes itself as "Britain's leading Catholic magazine". The publication has covered extensively the Republic's vote on abortion. In one editorial the Prime Minister was criticised for congratulating the Irish people on the result. "What was she thinking?" the opinion piece asks. "Does no one in Downing Street recognise that the prospective death of thousands of unborn children is not a matter for celebration, much less congratulation?" Brexit has been compared by a leading Remain supporter to appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Former foreign office minister Lord Malloch-Brown, head of the Best for Britain group, made the comments after billionaire George Soros announced a campaign for a new Brexit referendum is set to be launched. Mr Soros who is reported to have given about 500,000 to Best for Britain, which was set up last year by anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller said action was needed as EU withdrawal was immensely damaging for the UK. For centuries Britain has ignored events on continental Europe at its perilLord Malloch-Brown Lord Malloch-Brown said Britain needed to stay close to the EU because instances like appeasement showed what happened when the UK tried to shut itself off from the continent. He told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: Britains history as an island nation adjacent to mainland Europe is when we try to, sort of, pull away from Europes problems and close ourselves off to them they have a horrible habit of infecting us anyway. Appeasement in the 1930s, you name it. For centuries Britain has ignored events on continental Europe at its peril. The European Union is in an existential crisis and must reinvent itself to escape it. A multi-track Europe would allow member states a wider variety of choices that would have far-reaching benefits. https://t.co/eL0CgL6gWv George Soros (@georgesoros) May 29, 2018 He said Mr Soross reputation as the man who broke the Bank of England in 1992, when the financier bet against sterling on the money markets, was an unrelated issue to the anti-Brexit push. He broke the Bank of England as a financier because the British pound was over-extended. It wasnt credible. He broke the pound, not the Bank of England, I should say. He is someone who has devoted decades to an extraordinary global philanthropy which has fought for democracy and open values. Best for Britain, which wants to keep the UK open to EU membership, is expected to publish its campaign manifesto calling for a second referendum on June 8. Serena Alexander-Benson is in Poland with her mother, police said (Metropolitan Police/PA) A schoolgirl who sparked an international hunt after she left the UK for Poland has been found. Serena Alexander-Benson, 13, is in the country with her mother, Scotland Yard said, and police are investigating whether any crime has been committed. The teenager left the Wimbledon home where she lives with her father at around 7.50am on May 25, apparently on her way to school. When she did not arrive there she was reported missing. Police found that she had travelled out of the UK in a car on a Eurotunnel train with a female friend of her mother. On Wednesday the National Crime Agency revealed that Polish authorities had confirmed that Serena is with her mother. Flags fly on a roof eight months after the passing of Hurricane Maria in the Barrio Jacana Piedra Blanca area of Yabucoa (AP) A new study claims that many more deaths than normal occurred in Puerto Rico in the three months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, mostly because of problems with obtaining medicines or medical care. Researchers who surveyed a small sample of areas estimated that up to 4,600 more deaths than usual occurred, far more than earlier studies have suggested. At least one independent expert questioned the methods and the number in the new study. Donald Berry, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Centre, said: This estimate could be off by thousands. Easily. Expand Close Many people are still without power in Puerto Rico (AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Many people are still without power in Puerto Rico (AP) The research was published online in the New England Journal of Medicine. It is the latest study to analyse how many people died during or after the Category 4 storm that hit the US territory in September 2017, causing more than an estimated 100 billion dollars in damage. Researchers led by Harvard University called the official toll of 64 deaths a substantial underestimate. Maria caused the longest blackout in US history, leaving the entire island of 3.3 million people without power, including those in hospitals and nursing homes who relied on respirators. Researchers surveyed 3,299 households earlier this year and used the findings to extrapolate to the whole island. They found that 31% reported disruptions in medical services, and more than 14% said they were unable to access medicines. Researchers said: Indirect deaths resulting from worsening of chronic conditions or from delayed medical treatments may not be captured on death certificates. Expand Close A home in the Barrio Jacana Piedra Blanca still has a temporary canvas roof cover eight months after Hurricane Maria (AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A home in the Barrio Jacana Piedra Blanca still has a temporary canvas roof cover eight months after Hurricane Maria (AP) They calculated 4,645 more people died in the three months after Maria compared with the same period in 2016. One of the researchers, Rafael Irizarry of Harvard University, told reporters that the estimate is uncertain because of its limited size, but that the study still provides valuable information, including how some people died. Previous studies have found that the number of direct and indirect hurricane-related deaths in Puerto Rico is higher than the official toll, including a 2017 report that there were nearly 500 more deaths than usual on the island in September. In late February, Puerto Ricos governor announced that a team of experts at George Washington University would lead an independent review to determine the number of deaths caused by Hurricane Maria amid ongoing accusations that the government undercounted the toll. A preliminary report was due in May, but Puerto Rico officials announced last week that the team requested and was granted more time. Expand Close The hurricane led to the longest power outage in US history (AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The hurricane led to the longest power outage in US history (AP) The government of Puerto Rico issued a statement in response to the study saying that it welcomed the research and would analyse it. Carlos Mercader, executive director of Puerto Ricos Federal Affairs Administration, said: As the world knows, the magnitude of this tragic disaster caused by Hurricane Maria resulted in many fatalities. We have always expected the number to be higher than what was previously reported. Meanwhile, a couple of media organisations have gone to court to obtain more details on the deaths reported in Puerto Rico last year. Demographers have said that Puerto Rico recorded an official average of 82 deaths a day in the two weeks before Maria hit. The number increased to 117 a day after the storm pummelled the island in mid-September, and then fell below usual in October. Arkady Babchenko was shot dead at his Kiev home (AP) Russia is willing to help Ukraine investigate the murder of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, a senior MP has said. The call came after Mr Babchenko, who was scathingly critical of the Kremlin, was gunned down in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on Tuesday. The 41-year-old had fled Russia last year, fearing for his life, and settled in Ukraine. He had served in the Russian army during the two wars in Chechnya in 1990s and became one of Russias best-known war reporters. Expand Close The multi-storey building where Russian opposition journalist Arkady Babchenko lived in Kiev (AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The multi-storey building where Russian opposition journalist Arkady Babchenko lived in Kiev (AP) Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the State Duma, told Russian news agencies that Russia would be happy to help with the investigation if Ukrainian authorities requested it. Ukrainian authorities have said they think Mr Babchenko was killed because of his work. Several Ukrainian politicians blamed the Kremlin for the killing comments which Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed as cynical. Last week's historic referendum is further evidence that Ireland is changing for the better and a new more compassionate country is emerging where all citizens - north and south - must be treated equally. As with Marriage Equality in 2015, the people in the 26 Counties voted overwhelmingly to embrace a more progressive future, a future based on the equality, dignity and rights of all citizens. But here in the north, it's a very different story. Here the DUP remain determined to carve out a much bleaker future. Within days of the referendum result, DUP MLA Jim Wells announced that his party, if it had the opportunity, would use the Petition of Concern to block any change to abortion laws in the north. This echoes the approach they have consistently taken to marriage equality when the DUP repeatedly deployed the petition of Concern to block it in defiance of an Assembly and popular majority. Again, this is nothing new. The majority in the north support language rights but the DUP have set their face against it. The majority support the right of victims to truth yet the DUP leader prevented the Lord Chief Justice from carrying out Legacy inquests - a move later branded as 'unlawful' by Belfast High Court. And of course the DUP have always rejected the will of the people when it comes to the Good Friday Agreement - an accord they have never accepted despite its overwhelming endorsement by the people of Ireland, north and south. So what next for rights and equality in the north? What next for the concept of democracy? Clearly, it is unacceptable and unsustainable for the people of the north to be denied the same rights, the same choices and the same democratic entitlements as available everywhere else on these islands. It is shameful that the DUP, supported by their Tory partners, continue to deny these rights in opposition to the popular will. The British Government is supposed to act with rigorous impartiality. As a co-guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement, it has responsibilities for equality and the rights of citizens. Clearly, this British Government has abdicated those responsibilities in order to prioritise its self-serving arrangement with the DUP. However, such an anti-democratic and anti-equality position is not sustainable in the longer term and the referendum has cast a new international spotlight on the denial of rights to citizens in the north. The DUP and Tories can't continue to block equality indefinitely. They cannot prevent the emergence of a new Ireland where all citizens, north and south, are treated equally. More and more citizens are demanding their rights. More and more sectors are having a debate about the future and what kind of society they want to live in. I believe there is a responsibility on all progressive party leaders to reflect that by standing together in the interests of citizens and a future based on rights and equality for all. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Wednesday his government might reconsider resuming a search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 if new information emerged, while his transport minister announced that a final report on the joint international hunt would be publicized in July. Ocean Infinity, a U.S. seabed exploration company, on Tuesday ended its search for the airliner after more than three months of using the latest underwater imaging technology to sweep an area of the southern Indian Ocean. The company had signed a no cure, no fee contract with a 90-day timeframe in January, a year after Australia, China and Malaysia officially called off a joint search. If we find any new information, we may resume the search. But for now, we have to end it, Mahathir, 92, told reporters after his second cabinet meeting since leading the opposition bloc to a surprise election triumph this month. Flight MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 12 crew and 227 passengers, most of them from China. The disappearance of the Boeing 777 has been as dubbed one of the worlds greatest aviation mysteries. The coverage area is vast and we have yet to find any evidence, Mahathir said. Mahathir expressed regret over his governments decision, but said we cannot keep searching for something we cannot find. Transport Minister Anthony Loke told a news conference later on Wednesday that the joint international investigation was expected to release its report in July. There are many people interested in studying the report, including the never before-released data, Loke said. If any experts can provide evidence which can help us track the aircraft, we will revisit the location. When asked by reporters if the report would include controversial elements, the minister said: To me, whatever elements, we will just publish it. I can assure you the final report will be published with full disclosure, he said. There will not be any edits or anything hidden. In Oct. 3, 2017, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) published a report saying that the planes captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, had flown a route on his home simulator six weeks before the planes disappearance and it was initially similar to the course actually taken by the aircraft. But aviation intelligence agency Flight Global reported that then-Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai played down the ATSB data, saying that the simulator had contained thousands of simulations to many destinations. Calvin Shim, whose wife was a crew member on the plane, told BenarNews that while he found the theory of a murder-suicide by the pilot hard to believe, he could not totally discount the possibility. If he really had suicidal intentions, then I believe the police will somehow be able to find some clue about it through his closest kin, Shim said. But the police cleared him as a suspect, I think, in the early days [of the probe]. Other next-of-kin also spoke to BenarNews and shared their frustrations regarding the new governments decision to end the search, directing their ire at Loke, the transport minister. He has only been in office for a week and has already come to a conclusion to end it all, said Jacquita Gomes, whose husband, Patrick Gomes, was also among the planes crew. Has he really sat down and gone through and questioned all the discrepancies and mistakes made by those responsible during the initial search of the plane until this date? she said. A few pieces of aircraft debris have been found on Indian Ocean islands and along the east coast of Africa, but the search had cost Malaysia about 500 million ringgit (U.S.$125 million), Loke said. Officials said Ocean Infinity was expected to get paid up to $70 million if it found the jet or its flight data and voice cockpit recorders, also called black boxes. Mahathirs government stopped the search days after finance minister, Lim Guan Eng, said that Kuala Lumpurs liabilities had ballooned to 1 trillion ringgit (U.S. $251.7 billion), or more than 80 percent of the nations Gross Domestic Product. On Monday, Mahathir announced he would revisit the terms for a China-backed multibillion-dollar rail link project and also scrapped a planned high-speed rail link to Singapore, citing huge costs and a lack of return on investment. A dilapidated and rusted out BRP Sierra Madre, which was purposely left stranded by the Philippine Navy in Ayungin Shoal (Second Thomas) in the South China Sea to serve as Manila's command outpost in the disputed maritime region, is seen from a military plane, March 2014. Updated at 12:08 p.m. ET on 2018-05-30 The Philippines is constructing lighthouses in areas it controls in the disputed South China Sea, officials said Wednesday as they denied persistent claims that Manila had been quiet in the face of Chinese military expansionism in the region. Manila would not abandon a 2016 finding by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which ruled in favor of the Philippines after it questioned Chinas encroachment in Scarborough Shoal, National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon said. The shoal lies west of the main Philippine island of Luzon and is clearly within the countrys exclusive economic zone. Esperon said the ruling was merely set aside in line with President Rodrigo Dutertes policy of keeping cordial relations with countries that have varying claims to the South China Sea, or the West Philippine Sea, as Manila calls it. At the proper time, we will take full advantage of the tribunal ruling, even as China refuses to recognize this, to serve as basis for the countrys exercise of sovereignty and jurisdiction over features that are in the Philippine territorial waters, Esperon said. While the government appeared to be keeping silent, he said, it was continuously monitoring actions in the sea region. In particular, the government noted with serious concern the growing militarization in the area, such as the deployment of military assets on Chinese-held islands near Philippine territory. In response to these actions, the Philippine government has not been remiss in undertaking diplomatic actions against any nation, Esperon said, adding that the foreign office had already made representations through a bilateral consultation mechanism between the Philippines and China. And to dispel public fears that the country was not doing anything amid the Chinese movements, Esperon said the government was presently upgrading port and airstrip facilities on Pag-asa island (Thitu island), where about 100 or so civilians live. This is necessary for trade, the preservation of the livelihood of the fisher folk, and the timely delivery of basic necessities of the community in the Municipality of Pag-asa, Esperon said. Lighthouses are also now being constructed on features held by the Philippines to ensure safety of navigation, as provided for under international conventions to provide navigational safety for all international vessels transmitting the sea region, he said. Chinese weaponry This month, China raised concerns in the region after it landed long-range bomber planes such as the H-6K, which is capable of carrying air-launched cruise missiles, on one of its occupied islands for the first time as part of training exercises. It also reportedly installed anti-ship cruise missile and surface-to-air missile systems on three islands in the Spratlys, a disputed group of atolls and isles in the South China Sea. Apart from the Philippines and China, the mineral-rich region is also contested by Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan. The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI), a think-tank, also released satellite photographs of the Chinese activities, including what appeared to be Chinese surveillance planes. The Philippine has largely kept quiet on the issue, but the government released a statement last week reiterating its commitment to protect every inch of its territory, even as it said it had no clear evidence of the Chinese buildup. President Rodrigo Duterte has also taken pains against antagonizing China, which he has called a friend and rich source of development aid. Speaking at a congressional hearing on the issue Wednesday, Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano defended the governments apparent silence on the matter, saying there was no need to publicize every action that the government took. He said the goal of protecting the countrys territorial integrity remained the same but the approach or the underlying result of such approach is different." The past administration chose the approach of being loud, resulting in us losing control of a very important area in our national territory. Yes, there were gains, there were several gains, but there were also major losses, he said. Duterte, according to Cayetano, was prudent, patient and pragmatic. This approach has produced major results. It changed the momentum towards stability, peace and cooperation, Cayetano argued, adding that not only had it brought stability but had led to cooperation with Beijing in the fields of defense, labor, trade and anti-terrorism. Ayungin Shoal But Rep. Gary Alejano, a former Marine captain, said Chinese harassment in the sea region had not stopped even as the country was putting on a friendlier diplomatic face. Early this month, he said, a Philippine Navy vessel was challenged by a Chinese coast guard vessel during a mission to resupply a small contingent in Ayuning Shoal (Second Thomas Shoal). Lying west of the Philippine island of Palawan, the shoal is guarded by a tiny contingent of Filipino Marines stationed at a dilapidated Navy vessel that was marooned there as the countrys outpost. When the Philippine Navy ship launched a rubber boat to resupply BRP Sierra Madre, a chopper of PLAN (the Peoples Liberation Army Navy) hovered in a close and dangerous distance. The PLAN chopper was so close that sea water splash entered the rubber boat, Alejano said, citing military and foreign office sources. The Chinese forces were aboard Chinese Coast Guard vessel with bow number 3368 and a PLAN ship with bow number 549. Before, it was only CCG that was challenging and harassing our troops. Now, the CCG was already accompanied by the PLAN, he said. This is a clear threat to our security forces by no less than the Chinese Coast Guard and Navy which obviously requires condemnation from our end. He chided Cayetano for not speaking out on the issue, even as he said he has been appraised of the alleged intimidation and threats. Secretary Cayetano should not feign ignorance and act clueless as if his office is not receiving pertinent information, he said. During the House hearing Wednesday, according to Alejano, Cayetano acknowledged that the incident had indeed occurred in Ayungin Shoal. But he did not give a clear answer when asked whether Manila was going to protest this. As usual, the Duterte administration gives us the same general statements that they are discussing the matter and will be taking action, but the public is still being left in the dark. If the Duterte administration wants the public to trust its approach in the West Philippine Sea, certain details meant for public consumption should be released, Alejano said. On Monday, Cayetano said in a speech that Duterte had warned he would go to war against Beijing if it broke the "red lines" his administration had set in dealing with the South China Sea dispute. The red lines would include construction activities and extraction of oil and gas in the West Philippine Sea, the local name of the waters within the Philippines' 370-kilometer (231-mile) exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea. The President has said that. If anyone gets the natural resources in the West Philippine Sea, he will go to war, Cayetano said in his speech, an official transcription of which was provided to reporters by his office. Updated to include Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano's comments on Monday about "red lines" Duterte's administration had set. Australian Catholic nun Sister Patricia Fox is greeted by supporters after filing documents at the Bureau of Immigration in Manila, May, 4, 2018. A group of Philippine lawmakers filed a bill Wednesday seeking to grant Filipino citizenship to an Australian nun who has been ordered deported by President Rodrigo Duterte for joining protests questioning his drug war. The seven-member legislators, belonging to Makabayan (Nationalist) bloc at the House of Representatives, filed House Bill No. 7806 offering citizenship to Sister Patricia Fox, 71, in recognition of her selfless service to poor Filipinos. "For 27 years, Sister Pat lived with and served the farmers, indigenous peoples and other marginalized people in the communities, the bill said. By living with the poor and oppressed, Sister Pat has come to understand, experience and embrace the culture and the struggle of the poor Filipino majority. Among those who signed and filed the proposed legislation were left-leaning members of the House. But the bill is unlikely to pass, with Duterte controlling a super majority of the 290-member Congress. The immigration bureau had given Fox until last week to leave the Philippines, but the nun had filed an appeal and had vowed to exhaust all means to fight her deportation. Actually I feel very privileged that they would consider filing a bill that would make me a citizen. Because that makes me feel very accepted, Fox told reporters Wednesday. And that has been how I always felt here, very accepted. Father Jerome Secillano, a spokesman for the influential Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, said missionary work does not only involve church assignments but also covers field duties such as meeting members of communities. Church work does not only involve the pulpit. Also part of our mission is immersion in communities. It is part of our job to have concrete works, he said. Immigration agents detained Fox last month for allegedly violating terms of her religious visa. She was found to have engaged in activities that apparently offended Duterte, including attending rallies that questioned his war on drugs that has left thousands dead. She was the second foreign activist ordered out of the country. Authorities had also deported an Italian activist blacklisted by the government. Dennis Jay Santos from Davao City contributed to this report. GMD India will support AstraZenecas global established medicines portfolio; build capabilities in regulatory science, and clinical and patient safety. Global science-led biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca officially opened its new Global Medicines Development (GMD) Centre in Bengaluru, India today. This unit is one of AstraZenecas nine GMD centres around the world that transform breakthrough molecules into medicines and monitor their use and safety. With this opening, India will now play an even bigger role in AstraZenecas global operations. Globally, GMD works with AstraZenecas two biotech units Innovative Medicines and Early Development (IMED) and MedImmune and the Global Portfolio and Product Strategy (GPPS) organisation to understand where there is unmet medical need, to shape AstraZenecas therapy area strategies from early development through to commercialisation. The GMD Bengaluru team will focus on supporting AstraZenecas medicines, which covers treatments across a range of therapy areas, including oncology, respiratory and cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. GMD Bengaluru plays a key role supporting 51 of AstraZenecas mature brands which are used by patients around the world. During the last year, the team has recruited scientific experts in the fields of regulatory science, clinical, and patient safety, and has grown from 30 to 70 people. The expansion will see a further increase to more than 100 specialists. His Excellency Klas Molin, Swedish Ambassador to India and Chief Guest for the inauguration stated, Further to the bilateral innovation partnership between India and Sweden, we are pleased to bring more Swedish innovation into the country. The opening of AstraZeneca GMD unit in India is yet another promising step for strengthening this partnership for a sustainable future between Sweden and India. Ms. Elisabeth Bjork VP, Global Medicines Development Unit Head for Cardiovascular, Metabolic Renal Diseases, AstraZeneca present at the inauguration of the new GMD office space in Bengaluru said, AstraZeneca has a long-standing commitment in India over 40 years. The GMD expansion is part of AstraZenecas continued commitment to enhance scientific innovation in the country and I am delighted to open our newest GMD site and to welcome our new colleagues to the AstraZeneca team". Ms. Veena Rajan, GMD Site Lead Bengaluru, AstraZeneca India Private Limited stated, We plan to recruit more physicians, scientists and regulatory experts to support the GMD Bengaluru, and continue to deliver value for our global mature brands in oncology, respiratory, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Mr. Siva Padmanabhan, Centre Head, Global Technology Centre Chennai, AstraZeneca India Private Limited said, The GMD expansion further strengthens AstraZenecas commitment to invest in scientific capabilities to deliver more effective medicines to help meet unmet treatment needs for patients around the world. How Academic-Industry Synergy Assuages Rising Brain Disorders With an ageing population globally, the burden of neurological disorders is rapidly increasing, posing a challenge to the sustainability of health systems. The burden of neurological disorders such as stroke, headache disorders, epilepsy, Alzheimers disease, Parkinsons disease, multiple sclerosis, encephalitis, meningitis, traumatic brain injuries, among others, is also expected to increase in India due to the rapid demographic and epidemiological transition occurring in the country. To add to it, factors such as shortages in the neurology workforce, inadequate research funding, limited supply of drugs, and scarcity of basic healthcare amenities, are making the situation worse. Lets try to unearth the practicable solutions and innovations stemming from the industry and academia. After the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, in the following 24 hours more than 70 million people took to Instagram to express their support. According to Time magazine, 70 million people in 24 hours shared support through hashtags and images. Most notably, a simple drawing of the Eiffel Tower encompassed by that of a peace sign. It was created by French artist Jean Jullien, and emerged as a symbol of peace and support following the attacks. It went viral and it has served as a basis for other social media trends of empathy and support. Social media has transformed the way we cope with trauma, but has made it impossible to ignore. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 28/5/2018 (1233 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Advertisement Advertise With Us After the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, in the following 24 hours more than 70 million people took to Instagram to express their support. According to Time magazine, 70 million people in 24 hours shared support through hashtags and images. Most notably, a simple drawing of the Eiffel Tower encompassed by that of a peace sign. It was created by French artist Jean Jullien, and emerged as a symbol of peace and support following the attacks. It went viral and it has served as a basis for other social media trends of empathy and support. Social media has transformed the way we cope with trauma, but has made it impossible to ignore. The collective sympathy that is expressed on social media I am sure has no ill or malicious intent, it has just become the new normal. But it raises questions: is it an unconscious act to portray ones intellect or make one feel as though they share the pain and anguish of a tragedy that they have little or no connection to? It is almost comical to think that one "like" can be seen as a prayer, or that a tweet will solve a humanitarian crisis. We see this in our media with hashtags like #humboldtstrong and #torontostrong. It is amazing to see people come together and grieve collectively, but is it sincere? This mob mentality of collective sympathy can be detrimental to the way we experience the world, and the way we see ourselves. In recent years, social media has transformed the way we deal with tragedy and misfortune in the world. It allows the broadcasting of world events to large groups of people in a very little amount of time. Many rely on social media for their primary source of news, and it seems not a day goes by without hearing about some sort of tragedy. It has become common place to mourn the dead via Facebook and stamp a filter on a profile picture to show solidarity to those affected or killed by means of a terrorist attack, natural disaster, or some other horrific event. The world has never been kind, and acts of violence and atrocities occur every day. But it also means that we can no longer turn a blind eye to what goes on in our world. The presence of social media during a tragedy may serve as an informative tool that allows for information at the click of a mouse, but the accessibility and graphic depictions have been known to cause additional stress and anxiety among the public. The media tends to glorify and sensationalize violence, which can be dangerous to a vulnerable audience in times of tragedy. The fires that occurred downtown Brandon over the long weekend literally hit close to home in this regard. Fortunately, no one was injured. Yet many people flocked to this area of town to see the horrific event. Filming it for the sake of posting on Facebook, I believe many people forget this was someones neighbourhood, work or home. While the intentions of the prayers and likes on Facebook and other forms of social media are rooted in kindness, perhaps in the face of tragedy, some words are better left unsaid. Rory Thexton is a Grade 12 student at Ecole secondaire Neelin High School. The trial for a CFB Shilo soldier accused of trafficking cocaine is underway, with experts weighing in on whether or not the amount of cocaine in his possession could be for personal use. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 30/5/2018 (1231 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Advertisement Advertise With Us The trial for a CFB Shilo soldier accused of trafficking cocaine is underway, with experts weighing in on whether or not the amount of cocaine in his possession could be for personal use. Brent McCarthy, a master corporal with 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricias Canadian Light Infantry, has pleaded not guilty to possession for the purpose of trafficking and possession of a prohibited weapon in Brandon Court of Queens Bench. Through an investigation conducted by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service, McCarthy was surveilled in January, 2016 travelling to Winnipeg from Shilo where he purchased cocaine from a high level trafficker, the court heard on Monday. McCarthy was stopped on his way back to Shilo near Camp Hughes and one ounce of cocaine was found in his possession. A search of his home turned up a digital scale and packaging material, the steroid Primobolan and human growth hormones, 62 needles and 80 needle tips, a Nik drug testing kit, a variety of ammunition, bear spray, as well as support patches and clothing related to the motorcycle gang the Suicide Crew. On Tuesday, RCMP Staff Sgt. Derek John Inglis testified that he believed McCarthy purchased the cocaine for the purpose of trafficking based on the totality of evidence provided including the digital scale found in the home, the cost of purchasing a single ounce of cocaine at one time, and the fact McCarthy travelled to Winnipeg to purchase it. "Was there any lack of availability of cocaine in Brandon?" Crown attorney Christina Cheater asked Inglis. "Not that Ive discovered cocaine is one of the most easily attainable drugs in the province the quality may vary but it is a ready available controlled substance," Inglis said. In early 2016, the prices of cocaine were fairly consistent, Inglis said, with one ounce of cocaine at the time costing approximately $2,000. A regular cocaine user can consume approximately a gram a day whereas a heavy user can use approximately four grams a day, Inglis said, meaning an ounce of cocaine can last for a month or a week if used by one person. Users tend to purchase in smaller amounts, "re-upping or reloading" every few days so they have less to lose should they get busted by the police, Inglis added. "It is implausible for someone to buy an ounce for their own personal use, however I do admit it is possible," Inglis said. During cross-examination, defence lawyer Patrick Sullivan asked Inglis about the greater risk of exposure posed to someone visiting their dealer more frequently. "Is it possible that someone wishing to avoid detection and not frequent a dealer 16 times a week would buy an ounce at a time?" Sullivan asked. "Its conceivable, I dont believe its likely, but its possible," Inglis said. Inglis also agreed with Sullivan when asked if a user would get a better price by buying an ounce at a time rather than multiple grams. When asked about the contents found at the home, Inglis conceded the residue found on the scale and inside a dime baggie was not tested, and couldnt rule out that the scale could have been used for the steroids found in the home. Sullivan also called Ian Rabb, an expert in cocaine addiction, to the stand, who testified hes known users to purchase an ounce of cocaine for personal use and travel distances to get it. "Is it plausible to travel from Shilo to Winnipeg and back to get good quality cocaine?" Sullivan asked. "I would say yes," Rabb responded. "People are going to go to any lengths to get the drugs they need." The trial continues today. edebooy@brandonsun.com Twitter: @erindebooy Alistair Smout British manufacturers have turned up the pressure on the government to abandon one of its post-Brexit customs proposals, slamming the idea of a technology-based plan for border checks as naive and a waste of money. UK prime minister Theresa May has ruled out Britain staying in a customs union with the EU to the dismay of many employers groups and says her government is working on two possible solutions to minimise delays at the UKs ports and airports. However, the EEF manufacturers body said it was unrealistic and naive to think a technological border solution, known as max fac, or maximum facilitation, could be implemented by the time a planned Brexit transition period ends in December 2020. It may have some long-term benefits, but suggesting max fac is a solution to our immediate problems is a non-starter, said EEF chief executive Stephen Phipson. Phipson said a max fac-style arrangement at the US-Canada border had not eliminated the need for checks on most goods. The customs conundrum which will define commerce between the UK and its biggest trading partner for decades is a test of Mays leadership as she tries to pacify rival factions in her Conservative Party and her cabinet. She also needs to win agreement from Brussels where officials have dismissed both the options being considered. The max fac option is favoured by eurosceptics in Mays party who want looser ties with the EU after the UK leaves the EU. However, last week the UKs most senior tax official said such a customs arrangement could cost businesses up to 20bn (22.8bn) a year. Under the other option, the UK would collect tariffs on imports from outside the bloc on the EUs behalf. A senior EU official last week dismissed as fantasy some of the UKs main demands for Brexit, including on the border. Chief negotiator Michel Barnier urged the UK to stop playing hide and seek. Mays spokesman yesterday criticised what he called sound bites and negative anonymous briefings and called for a more constructive tone to the negotiations. Last week, the Confederation of British Industry said remaining in a customs union was currently the only workable option for the UK. Reuters By Ann O'Loughlin The Court of Appeal has been asked to grant an injunction preventing an English county council from proceeding with the adoption of a baby who was removed from Ireland without the parents having been given the opportunity to object. It follows strong criticism earlier this month by the appeal court of the conduct of both Irish and English social workers involved in the removal of the baby and two siblings last September following legal proceedings taken here by the English council with the co-operation of the Child and Family Agency (CFA). Mr Justice Gerard Hogan, on behalf of the Court of Appeal, said Irish social workers must "stop immediately" the practice of acting in conjunction with their UK counterparts in seeking the return to Britain of children at the centre of care proceedings without the parents' knowledge of that application. If it does not stop, social workers could face contempt of court proceedings, he said. It was a practice which had grown up in recent times whereby UK social workers travel to Ireland for to arrange the return of children by applying to the courts here without notice to the parents "thus depriving them of any opportunity" to challenge the proceedings, he said. The judge said it was difficult "to avoid the impression that the child care system provided for under the Child Care Act 1991 is being circumvented for this purpose". The practice of removing children without serving notice of the court proceedings on the parents is "a wholly unlawful one". He was commenting during an appeal over the three children, all under six, who were brought by their British parents to Ireland on September, with the youngest having born only two days previously. The two oldest children had been the subject of interim care orders in the UK and, three days after they left, all three were made wards of court by the English High Court. Concerns had previously been expressed by the social services unit of their local county council about the standards of hygiene within the home, the parental capacity to manage the children, domestic violence in previous relationships and parental substance abuse, Mr Justice Hogan said. The same day as the wardship orders were obtained in the UK, the English social services contacted their counterparts here in the CFA to say they had also obtained the requisite orders that the children be returned. The CFA, on September 11, made an unannounced visit to the home of the family here and, Mr Justice Hogan said, it was important to note that "nothing of concern" was found. The District Court here granted interim care orders, with the consent of the parents, to the CFA which meant the children were placed in foster care. The parents were told by the CFA the UK social services would apply to have the English court order that they be returned by means of making an application for an enforcement order to the High Court here, without notice to the parents. On September 21, the High Court, on an ex-parte (one-side only represented) application by the English county council, made that order. The three children were handed over by the CFA to English social workers at the Rosslare ferryport and brought back to the UK. The parents were told afterwards as the English social workers believe they were a flight risk. The parents appealed the ex-parte order to the Irish High Court but were ruled out of time by two days. As a result, they then went to the three-judge Court of Appeal . Mr Justice Hogan said the English county council, which did not participate in the Court of Appeal hearing for financial reasons, said it did not intend to return the children "irrespective of the outcome of the appeal to this court". The English council also began moves to have the youngest child adopted in the UK. Today, lawyers for the parents asked the Court of Appeal to grant an injunction preventing the UK council for taking any further steps in those adoption proceedings. Following arguments from lawyers on behalf of the parents and the Attorney General, who was before the court as an assistant to the cout, the Court of Appeal said it would give its decision as soon as possible given the urgency of the situation. The UK council was not represented. By Ann O'Loughlin A couple have lost their legal challenge to An Bord Pleanalas permission for construction of a wind farm near their home in Co Cork. Klaus Balz and his wife Hanna Heubach run a family horticulture business from their home at Bear na Gaoithe, located 637 metres from the proposed wind farm at Cleanrath, Inchigeelagh. After a permission granted to Cleanrath Windfarm Ltd for construction of 11 wind turbines was overturned by the High Court in February 2016, the developer brought a fresh planning application. Cork County Council granted permission for six turbines subject to 40 conditions. However, the Board, by a 3/1 decision of April 2017 on various appeals, granted permission for 11 turbines subject to 22 conditions. That permission was in line with many, but not all, recommendations of a Board inspector. At the High Court today Mr Justice Robert Haughton dismissed all grounds of the couples judicial review challenge to the Boards decision. He adjourned the matter for two weeks to allow the sides consider the judgment before final orders are made and costs issues are addressed. Among the couples complaints was the Board inspector had failed to assess the submissions and scientific research materials presented to support their claims the 2006 Wind Energy Development Guidelines, and a UK department of energy publication on which those guidelines were based, are out-dated and unfit for purpose. They also complained the inspector failed to assess that noise from wind farms may have a profound effect on human beings. Mr Justice Haughton found the Board was not required to examine, analyse, evaluate and assess every submission and scientific paper put before it for the purposes of an Environmental Impact Assessment. The Board, he also held, had examined and evaluated the couples submissions and scientific evidence in relation to amplitude modulation - the impact of the swish noise generated from the movement of turbine blades. The fact the Board had not adopted a particular condition recommended by its inspector that noise limits should not exceed specified levels and that Cleanrath should submit a noise monitoring compliance programme before commencing development did not invalidate its approval, he held. He dismissed other arguments concerning the impact of the wind farm on the Gearagh special area of conservation. The couple had argued a lack of certainty about the cause of damage to the Gearagh SAC as a result of flood events over the last number of years meant the Board and its inspector could not have concluded beyond reasonable scientific doubt the project would not adversely affect the integrity of the Gearagh SAC. The judge said, while the best scientific knowledge considered by the Board and inspector could not have definitively answered what historically has caused the degradation of the Gearagh SAC, that was not necessary to answer the real question - whether the proposed development, including all proposed mitigation measures, will affect the integrity of the Gearagh SAC in its current state. The Board had expressly stated it had regard to the conservation objectives, he said. In carrying out an appropriate assessment, the Board had regard to the best scientific knowledge in accepting those mitigation measures would mean the proposed development would not affect the integrity of the Gearagh SAC. By Louise Roseingrave The mother of murdered criminal Jason Molyneux wept in the witness box at the opening of an inquest into her sons death. Elizabeth Molyneux formally identified her sons body to detectives after he was shot dead on January 30 last. The 27-year-old, from North William Street, was shot six times in the chest and stomach after he went to meet someone at James Larkin House flats complex at 9.45pm. He was taken to the Mater Hospital but pronounced dead there a short time later. The father-of-one was well known to gardai for his involvement in serious and organised crime and had more than 120 convictions. At Dublin Coroner's Court Detective Garda John ODonovan said he formally identified Mr Molyneux to State Pathologist Professor Marie Cassidy at the City Morgue on January 31, 2018, the day after the fatal shooting. Prof Cassidy conducted an autopsy on the body and gave the cause of death as multiple gunshot wounds. Inspector Seamus DAlton of Store Street Garda Station applied to the coroner for a six-month adjournment of the inquest as investigations continue. This investigation is ongoing and live, Insp DAlton said. Molyneux was shot up to six times - four times in the chest and twice in the body - by a lone gunman who fled the scene on foot. Molyneux was a close associate of the Hutch criminal gang and he was shot dead the day before the funeral of his friend, Derek Coakley Hutch. Coroner Dr Myra Cullinane adjourned the inquest for further mention on December 6, 2018. By Aoife Nic Ardghail A Dublin man has gone on trial accused of breaking into an elderly farmer's home with two others and beating the victim with bats for a small sum of money. Adam Marlowe (23) of Walkinstown Drive, Walkinstown, has pleaded not guilty to aggravated burglary and assaulting Malachy Turley causing him harm at Kettles Lane, Kinsealy, Dublin, on July 29, 2016. He has also pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to robbing 50 from the then 81-year-old complainant on the same date. Antonia Boyle BL, prosecuting, read Mr Turley's Garda statement to the jury, in which he described how three men wearing homemade balaclavas broke into the man's home and attacked him. Ms Boyle explained that a witness statement can be read into the court record and taken as direct evidence when agreed by prosecution and defence. In the statement, Mr Turley said he had been living alone at his family home since 1986 after his mother's death and rarely left the premises or received any visitors. He said he had retired from farming a few years previously and allowed people to keep horses on his land for 100 a month. Mr Turley described how he had woken up in the early hours of July 29, as was usual, to have a cup of tea and a slice of apple tart. He said he went back to bed after a half hour and was roused again from his sleep to find a man standing in his bedroom doorway. The complainant said he grabbed his walking stick to defend himself but then saw two other fit lads. He told gardai the men wore homemade balaclavas and carried bats, a small blade and a firearm that looked like an imitation gun. Mr Turley said the three intruders pushed him onto his bed and beat him as they screamed: Where's the safe, where's the safe? He said they called him by his first name during the attack. The complainant stated that one of the men had a Dublin suburbs accent and kept hitting him and demanding money while the two other attackers left the room. I was just lying there and taking the beating, not thinking ahead, Mr Turley told gardai. He said he went unconscious at one point during the beating and that when the two intruders re-entered his room, he was pulled to the floor and his mattress thrown on top of him. He said he heard the gang pull his bedroom apart, get hold of keys and walk out of his room. He described lying under his mattress for up to 30 minutes before he emerged. Mr Turley said he put his mattress back on his bed with difficulty due to his bad hip and fell asleep for a time. He said he recalled thinking that if the intruders had taken his phone and car that he would be badly stuck. He stated that he couldn't remember feeling pain but thought it was because he was in shock. When he got up, he found his house ransacked, 50 missing from his wallet and two small bags of coins taken from his bookshelf. He revealed that he waited a while to ring his brother because he didn't want to disturb him so early. Mr Turley said he received five stitches to his hand, suffered bruising to his body and was prescribed painkillers. He told gardai that his main concern was that this incident could have been worse and that he didn't want anyone else to go through his ordeal. Earlier, Ms Boyle told the jury in her opening address that Garda forensics recovered a piece of blue material in Mr Turley's bedroom and that DNA recovered from this matched the accused. She said it was the State's case that Mr Marlowe was one of the three men who entered the complainant's house, attacked him and robbed him. The trial continues before Judge Melanie Greally and a jury of eight men and four women. By Gerard Cunningham Irish Independent editor Fionnan Sheahan told his colleague Anne Harris that garda whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe was a paedophile, the Charleton tribunal has been told. The tribunal is examining allegations by Supt Taylor that he was directed to brief the media negatively on whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe by former commissioner Martin Callinan, and that Ms O'Sullivan was aware of this. Both former commissioners deny this. Ms Harris said that the conversation took place in September 2014 when she was editor of the Sunday Independent, and Mr Sheahan was group political editor at Independent Newspapers. Mr Sheahan denies the conversation took place. Ms Harris said that rumours about Sgt McCabe were "pervasive" in INM offices, but were usually spoken of through euphemisms such as "interfering", or an "inappropriate interest in children". When Mr Sheahan came to her after an editorial meeting and said "he's a paedophile" in reference to Sgt McCabe, she was "shocked at the use of the word, I'd never heard it used in relation to Sgt McCabe before. "I thought Fionnan had chosen the most extreme word so I could know how serious it was," Ms Harris said. "I think he thought that perhaps she doesn't really know the story and he was tipping me off," Ms Harris said. Ms Harris said that Mr Sheahan was not a gossip, and would have been passing on information he thought she should know. Irish Independent editor, Fionnan Sheahan Ms Harris said that on another occasion Ian Mallon, then the Group News Editor at Independent Newspapers, said there was "more to Sgt McCabe than meets the eye", and asked, "do you know about McCabe and children? Rossa Fanning SC, for INM, Mr Mallon and Mr Sheahan, said his clients would be denying the alleged comments when they gave evidence. Ms Harris went on to say that it was "possible and likely" that Mr Mallon may have heard rumours from journalist Paul Williams, who had interviewed Miss D, and who made an allegation against Sgt McCabe in 2006. the DPP directed no prosecution following a subsequent garda investigation. Ms Harris said that she would not identify a freelance journalist who said there were rumours about Sgt McCabe at an editorial conference, as there had to be "some sort of privilege" regarding conferences, to allow journalists to speak freely about stories. She said that a freelance journalist was in a much more vulnerable position that a senior editor. Ms Harris said she believed journalists were being used "for nefarious purposes to spread rumour", and people were abusing journalistic privilege . Ms Harris said she was not bitter and did not bear a grudge to her former employers at INM, and she said she had no beef with Mr Sheahan or Mr Mallon. Maurice McCabe. In other evidence journalist Gemma O'Doherty said that she first heard rumours about Sgt McCabe when former garda John Wilson called her and said "you won't believe what they're saying about him now. Ms O'Doherty said she did not give the rumours any credence, but she did speak to Maurice McCabe about them. "I had no time for anyone who was suggesting this, I knew it to be utterly untrue," Ms O'Doherty said. Ms O'Doherty said she had no proof that a copy of the garda file had been given to Mr Williams, but it was her understanding and belief. Ms O'Doherty confirmed to barrister Michael McDowell, representing Sgt McCabe, that the sergeant was not the source of a story about former commissioner Martin Callinan having penalty points wiped. By Sarah-Jane Murphy The jury at the conspiracy to defraud and false accounting trial of former Anglo Irish Bank CEO David Drumm have been sent home for a second night, after deliberating for just under two hours on Wednesday. The nine men and three women began considering a verdict on Tuesday, day 81 of proceedings, after one of the longest running trials in the history of the State. They have now been deliberating for a total of three hours and nine minutes following the 16-week trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. Judge Karen O'Connor told jurors that she required a unanimous verdict in relation to both counts against Mr Drumm (51). However, you must consider each count separately and can acquit or convict on either or both, she said. The judge reminded them that Mr Drumm had pleaded not guilty and was presumed innocent and it was only for them to find otherwise. She said they were dealing with two separate trials within a trial, and asked them to consider each of the charges against the defendant separately. It is the State's case that Mr Drumm conspired with Irish Life & Permanent's former CEO, Denis Casey, Anglo's former financial director Willie McAteer and former Head of Treasury at Anglo, John Bowe, and others to carry out 7.2bn in fraudulent transactions in order to bolster the customer deposits figure on the bank's balance sheet. On the opening day of his trial in February, Mr Drumm's lawyers told the jury that he accepts that the multi-million euro transactions took place between Anglo and ILP in 2008 but disputes that they were fraudulent or dishonest. This afternoon, the forewoman asked Judge O'Connor if they could listen back to recorded phone call evidence in their jury room, rather than having to return to court to do so. They were told this was not possible but that they may return to court to listen to the tapes at any time. David Drumm (51) of Skerries, Co Dublin, has pleaded not guilty to conspiring with former bank officials Denis Casey, William McAteer, John Bowe and others to defraud depositors and investors at Anglo by dishonestly creating the impression that deposits in 2008 were 7.2bn larger than they were. The former Anglo Irish Bank CEO has also pleaded not guilty to false accounting on December 3, 2008, by furnishing information to the market that Anglo's 2008 deposits were 7.2bn larger than they were. By Louise Roseingrave A 31-year-old man died of head injuries following a fall from scaffolding at a building site. Lorcan Deasy from Errow, Castlebar, Co Mayo died on January 15, 2018. The young man suffered serious head injuries when he fell from a height. He was working on a roofing job in Kiltimagh Co Mayo on January 8, 2018, when the incident happened. He was rushed to Galway University Hospital and then transferred to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin where he received specialist treatment from neuropathology staff at the intensive care unit. However, despite medical interventions, the young mans condition deteriorated and he died a week later. A post-mortem examination conducted by specialist neuropathologist Dr Alan Beausang gave the cause of death as cranial cerebral trauma. At the opening of an inquest into his death at Dublin Coroners Court, the man's father Michael Deasy gave evidence of how he formally identified his sons body to a garda at the hospital after he passed away. The incident is under investigation by two separate authorities, the Health and Safety Authority and Gardai. (HSA)Inspector Kevin Broderick said his organisation is continuing to investigate the incident which took place on January 8, 2018. Inspector Broderick applied to the coroner for a six-month adjournment of the inquest to allow for investigations to continue. We do envisage a prosecution in this case, Insp Broderick said. Coroner Dr Myra Cullinane adjourned the inquest for further mention to November 15, 2018, and offered condolences to the family on what she described as 'an absolute tragedy.' By Ann O'Loughlin A man who spent 26 days in prison after being arrested by immigration authorities while travelling on a bus from Belfast to Dublin has been awarded 7,500 compensatory damages by the High Court. Ms Justice Mary Faherty ruled the man was entitled to compensatory damages over being wrongly deprived of his liberty for 26 days and for a two hour delay in releasing him after the Supreme Court ruled his detention was unlawful due to defects in the detention warrant. Rejecting arguments by the State he should get only a nominal award of one Euro, she could not accept his period of false imprisonment should be viewed as a lesser infringement of the constitutional guarantee to personal liberty since it only came about because of omissions of a technical nature. In assessing compensatory damages at 7,500, the judge said she was taking certain credibility issues into account including that the man, who claimed to be from Sierra Leone but who gardai believe is Nigerian, was less than forthcoming about his nationality. Based on other findings including there was nothing unsavoury in the Garda investigation into the mans status, the judge found he was not entitled to aggravated or exemplary damages. Gardai acted properly at all times in a situation where they had before them a non-national coming into the State without identity documents, she said. She did not find credible his explanation for giving two different addresses in Dublin and Cork for his residence here was because he felt intimidated by gardai. The man came here in 2008, was refused asylum in 2009 and refused subsidiary protection in late August 2011. On August 1st 2011, while on an Ulster Bus travelling to Dublin, he was arrested near Dundalk by gardai acting as immigration officers. He was refused leave to land in the State and detained overnight at Dundalk garda station. On his release the next day, he was rearrested and taken to Cloverhill Prison. The High Court rejected his challenge to the legality of his detention but, on appeal, the Supreme Court ruled on August 26th 2011 his detention was unlawful for reasons including the detention warrant did not state the fact of the refusal to land. The man was released at 3pm on August 26th but was immediately re-arrested and detained under a further detention order, dated that same day. His lawyers went to the High Court which ruled the two hour delay in releasing him on August 26th was unlawful but his subsequent arrest and detention was lawful. He was released from custody on September 22nd 2011 after the Nigerian embassy did not issue a travel pass for him. In 2013, he took civil proceedings in the High Court against the Garda Commissioner, Governor of Cloverhill Prison and the State, claiming damages for false imprisonment from August 1st to 26th 2011, including the period from 12.40pm to 3pm on August 26th 2011. He said his experience in prison was horrible and depressing, he lost his appetite, was unable to sleep and was nervous and anxious. The defendants denied false imprisonment, said he had illegally entered the state on August 1st 2011 and they were lawfully entitled to arrest and detain him for the purpose of deportation. A deportation order signed in respect of him in August 2015 stated he had failed to produce any documents to support his claim of being from Sierra Leone but would be returned to Nigeria only if/when the Nigerian authorities accepted he was a Nigerian national. A soldier has described hearing the crack of gunfire and a round whizzing past his head moments before another soldier was shot dead during a training exercise. Lance Corporal Matthew Linacre told a court martial that other soldiers nearby said "f*** that was close" before realising that Ranger Michael Maguire had been fatally shot in the head. The soldiers, who were members of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, were taking part in an exercise at the Castlemartin Training Area in Pembrokeshire in May 2012. Rgr Maguire, 21, from Cork, was shot in the forehead by a round fired from a GPMG machine gun. Cpl Linacre said he and other soldiers, including Rgr Maguire, were in a rest area getting their kit together to leave when he heard a shot ring out. "There was a distinctive crack and round going past my head," he told the court. "They were commenting on how close it was. A few were like 'f*** that was close'." He told the court another nearby soldier said: "F*** he's been shot in the head." Cpl Linacre said he turned around and saw the soldier lying on the floor with a wound to his head, while others shouted: "Man down." "More rounds came over. Sgt Pankhurst said to take cover behind the vehicles," Cpl Linacre said. "Once I ran over to the lorry I turned around and saw two corporals treating Rgr Maguire." Cpl Linacre said that at the time of the incident he and Rgr Maguire were not wearing their helmets or body armour. Two officers and a sergeant are facing court martial in Bulford, Wiltshire, in connection with the soldier's death. Captain Jonathan Price, 32, now of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish, is accused of the manslaughter by gross negligence of Rgr Maguire through his failure to set up and supervise a safe exercise. The prosecution allege he failed to attend a recce of the range when preparing a Range Action Safety Plan (Rasp), that he placed targets too close together and he failed to "deconflict" the two exercises. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Bell, 45, and Warrant Officer Stuart Pankhurst, 40, are both accused of negligently performing a duty. Lt Col Bell, the senior planning officer, is accused of failing to review or counter-sign the Rasp produced by Capt Price and failing to supervise or support him. Staff Sgt Pankhurst, who was supervising the exercise involving Rgr Maguire in area 10A, is accused of failing to "express any caution or concern" despite having attended the recce and having knowledge of the extent of the adjacent shooting in area 10B. All three defendants deny the charges and the trial before a board of seven senior officers continues. - Press Association By Alison O'Riordan Two men who threatened an accident victim that they were the IRA and would shoot him if he did not withdraw a claim have been found guilty of IRA membership by the Special Criminal Court. Kevin Braney (44), with an address at Glenshane Crescent, Tallaght, Dublin 24 and Ciaran Maguire (30), of Kippure Park, Finglas, Dublin 11 had both denied membership of an unlawful organisation, styling itself the Irish Republican Army, otherwise Oglaigh na hEireann, otherwise the IRA on August 2nd, 2017. Previously, the three-judge court heard that on July 13 last year the two accused men travelled from Dublin to an estate in Longwood, County Meath, where one of the two accused men told the victim that they were the IRA and if he did not drop a claim against a former employer the next time they saw him they would shoot him. The court heard that the victim had previously been working on a roof when the overhang gave way and he fell off, fracturing his arm, wrist and pelvis. He gave evidence in the trial saying that his employer did not pay his wages and he had put a claim in against him because of hospital bills. During the trial, the non-jury Special Criminal Court heard belief evidence from Detective Chief Superintendent Tom Maguire that the two accused men were IRA members on the day in question based on confidential information given to him. Fiona Murphy BL, prosecuting, said in her closing speech that CCTV evidence corroborated testimony from members of the National Surveillance Unit (NSU) that the accused men travelled from Dublin to Longwood on July 13 last year. Rosario Boyle SC, for Braney, and Paul Carroll SC, for Maguire, submitted that there was not sufficient evidence for the court to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt the men were members of the IRA. Delivering judgement today, Mr Justice Tony Hunt, presiding, sitting with Judge Gerard Griffin and Judge Flann Brennan, said that the court was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt as to the veracity of the belief evidence given by Det Chief Supt Maguire and the court did not entertain a reason to doubt his belief. Mr Justice Hunt said the man from the estate in Longwood, County Meath was a crucial witness in the trial and his evidence had provided context and meaning. We are satisfied he gave a truthful and accurate account of events at his house and it is buttressed by the account he gave to Gardai within a very short time, said the judge. Mr Justice Hunt later added that there was no doubt that this man was threatened by Braney and Maguire who had travelled to his home, issuing unlawful threats to him. The judge said it was a planned and joined enterprise to intimidate the man and the court was satisfied that these words were spoken by either Braney or Maguire. It was neither accidental nor coincidental, the sole purpose was to threaten and intimidate him, he said. The description by the man of his two visitors was consistent with the general appearance of the two men, added the judge. We can find no basis to come to the conclusion that (the man) exaggerated or made up this event. We are satisfied the two men were Mr Braney and Mr Maguire, he said. Mr Justice Hunt said there was no reasonable possibility that Braney and Maguire were not members of an unlawful organisation, styling itself the Irish Republican Army, otherwise Oglaigh na hEireann, otherwise the IRA on August 2nd, 2017. The convicted men were remanded in custody until July 24, when they will be sentenced. A schoolgirl who sparked an international hunt after she left the UK for Poland has been found. Serena Alexander-Benson, 13, is in the country with her mother, Scotland Yard said, and police are investigating whether any crime has been committed. The Liege attacks which left three people dead are being considered "terrorist murders", and the investigation now centres on whether the attacker acted alone, a Belgian federal magistrate said. The attacker, identified as Benjamin Herman, shouted "Allahu akbar," the Arabic phrase for "God is great", several times during spree before he was shot down by a group of police officers, magistrate Wenke Roggen said. Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko has turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Mr Babchenko's death was faked in order to foil a plot to take his life. Ukrainian police said Mr Babchenko, a strong critic of the Kremlin, was shot multiple times in the back on Tuesday and found bleeding there by his wife. Authorities said they suspected he was killed because of his work. Vasyl Gritsak, the head of the Ukrainian Security Service, announced at a news conference that the security agency and the police had solved Mr Babchenko's killing. He then startled everyone present by inviting the 41-year-old reporter into the room. To the applause and gasps of the press, Mr Babchenko took the floor and apologised to the friends and family who mourned for him who were unaware of the plan. "I'm still alive," he said. Before ushering Mr Babchenko into the room, Mr Gritsak said investigators had identified a Ukrainian citizen who had been recruited and paid $40,000 by Russian security services to organise and carry out the killing. The unidentified Ukrainian man in turn hired an acquaintance who had fought in the separatist war in eastern Ukraine as the gunman. Mr Babchenko, one of Russia's best-known war reporters, fled the country in February 2017 after receiving death threats. He said he had left the country because threats had been made against him and his family. He said his home address was published online and the threats he received were made by phone, email and social media. Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian lawmaker who also moved to Ukraine, said Mr Babchenko continued to be threatened after he settled last year in Kiev, where he worked as a host for the Crimean Tatar TV station. Mr Babchenko did not take the intimidation too seriously, according to Ponomarev. Moscow's annexation of Crimea and support for separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine were topics on which the journalist was scathingly critical of the Kremlin. - PA Banking regulator Wayne Byres is maintaining the pressure on banks to improve their assessments of home loan customers' living expenses, and says the misconduct revealed at the royal commission has been "disturbing." Mr Byres, chairman of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, also played down concerns the royal commission could cause a credit crunch, saying he was "not particularly" concerned about the risk the inquiry could trigger a dramatic slowdown in lending. APRA chair Wayne Byres Credit:Alex Ellinghausen One concern of bank investors in recent months has been the potential for losses in banks' mortgage books, due to the banks' over-reliance on indexes when assessing the living expenses of people seeking home loans. Appearing before a Senate estimates committee, Mr Byres said APRA was continuing to push banks to lower their reliance on a key benchmark, the Household Expenditure Measure (HEM.) Banks are set to refund "significantly" more than the $220 million already set aside for financial advice clients who were charged for services that were never provided, as institutions search their files for customers who were ripped off. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission also told Senate estimates on Wednesday night it was investigating a Dollarmites account scam at the Commonwealth Bank after it found out more details about the incident through the media, and it was looking into the revelation CBA charged some dead clients for advice. ASIC deputy chair Peter Kell says banks have more compensation to pay over the fees for no service scandal. Credit:Ryan Stuart ASIC also said the conduct of AMP, which has been embroiled in crisis due to revelations at the royal commission, was "extremely disappointing." AMP is the subject of a powerful ASIC investigation, after it admitted to repeatedly misleading the regulator at last month's royal commission hearings on financial advice. Officials from the watchdog were on Wednesday night questioned about the scandals being probed by the royal commission into misconduct in finance, including the fact the big four banks and AMP charged "fees for no service" in financial advice. The former chief executive of Domain, Antony Catalano, has resurfaced at one of the online property groups main advertising clients after purchasing a stake in Tomorrow Agency/Media Plus, which represents a collection of real-estate agents and developers. Mr Catalano stepped down from Domain in late January, two months after it listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. The abrupt resignation was closely scrutinised in media circles and coincided with a review of Domains workplace culture. Former Domain Group chief executive Antony Catalano has secured himself a new role. Fairfax Media, owner of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, has a 60 per cent share of the property classifieds site, since listing it in the stock exchange in 2017. Tomorrow Agency is a creative and media agency specialising in property, representing real estate project marketers and developers. It is Domain's biggest client. In May 2016, Lewis Christman was flying from Chicago to Rome when he suffered a bout of acute pancreatitis. He curled into a fetal position on the floor. He spent the next seven hours in agony while the plane flew on. The next three months, he spent in hospitals. This month, Christman sued, accusing United Airlines of ignoring a recommendation from a doctor on board to divert the flight and failing to contact medical consultants on the ground. It was another round of bad publicity for United and one that draws scrutiny to how airlines treat passengers in distress and the pressure to keep flights in the air. United Airlines has been sued after flying on for hours despite a medical emergency on board. "Obviously, there is a significant cost to landing the plane," said David Axelrod, Christman's lawyer. "We're looking for all the information about this incident, where my poor client is doubled over in pain and he's vomiting and they're not landing this plane." A medical emergency sets in motion a high-altitude calculation with human lives in the balance. While pilots are the ultimate decisionmakers, airlines have earth-bound medical consultants that help bypass on-board volunteers -- reducing expensive emergency landings, but with the potential of providing expert decisions in real time. All bets are off. At least that's according to Pusha T. The rapper spoke out Wednesday morning in an interview with the Breakfast Club after firing back at Drake with new diss track The Story of Adidon, the third installment in an ongoing feud between the two rappers. Pusha raps over Jay-Z's The Story of O.J. in the track, released Tuesday on Hot 97 and Soundcloud, and takes shots at Drake's parents, his blackness and his producer, Noah "40" Shebib. But the biggest bombs Pusha drops are his claims that Drake is hiding a secret child that he fathered with a porn star, and that the cover photo is an image of Drake in blackface that he says isn't doctored. How does the ABC connect with a younger audience that shuns broadcast television and radio and is conditioned to consume their content on demand and on their smartphones? The answer is podcasts. Back in February, the ABC debuted The Signal, a daily news and current affairs podcast. The short, sharp show comes in at about 10 to 15 minutes an episode, and while the influence of The New York Times' The Daily podcast is obvious, The Signal has developed its own distinct voice. Ange Lavoipierre and Stephen Smiley. Credit:ABC "The conversational tone was key and the American podcasts like The Daily are great at it. But we didn't want to emulate the American style," explains executive producer Cathy Bell. "Young Australian audiences are very sophisticated. They listen to a lot of stuff and they won't be patronised or manipulated. So it was really important to have young Australians telling the stories they wanted to tell, in their way." Telling those stories are journalists Ange Lavoipierre, Stephen Smiley and Chris Dengate with a rotating team of contributors along for the ride. Lavoipierre is thrilled by the opportunity. Some see this as a cynical cash grab from a couple who dont have anything left to lose. The former Deputy Prime Minister has already lost his job (and his political and social credibility), and Campion is also now without a job, so why not sell the last remnants of their dignity as well? That seems a bit of a stretch. As far as I can tell the main division is between JoyCam and everyone else. Barnaby Joyce and his former media advisor Vikki Campion, mother of his new baby boy, Sebastian. Credit:Fairfax Media But after watching a sneak peek of the interview last night you might wonder if, rather than cashing in, Joyce and Campion actually think they are the victims in this story. An emotional Campion pleaded: I couldnt help it. You cant help who you fall in love with. Its really a modern day Romeo and Juliet. Or at least, it might be, if the romantic hero was willing to play his part in this romantic tragedy. But Joyce has been quite clear in his views about love. Loading As a passionate and vocal campaigner against gay marriage, Joyce believes that people can indeed help who they fall in love with, and that love certainly does not conquer all. 'Space lawyer'. It sounds like a job out of The Jetsons, but it's real and they walk among us in Canberra. And as Australia looks increasingly towards the stars, there are academics who are also contemplating what that could mean for our legal system. ANU lawyer Dr Imogen Saunders. Credit:Karleen Minney The country's new space agency will be based in Canberra for at least its first six months, and will be tasked with regulating Australia's civil space activities. When Canberra man Peter Carey went to the vet last Thursday, he only wanted to get a lump on his dog Tom's eyelid checked out. Fellow vet-goer Jennifer Edmunds just wanted to make an appointment for her four-legged friend Bruce. From left: vets Dr Amanda Keast and Dr Damien Solley used blood from doberman cross poodle Bruce to save border collie Tom. Also pictured are the dogs' owners, Peter Carey and Jennifer Edmunds. Credit:Elesa Kurtz Neither expected one pooch to save the other's life, but that's exactly what happened. The morning started quietly at The Village Vet in Downer, but things took a dramatic turn when Tom lifted his leg and started urinating blood. The ABC is an organisation known intimately to every Australian and about which every one of us has an opinion. The letters pages of newspapers contain a steady stream of bouquets and brickbats for the public broadcaster. Yet according to pollsters, with around 80 per cent support, the ABC is the most trusted media organisation in the country by a very wide margin. It is one of the few organisations to maintain trust when confidence in institutions everywhere has declined. Programs like Gruen would be under threat if the ABC only produced material the commercial channels won't touch. This trust has been hard-earned over the ABCs 86-year history. But as some in the banking community have learnt recently, that trust can be eroded very quickly. Some people delight in undermining trust in public broadcasting because theyd rather darkness where we shine light, or because their commercial interests are served when Australians have less media diversity and choice. Loading The commercial television networks and some newspapers peddle an ever more urgent message that the ABC is hurting their business and should be held back. They take delight in reviews into the broadcasters efficiency and business practices, hoping they will coalesce into a full-blown revision of the ABCs Charter that relegates the public broadcaster to a "market failure" function limited to programming about fine arts, science, education or philosophy. This would likely spell the end for popular programming like Four Corners, Australian Story, Gruen or Sea Change because, the argument goes, these programs could be produced by commercial media and taxpayers would save millions. But this argument misses two points. Two weeks ago Sydney property developer Dimitrios Mavris was kidnapped and rescued in one of Colombia's most dangerous drug-trafficking hubs. Eight days later he was arrested by Australian Federal Police officers at Sydney Airport and by Friday last week the 48-year-old, known lovingly as"Jim," would be found dead in a Surry Hills jail cell. It was an abrupt end to the life of the Sydney family man and former mechanic, which has left friends "shocked". Dimitrios Mavris, 48, who was found dead in a jail cell last Friday. Credit:Facebook Mr Mavris was arrested by AFP investigators as he arrived at Sydney International Airport last Wednesday, targeted over his alleged role in the importation of 59 kilograms of cocaine in a shipment of frozen fish from Peru. The public has been given its first peek at the new plans for the $720 million redevelopment of Prince of Wales Hospital. Health Minister Brad Hazzard and Member for Coogee Bruce Notley-Smith unveiled the artist impressions of the new Acute Services Building on Wednesday to mark the Prince of Wales Hospitals 160th anniversary. The new complex, expected to be completed in 2022, will house a new and bigger adult emergency department, more beds, an intensive care unit, operating theatres, emergency psychiatric unit, a medical assessment unit, a virtual care centre and a new helipad. Today we celebrate not only the rich history of Prince of Wales Hospital but its exciting future, as it transforms into a world-class health and education hub, Mr Hazzard said. A Marist College boy who was critically injured in a high ropes incident on a school camp is expected to be released from Lady Cilento Children's Hospital in the next few days. Marist College Ashgrove issued a statement on Wednesday that 14-year-old Connor Petterson was continuing to improve after suffering a collapsed lung among other injuries. College students at the camp before the boy was injured. Credit:Marist College Ashgrove / Facebook Connor and his fellow year 9 students were on the second day of a school camp at Adventure Alternatives near Woodford when the incident occurred. The boy was airlifted to Lady Cilento Children's Hospital with severe neck and head injuries, and the camp cancelled. The then-Queensland governments own 2014 Carmichael Mine environmental impact statement (EIS) orders mining company Adani to provide financial compensation to Isaac Regional Council for the impact of the proposed coal mine. Questions over why Adani is making payments to the outback Queensland council where the proposed mine could be built were raised this week. However, the seventh and eighth EIS conditions between Isaac Regional Council and Adani Australia, and lodged with the Department of Transport and Main Roads, make this clear. Most of the proposed $16.5 billion Carmichael coal mine is within Isaac Regional Council, although a smaller portion is within Charters Towers Regional Council. Police have charged three teenagers over alleged threats made to schools in North Lakes and Arundel. A male was charged on Monday over an alleged threat made against a North Lakes school and its students that evening. Schools responded to alleged threats by going into lockdown and worked with police. Credit: He was charged with using a carriage service to make a threat to cause harm and threatening violence. On Tuesday morning, police charged another two males following an alleged threat made to an Arundel school on Monday evening. Parents, students and teachers are being asked to share their thoughts on NAPLAN, as the ACT's parliament launches an inquiry into standardised testing. Year nine students at St Mary McKillop College sit their NAPLAN test earlier this month. Credit:Sitthixay Ditthavong The ACT Legislative Assembly's standing committee on education, employment and youth affairs will run the ruler over the use of tests like NAPLAN in ACT schools, looking at their impact on student wellbeing and mental health, teacher morale and professional autonomy and the amount of time devoted to preparing for and conducting these assessments. The inquiry will also examine the cost of standardised testing, how ACT students perform and how the results inform school enrolments. It comes after ACT Education Minister Yvette Berry cast doubt on the usefulness of NAPLAN for measuring student achievement in March, saying it had become a "trigger for stress, anxiety and depression among young people fearful of letting someone down as opposed to a constructive tool for learning". ACT Mental Health Minister Shane Rattenbury said the program would support people with mental health conditions in places they felt most comfortable. It is similar to ACT Health's Crisis Assessment and Treatment Team, which provides acute mental health assessment and treatment outside clinical settings. Around $2.1 million will be set aside in next Tuesday's ACT budget over the next two years to create an "assertive" outreach program for child and adolescent mental health community-based services, targeted at 12-18 year olds. Teenagers suffering from mental illnesses will soon be able to receive help at home, as part of a new program to stop young people reaching crisis point. "This is about targeting people who dont access these services normally and making it easier for them. We go to the people who need the service, not wait for them to come to us. Thats what this is really about, making sure we dont sit and wait, that title of being an assertive outreach program describes it exactly, they will assert themselves in a way to make sure people do access our services," Mr Rattenbury said. ACT Health's Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service clinical director Dr Jeff Cubis said recruitment for the program's five staff would begin soon. He said the program would help connect teenagers to existing services, and overcome barriers that stop them from continuing treatment. Getting young people into services can be a major struggle in terms of they may be reluctant to present to an outpatient appointment or the family may struggle to get them there," Dr Cubis said. "Some adolescents are homeless and in very difficult, estranged situations from their families. Even in that situation you often need to work with the family and encourage the adolescent to really connect with services which they know." Chinese security officials who detained a Sydney academic in 2017 spent a full day interrogating him about Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls hand-picked China adviser, according to information gathered by national security officials. In March, 2017, Australian academic Chongyi Feng was prevented from leaving Guangzhou and subjected to interrogation. Credit:Steven Siewert Chongyi Feng, an Associate Professor in Chinese Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, was detained and questioned by Chinese officials during a visit to China in March last year about his links to liberal intellectuals in mainland China and contacts in Australia. Fairfax Media can reveal that during the interrogation, Chinese state security officials demanded information about adviser John Garnaut, who at the time was working on an ASIO inquiry commissioned by Mr Turnbull. The inquiry was aimed at assessing the extent of Beijings intelligence and interference operations in Australia. The Federal Court has again ordered embattled Jobs Minister Michaelia Cash to give evidence in the ongoing court case over last year's raids on the headquarters of the Australian Workers Union. Court documents seen by Fairfax Media show a subpoena has been issued for Senator Cash to attend court on August 1. It is the third subpoena issued against her by the AWU and the minister has again instructed her lawyers to fight it. "I am absolutely not covering up," Senator Cash declared at a press conference on Wednesday. "It does not surprise me that the AWU is trying this tactic again [but] I am not a party to these proceedings." Honolulu: A fast-moving lava flow from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano led officials to close a highway and to warn that sharp, thin strands of volcanic glass fibres carried on the wind could injure eyes and lungs. Traffic is stalled along Highway 132 as Leilani Estates residents wait to return to their homes to gather vital belongings and animals this month. Credit:Honolulu Star-Advertiser via AP Hawaii County's civil defence agency said lava was quickly approaching Highway 132, prompting the closure from Lava Tree State Park to Four Corners, and warned residents to monitor their radios and phones for updates and evacuation orders. Earlier on Tuesday, a small explosion of ash erupted from the summit of the volcano in a vertical plume about 4600 metres high, the US Geological Survey said, the latest outburst in a month of volcanic activity. The agency warned that ash was drifting north-west and was liable to affect anyone in the summit area. Hundreds of people have been ordered to leave the vicinity of one of the world's most active volcanoes. Latest News MyState announces new CEO Succession plan revealed as bank makes big steps into NSW and Victoria New HomeStart Finance CEO sets out stall for broker channel I believe in the role that we play in the community, helping people to overcome the barriers to homeownership Plans for class action proceedings have started against the entire mortgage industry, on behalf of bank customers who entered into a mortgage finance agreement since 2012. Law firm Chamberlains has been appointed to act on behalf of MortgageDeception.com. According to the Australian Financial Review lawyers representing up to 300,000 litigants are planning an $80billion action against mortgage lenders, mortgage brokers and financial regulators. The action has had $75million backing from the UK and Europe and around 200,000 borrowers are ready to join. On MortgageDeception.coms website, the firm said, In a further development, Chamberlains class action team is now instructed by Roger Donald Brown of MortgageDeception.com, who is representing various Australian bank customers who they allege may be incurring financial losses as a result of entering into mortgage loan contracts with banks since 2012. The MortgageDeception.com website said anyone who has entered into a loan with a bank since 2011 are about to encounter difficulties. It continued, Since 1995 banks in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, have been making massive and obscene profits from providing finance to property purchasers. These banks have cared little about the lending practices adopted by them, and reckless lending has brought about huge and unsustainable increases in property prices. We believe that the banking industry and its regulators have intentionally turned a blind eye to the irresponsible lending that has been taking place. It continued, For Australian bank customers that have entered into mortgage finance agreements with banks since 2012, we have appointed the leading Canberra based law firm of Chamberlains www.chamberlains.com.au to act in the planned class action lawsuit. The partner in charge is Mr.Stipe Vuleta. Related stories: APRA appointment will strengthen regulation Customers want trust, but do they also want brands? ASIC chair: Remove remuneration conflicts Latest News MyState announces new CEO Succession plan revealed as bank makes big steps into NSW and Victoria New HomeStart Finance CEO sets out stall for broker channel I believe in the role that we play in the community, helping people to overcome the barriers to homeownership After legislation was passed to strengthen the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) with an additional deputy chair position, the current Treasury deputy secretary has now been nominated. APRA chairman Wayne Byres welcomed the nomination of John Lonsdale, as well the reappointment of deputy chair Helen Rowell. The new appointment is expected to provide extra strength for APRA to ensure stability and accountability in the financial services sector. The government has already approved the same additional position for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). Rowell, who became an APRA member in 2013 and has served as Deputy Chair since 2015, has been reappointed for a new five-year term, commencing on 1 July. The appointment of Lonsdale will also be for a five-year term and is conditional on the approval of the Governor-General and on Parliament agreeing to legislation introduced on 24 May to amend the APRA Act to allow the appointment of up to two deputy chairs. Lonsdale will join Byres and Rowell, as well as current APRA member Geoff Summerhayes, on APRAs executive group. In a statement from Treasurer Scott Morrison, he said, Mr Lonsdale is currently the Deputy Secretary, Markets Group at the Treasury. He will bring to APRA a deep knowledge of the financial system and policy expertise acquired in his over 30 years at Treasury. He also played a critical role in helping to shape the current regulatory agenda in Australia through his role as head of the Secretariat of the Financial System Inquiry in 2014. Byres said the expansion of APRAs current executive group would add further depth and breadth of policy expertise at APRA as it delivers on its mandate to protect the financial well-being of Australian depositors, insurance policyholders and superannuation members. He added, "Geoff and I are very pleased to be able to continue working alongside Helen, as she further sharpens APRA's focus on enhancing outcomes for superannuation members. The expertise, authority and judgement Helen brings to APRA will be increasingly important in the years ahead as APRA continues its superannuation reform agenda. "The nomination of John to assist Helen, Geoff and myself is recognition of the extensive program of supervisory and policy work APRA faces across the industries we regulate. With more than three decades of experience at Treasury, John is a welcome and valuable addition to APRAs leadership team. Related stories: APRA appointment will strengthen regulation New body to distribute lenders' BBSW payments ASIC chair: Remove remuneration conflicts Indian households cannot do without milk, with most of them buying milk every day. According to reports, Indian households spend Rs 1,000 on average a month on milk. So, what could be a more sure shot way of increasing the frequency of online orders for food and grocery delivery platforms like Swiggy and BigBasket? That is indeed what they are planning to do. This will not only increase frequency of orders but will also make customers stick to their service. Grocery delivery platform BigBasket that is backed by big guns like Alibaba is in talks with Pune-based RainCan, Gurugram-based Milk Basket and Bengaluru-based Daily Ninja to buy out these milk delivery platforms, as mentioned in a report in The Economic Times. However, none of these talks are final yet. Food-delivery platform, Swiggy, on the other hand, is planning to alter its strategy and include grocery-delivery within its ambit. The Bengaluru-based company was pumped in with $100 million earlier this year by South African giant Naspers and Chinese giant Meituan-Dianping. Flushed with this new investment, Swiggy is trying to expand its portfolio. Additionally, it is in early talks with subscription-based milk delivery start-up Supr Daily. If they end up offering milk delivery services, the frequency of orders on these platforms would increase significantly from 4-5 times a month to 15-20 times a month, as mentioned in the report. While Swiggy and BigBasket did not respond to queries by the newspaper, RainCan refused to "comment on speculations". None of the milk delivery services commented either. According to industry estimates, Swiggy handles more than 3,00,000 orders every day, while BigBasket caters to 60,000-70,000 orders per day. RainCan handles 10,000 orders a day, while Milk Basket, Supr Daily and Daily Ninja handle 8,000, 5,000 and 25,000 orders every day respectively. Moreover, grocery segment is the next big thing online with Amazon India and Flipkart also jumping into the fray. Two months after India hosted an informal mini-ministerial meet of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Delhi, the country is making another attempt to re-energise discussions in the multilateral platform. This time, India, along with countries like Brazil and South Africa intend to revive WTO discussions on issues related to preventing theft of traditional knowledge in Geneva. The Doha Ministerial Declaration in 2001 had tasked the TRIPS Council of the WTO to examine the relationship between the TRIPS Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the protection of traditional knowledge and folklore. It also mandated that while doing so, the council should be guided by the objectives and principles set out in the TRIPS Agreement and should fully take into account the development dimension. While there has been considerable debate and deliberations on the subject no common understanding has yet been reached at the WTO. The current attempt is to bring together all stakeholders for an International Conference on TRIPS- CBD Linkage in Geneva on June 7-8, 2018. The programme is organised by the central government, along with the Centre for WTO Studies, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade and the South Centre (an inter-governmental organisation based in Geneva). A senior commerce ministry official said that the international conference will bring together indigenous people/local communities in developing and developed countries, internationally acclaimed academicians working on the subject, Geneva-based negotiators and capital based experts. "They will brainstorm on the options for energising negotiations on this subject in the WTO. Resource persons, stakeholders and experts from a large number of countries, including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Peru, Philippines, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, and the US, would participate", the official stated. The Convention on Biological Diversity is a multilateral agreement on sustainable development and fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising out of the utilisation of genetic resource. TRIPS CBD Linkage is important for India and other developing countries because it seeks to address bio-piracy. It has been a long standing demand that patents should not be granted for existing traditional knowledge and associated genetic resources. Further, it has also been argued that where traditional knowledge forms a basis for further scientific developments that are sought to be patented, there should be a mechanism to ensure disclosure of information in this regard. This is considered essential not only from the point of view of addressing information asymmetry at the patent office but in also enabling better assessment of the inventive step involved. The developing countries seek an amendment in the TRIPS Agreement to make disclosure of source or origin of genetic resource by patent applicants, submission of evidence of prior informed consent of local communities and evidence of fair and equitable sharing of benefits under the relevant national regimes mandatory. In 2008, developing countries garnered the support of the European Union to form a coalition of 109 countries (which included the African and Caribbean and Pacific Countries) for the above proposal seeking amendment of the TRIPS Agreement to enable mandatory disclosures in patent applications. The last major proposal along similar lines but incorporating the mechanism agreed to under the Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity was submitted by India, Brazil along with other like-minded countries in 2011. After this, the discussions appear to have lost steam. India is optimistic that during the forthcoming international conference on TRIPs CBD, the proponents will agree on a clear roadmap for pursuing this issue at the WTO, the official said. After continuous hike of fuel prices, India finally woke up to a cut on Wednesday. It was not long before everyone realised that the joy was short-lived and the celebration premature. You see, what everyone thought to be a cut of 60 paise on oil prices turned out to be a glitch. The actual cut was of 1 paisa. Yes, one whole paisa. IOCL said in a statement, "The reduction was supposed to be 1 paisa but due to a clerical error the price prevalent on May 25 was communicated as today's price." Currently, a litre of petrol in Delhi and Mumbai will cost citizens Rs 78.24 and Rs 86.23 respectively, while diesel stood at Rs 69.30 and Rs 73.78 respectively. Congress did not miss out on this chance with Rahul Gandhi saying, "If this is your (PM) idea of a prank, it's childish and in poor taste." Dear PM, You've cut the price of Petrol and Diesel today by 1 paisa. ONE paisa!?? If this is your idea of a prank, it's childish and in poor taste. P.S. A ONE paisa cut is not a suitable response to the #FuelChallenge I threw you last week. https://t.co/u7xzbUUjDS - Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) May 30, 2018 While the Congress' social media machinery is working full swing to blame the Modi government for the fuel price hike, the Centre's deafening silence is doing more damage than the Opposition. With the sudden and cruel dash of hopes, people took to Twitter to express their disbelief. While a lot wondered where and how they will invest that 1 paisa, others took a dig at the government. yaaay - i saved 29 paise on a full tank. What all do i do with that savings ... any suggestions https://t.co/27jp335ATA - Harini Calamur (@calamur) May 30, 2018 After 16 days of hikes, Petrol and Diesel price cut by 1 paisa.#HumFitTohIndiaFit is already showing results - Shirish Kunder (@ShirishKunder) May 30, 2018 Before petrol prices drop: The Walking Dead. After petrol prices drop by 1 paisa: Still Walking Dead. - Netflix India (@NetflixIndia) May 30, 2018 Petrol prices reduced by 1 paisa per litre. Common man breathes a big sigh of relief. #ModiModiModi - Sanjiv Bhatt (IPS) (@sanjivbhatt) May 30, 2018 When @IndianOilcl , slashes prices of petrol and diesel by 1 paisa. Petrol now at Rs 86.23/litre & diesel selling for Rs 73.78/litre in Mumbai #PetrolPrice #Petrolled pic.twitter.com/wgw13iZybe - Ruchita Maheshwari (@Ruchi_Mahi) May 30, 2018 Isn't it a joke on common people? https://t.co/KPJbyIQhOh - Prabodh Kant (@prabodh_kant) May 30, 2018 SALE !! SALE !! SALE !! Discount on Petrol of 1 Paisa https://t.co/sRM82diemQ - Godman Chikna (@Madan_Chikna) May 30, 2018 I am going to invest this in mutual funds now https://t.co/SkYnFgL5Xb - Saurabh Sharma (@100rabhsaccount) May 30, 2018 As a gesture of goodwill & as proof that the Modi govt is not oblivious to the hardships of the common man due to high fuel prices, prices for both, Petrol & Diesel, have been reduced by ONE WHOLE PAISA each. Prices for 30/05/18 Petrol 84.06 | Diesel 72.98#DayaluSarkaar - Sanjay Gupta (@sanjay0864) May 29, 2018 Arre! We must fill up petrol today - price reduced by a WHOPPING ONE PAISA per LITRE in Delhi ! Hurry ! https://t.co/s4UKP2y5oS via @ndtv - Manmohan Bahadur (@BahadurManmohan) May 30, 2018 Rising Petrol price pic.twitter.com/1catcTjr6A - Manoj Jha india. (@1977_jha) May 30, 2018 The difference between petrol prices yesterday & today is the same as the difference between 'yanny' and 'laurel'. - pandurang escobar (@Bhavessshh) May 30, 2018 The Sangh Parivar has now added one more name to its new list of unlikely friends. Earlier this week, eyebrows were raised when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) invited former President Pranab Mukherjee to address its workers on June 7. Now its affiliate, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), has extended an invitation to former RBI governor, Raghuram Rajan, to speak at the upcoming World Hindu Congress (WHC) in Chicago, US. "He has said he will try, so we are hoping he will make it," one of the organisers, who did not wish to be identified, told The Economic Times. The invitation certainly marks a U-turn from the Sangh's previous equation with Rajan - in fact, political parties and the media alike claimed that the RSS had played a significantly role in denying him a second term. And now they want him to address what has been billed as the biggest-ever gathering of the who's who of the Hindu community across the globe. The WHC, scheduled to be held over the September 7-9 weekend, commemorates 125 years of Swami Vivekananda's historic address to the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago on September 11, 1893. More than 2,000 Hindu delegates from over 50 countries are expected to attend it. If he does accept the invite, Rajan will be rubbing shoulders with a diverse guest list, including Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, Hollywood star Richard Gere, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, Indian corporate honchos like Piramal Group chairman Ajay Piramal and KPMG India chairman Arun Kumar, Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The chief ministers who have confirmed their participation at the event include Yogi Adityanath from Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra's Devendra Fadnavis. Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu lawmaker in the US Congress, is the chairperson of the Chicago WHC, which is being organised by the World Hindu Foundation. The latter was founded by Swami Vigyananand, VHP's Joint General Secretary. According to organisers, some Bollywood superstars as well as heads of Fortune 500 companies are also likely to attend the one-in-for-years mega-event. The inaugural WHC held in New Delhi in November 2014 had seen participation of 1800 delegates from over 50 countries. The theme this time round is "Sumantrite Suvikrante", or think collectively, achieve valiantly. The event, which will see concurrent conferences on economics, education, media, politics, youth involvement, women participation and collaboration of Hindu organizations, claims to be the largest global platform for Hindus to connect, share ideas and introspect. Noting that some 30 years ago, no one in the world cared about China, Swami Vigyananand recently told PTI that the world is now paying attention to the country because of its economic power, which results in military power and global power. "Our whole purpose is to regain economic strength," he said, adding, "The day Hindus - who constitute 16 per cent of the world population - become 16 per cent of the world economy, people would start listening to them [Hindus]." It will be interesting to see what Rajan will contribute in such an event, assuming he attends it. The Manpasand Beverages stock crash has left several mutual funds poorer by more than Rs 165 crore during the last two sessions. The stock of fruit juice manufacturer is down nearly 50% since Friday's closing of Rs 430.20 on BSE after the resignation of its auditing firm Deloitte with effect from May 26, 2018. Today, the stock price is down 9.99% stuck at the lower circuit limit of 10% after exchanges revised the lower circuit limit of 20%. The stock price fell 20% each on Monday and Tuesday on the news of resignation of auditor. Seven mutual funds held 1.283 crore shares of Manpasand Beverages to the tune of Rs 535.23 crore at the end of April 2018. BNP Paribas Mutual Fund, BOI AXA Mutual fund, Baroda Pioneer Mid-cap Fund - Growth, ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund, Kotak Mahindra Mutual fund, Motilal Oswal Mutual Fund and SBI Mutual Fund are the MFs which hold stakes in Manpasand Beverages. Motilal Oswal which held shares worth Rs 256.61 crore in April 2018 was the biggest loser among the mutual funds after the share price crashed after nearly 50% since Monday. SBI Mutual fund which held shares worth Rs 202.92 crore is the second biggest loser after the stock price crash. On Sunday, May 27, the company informed the exchanges that its statutory auditor Deloitte Haskins & Sells resigned ahead of a board meeting scheduled on May 30 for consideration of financial results. Due to sudden resignation of existing auditors, the business to be transacted at board meeting scheduled on May 30 has been cancelled, it added. In a letter addressed to company's board, Manpasand Beverages Managing Director Dhirendra Singh, Deloitte Haskins & Sells said that significant information" requested by us from the company at various points of time for the purposes of audit of the financial results have not yet been provided to us". "We observe that there has been no further progress with respect to the pending information, evidences and explanations. Therefore, as informed to you, we would be unable to complete the statutory audit of the financial statements of the company for the year ended March 31, 2018 by May 30, 2018," it added. "Under the circumstances, and as per our discussions with you, we are submitting our resignation as statutory auditors of the company with immediate effect," the letter said. According to a report in The Economic Times, Deloitte's sudden move was the result of not sharing of key crucial data related to capital expenditure and revenue which had been sought for at least a month. Deloitte has informed the ministry of corporate affairs about the resignation and the reasons for the same. In third quarter of last fiscal, the firm logged 65.7% rise in net profit to Rs 12 crore.The firm reported 39.7% yoy growth in revenue to Rs 143.1crore higher than estimates. Manpasand Beverages is engaged in the business of manufacturing of fruit juices in the beverages segment. The company is engaged in the business of manufacturing of fruit drink products with a primary focus on mango fruit. The company offers mango-based fruit drink under the Mango Sip brand. It also offers its products in other brands, including Fruits Up, Manpasand Oral Rehydrating Salts, Pure Sip and Coco Sip. All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), a coalition of 193 farmers' organisations from across the country, will lobby for the enactment of two private bills - Farmers' Freedom from Debt Bill and Guaranteed Fair and Remunerative Prices Bill - to ensure comprehensive debt relief to farmers and remunerative prices for the farm produce in the forthcoming session of the Parliament. The Bills, submitted by Parliamentarians Raju Shetti and K K Ragesh in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha respectively, have the support of 21 political parties. The AIKSCC has also submitted the Bills to President Ram Nath Kovind and requested him to call for a special session of the Parliament to discuss the agrarian crisiss and pass these bills. "We now intend to meet all Members of Parliament in their own constituencies, to ensure their support when the Bills get listed for discussion and passing during the upcoming monsoon session", stated AIKSCC leaders. "The President was positive. In our meeting with the President, we explained to him that this is the very first time in our history that farmers have created two Bills for, by and of farmers, that too after elaborate consultations. We also brought up the fact that there is a precedent with regard to a special session when the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee convened a special session of the Parliament in December 2003 to discuss the sugarcane crisis in the country in the light of the death of 3 sugarcane farmers in Manderva, Basti district of Uttar Pradesh. If we can have a special midnight session for GST, why not for addressing farmers' crisis?" they said. AIKSCC was formed on June 16 th last year, as a response to the repression of farmers' spontaneous movements in different states in 2017. After fine tuning the two Bills along with leaders of different political parties in the month of April 2018, both were submitted as private members bills in both the Upper and Lower Houses of the Parliament. On May 10, 2018, with lakhs of farmers signing on, memoranda addressed to the Lok Sabha Speaker and Rajya Sabha Chairperson were submitted to district collectors in different states of the country, asking for an early discussion and passing of these Bills. In the press conference on May 29, AIKSCC leaders demanded drastic reduction in the input costs in farming. They pointed out that rise in diesel prices is breaking the back of farmers. They also condemned the inaction of Uttar Pradesh government in addressing the non-payment of dues owed to cane farmers, which led to the death of a protestor. AIKSCC has planned a three day programme to mark the first anniversary of the killing of six farmers in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh in 2017. The press conference was addressed by VM Singh, Raju Shetti, Hannan Mollah, Atul Kumar Anjan, Dr. Sunilam, Prem Singh Gehlawat, Jagmohan Singh, Avik Saha and Yogendra Yadav. AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes seems to have landed himself in a soup. The Malaysia-born aviation tycoon, who wanted his Indian airline venture to fly internationally, was on Tuesday named in an FIR filed by the CBI. The central investigative agency has booked nine individuals on charges of corruption and criminal conspiracy. The accused, according to the CBI, allgedly bribed government officials to secure international flying permit for AirAisa India at a time when 5/20 rule was in place. The rule, that came into effect in 2004, mandated airlines to have five years of experience and a minimum of 20 aircraft-fleet to fly on international routes. The CBI has said that the payments to the tune of Rs 12.28 crore were remitted to India to lobby with public servants during the UPA rule. The investigating agency alleged that the AirAsia Group has also violated rules set by the now defunct FIPB (Foreign Investment Promotion Board) and FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) norms by giving management control to a foreign entity, and making AirAsia India a de-facto subsidiary of AirAsia Group in the process. "We have filed a case against Air Asia chief Tony Fernandes, his colleagues and government officers over procuring licences illegally," CBI official RK Gaur had told AFP. So far, CBI sleuths have raided AirAsia offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Gurugram. The no-frills carrier is a joint venture between Tata Sons and AirAsia Berhad. The airline started operations in 2013 and currently has a fleet of 18 Airbus A320s. In 2016, as part of the new aviation policy, the government scrapped the controversial 5/20 norm, paving way for domestic airlines to fly overseas provided they deploy 20 planes or 20 per cent of their total capacity for domestic operations. The move benefited AirAsia India and Vistara. Among those named in the FIR include top Tata Trusts executive R Venkataramanan. According to a report in The Economic Times, Venkataramanan, who is also a Director at AirAsia, allegedly gave personal assurances from the then civil aviation minister Ajit Singh. "Met Mr Ajit Singh a short while ago. He said approvals should come soon and that our planning should be on the basis of the 5/20 rule getting scrapped," Venkat reportedly wrote to top AirAsia executive Tharumalingam Kanagalingam, who is also named in the CBI FIR. Meanwhile, AirAsia India has refuted any wrong doing and is co-operating with all regulators and agencies to present the correct facts. "In November 2016, AirAsia India had initiated criminal charges against its ex-CEO and had also commenced civil proceedings in Bangalore for such irregularities. We hope to bring early resolution to all such issues," Shuva Mandal, Director at AirAsia India said in an official statement. The agency has also named Rajender Dubey, Director of Singapore-based HNR Trading Pte Ltd, Sunil Kapur, Chairman Total Food Services, Mumbai and Deepak Talwar, Principal and Founder DTA Consulting, New Delhi and the company HNR Trading as alleged lobbyists who used their influence to get 5/20 rule relaxed "before General Elections of 2014." The airline has been facing headwinds in the country for quite some time. The market share of AirAsia India stood at 5 per cent in April. Recently, the airline's CEO and MD Amar Abrol resigned from his position, and is reportedly moving back to the group headquarters in Malaysia to work on other projects. Two years ago, a Deloitte Touche investigation into Air-Asia India unearthed irregularities in the financial transactions of about Rs 22 crore involving its former CEO Mittu Chandilya. Last year, ousted Tata Sons Chairman Cyrus Mistry had alleged that Venkatramanan wanted to cover up the murky transactions at AirAsia India. Fernandes, whose entrepreneurial journey is somewhat akin to Richard Branson, was in the music business before he decided to buy debt-ridden AirAsia. He has worked at Branson's Virgin Communications and Warner Music. Jet Airways has grounded four pilots for clicking selfies onboard a training flight on April 19. An investigation is currently underway to further probe the matter. The grounded officials include a senior instructor level commander and three trainee pilots. The Jet Airways flight was a training flight from Leh to Delhi and did not have any passengers onboard. Even though there were no passengers, clicking pictures onboard violates flight norms. In a statement, Jet Airways said, "Acting in the interest of guest safety, Jet Airways has placed four crew members off their scheduled duties. The crew members are adding an internal investigation being conducted by the airline in connection with certain events aboard a training flight of April 19." "At Jet Airways, safety is of paramount importance," the statement further added. This is not a one-off incident. Only last month two Jet Airways pilots were suspended for allowing a woman friend inside the cockpit the for the entire flight duration onboard a Goa-Mumbai flight. While the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) grounded the two pilots, they were back to their jobs the very next day and during the suspension period. A Jet Airways spokesperson called it an administrative oversight. Before that, in January this year, DGCA suspended the flying licence of a senior Jet Airways pilot for allegedly slapping a female commander onboard a London-Mumbai flight. The female crew member was also expelled by DGCA. Besides physically assaulting the woman commander, the pilot also left the cockpit unattended twice, which is in violation of the safety norms leading to the suspension of his licence, according to the official. (With PTI inputs) Normal banking operations in branches of 40 banks will be affected today and tomorrow with nine bank employee unions kicking off their nationwide strike. National Organisation of Bank Worker's (NOBW) Vice-President Ashwini Rana yesterday claimed that 10 lakh bank employees and officers of the 21 public sector banks as well as old-generation private banks and foreign banks will join the two-day strike. According to Mint, as many as 12 private and seven foreign banks will be participating. Given that the public sector banks alone control 75 per cent of the total business in the country, the public is sure to face some inconvenience till the strike ends, or is called off. Several banks, including State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Bank of Baroda and Canara Bank, have already informed their customers that functioning of branches and offices will be impacted if the strike takes off. "However, impact may not be substantial due to non-branch activities like internet banking. However, customers dependent on branch banking like RTGS [Real Time Gross Settlement], demand draft etc. will be affected," VG Kannan, chief executive of IBA, told the daily. Likewise, services like deposits, withdrawal, foreign remittances and cheque clearance in the 40 participating banks will be affected. The big question mark currently is whether ATMs of these banks will continue to function during the strike. AIBEA president Rajen Nagar reportedly said yesterday that ATM security guards will also be participating in it. If that happens, at least some ATMs may remain shut over the next two days. So if your salary gets credited at the end of the month, you may not be able to withdraw it till Friday. However, several bank officials have been quoted by the media saying that ATMs will continue to work. The machines were reportedly stocked up yesterday and cash refilling is usually outsourced by banks, so the ATMs are unlikely to run dry. But can they remain open without the guards? To remind you, last week, UFBU - an umbrella body of nine unions, including All India Bank Employees' Association, NOBW and All India Bank Officers' Confederation - had called for the strike to protest against a 'meagre' 2 per cent wage hike offered by the IBA earlier this month. In comparison, in the last wage settlement, for the period November 2012 to October 2017, IBA had given a wage hike of 15 per cent. Hence UFBU is now demanding an expeditious and early wage revision settlement, an adequate increase in salary and improvement in other service conditions and wage revision settlement to include all officers up to scale VII, which will include divisional managers to general managers. IBA has currently decided to restrict wage negotiations to scale-III officers or up till the senior manager-level. Additional Chief Labour Commissioner (CLC) Rajan Verma had reportedly held a conciliatory meeting between the United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU), finance ministry officials and the Indian Banks' Association (IBA) on Monday in an effort to avert the strike. But with the talks failing to work out, the bank unions decided to go ahead with the strike. During the conciliation meeting, UFBU leaders quoted figures to prove how operating profit has doubled, staff expenses have reduced, business has more than doubled. They also told the CLC that the proposed hike "was not at all acceptable, considering the rise in cost of living". IBA officials had reportedly countered that by pointing to the huge non-performing assets that banks are grappling with. According to a recent CARE Ratings report, NPAs of the 26 banks that have declared Q4 results so far show a 15% jump over December quarter at Rs 7.31 lakh crore. With profitability hit, banks have little manoeuvring room left for significant wage revisions. But UFBU convener Devidas Tuljapurkar later pointed out that "It is only because of provisions towards NPA that banks have booked losses, and for this, bank employees are not responsible". He added that bank employees have worked tirelessly for implementation of government initiatives such as Jan-Dhan, demonetisation, Mudra and Atal Pension Yojana, among others, in the past two-three years, which resulted in a "huge increase in their workloads". According to AIBEA General Secretary CH Venkatachalam, the CLC not only "supported the issues and asked IBA to respond positively" but also said that "bank officers and employees have to be paid for hard work and not based on profit". Venkatachalam added that the IBA representative agreed to consider revised offer but requested UFBU to quantify the demand. So the ball is now in UBFU's court. With PTI inputs The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal on Wednesday granted a "conditional stay" on insolvency proceedings against RCom and its subsidiaries -- Reliance Infratel and Reliance Telecom -- after the company informed it had reached at an "amicable settlement" with Swedish networking provider Ericsson. Anil Ambani's beleaguered telecom company on Tuesday came out with a fresh offer of Rs 500-crore upfront payment to Ericsson to settle the matter. While hearing the matter on Wednesday, the tribunal asked RCom and its subsidiaries to pay Rs 550 crore as part of the settlement with Ericsson within the next 120 days (by September end) from June 1, failing which the insolvency proceedings would be started against the company. A two-member bench, headed by Chairman Justice SJ Mitttal, also directed the RCom MD to file an undertaking about the settlement amount. Ericsson India would also file an undertaking before the NCLAT over the acceptance offer. The appellate tribunal's decision comes as a relief to Anil Ambani's companies. The National Company Law Tribunal on May 15 had triggered the insolvency process against the debt-ridden company after Ericsson registered three separate applications against these companies over the non-payment of dues worth Rs 978 crore, which now total around Rs 1,600 crore. The appellate tribunal had on Tuesday suggested the matter to be solved between the parties. RCom and Reliance Infratel Limited and Reliance Telecom Limited had entered into a seven-year agreement with Ericsson in 2013, under which Ericsson provided all the operational services, including mobile towers, broadband, fixed line, wireless voice, and data, to the three companies but these companies failed to pay its dues. Earlier, RCom's financial creditors including State Bank of India and China Development Bank had also not backed the decision of Ericsson to move the NCLT to initiate insolvency proceedings against the telecom operator. The company has a total debt of over Rs 46,000 crore. To pare debt, RCom has planned to monetise assets worth Rs 25,000 crore from their sale to Reliance Jio. It had signed a deal to sell its wireless assets to Reliance Jio Infocomm for over Rs 25,000 crore in December 2017. Kalyani, co-founder of Inclov, was always a matchmaker waiting in the wings. When in college, this modern-day Emma, would try to match up her friends with each other. The realisation that matchmaking was something she was passionate about and there was a need for a dating app for disabled in the market, led to the inception of Inclov in 2016. Shankar Srinivasan, a friend, joined her in this journey some time later. Srinivasan was working for another start-up in those days but it was acquired, and he decided to move out of the company. The journey of the start-up is as interesting as the idea. In the initial days, the start-up existed as a small marriage bureau for disabled in Mumbai. "Parents of people with disability would come to meet me and tell us about their journey and ask us if we can help them in any way," Kalyani recalls. However, the need for funding and a better ecosystem for her start-up made her move to Gurugram. The challenges still aplenty. While they were facing social inhibition on the consumer side, investors too were apprehensive about investing in the start-up as they doubted its scalability. While they were able to raise funds, the social challenge still stays. "Social inhibition is in mind and it is the toughest to tackle, because you are trying to create an ecosystem, saying people with disability should go out and chill just like you and I do. They should be getting married, they should fall in love," says Srinivasan. Today, the start-up exists in the form of an app, a web app and a lighter version called Inclov light, which has been built just for the people with vision impairment. The founders have made the effort to make the platform as inclusive as possible, and it is currently available in Hindi, Punjabi and English. They claim to have 30,000 subscribers across the country. Inclov has raised $500,000 in two rounds of funding so far and is looking at raising Series A. To give its audience the opportunity of interacting with people they have met on the platform in real life, the start-up holds meet-ups across 14 cities in the country. Called Social Spaces, these meet-ups are held twice a month and the users of the platform need to buy the tickets from the web app or app to attend them. "The model is defined in a way to keep them more engaged. So it is like, you met somebody interesting online, here is where you can meet them. Here is where you buy your ticket and end up there. We close the loop there," informs Kalyani. "In fact, many of them travel, if we are holding up Social Spaces in a city nearby," she adds. The company has tied-up with several travel partners and hotels in these cities, where their users can stay. The meet-ups too are sponsored by the companies. But holding these meet-ups is a challenge in itself as most hotels, night clubs, restaurants etc. don't have disabled-friendly infrastructure. However, Srinivasan who is responsible for the offline side of business, works with these spaces to make them accessible. "It is about the mindset of the management. A lot of times I have come across people where they are not very comfortable about hosting something like this. But I have also seen a lot of other places, where people are but they need to know what needs to be done and we help them." The company uses these multiple online-offline channels to monetise its platform. Going ahead, the company is planning to expand geographically and would be launching in Australia soon. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and several Government Ministers today launched a 4 billion Project Ireland 2040 funds for rural development, urban regeneration, climate action and innovation. The four new funds are designed to help to ensure balanced regional development and aim to stimulate renewal and investment in rural and urban areas, the environment and innovation, preparing Ireland for a future with 1 million more people and 660,000 more people at work. The plan is targeting three quarters of new growth outside Dublin, with 50% of the projected population growth planned for towns, villages and rural areas and 50% for cities. Speaking about the launch of the four funds today, An Taoiseach said, "Three months ago we laid the foundations for the future with the launch of Project Ireland 2040. Today we are outlining how we plan to build on those foundations, through these four game-changing funds. The funds aim to regenerate our urban areas so we can have compact, sustainable growth in Irelands five cities and other large urban centres; develop rural Ireland so that prosperity is shared across the whole country; prepare for the greatest challenge facing the planet by acting decisively to protect it; and transform our society through the use of disruptive technologies and, in doing so, create the jobs of the future." Source: www.businessworld.ie As youre probably well aware by now, were surrounded by technology. From the way we cook and eat, to how we keep ourselves entertained every day, technological innovations are changing the way we live our lives and our healthcare is certainly no different. From your local small clinic, to the best Turkey hair transplant company, healthcare professionals across the world are being introduced to new technologies that are making the process of healing much more seamless. Here, were exploring some of the technological innovations that could shake up the healthcare industry in 2018. Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence has been stirring up numerous industries over the past months, but the healthcare industry is set to benefit more than most. Through the introduction of chat bots that can help patients answer common questions and provide problem-solving solutions where possible. Of course, they cant completely take over human interaction, but currently, smaller tasks like customer service responses, resource finding and helping triage symptoms could be picked up by chat bots to save professionals time and money and streamline the entire process. NASA-inspired Command Centres In 2017, a Canadian hospital became the first to implement a NASA/Air-control style of command centre and the potential it holds certainly shouldnt be ignored. While not every hospital has the budget to build such a centre, the improved analytics, cutting-edge technology, rich data and improved insights could all work to improve the way a hospital runs. The goal of these centres would be to improve the quality of care towards patients, reduce waiting times and increase responsiveness around the entire hospital and by 2020, its thought that most hospitals will have implemented or be looking to implement a similar control centre! 3D Printing 3D printing has incredible potential across a wide variety of healthcare sectors. Thus far, the dental industry has benefited from 3D printing through designs, fillings and replacement teeth, and even mainstream healthcare could prove to make the most of this technology with the potential to reproduce human cells using these printers. 3D printing of drugs, tools, organs and bionic features could revolutionise the industry as we know it. Mobile Health Its estimated that there are over 250,000 healthcare apps available today, with the number consistently growing though a good chunk of these dont come with clinical validation. However, despite this, the use of our mobiles in healthcare is set to change how we look up symptoms, do at-home testing and even speak to our GPs. Mobile appointments arent ideal in some cases, but with improvements, these appointments could save both healthcare professionals and their patients a lot of money and time through not needing to visit the doctor unnecessarily. The potential of new technologies within the healthcare industry is huge and this is only set to grow further over the year. From AI and machine learning shaking up the way we get our information, to improvements command centres making the entire hospital experience much more seamless, our healthcare systems could improve tenfold over the next few years. The union representing Ryanair pilots in Britain, the airline's largest market, has threatened possible strike action unless the company implements a transparent system to manage promotions and transfers, according to a letter seen by Reuters. Ryanair in December recognised trade unions for the first time in its 32-year history, but has since then struggled to reach agreement on the terms of the recognition with some unions and it faces several threats of strike action. Industrial action in Britain, Ryanair's first market to agree a formal union recognition agreement, could be particularly damaging. The airline has experienced minor disruption due to industrial action in Germany and Portugal, but has so far avoided a major stoppage. Ryanair's Irish union two weeks ago threatened possible strike action unless the airline agrees to new working practices. In the letter to Chief Executive Michael O'Leary, dated May 24, the BALPA union demanded a seniority system to "provide transparency and fairness to decisions made by management which have a very large impact on the lives of our members and their families." In particular, the union said it wanted transparent systems for involuntary base transfers, command upgrades and the allocation of annual leave and promotion. "If it is not possible to immediately negotiate the introduction of such a Seniority Agreement, it is our intention to escalate this matter as a matter of urgency, to seek sanction for industrial action up to and including strike action should that be necessary," the letter said. The letter requested a positive response to the letter "on or before" Tuesday, May 29. A spokesman for Ryanair said the airline did not comment on negotiations with its staff. (Reuters) Source: www.businessworld.ie (CTech) China has started blacklisting specific Israeli construction sites following a series of deadly work accidents, an Israeli state official said in an interview with Calcalist, speaking on condition of anonymity. On May 7, 38-year-old Chinese citizen Chen Zhong died after falling from a 20-foot-high scaffolding at a Jerusalem construction site. In 2017, China agreed to allocate 20,000 trained construction workers to Israel. The agreement pertained to 6,000 workers as a first stage, out of which only around 2,500 are currently working in Israel, according to the Israeli state official. A few hundred construction workers coming from China arrive in Israel each month, the official said. According to the current agreement with Israeli authorities, Chinese citizens can start working on Israeli sites only after individual assignments have been approved by Chinas embassy in Tel Aviv. So far, all requests pertaining to sites in the West Bank and Jerusalem have been denied, but in recent weeks, requests pertaining to real estate companies with a high rate of accidents are also being denied, the Israeli official said. The agreement was signed due to the Israeli construction industrys shortage of trained personnel. The rate of Israeli citizens working in construction is low, and Israelis joining the industry often aim to quickly move up to managerial positions. The industry is mostly manned by foreign nationals, including thousands of employees coming from the Palestinian Authority, Turkey, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria and China. Chen is the third construction worker to be killed on the job in a site operated by Solel Boneh Infrastructures Ltd., according to data collected by Kav LaOved, a Tel Aviv-based nonprofit organization dedicated to maintaining labor rights in the Israeli industry. Solel Boneh is a subsidiary of Shikun & Binui Ltd., one of Israels largest real estate companies. Chen is also the fourth Chinese citizen to be killed on Israeli construction sites since August, according to Kav LaOved. In 2015-16, deaths on construction sites amounted to 62% of all work-related deaths in Israel, an 11% increase compared to 2013-14, according to a report published in May by the Israeli State Comptroller, a government watchdog. According to the report, the state continually fails to investigate incidents and enforce laws and regulations regarding site safety. According to Kav LaOveds data, 15 people have died and 67 were moderately or severely injured working on Israeli construction sites since the beginning of the year. This article was originally published by CTech. news, latest-news Airline industry group boss Graeme Samuel has made an unqualified apology to the Kenyan high commission after unfavourably comparing Canberra and Nairobi airports. Mr Samuel, who is also the former chair of Australias competition watchdog, last week likened the aggressive tactics of Canberra Airport to something out of Somalia or Kenya. Kenyas high commissioner to Australia, Isaiya Kabira, rebuked the comparison in an open letter sent to Fairfax Media. While it is in your full right to express your outrage, we find it extremely unfortunate that you draw parallels of inefficiency and imagery of piracy to a respected and much-admired airport of Nairobi, Mr Kabira wrote. On Monday Mr Samuel wrote to the high commission to apologise for his remarks. I made a spur of the moment comment, with a poor choice of words referring to Nairobi, which I immediately regretted, he wrote. In making these remarks, I did not intend in any way to offend you or your country. In fact, in making my comments I went on to say that I was sure that the behaviour described at Canberra airport would not occur in Nairobi. Mr Samuel made the comparison at an airline industry event at Parliament House earlier in May. I cant contemplate any place in the world, except perhaps Somalia or perhaps Nairobi, where an aircraft would, having had to make an unscheduled landing because of weather, had a car parked in front of the aircraft, saying you cannot move until the airline provides a Visa card to extract a charge of $18,000, he said. Thats not Australia. Thats a third world country. Im assured by Qantas it doesnt even happen in third world countries they are involved in. In contrast, Mr Kabira said Nairobi Airport was a bustling freight and transport hub of which Kenyans were proud. At the same event Alan Joyce had likened Canberra Airport to a band of Somali pirates. Maybe the airport should be called The Canberra Pirates because you wouldnt have this in Somalia, Mr Joyce said. You wouldnt have this in other parts of the world. It is unbelievably appalling behaviour. Qantas also wrote to the Kenyan high commission to clarify its remarks on Monday. Qantas does indeed hold Kenya and Nairobi in high regard, group executive Andrew Parker wrote to high commissioner Isaiya Kabira. We regularly promote your country in our various digital and marketing platforms and in our Qantas Magazine, which has a circulation of over four million readers. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/044287f7-eb5a-4463-81af-74f863380a0a/r0_23_460_283_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news Good morning, Canberra. We're heading for a top of 13 today, rising up from an overnight zero. Brrrr! Grab a coffee to help with your morning defrost, and catch up on the latest news here: It might sound like a job out of The Jetsons, but rest assured - space lawyers are a real thing. Dr Imogen Saunders at ANU's College of Law specialises in international law, including those governing outer space, which she says are sorely out of date. "As new technology develops and as space becomes more and more accessible to private companies and to countries, we need space lawyers to help regulate what's going on." Katie Burgess tells us what that means for Canberra here. Agencies would be pushed to report the pay of senior bosses and disclose government spending on contractors under reforms pushed by independent reviewers. Telstra chief executive David Thodey and Medibank Private chair Elizabeth Alexander noted a lack of transparency around the two issues in a draft paper. Despite requests from leaders of the Prime Minister's department and Finance department, some agencies have failed to voluntarily publish information about executive pay on their websites, the paper found. Doug Dingwall reports. Teenagers suffering from mental illnesses will soon be able to receive help at home, as part of a new program to stop young people reaching crisis point. More than $2 million will be set aside in next Tuesday's ACT budget for the outreach program, targeted at 12-18 year olds. Katie Burgess has the details here. More positive news coming out of next week's budget, with a notorious blackspot in Canberra's north to be upgraded under a multimillion dollar roads package. Traffic lights will help to improve two intersections on Tillyard Drive as part of $4 million worth of works on the Belconnen road, with more details on other road improvements to be released in the upcoming territory budget. Katie Burgess (who, as you can see, has been a busy little bee!) shares the details here . It's a case of split priorities as an Australian rugby war threatens to erupt over player availability. The Wallabies have asked the ACT Brumbies to rest three high-profile stars in the same week the club is trying to rebuild crowd support and attract 15,000 fans to this weekend's game. The Wallabies have requested for David Pocock, Allan Alaalatoa and Scott Sio to be withdrawn from the Brumbies' clash against the Japan Sunwolves, but the Brumbies are apparently refusing to budge. Chris Dutton has the latest on this divisive issue. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/d95343d7-2cb4-4572-80f5-45acb1f41a89/r0_284_5287_3271_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news The Defence Department has moved to stop non-public servants from signing contracts after allegations were raised of contractor misbehaviour on Australia's $50 billion new submarines build. Defence officials say it is investigating complaints raised in an internal memo about contractors on the project, which is expected to deliver 12 submarines over several decades as the nation's largest military procurement program. The memo said contractors had signed contracts on behalf of the department's science and technology group, and paid invoices without apparent oversight by Defence staff, among several other complaints. Associate secretary Rebecca Skinner told a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday the group, following the claims, made changes requiring that only public servants sign contracts. Defence's fraud and audit staff began investigating the allegations in the internal memo, prepared in March, about "probity and apparent nepotism issues" on the future submarines project after it received a media query about the claims. Labor senator Kim Carr told Ms Skinner he would be troubled that contractors could sign contracts on behalf of Defence under any circumstances. "I would've thought the answer you would be able to provide me today was 'under no circumstances could this happen'," he said. Ms Skinner said there were some purposes, and limited situations, when contractors did have authority to engage other contractors on Defence projects, but said it was uncommon. "That's why we've ensured there are new measures in place to make sure that cannot happen," she said. "We are doing a review. Should there be matters that come out of that review that would indicate there has been a fraud or some other activity, then there'll be appropriate sanctions and appropriate referrals to other people." Defence secretary Greg Moriarty said he would wait for the outcome of the investigation before commenting. "There's a number of things here I agree strike me as very unusual to say the least, but I want to get to the bottom of the matter," he said. Mr Moriarty could not say the number of contracts signed by contractors on Defence's behalf, but said he understood there were "very limited circumstances where that may have taken place". He said both Defence Minister Marise Payne and Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne told him they expected "remedial action" addressing the complaints. Senator Payne told Senator Carr she became aware that contractors were allegedly signing contracts on the submarine program "in the course of events" after a media query sent to Defence. She said the alleged actions were "unacceptable". "I've made that view clearly to the secretary and the senior departmental officials in relation to that," she said. Staff at Defence's science and technology group, which has been tasked with researching designs needed for components of Australias new fleet of submarines, raised the complaints about contractor behaviour in the memo. The contracting arm of the Defence Departments non materiel procurement branch had also raised concerns about contractors on the project, called SEA1000, the internal memo said. Obtaining accurate information in relation to SEA1000 contracting has been difficult for a number of years, primarily as a result of an unwillingness to provide clear responses on contractual arrangements, it said. Defence science and technology officials in the memo complained that contractors had appeared to try hiding labour hire workers by registering them as service providers, who are paid differently. They also said contractors had engaged other contractors using purchasing orders designed for buying simple items, and without oversight by Defence Department public servants. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/22ea2ed1-6a96-4afb-bb36-08bfad5b7351/r0_73_1280_796_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, federal-politics Visitors to the Australian War Memorial have expressed their concern about the donations to the institution from Chinese-Australian businessman Chau Chak Wing. On Tuesday Veterans Affairs Minister Darren Chester said he would ask the memorial for a "detailed briefing" about its donations, including the $560,000 donated by Mr Chau, who was accused by Liberal MP Andrew Hastie under parliamentary privilege of funding the bribery of former United Nations president John Ashe in 2013. More than one million people visited the War Memorial last financial year, and it is one of the city's most popular attractions. Director Brendan Nelson has called it "the soul of the nation". Mr Chau was awarded a fellowship of the memorial in 2015, after he had donated $560,000 to a music and education centre that bears his company's name and a education program about soldiers with diverse ethnic backgrounds. Domestic and international visitors weighed in on the controversy, with mixed views on whether the donation should have been accepted. Phoebe Feng, an international student soon to begin studying at the University of Canberra said Mr Chau was allowed to make the donations. "It's their right to do that donation," she said. "Maybe you think Chinese people were the enemy of the Australian people." Henry Verhoeven and Alan Andrews were visiting the memorial from Victoria and said the prospect of the donations was "a bit hard to come to grips with". "There are issues as far as I'm concerned," Mr Verhoeven said. "If there's links to a political party, that's a worry." Peter Pike was also visiting the memorial and said that it was up to War Memorial director Brendan Nelson and "those up there" (gesturing to Parliament House) to decide whether the memorial should have a policy on where it takes donations from. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/b6f0c31a-bea3-42b9-9ba9-7afc6ef5cab6/r0_373_945_907_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg Colorectal cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in the United States when men and women are combined. However, regular screening can find colorectal cancer when it is small, hasnt spread, and might be easier to treat. Some types of screening can also help find and remove pre-cancerous growths called polyps before they have a chance to turn into cancer. The American Cancer Society (ACS) has guidelines for colorectal cancer screening and recommends people at average risk for colorectal cancer begin screening at age 45. In the most recent guideline update, ACS lowered the age to start screening because studies show rates of colorectal cancer among people younger than 50 are on the rise. ACS experts have determined that screening starting at 45 could help save more lives. Screening recommendations for those at average risk for colorectal cancer People at average risk should start regular screening at age 45. People who are in good health and expected to live at least more 10 years should continue regular screening through the age of 75. People ages 76 through 85 should decide with their health care provider whether to continue to get screened. This should be based on personal preferences, prior screening results, overall health and how long they are expected to live. People over 85 should no longer get screened for colorectal cancer. Screening for people at higher risk for colorectal cancer People at higher risk for colorectal cancer may need to start screening before age 45. They may also need to be screened more often or get specific tests. People at higher risk are those with A strong family history of colorectal cancer or certain types of polyps A personal history of colorectal cancer or certain types of polyps A personal history of inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis or Crohns disease) A family history of a hereditary syndrome such as familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) or Lynch syndrome A history of radiation to the abdomen (belly) or pelvis to treat a prior cancer People who think or know they are at higher risk for colorectal cancer should talk to their health care provider. Your health care provider can help you choose your best screening option and schedule. If youve delayed your screening appointments or they have been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, talk to your doctor about the steps you can take to safely resume these important tests. Recommended colorectal cancer screening tests There are several test options for colorectal cancer screening. There are some differences among the tests. But the most important thing is to get screened, no matter which test you choose. Stool-based tests: Highly sensitive fecal immunochemical test (FIT) every year Highly sensitive guaiac-based fecal occult blood test (gFOBT) every year Multi-targeted stool DNA test (MT-sDNA) every 3 years Visual exams: Colonoscopy every 10 years CT colonography (virtual colonoscopy) every 5 years Flexible sigmoidoscopy (FSIG) every 5 years Its important that everyone talk to their health care provider about which tests might be good options. You should also check your insurance about payment for each test option. These screening tests must be done at recommended time points to be effective. If you choose a test other than a colonoscopy, any abnormal test result must be followed up with a colonoscopy to see whether you have cancer. How to find more information 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. Gujarat State Electricity Corporation Limited(GSECL) has released an employment notification calling out for aspirants to apply for various posts. Those interested can check out the eligibility, salary scale, how to apply and the complete details of the government jobs here. Selected candidates can earn up to INR 115800. The last date to apply for the government job is June 18, 2018. GPSC Recruitment 2018 For Specialist Doctors: Earn Up To INR 208700! GSECL Recruitment 2018 Vacancy Details CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Posts Accounts Officer, Deputy Superintendent, Vidyut Sahayak and Instrument Mechanic Organisation Gujarat State Electricity Corporation Limited (GSECL) Educational Qualification CA or ICWA or diploma in engineering from a recognised university Maximum Age Limit 35 years Skills Required Accounting and engineering skills Salary Scale INR 26000 to INR 115800 Application Fees INR 500 Job Location Gujarat Industry Electricity Experience Desirable Application Start Date May 29, 2018 Application End Date June 18, 2018 Also Read: SKPSC Recruitment 2018 For Agriculture Development Officer How To Apply For GSECL Recruitment 2018 In order to apply for GSECL Recruitment 2018, follow these steps: Step 1: Log on to the GSECL official website. Step 2: Click on the Career tab. Step 3: The recruitment notifications will be displayed on the screen. Click on the link against Recruitment for the post of Accounts Officer, Dy. Supt(A/C), Instrument Mechanic and VS(PA-I). Step 4: The summary of the recruitment will be displayed with links for the advertisement and the application. Step 5: Click on the link to register as a new user. Step 6: A set of instructions will appear on the screen. Read them carefully. Step 7: Click on the declaration checkbox to acknowledge that you have read and agree to the terms and conditions. Step 8: Click Continue. Step 9: Enter your mobile number and click the verification button. Step 10: Enter the OTP that you receive and follow the subsequent pages to complete the registration process. Click here to read the detailed official notification. Sikkim Public Service Commission (SKPSC) has released an employment notification calling out for aspirants to apply for the post of Agriculture Development Officer. 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 40000. The last date to apply for the government job is June 30, 2018. WAPCOS Limited Recruitment 2018 For Engineers SKPSC Recruitment 2018 Vacancy Details CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Post Agriculture Development Officer Organisation Sikkim Public Service Commission (SKPSC) Educational Qualification BSc in agriculture from a recognised university Age Limit 21 to 40 years Skills Required Knowledge of state languages Salary Scale INR 9300 to INR 40000 Job Location Sikkim Industry Civil Services Experience Freshers can apply Application Start Date May 28, 2018 Application End Date June 30, 2018 Also Read: ICMR Recruitment 2018 For Multi Tasking Staff How To Apply For SKPSC Recruitment 2018 In order to apply for SKPSC Recruitment 2018, follow these steps: Step 1: Log on to the SKPSC official website. Step 2: Click on the button that reads, APPLY ONLINE. Step 3: Click on the registration link on the top of the page that reads, Click Here To Register. Step 4: Read the instructions on the new page and click on the registration link again. Step 5: The registration form will be displayed on the screen. Enter your details in the fields provided. Step 6: Enter the captcha code. Step 7: Click on the declaration checkbox. Step 8: Click Register and complete the registration process. Click here to read the detailed official notification. WAPCOS Limited, under the Union Ministry of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation, has released an employment notification calling out for aspirants to apply for the post of Engineer. 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 industry standards. The selection process is through a walk-in interview that is on June 3, 2018. Engineering Jobs 2018: TSNPDCL Is Hiring Electrical Engineers! WAPCOS Limited Recruitment 2018 Vacancy Details CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Post Junior Engineer or Engineer Organisation WAPCOS Limited Educational Qualification Degree or diploma in civil engineering Age Limit Not mentioned Skills Required Engineering skills Salary Scale Industry standards Job Location Dehradun, Uttarakhand Industry Engineering Experience 1 to 3 years Application Start Date May 28, 2018 Walk-in Date June 3, 2018 Venue WAPCOS Limited, 355/1, Near SBI, IDT Branch Main Kaulagarh Road, Dehradun-248001, Uttrakhand. Also Read: ECIL Recruitment 2018 For Technical Officer And Scientific Assistant How To Apply For WAPCOS Recruitment 2018 In order to apply for WAPCOS Recruitment 2018, follow these steps: Step 1: Log on to the WAPCOS Limited official website. Step 2: Click on the Careers tab. Step 3: The list of recruitment notifications will be displayed on the screen. Step 4: Download the application form and fill it. You'll have to carry it to the venue. Click here to read the detailed official notification. Many of us believe that the career options and opportunities are limited for students who hail from the arts discipline. However, the fact is different from what we believe. The arts stream is one of the most lucrative fields and shares an equal position with science and commerce in the country. There are many courses offered for class 12 arts students. Some of the top courses to consider after pursuing arts in class 12 are listed below. What To Do After CBSE Class 12th Results Are Declared Management Courses The management courses are open to students from all streams in India. Students who have completed 10+2 can opt to pursue management courses. The most popular management courses for undergraduates are Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) and Bachelor of Business Management (BBM). One can also consider Bachelor of Management Studies (BMS). A wide range of specialisations are offered to those pursuing a bachelor's and the lucrative ones are human resources management (HRM), retail management, finance management, logistics, supply chain management, etc. Law & Humanities Courses Most of the students opt for arts in class 12 to pursue courses in law and humanities. After completing 10+2 as an arts major, one can take up a five-year BA LLB/BBA LLB or BCom LLB. However, Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) is required to get an admission in the national law universities. Students can also opt for economics courses that'll help them venture into banking, insurance, finance and corporations. Psychology and sociology also come under humanities and students can also consider courses related to these fields after their 10+2. Animation & Multimedia Courses The career opportunities are huge for candidates who pursued animation and graphic design courses. After 10+2, one can look for courses in animation, graphics and web design. Many institutes offer diploma and certificate courses depending upon the programs. Web designing also comes under this field, where individuals have to work on developing web pages. Media & Journalism Courses Journalism and mass communication courses consist of courses on television and print and digital media. Arts students who have passed class 12 can take up various specialisations in journalism that include reporting, corporate communications, media management, public relations, etc. Designing Courses Arts students who have completed their 10+2 can take up designing courses like fashion, textile and interior designing. The career opportunities are a plenty for candidates with an interior and fashion designing background. A wide range of degrees, certificates and diplomas are offered in fashion designing. Some of the top courses in fashion designing are: fashion technology, clothing production, fashion branding, etc. Miscellaneous Courses Apart from the above fields, students who have completed their 10+2 in arts can also consider some unique courses. Here is the list: Hotel Management Event Management Travel & Tourism Photography Jewellery and Accessories Designing Leather and Footwear Design Airport Operations Cabin Crew/Air Hostess Language and Literature courses Also Read: What To Do After BA? Explore Courses And Career Opportunities Indeed it is unfair that all the hard work that you have put in for years altogether comes down to a single sheet of paper. But this is how life is, and if you want to stand out from the crowd, there is no other option than to make your resume special. Now, we understand that a resume is an official document and you need to be professional about it. This leaves you with very little scope for showing off your creativity. However, there is one part of your resume that is always open for customisation. We are talking about your job description here. If you can write this to your benefit, you will be able to not just cast a lasting impression on your interviewer, but will also be able to secure your place in the company. This article talks about how you can improve your job prospects by improving the job description section in your resume. 1. Identifying The Role Very often it is difficult to understand what is expected of you from the mere designation itself. In such a situation, the only way you can understand the responsibilities and duties associated with a position would be by reading in between the lines of a job description. That will ensure that you are aware of whether you are in a supervisory role, the amount of customer contact that is expected, the amount and type of interaction with other teams and other details as such. Based on this you can make the decision of whether you should apply for the said job or not. If the type of job is not really based on your liking, there is no point in you wasting your time applying for the job and preparing for the interview. 2. Focus On Your Skills And Achievements We understand that there are a lot of things you have achieved during the course of your education. However, not all of them will be relevant to the job that you are applying for. Make sure that you remove all the unnecessary details and provide only sufficient details to support your premises. The job description is what will shout out to you about what is expected from the job. Use this to your benefit and tailor your resume based on all the information that you can garner from the job description. If you can do this well, nothing can stop you from bagging the job of your dreams. 3. Appropriate Usage Of Keywords In today's digital world, most organisations use computer databases for the initial scanning of resumes. To get past this, the trick is to use as many industry and job-specific keywords. This will increase your chances of making it through such scanning processes. You will find the keywords you need to use in your resume in the job description itself. However, while doing so, you must remember that at the next level of the interview there will be some human being scanning your resume (and most organisations do not offer you a chance of changing your resume once it is submitted). Thus, if you have randomly sprinkled your resume with keywords, chances of it being rejected are very high. Thus, it is important for you to know how to strike a balance and use keywords appropriately. 4. Be Selective About What You Project As a prospective employee it is important for you to understand what it is that the hiring manager is looking for. Before you make it to the interview, the job description issued on their part and your response to that (in the form of your resume) is what is going to decide whether you will be called for the interview in the first place. Sometimes a small and irrelevant detail in your resume may well cost you the job. Thus, take time to read the job description to ensure that such a thing does not happen and that your resume meets the requirement of the hiring manager. 5. Try To Deduce The Compensation It is a fact that no job description will talk about the salary package upfront. However, this is something that you can deduce from the tone of the job description. For example, if the job description speaks about the company being in the start-up stages or the perks and incentives that are on offer, it may be well because of the fact that the salary is lesser than that of industry standards. Since talking about your prospective salary is not the best way to open a conversation with a prospective employer, it is a good idea to gather as much information about the same from the job description itself. Photo: The Canadian Press Outrage over the federal government's announcement about buying the Trans Mountain pipeline to ensure it gets built could fuel unprecedented protests, says a prominent environmentalist who was at the forefront of British Columbia's so-called War in the Woods in the 1990s. Tzeporah Berman said the fight against the pipeline expansion is even bigger than those over logging in Clayoquot Sound. Canadians are angry the government is shelling out $4.5 billion to purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline rather than investing in clean energy after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's climate-change promises during the 2015 election and his later commitment to the Paris climate accord, she said. "My experience is that people are motivated by betrayal, they're motivated by a lack of fairness, they're motivated by a sense of shared common purpose and outrage. In this case we have all of that," said Berman, who was cleared of aiding and abetting protesters at the Clayoquot blockade and is now an adjunct professor of environmental studies at York University in Toronto. Berman said the Liberal government "made a very big mistake" by backing Kinder Morgan's project and alienating voters to create "a perfect storm" that would prompt people to take action. "I think a lot of us who knocked on doors for the Trudeau government really believed them when they said they were going to bring evidence-based analysis and science and democratic process back to pipeline reviews." Berman is a director of Stand.earth, one of the groups that organized an anti-pipeline protest in Vancouver on Tuesday after Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced the government's plans for the pipeline between Edmonton and Burnaby. Another protest is planned in Victoria on Thursday. "My expectation is that the outrage is going to grow and we're not just going it see it here in British Columbia, but we're going to see it nationally and internationally," she said, adding social media makes it possible for activists to connect in ways that didn't exist at the height of anti-logging protests in 1993. "We didn't have email, we didn't have cellphones. It was a remote location that took most people five to seven hours to get through. This is a pipeline project that runs through urban centres," she said of Trans Mountain. Khelsilem, a Squamish Nation council member who goes by his first name, said the federal government's decision to pursue completion of the pipeline expansion threatens Indigenous communities if there was a spill of bitumen from increased tanker traffic in B.C. waters. "Trudeau had promised during the election that he would create a new environmental process that would protect Indigenous rights and that the Kinder Morgan project would be included and sent back to be done through the new process, and on both those counts he's failed completely," he said. Along with multiple legal challenges involving the pipeline, the Squamish Nation and five other First Nations are involved in a Federal Court of Appeal case that targets Ottawa's approval of the project. Luther's Ninety-Five Theses hit the wider German market in January 1518. He wrote his Instructions for Confession and his Sermon on the Proper Preparation of the Heart for the Reception of Communion in the spring of the same year. The Sermon, especially, bore the early seeds of Luther's later full-blown attack on Catholic sacramental theology a fact that Cardinal Thomas Cajetan had already sensed when he met with Luther and pressed him to recant his more problematic views in Augsburg in October 1518. Luther declined. The rest of the story is well known. Exactly 500 years after Luther's Sermon, communion is again a matter of debate in Germany. This time the disputants are the bishops themselves. Munich's Cardinal Reinhard Marx and other German bishops seek to allow Protestant spouses of Catholics to receive communion under certain conditions, so long as they "affirm the Catholic faith in the Eucharist." Cologne's Cardinal Rainer Woelki and six other German bishops oppose the effort. They have sought clarification from Rome. The Vatican, however, has declined to intervene and returned the matter to the German bishops, urging them to arrive at a conference-level agreement. Heat around the issue spiked earlier this month at a national German Catholic gathering. The country's president, along with a major television personality and others, publicly sided with Marx. Cardinal Marx argued that "When someone is hungry and has faith, they must have access to the Eucharist. That must be our passion, and I will not let up on this." Cardinal Woelki disagreed, noting that "whoever says 'yes' to the real presence of Christ in the [Catholic] Eucharist" also "naturally says 'yes' to the papacy, and the hierarchical structure of the Church, and the veneration of the saints, and much, much more" all typically rejected in Protestant belief. Woelki further stressed that "we [in Germany] are a part and parcel of the universal Church. There can be no German exceptionalism." Being human, bishops often disagree. Internal differences are common in any episcopal conference, and they're handled no surprise internally. But two things set the German situation apart: the global prominence of the controversy and the doctrinal substance of the debate. Who can receive the Eucharist, and when, and why, are not merely German questions. If, as Vatican II said, the Eucharist is the source and summit of our life as Christians and the seal of our Catholic unity, then the answers to these questions have implications for the whole Church. They concern all of us. And in that light, I offer these points for thought and discussion, speaking simply as one among many diocesan bishops: If the Eucharist truly is the sign and instrument of ecclesial unity, then if we change the conditions of communion, don't we in fact redefine who and what the Church is? Intentionally or not, the German proposal will inevitably do exactly that. It is the first stage in opening communion to all Protestants, or all baptized persons, since marriage ultimately provides no unique reason to allow communion for non-Catholics. Communion presupposes common faith and creed, including supernatural faith in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, along with the seven sacraments recognized by the perennial tradition of the Catholic Church. By renegotiating this fact, the German proposal in effect adopts a Protestant notion of ecclesial identity. Simple baptism and a belief in Christ seem to suffice, not belief in the mystery of faith as understood by the Catholic tradition and its councils. Will the Protestant spouse need to believe in holy orders as understood by the Catholic Church, which is logically related to belief in the consecration of the bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ? Or are the German bishops suggesting that the sacrament of holy orders might not depend upon apostolic succession? In such a case, we would be confronting a much deeper error. The German proposal severs the vital link between communion and sacramental confession. Presumably it does not imply that Protestant spouses must go to confession for serious sins as a prelude to communion. But this stands in contradiction to the perennial practice and express dogmatic teaching of the Catholic Church, the Council of Trent, and the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church, as well as the ordinary magisterium. It implies, in its effect, a Protestantization of the Catholic theology of the sacraments. If the teaching of the Church can be ignored or renegotiated, even a teaching that has received a conciliar definition (as in this case, at Trent), then can all councils be historically relativized and renegotiated? Many modern liberal Protestants question or reject or simply ignore as historical baggage the teaching on the divinity of Christ from the Council of Nicaea. Will Protestant spouses be required to believe in the divinity of Christ? If they need to believe in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament, why would they not need to share the Catholic belief in holy orders or the sacrament of penance? If they do believe in all these things, why are they not invited to become Catholic as a means to enter into visible full communion? If Protestants are invited to Catholic communion, will Catholics still be barred from Protestant communion? If so, why would they be barred? If they're not barred, doesn't this imply that the Catholic view on holy orders and valid Eucharistic consecration is in fact false, and if it is false, that Protestant beliefs are true? If intercommunion is not intended to imply an equivalence in the Catholic and Protestant confections of the Eucharist, then the practice of intercommunion misleads the faithful. Isn't this a textbook case of "causing scandal"? And won't it be seen by many as a polite form of deception or of hiding hard teachings, within the context of ecumenical discussion? Unity cannot be built on a process that systematically conceals the truth of our differences. The essence of the German intercommunion proposal is that there would be a sharing in holy communion even when there is not true Church unity. This strikes at the very heart of the truth of the sacrament of the Eucharist, because by its very nature, the Eucharist is the body of Christ. And the "body of Christ" is both the real and substantial presence of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine, and also the Church herself, the communion of believers united to Christ, the head. To receive the Eucharist is to proclaim in a solemn and public way, before God and in the Church, that one is in communion both with Jesus and with the visible community celebrating the Eucharist. An intrinsic link therefore exists between "being in communion" with a community, and "receiving communion" in that community. These realities point to each other. Many things unite us with Protestant Christians. The age of bitter polemics is over, and among the blessings in my life are the presence and example of Protestant friends of great Christian character, erudition, and dedication to the Gospel. Nothing I write here is meant to diminish their extraordinary witness. But it's also true that important things still divide us, and the issues that separate us are not merely the verbal artifacts of a bygone era. Our separation is a wound in the unity of Christians, and it is not willed by God; but it is a reality that we need to acknowledge. To insert a falsehood into the most solemn moment of one's encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist to say by one's actions, "I am in communion with this community," when one is demonstrably not in communion with that community is a lie, and thus a serious offense before God. In his 2003 encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, John Paul II wrote: The celebration of the Eucharist cannot be the starting-point for communion; it presupposes that communion already exists, a communion which it seeks to consolidate and bring to perfection. The sacrament is an expression of this bond of communion both in its invisible dimension, which, in Christ and through the working of the Holy Spirit, unites us to the Father and among ourselves, and in its visible dimension, which entails communion in the teaching of the Apostles, in the sacraments and in the Church's hierarchical order. The profound relationship between the invisible and the visible elements of ecclesial communion is constitutive of the Church as the sacrament of salvation. Only in this context can there be a legitimate celebration of the Eucharist and true participation in it. Consequently it is an intrinsic requirement of the Eucharist that it should be celebrated in communion, and specifically maintaining the various bonds of that communion intact. What happens in Germany will not stay in Germany. History has already taught us that lesson once. Slated to be next year only as the 2023 line, the Jeep Renegade is already showing off the streets with... The delegate rate for Cemtech Europe 2018 Conference & Exhibition is:Receive a 10% discount for groups of three or more when booked at the same time. A further 5% can be saved when paying online with a Credit Card at the point of order. Included in the Delegate Rate: Full access to conference and exhibition Delegate pack Gala Dinner Cement plant visit Spouse tour Specially negotiated hotel rate of EUR 145 (plus 8% VAT) per night, inc breakfast, discounted booking form available to registered delegates. Refund/Cancellation Policy: If you are subsequently unable to attend, you may transfer your delegate registration to another colleague without penalty. Alternatively, you may request a refund up to 30 days before the event, which will incur an administrative charge of 20% of the total delegate fee paid. Less than 30 days before the event, no refunds will be possible. Semen Indonesia - May 2018 April 2018 saw Semen Indonesia record a 7.1 per cent YoY increase in sales. Domestic sales for the month came in at 2,114,578t, which along with exports of 279,945t, brought total sales to 2,394,523t, compared to 2,234,869t in the same period a year earlier. During the same month, Thang Long Cement JSC (TLCC), Semen Indonesias Vietnamese subsidiary, saw its domestic sales advance by 3.1 per cent YoY to 179,050, while its exports leapt 107.6 per cent to 91,149t. This took total group sales to 2,664,722t in April, an increase of 8.7 per cent YoY. To continue reading this story and have 100% free access to the CemNet.com website, please Register for a subscription to International Cement Review or Login Ugandan government calls off plans for imports 30 May 2018 Uganda's government has back-tracked on initial plans to call in cement imports because local manufacturers have stablised prices. Yesterday, the Trade, Industry and Cooperatives Ministry Public Relations Officer, Khadijah Nakakande, said that cement prices had fallen and that government would no longer invite external players to import cement. "The cement prices have gone down and we understand a bag is now at UGX32,000 (US$8.50) around where it was before the crisis. There will be no other players because the condition was that manufacturers increase production and reduce prices, which they have done," Ms Nakakande said. Cement prices had risen sharply in April, following cement shortages with a bag of cement going for between UGX35,000-50,000. On 10 April Trade, Industry and Cooperatives Minister, Amelia Kyambadde, met cement manufacturers and ordered them to fix the scarcity and high prices by mid-May or else government invites other players to import cement. The big cement manufacturers, especially Hima Cement and Tororo Cement blamed technical glitches for the shortages. In April, the Kasese-based Hima Cement said it was receiving little electric power supply, which forced irregular operation of the plant while Tororo Cement blamed it on its routine plant maintenance. Both manufacturers said the problems forced them to first serve the bigger export orders to neighbouring regions and those for bigger local dam construction projects at Karuma and Isimba, and also the Jinja Cable Bridge. Published under Wolves are elusive animals, and when it comes to hunting their next meal no holds are barred. Packs have a way of wreaking havoc on livestock, inevitably making ranchers a wolfs biggest predator. Although the breed was just recently reintroduced into Yellowstone, wolves have been recolonizing the wilderness areas of Montana since the late 70s. Recently, a mysterious wolf-dog hybrid was found in the state, and it has experts scratching their chins to identify it. Follow along to learn more. 1. The mysterious wolf-dog was killed by a rancher May 16, 2018, presented a normal opportunity for a rancher to shepherd his livestock in Denton, Montana population 247. Not out of the ordinary, the rancher shot and killed what he assumed to be threatening wolf. He contacted the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, as is the protocol after killing a wolf. But authorities were not convinced that the creature was a wolf. Next: The reason this creature may not be a certified wolf. 2. Authorities could not determine the creature was a wolf A routine once-over of the animal turned into much more for the wildlife authorities. According to them and the Great Falls Tribune, The canine teeth were too short, the front paws were too small, but its claws were too long. Its large, floppy ears and its shaggy fur were also uncharacteristic of a common wolf. When Warden Sargent Kyle Anderson of the Fish, Wildlife and Parks took a gander, he said that based on the photos, we have some doubts as to whether it was a pure-bred wolf, or a hybrid or a wild dog of sorts. Next: DNA testing 3. The animal is being tested at a Bozeman lab As speculations started swirling across Montana and now the nation, the Fish, Wildlife and Parks of Montana decided the most important plan of action would begin with a full DNA testing. This will be the tell-tale of the origin of the questionable creature. Next: Everyone has an opinion 4. The theories have begun to swirl To no huge surprise, individuals started speculating what this mysterious wolf-dog could actually be and rest-assured the theories are entertaining. Similar to those surrounding bigfoot sightings, the following speculations are deep-rooted in ancient history and folk tales of which some individuals believe to be the truth. Is it a direwolf, a werewolf, or something else? Next: The wolf-dog hybrid 5. The wolf-dog hybrid The popular and perhaps the most logical explanation for the creature is what is believed to be a wolf-dog hybrid. In fact, this is not the first instance of reports surrounding such a breed. Wolves and domesticated dogs are absolutely able to breed together, producing quite testy and territorial offspring more reminiscent of a wolfs characteristics. Next: A Native American legend holds great truth. 6. The shunka warakin Native American legend makes mention of a wolf-hyena-like mix of a dog called shunka warakin. This animal was believed to be the culprit guilty of terrorizing Montanan livestock. Interestingly enough, the shunka warakin, also called ringdocus, was killed and displayed in an Idaho museum in the late 1880s. Some people speculate that this wolf-dog hybrid is actually the resurgence of the shunka warakin. Next: The dogman 7. The dogman Perhaps the most absurd and hilarious of theories is that of the dogman. One person speculated that it could very well be whats being called Dogman. Theyre spotted each day and the government quells any and all reports. Several people report being strong armed into keeping quiet about their reports by men wearing black suits. These are just facts. Look into if you dont believe it. Even though its falling behind the rest of the world, the United States population keeps increasing. However, some cities are growing faster than others. These 15 U.S. cities added the most new residents in 2017, according to the Census Bureau. Well call them the cities adding the most people. The top city on the list (page 15) added 66 people each day, but two sister cities (pages 12 and 13) saw 51 people moving in daily. 15. Henderson, Nev. People added per day: 28.8 28.8 Population increase: 10,534 10,534 2017 population: 302,539 Nevadas many casinos and legal marijuana cant account for all the people moving to Henderson. The Las Vegas suburb added close to 29 people every day from July 1, 2016, to July 1, 2017. Next: A hot job market brings in more residents. 14. Irvine, Calif. People added per day: 30.3 30.3 Population increase: 11,068 11,068 2017 population: 277,453 The word is out: Irvine is one of the best cities to find a job, and people are moving in like crazy. About 30 people moved to the town each day, which added more than 11,000 people to the citys population. Next: A state youd expect, a city you probably wouldnt. 13. Jacksonville, Fla. People added per day: 30.6 30.6 Population increase: 11,169 11,169 2017 population: 892,062 Even though there are lots of reasons to hate Florida, Jacksonville still shows up as one of the cities adding the most people. More than 11,000 people moved there from 2016 to 2017, pushing the population close to 900,000. Next: One big drawback isnt keeping people away. 12. Austin, Texas People added per day: 34.2 34.2 Population increase: 12,515 12,515 2017 population: 950,715 Austin has one major drawback for people moving in: Its a lot more expensive to buy a house there now than it used to be. Despite that negative, it added more than 12,500 people from 2016 to 2017, pushing the population to more than 950,000. Next: If you can afford it, a house is a great investment in this city. 11. San Diego People added per day: 35.1 35.1 Population increase: 12,834 12,834 2017 population: 1.41 million Despite California being one of the most expensive states to buy a house, San Diego is one of the cities adding the most people. If you can afford to move to San Diego, its worth it. Houses there make more than minimum wage, so you get a great return on your investment. Next: There is a lot to love about this city, which is why its growing so quickly. 10. Atlanta People added per day: 36.5 36.5 Population increase: 13,323 13,323 2017 population: 486,290 The mild weather, diverse neighborhoods, crazy job growth, and low taxes contribute to Atlanta being one of the cities adding the most people. More than 36 people moved in every day from 2016 to 2017, pushing the population closer to 500,000. Next: A small city thats growing quickly. 9. Frisco, Texas People added per day: 36.9 36.9 Population increase: 13,470 13,470 2017 population: 177,286 The smallest city on our list makes up for its stature in a big way. In 2010, the population was just over 117,000, but Frisco is perennially one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. Nearly 37 people moved in each day for the year ending on July 1, 2017, pushing the population over 177,000 and making it one of the cities adding the most people. Next: A surprising fact puts this Midwest city on our list. 8. Columbus, Ohio People added per day: 42.2 42.2 Population increase: 15,429 15,429 2017 population: 879,170 You might be surprised to find out that Columbus is actually one of the most popular U.S. destinations for travelers. Apparently, some of them are sticking around and making it one of the cities adding the most people. The 42 people moving in each day are moving to one of the major cities with affordable housing. Next: A bad reputation isnt a detriment. 7. Charlotte, N.C. People added per day: 42.5 42.5 Population increase: 15,551 15,551 2017 population: 859,035 Charlotte has a bad reputation for its gun violence, but thats not keeping people away. With more than 42 people arriving each day, its one of the big American cities adding the most people. Next: We can think of several reasons this city makes our list. 6. Seattle People added per day: 49.1 49.1 Population increase: 17,940 17,940 2017 population: 724,745 We can think of several reasons why Seattle is one of the cities adding the most people in the United States. Seattle has Amazons headquarters and 45,000 employees. The company is always looking for qualified workers, so its helping the city add to its population. The city is the epicenter of Washingtons fantastic craft beer scene, which appeals to thirsty fans of adult beverages. Washington state has some the loosest marijuana laws in the U.S., which is a draw for some people looking to enjoy themselves legally. Next: People are coming more than they are going. 5. Los Angeles People added per day: 51 51 Population increase: 18,643 18,643 2017 population: 3.99 million Los Angeles is expensive and overpopulated, which is why people are leaving. Yet the city is drawing more immigrants than most other big cities. People are coming more than theyre going, which is why L.A. is one of the cities adding the most people. Next: Another city in whats shaping up to be a popular state. 4. Fort Worth, Texas People added per day: 51.1 51.1 Population increase: 18,664 18,664 2017 population: 874,168 It looks like Texas is one of the most popular places in the United States. Weve already visited two Texas cities, and heres another one. The big tax refunds in the state are just one reason Fort Worth welcomed 51 people every day from 2016 to 2017 Next: Population growth is another way this city resembles its neighbor. 3. Dallas People added per day: 51.8 51.8 Population increase: 18,935 18,935 2017 population: 1.34 million Theres a reason Dallas and Forth Worth are mentioned in the same breath so often. Theyre similar in almost every way, all the way down to how many people the Census Bureau says they added from 2016 to 2017. Dallas saw its population grow by roughly 52 people per day, which is only slightly ahead of Fort Worths 51 each day. Next: The influx continues 2. Phoenix People added per day: 65.8 65.8 Population increase: 24,036 24,036 2017 population: 1.62 million We know Phoenix is a great city for retirees, but thats not the only reason its No. 2 on the list of cities adding the most people. Low taxes, affordable housing, low cost of living, and very little crime make it popular for everyone, including the over-65 crowd. Next: More proof of this states popularity. 1. San Antonio People added per day: 66.3 66.3 Population increase: 24,208 24,208 2017 population: 1.51 million Remember how we mentioned a few minutes ago that Texas is one of the most popular states in the U.S.? Well, this is just more proof. San Antonio added well over 24,000 people from 2016 to 2017 to top the list of cities adding the most people. The five Texas cities on our list Austin, Frisco, Fort Worth, Dallas, and San Antonio added 88,062 to their collective populations, according to the Census Bureau. Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! Read more: These Are the Richest Drug Dealers of All Time As U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley is a proven deal-maker, according to President Donald Trump, who nominated her for the position. Although the Republican worked her way up to this position, rumor has it shes not done: Could she run for president yet? Here well list some things you may not know about Haley. Read on to see why Trump picked her for the job (page 7) and how eight of her words became an Internet meme (page 8). Shes the daughter of Indian immigrants She was born Nimrata Randhawa to Sikh parents who immigrated from India. They called her Nikki right from the start. Before they arrived in America, her father was a professor and her mother earned a law degree. Once in America, he worked as a professor at Vorhees College, and she earned a masters degree and worked a public school teacher. Next: Why she was disqualified from a beauty pageant She grew up in South Carolina One of four siblings, Haley was born and raised in South Carolina. She wrote in her memoir that when she was five, her parents entered her into a beauty pageant in Bamberg, South Carolina. Traditionally, judges named one black queen and one white queen. Since she didnt fit either category, she was disqualified. When she was 12, Haley helped with the bookkeeping in her mothers clothing shop. She later credited this experience when she was 12 as giving her a sharp aversion to government intrusion. She went on to earn an accounting degree from Clemson University. Next: How she got into politics How her political career began Upon graduation, Haley worked for a waste management company but then joined her familys clothing business as controller and chief financial officer. She also served on boards for several business organizations and charities. In 2004, she ran successfully for the South Carolina House of Representatives, on a property tax relief and education reform platform. She became the first Indian-American to hold office in the state. She then had aspirations to become governor. (More on that soon.) Next: How shes two religions Religion and family While Haley identifies with the Sikh religion of her parents, she also attends a Methodist church. When asked by Christianity Today whether she hopes her parents convert to Christianity, she replied, What I hope is that my parents do whats right for them. In 1996, she married Michael Haley, an officer in the South Carolina Army National Guard. They have two children, daughter Rena and son Nalin. Next: Her groundbreaking move as governor First female governor of South Carolina Haley served as her states first female governor, from 2011 to 2017. During this time, she notably ordered the 2015 removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds. This action followed the shooting of nine African Americans at Charlestons historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. This flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state, she said at the time. Next: She wasnt a Trump supporter at first. She didnt endorse Trump in the primary Notably, Haley supported presidential candidate Marco Rubio in the 2016 primary election. When she delivered the GOP response to President Obamas last State of the Union speech, she referred to Trump indirectly: During the angriest of times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation. Next: Why Trump nominated her Her job in Trumps cabinet Haley resigned as governor in 2017 when Trump tapped her to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. His reasons for that likely included her strongly hawkish worldview. On a political level, it also freed him of a possible 2020 campaign rival. He also may have viewed nominating a minority female as a response to racism charges. In her role, Haley supported moving the U.S. Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem which came to fruition in May 2018. She also encouraged the U.N. to increase sanctions against North Korea in 2017. The U.N. council approved this move, banning exports worth over $1 billion. Next: How her words became a meme Her spat with a White House official In April 2018, Haley clapped back at Trump aide Larry Kudlow after he remarked she may have suffered momentary confusion regarding Trumps plans for Russian sanctions. When contact for a response, Haley simply offered, With all due respect, I dont get confused. This prompted an apology from Kudlow, White House economic advisor. But that didnt stop the flurry of memes and late-night monologues. Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! Former Gays, Lesbians Blast Calif. for Regarding Them as 'Frauds' With Pending Therapy Ban CP Reporter | 30 May, 2018 by Brandon Showalter Eight former gays and lesbians who are residents of California have released a video resisting pending state legislation banning therapy for individuals with unwanted same-sex attraction, arguing their state government considers them frauds. The video, which was published Saturday by Church United on the video sharing site Vimeo, features eight men and women who once lived and identified as gay or lesbian, some of whom are now in heterosexual marriages and have children. "I'm a fraud," the participants say in the video at the beginning. That is how the state of California regards them with their proposed law, AB-2943, that would outlaw goods and services seeking to minister to anyone with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender confusion, they go on to explain. "I came out in my 20s as a lesbian. I fully embraced that identity," Elizabeth Woning says in the video. Woning ministers with Equipped to Love, a ministry based out of Bethel Church in Redding, California. "I felt that I had been born that way. Really, it seemed to explain why I was the way I was." Ken Williams, who is also a pastor with Equipped to Love, recounts that he once heard a family member express gratitude for AIDS because it was God's punishment for gay people. "So you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that it's not going to be ok for you to say that you're having some unwanted same-sex attractions," he says. Yet Woning says on one occasion, as a lesbian who fully embraced her homosexual identity and liberal, LBGT-affirming theology, a young man shared with her a prophetic word he felt the Lord had given him and it was a direct answer to something about which she had been praying. That event caused her to question whether or not she really knew God and she began more deliberately poring over the Scripture. Upon coming to an understanding of God's character, she became convinced she had to yield everything to Him, including her sexuality. She explains that she did not pursue God in order to alter her sexuality but pursued Him for Him, and as she did, her conception of her identity began to change. She was shocked to discover herself developing affections for a man, the man who is now her husband of 13 years. Read more about Former Gays, Lesbians Blast Calif. for Regarding Them as 'Frauds' With Pending Therapy Ban on The Christian Post. Up to 120,000 Trapped in North Korean Labor Camps: State Dept. Religious Freedom Report Christian Post Contributor | 30 May, 2018 by Samuel Smith Between 80,000 to 120,000 people are trapped in North Korean gulags with many of them being imprisoned for their faith, the U.S. State Department has said. On Tuesday, the agency released its congressionally-mandated 2017 International Religious Freedom report, an annual document describing the status of religious freedom in every country. This year's report labels the Rohingya refugee crisis in Burma as "ethnic cleansing." It also places an estimate on the number of people subjected to North Korea's notorious system of prison camps. Escapees over the years have shared the horrors of torture, forced labor and abuse they have experienced inside North Korea's prison camps. People are imprisoned in what the Kim regime likes to call "re-education camps" for crimes such as worshiping in a church that's not state-recognized or for defecting from the country. "The government continued to deal harshly with those who engaged in almost any religious practices through executions, torture, beatings, and arrests," the report states. "An estimated 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners, some imprisoned for religious reasons, were believed to be held in the political prison camp system in remote areas under horrific conditions." The State Department relied on the expertise of NGOs like Christian Solidarity Worldwide to state that a "a policy of guilt by association was often applied in cases of detentions of Christians, meaning that the relatives of Christians were also detained regardless of their beliefs." "Religious and human rights groups outside the country continued to provide numerous reports that members of underground churches were arrested, beaten, tortured, and killed because of their religious beliefs," the report states. "According to the [Database Center for North Korean Human Rights], there was a report in 2016 of disappearances of persons who were found to be practicing religion within detention facilities. International NGOs and North Korean defectors reported any religious activities conducted outside of those that were state-sanctioned, including praying, singing hymns, and reading the Bible, could lead to severe punishment, including imprisonment in political prison camps." According to the report, one Christian who defected after spending eight years in prison for attending church in China for four months told a U.S.-based NGO that she was charged with "practicing Christianity" and learning of its "disgraceful nature." "During her imprisonment, authorities told her up to a dozen times a day to repent of her past and try to 'wash' her mind," the report reads. "She reported six other women who were in prison for attending church were either beaten to death or died from diarrhea because they did not have access to medicine." The report also states that Christians are "restricted to the lowest class rungs of the songun system" as they are seen as a "means of foreign, Western encroachment." The songun system classifies individuals on the basis of social class, presumed support of the Kim regime, religious views, family background and other identifiers. Read more about Christianity in North Korea in The Christian Post. Six months after the Obama administration said it was "committed" to involving Israel in its flagship international counter-terrorism initiative, there has evidently been little progress, and the State Department indicated Wednesday it was still trying, CNSNews.com reports. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prepares to attend a meeting of the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF) in the United Arab Emirates next week, a State Department spokesman said the U.S. would there again raise the issue with its GCTF partners. The Obama administration took flak from the start when it excluded Israel from the forum, because Israel has had decades of experience facing and combating terrorism -- far more than most other countries invited to join the forum. Critics said it was obvious Israel was left out because Muslim countries, which the administration wanted to draw in, would not have joined had Israel been involved. Eleven of the 29 countries welcomed into the GCTF are members of the 56-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC); a senior administration official said last summer a key aim of the GCTR was to "bridge old and deep divides in the international community between Western donor nations and Muslim-majority nations." Palestinian terrorists say they fired more than 100 rockets and mortars from Gaza into Israel this week. The attacks started Tuesday evening and went into Wednesday morning, but Israels Iron Dome missile defense system shot down many of the rockets. According to Israels Channel 10, experts estimate more than 115 missiles and rockets were launched from Gaza into Israel. Others have estimated that number at around 130. No one was killed in the attacks, but three Israel Defense Forces soldiers were injured from mortar fragments. In response, the IDF struck 25 military targets in Gaza, the IDF said on its Twitter page. "The IDF is prepared for a variety of scenarios and is determined to act against terror operatives," the IDF said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahusaid that since Tuesday, the military has hit dozens of terror targets, delivering the hardest blow in years. Those responsible for the escalation, inspired by Iran, are Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations, said Netanyahu. I will not detail our plans because I do not want the enemy to know what is in store, but one thing must be made clear to them: When they try us, they pay. And if they continue to try us, they will pay even more. Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attacks on Israel. The groups said they were striking back after Israel killed more than 100 Palestinians who were protesting along the border. Protesting has been largely violent at the border as protestors at the Gaza border are calling for the reversal of a blockade on the Gaza strip. The blockade has been in place since 2014, according to Business Insider. Israel has since imposed a naval blockade on Gaza. Hamas has reportedly agreed to a ceasefire and Israel said it would respect the ceasefire. Egypt has agreed to moderate the ceasefire. An Israeli official said however, it would be prepared to launch a strike if the terrorist groups resume attacks. Publication date: May 30, 2018 On Wednesday, Israel successfully test-fired a missile said to be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and striking Iran, adding to the debate over whether Israel's leaders are considering a military attack on Tehran's weapons facilities, according to CNSNews.com. Israeli officials have long warned that a military strike was an option, and this week Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed new concerns about Iran's nuclear program. Wednesday's missile launch, from a base on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, added to the speculation that Israeli action could be imminent. Israel considers Iran its most dangerous threat; Iran has repeatedly referenced Israel's destruction and voiced support for anti-Israel militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah. "What Israel would wish to see is that the United States and rest of powers would pressure Iran more seriously ... first with more sanctions and if they don't work, to go to war with Iran," said Eldad Pardo, an Iran expert at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. In the case of any attack on Tehran, Iran's military leaders say they will "punish" Israel. Only four percent of North Korean defectors had seen a Bible in the country, according to a new State Department report, which also said the Communist government continues to deal harshly with those who [engage] in almost any religious practices through executions, torture, beatings, and arrests. Additionally, an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 citizens are being held in political prison camps, and many for religious reasons, according to the report. The data was included in the State Departments International Religious Freedom Report for 2017, which was released Tuesday and included findings for every country in the world. The report on North Korea was particularly eye-opening. The U.S. government estimates the North Korean population at 25.2 million. United Nation estimates say there are between 200,000 and 400,000 Christians in the country. Defector accounts indicated religious practitioners often concealed their activities from neighbors, coworkers, and other members of society due to fear their activities would be reported to the authorities, the report said. Religious and human rights groups outside the country continued to provide numerous reports that members of underground churches were arrested, beaten, tortured, and killed because of their religious beliefs. International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and North Korean defectors reported that praying, singing hymns, and reading the Bible could lead to severe punishment, including imprisonment in political prison camps. A 2014 North Korean government document states that Freedom of religion is allowed and provided by the State law within the limit necessary for securing social order, health, social security, morality and other human. Michael Foust is a freelance writer. Visit his blog, MichaelFoust.com Photo courtesy: Thinkstock/Tuongtang Publication date: May 30, 2018 Shortly after making my calling public to my local church at age 15, I told my parents I wanted to go to seminary eventually. Thats what my father, a pastor, had done after college, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. Once I started college, however, I wasnt as zealous anymore. I didnt think I could do seminary; I was timid and unsure if I were smart enough. Moreover, I was a Christian studies major at a liberal arts school who thought what I was learning there was sufficient training for ministry. But then my perspective changed. As I was praying and thinking through whether or not I should go to seminary, my Bible reading led me to 2 Timothy 3:1415: But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. This commandcontinue in what you have learnedpropelled me into seminary those years ago, but it has also served me well in the intervening years. Learning is a prerequisite for those who want to be teachers and communicators of Gods Word, but it is also a lifestyle and an attitude that all of Gods children should adopt. For women who feel called to communicate Gods Word to the people of God, theological training is necessary to prepare you for the work. As a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, you will bear the responsibility of speaking on behalf of God by expounding his Word, and also the responsibility of shepherding and protecting his sheep (even if those sheep are exclusively women and children). Jamess warning should reverberate in our ears and cause us to proceed cautiously: Not many of you should become teachers because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly (James 3:1). Likewise, vocational ministry is the serious business of soul care. Like surgeons who feel the life-and-death weight of their work, we, too, should feel the eternal life-and-death weight of our callings just as much and possibly more. My friend Hayden Walker served as a youth minister at a Baptist church in Birmingham for several years. Ministry is hard work, she wrote to me, and it should be more than just event planning. My theological education reminds me that I have a responsibility to the gospel and to communicate truth, not just coordinate a calendar. As 2 Timothy suggests, a serious calling requires serious study of Scripture. With that in mind, I offer here a womans guide to pursuing a seminary education. Choose your seminary wisely. As you seek to choose a school, the first question to ask is: Do I want to attend a seminary within my own denomination or one that is inter-or multi-denominational? In other words: Whom do I want to shape me? The advantage of going to a seminary within your denomination is that you will be shaped by top thinkers in your own tradition. If you are Episcopalian, you will perhaps become even more firmly Episcopalian. If you are Baptist, you will perhaps leave seminary even more Baptist. If you want to be ordained, a denominational seminary will (usually) get you there faster, and some denominations who ordain women will not ordain you unless you go to one of their seminaries. On the other hand, most interdenominational evangelical seminaries offer a unique ecumenical approach. They want their students to leave as they entered: as good members of their respective denominations but with a deepened appreciation of other traditions. So both options offer benefitsjust different ones. But wherever you go, look for a seminary committed to orthodoxy. Article continues below Consider attitudes toward women. Regardless of whether you are complementarian or egalitarian (or somewhere in the middle) in your views, youll want to consider a schools beliefs and attitudes about the role of women in gospel ministry. Dont expect to go to a seminary where every male student is supportive of women in ministry, even if you dont feel called to be a senior pastor. Most likely, youll encounter opposition at some point. On the other hand, beware of schools where you find a lot of women who exhibit anger toward men. These schools raise other red flags. Consider these questions when examining seminaries: Are there any women on the faculty? What do female students and alumnae report about their experience? What does the director of admissions say about the schools calling to prepare women for ministry of all kinds? Consider online versus on-campus education. Attending seminary in person poses challenges for many womenthose who are married, caring for children, or engaged in other personal or professional commitments that infringe on their time or mobility. The purpose of online degrees is to make seminary available to those who wouldnt normally be able to pursue theological training, and in that sense, the internet has created opportunities for those who might otherwise have none. Almost every institution now offers online degrees. (In this CT piece, Marybeth Baggett offers suggestions for online programs worth considering.) Although attending seminary remotely is better than not attending at all, nonetheless, if you have the ability to go the on-campus route, I strongly encourage you to do it. Something transformative happens in the classroom: You get to meet peers and professors face to face, engage directly with professors, and converse with students after class. The best type of theological education takes place in a community of faith. If youre willing and able to move across the country (or the world) to serve Christ in ministry wherever he places you, then consider doing the same with seminary. Move to the seminary God is calling you to. Its a way to practice obedience and trust so that when he calls you to ministry after seminary, it will be easier to take that next step. Consider your degree and course options. The most common degree for most types of pastoral ministry is the MDiv (Master of Divinity). Although it depends on the school, most evangelical institutions offer biblical languages, church history, systematic theology, preaching, and pastoral care courses as part of an MDiv program. If you plan to teach Gods Word through writing, speaking, preaching, or teaching, the MDiv provides a strong grasp of biblical languages. Two or three classes in Greek or Hebrew is not enough, however. You need to learn the languages well but also know how to use them for preaching and teaching. With that in mind, beware of institutions that have cheapened their MDiv degree by only requiring a few classes in biblical languages. The MDiv degree will also require you to take preaching classes. If preaching is a spiritual gift you think you might have, you need the training and the practice. Even if you dont plan to be in the pulpit, preaching classes will give you the tools to interpret, apply, and communicate Scripture. You can use these skills in different areas of ministryeven in the nurseryand in conjunction with other gifts. Consider finding a female mentor. As you pursue seminary, look for someone who can impart wisdom, speak truth, and pastor you. Your mentor doesnt have to be female, of course. Nonetheless, given the natural difficulties of pursuing ministry as a womanin the pulpit or elsewhereI strongly recommend finding a female mentor. Article continues below As you seek one out, look for someone who has done (or is doing) gospel ministry, especially in an area close to your interest. If you feel called to youth ministry, for example, then pray and search for someone in that field. Second, look for someone who is respected by others and mature in the faith. Third, look for someone who is theologically educated or at least more likely to encourage you toward that end. (And keep in mind that mentoring does not take the place of studying Scripture with scholars.) Finally, look for someone who will speak truthfully into your life with Christlike love. Consider the faculty-to-student ratio. As you assess your seminary options, read up on the faculty. Who will be the people shaping you? What have they written? What courses do they teach, and whats their area of specialization? Perhaps most importantly, will you have the opportunity to get to know them. Large seminaries may have some of the best scholars in the field (a huge positive), but you might run the risk of not being able to know your professors on a personal level. For me, one of the benefits of attending a small seminary was sitting at the feet of biblical scholars in class and then getting to know them outside of class. When youre one of 14 students, youre able to ask more questions and be more involved. That benefit often extends past seminary, too. For example, while working on my book last year, I asked one of my former New Testament professors a question about Romans 16. He graciously sent me a section of the commentary on Romans that he had written for Zondervan (which at the time had yet to be published). The greatest value of seminary has been this: lifelong relationships with scholars who are invested in my life and ministry and continue to pray for me. You cant put a price tag on that. Consider the cost. As you examine the cost of seminary, consider not only the cost of education but also the cost of living in the area where the school is located. This is especially important for women who have families. Does the seminary offer on-campus housing? If you have kids, is the on-campus housing family friendly? If not, whats the cost of off-campus housing? Explore both loan and scholarship options. Most schools offer scholarships and other forms of financial support, as do many churches. Ask about scholarships given by your own church and also churches near the school that youre considering. (Research national scholarships, as well.) Think, too, about work. Will you have to work while in seminary? How much will you have to earn to make ends meet? And are you eligible for federal work-study? Take the long view. In Scripture, the call to ministry is never fast or easy. Abraham is promised a land he never gets to inherit and a nation he never gets to see. Moses is never able to bring the people into the Promised Land. David has to wait roughly 15 years from his anointing as king to the day he takes the throne, and even then he never gets to see the building of the temple. Similarly, seminary requires time and sacrifice. It may seem like a waste of time or money or an obstacle to fulfilling your call now, but seminary is neither easy nor fast. Its designed to mirror ministry and teach you what it will be like: hard and slow. The week before my third-semester finals in seminary, I called my father to complain about feeling overwhelmed by all the papers and tests (in addition to my part-time job). Kristen, he said to me, God is using these experiences to teach you now what it means to depend on God and to not give up in the hard times so that when you experience the difficult times in ministry later, you will remember that the power of God carried you now and will carry you then. Article continues below He was right. As I have faced challenges in my ministry journey, I am grateful that I had hard, slow theological training because it has prepared me for the hard, slow process of ministry. Finally, pray through the process. As you consider seminariesand there are many wonderful options out thereI encourage you to pray fervently through the process. Seek the God who has called you into his service. Ask him to show you where you should be shaped for the ministry to which he has called you. Ask him to open doors and close doors. Ask him to raise red flags and green flags. Ask him, too, to speak through the mouths of mentors and other trusted people. Finally, ask him to guide and lead you, and then trust that he will. Let Psalm 138 be your prayer: The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever. Do not forsake the work of your hands (Ps. 138:8, ESV). Amen. Kristen Padilla, MDiv, is the author of Now That Im Called: A Guide for Women Discerning a Call to Ministry. She is a writer, Bible teacher, wife to a biblical scholar, mom of one, and on staff at Beeson Divinity School of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Connect with her at kristenrpadilla.com or on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. This essay was adapted from Now That Im Called: A Guide for Women Discerning a Call to Ministry. Copyright 2018 by Kristen Padilla. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com. Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Like many, I am deeply concerned about school violence. A massive shift has occurred. Talking, chewing gum and making noise were the top three public school problems in the early 1960s. Currently, rape, robbery and assault could lead the list. Education expert William Jeynes correlates the decline in public schools with the Supreme Court's 1962 and 1963 decisions to remove Bible reading: "One can argue, and some have, that the decision by the Supreme Court in a series of three decisions back in 1962 and 1963 to remove Bible and prayer from our public schools, may be the most spiritually significant event in our nation's history over the course of the last 55 years." That decision had enormous implications that will continue unless we make drastic changes. Granted, how can we promote prayer in schools when prayer in the church is at an all-time low? Tighter guns laws have some merit as long as law-abiding citizens are not restricted. However, guns are not the problem sin is the problem. Will we outlaw pipe fittings to prevent pipe bombs and cars to prevent road rage? Of course not. Cain killed Abel with a rock. The human heart is the problem. 1. Bring God back into the schools. I remember a time when we weren't embarrassed about God. Teachers and administrators would willingly share their faith. Now, evolution is taught as fact, and God is portrayed as a fairy tale when in reality, evolution is a fairy tale and creation is a fact. In the same sense that this article did not write itself, we are not here by random chance. Kids need to know that they are made in the image of God and that their Creator loves them and will guide them if they turn to Him. Bringing God back into the schools will reverse everything from violence to bullying to depression. Secular groups have been pushing their agenda far too long. "Separation of church and state" is their battle cry. The courts have misused the infamous "separation" phrase to ban religious activities, primarily those promoting Christian principles. Thomas Jefferson used the phrase in 1802 in a private letter written to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut. The Baptists feared that the government might try to regulate religious expression. They were assured that this would not happen. Ironically, we are seeing this today. In other words, the people did not want the government imposing a national religion on the people. Jefferson wisely agreed with them. His statement was intended to protect religious expression by building a wall of separation between the church and the state; solidifying the fact that the federal government could not strike down religious freedoms. Ironically, the public school system was first introduced in the 1600s to teach kids the Bible. Scholars were born through Princeton and Yale. God was embraced, not replaced. America, wake up! We can unapologetically acknowledge the sovereign hand of God on our campuses. Acknowledgment is not establishment. I pray that local school districts don't cave in to political correctness; difference makers should make a difference. 2. Allow hope onto the campus. When I inquired recently if pastors could help students after a local school shooting, I was told that they have many trained secular psychologists who can help. In short, pastors aren't allowed on campuses. Remember, "separation of church and state." The irony is that those who can offer lasting hope are not allowed on campuses. Granted, I'm not talking about being aggressive and proselytizing unwilling students. My recommendation is that (after a thorough vetting process), certain Christians are allowed on campus as encouragers and change agents, building up those who are bullied and offering hope to the hopeless. 3. Bring God back into our homes. As the family goes, so goes the nation. Violent video games and movies do nothing but foster violence. For example, in Grand Theft Auto, kids can have sex with a prostitute, take back the money, and set her on fire. Parents, for the love of God, wake up! Turn off the media and invest in your children. Ironically, the missing element that few want to talk about is the fact that most shooters are taking psychotropic drugs to deal with emotional pain. Therein lies one of the main problems. Homes resemble a volcano ready to erupt rather than a loving, nurturing environment. And our media choices instill fear, violence, and sexual perversion. In short, we are reaping what we are sowing in our homes. Parents should be the spiritual leaders in our homes; our absence has caused an epidemic. The majority of youth suicides, runaways, rapists, and high school dropouts are from fatherless homes. Also remember, we don't have to leave home to be absent; we can check out mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and lead our family astray. If we fail to train our children, society will do it for us. Many who have been interviewed after a suicide attempt talk about feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. They see no way out. By bringing God back into our homes and schools, we can impact the next generation at a very deep level. Parents must repent of their apathy and turn completely to God to be changed from the inside out, which, in turn, will change the atmosphere of our homes, schools, and country. We are witnessing the tragic results of people dying spiritually. We must point people to the true source of healing, or violence will only escalate. Xanax, OxyContin, and Vicodin will never replace repentance, renewal, and restoration through Jesus Christ. We have sown to the wind and are reaping the whirlwind. In addition to violence increasing, SAT scores have sunk to the lowest level since the college admission test was overhauled in 2005. Unless the Lord builds the house, he who labors, labors in vain. Unless the Lord builds the school, he who labors, labors in vain. More at WCFAV.org Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Last Friday, the Trump administration announced its new Protect Life Rule. These new HHS regulations will insure that Title X Family Planning Funds will no longer go to organizations that perform or promote abortions. As the nation's largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood is poised to lose the $50 to $60 million it receives annually in Title X funds its second largest source of taxpayer funding. Contrary to some media reports, these new regulations will not reduce funding for family planning programs. They will instead redirect this funding to more than 9,000 Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) around the country, as well as community health centers, non-profit clinics, state and county health departments, and other alternatives which are more dispersed geographically and which provide more holistic health care services. These new Title X regulations are good news for women's health care and a significant win for pro-lifers. Even though Title X funds did not directly pay for abortions, money is fungible and these funds subsidized abortion procedures indirectly. Reducing taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses has been a major pro-life policy goal because, to put it simply, Big Abortion needs big government. Some history is instructive. The U.S. abortion rate increased sharply in the year immediately following the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one important factor is that for most of the mid-to-late 1970s, abortions for low-income women were subsidized by tax dollars via Medicaid. During this time, pro-lifers shrewdly realized that they had to take steps to redirect taxpayer funding from Big Abortion. In 1976 Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, which placed strict limits on the federal government's ability to use tax dollars to pay for abortion through Medicaid. After years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment in Harris v. McRae in 1980. Partly as a result of this important policy, the U.S. abortion rate has consistently fallen. In fact, in 2014, the most recent year for which we have data, the U.S. abortion rate was half of what it was in 1980. The Hyde Amendment has played a key role in that decline. There is a broad body of research which shows that cutting funding for abortion reduces abortion rates. Furthermore, my 2016 analysis of the Hyde Amendment which was published by the Charlotte Lozier Institute indicates that the Hyde Amendment saves 60,000 lives every year, adding up to more than two million lives overall. Planned Parenthood is well aware of their dependence on taxpayer dollars. When the Protect Life Rule was announced, they and their allies in the mainstream media put on a full court press. They tried to argue that defunding Planned Parenthood would deny women access to health care. Again, the Protect Life Rule would simply redirect Title X funds to alternative providers that vastly outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities. Similarly, Planned Parenthood's allies have frequently used misleading statistics to claim that the end of taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood in Texas in 2011 caused a public health crisis in the Lone Star State. However, despite plenty of media reports to the contrary, many public health trends in Texas are positive. Since 2011, births to minor girls have fallen by more than 30 percent. Abortions performed on minor girls have decreased by over 45 percent. There is no evidence of an increase in the unintended pregnancy rate. In fact, the Lone Star State clearly shows that positive public health outcomes are possible without taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood aborts over 320,000 innocent preborn children every year. Furthermore, they have engaged in a considerable amount of misconduct. Evidence shows that Planned Parenthood has failed to report cases of statutory rape and helped minors circumvent state pro-life parental involvement laws designed to protect vulnerable children. There is evidence from 11 states that Planned Parenthood affiliates have overbilled state Medicaid programs, costing taxpayers millions of dollars. Tragically, taxpayers currently are forced to finance this misconduct to the tune of approximately $1.5 million every day. The Trump Administration's Protect Life Act is a key step toward eliminating all taxpayer funding of organizations that profit from abortion. Michael J. New is a Visiting Associate Professor at Ave Maria University and an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_J_New Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Some years ago I did an interview on the topic of my book Finding God in the Shack (a companion to Paul Young's bestseller The Shack). At one point in the interview I offered the following radical example of grace and forgiveness: When I was growing up, I lived near the Pacific Northwest, and we got the Seattle TV stations. I remember hearing every day about this person called The Green River Killer. He was a serial killer who had killed more than 70 women in the Pacific Northwest. Gary Ridgway was caught in 2003, and they had a sentence hearing for him. At the hearing, they had victim impact statements that I saw. There were people whose daughters, sisters, and so on, had been brutally assaulted, raped and killed by this guy. Some of them said, "You're going to burn in hell for eternity," and other things, and he sat there with his head bowed. But one guy got up there and said, "God told me to forgive. He didn't say who to forgive, He just said forgive." And suddenly, this person Gary Ridgway, who's supposed to be a sociopath, had big tears rolling down his cheeks. I thought at that moment that forgiveness is the most powerful force in the universe. (Source) Few images are as powerful as the picture of a completely debased murderer being extended forgiveness by a bereaved parent. And yet, that's what God's radical grace looks like. Meeting the Psychopath A few months after that interview, I mentioned the Ridgway story to a Christian friend who happens to be a clinical psychologist. To my surprise, he didn't have the same impressed reaction as the interviewer: instead of smiling and nodding in agreement at the wonder of grace, he looked skeptical. My friend then observed that if Ridgway is a psychopathic personality, and the evidence suggests that he is, then the man could not feel sorrow for his sins at all: he could only feel pity for himself. In short, if Ridgway was a psychopath, then the event that I interpreted as the moment that grace broke through to a sinful heart was, in fact, nothing more than an instance of indulgent self-pity. That unsettling revelation prompted me to spend a couple months reading up on the personality disorder commonly known as psychopathy. I learned that psychopathy is a disorder which renders individuals utterly incapable of grasping moral principles of good and evil or right and wrong. To give an analogy, the psychopathic personality is to morality as the colorblind person is to color: just as the colorblind person is unable to see color, so the psychopathic person is unable to "see" moral values and obligations. Perhaps most disturbingly, the evidence suggested that psychopathy is untreatable. In fact, the more therapists attempt to treat a psychopath the more the psychopath becomes adept at manipulating others. By one estimate, approximately 1% of the population would qualify as clinical psychopaths. However, it's also important to understand that few psychopaths are serial killers like Ridgway. Indeed, psychopaths can be found throughout society from the CEO of a major corporation to the perpetually unemployed fellow who forever sponges off his "friends". Bottom line: the chances are that you probably know at least one clinical psychopath. Why Christians are Especially Vulnerable to Psychopathic Exploitation Since psychopaths lack the constraints and guidance that come with true moral awareness, they tend to live their lives by the callous, self-interested exploitation of others. That in itself suggests that we should all become more familiar with the psychopathic personality type so that we are less likely to become their victims. However, above and beyond that general warning, I believe Christians are particularly vulnerable to being exploited by psychopaths. To begin with, the Christian worldview accepts the call for radical grace in forgiving the evil actions of others. The psychopath can readily use that commitment to grace and forgiveness to exploit the good will of well-meaning Christians. To put it bluntly, the inclination to forgive and restore an individual who appears to express repentance the tendency to think the best of others can offer psychopaths a particularly effective means to use and abuse their victims. Consider the idea of so-called "trophy conversions": that is, extreme versions of a sinner coming to grace which are used as examples to buoy the faith of Christians in the power of the Gospel. Evangelicals in particular have long gravitated toward trophy conversions because they can powerfully exhibit God's grace and mercy in very tangible ways. For example, growing up in the church in the 1970s everyone I knew had read Nicky Cruz's autobiography Run Baby Run which told of his life as a notorious gang leader in New York who was radically transformed by the Gospel. Stories like that of Nicky Cruz can indeed be wonderful and inspiring. And in that sense a "trophy conversion" can indeed illumine the power of the Gospel. But we should recognize that psychopaths can readily exploit this Christian narrative of grace for their own ends. Let me give you one striking example. In 1989 James Dobson interviewed notorious serial killer Ted Bundy on the night before his execution. During the interview, Bundy blamed his history of murder, cannibalism, and necrophilia on pornography. This explanation was appealing to Dobson who had a vested interest in highlighting the dangers of pornography. But as far as Bundy goes, it was simply an excuse to avoid responsibility for his uniquely heinous crimes. As Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth rightly observe, this was "his newly contrived 'devil made me do it' defense to help explain his almost unfathomable murder career." (The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy (Authorlink, 1999), 340). What is more, Bundy claimed to have converted to Christianity in jail. And the Christian keen to elevate the most extreme trophy conversions may have been inclined to believe him: Dobson certainly was. But the fact is that Bundy cleverly manipulated Dobson by telling the respected psychologist exactly what he knew evangelicals wanted to hear. In one surreal moment, Dobson invited Bundy to share about his loneliness in prison, in short inviting sympathy for a psychopath who murdered and mutilated at least thirty women. Fortunately, Bundy was in prison at the time. But the way he played Dobson is a sobering example of how the psychopath can manipulate well-intentioned Christians for their own nefarious ends. Conclusion I said above that psychopaths do not respond to conventional treatment. Of course, I also recognize that God can in principle heal a psychopath of their personality disorder. But the fact that radical transformation of the true clinical psychopath is theoretically possible doesn't change the fact that such transformations rarely if ever occur. This simple fact suggests extreme caution when interacting with psychopaths. But where to begin? My suggestion is that Christians everywhere should familiarize themselves with the psychopathic personality profile as described in Robert Hare's Psychopathy Checklist (the premiere clinical tool for identifying psychopaths). That is at least a start in equipping ourselves and our communities to follow the words of Jesus: "I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16, NIV) Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment It's become hip to criticize President Trump, even among conservatives. These armchair critics usually don't have any better alternatives to suggest, they revel in tearing down Trump. He's easy to criticize because he speaks his mind without a filter. But does that make him unworthy of being president? The only other alternative was Hillary Clinton, who was a far worse choice. Tearing Trump down isn't going to help him succeed in office, but will hamper his ability to get things done. Trump surprised most of us by becoming an extremely proactive conservative once in office. He's accomplished more already than probably any other of the GOP presidential candidates would have at this stage. Conservatives should be elated at everything he has done. The Heritage Foundation reported in February that Trump had accomplished nearly two-thirds of the think tank's 334 agenda items. This is faster than Ronald Reagan, who had only achieved 49 percent of their policy goals at the same time into his presidency. Writer Andrew Sullivan, no conservative, penned a piece for New York Magazine entitled "Obama's Legacy Has Already Been Destroyed." He asserts, "In 17 months, he has effectively erased Barack Obama's two-term legacy." But the #NeverTrumpers don't seem to care how much Trump has accomplished for conservatives. Tearing him down is more important than ensuring that he continue this progress. Despite the fact he's not being impeached, and has a good chance of winning reelection, his critics pounce on every flaw. Trump comes from a reality TV background and was a Democrat for much of his career. If he had affairs with women before he became president, it doesn't disqualify him from being president. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton both had multiple affairs. Condemning Trump nonstop, as CNN and MSNBC are doing, is overkill. He's denied the accusations and his wife is standing by him. Even if he is guilty of affairs, whatever happened to Christian forgiveness, a Biblical principle? Trump's critics also decry his ties to Wall Street, the Rothschilds and other powerful interests. They claim that Trump is doing the bidding of these power brokers. But the fact that Trump's agenda coincides with theirs, such as moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem to acknowledge it as the real capital, is not the same as them convincing Trump to take action contrary to conservative interests. Even if he is a little too cozy with some of these wealthy operatives, what is the alternative? One can disapprove of aspects of Trump but still support him, it's not an either/or choice. It is not necessary to praise Trump or be a cheerleader. Why not encourage him to do better and pray for him instead of tearing him down? The left already does a thorough job of tearing him down. Late night comedy has become a monolithic hate fest toward the president. Trump may not act like Ronald Reagan, but he's already on pace to accomplish more for conservatives than Reagan did. Where is the gratitude? Constantly criticizing Trump will convince some conservatives not to support him for reelection in 2020. It's a self-defeating strategy. He's likely to win the primary nomination again, so where it will hurt him will be the general election. The Democrats are grooming up-and-coming stars like California Senator Kamala Harris, who would be the first black female president. They are also trying to recruit Oprah Winfrey. If conservatives stay at home and don't vote, a Democrat could pull it off. What is worse, four more years of Trump or four years of a staunch Democrat? Some are finally coming around. Conservative media mogul Glenn Beck announced on Friday during his radio show that he will vote for Trump in 2020. He cited the constant media bias as the reason. He admitted Trump's record is "amazing." The longer the naysayers continue to attack Trump, the more foolish they appear. He hasn't slowed down implementing a conservative agenda. It's probably just going to get even better. You don't have to like Trump. You don't have to defend all of his actions. But it's counterproductive to join the left and take him down. There's already plenty of them doing that. Catholics who supported abortion referendum in Ireland should go to confession, bishop says An Irish bishop says that Catholics who voted for "Yes" during the recent Ireland referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment should go to confession. Bishop Kevin Doran from Elphin told RTE Radio One that Catholics who supported the repeal have committed a sin but said that those who go to confession will be shown compassion in their penitence. Doran's statements, however, sparked angry replies from the listeners. Some sent in text messages to say that they attended mass regularly and still voted for "Yes." Other listeners, however, told host Sean O'Rourke that they would never disclose to their neighbors that they supported the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. But Doran is not alone in his disappointment about the turnout of Ireland's referendum, where at least 66 percent of voters chose to make abortion legal. "It's extraordinary the way the campaign focused so much on 'me, me, me,' the rights of the mother, and very little mention of the unborn child," 75-year-old devotee Frank Gaynor told reporters. "That was sidelined," he added. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, however, said that the vote was also a reflection of how Irish Catholics view the church today. Martin told the Independent that church leaders should take this as a chance to assess the role of the church in shaping culture. "Pro-life means radically rediscovering in all our lives a special love for the poor that is the mark of the followers of Jesus," Martin said. Following last Saturday's referendum, the next task is for lawmakers to craft legislation and guidelines to ensure that the process is safe for women. Pro-lifers, however, said that their fight is not yet over and they will continue to oppose any new legislation. "Shortly, legislation will be introduced that will allow babies to be killed in our country. We will oppose that legislation," No voter John McGuirck said. Fulani herdsmen want to exterminate Christians says Nigerian bishop Militant Fulani herdsmen are attempting to eradicate Christianity from the Middle Belt region of Nigeria, according to a local bishop. Up to 100 Christians have died this year at the hands of nomadic herdsmen. The Fulani are Muslim, while Christians tend to be farmers or town-dwellers. According to Bishop Wilfred Chikpa Anagbe of Makurdi, unknown sources are arming the Fulane with 'sophisticated weapons'. In an interview with the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, Anagbe said: 'There is a clear agenda a plan to Islamise all of the areas that are currently predominantly Christian in the so-called Middle Belt of Nigeria.' He said 11 parishes in his diocese had been attacked. In one incident two priests and at least 17 parishioners were killed when militants struck at St Ignatius' church during early morning mass last month. Anagbe added: 'The Fulani tribesmen for the most part live in the forests and cannot afford the luxury of such sophisticated weapons so who is funding them?' He criticised the security forces, saying: 'When the attacks take place, there are never any police or soldiers present.' The Fulanis' agenda was the same as that of Boko Haram, he said: 'both groups are united in the same intention to Islamise the entire region'. Asking for prayer and support, Anagbe said: 'Please pray for us and make yourself spokesmen for the suffering our community is going through. 'We need people to raise their voices in our defence.' Healthy baby born on a migrant rescue ship named 'Miracle' A healthy baby boy has been born on a migrant rescue ship sailing from Libya to Italy. His mother, who was fleeing captivity, gave him the name Miracle. Miracle, who weighed 6lbs and 2oz, came to the world at 3:35 p.m. Thursday, May 24. He and his mother are currently doing well, according to midwife Amoin Soulemane. The baby boy is the sixth infant born aboard a rescue ship and the first for 2018, reports revealed. Other migrants sang, dance and cheered upon learning of his birth on the Aquarius rescue ship. Miracle's mother, who remains unnamed, was one of hundreds of Libyans who escaped captivity earlier this year. She was reportedly beaten and received little food while in captivity and escaped on a rubber boat when she was already heavily pregnant. Nurse Aoife Ni Mhurchu said that smugglers helped the mother, who was by then 34 weeks pregnant, escape last Wednesday but their boat broke down. They had to return to Libya's shores so that the smugglers could regroup and gather more resources. The refugees were told to hide on the beach. When the smugglers did not return for 24 hours, they started to worry that they would never make it out of the country. Mhurchu said that had the mother stayed longer on the shore, she would have given birth to Miracle in dire conditions. Reports state that although the baby was born in international waters, he would have Nigerian citizenship. The Aquarius is one of many humanitarian ships coasting near the waters of Libya for refugees regularly. Its crew includes members from the SOS Mediterranee and Doctors without Borders (MSF). An Aquarius spokesperson told Reuters, "It's really hard to know what's happening inside Libya, or why the Libyan coastguard has not been so active in these last few days." Incoming NRA president Oliver North says Gospel 'transformed' him during his military service Oliver North, who was recently picked to be the new president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), says his life was changed during military service after a superior officer advised him to read the Bible. The former U.S. Marine stopped by at the Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Dallas to deliver a speech during a Memorial Day service on Sunday. Derric Bonnot, creative director of Fellowship Church, said North was invited to speak at the church to help congregants understand the significance of Memorial Day. "Who better to help us understand the sacrifice that these men and women had made than somebody who had been there," Bonnot said, according to NBCDFW. In his speech, North recalled how a superior officer had risked his career to share the Gospel with him. "Read this. You have to get to know your Lord and Savior," North recalled the officer as saying, as reported by Dallas News. "You tried that today a superior officer telling a subordinate you'd get a court martial," he added. The retired Marine lieutenant colonel said that he eventually came upon the Gospel of Matthew, which tells the story of a man of position asks Jesus Christ to heal a servant. North contended that the senior ranking service member did the same thing for him when the officer urged him to commit his life to Jesus Christ. "My life was completely transformed at the age of 35 because a leader who made a commitment to our Lord and Savior showed me I needed to have that same commitment," North recalled, according to Dallas News. North, who has served as the host of "War Stories" on Fox News, was convicted of three felony counts in 1989 in connection with his role in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan-Bush administration. The controversy involved the sales of weapons to Iran, which was under an embargo at the time as part of an effort to persuade the regime to release U.S. hostages. North's conviction was later overturned on a technicality, according to The Guardian. The NRA, which made the announcement about North's new role earlier this month, hailed the retired marine as a "legendary warrior for American freedom, a gifted communicator and skilled leader." Dallas News said hundreds of congregants were present during North's speech at Fellowship Church. Dozens reportedly stayed behind after the service to ask the retired marine to sign copies of his book "Under Fire: An American Story," which chronicles his trial over the Iran-Contra affair. Pope Francis to honour Mafia-slain priest in Sicily Pope Francis will later this year visit the neighbourhood and parish connected with a Sicilian priest killed by the Mafia in 1993, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the death of the 'First Martyr of the Mafia'. Having quietly tackled the Mafia through the education of young people, Fr Giuseppe 'Pino' Puglisi was assassinated by hit-men on September 15, 1993, his 53rd birthday. Pope Francis will fly on September 15 to Piazza Armerina where he will greet authorities and the local bishop and meet with the faithful, the Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported. He will then, having transferred to Palermo by helicopter, celebrate mass in memory of Puglisi and visit the Mission of Hope and Charity to take lunch with guests of the mission and a group of prisoners and immigrants. The pope will also make private stops at Puglisi's home and parish, San Gaetano, in the Brancaccio neighborhood of Palermo, before also meeting with priests, religious, and seminarians and later with youth, before returning to Rome. Born on September 15, 1937, to a modest, working-class family in Palermo, Puglisi entered the seminary at the age of 16 and was ordained a priest in 1960 at the age of 22. The CNA noted that troughout his priesthood, Puglisi was known for being outspoken against injustices including communism, the Mafia, and problems within the Church. In 1990, he was transferred to the parish of San Gaetano, in a mob-ridden neighborhood. 'Father Puglisi was not a typical anti-Mafia priest. He did not organise rallies or make public condemnation of Mafia,' Archbishop Michele Pennisi of Monreale told the National Catholic Register in 2013. '[The] Mafia does not see that kind of priest as dangerous.' Archbishop Pennisi said that Puglisi would convince youth not to steal or quit school, and encouraged them away from the Mafia, who would regularly use children to help them traffic drugs and other illicit materials. According to the CNA, Puglisi often preached against the Mafia, ignored their threats, banned them from leading religious processions and even stealthily gave clues to the authorities about their latest activities in his sermons. As a result, he was threatened by the mob numerous times. This was reportedly not known to those closest to him until after his death. On September 15, 1993, Puglisi was shot in the neck at point-blank range by hitmen under the direction of local Mafia bosses, Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano. Puglisi died of his injuries after being taken to hopsital. 'This is a Mafia crime,' Lorenzo Matassa, an investigating magistrate with anti-Mafia experience, told the New York Times in 1993. 'Cosa Nostra could not stand that priest's teaching the kids in the neighbourhood about an anti-Mafia culture.' One of the hitmen, Salvatore Grigoli, later confessed and revealed that the martyr's final words were, 'I've been expecting you'. According to the CNA, his martyrdom further galvanized the Catholic Church in Sicily to act and speak out against the mob and five years after his death four Mafia members received life sentences for their involvement in the murder. Puglisi was declared a martyr by Benedict XVI in 2012 and beatified in 2013. He is buried in the cemetery of Sant'Orsola in Palermo. Pope Francis spoke about Puglisi the day after his beatification, calling him a 'martyr' and an 'exemplary priest'. The pope said that in the end it was Puglisi 'who won, with the Risen Christ'. Francis said of the Mafia: 'Let us pray to the Lord to convert the heart of these people...They cannot do this! They cannot make slaves of us, brothers and sisters!' The pope added: 'We must pray that these members of the Mafia be converted to God and let us praise God for the luminous witness borne by Fr Giuseppe Puglisi.' Televangelist claims God told him he needs a $50m private jet A televangelist has said that God told him he needs a fourth new jet, adding that if Jesus was on Earth today he would travel on a plane and not a donkey. Jesse Duplantis said that specifically he needs a Dassault Falcon 7X, a three-engine private jet capable of carrying 12 to 16 passengers at speeds up to 700 miles per hour, USA Today reported. The Falcon 7X would be the fourth plane owned by Jesse Duplantis Ministries. It has a range of almost 6,000 miles and costs around $54 million new, according to SherpaReport. Duplantis said in a video posted last week: 'Now, some people believe that preachers shouldn't have jets. I really believe that preachers ought to...have every available outlet to get this Gospel preached to the world.' He added that 'if Jesus was physically on the Earth today, he wouldn't be riding a donkey... He'd be in an airplane preaching the Gospel all over the world.' Duplantis described the message from God as 'one of the 'greatest statements the Lord ever told me'. 'He said, "Jesse, you wanna come up where I'm at?" And I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "I want you to believe in me for a Falcon 7-X." So, I said, "OK." But the first thing I thought of: "Well, how am I going to pay for it?"' Duplantis said he then remembered something that God had told him in 1978. '"Jesse, I didn't ask you to pay for it, I asked to believe for it.'" The preacher said he was being transparent. 'I like all people to know exactly what I'm doing in this ministry,' Duplantis said. 'We don't hide nothing whatsoever at all.' He explained that he would not personally own the plane. Instead, the jet would be owned by the ministry and would be used by the next person to take it over after his death. Duplantis said that God had instructed him to 'preach the gospel to every creature'. He continued: 'Now how we gonna do that? I can't live long enough to travel by car, or by ship, or by train, but I can do it by an airplane.' Duplantis said of the plane: 'All it's gonna do is touch people...It's gonna reach people. It's gonna change lives, one soul at a time. I don't want to learn how to fly it, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in preaching the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.' He displayed three planes currently owned by his ministry, with the caption: 'It's not about possessions, it's about priorities.' Duplantis also expressed excitement over the US moving its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, saying that tells him that the end time is 'coming fast, ladies and gentlemen'. Bill Montgomery United Airlines is giving $8 million in grants to Houston and other hub communities to support the areas where its employees live and work. The airline announced Wednesday that it will give $1 million to the nonprofit Year Up in Chicago. This will help provide young adults with technical and professional skills training, corporate internships, college credits and other support. Canadas purchase of Kinder Morgan Inc.s embattled pipeline is good news for the oil patch, so long as it doesnt become the norm. While the $3.5 billion Trans Mountain takeover keeps alive a project seen as critical to expanding markets for Canadas crude and improving the price oil-sands producers get paid, it also reveals how key infrastructure projects can be stymied by local opposition and regulatory hurdles. We would desperately hope this is not the model of how future projects get done, Chris Bloomer, president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, said in a phone interview, adding that he is nonetheless pleased that the project can now go ahead. Long after getting federal approval to almost triple the capacity of its six-decade old conduit in 2016, Kinder became the latest pipeline operator to come against fierce local opposition in Canada. The much more ambitious Energy East project was abandoned by TransCanada Corp. amid outcry in Quebec -- and no government move to save it. We think that todays announcement is based on extraordinary circumstances, Tim McMillan, chief executive officer of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said in a press conference Tuesday. We dont want to find ourselves in this situation again. Taxpayer Money The fact that Trans Mountain needed tax payers to purchase the project has exposed fundamental flaws in Canadas regulatory system, the Business Council of British Columbia said in a release. It shows that Canada is not very business friendly because the only way this could be done is that the federal government has to step in and buy it, Laura Lau, who helps manage C$1.5 billion in assets at Brompton Corp. in Toronto, said by phone. Albertas oil sands, the worlds third-largest crude reserves, are a crucial part of Canadas economy. The existing Trans Mountain line has been operating since the 1950s, carrying as much as 300,000 barrels a day of oil and refined fuels from Alberta to the Vancouver area, where it connects with a line carrying crude to refineries in Washington state. The planned expansion to 890,000 barrels a day could open up exports to growing markets in Asia, lessening Canadas almost exclusive dependency on the U.S. as a market for its oil and reducing the discount energy companies receive from the crude. Critical Infrastructure Suncor Energy Inc., Canadas biggest oil company, welcomed the governments move, saying it reinforced the criticality of this infrastructure to all Canadians, Chief Executive Officer Steve Williams said in a statement. We support improving market access to ensure Canada achieves fair recognition and full value for its energy resources. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, who has threatened to curtail petroleum exports to British Columbia in retaliation for the neighboring provinces battle against Trans Mountain, said sometimes, on a big national project, the government has to step in and play a role. That does not in any way, shape or form, mean that we are not a good place for private investment, she said. In fact, I would argue that we are a more stable place for private investment because we make sure the job gets done. 2018 Bloomberg L.P. Courtesy of the artists / Courtesy of the artists THEATER Shakespeare in Vegas A polished New York actor finds herself in Sin City. Presented by 4th Wall Theatre Company. 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, through June 9; $17-$53; Studio 101, 1824 Spring; 832-786-1849, 4thwalltheatreco.com. David, the Best Slinger in the West David and Goliath tale told as a Western in this childrens theater production. Presented by A.D. Players. 7 p.m. Tuesday, 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, 10:30 a.m. Thursday, through June 22; $20; The Jeanette and L.M. Theater, 5420 Westheimer; 713-526-2721, adplayers.org. Daddy Long Legs Based on Jean Websters novel that was later turned into the 1955 Fred Astaire film. Presented by Main Street Theater. 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, through June 17; $39-$42; Rice Village, 2540 Times; 713-524-9196, mainstreettheater.com. Replica Sci-fi drama from TV writer Mickey Fisher. Presented by Stages Repertory Theatre. 8 p.m. Friday, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, through June 10; $25-$73; 3201 Allen Parkway; 713-527-0123, stagestheatre.com. The Strangerer George W. Bushs 2004 debate against John Kerry, interpreted through Albert Camus. Presented by Catastrophic Theatre. 8 p.m. Friday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday. All tickets pay-what-you-can; MATCH, 3400 Main; 713-522-2723, catastrophictheatre.com. Jim Lehrer and the Theater and Its Double and Jim Lehrers Double PBS news anchor encounters a twin. Presented by Catastrophic Theatre. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Saturday, 4:15 p.m. Sunday. All tickets pay-what-you-can; MATCH, 3400 Main; 713-522-2723, catastrophictheatre.com. Shake, Rattle & Roll A new musical comedy production. Presented by The Music Box Theater. 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, through June 16; $29-$39; 2623 Colquitt; 713-522-7722, themusicboxtheater.com. Wanda, Daisy and the Great Rapture Alexis Schaetzles new magical realist drama. Presented by the Landing Theatre Company. 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, 8 p.m. Thursday, through June 9; $35 adults, $25 students; Obsidian Theater, 3522 White Oak; 832-889-7837, obsidiantheater.org. The Great American Trailer Park Musical Best-selling raunchy musical. Presented by Stages Repertory Theatre. 8 p.m. Friday, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, through July 22; $25-$73; 3201 Allen Parkway; 713-527-0123, stagestheatre.com. Picasso at the Lapin Agile Steve Martins 1993 play featuring Picasso and Einstein at a bar. Presented by Alley Theatre. 8 p.m. Friday, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday; $26-$99; 615 Texas; 713-220-5700, alleytheatre.org. Ma Raineys Black Bottom August Wilsons classic. Presented by Ensemble Theatre. 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday; $30-$50; 3535 Main; 713-520-0055, ensemblehouston.org. CLASSICAL/OPERA Ima Hogg Finals Competition Musicians ages 16-26 compete for a $25,000 award. Presented by Houston Symphony. 7 p.m. Saturday; $25; Stude Concert Hall, Rice University; 713-224-4240, houstonsymphony.org. DANCE Sizzling Summer Dance METdance premieres a new piece by its emerging choreographer awardee, plus Dominic Walshs Arum, with live music by Two Star Symphony and other works from the repertoire. 8:30 p.m. Friday; free; Miller Outdoor Theatre, 6000 Hermann Park Drive; 281-373-3386, milleroutdoortheatre.com. Reflecting Rhythms: From Taiko to Tap with Kazunori Kumagai and Kaoru Watanabe A rhythm showcase featuring an award-winning tap dancer and innovative instrumentalist who perform solo, then collaborate on an explosive duet.7 p.m. Friday; $10; Asia Society Texas Center, 1370 Southmore; 713-496-9901, asiasociety.org. Dance India! A Universal Language A two-part show of Odissi and Silambam classical dance featuring Odissi stars Sujata Mohapatra and Revital Carroll and Silambam Houston Dance Companys Kavya Poetry in Motion. 7:30 p.m. Sunday; free; Miller Outdoor Theatre, 6000 Hermann Park Drive; 281-373-3386, milleroutdoortheatre.com. An Ordinance of Discordance Transitory Sound and Movement Collective presents an immersive, site-specific performance by leading experimental musicians and five dancers. 6:30 p.m. Thursday; free; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 5216 Montrose; 713-284-8250, camh.org. MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON 1001 Bissonnet; mfah.org Michelangelo: Love & Death A cinematic journey from the print and drawing rooms of Europe, through the great chapels and museums of Florence, Rome and the Vatican, to explore the tempestuous life of Michelangelo. 3 p.m. Friday and Saturday Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat Explores the pre-fame years of the American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and how New York City and tectonically shifting arts culture of the late 70s and 80s shaped his vision. 7 p.m. Friday and 1 p.m. Thursday Sleepwalk A woman is hired to transcribe an ancient Chinese manuscript. She finds that little by little, the manuscript has powers to take over her life. 7 p.m. Saturday Western When some German construction workers begin a challenging new job, their sense of adventure is awakened, but so are their prejudices. 5 p.m. Sunday 14 PEWS 800 Aurora; 14pews.org Itzhak A look at the life, work and religious heritage of violinist Itzhak Perlman. 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday Citizen Kane Following the death of a publishing tycoon, news reporters scramble to discover the meaning of his final utterance. 7 p.m. Tuesday ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE CINEMA 531 Mason, Katy; drafthouse.com/houston Coming to America An African Prince travels to New York and goes undercover to find a wife whom he can respect for her intelligence and will. 7:30 p.m. Friday Deep Red After witnessing the murder of a famous psychic, a musician teams up with a feisty reporter to find the killer. 10 p.m. Friday Jaws 3-D After a young great white shark finds its way into a sea-themed park, workers try to capture it. 4:30 p.m. Saturday Monty Python and the Holy Grail King Arthur and his knights embark on a surreal search for the Holy Grail, encountering many silly obstacles. 7:30 p.m. Saturday Superman An orphan is sent from his dying planet to Earth, where he grows up to become his adoptive homes first and greatest superhero. Noon Sunday Gosford Park The lives of upstairs guests and downstairs servants at a party in 1932 in a country house in England as they investigate a murder involving one of them. 4:30 p.m. Sunday Falling Down An unemployed defense worker frustrated with the various flaws he sees in society, begins to psychotically and violently lash out against them. 8 p.m. Sunday The NeverEnding Story A troubled boy dives into a wondrous fantasy world through the pages of a mysterious book. Noon Monday- Thursday Bridesmaids A competition between the maid of honor and a bridesmaid, threatens to upend the life of an out-of-work pastry chef. 7:30 Tuesday Steel Magnolias A young beautician finds work at a local salon, where a small group of women share a close bond and welcome her into the fold. 7:30 Thursday HOUSTON MUSEUM OF NATURAL SCIENCE 5555 Hermann Park Drive; hmns.org Pandas 3-D In Sichuan, China, a researcher forms a bond with a panda who is about to experience nature for the first time. Multiple screenings daily. Hurricane 3-D A storm forms off the coast of West Africa and grows as it crosses the Atlantic. Multiple screenings daily. Oceans: Our Blue Planet 3-D A journey of discovery, transporting the audience to the deep, mysterious worlds of Earths oceans. Multiple screenings daily. RIVER OAKS THEATRE 2009 W. Gray; landmarktheatres.com Akira A secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psychic psychopath that only two teenagers and a group of psychics can stop. Midnight Friday and Saturday Phone reminders chime and alarm clocks sound on the day each January when online registration opens for Writers in the Schools creative writing summer day camps. With a mental strategy involving preferred date and location, parents log on hoping for a spot in the 28-year-old camp. In collaboration with Rice University, the program gives kids as young as 5 the chance to learn storytelling and story development from local practicing, professional writers. Many of the camps fill up within hours, and the mom who slept in that morning might not get a spot. Take heart. Theres another way to tap the talent of the talented writers who teach Writers in the Schools free creative writing classes Saturday mornings at Discovery Green. Each week, two instructors employed by WITS lead a free creative writing class for kids, kicking things off with a prompt designed to spark imagination and descriptive storytelling. One week, a teacher might bring a guitar to inspire songwriting. At another class, the kids may be loaned a mirror to draw a self portrait thats later used for self-reflective poetry writing. On other weekends, students stroll the park to see if its public art or events become the beginning of a story. Like WITS summer camps, the program is designed to make writing fun, said Robin Reagler, executive director. Kids spend a lot of time, day in and day out, coming up with the same answer as everyone else, following rules and doing what is expected, she said, referencing classroom subjects that teach the same correct answers for all students. No two of those students are exactly alike, however, and creative writing allows unique personalities to come through our stories, she said. Like all creative endeavors, creative writing is meaningful to kids on a personal level, she said. It helps facilitate a child find his or her own voice. You see a lot of pride in these kids making something and sharing it with the group. Reagler said the class prompts are meant to be exploratory, helping kids put something descriptive on the page that will give their reader a sensation. More Information Young Writers Workshop Suggested for grades 2-8 When: 10:30-11:30 a.m. Saturdays Where: Discovery Green, 1500 McKinney Details: Free; discoverygreen.com Youth Poetry and Writing Program For ages 13-19 When: 6:30-8 p.m, Friday, and the first Friday of every month Where: Discovery Green, 1500 McKinney Details: free; discoverygreen.com See More Collapse Because its an easy launching point, she said kids are often asked to write about their favorite food. Pizza and doughnuts are inevitable choices, Reagler said, but the trick is to ask them questions so theyre moving beyond the obvious description. A discussion of sprinkles leads a child to liken the colorful pieces to Fourth of July fireworks, she said. Another pupil points out chocolate icing reminds him of the smell of his grandfathers coffee in the morning. After their first draft is complete, kids spend time on revision tactics, which participants learn is an important part of the writing process, Reagler said. For example, children are encouraged to re-read their work to make sure all five senses have been included in a description. From there, they share their work with classmates. One of the first pieces Rhea Brennan ever shared in a Discovery Green class was a poem about a bird leaving its nest. Only 4 years old at the time, Rhea dictated her words to an instructor because she was still learning to read and write. Rheas father, Rick, said the experience got Rhea hooked. That gave her so much confidence, said Rick Brennan, a former teacher who was once employed by WITS and now owns a gaming company that consults with WITS on reading games. She then considered herself a writer. On the way home, Rhea asked for a writers notebook so she could continue tweaking her work. Now 10, Rhea still regularly attends the weekly classes and has been selected to read her poetry aloud to large audiences, including at events at the Houston Arboretum and the downtown library. This year, she was the only student to chose to read poetry at her schools talent show. Its part of who she is now, Rick Brennan said. Allison Bagley is a writer in Houston. Three people, including an innocent bystander, were injured in Northline Tuesday night when two men began opening fire on each other in a violent family feud. Sometime before 9 p.m., the two men were fighting near a convenience store at 6100 Werner and pulled their guns on each other, said Det. Bobby Salazar of the Houston Police Department. Playhouse on the Prairie / Playhouse on the Prairie Courtesy of the artists / Courtesy of the artists Black Panther Bash Meet the King of Wakanda as he joins the Childrens Museum of Houston for a fan celebration event with interactive activities. When: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday Where: 1500 Binz Details: $12; cmhouston.org Chalk on the Block Spectators will get to watch local artists as they create pavement art on the sidewalks around Bagby Park. When: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday Where: 415 Gray Details: facebook.com/events/468914113511847 Houston Vegandale Food Drink Festival A celebration of veganism through food, drinks, music and art. When: 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday Where: Sam Houston Park, 1000 Bagby Details: $15, free for 12 and younger; vegandalefest.com/houston Wonderland Family Playhouse Presented by Playhouse on the Prairie, in collaboration with Conservatory and Prohibition Theatre, this family event features interactive activities, food vendors, admission to Alice! Show and cast meet and greet. When: 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, through June 30 Where: Playhouse on the Prairie, 1008 Prairie Details: $20; prohibitiontheatre.com Jamail Skatepark 10 Year Celebration The Lee & Joe Jamail Skatepark anniversary celebration features pro skater Sky Siljeg and music by Black Joe Lewis, The Cops, Texas Massacre and DJ Brother Roo. When: 5 p.m. Saturday Where: 103 Sabine Details: facebook.com/events/116768682486311 Dance India! A Universal Language Dance performance by Odissi and Silambam, featuring a mixture of traditional and contemporary Indian culture. When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday Where: Miller Outdoor Theatre, 6000 Hermann Park Drive Details: milleroutdoortheatre.com WWE Raw Wrestling event featuring superstars Roman Reigns, Samoa Joe, Braun Strowman, Seth Rollins, Finn Balor, Nia Jax, Sasha Banks and Kurt Angle. When: 6:30 p.m. Monday Where: Toyota Center, 1510 Polk Details: $20-$105; houstontoyotacenter.com Thursday Concerts Concert at the park featuring Rosie Flores with The Octanes. When: 7-9 p.m. Thursday Where: Discovery Green, 1500 McKinney Details: discoverygreen.com KATY Brazilian Country Fest A traditional Brazilian celebration with food, dance performances, live music and activities for children. When: 4-10 p.m. Saturday Where: The Wildcatter Saloon, 26913 Insterstate 10 W. Details: $15, free for 12 and younger; facebook.com/events/1552261488204170 KEMAH Schools Out Summer Bash A summer celebration filled with movie screenings, live music, magic shows and activities for kids. When: 4-9 p.m. Friday, noon Saturday-Sunday Where: Kemah Boardwalk, 215 Kipp Details: kemahboardwalk.com Beers & Vintage Art Market Family-friendly market featuring artisans, crafters, vintage curators, local food producers, Texas craft beers and blends of Hawaiian shaved ice by Kahuna Joes. When: 2-7 p.m. Sunday Where: Aloha Beer Garden, 604 Bradford Details: facebook.com/events/366827580479171 Tejano Nights Kemah Boardwalk will host a live Tejano music concert every Sunday night in June. When: 6 p.m. Sunday Where: 215 Kipp Details: kemahboardwalk.com SUGAR LAND Houston Show Choir Concert featuring an auditioned adult music group known for performing a variety of genres. When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday Where: 15958 City Walk Details: sugarlandtownsquare.com THE WOODLANDS Wine & Food Week Event features tastings, chef demonstrations, music performances and more than 60 participating restaurants and 500 wines. When: 7 p.m. Tuesday, through June 10 Where: Visit website for list of events Details: $20-$75; wineandfoodweek.com Today is Thursday, May 31, the 151st day of 2018. There are 214 days left in the year. Todays highlight in history: On May 31, 1921, a race riot erupted in Tulsa, Okla., as white mobs began looting and leveling the affluent black district of Greenwood over reports a black man had assaulted a white woman in an elevator; hundreds are believed to have died. On this date: 1578: The Christian catacombs of ancient Rome were accidentally discovered by workers digging in a vineyard along the Via Salaria. 1669: English diarist Samuel Pepys wrote the final entry of his journal, blaming his failing eyesight for his inability to continue. 1790: President George Washington signed into law the first U.S. copyright act. 1889: Some 2,200 people in Johnstown, Penn., perished when the South Fork Dam collapsed, sending 20 million tons of water rushing through the town. 1916: During World War I, British and German fleets fought the naval Battle of Jutland off Denmark; there was no clear-cut victor, although the British suffered heavier losses. 1935: Movie studio 20th Century Fox was created through a merger of the Fox Film Corp. and Twentieth Century Pictures. 1949: Former State Department official and accused spy Alger Hiss went on trial in New York, charged with perjury (the jury deadlocked, but Hiss was convicted in a second trial). 1962: Former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel a few minutes before midnight for his role in the Holocaust. 1977: The Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, three years in the making despite objections from environmentalists and Alaska Natives, was completed. (The first oil began flowing through the pipeline 20 days later.) 1985: Eighty-eight people were killed, more than 1,000 injured, when 41 tornadoes swept through parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and Ontario, Canada, during an 8-hour period. 1994: The United States announced it was no longer aiming long-range nuclear missiles at targets in the former Soviet Union. 2005: Breaking a silence of 30 years, former FBI official W. Mark Felt stepped forward as Deep Throat, the secret Washington Post source during the Watergate scandal. 2008: Space shuttle Discovery and a crew of seven blasted into orbit, carrying a giant Japanese lab addition to the international space station. 2013: A tornado in the Oklahoma City metro area claimed eight lives, including those of storm chasers Tim Samaras, his son, Paul, and Carl Young; 13 people died in flash flooding. Four firefighters searching for people in a blazing Houston motel and restaurant were killed when part of the structure collapsed. Actress Jean Stapleton, who played Archie Bunkers far better half, the sweetly naive Edith, in TVs groundbreaking 1970s comedy All in the Family, died in New York at age 90. 2017: President Donald Trump welcomed Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc to the White House for talks focusing on the American trade deficit. A suicide attacker struck the fortified heart of the Afghan capital Kabul with a massive truck bomb that killed more than 150 people. CBS announced that Scott Pelley was being removed as anchor of The CBS Evening News after six years. Coca-Cola plans to build a 1 million-square-foot manufacturing and distribution facility that will replace two existing bottling plants in Houston. Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages, a Dallas-based franchisee, announced plans Wednesday to consolidate its two manufacturing plants and four warehouse and distribution centers into one single facility at Pinto Business Park, a Hines-developed industrial park at Beltway 8 and Interstate 45. An 18-year-old Cleveland teen, Kyra Lewis, is one of six Texas young ladies competing for the Miss Rodeo Texas Teen title in San Antonio this June. Lewis is the daughter of James Clay and Angela Lewis and a 2018 Cleveland High School graduate. She also is the runner-up in this years Miss Rodeo Cleveland Livestock Show and last years Trinity Valley Exposition queen contest. Miss Rodeo Texas Teen is basically a rodeo pageant. In order to qualify, you have to have held a title in a rodeo, whether local or state, Lewis said. Its a competition to see who the best of the best is. Contestants will be judged on their knowledge of rodeo subjects, including horsemanship, and on categories such as extemporaneous speech, modeling, personality and congeniality. For extemporaneous speech, we are given subjects and have to give a 90-second speech on that subject. The modeling portion uses our own clothes, and that is more about confidence and appearance, she said. Personality and congeniality go hand in hand. For congeniality, the other girls pick from each other and for personality, the judges decide on that. Though she is hoping to win and represent Cleveland, Texas, as the Miss Rodeo Texas Teen, Lewis said the experience itself is a reward. I used to be really shy and would not talk to anyone. This is about proving to me that I am able to do things. I can break out of my comfort zone, she said. The win would also give her a chance to highlight a rare autoimmune illness - Addisons Disease - that Lewis has battled since childhood. The disease is found in 1 in 100,000 people in the United States. For people without Addisons Disease, stressors cause their body to produce cortisol, the bodys survival hormone. My body does not produce cortisol so I have to take medications, steroids, which cause my body to retain water and swell, Lewis said. Lewis is part of an online network of Addisons Disease sufferers. She hopes her online friends will be inspired to pursue their own dreams. I want my friends who have this to know they can do things and still live through it, she said. Anything and everything that I can put my hands in, I am going to go for it. The Cleveland community can help support Lewis pursuit of the title in two ways - by sponsoring her financially or going online to Facebook where they can cast votes in the Peoples Choice contest. Go to the Miss Rodeo Texas Facebook page and like the page. Then scroll through the Miss Rodeo Texas Teen Page and like my photo. That counts as a vote for me, Lewis said. This fall, Lewis plans to attend Sam Houston State University to pursue a degree in agribusiness. Her dream after college is to open a ranch for troubled youth. For me, its not about making money. There have been a lot of people who have helped me with what Ive gone through. I want to do the same for someone else, she said. The strains of the hymn Amazing Grace could be heard wafting across the grounds of Palms Memorial Park cemetery in Dayton on Monday, as Army Specialist E4 Larry Fowler called mourners to a remembrance of those who gave their lives in war. As the sound faded, the memories of loved ones buried in the cemetery did not. Tears filled the eyes of many of the 125-plus who gathered as the military-style honors were rendered for fallen comrades. Retired Master Sgt. Richard Overbay of Kenefick delivered the memorial address reminding all that the deaths continue. This is a solemn day in which we remember all of our soldiers from the day of our independence to today. We are still losing soldiers in the combat theater and graves are all across the U.S. and Europe, he said. Overbay has dual membership in both American Legion Post 512 and serves as the commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 5621. This Memorial Day we assemble once again to attempt to find fitting words to recognize these men and women that gave the ultimate sacrifice and we struggle to find the right words to convey our gratitude, the retired master sergeant said. Each and every one of us owes a great debt to the courage of the men and women who have paid the ultimate sacrifice while defending and protecting this country. For Evelyn Wagner of Dayton, the loss of her father was still raw and difficult to bear. As she left the service and went to the new American Legion Post for the reception, her eyes met her fathers name engraved on a brick in the Memorial Wall. It was too much for her as she broke into tears. U. S. Marine L. L. Walker passed away Feb. 18 of this year. He was a very proud hero, she said of her father. Overbay said we must carry on the legacy of those who have fallen. From the ashes of [death] comes a strength to move forward and overcome. Although wounded, we shall heal. We will always carry on. Thats our duty. The living, he said. Overbay also reminded attendees that those who died in combat had performed the highest form of public service and were the reason the United States was unique among the nations of the world. Our friends and comrades of our nation understood the price of freedom with a courage and conviction that was demanded, he said. They answered the call. The heroes gave their life for it. We are bearers of witness to them. The master sergeant encouraged everyone to walk the grounds where comrades have been laid to rest and those who do will come to realize that every grave, each headstone carries a different story, a different representation of a person who was loved by someone. Let us commit to do all that we can to remember these soldiers. It only takes a moment on Memorial Day to pause and remember the price of almost 1 million who have given their life for this country, he said. After a roll call of those who died this year were read, the military honor guard rendered three volleys and then the sad refrain of Taps was played. The crowd adjourned to the newly built American Legion Post 512 that sits adjacent to the cemetery. We just opened up this building and this is our first introduction to the community, said. Post Adjutant Jerry Killion. The Sterling Trust donated the five acres the new facility now sits on and the building has been paid for as they have raised the money. They are debt-free from the sell of 436 bricks for the memorial wall. We poured the foundation in 2016 and the exterior is done, he said. Killion said another $20,000 is needed to finish out the building and donations can be sent to the American Legion Post 512, P. O. Box 464, Dayton, Texas, 77535 and they are tax deductible. dtaylor@hcnonline.com The Montgomery County Sheriffs Office arrested a Houston man after one person was shot and another injured during a large party in the Porter area on Saturday. Carlos Gadiel Castillo, 30, faces two charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and police say he allegedly shot a male, a hit female in the face and fled the scene. MCSO was dispatched to the 19100 block of Jonathan Dalton Ct. when deputies were advised that a large party was being held at the address with a live band performing. They were also advised that one person had reportedly been shot and that the suspect fled in a silver Pontiac sedan. NEW: Memorial Day busy for first responders with lake rescue, fatal motorcycle crash When deputies arrived, they found a 21-year-old male in the backyard who had been shot in the abdomen and leg from a small caliber firearm, MCSO Lt. Scott Spencer said. During the investigation, deputies also learned that a 25-year-old Hispanic female was also allegedly assaulted by Castillo. The female victim received a laceration to her face. Both victims were transported from the scene are expected to survive their injuries. During the course of their investigation, deputies learned the female was Castillos girlfriend and he had become agitated when he observed the female and male sitting in a car outside of the party, law enforcement stated. HEARTBREAKING: Conroe man found dead after Silver Alert Castillo allegedly struck the female victim numerous times and then produced a handgun from his waistband, and shot the male victim while he was standing near the vehicle, Spencer said in a release about the incident. After both victims ran, Castillo got into his vehicle and fled the scene. MCSO detectives tracked Castillo to his residence near the Acres Homes area where he was interviewed about the incident and detained. He was transported to the Montgomery County Jail where he remains held on a $100,000 bond. jennifer.summer@hcnonline.com An infusion of international glam is about to debut in Houston when Nobu opens its gilded doors on June 1. The 280-seat restaurant, opening on the second level of the restaurant collection at the former Saks Fifth Avenue location at the Galleria, is perhaps the world's most famous Japanese restaurant, founded by superchef Nobu Matsuhisa and actor Robert De Niro. Its culinary reach is global: Hong Kong, Tokyo, Perth, London, Milan, Mexico City, Dubai, Moscow. And now, Houston. The second Nobu in Texas after Dallas, the restaurant will ply local diners with all the hot and cold seafood jewels, slivers of raw fish and Japanese Wagyu hunks of beef. Nobu signature nibbles will be solidly represented, as well as dishes developed with Houston in mind including Alaskan king crab legs with black truffle panko crust, pan-seared Dover sole with yuzu butter, boneless ribeye steak with yuzu butter, and grilled Wagyu in a pot of cherry blossom smoke with truffled cabbage. RICE WINE: HoustonChronicle.com report explores the versatility of sake at this Top 100 Restaurant The Nobu experience, said executive chef Carl Murray, "starts when you come in the door." That means hospitality to be sure, but also visuals: white oak, soft lighting, Italian flooring and Japanese-inspired textiles. The look is austere but seductive. And plenty of light from the windows to the terrace dining area. The menu is divided between classic hot and cold dishes Nobu has two separate areas of preparation and new hot and cold dishes. On the classic side, the hot menu includes Matsuhisa's iconic black cod miso. It also offers tiger shrimp with spicy garlic, spicy eggplant miso, rick shrimp tempura with ponzu butter or spicy cream, Chilean sea bass with dry miso, Maine lobster with spicy garlic or wasabi pepper, creamy spicy snow crab, and arctic char with crispy spinach and yuzu soy. The classic cold dishes include yellowtail sashimi with jalapeno, tiradito, red snapper sashimi with dry miso and yuzu, bluefin toro tartare, lobster ceviche on butter lettuce, and lobster and shiitake salad with spicy lemon dressing. Murray, who comes to the Houston project from the Dallas location, oversees the hot kitchen. Executive sushi chef Eiji Saito, who moved to Houston from the Las Vegas Nobu in Caesars Palace, oversees the hot kitchen. Saito said he has made slight adjustments to his vast sushi repertoire to take into account the city's humidity which he says requires stronger flavors more sweetness and more sour. But those who know Nobu will feel right at home at the Houston restaurant, said general manager Gordon Gilbert. "Each particular space is different," Gilbert said. "But the ultimate aim is to have a familiarity for regular customers. We want them to leave happy." Plenty of Houstonians intend to do just that. When Nobu began accepting reservations last week, the response was tremendous: in one day more than 1,000 calls came in, Gilbert said. He said his staff is ready to begin creating Nobu memories for its guests. "You're in control of creating an experience," Gilbert said. "You can walk them through and create a unique experience. You can more through flavors, textures, and temperatures. You want to see all those touch points." Murray said he's thrilled to be in a "big, enormous city" that obviously appreciates all types of food and dining experiences. "It's exciting. You can feel the vibe going on in the diversity of the food," he said. "I really want to get on a close level with the people of Houston, get to know their palate and create with a Houston flair." That flair goes into play on Friday. Nobu Houston, 5115 Westheimer at the Galleria, 832-987-2599; noburestaurants.com/Houston. Dinner will be offered Sunday through Thursday from 6 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 6 to 11 p.m. Bar and lounge hours are Sunday through Thursday from 5 to 10 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 5 to 11 p.m. Humaira John traveled across the globe until she decided to call Kingwood her home a couple of years ago. Originally from Pakistan, Humaira was three years old when she left due to some family issues. Because of this, Humaira along with her parents and siblings decided to move to Saudi Arabia and spent the rest of her childhood there. She grew to love traveling during her summer vacations to Europe with the family. Growing up she has learned to speak many languages such as Arabic, the official language of Saudi Arabia and Urdu, the official language of Pakistan. The advantage we had was that Urdu is a combination of five other languages; Arabic, Persian, Iranian, (Hindi and Farsi) and its written from right to left, she said. Humaira graduated high school from Saudi Arabia and then went off to London to study teaching and kicked off her career there. Not long after, she returned to Saudi Arabia and obtained her bachelors degree in art from the University of Karachi. Humaira moved back to Pakistan, but her brother Sammy who was currently studying in the United States at the time decided to stay in the U.S. to get his degree in engineering. When she would visit her brother in the United States, she thought sometimes about staying but decided not to at the time to be with her father. After my mom passed away (of cancer), my dad was just (upset) and I was the oldest and he needed me, she said. I wanted to settle here, go for more education and do something, but I couldnt because of my father. So I said, You know what? Next time dad and I are both going to come here. With Sammys help she was able to get proper immigration documentation for both Humaira and her father. They both packed their bags and moved in with her brother in Salt Lake City in 2001 to start a new life and to avoid the growing unrest of the Middle East due to the Taliban. She spent six years teaching in Salt Lake City before moving to the Houston area to take care of her father. Sammy had moved to Houston for a job opportunity and her father went with him. Once she moved to Houston she got a job as a teacher Pines Montessori School in Kingwood. Humairas father was living in Kingwood at the time of his illness and Humaira moved to Houston to care for him. He died in 2012. At that time daddy was suffering, he was sick, and the doctor said hes on the last stage of cancer, Humaira said. After her fathers death, she continued to live in the apartment complex her and her father both stayed in. Eventually, she moved to the Watercrest at Kingwood. Humaira has been a resident at Watercrest since January 2015. Since then she has met a lot of new people and even became an ambassador of the senior facility to tell prospective residents the benefits of living at Watercrest. (Watercrest) is like a blessing. It is a heaven. This is my paradise. This is my home sweet home, Humaira said. Watercrests Executive Director Terri Lowery said Humaira represents the community in a great way and is a wonderful resident. Humaira John is an inspiring example of what it means to live life on ones own terms, Lowery said. The safety of being in a retirement community and the maintenance-free lifestyle attracts adults of all ages. Humaira shows all of us what it means to live well, and we are privileged to have her as part of our community." kaila.contreras@chron.com Harvey dealt Houston a tough hand, but power team Carolyn Faulk and Katie Clapp had a few tricks up their sleeves. The mother-daughter duo spend their days together running a national business A&C Plastics and a local nonprofit, the Faulk Foundation. They were able to put both roles to work for relief efforts after the storm. We were fortunate to have the infrastructure in place, Faulk said. From her home in a highrise in the Galleria area, she was able to see devastation spreading around the city after the hurricane hit. Clapp resides in Bellaire. Her house was high and dry, but the streets around her were underwater. I didnt realize how bad it was until I heard roof rescues a couple of streets over, she said. Her mind rushed to her business, wondering whether her employees, customers and offices were OK. Of 50 employees, only three were affected by Harvey. Our first thought was what can we do to help them, Clapp said. Then, we reached out to our customers. While she and Faulk were calling around to check on people they knew, they started getting phone calls from vendors, clients and other connections around the U.S. asking how they could help. She had an answer -- donate to her nonprofit. The Faulk Foundation was established in 2008 to help families faced with hardships, from illnesses to the complications of having a family member deployed overseas. Individuals apply for support from the nonprofit, and Faulk, Clapp and a team of volunteers go to work getting whatever they need. After Harvey, applications for aid were pouring in by the hundreds. So were donations. Everyone needed cleaning supplies, face masks, groceries and sheetrock. At A&C Plastics, the women have a warehouse, trucks and forklifts. We went to Home Depot and Lowes and bought palettes of stuff, Clapp said. Then we used our resources to pick everything up. She also used her industry connections to help bring in supplies that were in high demand. People needed sheetrock, but you couldnt get it, she said. People were buying it left and right. We called around and brought in trucks of sheetrock to our warehouse. Clapp and Faulk organized distribution days, inviting those who applied for aid at the Faulk Foundation to come to the warehouse and load up with supplies. They hosted six events. As the holidays neared, they were still receiving hundreds of requests for help. About 90 percent of them needed beds, Clapp said. We got a deal with Mattress Firm and bought 150 beds, pillows and bed sheets. They gave away the beds, along with household items and holiday gifts in November and December. If there was any more room in their car, we loaded them up, Faulk said. They were able to help more than 2,000 families, providing about 5,000 panels of sheetrock, $40,000 in cleaning supplies, $40,000 in gift cards and more than $100,000 in household goods. They sent trucks of supplies to Beaumont, Katy, Lumberton and Vidor, which were also hit hard by Harvey. And the mother-daughter duo is still going strong, answering applications for help even now, months after the storm. Our city still needs a lot of help, Faulk said. Its not over yet. We cant fix the problem, but we can let people know that we care. And that gives them hope. Many volunteers have helped the Faulk Foundation. Some were even helping others, despite having damaged homes themselves. Faulk hopes Houstonians continue to do what they can to help those who are still struggling. Volunteer, donate, just do anything you can, she said. Help one family at a time. You can do anything, something small, just do something to help. Helen Vollmer Caudle learned about the Faulk Foundation a few months before the storm. She was impressed with Clapp and Faulks efforts then and even more so now. Theyre relentless when it comes to helping people, she said. And theyre so organized and thoughtful. They help people get what they actually need. houstonheroes@chron.com Clear Lake City, the community built to serve NASA's Johnson Space Center, was the embodiment of American suburban life in the 1960s. It was the Houston area's first master-planned community, opened in 1963 by Friendswood Development Co. Here, astronauts and other tech-minded people filled homes on quiet streets, many of which maintain the same neighborly atmosphere today. A federal judge is allowing a high school students lawsuit against the Klein Independent School District to move forward for alleged bullying and harassment from teachers and administrators when she refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. The student, who is listed by her initials as M.O., originally filed a lawsuit in October for harassment from four teachers, three principals and other students. According to court documents, the bullying lasted from 2014 to 2017 which ultimately led M.O.s mother, LaShan Arceneaux, to withdraw her from Klein Oak High School and home school her for a semester. The plaintiffs allege that the defendants failed to prevent continuing harassment and constitutional violations because they did not discipline school employees and allowed M.O. to be bullied by other students, court documents state. According to the Texas Education Agency, a note from a parent or guardian can excuse a student from participating in the pledge. The documents state that Arceneaux supported her daughters decision not to stand for the pledge and provided a note to the school to exempt her from reciting it. Back in October, M.O.s lawyer, Randall Kalinen said she had been repeatedly taken out of class and chastised by teachers. "School students do not lose their freedom of speech when they walk onto a campus," Kallinen said at a press conference in October. Court documents state that one teacher told M.O. that people who refuse to participate during the pledge were Soviet communists, members of the Islamic faith seeking to impose Sharia law, and those who condone pedophilia. Another teacher confiscated M.O.s phone not standing for the pledge. A third teacher instructed M.O. to stand for the pledge several times. After speaking with the school guidance counselor, M.O. switched of the class. A fourth teacher allegedly retaliated against M.O. after the lawsuit against Klein ISD was filed and threatened to send her to the principals office for not providing information about the case and demoted her on the debate team. Fellow students reportedly bullied M.O. for refusing to stand during the pledge and were not disciplined after stealing food from M.O. and swearing at her. Klein ISD denied the allegations of bullying. India Landry, a student from Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, was expelled for not standing for the pledge. She was also one of Kallinens clients and was later reinstated at her school. Only after he misspelled the word "reblochon" Wednesday did a hungry Tristan Harper, 13, realize the irony of his mistake. Reblochon is a semi-soft cheese that "originated at the heart of the massif des Aravis, in the Thones region of Haute-Savoie in France." Harper, who is from Shoreacres and will attend La Porte High School in the fall, is one of eight Houston-area students competing in the 2018 Scripps National Spelling Bee at the National Harbor in Maryland. READ MORE: Texas spelling bee contestants advance in national competition "It was nerve-wracking. You're up there with a bunch of people," Harper told Chron.com Wednesday morning. Fellow Houston-area students Rohan Arulkumar, 12, who attends Quail Valley Middle School, and Cohen Dunham, 12, from Dickinson, have also struggled with nerves as well. Both boys spent months studying word lists. "It feels really cool, to be somewhere new with all these people around," Dunham said. The Spelling Bee will air on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, and the ESPN App through May 31. In 2017, the winning Spelling Bee word was marocain, which is a dress fabric of ribbed crepe made of silk or wool or both, according to Google's dictionary. Fernando Alfonso III is a digital reporter at Chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @fernalfonso. A baby who was born inside of a Texas jail has reportedly died. Shaye Bear gave birth to her son Cashh in the Ellis County Jail on May 17. News station WFAA-TV reports her son was born prematurely and died after he was taken off of life support on Saturday. READ THE ORIGINAL: A woman gave birth in a Texas jail cell. She claims guards did nothing to help her Bear told WFAA-TV that Cashh being born inside of a jail contributed to his death. The mother said her son's lungs were too weak to work on their own and that his brain was bleeding. Bear added that she took her son off of life support because she didn't want to see him in pain and believed it was the best thing to do for him. Bear said the day she gave birth, jail guards refused to help her until she had her baby in a cell. She told the news station earlier this month that she sucked the fluid out of her son's mouth immediately after giving birth to him. Cashh was transported to Cook's Children Medical Center in Fort Worth after the birth. BAD MOM: Allegedly drunk Texas mother thrown out of school play, kicks officer, floods city jail According to the Quint V Boenker Preemie Survival Foundation, a baby is considered premature if it is born before 37 weeks in a pregnancy. Babies born at 23 weeks or sooner have a 17 percent chance of survival. The survival rate for a premature baby born at 24 weeks improves to 39 percent. If born at 25 weeks, the premature baby's chance of survival improves to 50 percent. The foundation reports one out of 10 premature babies will develop a permanent disability like lung disease, cerebral palsy, blindness or deafness. "Preterm (premature) births occur in about 12 percent of all pregnancies in the U.S. It is one of the top causes of infant death in this country," the Quint V Boenker foundation reports. FREE: Texas teen who used 'affluenza' defense freed from jail The Texas Rangers told Chron.com last week that the agency is investigating Cashh's birth and said in a statement, "The investigation is ongoing and no additional information will be released." Ellis County Sheriff Charles Edge declined to comment on the incident when contacted last week, deferring to the Texas Rangers. Bear maintains that her son may still be alive if he was born inside of a hospital instead of the Ellis County Jail. She adds she has a lawyer and may file a lawsuit due to her son's death. Bear reportedly was arrested on drug charges on March 10 and is being held on a $5,000 bond. Get instant Houston breaking news alerts sent directly to your phone by texting CHRON to 77453. Will Axford covers the news of Texas for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. Follow him on Twitter. Dont be deterred by the construction the D. Bradley McWilliams YMCA is open for business. Were still here, Jennifer Stephens, district executive of YMCA of Greater Houston, said. And were still available to offer assistance. We are still giving out scholarships on a daily basis. Hurricane Harvey took a toll on the branch, which is located at 19915 Texas 249, right next to the banks of Cypress Creek. Board member Jim Schier witnessed the wreckage. He has lived in the neighborhood since 1976, and his house flooded for the first time in the storm. Still, he drove over to the Y to check on it as the waters started to rise. We even got sandbags and tried to stop the water, but there was nothing we were able to do, he said. We knew the water was heading into the Y building, but we never dreamed it would be that bad. The main building, which measures 87,000 square feet, was constructed in 1980 and never flooded before. This was the first time, Schier said. More Information Want to know more? For more information about the D. Bradley McWilliams Y, visit www.ymcahouston.org/locations/d-bradley-mcwilliams-ymca-cypress-creek. See More Collapse The Shindeldecker Family Youth Center also flooded for the first time. The Family Center had weathered rising water in the past and was submerged again during Harvey. A couple of days after the hurricane, Schier returned to the campus to assess the damage. In the main building, the water measured 3 feet to 4 feet deep. It was just unbelievable, he said. It was a mess. It was pretty devastating. The Y quickly developed a plan to renovate the Shindeldecker building first. Construction crews spent the next couple of months replacing walls and floors, and the branch reopened the second week of November. All new equipment was purchased, and Shindeldecker, which usually houses youth programs like dance and martial art classes, was transformed into a miniature main building, complete with exercise rooms, cycle studios and administrative offices. Were pretty squeezed in, but we feel blessed to have this building where we can continue to serve our members, Stephens said. Other Y locations hit by Harvey only had one building, she explained, and were not able to reopen. Schier said that in total, the cost of renovations totaled $35 million for all of the area Ys affected by Harvey. Insurance is covering $23 million. The Y is hosting a fundraising campaign to make up the difference. Schier said the cost for renovation work on the D. Bradley McWilliams Y campus totals $8 million. He explained that the remodel of the main building was delayed to provide time to address current building codes. Were doing a major renovation, he said. We brought in an architect to really modernize the building and open it up. Crews are in the midst of demolishing the interior of the building, and construction is expected to wrap in October. In the meantime, the family center building has also reopened and now is serving as a home base for various programs, including this summers Outdoor Adventure Camp. The YMCA counts its membership in units, which can refer to an individual, couple or family. The D. Bradley McWilliams Y had about 6,000 units before Harvey, and its membership has climbed back up to 4,400 units in the past few months. Stephens said that during the renovation, membership rates dropped significantly, since resources were limited. People are still just waiting for the building to reopen, she said. The branch also reopened its outdoor pool and water activity park in May. After Harvey, the D. Bradley McWilliams Y gained an Aire Fitness pod, which is essentially an outdoor structure, loaded with equipment for circuit training and boot camps in fresh air. The pod is unique to the campus and the Lake Houston Y, which also flooded drastically. Stephens said the D. Bradley McWilliams Y has managed to keep most of its programs going, while waiting for the main building renovation. There are still regular senior events, as well as outreach activities at local schools. More than 1,000 Highlanders crossed the stage on Tuesday night to receive their diplomas after graduating from The Woodlands High School. Many will now be moving off to join the armed forces, attend various universities and begin building their futures. The seating at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion was jam packed as family and friends filed in to witness 1,070 seniors from The Woodlands High School reach their graduation milestone on May 29. Tuesday marked a milestone for Principal Gregg Colschen as well as he is stepping down from his position. Next school year, Colschen will be assistant superintendent of secondary education for Conroe Independent School District, and he offered some parting remarks to the high school students on whom he has made an impact. How proud I am of them and the accomplishments that they have made for themselves and each other, and for allowing me to be part of their lives, with these kids for the last four years and collectively for the last 16 years, Colschen said. Its been an incredible ride. For the seniors specifically who graduated Tuesday night, Colschen encouraged them to continue to succeed in life by doing what they have done to get them to graduation. Continue to do the things that youve done that have made you successful up to this point, he said. The quality of character that these kids have will take them a long way in life if theyll continue to do the things theyve done. James McDowell, TWHS student body president, explained during the welcome and introductions that although many of them were Bush Bobcats, Buckalew Bears or Mitchell Mustangs in elementary school, they all came together as Highlanders and supported one anothers path to success. Throughout all of the years and changes the class underwent, McDowell said that outgoing-Superintendent Dr. Don Stockton was the one thing that remained constant. Stockton provided the students every opportunity to be successful and created the Read for a Better Life campaign, McDowell explained. Stockton also served as principal of The Woodlands High School from 1999 to 2002 before becoming district superintendent. He played a huge role in establishing many of the traditions we hold dear. Dr. Stockton is retiring on Friday, and we wanted to express our heartfelt thanks for guiding us through our school experience. Please know that you will always be a Highlander, McDowell said to thunderous applause. Christy Chinn, one the high schools numerous summa cum laude graduates, gave the commencement speech on Tuesday. Chinn discussed some of the tragedies the seniors faced and how they reacted, including banding together after Hurricane Harvey and showing support for the students in Parkland, Florida, following the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School. These tribulations have served as a testament to our character and helped to build our immunity to the calamities that life may bring, Chinn said. She issued a call to action for her classmates to take what they have learned in high school and become leaders. I challenge you to go out into the world and be the light. Take the morals and values that The Woodlands has taught you, and spread joy and love, she added. Chase the same tradition of excellence that has been instilled in us for all of these years. Pursue what sets your heart on fire and never settle for anything less than your best. The Class of 2018 accomplished much during their final year, including 11 perfect scores on either the ACT or SAT and receiving more than $14 million in scholarship funds, which is $4 million more than the highest amount in past years. Home buyers have all kinds of dream features on their wish lists: an open kitchen with state-of-the-art appliances, a patio to relax on in the warm-weather months, and enough space to raise a growing family. But not all housing markets are created equal when it comes to just how much buyers will be shelling out for those coveted extra rooms. So which cities offer the mostand leastsquare footage for $200,000? Buyers seeking sizable homes on a budget want to stay far away from the ultraexpensive coasts, according to a recent PropertyShark report. But the South and Midwest are good bets for those hoping to save a few bucks. The home listing website looked at its own data to determine the median home's square footage in each of the 33 large cities (with Brooklyn and Manhattan, both parts of New York City, counted separately) included in the report. PropertyShark also used U.S. Census Bureau data to figure out the median home price. The company then divided the sale price by the home size to come up with the price per square foot. (The median home list price nationwide is $289,900, according to the most recent realtor.com data. Meanwhile, the median home square footage was 2,422 for U.S. homes completed in 2016, according to Census data. That's about $120 per square foot.) It turns out that $200,000 will net buyers a measly 126 square feet in New York City's prized borough of Manhattan, home to many of the big skyscrapers that the city is known for. (To put this into perspective, the average standard U.S. hotel room size is 325 square feet.) "We always say location, location, location, and people will pay for that," says Manhattan-based real estate broker Karen Gastiaburo, of Halstead Real Estate. "Theres no city like New York City. Theres a vibrancy, theres a uniqueness. New York City isn't the only city where $200,000 will get you a home smaller than Kim Kardashian West's closet. The same sum can purchase only 260 square feet in San Francisco; 371 in Boston; 376 in San Jose, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley; 423 in Washington, DC; and 451 in New York City's borough of Brooklyn. Meanwhile, buyers can score a palatial 3,769 square feet in Cleveland for that $200,000. That's about 30 times the amount of space they can get in Manhattan. Is it time to install an indoor skating rink? Buyers can also live large in El Paso, TX, where $200,000 buys 3,334 square feet; in San Antonio, TX, at 3,249; and in Memphis, TN, at 2,965. It would be hard to spend $200,000 in certain neighborhoods, and it wouldnt be enough in others," says Cleveland-based real estate agent David Sharkey, of Progressive Urban Real Estate. About "$200,000 could get an older home thats been rehabbed pretty nicely, with three to four bedrooms and two bathrooms in a nice neighborhood. However, in Cleveland's hipper, pricier neighborhoods, that amount will get buyers much smaller, move-in ready abodes. "If it was a larger home [in those areas], it would need quite a bit of rehab," Sharkey says. The post How Many Square Feet Will $200K Buy Across the Country? appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com. Houston and Harris County officials are holding a series of public meetings to get input on how they should spend about $1 billion that each received for long-term Hurricane Harvey recovery services. The city had held four meetings as of May 29 and had five more scheduled through June 7. Harris County, which will provide services in unincorporated areas and small cities, has scheduled eight meetings through June 14. SLOW RECOVERY: Get the latest details as the region bounces back from Harvey The sessions will help local officials determine how to spend funds allocated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for home repairs, public infrastructure improvements and other purposes. The funds provided to Houston and Harris County account for about half of the initial $5 billion HUD allocated for long-term Harvey recovery in Texas. Total HUD funding to the state so far is about $10 billion. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and county leaders lobbied aggressively to control how disaster relief money is spent in the region. The public meetings are a required part of that process. Officials say it will be several months before the money is in the hands of local officials. ASSESSMENT: HoustonChronicle.com explores Harris County's new After Action Report The remaining city meetings will be: * Saturday June 2 at Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church, 7701 Jutland, from 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.; * June 2 at the Northeast Multi-Service Center, 9720 Spaulding, from noon to 2 p.m.; * Online AARP town hall meetings on June 6 (English) and June 7 (Spanish) from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. and at the Southwest Multi-Service Center, 6400 High Star, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The county meetings will be: * Wednesday May 30 at the Crosby Community Center, 409 Hare Road, Crosby, from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.; * May 31 at the Northeast Community Center in James Driver Park, 10918 Bentley, Houston, from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.; * June 5 at the BakerRipley Cleveland Campus, 720 Fairmont Parkway, Pasadena, from 8:30 a.m. to 11 a.m.; * Wednesday June 6 at the Weekley Community Center, 8440 Greenhouse Road, Cypress, from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.; * June 7 at the Leon Z. Grayson/Baldree Community Center, 13828 Corpus Christi, Houston, from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.; * June 12 at the El Franco Lee Community Center, 9500 Hall Road, Houston, from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.; * June 13 at the Phillip Cezeaux Recreation Building, 111 N. Houston Ave., Humble, from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.; * June 14 at the Baytown Community Center, 2407 Market, from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Kimberly Vaughan was among the missing Tuesday as her classmates returned to Santa Fe High School. She should have been sending her mother goofy text messages or practicing sign language, but instead family and friends said goodbye to the freshman high school student during her funeral Tuesday afternoon at Clear Creek Community Church in League City. As the palm trees swayed and the afternoon sun shone down, guests slowly strolled toward the sprawling tan and brown church. A couple of guys wore Boy Scout uniforms and another girl walked in wearing a beige Girl Scout vest, paying homage to Vaughan who was a devoted senior Girl Scout in the San Jacinto Council. Eleven days prior to laying her daughter to rest, Vaughans mother, Rhonda Hart, posted an urgent message on Facebook as she waited to learn whether Vaughan was one of the ten victims killed at Santa Fe High School. My daughter was in first period art class at Santa Fe high school today, Hart wrote on Facebook on May 18. There was a shooter. I have not found her. MET WITH STUDENTS: Abbott consoles Santa Fe students Earlier that morning, Hart saw her 14-year-old daughter for the last time, while on the school bus she drives for the Santa Fe ISD school district, she recalled last week to Anderson Cooper on CNN. Harts daughter walked by and Vaughan remembers using sign language to speak with her. I looked over and I said, Bye Kim, and I went I love you, Hart recalled. This was our thing I Love You in ASL. Hart explained during her television interview how she and her daughter first began using sign language when Vaughan was young because she was delayed in speech as a toddler and in preschool. Vaughans love of sign language continued and she planned on creating a program for young children and families to communicate better using ASL as part of her Gold Award project for Girl Scouts. Hart recalled often receiving goofy text messages from her daughter and described her as a great comedian. Vaughan also was a huge fan of Harry Potter, cats and library trips, according to her obituary. She was just too awesome for all of us down here, so she had to go upstairs and be awesome up there, said Hart in her CNN interview. The media was not allowed inside Tuesdays service. Last week, as white crosses were placed in front of Santa Fe High School in honor of the victims, Sierra Dean held her face in her hands as she stood in front of her best friends memorial. This is my best friend who passed away on Friday 5/18/18 i love and miss u kimmy ill see u again, she wrote on Facebook along with a photo collage of Vaughan. On her obituarys website, loved ones of Vaughan also typed their condolences. She was an amazing girl. Had a contagious smile, she was smart and creative, wrote Christi Prater. My heat breaks for you and your family. Fly high sweet girl. Since the days of the shooting, Hart has been outspoken on social media about changes that need to be made regarding gun violence and told People magazine that shes contacted Sen. Ted Cruz. I called him today and left him a message and I said, Im Kims mom and I want to know what you are going to do and heres my phone number, and Ill keep calling. Every week. Every other day. Whatever I have to do, she said. During her interview with Anderson Cooper, Hart said her daughter was excited at the start of the school year to dye her hair with red streaks and urged others to add red streaks in their hair if they wanted to honor Vaughan. A few red-streaked funeral attendees could be seen streaming into the church on Tuesday. My daughter has a cross. She should NOT have a cross, wrote Hart recently on Facebook. She should be right next to me, pretending to fart on me or annoy her brother or picking up a cat to sneak into her room. brooke.lewis@chron.com @brookelewisa Huffman ISD became the first Houston-area school district to move to arm some of its teachers and staff members following the mass shooting at Santa Fe High School on May 18 that left 10 dead and 13 injured. Huffman ISDs Board of Trustees approved a change in policy last Friday that will allow the district to arm qualified staff in the districts four schools beginning in August, supplementing protection already offered by two school resource officers who monitor the campuses. At least 217 of Texas more than 1,000 traditional school districts have so-called Guardian Plan policies on the books that allow staff to carry firearms, according to the Texas Association of School Boards, or TASB. Shirley Dupree, a spokeswoman for Huffman ISD who also serves on the districts emergency response team, said officials will spend the summer finalizing details to their plan. Any staff member who is selected to carry a firearm on campus will have to go through an intense vetting process, Dupree said, including training and psychological evaluations. Unfortunately, were at a point in education where we have to worry about this, Dupree said. We have to do what we have to do to protect our students. Huffman ISD also will create a focus group to discuss other steps that can be taken to address students mental health, violence prevention and additional security measures. HERO: Santa Fe HS teacher remembered for saving lives School security has become a priority across districts in Houston and Texas following the massacre at Santa Fe High School less than two weeks ago. In that case, a 17-year-old student opened fire on an art class and shot at law enforcement before being taken into custody. He has been charged with capital murder and is being held without bail. The shooting has shocked area school officials into reviewing their security policies and asking questions about whether to add more armed adults to their ranks. Nearly 400 of Texas independent school districts already have their own internal police departments or hire school resource officers from local law enforcement agencies, according to TASB. Dupree said Huffmans status as an unincorporated town and its relatively small size of 3,500 students make it difficult to create an internal police department and hire more school resource officers. The district hired a second resource officer this year after having only one patrol its schools for 15 years. Huffman ISDs four schools are located on two consolidated campuses its two elementaries are located next to each other, as are the districts middle and high school. One resource officer is assigned to each of the two campus complexes. The worry, Dupree said, is the time it could take for an officer to respond to a neighboring campus in an emergency situation. The time from when the first shot is fired until law enforcement gets there, thats the most critical time, Dupree said. If the SRO is next door at the middle school, and something happens at the high school, it could take one or two minutes for them to get over there. And theres a lot of damage can be done in two minutes. Districts in more rural areas have similar concerns, and some have resorted to arming staff members to speed up response times to potential incidents. Texas schools have two options to arm non-law-enforcement employees. The states School Marshal Program, passed by the Legislature in 2013, allows districts to identify staff members who hold concealed carry licenses to be trained and licensed by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which oversees the program. That plan does not allow staff to be armed around students, although Gov. Greg Abbott suggested removing that stipulation in a series of safety proposals he outlined Wednesday. Participants also must take an 80-hour course provided by an approved law enforcement academy and undergo a psychological evaluation. The Guardian Plan, which has been around since 2007, has no state oversight and allows local boards to set vetting and training standards for their armed teachers. Psychological evaluations and training are hallmarks of the program, although the standards can vary from district to district. Gun-carrying staff members are required to stay mostly anonymous under both plans, their identities known only to a handful of school and district administrators. ABBOTT'S PLAN: More armed teachers, security presence sought in schools Shonda Delow, president of the Northeast Houston chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, said teachers already are over-burdened with responsibilities without having to worry about firearms carried by themselves or colleagues. Even if an armed teacher confronted a gunman, Delow worried the educator could be overpowered easily. You cant compare a loaded handgun or a concealed weapon for the teachers to carry if you have an intruder coming in with a semi-automatic and multiple clips of ammunition, Delow said. Jonathan Rhyne, an oil purification technician who has a 17-year-old daughter in Huffman ISD, disagreed. He said the voluntary nature of the program and training would help ensure the right staff members are selected. Plus, he said, it only takes one shot to bring down a gunman. We shouldnt have to be afraid to send our kids to school, Rhyne said. If we have the means to protect kids, whether with ISD police or armed teachers, I think its a great idea. shelby.webb@chron.com twitter.com/shelbywebb AUSTIN Incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has doubled his lead over Democratic challenger Lupe Valdez in recent weeks, a new poll published on Wednesday shows. Incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz also extended his lead over Democrat Beto ORourke to 50-39 percent, picking up a big boost from men. Last months poll implied a closer 47-44 percent race. The Quinnipiac Poll which surveyed 961 Texas voters May 23-29 with a margin or error of 3.8 points showed that Abbott leads Valdez, the former Dallas County sheriff, by a margin of 53-34 percent, doubling his 49-40 percent lead in an April 18 poll by the university. MAKING AMENDS: Lupe Valdez makes payments on overdue taxes According to the new poll, Abbott leads 58-28 percent among men and 48-40 percent among women. White voters back Abbott 69-22 percent, black voters back Valdez 66-21 percent and Latino voters are divided 43 percent for Valdez and 39 percent for Abbott. "Gov. Greg Abbott is way ahead in his reelection bid. Lupe Valdez has won the Democratic Primary and is now able to focus on the general election. But she has a long way to go," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Poll. Not surprisingly, Republicans support Abbott 94-2 percent, and independent voters chose him by a 45-38 percent margin. Democrats back Valdez 78-12 percent. AFTER SANTA FE: Ted Cruz says injured students told him 'don't take our guns' The poll also found that 60 percent of Texas voters approve of the job Abbott is doing and give him a 53 percent favorability rating. Valdez has a 15 percent favorability rating, but 53 percent of voters who responded to the poll said they didnt know enough about her to form an opinion of her. The poll also reported that Texas voters are evenly split on President Donald Trump 47 support and 47 percent oppose him 47 percent in what is a slightly improved rating, compared to a 52-43 percent negative view Texans had of him in the April poll. Mike Ward, the Houston Chronicle's Austin Bureau Chief, covers state government and politics, specializing in the governor and Executive Branch, investigations, criminal justice and ethics. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook. Send him news tips at Mike.Ward@chron.com. Listen to him for free on Texas Take: The Podcast, our top-rated weekly show about Texas politics. Lidia Cleveland had offered to be with her son when he walked into Santa Fe High School on Tuesday. She wanted to make sure he felt supported, although the senior, Jacob Hinton, said he wanted to return on his own. Still, the 17-year-old was far from alone. Hundreds of well-wishers joined Cleveland along the side of Texas 6 in front of the high school on Tuesday morning as students returned for classes for the first time since a May 18 mass shooting that killed 10 people and injured 13 others. A 17-year-old student has been charged with capital murder in the killings. Its going to be tough, coming back for the first time, Cleveland said from her spot along the road, before most students had arrived. But he needs to face it and try to move on. Most Santa Fe High students began their school day at 10 a.m., nearly three hours after their regular start time. As 10 a.m. approached, many stood in a 150-yard line that snaked around the southeastern half of the building. Senior Gracie Hamilton, 17, said students were scanned with metal detectors and were checked into the school by staff. Law enforcement officers from as far away as the Klein and Houston school districts helped guide traffic and escort students inside. Then we headed to the gym for our ceremony, which was totally heart-wrenching to see the slide show of the people who lost their lives in the shooting, Hamilton wrote in a text message. We all came together and held each other and it was beautiful. Gov. Greg Abbott made an unannounced appearance and promised he would work to make changes to better secure schools. Students locked arms and sang their school song as the assembly ended. Outside, many of those gathered had dressed in hunter green and yellow in a nod to the schools colors. Some held handmade signs in one hand and shielded their eyes from the glare of the rising sun with the other. Six school buses filled with more than 200 Alvin ISD students, who finished their school year on Friday, pulled up to the school at about 7:35 a.m. They lined up along the shaded southwest corner of the school, holding signs and clapping for law enforcement and Santa Fe students as they walked toward the main entrance. Lee Blatt, an algebra II teacher at Alvin High School, said many Santa Fe students looked grief-stricken as they made their way into the school. It wasnt in them to smile, but some of them said thank you, said Blatt, who is also Alvin Highs student council sponsor. One (Santa Fe High) parent wrote on Facebook that when she returned to her car, all she could do was cry. When she first arrived at school, she wanted to turn around and go back home. But when she saw us there welcoming students, it gave them strength to go in. Manolis Tjanis, a 15-year-old who attends Alvin High but did not travel there on one of the school buses, said he does not know anyone who attends Santa Fe High School but wanted to be part of something positive on their first day back. I think we dont see enough of the caring and love we need in the world, Tjanis said. We wait for bad things to happen before we do something like this. Eight Santa Fe High School students and two substitute teachers died in last weeks massacre. They were identified as teachers Glenda Perkins and Cynthia Tisdale, and students Jared Black, Shana Fisher, Christian Riley Garcia, Aaron Kyle McLeod, Angelique Ramirez, Sabika Sheikh, Christopher Jake Stone and Kimberly Vaughan. Eight of the dead were buried last week and over the weekend. Vaughans funeral was Tuesday, and Perkins is scheduled for Wednesday. Authorities have charged a 17-year-old senior in the slayings. Police said he came into the school that morning with a Remington 870 shotgun, a .38-caliber pistol and a few faulty, homemade bombs. The campus was closed immediately after the shooting rampage, and teachers returned to work last week on Wednesday. Counselors will be on campus through Friday to provide services to students and staff, according to Santa Fe ISD. Graduation is still on schedule for seniors and will be held Friday.Gracie Hamilton, the graduating senior, said she was inspired by the coming together of students on Tuesday. It was honestly beautiful seeing everyone stand together as one, Hamilton said. It truly shows the strength the Santa Fe community has. shelby.webb@chron.com twitter.com/shelbywebb WASHINGTON Seven of Texas best spelling whizzes earned slots to the next round of a national spelling bee Tuesday morning. Hailing from San Antonio, Sugar Land, Pearland, Dickinson, Spring, Katy and Beaumont, the contestants spelled their words correctly in the oral spelling round advancing to Wednesdays second day of competition. The Scripps National Spelling Bee is an annual competition that brings more than 500 of the most advanced young spellers from every state to compete in D.C. The bee started with a preliminary round Tuesday morning. Pranav Chemudpaty, a 14-year-old from Nolan Ryan Junior High School in Pearland, said he was confident hed correctly spell fritillaria, which is a plant or bulb with checkered flowers, because hed already reviewed the term. I try not to be too confident, but I just look at the pronouncer, he said. Its nice because Ive been trying really hard to be here. Harini Logan, a 10-year-old from the Montessori School of San Antonio, said shes watched the Scripps spelling bee every year and always aspired to enter the competition. She said she felt confident because she could ask the pronouncer any question shed like to ask about the word terek, meaning a sandpiper of the old world, which she spelled correctly. Its really exciting I watched all these spellers tackle all these words I didnt know, and now Im one of those people, Logan said. When Benjamin Chen, an 11-year-old from Sallie Curtis Elementary School in Beaumont, correctly spelled kathak a classical Indian dance hed also secured a spot in Wednesdays competition. His mother, Xisong Hung, said her son didnt prepare for spelling bee competitions until he qualified for the national bee. When he earned a spot, Hung said he started reviewing more terms and began to have fun alongside his competitors. Im happy for him, she said. Hes not sure now if he wants to keep going, but hes telling me hes having fun now and hed like to do it next year. When Tuesdays round closed, 454 out of 519 total contestants remained in the competition. Spellers on stage Tuesday had already passed a written exam. Contestants must complete two oral spelling rounds during the preliminary round. Their results, combined with the written test scores, will determine whether they advance to the finals Thursday. After the next oral spelling round, the number spellers will be knocked down to 50 for the finals. ESPN live-streams the entire competition. sarah.roach@chron.com A Texas nurse who had more than $41,000 seized from her by federal agents at George Bush Intercontinental Airport last fall has her money back but it's not stopping her from taking legal action. Anthonia Nwaorie of Katy, Texas had $41,377 on her while attempting to board a flight to Nigeria in October, according to The Washington Post. Some of the cash was separated into envelopes to be given to ill and aging family members. The newspaper reports she also packed medical supplies and over-the-counter medication. WATCH OUT: U.S. Customs and Border Protection warns consumers about counterfeit products Before she could board the plane to Nigeria, U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped her. Agents asked about the money and her legal status. Nwaorie became a U.S. citizen in 1994 and is from Nigeria. "It was like I was a criminal," Nwaorie told The Washington Post. "I felt so humiliated, so petrified, too. They were talking among themselves, saying how 'this is how people smuggle money out of the country. This is how they do it.'" The Guardian reports Nwaorie received a check from the agency for the $41,377 last Friday, months after the seizure. Both newspapers report Nwaorie had saved most of the $41,377 to open up a clinic for women and children in Nigeria. The nurse said she was unaware she was required to declare currency more than $10,000 when leaving the U.S. Nwaorie hasn't been charged with a crime. Customs and Border Protection sent her a letter in April saying the agency would return the money if she signed an agreement to never take legal action against the U.S. government, according to the Guardian. THAT'S NOT GAS: Texas police find 71 pounds of meth hidden inside gas tank The nurse told the Guardian she refused to sign the agreement. Instead, she filed a federal-class action lawsuit against the agency earlier this month. She is seeking to end the practice of requiring people to waive legal rights to get their money back. U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment on the pending litigation when contacted by the Guardian. Get instant Houston breaking news alerts sent directly to your phone by texting CHRON to 77453. Will Axford covers the news of Texas for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. Follow him on Twitter. A federal judge Tuesday denied bail to a conspiracy theorist who claims the November mass shooting in which 26 people were killed at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs never took place. During a hearing Tuesday, testimony that agents found 10 guns and nearly 1,000 rounds of ammo at the Lockhart home of Robert Mikell Ussery after his arrest on May 23 helped sway U.S. Magistrate Judge Henry Bemporad to deny Ussery release on bail. The judge agreed with federal prosecutors that Ussery may be a danger to the community. Ussery, 54, who refers to himself as Side Thorn Journalist, and his girlfriend, Jodi Mann, known as Conspiracy Granny, were initially arrested March 5 on state charges of resisting arrest, trespassing and other counts after allegedly walking onto the churchs lawn and confronting Pastor Frank Pomeroy, whose daughter was among those killed by a gunman. Special agent Kaitlyn OConnell with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said the feds were called in by Texas Rangers after the incident. He was talking about the mass shooting, OConnell said. He was saying it didnt actually happen and that it was a hoax. The agent also said Ussery used profanity, and told Pomeroy that the people would hang him and that (Ussery) would (urinate) on him. Though the pair made bail on the state charges, the matter resulted in a restraining order being issued against them, according to testimony and court records. During the incident, the pair had Go-Pro video recording equipment that recorded the encounter. That helped agents develop a federal case against him. When ATF agents reviewed the video, it showed Ussery handled a gun by the pickup the pair were in, placed it under a mat in the truck and told Mann that if theres a question about the gun by police, Mann should claim ownership, OConnell testified. Ussery was convicted of felony burglary of a vehicle in 1984 in Brazoria County and is barred by federal law from possessing a gun. Some time after the church confrontation, Ussery went to the FBI to claim he was getting death threats. Last week, authorities from Caldwell County called Ussery in to talk to him about the alleged death threats, but it was part of an operation to get him away from his home to serve a search warrant at his home and arrest him on a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm, OConnell testified. OConnell said agents found 10 guns on the property, including a .50-caliber rifle, two assault-style rifles, two shotguns and nearly 1,000 rounds of ammunition. Guillermo Contreras is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | gcontreras@express-news.net | @gmaninfedland Several residents of Schertz and Cibolo discovered flyers from the neo-Nazi group Blood and Soil tossed in their front yards on Monday. The flyers, which have a heading of "Keep America American," urge residents to report undocumented immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They were sealed in plastic baggies and weighed down with small stones and at the bottom of the flyers is a phone number for ICE and the URL for Blood and Soil's website. "Blood and soil" was a key Nazi slogan expressing desire for a racially pure, Aryan homeland. The Blood and Soil movement in the U.S. has consisted mainly of masked men posting their flyers on university campuses in the middle of the night. RELATED: Texas State officials investigating after flyers promoting white supremacy found on campus Tannya Lee, 44, who discovered one of the flyers outside of her home in the Heights of Cibolo neighborhood, said nothing so openly racist has happened in her community, which she described as diverse and open. Lee said several people in her neighborhood found the flyers, and many others posted about it in a Facebook group for residents of Schertz and Cibolo. "Most people were pretty upset and aggravated," she said. "It's been a mixed response, but the majority were pretty appalled, especially when they discovered the group (Blood and Soil) is a neo-Nazi group." She said she was personally offended by the flyers because her mother is Mexican, and she has several other family members who had to work for years to become legal citizens. She knows many others who had to flee from Mexico or face starvation or violence related to the drug trade. "It's just a very sad situation because they know they're not wanted, and they're hated, but they have to come because they'll either starve or be in danger," she said. Flyers and banners promoting white suppremacy, including several from the same group, were also found on the Texas State University campus in San Marcos multiple times last fall. The university denounced the messages and police ultimately gave criminal trespass warnings to five men authorities said were responsible. RELATED: Texas State University police catch culprits reportedly responsible for white supremacist banners Cibolo City Manager Robert Herrera said city officials were "saddened to see the racist flyers thrown on some of the lawns of residents." "Cibolo is a diverse town that is one of the safest cities in the area. We want all of our families to feel safe, and encourage reporting this type of propaganda to the Cibolo Police Department. We will continue to track and find the organization members who are spreading this hateful message," he said. Lee said the other residents of her neighborhood plan to keep an eye out for any other flyer distributors. "If you're going to put something in my yard, I think you should be able to be open about it, put your name behind it," she said. "If you're doing it in a hidden way, it's because you know there's something wrong with it." 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 WASHINGTON President Donald Trump is scheduled to arrive in Houston on Thursday for a $5,000-a-plate luncheon, part of a Republican fundraising swing through Texas that will wrap up with a big dollar dinner reception several hours later in Dallas. He will also meet with the victims of this month's school shooting in Santa Fe, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced Wednesday. "He will meet with the families of the victims from the tragic school shooting at Santa Fe high school to personally offer his condolences and support," she said. The White House offered few further details. The Texas fundraising trip comes as lawmakers in Congress use a weeklong Memorial Day break to load up on cash for November midterm elections that could decide control of both the House and Senate. The two GOP fundraisers also mark Trump's fifth visit to Texas since Hurricane Harvey hit last summer. One of the trips was combined with a $4.3 million fundraiser last October in Dallas, one of the nation's top repositories of GOP cash. Trump was last in the state earlier this month, when he returned to Dallas to help raise money and give a full-throated defense of gun rights at a National Rifle Association (NRA) convention. The stop in Houston will be his first to the Gulf region since the flood devastation from Harvey, when he made back-to-back trips to Corpus Christi and Houston to see the storm damage and confer with local officials on recovery efforts. Since then, The Lone Star State has been the scene of two other national tragedies: The church shootings in Sutherland Springs in November, followed by school shootings in Santa Fe earlier this month. The White House dispatched Vice President Mike Pence to pray with the victims in Sutherland Springs. Thursday's visit, however, will have a political focus. Although White House officials have considered including an official event involving some of the affected families from Santa Fe, it appeared Wednesday that it would be limited to a meeting inside a hangar at a Coast Guard air station. Also joining the meeting will be U.S. Rep. Randy Weber, a Republican from Friendswood whose district includes Santa Fe, and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz. Officials in the White House said the meeting was expected to be private, at the request of the families. Some noted that unlike some of the students from the Parkland shooting in Florida in February, the survivors of Santa Fe have tended to be less politically active in their grief. Officials also suggested that the airport location was to avoid the traffic disruption of another presidential motorcade. Whatever the circumstances, the meeting with the Santa Fe victims allows officials to designate much if not all of the daylong fundraising outing as government expense. Trump's fundraising trip to Texas, a leading donor state for both political parties, was pushed back from earlier this month amid planning for a possible summit with North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un, which is still up in the air. The luncheon at the St. Regis in Houston is a benefit the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the political arm of the Senate Republicans, who are defending their 51-49 majority in the November midterm elections. Among the seats being contested this year is one held by Cruz, who faces a well-financed challenge from Democrat Beto O'Rourke, a three-term congressman from El Paso. The dinner in Dallas will be a joint fundraiser for the RNC and Trump's 2020 reelection campaign, which is being managed by San Antonio political operative Brad Parscale. A Cruz spokeswoman did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether he plans to attend either of the fundraisers. A spokeswoman for Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a former NRSC chairman, said a scheduling conflict would keep him from attending either one. Trump is expected to travel on Air Force One, arriving at Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base shortly before the Houston luncheon. For security reasons, and possibly to ward off protests, organizers have not disclosed the location of the event. Contribution levels start at $5,000 per person and go up to $100,000 per couple for preferred seating, according to an invitation obtained by the Houston Chronicle. From Houston, Trump will travel to Dallas for an evening event where dinner seating starts at $35,000. VIP photo opportunities and special seating go up to $100,000 a couple, according to a separate invitation obtained by the Chronicle. Texas GOP donors associated with the events have told the Chronicle that Trump's visit will help boost Republican candidates across the nation. For the NRSC, which has lagged behind its Democratic counterpart in raising money for Senate races, Trump's visit to Texas could be a welcome boost. "This is the honey pot of the Republican Party," said Dallas GOP fundraiser Doug Deason, a state co-chair of the Trump Victory Committee, a joint effort of the Trump campaign organization and the Republican National Committee. "Literally, everybody comes through here." Related Content: Texas Republican backers returning to the fold with checks in hand Kevin Diaz is the Chronicle's Washington Bureau Chief, covering issues important to Texas from the White House, the Supreme Court and Capitol Hill. Follow him on twitter at @DiazChron and send him tips at Kevin.Diaz@chron.com Tom Reel, Staff / San Antonio Express-News AUSTIN -- Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told returning students and teachers at Santa Fe High School on Tuesday that he was impressed with their character and spirit in how they have handled the aftermath of the May 18 shooting that killed 10 and injured 13 others. In a private session at an assembly, the governor consoled them and said that while he was unable to explain their individual feelings, he can relate to a life-changing event such as the shooting. DALLAS Gov. Greg Abbott is asking for more armed teachers, heightened security presence on campuses and better identification of troubled students to make Texans safer as the nation grapples with a terrifying drumbeat of school shootings. The governor released a 40-page school and firearm safety action plan Wednesday at Dallas Independent School District, offering recommendations that come with more than $100 million in grant money and other matching funds to help school districts afford the changes and upgrades. The plan also includes proposed changes to state law. Everybody in this entire process and everybody in the state of Texas never wants to see another occasion where innocent children are gunned down in their own schools, Abbott said referencing this months school shooting at Santa Fe High School that left 10 dead and 13 wounded. This plan is a starting point, not an ending place. The governors plan, much of which was developed over the Memorial Day weekend, also includes a gun lock giveaway and media strategy to encourage people to lock up their firearms, a school safety app, new alarms specifically to sound for active shooter events and metal detectors. While the recommendations are optional, Abbott said he expects all school districts to ramp up personnel to show a greater law enforcement presence in their schools and figure out how to increase access to mental health programs. Many of the ideas can be implemented by the beginning of next school year, he said. Education and political officials across Texas offered support for some of Abbotts proposals, particularly those involving additional spending on staff, security upgrades for campuses and more mental health services. Houston ISD Police Chief Paul Cordova said his department will be a willing participant in seeking grant money available for more staff and equipment. Cordova said the district already has implemented some of Abbotts recommendations and will consider some new policies. For example, metal detectors in schools is something thats being looked at, Cordova said. Other parts of Abbotts proposal do not fit the districts vision for school safety, including an emphasis on arming teachers. I would say, on the whole, its a good plan and its really a step forward for the state of Texas, Cordova said. SANTA FE: Everything you need to know about the high school shooting MORE: Texas plans to launch anonymous reporting app in schools However, some advocates were disappointed Abbott did not promote policies that would reduce the number of armed staff members in schools. Others also questioned whether legislators will dedicate sustained funding for improved campus security during the 2019 Legislative session. Many Democrats and education leaders repeatedly have accused Republican lawmakers of shortchanging Texas schools, as the states per-student contribution to K-through-12 education has remained relatively stagnant in the past decade. The governors proposals to strengthen physical security measures at schools, to hire more professional trained security guards and to expand mental health programs are steps that can save lives, Texas State Teachers Association President Noel Candelaria said in a statement. But are temporary grants and federal funding, as the governor has proposed, enough to pay for them? Will the governor follow through with a plan for sufficient state funding when the grants expire or the federal money dries up? Much of Abbotts plan was born out of three days of roundtable discussions with survivors from the Santa Fe school shooting and a church shooting in Sutherland Springs, mental health experts, law enforcement, and educators, among others, Abbott said. A Santa Fe senior at one of those listening sessions said she wished more teachers were allowed to be armed at her school without students knowledge. Abbott said other students echoed that sentiment and said he wants to expand and streamline existing the voluntary school marshal program and will offer training for teachers who wish to carry on campus. Throughout Texas, at least 172 school districts have school marshal programs that are governed by the state, the Texas Association of School Boards said in in February. The association said at least 215 districts have a similar arrangement, known as a Guardian Program, which allows some staff members to be armed while on-campus under locally designed policies. The Texas Association of School Boards has not released the names of districts with a school marshal program. A local representative of the Texas School District Police Chiefs Association said he believes no Houston-area districts employ a marshal program. One district, Huffman ISD in northeast Harris County, changed its policies last week to allow some teachers and staff members to carry firearms through a Guardian Program. GRAY MATTERS: HoustonChronicle.com asks, Will the shooting draw us together? OTHER TRAGEDIES: A look at some of the deadly US school shootings of years past Many school districts and teachers unions across the state, however, have said arming staff members is a non-starter. Advocates for stricter firearms regulations had pushed for stronger background checks for gun buyers, an idea absent from the governors proposal. However, Texas Guns Sense spokesman Ed Scruggs said he was pleased the governor proposed mandatory reporting of lost or stolen firearms and speeding up from 30 days to 48 hours the turnaround time for the courts to report certain adjudications that would disqualify gun ownership. Scruggs also applauded the governors support for a so-called red flag law allowing law enforcement, a family member, school employee, or an attorney to file a petition to remove firearms from a potentially dangerous person after due process. Its not enough, of course, Scruggs said of the governors plan. Members of the Texas House Democratic Caucus supports most of the governors plan, according to Rep. Chris Turner, a Grand Prairie Democrat and chairman of the group. State Rep. Harold Dutton Jr., D-Houston, said he disagrees with some of Abbotts proposals - I think arming teachers is crazy, he said - but took heart in Abbotts attempt to increase resources for schools looking to beef up security. Dutton said hes optimistic lawmakers will dedicate sustained funding for school safety during next years legislative session. If (Abbott) is out there leading the charge, I think the Legislature will get behind it and do what needs to be done, Dutton said. We dont have any situations that get closer to home than this. At least from what Ive seen, folks are going to get on board and do something about it - and that includes the financial resources. MORE: Read the governors plan here Some lawmakers have called on Abbott to order a special session so lawmakers can pass laws to make schools safer. Abbott said while he was open to that option, many of the key recommendations can be implemented now by school districts without any delays for legislative action, so additional safety measures can be in place by the time classes start in August. He said more than $120 million in funding is included to expedite the added measures and said the recommendations generally are intended as options so districts can implement the measures they believe will best fit their needs, although some precautions and safety programs will be implemented statewide. My plan is a starting point, not an ending place, Abbott said during an afternoon appearance in San Marcos, where his plan drew applause from local officials. There can never be enough barriers we can build to protect our students . . . This plan will make our state, our communities and our schools safe. Reporter Jacob Carpenter contributed to this story. andrea.zelinski@chron.com mike.ward@chron.com jacob.carpenter@chron.com Conservative pundits are typically in agreement when it comes to chastising what they see as the left's crackdown on free speech but not with Roseanne Barr. On Tuesday, ABC canceled the successful reboot of "Roseanne" after a racist tweet by Barr compared former President Barack Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to a cross between the Muslim Brotherhood and the "Planet of the Apes." The now-deleted tweet sparked outrage, with many applauding the cancellation and others calling the move an attack on the first amendment. But not everyone took to their regular roles. Tomi Lahren, a far-right commentator who herself once landed in hot water for comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to the Ku Klux Klan, sided with the criticisms made against Barr. "What Roseanne said was wrong," Lahren tweeted. "I'm sure she knows that. She made a mistake. I don't know why fellow conservatives are playing mental gymnastics trying to justify it. Come on. Wrong is wrong." LATEST: Leaked photo reveals 'mass trial' of immigrants in Texas On the otherhand, conspiracy theorist and conservative shock pundit Alex Jones stayed true to his nature and invited Barr on his show. Another far-right personality, Ali Alexander, feuded with conservative commenator Ben Shapiro after he was called out on Shapiro's podcast for defending Barr. On Wednesday, Roseanne defended herself from accusations of racism and sent time replying to users who attacked her. "I'm not a racist, I never was & I never will be," Barr wrote. "One stupid joke in a lifetime of fighting 4 civil rights 4 all minorities, against networks, studios, at the expense of my nervous system/family/wealth will NEVER b taken from me." Fernando Ramirez is a reporter for Chron.com and the Houston Chronicle. You can follow him on Twitter at @fernramirez93. Surveillance systems that track the locations of cellphone users and spy on their calls, texts and data streams are being turned against Americans as they roam the country and the world, say security experts and U.S. officials. Federal officials acknowledged the privacy risk to Americans in a previously undisclosed letter from the Department of Homeland Security to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., last week, saying they had received reports that "nefarious actors may have exploited" global cellular networks "to target the communications of American citizens." The letter, dated May 22 and obtained by The Washington Post, described surveillance systems that tap into a global messaging system that allows cellular customers to move from network to network as they travel. The decades-old messaging system, called SS7, has little security, allowing intelligence agencies and some criminal gangs to spy on unwitting targets - based on nothing more than their cellphone numbers. "I don't think most Americans realize how insecure U.S. telephone networks are," Wyden said in a statement. "If more consumers knew how easy it is for bad guys to track or hack their mobile phones, they would demand the FCC and wireless companies do something about it. These aren't just hypotheticals." Website flaw exposes real-time locations of US cellphones Wyden also revealed in a separate letter Tuesday that a major American cellular carrier has referred an "SS7 breach" involving customer data to federal law enforcement officials for investigation. He chastised the Federal Communications Commission in the letter, saying it had "failed to address this ongoing threat to national security." The FCC declined to comment on the letter, which was addressed to Chairman Ajit Pai. SS7, which stands for Signaling System 7, was created in the 1970s as a way for telecommunications carriers to exchange information as they routed calls. Over the years, SS7 expanded to serve a sprawling global cellular system that allowed users to move from network to network - within their own nations and across international borders - without missing calls, losing service or having to make payments to each carrier that routed a signal to their phones. more techburger Get more tasty tech news at TechBurger. And follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to the Chronicle for regular access to TechBurger stories and to be able to comment. See More Collapse But as the number of companies with access to SS7 grew from a handful to many thousands, the lack of built-in security became a growing problem. It was easy for anyone with access to the network to pretend to be a carrier making legitimate requests for information about customers. Early research of SS7 surveillance focused on its use in tracking user locations through cellphones. But in recent years, a more serious issue has emerged around its ability to intercept calls, texts and data. Researchers say SS7 tracking systems around the world now create millions of "malicious queries" - meaning messages seeking unauthorized access to user information - each month. One Israeli surveillance vendor, Ability, said in an online marketing video posted last year that its ULIN interception system can eavesdrop on cellphone calls on targets in New York or Los Angeles while agents are "sitting at your desk . . . anywhere in the world." A 2016 brochure for the company depicted phones being tracked in Massachusetts. Ability declined to comment about SS7 interception or where the company conducts surveillance, but a person familiar with its operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private corporate details, said the ULIN system is not used in the United States. The video, this person said, is used "for demonstration purposes." The company says on its website that it has had 50 government clients around the world and does not have private-sector clients. Public financial documents listed Ability's major areas of operation as Latin America, Asia and Africa, but it does not name nations. Forbes has previously reported on Ability's capabilities and sales, including to a client in Mexico. The company, which has struggled financially in recent years, according to news reports, has several competitors, including in Israel, in Eastern Europe and in other parts of the world, say experts in SS7 surveillance. US identifies suspect in major leak of CIA hacking tools Wyden said the risks posed by SS7 surveillance go beyond privacy to affect national security. American, Chinese, Israeli and Russian intelligence agencies are the most active users of SS7 surveillance, experts say, and private-sector vendors have put systems within the reach of dozens of other governments worldwide. Sophisticated criminals and private providers of business intelligence also use the surveillance technology. "America is the Number One target, far and away. Everyone wants to know what's happening in America," said Brian Collins, chief executive of AdaptiveMobile Security, a cellular security firm based in Dublin. "You will always be a target, whether at home or away." Other experts said SS7 surveillance techniques are widely used worldwide, especially in less developed regions where cellular networks are less sophisticated and may not have any protection against tracking and interception. But the experts agreed that Americans are significant targets, especially of rival governments eager to collect intelligence in the United States and other nations where Americans use their cellphones. Collins said his firm detected a surge in SS7 queries in U.S. networks in late 2014 that it thinks was related to the Office of Personnel Management hack in which intruders - widely reported to be Chinese - gained access to the files of millions of federal workers, including in some cases their phone numbers. (Although publicly reported in 2015, the hack began at least a year earlier.) AdaptiveMobile Security also detected an uptick in malicious SS7 queries this month in the Middle East, in the days after President Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, Collins said. This surveillance probably was the work of intelligence agencies studying how the U.S. move would affect oil prices and production, Collins said. CTIA, a wireless industry group based in Washington, said carriers have worked to implement recommendations from federal officials to protect against SS7 surveillance. "The wireless industry is committed to safeguarding consumer security and privacy and collaborates closely with DHS, the FCC and other stakeholders to combat evolving threats that could impact communications networks," CTIA said in a statement. Firewalls installed by carriers in recent years block many of the malicious queries, but many others are successful in eliciting unauthorized information from cellular carriers worldwide. "It does happen, and it does happen thousands of times a month," said Karsten Nohl, a telecommunications security expert with Security Research Labs in Berlin. The most advanced SS7 surveillance systems can monitor the movements of dozens of people for hours at a time, sending alerts if they get close to select areas or to one another, experts say. German telecommunications researcher Tobias Engel first warned of the potential for SS7 surveillance at a security conference in 2008, during which he demonstrated how to locate a cellphone provided by a volunteer from the audience. Engel also located the cellphone of a Washington Post reporter in 2014, at The Post's request, for an article about the growing availability and effectiveness of such systems. Researchers have continued to detail SS7 vulnerabilities in recent years, including call, data and text interception. A site reachable on Tor, an encrypted Internet browsing tool, offers SS7 tracking and interception of cellphones for a few hundred dollars a month. Criminals last year used SS7 to intercept security codes that a bank texted to its customers in Germany, allowing the criminals to steal money from accounts, according to news reports. Carriers worldwide have gradually added better security, but SS7 does not have any way to verify that carriers sending data requests are who they claim to be. The firewalls increasingly installed by carriers, meanwhile, protect their own customers but typically not people who are roaming on the network, said Engel, the German researcher who first reported the security and privacy risks of SS7. "It's much simpler to protect your own subscribers," said Engel, now a researcher for GSMK, a mobile communications security company based in Berlin. "It could be that you're vulnerable as soon as you enter somebody else's network, domestic or foreign." Calls for an aggressive federal response grew after The Post's 2014 article and a "60 Minutes" report in 2016 in which Nohl, one of the German researchers, demonstrated SS7 surveillance risks by intercepting a call to the cellphone of Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., with his permission. DHS, which declined to comment for this article, issued a report on SS7 cellphone security in April 2017 that noted the risk to federal personnel, "SS7 attack types can be used to target key U.S. Federal Government personnel both in the United States and traveling or working overseas." The DHS report recommended that carriers adopt new protections. An FCC group, the Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperabilty Council, issued recommendations for improving SS7 security in March 2017 that U.S. carriers have largely adopted. But Wyden and some other officials say the government must do more to protect American cellphone users by documenting SS7 breaches and commissioning independent testing of the vulnerabilities in national cellular networks - a step that Britain and some other nations have taken. "The FCC has been studying SS7 vulnerabilities for nearly two years. Enough," said FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat. "It's time for the agency to get serious and come up with a real plan to make sure that our networks are safe and secure." Get more tasty tech news at TechBurger. And follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to the Chronicle for regular access to TechBurger stories and to be able to comment. Growing Canadas future economy an impossibility without immigration Canada's Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen touts 'profound impact' of Express Entry changes Stephen Smith Aa Accessibility Font Style Serif Sans Font Size A A When it comes to the future of immigration to Canada, its no longer a question of why immigration but how much, says federal Immigration Minister, Ahmed Hussen. Thats where the debate is now, he told his audience at the 2018 Canadian Immigration Summit in Ottawa. Without immigration, our ability to grow our economy would become an impossibility, Hussen said, referencing a recent report by the Conference Board of Canada. The report makes the case that an immigration rate of one per cent of Canadas population by the year 2030 would help offset the challenges caused by an aging population and contribute one-third of Canadas projected average annual real GDP growth rate of 1.9 per cent that year. In a multi-trillion dollar economy, thats substantial, Hussen said. In 1971, Hussen said there were six working Canadians for each retiree, a ratio that had dropped to 4:1 in 2012 and could drop to 2:1 by 2036 if immigration levels arent increased. How would we maintain what we have with a ratio of 2:1, Hussen asked, pointing to social programs like public health care and pensions as well as infrastructure. Canadas multi-year levels immigration plan, introduced last year, is responding to this mounting demographic challenge, he said, and will increase Canadas immigration rate to 0.9 per cent of the Canadian population by 2020. Sixty per cent of this immigration will be in the economic category to fill labour market gaps as well as skills gaps, Hussen said. Express Entry inviting more highly skilled workers He also touted the profound impact brought about by changes to the federal governments Express Entry economic immigration system introduced in late 2016 that saw the number of bonus points for a job offer reduced, among other changes. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has said the changes significantly shifted the number of invitations for Canadian permanent residence issued through Express Entry in favour of candidates with higher so-called human capital scores, namely candidates in Express Entrys Federal Skilled Worker Class. Immigrants now represent a significant portion of highly skilled labour in Canada, Hussen said, filling 50 per cent of all Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)-related jobs in Canada. Immigrant entrepreneurs, he added, are also helping create jobs and the jobs of the future in Canada. Some of our most creative and innovative entrepreneurs are immigrants, he observed. He told the story of a Cuban immigrant he met in Edmonton who had started a software company that is now one of the leading software companies in Western Canada and employs 150 people. On the topic of entrepreneurs, Hussen said recent immigrants now surpass Canadians when it comes to self-employment and business. These businesses are more likely to sell their products to other countries, helping Canada to open markets for all of us beyond the United States, he said. To find out if you are eligible for Canadian immigration, please fill out a free assessment form. Atlantic Immigration Pilot The perils of population decline and labour shortages are on full display in Canadas Atlantic Provinces, Hussen said, and the government is working with the regions provincial governments to address them through the Atlantic Immigration Pilot (AIP). In Newfoundland, for every 100 people you have joining the workforce, you have 125 leaving the workforce, Hussen said. That gap has to be addressed. Hussen said the employer-driven AIP allows employers to recruit foreign workers without the need for a Labour Market Impact Assessment in return for a settlement plan that encourages workers and their families to stay in the Atlantic Canada region. The problem in Atlantic Canada isnt so much attraction of workers, its retention, he said. In Ontario and Alberta, the retention rate is 90 per cent. In Atlantic Canada, its 60 per cent. Hussen said until Atlantic provinces start meeting their quotas under the AIP, there are no plans to revisit their annual Provincial Nominee Program allocations. Furthermore, if a province doesnt use its quota, the other Atlantic provinces can use it. We gave Atlantic Canada thousands more applicants on top of their PNP numbers, and we allow those applicants to bring their family members, he said. Finish those numbers and then we can talk PNPs. A key focus in Atlantic Canada, and the rest of the country, needs to be on settlement plans that among other priorities help find schooling for kids and jobs for spouses, Hussen said. When the family has roots in Atlantic Canada, it is very difficult for the skilled immigrant to then move away from Atlantic Canada. Lessons from Atlantic pilot for other regions, including Northern Ontario Ensuring newcomers are effectively integrated is vital not only in Atlantic Canada but across the country and Hussen said the AlP will hold valuable lessons for other regions of Canada that are also experiencing population challenges and need workers, like Northern Ontario and rural areas of the country. The success of our immigration will largely depend that the hundreds of thousands of newcomers who arrive each year, regardless of the program they enter under, are welcomed and integrated and absorbed and embraced by the Canadian family, he said. The faster that a newcomer can be assisted to start their lives and succeed in Canada, the faster they can contribute to our society. Hussen concluded his remarks by calling on his audience to play their part in challenging anti-immigrant sentiments that are on the rise worldwide. Its incumbent on those who are leaders and opinion leaders to not take what we have in Canada for granted, because we are not immune to this rhetoric, he said. Whatever you can do in your own private spaces to push back against that narrative by fighting fear with facts would be very helpful. Im not asking on behalf of the Government of Canada, Im asking as a Canadian. To find out if you are eligible for Canadian immigration, please fill out a free assessment form. 2018 CICNews All Rights Reserved Is machine learning for the future or is it for your business right now? Its a question lots of business leaders are asking as each day new instances of AI and machine learning push the boundaries of what we thought we knew about technology. One recent and powerful example was Googles May 8 demonstration of its Google Assistant booking hair salon and restaurant reservations with conversational clarity that was both inspiring and unnerving. Many business leaders would be forgiven for a twinge of panic. If machines are learning that quickly, how behind is my business right now when it comes to leveraging machine learning? Good news: this is just the beginning While its part of Googles job to be the maverick, breaking ground with embryonic and advanced technologies, most CIOs are tasked with delivering solutions that yield business results. Outside of the companies racing to build self-driving cars or lead the way in global face recognition systems, few companies have figured out how to monetize the kind of machine learning that focuses on teaching robots to behave more like humans. Despite that fact, there is tremendous investment pouring into AI and machine learning. The International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that investment in cognitive and artificial intelligence systems will grow to over $52 million by 2021. Right now: let the machines be machines Where should CIOs focus their machine learning budgets and vision? Rather than looking for ways that technology can behave more like humans, CIOs can and should take more advantage of the some of the distinctly non-human capabilities computers have. For example, computers today can process and analyze large, complex data sets in milliseconds. Add machine learning capabilities to that colossal, rapid analytical ability and suddenly you have a business intelligence (BI) tool that can crawl ever-growing, complex business data, watch for trends, analyze what it finds and provide insights and potential solutions. Business intelligence: where the action is Business intelligence right now, with its ability to combine big data analytical work with machine learning capabilities, is where we are seeing several different industries make strategic forays into artificial intelligence. Here are a few examples of how machine learning is already hard at work across several industries: Financial services : The financial services sector is a data-rich sector. Every customer transaction and engagement produces data that can be analyzed to improve services and satisfaction. Using machine learning, financial institutions can watch for patterns in customer behavior, from spending to saving to investing, analyze the trends and offer up custom financial advice and products. : The financial services sector is a data-rich sector. Every customer transaction and engagement produces data that can be analyzed to improve services and satisfaction. Using machine learning, financial institutions can watch for patterns in customer behavior, from spending to saving to investing, analyze the trends and offer up custom financial advice and products. Retail : Online retailers are known for their ability to gather and leverage customer data in order to maximize sales and satisfaction. This kind of information gathering and learning is expanding across retail everywhere as retailers look to business intelligence and smart machines to rapidly determine when and where the best time is to offer discounts, change products or revise pricing. You see this with surge pricing in companies like Uber and Lyft who leverage weather, traffic and event data to determine pricing in real time. Business intelligence tools will continue to be able to go deeper and broader, looking for buying trends across geographies, over various timespans and across demographics and helping businesses better know and anticipate their customers. : Online retailers are known for their ability to gather and leverage customer data in order to maximize sales and satisfaction. This kind of information gathering and learning is expanding across retail everywhere as retailers look to business intelligence and smart machines to rapidly determine when and where the best time is to offer discounts, change products or revise pricing. You see this with surge pricing in companies like Uber and Lyft who leverage weather, traffic and event data to determine pricing in real time. Business intelligence tools will continue to be able to go deeper and broader, looking for buying trends across geographies, over various timespans and across demographics and helping businesses better know and anticipate their customers. Healthcare: In healthcare, deep learning algorithms are working to help with medical diagnoses. For example, Stamford developed an algorithm capable of diagnosing skin cancer by learning from the data and imaging fed into it. Across much of the medical field, computers are being trained to study imaging and identify potential issues and abnormalities. Algorithms are also beginning to improve clinical trials and pharmaceutical development by combing data sets across various sources (labs, institutions, studies) in order to help identify success factors and/or potential issues. The smart machines are here While they might not yet be driving our cars and building our houses, smart machines are hard at work turning the data we have into answers we need. For business leaders wondering where to begin with machine learning, the answer is in the question. What are the hardest questions your business is looking to answer? If theres data to explore, there are smart machines and business intelligence tools equipped to help your business with the answers. Digital health is the next frontier of healthcare. Across the entire care continuum, hospitals, clinics, and other institutions have recognized the transformational role technology can play in helping practitioners treat patients in more efficient, less expensive waysall while producing better patient outcomes. As calls for value-based care grow louder, its incumbent on healthcare leaders to find and deploy the next generation of impactful healthcare technology. Traditionally, these innovations have been products and services designed especially for medical environments. But while effective, these solutions are often applicable only in certain places, like operating theaters or ICUs. This leaves countless arenas in need of new technologies to help them run smarter, operate more efficiently, and better serve patients. Thats why, increasingly, providers are turning to digital consumer technologies that we already use every day. Today, the most ubiquitous devices in our homes and offices are finding a new place in the healthcare arena. Virtual reality is providing new, cost-effective, non-addictive treatment options for patients with a wide range of conditions. Tablets and IoT-enabled sensors are making it possible for seniors and people with disabilities to live healthier, more independent lives. And smartphones and wearable devices are streamlining the entire continuum of care, by empowering all of us to take control of our own health and wellness. Virtual reality Americas opioid epidemic has reached dangerously high levels. The crisis has proven to be extraordinarily costly, both in lives and in dollars. An estimated 115 Americans die every day as a result of drug overdoses, and one study of a West Virginia hospital found that the hospital lost $3.5 million in a single year treating rising infection rates among patients taking opioids. Policymakers and legislators will continue to debate legal and regulatory fixes to the problem, but in the meantime, healthcare institutions need to act. Here, consumer technologyspecifically, virtual realitycan play a vital role, by giving practitioners and patients the non-addictive pain management tools they need, while potentially cutting costs at the same time. VR holds particular promise for the noninvasive, non-addictive treatment of patients with chronic or acute pain, potentially offering an alternative to opiates and other traditional pain treatments. Clinical trials performed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA have shown that VR-based treatments are an effective tool for reducing pain. In a randomized controlled trial enrolling 120 patients, hospitalized patients experienced a 52% reduction in pain when receiving the VR treatment, with pain relief extending even after the headset was removed. Additional studies are underway to determine how VR solutions, when used in tandem with other digital tools including wearables and nerve stimulation devices, may reduce pain and lower costs for patients with orthopedic work-related injuries. Beyond pain, recent research has shown that virtual reality can be effective in treating other types of conditions such as macular degeneration, post-traumatic stress disorder, stroke, and spinal cord injury. Home connected devices and tablets The AARP has reported that nearly 90% of seniors want to stay in their own homes as they age. For seniors who are debilitated due to chronic disease and/or disability, this often requires in-person home care, which can be costly and intrusive when provided around the clock, and ineffective when performed for brief daily periods. But now, wearables and smart homes can be leveraged not only to enhance daily living, but also to link patients to their family and healthcare providers for real-time carewithout the costs and hassle typically associated with in-home visits. In recent years, IoT-enabled sensors have made it easier and more efficient than ever for care teams and loved ones to ensure that seniors and people with disabilities can enjoy optimal living conditions in their homes. Motion sensors that have been strategically placed in the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, medicine cabinet, and dining areas can identify gradual changes in baseline activity and enable proactive intervention when an individuals condition is worsening. Connected appliances, thermostats, and utilities can automatically notify care teams in advance of a potentially hazardous incident. And connected refrigerators are making it easier for loved ones to ensure that independent seniors always have enough healthy food at home. Samsung works with a number of partners to customize its products for seniors and/or others requiring ongoing medical supervision. Breezie is a Samsung tablet that has been preconfigured to optimize the user experience for technology-naive seniors, and when combined with a social engagement program sponsored by the National Council on Aging (NCOA), it has been shown to increase socialization, cognitive function, and physical activity in low-income seniors with little to no prior computer experience. Another Samsung tablet solution that has been well adopted by seniors is the Vivify Health platform. Vivify Health offers clinicians the ability to monitor a seniors ongoing health with remote patient monitoring devices such as digital weight scales, blood pressure cuffs, and glucometers. It also enables HIPAA-compliant video conferencing between the clinician and the senior. Meanwhile, smartwatch solutions by MobileHelp and Reemo offer seniors a highly intelligent device with monitoring and emergency response capabilities as well as providing the ability to monitor a seniors location, activity, and the battery life of the watch. Smartphones More and more smartphone users are using their devices to take control of their own health and wellness via mobile solutions. Samsung Health enables users to track daily health habits captured from wearables, smart phones, and/or other peripheral devices and sensors. Samsung Health turns your smartphone into a proactive, preventative tool that puts your health in your hands. Of course, monitoring our health comes with different concerns at different points in our lives. Children might require quick check-ins when a fever soars or a cough persists, while patients with chronic conditions might require more direct, ongoing communication and care from providers. Heres where smartphones become even more crucial. With telehealth services such as Samsung Healths Ask an Expert feature, users can video chat with a licensed physician to discuss their symptoms and receive a diagnosis. As a result, without the financial and logistical challenges of meeting in-person, patients can reach healthcare providers, including For many of us, the smart phone has become the most important device in our life. It is now helping us to live better, healthier lives, by equipping us with the tools that we need to monitor our own health, and by connecting us with medical professionals with the touch of a button. Driving the future of care Today, the most exciting new healthcare technologies arent new imaging machines or robotic surgery systems, but the ubiquitous consumer devices that so many of us already own. Healthcare solutions delivered on consumer technologies are transforming care and making it easier, affordable, and efficient for patients to access healthcare and for healthcare professionals to meet their patients needs. In January, Kentucky governor Matthew Bevin announced changes to the states Medicaid program. Relying on newly granted flexibility from the Trump administration, the Bluegrass State would now require, among other things, that childless, able-bodied adults work or engage in some other productive activity in order to receive Medicaid benefits. Within days, a coalition of liberal activist groups, including the dubious Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a class action lawsuit to block Bevins Medicaid reforms. While the lawsuit focuses entirely on the alleged harm that would befall Kentucky residents as a result of the new program, neither Governor Bevin nor any other Kentucky official is named as a defendant. Rather, the groups are suing only federal officialsensuring their access to the Obama-packed D.C. Circuit courtson the unusual theory that the federal government violated its own statutes and the Constitution by granting Kentucky too much regulatory freedom. In February, Governor Bevin filed a rival lawsuit in Kentucky federal court, seeking a declaration that his Medicaid plan is legal. Both lawsuits are proceeding along separate tracks. The stakes in this legal battle are high. The rising cost of Medicaid is creating fiscal emergencies across the United States, eating up a quarter of state budgets nationwide, and crowding out spending on other priorities, like education and infrastructure. If states are not empowered to rein in these costs, it will strike a mortal blow to the system of cooperative federalism on which federal aid programs are based. The controversy began in January 2018 when the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that states could seek waivers from Medicaid rules in order to require community engagementa term that encompasses not only working but also looking for work, taking classes, and getting substance-abuse treatment, among other activities. Pregnant women, the elderly, and the disabled would all be exempt from these requirements. Four states, including Kentucky, have already received community-engagement waivers, and seven other states have pending applications. The state waiver applications vary but generally require 20 hours of community engagement per week. Mainstream media and liberal pressure groups have declared war on the waiver programinvariably focusing only on work requirements, rather than the broader concept of community engagement. An essay in the New York Times argues that the imposition of harsh work requirements would be catastrophic, causing severe harm to the poor. But the authors go on to argue that the requirements would be largely ineffective because most Medicaid recipients already work. In fact, the immediate impact of the community-engagement waivers is likely to be modest. According to a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, among non-elderly adults covered by Medicaid, 60 percent are already working, and nearly 80 percent live in a household with at least one worker. Many of the remaining individuals are disabled and, therefore, not subject to the new requirements. But for the restable-bodied, childless adults with no jobtheres no particular reason why the government cannot try to nudge them away from dependency. Community engagement represents an incremental step toward the long-term goal of bringing Medicaid back to its original design: a temporary safety net for the truly vulnerable, not a permanent entitlement. The more pernicious argument advanced by the plaintiffs in the Kentucky lawsuitand echoed by various pressure groupsis that community-engagement requirements are categorically outside the scope of the governments waiver authority precisely because they might succeed in reducing Medicaid enrollment. On this reading, state flexibility under Medicaid is a one-way ratchet: states can innovate all they wantprovided their goal is to expand coverage. In fact, the law requires only that waivers advance the objectives of Medicaid, which include services that help poor families achieve independence or self-care, according to the laws language. Ultimately, Medicaids goal ought to be good health outcomes, not maximum enrollment. Even before the Trump administration, CMS guidelines allowed waiver programs that sought to improve health outcomes or increase the efficiency of the program. Under those guidelines, the Obama administration permitted states to introduce financial incentives for the poor to engage in healthy behaviors, a term which includes cutting back on tobacco or alcohol, exercising, eating better, or losing weight. Isnt getting a job at least as good for you as eating a salad? Activists in the U.S. are trying to cast doubt on the proposition, but there is mounting evidencesome of it cited in CMSs January announcementthat working and community engagement lead to better health. A study commissioned by the British government a few years ago found strong evidence that unemployment is bad for you, while working is good for both mental and physical health. Even sick and disabled people, according to the study, should continue working to the extent possible. Its significant that a country like Britain, which picks up the tab for all health care, is keen to promote the health benefits of work. And yet, the opponents of community engagement insist that such programs must not even be attempted. What are they afraid of? Medicaid waivers are time-limited, state-by-state experiments. If work requirements prove to be harmful or ineffective, states will soon lose interest. But if they promote good outcomes, they are likely to spur reforms at the state and federal level. In the battle over Medicaid work requirements, its the flexibility of a federalist system that is really under attack. Kentucky governor Matt Bevin with President Trump (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Mayor Bill de Blasio has touted recent downward trends in violent crime in New York as evidence that his progressive governance is working. Last year, New York reported fewer murders than at any time since the early 1950s, and the city has a good shot at doing even better this year. But while the streets may be safe, a different reality pertains in homeless shelters and public schools. Levels of crime and disorder are disturbingly high in schools and shelters, though de Blasio has modified reporting protocols in ways that make a full accounting of his administrations safety record all but impossible. Consisting of hundreds of facilities operated mainly by nonprofit organizations, the shelter system is city governments frontline response to the escalating homelessness crisis. Shelter costs are projected to reach almost $2 billion in the next fiscal year. Grim tragedies in and around the shelters have made news, including stabbings, violent attacks on children, and even a near-decapitation. In February, the New York Daily News revealed that, as part of changes to how it reports on crime and disorder in the shelters, the city had ceased disclosing arrest totals. These changes were necessary, the city subsequently explained, because shelter arrest data would expose the individuals residing at specific . . . locations to a heightened level of scrutiny and stigma. The new disclosure standards yielded results that are impossible to credit. For example, last year, under the new guidelines, only 29 critical incidents were reported at the Bedford-Atlantic Armory shelter, one of the systems largest and most notorious facilities. Internal records, by contrast, showed 89 arrests and 865 service calls for shelter-safety officers. The Daily Newss reporting has prompted some administration backtracking. Late last month, the city announced that the NYPD would begin making precinct level shelter arrest data available. But Albany has launched an investigation into whether the city has been complying with state disclosure requirements relating to crime in shelters. Looking to expand the shelter system, de Blasio is waging a public relations campaign to assure community groups that new shelters wont destabilize conditions in their neighborhoods. His administrations dubious record on transparency makes that a hard sell. Similarly, when it comes to school safety, the official statistics are misleading. The press touted the news when suspensions and crime fell to all-time lows, but those declines resulted from pressuring principals not to suspend unruly students and encouraging school-resource officers to issue warnings for offenses that previously justified an arrest. Notably, both suspensions and crime have ticked back up in the past year. A Freedom of Information request by the New York Post revealed that according to internal data, teacher assaults, threats, and serious incidents have been rising steadily. This evidence squares with state data. Soon after taking office, de Blasio dropped 17 safety- and order-related questions from the NYC School Survey. When a Manhattan Institute study revealed that more students reported violence, drugs, and gang activity on the remaining questions, the school system changed the form of the answers. New York City parents cant judge shifts in school safety over time, because a standard measure from which to draw comparisons no longer exists. The city found a way to say crimes are down in New York City public schools by changing crimes, says Local 237 executive director Derek Jackson, whose union represents both the school-safety agents and the peace officers who work in the shelter system, and they found a way to say that crime is down in New York City shelters by simply not reporting it. Citywide conditions have improved in numerous areas under de Blasio. In addition to fewer murders, the local economy has expanded, and the school graduation rate is rising. But the non-progressive administrations of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg succeeded on many fronts as well. De Blasios progressive posturing has raised expectations that he will do more to help members of the underclass allegedly neglected during the citys revival over recent decades. It goes without saying that schools and homeless shelters serve some of New Yorks most vulnerable populations. Shifting disclosure standards prevent an honest evaluation of whether this progressive administration is delivering on its promises. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images If the charity sector does not step up and get into the guts of blockchain it risks being left behind, according to a report by Charity Futures. The think tank commissioned Asheem Singh, former director of policy at Acevo and author, to write the report Using Blockchain to Better Humanity. Its main findings are that blockchain technology offers charities "huge untapped benefits but that the sector is behind the curve. The paper argues that charities need to become more involved to shape the debate or they will find themselves unable to influence how it develops. Singh said: Fads come and go - but blockchain is here to stay. Charities need to step up and get into the guts of this technology or risk losing out. Charities must own the debate The report summarises some of the examples of how charities could use blockchain, including Disberse, a new platform for transferring money overseas which is being trialled by aid charities, and the Alice fundraising platform. But it said there are too few examples of charities getting involved. Singh added: Money is already pouring into charity and aid blockchain projects. Some - such as those we discuss in the report - are great, others less so. And without significant input from the sector, scarce donor money that could well have been better spent elsewhere will be wasted. This is already happening. Charities must own this debate, engage with blockchain and begin to create their own future using these tools, or risk being sidelined as the future takes shape around them. I hope this report can help as many in the sector as possible get a foothold. Leadership on blockchain from within the sector is needed urgently and I hope we can come together, get behind Charity Futures and others, and develop the advocacy on this subject that we need. We need to get better at explaining admin Sir Stephen Bubb, director of Charity Futures, said one of the key challenges for the sector was in making sure it makes the case for spending on overheads. He said there was a danger if donors are giving directly to the front line. Who will pay to develop charity infrastructure? And how do we ensure we have proper safeguarding arrangements in place if donors dont want to support the charity by paying for their overhead costs? He said. Oversight and administration are so boring for many people but they are exactly what ensure effective charity. Charities must work even harder to educate donors and the public on the paramount importance of core cost funding. Civil Society Media is hosting a an interactive Chartiy Technology Breakfast Briefing in partnership with Charty IT Leaders about IT procurement on 26 June. For more information, and to book, click here. Charities have known that they face serious safeguarding issues since 2002 and have been turning a blind eye ever since, one of the authors of a UN report into the issue said yesterday. Asmita Naik, an independent consultant, was one of the authors of a report covered on the front page of The Times yesterday, which said that sexual exploitation of refugees by charity staff was widespread. Speaking to Civil Society News yesterday, she said that while The Times had accurately said that a full report was not published in 2002, a summary had been released, and had caused widespread discussion in the media. This was a very big deal at the time, she said. Its true the full report was not released but a summary was. There was a big global story. It was debated at the UN; there was a UN General Assembly resolution and a system-wide policy put in place by the UN Secretary General. It was the first time sexual exploitation in the aid sector was put on the global agenda. Level of change 'lamentable' She said that a lot of work was done at the time to put systems in place to prevent aid workers from sexually exploiting beneficiaries, but that not all of the changes in policy had been properly implemented on the ground. She said that frontline staff had not been prosecuted, and some agencies did not seem to have reported any incidents. The level of change on the ground was lamentable, she said. I find that rather alarming that a number of organisations don't seem to have taken proper action at all. After the 2002 report, she said, there was little attempt to punish those found to have broken the rules. There were no real consequences for wrongdoers, she said. No institutional donors withheld funds. No one was prosecuted and a mere handful lost their jobs out of what were some 130 allegations arising from the original report and further UN investigations. She indicated that the same situation likely continued at many agencies. A lot of high level policy work was done after the report in 2002, but Im not convinced its produced change on the ground, she said. I dont think the policies have been properly implemented. Its not credible to suggest that there are no cases. In every part of society there are always abuses, so if they arent finding any, it can only be because they arent paying attention to the issue. Its because theyre turning a blind eye. UN response was weak She said that agencies weak approach was in part due to the approach from some senior staff at the UN. I would say charities have known that sexual exploitation and safeguarding have been problems for at least 16 years, she said. It is possible that some smaller organisations may not have had the information fed down to them through organisations like Bond, but theres no excuse for the larger ones. Its not that nothing was done. It had a big impact on the aid community. There were parts of the UN, NGO community and governments that took an interest and pushed forward change. The working groups set up in response still remain today. But in some parts of the UN there was a campaign to denigrate the report. That campaign took the wind out of the sails. Culture an issue She said the problem also came down to culture at particular charities. Most of the agencies involved havent gone far enough in implementing the policies and procedures set up in the wake of the report, she said. Part of the problem with that is culture. People know its wrong. They go and investigate. But then they take the wrong decisions. Even Joe Public understands that if your employees do something like this you cant let them off, but the top people at the charities have other priorities, whether its reputation or funding. Ethical leadership and management responsibility for these issues throughout the management chain is what's needed to effect change. And she said that institutional donors also took a share of the blame. Funders have culpability in this, she said. Why is it that The Times is going back and checking on this, but the government donors have taken their eyes off the ball? A report on the charity sectors response to the Grenfell tower fire last June says there was a lack of coordination between organisations on the ground in the immediate aftermath. The report Grenfell: One Year On - a review of the voluntary sector response by Muslim Aid says overall the response of the voluntary sector to the immediate needs of local people has been widely praised but it says more could be done to better prepare for future emergencies. It says there was a lack of leadership in the days following the fire, particularly from the local authority, from whom it was almost entirely lacking. The report says the voluntary sector did not come together as one either, with local charity the Kensington and Chelsea Social Council only managing to arrange a meeting more than a week after the fire. It says some local voluntary sector leaders found it difficult to contact one another on the first day, with bicycles being used to convey information between centres. The report says that links between faith-based charities have deepened since the fire, including a six-month inter-faith event at St Pauls Cathedral. It recommends that more effective mechanisms need to be developed to better harness the collective capabilities of the voluntary sector, including those offered by faith organisations, in emergency response. Muslim Aids chief executive Jehangir Malik said: I would have expected this chaos in a developing country, because almost always there is poor infrastructure. I honestly thought we had better disaster preparedness and response systems here in the UK. We are now asking for lessons to be learned and for greater coordination of the voluntary organisations with local authorities, including as part of national emergency response structures. More diversity needed The report says that while many Muslim charities reflected the make-up of the North Kensington community affected by the Grenfell fire, larger organisations were less attuned. Mike Adamson, chief executive of the British Red Cross, one of the larger charities that provided support in the wake of the Grenfell fire, wrote in a blog last year that his organisations volunteers, staffing and leadership were nowhere near as diverse as we need to be. The report recommends that in future those steering the voluntary sectors thinking and practice need to ensure that charities better reflect the diversity within British society. Experience from elsewhere demonstrates how different communities can be differently affected by the same types of disaster, and unless their realities are embraced, the road to recovery can be a tortuous one, it says. Charities should speak out The report says that there is a strong sense of injustice felt by local residents, particular towards the local authority. While it says charities abilities to address these grievances through their own service provision is limited, residents would like charities to advocate for them. It says: There is a shared sense among residents organisations that the voluntary sector should be doing more in this regard. Fair or not, given uncertainty about the motives of at least some in the sector and the belief that not everyone is being entirely selfless, it is important that voluntary organisations give their backing to the voices and grievances of the people they exist to support. Ongoing support A number of new organisations were created following the fire. At one point in 2017 there were 280 organisations online with "Grenfell" in their name compared to only three prior to the fire. The report says some are dubious about the added value of some of the new organisations' work, described by one residents' representative as "yoga for Grenfell". However, the report says there will be a great need for further support to local charities in the coming years, with an increased need for mental health support in particular in the area. One of the few guaranteed sources of income sits with the Kensington and Chelsea Foundation, which has retained 1.6m which it intends to invest in initiatives to improve the lives of residents over the next two to three years. But it says: There is clearly a need for continuing support to agencies in the recovery stage, including faith organisations of all hues, which are often short of resources. Funding needs to be supplemented by other forms of capacity strengthening support to help agencies define their individual or collective roles or strategies in continuing to support affected people. The Living Wage Foundation has launched an action plan and is calling on government and charities to work together to address low pay in the sector. Government cuts, as well as low awareness of the real living wage, have led to a race to the bottom environment, the campaign said, which is why it has launched the plan Tackling Low Pay in the Charity Sector: An Action Plan. Last November, the Living Wage Foundation published a report which found that over a quarter of charity workers are paid below the real living wage - higher than the UK average of 21 per cent. A Civil Society News analysis of the largest 100 charities found that just 13 were accredited by the Living Wage Foundation. The Living Wage Foundation has now held discussions with charities, umbrella bodies, trade unions and funders to identify barriers. It found that one of the biggest barriers were government funding cuts creating a race to the bottom environment putting pressure on wages. The other main barrier was and a lack of awareness about the Real Living Wage campaign combined with the public perception that charity work should be voluntary and that as much money as possible should go to beneficiaries. Sector has a huge problem The Living Wage Foundation called on the sector and the government to take action to enable charities to pay people more. Tess Lanning, director of the Living Wage Foundation, said: The huge scale of low pay in the sector reflects the fact that charity work is often unappreciated. But charity workers deliver childcare, social care, womens refuges and other vital services to some of the most vulnerable people in our society. They deserve a real Living Wage that covers the cost of living. We now need to see government and the sector work together to deliver real change, and commit more charities to go beyond the government minimum and pay a real Living Wage. John Hume, chief executive of the Peoples Health Trust, said: "It's clear the charity sector has a huge problem with low pay. There are thousands of charities doing great, important work, but too often they are struggling to provide decent pay, with black and ethnic minority, part-time and young workers hit the hardest. "Charities have had to deal with deep cuts in funding which in turn has meant passing on this financial squeeze to already struggling workers. "If we are to address this issue then we need to go to the root cause. The action plan calls on commissioners and funders to recognise the intrinsic value of paying the real Living Wage and to begin to see a concerted effort from all parties to drive this change through the sector. We need to see more funders and commissioners provide a real Living wage that covers the cost of living, and more charity workers receiving a fair day's pay for a hard day's work." Solutions The Living Wage Foundation is calling on commissioners to procure services on the basis that people should be paid the real living wage. It is also encouraging more funders to sign up to its Friendly Funders scheme. The campaign also wants charities that pay the real living wage to champion it publicly by doing things like adding the Living Wage badge to their website and using it in recruitment material. It also suggested that recruitment websites and funding finder tools add an option to filter by organisations signed up to the movement. Civil Society Media is hosting its Charity People & Culture Conference on 18 September 2018. For more information, and to book, click here ONE MORNING IN APRIL, Seattle University senior Tess Riski noticed that newsstands that typically held copies of the student paper, The Spectator, were empty. After finding empty stands in multiple buildings, Riski, who is the news and investigative editor for The Spectator, texted her fellow editors that we might have a problem. The Spectator contacted SUs Public Safety office, which reviewed video footage of the area and determined that English professor Fr. David Leigh, SJ, had removed several stacks of papers. Hours later, Leigh emailed The Spectator and apologized. He said he had removed the papers because he was concerned about students arriving for Accepted Students Decision Day at the private Jesuit college seeing them. ICYMI: NYT reporters tweet sparks controversy among journalists Why? The cover of that weeks edition was a photo from SUs 10th annual drag show, featuring a fully-clothed male performer in heels and a wig gesturing onstage. Leigh said he was offended by the picture, and described it as inappropriate and risque. If you didnt get a hard copy of last weeks issue, we apologize. Read more here: https://t.co/oHQp1UbVsX pic.twitter.com/ULIH9Ocjgv The Spectator at SU (@SU_Spectator) April 19, 2018 Sign up for weekly emails from the United States Project Riski put together an article about the situation, for which she interviewed SUs president, Fr. Stephen Sundborg, SJ. Sundborg said he was very, very embarrassed and ashamed of the photo, and criticized the paper for publishing it. To go and show that poseindecent poseon the cover is taking it too far, Sundborg said. Anybody who would see that who has a sense of propriety would find that offensive. Riskis article riled the SU campus. Sundborgs comments were heavily criticized by the schools LGBT community, and Spectator editor in chief Nick Turner said letters to the editor came pouring in from students and alumni. Different departments on campus published public statements in support of The Spectator and the LGBT community, and Kaplan and Riski spoke at a forum the law school hosted about LGBT rights and press freedom. Sundborg changed the theme of his annual campus address to discuss the situation, which turned into a packed public forum. The incident received coverage in The Seattle Times and Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, as well as in several conservative outlets. (Rod Dreher referred to SU as a freak farm in The American Conservative.) Spectator editors tell CJR there has been a pattern of papers being removed during events for prospective students. News editor Anna Kaplan says that a similar incident occurred on an admitted students day in the past, when the papers cover photo referenced drug use. A representative from the presidents office tells CJR that they were not aware of any previous incidents, and that student journalists are given wide latitude and freedom to cover the campus the way they choose to do so. Since Seattle University is a private school, the administration is allowed to remove papers from newsstands, something that would be illegal at a public university. SUs status as a private university is a continual challenge for The Spectator, says Turner, since the newsroom cannot use FOIA requests to access public records and the university has no legal obligation to divulge information to the press. We tiptoe sometimes just to make sure were not crossing the line, and I dont even really know what that line is. Its hard to navigate. While incidents like this are infrequent and the university does not review copies of the paper before they go to print, Riski said that going to a private, Catholic school makes the staff extra careful about what they publish. We tiptoe sometimes just to make sure were not crossing the line, and I dont even really know what that line is, Riski says. Its hard to navigate. Riski adds that newer staff members are especially nervous about doing reporting that portrays SUs ties to the Catholic Church in a poor light. This issue is not unique to SU. A report released this spring by a group of student journalists at Christian colleges found that censorship is pervasive in their universities. More than three out of four survey respondents said their publication has faced pressure from faculty to change, edit or remove articles after publication. More than 70 percent of respondents said their newspaper advisors can control what can and cant be published. Less than a quarter of respondents believed that they had the same press freedoms as reporters at public universities. The Spectator is organizing to change that for themselves. They are partnering with the faculty government association, Academic Assembly, to establish a free speech policy at SU that would give campus media the same first amendment protections as those at public universities. The policy would make it especially difficult for physical copies of the paper to be removed. Turner says that faculty have been very supportive of The Spectator; if they cannot get the policy passed by the end of this school year, his last, then Turner is confident future editors can do it next year. Riskiwho has interned for The Stranger, Crosscut, and The News Tribune in Tacomasays her work with local newspapers made her realize just how disenfranchised The Spectator is. (Kaplan interned at The Stranger as well, which gave them both a shout-out for their work.) Because I worked at three other actual newspapers where they dont have restrictions on what they can report on, its a stark contrast for me a lot when Im reporting at Seattle U, Riski said. Its really up to the discretion of the university to decide what information they want to divulge and what they want to withhold. Those restrictions, says Riski, have made her a better investigative reporter by forcing her to come up with alternative ways of discovering information. The paper provided a hub for LGBT students and alumni to share how administration comments made them feel, and gave the whole student body a way to keep track of what was happening. For SUs part, the university tells CJR in a statement that it has more to do to fulfill its commitment to diversity and inclusion, and is creating a task force to consider how it can better support LGBT students. President Sundborg has made clear that removing newspapers is unacceptable and that there are consequences for such action, says university spokesperson Dean Forbes. However, Spectator staff are unimpressed with the university administrations response. Neither Leigh or Sundborg met directly with any reporters from The Spectator (though Sundborg had a discussion with their faculty advisor). Kaplan says their apologies have been more reactive than proactive, and demonstrate a lack of accountability. What started as a routine event story about a drag show turned into something nobody at SU could have predicted. Turner, who will graduate in just a month, says that in his four years at SU weve never had a response to anything like weve had to this. The situation has led to one positive outcome for The Spectator: more student engagement. The paper provided a hub for LGBT students and alumni to share how the administrations comments made them feel, and gave the whole student body a way to keep track of what was happening. After the initial incident, the paper published a story about the LGBT communitys response, with a rainbow sign spelling out resist on the cover. The Spectator anticipated a similar incident in early May after a few more newsstands turned up completely empty. Public Safety officers looked through security footage again, says Kaplan; but this time, people had actually just come and taken them all one by one. ICYMI: Iowa students create independent newspaper following controversy Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Carina Julig is managing editor of the University of Colorado Boulders student newspaper, the CU Independent, and has written for publications including Al Jazeera, them, and Slate. Follow her on Twitter at @CarinaJulig. The average total cost per workers compensation claim in Indiana was stable in the years since the state enacted workers compensation system reforms, according to a recent Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) study. The study, CompScope Benchmarks for Indiana, 18th Edition, provides a look at changes in the Indiana workers compensation system following the enactment in 2013 of House Enrolled Act (HEA) 1320. The legislation included the implementation of a hospital fee schedule that took effect on July 1, 2014, as well as increases in indemnity benefits in three yearly increments beginning in 2014. Recent stability of cost trends is likely related to provisions in HEA 1320, said Ramona Tanabe, WCRI executive vice president and counsel. Since 2013, payments per claim changed little, in contrast to growth averaging 6 percent per year from 2004 to 2013. For the study, WCRI analyzed workers compensation claims with experience through 2017 for injuries up to and including 2016. WCRI compared Indiana with workers compensation systems in 17 other states and found workers compensation costs in Indiana were typical of those in the other states studied. Medical payments per claim remained higher in Indiana and indemnity benefits per claim remained lower in Indiana when compared with most of other states WCRI studied. The following are among the studys other findings: From 2014 to 2015, medical payments per claim decreased 12 percent due in part to the introduction of a hospital fee schedule, which took effect on July 1, 2014. From 2015 to 2016, medical payments per claim increased 9 percent, which may partly reflect system features. Indemnity benefits per claim increased 4 percent from 2014 to 2015 and 11 percent from 2015 to 2016. The income benefit provisions of HEA 1320 were likely a factor in the recent increases in indemnity benefits per claim. For more information about this study or to purchase a copy, visit https://www.wcrinet.org/reports/compscope-benchmarks-for-indiana-18th-edition. Source: WCRI Rivers and watering holes are drying up, popular mountain recreation spots are closing and water restrictions are in full swing as a persistent drought intensifies its grip on pockets of the American Southwest. Climatologists and other experts on Wednesday provided an update on the situation in the Four Corners region where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet. They say the area is among the hardest hit and theres little relief expected, and even robust summer rains might not be enough to replenish the soil and ease the fire danger. The region is dealing with exceptional drought the worst category. That has left farmers, ranchers and water planners bracing for a much different situation than just a year ago when only a fraction of the region was experiencing low levels of dryness. Brian Fuchs, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center in Nebraska, said people are become more aware and more concerned. Weve been on this pattern where conditions have dried out, we havent seen much relief through last summer or into the winter months and here we are going into the summer of 2018 with over two-thirds of the region already in drought, he said. So thats alarming to say the least. Portions of the four states are seeing near-record to record dryness. Fuchs explained that some spots have missed out over the last two years on more than 12 inches (30 centimeters) of precipitation which can add up to as much as a years worth of rain under normal conditions. Warmer-than-average temperatures havent helped as the soil dries out and water demands increases. With the regions resources strained, a top federal official has resumed pressure on states in the Southwest to wrap up long-delayed emergency plans for potential shortages on the Colorado River, which serves 40 million people in the U.S. and Mexico. We face an overwhelming risk on the system, and the time for action is now, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman said Tuesday. She spoke before the Imperial Irrigation District in Southern California, one of the biggest single users of the Colorado River. The drought has hit the Colorado River hard. Forecasters say the river will carry only about 43 percent of its average amount of water this year into Lake Powell, one of two big reservoirs on the system. In New Mexico, stretches of the Rio Grande another one of North Americas longest rivers have already gone dry as biologists have been forced to scoop up as many endangered Rio Grande silvery minnows as possible so they can be moved upstream. The river this summer is expected to dry as far north as Albuquerque, New Mexicos most populous city. The area saw its first major dose of rain this week, ending a 54-day dry spell. It wasnt enough to make up for months without meaningful precipitation. Management of the Rio Grande and the groundwater associated with it is at the center of a legal battle that has been simmering before the U.S. Supreme Court since 2013. New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas late Tuesday filed counterclaims against Texas and the federal government, saying they also bear responsibility to ensure proper allocation and accounting of water if the region hopes to have a sustainable future. While this case initially should have been resolved without filing a costly lawsuit, I am excited New Mexico will finally get to tell its unified story about how Texas and the United States have unfairly tried to scapegoat New Mexico, Balderas said Wednesday. Texas officials are reviewing New Mexicos claims. Balderas, who inherited the case from former Attorney General Gary King, said hes still hoping to resolve the lawsuit but wants to protect New Mexicans from paying an unjust price. It could be years before the court issues a ruling on the merits of the case. Depending on the outcome, New Mexico could be forced to pay millions of dollars in damages despite the states claims that water deliveries have been met and that Texas hasnt suffered damages. (Associated Press journalist Dan Elliott in Denver contributed to this report.) Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Sheriffs deputies and state agriculture officials are investigating the disappearance of as many as 200 cows in northern Nevada over the past year that may have been stolen by modern-day cattle rustlers across rangeland covering hundreds of square miles. Investigators havent uncovered any proof that thieves took the animals, but authorities in Humboldt County say it would be an uncommonly large number of animals to have died on the range over the winter. This is unusual for our area, Humboldt County Sheriffs Lt. Sean Wilkin told The Associated Press, adding hes not aware of any similar incidents in recent years. Fifty cows or calves were reported missing in late March and early April when ranchers counted their herds as they moved them off their winter grazing range in Paradise Valley about 200 miles (320 kilometers) northeast of Reno and 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of the Oregon line. The animals belonging to the Ninety-Six Ranch are Hereford and black Angus mixes with 96 and the year of birth branded on the left hip. The disappearance comes about a year after 150 cattle were reported missing in April 2017 on a series of ranches operated by Orovaco in northern Humboldt County farther east toward the Elko County line. Wilkin said it is possible some of the cattle could have died on the range and their carcasses havent yet been discovered. It is a lot of land to check. We are talking hundreds of square miles, he said. But he thinks that is unlikely, giving the missing animals make up about 10 percent of the herds. Im staying away from the words stolen or theft because we dont have suspects or evidence of a crime, Wilkin said. However, it is likely the cattle are in fact missing. If they were taken, it would have taken multiple trucks to haul them away. Depending on the size of the animals, he estimated 30 to 50 would fit in a single tractor-trailer load. At this point, we havent received any tips that would produce any leads on this. So we are reaching out to the media in hope that helps develop something, Wilkin said. Doug Farris, the Nevada Department of Agricultures animal industry division administrator, issued a statement earlier this month confirming the cattle are missing and reminding ranchers they must report allegations of stolen cattle to the states livestock identification program or a state department enforcement marshal. If you suspect missing cattle on your operation, please contact us immediately, he said. But Farris said in an email to the AP that his agency has no evidence the cattle in Humboldt and Elko counties were stolen. We receive reports of missing livestock from all over the state, and there is no reason to believe these two reports are related. Most missing cattle show up on the ranch property or on a neighboring ranch property when more extensive gathering is done or when inclement weather sets in, he said. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Four City Council members took exception to comments from one of their own that any charter review recommendations forwarded to them may be dead on arrival. Mayor Carol Roe went so far as to read a statement into the record last week that was also forwarded to Charter Review Commission facilitator Lawrence Keller concerning an interview with Councilman Kahlil Seren on May 17. "At that meeting, Councilman Seren said it was very clear that a four-member majority of council was not interested in putting the recommendations of the Charter Review Commission on the ballot," the letter to Keller states. Roe added that she, Vice Mayor Melissa Yasinow and council members Mary Dunbar and Mike Ungar were "distressed" that Seren "has never talked to us about our views on this process, or our intentions." That changed Tuesday night after Seren requested a discussion during the Committee-of-the-Whole meeting, saying that his comments during the interview with the Charter Review Commission applied strictly to the "form of government" issue of "city manager" vs. "strong mayor." Due to the Memorial Day holiday, that meeting was rescheduled beyond the Sun Press weekly deadline, with a full follow-up account to be posted later this week on cleveland.com. "(Seren's) statement has understandably caused concern among Charter Review Commission members," Roe stated. "And it is our perception that the statement was reckless, irresponsible and false." In his initial response to his fellow council members' objections, Seren said that his statements to the Charter Review Commission were based on his four colleagues' answers to survey questions they had turned in months before he returned his -- with his interview scheduled after that. "We have the utmost respect for the commission and its members," Roe added, noting that the council vote for appointments to the 15-member panel was unanimous and included Seren. From there, any recommendations -- including any possible changes to the current form of government -- would require a five-member majority vote of council to forward them to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. "We have no interest in wasting anyone's time," Roe said. "The commission is addressing complicated and challenging issues with the utmost professionalism and seriousness." Roe concluded that council looks forward to hearing the commission's recommendations, "and we are committed to receiving and reviewing them with an open mind." Back at his May 17 interview before the Charter Review Commission, Seren was critical of council's "committee-style decision-making process," saying that while "there's something great to be said for compromise, at the same time, caution can be debilitating." Seren feels that the city's "organizational culture" lacks vision, citing as a recent case in point the "laborious" process of establishing a community development corporation (CDC). As for the Charter Review Commission itself, Seren said that "it's not a question of not having faith in the process." At the same time, he does not see a ballot appearance for any proposed change in the current form of government from "council-city manager" to "council-mayor." "That does not mean that other things can't appear on the ballot for the city to take a look at, consider and vote on," Seren said. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Casey Camp-Horinek watched heroin and opiate addiction sweep though her Oklahoma tribe over the past decade, changing members into what she described as "walking zombies." Camp-Horinek, one of more than 3,000 members of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, said members of her tribe turned to drugs for various reasons, including mistreatment by the government, environmental problems and having a lower standard of living than other parts of the country. Many got addicted simply by listening to their doctors. "I think it snuck up on us," Camp-Horinek said. "I think the fact that you are dealing with something that's being prescribed by your medical caretaker made us believe that everything would be OK." Native American tribes across the country have filed or are considering filing lawsuits against drug companies over the nation's opioid epidemic. These suits, which includes one filed by the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, seek to recoup costs for social services and other programs the tribes funded as a means to treating record-high addiction rates among Native Americans. They say the drug companies undertook a misleading and aggressive marketing effort that downplayed the addictive nature of prescription opioids. A federal judge in Cleveland is overseeing the lawsuits, along with hundreds of others filed by cities, counties, states and unions from across the country. Defendants in the cases include Purdue Pharma, AmerisourceBergen and the Ohio-based Cardinal Health. He has pushed all sides to reach a settlement, but has allowed for discovery and set the first trial for March 2019. The lawsuits filed by the Ponca and other tribes are different, according to David Domina, an attorney for several federally-recognized tribes in Nebraska. As such, they should be treated differently and grouped together, he says. "History, culture, predominant religious practices, significant health practices, abbreviated longevity, lower average user age, elevated usage levels, and historical problems with addictions, all make problems of tribal governments unique," Domina wrote in a brief filed Monday. Right now, certain states, hospitals and third-party payers are grouped together as the cases are litigated. Native American tribes are lumped into a group with the state of Alabama. The parties have until Aug. 17 to submit a plan to group more cases together for what are called "litigation tracks," which Domina and others hope includes one for the tribes. Domina, who represents the Omaha, Ponca and Winnebago tribes of Nebraska, and the Santee Sioux Nation, said in an interview that grouping the tribes' cases together would provide focus for issues that affect the tribes but not the other government entities suing the drug companies. He said the tribes' claims are distinct because their doctors are generally provided by Indian Health Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Domina's brief also says there are also medical and cultural issues surrounding Native Americans that warrant the cases being grouped together. Brendan Johnson, a Sioux Falls, South Dakota attorney representing several tribes in the opioid litigation, said the tribes are recognized as sovereign nations, which also makes their opioid lawsuits unique. Of the hundreds of lawsuits filed against drug companies being heard in Cleveland, more than 20 were filed by Native American tribes, though more are expected. None originate from Ohio, as the state does not have any federally or state-recognized tribes. While the number of cases is small, the federal government has said the opioid epidemic has disproportionally affected the members of the 550-plus federally-recognized tribes nationwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says American Indians and Alaska natives had the highest drug overdose rates in 2015 of any American ethnic group, according testimony given to the U.S. Senate's Committee of Indian Affairs in March by Dr. Michael Toedt, chief medical officer for the Indian Health Service. Deaths increased more than 500 percent between 1999 and 2015, the largest increase when compared to other ethnic groups, Toedt testified. Those statistics might not account of a number of deaths that went unreported, as some death certificates do not list the correct ethnicity of many Native Americans, he said. Drug companies have maintained that painkillers such as Oxycontin have legitimate medical uses approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Camp-Horinek, the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma member who also sits on the tribe's business committee, called the drug companies "predators." She said she sees the effects of addiction in her community, from crime to child welfare issues. "Each and every family I speak to has a personal story about a family member that has become addicted," she said. Her family is no exception. Her former son-in-law hurt was hurt at work when a truck in which he was a passenger flipped. He underwent several surgeries and eventually got hooked on painkillers. When the prescriptions dried up, her son-in-law switched to methamphetamine and then heroin. Camp-Horinek said her family "lost him entirely," and that the painkillers turned a decent man with a lot of cultural pride into an addict who is only looking for his next fix. "He's still alive but he's no longer living in that pitiful body there," Camp-Horinek said. "A shell of a human being there that used to be a loved family member, and is now someone that's only about feeding his addiction. It's like a death." Camp-Horinek said the tribe would use any money from the opioid litigation - should it ever come - for programs that treat addiction. U.S. District Judge Dan Polster, a Cleveland federal judge who is presiding over all the cases in U.S. district courts, said at a May 10 hearing that "the tribes are an important part of this litigation. They have been, I think, disproportionately affected by the opioid epidemic and I've made very clear if there is a resolution there won't be one without them." Paul Hanly, Joe Rice and Paul Farrell, who serve as lead counsel for the hundreds of plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement that "the tribes are an important component of any solution and we support Judge Polster's statement that they will not be overlooked nor forgotten. "Every plaintiff will eventually have the opportunity to be designated in a case track." Mostly, though, the tribes just don't want to be forgotten, their attorneys said. Johnson said the tribes worry about this because they were not part of the litigation and eventual settlement state governments reached with Big Tobacco in the late 1990s. The opioid litigation is frequently compared to the lawsuits filed against Big Tobacco. "Here the tribes have stood up and demanded to have a voice," said Johnson, who served as South Dakota's U.S. attorney under President Barack Obama. Among the tribes he represents in South Dakota include the Flandreau Santee Sioux and the Rosebud Sioux tribes and the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation. Camp-Horinek doesn't think the tribes forgotten, but rather that it was "deliberate," citing grievances about historically bad treatment by the federal government. That said, she said her tribe has been resilient after one crisis after another, be it environmental, government, drugs or otherwise. "We have somehow found a way to live," she said. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Following Memorial Day, 'Deferment Donald' Trump went back to work launching a twitter strike against Marine Robert Mueller, claiming the Special Counsel's squad of prosecutors will be meddling in the midterm elections. "The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls. There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats!," tweeted Trump. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is a REPUBLICAN. He was a REPUBLICAN when he was appointed by REPUBLICAN Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein after Trump fired REPUBLICAN FBI Director James Comey. Mueller was a REPUBLICAN when he was named Director of the FBI, by REPUBLICAN President George W. Bush, going on to being the longest-serving FBI Director since J. Edgar Hoover. Mueller was a REPUBLICAN when Trump considered naming him his FBI Director. Mueller was a REPUBLICAN when he served in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. Mueller was a REPUBLICAN when he received medals for his actions in the Vietnam war, while Trump won a 'Yellow Heart' and 'Bronze Bone Spur Star' for obtaining FIVE DEFERMENTS. Last week, a reader asked in the comment section, what, if anything, Mueller's Russia investigation has produced? As of the one year anniversary of Mueller being named Special Counsel, 19 people and 3 Russian companies have been indicted, and are facing trial, or plead guilty and are cooperating with Mueller's investigation. Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort has been indicted on multiple charges and is awaiting trial in Virginia. Trump's former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates has plead guilty to charges and is cooperating with Robert Mueller's investigation. Trump's former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has plead guilty to charges and is cooperating with Robert Mueller's investigation. Trump's attorney and 'fixer' Michael Cohen has had his home and offices raided. Cohen's business associate has plead guilty to charges and his cooperating with Department of Justice prosecutors. The New York Times reported Tuesday evening that Trump's Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a key witness in Mueller's investigation of possible Trump obstruction of justice. The NYT reported on a previously undisclosed meeting in which Trump reportedly pressured Sessions to take control of Mueller's investigation, despite Session having recused himself. It adds to the list of multiple occasions Trump bemoaned Session's recusing himself. Just as he did in Vietnam, Special Counsel Mueller is doing his job, honoring those who gave their lives fighting for and defending America's democratic principals, as 'Dishonest Donald' Trump dishonors the party of 'Honest Abe' Lincoln. AKRON, Ohio -- A Summit County jury found an Akron man guilty Tuesday in the fatal shooting death of a 25-year-old man two years ago, prosecutors said. Darshawn T. McCormick, 27, was also charged with felonious assault and having a weapons under a disability in the Dec. 26, 2016, killing of Javanta Virden, according to the Summit County Prosecutor's Office. Virden, 25, of Akron died at Summa Akron City Hospital after being shot in the head in a parking lot in the 1000 block of Ericsson Avenue following a fight with three men, authorities said. Investigators identified McCormick as the shooter through witness statements and physical evidence collected at the scene, police have said. McCormick is scheduled to be sentenced June 26 at 1 p.m. by Summit County Common Pleas Court Judge Jason Wells. To comment on this story, please visit Wednesday's crime and courts comments page. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 31-year-old man is charged with illegally carrying a gun after he accidentally shot a man sitting in his car in a nearby parking space in a downtown Cleveland parking garage. Rico Ivy of Cleveland is charged with carrying a concealed weapon. He was released from the city jail after posting a $5,000 bond on Tuesday. The shooting happened 3 a.m. Sunday on West St. Clair Avenue and West 3rd Street, across the street from the Cuyahoga County Justice Center that houses Cleveland police headquarters. Ivy told police he was standing outside his car on the driver's side when he went to put his gun on to his passenger seat, according to police. He accidentally pulled the trigger and a bullet ripped through his car. A 32-year-old man was sitting his car parked in the space next to Ivy. The bullet hit him in the lower back, according to police reports. Ivy flagged down police officers and told them he needed help, police reports said. He led them back to his car, where the man sat after being shot. The 32-year-old man was taken to MetroHealth. Police found Ivy's gun in his car and a fired bullet casing on the ground between the two men's cars, police reports say. To comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments page. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Days after publicly blaming Cuyahoga County Director of Corrections Ken Mills for a shortage of nurses at the county jail, a MetroHealth medical supervisor at the jail was removed from his position, stoking controversy over the health care of inmates. At a committee hearing last week, members of Cuyahoga County Council questioned Mills and MetroHealth's Interim Director of Ambulatory Care Gary Brack about the cause of the nursing shortage - which councilmembers called a "life and death" issue. The MetroHealth system handles medical care at the jail, but the county is responsible for hiring nurses. Six nursing positions remain vacant at the county's main jail, while temporary staff fill two nursing positions at the newly re-opened Bedford Heights facility. Mills had made an emergency funding request to the Board of Control on May 14, in which he asked for money to temporarily staff Bedford Heights with nurses until permanent positions could be filled. Mills told members of the Public Safety and Justice Affairs Committee that nurses were lined up to work at the Bedford Heights jail, but each backed out for various reasons, including a below-average pay rate. Mills and MetroHealth staff both acknowledged last week that the county pays nurses about $6 or $7 an hour less than comparable positions elsewhere, making it difficult to attract candidates for the jobs in a region where nurses are in high demand. But Brack's testimony laid the blame for the nursing shortage squarely at Mills' feet, accusing the director of obstructing the hiring process and creating an unsafe environment for staff by scaling back security in the medical unit. MetroHealth Chief of Staff Jane Platten also testified, corroborating Brack's accusations about the hiring process, and stating that the hospital system has a paper trail to back them up. Brack said he and MetroHealth enjoy a healthy working relationship with Cuyahoga County Sheriff Cliff Pinkney. But when working with Mills, MetroHealth is "constantly left out of the planning" around medical issues at the jail. "It's very tumultuous," Brack told the committee. After Brack's criticism last week, the county asked MetroHealth to replace him, county spokeswoman Mary Louise Madigan confirmed in an interview Tuesday. "There has to be trust and a strong working relationship between the (Interim Director of Ambulatory Care) and the director of jail services," Madigan said. "And clearly, it isn't there, so we did ask MetroHealth if they had another person." A MetroHealth spokeswoman declined to say why Brack was moved from his position at the jail. Committee chairman Michael Gallagher said in an interview Tuesday that he had reason to believe that Brack was truthful in his testimony. Gallagher went on to question whether the jail should accept new inmates from local jurisdictions before the staffing shortage is rectified. "Until we get to the bottom of this I don't know how we can move forward with accepting new prisoners," Gallagher told cleveland.com. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday slapped a Brunswick lawyer with a two-year suspension for lying to police and blaming a 2016 car crash on a black man who didn't exist. Kenneth Lewis told police that he and his then-girlfriend allowed an "unknown African-American male" to drive them home from the Train Station Bar in Lewis' car. He said the man crashed into a utility pole and fled the scene. The court will allow Lewis to apply to have his license reinstated in 18 months. The suspension follows the recommendation of the Lorain County Bar Association, which sought the sanctions following Lewis' 2016 arrest. Lewis and his then-girlfriend, another attorney named Heather Wilsey, left the Train Station Bar about 1 a.m. June 8, 2016, together in Lewis' 2012 Acura, according to court records. A short time later, Elyria police officers came upon the crash, which left the car inoperable. Lewis told police that he and Wilsey had met a black man at the bar and let him drive them home, and that he ran off after the crash, records say. Police went back to the bar and got surveillance footage that showed only Lewis and Wilsey getting into his car before it drove off, court records say. Police then called the two back into the police station and had them give written statements. When both claimed the fictitious black man crashed the car, police immediately arrested them and charged them with obstruction of justice. Wilsey was also charged with drunken driving. Two months later, with the case still pending, Wilsey and Smith were involved in another alcohol-fueled crash in Medina County, according to court records. Lewis pleaded guilty to a drunken driving charge, but did not tell the bar association about it, according to records. Lewis pleaded guilty in Elyria last year and was sentenced to spend 10 days in the Loran County Jail. Wilsey died of a drug overdose in February 2017 before her case was adjudicated. During Lewis' disciplinary hearing on the bar complaint, he admitted that he lied to protect Wilsey. The responding officers testified at the hearing that Lewis was the one who told them about the black driver, but Lewis maintained that it was Wilsey who cooked it up and that he only affirmed the story when police asked him about it. The next day he wrote a statement to police about the crash that contained the lie. To comment on this story, please visit Wednesday's crime and courts comments page. CLEVELAND, Ohio - A statewide bail-reform bill, greeted enthusiastically by liberals and conservatives when it was introduced in December, is hung up in the Ohio House of Representatives' Criminal Justice Committee. State Rep. Nathan Manning, the committee's Republican chairman, said he and other interested parties plan to work on House Bill 439 over the summer to see if a critical funding issue can be worked out. The bill calls for judges to rely less on bail by instead using objective risk-assessment methods to determine the likelihood of a defendant failing to show up in court or committing a crime after released. Doing so, however, will require an investment in pretrial supervision to assist with higher-risk defendants, as well as a system for data collection. A major concern, Manning said, is finding money to pay for that data collection, which would be necessary to determine if the bail reforms, if implemented, are working as intended. Representatives of the Ohio Judicial Conference, a statewide judges association, have told legislators that they don't know where the money would come from to integrate computers and hire the necessary support staff in order to monitor defendants over time. "While judges recognize the strong interest in reforming the bail process in Ohio, the data collection provisions in the bill are entirely unfunded and potentially very costly," stated Rocky River Municipal Court Judge Brian Hagan, who is president of the Association of Municipal and County Court Judges of Ohio, in a written statement to the Criminal Justice Committee. But one ardent supporter of bail reform believes those concerns are overblown and are being fomented by the bail-bond industry in hopes of sabotaging the bill. Daniel Dew, legal fellow at the conservative Buckeye Institute, said critics of the proposed Ohio legislation point to the high cost of New Jersey's bail reforms. But Dew said that's comparing apples and oranges because New Jersey's reforms call for judges to be available for bail hearings around the clock. The Ohio legislation would give counties more flexibility, he said. Dew believes the bail bond industry has embarked on a misinformation campaign, knowing that if judges rely less on bail, bond agents will have less business. "So they are doing everything they can to keep bail reform from happening," Dew said. The introduction of the legislation follows nearly two years of coverage and advocacy on the issues of bail reform by cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer in its ongoing Justice for All series. Besides calling for judges to rely less on bail by using objective risk-assessment methods, the bill would expand expand a judge's ability to detain felony defendants considered too high of a risk to be released in the community. As it stands, state law only allows a limited number of instances where bail of some kind can be denied. Courts would still be able to rely on bond schedules, which are predetermined bail amounts based on the charge, but only when a judge or magistrate is not available, such as over a weekend. Woody Fox, a bail agent in Franklin County, questions the reliability of using risk-assessment methods to make bail decisions. "If I thought a risk assessment tool would help the judge in any way, I'd be for it," Fox said, adding that he believes the survey questions used in one prominent system, established by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, are too limited in scope. Locally, the Cleveland Municipal Court has embraced the Arnold Foundation system, which uses nine criteria to rate the likelihood of a defendant skipping court or committing a crime while released. Manning said the bail-bond industry should be part of the lawmaking process and that he doesn't think it's holding up progress. He endorses the concept of bail reform, he said, and if a bill passes, he still envisions a role for the bail-bond industry. But one prominent bail agent operating in Cleveland said that unless bail agents are allowed to thrive, which they wouldn't under H.B. 439, they will go out of business. Bail agents operate like insurance agents, Jeff Walling, owner of ABC Bail Bonds, said. Unless they are able to post bonds for low-risk defendants, they won't be able to make enough money to justify posting bonds for the high-risk defendants. And that would be a bad thing, Walling said, because bail agents provide an important service to the public, which is making sure defendants who want to avoid their day in court are held accountable. Walling said that without a bail-bond industry, there would be nobody to go after those defendants who skip court, and if that job then falls to police, it could result in dangerous encounters. The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which strongly supports bail reform and is neutral on the current incarnation of H.B. 439, has said the bail-bond industry has no place in the legislature's bail-reform debate. Mike Brickner, senior policy director for ACLU Ohio, said high bonds don't necessarily ensure public safety because a wealthy person who is a danger to the community can afford to post bond. Brickner said he supports the use of risk assessments and data collection, but that he wants the bill to be more emphatic in its denunciation of the use of bail. "Jail shouldn't be a place to house people," he said. As for the concerns about the cost of data collection, Brickner said, it's something the criminal justice system desperately needs because it would provide important information about defendants to show how well bail reform is working. He also points to evidence that supports bail reform being affordable. In Summit County, for example, a $783,000 investment led to more than $7 million in savings by keeping people out of jail. PEPPER PIKE, Ohio -- Ursuline College has a new vice president of enrollment management, officials announced Tuesday. A nine-member search committee for the Roman Catholic liberal arts women's college chose Clevelander Susan Dileno out of 34 applicants. She will manage admission and financial aid. Just over 1,100 students attended Ursuline last year. Before Ursuline, Dileno worked in the same position at Ohio Wesleyan University for three years and Baldwin Wallace University for 11 years. She served on the College Board and on the board for the Ohio College Access Network, a statewide network to work on college access programs. She graduated with a bachelor of science at Niagara University and got her masters of business administration at Case Western Reserve University. Dileno will take Deanne Hurley's role, who will resume her position of vice president of student affairs and dean of students. Hurley took on the vice president of enrollment management role in 2013. CLEVELAND, Ohio - Less than three weeks before Independence Day in the U.S., The Cleveland Opera will celebrate the independence of Poland, the homeland of the company's founders. They're going big, too. Just as cities and towns across the nation will opt for grand fireworks displays on July 4, The Cleveland Opera is feting the 100th anniversary of Poland's independence June 16 with a full production of "The Haunted Manor," a rarely-heard (in the U.S.) opera by Stanislaw Moniuszko. The one-night-only performance takes place at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 16 in the Ohio Theater at Playhouse Square, 1511 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Tickets, $25-$65, are available at playhousesquare.org or 216-241-6000. Children and students are half price. A musical and patriotic favorite in Poland, "The Haunted Manor" is something of a rarity in the U.S., and certainly in Cleveland. Here the work will be performed in its original Polish, with projected translations in English. The opera, premiered in Warsaw in 1865, combines singing and dancing in a musical depiction of life at a Polish country manor house. The tale concerns two patriotic young men and their fruitless efforts to remain single, so as to be forever ready to defend Poland. In addition to Polish songs presented in both solo and individual scenes, the opera incorporates a range of traditional dances, such as the Mazurka and Polonaise. These will be performed by Cleveland Ballet, employing choreography by that company's artistic director, Gladisa Guadalupe. The full-scale production, including a chorus and the Cleveland Opera Orchestra, will be conducted by Grzegorz Nowak, music director at The Grand Opera in Warsaw and permanent associate conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London. The Cleveland Opera co-founder Dorota Sobieska stars as Hanna, along with soprano Justyna Giermola, baritone Francisco Prado, tenor Mikhail Urusov, and bass Mikhail Smigelski. For more information about this production of "The Haunted Manor," visit theclevelandopera.org or call 216-816-1411. CHICAGO, Illinois -- A dispute over a woman resulted in a worker at a Taco Bell being stabbed by his manager, reports say. The 21-year-old victim was taken to a hospital but refused to cooperate with police or press charges, according to the Chicago Tribune. The incident occurred Tuesday morning in the city's Wrigleyville neighborhood, ABC 7 reports. The victim and the manager, a male in his 40s, reportedly had been in an ongoing argument over a woman, police say. Tuesday morning, the argument carried over to an alley outside the restaurant, where the manager reportedly stabbed the worker in the stomach. The victim wasn't seriously injured, ABC 7 reports. Taco Bell released a statement saying it was "shocked and saddened" by the incident and that the franchisee is cooperating with investigators. If you would like to comment on this story, please visit Tuesday's crime and courts comments section. DeLAND, Florida -- A police officer in Florida is being accused of sending threatening messages to a woman in Georgia in an attempt to get her to send him nude photos. Deputies with Volusia County Sheriff's Office arrested Joshua Fancher, 25, of DeLand, on Tuesday on a warrant from Georgia charging Fancher with making terroristic threats, according to a news release. Investigators say Fancher used text messages and social media such as Instagram to send the woman messages demanding nude photos. The messages included threats of killing the woman and killing and raping her family members if she didn't comply, the release says. Fancher resigned from the Orange City Police Department after his arrest. He is being held in jail without bond. Lowndes County Sheriff's Department in Georgia is investigating the case, the release says. If you would like to comment on this story, please visit Tuesday's crime and courts comments section. RICHFIELD, Ohio - Attorney General Mike DeWine, the Republican nominee for governor, side-stepped questions on Wednesday about whether he would support so-called right-to-work legislation. DeWine's demurral came while he was accepting the endorsement of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 18, which represents workers in 85 Ohio counties. Asked several times about right-to-work, DeWine dodged giving a direct answer, leaving the possibility open that he would sign the legislation in the future. "Not on our agenda at all," DeWine said, deflecting to discussing jobs, opioids and career training. But what about the possible ballot initiative? "I haven't even looked at the ballot language," DeWine said. So-called right to work legislation has come up several times in Ohio and across the country in recent years. Unions see it as anathema since it weakens their existence in the workplace, allowing workers to not join or pay union dues even in unionized shops. Republican Gov. John Kasich rolled back public-sector employee unions' collective bargaining rights in 2011 with Senate Bill 5. While not exactly a right-to-work bill, it did include eliminating fair-share union dues - the requirement that all workers who benefit from union bargaining pay toward the cost of representation. Kasich suffered an embarrassing defeat at the ballot as a result when voters overturned the law. What's telling about that is Kasich's language on right-to-work following its defeat. "It's not on my agenda," Kasich said several times to journalists in 2014. That sounds familiar. DeWine's comments also sound remarkably similar to other governors around the country who said right-to-work was not on their agenda, only to support it when they got into office. "I don't think it's an appropriate subject for us to be dealing with today," said Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, in 2011. "Because we have higher priorities that need to be addressed in our state." Snyder reversed course in 2012, signing a right-to-work bill into law and calling it a "major day in Michigan's history." Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a notably anti-union Republican, also played the "not on my agenda" card in the midst of an election in 2014. "I think it's pretty clear the Legislature has worked with us hand in hand in the past and I'm making it clear in this campaign, as I'll make it clear in the next (legislative) session, that that's not something that's part of my agenda," Walker said. Walker signed a right-to-work bill in 2015. DeWine wouldn't elaborate his position on right-to-work in general but - with echoes of Scott, Snyder and Kasich - ultimately left the door open to passing right-to-work in the future if he were elected. "I will do anything that keeps Ohio competitive," DeWine said. "This is not what we're looking to do. This is not on our agenda. This is not what I believe is important." COLUMBUS, Ohio--U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan is set to be in suburban Columbus on Wednesday afternoon for a fundraiser on behalf of 12th Congressional District Republican nominee Troy Balderson, according to Balderson's campaign. The Wisconsin Republican's appearance is the latest help given by the GOP establishment to Balderson, a state senator from Zanesville who hopes to take over the central Ohio congressional seat, which was vacated by Republican Pat Tiberi earlier this year. Balderson will face Democrat Danny O'Connor in an Aug. 7 special election. U.S. Sen. Rob Portman is also scheduled to attend the fundraiser, which will be held at the Dublin home of lobbyist Kurt Leib, according to an invitation. Balderson's campaign is asking $1,000 per attendee and the legal maximum donation of $2,700 per host. Balderson narrowly won the GOP nomination earlier this month over Freedom Caucus-backed opponent Melanie Leneghan and seven other candidates, thanks in part to a wave of spending by Tiberi and establishment Republican groups. In a statement, Ohio Democratic Party spokeswoman Kirstin Alvanitakis said Ryan's appearance is a further attempt by D.C. Republicans to bail out Balderson and shows they are "clearly panicking." Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish needs to say yes to bail reform and make sure the county writes the checks needed when the local judges, lawyers and other experts who made up the Cuyahoga County Bail Task Force come asking for this critical support. Investing in improved pretrial services among other reforms can yield significant savings by eliminating unnecessary jail time that has to be underwritten by taxpayers. As our editorial board said in March when the task force first outlined a series of bail reforms designed to ensure a fairer justice system for all in Cuyahoga County, Budish needs to step forward and, without ambiguity, pledge county funding to underwrite pivotal aspects of the proposal. These include expanded and centralized pretrial services and data collection; far more rapid, in-person bail hearings; an expanded risk assessment tool that includes provisions for domestic violence cases; and a centralized bail process. We are still waiting for Budish clearly and categorically to promise county underwriting of these bail reforms. The work of the county's bail reform task force, assembled and led by Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Administrative and Presiding Judge John J. Russo, followed more than a year and a half of reporting by cleveland.com as part of its Justice for All series on abuses that, among other consequences, allowed too many suspects to languish in jail for want of bail. The task force report also highlighted the numerous inconsistencies in bail practices in the county's 13 municipal courts that argue clearly for centralized approaches. Russo and his colleagues should be commended. There must not be one form of justice for the well-off and another that victimizes those lacking means with unwarranted jail time that can cause them to lose their jobs as they wait unnecessarily for bail to be set, or lowered. The task force's thorough assessment of this problem and its proposed solutions, seconded earlier this month by the judicial conference of the 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals, deserve adoption in full. This will not happen without county money dedicated to the process. Armond Budish must pledge that support now. About our editorials: Editorials express the view of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer -- the senior leadership and editorial-writing staff. As is traditional, editorials are unsigned and intended to be seen as the voice of the news organization. Have something to say about this topic? * Use the comments to share your thoughts. Then, stay informed when readers reply to your comments by using the "Follow" option at the top of the comments, and look for updates via the small blue bell in the lower right as you look at more stories on cleveland.com. * Send a letter to the editor, which will be considered for print publication. * Email general questions about our editorial board or comments on this editorial to Elizabeth Sullivan, director of opinion, at esullivan@cleveland.com. CLEVELAND, Ohio - For the eighth day in a row, the mercury at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport will once again top 80 degrees Thursday. And yes, it's still spring. The heat wave continues; but this time with storms. Temperatures in Cleveland, Akron and almost everywhere else in Northeast Ohio won't dip below 70 degrees. The day's high will likely hit the upper 80s, and very moist air will make that feel almost 4 to 5 degrees hotter. Thursday will also be the eighth day in a row temperatures will near records. Cleveland's high temperature forecast of 88 degrees is not too far away from the 92-degree record set in 1944. Akron is less likely to reach record heat, as the all-time high is at 94 degrees set back in 1895. The National Weather Service in Cleveland's slightly different high temperature forecast for Thursday. Cloudy skies and gusty winds will help immensely with the heat, however that comes with the threat for storms. Scattered pop-up showers are possible all day, but the best bet for stronger, more widespread storms is in the afternoon. The Storm Prediction Center has our corner of the state under a marginal risk for severe storms, which carry damaging winds and hail. That means severe thunderstorms can't be ruled out but aren't exactly likely. Thursday's severe weather threat. (NOAA/Storm Prediction Center) Check out the forecast: Temperatures Temperature forecast. Precipitation chances Precipitation forecast. Winds Wind speed forecast. Sunrise: 5:56 a.m. Sunset: 8:54 p.m. Pollen: 7.6/12, medium-high for grasses, mulberry and hickory Live radar: Keep checking cleveland.com/weather for daily weather updates for Northeast Ohio, and don't forget to submit any weather questions you may have! Kelly Reardon is cleveland.com's meteorologist. Please follow me on Facebook, Twitter @KellyRWeather and Instagram. By Shamim Nateebwa The government Health Monitoring Unit has recovered a suspected CD4 machine in one of the bars in Kampala. Addressing the media at unit headquarters in Naguru, the Director Dr. Jackson Ojera Abusu said the machine worth Shs28mwas about to be sold off when concerned citizens tipped off the team and it responded swiftly. He said that they had established the health facility from which the machine is suspected to have been stolen together with a microscope which is yet to be recovered. Four suspects have so far been arrested as police hunts for others. In a separate development, the unit has arrested an individual who was employed as a district supervisor during the recent mosquito net distribution campaign for stealing mosquito nets that made many Sheema residents miss out on the nets. Doctor Abusu noted the matter is before court. Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer, Microsoft speaking at the 2018 Code Conference on May 29th, 2018. Tech history repeats itself, and nobody knows that better than Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief counsel. Smith was deeply involved in Microsoft's antitrust battle against the federal government in the 1990s, and remembers how resolved the company was to fight it. That turned out to be a mistake, Smith said at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, on Tuesday. "If we had worked things out in 1998, we might have been able to work them out before it became the antitrust version of nuclear war," Smith said. Instead, the federal government tried to break up the company, a ruling that was eventually overturned on appeal. Smith sees parallels at Facebook, which has come under recent scrutiny from the government over issues like Russian operatives using the platform to try and influence the 2016 presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica data leak. By Ssebuliba Samuel. Yesterday Parliament finally passed the Value Added Tax (Amendment) Bill, 2018. According to this bill VAT on Bibles and Qurans, Movie production, goods and services to specified strategic Investments have been scrapped. According to the state minister for finance David Bahati bible and Quran exemption from VAT was based on ground that all Bibles and Qurans which are used in the Country are imported into Uganda as donations. Meanwhile he said that exemption on movie production is intended to promote production of movies in Uganda which has other benefits such as employment Chinese conglomerate HNA Group's Hong Kong Airlines is considering an initial public offering in the "short to medium term" and tapping investors to raise funds through the issue of new shares and convertible bonds, a document reviewed by Reuters shows. Ahead of the planned listing, HNA is seeking to raise about $350 million by selling new shares, expanding its equity base by 22 percent, according to the document dated April 2018. That would give the 12-year-old airline a pre-IPO valuation of about $1.6 billion, based on Reuters calculations. Greg Baker | AFP | Getty Images The company also wants to raise up to $550 million via convertible bonds or tradable bonds before the listing, the document showed. The bond issue will be at a coupon rate of 8-to-10 percent for a two-to-five year period, according to the document. For comparison, Virgin Australia Holdings, a partner of Hong Kong Airlines which also lacks an investment grade rating this month raised A$150 million ($113 million) through a senior unsecured bond at a coupon of 8.25 percent, according to Thomson Reuters IFR. HNA referred fund raising questions to Hong Kong Airlines. Hong Kong Airlines declined to comment. HNA Group declined to comment on its relationship with HK Airlines. These latest moves, previously unreported, signal its IPO plans for Hong Kong Airlines are back on after HNA tried to take it public a few years ago, eventually abandoning those plans in 2015. That attempt failed as it was unable to satisfy questions from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in the timeline provided. It did not refile its listing application. The document reviewed by Reuters did not contain the reasons behind the new push for an offering, or the investor interest HNA may be able to generate. The Chinese aviation-to-financial services firm, which struck M&A deals worth about $50 billion in 2016 and 2017, is faced with soaring debt and a Beijing crackdown on aggressive Chinese acquirers. A floor trader checks share prices at the Hong Kong Exchange in Hong Kong. Tyrone Siu | Reuters Hyatt Hotels will more than double its revenue from China over the next five years as the hotel chain seeks to gain a firmer foothold in the burgeoning hospitality market, the company's president and CEO said. "If I look over the next four, five years, we will fully double our presence here moving from the 58 hotels or thereabouts that we have today to more than double that number," Mark Hoplamazian told CNBC. "And from a financial perspective also quite important for us more than $50 million of fee revenue coming out of greater China that will more than double over the next four to five years again because of our growth," Hoplamazian added. Hoplamazian was speaking to CNBC's Eunice Yoon in the Chinese city of Xian which recently welcomed a new Grand Hyatt hotel. The American hospitality group plans to release more than 20,000 new rooms into the Chinese marketplace across over 90 hotels, he said. About 70 percent of Hyatt's guests in the country are Chinese travelers. "The government has done a great job of identifying business centers where you've got new early stage companies and innovation centers opening up. So if you look at Xian, for example, there is more and more focus on bringing technology companies to Xian," said Hoplamazian. "And I think that is going to be a key reason why some of these so-called second-tier cities are going to be cities in which you'll see a lot of development." he said. Sir Richard Branson in front of Virgin Galactic's Unity spacecraft Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic reached nearly halfway to space in the second powered flight of its Unity spacecraft Tuesday, putting the company only months away from launching its first commercial passengers. "It will be something like two or three more flights before we're actually in space," founder Richard Branson told CNBC after the second test flight, which he called "a tremendous step in the right direction toward accomplishing our goals." Branson's space company has "a step-by-step cautious approach" in its testing program, he said, doing "whatever it takes to make absolutely certain that we've put everything to bed" before trying to send humans into space. Tuesday's flight was its second rocket-powered launch since the fatal crash of its Enterprise spacecraft on Oct. 31, 2014. Unity underwent extensive engine testing and seven glide tests before Virgin Galactic said it was ready to make another rocket-powered flight. Once Virgin Galactic has "a safe craft" that can reach more than 264,000 feet, Branson said, he will go up. "Soon after that, we'll start taking some of our astronauts up," Branson said. A key part of Virgin Galactic's plan to turn space tourism into a business is rapid reuse of the spacecraft. Unity was lifted into the air by the jet-powered mothership Eve, taking off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. It was released from under Eve's wing about an hour later, when Unity's rocket engine roared to life, sending the spacecraft at about twice the speed of sound to 114,500 feet. Unity then returned, using a technique called feathering to re-enter the atmosphere and glide back down to a landing on the same runway it had left. This technique of reaching space means Virgin Galactic was able to turn Unity around only 54 days after its first launch. Coincidentally, that's the same amount of time it took NASA to launch, land and launch again the space shuttle Atlantis in 1985 the fastest turnaround during the shuttle program. Virgin Galactic's Unity spacecraft fires its rocket engine during the second powered test flight. Virgin Galactic "Ultimately we'll be able to cut it down to every four days," Branson said. He added that the goal of four days will only be realized "well after the test program is completed." For now, Branson is focused on his company creating a reliable means of letting more people experience weightlessness. In the latest test flight, Unity's rocket engine fired for 31 seconds. Virgin Galactic will likely aim to fire the engine for 40 seconds on the next flight, according to Branson, and 50 seconds on the following flight. "And then, if that's all gone according to plan, 63 seconds will be what will take us into space," Branson said. Competing with Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin Branson is neck and neck with fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos as their companies close in on launching tourists into space. Branson said he does "not see this as a race," despite the comparison often arising. "Both companies need to succeed," Branson said. "If one beats the other by a couple of months, one way or the other, as far as the long term is concerned, that's not important." Jeff Bezos checking out Blue Origin's Crew Capsule 2.0 after touchdown in West Texas on December 12, 2017. Blue Origin Bezos has been pouring nearly $1 billion a year from his Amazon holdings into Blue Origin, the rocket-builder he founded in the pursuit of reaching zero-gravity conditions. Blue Origin is in the final stages of testing its New Shepard rocket, most recently launching its human-carrying capsule to 322,405 feet in an eighth successful flight on April 29. Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith told CNBC on April 18 that he hopes his company will be launching tourists to space on New Shepard this year. 'No ride anywhere in the world that will be like it' Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel speaking at the 2018 Code Conference on May 29th, 2018. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said he isn't worried that Facebook's Instagram continues to imitate its core features. "Snapchat is not a bunch of features," Spiegel said on Tuesday at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. "It has an underlying philosophy that runs counter to traditional social media." Spiegel characterized Facebook's core mission as convincing people to build lots of shallow "friend" relationships, then "having people compete online for attention." When people "realize that competing with their friends for likes" is not great, they'll turn to Snapchat, which focuses on building connections with fewer people but actual friends. "Fundamentally, they're having a hard time changing the DNA of their company," he said. He also said that Snap was somewhat flattered by the imitation, because a designer feels a sense of "triumph" if the only thing a competitor can do is copy a product precisely. "We would really appreciate it if they copied our data protection practices as well," he added. Spiegel also noted that Snap built its entire business around the idea of minimizing data collection -- Snapchat's original core feature was trading pictures that disappeared -- and said he was gratified that the entire industry is now being forced to move this way by increasingly strict privacy laws like the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A man reads a notice stating "We're Closing Early On May 29," posted outside a Starbucks store, before more than 8,000 branches nationwide will close this afternoon for anti-bias training, in Philadelphia, May 29, 2018. Starbucks baristas completed four hours of anti-bias training on Tuesday, but some said they found the scope to be too limited. In the wake of an incident in Philadelphia that the company said challenged fundamental parts of its values, Starbucks shuttered 8,000 of its stores so that more than 175,000 baristas could participate in a training seminar. As baristas left their locations Tuesday evening after a master class designed to address implicit bias, promote inclusion and help prevent discrimination, one question lingers: Can this training really make a difference? For some Starbucks employees, the training was a chance for socially conscious workers to discuss hot topics such as racial anxiety and the difference between implicit and explicit bias. For others, the experience was "more performative than productive." "We all agreed that the topic of race and diversity is extremely important to discuss but that the company might have gone about the discussion in the wrong way," one barista in New Jersey told CNBC. The barista said that some of the videos presented to the employees were "a little cheesy" and "felt a little forced." A barista in Virginia said, "Some Starbucks partners are frustrated that they have to take the time to go through the diversity training because of someone else's actions. But I think that taking the time to close [the stores] for this training is a way to let customers know that we don't stand for what happened." Several baristas also voiced concerns that the company's training focused too much on race relations between white and black people and not enough on all people of color. "One of the guys in the store who is Filipino brought up that he feels like he is discriminated against for being a [person of color] and that Starbucks glazed over non-black people by focusing solely on the divide between black and white," the New Jersey barista said. "Another girl in the store agreed. She's Latino, and the most recent Starbucks issue in California involved a Latino family. She said she felt like Starbucks was missing a larger part of the discussion by not addressing other minority communities." Starbucks' curriculum featured videos from CEO Kevin Johnson and Chairman Howard Schultz, as well as rapper Common, and members of the Perception Institute who spoke on racial anxiety and how employees can better serve customers. Employees also watched a documentary by award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson. "The Nelson video actually provided some good discussion," the New Jersey barista said. "It was the first one of the materials that actually got everyone to talk about their own experiences." Nelson's eight-minute documentary features several African-Americans discussing their experiences and how they feel the need to alter their physicality and mannerisms to make social situations with other races more comfortable. One participant in the video said that he often left extra space between himself and other customers while in a store, kept his hands visible at all times, made eye contact with security guards and managers and watched the tone of his voice so they would not think that he was stealing or hiding something. After these videos were screened to employees, they were instructed to answer a number of prompts in their notebooks as well as a Team Guidebook. Employees were asked to recall the first time they noticed their racial identity, whether their accent ever affected how people perceived them and to describe how they might create a feeling of acceptance in their stores. "I think [the training is] an appropriate response/solution to what happened in Philadelphia," the Virginia barista said. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, said on Tuesday that he fears a "tough summer" is ahead, with respect to immigration issues like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The Trump Administration has sought to end DACA, an Obama-era policy that provides legal protection for young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Microsoft has advocated the protection of DACA and has more broadly supported immigration as a way to make sure U.S. companies are hiring talented people. Smith, who has previously been outspoken against the efforts to stop DACA, told Recode's Kara Swisher that he doubts there will be any kind of political compromise to keep the program intact. "There is room, I believe, for common ground if people want to find it," Smith said at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. "In an era of such disagreement, I just don't know that people are looking for that common ground." Smith also said he thought the Trump administration could try to take away work authorization for spouses of people with H-1B visas, known as the H-4 rule. This would affect "virtually every company," he said. "We have 98 employees who are here on an H-4," Smith said. "They will lose their jobs if this administration revokes that authority." Additionally, Smith said, the U.S. government could roll back the potential for certain people with science, technology, engineering or math degrees to work under H-1B visas. If that were to happen, Smith said, "we could have thousands of people suddenly unable to work. And I just think this is terrible for the country, it's terrible for the tech sector and it is a tragedy for the individuals involved." Microsoft could well take its political opposition to the courts, Smith said. "I think we need to be firm in our resolve to take whatever action we can," he said. "That means using our voice, it means using our lawyers, it may mean standing behind our employees, and if necessary, giving them the ability to work in Canada instead of the United States." President Donald Trump meets Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto during the their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany July 7, 2017. Mexico will "never" pay for a wall that separates its border from the United States, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said Tuesday. The North American country won't ever finance such a project, Nieto said in a tweet addressed to President Donald Trump. Nieto tweet: President @realDonaldTrump: NO. Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever. Sincerely, Mexico (all of us). Speaking at a rally earlier in the day, the U.S. leader had said the neighboring nation would eventually foot the bill for a border wall that he claims will stymie illegal immigration into the U.S. It's not the first time Nieto has denied the idea. In 2016, he penned a similar tweet and earlier this year, he postponed plans to visit the White House after an argument with Washington over the matter. More than two-thirds of people around the world work away from the office at least once every week, according to researchers. A study released Tuesday by Zug, Switzerland-based serviced office provider IWG found that 70 percent of professionals work remotely a phenomenon known as telecommuting at least one day a week, while 53 percent work remotely for at least half of the week. The ability to work from home and the emergence of digital office rental services has led to changing attitudes around where people should work and whether they should stick to the traditional nine-to-five working hours. For instance, WeWork a competitor of IWG, which owns Regus and Spaces provides shared workspaces for companies and freelancers. IWG said the study related to full-time employees rather than the self-employed or contractors. Chief Executive Mark Dixon said that technology was the primary driver of changing perceptions around locations and working hours. "The biggest driver is digital changing every industry in the world," Dixon told CNBC in a phone interview. "On the one hand, it's changing how real estate needs to be offered, but it's also companies wanting something different in the digital world." Dixon said that firms are less inclined to invest in real estate and were looking to digital services instead to hire out office spaces. He added that the idea of remote working allowed employees to be more flexible. "If you offer workers the chance to work where they need to be, and not where they are told to go to, it completely transforms their view of the company, they are more productive," Dixon said. "If they can work at an office near to where they live or near to where they need to be, it's totally transformational." IWG surveyed 18,000 business professionals across 96 international companies for the study. Dixon said established corporates were leading the charge into remote working, to boost productivity and job satisfaction. HSBC, for example, rented out more than 300 hot desks in a space run by WeWork in Hong Kong last year. WeWork, reportedly worth $20 billion after an investment led by Japan's SoftBank, counts Microsoft, Salesforce and Spotify among its enterprise clients. Last year, a report by U.S. market research firm Gallup found that the number of American employees working remotely rose to 43 percent in 2016 from 39 percent in 2012. Another study, by telecommuting research firm Global Workplace Analytics and recruitment firm FlexJobs, found that 3.9 million American workers said they telecommuted at least half of the time in 2015, representing an increase of 115 percent from the 1.8 million U.S. employees that said the same in 2005. Rosanne Barr in "Rosanne." Adam Rose | Getty Images ABC revived Roseanne Barr's working-class-themed television show even though she had compared a prominent African-American to an ape back in 2013. The network invoked cultural diversity. ABC canceled Roseanne on Tuesday after Barr tweeted a similar comparison even though the show had become a hit slated to reap $60 million in advertising next season. The network condemned her bigotry as "repugnant." The message from those events can sound as muddled as the one from recent elections. Americans made Barack Obama their first black president and then elected Donald Trump, who has sympathized with white supremacists, disdained African-Americans protesting injustice, and crudely demeaned immigrants. Yet a pattern lies beneath today's noise. It follows the last half-century of American history toward less racism and more tolerance. Though halting and fitful, the path leads in only one direction over time. During the 1960s, the federal government outlawed racial discrimination in education, employment, public accommodations and voting rights. It erased state laws banning interracial marriage. It opened the U.S. to increased immigration. Principles of equality gained near-universal acceptance. Polling amassed by the University of Illinois' Institute of Government and Public Affairs showed that by 1972, 97 percent of whites agreed blacks should have equal job opportunities; by 1997, 95 percent said they would vote for a black presidential candidate; by 2011, 86 percent approved of interracial marriage. Laws can only eliminate discrimination in theory. A chasm separates principles and practice. The ideals they expressed provoked fierce, still-unresolved conflicts over how to realize them and turned the political parties inside out. White backlash helped Republicans build an electoral majority. Increasing diversity But America's increasing diversity eroded that majority and changed attitudes further. Obama's election not once, but twice demonstrated those shifts. That produced its own backlash. Trump rose in politics by spreading the fiction that Obama was not born in America. Researchers found that his core 2016 supporters disproportionately older, less-educated white Christians expressed outsized resentment toward racial and religious minorities. Reminding whites that they will one day become an American minority, one study concluded, deepened their support for Trump. As president, Trump has courted and comforted that constituency. But the constituency, notwithstanding the volume of Trump's megaphone, is shrinking. The nation grows more diverse and better-educated year by year. In a quarter-century, the Census projects, America will be a majority-minority country. In a globally connected economy, money and influence follow that evolution. Different experiences After Trump praised "both sides" at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer, corporate leaders ended their participation in White House advisory panels. Those decisions mirrored yesterday's move by ABC, averting intense pressure on its advertisers. The younger Americans corporate marketers covet have been shaped by fundamentally different life experiences. Just 28 percent of baby boomers are non-white, but 44 percent of millennials are, a Pew Research poll earlier this year found. Younger whites have different attitudes as a result. The Pew poll revealed that white millennials are more likely than their parents to fault discrimination for holding blacks back, and support more government action to help. The same Pew survey found overwhelming opposition among white millennials to Trump's proposed wall on the Mexican border. Among Republican millennials, 61 percent called openness essential to America's identity. It is similarly essential to the individual identities of a growing subset of Americans. Five decades after the Supreme Court made it legal for people of different races to wed, Pew concluded from Census data that one in six marriages is interracial. One in seven American infants is multiracial. Two months ago, Trump boasted to supporters that Roseanne's blockbuster early ratings were "about us." He has not yet addressed the show's demise, even while complaining on Twitter today that ABC never renounced "HORRIBLE" statements about him. But ABC's decision, and the public attitudes that propelled it, recall Obama's fondness for an observation by Martin Luther King Jr.: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It bends toward tolerance, too. WATCH: Sanders says Disney CEO Iger should have apologized to Trump Check out the companies making headlines after the bell on Wednesday: Shares of CRISPR Therapeutics plunged 18.5 percent in extended trading. The biotechnology company disclosed that the FDA has placed a clinical hold on its drug application for a sickle cell disease stem cell therapy. The suspension will be in effect until CRISPR and Vertex Pharmaceuticals answer FDA questions about the drug application. Vertex shares crept down 0.4 percent after the announcement. Box stock tumbled 6.5 percent in the extended session, before recovering some of its losses. The cloud storage company reported first quarter financial results that surpassed analyst expectations on top and bottom lines. Box reported loss per share of 7 cents on revenue of $141 million. The street was expecting a loss of 8 cents on $140 million. Box shares have gained 31 percent year-to-date. Shares of Guess fell as much as 2 percent after the bell, before recovering some losses. The clothing brand and retailer reported a 23 cent loss per share in the first quarter, which fell in-line with analyst expectations. Guess surpassed Wall Street projections on revenue, reporting $521 million versus the $508 million expected. The fashion brand issued weaker than anticipated earnings outlook for the second quarter and full year outlook. Cars.com stock jumped 8 percent, before losing some of its gains in after hours trading. The classified auto listings site announced it had hired J.P. Morgan to explore a possible sale. PVH shares wobbled in extended trading and turned negative. The clothing company, which owns brands, like Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, beat analyst expectations on first quarter earnings and revenue and issued strong second quarter and full-year guidance. The apparel manufacturer has demonstrated stronger growth in international markets, like Europe and Asia, than in North America. Shares of Symantec edged down nearly 1 percent in after hours trading. The cybersecurity company, which owns Norton products, announced it would delay filing its annual shareholder report, related to an internal accounting probe announced earlier in May. The company informed shareholders it did not think the probe would have a material impact on its past financial statements. During Amazon's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday, CEO Jeff Bezos acknowledged the e-commerce giant has come under a lot of scrutiny this year. But the billionaire said he didn't take it too personally, and he seemed open to increased inspection, as he addressed shareholder questions. "Large entities deserve to be inspected and scrutinized. Inside Amazon we talk about this, I say 'we are a large corporation, we deserve to be inspected,'" Bezos said. "'Don't take it personally.'" Amazon has faced mounting criticism from President Donald Trump. In March and April the president took to Twitter call out the company for everything from allegedly evading taxes to using the U.S. Postal Service as a personal delivery boy. Bezos himself has also come under fire for having too much power. In advance of the shareholder meeting, a group of protesters gathered outside to demand an independent chairman of the board be appointed to oversee Bezos' activities as CEO. An activist group called SumOfUs had been planning to fly a plane overhead with a banner reading, "Bezos Needs a Boss." During the meeting, shareholders struck down a proposal to appoint an independent chairman. The board recommended against that proposal in a proxy statement issued in advance of the meeting. "We believe that it is important for the Board to continue to determine on a case-by-case basis the most effective leadership structure for the Company, rather than take a rigid approach to board leadership, as called for by the shareholder proposal," the statement said. Bezos said Amazon's rapid growth from about 30,000 employees in 2010 to around 600,000 today has made flexibility and transparency even more important as the company moves forward. "We have to conduct ourselves so when we are scrutinized we pass with flying colors," Bezos said. Randall Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T, said he was not surprised when the federal government sued to stop the company's attempted acquisition of Time Warner. "We saw it coming," Stephenson said on Wednesday at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. "It was obvious that when Mr. Delrahim had been confirmed by the Senate, that we were really close to having a deal done with the DOJ and all of a sudden those talks came to a grinding halt. So we saw this coming. It wasn't like that day was a big wakeup call." Later, he noted, "You go into a transaction like this, you step into it, you hope you never have to litigate but you step into it with the expectation that you may have to litigate." Stephenson likened it to buying fire insurance you don't want your house to burn down, but you know you have to prepare in case it does. In November, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit to block the deal, arguing that it would raise prices for consumers and hurt competition. AT&T is fighting the suit and has resisted suggestions that it sell off some units to win regulatory approval. President Trump has lobbied against AT&T's purchase of Time Warner, which owns CNN, a frequent target of his attacks. tweet Stephenson said he was pursuing the tie-up because AT&T believes that vertically integrated companies, which own both the content and the pipes through which the content flows, are the only way to win against tech giants like Amazon and Apple. Media companies who distribute their content through multiple channels, like Time Warner does today, lack a "direct relationship with the customer," which makes it harder for them to sell premium content and the targeted advertising that marketers have grown to expect from online players. Stephenson said that by combining distribution and content, a company like AT&T should be able to offer more effective ads, and thereby lower the number of ads it has to show, leading to a better experience for consumers. London-based investor and prominent Kremlin critic Bill Browder told CNBC that his arrest in Madrid on Wednesday was another attempt by Russian President Vladimir Putin to put a stop to his political activities. "He's been going after me in every different way, trying to have me arrested, trying to have me sued, doing all sorts of crazy stuff," Browder said on "Power Lunch" Wednesday. "And today was just one more example of that." Browder, co-founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, said Spanish national police officers showed up to his hotel around 9:40 a.m. and told him they had a warrant for his arrest from Interpol, based on a Russian request. "I don't know how they found out, but they knew I was going to be in Spain, and they tracked me down in Spain and got this organized," Browder said. "It was all based on a Russian warrant," he added. Browder live-tweeted the events of the day. TWEET TWEET He said he was then taken to a police station in Madrid. After contacting Interpol, Spanish officials told Browder that Interpol was canceling the warrant, and he was released, he said. TWEET He has since returned to his home in London. The American-born Browder, author of the 2015 book "Red Notice," did business in Russia for more than a decade. His lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Russian prison in 2009 after exposing corruption in the government. Since then Browder has led an anti-corruption campaign against Russian officials. In 2012, the U.S. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions Russians for alleged human rights abuses. Since then it has been difficult for some Russians to obtain visas to enter the U.S. As a result, Browder said, Russian officials seek retribution. "This is something that is front and center of Putin's mind," he said. "He absolutely hates the Magnitsky Act. He stated it as the single largest foreign policy priority to repeal it." Last October, Canada passed its own version of the act, something Browder told CNBC he was "responsible for." Within a few days, he said, he was placed on Interpol's wanted list. Browder said he's been on the list six times, per Russian request, since 2013. Last week the U.K.'s House of Commons passed its own version of the Magnitsky Act. "In doing so, it ... creates a hostile environment for Putin and his cronies in London," Browder said. "And I'm sure that they're very mad about that." British businessman Bill Browder, a prominent Kremlin critic, was detained and then released by Spanish police on Wednesday, after a warrant for his arrest he said came from Russia was found to be no longer valid, a police source said. The head of investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, Browder led a campaign to expose corruption and punish Russian officials he blames for the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, who he employed as a lawyer. A Russian court sentenced Browder to nine years in prison in absentia in December after finding him guilty of deliberate bankruptcy and tax evasion. Browder said on his Twitter account that the Interpol General Secretary had advised Spanish police not to honor a Russian Interpol red notice - a request to locate and provisionally arrest someone pending extradition. Tweet 1 "This is the sixth time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case," he tweeted, following his release from a Madrid police station. A police source could not confirm that the arrest warrant came from Russia or what made it no longer valid. The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Browder is in Madrid to give evidence to Jose Grinda, a Spanish prosecutor who spearheads investigations into organised crime, about money from the Magnitsky case that has flowed to Spain, the British businessman said on Twitter. Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 shortly after alleging that Russian officials were involved in large-scale tax fraud. His death nearly a year later while awaiting trial caused an international uproar. Browder has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of a personal vendetta over the businessman's efforts to get other countries to impose so-called Magnitsky sanctions against Russian individuals. British foreign minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday he had spoken to Browder and was glad he had been released. "Moscow should concentrate on bringing those responsible for the murder of Magnitsky to justice," Johnson said in a tweet. Shares of Cars.com jumped 8.8 percent Wednesday after a report the online car retailer hired J.P. Morgan to explore a possible sale. Shares rose 1 percent in after-hours trading. The New York Post reported Wednesday afternoon, citing a source, that Cars.com has hired J.P. Morgan to explore strategic options that include a potential sale of the company. The source said a sale looks likely, at possibly $40 a share. Cars.com has a $1.9 billion market value and closed at $26.59 a share Wednesday, down 7.8 percent for the year. In March, the company said its board would add two directors supported by activist investor Starboard Value. Starboard is the second-largest investor in Cars.com and had a 9.4 percent stake in outstanding shares as of March 31, according to FactSet. Representatives for Cars.com and J.P. Morgan did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment. Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a speech this week that blockchain the technology underlying bitcoin has "breakthrough" applications. "A new generation of technology represented by artificial intelligence, quantum information, mobile communications, internet of things and blockchain is accelerating breakthrough applications," he said Monday, according to a translation of his remarks. Xi also emphasized the need for China to focus on technological development and become the global center of science and innovation. Bitcoin is the first and most well-known application of blockchain. The technology eliminates the need for a third party intermediary, such as a bank, by quickly creating a secure and permanent record of transactions between two parties. Speculation on the enormous but still largely unproven potential of blockchain helped send bitcoin prices skyrocketing last year. Beijing has effectively halted bitcoin trading domestically, and in September officially banned sales of new digital tokens through the "initial coin offering" process. However, the country remains a hub of activity for blockchain development. Several start-ups are partnering with the local Chinese government to research or implement the technology. "In China, blockchain's still developing, really great," said Albert Xuan, project manager at Liaoyuan, a consulting firm and incubator for start-ups. He said roughly 100 to 200 people flew from China to New York earlier this month to attend Liaoyuan's "Blockchain Without Borders" conference, which drew about 650 people and held at least two panels in Mandarin Chinese. Blockchain is also mentioned twice in the Chinese State Council's 13th five-year economic plan that was released in 2016. "Since entering the 21st century, global science and technological innovation has entered into an unprecedented period of intensive activity," Xi said in his speech. "A new round of scientific and industrial revolution is reconstructing the global innovation map and reshaping the global economic structure." Xi was addressing a meeting of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. CNBC's Julia Boorstin, Carl Quintanilla, and Jon Fortt Report for the Network Following are excerpts of CNBC interviews aired across CNBC's business day programming today, Wednesday, May 30th, live from Recode's Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA including: Spencer Rascoff, Zillow CEO; Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple CEO; Randy Freer, Hulu CEO; and Roger Lynch, Pandora CEO. All references must be sourced to CNBC. SPENCER RASCOFF, ZILLOW CEO, ON CNBC'S "SQUAWK ON THE STREET": Video from interview: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/05/30/zillow-ceo-this-has-been-a-wake-up-moment-for-tech.html. Rascoff on Facebook: I REALLY THINK THAT THE CULTURAL SHIFT THAT THEY TALKED ABOUT YESTERDAY IS REAL. I MEAN, YOU CAN SEE IT IN SHERYL'S EYES AND HEAR IT IN THE -- I MEAN, THE FACEBOOK EXECUTIVES THAT I TALKED TO, REALLY HAVE TAKEN TO HEART, THEY FEEL GUILT. THEY FEEL THAT THEIR PLATFORM WAS USED IN A WAY THAT IT WAS NOT DESIGNED FOR. AND THEY REALLY ARE THROWING RESOURCES AND INTELLECT AT THE PROBLEM. Rascoff on Regulation: I THINK THERE MAY BE REGULATION AND MAYBE THAT'S WARRANTED. IF THERE IS REGULATION I HOPE IT'S INTELLIGENT REGULATION. WE'RE NOT OFF TO GREAT START IN THAT SENSE. BUT I DO THINK MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANY POTENTIAL REGULATION WILL BE HOW COMPANIES THE ATTITUDE THAT EMPLOYEES AND EXECUTIVES AT THESE COMPANIES HAVE ABOUT THEIR SERVICES. THE ONE THING THAT SHERYL SAID I THINK IS WORTH POINTING OUT IS, SHE SAID FREQUENTLY REGULATION ENTRENCHES LARGE COMPANIES. SO LET'S MAKE SURE ANY REGULATION WE HAVE, DOESNT PREVENT THE NEXT FACEBOOK THAT'S BEING DEVELOPED, HOPEFULLY BY TWO GIRLS IN A GARAGE SOMEWHERE. Rascoff How Regulation Affects Venture Capital: THE WAY IT IMPACTS VENTURE CAPITAL IS IT'S VERY HARD TO GET FUNDING WITH A DIGITAL MEDIA ADVERTISING BUSINESS IN THE -- AS YOU SAID, JULIA, THE DUOPOLY OF DIGITAL ADVERTISING THAT IS GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK. I MEAN IF YOU'RE -- I MEAN ZILLOW SELLS ADS TO REAL ESTATE AGENTS, PRIMARILY. IT WOULD BE PRETTY HARD TO GET FUNDED TODAY WITH A BUSINESS MODEL AROUND BEING IN A VERTICAL MARKETPLACE, AGGRAVATING AUDIENCE AND SELLING DIGITAL ADVERTISING TO X,Y OR Z IN A FACEBOOK/GOOGLE WORLD. Rascoff on Zillow As An Owner: WE THINK OF IT LIKE NETFLIX MOVING INTO ORIGINALS. SO IT'S A BUSINESS EXTENSION. IT LEVERAGES OUR DATA ADVANTAGE. WE KNOW WHAT HOUSES PEOPLE WANT TO BUY AND SELL. WE ARE NOW BUYING HOUSES IN PHOENIX AND LAS VEGAS AND SELLING THEM WITHIN A COUPLE WEEKS. WE'RE DOING A LIGHT REMODEL, GETTING THE HOME READY FOR SALE AND RESELLING IT. WE THINK THAT WE CAN PREMARKET THE HOME TO BUYERS WHOSE INFORMATION -- YOU KNOW, THEY'RE TELLING US WHAT HOMES THEY WANT TO BUY, THEY'VE GOT SAVED SEARCHES SET UP AND AS ESSENTIALLY A MARKET MAKER IN THE BUYING OF THE HOME AND RESELLING OF THE HOME WE THINK WE CAN BUILD A NEW BUSINESS. Rascoff On-Demand Real Estate: WE'RE IN AN ON-DEMAND ECONOMY NOW. PRESS A BUTTON ON YOUR SMARTPHONE, HAVE MAGIC HAPPEN. PRESS A HOME, HAVE A CAR ARIVE. PRESS A HOME, HAVE FOOD ARRIVE. PRESS A OR PRESS A BUTTON, RATHER, AND HAVE SOMETHING HAPPEN. THE ANGST, THE WORK, THE STRESS THAT SELLERS HAVE TO GO THROUGH TO SELL THEIR HOME, THEY WANT SOMEONE ELSE TO ALLEVIATE THAT STRESS. SO WE ARE DOING IT. WE THINK OF IT AS A SERVICE TO A SELLER RATHER THAN A HOME FLIPPING SERVICE. BRAD GARLINGHOUSE, RIPPLE CEO, ON CNBC'S "POWER LUNCH": Video from interview: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/05/30/momentum-for-ripple-continues-to-build-ripple-ceo.html?play=1. Garlinghouse on Ripple Growth: WE ARE NOW SIGNING UP MORE THAN ONE BANK TO A PRODUCTION CONTRACT PER WEEK. SO IT'S REAKKT ACCELERATED OUR 2017. WE ANNOUNCED THIS MORNING THAT WE SIGNED THE LARGEST BANK IN KUWAIT, THE NATIONAL BANK OF KUWAIT. SO IT CONTINUES TO BUILD -- MOMENTUM CONTINUES TO BUILD. AND THE DYNAMIC THERE IS THERE ARE NETWORK EFFECTS. THE MORE PARTICIPANTS, THE MORE VALUE IN JOINING. AND SO WE'RE SEEING THAT MOMENTUM BUILD. Garlinghouse on Working With Banks: FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS, RIPPLE KIND OF STAKED OUT A SPACE THAT SAID "LOOK, WE ARE NOT ANTI-GOVERNMENT. WE'RE NOT WORKING AGAINST THE BANKS. WE ARE NOT TRYING TO CIRCUMVENT REGULATION." INSTEAD WE'RE TRYING TO WORK WITH THE SYSTEM. WE THINK THE BLOCKCHAIN REVOLUTION IS REALLY HAPPENING -- CAN HAPPEN FROM WITHIN THE SYSTEM. IT IS NOT GOING TO BE ATTACKING THE SYSTEM. Garlinghouse on Correction: I THINK OVER TIME AS THE UTILITY OF THESE DIFFERENT DIGITAL ASSETS IS BETTER UNDERSTOOD, YOU WILL SEE MARKETS AND BEHAVIORS UNDERSTAND, OK, HERE'S THE REAL PROBLEM, HERE'S WHAT'S CREATING DEMAND AND VELOCITY AND USAGE OF THAT DIGITAL ASSET. BUT, THERE'S ALSO A LOT OF DIGITAL ASSETS WHERE, AS A PARTICPANT IN THE MARKET, IT'S NOT CLEAR TO ME THAT THEY ALL HAVE UTILITY. SO, I THINK THAT THERE IS GOING TO BE, YOU KNOW, A BIT OF A CORRECTION ALONG THE WAY HERE, WHERE I THINK A LOT OF THE PLAYERS IN THE SPACE THAT DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE THAT DON'T SOLVE A REAL PROBLEM ARE GOING TO GET WASHED OUT. Garlinghouse on Regulation: THE SEC IS GETTING INVOLVED, AS THEY SHOULD, BECAUSE THERE HAVE BEEN FRAUDS COMMITTED. SO I THINK WE HAVE BEEN AN ADVOCATE THAT YES, THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD GET INVOLVED, THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE PROTECTING INVESTORS AND COMPANIES. BUT THERE ARE ALSO EXAMPLES WHERE THERE IS REAL UTILITY. THE WAY WE ARE USING XRP TO SOLVE A PAYMENTS PROBLEM WHERE WE'RE MAKING PAYMENTS INSTANT, WE'RE MAKING PAYMENTS CERTAIN. Garlinghouse on XRP: I THINK ABOUT IT SOMETIMES AS YOU KNOW, 100 YEARS AGO THE COMMODITY OIL HAD VERY LITTLE VALUE. ALONG COMES THE COMBUSTION ENGINE THAT DROVE DEMAND AND PRODUCT OF OIL, AND NOW ALL OF A SUDDEN WE HAVE A VERY OBVIOUSLY VERY LARGE AND ROBUST ECOSYSTEM AROUND OIL AS A COMMODITY. SO I THINK WHAT WE ARE DOING AS RIPPLE AND OTHER COMPANIES ARE DOING ON THE XRP ECOSYSTEM, BECAUSE IT IS THE MOST EFFICIENT DIGITAL ASSET IT'S 1,000 TIMES CHEAPER PER TRANSACTION THAN BITCOIN, IT'S 1,000 TIMES FASTER THAN BITCOIN PER TRANSACTION, YOU'RE SEEING MORE AND MORE PEOPLE GETTING ON BOARD TO USE THAT TO SOLVE VARIOUS PROBLEMS THAT CAN BE SOLVED THROUGH BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES. RANDY FREER, HULU CEO ON CNBC'S "POWER LUNCH" Video from interview: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/05/30/hulu-ceo-original-content.html?play=1. Freer on the Hulu Package: WHAT PEOPLE LOSE SIGHT OF FOR US, IN THE $39.99 PACKAGE, YOU GET LIVE TV PLUS YOU GET THE ENTIRE HULU ON-DEMAND SERVICE, SO THAT'S 75,000 HOURS SORRY 75,000 EPISODES OF TELEVISION, IT'S ORIGINAL PROGRAMMING, IT'S SHORT FORM, IT'S ALL OF THE THINGS THAT PEOPLE LOVE. IT'S CURRENT TELEVISION. SO WHEN YOU LOOK AT THAT PACKAGE, AND WE DO A BETTER JOB OF REALLY PROMOTING AND REALLY GETTING IT OUT THERE, I THINK WE'RE GOING TO SEE THAT TICK UP AND WE'LL DO GREAT AGAINST OTHERS IN THE MARKETPLACE. Freer on Competition: WELL, IT'S NOT ABOUT HOW MUCH YOU SPEND ON ORIGINAL. IT'S ABOUT HOW YOU TELL STORIES, HOW YOU PICK THOSE STORIES, WHAT THEN BECOMES CULTURALLY RELEVANT, HOW YOU GIVE THOSE STORIES TIME TO BREATHE AND MAKE IT WORK. WE'VE BEEN BLESSED AND LUCKY TO HAVE YOU KNOW, "HANDMAID'S TAIL," WHICH WAS THERE LONG BEFORE I WAS. SO THAT'S BEEN AWESOME IN THE PROCESS. WE'RE REALLY EXCITED ABOUT "CASTLEROCK," WHICH IS J.J. ABRAMS AND STEVEN KING COMING UP. SO WE'RE HAPPY TO COMPETE WITH ANYONE. Freer on Ownership: IF WE DO EVERYTHING WE CAN DO, EACH AND EVERY DAY TO MAKE HULU BETTER FOR OUR CUSTOMERS, WE DRIVE SUBSCRIBERS, WHEN ALL OF THIS SHAKES OUT, HOW EVER IT ALL SHAKES OUT, WE'LL BE IN A GREAT POSITION TO HELP THAT MAJORITY OWNER DRIVE THEIR BUSINESS AS WELL. SO I THINK WE'RE REALLY FOCUSED ON MAKING SURE HULU IS THE BEST PRODUCT POSSIBLE. Freer on Roseanne: I THINK YOU HAVE TO LOOK AT EACH ONE AS AN INDIVIDUAL INCIDENT AND TRY AND MAKE THE BEST JUDGEMENT, BOTH FOR THE VALUES OF YOUR COMPANY, AND FOR THE PEOPLE IT EFFECTS, AND FOR OBVIOUSLY FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS ACROSS THE BOARD. BUT THESE ARE THESE ARE HARD DECISIONS AND SOMETIMES THEY'RE HARD DECISIONS AND SOMETIMES I THINK THEYRE PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD. I THINK YOU KNOW, ABC AND DISNEY, THIS ONE WAS PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD, AND THEY ACTED SWIFTLY, AND WE WERE YOU KNOW, THERE TO SUPPPORTING IN PART OF THAT PROCESS. ROGER LYNCH, PANDORA CEO ON CNBC'S "CLOSING BELL" Video from interview: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/05/30/pandora-ceo-weve-weathered-lots-of-competition-and-are-still-number-one.html?play=1. Lynch on Family Plans: IT'S YOU KNOW IT'S THE FASTEST GROWING PART OF THE BUSINESS. AND EACH OF THE LAST FEW QUARTERS YOU KNOW, GREW OVER 60%. BUT FRANKLY WE WERE MISING ONE OF THE BIG OPPORTUNITIES WHICH IS THESE FAMILY PLANS. SO WHAT WE JUST ANNOUNCED IS A NEW FAMILY PLAN SERVICE THAT UP TO SIX MEMBERS OF YOUR FAMILY CAN SHARE FOR 15 DOLLARS, IT'S FANTASTIC VALUE. Lynch on Crowded Music Space: YOU KNOW, I MEAN MUSIC HAS BEEN A CROWDED SPACE FOR A WHILE. AND GOOGLE THEY HAVE A NEW SERVICE THROUGH YOUTUBE, BUT THEY'VE HAD A MUSIC SERVICE THROUGH GOOGLE FOR QUITE A WHILE. PANDORA REMAINS THE LARGEST MUSIC STREAMING SERVICE IN THE U.S. BY A LONG WAY. AND SO PANDORA HAS HAD TO WEATHER LOTS OF COMPETITION THAT'S ENTERED INTO MARKET ALREADY AND STILL REMAINS NUMBER ONE. Lynch on Extreme Artists: JULIA BOORSTIN: WILL YOU PULL BACK ON PROMOTING ARTISTS LIKE R. KELLY? LYNCH: SO WE DON'T TALK ABOUT SPECIFIC ARTISTS AND HOW WE APPLY IT. BUT WE HAVE HAD A POLICY WHERE WE DON'T PROMOTE MUSIC FOR -- WHEN WE SEE EXTREME BEHAVIOR. THAT DOESN'T MEAN WE TAKE IT OFF THE SERVICE -- BOORSTIN: SO DOES THAT MEAN YOU'RE NOT INCLUDING R. KELLY SONGS IN YOUR PLAYLIST OR YOU'RE NOT MIXING IT IN? LYNCH: NO YEAH, ON THE PROMOTED PLAYLISTS WHERE WE ARE ACTUALLY PROMOTING MUSIC, AS OPPOSED TO -- THERE'S A DISTINCTION BETWEEN WHAT YOU PROMOTE AND WHAT'S AVAILABLE ON THE SERVICE. BOORSTIN:: SO HOW DO YOU MAKE THOSE DECISIONS? WHAT DEFINES THOSE THOSE CALLS? LYNCH: IT'S DONE ON A CASE-BY-CASE BASIS. OBVIOUSLY, YOU KNOW, WITHIN MUSIC, UNFORTUNATELY THERE'S LOTS OF CASES LIKE THIS. AND SO THERE'S NO BLANKET RULE YOU CAN APPLY. For more information contact: Jennifer Dauble CNBC t: 201.735.4721 m: 201.615.2787 e: jennifer.dauble@nbcuni.com Emma Martin CNBC t: 201.735.4713 m: 551.275.6221 e: emma.martin@nbcuni.com A Delta Airlines plane John Greim | LightRocket | Getty Images Oil prices at $70 and even as high as $90 a barrel are a "sweet spot" for the industry because "it causes people to think" before flooding the market with more seats, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said at a conference on Wednesday. Like its competitors, the second-largest U.S. airline is paying more to fuel its planes during the busiest season of the year, when cutting back on flying is out of the question. Airlines have increased capacity between the U.S. and abroad 4.3 percent in the May-July period from a year earlier, according to Planestats.com, a site of consulting firm Oliver Wyman. Jet-fuel prices in the U.S. rose about 60 percent over the past 12 months to late May, according to S&P Global Platts. When oil prices fell to $30 a barrel two years ago "it created a lot of dysfunctional behavior," Bastian said, even though airlines were making money. U.S. airlines' net income peaked at more than $26 billion in 2015, the year after oil prices started to crater. Last year, in comparison, they brought in nearly $17 billion, according to the Department of Transportation. Delta and its large competitors are battling low-cost, long-haul airlines like Norwegian Air Shuttle, WOW Air and others that have expanded in recent years as costs to fuel planes plunged. Fuel generally represents the biggest expense for low-cost airlines. Bastian pointed to a nearly 15 percent uptick in its trans-Atlantic revenue in the first quarter and said it doesn't expect the business to be hurt by the new entrants. "Customers that travel on those ultra-low cost carriers are people that otherwise would not be flying," he said. Delta and American, as well as their partners in Europe, are trying their hand at a similar low-cost model, however, offering no-frills basic economy tickets this year, which charge passengers around $60 to check a bag. Bastian said it could take up to 12 months for higher fuel prices to show up in the airline's capacity or fares. WATCH: Delta plans non-stop flights to India for first time in decade A sign is seen at the entrance of the ExxonMobil Port Allen Lubricants Plant in Port Allen, Louisiana, November 6, 2015. Lee Celano | Reuters Exxon Mobil faced heat over worker rights and safety at its annual meeting on Wednesday but it prevailed against several shareholder demands. Shareholders voted against four resolutions, including a call for greater clarity around the oil giant's political lobbying activities. Union members had raised the concern, arguing that Exxon was implementing "complex and confusing" safety procedures aligned with a conservative group known for producing industry-friendly legislation. At the same meeting, shareholders approved executives' pay package, with nearly 73 percent of voters supporting the measure. More than 90 percent also voted to re-elect the members of the board. Shareholders should be concerned that core health and safety procedures seem to be weakened by our company. Ricky Brooks United Steel Workers Local 13-2001 president The failure of any single shareholder resolution to attract adequate support this year was a relief to Exxon, which last year failed to quell investors' demands that the company report regularly on how global climate change initiatives will affect its business. A shareholder resolution calling for the report passed last May after large institutional investors threw their support behind the measure. The vote came amid reports that Exxon downplayed the danger of global warming despite internal research that showed it was a major concern. However, a resolution proposed at this year's meeting by the United Steelworkers union and 25 co-filers asking Exxon to report annually on its lobbying expenses garnered the support of just over a quarter of voting shareholders. Employees speak out about safety shortfalls Ricky Brooks, president of USW Local 13-2001 in Baytown, Texas, said Exxon's membership in the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, raises safety concerns for its members. He claimed that ALEC, which drafts legislation that states and municipalities can adopt, seeks to water down workers rights and health and safety rules, as well as to roll back contracts and arbitration awards. "We see their impact in how our company is unilaterally implementing complex and confusing safety changes in Baytown," where Exxon operates a refinery, said Brooks, who works at the facility. "For decades, these safety practices have been mutually agreed upon to ensure workers' health and safety." "Shareholders should be concerned that core health and safety procedures seem to be weakened by our company," he said. Brooks said the lobbying report is necessary because publicly available government data is difficult to find and Exxon had failed to hold promised tutorials on the subject. In response, Exxon CEO Darren Woods, said the Baytown refinery is one of the safest in the company's circuit and around the world. However, another shareholder from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, complained that the company's system for reporting safety issues "penalizes and punishes and disciplines" employees who report incidents or injuries. He said the company's safety performance record likely does not accurately reflect the true number of workplace accidents because the current policy discourages workers from speaking up. "Your experience is very different than the philosophy of that system and how we've implemented it around the world," Woods said. In a statement to CNBC on Thursday, Exxon spokesman William Holbrook said, "Nothing is more important to our company than the safety of our employees, our contractors and the people who live and work around our operations. Safety is a core value for our company and we're committed to continuous improvement." He said Exxon's safety system "deliberately encourages workers to report [incidents and near-incidents] for the express purpose of learning and preventing reoccurrence." Resolutions on independent chair, diversity and shareholder rights also fail A resolution aimed at preventing Exxon's CEO from holding the role of chairman of the board once again failed this year after several previous attempts. However, with 38.7 percent of voters in favor of the measure, it garnered the highest support of the four shareholder proposals. The measure was put forward by the Kestrel Foundation and co-filed by Vermont's pension fund. Kenneth Steiner, a prolific filer of shareholder proposals, also put forward a measure that would allow shareholders with a 10-percent stake in the company to call for a special meeting without having to petition a judge. The proposal appeared geared toward giving shareholders greater say over board members. Just 36 percent of shareholders backed the proposal, down from 40 percent at last year's meeting. A representative for New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer and the New York City pension funds presented the final proposal, which asked Exxon to create a "diversity matrix" outlining each director's race, gender and ethnicity. Exxon, whose board is composed mostly of men and white people, argued that it already provided adequate information. Shareholders appeared to agree with Exxon. More than 83 percent voted down the measure. During the Q&A period, Julian Martinez, director of program development at the Hispanic training and education nonprofit SER National, noted that Exxon has no Latinos on its board and urged the company to address the lack of representation. WATCH: XOM raises its quarterly dividend Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have a testy history of disagreeing about the potential for artificial intelligence, with Zuckerberg as the optimist and Musk as the prophet of doom. But on Thursday in Paris at the Viva Technology conference, Zuckerberg ducked an opportunity to disagree with the Tesla and SpaceX boss, instead focusing on an area where the two tech titans have similar perspectives. "I actually think that recently, I have heard Elon making a lot of the same points on this that I have been trying to make for a long time," says Zuckerberg, responding to a question about Musk's vocal skepticism about the future of AI. "He has had a number of real incidents around car accidents. And he has had to deal with this issue, where you have a lot of AI critics who come out and say, 'Hey, is this too dangerous?'" says Zuckerberg. "And I think he is making a point that I really agree with on this, which is that, look, over the long term, if we can get to a state where we have good self-driving cars you know, one of the leading causes of people dying is car accidents and if we can get to a state where we have good self-driving cars, then that is going to potentially massively reduce one of the leading causes of death and is a very important humanitarian thing that needs to done," Zuckerberg says. Indeed, in May, the driver of a Tesla Model S had the car's semi-autonomous Autopilot mode engaged when she slammed in to the back of a fire truck in suburban Salt Lake City. The driver broke her foot. And in March, a Tesla Model X that was involved in a fatal car accident near Mountain View, Calif., had its Autopilot system activated. In fact Tuesday, days after Zuckerberg commented, a Tesla sedan in Autopilot mode crashed into a parked police cruiser in Laguna Beach, California. The Tesla driver "suffered minor injuries," according to a report from the Associated Press. And May 2018 report from the U.S. Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration projects that 37,150 people died in traffic crashes in 2017. (This projection is set to be revised as data continues to become available, the NHTSA says.) Facebook chief Zuckerberg did not specify which of Musk's comments he was referring to, but Musk recently tweeted his frustration with the media coverage of the Salt Lake City accident. It's super messed up that a Tesla crash resulting in a broken ankle is front page news and the ~40,000 people who died in US auto accidents alone in past year get almost no coverage What's actually amazing about this accident is that a Model S hit a fire truck at 60mph and the driver only broke an ankle. An impact at that speed usually results in severe injury or death. Musk acknowledged his Autopilot system needs to be improved, but he said using the system was safer than not. It certainly needs to be better & we work to improve it every day, but perfect is enemy of good. A system that, on balance, saves lives & reduces injuries should be released. It seemed to be that sentiment Zuckerberg was defending in Paris. "Now, are there going to be issues along the way? Of course there are. No technology comes out fully formed and we need the pioneers to be able to go work on this and take the issue seriously in order to be able to make forward progress and get to the state that we want," says Zuckerberg. "But the point that I have heard him make recently, which I really agree with and I have been trying to make for a while, is that we need to make sure that we don't get too negative on this stuff, because it is too easy for people to point to an individual failure of technology and try to use that as an argument to slow down progress." Zuckerberg says those who protest the implementation of artificial intelligence because of individual incidents during the developmental phase are getting in the way of important advancements. "Fundamentally, I just think AI is going to unlock so much good around helping to cure diseases, to keep people safe, to keep our communities safe. And I do think that if you want to be out there saying that we need to slow down progress on this, then I think if you are doing that, you need to own some of the responsibility that every day that goes by that we don't have cures for those diseases, or safer self-driving cars, you know, I don't know that that is necessarily doing the world a service," says Zuckerberg. "That's my own personal stance. I am very optimistic on this, but we need to take the issue seriously which I do think the industry is and make sure that we move forward towards this greater good." Zuckerberg's careful move to find common ground with Musk contrasts sharply with his language about Musk last summer. In July 2017, Zuckerberg hosted a Facebook live one Sunday afternoon while he was smoking meat in his backyard in Palo Alto, California. A user submitted a question, which Zuckerberg read out loud: "I watched a recent interview with Elon Musk and his largest fear for future was AI. What are your thoughts on AI and how it could affect the world?" Musk, earlier that month, had said that AI will cause massive job disruption, that robots "will be able to do everything better than us." He also said: "I have exposure to the most cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned by it. AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization." To that negative perspective, Zuckerberg had harsh words. "I have pretty strong opinions on this. I am optimistic," says Zuckerberg. "I think you can build things and the world gets better. But with AI especially, I am really optimistic. "And I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios I just, I don't understand it. It's really negative and in some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible," Zuckerberg said at the time. At the time, Musk clapped back, undercutting the Facebook chief's understanding of the full potential of artificial intelligence. "I've talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited," Musk tweeted at the time. See also: Facebook may have lost its customer trust, but it can turn things around, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told Jim Cramer on CNBC's "Mad Money" on Tuesday. "Today I talk to so many CEOs, and if I were to give them one piece of advice, it is there's nothing more important than trust that you have with your customers, with your employees, with your partners with all your key stakeholders. And that's a major transformation in business," Benioff said. "In today's world, you've got to have trust as your highest value." Benioff has been a big critic of Facebook in the past, saying that he thought social media should be regulated like cigarettes and sugar. The company has come under fire for the proliferation of fake news, election meddling and unauthorized usage of personal data. The situation is not unlike Uber, which over the past year has changed leadership after accusations of sexism, intellectual property theft and a massive data breach. Both companies have already taken steps to change course. Facebook has revamped its privacy and advertising settings, shut down fake accounts and audited outside apps, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has fielded hours of questions from regulators. Uber has also come to peace with its board and investors and is in the process of dealing with regulators. "When you lose trust with your customers like what we saw with Facebook well, then you've got to really work hard to build it back," Benioff said. "And, in that case, we have a crisis of trust. We saw that last year here in San Francisco with Uber, as well. These are companies that go through incredible crisis because they have to reboot their values. It's better to look at those values now, before you get to that point of crisis." Salesforce and Facebook do have at least one thing in common: They make tools that help marketers and advertisers reach new audiences. Nonetheless, Benioff comes out ahead of his peers, at least according to Comparably, which ranked him the best CEO in America thanks to his "consistent voice of company culture issues." "All of these companies and these CEOs, they could have a moment where they have to go, 'Wow, you know, I was an entrepreneur. Now I'm a leader. I have to move. I have to transform. I have to evolve. I have to go forward,'" Benioff said. "And that's an opportunity for every entrepreneur. They're not running a start-up anymore. They're running a huge company that's so important to the future of our industry, our country, our world. And sometimes it's a little bit of a difficult switch." James Murdoch, CEO of 21st Century Fox, speaking at the 2018 Code Conference. Asa Mathat | Vox Media Facebook looks "less like an ad business and more like an attack surface," James Murdoch, the CEO of 21st Century Fox, said at Recode's Code Conference this week. "You can have neo-Nazis or foreign governments or political actors or whatever [on the platform,]" Murdoch said at the conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. "It's easy to do. You can just buy people's accounts and buy their identities there are farms where you can do that right?... That doesn't seem great." Facebook is facing heightened scrutiny after widespread reports of abuse on its platform, including foreign election meddling and difficult-to-detect hate speech. "From a national security perspective, as well, you really worry about this kind of a platform and I hope that they're dealing with that as seriously as they say they are," Murdoch said. Facebook has upped its content review efforts and vowed to more effectively curtail abuse surrounding elections. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said at Code the company didn't properly anticipate all the ways in which bad actors could abuse the service. But Facebook's top executives have repeatedly said there will always be bad actors and dampening abuse will be a constant, ongoing battle. Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment on Murdoch's response. James Murdoch's father, Rupert Murdoch, is the CEO of News Corp and founder and chairman of 21st Century Fox, and has a rocky history with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Earlier this year Rupert Murdoch said Facebook should have to pay news publishers for content. The Murdochs aren't immune to regulatory scrutiny and privacy concerns: James Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch both appeared before Parliament after their media company was accused of hacking the voicemails of crime victims, politicians, celebrities and veterans in search of stories. Still, Murdoch questioned the ad-based business model that Facebook has repeatedly defended. "Is engagement above all driving us to the lower common denominators just to have more clicks and more time?" Murdoch asked. "I think that's probably true." Murdoch, citing tech pioneer Jaron Lanier, said "a communication platform connecting billions of people where every single conversation is mediated by somebody spending money precisely to manipulate them" is bad for society. Fox is currently the subject of an acquisition bid by Disney, but Comcast is considering a rival all-cash bid. Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC. WATCH: Trump's 'fake news' fight a boon for media companies Rudy Giuliani Jabin Botsford | The Washington Post | Getty Images Two law firms linked to Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump's lawyer and longtime confidant, worked for a super PAC that employed controversial data-gathering firm Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 presidential election. The firms in question, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP and Greenberg Traurig LLP, provided legal consultation to the pro-Trump Make America Number 1 PAC throughout the 2016 election cycle, Federal Election Commission records show. Giuliani left Greenberg Traurig earlier this month, citing potential conflicts that come from him working as Trump's lawyer in the Russia probe. Longtime Giuliani associate Laurence Levy remains at the firm. Levy served four years as deputy counsel when Giuliani was mayor of New York and eventually followed him to both Bracewell and Greenberg Traurig. He also acted as chief counsel to the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee during the former NYC mayor's ill-fated 2008 run for the White House. Levy has ties to Rebekah Mercer, the eventual leader of Make America Number 1, an influential force behind the scenes of conservative politics and daughter of billionaire donor Robert Mercer. Four years ago, before the super PAC was formed, Levy gave Rebekah Mercer legal advice regarding Cambridge Analytica's potential involvement in U.S. campaign-related activities. Robert Mercer, meanwhile, played a critical part in the super PAC's formation, contributing $15 million to fund the committee. Giuliani told CNBC that neither the PAC nor the Mercers were his clients. "Not clients of mine," Giuliani said in a text message. "In any event the rules of ethics would prohibit comment," he added. When asked whether he and Levy had ever worked together, Giuliani answered: "Not on the matter you are asking about. Talk to him. Of course I don't reveal clients unless they want me to." A spokesman for Bracewell LLP, which changed its name after Giuliani left in January 2016, did not reply to repeated requests for comment. Levy also did not reply to multiple requests for comment. An influential super PAC is formed The PAC, first known as Keep the Promise I, was originally created in April 2015 to support Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz's run for president and was almost entirely funded by the Republican mega-donor Mercer. Eventually, the group would shift its allegiance to Trump and change its name to Make America Number 1. During its first year of its existence, the group turned to Bracewell & Giuliani LLP for legal and compliance services. The firm, for which Giuliani was a partner, specializes in white collar crime, among other subjects. While the super PAC paid Giuliani's firm, it also started paying data-collecting company Cambridge Analytica hundreds of thousands of dollars for "media-prepaid" services, according to Federal Election Commission records. The Mercer family was also behind Cambridge Analytica, which recently made headlines for its role in a data-collection scandal involving Facebook. An app harvested data from as many as 87 million Facebook profiles, and, according to a whistleblower, that data was then sold to Cambridge Analytica. The firm then used the data to develop profiles of voter and deliver to them pro-Trump material. It shut down earlier this month, claiming that negative media coverage drove away clients. Cambridge Analytica had denied wrongdoing. Levy's links to the Mercer family The Mercers' link to Giuliani's legal circle goes back to 2014, the year before the formation of Keep the Promise I. That year, Levy represented Rebekah Mercer; Steve Bannon, who would go on to lead Trump's campaign and serve as senior White House strategist; and Alexander Nix, then-CEO of Cambridge Analytica. Levy was working as an attorney for Bracewell & Giuliani as the PAC sought "guidance regarding the participation of Cambridge Analytica, LLP, a foreign corporation, and of foreign nationals in connection with United States elections for federal, state and local government office," according to a memo. Robert Mercer and Rebekah Mercer attend the 2017 TIME 100 Gala at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 25, 2017 in New York City. Patrick McMullan | Getty Images Levy concluded at the time that Nix, who is British, would have to recuse himself from any work the data-collecting company did when it came to U.S. elections. However, Levy said Bannon, a founder of the business, and Mercer, a major investor, could be involved in campaign activities. By the end of the 2016 election cycle, Bracewell & Giuliani were the PAC's top vendors, receiving $336,495 over a span of eight payments, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. A defining moment Giuliani left Bracewell for another law firm, Greenberg Traurig, in January 2016. Levy followed him there a month later. In May of that year, the PAC paid $99,470 to Greenberg Traurig. A month later, as Trump was on his way to clinching the GOP nomination, the PAC changed its name to Make America Number 1. "We do not comment on the types of matters you are asking about," a spokesman for Greenberg Traurig told CNBC. The defining moment for the relationship between Make America Number 1, Cambridge Analytica and attorneys at Greenberg Traurig came in the closing months of the 2016 election. The super PAC's leadership shifted from David Bossie, president of conservative think tank Citizens United, to Rebekah Mercer in September. In September, the PAC boosted payments to Cambridge Analytica for "campaign management consulting services," according to the FEC. The PAC shelled out $301,763 that month, and did the same in October. The PAC finished the election cycle paying Cambridge Analytica more than $5 million over 116 payments. October was also when voters became saturated with political ads as the campaign hit a fever pitch, the pro-Trump Make America Number 1 released an ad alleging that Clinton paid her female staffers less then male staffers. After Trump won, Rebekah Mercer joined his presidential transition's executive team, a group that helped advise President-elect Trump on his potential Cabinet picks. A spokeswoman for Mercer did not return requests for comment. Legal scrutiny for Make America Number 1 In October 2016, Campaign Legal Center, the nonpartisan election law advocacy group, named the PAC in an FEC complaint. The watchdogs claimed that Make America Number 1 broke FEC regulations by directly coordinating with the Trump campaign. Also that month, Greenberg Traurig received $41,000 for legal services from the PAC and then another $55,000 in December. The FEC case is still unresolved. "As a provision of federal campaign finance law requires that any Commission action on an enforcement matter be kept strictly confidential until the case is resolved," a spokesman for the FEC said. "When a matter has closed, redacted files are made available to the public within 30 days after the parties involved have been notified that the entire matter has been closed." In March of this year, another nonpartisan group, Common Cause, called on the Department of Justice and the FEC to investigate whether Cambridge Analytica's work for the Trump campaign broke any laws on foreign interference in the U.S. election. Neither of these complaints have led to official conclusions by the federal agencies. Yet legal experts say that a PAC could hire a firm like Greenberg Traurig if it is concerned about being under legal scrutiny for working with a company like Cambridge Analytica. "I can imagine that if a super PACs got a subpoena or they were worried they would get one, they would hire legal counsel right away," John Coffee, professor at Columbia Law School told CNBC. "They aren't a publicly traded company so they don't have to announce it. They might want to retain a firm because the Federal Election Commission may have asked them to produce records." There is no immediate indication that the PAC engaged in any wrongdoing. WATCH: Trump considered benching Giuliani from doing TV interviews Roger Newport, chief executive officer of AK Steel Holding Corp., listens during a press conference following a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and steel and aluminum executives at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, March 1, 2018. Profitability at parts of AK Steel remains limited, according to Goldman Sachs, despite support from President Donald Trump's aggressive tariffs on foreign steel. The bank downgraded shares to sell from neutral on Wednesday citing increased competition within its core automotive U.S. business . "AK Steel shares are now trading below their level from early November 2016, having given back the gains made with the election of President Trump in November 2016, the initial run-up of the current cycle in domestic steel prices starting in November 2017, and the Department of Commerce announcement in February 2018 of more stringent-than-expected recommended Section 232 remedies," Goldman analyst Matthew Korn wrote Tuesday. "Now, with our updated estimates reflecting lower forecasts for realized pricing and profitability, the risk/reward for AK Steel looks unfavorable," he added. Shares of AK Steel fell more than 2 percent in premarket trading following the Goldman Sachs note. Shares of the nation's major steel producers have gyrated in recent months, rising and falling on the nuances of the Trump administration's pursuit of tariffs on imports of steel. The White House's decision to push back the tariff deadline in early May, for example, sent shares of rivals U.S. Steel and Nucor down 6 percent and 2 percent respectively. Hoping to address creeping doubts over the future of the taxes, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last week that U.S. tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum imports a key target of the original policy will stay in place even as the administration suspends separate tariffs on Chinese goods. "As it relates to China, the steel and aluminum tariffs will remain enforced," he said. "Those were not part of our discussions. We were merely focused on the proposed $150 billion." "Those are not being touched," he added. Notwithstanding the assurance from Mnuchin, AK Steel's stock price, which rallied more than 60 percent in the months immediately following President Trump's election, has tumbled back to their pre-election levels above $4. With weaker-than-expected quarterly guidance on pricing and profits, Goldman Sachs believes the stocks could sink further. Analyst Korn cut his 12-month price forecast for the company to $4 from $6, implying 9.5 percent downside from Tuesday's close. Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said the FBI has used proper methods in its ongoing probe of potential Russian links to the Trump campaign, a rebuke to President Donald Trump's recent rhetoric that a "spy" had been embedded in his campaign "for political purposes." Gowdy, who is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a leading player on the House Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday night that his view of the FBI was only strengthened after a briefing on Thursday with intelligence officials. "I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do," Gowdy said in a Fox News interview. "It has nothing to do with Donald Trump." Gowdy was among the congressional Republicans invited to a briefing last week with Justice Department and intelligence community officials to discuss the FBI's use of the alleged informant. After being criticized for initially scheduling a single meeting without any Democrats present, the White House added another briefing that included members of the opposition party. Trump has repeatedly claimed that a spy was placed in his campaign for "political purposes," an accusation for which no evidence is publicly available. Trump tweet Gowdy said the context for Trump's frustration is understandable, citing former Obama officials and Democrats in Congress whom he described as having beat the drums of collusion and impeachment for months. Gowdy made his name by targeting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in his role as one of the chief investigators in the probe over the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on U.S. officials in Benghazi, Libya. Today's classrooms are packed with technology, from tablet computers and widescreen televisions to interactive whiteboards. The last few years have also seen the development of massive open online courses, or MOOCS. Providers such as edX which was founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 offer free online courses from renowned institutions such as Columbia University and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The platform provides more than 1,900 courses and its users come from all over the world. As technology drives change in education, one of the sector's big players is looking to keep pace with developments and encourage innovation. "The digital medium gives us the opportunity to really take the education and learning experience to the next level," Albert Hitchcock, chief technology and operations officer for Pearson Education, told CNBC in an interview broadcast earlier this week. "The technology, ultimately, will allow us to truly personalize the education experience in a way that both improves learning outcomes (and) shortens the learning time." Hitchcock added that technology would give Pearson the ability to deliver learning at any time and in any place around the world. At Pearson, Hitchcock set out the vision behind the company's efforts to develop a global learning platform, explaining that the idea was to "basically create a model that a lot of the other digital native companies have already employed." "We're all familiar with the use of Amazon for retail Netflix for TV and movies, Spotify for music," he said. "Those companies have sort of transformed their sector. The opportunity for us is to create that global platform that will deliver all of our courseware and experiences around the world, and to take that learning experience to the next level." Machine-learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are at the core of the platform. "It's a complete multi-device agnostic platform so we can deliver content to any device anywhere in the world," Hitchcock said. "And it's also going to allow us to personalize the experience to the student, but also give the institution, and the teaching faculty, access to how the student is responding to that experience." Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook. For the first time since World War II, Italian populists are on the brink of securing an unprecedented popular mandate to govern the country. Itay's economy, the euro zone's third-largest, has been anemic for a long time. That's been a significant concern for the EU as well as global markets more broadly. Italy has been plunged back into crisis mode after several weeks of protracted negotiations between anti-establishment groups ultimately failed to produce a new coalition government. Italy is embroiled in a dramatic power struggle between euroskeptic populists and pro-EU establishment lawmakers. The country has been plunged back into crisis mode after several weeks of protracted negotiations between anti-establishment groups ultimately failed to produce a new coalition government. As a result, Italy is back to square one. What happened? Italy has been without a government since an election in early March resulted in a hung parliament. While there was no outright winner, the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) secured the largest chunk of the vote and soon sought to join forces with the far-right Lega (League) group in an effort to set Italy on a path toward forming a new coalition government. However, government talks broke down over the weekend after the surprise resignation of Giuseppe Conte, a little-known law professor that M5S and Lega had selected as the country's next prime minister. Conte officially stepped down Sunday, following President Sergio Mattarella's decision to reject the parties' controversial choice for economy minister. How did we get here? Italy's head of state, who was installed by a previous pro-EU government, refused to accept the nomination of euroskeptic candidate Paolo Savona for economy minister. Instead, he set the country on course for another snap vote by appointing former International Monetary Fund (IMF) official Carlo Cottarelli as interim prime minister. Cottarelli, who became known as "Mr. Scissors" for his reputation regarding cuts to public spending in Italy, is now tasked with the planning of fresh elections and passing the next budget. Luigi Di Maio, Five-Star Movement (M5S) leader, addresses the media after a new round of consultations, with Italian President Sergio Mattarella, for the formation of the new government at the Quirinale Palace in Rome, Italy. Giuseppe Ciccia | Pacific Press | LightRocket via Getty Images The decision to appoint Cottarelli to form a temporary administration prompted M5S and League to switch back to campaign mode. It also triggered Luigi Di Maio of M5S to call for Mattarella to face impeachment charges, as he claimed Italy's president had betrayed the Italian electorate by blocking Savona's nomination. Nonetheless, Di Maio has since walked back his plea for such drastic measures, amid an apparent lack of support from Lega leader Matteo Salvini. What makes this a crisis? Itay's economy, the euro zone's third-largest, has been anemic for a long time. That's been a significant concern for the EU as well as global markets more broadly. "If you just look at the economic fundamentals of Italy, they are worrying," Mouhammed Choukeir, chief investment officer at private bank Kleinwort Hambros, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" Tuesday. "It is one of the biggest indebted countries in the world it's got an unemployment rate of 11 percent and its economy is still lower than where it was in 2007, whereas most major economies have recovered. So, clearly there is a requirement for structural reform here in order to regain confidence," he added. Meanwhile, the looming prospect of a snap vote continued to rattle financial markets Wednesday, amid renewed fears a forthcoming election campaign could be fought over the country's role in the European Union and the euro zone. Italy's deepening political turmoil has also prompted some analysts to sound the alarm over signs of market "contagion," with countries such as Spain and Portugal thought to be potentially exposed though so far the risk is seen to be somewhat limited. Why is this Italian crisis unique? Italy is certainly no stranger to political turmoil, but the ongoing stand-off constitutes new territory for the country. For the first time since World War II, Italian populists are on the brink of securing an unprecedented popular mandate to govern the country. Yet, for some, Italy's current political convulsions can be traced back to one key moment in 2016. "Italian politics has been our top political risk in Europe ever since then-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi started to lose support in mid-2016 for his ill-fated constitutional referendum," Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg, said in a research note published Tuesday. Matteo Renzi, Italy's prime minister, pauses at a news conference following the constitutional reform referendum results in Rome, Italy, on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin met over the weekend in Russia to discuss disputed Pacific islands and potential economic cooperation. It was the two leaders' 21st meeting, but Russia-Japan discussions remain gridlocked, and there is little confidence that upcoming meetings could improve the situation, according to one expert. "From what we've just seen at the summit in Moscow, there's very little progress that has been made. I think these efforts from Abe have not managed to create any progress yet. There's little reason to think that anything will change with subsequent meetings," James Brown, an associate professor of political science at Temple University in Japan, told CNBC's "Street Signs" on Monday. Territorial disputes over the South Kuril Islands have long been a source of contention between Japan and Russia. Since Soviet forces occupied the islands in 1945, the two countries have not signed a peace treaty. "The problem is that the Japanese side wants territorial concessions and their deals are always very difficult because, quintessentially, territorial issues are a zero-sum game." Despite the conflict, Japan has in recent years attempted to strengthen political and economic relations with Russia. But such efforts are quickly losing momentum as Russia faces increasing international isolation due to multiple factors. Perhaps a more promising opportunity for the two countries to find common ground lies in the ongoing efforts to denuclearize North Korea. In fact, both countries are on the outside of discussions about the proposed summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Because of that, potential decisions reached at the meeting could leave out Russian and Japanese interests, Brown said. "With the increase in diplomatic activity on the Peninsula, there are some increased commonalities between Japan and Russia and the reason for this is, I think, that the both of them feel a bit left out," Brown said. The longer-term outlook for London remains positive despite the uncertainty surrounding Brexit, according to global consulting firm A.T. Kearney's 2018 Global Cities Report. London is "still very solid" in terms of business activity, cultural experience and its ability to attract top talent, said Olivier Gergele, consumer industries and retail practice partner at the firm. Speaking with CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday, Gergele acknowledged that Brexit could have an impact to a "certain extent" but said a city such as London has "very strong foundations" for the longer term. As a result, he said, there is "no reason" that London is not going to continue having a high ranking in the future and there is a need to differentiate between "short-term market volatility to the long-term basis, the long-term fundamentals" of cities. Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell says that as artificial intelligence infiltrates the workforce and robots start taking jobs, there is one clear way to make sure you stay relevant: "Be good at the things that the machine is not." Overall, he says, "I'm not an alarmist about A.I. I happen to think that there are so many things that we need people to do that are not being done right now," he tells organizational psychologist Adam Grant in the latest TED podcast episode of "WorkLife with Adam Grant." "Most of it involves communicating with them and empathizing with them and helping them out," Gladwell says. "Some displacement in some areas is not the end of the world." Most Americans seem to agree with Gladwell. About half of U.S. workers aren't worried about robots eliminating their jobs within the next five or 20 years, according to a 2017 Gallup poll. Michael Cohen, personal lawyer to U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives at federal court in New York, U.S., on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. Avenatti responded to Cohen, saying he and his client "did not do anything improper relating to the release of any information concerning Mr. Cohen." Cohen's lawyer, Stephen Ryan, accused the porn star's representative, Michael Avenatti, of staging a "drive-by shooting of my client's rights" by releasing the information. An attorney for Michael Cohen , President Donald Trump 's personal lawyer, on Wednesday accused porn star Stormy Daniels ' attorney of an "intentional, malicious and prejudicial" release of Cohen's bank records. The comments were made in Avenatti's presence in Manhattan federal court, as part of a case currently sorting out which materials seized from Cohen in FBI raids last month are protected by attorney-client privilege. The judge in that case, Kimba Wood, adjourned the Wednesday hearing after setting a June 15 deadline for Cohen's team of lawyers to complete their review of the seized materials. If the lawyers miss that deadline, Wood said a separate group of government lawyers, known as a "taint team," will take over to review the remainder. Lawyers for Cohen said that about 3.7 million files in total needed to be evaluated for privilege status, and that they had thus far reviewed about 1.3 million of them. Avenatti, a California-based lawyer, is attempting to represent Daniels in the New York case involving Cohen. Lawyers for Cohen have argued that Wood should not permit Avenatti to intervene in this instance. Ryan, in opposing Avenatti's request for admission, noted the lawyer has made 170 media appearances in recent months. Cohen appeared in court Wednesday, though he said nothing during the proceeding aside from inaudible whispers to his lawyers. Earlier in May, Avenatti published a report alleging payments made to Cohen's company, Essential Consultants, from large corporations including telecommunications giant AT&T and drug company Novartis, among others. Those companies both said in subsequent statements that they paid Cohen's company. Lawyers for Cohen had questioned in a previous court filing how Avenatti could have obtained the information, which appeared to be drawn from bank records known as "suspicious activity reports." "Mr. Avenatti has published some information that appears to be from Mr. Cohen's actual bank records, and Mr. Cohen has no reason to believe that Mr. Avenatti is in lawful possession of these records," the filing said. Ryan, in court on Wednesday, called Avenatti's conduct reckless, intentional and malicious. "I've never seen an attorney conduct himself the way Mr. Avenatti conducted himself," Ryan said. "What Mr. Avenatti did in releasing those records was entirely improper," he added. WASHINGTON Fei-Fei Li is among the brightest stars in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, somehow managing to hold down two demanding jobs simultaneously: head of Stanford Universitys A.I. lab and chief scientist for A.I. at Google Cloud, one of the search giants most promising enterprises. Yet last September, when nervous company officials discussed how to speak publicly about Googles first major A.I. contract with the Pentagon, Dr. Li strongly advised shunning those two potent letters. Avoid at ALL COSTS any mention or implication of AI, she wrote in an email to colleagues reviewed by The New York Times. Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google. Dr. Lis concern about the implications of military contracts for Google has proved prescient. The companys relationship with the Defense Department since it won a share of the contract for the Maven program, which uses artificial intelligence to interpret video images and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes, has touched off an existential crisis, according to emails and documents reviewed by The Times as well as interviews with about a dozen current and former Google employees. It has fractured Googles work force, fueled heated staff meetings and internal exchanges, and prompted some employees to resign. The dispute has caused grief for some senior Google officials, including Dr. Li, as they try to straddle the gap between scientists with deep moral objections and salespeople salivating over defense contracts. More from The New York Times: Uber's exit from Southeast Asia upsets regulators and drivers The next privacy battle in Europe is over this new law F.B.I.'s urgent request: Reboot your router to stop Russia-linked malware The advertising model behind Googles spectacular growth has provoked criticism that it invades web users privacy and supports dubious websites, including those peddling false news. Now the companys path to future growth, via cloud-computing services, has divided the company over its stand on weaponry. To proceed with big defense contracts could drive away brainy experts in artificial intelligence; to reject such work would deprive it of a potentially huge business. The internal debate over Maven, viewed by both supporters and opponents as opening the door to much bigger defense contracts, generated a petition signed by about 4,000 employees who demanded a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology. Executives at DeepMind, an A.I. pioneer based in London that Google acquired in 2014, have said they are completely opposed to military and surveillance work, and employees at the lab have protested the contract. The acquisition agreement between the two companies said DeepMind technology would never be used for military or surveillance purposes. About a dozen Google employees have resigned over the issue, which was first reported by Gizmodo. One departing engineer petitioned to rename a conference room after Clara Immerwahr, a German chemist who killed herself in 1915 after protesting the use of science in warfare. And Do the Right Thing stickers have appeared in Googles New York City offices, according to company emails viewed by The Times. Those emails and other internal documents, shared by an employee who opposes Pentagon contracts, show that at least some Google executives anticipated the dissent and negative publicity. But other employees, noting that rivals like Microsoft and Amazon were enthusiastically pursuing lucrative Pentagon work, concluded that such projects were crucial to the companys growth and nothing to be ashamed of. Many tech companies have sought military business without roiling their work forces. But Googles roots and self-image are different. We have kind of a mantra of dont be evil, which is to do the best things that we know how for our users, for our customers and for everyone, Larry Page told Peter Jennings in 2004, when ABC News named Mr. Page and his Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, People of the Year. The clash inside Google was sparked by the possibility that the Maven work might be used for lethal drone targeting. And the discussion is made more urgent by the fact that artificial intelligence, one of Googles strengths, is expected to play an increasingly central role in warfare. Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, made a much-publicized visit to Google in August shortly after stopping in at Amazon and called for closer cooperation with tech companies. I see many of the greatest advances out here on the West Coast in private industry, he said. Dr. Lis comments were part of an email exchange started by Scott Frohman, Googles head of defense and intelligence sales. Under the header Communications/PR Request URGENT, Mr. Frohman noted that the Maven contract award was imminent and asked for direction on the burning question of how to present it to the public. A number of colleagues weighed in, but generally they deferred to Dr. Li, who was born in China, immigrated to New Jersey with her parents as a 16-year-old who spoke no English and has climbed to the top of the tech world. Dr. Li said in the email that the final decision would be made by her boss, Diane Greene, the chief executive of Google Cloud. But Dr. Li thought the company should publicize its share of the Maven contract as a big win for GCP, Google Cloud Platform. She also advised being super careful in framing the project, noting that she had been speaking publicly on the theme of Humanistic A.I., a topic she would address in a March op-ed for The Times. I dont know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry, she wrote in the email. Asked about her September email, Dr. Li issued a statement: I believe in human-centered AI to benefit people in positive and benevolent ways. It is deeply against my principles to work on any project that I think is to weaponize AI. As it turned out, the company did not publicize Maven. The companys work as a subcontractor came to public attention only when employees opposed to it began protesting on Googles robust internal communications platforms. The company promised employees that it would produce a set of principles to guide its choices in the ethical minefield of defense and intelligence contracting. Google told The Times on Tuesday that the new artificial intelligence principles under development precluded the use of A.I. in weaponry. But it was unclear how such a prohibition would be applied in practice. At a companywide meeting last Thursday, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, said Google wanted to come up with guidelines that stood the test of time, employees said. Employees say they expect the principles to be announced inside Google in the next few weeks. The polarized debate about Google and the military may leave out some nuances. Better analysis of drone imagery could reduce civilian casualties by improving operators ability to find and recognize terrorists. The Defense Department will hardly abandon its advance into artificial intelligence if Google bows out. And military experts say China and other developed countries are already investing heavily in A.I. for defense. But skilled technologists who chose Google for its embrace of benign and altruistic goals are appalled that their employer could eventually be associated with more efficient ways to kill. Googles unusual culture is reflected in its company message boards and internal social media platforms, which encourage employees to speak out on everything from Googles cafeteria food to its diversity initiatives. But even within this free-expression workplace, longtime employees said, the Maven project has roiled Google beyond anything in recent memory. When news of the deal leaked out internally, Ms. Greene spoke at the weekly companywide T.G.I.F. meeting. She explained that the system was not for lethal purposes and that it was a relatively small deal worth only $9 million, according to two people familiar with the meeting. That did little to tamp down the anger, and Google, according to the invitation email, decided to hold a discussion on April 11 representing a spectrum of viewpoints involving Ms. Greene; Meredith Whittaker, a Google A.I. researcher who is a leader in the anti-Maven movement; and Vint Cerf, a Google vice president who is considered one of the fathers of the internet for his pioneering technology work at the Defense Department. Because there was so much interest, the group debated the topic three times over one day for Google employees watching on video in different regions around the world. According to employees who watched the discussion, Ms. Greene held firm that Maven was not using A.I. for offensive purposes, while Ms. Whittaker argued that it was hard to draw a line on how the technology would be used. Last Thursday, Mr. Brin, the companys co-founder, responded to a question at a companywide meeting about Googles work on Maven. According to two Google employees, Mr. Brin said he understood the controversy and had discussed the matter extensively with Mr. Page and Mr. Pichai. However, he said he thought that it was better for peace if the worlds militaries were intertwined with international organizations like Google rather than working solely with nationalistic defense contractors. Google and its parent company, Alphabet, employ many of the worlds top artificial intelligence researchers. Some researchers work inside an A.I. lab called Google Brain in Mountain View, Calif., and others are spread across separate groups, including the cloud computing business overseen by Ms. Greene, who is also an Alphabet board member. Many of these researchers have recently arrived from the world of academia, and some retain professorships. They include Geoff Hinton, a Briton who helps oversee the Brain lab in Toronto and has been open about his reluctance to work for the United States government. In the late 1980s, Mr. Hinton left the United States for Canada in part because he was reluctant to take funding from the Department of Defense. Jeff Dean, one of Googles longest-serving and most revered employees, who now oversees all A.I. work at the company, said at a conference for developers this month that he had signed a letter opposing the use of so-called machine learning for autonomous weapons, which would identify targets and fire without a human pulling the trigger. DeepMind, the London A.I. lab, is widely considered to be the most important collection of A.I. talent in the world. It now operates as a separate Alphabet company, though the lines between Google and DeepMind are blurred. DeepMinds founders have long warned about the dangers of A.I. systems. At least one of the labs founders, Mustafa Suleyman, has been involved in policy discussions involving Project Maven with the Google leadership, including Mr. Pichai, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Certainly, any chance that Google could move quietly into defense work with no public attention is gone. Nor has Dr. Lis hope to keep A.I. out of the debate proved realistic. We can steer the conversation about cloud, Aileen Black, a Google executive in Washington, cautioned Dr. Li in the September exchange, but this is an AI specific award. She added, I think we need to get ahead of this before it gets framed for us. Polaris Industries is moving into the boating market with the acquisition of Boat Holdings, a company Polaris CEO and Chairman Scott Wine referred to as a "great business." "They've managed their capital so well that even in a downturn this thing returns very strong financials for us," Wine told CNBC on "Power Lunch" on Wednesday. Boat Holdings, the largest manufacturer of pontoon boats in the U.S., generated approximately $560 million in sales last year. Polaris Industries a Medina, Minnesota-based manufacturer of snowmobiles, off-road vehicles and motorcycles with a market cap of about $7 billion agreed to acquire Boat Holdings in an $805 million all-cash deal. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018. Wine said one of the things that attracted Polaris to Boat Holdings was that the company doesn't "perform quite as cyclical as the boat or RV industry." "Boat Holdings expands Polaris' footprint in the recreational outdoors market, commanding more of consumers' discretionary spending," Wine said in a statement. Strong consumer sentiment, increased traffic in dealerships and tax cuts that benefited consumers are all signs of future growth for the company, Wine told CNBC. Shares of Polaris Industries declined Wednesday after the announcement, but are up more than 30 percent year to date. Correction: Polaris Industries is based in Medina, Minnesota. An earlier version misstated its location. The CEO of retailer PVH is a little more optimistic these days about the ongoing tariff rhetoric between the United States and China. In an interview with CNBC's "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer on Wednesday, Manny Chirico said, "It feels like cooler heads will prevail." On Tuesday, the Trump administration said it will continue pursuing trade action on China. By June 15, the U.S. will release a list of about $50 billion worth of Chinese goods that will be subject to a 25 percent tariff, the White House said in a statement. The announcement comes days after Washington and Beijing announced a tentative solution to their dispute, which eased concerns about a possible trade war. The escalating trade war between the two nations saw President Donald Trump threaten to impose tariffs on up to $150 billion on Chinese goods, while China warned of equal retaliation. Chirico said it feels like the tariff threats are "negotiating positions that will work their way through." Apparel retailers are among those who have complained that U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods would result in higher consumer costs. Chirico said it is clear that China needs to make changes to open up its market and the issue surrounding the theft of intellectual property needs to be addressed. However, "I don't think you really want to disrupt everyone's supply chains coming out of Asia as we go forward." That said, he added, "I feel much better today than I did two or three months ago." PVH, which is the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, reported earnings on Wednesday that beat expectations. As the founder of the world's largest hedge fund, Ray Dalio is successful by any standard. He took his company, Bridgewater Associates, from an operation running out of his two-bedroom New York apartment and turned it into a firm managing about $160 billion in assets making him a billionaire along the way. To succeed like he did, there are two bad habits you need to nip in the bud, Dalio says in "Principles for Success," an animated video series based on his book "Principles: Life & Work." Tweet Both habits have to do with self-awareness, and they are problems anyone can fix. 1. Listening to your ego The first bad habit is believing you are always correct. "Because our need to be right can be more important than our need to find out what is true, we like to believe our own opinions without properly stress-testing them," Dalio says, meaning to offer up an idea for dispute by others. "We especially don't like to look at our mistakes and weaknesses." When our ideas and opinions are questioned, the natural reaction is to be defensive and angry. But that doesn't mean it's the right reaction. "This leads to our making inferior decisions, learning less, and falling short of our potentials," Dalio explains. To avoid this pitfall, he suggests viewing criticism as helpful feedback instead of as an attack. It's something the billionaire himself practices. For example, when Dalio received a harshly critical email about his performance during a meeting from a junior employee, he passed it along to all of Bridgewater. The email, which Dalio shared at a Ted Talk, read: Ray - you deserve a "D-" for your performance today in the meeting ... you did not prepare at all because there is no way you could have and been that disorganized. In the future, I/we would ask you to take some time and prepare and maybe even I should come up and start talking to you to get you warmed up or something but we can't let this happen again. If you in any way think my view is wrong, please ask the others or we can talk about it. "Isn't that great?" Dalio said to the Ted Talk crowd about the email. "It's great because I need feedback like that," he continued. "And it's great because if I don't let Jim and people like Jim express their points of view, our relationship wouldn't be the same." 2. Not realizing your blind spots "The blind-spot barrier is when a person believes he or she can see everything," Dalio explains in a "Principles for Success" video. And that mentality is a mistake: "It is a simple fact no one alone can see a complete picture of reality," he adds. Since people have varying strengths and weaknesses, Dalio says, the best outcomes are created with a wide range of perspectives. "While some people are better at seeing the big picture, others excel at seeing details," he continues. "Some are linear thinkers, and others are more lateral. While some are creative but not reliable, others are reliable but not creative." Organizational psychologist and Wharton professor Adam Grant agrees that sourcing a variety of opinions even those you disagree with improves idea generation. "Evidence shows that minority opinions improve decision-making even when they are incorrect," Grant tells CNBC Make It. "Your probability of making a smart decision or coming up with a creative solution to a problem actually goes up, and the reason for that is that dissenting opinions force us to reexamine our criteria, to reconsider our processes and all the options available. Instead of leading to convergent thinking they stimulate divergent thinking and really increase diversity of thought." MILAN, May 30 (Reuters) - Italian utility Enel and its Spanish peer Iberdrola have until the end of Wednesday to present improved bids for Eletropaulo, the Brazilian power grid operator said, citing the country's market regulator. Eletropaulo Metropolitana Eletricidade de Sao Paulo SA said it had received a letter from Brazilian market watchdog CVM on Tuesday setting the May 30 deadline for best bids and confirming June 4 as auction date. Brazil's biggest power distributor became one of the world's most prized power assets last month when Enel and Iberdrola locked horns in a country both see as key to expansion. But a row over the procedural terms of the bid has delayed the process. Enel offered 32.20 Brazilian reais a share in April, valuing Eletropaulo at 5.39 billion reais ($1.5 billion). The offer was above an Iberdrola bid of 32.10 a share which it made through its Brazilian subsidiary Neoenergia. A source close to the matter said bids on Wednesday were due in by 7 p.m. (2300 GMT) and would be opened after. The auction on June 4 was effectively the settlement date after Eletropaulo investors had decided what to do with their shares in the light of the bids, the source said. The Enel bid is dependent on 50 percent of Eletropaulo shareholders plus one accepting the offer. On Tuesday the board of Eletropaulo recommended its shareholders accept Enel's bid because it was higher but added it was open to modifying its opinion if bids changed. ($1 = 3.7256 reais) (Reporting by Stephen Jewkes Editing by David Holmes) BEIJING, May 30 (Reuters) - Trade frictions pose a risk for China's economy, an official from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Wednesday, when asked about the impact of the ongoing tensions with the United States. Trade tensions should be reduced, Alfred Schipke, senior resident representative at IMF, told reporters at a briefing in Beijing, and called for cooperation. (Reporting by Stella Qiu and Ryan Woo Editing by Shri Navaratnam) GUARULHOS, Brazil, May 30 (Reuters) - In a bunker-like room in a gritty suburb of Sao Paulo, retired police colonel Antonio Marin and a dozen employees track the location of hundreds of cargo trucks on a bank of monitors. During his 34 years in Sao Paulo state's military police, Marin took a gunshot to the thigh and spent two years guarding the governor. But his latest job at a private trucking firm may be his biggest challenge yet: protecting clothing, cosmetics and other merchandise amid a crime wave in Brazil that is reshaping the country's nascent e-commerce industry. Last year, 22,000 cargo robberies were reported in two states alone - Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro - home to the country's two largest cities. That is about 60 heists a day, a record figure that has almost doubled since 2012. Authorities blame criminal gangs preying on shipments. Losses are estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars annually. "You are always running a risk," said Marin, head of security for Braspress, one of the country's largest trucking and logistics firms. "It starts the moment you put cargo in the truck and travel across Brazil." All manner of businesses are targets, but authorities say bandits favor consumer goods that are easy to fence. That is posing a particular challenge to Brazil's fast-growing e-commerce trade. Security costs are squeezing profit margins and forcing retailers and logistics firms to adjust their strategies to succeed in Latin America's largest economy. Electronics retailer Via Varejo SA, for example, has developed a satellite-tracking system to keep tabs on its trucks. And it dispatches armed guards to accompany many shipments, logistics chief Marcelo Lopes told Reuters. "We don't scrimp on security," he said. "We invest heavily to protect goods and to protect people." A major e-commerce player, the company has also bet big on a "click-and-collect" operation that allows customers to pick up online orders at Via Varejo stores. The program is popular with working-class shoppers who like the security, and it means fewer delivery trucks plying dangerous neighborhoods, Lopes said. Brazilian retailer Magazine Luiza SA has employed a similar model to grow its online sales. Still, it is avoiding expansion in Rio state, in part due to worries about cargo theft, Chairwoman Luiza Trajano said last year. Lousy infrastructure, hefty taxes and tangled bureaucracy have long made shipping expensive in this continent-sized country. Rampant cargo theft has only added to the burden. The tricky terrain will be a test for Amazon.com Inc . The world's largest online retailer is gearing up for a major expansion in Brazil after about six years of peddling mostly e-books and digital movies here. Amazon declined to discuss its strategy. But retail veterans said the Seattle company had better buckle up. Brazil presents "a very different reality for the companies that prosper elsewhere," Magazine Luiza's CEO, Frederico Trajano, said at a public event in April. OUTMANNED, OUTGUNNED At around 2 a.m. on a weeknight in March, the call came into Braspress' security center. Bandits had trapped a truck carrying clothing on a busy thoroughfare in northern Rio de Janeiro. A Braspress guard radioed for help from the scene. "They blocked the truck!" the guard shouted in a call that Braspress recorded and shared with Reuters. "We've been held up by two cars here. They're heavily armed!" Marin's team cut the truck's ignition remotely and the robbers fled. The driver and two guards were unharmed. But the battle never stops, said Marin, a stout 55-year-old who got his start patrolling rough neighborhoods in Sao Paulo. In the midst of an interview with Reuters at the Braspress command recently, he got word that yet another company truck was under attack in Rio. Cargo theft in Brazil is on pace for a new record in 2018, police reports show. Roads in southeast Brazil now rank the eighth most dangerous in the world for these heists, worse than in war-torn Iraq, according to a report released this month by the Joint Cargo Committee, an organization of insurers. A dozen logistics and retail executives consulted by Reuters blamed organized crime for the surge. The problem is particularly acute in Rio, where a military intervention to crack down on drug gangs has done little to stop lawlessness. Groups such as Rio's feared Red Command have cultivated crooked cops as well as moles inside private companies to tip them off about shipments. That has added a level of sophistication to cargo piracy that was once the domain of common street criminals, logistics experts say. "Cargo robbery is just as profitable as trafficking drugs," said Marco Aurelio Prometti, head of logistics for Prezunic, a Rio-based grocery chain owned by owned by Chile's Cencosud SA . He said attacks on the company's trucks jumped four-fold between 2015 and 2016. An exact measure of losses due to theft is hard to come by. NTC & Logistica, a national cargo trade group, estimated 1.36 billion reais ($365 million) in 2016, the most recent year available. But the true cost is probably much higher. Members of Sao Paulo state's cargo transport guild reported spending an average of 10 percent to 14 percent of revenue on security, up from 4 percent to 6 percent just a few years ago, said Tayguara Helou, the group's president. In violent Rio state, it is 15 percent to 20 percent. Grocery chain Prezunic, for example, now has armed guards escorting many shipments, logistics chief Prometti said, adding costs to a low-margin business. Insurance premiums are rising too. For shipments in Rio, insurers are charging an "emergency rate" of up to 1 percent of the cargo's value, said Eduardo Ferreira Rebuzzi, president of the state's transport guild. To stem losses, retailers Magazine Luiza and Via Varejo have outsourced some deliveries in rough neighborhoods to local firms that best know the terrain, executives from both companies said. Logistics firm Tegma Gestao Logistica SA sold its e-commerce delivery business to major online retailer B2W Cia Digital SA in 2014, in part because of the unit's security problems, Tegma CEO Gennaro Oddone told Reuters. For a look at rising cargo theft in Brazil, see: https://tmsnrt.rs/2KO0g15 DITCHING THE HIGHWAYS In the Braspress bunker where Marin operates, red dots on a computer monitor show the few places where drivers are allowed to stop for a bathroom break on a 370-mile (595 kilometer) trip between Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte in neighboring Minas Gerais state. "Heat maps" showing the likelihood of a hijacking attempt dictate drivers' routes. Red patches represent serious danger zones; the screen is loaded with them. Workers also scan social media for news of trouble near roadways. Fed up with watching their trucks picked off, some companies are taking to the air. Brazilian airline Azul SA has seen its cargo business increase dramatically in recent years, especially for pricey but lightweight consumer goods such as cell phones, said Leandro Pires, head of cargo sales at Azul. He said demand was increasing even for short-haul routes, such as the 220-mile (354 kilometer) hop from Rio to Sao Paulo. Still, even air travel is not foolproof. In early March, thieves disguised as security personnel infiltrated an airport near Sao Paulo and made off with $5 million in cash set to be flown out on German airline Lufthansa , a crime reminiscent of the famed 1978 Lufthansa heist at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. The Sao Paulo crime remains unsolved. "Criminals are evolving as time passes," said Marin of Braspress. "We're learning and adapting along the way." (Reporting by Gram Slattery; additional reporting by Gabriela Mello, Flavia Bohone, Jeffrey Dastin and Alberto Alerigi Jr. Editing by Marla Dickerson) ABUJA, May 30 (Reuters) - Nigeria's central bank said on Wednesday it had injected $210 million into the interbank foreign exchange market, extending efforts to boost liquidity and alleviate dollar shortages. The bank said in a statement it had released $100 million earmarked for the wholesale market, $55 million for small businesses and individuals, and $55 million for certain dollar expenses such as school fees and medical bills. (Reporting by Camillus Eboh Writing by Paul Carsten Editing by Catherine Evans) LIMA, May 30 (Reuters) - Peruvian miner Minsur expects to secure $800 million to $900 million in financing from a group of banks in August that will put it on track to start building its $1.6 billion Mina Justa copper project toward the end of the year, the company said on Wednesday. The banks - from Germany, Canada, Australia and South Korea - will likely offer financing to be repaid in eight to nine years, Minsur President Juan Luis Kruger said in an interview at the International Gold & Silver Symposium in Peru. Last month Chilean industrial conglomerate Empresas Copec bought a 40 percent stake in Mina Justa from Minsur for $168.5 million. The company will use its own capital to finance the rest of the project, which should start annual production of about 100,000 tonnes of copper in 2020, Kruger added. Minsur, one of the world's biggest tin producers, is also carrying out a $200 million expansion of its San Rafael tin mine that should extend its life by nine years and raise its output to 23,000 tonnes per year from 18,000 tonnes, Kruger added. Minsur wants about 40-45 percent of its production to be tin, another 40-45 percent copper and the rest gold, Kruger said. "When Mina Justa and expansion of San Rafael are producing...we'll probably be able to venture into new opportunities," Kruger said. (Reporting By Marco Aquino, Writing By Mitra Taj; Editing by Cynthia Osterman) By Jung Min-ho A group of Chinese men assaulted a British man who had the word "Taiwan" tattooed on his forehead for refusing to say "Taiwan is part of China." Paul Farrell, who has lived in Taiwan for 14 years, lost two teeth, received a fat lip and ended up with bruises all over his body after 10 Chinese men beat him during his holiday in the southern Cambodian city of Sihanoukville, the Taiwan News reported Sunday. According to the report, he became embroiled in an argument with them after they tried to pick a fight over the tattoo at a bar. One of them suddenly shouted "Taiwan-China!" In response, Farrell said, "Taiwan-Taiwan!" And then they "went insane, grabbed poles and started attacking me," he said. He said at least 10 Chinese men savagely assaulted him, forcing him to say "Taiwan is part of China," as hundreds of bystanders watched the attack. Fearing for his life, Farrell eventually said: "OK, you think Taiwan is China, I'll say Taiwan is China. I just want to leave." According to local media, Farrell received widespread attention last October when photos of his Taiwan tattoo were posted on social media. He said he became a naturalized Taiwanese citizen after marrying a local woman seven years ago. SEOUL, May 30 (Reuters) - South Korea's National Pension Service (NPS) said on Wednesday it would significantly increase its asset allocation to overseas and alternative investments to diversify its holdings. NPS, the world's third-largest pension fund with around 68 percent of its $579 billion portfolio invested in South Korea, has been pressured to diversify beyond the limitations of South Korea's Asia's fourth-largest economy. The fund is seen as too big for South Korea's relatively limited opportunities, and studies suggest the fund cannot earn the returns needed to sustain the fund for decades to come if it continues to concentrate on local assets. The fund said in a statement that it aimed by end-2023 to have around 30 percent of its assets in overseas stocks and around 5 percent in overseas bonds, up from 17.4 percent and 3.8 percent respectively as of end-2017. NPS' projected that its alternative investments such as real estate would reach 92.6 trillion won, or 12.7 percent of total assets, by end-2019 and was targeting 15 percent by the end of 2023. The NPS, which pays retirement pensions to all South Koreans who contribute to the fund, had 625.9 trillion won ($578.57 billion) in assets under management as of March, which was expected to swell to 2,561 trillion won by 2043, it said on its investment management website. The fund, which holds key stakes in nearly all major South Korean companies thanks to its size and concentrated investment in the local market, also plans to consult Korean Air Lines' management over the recent controversy surrounding the family that owns its parent conglomerate. Korean Air Lines Chairman Cho Yang-ho stepped down from his post of co-chief executive at budget affiliate Jin Air , amid public backlash prompted by his younger daughter Cho Hyun-min's behavior. She is being investigated by police after she allegedly threw water at a person attending an April business meeting. ($1 = 1,081.8000 won) (Reporting by Haejin Choi Editing by Eric Meijer) (Adds quote, details, background) OTTAWA, May 30 (Reuters) - Canada will "respond appropriately" to any U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Wednesday, less than two days before the punitive measures are due to kick in. U.S. President Donald Trump announced the tariffs in March but later suspended them until June 1 to give the United States, Mexico and Canada time to push ahead with negotiations to rework the North American Free Trade Agreement. Talks on the pact have stalled, however. "The government is absolutely prepared to - and will defend - Canadian industries and Canadian jobs. We will respond appropriately," Freeland told reporters when asked about possible U.S. action. Canadian government officials have said they are prepared to impose retaliatory tariffs should the Trump administration make a move but have not revealed what they have in mind. Trump says the steel and aluminum tariffs would be imposed for security reasons, which Freeland said was "frankly absurd". Canada has repeatedly rejected any suggestion it could be a threat to the United States. Freeland spoke after returning from Washington, where she met U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to discuss NAFTA. The negotiation "will take as long as it takes to get a good deal", she said. (Reporting by David Ljunggren and Leah Schnurr; Editing by Dan Grebler and Tom Brown) * Q1 net profit up 11 percent y/y to 1.31 billion ringgit * Cost discipline and lower provisions helped earnings * Performance also lifted by one-off gain from stake disposal (Updates with earnings details, background) KUALA LUMPUR, May 30 (Reuters) - CIMB Group Holdings Bhd , Malaysia's No.2 lender by assets, turned in its highest quarterly profit in five years, boosted by lower cost and provisions as well as a one-off gain from a stake disposal in its brokerage business. CIMB's results, coming on the heels of a promising quarter from Malayan Banking Bhd (Maybank), will likely help ease investor worries that a slow down in economic growth at home will dent banks' profits. CIMB reported 1.31 billion ringgit ($325.57 million) in net profit for the three months ended March, versus 1.18 billion ringgit a year ago. This was the highest since the first quarter of 2013 and ahead of an average estimate of 981 million ringgit from four analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. Results were underpinned by a one-off gain of 152 million ringgit from selling part of the bank's 50 percent stake in its international brokerage business to China Galaxy Securities. CIMB is expected to record several one-off disposal and revaluation gains for the year - including from paring down stakes in two asset management joint venture units to U.S.-based partner Principal Financial Group for 470.3 million ringgit and 637 million ringgit in marked-to-market revaluation gains on its existing 40 percent stake in CIMB Principal Asset Management. These gains could help the group kick off restructuring initiatives to enhance productivity and reduce overall operating costs, such as digitalisation and headcount rationalisation efforts, analysts said. Bigger rival Maybank also reported strong first-quarter results on Monday, charting a 10 percent increase in net profit on lower expenses and impairment losses. Malaysia's top two banks expect stronger demand for corporate and consumer loans in the Southeast Asian region, driven by improving economies, to support their overall loans growth in 2018. ($1 = 3.9900 ringgit) (Reporting by Liz Lee; Editing by Himani Sarkar) (Adds comment by Trump pick for U.S. ambassador to Seoul, paragraph 7; background) * Rare visit to U.S. by close aide to North Korea's Kim Jong Un * Trump-Kim summit expected to go ahead June 12 -White House * Two sides appear far apart on main issue of nuclear weapons NEW YORK, May 30 (Reuters) - A senior North Korean official made a rare visit to the United States on Wednesday for talks about a possible summit between the leaders of the two countries but the sides appeared far apart on the central issue of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons. Kim Yong Chol, a close aide of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and vice chairman of the ruling Workers' Party's Central Committee, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy airport on a flight from Beijing. He was later seen entering a hotel in midtown Manhattan. Kim Yong Chol is due to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss whether to go ahead with an unprecedented meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim. The summit, originally planned for June 12 in Singapore, has been cast in doubt as the two countries - which have technically been at war since the 1950s - test each other's diplomatic mettle. Trump last week called off the summit after North Korea expressed anger at comments by senior U.S. officials. But Trump later said he was reconsidering his position and U.S., North Korean and South Korean officials have gone ahead with summit preparations anyway. The White House said on Wednesday that negotiations at the demilitarized zone along the border between North and South Korea for the summit were going well and that it expects the historic meeting to take place on June 12. Separately on Wednesday at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Admiral Harry Harris, the outgoing head of U.S. Pacific Command who is Trump's pick to be the ambassador to South Korea, said North Korea remained the United States' most imminent threat. "And a nuclear-capable North Korea with missiles that can reach the United States is unacceptable," Harris said. A U.S. official said negotiations about the summit's agenda have so far been slow going, and the two fundamental issues, the definition of North Korean denuclearization and whether both sides would take actions at the same time or separately, remained unsettled. 'DENUCLEARIZATION' Trump has sworn not to allow North Korea to develop nuclear missiles that could hit the United States and wants North Korea to "denuclearize," or get rid of its nuclear arms. But the leadership in Pyongyang is believed to regard nuclear weapons as crucial to its survival and has rejected unilaterally disarming. The U.S. official said the U.S. position remained that North Korea must agree to complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization before it can receive any financial assistance, such as relaxation of some economic sanctions, new food or other aid, or new investment, and that the degree of assistance would depend on the pace and extent of Pyongyangs actions. North Koreas position going into the meetings with Pompeo in New York, meanwhile, was that a pledge of denuclearization alone should open the way to economic relief, said the official, who is familiar with the talks and spoke on condition of anonymity. South Koreas Yonhap news agency quoted Seouls Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon as saying in a speech on Wednesday that the differences between North Korea and the United States on the denuclearization issue remained quite significant and it would not be easy to narrow the gap. However, Cho added that the engagement of the leaders of the two countries meant chances are high that common ground can be found." Kim Yong Chol is the most senior North Korean official to meet top officials for talks in the United States since Jo Myong Rok, a vice marshal, met then-President Bill Clinton at the White House in 2000. A former military spy chief, he has played a central role in the thaw in relations over the past six months between North Korea and South Korea, as well as the United States. During his tenure as a senior intelligence official, Kim was accused by South Korea of masterminding deadly attacks on a South Korean navy ship and an island in 2010. He was linked by U.S intelligence to a cyber attack on Sony Pictures in 2014. North Korea denied any involvement in the attack on the ship and on Sony Pictures. North Korea defends its nuclear and missile programs as a deterrent against what it sees as U.S. ambitions to overthrow its leadership and unite the Korean Peninsula. The United States stations 28,500 troops in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-1953 Korean War. (Reporting by Rodrigo Campos and Jonathan Allen in New york; additional reporting by David Brunnstrom and Matt Spetalnick in Washington Writing by Alistair Bell; editing by Mary Milliken and Grant McCool) (Adds U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo's Twitter post, paragraphs 5-6) * Rare visit to U.S. by close aide to North Korea's Kim Jong Un * Trump-Kim summit expected to go ahead June 12 -White House * Two sides appear far apart on main issue of nuclear weapons NEW YORK, May 30 (Reuters) - A senior North Korean official made a rare visit to the United States on Wednesday for talks about a possible summit between the leaders of the two countries but the sides appeared far apart on the central issue of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons. Kim Yong Chol, a close aide of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and vice chairman of the ruling Workers' Party's Central Committee, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy airport on a flight from Beijing. He was later seen entering a hotel in midtown Manhattan. Kim Yong Chol is due to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss whether to go ahead with an unprecedented meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim. The summit, originally planned for June 12 in Singapore, has been cast in doubt as the two countries - which have technically been at war since the 1950s - test each other's diplomatic mettle. As the U.S. and North Korean officials prepared for their first encounter in New York on Wednesday evening, Pompeo repeated the Trump administration's demands. "Looking forward to meeting with Kim Yong Chol in New York to discuss zPotus potential summit with Chairman Kim. We are committed to the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula zStateDept," Pompeo said in a Twitter post. Trump last week called off the summit after North Korea expressed anger at comments by senior U.S. officials. But Trump later said he was reconsidering his position and U.S., North Korean and South Korean officials have gone ahead with summit preparations. The White House said on Wednesday that negotiations at the demilitarized zone along the border between North and South Korea for the summit were going well and that it expects the historic meeting to take place on June 12. Separately on Wednesday at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Admiral Harry Harris, the outgoing head of U.S. Pacific Command who is Trump's pick to be the ambassador to South Korea, said North Korea remained the United States' most imminent threat. "And a nuclear-capable North Korea with missiles that can reach the United States is unacceptable," Harris said. A U.S. official said negotiations about the summit's agenda have so far been slow going, and the two fundamental issues, the definition of North Korean denuclearization and whether both sides would take actions at the same time or separately, remained unsettled. 'DENUCLEARIZATION' Trump has sworn not to allow North Korea to develop nuclear missiles that could hit the United States and wants North Korea to "denuclearize," or get rid of its nuclear arms. But the leadership in Pyongyang is believed to regard nuclear weapons as crucial to its survival and has rejected unilaterally disarming. The U.S. official said the U.S. position remained that Pyongyang must agree to complete denuclearization before it can receive any financial assistance, such as relaxation of some economic sanctions, new food or other aid, or new investment, and that the degree of assistance would depend on the pace and extent of Pyongyangs actions. North Koreas position going into the meetings with Pompeo in New York, meanwhile, was that a pledge of denuclearization alone should open the way to economic relief, said the official, who is familiar with the talks and spoke on condition of anonymity. South Koreas Yonhap news agency quoted Seouls Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon as saying in a speech on Wednesday that the differences between North Korea and the United States on the denuclearization issue remained quite significant and it would not be easy to narrow the gap. However, Cho added that the engagement of the leaders of the two countries meant chances are high that common ground can be found." Kim Yong Chol is the most senior North Korean official to meet top officials for talks in the United States since Jo Myong Rok, a vice marshal, met then-President Bill Clinton at the White House in 2000. A former military spy chief, he has played a central role in the thaw in relations over the past six months between North Korea and South Korea, as well as the United States. During his tenure as a senior intelligence official, Kim was accused by South Korea of masterminding deadly attacks on a South Korean navy ship and an island in 2010. He was linked by U.S intelligence to a cyber attack on Sony Pictures in 2014. North Korea denied any involvement in the attack on the ship and on Sony Pictures. North Korea defends its nuclear and missile programs as a deterrent against what it sees as U.S. ambitions to overthrow its leadership and unite the Korean Peninsula. The United States stations 28,500 troops in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-1953 Korean War. (Reporting by Rodrigo Campos, Daniel Bases and Jonathan Allen in New York; additional reporting by David Brunnstrom, Matt Spetalnick and Lesley Wroughton in Washington Writing by Alistair Bell and Richard Cowan; editing by Mary Milliken and Grant McCool) Roseanne Barr Vera Anderson | WireImage | Getty Images With ABC's cancellation of the hit sitcom "Roseanne" on Tuesday, people who worked on the show suddenly found themselves out of work. The situation is a good reminder that events out of your control can leave you jobless. While national unemployment is currently low and new work might be less challenging to find than several years ago, the realization that you unexpectedly have no income can be jarring. Nevertheless, it also should be a time of action. May 30, 2018 "If you weren't already organized with your finances, being suddenly unemployed is really the time to get organized," said certified financial planner Douglas Boneparth, president of Bone Fide Wealth in New York. "It's reactive, but important. "The emphasis is going to be on finding new employment and you don't want to be distracted." Here are some tips for those who find themselves unexpectedly without a job. Look into unemployment insurance First up is seeing if you are eligible to collect unemployment benefits. While the specifics of each state's program differs, workers who qualify for a weekly unemployment check can generally get help for up to 26 weeks. This can be trickier for gig workers or contractors, due to various requirements imposed by your state. However, it's worth looking into it instead of assuming those weekly checks are unavailable to you. For information on how to apply, start with your state's labor department. Evaluate financial resources Sudden unemployment is one of those situations that shows why many financial advisors recommend setting aside at least six months' worth of living expenses for emergencies. Regardless of whether you have that much, or a smaller amount, saved, you should trim your budget as much as possible to stretch out whatever savings you have. "This is a time to really analyze what expenses are absolutely necessary and then pull back on your discretionary expenses," Boneparth said. Weigh health insurance options If you were receiving health insurance through your employer, there's a good chance you can keep it. A law known as COBRA allows qualifying workers to keep their group coverage when they leave the job, assuming the employer is subject to the law (smaller firms and certain other employers are exempt). However, you'll be responsible for paying the full premium. Under COBRA, you generally can keep the group coverage for up to 18 months. This is a time to really analyze what expenses are absolutely necessary and then pull back on your discretionary expenses. Douglas Boneparth President of Bone Fide Wealth in New York Alternatively, you can look for a health plan on the open marketplace that could be cheaper. If you want to keep your group policy, contact your company's human resources department for guidance. Stay on top of debt Leave retirement savings alone If you have a 401(k) plan or individual retirement account and you're under age 59, taking money out could result in an early-withdrawal penalty of 10 percent. That's on top of paying ordinary income taxes on any money withdrawn. While many 401(k) plans allow workers to take a loan from their account, that option generally disappears when you leave the company. Focus on job huting Rudy Giuliani, attorney for U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives for the White House Sports and Fitness Day event on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, May 30, 2018. Rudy Giuliani is conducting question-and-answer sessions with President Donald Trump to prepare Trump for the special counsel's investigation, according to an NBC News reporter. tweet 1 Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who joined Trump's legal team in April, is preparing Trump by holding in-person and phone sessions with the president, according to the reporter. The sessions are "to educate me" about what he can say that is not protected by attorney-client privilege, Giuliani also told the reporter. tweet 2 Giuliani also touched on the alleged use of an FBI informant in Trump's campaign a revelation Trump has fervently decried as a potential scandal. Multiple outlets reported that an FBI informant spoke with multiple Trump campaign associates as part of the federal investigation of Russian election meddling. Giuliani told the reporter that he is not yet "satisfied" that the alleged use of an informant was proper, saying he had not seen related FBI documents. tweet 3 In a Washington Post interview on Tuesday, Giuliani tied the prospects for an interview between Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller's team to the alleged FBI informant. "We need all the documents before we can decide whether we are going to do an interview," Giuliani told the Post. Trump has repeatedly claimed that a "spy" was placed in his campaign for "political purposes," an accusation for which no evidence is publicly available. Trump tweet 1 In remarks to reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Giuliani doubled down on the Sept.1 deadline he had previously floated as the time he expected Mueller to conclude his probe of potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. "If he doesn't file this report by September 1, mid-September, he's clearly doing a Comey," Giuliani said. He was referring to former FBI Director James Comey, who made statements about an investigation into former candidate Hillary Clinton's email server shortly before the 2016 election. He added that Democrats "want to see the investigation stretch out past the next midterm elections," despite recent statements to the contrary from some Democrats. The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. Police cars stand at the entrance to a house where Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was shot in Kiev, Ukraine, on May 29 2018. A prominent Russian journalist and critic of President Vladimir Putin was shot dead in Ukraine where he had fled into exile following threats, police said on Tuesday. Arkady Babchenko, 41, died of his wounds in an ambulance after his wife found him covered in his blood in their home, police said, adding they suspected the murder was due to Babchenko's professional activities. Babchenko, a former soldier in the Chechen war who became one of Russia's best-known war correspondents, had left his homeland fearing for his life after criticizing Russian policy in Ukraine and Syria. He had been denounced by pro-government politicians in Russia over comments on social media about the Russian bombing of Aleppo in Syria's war, and over his characterisation of Russia as an aggressor towards Ukraine. "The first and the most probable version is his professional activity," Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko said at a televised press briefing when asked what police suspected lay behind the murder. Babchenko's wife is in a state of shock and police are unable to speak to her, he said. Ukrainian authorities released a drawing of the man they suspect is Babchenko's assassin, around 40-45 years old, with a grey beard and wearing a cap. Two years ago Pavel Sheremet, a Belarussian journalist known for his criticism of his home country's leadership and his friendship with the slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was blown up in a car bomb in central Kiev. "Putin's regime takes aim at those who cannot be broken or intimidated," Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and adviser to the interior minister, wrote on Facebook. Babchenko's house had run out of bread and he had gone to the shops to buy some, Gerashchenko said. He was gunned down on Tuesday by someone waiting for him in the stairwell at the entrance to his home. He was shot him in the back several times. "Today in Kiev on the threshold of the apartment where he lived, famous Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was shot and killed, a consistent opponent of the Putin regime and a friend of Ukraine." In a statement, the Russian foreign ministry said journalists were being killed with impunity in Ukraine. "Bloody crimes and total impunity have become routine for the Kiev regime. We demand that the Ukrainian authorities make every effort to promptly investigate," it said on Facebook. The Investigative Committee of Russia said it had opened a criminal case into Babchenko's death. Babchenko took part in the war in Chechnya as a soldier. He then he became a war reporter for several Russian newspapers. On Feb. 27 last year, he wrote on Facebook that he had left Russia. He reported on Russia sending private military contractors to Syria and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17 in July 2014 in eastern Ukraine, for which investigators last week held the Russian state responsible. Russian authorities again denied any connection with the plane's downing over an area of Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatist forces. In his last Facebook post before he was killed, Babchenko recalled an incident four years ago when he was meant to fly in a Ukrainian military helicopter in Ukraine's embattled Donbass region. The helicopter was overloaded and he was not permitted to fly. It was shot down and 14 people on board were killed. "And I was lucky. Second birthday, it turns out," he wrote. At a recent MIT event on the future of work in New York City for its high-achieving alumni network, Andrew McAfee, co-director of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy and a principal research scientist at the university's Sloan School of Management, said leaders are realizing that a lot of their human practices, human resources and human capital practices are simply outdated. McAfee's view: "If you want the bias out, get the algorithms in." Silicon Valley is investing in many start-ups selling the idea that they can solve the problem of human bias in job-hiring decisions with artificial intelligence. But a new class of independent algorithm auditing firms and public policy experts with experience at some of the largest tech companies in the world and educations from elite institutions say 'algorithmic bias' has already been proved to exist in other areas. As a result, the rapid uptake of AIs for hiring in the market has moved too fast, and with too little scrutiny, they say. Source: Pymetrics Algorithms can help HR professionals make smart hiring decisions, but these algorithms can often be biased against minorities, said speakers on a panel at the MIT event. The biases creep in because human bias influenced the algorithm, and it's up to humans to notice the bias and fix it. Traditional resume review leads to women and minorities being at a 50 percent to 67 percent disadvantage, according to start-up pymetrics, which attempts to go well beyond the resume in assessing job applicants using neuroscience games and AI. Companies using AI can reduce those figures dramatically, pymetrics said, as long as the input data is accurate and remains unbiased. That's a big "if." AI can work, 'as long as' the input data is accurate Cathy O'Neil, who also spoke at the MIT future-of-work event, said the hiring algorithms now coming into the human resources field are a perfect test case for her skepticism about the tech utopian movement, and she uses these job algorithms often in presentations. O'Neil, an academically trained mathematician who studied and worked at UC Berkeley, Harvard and MIT and left a job on Wall Street to join the Occupy Wall Street movement and write a book on the dangers of algorithms often employs a thought experiment in talks she gives: Imagine what a machine-learning hiring algorithm trained on Fox News data would result in, even if reasonable choices were being made by the data science team. Then she points out that it doesn't have to be an outrageous example like Fox News, because there is no perfect workplace with perfect hiring policies, perfect raises and promotion methods, and a culture that welcomes all people equally. When we blithely train algorithms on historical data, to a large extent we are setting ourselves up to merely repeat the past. ... We'll need to do more, which means examining the bias embedded in the data. Cathy O'Neil author of "Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy" "It's going to take some real thought," said Dr. Lori Kletzer, an economics professor at Colby College in an interview with CNBC. "It's not just going to happen. And it's important to raise the questions now. ... The implications are societal, so we can't just leave it to the market, because the market only cares about the bottom line." To start, the makeup of the tech industry creating the hiring algorithms isn't perfect. While Silicon Valley has a long history of encouraging immigrant entrepreneurs and bringing in foreign workers from around the world on skill visas, it has been criticized for diversity in terms of hiring from within the national population. A report from the federal government's Government Accountability Office released in November 2017 found that the technology industry is behind other sectors in diversity of its workforce. "The estimated percentage of minority technology workers increased from 2005 to 2015, but GAO found that no growth occurred for female and black workers, whereas Asian and Hispanic workers made statistically significant increases. Further, female, black and Hispanic workers remain a smaller proportion of the technology workforce mathematics, computing and engineering occupations compared to their representation in the general workforce." "When we blithely train algorithms on historical data, to a large extent we are setting ourselves up to merely repeat the past. If we want to get beyond that, beyond automating the status quo, we'll need to do more, which means examining the bias embedded in the data. The data is, after all, simply a reflection of our imperfect culture," O'Neil, who now runs her own algorithm auditing firm, said via email. The traditional job application process isn't working Dr. Frida Polli, pymetrics CEO and co-founder, also has an extensive academic resume, which includes an MBA from Harvard and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience from MIT. Though despite the impressive accomplishments, she feels that simply listing them on her resume didn't provide employers much information about her potential. Pymetrics is working with companies such as Unilever, Accenture, LinkedIn and Tesla. The company uses behavioral neuroscience and artificial intelligence to help identify candidates in a more predictive and unbiased way. Pymetrics bypasses the resume, using data generated from brain games to match applicants with roles. HireVue is another start-up working with the corporate industrial psychologists to make sure employer assessment tools are up to industry standards and, by adding AI to the mix, eliminating bias. It has been around for more than a decade, starting with tech that allowed for video interviews and moving more recently to AI-based job assessments. "We can measure it, unlike the human mind, where we can't see what they're thinking or if they're systematically biased," Lindsey Zuloaga, director of data science at HireVue, recently told CNBC. Once the candidate reaches a human recruiter, companies using HireVue have reported a much more diverse candidate pool: Unilever has improved the diversity of its talent pool by 16 percent since partnering with HireVue. "If the team does notice a skew in results, it can evaluate the algorithm to see what went wrong and remove the bad data," Zuloaga said. "AI is not impartial or neutral," said Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of the AI Now Institute at New York University, and founder of Google's Open Research group. AI Now which Whittaker co-founded with Kate Crawford, an NYU professor and principal researcher at Microsoft Research aims to move beyond what it describe as "minimal oversight" of AI. Algorithmic bias is one of its core research areas. "In the case of systems meant to automate candidate search and hiring, we need to ask ourselves: What assumptions about worth, ability and potential do these systems reflect and reproduce? Who was at the table when these assumptions were encoded?" Whittaker asked. More from @Work: There are two classes of workers in Silicon Valley Co-working spaces for women rise as response to #MeToo A new robot poised to make coffee better than a barista Whittaker said HireVue, for instance, creates models based on "top performers" at a firm, then uses emotion detection systems that pick up cues from the human face to evaluate job applicants based on these models. "This is alarming, because firms that are using such software may not have diverse workforces to begin with, and often have decreasing diversity at the top. And given that systems like HireVue are proprietary and not open to review, how do we validate their claims to fairness and ensure that they aren't simply tech-washing and amplifying longstanding patterns of discrimination?" In a statement to CNBC, Loren Larsen, CTO of HireVue, said, "It is extremely important to audit the algorithms used in hiring to detect and correct for any bias. ... No company doing this kind of work should depend only on a third-party firm to ensure that they are doing this work in a responsible way. Third parties can be very helpful, and we have sought out third-party data-science experts to review our algorithms and methods to ensure they are state-of-the-art. However, it's the responsibility of the company itself to audit the algorithms as an ongoing, day-to-day process." The potential 'drastic and harmful' downside of AI Pymetrics said the biggest hurdle with HR teams within corporations are legal concerns about bias. That's why pymetrics developed a process to de-bias their algorithms and has open-sourced that methodology on GitHub. It "wants all companies, regardless of industry, to have the tools to detect and remove bias from their algorithms," Polli said. But it does not let third-party algorithm auditing firms, like O'Neil's, review its actual job-hiring code for undetected bias. "The algorithms themselves are not the solution, because they could actually make it worse. Audited algorithms that are shown to be free of gender bias ... are the answer to removing bias," Polli said. She added, "If you want to have a third-party auditor, fantastic. But the most critical thing is that it is being done however it is getting done." Polli said the pymetrics process has now 50,000 pieces of data tested, and that does give it confirmation of no gender or ethnic bias. That kind of confidence in an internal review process doesn't sit well with Dipayan Ghosh, a Harvard fellow and former Facebook privacy and public policy official who is now with the New America think tank. He said the use of advanced algorithms and AI in recruiting can create tremendous value for the industry, where discrimination by hiring managers has been rampant, but if implemented irresponsibly, it can have drastic and harmful effects for job candidates. "Algorithms discriminate. There have been countless episodes in different contexts that have illustrated this in high resolution in recent years, from social media advertising to creditworthiness decision-making to subsidy dispensations." He also said companies reviewing their own code is not enough, especially in the corporate sector, where returns are optimized against near-term revenue, forward investment and stock return, above all else. "We know of too many past cases where all a company needed to do is to self-certify, and it was shown to be perpetuating harms to society and, specifically, certain people. ... The public will have little knowledge as to whether or not the firm really is making biased decisions if it's only the firm itself that has access to its decision-making algorithms to test them for discriminatory outcomes." There could be a serious risk, and it has the potential to open up the floodgates to something very bad. Davida Perry co-founder and managing partner of Schwartz, Perry & Heller LLP, a firm that specializes in employment law Singapore Airlines has announced it will launch the world's longest non-stop flight route in October, using an aircraft that offers no economy class. The airline will begin a once-daily journey in both directions between Singapore's Changi Airport and Newark Liberty Airport, which serves New York City. The first flight takes off on October 11 and will travel more than 9,500 miles to New York, according to the airline's press release. Singapore said the journey should take just shy of 19 hours. The aircraft, an Airbus A350-900ULR, will feature 67 business class and 94 premium economy seats. Singapore Airlines said non-stop Singapore-Los Angeles flights are also planned, with details to be announced at a later date. With long-haul planes getting ever more efficient, CNBC takes a look at the current routes guaranteed to wear out any hardened traveler. Check out the companies making headlines before the bell: Dick's Sporting Goods The sporting goods retailer beat forecasts by 7 cents a share, with adjusted quarterly profit of 52 cents per share. Revenue also came in above forecasts. Comparable-store sales fell more than expected, but Dick's also raised its full-year outlook largely above Street's forecast. Target Bank of America/Merrill Lynch added the retailer's stock to its US 1 List, noting a number of initiatives that it feels will drive comparable-store sales higher. Salesforce.com Salesforce reported adjusted quarterly profit of 35 cents per share, beating estimates by 2 cents a share. Revenue also topped forecasts and the company raised its full-year forecast on continued strong demand for its cloud-based sales and marketing software. HP Inc. HP matched estimates with adjusted quarterly earnings of 48 cents per share. The computer and printer maker's revenue beat Street forecasts and HP Inc. raised its forecast for the full year. Separately, the company named Steve Fieler as its new chief financial officer, replacing Cathie Lesjak who will become interim chief operating officer. Novo Nordisk The European drugmaker said its oral diabetes drug did better in a study at lower blood sugar levels than competitor Jardiance, a treatment made by Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly. Michael Kors The luxury goods retailer earned an adjusted 63 cents per share for its latest quarter, 3 cents a share above estimates. Revenue topping forecasts, as comparable-store sales rose 2.3 percent, versus an expected drop. The company's earnings forecast of $4.65 to $4.75 per share fell largely below the consensus estimate of $4.74 a share. DSW The shoe retailer reported adjusted quarterly profit of 39 cents per share, 2 cents a share above estimates. Revenue and comparable-store sales also exceeded forecasts. However, DSW left its full-year forecast unchanged at $1.52 to $1.67 per share, compared to the consensus estimate of $1.63 a share. Movado Group The watchmaker and distributor reported quarterly profit of 37 cents per share, well above the 11 cents a share consensus estimate. Revenue beat estimates by a wide margin and Movado raised its full-year outlook. Royal Bank of Scotland The bank announced the resignation of its finance chief Ewen Stevenson. The surprise departure came on the day of the bank's annual meeting. Walmart The retail giant will begin its two-day annual meeting Wednesday in Bentonville, Arkansas. CBS CEO Leslie Moonves is accused by controlling shareholder Shari Redstone in a court complaint of threatening to resign, unless directors voted to strip the Redstone family of voting control. Amazon.com Amazon announced an expansion of savings available to Prime members at its Whole Foods supermarkets, making those savings available at an additional 121 locations across 12 states. Today is also the day of Amazon's annual meeting. WellCare Health Plans The health plan operator is buying pharmacy benefits manager Meridian for $2.5 billion in cash. Meridian operates in Illinois and Michigan, and is the leading Medicaid provider in Michigan. AbbVie The drugmaker was downgraded to "underperform" from "neutral" at Credit Suisse, amid concerns about AbbVie's best-selling Humira drug. The firm notes the upcoming entry of multiple biosimilars coming on the market that will erode Humira's sales. Exxon Mobil Exxon Mobil was upgraded to "outperform" from "sector perform" at RBC Capital, which points to potential dividend growth as well as superior returns. KKR The private-equity firm will reportedly pay $8.3 billion to buy privately held BMC Software, according to the New York Post. The deal was announced Tuesday morning, but terms were not disclosed. G-III Apparel The apparel maker was upgraded to "outperform" from "market perform" at Cowen, which thinks that current Street earnings forecasts are too conservative given expanding profitability at Donna Karan among other factors. Polaris Industries The recreational vehicle maker is buying privately held Boat Holdings the leading U.S. manufacturer of pontoon boats in an all-cash transaction valued at $805 million. Polaris will pay $705 million and will accrue about $100 million in net tax benefits. Michael Avenatti, lawyer of adult-film actress Stormy Daniels speaks to media as he exits the United States District Court Southern District of New York on May 30, 2018 in New York City. Avenatti was referring to a separate motion by Daniels to intervene in Cohen's case for the purpose of potentially asserting claims of attorney-client privilege on documents seized from Cohen by the FBI last month that relate to her. In a statement, Avenatti said, "It is now not necessary because the motion to intervene is being held in abeyance by agreement with the government. We are on the verge of getting the documents we need." Avenatti has become a constant media presence and pugnacious critic of Trump and Cohen since his client sued them both to be released from a nondisclosure agreement she signed before the 2016 election. Daniels was paid $130,000 as part of the deal in exchange for her silence about an alleged affair with Trump from years earlier. The withdrawal came hours after U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood said Avenatti would have to end his "publicity tour" if he were admitted as a lawyer for the porn star Daniels in Cohen's case. Michael Avenatti on Wednesday withdrew his motion to represent his client Stormy Daniels in the ongoing court proceedings involving President Donald Trump 's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen . Cohen is under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in New York City. He has not been charged, but evidence seized from him last month is in the process of being reviewed and turned over to prosecutors. A trial lawyer in California, Avenatti would need Wood's permission to be admitted in New York federal court solely for Cohen's case. Such pro hac vice admissions are routinely requested by out-of-state lawyers and are rarely denied. Wood noted that it would be premature to rule on Avenatti's request for admission in the case without first addressing the pending motion by him, on Daniels' behalf, that Daniels be allowed to intervene in the case. Wood also said that if she were to grant Avenatti's motion for such an admission, he then would be bound by a code of conduct that would prevent him from both stating his opinion on Cohen's purported guilt and from releasing non-public information related to Cohen. Avenatti has done both notably by releasing a report on May 8 showing payments made to Cohen's company, Essential Consultants, after the election by corporations including telecom giant AT&T, drug maker Novartis and Korea Aerospace Industries. He has recently indicated he plans to reveal more information about Cohen. Lawyers for Cohen had questioned in a court filing how Avenatti could have obtained the information, which appeared to be drawn from confidential bank records. In court Wednesday, Avenatti said he and his client "did not do anything improper relating to the release of any information concerning Mr. Cohen." Cohen's lawyer, Stephen Ryan, said at the courthouse, "I've never seen an attorney conduct himself the way Mr. Avenatti conducted himself. What Mr. Avenatti did in releasing those records was entirely improper." Ryan strongly opposed Avenatti's admission request. Avenatti withdrew the motion without prejudice in a court filing following the hearing, meaning it could "be re-filed, if necessary, at a later time." Ryan did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment on Avenatti's withdrawal. Both Trump and the Trump Organization have been granted intervenor status in the case which allows them to make arguments related to evidence seized from Cohen which might be protected by the president's and the company's attorney-client privilege. Avenatti has argued that Daniels is entitled to the same intervenor status by virtue of documents related to her and to her prior lawyer, Keith Davidson, which are believed to have been seized from Cohen by the FBI. Avenatti said Wednesday that he had been contacted by a reporter with a recording he believes was made by Cohen that involved Davidson. Davidson represented Daniels when she received the $130,000 payment from Cohen through Essential Consultants. "From what I understood there were audio recordings" between Cohen and Daniels' former lawyer, Keith Davidson, "regarding attorney-client privilege," Avenatti said. Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller hasn't been the most optimistic voice on Wall Street, but he isn't writing off the bull market. His chief reason: President Donald Trump's pro-business influence. "There is a sort of optimism about the markets under Trump, and that's continuing. I don't see a reason for it about to change," the Yale professor said Tuesday on CNBC's "Trading Nation." "There's something about how the world is reacting to the president. Something about his self-confidence which is gradually lifting our spirits." Shiller believes the momentum is so powerful, it's essentially propping up a bull market that is getting long in the tooth. "We've seen an overpriced stock market. We've seen concerns about that for years now," he said. Shiller acknowledged it's definitely possible the U.S. stock market could generate gains this year, but he warned the Trump effect "is not a very reliable thing." So, he said the best strategy is to diversify abroad in this environment. "If you have been overexposed to the United States in your portfolio, this is a time to reconsider that," Shiller said. "Not to pull out, but to balance things ... Europe is cheaper than the U.S.." Shiller's thoughts came as stocks were selling off in reaction to political turmoil in Italy. There's fear new elections in the euro zone's third-largest economy could put populist parties in power that will move to abandon the euro. "We got news today [Tuesday] about Italy that is troubling," Shiller said adding he was optimistic Italy would work out its problems and prevent a crisis. Political turmoil in Italy has TradingAnalysis.com founder Todd Gordon betting on a drop for another key European market: Germany. The German stock market-tracking ETF (EWG) tumbled more than 3 percent Tuesday, and Gordon believes the ETF, which he says is "representative of [the] overall condition of European markets," is headed lower on the recent volatility. On a chart of the and the EWG, Gordon points out that EWG is coming down to retest the $31 level for a third time According to Gordon, a third retesting of this level means EWG could likely break below $31 The S&P 500, said Gordon, has also been making lower highs, which together with the move down in EWG has him concerned about global markets as a whole How low could EWG go? Gordon believes that if volatility continues then the EWG could even fall to around or below the $30 mark As a result, Gordon wants to buy the July monthly 31-strike put and sell the July monthly 29-strike put for 53 cents, or $53 per options spread This means that if EWG closes above $31 on July 20 expiration, Gordon would lose the $53 it cost him to make the trade. But should EWG close below $29 on July 20, then Gordon could make around $145 on the trade. The trade: Gordon is suggesting buying the July monthly 31/29 put spread for about 53 cents, or $53 per options spread. Bottom line: Gordon believes German stocks will continue falling, with EWG dropping below $30. President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday that he wishes he had picked someone other than Jeff Sessions to be attorney general. In a series of tweets citing Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, Trump unleashed yet another attack on Sessions, who, as a senator, was one of the first mainstream Republicans to publicly endorse the real estate magnate's candidacy for president. Trump tweet 1 Trump tweet 2 Trump tweet 3 Gowdy made the comments about Sessions on Wednesday's edition of "CBS This Morning." Once friendly with the attorney general, Trump has targeted much of his wrath over the Russia probe at the former Alabama senator after Sessions recused himself last year from the Justice Department's probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump's attorneys in the Russia probe, told CNBC that Trump still seems frustrated over Sessions for the recusal "because he believes he should not have in the first place." The Justice Department declined to comment. Sessions' recusal came March 2, 2017, after The Washington Post reported on previously undisclosed contacts between the Alabama Republican and the Russian ambassador during the campaign and the transition period. Sessions, who was a key surrogate and advisor for Trump during the campaign, had not disclosed the meetings during his confirmation hearing before the Senate. The Wednesday tweets came on the heels of a New York Times article that said the president had asked Sessions to reverse his decision to recuse himself. Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the reported request as part of an inquiry into whether Trump obstructed justice. Trump has repeatedly denied that his campaign colluded with the Kremlin to undermine Democrat Hillary Clinton's candidacy. He also has denied that he obstructed justice, and has often called the probe a "witch hunt." A representative for the the White House did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. CNBC's Brian Schwartz contributed to this article. President Donald Trump is the wildcard when it comes to the potential summit between him and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, according to a geopolitics expert. "It is not clear what the calculus is with (Trump)," Lanhee Chen, a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Tuesday. "We know that there are issues that trigger the president. But we don't know exactly what the end game is," he said, adding that the question of legacy could be very tempting to the president. In comparison, North Korea's Kim is seen to be the more predictable leader, Chen said. "Kim Jong Un behaves in a certain way rationally," the Stanford expert said. "We know (Chinese President Xi Jinping) is influential, domestic politics are influential, or maybe he wants an exit strategy. But with President Trump, it is more difficult to tell." The recusal kept Sessions from overseeing the special counsel's investigation into possible Russian involvement with the Trump campaign, ceding responsibility to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein . The meeting is under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller 's team, which is seeking to find out whether Trump has made attempts to obstruct the probe, the Times said. It's also an indication that Mueller's obstruction probe into Trump is more extensive than previously thought. President Donald Trump asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his decision to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, according to a report in The New York Times . At a meeting at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in March 2017, the president berated Sessions for recusing himself and asked him to change his mind, saying he needed a loyalist overseeing the investigation, the Times reported. Sessions refused, the article said. A representative for the attorney general did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. The special counsel's office declined to comment, and the White House referred inquiries to the president's outside counsel. Later Wednesday morning, Trump tweeted that he wished he had picked another person to be attorney general. TRUMP TWEET WISH Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump's attorneys in the Russia probe, told CNBC that Trump still seems frustrated over Sessions for the recusal "because he believes he should not have in the first place." Ever since Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Trump has attacked sessions both in public and in private. The president has frequently taken to Twitter to slam Sessions. Donald Trump tweet Donald Trump tweet The Times, citing a source, also reported that Trump, in July, had told his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to convince Sessions to resign. Priebus then informed the attorney general's chief of staff, who told Priebus that the president himself would have to ask Sessions to quit, which did not end up happening, the report said. Priebus was out as chief of staff by the end of July, replaced by John Kelly. The Times reported that Mueller's team wants to ask Trump about his discussions with Priebus regarding Sessions. Read the full report in The New York Times. CNBC's Brian Schwartz contributed to this article. Taxify, a European competitor to Uber, has raised $175 million in a funding round led by German automaker Daimler. The Tallinn, Estonia-based start-up secured a $1 billion valuation after the investment, helping it enter the ranks of Europe's unicorn companies. Korelya Capital, a French venture capital fund, Taavet Hinrikus, the co-founder of U.K.-based money transfer start-up TransferWise, and existing investor Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-hailing firm, all participated in the round. Daimler, which owns Uber competitor MyTaxi, will join Taxify's board following the investment. "Taxify is an ideal addition to our existing and extensive mobility services portfolio," Joerg Lamparter, head of mobility services at Daimler Financial Services, said in a statement Wednesday. Taxify currently has 10 million customers signed up to its platform and is present in 25 countries. The company entered London, a key battleground for Uber, last year. Taxify said it would use the latest investment to develop its technology and further expand in home markets like Europe and Africa. The investment comes as Uber, the world's best known ride-hailing start-up, tries to reshape its public image under new Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi. Under former boss Travis Kalanick, Uber was hit with a series of scandals, from sexual harassment complaints against the company, to allegations that it tried to evade regulation in various cities. In London, the company is fighting to keep its license to operate after a ban by the city's transport regulator last year. Also in 2017, a British judge ruled that Uber drivers should be classified as formal workers rather than as self-employed, presenting a challenge for both Uber and the so-called "gig economy." Uber has long maintained that its drivers are self-employed rather than employees, and are therefore not entitled to rights including holiday pay and a minimum wage. Shoppers at Nyamirambo Market in the Rwandan capital of Kigali sift through piles of used clothing on May 10, 2018. While the U.S.' tempestuous trade relationship with China has dominated the news, the world's largest economy is also harboring a disagreement with the landlocked African country of Rwanda over an unusual commodity second-hand clothes. The U.S.' 60-day notice period for Rwanda to reduce its tariff on imported used clothing or face the consequences expired on Monday. Details on what will happen next to an industry which creates tens of thousands of jobs in both countries are hazy. In July 2016, the east African countries of Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda hiked tariffs on imported second-hand garments, citing fears that cheap clothes from abroad were threatening their domestic manufacturing industries. Rwanda reportedly increased duties by 20 cents to $2.50 per kilogram. Discussion among the east African countries of banning imports completely by 2019 has been on the cards as far back as 2015. But in March last year, the matter was alerted to the Office of the United States Trade Representative by the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association, a U.S.-based group representing companies that gather and sell on the U.S.' old clothes. It maintained that 40,000 U.S. jobs would be negatively impacted, as well as tens of thousands of jobs in the east African countries themselves, should an embargo be put in place. Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda have since backed away from the tax hikes following a U.S. threat to limit the benefits from their membership of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) the U.S.' main trade legislation for Africa which permits duty-free U.S. imports on 6,500 goods. "Rwanda is not making sufficient progress toward the elimination of barriers to U.S. trade and investment, and therefore is out of compliance with eligibility requirements" of the act, said a statement on the U.S. Trade Representative website. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note , which moves inversely to price, was higher at around 2.826 percent, while the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond was also higher at 3.013 percent. U.S. government debt yields rose Wednesday after a dramatic flight to safer assets in the prior session drove rates down across the board. Italy's political woes have rattled global financial markets in recent sessions, amid renewed concerns over the prospect that snap elections in Rome could be framed as a de facto referendum on the country's role in Europe. However, European markets stabilized on Wednesday after a regular Italian bond auction proved better than feared. The Stoxx Europe 600 traded flat, while Italy's FTSE MIB rallied 1.7 percent. The euro, meanwhile, recovered much of its previous losses with a 0.8 percent climb against the greenback to $1.162. Italian bond yields, which spiked Tuesday amid the political turbulence, fell across the board Wednesday. Hiring decelerated in May, with private companies adding 178,000 positions even amid other signs of a tightening jobs market, according to a report Wednesday from ADP and Moody's Analytics. The number missed expectations of economists surveyed by Reuters who had forecast 190,000. Moody's Analytics and ADP also revised its April number downward to 163,000, a decline of 41,000 from the original 204,000. The news of this program comes as many businesses in the U.S. today face a tighter labor market, and competition for the best talent is intensifying. Chains like Starbucks and Chipotle have started offering similar education perks to get workers to stick around. To make this possible, Walmart is partnering with Guild Education, a tuition reimbursement and education platform that helps large employers extend education benefits, including tuition reimbursement, to workers. The nation's biggest private employer announced Wednesday morning, at the start of its annual shareholders meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas, that it will begin subsidizing the cost of higher education for its employees who've yet to earn a college degree. Starting Wednesday, they will be able to enroll and study at either the University of Florida, Brandman University or Bellevue University. Walmart hopes that helping send its workers back to college will keep them with the company. Earlier this year, Walmart hiked its starting wage rate for hourly employees in the U.S. to $11, while also expanding maternity and parental leave benefits. The retailer also has been testing out a more lax dress code in certain markets to allow jeans. The company said it estimates as many as 68,000 of its employees initially could sign up for the new college program. Walmart employs 1.5 million in the U.S. The company declined to comment on how much this initiative will cost it. Employees will contribute $1 per day, for 365 days every year, toward their education, so long as they're enrolled. Walmart will cover the rest of the tab. Workers will be able to choose from the three nonprofit schools and have the option of taking classes online with the flexibility to study during the evenings or on weekends. Currently, Walmart helps workers complete their high school education and take the GED. With the new program, they will be able to obtain an associate's or bachelor's degree in either business or supply chain management (with more degree options expected to be added over time). And unlike some other programs, Walmart hasn't set a minimum GPA requirement, so long as employees pass their courses. Julie Murphy, executive vice president of Walmart's U.S. people division, explained on a call with members of the media that there's also no penalty for those people who choose to stop the program early. It's designed to "give employees the confidence to learn and grow with Walmart," she said. Lowe's earlier this year announced a new workforce development program known as "Track to the Trades," also through a partnership with Guild. CNBC reported late last year that Guild, started in Silicon Valley, is valued at more than $100 million. Warren Buffett held talks with Uber, the legendary investor confirmed to CNBC Wednesday. "I'm a great admirer of [Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi]," Buffett said. "Some of the reported details are not correct but it's true that Berkshire had discussions with Uber." Buffett's comments were in response to a Bloomberg report that said Buffett's firm Berkshire Hathaway offered Uber a $3 billion investment earlier this year. The offer came shortly after Japanese investment giant SoftBank secured its own stake in the ride-sharing company in January, according to Bloomberg, which cited anonymous sources. Uber and Berkshire Hathaway disagreed on the terms and size of the deal, according to the report, so Uber tried to talk Buffett into a smaller stake. "One of my business goals in life has been to get Warren Buffett to invest in something that I'm involved in and, so far, I failed," Khosrowshahi told CNBC's Carl Quintanilla in an interview late Wednesday. Khosrowshahi said it's possible the parties could revisit a deal in the future, but that Uber's "enormous growth trajectory" comes with "considerable risk." "I don't think we necessarily fit in with the typical Warren Buffett investment. Maybe we can be a different kind of an investment, a portfolio diversification play for him," he said. Buffett has a history of bailing out companies in crisis, but has historically stayed away from tech deals. He acknowledged earlier this month that he was "wrong" in passing on Google and Amazon. SoftBank bought in with Uber at a valuation of $48 billion, a discount from the $66 billion that Uber was once said to be worth. Uber last week announced first quarter results and a tender offer that nudges its valuation past $60 billion. The company has been in the middle of a reputational turnaround since its controversial founder Travis Kalanick was ousted last year. Khosrowshahi has emphasized rider safety, driver rights and better governmental relations in his 10 months as CEO. A Berkshire investment would have served as something of a stamp of approval for Uber ahead of an eventual IPO. Buffett sent Apple's stock soaring earlier this month when he revealed a massive stake in the hardware giant. CNBC's Becky Quick and Saheli Roy Choudhury contributed to this report. [The stream is slated to start at 2:45 p.m. ET. Please refresh the page if you do not see a player above at that time.] Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is set to brief reporters at the White House Wednesday afternoon. The first such briefing in more than a week arrives on the heels of a rally in Nashville, Tenn., on Tuesday night, where President Donald Trump called on his supporters to vote more Republicans into Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. Trump said on Tuesday that the Russia probe, which he again called a witch hunt, will impact the upcoming mid-term elections. The president referred to special counsel Robert Mueller's team as "The 13 Angry Democrats." trump tweet meddling Some Democrats are already working to stifle this political argument, which could be used as a scapegoat if Republicans lose seats in Congress come November. On Wednesday, Trump signed a "right-to-try" bill that gives severely ill patients the ability to access experimental drug treatments that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Trump also weighed in on a cultural controversy on Wednesday, criticizing Disney CEO Bob Iger over the cancellation of "Roseanne," the revival of Roseanne Barr's sitcom from the 1980s and '90s. The show, which garnered a huge audience in its first season back on television, was abruptly canceled after Barr compared Valerie Jarrett, a black aide to former President Barack Obama, to an ape in a tweet. The tweet, which has been deleted, said of Jarrett: "muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj." Trump asked on Wednesday why Iger had not called him for "the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC." Trump tweet Iger Barr is a vocal Trump supporter who has spread conspiracy theories from her social media account in the past. Trump had previously congratulated Barr on the success of her show's revival. Meanwhile, a new study from Harvard estimated that 4,600 people or more may have died from Hurricane Maria, which decimated the island in September. The official death count from the hurricane is 64. On March 21, 2015, the board of directors of low-cost airline AirAsia India met for the 11th time at Hotel Novotel in Hyderabad. Several matters were discussed at the meeting, but one particular issue stood out. Under Agenda Point Number 4 of Business and Operational Update, presented by the then CEO Mittu Chandilya, there was a particular discussion on regulatory updates. The vital regulatory update, according to company documents that CNBCTV18.com reviewed and confirmed with three people deeply familiar with the matter, related to route dispersal guidelines (RDG) and the 5/20 rule for eligibility to fly abroad. Various options and scenarios to meet the eligibility criteria were presented and discussed at length, noted the board resolution. Soon after, AirAsia India, a joint venture between the Tata Group and AirAsia Bhd of Malaysia, engaged HNR Trading PTE Ltd, a Singapore-registered entity to assist its regulatory and corporate affairs liaising. The attempts of HNR Trading and AirAsia to ease Indian aviation rules were thrust into the spotlight on Tuesday when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) launched a case against the airline, its Malaysian parent, and senior executives, including group chief executive officer Tony Fernandes, among others. CBI has charged the entities and executives with allegedly entering into a criminal conspiracy with the previous UPA government to secure rights to fly abroad. During 2015-16, AirAsia remitted about Rs 12.28 crore to M/s HNR Trading Ltd, Singapore (co-accused) for a sham contract on the basis of a bogus agreement on plain papers, which was utilised for paying bribe to unknown public servants of Indian government and others for securing permit for operation of international scheduled air transport services, stated the FIR filed by the CBI. Rules Did Change Eventually The 5/20 rule prohibited new airlines from flying internationally until they acquired 20 aircraft and completed five years of operations. Fernandes had previously frequently demanded the government scrap the rule. Route dispersal guidelines (RDG) are a government push to connect remote locations and airlines typically resist because many of these routes run up losses. In June 2016, the government partly scrapped the 5/20 rule, retaining the 20 aircraft eligibility condition to fly international and tweaked the RDG to make it more transparent under a new aviation policy. The aviation ministry is consulting airlines to further relax RDG because several are still unhappy. This is the second time that HNR Trading has received attention in the press and in similar light. In October 2016, former chairman of Tata Group Cyrus Mistry wrote in a letter to directors of Tata Sons that a forensic investigation revealed fraudulent transactions of Rs. 22 crore involving non-existent parties in India and Singapore. The investigation by Deloitte Touche showed that payments of about Rs 12 crore were made to HNR Trading for government/regulatory framework but there was no evidence of actual services being provided. AirAsia India has denied any wrongdoing and said on Tuesday that it is cooperating with all regulators and agencies to present the correct facts. In November 2016, AAIL had initiated criminal charges against its ex-CEO (Chandilya) and had also commenced civil proceedings in Bengaluru for such irregularities, the airline said in a statement quoting director Shuva Mandal. Fernandes, AirAsia India and Chandilya did not comment for this article. The HNR-AirAsia India Connection Though HNR Trading was engaged for regulatory and corporate affairs liaising, a euphemism for lobbying, the company has no history of such activity. Filings with the accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), the regulator of business entities and public accountants in Singapore, show value added logistics and general whole trade as the principal activities of HNR. HNR was incorporated on September 27 2012 with a paid-up capital of $50,000. The shareholders are Hameed Noor, a Singapore citizen, and Rajendra Dubey, the former head of Globe Air Cargo India, a cargo general sales and services agent (GSSA) and part of the ECS Group. Globe Air Cargo India was announced as AirAsia India's agent in July 2014 and the contract ended in November 2016. Dubey resigned as Globe Air Cargo India head after the Deloitte report surfaced in the media. He had previously denied allegations in the Deloitte report that he was a lobbyist for Chandilya, or AirAsia India. Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata group, and AirAsia Bhd of Malaysia own 49% each in AirAsia India. AirAsia India chairman S Ramadorai and director R Venkataramanan own the remaining 2%. Despite the relaxation of the 5/20 rule, AirAsia is yet to show an urgency to fly abroad. Aviation analysts have attributed this to the airlines long struggles in India. The airline, which has 17 planes, is making losses and is yet to break even. It has just over 4% share of the domestic passenger market and been hobbled by a procession of exits by people in vital roles such as engineering, cargo, HR and security as well as a bitter shareholder dispute in 2015. The AirAsia India board has also seen a churn since inception. It now has three independent directors namely, Ashok Sinha, a former managing director of oil company BPCL, former aviation secretary M Madhavan Nambiar, and retired bureaucrat Maya Swaminathan Sinha. The Tatas are represented by Ramadorai, chief financial officer Deepak Mahendra, R Venkataramanan, and Mandal. AirAsia Bhd has Fernandes, AirAsia India CEO Amar Abrol and Bo Lingam on the board. Mandal, group general counsel at Tata Sons, was named director on May 21. After claiming that it was reducing the fuel prices by 59 paise in metro cities, the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) cut the prices only by one paisa. The state-owned firm later clarified that they had published the wrong price data on Wednesday morning. "There was a technical glitch in posting the selling prices of petrol and diesel on our website today," the company said in its statement, clarifying the revised fuel prices. "The selling prices of petrol and diesel with effect from May 30, 2018, have been rectified on our website. Today, there is a minor reduction in fuel prices," the statement said. The fuel prices were cut for the first time after 16 days of continuous rise in rates. The current petrol price in Mumbai is Rs 86.23 per litre from the previous Rs 86.24 per litre and the current diesel price is Rs 73.78 per litre from the previous Rs 73.79 per litre. Before the oil retailer corrected the error, the petrol price in Mumbai was pegged at Rs 85.65 per litre and diesel at Rs 73.20 per litre, each falling by 59 paise. The fuel prices in New Delhi were also cut only by one pais a. The current diesel price is pegged at Rs 69.30 per litre rate from the earlier Rs 69.31 per litre rate while the petrol was pegged at Rs 78.42 per litre from the previous Rs 78.43 per litre. The rate before the correction in New Delhi was Rs 77.83 per litre for petrol and Rs 68.75 per litre for diesel. The outbreak of the deadly Nipah virus has claimed at least 13 lives in Kerala. According to the World Health Organization Nipah was first identified in 1999, the virus can be transmitted to humans from animals and is hosted by fruit bats. Absence of a vaccine to combat this killer disease has made the task of health officials extremely difficult. However, despite these challenges, the Kerala government claims to have successfully contained the virus. CNBC-TV18 caught up with Rajeev Sadanandan, Kerala's health secretary to understand how the state managed to make this possible. Watch Here: Edited Excerpt: Q: Do you feel absolutely confident that you have been able to now contain the spread of the deadly Nipah virus in Kerala? A: No, I would not say we are absolutely confident. We have contained the first wave, but there is always a possibility of the contacts of the contacts, what we call the second wave, starting up. However, we are almost reaching the period within which this wave should have started up. We have not seen signs of it, so, we are still keeping our fingers crossed. We are not calling the surveillance off, the whole missionaries is on active alert, but we are moderately hopeful that we have got out of the woods. Q: Can you explain to us the measures that you have taken so far in order to contain the spread of the Nipah virus? Which are the agencies that you have worked with international agencies, domestic agencies, and you said that you are not going to call the surveillance off just yet, what are the other remedial measures, precautionary measures that the state is putting in place to ensure that we do not see a repeat or in fact spread? A: When we got notice of the case, we went back to the basics, that is we identified the index case and went about identifying all the contacts. I am happy to say that our team did such a good work that almost every case that has turned positive, figured in our contact list. That is the first thing which we did. Then we went to the international agencies trying to find where it is that we could get help. We were lucky to get in touch with Professor Christopher Broder of Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in US. Christopher has been one of the leaders in developing the cell-line and from that the monoclonal antibody. Meanwhile we also got in touch with the World Health Organisation (WHO). Chris was able to put us in touch with the Queensland government who borrowed the cell-line from US, developed the antibody, and have stock filed the only monoclonal antibody that is believed to be an antibody to this virus. We got in touch with Queensland, Queensland said we will respond if the central government asks us. Never before would have Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) moved so fast; we got the no objection from the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI), they moved the Queensland government, and we are at the final stage of getting those drugs in. Meanwhile the WHO clinical development group has been made active again. We are working with them, the ICMR is working with them, and we are hopeful that going forward we should be able to see some active work, both on the drug development and on the vaccine development. Going forward, what we would like to do us, we know that these bats are prevalent all across the country, and the bats carry infections below the detectable level. So, any part of India I would say is at risk. So what we will do is to identify the best persons working in this area in Asia, invite them over, do a study of our bat population and identify the infection root. We are also inviting the ICMR to join us and indications are the National Institute of Epidemiology under the ICMR would join us and together we will be able to ensure that the lessons that we learnt from this epidemic is available to us and for the rest of the country. Q: I also want to understand about the practical reality on the ground. You talked about that surveillance system that you have put in place in order for you to be able to contain the spread of the virus. Can you explain to us because I would imagine that, that can also be important lesson for other states to follow through on, it must be a multi-thread surveillance system that you have put in place, can you explain to us how you brought about that and how it has been working on the ground? A: Let us start before the epidemic got noticed because we know that this virus becomes active between December and May and what we will do in future is to start looking for this virus infections in future. What happens now is, once case is identified then you do an active history taking, we look at all the contact who are there, find out how many other contacts they have had and what we did was to prepare a master list, advise our health field staff to contact each of them and advise them on house quarantine. At one point of time we had more than 900 people who had been alerted and on house quarantine. Our field staff would call them up, visit them and find out if they are showing any symptoms. The moment they showed the symptoms, we would shift them to the facility we had identified and there they would remain under observation while we draw their blood, send it out for testing to our partner institute which is the Manipal Institute of Virology and the turnaround time was around 18 hours. Within that time they remain there and if they are positive they are moved to the management facility, if they are not positive then they are sent home. That is the drill that we had followed and this is something we will try to refine in future if something happens again. Q: In terms of being able to actively engage the local community to also ensure that precautionary measures are taken, I think that you have managed to do a fairly effective job this time around with the Nipah virus outbreak. Can you explain to us what specific measures were taken to engage the local community? A: Kerala has a high level of social capital and the community generally rallies around when something like this happens. Secondly our elected representatives, we have gram panchayats and all the gram panchayats where the infections happened were very active and they ensured that the whole community was mobilised. The local MLA is one of our ministers, he was there right through the event. The health minister was there right through the event. The media in Kerala has been very responsive, educating people on how the disease spreads, what measures to take, how not to panic. I would be very proud of the way that my whole state, the whole community, the media, the politicians, the health services, everybody pulled together to get us out of this problem. The Missourians Opinion section is a public forum for the discussion of ideas. The views presented in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missourian or the University of Missouri. If you would like to contribute to the Opinion page with a response or an original topic of your own, visit our submission form October 2020 brought a lighter-than-usual crop of patches. For the first time in recent memory, there were none at all for Internet Explorer or the (Chromium-based) Edge browser. The cumulative updates went in with few reports of problems, although there were many complaints about printers not working after the update. Strange things happened, though, outside the usual monthly patching schedule. The day after Patch Tuesday, Microsoft announced a(nother) fix for a security hole in the HEVC codec CVE-2020-17022 distributed, once again, only through the Microsoft Store. HPs Secure Click Enterprise started falling over immediately after installing this months Windows cumulative updates. HP released a Win10 update-friendly version a couple of days later. It continues to astound me that a mainstream product from a major manufacturer isnt tested before the cumulative updates roll out. There was a security hole plug specifically for Visual Studio programmers, CVE-2020-17023. Then theres the security patch for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, CVE-2020-16943, that was announced but never appeared. Its still missing in action. Something in there about counting chickens before theyre hatched. As usual, we had dire warnings galore from the usual patch-right-now sources (Microsoft warns beeeelions of customers to patch immediately!). As usual, we havent seen any immediately exploited security holes, with the possible exception of SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019. The usual grab-bag of bugs Every month for the past year or two, weve seen a big accumulation of bugs arrive on the heels of Patch Tuesday. This months no exception. You can see a motley collection of blocked update error messages, error codes, blue screens, crashes, and peripheral problems in Mayank Parmars article in Windows Latest, Lawrence Abrams piece for BleepingComputer, Venkats rundown in Techdows, Gunter Borns post in Borns Tech and Windows World, and countless parrot sites around the web. I dont see any particular pattern to any of it, which has become increasingly common. New patches just seem to bring along a trove of unrelated bugs, any one of which can be hugely frustrating but none of which seem to be particularly widespread. The one exception: Ive seen many reports of printers that stop working after the latest cumulative update gets installed. In every case Ive seen, pulling the plug on the printer and plugging it back in solves the problem an easy task for individuals, not so much for admins. 'Windows cant verify the publisher of this driver software' Some people are reporting an unexpected error when installing certain drivers. Microsoft describes the situation in the Resolved issues portion of the Windows Release Information Status page: When installing a third-party driver, you might receive the error, Windows cant verify the publisher of this driver software." You may also see the error No signature was present in the subject when attempting to view the signature properties using Windows Explorer. This issue occurs when one or more of the following is present in a driver package: An improperly formatted catalog file is identified during validation by Windows. Starting with this release, Windows will require the validity of DER encoded PKCS#7 content in catalog files. Catalogs files must be signed per section 11.6 of describing DER-encoding for SET OF members in X.690. A driver catalog file extension is not one of the supported extensions. Thats a feature, not a bug. Microsoft suggests that you contact the driver manufacturer and ask for an update. If your hardware vendor isnt real interested in keeping up with Windows 10, well, jokes on you. Gunter Born puts it succinctly: Windows is a huge hardware exterminator, rendering still working devices as electronic waste, because drivers can no longer be installed. 'Optional' .NET previews arent optional any more Weve seen this problem for several months, and it still hasnt been fixed. Windows Update doesnt handle the .NET Preview monthly rollups the way you (or at least, I) would expect. Cumulative Update previews have to be manually approved by clicking a Download and install link. .NET Previews dont even offer the option. Theres a convoluted set of rules about Windows automatically installing .NET Previews. @abbodi86 has unrolled the behavior this way: The new .NET Previews are nothing different from all previous non-security .NET cumulative updates. They just have the term Preview in label. If youre a seeker (click Check for updates in Windows Update), the .NET Preview update will be installed regardless of your other settings. If you arent a seeker, when a normal update scan takes place, one of two things will happen. (1) If the previous .NET Security update is not yet installed, the .NET Preview update will be flagged as potentially superseded, and Windows Update will not offer it. (2) If the latest .NET Security update is already installed, the .NET Preview update will be installed. If that isnt confusing enough for you, @abbodi86 has full details here. I have no idea why Microsoft thinks that its preview (i.e., not-yet-ready-for-prime-time) patches should be installed on machines without any warning or opt-out capability. But there you have it. Microsoft pulls back on potentially unwanted PWA apps When is a PUP installer not a PUP installer? When its a Windows beta, of course. Somebody at Microsoft decided it would be a good idea to jury-rig some beta test versions of Windows 10 so they automatically installed the new PWA (progressive web app) versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. Several beta testers took umbrage at an operating system that cavalierly installed potentially unwanted programs. A couple days later, Microsoft changed course, claiming that the pushy behavior was a bug. Right. Sean Hollister at The Verge has details. Office 2010 and Exchange Server 2010 hit end of life As of Oct. 13, both Office 2010 and Exchange 2010 fell off the support cycle. You wont get any more patches. A pity, really, because Office 2010 (in spite of its interface peculiarities) was a real workhorse. Patch Lady Susan Bradley has details. Version 20H2 (or is it 2009?) rolling out Microsoft is starting to make Win10 version 20H2 available for the masses although you have to click Download and install to get it. At least, thats the theory. Considering version 2004 had almost no new worthwhile features, and 20H2 has fewer still (theme-related shading on Start tiles? Alt+Tab switching Edge tabs? Puh-lease), the push to 20H2 is now under way. Think of it as yet another cumulative update, except it doesnt plug any new security holes. If you ever needed a concrete example of why twice-a-year upgrades for Win10 make absolutely no sense at all, now you have it. Patching problems? Hit us on AskWoody.com. Connor Short is the Youth Coordinator for Tory Workers and the Chairman for Wigan, Leigh and Makerfield Young Conservatives. The Council ward of Leigh South in the Borough of Wigan, has been held entirely by Labour ever since it was formed as a ward in 2004.The three seats in the ward have only ever been held by the same three Labour men. This should come as no surprise. In Mark Wallaces article in 2015 there was a fascinating comparison between the coalfields and Labour strongholds. So comfortable were their positions that at no point have any of the Labour councillors ever felt the need to perform a Get Out The Vote exercise in the last few days of the campaign, but this time they did and the results proved that they needed to. Throughout the count, Labour were concerned as they witnessed what was always a red stronghold become, for the first time ever, a marginal seat. On a night where we boosted the number of Tories on Wigan Council, the story seemed to be focused on Leigh South. Achieving as high as 46 per cent of the vote was an unexpected scare for Labour. The best result for the Conservatives since 1979, when it was under a different boundary and a different name. The myth on the minds of many voters at election time is that the Labour Party support the workers, while the Tories support the bankers. Its this myth that is found running its own race in Labour heartlands like Leigh. Defeating this stereotype can only be broken by providing a display of the hard work ethics in the candidate. A display can be provided by turning up on voters doorsteps to ask for their concerns and providing them with a clear leaflet, which both promotes the candidate and, if in opposition, holds the incumbent councillors to account. Leigh has a very proud history of mining and working class values. Residents in Leigh even have the proud honour of living in the same town as the birthplace of the Spinning Jenny. Instinctively, voters in Leigh will not vote for a candidate that is either from out of town or has a lack of working class attitudes. Sitting in an office does not win any votes here. To win a vote, you must show how hard youll work and how passionate you are about speaking up for everyone in the ward. Every single vote must be earned. So, thats what I did over three months of hard campaigning, to achieve marginality in a Labour stronghold and set up a reshaping of politics in Leigh. Proudly, as a Tory Worker, it took a strict workers attitude to break new ground in Leigh at this years election. Over the course of the campaign, I took 702,000 steps, delivered two leaflets in the first and third months of the campaign to every single letterbox in the ward, knocked on 2,700 doors (including at least 250 in every polling district) and my dawn raid took in 23 miles and led to three days of painful limping after polling day. The result of the campaign was something I am very proud of. Labour saw their majority get slashed from 30 per cent to just eight per cent. A Workers campaign is not something that works exclusively in Leigh South, or even Leigh constituency. It is a campaign that will be highly respected by the electorate in working class areas, industrial areas and areas with a high population in the social grades C2 D and E, across the whole of the UK. Practicing this attitude, using the right local candidates with a determined, focused and passionate attitude, will likely open up many doors currently being creaked open. Since January, there has been a seven-point swing from Labour to the Conservatives amongst working class voters. At this current time, we have been presented with an opportunity to appeal to a new generation of Conservatives and prove to everyone that we stand for everyones right to access the ladder of opportunity. Lets take it. To the no-nonsense free-thinking plain-speaking Anglo-Saxon mind, the Italian Presidents recent conduct exemplifies everything thats wrong with the EU. How dare Sergio Mattarella veto Paolo Savona, a critic of the Euro, from the post of finance minister. Why should the wishes of a democratically elected government be trampled upon in this way? What possible justification can there be for the imposition of Carlo Mr Scissors Cottarelli, an IMF official who no-one has voted for, as prime minister over the heads of the voters? However you vote in Italy, the argument runs, you get Germany thats to say, the growth-cutting, job-wrecking straitjacket of the Euro, together with the uncontrolled immigration and unaccountable government which the EU has made its own. But the English mind is not well placed to get inside the Italian one. Now on its 62nd government since the war, with every prospect of moving soon to its 63rd, Italy really is another country. The President is arguably within his constitutional right to have acted as he did (though just as arguably outside it). In any event, it is not at all clear that Italys parliament will impeach him. Furthermore, Italy is no stranger to takeover by bureaucrats: the unelected Mario Monti, a former European Commissioner now theres a suprise formed an unelected Cabinet after the fall of Silvio Berlusconi. One account has it that the latter was toppled by Brussels and the European Central Bank because he wasnt sufficiently enthused bythe Euro. Berlusconi himself rode a popular wave in the wake of the collapse of Italys Christian Democrats. Barred from serving in any legislative post for six years, he is waiting in the wings for the bar to lapse. Since Berlusconi came and went, Matteo Renzi has come and gone, too ejected in the wake of his failed referendum on constitutional reform. Brexiteers warm instinctively to the Brussels-hostile new government of the League and the Five Star Movement, but it is not a stable combination, and its programme is Arthur-Laffer-meets-Jeremy-Corbyn: thats to say, lower income tax and a universal basic income, plus a lower pension age. Reality is so dispiriting in Italy that its little wonder voters have opted for unicorns. Our point is not that Mattarella was right to veto Savona and send for Cottarelli or that the government somehow lacks legitimacy. It is, rather, William Hagues familiar truth: that the Euro is a burning building with no exits. Whatever happens, Italys options are grisly. On the one hand, a future in the Eurozone means stagnation, mass unemployment, uncontrolled migration (by extension), a democratic deficit and, in effect, rule from abroad. On the other, to leave the zone, by whatever means, risks market turmoil, investment flight, bust banks and economic upheaval. Once upon a time, Italy, since it cant seem to manage structural reform, would devalue and spend. That option is not available. In the fable, an Irishman says that one wouldnt start from here. Perhaps it should feature an Italian instead. In a strange way, Mattarella has a point. If Italian voters really are to ask those they elect to leave the Euro, or experiment with parallel currencies, it would be best for them knowingly to take the plunge, rather than see a government probably one that is an inchoate coalition blunder into doing so without full democratic backing. The League-Five Star combination is a distance from adopting depature from the currency as policy, and it is reported today that there may not even be fresh elections. A poll could see Italys voters choose a different path to that taken by their Greek counterparts, with consequences so momentous for Europe as almost to defy description. But the EU has a long history of quelling voter protest. This beautiful, cynicism-worn, bewildering country is hard to read. Experts say there are several benefits that come with offering more than the minimum wage A new study conducted by researchers from the Institute for Operations and the Management Sciences explored the wide-ranging effects that come with raising the minimum wage. While a higher minimum wage is beneficial because it encourages stronger work performance from employees, the researchers found that it also changes how consumers view businesses. Overall, the researchers learned that customers had a more positive view of a business when its minimum wage is higher. ... 05/30/2018 Photo (c) andriano_cz - Getty Images Just a week after saying the U.S.-China trade dispute is on hold, the Trump administration has pushed ahead with plans for tariffs on some Chinese imports. Tariffs increase the cost of imported goods, and those increases almost always get passed along to consumers. On Tuesday, President Trump said the U.S. would move ahead with a plan to impose a 25 percent tariff on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports. The White House said the tariffs will begin within the next month. Another truce is possible But it is entirely possible a trade truce could be called once again. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross will go to China within days for talks designed to resolve outstanding issues. Ross is in Paris today, where he scolded the European Union (EU) for refusing to negotiate with the U.S. after Washington imposed tariffs on EU imports in March. Ross noted that China, at least, was willing to negotiate. Trump imposed the tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, saying he was acting to protect American jobs. But the tariffs have been postponed while the U.S. tries to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Negotiating tactic? Trump has repeatedly said that the U.S. has accepted bad trade deals, suggesting the tariffs may be a negotiating tool as the administration seeks to improve its trade posture. So far, the tariffs on China have not targeted finished goods sold to consumers. However, the higher costs for Chinese steel, aluminum, and electronic components have the potential to make other products more costly for consumers. A recent analysis by Bloomberg News found the list of products facing a 25 percent tariff appears to have been carefully crafted, excluding items that would impact consumers the most and could potentially disrupt the U.S. economy. For its part, China has responded to the surprise announcement from the White House by saying it does not want a trade war, but it isn't afraid of one either. We are analyzing the site. Please wait a few seconds.. 100% Website samensterkzonderstigma.nl uses latest and advanced technologies like: JQuery. It supports HTTPS and GZIP compression. The main html page has a size of 117139 bytes (114.39 kb uncompressed) and 15793 bytes (15.42 kb compressed). This CoolSocial report was updated on 2021-03-14, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want. CORNWALL, Ontario Christopher Beaulieu, 43, of Rockland was arrested on May 18, 2018 and charged with the following: Assault Assault cause bodily harm Assault with a weapon Threats Possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose Forcible Confinement Robbery Breach of recognizance (for possessing weapons) It is alleged on May 5, 2018 the man entered the residence of a man unknown to him and assaulted the man with an object, causing him to seek medical attention. The man also allegedly brandished a knife while making threats to further injure the man, prevented him from leaving the residence, and forcibly removed property from the residence without permission. Police were contacted and an investigation ensued. On May 18, 2018 the man was taken into custody, charged accordingly and held for a bail hearing. THEFT UNDER $5,000, BREACH Cornwall, ON Austin-Taylor Anderson, 19, of Cornwall was arrested on May 18th, 2018 and charged with theft under $5000 and breach of probation for failing to keep the peace. It is alleged between April 10-11th, 2018, the man removed a wallet from a motor vehicle and police were contacted. On May 18th, 2018 the man was taken into custody, charged accordingly and released to appear in court on June 14th, 2018. SEXUAL ASSAULT, SEXUAL INTERFERENCE Cornwall, ON A 23-year-old Cornwall man was arrested on May 18th, 2018 and charged with sexual assault and sexual interference. It is alleged in June, 2012 the man inappropriately touched his 8-year-old cousin. Police were contacted and an investigation ensued. On May 18th, 2018 the man attended police headquarters to deal with the matter. He was taken into custody, charged accordingly and was released to appear in court on June 19th, 2018. His name was not released as the man was a youth at the time of the incident and is protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. ASSAULT Cornwall, ON A 28-year-old Cornwall woman was arrested on May 18th, 2018 and charged with assault. It is alleged during an argument on May 18th, 2018 the woman assaulted her boyfriend and police were contacted to investigate. During the investigation the woman was taken into custody, charged accordingly and released to appear in court on June 19th, 2018. Her name was not released as it would identify the victim in the matter. IMPAIRED OPERATION, OVER 80 Cornwall, ON Arlene Jock, 37, of Akwesasne was arrested on May 19th, 2018 and charged with impaired operation and over 80. It is alleged on May 19th, 2018 the woman was operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol at the Canadian Port of Entry. She was taken into custody, charged accordingly and released to appear in court on May 31st, 2018. ASSAULT Cornwall, ON A 38-year-old Moose Creek woman was arrested on May 20th, 2018 and charged with assault. It is alleged during an argument on May 20th, 2018 the woman assaulted her boyfriend and police were contacted to investigate. During the investigation the woman was taken into custody, charged accordingly and held for a bail hearing. Her name was not released as it would identify the victim in the matter. WARRANT Cornwall, ON Mickey Delormier, 28, of Cornwall was arrested on May 20th, 2018 on the strength of a warrant. It is alleged the woman failed to attend court for an assault police charge and a warrant was issued for her arrest. She was located by police on May 20th, 2018, was taken into custody on the strength of the warrant and held for a bail hearing. Cornwall, ON Shawnna Chartrand, 25, of Cornwall was arrested on May 20th, 2018 on the strength of a warrant. It is alleged the woman failed to attend court for a theft charge and a warrant was issued for her arrest. On May 20th, 2018, the woman attended police headquarters to deal with the matter. She was taken into custody on the strength of the warrant and held for a bail hearing. THEFT UNDER, MISCHIEF UNDER, BREACH, WARRANT Cornwall, ON A 30-year-old Cornwall man was arrested on May 21st, 2018 on the strength of a warrant. He was also charged with theft under $5000, mischief under $5000, breach of probation and breach of undertaking for failing to notify a change of address, possessing a weapon, and failing to keep the peace. It is alleged the man failed to attend court on May 4th, 2018 and a warrant was issued for his arrest. It is also alleged on May 8th, 2018 the man attended his ex-girlfriends residence, damaged dishes and a door, and removed several electronics from the residence without permission. Police were contacted and an investigation ensued. On May 21st, 2018 the man was located by police and was found to be in possession of several knives despite his conditions. He was taken into custody on the strength of the warrant and held for a bail hearing. His name was not released as it would identify the victim in the matter. ASSAULT Cornwall, ON An 18-year-old Cornwall woman was arrested on May 21st, 2018 and charged with assault. It is alleged during an argument on May 21st, 2018 the woman assaulted her boyfriend and police were contacted to investigate. During the investigation the woman was taken into custody, charged accordingly and released to appear in court on June 12th, 2018. Her name was not released as it would identify the victim in the matter. BREAK AND ENTER, THEFT UNDER, THREATS, BREACH Cornwall, ON Fowler Thompson, 32, of Cornwall was arrested on May 21st, 2018 and charged with break and enter, theft under $5000, threats, and breach of recognizance for consuming drugs. It is alleged on May 21st, 2018 the man forced his way onto the property of someone unknown to him, removed a bat, and made threats to a youth inside the residence. The man also allegedly removed shoes from a motor vehicle without permission and police were contacted to investigate. During the investigation police located the man and he was found to be intoxicated by drugs. He was taken into custody, charged accordingly and held for a bail hearing. REFUSAL Cornwall, ON Toby Back, 33, of Akwesasne was arrested on May 21st, 2018 and charged with refusing to provide a sample of his breath. It is alleged on May 22nd, 2018 the man failed to provide a proper sample of his breath upon demand after being stopped at the Canadian Port of Entry. Police were contacted and an investigation ensued. During the investigation he was taken into custody, charged accordingly and released to appear in court on May 31st, 2018. There were 199 calls for service in the City of Cornwall over the long weekend (8am Friday to 8am Tuesday morning). To see whats happening in your neighbourhood visit our Crime Plot Map. CCPS reserves the right to not post all calls for service in order to protect the identity of the victims. CORNWALL, Ontario Cornwall resident Robert Carriere wants a new electric wheelchair and some answers. Carriere has a bad heart, COPD and has lost a leg. He is confined to a wheelchair, but says that the Champlain Local Area Health Network (LHIN) denied his request for a new electric wheelchair. Carriere, 70, says that he has not been given a good reason as to why he will not be getting a new chair. They say I can do too much, but Im lost without my chair, he said. Carriere currently has an electric wheelchair, but he says that the has had it inspected by paramedics who say that the engine is failing. He does not want to take the risk of being out in his old electric wheelchair and have it fail on him. The chair is making a lot of noise, said Carriere. All the CCAC would do was buy me two new batteries. CCAC, the Community Care Access Centre in Cornwall was taken over by the Champlain LHIN one year ago. The Champlain LHIN takes client concerns very seriously, the LHIN said in an emailed statement to Cornwall Seaway News. While we do not discuss individual cases out of respect for patient confidentiality, we have a robust process in place to respond to concerns and complaints. More information on our complaints process can be found on our public website. The LHIN went on to say that it can only provide equipment under certain circumstances and on a limited basis. The LHIN can provide equipment under certain circumstances on a short-term basis to patients receiving LHIN home care services, the LHIN said. Eligible patients must be receiving, or have been referred to, at least one professional service, such as nursing, physiotherapy or occupational therapy. There are provincial government programs that Carriere has looked into to see if he could get funding for a new chair, but the Ontario Assistive Devices Program only covers 75 percent of the total cost of the device, leaving the patient to pay for the remaining 25 percent. Carriere said that electric wheelchairs cost upwards of $10,000 and that it is too much for him to afford even 25 percent of the cost on his pension. Carriere says that the chair is an important part of his life as he still tries to remain independent and active. He said that he would use his chair to travel to the clinic when he needed to and that he still likes to go fishing during the summer. NORTH GLENGARRY, Ontario As a result of a sexual assault investigation conducted by members of the Stormont Dundas & Glengarry Ontario Provincial Police, a 48 year-old male resident of North Glengarry was arrested on May 18, 2018. The 48-yr old male resident of North Glengarry faces charges of: Sexual Assault (2 counts) The above charges are in relation to incidents involving a teenaged girl. The name of the accused is being withheld in order to protect the identity of the victim. He was released and is scheduled to appear at the Ontario Court of Justice in Cornwall court on July 4, 2018. THREATS SOUTH DUNDAS, Ontario On May 18, 2018 at approximately 10:57 a.m. Stormont Dundas & Glengarry Ontario Provincial Police officers responded to a report of threats in South Dundas Township. Investigation revealed that a male youth had uttered threats. A 15-year-old male of South Dundas, Ontario was arrested and is charged with; Uttering Threats He was released and is scheduled to appear at the Ontario Court of Justice in Cornwall court on June 28, 2018. The name of the accused is being withheld in accordance with the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA). STOLEN BOAT SOUTH GLENGARRY, Ontario On May 18, 2018 at approximately 5:09 p.m., Stormont Dundas &Glengarry Ontario Provincial Police responded to a report of a Boat being taken from a property on Purcell Rd., South Glengarry Township. Investigation indicated that sometime in the previous weeks a 1978 Glastron Runabout fiberglass boat with blue seats Whaler was stolen. The boat was on a 2016 Home grey trailer with Ontario plate # N7881P. STUNT DRIVERS SD&G, Ontario On May 18, 2018 Ontario Provincial Police officers conducted speed measuring enforcement in SD&G and intercepted the following vehicles for traveling at excessive speeds. The vehicles were impounded and the drivers permit seized for seven (7) days in accordance to policy. May 18, 2018 7:30 a.m. (South Glengarry); vehicle stopped travelling 147km/h (80km/h zone)(Highway 401)(Construction zone). Female driver (44) from Montreal, Quebec was charged with Stunt Driving (Highway Traffic Act). May 18, 2018 2:07 p.m. (South Dundas); vehicle stopped travelling 158km/h (100km/h zone)(Highway 401). Female driver (32) from Ajax, Ontario was charged with Stunt Driving (Highway Traffic Act). IMPAIRED DRIVER NORTH DUNDAS, Ontario On May 19, 2018 at approximately 11:23 p.m., Stormont, Dundas & Glengarry (SD&G) Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officers responded to a single vehicle collision on County Road 3 in North Dundas, Ontario. The investigation revealed that the adult female driver was under the influence of alcohol. Taunya van Allen, 47, of North Dundas, Ontario was arrested and is charged with; Care or control of a Motor Vehicle with over 80 Milligrams of Alcohol in blood Care or control of a Motor Vehicle while Impaired She was released and is scheduled to appear at the Ontario Court of Justice in Cornwall on June 5, 2018. DRIVER OF A STOLEN VEHICLE ARRESTED SOUTH GLENGARRY, Ontario On May 20, 2018 at approximately 10:38 p.m. Stormont Dundas & Glengarry officers conducted a traffic stop on Highway 401, South Glengarry, Ontario. The investigation revealed that a male was driving a Toyota Corolla which had been stolen from Toronto, Ontario. Investigation further revealed that the adult male was in possession of a controlled substance (marijuana). Mohamed Aroud, 18, of Chambly, Quebec was arrested and is charged with; Possession of property obtained by crime over $5,000 Possession of a controlled substance Drive motor Vehicle -no licence (Highway Traffic Act) He was held in custody pending a court appearance (bail) at the Ontario Court of Justice in Cornwall. IMPAIRED DRIVER SOUTH DUNDAS, Ontario On May 20, 2018 at approximately 1:31 p.m., Stormont, Dundas & Glengarry (SD&G) Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officers responded to a two vehicle collision on Highway 401 in South Dundas, Ontario. The investigation revealed that the adult female driver was under the influence of alcohol. Karen Whiteaway, 49, of Saint-Julie, Quebec was arrested and is charged with; Care or control of a Motor Vehicle with over 80 Milligrams of Alcohol in blood Care or control of a Motor Vehicle while Impaired She was released and is scheduled to appear at the Ontario Court of Justice in Cornwall on June 5, 2018. ASSAULT- DOMESTIC NORTH DUNDAS, Ontario On May 20, 2018 at approximately 10:04 p.m. Stormont Dundas & Glengarry Ontario Provincial Police officers responded to a report of domestic situation in North Dundas Township. Investigation revealed that an adult male had assaulted his wife. A 39-year-old male of North Dundas, Ontario was arrested and is charged with; Assault ( 2 counts) He was released and is scheduled to appear at the Ontario Court of Justice in Cornwall court on June 19, 2018. ANYONE HAVING INFORMATION ON THE ABOVE OR ANY CRIME IS ASKED TO CALL SD&G OPP AT 1-888-310-1122 OR CRIME STOPPERS AT 1-800-222-8477. CORNWALL, Ontario St. Lawrence College has announced that it will be presenting Dr. Rachel Navaneelan with an honorary diploma. Navaneelan will receive the diploma during her address to graduating students in Cornwall at Aultsville Theatre on Friday, June 1 a 1:30 p.m. St. Lawrence College said that Dr. Navaneelan was being recognized because of her years of public service supporting non-profits and charitable causes both in Cornwall and around the world. St. Lawrence College particularly cited Dr. Navaneelans work with her own non-profit organization, Rachels Kids. Over the years, Rachels Kids and Dr. Rachel have worked to fulfill specific needs in the Cornwall community, collaborating with numerous organizations including the Childrens Treatment Centre, Cornwall Community Hospital, Victim Services of SDG&A, Koala Place, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Cornwall & District, and St. Vincent de Paul Society, among others, the press release reads. Dr. Navaneelan explained that she strongly believed in giving back to the community. Im a strong believer in giving back to the Cornwall community as it has been so great to me since I arrived here and started my dentistry practice 25 years ago, says Dr. Rachel. All children locally and globally hold a special place in my heart and this is the reason why I started Rachels Kids House of Hope, so I could support children and families in need right here in our community. NORTH GLENGARRY, Ontario Jamie MacDonald has decided to run for Mayor of North Glengarry after serving as the Deputy Mayor for the last six years. Prior to his current role, he acted as the Alexandria Ward representative for six years. I think I have lots to offer as Mayor, said MacDonald. I think I have great leadership qualities and there are still a lot of things that I want to accomplish on council. MacDonald is excited to continue the Maxville Water Project, which he thinks is one of the biggest infrastructure projects in North Glengarrys history. Similarly, he is looking forward to upgrading the lagoon in Alexandria. He says that the project is moving swiftly and successfully thus fair, and it is staying on budget. MacDonald acknowledges that North Glengarrys population has been dropping over the past few years, according to Census surveys. Were hoping to turn that around with new growth, said MacDonald. We feel that once Maxville has got water, we will be in prime for growth along that corridor. MacDonald is also hopeful to continue with the Community Improvement Plan (CIP) if he were to be elected as Mayor. We have a whole bunch of projects being applied for in the hamlet of Glen Robertson, and we have some in the other small hamlets that have come forward for information, said MacDonald. I think its great. Theres a lot of history in some of these buildings and we are revitalizing our downtown. I think its one of our biggest successes of the last term. Growing the municipalitys tax base is important to MacDonald, as is maintaining roads and infrastructure. MacDonald is hoping for more support from the federal and provincial government to be able to continue with these upgrading projects. Working closely and openly with the public and council members is also a priority. I just hope to lead a transparent council, said MacDonald. We will never always agree on everything, but (I hope for) a council that will work together to bring any project to fruition, ie that community plan. Council was on board with it, we invested some big dollars into it and its worked for us. But you cant do that if youre not willing to work together. NORTH GLENGARRY, Ontario After eight years as Mayor and almost 20 years on council, incumbent Chris McDonell has decided to retire. Its a young mans job, said McDonell. Theres a lot of meetings. I enjoyed my time though. I had a good career at it and I think I did alright. Before his career in politics, McDonell was a police officer with OPP. He will miss working with the public as he enjoyed serving and bettering his community. McDonell worked in various positions within municipal politics since 2000, including acting as SDG Counties Warden in 2009. One of the projects that McDonell is most proud of during his time as Mayor is the Maxville Water Project. Its a $30 million project, its good for the area, good for the community and necessary for Maxville, said McDonell. McDonell is impressed with the work of his colleagues Sarah Huskinson, the Chief Administrative Officer/Clerk, and Kimberly Champigny, the new Treasurer and Director of Finance. He also thinks that Jamie MacDonald would make an excellent Mayor as he is always involved in community projects. During his retirement, McDonell plans to help his brother by working on his farm. I just want to thank everyone for putting up with me, McDonell joked. The people were very good to me. In all my years as an active organizer and volunteer for the NDP, Ive been inundated with statements that our party is bad for business. Thats simply not true. Its a myth the Liberals and Conservatives want you to believe while their policies only benefit those in their inner circles. When we empower our communities, educate our population, and provide them with adequate infrastructure and health services everyone benefits. Especially employers. Our Party has always supported local, community based development. Thats why our plan asks the wealthiest among us to pay a bit more, but gives small business owners and the rest of us a break. Well also be closing tax loopholes which corporations have taken advantage of under the Liberals, and well return the corporate tax rate to where it was when the Premier took office, helping to fix the budget woes she herself created. We know that times are just as hard for the business community as they are for workers. Thats why, were going to end the tax loophole that allows major corporations to masquerade as small businesses. It isnt right, it isnt fair, and leaves our local entrepreneurs at a competitive disadvantage. We will also maintain the one third reduction in small business taxes. Our Pharmacare plan takes the onus off of many entrepreneurs, and will help ensure our workforce is adequately taken care of. Businesses in Ontario stand to save between $800 million to $1.9 billion each year. Andreas plan will also support infrastructure spending, that will directly benefit our local business community. We plan to invest $180 billion into infrastructure projects, and well do in a financially stable way, without dangerous P3 agreements that leave our communities with less control and less quality. Doug Fords plan is not a plan, and its definitely not a direction that voters deserve. Its hard to tell how much it will cost Ontarians. Despite his claims of efficiencies, some estimates now put the combined toll of his cuts and spending promises at a figure that far outweighs anything the New Democrats have promised. If you want a reasonable path forward, that lowers the deficit projections while bolstering small businesses and investing back into our communities than there is only one clear option at the ballot box. Marc Benoit ONDP Candidate Stormont-Dundas-South Glengarry An aspect of my job that I especially enjoy is the opportunity to regularly talk hair science with a variety of others. My position brings me into frequent contact with many other researchers in our field with whom I relish such discussions; at the same time, teaching and consulting keeps me on my toes in terms of countless interesting questions. This said, my stomach sinks every time the phone rings and the person on the other end wants to talk about hair body and volume. Such nebulous and sometimes spurious language used by consumers has been a reoccurring theme of past columns, but the terms volume and body are perhaps the most indefinable. To a scientist, the term volume has a clear definitionWebsters dictionary defines it as the amount of space occupied by a three-dimensional (3D) object. But, to quote Chris Gummer of Cider Solutionswho reviews hair claims for Clearcast, the British claims clearance agencywarning lights start flashing when I see the dictionary being used as a scientific reference. Figure 1 and Figure 2 show individuals whose hair occupy a great deal of spaceyet neither of these represent desirable states. The hair in Figure 1 would more likely be termed frizzy; while Figure 2 shows an extreme case of static flyaway. Clearly the consumer parameter is considerably more complex than this simple technical definition. Consumers know volume and body when they see it but pushing for further description generally results in other similarly intangible termshair is full of life, vibrance, bounce, etc. The same is true for the antithesis of this state, where language such as flat, limp and lifeless may be encountered. It would be nice to report that rigorous scientific attention has unlocked these mysteries and provided luciditybut no. These complex inter-related attributes have no simple definition and therefore no simple means of measurement. This is an important point as, to paraphrase the measurement scientists axiom, attributable to the illustrious Lord Kelvin (18241907), When you cannot express it in numbers your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory nature. That pretty much sums up our understanding of hair volume and body. This article nonetheless attempts to wade through the muddiness surrounding these parameters and shares views acquired from years of personal experimental endeavors, reading scientific literature and participation in end-user panel discussions and focus groups. It is hoped that this discourse defines our current comprehensionwhile perhaps encouraging others to pick up the torch and move forward. Scientifically Speaking It is difficult, and possibly even dangerous, to tackle consumer-speak from a scientific perspective but a few studies have attempted to do so for our two inextricably-linked consumer attributes. Some of these have been published1, 2 while others I am also aware of have not. The good news, at least, is that all pretty much come to the same conclusions: namely, a number of single fiber properties seem to associate. Fiber dimensions, for example, are believed important; where body and volume are often difficult to attain for those with fine, thin hair. Lower fiber density on the scalp is also thought a hindrance. Fiber stiffness was similarly identified in all studies, where less rigidity is believed an impediment. These ideas/parameters sound reasonable and possibly even instinctivebut at the same time they are not factors that appear readily altered by cosmetic treatments (although more on this later). Fiber curvature is thought to be another key parameterand one that can be cosmetically manipulated either through temporary heat styling or a long-lasting permanent wave. However, the one parameter identified in all studies that is most easy altered is inter-fiber friction. Consumers know volume and body when they see it; but pushing for further description generally results in other similarly intangible terms. A degree of inter-fiber friction is thought desirable to prop-up voluminous styles and help to prevent them from relaxing or settling under their own weight. This concept has a number of interesting implications. On one hand, increasing hair curvature could be argued to produce more tenacious points of contact between adjacent fibers and so the effect of curvature might itself be a corollary of the friction. Perhaps we also think about the popular (though ill-advised) practice of back-combing to achieve volume and body. That is, hair is combed from tip to rootand against the grain of the cuticle scaleswhich creates friction due to irreversible uplifting of the tile-like structures. A simpler (and immensely less damaging) approach might be to use a hair spray, which achieves this goal by introducing polymeric spot-welds and seam-welds between adjacent fibers. The lubricating effect of traditional conditioner products has been heralded in many earlier articles in this column; but here a downside manifests. Specifically, this lubrication reduces inter-fiber friction which, by the above argument, should hinder the ability to maintain voluminous styles. The additional weight of surface deposits is also often cited as a negative. To this end, conditioners are generally thought to have a negative effect on body and volumewhere extra-body or bodifying variants in product lines are usually on the light end of the conditioning spectrum. Hair Color for Body and Volume A somewhat common belief is that there is an improvement in these parameters accompanying a permanent color treatment. The science behind these products has been touched upon previously in this series,3 while also highlighting the permanent changes to the hair structure4, 5 (i.e., damage) that can occur. One such manifestation of damage involves some degree of cuticle deterioration, thus increased inter-fiber friction might be theorized as the root-cause. However, we are learning that a variety of treatmentsincluding many traditionally thought to be damagingcan indeed increase individual fiber stiffness. This can be quantified in terms of the dry state Youngs modulus via conventional single fiber tensile testing6and has been shown previously for bleaching,5 UV exposure and heat treatment7 of hair. Figure 3 shows the Youngs modulus for hair dyed with a commercial permanent dye relative to the untreated control state and similarly demonstrates a comparable effect. The reason for this occurrence is still a puzzle since such treatments are known to deplete strength-supporting bonds within the hair, and would therefore be expected to lower all mechanical properties. However, despite the diminishment of other tensile properties, these treatments consistently raise the dry state Youngs modulus. Therefore, contrary to an earlier statement, there is the possibility for cosmetically increasing fiber stiffnessalthough we would like to learn how to accomplish this feat without causing other compromising issues associated with these treatments. Skill and know-how, coupled with the right hair care products, can allow for a degree of manufactured volume and body in individuals not blessed with optimal natural properties. Moment of Clarity The above scientific discourse sheds light on how fundamental single fiber properties apparently relate to the perception of body and volume. But on the other hand, a professional stylist is able to generate these states in even the limpest hair. Clearly, there must also be a skill-related component to the creation of these desired states. For me, a revelation in this area occurred while watching, from behind a one-way mirror, focus group participants styling their hair. Panelist after panelist created voluminous hair styles using a blow drier and their own hair care products in accord with their daily routine. But then, each was asked to re-wash their hair and again go through the same processexcept this time the study moderator confiscated their mousse products. The difficulty created by the absence of this product form was dramatic. The study participants were no longer able to adequately hold and manipulate their hair with the styling brush, as fibers flailed in an uncontrollable, chaotic manner under the influence of blow driers. Without the gripping ability provided by such a product, the participants had to fight against the lubrication delivered by their conditionersand, at the end of the process, all participants ended up with notably less voluminous styles. This experience illustrated to me the importance of the style creation process. Clearly, professional stylists are trained and skilled in this area to a degree above and beyond a typical individual. But the importance of so-called style creation products (i.e., mousses, gels, etc.) to facilitate this process becomes eminently apparent. I have also seen professionals use hair sprays during the styling process to the same end. There may, indeed, be fundamental hair properties that predispose the wearer to a natural, innate state of body and volume; but there is also an ability to create a manufactured version of these states, with the extent of this acquired state having dependence on individual skill and know-how. Measurement Attempts Each of the aforementioned single fiber properties themselves (diameter, stiffness, curvature, fiber density and friction) can be quantified without too much difficulty but it is still likely their relationship to the desired end property is complex. For example, very thick, dense, curly hair may well be described as frizzy and unmanageable (see Figure 1) rather than voluminous. Moreover, only one of these properties would seem affected by traditional shampoo and conditioner productsand, in theory, conditioning-related lubrication would be considered a negative. There is desire for quantification at the fiber array level. Most often this is performed by taking the consumer language literally and using the combination of high quality photography and image analysis techniques to calculate a spatial measure of hair volume. An example is shown in Figure 4. Of course, this strategy is subject to all the caveats already mentioned. Another approach that is sometimes encountered involves measuring forces associated with pulling hair tresses through a series of rings with decreasing radii.8 Here, the belief is that more voluminous hair will produce higher forces as it squeezes through progressively smaller holes. In theory, curlier, stiffer and thicker hair would seemingly give rise to higher forces; however, per previous stipulations, it appears a stretch to directly equate this property to consumer body and volume. The same is seemingly true for the so-called radial compression method, which measures the force (or energy) to squeeze a fiber bundle.9 Presumably, having "just right" combinations of given single hair fiber properties predisposes the wearer to volume and body. Hair Motion Hair motion is a concept I propose to also relate to body and volume. At some point, every TV hair care commercial shows a model flipping her hair around in a beautiful, flowing manner. Clearly, this motion is characteristic of attractive, healthy hair, with the controlling variables presumably being very similar to those already described for body and volume. Hair dimensions, density, weight, stiffness, curvature and inter-fiber friction would all seem factors that will greatly impact hair motion. This is a topic that has received surprisingly little attention in the scientific literature. Our own experimental efforts indeed suggest that different sources and states of hair do indeed move very differently (see Figure 5). Thick, heavy Asian hair moves very differently from fine Caucasian hair; curly hair moves differently from straight hair; chemically damaged hair moves differently from healthy hair. That being said, a means of quantifying these visually noticeable movements is not obvious or straightforward. Summary On the surface, it appears gratifying that independent studies have reached the same conclusions regarding the importance of certain single fiber technical properties to the consumer terms body and volume. But further poking produces some wrinkles. Namely, while parameters such as fiber thickness, curvature, stiffness, friction and density all appear reasonable contributors, it seems a Goldilocks scenario must exist where, for example, hair that is too thick, too dense and/or too curly will produce an undesirable, unmanageable and very frizzy state. Seemingly, fibers should not be too thick, or too thin; hair should have some curvature, but not too much, etc. Herein, perhaps lies the key to the problemwhereby hair that possesses what consumers call body and volume appears to sit at a sweet spot in terms of actual technical volume. Hair should have some life and not hang limply from the head but at the same time, it should not be too expansive. Presumably, having just right combinations of the aforementioned single fiber properties predisposes the wearer to a high degree of innate volume and body. Yet, as highlighted, these are mostly unaffected by cosmetic treatments. Nonetheless, skill and know-howcoupled with the right hair care productscan allow for a degree of manufactured volume and body in individuals not blessed with optimal natural properties. Specifically, products such as mousses and gels greatly facilitate the style creation process and allow those with relatively flat hair to go bigger (so-called up-volume). On the other hand, those with a very thick, curly natural state may desire a means to tame their hair to a more-desired state (down-volume). In this instance, heavy conditioning treatments may achieve this end through the action of additional weightalthough such treatments would clearly be disastrous to those desiring volume-up. This sweet spot complicates measurement approaches as there seemingly is not a linear relationship between parameters such as hairs actual physical volume or compressive forces and the desired end result. Some increase within an appropriate hair type might indeed be desirable; but not too much, and not for all hair types. Moreover, sample preparation takes on a still higher significancewhere, for example, a given hair tress treated with the same treatment will give very different volume if it is air-dried under static conditions, blow-dried or dried with physical manipulation (i.e., brushing). Accordingly, the significance of the treatment itself might be muddled. A means for differentiating between natural and manufactured volume might lie in hairs motion. That is, while styling products can be used to produce highly voluminous styles, these are usually accompanied by a stiff feel and limited motion. Similarly, the use of heavy conditioning products and oils to tame overly-voluminous styles can also preclude a natural motion. Clearly, there is much work for hair researchers going forward. References PS Hough, JE Huey and WS Tolgyesi, Hair body, J Cos Sci 27 571578 (1976) CR Robbins and GV Scott, Prediction of hair assembly characteristics from single fiber properties, J Cos Sci 29 783792 (1978) TA Evans, Quantifying hair color fading, Cosm & Toil 130(1) 3035 (2015) TA Evans, How damaged is hair? Part 1: Surface damage, Cosm & Toil 132(4) 3848 (2017) TA Evans, How damaged is hair? Part 2: Internal damage, Cosm & Toil 132(6) 3645 (2017) TA Evans, Measuring hair strength, part 1: Stress-strain curves, Cosm & Toil 128(8) 590594 (2013) TA Evans, How damaged is Hair? Part 3: Better defining the problem, Cosm & Toil 132(7) 5867 (2017) CR Robbins and J Crawford, A method to evaluate hair body, J Cos Sci 35 369377 (1984) HD Weigmann, YK Kameth and H Mark, Radial compression for evaluation of hair body, Proc Int Wool Textile Res Conf, Pretoria, South Africa (1980) A top Ricoh executive said he sees "chaos" in the printer market and believes it's an opportunity for the company to grab market share from its rivals, which in the case of Xerox is coming off a highly publicized internal battle for control. "We're starting to see classic chaos in the industry and we think we can take advantage of it, both through the differentiation of having both products and services, and being unified in front of the customer associated with our go to market strategy," Glenn Laverty, senior vice president of Ricoh Americas marketing, and CEO of Ricoh Canada, told CRN. "I think the one thing that will stand the test of time is our approach to the customer experience. We saw last year when we changed our market strategy, a four point gain in our customer loyalty index which surprised us. It was an indicator to us that we're headed in the right direction." In April, Ricoh named Joji Tokunaga, as CEO of its Americas division. A 33-year veteran of the Tokyo-based printer maker, Tokunaga said his channel strategy is going to revolve around giving Ricoh's 380 partners the support they need to "harmonize" them with the company's direct sales force. "What I feel personally is that the product itself, is not that much different to us," Tokunaga said. "Whether it's an A3 or an A4 and it prints in color or black and white. You mentioned Lexmark reinventing its entire fleet. My view is, I don't think a new product alone is going to have a strong enough pull to differentiate. So our focus is to try to have an alignment between direct sales and our dealers, and try to create a mutually agreeable strategy to drive sales through that." Some of this work was done last year when the company stopped the "insane" practice of fighting for sales against itself, Laverty said. He said Ricoh's direct sales team was competing for small and medium-sized business share with Ricoh channel partners. "When you get in a room and think about that, that's close to insane in my opinion," he said. "So we demonstrated the courage to change, and say, 'We're going to move that part of our sales force away from competing with our dealer partners.' In doing so we elected to take the sales force that we had, and move it to the upper end of the marketplace to add some verticals." Ricoh said one way they accomplished this is by turning over leads aimed at its direct sales force to channel partners. Laverty said those leads generate sales about 38 percent of the time, which has been a tremendous help to partners. Some of Ricoh's 380 channel partners have been with the company for 40 years. Taken as a whole, their work represent 40 percent of the company's sales. Laverty said providing customers with a local business, and commitment to the community has paid off. "We're seeing growth in the channel today," he said. "We don't think they've exhausted their opportunities. We're, quite frankly, excited about the large number of our dealers who are still interested in growing their businesses. And when we map out what our support systems can do to assist them in that regard, we definitely see them taking share and ultimately growing their business and we along with that as a byproduct." Tokunaga said his job is to grow channel sales by fostering the relationship between direct sales and partners, and give partners the support they need. "The only way to help us grow is to get the customer's mindset," he said. "Our challenge is how can we make it easier for dealers. Our job is not to grow direct and dealer independency," he said. "Rather we want to combine the assets and our back-office capabilities and then make the dealers more flexible into the market place." Hewlett Packard Enterprise Chief Sales Officer Phil Davis Wednesday slammed Dell EMC's storage product road map "rationalization," claiming it raises questions about which products will survive. "More than two years after the EMC acquisition, Dell is still in the midst of churn and transition, and despite the promise that its product roadmaps would not change drastically," said Davis in a blog post titled For Customers, Confidence In Their Storage Partner Is Key- And It Starts With A Clear Roadmap. "The one thing that is clear is that Dell EMCs storage roadmap is changing; unfortunately for customers, which products will survive is uncertain." Davis, who is leading the worldwide hybrid IT sales charge for HPE, said that even with the Dell EMC "product rationalization" there is still a lot of confusion. [Related: HPE Kicks Nimble All Flash Charge Into High Gear With 'Blockbuster' Storage Capacity Efficiency Guarantee] "Back in 2016, when Dells EMC acquisition was completed, the company told customers and partners in a letter, 'because our combination is very complementary, we do not expect any changes in the product roadmaps except for new products we create that bring all of our innovation together,'" said Davis, who headed up Dell's enterprise solutions business before joining HPE four years ago. "Yet today, we see a different reality with Dell EMC suggesting they may reduce their mid-range offering from four products to a single product -- leading to portfolio uncertainty. This presents a challenge for customers because confidence in their storage partner is paramount and that can only start with a clear product roadmap." Dell EMC did not respond to comment by press time. Davis urged Dell EMC customers to reconsider their storage options in the wake of the product rationalization. "Dell EMCs storage options may have met your needs in the past, but as the product lines undergo a mass consolidation, the first since Dell acquired EMC in late 2016, I ask you to check their suitability to meet your needs into the future," he said in the blog. "Users have been asking about their roadmap for a long time, and they responded publicly that no rationalization of the storage portfolio was coming; yet, now we find ourselves with incomplete facts and a fuzzy picture." The Davis throwdown comes just two weeks after CRN reported that Dell EMC is realigning its engineering teams to focus on four primary storage product lines as part of a broad restructuring aimed at accelerating product innovation The changes focus the Dell engineering teams squarely on a single product line for each market segment moving from low-end to midrange to high-end, and a separate product for the unstructured file and object storage market, sources told CRN. The $80 billion Round Rock, Texas, digital transformation infrastructure behemoth is currently developing a new midrange product and a new unstructured file and object storage product as part of the restructuring, sources said. For the high-end market, Dell will focus on its new all-flash PowerMax product unveiled this month, sources said. Dell's PowerVault product line will be the go to offering the entry level and SMB market, according to sources. The sweeping changes mark the first major redrawing of the storage product roadmap since Dell's blockbuster acquisition of EMC in 2016 for $67 billion. Even though Dell is redrawing the product road map, the company is not going to end-of-life any current products in the market today such as its SC, Unity, XtremIO, Isilon or ECS storage product lines, sources said. Dell declined to comment on the product revamp at the time. John Kolimago, executive vice president and general manager of the cloud solutions business unit at Anexinet, No. 209 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, said HPE's storage strategy with InfoSight predictive analytics across the entire product line is "light years" ahead of competitors. "Dell EMC is trying to rationalize a storage portfolio of four disparate midrange platforms," he said. "That is a tall order to go through that." Kolimago credited HPE with delivering an end-to-end product portfolio that is second to none as a result of breakthrough organic innovation, acquisitions and partnerships with ecosystem partners. "HPE's strategy is to one way or another deliver the solutions customers want," he said. "That is a powerful message. You are not seeing that from everybody. HPE is truly the one company you can partner with today for end to end solutions." Anexinet's "high value" offerings centered on HPE including Synergy, SimpliVity, Nimble and 3Par are up 50 percent in the first six months of this year, said Kolimago. "That's what our sellers want to sell because those products are without peer in the industry right now," he said. Raymond Tuchman, CEO of Experis Technology Group, a fast-growing Potomac, Md.-based HPE private cloud powerhouse, said the Dell EMC customers are "prime targets" for HPE in the wake of the Dell EMC storage product rationalization. "HPE's product portfolio from SimpliVity to Nimble to 3Par is the best it has ever been," he said. Putting HPE InfoSight across the entire HPE product line, including SimpliVity, meanwhile, also provides HPE with a big competitive advantage over Dell EMC and other competitors, said Tuchman. Davis, for his part, said the HPE's "intelligent storage portfolio" with InfoSIght predictive analytics is in sharp contrast to the Dell portfolio. "HPEs storage roadmap is both clear and it is constantly and autonomously thinking ahead on your behalf," he said. "HPE InfoSight brings Artificial Intelligence to HPE Nimble and HPE 3PAR Storage. As a result, HPE Storage self-adjusts and self-heals, it transforms how data is transferred, stored, accessed, analyzed, and secured in the cloud, within the data center, and, most critically, at the edge and is the only All-Flash portfolio which gets smarter the more time and data you throw at it." Is the cruise industry headed for annual net earnings in the $9 billion range on total gross revenues of $60 billion or more? That is the projection provided by the 2018-2019 Cruise Industry News Annual Report. The forecast is based on projected capacity growth reaching nearly 40 million passengers by 2027 and the 2017 average spend by each passenger of approximately $1,500 per cruise. Capacity growth is tracked year by year through 2027 including newbuild orders, ship deployment and withdrawals. Net earnings are estimated from the publicly traded companies 2017 profit margins that ranged from 14 percent from Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings to 14.8 percent for Carnival Corporation and 18.5 percent for Royal Caribbean Cruises. A further upside would come from the new and larger ships being yet more efficient to operate and offering more onboard spending opportunities, as well as growing demand in existing markets and tapping new markets. The two largest companies, Carnival Corporation and Royal Caribbean Cruises, have a string of unbroken annual earnings since their IPOs in 1987 and 1993, respectively. --- About the Annual Report: The Cruise Industry News Annual Report is the only book of its kind, presenting the worldwide cruise industry through 2027 in 400 pages. Statistics are independently researched. See a preview by clicking here. The report covers everything from new ships on order to supply-and-demand scenarios from 1987 through 2027+. Plus there is a future outlook, complete growth projections for each cruise line, regional market reports, and detailed ship deployment by region and market, covering all the cruise lines. Order the 2018-2019 edition today. Genting Cruise Lines organized the first ever Safe Piloting and Techniques Seminar in Shenzhen, China along with the China Maritime Pilots' Association (CMPA), Shenzhen Pilots (SZP), and Hong Kong Pilots Association (HKPA). Taking place last week, the two-day event gathered together the international maritime community in an exchange of ideas centering on safe piloting and techniques for cruise vessels, according to a statement. Over 100 guests participated in the seminar, including professionals and captains from major cruise companies, pilot agencies from China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia, guests from the Ministry of Transport of the P.R.C, local governments, industry organizations, cruise port operators and consulting research institutes. The line-up of speakers at the seminar featured Chen Ying, Deputy Director of the Water Transport Bureau of the Ministry of Transport; Lou He Ru, Vice Chairman of the Transport Commission of Shenzhen Municipality; Chen Jian Hua, Executive Vice President and Secretary General of CMPA; Li Guan Hua, Chairman of HKPA; and Lim Jiun Yan, Senior Vice President of Genting Cruise Lines. . Many cruise companies are now operating multiple routes in mainland China to meet the market demands and Genting is proud and honored to be given the opportunity to co-host this event which brings together key stakeholders to participate at this important information sharing platform, said Lim Jiun Yan, senior vice president. Coming from the perspective of a cruise operator, Lim shared ideas and suggestions on how cruise ship supervision, pilotage and operations at multi-destination ports can be improved while ensuring that safety is not compromised. The comprehensive discussions held during the seminar were rich in content, covering a wide range of topics including simulation studies, the responsibilities of pilots, comparisons between new cruise ships equipped with Azipods and conventional cruise ships using propellers, as well as the setup of the bridge team for navigation of ships, according to a statement. Lou He Ru, Vice Chairman of the Transport Commission of Shenzhen Municipality commented that the safe entry and exit of the cruise ships can only be achieved with perfect cooperation between captains and pilots. The selection of Shenzhen as the event venue also reiterated the commitment and desire by the Shenzhen Port to establish itself as a major cruise port while also improving its pilotage service standards. Ports America Group today announced the appointment of Mark Montgomery as president and CEO. He replaces former president and CEO, Michael Hassing. Montgomery was previously president and CEO of Ports America Chesapeake (PAC) from 2010 to 2014, and currently serves as a senior advisor and operating partner to the Infrastructure Investing strategy of Oaktree Capital Management, where he brings more than 30 years of maritime industry experience. Montgomery led the company through a successful Public Private Partnership with the Maryland Port Administration at PAC in 2010. He also serves in board roles at the Port Newark Container Terminal (PNCT), PAC, the Delaware River Stevedore joint venture in Philadelphia, the CP&O joint venture in Norfolk, the Port of Miami Terminal Operating Company and the Eller-ITO Stevedoring joint ventures in Miami. Montgomery also serves on the Board of the National Association of Waterfront Employers, the North Atlantic Ports Association and the General Stevedoring Council. His exceptional track record of providing outstanding customer service, market-leading safety and operational performance will serve Ports America well, according to a statement. Concurrent with the transition, Dave Starling will assume the responsibility of chairman of the board of directors. He has more than 40 years of experience in the North American rail, intermodal and global shipping logistics industries. Most notably, Starling served as the CEO of Kansas City Southern (KCS), a publicly traded Class I railroad. He currently serves on the board of directors of Greenbrier, an international railcar manufacturing and leasing company. Prior to KCS, he held management, leadership and operational positions at the Panama Canal Railways Company, American President Lines, the St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad and Burlington Northern. He was named the Railway Ages Railroader of the Year in 2012. Furthermore, Starling currently serves as a senior advisor to Oaktrees Infrastructure Investing strategy. Ports America provides the only tri-coastal terminal operating footprint in North America. Our position provides us an excellent springboard to achieve our goal of expanding the logistics solutions we currently offer our clients, said Montgomery. I am thrilled to be assuming leadership of the Ports America platform. The company will remain focused on providing best-in-class service to many of the worlds leading shipping lines. I also believe there is a tremendous opportunity to provide improved workflow solutions to beneficial cargo owners to drive dramatic growth for the company. Having Mark Montgomery join our team is the next major step in the evolution of Ports America, added James Kowalishin, the current chairman of the company. Marks strong leadership, experience and track record of building superior management teams focused on customer satisfaction, safety and operational excellence gives the board the utmost confidence that he will drive the continued growth of the company. While Dave Starling will replace James Kowalishin as chairman of the board, Kowalishin will continue to serve on the board of directors. Ports America thanks James for his two years of service as the companys chairman and we look forward to the benefit of his continued advice and wise counsel, said Starling. We are excited about the future direction of the company and look forward to helping build on the outstanding foundation of excellence that is already in place. Alexander Soule / Hearst Connecticut Media Connecticut regulators fined five affiliates of Boston-based Liberty Mutual a combined $120,000 for varying violations for insurance policies on their books in 2015. The Connecticut Department of Insurance levied penalties of more than $40,000 against Liberty Mutual subsidiaries Safeco Insurance and General Insurance Co. of America each, for multiple infractions of state regulations including improper non-renewal or cancellation of policies and using brokers that were not licensed to issue policies in Connecticut. Carla Ruffin, 57, spent essentially all of her working life wearing her hair straight, the kind of decision black women often make in order to fit in in the mostly white corporate world. She's worked at Starbucks for 14 years and had been considering starting to wear her hair natural, but it wasn't until Tuesday that she and her colleagues discussed the idea of doing so at work. "It represents freedom in embracing your ethnicity," she said. Natural hair was just one of a broad range topics that came up in the racial bias training session attended by Ruffin, a regional director who oversees more than 100 Starbucks stores in New York City. The interactive training provided prompts for small groups of employees to discuss their own experience of race. One of the questions intended to generate discussion asked employees to recall the first time they went to work with "natural hair without comments or questions from others." Another asked workers if they'd ever "felt distracted at work because of external events related to race." Starbucks shut its roughly 8,000 company-owned stores for the closed-door training, but it let a few reporters interview some senior managers, including Ruffin, after they went through the four-hour session in Brooklyn. Ruffin oversees nine district managers and said she hopes the training frees her staff to address racism directly in the future. "People circumvent talking about bias-it's very uncomfortable," she said. "This gives us a foundation for this to be day-to-day." How and if Starbucks changes day-to-day is the big open question for the company, which is trying to address one of the most bedeviling challenges in U.S. society. With the training-which Starbucks said will be the first of many for employees-the coffee giant is trying to tackle nothing less than the casual, everyday prejudices that many of its staff and customers experience. Whether it's successful depends on a long list of decisions the company and its leadership have yet to make, including how anti-bias training will be integrated into new employee orientation and broader questions of how to evaluate if it's even working. The issues facing Starbucks have changed since the company's founding as it has expanded across the U.S. with thousands of stores, forcing it to confront thorny societal problems like the racial divide, opioid abuse and homelessness, chairman Howard Schultz said. "We are serving and interacting with many, many different types of customers and many different types of people who systemically are dealing with things we didn't deal with when we were a much younger company," he said. The anti-bias training comes after public outcry when two black men were arrested at a Starbucks in Philadelphia. On April 12, a store manager summoned the police after the men waited for a meeting without ordering. A video of the encounter went viral, and Chief Executive Officer Kevin Johnson later apologized for the arrests. "Watching that video was hard to do," Johnson said in an interview last week. "It hit home. It was a wake-up call." In a matter of days, Starbucks announced the plans for the afternoon store closures to train the employees that work at its company-owned cafes. While it was anti-bias training broadly, much of the content revolved around racism, specifically anti-black racism. Starbucks says 66 percent of its U.S. staff are women and 43 percent are minorities. While many large corporations work with a wide range of customers and employees that expose them to broad societal problems like racial inequity, Starbucks is unique in its response. It has long tried to build a feel-good brand to attract and retain employees in an industry that struggles with high turnover. Heather McGhee, president of Demos who was an unpaid adviser to Starbucks for the program, said Schultz has prided himself on putting Starbucks on what he saw as the right side of social issues. "For them to suddenly to be on the wrong of the problem was very much a violation of their culture and standards," she said. In the days following the Philadelphia incident, the company's reputation as a place people said they would feel proud to work at fell to the lowest level in at least 10 years, according to YouGov BrandIndex. "People are going to be cynical about anything a corporation does, but this was an extraordinary step." The trainings don't end Tuesday. What started as a one-off session has evolved into a longer commitment, with a year of monthly trainings for managers and a leadership conference planned in 2019. Johnson, a white man like most U.S. CEOs, said that since the Philadelphia event-and after going through the bias training himself-he's come to understand "the fact that this happens to people of color more than you would know, and that for every step we take, it just reinforces how much more there is to do." The sheer scale of the company's operations made the event a massive undertaking. The company said it consulted more than 30 racial justice experts, for example, and Starbucks underwrote a short film about the history and continuation of racism in public places, like the sit-in protests during the Civil Rights era. And Starbucks had to logistically make it happen, from rescheduling shifts to making sure kiosks and smaller locations had space to meet. The company deployed thousands of iPads to its stores for the training session, and the tablets will stay in the field so each month they can be used for a new training topic, though the future sessions won't close the stores. "People are going to be cynical about anything a corporation does, but this was an extraordinary step," said McGhee. "They have really embraced the magnitude of what they need to take on to do more than a crisis response." With so much effort put into developing and producing the training in a little over a month, the company has yet to deeply focus on what comes next. When asked whether Starbucks was working on internal or external studies to measure the impact, for example, Johnson said Starbucks already surveys customers about their experience at its cafes, and "I would expect that we'll continue to enhance and tune those surveys as we go through this to understand if we're doing a better job and making progress on the dimension of racial bias." McGhee said she's told the company it should perform "spot check audits" on whether the training is helping-for example, sending a black man into a store to see how he's treated. She also said Starbucks needs to consider more "deeper training" for managers so the message lasts given the high turnover in the industry. Johnson said the training will be an important step for future new hires, too. Schultz added that he thinks the training "will be hard to measure in the traditional sense," so the company's looking at more qualitative approach. "We have to continue to imprint and weigh in with our people about the critical importance of this and make sure they realize this isn't an adjacent to their core job, but this is their job," he said. How much Starbucks devotes to these efforts could come back to the issue of budget. Schultz said some shareholders questioned the cost of the training, which Bloomberg estimated could total around $16.7 million in lost revenue, but he likened the spending to providing health care or tuition help for employees. "We don't view it as an expense-we view it as an investment in our people and the long-term culture and values of Starbucks," Schultz told reporters in New York. Starbucks had $22.4 billion in revenue last year. Johnson said executives at other companies have asked him about the training, which he said he sees as validation for Starbucks's efforts. He said the company will release the training material online on May 30, and other companies can choose to use them. - - - Bloomberg's Leslie Patton contributed. CHESTER Can the founding of the United States of America be traced back to the Connecticut River ferries? The British officers could ride for free, and not only did the ferry operators hate it, the colonists hated it, too, said Wick Griswold, whose new book, Connecticut River Ferries, delves into the history of the cross-river service and the quirky characters who operated the barges. And when Rochambeau had to transport his army across the Connecticut, the ferry operators quickly mobilized transporting his 5,000 troops and horses and gear from East Hartford to Hartford in just three days, an amazing achievement. Griswold said if you spend time with modern ferries and ferry operators, its not long before you make a connection with the ferries of legend. In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers that divide the world of the living from the world of the dead. He appears in Dantes Inferno as the ferryman unwilling to transport Dante across the river Acheron, the first of the three infernal rivers of Hell. Griswold is quick to note the connections between the ferries of mythology and those that crossed the Connecticut River. Like the irascible Charon, ferry captains were impatient with travelers who couldnt come up with the fare. (In ancient Greece, the dead were buried with a coin in their mouths to pay the ferryman.) Rich in history Then theres the story of Jonas Lincoln, the Revolutionary War veteran whose battle-scarred mind leaves him to wander aimlessly about New England. After being refused passage on the Hartford-East Hartford ferry, he walks around the Connecticut, perhaps as far north as Canada, to wade across the river. He eventually meets up with the crusty ferryman on the other side. Here I am, in spite of you, you old skinflint, the old soldier says. A similar story played out in Norse legend, Griswold said. There was a ferryman called Harbard who also made Thor by then an old warrior walk around a river. Griswold teaches history at the University of Hartford. He co-wrote the book with Stephen Jones, professor emeritus of the Maritime Studies Program of the University of Connecticut at Avery Point. Both have written several books on New Englands maritime legacy. The Chester-Hadlyme ferry, although it dates back to 1769, isnt the oldest in the state. That honor belongs to the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury ferry, which began service in 1655. Its the oldest continuously operating ferry in the U.S. Today those two ferries are the last that still cross the Connecticut River in the state. In the 19th century there were more than 100 ferries crossing the river, but most quickly went out of business after several bridges went up. Changing business model More Information Connecticut River Ferries By Wick Griswold and Stephen Jones History Press, $21.99 See More Collapse Before the steam era, ferries were kept in the same families for over 100 years, Griswold said. Because, in addition to the boat, you needed a place on the riverbank, and this was where many built an inn. So for decades, operating a ferry was a profitable enterprise. And they were the purveyors of information, too they were often the first to get the news from Boston and New York. Still, some of these ferries faltered as families squabbled over ownership. And over time, fees were increasingly dictated by the government. When the steam era arrived in the late 1800s, they became too expensive to operate. Soon local governments took over the ferries, then the state. The state still threatens to shut them down, Griswold said. They lose about a half-million dollars a year. But every time this happens, people turn up in Hartford with the pitchforks at the state Capitol. He wryly notes that schools and highways produce even less income than the pittance collected on the ferries. Not all of the stories in the book are from the bygone era when boats were propelled by long poles and arm-power. In 2014, the state, hoping to squeeze every last dime from the ferries, turned the boats according to critics into floating billboards, festooned with Get Carter! signs. Carter is Carter Mario, who heads a large team of personal injury attorneys. He quickly realized that the signs werent having the desired effect and had them replaced with a large educational poster depicting the history of the ferry service. This was much more in keeping with aesthetics and proper New England decorum preferred by the ferry fanatics. It costs $5 to take your car on the ferry ($6 on weekends), $2 if youre on foot or with your bicycle. The Chester-Hadlyme ferry can hold nine cars, and it still offers the easiest crossing in that part of the state. The stunning Gillette Castle is on the Hadlyme side and there are several quaint towns to explore nearly. The tug-and-barge Rocky Hill-Glastonbury ferry can only hold three cars. jburgeson@ctpost.com HARTFORD Endorsed Democrats for top-of-the-ticket spots got together for the first time on Wednesday, noshing on some barbecue and discussing political strategy, mostly strategizing on their fall races. Led by Ned Lamont, the candidate for governor, the endorsed politicians admitted that the August primary will become a rallying point for party unity in what is anticipated to be a grueling campaign against Republicans into November. Our plan is to work together going forward, Lamont told reporters on the sidewalk outside a downtown restaurant after their closed-door meal. Its a great group. Im proud to be here with them. Smart, battle-tested, and ready to fight for Connecticut values. And were just beginning to discuss how we can work together going forward into the primary and then how we win in November, because this is such an important lights-on, lights-off election. Lamont, addressing the issue of the racial and ethnic makeup of the ticket, which became a subtext of the recent Democratic State Convention, said he is proud of the people he will share the prominent position on the August 14 primary ballot: state Rep. William Tong of Stamford, the attorney general nominee; Shawn Wooden of Hartford, treasurer; Secretary of the State Denise Merrill of Hartford; and Susan Bysiewicz of Middletown, the nominee for lieutenant governor. As many as four of the five candidates could face primary challenges, including Lamont himself, depending on the petition campaigns of Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim and Greenwich business executive Guy Smith. Tong is in a three-way primary with state Sen. Paul Doyle of Wethersfield and Chris Mattei, a former federal prosecutor from Windsor. Wooden faces Dita Bhargava of Greenwich. Bysiewicz is being challenged by Eva Bermudez Zimmerman, a union organizer from Newtown. Look, Id like Susan Bysiewicz to be my running mate, Lamont said. I think were very complementary. She knows Hartford. Shes got a primary coming up. Well be all working together as the endorsed slate going forward. I know Eva very well and lets see how the primary voters make up their minds. Later on Wednesday afternoon, Mattei snapped back. "It's disappointing to see party insiders presumptuously declare 'we're the Democratic Party' long before actual voters get the chance to do so in August, Mattei said in a statement. This is exactly the type of establishment, top-down politics that voters in Connecticut have been frustrated with for years. State Comptroller Kevin Lembo, who also does not face a primary challenge, failed to make the noontime meeting because of a scheduling conflict. kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT In a business world, most people want to rise to the occasion and get ahead. Yet it is rare to find those who are truly courageous. History has shown that when people have stepped up, taken risks and lead, even when things are precarious, they generally prevail. Aristotle said that courage is the first virtue because it makes all the other virtues possible. Courage is the lifeblood of leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation. Take away courage, and they all lose their potency. Starbucks Howard Schultz, Xeroxs Anne Mulcahy, Teslas Elon Musk, Amazons Jeff Bezos and Alibabas Jack Ma are part of the courage cohort who, as leaders, made courageous decisions to build great global companies. When everyone shows up to work each day with more courage, business wins. Related: How to Overcome Obstacles In business, you often see a "work hard, work longer and take on more" attitude, but the paradox of courage requires us to slow down and reflect. To step back and gain perspective. Courage isnt so much about what one does as who one is. Leaders must turn their attention inward and reassess the beliefs, behaviors and assumptions that keep businesses stuck in outdated modes of operation. In todays digital world, allowing oneself to slow down and reflect on business requires embracing courage. When you turn your attention inward, you can find inner sources of energy, insight and personal courage. The human ego insists on doing whatever it thinks is necessary to maintain control, so business leaders naturally expend their energies on filling up their calendars with things to do. In return, they do not have time to quietly reflect. Check your ego at the door, slow down, and create an opportunity to examine the path forward to foster a better understanding of where a business is headed. Let me share with you seven principles that business leaders can implement to create courageous workplaces, where both people and business flourish. 1. Fast and furious change dictates most workplaces. Todays workplaces need a mindset shift to be relevant in the future. Leaders need to leave change management theories in the past and focus on the development of an employees future potential. Rather than massaging the message when delivering to staff to get buy-in or apologizing profusely for the constant change, your investment as a leader should be focusing on business readiness -- getting people confident in the now and ready for whats next. Pain will often come, not from the changes, but from your resistance to those changes. By shifting mindsets, opportunities are created for both people and business to thrive. 2. A state of being or suffering -- your choice. When leaders believe that change is hard, you will often notice a leadership style where they attempt to take the suffering out of change. What results is leaders reinforcing that change causes suffering. By attempting to remove discomfort that comes with learning something new, a passive attitude is nurtured and doesnt allow for people to develop new skills to adapt and progress. People choose suffering over succeeding. Related: Learning to Deal With Change Faster is Key to Being More Resilient at Work When seeking to make change manageable, too many leaders take it upon themselves to develop inspired speeches, invest energy into rolling-out the perfect process and spell out the communication channels. Ultimately, leaders reinforce a culture of learned helplessness. 3. Breakthrough the illusion. How many times have you heard people espouse that change is painful, exhausting, unnecessary, hard and a waste of time. Change will only be hard for the people who are not ready. When your thinking is embedded in having to have a perfect set of circumstances before change can occur, an illusion is created. Today, workplaces require a space for change being least disruptive to business. Alaska Airlines lead a courageous charge by developing a comprehensive training program with an explicit goal of helping frontline staff internalize its service standards. The companys top executives attended the training to highlights its importance. As a result, in 2017, Alaska Airlines earned J.D.Powers highest customer satisfaction ranking among traditional airlines, continued to be positioned as a low-cost leader and ranked at the top of the biggest 15 U.S. airlines in fuel efficiency. 4. Stop trying to coax people with change. How many times have you witnessed the majority being held hostage to the one person who wanted their demands met before they would get on board? In business, once you have identified the people who are willing, stop trying to coax those who arent. They will either figure it out and jump in or they wont. Full commitment and accountability are needed for the privilege of staying with the organization. There is no other option. 5. Call to action is a shared responsibility. Shared responsibility requires self-reflection. The leader articulates the expectation that people will move beyond their personal preferences to deliver a business case for change. The leaders role is to explain deliverables and to encourage people to take responsibility for building the skills and competencies they need now and to help them be ready for whats next. 6. Internal disruptors. Leaders should not be the main drivers of change. Employees are the ones closest to the marketplace. They are invaluable resources for helping the business know whats next. Drivers of change lead the situation and constantly scan the landscape, becoming internal disruptors. They talk about how to make change work, and they act by innovating, removing barriers with a constant vision to the future. Netflix expects their staff to exercise freedom as part of their responsibility to the organization. Their company culture promotes employees to embody courage by using their own judgment within the strategic priorities, to communicate openly and to argue their points of difference. Related: Leading Your Company Forward in These Tumultuous Times 7. Buy-in is not an option. Buy-in cannot be bought, ordered or be part of an upsell. Buy-in is a core workplace responsibility. It is how people show up. Every time leaders attempt to create perfect situations to earn it or use money to purchase buy-in, the ego is being fed, entitlement is running wild, and the victim mindset is running the show. The leaders role is to discover those who have chosen to buy-in -- the willing -- and then work with them to create extraordinary results. Like accountability and engagement, its a choice. Related: The 7 Leadership Building Blocks for Courageous Workplaces More Than 4 Walls: How to Transform Your Company Into a Community The Perfect Work Environment Has To Be One That Does Not Feel Like, Well, Work Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved In this series, The Way We Work, Entrepreneur Associate Editor Lydia Belanger examines how people foster productivity, focus, collaboration, creativity and culture in the workplace. If your criminal record is a clean slate, you probably dont think too much about background checks. But probability suggests its almost certain that someone you work with has one. What constitutes a criminal record can range from minor to major crimes, from fishing without a license to speeding to driving under the influence to murder. But historically, some background check processes havent distinguished among offenses of varying degrees. The Ban the Box movement has pushed to remove the Have you ever been convicted of a crime? checkbox on job applications that can automatically land a candidates app in the trash, regardless of what that crime might have been. A company might look at its large candidate pool and decide to pass on anyone with a criminal record, unwilling to spend the time and human resources to vet them. Related: 7 Practical Ways to Reduce Bias in Your Hiring Process The time-consuming nature of background checks was the initial inspiration for background check software company Checkr. Co-founders Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon were working as engineers at on-demand delivery startup Deliv back in 2013, when the gig economy had first taken shape. Suddenly, consumers were trusting strangers employed for contract work by startups to clean their homes, drive them around, deliver their dinner and more. Deliv needed lots of drivers, but existing background check technology made the screening process take a week or more. Today, using AI, Checkr automates background checks, and the process only takes a day or two. The San Francisco-based companys 10,000-plus customers include gig-economy giants such as Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Postmates and Grubhub, as well as staffing companies, retailers and more. Background checks vary in their thoroughness. Some include driving records, employment verifications and drug tests. Checkr gathers data from various sources, including criminal records from courthouses at the county, state and federal levels. Many of these databases are digital, but for those that still keep records on paper, Checkr dispatches a contractor to manually collect the information. Employers typically pay $35 per applicant screening. Checkr pricing varies based on the information requested and the volume of checks a customer runs. Checkr also adds a layer of quality assurance, confirming that, say, two guys with the same name, birth date and state of residence arent confused for each other. Finally, its programmed to account for differing background check regulations at the state level. That would take multiple days for humans to review and do the work, Yanisse says, so we've automated that with algorithms, which is more accurate and faster. But the Checkr team didnt set out to help the Ubers of the world reject convicts faster. From day one, Yanisse says theyve designed the software to reduce bias in hiring and give more qualified candidates a chance at employment. He points out that the U.S. economy loses roughy $87 billion annually because people with criminal records cant get hired, and that nearly 75 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals are still unemployed a year after release, according to ACLU research. People who have criminal records but dont have quality jobs that pay a living wage are more likely to commit a crime again. That translates to more people on government assistance or in jail -- and more taxpayer money to pay for it. Meanwhile, employment retention rates are higher among people with criminal histories than the general population, which translates to lower long-term recruitment costs for companies who hire them, according to the ACLU. Related: Evernote's Head of 'People' Explains How the Company Employs Tech Tools to Reinforce Its Values When you look at statistics, it's extremely rare to have workplace violence or crime, especially if you have a good interview process and good HR practices in place, Yanisse says, explaining that the background check industry has long relied fear-mongering as a marketing tactic. So we just want to rebalance. Checkr also corrects for variation and biases among humans who are trying to hire fairly. It is unrealistic to hold a large company to one hiring standard. If someone has the discretion to reject or advance a candidate, he or she might have trouble standardizing the approach. Each Checkr client can customize the software to ignore or never surface data about certain criminal offenses that they dont deem relevant to the job at hand. Someone applying to be a customer service representative, for example, could perform the job perfectly well even with traffic violations on their record. A ride-hailing driver? Perhaps not. Companies can also specify time windows: If the crime happened before a certain year, its no longer a concern. In reality, when you would get a background check report in the past, if there was a long list of things, even if it was just a long list of traffic variations or things like that, you probably were going to be biased, Yanisse says. Like, Ooh, there are a bunch of flags here. I'm not sure I want to take the risk. When it comes to AI, many people worry about the potential for AI to reflect the biases of the human software engineers who built it. But Yanisse insists that doesnt come into play with Checkr, because the AI is not determining if a candidate is qualified for the job or make hiring decisions for its user companies. We are not predicting if the person is going to be a good fit for the job, Yanisse says. We're using AI for classifying data. Like, is this a driving violation or is this a physical crime? Those things are more fact-based. Yanisse likens Checkr to the advent of the credit score. Pre-FICO and credit bureaus (the automation of credit score determinations), a loan officer at a bank could pass judgement or discriminate against a credit applicant. It removes the ability for employers to use a background check as a proxy to screen people out, says David Patterson, Checkrs head of communications. Historically, employers would often tell people who were minorities that they didnt get the job and use the background check as an excuse, like, Oh we couldn't hire them because they had this like minor thing on their record. But that may have not been the actual reason. At the moment, Checkr is focused on measuring its impact and calculating how many candidates would have been rejected with or without its software. Last year, the company reports that it helped 8,000 candidates get accepted instead of declined. For 2018, its goal is 80,000. It aims to achieve that not only by signing on more clients, but getting its existing clients to fine-tune their use of the tool. Initially, I think it was quite binary how decisions were made. Either you're clean and you haven't done anything and you're a good person, or you have some flags in your background, so we're not going to hire you, Yanisse says. But when you get into the details, you realize that that's not the case. There's no good or bad people, there's a whole spectrum. People make mistakes, and there are different severities of mistakes. Related video: How Making Naive Mistakes Led Me to Ultimate Success Related: This AI Tool Helps Companies Eliminate Hiring Bias in the Name of Productivity Both Workplaces and Gig Economy Companies Are Killing People, This Stanford Professor Warns Meet This Company That Turns Restaurants Into Coworking Spaces Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved SINGAPORE - At an island resort secluded from throngs of international reporters, a top aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met with his American counterpart Wednesday to plan one of the most widely anticipated diplomatic events in a decade. The meeting in Singapore - one of three bilateral meetings this week aimed at salvaging a summit between Kim and President Trump - dealt purely with logistics but has been shrouded in secrecy. Hotel security guards blocked journalists from the premises of the resort off Singapore's southeastern coast, and the White House and the State Department declined to confirm even mundane details, such as meeting dates or participants. The logistics meeting came amid fresh doubts that Kim and Trump will actually sit down to negotiate the U.S. demand for the complete dismantlement of Pyongyang's nuclear program. Last week, Trump canceled the summit, which had been scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, but days later approved a flurry of new talks in New York, Singapore and the Korean demilitarized zone to explore putting it back on. But on Wednesday, a top South Korean official warned that "significant" differences remain between the two sides on how to achieve denuclearization. The two teams in Singapore are tasked with working out the logistics of the summit, including venue spaces, transportation, security and group photographs. They face a daunting target date of June 12, and the knowledge that a failed meeting could increase the chances for military confrontation between Washington and Pyongyang. "We must remember that modern-day summits between two nations are completely scripted affairs - no detail, agenda item or deliverable is left to chance," said Harry Kazianis, an Asia expert at the Center for the National Interest. "These take months to negotiate, and considering the stakes for North Korea and the United States, the outcome must be determined before the meeting." Kim has expressed an unusual degree of interest in the summit's logistics, asking Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during his visit to Pyongyang this month about fuel for the 6,000-mile round-trip flight to Singapore and how many body guards he could bring, according to people familiar with the conversations who were not authorized to discuss sensitive conversations. Although most logistics teams would be led by a low-level bureaucrat, Kim sent his de facto chief of staff, Kim Chang Son, one of the country's most powerful officials, to head the North Korean team. The U.S. team is led by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, who has served in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan's. On Wednesday afternoon, the two teams met at the luxurious Capella hotel on the island of Sentosa. Some members of the U.S. and North Koreans teams dressed casually in khakis and short-sleeve button-down shirts in Singapore's muggy 85 degree heat. The hotel has barred journalists from entering, and a Washington Post reporter was ordered to leave the property after speaking briefly to the American delegation. As Hagin entered a meeting with Kim Chang Son, he told The Post that the teams were still discussing the venue for the summit. "We're workin' at it," he said. The organizers have plenty of options. The Shangri-La, a 747-room hotel, has held major security conferences for years, including the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, which attracts dozens of ministers of defense and state, including top U.S. officials. The Marina Bay Sands hotel and casino, a massive three-towered property with a giant swimming pool atop it, could appeal to Trump's Las Vegas-style sensibilities, but also poses a conflict of interest. The resort is owned by a company chaired by Sheldon Adelson, one of Trump's biggest political donors, a prospect that could make it more or less appealing. "Do you help your largest donor or avoid the swamp effect of doing so?" said Douglas Paal, an Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Singapore, as a destination for the summit, has benefits and drawbacks. The island is considered neutral because it has a long-standing trade and investment ties with the United States and has sustained a diplomatic relationship with North Korea since 1975 while other countries have severed ties. But it won't offer the type of familiarity that benefited the meeting last month between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Kim on the countries' border. "The South Koreans literally did a dress rehearsal for April 27 at Panmunjom together with North Korean officials a couple of days prior to the event, but that is presumably not an option in Singapore, so there is a lot of stage direction and protocol that will have to be worked through to satisfy both sides," said Scott Snyder, an Asia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "They will have to agree on a minute-by-minute ticktock outlining the course of the entire encounter, including security, media and logistics." In advance of the summit, foreign journalists have flocked to Singapore to track every aspect of the planning. On Monday, when Caucasian men in suits began walking around the Shangri-La Hotel, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency speculated in a story that the "Western-style" men could be the American team surveying a potential summit location, although such sightings are hardly rare in an international city such as Singapore. Seungjin Ryu, a journalist with South Korea's Channel A, said he spent six hours in the hot weather Tuesday, without a toilet or food break, waiting for a glimpse of the North Korean delegation outside the Fullerton Hotel. "We gave up around 1 a.m. and got McDonald's," he said. "This has been tiring and confusing because of the lack of clear information from the two delegations." Meanwhile, a separate team of U.S. and North Korean negotiators in the Korean demilitarized zone appears to have hit obstacles following a four-hour meeting Wednesday. That group is focused on the substance of the negotiations should a Trump-Kim summit happen, but South Korean Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon said the different positions of Washington and Pyongyang "remain quite significant." "It will not be easy to narrow the gap and find common ground, but I think it would not be impossible," he said during an address in Seoul. The discussions resumed when Pompeo met with North Korean official Kim Yong Chol for dinner in New York on Wednesday. Both levels of negotiations between U.S. and North Korean officials are aimed at closing the gap on the issue of North Korea's nuclear weapons program ahead of the potential summit. Cho said he remains hopeful for the meeting between Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol. "Now that the leaders of the two countries are engaging in talks in a top-down manner, I think the chances are high that common ground can be found," he said. - - - Lee reported from Seoul. Previously on Buzz: Linda McMahon, former WWE empressario who serves in the Trump administration as head of the Small Business Administration, gave a shout-out to brick-and-mortar stores in the age of internet shopping. In a speech, McMahon cited the example of a clothing store in her hometown (presumably Greenwich) that gives her individualized service, has a large selection of the latest fashions, and goes out of its way to accommodate her busy schedule. But she declined to identify the store. Her spokeswoman said to do so would be tantamount to an endorsement, a no-no under federal ethics rules. One likely suspect, Carlisle on Greenwich Avenue, told my colleague Macaela Bennett it wasnt them. Now to this episode: After reaching out to our readership for tips, I got back a few emails saying surely it was Richards on Greenwich Avenue. Not only do they have wonderful clothes, but you have a salesperson who knows your likes and dislikes, one respondent enthused. They are absolutely 100 percent customer oriented. Boom, case closed! Or so I thought. A call to Richards was fielded by a talkative but ultimately lukewarm manager. His or her ultimate response? No comment, and thats off the record. But betwixt and between, I got the impression Richards wasnt the place. I may be wrong, but for now the beat goes on. How many high-end womens clothing stores can there be in Greenwich and environs? Evidently more than I can imagine, given my modest existence here in the nations Capitol. (Full disclosure: I have some shopping memories of Westport in the 1960s but most of them revolved around Food Fair, not womens clothing and accessories.) So if any of you reading this column have further guidance to offer, feel free to email me! Eye on the sky The day-to-day art of the congresswoman or congressman surely rests in attaching small-ball amendments to major must-pass bills and then making sure those achievements are trumpeted via press release. But the reality is that while eyes-glazing-over is the normal response, some of these amendments evoke a whoa! So when Rep. Elizabeth Esty touted her three amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 which sets defense spending priorities for the coming year my eyes came to rest on one of them: Urging the Defense Department and the FAA to come up with a plan for preventing the unauthorized flight of unmanned aircraft over Arlington National Cemetery. Drones hovering above grieving families burying the remains of fallen loved ones at the nations premier national cemetery? Did a Connecticut constituent attending a military funeral witness such a high-tech intrusion? No, an Esty spokeswoman assured me. It grew out of Estys role as ranking Democrat on the House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs. She pointed me back where I started, to Estys press-release statement: Arlington National Cemetery is a sacred national shrine Families burying their loved ones at Arlington National Cemetery should be allowed to focus on their loved ones funeral service and not have to worry about strangers watching from drones flying overhead. @danfreedma; dan@hearstdc.com An insurance company is asking a federal court judge to rescind an insurance bond policy to nullify a $1.2 million claim made by the $55 million Greater Eastern Credit Union after its former CEO admitted to embezzlement. Sherry Ann Allen stole more than $1.1 million from the Johnson City, Tenn.-based credit union using a hidden transaction feature, knowing no one reviewed hidden transactions, enabling her to move large sums of money into and out of accounts she controlled over seven years. Earlier this month, Allen signed an agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to theft and income tax evasion. She admitted to using the stolen funds to pay for her credit card bills, her cars, her clothes, her jewelry, and she also funded cruises and trips for her churchs youth group and credit union employees. Johnson also handed out expensive gifts to employees at GECUs Christmas party and at its annual picnic. Berkley Regional Insurance Company based in Urbandale, Iowa filed a civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Greenville on May 16. The insurance firm is seeking a declaratory judgement to rescind the credit unions insurance bond policy for employee or director dishonesty, which would nullify GECUs $1.2 million claim. Credit union league presidents in Utah and the Dakotas thanked members of Congress for their efforts in passing S. 2155the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act. In an op-ed piece that appeared in the Grand Forks Herald, the Capital Journal and InForum, Jeff Olson, CEO of the Credit Union Association of the Dakotas, praised Congress for helping small lenders with the passage of S. 2155. The new law offers credit unions relief from the most burdensome of Dodd-Franks regulations. In so doing, it would free up credit unions to divert spending away from regulatory complianceand toward their member consumers, Olson wrote. Denmark Under Attack A survey of Danish business and organisations has found that up to one in eight attempted cyber-attacks are successful. The survey, carried out by the Danish Society of Engineers IT subsidiary IDA-it, asked a total of 668 individuals employed in IT or personal data-related roles in private or public organisations. Two out of three businesses said they had been on the receiving end of cyber-attacks within the last year, with one in eight of those attacks being successful, according to the results of the survey. IDA-its chairperson Kare Lvgren said that businesses and organisations should be better at sharing their experiences and methods for combatting the problem. Only around one third report a cyber-attack to the police or thr Danish National Centre for Cyber Security. To me, that is a sign that there is a lack of a safe way to raise the alarm to prevent the infection from spreading, Lvgren told Ritzau. Meanwhile, the Centre for Cyber Security, a subdivision of Denmarks national police security agency PET, described the threat against Denmark from cyber espionage and cyber-crime as very serious in an annual evaluation announced recently. The serious threat comes from foreign states and criminal networks that carry out online attacks in an attempt to access state secrets or personal data, Ritzau reports. Denmark must accept that it is now a target for threats of this kind, said Centre for Cyber Security head Thomas Lund-Srensen. The threat is particularly from cyber espionage, in which foreign states try to access our secrets through public systems or private companies, Lund-Srensen said. This may be of foreign policy, defence or military character. It is a threat that has existed for many years but is now digital in character, he added. A high level of threat is also reported to come from criminal networks who attempt to use data stolen from private individuals or businesses in order to make money, according to the agency. The Centre for Cyber Security also considers the majority of Danish authorities and businesses to be subject to the threat. At management level, whether in private businesses or public authorities, there should be an awareness of the risk of cyber-attacks associated with digitalisation, Lund-Srensen said. They should take relevant and sensible precautions to protect their networks, or ensure they have a plan for what to do if they are hit by a cyber-attack, he added. The Local: You Might Also Read: Denmark: A Leader In Cyber Security: Denmark Plans $75 Million For Cyber Control: For Subscribers All about York County's infamous Hex Hollow witchcraft murder The Hex Hollow murder left York County shocked in 1928 when a farmer was murdered by three men who believed he cursed them with powwow magic. On May 29, BJP president Amit Shah launched his party's massive outreach programme, Sampark for Samarthan (contact for support), aiming to highlight the achievements of the Narendra Modi-led government over the past four years. As part of the programme, Shah will personally contact at least 50 people (read influencers) to enlighten them about the achievements of the Modi government. About 4,000 BJP functionaries, from chief ministers, Union ministers, right down to panchayat members, across the country will contact one lakh people who are recognised names in their respective fields to inform them about the government's achievements and programmes, the party said. The BJP president Amit Shah has already met former Indian Army chief Dalbir Singh Suhag, followed by a meeting with constitutional expert Subhash Kashyap. In these interactions, Shah discussed the Central government's welfare programme with both the well-known Army chief and the man of constitutional letters. Amit Shah with former Army chief Dalbir Singh Suhag. [Photo: PTI] Amit Shah with constitutional expert Subhash Kashyap. [Photo: PTI] As the programme began, the BJP chief tweeted: "Launched the nationwide campaign 'Sampark for Samarthan', a door-to-door initiative aimed at making people aware of the transformative initiatives undertaken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji's government in the last four years." Every party worker has been instructed to contact 10 people themselves and tell them about the government's achievements. To help them in this initiative, a special section has been created in the Narendra Modi app, called Sampark for Samarthan. While this initiative to connect will definitely help the party reach out to influencers, it will also counter the opposition charge of arrogance and ignoring civil society often heaped on the ruling party. The prime minister himself is reaching out directly to beneficiaries through the NaMo App. Interacting with the beneficiaries of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, which was launched on May 1, 2016, the PM on May 28 said that the flagship scheme has positively impacted the lives of several people across India. He said that the scheme has strengthened the lives of the poor, marginalised, Dalits and tribals. This initiative is playing a central role in social empowerment, he said. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, OBCs, Dalits and tribals had voted in large numbers for the BJP. Currently, this outreach is also aimed at countering Dalit angst over the increasing crimes against the community as well as the recent dilution of the SC/ST Atrocities Act, which led to large-scale protests. The party would also hope that directly reaching out to beneficiaries will counter the political impact of the recent coming together of erstwhile bitter rivals BSP and SP under the umbrella of a grand alliance. Dalit angst over the dilution of the SC/ST Atrocities Act. [Photo: Reuters] Besides its own formidable social media team, the outreach to prominent citizens, be it army men, sportspersons or social media influencers, is a well-calculated move on the part of the BJP to increase its influence and create a new role for those not traditionally considered intellectuals, the title generally reserved for academics et al. But, with social media playing such a prominent role in all electoral battles now, these netizens can help the BJP spread its achievements among their millions of followers. Further, with nationalism becoming a buzzword, who better to target than the men in olive to enlist powerful support. The social media strength of these influencers will be a major fillip to the BJP's efforts to retain the governance crown for Modi in 2019. The saffron party is a master when it comes to using technology, along with its massive cadre base. The PM is known to use 3D hologram technology to address several rallies simultaneously, something used with great impact in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The PM's personal outreach using the NaMo App along with Contact for Support will help the party reach the masses directly. With the government increasingly coming under opposition attack for not delivering on its poll promises, this strategy would help the BJP counter the negative narrative. With by-polls for four Lok Sabha and 10 assembly seats over on May 28, the BJP president has already dived into perhaps his biggest challenge yet taking on the grand opposition alliance as well as its own discontented alliance partners. While the principal opposition party, the Congress, which formed a post-poll alliance government in Karnataka, is still fighting over the allocation of portfolios with alliance partner JD(S), the BJP, it seems, has already kick-started its campaign for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. If the opposition wants to seriously take on the Modi-Amit Shah duo, they will have to do more than just take potshots at them on Twitter. Forming a grand alliance may be a good start but to take on the Modi government, the opposition parties will have to hit the ground running and re-strategise. At the moment, opposition groups look more interested in influencing the perks of imagined power. In contrast, the BJP has started reaching out to real influencers who could get them more real power. Also read: CBSE should be ashamed for allowing students to score 499 out of 500 marks With the US ramping up sanctions against countries deemed as "enemy nations", India is in a bit of a spot. Russia and Iran are both under sanctions. As the worlds largest economy, the US finds sanctions an effective diplomatic weapon to put pressure on its enemies. Countering Americas Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) is now a major tool to scarce away all those who wish to defy the US. Countries doing business with Americas enemies will also come on the radar and bear the brunt of US sanctions. India, which does business both with Russia and Iran, is likely to be hit hard. Despite growing warmth in ties with the US the spin-off may adversely affect Indias relations with the US. From being on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, India-US ties underwent a dramatic change since the signing of the civil nuclear deal in 2005. US versus them: India has said that it only follows UN sanctions, not US sanctions on Iran. [Credit: Reuters photo] The ties have blossomed under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump. But sanctions now have become a major hitch. Successive Indian governments have followed a policy of not honouring sanctions slapped unilaterally by any country. Only sanctions which are endorsed by the UNSC is followed by Delhi. Foreign minister Sushma Swaraj made this point clear at her news conference on Monday (May 28). "India follows only UN sanctions and not unilateral sanctions by any country. Indications are this policy is not about to change. Indias defence ties with Moscow run deep, more than 70 per cent of equipment come from Russia, though in recent yeas both the US and Israel are also competing for Indias lucrative defence market. India has defence deals worth nearly $12 billion in the pipeline with Russia. Will all these go under, thanks to the latest round of US sanctions on Russia? In the spotlight is the S-400 Triumf air defence missile system, which New Delhi has zeroed in on and about to sign the $5.5 billion deal. A group of visiting US lawmakers, led by William Thornberry, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told a select group of defence correspondents on Monday, that Washington wants India not to sign this crucial contract with Russia. Though US values Indias partnership and does not want the sanctions on Russia to hurt India, this particular defence deal was of concern to Washington. India is in no mood to follow the US diktat. The US is keen that India scraps this major pact. The delegation also clearly said that sale of high-tech US equipment to India, like armed drones could be stalled if India went ahead with the air defence shield. During Prime Minister Modis informal summit with President Vladimir Putin in the Russian resort town of Sochi, India assured Russia that it would not backtrack on its commitment to acquire the S-400 air defence system. In fact, a major part of the Modi-Putin conversation was on ways to get round US sanctions on Russian entities involved in supplying defence equipment to India. By travelling to Russia for the meeting, Modi has clearly signaled that India is not moving into the US orbit, as many predicted. This was perhaps because Indias engagement with the US seemed to far outshine its old friendship with Russia. In an ever-changing world order, Delhi has realised the importance of having multiple choices instead of tying itself to the American band wagon.Putin too has realised the importance of re-invigorating ties with a major country like India. In the past, India and Russia had often worked around nuclear sanctions. The Kundankulum nuclear power station in Tamil Nadu is one such example. The Nuclear Suppliers Group had slammed Russia, for giving India nuclear know-how at a time when New Delhi refused to allow inspection of its nuclear facilities. This was because India refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement on the grounds that it was discriminatory, while Russia had already signed up. The Nuclear Suppliers Group tried to stop Russias bid to add more units to Kundankulam power plant without IAEA inspection of the facilities. Moscow pointed out that the original agreement with India predated April 3, 1992, when the new NSG guidelines entered into force. Russia went ahead despite vehement criticism by NSG member states. But circumventing the US would no longer be as easy, considering an unpredictable American president like Trump is in office. But the US also needs India for its market as well as for strategic balance in Indo-Pacific. In fact, it had often proposed joint patrols in the Pacific and wants India to be much more active in the region to balance Chinas growing assertiveness. While America is likely not to push India too much so it goes back to the Russian fold, it would perhaps allow Delhi to purchase some military equipment from Russia. But the defence shield is a big no from Washington. Friends forever: India and the US do not see eye to eye on Iran and Russia. [Credit: Reuters photo] New Delhi is keen to acquire this and is also not in a mood to back down. Details of the talks between Modi and Putin are not known, but the two sides will do their best to save the deal. On Monday, the other visitor to New Delhi was Irans foreign minister Javed Zarif, who met Sushma Swaraj in the evening. Saving the Iran nuclear deal, despite the US walking out, is very much on Tehrans agenda. Zarif has been travelling to Europe and discussing with European partners how to save the deal. Zarif briefed Swaraj on his talks with countries willing to stand by the deal. This includes most European nations, including Germany and France. Britain is also on board. India is with Iran and the UN on this. Sanctions on Iran is likely to affect Indias strategic interests in the region. Developing the Chabahar Port and using it for trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia has long been New Delhis way of by-passing Pakistan, which does not allow Indian goods to pass through its territory. From Chabahar, the existing Iranian road network links to Zaranj in Afghanistan, about 883km from the port. The Zaranj-Delaram road constructed by India in 2009 can give access to several major towns inside Afghanistan. However, with US sanctions expected to hit Iran hard, Chabahars transition to a bustling trade and transport hub will remain unfulfilled for some more time. India is hoping that the US may not disrupt connectivity through Chabahar because the port feeds into the Afghan network of roads. Economic activity and development of Afghanistan is very much a US goal. Whether or not the Trump administration will allow India to go ahead with the project remains to be seen. India and the US do not see eye to eye on Iran and Russia. Whether this will impinge on Indias ties with the US is difficult to say right now. But differences on sanctions will persist and may ultimately hit India-US ties. India is a big country of 1.3 billion people and is no pushover as Donald Trump will soon realise. Also read: Parmanu, the true story of Pokhran: How India 'fooled' CIA with historic nuclear test Over the last few days, a series of meetings have been held at the state secretariat of Shimla. All of them were chaired by Jairam Thakur, the chief minister of Himachal Pradesh. The sole reason for holding these meetings is the accentuating water crisis in Shimla, the state capital which also happens be a popular tourist destination. The accountability for the current crisis lies squarely with the BJP because not only is the party in power in the state but is also in command of the Municipal Corporation Shimla. A year ago, when the BJP won the municipal elections, it promised to provide water on daily basis to the city. But the serpentine queues formed to collect water in the city show how the BJP has failed to deliver on its promises. By the civic body's own admission, water is being distributed once in eight days in some localities, while in others it is once in 10 days. What this means is that the administration is able to provide water just thrice in a month. The institutions have miserably failed to either comprehend the situation or effectively manage the crisis. Even three days of regular meetings chaired by the chief minister have not cut much ice. The people continue to face the crisis and as a result are forced to fetch water from the adjoining natural sources (bauris) which are highly contaminated. What brought the crisis? The Shimla city gets its water supply from five main sources. These are Gumma, Giri, Ashwini Khad, Churat and Seog. The overall installed capacity is 65 million litres per day (MLD). The demand in the city is approximately 45 MLD. The figures would suggest that the installed capacity is far beyond the requirement and there should be no reason for the scarcity. Despite the installed capacity being high in reality the city never gets more than 35 MLD on an average throughout the year. More than 50 per cent is lost in leakages. This leakage takes place at both the pumping and distribution stages. The only time a serious effort was made to check the leakages from Giri, Gumma and Ashwinin Khad was when the corporation was run by the CPI(M) from 2012-17. The Giri scheme has an installed capacity of 20 MLD whereas not more than 8 MLD was being pumped. When the 2-km-long pipeline was changed, Giri was able to supply over 20 MLD. Another major problem is the contaminated water in Ashwini Khad. This source, which is one of the best, got contaminated in 2005 when a sewage treatment plant (STP) in Malyana was constructed just 5km upstream. Since then there have been periodic episodes of hepatitis in the city. Since 2007, people have been getting infected with this virus and many have even died. The previous municipal corporation (2012-17) stopped lifting water from Ashwinin Khad. This source was able to meet the requirements of 25 per cent of the city's population. Stopping water lift from this source is a major challenge as this cannot be compensated even by an increase from Giri. At present, not more than 2-3 MLD of water is being pumped into the city from Ashwinin Khad. The corporation has to take this challenge seriously because if it insists on lifting water from this source then the chances of outbreak of hepatitis loom large. If they do not then the persisting crisis would further deepen. There has to be a proper mechanism to deal with this source. The third reason for the deepening of the crisis is that there are over 50 sources in and around the city which are run and operated by the irrigation and public health department (IPH) of the state government. The IPH has virtually stopped lifting water from these sources on the pretext that these are contaminated. This has further mounted burden on the civic body to ensure that water is supplied even to such areas which are not under its jurisdiction. The present corporation run by the BJP is completely callous and the management is very poor. The elected council is not only apathetic to people's needs but also does not have the experience of running a city. Shimla's corporation has traditionally been run either by the Congress or the CPI(M). The BJP got elected in 2017. It is also believed that the BJP leadership wants the situation to further deteriorate so that there is a ground to privatise the water supply. Is climate change also a reason? Believe it or not but the impact of climate change has been profound on Shimla's water supply system. The winters were by and large dry. The average rainfall was 80 per cent deficient. It rained in March and April. But retention of water in these months is very less. The sources of water have gone 50 per cent below their average. It must be noted that Shimla uses only surface water for its needs. Over a period, the impact of climate change is manifesting itself. The city is witnessing less snow and more rain. But the period of rainfall isn't long enough. It means that there is less retention of water through the natural water ecosystem and more flooding as rain comes in torrents. Such water cannot be harvested. The overall building plan in the city is also a matter of concern. What is needed are more embankments so that the flow of the water is restricted and allowed to percolate and recharges numerous water bodies. But the infrastructure built for drains, houses etc is such water gushes fast and is hardly retained. What is the alternative? There has to be both immediate and long-term planning. In the short term, there must be proper monitoring and management. Proper distribution of water and checking of leakages must be done at war pace. The government offices and colonies - both the central and state - occupy almost 50 per cent of the land mass (minus forests) in Shimla city. It has to be made mandatory that at least the government offices ensure that they become resilient and ensure that they have 100 per cent rainwater harvesting in their offices and residential colonies. This planning is hardly there. The Greater Shimla Water Supply and Sewage Circle (GSWSSC) must be strengthened for its autonomous functioning. The duality of water supply and distribution has ended. The strengthening of the GSWSSC will make it more accountable. But this is not sufficient. The city requires to find another major source of water which is perennial. The growth of the city has been massive. From a population of 30,000, the city has moved to over 2,00,000 people with over 1 lakh entering and leaving the city every day. The city also has more than 4 million (40 lakh) tourists visiting every year. Hence the present water sources cannot suffice. The previous CPI(M)-run corporation was instrumental in signing a memorandum of understanding with the World Bank for lifting water from Koldam Dam. The plan is expected to ensure a water supply of at least 100 MLD. This is almost three times of what the city gets right now. By now, the plan should have been in the execution stage. However, it is still being negotiated. The BJP government has to take the initiative to ensure that the Koldam Dam scheme is executed at war pace. There can be no excuses for not fixing Shimla's water supply. What is required is a cohesive strategy with a plan that has to be well executed and monitored. If this is not done, the city will soon see loss of people, jobs, and cause the economy dear. It is time for action. Also read: Karnataka CM at Congress' mercy, Kannadigas at God's The following companies are subsidiares of BorgWarner: B80 Italia S.r.l., BERU AG, BW El Salto S.A. De C.V., BWA Receivables Corporation, BWA Turbo Systems Holding LLC, Borg Warner Europe Holdings (PDS) B. V., BorgWarner (China) Investment Co. Ltd., BorgWarner (Reman) Holdings L.L.C., BorgWarner (Thailand) Limited, BorgWarner Aftermarket Europe GmbH, BorgWarner Alternators Inc., BorgWarner Arden LLC, BorgWarner Arnstadt RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Asia Inc., BorgWarner Automotive Asia Limited, BorgWarner Automotive Components (Beijing) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Automotive Components (Jiangsu) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Automotive Components (Ningbo) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Automotive Components (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Automotive Components (Wuhan) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Brasil Ltda., BorgWarner Chungju Co. LLC, BorgWarner Comercial e Distribuidora de Pecas para Veiculos Automotores Ltda., BorgWarner Comercializadora PDS S. de R.L. de C.V., BorgWarner Componentes PDS S. de R.L. de C.V., BorgWarner Cooling Systems (India) Private Limited, BorgWarner Cooling Systems GmbH, BorgWarner Diversified Transmission Products Services Inc., BorgWarner Drivetrain Engineering GmbH, BorgWarner Drivetrain Management Services de Mexico S.A. de C.V., BorgWarner Drivetrain de Mexico S.A. de C.V., BorgWarner Electric Motors L.L.C., BorgWarner Emissions Systems (Ningbo) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Emissions Systems (Ningbo) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Emissions Systems Holding LLC, BorgWarner Emissions Systems India Private Limited, BorgWarner Emissions Systems LLC, BorgWarner Emissions Systems Portugal Unipessoal LDA, BorgWarner Emissions Systems Spain S.L.U., BorgWarner Emissions Systems of Michigan Inc., BorgWarner Emissions Talegaon Private Limited, BorgWarner Engineering Ketsch RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Engineering Kibo RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Esslingen GmbH, BorgWarner Europe GmbH, BorgWarner Europe Holding S.a. r. l., BorgWarner Gateshead Limited, BorgWarner Germany Holding GmbH, BorgWarner Germany Holding Services GmbH, BorgWarner Germany REH GmbH, BorgWarner Germany REM GmbH, BorgWarner Germany Verwaltungs GmbH, BorgWarner Global Holding S.a. r. l., BorgWarner Heidelberg I RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Heidelberg II RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Heidelberg REH GmbH, BorgWarner Heidelberg REM GmbH, BorgWarner Holding Inc., BorgWarner Holdings Limited, BorgWarner Hungary Kft., BorgWarner IT Services Europe GmbH, BorgWarner India Holdings Inc., BorgWarner Investment Holding Inc., BorgWarner Ithaca LLC, BorgWarner Ketsch Plant RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Ketsch REH GmbH, BorgWarner Ketsch REM GmbH, BorgWarner Kft., BorgWarner Kibo RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Korea Holdings (PDS) B.V., BorgWarner Korea Holdings LLC, BorgWarner Korea LLC, BorgWarner Limited, BorgWarner Ludwigsburg GmbH, BorgWarner Ludwigsburg RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Markdorf Plant RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Markdorf REH GmbH, BorgWarner Markdorf REM GmbH, BorgWarner Massachusetts Inc., BorgWarner Mauritius Holdings Ltd., BorgWarner Mexico Holding BV, BorgWarner Mexico Holdings II LLC, BorgWarner Mexico Holdings LLC, BorgWarner Morse Systems India Private Limited, BorgWarner Morse Systems Italy S.r.l., BorgWarner Morse Systems Japan K.K., BorgWarner Morse Systems Mexico S.A. de C.V., BorgWarner Muggendorf RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner NW Inc., BorgWarner Netherlands Holdings (PDS) B.V., BorgWarner Oroszlany Kft., BorgWarner PDS (Anderson) L.L.C., BorgWarner PDS (Changnyeong) LLC, BorgWarner PDS (Indiana) Inc., BorgWarner PDS (Livonia) Inc., BorgWarner PDS (Ochang) LLC, BorgWarner PDS (Thailand) Limited, BorgWarner PDS (USA) Inc., BorgWarner PDS Brasil Produtos Automotivos Ltda., BorgWarner PDS Irapuato S. de R.L. de C.V., BorgWarner PDS Mexico Holdings S. de R.L. de C.V., BorgWarner PDS Technologies L.L.C., BorgWarner Poland Sp. z o.o., BorgWarner Pyongtaek LLC, BorgWarner Romeo Power LLC, BorgWarner Rzeszow Sp. z o.o., BorgWarner Shenglong (Ningbo) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner South Asia LLC, BorgWarner Southborough Inc., BorgWarner Spain Holding S.L.U, BorgWarner Sweden AB, BorgWarner Systems Lugo S.r.l., BorgWarner Thermal Systems Inc., BorgWarner Thermal Systems of Michigan Inc., BorgWarner TorqTransfer Systems Beijing Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Tralee Ltd., BorgWarner Transmission Products LLC, BorgWarner Transmission Systems Arnstadt GmbH, BorgWarner Transmission Systems GmbH, BorgWarner Transmission Systems Korea LLC, BorgWarner Transmission Systems Tulle S.A.S., BorgWarner Trustees Limited, BorgWarner Turbo & Emissions Systems France S.A.S., BorgWarner Turbo Systems Engineering GmbH, BorgWarner Turbo Systems GmbH, BorgWarner Turbo Systems LLC, BorgWarner Turbo Systems Worldwide Headquarters GmbH, BorgWarner Turbo Systems of Michigan Inc., BorgWarner Turbo and Emissions Systems de Mexico S.A. de C.V., BorgWarner UK Financing Ltd., BorgWarner UK Holding and Services Ltd., BorgWarner US Holding LLC, BorgWarner USA Industries L.L.C., BorgWarner United Transmission Systems Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Waterloo Inc., BorgWarner Wrexham Limited, Cascadia Motion LLC, Creon Insurance Agency Limited, Delphi Technologies, Dytech ENSA, Gustav Wahler GmbH u. Co. KG, Haldex, Kuhlman LLC, Kysor Europe Limited, M. & M. Knopf Auto Parts L.L.C., NSK-Warner (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., NSK-Warner K.K., NSK-Warner Mexico S.A. de C.V, NSK-Warner U.S.A. Inc., New PDS Corp., Old Remco Holdings L.L.C., Old Remco International Holdings L.L.C., Remy International, SeohanWarner Turbo Systems LLC, Sevcon, Sevcon New Energy Technology (Hubei) Company Limited, and Transmission Systems AutoForm LLC. CONSOL Coal Resources LP produces and sells high- British thermal unit (Btu) coal in the Northern Appalachian Basin and the eastern United States. It owns a 25% undivided interest in the Pennsylvania mining complex, which consists of three underground mines and related infrastructure that produce high-Btu thermal coal located primarily in southwestern Pennsylvania. The company markets its thermal coal principally to electric utilities. CONSOL Coal Resources GP LLC operates as a general partner of the company. The company was formerly known as CNX Coal Resources LP and changed its name to CONSOL Coal Resources LP in November 2017. CONSOL Coal Resources LP was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Read More Dunelm Group plc engages in the retail of homewares in the United Kingdom. The company offers furniture for bedroom, living room, dining room, and office; sofas and chairs; bean bags; bed frames, mattresses, divan beds and bases, and headboards, as well as kids beds; and bedding products, such as bed linens, duvets, pillows, protectors, and baby and kids beddings. It also provides curtains, and poles and tracks; blinds; rugs, runners, and door mats; mirrors; cushion pads, covers; throws; seat pads; pictures and frames, wallpapers, and accessories; lighting products, including ceiling and wall lights, lamp shades, floor and table lamps, and outdoor lights; kitchen products, such as cooking, dining, utility, and electrical products; and storage products for home, clothes, and kitchen, as well as travel and luggage products. In addition, the company offers towels and bathmats, bathroom accessories, and bathroom furniture; kids accessories and toys, and nursery furniture and products, as well as travel, safety, and wellbeing products; garden furniture and storage, and garden dAcor products; and Christmas trees and lights, wreaths and garlands, baubles and tree decoration, and novelty products. It operates 173 superstores and 2 distribution centers, as well as sells its products through an online store at dunelm.com. Dunelm Group plc was founded in 1979 and is based in Syston, the United Kingdom. Read More Augusta Gold Corp., a junior exploration company, engages in the acquisition and exploration of mineral properties in the United States. It primarily explores for gold, silver, and other metals. The company holds interests in the Bullfrog gold project located in the north-west of Las Vegas, Nevada. It also owns, controls, or has acquired mineral rights on Federal patented and unpatented mining claims in the state of Nevada for the purpose of exploration and potential development of metals on a total of approximately 7,800 acres of land. The company was formerly known as Bullfrog Gold Corp. and changed its name to Augusta Gold Corp. in January 2021. Augusta Gold Corp. was incorporated in 2007 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. Read More McDermott International, Inc. provides engineering, procurement, construction and installation, and technology solutions to the energy industry worldwide. It operates through five segments: North, Central and South America; Europe, Africa, Russia and Caspian; the Middle East and North Africa; Asia Pacific; and Technology. It designs, engineers, and constructs upstream offshore oil and gas facilities, downstream oil and gas facilities, gas-fired power plants, liquefied natural gas import and export terminals, atmospheric and refrigerated storage vessels and terminals, water storage and treatment facilities, pipe and module fabrication, hydrocarbon processing facilities, pipe fabrication and manufacturing, and refining and petrochemical facilities. The company also provides gas processing, refining, petrochemical and coal gasification technologies, as well as a supplies catalysts, equipment, and related engineering services. It serves national, integrated, and other oil and gas companies, as well as producers of petrochemicals and electric power. McDermott International, Inc. was founded in 1923 and is headquartered in Houston, Texas. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Prudential Financial: 210-220 E. 22nd Street SSGA Owner LLC, AIG Edison, AIG Star, AREF Cayman Co Ltd., AREF GP II Pte. Ltd., AREF GP Ltd., ASPF II - Feeder Fund GmbH, ASPF II - Verwaltungs - GmbH & Co. KG, ASPF II Management GmbH, ASPF III (Scots) L.P., ASSURANCE, AST Investment Services Inc., Adlerwerke CB Investment LLC, Administradora de Fondos de Pensiones Habitat S.A., Administradora de Inversiones Previsionales SpA, Aoba Life Insurance Company, Asia Property Fund III GP S.a.r.l., Assurance IQ LLC, Assurance Intelligence LLC, BSC CP LP, Braeloch Holdings Inc., Braeloch Successor Corporation, Brazilian Capital Fund GP Limited, Broad Street Global Advisors LLC, Broome Street Holdings LLC, CB German Retail LLC, CLIS Co. Ltd., COLICO INC., Campus Drive LLC, Capital Agricultural Property Services Inc., Chadwick Boulevard Investment Holdings Co. LLC, Cibecue LLC, Coconino LLC, Colico II Inc., Columbus Drive Partners L.P., Commerce Street Holdings LLC, Commerce Street Investments LLC, Coolidge LLC, Coral Reef GP, Coral Reef L.P., Coral Reef Unit Trust, Cottage Street Investments LLC, Cottage Street Orbit Acquisition LLC, DHFL PRAMERICA LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY LIMITED, DICKENS AVENUE HOLDINGS VI LLC, DICKENS AVENUE PARTNERS VI (Ireland) L.P., DICKENS AVENUE PARTNERS VI (US) L.P., Don Cesar Investor LLC, Dryden Arizona Reinsurance Term Company, Dryden Finance II LLC, EVP II GP S.a r.l., EVP II Sweden Resi I GP S.a r.l., Edison Place Senior Note LLC, Essex LLC, EuroCore GP S.a r.l., European Value Partners GP S.a.r.l., Everbright PGIM Fund Management Co. Ltd., Flagstaff LLC, GA 1600 Commons LLC, GA 333 Hennepin Investor LLC, GA BV LLC, GA Bay Area GP LLC, GA Bay Area Investor LLC, GA Belden LLC, GA CLARENDON LLC, GA Cal Crossings LLC, GA Collins LLC, GA E. 22nd Street Apartments Holdings LLC, GA East 86 Street LLC, GA JHCII LLC, GA MENLO PARK INVESTOR LLC, GA Manor at Harbour Island LLC, GA Metro LLC, GA Mission LLC, GA TRITON INVESTOR LLC, GA W Paces LLC, GA/MDI 333 Hennepin Associates LLC, GIBRALTAR BSN HOLDINGS SDN BHD, GIBRALTAR INDIA SOLUTIONS LLP, Gateway Holdings II LLC, Gateway Holdings LLC, German Retail Income CP LP, Gibraltar BSN Life Berhad, Gibraltar International Insurance Services Company Inc., Gibraltar International Service LLC, Gibraltar Reinsurance Company Ltd., Gibraltar Universal Life Reinsurance Company, Glenealy International Limited, Global Portfolio Strategies Inc., Gold GP Limited, Gold II L.P., Gold L.P., Graham Resources Inc., Graham Royalty Ltd., Green Tree GP, Green Tree L.P., Greenlee LLC, Halsey Street Investments LLC, Hirakata LLC, IVP Fund GP LLC, Impact Investments Bridges UK S.a.r.l, Inter-Atlantic G Fund L.P., Inversiones Previsionales Chile SpA, Inversiones Previsionales Dos SpA, Ironbound Fund LLC, Jennison Associates LLC, Kyarra S.a r.l., Kyoei Annuity Home Co. Ltd., LINEUP LLC, Lake Street Partners IV L.P., MC GA COLLINS HOLDINGS LLC, MC GA COLLINS REALTY LLC, MC Insurance Agency Services LLC, Manor at Harbour Island LLC, Marble Canyon LLC, Maricopa LLC, Market Street Holdings IV LLC, Morenci LLC, Mulberry Street Holdings LLC, Mulberry Street Investment L.P., Mulberry Street Partners LLC, Mullin TBG Insurance Agency Services LLC, MullinTBG Insurance Agency Services, National Family Assurance Group LLC, New Savanna, Orchard Street Acres Inc., PAI Bay Farm LLC, PAI Bayrock Groves LLC, PAI Belvidere Farms LLC, PAI Big Cypress Farm LLC, PAI Corcoran 640 Ranch LLC, PAI DeKalb Farm LLC, PAI Delano 1500 Ranches LLC, PAI Flicker Orchard LLC, PAI Good Hope Farm LLC, PAI Hawk Creek Ranch LLC, PAI Hills Valley Ranches LLC, PAI Holly Hill Groves LLC, PAI Hunt Farm LLC, PAI Jackson Bayou Farm LLC, PAI Lake Placid Groves LLC, PAI Wallula Gap Vineyard LLC, PCP V Cayman AIV GP L.P., PEREF II Co-Invest 1 GP S.a r.l., PEREF II GP S.a r.l., PEREF II PV S.r.l, PFI EM-Tech Fund I LLC, PG Business Service Co. Ltd, PG Collection Service Co. Ltd., PGA Asian Retail Limited, PGA European Limited, PGI Co. Ltd, PGIM (Australia) Pty Ltd, PGIM (Hong Kong) Ltd., PGIM (Scots) Limited, PGIM (Shanghai) Company Ltd., PGIM (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., PGIM AVP IV GP S.a r.l., PGIM Advisory (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PGIM Agricultural Investments GP LLC, PGIM Agricultural Investors LP, PGIM Broad Market High Yield Bond Fund L.P., PGIM Broad Market High Yield Bond Partners LLC, PGIM Capital Partners Management (Feeder) VI LLC, PGIM Capital Partners Management Fund VI L.P., PGIM European Financing Limited, PGIM European Services Limited, PGIM Financial Limited, PGIM Fixed Income Alternatives Fund II L.P., PGIM Fixed Income Alternatives Fund L.P., PGIM Fixed Income Alternatives GP LLC, PGIM Fixed Income Alternatives II GP LLC, PGIM Foreign Investments Inc., PGIM Holding Company LLC, PGIM INDIA ASSET MANAGEMENT PRIVATE LIMITED, PGIM INDIA TRUSTEES PRIVATE LIMITED, PGIM Inc., PGIM International Financing Inc., PGIM Investments LLC, PGIM Japan Co. Ltd., PGIM Korea Inc., PGIM LTIF Berlin GP S.a r.l., PGIM LTIF Berlin MLP S.ar.l., PGIM LTIF GP S.a.r.l., PGIM Limited, PGIM Loan Originator Manager Limited, PGIM M Campus GP S.a r.l., PGIM Management Partner Limited, PGIM MetaProp Investor LP LLC, PGIM Netherlands B.V., PGIM Overseas Investment Fund Management (Shanghai) Company Ltd, PGIM Private Capital (Ireland) Limited, PGIM Private Capital Limited, PGIM Private Placement Investors Inc., PGIM Private Placement Investors L.P., PGIM REF EUROPE SCSp, PGIM REF Europe GP S.a r.l., PGIM REF Europe Member LLC, PGIM REF Intermediary Services Inc., PGIM Real Estate (Japan) Ltd., PGIM Real Estate (UK) Limited, PGIM Real Estate CD S.a.r.l., PGIM Real Estate Capital VII GP S.a r.l., PGIM Real Estate Carry & Co-Invest GP LLC, PGIM Real Estate Carry & Co-Invest GP S.a r.l., PGIM Real Estate Carry & Co-Invest L.P., PGIM Real Estate Carry & Co-Invest SCSp, PGIM Real Estate Co-Invest Holdings LLC, PGIM Real Estate Debt GmbH, PGIM Real Estate Finance Holding Company, PGIM Real Estate Finance LLC, PGIM Real Estate France SAS, PGIM Real Estate Germany AG, PGIM Real Estate Global Debt GP LLC, PGIM Real Estate Inmuebles S. de R.L. de C.V, PGIM Real Estate Italy S.r.l., PGIM Real Estate Loan Services Inc., PGIM Real Estate Luxembourg S.A., PGIM Real Estate MVP Administradora IV S. de R.L. de C.V., PGIM Real Estate MVP Administradora V S. de R.L. de C.V., PGIM Real Estate MVP Inmuebles IV S. de R.L. de C.V., PGIM Real Estate MVP Inmuebles V S. de R.L. de C.V., PGIM Real Estate Management Luxembourg S.a.r.l., PGIM Real Estate Mexico S.C., PGIM Real Estate S. de R.L. de C.V., PGIM Real Estate U.S. Debt Fund GP LLC, PGIM Senior Loan Opportunities Management (Feeder) I LLC, PGIM Senior Loan Opportunities Management Fund I L.P., PGIM Strategic Financing LLC, PGIM Strategic Investments Inc., PGIM USPF VI Manager LLC, PGIM Warehouse Inc., PGLH of Delaware Inc., PIFM Holdco LLC, PIIC Limited, PIISC Holdings (UK) Limited, PIM KF Blocker Holdings LLC, PIM KF Blocker V Holdings LLC, PIM USPF V Manager LLC, PLA Administradora Industrial SRL, PLA Administradora LLC, PLA Administradora S. de R.L. de C.V., PLA Asesoria Profesional II S. de R.L. de C.V., PLA Asesoria Profesional S.de R.L. de C.V., PLA Co-Investor LLC, PLA Mexico Industrial Manager I LLC, PLA Mexico Industrial Manager II LLC, PLA Mexico Residential Manager I LLC, PLA Residential Fund III Aggregating Manager LLC, PLA Residential Fund III Limited Manager LLC, PLA Residential Fund III Manager LLC, PLA Residential Fund IV Aggregating Manager LLC, PLA Residential Fund IV Manager LLC, PLA Retail Fund I Blue LP, PLA Retail Fund I LP, PLA Retail Fund I Manager LLC, PLA Retail Fund I Red LP, PLA Retail Fund II Aggregating Manager LLC, PLA Retail Fund II LLC, PLA Retail Fund II LP, PLA Retail Fund II Manager LLC, PLA Retail Fund II U.S. Carry/Co-Invest LP, PLA Services Manager Mexico LLC, PLAI Limited, PMCF Holdings LLC, PMCF Properties LLC, PPPF General Partner LLP, PR GA SCP Apartments LLC, PRAMERICA PRECAP VI GP (SCOTS FEEDER) LLP, PRAMERICA PRECAP VI GP LLP, PRECO ACCOUNT III LLC, PRECO ACCOUNT PARTNERSHIP III LP, PRECO Account IV LLC, PRECO Account Partnership IV LP, PRECO III GP LLP, PREFG Hanwha Manager LLC, PREI Acquisition I Inc., PREI Acquisition II Inc., PREI Acquisition LLC, PREI HYDG LLC, PREI International Inc., PRIAC Property Acquisitions LLC, PRICOA Management Partner Limited, PRISA Fund Manager LLC, PRISA II Fund Manager LLC, PRISA II Pooled Manager LLC, PRISA III Fund GP LLC, PRISA III Fund PIM LLC, PRREF II Fund Manager LLC, PRU 3XSquare LLC, PRUCO LLC, PRUDENTIAL CAPITAL ENERGY PARTNERS MANAGEMENT (FEEDER) LLC, PRUDENTIAL MORTGAGE SKP MEMBER LLC, PRUDENTIAL MORTGAGE SKP REIT LLC, PRUDENTIAL MORTGAGE SKP VENTURE 2 LLC, PRUDENTIAL MORTGAGE SKP VENTURE LLC, PT PFI Mega Life Insurance, Passaic Fund LLC, Pine Tree GP, Pine Tree L.P., Platinum GP Limited, Platinum II L.P., Platinum L.P., Pramerica (Hong Kong) Holdings Limited, Pramerica (Luxembourg) CP GP S.a.r.l., Pramerica (Scots) CP GP LLP, Pramerica Business Consulting (Shanghai) Company Limited, Pramerica EVP CP LP, Pramerica Financial Asia Headquarters Pte. Ltd., Pramerica Financial Asia Limited, Pramerica Fixed Income Funds Management Limited, Pramerica Fosun Life Insurance Co. Ltd., Pramerica General Partner LLP, Pramerica Holdings Ltd, Pramerica Insurance Agency (China) Company Ltd., Pramerica PRECAP I GP LLP, Pramerica PRECAP II GP LLP, Pramerica PRECAP III GP LLP, Pramerica PRECAP IV GP LLP, Pramerica Pan European Real Estate (Scots) LP, Pramerica Property Partners Fund (Scotland) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital I (Scotland) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital I GP (Scots Feeder) LLP, Pramerica Real Estate Capital II (Scots) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital III (Scots) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital IV (Scots) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital IV GP (Scots Feeder) LLP, Pramerica Real Estate Capital IV GP Limited, Pramerica Real Estate Capital V (Netherlands) GP LLP, Pramerica Real Estate Capital V (Scots) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital VI (Scots) Limited Partnership, Pramerica SGR S.p.A, Pramerica Systems Ireland Limited, Preco III (Scotland) Limited Partnership, Pru 101 Wood LLC, Pru Alpha Partners I LLC, Pru Fixed Income Emerging Markets Partners I LLC, PruVen Capital Partners Fund I L.P., Pruco Assignment Corporation, Pruco Life Insurance Company, Pruco Life Insurance Company of New Jersey, Pruco Securities LLC, Prudential 900 Aviation Boulevard LLC, Prudential Affordable Mortgage Company LLC, Prudential Agricultural Property Holding Company LLC, Prudential Annuities Distributors Inc., Prudential Annuities Holding Company Inc., Prudential Annuities Inc., Prudential Annuities Information Services & Technology Corporation, Prudential Annuities Life Assurance Corporation, Prudential Arizona Reinsurance Captive Company, Prudential Arizona Reinsurance Term Company, Prudential Arizona Reinsurance Universal Company, Prudential Bank & Trust FSB, Prudential Capital Energy Opportunity Fund L.P., Prudential Capital Energy Partners L.P., Prudential Capital Energy Partners Management Fund L.P., Prudential Capital Partners Management Fund IV L.P., Prudential Capital and Investment Services LLC, Prudential Chile II SpA, Prudential Chile SpA, Prudential Commercial Property Holding Company LLC, Prudential Customer Solutions LLC, Prudential Equity Group LLC, Prudential Financial Securities Investment Trust Enterprise, Prudential Fixed Income Global Liquidity Relative Value Partners LLC, Prudential Fixed Income U.S. Relative Value Partners LLC, Prudential Funding LLC, Prudential General Services of Japan Y.K., Prudential Gibraltar Agency Co. Ltd., Prudential Global Funding LLC, Prudential Holdings of Japan Inc., Prudential Huntoon Paige Associates LLC, Prudential IBH Holdco Inc., Prudential Impact Investments Mortgage Loans LLC, Prudential Impact Investments Private Debt LLC, Prudential Impact Investments Private Equity LLC, Prudential Industrial Properties LLC, Prudential Insurance Agency LLC, Prudential International Insurance Holdings Ltd., Prudential International Insurance Service Company L.L.C., Prudential International Investments Advisers LLC, Prudential International Investments Company LLC, Prudential International Investments LLC, Prudential Investment Management Services LLC, Prudential Japan Holdings LLC, Prudential Legacy Insurance Company of New Jersey, Prudential Life Insurance Company of Taiwan Inc., Prudential Mortgage Asset Holdings 1 Japan Investment Business Limited Partnership, Prudential Mortgage Asset Holdings 2 Japan Investment Business Limited Partnership, Prudential Mortgage Capital Asset Holding Company LLC, Prudential Mortgage Capital Funding LLC, Prudential Mortgage Capital Holdings LLC, Prudential Multifamily Mortgage LLC, Prudential Mutual Fund Services LLC, Prudential Newark Realty LLC, Prudential QOZ Investment Fund 1 LLC, Prudential Realty Securities Inc., Prudential Retirement Financial Services Holding LLC, Prudential Retirement Holdings LLC, Prudential Retirement Insurance and Annuity Company, Prudential Securities Secured Financing Corporation, Prudential Securities Structured Assets Inc., Prudential Seguros Mexico S.A. de C.V., Prudential Seguros S.A., Prudential Servicios S. de R.L. de C.V., Prudential Structured Settlement Company, Prudential Systems Japan Limited, Prudential Term Reinsurance Company, Prudential Trust Co. Ltd., Prudential Trust Company, Prudential Universal Reinsurance Company, Prudential Workplace Solutions Group Services LLC, Prudential do Brasil Seguros de Vida S.A., Prudential do Brasil Vida em Grupo S.A., Prudential/TMW Real Estate Group LLC, Pruservicos Participacoes Ltda., QMA JP EM All Cap Equity Partners LLC, QMA LLC, QMA Wadhwani LLP, Quartzsite LLC, Residential Services Corporation of America LLC, Rio CP LP, Rock European Real Estate Holdings S.ar.l., Rock Global Real Estate LLC, Rock Kensington Limited, Rock Marty GP S.a r.l., Rock Oxford S.a r.l., Rock UK Real Estate Holdings S.ar.l., Rock UK Real Estate II S.a.r.l., Rockstone Co. Ltd., Rosado Grande LLC, Ross Avenue Energy Fund Holdings LLC, Ross Avenue Minerals 2012 LLC, SCP Apartments LLC, SENIOR HOUSING PARTNERS VI GP LLC, SENIOR HOUSING PARTNERSHIP FUND VI GP LLC, SHP IV Carried Interest LP, SHP V Carried Interest L.P., SMP Holdings Inc., SVIIT Holdings Inc., Sanei Collection Service Co. Ltd. (Kabushiki Kaisha Sanei Shuuno Service), Senior Housing Partners IV L.L.C., Senior Housing Partners V LLC, Senior Housing Partnership Fund IV L.L.C., Senior Housing Partnership Fund V LLC, Sterling Private Placement Management LLP, Stetson Street Partners L.P., Strand Investments Limited, TBG Insurance Services Corporation, TENSATOR HOLDINGS LTD, TF Proveedora S.C., TMW ASPF I Verwaltungs GmbH & Co. KG, TMW ASPF Management GmbH, TMW Management LLC, TMW Real Estate Group LLC, TMW Realty Advisors LLC, TMW USPF Verwaltungs GmbH, TRGOAG Company Inc., The Gibraltar Life Insurance Co. Ltd., The Keynes Dynamic Beta Strategy (US) Fund GP LLC, The Prudential Assigned Settlement Services Corp., The Prudential Brazilian Capital Fund LP, The Prudential Gibraltar Financial Life Insurance Co. Ltd., The Prudential Home Mortgage Company Inc., The Prudential Insurance Company of America, The Prudential Life Insurance Company Ltd., The Prudential Real Estate Financial Services of America Inc., The WMF Group, Thurloe Commercial Guernsey Limited, Times Square Center Associates, USPF V - Verwaltungs - GmbH & Co. KG, USPF V Carry LLC, USPF V Co-Invest LLC, USPF V Investment LP, United States Property Fund VI GP S.a r.l., Vailsburg Fund LLC, Vantage Casualty Insurance Company, Wabash Avenue Holdings V LLC, Wabash Avenue Partners V L.P., Wadhwani Capital Limited, Waveland Avenue Holdings I LLC, Waveland Avenue Partners I (Ireland) L.P., Waveland Avenue Partners I (US) L.P., Wellness Services Ecossistema De Bem Estar Ltda., Wellness Services SRL, Yamato Life, and Yavapai LLC. Agilent Technologies, Inc. engages in the provision of application focused solutions for life sciences, diagnostics, and applied chemical markets. It operates through the following segments: Life Sciences and Applied Markets; Diagnostics and Genomics; and Agilent CrossLab. The Life Sciences and Applied Markets segment offers application-focused solutions that include instruments and software that enable to identify, quantify, and analyze the physical and biological properties of substances and products, as well as the clinical and life sciences research areas to interrogate samples at the molecular and cellular level. The Diagnostics and Genomics segment consists of activity providing active pharmaceutical ingredients for oligo-based therapeutics, as well as solutions that include reagents, instruments, software and consumables. The Agilent CrossLab segment includes startup, operational, training and compliance support, software as a service, and asset management and consultative services. The company was founded in May 1999 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA. Read More CA, Inc., doing business as CA technologies, develops, markets, delivers, and licenses software products and services in the United States and internationally. It operates through three segments: Mainframe Solutions, Enterprise Solutions, and Services. The Mainframe Solutions segment offers solutions for the IBM z Systems platform, which runs various mission critical business applications. Its mainframe solutions enable customers enhance economics by increasing throughput and lowering cost per transaction; increasing business agility through DevOps tooling and processes; increasing reliability and availability of operations through machine intelligence and automation solutions; and protecting enterprise data with security and compliance. The Enterprise Solutions segment provides a range of software planning, development, and management tools for mobile, cloud, and distributed computing environments. It primarily provides customers secure application development, infrastructure management, automation, and identity-centric security solutions. The Services segment offers various services, such as consulting, implementation, application management, education, and support services to commercial and government customers for implementation and adoption of its software solutions. The company serves banks, insurance companies, other financial services providers, government agencies, information technology service providers, telecommunication providers, transportation companies, manufacturers, technology companies, retailers, educational organizations, and health care institutions. It sells its products through direct sales force, as well as through various partner channels comprising resellers, service providers, system integrators, managed service providers, and technology partners. The company was formerly known as Computer Associates International, Inc. and changed its name to CA, Inc. in 2006. CA, Inc. was founded in 1974 and is headquartered in New York, New York. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Yum China: AIR BP-PBF DEL PERU SAC, BELFAST STORAGE LTD, CANADIAN ULTRAMAR COMPANY, COLONNADE TEXAS INSURANCE COMPANY LLC, COLONNADE VERMONT INSURANCE COMPANY, DIAMOND ALTERNATIVE ENERGY LLC, DIAMOND ALTERNATIVE ENERGY OF CANADA INC., DIAMOND GREEN DIESEL HOLDINGS LLC, DIAMOND GREEN DIESEL LLC, DIAMOND K RANCH LLC, DIAMOND OMEGA COMPANY L.L.C., DIAMOND SHAMROCK REFINING COMPANY L.P., DIAMOND UNIT INVESTMENTS L.L.C., DSRM NATIONAL BANK, ENTERPRISE CLAIMS MANAGEMENT INC., GCP LOGISTICS COMPANY LLC, GOLDEN EAGLE ASSURANCE LIMITED, HAMMOND MAINLINE PIPELINE LLC, HUNTWAY REFINING COMPANY, MAINLINE PIPELINES LIMITED, MAPLE ETHANOL LTD., MICHIGAN REDEVELOPMENT GP LLC, MICHIGAN REDEVELOPMENT L.P., MRP PROPERTIES COMPANY LLC, NECHES RIVER HOLDING CORP., NORCO METHANOL LLC, OCEANIC TANKERS AGENCY LIMITED, PARKWAY PIPELINE LLC, PENTA TANKS TERMINALS S.A., PI DOCK FACILITIES LLC, PICKARD PLACE CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION, PORT ARTHUR COKER COMPANY L.P., PREMCOR USA INC., PROPERTY RESTORATION L.P., PURE BIOFUELS DEL PERU S.A.C., PURE BIOFUELS HOLDINGS L.P., Parkway Pipeline, Premcor, Pure Biofuels Del Peru, SABINE RIVER HOLDING CORP., SABINE RIVER LLC, SAINT BERNARD PROPERTIES COMPANY LLC, SUNBELT REFINING COMPANY L.P., THE PREMCOR PIPELINE CO., THE PREMCOR REFINING GROUP INC., THE SHAMROCK PIPE LINE CORPORATION, TRANSPORT MARITIME ST. LAURENT INC., ULTRAMAR ACCEPTANCE INC., ULTRAMAR ENERGY INC., ULTRAMAR INC., Ultramar Diamond Shamrock, V-TEX LOGISTICS LLC, VALERO (BARBADOS) SRL, VALERO (PERU) HOLDINGS GP LLC, VALERO (PERU) HOLDINGS LIMITED, VALERO ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO ARUBA ACQUISITION COMPANY I LTD., VALERO ARUBA FINANCE INTERNATIONAL LTD., VALERO ARUBA HOLDING COMPANY N.V., VALERO ARUBA HOLDINGS INTERNATIONAL LTD., VALERO ARUBA MAINTENANCE/OPERATIONS COMPANY N.V., VALERO BROWNSVILLE TERMINAL LLC, VALERO CANADA FINANCE INC., VALERO CANADA L.P., VALERO CAPITAL CORPORATION, VALERO CARIBBEAN SERVICES COMPANY, VALERO COKER CORPORATION ARUBA N.V., VALERO CUSTOMS & TRADE SERVICES INC., VALERO EAST BAY LLC, VALERO ENERGY (IRELAND) LIMITED, VALERO ENERGY ARUBA II COMPANY, VALERO ENERGY INC., VALERO ENERGY LTD, VALERO ENERGY PARTNERS GP LLC, VALERO ENERGY PARTNERS LP, VALERO ENERGY UK LTD, VALERO ENTERPRISES INC., VALERO EQUITY SERVICES LTD, VALERO FINANCE L.P. I, VALERO FINANCE L.P. II, VALERO FINANCE L.P. III, VALERO FOREST CONTRIBUTION LLC, VALERO GRAIN MARKETING LLC, VALERO H2 PIPELINE COMPANY LLC, VALERO HOLDCO UK LTD, VALERO HOLDINGS INC., VALERO INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS INC., VALERO LIVE OAK LLC, VALERO LOGISTICS UK LTD, VALERO MARKETING AND SUPPLY (PANAMA) LLC, VALERO MARKETING AND SUPPLY COMPANY, VALERO MARKETING AND SUPPLY DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO MARKETING AND SUPPLY DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO MARKETING AND SUPPY INTERNATIONAL LTD., VALERO MARKETING IRELAND LIMITED, VALERO MKS LOGISTICS L.L.C., VALERO NEDERLAND COOPERATIEF U.A., VALERO NEDERLAND COOPERATIEF U.A., VALERO NEW AMSTERDAM B.V., VALERO OMEGA COMPANY L.L.C., VALERO OPERATIONAL SERVICES DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO OPERATIONAL SERVICES DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO OPERATIONS SUPPORT LTD, VALERO PARTNERS CCTS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS CORPUS EAST LLC, VALERO PARTNERS CORPUS WEST LLC, VALERO PARTNERS EP LLC, VALERO PARTNERS HOUSTON LLC, VALERO PARTNERS LOUISIANA LLC, VALERO PARTNERS LUCAS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS MCKEE LLC, VALERO PARTNERS MEMPHIS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS MERAUX LLC, VALERO PARTNERS NORTH TEXAS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS OPERATING CO. LLC, VALERO PARTNERS PAPS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS PORT ARTHUR LLC, VALERO PARTNERS SOUTH TEXAS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS TEXAS CITY LLC, VALERO PARTNERS THREE RIVERS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS WEST MEMPHIS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS WEST TEXAS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS WYNNEWOOD LLC, VALERO PAYMENT SERVICES COMPANY, VALERO PEMBROKESHIRE LLC, VALERO PEMBROKESHIRE OIL TERMINAL LTD, VALERO PLAINS COMPANY LLC, VALERO POWER MARKETING LLC, VALERO RAIL OPERATIONS DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO RAIL OPERATIONS DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO RAIL PARTNERS LLC, VALERO REFINING AND MARKETING COMPANY, VALERO REFINING COMPANY-ARUBA N.V., VALERO REFINING COMPANY-CALIFORNIA, VALERO REFINING COMPANY-OKLAHOMA, VALERO REFINING COMPANY-TENNESSEE L.L.C., VALERO REFINING-MERAUX LLC, VALERO REFINING-NEW ORLEANS L.L.C., VALERO REFINING-TEXAS L.P., VALERO RENEWABLE FUELS COMPANY LLC, VALERO SECURITY SYSTEMS INC., VALERO SERVICES INC., VALERO SKELLYTOWN PIPELINE LLC, VALERO TEJAS COMPANY LLC, VALERO TERMINAL HOLDCO LTD, VALERO TERMINALING AND DISTRIBUTION COMPANY, VALERO TERMINALING AND DISTRIBUTION DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO TEXAS POWER MARKETING INC., VALERO ULTRAMAR HOLDINGS INC., VALERO UNIT INVESTMENTS L.L.C., VALERO WEST WALES LLC, VRG PROPERTIES COMPANY, VTD PROPERTIES COMPANY, WARSHALL COMPANY LLC, and ZELIG COMMERCIAL INC.. Wall Street analysts have given iShares MSCI EAFE ETF 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 iShares MSCI EAFE ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. KB Financial Group, Inc. engages in providing financial services through its subsidiaries. It operates through the following segments: Corporate Banking, Retail Banking, Other Banking Services, Credit Card, Life Insurance, Investment and Securities business. The Corporate Banking business segment provides services such as loans, overdrafts, deposits, credit facilities and other foreign currency activities. The Retail Banking business segment offers services such as private customer current accounts, savings, deposits, consumer loans and mortgage loans. The Other Banking business segment provides services relating to banking business besides corporate banking and retail banking services. The Credit Card business segment offers services such as domestic as well as overseas credit and debit card operations. The Investment and Securities business segment provides services such as investment banking and brokerage. The Life Insurance business segment provides products such as life insurance and wealth management. The company was founded on September 29, 2008 and is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. Read More American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. All rights reserved. 326 E 8th St #105, Sioux Falls, SD 57103 | U.S. Based Support Team at contact@marketbeat.com | (844) 978-6257 MarketBeat does not provide personalized financial advice and does not issue recommendations or offers to buy stock or sell any security. Our Accessibility Statement | Terms of Service | Do Not Sell My Information 2021 Market data provided is at least 10-minutes delayed and hosted by Barchart Solutions. Information is provided 'as-is' and solely for informational purposes, not for trading purposes or advice, and is delayed. To see all exchange delays and terms of use please see disclaimer. Fundamental company data provided by Zacks Investment Research. The following companies are subsidiares of WESCO International: 1502218 Alberta Ltd., ALLNET Technologies Pty. Ltd., AXE Distribution Solutions Trinidad Ltd., Accu-Tech Corporation, Anixter (Barbados) SRL, Anixter (CIS) LLC, Anixter (Switzerland) Sarl, Anixter (U.K.) Limited, Anixter Argentina S.A., Anixter Asia Holdings Limited, Anixter Australia Pty. Ltd., Anixter Austria GmbH, Anixter Bahamas Limited, Anixter Belgium B.V.B.A., Anixter Cables y Manufacturas S.A. de C.V., Anixter Canada Inc., Anixter Canadian Holdings ULC, Anixter Chile S.A., Anixter Colombia S.A.S., Anixter Communications (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Anixter Communications (Shanghai) Co. Limited, Anixter Costa Rica S.A., Anixter Czech a.s., Anixter Danmark A/S, Anixter Deutschland GmbH, Anixter Distribuidor de Soluciones Empresariales e Industriales S.A., Anixter Distribution Ireland Limited, Anixter Dominicana SRL, Anixter Egypt LLC, Anixter Espana S.L., Anixter Eurotwo Holdings B.V., Anixter Fasteners Deutschland GmbH, Anixter Financial Inc., Anixter France SARL, Anixter Guatemala y Compania Limitada, Anixter Holdings Inc., Anixter Holdings Mexico LLC, Anixter Hong Kong Limited, Anixter Iletisim Sistemleri Pazarlama ve Ticaret A.S., Anixter Inc., Anixter India Private Limited, Anixter Information Systems LLC, Anixter International, Anixter Italia S.r.l., Anixter Jamaica Limited, Anixter Japan KK, Anixter Jorvex S.A.C., Anixter Limited, Anixter Logistica do Brasil LTDA, Anixter Logistica y Servicios S.A. de C.V., Anixter Magyarorszag Elektronikus Halozati Rendszer Kereskedelmi es Szolgaltato Kft, Anixter Mid Holdings B.V., Anixter Middle East FZE, Anixter Morocco SARL AU, Anixter Nederland B.V., Anixter New Zealand Limited, Anixter Norge A.N.S., Anixter Operaciones y Logistica s De RL De CV, Anixter Panama S.A., Anixter Pension Scheme Trustees Limited, Anixter Pension Trustees Limited, Anixter Peru S.A.C., Anixter Philippines Inc., Anixter Poland Sp.z.o.o., Anixter Portugal S.A., Anixter Power Solutions Canada Inc., Anixter Power Solutions Inc., Anixter Procurement Corporation, Anixter Puerto Rico Inc., Anixter Real-Estate LLC, Anixter Receivables Corporation, Anixter Saudi Arabia Limited, Anixter Singapore Pte. Ltd., Anixter Slovakia s.r.o., Anixter Sub Holdings B.V, Anixter Sverige AB, Anixter Thailand Inc., Anixter U.S. LLC, Anixter Venezuela Inc., Anixter de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Anixter do Brasil Ltda, Atlanta Electrical Distributors, Atlanta Electrical Distributors LLC, Atlas Gentech (NZ) Limited, Avon Electrical Supplies, B.E.L. Corporation, Brews Supply, Brown Wholesale Electric, Bruckner Supply, CBC LP Holdings LLC, CDW Holdco LLC, Calvert Wire & Cable Corporation, Carlton-Bates Company, Carlton-Bates Company (CBC), Carlton-Bates Company de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Carlton-Bates Company of Texas GP Inc, Central Security Distribution Pty. Ltd, Communication Cables LLC, Communications Supply Corporation, Conney Investment Holdings LLC, Conney Safety Products, Conney Safety Products LLC, Distribuidora Materiales Electricos E-Supply Limitada, EECOL Electric, EECOL Electric Bolivia Ltda, EECOL Electric Corp., EECOL Electric Peru S.A.C, EECOL Industrial Electric (SudAmerica) Limitada, EECOL Industrial Electric Ecuador Limitada, EECOL Industrial Electric Limitada, EECOL Power S.A., EECOL Properties Corp, Eurinvest B.V., Eurinvest Cooperatief U.A., Fastec Industrial, HMH Pension Trustees Limited, Hazmasters, Hazmasters Inc., Herning Underground Supply, Hi-Line Utility Supply, Hi-Line Utility Supply Company LLC, Hill Country Electric Supply, Hill Country Electric Supply L.P., ICV GP Inc., Infast Group Limited, Inner Range Pty. Ltd, Itel Container Ventures Inc., Itel Corporation, Itel Rail Holdings Corporation, J-Mark Inc., LaPrairie, Liberty Wire & Cable Inc., Monti Electric Supply, Needham Electric Supply, Needham Electric Supply LLC, Obras Y Servicios Sunpark S.A.C., PT Anixter Indonesia, Potelcom Supply, Pro Canadian Holdings I ULC, RECO LLC, RS Electronics, Reily Electrical Supply, SASK Alta Holdings S.A., Services Voice Video and Data Distribution de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Servicios Anixter S.A. de C.V., Signal Capital Corporation, Signal Capital Projects Inc., Stone Eagle Electrical Supply GP Inc., Stone Eagle Electrical Supply Limited Partnership, TVC Communications, TVC Communications L.L.C., TVC Espana Distribucion y Venta De Equipos S.L., TVC International Holding L.L.C., TVC UK Holdings Limited, Tri-Ed Puerto Rico Ltd. Inc., Trydor Industries, Voice Video and Data Distribution de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., WDC Holding Inc., WDCH LP, WDCH US LP, WDI USVI LLC, WDI-Angola LDA, WDINESCO B.V., WDINESCO II B.V., WDINESCO III B.V., WEAS Company S. de R.L., WESCO (Suzhou) Trading Co. Ltd., WESCO Australia Pty Ltd, WESCO Canada GP Inc., WESCO Canada I LP, WESCO DC Holding I LP, WESCO DC Holding II LP, WESCO DC Holding III LP, WESCO DC Holding IV LP, WESCO Distribution Canada Co., WESCO Distribution Canada LP, WESCO Distribution HK Limited, WESCO Distribution II ULC, WESCO Distribution III ULC, WESCO Distribution IV Inc., WESCO Distribution Inc., WESCO Distribution Ireland Limited, WESCO Distribution NL B.V., WESCO Distribution Pte. Ltd., WESCO Distribution de Mexico S. de R.L., WESCO Distribution-International Limited, WESCO Enterprises Inc., WESCO Equity Corporation, WESCO Holdings LLC, WESCO Integrated Supply Inc., WESCO Integrated Supply Polska Spolka z o.o., WESCO Netherlands B.V., WESCO Nevada Ltd., WESCO Nigeria Inc., WESCO Procurement Canada ULC, WESCO Real Estate I LLC, WESCO Real Estate II LLC, WESCO Real Estate III LLC, WESCO Real Estate IV LLC, WESCO Receivables Corp., WESCO Services LLC, WESCO TLD Holdings Co. Ltd., WND Nigeria Limited, WireXpress Ltd., Xpress Connect Supply Hong Kong Limited, XpressConnect Holdings B.V., XpressConnect International B.V., XpressConnect Supply B.V.B.A., XpressConnect Supply Colombia S.A.S., XpressConnect Supply Inc., XpressConnect Supply Mexico S.A. de C.V., and XpressConnect Supply do Brasil Ltda. Strategic Hotels & Resorts, Inc. (SHR) is a self-administered and self-managed real estate investment trust (REIT). The Company acquires and asset manages hotels. The Company owns land held for development including 50.7 acres of oceanfront land in Nayarit, Mexico; 13.8 acres of land in Scottsdale, Arizona adjacent to its Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale at Troon North, and a 20,000 square-foot oceanfront land parcel in Santa Monica, California adjacent to its Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel. The Company's hotels are operated under the brands of Fairmont, Four Seasons, Hyatt, InterContinental, JW Marriott, Loews, Marriott, Montage, Ritz-Carlton and Westin. The Hotel del Coronado is operated by a specialty management company, KSL Resorts. Read More Suburban Propane Partners LP engages in the business of liquefied petroleum gas business. It operates through the following business segments: Propane; Fuel Oil and Refined Fuels; Natural Gas and Electricity; and All Other. The Propane segment engages in natural gas processing and petroleum refining. It also used in residential and commercial applications, industrial applications and agriculture. The Fuel Oil and Refined Fuels segment refers to the marketing and distribution of fuel oil, kerosene, diesel fuel and gasoline primarily to the northeast region of the United States. The Natural Gas and Electricity segment pertains to the generation, transmission, and distribution of natural gas and electricity among residential and small commercial customers. The All Other segment include the sale, installation and service of whole-house heating products, air cleaners, humidifiers, and space heaters to the customer who uses propane, fuel oil, natural gas and electricity businesses. The company was founded by Mark Anton in 1928 and is headquartered in Whippany, NJ. Read More Ellie Mae, Inc. provides cloud-based platform for the mortgage finance industry in the United States. It provides Encompass, an enterprise solution that engages in running the business of originating mortgages, including marketing and lead management; loan origination and processing; underwriting; preparation of mortgage applications, disclosure agreements, and closing documents; loan funding and closing; compliance with regulatory and investor requirements; and enterprise management. The company's Encompass Digital Lending Platform helps lenders and investors across their workflow from the prospective customers to the point of loan delivery. In addition, the company provides education and training services; professional and technical support services; and loan product, policy, and guideline data and analytics services. Ellie Mae, Inc. was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Pleasanton, California. Read More TCF Financial Corporation operates as the financial holding company for TCF National Bank that provides various financial products and services in the United States and Canada. It operates through Consumer Banking, Commercial Banking, and Enterprise Services segments. The company offers checking, savings, and money market accounts; certificates of deposit; individual retirement accounts; debit and credit cards; and check cashing and remittance services. It also provides investment management and custodial services, trust services, financial and estate planning, and retirement planning and employee benefit programs; residential, consumer, and small business lending products; and consumer real estate secured lending, consumer loans, loans secured by personal property, and unsecured personal loans. In addition, the company offers loans and lines of credit, deposits, cash management, capital market products, international trade finance, letters of credit, foreign exchange management services, and loan syndication services. Further, it provides commercial and industrial, commercial real estate banking, and lease financing; and treasury services comprising investment and borrowing portfolios, as well as manages capital, debt, and market risks. As of December 31, 2020, the company operated 478 branches, including 373 traditional branches, 102 supermarket branches, and three campus branches located in Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona, and South Dakota; and 1,062 ATMs. TCF Financial Corporation was incorporated in 1987 and is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan. Read More 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. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Vodafone Group: 360 Connect S.A., [email protected] Telecom, A-ccelerator B.V., A-ccelerator Holding B.V, AAA (Euro) Limited, AAA (MCR) Limited, AAA (UK) Limited, Acorn Communications Limited, Africonnect (Zambia) Limited, Ag Mercantile Company Private Limited, Al-Amin Investments Limited, Amsterdamse Beheer- en Consultingmaatschappij B.V., Apollo Submarine Cable System Limited, Array Holdings Limited, Asian Telecommunication Investments (Mauritius) Limited, Aspective Limited, Astec Communications Limited, Autoconnex Limited, Aztec Limited, BelCompany BV, Bluefish Apac Communications Pte. Ltd, Bluefish Communications, Bluefish Communications Limited, Business Serve Limited, C&W Worldwide Nigeria Limited, C.S.P. Solutions Limited, CCII (Mauritius) Inc., CGP India Investments Ltd., CGP Investments (Holdings) Limited, COOP Mobil s.r.o, CT Networks Limited, CWGNL S.A., CWW Operations Limited, Cable & Wireless Access Limited, Cable & Wireless Americas Systems Inc., Cable & Wireless Aspac Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless CIS Services Limited, Cable & Wireless CIS Svyaz LLC, Cable & Wireless Capital Limited , Cable & Wireless Communications Data Network Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Communications Starclass Limited, Cable & Wireless Communications Technical Service (Shanghai) Co. Ltd (Beijing Branch), Cable & Wireless Europe Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless GN Limited, Cable & Wireless Global (India) Private Limited, Cable & Wireless Global Business Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Global Holding Limited, Cable & Wireless Global Telecommunication Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Holdco Limited, Cable & Wireless Networks India Private Limited, Cable & Wireless Trade Mark Management Limited, Cable & Wireless UK Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless UK Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Waterside Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Pension Trustee Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Voice Messaging Limited, Cable & Wireless a-Services Inc, Cable & Wireless a-Services Limited, Cable and Wireless (India) Limited, Cable and Wireless (India) Limited Indian Branch Office, Cable and Wireless Nominee Limited, Cable and Wireless Worldwide South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Cavalry Holdings Ltd, Celfocus Solucoes Informaticas Para Telecomunicacoes S.A, Cellops Limited, Cellular Operations Limited, Central Communications Group Limited, Central Telecom (Northern) Limited, Centurion GSM Limited, Chelys Limited, City Cable (Holdings) Limited, Cobra do Brasil Servicos de Telematica ltda., Commnet Cellular Inc., Complete Network Technology, Connect (India) Mobile Technologies Private Limited, Cornerstone Telecommunications Infrastructure Limited, Dataroam Limited , Device Insight, Digital Island (UK) Ltd, Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited, East Africa Investment (Mauritius) Limited, Emtel Europe Limited, Energis (Ireland) Limited, Energis Communications Limited, Energis Holdings Limited, Energis Local Access Limited, Energis Management Limited, Energis Squared Limited, Erudite Systems Limited, Esprit Telecom B.V., Eudokia Limited, Euro Pacific Securities Ltd., Eurocall Holdings Limited, Europolitan Holdings AB (now Europolitan Vodafone AB), FB Holdings Limited, FM Associates (UK) Limited, FinCo Partner 1 B.V., FireFly Networks Limited, Flexphone Limited, GS Telecom (Pty) Limited, Gateway Communications Africa (UK) Limited, Gateway Communications Tanzania Limited, General Mobile Corporation, Generation Telecom Limited, Ghana Telecommunications, Ghana Telecommunications Company Limited, Global Cellular Rental Limited, Globe Limited, GrandCentrix GmbH, Grupo Corporativo ONO S.A.U., H3ga Properties (No 3) Pty Limited, HBO Nederland Cooperatief U.A., HBO Netherlands Channels sro, HBO Netherlands Distribution B.V., Hellas Online, How2 Telecom Limited, Hutchison Essar Ltd, Indus Towers Limited, Intercell Communications Limited, Internet Network Services Limited, Invitation Digital Limited, Ipergy Communications NV, Isis Telecommunications Management Limited, Jaguar Communications Limited, Jaykay Finholding (India) Private Limited, Jupicol (Proprietary) Limited, KABELCOM Braunschweig Gesellschaft Fur BreitbandkabelKommunikation Mit Beschrankter Haftung, KABELCOM Wolfsburg Gesellschaft Fur BreitbandkabelKommunikation Mit Beschrankter Haftung, Kabel Deutschland, Kabel Deutschland Holding, Kabel Deutschland Holding Erste Beteiligungs GmbH, Kabel Deutschland Holding Zweite Beteilgungs GmbH, Kabel Deutschland Neunte Beteiligungs GmbH, Kabel Deutschland Siebte Beteiligungs GmbH, Kabelfernsehen Munchen Servicenter GmbH & Co. KG, LG Financing Partnership, LGE HoldCo V B.V., LGE HoldCo VI B.V., LGE HoldCo VIII B.V., LGE Holdco VII B.V., LLC Vodafone Enterprise Ukraine, Le Bunt Holdings Limited, Legend Communications Limited, Liberty Global, Liberty Global Content Netherlands B.V., London Hydraulic Power Company, M-PESA Foundation, M-PESA Holding Co. Limited, ML Integration Group Limited, ML Integration Limited, ML Integration Services Limited, MV Healthcare Services Private Limited, Mannesmann AG, MetroHoldings Limited, Mezzanine Ware Proprietary Limited (RF), Mirambo Limited, Misrfone Trading Company LLC, MobiFon S.A., Mobile Commerce Solutions Limited, Mobile Phone Centre Limited, Mobile Wallet VM1, Mobile Wallet VM2, Mobile by Sainsburys Limited, Mobiles 4 Business.com Limited, Mobileworld Communications Pty Limited, Mobileworld Operating Pty Ltd, Mobilvest, Motifpros 1 (Proprietary) Limited, Multi Risk Indemnity Company Limited, Multi Risk Limited, ND Callus Info Services Private Limited, Nadal Trading Company Private Limited, Nat Comm Air Limited, National Communications Backbone Company Limited, Navtrak Ltd, Netforce Group Limited, Netgrid Telecom SRL, Number Portability Company (Proprietary) Limited, ONO, Omega Telecom Holdings Private Limited, Oni Way Infocomunicacoes S.A, Oskar Mobil S.R.O., Oxygen Solutions Limited, P.C.P. (North West) Limited, PPL Pty Limited, PT Network Services Limited, PTI Telecom Limited, Peoples Phone Limited, Pinnacle Cellular Group Limited, Pinnacle Cellular Limited, Plex Limited, Plustech Mercantile Company Private Limited, Prime Metals Ltd., Project Telecom Holdings Limited, Quickcomm Software Solutions, Radio Opt GmbH, Rian Mobile Limited, SBC SMART CITY 1517 B.V., SMMS Investments Pvt Limited, Safaricom Limited, Safenet N.P A., Sarmady Communications, Scarlet Ibis Investments 23 (Pty) Limited, Scorpios Beverages Pvt. Ltd, Silver Stream Investments Limited, Singlepoint (4U) Limited, Singlepoint (4U) Ltd., Singlepoint Payment Services Limited, Siro Limited, Spar Aerospace (Nigeria) Limited, Sport TV Portugal S.A, Starnet, Stentor Communications Limited, Stentor Limited, Storage Technology Services (Pty) Limited, T.W. Telecom Limited, T3 Telecommunications Limited, TKS Telepost Kabel-Service Kaiserslautern Beteiligungs GmbH, TKS Telepost Kabel-Service Kaiserslautern GmbH & Co. KG, TNAS Limited, TSM NZ Limited, Talkland Airtime Services Limited, Talkland Australia Pty Limited, Talkland Communications Limited, Talkland International Limited, Talkland Midlands Limited, Talkmobile Limited, Tele2 Italia SPA, Tele2 Spain, Telecom Investments India Private Limited, Telecommunications Europe Limited, Ternhill Communications Limited, The Cobra Group, The Eastern Leasing Company Limited, The Old Telecom Sales Co. Limited, Thus Group Holdings Limited, Thus Group Limited, Thus Limited, Thus Profit Sharing Trustees Limited, TnT Expense Management LLC, Tomorrow Street GP S.a r.l., Tomorrow Street SCA, Torenspits II B.V., Townley Communications Limited, Trans Crystal Ltd., UMT Investments Limited, UPC Nederland Holding I B.V., UPC Nederland Holding II B.V., UPC Nederland Holding III B.V., Unified Communications, Uniqueair Limited, Urbana Teleunion Rostock GmbH & Co.KG, Usha Martin Telematics Limited, VAPL No. 2 Pty Limited, VBA (Mauritius) Limited, VBA Holdings Limited, VBA International (SL) Limited, VBA International Limited, VEI S.r.l., VM SA, VND S.p.A, VSSB Vodafone Shared Services Budapest Private Limited Company, Verwaltung Urbana Teleunion Rostock GmbH, Victus Networks S.A., Vizzavi Finance Limited, Vizzavi Limited, Voda Limited, Vodacall Limited, Vodacash s.p.r.l., Vodacom (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Business (Angola) Limitada, Vodacom Business (Ghana) Limited, Vodacom Business (Kenya) Limited, Vodacom Business Africa (Nigeria) Limited, Vodacom Business Africa Group (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Business Africa Group Services Limited, Vodacom Business Cameroon SA, Vodacom Business Cote Divoire S.A.R.L., Vodacom Congo (RDC) SA, Vodacom Financial Services (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Group Limited, Vodacom Insurance Administration Company (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Insurance Company (RF) Limited, Vodacom International Holdings (Pty) Limited, Vodacom International Limited, Vodacom Lesotho (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Life Assurance Company (RF) Limited, Vodacom Payment Services (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Properties No 1 (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Properties No.2 (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Tanzania Limited Zanzibar, Vodacom Tanzania Public Limited Company, Vodacom UK Limited, Vodafone (NI) Limited, Vodafone (New Zealand) Hedging Limited, Vodafone (Scotland) Limited, Vodafone 2, Vodafone 4 UK, Vodafone 5 Limited, Vodafone 5 UK, Vodafone 6 UK, Vodafone Albania Sh.A, Vodafone Alternatif Telekom Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Americas 4, Vodafone Americas Virginia Inc., Vodafone And Qatar Foundation L.L.C, Vodafone Asset Management Services S.a r.l., Vodafone Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Automotive Deutschland GmbH, Vodafone Automotive Electronic Systems S.r.L, Vodafone Automotive France S.A.S, Vodafone Automotive Iberia S.L, Vodafone Automotive Italia S.p.A, Vodafone Automotive Japan K.K, Vodafone Automotive Korea Limited, Vodafone Automotive SpA, Vodafone Automotive Technologies (Beijing) Co Ltd, Vodafone Automotive Telematics Development S.A.S, Vodafone Automotive Telematics S.A, Vodafone Automotive UK Limited, Vodafone Belgium SA/NV, Vodafone Benelux Limited, Vodafone Bilgi Ve Iletisim Hizmetleri AS, Vodafone Business Services Limited, Vodafone Business Solutions Limited, Vodafone Canada Inc, Vodafone Cellular Limited, Vodafone Central Services Limited, Vodafone China Limited (China), Vodafone China Limited (Hong Kong), Vodafone Connect 2 Limited, Vodafone Connect Limited, Vodafone Consolidated Holdings Limited, Vodafone Corporate Limited, Vodafone Corporate Secretaries Limited, Vodafone Czech Republic A.S., Vodafone DC Pension Trustee Company Limited, Vodafone Dagitim Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Data, Vodafone Distribution Holdings Limited, Vodafone Egypt Telecommunications S.A.E., Vodafone Elektronik Para Ve Odeme Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Empresa Brasil Telecomunicacoes Ltda, Vodafone Empresa Mexico S.de R.L. de C.V., Vodafone Enabler Espana S.L., Vodafone Enterprise Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Austria GmbH, Vodafone Enterprise Bahrain W.L.L., Vodafone Enterprise Bulgaria EOOD, Vodafone Enterprise Chile SA, Vodafone Enterprise Communications Technical Services (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Corporate Secretaries Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Denmark A/S, Vodafone Enterprise Equipment Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Europe (UK) Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Europe (UK) Limited Czech Branch, Vodafone Enterprise Europe (UK) Limited DubaiI Branch, Vodafone Enterprise Finland OY, Vodafone Enterprise France SAS, Vodafone Enterprise Germany GmbH, Vodafone Enterprise Global Businesses S.a r.l., Vodafone Enterprise Global Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Global Network HK Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Global Network Pte. Ltd., Vodafone Enterprise Hong Kong Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Italy S.r.L, Vodafone Enterprise Korea Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Luxembourg S.A., Vodafone Enterprise Netherlands BV, Vodafone Enterprise Norway AS, Vodafone Enterprise Regional Business Singapore Pte.Ltd., Vodafone Enterprise Singapore Pte.Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Spain S.L.U. Portugal Branch, Vodafone Enterprise Spain SLU, Vodafone Enterprise Sweden AB, Vodafone Enterprise Switzerland AG, Vodafone Erste Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Vodafone Espana S.A.U., Vodafone Euro Hedging Limited, Vodafone Euro Hedging Two, Vodafone Europe B.V., Vodafone Europe UK, Vodafone European Investments, Vodafone European Portal Limited, Vodafone Finance Limited, Vodafone Finance Luxembourg Limited, Vodafone Finance Sweden, Vodafone Finance UK Limited, Vodafone Financial Operations, Vodafone Financial Services B.V., Vodafone Fixed Ltd, Vodafone Foundation, Vodafone Foundation Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Gestioni S.p.A, Vodafone Ghana Mobile Financial Services Limited, Vodafone Global Content Services Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise (Hong Kong) Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise (Italy) S.R.L., Vodafone Global Enterprise (Japan) K.K., Vodafone Global Enterprise (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Vodafone Global Enterprise Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise Russia LLC, Vodafone Global Enterprise Taiwan Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise Telecommunications (Hellas) A.E., Vodafone Global Network Limited, Vodafone Global Network Limited Slovakia Branch, Vodafone Global Services Private Limited, Vodafone GmbH, Vodafone Group (Directors) Trustee Limited, Vodafone Group Pension Trustee Limited, Vodafone Group Services GmbH, Vodafone Group Services Ireland Limited, Vodafone Group Services Limited, Vodafone Group Services No.2 Limited, Vodafone Group Share Trustee Limited, Vodafone Hire Limited, Vodafone Holding A.S., Vodafone Holdings (Jersey) Limited, Vodafone Holdings (SA) Proprietary Limited, Vodafone Holdings Europe S.L.U., Vodafone Holdings Luxembourg Limited, Vodafone Hutchison Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Hutchison Finance Pty Limited, Vodafone Hutchison Receivables Pty Limited, Vodafone IP Licensing Limited, Vodafone India Digital Limited, Vodafone India Limited, Vodafone India Services Private Limited, Vodafone India Ventures Limited, Vodafone Institut fur Gesellschaft und Kommunikation GmbH, Vodafone Intermediate Enterprises Limited, Vodafone International 1 S.a.r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone International 1 S.a r.l., Vodafone International 2 Limited, Vodafone International Holdings B.V., Vodafone International Holdings Limited, Vodafone International M S.a r.l., Vodafone International Operations Limited, Vodafone International Services LLC, Vodafone Investment UK, Vodafone Investments (SA) Proprietary Limited, Vodafone Investments Australia Limited, Vodafone Investments Limited, Vodafone Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l., Vodafone Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone Ireland Distribution Limited, Vodafone Ireland Ltd., Vodafone Ireland Marketing Limited, Vodafone Ireland Property Holdings Limited, Vodafone Ireland Retail Limited, Vodafone Italia S.p.A., Vodafone Jersey Dollar Holdings Limited, Vodafone Jersey Finance, Vodafone Jersey Yen Holdings Unlimited, Vodafone Kabel Deutschland Field Services GmbH, Vodafone Kabel Deutschland GmbH, Vodafone Kabel Deutschland Kundenbetreuung GmbH, Vodafone Kenya Limited, Vodafone Leasing Limited, Vodafone Libertel B.V., Vodafone Limited, Vodafone Luxembourg 5 S.a r.l., Vodafone Luxembourg 5 S.a r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone Luxembourg S.a r.l., Vodafone Luxembourg S.a r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone M-PESA SH.P.K., Vodafone M-Pesa S.A, Vodafone M.C. Mobile Services Limited , Vodafone Magyarorszag Mobile Tavkozlesi Zartkoruen Mukodo Reszvenytarsasag, Vodafone Malta Limited, Vodafone Marketing UK , Vodafone Maroc SARL, Vodafone Mauritius Ltd., Vodafone Mobile Commerce Limited, Vodafone Mobile Communications Limited, Vodafone Mobile Enterprises Limited, Vodafone Mobile NZ Limited, Vodafone Mobile Network Limited, Vodafone Mobile Operations Limited, Vodafone Mobile Services Limited, Vodafone Multimedia Limited, Vodafone Nederland Holding I B.V., Vodafone Nederland Holding II B.V., Vodafone Nederland Holding III B.V., Vodafone Net Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Network Pty Limited, Vodafone New Zealand Foundation Limited, Vodafone New Zealand Limited, Vodafone Next Generation Services Limited, Vodafone Nominees Limited1, Vodafone ONO S.A.U., Vodafone Oceania Limited, Vodafone Old Show Ground Site Management Limited, Vodafone Overseas Finance Limited, Vodafone Overseas Holdings Limited, Vodafone Panafon International Holdings B.V., Vodafone Panafon UK, Vodafone Partner Services Limited, Vodafone Payment Solutions S.a r.l., Vodafone Portugal Comunicacoes Pessoais S.A., Vodafone Procurement Company S.a r.l., Vodafone Property Investments Limited, Vodafone Pty Limited, Vodafone Qatar Q.S.C., Vodafone Retail (Holdings) Limited , Vodafone Retail Limited, Vodafone Roaming Services S.a r.l., Vodafone Romania S.A, Vodafone Romania M - Payments SRL, Vodafone Romania Technologies SRL, Vodafone Sales & Services Limited, Vodafone Satellite Services Limited, Vodafone Servicios SL.U, Vodafone Servizi E Tecnologie S.R.L, Vodafone Servicos Empresariais Brasil Ltda., Vodafone Shared Services Romania SRL, Vodafone Specialist Communications Limited, Vodafone Stiftung Deutschland Gemeinnutzige GmbH, Vodafone Technology Solutions Limited, Vodafone Teknoloji Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Tele-Services (India) Holdings Limited, Vodafone Telecel-Comunicates Pessoais S.A., Vodafone Telecommunications (India) Limited, Vodafone Telekomunikasyon A.S, Vodafone Towers Limited, Vodafone UK Content Services Limited, Vodafone UK Investments Limited , Vodafone UK Limited1 , Vodafone US Inc, Vodafone Ventures Limited1 , Vodafone Vierte Verwaltungs AG, Vodafone Worldwide Holdings Limited, Vodafone Yen Finance Limited , Vodafone m-pesa Limited, Vodafone-Central Limited Vodaphone Limited, Vodafone-Panafon Hellenic Telecommunications Company S.A., VodafoneZiggo Group Holding B.V, Vodata Limited , Vouchercloud SA (Pty) Ltd, Wataneya Telecommunications S.A.E, Waterberg Lodge (Proprietary) Limited, Wayfinder, Wheatfields Investments 276 (Proprietary) Limited, Wireless Interactions & NFC Accelerator 2013 B.V., Woodend Cellular Limited, Woodend Communications Limited, Woodend Group Limited, Woodend Holdings Limited, XB Facilities B.V, XLink Communications (Proprietary) Limited, Your Communications Group Limited, ZUM B.V., ZYB, Zelitron S.A., Zesko B.V., Ziggo B.V., Ziggo Bond Company B.V., Ziggo Deelnemingen B.V., Ziggo Finance 2 B.V., Ziggo Financing Partnership, Ziggo Holding B.V., Ziggo Netwerk B.V., Ziggo Netwerk II B.V., Ziggo Services B.V., Ziggo Services Employment B.V., Ziggo Services Netwerk 2 B.V., Ziggo Zakelijk Services B.V., and Zoranet Connectivity Services B.V.. Two hundred years ago, when Dalhousie University was founded, its home wasnt located at the end of University Avenue. It was in the heart of Halifaxs Grand Parade the exact spot where City Hall stands today. City Hall has been one of the most popular destination during Doors Open Halifax each June. And Dalhousie has been a participant in the city-wide event for which buildings of historical, architectural or contemporary significance open their doors for free to the community every year since it started in 2013. Given that Dal is celebrating 200 years in 2018, its no surprise that the university is about to have one of its strongest-ever showings in Doors Open Halifax including a special exhibit celebrating its historic campus. On both the Saturday and Sunday of Doors Open Halifax (June 2 and 3), Halifax City Hall will host a Dalhousie 200th anniversary exhibit, offering a look back at the universitys history from its earliest years through until today. And although Dal has Convocation ceremonies on the Saturday of Doors Open, Sunday, June 3 will see the universitys largest-ever participation in the event: six buildings opening their doors, each of them hosting unique hands-on activities sure to delight visitors of all ages. The roster includes new facilities like the Collaborative Health Education Building and the just-opened Dalplex fitness centre, but also historic spaces like the Forrest Building Dals first home in South-End Halifax. Learn more: dal.ca/doorsopen So drop by campus on Sunday, June 3 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and discover something new about Dalhousie. Heres a glimpse at whats in store: &amp;nbsp; New Dalplex fitness centre 6260 South Street Completed: 2018 Doors Open Halifax is a great opportunity to get a look at Dals newest building: the Dalplex fitness centre expansion. The first major expansion to Dals fitness and recreation spaces in nearly 40 years, the fitness centre just opened to members and students on Friday, May 25. For Doors Open Halifax there will be building tours and fitness class demonstrations throughout the day, and you can also explore the new Dalhousie Physiotherapy Clinic. Collaborative Health Education Building 5793 University Avenue Completed: 2015 Dals collaborative building for health-care education includes the Centre for Collaborative Clinical Learning and Research on its third floor a hospital-like setting in which students work with technology and simulated patients to prepare for their health profession career. A variety of health care simulations will be demonstrated throughout the day, and younger visitors are invited to bring their favorite stuffed toy from home for some interactive TLC with the Teddy Bear for Care fun-spot. Steele Ocean Sciences Building 1355 Oxford Street Completed: 2012 The heart of ocean research on-campus, the Steele Building will be showcasing research from the Faculties of Science and Agriculture during Doors Open Halifax. Researchers will show you first-hand how everything from mathematics and plant science, to aquaculture and oceans research impacts the world we live in, and how Nova Scotian researchers and students contribute to building the scientific knowledge needed to advance societies around the globe. Goldberg Computer Science Building 6050 University Avenue Completed: 1997 If youre into robots and technology, then the Goldberg Building is the place to be for Doors Open Halifax. Join Computer Science students, professors and SuperNOVA in the building's atrium to take part in family-friendly activities throughout the day, including programming your own robot. Also, you can take an interactive journey through time at the launch of the virtual exhibit celebrating women in computing. Dentistry Building 5981 University Avenue Completed: 1958 Though its one of the older buildings in Dals Doors Open Halifax offerings this year, theres plenty new to see in the Dentistry Building. Get an up-close look at the buildings newly renovated, state-of-the-art clinic that hosts 6,000 patients each year. Watch students demonstrating their skills, and younger visitors can bring in their favourite stuffed toy from home for an oral check-up at another Teddy Bear for Care fun-spot. Forrest Building 5869 University Avenue Completed: 1887 Home to Dalhousie Nursing, Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy, the historic Forrest Building will celebrate one of its oldest alumni during Doors Open: beloved Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, who attended classes in the Forrest Building in 1895-96. But you'll also get a great look at Dal health research in the here-and-now. See how the brain is stimulated; watch motion-capture technology paired with Nova Scotia's most advanced treadmill; listen to the heart, lung and bell sounds of high-fidelity mannequins; and tour the occupational therapy home suite to learn more about accessibility. Younger visitors can also take in another Teddy Bear for Care fun-spot. Halifax City Hall Dal 200 exhibit (open both Saturday and Sunday) Halifax Room, Grand Parade, 1841 Argyle Street Completed: 1890 As part of the broader Doors Open experience at City Hall, take a walk through the past and discover just some of the major milestones in Dalhousies history. The exhibit honours the moments, achievements and people that have shaped what Dal is today and what it will become tomorrow. Learn more about Doors Open Halifax at Dal by visiting dal.ca/doorsopen This article is part of a series highlighting the Dalhousie Class of 2018 the graduates of Dal's 200th year. Read more of our Spring Convocation grad profiles. Mechanical Engineering student Stephen Robinson-Enebeli apologizes for the strong smell of coffee that hangs in the air of the third-floor computer lab. A lot of late nights in here, he explains. Stephen, who graduates Wednesday, says it was those times spent working together with classmates that were his favourite part of the program. There was a lot of collaboration. I mean, maybe there are some people who are smart enough to do it on their own but the Engineering program can be very hectic, he admits. So, you find a lot of long-lasting friends during that journey because youve got to work together to get stuff done. Transferrable skills As with many upper-year Engineering students at Dalhousie, Stephen didnt start his program here. He transferred from Saint Marys University through the Associated University Program, which accepts students into the third year of the Bachelor of Engineering program at Dalhousie once theyve successfully completed the first two years of study at an associated university. The first two years of the program are fairly general, he explains. Its the same thing at Dal. And then everybody transfers to the third year where they specialize. Stephen chose Mechanical Engineering, an interest that was sparked while watching a Discovery Channel show about mechanical engineers who were building cars. I really wanted to do that, he recalls. I really wanted to take science and apply it to something that everybody can use because it's one thing to know science and love science, it's another thing to use it to give it to other people. Learning on the job During his degree, Stephen participated in three co-op opportunities. His first stint at Metamaterial Technologies Inc. in Dartmouth got him involved with optics, an area hes going on to pursue through graduate studies. I worked with lasers there and they were making optical films to block lasers for aviation pilots. I helped in the lab, I helped with the research and I helped setting up optical tables and optical equipment. When reflecting on his positive co-op experiences he says it was worth the effort to add that additional dimension to his learning. The co-op program is really good, if you put in the work. I applied for about 50 jobs in my first co-op until I landed one. Helping in the community The idea of putting in the work is something Stephen also applies to his community involvement he was honoured with an Impact Award this year to acknowledge the work hes done outside of university. Hes been involved with Pathways Spryfield as well as lending his time to help out with youth conferences at St. Michaels Parish and with the annual Africa Festival of Arts and Culture. With Pathways Spryfield, I helped high school students in science and mathematics. A lot of people have this misunderstanding that science is hard, he explains. I think if you decide something is hard, it's going to be hard. So, I tried my best to push them away from that mentality. Appreciating science In September, Stephen starts a masters degree focused on Nanotechnology at the University of Waterloo. He hopes to continue with research to discover new ways to make a difference through science. I want to be able to bring advancements in science to our society, Stephen says. I don't take my cell phone for granted. It started with basic science that built up over the years and now everybody has this object that they carry around with them and it all started with science. I know how much work was put into that advancement. I want to be able to contribute to that in my own way while I'm around. That's really my end goal, so I am doing more school. Convocation reflections While Stephen is excited to finish his degree, hes sorry hell miss the opportunity to work in the new IDEA buildings. I think with the resources they have, the professors really do their best but soon, it will be way better, he says. The IDEA Project is a sign that the voice of the students is being heard and thats satisfying but I wish I would have been able to learn in the new buildings. Stephen offers a few words of encouragement for current students who find themselves struggling to get through the work. The Engineering degree was a journey and I feel like there were some times where you have to find within yourself whether this is what you want to do. Then when you have an end goal in mind you should always wake up and imagine that end goal, he recommends. For me, I felt like there was a lot of push, push, push but with the team support and stuff like that my friends supporting me and me supporting them we all got through it. And the professors were there to help as well. We should collaborate with our professors a lot more like that because a lot of them are there to help. W 124 E-Class was the first luxury car in Indias modern era which rolled out of the assembly plant of Mercedes-Benz India in Pimpri, Pune. After 24 years of local operations in our country, Mercedes-Benz has finally completed production of 1,00,000 units in India. The 1,00,000th unit is an E-Class, which is only available in its long wheelbase specification in India. The German carmaker took 13 years to produce 20,000 units while the next 10,000 units were churned out in two years from then. However, after touching the 50,000 mark in 2014, it took only four years to double that number thanks to increased demand. Although Mercedes-Benz may have started off its operations in Pimpri, Pune, it now produces Mercedes-AMG Launches Limited Edition GLE 43 And SLC 43 Models cars its Chakan facility nearby. Not only is the company the top luxury carmaker in the country, it also boasts of the widest range of cars when compared to its rivals such as Audi and BMW. Currently, the A-Class is the most affordable of the lot while the Mercedes-Maybach S650 is the most expensive. For further details take a look at the companys official statement. Mercedes-Benz becomes the first luxury car maker in India to reach the milestone of manufacturing 100,000 cars Made in India, for India India is a key emerging market for Mercedes-Benz with a world class production facility and processes- enabling reduced time frame for producing more cars than ever before. Mercedes-Benz has a robust local portfolio comprising 9 key models in India including the New Generation Cars like CLA, GLA; C-Class, E-Class, S-Class, sedans and the GLC, GLE, GLS SUVs and also Mercedes-Maybach S 560 Mercedes-Benz started its production in India by rolling-out the E-Class in 1995 Pune: Indias largest luxury car manufacturer Mercedes-Benz today celebrated a historic milestone of rolling-out of the 100,000th Mercedes-Benz for the Indian market an E-Class. The car was rolled-out from the assembly line of Mercedes-Benzs world-class manufacturing facility at Chakan, by Roland Folger, Managing Director and CEO, Mercedes-Benz India and Piyush Arora, Executive Director, Operations, Mercedes-Benz India. Recommended: Mercedes-Benz S-Class vs BMW 7 Series: Real-World Performance Comparison Speaking on this historic occasion, Roland Folger said, The th Mercedes-Benz vehicle in India is a strong testimony of the impeccable customer trust and the unsurpassable brand equity Mercedes-Benz enjoys in this dynamic country. The journey that began 24 years ago, as we pioneered the luxury car segment in the country, has only gotten more fruitful and today we remain the most preferred luxury brand in the country. The milestone of rolling-out 100,000 cars is also the result of the absolute dedication of all past and present employees of Mercedes-Benz India, who remain our best brand ambassadors. This achievement also reiterates Mercedes-Benzs India commitment and we strongly believe in the India story and its potential. We will further deepen our strong connect with the Indian customers and keep continuing to fascinate them with our products and customer service. roll out of the 100,000. Mr. Folger further added, With the growing demand of Mercedes-Benz products, a spiraling aspiration among young successful Indians, our extensive and expanding local portfolio, combined with an unparalleled network and innovations in customer service; we are positive that the next production milestone will be attained even earlier. We pioneered luxury motoring in India and with our customer delight approach and vision for future, we are confident of defining future mobility in India as well. Piyush Arora, Executive Director, Operations, Mercedes-Benz India commented, Mercedes-Benz Indias production facility is a global benchmark in quality and technological advancement in manufacturing, and it has remained the backbone of our growth narrative in India. A very high level of refinement and implementation of advanced technology and flexible processes ensures Mercedes-Benzs production quality conforms to the most stringent global th car, we reiterate our Make in India, for India commitment and will continue our local value addition and make the best of global products available for our discerning customers in India. We are well positioned to meet any future demand in production and adopt future technologies as per market requirements.standards, and creates new benchmark in manufacturing for the luxury car industry in India. With the roll-out of the 100,000 With a heritage that goes back over 130 years and an illustrious history in India, Mercedes-Benz has inextricably been a part of the countrys automotive landscape. Mercedes-Benz was the first luxury automotive brand to enter the Indian market in 1994. The W 124 E-Class was the first luxury car in Indias modern era which rolled out of the assembly plant of Mercedes-Benz India in Pimpri, Pune. Since then, Mercedes-Benz India has been redefining the entire business of automotive luxury in the country. Today, Mercedes-Benz India has moved the facility to Chakan near Pune with an investment of INR 1000+ crores, the facility is spread over 100 acres and is part of Mercedes-Benzs Global Production Network. Mercedes-Benz India plays an important role in the CKD/MVP production network in Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. At these locations, Mercedes-Benz produces vehicles in various extension levels for domestic markets. Since June 2015, Mercedes-Benz India also commenced production from its new expanded production facility located in the same premises. Giving a competitive edge in the dynamic market, Mercedes-Benz also boasts of the largest spare parts warehouse by luxury car manufacturer in India which can stock up to 44,000 parts. Source: CarDekho.com The lenders of Binani Cement have issued letter of intent to UltraTech after approving its bid to acquire the company under the bankruptcy code, Aditya Birla group firm said on Wednesday. New Delhi: The lenders of Binani Cement have issued letter of intent to UltraTech after approving its bid to acquire the company under the bankruptcy code, Aditya Birla group firm said on Wednesday. The Committee of Creditors (CoC) of Binani Cement on May 28 approved the resolution Plan submitted by UltraTech Cement, it said in a regulatory filing. The company said that the CoC "has today issued a letter of intent to the Company for acquisition of Binani Cement". According to sources, the CoC of Binani Cement had voted in favour of UltraTech Cement's Rs 7,960-crore offer. The race to acquire Binani was bitterly contested between two resolution applicants - UltraTech and Dalmia Bharat group. The CoC had earlier approved the bid of Dalmia Bharat Group. However, the Kolkata Bench of the National Company Law Tribunal had turned it down asking to consider UltraTech offer, which was higher. According to UltraTech, the "acquisition provides the company access to large reserves of high quality limestone." It said: "The acquisition increases the Company's presence in the highly competitive and fast growing Northern and Western markets in the country." Binani Cement has a capacity of 6.25 million tonne per annum (MTPA) in Rajasthan comprising an integrated cement unit with capacity of 4.85 MTPA and a split grinding unit with capacity of 1.4 MTPA. In addition, BCL subsidiaries operate 2 MTPA grinding unit in UAE, 3 MTPA clinker unit and 0.5 MTPA grinding unit in China, UltraTech said. "As the Company has already received the CCI approval, the resolution plan is now subject to the approval by NCLT," UltraTech further informed. Binani's acquisition would also provide UltraTech access to large reserves of high quality limestone. "The Company is confident of turning around the operations of Binani Cement, which will benefit all the stakeholders of BCL and result in synergies from optimisation of costs and improved realizations," it said. It would also "infuse the required financial stability and resources" in Binani Cements. On May 20, UltraTech announced to merge the cement business of BK Birla Group company Century Textiles and Industries through a share swap deal. "Upon consummation of this transaction, the Company's cement capacity will stand augmented to 116.15 MTPA including the recently announced acquisition of cement units of Century Textiles & Industries Ltd," said UltraTech. Mumbai: Private sector lender ICICI Bank on Wednesday said it instituted an independent enquiry into the allegations levelled by anonymous whistle-blower against MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar. Without detailing the allegations, the bank in a regulatory filing said the enquiry will be headed by an independent and credible person. "The scope of enquiry would be comprehensive and include all relevant matters arising out of and in the course of examination of the facts and wherever warranted, use of forensics/e-mail reviews and recordal of statements of relevant personnel etc," the filing said. The allegations are related to 'conflict of interest' over a time and 'quid pro quo' in course of Kochhar's work in dealing with certain borrowers. Tata Steel offered Rs 35,200 crore in cash to acquire Bhushan Steel. It would pay another Rs 1,200 crore over next 12 months to creditors and convert the remaining debt owed to banks to equity. New Delhi: The company law appellate tribunal on Wednesday asked Tata Steel if it will clear the statutory dues like income tax and GST of Bhushan Steel, a company it had acquired in the insolvency proceedings earlier this month. The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), hearing appeals against the acquisition filed by Bhushan Steel's founding Singal family and the firm's operational creditor Larsen and Toubro, asked Tata Steel to submit a statement of statutory dues of the company. The two member bench headed by NCLAT Chairman, Justice S J Mukhopadhaya also asked the Resolution Professional, which oversaw the auction of Bhushan Steel, to state how much would L&T get from Rs 532 crore offered to all the operational creditors. Bhushan Steel owed its lenders about Rs 56,000 crore and was among the 12 big loan defaulters identified by the Reserve Bank of India last year to undergo insolvency under the new bankruptcy law. Tata Steel offered Rs 35,200 crore in cash to acquire Bhushan Steel. It would pay another Rs 1,200 crore over next 12 months to creditors and convert the remaining debt owed to banks to equity. After the entire exercise, Tata would hold 75 per cent stake and banks would get 12.27 per cent. Singal family would be left with 2.5 per cent and the remaining 10 per cent would be public holding. While L&T wants to recover its Rs 956 crore dues, Singal family has made a Rs 28,592 crore counter-offer. During the proceedings, senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi opposed the Rs 28,592 crore offer by Neeraj Singal. "This Rs 28,592 crore offer in 14 years is a spoiler," he said. Meanwhile, senior advocate S Ganesh appearing for Singal submitted that Tata Steel was ineligible to bid for Bhushan Steel under section 29 A of IBC. The section mandates that a person convicted for any offence punishable with imprisonment for two years or more is ineligible for submitting a resolution plan. Tata Steel UK, a foreign subsidiary of Tata Steel, was fined by an English Court in February 2018, he added. The appellate tribunal has listed the matter on July 3 for next hearing. Neeraj Singal and L&T had filed appeals challenging May 15 order of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) that had approved Tata Steel's bid for Bhushan Steel. The card also comes with the medical and life insurance covers of Rs 2.5 lakh and Rs 5 lakh respectively. New Delhi: State run BSNL has formed an alliance with auyrveda consumer goods company Patanjali to offer co-branded SIM cards. The move can stir up the current low tariff plans of the incumbents including Reliance Jio as BSNL is well versed in matching the Mukesh Ambani upstarts free voice and cheap data combos. Both BSNL and Patanjali are in revenue sharing agreement for this alliance. Patanjali Yoga Pithas head Baba Ramdev launched a Swadeshi Samriddhi SIM cards in alliance with BSNL where the users will be able to avail unlimited calls, 2GB data and 100 SMS by making a recharge of just Rs 144 with a validity period of a month. It is available to all. On the 2GB data per day offers, Airtel recently launched a recharge pack worth Rs 449 that offers 140GB of 3G/ 4G data for a period of 70 days. Reliance Jio offers 2GB of high-speed 4G per day data for a period of 84 days under its Rs 448 plan. BSNLs offer will be comparatively the cheapest on the 2GB segment offering 60 GB for 30 days at Rs 144. The per day 2GB component is the most price elastic slice of the prepaid mobile segment and is fought hard by telcos to grab customers as this is mass base tariff plan. The card also comes with the medical and life insurance covers of Rs 2.5 lakh and Rs 5 lakh respectively and the offer is available in the market. We are delighted to partner with the countrys growing brand. We are confident this partnership will add immense value to both organisations and benefit India. We look forward in strengthening this alliance, Anupam Shrivastava, CMD, BSNL said on the tie-up. The Rs 144-plan offers unlimited voice calls across India (except Mumbai and Delhi circles). It provides 2GB of data and 100 SMS messages for a validity period of 30 days and also offers free roaming as is the case with BSNLs all other plans. There are two more denominations of the plans Rs 792 plan is for 180-days and the Rs 1584 plan has a one-year validity. Mumbai: Janhvi Kapoors popularity before shes made her debut knows no bounds and with Dhadak releasing in two months' time, people are keen to watch her talk, read her views apart from the social media posts. The soon-to-be debutante gave her first interview to Vogue, and a familiar face was the interviewer, her launcher Karan Johar, the producer of the film. Also read: Caught on camera: Janhvi Kapoor mobbed, touched inappropriately in crowd KJo started by saying he felt she was more connected with US Weekly than Filmfare despite growing up in the industry. Was it a conscious effort from her mother? Janhvi replied, She never wanted me to be an actress. Probed further, she elaborated, She was more relaxed about Khushi getting into films. She thought I was naive, that I wasnt thick-skinned enough. She wanted us to live a more relaxed life. She loved what she did but you know it was intense. But despite Sridevi not wanting Janhvi to join the glamour world, Karan recalls the former leaving the latter in the USA for an acting course. About it, Janhvi said, Oh yeah. She said, Phool ko kichad mein chhod kar chali ja rahi hu main! (Im leaving my little flower in the muck). In the wild, wild west. I think its cool to be naive. It takes a certain amount of courage to not be pessimistic. Id like to believe there is good in everyone. Also read: Priyanka, Aamir, Sonam wish Mothers Day, Janhvi misses Sridevi, Ranbir is moms date The newcomer didnt mind being honest when asked about 'life while growing up'. My attendance in school was 30 per cent. I was always travelling with my parents. My education was on the sets. I would do well in history and English but beyond that I just about passed. After I finished school I wanted to do a bunch of coursesart history in Florence, fashion in London and acting in Los Angeles. So I started with acting, and soon I knew this is it, this is what I need to do. Janhvi is starting young but her mother worked since she was just four years old. About the stories Sridevi told her, she says, Those were my bedtime stories. Her whacked-out experiences. You know, in the 80s and 90s, when actors would do multiple shifts working simultaneously on different films? So she was doing three movies with the same director, who was also the actor. They were in Ooty and he decided to shoot songs for all three films together. Hed do a scene, then cut and walk to the next location and the entire cast and crew would follow. At one point, he does a shot, starts walking and, suddenly, hes behind a tree taking a piss, and the entire cast and crew is there, watching. He was just walking, and everyone assumed they were going to the next location! Mum was in all the films, and shed figure out which film they were shooting for by his wigs, which would change for each role. While Sridevis death has come as a shock to the world, it has reunited Boney Kapoors two families, with Arjun, Anshula, Janhvi and Khushi bonding and even posing together at their cousin Sonam Kapoor Ahujas wedding recently. About the new bonding, she says, Its made us feel safe and secure. I think, even for Papa, its a source of comfort. Its definitely tied us together. Weve lost mom and I dont think thats a loss any of us will ever get over. Karan recollects Janhvi saying, I want to work because I want to want to do this for my mother during the tough phase. Thats always been my motivation. Im so proud of my parents. I need to make them as proud of me, she replies. About being in the spotlight of paparazzi since three years, and her gym, airport visits being tracked, she says, Its flattering than anyone would care what I look like after the gym. I feel like I havent done anything to earn that attention, so I dont know how to react. Should I smile and wave because theyve been waiting and its courteous? Or should I hide because Im sweaty? Janhvi and Khushi has surely been following in her mothers footsteps in the glamour department. About their appearances at events already making headlines, Janhvi says, I think other than films this is something that we have bonded over. We love clothes and are roughly the same size. We enjoy dressing up. Papa would call us three women on a mission when we shopped. Hes always been very into our lookhed approve them or make us change. And all of those photos of mom and me before events? He clicked them! With Sridevis passing, the actress doesnt have anyone to turn to for fashion advice. Of course. I could always be the baby with her. When Id wake up, the first thing Id do was ask for her. Id need her to put me to sleep sometimes and she literally had to feed me. The day before she left for the wedding (of Janhvi's cousin Mohit Marwah in UAE), I had to shoot, but I couldnt sleep, so I was like, I need you to come and put me to sleep. But she was packing, so by the time she came to me I was half asleep. But I could feel her patting my head, she replies. We might assume that being the elder child, Janvhi would the one to be maternal to her younger sister, but she says, Ive always been very bad at that. Khushi is very maternal with me. I am a full baby. She takes care of me. Now she comes and puts me to sleep sometimes. Karan reveals that Sridevi watched 25 minutes footage of Dhadak before her passing. About her opinion of Janhvi, she says, She was very technical about it. The first thing she told me was the things I needed to improveshe felt the mascara was smudged and it really bothered her. The second half has to be different, she told me, You cant wear anything on your face. Thats all she told me but she was happy. Janhvi surely looked confident in the interview, and we are now to keen that confidence translate on screens on July 20. Read the entire interview here: Sanju has been in the news ever since the idea germinated. Many people questioned whether a criminals life should be shown on screen, but all such questions soon turned to curiosity after Ranbir Kapoors look from the movie was leaked. It is difficult to not notice any similarities between Sanjay Dutt in real life and Ranbir Kapoor on screen as the latter recreated the moments of Sanju babas life. Ranbir has often said how hes been a fan of Sanjay Dutt and wishes that Baba starts liking him and his work. But when it came to Sonam Kapoor, her reason for doing Sanju was slightly different. I just wanted to work with Raju (Rajkumar Hirani) sir. Whatever films he offers me, I'll say yes, she said at the recently held trailer launch. Paresh Rawal, who appeared to be overexcited mentioned, I didn't even speak about money with Sanju since I worked with my favourite actor Ranbir Kapoor. Dia Mirza plays the role of Sanjay Dutts wife Maanyata in the film. When asked about her technique, she said, I empathized with Maanyata like I do with every character. Ranbir, who got into the zone of Sanjay Dutt, also got out of it and became Ranbir Kapoor again thanks to Brahmastra. I simultaneously worked in Brahmastra so didn't have problem going back to becoming Ranbir Kapoor, said the actor. Ask Ranbir if he would like to do a biopic or a romantic film again, he had a definite yes. I would love to do a biopic and I love romantic films, he mentioned. Ranbir has a nude scene in the film. When asked if he had any trouble getting with the scene, he added, I'm very shy in real life, but not in front of the camera. From the looks of the trailer, Vicky Kaushal seems to be the strong friend of (on-screen) Sanjay Dutt, who even discussed sex with the actor in the film. Ask if Salman Khan will be shown in the film and Rajkumar Hirani is quick to probe, Vicky is not playing Salman. Most of Vicky's personality is from Sanjay's friend from USA, Paresh. Not giving out any name in particular, Rajkumar added, Sonam is playing one girlfriend from the 308 girlfriends. Talking about girlfriends, Sanjay Dutt became most popular for his alleged affair with Madhuri Dixit. As soon as the actress name popped up at the trailer launch, Vidhu Vinod Chopra humoured, The film has mine and Raju's love story too. You just watch the film. Finally answering the hot topic, Ranbir spoke about his absence from social media, stating, I will be myself on social media, not films. Right now I'm happy staying away, but maybe some day. GENEVA: China has overtaken the United States in healthy life expectancy at birth for the first time, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) data. Chinese newborns can look forward to 68.7 years of healthy life ahead of them, compared with 68.5 years for American babies, the data - which relates to 2016 - showed. American newborns can still expect to live longer overall - 78.5 years compared to Chinas 76.4 - but the last 10 years of American lives are not expected to be healthy. The lost years of good health that are a factor in calculating healthy life expectancy at birth are lower for China, Japan, Korea and some other high income Asian countries than for high income Western countries, said WHO spokeswoman Alison Clements-Hunt. The United States was one of only five countries, along with Somalia, Afghanistan, Georgia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where healthy life expectancy at birth fell in 2016, according to a Reuters analysis of the WHO data, which was published without year-on-year comparisons in mid-May. The best outlook was for Singaporean babies, who can count on 76.2 years of health on average, followed by those in Japan, Spain and Switzerland. The United States came 40th in the global rankings, while China was 37th. In terms of overall life expectancy China is also catching up with the United States, which Reuters calculations suggest it is on course to overtake around 2027. Chinese life expectancy has increased substantially and is now higher than for some high-income countries, said Clements-Hunt. Meanwhile U.S. life expectancy is falling, having peaked at 79 years in 2014, the first such reversal for many years, Clements-Hunt said. That reflected increasing rates of drug overdose deaths, mainly from opioids, suicides, and some other major causes among younger middle-aged Americans, particularly in less affluent areas, she said. The worlds longest life expectancy is in Japan, at 84.2 years, meaning that babies born there in 2016 were the first to be able to look forward to seeing the next century. The Karnataka Film Chambers of Commerce decided not to allow screening of his movie 'Kaala', due for release on June 7. (Photo: Twitter) Bengaluru: Following Rajinikanth's comments on the Cauvery row in which he asked Karnataka chief minister H D Kumaraswamy to release to Tamil Nadu its share of Cauvery water, as mandated by the Supreme Court, the Karnataka Film Chambers of Commerce (KFCC) on Tuesday decided not to allow screening of his movie 'Kaala', due for release on June 7. The film industry is upset with Rajinikanth's reported statement that whichever government comes to power Karnataka should implement the Supreme Court order on Cauvery water sharing. "A decision has been taken that Rajinikanth's movie will neither be distributed nor screened anywhere in Karnataka," KFCC president Sa Ra Govindu said, admitting that the actor's statement on Cauvery issue made them take such a decision. The KFCC president also said the ban on distribution and screening of Rajinikanth movies will continue. "The ban will remain because neither will he apologise for his statement nor are we going to pardon him," Govindu said. Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy had recently asked Rajinikanth to visit the Krishnaraja Sagar Dam to see the status of water level before passing any comments. The film star has often faced the wrath of pro-Kannada organisations for his comments on Cauvery issue. The actor has a great fan following in Karnataka, especially Bengaluru and Kolar where there is a sizable Tamil population. CBI has registered the case after carrying out searches at Delhi PWD minister Satyendar Jains residence today morning. (Photo: File | PTI) New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registered a case against Delhi minister Satyendra Jain, S K Srivastava, then Engineer-in-Chief, PWD and others to investigate the allegations of irregularities in hiring of creative teams in PWD. The central investigating agency registered the case after carrying out searches at Delhi PWD minister Satyendar Jains residence today morning. Cbi raids my house for hiring creative team by PWD. Professionals were hired for different projects. All were forced to leave by cbi. Satyendar Jain (@SatyendarJain) May 30, 2018 The raid was conducted after registering a fresh case against Satyendra Jain in connection with alleged violation of norms in hiring architects for the Public Works Department (PWD), officials said in New Delhi. CBI team at Delhi Minister Satyendra Jain's residence, searches were conducted over alleged violation in hiring of creative team by Public Works Department(PWD) pic.twitter.com/1xVI8qt96Y ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 Officials have confirmed that searches at five more locations, including residences of other PWD officials and private people are being carried out. Jain is already facing probe in a case pertaining to money laundering. The PWD minister, in a tweet, confirmed that the Central agency was carrying out searches at his residence. The CBI has also registered a fresh case against Jain, alleging violations in hiring architects for the PWD projects. The agency had registered a preliminary enquiry into the hiring of 24 architects for a creative wing of the PWD through an agency, which reportedly lacked any prior experience, the officials added. Soon after the raids, the Delhi Chief Minister tweeted, "What does PM Modi want?" questioning the sudden step by the CBI. What does PM Modi want? https://t.co/3vN1MVxPqk Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) May 30, 2018 Today's raid on Delhis PWD minister Satyendra Jain comes a day after the CBI closed its probe into his daughter Soumya Jain's appointment as an adviser to the state government's project on mohalla clinics. Petrol and diesel prices are witnessing an all-time high, rising every day for the last 15 days. (Representational Image/PTI) Mumbai: In a big respite for the people of Kerala, the state government has decided to reduce the prices of petrol and diesel by Re 1 in the state. The order will come into effect from Friday (June 1), news agency ANI reported quoting Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. With this, Kerala becomes the first state to announce a cut in fuel prices. Petrol and diesel prices are witnessing an all-time high, rising every day for the last 15 days. Though, both petrol and diesel prices were marginally cut by 1 paisa per litre today. Also Read: Not 60 but 1 paisa: Indian Oil revises petrol, diesel prices within hours In all, petrol price was increased by Rs 3.8 per litre and diesel by Rs 3.38 since May 14. Petrol and diesel prices in India are linked to Singapore gasoline prices GL95-SIN and Arab Gulf diesel prices GO-AG, which mostly track movements in crude oil prices LCOc1. The reason behind the increase in petrol prices in the country is the rise in the crude oil cost and high excise duty levied on the particular fuel type. Petrol fetched Rs 78.42 in Delhi while in Mumbai it was sold for Rs 86.23 per litre today. Meanwhile, diesel costed Rs 69.30 in Delhi and Rs 73.78 in Mumbai. (Representational Image/File) Mumbai: After 16 days of relentless petrol and diesel price hike that was witnessed across the country, a cut of 60 and 54 paise respectively was announced on Wednesday morning. However, the excitement among consumers proved to be short-lived, after the official website of Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL) reported an error. Within hours the cut was rolled back to a paltry Re 1 paisa in Delhi and Mumbai. Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said, "Since we moved to the mechanism of daily price change, prices have gone up and down by 1 paisa, 12 paise, 27 paise etc, it is not for the first time that there has been a change of 1 paisa. However, today one of our employees made a mistake and we accept it." Many opposition parties and consumers slammed the one paisa cut in fuel prices. Social media, too, went into a tizzy with consumers using hashtags such as '#petrolled' and '#fuelonfire' to highlight the apathy of the common man. Read: Not 60 but 1 paisa: Indian Oil revises petrol, diesel prices within hours One user posted a picture of the long gone 5 paise coin, saying "My savings today after filling 5 litres of petrol". Another user said, "I am going to invest it in mutual funds now." Congress president Rahul Gandhi also took to Twitter and asked PM Modi whether the price cut was a prank. Gandhi said the one paisa cut in petrol rates was not a "suitable response" to the fuel challenge he threw to the prime minister a few days ago. Dear PM, You've cut the price of Petrol and Diesel today by 1 paisa. ONE paisa!?? If this is your idea of a prank, its childish and in poor taste. P.S. A ONE paisa cut is not a suitable response to the #FuelChallenge I threw you last week. https://t.co/u7xzbUUjDS Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) May 30, 2018 However, in a big respite for the people of Kerala, the state government decided to reduce the prices of petrol and diesel by Re 1 in the state. The order will come into effect from June 1. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said, "The decision to reduce fuel prices was taken despite the state facing severe financial difficulties. The Centre must take a cue from the state and bring down the fuel prices as it was causing severe hardship to the common man." Also Read: Kerala cuts petrol prices by Re 1, rest of India gets paltry 1 paisa 'relief' Speaking along the same lines, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury also suggested that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should follow Kerala's example and reduce the duties on fuel. Speaking about the revision of price cut from 60 to 1 paisa, Punjab CM Amarinder Singh said, "Clerical error? Nobody can believe that. It is just another joke the Narendra Modi government has perpetrated on the people of the country." Congress spokesperson RPN Singh said the high fuel prices have adversely impacted the people, especially the middle class and farmers, which has led to agitation across the country. "If we look at the fuel prices in the last four years, there has been Rs 10 lakh crore loot and one paisa relaxation. This is a cruel joke," he told a press conference Petrol and diesel prices in India are linked to Singapore gasoline prices GL95-SIN and Arab Gulf diesel prices GO-AG, which mostly track movements in crude oil prices LCOc1. The reason behind the increase in petrol prices in the country is the rise in the crude oil cost and high excise duty levied on the particular fuel type. (With agency inputs) Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a gathering of Indian diaspora at the Jakarta Convention Centre in the Indonesian capital. (Photo: Twitter/@PIB_India) Jakarta/New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday announced a 30-day free visa for Indonesian citizens and invited the diaspora to travel to their country of origin to experience the 'New India'. Addressing a gathering of Indian diaspora at the Jakarta Convention Centre in the Indonesian capital, PM Modi said, "not only do the names of our nations rhyme but also there is a distinct rhythm in the India-Indonesia friendship." "We will grant free of cost visa for Indonesian citizens for travel of up to 30 days," the Prime Minister said, amid applause. "Many of you may never have been to India. I invite you all to come to India for the Kumbh in Prayag next year," PM Modi told the gathering. Kumbh Mela is one of the largest human congregations on the Earth. Taking a dig at the previous governments, Prime Minister Modi said his first priority as a government was to make the country corruption free, citizen-centric and development friendly. "Our government has been making India ready according to the need and expectations of the 21st century," he said. "We have gone a step ahead of Ease of Doing Business.' Our focus is Ease of Living.' Our processes are transparent and sensitive," he added. "We have to make a 'New India'. We have to start working to realise the dream of New India by 2022, when India will celebrate 75 years of her independence," the Prime Minister added. In the last two-and-a-half years, more than 9,000 start-ups have been registered in India, he said, adding that the world's second largest start-up ecosystem is built in India. "And my friends living in Indonesia, these are happening, laws are the same, officers are the same, offices are the same, tables and chairs are the same, only the government has changed and the country is changing," Prime Minister Modi said. "If the policy is clear and intension pure, then development has to happen which we have shown," he asserted. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who arrived in Jakarta Tuesday night on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, earlier met President Joko Widodo at the Merdeka palace, one of the presidential palaces in Indonesia. Pranab Mukherjee has been invited to be the chief guest at the valedictory function of Sangh Shiksha Varg -- a training camp for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh volunteers -- at its headquarters in Nagpur. (Photo: PTI) Mumbai: Union minister and senior BJP leader Nitin Gadkari on Tuesday welcomed former President Pranab Mukherjee's decision to accept an invitation to attend an RSS event, saying it is a "good start" and "political untouchability" is not good. Gadkari, the Lok Sabha MP from Nagpur, also said the RSS was not Pakistan's ISI but an organisation of nationalists. Mukherjee has been invited to be the chief guest at the valedictory function of Sangh Shiksha Varg -- a training camp for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh volunteers -- at its headquarters in Nagpur. Read: No comments: Congress on Pranab Mukherjee accepting RSS' invite The event is to be held on June 7 and a senior RSS functionary had said on Monday that Mukherjee has accepted the invitation. "Mukherjee's acceptance of the invitation is a good start. Political untouchability is not good," Gadkari told reporters here when asked about reported reservations in the Congress over the former President accepting the RSS invite. Even though there has been no official reaction from the Congress on Mukherjee's decision, several party leaders have expressed surprise over the development. Also Read: Pranab Mukherjee to address 600 RSS workers in Nagpur on June 7: report The results of all the byelections, which were held in four Lok Sabha seats (including Palghar in Maharashtra and one in Nagaland) and 10 Assembly seats across several states, like Jharkhand, West Bengal and Kerala on May 28, will be declared on Thursday, May 31. (Photo: AP) (Representational image) New Delhi: Amid tight security arrangements, repolling was held at 122 polling booths in the Kairana and Gondia-Bhandara constituencies of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra respectively and one booth in Nagaland's lone Lok Sabha seat on Wednesday. The repolling was ordered by the Election Commission after technical snags in the EVM-VVPAT machines during the byelections held on Monday were reported from these booths. The entire exercise is learnt to have passed off largely peacefully. While 73 booths under Kairana Lok Sabha seat underwent repolling, votes were cast again in 49 polling booths in Maharashtra's Gondia-Bhandara constituency. One booth in Nagaland's Aongleden also saw repolling. The results of all the byelections, which were held in four Lok Sabha seats (including Palghar in Maharashtra and one in Nagaland) and 10 Assembly seats across several states, like Jharkhand, West Bengal and Kerala on May 28, will be declared on Thursday, May 31. On Wednesday, the Election Commission also announced the biennial polls to three Rajya Sabha seats from Kerala, including the one held by Upper House deputy chairman P.J. Kurien, that are falling vacant on July 1. The election will be held on June 21, for which the notification will be issued on June 4, the poll panel said. In Kairana, meanwhile, around 80,000 voters were registered in the booths where the repolling was held. The Opposition Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal as well as the ruling BJP had raised claims of the tampering of electronic voting machines (EVMs) at these booths. On Monday, 54 per cent polling was recorded in Kairana seat. New Delhi: The CBI on Wednesday booked Delhi minister Satyendar Jain in a case related to the alleged corruption in hiring a creative team for the PWD to suggest new architectural designs and bring down costs. According to sources the agency has also named then officials of the PWD-- engineer-in-chief S K Srivastava, principal director (projects) Manu Amitabh, deputy director (admin) and A K Pait, project manager P C Chanana as accused. Jain, who holds the PWD portfolio, is already facing a CBI case related to alleged money laundering. The CBI sleuths carried out searches at various locations, including the residential premises of Jain and other accused in the matter. In a tweet, the minister said the agency was carrying out searches at his residence. "Professionals were hired for different projects. All were forced to leave by the CBI," he said . The CBI had registered a preliminary enquiry in the matter on April 5 last year and converted it into a regular case after it allegedly found prima facie evidence. During a year-long preliminary enquiry, the CBI said it found that Jain had allegedly entered into a criminal plotwith PWD officials to award the tender to Soni Detective and Allied Services for hiring the creative team. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo held talks in Jakarta on Wednesday following which the two countries decided to "establish a New Comprehensive Strategic Partnership" and announced setting up of "a Joint Task Force to undertake projects for port related infrastructure in and around Sabang"(a strategically-located Indonesian island at the northern tip of Sumatra near the Malacca Straits to which New Delhi will now gain access). Sources said India is only the second country after China with which Indonesia has established a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. It was also decided to boost connectivity between Sabang island and Indias Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar islands which are a few hundred nautical miles apart. While the development of the strategically-located port is expected to benefit India economically, there is however no official word on whether this could translate in the future to Indian military access to the port. Crucial global shipping lines pass through the Malacca Straits. The move to enhance ties with Jakarta is significant, given increased Chinese assertiveness in south-east Asia. Significantly, both countries also issued a "Shared Vision of India-Indonesia Maritime Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific" to "strengthen the existing security architecture in the Indo-Pacific". The two nations also inked 15 pacts including a defence one for "consultation on strategic defence and military issues of common interest and exchange of strategic information". The two leaders also "agreed to hold Annual Summit meetings. The by-polls for four Lok Sabha seats and nine assembly constituencies were held on Monday across 10 states. (Photo: ANI) New Delhi: Amid tight security arrangements, repolling was held at 123 polling booths in the Kairana and Gondia-Bhandara constituencies of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra respectively and one booth in Nagalands lone Lok Sabha seat on Wednesday. The repolling was ordered by the Election Commission after technical snags in the EVM-VVPAT machines during the byelections held on Monday were reported from these booths. The entire exercise is learnt to have passed off largely peacefully. EC a mistress, says Shiv Sena In a virulent attack on the Election Commission (EC) over complaints of malfunctioning of EVMs and VVPAT machines in bypolls, the Shiv Sena on Wednesday dubbed the poll panel, democracy and elections as mistress of those in power. New Delhi: At a time when differences have surfaced within the Congress over former President Pranab Mukherjee's apparent move to send a clear signal that the RSS is not untouchable, the Sangh is now trying to establish a closer and a more intimate bond with the veteran Congressman. The RSS, which used to refer to him as "Dr Pranab Mukherjee" or "Shri Pranab Mukherjee", moved a step closer and now referred to him as "Pranab da". On the website of the RSS' mouthpiece Organiser, the lead story's headline screamed: "Pranab Da at RSS Headquarter: Why Intolerant Brigade is Shocked?" Incidentally, Mr Mukherjee is fondly called "dada" or "Pranabda" by his close associates and friends.While Leader of the Opposition in the Kerala Assembly Ramesh Chennithala, in a letter to Mr Mukherjee, said he was "deeply hurt" by his decision to accept the invitation, another senior Congress leader Abhishek "Manu" Singhvi said it was "wrong to judge someone for accepting an invitation till we listen to his speech". Recalling his brief association with RSS mouthpieces, Mr Singhvi said he had also "written" for Panchjanya and Organiser and that his articles had been "well accepted" within the party. Mr Singhvi took a potshot at those who had opposed his decision to write for the RSS mouthpieces. He said while a majority of Congress leaders appreciated and accepted his decision, there were "a few snipers, which are there in every party", who chose to target him. Former finance minister P. Chidambaram said now Mr Mukherjee has accepted the invitation, "it is wrong to discuss whether he should have accepted or not". Claiming that he "wouldn't have accepted the invitation", Mr Chidambaram felt that Mr Mukherjee "should go there and tell them what is wrong with their ideology". Meanwhile, Organiser maintained in its lead article that "people who share the same values of patriotism and are dedicated to social change are bound to attend the RSS camps on invitations despite different political ideologies. Hyderabad: Schools will function for half-a-day till June 8 in view of the prevailing high temperature, education minister Kadiam Srihari said on Wednesday. This follows demands from parents and schools associations to postpone the reopening day to June 8. A schedule will be decided later based on the weather conditions. The government issued instructions to schools to reopen on June 1 and conduct the Telangana Formation Day celebrations on June 2, Mr Srihari said. The Telangana Recognised School Management Association (TRSSMA) had decided earlier on Wednesday to extend the summer holidays to June 10 after celebrating the Formation Day on June 2. It later said it would follow the instructions from the government . The school education department, for the first time, had decided to reopen schools on June 1 to involve students in the Formation Day celebrations on June 2. School managements have decided to celebrate the day in a grand manner. Earlier, Mr Srinivas Reddy, president of Telangana recognised School Management Association said, We have decided to reopen the schools on June 11 considering that the heat wave conditions may affect the students health. Dehradun: Gagandeep Singh, the hero of Uttarakhand last week, has become a villain now. The police inspector in Ramnagar who shot to fame after saving a Muslim boy from a lynch mob which attacked him for being with his Hindu girlfriend on the premises of a temple is now flooded with death threats. The reason: he defended indecent behaviour. Mr Singh is now sent on leave, say his colleagues. Mr Singh earned a lot of fans after the video of him saving the couple went viral on social media. The mob was alleging love jihad by the Muslim youth when the police officer intervened and saved him. In the process, he received several blows on him, too. The local BJP politicians are also angry with the inspector. It is not right for the Muslims to bring Hindu girls to the temple, BJP MLA Rakesh Nainwal is quoted as saying. They know that it is a temple and it is a pious place. Rajkumar Thukral, another BJP MLA, is quoted as saying that it was an attempt to hurt the Hindu community's religious feelings. He questioned the act, saying when Hindus do not go to mosques knowing it is not a place for them, why the Muslims come to the temple. However, the local residents do not seem to share the sentiments of the BJP leaders. When a boy and a girl go somewhere together by choice, then how can these right-wing groups call it a case of love jihad and attack them?" Ajit Sahni, a resident of Ramnagar, is quoted as saying. Cuttack: "People are touching my feet now," says D Prakash Rao, a Cuttack-based tea seller, after he was lauded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the 44th edition of 'Mann Ki Baat' over the weekend. Starting at the mere age of 6, Rao has been selling tea for the past 54 years. Due to financial problems, he was not able to continue studies after class five despite getting a distinction. However, Rao accepted this as a challenge and today he lives his dream through nurturing the lives of 70-75 slum children in his school. "I don't want these kids to lack behind in studies just because they don't have money. So, I divide my time between school, tea shop and going to a hospital to help patients. I started my life as a tea seller. Later on, I became a teacher and now people in hospital think that I am a doctor too," Rao told news agency ANI. Rao said that over 70 students study in his school and that the students feel more comfortable in school rather than sitting idle at home or roaming around in streets. "Around 70-75 students study in my school. Their parents are not much concerned about their studies. Even these children didn't want to come to us. However, we decided to give food to them. That's how they all come here now. Also, besides studies, these children get to learn singing, dance and judo. Today, they feel more comfortable in school rather than sitting idle at home or roaming around in streets," he added. (Photo: Twitter/ANI) When asked as to how he manages to run the school single-handedly, Rao said, "I earn Rs 600 per day during off season and around Rs 700-800 in season time. So, money is not an issue. I want to see these children become something in future." While sharing insights from his meeting with Prime Minister Modi, Rao said, "I never thought in my dreams that I will get to meet the world's favourite leader. When he came to Odisha, I got a call from his office to come and meet him. With 15-20 children, I went to meet PM Modi. When he saw me, he waved his hand and said, 'Rao sahib. I have come here to meet you. I know everything about you. Nobody needs to tell anything to me.' Though Rao was hesitant at first, he said he soon became comfortable after looking at the hospitality of the Prime Minister. "Modi ji asked me to sit next to him. He spent 18 minutes with us. It's a coincidence that on May 26, Modi ji met us and the very next day he lauded my efforts on 'Mann Ki Baat'. After this incident, people have started touching my feet. He said he will surely come to have food in our school whenever he next comes to Odisha." Not to miss out, besides his efforts in school, Rao has also donated blood for an unbelievable "217 times." "Today, I have received so many awards that my wife fights with me as to why I get them at home when we don't have space to keep them," Rao concluded. Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his monthly radio programme on May 27, said, "Rao has been a tea vendor in Cuttack for the past five decades. You will be surprised to know that the lives of more than 70 children are being illuminated through education due to his efforts. He has opened a school named 'Asha Ashvaasan', spending 50 per cent of his income for children living in slums and hutments." "He ensures education, health and meals for all the children coming to this school," said PM Modi, who met Rao during his Cuttack visit on May 26. Superstar Rajinikanth also warned Tamil Nadu will become a 'graveyard' if there were too many agitations. (Photo: Twitter/ANI) Chennai/Tuticorin: A visibly aggressive superstar Rajinikanth on Wednesday blamed anti-social elements for the violence during anti-Sterlite protests last week that resulted in 13 deaths in police firing, and warned Tamil Nadu will become a 'graveyard' if there were too many agitations. The actor, who has announced his plans to join politics, called for a Jayalalithaa-style 'iron fist' policy to crush anti-social elements in the interest of Tamil Nadu. Speaking to reporters in Chennai on his return from Tuticorin, which witnessed violence on May 22, he said the "problem started" only after police came under attack from such anti-social elements. With a visibly aggressive body language, Rajinikanth asserted that he would not tolerate assault on policemen, virtually reiterating his stand on this issue. He had slammed the alleged attack on policemen during a protest by pro-Tamil outfits in April, when they agitated against holding IPL matches in Chennai till the Cauvery Management Board was formed. The actor said that such elements had infiltrated the pro-jallikattu protest held at Marina in 2017, which again ended on a violent note. Asked about protests in the state, he shot back, saying "Tamil Nadu will become a graveyard if there is a protest for everything." Earlier, speaking to reporters at Tuticorin after meeting those injured in the firing, he said police and the Collector's office had not been attacked by common people, but by such anti-social elements. Rajinikanth who last week held the government responsible for the deaths caused due to the firing, however, did not favour K Palanisamy's resignation as Chief Minister over the issue. "The attack on the Collector's office and setting on fire (Sterlite) quarters was not done by the common people. Some anti-social elements infiltrated (the protesting locals). It is their handiwork," he said and expressed grief that 'this noble protest' had ended on a bloody note. The actor, who gave away Rs 10,000 relief to each of the 48 injured persons, said pro-Jallikattu protests in Tamil Nadu last year also saw infiltration of 'anti-social elements'. He had earlier announced a relief of Rs two lakh each to the families of the 13 deceased. "The government should crush such anti-social elements with an iron fist. On that front I laud Jayalalithaa as she kept such persons under check with an iron fist. They should follow her policy and keep them under check, as otherwise it will result in great danger for Tamil Nadu," he said. He also called for action against those who attacked policemen during the May 22 protest. Thirteen people were killed in police firing on May 22-23 when violence broke out at the protest by locals, demanding closure of Sterlite Industries in this district over pollution issues. On the opposition's demand for resignation of the chief minister, Rajinikanth sought to know how quitting could be a solution. "If you demand resignation for everything, what (is the purpose)... I don't want to talk about that," he said. To a question, he said he had "no confidence" in the state government appointed one-man inquiry commission to probe the violence, under retired Madras High Court judge Aruna Jegadeesan. The actor said constant agitations may not yield solutions and added that one should move courts for redressal of their grievances. Agitations often happen in the state, sometimes for "genuine reasons," he said, adding that people should be careful against being incited. Too many protests could dissuade trade and investors from coming to Tamil Nadu, affecting employment opportunities, he said, adding agriculture has already been hit due to water scarcity. The actor cautioned Vedanta Ltd, which runs Sterlite Industries, against moving court over the Tamil Nadu government's closure order of the copper smelter unit, saying "they are not humans if they do so." "With so many deaths and injuries, they should not even think of doing that," he said, adding, nothing can stand before people's power. Rajinikanth faulted the police intelligence for its 'big mistake' in failing to detect the presence of anti-social elements in the protests. At the hospital, the actor spoke to the injured and was seen holding hands of some of them. Earlier, speaking to reporters in Chennai ahead of his visit to Tuticorin, about 500 km from Chennai, Rajinikanth hoped that those injured would have "some joy" in meeting him as he was a cinema star. His visit was aimed at consoling them, he said and expressed regret that his visit to Tuticorin had come at a very "difficult time". His going there was his 'goodwill gesture,' he added. To a question on the war of words between AIADMK and DMK over the May 22 incident, he said there should be no blame game on such matters and the focus should be on moving ahead. Asked for his comments on Prime Minister Narendra Modi not reacting to the incident so far, he said: "The media is so powerful. Ask him, ok." Recently, Anil Vij compared Rahul Gandhi to the deadly Nipah virus, saying whoever comes in contact with him will be destroyed. (Photo: File/PTI) Ambala: Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij on Wednesday said that it should be mandatory for everyone to spend time with the RSS. His remarks come amid the controversy over former President Pranab Mukherjee's decision to attend an RSS meet. "The RSS is a nationalist organisation," the minister tweeted in Hindi. "It should be made mandatory for all people of the country to spend some time with the sangh. Many problems of the country will be solved," he added. The tweet, however, made no direct mention of Mukherjee's decision to attend the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh event. Vij has made controversial statements in the past against Mahatma Gandhi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi. Recently, he compared Rahul Gandhi to the deadly Nipah virus, saying whoever comes in contact with him will be destroyed. He had once demanded that the cow should be declared a national animal. TRS and the TD, the ruling parties in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh respectively, who benefited from defections post the 2014 elections, are now facing problems wi-th the next elections drawing near. (Representational image) Hyderabad: The TRS and the TD, the ruling parties in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh respectively, who benefited from defections post the 2014 elections, are now facing problems with the next elections drawing near. Selecting candidates in the constituencies of defected MLAs may become a big headache for both parties. Despite having a majority in their respective assemblies, the TRS and TD have encouraged defections with the aim of weakening their main opposition party. In Telangana, as many as 28 MLAs joined the TRS from the Congress, TD, YSR Congress and CPI and three MPs from the Congress, TD and YSRC. In AP about 23 YSRC MLAs and three MPs have joined the TD. Both TRS and TD have given cabinet berths to the MLAs who defected. In Telangana, the TRS is likely to face a tough fight from the Congress, and in AP the TD is likely to face a tough fight from the YSR Congress. In the 2014 elections, the TRS won 63 assembly seats out of 119 and in AP, TD won 103 out of 175. In Telangana, the Congress party won 22 and the TD 15 seats. In AP, the YSRC won 67 seats. To form the government in Telangana a party requires 60 seats and in AP, 88 seats. Against this background, winning the seats of the defected MLAs has become more important to the TRS and TD. In several constituencies the MLAs who defected are facing a threat from the party they left. For example, in Telangana, Erraballi Dayakar Rao, Palakurthi MLA from Warangal district crossed over from the TD to the TRS. In this constituency former MLA and TRS leader N Sudhakar Rao, who was defeated by Mr Dayakar Rao in the last assembly elections, is a strong contender for the Palakurthi assembly ticket from the TRS. In Sirpur, Kagaznagar BSP MLA Koneti Konappa joined the TRS. Here former TRS MLA Kaveti Sammayya is a strong contender and sources say that Sammayya is likely to join the Congress because he has lost hope of getting a TRS ticket after Mr Konappa defected. The situation looks quite similar in Andhra Pradesh. For example, Jammalamadugu MLA Adinarayana Reddy of Kadapa district has joined the TD who won from though he had won as a YSRC candidate. Former TD Minister Rama Subba Reddy is a strong contender for an assembly ticket here. Adinarayana Reddy was made a minister after joining the TD. In some other constituencies also, the MLAs who defected to the TD are facing problems from the original TD leaders. The leadership of the TRS and the TD have to convince either the MLAs, who defected from other parties, or the original party leaders to accept whatever decision they make in awarding tickets. In a neck-to-neck fight, a small number of votes may make a difference. In these constituencies, a leader may not be strong enough to win the election on his own but he or she can defeat the party candidate. Thiruvananthapuram: Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Wednesday hit out at Opposition Leader Ramesh Chennithala saying that he was known for talking nonsense. He was reacting to the questions on Chennithalas charge that everything was being controlled in police by his adviser Raman Sreevastava. He is famous for his nonsensical statements. He has not yet understood the importance of the opposition leaders position that he is occupying. Pinarayi blamed the media for spreading untrue information which put the state in bad light. The Chief Minister said baseless reports were being spread by media. You should desist from such reports. You are attempting to insult Kerala. There was a murder and a section was trying to create the story that the Chief Ministers security was responsible for the lapse. If such wrong thing happen in the police, we will take stern action in future, he said. On the possibility of reshuffle in police top brass, the chief minister said no such decision had been taken. DGP is functioning in a proper way he is discharging his duty as state police chief. If you have any suggestions to improve policing we will examine, he added. He said a section of media was trying to cook up stories. There is no dearth in messages being given to the police personnel. From higher officials to middle level officers all have been given specific directions from time on discharging their duties, their conduct with public. "If we examine the functioning of police department, majority of the police officers are doing a good job. There are people who are resorting to wrong things and strict action is being taken. But we cannot abolish the entire police force. Whenever there is a criminal activity on their part, legal action will be taken. No protection will be given. There is no question of any leniency," he said. When asked why the Chief Minister required such heavy security, Pinarayi shot back You ask those who have decided that. The security is not decided by the chief minister himself or as an individual . If someone blocks the chief minister then you will be raising hue and cry over security lapse and lack of adequate security cover, he said. When asked whether he would visit Kevins house, the chief minister said the question is not about visiting the place. We are with the family. The government is with the family. Strict action has been taken, main culprits have been arrested and vehicles impounded. I have not decided to visit the house at the moment, he added. The Chief Minister said a section of media was passing judgement rather than giving news as news. This is not the right way of discharging your work. The criticism is wrong. A section of media was reporting that IG has sent a report to the DGP on the issue in which he has indicted the police. No such report was sent at that time. You create news out of nothing, The Chief Minister said if there was lapse on the part of the police the media had the right to criticise the government and launch scathing criticism. But by saying that because of VIP security this incident took place you want to portray that the chief minister is an accused, he added. Its CM who is insulting state In a reply to the Chief Minister, opposition lea-der Ramesh Chennithala said it was Mr Vijayan who was insulting the state. "The media is doing its job," said Mr Chennithala in response to Mr Vijayan's charge that he was being defamed over the 'honour killing' of a youth at Kollam the other day. "I will do my job as the Opposition Leader to inform the people about the commissions and omissions of the government," he said referring to Mr Vijayan's statement that Mr Chennithala did not know his job as opposition leader. Mr Chennithala, who called a press conference immediately after the CM's briefing, said Mr Vijayan had lost his mental balance. "It is not the media which is insulting the state, but the chief minister. It was the media which brought out the 'honour killing' of Kevin P. Joseph," said Mr Chennithala. "I did not talk nonsense as alleged by the CM. I will do my duty as the Opposition Leader. Even if it is the king, I will say what I have to say," he asserted. In his 1852 critique of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Karl Marx begins by citing the Hegelian remark that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Whatever one might think of that opinion, it would surely be uncontroversial to argue that the artistic recreation of history, or even current affairs, as farce involves stepping into tricky terrain. It should be equally uncontentious to claim that the Scottish satirist and director Armando Iannucci is a past master in this genre, with his television comedies The Thick of It and Veep offering hilarious excoriations of, respectively, British and American politics. His most recent film, The Death of Stalin, shows him to be equally capable of tackling Soviet history with a sharp eye for absurdity. Joseph Stalin was no joke, of course, particularly to his millions of victims, who included the cream of the Bolshevik intelligentsia. And there was a kind of poetic justice in the way Stalins depredations possibly contributed to claiming his own life. One of the striking features of the final phase of his rule was a wave of anti-Semitism, a crucial aspect of which was the so-called doctors plot, whereby the nations leading medical experts many of them Jewish suddenly disappeared from their clinics, and consequently werent available to consult when the dictator lay dying. Such facts provide the underlayer for Iannuccis sparkling comedy, and perhaps his greatest achievement lies in milking the bizarre circumstances for laughs without losing sight of the horrors inherent in Stalins legacy. He has been accused of taking liberties with the facts, but historical accuracy can hardly be expected from a satire. It is, in fact, the parallels that stand out more, and its worth noting that in some cases Iannucci felt obliged to tone down facts that audiences might have considered too unbelievable. In most cases, the actors lined up to portray historical figures, from Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) and Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) to Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) and Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale), bear at best a passing resemblance to the characters sometimes none at all and, thankfully, none of them speaks in a Hollywood-prescribed Russian accent. Sure, history records no military massacre at Stalins funeral, and Beria, the dreaded security police chief, was summarily executed a few months following Stalins demise rather than immediately afterwards. But then, no teacher of history would recommend this film as a lesson in accuracy. At the same time, though, for those familiar with what occurred, it offers an illuminating angle on events via an absurdist prism. The fact that the film was banned in Russia points to its resonance in an age when the ghost of Stalin stalks many parts of the world, albeit mainly from the right wing. Whether it will go down in cinematic history as something of a masterpiece is a moot point. It bears closer relation to Stanley Kubricks delightfully scary Dr Strangelove (1964) than it does, for instance, to the brilliance of Charles Chaplins The Great Dictator (1940), which mocked Adolf Hitler just as he embarked on his greatest misadventure: the attempted Nazi conquest of Europe. Many years later, Chaplin acknowledged that the film, whose plot revolves around the repression of German Jews, could not have been made had the extent of Nazi atrocities been known in 1939-40. Yet, almost 60 years later, the Italian actor and director Roberto Benigni pulled off a miracle by setting his poignant comedy Life is Beautiful in a Nazi death camp. In The Great Dictator, Chaplin plays a Jewish barber as well as Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of the nation of Tomania. The film concludes on a tender note with a public speech delivered by the barber after he has been mistaken for the tyrant. Greed has poisoned mens souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed, he declares. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance The Death of Stalin, made long after most of the Soviet leaders crimes had been catalogued, ends on a much darker note. There are useful lessons to be learnt from both in an age when laughter and tears once more coexist cheek by jowl. By arrangement with Dawn There were far too many technical failures in the Lok Sabha and Assembly bypolls held earlier this week. While much of this lay in the malfunctioning VVPAT system, which gives the voter a verifiable paper audit, the Election Commissions credibility in ensuring foolproof arrangements took a major hit. The 123 booths where repolling was held on Wednesday show the extent of the problem, even as poll officials tried to blame the malfunction on late Mays extreme heat. But none of the excuses about lack of preparation time for officials and the tropical heat causing glitches will hold good when the general election is less than a year away. The VVPATs failure rate exceeding 20 per cent is a symptom of the disease, that is technical in nature and can be tackled. The larger issue is about democracy. People believe in this in India, and that faith shouldnt be eroded by the weakness of officials appointed to the EC. There were times when malpractices were the norm rather than the exception, but a strong EC ended all this when CECs like T.N. Seshan and J.M. Lyndgoh headed what is the most important sentinel of democracy, entrusted with the conduct of free and fair elections. The EC cant run credibility tests like challenging political parties to hackathons to prove the infallibility of our EVMs, which is a standalone model that has a lot to commend itself for. Cries for switching back to paper ballots are being heard not just because of the infirmities being shown by these machines. Its really a matter of credibility, and only a robust and impartial EC can restore it. The RSS, the chief promoter of Hindutva thought, which is intrinsically intertwined with hate for the religious minorities, has always felt a need for even deemed endorsement by individuals of high standing. To this end, its proponents have sometimes misleadingly invoked Mahatma Gandhi, who had an abhorrence of communalist thought. And now it has invited former President Pranab Mukherjee who has accepted the invite to deliver the valedictory address at a major function in its calendar, making the Congress Party uncomfortable. The RSS genuine big moment was when it bagged Jayaprakash Narayan. When JP was fighting the Emergency, he had shocked many when he said: If the RSS is fascist, I too am fascist! For years after, the Hindutva outfit wore that as a badge of honour. It even began to place JPs photo alongside Deendayal Upadhyay at public forums. But the goodwill generated by JPs remark evaporated after the Janata Party into which BJPs precursor Jan Sangh had merged itself split (when in power!) on the so-called dual membership issue, with its leading lights pointing fingers at the RSS. The Jan Sangh-RSS again found itself politically isolated, a political untouchable, to use an expression common those days. The situation was repaired when Prime Minister V.P. Singhs government needed the BJPs outside support. After that the BJP-RSS didnt look back, having found a firm foothold through the Ayodhya movement. Today it is in government on its own steam. And yet, it has looked outside of itself for popular approval through the invitation to the former President. Is this because the RSS knows in its gut politically it is a very astute outfit that PM Narendra Modis government has become increasingly unpopular, and the going will be tough as its opponents are trying to come together to challenge it in the next Lok Sabha election? More important than whether Mr Mukherjee should have accepted the RSS invitation is what he is going to say in his address to the Hindutva body. It will be a delicate moment for the former President. He must observe the protocols of courtesy expected of a guest, but deliver his message without compromising on the truth and his own personal credo, since on becoming President he had ceased to belong to the Congress, his old party. Decades before Indias independence, Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini tried to ensnare Jawaharlal Nehru to Rome through solicitous invitations. The Indian freedom fighter did not fall for the bait. He had no desire to confer legitimacy. He drew the line at fascists. So did arch-imperialist Winston Churchill. When Franco of Spain died, the British statesman spoke of the dead fascist as the most unmourned corpse in Europe. But eventually, in public life, everything is a matter of context. Let us not pre-judge the former President before his speech. Leaks suggest that this model could be referring to the bigger Redmi 6 Plus, which could essentially be the bigger version of the Redmi 6 series. After unveiling a string of new smartphones in 2018, Xiaomi seems to be gearing up to launch yet another Redmi series handset soon. The Chinese company took the wraps off the Redmi 5 series back in December, followed by a global launch in February. And just three months later, we are witnessing the first glimpse of its successor the Redmi 6. Recently, the smartphone was purportedly spotted on a Chinese certification website with model number M1805D1SE. Leaks suggest that this model could be referring to the bigger Redmi 6 Plus, which could essentially be the bigger version of the Redmi 6 series. The Redmi 6 Plus could come with a notched display, like the current design trend in the smartphone market. However, the chin could be substantially noticeable. The Redmi 6 Plus could also feature a vertically stacked dual rear camera module, inspired from the Redmi S2. The TENAA listing indicates the device could flaunt a 5.84-inch full HD+ display with a 19:9 aspect ratio. Under the hood, the handset is expected to be powered by a Snapdragon 625 or the latest MediaTek Helio P60 chipset. The alleged device will come in 2GB/3GB/4GB RAM with 16GB/32GB/64GB storage. Xiaomi could also stuff in a 4000mAh battery, which is a standard practice for Redmi series smartphones. The 6 Plus could sport a 12MP primary sensor and a 5MP camera on the front. The listing hints that the phone will run on the latest Android 8.1 Oreo. The company is expected to launch the new phone with the MIUI 10 that will be launched alongside the flagship Mi 8. In addition, the Xiaomi Redmi 6 Plus is said to come in Black, Rose Gold, Champagne Gold, White, Blue, Red, Pink, Gray, and Silver colour variants. (Source) Disclaimer: The above report is completely based on online rumours and leaks from the respective sources. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Deccan Chronicle and/or other staff and contributors to this website. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. No religious group is permitted to carry out any religious activities, including preaching, missionary work, proselytizing, and ordaining clergy, without government approval. (Photo: File) Washington: Observing that Tibetan Buddhists continue to be in a very difficult situation, a top American diplomat on May 30 said that China remains a "very troubling" country on religious freedom. "Situation for Tibetan Buddhists that continues to be a very difficult situation for them ... for Christians, for Falun Gong practitioners. China remains a very, very troubling country on religious freedom," US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback told reporters during a news conference in Washington DC. According to the annual State Department report on International Religious Freedom, although Chinese authorities continued to block information about the number of self-immolations of Tibetan Buddhists, including Buddhist monks, media reported on six self-immolations and one instance in which a man in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) committed suicide by slitting his throat. Reportedly, a Buddhist monk self-immolated in Haikou City due to a land requisition dispute involving a Buddhist temple. Multiple media outlets reported an increase in control over religious activities in advance of the 19th Party Congress in October, it said. There are between six-eight million Tibetan Buddhists in China. "Tibetan Buddhists in the country, including outside the TAR, are not free to venerate the Dalai Lama openly," the report said. "While there is no public law expressly forbidding it, authorities view as suspect any display of the Dalai Lama's photo by businesses or individuals and treat those seen as loyal to him as a separatist threat," it said. In February 2017, the report said authorities in Xinjiang defined 26 religious activities, including some practices of Islam, Christianity, and Tibetan Buddhism, as illegal without government authorisation. These regulations, which came into force April 1, stipulate that no classes, scripture study groups, or religious studies courses may be offered by any group or institution without prior government approval. No religious group is permitted to carry out any religious activities, including preaching, missionary work, proselytizing, and ordaining clergy, without government approval. "The pronouncement forbids the designation of reincarnations of Tibetan Buddhist teachers without government approval," the report said. It also bans editing, translation, publication, printing, reproduction, production, distribution, sale, and dissemination of religious publications and audiovisual products without authorisation, said the Congressional-mandated report. The Trump administration's decision to impose tariffs on USD 50 billion worth of Chinese products is in fact a tax on American consumers and will undermine the competitiveness of American companies. (Photo: File/AFP) Washington: The Trump administration's move to impose a hefty 25 per cent tariff on the USD 50 billion worth of Chinese goods and tighten its noose against China's alleged theft of US' intellectual property rights will have an adverse impact on American consumers, industry leaders and lawmakers have warned. The White house said on May 29 that the US will impose a 25 per cent tariff on USD 50 billion of goods imported from China containing industrially significant technology, including those related to the 'Made in China 2025' programme. "The US Chamber supports the administration's ongoing efforts to deal with China's unfair trade practices and policies. However, we continue to believe that the use of tariffs puts all the burden on American companies and consumers," US Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Thomas J Donohue said on Tuesday. "The administration's decision to impose tariffs on USD 50 billion worth of Chinese products is in fact a tax on American consumers and will undermine the competitiveness of American companies, just as the administration's steel tariffs have dramatically raised prices on steel in the US," he said. China must address its failure to protect US intellectual property, but these tariffs are not an effective response because it will harm American jobs and consumers, said Erik Paulsen, Joint Economic Committee Chairman Congressman. "Our economy is seeing measurable gains thanks to pro-growth policies like the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act. GDP has grown an average of 2.5 per cent over the past five quarters, unemployment is at its lowest rate since December of 2000, and everywhere we are hearing positive stories from businesses large and small. Placing tariffs on medical devices and consumer electronics threaten these gains," Paulsen said. President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to confront China's unfair trade practices, but his continued chaotic trade brinkmanship threatens to invite retaliation that harms American workers, farmers and the American economy, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi alleged. "Last week, the President revealed the utter hollowness of his promises by pledging the American government resources to a Chinese company that has violated US sanctions by selling technology to North Korea and Iran, and that is a known cyber security risk to the United States," she said. Pelosi said strong, smart and strategic action not reckless and rash floundering was needed to confront China's brazen trade cheating. "Beijing's regulatory barriers, localisation requirements, labor abuses, theft of trade secrets and counterfeiting of designs, anti-competitive 'Made in China 2025' policy and many other unfair trade practices threaten America's ability to compete both in China and with China around the world," Pelosi said. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump had the potential to do more to correct China's "unfair" trade policies than any president has had but he must be strong, tough and consistent. "While obviously more details are needed, this outline represents the kind of actions we have needed to take for a long time, but the president must stick with it and not bargain it away," Schumer said. Having already undermined US national security interests by agreeing to China's precondition to trade talks by easing penalties on ZTE, the administration now appears to be saving face by rattling its saber with new deadlines on investment restrictions and tariffs on China, said Ways & Means Committee Ranking Member Richard Neal. "In the meantime, the Made in China 2025 initiative continues full speed ahead. Without a coherent strategy, it's hard to see the renewed commitment to threatening tariffs and investment restrictions as anything but more bluster and chaos," Neal said. Congressman Matt Gaetz commended Trump for taking action against China's ruthless and unfair trade practices, as well as its state-sponsored theft of American innovators' intellectual property (IP). "For too many years, China has pursued trade practices and business policies that make it impossible for foreign companies to compete on a level playing field with Chinese companies. These policies, like its 'Made in China 2025 policy' hurt American companies and limit economic growth worldwide," he said. Noting that IP theft costs the US economy over USD 225 billion a year, he said the greatest perpetrator is China. "As a member of the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, I applaud the bold steps President Trump is taking to address this troubling issue. China is one of America's largest trading partners; their predatory behaviour is unacceptable," he said. Noting that China is engaging in a systematic and multifaceted strategy to steal intellectual property, Gaetz alleged that beyond the economic costs, this theft presented significant concerns for national security. "The majority of Chinese companies that steal or benefit from stolen intellectual property are state-owned. The Chinese government is known for using their military's cyber capabilities to hack into private US tech firms, stealing IP, then transferring the technology to state-run companies who profit from its development," he said. The trade spat between the top two economies of the world began last month with Trump imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports into US. Asuncion: Paraguay will have a woman president for the first time in its history, at least temporarily, after outgoing leader Horacio Cartes stepped down ahead of schedule. Vice-President Alicia Pucheta, 68, will complete Cartess mandate after he resigned to become a senator. On August 15, fellow conservative Mario Abdo Benitez, elected in April 22 polls, will begin his five-year term as president of one of Latin Americas poorest countries. Parliament is due to confirm Cartess resignation and proclaim Pucheta as interim president on Wednesday. Opposed to the legalisation of abortion, Pucheta is from the right-wing Colorado Party, which has been in power in Asuncion for decades. Opposition Senator Desiree Masi said she does not see Puchetas nomination as an advance for women in Paraguay. According to the USCIS, the H-1B visa program should help US companies recruit highly-skilled foreign nationals when there is a shortage of qualified workers in the country. (Representational Image) Washington: More than 5,000 complaints of H-1B visa fraud and abuse have been received by a federal agency on a dedicated email helpline that was launched by the Trump administration in 2017, an official said. "As of May 21, 2018, the USCIS has received over 5,000 tips to the dedicated H-1B email address," Philip Smith, a Spokesperson for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) told news agency Press Trust of India. After US President Donald Trump Signed "Buy American, Hire American" executive order last year, Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) established email addresses dedicated to receiving information about suspected H-1B and H-2B fraud or abuse. FDNS leads USCIS's efforts to combat immigration benefit fraud. Anyone (including both American workers and workers who suspect they or others may be the victim of H-1B or H-2B fraud or abuse) can email ReportH1BAbuse@uscis.dhs.gov or ReportH2BAbuse@uscis.dhs.gov to submit tips, alleged violations, and other relevant information about potential fraud or abuse, Smith said. The USCIS, however, did not provide any other details with regard to the nature of complaints, the companies involved and which country's high-tech professionals were the victims of H-1B visa fraud and abuse. "Pursuant to the Buy American, Hire American Executive Order, FDNS has helped the agency investigate the H-1B program to protect American workers," Smith said. In April 2017, USCIS FDNS created and implemented the Targeted Site Visit and Verification Program (TSVVP) as part of its continuous efforts to enhance the integrity of the immigration benefit process, he said. "This targeted approach focuses on H-1B dependent employers (those who have a high ratio of H-1B workers as compared to US workers, as defined by statute); Cases that we cannot validate the employer's basic business information through commercially available data; and employers petitioning for H-1B workers who work off-site at another company or organisation's location," Smith said in response to a question. FDNS officers resolve background check information and other concerns that surface during the processing of immigration benefit applications and petitions. Resolution often requires communication with law enforcement or intelligence agencies to make sure that the information is relevant to the applicant or petitioner at hand and, if so, whether the information would have an impact on eligibility for the benefit. FDNS officers also perform checks of USCIS databases and public information, as well as other administrative inquiries, to verify information provided on, and in support of, applications and petitions. Smith said administrative inquiries may include targeted site visits Inquiries conducted in cases where fraud is suspected. FDNS uses the Fraud Detection and National Security Data System (FDNS-DS) to identify fraud and track potential patterns, he said. The USCIS has formed a partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in which FDNS pursues administrative inquiries into most application and petition fraud, while ICE conducts criminal investigations into major fraud conspiracies, he said. According to the USCIS, the H-1B visa program should help US companies recruit highly-skilled foreign nationals when there is a shortage of qualified workers in the country. "Yet, too many American workers who are as qualified, willing, and deserving to work in these fields have been ignored or unfairly disadvantaged," the USCIS says on its webpage. Employers who abuse H-1B visa program may negatively affect US workers, decreasing wages and opportunities as they import more workers from abroad, it said. Highly popular among Indian technology professional, the H-1B visa is normally issued for three years and renewed for another three years. The US Congress has a cap of 65,000 H-1B visas per year. It also issues another 20,000 H-1B visas to those who have masters and higher education from a US academic institute. America is rebuilding and reforming military to deter adversaries and reassure friends like India. (Photo: File) Washington: The relationship between India and the United States is a "natural partnership" between the two Indo-Pacific partners, a top American lawmaker has said. "The US-India relationship is a natural partnership between two Indo-Pacific partners. We share interests and concerns, including transnational terrorism and China's aggressive behaviour in the region and around the world," Congressman Mac Thornberry, Chairman of House Armed Services Committee, said. Leading a bipartisan Congressional delegation, Thornberry, on Monday concluded a series of high-level meetings with senior Indian officials, including Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in New Delhi. "America is rebuilding and reforming our military to deter these adversaries and reassure friends like India, but more can be done. The US needs a whole of government strategy to confront both of these challenges, including how we can deepen our partnership with India," Thornberry said. The delegation also met Foreign Secretary Vijay Keshav Gokhale, Indian foreign policy experts, business leaders, and leading members of the Indian Parliament. Other members of the delegation were Congressmen Henry Cuellar, Vicky Hartzler and Carol Shea-Porter. Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo participated in the 'Kite Exhibition' which showcases the strong civilisational links between India and Indonesia. (Photo: ANI | Twitter) Jakarta: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Wednesday flew kites as they inaugurated the first joint kite exhibition themed on India's largest epics Ramayana and Mahabharata at the Jakarta's National Monument here. Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo participated in the 'Kite Exhibition' which showcases the strong civilisational links between India and Indonesia. "The Leaders jointly unveiled a Kite Exhibition on the theme of Ramayana and Mahabharat," Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement. #WATCH PM Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo fly kites at a Kite exhibition in Jakarta pic.twitter.com/pQg39OgvOZ ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 "The Leaders welcomed the conclusion of the MoU between Layang-layang Museum Jakarta and Kite Museum of Ahmadabad and noted with appreciation the holding of the First Joint Kite Exhibition on the theme of Ramayana and Mahabharat at National Monument in Jakarta," it said. Modi and Widodo also flew kites at the kite exhibition. The exhibition is themed on Hindu mythology epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata with images on kites of Lord Rama killing his rival Ravana and of demons. The Ramayana theme is designed by Indonesian organisers while the Mahabharata theme has been designed by Indians. Modi arrived in the Indonesian capital Jakarta yesterday on the first leg of his three-nation tour to East Asia during which he will also travel to Malaysia and Singapore to further boost India's Act East Policy. Kabul: At least three police officers were killed after a group of Taliban suicide bombers attacked a police station in eastern Logar province, provincial officials said Wednesday. The slain police included the commander of the police station, another officer and the deputy director of traffic police for Logar's capital of Puli Alim, said Khalid Safi, a spokesman for the provincial governor. In addition, 12 others including four police and eight civilians were wounded in the Wednesday morning attack, said Shah Poor Ahmadzai, spokesman for the provincial police chief. Two young children were among those wounded, he said. The attack began when a suicide bomber detonated a vehicle full of explosives close to the police building. Three other suicide bombers then tried to enter into the compound, Ahmadzai said. The three were shot and killed by security forces within five minutes of the gunbattle, he said. A number of civilians houses were damaged by the car bomb, he said. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack. The Taliban have stepped up their attacks against Afghan security forces as well as government officials since the announcement of their spring offensive in April across the country. Its tougher stance comes as President Donald Trump prepares for a June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose key diplomatic backer is China. (Photo: File/AP) Beijing: China lashed out on Wednesday at renewed threats from the White House on trade, warning that it was ready to fight back if Washington was looking for a trade war, days ahead of a planned visit by U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. In an unexpected change in tone, the United States said on Tuesday that it still held the threat of imposing tariffs on USD 50 billion of imports from China unless Beijing addressed the issue of theft of American intellectual property. Read: New tariffs on Chinese goods to burden Americans: US Industry, lawmakers Washington also said it will press ahead with restrictions on investment by Chinese companies in the United States as well as export controls for goods exported to China. Its tougher stance comes as President Donald Trump prepares for a June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose key diplomatic backer is China, and as Washington steps up efforts to counter what it sees as Beijing's efforts to limit freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. The trade escalation came after the two sides had agreed during talks in Washington earlier this month to find steps to narrow China's USD 375 billion trade surplus. Ross is expected to try and get China to agree to firm numbers to buy more U.S. goods during a June 2-4 visit to the Chinese capital. "We urge the United States to keep its promise, and meet China halfway in the spirit of the joint statement," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing, adding that China would take "resolute and forceful" measures to protect its interests if Washington insists upon acting in an "arbitrary and reckless manner". "When it comes to international relations, every time a country does an about face and contradicts itself, it's another blow to, and a squandering of, its reputation," Hua said. China has said it will respond in kind to threats by Trump to impose tariffs on up to USD 150 billion of Chinese goods. Trade war fears had also receded after the Trump administration said it had reached a deal to put ZTE Corp back in business after banning China's second-biggest telecoms equipment maker from buying U.S. technology parts for seven years. The easing in tensions had fuelled optimism that agreement was imminent for Chinese antitrust clearance for San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc's USD 44 billion purchase of Netherlands-based NXP Semiconductors NV, which has been hanging in the balance amid the trade dispute. A team of Qualcomm lawyers that is expecting to meet with Chinese regulators ahead of Ross's arrival remained in San Diego as of late Tuesday, a source familiar with the matter said. "On hold now," another person familiar with Qualcomm's talks with the Chinese government said on Wednesday, declining to be identified as the negotiations are confidential. "Trump is crazy. Crazy tactics might work, though," the person added. Tariffs and tactics William Zarit, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, said Washington's threat of tariffs appeared to have been "somewhat effective" thus far. "I don't think it is only a tactic, personally," he told reporters on Wednesday, adding that the group does not view tariffs as the best way to address the trade frictions. "The thinking became that if the U.S. doesn't have any leverage and there is no pressure on our Chinese friends, then we will not have serious negotiations." The Global Times, an influential tabloid run by the ruling Communist Party's official People's Daily, said the United States was suffering from a "delusion" and warned that the "trade renege could leave Washington dancing with itself". State news agency Xinhua said China hoped that the United States would not act impulsively but stood ready to fight to protect its own interests. "China will continue to hold pragmatic consultations with the United States' delegation and hope that the United States will act in accordance with the spirit of the joint statement." Also on Tuesday, a White House official said the U.S. government plans to shorten the length of visas issued to some Chinese citizens as part of a strategy to prevent intellectual property theft by U.S. rivals. Citing a document issued by the Trump administration in December, the official said the U.S. government would consider restrictions on visas for science and technology students from some countries. A faux pas by India's largest fuel retailer Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) on its website that petrol prices have been cut by 60 paise per litre, and diesel by 56 paise, led to excitement among consumers on Wednesday morning, which turned into a rude shock when they reached petrol pumps: the actual cut was only one paisa per litre. The IOC website at 6 am on Wednesday said it had cut petrol prices by 60 paise and diesel by 56 paise. At 9.30 am, the website corrected the error saying the revision was only minor. It said due to a technical glitch, the price revision was shown as 60 paise. Petroleum dealers said the communication on the website is an information only for the general public and has nothing to do with them. The dealers receive price-related communication through a different channel. "There was no miscommunication to dealers. No one sold petrol at 60 paise per litre cut," All India Petroleum Dealers Association president Ajay Bansal told DH. But before that, confusion prevailed on who would bear the loss if fuels were sold at hefty cuts. Industry sources even said that if there were losses, they would have to be borne by oil companies. The government, however, came under attack from all quarters for a paltry one-paisa cut in fuel prices after 16 days of the consecutive hike since the Karnataka polls. Fuel prices kept increasing after May 14. In this period, petrol became dearer by Rs 3.8 per litre, while diesel rose by Rs 3.38 per litre. Political parties and the public took to Twitter to criticise the government. Using a hashtag #EKPaiseKiSarkar, the Congress said on its Twitter handle: "the reduction in fuel prices by ONE paisa is a cruel prank played by the Modi Govt on Indian citizens." Is it a prank, asks Rahul "Dear PM, You've cut the price of Petrol and Diesel today by 1 paisa. ONE paisa!?? If this is your idea of a prank, it's childish and in poor taste," Congress President Rahul Gandhi tweeted. "P.S. A ONE paisa cut is not a suitable response to the #FuelChallenge I threw you last week," he said. Under #ModiKiNiyat, CPM Secretary General Sitaram Yechury said "flagged Rs 3 lakh crores of relief for big corporate unpaid loans. 1 paise relief for the common Indian". The Centre had assured last week that it would come up with a "long-term" solution on fuel rates which would be "sustainable". Interim Finance Minister Piyush Goyal even hinted at the GST Council soon taking a call on bringing petrol and diesel in its fold. Reports also said that the government was planning to impose a "windfall" tax on producers such as ONGC. RCom offered an upfront payment of Rs 500 crore to its operational creditor Ericsson, which has got an insolvency order against the Anil Ambani group firm. During the proceedings of the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal ( NCLAT), senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for RCom, suggested an upfront payment. To this, the NCLAT bench headed by Chairman Justice S J Mukhopadhaya suggested settlement between parties. "You know the fate of operational creditors (Incorporate resolution process). You may not even 5 percent. If you want we would give you time for settlement," the bench said Ericsson had total dues of Rs 978, which have now increased to Rs 1,600 crore, counsel appearing for Ericsson informed. "If you want, we can allow settlement. Find out ways and means to solve the issue," the bench said. The tribunal has listed for tomorrow the hearing of interim prayer of RCom to stay the NCLT order, which has directed to start insolvency proceedings against it over the Ericsson plea. During the proceedings, Sibal said that RCom has a total debt of around Rs 46,000 crore. He further added that RIL's Jio, which is buying RCom's assets, has offered Rs 17,000 crore of upfront payment along with spectrum dues and transfer of debts. On May 15, the Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) had admitted an insolvency petition filed by Ericsson against Reliance Communications and two of its subsidiaries seeking to recover unpaid dues. Ericsson, which had signed a 7-year deal in 2014 to operate and manage RCom's nationwide telecom network, had alleged that it had not been paid the dues. Last September, the Swedish company had filed a petition in the NCLT's Mumbai bench seeking liquidation of the telecom operator to recover Rs 1,150 crore that RCom allegedly owes it. Evening showers on Wednesday left many parts of the city waterlogged. Areas like Hebbal Main Road, Puttenahalli, Koramangala, Queens Road, War Memorial, Fraser Town, Kamaraj Road, Bilekahalli, near Eco Space in Domlur and Yelahanka New Town were completely flooded. With up to two feet of water on these roads, traffic was paralysed, leaving commuters stranded for hours. Many people were seen stranded even at Baiyappanahalli Metro station. Some took to Twitter to express their misery. Ring Roads are meant to be arterials which flow. Ours are polycythemic and viscous. Rain, you clog the life out of Bangalore roads, expressed Dr Rajath Athreya, a resident. Around seven trees were uprooted across the city until 11.15 pm and Bangalore Traffic Police warned residents via Twitter not to park vehicles under trees during rains. Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy spoke to BBMP commissioner M Maheshwar Rao on the rain situation in the city. The commissioner briefed the chief minister on the necessary precautions taken by the BBMP to prevent any damage. The commissioner said, BBMP has deployed officers and Prahari teams to address rain-related problems in all zones. All control rooms are equipped with Praharis and even BBMP forest officers are working round the clock to ensure that uprooted trees are removed. Mayor R Sampath Raj said, We have formed 21 teams to attend to waterlogging problems. Water on the inundated roads is also being drained. The Chief Minister has directed us to take proper measures. Forecast Even as the southwest monsoon advanced further over the coast, the weatherman maintains that Bengaluru is still experiencing pre-monsoon showers. India Meteorological Department (IMD) said the city is still experiencing pre-monsoon showers and monsoon has advanced till Shirali, Hassan and Mysuru. After studying the charts, the arrival date of the monsoon in Bengaluru will be announced on Thursday. According to IMD officials, the city received 4.4 mm rainfall till 8.30 pm, while HAL Airport received 32.4 mm rainfall. The rain started at 7.45 pm. IMD has forecast thundershowers over coastal Karnataka and north interior Karnataka and at a few places over south interior Karnataka for the next 48 hours. The stalemate over sharing of key portfolios, especially finance, among the coalition partners the JD(S) and the Congress -- continued on Tuesday. Hectic deliberations between the leaders of the two parties have been on since May 19, after the then chief minister B S Yeddyurappa resigned as he did not have the numbers to prove his majority on the floor of the House. The delay in expansion of the Council of Ministers seems to be taking a toll on the administration. Review of departments have not taken place since the model code of conduct came into force for the Assembly polls in April this year. Chief Ministers H D Kumaraswamy and his deputy G Parameshwara of the Congress are the only two members in the Cabinet. On Tuesday, Kumaraswamy is said to have expressed his unhappiness among his close associates on the stubbornness shown by the Congress on sharing of portfolios. He is said to have reminded them that it was the Congress that had extended its unconditional support to his party. Kumaraswamy remained confined to his J P Nagar residence through Tuesday morning delaying the start of his first Janata Darshan by over three hours. The Congress has been maintaining that it being the majority partner be given portfolios such as finance, public works, energy and water resources. However, on record, both Kumaraswamy and Parameshwara maintained that all is well in the alliance and it was a matter of time before the portfolio allocation issue is sorted out. All portfolios will be allotted in one go, Parameshwara said. Meanwhile, lobbying for ministerial berths in the Congress by newly elected legislators continued on Tuesday. The residence of Parameshwara, who is also the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president, in Sadashivanagar witnessed a steady stream of visitors. Senior Congress leader D K Shivakumar denied that there was tussle between JD(S) leader H D Revanna and himself over the Energy portfolio. Its only a media creation, he added. Chamrajpet MLA B Z Zameer Ahmed Khan (Congress), who was one of the first to visit Parameshwaras residence, said he had come to wish the party president. If I wanted to lobby for a ministerial post I would have gone to New Delhi. I have won on the Congress ticket and hence am visiting my leader. Can I go to Yeddyurappas place?, he asked. India has lost the highest number of its peacekeepers in various UN peacekeeping operations in the last 70 years, with 163 military, police and civilian personnel from the country laying down their lives in the line of duty. According to the UN, of the 3,737 peacekeepers who have died since 1948, 163 have been from India, the highest total from any troop-contributing country. India is currently the third largest contributor of military and police personnel to UN peacekeeping, with 6,693 now deployed in Abyei, Cyprus, Congo, Haiti, Lebanon, the Middle East, South Sudan and Western Sahara. However, the UN owes India USD 92 million for troops, formed police units and contingent-owned equipment as at April 30, 2018. The UN commemorated the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers on Tuesday, paying tribute to the service and sacrifice of peacekeepers around the world. Currently, more than 96,000 uniformed personnel from 124 troop and police-contributing countries serve under the blue flag, alongside more than 15,000 international and national civilian staff and nearly 1,600 United Nations Volunteers. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of United Nations peacekeeping, the flagship enterprise of the Organization described by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as "a proven investment in global peace, security and prosperity". "We express our gratitude to the more than one million men and women who have served under the UN flag, saving countless lives. We honour the more than 3,700 Blue Helmets who have paid the ultimate price. And we pay tribute to the 14 peacekeeping missions working around the clock to protect people and advance the cause of peace," Guterres said in Mali to mark the International Day of UN Peacekeepers. The north-west African country is the most dangerous place in the world to be a UN 'blue helmet' and last year 21 troops serving with the UN Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) lost their lives, together with seven civilians. Upon his return from Mali, the Secretary-General will preside over the observance of the day on June 1. He will lay a wreath to honour those who lost their lives while in the service of peace and will also officiate at a ceremony to posthumously present the Dag Hammarskjold Medal to 132 military, police and civilian personnel from 37 countries who lost their lives in peacekeeping operations during 2017. No peacekeeper hailing from India was killed while serving in any UN peacekeeping mission in 2017. In 2016, two Indian peacekeepers - Rifleman Brijesh Thapa who served with the UN Organization Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and Private Ravi Kumar who was deployed with the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) - died in the line of duty and posthumously received the Dag Hammarskjold Medal. At a time of increasingly complex conflicts and rising peacekeeper fatalities, the Secretary-General said, "as we recognise a legacy of service and sacrifice around the world, I am also committed to taking Action for Peacekeeping action to make our operations more effective and safer in today's challenging environments". Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix said the service and sacrifice of UN peacekeepers inspired "us to work harder to support a sustainable peace in some of the world's most complex and challenging places". Under-Secretary-General for Field Support Atul Khare said the international community owed a "debt of gratitude" to the brave men and women who risk their lives every day in service to others. "We grieve with the families and nations of our fallen colleagues. But beyond gratitude, we owe our peacekeepers all the support we can muster to ensure they are well equipped, well trained and well prepared to complete their missions successfully," Khare said. The General Assembly established the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers in 2002 to pay tribute to all men and women serving in peacekeeping, and to honour the memory of those who have lost their lives in the cause of peace. The Assembly designated May 29 as the Day because it was the date in 1948 when the first United Nations peacekeeping mission the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization began operations in the Middle East. Ukraine charged on Wednesday that Russia's "totalitarian machine" was behind the murder of anti-Kremlin reporter Arkady Babchenko, prompting Moscow to furiously deny the blame. A prominent Russian war correspondent famous for his fierce tirades against Moscow, Babchenko was shot dead on Tuesday evening in an apparent contract-style killing in the stairwell of his building in Kiev. The 41-year-old had moved to the Ukrainian capital last year following a campaign of harassment in Moscow. He was the latest Kremlin critic living in Kiev to be killed in less than two years. Ukrainian police have opened a probe into premeditated murder, saying they suspected the crime was linked to his "professional activities". "I am convinced that the Russian totalitarian machine did not forgive him his honesty and principled stance," Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said late Tuesday. "A true friend of Ukraine who was telling the world the truth about Russian aggression. His murderers should be punished." An aide to the Ukrainian interior minister, Anton Gerashchenko, also pointed the finger at Moscow, writing on Facebook: "The Putin regime targets those it cannot break or intimidate." He said the Ukrainian government should ensure the safety of Babchenko's family. Many politicians and observers including Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin suggested Russia wanted to sow chaos in the country -- already wracked by a four-year conflict with pro-Russian rebels in the east -- ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections next year. Ties between Russia and Ukraine were shredded after a popular uprising ousted a Kremlin-backed president in Kiev in 2014 and Russia annexed Crimea and moved to support insurgents in the east of the former Soviet state. Russian authorities furiously denied the blame, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying it was "very sad" Moscow had been accused of murdering the reporter. "The Ukrainian prime minister is already talking about how it was done by Russian secret services," he said. "This fashion of conducting international affairs is very sad," Lavrov told reporters. Investigators in Moscow opened their own probe. "The Investigative Committee is not going to turn a blind eye to the cruel crimes against Russian citizens," it said in a statement. Ukrainian police spokesman Yaroslav Trakalo said Babchenko was found bleeding by his wife after she heard shooting, adding that he died in an ambulance on his way to hospital. The journalist had received three gunshots to the back. His murder was reminiscent of the assassination of several prominent Kremlin critics in Russia, including politician Boris Nemtsov who was gunned down near the Kremlin in 2015 and journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was shot and killed in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment in 2006. A number of Kremlin critics have also been killed in Kiev in recent years. Pavel Sheremet, a dual Russian and Belarusian citizen, died when his car exploded in the centre of Kiev in 2016 in still unexplained circumstances. Denis Voronenkov, a former Russian lawmaker who went into exile in Ukraine, was gunned down in central Kiev last year. Babchenko fought in Russia's two Chechen campaigns in the 1990s and early 2000s before becoming a war correspondent and author. He repeatedly said he faced death threats. He contributed to a number of media outlets including top opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Babchenko was also an avid blogger, accusing Russian authorities of slaughtering Kremlin critics and unleashing wars in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere. He wrote about a young Russian soldier's experience in the Chechen campaigns in a book published in English under the title "One Soldier's War". He made a name for himself with his poignant reportages from the frontlines, including the conflict in eastern Ukraine between Kiev forces and pro-Russian separatists that has killed more than 10,000 people since 2014. In recent years his increasingly bombastic posts constantly pushed the boundaries of good taste and some of his colleagues and followers stopped reading him on Facebook. But his killing triggered an outpouring of grief among liberal Russians. Babchenko left Russia in February 2017 after receiving threats, living first in the Czech Republic and Israel before moving to Kiev.He had hosted a programme on the Crimean Tatar TV station ATR for the past year. Vigils in memory of the slain journalist were planned in Russia and Ukraine. As rain pours down on Bengaluru, people are scrambling desperately to find autos and cabs. As demand spikes, Ola and Uber apps say they are unable to find rides. Autos are also hard to come, and when you do find one, the drivers demand high fares. Apps allow users to hail autos to their doorstep, but the service becomes scarce the moment it begins to drizzle, users say. Harsha Krishnan, graphic designer, feels frustrated and angry. Drivers never accept rides when it rains even if they are standing around idle, he complains. I have tried booking autos at locations where they are parked just across the roads. Whats the use of all this at-your-finger tag if you cant avail the service when you need it the most? he wonders. Regular autos refuse to go by the meter, saying a customer ready to pay surge fares to Ola and Uber can pay a little more to them. A communication professional ended up paying Rs 600 from Richmond Road to J P Nagar in a normal auto instead of the regular Rs 150. It is my usual route and since it was pouring, autos refused to go by meter. I had no choice but to agree to pay Rs 600. This is insane, she says. An Ola Spokesperson says, In situations such as heavy rainfall, when demand exceeds supply, we strive to optimise resources and work hard to ensure that everyone who needs a reliable and safe mode of commute has one. In addition, we have a wide range of categories that include Ola Auto and eight others that customers can use. Customers can also opt for Ola Share which ensures that more individuals can get convenient transportation by sharing their ride. Uber has introduced auto hailing but it has yet to gain momentum. Bency Sebastian, student, uses cabs for her commutes. I usually get one in less than two minutes, but when it rains, it takes at least 15 to 20 minutes. Sometimes, drivers cancel the ride after making us wait, she says. Some alternatives When you cant hail a cab or auto on your app, but carry an umbrella... Try making a dash to the nearest bus stop. Take the BMTC Vayu Vajras. Slightly expensive, but you get moving. Wait at the nearest hang-out. Shop, sip coffee, relax! Consider share, premium and luxury cab options. Drivers woes Auto drivers are wary of long trips when it rains. The roads are flooded, and it becomes difficult to spot ditches and potholes. Traffic comes to a standstill at many places, and drivers end up waiting for ever for a small fare. Fleeced by auto drivers? You can call the police on 080-22868444 and 2286 8550. Tamil actor-cum-politician Rajinikanth on Wednesday blamed anti-social elements for the violence during the anti-Sterlite protests in Thoothukudi last week that resulted in the death of 13 people in police firing. His comments turned into a political slugfest with Opposition parties, including the DMK and the Left parties, joining issue with Rajinikanth seeking to know whether he was labelling all protesters as anti-social elements. The CPM wanted to know why Rajinikanth was speaking the BJP's language and whether he intends to mix politics with films. During a brief interaction with the media in Thoothukudi after meeting the injured, Rajinikanth asked the government to follow Jayalalithaa-style iron fist policy to crush such people in the interest of the state, while alleging that pro-Jallikattu protests in Tamil Nadu last year also saw infiltration of anti-social elements. The actor, who has announced his intention to contest the next Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, also appealed to the people not to protest against every project since closing down of industries would only result in youth losing their jobs. He also demanded action against miscreants and anti-social elements who attacked policemen and their vehicles during and after last Tuesday's protests. While blaming the state for intelligence failure for not predicting that anti-social elements would intrude into the protests, the actor, however, rejected demands for the resignation of Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami. Only the anti-social elements and miscreants set vehicles on fire, attacked the district collectorate and apartments housing Sterlite employees. People did not indulge in violence and they held a peaceful protest for 100 days. It is definitely the handiwork of miscreants and anti-social elements, whose numbers have increased in Tamil Nadu, Rajinikanth said. The government should crush such anti-social elements with an iron fist. On that front, I laud Jayalalithaa as she kept such people under check with an iron fist. They should follow her policy and keep them under check, otherwise, it will result in great danger for Tamil Nadu, he said. The actor also hoped that Sterlite Copper will not land at courts to challenge the Government Order (GO) ordering the permanent closure of the plant in Thoothukudi. If they (Sterlite) still go to the court to challenge the GO, then they are not humans. Even judges are human, Rajinikanth said. The actor also took a swipe at the DMK for boycotting the Assembly session and demanding the resignation of Palaniswami. Everything is being politicised...politicians think people dont know anything. But people are following everything," he said. "If we continue to protest like this, the industrial climate in the state will be affected. If we will have to protest we should approach the court and fight legally rather than protesting like this, the actor added. Political parties in Tamil Nadu alleged that Rajinikanth was toeing the BJP's line. Is Rajinikanth's speech that anti-social elements in Tamil Nadu have increased a reflection of Union minister Pon Radhakrishnan's statements that extremists have increased in the state? writer and Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi general secretary D Ravikumar asked. A group of 29 students have filed a fresh petition in the Supreme Court, seeking cancellation of the Common Law Admission Test 2018 (CLAT) held on May 13. A bench of Justices L Nageswara Rao and Mohan M Shantanagoudar agreed to put the petition for consideration on Wednesday, a day before the results of the test are scheduled to be announced. Advocate Zoheb Hossain mentioned the petition filed by Akshat Aggarwal and others for urgent listing. The petitioners also sought a direction to conduct the examinations afresh. Notably, on May 25, the top court had approved setting up of a panel headed by former Kerala High Court judge M R Hariharan Nair and comprising a professor of Cochin University, Santosh Kumar G, to look into grievances of the candidates. The National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS), Kochi, that conducted the tests, has been asked to file a status report on Wednesday, after inviting complaints of the candidates by Sunday 7 pm and addressing the issues, including technical glitches that they faced. A batch of petitions earlier filed by candidates in the top court, as well as various high courts, sought quashing of the CLAT 2018 examination besides a re-test claiming that several inconsistencies had cropped up during the test held on May 13 for admission to undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in premier National Law Universities. Irelands decisive endorsement to repeal constitutional obstacles in the way of abortion is a victory for womens rights over their reproductive health. The Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution confers equal rights on the foetus and the mother. In effect, it prohibited abortion, forcing thousands of women to either travel abroad to terminate their pregnancy or buy pills online illegally. In doing so, they risked a 14-year jail sentence. Public opinion on the proposed amendment was sought through a referendum and 66.4% supported amending the Eighth Amendment. This is remarkable, considering that in 1983 70% of voters supported laws restricting abortion. The referendum vote will pave the way for legislation allowing termination of pregnancy within the first 12 weeks, and up to 24 weeks in exceptional circumstances. The new legislation should be in place by the end of this year. This is a landmark step forward for Ireland and women the world over. The campaign to legalise abortion overcame strong opposition from Irelands powerful Roman Catholic Church and has come at a time when right-wing conservatism is sweeping across the world. Womens rights activists in Ireland have been campaigning assiduously for decades for the right to legally terminate pregnancy. But theirs seemed a lost cause given the power of the anti-abortion Catholic Church in moulding public opinion. Even a decade ago, many Irish politicians, including its Indian-origin Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, were staunchly anti-abortion. In 2012, Savita Halappanavar, a young dentist from Belagavi died in Ireland following a septic miscarriage after she was denied an abortion. Her death sent shockwaves through Irish society, culminating in even hardline conservatives doing some soul-searching and becoming convinced that women should be allowed to abort legally and safely. It provided a shot in the arm to the campaign to legalise abortion. It resulted in the referendums overwhelming yes vote. The winds of change began blowing through Ireland only a few years ago. In May 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage on a national level by popular vote. It indicated that the Catholic Churchs hold over public opinion was weakening. That encouraged parties to shed their conservative positions on abortion. The campaign for the right to abortion benefited from these changes in Irish society. Irelands vote for change will impact other countries. Already, women in Northern Ireland are demanding legalising abortion. In the US, womens rights are under threat. Forty-five years after American women got the right to choose abortion, one state after another is putting in place restrictions on this right. The American pro-choice campaign faces a tough battle ahead. Nandikurali villagers of Raibag taluk resorted to arson on Wednesday and vandalised the office of North West Karnataka Road Transport Corporation (NWKRTC) located at the Raibag bus stand. They were enraged over the death of a woman who was among those protesting stone quarrying on Tuesday night. They stoned buses too. Some commuters suffered injuries and were treated in hospitals. Police caned the unruly mob and arrested over 20 protesters. Others who managed to flee after the arson attempt, have been captured in the act on CC camera, and will be arrested soon police assured. The villagers were upset by the death of Rehmat Sultani who was allegedly killed in the stone pelting that occurred over the shifting of a stone crusher unit at Nandikurli village. Police said over 20 villagers from the complainant's side trespassed into the crusher site armed with canes. They attacked the crusher workers who locked themselves up in their rooms to protect themselves. Superintendent of Police Sudheerkumar Reddy attempted to pacify the unruly mob, but they had to be caned as they did not respond to his requests to maintain peace. The police, in a statement, maintained that Rehmat Sultani, died because of injuries she suffered after slipping from the steps. "She did not die in the stone pelting SP Reddy said; adding that a postmortem would ascertain the real cause of death. SP Reddy on Wednesday said that argument ensued between a local family and stone crusher workers that led in stone pelting. "The deceased lady Rehmat, tried to enter one of the rooms when she slipped from the steps and was gravely injured. Video evidence from the spot was available and it will be shown to those interested," the SP Reddy stated. Disney released a second, full-length trailer for the new film Christopher Robin on Friday. The trailer debuted on Ellen when Scottish actor Ewan McGregor, who plays Christopher Robin, appeared on the show. The film revisits the beloved characters from the Winnie the Pooh cartoons, telling the story of Christopher Robins adult life, which is burdened by a demanding boss and work schedule in London. Christopher is sitting on a park bench in London when Pooh surprises him and asks him for help to find his lost friends. After they reunite with Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore and others, Christopher returns to his family. The trailer then shows Pooh and company leaving the Hundred Acre Wood to save Christopher," who has let work begin to control his life. "Now it is up to his childhood friends to venture into our world and help Christopher Robin rediscover the joys of family life, the value of friendship and to appreciate the simple pleasures in life once again," the video caption says. Christopher Robin will be in theaters on Aug. 3. Watch the full trailer here. SALT LAKE CITY A last will and testament is important, but it's a dry, legal document that conveys only physical assets, not the values parents want to leave to their children. For that, you need a spiritual, or ethical, will. The spiritual will is a centuries-old tradition in Judaism, with roots that snake back to Genesis, and the custom is gaining favor in other religious traditions. People think of a will as what you go to a lawyer for, to distribute your goods," said Sister Mary Petrosky, a psychiatric social worker and Catholic nun who recently published a book about how to write a spiritual will. But (this kind of will) is nothing about your earnings; its about your learnings. Its nothing about your valuables, its about your values, she said. Sister Petrosky, who is 86 and affiliated with the Holy Name of Jesus Convent in New York City, said shed never heard of a spiritual will before she was asked by Ave Maria Press to write a book about it. But once she began doing research, she embraced the concept and has composed a will directed at her nieces and nephews. In it, she encourages them to carry on the familys mission of hospitality to all, her fathers pride in paying taxes, and love so strong and tangible that she can still get tears in her eyes thinking about her dad and the sense of security that his presence gave her. While a spiritual will can be a simple letter only a page or so in length, the process of writing one requires a careful excavation of your beliefs. This work can be challenging but it is helpful, not only to the eventual recipients, but to the writer, according to Sister Petrosky and other people who teach ethical-will writing. "The drafting of a spiritual or ethical will can help clarify life goals, give purpose to life while living; it can be a vehicle for life change; it can be a vehicle for healing," said Rabbi David Markus, who holds workshops in writing ethical wills. And you dont have to be a sophisticated thinker or writer to compose one that will matter to people centuries after youve passed. If you had a meaningful letter from a great-grandparent you never met, would you care about whether it was well-written? You wouldnt, says Daniel Taylor, a writer and retired college professor in Minneapolis. The important thing is to know them, and to know what they thought about life, and their life experience. A spiritual harvest As both an attorney and a rabbi at Temple Beth-El of City Island outside New York City, Rabbi Markus has experience in legal and ethical wills. The concept of the ethical will goes back to the Torah in the pronouncement of a blessing by a dying patriarch upon his family. The first ethical will we have in the printed record is approximately 1,000 years old. It reads a little bit like a personal book of Ecclesiastes, Rabbi Markus said. I suspect that the reason a spiritual or ethical will some call it a legacy letter is so ingrained in Jewish history is that intergenerational transfer, the preservation of the family unit, has been a priority of Jewish life for so many centuries, he said. Intergenerational transfer has never meant only the physical things, the physical possessions, of ones life, he added. Who we are, not what we own, may be the most important part of our legacy. Rabbi Markus talks about ethical wills in terms of a spiritual harvest, a reaping. Our life is like a field, and the things that grow in the field are not just the house, the car, the bank accounts; its also the lessons learned, even sometimes the hard ones. One can have a sense of harvesting the wisdom of ones life, he said. For people who are aging, and even preparing to face death, this process can lead to closure and can be part of giving oneself a gift of spiritual health in the death process. A blessing for the future Taylor, the author of 12 books, including Creating a Spiritual Legacy, teaches workshops on how to write an ethical will and, as an extension of that, how to write personal stories that convey values you want to share with your descendants. For him, wills are a down payment on a legacy of stories. Taylor prefers the term spiritual will to ethical will or legacy letter because, as he says, The human spirit and I dont use that strictly in a religious sense is larger than behavioral guidelines. The word ethical doesnt quite seem big enough for me. At a workshop, the first thing Taylor asks participants to do is to decide on an audience, the people you would like to bless in this way. Identifying the recipients helps the sharpen the writers focus and differentiates an ethical will from a general compendium of advice, such as in a commencement speech. Its best when it has a specified audience, rather than general comments that would be good for any person, he said. Its not just talking about your life; its talking about your life for the benefit of a specific person or people. And the purpose of talking to those people is not just to remain in their memory, but to lift them up whether it be by sharing lessons you learned (sometimes painfully), by asking for forgiveness, recalling things others did for you or said to you, or spiritual insight you believe to be especially important. Taylor recalls a pastor at one of his workshops who wrote about a difficult incident in his childhood that turned out to be a powerful turning point. As a teen, the man had felt called to the ministry, but after he delivered a disastrous message at his church, his parents told him on the ride home that maybe he should consider another profession. Heartbroken, the teen retreated to his room and turned out all the lights. And then his grandfather comes thumping up in the dark, and puts his hand on him, and in Swedish, puts a blessing on him and asks God not to remove his call. In telling the story, the man called the moment his ordination into his lifes calling. What a powerful story, Taylor said. My point to him, and to the group, was that this is a story that would be a tragedy (if it were) to die. He has since died. The story has to be preserved. It is a blessing to anyone who hears it. Honesty and trust The practice of writing down spiritual insights is not new or unique, nor is it limited to any one faith tradition. In an article on the website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Utah writer Jennifer Johnson shares her experience in keeping journals of personal spiritual revelations, inspired by a seminary instructor and the words of the late Elder Richard G. Scott, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, who advised, Write down in a secure place the important things you learn from the spirit. You will find that as you write down precious impressions, often more will come. Also, the knowledge you gain will be available throughout your life. This advice and other values coalesce in the writing of spiritual wills which, according to Rabbi Markus, may even be distributed while the writer is alive. The giving and receiving of an ethical will, not after death, but during life, can be a transformational experience between two people who care about each other. An ethical will does not have to be given after death. In fact, it can promote the most healing, the most closure, if given while the writer is still alive. Sharing an ethical will before your death, however, makes demands of all the people involved. An ethical will asks deep honesty of the writer, and deep receptivity from the recipient, and a great deal of trust, because by opening up our hearts in these ways, we make ourselves vulnerable, Rabbi Markus said. Preparing your spiritual will In her new book, Sister Petrosky gives examples of 10 spiritual wills and suggests 14 questions for people to think about when considering what to write. Among them: What gets you out of bed in the morning? Where do I find inner peace? What experience of beauty has moved you, lifted you out of yourself? What would I be willing to die for? She recommends beginning and ending the process with a prayer. Its simple, really, but you have to search into your heart to do it and to be happy with what youve done. Rabbi Markus said that authenticity is the most important quality of an ethical will, and he advises, Be audacious, be bold, leave it all here. His own will, which he revises or rewrites every five years, is currently 5 pages long. But while authenticity is important, its also important that the writer come at the process of preparing an ethical will with the proper intent. I hope what an ethical will never be is the equivalent of a slap from the grave, he said. As an attorney, I have seen people use their legal wills to say things to their loved ones that are hurtful and even full of revenge. And theres no way to speak back, and theres no way to heal, and they end up doing a great deal of harm. The purpose of an ethical will is not to have a screaming match or give a lecture, he said. Its to harness our highest wisdom, our deepest truths and to refine them in ways that will be constructive, not destructive. It helps to think of an ethical will as your blessing on your loved ones and future generations. A blessing is anything transferred from one person to another to enhance the recipients life, Taylor said. My argument is, the kind of spiritual blessings or life blessings you can give to people are much more important than financial blessings. SALT LAKE CITY Shona Kay Moyer was terrified to portray Emma Smith in the upcoming film In Emmas Footsteps. After the 1844 martyrdom of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, members of the church followed his successor, Brigham Young, out west. Joseph's wife, Emma Smith, chose to stay behind with her family and Lucy Mack Smith, Josephs mother. This choice led to a rift between Emma and Brigham Young, which lead to decades of misconceptions about Emma Smith. The movie In Emmas Footsteps is a non-linear look at Emmas life after Josephs death. It opens June 1 and will play in Utah Megaplex theaters. Moyer is a British-born actress who currently resides in Utah. While filming In Emmas Footsteps she was also working on the LDS Churchs Book of Mormon video project. Her most recent film was Love, Kennedy. Moyers fear of playing Emma came from three places: first, the pressure of playing a well-known historical character; second, learning to speak in an old-timey United States New England accent; and third learning to portray Emma, a woman she saw as a spiritual wonder and mystery. I really felt that I had to focus on giving her a voice that would really unveil her humanity, and maybe try and help people connect with her on an emotional level, Moyer told the Deseret News. Within hours of her audition, Producer Brian Brough and Scriptwriter/Director Brittany Wiscombe informed Moyer she had the part and that filming began in three days. I just basically prayed the whole way through it, Moyer said with a laugh. Filming ran for two weeks, and then another challenge popped up: The project ran out of funding. Filming stopped and it was unknown when or if it would start again. That delay ended up lasting five years. In between other filming projects, Brough would return to the idea of the Emma Smith movie, but it was never the right time. Meanwhile, Moyer gave birth to two of her three children, all while wondering if the film would ever be picked up again. But her preparation for the role continued unintentionally. Moyer was asked to speak at various church functions as Emma Smith, which prompted her to continue learning about Emma. Later, she was even called upon to portray Emma Smith in videos featured in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints new Church History Museum display. Moyer struggled to understand why she continued to be thrown into this specific role. What am I not learning? is really what I thought, Moyer said. What am I not getting here, because I know Im not the brightest but Im not that thick! In the midst of her frustration, her husband offered up an alternative reason. Maybe its not something youre supposed to learn, he told her, maybe its something youre supposed to do. So, five years after filming had begun and ended, Moyer sat down and wrote what she called a massive letter to Brough. In her letter, Moyer told Brough she felt an absolute desire to do whatever she could to finish the project and tell Emmas story. To her surprise, Brough responded, Lets do it. He explained the film would be a scaled-back version of their original plan, and that they didnt have the money they were planning on, but they at least had the script. Filming began a few months later. All the pieces had fallen into place. Once filming began, Brough and Wiscombe said they didnt face any major hiccups or problems, which Wiscombe said she took as a wonderful blessing. For Moyer, however, filming presented personal challenges she had to work to overcome. I have always felt this, almost a burden of responsibility, when portraying Emma, to be worthy of doing so, Moyer said, explaining that before she was cast, she hadnt attended an LDS temple in a while, but after receiving the role, she felt compelled to do so. It actually changed my life quite a lot, Moyer said. When you try to emulate somebody who is so faithful, and somebody who is so good, like she was I wanted to become more like her, she continued. I felt myself really taking on that challenge and really trying to be more like her. Of course, portraying Emma also meant acting out some of Emmas greatest traumas and trials. Moyer described Emmas circumstances as nearly impossible to withstand and referred to a famous quote from Lucy Mack Smith, in which she said the trials Emma withstood would have borne down almost any other woman. After filming for 12 hours in one day, Moyer said she would return home and collapse, feeling emotionally drained, wondering how she could do it again the following day. But Moyer believe she had heavenly help in portraying Emma. During filming, she had several profound experiences. Moyer said she would prepare to film a scene, and feel like she knew what emotions she wanted to portray. As soon as filming began, however, this feeling would come over me and it would not be my own feelings, it would not be my own emotions. Moyer firmly believes her heavenly help came from Emma Smith herself. She said she believes Emma wants her story to be told. Brough and Wiscombe both added they feel its important for people to see the film to gain a better understanding, and perhaps a little more sympathy, toward Emma, who is sometimes criticized in LDS circles for not joining other church members during the churchs exodus to Utah. We dont want to try to be definitive on this is why she did things, because the reality is, most people dont (know), Brough said. We want people to be able to put themselves in her shoes and say, Had I been there would I have done what she did, or something else? Brough said the film tries to address things like the feud between Brigham Young and Emma Smith and paint it in as neutral a light as possible so people can make up their own minds. Our focus it really to give her that voice and to unveil her humanity, and to unveil that she was flawed, yeah, but also complex and beautifully human, Moyer said. And I think that is something that people can connect with, because God doesnt only use perfect people in his work, otherwise wed all be kind of out of luck. SALT LAKE CITY After several minutes of telling the editorial boards of the Deseret News and KSL why she decided to defy her party leadership and attempt to force a vote on a bill to protect the children of undocumented immigrants, U.S. Rep. Mia Love felt the need to add, You can tell this is something, obviously, I feel frustrated about. Frustration is nothing new in Washington. Way back in 1910, it was the emotion responsible for the House procedure she is attempting, known as a discharge petition. Through it, members of the House can force a bill from the clutches of a speaker and onto the floor for a vote. But because frustration, even in Washington, rarely rises to a level equal to the fear of political retaliation, the discharge is considered radical. Maybe those days are changing. Maybe, if this succeeds, bipartisan factions in Congress will unite to force solutions to the budget deficit, reform entitlements or direct the Food and Drug Administration to allow more research on the medicinal effects of marijuana. Is this the dawning of a brilliant new day? Dont hold your breath. Between 1931 and 2003, 563 such petitions were filed, according to the Congressional Research Service. Only three resulted in laws. Love, a Republican, represents Utahs 4th Congressional District. House Speaker Paul Ryan was her assigned mentor when she first entered Congress. Defying him is not something you want to do. Its kind of difficult, she said. But there are a couple of reasons it may not be so much of a risk. Love, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, was once referred to by Politico.com as an asset worth protecting for the Republican Party. It would make little sense to retaliate against her during an important election year. Another reason other Republicans may take courage is that protecting the children of undocumented immigrants is a popular notion. As Chicago Tribune editorial writer Steve Chapman wrote recently, a failure to pass a permanent Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, is stark evidence of the mind-numbing irrationality and dysfunction of our system of government. He cited an ABC News/Washington Post poll in January that found 87 percent of Americans in support of such a program. Many Americans, it seems, would not be too upset to see someone shake loose a bill for a vote. We will know, soon after the House reconvenes next Tuesday, whether the effort succeeds. At its heart, this is a fight over procedures and the Constitution. Loves opponent this fall, Democratic Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams, has noted that Love opposed former President Barack Obama when he issued the order creating DACA three years ago. But she said that had more to do with executive overreach than the issue itself. Certainly, presidents have become too cozy with the idea of trying to circumvent Congress. But when it comes to failing to pass immigration reform, Congress has only itself to blame. President Donald Trump overturned Obamas executive order creating DACA, giving Congress until March 5 to pass something substantive in its place. But then a federal court struck down Trumps action, and nothing has happened since. History may not neatly repeat itself, but it does sometimes echo. Back in 1910, the House was in the grips of one of its strongest and, according to some accounts, most disliked speakers, Rep. Joseph G. Cannon, R-Ill. He had been an ardent foe of fellow Republican President Teddy Roosevelt. Republicans seemed divided and in disarray. It was against this familiar backdrop that Congress rebelled against Cannon by imposing, among other things, the discharge method. In its current form, if more than half the members of the House sign a petition, it forces a vote on a measure despite the speakers displeasure. Perhaps the frustrations of that earlier age, when invention, prosperity and national confidence seemed to defy political divisions, will help solve a vexing problem in our day. But again, dont hold your breath. A DACA bill still would need to pass the Senate and earn a presidential signature. As with the dawning of that elusive brilliant new day, hoping for the end to frustrations can be frustrating, indeed. With its dwindling rates of attendance at religious services and rising numbers of churches shuttered or sold, Western Europe seems to be the region of the world where the outlook for faith is bleakest. Roman Catholicisms Pope Francis was the latest to lament this trend, saying only last week that Western society seemed like a journey ending in a shipwreck, with the survivors trying to build a raft. A new survey by the Pew Research Center looks past the headlines that worry the established churches to ask what Western Europeans think about religion. The results, issued Tuesday (May 29), suggest a more nuanced picture. Despite the regions widespread secularization, 64 percent of the 24,599 adults Pew surveyed in 15 countries still identify as Christians, even if only 18 percent say they attend church at least once a month. At 46 percent of the total sample, nonpracticing Christians make up the largest single group in the survey, almost double the 24 percent of religiously unaffiliated atheists, agnostics and nones that often dominate commentaries about the state of Christianity in its erstwhile stronghold. These nonpracticing Christians have their own mix of religious and social views, sometimes leaning more toward their churchgoing neighbors and sometimes more toward the unaffiliated. These can have political effects as well, for example in the growing debate over Muslim immigration to Europe. Christian identity remains a meaningful marker in Western Europe, even among those who seldom go to church. It is not just a nominal identity devoid of practical importance, the survey said. While religion surveys in Europe have long noticed this large group of nonpracticing Christians, few study them in detail. French opinion surveys sometimes distinguish between observant and lapsed Catholics because their political views can vary, but those surveys usually dont look closer at the respondents beliefs. In Germany, the usual distinction is between registered church members and nonmembers, because the system of church taxes makes this an important comparison. Paul Bickley, head of the political program at Theos, a London think tank that studies the role of religion, said a British census question on religion gives an idea of a group dubbed census Christians without further detail about beliefs. The 2001 census showed a surprisingly large 72 percent of self-identified Christians, but this dropped to 59 percent in the 2011 census. Bickley agreed in general with the Pew findings but stressed the longer-term perspective that other research in Britain has indicated. Its clear that religious identity and practice are both declining, he said. Also, the nones arent blanks with no spiritual beliefs at all a lot is retained, rethought or re-understood. Theres complexity beneath any figures like these. In the Pew survey, about half of the nonpractitioners said they believe in a higher power or spiritual force and another quarter in the God described in the Bible, compared with two-thirds of practicing Christians who have the biblical view of God. Some 87 percent raise their children as Christians, not that far behind the 97 percent of churchgoers who do so, the 168-page survey said. About 62 percent agree that churches and religious organizations play an important role in helping the poor, compared with 78 percent of practicing Christians. Even among the unaffiliated, 48 percent agreed on this. The nonpracticing Christians also appeared closer to the churchgoers on social questions such as immigration and national identity, which have become hot political topics thanks to rising Muslim immigration in recent decades. About half of all Christians 48 percent of the nonpracticing and 54 percent of the observant say their culture is superior to others. Only one-quarter of the unaffiliated agreed with that view. Similar gaps emerged when the survey asked questions linked to immigration. Some 45 percent of the nonpracticing Christians said Islam was not compatible with European values, against 32 percent among the unaffiliated. While 11 percent of the unaffiliated would not accept a Muslim into their family and 7 percent would not welcome a Jew, 30 percent of nonpracticing Christians would not accept a Muslim and 19 percent would reject a Jew. Both church-attending and non-practicing Christians are more likely than religiously unaffiliated adults in Western Europe to voice anti-immigrant and anti-minority views, the survey remarked. The survey did not hazard an explanation for this but did quote French Islam expert Olivier Roy as saying that traditional organized Christianity had faded away in favor of a cultural marker which is more and more turning into a neo-ethnic marker (true Europeans versus migrants.) Drilling down into the numbers, the survey found that Catholics were more likely than Protestants to have negative views of Muslims. While geography may play some part in that since southern Europe is more heavily Catholic and the north more Protestant, the survey said the overall pattern is evident in countries with large groups from both denominations, such as Britain and Germany. The survey stressed its results did not mean most Christians opposed Muslim immigration and pointed out that churches helped to resettle refugees. It could be that holding anti-immigrant positions may lead a person to embrace Europes historically dominant religious identity, rather than that identifying with Europes historically dominant religious group leads a person to take anti-minority positions, it said. On social issues, around four-fifths of the nonpracticing Christians agreed with the 87 percent of unaffiliated who support abortion and gay marriage. A majority of churchgoers also approved, but at 52 percent and 58 percent respectively. The survey had some interesting comparisons between Western Europe and the United States. They have roughly similar levels both of self-identification as Christian (64 percent for Western Europeans and 71 percent for Americans) and of the religiously unaffiliated status (about 24 percent). But Americans are far more likely than West Europeans by 53 percent versus 11 percent to say that religion plays an important part in their lives. Even the religiously unaffiliated in the U.S. see faith as more important than their counterparts across the Atlantic, to the point where American nones sometimes emerge as more religious than Christians in several European countries when asked about belief in God, prayer and attendance at religious services, it said. The share of nones varies considerably across Western Europe, ranging as high as 48 percent of the adult population in the Netherlands and as low as 15 percent in Ireland, Italy and Portugal. The survey was conducted between April and August of last year. It said it showed higher shares for religiously affiliated people than the widely used European Social Survey because Pew only asked respondents what if any religion they followed whereas the ESS asked first if they belonged to a faith and if so which one. One of the oldest nonprofit organizations dedicated to distributing Bibles around the world will soon require all employees to adhere to orthodox Christian beliefs and heed a conservative code of sexual ethics. Employees are resigning in protest of the new policy, which will effectively prohibit sexually active LGBT people and couples in cohabitating relationships from working for the American Bible Society. But the organization stands by it as a measure intended to bring unity and clarity. In a statement issued in response to RNS questions, President and CEO Roy Peterson wrote: We did this because we believe a staff made up of people with a deep and personal connection to the Bible will bring unity and clarity as we continue our third century of ministry. He added: We understand there are differing views on these matters. He also said: This decision does not signal intent to advocate or champion any cause other than increased engagement with the Bible. The American Bible Society, founded 202 years ago to publish, distribute and translate the Bible, presented its Affirmation of Biblical Community to employees in December. It requires employees to refrain from sexual contact outside the marriage covenant, which it defined as man and wife. The document also requires employees to be involved in a local Christian church and to resist temptations of deception, malicious speech, stealing, cheating others, and dishonoring my body through substance abuse. It opens with an I believe section similar to the Nicene Creed. Beginning in January 2019, all employees will be required to sign the document. Those who dont will be asked to tender their resignation. Already, at least nine of the organizations 200 or so employees have quit. More told RNS they are looking for jobs elsewhere and will likely take another job on or before January. Some suspect a man hired as a help desk manager last year was the impetus for the change. He had introduced his husband to employees shortly after being hired at the societys Philadelphia headquarters. The affirmation is just the latest sign that the organization has shifted away from its ecumenical roots toward a more narrow evangelical identity. That shift began in the 1990s when the American Bible Society changed its constitution to make it a ministry that undertakes Scripture engagement. Previously it published Bibles without note or comment. This is a clear manifestation, or a logical conclusion, of the evangelical takeover in the 1990s, said John Fea, a historian at Messiah College and author of the book The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society. In many ways they are creating boundaries here for the organization that are new, that have limited their scope beyond what has happened in the past, Fea added. Jeremy Gimbel, a 34-year-old gay man who had worked for the organization for 10 years as a web services manager, said he felt no choice but to quit a few months ago. I was very happy where I was, said Gimbel, who now works for a web agency in New York. I loved the team I worked with. I loved what I was doing. It was hard to come to terms with the fact that I was being forced out after nearly 10 years of my life. In a letter he sent to the board of directors before he left, he wrote: I am hurt because this Affirmation specifically excludes me from the community it is supposed to foster. The Affirmation will, like much (of) the political climate we live in today, build walls along the lines of difference, pushing away diversity and leaving no room for unity. I truly believe the organization will suffer. This is not the first time the American Bible Society has faced criticism for adopting a religious policy. Earlier this year, a group of academics protested the organizations recently acquired .bible domain name for excluding any group with a scholarly or secular orientation from using the internet network address. The American Bible Society relented to allow Jewish groups to use the .bible domain name, but its internet dispute panel still requires members who believe that the Bible is the Word of God which brings salvation through Christ, a statement Jews could not adhere to. The new affirmation has led several employees to quit on principle. They said they didnt want to work for an organization that so tightly circumscribes its workforce and its message to evangelicals only. Everything that was on that affirmation was stuff I could pretty much sign in good faith and say yes, I can comply with these things, said Doug Black, a web developer who quit in February. But Black, who is also an ordained minister in the Assemblies of God, said he couldnt abide the change in direction. The American Bible Society wasnt an organization that was primarily white evangelical up until that affirmation, Black said. Some employees pointed to the apparent contradiction between the new policy and the marketing materials the society was pushing, such as a video called The Apology, in which a group of people apologize for the ways the Bible has been used to hurt others. Some of us have used this book of love for hateful things, among them oppressing women, defending slavery, treating others with disgust and revulsion, the people on the video proclaim. This book is all about doing just the opposite. A host of various organizations collaborated to put on the recent Hiring Utahs Heroes Career Fair an event more agencies should emulate to provide needed assistance to Americas soldiers. Thecareer fair at the Davis Conference Center in Layton aimed to connect nearly 60 potential employers with Utahs veterans. This event is one example of the many services and opportunities offered by the states Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Workforce Services, two agencies whose efforts should serve as a model for effective veterans assistance nationwide. Utah has one of the lowest total unemployment rates in the country, with the unemployment rate roughly 25 percent less than the national average. The states Department of Workforce Services has played an active role in keeping the unemployment rate low, working closely with the Department of Veterans Affairs to ensure all veterans have equal opportunities upon returning home. Since 2012, these departments have worked together to place more than 60,000 veterans in jobs. Achieving this rate of success has required both private partnerships and concerted collaboration across departments successful approaches the federal government would do well to model. First, by partnering with private companies, these departments have been able to expand the resources offered to veterans, including training workshops, career fairs and paid accommodation assistance to veterans traveling during their job search. Second, by working collaboratively to find sensible solutions, both departments have enjoyed the satisfaction of making measurable changes to employing veterans. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Utahs veteran unemployment rate sits at 2.9 percent, making the state one of 12 to fall below the 3 percent mark. Thats a proud accomplishment given the national veteran unemployment rate of 3.7 percent. Nationwide, the unemployment rate for all veterans who have served in the armed services since 2001 is significantly higher than the national average. Additionally, the District of Columbia has the second highest rate of unemployment for veterans, just under Maine. For places ironically situated so close to the federal government, these statistics are unacceptable. Federal legislators should look to Utah and implement effective policies to provide robust, empathetic assistance to the countrys veterans. Doing so will require an increase in partnerships with private partners, building on President Barack Obamas successful Joining Forces initiative, which urged private businesses to hire veterans. It will also require transparent, functional collaboration across federal and state departments to understand the root causes of this issue and work to address them. Both state and federal governments have a moral obligation to assist those who put their lives on the line for the safety of the country. They should employ concerted, empathetic policies to build healthier lives for veterans and their families, ensuring those who defend freedom are rightfully honored. WASHINGTON Three recent news items: At the Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, House Speaker Paul Ryan said: "We see moral relativism becoming more and more pervasive in our culture. Identity politics and tribalism have grown on top of this." Ryan went on to talk about Catholic social doctrine, with its emphasis on "solidarity" with the poor and weak, as "a perfect antidote to what ails our culture." In the Oval Office, according to The Washington Post, President Trump boasted about how easy it is to appeal to audiences with an anti-immigrant message: "Acting as if he was at a rally, he then read aloud a few made up Hispanic names and described potential crimes they could have committed, like rape and murder. Then, he said, the crowds would roar when the criminals were thrown out of the country." In the Post's account, "(Stephen) Miller and (Jared) Kushner laughed." At the American border, the brutal separation of confused, weeping children from parents who cross illegally is being implemented. According to The Arizona Republic: "The Office of Refugee Resettlement reported at the end of 2017 that of the 7,000-plus children placed with sponsored individuals, the agency did not know where 1,475 of them were." Some could be lost to abuse or trafficking. What do these incidents add up to? A political, moral and religious failure of massive, discrediting proportions. It is often difficult to apply theological doctrines to public policy. But if there is one area where the teaching of the Christian faith is utterly clear, it is in the requirement to care for the vulnerable stranger. According to the Hebrew scriptures: "When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born." In the New Testament, Jesus employs compassion for an abused traveler as the test and definition of neighborly love. The dehumanization of migrants and refugees has been one of the most consistent themes of this president including using the fact that some criminals enter the country illegally to fan a generalized hostility to Hispanic immigration. Can you imagine what would have happened if a White House staffer attending a policy meeting on family separation had said, "This is cruel. This is immoral. This is wrong." They would have been quickly cleaning out their desk. The rejection of Christian teaching on this issue is pretty much a job requirement in the Trump administration. And how did Ryan address the issue of Trump's habit of dehumanization at the Catholic Prayer Breakfast? By avoidance, under a thick layer of hypocrisy. He complained that politicians are too often in "survival mode" trying to "get through the day," rather than reflecting on and applying Catholic social teaching. Ryan was effectively criticizing the whole theory of his speakership. He has been in survival mode from the first day of Trump's presidency, making the case that publicly burning bridges with the president would undermine the ability to pursue his vision of the common good (including tax reform and regulatory relief). This, while a weak argument, is at least a consistent one. But by making the Christian commitment to human dignity relative to other political aims, it is no longer an option for Ryan to speak of "moral relativism" as the defining threat of our time. In the name of survival, Ryan has ignored and enabled the transformation of the GOP into an anti-immigrant party. This does not reflect his personal views. But it will be remembered as the hallmark of his time in office the elevation of survival above solidarity. My tradition of evangelical Protestantism is, if anything, even worse. According to a recent Pew poll, white evangelical Protestants are the least likely group in America to affirm an American responsibility to accept refugees. Evangelicals insist on the centrality and inerrancy of scripture and condemn society for refusing to follow biblical norms and yet, when it comes to verse after verse requiring care for the stranger, they not only ignore this mandate but oppose it. This represents the failure of Christian political leadership not only from the speaker, but from most elected religious conservatives. Even more, it indicates the failure of the Christian church in the moral formation of its members, who remain largely untutored in the most important teachings of their own faith. Ryan concluded his remarks by quoting Mother Teresa on God's call to "be faithful," not to "be successful." But what if one is neither? Perhaps silence is the best option. WASHINGTON Utahn Josh Holt's safe return to the United States after being detained in a Venezuelan prison for two years took "teamwork and trust," the State Department spokeswoman said during a briefing with reporters on Tuesday. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert opened the briefing with a statement on Holt's release, thanking her department colleagues for their efforts on Holt's behalf. Nauert singled out the role of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon, who "coordinated with members of Congress advising them on what proved to be a successful strategy on the part of our colleagues. Such teamwork and trust is essential to manage these incredibly difficult cases and seeking progress however we can. The State Department "continued to call for his release on humanitarian grounds for a very long time. You heard us speak about that frequently here. Id like to thank our colleagues at our U.S. Embassy in Caracas. Id like to thank my colleagues in Consular Affairs and especially Id like to thank our Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Tom Shannon for his efforts on this case over the past two years," she said. "Under Secretary Shannon helped lead the efforts of the entire department to include CA, legislative affairs and Western Hemisphere teams to secure the humanitarian release of the Holt family from Venezuela." Holt and his wife Thamy, who was also imprisoned, returned to Utah Monday evening, welcomed by cheering crowds after touching down at the Salt Lake City International Airport and in Riverton, his hometown, at the Old Dome Meeting Hall. Their release and warm welcome marked the end of two years of captivity in a Venezuelan prison on what U.S. officials and his family says were false charges. Holt and Thamara "Thamy" Caleno met in person for the first time in May 2016 in the Dominican Republic, and he proposed to her on the lawn of an LDS church there. He traveled in June to marry her in her hometown of Caracas, one of the most violent cities in the world. The two planned to wait for her visa before flying to the U.S. In early July 2016, Holt's family members announced they had not heard from him in a week. They suspected he had been framed and was being held as a spy. They received a Facebook message from his wife's mother, stating that her daughter and Josh Holt were in prison. The message had little information about the arrest but included a local news article about the alleged crime, including photos of guns, a grenade, cash, Josh Holt's passport, credit cards and IDs allegedly taken from the apartment where the couple was living. While he was imprisoned, Holt's family desperately pleaded for help to get him released. They turned to Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, for their assistance. The Holts rallied at the state Capitol and called for the Obama and Trump administrations to intervene. The Venezuelan government unexpectedly released Holt from jail on Saturday after Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., met with Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas on Friday, a meeting that was arranged through back channels. Corker, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, accompanied Holt, his wife and stepdaughter to Washington. Contributing: Dennis Romboy SALT LAKE CITY The University of Utah is launching a new initiative aimed at addressing the growing issue of housing affordability. Under the newly formed partnership called Design+Build Salt Lake, students in the U.'s School of Architecture will develop, design and construct affordable, energy-efficient residential buildings from the first sketch to the final construction, along with local neighborhoods, explained Jorg Rugemer, director of the program and an associate professor of architecture. The program is designed to give participants an immersive experience, he said. Designing a building is one thing. Transforming the design into a real and resilient building that is affordable is a very different challenge though, Rugemer said. This program offers participants the opportunity to explore the consequences of their ideas in direct relation to the built environment, social equity, global climate change, and feasibility, where each step has to withstand the critical arguments of a real client." As part of a design studio, taught in combination with architectural history and architecture technology courses, students have already completed the process of subdividing a city-owned plot of land measuring roughly 20,000 square feet into three individual lots with high-performance houses at an affordable cost designed for each parcel, he said. We have teamed up with Salt Lake Citys Housing and Neighborhood Development Department to design, develop and build the Montgomery Triplets three 1,500-square-foot single-family residences on a vacant lot in Poplar Grove in west Salt Lake, Rugemer said. Another program partner, Salt Lake Valley Habitat for Humanity, will play a vital role in the realization of the studio projects, he added. Architecture research assistants are working to support efforts to secure a planned development and building permit in order to begin construction next summer, he said, with Habitat for Humanitys professional contractor to act as the teams supervisor. Design+Build Salt Lake is an important partnership that will encourage the next generation of housing innovations, said Todd Reeder, capital asset development manager for Housing and Neighborhood Development. Taking small and odd shaped lots from the city inventory and envisioning innovative housing solutions will not only improve access to housing opportunities but will also advance design standards in the community. Christopher Layton was born and raised in at Bedfordshire, England. He joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1842. The following year, he made the journey to Nauvoo, Illinois, where he became acquainted with the Prophet Joseph Smith. He and his family were among the first to leave Nauvoo in February 1846. Later that year, he marched with the Mormon Battalion. Tradition holds that Christopher Layton was the one who raised the first U.S. flag at Tucson, Arizona (see Norma Baldwin Ricketts' "The Mormon Battalion: U.S. Army of the West, 1846-1848," pages 98 and 327). He later settled in Kaysville, in Utah's Davis County. With boundaries greater than they are today, Kaysville was first known as Kays Ward after its first bishop, William Kay. Layton served as the fourth bishop of the Kaysville congregation and, later, in the first stake presidency in Davis County, which was a single stake. He was remarkably faithful to church leaders and successful in his business dealings. He was able to build several homes for his family. At least one of those is still extant. The Utah Central Railroad, a line from Ogden to Salt Lake, established a stop in Kaysville at Laytons farm which came to be known as simply Layton. In 1883, he was called to serve as president of the St. Joseph Stake in Arizona. He served there until 1898, returned to Utah and that same year. In the 1880s, friction arose between the northern and southern areas of Kaysville. The northern region became known as Layton. A timeline in the Layton Heritage Museum notes that Layton separated itself from Kaysville as an unincorporated entity until official incorporation as a town in 1920. A few weeks ago, it was announced at the April general conference that Layton will be the site of a temple of the Lord. SALT LAKE CITY Though there are still many details to hash out and some lingering concerns about how many new police officers will be hired the Salt Lake City Council has signaled early support for Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski's proposed priorities for the city's sales tax hike that will trigger this fall. While wading through the various projects and programs the mayor has proposed for the sales tax hike's first year, estimated to bring in about $25 million in new revenue, council members on Tuesday voted in a straw poll to endorse Biskupski's plan to break down the revenue into four areas. That includes about $7.1 million for streets and infrastructure; nearly $6 million for public safety, including $2.2 million for 27 police officers; nearly $5.3 million for transit projects; and more than $4.1 million for affordable housing initiatives. The rest would be held in reserves. But exactly what transit and road projects and affordable programs that revenue will fund remain uncertain and a question council members grappled with during Tuesday's three-hour-long work session as they delved deeper into Biskupski's proposals for transit, roads, police and affordable housing. Tuesday's informal vote comes after Councilmen Charlie Luke and James Rogers expressed frustrations with Biskupski's proposal to fund 27 new police officers in the tax hike's first year rather than all 50 the council funded with one-time money as a budget adjustment last year. In a meeting last week, Luke and Rogers clashed with Biskupski briefly over the issue, accusing the mayor of only funding a portion of the police, while Biskupski reiterated she still intends to fund all 50 officers, it will just take two years to do so because of hiring challenges currently facing the police department. "This is really frustrating for me," Rogers said in last week's meeting. "We came out, we did something I thought was very ahead of the curve; we said 50 police officers ... and all I've heard is, 'We don't need 50.'" "No, we're not saying " Bisupski interjected, but Rogers cut her off. "Let me finish," he said, his voice rising. "When we were at the table, the chief said, 'We don't need 50 to fill our beats, we need 27. ... I'm sorry, this is not right. This isn't monopoly money." Biskupski said she's "always been committed" to hiring 50, but it will take two years, again referring to difficulties hiring due to lack of qualified candidates. "So you can ask for 50 officers in 2018, and you can't get them," she said. Tuesday, the council discussed the police department's budget with Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown. Luke questioned the chief on whether the 27 officers would be enough to fill neighborhood beats, and Brown said he believed the 27 would bring his force up to the roughly 200 he'd need. During the meeting, neither Luke nor Rogers brought up their concerns with Biskupski's proposal to fund only 27 for the tax hike's first year and both voted in favor of the straw poll to endorse the funding breakdown. But in an interview after the meeting, Luke said he still has concerns. "The problem we have now is for the past seven years I've been hearing the police department is understaffed," Luke said, but added that if Brown argues 27 will be enough, it is "politically tough to argue" the police department needs more. "At this point, I hope that they're right," Luke said. "We don't really have a choice since they argued against the additional officers." Luke said it's "frustrating" because come next year, even though the tax hike will bring in even more revenue in its second year, he worries now's the time to allocate the funds. "Next year we'll have more money, but we're also going to have additional needs," he said. "Others are going to want to put it toward more housing, others are going to want to put more money into streets, so it's going to be tough to come back and justify that when ... this year we're told 'We don't need it.'" Brown said in an interview that as far as next year is concerned, the 27 new officers should be enough to fill the neighborhood beats but he also cautioned that that may change depending on the results of a study currently underway by the International Associations of Chiefs. Plus, Brown pointed out more than 30 officers are currently in training and haven't yet hit the streets. "I don't think we know what we need right now," Brown said. "But I do know we need those 31 officers in the academy today." Either way, Brown said he welcomes any additional police officers, but hiring challenges also complicate matters. "I've never had a council say, or a mayor say, 'Here's 27 officers,'" let alone 50, Brown said. "We're very grateful, we just have to see how the numbers play out." Biskupski's deputy chief of staff, David Litvack, said the mayor's office "appreciates" the council's early support of the mayor's proposed breakdown, crediting department officials for basing their requests off the city's transit master plan and affordable housing plan. But he also acknowledged there's still work to be done. "We're all doing this to achieve greater access to affordable housing, better roads, a safer community, and better access within the city using transit," he said. "We appreciate the council support, but we know it's an ongoing conversation." The specific projects and programs for the revenue will have to be sorted out over the next several weeks as the council continues its budget discussions. Under state law, the council must adopt a balanced budget by June 22. PROVO Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, and his GOP primary opponent, former state lawmaker Chris Herrod, sparred in their first debate Tuesday over whether Curtis is conservative enough for 3rd Congressional District voters. "I'm getting a little tired of your brand of conservatism being the right brand, as if I don't love the Constitution, as if I don't love this country as much as you do," Curtis said. "I suppose from the extremist view, everybody's a moderate." The newest member of Utah's congressional delegation, elected last November in a special election to replace former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, was responding to an accusation made by Herrod that his votes in Congress expanded government. "It's not easy being conservative," Herrod said when asked to list the votes. Instead, Herrod said taxes went up during Curtis' time as mayor of Provo. "My frustration is that we can't be honest. It's fine if you're moderate or liberal. Just own it." Curtis said repeatedly throughout the hourlong debate sponsored by the Utah Debate Commission and held at KBYU-TV that he has held 50 town halls since being elected, and is "right in line" with his constituents. The pair, who, along with political newcomer Tanner Ainge, previously squared off in last year's special election Republican primary, disagreed on a number of issues, including President Donald Trump's tariffs on China and various products. Herrod said although in general he opposes tariffs, Trump should be given credit for being willing to go "to the brink" in imposing the taxes, intended to protect domestic markets by making foreign products more expensive. Curtis, however, said tariffs were an area in which he disagrees with the president. He said Trump's tariffs are too broad-based and "not in Utah's best interest" because they are hurting businesses in the state. Herrod reminded the audience he campaigned for Trump before the 2016 election and is behind the president's agenda, especially on building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico and other immigration issues. Herrod also said he supports Trump's appointment of Utahn Ron Mortensen, an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration, to a key U.S. State Department post over refugees and migration, citing his disaster relief work for the federal government. Curtis said that while he doesn't know Mortensen well, "there is no way this Congressman will ever vote for a racist to fill that position." The president's nominees go before the Senate for confirmation, not the House. Immigration is complicated, Curtis said, calling it "embarrassing" that the status of young people brought to the country illegally as children has yet to be resolved. He said border security would require more than just a wall. There were also differences over what gun control measures were needed following the recent deadly school shootings in Florida and Texas. Curtis said that as he watched news coverage, he promised himself that he "would conduct myself as if that was my own child or grandchild getting shot. When you do that, you can't just hide behind the Second Amendment." Noting he had spent much of his professional career with a company that constructs shooting ranges and had a high rating from the National Rifle Association, Curtis said he is "building a coalition of like-minded people in Congress" to look for answers. Herrod said he had spoken at a pro-Second Amendment rally the same day thousands gathered to call for more gun control and was struck by how "genuinely frightened" many students seemed. "There's never been a safer time for a child to be raised," Herrod said, calling school one of the safest places. "Somebody needs to give that reassuring voice, or people as soon as they can vote will take the Second Amendment away." The candidates disagreed on the medical marijuana initiative going before voters in November, with Herrod saying he is still making up his mind and Curtis "reluctantly" opposing it because he said it confuses recreational and medical use. Afterwards, Herrod said he hopes voters had an opportunity to see the differences between the two candidates. He said Curtis is not a conservative because he at one time headed the Utah County Democratic Party. "I supported President Trump, I voted for him. I think that the state of Utah is now warming up to President Trump. He's done what he said he was going to do," Herrod told reporters. During his time answering post-debate media questions, Curtis said his voting record and life show that he is "totally in line with Utah's conservative values. That makes me question, if (Herrod's) not there, does that mean he's an extremist." The congressman also said what he is hearing from voters in the 3rd Congressional District is that they are "conflicted" about Trump because while they like some of what they see from the president, they still struggle with his personality. "I think it is important to be independent and to be a representative of the 3rd District and not of the president," Curtis said, as well as for voters to remember "I'm running on my record, not the president's." PROVO U.S. Senate candidate Mike Kennedy threw a few jabs at Mitt Romney over some of the former GOP presidential nominee's past decisions and statements in a Republican debate Tuesday, but left himself open for a shot to the chin just before the final bell. Romney described his willingness to find common ground and how he worked with Democrats in Massachusetts to forge occasional compromises in response to a last question about collaboration. "I'm grateful to hear my opponent say he's willing to work with people because when he's labeling President Trump as a phony and as a fraud, and Pastor Jeffress as a bigot, I don't see those as productive steps in building a relationship," Kennedy said in his rebuttal. Moderator David Magleby tried to end the hourlong debate there, but Romney, said "No, no, no, no." Romney said the president respects people who call them as they see them, and Trump has endorsed him in the campaign. He recounted some of the derogatory comments Texas Baptist Minister Robert Jeffress has said about the LDS Church, to which Romney and Kennedy both belong. "For Rep. Kennedy to call (Jeffress) and to apologize to him is absolutely inexplicable. Jeffress should be apologizing to Rep. Kennedy and the people of Utah of my faith," he said. "When people express bigotry, they ought to be called out for it." The two candidates looking to replace retiring GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch squared off in the live televised debate at BYU sponsored by the Utah Debate Commission. KBYU will air the debate again Thursday at 1 a.m. and June 21 at 6 p.m., five days before the primary election. The winner faces Democratic Salt Lake County Councilwoman Jenny Wilson, who watched from the gallery. A UtahPolicy.com poll last week showed Romney with commanding 67-24 lead over Kennedy. Kennedy called Jeffress to apologize for Romney calling the pastor a "religious bigot" in a tweet earlier this month. Jeffress described the apology as being on behalf of the state. Romney had not previously commented publicly about Kennedy's apology. Though the public backlash was severe, Kennedy said after the debate he holds firmly to his faith but that he also builds bridges and doesn't burn them down. He said the campaign is greater than just that issue. Kennedy and Romney mostly agreed on things such as repealing the Affordable Care Act, balancing the federal budget and opposing Utah's medical cannabis initiative. But they diverged somewhat on gun issues. Romney said he opposes new federal legislation on guns and would protect the Second Amendment but favors a ban on the sale of bump stocks a device that makes semi-automatic weapons fire faster to the public. Kennedy said banning bump stocks doesn't work and that wouldn't be a useful step in making schools safer. He said as a state lawmaker he has voted against any bill that would infringe on Second Amendment rights, but Romney signed an assault weapon ban in Massachusetts. "It's just hard for me to know as our U.S. senator what you'll do regarding this and other issues," Kennedy said. Romney said the pro-gun lobby and the anti-gun lobby came together on Massachusetts legislation that banned certain weapons and expanded the rights of gun owners. He said he was happy to see them find a solution that worked for that state and that he supported it. "I've run for president twice," he said. "I'm running for Senate with the same policies I had when I was running for president." Kennedy also took a shot at Romney over a comment he made about immigration during the 2012 presidential campaign. "I thought I remembered in the presidential campaign something about self-deportation. But that's fine. I guess that opinion has changed as well," Kennedy said. Romney said self-deportation was a reference to e-verify, a federal program that allows businesses to determine if employees are eligible to work in the U.S. If employers are punished for hiring illegal workers and people can't get jobs because they're in the country illegally, they would leave on their own, he said. "Self-deciders," he said, is the best way to enforce immigration laws. Kennedy said repeatedly during the debate that he stands with Trump, but afterward admitted that he cast a write-in vote for GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in 2016. He said he wasn't sure who Trump was going to be but now "firmly" backs the president and expects in the next election he would win Utah in a "landslide." "He's had a lot of converts in this state as a result of the work he has done," Kennedy said. Romney has said he agrees with Trump's policy agenda so far, but would call him out when he disagrees. PARK CITY This resort town may be unique to Utah for its affluence, but it's like many other communities in the state and around the country when it comes to families, schools and community leaders looking for ways address teen anxiety and its devastating consequences. On Tuesday, about 50 people including teens and parents met at the Park City Library for a free screening of the IndieFlix documentary "Angst" and to participate in a panel discussion. We wanted to show the film in a community like this to start a discussion and break the stigma so people can find the help and support they deserve, said the film's producer Karin Gornick. The event was organized by the Deseret News as part of six-month initiative of in-depth reporting, research, analysis and events to help Utahns address teen anxiety. A second screening of "Angst" will take place Wednesday in Herriman, at Fort Herriman Middle School, 14058 Mirabella Drive, at 6:30 p.m. The idea for the movie came to Gornick when she struggled to find help for her son who had anxiety. Jenny Howe, an advising therapist to the movie who also appears throughout the documentary, became both Gornick's and her sons therapist as they both worked through their anxieties. The film came out of their collaboration and desire for discussion on the topic. The kids are asking for us to talk about this, Howe said. Our kids teach us we need to be human and present with them. Diversity of anxiety The film showcased a diversity of teens and children who described their challenges of identifying and coping with anxiety. With a variety of age ranges, genders, races, backgrounds and individual struggles, the featured subjects encouraged the theme that anxiety doesnt discriminate and has varied experiences. Through the experiences of the youth, their parents and therapists, the nearly hour-long documentary explored the causes of anxiety and effective treatments. Gornick said the film intentionally didn't address medication to avoid alienating those who don't have resources for medication, but she noted that medication can be necessary in treating certain people. In asking questions to panelists following the film, Rachel Elliott, 16, said it is hard for her to confide in people about her social anxiety. Howe challenged her to just talk to one person, no matter how hard that is. Victoria Weser, 17, and her friend Emma Davidson, 16, came with Elliott and their LDS Young Womens group from Provo to Park City for the event. Davidson said while she doesnt have an anxiety disorder she appreciated the discussion as it helped her understand the people in her life who struggle with anxiety. I actually just texted my friends about the movie and let them know Im here for them, Davidson said. Weser also said she wants to talk about this with her parents, and that it has helped her better understand some of her friends. Challenging your fears In the panel discussion moderated by Deseret News Opinion Editor Boyd Matheson, Gornick, Howe and local activist and videographer Collin Kartchner discussed how to break the stigma of anxiety, especially between parents and children and teens-to-teens. In Utah, there is a tradition of putting on a mask for others, where we feel our culture and religion are so intertwined here and its hard to separate the two, said Howe, a psychologist whose practice in based in Utah. Social media also plays a role, according to Kartchner, who started a #SavetheKids social media campaign to spread awareness of how social media is contributing to teen anxiety, depression and suicide_._ He described meeting teens, through his travels to speak at schools and other groups, with no formal history of mental illness end up struggling with anxiety when it relates to involvement and separation from social media or technology. Kids grow up thinking they cant show the world anything but perfect, he said. Urging adults to validate their children's struggles, Kartchner urged parents to validate their children's struggles and to emphasize it is OK to not be OK, it is fine to struggle. Howe agreed, counseling parents to show their own vulnerabilities to the pressures they face everyday, along with modeling the good stuff, to teach children healthy habits. From Park City to nationwide In September 2016, two 13-year-old Treasure Mountain Junior High boys overdosed on synthetic drugs within 48 hours. Their deaths were a wake up call to the community, according to Mary Christa Smith, youth prevention coordinator for the Summit County Mental Health Alliance. We realized we had a community-wide problem, she said. In a concerted effort to combat anxiety, depression and substance abuse in the area, the number of people of all ages seeking mental health treatment has increased 86 percent from 2016 to 2018, said Aaron Newman, mental health and substance abuse coordinator at the Summit County Health Department. This is a positive sign to the work we are doing, he said, attributing the rise to greater awareness and addressing the stigma of mental health. Part of the success has been adopting the national Communities that Care model in Park City. Communities that Care is an evidence-based, five-stage process that guides communities to support their youth by encouraging positive behavior and preventing negative behaviors. Smith said that the alliance has teamed with the non-profit Connect Summit County to destigmatize mental illness through events, encouraging conversations and linking people with mental health professionals and programs. Park City schools have also been enlisted in the effort. Ben Belnap, assistant superintendent of Student Wellness at the Park City School District, said a specialized counselor at Park City High School was hired for students who need to speak about their mental health struggles and school stressors as well as training teachers to identify mental illness early on. Belnap, a psychologist, said his position was created to better serve students in response to the 2016 deaths of Ryan Ainsworth and Grant Sever. The most significant achievement in the effort to address teen anxiety in the community has been the students opening up the conversation about mental illness, according to Smith. Connect Summit County, the non-profit founded and directed by a board of community members who have had personal experience with mental illness, has worked with students to gain funding for events, speakers and even bracelets that have an emergency number and an encouraging message on them. Students have formed clubs and safe spaces to have a discussion about anxiety and depression with their peers. Dont wait for a tragedy to happen in your community. There are people in every community across the country that struggles, she said. This is a nationwide challenge, not just a Park City challenge. EAGLE MOUNTAIN There were very few surprised faces in the room Wednesday when officials from the state and Eagle Mountain revealed Facebook as the entity behind a massive planned data center, and the recipient of an equally massive tax relief package. Project details were made public almost two weeks ago, but even though the project's potential owner/operator had been kept under wraps, industry pundits had identified Facebook as the odds-on favorite to be the company behind the curtain. A bevy of state and local officials were on hand in Eagle Mountain for the announcement, including Gov. Gary Herbert, Congresswoman Mia Love, R-Utah, Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes, R-Draper, Senate President Wayne Niederhauser, R-Sandy, Governor's Office of Economic Development Executive Director Val Hale, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and others. Under terms ratified by five different taxing entities, Facebook will qualify for some $150 million in tax breaks over 20 years for Phase 1 of the project, a two-building, 970,000-square-foot undertaking worth $750 million. The open-ended agreements, however, extend those benefits beyond the first phase and could land the company hundreds of millions in additional tax relief over the next four decades. Facebook continues to be the most profitable social media company on the planet and just reported record revenues of nearly $12 billion in the first quarter of 2018. And that in spite of a slew of criticism surrounding revelations late last year that a data scientist harvested personal data, without authorization, on some 80 million Facebook users. Later, he sold the information to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that worked with various campaigns including President Donald Trump's before he was elected and the pro-Brexit movement. Facebook boasts nearly 1.5 billion daily users and over 2 billion regular monthly users. Eagle Mountain Mayor Tom Westmoreland said bringing the company to his "new" community, near the southwest end of Utah Lake, will help lay the groundwork for a brighter future. "Eagle Mountain is relatively young. We've only been around for 22 years," Westmoreland said. "We have a rare opportunity here to plan a city of the future from the ground up. So were very particular about who we partner with. I strongly believe we have found the right partner to help build that future." Rachel Peters, Facebook's vice president of Data Center Strategies, told the Deseret News that although the estimate on staff size for the new facilities originally indicated 30-50 employees, the company would likely be hiring more than that, as well as putting scores to work constructing the twin buildings. "On the construction side, there will be hundreds, up to thousands of jobs over the term of the build," Peters said. "As far as long-term operational folks, two buildings typically take a minimum of 100 to run the facilities." Peters said the company is "committed to hiring locally. Thats what were all about from construction and through operations." Herbert offered comments at the event, noting the novelty of celebrating a tech investment outside of the Wasatch Front's Silicon Slopes area. "It's good to see some things happening and not just along the I-15 corridor," Herbert said. "And this is happening on property that would likely not be developed until a long time into the future and this is going to accelerate that." Talks centered on the project go back at least a year when Herbert and others visited the company in Palo Alto, California, but the company's name was kept concealed due to "ongoing contract negotiations" according to those involved with the deal. Phase 1 of the effort calls for the two buildings to be constructed on a roughly 500-acre parcel south of Eagle Mountain's city center. The property is currently completely undeveloped and considered part of the "greenbelt" surrounding most of the city. Theresa Foxley, president/CEO of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah, said last week that once shovels are in the ground, the expected construction term should be about 18 months. The company will also be investing, according to Foxley, about $150 million in infrastructure improvements, including bringing power to the site from a nearby high-capacity power line corridor, extending sewer and water service, bringing in telecommunication lines and improving roads. That infrastructure investment is expected to be equalized by the Phase 1 tax benefits of $150 million over 20 years. That tax break gives Facebook 100 percent tax relief on personal property taxes due and 80 percent relief on real property taxes due for a term of 40 years for four of the five taxing entities it's beholden to. Only the Alpine School District Board created some caps on those benefits, with limits of $40 million per phase and $120 million total over 35 years. Alpine School District represents the biggest beneficiary of the taxes Facebook will pay and the entity giving up the most via the tax break package as the recipient of about 70 percent of the total taxes due. The company will also enjoy some sales tax exemptions, created specifically for data centers by the Utah Legislature. This is a much different outcome than Facebook's first attempt at putting together a data center deal in Utah. In 2016, Salt Lake County officials led the charge in voicing concerns that included the size of a proposed tax incentive estimated at $250 million over 20 years to lure a $2.5 billion Facebook data center project to West Jordan. West Jordan, which kept the negotiations secret for nearly a year before the company's name was revealed, eventually lost out to Los Lunas, New Mexico, much to the ire of West Jordan officials. On Wednesday, Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams said that the Eagle Mountain deal seemed better for the taxpayer, adding that its up to elected officials from Utah County, Eagle Mountain and the Alpine School District to weigh the data centers benefits. I think this deal is very different than what was proposed (in West Jordan), McAdams said. Looks like there have been lessons learned all around for this deal. While the initial tax breaks for the Eagle Mountain redux are signficantly less than those offered to Facebook two years ago, they have the potential to dwarf the breaks offered in the West Jordan deal. A study commissioned by Eagle Mountain on the project referenced the potential for five phases which, if executed inside the 40-year limit, would earn Facebook $750 million in tax relief. According to Eagle Mountain officials, the property currently generates about $66 per year in tax revenues. After Phase 1 of the data center is complete, the tax revenues would shoot up to about $840,000 annually. Westmoreland said the net benefits for Eagle Mountain and its residents cannot be understated. And he expects the Facebook project is the first of more to come. "Having Facebook here is big deal, theres no doubt about it," Westmoreland said. "With them coming here and making these investments, now its a whole new game. We just became relevant, very relevant in the eyes of other members of the industry that may join them." Foxley told the Deseret News that the Eagle Mountain mayor's prediction is already showing signs of coming to fruition. "We had a phone call yesterday from a site selector who read about this and wanted to hear more about the infrastructure," Foxley said. "After today, and making it official, I think my phone is going to be ringing off the hook." Contributing: Katie McKellar Correction: An earlier version incorrectly stated Facebook reported profits of nearly $12 billion in the first quarter of 2018. The company reported revenues of nearly $12 billion. SALT LAKE CITY What should have been a routine police call to remove a disruptive teenager from a public park resulted in two officers being assaulted and two people arrested on Tuesday. Just before 8:30 p.m., a 16-year-old boy was "harassing" a younger boy at Fairmont Park, 1040 E. 2225 South, according to police. Salt Lake police detective Robert Ungricht didn't know Wednesday exactly how the boy was being harassed but said it may have risen to the level of bullying. Two officers approached the 16-year-old to ask him to leave the park. But the teen was "very confrontational and uncooperative," Ungricht said. The next step was to take the boy into custody. The officers' plan was to remove the boy from the park and hand him over to his parents, Ungricht said. But about 20 to 30 people who were at the nearby skate park saw what was happening and reacted by surrounding the police officers, calling them names and threatening them, he said. That's when Joseph Christiansen, 25, assaulted the officers, according to Ungricht. "(He) was told several times he needed to leave the park and refused. (Christiansen) pushed one of the officers, causing him to not be able to arrest the male at that time," a Salt Lake County Jail report states. Ungricht said injuries to the officers were minor. Ten additional officers were called as backup. The 16-year-old was arrested and taken to juvenile detention for investigation of resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. Christiansen was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail for investigation of assault on a police officer, interference, failure to disperse and drug possession. SALT LAKE CITY A woman who was supposed to be taking care of the finances of vulnerable adults was charged Wednesday with taking their money. Kathy Ann Faletau, 42, of Riverton, is charged with abuse of a vulnerable adult, unlawful dealing of property by a fiduciary and engaging in a pattern of unlawful activity, all second-degree felonies; plus falsifying or altering government records, a class B misdemeanor. While working for New Leaf Alternative in South Salt Lake, Faletau was "the representative payee/fiduciary" for a Sandy man's finances. "Faletau acquired a debit card for (the man's) account in her own name and used that card for purchases for the benefit of someone other than (the man). An analysis of Faletaus financial records, and records of other Medicaid recipients under Faletaus care, disclosed that five additional vulnerable adults had unauthorized transfers from their accounts into Faletaus account and/or the accounts of other individuals," charging documents state. A review in 2016 revealed "there were over $7,500 in charges to (the man's) account where he received no benefit," the charges state. Some of those purchases included airline tickets and rental cars, as well as purchases made in Missouri, Nebraska, and Wyoming, the charges state. The man's parents confirmed he was never in those states during the time of the purchases. Faletau left New Leaf in August 2015 and started her own company called TLC, also known as Touching Lives, the charges state. Investigators found at least five other vulnerable adults who had thousands of dollars taken from their accounts and placed into Faletau's account. According to court records, Faletau was arrested in South Jordan for prescription fraud in 2016, and again by Unified police in 2017. SALT LAKE CITY Sen. Orrin Hatch had a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member carry a letter to the president of Venezuela that opened a correspondence that he says led to the release of Josh Holt and his wife. In the letter delivered by Caleb McCarry, the committees senior staffer for Latin America, the Utah Republican asked President Nicolas Maduro for Holts swift release. That gesture became the opening of a unique and unexpected partnership, Hatch wrote in a Time op-ed Wednesday. It was President Maduro and me, two individuals with different priorities, from different worlds, agreeing to a conversation. After much correspondence, Hatch said he and Maduro eventually talked on the phone for nearly an hour. The senator said he believes they reached each other in a way that transcended geopolitical dynamics. "We spoke as two individuals, each making a plea to the other. I told him that as a man of my word, I would be able to speak on his behalf to the American public and the American leadership, but only once he released Joshua Holt and his wife, Thamy," Hatch wrote. The Venezuelan government unexpectedly released the Holts from jail last Saturday after Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., met with Maduro in Caracas the day before a meeting McCarry arranged through back channels. Josh and Thamy Holt returned to Utah Monday evening, welcomed by cheering crowds at the Salt Lake City International Airport and in Riverton, his hometown. Their release and warm welcome marked the end of two years of captivity in a Venezuelan prison on what U.S. officials say were trumped-up charges. Both Corker and Hatch said McCarry played a critical role in making it happen. Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, who became close to Holt's mother, Laurie Holt, during the Holts' imprisonment, said Saturday that no one person could have secured the couple's freedom. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters Tuesday it took "teamwork and trust" to bring Holt home. Nauert singled out the role of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon, who "coordinated with members of Congress advising them on what proved to be a successful strategy on the part of our colleagues. Such teamwork and trust is essential to manage these incredibly difficult cases and seeking progress however we can. In his op-ed, Hatch said the case was a priority for him from the time the Holts were thrown in jail under the false allegation that they were in possession of weapons and involved in espionage, just 15 days after their June 16, 2016, wedding. He said he and a small team worked tirelessly over the next two years to free them. The team's search for leads and angles that might free Holt eventually led to Maduro, he said. Hatch said there are several lessons to be learned from Holt's case, including the importance of the team, listening to all voices, and faith and planning go hand in hand. "This journey is ultimately about rescuing one man, his wife, and their child," Hatch wrote. "But it can also be a lesson for how our leadership might build a way forward through not only the present situation in Latin America, but in the many areas of the world from Europe to the Korean Peninsula where being able to listen and have the right understanding of faith has never been more urgent." SALT LAKE CITY Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski signed a proclamation Wednesday kicking off Utah's annual Pride celebration. Biskupski, reading from the document, distinguished June 2 and June 3 as Pride in Salt Lake City, encouraging all residents and visitors to embrace Prides message of equality and unity and to enjoy the festival in peace, safety and love. Biskupski signed the proclamation surrounded by festival volunteers and organizers who helped her raise the rainbow Pride flag in front of the Salt Lake City-County Building. The signing kicked off the multiday LGBT celebration that expects to bring over 50,000 people to Sundays parade alone, according to organizer estimates. Pride means so many different things to so many different people, Rob Moolman, the executive director of the Utah Pride Center, said after the mayor's proclamation. To me, however, Pride, and particularly this Pride, means coming together. The Utah Pride Center tasks itself with organizing the annual Pride Festival and Moolman estimates hundreds of volunteers provide their time for the planning and preparation of the event. Real Salt Lake was set to host the first Pride event during Wednesdays game against the Houston Dynamos at Rio Tinto Stadium. A portion of the ticket proceeds were to be used toward an LGBT University of Utah student scholarship. On Thursday, Zion Lutheran Church will host a Pride Interfaith Service from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. at 1070 Foothill Drive in Salt Lake City. Tickets for Fridays Pride Spectacular sold out two weeks after they went on sale, according to the events website. The annual reception will be held at the Union Events Center from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. The Youth Pride Dance will be held Friday from 8 to 11 p.m. on the Washington Square. Tickets are available for purchase online and at the event for those between 14 and 20 years old. The festival itself, with tickets ranging from $9 to $60, will be held Saturday and Sunday on both sides of Washington Square Park with multiple official events throughout each day. Live music, karaoke and activities will be spread out across the grounds with food and drink available for purchase. The festival runs Saturday from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Sunday, bringing in between 30,000-40,000 people on average each day, according to Moolman. The weekend festival on the park grounds, with its freedom from judgment or any kind of discrimination, is what Moolman said he loves more than anything. Come and just sit on one of these benches and just watch people walk past, Moolman said. It is families, it is friends, it is colleagues. This is a place where you can see people breathe. Starting Saturday, June 2, at 8 a.m. in Jordan Park, the first event of the day will be the OUTdoors and Proud 5K. Wednesday is the last day to register for the race, which will also include yoga, fitness challenges and other activities in the park. From 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. that same day, participants will march from the state Capitol down State Street and 200 East for the Pride March and Rally. The rally itself will begin on the south stairs of the capitol. Saturdays official events will conclude with a series of speakers and films at the main branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library from noon until 6 p.m. The weeks events all culminate on Sunday for the Utah Pride Parade on 200 South in downtown Salt Lake City. Beginning at the 200 West intersection at 10 a.m., the parade route runs east down 200 South and disbands at the 400 East intersection. The parade is expected to end at noon. Sundays official events will also close with a series of speakers and films at the Salt Lake City Public Library from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. A group of first-graders in Maui, Hawaii, has gone out of its way to express love and kindness to Alexis Ince, an 8-year-old classmate who has an extremely rare genetic condition, KITV reported. As a result of Alexis condition, she is the size of a 3-year-old and cannot speak. Vanessa Ince, Alexis mother, was afraid Alexis would be bullied when she started school, but just the opposite happened. One first-grade girl began to reach out to Alexis, helping her find her way around school. Soon, other children joined to form a group that escorts Alexis throughout her day. Ince called it Alexis friend support network. I think it gives people hope, Ince told KITV. Hope that, in the face of all these mass shootings and all these horrible things happening in our schools, that kids dont have to be that way. According to Ince, the students have also started to line up each morning to welcome Alexis when she arrives at school. Alexis cant communicate verbally, but she shows her appreciation by giving her friends flower leis. As soon as they see the car pulling up, they jump up and down and theyll say, Alexis is here! Alexis is here! Ince said. Although Pomaikai Elementary School usually only names one Student of the Month, they awarded the honor to five students in one month for their kindness towards Alexis. Read or watch the full story here. SALT LAKE CITY Medicaid spending per capita is lower in the Beehive State than anywhere else in the country, according to the findings of a Utah Foundation report published Wednesday. As of 2016, $703 in combined state and federal Medicaid dollars were spent per capita in Utah, said the foundation, a nonpartisan policy research nonprofit. Per capita data was calculated by dividing costs by the number of total residents in the state. Sam Brucker, a Utah Foundation research analyst who authored the report, said the low number is "good news" for the average Utah taxpayer. "It's a lower tax burden overall for Utahns," Brucker said. State costs for Utah's Medicaid program also account for 18.7 percent of the state budget, eighth lowest in the United States, the report found. Nationwide, Utah also had the lowest percentage of its population enrolled in Medicaid as of 2016. The average cost for each Medicaid enrollee in Utah was $5,326 in 2014, the most recent year for which that figure is available, the report says. That number was the 10th lowest in the United States. Low per-enrollee spending, which is "a little more significant" of a metric showing "what the actual population in Medicaid costs," Brucker said, is due in part to children making up a relatively high proportion of those the program covers in Utah. In 2017, recipients 18 years old or younger made up about 63 percent of Utah's Medicaid enrollees, but accounted for less than a third of the program's costs, the report says. "They may need some ... preventive services and (other) services that don't cost quite as much and they don't need them quite as often," Brucker said. Utah's comparatively large families have also held sway on per capita income formulas the federal government uses to determine how much to pay for Medicaid services in the state. A high number of children have contributed to per capita income in the state ranking among the lowest in the country, leading to the federal government paying 70 percent of Medicaid costs in Utah, which the report says is "the ninth highest reimbursement rate in the nation." "We kind of make out well because of the way the federal funding is designed," Brucker said. The state pays the remainder of Medicaid costs that are not reimbursed by the federal government. In Utah, 10 percent of the population was enrolled in Medicaid in 2016, the report says. That coverage rate was lowest in the country, and 18 states and the District of Columbia had rates more than double that, according to data kept by health care policy think tank Kaiser Family Foundation. Contributing to that low number, Utah is one of 18 states in the country that have opted not to expand Medicaid eligibility as provided for under the Affordable Care Act, Brucker said. "So we're one of the 18 states still kind of in flux," she said. "You have ... the community health workers advocacy agencies who are encouraged to get a broader population covered. Then you have this other side where there is this concern with spending." After years of failed efforts doomed by such budget concerns, state lawmakers passed a law this year seeking large-scale Medicaid expansion. The law instructs state health officials to apply with the federal government to expand Medicaid eligibility to Utahns in households earning up to 100 percent of the federal poverty level, potentially giving coverage to up to 90,000 more Utahns. Medicaid advocates, arguing their measure is a better option, have created an initiative that would expand coverage up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level and make up to 150,000 more Utahns eligible. This week, the initiative was certified as having enough signatures to go before the state's voters in November. "There is an ongoing tension between concerns about the growing cost of Medicaid and a desire to expand coverage to a broader population in Utah," said Utah Foundation President Peter Reichard in a statement Wednesday. "As current and future Medicaid proposals unfold, coverage and its costs will demand close attention from the public and policymakers." Nationally, Medicaid costs are expected to increase 5.8 annually on average through 2026, Utah Foundation's report says. Currently the program is paid for chiefly through unrestricted federal matching funds activated by state expenditures. One significant reason for the projected cost increase for Medicaid, Brucker said, is "because we're seeing increasing enrollment of older people in general and ... also individuals with disabilities, and those two populations do cost more." In 2016, Utahns with disabilities were just 15 percent of all Medicaid enrollees in the state, but accounted for a little more than 47 percent of the program's costs, according to the new report. Utahns 65 years old or older are 3.9 percent of the state's Medicaid recipients, but account for 7.3 percent of its costs. Those groups' prevalence among Utah Medicaid enrollees somewhat increased from 2016 to 2017, "while at the same time child enrollees decreased by 1.9 percent and pregnant women, who are also on average a less expensive group, also decreased 5.1 percent," Brucker said. General rises in prices for medical care and prescription drugs are also seen as "primary factors driving Medicaid spending growth," the Utah Foundation said in a release. Prasanth Varma To Helm Telugu Remake Of Queen? After getting delay for a while, it now looks like that the Telugu remake of Vikas Bahls hit Bollywood film Queen will finally get underway and this time with a new director. The movie is taken up by Prashanth Varma, who made his debut with Awe. It is said that the producers really liked his work in Awe and they felt that a young director like him would be ideal to give this film the makeover that it needs. Tamannaah is essaying the role of Kangana Ranaut in the movie and it has been facing one hiccup after another since it went on the floor. First, national award-winning director Neelakanta stepped back from the project due to creative differences with the makers. Also, actor-filmmaker Ramesh Aravind, who is helming the Tamil and Kannada versions of Queen, had initially agreed to helm the Telugu but he too walked out of the project midway. And now, Prasanth Varma has been brought on board to finish the film and getting it ready for release this year. As per the rumours, Prasanth and Tamannaah seem to have similar sensibilities which made the makers see him as an ideal fit to complete the film. We only wish that things go well this time and we soon get to watch this one of the most-awaited movies of the year. For latest movie reviews, ratings and trailers, download the Desimartini App. Source: www.tollywood.net The government of South Africa appears to be reconsidering its planned sale of a stake in mobile operator Telkom, of which it holds 40.5%. Last year, the countrys government expressed an interest in selling part or all of its holding in Telkom in order to generate funding for the national air carrier, South African Airways. However, while presenting the operators annual financial results, CEO Sipho Maseko noted that such discussions had gone very quiet. Maseko noted that measures enacted by former finance minister Malusi Gigaba - who originally suggested selling some or all of the stake had succeeded in generating revenue, thereby mitigating the need to bring in additional funds by selling off shares in Telkom. We might not be high up on the chopping block, said Maseko. Theyll have to say so themselves officially, but in different conversations with them it does look like the appetite is not as accentuated as it was. But who knows? He added that following a recent meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, he didnt get a sense that a stake sale was at the top of the governments agenda. It seems Motorola, like the many other phone makers before it, is eager to jump on the notch bandwagon in order to achieve a higher screen-to-body ratio with their smartphones. AndroidHeadlines was first to grab an image of the unreleased Moto phone dubbed Motorola One Power. The new Motorola marks the introduction and reintroduction of a few elements. Lets review them. As reported, the Motorola One Power is an Android One device. That means the phone will run a pure version of Android and receive the faster Android updates. It seems Motorola is continuing to use Android One in their phones; the last model to come with it was the American version of the Moto X4. The image from AndroidHeadlines reveals a dual camera setup at the back side of the phone, and the signature Motorola batwing logo sitting inside a dimple that could well double up as a fingerprint sensor. The image also reveals that the branding on the front side of the phone is now Motorola and not Moto as it was on previous models from the recent past. After a confused spell of back-and-forth brand shuffling by Motorola and Lenovo, it seems the company has finally decided to move away from Moto by Lenovo and slowly return to the full name of Motorola. Only time will tell if the original name will stick. The notch is now present on yet another new phone. The image reveals that the Motorola One Power has a display that covers almost the entire of the front face, save for the noticeable chin at the bottom and a rather wide notch at the top. The display seems to be slightly rounded around the corners. This is officially the first phone from Motorola to sport a notch on the display. However, many suspect that this could ultimately end up being the Moto X5 that was seen in leaked images back in January this year. The leaked images of the Moto X5 suggested the presence of a notch on the top along with dual rear cameras. Motorola was reportedly last heard scrapping the Moto X5 project. This leak comes less than a week before Motorola's new launch. The Lenovo-owned brand announced earlier that they would launch two new models in their G-series smartphones, the Moto G6 and the Moto G6 Play in India on June 4. The Moto G6 features a 18:9 5.7-inch display with FHD+ resolution, runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 platform, and offers a choice of memory and storage: 3GB RAM & 32GB of storage or 4GB RAM & 64GB of storage. The Moto G6 Play is expected to be a cheaper version of the Moto G6. Today, multiple reports of a camera sample leak from an alleged Xiaomi Mi 8 SE have been cropping up. The claim is that the image sample shown was shot on the allegedly upcoming smartphone using its AI dual camera. The story was first broken by Gizmo China. The assertion is made based on a simple watermark at the bottom left of the image which says Shot on MI 8SE AI Dual Camera with another watermark in Chinese on the bottom right. While the image is very much real, it was definitely not shot on the Xiaomi Mi 8 SE, or any other Xiaomi smartphone, or any smartphone for that matter. The photo was actually shot by a photographer named Buyi Huang and was taken using a Sony A7r MarkII. In case you dont believe us, read on. Wait, is this the Burj Khalifa? The query into the image began with a debate between those who had read the story and those who had just glanced at the image as to whether the skyscraper in the story was the Burj Khalifa or not. During the debate, I looked closer at the image and was confused as to how a smartphone was able to get such a wonderfully correct perspective and show so many straight lines without any notable distortion. This was red-flag number one. We then scanned the photo using Google Lens, but the service just said sky. We then turned to the Big Brother (Google Reverse Image search) and thats when things got interesting. We found image results that pointed to wallpaper websites which had the same skyscraper and the image looked a lot similar to our alleged Xiaomi Mi8 SE camera sample leak. This was red-flag number two. The problem with the image on the wallpaper website was that it had the top bit of the skyscraper cropped out, so we couldnt say conclusively if the story had been cooked up using a stock wallpaper. Here's the link to the reverse Google image search query. Smartphones are NOT DSLRs Having been a professional photographer for well over a decade, I was skeptical that the image could have been shot on a smartphone. For starters, this was a night shot that showed very little noise, and next to no JPG compression artifact. All smartphone photos show compression artifact unless you shoot in RAW, so I first thought that this may have been shot in RAW. However, having worked with RAW files from pretty much every flagship from the last 3 years, particularly including the Samsung Note 8, Huawei P20 Pro and even the Lumia 1020, I am yet to come across an instance where the files have the kind of dynamic range latitude as shown in the leak. Maybe my editing skills are sub-par, maybe someone layered multiple images together to produce this, maybe it was an AI, whatever, but the continued skepticism poked all of us to keep looking. Also, good luck getting such straight lines out of a camera smartphone. Photographers spend thousands of dollars OR lakhs of rupees on lenses that can capture wide-angle photos with little distortion (as in, retaining straight lines as straight). So we kept digging and finally stumbled upon Unsplash! Unsplash is a new stock photography website that allows photographers to upload their work onto the platform, from where anyone can download their images and use them. For free. Unsplash has created some controversy over their business model, but thats a discussion for another time. After jumping from one URL to another for all of 5 minutes, we found an image of Nanjing Citys nighttime skyline, and bang in the middle was our unknown skyscraper. At least now we knew this wasnt the damn Burj Khalifa. A quick visual inspection of the image on Unsplash convinced many of us that this was the source image used in the leak. I wasnt convinced, so I downloaded the original image and the alleged leak. According to the page, the image is available on, it was shot by a photographer named Buyi Huang in Nanjing China. It was shot on a Sony A7r MarkII (great camera) using an unspecified lens with a field of view of 25mm and an aperture of f/5.6. The lens model is missing probably because he was using a non-Sony lens mounted on the camera using a converter, a common practice amongst Sony users. The photo was uploaded on April 23, 2018. It even has 82 likes, which I hope go up after youre done reading this story. Unscientific Forensic Process First thing I did was determine the aspect ratio of our offending leak. It has a convincing 18:9 aspect ratio, making sure the fanboys of the new Univisium format dont look any further. I then took the original image and resized it so as to match the leak images proportions. Then, I simply superimposed the original image on leaked camera sample, rapidly turning the top layer on and off. This helps ascertain any visual differences that might exist between the two layers. Here are the two images side-by-side, with boxes drawn around areas of particular interest. If you want to see a higher resolution version, click here. Red Flag #3 - The Mysterious Rider If you look closely at the left side of the bottom-third of the image, you see a vehicle just making a turn. You would have to be incredibly lucky to replicate this condition in two photos. Even if the photos were literally shot at the same time, there would still be minute movement artifact, which there isnt. Professionals would almost always agree that getting two shots with identical placement of moving objects is just impossible because, well, physics, but I argue that if you had super-powers (such as being able to stop time), you could potentially pull something like this off. Red Flag #4 - Big City Lights Comparing the lights in Nanjings skyline reveals that the two photos share the identical amount of illuminated signages. Not only are the same amount of lights turned on in the horizon, as far as the eye can see, but they also have an identical spread. The density and temperature of air in the skyline would have to be absolutely identical so as to get the exact same spread in lights. Again, super-powers needed. Red Flag #5 - Spying on the little details The most prominent building in the foreground is on the bottom right side of the frame. It could be a hotel, it could be an office. Lets assume its a hotel. It has a number of lights turned on, 7 to be precise. Four of those lights are yellow and three blue. This is another feature that is identical between the original photograph and the leaked camera sample. Ive also matched the number of lights in the building behind our hotel, with the same conclusion. In fact, if youre feeling like wasting some time, go ahead and patch the lights in all the buildings. They are identical between the two photos, leading us to believe that Maybe they were shot at the same time Okay, so you think that its possible that both the photos were shot at literally the same time, down to the very nano-second. This would explain the same number of lights everywhere and even that one random people out on a joyride in his vehicle. Even if this were true, there should still be one very critical difference in the shots that would set them apart and that is Perspective There hasnt been a better time to say we all have a different perspective on things. If two lenses are trained on a scene, they will render a different visual perspective, no matter what. Even if there is a 0.01mm gap between the two imaging assemblies, there will STILL be a noticeable difference. IF you have a hard time believing me, just line up two identical smartphones together and try shooting a landscape photo. To Sum things up Basically, it looks like someone decided to take a photo shot by a professional photographer, using professional equipment, cropped it into the new 18:9 aspect ratio and slapped on a watermark. Publications like Gizmochina and even Indian media outlets like Gadget360 etc ran with the story, not questioning the authenticity of the leak. What we have here is not a leak, but a cleverly devised lie. Gizmochina attributes the photo to a post in Weibo, but the account they link to does not have the image anywhere. Perhaps it was deleted, but even so, publications have failed to do any due diligence to check on facts. Next time someone shows you a photo that looks like its too good to have been shot on a smartphone, dont dismiss it but do question the claim. Story written and images analysed by: Swapnil Mathur The Samsung 860 Evo is no doubt a good SSD to go for. You get good performance and a 5-year warranty period. Moreover, the improved MJX controller and the use of LPDDR4 ensures that your power consumption values are much lower. So you can always use the 860 Evo in a laptop and gain slightly better battery life compared to the other SSD options. Were looking at an improvement that would range about 15-20 minutes but thats still a noteworthy gain. In order to compete in the budget segment, Samsung needs to drop the prices and match international pricing. Samsung 860 Evo 250GB detailed review Samsung has been enjoying the limelight in the SSD space thanks to their Evo and Pro series which have been leading the SSD performance race for more than two years now. Ever since OCZ went bankrupt and the R4 saw no viable successors, the consumer ecosystem opened up for the likes of high-performance drives from Intel and Samsung to take up the space. Intel was known for building reliable drives while Samsung focused more on the performance aspect except when the 840 Evo glitch caused performance to drop over time. The 860 Evo uses Samsungs fourth generation technologies including the 3D-NAND and the MJX SATA Controller. Thankfully, we havent seen any reports of the slowdown glitch affecting the 860 Evo nor have we seen it in the sample drive Samsung sent us. This being the 250 GB drive, were bound to see slightly reduced performance owing to fewer NAND chips that can be accessed in parallel. Lets see how the numbers match up to some of its competitors launched this year. Samsung 860 EVO 250 GB SSD Samsung didnt share any information regarding the new controller with us, nor is there any datasheet on Samsungs website for the same. So there isnt much to say about it except from what we can infer from the specifications. For starters, we see that the 860 Evo is now using LPDDR4 which is more power efficient compared to the older LPDDR3 thats used on most of the older SSDs in the market. Also, this is the 2.5-inch SKU, so expect slightly lower performance numbers compared to the larger capacity SKUs in the range. Were comparing the Samsung 860 Evo with another SSD that was launched this year and that too is of lower capacity, making this an apples to apples comparison in terms of capacity. The underlying technology, on the other hand, is vastly different. Were trying to source the M.2 variant of the same SSD, once we do get that, well update the graphs and then you can see if theres any difference at all. With every new generation of controllers and memory medium, manufacturers are really narrowing the gap between file characteristics as experienced on the M.2 PCIe and 2.5-inch interfaces. Unfortunately, because of the limitations of SATA, brands can only do so much. Samsung 860 Evo Capacity 250 GB 500 GB 1 TB 2 TB 4 TB Controller Samsung MJX NAND Memory Samsung V-NAND 3-bit MLC DRAM Memory 512MB LPDDR4 512MB LPDDR4 1GB LPDDR4 2GB LPDDR4 4GB LPDDR4 Form-factor 2.5-inch Seq Read 550 MB/s Seq Write 520 MB/s 4K Random Read QD1 10,000 IOPS 4K Random Write QD1 42,000 IOPS 4K Random Read QD32 98,000 IOPS 4K Random Write QD32 90,000 IOPS Idle Power 50 mW Active Power 2.2 W 2.5 W 3 W 3 W 3 W Sleep 2 mW 2 mW 2.6 mW 5 mW 8 mW MTBF 1.5 million hours TBW 150 TB 300 TB 600 TB 1200 TB 2400 TB Warranty 5 Years As expected, the inclusion of LPDDR4 has reduced the power consumption during active and idle states to much lower levels. Itll be interesting to see if these numbers stay that way during sustained write cycles. Performance Since the Samsung 860 Evo is still using TLC NAND, it does suffer from the typical characteristics of the older technology. We see that both of Intel 3D Xpoint devices seem to offer better sustained and bursty performance. This particular test is using low queue depth to see how the drive would react in day-today applications that show sudden transfers of short durations. Something a lot of applications tend to do when launched for the first time. The 860 Evo manages to score about 35 MB/s with bursty data and about 74 MB/s on sustained reads using 4K 1QD. With random writes using the same file size and queue depth, we see that the Samsung 860 Evo offers better performance than the 760p with sustained data but still suffers when you consider bursty data. To get a better idea as to how the drive will perform when youre moving large files in and out, we have the 128k sequential tests and they generally cap out the read and write speeds of SSDs. The Samsung 860 Evo ends up offer 390 MB/s with bursty data and about 500 MB/s with sustained workloads. With the 128k workload set to write, we see the Samsung Evo turn the tide on the 760p with regards to sustained and bursty workload. Finally, the improved 3D V-NAND stack from Samsung can stand up to the newer 3D Xpoint. Lastly, we have the mixed workload benchmark which is more indicative of your average day to day usage where reads and writes are interspersed. It appears that the Samsung 860 Evo is definitely better than the Intel 760p, however, the newer 800p still leads the race. Samsungs new 860 Evo is certainly a viable contender among the SSDs launched this year. The Evo series have always been favoured by consumers who want a speed and capacity without breaking the bank. If pure speed is something that you aim for, then the Pro series is what you should be looking at. Pricing The Samsung 860 Evo retails at Rs.8,750 though you can find it for about Rs.6,000 on most PC component websites. At Rs. 35/GB, the Samsung 860 Evo isnt exactly the most economical option as Kingston, SanDisk and Crucial offer similar capacities for Rs.2,000 lesser, that's a 25% difference in the budget segment. Performance wise, the Samsung 860 Evo is better than those drives, however, when you are competing in the budget segment you need to compete on the basis of price. Thats where the 860 Evo loses out. The Kingston UV400 is actually more expensive than the 860 Evo in American and European markets at $82 while the 860 Evo costs $79. In India, we see the tables turned. Those who want slightly better performance can always opt for the 970 Evo which include their latest 3D VNAND memory. Verdict The Samsung 860 Evo is no doubt a good SSD to go for. You get good performance and a 5-year warranty period. Moreover, the improved MJX controller and the use of LPDDR4 ensures that your power consumption values are much lower. So you can always use the 860 Evo in a laptop and gain slightly better battery life compared to the other SSD options. Were looking at an improvement that would range about 15-20 minutes but thats still a noteworthy gain. In order to compete in the budget segment, Samsung needs to drop the prices and match international pricing. Computex 2018 presents largest startup platform in Asia Innovative technology is currently revolutionizing industries and driving markets to become more diversified. As Asia's leading startup platform, InnoVEX at Computex attracts local and worldwide high-potential startups, organizations and teams to participate in the annual event. With a series of much-anticipated forums, the platform makes it possible for exciting new ideas to emerge. Entering its third edition, this year's InnoVEX will take place from June 6th to 8th at Taipei World Trade Center Hall 3, with some exhibits focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) technology and applications. InnoVEX forums, on the other hand, will stress on new technology, such as blockchain technology applications. During the three-day exhibition, participants have the opportunity to exchange views with startups from around the world. The Pi Stage also offers the best platform to present ideas and create investment opportunities, bringing innovation momentum to the technology industry. At this year's event, InnoVEX forums will be broadcasted exclusively by Twitch, the official live streaming platform of Computex 2018. At 10:00 am on June 8th, co-founder and CEO of Bitmark Sean Moss-Pultz, co-founder of KKFARM Pochang Wu, co-founder and CEO of Health2Sync Ed Deng will discuss the trend of blockchain technology and its applications. Ambidio founder Iris Wu and Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin will exchange views on new technology's role in the film industry and gaming industry, opening infinite possibilities for cross-industry collaboration. Connect global resources to accelerate commercialization of innovative applications InnoVEX Pi Stage offers a platform for corporate and exhibitors to showcase and exchange ideas, at the same time opening up more opportunities for investing and incubating startups. World-renowned accelerators and startups, including Audi, Amazon Launchpad, JAFCO, Samsung Next, TRIPLE and imec.xpand, will talk about their global plans and cross-industry collaboration strategies on Pi Stage at 11:00 am on June 6th. They will also share how to help early-stage startups become commercialized, and ways to create a win-win situation for the startup community. Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, which is devoted to investing entrepreneurs and young people in Hong Kong and Taiwan, will participate in the event for the first time and directly exchange views with global startups, an excellent opportunity for young entrepreneurs. The series of events and unique opportunities prove that InnoVEX is the best platform for startups to grow. At Nangang Exhibition Center, Garage+, a renowned Taiwan-based startup community, will bring startup companies around the world to share their technology and innovation that are in line with the latest trends in the industry. NQM.AI from the UK will showcase its digital transformation solution; the Canada based software platform Invision AI will demonstrate how it employs AI in image analysis; the Taiwanese software company Deep Force will share their experience in making hardware products more useful through AI software. Mr. Walter Yeh, TAITRA President & CEO, said COMPUTEX continues to present global innovation resources at InnoVEX. In addition to providing a platform for startups, InnoVEX is devoted to attracting leading global venture capital companies, business incubators and accelerators to create opportunities for new solutions to secure the funds they need, driving the growth of startups and paving the way to a world of technology. InnoVEX at Computex 2018 will take place from June 6th to 8th at Taipei World Trade Center Hall 3. The three-day exhibition will showcase innovative technology, global startups and resources while revealing latest innovative trends in the tech industry during the InnoVEX forums. Computex 2018 presents startup platform in Asia DIGITIMES' editorial team was not involved in the creation or production of this content. Companies looking to contribute commercial news or press releases are welcome to contact us. Air Asia CEO Tony Fernandes, others tried to skirt 5/20 rule, alleges CBI The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registered a case against Air Asia Group CEO Tony Fernandes and others for alleged violation of rules and manipulation of government policies for securing international flying licences. According to the CBI, directors of the aviation company used corrupt means to manipulate government policies to get the rules that require airlines five years of domestic operations and at least 20 operating aircraft (called 5/20 rules) to be relaxed. in order to be eligible for licenses to operate international services. Air Asia India also allegedly violated of Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) rules, reports quoting civil aviation ministry officials said on Tuesday. Besides Fernandes, the others named as accused include former deputy group CEO of Malaysia-based Air Asia Berhad Tharumalingam Kanagalingam (also known as Bo Lingam), Bengaluru-based Air Asia India Ltd director R Venkataramanan, Air Asia India Pvt Ltd and Air Asia Berhad. "The case has been registered under 120-B (criminal conspiracy) under the IPC and sections 13(2) read with 13 (1) (d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act. The searches took place at five locations in Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru," CBI spokesperson RK Gaur said today. According to the CBI, Venkataramanan was lobbying the government to secure mandatory approvals, some of them through non-transparent means, including the then Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance, no objection certificate and the attempt for removal or modification of 5/20 rule. The company is yet to get international flying permit as it currently has only 18 aircraft, they said. Fernandes wanted Air Asia India to operate international flights from the day of granting flying permit in May 2014, it alleged. Tony Fernandes and Venkatramanan, nominee of Air Asias local partner Tata Sons, have been lobbying in government to get all approvals, including FIPB clearance and to amend or remove existing 5/20 rule for international operations, the FIR has alleged. The agency has also named Rajender Dubey, director of Singapore-based HNR Trading pte Ltd, Sunil Kapur, chairman of Total Food Services, Mumbai and Deepak Talwar, principal and founder DTA consulting, New Delhi, and HNR Trading as alleged lobbyists who used their influence to get 5/20 rule relaxed before General Elections of 2014. It is alleged that Dubey was instrumental in seeking appointments and facilitating meetings for officials of AAIL with officials in the ministry for getting clearances. CBI alleged that in December 2014, Kapur along with Bo Lingam handed over a closed packet containing cash of Rs50 lakh to one Sriram at the coffee shop in the Four Season, Mumbai Hotel, to facilitate the removal of the 5/20 rule. In return the catering contract for the airlines was given to Kapur as a quid pro quo, it has alleged. The FIR has alleged that a secret note was sent on 27 February 2014 to the union cabinet to amend the rule followed by a supplementary note on 5 March 2014 which was not approved since the Election Commission had announced the Lok Sabha general elections on 5 March 2014. Air Asia (lndia) Limited remitted about Rs12.28 crore to HNR Trading Pte Ltd Of Dubey for a 'sham contract on the basis of a bogus agreement on plain papers, it was alleged. This money was allegedly utilised for paying bribe to unknown public servants of and others for securing permit for international operations through Talwar and Kapur who acted lobbying agents, the FIR said. "Air Asia India Limited refutes any wrong doing and is co-operating with all regulators and agencies to present the correct facts. In November, 2016 AAIL had initiated criminal charges against its ex-CEO and had also commenced civil proceedings for such irregularities. We hope to bring early resolution to all such issues," Shuva Mandal, director, Air Asia India Limited, said in a statement. US announces 25% new tariffs on Chinese tech goods Days after US and China reached an agreement on how to avoid a trade war and instead engage in trade enhancing measures, the White House on Tuesday announced that it will impose a hefty 25 per cent tariff on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods containing "industrially significant" technology. Earlier, in the height of a trade row, the Trump administration had demanded China to reduce its $375 billion trade surplus against the by $100 billion while China retaliated with similar measures imports from the US. China and the US announced measures to avert a trade war on 20 May under which Beijing agreed to "significantly increase" its purchases of American goods and services to reduce Chinas $375 billion trade surplus with the United States. The two sides had also issued a joint statement vowing not to launch a trade war against each other. "The United States will impose a 25 per cent tariff on $50 billion of goods imported from China containing industrially significant technology, including those related to the 'Made in China 2025' programme," the White House said in a statement. The final list of imports covered by the new duty will be announced by 15 June, and tariffs will be imposed on those imports shortly thereafter, it said. The new tariff is part of one of three major steps that the US is taking based on the 22 March memorandum signed by President Donald Trump. The import duty is part of multiple steps the US would take to protect domestic technology and intellectual property from certain discriminatory and burdensome trade practices by China, the White House said. The trade-related actions were announced following a report by the Office of the US Trade Representative regarding China's practices with respect to technology transfer, intellectual property and innovation. The USTR has since updated Trump about the progress achieved since the March 22 memorandum. In order to protect its national security, the US administration will also implement specific investment restrictions and enhanced export controls for Chinese persons and entities related to the acquisition of industrially significant technology. The proposed investment restrictions and enhanced export controls will be announced by 30 June and they will be implemented shortly thereafter, it said. The US will also continue to pursue litigation at the World Trade Organisation for violations of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights based on China's discriminatory practices for licensing intellectual property, the statement said. The US filed the case regarding these violations on March 23. Besides, the White House said it would continue with efforts to protect domestic technology and intellectual property, stop non-economic transfers of industrially significant technology and intellectual property to China, and enhance access to the Chinese market. US has already requested China to remove all of its several trade barriers, including non-monetary trade barriers, which make it both difficult and unfair to do business there, it said. The US will request that tariffs and taxes between the two countries be reciprocal in nature and value. "Discussions with China will continue on these topics and the US looks forward to resolving long-standing structural issues and expanding our exports by eliminating China's severe import restrictions," the statement said. Nepal scraps power project contract with Chinese firm over tariff row Nepal has scrapped a contract with a Chinese infrastructure firm for building a 750 megawatt hydel project in western Nepal, after the Chinese firm demanded a hike in power tariff, and decided to build the mega power project on its own, Nepals finance minister Yubaraj Khatiwada has said. Khatiwada made the announcement to scrap the hydel power project contract with China Three Gorges Corporation (CTGC) while releasing the first federal budget for fiscal 2019 CTGC demanded a hike in the power purchase rate, ie, the price at which Nepal would be buying electricity, in order to complete the reservoir type project in western Nepal, which left the project incomplete, the Himalayan nation's finance minister said. With several rivers flowing out of snow covered mountains, Nepal offers huge untapped potential for hydropower generation. The country, however, lacks the funds and technology necessary for building such mega power projects. With a annual demand of 1,400 megawatts (MW), Nepal is dependent on neighbouring countries, including India, for meeting its annual demand for power. The power project has been stuck since 2012 over the tariff dispute. A year ago, the Chinese firm had given Nepal an option to reduce the production capacity to 600 MW, in case Nepal was not agreeable to paying a higher price for purchasing power from the project. The Nepal government had appointed a committee to look into the deal and suggest a way out. The committee recommended against the Chinese proposals, which lead to the decision to terminate the deal. Under the deal signed between the Chinese company, the Chinese firm CTGC will have a 75 per cent stake in the project and the rest will be held by the Nepal Electricity Authority. The project with the reservoir covers Baitadi, Bajhang and Dadeldhura. It was expected to produce 1.8 billion units of electricity a year. The project with the 207-metre-tall dam was estimated to cost $1.8 billion, including the interest charges, or $1.4 Billion excluding interest charges. In November last year, Nepal had scrapped a $2.5 billion deal with China Gezhouba Group Corporation to build the country's biggest hydropower plant, citing lapses in the award process, the energy minister had said. A Maoist-dominated coalition government had in June last year awarded the contract to China Gezhouba Group Corporation to build a 1,200 MW plant on the Budhi Gandaki River, without any competitive bidding, which is required by law. A parliamentary panel asked the government that succeeded the Maoist-led coalition to scrap the deal. Canada to nationalise Kinder Morgan oil pipeline to save project Canadas federal government will buy Kinder Morgan Canada Ltds Trans Mountain pipeline for C$4.5 billion ($3.5 billion) in a bid to save the project from political and environmental opposition, the government said on Tuesday. Finance minister Bill Morneau said nationalisation of the pipeline was the only way to ensure that a planned expansion could go ahead. Kinder Morgan Canada has proposed to more than double the pipelines capacity amidst stiff opposition and efforts by the province of British Columbia to block construction. Kinder Morgan has given Ottawa until 31 May to come up with reassurances it could press ahead with plans to boost capacity of the line to a Vancouver-area port. The federal government backs the proposal to boost the pipelines capacity as it would give Canada crude greater access to foreign markets. However, the pipelines nationalisation would open political risks for Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. When we are faced with an exceptional situation that puts jobs at risk that puts our international reputation on the line, our government is prepared to take action, Morneau told reporters. He said nationalisation of the pipeline provided the federal jurisdiction needed to overcome British Columbias opposition, but did not explain how it could force the province to allow construction. Ottawas move drew immediate criticism from both ruling and opposition parties, and raised prospects of Trudeaus popularity falling in the key British Columbia province in the 2019 federal election. This decision represents both a colossal failure of the Trudeau government to enforce the law of the land, and a massive, unnecessary financial burden on Canadian taxpayers, Canadian Taxpayers Federation Federal Director Aaron Wudrick said in a statement. For now, the Canadian government will offer federal loan guarantees to ensure construction of the expansion continues through the 2018 season as part of the deal with the company, a unit of Houston-based Kinder Morgan Inc. We have agreed to a fair price for our shareholders, said Steve Kean, chief executive officer of Kinder Morgan Canada and Kinder Morgan Inc. Kean did not say why he decided to sell rather than absorb the risk of further delays. Kinder Morgan Canada will continue to own some of the assets, including crude storage, rail terminals and a condensate pipeline, he said. I think the transaction is a win-win. Its actually better for Kinder Morgan than it is for Canada. They are getting a very good value, said Paul Bloom of Bloom Investments Counsel Inc, which owns about 300,000 shares in Kinder Morgan Canada. British Columbia isnt a part of the deal and while a government buy (out) makes it more likely that the project will go through, it still doesnt guarantee there wont be more protests, he said in an interview. The Austrian curator is certainly to congratulate on the selection of such high-quality contributions. The exhibition undoubtedly fulfils her declared goal to interpret Freespace as a versatile realm which is shaped by coexistence, where concepts such as deviation, atmosphere and beauty can be materialised. Still, as each one of the three powerful oeuvres addresses these topics with its distinctive language, materials and shapes, at first sight they stand as separate events and fail to harmonise into a coherent ensemble, therefore somehow weakening the overall impression. Will the Biennales hasty audience be able to take a few minutes and give this pavilion a much deserved second glance? Should we create buildings or places? This is the question posed to the public by the curators of the French Pavilion, Encore Heureux (Nicola Delon, Julien Choppin, Sebastien Eymard). The question may sound rhetorical, but it contains an important idea about the meaning of architecture. A place is the meeting point between different political, human, economic and spatial realities. It is a fundamental point of passage between what we consider a city and the thing we call architecture. The place builds a space for life, but it is also an economic engine and courageously represents the political choice made by a country that believes in architectural experimentation as a process of dialogue. Username: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 2 Vote(s) - 5 Average 1 2 3 4 5 To all of the victims of fascist dictatorships. Norseman lop guest User ID: 440399 05-30-2018 11:20 AM Post: #1 To all of the victims of fascist dictatorships. Advertisement To all of the women, children, and men, where your leftist communist governments let you down. To all of the victims of the EU: Britain (I do not consider you great anymore), France, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, Germany, Finland, just to name a few. I know you all and I am not leaving you out. I pray for your survival as your leftist governments have allowed muslim vile animals to invade your countries and rape your women and daughters and kill your fathers and brothers. A day is coming, as was 1945, when you will be set free. Why has this happened again? Because you trusted someone other than yourself to take care of your household - you trusted your government to take care of you - and they have failed you again. Do not bring down statues - leave them in place so that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past. Well, here we are. Never trust anyone but yourselves. No one has the right to make decisions about you and your family, but you. For all we know, we only have this one life, and it is up to you, Father, and Mother, to protect the lives that God has entrusted us with, the very lives, our children, who are our very essence of our lives, themselves. 77 Theofacist Deluxe edition User ID: 438700 05-30-2018 11:37 AM Posts: 4,000 Post: #2 RE: To all of the victims of fascist dictatorships. THEY AINT ON THE LIST, \My Tribes/ 4% of world pop,,, survive,,, the rest x| so wish granted, the dudes have the list, its like turkmen, an inbreds, and THEM, not you lot, nor the monsters, but inbred longpig, and the rejected silver, lets fill hell 77 Theofacist Deluxe edition User ID: 438700 05-30-2018 11:38 AM Posts: 4,000 Post: #3 RE: To all of the victims of fascist dictatorships. https://www.gematrix.org/?word=2%2C733 why aint you registered |Norseman,? i invite you, this place, SAFE. meeting place, an hunting ground, be friend rather than slave why aint you registered |Norseman,? i invite you, this place, SAFE. meeting place, an hunting ground, be friend rather than slave James Registered User User ID: 443596 05-30-2018 12:17 PM Posts: 8,503 Post: #4 RE: To all of the victims of fascist dictatorships. Hear Hear! There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. - Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda Norseman lop guest User ID: 440399 05-30-2018 12:26 PM Post: #5 RE: To all of the victims of fascist dictatorships. Etrigan Wrote: (05-30-2018 11:38 AM) https://www.gematrix.org/?word=2%2C733 why aint you registered |Norseman,? i invite you, this place, SAFE. meeting place, an hunting ground, be friend rather than slave I have never been a slave. I am here to set men, women, girls, and boys, and dogs, and cats, and every life form on this earth, free. I have never been a slave. I am here to set men, women, girls, and boys, and dogs, and cats, and every life form on this earth, free. The need for flexibility in the workspace is growing sometimes even as far as to a workspace on the other side of the continent. Working remotely is becoming increasingly popular, both on the employer side and on the employee side. Even though it might not be the right choice for every organisation, many opportunities are wasted here, for smaller companies as well. That is why well describe these opportunities (and the challenges), and what you can do as an employer to make working remotely work. The difference between flexible and remote To start off, its probably good to know that working flexibly and working remotely are not the same thing. Remote working is a form of flexible working, but flexible does not necessarily mean remote. Confused yet? Working flexibly can mean multiple things, from organizing your own work schedule to the possibility to work from home. Working remotely means that an employee is not present in the office for most or even the entire time, but works from a different location. Why should you let people work remotely? This way of working is beneficial to both retaining current employees and attracting new talent. Many people are searching for the possibility to work from home (or another location) possibly your employees as well. If you wont give them the possibility to do this at your company, they might start searching for an employer who will. Moreover, research by the Flex Strategy Group shows that employees who are offered this option are, among other things, more loyal. So, by giving employees the option to work remotely, you attract new talent who were not in the liberty to do so at their former employer. However, there is more potential for attracting new talent: your talent pool suddenly increases immensely. Because if your employee doesnt have to commute to the office every day, what is stopping you to hire someone from the other side of the country, Europe or the United States? Not only are employees, as mentioned before, more loyal of they get this option, but also their often happier, more productive and more creative than employees who always work in the office. Speaking of the office: if you have (part of) your team working remotely, youll need less desks, chairs and square foot, which saves costs. According to research by EY (formerly known as Ernst and Young), its important for Millennials (people born after 1980) to have a flexible working environment. Since Millennials are (becoming) the biggest part of the workforce, their wishes and needs need to be taken into account if you want to stay relevant as an employer. As reported by EY, in 2020 more than eighty per cent of the workforce will consist of Millennials. The pitfalls It all sounds very nice, but there must be a reason it doesnt work out for some companies. Remote working does create a few challenges. Thinking in terms of safety: how safe is it when your employee, who is in possession of sensitive company information, connects with public WiFi? And how well are their devices secured? And what if employees cant communicate with each other face to face, how does that affect the efficiency and progress? Sometimes, remote working simply doesnt suit your company or employees. And thats ok. It could always be worth a shot, but if your employees start saying beforehand that they feel like theyre going to be distracted and end up in front of the television: just dont start. Another reason it fails could be that the company just did not handle it the right way. So how do you handle remote employees? Start small, with just a few people. You could for instance first implement a Work at home Wednesday. This way you can monitor it for a while and keep evaluating how it goes. Do people get the same results? Or maybe even better ones? Do the results recline? Ask your team to contribute ideas, evaluate, modify, and if it doesnt work after two months? Stop. Set up a policy for deadlines, tasks, safety, communications, meetings, et cetera. The first phase is a good moment to test out a couple of things and find what works for you. If its clear for all those involved whats expected of them, there will be no misconceptions about it. Make sure that theres a daily moment where employees can speak to each other and motivate people to video chat. Use the right tools and make sure that employees always have access from any location to what they need, in an efficient manner. You can think of tools like a digital workspace like Workspace 365, to simplify access to applications, documents and information, or Office 365. Also think of chat tools, which are very important for streamlining communication, like Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business. For collaboration on a grander skill you could look in to enterprise social media like Yammer. Whatever you choose, make sure everyone uses the same digital workspaces and tools to keep people productive. Also think about security: what tools will make sure that your employee can safely handle data from a different location? A culture of trust Even if you use the most amazing and efficient tools and you have a clear policy no doubt could arise about, remote working can still fail, simply due to a lack of trust. Burying an employee in messages or checking if they are actually working every thirty minutes does not actually contribute to productivity for both parties. Working remotely is not something you only do, it also has to be a piece of who you are: it has to fit into the company culture. Username: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average 1 2 3 4 5 Page: 1 2 Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 389303 05-30-2018 11:55 AM Post: #1 Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" Advertisement May 30, 2018: According to the article, countries in the Middle East is about to erupt into war. That the Iranians want to ally with the Iraqis, and Israel is reporting that Hamas and Islamic Jihad has fired at least twenty-seven military Mortar Rounds from the Gaza Strip into surrounding communities in Israel over the past few hours, causing the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to return fire. And that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is holding Emergency National Security meetings. The Hal Turner Radio Show is providing up to the minute updates regarding the tense situation, here. http://battleforworld.com/2018/05/30/urg...ng-to-war/ What I`ve been warning you for a while. Get ready.May 30, 2018: According to the article, countries in the Middle East is about to erupt into war. That the Iranians want to ally with the Iraqis, and Israel is reporting that Hamas and Islamic Jihad has fired at least twenty-seven military Mortar Rounds from the Gaza Strip into surrounding communities in Israel over the past few hours, causing the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to return fire. And that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is holding Emergency National Security meetings.The Hal Turner Radio Show is providing up to the minute updates regarding the tense situation, here. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 443029 05-30-2018 12:16 PM Post: #2 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" They ordered Trump to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem expressly to trigger war. And he don't care as long as they don't release the video of him drinking piss, and he gets paid LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 443597 05-30-2018 12:17 PM Post: #3 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" LoP Guest Wrote: (05-30-2018 11:55 AM) What I`ve been warning you for a while. Get ready. May 30, 2018: According to the article, countries in the Middle East is about to erupt into war. That the Iranians want to ally with the Iraqis, and Israel is reporting that Hamas and Islamic Jihad has fired at least twenty-seven military Mortar Rounds from the Gaza Strip into surrounding communities in Israel over the past few hours, causing the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to return fire. And that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is holding Emergency National Security meetings. The Hal Turner Radio Show is providing up to the minute updates regarding the tense situation, here. http://battleforworld.com/2018/05/30/urg...ng-to-war/ These clowns have been hiding under the u.s. skirt as long as they have existed. They are a criminal state warring with any neighbor at random. It will be a good day to see these worthless individuals get a taste of their own medicine. These clowns have been hiding under the u.s. skirt as long as they have existed.They are a criminal state warring with any neighbor at random.It will be a good day to see these worthless individuals get a taste of their own medicine. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 442320 05-30-2018 12:20 PM Post: #4 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" Netanyahu = Jared 666 Kushner = Mohamed bin Salman All (corrupt) Zionists Unite. Don't touch IsraHell or else... Drumpf = Israel = Saudi ArabiaNetanyahu = Jared 666 Kushner = Mohamed bin SalmanAll (corrupt) Zionists Unite.Don't touch IsraHell or else... LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 443029 05-30-2018 12:27 PM Post: #5 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" Let the inbreds war it out and pull all American support out of the region. I'd bet my house that if a referendum were polled today in America there'd be an overwhelming amount whom would say to pull support of Israel. We don't give a f*#k about that shithole. Our politicians are bought and paid for by that shithole via lobbyists. And so is our POTUS. Let it burn LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 398305 05-30-2018 12:30 PM Post: #6 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" With what? LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 442313 05-30-2018 12:48 PM Post: #7 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" Unexpected blood moon over Jerusalem . ? Sign of the Apocalypse?Unexpected blood moon over Jerusalem 269346 The Grinch Who Stole LOPmas! User ID: 438668 05-30-2018 12:53 PM Posts: 7,029 Post: #8 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" Hal Turner is so off base, he couldn't get a scoop in an ice cream parlor. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 389303 05-30-2018 12:54 PM Post: #9 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/World+News/Middle+East/Syria http://battleforworld.com/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/ This will start WWIII. They are going to attack Iran. I request a pin. I will provide updates as they come along. These are my three go to sites for breaking news I will put them here for people to follow this news. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 441717 05-30-2018 01:02 PM Post: #10 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" A war paid by America.. A good comment I found in Washington Post.. Americans are duped on Israel so they'll continue to send tax dollars to Israel without complaint. Obama had to pay off Israel with $4 billion military aid per year to get permission to enter the Iran deal. Deal's gone, but our money's still going there. Further, Israel is the only country allowed to use military aid to manufacture arms for export. So Americans are subsidizing Israel's arms industry with their tax dollars. Finally, Israel has universal healthcare. Since money is fungible, that means Americans are paying for Israelis' healthcare while they don't have any themselves. Americans are brainwashed so they'll continue to support all of this. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 442320 05-30-2018 01:02 PM Post: #11 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" LoP Guest Wrote: (05-30-2018 12:54 PM) This will start WWIII. They are going to attack Iran. I request a pin. I will provide updates as they come along. These are my three go to sites for breaking news I will put them here for people to follow this news. http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/World+News/Middle+East/Syria http://battleforworld.com/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/ What has Iran done to you that you hate them so much? How many countries has Iran attacked in the recent (or distant) past? What makes you think the country of Iran should be wiped off the world map? Why are you buying everything that the MSM are telling you? Bomb Iran. Depose Assad. Change the Syrian and Iranian "regimes" to have them replaced by new leaders chosen by Israel and the United States? Establish IMF controlled central banks in both countries. What has Iran done to you that you hate them so much?How many countries has Iran attacked in the recent (or distant) past?What makes you think the country of Iran should be wiped off the world map?Why are you buying everything that the MSM are telling you?Bomb Iran.Depose Assad.Change the Syrian and Iranian "regimes" to have them replaced by new leaders chosen by Israel and the United States?Establish IMF controlled central banks in both countries. PioneerSpirit Registered User User ID: 441578 05-30-2018 01:14 PM Posts: 15,196 Post: #12 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" Doubt it. "They notice that you notice" - Mothman Prophecies A tradition cannot make an historical claim and then refuse to have it evaluated by history LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 441717 05-30-2018 01:19 PM Post: #13 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" PioneerSpirit Wrote: (05-30-2018 01:14 PM) Doubt it. Heck man. Israel is at war 365 days a year... Heck man. Israel is at war 365 days a year... 269346 The Grinch Who Stole LOPmas! User ID: 438668 05-30-2018 01:25 PM Posts: 7,029 Post: #14 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" LoP Guest Wrote: (05-30-2018 01:19 PM) PioneerSpirit Wrote: (05-30-2018 01:14 PM) Doubt it. Heck man. Israel is at war 365 days a year... That's a woman. And I use that term very loosely. That's a woman. And I use that term very loosely. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 441717 05-30-2018 01:27 PM Post: #15 RE: Urgent: Israeli Army Spokesman "Tonight We Are Going To War" 269346 Wrote: (05-30-2018 01:25 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (05-30-2018 01:19 PM) Heck man. Israel is at war 365 days a year... That's a woman. And I use that term very loosely. I'm a druggie, Ok man! I'm a druggie, Ok man! Advertisement Instantly delete email threats for Office 365 With the free app, 365 Threat Monitor, scan all emails as they reach your users' mailboxes to detect ransomware, phishing and spam. Get real-time phone alerts + security breach updates and delete threats instantly with just one click. Download now! Facebook plans to offer members a tool that to prevent tracking of their online activity outside the network. The Clear History feature will allow users to see which websites and applications send Facebook information when they use them, delete the data and prevent Facebook from collecting and storing it in the future. Although that information would not be associated with a user's account, it still would be used in anonymized form to provide website operators and app developers with analytics about Facebook users use of their wares. "It will take a few months to build Clear History," wrote Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan in a Tuesday post. "We'll work with privacy advocates, academics, policymakers and regulators to get their input on our approach, including how we plan to remove identifying information and the rare cases where we need information for security purposes," she said. "We've already started a series of roundtables in cities around the world," Egan added, "and heard specific demands for controls like these at a session we held at our headquarters two weeks ago." Hunting for Wins While Clear History is a step toward securing more privacy for Facebook's members, it remains to be seen how significant it will be. "It's obviously a step in the right direction, but I see it as more of a PR move than a transformation of how Facebook is operating," said Vincent Raynauld, an assistant professor in the department of communication studies at Emerson College. "Facebook at this moment is looking for wins, because its brand has lost some of its shine," he told TechNewsWorld. "This delivers a clear PR win, but additional steps need to be made to truly protect users' privacy." This is a smart move for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, noted John Carroll, a mass communications professor at Boston University. "He's been taking so much heat lately that he needed to do something, as opposed to just saying something," he told TechNewsWorld. Privacy Placebo Clear History is a good first step toward better privacy at Facebook, said Jason I. Hong, an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. However, the greater concern is which parties can see a user's data and what they can do with it. "This feature also puts the burden of privacy on individuals, who are already overwhelmed with the number of features available on Facebook," he told TechNewsWorld. "It gives sites like Facebook an easy excuse for saying that they are doing something about privacy, but the likely scenario is that few people will know about this feature and use it in practice," he pointed out. "I call features like this 'privacy placebos,'" Hong added, "because they make some people feel better about privacy when in practice it often does very little about actually improving privacy." Devil in the Details Until Facebook releases its Clear History tool, it's impossible to gauge how users will react to it. Zuckerberg already has warned that the Facebook experience could be degraded for anyone who activates the feature. "Letting users reset their profiles is a net positive, and echoes similar tools to reset advertising identifiers on mobile OSes," said Joseph W. Jerome, policy counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology. "It's a good alternative to a complete account kill switch," he told TechNewsWorld. "We'll have to see where the setting is located and how easy it is to access." Clear History addresses one particular privacy concern of Facebook users, said Lorrie Faith Cranor, director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon. "However, this does not address privacy concerns people have about other aspects of their Facebook use, such as their interactions with the platform and other users on Facebook itself," she told TechNewsWorld. GDPR Anxiety All social platforms no doubt harbor concerns about the tough privacy rules that will take effect later this month under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, Carroll noted. "They're worried about strong privacy gaining a foothold in Europe and drifting across the Atlantic and landing here," he said. The GDPR, threat of congressional action, and just plain bad PR has had an impact on Facebook, according to Carroll. "It's led them to do more than just say, 'I'm sorry, and I won't do it again.'" Facebook will have to wait and see if Clear History will be sufficient to keep European regulators at bay, said Danny O'Brien, international director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The new GDPR rules coming into force on May 25 require not just these capabilities -- to see, delete and turn off tracking -- but also proactive consent from users," he told TechNewsWorld. "Will Facebook start asking permission to begin this tracking? Or will the default be to keep collecting this data?" 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. Instantly delete email threats for Office 365 With the free app, 365 Threat Monitor, scan all emails as they reach your users' mailboxes to detect ransomware, phishing and spam. Get real-time phone alerts + security breach updates and delete threats instantly with just one click. Download now! There has been a lot of noise in the wireless industry in the last few years. Between the competition among existing wireless carriers and the challenges of new players, the industry has been growing and transforming. However, despite all the chaos, one thing has remained unchanged: Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility are still the top two competitors in the space. These two companies have been leading the industry for more than a decade. In both cases, their corporate parents have begun heading in exciting new directions for growth in order to keep shareholders happy. The Big 4 Wireless Players It started when AT&T acquired DirecTV and created DirecTV NOW, wireless TV or mobile TV. It has been trying to acquire Time Warner as well, which would give it the ability to grow in many other areas going forward. Verizon acquired AOL and Yahoo, and it also has been heading in new directions. It no doubt has noticed AT&T's growth with DirecTV and may head in the same direction, due to its success and in light of the transformation of the entire space. T-Mobile and Sprint have been trying to merge. If they do, they will be able to mount a better challenge to both Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility as the No. 3 competitor. They would combine the marketing of T-Mobile and the spectrum of Sprint. Further, T-Mobile may follow the AT&T DirecTV success story later this year with its own similar service. Mobile Industry Up and Comers Google's Project Fi entered the wireless space a couple of years ago. It resells T-Mobile and Sprint. There has not been much buzz around it lately, but this resale space will continue to grow. It's unclear how well Project Fi has been doing -- Google has been very quiet. Comcast entered wireless one year ago with Xfinity Mobile. It has not been competing like a traditional wireless player. Instead, it has been focusing on wireless as a way to create a more stable customer base. It offers a sticky bundle of services that include pay TV, high-speed Internet and wireless. It's off to a strong start. Charter has been getting ready to follow Comcast into wireless with its own sticky bundle of services. Like Comcast, I don't expect it to really shake up the wireless industry, and it's a year behind Comcast. Altice is another cable television company with the same growth problem. It plans to enter the wireless space next year and very likely will follow the models embraced by both Comcast and Charter. Comcast and Charter will resell Verizon Wireless services. Altice will resell Sprint services. Or by the time they actually get into wireless next year, perhaps the T-Mobile, Sprint merger will have happened, and they will start reselling with T-Mobile. The traditional cable television space, like traditional telephone, has stopped growing. That means players need to create new ways to offer sticky service bundles to solidify their customer base and grow it going forward. Wireless is a great weapon in that new battle. One curious item: What explains the separation of the Comcast, Charter and Altice entries into the wireless space by an entire year each? This makes no sense. The opportunity is real, and it is now. What is taking Charter and Altice so long? Top 2: Their Market to Lose I expect to see other companies entering the wireless sector -- companies like Amazon and Facebook, for example. They tried to enter the space years ago but failed. I think if other companies enter the space successfully, there will be renewed interest from these and other players. With all the activity in the wireless industry, it's easy to lose track of developments. However, one thing is obvious: Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility are still the leaders in the space, and from what I can see, they will dominate the competitive landscape for the foreseeable future. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network. Jeff Kagan has been an ECT News Network columnist since 2010. His focus is on the wireless and telecom industries. He is an independent analyst, consultant and speaker. Email Jeff. In one of the coolest social media campaigns since the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the United Nations launched a global challenge to #BeatPlasticPollution, the theme of World Environment Day on June 5. The movement encourages you to give up single-use plastics and replace them with reusable and sustainable alternatives. Participants are asked to announce their commitment on social media and tag their friends to help spread the message within 24 hours. A growing number of celebrities and environmentalists are taking part in the challenge, including actor Adrian Grenier, who has vigorously campaigned against plastic straws as co-founder of Lonely Whale. "We use 500 million of these suckers every single day in the U.S. alone," the UN Environment Goodwill Ambassador said in his video. "The good news is that people and businesses are making the switch. And it's so easy, all you have to do is switch to an environmentally friendly alternative." Star Trek Into Darkness actress Alice Eve, who gave up plastic tampon applicators for biodegradable alternatives, said in her post: "Plastic is very bad, it never goes away. A little fish eats it, and then a bigger fish eats it, and then we eat it, and it goes into us. By 2050, there will be more plastic in the sea than fish." In his video, former California Governor and staunch environmentalist Arnold Schwarzenegger pledged to terminate plastic spoons in dramatic fashion. "We all have to work very hard to make this a healthy environment, a great environment, and to save our oceans and save the planet," he said. Babe actor and activist James Cromwell noted that a million fossil fuel-based plastic bottles are sold around the world every minute. "Our Earth is in crisis because human activity is destroying the environment. We're addicted to fossil fuels," Cromwell said, adding that we are responsible for the planet's survival. He cleverly tagged EPA head Scott Pruitt, former ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin in his video. "Come on boys, pony up. Do the right thing." Other high-profile participants enthusiastically pledged against using single-use items such as plastic bottles, supermarket bags and drink stirrers, including musician Moby, comedian Rachel Dratch, Harry Potter actor Tom Felton, Flint activist Mari Copeny, extreme swimmer Lewis Pugh, United Nations environment program director Erik Solheim and UN Climate Change executive secretary Patricia Espinosa. To take part in the challenge, share a selfie or video on social media about the disposable plastic product you'll be giving up. You then "tag" three friends, businesses or high-profile people to challenge them to do the same within 24 hours. Remember to include the #BeatPlasticPollution hashtag and mention @UNEnvironment. There a numerous ways to take part in this year's World Environment Day. UN Environment is calling on citizens, companies and civil society groups around the world to organize cleanups and has offered a toolkit and lesson plans on how to beat plastic pollution. From June 2-4, at the inaugural Ocean Heroes Bootcamp in New Orleans, kids ages 11-18 will work together to come up with solutions to fight plastic in their own communities. Their plans will be shared with world leaders at the upcoming G7 Summit in Canada. Although signups for the bootcamp are closed, those interested can participate online. "Our oceans supply up to 70 percent of earth's oxygen. If they die, so does everything and everyone that needs oxygen," said Nickelodeon star and bootcamp participant Aidan Gallagher, the youngest ever UN Environment Goodwill Ambassador. "Protecting our oceans' health should be our top priority." By Nicolas Gunkel Leadership in addressing climate change in the U.S. has shifted away from Washington, DC. Cities across the country are organizing, networking and sharing resources to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and tackle related challenges ranging from air pollution to heat island effects. But group photos at climate change summits typically feature big-city Democratic mayors rubbing shoulders. Republicans are rarer, with a few notable exceptions, such as Kevin Faulconer of San Diego and James Brainard of Carmel, Indiana. Faulconer co-chairs the Sierra Club's Mayors for 100 Percent Clean Energy Initiative, which rallies mayors around a shared commitment to power their cities entirely with clean and renewable energy. Brainard is a longtime champion of the issue within the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Climate Mayors network. In our research at the Boston University Initiative on Cities, we found that large-city Republican mayors shy away from climate network memberships and their associated framing of the problem. But in many cases they advocate locally for policies that help advance climate goals for other reasons, such as fiscal responsibility and public health. In short, the U.S. is making progress on this issue in some surprising places. Climate Network Members Are Mainly Democrats In our initiative's recent report, "Cities Joining Ranks," we systematically reviewed which U.S. cities belong to 10 prominent city climate networks. These networks, often founded by mayors themselves, provide platforms to exchange information, advocate for urban priorities and strengthen city goverments' technical capacities. The networks we assessed included Climate Mayors; We Are Still In, which represents organizations that continue to support action to meet the targets in the Paris agreement; and ICLEI USA. We found a clear partisan divide between Republican and Democrat mayors. On average, Republican-led cities with more than 75,000 residents belong to less than one climate network. In contrast, cities with Democratic mayors belonged to an average of four networks. Among the 100 largest U.S. cities, of which 29 have Republican mayors and 63 have Democrats, Democrat-led cities are more than four times more likely to belong to at least one climate network. This split has implications for city-level climate action. Joining these networks sends a very public signal to constituents about the importance of safeguarding the environment, transitioning to cleaner forms of energy and addressing climate change. Some networks require cities to plan for or implement specific greenhouse gas reduction targets and report on their progress, which means that mayors can be held accountable. Constituents in Republican-Led Cities Support Climate Policies Cities can also reduce their carbon footprints and stay under the radara strategy that is popular with Republican mayors. Taking the findings of the "Cities Joining Ranks" report as a starting point, I explored support for climate policies in Republican-led cities and the level of ambition and transparency in their climate plans. To tackle these questions, I cross-referenced Republican-led cities with data from the Yale Climate Opinion maps, which provide insight into county-level support for four climate policies: Regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant Imposing strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants Funding research into renewable energy sources Requiring utilities to produce 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources In all of the 10 largest U.S. cities that have Republican mayors and also voted Republican in the 2008 presidential election, county-level polling data showed majority support for all four climate policies. Examples included Jacksonville, Florida, and Fort Worth, Texas. None of these cities participated in any of the 10 climate networks that we reviewed in our report. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, CC BY-ND This finding suggests that popular support exists for action on climate change, and that residents of these cities who advocate acting could lobby their elected officials to join climate networks. Indeed, we have found that one of the top three reasons mayors join city policy networks is because it signals their priorities. A mayor of a medium-sized West Coast city told us, "Your constituents are expecting you to represent them, so we are trying politically to be their voice." Mayors join networks to amplify their message, signal priorities to constituents and share information. BU Initiative on Cities, CC BY-ND Climate-Friendly Strategies, But Few Emissions Targets Next I reviewed planning documents from the 29 largest U.S. cities that are led by Republican mayors. Among this group, 15 have developed or are developing concrete goals that guide their efforts to improve local environmental quality. Many of these actions reduce cities' carbon footprints, although they are not primarily framed that way. Rather, these cities most frequently cast targets for achieving energy savings and curbing local air pollution as part of their master plans. Some package them as part of dedicated sustainability strategies. These agendas often evoke images of disrupted ecosystems that need to be conserved, or that endanger human health and quality of life. Some also spotlight cost savings from designing infrastructure to cope with more extreme weather events. In contrast, only seven cities in this group had developed quantitative greenhouse gas reduction targets. Except for Miami, all of them are in California, which requires its cities to align their greenhouse gas reduction targets with state plans. From planning documents it appears that none of the six Californian cities goes far beyond minimum mandated emission reductions set by the state for 2020. Greenhouse gas reductions goals, with baselines, for the seven largest Republican-led cities Nicolas Gunkel, CC BY-ND Watch What They Do, Not What They Say The real measure of Republican mayors taking action on climate change is not the number of networks they join but the policy steps they take, often quietly, at home. While few Republican mayors may attend the next round of sub-national climate summits, many have set out policy agendas that mitigate climate change, without calling a lot of attention to itmuch like a number of rural U.S. communities. Focusing narrowly on policy labels and public commitments by mayors fails to capture the various forms of local climate action, especially in GOP-led cities. Carmel, Indiana Mayor James Brainard has suggested that some of his less-outspoken counterparts may fear a backlash from conservative opinion-makers. "There is a lot of Republicans out there that think like I do. They have been intimidated, to some extent, by the Tea Party and the conservative talk show hosts," Brainard has said. Indeed, studies show that the news environment has become increasingly polarized around accepting or denying climate science. Avoiding explicit mention of climate change is enabling a sizable number of big-city GOP mayors to pursue policies that advance climate goals. Reposted with permission from our media associate The Conversation. By Tim Radford German scientists have shown once again that climate change remains a global problem, with China's climate impact, for instance, hurting the economy of the U.S. Disastrous floodinglikely to increase as the world warms, and ever more water enters the atmospherein one country could reverberate in ways that could harm another nation's economy. More precisely, China alone could experience a total of $380 billion in economic losses over the next 20 years: this adds up to about 5 percent of the nation's annual economic output. About $175 billion of total losses could be attributed to future climate changeand as these losses are passed down the global trade and supply network, the U.S. and the European Union could be most affected. If so, river flooding in China aloneaside from the ever-greater extremes of heat and windstorm that are predicted to arrive with higher temperaturescould bring U.S. losses of up to $170 billion in the next 20 years. "The EU will suffer less from indirect losses caused by climate-related flooding in China due to its even trade balance. They will suffer when flooded regions in China temporarily fail to deliver, for instance, parts that European companies need for their production, but on the other hand Europe will profit from filling climate-induced production gaps in China by exporting goods to Asia. "This yields the European economy currently more climate-prepared for the future," said Sven Norman Willner, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who led the study. "In contrast, the U.S. imports much more from China than it exports to this country. This leaves the U.S. more susceptible to climate-related risks of economic losses passed down along the global supply and trade chain." He and his co-authors report in Nature Climate Change that they took a look at the economic challenge for the world as a whole in the limited case of river flooding: damage caused by human-induced climate change, as a consequence of the combustion of fossil fuels at a rate that has already begun to change the chemistry of the atmosphere, could become a significant factor in the global economy, and river flooding has always been a problem. Heat Rises by 1C But as temperatures riseand they have already risen by a global average of about 1C in the last century, as ever more greenhouse gases have reached the atmosphereso does evaporation, and so does the capacity of the atmosphere to hold moisture, which must eventually fall as rain. The researchers looked at projections of near-future flood hazards on a regional scale that humans could expect to see on the basis of greenhouse gases already emitted. They then incorporated what is already known about economic network response to river flooding and its effects, taking into account the dynamics of international trade. In research of this kind, the Potsdam Institute has what racing tipsters call "form." One of the researchers, Anders Levermann, has already warned that greenhouse gases are forcing up sea levels; that warming carries with it global economic threats; and that the numbers of humans at risk from the worst of the future floods are rising. The news is not all bad: climate change could also bring more rain to the countries of the African Sahel, but the same changes could mean ever higher levels of hurricane damage in the U.S. Complicated Prospect The latest study has its own complexities: much depends on the course of international trade and the capacity of those countries not flooded to make good the shortfalls that follow flood disasters in one river system. In essence, international relations and natural hazard vulnerabilities have become entangled. The entanglement remains, even though America's President Trump has imposed tariffs to protect U.S. industry. Unless nations adapt further, climate change will accelerate flood losses worldwide by about 15 percent, to a global total of $600 billion within the next two decades. China's losses could increase by 82 percent. America will still feel the shock, the researchers say. "We find that the intensification of the mutual trade relation with China leaves the EU better prepared against production losses in Asia than the U.S. The prospect that the U.S. will be worse off can be traced back to the fact that it is importing more products from China than it is exporting," said professor Levermann. "Interestingly, such an unbalanced trade relation might be an economic risk for the U.S. when it comes to climate-related economic losses. In the end, Trump's tariffs might impede climate-proofing the U.S. economy." He continued: "Trump's tariff sanctions are likely to leave the U.S. economy even more vulnerable to climate change. As our study suggests, under climate change, the more reasonable strategy is a well-balanced economic connectivity, because it allows to compensate economic damages from unexpected weather eventsof which we expect more in the future." Reposted with permission from our media associate Climate News Network. By Jon Queally Thirty-nine people were arrested in California on Tuesday after approximately 500 animal rights activists organized by the Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) network staged a non-violent vigil and attempted a rescue operation at an industrial egg facility in the town of Petaluma. Marching outside the farm entrance carrying flowers and denouncing the "horrific cruelty" they say takes place within the facility, the group was confronted by local police who barred them from entering and later arrested those who tried. The group cited this video footage as evidence that Sunrise Farmsone of the region's largest egg farms and which provides eggs to Amazon-owned Whole Foods grocery chainis keeping the birds in cruel and unhealthy confinement. "Americans do not want to see animals exploited in our food system," former Northwestern law professor and DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung said. "But when we have gone to authorities or corporations like Amazon with absolutely horrific footage of cruelty, no action has been taken." Along with Hsuingalready facing the potential of decades in prison for previous investigations and similar rescue operationsdozens of other activists were arrested by local law enforcement after, according to the group, they attempted to enter the farm and access one of the industrial chicken sheds to document conditions and demand the transfer of sick or mistreated birds to the city animal shelter. As the local Press Democrat reported: Organizers claim the egg farm is an example of a systemic pattern of criminal animal abuse in California that isn't being addressed by either the justice system or by state and local animal welfare agencies. "When the law is failing us, consumers and individuals have the right, and even the obligation, to reveal what's happening behind closed doors," said Cassie King, one of the organizers arrested Tuesday. King maintained that California law expressly allows the protesters the right to provide aid and care to sick and injured animals and to document violations of the state's animal cruelty laws. "These birds are living creatures, not things, but Amazon and other major retailers treat them like commodities,"DxE lead investigator Priya Sawhney said. "Whether it's foie gras or fur or factory farms, Amazon is shipping cruelty into millions of households across the world." Hsiung, who was ultimately one of those arrested, said that when more Americans see "what's happening behind the doors of factory farms, they know it's against their values." But, he added, "as long as corporations control our food systemincluding sending whistleblowers to prisonwe won't have a food system with integrity." He concluded by saying he hopes Tuesday's demonstration "will chip away at their power." Reposted with permission from our media associate Common Dreams. Endangered whale shark fins were found smuggled into a shipment sent via Singapore Airlines to Hong Kong in May, activist group Sea Shepherd Global announced Wednesday. The fins from the endangered species were hidden within legal fins in a 989 kilogram (approximately 2,180 pound) shipment that traveled from Colombo, Sri Lanka through Singapore to Hong Kong, which is one of the largest shark fin trading centers in the world, AFP reported. Singapore Airlines, which bans the shipment of shark fins, said in an email statement Wednesday reported by Reuters that the shipment had slipped past the airline's notice because it was labeled "Dry Seafood." "Singapore Airlines are yet another victim of these shark fin smugglers, who deceived the airline by declaring the shipment as 'dried seafood' to skirt the airline's internal booking checks," Asia director for Sea Shepherd Global Gary Stokes told AFP. According to Reuters, Stokes discovered the endangered fins hidden in the shipment. Singapore Airlines has since blacklisted the shipper and alerted employees to check any other shipments labeled "dry seafood." Hong Kong allows the import of shark fins, which are served in a jelly-like soup believed to have health benefits. Most of the fins imported to Hong Kong are then sent on to mainland China, according to AFP. Fins from species on the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species are supposed to be accompanied by a special permit, Reuters reported. Activists have succeeding in halving the number of shark fins entering Hong Kong in the past 10 years, but the trade still poses a danger to vulnerable shark species. According to the World Wildlife Fund, more than 70 million sharks are killed each year and a quarter of species are threatened with extinction. The latest discovery comes a little over a year after a three-month investigation by Sea Shepherd revealed that shark fins from endangered species like hammerhead and oceanic whitetip sharks were entering Hong Kong despite bans imposed by shipping lines and airline cargo companies. Smugglers used similar tactics of mislabeling shipments as "seafood," "dried seafood" or "dried goods" to bypass bans by Maersk, Virgin and Cathay Pacific. At the time, all three companies pledged to work with Sea Shepherd to combat smuggling. Maersk, the world's largest shipping company, also became the first to ban shark fin cargo in 2010. Cathay Pacific was the first airline to ban unsustainable shark products in 2012, and banned shark fins altogether in 2016. Now, more than 30 airlines and nearly 20 shipping lines have implemented similar bans, Alex Hofford of WildAid said. About 92 percent of shark fins enter Hong Kong by sea and 8 percent by plane. (Photo: myswitzerland)The Winterthur mosque's minarets show in the Swiss city's skyline. A mosque in the northern Swiss city of Winterthur near Zurich that has faced accusations of allowing hate preaching in the past will close its doors for good after the holy month of Ramadan ends on June 24. Atef Sahnoun, the president of the An'Nur cultural association that runs the mosque, confirmed the closure to the SonntagsBlick newspaper, according to swissinfo, a service of the Swiss national broadcaster. Sahnoun told Blick the association had been unable to find new premises. In addition the mosque has been stricken by financial problems and is leaderless, with no one willing to take on the presidency, said the paper. But public pressure may also have contributed to the closure of the mosque since it became the subject of allegations of allowing radicalization and hate speech by attendees. The mosque was originally slated to close by the end of 2016, as the company that owned the property refused to renew the long-term lease, but the place a worship gained a temporary extension after a meeting in January. The mosque was raided in November 2016, after its Imam was accused of having called on worshippers to murder other Muslims who refused to take part in communal prayers. The umbrella association of Islamic organizations in Zurich (VIOZ) had suspended the mosque after the incident. In an interview on the national broadcaster SRF in December, the mosque's president asserted that keeping tabs on worshippers who may be problematic is not part of his job. He also denied that prayers being held at the mosque were radical in nature. Around 350,000 and 400,000 Muslims live in Switzerland, around 12 percent of whom are Swiss citizens. They represent a diverse community divided along ethnic and linguistic lines with around 80 percent originating from the Balkans region and Turkey. Around 12-15 percent are said to actively practice their faith by regularly visiting one of about 250 mosques. These are managed by Islamic communities which are organized mostly as small private associations as well as a small number of foundations. While Muslims in Switzerland are generally well integrated, recent charges of radicalization in mosques in Winterthur and Geneva have led to questions about the surveillance of mosques, external influence and funding. Saida Keller-Messahli, the president of Forum for a Progressive Islam, says the situation in Switzerland is "alarming." "Huge sums of money from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Turkey are flowing to Switzerland," she told the NZZ newspaper. She claimed the Saudi-funded Muslim World League, an NGO that promotes the spread of Islam, for example, supports at least 30 Albanian mosques where Salafist ideas are preached. In November, the umbrella association of Islamic organizations in Zurich (VIOZ) suspended the troubled Winthertur mosque that was raided by police. An imam is suspected of inciting violence and became the subject of a criminal investigation. The national spotlight on the strikes and walkouts this spring has been on the teachers themselves. But in the shadows was another group thats just as critical for keeping schools running: support staff. Often overlooked in the broader public discourse, these workers, including instructional aides and paraprofessionals, sometimes had more at stake in the walkouts than full-time teachers. When schools were closed, many didnt get paid. Anytime we hear about how bad conditions are for teachers in these states, theyre worse for support staff, said Rebecca Kolins Givan, an associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Theyre really struggling. Theres a lot of school support staff who are eligible for Medicaid, who are eligible for food stamps, who are working multiple other jobs in addition to their school job to make ends meet. The goals of much of the teacher activism this springhigher wages, more school fundingare shared by support employees, especially paraprofessional educators. Those workers, who do not all have college degrees, are working directly with students, side-by-side with the teachers. They give individual attention to students, many of whom have special needs. In states with ballooning class sizes and fewer resources, the paraeducators help keep the classroom running smoothly. The joke going around is were a little bit crazy, because we do this job for nothing, said Rachel McCartney, a teachers assistant in a high school special education class in Oklahoma. She helps students with physical disabilities do their schoolwork, use the bathroom, and eat lunch. An average paycheck for two weeks of work, she said, is about $550 after taxes. During the nine-day statewide walkout, McCartney took unpaid time off to head to the state Capitol and fight for more education funding. She joined thousands of other support staff in Oklahoma, Arizona, and West Virginiamany of whom were sacrificing their paychecks to stand up for their profession. Still others stayed on the sidelines during the walkouts, working in empty school buildings while they waited to hear whether they would receive a pay raise. Paraeducator Salaries The average annual wage for full-time teachers assistants is $27,950. But in the states with large-scale walkouts this spring, teachers assistants make less than the national average. Arizona: $24,910 West Virginia: $24,640 Oklahoma: $20,090 Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017 In West Virginia, educators ultimately secured a 5 percent across-the-board pay raise for teachers, school service personnel, and other state employees. In Oklahoma, teachers received an average $6,100 pay raise, while school support personnel got $1,250 more per year. In Arizona, teachers received a 20 percent pay raise over three years. But instead of designating money for pay increases for other staff members, the state allocated $371 million over five years$100 million next school yearto school districts. Districts have the flexibility to use the money to update curriculum, modernize classroom technology, or increase support staff salaries. That resolution frustrated many paraeducators in Arizona, including Allison Evans, who was working as an instructional assistant in Mesa, making $11.18 an hour. Evans said she felt like support staff lost a weeks worth of wages for what turned out to be no guarantee of a sizeable raise. I know that kids need better textbooks. I know that roofs have holes in them and need to be repaired, she said. And while those should be priorities, you have to pay your staff, too, she said. Theres no telling how much money is going to be left over, and I know the employees are going to be the end of the list. Frustrations, Sacrifices For teachers, school closures were generally treated as a sort of snow day, Kolins Givan said: They may have to make up a few days at the end of the school year, but their salaries werent affected. But for many paraeducators, the impacts were less cut and dried. While every district handled the walkout differently and some tried to continue to pay their support personnel, it wasnt always feasible. And it became harder as the walkouts stretched on. Loretta Martin, an English-language development technician in the Flowing Wells school district outside of Tucson, Ariz., said she ultimately lost one days worth of wages during the strike. Her district let support staff work during the first couple days of the walkout. The district closed entirely the second week, but officials are letting employees make up two days at the end of the school year. The lost income was still a bit of a financial hit, Martin said, but she was willing to make the sacrifice. Her husband is a retired teacher, and she wants more funding for the students she works with. The momentum of this movement seems to be strong, and I want to do whatever I can for it, she said. It was worth it for me. Evans of Arizona, who had hoped to become a special education teacher, also supported the movements goals. But losing a weeks worth of income was difficult. She had to pick up extra hours at her part-time job as a respite caregiver. She was counting on being able to make up the hours from the strike at the end of the school year, but district officials eventually decided to alter school hours instead of adding additional days to the calendar. I was OK with putting a pause on my paycheck. ... I was willing to hold out as long as I could, as long as I knew I wouldnt be losing pay [in the long-term], Evans said. She has since quit her job as an instructional aide and is no longer sure she wants to become a teacher. Now, shes focusing on her job as a caregiver, which pays $14 an hournearly $3 an hour more than she made at school. Living Paycheck to Paycheck For district officials, whether to continue paying support staff was one of the most pressing questions during the work stoppages. In Oklahoma, Tulsa school district officials, who supported the strike, were able to keep support staff employed for the first week of the nine-day walkout. The second week, however, the money ran out. The first week was really critical for us, because we knew that support staff members had just come off spring break and a couple of other unpaid holidays, said Devin Fletcher, the districts chief talent and learning officer. It was really important that we tried to bridge a gap, because we knew that many of our employees are living paycheck to paycheck. The district could not use federal funds to pay employees during the walkout due to restrictions, Fletcher saidso officials had to tap into other funding streams, including donations from community organizations. During the first week, many support personnel, like janitors and bus drivers, were doing maintenance work thats traditionally done over the summer, he said. Paraeducators were sent to community centers and churches that opened as makeshift child-care facilities. We deployed our people to where our students were to ensure we were creating holistic care while they were there, Fletcher said. The second week of the walkout, Fletcher said some community centers hired teachers aides to keep working there. Local communities found other ways as well to chip in and help hourly staff during the walkouts. Several schools in Oklahoma and Arizona held canned food drives or collected donations for support staff. At Arcadia High School in Phoenix, officials couldnt pay the schools 22 classified staff members, who include paraprofessionals, instructional aides, and cafeteria workers, during the six days of the strike. The day before schools closed, teachers took up a collection for the classified staff to help tide them over. It was a gesture [that said], Were about to go on a walkout, youre not going to get paid because of our actions. Please know were thinking of you, Principal Todd Stevens said. After the walkout concluded, the school partnered with a local brewery to hold a benefit concert, with proceeds going to the classified staff. And the parent-teacher organization started an online crowdfunding campaign, raising over $4,000 to give to these school workers. It was so nice to be able to support those people, Stevens said. Certainly in Arizona, some of the education funds will end up in the hands of those classified staff, but in the short-term, they were the most negatively affected. Brooke Barnett, the principals secretary at Jackson Elementary School in Norman, Okla., said her school district paid support staff during the walkout and did not require them to come into work. Instead, the entire staff is making up the time they missed by working longer days and staying on into June. That was a real blessing. It would have been absolutely a financial hardship [to not be paid for two weeks], Barnett said. She was able to go down to the state Capitol almost every day of the walkout, bringing her children with her. She wanted to raise awareness of the low pay and tough working conditions that both teachers and support staff endure, she said. I appreciate the fact that throughout the entire conversation, support staff was always included, Barnett said. We know how important and valuable the teachers are ... and they value the support staff as well. It seems pretty likely that the Trump administration will revise or rescind an Obama-era directive intended to address racial disparities in school disciplinary actions. The Dear Colleague letter in question, issued by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice in 2014, has been the subject of much debate of late. It stated that school districts could be investigated and found guilty of violating students civil rights when doling out punishments, even if the discipline policies were race-neutral and implemented in even-handed ways (in other words, even if there was no evidence of discriminatory treatment of students). Yet, the latest federal discipline data, released earlier this month, show that African-American students continue to be disciplined at higher rates than white students. While U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos held roundtable meetings with lawmakers in April to hear debates about the guidance from both sides, there is no timeline for the administrations final decision. But school discipline reform did not begin with President Barack Obama, and it wont end with President Donald Trump. Efforts for change have been gaining steam for years, which legislatures and school boards have increasingly codified into laws and practices at state and local levels. As an education reform leader who has been studying and writing about school discipline for years, I am concerned by the lack of common sense and evidence-based consensus in this realm. If the Trump administration makes its move to revise or rescind, local education leaders will regain discretion over how to balance discipline with safety and order in the classroom. Regardless of what happens at the federal level, school discipline brings into play a number of important but often competing goals for school districts: eliminating discrimination, protecting the learning time of both disruptive students and their well-behaved peers, upholding high expectations for students, empathizing with traumatized students, and defending the authority of teachers. School discipline reform did not begin with President Barack Obama, and it won't end with President Donald Trump." With those competing values in mind, here are seven suggestions (which are by no means a comprehensive list) for superintendents and district-level administrators to consider for their discipline policies: DO worry about racial discrimination and implicit bias when determining punishments for students who misbehave. Advocates for fair school discipline are right to be alarmed by the dramatic racial disparities. Schools nationwide suspended 2.7 million students in 2015-16100,000 fewer students than 2013-14. But African-American male students represented a quarter of all students who received an out-of-school suspension in 2015-16, despite making up only 8 percent of enrollment. Multiple studies have found that educator bias explains some of these disparities. Furthermore, it is clearly against the lawand has been for half a centuryfor districts to treat students differently based on their race. Any differential treatment will remain illegal, even if the Trump administration does rescind federal guidance. DONT assume that racial bias alone explains disparities in discipline rates. The same studies that find evidence of racial bias in disciplinary actions also find that such bias only explains some of the disparities. Differences in student behavior are also a major factor. Thats not because of the race of the students, but because, tragically, different racial groups face different kinds and degrees of trauma, abuse, and deprivation, many of them associated with poverty. Students themselves even report such differences. On federal surveys, twice as many African-American students report getting into fights at school as white students. It would be a miracle if childrens vastly different experiences didnt result in behavioral differences in school. DO show empathy for kids whose misbehavior is due to difficult life circumstances. Educators need to understand the truly tough circumstances that some children face outside of school and do their best to help them cope. Identifying appropriate mental-health supports is particularly important. Addressing the underlying causes of student misbehavior can go a long way toward nipping it in the bud. DONT engage in the soft bigotry of low expectations. Its just as important for empathy not to turn into excuses for behavior that is out of line or compromises students academic potential. All students need to learn how to control their impulses and behave in acceptable ways, as well as cultivate an attitude that reflects motivation and engagement. DO find ways to address misbehavior that lead to positive changes and protect opportunities to learn. Long suspensions reduce learning time for those being punished and may not improve their behavior. Its worth trying in-school suspension for nonviolent offenses, with supports for students so they can behave better and continue learning the valuable skills and knowledge that schools exist to teach them. DONT just send disruptive kids back to their classrooms. Those who break rules cant be our exclusive concern; their classmates also have the right to learn. We must protect their learning environment to stay on track and close achievement gaps. Research also shows what common sense indicates : One or two disruptive students can erode the learning of an entire classroom. It should alarm us that in 2015-16, 43 percent of educators reported classroom misbehavior that affects their ability to teach students , according to the National Center for Education Statistics. DO address your suspension factories. A 2013 report by researchers at The Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that thousands of public schools suspend more than a quarter of their students every year. And that is still the case for too many schools todaya sign that they are careening out of control on disciplinary measures. While its bad to ignore schools with such high rates of suspensions, its arguably worse to respond by simply commanding that they get their numbers down without providing massive amounts of support. School discipline presents enormous challenges for education leaders. Getting it right takes balance, judgment, and wisdom. Theres not much of that in Washington these days, but thankfully it still exists in abundance across our nations schools. Lets make our decisions wisely. It is the first meeting of our Fearless Females womens empowerment club for the 2012-13 school year. The students and I want to recruit new members, so we are making colorful posters to hang in the hallways. We chat as we color. Then the schoolwide PA system beeps to signal an announcement, and we hear our principals urgent voice. This is a lockdown. Everyone, lock down now. At Joliet Central High School in Illinois, where I teach English, we have lockdown drills twice a year. But this doesnt feel like a rehearsal. Drills dont happen after school. Drills dont start with the breathless voice of the principal. This is not a drill. One student, Elizabeth, is among those hiding behind my desk. She rapidly scrolls through her cellphone as we wait. I whisper to her not to post anything or text anyone that could give away our location. She shakes her head that she wont. I just want to see if anyone is posting about whats going on, she types into her phone. She doesnt want anyone to hear us and know where we are. Smart kid. Smarter than she has to be. I try to keep my facial expression measured so as not to show the students I am terrified. The lockdown is the longest 25 minutes of my life. But we emerge unharmed. I find out later that a student had brought a gun on to school grounds because another student was trying to fight him. The next day, as I walk into school, I look up. The bullet hole is in the middle of a glass panea visible battle scar. A classrooms distance to the right and it would have been our window, Elizabeth remarks later. We got lucky. The Problem Is Everywhere Gun violence in communities has been a problem for a long time. In the United States, according to research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 33,000 people die each year as a result of gun violence. In Chicago, as of May, 890 people have been shot this year alone. Worse, this is happening in schools. So many schools. Seventeen dead in Parkland, Fla. Just last week, 10 dead in Santa Fe, Texas. Thirteen K-12 school shootings and counting in 2018. This is everywhere. Every town. Our school is about 40 miles away from Chicago, and many of our students have experienced gun violence in their daily lives. We do not have real lockdowns often, but gun violence is present in our community. The false alarms are just as terrifying as real threats. In March, during our schools walkout to protest gun violence and commemorate the victims of the February 14 Parkland shooting, a student yelled, How many of you have been affected by gun violence? Hundreds of students fell silent. Almost everyone raised their hands. We teachers watch helplessly as the body count rises, waiting for the politicians to take action. Students walk out of school in protest. Their voices are getting louder; some legislators are paying attention. Since the Parkland shooting, 14 states have tightened gun control laws or attempted to increase school safety, and some local municipalities have either passed or challenged laws pertaining to gun control. But progress is slow. Changing Our Own Luck No student or teacher in my school has died during a lockdown. The school was hit instead of the shooters target. But I cant call that luck. It was decidedly unlucky that a student decided to bring a gun to a fight in the first place. It seems like thats the kind of bad luck that we should change. Sheer luck should not be what keeps our students from being shot. There should be calculated measures in place to avoid these senseless deaths: stricter background checks, gun bans for those convicted of domestic violence, research for smart guns that will fire only after sensing an owners fingerprint, and no sales to individuals under 21. Those would be places to start. I dont want to take away hunting tools or hobbies. But I do want to keep guns out of the hands of people who will bring them to school parking lots or classrooms or movie theaters or concerts or places of worship. I want to keep them out of the hands of gang members and bullied teenagers and mass shooters. It seems the best way to prevent a tragedy is not to prepare teachers with lockdowns and their own weaponsas some politicians have suggested but to take the weapons away from the would-be perpetrators. No gun, no tragedy. Simple logic. Teachers Are Ready for a Change Months after the lockdown, my students and I are in another club meeting. The PA system beeps. The front desk is looking for a student. Elizabeth lets out an audible sigh. I dont think Ill ever get over that. Every time the PA system sounds, I get worried, she says. Theres nothing I can say, because it happens to me, too. The emotional scars run deep, and our situation does not even come close to the trauma and anguish in Santa Fe and Parkland and Sandy Hook and Columbine and so many other places. I cannot imagine how those students, teachers, and parents feel. I want to live to see a time when there is no need for lockdowns, no senseless and violent deaths, and no student who is afraid to attend school. It may seem like a lofty dream, but I believe it can happen. Elizabeth and I are ready for a change. We are ready to let out a sigh of relief. I think most of the nation is, too. Despite isolated job cuts, such as those announced by Globalfoundries, the semiconductor industry in Saxony is recording a steady increase in jobs. The semiconductor industry in Saxony is growing and employs more and more people, according to the industry association Silicon Saxony. "Since 2012, the number of jobs has risen continuously," Robert Weichert of the Silicon Saxony industry association said to the German Press Agency. According to the latest figures from 2016, around 26,000 people were employed in the semiconductor industry in 2012 the figure was around 21,000. The microchips produced there are used, for example, for computers, smartphones or in cars. Saxony is one of the largest microelectronics locations in Europe. Despite individual job cuts announced since 2012, as at chip manufacturer Globalfoundries in October 2015, at the bottom line, there was a continuous, slight growth in the semiconductor industry, Weichert continued. This Tuesday, around 300 representatives from industry, business and science will meet in Dresden for the 13th "Silicon Saxony Day". The industry meeting will be about the Internet of Things, where products and objects can exchange information with each other. This is increasingly changing industrial production. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Verwandte Artikel Infineon Technologies AG, INFINEON Technologies AG Neubiberg, Globalfoundries, GLOBALFOUNDRIES Europe Ltd. TT visitors' bikes stolen in Liverpool The bikers arrived on the Island as foot passengers after their motorcycles were stolen in Liverpool. Two TT visitors arrived on the Island without their bikes after thieves stole their motorcycles in Liverpool. The duo arrived in Douglas as foot passengers, despite Merseyside Police running an operation in a bid to reduce bike thefts. The Island's police are urging those travelling through the city to be vigilant and do all they can to prevent their machines from being stolen. The destination for the royal couple's honeymoon has been revealed. It's now known where Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will celebrate their newlywed status. Heading North The location for their honeymoon vacation has been kept tightly under wraps for the past few weeks, with everywhere from Africa to Ireland floated as a possibility for the newly anointed Duke and Duchess of Sussex. According to TMZ, the royals are headed north of the border for their romantic holiday, to a spot with a royal reputation of its own. Prince Harry and Markle are headed to Alberta, Canada. Or, more accurately, to the picturesque Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, for their post-wedding getaway. Rather than some rink-dink cabin like normal folks, however, they'll be staying at the 6,000 sq. ft. Outlook Cabin, otherwise known as the Royal Retreat. Their arrival date is not yet known, but both British and Canadian security will be on hand to keep them safe once they do. The Ideal Location The spot is considered a Canadian paradise, tucked away from civilization in the middle of Jasper National Park. It also has a lengthy history of both famous and royal guests. Back in 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth stayed in the luxurious 6-bedroom cabin. Likewise, the current Queen and Prince Philip visited in June 2005. Celeb guests include Sir Anthony Hopkins, John Travolta, and Bill Gates. It's also where the 1954 film River of No Return, starring Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum, was filmed. The description of the cabin is quite awe-inspiring, and seems fit for a royal couple. "Supreme comfort is present in every detail of the sumptuously comfortable bedrooms, enclosed verandas and majestic stone fireplace that warms both the dining room and great room -- the perfect place to ... celebrate a special occasion," reads the website. Making Their Markle Prince Harry and Markle got hitched on May 19 at St. George's Chapel, at Windsor Castle. The royal wedding was watched by over 29 million people worldwide. Their original plan was to head for Namibia, in Africa, where both Harry and Markle have roots. However, security concerns forced them to choose an alternative destination. Prince Harry has frequently described Africa as a second home. It's also where he and his now-wife shared their first-ever vacation together as a couple. Canada is significant to the couple, too. Former Suits star Markle lived in Toronto for seven years while filming the hit legal drama. The pair also made their first official public appearance together at the 2017 Invictus Games there. Brody Jenner is preparing to tie the knot with his partner. A couple of his family members won't be in attendance for the big day. Kylie And Kendall Jenner Didn't Bother To Respond The Hills alum is getting hitched in Nihi, Sumba Island, to fiancee Kaitlynn Carter. However, he noted that at least two members of his famous extended family won't be there to celebrate with them. "My two little sisters, we never even heard from them. They never even RSVP'd I don't think," revealed the 34-year-old to PEOPLE, referring to half-sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner. Brody acknowledged that he and his soon-to-be wife would love to have them to be there, but they haven't received any response. "We sent them an invite but we just never heard anything back. ... Well, they'll be missed," he said. Sharing The Happy Moments Although 22-year-old Kendall and 20-year-old Kylie have ignored their wedding invites, one person who responded is Caitlyn Jenner. A source confirmed that the elder Jenner has work commitments that unfortunately can't be changed. Things are good between the two of them, at least, with Olympian and trans rights activist Caitlyn, who's planning to throw a big party for her son and his new wife once they return home to California. Brandon, brother and best man to Brody and their mother Linda Thompson are all already on the Indonesian island, getting ready to celebrate. Thompson took to Instagram Monday to share how much fun they were having embracing the culture on #JennerIsland. Reality star Brody proposed to his 29-year-old model girlfriend in May 2016 after two years of dating. "I couldn't be more in love with this woman and I can't wait to spend the rest of my life with her," Brody gushed at the time. Ongoing Family Drama Back in February, Brody confirmed he hadn't spent any quality time with Kylie in a couple years. The youngest member of the extended Kardashian-Jenner clan gave birth to her first child, daughter Stormi, on Feb. 1. Brody claimed at the time he hadn't even known she was pregnant. Caitlyn, meanwhile, has been hugely involved in her son's relationship, she even attended Carter's bridal shower in L.A. last month. She shared a post on Instagram at the time that it was more fun than a bachelor party. It's unclear why Kendall and Kylie opted not to attend Brody's nuptials. However, there's a reportedly planned Los Angeles-based reception, so they may be looking to celebrate with him there instead. Kylie was last spotted with baby daddy Travis Scott, sitting courtside at the Houston Rockets game this past Monday. Kendall, on the other hand, spent a quiet Memorial Day with sister Kourtney Kardashian and some friends. America Ferrera has just become a mother. The actress announced on Instagram that her first child, a little boy, has been born. Welcome To The Family The Golden Globe-winner shared the happy news on social media on Tuesday. The baby is her first child with husband Ryan Piers Williams. In the post, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants star revealed the little guy's name, as well as his all-important nickname. "When 2 become 3... Welcome Sebastian Piers Williams -- aka Baz!" she wrote, alongside an adorable photo of the baby's little foot. Ferrera signed off the post by gushing that she, Piers Williams, and their new little bundle of joy are all doing great and are completely in love with each other. Sharing The Love The happy couple shared the news that they were expecting during the New Year. Donning colorful 2018 glasses, and brandishing a teeny onesie, the Superstore actress and her hubby of almost seven years posted a romantic snap on Instagram. The caption revealed they'd soon have one more face to kiss later this year. Little Sebastian arrived right on schedule, just a few weeks from his parents' wedding anniversary on June 27. The happy couple, who have been sweethearts since they met in college at the University of Southern California, got hitched back in 2011, in Chappaqua, New York. Piers Williams cast Ferrera in one of his student films, and the rest is history. Celebrating With Her Sisterhood Ferrera's baby boy has officially turned the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants cast into a sisterhood of moms as all four leads -- Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, Blake Lively, and Alexis Bledel -- are now mothers. They all posed with her in a photo shortly after Ferrera announced her pregnancy, to share in the good news. Tamblyn was present at Ferrera's baby shower last month, which she celebrated with her so-called "village of women." The 33-year-old celebrated her big news at Beauty & Essex Los Angeles with guests including Ugly Betty co-stars Ana Ortiz and Mark Indelicato. She was quick to note there were no "poopie diaper" games being played on the day, and that it was a mostly classy affair. Ferrera also posed for a sweet group photo with her Superstore colleagues including Ben Feldman, Kelly Stables, Nichole Bloom, Colton Dunn, Kaliko Kauahi, Nico Santos, and Lauren Ash. The hit NBC comedy debuted in 2015. It follows a group of hapless employees working at a fictional big-box store in St. Louis, Missouri. Primarily based on archival research, especially an unpublished diary of Nicobarese stalwart leader John Richardson, this article gives a glimpse of the sufferings that the Nicobarese endured under the Japanese colonial regime during World War II. The regime exposed the indigenes to war, slavery, torture, and executions. At the same time it engendered leadership in the Nicobar Islands which consolidated these historically isolated people into a community and ended their prolonged economic and sexual exploitation. Always Tell the Truth, 2018-04-27 Maeci Minister Alfano met the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the sidelines of the meeting of NATO Ministers of Foreign Affairs in Brussels. Minister Alfano reaffirmed the centrality of the traditional relations between Italy and the United States of America. The meeting focused on NATO-Russia relations, defence spending and Iran, and also the latest developments in the Korean dossier. "Today's meeting between North and South Korean leaders represents an encouraging sign of detente, which I trust will be followed by more concrete progress," said the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Angelino Alfano. "I sincerely hope that, thanks to Washington's strong impulse and leadership, and the determination of the international community as a whole, this will be a real step forward towards the goal of a complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula." 2018-05-04 Maeci I had a very constructive and fruitful talk with my fellow colleague, Vargas Maldonado, during his visit to Rome at the Italian-Latin America Institute for the high-level meeting on education at the Forum Italy-SICA, the Central American Integration System, currently chaired by the Dominican Republic. Relations between Italy and the Dominican Republic are historical and strong and founded on fruitful political dialogue. It is with much conviction that I decided to reopen the Italian Embassy in Santo Domingo in February 2017. In this connection, we are very interested in promoting stronger cooperation in the economic field especially in the energy and water sectors and in security and the fight against organised crime, said Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Angelino Alfano, after meeting today the Dominican Minister of Foreign Affairs, Miguel Octavio Vargas Maldonado. 2018-05-30 Maeci The Permanent Conference on Political Issues in the Framework of the Negotiation Process for the Settlement of Transnistria, which took place on 29 and 30 May in Rome, closed with a commitment to finalise all aspects of the package of eight. It makes 2018 a historic year for Chisinau and Tiraspol, said the OSCE Special Representative, Franco Frattini. The Rome Protocol was signed by all the Parties participating in the Conference in the 5+2 format (Moldova, Transnistria, the OSCE, Ukraine, the Russian Federation, the EU and the U.S. as observers). The Protocol outlines timelines and a roadmap to ensure the rapid finalisation of the eight priorities, which the Parties identified a year ago. All the participants in the Conference acknowledged the commitment of the Parties in implementing the agreements signed on the occasion of the previous talks in Vienna and Berlin. This "gives me confidence that the remaining priorities related to telecommunications, criminal cases and the freedom of movement will be achieved by the Parties by the end of the year, if not sooner, said Franco Frattini. The agreement reached on the participation of vehicles from Transnistria in international traffic was applauded. The commitment on the use of farmlands in the Dubasari district and the implementation of the licence plate agreement" was also reconfirmed. Moreover, agreements are underway regarding the functioning of Latin-script schools, and the opening of the Gura-BiculuiBychok bridge. Ambassador Michael Scanlan, Head of the OSCE Mission to Moldova, said: I am confident the Sides will continue this results-oriented approach over the coming months, as direct negotiations between the Parties in Chisinau and Tiraspol facilitated by the OSCE Mission move beyond the package of eight to ensure continued progress in the settlement process. The goal of the 5+2 talks is to develop a comprehensive settlement based on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Moldova within its internationally recognized borders, with a special status for Transnistria within Moldova. 2018-05-02 Maeci Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Angelino Alfano, said: We firmly condemn the terrorist attack carried out this morning in Tripoli against the Libyan High National Election Commission. Our sympathy and heartfelt condolences go to the families hit in the attack, and we wish a prompt recovery to the injured. Once again, we reiterate our support to Libya's institutions in such a difficult moment. Terrorism has no right to exist in Libya, and those who are responsible for the attack must be identified as soon as possible and brought to justice. Such a terrible act of violence must not dishearten the effort of reconciliation to move forward in the political process of the country, with a view to holding free and democratic elections. 2018-05-19 Maeci The Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Angelino Alfano: I learned with immense grief of the news of the tragic plane crash in Havana. On behalf of all of Italy, I would like to express our deepfelt condolences for the Countrys loss. Italy, in a spirit of unrelenting friendship, stands by Cuba in this difficult and sad moment, and to the families of the persons who have so tragically lost their lives. 2018-05-19 Maeci The meeting will open at 7:45 p.m. (Buenos Aires time) with a working dinner on Contribution, expectations and nature of the G20. The G20 unites Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, South Korea, France, Germany, Japan, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, United Kingdom, Russia, United States, South Africa, Turkey and European Union. The G20 comprehensively represents 80% of the worlds GDP, 77% of global trade and two-thirds of the population on the planet. On Monday, the meeting schedules two working sessions: the first, at 9:30 a.m., will be dedicated to the relationship between multilateralism and global governance; the second session, at 12:45 p.m., will focus on the wide-reaching issue of sustainable development, which will be addressed according to the three priority issues on the agenda of the Argentinian presidency: the future of work, infrastructure for development and a sustainable food future. New dating of rocks and reanalysis of animal bones from islands along the shore of southeastern Alaska suggests that a narrow corridor between the Pacific Ocean and the Cordilleran Ice Sheet (CIS) in Alaska may have enabled the migration of humans to the Americas as early as 17,000 years ago. While the data imply that this Pacific coastal corridor - a pathway exposed following deglaciation - was physically and environmentally viable for early human migration to the Americas, the authors say that archeological evidence of human activity is still necessary to confirm that this pathway played an important role in the peopling of the Americas. The Beringia route was widely believed by many in the 20th century to be the course of human migration to the Americas from Asia. Recent analyses, on the other hand, have suggested that early human migration took place approximately 16 thousand years (ka) ago through a deglaciated corridor to the west of the CIS along the North Pacific coast. Yet, whether or not the coastal region's environmental conditions - such as biological productivity, availability of food resources and the presence or absence of physical barriers - were fit to support humans at that time remains unknown. Here, Alia J. Lesnek and colleagues reconstructed deglaciation using two different proxies. First, they applied 10Beryllium-dating of ten rock surfaces - five perched boulders and five bedrock samples - from three proposed areas: Dall Island, Suemez Island, and Warren Island. Second, they utilized previously published 14Carbon-dated mammal and bird bones found in caves on nearby islands. Their analysis showed that this area was glaciated from around 20 to 17 ka ago and thus not open for human migration. However, the islands were deglaciated after 17 ka ago and hosted robust terrestrial and marine ecosystems that could support humans during southward migration into the Americas. ### WASHINGTON, D.C., May 30, 2018 -- Nanoscientists at Northwestern University have developed a blueprint to fabricate new heterostructures from different types of 2-D materials. 2-D materials are single atom layers that can be stacked together like "nano-interlocking building blocks." Materials scientists and physicists are excited about the properties of 2-D materials and their potential applications. The researchers describe their blueprint in the Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing. "We've outlined an easy, deterministic and readily deployable way to stack and stitch these individual layers into orders not seen in nature," said Jeffrey Cain, an author on the paper who was formerly at Northwestern University but is now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California. Cain explained that for nanoscientists, "the dream" is to combine 2-D materials in any order and collate a library of these heterostructures with their documented properties. Scientists can then select appropriate heterostructures from the library for their desired applications. For instance, the computer industry is trying to make transistors smaller and faster to increase computing power. A nanoscale semiconductor with favorable electronic properties could be used to make transistors in next-generation computers. So far, nanoscientists have lacked clear methods for fabricating heterostructures, and have not yet been able to develop this library. In this work, the scientists looked to solve these fabrication issues. After identifying trends in the literature, they tested different conditions to map out the different parameters required to grow specific heterostructures from four types of 2-D materials: molybdenum disulfide and diselenide, and tungsten disulfide and diselenide. To fully characterize the atomically thin final products, the scientists used microscopy and spectrometry techniques. The group was inspired by the science of time-temperature-transformation diagrams in classical materials, which maps out heating and cooling profiles to generate precise metallic microstructures. Based on this method, the researchers packaged their findings into one diagrammatic technique -- the Time-Temperature-Architecture Diagram. "People had previously written papers for specific morphologies, but we have unified it all and enabled the generation of these morphologies with one technique," Cain said. The unified Time-Temperature-Architecture Diagrams provide directions for the exact conditions required to generate numerous heterostructure morphologies and compositions. Using these diagrams, the researchers developed a unique library of nanostructures with physical properties of interest to physicists and materials scientists. The Northwestern University scientists are now examining the behaviors displayed by some materials in their library, like the electron flow across the stitched junctions between materials. The researchers hope that their blueprint design will be useful for heterostructure fabrication beyond the first four materials. "Our specific diagrams would need revisions in the context of each new material, but we think that this idea is applicable and extendable to other material systems," Cain said. ### The article, "Controlled synthesis of 2D MX2 (M=Mo, W; X=S, Se) heterostructures and alloys," is written by Jeffrey D. Cain, Eve D. Hanson and Vinayak P. Dravid. The article appeared in the Journal of Applied Physics May 29, 2018, (DOI: 10.1063/1.5025710) and can be accessed at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5025710. ABOUT THE JOURNAL Journal of Applied Physics is an influential international journal publishing significant new experimental and theoretical results of applied physics research. See http://jap.aip.org. A new study from The Auk: Ornithological Advances presents some of the best evidence that Whiskered Auklets are an outlier in the auklet family by not migrating and instead staying close to "home" (their breeding colonies) year-round. Most migratory birds lead two opposite lifestyles in the same year. During the breeding season a bird's location is constrained and their habits are repetitive given a nest full of chicks that require food, warmth, and protection. For some birds it is the only time they congregate or otherwise come together. Comparatively, during the non-breeding season their only true task is to survive. Whether migratory or residential, as long as the bird makes it back to the breeding grounds to reproduce, they can go almost wherever they want. Whiskered Auklets are consistent through the year though and don't wander far at all. Carley Schacter and Ian Jones of Memorial University of Newfoundland used light-based archival geolocation tags on Whiskered Auklets in Buldir Island, Aleutian Islands, Alaska, to determine the locations of their full annual life cycle. The data they collected corroborated what researchers have long suspected. This species is unique in the auklet family for not migrating at all. Most seabirds roost on the water at night, but Whiskered Auklets stay in the vicinity of the breeding colony year-round and consistently return to roost at night on land. Such behavior may not only be unique to auklets, but to the entire seabirds group. How could this unusual adaptation have come about? Whiskered Auklets capitalize on the foraging habitat close to their breeding colony which reduces metabolic costs. Given the influence of tradeoffs on animal behavior and life history strategies, this foraging area could be a large contributor to their residential behavior. But there are risks to this strategy as well. Lead author Carley Schacter notes, "While this non-migratory behavior is very interesting to us on a theoretical level, there are also important implications for the conservation and management of this most vulnerable of auklet species. Year-round residence near the breeding site (an area of high fishing and shipping traffic) makes Aleutian-breeding Whiskered Auklets even more exposed than previously thought to human threats such as oil/fuel spills and light attraction leading to fatal collisions with vessels. Their nocturnal roosting behavior also makes them especially vulnerable to introduced mammalian predators such as rats and foxes." "The authors found evidence for an almost unique adaptation of a seabird in a remote, difficult-to-work-in, and isolated environment," adds Jeff Williams, Assistant Refuge Manager at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, who was not involved with this research. "We now know that Whiskered Auklets are particularly sensitive to human-caused disturbances (oil spills, light attraction, invasive species introductions etc.) and can incorporate this information into management planning." ### Confirmed year-round residence and land roosting of Whiskered Auklets (Aethia pygmaea) at Buldir Island, Alaska will be available May 30, 2018, at http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1642/AUK-17-235.1 Researcher contact: Carley R. Schacter, crs634@mun.ca About the journal: The Auk: Ornithological Advances is a peer-reviewed, international journal of ornithology that began in 1884 as the official publication of the American Ornithologists' Union, which merged with the Cooper Ornithological Society in 2016 to become the American Ornithological Society. In 2009, The Auk was honored as one of the 100 most influential journals of biology and medicine over the past 100 years. The baby looked healthy at first. But within two hours, he was having severe seizures. Hospital staff at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, were performing a routine check when they realized that the baby was unwell. They transferred him to the neonatal intensive care unit right away and began conducting tests, hoping to reach a diagnosis. But every test came back negative. His results looked normal. The question was simple: What ails this baby? The answer would take years to figure out. Researchers from Rambam Medical Center, Japan's RIKEN Brain Science Institute, and other institutions in both countries announced their solution to the medical mystery in an article in the June issue of the Journal of Lipid Research. A mysterious genetic ailment Dr. Hanna Mandel, a metabolic disease specialist, was head of the team that assessed the infant in the NICU back in 2011. Seizures in newborns may stem from a variety of causes - some more common than others. Nothing in this baby's general appearance provided clues for the cause of his seizures. More than a dozen routine tests came back normal. The child had no infection, no problem with known metabolites, no clues in his urine or cerebrospinal fluid. After completing a battery of routine tests as well as extra metabolic workup, Mandel said, they found nothing that could explain the child's illness. So the medical team sent the child, by this time three weeks old, for brain scans. The images showed a lack of myelin, the essential fatty coating around nerves. Myelin works like the plastic insulation around an electrical wire. If the insulation isn't there, the wires--in this case, the neurons--cannot carry electrical signals as far or as fast as they should. This deficiency, they thought, may have affected the boy's development. As he grew older, the child missed milestones, never even moving on his own. Follow-up scans showed that his myelin was still not developing, and other parts of his brain were beginning to atrophy. When the child was 4 years old, Dr. Orly Elpeleg, a specialist in rare genetic diseases at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem, led a team that sequenced and analyzed much of the boy's genome, looking for genetic mutations that he might have inherited from both of his parents, who are cousins. Elpeleg identified 13 sites in the boy's genome where he had inherited very rare coding variants from both parents. By examining his healthy family members' genes, the team could rule out many of these sites as causing the child's problems. The mutation the researchers found responsible for the disease affected a gene called EPT1. Compared with a healthy control, the patient's mRNA encoding the EPT1 protein was abnormally shortened. This was the first time a patient was diagnosed with EPT1 mutation. When the geneticist found identified the mutation, Mandel went straight to PubMed, a database housing medical and biological research. She was looking, she said, "for someone who would be interested in studying the pathogenicity of the EPT1 mutation." She found the world experts on the gene in question. Establishing an international collaboration Several years earlier, Yasuhiro Horibata had been a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Yoshio Hirabayashi, who studies lipid physiology at the prestigious RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. The two had discovered that the EPT1 gene codes for an enzyme that puts the finishing touches on the production of a lipid called phosphatidylethanolamine, or PE for short. PE makes up about a fifth of all the phospholipids in the brain. They published their findings in a 2007 paper in the Journal of Lipid Research. Mandel found that paper and wrote to Hirabayashi. Soon, she, Hirabayashi and Horibata, by then an assistant professor at Dokkyo University, hatched a collaboration by email, and the Israeli team shipped a tissue sample from the child to Japan. The Japanese team measured enzyme activity in the child's cells, and confirmed that it was very low compared with a healthy control, because the erroneously shortened protein was immediately destroyed by the cell's quality-control systems. They looked for changes in the child's skin cells, measuring all the lipids the cells produced. To their surprise, the lack of EPT1 only slightly reduced the amount of PE in the child's tissue. This was unexpected, since PE was the main known product of EPT1 activity. However, the shortage of EPT1 dramatically reduced the amount of another molecule, plasmalogen, a lipid product made from PE which is abundant in myelin. It seemed that the child's cells were able to employ other enzymes to compensate for PE production; however this did not rescue the lower plasmalogen synthesis. The researchers concluded that, even though its PE-manufacturing work is duplicated by the action of another enzyme, EPT1 is essential for making myelin in the normal brain. This work is described in the team's new JLR paper. Hope for the future The researchers solved the genetic piece of the mystery underlying the boy's puzzling disease. Last year a British team reported on a patient with similar symptoms and a similar mutation, making the Israeli boy the second patient with EPT1 disorder ever to be reported in the medical literature. As for many people living with rare genetic diseases, the boy's treatment options are limited. Today, the patient is paraplegic, blind and deaf, and his seizures have worsened. Nevertheless, Mandel emphasizes the positive aspects of the child's life. "He lives in a beautiful Arab village in Northern Israel, in a beautiful house with his parents and his sister," she said. "During the day, he attends a rehabilitation center near his home village, where he receives all the paramedical support one could think of." Meanwhile, the doctors have offered the boy's parents genetic counseling based on their research findings. "The couple is aiming for preimplantation genetic diagnosis for future pregnancies," Mandel said. ### Many important proteins in the human body need iron-sulfur clusters, tiny structures made of iron and sulfur atoms, in order to function correctly. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the University of Kentucky have discovered that disruptions in the construction of iron-sulfur clusters can lead to the buildup of fat droplets in certain cells. These findings, which will be published in the May 25 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, provide clues about the biochemical causes of conditions like nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and clear cell renal carcinoma. "Iron-sulfur clusters are delicate and susceptible to damage within the cell," said Daniel Crooks, the postdoctoral fellow who led the new study. "For this reason, the cells in our body are constantly building new iron-sulfur clusters." Crooks began studying the enzymes that build iron-sulfur clusters during his graduate studies in Tracey Rouault's lab at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the NIH. Mutations in one of these enzymes can cause ISCU myopathy, a hereditary condition in which patients, despite seeming strong and healthy, cannot exercise for more than a short time without feeling pain and weakness. Therefore, it was clear to Crooks that lifelong deficiency of iron-sulfur clusters caused profound changes in how cells processed energy. But he wondered exactly what happened in a cell in the first moments after something went wrong with iron-sulfur cluster production. Which of the many proteins that need iron-sulfur clusters were affected first, and what effect did this have on cell metabolism? Crooks developed experimental methods to abruptly stop iron-sulfur clusters from being manufactured in cells and to monitor what happens to how these cells process glucose. Ordinarily, over a series of metabolic steps, cells would convert glucose into energy. But without iron-sulfur clusters, an enzyme called aconitase that carries out one of the steps in this process doesn't work. As a result, the cells quickly accumulated an intermediate metabolic product called citrate, which was eventually converted into droplets of fat. Over-accumulation of fats in tissues where they're not normally found is a hallmark of numerous diseases, including nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a risk factor for cirrhosis and liver cancer. These findings suggest that this state could be caused by failures of iron-sulfur cluster production, for example due to cellular stressors or toxin exposure. "We're hoping that the people who are working so hard on nonalcoholic fatty liver disease will find our paper helpful to their research," Rouault said. Crooks, working in the laboratory of surgeon and scientist W. Marston Linehan at NCI, is now examining the role of iron-sulfur cluster formation and aconitase function in cancers, for example clear cell carcinomas. Various cancers are often characterized by excessive fat accumulation in cells. In fact, this accumulation of lipid droplets is where clear cell carcinomas get their name: when a slice of a such a tumor is fixed on a slide and its proteins are stained, the large areas of lipid accumulation in the cells look transparent. "We really want to look at the beginnings of cancer...to understand whether the lipids were formed from glucose or other fuels and whether the lipids are important for pathogenesis, or whether they're just bystanders that form in response to metabolic reprogramming which is likely to include disruption of iron sulfur protein activities," Crooks said. ### About the Journal of Biological Chemistry JBC is a weekly peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes research "motivated by biology, enabled by chemistry" across all areas of biochemistry and molecular biology. The read the latest research in JBC, visit http://www.jbc.org/. About the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology The ASBMB is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization with more than 12,000 members worldwide. Most members teach and conduct research at colleges and universities. Others conduct research in various government laboratories, at nonprofit research institutions and in industry. The Society's student members attend undergraduate or graduate institutions. For more information about ASBMB, visit http://www.asbmb.org. When you think of a radish, you may think of the small, round, crunchy, red-and-white vegetable that is sliced into salads. You might be surprised to learn that a larger, longer form of this root vegetable is being used in agriculture as a cover crop. Cover crops are grown between main crops such as wheat, corn, or soybeans when the soil would otherwise be bare. Cover crops can control erosion, build soil, and suppress weeds. Radish as a cover crop can provide these benefits and more. The long radish root creates deep channels in the soil that can make it easier for subsequent crops to reach water in the soil below. Radish is also known to benefit water quality. It does so by taking up nitrogen, in the form of nitrates, from the soil. This leaves less nitrogen in the soil that can run off to nearby streams and lakes. Matt Ruark of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues wanted to know more about the effect of this nitrate uptake in the following growing season. They established test sites in three Wisconsin locations and studied them for three years. At each site, some plots received the radish cover crop and some did not. The radish cover crop was planted in August after a wheat harvest. Corn was planted the following spring. The research showed that radish significantly reduced the nitrate content in the soil as compared to the test plots with no cover crop. This finding confirmed the results of several earlier studies. It showed that radish did take up nitrogen, in the form of nitrates, from the soil. This research supports the use of radish as a cover crop as a trap crop for fall nitrogen. However, what happens to that nitrogen afterward remains unknown. There was no consistent evidence that nitrogen was returned to the soil as the radish crop decomposed. Radish did not supply nitrogen to the corn crop. The researchers concluded that in the Upper Midwest the nitrogen in radish could not replace fertilizer. Ruark commented, "Radish grows well when planted in late summer and traps a lot of nitrogen. But the way it decomposes doesn't result in a nitrogen fertilizer benefit to the next crop. We don't know exactly why. We were hoping it would provide a nitrogen benefit, but alas, it did not." What happens to the nitrogen? The decomposition pattern of radish needs to be explored more fully to learn more. And perhaps, Ruark said, radish could be more beneficial if mixed with a winter-hardy cover crop. ### Read more about Ruark's work in Agronomy Journal. The Wisconsin Fertilizer Research Council funded this research with additional support from the Leo Walsh Graduate Fellowship. What's portable, self-contained, solar-powered, and can take precise measurements of how dirty the air is in someone's backyard? That would be some uniquely user-friendly, cost-effective air samplers designed by Colorado State University researchers. Soon, many more of these samplers will be taking air quality measurements across Colorado, the Northwest and southern California - powered by the sun, and by willing volunteers. The Citizen-Enabled Aerosol Measurements for Satellites (CEAMS) project, a CSU-led, NASA-funded effort for measuring local air quality, has just received the green light for full speed ahead. Following a successful pilot phase in Fort Collins over the past year, NASA has re-upped CEAMS to the tune of $1.6 million over three years. That means recruiting even more citizen scientists, deploying more air samplers, and crunching a lot more data. Eventually, it means more knowledge to share with NASA's Earth Science Research Program. The agency's air quality-indicator satellites that fly overhead only provide broad estimates of global air quality. Ground-level, dispersed measurements from CEAMS could lead to improved satellite-derived pollution estimates, at higher spatial and temporal resolutions. This will help scientists better understand where the air is dirtiest, when and why. The CEAMS samplers take two critical measurements. One is aerosol optical depth, which is a picture of how much particulate matter is present in a column of air from Earth to space. The other is ground surface PM2.5 - a measure of airborne particulate matter with diameters smaller than 2.5 microns, which are proven to affect human health. The team, composed of several CSU scientists, graduate students and other collaborators, aims to have 250 CEAMS samplers deployed by project's end. The Fort Collins pilot involved about 15 volunteers. The team is led by: - John Volckens, principal investigator; professor of mechanical engineering; affiliate faculty in the Colorado School of Public Health, School of Biomedical Engineering, and Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences; member of the CSU Energy Institute - Bonne Ford, project manager; research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science - Shantanu Jathar, co-investigator; assistant professor of mechanical engineering; member of the CSU Energy Institute - Marilee Long, co-investigator; professor of journalism and media communication - Jeff Pierce, co-investigator; associate professor of atmospheric science; Monfort Professor They plan to expand their data collecting to Denver, as well as to Los Angeles, Washington, and Idaho. For these efforts, they'll involve new collaborators: Sheryl Magzamen, assistant professor in the CSU Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences, and others from University of British Columbia, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and Research Triangle Institute. "Each location was chosen to look at known difficulties in relating satellite observations to surface air quality: urban air quality, coastal environments, and biomass burning regions," project manager Ford said. They will also continue to work with a 20-year-old, highly successful citizen science network also based at CSU: the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, which has over 20,000 volunteers nationwide. A handful of CEAMS volunteers were chosen from willing CoCoRaHS participants, who - no surprise - were among the most self-sufficient and motivated volunteers in the pilot run, the scientists reported. In designing any product, user testing is essential - and that's especially true for citizen science. "Our volunteers provided lots of great feedback that helped us to improve the instruments, our mobile app, and our sampling strategy," Ford said. For example, many volunteers reported trouble with correctly aligning the aerosol optical depth sensor, which needs to be in direct sunlight. The team plans to add a reflective bead to help the citizens identify when the sensors are properly aligned. The team also plans to increase the wireless capability of each CEAMS sampler. They propose adding a WiFi chip to the devices, in addition to existing Bluetooth-powered communication, so data can stream automatically from the samplers to project servers. Other technical enhancements planned: low-voltage checks to detect the presence of clouds (cloudy days are no good for accurate aerosol optical depth measurements), and accelerometers to detect when wind has caused misalignment. Ask any of the scientists working on CEAMS, and they will all say they are motivated by a sobering fact: air pollution kills. It's a leading cause of death worldwide, it gives kids asthma, and it exacerbates health problems for vulnerable people including the very young and the very elderly. "Our hope is that our project will help tackle the global challenge of air pollution," principal investigator Volckens said. "But we can't do it without our wonderful volunteers. That's what's going to make this project work, and that's ultimately what's going to lead to fewer deaths and illnesses from air pollution." ### Experiments that measure the lifetime of neutrons reveal a perplexing and unresolved discrepancy. While this lifetime has been measured to a precision within 1 percent using different techniques, apparent conflicts in the measurements offer the exciting possibility of learning about as-yet undiscovered physics. Now, a team led by scientists in the Nuclear Science Division at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has enlisted powerful supercomputers to calculate a quantity known as the "nucleon axial coupling," or gA - which is central to our understanding of a neutron's lifetime - with an unprecedented precision. Their method offers a clear path to further improvements that may help to resolve the experimental discrepancy. To achieve their results, the researchers created a microscopic slice of a simulated universe to provide a window into the subatomic world. Their study was published online May 30 in the journal Nature. The nucleon axial coupling is more exactly defined as the strength at which one component (known as the axial component) of the "weak current" of the Standard Model of particle physics couples to the neutron. The weak current is given by one of the four known fundamental forces of the universe and is responsible for radioactive beta decay - the process by which a neutron decays to a proton, an electron, and a neutrino. In addition to measurements of the neutron lifetime, precise measurements of neutron beta decay are also used to probe new physics beyond the Standard Model. Nuclear physicists seek to resolve the lifetime discrepancy and augment with experimental results by determining gA more precisely. The researchers turned to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), a cornerstone of the Standard Model that describes how quarks and gluons interact with each other. Quarks and gluons are the fundamental building blocks for larger particles, such as neutrons and protons. The dynamics of these interactions determine the mass of the neutron and proton, and also the value of gA. But sorting through QCD's inherent complexity to produce these quantities requires the aid of massive supercomputers. In the latest study, researchers applied a numeric simulation known as lattice QCD, which represents QCD on a finite grid. While a type of mirror-flip symmetry in particle interactions called parity (like swapping your right and left hands) is respected by the interactions of QCD, and the axial component of the weak current flips parity - parity is not respected by nature (analogously, most of us are right-handed). And because nature breaks this symmetry, the value of gA can only be determined through experimental measurements or theoretical predictions with lattice QCD. The team's new theoretical determination of gA is based on a simulation of a tiny piece of the universe - the size of a few neutrons in each direction. They simulated a neutron transitioning to a proton inside this tiny section of the universe, in order to predict what happens in nature. The model universe contains one neutron amid a sea of quark-antiquark pairs that are bustling under the surface of the apparent emptiness of free space. "Calculating gA was supposed to be one of the simple benchmark calculations that could be used to demonstrate that lattice QCD can be utilized for basic nuclear physics research, and for precision tests that look for new physics in nuclear physics backgrounds," said Andre Walker-Loud, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division who led the new study. "It turned out to be an exceptionally difficult quantity to determine." This is because lattice QCD calculations are complicated by exceptionally noisy statistical results that had thwarted major progress in reducing uncertainties in previous gA calculations. Some researchers had previously estimated that it would require the next generation of the nation's most advanced supercomputers to achieve a 2 percent precision for gA by around 2020. The team participating in the latest study developed a way to improve their calculations of gA using an unconventional approach and supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge Lab) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore Lab). The study involved scientists from more than a dozen institutions, including researchers from UC Berkeley and several other Department of Energy national labs. Chia Cheng "Jason" Chang, the lead author of the publication and a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division for the duration of this work, said, "Past calculations were all performed amidst this more noisy environment," which clouded the results they were seeking. Chang has also joined the Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program at RIKEN in Japan as a research scientist. Walker-Loud added, "We found a way to extract gA earlier in time, before the noise 'explodes' in your face." Chang said, "We now have a purely theoretical prediction of the lifetime of the neutron, and it is the first time we can predict the lifetime of the neutron to be consistent with experiments." "This was an intense 2 1/2-year project that only came together because of the great team of people working on it," Walker-Loud said. This latest calculation also places tighter constraints on a branch of physics theories that stretch beyond the Standard Model - constraints that exceed those set by powerful particle collider experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. But the calculations aren't yet precise enough to determine if new physics have been hiding in the gA and neutron lifetime measurements. Chang and Walker-Loud noted that the main limitation to improving upon the precision of their calculations is in supplying more computing power. "We don't have to change the technique we're using to get the precision necessary," Walker-Loud said. The latest work builds upon decades of research and computational resources by the lattice QCD community. In particular, the research team relied upon QCD data generated by the MILC Collaboration; an open source software library for lattice QCD called Chroma, developed by the USQCD collaboration; and QUDA, a highly optimized open source software library for lattice QCD calculations. The team drew heavily upon the power of Titan, a supercomputer at Oak Ridge Lab equipped with graphics processing units, or GPUs, in addition to more conventional central processing units, or CPUs. GPUs have evolved from their early use in accelerating video game graphics to current applications in evaluating large arrays for tackling complicated algorithms pertinent to many fields of science. The axial coupling calculations used about 184 million "Titan hours" of computing power - it would take a single laptop computer with a large memory about 600,000 years to complete the same calculations. As the researchers worked through their analysis of this massive set of numerical data, they realized that more refinements were needed to reduce the uncertainty in their calculations. The team was assisted by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility staff to efficiently utilize their 64 million Titan-hour allocation, and they also turned to the Multiprogrammatic and Institutional Computing program at Livermore Lab, which gave them more computing time to resolve their calculations and reduce their uncertainty margin to just under 1 percent. "Establishing a new way to calculate gA has been a huge rollercoaster," Walker-Loud said. With more statistics from more powerful supercomputers, the research team hopes to drive the uncertainty margin down to about 0.3 percent. "That's where we can actually begin to discriminate between the results from the two different experimental methods of measuring the neutron lifetime," Chang said. "That's always the most exciting part: When the theory has something to say about the experiment." He added, "With improvements, we hope that we can calculate things that are difficult or even impossible to measure in experiments." Already, the team has applied for time on a next-generation supercomputer at Oak Ridge Lab called Summit, which would greatly speed up the calculations. ### In addition to researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, the science team also included researchers from University of North Carolina, RIKEN BNL Research Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Julich Research Center in Germany, the University of Liverpool in the U.K., the College of William & Mary, Rutgers University, the University of Washington, the University of Glasgow in the U.K., NVIDIA Corp., and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. One of the study participants is a scientist at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The Titan supercomputer is a part of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). NERSC and OLCF are DOE Office of Science User Facilities. The work was supported by Laboratory Directed Research and Development programs at Berkeley Lab, the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, the Nuclear Physics Double Beta Decay Topical Collaboration, the DOE Early Career Award Program, the NVIDIA Corporation, the Joint Sino-German Research Projects of the German Research Foundation and National Natural Science Foundation of China, RIKEN in Japan, the Leverhulme Trust, the National Science Foundation's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Multiprogrammatic and Institutional Computing program through a Tier 1 Grand Challenge award. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world's most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab's scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel Prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. For more, visit http://www.lbl.gov. DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov. Supercomputer simulations of neutrons' inner turmoil and a new method that filters out "noise" yield the highest-ever precision calculation of nucleon axial coupling, a property crucial to predicting neutron lifetime UPTON, NY--Using some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, an international team including scientists from several U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories has released the highest-precision calculation of a fundamental property of protons and neutrons known as nucleon axial coupling. This quantity determines the strength of the interaction that triggers neutrons to decay into protons--and can therefore be used to more accurately predict how long neutrons are expected to "live." The results appear in Nature. "The fact that neutrons decay into protons is a very, very important fact in the universe," said Enrico Rinaldi, a special postdoctoral researcher at the RIKEN BNL Research Center at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, who was involved in developing simulations essential to the new calculation. "It basically tells you how atomic nuclei--made of protons and neutrons--were created after the Big Bang." Neutron lifetime also has bearing on the relative abundance of atoms like hydrogen and helium in the universe today, and how that balance will affect the formation of future stars. The new calculation could also help scientists determine which of two approaches to experimentally measure neutron lifetime is more accurate--and whether the several-second discrepancy between the two could potentially point to the existence of yet-to-be discovered particles. The effort to calculate the axial coupling, led by Andre Walker-Loud of DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), used computing resources at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "This was an intense two-and-a-half-year project that only came together because of the great team of people working on it," Walker-Loud said. Details of neutron decay When you think of the atoms that make up the stuff of our world today, you probably think of neutrons as relatively stable. A wooden desk, made of lots of carbon atoms, for example, doesn't appear to decay in any appreciable way. But if you pulled an isolated neutron out of one of those carbon atoms, it would transform into a proton, on average, in less than 15 minutes. The process that makes this happen is a quantum mechanical interaction between external particles called W bosons with the inner building blocks of the neutron, known as quarks and gluons. This interaction changes the identity of one of the constituent quarks and therefore the overall identity of the particle. But that's an overly simplistic picture, Rinaldi said. "That is what would happen at very high energy where we can approximate the quarks and gluons as free objects." In the real world, at lower energy, quarks and gluons are confined, or bound together within particles like protons and neutrons, Rinaldi explained. And those quarks and gluons interact strongly with one another in myriad ways. "We cannot tell exactly what the velocities and positions of all the constituents inside the neutron are. It's a quantum mechanical bundle of quarks and gluons and the interactions among them," Rinaldi said. The strength of the W boson interaction that triggers the neutron decay depends on a value determined by the composite sum of all those internal interactions. "What the W boson sees is the nucleon axial coupling constant, a number that parameterizes all the interactions that the W boson could have with the constituents inside the neutron," Rinaldi said. Running the supercomputing experiment To calculate the axial coupling constant, or g?A, physicists use powerful supercomputers to solve the equations of quantum chromodynamics (QCD)--the theory of the strong nuclear force, which governs how quarks and gluons interact. These complex equations can be viewed as containing more than a million variables that account for all the possible interactions within the teeming microcosm of a neutron. They would be impossible to solve without a technique known as lattice QCD. Lattice QCD places the particles at discrete points on an imaginary four-dimensional grid of spacetime (three spatial dimensions plus time) to calculate all the possible interactions of adjacent particles one by one, and then combines them into a final result. The overall computational part is fairly straightforward, Rinaldi said, again emphasizing that this is a vastly simplified view: "You have a computer and a code that solves the equations. You run the code on the computer, do analysis, and extract the result. It is kind of like doing an experiment because there are many steps and parts--analogous to a particle accelerator, its detectors, the collisions, and the data collection--and we have to control every one of these steps." One of Rinaldi's roles was to create inputs for the "experiment"--a series of simulations that each included a different mass for the neutron. Artificially inflating the mass of the neutron makes the equations easier to work with, he explained. "The algorithms become harder and harder to use, requiring more computing time to solve, as you try to analyze what happens in the real world. We would have huge error bars. But if you artificially change the input to the equations--make the neutrons more massive--that makes it easier to calculate. We can get a very accurate result for each of these calculations at higher masses, and then put the results together to extrapolate to the real-world conditions," he said. Reducing the noise to extract the signal But changing the input can only do so much. The Berkeley Lab-led team's biggest leap in precision (relative to other groups who have used similar methods to calculate g?A) came from improvements to the experiment's "detector," Rinaldi said. The team was interested in the properties of the neutron, he explained. But the quantum mechanical interactions of quarks and gluons can also generate "excited states" that look like neutrons but are not neutrons. Those excited states generate "noise" that contaminates the signal. The Berkeley Lab team figured out how to filter out the noise to produce a result that, for the first time, achieved the one-percent threshold of precision that is a gold-standard for lattice QCD calculations. "When measuring the axial coupling, the signal-to-noise degrades exponentially the longer the neutron travels," said Chia Cheng "Jason" Chang, a postdoc at Berkeley Lab who led the analysis. "Past calculations were all performed amidst this more noisy environment." "We found a way to extract the measurement before the noise takes over and ruins the experiment," Rinaldi said. The scientists have already used the new nucleon axial coupling calculation to derive a purely theoretical prediction of the lifetime of the neutron. Right now, this new value is consistent with the results from both types of experimental measurement, which differ by a mere 9 seconds. "We have a number for the neutron lifetime: 14 minutes and 40 seconds with an error bar of 14 seconds. That is right in the middle of the values measured by the two types of experiments, with an error bar that is big and overlaps both," Rinaldi said. With more statistics from more powerful supercomputers, the research team hopes to drive the uncertainty margin down to about 0.3 percent. "That's where we can actually begin to discriminate between the results from the two different experimental methods of measuring the neutron lifetime," Chang said. "That's always the most exciting part: When the theory has something to say about the experiment." Ultimately, Rinaldi said, this and other calculations enabled by the team's computational technique could improve our understanding of protons and neutrons, and help answer other outstanding questions about nuclear physics, dark matter, and the nature of the universe. ### This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science, the RIKEN laboratory in Japan, and the U.S. National Science Foundation. In addition to researchers at Berkeley Lab and the RIKEN BNL Research Center, the team also included scientists from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), another DOE Office of Science user facility located at Berkeley Lab; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of North Carolina; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the Julich Research Center (Germany); the University of Liverpool (U.K.); The College of William & Mary; Rutgers University; the University of Washington; the University of Glasgow (U.K.); NVIDIA Corp.; and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, pleahttp://twitter.com/BrookhavenLabse visit science.energy.gov [https://science.energy.gov/]. Follow @BrookhavenLab on Twitter or find us on Facebook. Related Links Scientific paper: "A per-cent-level determination of the nucleon axial coupling from quantum chromodynamics " Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory news release Oak Ridge National Laboratory feature story Neutron Lifetime Puzzle Deepens, but No Dark Matter Seen What Can the Death of a Neutron Tell Us About Dark Matter? Follow @brookhavenlab on Twitter and Facebook One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit applied science and technology organization. Heidelberg, 30 May 2018 - EMBO is pleased to announce that Montenegro has joined its intergovernmental funding body, the European Molecular Biology Conference (EMBC). Montenegro is the 30th country to become part of the EMBC, and will now be able to benefit from the support EMBO offers to talented life science researchers at all career stages. "Montenegro is making a strong effort to improve life science research in their own country and through cross-border initiatives," says EMBO Director Maria Leptin. "We are pleased to welcome Montenegro as part of the European life science community that EMBO represents. And we look forward to offer the country's scientists the opportunities and support available in our member states." Montenegro's accession as EMBC Member State was agreed by EMBC Council following a presentation from Montenegrin Minister of Science Sanja Damjanovic, and Danilo Mrdak, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Science at the University of Montenegro. "It is our goal to strengthen science in Montenegro," says Damjanovic. "One of the ways in which we are looking to do this is through creating international connections. Being part of EMBO will help us to intensify the ties with the rest of Europe and to provide financial and professional support to researchers in our country." Following the completion of the parliamentary ratification procedure, life scientists working in Montenegro are now eligible to apply to EMBO for Long-Term and Short-Term Fellowships, Courses & Workshops funding and the EMBO Young Investigator Programme. Access to support in these areas helps some of Europe's best scientists to excel in their research and to engage in professional networking with an international community of peers. ### About EMBO EMBO is an organization of more than 1800 leading researchers that promotes excellence in the life sciences. The major goals of the organization are to support talented researchers at all stages of their careers, stimulate the exchange of scientific information, and help build a European research environment where scientists can achieve their best work. EMBO helps young scientists to advance their research, promote their international reputations and ensure their mobility. Courses, workshops, conferences and scientific journals disseminate the latest research and offer training in techniques to maintain high standards of excellence in research practice. EMBO helps to shape science and research policy by seeking input and feedback from our community and by following closely the trends in science in Europe. For more information: http://www.embo.org About EMBC The European Molecular Biology Conference (EMBC) is an intergovernmental organization comprising 30 Member States. EMBC promotes a strong transnational approach to the life sciences. Within EMBC, Member States pool their resources to improve the quality of research at a national level and to contribute to the advancement of basic research in Europe. For more information: embc.embo.org A new study in Biological Psychiatry provides updated estimates of the lifetime and 12-month prevalence of eating disorders Philadelphia, May 30, 2018 Biological Psychiatry has published a new study revising the outdated estimates of the prevalence of eating disorders in the United States (US). The new estimates were based on a nationally-representative sample of 36,309 adultsthe largest national sample of US adults ever studied. The findings estimate that 0.80 percent of US adults will be affected by anorexia nervosa in their lifetime; 0.28 percent will be affected by bulimia nervosa; and 0.85 percent will be affected by binge eating disorder. Importantly, the study provides the first prevalence estimates using the current definitions of eating disorders. Although the diagnostic criteria for several common eating disorders were changed with the 2013 publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-5, the rates of eating disorders hadnt been studied since 2007. Our study confirms that eating disorders are common, are found in both men and women and across ethnic/racial groups, occur throughout the lifespan, and are associated with impairments in psychosocial functioning, said first author Tomoko Udo, PhD, of University at Albany, New York. Dr. Udo conducted the study alongside Carlos Grilo, PhD, of Yale University School of Medicine. The prevalence and impact of eating disorders continues to be underestimated in society. This definitive study should guide both research and policy development, said John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. The data analyzed in the study were from the 20122013 National Epidemiologic Survey Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC-III). In addition to lifetime estimates, the study found that 12-month estimates for anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder were 0.05 percent, 0.14 percent, and 0.44 percent, respectively. The rates of anorexia nervosa were similar to previous estimates, but the researchers were surprised to find the rates of bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder were lower than previous estimates. Many researchers and clinicians expected higher estimates than earlier studies as a result of loosening of diagnostic criteria for eating disorders, said Dr. Udo, referring to the changes made to criteria in the DSM-5. She added that more large-scale epidemiological studies will be needed to explain the reason for these unexpected findings and to better understand the impact of changes in diagnostic criteria. The disorders occurred across different ages and were persistent, lasting for years. The study also reported that the eating disorders included in analysis often interfere with normal daily activities and social relationships. According to Dr. Udo, the findings show that eating disorders represent an important public health problem and demonstrate the importance of screening for eating disorders across all socio-demographic groups. Binge eating disorder, a new formal diagnosis in the DSM-5, is especially important to screen for and identify, as it is associated with substantially increased risk for obesity yet often goes unrecognized, she said. In many communities, specialty treatment for eating disorders is not as easily accessible as for other psychiatric and medical conditions, and thus improving access to care is an important priority for healthcare systems, said Dr. Udo. ### Notes for editors The article is "Prevalence and Correlates of DSM-5 Eating Disorders in Nationally Representative Sample of United States Adults," by Tomoko Udo and Carlos M. Grilo (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2018.03.014). It appears in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier. Copies of this paper are available to credentialed journalists upon request; please contact Rhiannon Bugno at Biol.Psych@UTSouthwestern.edu or +1 214 648 0880. Journalists wishing to interview the authors may contact Tomoko Udo at tschaller@albany.edu or +1 518 486 5572. The authors affiliations and disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available in the article. John H. Krystal, MD, is Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, Chief of Psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and a research psychiatrist at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. His disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available here. About Biological Psychiatry Biological Psychiatry is the official journal of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, whose purpose is to promote excellence in scientific research and education in fields that investigate the nature, causes, mechanisms and treatments of disorders of thought, emotion, or behavior. In accord with this mission, this peer-reviewed, rapid-publication, international journal publishes both basic and clinical contributions from all disciplines and research areas relevant to the pathophysiology and treatment of major psychiatric disorders. The journal publishes novel results of original research which represent an important new lead or significant impact on the field, particularly those addressing genetic and environmental risk factors, neural circuitry and neurochemistry, and important new therapeutic approaches. Reviews and commentaries that focus on topics of current research and interest are also encouraged. Biological Psychiatry is one of the most selective and highly cited journals in the field of psychiatric neuroscience. It is ranked 6th out of 142 Psychiatry titles and 10th out of 258 Neurosciences titles in the Journal Citations Reports published by Thomson Reuters. The 2016 Impact Factor score for Biological Psychiatry is 11.412. About Elsevier Elsevier is a global information analytics business that helps institutions and professionals advance healthcare, open science and improve performance for the benefit of humanity. Elsevier provides digital solutions and tools in the areas of strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support and professional education, including ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, ClinicalKey and Sherpath. Elsevier publishes over 2,500 digitized journals, including The Lancet and Cell, more than 38,000 e-book titles and many iconic reference works, including Gray's Anatomy. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a global provider of information and analytics for professionals and business customers across industries. http://www.elsevier.com Media contact Rhiannon Bugno Editorial Office, Biological Psychiatry +1 214 648 0880 Biol.Psych@UTSouthwestern.edu Scientists in supramolecular chemistry often run into surprising outcomes. A broken seal of a lab cuvette led an American researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology to the origin of these inexplicable results: the weather. Or the humidity, to be more precise, because this determines the water concentration in oils used as solvents, which was previously thought to be negligible. Research now shows that the lone water molecules in oil aren't just spectators, they firmly direct supramolecular processes. This outcome means that a lot of previous research has to be re-examined, but also that chemists get a new, cheap and powerful tool. The results are published in Nature. In September 2016 postdoctoral researcher Nathan van Zee spent a week with his parents in Florida. But his thoughts often led him back to his lab in The Netherlands because he had been struggling for quite some time with erratic outcomes he didn't understand. The molecular helices that he was synthesizing sometimes had a clockwise structure and sometimes an anti-clockwise structure. This is an important difference--for instance, it can make the difference between a drug that works and a drug that doesn't. Van Zee had already tried all sorts of things, but was not getting any closer to answers. After his flight back from the US he immediately went to his laboratory to start a new experiment, after which he wanted to take a nap. But his jetlag caused him to use the wrong settings for the instrument, and he overslept. His eureka moment, which would eventually lead to a Nature publication, came the next day. Back in the lab he saw strange results. But he also saw that the seal of his lab cuvette was broken, and the ultradry air of the enclosing sample holder had gotten into it. This gave him an important clue: his sample had become drier, suggesting the water content of the solvent oil is a driving force. Van Zee and his supervisor professor Bert Meijer immediately knew they were on to something important, and they decided to get to the bottom of it. They discovered that it was indeed the water concentration in the sample that made the difference, even though it was only a few ppm (parts per million). Even with extremely small fluctuations in water concentration, they observed that the helix rotation changes from clockwise to anti-clockwise. This result caused the researchers to have a closer look at some of their previous work that had inexplicable results. It turned out that also in these tests the water concentration determined the outcome. The previously inexplicable changes in the results were caused by fluctuations in the water content of the oil-based solvent. Because that content fluctuates with the humidity. And the atmospheric humidity--indoors and outdoors--is constantly changing because of the weather. The consequence is that a test run on day A can have totally different results from exactly the same test run on day B. Van Zee and his colleagues also revealed how the minute water concentration can have such a big impact. Water molecules are polar: one side is negatively charged and the other positively. That's why they like to bond, via so-called hydrogen bonds. But oil is hydrophobic: it repels water. This repulsion leaves too little space for the water molecules in oil to bond with other water molecules; they are isolated. That means their potential energy to form new hydrogen bonds is available for other uses. The Eindhoven researchers have shown that this energy of water plays a crucial role in the formation of supramolecular structures. These are molecular aggregates based on reversible bonds, for example hydrogen bonds. Their findings put quite a burden on their own science field as well as adjacent ones. A lot of chemistry is done in oil, so a lot of previous research will have to be re-evaluated to assess the effect of water. The researchers suspect that many previous reports of unexplained phenomena, be it changes in structure, size or processing, are fundamentally due to interactions with water. On the other hand the Eindhoven research team provides chemists worldwide with an amazing new instrument, Van Zee explains. "The water concentration turns out to have a very strong influence. And one can easily control it, by manipulating the humidity, which is pretty simple in a closed environment. We think there will be a lot of follow-up research also in other fields of chemistry." ### Brazilian researchers found that the root spittlebug nymph produces bubbles from the suction of sap to form a thermal insulator-foam that maintains an optimal body temperatures during development. Tiny balls of froth can often be seen near the roots of plants in sugarcane plantations in Brazil during summer. The foam protects nymphs of the root spittlebug Mahanarva fimbriolata, a major pest of crops and pasture throughout the Neotropics. Researchers at the University of Sao Paulo's Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ-USP), in collaboration with colleagues at the same university's Sao Carlos Physics Institute (IFSC-USP), have discovered that the insect produces the foam to protect itself from temperature fluctuations in the external environment. The temperature inside the ball of froth is similar to that of the soil and ideal for the insect's development, remaining constant during the day even as the sun heats the ground. An article describing the study has been published in Scientific Reports. "The theory that the foam produced by the spittlebug serves in thermoregulation [maintenance of an optimal body temperature] has been around since the 1950s but has never been proven until now. We obtained proof by means of direct analysis," said Jose Mauricio Simoes Bento, co-author of the study. (Watch a video showing a spittlebug forming a ball of froth here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEs8leBCee8) The investigation was carried out within the scope of one of Brazil's National Institutes of Science & Technology (INCTs), an initiative from the Brazilian Federal Government developed in partnership with various funding institutions in the country. Bento is principal investigator for INCT Semiochemicals in Agriculture, which has support from the Sao Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP. The researchers had already observed a sharp increase in spittlebug numbers on sugarcane plantations in Sao Paulo State after the 2016 ban on pre-harvest sugarcane burning. The nymphs in their foam typically appear around the roots between the summer months of November and March, when atmospheric humidity is low and the soil is wet because of the rainy season. To determine whether the foam does indeed confer thermal protection during this crucial stage of the insect's development before it reaches the adult stage, the researchers conducted field experiments, monitoring temperatures inside and outside of the foam and the soil on a sugarcane plantation in the Piracicaba region of Sao Paulo State on a warm summer's day when temperatures fluctuated significantly. Their analysis showed that while external temperatures ranged from 24.4 C to 29.2 C, the temperature inside the foam remained constant throughout the day at approximately 25 C, which is ideal for the nymph stage and similar to the typical soil temperature. "We confirmed that the foam provides thermal protection for the insects during this stage of their development," said Mateus Tonelli, a PhD student in entomology at ESALQ-USP and another co-author of the study. Thermoregulatory mechanism To gauge the foam's thermal resistance at temperatures higher than those found in the field, the FAPESP-supported research included a laboratory experiment in which foam-covered spittlebug nymphs were placed in a plant growth chamber heated to between 32 C and 33 C. The analysis showed that when the temperature in the growth chamber was 32 C, the temperature inside the foam was approximately 2 C lower, in the range of 30 C, and that the foam's structure remained intact. "We observed that the foam acts as a thermoregulatory mechanism, keeping the temperature around the nymph below 32 C, the temperature that is lethal for the insect. In sum, the foam is a sort of microhabitat or microenvironment in which the temperature is lower than that outside and remains constant regardless of external temperature fluctuations," Tonelli said. The researchers at the FAPESP-funded institute also analyzed the chemical composition of the foam to identify the compounds related to bubble production and stability. They found significant amounts of palmitic acid and stearic acid as well as proteins and carbohydrates. These substances act as surfactants that stabilize the foam by reducing surface tension and modulating bubble size and distribution based on viscosity and elasticity. Interactions between the carbohydrates and proteins create a stable film that stiffens and stabilizes the foam around the insect. "The foam's chemical composition, which gives the bubbles a rigid architecture, was poorly understood until now," Bento said. The foam comprises liquid from the sugarcane sap on which the nymphs feed, which is mixed with air, palmitic and stearic acid, and proteins and carbohydrates that reduce surface and interfacial tension to form emulsions. To produce the foam, the spittlebug nymph uses its mouth apparatus to pierce the roots of the sugarcane plant to the xylem, the tissue that transports sap, and suck out the liquid. Part of this liquid blends with other substances present in the insect's Malpighian tubules, its main excretory organ. The nymphs produce foam by sucking air into the ventral cavity of the abdomen. This air is mixed with the surfactant molecules and fluid in the Malpighian tubules, forming bubbles in the terminal part of the abdomen. "Phylogenetic studies have shown that the spittlebug evolved some 200 million years ago from the cicada, which during the nymph stage, builds an underground tunnel enabling it to live for years in favorable thermal conditions. Its body temperature remains constant without any thermal insulation mechanism. The foam produced by the spittlebug nymph may serve as a 'soil extension' for the insect," Bento said. "Unlike the cicada's legs, the spittlebug nymph's front legs are not strong enough to burrow into the soil in order to maintain a constant temperature. The spittlebug nymph has a delicate cuticle, and without the protection afforded by the foam, it would be vulnerable to environmental factors, such as high temperatures and low humidity." According to Bento, knowledge of the foam's physical and chemical properties can be used to control the pest by developing compounds that prevent bubble formation by the spittlebug nymph. "Currently, there aren't any commercially available compounds capable of eliminating the foam," he said. Another possibility is the development of thermal insulators inspired by the foam. ### About Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) The Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. For more information: http://www.fapesp.br/en. A neutron "lives" for almost 15 minutes before it decays. The elementary particles remain stable as long as they are in the atomic nuclei. In isolation, however, they decay after just under 15 minutes into other particles - protons, electrons, and antineutrinos. To determine the lifetime of the neutrons, scientists observe either the emergence of these decay products or the disappearance of the neutrons. However, these two varying experiments deliver different results. The deviation is less than nine seconds. This might not appear to be much, but the conflicts between the experimental measurements could answer key questions about a new physics beyond the known particles and processes in the universe. For the first time, an international team of scientists used supercomputers to calculate a quantity that is crucial for understanding the lifetime of neutrons: the axial coupling constant of the weak interaction, or g A for short. "It determines the force with which the particles are bound together in the atomic nucleus as well as the radioactive decay rate of the neutron," explains Evan Berkowitz from the Nuclear Physics Institute (IKP). "We were able to calculate the coupling constant with unprecedented precision and our method is paving the way towards further improvements that may explain the experimental discrepancy in the lifetime of neutrons." Space and time on a lattice For their calculation, the researchers turned to a key feature of the standard model of particle physics: quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This theory describes how quarks and gluons - the building blocks for nuclear particles such as protons and neutrons - interact with each other. These interactions determine the mass of the nuclear particles, the strength of their coupling, and, therefore, the value of the coupling constants. However, QCD calculations are extremely complex. For their calculations, the researchers therefore used a numerical simulation known as lattice QCD. "In this simulation, space and time are represented by points on a lattice," explains Berkowitz. "Through this construction, a calculation of the relations between the elementary particles is fundamentally possible - but only with the aid of powerful supercomputers." The scientists used the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee for their simulations. Microscopic universe The coupling constant, which previously could only be derived from neutron decay experiments, was thus determined directly from the standard model for the first time. To this end, the researchers created a simulation of a microscopic part of the universe measuring just a few neutrons wide - much smaller than the smallest atom. The model universe contains a single neutron in the middle of a "sea" of gluons and pairs of quarks and their antiparticles, antiquarks. In this microcosm, the scientists simulated the decay of a neutron to predict what happens in nature. Berkowitz explains that this allows two results for g A from completely independent sources - those from the neutron decay experiments and those using the standard model - to be compared with each other for the first time. "Even the smallest deviations between the values could lead to new discoveries related to dark matter, the asymmetry between matter and antimatter, and other fundamental questions concerning the nature of the universe." A new era "Through our simulation, we were also able to show that the lattice QCD approach can be applied to basic research on the physics of atomic nuclei," explains Berkowitz. The methods have so far mainly been used for elementary particle physics, i.e. the physics of quarks and gluons , and of short-lived particles found in collider experiments. "These calculations ring in a new era. We can now determine parameters of nuclear physics with greater precision without having to resort to experimental measurement data or phenomenological models." ### NEW COMPUTER MODEL: Dr. Jane Lixin Dai, theoretical astrophysicist and assistant professor and Prof. Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, both from the DARK Cosmology Center at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, have recently provided the scientific community with a much-needed computer model. It is necessary for the investigation of Tidal Disruption Events - rare, but extremely forceful events taking place in the center of galaxies. In the figure we see a cross section of what happens when the material from the disrupted star is devoured by the black hole. An accretion disk is formed (disk) by the material. There is too much material for it to pass into the black hole at once. It is heated up in the process and emits vast amounts of light and radiation, visible from Earth (Double arrow). Dr. Jane Dai's computer model takes the difference in viewing angle from Earth into account, which means we are now able to categorize the variations in observations correctly. This means we can study the properties of the black hole, and learn about a celestial body we would otherwise not be able to see. Tidal disruption events In the center of every big galaxy, there is a supermassive black hole, millions to billions times heavier than the Sun. However, it is difficult to observe the majority of them, as they don't emit any light or radiation. This only happens, when some form of material is pulled into the extremely strong gravitational field of the black hole. On rare occasions, actually as rare as once in every 10.000 years for one galaxy, a star passes very close by the supermassive black hole, and the gravity of the black hole tears it apart. This type of fatal event is called a tidal disruption event. When a tidal disruption event happens, the black hole will be "overfed" with stellar debris for a while. "It is interesting to see how materials get their way into the black hole under such extreme conditions," says Dr. Jane Dai who has led the study. "As the black hole is eating the stellar gas, a vast amount of radiation is emitted. The radiation is what we can observe, and using it we can understand the physics and calculate the black hole properties. This makes it extremely interesting to go hunting for tidal disruption events." A unification model While the same physics is expected to happen in all tidal disruption events, the observed properties of these events have shown great variation: Some emitting mostly X-ray emissions, while others mainly emitting visible light and UV. It has been in high demand to understand this diversity and assemble these very different pieces of the puzzle. In the model, it is the viewing angle of the observer that has set the difference. Astronomers observe everything from Earth, but the galaxies are oriented randomly across the universe. "It is like there is a veil that covers part of a beast. From some angles we see an exposed beast, but from other angles we see a covered beast. The beast is the same, but our perceptions are different," said Prof. Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, a co-author on the study. Jane Lixin Dai, theoretical astrophysicist at DARK Cosmology Centre and Niels Bohr International Academy at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, has long wanted a computer model that makes it possible to calculate black hole properties. With the model Dr. Dai and her collaborators put together, combining elements from general relativity, magnetic field, radiation and gas, we now have a measure of what we expect to see when we are viewing tidal disruption events from different angles. This also allows us to put different events into a coherent framework. "We will observe hundreds to thousands of tidal disruption events in a few years. This will give us a lot of "laboratories" to test our model and use it to understand more about black holes," said Dr. Dai. Collaboration and perspectives This work has been made possible by the collaboration between Dr. Jane Dai from the DARK Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI), Prof. Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz from both NBI and the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), as well as researchers from the University of Maryland: Prof. Jonathan McKinney, Dr. Nathaniel Roth, and Prof. Cole Miller. In particular, state-of-the-art computational tools were employed to solve the puzzle. These simulations were carried out by Dr. Dai and Dr. Roth, on the recently acquired large computer cluster made possible by the Villum Grant from Professor Jens Hjorth, head of DARK Cosmology Centre, as well as clusters funded by NSF and NASA. This breakthrough has provided a new perspective to the fast-growing research field. "Only in the last decade or so have we been able to distinguish TDEs from other galactic phenomena, and the model by Dr. Dai will provide us with the basic framework for understanding these rare events", says Prof. Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz. In coming years, the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE) transient survey, led by DARK and UCSC, together with other telescopes such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescopes being built in Chile, will give us access to much more data, and help greatly to expand this field of research. ### Lixin Dai, Assistant professor, Dark Cosmology Centre and NBIA, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Email: lixin.dai@nbi.ku.dk, Phone: +45 35 33 29 33 FRANKFURT. The theoretical physicist Hannah Petersen has been awarded the Zimanyi Medal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The award is in honor of her work on relativistic heavy ion collisions. This young researcher has been the leader of a Helmholtz Young Investigators Group at GSI Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung since 2012 and is a professor teaching at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Her studies are important for the work on the future accelerator center FAIR, which is currently being constructed at GSI. Prof. Petersen received the award at the Quark Matter Conference in Venice, where she also presented the latest results from her working group. The quark matter conference is the largest conference in this field with over 800 participants. Hannah Petersen is the youngest member of the International Advisory committee of the Quark Matter Conference. She is working on new theoretical descriptions of the state of matter shortly after the Big Bang. Relativistic heavy ion collisions offer a way to study strongly interacting matter under the extreme conditions that prevailed at that time. "By accelerating lead or gold nuclei to almost the speed of light and smashing them together, we can reach temperatures and densities that existed in the early universe only microseconds after the Big Bang," she says to describe her research. At such high energy densities, the basic theory of strong interaction, the quantum chromodynamics, predicts the existence of a new phase of matter--the quark-gluon plasma--which expands explosively at extremely high pressure. Prof. Petersen was one of the first to recognize and investigate how the course of this explosion was affected by density and temperature variations resulting from quantum effects. By comparing theoretical and experimental data she was able to propose a frequently cited hybrid model that illustrates the dynamics and viscosity of the plasma as a function of the respective initial state of the quantum fluctuation. The future accelerator center FAIR will provide the researchers with conditions that otherwise only exist in outer space. The work of Prof. Petersen and her Young Investigators Group is an important element for drawing essential conclusions from the experiments. Her main goal is to develop a transport approach for the dynamical description of heavy ion reactions at FAIR using state-of-the-art scientific computing. The scientific managing director of GSI and FAIR, Prof. Paolo Giubellino, is delighted about the young physicist's award. "Hannah Petersen's analytical method lays an important new foundation for experimental measurements at FAIR. Her work has now been rightly honored with the highest award for young theoretical physicists in the area of heavy ion physics," he said. The Zimanyi Medal is awarded by the Wigner Research Center for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. The prize was created in memory of the nuclear physicist Jozsef Zimanyi, who died in 2006. Zimanyi was also a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a professor at the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics (RMKI). The medal is awarded to theoretical physicists under the age of 40 years who have achieved important international recognition and impact in the area of theoretical high-energy physics. ### Picture material can be downloaded at: http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/72219632 Caption: Hannah Petersen and Tamas Sandor Biro from the Zimanyi Foundation at the award ceremony in Venice. Photo: Rosario Turrisi Further information: Professor Hannah Petersen, Institute for Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Physics, Riedberg Campus, Tel.: +49(0)69-798- 4752, petersen@fias.uni-frankfurt.de. Current news about science, teaching, and society in GOETHE-UNI online Goethe University is a research-oriented university in the European financial centre Frankfurt The university was founded in 1914 through private funding, primarily from Jewish sponsors, and has since produced pioneering achievements in the areas of social sciences, sociology and economics, medicine, quantum physics, brain research, and labour law. It gained a unique level of autonomy on 1 January 2008 by returning to its historic roots as a "foundation university". Today, it is among the top ten in external funding and among the top three largest universities in Germany, with three clusters of excellence in medicine, life sciences and the humanities. Together with the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Mainz, it acts as a partner of the inter-state strategic Rhine-Main University Alliance. Internet: http://www.uni-frankfurt.de Publisher: The President of Goethe University Editor: Dr. Anne Hardy, Referee for Science Communication, PR & Communication Department, Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 1, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Tel: (069) 798-13035, Fax: (069) 798-763 12531. After decades of research, a research team has discovered the key receptor molecule that enhances the infection of the influenza A virus, providing a novel target for anti-flu drug development. Viral infection starts when a virus particle attaches to a receptor molecule on the surface of a host cell. The virus particle then hijacks cellular machinery to enter the cell and replicate itself, establishing the infection. The key receptor molecule for the influenza A virus (IAV) has remained unidentified despite decades of research. A research team led by Professor Yusuke Ohba of Hokkaido University previously demonstrated that changes in Ca2+ concentration in host cells play an important role in IAV infections. In the latest study published in Cell Host & Microbe, the team has discovered that the Ca2+ channel, a transmembrane protein that allows Ca2+ to move across the cell membrane, is the key receptor molecule for IAV infections. Furthermore, treating human cells with calcium channel blockers (CCBs), which are commonly used as anti-hypertension drug, significantly suppressed IAV infections. In experiments using cultured human cells, the team found that IAV binds to the Ca2+ channel on the cell's surface to trigger an influx of Ca2+, followed by entry of the virus and infection. Knocking down Ca2+ channels inhibited IAV-induced Ca2+ influx and virus entry. They also revealed that sialic acid on the Ca2+ channel is crucial for the virus to bind. Finally, the team tested the effect of CCB on IAV infections using mice. When they treated the animals with CCB intranasally, a significant and dose-dependent reduction in the amount of replicated viruses was observed. When the animals were treated with high amounts of IAV, administration of CCB significantly prolonged survival and allowed weight recovery of the survivors whereas the untreated group died within five days. "There were cases when the suppressive effect of CCB on IAV infections was comparable to that of an existing anti-flu drug. We expect that the interaction between IAV and the Ca2+ channel could be a novel and important target for future drug development," says Yusuke Ohba. ### The EU biofuel regulation does not guarantee a reduced climate impact - nor does it address the core issue of substantially reducing transport emissions, according to a new doctoral thesis from Lund University in Sweden. "On a smaller scale, biofuels can be a good alternative for public transport, but we cannot solve the climate issue by simply replacing fossil fuels with biofuels. Instead, we must reduce our energy consumption, as the total energy consumption within road transports is not decreasing", explains David Harnesk, researcher at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies. In his thesis, David Harnesk studied the effects of the EU's biofuel regulation, specifically the Renewable Energy Directive from 2009, investigating how well the directive meets its goals of reducing the climate impact from the transport sector and promoting rural development. The directive introduces a regulatory framework to ensure that, by 2020, the share of energy from renewable sources will correspond to 10% of the transport sector's energy consumption. The study argues that EU biofuel regulation is neither environmentally sustainable nor socially beneficial in the long term. Essentially, it benefits the EU market, without taking into account the directive's impacts outside the region. He suggests that, in part, the directive and its predecessors were drafted in an effort to support the energy and agriculture sector in Europe, which was experiencing an economic crisis at the time. "The sustainability perspective was added afterwards. Furthermore, today it looks like the Renewable Energy Directive cannot actually guarantee reduced greenhouse gas emissions", says David Harnesk. The thesis points out that significant environmental and social aspects are not ensured by the minimum requirements of the Renewable Energy Directive. The minimum requirements concern greenhouse gas emissions, as well as land criteria for carbon storage capacity and biodiversity, and must be fulfilled in order for producers to be allowed to deliver to the EU's subsidised biofuels market. Two examples of how the minimum requirements do not live up to the directives' climate- and rural development ambitions are land use change and poverty reduction through rural development. He argues that the production of biofuels is part of a larger change in land use, which for some time has shifted towards large-scale crop production. This has come at the expense of smaller farms as well as more biodiverse rural areas, both within and outside Europe. For example, in Malaysia and Indonesia, two countries that produce a large proportion of the palm oil exported to the EU, there has been a significant increase in biofuels production for European consumption. This has led to clearing of large areas of land and the release of greenhouse gases that were previously stored in the forest. David Harnesk also analysed the EU's developmental argument that was pursued in connection with the establishment of the Renewable Energy Directive. Developing countries would benefit economically, as it would enable them to deliver biomass to a new European market, which in turn would lead to more jobs and increased growth. "This argument has not panned out. Partly due to conflicts over land emerging due to the shift towards large-scale agriculture, and partly because many countries aiming to deliver to the EU, such as Tanzania, do not have institutions that redistribute the economic gains in ways that will benefit the local population", he says. The EU's biofuel project diverts attention from the need for transformation that is crucial in order to create a more sustainable society, he suggests. The total energy consumption of transports must be reduced. However, today, politicians and companies rely on biofuels as some kind of universal cure for the transport sector's climate problems. "We will not be able to avoid transports, but we can change our approach. Society's basic need for transport can be organised as a social service. This is already the case to a certain extent within public transport and mobility services. In order for the system to be sustainable, we need a combination of institutional arrangements that both reduce energy consumption and safeguard society's basic transport needs", David Harnesk concludes. ### A new fossil from Africa, published in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ by Italian paleontologists, represents a small juvenile individual of the huge sail-backed Spinosaurus Spinosaurus is the longest, and among the largest predatory dinosaurs, and possesses many adaptations for a semiaquatic lifestyle. A tiny claw phalanx of the foot, discovered in Cretaceous-aged sandstones of the Sahara, shows a peculiar shape compatible with an early juvenile Spinosaurus. As reported in PeerJ - the Journal of Life & Environmental Sciences, the fossil is from the smallest known individual of this giant, sail-backed theropod. The findings suggest the small specimen retains the same locomotor adaptations as the large version - such as traversing soft substrates or paddling - during the entire lifespan. Collected in Morocco in 1999, a 21 mm-long pedal ungual phalanx (a phalanx supporting a claw of the foot) remained unnoticed in the Paleontological Collection of the Natural History Museum of Milan, until the recent discovery (2014) of a new partial skeleton of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, that preserves an almost complete right foot with peculiar morphology in the phalanges. The striking similarities with the claw phalanges of the foot of Spinosaurus allowed palaeontologists Simone Maganuco and Cristiano Dal Sasso to identify the tiny bone to a very small and young specimen of the sail-backed Spinosaurus, the smallest individual reported up to today. "Besides the rarity of the fossils belonging to juvenile theropod dinosaurs, and the rarity of Spinosaurus bones, this finding is even more remarkable if we consider the dramatic size attained by some large specimens of Spinosaurus, which are possibly the longest, and among the largest predatory dinosaurs ever found"- says Maganuco. Assuming the juveniles looked like smaller versions of the adults, the 21 mm-long claw phalanx from this small specimen would pertain to an early juvenile individual, 1.78 m-long, only just a little bit longer than the estimated length of the sole head of the largest adult Spinosaurus known to date, which is also housed at the Natural History Museum of Milan. According to recent studies, the broader than deep unguals in Spinosaurus with their flat plantar surface are reminiscent of the flattened pedal shape of shorebirds that do not perch, and the whole foot may have been adapted to traversing soft substrates or webbed for paddling. "This find indicates that in Spinosaurus the foot of early juveniles had the same locomotor adaptations observed in large individuals, that were probably achieved early in ontogeny and retained for the entire lifespan", remarks co-author Cristiano Dal Sasso. ### Full Media Pack including article pdf and images: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1sC4W3EVBdgXtCOPV-woyr6HuZ4iX0XYL?usp=sharing EMBARGOED until 30 May 2018: 7 am EST; 12 midday UK local time; 11 am GMT (i.e. the date of publication) Link to the Published Version of the article (quote this link in your story - the link will ONLY work after the embargo lifts): https://peerj.com/articles/4785/ your readers will be able to freely access this article at this URL. About: PeerJ is an Open Access publisher of two peer-reviewed journals and a preprint server. PeerJ's mission is to help the world efficiently publish its knowledge. All works published by PeerJ are Open Access and published using a Creative Commons license (CC-BY 4.0). PeerJ is based in San Diego, CA and the UK and can be accessed at peerj.com PeerJ is the peer-reviewed journal for Biology, Medicine and Environmental Sciences. PeerJ has recently added 15 areas in environmental science subject areas, including Natural Resource Management, Climate Change Biology, and Environmental Impacts. peerj.com/environmental-sciences PeerJ has an Editorial Board of over 1,900 respected academics, including 5 Nobel Laureates. PeerJ was the recipient of the 2013 ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation. PeerJ Media Resources (including logos) can be found at: peerj.com/about/press Media Contacts For the authors: Simone Maganuco simonemaganuco@iol.it +393471868851 Cristiano Dal Sasso cdalsasso@yahoo.com For PeerJ: email: press@peerj.com , https://peerj.com/about/press/ Note: If you would like to join the PeerJ Press Release list, please register at: http://bit.ly/PressList Creation of a map of the molecular network in the aging brain reveals two new Alzheimer's disease target genes In the ongoing quest for a successful treatment for Alzheimer's disease, a team of scientists from several leading research institutions have created a map of the molecular network in the aging brain. Molecular networks are cellular and subcellular structures in an organism and the structures' physical interaction between molecules, RNA, or proteins. The researchers used their map to identify two new Alzheimer's disease target genes -- that is, genes that can be deleted, added, or modified, in the ongoing quest for a successful treatment for the disease. The team presented their findings in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience on May 25. Led by principal investigators Dr. David A. Bennett at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and Dr. Philip L. De Jager at Columbia University in New York, the research team is part of the Accelerating Medicines Program for Alzheimer's disease. Known as the AMP-AD, the program seeks to leverage advances in analytic methods and large-scale molecular profiles of the aging brain to identify novel therapeutic targets for Alzheimer's disease. The National Institute on Aging and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health spearheaded the development of AMP-AD in collaboration with several industry and non-profit partners. The program launched in 2013. Map distinguishes between events leading to brain pathology and to loss of cognitive function The network described in the Nature Neuroscience manuscript accounts for all older people, not just those that meet certain diagnostic guidelines. Further, it separates molecular events that lead to changes in brain tissue (pathology) from those involved in loss of cognitive function, which is the true target of therapeutic efforts. "Prior network approaches had not considered the detailed change in cognitive state over time of older individuals," said Bennett. "Instead, they had relied on comparisons of cases from a dementia clinic with volunteers who after their deaths came to autopsy without ever developing dementia. This does not capture the variability over time exhibited by a diverse population of older individuals." The burden of Alzheimer's disease on our aging human populations is growing rapidly, but current therapeutic strategies targeting a small number of proteins have yet to yield a successful treatment. Analysis honed in on genes most likely to drive cognitive decline The study drew on data about the deeply characterized subjects from two community-based studies based at the Rush Alzheimer Disease Center. Participants in these studies receive extensive medical testing and evaluation while alive and donate their brains to research upon their deaths. None of the participants had a diagnosis of dementia when they enrolled in the study, but some later developed it. The investigators have created a unique resource that links molecular changes in nearly 500 older brains profiled in this study to both the individual trajectories of participants' change in cognition over multiple years prior to death and detailed measures of Alzheimer's disease and other common brain pathologies measured after death. "We have a detailed picture of brain function before death and an extensive evaluation of the molecular features of each individual brain," De Jager observed. Co-lead author Chris Gaiteri, PhD, also from the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center, added that "unlike traditional studies, all possible outcomes and molecular events are considered simultaneously, enabling us to prioritize a few large groups of genes that are most likely to lead directly to cognitive decline and/or brain pathology, instead of having to focus on a large list of individual genes." His co-lead author, Sara Mostafavi, PhD, of the University of British Columbia, extended this comment, "The strength of our analytic approach is that it makes no assumptions as far as what genes are important," she said. "While we find thousands of genes associated with cognitive decline, we do not simply go for the strongest gene. We find patterns that lead to cognitive decline and then prioritize a small subset of genes that appear to be driving these large-scale changes." Experiment reduced genes' production of protein that contributes to Alzheimer's These so called "driver genes" are potentially excellent candidates or targets for developing Alzheimer's disease therapies. However, statistical analyses are not enough. Therefore co-investigator Tracy Young-Pearse, PhD, from Brigham and Women's Hospital designed an experiment in which some of these target genes were perturbed to see if this change affected known molecules involved in Alzheimer's disease. "When they were altered in human astrocytes, a type of brain cell that plays a key role in maintaining brain function, two of the 14 genes predicted to be driver genes by the network displayed a reduction in the secretion of amyloid beta, a protein that contributes to the onset of Alzheimer's disease," Young-Pearse said. These two genes make proteins and the approach raises the possibility that finding drugs that affect those proteins could also lower the production of amyloid beta. Dr. Bennett and his colleagues recently measured a number of the proteins in the network to see if they could replicate the predictions from the network map. Using the network to predict the 14 driver genes itself was a scientific feat akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, given that the brain map includes about 14,000 genes. "This study is a milestone in the study of Alzheimer's disease and the aging brain, said De Jager. "We established a molecular network that not only predicts Alzheimer's disease genes that can be validated experimentally but also can be repurposed to study very different molecular events involved in brain aging, such as stroke, and the fundamental function of the brain itself." Sharing science to spur discoveries All data and network models were made available to share with the scientific community via the AMP-AD Knowledge Portal and the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center Resource Sharing Hub before the publication of the manuscript to enable other investigators to make us of the data and underlying observations for their own studies and to allow them to confirm the results of the study independently. "This study is the culmination of efforts by the NIA, multiple pharmaceutical industry partners, and a tight-knit group of academic investigators to provide a novel, unbiased perspective on Alzheimer's disease biology," said Bennett. "Importantly, this approach does not focus on a single gene of interest, but rather searches for the key nodal point in a network where an intervention may be most likely to have an effect on a devastating disease that remains untreated today." While the two genes identified as candidates by the network approach and its validation need further study before they can be used as the basis for drug development efforts, this report is an important milestone for AMP-AD Target Discovery program. It shows the potential of the open science research model to deliver new disease insights with high translational potential and to create unique research resources for the community of pharmaceutical industry, small biotech and academic investigators interested in diversifying the therapeutic approaches for AD and other diseases of the aging brain. ### The study was funded by grants from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (including U01AG046152, R01AG036836, P30AG10161, R01AG015819, R01AG017917, R01AG036547). A new SLAS Discovery original research article available now for free ahead-of-print, researchers from the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) highlights a diversity of approaches that their automated high-throughput flow cytometry has enabled for phenotypic drug discovery. Flow cytometry is a very powerful tool that has been used for decades and allows for multiparametric readouts at the single cell level within heterogeneous cell populations. However, in the context of high-throughput screening, flow cytometry is slow, low-throughput, and is not amenable to automation. The GNF group has developed a fully automated screening system that solves this problem. The system can achieve a throughput of 50,000 wells per day, resulting in a fully automated platform that enables robust phenotypic drug discovery. Over the past five years, this screening system has been used for a variety of drug discovery programs, across many disease areas, with many molecules advancing quickly into preclinical development and into the clinic. Pharmaceutical companies are tasked with finding new drugs that provide real benefit to patients. A common approach is through the use of phenotypic screening. This is dependent upon the ability to establish complex, biologically relevant screening assays and run high-throughput screening campaigns. However, this kind of complex biology requires new methodologies for lead identification and screening systems like the one developed by the GNF team. ### A Fully Automated High-Throughput Flow Cytometry Screening System Enabling Phenotypic Drug Discovery can be accessed for free at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2472555218773086. 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). Department of Defense grant aims to target breast cancer that has spread to the bone by re-igniting the body's own immune system PHOENIX, Ariz. -- May 30, 2018 -- Often what kills cancer patients is not the cancer at its original or primary site, but its spread to secondary sites within the body, through a process called metastasis. In the case of breast cancer, the tumor often spreads to the bone, and it is this bone metastasis that results in intense pain and precedes the cancer's spread to other organs. In an effort to combat metastatic breast cancer, the U.S. Department of Defense has jointly awarded a $6.7 million grant to Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah, and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope. With this new funding, HCI will focus on the biology of an important cellular pathway in metastatic breast cancer, while TGen will focus on drug development and supervise clinical trials to test those drugs. "This is a critical unmet medical need. Cancer that has spread to the bone can cause unbearable pain for these patients," said Dr. Jeffrey Trent, TGen President and Research Director. "For the first time, this team's novel approach will seek to uncover this hidden cancer and enlist an immune response while at the same time preventing further damage to skeletal structures." A target protein, called RON kinase, was discovered by HCI investigators to support the growth of metastatic breast cancer, but also suppresses the body's own anti-tumor immune responses. "We found that this protein, RON kinase, plays a very critical role in influencing the surrounding immune cells in the bone environment, suppressing the natural anti-tumor immune response, and thereby facilitating metastatic growth of the tumor," said Dr. Alana Welm, HCI investigator and Associate Professor in the Department of Oncological Sciences at the University of Utah. Dr. Welm will be the lead researcher for this study at HCI, who last year published a study about the effects of RON kinase in the journal, Science Translational Medicine. "When breast cancer spreads to the bones, it destroys the bone in a process similar to what happens in osteoporosis, except to a much greater extent," Dr. Welm explained. "The cancer causes bone to be eaten up. So you quite literally get holes in the skeleton." While breast cancer treatment has progressed significantly in recent years, no cure for metastatic breast cancer currently exists. In order for breast cancer to metastasize, cancer cells must be able to escape the primary cancer site, enter into the bloodstream, invade other tissues, modify the new site, and create a new tumor. Nearly three in four metastatic breast cancer patients experience their cancer spreading to the bone, with median survival rate of only two to three years. "We believe that working on a new approach that can block RON kinase in the bone can also stop metastasis, blocking the deterioration of the bone and enhancing anti-tumor immunity," said Dr. Sunil Sharma, M.D., TGen Deputy Director and Director of TGen's Applied Cancer Research and Drug Discovery Division. Dr. Sharma will supervise drug development at TGen and supervise clinical trials at HonorHealth Cancer Research Institute, where he serves as Chief of Translational Oncology and Drug Development. He also is a Professor of Medicine at City of Hope. "We've identified a novel strategy that blocks the activity of RON kinase in the bone microenvironment. In preliminary studies, we've shown it to have potential to advance treatment of bone metastases from breast cancer," said Dr. Sharma, a former physician-scientist at HCI, whose work complements Dr. Welm's research. Dr. Michael Caligiuri, M.D., the immediate past President of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and a renowned physician-scientist, said that finding new ways to prevent breast cancer from spreading could substantially reduce the pain and suffering of breast cancer patients, and their families. "More than 2.5 million live successfully with breast cancer. I believe this project holds great hope for extending the survival and quality of life for many others," said Dr. Caligiuri, who serves as the President and Physician-in-Chief of City of Hope National Medical Center. ### This study is funded by a grant from the Department of Defense Office of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs, whose mission, in part, is to develop, deliver and sustain medical capabilities, and enhance warfighter readiness. About TGen Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) is a Phoenix, Arizona-based non-profit organization dedicated to conducting groundbreaking research with life changing results. TGen is focused on helping patients with neurological disorders, cancer, diabetes, and infectious diseases, through cutting edge translational research (the process of rapidly moving research towards patient benefit). TGen physicians and scientists work to unravel the genetic components of both common and rare complex diseases in adults and children. Working with collaborators in the scientific and medical communities literally worldwide, TGen makes a substantial contribution to help our patients through efficiency and effectiveness of the translational process. TGen is affiliated with City of Hope, a world-renowned independent research and cancer and diabetes treatment center: http://www.cityofhope.org. This precision medicine affiliation enables both institutes to complement each other in research and patient care, with City of Hope providing a significant clinical setting to advance scientific discoveries made by TGen. For more information, visit: http://www.tgen.org. Follow TGen on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter @TGen. Media Contact: Steve Yozwiak Translational Genomics Research Institute 602-343-8704 syozwiak@tgen.org About Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah is the official cancer center of Utah. The cancer campus includes a state-of-the-art cancer specialty hospital as well as two buildings dedicated to cancer research. HCI treats patients with all forms of cancer and operates several clinics that focus on patients with a family history of cancer. As the only National Cancer Institute (NCI)-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center in the Mountain West, HCI serves the largest geographic region in the country, drawing patients from Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. HCI scientists have identified more genes for inherited cancers than any other cancer center in the world, including genes responsible for hereditary breast, ovarian, colon, head, and neck cancers, along with melanoma. HCI manages the Utah Population Database - the largest genetic database in the world, with information on more than 9 million people linked to genealogies, health records, and vital statistics. The institute was founded by Jon M. and Karen Huntsman. Media Contact: Amie Parker Huntsman Cancer Institute 801-213-5755 amie.parker@hci.utah.edu PHOENIX, Ariz., and CHICAGO, Ill. -- May 29, 2018 -- All humans experience some cognitive decline as they age. But how is it that some people in their 80s and beyond still have memory capacity of those 30 or more years younger? Recent studies have shown that these SuperAgers have less evidence of brain atrophy, have thicker parts of the brain related to memory, and lower prevalence of the pathological changes associated with Alzheimer's disease. Now, a study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine suggests that having resilient memory performance during aging could be inherited, and that a particular gene might be associated with SuperAgers. The study results, published today in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, suggest that therapies targeting the MAP2K3 gene could reduce age-related memory decline, and perhaps the threat of memory loss posed by Alzheimer's disease. "This study suggests that SuperAgers may have a genetic 'leg up' on the normal aging population -- they may have higher resistance to age-related cognitive changes -- and also that this might highlight a new way to enhance memory performance," said Dr. Matt Huentelman, Ph.D., TGen Professor of Neurogenomics, and the study's lead author. Researchers sequenced the genomes of 56 SuperAgers in the hunt for genetic variations. They defined SuperAgers as those individuals 80 years or older who scored at or above average normative values for adults age 50-65 in episodic memory tests, and at least average-for-age in other cognitive tests. They compared these to a control group of 22 cognitively average individuals, those who scored within the average-for-age on episodic memory and other cognitive tests, as well as with a large group of individuals from the general population. They found that the SuperAgers were enriched for genetic changes in the MAP2K3 gene compared to the two control groups. "Based on our findings, we postulate MAP2K3 inhibitors may represent a novel therapeutic strategy for enhanced cognition and resistance to Alzheimer's disease", said Dr. Emily J. Rogalski, Ph.D., Associate Professor at the Mesulam Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, and the study's senior author. "Replication of the finding and mechanistic studies are important next steps." ### This study -- Associations of MAP2K3 gene variants with superior memory in SuperAgers -- was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute on Aging (grant numbers R01 AG045571 and P30 AG13854), and the Davee Foundation. Tissue samples were provided by the National Cell Repository for Alzheimer's Disease. Data collection and sharing was provided by the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. About TGen Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) is a Phoenix, Arizona-based non-profit organization dedicated to conducting groundbreaking research with life changing results. TGen is focused on helping patients with neurological disorders, cancer, diabetes, and infectious diseases, through cutting edge translational research (the process of rapidly moving research towards patient benefit). TGen physicians and scientists work to unravel the genetic components of both common and rare complex diseases in adults and children. Working with collaborators in the scientific and medical communities literally worldwide, TGen makes a substantial contribution to help our patients through efficiency and effectiveness of the translational process. TGen is affiliated with City of Hope, a world-renowned independent research and cancer and diabetes treatment center: http://www.cityofhope.org. This precision medicine affiliation enables both institutes to complement each other in research and patient care, with City of Hope providing a significant clinical setting to advance scientific discoveries made by TGen. For more information, visit: http://www.tgen.org. Follow TGen on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter @TGen. Media Contact: Steve Yozwiak TGen Senior Science Writer 602-343-8704 syozwiak@tgen.org About Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine is a top 20 medical school where nationally recognized scientists collaborate with skilled clinicians to improve human health. More than 3,400 faculty members teach, practice medicine, and conduct research at the medical school, which is a central component of Northwestern Medicine, a premier academic health system. BUFFALO, N.Y. -- When and how did the first people come to the Americas? The conventional story says that the earliest settlers came via Siberia, crossing the now-defunct Bering land bridge on foot and trekking through Canada when an ice-free corridor opened up between massive ice sheets toward the end of the last ice age. But with recent archaeological evidence casting doubt on this thinking, scientists are seeking new explanations. One dominant, new theory: The first Americans took a coastal route along Alaska's Pacific border to enter the continent. A new geological study provides compelling evidence to support this hypothesis. By analyzing boulders and bedrock, a research team led by the University at Buffalo shows that part of a coastal migration route became accessible to humans 17,000 years ago. During this period, ancient glaciers receded, exposing islands of southern Alaska's Alexander Archipelago to air and sun -- and, possibly, to human migration. The timing of these events is key: Recent genetic and archaeological estimates suggest that settlers may have begun traveling deeper into the Americas some 16,000 years ago, soon after the coastal gateway opened up. The research will be published online on May 30 in the journal Science Advances. "People are fascinated by these questions of where they come from and how they got there," says lead scientist Jason Briner, PhD, professor of geology in UB's College of Arts and Sciences. "Our research contributes to the debate about how humans came to the Americas. It's potentially adding to what we know about our ancestry and how we colonized our planet." "Our study provides some of the first geologic evidence that a coastal migration route was available for early humans as they colonized the New World," says UB geology PhD candidate Alia Lesnek, the study's first author. "There was a coastal route available, and the appearance of this newly ice-free terrain may have spurred early humans to migrate southward." The findings do not mean that early settlers definitely traversed Alaska's southern coast to spread into the Americas: The project examined just one section of the coast, and scientists would need to study multiple locations up and down the coastline to draw firmer conclusions. Still, the work is exciting because it hints that the seafaring theory of migration is viable. The bones of an ancient ringed seal -- previously discovered in a nearby cave by other researchers -- provide further, tantalizing clues. They hint that the area was capable of supporting human life at the time that early settlers may have been passing through, Briner says. The new study calculates that the seal bones are about 17,000 years old. This indicates that the region was ecologically vibrant soon after the ice retreated, with resources including food becoming available. Co-authors on the research included Briner; Lesnek; Charlotte Lindqvist, PhD, an associate professor of biological sciences at UB and a visiting associate professor at Nanyang Technological University; James Baichtal of Tongass National Forest; and Timothy Heaton, PhD, of the University of South Dakota. A landscape, touched by ice, that tells a story To conduct their study, the scientists journeyed to four islands within the Alexander Archipelago that lie about 200 miles south/southeast of Juneau. The team traveled by helicopter to reach these remote destinations. As soon as the researchers arrived, Briner knew that the islands had once been covered by ice. "The landscape is glacial," he says. "The rock surfaces are smooth and scratched from when the ice moved over it, and there are erratic boulders everywhere. When you are a geologist, it hits you in the face. You know it immediately: The glacier was here." To pinpoint when the ice receded from the region, the team collected bits of rock from the surfaces of boulders and bedrock. Later, the scientists ran tests to figure out how long the samples -- and thus the islands as a whole -- had been free of ice. The researchers used a method called surface exposure dating. As Lesnek explains, "When land is covered by a glacier, the bedrock in the area is hidden under ice. As soon as the ice disappears, however, the bedrock is exposed to cosmic radiation from space, which causes it to accumulate certain chemicals on their surface. The longer the surface has been exposed, the more of these chemicals you get. By testing for these chemicals, we were able to determine when our rock surfaces were exposed, which tells us when the ice retreated. "We use the same dating method for huge boulders called erratics. These are big rocks that are plucked from the Earth and carried to new locations by glaciers, which actually consist of moving ice. When glaciers melt and disappear from a specific region, they leave these erratics behind, and surface exposure dating can tell us when the ice retreated." For the region that was studied, this happened roughly 17,000 years ago. The case for a coastal migration route In recent years, evidence has mounted against the conventional thinking that humans populated North America by taking an inland route through Canada. To do so, they would have needed to walk through a narrow, ice-free ribbon of terrain that appeared when two major ice sheets started to separate. But recent research suggests that while this path may have opened up more than 14,000 years ago, it did not develop enough biological diversity to support human life until about 13,000 years ago, Briner says. That clashes with archaeological findings that suggest humans were already living in Chile about 15,000 years ago or more and in Florida 14,500 years ago. The coastal migration theory provides an alternative narrative, and the new study may mark a step toward solving the mystery of how humans came to the Americas. "Where we looked at it, the coastal route was not only open -- it opened at just the right time," Lindqvist says. "The timing coincides almost exactly with the time in human history that the migration into the Americas is thought to have occurred." ### The research was funded by a UB IMPACT award, and Lesnek's work on the project, which will contribute to her dissertation, was supported by the National Science Foundation. To obtain additional images not available through EurekAlert!, contact Charlotte Hsu in UB Media Relations at chsu22@buffalo.edu. The American Cancer Society (ACS) and other preventive guideline organizations recommend that screening for colorectal cancer start for people of average risk at age 50. However, new data showing rising colorectal cancer incidence in people younger than 50 - and in some cases much younger than 50 - may argue for an earlier start to screening. A study published today the journal Cancer adds this new data to the model used as a basis for the ACS guidelines, showing what it calls a "favorable balance between screening benefits and burden" with screening starting at age 45, five years younger than currently recommended for both men and women of all races and ethnicities. "Moving the start of screening back to age 45 for the average risk population is a considerable change," says Andrea (Andi) Dwyer, director of the Colorado Colorectal Screening Program at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and program director at the Colorado School of Public Health. "If everyone followed screening recommendations based on risk, we could cut colorectal cancer mortality by at least a half, with some estimates suggesting mortality would be cut up to 70 percent," she says. Dwyer is a co-author of the Cancer paper and works collaboratively with the organization Fight Colorectal Cancer. Every year in the United States, about 140,000 new cases of colorectal cancer will be diagnosed and over 50,000 Americans will die from the disease. Worldwide, almost 850,000 people will die of colorectal cancer annually. Because it is nearly impossible to ask large cohorts of people to start colorectal cancer screening at different ages and then follow the outcomes of these cohorts, determining the best age to start and stop screening, and the optimal frequency of screening, depends on sophisticated mathematical models. There are two common models, SimCRC (a collaboration between the University of Minnesota and Massachusetts General Hospital) and MISCAN (by Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City and Erasmus, MC in the Netherlands). The current study worked with the MISCAN model, adjusting the lifetime incidence of colorectal cancer to reflect the most current data, which includes higher incidence younger in the lifespan. The study then compared screening strategies starting at ages 40, 45 and 50 and stopping at ages 75, 80 and 85. The goal was to discover how many years of life were gained per colonoscopy. "Think of it this way," Dwyer says, "if screening started at age 20, you'd have maximum benefit but also a huge burden. It would be inefficient - we would find very few cases of cancer per colonoscopy. On the other hand, if screening started at age 60, you'd have minimal burden but also minimal benefit - we would be missing some cancers and finding others too late. The goal of screening guidelines is to find that sweet spot where there is the most benefit with the least burden." With new data, the MISCAN model finds the highest ratio of benefit-to-burden with colonoscopy screenings every 10 years starting at age 45 and ending at age 75. Of course, the implications of increasing colorectal cancer incidence among young people go beyond the need for adjusted screening recommendations. Perhaps an even bigger question is why incidence in this population is increasing in the first place. "We used to think that young colorectal cancer was genetically different than the disease found in older patients. But now we're finding this might not always be the case. It's showing up younger and no one knows why," Dwyer says. "Researchers have explored the usual things - obesity, tobacco, alcohol - but none of those fully explain the increase. Now people are examining anything they can think of that could influence this early risk - sugar, tap water, lifestyle, even the microbiome. I think there's something very different for a 65-year-old who gets it versus a 25-year-old who gets it, but right now we just don't know what that thing is." Finding the factor or factors driving the development of colorectal cancer in young patients could be key in preventing the disease. Until then, Dwyer and colleagues offer the current recommendations with the intention of optimizing screening to find these cancers, even in younger patients, early enough to offer successful treatments. ### The chunk of metal sitting on a table in Joel Rosenthal's office at the University of Delaware looks like it should belong in a wizard's pocket. Shiny silver with shocks of pink and splashes of gold, it's called bismuth, and it's currently used to make products ranging from shotgun pellets to cosmetics and antacids, including Pepto-Bismol. But Professor Rosenthal's research is expanding bismuth's repertoire--he's identified a kind of magic in the metal that may be just what the doctor ordered for Planet Earth. He says it could help reduce rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and provide sustainable routes to making fuels. Rosenthal and his team in UD's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry have discovered that bismuth has an unusual property that can be harnessed to help the environment--as a chemical "spark" or catalyst for converting carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas, into liquid fuels and industrial chemicals. The findings are reported in ACS Catalysis, a journal published by the American Chemical Society. Rosenthal's team also has filed a patent on the work. University of Delaware Professor Joel Rosenthal (right) and postdoctoral fellow Abderrahman Atifi are working on a new approach to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Rosenthal refers to bismuth's specialized capability as "catalytic plasticity." When an electrical current is applied to a bismuth film in a bath of salty liquids containing imidazolium and amidinium ions, he and his team can "tune" the chemical reaction to convert carbon dioxide to either a liquid fuel such as gasoline, or to formic acid--a valuable chemical with many industrial uses--from preserving human food and livestock feed, to manufacturing rubber and leather, artificial flavorings and perfumes. Traditionally, chemists have needed to create a new catalyst to promote each different chemical reaction they studied, from steps a to b, from b to c, and so forth, Rosenthal said, which makes this approach--using one catalyst that can be tailored or tuned to efficiently promote multiple types of reactions--particularly novel. "We're working to push the boundaries of this idea," Rosenthal said. "Our new findings are important from a technological standpoint--we think this platform will allow renewable energy sources such as solar and wind to drive the direct production of liquid fuels. But more importantly, we believe this concept of 'catalytic plasticity' signals a potential paradigm shift, a new way to think about renewable energy conversion, fuel production and catalysis, in general." Rosenthal and his team previously showed that bismuth films can be used in conjunction with certain liquid salts as inexpensive catalysts for converting carbon dioxide and renewable energy to gaseous fuels such as carbon monoxide. In this study, they found they could use the same materials in the presence of different salts to convert carbon dioxide directly to liquid fuels. "I've been fascinated by the field of catalysis for a long time," Rosenthal said. "Thinking about how you can take something cheap and plentiful and convert it into something much more useful and valuable without having to dump a lot of extra energy into it has always captured my imagination. There are philosophical parallels between catalysis and the goals of the ancient alchemists. Alchemy is a loaded word, but in some ways, what we are studying is like modern alchemy-- efficiently transforming carbon dioxide to more valuable fuels and chemicals is akin to trying to convert lead to gold." What impact could Rosenthal's technology have on current carbon dioxide levels? "It's hard to predict the direct impact on those levels," he said. "This technology would allow us to make liquid fuels using renewable electricity from sunlight and wind. This, in turn, would decrease our need for conventional petroleum resources, resulting in fewer carbon dioxide emissions." This past April, Earth's atmosphere attained its highest sustained levels of carbon dioxide since humans have been monitoring it--exceeding 410 parts per million for the entire month--according to measurements made at Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory. Rosenthal has been working on the challenge for nearly eight years and continues marching on. "Finding chemistries to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions and atmospheric levels is important to me," he said. ### The research team also included postdoctoral fellow Abderrahman Atifi, John L. DiMeglio, who received his doctorate from UD and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, and David W. Boyce, who also received his doctorate at UD and is now a research consultant. The work was supported by Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures and Transport (FIRST), an Energy Frontier Research Center located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a Camille and Henry Dreyfus postdoctoral fellowship in environmental chemistry to Atifi, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The professional ethos of law firms discourages men from taking parental leave, a new Finnish-Canadian study shows. Carried out by the University of Eastern Finland and TELUQ University in Quebec, the study found that the professional culture in law firms rests on traditional masculine ideology, with men regarded as the providers for their families. This view does not encourage men to combine their professional career and child care. The findings were reported in the International Journal of the Legal Profession. The fact that few male lawyers take parental leave is an indication of gender inequality within the legal profession. "In law firms, family policies and flexible working arrangements are mainly targeted at women, and this has a negative impact on women's career development. If fathers took a more active role in child care, it would facilitate the emergence of a professional culture that is more family-friendly. In the process, it is also likely that this would reduce gender bias in the division of legal tasks and career paths within law firms," Researcher Marta Choroszewicz from the University of Eastern Finland explains. The study examined male lawyers' motives behind taking or not taking paternity and parental leaves in law firms based in Helsinki, Finland, and in Montreal, Canada. Canadian male lawyers were significantly less keen to take paternity leave than their Finnish colleagues. This is partly explained by Finland's longer paternity leave tradition. Instead of taking paternity leave, Canadian male lawyers preferred taking annual holiday when their child was born. The greater popularity of paternity leave in Finland is also explained by organisational differences between Finnish and Canadian law firms. In Finland, young lawyers typically work as members of a team, and they for example face lower expectations to attract new clients than their Canadian colleagues. In Canada, the work revolves more around the individual, and even young lawyers are expected to contribute to marketing, networking and new client recruitment. Preliminary findings from Finland show that there, too, the attitudes to paternity leave vary from one generation to the next. Law firm partners representing the post-Second World War generation and Generation X often did not take paternity leave when their children were small, and they do not necessarily understand the need of today's young male lawyers to participate in early child care. In many law firms, paternity leaves are still regarded as optional, compared to, for example, maternity leaves. "It is not enough that men's right to parental leave is guaranteed by legislation. We also need organisational solutions, collegial encouragement and examples set by male law firm partners," Choroszewicz points out. In Finland, the right to paternity leave was enacted in legislation in 1978. In 2013, the length of paternity leave was extended to nine weeks. In Canada, taking paternity leave has been possible since 2006, but only in the province of Quebec, and the length is only half of what it is in Finland. ### For further information, please contact: Researcher Marta Choroszewicz, tel. +358 50 330 9365, marta.choroszewicz(at)uef.fi Research article: Marta Choroszewicz & Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay (2018). Parental-leave policy for male lawyers in Helsinki and Montreal: cultural and professional barriers to male lawyers' use of paternity and parental leaves. Doi https://doi.org/10.1080/09695958.2018.1456435 Wild monkeys which have more social partners form larger huddles in adverse weather and have a better chance of surviving winter, new research has found. Behavioural ecologists studied wild Barbary macaques in Morocco and found that monkeys that had more social partners - the monkeys they groomed with - would form larger huddles at night than those animals with fewer social partners, allowing them to save more energy for growth and reproduction. This method of keeping warm, called social thermoregulation, means that the macaques with more grooming partners would stay warmer, spend less energy on maintaining body temperature and be less exposed to environmental stress, increasing their probability of surviving winter. The study is the first to show that such social huddling may be a mechanism that connects social bonding to higher "fitness" - the term used by scientists to measure of how well animals can cope with their local ecological conditions, usually measured by reproductive success and survival. Dr Bonaventura Majolo, a behavioural ecologist based in the School of Psychology at the University of Lincoln, carried out the study with Liz Campbell, Programme Director at the Moroccan Primate Conservation Foundation, who previously worked as a researcher studying Barbary macaque social behaviour at the University of Lincoln. He said: "In several species, research has found that the most sociable individuals within a group tend to experience greater survival, longevity, reproductive output, and offspring survival. "We know from previous studies of a number of different species that forming social bonds positively affects survival and reproduction, but exactly how this happens was not clear. "Barbary macaques were an ideal species to examine because of the varying social relationships they have with their group companions, and the extreme weather conditions they experience, such as cold and snowy winters, and hot and dry summers. We found that monkeys which were more sociable would huddle together during winter nights with their social partners, and that this led to the formation of larger huddles when it rained or the temperature dropped." Researchers examined the grooming behaviour and hierarchy of two wild groups of Barbary macaques during the day, before recording their sleeping locations, and how many monkeys were huddled together in preparation for the night. The air temperature and whether it had rained or snowed was also recorded, as well as the amount of time the primates spent grooming, their dominance rank, and whether the grooming pair was the same sex or opposite sex. Researchers found that monkeys that spent more time grooming together were more likely to huddle together, and that they would gather in larger groups when there was precipitation and low temperatures. The findings support previous research that increasing huddle sizes is a behavioural response to combat the adverse impact of cold climates. Liz Campbell, Programme Director at the Moroccan Primate Conservation Foundation, said: "Social thermoregulation through huddling, communal nesting or communal roosting, is a very widespread behaviour across a range of species, and this could therefore be a very widespread mechanism linking sociality with an evolutionary advantage. "In the ecological conditions of our study where Barbary macaques experience severe winter energy deficits, the benefits provided by social thermoregulation can explain why more social monkeys are more likely to survive winter. In less extreme climates, more effective social thermoregulation could allow greater energetic investment in growth and reproduction, contributing to the greater longevity, reproductive output, and offspring survival experienced by more social individuals in other species. While previous research has investigated the link between sociality and fitness, it has often explored behaviours that may not apply generally across species, such as support provided by social partners in fights, protection from infanticide, or stress reduction from grooming. "We were searching for a behavioural mechanism which could potentially apply across a diverse range of species to explain the fitness benefit of social bonds. We hope that our study will stimulate further research in this area, helping to understand the benefit of forming and maintaining social bonds, and thus the evolution of complex sociality." The findings have been published in the journal Scientific Reports. ### A new clinical trial from the University of Leeds is testing omega-3 capsules in patients who have bowel cancer which has spread to the liver, to see if it can stop the cancer returning after surgery. Promising results in an earlier smaller trial showed that providing patients with 2g per day of the omega-3, called EPA, for around a month prior to surgery led to a 30 per cent increase in survival after 18 months. Researchers at the University of Leeds are building on this past work by launching a larger clinical trial, recruiting 450 patients who are undergoing surgery for bowel cancer which has spread to the liver, known as secondary liver cancer. The first Leeds patient has just been recruited to the trial in Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. The trial is investigating whether a highly purified form of the omega-3 EPA could be an effective way to stop cancer returning after surgery, and is funded by Yorkshire Cancer Research. Professor Mark Hull, from the University of Leeds' Institute of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences and Leeds Teaching Hospitals, is leading the trial, which involves several hospitals from around the country, including Leeds, Sheffield and Southampton. Professor Hull said: "Secondary liver cancer is the leading cause of death for patients with bowel cancer, as the cancer spreads from the bowels to the liver, so it is vitally important that we improve our ability to stop secondary liver spread. "After undergoing surgery to remove secondary liver cancer, 50 to 75 per cent of patients develop a recurrence of the disease after two years, so we are investigating an intervention that may help stop the cancer returning. "Given the minimal side-effects of omega-3 capsules and how relatively cost-effective they are compared with other more expensive anti-cancer treatments, this intervention could one day be used widely to improve survival from advanced bowel cancer." Bowel cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the UK, with more than 41,000 new cases diagnosed every year. While survival has more than doubled in the last 40 years, more than half of patients with the disease experience recurrence elsewhere in the body, most commonly the liver or lungs, which is known as secondary, advanced or metastatic bowel cancer. Omega-3 fatty acids are found mainly in fish oils and are already known to be beneficial for other health conditions including heart problems. Dr Kathryn Scott, Chief Executive at Yorkshire Cancer Research which is funding the trial, said: "This is a cheap and potentially powerful new way to help treat bowel cancer that, if successful, could have a huge impact. "As well as having a potential impact on treatment, the trial will provide an opportunity for patients to take part in a pioneering study. It is well proven that patients do better in a research-rich environment." The EPA formulation, known as icosapent ethyl and marketed as a prescription product called Vascepa in the United States, and the placebo, have been donated free of charge by Amarin Corporation plc. ### Leicester team to use satellite data to examine how changes in water availability and agricultural practises threaten the sustainability of crop yield and production Project will drive strategies to optimise agriculture practises in the region Researcher exchanges between India and UK planned International scientists, including researchers from the University of Leicester, are using space sensors to monitor the health of land around the River Ganges in India, home to approximately 500 million people. The Ganges flows through India and Bangladesh. UK and Indian scientists are using sensors on space-borne and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms to map an area - a new Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) - on the banks of the Ganges Basin. The CZO encompasses agriculturally-rich land, however climate unpredictability combined with ground-water depletion and high levels of poverty are directly threatening the livelihoods of farming communities living within the Ganges Basin. The project, funded by UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) through the UK's Global Challenges Research Fund, will bring together UK and Indian expertise to generate new scientific observations which will advance our understanding of sustainable land-use, secure and resilient food systems and water security. The CZO was set up by Rajiv Sinha and colleagues from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) as part of an international effort to determine how land and atmosphere interactions within the CZO ecosystem are impacted by human-induced and environmental disturbances. The CZO, supported by the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), has a network of hydro-meteorological instrumentation with data being collected for more than a year. The CZO will be augmented with high-resolution thermal infrared sensors and measurements through the STFC project. Space scientists Harjinder Sembhi and Darren Ghent, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester, will monitor the CZO using land surface temperatures (LST) derived from data collected by the SLSTR (Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer) instrument, flown on board the European Sentinel 3A mission and calibrated at the STFC RAL Space Centre Calibration Facility. Project leader Harjinder Sembhi said: "This project is about using high-quality SLSTR observations to characterise how vegetation is impacted by agriculture practises (such as irrigation regimes and crop rotation) and identify how the changing climate is impacting the landscape. With our NGO partners, The Flow Partnership-UK and The Energy and Resources Institute, we will disseminate information through stakeholder engagement with policy-makers and farming communities and co-develop evidence-based strategies to make future policy recommendations." The Leicester team and IITK scientist Sachidanand Tripathi will install high-quality radiometers at the CZO to provide the first opportunity to assess the quality of SLSTR measurements in the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP). Co-investigator Darren Ghent, who leads the SLSTR LST activities within the Sentinel-3 Mission Performance Centre, says this validation will strengthen the capability within the UK to assess the performance of the Sentinel-3 operational LST data product and facilitate the evaluation of the instrument and algorithms in higher temperature environments which can inform the STFC calibration team. Co-investigator Martin Wooster from King's College London will work with IITK to generate the first in-depth mapping of CZO vegetation, crop residue burning and surface properties using high-resolution thermal and hyperspectral cameras flown on UAVs. The scientific observations collected during a dedicated measurement campaign will be implemented into land and hydrological models to derive downstream flux and emission estimates. In addition to significant scientific outputs, this project will provide opportunities for researcher exchange that will boost capacity building in the area of space sensors for monitoring of the land and atmosphere. ### Additional information: STFC https://stfc.ukri.org/index.cfm The Global Challenges Research Fund The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research and innovation that addresses the global issues faced by developing countries. It harnesses the expertise of the UK's world-leading researchers, focusing on: funding challenge-led disciplinary and interdisciplinary research; strengthening capability for research, innovation and knowledge exchange; and providing an agile response to emergencies where there is an urgent research or on-the-ground need. It is a 1.5 billion fund which forms part of the UK Government's Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitment and is overseen by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), and delivered through 17 delivery partners including the Research Councils, the UK Academies, the UK Space Agency and funding bodies. https://www.ukri.org/research/global-challenges-research-fund/ Earth Observation Science, University of Leicester The Earth Observation Science (EOS) group, part of the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Leicester Institute for Space and Earth Observation, is a nationally and internationally recognised multi-disciplinary team with a heritage in remote sensing and instrumentation for Earth surface and atmospheric science. The University of Leicester also hosts the National Centre for Earth Observation, a NERC research centre with more than 80 scientists distributed across leading UK universities and research organisations and led by Professor John Remedios. https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/physics/research/eos Key Contacts: Harjinder Sembhi (Principle Investigator, University of Leicester), contact hs32@leicester.ac.uk https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/physics/research/eos/harjinder-sembhi Darren Ghent (Sentinel-3 LST Algorithm Manager, NCEO-Leicester), contact djg20@leicester.ac.uk Find out more about LST data here: http://www.globtemperature.info Martin Wooster (NCEO-Kings) http://wildfire.geog.kcl.ac.uk/wildfire-research-group/martin-wooster/ Minni Jain (The Flow Partnership) http://www.theflowpartnership.org Rajiv Sinha and Sachichand Tripathi (IIT Kanpur) http://home.iitk.ac.in/~rsinha/ http://home.iitk.ac.in/~snt/ Sumit Sharma (The Energy and Resources Institute) http://www.teriin.org/profile/sumit-sharma The wealthiest areas of the world will experience fewer changes in local climate compared to the poorest regions if global average surface temperatures reach the 1.5C or 2C limit set by the Paris agreement, according to new research. The new study, published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, compares the difference between climate change impacts for wealthy and poor nations. The results are a stark example of the inequalities that come with global warming, said lead author Andrew King from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at the University of Melbourne in Australia. The richest countries that produced the most emissions are the least affected by heat when average temperatures climb to just 2C, while poorer nations bear the brunt of changing local climates and the consequences that come with them. The least affected countries include most temperate nations, with the United Kingdom coming out ahead of all others. By contrast, the worst affected are in the Equatorial regions, including countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo. This pattern holds true even if global average surface temperatures only reach 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. To get their results the researchers used a simple metric the signal to noise ratio. The signal in this case is the local change in average temperatures caused by climate change. The noise is how variable the temperature is for that region. In places outside the tropics, where there is greater year-to-year variability and those locations are more well adapted to a wide range of temperatures, the warming will be less noticeable. But in Equatorial regions, where there is already a very high average temperature and less variation through the year, a small rise in temperatures due to climate change will be distinctly felt and have immediate impacts. This difference in experienced temperature combined with the distribution of wealth across the world, with richer nations tending to be in temperate regions and the poorer nations in the tropics, adds to the future climate change burden of developing nations. Economically powerful nations, who are most responsible for the emissions that led to global warming, are going to have to pick up the slack if they want to maintain economic growth in developing countries, said co-author Luke Harrington from the University of Oxford. Its why we need to invest in limiting the worst impacts of climate change for developing nations today. By assisting developing nations to meet these challenges we help maintain their economic stability and security into the future and by extension, our own as well. ### Using the largest supercomputers in the country, scientists have reached a milestone decades in the making. The team, which includes a researcher from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has calculated the axial coupling of the neutron, an important process in nuclear physics that governs nuclear beta decay, or the process by which neutron decays to a proton, an electron, and a neutrino. The team's calculation (which is g_A = 1.271 +- 0.013) has groundbreaking precision. The methods used for this calculation could enable fields involving nuclear physics, like nuclear energy and nuclear weapon detection research, to become more quantitative. These areas of research currently rely on qualitative modeling that is built on unproven assumptions, but the new calculation shows that more accurate predictions may one day be possible. Amy Nicholson, assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill, is a lead author on the paper, which will appear in the journal Nature on May 30. "This calculation represents a turning point for nuclear physics," Nicholson said. "The theoretical uncertainties around calculating the nucleon axial coupling have proven frustratingly difficult to control, but now that we have shown that these methods can be reliably applied, nuclear physics can enter a more quantitative era. The ability to accurately predict properties of atomic nuclei directly from theory may allow us to access information unavailable through direct experimentation." Nicholson and colleagues calculated the axial coupling of the neutron, which indicates the strength of the interactions between protons and neutrons (the basic constituents of all atomic nuclei), as well as the lifetime of the neutron. To accomplish this work, the team simulated a microscopic universe to provide a window into the subatomic world, using the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The study involved scientists from more than a dozen institutions, including UNC-Chapel Hill, the University of California at Berkeley and U.S. Department of Energy national labs. Many groups have been trying to calculate this quantity for years and have been unable to fully control the uncertainties. It was estimated that using next-generation computing resources might allow a calculation of the axial coupling at a precision of within 2 percent by 2020. Instead, using a new mathematical strategy and current computing power, the researchers successfully calculated it to within 1 percent uncertainty. The axial coupling calculations used about 184 million "Titan-hours" of computing power -- it would take a standard computer processor about 75,000 years to work through the same set of calculations. Nicholson's research field, called "lattice QCD," began in the 1970s and has roughly a thousand practitioners worldwide. Lattice QCD stands for "lattice Quantum Chromodynamics." It has taken decades of simultaneous advancements in theories, techniques, algorithms and computer hardware to reach this point. ### The paper can be viewed using http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0161-8. About the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nation's first public university, is a global higher education leader known for innovative teaching, research and public service. A member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, Carolina regularly ranks as the best value for academic quality in U.S. public higher education. Now in its third century, the University offers 77 bachelor's, 111 master's, 65 doctorate and seven professional degree programs through 14 schools and the College of Arts and Sciences. Every day, faculty, staff and students shape their teaching, research and public service to meet North Carolina's most pressing needs in every region and all 100 counties. Carolina's more than 323,000 alumni live in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and 149 countries. More than 169,000 live in North Carolina. System designed to use data from non-surgical devices powered by AI and machine learning Epileptic seizures strike with little warning and nearly one third of people living with epilepsy are resistant to treatment that controls these attacks. More than 65 million people worldwide are living with epilepsy. Now researchers at the University of Sydney have used advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop a generalised method to predict when seizures will strike that will not require surgical implants. Dr Omid Kavehei from the Faculty of Engineering and IT and the University of Sydney Nano Institute said: "We are on track to develop an affordable, portable and non-surgical device that will give reliable prediction of seizures for people living with treatment-resistant epilepsy." In a paper published this month in Neural Networks, Dr Kavehei and his team have proposed a generalised, patient-specific, seizure-prediction method that can alert epilepsy sufferers within 30 minutes of the likelihood of a seizure. Dr Kavehei said there had been remarkable advances in artificial intelligence as well as micro- and nano-electronics that have allowed the development of such systems. "Just four years ago, you couldn't process sophisticated AI through small electronic chips. Now it is completely accessible. In five years, the possibilities will be enormous," Dr Kavehei said. The study uses three data sets from Europe and the United States. Using that data, the team has developed a predictive algorithm with sensitivity of up to 81.4 percent and false prediction rate as low as 0.06 an hour. "While this still leaves some uncertainty, we expect that as our access to seizure data increases, our sensitivity rates will improve," Dr Kavehei said. Carol Ireland, chief executive of Epilepsy Action Australia, said: "Living with constant uncertainty significantly contributes to increased anxiety in people with epilepsy and their families, never knowing when the next seizure may occur. "Even people with well controlled epilepsy have expressed their constant concern, not knowing if or when they will experience a seizure at work, school, travelling or out with friends. "Any progress toward reliable seizure prediction will significantly impact the quality of life and freedom of choice for people living with epilepsy." Dr Kavehei and lead author of the study, Nhan Duy Truong, used deep machine learning and data-mining techniques to develop a dynamic analytical tool that can read a patient's electroencephalogram, or EEG, data from a wearable cap or other portable device to gather EEG data. Wearable technology could be attached to an affordable device based on the readily available Raspberry Pi technology that could give a patient a 30-minute warning and percentage likelihood of a seizure. An alarm would be triggered between 30 and five minutes before a seizure onset, giving patients time to find a safe place, reduce stress or initiate an intervention strategy to prevent or control the seizure. Dr Kavehei said an advantage of their system is that is unlikely to require regulatory approval, and could easily work with existing implanted systems or medical treatments. The algorithm that Dr Kavehei and team have developed can generate optimised features for each patient. They do this using what is known as a 'convolutional neural network', that is highly attuned to noticing changes in brain activity based on EEG readings. Other technologies being developed typically require surgical implants or rely on high levels of feature engineering for each patient. Such engineering requires an expert to develop optimised features for each prediction task. An advantage of Dr Kavehei's methodology is that the system learns as brain patterns change, requiring minimum feature engineering. This allows for faster and more frequent updates of the information, giving patients maximum benefit from the seizure prediction algorithm. The next step for the team is to apply the neural networks across much larger data sets of seizure information, improving sensitivity. They are also planning to develop a physical prototype to test the system clinically with partners at the University of Sydney's Westmead medical campus. ### Multimedia: download images and video at this link. Media enquiries: Marcus Strom marcus.strom@sydney.edu.au +61 423 982 485 In your body, blood stem cells produce approximately 10 billion new white blood cells, which are also known as immune cells, each and every day. Even more remarkably, if some of these blood stem cells fail to do their part, then other blood stem cells pick up their slack and overproduce whichever specific type of immune cell is lacking, according to a new USC Stem Cell study published in the journal EMBO Reports. USC PhD student Lisa Nguyen and colleagues in the laboratory of Rong Lu observed this phenomenon by tracking the individual blood stem cells that reside in the bone marrow of mice. To create the tracking labels, the scientists attached a unique piece of genetic code to each blood stem cell. During blood production, each blood stem cell passes its unique genetic label onto its progeny--which include two types of immune cells, known as B cells and T cells. To test the contributions of these uniquely labelled blood stem cells, the scientists performed a series of bone marrow transplantations in mice. Mice received a combination of normal blood stem cells and deficient blood stem cells with a genetic mutation that prevented them from producing either B cells only, or both B and T cells. The scientists found that the normal blood stem cells compensated for the B and T cell deficiencies. When co-transplanted with B-deficient stem cells, the normal stem cells overproduced B cells to keep the immune system in balance. And when co-transplanted with B- and T-deficient stem cells, the normal stem cells compensated by overproducing both B and T cells to maintain a balanced immune system. Furthermore, the scientists found that a few specific blood stem cells were doing most of the work. These key blood stem cells proliferated dramatically to compensate for the immune cell deficiencies in the recipient mice, and these cells continued to proliferate when they were transplanted into different recipient mice. Furthermore, these highly productive blood stem cells showed changes in gene activity that enhanced their ability to oversupply deficient types of immune cells. "These stem cells' ability to compensate provides some degree of resilience to disruptions of the blood and immune system--such as the aging process, the early stages of many blood cancers and disorders, and bone transplantation," said Lu, an assistant professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at USC. "By understanding and ultimately harnessing this innate capacity of stem cells, we can potentially optimize treatments for a wide range of diseases." ### Additional co-authors include Zheng Wang, Adnan Y. Chowdhury, Elizabeth Chu, Jiya Eerdeng and Du Jiang from the Lu Laboratory. Funding came from the National Institutes of Health (R00HL113104, R01HL135292, R01HL138225, P30CA014089, T32HD060549, and F31HL134359), the Rose Hills Foundation Science and Engineering Fellowship, the USC Provost's Undergraduate Research Fellowship, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine Training Grant, the Hearst Fellowship Award, the USC Office of Research, and the Norris Medical Library. About USC Stem Cell: USC Stem Cell is a collaborative, multidisciplinary effort working to translate the potential of stem cell research to the clinical imperative of regenerative medicine. Centered at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, the initiative brings together nearly 100 research and clinical faculty members from the Keck School of Medicine of USC, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, the USC Davis School of Gerontology, the Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC, the USC School of Pharmacy, and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Please visit stemcell.keck.usc.edu. Follow USC Stem Cell stemcell.keck.usc.edu | facebook.com/uscstemcell | twitter.com/uscstemcell For centuries Inuit children in Greenland, Canada, and Alaska have been observed as small. But recently they have begun to grow a lot. For centuries Inuit children in Greenland, Canada, and Alaska have been observed as small. But recently they have begun to grow a lot. During the last couple of years people have noticed that Greenlandic boys and girls are getting taller compared to older generations. These common observations have now been scientifically proved, says Marius Klvgaard, MD and one of the scientists behind a newly published study of growth of Greenlandic children. Previous studies of growth of the indigenous Inuit people of Greenland, Canada and Alaska has characterized them as shorter but with the same weight as European or continental US citizens. Yet, this specific growth pattern was no longer found in the new study of growth of Greenlandic children conducted by researchers from University of Southern Denmark, which has just been published in the scientific journal Acta Paediatrica. We evaluated the growth of 279 healthy Greenlandic boys and girls aged 6-10 years and found that at puberty, Greenlandic children are now as tall as children in Denmark, says Marius Klvgaard. As a part of the study the research group has also conducted specific growth charts for children in Greenland that can be used for monitoring growth and thrive. Growth charts for Greenlandic children have never been published before. Genes and obese mothers The fact that the growth of Greenlandic children is no longer stunted has several explanations. Many people in Greenland have one or more ancestors of Scandinavian origin so genetic admixture is quite common. That might to some extent explain why children in Greenland have a similar growth pattern to children in Denmark, says Marius Klvgaard. Another important finding is a high number of obese mothers. It is well-known that obese mothers get large babies, and it seems like these larges babies keep on being large during their childhood, says Marius Klvgaard. Healthy children Furthermore, in a recent study, the research group found, that children in Greenland are as healthy as children in Denmark. Actually, children in Greenland have fewer visits to the doctors than Danish children. Chronic diseases might hamper growth. But improvements in health and nutrition have reduced these kind of problems, says Marius Klvgaard. ### The scientific article Growth of children in Greenland exceeds the World Health Organization growth charts can, together with the growth charts for Greenlandic children, be downloaded from Acta Paediatrica at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/apa.14369. About 66 million years ago, an asteroid smashed into Earth, triggering a mass extinction that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and snuffed out 75 percent of life. Although the asteroid killed off species, new research led by The University of Texas at Austin has found that the crater it left behind was home to sea life less than a decade after impact, and it contained a thriving ecosystem within 30,000 years -- a much quicker recovery than other sites around the globe. Scientists were surprised by the findings, which undermine a theory that recovery at sites closest to the crater is the slowest due to environmental contaminants -- such as toxic metals -- released by the impact. Instead, the evidence suggests that recovery around the world was influenced primarily by local factors, a finding that could have implications for environments rocked by climate change today. "We found life in the crater within a few years of impact, which is really fast, surprisingly fast," said Chris Lowery, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) who led the research. "It shows that there's not a lot of predictability of recovery in general." The research was published May 30 in the journal Nature. UTIG research scientists Gail Christeson and Sean Gulick and postdoctoral researcher Cornelia Rasmussen are co-authors on the paper, along with a team of international scientists. UTIG is a research unit of the Jackson School of Geosciences. The evidence for life comes primarily in the form of microfossils -- the remains of unicellular organisms such as algae and plankton -- as well as the burrows of larger organisms discovered in a rock extracted from the crater during recent scientific drilling conducted jointly by the International Ocean Discovery Program and International Continental Drilling Program. The tiny fossils are hard evidence that organisms inhabited the crater, but also a general indicator about habitability in the environment years after impact. The swift recovery suggests that other life forms aside from the microscopic were living in the crater shortly after impact. "Microfossils let you get at this complete community picture of what's going on," Lowery said. "You get a chunk of rock and there's thousands of microfossils there, so we can look at changes in the population with a really high degree of confidence ... and we can use that as kind of a proxy for the larger scale organisms." The scientists found the first evidence for the appearance of life two to three years after impact. The evidence included burrows made by small shrimp or worms. By 30,000 years after impact, a thriving ecosystem was present in the crater, with blooming phytoplankton (microscopic plants) supporting a diverse community of organisms in the surface waters and on the seafloor. In contrast, other areas around the world, including the North Atlantic and other areas of the Gulf of Mexico, took up to 300,000 years to recover in a similar manner. The core containing the fossil evidence was extracted from the crater during a 2016 expedition co-led by the Jackson School. In this study, scientists zeroed in on a unique core section that captures the post-impact seafloor in unprecedented detail. Whereas core samples from other parts of the ocean hold only millimeters of material deposited in the moments after impact, the section from the crater used in this study contains more than 130 meters of such material, the upper 30 inches of which settled out slowly from the turbid water. This material provides a record that captures the seafloor environment days to years after the impact. "You can see layering in this core, while in others, they're generally mixed, meaning that the record of fossils and materials is all churned up, and you can't resolve tiny time intervals," said co-author Timothy Bralower, a micropaleontology professor at Pennsylvania State University. "We have a fossil record here where we're able to resolve daily, weekly, monthly, yearly changes." Ellen Thomas, a senior research scientist in geology and geophysics at Yale University who was not part of the study, said that although she thinks the paper makes a strong case for a speedy recovery, she expects that the larger scientific community will be interested in digging into the data for themselves. "In my opinion, we will see considerable debate on the character, age, sedimentation rate and microfossil content ... especially of the speculation that burrowing animals may have returned within years of the impact," Thomas said. The relatively rapid rebound of life in the crater suggests that although the asteroid caused the extinction, it didn't hamper recovery. The scientists point to local factors, from water circulation to interactions between organisms and the availability of ecological niches, as having the most influence on a particular ecosystem's recovery rate. The findings indicate that recovery after a global catastrophe could be a local affair. ### The International Ocean Discovery Program, the International Continental Drilling Program, the National Science Foundation and NASA funded the research. DALLAS - May 30, 2018 - UT Southwestern biochemist Dr. Benjamin Tu has been selected as one of 31 finalists for the 2018 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists for his innovative studies of molecules that could help improve treatments for cancer and conditions associated with aging. Dr. Tu's research uses both yeast and mammalian cells to study complex DNA-regulating processes that are linked to the internal workings of cells. "The influence and importance of the metabolic state on cell regulation are far too often overlooked and we aim to decipher these very complex mechanisms," said Dr. Tu, Associate Professor of Biochemistry, who holds the Martha Steiner Professorship in Medical Research. "Our research has begun to show that small molecule metabolites play underappreciated roles in the regulation of growth and survival of cells." Dr. Tu's laboratory opened a new area for investigation with findings that identified chromatin methylation as important to the production of the amino acid cysteine - results that suggest methylation might be as important to metabolism as it is to gene expression. "UT Southwestern is fortunate to have innovative scientists like Ben, whose discoveries in metabolism and biochemistry have revealed how intracellular levels of intermediary metabolites coordinate cell growth and physiology," said Biochemistry Chair Dr. Margaret Phillips, who is also Professor of Pharmacology and holds The Sam G. Winstead and F. Andrew Bell Distinguished Chair in Biochemistry. ### Dr. Tu, a UT Southwestern Presidential Scholar and a W.W. Caruth, Jr. Scholar in Biomedical Research, began his groundbreaking studies by examining yeast and has since obtained similar findings in mammals. Dr. Tu previously has been recognized with the Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Research, the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award, a Packard Fellowship, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, and the AAAS/Science/GE Healthcare Young Scientist Regional Award Winner for North America. Last year, he was also a finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards. Dr. Tu earned bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from the University of California, San Francisco. He joined the UT Southwestern faculty in 2007 as an Endowed Scholar. The Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, established by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, celebrate the excellence of outstanding early career scientists and engineers from institutions across the United States. Finalists will be honored in September when three Blavatnik Laureates are recognized. About UT Southwestern Medical Center UT Southwestern, one of the premier academic medical centers in the nation, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution's faculty has received six Nobel Prizes, and includes 22 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 15 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The faculty of more than 2,700 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in about 80 specialties to more than 100,000 hospitalized patients, 600,000 emergency room cases, and oversee approximately 2.2 million outpatient visits a year. Radio City, Indias leading radio network announced its association with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) as the radio partner for the World Environment Day initiative to be held in India to control plastic pollution. UNEP is an agency of United Nations to coordinate environmental activities, assisting developing countries in implementing environmentally sound policies and practices. Every year, United Nations chooses one country to be a global host to spread environmental awareness, and this year its India. Radio Citys consistent effort towards addressing societal issues by leveraging the reach and power of the medium has made it an unrivaled partner for UNEP to amplify this noble cause. Versova beach in Mumbai has been selected to drive the campaign Beat Plastic Pollution, by the United Nations and Indian Government to kick start the cleanup drive. Radio City initiated proceedings on 27th May with a beach cleanup drive in Versova, as a build up to the World Environment Day to be held on 5th June. The launch event hosted by popular Radio City RJ Archana, witnessed participation from high profile dignitaries including the UN environment Chief Erik Solhiem, Aditya Thackrey, actresses Diya Mirza and Pooja Bhatt. An awareness generating video featuring RJ Archana was also unveiled at the event to create awareness on various measures to be taken to beat plastic pollution. Commenting on the association with UNEP for World Environment Day,Mr. Abraham Thomas, CEO, Radio City said,Radio has the power to influence mindsets and bring about a positive change in the society. We are proud to partner with UNEP to work towards this greater cause. At Radio City, we strongly believe in maintaining a right balance in the environment where we all co-exist. The Versova beach cleanup is one of the many activities that we intend to drive this year with the objective of highlighting the importance of protecting our environment for the future generations. "It's fantastic to get the support of partners like Radio City to get the World Environment Day message out across India," said UN Environment Chief Erik Solheim. During my visit to Mumbai, I witnessed first-hand, the damage marine plastic pollution is causing. It will require a step forward from each one of us to do what we can to reduce our own plastic footprint, and of course we must. I am delighted that a booming economy like India is the global host of World Environment Day 2018 and will be leading the push to save the oceans and the planet. Every single environmental challenge we face can be solved by innovation. It's simply a case of getting the message out and inspiring as many people as possible to join forces and take a stand for the planet and look forward to Radio City's help to amplifying the same." Radio Citys RJ Archana, expressing her thoughts on the cleanup drive said, Mumbai is known for its beaches and it is extremely sad to see the condition of the beaches with plastic getting deep rooted. I have always been taken aback by the amount of plastic waste that is dumped on the streets and the beaches of Mumbai. Being a Mumbaikar, I feel a sense of responsibility to make this city pollution free and a better place to live in. I urge all Radio City listeners and all Mumbaikars to contribute towards conserving our environment and keeping it pollution free. As a part of the campaign Radio City along with Afroz Shah, the UN environment ambassador takes the drive on air and on ground by creating awareness amongst Mumbaikars of how they could replace, reuse plastic thereby avoiding plastic pollution. Radio City will go on ground to various locations in Mumbai where plastic pollution is high and continue to drive the awareness of beating plastic pollution with volunteers from schools, colleges and fellow Mumbaikars. Read more news about (internet advertising India, internet advertising, advertising India, digital advertising India, media advertising India) An attack on Tuesday that killed two policewomen and a male bystander in the Belgian city of Liege is being treated as "terrorist murder", prosecutors said Wednesday. The gunman, identified as 31-year-old Benjamin Herman, is also suspected in the killing of a fourth person on the eve of his rampage, federal prosecutors spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt told a press conference. The facts are qualified as terrorist murder and attempted terrorist murder, Van Der Sypt said, referring also to the shootings that wounded four other police officers. Prosecutors said this assessment was based on a number of first elements from the investigation, including the modus operandi of attacking police with a knife and stealing their firearms, which the Islamic State group has encouraged in online videos. In Tuesdays attack Herman stabbed the two policewomen repeatedly before taking their handguns. Van Der Sypt said they also based their argument on the fact he shouted Allahu Akbar, or God is greatest in Arabic. Finally, Van Der Sypt said, there were reports from state security and regional authorities that the perpetrator had been in touch with radicalised persons. The killer is also suspected of a manslaughter in On, Marche-en-Famenne, in southern Belgium, he added. The exact circumstances of this offence are the subject of a separate investigation, Van Der Sypt said. Privacy Settings This site uses functional cookies and external scripts to improve your experience. Which cookies and scripts are used and how they impact your visit is specified on the left. You may change your settings at any time. Your choices will not impact your visit. NOTE: These settings will only apply to the browser and device you are currently using. Benjamin Herman, who shot three people dead in a suspected terror attack in eastern Belgium, was a serial petty criminal with a drug problem who may have been radicalised in prison. The 31-year-old Belgian was known to police since adolescence and had been in and out of prison for robbery and drug offences. Local media have portrayed him as a violent and unstable man. He is thought to have converted to Islam in prison but questions remain over whether he became radicalised there and whether this was what drove him to carry out his murderous rampage. He converted to the Muslim religion in 2012 while meeting with another prisoner in Arlon, a town in southern Belgium near Luxembourg, Justice Minister Koen Geens told broadcaster RTBF. But both Geens and Interior Minister Jan Jambon, interviewed on Belgiums RTL channel, were cautious about whether he had embraced Islamist militant ideology before launching his attack. The fact he took part in a prayer group, for example, is it a sufficient sign of radicalisation to treat him as a dangerous terrorist? Geens asked. We may have been mistaken, but the response was negative, Geens added. Jambon echoed his point. There were signs of radicalisation in prison but did this radicalisation lead to these actions? There, too, we can ask ourselves questions, Jambon said. We must wait for the results of the investigation. Hermans name appeared in police and state security reports about radicals, though he was not the subject of the reports. Terrorist murder Prosecutors say they are treating the case as terrorist murder and attempted terrorist murder. That was partly because the method of his attack has been advocated in online videos by the Islamic State group. Herman attacked police officers with a knife before taking their guns to shoot people. Alain Grignard, a Belgian Islamic studies expert at the University of Liege, said Herman appeared to be a criminal who converted. People want labels that are too clear: delinquent, terrorist. The reality is between the two, Grignard said. Hermans first brush with the law was in 2003 when, aged 16, he was placed for several weeks in a juvenile home in the Flemish region of Everberg. Herman and his brother were both reported to be cocaine and heroin addicts. Every day they hunted for money to get their fix, the newspaper La Meuse reported. Herman was granted temporary release from prison on Monday morning for family leave. He embarked on his deadly spree instead of returning on Tuesday evening. In a separate investigation, prosecutors also suspect Herman killed another man on the eve of his rampage. Analysts say a high number of jihadists had trouble with the law before being radicalised. They include several involved in the November 2015 attacks in Paris and the March 2016 Brussels suicide bombings. lc/pdw/arp/rlp The United Nations said Wednesday there are "strong indications" that Mexican security forces are responsible for a wave of kidnappings in the city of Nuevo Laredo, on the border with the United States. At least 21 people have disappeared in the city since February, often detained by uniformed officers late at night or early in the morning and never heard from again, said the office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein in a statement. Many of these people are reported to have been arbitrarily detained and disappeared while going about their daily lives, Zeid said in the statement. It is particularly horrific that at least five of the victims are minors, with three of them as young as 14. These crimes, perpetrated over four months in a single municipality, are outrageous. The UN Human Rights Office in Mexico has independently documented at least 21 disappearances, but according to a local human rights group, there have been at least 40, the statement said. Family members searching on their own have found the bodies of at least six of the victims, it said. The UN said federal security forces appeared to be implicated in the crimes, but did not say which ones. Mexico has been hit by spiraling violence since the government sent the army into the streets in 2006 to fight the countrys powerful drug cartels. Since then, more than 200,000 people have been murdered in the country. More than 30,000 are reported missing. Nuevo Laredo is in the violent border state of Tamaulipas, one of the states hardest hit by brutal turf wars between rival drug trafficking groups. It is not the first time Mexican security forces have been accused of kidnappings and killings. Most recently, police in the western state of Jalisco were accused of detaining three Italian nationals and handing them over to a drug cartel in January. In the eastern state of Veracruz, 19 ex-officials, including a former state police chief, were accused in February of running a hit squad that abducted and presumably killed at least 15 people. US philosopher Michael Sandel, a fierce critic of the influence of the business world on society, was awarded on Wednesday Spain's prestigious Princess of Asturias award for social sciences, with the jury describing him as "one of today's foremost intellectuals". In a statement, the jury hailed Sandels exemplary body of work on the foundations that regulate liberal democracy, as well as the defence of public virtues and the diverse ways of conceiving good in our societies. In addition to his public vision of justice, he stands out for his criticism of the excesses of the logic of the market and for promoting debate aimed at solving major moral dilemmas, it added. The jury also praised the 65-year-old Harvard University professor for taking political philosophy beyond academic circles and making it accessible to the general public on television and online. Sandels course Justice is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on television and has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world, according to his profile on the universitys website. His writings on justice, ethics, democracy and markets have been translated into 27 languages. A Harvard professor since 1980, Sandels method is not to lecture from on high but to lead a kind of Socratic debate in which members of the audience tackle moral conundrums from opposing positions. Spains 50,000-euro ($58,000) award for international cooperation is one of eight prizes handed out yearly by a foundation named after Spains Princess Leonor. Other categories include the arts US film director Martin Scorsese won it this year sport and literature. The awards are handed out in October in the northern Spanish city of Oviedo, capital of the Asturias region, in a glittering ceremony that is broadcast live on Spanish television. The European Parliament President Antonio Tajani said Wednesday he was "relieved" that anti-Kremlin reporter Arkady Babchenko had not been killed, after Ukraine admitted staging the journalist's murder. The prominent Russian war correspondent and former soldier appeared at a news conference in Kiev less than 24 hours after authorities said he had died from three gunshots to the back in a contract-style killing. The head of Ukraines security service Vasyl Grytsak said the assassination was faked as part of a special operation to pre-empt a real plot to kill him. Tajani, who had earlier called the supposed murder a hideous crime, welcomed the dramatic news that Babchenko was safe and well. Relieved to learn that Russian journalist Arkadi Babchenkos murder was staged by Ukrainian police and that he is alive and taking part to a press conference to explain reasons that forced him to make this up, Tajani tweeted. Grytsak announced that the authorities had arrested the alleged mastermind of the plot, saying a Ukrainian citizen had offered to pay a hitman to carry out the killing after being recruited by Russian special forces. Maja Kocijancic, spokeswoman for EU diplomatic chief Federica Mogherini, echoed Tajanis reaction. Relieved to hear that Mr Babchenko is alive. We are following the actions of the Ukrainian authorities and are looking forward to further details on this case, she tweeted. House prices in Portugal have skyrocketed - the median value of homes sold has risen 7.6% in one year. Luis Lima, the head of the nations estate agents association, APEMIP, says he is worried about the ever-rising prices, especially in city centres. No one can pay the prices being asked in city centres. What happens is that people are going to the periphery and this is causing housing stock in the periphery to run out and prices also are increasing, warns Luis Lima, adding, Things will not always grow one day they will fall and I do not know any country in the world where prices grow, grow and one day do not fall Luis Lima has mentioned the possibility of real estate bubbles in the centres of the big cities, such as Lisbon and Porto and blames foreigners, speculation will kill us. Lima, his grasp of economics and reality now long departed, said that there should be only one kind of property valuation, There is an evaluation by banks for the granting of credit, there is an assessment made by the tax authorities for the payment of taxes It would be important to have only one kind of valuation in the real estate market that would serve everything. Portugals State Prosecutor in the Ellie Chessell acid attack case heard in Portimao Court, has suggested that a maximum 25-year sentence would be in order as the defendant had ordered the 'macabre and repulsive' crime. Carla Neto said in her closing speech on Monday, the last day of the trial, that there could be no doubt about the guilt of Claudio Gouveia, Ellies former boyfriend. He plotted a cruel plan that I say any ordinary person would find macabre and repulsive, Neto said to the three women judges, adding the Ellies injuries would have been far worse had she not received rapid medical attention. The prosecutor is pushing for an exemplary sentence, accusing Gouveia of repeatedly assaulting Ellie during their relationship and of sending her death threats when she left him, In one of the messages he sent her, he said he wanted to rip her face off with all his strength. Another message sent to the victims mother read, Im going to burn your face. Gouveia, 35, from Madeira, is accused of ordering an accomplice to douse the Tui travel rep with acid after luring her to a rendezvous in Alvor. Ellie, 29, from Newport in the Isle of Wight, has been left with scars from the burns she suffered on May 6th, 2017. Gouveia has to wait until June 12th to find out if he is found guilty or innocent, of Chessells attempted murder and of domestic violence. The maximum sentence for each is 25 years and 5 years but he will only get 25 years even if found guilty of both crimes as this is the maximum sentence in Portugal. As for the attacker, Gouveias alleged accomplice, Edmundo Helder Rodrigues Fonseca, also from Madeira, he will be tried later but has appeared as a witness in Gouveias prosecution. Fonseca faced questions on Monday and was accused of throwing acid over Ellie after Gouveia had posed as a wealthy businessman on Tinder and set up a date with Chessell. Fonseca, 44, was in jail in Uganda, pending charges for drugs offences and extradited to Portugal in May. He told the Portimao Court that he wanted to remain silent, which has exasperated Gouveia who said to the judges, I dont know what else I can do. Only Edmundo can tell the truth and now he doesnt want to speak. He is using my trial to prepare his. I am innocent. I had nothing to do with this. Ellie and I had a fantastic relationship, we never had problems. I feel sad and wronged. Gouveias defence lawyer said in her summing-up that the evidence against her client was, extremely fragile as no one had seen him in the area where the travel rep was attacked and there was no proof he had created the fake Tinder profile, There are email messages sent from accounts he recognises are his, but there is no proof the other accounts belong to him and it was those accounts the threats were sent from. algarvedailynews.com The above content produced by swissinfo.ch is not intended for commercial use and may not be republished by third parties either wholly or in part. Portugal's parliament has rejected a bill seeking to legalise voluntary euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide after a tight vote in the Catholic-majority country. A text proposed by the governing Socialist Party, which sought to set special conditions under which euthanasia would be permitted such as for patients in extreme suffering or with an incurable disease was defeated on Tuesday by 115 votes against, 110 votes for and four abstentions. Other proposals by the radical Left Bloc, the Green Party, and the People-Animals-Nature party were also rejected. Before the vote Lisbon Cardinal Dom Manuel Clemente, head of the Catholic Church in Portugal, had urged deputies to vote down the bill. Even if one of the proposals had passed, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa could have potentially vetoed the legislation. The head of state, a practising Catholic, had refused to take a public stance on the euthanasia issue, but Portuguese media reported he was prepared to use his veto if the euthanasia bill passed by only a handful of votes. Although euthanasia is not legal in Portugal, an ethics council has approved the withholding of life support or medical treatment in some cases. This vote has expressed the will of parliament but it has also shown there is a wide debate within Portuguese society, said Left Bloc leader Catarina Martins after the result. Earlier this month the lower house of parliament in neighbouring Spain, also predominantly Catholic, voted to examine a bill on legalising euthanasia. Voluntary euthanasia was first legalised in Belgium and the Netherlands in 2002. Russian anti-Kremlin journalist Arkady Babchenko, whose fake death Ukraine admitted on Wednesday to staging, has many admirers but probably even more detractors. Babchenko reappeared alive on Wednesday less than 24 hours after he was believed to have been gunned down in Kiev. Ukrainian security services said it was a set-up to foil an attempt on his life by Russia. I would like to apologise for what you have all had to go through, Babchenko told reporters at a press conference. The 41-year-old, who fought with the Russian army in Chechnya in the 1990s and went on to cover conflicts in Georgias breakaway region of South Ossetia and Ukraine, had previously faced a campaign of harassment over his reporting. A contributor to media outlets including top Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, he regularly accused Russian authorities of hunting down Kremlin critics and unleashing wars in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere. Good soldier. Bad soldier He repeatedly said he hated war and did not want to take up arms again. I used to be a good soldier, Babchenko wrote in 2017. And now I am a bad soldier. I want to live more than to die. Babchenko was 19 when he was sent to fight in Russias first Chechen campaign in the 1990s as a conscript. He fought in the second Chechen campaign in the 2000s as a contract soldier. After serving in the army he went on to become a war correspondent and author. He described his experience in the Chechen conflicts which saw Moscow suppress a separatist insurgency in the North Caucasus in a book published in English under the title One Soldiers War. When a brief but bloody war broke out between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia in 2008, Babchenko went to the separatist region to cover the conflict as a correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, an award-winning opposition newspaper in Russia. It was him who did for Novaya Gazeta the best reportages from the war in South Ossetia, the newspaper wrote in an editorial, calling him a true artist. Dying is scary Babchenko embraced the popular Kiev uprising that ousted a Kremlin-backed regime in 2014 and went to cover the conflict between Ukranian troops and pro-Russian insurgents in the east of the former Soviet country following the annexation of Crimea by Moscow. In recent years, he became increasingly alienated from Moscow journalists critical of the Kremlin. His bombastic Facebook posts constantly pushed the boundaries of good taste and some of his colleagues and followers stopped reading him on social networks. From Babchenkos position, even his Moscow colleagues looked this way: weak, conformist, inclined to endless compromises, Russian journalist Yury Saprykin wrote on Meduza, an independent news site. In a controversial 2016 Facebook post, Babchenko wrote he had no sympathy or pity for the victims of a plane crash carrying Russias Red Army choir to Syria given Moscows support for Bashar al-Assad. Pro-Kremlin activists unleashed a campaign of harassment against Babchenko, forcing him to flee Russia last year. He moved to Kiev after living in the Czech Republic and Israel. In Kiev, he hosted a programme on the Crimean Tatar TV station ATR. Known for his caustic style and earthy language, Babchenko endlessly promoted doom-and-gloom scenarios for Russia under Putin. The motherland will always dump you, my son, he used to say. In a Facebook post hours before the fake killing, Babchenko wrote about his second birthday when a Ukrainian general refused to let him on a helicopter that was then shot down by Kremlin-backed rebels, killing 14 people on board in 2014. After announcing Babchenko was alive and that his death was staged, the head of Ukraines security service congratulated Babchenko on his third birthday. Russia on Tuesday rejected calls at the United Nations to accept responsibility for the downing of Flight MH17 over Ukraine after an investigation found that a Russian army missile was used in the attack. At a Security Council meeting on Ukraine, Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok called on Moscow to accept the findings that the airliner was shot down by a Russian-made BUK missile provided by a brigade based in the Russian city of Kursk. The language of ultimatums is not something that anyone will be allowed to use when speaking to Russia, Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the council meeting. We cannot accept the unfounded conclusion of the JIT, the Dutch-led Joint investigation Team, he added. All 298 people on the Malaysia Airlines flight en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were killed when the missile slammed into the plane as it flew over territory held by pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine in July 2014. Responding to Nebenzia, the Dutch foreign minister said his arguments were nothing new and again urged Russia to work with the Netherlands and Australia to identify the perpetrators. US Ambassador Nikki Haley voiced strong support for the Dutch and Australian call on Russia to acknowledge its role in the tragedy and help bring to account those responsible for the shooting down. Despite its transparent denials, there is no doubt Russia is driving the Ukrainian conflict, said Haley. More than 10,000 people have been killed since the Moscow-backed insurgency broke out in April 2014 following Russias annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told the council that Russias rejection of the findings did not surprise me at all. We have no doubt that the downing of MH17 flight is a terrorist act, he said. Ukraine will present documents to the International Court of Justice next month showing that Russia is violating anti-terrorism agreements, he said. Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz renewed his call for a peacekeeping mission to be deployed to east Ukraine and urged Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to appoint a UN special envoy for Ukraine. Diplomats say Russia, a veto-wielding power at the council, has blocked attempts to step up UN involvement in efforts to end the conflict. Make sure youre ready to apply for Russian citizenship by getting an understanding of the countrys nationality law. If you are relocating to Russia or looking to live their for a long period of time, you can choose between Russian permanent residency or full Russian citizenship. Both afford you the rights of Russian nationals, although there are differences between them. There are different conditions and requirements depending on where you are travelling from, with those from Russian speaking former Soviet countries able to more easily settle in Russia. There are also benefits for refugees and those who enter on a Highly Skilled Professionals visa. Even more information on Russian entry visas is available in our article here. This guide to Russian citizenship and Russian permanent residency includes information on topics such as: Who can get a Russian passport or Russian permanent residency? Foreign nationals in Russia can apply for Russian permanent residency after living in Russia for one year and for naturalization as a Russian citizen after five years of permanent residence. You can also do this sooner if you meet certain criteria. In order to obtain Russian permanent residency, you must legally reside in Russia with a valid Russian temporary residence permit (other than nationals from Belarus, refugees from Turkmenistan, and those entering on a Highly Skilled Migrant visa, who are entitled to permanent residence upon entering Russia). This is normally for those in Russia on a long-stay visa such as a Russian work visa. Temporary residence permits have government quotas and certain categories of foreign residents receive preference. See our guide to Russian visas and residence permits for even more information. The Russian General Directorate of Migratory Affairs (GUVM) issues residence permits and Russian passports. Advertisement Differences: Russian citizenship or Russian permanent residency? The Russian permanent residence permit is a step towards taking on Russian citizenship. Many people are happy to settle in Russia on permanent residency alone. However, there are certain rights and benefits for both Russian citizens and permanent residents. Both may take up employment in Russia without a work permit. In addition to this, both are able to: freely enter and exit Russia without needing a visa access Russian social services permanently register at a Russian address engage in self-employment or set up a business vote in local elections and referendums The following applies only to those with full Russian citizenship: issued with a Russian passport (ranked 43 rd in the world on the passport index) in the world on the passport index) full electoral rights in all national elections right to work in the state bodies of the Russian Federation duty to serve in the Russian military cannot be deported can live overseas for an unlimited period of time The Russian permanent residence permit is valid for five years but can be renewed an unlimited number of times. However, it has to be registered with the GUVM every year. If a Russian permanent residence permit expires, it cannot be renewed. It will also become invalid if you leave the country for an unbroken six month period. If you take full Russian citizenship through naturalization, you will also need to renounce the citizenship of your home country. You will also have to pay the Russian citizenship fee and embark on a process that can take up to a year to complete. Advertisement Applying for Russian permanent residence You can apply for Russian permanent residence after one year of legally residing in Russia. You should do this six months before your temporary residence permit expires. The Russian permanent residence permit is valid for five years, can be extended an unlimited number of times but it cannot be issued beyond the expiration date of your passport. Renewal of a Russian permanent residence permit must be done at least two months prior to its expiration. If your permit is revoked, however, you must leave Russia within 15 days. Russian permanent residence applications need to be made at the GUVM office in your region. A list of local GUVM offices is available here. Exact documents required vary depending on whether you are from a CIS or non-CIS country, but will include the following: 4 x passport-sized photographs passport or valid ID proof of income to sustain yourself and any family members you are supporting proof of accommodation medical certificate confirming absence of HIV (AIDS) proof of proficiency in Russian language, knowledge of Russian history and of the foundations of the Russian Federation If you are living in Russia, you can check your eligibility for a Russian permanent residence permit here. Russian citizenship requirements Current Russian citizenship requirements are according to the 2002 Russian Citizenship Act. You can acquire Russian citizenship through the following ways: by birth through naturalization (either common or simplified process) by restoration of citizenship for former citizens Russian citizenship by birth A child can claim Russian citizenship through birth if any of the following applies: both parents are Russian citizens (or one parent if a single parent) if one parent is a Russian citizen and the other is stateless one parent is a Russian citizen and the other is a foreign national, if the child is born in Russia one parent is a Russian citizen and the other is a foreign national, if the child is born outside Russia and hasnt been granted citizenship of any foreign country both parents are foreign nationals living in Russia, if the child is born in Russia and hasnt been granted citizenship of any foreign country a child in Russia without parents, if still parent-less after a 6 month period Russian citizenship by naturalization (common process) Foreign nationals living in Russia can apply for citizenship by naturalization if they meet the following requirements: they hold a valid permanent residence permit they have lived as a permanent resident in Russia for five years (with no periods living outside Russia exceeding three months in any one year) agree to abide by the Russian constitution can provide proof of legal means of subsistence for themselves and any family members they are supporting have renounced the citizenship of their home country (except for countries that have dual citizenship treaties with Russia) can provide proof of basic command of the Russian language The Russian permanent residence requirement can lessen to one year for the following groups: those who have entered Russia on a Highly Qualified Professional visa those who have refugee status Russian citizenship by naturalization (simplified process) Certain categories of foreign national can apply for Russian citizenship by naturalization as soon as they have become permanent residents. These are foreign nationals who: have at least one parent who is a Russian citizen living in Russia had former USSR citizenship but have not taken citizenship of any former USSR country are citizens of former USSR states who have received secondary, vocational, or higher education in Russia after 2002 were USSR citizens born in Soviet Russia were married to a Russian citizen for at least three years have a disability and have a capable child who is a Russian citizen have a disability and are from a former USSR country are from a former USSR country and were legally residing in Russia on 1 July 2002 World War Two veterans who were citizens of the former USSR are a child or a disabled person with a legal guardian who is a Russian citizen Restoration of citizenship for former Russian citizens Former Russian citizens who have given up their Russian citizenship voluntarily may have their Russian citizenship reinstated after three years of residence in Russia. Russia also has a joint international treaty with Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan enabling citizens of those countries to apply for Russian citizenship using a simplified process. Advertisement Applying for Russian citizenship The GUVM processes Russian citizenship applications. Before applying for Russian citizenship by naturalization, you need to submit a request to an authorized agency to renounce the citizenship you hold within your home country. This request will only be carried through upon being successfully granted Russian citizenship. You will need to submit your Russian citizenship application through the GUVM, as well as documents including: proof of Russian language capability proof of income application to renounce current citizenship If your Russian citizenship application is successful, you will be issued with an internal Russian passport (to be replaced with a citizens identity card in 2018) and will also be eligible to apply for a Russian passport for international travel. Russian passports are valid for 10 years. Decisions on Russian citizenship applications can take up to a year and are made by the Office of the President of the Russian Federation. Applications via the simplified process take up to six months and are made by the GUVM. If your application for Russian citizenship is rejected, however, you are entitled to appeal through the courts. You should contact your local GUVM office for information. Advertisement Russian citizenship costs The Russian citizenship cost is R3500 for the application. Those from former USSR countries who havent taken up citizenship in these countries, as well as parent-less children, are exempt from this fee. The cost of a Russian passport is R3500 for adults and R1500 for children. It is possible to purchase a special shorter-term passport that lasts for five years for R2000. Dual nationality in Russia Russian dual citizenship is a complex issue. On the one hand, Russia officially allows dual citizenship and Russian citizens can acquire citizenship abroad without giving up their Russian citizenship. However, the Russian state sees dual citizens as Russians only. In fact, Russia has dual citizenship treaties with just two countries: Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Citizenships of these countries are equal. However, recent changes in the law mean that Russian citizens acquiring dual nationality abroad need to inform their local GUVM office within 60 days. If you become a Russian citizen through naturalization, you must renounce the citizenship of your home country during the Russian citizenship application process. This may provide grounds for you permanently losing your citizenship of your home country, depending on what the rules are regarding citizenship. You will also need to enquire with the relevant authorities of your home country if you have concerns regarding this. Martin Sorrell, who last month resigned as head of British advertising giant WPP after allegations of personal misconduct, announced Wednesday plans to launch a communications company. Sorrell, 73, has invested 40 million ($53 million, 46 million euros) to help create an investment vehicle, S4 Capital, with the aim of turning it into a multi-national communication services business, he said in a statement. S4 Capital will meanwhile be set up by investment group Derriston Capital. The board of Derriston has reached agreement on the terms of a transaction to acquire S4 Capital Limited, a newly incorporated company that has recently completed a 51 million equity fundraising, the statement added. Using a further 150 million from investors, the plan is to build a multi-national communication services business, initially by acquisitions. Sorrell, who will become executive chairman of S4, noted that there existed significant opportunities for development in technology, data and content. Derriston Capital was created in 2016 with the aim of acquiring companies operating in the medical products and devices sector. WPP was formed in similar fashion, when in 1986 Sorrell turned Wire and Plastic Products, which made wire baskets for retailers, into a marketing services group. Until yesterday Derriston Capital was just one of several cash shells floating around on the London market, AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould said Wednesday. Derriston will purchase Sorrells newly incorporated S4 Capital in a reverse takeover and, following the deal, the new entity will be renamed S4 Capital. With Sorrell as executive chairman and around 200 million in raised and committed funds, this buy-and-build effort is likely to create plenty of noise, Mould added. Sorrell sensationally quit as chief executive of WPP after the company launched an independent probe into an allegation that he misused group assets. While the investigation concluded that the allegation did not involve amounts that are material, Sorrell shocked the industry with his surprise departure after 33 years at the helm. bcp/ser A British financier turned anti-Kremlin crusader who used to be the boss of late anti-corruption Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was briefly detained in Spain on Wednesday due to confusion over an arrest warrant Interpol says never existed. William Browder, who tweeted that he was in Madrid to give evidence to senior Spanish anti-Russian mafia prosecutor Jose Grinda, was taken to a police station on Wednesday morning. The 54-year-old tweeted that he was wanted on an Interpol Russian arrest warrant. But police later told AFP he had been released when they realised the warrant had expired. An arrest warrant has a date limit and when that expires, it must be deleted from the computer programme and in this case Interpol hadnt deleted it. Once in the police station, they realised it wasnt valid, a police spokesman told AFP. Browder however tweeted that Interpol had intervened and told the police not to honor the new Russian Interpol Red Notice, referring to the international police groups list of wanted people. Further muddying the waters, Interpol told AFP that Browder was not wanted via their own channels. There is not, and never has been, a Red Notice for Mr Bill Browder, it said in a statement. The US-born British citizen, who describes himself as (Russian President Vladimir) Putins no.1 enemy, has led a high-profile campaign in memory of his former employee Magnitsky. Magnitsky went public with details of massive fraud by Russian state officials before being charged with tax evasion and later dying in detention after spending 11 months in squalid prisons in 2009. A Moscow court in December sentenced Browder in absentia to nine years in a penal colony after convicting him of deliberate bankruptcy. His campaign for Magnitsky has had strong resonance worldwide. In 2012, the US passed the Sergei Magnitsky Act which imposed a visa ban and froze the assets of Russian officials implicated in the lawyers death. The act became a symbol of prison abuse in Russia and strained ties with Washington. Then, earlier this month, British lawmakers backed a measure to impose sanctions against people guilty of human rights violations in memory of Magnitsky. Browder said he was going to talk to Grinda about the huge amount of money from the Magnitsky case that flowed to Spain. From: American Evaluation Association (AEA) For Immediate Release: Dateline: Washington , DC Wednesday, May 30, 2018 My name is Stephanie Evergreen and I was the 2017 AEA Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Evaluation Practice Award recipient, given to an evaluator who exemplifies outstanding evaluation practice and who has made substantial cumulative contributions. Im probably not alone in admitting that I had no idea who Alva and Gunnar Myrdal were, even as I was receiving an award named after them. So heres the scoop on what Ive learned: Alva and Gunnar were Swedish scholars, coming into their prime in the 1930s and 40s. In Sweden back then, like in America, white women were viewed as inferior to white men, while in America in particular, Black people of all genders were seen as second class citizens. So, the Carnegie Corporation of New York funded a six-year study on US race relations and chose Gunnar, a Swedish economist and Nobel laureate, to conduct it because as a non-American he was thought to be less biased and more credible than American researchers. (Alvas considerable contributions to the writing and editing are overlooked because she was not acknowledged as an author.) ANYWAY, Gunnars study of race relations, An American Dilemma, was published in 1944. The distinguished African-American Ralph Bunche served as his major American researcher. The 1,500-page study detailed what the Myrdals identified as a vicious cycle in which white people justified their white supremacist behaviors by oppressing black people, and then pointed to black peoples poor performance as reason for the oppression. The Myrdals were ultimately hopeful that improving the circumstances of black people in America would disprove white supremacy and undermine racism. Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated schools. It is especially timely to remember this pioneering policy evaluation work and breakthrough Supreme Court decision because Linda Brown, the student in the Brown decision, died earlier this year at age 76. Lesson Learned: The fact that I have a PhD in evaluation and didnt know anything about this pioneering work is a sad sign that this early study and others published this week are alive in the minds of our evaluation elders but considered history to my generation of evaluators, a history that could be forgotten. Rad Resources: Add these resources to your summer reading list: Yvonne Hirdmans 2008 book, Walter Jacksons 1994 book, and, of course, Gunner (and Alva) Myrdals book, The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Memorial Week in Evaluation. The contributions this week are remembrances of pioneering and classic evaluation publications. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the About AEA The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association and the largest in its field. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products and organizations to improve their effectiveness. AEAs mission is to improve evaluation practices and methods worldwide, to increase evaluation use, promote evaluation as a profession and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action. For more information about AEA, visit www.eval.org. This is a post in the series commemorating pioneering evaluation studies in conjunction with Memorial Day in the USA (May 28).My name isand I was the 2017recipient, given to an evaluator who exemplifies outstanding evaluation practice and who has made substantial cumulative contributions.Im probably not alone in admitting that I had no idea who Alva and Gunnar Myrdal were, even as I was receiving an award named after them. So heres the scoop on what Ive learned: Alva and Gunnar were Swedish scholars, coming into their prime in the 1930s and 40s. In Sweden back then, like in America, white women were viewed as inferior to white men, while in America in particular, Black people of all genders were seen as second class citizens. So, the Carnegie Corporation of New York funded a six-year study on US race relations and chose Gunnar, a Swedish economist and Nobel laureate, to conduct it because as a non-American he was thought to be less biased and more credible than American researchers. (Alvas considerable contributions to the writing and editing are overlooked because she was not acknowledged as an author.) ANYWAY, Gunnars study of race relations, An American Dilemma, was published in 1944. The distinguished African-American Ralph Bunche served as his major American researcher.The 1,500-page study detailed what the Myrdals identified as a vicious cycle in which white people justified their white supremacist behaviors by oppressing black people, and then pointed to black peoples poor performance as reason for the oppression. The Myrdals were ultimately hopeful that improving the circumstances of black people in America would disprove white supremacy and undermine racism.The Myrdals book was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court decisionthat desegregated schools. It is especially timely to remember this pioneering policy evaluation work and breakthrough Supreme Court decision because Linda Brown, the student in the Brown decision, died earlier this year at age 76.Former AEA president/queen Eleanor Chelimsky recalls that, when establishing the Myrdal award, association members had universal admiration for The American Dilemma. It was an important and courageous effort to draw attention to the continuing problem of race in America. This pioneering book sold over 100,000 copies and is often cited as an exemplar of social science research and evaluation influencing both policy and public opinion.The fact that I have a PhD in evaluation and didnt know anything about this pioneering work is a sad sign that this early study and others published this week are alive in the minds of our evaluation elders but considered history to my generation of evaluators, a history that could be forgotten.Add these resources to your summer reading list:Yvonne Hirdmans 2008 book, Alva Myrdal: The Passionate Mind Walter Jacksons 1994 book, Gunnar Myrdal and Americas Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987 and, of course, Gunner (and Alva) Myrdals book, An American Dilemma The American Evaluation Association is celebratingThe contributions this week are remembrances of pioneering and classic evaluation publications. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The Traditional Transactional Conference Model Giving As A Practice And Not A Holiday Transaction We are used to thinking of our conference and its planning process as a one-way transaction from the company to its customers.Sometimes we view the planning process as a backbreaking, arduous, life-draining experience. We may even dread working with a new conference advisory committee due to our negative past experiences.If this sounds like you, perhaps its time to rethink your mental model of your conference and its planning process. Instead, consider your conference as a life-giving and soul-enhancing experience where everyone involved collaboratively contributes and receives. See your conference as a giving field and reap its new harvests.Too often we see our conferences as one-way transactions.Customers pay to attend our event located in a distinct city on exact dates at specific times. In exchange for their money, we give them access to hand-chosen speakers that dispense their knowledge.In short, the organization employs staff and recruits volunteers to design a transactional conference experience to promote its purpose. We are the instruments to serve their customers. We are the givers and the customers are the receivers.We have a choice in our service of conference planning and implementation.We can see the planning process as a transaction of pushing our skills and expertise at conference participants. Or we can choose to see the conference planning process as multi-directional experience, receiving gifts through interactions with others. When we chose the latter, we embrace giving as a practice. And as a way to constantly evolve into something new.A gift is not just something that we give to or for another person. It is more than a holiday transaction. Something actually happens to both the giver and receiver as they move into a relationship.Our interactions with others can be gifts. When we approach others with gratitude, we are unsure about who is giving to who. Teachers talk about the deep gratification and child-like insights they receive from educating their students. Doctors discuss the joys they receive from a patients recovery. A gift is a perfect conspiracy, meant to open us up to the possibility of becoming something new. Warren Nilsson, co-founder of Organization Unbound Embrace Your Event As A Giving Field As conference professionals, we have the opportunity to re-frame our conferences from one way transactions to multi-directional giving fields As a giving field , our conference radiates in all directions, from each to each. There is no longer a distinction between giver and receiver. Everyone provides and benefits continuously. Everyone involved is a giver and receiver. Everyone contributes and everyone participates.When we embrace our conference planning and implementation as a giving field, we see it as a beautiful, expansive space in which to play and to grow things. A place of light and color and surprise. A place where we can go to un-tame ourselves. As we enter this field, we may find ourselves provoked into acts of re-imagination that startle and delight us with unsuspected possibilities for personal growth and community renewal. Warren Nilsson. How can you apply the concept of a giving field to your conference? What are you curious about or fearful of embracing regarding the concept of your conference as a giving field? Cheniere Energy has decided to build a third unit to process liquefied natural gas at its export facility under construction in Corpus Christi. Limited construction began last year, and Cheniere will give its builder, Bechtel, notice to proceed with the project. Its the first commitment to build new U.S. liquefaction capacity since 2015, Cheniere said. The Corpus Christi facility will support as many as five processing units. Construction on the first two began in 2015. Earlier this year, Cheniere struck two long-term deals to sell LNG to PetroChina International Co., a subsidiary of Chinas state-controlled oil and gas giant. Those sale contracts, which extend through 2043, supported Chenieres decision to construct the third processing unit in Corpus Christi. Cheniere has been exporting natural gas since 2016 through its Sabine Pass facility in Louisiana. Its now expanding that complex to support more production and exports. Chinas recent efforts to reduce trade tensions with United States by buying more U.S. products could boost the LNG industry. China is trying to reduce its dangerous pollution levels by shifting power production to natural gas from coal. The United States ships LNG to at least 20 foreign markets. In addition to Cheniere, Dominion Energy of Richmond, Va., is exporting LNG from a terminal in Maryland. Other companies are expected to follow later this year, including two Houston firms, Freeport LNG, which will operate a Gulf Coast terminal at Quintana Island, and Kinder Morgan, which is completing an export terminal in Georgia. Several other companies, including Sempra Energy and Tellurian of Houston, are working on projects expected to start up in the coming years. Vijay Mhay, a Punjabi-American, is used to getting different looks when he enters stores and restaurants. But when I start talking, they know that, OK, he doesnt have an accent, hes educated, he knows what hes talking about. They get more calm, Mhay said. But I still get looks. A Starbucks store manager in Philadelphia drew national attention to the kinds of racial prejudices minorities are subjected to on a daily basis after calling the police on two African-American men who were waiting for a friend. One of the men was denied access to the stores restroom because they hadnt ordered anything. The two then were arrested. Mhay was one of millions of customers who couldnt get their caffeine fix Tuesday afternoon. The Seattle-based company closed 8,000 stores for several hours to train more than 175,000 employees about racial bias and discrimination. The move was one of the many steps Starbucks is taking as part of the companys aggressive apology campaign to stem public outrage over the April incident. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson publicly apologized within days of the incident, and the company quickly settled with Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, the arrested men, for an undisclosed sum. The company also offered to cover all of their costs for college. Within days, Executive Chairman Howard Schultz confirmed the store manager who made the call no longer was with the company. The chain has since adopted a policy allowing anyone to use its restrooms, even if he or she dont purchase anything. The incident has prompted us to reflect more deeply on all forms of bias, the role of our stores in communities and our responsibility to ensure that nothing like this happens again at Starbucks, Schultz wrote in an open letter published on the companys website Tuesday. The reflection has led to a long-term commitment to reform systemwide policies, while elevating inclusion and equity in all we do. Starbucks decision to close thousands of stores so employees could attend the training drew a mix of praise and skepticism. You cant just close your stores for one day of training, even though I applaud the step, said Trish DeBerry, president and CEO of the DeBerry Group, a marketing and public relations firm based in San Antonio. It will be how its implemented and ingrained into the Starbucks culture every day after that because that is what customers have come to expect from the brand. DeBerry added, You have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. The Seattle chain was able to contain some of the negative fallout by quickly meeting with and settling potential litigation with Nelson and Robinson, said Beau Phillips, a crisis communications specialists with Reset Public Affairs in Washington. Americans are really good at spotting a phony, Phillips said. If a company comes out and apologizes and doesnt mean it or doesnt do enough, people are really good about seeing through it and expressing their displeasure. But some of the steps, like the new bathroom policy and the racial bias training and adopting the new bathroom policy, feels like theyve gone too far, Phillips said. The company had to backpedal some on its bathroom policy after customers complained that stores could attract homeless people and drug use. NAACP Chairman Leon Russell lauded Starbucks move as an important step in recognizing unconscious racial bias, and said other employers ought to consider similar moves, considering that people of color encounter bias on a regular basis. It can be the fact that maybe Im standing at a hotel counter and I might have on a suit and tie and its assumed that I work there or Im a driver for somebody or something like that, Russell said in a phone interview Tuesday. I think, in one way or another, a lot of people feel that kind of discrimination every day. By closing down its stores, Starbucks executives are trying to show the public that some of its employees could benefit from such training, said Veronica Edwards. She and Mhay, who are moving from the Bay Area in California to San Antonio this fall to attend Galen College of Nursing, tried the door at the chains location on Houston Street downtown to find it closed. But, Edwards said, some employees still might engage in discriminatory behavior regardless of training. It creates awareness that you shouldnt be doing it, Edwards said. You shouldnt feel comfortable doing things like that. Tyler Wright, a 24-year-old psychology graduate from St. Marys University, was trying to apply for a job at the Houston Street location when she found the store closed. Wright, whos black, said she hasnt experienced discrimination at the chain and doesnt experience racial bias often at retailers and restaurants. When she was a teenager, Wright said, an employee wrongfully accused her of stealing groceries from a retailer on the East Side. But Wright said she wasnt sure whether that incident was motivated by racism, noting she was carrying a large bag at the time. It couldve been racial bias, but it hasnt happened here so I cant make that generalization of every Starbucks, Wright said of the Philadelphia incident. I like Starbucks. Joshua Fechter is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFreports The news kept coming: Immigrant mothers and fathers separated from and searching for their children. Nearly 1,500 unaccompanied minors unaccounted for after they left the federal shelter system. Reports of migrant child-abuse allegations without a thorough investigation. Overwhelmed by coverage of the recent events and the plight of asylum-seekers, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio began making dozens of calls and devising a plan. When I saw all this news come out, and I saw there was so much passion and anger about everything, I decided to take action and start to organize and help organize, Castro said. And now Ive had conversations with people in different cities in Texas and different cities around the country. Seizing on the concerns from readers and Democratic leaders, Castro and a host of other organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant rights advocacy groups launched the #WhereAreTheChildren social media campaign, and are planning rallies in major cities across the country. On Thursday, Castro, the Mexican American Legislative Caucus and other local and state officials are hosting a rally at Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center at 7 p.m. Other cities, from San Francisco to Washington, signed up to rally Friday for a National Day of Action for Children. RELATED: Trump administration defends family separations at border During the day Tuesday, the cities that signed up for rallies grew from nine to 22 on the Action Network website. The public outcry reached a boiling point last week likely due to the confluence of news reports and National Missing Childrens Day. Along with the debate came its frequent companion: misinformation, which spilled across the internet as people confused the 1,475 children who went unaccounted for last year by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal shelter system, with those who are being separated from their parents today on the Southern border. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new zero-tolerance policy earlier this month that has led to the separation of families. He said all immigrants caught crossing the border would be prosecuted with a misdemeanor, including those families seeking asylum. Since then, hundreds of families have been separated, with parents put into criminal custody, to be tried in court, while their children are treated as unaccompanied minors and put in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR. The Trump administration has said families are taking advantage of the immigration system through the asylum process, and argue this crackdown will deter further illegal entry across the border. If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law, Sessions said. Castro called Sessions new policy draconian. Just because somebody crosses a border doesnt make them nonhuman. They should still be treated like human beings, he said. Most asylum-seekers in the United States say theyre fleeing civil unrest and gang violence in Central America and ultimately must prove their case before an immigration judge. Think about someone whos down in El Salvador, and is worried their child might be killed, or are getting threats that they have to pay money to a gang, said Lance Curtright, an immigration attorney at the San Antonio-based De Mott McChesney Curtright & Armendariz firm. Its hard for me to imagine how someone in those conditions is thinking about what Jeff Sessions is saying. Its absurd to think that would deter people who are fleeing for their lives, he said. But in a Tuesday morning briefing with reporters, the Trump administration doubled down on the new policy. A senior White House official said the administration was enforcing a law that had not been fully enforced before. In the past, parents were not prosecuted as criminals. Undocumented parents and their children apprehended at the border were kept together in family residential detention centers or released with notices to appear before an immigration judge to make their asylum claim. The Trump administration is taking children who arrive with their parents., whose whole family is asking for asylum protection, and by ripping apart that family, theyre making those children the same as a child who unfortunately had to flee to the U.S. without a parent, said Justin Tullius, an immigration attorney at the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or RAICES. Once an unaccompanied minor is apprehended along the border, he or she is turned over to ORR and then released to adult sponsors, similar to legal guardians. In 2017, 40,810 children were referred to ORR. The refugee agency then attempted to contact 7,635 of them through well-being calls between October and December. The 1,475 minors who have been identified as missing did not respond to those calls. The figures first were reported by Steven Wagner, a top official in the Department of Health and Human Services, which presides over the ORR, in an April Senate hearing. He said the ORR is not legally responsible for the minors once theyre released from the federal shelter. Through March of this year, 21,574 children have been referred to ORR. Why arent people calling them back? I think that is in large part because of the administrations regressive immigration policies, where people are afraid to approach the government in any respect about an immigration issue, Curtright said. While the ORR cant summon adult sponsors of the children to immigration courts, Curtright said family members fears of also getting deported are well-placed. Wagner also acknowledged in the testimony that ORR alerts the Homeland Security Department about the adult sponsors identity, location and relationship to the unaccompanied minor. He said the administration is working to enhance the collaboration between ORR and homeland security, which manages U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Its a real climate of fear, and when you have a climate of fear, its hard for law enforcement to enforce the law. Which is somewhat ironic, Curtright said. Castro said if the guardians werent afraid to cooperate with ORR, the government might help protect them from other dangers. We want to make sure that theyre safe from dangers like human trafficking, he said. In 2018, the majority of adult sponsors, 49 percent, were parents, 41 percent were relatives and 10 percent were unrelated to the children. Curtright said its not uncommon for the relatives of these minors to be undocumented. Once the minors are released to guardians and await their court cases seeking asylum, the ORR does not provide them legal aid. The family members must choose to seek legal counsel from immigration firms, and either pay or find someone who will do it pro-bono, Tullius said. The majority of minors in ORR come from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, Wagner said. A lot of people are coming here not just because they want to work or be with their families, but because they fear for their lives, Curtright said. Its a powerful motivator that makes you do things you maybe shouldnt do, like not return a call. sfosterfrau@express-news.net A judge Wednesday granted a defense request for a complete psychological evaluation of convicted child killer Genene Jones to investigate claims she has diminished capacity from a series of strokes and allegations that she said the voices in her head killed the babies. Jones, 67, had worked at hospitals in San Antonio and for a Kerrville pediatrician in the 1980s when she was convicted of killing 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan. The baby died in 1982 from an overdose of muscle relaxers given to her by the nurse. A Williamson County jury sentenced Jones to 99 years in prison in 1984. She also was convicted in Bexar County of injury to a child/serious bodily injury and sentenced to 60 years in prison for giving an overdose in 1982 to 4-week-old Rolando Santos, who survived. Jones served both sentences concurrently and was due to be paroled in March, as per a law designed to reduce prison crowding. However, in an effort to prevent Jones release on parole, Jones was indicted on May 25, 2017, on a new murder charge involving the death of 11-month-old Joshua Sawyer on Dec. 12, 1981. Since then, she has been indicted in the overdose deaths of four more Bexar County children. Court records indicate she is to go to trial in the first case in July. Appearing Wednesday before Criminal Magistrate Judge Andrew Carruthers, Jones attorney Cornelius Cox sought to have her competency and sanity evaluated. He said she may not be competent to stand trial because of a series of strokes while incarcerated some 35 years. He also brought up allegations that she hears voices in her head. I feel my ability to have meaningful, detailed conversations with her in relation to the alleged events that occurred more than 30 years ago have been diminished, Cox told the court. She may be incompetent to stand trial. At an April hearing on Coxs motion for speedy trial, prosecutor Jason Goss testified there were witnesses who said that on at least three instances Jones confessed to killing babies that were in her care. Goss also testified that an inmate Jones encountered wrote a letter to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles that stated she was hearing voices in her head. Carruthers granted the motion for evaluations on sanity and competency for Jones in all five cases. Along with Sawyers death, she is accused of killing Richard Ricky Nelson, 8 months, who died July 3, 1981; Patrick Zavala, 4 months, who died Jan. 17, 1982; Rosemary Vega, 2 years old, who died Sept. 16, 1981; and Paul Villarreal, who was 3 months old when he died Sept. 24, 1981, all from overdoses. The prosecution has said they would try each case separately. If convicted, she faces up to life in prison. Elizabeth Zavala is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | ezavala@express-news.net | @elizabeth2863 When they gather in San Antonio starting today, delegates to the 89th state convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens will attend workshops on redistricting and human trafficking and honor the citys Tricentennial with an exhibit of the organizations own Texas roots. The annual conference also might exhibit some internal acrimony. LULAC has had a turbulent year, even for a group that has become known for cutthroat political gamesmanship and hotly contested elections, and the meeting at El Tropicano Hotel comes amid new crises over its leadership and financial stability. At one time, the storied civil rights organization had a national staff of 25 and an annual budget of $6 million, former CEO Brent Wilkes said. This year, it lost senior staff, and LULACs remaining employees have successfully unionized. A 2018 internal financial report by national treasurer Patricia Roybal Caballero, provided by a member who asked for anonymity, shows membership is down and revenues were less than $1 million last year after four years of declines. The report pointed to employee grievances accusing national president Roger Rocha of Laredo of micromanging, interfering in day-to-day operations and creating an exodus of key personnel. These concerns reached our corporate partners and other partners, with the corporate partners issuing a strong letter of caution and concern. Roybal Caballero wrote. Rocha was accused of excessive credit card expenses, reportedly spending $89,000 in 2017, some of it on airline tickets costing more than $1,000 each, with as many as four purchased at a time. The report also notes an overabundance of handing out complimentary passes in pork barrel patronage. The treasurer used words such as critical, serious and decline to describe LULACs financial state, and listed emergency measures, among them suspension of contracts for public relations services and a CEO search firm. LULAC suspended Rochas credit card and his $60,000 annual stipend, a perk that had been instituted by former national president Margaret Moran of San Antonio, whose husband, Oscar Moran, also served as president. But Rocha received the most criticism for writing a letter to President Donald Trump in general support of his immigration policies. It was in conflict with LULACs legislative agenda and it hit a nerve, triggering national media coverage. Rocha sidestepped impeachment proceedings this year by obtaining a temporary restraining order against his own board. Wilkes resigned in protest. He already had announced his departure but had agreed to stay to help a new CEOs transition. Rochas letter undercut our values, he said. As much as Rocha has been a lightning rod, the groups troubles have been festering for several years, due in large part to volatile board elections at its national conventions, marred by factional charges and countercharges of unethical behavior and voting irregularities. LULAC had been holding stand up elections in which assembled delegates had to stand to be counted. Electronic voting since has been instituted. Another problem has been the creation of paper councils, chapters allegedly established to sign up delegates in support of one presidential candidate or another. Wilkes, who for years didnt comment on the issue, confirmed the practice was longstanding. Reforms are necessary to stop it and a related abuse: the ability of presidential hopefuls to pay council and individual membership dues, convention registrations, hotel expenses and even bus transportation for convention delegates. They polluted the voting process, Wilkes said. That has been a big issue. A governance study conducted for LULAC called for changes, Wilkes and others said, but not all LULAC leaders agree election fraud is at play. LULAC state director Lupe Torres, for example, called paper councils a myth. Torres, whos running for re-election, said the convention will vote electronically Sunday in its state elections. Shes expecting about 1,000 attendees, half of whom will be eligible to vote, from all of the states major cities, including two buses from Dallas and another two from the McAllen area. Convention workshops are free and open to the public. The two declared hopefuls for national president, Domingo Garcia of Dallas and Darryl Morin of Wisconsin, will be in San Antonio for separate meet-the-candidate events. Garcia, who didnt return calls for comment, is a former state lawmaker, former Dallas City Council member and an attorney. He has run for LULAC president before but never has held national office. Several former national presidents have endorsed him, along with Antonio Gonzalez, president of the San Antonio-founded Southwest Voter Registration Education Project; U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio; and his brother, former Housing Secretary and San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro. In 2001, Texas Monthly handed Garcia a Bum Steer Award, calling him a one-man leper colony for working against the re-elections of several fellow lawmakers. Garcia will meet with state delegates at an 8 p.m. Friday event featuring Julian Castro and Tejano recording artist Gary Hobbs. Morin, a business owner, is a former LULAC vice president for the Midwest and served as an adviser to former national president Rosa Rosales of San Antonio, among others. Morin says he supports reforms recommended by the governance study he helped lead it, and helped institute electronic voting, he said and wants to put power back in members hands with bylaw and constitutional revisions. In particular, he favors repeal of the two-thirds majority needed to overrule LULACs unpaid lawyers, who are handpicked by presidents, and wants to prohibit paper councils and make impeachment proceedings possible outside regularly scheduled board meetings. Early this year, at such a meeting, an effort to impeach of Rocha was muzzled by a court order obtained by his San Antonio-based lawyers linked with the organizations national legal team, also from the Alamo City. Morin said he wants LULACs two volunteer lawyers, Luis Vera and Manuel Escobar of San Antonio, to step down. Wilkes said that would be a good move, too. Ultimately, Morin wants LULAC to hire lawyers less beholden to the president, to use dispute resolution rather than litigation to resolve internal differences and require board training in best practices, such as barring board members from voting on issues in which they have conflicts of interest. Morin will meet state delegates at 9 a.m. Saturday. Rocha remains president. He has said he will not seek re-election at LULACs national convention in Phoenix in July plans for which LULAC reportedly has scaled down. Corporations look for leadership and financial stability in giving to civic causes, said Eddie Aldrete, senior vice president of IBC Bank, who has not been engaged in LULAC matters. Sometimes their interests shift, he said. It could be because of bad behavior or bad management. You may not always know, as a nonprofit, why a sponsorship was declined. Elaine Ayala is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | eayala@express-news.net | @ElaineAyala Based on the number admitted into University Hospital last year, area children hurt by shootings, vehicle accidents, burns or being hit with objects continued a general five-year increase that concerns health officials. University Hospitals annual community trauma report for 2017 gives the broadest of statistical portraits of how San Antonians and those in surrounding counties get hurt, and sometimes die. But the numbers are from a single hospital and officials could offer no firm reasons for the upward trend. Universitys staff said a more thorough study of gun violence, with the assistance of local police, might be needed to make sense of the numbers of children injured by firearms, which rose from nine victims in 2013 to 38 in 2016 and then 31 in 2017. Honestly, we have no explanation, said Dr. Lillian Liao, Universitys pediatric trauma and burn medical director, after a press conference Tuesday at the hospitals medical center campus. Without a more in-depth study its hard to comment on the cause. Regardless of its cause, the problem begs for further educational campaigns on firearm safety in the home, Liao said. Similar efforts to promote the use of child car seats and keep kids from using fireworks may have helped reduce or slow the growth of those injury numbers. Fireworks injuries at University have declined from 29 to 19 since 2013. Gunshots were not the only category to see sharp increases. The hospital treated 166 children last year who had been struck with objects - belts, sticks, boards, rocks, skateboards an increase of 1,409 percent over 2013. Children hurt by burns increased by 50 percent, animal bites 70 percent, falls 103 percent, electrical shocks 40 percent and all assaults 133 percent in the past five years. Car crashes contine to be the leading cause of injury to the hospitals child patients. Adult trauma chief Dr. Mark Muir said that falls, especially among the elderly, continued lead among adults, followed by vehicle crashes, burns, getting struck by an object and getting hit by a vehicle as a pedestrian. In a trend seen across the country, University reported an increase in bicycle injuries, from 34 to 98, from 2016 to 2017. Adult injuries from burnings, explosions and being struck by an object all increased exponentially over five years 278 University patients ages 17 and older were injured by objects last year, compared to just 27 in 2013. Hospital and military officials used the press conference to repeat their concern that Brooke Army Medical Center, a Level 1 trauma center - and the only one in the Department of Defense - would be threatened if Methodist Hospital expands its existing trauma center. Dr. Brian Eastridge, chief of trauma and emergency surgery at UT Health San Antonio, wrote in an introduction to the trauma study that competitive forces have led private hospitals to seek a higher trauma level designation and that he hoped elected officials would recognize San Antonios unique partnership with BAMC. While we believe competition is generally a good thing, wrote Eastridge, in the care of life-threatening injuries it can have unintended consequences. Col. Kurt Edwards, former chief of trauma at BAMC, said that if BAMCs existing patients were diverted to a competing trauma center, the reduced workload might cause the Pentagon to send fewer military physicians to San Antonio for training. BAMC and University Hospital have the only Level 1 trauma centers in San Antonio and serve a 22-county region in Southwest Texas with a population of more than 2.2 million. Methodist Hospital had considered adding a Level 2 trauma center, a scaled-down version without an education and research capacity. Methodist spokeswoman Palmira Arellano said in December the hospital was just doing our due diligence and researching community needs. She also said that the unfortunate increase in natural disasters and tragic events that have occurred recently in the United States have caused many communities across the country to research the proper structure of trauma levels within their regions. bselcraig@express-news.net 2 1 of 2 Drew Anthony Smith, Stringer / Getty Images Show More Show Less 2 of 2 Drew Anthony Smith, Stringer / Getty Images Show More Show Less AUSTIN Texas will launch an anonymous reporting app so Texas students can report suspicious behavior in an attempt to prevent more mass shootings in schools, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Wednesday. The app, called "I Watch Texas," will allow students to report any concerning behaviors in schools or warning signs they may see on social media and outside of school buildings. The state plans to launch the app next month, Abbott said. As I walked the beautiful San Pedro Creek Project recently, looking at all the interesting art, I wondered if San Antonio was 100 percent American Indian and Latino. I saw no representation of the diversity that made this city great. You could be excused for thinking you had fallen into an urban renewal project in Monterrey. In this age of diversity, it felt tone deaf. What of the German-Americans who built King William and were the economic engine that helped propel San Antonio? You see so many street names on the Northside named for the early German settlers, and you see the architecture in King William and downtown, as well as their influence in the stone houses with tin roofs, but very little else about them. No statues or murals for them. It may be because they are a quiet, humble people who frown on self- aggrandizement. Whatever the reason, it is not right. San Antonio lacks diversity in how it presents itself. I am also amazed at the lack of feeling for the Alamo. The city is almost ambivalent about this great symbol. Shocking. It is almost as if the city wishes it were still Mexico, and the Alamo just a mission. The irony is that, in a city that calls itself Military City and the Alamo City, it is does not seem to care much about either. As a tourist, you get such a different feel for the city than you do when you live here; all the romance sort of fades into a stunning reality. Oftentimes, I feel like a foreigner in the city, perplexed at the allegiance to Mexico and the near hatred of Texas. And though I love the Latino culture and the cuisine, it can be overwhelming and insular. I am Creole, but I have no allegiance to France and appreciate the diversity clearly celebrated in New Orleans that is so lacking here. If San Antonio really wants to be a great city, it must recognize others who have contributed to the city. It should not always pursue the same narrative. Moving a statue that most thought was Travis, running Republicans out of town, making it seem nobody but Latinos and Indians contributed to the city, and treating the Alamo like a poor stepchild is not exactly a winning strategy for greatness, San Antonio. The city is actually quite diverse, but you would never know it walking down the San Pedro Creek or listening to our mayor, who is not Latino or indigenous, but perhaps wishes he were. Then he would better fit the narrative of the city progressive liberals seem to want to project to the world a monolithic metropolis of one thought and one ethnicity, ironically the very thing for which they call out the president. Shannon Deason is a reader who lives in San Antonio. GREENWICH It was a special day at Carens Cos Cobber and not just because the popular restaurant was open for breakfast. On Wednesday, every item ordered by hungry customers helped to benefit GEMS. Cos Cobber owner Caren Vizzo donated half of the restaurants proceeds from the days extended hours to Greenwich Emergency Medical Services, continuing a yearly fundraiser that is now in its fifth year. I believe in GEMS, Vizzo said. They are always there whenever you call. Their response time is amazing, and they do incredible work in the community. Its very important we support GEMS and raise what we can for them. Every year, Vizzo works closely with GEMS board member Ann Hagmann to put the event together. No one can say that he or she will never use this service, Hagmann said. In that sense, GEMS is unique. There is so much that GEMS does, and it has the response time and the save rate that allows people to survive after a medical emergency. People are alive today because of GEMS, she said proudly. But to cover costs, we need the communitys support. Vizzos donation from past events has been about $5,000, which helps the nonprofit. GEMS receives yearly funding in the town budget, but that only covers personnel costs. GEMS is not a town department like the police or firefighters. It relies on private fundraising and community support to pay for new ambulances and the life-saving, state-of-the-art equipment inside them. For GEMS Executive Director Tracy Schietinger the value of Vizzos fundraiser goes beyond the money brought in. Every year, GEMS parks an ambulance in front of the Cos Cobber so interested residents can get tours and check out the equipment. Its events like this in the community that are crucial for GEMS, Schietinger said. It really helps everybody because they see the community supporting us and us being able to explain everything we do. ... We do so much more than respond to 911 calls, and people can find out about it thanks to this. On Wednesday, the ambulance at the Cos Cobber had a donated by the citizens of Greenwich marker on it. Schietinger said she wants people to know their support provides for the ambulances, safety equipment and training for GEMS, which can truly save a life. GEMS board member Charles Kaufmann, a retired vice chair, said the positive conversations and community outreach at the event pay off throughout the year. This does quite a bit of good in the community, Kaufmann said. Hagmann added, You cannot get the message out too many times. As part of GEMS event Wednesday, trained EMTs and members of the GEMS Explorers program were on hand, too. They explained the proper way to do CPR and provided other safety tips, including advising residents to compile a file of life that includes all the medications that they use. If an emergency response is needed, GEMS can be provided with the list immediately to help provide proper patient care. GEMS Explorer Nadine Shunnar said residents are definitely appreciative of what GEMS does within the community. I think they do listen and they take what we do to heart, she said. Its not every day where you get the opportunity to learn about this. kborsuk@greenwichtime.com Contributed / Griffin Hospital DERBY The Community Health Resource Center at Griffin Hospital, 130 Division St., Derby, will host a free talk about the stress-relieving Emotional Freedom Technique at 10:30 a.m. June 7. Stacey Altomari, a certified Emotional Freedom Technique Level 1 and 2 practitioner, will discuss how the technique, also known as tapping, can help individuals lower stress, and improve focus and sleep. Emotional Freedom Technique is a non-invasive and painless technique that combines acupressure and modern psychology to help a person feel calm and safe. Rural businesses in Scotland have been told to "grab the steering wheel" and make "daring and innovative" investment decisions. Failure to adapt to current uncertainty and the post-Brexit landscape will have far reaching consequences for generations to come, a Brexit conference held by Scottish Land & Estates heard. The conference in Edinburgh was addressed by Fergus Ewing MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Rural Economy and Lord Duncan of Springbank, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Scotland Office. David Johnstone, chairman of Scottish Land & Estates said "great uncertainty" remains around agricultural and rural policy, trade arrangements and what they will mean for food imports and exports as well the potential impact on profitability for many Scottish businesses. However, the reality is that change was heading our way regardless, most notably in terms of the reform of agricultural support, Mr Johnstone said. What is clear is that we who live and work in rural Scotland cannot afford to sit back and wait for Brexit and the post-Brexit era to arrive before we take action. There really is no choice but to find new ways of working that will help businesses through a very challenging time. He added: It is encouraging to see rural land-based businesses rising to that challenge in different parts of the country and the rural economy is going to need to see a lot more of that type of enterprise. 'New approach' Sarah Jane Laing, executive director of Scottish Land & Estates said that diversification is accelerating. She said there are examples where land-based businesses are "grabbing the steering wheel" and investing in a new approach. In agriculture we are seeing more flexible arrangements coming into place such as more contract farming and joint ventures Ms Laing said. There is certainly a growing interest in forestry and we are seeing diversification such as deer farming and a drive to create many more farm shops. This is encouraging and, given the uncertainty the rural business sector is facing, it is a trend that will have to gather pace quickly. Chicken farmers in the Philippines will soon test their birds for deadly pathogens with a new hand-held device and smartphone app they can use on their own farms. It will help farmers act fast before disease can spread and potentially infect people. It also cuts out the need to send samples away for expensive lab tests. A team of scientists lead by Brunel University London will develop a molecular test and a smartphone app that, when used together, detect six key pathogens in poultry. Farmers will collect samples from their birds using a large-matchbox-sized instrument that screens the DNA and RNA. The device connects wirelessly to the app to display the results, which can can also feed into a central store to help track outbreaks across the islands. The whole process takes less than an hour. Near-patient molecular diagnostics have been very important in improving human health, said Brunel University Londons Professor Balachandran. But such technology in animal health in farms is less advanced. This will make a massive change to the poultry industry, especially for low and middle-income countries. Devastating outbreaks Hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines and other poorer countries make a living farming poultry, so disease outbreaks can devastate their economies. But standard molecular tests dont work well for developing countries. Equipment is expensive, mobile instruments are rare and lab results can take hours or days. Backed by 615,000 from the UK governments Newton Fund, Prof Balachandran will work with the University of Surrey and Lancaster University to develop the tests over the next three years. This quick and easy test will help vets identify disease among poultry, which helps prevent it spreading, said Professor Roberto La Ragione at the University of Surreys School of Veterinary Medicine. The technology will not only benefit the Philippines, but could be rolled out to other developing countries. Reliable tests Reliable and affordable tests for viral diseases in poultry are one of the most important and challenges in poultry health in the developing world, said Molecular Virologist Dr Muhammad Munir at Lancaster University. Many viruses and bacteria infect chickens simultaneously, especially in developing countries, and complicate the clinical signs of individual disease, he said. This makes molecular diagnostic tests that can be applied in less-equipped laboratories and on the farm a necessity. SUNNYVALE (dpa-AFX) - Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (ISRG) said it has begun direct operations in India, following seven years of doing business in the country through a distributor, Vattikuti Technologies Pvt. Ltd. In support of the company's commitment to India, Intuitive also named Mandeep Singh Kumar as its general manager. Mandeep will direct and implement Intuitive's in-country strategy and commercial operations. He has more than 20 years of global business experience in health care, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and advertising. Most recently, Mandeep served as the chief commercial officer for GE Healthcare, India and South Asia. Intuitive's sixth international office will be headquartered in Bengaluru, where employees in sales, marketing, field service engineering, and business operations will be based to support customers throughout the country. More than 65 da Vinci surgical systems are currently in use in India, with surgeons performing robotic-assisted procedures in urology, gynecology, thoracic, and general surgery. More than 60 former Vattikuti employees became a part of Intuitive India's business. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 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. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - May 29, 2018) - CardioComm Solutions, Inc. (TSXV: EKG) ("CardioComm" or the "Company"), a leading global provider of consumer heart monitoring and electrocardiogram ("ECG") acquisition and management software solutions, issued 62,500 stock options to Etienne Grima, the Company's CEO, in accordance with his employment agreement. The options are exercisable at $0.05 per share for five years from the date of grant and vest immediately. The grants are subject to the provisions of the Company's Stock Option Plan, the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange and applicable securities laws. To learn more about the CardioComm's products and for further updates regarding HeartCheck ECG device integrations please see the Company's websites at www.cardiocommsolutions.com and www.theheartcheck.com About CardioComm Solutions CardioComm Solutions' patented and proprietary technology is used in products for recording, viewing, analyzing and storing electrocardiograms for diagnosis and management of cardiac patients. Products are sold worldwide through a combination of an external distribution network and a North American-based sales team. CardioComm Solutions has earned the ISO 13485 certification, is HIPAA compliant and holds clearances from the European Union (CE Mark), the USA (FDA) and Canada (Health Canada). FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: Etienne Grima, Chief Executive Officer 1-877-977-9425 x227 egrima@cardiocommsolutions.com www.cardiocommsolutions.com Forward-looking statements This release may contain certain forward-looking statements and forward-looking information with respect to the financial condition, results of operations and business of CardioComm Solutions and certain of the plans and objectives of CardioComm Solutions with respect to these items. Such statements and information reflect management's current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management. By their nature, forward-looking statements and forward-looking information involve risk and uncertainty because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the future and there are many factors that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. In evaluating these statements, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. The Company does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements and forward-looking information contained in this release other than as required by applicable laws, including without limitation, Section 5.8(2) of National Instrument 51-102 (Continuous Disclosure Obligations). 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. Public Relations Office Phone: +81-3-5470-3235 TOKYO, May 30, 2018 - (JCN Newswire) - Showa Denko (SDK; TSE:4004) will start to supply 'low-carbon' hydrogen gas, made from used plastics (low-carbon hydrogen), as an energy source for fuel cells. SDK's Kawasaki Plant will supply 'low-carbon' gas to the KAWASAKI KING SKYFRONT TOKYU REI HOTEL, which will open on June 1, 2018.In 2003, SDK's Kawasaki Plant introduced a method to extract hydrogen, which is used as a raw material to produce ammonia, from used plastics. By utilizing used plastics as raw material, this hydrogen production method not only reduces consumption of fossil fuels but also promotes reuse of CO2 gas, which is generated as a by-product of the hydrogen extraction process, by converting it into dry ice. Thus this hydrogen production method considerably lowers the burden on the environment from that of conventional production method.SDK's "Demonstration Project to Promote Local Consumption of Locally Produced Low-carbon Hydrogen Gas Made from Used Plastics" has been accredited as an official project under the framework of "FY 2015 Regional Cooperation and Low-carbon Hydrogen Technology Demonstration Project" commissioned by the Ministry of Environment. SDK's project has also been accredited as a part of "Kawasaki Eco-town Project," which is promoted by Kawasaki City.This is the first case in the world to introduce low-carbon hydrogen gas made from used plastics into fuel cells set up in a hotel. KAWASAKI KING SKYFRONT TOKYU REI HOTEL will use low-carbon hydrogen as energy source to be converted into electricity and heat through large-sized fuel cells.SDK has been promoting its products and technologies aiming to contribute to solving social problems including global environmental, energy, and natural resource issues. SDK will continue contributing to creation of sustainable society through development of environment-friendly products and production processes.About Showa Denko K.K.Showa Denko K.K. (SDK; TSE:4004, ADR:SHWDY), a major manufacturer of chemical products, serves a wide range of fields from heavy industry to electronics and computer industries. The Petrochemicals Sector provides cracker products such as ethylene and propylene, the Chemicals Sector provides industrial, high-performance and high-purity gases and chemicals for semicon and other industries, and the Inorganics Sector provides ceramic products, such as alumina, abrasives, refractory and graphite electrodes and fine carbon products. The Aluminum Sector provides aluminum materials and high-value-added fabricated aluminum, the Electronics Sector provides HD media, compound semiconductors such as ultra high-bright LEDs and rare earth magnetic alloys, and the Advanced Battery Materials Department (ABM) provides lithium-ion battery components. For more information, please visit www.sdk.co.jp/english/.Source: Showa Denko K.K.Contact:Copyright 2018 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved. PARIS and MILAN, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ENGIE ' s mandatory tender offer initiated by ENGIE now extended to the warrants held by the European Investment Bank ( EIB ) EPS will proceed with the early repayment of the first 10 million tranche of the EIB financing , and the two other tranches, for a total of 20 million not drawn down , will be cancelled Repayment as well as financing and setup of necessary resources for the development of the company will occur upon completion of the tender offer and could be financed through a capital increasewith preferential subscription rights(RightsIssue),to which ENGIE would participate as well, for an amount of around 30 million, for which the issuance price would be equal to the tender offer price, i.e. 9.50 per new share, subject to market conditions allowing to setup an issuance price below the share price, and which would take place before expiring of the prepayment period granted by the EIB, thus on 6 September 2018 at the latest Electro Power Systems S.A. (EPS), technology pioneer in energy storage systems and microgrids, listed on the French-regulated market Euronext Paris (EPS:FP) - in parallel with the filing by ENGIE, through its subsidiary GDF International, of the simplified tender offer - has reached an agreement with EPS, ENGIE and the EIB with respect to the 30 million financing granted by the EIB in 2017. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/633003/EPS_Logo.jpg ) Following ENGIE's acquisition of around 56.1% of EPS' share capital and voting rights, which closed on 7 March 2018, the EIB considered its support to innovation and growth sectors, in the context of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), as accomplished. The EIB has therefore indicated to EPS its intention to exercise the change of control provision and to ask for the early repayment of the first tranche of 10 million drawn-down in June 2017. This first tranche did not accrue interest but was linked to the issuance of 660,513 warrants to the EIB, each giving the right to subscribe to one EPS share from 1stJuly 2017. The EIB indicated its intention to tender its warrants to the tender offer, which has therefore been extended by ENGIE to them at a price of 9.30 per warrant (i.e. a price, net of the 0.20 exercise price, equivalent to the 9.50 per EPS share). While the finance contract provided for a 30-day repayment period, the EIB agreed to extend this period to 120 days for the repayment of the first tranche of 10 million, i.e. until 6 September 2018. The two other tranches, for a total of 20 million not drawn down, will be cancelled. In order to select the financing solution that best protects the interests of EPS and of all of its shareholders, EPS is contemplating different options. The preferred option is a capital increase with preferential subscription rights (Rights Issue), for an amount of around 30 million, that will allow all the shareholders of EPS and the acquirers of preferential subscription rights to participate to the new financing strategy of the company. The issuance price would be equal to the tender offer price, i.e. 9.50 per new share, subject to market conditions allowing to setup an issuance price below the EPS share price. The capital increase would take place after closing of the tender offer and before expiring of the prepayment period granted by the EIB, thus on 6 September 2018 at the latest. ENGIE has ensured EPS of its support to take part in the refinancing of the first tranche and therefore contemplates, in case of completion of the abovementioned capital increase, to freely subscribe up to the percentage of the rights that it will hold following the tender offer, for an amount enabling the success of the transaction, it being specified that the subscription by ENGIE for an amount exceeding 10 million remains subject to the internal approval procedures pertaining to the ENGIE group. Information to the public A prospectus drafted in French language, comprising (i) the reference document of EPS that will be filed with the Autorite des Marches Financiers ("AMF") and (ii) a note d'operation (including a summary of the prospectus), subject to the AMF visa, will be made available to the public. EPS draws the attention of the public on the existence of risk factors that will be included in the reference document and the note d'operation. Disclaimer This press release is for information purposes only and the information contained herein do not, and shall not, in any circumstances, constitute a public offering by EPS nor an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe to shares in EPS in any jurisdiction (including France and Italy). This press release does not constitute or form part of an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe for securities in France. The securities referred to herein may not be and will not be offered or sold to the public in France. This announcement is not a prospectus within the meaning of Directive 2003/71/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 4 November 2003, as amended (together, the "Prospectus Directive"). With respect to the Member States of the European Economic Area which have implemented the Prospectus Directive (each a "Relevant Member State"), no action has been undertaken or will be undertaken to make an offer to the public of the securities referred to herein requiring the publication of a prospectus in any Relevant Member State. As a result, the securities may not and will not be offered in any Relevant Member State, except in accordance with the exemptions set forth in Article 3(2) of the Prospectus Directive, or under any other circumstances which do not require the publication by EPS of a prospectus pursuant to Article 3 of the Prospectus Directive and/or to applicable regulations of that Relevant Member State. This press release is not an offer of securities for sale in the United States or any other jurisdiction. Securities may not be sold or offered in the United States unless they are registered or are exempt from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended. EPS does not intend to register any portion of this offering in the United States or to conduct a public offering of securities in the United States. In the United Kingdom, this press release is only being distributed to, and is only directed at, persons that (i) are "investment professionals" falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (as amended) (the "Order"), (ii) are persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) ("high net worth companies, unincorporated associations etc.") of the Order or (iiii) are other persons to whom an invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity (within the meaning of section 21 the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000) in connection with the issue or sale of any securities may otherwise lawfully be communicated or caused to be communicated (all such persons in (i), (ii) and (iii) together being referred to as "relevant persons"). In the United Kingdom, this press release is directed only at relevant persons and must not be acted on or relied on by persons who are not relevant persons. Any investment or investment activity to which this press release relates is available only to relevant persons and will be engaged in only with relevant persons. The distribution of this document in certain countries may constitute a breach of applicable law. The persons in possession of this announcement shall then get knowledge of any local restrictions and shall comply with these restrictions. The information contained in this document does not constitute an offer of securities for sale in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan. It may be unlawful to distribute this press release in certain jurisdictions. This press release is not for distribution in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan. About EPS Electro Power Systems (EPS) operates in the sustainable energy sector, specialising in storage solutions and microgrids that enable intermittent renewable sources to be transformed into a stable power source. Listed on the French-regulated market Euronext (EPS:FP), EPS is part of the ENGIE group and is listed in the CAC Mid & Small and the CAC All-Tradable indices. Its registered office is in Paris and conducts its research, development and manufacturing in Italy. Thanks to technology covered by 130 patents and applications, combined with more than 10 years of R&D, the Group develops utility scale energy storage systems to stabilize electrical grids that are heavily penetrated by renewable sources in developed countries and microgrids in emerging economies to power off-grid areas at a lower cost than fossil fuels. As of 31 December 2017, EPS has installed and has under commissioning an aggregate of 48 large scale projects, including off-grid hybrid systems powered by renewables and energy storage that provides energy to over 165,000 customers every day, with a total capacity output of 47MWh systems in 21 countries worldwide, including Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa. Media Release Basel, May 30, 2018 Dufry signs new contracts with Holland America Line, Carnival and Norwegian Cruise Line further expands its footprint in the cruise channel In line with its strategy to further expand its presence in cruise ship retail, Dufry signed a new contract with Holland America Line to operate shops onboard eight ships, added another important contract with Norwegian Cruise Line to operate shops on the BLISS and signed an additional agreement with Carnival Cruise Line to operate shops on Carnival Inspiration. With these new contracts, Dufry will add close to 2,800m2of retail space, representing a major expansion and further supporting the growth and development of the cruise line channel. Dufry has signed a contract with Holland America Line, a subsidiary of Carnival Corporation, to operate gift shops onboard eight ships for the next five years. In addition, another agreement was signed with Carnival Cruise Line to operate shops on Carnival Inspiration. The total retail space of these two contracts is 2,000 m2. The new contract strengthens and expands Dufry's partnership with the Carnival Corporation, which started in May, 2017, with operations onboard Carnival Sensation and Carnival Valor. Building on its long-term partnership with Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL), Dufry added another important vessel to its existing portfolio by signing a contract to operate on the BLISS for four years, with operations starting in April 2018 and with an option to extend for another year. The retail space will cover 750 m2 offering all product categories and including fine jewelry. Expanding the portfolio by adding vessels of the Holland America Line The new agreement with Holland America Line covers a total of 1,744 m2 of retail space distributed across eight ships for a period of five years. The shops will offer a wide range of products including all core categories such as liquor, tobacco, perfumes and cosmetics and confectionery but also categories like sundries, souvenirs, apparel, leather and fashion accessories, sunglasses, electronics, souvenirs as well as fashion & custom jewelry. Moreover, Dufry and Holland America will develop a new souvenirs and logo program that will elevate the on-board retail experience and reflect the premium cruise-line brand. The Holland America Line is a subsidiary of Carnival Corporation, based in Seattle, United States. It has a fleet of 14 ships covering the main routes in Alaska, the US West- and East Coast, the Caribbean, North- and South Pacific and South America. Launching the BLISS, NCL's latest addition with 750 m2 of retail space Dufry was awarded to design and build the retail spaces on board NCL's latest addition: the BLISS. The BLISS commenced operations in spring and will cruise in its debut season from Seattle to Alaska and to the Caribbean during the winter months. The ship belongs to the Breakaway Plus Class and has a capacity of 4'000 guests. The ship offers a retail space of around 750 m2, where Dufry will operate all product categories including fine jewelry. The assortment will include brands such as MontBlanc, Hublot, Tag Heuer, Longines as well as Colombian Emeralds International in combination with EFFY in fine jewelry, Chanel, Dior, Clinic, Estee Lauder and Lancome just to name a few. Important to mention is a shop-in-shop concept where Dufry will offer products designed by the famous marine artist Wyland who has created the iconic hull art featuring dolphins. Adding another Carnival vessel: The Inspiration with 250 m2 Dufry has recently also started operations on board the Carnival Inspiration. The retail space is close to 250 m2 including all core categories such as fine watches, fashion and custom jewelry. The Inspiration will cruise the US West Coast all year around. With this new addition, Dufry Cruise Services is operating stores on board three Carnival Cruise Line vessels in total. The two other ships, Sensation and Valor, were taken over in May and June last year. Carnival Corporation is the world's largest travel leisure company focused in cruise lines with a combined fleet of over 100 vessels across 10 distinct cruise line brands visiting more than 700 ports around the globe. Reaching new levels for Dufry's cruise line channel After these new contracts, Dufry will increase its presence in the cruise line channel, going from 17 to a total of 27 ships which cover routes in the main markets across the Caribbean, Europe, Alaska and Asia. Going forward, Dufry plans to continue further expanding in this segment following the first initiatives started last year, when more ships were added in the portfolio. The cruise line channel is globally growing and offering new opportunities. According to a survey conducted by CLIA (Cruise Lines International Association), the majority of travel agents reported an increase in the volume of cruise-based sales in 2017, equal to a weighted average of +7% growth, which represents +2% growth versus the previous year. Julian Diaz, CEO of Dufry, commented: "We are pleased with the new contracts signed as they illustrate our expertise and the strength of our portfolio with several different retail formats and at the same time will allow us to further extend our reach in relevant markets through a very interesting travel retail channel. We will continue to develop and expand our market share in cruise lines and we are very excited with this new endeavor. One of Dufry's main ambitions along the years has been very clear: to grow in touristic destinations and, the cruise market has been playing an important role in this context, being one of the most dynamic channels in recent years. We would like to thank Holland America Line, Norwegian Cruise Line as well as Carnival Cruise Line for entrusting Dufry with the mission of serving their passengers while offering excellence in our services within all our shops. We are confident that this successful alliance will support us in developing even further our operations within the cruise line segment." "We are reimagining the on-board shopping experience at Holland America Line by bringing on more regional items, premium products and quality logo gear", said Orlando Ashford, president, Holland America Line. "Just as we have elevated many areas of our cruise product over the past few years, we anticipate that the retail enhancements will be popular with our guests and establish us as a retail leader in our industry". For further information please contact: Renzo Radice Rafael Duarte Corporate Communications & Investor Relations Global Investor Relations Phone: +41 61 266 44 19 Phone: +41 61 266 45 77 renzo.radice@dufry.com rafael.duarte@dufry.com Sara Lizi Karen Sharpes Investor Relations Americas & Communications Div. 4 Global Media & Events Phone: +55 21 2157 9901 Phone: +44 0 208 624 4326 sara.lizi@br.dufry.com karen.sharpes@dufry.com Dufry Group - A leading global travel retailer Dufry AG (SIX: DUFN; B3 S.A - Brasil, Bolsa, Balcao: DAGB33) is a leading global travel retailer operating over 2,200 duty-free and duty-paid shops in airports, cruise lines, seaports, railway stations and downtown tourist areas. Dufry employs over 30,000 people. The Company, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, operates in 65 countries in all five continents. Social Responsibility Dufry cares for children and supports social projects from SOS Kinderdorf in Brazil, Cambodia, Mexico, Morocco and Ivory Coast. SOS Children's Villages is an independent, non-political and non-demonstrational organization established for orphaned and destitute children all over the world. Astea will showcase the upcoming Alliance Enterprise release and Astea leadership will deliver a presentation on increasing customer profitability AMSTERDAM, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Astea International Inc. (OTCQB: ATEA), a leading global provider of field service management and mobility solutions, announced it will be showcasing its upcoming Alliance Enterprise release at Field Service Forum which starts today, May 30, at the Novotel Amsterdam City in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Attendees will get a preview of the newest version of the award-winning Astea Alliance field service management and mobility platform, scheduled for release this summer. Additionally, Senior Business Consultant Bart van den Hurk will be presenting How the Right Customer Experience Can Maximize Customer Profitability. "The theme for Field Service Forum 2018 is The Future of Customer Engagement, which aligns perfectly with the customer-centric design tenet of the newest version of our Alliance platform," said Emily Hackman, director of global marketing at Astea International. "Alliance Enterprise empowers service organizations to answer customers' demands for intuitive, mobile, real-time interactions that provide transparency, visibility and control over the relationship with their service provider. Our customer portal and customer self-service mobile app have been enhanced with features such as appointment booking, live chat with a service agent, and Uber-like visualizations of technicians arriving at a customer site. These are all examples of the kind of smart self-service interactions customers now expect from their service company." Field Service Forum attendees, be sure to catch the following track session presented by Astea: Track 3: How the Right Customer Experience Can Maximize Customer Profitability Who: Bart van den Hurk, Senior Business Consultant When: Thursday, May 31, 2018, 11:30 AM The latest version of Alliance, formally to be called Alliance Enterprise, will be the most transformative software version release to date for Astea's flagship product. This release will include an entirely new look and feel as well as innovative capabilities designed to maximize the efficiency of service operations, digitize and improve the customer experience, improve the effectiveness of field workers and help organizations compete in the face of a global talent war for skilled labor. Alliance Enterprise will also offer advanced scheduling of both third party resources and contingent workers via today's most popular worker portals. It will also enable Just-in-Time Service by integrating with the most popular carriers to coordinate parts delivery dates with technician arrival dates. Alliance Enterprise will also deliver greater intelligence via multiple mediums, including embedded and external business intelligence, reporting, dashboards and scorecards, to any stakeholder in an organization's service ecosystem. Information will be accessible via any of the new native applications and portal interfaces that are part of the expanded Alliance mobility applications. Customers, crew chiefs, partners, executives and technicians can now each connect to critical business applications and emerging technologies utilizing native applications that build upon the award-winning Alliance Mobile Edge application. Follow the conversation at @AsteaService FieldServiceForum. About Astea International Astea International is a global leader in field service and mobile workforce management, including all the cornerstones of full service lifecycle management: customer management, service management, asset management, forward and reverse logistics management and mobile workforce management and optimization. Astea technology helps the world's best service-driven companies generate higher profit while properly balancing customer satisfaction and service levels through proactive communication that creates a seamless, consistent and highly personalized experience at every customer relationship touch point. Astea's solutions unify processes, people, parts, and information to focus the entire organization on the creation of sustainable value in highly competitive, global markets. www.astea.com. Service Smart. Enterprise Proven. 2018 Astea International Inc. Astea, Astea Alliance, Alliance Mobile Edge, Alliance Enterprise and Just-in-Time Service are trademarks of Astea International Inc. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/698219/Astea_International_Field_Service_Forum.jpg BRUSSELS, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today the European Foundations Centre (EFC) opened its Annual Conference in Brussels, where Natalia Yemchenko, a member of the Supervisory Board of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation, and Roman Rubchenko, Director of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation, presented an album of photographs: "Donbass and Civilians". (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/697992/Rinat_Akhmetov_logo.jpg ) The EFC unites more than 500 philanthropic organisations in Europe. The topic of the 29th Conference (this year it is held as a part of the European Year of Culture) is "Culture Matters: connecting citizens, uniting communities". The event includes a series of exciting exhibitions, topical sessions and thought-provoking site visits. The speech of the Ukrainian delegation focussed on drawing the attention of the world community to one of the largest armed conflicts of the XXI century, which is taking place today in the heart of Europe. The photo book "Donbass and Civilians" was presented during the session "A matter of culture - Civil society and democratic dialogue in Central and Eastern Europe". The unique edition was published under the auspices of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation: "The book is about the war and the civilians of Donbass. 11 stories about the fate of the most unprotected people: the children, who were injured, and the old people, who were trapped in the frontline conflict zone. All these people have managed to survive thanks to the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation. The stories of the Civilians are so shocking, you cannot keep silent about them. We want more people to know about them to tell them the truth about the events in Donbass," said Natalia Yemchenko presenting the book. The UNO reports 4.4 million victims of the war in eastern Ukraine. Donbass is recognised as one of the most heavily mined places on the planet. The UNICEF reports that 220 thousand Donbass children are forced to attend schools in the war zone. "The children risk being wounded or killed every day, by land mine blasts or shells. They study in buildings with bullet holes in the walls and windows with sandbags, where bomb shelters are equipped in the basements, and fragments of shells lie in the school yards. The armed conflict in Ukraine has been waged now for more than four years. We cannot remain silent or pretend that it does not concern us. They say war has no face and no voice. It has - the voices of the Civilians, who suffer in Donbass. We want them to be heard in Europe and worldwide," declared Yemchenko. About The Rinat Akhmetov Foundation The Rinat Akhmetov Foundation is the largest charitable mission in Ukraine. It is the largest personal initiative in the east of the country. The Foundation has succeeded in saving more than a million civilians in the East of Ukraine since 2014. The largest programme of the Foundation is the Humanitarian Center, which has been helping the most vulnerable members of the population of Donetsk and Lugansk regions for more than four years. Approximately 12 million grocery sets have been given close to the line of contact, which help people survive. Over 750 settlements are served with this aid. Since February 28, 2017, the activity of the Humanitarian Center in the territories of Donbass not controlled by Ukraine has been blocked. 500 thousand people have been left without help. The Center continues to support the residents of the "gray zone" and internally displaced persons. Saving lives is the main task that Rinat Akhmetov has set for the Foundation. Media contact: James Wilson james@eupr.eu +32496120786 BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - Destatis releases German retail sales for April at 2:00 am ET Wednesday. Ahead of the data, the euro rose against its major rivals. The euro was worth 1.1556 against the greenback, 125.56 against the yen, 1.1476 against the franc and 0.8714 against the pound as of 1:55 am ET. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Highlights Gross revenue of 29.3 million with a growth of net revenue margin to 34.8% up from 29.4% in Q1 2018 EBITDA improved to -4.0 million compared to -5.1 million in Q1 2017 Successful launch of new in-app header bidding technology Fyber FairBid with first beta partners AdColony and Tapjoy; working on several more strategic partnerships to further grow the partner network for Fyber FairBid New Fyber brand launched and presented at the leading industry conference Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Fyber (FSE: FBEN), a leading advertising technology company, today announced the results for the first quarter of 2018, reporting a challenging start in the fiscal year with a decline in revenues but an improved EBITDA. Gross revenue showed a shortfall by 41% to 29.3 million (Q1 2017: 49.7 million). Net revenue margin increased to 34.8% (Q1 2017: 29.4%), resulting in a slower decline of net revenue by 30% to 10 million (Q1 2017: 14.6 million). The EBITDA improved to -4.0 million (Q1 2017: -5.1 million). The revenue decrease can be attributed to three main developments. First, Fyber's strategic decision to close down several traffic sources, as part of the 'Keeping it Clean' initiative launched last year has had a short-term adverse effect on revenue. Furthermore, Google's ban of the charging screen ads format, previously a highly popular ad format especially in China, impacted the high growth anticipated in this region. Finally, the reorganization and merging of Fyber's sales structure focusing heavily on training, account transitions and alignment reduced the output of the sales teams. Fyber CEO Ziv Elul, commented: "2018 will be a year of investment and setting ourselves up for future wins. Our merger efforts thus far have been a success. We are confident in our strategy to lead with technology, and continue to push towards a clean, fair and transparent ad marketplace. While this strategy has an impact on the short-term revenue growth, we strongly believe the investment will pay off. We knew that the first quarter would be challenging, especially with the continued merger efforts both on the business and technology side. But with our achievements in innovation such as the new Fyber FairBid technology, our Video Ad Monetization Platform (VAMP) and the unified product, we trust in our ability to deliver concrete business wins and stronger financial performance." Positive outlook Fyber's clear focus for the remainder of the year will be on further enhancing the Company's product offering, completing the integration of the four group companies, and expanding the network of partners using Fyber's proprietary header bidding solution 'Fyber FairBid'. FairBid's beta was launched in February, offering app developers the world's first and only technology to create a true state of header bidding for the mobile app environment. The Company has already signed strategic partnerships with AdColony and Tapjoy and expects to add more top players to this list in the near future. Later in 2018 Fyber plans to launch its unified platform, offering even more innovative monetization tools to our clients, and strengthen Fyber's position and as true technological leader. Despite a challenging first quarter, management is confident in Fyber's growth strategy, innovative power and competitive position, especially considering the digital advertising business is a seasonal one, with the majority of sales generated in the second half of the year. The complete interim report is available on the Fyber website at: https://investors.fyber.com/reports-presentations Key Figures Q1 Change Full year In million 2018 2017 2017 YoY 2017 Gross revenue 29.3 49.7 -41% 229.8 Net revenue 10.2 14.6 -30% 69.9 Net revenue margin 34.8% 29.4% 5.4pp 30.4% EBITDA* -4.0 -5.1 22% -1.2 *Note: Adjusted to eliminate one-off impacts such as acquisition-related costs and option plans About Fyber Fyber is a leading advertising technology company, developing a next generation platform for the programmatic trading of ads, in a data-driven environment. Our mission is to fuel the creation of quality content by empowering digital publishers and app developers to unlock the true value of their advertising properties through advanced technologies, innovative ad formats and data-driven decision-making. Fyber's technology platform provides an open-access platform for both digital advertisers and publishers, enabling cross-device advertising with a global reach of more than 1.2 billion unique monthly users. Fyber has offices in Berlin, Tel Aviv, New York, San Francisco, London and Beijing. The Company employs more than 300 people globally and is listed on the Prime Standard of Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol 'FBEN' and the ISIN NL0012377394. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180529006401/en/ Contacts: Fyber N.V. Investor Contact Sabrina Kassmannhuber ir@fyber.com +49 30 609 855 555 or Media Contact Anja Ben Lekhal anja.benlekhal@kirchhoff.de +49 40 609 186 55 Mitsubishi Corporation Telephone:+81-3-3210-2171 Facsimile:+81-3-5252-7705 TOKYO, May 30, 2018 - (JCN Newswire) - Mitsubishi Corporation has been awarded a contract for port construction in the Republic of Iraq. Extended by the General Company for Ports of Iraq (GCPI), the contract covers a port rehabilitation project in the country's southern region of Basra, and is valued at approximately $110 million. The project is being funded through ODA loans provided by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).The project will be executed through a partnership between MC and multiple international contractors, including Turkey-based energy infrastructure provider Calik Enerji (CE), in which MC holds shares(1), and construction firm Gap Insaat, also Turkey-based. Both part of the Calik Holding group, these two sister companies will play a major role in executing construction while MC will be responsible for overall project coordination and serve as the prime contractor, facilitating the import of steel structures and other necessary supplies from Japan.The objective of this project is to modernize existing industrial port facilities around Basra by (i) expanding the oil products berth at Khor Al-Zubair Port, and (ii) building a new service berth for working ships and service boats at Umm Qasr Port.The rehabilitation of ports throughout Iraq is essential to meeting increasing demands for port infrastructure, which is growing rapidly as the volumes of trade flowing in and out of the country grows. Rehabilitating this critical infrastructure will also contribute to further stabilizing the country's economy as post-war reconstruction advances. This project is particularly noteworthy given that Khor Al-Zubair and Umm Qasr are the only ports currently in operation in the Basra region, where a system of ports located in the 48 kilometer wide tip of the country wedged in between Iran and Kuwait along the Persian Gulf gives Iraq its only outlet to the sea.In addition to this project, MC intends to continue leveraging provisions under the Japanese Government policy framework for promoting export of "high-quality infrastructure" to identify opportunities that support Iraq's efforts towards reconstruction, economic development, and increased quality of life.(1) The partnership between Calik Holding (CH) and MC dates back to the 1990's when the two companies started collaborating on a number of plant construction projects in Central Asia. On June 4, 2015, MC entered into a strategic alliance with CH and CE that included the acquisition of shares in CE and the exchange of personnel.About Mitsubishi CorporationMitsubishi Corporation (MC; TSE: 8058) is a global integrated business enterprise that develops and operates businesses across virtually every industry, including industrial finance, energy, metals, machinery, chemicals, and daily living essentials. MC's current activities have expanded far beyond its traditional trading operations to include investments and business management in diverse fields including natural resources development, manufacturing of industrial goods, retail, new energy, infrastructure, finance and new technology-related businesses.With over 200 offices and subsidiaries in 90 countries and regions worldwide and a network of approximately 1,300 group companies, MC employs a multinational workforce of over 70,000 people.For more information, visit https://www.mitsubishicorp.com/jp/en/Source: Mitsubishi CorporationContact:Copyright 2018 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved. Trading desk is first in Europe to leverage Amobee's self-service DSP Amobee a leading global digital marketing technology company serving brands, agencies and trading desks and AMNET France today announced the influential trading desk has become the first in Europe to seamlessly activate programmatic media buying over Amobee's self-service DSP with integrated audience buying across programmatic and social. AMNET France, a programmatic trading desk headquartered in Paris, works with leading brands and agencies to create ambitious, in-depth marketing strategies that drive results. Through the strategic collaboration with Amobee, AMNET France will provide clients with integrated programmatic services across devices, contents and ad formats, enabling marketers to deliver seamless consumer journeys. "Amobee's DSP is interesting to us because of its unique ability to address programmatic display, video and social via one single platform," says Marie Le Guevel, CEO of AMNET France. "With valuable audience and campaign insights, Amobee's technology integration also allows us to interact with consumers in a more meaningful way. We're excited to develop this strategic alliance and build momentum through increased efficiency and relevance." "We're thrilled to see AMNET France embracing the self-service Amobee DSP," says David Barker, Managing Director and Senior Vice President of Amobee EMEA. "The ability to streamline all programmatic strategies from start to finish over one unified platform will not only improve AMNET France's ability to engage with the right consumer at the right time, but will also enrich the brand experiences of consumers." One of the world's largest independent advertising platforms, Amobee unifies key programmatic channels including all major social media platforms, formats and devices, to provide both managed and self-service clients with easy-to-use data management and media planning capabilities as well as actionable, real-time market research and proprietary audience data. Simplifying the delivery of advertising across all channels and screens, including video, display, mobile, and social, the platform empowers campaign managers and marketers to make more informed decisions. About Amobee Amobee is a technology company that transforms the way brands, agencies and trading desks make marketing decisions. The Amobee Marketing Platform enables campaign managers and marketers to plan and activate cross channel, programmatic media campaigns using real-time market research, proprietary audience data, advanced analytics, and more than 150 integrated partners, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter. Amobee is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singtel, one of the largest communications technology companies in the world which reaches over 700 million mobile subscribers. The company operates across North America, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Australia. For more information, visit amobee.com or follow @amobee. About AMNET France AMNET Trading desk was created in 2012 in France. With more than 200 advertisers today either local or international AMNET programmatic expertise is known for Branding as well as Direct Response campaigns, cross-device activations, DMP creation, and the launch of new digital programmatic opportunities such as TV, radio and OOH. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005390/en/ Contacts: Blast PR Anne Hallock amobee@blastpr.com WARSAW, Poland, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- On 28 May 2018,VLET Holdings S. a. r. l., a subsidiary of Abris CEE Mid-Market Fund III LP,a private equity fund managed by Abris Capital Partners Ltd.,acquired a majority stake in Velvet CARE Sp. z o.o.This transaction has also been approved by Poland's Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK). Velvet CARE is Poland's leading manufacturer of brand-name, paper-based personal care products (including tissues, toilet paper and kitchen paper towels) and the owner of the highly-regarded Velvet brand in Poland. Velvet CARE can boast of having more than 20 years of success on the Polish market, with brand recognition recorded at an impressive 96% among Poles. The process of passing control over Velvet CARE to the new majority shareholder has now been completed. The change will facilitate further acceleration of the company's rapid growth, including international expansion in the CEE region. Velvet CARE was established in August 2013, although its origins date from 1897. In that year the Paper Mill in Klucze was established and the company's main manufacturing facility has been located there for over 120 years. The Velvet name, the brand underpinning its paper-based hygiene products, was launched in 1997 on the 100th anniversary of establishing the company. Today, the Velvet brand has grown to become the leader among paper-based categories and the most popular tissue brand in Poland. "We are delighted that in less than three months from the time of signing the agreement we have been able to complete the acquisition of Velvet CARE successfully. Our approach to this investment reflects our long-term investment strategy of turningVelvet CAREinto a leading manufacturer in Central Europe.We are convinced that we will achieve this target in a few years by working hand-in-hand with the highly seasoned management team atVelvet CARE," says Pawel Gierynski, Managing Partner of Abris Capital Partners. Artur Pielak, CEO of Velvet CARE Sp. Z o. o. remarks: "One of the core principles hardwired into our company's DNA is the drive to grow the business rapidly and deliver on ambitious goals. For that reason, we appreciate the great accountability involved in selecting the business partners who will help us attain those goals. As we open a new chapter in the company's history, this time with Abris Capital Partners as our new partner and with whom we share a similar approach to business, we are poised to pursue a path of international expansion by acquiring attractive entities in our region while also growing organically in Poland as well as on selected western European markets." Abris Capital Partners Abris Capital Partners is an independent private equity fund manager which invests in Central & Eastern Europe. Since its inception in 2007, Abris has secured cumulative commitments of approximately 1.3 billion from investors, all targeted at mid-market opportunities in CEE. Since 2007, Abris funds have made more than 20 investments in Poland and elsewhere in CEE. DARMSTADT, Germany, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Launch of MSInsideOut c ampaign, aimed at providing a deeper understanding of multiple sclerosis (MS) Donation to the MS International Federation (MSIF) * of up to 20,000 Shift.ms to Executive Produce a documentary to highlight stories and unique perspectives within the MS community Merck, a leading science and technology company, today announced its support of World MS Day 2018 and MS International Federation (MSIF)'s BringingUsCloser campaign through a new campaign, MSInsideOut, to support the multiple sclerosis (MS) community and deepen understanding of the disease. The initiative will involve a collaboration with Shift.ms, the social network for people with MS, who will be Executive Producers on a new documentary which will feature unique perspectives from the MS community. The documentary will premiere at the 34th Congress of the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS) in Berlin, Germany in October. To view the Multimedia News Release, please click: https://www.multivu.com/players/uk/8337651-merck-ms-insideout-campaign/ In addition, for every use of the hashtag MSInsideOut on Twitter until June 8, Merck will donate 1 (up to 20,000) towards MSIF's research fellowship program - to mark Merck's commitment to MS over the last two decades. "To create further advances it is critical that we continuously ask questions, listen and learn," said Rehan Verjee, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at the Biopharma business of Merck. "At Merck, we want to truly understand MS from the inside-out, and more importantly, help others do the same." "We are pleased to be working as Executive Producers on this new Merck documentary in an effort to shine a light on the untold stories of MS," said George Pepper, Co-founder and Director, Shift.ms. "In line with our broader mission at Shift.ms, the aim of this documentary is to highlight the positive stories of our members, as well as the elements of MS that still remain under-represented. We hope that by bringing these stories out in the open we will be able to address the challenges that remain and drive further innovation to tackle these barriers." For people living with MS, a diagnosis often occurs in the prime of their lives, ages 20-40[i], and MS produces significant physical disability within 20 to 25 years in more than 30% of patients[ii]. Despite advances in MS care, a deeper understanding of the unique challenges both patients and care partners face is needed. Last year, Merck announced the largest global MS care partner study to date in partnership with the International Alliance of Carer Organizations (IACO). Findings from previous research have shown that problems identified among care partners include anxiety, depression, insomnia and pain, along with concerns about the financial impact of MS for families[iii]. These data, which will be published at ECTRIMS in Berlin, Germany, October 10-12, 2018, further demonstrate the need for a deeper understanding of those affected by MS and their care partners. Merck, a company celebrating its 350th anniversary in 2018, has played an important role in innovation, as well as supporting the MS community more broadly, for more than two decades. Curiosity has always been the force that drives Merck and will continue to motivate the company to apply its expertise in science and technology to achieve human progress. In addition, today, MS in the 21st Century, a Merck-sponsored initiative, is launching a website that will support the facilitation of discussions between patients and healthcare professionals, available at http://www.msinthe21stcentury.com. To learn more about the company's activities and the MSInsideOut Campaign, visit our website. Follow @MerckHealthcare on Twitter and Healthcare Business of Merck on LinkedIn from World MS Day onwards to view, like and share stories that will help others better understand MS. * For every use of the hashtag MSInsideOut until June 8, Merck will donate 1 towards MSIF's ongoing research fellowship program- to mark Merck's commitment to MS over the last two decades. All Merck Press Releases are distributed by e-mail at the same time they become available on the Merck Website. Please go to http://www.merckgroup.com/subscribe to register online, change your selection or discontinue this service. About Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune, chronic and inflammatory condition that affects the central nervous system (CNS) and is the most common, non-traumatic, disabling neurological disease in young adults. Relapsing remitting MS (RRMS) is the most common form of MS, and around 85% of people with MS are diagnosed with this type.[iv] The exact cause of MS is unknown but it is thought that the body's immune system attacks myelin, disrupting the information flow along the nerves. There is currently no cure for MS, but treatments are available to help slow the course of the disease. About World MS Day 2018 World MS Day is officially marked on the last Wednesday of May. Events and campaigns take place throughout the month of May. It brings the global MS community together to share stories, raise awareness and campaign with and for everyone affected by multiple sclerosis. In 2009, the MS International Federation (MSIF) and its members initiated the first World MS Day. Campaigns are rolled out globally which focus on a different theme each year. The theme for World MS Day 2018 is 'Bringing Us Closer'. About Shift.ms Shift.ms - http://www.Shift.ms - is the social network for people with multiple sclerosis. Founded by MSers, for MSers, the charity supports many thousands of recently diagnosed people across the world as they make sense of MS. It's independent and it's free. About Merck Merck is a leading science and technology company in healthcare, life science and performance materials. Almost 53,000 employees work to further develop technologies that improve and enhance life - from biopharmaceutical therapies to treat cancer or multiple sclerosis, cutting-edge systems for scientific research and production, to liquid crystals for smartphones and LCD televisions. In 2017, Merck generated sales of 15.3 billion in 66 countries. Founded in 1668, Merck is the world's oldest pharmaceutical and chemical company. The founding family remains the majority owner of the publicly listed corporate group. Merck holds the global rights to the Merck name and brand. The only exceptions are the United States and Canada, where the company operates as EMD Serono, MilliporeSigma and EMD Performance Materials. References i. National Institute of Neurology Disorders and Strokes. Multiple Sclerosis: Hope Through Research. http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/multiple_sclerosis/detail_multiple_sclerosis.htm. Accessed May 3, 2016. ii. Luzzio C, Dangond F. Multiple Sclerosis. Medscape. http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1146199-overview . Accessed February 22, 2017. iii. Kantar Health. May 2017. NATIONAL HEALTH AND WELLNESS SURVEY, 2016 [EU]. New York, NY. iv. MS Society. Relapsing Remitting (RRMS). https://www.mssociety.org.uk/what-is-ms/types-of-ms/relapsing-remitting-rrms Accessed March 7, 2017. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/697963/Merck_MS_Inside_Out_Logo.jpg ) Video: https://www.multivu.com/players/uk/8337651-merck-ms-insideout-campaign/ MOSCOW, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- During the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) Andrey Guryev, PhosAgro's CEO, President of the Russian Association of Fertilizer Producers (RAFP) and Vice President of the International Fertilizer Association (IFA) for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, took part in the Russia-France Business Dialogue panel discussion attended by the Russian and French Presidents Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron. The panel, focusing on issues of and prospects for bilateral cooperation, included speeches by representatives of the two nations' business communities, government bodies and civil society. Commenting on the Russia-France business dialogue in the domain of agriculture and application of mineral fertilizers, PhosAgro CEO and RAFP President, Andrey Guryev, noted: "The phosphate-based fertilizers produced in Russia (with PhosAgro leading the charge in the domestic market) are of exceptionally high quality and environmental purity. "While many manufacturers of fertilizers that are far less eco-friendly enjoy free access to the European market, Europe continues imposing a 6.5% customs duty on the pure products originating from Russia, with the European consumers being the ones who pay with their health and money for artificial restrictions on imports of the Russian clean fertilizers. "We are happy to see that Europe has recently launched a public discussion on the contamination of soils, agricultural products and foods with toxic heavy metals such as cadmium and arsenic. Indeed, today this is a global challenge to human health and preservation of the environment for the future generations. This topic is of particular significance to France, the leading agricultural producer in the EU and the largest importer of phosphate fertilizers. "France is uniquely positioned to lead the EU by example if it chooses to limit its use to eco-friendly phosphate fertilizers with a low content of harmful impurities. Russia will gladly help its long-term partner to put healthy food on the French tables by ramping up the volumes and expanding the range of exported green phosphate fertilizers. In its turn, France just needs to take charge when it comes to putting a cap on fertilizers with dangerous heavy metals and other impurities in Europe, as well as set in motion the cancellation of the EU's 6.5% duty on Russian imports of phosphate fertilizers," said Andrey Guryev, PhosAgro's CEO. Another important avenue for cooperation between Russia and France is the banking sector. Over the past few years, French banks have been actively providing financing for the Russian corporations and their foreign subsidiaries. PhosAgro has been a long-term partner of several French banks. For example, Societe Generale acted as PhosAgro's lender and lead arranger of a USD 250 m pre-export loan that the Company raised in June 2016 and has since fully repaid. The bank also worked with PhosAgro in 2017-2018 on its second and third Eurobond issues, of USD 500 m each. Andrey Guryev also spoke at the Russia-Japan Business Dialogue that took place at SPIEF. The two countries are expected to further their economic partnership when it comes to developing projects and fostering cooperation between Russian and Japanese businesses. The Russia-Japan Business Dialogue panel discussion at SPIEF 2018 was attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and touched on the achievements and current challenges in the relations between the two countries, as well as on new business opportunities and prospects. Vladimir Putin, said: "Japan is undoubtedly one of our key partners in the Asia-Pacific Region, but not just in Asia. We would like to take our relations to the global level. We took a keen interest in Japanese Prime Minister Abe's initiatives on developing Russian-Japanese relations in eight priority fields, and have already proposed an 80-project plan on its basis. Some of these projects have already kicked off." In his speech, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, said, "Together, Japanese and Russian companies can implement many projects that will greatly benefit our nations, I am sure of that. I have no doubt that it will lead us towards a bright future. I hope this business dialogue becomes a productive forum for a better tomorrow." Andrey Guryev, PhosAgro's CEO, shared the experience of long-standing cooperation between PhosAgro Group and Japan's industrial corporations and financial institutions. Russian and Japanese companies can use it in various aspects of their business, such as the implementation of state-of-the-art technology. "Our cooperation dates back 40 years, to the construction of the first large-scale ammonia plant in Cherepovets using the technologies of the Japanese Toyo Engineering Corporation," he said. "Five years ago, here at SPIEF, we signed a contract with an international consortium led by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for construction of a new, highly advanced ammonia plant, which produces 760 kt of the product that we use to manufacture fertilizers. The capital investments in the Cherepovets capacities (including the new ammonia plant) exceeded RUB 65 billion. "These funds were in part sourced using Japanese project financing, as we became perhaps the only Russian public company to attract a long-term loan of almost USD 500 million directly from JBIC and a consortium of Japanese banks. "Thanks to that, we were able to utilise some of the best technologies in the world to build the most advanced ammonia facility in Europe, which last year reached its design capacity." Praising the quality and effectiveness of cooperation with JBIC, PhosAgro's CEO Andrey Guryev said that for large-scale industrial projects to be implemented, there need to be more institutions like Japan's JBIC and Russia's RDIF. Shinzo Abe, Japan's Prime Minister, addressed the questions by the Russian business community and Andrey Guryev in particular on the Japanese government's plans regarding the most favoured nation status of Russia, expressing his gratitude to those who contributed to developing and strengthening the business ties between Russia and Japan and saying: "Our governments will continue fostering the business relationship between the two countries, (...) and we would like Japan's government to support Japanese enterprises. "The financial system is also very important. Last September, JBIC and the Russian Direct Investment Fund launched and committed USD 1 bn to a joint investment vehicle that has already invested in three projects. "In February 2018, JBIC collaborated with the Far East Investment and Export Agency and other organisations to establish a venture for developing and promoting investment projects. The company will provide support to the Japanese business when it comes to investing and selecting new projects. "Two years ago, Mr Putin and I agreed to expand economic cooperation between our countries. That decision, coupled with our willingness to work together, is opening new opportunities and has already yielded results in the last two years. "I hope we can explore new avenues for cooperation, and we are doing everything we can to make it possible. This will remain a priority for us, so that Japan and Russia could help each other grow and build a new society." Andrey Guryev also took part in televised debates organised by the RDIF and Rossiya 24, titled 'Investment Breakthrough: Infrastructure and Technology of the Future'. During the televised debates, participants noted that Russia has established an infrastructure that unites investments from leading sovereign funds from around the world and leading Russian companies. This makes it possible to combine best global expertise and practices with unique opportunities and progressive developments by Russian companies. One of the main issues discussed by the participants was the effect of investments in creating competitive advantages for companies in the Russian market and abroad. Over the past five years, PhosAgro has invested RUB 160 billion into its development using best available technologies. As a result, production volumes during this period increased by 40%, to a record 8.3 million tonnes, while labour productivity per employee increased by 2.5 times, which helped the Company win in a Vedomosti rating. For the last three years, PhosAgro has achieved annual growth in fertilizer output of 10%, with a similar trend for phosphate rock production. This year the Company plans to maintain the same pace of growth. Last year, PhosAgro completed a large-scale investment into the construction of new, high-tech production facilities. PhosAgro's new ammonia plant is currently the highest-capacity in Russia (760 thousand tonnes per year), as is the granulated urea line with a capacity of 500 thousand tonnes per year. Investments in the project exceeded RUB 65 billion. These will enable PhosAgro to continue to produce phosphate-based fertilizers that are naturally low in potentially-harmful impurities, helping to support national and global food security. The new production facilities will also create significant potential for increasing production capacity and improving the Company's self-sufficiency in key inputs. In the next two years, PhosAgro plans to invest at least RUB 50 billion, which will enable it to open three new production facilities (sulfuric acid, nitric acid and ammonium sulfate) at the production complex in Cherepovets by 2020, and to expand the capacity of the third apatite-nepheline beneficiation plant. PhosAgro is also considering options for the development of the production complex in Volkhov. PhosAgro CEO Andrey Guryev said: "At present, we are working on a long-term strategy for the development of PhosAgro until 2025, which will be aimed at further improving efficiency, strengthening the Company's positions in domestic and foreign markets, increasing shareholder value and profitability. "The Company, whose shares have traded on the London Stock Exchange and Moscow Exchange since 2011, last year conducted its second SPO in recent years. Shareholders successfully placed 4.5% of the shares of PhosAgro. RDIF together with five sovereign funds from China, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE participated in the SPO, as well as international investment funds from the UK, continental Europe and the United States. "The Company benefited significantly from the SPO with RDIF, increasing its free float to more than 25%, helping the liquidity of PhosAgro shares traded on the Moscow Exchange to grow 5-fold. The company's weighting in the MSCI Russia index also grew, while the geography and structure of its investors became more diversified, and the share price broke records. "RDIF has built an effective mechanism for attracting financing from foreign sovereign funds to the Russian equity market, and this contributed to high demand for PhosAgro shares. The order book for PhosAgro shares was fully subscribed within an hour, becoming oversubscribed thereafter. The volume of the transaction exceeded RUB 15 billion. "We also expanded the Board of Directors of PhosAgro to ten people from eight, and an absolute majority of those are independent directors. In addition, through our cooperation with RDIF, we have gained invaluable insight into communication with and decision making by sovereign funds. "I believe that RDIF provides a certain assurance of quality. Trust in Russia, inspired by this fund, is extremely unique." Responding to a question from the moderator about the possibility of an investment breakthrough, Andrey Guryev noted that "an investment breakthrough is not only possible and inevitable, but we have already entered this investment cycle, investing about USD 500 million annually into production development." About PhosAgro PhosAgro (http://www.phosagro.ru) is one of the world's leading vertically integrated phosphate-based fertilizer producers in terms of production volumes of phosphate-based fertilizers and high-grade phosphate rock with a P 2 O 5 content of not less than 39% (according to IFA, Fertecon and CRU). PhosAgro's main products include phosphate rock, over 35 grades of fertilizers, feed phosphates, ammonia, and sodium tripolyphosphate, which are used by customers in 100 countries spanning all of the world's inhabited continents. The Company's priority markets outside of Russia and the CIS are Latin America, Europe and Asia. PhosAgro's shares are traded on the Moscow Exchange, and global depositary receipts ("GDRs") for shares trade on the London Stock Exchange (under the ticker PHOR). Since 1 June 2016, the Company's GDRs have been included in the MSCI Russia and MSCI Emerging Markets indexes. ALBANY, New York, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a new market report published by Transparency Market Research, the global television broadcasting services market was valued at US$ 395.5Bn in 2016 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 6.9% from 2018 to 2026, reaching US$755.7 Bn by the end of the forecast period. According to the report, North America was the largest contributor in terms of revenue to the television broadcasting services market in 2016. This is primarily due to strong adoption of television broadcasting services such as cable television, satellite television, and IPTV across the region. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/664869/Transparency_Market_Research_Logo.jpg ) Increasing demand for high definition content and advertisement as a growing source of revenue are driving the global television broadcasting services market Increasing demand for high definition content and advertisement as a growing source of revenue are the major factors which are expected to fuel the growth of the television broadcasting services market across the globe. The television industry has shifted from provider-driven to consumer-driven. Moreover, emergence of quality standards along with the technological advancements in manufacturing of devices are contributing significantly in meeting rising consumer expectations. Demand for high-quality OTT televisions, such as HBO Go and others are increasing as consumers prefer to have high standard quality videos and content. According to Ericsson Mobility Report 2017, ownership of HD TVs has increased from around 75% in 2012 to almost 85% in 2017. Apart from this, companies are focusing on enhancing revenue through advertisements. Television serves as the most prominent source to reach a large audience and potential customers. Thus, adoption of television platforms by companies to improve their business operations is growing significantly due to its wide reach and increasing number of channels. This in turn is expected to drive the television broadcasting services market during the forecast period. Request a Brochure for Research Insights at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=13574 Television Broadcasting Services Market: Scope of the Report The global market for television broadcasting services is segmented on the basis of delivery platform, broadcaster type, revenue model, and geographic regions. On the basis of delivery platform, the market is segmented into digital terrestrial broadcast, satellite broadcast, cable television broadcasting, internet protocol television (IPTV), and over-the-top television (OTT). In 2017, the cable television broadcasting services segment accounted for the largest market share in terms of revenue of the global television broadcasting services market. Furthermore, demand for satellite television broadcasting service is also expected to gain major market share throughout the forecast period. On the basis of broadcaster type, the global television broadcasting services market is segmented into public and commercial. In 2017, public broadcasting segment accounted for the largest share of the market. Television broadcasting service providers are generating more revenue from the public sector. However, commercial broadcasting services segment is estimated to expand at a substantial rate over the forecast period. Furthermore, based on revenue model, the global television broadcasting services market is categorized into subscription and advertisement. Among them, the subscription segment is expected to grow at a significant rate. The growth of this segment is mainly driven by rising adoption of pay TV subscription and on-demand television services, which is consequently expected to fuel the growth of the subscription market during the forecast period. Advertisement segment is expected to have moderate growth during the forecast period. This is the result of digitization. Revenue from user subscription is expected to witness uptake during the forecast period. Request a PDF Sample at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=13574 Based on geography, the global television broadcasting services market is bifurcated into North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, South America, and Middle East & Africa. Among these regions, the market for television broadcasting services in North America is expected to hold its dominant position throughout the forecast period. However, Asia Pacific and Europe are also expected to contribute significant market share during the forecast period. Browse Press Release athttps://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/television-broadcasting-market.htm Global Television Broadcasting Services Market: Competitive Dynamics Players in the television broadcasting services market are partnering with other technology companies in order to expand their market presence. Apart from partnerships, vendors are also improving their services in terms of content quality and converging the content of production and distribution in order to gain market share globally. The global television broadcasting services market includes different players such as A&E Television Networks, LLC, AT & T, Inc., British Broadcasting Corporation, CANAL+ GROUP, CBS Interactive, Channel Four Television Corporation, CenturyLink, Inc., 21st Century Fox, Comcast Corporation, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Heartland Media, LLC, RTL Group, Time Warner, Inc., Tivo Corporation, and Viacom International, Inc. Download Report TOC athttps://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/report-toc/13574 The television broadcasting services market has been segmented as below: Market Segmentation: Global Television Broadcasting Services Market By Delivery Platform Digital Terrestrial Broadcast Satellite Broadcast Cable Television Broadcasting Services Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) Over-the-top Television (OTT) By Broadcaster Type Public Commercial By Revenue Model Subscription Pay-per View On-demand Advertisement Digital Interactive Broadcasting In addition, the report provides analysis of the television broadcasting services market with respect to the following geographic segments: North America The U.S. Canada Rest of North America Europe The U.K. Germany France Russia Rest of Europe Asia Pacific (APAC) China India Japan Australia Rest of Asia Pacific (APAC) Middle East & Africa (MEA) GCC South Africa Rest of MEA & (MEA) South America Brazil Rest of South America Popular Research Reports by TMR: Transport Stream Switching Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025 : https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/transport-stream-switching-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/transport-stream-switching-market.html Free-to-air (FTA) Service Market (Device - Satellite Television, Cable Television, Mobile TV, and Radio) - Europe and Middle East & Africa Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/emea-free-to-air-service-market.html About Us Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The company's exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information. TMR's data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports. Contact: Transparency Market Research State Tower, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany NY - 12207 United States Tel: +1-518-618-1030 USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453 Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.com Website: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Research Blog: http://www.techyounme.com/ MEXICO CITY (dpa-AFX) - Fresnillo Plc. (FRES.L), a producer of silver and gold, said it will back its guidance for the full year in the AGM to be held at noon on Wednesday. The company will continue to expect production of 67 mln - 70 million ounces of silver, including Silverstream, and 870 thousand - 900 thousand ounces of gold for 2018. The Group is to announce that it declared an interim dividend of 10.6 US cents per share, with a final dividend of 29.8 US cents per share, bringing the total for the year to $297.7 million. It also continues to seek to improve energy efficiency and progressively integrate renewables and clean technologies into its energy mix. Fresnilla, in its annual general meeting, expects to announce the stepping of its independent non-executive director, Guy Wilson, at the AGM meeting. Also, it would unveil the Board's recommendation from the Nominations Committee to name Alberto Tiburcio as Chairman of the Audit Committee and Charles Jacobs as a member to the Audit Committee. The Board has further approved the appointment of Alejandro Bailleres as Deputy Chairman of the Company. 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. HONG KONG (dpa-AFX) - Checkout the few notable companies that are scheduled to release their quarterly financial results on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. ADI Sees Continued Momentum Across Its Industrial Applications Analog Devices Inc.'s (ADI) strength in aerospace & defense sector, and industrial automation business are likely to propel its second-quarter results. The company is set to release its Q2 results today, with analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters estimating earnings of $1.38 per share and revenue of $1.47 billion for the quarter. * Sees Q2 revenue in the range of $1.43 bln - $1.51 bln * Expects Q2 OpEx of $430 mln - $440 mln * Projects Q2 EPS, excl. items, of $1.30 - $1.44. * Expects Q2 GAAP EPS of $0.87 - $1.01. Year-Ago Numbers: * Revenue - $1.15 bln * GAAP net income - $93.6 mln * GAAP EPS - $0.27 * Non-GAAP EPS - $1.03. ** Strategic Initiatives Likely To Boost DKS' Q1 Results Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect Dick's Sporting Goods Inc. (DKS) to report earnings of $0.45 per share and revenue of $1.88 for the first quarter, which is scheduled to be released before the bell today. The sporting goods retailer continues to evaluate and adjust its business model, and is taking actions to reduce expense structure in order to fund and develop its longer-term strategic initiatives. Year-Ago Numbers: * GAAP net income - $58.2 mln * GAAP EPS - $0.52 * Non-GAAP net income - $60.3 mln * Non-GAAP EPS - $0.54 * Net sales - $1.8 bln. Edward Stack, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, 'In 2018, we expect stronger product innovation from select key partners and the continued expansion of our private brands to result in less margin pressure than previously expected. We see meaningful opportunity to drive improvements across our business and will make significant investments that will continue to position DICK'S Sporting Goods as the leader in our industry.' FY18 Outlook * Expects FY18 EPS of about $2.80 - $3.00; Consensus - $2.93. * Expects same store sales of about flat to low single-digit decline versus 0.3% decrease in 2017. * Expects to open about 19 new DICK'S Sporting Goods stores in 2018. ** Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein Brands Likely To Boost PVH's Q1 Results PVH Corp. (PVH) intends to post its first-quarter financial results today after the bell. What's In Store For Q1? * Expects Q1 GAAP EPS to be $2.13 - $2.18 * Sees non-GAAP EPS of $2.20 - $2.25; Consensus - $2.25/Shr. * Sees Q1 revenue to increase about 15%; Consensus - 14.80%. * Expects Tommy Hilfiger revenue to rise 19%. * Expects Calvin Klein revenue to increase 17%. Year-Ago Numbers: * GAAP net income - $70.4 mln * GAAP EPS - $0.89 * Non-GAAP net income - $130.2 mln * Non-GAAP EPS - $1.65 * Total revenue - $2.0 bln FY Guidance * Sees FY GAAP EPS of $8.76 - $8.86 * Expects non-GAAP EPS of $9.00 - $9.10; Consensus - $9.13/Shr. * Expects revenue to increase about 7%; Consensus - 7.30%. ** Portfolio Expansion May Drive KORS' Q4 Results Michael Kors Holdings Ltd. (KORS) is scheduled to release its Q4 results before the bell today. The company continues to capitalize on the fashion active trend incorporating newness into its best-selling Allie and Billie active styles. * Sees Q4 total revenue of $1.11 bln - $1.13 bln; Consensus - $1.15 bln. * Expects Q4 EPS of $0.50 - $0.55; Consensus - $0.60/Shr. Year-Ago Numbers: * Total revenue - $1.06 bln * Net loss - $26.8 mln * Loss per share - $0.17. * Net income, excl. charges - $118.0 mln * EPS, excl. charges - $0.73. FY18 Outlook * Expects FY total revenue to be about $4.66 bln; Consensus - $4.69 bln. * Projects FY EPS of $4.40 - $4.45; Consensus - $4.49/Shr. *** Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de MOUNTAIN VIEW (dpa-AFX) - Market Intelligence Some key pieces of U.S. economic data are awaited today, amid Italy's political tensions and U.S. President Trump's sudden decision to push forward with Chinese import tariffs, just a few days after efforts to work towards a deal. Few Retail earnings are also on the cards. Economics Intelligence *The U.S. Commerce Department will release the second estimate of Q1 economic growth today. The initial GDP release reported that the economy grew at a 2.3% annualized rate. Consensus lingers between the second estimate remaining unchanged at 2.3% or an upward revision to 2.4% growth. *The Federal Reserve will release the Beige Book prepared for the FOMC meeting in mid-June. Published 8 times a year, the Beige book is a collection of anecdotal information on current economic conditions in districts across the country and forms the basis of the economic discussion in a Fed meeting to be held in two weeks from now. The report may say that economic activity in the 12 districts continued to expand at a modest to moderate pace. *Private payrolls data from ADP, awaited today may say that Jobs growth in the U.S private sector slowed to approximately 190k hires vs. 204k hires in the previous month. The hires have been exceeding 200k in the last 5 months in a row. If today's data matches expectations, it will buck this trend. The U.S. Labor department will release the official nonfarm Payrolls report on June 1, 2018. Stocks Intelligence Domino's Pizza, Inc. (DPZ) - Billionaire George Soros is betting against a few European companies, including the Domino's Pizza Group, after warning about a European Union existential crisis. Shares of U.S. counterpart Domino's Pizza, Inc. (DPZ) declined nearly 2% on the NYSE on May 29, closing trade at $245.8. Investors may want to watch and take advantage of the dips. The tech race to reach a trillion dollar market cap makes Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) the must-watch stocks for the long haul. Tuesday, MSFT reached a market value of $753.03 billion to become the third most valued company in the world, surpassing Google parent Alphabet's $738.92 billion valuation. AAPL holds the top spot with a market cap of $923.56 billion, while AMZN ranks second with a market value of $782.61 billion. Earnings Intelligence 1. Cavco Industries, Inc. (CVCO), engaged in design and production of factory-built housing products, posted better-than-expected quarterly results. *Net income rose to $22.1 million or $2.4 per share vs. year-ago $10.9 million or $1.19 per share. *Revenue rose 22.5% to $242.5 million from $198 million last year. *Both Top line and bottom line numbers surpassed analysts' estimates for EPS of $1.52 and revenues of $219.11 million. CEO comments Joseph Stegmayer, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer said, 'Fiscal year 2019 begins with optimism about demand for housing as home ownership rates, currently at a low 64.2%, are reported to be trending higher. With housing prices and rental rates also on the rise, we believe systems-built housing will be an increasingly sought after option for affordable living.' 2. HP Inc. (HPQ) *names Steve Fieler CFO, to succeed 32-year HP veteran Cathie Lesjak *Returns more than $1 billion ($1,028 million) in buybacks and dividends to shareholders in Q2 *sees Q3 adjusted EPS of $0.49 to $0.52, vs. $0.49 consensus *raises its annual earnings per share expectations to $1.97 to $2.02 from prior $1.90 to $2.00. Analysts are modeling EPS of $1.98 *Expects to generate free cash flow of at least $3.7 billion for FY18 *** Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de CINCINNATI, Ohio, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Intellect Global Transaction Banking (iGTB), the transaction banking and technology specialist from Intellect Design Arena Ltd, announced a strategic agreement with Fifth Third Bank, a U.S. regional banking corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. Jeff Siekman, Senior Vice President and Director of Payment Products for Fifth Third says, "We believe this collaboration with iGTB on future digital projects will help us deepen our relationship with existing customers and acquire new ones. We are committed to embracing technology at Fifth Third and we look forward to bringing new capabilities for our clients." Manish Maakan, CEO, Intellect Global Transaction Banking (iGTB) says, "This represents a big milestone for iGTB and our expansion of a customer footprint in the US. We have invested many millions of dollars each quarter in R&D into the banking space and having contracted for 10 digital transformation activities this calendar year worldwide, we are now expanding our footprint and contextual banking into the US with this partnership." About Intellect Design Arena Ltd: Intellect Design Arena Ltd, a specialist in applying true digital technologies, is the world's first full spectrum Banking and Insurance technology products company, across Global Consumer Banking (iGCB), Central Banking, Global Transaction Banking (iGTB), Risk, Treasury and Markets (iRTM), and Insurance (Intellect SEEC). With over 25 years of deep domain expertise, Intellect is the brand that progressive financial institutions rely on for digital transformation initiatives. Intellect pioneered Design Thinking for cutting-edge products and solutions for Banking and Insurance, with design being the company's key differentiator in enabling digital transformation. FT8012, the world's first design centre for Financial Technology, reflects Intellect's commitment to continuous and impactful innovation to address the growing need for digital transformation. Intellect generates annual revenues of more than USD 169 million, serving more than 240 customers through offices in 40+ countries and with a diverse workforce of more than 4,000 solution architects, domain and technology experts in major global financial hubs around the world. For further information on the organization and its solutions, please visit intellectdesign.com. For information on the solutions for global transaction banking, please visit www.igtb.com . For Media related information, please contact: Nachu Nagappan Intellect Design Arena Ltd Mob: +91-89396-19676 Email: nachu.nagappan@intellectdesign.com For Investor related information, please contact: Praveen Malik Intellect Design Arena Ltd Mob: +91-89397-82837 Email: praveen.malik@intellectdesign.com Goldman Sachs and PSP Investments lead funding round for market leader in supply chain payments and marketplaces. Tradeshift, the leader in supply chain payments and marketplaces, today announced that it is raising $250 million in a Series E funding round led by Goldman Sachs and Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments). Additional participation comes from HSBC, H14, GP Bullhound, and Gray Swan, a new venture company established by Tradeshift's founders. The new round of financing brings Tradeshift's total funding to more than $400 million. Company valuation is now at $1.1 billion. The new investors join existing backers, including HSBC, American Express Ventures, CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund, Notion Capital, Santander InnoVentures, and others. Mikkel Hippe Brun, Tradeshift's GM of China and Co-Founder, will join Tradeshift's Board of Directors. "Given the rapid increase in B2B online transactions, online marketplaces are no longer just for consumers. Tradeshift has established itself as a leader in supply chain commerce by enabling corporations around the globe to take greater control of their supply chains," said Darren Cohen, Global Head of Principal Strategic Investments at Goldman Sachs. Vinay Mendonca, Global Head of Product and Propositions, Global Trade Receivables Finance at HSBC said, "Modernising trade and supply chain solutions is a strategic priority for HSBC. We are investing heavily to enable simpler, better and faster experiences for clients. Our partnership with Tradeshift allows us to provide fully digitised and automated working capital propositions across the entire supply chain ecosystem, supported by the breadth and depth of our global network. We are really excited to offer our clients a full range of integrated propositions across the financing and payments spectrum." "We are very happy with this validation of our vision," said Tradeshift CEO and Co-Founder Christian Lanng. "We have always believed that the future of supply chains is 100 percent digital and that connecting trade is just the first step to a digitally connected economy. This investment will enable us to continue our rapid growth and consolidate our leadership position. We welcome Goldman Sachs and PSP Investments as our newest investors and look forward to their valuable contributions as we enter our next growth phase." Tradeshift enables supply chain payments and marketplaces for more than 1.5 million businesses globally, including large enterprise brands such as Air France-KLM, DHL, Fujitsu, HSBC, Siemens, Societe Generale, Unilever, and Volvo. The company's ecosystem now enables alternatives for trade financing, spend and receivables management, lending and payments, and private marketplaces, unlocking the $9 trillion of capital trapped in online payments. According to the November 2017 Forrester report, Vendor Landscape: B2B Business Networks, 2017 To 2018, Tradeshift is cited among companies that "cause other PO/invoice network vendors to change strategy." The funding round will be used for core strategic initiatives, including continued global expansion of Tradeshift in Europe and Asia; growth of transacted volume and value across its platform; and strategic investments into emerging technologies, including blockchain and artificial intelligence via its Frontiers division, which was launched in January 2018. About Tradeshift Tradeshift drives supply chain innovation for the digitally connected economy. As the leader in supply chain payments and marketplaces, the company helps buyers and suppliers digitize all their trade transactions, collaborate on every process, and connect with any supply chain app. More than 1.5 million companies across 190 countries trust Tradeshift to process over half a trillion USD in transaction value, making it the largest global business network for buying and selling. Discover commerce for all at tradeshift.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005500/en/ Contacts: Amy Moore Tradeshift Public Relations pr@tradeshift.com Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. OTTAWA (dpa-AFX) - Xinyuan Real Estate Co., Ltd. (XIN) said it expects contract sales to be about US$530 million for the second quarter of 2018. For 2018, the company expects an increase in contract sales of about 10% and an increase in consolidated net income of 15% to 20% over 2017. The 2018 business outlook reflects the modified retrospective adoption of ASC 606 and may not be comparable to prior year periods. Yong Zhang, Xinyuan's Chairman, stated, With the upgrade of our strategy, we expect the Group's sales and net profits will grow better than last year, and we maintain a stable dividend policy this quarter. The management is optimistic about the financial outlook for the entire year of 2018, and will further enhance operational efficiency, optimize the capital structure, and build a first-class global real estate development operations and asset management group.' 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. Research finds that just over two-thirds (67%) Americans believe that the government, Internet Service Providers and Police can access their internet history. Yet 55% reject privacy online as a basic human right. Those crazy cats You know we're all about keeping our private bits private. The latest version (4.0) of HMA! includes new Location Mode, IP Shuffle and Kill Switch features to make it easier for you to manage your security and anonymity online Furious AND faster. New servers in core data centers have increased peak performance by 200% in 25% of VPN sessions At the beginning of May, the HideMyAss! (HMA!) team asked a bunch of Americans, Germans, and French (6,095 of them to be precise) about the organizations they think can access their internet history. Unsurprisingly, 2,002 respondents in the US said 'government,' 'Internet Service Providers' (ISPs) and 'Police.' What is surprising was the respondents' mixed opinions towards privacy as a basic human right: 55% of those surveyed in the US think that it isn't one. We're here to tell you that privacy is 100% a basic human right, whether you agree with the 'I have nothing to hide' argument or not. This is why Jack and team have added a bouquet of new privacy and security features in the lightning-fast version 4.0 of our HMA! VPN. Now, the countless ISPs, evil cybercriminals and government agencies that do track you will have a much, much harder time doing so. Everyday I'm Shufflin', Shufflin' One of the standout features we're uber proud of is IP Shuffle*, which periodically randomizes your IP address. Think of it as teleportation on the internet. You jump from one location to the next which makes tracking your whereabouts considerably more difficult. And there are plenty of places for you to visit, too. We have over 890 servers in over 280 locations in over 190 countries. IP Shuffle integrates nicely with another important update that we'd like to share: Kill Switch. Now available across Windows and Mac platforms, Kill Switch immediately cuts your internet connection if your VPN server drops out. It's the product's fail-safe mechanism. We've also completely redesigned Location Mode** to make it easier for you to pick and 'favorite' the best server locations around the world for your preferred VPN activities like streaming or P2P. And if that's still not enough, version 4.0 comes with a new connection rule that we're calling Trusted Networks***. We know there are some (only some, of course) occasions when you might not want a VPN connection. Perhaps you're connected to a home network you trust. This feature allows you to select the networks you don't want the VPN to connect to. HideMyAss! spokeshuman Brad Poole commented, "Technology has enabled mass surveillance and crime on an unprecedented scale. The flipside is that consumers who need greater online privacy and security to protect themselves can also benefit from good tech like a VPN. Recent and new legislation like the Investigatory Powers Act in the UK and GDPR have generated confusion, panic and, let's be fair, some anger. But in doing so they have helped raise awareness of our human rights when it comes to online activity. However, online privacy and security are still undermined by organizations sharing or storing personal information and internet activity, sometimes without a person's knowledge. The new updates in version 4.0 add an extra layer of privacy and security to help protect us against snoopers and cybercriminals." Let's get physical, physical Oh, and just one more thing. All of our servers are fully encrypted with a feature called Full Disk Encryption. Technically, this isn't part of HideMyAss! version 4.0, but it's just as important. It offers protection against physical theft of VPN server drives and misuse of sensitive data. Our heavily encrypted disk drives keep them off limits from potential threats such as shady duplication from third parties, covert installation of wiretaps and data modification by hackers. Version 4.0 of HMA! is currently available in 27 languages on select platforms, including Window, MacOS, iOS and Android. The product is priced at $6.99 per month on a 12 month plan and allows connections for up to five devices simultaneously. Technical information including platform support can be found on the HMA! support page. For any queries, or if you'd like to receive an HMA! version 4.0 license code please contact Jack at PR@avast.com. IP Shuffle is currently available on Windows, Mac and Android platforms. It is not available on iOS due to technical limitations of the mobile operating system **Location Mode is currently available on Windows and Mac products. Release to Android and iOS platforms is coming soon. ***Trusted Networks is currently available on Mac products. Release to other desktop and mobile platforms is coming soon. Notes to Editors: The survey, carried out by Censuswide on behalf of HideMyAss! in May 2018, surveyed 8,102 respondents in the UK, US, France and Germany. About HideMyAss! HideMyAss! (HMA!) helps millions of people all over the world to safely and securely enjoy the internet, preserving our fundamental right to choose how and when we share personal information. HideMyAss! has more than 890 servers in over 280 locations in over 190 countries and is a global company based in London with offices in the UK and Serbia. In 2016, HideMyAss! was acquired by Avast (LSE: AVST), the global leader in digital security products, which has added HMA! Pro VPN to its existing portfolio of security software and services. HideMyAss! is a champion of net neutrality and a committed anti-censorship campaigner. It believes strongly that everyone should be entitled to freedom of association and open access to online information. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005740/en/ Contacts: Avast Jen Bennett, 415-596-6770 jennifer.bennett@avast.com LONDON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Enterprise focused review of the most prominent protocols in the blockchain space WhatMatrix, the independent technology comparison and analysis site, today announced the release of a blockchain-platform comparison. The new category analyzes and ranks major available blockchain platforms, enabling visitors to identify the most appropriate solution for their use case; featuring Ethereum, Hyperledger Sawtooth, IBM Blockchain, R3 Corda, Ripple and Tron. The comparison is available immediately here. The category provides an enterprise-focused technical review of the most prominent protocols and their implementations in the blockchain space. The analysis covers technical details including security models and consensus, business applications, support, implementation challenges, and total cost of ownership. The comparison's unique depth of information is an industry first in its unbiased review process. It allows business leaders to get familiar with this disruptive technology, without being sold on a particular solution. Site visitors will be given the opportunity to learn firsthand the major technical performance metrics to evaluate this brand-new technology, with the opportunities to customize product recommendations for specific business use cases. Michael Gord and Jeff Holek from MLG Blockchain are the category lead consultants on this new WhatMatrix category. Michael also sits on the board of directors of the Bitcoin and Blockchain Alliance of Canada. "We're excited to collaborate with MLG Blockchain consulting on this new category. The experience that both Michael and Jeff bring to the community is unparalleled in the industry and will attract major interest from enterprise clients looking to implement blockchain technologies," said Ruben Spruijt, WhatMatrix Community Board Member, CTO and Field CTO at Frame. "Providing this new comparison is further testament to the continuing success of the WhatMatrix platform. We are regularly approached by consultants and vendors alike asking us to include their emerging technologies in our comparisons." "I'm delighted to be involved with WhatMatrix and to bring the blockchain comparison to the site," commented Jeff Holek, WhatMatrix Category Consultant. "Other comparison sites we looked at perform little or no technical analysis, evaluations appear based on user reviews or vendor-submitted data. WhatMatrix is different, their technical evaluation process, named expert ownership - combined with open community curation - allows us to generate trusted advice for our own clientele while highlighting our expertise in the community." WhatMatrix continues to grow its industry awareness with its unmatched technical insight, rapidly expanding categories and regular applications from new community contributors. Vendors increasingly recognize the marketing value of being involved, as highlighted by Dan Murphy, CMO, Embotics Corporation, "WhatMatrix's in-depth technical evaluation generates unique product awareness for us." Product capabilities are further highlighted through an enhanced analysis listing that provides greater insight and visibility to their solutions. About WhatMatrix WhatMatrix, the first crowdsourced-powered IT comparison community, has evolved from the popular VirtualizationMatrix and is changing the consultancy landscape. By providing indepth technical, free, and "always-online" technology comparisons by respected industry experts, WhatMatrix significantly reduces the time and cost spent on researching suitable technologies to solve today's business challenges. Being involved with WhatMatrix instantly raises the profile for both vendors and contributing consultants alike. For more information visit www.whatmatrix.com. About MLG Blockchain MLG Blockchain is a global blockchain development and consulting firm headquartered in Toronto with a distributed team across North America, Europe and Asia that is focused on building next generation applications using blockchain and smart contract technology. MLG Blockchain speeds up your team's understanding of the blockchain and its potential opportunities for your business and creates a blockchain strategy that can be implemented today. MLG Blockchain is blockchain agnostic and is experienced working with many blockchain fabrics including the Bitcoin Blockchain, Ethereum, Hyperledger, Ripple, Factom, Eris. MLG Blockchain is also experienced working with many blockchain development APIs, software frameworks, databases, and DevOps tools for testing and agile development. Media Contact: Jane Rimmer jane@hiviz-marketing.com +44-7110-633488 BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - The Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development said the global economy is undergoing stronger growth underpinned by a rebound in trade, higher investment and buoyant job creation. Nonetheless, the OECD emphasized significant risks posed by trade tensions, financial market vulnerabilities and rising oil prices to global economy. In the latest Economic Outlook, the Paris-based think tank said the global economy is set to grow 3.8 percent this year and 3.9 percent in 2019. In March, the agency had projected 3.9 percent growth for both 2018 and 2019. OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said the current recovery is still being supported by very accommodative monetary policy, and increasingly by fiscal easing, suggesting that strong, self-sustaining growth has not yet been attained. 'Policymakers need to put greater focus on structural policies to boost skills and to improve productivity to achieve strong, sustainable and inclusive growth,' Gurria added. According to the latest forecast, growth in the OECD area is set to remain around 2.5 percent per annum, helped by fiscal easing in many economies. Largely due to a substantial fiscal boost, the United States will expand 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.8 percent next year, the agency said. Eurozone is forecast to grow 2.2 percent in 2018 and 2.1 percent next year as accommodative monetary policy, fiscal support and improving labor markets are supporting domestic demand. Germany's GDP growth is forecast to be 2.1 percent each in 2018 and 2019, while France's growth is seen at 1.9 percent for both this year and next. Economic growth in the U.K. is projected to remain moderate at 1.4 percent in 2018 and 1.3 percent in 2019, owing to high uncertainties about the outcome of Brexit negotiations. Underpinned by exports, business investment and private consumption, Japan's economy is projected to grow 1.2 percent in 2018 and 2019. 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. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - May 30, 2018) - New Energy Metals Corp. (TSXV: ENRG) ("New Energy Metals" or the "Company") announces that it has entered into an option agreement (the "Lithium Agreement") to acquire a 100% interest in a lithium project (the "Atacama Lithium Project") located in the Atacama salar district in northern Chile. New Energy Metal's President and Chief Executive Officer, Grant Ewing, said "We are excited with the opportunity to acquire a project in a region recognized as having the world's highest grade and largest producing lithium brine salt flat. This opportunity is viewed as a strategic acquisition by the Company as it believes that potential value creation opportunities could arise in the future as a result of the transaction." Atacama Lithium Project Highlights The Atacama Lithium Project is located in the Salar de Atacama district, recognized as one of the highest grade and largest producing lithium brine regions. The Atacama Salar hosts a significant portion of the world's known lithium reserves and produces approximately one third of global lithium output from two production facilities operated by Sociedad Quimica y Minera ("SQM") and Rockwood Lithium (Albemarle). The favourable characteristics of the salar, including: high grade lithium and potassium, high evaporation rate, and low rainfall make Atacama's lithium production highly efficient versus other producing regions (source: U.S. Geological Survey). Current production occurs in the southern portion of the Salar. The Company's Atacama Lithium Project concessions cover an area of approximately 66,000 hectares and are located in the southeastern part of the district (see Figure 1). The proximity of the Atacama Lithium Project to existing production indicates the exploration potential for the discovery of brines in the eastern and southern areas of the district, underlying portions of the Company's Atacama Lithium Project. Summary of Lithium Agreement Under the terms of the Lithium Agreement, the Company can earn a 100% interest in the Atacama Lithium Project through the following cash and share payments: Atacama Lithium Project Date Amount (US$) Shares On Signing US$550,000 550,000 shares January 2019 US$1,600,000 1.6M shares January 2020 US$2,000,000 2M shares January 2021 US$2,200,000 2.2M shares January 2022 US$3,000,000 3M shares Total US$9,350,000 9,350,000 shares The Atacama Lithium Project is not subject to underlying royalties. During the option period, the Company will be responsible for maintaining the concessions comprising the project in good standing. There are no work commitments and all work carried out on the project will be at the sole discretion of the Company. The Lithium Agreement is subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. About The Company New Energy Metal's principal project is the Cristal copper project located in northern Chile. The Company has entered into agreements to acquire several prospective cobalt projects in Chile's past producing San Juan cobalt district, and a lithium project in Chile's prolific Atacama salar district. The recent name change to "New Energy Metals Corp." reflects the Company's corporate strategy of exploration and development of energy metals in Chile. Qualified Person Mr. Grant Ewing, P.Geo., is a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Ewing and has reviewed the scientific and technical information that forms the basis of this news release and has approved the disclosure herein. Mr. Ewing is not independent of the Company. On behalf of New Energy Metals Corp. Grant Ewing, President & CEO T: 604.484.1232 E: info@newenergymetals.ca W: www.newenergymetals.ca 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 No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. This News Release includes certain "forward-looking statements". Other than statements of historical fact, all statements included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding future plans and objectives of New Energy Metals Corp., are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from New Energy Metal's expectations are the risks detailed herein and from time to time in the filings made by New Energy Metals Corp. with securities regulators. Those filings can be found on the Internet at http://www.sedar.com. To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/5737/34923_new_pa2.jpg To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit: http://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/5737/34923_a1527657546244_77.jpg Intelsat S.A. (NYSE:I), operator of the world's first Globalized Network and leader in integrated satellite communications, today announced that Juan Pablo Cofino has joined the company as Regional Vice President, Latin America and the Caribbean. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005234/en/ Juan Pablo Cofino Regional Vice President, Latin America and the Caribbean (Photo: Business Wire) Cofino will be responsible for the development and implementation of Intelsat's sales and regional go-to-market strategies for the company's broadband, mobility, media and government customers operating in Latin America and the Caribbean. He will be based in Intelsat's Coral Gables office in Florida and report directly to Kurt Riegelman, Intelsat's Senior Vice President, Sales, Marketing and Communications. "Juan Pablo's understanding of Latin American business culture, track record for recruiting and leading high-performing sales teams, and ability to cultivate valuable partner and customer networks make him an important addition to our team," said Kurt Riegelman. "As we work to support our customers' business and growth objectives, Juan Pablo innately understands the complex communications challenges facing customers in the region. His strong background and skillset will prove instrumental as we continue to deliver secure, fast, seamless, high-quality broadband access and content distribution to businesses and communities throughout the region." Cofino joins Intelsat from ATN International, where as president, Caribbean Latin America, he managed telecom operations on Guyana, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Aruba and the Cayman Islands. He designed and coordinated business strategy and product initiatives for mobile wireless, broadband internet and home fixed business units as well as helped define the company's vision, strategy, technical and commercial road map, financial budgets and capital allocation plans. Prior to that, he held sales and business unit management positions at Milicom (Tigo) and Grupo Progreso. Cofino earned a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a Masters of Business Administration in Business, Management, Marketing and Related Support Services from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago. About Intelsat Intelsat S.A. (NYSE: I) operates the world's first Globalized Network, delivering high-quality, cost-effective video and broadband services anywhere in the world. Intelsat's Globalized Network combines the world's largest satellite backbone with terrestrial infrastructure, managed services and an open, interoperable architecture to enable customers to drive revenue and reach through a new generation of network services. Thousands of organizations serving billions of people worldwide rely on Intelsat to provide ubiquitous broadband connectivity, multi-format video broadcasting, secure satellite communications and seamless mobility services. The end result is an entirely new world, one that allows us to envision the impossible, connect without boundaries and transform the ways in which we live. For more information, visit www.intelsat.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005234/en/ Contacts: Intelsat Michele Loguidice, +1-703-559-7372 Director, Corporate Communications Michele.loguidice@intelsat.com PALM BEACH, Florida, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Marketnewsupdates.com News Commentary The world's helium supply shortage has the medical industry worried. Why do they care? The fact is, nearly a quarter of the world's helium is used for cryogenics in MRI machines. The situation has gotten so bad that doctors have actually called for a ban on party balloons to save helium for life-saving purposes. This critical shortage has caused a helium price surge to all-time highs and has drawn investor attention to gas producers like American Helium Inc. (TSX-V: AHE) (OTC: AHELF), Praxair Inc. (NYSE: PX), Air Products & Chemicals Inc. (NYSE: APD), Gazprom PAO (OTC: OGZPY) and United State Natural Gas Fund LP (NSYE: UNG). Shortage Driving Up The Price Of Helium Global demand for helium has risen by 10% per year over the past decade to an estimated 8 billion cubic feet. This far exceeds current supply which sits at only 5.4 billion cubic feet. This shortfall has placed an enormous strain on the price of helium, driving it up to an all-time high this year to $119 per thousand cubic feet. This represents an 11% increase over 2017. This trend is likely to continue into 2020, where the value of the helium market could exceed $1.5 billion. A balloon ban could certainly be effective, but this extreme option isn't a long-term solution. A much better solution lies in finding new sites that can produce helium in the future. This has created a window of opportunity for a pure-play helium producer to help fill the gap between demand and supply. A Discovery That Could Rebalance The Helium Shortage One candidate that may have an opportunity to fill the gap between supply and demand is American Helium Inc. (TSX-V:AHE) (OTCQB:AHELF), which is currently exploring a land package consisting of over 17,700 acres of land in the Uinta Basin in Utah. Analysis of historical data shows that the company's asset has very high helium concentrations of 1-1.5%. This number is comparable to Texas, the biggest helium-producing region. American Helium Inc. aims to be the first pure-play U.S. helium producer. It appears that any such producer may have the backing of the United States government. Recently, Donald Trump placed helium on his list of critical minerals, sending a signal that the U.S. government is in full support of companies that can unearth helium domestically in fill the void. The company is led by David Sidoo, a 20-year veteran in the oil and gas industry and founding shareholder of American Oil & Gas Inc. Their goal is to take their land package into commercialization within 14 months. If all goes to plan, Utah could become just the third helium-producing state. Just recently, the company reported a significant resource increase at its land package, now estimated to hold 7.85 billion cubic feet (bcf) of helium. Since global demand for helium sits at 8 bcf, American Helium Inc.'s asset has the potential to cover nearly all of the global demand and rebalance the current supply shortage. The company has now laid out the location of its first well and is in the processing of acquiring drilling permits, bringing this potential solution closer to reality. Why A Pure-Play Helium Operation Matters The U.S. is currently the world's biggest helium producer and controls 55% of global supply, but there actually isn't a lot known helium resources within its borders. However, the U.S. hasn't historically had any companies actively looking to unlock its helium potential. Only Texas and Wyoming have produced helium, but this helium has always been a byproduct of oil and gas drilling. At the moment, the U.S. government operates the world's largest helium source at the Hugoton Field down in Texas, but this source is declining by 7% a year and will be completely shut off in 2021. This means that in just three years, the U.S. will need an injection to its helium inventory. Although the U.S. has already begun importing helium overseas, that's far from a sustainable solution, because other helium-producing nations are also facing a similar supply crunch. For example, Qatar, the second-biggest producer, closed two helium plants last year due to tensions in the Middle East. Clearly, helium supply will not be able to keep up with demand without a pure-play helium producer. The current field is simply too invested in oil and gas drilling, and helium is just a second thought. When pure play helium producers enter the market, it is highly likely that they will have significant advantages over traditional oil and gas drillers in the helium space. This new generation of helium suppliers is making progress each day, with American Helium Inc. (TSX-V: AHE) (OTCQB: AHELF) potentially emerging as an early front-runner. Other Industrial Gas Companies in the U.S. Praxair Inc. (NYSE: PX) - Praxair Inc. is an industrial gas company with operations across North America, Europe, South America, and Asia. Praxair produces, sells and distributes atmospheric, process and specialty gases, and high-performance surface coatings. In November 2017, the company notified bulk liquid helium customers worldwide of increases in helium prices of up to 10%, effective January 1, 2018, or as contracts permit. Air Products & Chemicals Inc. (NYSE: APD) - Air Products & Chemicals Inc. is an industrial gas company providing atmospheric and process gases and related equipment to manufacturing markets, including refining and petrochemical, metals, electronics, and food and beverage. The company operates packaged gas businesses in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. In the U.S., the company's packaged gas business sells products only for the electronics and magnetic resonance imaging industries. Gazprom PAO (OTC: OGZPY) - Gazprom is a global energy company focused on the exploration, production, transportation, storage, processing, and sales of gas, gas condensate and oil. The company holds the world's largest natural gas reserves. Its share in the global and Russian gas reserves amounts to 17% and 72%respectively. United State Natural Gas Fund LP (NSYE: UNG) - United State Natural Gas Fund is an exchange-traded security that is designed to track in percentage terms the movements of natural gas price. The investment objective of UNG is for the daily changes in percentage terms of its shares' net NAV to reflect the daily changes in percentage terms of the price of natural gas delivered at the Henry Hub, Louisiana. For more information on American Helium (TSX.V:AHE) (OTCQB:AHELF), please visit Microsmallcap.com for a free research report. DISCLAIMER: Microsmallcap.com (MSC) is the source of the Article and content set forth above. References to any issuer other than the profiled issuer are intended solely to identify industry participants and do not constitute an endorsement of any issuer and do not constitute a comparison to the profiled issuer. FN Media Group (FNM) is a third-party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. FNM is NOT affiliated with MSC or any company mentioned herein. 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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 MSC and FNM undertake no obligation to update such statements. Media Contact: FN Media Group, LLC info@marketnewsupdates.com +1(561)325-8757 BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - The Automatic Data Processing has released private sector employment data for May at 8:15 am ET Wednesday. Following the data, the greenback changed little against its major counterparts. The greenback was trading at 1.1639 against the euro, 108.95 against the yen, 0.9894 against the franc and 1.3304 against the pound around 8:17 am ET. At 8:30 am ET, the second estimate of U.S. GDP data for the first quarter is due. 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. VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / May 30, 2018 / Omni Commerce Corp. ("Omni", or the "Company") (TSX-V: OMNI, FRA: 0MZA) is pleased to announce the appointments of Matthew Morgan, Morgan Good, Steen Rasmussen and Todd Embley to the Company's advisory board. Mr. Morgan is a serially successful cannabis entrepreneur as the former owner of Reef Dispensaries, Tryke Companies and Bloom Dispensaries. Reef currently runs six retail locations, two manufacturing plants, and two laboratories in Nevada and Arizona, with over 400 employees. Mr. Morgan now works for ALQ Gold Corp. (Green Axis) and has solidified himself as a leader in the cannabis industry recently being named one of High Times top 100 most influential people in cannabis. Earlier this year, he partnered with Dan Bilzerian, to develop his Ignite brand. Mr. Good is a venture capitalist with 15 years of experience as a stock market professional focusing in areas of finance, corporate development and investor relations. He founded Patriot Capital Corporation in early 2013 to invest in both private and public companies, with an emphasis on acquiring large positions in well-structured entities. Currently Mr. Good is the founder and CEO of Delrey Metals Corp. and interim CEO of ALQ Gold Corp. (Green Axis) which has partnered with Dan Bilzerian and intends to become an investment company focusing on the global cannabis sector. Mr. Rasmussen brings a wide breadth of experience in finance spanning over 20 years and is a Director at Duke Capital. He was recently appointed CEO of a private technology company based in Canada. Previously he has worked as a financial analyst for TELUS and at numerous other private companies where he has spearheaded their accelerated growth. He holds an Engineering Technology diploma and a Bachelors of Commerce degree from the University of Alberta. His astute financial management and network he has cultivated in the capital markets in the technology and cannabis sectors will make him a valued asset to Omni. Mr. Embley is a serial entrepreneur who is well versed in VC, startups, technology community building and corporate innovation, at a global level. He spent 8 years in China, first as an entrepreneur then with SOSV's Chinaccelerator where he was Program Director for nearly 5 years. He led Chinaccelerator to become not only the #1 accelerator program in China, but also the world's #1 seed investor in female-led startups. Mr. Embley also co-founded and co-hosted China's #1 English podcast on technology and innovation, later exiting the company before moving back to North America. After 9 months in Silicon Valley, he is now back in Canada and the co-founder and COO of a new corporate innovation platform, Horizon Three. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD Keir Reynolds Chief Executive Officer Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially because of factors discussed in the management discussion and analysis section of our interim and most recent annual financial statement or other reports and filings with the TSX Venture Exchange and applicable Canadian securities regulations. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable laws. CONTACT #1001 - 1185 West Georgia Street Vancouver BC Tel: 778-998-9242 SOURCE: Omni Commerce Corp. NEW YORK, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Wipro Digital, the digital business unit of Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO), today released a new study that indicates the growing importance of MarTech-related skills for marketing teams across the U.S. and U.K. However, the study also indicated that despite this growing emphasis on MarTech expertise, many marketing departments are struggling to reap the full potential of their investment and deliver expected ROI. While the survey found that 75 percent of marketing executives are confident in their own MarTech proficiency, only 6 percent believe that most of their marketing team is MarTech conversant. Over one-third of marketing executives believe that less than half of their team has the necessary expertise to deploy MarTech effectively, and over half (51 percent) of respondents noted the lack of MarTech competency of the wider team was a barrier to success. However, many marketers are focusing on addressing this issue - they have made reskilling current marketers with the skills they'll need for MarTech success, a huge priority. 84 percent of respondents reported that their company already has reskilling programs in place. Training marketers at every level to become MarTech proficient, reflects an industry-wide shift towards a MarTech-dominated world. Other key findings include: MarTech expertise needs to start at the top: 81 percent of respondents indicate that it is important for CMOs to have MarTech qualifications and/or skills, with only one percent of respondents noting that MarTech is not as important as other skills for a CMO 81 percent of respondents indicate that it is important for CMOs to have MarTech qualifications and/or skills, with only one percent of respondents noting that MarTech is not as important as other skills for a CMO MarTech skills overshadow strategy expertise: More respondents ranked MarTech (47 percent) among the top three most important skills for a CMO's success than both Marketing Strategy (44 percent) and Business Strategy (37 percent) Previously high-valued skills - such as Brand Management (21 percent), Advertising (13 percent), and Sales (15 percent) - have significantly declined in importance More respondents ranked MarTech (47 percent) among the top three most important skills for a CMO's success than both Marketing Strategy (44 percent) and Business Strategy (37 percent) Previously high-valued skills - such as Brand Management (21 percent), Advertising (13 percent), and Sales (15 percent) - have significantly declined in importance MarTech investments are set to increase: 62 percent of CMOs plan to increase MarTech spending in 2019. And, investing more heavily tends to translate into results Overall only 4% of respondents equating to $82M in spend terms were dissatisfied with the return on their MarTech investments. "CMOs and marketing departments are aware that MarTech is key to creating and delivering relevant and personalized experiences to customers. However, too many marketers are struggling with implementation and changing how they work," said Andy Coghlan, Global Head of MarTech, Wipro Digital. "Equipping marketing teams with the right MarTech talent and expertise is only half of the battle - the real challenge lies in determining how MarTech fits into the larger digital transformation and enterprise renovation program, and how to reinvigorate operating models, culture, and leadership, accordingly." Respondents noted some of the cultural and institutional challenges, beyond expertise, to adapting and integrating MarTech solutions, including: Retrofitting new tech to outdated operating models: The survey found that over one-third of respondents say that their company modifies the technology to fit into existing operating models rather than exploring new ways of operating The survey found that over one-third of respondents say that their company modifies the technology to fit into existing operating models rather than exploring new ways of operating Changing the way that marketing works: 64 percent of respondents noted that "changing the way that marketing works" is a major barrier to MarTech ROI 64 percent of respondents noted that "changing the way that marketing works" is a major barrier to MarTech ROI Fitting MarTech into the larger digital transformation picture: 43 percent of respondents noted that effectively integrating MarTech with other technology systems is a major barrier to MarTech's overall success Methodology: In April 2018, Wipro Digital commissioned an online survey of 500 senior-level executives, employed with organisations with more than 1,000 employees, in the US and UK. About Wipro Limited Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO) is a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company. We harness the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics and emerging technologies to help our clients adapt to the digital world and make them successful. A company recognized globally for its comprehensive portfolio of services, strong commitment to sustainability and good corporate citizenship, we have over 160,000 dedicated employees serving clients across six continents. Together, we discover ideas and connect the dots to build a better and a bold new future. About Wipro Digital Wipro Digital, the digital business unit of Wipro, collaborates and iterates with clients to deliver customer-centered digital transformation. Working at the intersection of strategy, design and technology, we derive insight, shape interaction, drive integration and unlock innovation for our clients. We apply Customer Journey Engineering to create extraordinary experiences for global brands, businesses and their customers at scale. Learn more at wiprodigital.com or @WiproDigital. Media Contacts: Shraboni Banerjee Wipro Limited shraboni.banerjee@wipro.com Brianna Rabe Ruder Finn on behalf of Wipro Digital +1 (203) 246-1304 rabeb@ruderfinn.com Forward-looking and Cautionary Statements Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in our earnings, revenue and profits, our ability to generate and manage growth, intense competition in IT services, our ability to maintain our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which we make strategic investments, withdrawal of fiscal governmental incentives, political instability, war, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, unauthorized use of our intellectual property, and general economic conditions affecting our business and industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. We may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made from time to time by us or on our behalf. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/518545/Wipro_Limited_Logo.jpg Infiniti Research, a global market and customer intelligence solutions provider, has announced the completion of their new brand strategy engagement study on the active ingredient manufacturing industry. A prominent active ingredient manufacturer wanted to plan new strategies to build interest among the customers about the products being offered. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005837/en/ Brand Strategy Engagement Boosting Brand Awareness for an Active Ingredient Manufacturer. (Graphic: Business Wire) According to the brand strategy engagement experts at Infiniti,"Organizations can execute specific and long-term goals to improve their brand value with the help of brand strategy engagement." Request for a Proposal to see how Infiniti Research's solutions can help you. Active ingredients are used in the production of pharmaceutical drugs. The market for the active ingredient is influenced by many factors including the augmented incidence of chronic diseases, rising incidences of age-related diseases, and advancements in technology in API manufacturing. Also, patent expiration of chief drugs that upsurge generic drug sales and government initiatives are spurring the market's growth. The brand strategy engagement solution offered by Infiniti helped the client to master the art of understanding customers and their perception of a particular brand. The client was able to understand the emotions of the customers and create a better relationship with them to foster customer loyalty. This brand strategy engagement solution provided benefits that helped the client to: Devise effective strategies to engage and retain customers Create a robust brand image To know more about our brand strategy engagement, ask an analyst This brand strategy engagement solution provided predictive insights on: Improving their brand awareness Capturing higher shares of the market To read more about the scope of our engagement, request a proposal View the complete brand strategy engagement study here: https://www.infinitiresearch.com/casestudy/brand-strategy-active-ingredient About Infiniti Research Established in 2003, Infiniti Research is a leading market intelligence company providing smart solutions to address your business challenges. Infiniti Research studies markets in more than 100 countries to help analyze competitive activity, see beyond market disruptions, and develop intelligent business strategies. With 15+ years of experience and offices across three continents, Infiniti Research has been instrumental in providing a complete range of competitive intelligence, strategy, and research services for over 550 companies across the globe. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005837/en/ Contacts: Infiniti Research Anirban Choudhury Marketing Consultant US: +1 844 778 0600 UK: +44 203 893 3400 hello@infinitiresearch.com https://www.infinitiresearch.com/contact-us ZURICH, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- IWG reveals the results of largest ever poll on flexible working attitudes - surveying over 18,000 professionals from a range of different industries across 96 countries More than two-thirds of global employees work remotely every week, and over 50% do so for at least half of the week, heralding a major reassessment of corporate real estate, according to a comprehensive new global study. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/659938/IWG.jpg ) The emergence of this mobile workforce has been driven by technological change, globalisation and changes in employee expectations, according to IWG, the parent group of leading workspace companies including Regus and Spaces. IWG has released a study based on the insights of over 18,000 business people across 96 companies. It found that every week 70% of employees are working at least one day a week somewhere other than the office. More than half (53%) work remotely for half of the week or more, whilst more than one in 10 (11%) people work outside of their company's main office location five times a week. Mark Dixon, founder and CEO of IWG, said: "People from Seattle to Singapore, London to Lagos no longer need to spend so much time in a particular office. "We are entering the era of the mobile workforce and it is hugely exciting. Not just for individual employees, but for businesses too. This is a huge shift in the workspace landscape globally, and businesses are now looking closely at what this means for their corporate real estate portfolios." The study by IWG also found that businesses recognised that offering flexible working strategies to their employees provided them with significant benefits: Business growth (89% - up from 67% in 2016) Competitiveness (87% up from only 59% in 2014) Productivity (82% up from 75% in 2013) Attracting and retaining top talent (80% - up from 64% in 2016) Profit maximisation (83%) For generations, the world has understood office-based work to involve a fixed location and a 9-5 schedule. But an unprecedented number of businesses are now adopting a very different working model, which produces benefits for them and their workers. The IWG survey found that flexible working not only reduces commuting time, but enhances productivity, staff retention, job satisfaction and even creativity. This is in addition to the financial and strategic advantages that it brings for businesses. Creating a happier, more productive workforce The move to flexible workspaces reflects the changing demands and expectations of the workforce. 80% of those surveyed agree that flexible working helps them retain top talent whilst 64% are now offering this to help them recruit. Over half (58%) agreed that offering flexible working improves job satisfaction, demonstrating the need for businesses to provide working environments suited to today's employees to maintain a first-class workforce. The benefits businesses are experiencing are clear: a resounding 91% said that flexible workspaces enable employees to be more productive while on the move. Ian Hallett, IWG Group Managing Director and Global Head of Brands and Ventures, said: "New technologies mean many of us can now work anytime, anywhere. The challenge for businesses is how to optimise this new landscape. Companies are realising the benefits of flexible working and its ability to increase productivity, job satisfaction and business performance." Everyone is demanding 'on-demand' The survey showed also that flexible working and the use of shared workspaces are no longer the preserve of start-ups. The world's most successful businesses - including varied companies such as Etihad Airways, Diesel, GSK, Mastercard, Microsoft, Oracle and Uber - are already adopting a flexible workspace approach. Mr Dixon added: "Changes in technology and digitalisation have led to a growing use of on-demand services generally in business, with organisations of all sizes wanting to increasingly outsource non-core activities. "Flexible working, supported by a professional on-demand workspace network, is now being discussed by senior leaders across functions in companies including risk management, business development, human resources, marketing and strategy. "One day soon, flexible working could simply be known as 'working'. We are reaching the tipping point." Notes to Editor Over 18,000 professionals from a range of different industries in 96 countries were surveyed in the IWG Flexible Working Survey. The sample is drawn from an IWG global contacts database of over 2.1 million senior businesspeople, managers or business owners, worldwide. The sample is highly representative of senior managers and owners in businesses across the globe. Respondents were canvassed online in January 2018 and contacts were drawn out of a pool of customers, prospects and business leaders from over 100 countries. The survey was independently managed by MindMetre Research. Respondents were asked for their views on the benefits and drivers of flexible working. More information is available at http://www.iwgplc.com. About IWG IWG is leading the workspace revolution. Our companies help more than 2.5 million people and their businesses to work more productively. We do so by providing a choice of professional, inspiring and collaborative workspaces, communities and services. Digitalisation and new technologies are transforming the world of work. People want the personal productivity benefits of living and working how and where they want. Businesses want the financial and strategic benefits. Our customers are start-ups, small and medium-sized enterprises, and large multinationals. With unique business goals, people and aspirations. They want workspaces and communities to match their needs. They want choice. Through our companies we provide that choice, and serve the whole world of work: Regus, Spaces, No18, Basepoint, Open Office and Signature. We create personal, financial and strategic value for businesses of every size. From some of the most exciting companies and well-known organisations on the planet, to individuals and the next generation of industry leaders. All of them harness the power of flexible working to increase their productivity, efficiency, agility and market proximity. We're reaching a tipping point. The workspace revolution is coming. Join us at http://www.iwgplc.com CEO Jen Nayar also named Woman of the Year by Markets Media Vela, a leading provider of trading and market access technology, announced that Development Lead Alexandria McGrath has been recognized as a Rising Star at Markets Media's sixth annual Markets Choice Awards presented at a dinner in New York last month. The Markets Choice Awards focused on the opinions of market participants and winners were chosen from across the institutional trading and technology space and include buy-side investment managers, sell-side execution desks, hedge funds, exchanges and trading platforms, established technology providers, and emerging FinTech firms. Mohan Virdee, Chief Executive and Founding Partner of Markets Media, said, "We were thrilled to present the Rising Star award to Alex McGrath for her strong Engineering background, talent, and dedication to excellence in her profession. The Vela team believes that she has a successful long-term career ahead of her, having shown all the qualities needed of a strong female leader in the making. A big congratulations to Alex and to Jen for being named this year's Woman of the Year." Jen Nayar, CEO of Vela, commented, "I am truly delighted that our strategy of investing in exceptional technologists such as Alex McGrath is being recognized externally. Moreover, in a field that has traditionally been filled by male professionals, highlighting the talents of impressive women like Alex is another step forward in empowering women in technology and encouraging them to take on more challenging roles." McGrath commented, "I am very pleased to have received this recognition so early in my career. Thanks to the team at Vela, I have been able to expand both my technical and management skills and I will continue to work towards achieving the goals I have set for myself professionally." About Vela Vela is a leading independent provider of trading and market access technology for global multi-asset electronic trading. Our software enables clients to successfully execute on their trading strategies and manage risk across multiple fragmented markets, liquidity pools, and data sources. We help firms successfully differentiate and innovate in an ever-changing, increasingly-regulated and fiercely-competitive landscape, while also reducing total cost of ownership. Vela's ticker plant, execution gateways, trading platform, and risk and analytics software deliver a unique, ultra-low latency technology stack for electronic low-touch and Direct Market Access (DMA) execution and pricing. We leverage the latest innovations in technology to deliver cutting-edge performance, features and reliability. Our modular stack is accessed through a single set of trading, data and risk APIs and can be delivered as-a-Service from multiple co-location data centers globally. With access to more than 200 venues, Vela provides global coverage across all major asset classes. Clients are supported by an award-winning team of technical and business experts available 24x7 from our multiple offices in the US, Europe, and Asia. Vela's clients include traders, market makers, brokers, banks, investment firms, exchanges, and other market participants. Visit us at www.tradevela.com. Follow us on Twitter @TradeVela. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530005340/en/ Contacts: For media inquiries: The Realization Group for Vela Melanie Budden, +44 7974 937970 melanie.budden@therealizationgroup.com Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - May 30, 2018) - Sunniva Inc. (CSE: SNN) (OTCQX: SNNVF) wholly-owned subsidiary, Natural Health Services Ltd. ("NHS"), Canada's largest referral network of medical cannabis patients to Licensed Producers ("LPs") in Canada, is holding an open house for media and the public, today, Wednesday, May 30 at the grand opening of its clinic located at 7900 Anchor Drive in Windsor, Ontario. The facility is one of seven owned and operated patient-centric clinics operating in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. NHS Logo NHS clinics use a unique triage system that provides an uncompromising standard of care from full-time medical professionals across its clinics. NHS provides consultation, medical cannabis education and an introduction to the products and strains available through LPs across Canada. NHS clinics are staffed by physicians, nurses, educators and patient care representatives on-site. "Consumers are increasingly turning to cannabis for relief from a broad range of medical conditions," said Dan Vass, President, NHS. "Our clinics allow patients to come in and talk freely and openly with knowledgeable medical professionals who are equipped to recommend the appropriate strain and dose to ensure positive outcomes." Medicinal cannabis is increasingly recognized and used to safely treat symptoms related to a wide range of ailments. The NHS Windsor clinic is accepting new patients. Booking is available at www.naturalhealthservices.ca. About Sunniva Inc. Sunniva, through its subsidiaries, is a vertically integrated cannabis company operating in the world's two largest cannabis markets - Canada and California - where we are committed to delivering safe, high-quality products and services at scale. Our vision is to become the lowest cost, highest quality cannabis producer in the markets we serve by building large scale purpose-built current cGMP designed greenhouses, offering better quality assurance with cannabis products free from pesticides, providing better patient and doctor access to cannabis education and sourcing better therapeutic delivery devices. Sunniva's management and board of directors have a proven track record for creating significant shareholder value both in the healthcare and biotech industries. Sunniva operates through its wholly owned subsidiaries: Natural Health Services Ltd. ("NHS") - NHS owns and operates a network of 7 clinics in Canada specializing in medical cannabis under ACMPR. NHS connects patients with safe and effective medical cannabis products through LPs. NHS has in-house physicians and nurse practitioners specializing in the endocannabinoid system providing expert consultation, education, and recommendations for patients. NHS' proprietary technology infrastructure assists physicians, patients and LPs to comply with the rules of Health Canada. NHS has more than 150,000 active medical documents outstanding and 95,000 active patients. Sunniva Medical Inc. ("SMI") - SMI is building the Sunniva Canada Campus, 740,000 square feet of purpose-built cGMP designed greenhouse facilities in British Columbia. The facility will produce pesticide free products and will convert trim to extracted products such as cannabis oil. The oil can be used for drug delivery formats such as capsules, dissolvable strips, vaporization cartridges, tinctures and creams. As the facility is not complete, revenue and costs are not known, therefore, profitability cannot be assured. CP Logistics, LLC ("CPL") - Through CPL, Sunniva has commenced construction of the Sunniva California Campus, state-of-the-art, purpose-built greenhouse facilities in Cathedral City, California. The Sunniva California Campus is planned in two phases and has been cGMP designed. Phase 1 is designed to be 325,000-square feet and Phase 2 will be 164,000 square feet. At this facility, it is estimated 30% of all product will be used for higher margin extracted products and all products will be produced free from the pesticides commonly used within today's industry. As the facility is not complete, revenue and costs are not known, therefore, profitability cannot be assured. Full-Scale Distributors, LLC ("FSD") - FSD, through its brand, Vapor Connoisseur, is a provider of custom, private-label vaporizers and accessories. FSD currently serves the needs of over 80 brands in the North American marketplace. Vapor Connoisseur is recognized for its high quality and innovative vaporization devices. Products are tailored to client needs, ensuring both safety and reliability and FSD will continue to provide these services in coordination with the large supply from both Sunniva Campuses. For more information please visit: www.sunniva.com Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Contact Information: Dr. Anthony Holler Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Investor Relations Contact: George Jurcic Manager, Investor Relations 587-430-0680 ir@sunniva.com Corporate Communications Contact: NetworkNewsWire (NNW) New York, New York www.NetworkNewsWire.com 212.418.1217 Office Editor@NetworkNewsWire.com Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - May 30, 2018) - Power Americas Minerals Corp. (TSXV: PAM) ("Power Americas" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has signed an agreement to purchase the historic Thomas Edison mine located in the heart of the Kittson-Cobalt project. The mine lies on the same fracture system that hosts the historic Shakt-Davis mine located ~1 km to the east. The Thomas Edison property, consists of one 16 hectare patented claim with both surface and mineral rights. Power America's 100% owned Kittson Project now consists of 216 unpatented claims and 1 patented claim totaling 4,440 hectares. Jeffrey Cocks, President and CEO said: "The Thomas Edison Mine is a landmark acquisition for the Company. Over 100 years ago the famous inventor and entrepreneur, Thomas Edison, developed this mine as a source of cobalt for his groundbreaking iron-cobalt batteries. Today, cobalt is once again in demand for the green energy revolution using lithium-cobalt batteries. The Thomas Edison mine has not been explored since 1907 and will be the central focus of this summer's exploration program." The Thomas Edison mine, as the name implies, was developed by the famous inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison. While Edison is better known for inventions such as the first practical light bulb, he was also very involved in the mining industry. Edison pioneered new geophysical techniques, mineral extraction technologies, and developed the battery powered miners' head lamp. He was instrumental in the discovery of nickel at Falconbridge, Ontario and also had interests in iron ore in New Jersey, and gold in New Mexico. Edison was heavily involved with the original Cobalt, Ontario silver rush, however it was not the silver he was after. At the turn of the 20th century, Edison was developing a new cobalt-Iron battery (US patent No. US678722A). Similar to today, Edison had difficulty sourcing sufficient supplies of cobalt. In order to keep the price down, Edison sent undercover representatives to Cobalt, Ontario to buy cobalt bearing minerals, which were produced as a by-products from silver mining in the area, for his battery manufacturing facility in New Jersey. He also used these representatives to attempt to buy high-grade cobalt silver mines and prospects. Eventually Edison acquired the Darby property (now the Thomas Edison Mine) in 1905. From 1905 to 1907 Edison remotely directed operations at the mine which included sinking two shafts to 150 feet, which were connected by an adit, as well as several exploration drifts and crosscuts. Between 6 and 8 tons of ore of unknown grade are reported to have been extracted, but no commercial production is recorded. Edison's correspondence with his agent in Cobalt who was later his mine manager has been preserved and makes for a fascinating read. It has been well summarized in "TIMES WERE HARD BUT MEMORIES ARE GOOD" Proceeding of the history workshop, Timiskaming Abitibi Heritage Association, April 27, 1996, which is available from Rosanne Fisher Publishing in Haileybury, Ontario. The transaction is expected to close within 30 days. Planning is currently underway on Power Americas' summer exploration program, which will include follow-up drilling on the property, as well as reconnaissance mapping, prospecting, geophysical surveys and soil sampling on the newly-acquired claims extending to the southwest (see PAM news release: 12-18-2017). Additional results from the Company's recent drill program will be released as they become available. About the Kittson-Cobalt Project The Project is located near the town of Cobalt in northeast Ontario, Canada. The Project hosts the historic Thomas Edison, Shakt-Davis and Cobalt-Kittson mines, as well as numerous historic workings, the deepest extending down to 628 feet, and over 2,700 feet of lateral workings. Cobalt mineralization occurs in Proterozoic-aged quartz-carbonate veins hosted in brittle shears in Nipissing diabase. This style of mineralization is similar to that of the famous Cobalt Silver Camp Located ~15 km east of the Property, which produced 420 million ounces of silver with cobalt as a significant by-product. Veins hosting the mineralization at the Kittson-Cobalt Project differ from the typical Cobalt Silver Camp veins in that they are lower in silver but richer in cobalt, and are associated with significant gold. Historic reports from the Shakt-Davis mine indicate values of 1.5% Co over 1.37 metres and select grab samples returning up to 4% Co and 93.3 g/t Au. Locally significant nickel, copper and to a lesser extend lead, zinc and bismuth also occur within the quartz-carbonate veins. About Power Americas Mineral Corp. Power Americas Minerals Corporation is a Canadian-based junior mining exploration company focused on the procurement, exploration and development of cobalt, lithium and other energy metals in North and South America. Power Americas' acquisition strategy focuses on acquiring affordable, cost-effective and highly regarded mineral properties in areas with proven geological potential. The Company's shares are listed and posted for trading on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "PAM", in the USA on the OTC Markets under the symbol "PWMRF", and on the Frankfurt Exchange under the symbol "VV0". The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Neil Pettigrew, M.Sc., P.Geo., Vice President of Exploration and a director of the Company, and a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. On behalf of the Board of Directors: "Jeffrey Cocks" Jeffrey Cocks President For more information please contact: Howard Milne V.P. Business Development Tel: (604) 377-8994 Email: hdmcap@shaw.ca Website: www.poweramericascorp.com Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. UNION CITY, California, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Mizuho OSI, a leading manufacturer of specialty surgical tables, is demonstrating its suite of advanced surgical tables and integrated technology for the operating room for trauma and orthopedic surgeons at the 19th EFORT Congress in Barcelona, Spain, from May 30th to June 1st, 2018. Featured products in booth C2 include the Trios Surgical Table System, Paramon OR Integration System, Hana SSXT Specialty Surgery Extension, and the Hana Orthopedic Table. The Company is hosting a symposium presentation on optimizing the anterior approach for hip replacement. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/698499/Dr_Joel_M_Matta.jpg As surgeons seek to reduce patients' recovery time, advanced surgical techniques, including the anterior approach hip replacement, are gaining in popularity. In the symposium session, Optimizing the Anterior Approach with a Proven Algorithm, taking place on May 30th at 13:00 CET, orthopedic leaders bring a global perspective on the anterior approach and how the Hana Table is a valuable tool in the success of this procedure. "By leading the discussion around the importance of the anterior approach and helping to drive innovation in the operating room, Mizuho OSI hopes to support the education and adoption of the anterior approach in Europe," said Greg Neukirch, vice president of Marketing and Sales at Mizuho OSI. "We're excited to collaborate with European partners and demonstrate how specialty tables, such as our Hana Table, can better position surgeons to operate with precision, helping to reduce the amount of time the patient spends in the operating room." Attendees of the symposium session will hear from the following expert speakers on these topics: Joel M. Matta , MD, Steadman Clinic, Vail USA : "Technology and Innovation Paves the Way for Medical Advancement" , MD, Steadman Clinic, Vail : "Technology and Innovation Paves the Way for Medical Advancement" Rajrishi Sharma, MD, University of Calgary , Canada: "Why Perform the Anterior Approach in a Socialized Healthcare System? A Perspective on Efficiency and Outcome within the Canadian System" , Canada: "Why Perform the Anterior Approach in a Socialized Healthcare System? A Perspective on Efficiency and Outcome within the Canadian System" Klaus-Arno Siebenrock , MD, University of Bern, Switzerland : "Swiss Precision in the Operating Room: My technique for Anterior Approach" , MD, University of : "Swiss Precision in the Operating Room: My technique for Anterior Approach" Moritz Tannast, MD, University of Bern, Switzerland : "Beginning the Anterior Approach: What I Learned in My First 50 Cases" About Mizuho OSI Mizuho OSI is a U.S. based company and the leader in the markets for specialty surgery and patient positioning. The company's portfolio includes specialty surgical tables for procedure-specific approaches that improves patient outcomes in spine and orthopedic surgeries, a range of general surgical tables, and consumable surgical patient care products. Mizuho OSI products are sold direct in the U.S. and Germany, and by the Mizuho Corporation in Japan. Both companies sell their products and solutions worldwide through authorized international distributors. Mizuho OSI is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mizuho Corporation located in Tokyo, Japan, a leading surgical table manufacturer in Asia. The Mizuho Group also includes TRILUX Medical, a subsidiary of Mizuho OSI. TRILUX Medical is a provider and manufacturer of surgical lights, surgical pendants, operating room patient integration, and video management systems. TRILUX Medical products and solutions are sold direct in Germany and worldwide through authorized international distributors. More information is available at www.mizuhosi.com and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657447/Mizuho_OSI_Logo_1_line_Large_Logo.jpg LOS GATOS, Calif. and AACHEN, Germany, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- HighWire, the technology partner of choice for leading commercial and scholarly publishers, has announced a new partnership with PubGrade GmbH. HighWire and PubGrade have agreed to provide HighWire customers the option of leveraging PubGrade's integrated advertising platform: PubGrade for Publishers. PubGrade's platform-as-a-service solution: PubGrade for Publishers will provide publishers with a fully integrated advertising platform that enables them to offer cutting-edge digital advertising campaign targeting, monitoring, reporting, as well as workflow and optimization solutions. "We are proud to partner with HighWire and offer our services to their extensive customer base," said Philipp Eckerle, PubGrade CEO. "PubGrade's platform provides publisher's digital ad sales teams with the ability to offer granular contextual and behavioural ad targeting, campaign forecasting, real-time monitoring and detailed client reporting across scalable content inventory. Sites that have installed PubGrade, have seen a significant uplift in digital display revenues." Dan Filby, Chief Executive Officer, HighWire said: " We continually explore ways to enhance the value proposition for our publishers. By partnering with PubGrade, our publishers can increase their revenues by using PubGrade's contextual advertising services. Our latest partnership gives our customers an elegant 'off-the-shelf' solution that integrates with the HighWire Intelligent Publishing Platform to provide a focused, targeted way to optimise revenue from digital advertising." HighWire is looking forward to introducing customers to this service at the SSP 40th Annual Meeting, May 30 - June 1. About HighWire HighWire is the technology partner of choice for world-leading commercial and scholarly publishers. With offices globally, HighWire provides digital publishing solutions and platform expertise across all aspects of the publishing life cycle, including content management and hosting, e-commerce, analytics, access and identity management, manuscript submission and tracking. HighWire also delivers strategic consulting services for developing systems and applications and improving the customer experience. HighWire is a CODiE award finalist for Vizors in the Best Business Intelligence Reporting & Analytics Solution category. About PubGrade Since 2013, PubGrade has provided STM Publishers with innovative advertising technologies tailored to their individual advertising revenue generation needs. PubGrade's proprietary technology is used across hundreds of prestigious scientific journals including those published by Springer Nature and PLOS. As of 2017, PubGrade has enabled precision-targeted delivery of digital ad campaigns for more than 190 international advertisers. www.pubgrade.com Media Contact: Philipp Eckerle Phone: +49-24193672513 Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - May 30, 2018) - Prospero Silver Corp (TSXV: PSL) (the "Company" or "Prospero") is pleased to announce that drilling started at the Buenavista project in northwest Durango State, Mexico on May 26, 2018. This is the fourth project to be drilled under the terms of a second round of strategic investment from Fortuna Silver Mines Inc. (NYSE: FSM) (TSX: FVI) made in May 2018, as per the revised agreement and warrant exercise announced on May 7, 2018. As on the first three projects, the drill program is preliminary in nature and intended to confirm below surface structures and allow the Company to determine where in the vertical epithermal column an ore zone might lie. The 3,000 meter core drill program, starting on Buensavista South Stockwork, will test at least 4 principal drill-ready zones. In addition to the Buenavista South Stockwork, other targets include the Buenavista NE dike/vein, the Camaleon vein and the Pajaro Stockwork. The surface expression of these targets occurs within the lower portion of a strong high-level argillic cap. The exploration program contemplates drilling down to a deeper more favorable geologic level to further investigate the grade potential of a possible preserved epithermal mineralized zone. Information on the Buenavista project can be found on Prospero's website at: http://www.prosperosilver.com/s/BuenavistaDurangoState.asp. Prospero's field crews have just completed channel sampling at the Pajaro zone and a structural consulting geologist is currently on site to conduct detailed structural mapping and assist in drill hole targetting. Buenavista is a precious metal-bearing, structurally controlled vein systems centered on a rhyolite dome complex in in NW Durango, 270km northwest of Durango City. Fresnillo's recently commissioned San Julian Mine lies 20 Km to the northwest. . . Alteration at surface is high-level argillic suggestive of the presence of an epithermal deposit at depth, possibly hosted in Lower Volcanic Series andesites. Between 1996 and 2008, eleven drill holes were completed at the Buenavista NE zone testing for relatively shallow mineralization. The best historic intersections include: 2.37m of 400g/t Ag and 0.27g/t Au 100m in hole 96-1. 4.3m of 87g/t Ag and 0.08g/t Au in hole BE-04 including 245g/t Ag over 1.5m. 9.3m of 125g/t Ag and 0.35g/t Au in hole BE-05 including 276g/t Ag over 1.15m. 8.0m of 129g/t Ag and 0.07g/t Au in hole BE-06 including 206g/t Ag over 4.5m. Note that these results are historic in nature. Prospero has not yet completed the work required to verify them and as such they cannot be relied upon. However, the drilling and assay work was believed to have been carried out to a high standard. Qualified Person Tawn Albinson, M.Sc., President of the Company, is a Qualified Person, as defined in NI 43-101, and is responsible for the technical content of this news release. Mr. Albinson is a Member of the American Institute of Professional Geologists and a Certified Professional Geologist (CPG) No. 11368. About Fortuna Silver Mines Inc. Fortuna is a growth-oriented, precious metals producer focused on mining opportunities in Latin America. The company's primary assets are the Caylloma silver mine in southern Peru, the San Jose silver-gold mine in Mexico and the fully-permitted Lindero gold project in Argentina. About Prospero Silver Corp. Prospero is a Mexico-focused project generator listed on the TSX.V under the symbol PSL.V. Prospero's aim is to discover world-class precious metal projects in the major mineral belts of Mexico. The Company applies a unique blend of practical exploration experience, cutting-edge mineral deposit science, and an extensive knowledge of Mexico's geology to find new gold and silver systems. Our exploration programs are run by a small but highly-focused geological team based in Mexico. For further information please contact: Ralph Rushton Exec VP Business Development Tel: 604 307 0055 William Murray Chairman Tel: 604 288 2553 Forward-Looking Statement Cautions: This press release contains certain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation, relating to, among other things, the Company's proposed use of the financing proceeds. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts; they are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates," "projects," "aims," "potential," "goal," "objective," "prospective," and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will," "would," "may," "can," "could" or "should" occur, or are those statements, which, by their nature, refer to future events. The Company cautions that Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made and they involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Consequently, there can be no assurances that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Except to the extent required by applicable securities laws and the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements if management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change. Factors that could cause future results to differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements include, possible, accidents and other risks associated with mineral exploration operations, the risk that the Company will encounter unanticipated geological factors, the possibility that the Company may not be able to secure permitting and other governmental clearances necessary to carry out the Company's exploration plans, the risk that the Company will not be able to raise the additional funds in the future to continue to carry out its business plans, and the risk of political uncertainties and regulatory or legal changes that might interfere with the Company's business and prospects. The reader is urged to refer to the Company's reports, publicly available through the Canadian Securities Administrators' System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR) at www.sedar.com for a more complete discussion of such risk factors and their potential effects. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of any of securities of the Company in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful, including any of the securities in the United States of America. The Company's securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933 (the "1933 Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to, or for account or benefit of, U.S. Persons (as defined in Regulation S under the 1933 Act) unless registered under the 1933 Act and applicable state securities laws, or an exemption from such registration requirements is available. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. THIS RELEASE IS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - May 30, 2018) - Xiana Mining Inc. ("Xiana" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that Xiana Peru Mining S.A.C ("Xiana Peru") (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Xiana) has entered into a mining assignment agreement ("Santa Ines Assignment") with Compania Minera Santa Ines Y Morococha S.A. ("Santa Ines") in respect of mining concessions, property and assets comprising the Santa Ines mine (the "Santa Ines Mine"), located in the Castrovirreyna district in Peru. Commenting on the Santa Ines Assignment, Carlos Ballon, Chairman & CEO said: "Santa Ines is an excellent brownfield opportunity for Xiana. The mine had been in operation for over 70 years before being recently put on care and maintenance. The property has significant exploration potential and with available infrastructure on site, this represents an ideal value creation opportunity for Xiana. Our team is excited by the prospectivity of the region and we look forward towards realisation of our Chile-Peru focussed base metals growth strategy." Overview of Santa Ines Mine The Santa Ines Mine is a property located in the Castrovirreyna district in Huancavelica, 445km south east of Lima The property has good access through roads and highways. Santa Ines Mine has been in operation for over 70 years with existing plant of 2,000 tpd on site. The Santa Ines Mine is currently on care and maintenance The Castrovirreyna district has been the source of high-grade vein silver ore since colonial times. Over the last half century, a series of steeply dipping veins have been mined underground and recently in responses to high silver prices, in small shallow open pits, for silver-lead-zinc ore The veins at Santa Ines Mine are concentrated along the west-east side of a large argillized and oxidized alteration zone in sectors Two types of mineralization have been encountered (i) silver-lead-zinc vein system, of intermediate-sulphidation epithermal type and (ii) one or more porphyry copper centres are believed to be present in the district, most likely at depth. A total 25 veins outcrop within the concession areas, many of which have not been drill tested The exploration potential at Santa Ines Mine is considered excellent. Xiana has developed a work program aimed at evaluating the existing mining developments with a view to evaluating where to direct exploration toward higher grade zinc mineralisation and evaluation of other exploration targets in the district wide concessions Santa Ines Assignment Agreement Summary Pursuant to the Santa Ines Assignment, Santa Ines has assigned to Xiana Peru all of its right, title and interest in and to the mining concession, the beneficiation concession, the property and the assets of Santa Ines Mine The term of the Santa Ines Assignment shall commence on May 29, 2018 and continue for a period of 20 years (subject to Xiana Peru periodically demonstrating certain minimum levels of proven mineral reserves) following the commencement date, subject to automatic renewal for one additional period of 10 years provided that at the time of such renewal certain customary conditions have been satisfied Notwithstanding the above, the first six months following May 29, 2018, shall be considered a voluntary period for Xiana Peru (the " Voluntary Period ") during which time if Xiana Peru determines that it does not wish to continue the assignment it has the option to terminate the Santa Ines Assignment Xiana Peru shall make a payment to Santa Ines of US$2 million within 5 days of the expiry of the Voluntary Period As consideration for the assignment, Xiana Peru shall pay Santa Ines on a quarterly basis, a net smelter return royalty originating from the sale of mineral products from the mining concessions at 4% of the net smelter returns As per the terms of the Santa Ines Assignment, Xiana Peru has committed to total minimum expenditure in respect of the mining concessions of a total of US$12.5 million in 4 years following the last day of the Voluntary Period (the "Commencement Date"), as per the following schedule: Time Period Committed Minimum Expenditures On or before the first anniversary of the Commencement Date US$1.5 million On or before the second anniversary of the Commencement Date US$4 million On or before the third anniversary of the Commencement Date US$7.5 million On or before the fourth anniversary of the Commencement Date US$12.5 million Additional Items Completion of the Santa Ines Assignment is subject to satisfaction of a number of customary conditions precedent, including, without limitation, the acceptance of the TSX Venture Exchange and the satisfaction of any conditions which the TSX Venture Exchange may impose. NRG Capital Partners is acting as Financial Adviser to Xiana. McCarthy Tetrault LLP is acting as legal counsel to Xiana in relation to the Santa Ines Assignment. Qualified Person The technical information contained in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Robert Baxter (FAusIMM), a Director of Xiana Mining Inc. and a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Baxter is not independent of the Company. Stock Options The Company also announces that, pursuant to their Stock Option Plan, incentive stock options have been granted to directors, officers, employees and consultants of the Company to purchase up to 4,600,000 common shares in the capital stock of the Company. The options are exercisable on or before May 30, 2023 at a price of $0.60 per share. About Xiana Mining Inc. Xiana Mining Inc. is a mineral exploration and development company focused on acquiring and developing mining assets in Peru and Chile. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF XIANA MINING INC. Carlos Ballon Carlos Ballon, Chairman & CEO For further information please contact: Tony Drescher (Chief Financial Officer) Telephone: +1 (604) 685-1017 E-mail: ajd@harbourpacific.com Rita Adiani NRG Capital Partners Telephone: +44 (0)203 709 4504 E-mail: rita.adiani@nrgcapitalpartners.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. Forward Looking Statements This press release contains forward looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation, which includes without limitation statements concerning completion of the Santa Ines Assignment. Although Xiana believes that the expectations reflected in these forward looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because Xiana 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 Santa Ines Assignment may not be completed if required approvals or some other condition to closing is not satisfied. The closing Santa Ines Assignment could be delayed if Xiana is not able to obtain the necessary regulatory and stock exchange approvals on the timelines it has planned. The Santa Ines Assignment will not be completed at all if these approvals are not obtained or some other condition to the closing is not satisfied. Accordingly, there is a risk that the Santa Ines Assignment will not be completed within the anticipated time or at all. There is no assurance that forward looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward looking statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward looking statements. The forward looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date hereof and Xiana 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. ESPOO (dpa-AFX) - The Annual General Meeting of Nokia Corp. (NOK) was held on May 30, 2018 and adopted resolutions. The Board also established a Technology Committee. The Meeting resolved to elect ten members to the Board of Directors of Nokia. The Meeting resolved to distribute a dividend of 0.19 euros per share for the financial year 2017. The ex-dividend date is on May 31, 2018. The dividend record date is on June 1, 2018 and the dividend is expected to be paid on or about June 13, 2018. The Meeting resolved to elect ten members to the Board of Directors of Nokia . The members of the Board were re-elected for a term ending at the close of the Annual General Meeting in 2019: Bruce Brown, Jeanette Horan, Louis Hughes, Edward Kozel, Elizabeth Nelson, Olivier Piou, Risto Siilasmaa, Carla Smits-Nusteling and Kari Stadigh. In addition, Sari Baldauf was elected as a new member of the Board for the same term. In an assembly meeting that took place after the AGM, the Board elected Risto Siilasmaa as Chair of the Board, and Olivier Piou as Vice Chair of the Board. The Board also elected the members of the three existing Board committees. Carla Smits-Nusteling was elected as Chair and Jeanette Horan, Louis R. Hughes, Edward Kozel and Elizabeth Nelson as members of the Audit Committee. Bruce Brown was elected as Chair and Sari Baldauf, Elizabeth Nelson, Olivier Piou and Kari Stadigh as members of the Personnel Committee. Risto Siilasmaa was elected as Chair and Sari Baldauf, Bruce Brown, Carla Smits-Nusteling and Kari Stadigh as members of the Corporate Governance and Nomination Committee. The Board also established a Technology Committee primarily as an advisory forum and for the purpose of reviewing Nokia's high-level innovation and technology strategies which are formulated and executed by the management of the Company. Consequently, Edward Kozel was elected as Chair and Bruce Brown, Jeanette Horan, Louis Hughes, Olivier Piou and Risto Siilasmaa as members of the Committee. The Meeting resolved the following annual fees to be paid to the members of the Board for the term ending at the Annual General Meeting in 2019: EUR 440 000 for the Chair of the Board, EUR 185 000 for the Vice Chair of the Board and EUR 160 000 for each Board member. In addition, the AGM resolved that the Chairs of the Audit Committee and the Personnel Committee will each be paid an additional annual fee of EUR 30 000, and other members of the Audit Committee an additional annual fee of EUR 15 000 each. Furthermore, the Meeting resolved to pay an additional annual fee of EUR 20 000 to the Chair of the Technology Committee. The Meeting also resolved to pay a meeting fee of EUR 5 000 per meeting requiring intercontinental travel and EUR 2 000 per meeting requiring continental travel for Board and Committee meetings to all the other Board members except the Chair of the Board. The meeting fee would be paid for a maximum of seven meetings per term. The Meeting resolved that the members of the Board of Directors shall be compensated for travel and accommodation expenses as well as other costs directly related to Board and Committee work. In addition, the Meeting resolved, in line with Company's Corporate Governance Guidelines, that approximately 40% of the annual remuneration will be paid in Nokia shares purchased from the market, or alternatively by using treasury shares held by the company. The Board members shall retain until the end of their directorship such number of shares that corresponds to the number of shares they have received as Board remuneration during their first three years of service in the Board. The meeting fee and costs directly related to Board and Committee work will be paid in cash. The Meeting re-elected PricewaterhouseCoopers Oy as the auditor for Nokia for the fiscal year 2018. The Meeting authorized the Board to resolve to repurchase a maximum of 550 million Nokia shares. The shares may be repurchased under the proposed authorization in order to optimize the capital structure of the Company and the Board expects them to be cancelled. In addition, shares may be repurchased in order to meet obligations arising from debt financial instruments that are exchangeable into equity instruments, to settle the Company's equity-based incentive plans, or to be transferred for other purposes. The authorization is effective until November 30, 2019 and it terminated the corresponding repurchase authorization granted by the Annual General Meeting on May 23, 2017. The Meeting also resolved to authorize the Board to issue a maximum of 550 million shares through issuance of shares or special rights entitling to shares in one or more issues. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de Frankfurt am Main (ots) -- PPP financing makes major European project possible - Total investment volume: approx. EUR 830 million / share provided by KfW IPEX-Bank: approx. EUR 124 millionKfW IPEX-Bank is financing the reinforcement of the Afsluitdijk Project in the Netherlands in cooperation with four other commercial banks and the European Investment Bank (EIB). Within the framework of a complex PPP financing structure, the banks are together providing borrowed funds of around EUR 815 million for the major project. KfW IPEX-Bank is making some EUR 124 million available. The total investment volume is valued at around EUR 830 million."We are very pleased to be a part of this crucial infrastructure project," commented Andreas Ufer, member of the Management Board of KfW IPEX-Bank. "In the Netherlands and other European countries, PPP is a proven and successful procurement option - thanks to the cooperation between public and private project stakeholders, measures of this kind can be implemented in an economically sustainable way."By agreeing to provide the necessary funds, the bank consortium consisting of the European Investment Bank, KfW IPEX-Bank, DekaBank Deutsche Girozentrale, Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg, Belfius Bank NV/SA and Cooperatieve Rabobank U.A. support the project sponsors: The Levvel consortium shareholders and equity providers are BAM PPP (46%), Van Oord (46%) and Rebel (8%), together with joint venture partners Aberdeen Standard Investments, APG Group, PGGM and EPICo. The design, construction and long term maintenance will be completed by BAM Infra and Van Oord Nederland. Rebel is the consortium financial advisor. Other consultants involved include legal advisers De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek and BDO LLP as model auditor. Nauta Dutilh (legal), Atkins (technical) and AON Global Risk Consulting (insurance) advised the lenders.Supporting PPP projects for the development and preservation of social and business infrastructure in Germany and Europe is part of KfW IPEX-Bank's core business. Over the past few years, the bank has been involved in a number of PPP projects, both in Germany and other European countries such as France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.Please find more information about the Afsluitdijk Project here: http://ots.de/xNvKjMOriginaltext: KfW IPEX-Bank digital press kits: http://www.presseportal.de/nr/69662 press kits via RSS: http://www.presseportal.de/rss/pm_69662.rss2Pressekontakt: KfW IPEX-Bank GmbH, Palmengartenstrae 5-9, 60325 Frankfurt Pressestelle: E-Mail: Antje.Schlagenhaufer@kfw.de Tel. 069 7431-4009, Fax: 069 7431-9409, E-Mail: info@kfw-ipex-bank.de, Internet: www.kfw-ipex-bank.de BOTHELL, Washington, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AGC Biologics, a global leader in clinical and commercial manufacturing of therapeutic proteins, announced today the company will participate in the upcoming BIO International Convention in Boston, Mass. on June 4-7, 2018. Newly rebranded in January 2018, AGC Biologics is the product of the convergence and integration of Asahi Glass Company (AGC) Bioscience, Biomeva GmbH, and CMC Biologics. This will be the first BIO International Convention attended by AGC Biologics as a single, global CDMO with more than 55 years of combined industry experience. With an expanding network of cGMP facilities across the globe, and demonstrated proficiency with innovative technologies and solutions, the growing company has actively exhibited a proven commitment to meet the demands of the dynamic, fast-growing market. AGC Biologics' President and Chief Executive Officer, Gustavo Mahler, Ph.D., will deliver a talk at the BioProcess International Theater on Wednesday, June 6 at 2:00 pm. The presentation will be included in the track: Emerging Techniques, Technologies, and Strategies: Outsourcing/ Continuous Processing/Single-Use/Assays, and will focus on Emerging Technologies & Strategies to Accelerate Process Development and Time to Market. AGC Biologics will exhibit and host meetings at Booth #663 in the BioProcess Zone. "This year's BIO International Convention is a meaningful venue to exhibit and participate under our new name, AGC Biologics," said Bob Broeze, Chief Business Officer at AGC Biologics. "We look forward to meeting with our wide range of clients and industry colleagues, as well as fostering new connections and relationships, and further establishing AGC Biologics as an industry-leading CDMO with a significant and growing presence in the global marketplace." About AGC Biologics AGC Biologics is a leading global Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO), with a strong commitment to deliver the highest standard of service to our clients and partners. AGC Biologics is the product of the convergence and integration of Asahi Glass Company (AGC) Bioscience, Biomeva GmbH, and CMC Biologics. The company currently employs more than 850 employees worldwide. Our extensive network spans three continents, with cGMP-compliant facilities in Seattle, WA; Berkeley, CA; Copenhagen, Denmark; Heidelberg, Germany; Yokohama, Japan; and Chiba, Japan. AGC Biologics offers deep industry expertise and unique customized services for the scale-up and cGMP manufacture of protein-based therapeutics; from pre-clinical to commercial production, for mammalian and microbial. Our integrated service offerings include cell line development, bioprocess development, formulation, analytical testing, antibody drug development and conjugation, cell banking and storage, and protein expression - including our proprietary CHEF1 Expression System for mammalian production. Further information can be found at www.agcbio.com AGC Biologics Media Contact Information: Ms. Kim Yang Director, Global Marketing and Communications Email: kyang@agcbio.com Office: +1 425.415.5438 Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/624983/AGC_Biologics_logo_Logo.jpg Marijuana News TodayIn the marijuana news today is the upcoming cannabis convention, CannaCon, taking place this weekend in Detroit. The gathering will see between 3,000 and 5,000 attendees come together to talk show about the cannabis business. (Source: "Marijuana entrepreneurs headed to Detroit for CannaCon," Detroit Free Press, May 30, 2018.)The convention is yet another example of the U.S.' growing acceptance of the drug, with Detroit being a particularly timely choice to host the convention, as Michigan is readying itself for medical. 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. MUMBAI, India, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --Rolta India Limited (Rolta), a leading provider of innovative IP-led IT solutions for many vertical segments, including Defence and Security, today announced financial results for the quarter and the audited results for the year ended March 31, 2018. FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS Consolidated Revenue for 12 Months FY-18 at Rs. 2,860.81 cr (Rs. 28.60 Billion) against Rs. 3,179.88 cr (Rs. 31.80 Billion) in 12 Months FY-17. Consolidated EBITDA Margin for 12 Months FY-18 is 29.0 % against 29.9% in 12 Months FY-17. Consolidated Loss before tax for 12 Months FY-18 at Rs. 43.94 cr (Rs. 0.44 Billion) against Loss of Rs. 358.34 cr (Rs. 3.58 Billion) in 12 Months FY-17. Consolidated Loss after tax for 12 Months FY-18 at Rs. 105.69 cr (Rs. 1.06 Billion) against Profit of Rs. 166.74 cr (Rs. 1.67 Billion) in 12 Months FY-17 Consequent upon the enactment of Tax Cuts and Job Act (Tax Reform) in USA, which has principally reduced the effective tax rate from 35% to 21% with effect from 1st January 2018 , has resulted in to reversal of deferred tax asset earlier recognized till 31st December 2017 of Rs. 172.29 Crores which has been debited to the statement of profit and loss. , has resulted in to reversal of deferred tax asset earlier recognized till of Rs. 172.29 Crores which has been debited to the statement of profit and loss. The Board of Directors have not recommended a dividend for Financial year 2018. Mr. K. K. Singh, Chairman and Managing Director said, "In today's world of exponential change, as organisations move forward in their Business 4.0 journey, Rolta is helping them to leverage and adopt the latest and emerging digital transformation technologies. The Company is able to bring together rich solutions powered by our growing portfolio of IP in combination with decades of Geospatial, Engineering and Enterprise IT experience to address our customer's needs. Rolta invested in this long and arduous journey to develop its IP portfolio and grow its Digital Solutions revenue while having to optimise its resources and investments in traditional IT services. We will now reap the benefits of this transformation with around 60% of consolidated revenues coming from Digital Solutions." CORPORATE HIGHLIGHTS Digital Transformation has emerged as a driver of sweeping change in the world around us. Organisations who recognise the inherent value within their digital data and learn to extract meaningfully insights are able to reap huge benefits. Rolta has been charting a course to constantly transform itself and remain relevant in the face of relentlessly changing technologies and market needs. The Company continues to make investments in developing differentiating intellectual property targeted at the growing demand for Digital Transformation Solutions. The Company's persistent efforts at innovation, R&D and product development has further enriched its growing portfolio of software products across the Defence, Security, Cloud, Mobility, Analytics, Safe and Smart City segments. During the year the company was granted with another patent (no. US 20150331584 A1) in the Geospatial domain. Additionally, Rolta has developed 430+ IP led Big Data Analytics software applications cutting across upstream Oil & Gas, Refineries, Petrochemicals, Chemicals, Power Generation, Utilities and Transportation for which Copyrights have been filed. During the year Gartner recognized Rolta OneView in their research report, "Take Advantage of the Disruptive Convergence of Analytic Services and Software". Defence and Security The Indian Army's Battlefield Management System (BMS) is aimed at ushering in Digital Transformation of the Indian Army by networking the Army's combat units and interlinking frontline soldiers to provide them common tactical picture in the battle fields of the future. MoD has mandated a totally indigenous software for BMS. The Consortium of BEL and Rolta continues to progress under the active support and guidance of the Indian Army. Rolta has been the leading provider of C4ISR solutions to the Indian Army having addressed all echelons of command and continues to enhance its suite of products by incorporating next generation cutting edge technologies. The Company is uniquely poised to migrate to the next generation, 64-bit Rolta IP based Intelligence and Situation awareness solutions (C4ISR) that integrate Photogrammetry and Imaging with GIS to facilitate decision making at operational and tactical levels of the armed forces. Recently Rolta participated in an RFI for procurement of latest C4ISR technologies to modernise the complete Intelligence Systems of the Armed Forces through the Buy Indian IDDM (Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured) categorization placing Rolta in a favorable position due to its indigenously developed cutting edge software. Rolta is actively developing indigenous software suite for the Indian Army's War gaming and simulation projects for conventional as well as Counter Insurgency and Counter Terrorism (CI/CT) operations. This will enable the Army to provide dynamic and cost-effective training by simulating operational and tactical scenarios. This will be a first of its kind indigenous war gaming solution for training Battalion/Company and Platoon levels of the Indian Army to meet the real challenges being faced by them and will be rolled out on a much larger scale in stages. Border Security & Management along 15000 Km of the country's land borders and 7500 Km of its Coastline, presents huge opportunities for Rolta's portfolio of indigenous Command & Control (C2) solutions. Rolta is participating in the ambitious program of the Border Security Force (BSF) to secure the country's borders and has responded to their RFP issued recently. Additionally, Rolta has offered its C2 solution for tenders related to Security Systems for airfields of Indian Navy and Air Force. Rolta has successfully harnessed Geo-BI and Big Data Analytics technologies for meeting the needs of the Indian Defence. These indigenous solutions provide Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics which will be utilized to address large Defence digital enablement programs. Rolta is addressing opportunities more than Rs 5000Cr (US $ 750+M) in the domains of C4ISR, War gaming, Border Security and Management, AI and advanced Analytics for Defence through RFIs and RFPs submitted during the year. Digital Solutions: Geospatial, Asset Management, Enterprise IT, Security, Cloud, and Big Data Analytics In today's Digital age, data is the most vital asset and the new currency of business. Digital Transformation continues to be the #1 priority for organizations globally to remain relevant in the hyper-connected world and reap the benefits of multi-fold value of the data to stay ahead of competition. Rolta is helping organizations to accelerate the digital transformation by abstracting the complexities of the nexus of technologies such as Big Data, Internet of Things, Cloud, Geospatial, Cyber Security, Mobility and Social Media through Rolta's Digital transformation platforms and solutions built on growing portfolio of IPs and replicable software solutions. With over 80% of digital data having a locational context, adding a geospatial dimension is vital and essential for deeper insights. Rolta's rich heritage of creating and designing digital repositories enriched with geospatial and engineering data has uniquely positioned the Company to analyse complex data patterns and thereby extract deep insights from the digital data. This enables the Company to address the Industry 4.0 Digital enterprise programs. Rolta OneView 9.0 released during the year introduced new features and functionalities including embedded process integration, value-added enterprise knowledge hub, 3D/4D spatial visualisations, enterprise search, NLP and collaboration together with continuous innovations in AI, Deep Learning, Data Lake and Predictive Analytics. In North America Rolta has won orders aggregating US $ 50+M from Cloud, Security and Mobility Solutions. For example, Rolta was engaged by a Fortune 500 Healthcare organization to enhance their private Cloud infrastructure along with edge communication systems spanning their distribution network. While in the In the Insurance segment, one of the largest insurance company engaged Rolta for their mobility and analytics to greatly enhance business productivity while also reducing costs. An American Electric Power Company on the other hand engaged Rolta to improve their network security to protect them and their customers from emerging security threats. With decades of expertise and leadership in the Geospatial technologies, Rolta has built a formidable track record and IP for replicable Smart City Solutions. Rolta's Smart and Safe City Solutions portfolio covers the entire gamut of Safe and Smart City Operations. For example, Rolta was entrusted with a prestigious contract for a national level Digital Transformation program for one of the largest countries in the Middle East. During the year, the Company won several multimillion dollar Safe and Smart City orders, both in India and across the globe aggregating US $ 45+M. In the Transportation segment, as part of their digital transformation program, a large State Road Transport Corporation in India awarded Rolta with a contract to create a robust and flexible solution to increase operational efficiency and facilitate better planning and operations. While, a premier Shipping Transport Authority awarded Rolta a contract to drive their Cloud based digital transformation for all their organizational functions related to shipping, operations and maintenance while also providing deep cross-functional analytical insights and decision support by leveraging Rolta OneView. Similarly, in the US a Department of Transportation of a large State engaged Rolta to provide a comprehensive analytics solution for monitoring and condition-based ranking of their extensive transportation work. The Company won orders worth US $ 25+M from the transportations sector. In the Telecom vertical, Rolta recently won a US $ 20+M project for a state-of-the-art network management and analytics system for a Fibre Optic Network to provide Geospatial Analytics with network and inventory management to facilitate network planning, preventive maintenance, fault analysis and reporting. In the Energy and Utilities sector, one of India's largest energy conglomerate, a dominant power major with presence in the entire value chain of the power generation contracted Rolta for their ambitious program to establish and manage their next generation paperless office as part of the Digital India initiative. While another Power Utilities organisation awarded Rolta a multimillion dollar order for a Rolta OneView Big Data Analytics based Smart Meter data management spanning energy suppliers, network operators and users. Similarly, a UK based water utility awarded an extension for their geospatially enabled Asset Information Management, reporting and Analytics as a Service. The Utilities segment resulted in aggregate business worth US $ 35+M. About Rolta: Rolta is a leading provider of innovative IP-led IT solutions for many vertical segments, including Federal and State Governments, Utilities, Oil & Gas, Petrochemicals, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Retail, and Healthcare. Rolta is recognized for its extensive portfolio of solutions based on field-proven Rolta IP tailored for Indian Defence and Homeland Security. By uniquely combining its expertise in the IT, Engineering and Geospatial domains, Rolta develops State-of-the-Art Digital Solutions incorporating rich Rolta IP in the areas of Cloud, Mobility, IoT, BI and Big Data Analytics. Rolta is a multinational organization headquartered in India and the Company's shares have been publicly traded for more than 25 years in India. For additional information please visit www.rolta.com, or contact: LUXEMBOURG, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Millicom, a leading provider of cable and mobile services, has pledged its continuing support for UNICEF's work in Child Rights in Latin America through a renewed three-year collaboration agreement aimed at preventing violence and protecting children and teens in the region. This commitment builds on Millicom's existing partnership with UNICEF, which seeks to protect children's rights online and offline. The announcement was made during a press conference hosted by TIGO El Salvador with representatives from Millicom, UNICEF and TIGO's Latin American operations. As part of the agreement, Millicom will fund programs related to rights promotion, use of technology, and violence prevention against children and teens through its TIGO operations across its markets in the region. Through these programs UNICEF and Millicom will be able to create and improve helplines for children and teens; provide specialized technical support for this group; and detect and prevent digital criminal activity directed to children like sexting, grooming and cyber-bullying. Millicom will also continue to share its experience with UNICEF on its work to fully integrate Child Rights into its Corporate Responsibility strategy, moving beyond its existing Child Online Protection programs. Through this partnership both organizations expect to further help the telecommunications industry understand its impact on Child Rights. Commenting on the ongoing partnership, Rachel Samren, Millicom's EVP Chief External Affairs Officer said: "40 percent of the population in the Latin American markets where we operate are 0-19 years old. We are committed to work with UNICEF on protecting the rights of these children and teens in the long-term. That's why the renewed agreement goes beyond protection of children online and includes a focus on violence prevention. " "This agreement is an example of how the private sector can articulate sustainability strategies that center in childhood and youth", said Stefan Stefansson, responsible for UNICEF's Private Sector for Latin America and the Caribbean. "In a region that is becoming more digital, the online and offline prevention and protection of the most vulnerable ones who are usually the children and teens, have to be a priority for us. " CONTACT: For further information, please contact: Millicom Press: Vivian Kobeh, Corporate Communications Director +1-305-476-7352 / +1-305-302-2858 press@millicom.com UNICEF Press: Alfonso Fernandez Reca, UNICEF Latin America and the Caribbean + 507-3017373 / +507-69412277 afernandezreca@unicef.org This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com http://news.cision.com/millicom-international-cellular/r/millicom-announces-continued-support-of-unicef-s-efforts-to-protect-children-s-rights-in-latin-ameri,c2535523 The following files are available for download: After closing its first 70 MW tender in early May, and launching the pre-qualification process for a new 500 MW PV tender a week later, the Tunisian government has announced it is tendering a second 70 MW series for solar projects up to 10 MW in size.The Tunisian Ministry of Mines and Energy has issued a second tender for the deployment of 70 MW of PV capacity, consisting of half a dozen 10 MW plants and ten 1 MW solar parks. Large-scale solar projects selected through the tender will sell electricity to Tunisia's state-owned utility, Societe Tunisienne de l'electricite et du gaz (STEG) under ... 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. 30 May 2018 Clear Leisure Plc ("Clear Leisure" or "the Company") Settlement Agreement and Issue of New Ordinary Shares The board of Clear Leisure (AIM: CLP) is pleased to announce that it has reached a settlement agreement with Mr Peter McBride in respect of an amount due by the Company to Mr McBride. The settlement is in regard to an amount of 91,722 relating to interest accrued on a loan of 250,000 made by Square One Limited to Clear Leisure in March 2015, at which time the Company was under the control of its previous board. The benefit of the accrued interest was assigned to Mr McBride by Square One Limited in February 2018. The principal amount of the loan was repaid in 2016. Settlement of the 91,722 will be satisfied through the issue and allotment of 8,263,250 new Clear Leisure ordinary shares at a price of 1.11p per share. The board also announces that the Company has agreed to issue 7,868,130 new Clear Leisure ordinary shares at a price of 1.11p per share to 64Bit Limited, the Company's joint venture partner in Miner One Limited ("MOL") in order to cover the Company's share of capital and operating expenditure, amounting to 100,000, which had been advanced to MOL by 64Bit Limited. During the next few weeks, 64Bit Limited will transfer ownership of the assets to MOL. Following the issue of shares, the Company will now have fully funded its initial 50% contribution to the joint venture partnership amounting to 200,000 as stated in the announcement dated 27 December 2017. Francesco Gardin, CEO and Executive Chairman of Clear Leisure, commented, "We have been in negotiations with Mr McBride since our arrival on the board in July 2015 to settle the interest component of the loan. This has now been concluded by issuing Mr McBride with shares in the Company. The original terms of the agreement were for repayment to be made within three months. However, the long period of negotiation has led to a material reduction in the interest portion from the original terms." Application will be made for the new ordinary shares to be admitted to trading on AIM with admission expected to occur on 5 June 2018. The new ordinary shares will rank pari passu with the existing ordinary shares of nominal value 0.25p each in the capital of the Company (the "Ordinary Shares"). Following admission, the Company's enlarged issued share capital will comprise 513,092,462 Ordinary Shares. This figure may be used by shareholders in the Company as the denominator for the calculations by which they will determine if they are required to notify their interest in, or a change in their interest in, the share capital of the Company under the FCA's Disclosure and Transparency Rules. -ends- The information contained within this announcement is deemed by the Company to constitute inside information as stipulated under the Market Abuse Regulation ("MAR"). Upon the publication of this announcement via Regulatory Information Service ("RIS"), this inside information is now considered to be in the public domain. For further information please contact: Clear Leisure Plc +39 335 296573 Francesco Gardin, CEO and Executive Chairman SP Angel Corporate Finance (Nominated Adviser & Sole Broker) +44 (0)20 3407 0470 Jeff Keating / John Mackay Leander (Financial PR) +44 (0) 7795 168 157 Christian Taylor-Wilkinson About Clear Leisure Plc Clear Leisure plc (AIM: CLP) is an AIM listed investment company with a portfolio of companies primarily encompassing the leisure and real estate sectors mainly in Italy. The focus of management is to pursue the monetisation of all of the Company's existing assets, through selected realisations, court-led recoveries of misappropriated assets and substantial debt-recovery processes. The Company has recently launched a joint venture initiative in the cryptocurrency mining sector. For further information, please visit, www.clearleisure.co.uk VANCOUVER, B.C. / ACCESSWIRE / May 30, 2018 / Gungnir Resources Inc. (TSX-V: GUG, OTC PINK: ASWRF) ("Gungnir" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has received the second of five, $1,000,000 annual advance royalty payments. The first annual payment of $1,000,000 was received May 1, 2017. The next (third) $1,000,000 payment is due on or before April 30, 2019. Drilling in Sweden on the Company's Knaften property is expected to commence on June 4, 2018. Initial drill-testing will focus on areas in the south-half of the property including near-surface gold mineralization at the Knaften 300 Gold Zone. For target areas, please refer to the Company's Corporate presentation on Gungnir's website: www.gungnirresources.com. About Gungnir Resources Gungnir Resources Inc. is a Canadian-based TSX-V listed mineral exploration company (TSX-V: GUG) with gold and base metal permits in northern Sweden within a region hosting 12 million ounces of gold delineated in existing and mined resources plus several past-producing and producing base metal mines. The Company's key gold project, Knaften, is situated at the southern extension of the "Gold Line" which hosts a number of gold deposits including Faboliden and Svartliden (Dragon Mining), and Barsele (Agnico Eagle and Barsele Minerals). The Company holds a royalty stream from the sale of the Kenville Gold Project in BC with $3,000,000 still due in three further annual advance cash payments of $1,000,000 each. Further information about the Company and its properties may be found at www.gungnirresources.com or at www.sedar.com. On behalf of the Board, Jari Paakki, CEO and Director Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements made herein may contain forward-looking statements or information within the meaning of Canadian securities laws. In certain cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved", or the negative of these words or comparable terminology. By their very nature forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual performance of the Company to be materially different from any anticipated performance expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements or information include, but are not limited to, statements or information with respect to the payment of any advance royalty payments, Gungnir Resources' plan for future funding, and exploration and development of its properties. Forward-looking statements or information are based on a number of estimates and assumptions and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements or information. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying estimates and assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements or information. For example, there is no certainty, that any economically viable mineral deposit will be located on the properties, or that the Company will receive or be able to raise sufficient capital to complete all of its exploration programs. Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements or information. Gungnir does not expect to update forward-looking statements or information continually as conditions change, except as may be required by securities law. CONTACT: Chris Robbins, CFO Tel: 604-683-0484 robbinscr@shaw.ca Jari Paakki, CEOTel: 705-507-4470jpaakki@eastlink.ca SOURCE: Gungnir Resources Inc. Attendees will experience the Aixplorer's groundbreaking 60-second alternative to liver biopsy. Regulatory News: SuperSonic Imagine (Euronext: SSI, FR0010526814) (Paris:SSI), a company specializing in ultrasound medical imaging, announced today that it will feature the Aixplorer platform at Digestive Disease Week (DDW) 2018, held June 2 5 at Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The Aixplorer platform, which includes the Aixplorer and Aixplorer Ultimate ultrasound systems, is the only imaging ultrasound device platform to receive 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to aid clinical management of adult patients with liver disease. The technology gives physicians new validated clinical indicators to support non-invasive assessment of hepatic fibrosis and steatosis. "To use an accurate, non-invasive, 60-second imaging test instead of a biopsy is a groundbreaking change for hepatologists who treat liver disease and millions of patients who suffer from it," said Dr. Sumeet Asrani MD MSc, Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, Texas. "Millions of Americans are diagnosed with liver diseases each year, and tens of thousands die.1 A non-invasive alternative can help patients avoid repeated biopsies, as well as lower the threshold for that level of testing. It is truly exciting." In addition to routine morphological and hemodynamic imaging, Aixplorer systems can quickly and reliably image and measure liver and spleen stiffness in real time under image guidance, utilizing the platform's ShearWaveTM Elastography (SWE) technology, a 60-second non-invasive exam. Liver and spleen stiffness are known to be correlated to liver fibrosis severity and are therefore considered critical non-invasive bio markers of disease severity. Physicians also can compare ultrasound liver brightness to reference tissue to gain a hepato-renal brightness ratio, which indicates the extent of hepatic steatosis. Aixplorer's ability to visualize and quantify abdominal vascularization and perfusion aid clinical management of adult patients with liver nodules and advanced chronic liver diseases as well. "We think it's appropriate to feature the Aixplorer Ultimate's capabilities for liver disease at this DDW 2018 meeting, which is themed, 'Monumental Developments in Science and Medicine,'" said Michele Lesieur, CEO of SuperSonic Imagine. "We are very proud of the 510(k) clearance we received in January, which made the Aixplorer platform the only imaging ultrasound device specifically approved for management of liver disease, and we look forward to sharing its capabilities with esteemed specialists from around the world." SuperSonic Imagine will be exhibiting during DDW 2018 in the Exhibit Hall at booth #2046. About SuperSonic Imagine Founded in 2005 and based in Aix-en-Provence (France), SuperSonic Imagine is a company specializing in medical imaging. The company designs, develops and markets a revolutionary ultrasound system, Aixplorer, with an UltraFast platform that can acquire images 200 times faster than conventional ultrasound systems. In addition to providing exceptional image quality, this unique technology is the foundation of several innovations which have changed the paradigm of ultrasound imaging: ShearWave Elastography (SWE), UltraFast Doppler, Angio PL.U.S Planewave UltraSensitive Imaging and more recently TriVu. ShearWave Elastography allows physicians to visualize and analyze the stiffness of tissue in a real-time, reliable, reproducible and non-invasive manner. This criteria has become an important parameter in diagnosing potentially malignant tissue or other diseased tissue. As of today, over 400 peer-reviewed publications have demonstrated the value of SWE for the clinical management of patients with a wide range of diseases. SuperSonic Imagine has been granted regulatory clearances for the commercialization of Aixplorer in key global markets. SuperSonic Imagine is a listed company since April 2014 on the Euronext, symbol SSI. For more information about SuperSonic Imagine, please go to www.supersonicimagine.com. 1. CDC/National Center for Health Statistics: Chronic Liver Disease and Cirrhosis. October 6, 2016. (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/liver-disease.htm). View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530006053/en/ Contacts: SuperSonic Imagine Marketing Communication Emmanuelle Vella, +33 4 86 79 03 27 emmanuelle.vella@supersonicimagine.com or FP2COM Media Relations Europe Florence Portejoie, +33 6 07 76 82 83 fportejoie@fp2com.fr or NewCap Investor Relations EU Pierre Laurent Florent Alba, +33 1 44 71 98 55 supersonicimagine@newcap.fr or Pascale Communication Media Relations US Amy Phillips, +1 412 327 9499 amy@pascalecommunications.com Washington, D.C.--(Newsfile Corp. - May 30, 2018) - The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that the SEC Investor Advisory Committee (IAC) will hold its first-ever meeting outside Washington, D.C. on June 14, 2018 at 8:30 a.m. in Atlanta. In another first, all five SEC Commissioners are planning to hold an "Investing in America" Town Hall in Atlanta on June 13 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. to meet with, and hear from, Main Street investors. For details, please see the event's webpage. Both the Town Hall and Investor Advisory Committee meeting will take place at Georgia State University College of Law, 85 Park Place NE, in Atlanta. The June 14 IAC meeting will include two panel discussions with outside speakers: "Discussion of the Commission's Proposed Regulation Best Interest and Proposed Restriction on the Use of Certain Names or Titles," and "Discussion Regarding the Commission's Proposed Form CRS Relationship Summary, including Effective Disclosure and Design." In addition, the committee will discuss disclosure enhancements for municipal and corporate bonds and may discuss a possible recommendation on that topic. For the full agenda, please see the IAC's webpage. The committee welcomes three new members: Paul Mahoney, David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law; Lydia Mashburn, Managing Director, Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, Cato Institute; and J.W. Verret, Associate Professor of Law (with tenure), Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University and Senior Scholar, Mercatus Center. Members of the IAC represent a wide variety of investor interests, including those of individual and institutional investors, senior citizens, and state securities commissions. For a full list of IAC members, see the committee's webpage. The June 14 IAC meeting will be open to the public and webcast live, and it will be archived on the IAC's website for later viewing. The IAC was established under Section 911 of the Dodd-Frank Act to advise the SEC on regulatory priorities, the regulation of securities products, trading strategies, fee structures, the effectiveness of disclosure, and on initiatives to protect investor interests and to promote investor confidence and the integrity of the securities marketplace. The Dodd-Frank Act authorizes the committee to submit findings and recommendations to the Commission. OTTAWA (dpa-AFX) - More than 3,000 conductors and engineers of Canadian Pacific Rail went on strike on late Tuesday night. The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference said its workers walked out at 10 p.m. as negotiations continued with the company with the assistance of federal mediators. The announcement came minutes after CP Rail said a tentative deal had been reached with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for 360 signaling workers who had also called for strike on Tuesday evening. The Teamsters said it had made 'best efforts to reach a negotiated settlement' and are still 'willing to remain at the bargaining table during the strike.' 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. For Immediate Release 30 May 2018 Former LSE CEO Xavier Rolet Joins PhosAgro's Team of Independent Directors Moscow - PhosAgro (Moscow Exchange, LSE: PHOR), one of the world's leading vertically-integrated phosphate-based fertilizer producers, announces that Xavier Rolet has joined the Company's Board of Directors. Today, the new composition of the Board of Directors of PJSC PhosAgro was duly elected at the Annual General Meeting of shareholders (AGM). Xavier Rolet successfully led the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), Europe's leading stock exchange group, for nine years. Under his leadership, the LSEG developed and executed an effective and successful strategy that transformed the Exchange as a global financial institution, and also established a strong senior management team. As a result, the LSEG under Xavier Rolet became a genuinely diversified player on the global financial infrastructure market, and its market capitalisation increased from GBP 800 million to GBP 14 billion. In 2017 Harvard Business Review named Xavier Rolet one of the world's 100 top CEOs. PhosAgro CEO Andrey Guryev said: "We are delighted to welcome Xavier to the Board as an independent director. He has unrivalled knowledge of global capital markets as he has successfully headed a major international financial institution. We believe that his insights and unique skillset will benefit our Company." PhosAgro CEO Andrey Guryev further noted that with this appointment independent directors now account for the majority of Board members. Along with Rolet the following candidates were elected as new Board members: Sven Ombudstvedt, Chairman of the Board of Directors; Marcus Rhodes, Chairman of the Audit Committee of the Board; Irina Bokova, the first woman to become the CEO of UNESCO where she served two four-year terms between 2009 and 2017; Jim Rogers, international investor; Natalia Pashkevich, a world-renowned scientist; Andrey Sharonov, who has extensive experience of working in government and investment. Chairman of PhosAgro's Board of Directors Sven Ombudstvedt said: "Xavier Rolet will undoubtedly strengthen the Board yet further, extending the range of knowledge and skills of its members and helping to further improve PhosAgro's corporate governance system and comply with the best market practice". PhosAgro's New Board of Directors will now include the following members: Andrey A. Guryev Andrey G. Guryev Sven Ombudstvedt Jim Rogers Xavier Rolet Marcus Rhodes Mikhail Rybnikov Irina Bokova Natalia Pashkevich Andrey Sharonov Biographical information Xavier R. Rolet was the CEO of the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) from May 2009 to December 2017. Under his leadership, the company acquired MillenniumIT (2009), Turquoise Holdings Ltd (2010), FTSE Group (2011), TRS (2011), GATElab Srl (2012), EuroTLX Srl (2013), LCH.Clearnet (2013), Bonds.com (2014), Exactpro(2015), XTF (2015) and the Frank Russell Company (2014) from Northwestern Mutual, which in October 2015 sold its asset management division to TA Associates and Reverence Capital Partners. In 2016, he acquired Mergent, Inc. and the Yield-Book & Citigroup's Global Fixed Income Index Business from Citigroup, making FTSE Russell the largest index company in the world with ca $15 trillion of assets under benchmark. In October 2015, LSE Group launched Curve Global, a new futures exchange co-owned with Barclays Bank, Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale, BNP Paribas and the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Under his tenure, the value of the London Stock Exchange Group increased from 800 million to 14 billion. Prior to joining the London Stock Exchange Group, Xavier Rolet worked for Lehman Brothers, Kleinwort Benson, CS First Boston and Goldman, Sachs & Co. After graduating from the KEDGE Business School with an MSc in management science and finance in 1981, Xavier served as a second lieutenant and instructor at the French Air Force Academy, and earned an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1984 and a post-graduate degree from Paris-based IHEDN (Institute of Advanced Studies in National Defence) in 2008. Xavier then became a member of the European Securities Markets Expert Group of the European Commission, a member of the French Government's Conseil Strategique de l'Attractivite("Strategic Council for Attractiveness"), a board member of the American Chamber of Commerce in France, and a member of Chatham House in London. Xavier is a member of the Board of Overseers of Columbia University Business School, an Honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investments FSCI (Hon), and was a member of the Financial Services Trade and Investment Board of HM Treasury (FSTIB). Since Oct 2017, he has been a member of the Committee of Expert Advisers at the Department for International Trade. He was also a member of Prime Minister David Cameron's Business Advisory Group and was a member of the Governor of the Bank of England's Financial Services Forum and of the Bank of England's Open Forum. In October 2015, he was appointed an Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. In December 2015, he was appointed Echansonnier 'A Camera Paramenti' of the Echansonnerie de Chateauneuf-du-Pape. In January 2016, President of France Francois Hollande made him a Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honour of the French Republic. In July 2016, he was made an Officer of the Royal Sharifian Order of Al-Alaoui (Order of OuissamAlaouite) by His Majesty King Mohammed VI of Morocco. In 2017, the highly respected Harvard Business Review included him on their list of the best-performing 100 CEOs in the world. Futures & Options World awarded him its 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award. He received the same Lifetime Management award in 2018 from both Risk Magazine and the City of London Wealth Management Association. He was awarded the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation (???????????) by Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko on behalf of Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation Sergei Lavrov. ____________ *PhosAgro (www.phosagro.ru) is one of the world's leading vertically integrated phosphate-based fertilizer producers in terms of production volumes of phosphate-based fertilizers and high-grade phosphate rock with a P2O5 content of not less than 39% (according to IFA, Fertecon and CRU). The Company is the largest phosphate-based fertilizer producer in Europe, the largest producer of high-grade phosphate rock worldwide, and one of the top-three MAP/DAP producers in the world (by production volumes, according to IFA). PhosAgro is also one of the leading producers of feed phosphates (MCP) in Europe, and the only producer in Russia (according to CRU and RAFP). PhosAgro is Russia's only producer of nepheline concentrate (according to RAFP). PhosAgro's main products include phosphate rock, over 35 grades of fertilizers, feed phosphates, ammonia, and sodium tripolyphosphate, which are used by customers in 100 countries spanning all of the world's inhabited continents. The Company's priority markets outside of Russia and the CIS are Latin America, Europe and Asia. PhosAgro's shares are traded on the Moscow Exchange, and global depositary receipts ("GDRs") for shares trade on the London Stock Exchange (under the ticker PHOR). Since 1 June 2016, the Company's GDRs have been included in the MSCI Russia and MSCI Emerging Markets indexes. FISHERS, IN / ACCESSWIRE / May 30, 2018 / American Resources Corporation (OTC PINK: AREC), through its wholly-owned subsidiary Quest Energy Inc. and Deane Mining LLC, has recently commenced operations at its Razorblade Surface mine located in Letcher County, Kentucky. This is American Resources" fifth mine brought into production in the last two years since acquiring and restructuring an asset base throughout the industry's most recent downturn to operate on a more efficient cost structure. Quest Energy is initially extracting coal from the Hazard 4 and Hazard 4 Rider coal seams, with additional future plans for mining the Amburgy, Whitesburg, Hazard 5, Taylor, and the Hamlin 5, 6, and 7 seams utilizing a contour, auger, and highwall mining plan. Quest Energy anticipates several years' worth of coal production from the Razorblade Surface mine. All production from the Razorblaze Surface mine will be trucked across the street to the company's 800 tons-per-hour Mill Creek Preparation Plant and/or its batch weight RapidLoader Loadout, where it will be loaded to railcars. Once fully ramped, American Resources expects Razorblade to contribute as much as 26,000 clean tons of high-grade PCI and thermal coal per month and enable them to expand coal sales to meet customers' demands since restarting their Access Energy mine at Deane Mining this past September. Razorblade is the first in a series of surface mines to be put into production organically, along with its recent acquisitions of the Wayland Surface mine and PointRock mine, throughout American Resources' footprint within Floyd, Knott, Letcher, and Pike counties in Kentucky. "We are very excited about expanding our production at Deane Mining to help meet the domestic and global demand for high-quality coals," stated Thomas Sauve, President of American Resources Corporation. "Furthermore, developing our surface mining assets, such as Razorblade, with very low transportation and operating costs, will allow us to maintain our very competitive cost position in the marketplace while enhancing our per-ton profit margin for our shareholders." American Resources continues to focus on its growth objective by leveraging its 35 controlled mining permits while also looking for supplemental, strategic acquisitions. The Company has several low-cost surface mines in its portfolio that can be quickly put into development and production. Additionally, the company remains committed to being one of the lowest cost operators in Central Appalachia and throughout all its coal mining, processing, and transportation operations. About American Resources Corporation American Resources Corporation is engaged in diversified energy services including mining, processing, and logistics, with a primary focus on traditional energy sources such as coal and oil and gas. American Resources Corporation plans to expand its business by continuing to develop its currently leased properties and further expanding its processing and logistics business, and through the pursuit of strategic acquisitions. Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other important factors that could cause the Company's actual results, performance, or achievements or industry results to differ materially from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. The words "believes", "may", "will", "should", "would", "could," "continue," "seeks", "anticipates", "plans", "expects", "intends", "estimates", or similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain such identifying words. Any forward-looking statements included in this press release are made only as of the date of this release. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update or supplement any forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. The Company cannot assure you that the projected results or events will be achieved. CONTACT: Mark LaVerghetta,Vice President of Corporate Finance and Communications investor@americanresourcescorp.com SOURCE: American Resources Corporation Company focuses on social purpose, responsibility and creating a world-class workplace for employees Unum (NYSE: UNM) and its employees in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland contributed more than $12.8 million in corporate and employee contributions and volunteered more than 77,000 hours to charitable organizations in 2017. Beyond giving back, the company's commitment to social responsibility includes helping millions of people gain affordable access to financial protection benefits and creating a world-class workplace for its employees. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530006342/en/ Unum customer David Connor never expected to be in a position where he couldn't work, but a routine task at work altered his life forever. His disability coverage helped provide financial stability while he took time away from work to recover. He's now working again and has returned to his passion surfing. (Photo: Business Wire) "Unum has always been committed to helping people through difficult times, and that commitment to making a difference also guides our approach to social responsibility," said Rick McKenney, Unum's president and CEO. "We've been around for 170 years, and while a lot has changed in that time, one thing that hasn't is the caring spirit at the heart of who we are." Unum's recently released 2017 Corporate Responsibility Report highlights the company's focus on social responsibility and support of public education that provide students more opportunities to learn. Other areas of community support include health and wellness, and arts and culture. Over the years, Unum has been instrumental in creating business-education programs like the Principal Leadership Academy in Chattanooga, Tenn.; Maine Development Foundation's Education Leaders Experience in Portland; South High Community School partnership in Worcester, Mass.; and the Midlands Education and Business Alliance in Columbia, S.C. Earlier this year, Unum announced it's investing an additional $1 million in charitable contributions in support of local communities. Another core component of its social responsibility is creating a world-class workplace for Unum's 10,000 employees. Central to this work environment is an inclusive culture where unique talents, ideas and perspectives of all employees are valued and respected, which ultimately help the company better serve the diverse needs of its customers. Other workplace initiatives include a multi-year investment into modernizing home office locations to foster collaboration and spark creativity and innovation; minimizing its environmental impact to improve the quality of life for the surrounding communities; and a total rewards benefits package designed to promote wellness, support a healthy work-life balance, and encourage employees to live their best at work and outside of company walls. "We invest in our people because they're the ones who deliver on our promises every day," McKenney said. "Their dedication to serving others is a hallmark of our culture and will define our legacy for years to come." ABOUT UNUM Unum Group is a leading provider of financial protection benefits in the United States and the United Kingdom. Its primary businesses are Unum US, Colonial Life, and Unum UK. Unum's portfolio includes disability, life, accident and critical illness, dental and vision coverage, which help protect millions of working people and their families in the event of an illness or injury. Unum also provides stop-loss coverage to help self-insured employers protect against unanticipated medical costs. The company reported revenues of $11.3 billion in 2017, and provided nearly $7 billion in benefits. For more information, connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180530006342/en/ Contacts: Unum Group Kelly Spencer, 423-294-4508 Kspencer2@unum.com Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - May 30, 2018) - Gunpowder Capital Corp., (CSE: GPC) (CSE: GPC.PR.A) (OTCQB: GNPWF) (FSE: YS6N) (the "Corporation") released today a summary of its financial results for the three months ended March 31st, 2018. Key highlights include: Total Revenues increased to $ 302,335 in Q1 2018 from $ 94,190 in Q1 2017, representing a 221% increase. Total Assets increased to $ 8,071,818 in Q1 2018 from $ 4,587,722 in Q1 2017, representing a 76% increase. Net loss was -$ 184,590 in Q1 2018 vs. a net loss of -$ 155,467in Q1 2017, representing a slight increase of 18%. As was the case in Q1 2017, Fully Diluted EPS remained as (-$0.01) for Q1 2018. The Corporation's Unaudited Consolidated Financial Statements and Management's Discussion and Analysis for the three months ended March 31st, 2018 have been posted on the Corporation's SEDAR profile page which can be viewed by visiting www.sedar.com and on the Corporation's website, which can be viewed by visiting www.gunpowdercapitalcorp.com. For further information please contact: Mr. Frank Kordy CEO & Director Gunpowder Capital Corp. T: (647) 466-4037 E: frank.kordy@gunpowdercapitalcorp.com Mr. Paul Haber CFO Gunpowder Capital Corp. T: (416) 363-3833 E: paul.haber@gunpowdercapitalcorp.com Forward-Looking Statements Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. The forward- looking statements contained herein are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements included in this document are made as of the date of this document and the Corporation disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable securities legislation. Although management believes that the expectations represented in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities described herein and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such. Neither CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. - 30 - Statement of Matthew L. Myers, President, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids WASHINGTON, May 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As the world prepares to mark World No Tobacco Day on May 31, Philip Morris International is publishing ads repeating the company's claimed commitment to a smoke-free future. Philip Morris is doubling-down on hypocrisy. At the same time that it claims to want a smoke-free future, Philip Morris is aggressively marketing cigarettes across the globe - especially in low- and middle-income countries - and fighting proven policies that reduce smoking and save lives. It is a sick joke for Philip Morris to say that "we should promote every day as World No Smoking Day," when the company's primary mission every day is to sell more deadly cigarettes. Philip Morris' claims should be seen for what they are: A PR stunt to hide the fact that Philip Morris remains a primary cause of the global tobacco epidemic, not part of the solution. Here are the facts about Philip Morris International: Despite its claimed commitment to a smoke-free future, Philip Morris makes most of its revenue from selling cigarettes, brags that it sells the world's best-selling cigarette brand (Marlboro), and works aggressively to expand the global cigarette market, touting to investors the company's "robust plans to grow [its] cigarette business." Across the globe, Philip Morris promotes its cigarettes in ways that appeal to kids, introducing flavored cigarettes, conducting aggressive marketing near elementary schools, and sponsoring race cars and concerts. In 2016, a senior company executive touted Philip Morris' efforts to "develop untapped markets" for cigarettes across Africa and the Middle East. These are not the actions of a company that wants a smoke-free future. It is also galling for Philip Morris to say that global smoking rates are not falling fast enough when the company itself has led the fight against proven strategies that can accelerate progress. A 2017 investigative report by Reuters revealed a massive, secret campaign by Philip Morris to undermine the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, depicting "a company that has focused its vast global resources on bringing to heel the world's tobacco control treaty." From Australia to Uruguay to Thailand, Philip Morris has filed expensive lawsuits that challenge strong tobacco control laws and seek to intimidate countries into inaction. If Philip Morris was serious about a smoke-free future, it would actively support rather than fight these proven strategies, including significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws, tobacco advertising bans and graphic health warnings on cigarette packs. Tobacco use kills more than 7 million people worldwide each year and is projected to kill a billion people this century. To end this terrible epidemic and truly create a smoke-free future, we need strong action by governments, not empty promises from tobacco companies. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/458701/campaign_for_tobacco_free_kids_logo.jpg CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - China will on Thursday see May results for its manufacturing and non-manufacturing PMIs, highlighting a busy day for Asia-Pacific economic activity. The manufacturing PMI is expected to hold steady at 51.4, while the non-manufacturing PMI is called unchanged at 54.8. Japan will release April numbers for industrial production, vehicle production, housing starts and construction orders. Industrial production is expected to add 1.4 percent on month and 3.6 percent on year after rising 1.4 percent on month and 2.4 percent on year in March. Vehicle production was up 0.2 percent in March and construction orders sank an annual 40 percent. Housing starts are tipped to slide 8.9 percent on year after falling 8.3 percent a month earlier. Australia will provide Q1 figures for capital expenditure, plus April data for private sector credit. Capex is expected to add 1.0 percent after easing 0.2 percent in the three months prior. Credit is tipped to add 0.4 percent on month and 5.0 percent on year after rising 0.5 percent on month and 5.1 percent on year in March. New Zealand will see May results for the activity outlook and business confidence indexes from ANZ; in April, their scores were +17.8 and -23.4, respectively. South Korea will release April numbers for industrial production and retail sales. In March, output sank 2.5 percent on month and 4.3 percent on year, while sales advanced 2.7 percent on month and 7.0 percent on year. Hong Kong will see April figures for retail sales; in March, sales jumped 11.4 percent on year. Malaysia will provide April data for producer prices; in March, prices were down 0.4 percent on month and 2.2 percent on year. Thailand will release Q1 numbers for current account and April figures for imports, exports and trade balance. The current account surplus was $12.68 billion in Q4, while imports were worth $19.04 billion and exports were at $22.06 billion in March for a trade surplus of $3.02 billion. Finally, the markets in Malaysia are closed on Thursday and Friday for the Harvest Festival and for the King's birthday, respectively. The markets will re-open on Monday. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de (ASX:OPT) Hello, I'm Jessica Amir for the Finance News Network. Joining me from Opthea is Managing Director and CEO, Dr. Megan Baldwin. Megan, thanks for coming. Welcome.Thanks Jess.For new investors, just give us a quick introduction to the company.We are focused on developing novel therapies for the treatment of eye disease. We have a lead drug candidate in development, which we call OPT-302 and we're developing it for the treatment of two eye diseases. The first one being wet AMD or wet age-related macular degeneration, which is the leading cause of blindness in people aged over the age of 55. And the second indication is diabetic macular edema or DME, which is the leading cause of blindness in people with diabetes.We currently have two clinical trials that are ongoing. A large phase 2B clinical study in wet AMD patients and a phase 1B/2A clinical trial in diabetic macular edema patients. Importantly, both of those diseases have an unmet medical need. There's only two approved therapies, so a limited therapeutic option for those patients, and we are developing one of the very promising new drugs that may actually improve vision in those patients that suffer from that debilitating eye disease.Now to a little more on wet AMD. Just tell us about the disease.So wet AMD or wet age-related macular degeneration is a disease of the aging process that affects the back of the eye. And what happens in that disease process is there's too many vessels that grow at the back of the eye, and as they grow, they're highly leaky. So there's fluid, there's vessels, and that can trigger inflammation, fibrosis, and scarring. And if it's left untreated, it leads to a chronic and often a very rapid decline in vision, which is generally in the centre of the vision field, and this is the region of the eye that's required for highly detailed focused vision.Now tell us about the trial.We're conducting it in ten countries around the world. Eight countries in Europe, the US, as well as Israel. It will enrol 351 patients and importantly, it's a randomised controlled clinical study. So we're testing OPT-302 in addition with the standard of care therapy for wet AMD which is referred to as Lucentis. And we're going to compare the vision in those patients to those patients that received Lucentis on its own.So what we're really looking for is whether we can see an additive benefit of adding OPT-302 to the existing standard of care. And if we can demonstrate that in a Phase 2B clinical trial that is robustly powered as we have designed it, that's going to be a major clinical event for the company and a real indicator that we have a very promising drug indeed.And what are the outcomes of the trial, and when can we expect data?We're dosing patients for six months and what we're looking for there, as a primary read out, is the change in vision in those patients that received the combination OPT-302 therapy compared to the standard of care therapy alone. But in addition to measuring vision improvements, what we are also looking at is the anatomical parameters of the eye. So how thick is the retina? How much fluid can we resolve at the back of the eye? And all of those secondary outcomes are also very important, that may also signal the type of activity that our drug has to treat the debilitating eye disease of wet AMD. We expect the primary data outcome for the Phase 2B study to be reported early in 2020.Now can you tell us about your diabetic macular edema program?So diabetic macular edema is a disease that also affects the back of the eye. It is the leading cause of blindness in the diabetic population. So you can imagine how many people, millions of people, suffer from this form of blindness that's associated with diabetes. And what happens in that disease is that elevated glucose levels actually trigger vessels to grow and become highly leaky so there's a swelling at the back of the eye that's characterised by fluid. And what our drug does, when we inject it into the eyes of patients is blocks signals that are involved in making those vessels leak. And so we hope to block that leakage process and actually resolve fluid and therefore have our drug improve vision in patients that suffer from diabetic macular edema.We have an ongoing study in DME right now. It is a Phase 1B/2A clinical trial. We hope to enrol 117 patients and we're recruiting patients from the United States as well as Australia. And the primary outcome of that clinical study is to look for the response rate in patients. So we're looking for those patients that receive the combination therapy and actually respond over and above what we would expect with Eylea on its own, which is a VEGF-A inhibitor.A question about financials. Drug development typically requires deep pockets, so what are your funding requirements?So, as I've said, we've got two clinical trials ongoing right now and we are fully funded through the outcomes of those studies. So we are fully funded through 2020 and the readout of the Phase 2B wet AMD and the Phase 1B/2A study in diabetic macular edema. At the end of April, we finished with approximately $37 million Australian dollars, cash in bank. And together with the R&D tax rebate, as I've said, we have enough cash in order to execute upon the clinical studies and read out the data from those studies.And lastly, Megan, why should investors consider adding Opthea to their portfolio?We have one of the most exciting and promising drug development programs in development right now. We have a quality data set that weve generated with our first in human clinical study that we reported in April 2017. That was a very good-sized Phase 1/2A clinical trial of 51 patients, and we generated real quality data, demonstrating biological activity of our molecule. We also demonstrated very importantly, that the drug is safe when injected into the eye. So we have been able to execute upon that positive data. We've raised $45 million cash in 2017, and it's really been backed by a large number of institutional health care investors from around the world. And many of those investors have done deep due diligence on our molecule. So they're aware of the potential of the molecule, they're aware of the market, and the commercial potential for a drug if we can demonstrate additional clinical benefit or vision improvement in patients when they receive OPT-302.Well Dr. Megan Baldwin, thank you so much for the update.Thank you very much. AirAsia India, where Tatas have 51 percent stake, began operations in 2014. New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) case of alleged efforts by AirAsia India and its senior officials to manipulate government policies might trigger calls from established carriers for cancellation of Tatas' majority-owned budget airline's licence and sharpen the divide in the domestic aviation space, according to industry experts. With the CBI registering a case against AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes and other officials for allegedly trying to manipulate government policies through corrupt means to get international licence brings the spot light on the erstwhile '5/20 norm'. The norm -- which required local airlines to be in operation for at least five years and a minimum fleet of 20 planes in order to start overseas operations -- was done away with in 2016. Now, only the fleet requirement of 20 aircraft is in force, making it easier for new players such as AirAsia India and Vistara to commence international flights, experts said. Against this backdrop, experts also opined that the CBI case would make things difficult for AirAsia India to start overseas operations. At present, the airline -- a joint venture between Tatas and Malaysia's AirAsia Berhad -- has 18 aircraft and is in the process of firming up international plans. A senior aviation industry analyst told PTI that the CBI case is definitely a set back for AirAsia India and would have an impact on its proposed international operations also. "There could be a demand for suspension or cancellations of the airline's licence as well from the Federation of Indian Airlines. which had been opposed to any tinkering in the now amended 5/20 norm," the expert said on condition of anonymity. The Federation of Indian Airlines (FIA) is a grouping of four established airlines -- Jet Airways, SpiceJet, GoAir and IndiGo. It had opposed amending the 5/20 rule. FIA could not be immediately contacted for comments on the AirAsia case. Besides Fernandes, the CBI has named AirAsia India director R Venkataramanan and AirAsia Berhad's former deputy CEO Tharumalingam Kanagalingam, among others, as accused in the case. Venkataramanan is also the managing trustee of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and is responsible for management and oversight of all the Tata Trusts, as per Tata Trusts website. The CBI has alleged that Venkataramanan was lobbying in the government to secure mandatory approvals, some of them through "non-transparent means", including the then Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance, no-objection certificate and the attempt for removal or modification of 5/20 rule. "The case has been registered under 120-B (criminal conspiracy) under the IPC and sections 13(2) read with 13 (1) (d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act. The searches took place at five locations in Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru," CBI spokesperson R K Gaur said on Tuesday. In a statement, Air Asia India refuted any wrong-doing and is co-operating with all regulators and agencies to present the correct facts. "In November, 2016 AirAsia India Ltd had initiated criminal charges against its ex-CEO and had also commenced civil proceedings in Bengaluru for such irregularities. We hope to bring early resolution to all such issues,"Air Asia India Director Shuva Mandal said. AirAsia India, where Tatas have 51 percent stake, began operations in 2014. "Air Asia scam will expose the fraud of the UPA Govt. I am happy Namo did not allow anyone to block CBI and the CBI Director Alok Vermas steady hand as well as Jt Director A K Sharma diligence that this scam has been exposed," senior BJP leader Subramanian Swamy said in a tweet. In 2013, Swamy has filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) against approvals for AirAsia India venture. Banking activities in public sector banks across the country have been interrupted as employees go on two-day nation-wide strike against the meagre two percent salary hike offered by the management - Indian Banks Association. New Delhi: Banking activities in public sector banks across the country have been interrupted as employees go on two-day nation-wide strike against the meagre two percent salary hike offered by the management - Indian Banks Association. However, operations in the new-generation private banks like ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank were almost normal, barring few activities including cheque clearance. Around one million bank employees have gone on strike. The two-day nation-wide strike will end on Friday, 1 June at 6 AM. Salary withdrawals Since the strike coincides with the month-end, salary withdrawals from branches are likely to get affected. Some ATMs may also take a hit. Besides, deposit in branches, FD renewal, government treasury operation, money market operation would see the impact of the strike. As several rounds of talks between banks and the unions of their employees did not make any headway, the United Forum of Banking Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of nine bank unions, has gone on strike against the proposed wage hike of 2 percent as against 15 per cent given last time, All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA), general secretary C H Venkatachalam said. The UBFU has nine bank unions -- All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA), All India Bank Officers Confederation (AIBOC), National Confederation of Bank Employees (NCBE), All India Bank Officers' Association (AIBOA), Bank Employees Federation of India (BEFI), Indian National Bank Employees' Federation (INBEF), Indian National Bank Officers' Congress (INBOC), National Organisation of Bank Workers (NOBW) and National Organisation of Bank Officers (NOBO). It is kind of an insult to the employees of public sector banks...to be offered this kind of meagre hike. We had no other option but to go on strike, forgoing two days' salary, All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC) joint general secretary Ravinder Gupta said. Success of all government schemes like Mudra, Jan Dhan and demonetisation were ensured by public sector bankers but the reward is just two percent hike, he said, adding, it is gross injustice to bankers who have worked very hard for nation building. Nearly 10 lakh employees are participating in the nation-wide strike as part of our democratic right by forgoing our salary, Venkatachalam said, hoping that good sense prevails. There are about 85,000 branches of 21 public sector banks across the country having business share of about 70 percent. Most of the banks, including SBI, PNB and BoB, have already informed their customers about functioning of branches and offices due to strike. Banking services in Maharashtra hit hard Banking services in Maharashtra is crippled as nearly 60,000 employees of various banks took part in the nationwide strike from today, PTI reported Nearly 10 lakh employees working in various branches of 21 public sector banks, 13 old generation private sector banks, six foreign banks and 56 regional rural banks across the country went on the strike as the banking lobby, Indian Banks Association (IBA), offered them a nominal wage revision. "Bank employees are on strike to demand an adequate wage revision to all employees and officers," United Forum of Bank Unions convenor (Maharashtra) Devidas Tuljapurkar said. Around 60,000 bank employees and officers in Maharashtra, including 25,000 bank employees and officers in Mumbai, are on strike, he claimed, adding that nearly 12,000 bank branches in the state are shut. "Bank employees have implemented government's flagship programmes, such as Jan Dhan Yojna, demonetisation, Mudra scheme, Atal Pension Yojana, in the last few years. Our workload has increased substantially and we need an appropriate compensation for it," Tuljapurkar said. The protesting bank employees and officers also organised a rally in the Fort area of south Mumbai. Bank profits used for clearing bad loans The governed expressed its inability to pay more to the employees saying banks had not earned enough profits. But the fact remains that year after year banks have been earning more operating profits, said Venkatachalam. For instance, in fiscal 2015-16, the banks earned a total operating profit of Rs 1.37 lakh crore, but banks set aside Rs 1.55 lakh crore towards bad loans thus wiping-off profits. Hence, there was a net loss of Rs 18,000 crore. Similarly in fiscal 2016-17, banks earned a total operating profit of Rs 1.59 lakh crore but the provision for bad loans was Rs 1.7 lakh crore, resulting in a net loss of Rs 7,000 crore. Taking the last 10 years, from 2008-17 into account, banks have earned a total operating profit of Rs 9.2 lakh crore out of which Rs 6.6 lakh crore has been wiped off, for bad loans, Venkatachalam said, adding, penalising employees and officers with lower wages on account of bad loans is unfair. With PTI inputs Petrol and diesel prices in India are linked to Singapore gasoline prices and Arab Gulf diesel prices, which mostly track movements in crude oil prices. New Delhi: The reduction in petrol and diesel prices was today revised to just 1 paisa a litre each, with state-owned oil companies blaming clerical error for previously announcing a cut of up to 60 paise. State-owned oil companies this morning announced reduction in petrol price by 60 paise to Rs 77.83 a litre and diesel by 56 paise to Rs 68.75 in Delhi. Within hours of the announcement, they revised the cut to just 1 paisa a litre each. "The reduction was supposed to be 1 paisa but due to a clerical error the price prevalent on 25 May was communicated as today's price," a senior official of Indian Oil Corp (IOC), the nation's largest fuel retailer, explained. Petrol in Delhi now costs Rs 78.42 per litre and diesel Rs 69.30. The marginal reduction comes after 16 consecutive price increases since 14 May when fuel retailers ended a 19-day pre-Karnataka poll hiatus to pass on a spike in global oil rates. In all, petrol price was increased by Rs 3.8 per litre and diesel by Rs 3.38 in that fortnight. Prices vary from state to state depending on local sales tax or VAT (value-added tax). Delhi has the cheapest price among all metros and most state capitals. By Ranga Sirilal COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka on Wednesday signed an agreement with a subsidiary of U.S. firm Schlumberger for a $50 million seismic study off the country's east coast to evaluate any prospective oil resources, a senior government official said. Sri Lanka signed the agreement with Eastern Echo DMCC, a subsidiary of Schlumberger, to carry out seismic data acquisition surveys, advance data processing and interpretation work or modelling of petroleum systems. By Ranga Sirilal COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka on Wednesday signed an agreement with a subsidiary of U.S. firm Schlumberger for a $50 million seismic study off the country's east coast to evaluate any prospective oil resources, a senior government official said. Sri Lanka signed the agreement with Eastern Echo DMCC, a subsidiary of Schlumberger, to carry out seismic data acquisition surveys, advance data processing and interpretation work or modelling of petroleum systems. "The main objective of entering into this agreement is to acquire more petroleum data using modern acquisition and processing techniques," Arjuna Ranatunga, Minister of Petroleum Resources Development told reporters after signing the agreement in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo. Ranatunga also said that the company would invest at least $50 million for several data acquisition projects, including 2D and 3D seismic, in selected offshore areas around Sri Lanka and would recover the investment from sales proceeds to multiple investors. This agreement follows comments on May 4 from the Director general at Petroleum Resources Development Secretariat (PRDS) Vajira Dassanayake, who said Sri Lanka would sign agreements with French oil company Total and Eastern Echo DMCC for a seismic study off its east coast. Sri Lanka first signed a deal with Total in 2016 to conduct a study off the eastern coast but this did not take place. Total had earlier signed a two-year agreement with PRDS to survey around 50,000 sq km off the east coast from the air, at a cost of $25 million to acquire data on unexplored areas. Dassanayake earlier in May said Total would invest $3 million to $10 million for the seismic study, while Eastern Echo DMCC would carry out the marine survey. Officials from Total and Schlumberger did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Sri Lanka produces no oil and is dependent on imports for all of its fuel requirements, despite trying to reinvigorate oil and gas exploration after its 25-year civil war with Tamil separatists ended nine years ago. Importing oil cost the island $3.2 billion in 2017. (Reporting by Ranga Sirilal; Editing by Shihar Aneez and Jane Merriman) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. (Corrects 9th paragraph to show that past actions taken by NAACP LDF, not by the NAACP, a separate organization) By Lisa Baertlein (Reuters) - Black leaders who are advising Starbucks Corp on its anti-bias training program, which begins Tuesday, hope it will reinvigorate decades-old efforts to ensure minorities get equal treatment in restaurants and stores, setting an example for other corporations. Starbucks committed to the training after a Philadelphia cafe manager's call to police resulted in the arrests of two black men who were waiting for a friend. (Corrects 9th paragraph to show that past actions taken by NAACP LDF, not by the NAACP, a separate organization) By Lisa Baertlein (Reuters) - Black leaders who are advising Starbucks Corp on its anti-bias training program, which begins Tuesday, hope it will reinvigorate decades-old efforts to ensure minorities get equal treatment in restaurants and stores, setting an example for other corporations. Starbucks committed to the training after a Philadelphia cafe manager's call to police resulted in the arrests of two black men who were waiting for a friend. The arrests sparked protests and accusations of racial profiling at the coffee chain known for its liberal stances on social issues such as same-sex marriage. Anti-bias training is intended to get participants to recognise their own unconscious biases and avoid unintentional discrimination. Starbucks is closing 8,000 company-owned U.S. stores at around 2 p.m. local time on Tuesday as a first step in training 175,000 employees on racial tolerance. Some 6,000 licensed Starbucks cafes will remain open in locations such as grocery stores and airports, and those employees will be trained at a later time. Starbucks' training could have a lasting impact on its employees' behaviour and pave the way for other companies to finally tackle racism in their own eateries and shops, said Heather McGhee, president of public policy group Demos. McGhee said one of her earliest memories as a black girl was being chased from a penny candy store by a white store manager. McGhee and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (NAACP LDF) President Sherrilyn Ifill, who are both advising Starbucks on its program, said they have been in regular contact with company executives, particularly Chief Operating Officer Rosalind Brewer, who also is African-American. "People forget that the effort to be treated as full citizens with dignity in public spaces in this country was central to the civil rights movement, from the Freedom Riders to the Montgomery bus boycott to the lunch counter sit ins" of the 1950s and 1960s, said Ifill. The NAACP LDF in the past sued Abercrombie & Fitch , Wet Seal and Denny's Corp for racial bias. Each of the companies reached multimillion-dollar settlements and vowed to change their practices. Starbucks in a preview of Tuesday's four-hour program said employees will watch videos featuring company leaders, hip hop artist Common and experts from the Perception Institute as well as a short documentary on the history of racism in public spaces. They also will participate in discussion and problem-solving sessions on identifying and avoiding bias. The company already has issued employee guidelines for addressing disruptive customer behaviour, including sleeping, using abusive language or taking drugs. The guidelines encourage workers to ask if they would take the considered action with any customer, to verify the perceived situation with a co-worker and to dial 911 if the situation becomes unsafe. Starbucks did not comment on future training plans. It has said it intends to eventually share its training program with other companies. Corporate America began to embrace anti-bias training after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Most anti-bias programs involve education on what unconscious bias is, why humans have it, its impact on social interactions and society and mitigation tools. "Most people want to think of themselves as being fair ... if you give them the tools to do that, their better angels take over," said Howard Ross, author of "Everyday Bias" and founding partner of Cook Ross, which offers training on unconscious bias and gave Starbucks input on its program. (Reporting by Aishwarya Venugopal in Bengaluru; editing by Patrick Graham) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. Chhattisgarh goes to the polls this December and, considering the RWL contract is up for renewal in October 2020, the Shivnath issue is bound to loom large once again. Raipur: Privatisation is a dirty word in large swathes of socialist India. So, it would take an extremely brave person or a madman to hand the management of a community asset like a river to a private company. But thats what the Digvijay Singh government in Madhya Pradesh did in 1998, when they contracted out a 23.6-kilometre stretch of the Shivnath River in Durg district to Radius Water Ltd (RWL) to build a barrage and supply water to a nearby industrial estate. Twenty years on, the controversy over the original decision refuses to die down. The new state of Chhattisgarh inherited the project and both successive governments, one led by Ajit Jogi of the Congress and the other by Raman Singh of the BJP, have stood firmly behind it. That, despite a scathing report by the state legislatures Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in 2007 that described the terms of the Radius water contract as a plunder of public assets and called for the arrest of the officials involved. The 345-kilometres Shivnath River is Mahanadis largest tributary. It originates in the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra and joins the Mahanadi River near the small town Shivrinarayan in Chhattisgarh. The Radius project arose from the Madhya Pradesh governments efforts to attract industry to the area. Factories in the proposed Borai industrial park needed water, but the government lacked the funds to build the requisite infrastructure. Under a Rs 9-crore project, MP Aydhyogik Kendra Vikas Nigam (MPAKVN) contracted RWL to build a barrage on the Shivnath River and supply up to 30 million litres per day (mld) to factories in Borai. RWL would operate the storage and distribution infrastructure for 22 years, after which the entire asset would be transferred to MPAKVN (now its successor, Chhattisgarh State Industrial Development Corporation or CSIDC) at no cost. RWL gained exclusive rights to supply water to the Borai industrial park and the CSIDC was obliged to provide the company land needed to build project-related infrastructure free of cost. CSIDC would purchase water from RWL and sell it to factories in Borai. Construction was completed in two years and operations began in January 2001. Borai then housed two medium-scale units and their combined water requirement was between 1.14 and 2.5 mld. But CSIDC, under the agreement, had to compulsorily buy 4 mld to make the project viable. It was the water-pricing formula, however, that did CSIDC in. Bad business ignored too long According to the latest report of Chhattisgarhs Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), between fiscal 2011 and 2015 CSIDC paid RWL between Rs.15.95 and Rs. 17.36 per kilolitre. In this 5-year period, CSIDC also paid the governments Water Resources Department between Rs.10.53 and Rs.25.17 per kilolitre, taking its cost of water to anything between Rs.26.71 and Rs.41.58 per kilolitre. But CSIDC supplied the water to its industrial clients at a steep discount, at rates ranging from Rs.18.12 to Rs.21.26 per kilolitre. Unsurprisingly, CSIDC incurred a cumulative loss of Rs. 30.6 crore over this period. As the PAC report of March 2007 observed, (This) is in the view of committee a conspiracy done with an ill motive to put the administration in a situation of non-profit. Its a conspiracy done with bad intention and (its) very rare to find such (an) example in (a) democratic system. But 11 years later, the PACs recommendations remain a dead letter. Says RWL director Kailash Soni, This is a very old story and has already expired long back as the project has nothing wrong (with it). Adds Tokhan Sahu, parliamentary secretary for irrigation in the Chhattisgarh government, Shivnaths privatisation is no more an issue. The required amount of water needed for farmers is supplied by us. The Opposition parties spread rumours and try to defame the BJP government. Speaking of the governments unwillingness to act, Ramchandra Singhdev, a former finance and irrigation minister and member of the PAC says, How to exploit the natural resources of state can be seen in BJP governance anywhere in Chhattisgarh. The government should explain that in the Shivnath matter, under whose pressure or what allurement has the file been kept closed for eight years? Farmers pumps, nets seized RWL has always maintained that, under the terms of the contract, people living on the banks of the river along this 23.6 kilometres stretch have no right to its water, whether for drinking or irrigation. If the villagers draw water for any reason, its the responsibility of CSIDC to compensate the company. The company has repeatedly seized electric pumps belonging to farmers. The company has also confiscated the nets of local fishermen on its stretch of the river. Mahmara village is most affected by RWLs operations. Sivakumar Nishad, former sarpanch of Mahmara village recalls how farmers and fishermen of the area had fought a long battle over water. "Earlier we used to mine sand from Shivnath river. It was a huge source of income for the panchayat, but due to Radius Water, the work was completely closed. Besides this, there was a graveyard there that was submerged. If someone dies in the rainy days, it is difficult to conduct a funeral. Radius Water opens the dam gates whenever they want, due to which danger always prevails. Says Gautam Bandopadhayay of Nadi Ghati Morcha, a river activist working in Chhattisgarh, Shivnath is not Chhattisgarhs but Indias first river to be privatised. Those dependent on the river have no law to protect their rights. The gates to privatisation has been opened. Next will be the Kelo river in Raigarh, Shabri in Dantewada and Maniyari in Bilaspur. Rivers like Indravati, Arpa, Kharun and Mahanadi are already supplying industry. We dont have an equitable water policy. Chhattisgarh goes to the polls this December and, considering the RWL contract is up for renewal in October 2020, the Shivnath issue is bound to loom large once again. (Vandana Agrawal is a Raipur-based freelance writer and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters) The Delhi's Patiala house court said no course of action can be taken against former finance minister P Chidambaram in the Aircel Maxis case until 5 June. A special court here on Wednesday granted interim protection to P Chidambaram from arrest till 5 June in the Aircel-Maxis deal case. Special Judge O P Saini announced the order and directed him to join the investigation on 5 June, the date when Enforcement Directorate (ED) has asked him to appear before it for questioning. The court has asked ED to file a response on Chidambaram's anticipatory bail plea and listed the matter for further hearing on 5 June. Earlier, the court granted interim protection to Karti Chidambaram from arrest till 10 July in the Aircel-Maxis deal case. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the ED are investigating how Karti Chidambaram allegedly managed to get a clearance from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) in the Aircel-Maxis deal when his father P. Chidambaram was the Finance Minister in 2006. Financial irregularities The ED is probing the financial irregularities committed as per the Prevention of Money Laundering Act in the case, which is also being investigated by the CBI. Both agencies are trying to find out how Karti allegedly managed to get a clearance from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) for the Aircel-Maxis deal. The ED in September last year had also attached Rs 1.16-crore assets of Karti in connection with the case. According to the CBI charge sheet submitted in the special court, Mauritius-based Global Communication Services Holdings Ltd, a subsidiary of Maxis, had sought approval for an investment of $800 million in Aircel. Though it was the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), headed by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which was competent to grant the approval, it was cleared by then Finance Minister P Chidambaram on his own and the amount for FIPB clearance was wrongly projected to conceal the facts. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy has alleged that Chidambaram had tweaked the FIPB norms for clearing the deal in 2006. Seeking a probe into the role of Chidambaram in alleged violation of the FIPB norms for approving the deal, Subramanian Swamy has referred to the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG)'s 2015 report, which points to two alleged illegalities. According to Swamy, the CAG cited the illegality of FIPB approving Maxis' acquisition of 93.3 per cent stake in Aircel Tele Ventures Ltd through its wholly-owned subsidiary, the GCSHL, well in excess of the then ceiling of 74 per cent investment by a foreign entity. The second illegality, Swamy has said, was that since the foreign investment in Aircel was more than Rs 600 crore, it should have gone to the CCEA for approval, but it was instead cleared by the FIPB. Karti is also an accused in the INX Media Case where he has been charged with receiving irregular FIPB clearance for investments up to Rs 305 crore. As India gears up for the monsoon season, state authorities have sprung into action to ensure any possible disaster or inconvenience during it is averted through timely preparedness. As India gears up for the monsoon season, state authorities have sprung into action to ensure any possible disaster or inconvenience during it is averted through timely preparedness. On Tuesday, Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis held a meeting with Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) officers and heads of other civic authorities to take stock of the monsoon preparedness in the flood-prone state. Referring to a large number of waterlogging incidents that were reported in Mumbai last year, the chief minister said, All these sensitive sites should be focussed and infrastructure should be in place. According to a report in The Indian Express, there is an anticipation of increased trouble this year due to the ongoing metro work and hence Fadnavis alerted all authorities to be better equipped to deal with the situation. There should be perfect coordination between MMRDA, BMC, railways, state government departments and all related institutions, he said. The BMC on its part said that 225 places, where waterlogging is expected, have been identified, of which, corrective measures have been undertaken at 120 places. Meanwhile, across the city and suburbs, 298 placed have been equipped with water-pumping to drain the monsoon water and almost 1,200 manholes have been provided with an extra net to avert accidents, the Express report said. BMC has also issued notices to 688 dilapidated buildings to vacate them. And to tackle emergency situations, 1,300 beds in hospitals are being kept reserved. Additional security personals are also being deployed along seashores and beaches at Girgaun, Dadar and Aksa and Gorai. While the Central Railway too has come forward to work closely with the India Meteorological Department (IMD), for setting up equipment along the railway tracks. All our officers from the headquarters to the station level, will be on the IMDs notification list so that everyone is abreast real time of the weather predictions, said Central Railway general manager, DK Sharma. For all agencies, ensuring tracks do not flood in heavy rains as is usually the case in the city remains a priority, he said. According to a Hindu report, Sharma also said that said two rounds of cleaning of drains and culverts have been completed and the third round would be done by the first week of June. He said 259 Maharashtra Security Force and 220 Railway Protection Force staff were part of the quick response teams, and the CR had identified 13 critical foot over bridges at key stations such as Dadar, Parel, Currey Road, Chinchpokli, Ghatkopar and Kurla. As per a Times of India report, Municipal Commissioner Ajoy Mehta told Fadnavis in the meeting that besides cleaning major nullahs, this year, the BMC is also focusing on micro-mitigation measures. We have marked the spots that had flooded on 29 August 2017 and fixed the problems that caused flooding". Whereas in Telangana, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation authorities has assured citizens that work is being done to make the city prepared heavy rains. "Identification and rectification of waterlogging points is underway. Nala widening work is also being taken up. Other wings of GHMC too are working on preparing for the monsoon," a Times of India report quoted Bharati Hollikeri, zonal commissioner (Khairatabad- GHMC) as saying. On the other hand, the Odisha government has asked all the 30 district officials to be prepared for possible flood and stock adequate food grains in remote areas which are more prone to it. As per a report in India Today, the instructions were given by Special Relief Commissioner & Commissioner-cum-Secretary (Disaster Management) BP Sethi in a review meeting on the preparedness for the possible floods during monsoons on Wednesday. The state already has 301 power boats with the State Port Engineering Organisation under the SRC which are currently being run through a test in different districts. As many as 108 vulnerable points have been identified in different rivers and saline embankments out of which three have been identified as critical vulnerable points, Sethi said. Also, executive engineers have been instructed to verify the status of sluices and make those operational by 1 June, the report said. BJP MLA from Bisauli constituency of Uttar Pradesh's Badaun district, Kushagra Sagar, was accused of raping the daughter of his maid when she was a minor Bharatiya Janata Party MLA from Bisauli constituency of Uttar Pradesh's Badaun district, Kushagra Sagar, was accused of raping the daughter of his maid when she was a minor, according to media reports. The survivor, who is now 22, filed a complaint with the Bareilly police station on Tuesday. #BREAKING - Daughter of domestic help alleges rape by BJP MLA Kushagra Sagar from Bisauli, Badaun. The victim has lodged a complaint and police is investigating the matter. pic.twitter.com/nieRMdZOGS News18 (@CNNnews18) May 30, 2018 "I will commit suicide if I don't get justice. I have been receiving threats as well and have become a subject of ridicule in society," the survivor said, according to DNA. The report added that she filed a complaint against Sagar when she got to know that he is going to get married on 17 June. The woman has also claimed that the accused's father and former MLA Yogendra Sagar had assured her that he would get his son married to her. However, she was later offered Rs 20 lakh for a compromise. The woman said that the MLA raped her several times on the pretext of marriage, and that she will not let his wedding take place. Senior Superintendent of police Kalanidhi Naithani said, "We have initiated an investigation in the matter and appropriate action will be taken very soon," The Times of India reported. Meanwhile, Sagar said the police complaint is a conspiracy against him and his political rivals who had ruined his fathers political career now wanted to make a dent in his reputation, the report said. "This woman has already approached the police in 2014 and came to a compromise taking Rs 10 lakh from me. I have a copy of the written compromise. Now, all of a sudden she again levelled false allegations against me before my wedding that is scheduled next month. I am ready to face these charges and even a narco test. Let the probe be completed. Everything will become clear," Sagar said. This comes days after the CBI booked BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who is already in jail for allegedly raping a teenage girl in Unnao last year, in a case of criminal conspiracy for allegedly 'falsely implicating the rape victim's father in an Arms Act case'. The father of the 18-year-old woman, who was allegedly rape by Sengar and his brothers, died in custody at Unnao in Uttar Pradesh. Sengar, the MLA from Bangermau in Unnao district, has also rejected the charge and alleged a conspiracy by his political opponents to tarnish his image. Upset over not securing high grades in Class 10 board exam conducted by CBSE, three students committed suicide in New Delhi on Tuesday, the police said Upset over not securing high grades in Class 10 board exam conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), three students ended their lives in the national capital on Monday, according to reports. A 17-year-old student allegedly committed suicide by hanging himself in Kakrola in New Delhi, the police said. The deceased, identified as Rohit Kumar Meena, was a student of MR Vivekananda Model School in Dwarka. He had secured 59 percent marks in the exam. No suicide note has been found, but it is suspected that he was upset after the results, they added. He was rushed to a hospital where he was declared dead on arrival. The police were informed around 3.45 pm about the incident. Another 15-year-old girl in Delhi hanged herself from a fan at her home on Tuesday, allegedly upset over her scores in the CBSE Class 10 exams declared in the afternoon, NDTV reported. The girl, a student of Ryan International School in Vasant Kunj in south Delhi, had scored 70 percent marks. She reportedly wanted to pursue the Science stream, but feared she would not be allowed to due to her grades. According to The Indian Express, a third student a 16-year-old girl from the School of Open Learning also ended her life on Tuesday by slashing her wrists and hanging herself from a ceiling fan in her house in Dabri. The girl could not clear the Science and Mathematics papers, the police said, according to the report. "The incident came to light in the evening after her parents informed the police. No suicide note has been recovered yet," a police official said. The CBSE declared the Class 10 board exam results on Monday. With inputs from PTI Senior Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala on Wednesday sent a letter to former president Pranab Mukherjee requesting him to refrain from attending a RSS function at Nagpur on 7 June. Thiruvananthapuram: Senior Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala on Wednesday sent a letter to former president Pranab Mukherjee requesting him to refrain from attending a RSS function at Nagpur on 7 June. Mukherjee, who has been a Congress veteran, has been invited to be the chief guest at the valedictory function of Sangh Shiksha Varg a training camp for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh volunteers at the RSS headquarters. The leader's request comes amid a raging debate over Mukherjee accepting the invite from the RSS to attend the event. In the letter, Chennithala, also a leader of the opposition in the state Assembly, said Mukherjee's decision to attend the function had come as a "rude shock" to secular minds of the country. He alleged that RSS has been trying to divide the country on religious lines and to run the incumbent government by remote control. "Being one of the tallest leaders of the great Indian National Congress, which has been responsible for preserving the secular fabric of this country, your decision has invited unparalleled disgruntlement among the rank and file of the Congress Party," the letter said. "As a person who has served as the first citizen of our country and the greatest ambassador of secularism, I request you to reconsider your decision to attend the RSS meet on 7 June,2018," it said. Describing RSS as a 'communal outfit', the Congress leader said its vision of creating "Hindu Rashtra" comprising only one section of the population is in sharp contrast with the Congress ideology of secularism and democracy. He alleged that the RSS had been using "unholy means" to rewrite the history of the great freedom movement and "demean" the contributions made by leaders of the Indian National Congress. "They have also weakened all democratic institutions in our country by instigating the venom of communalism," the leader charged. A day after Cyclone Mekunu brought heavy rains to Mangaluru and Udupi in Karnataka on Tuesday, the authorities are expecting the downpour to continue. A day after Cyclone Mekunu brought heavy rains to Mangaluru and Udupi in Karnataka on Tuesday, the authorities are expecting the downpour to continue. Quoting weather officials, NDTV reported that coastal Karnataka is likely to further receive more rainfall on Wednesday. According to Zee News, schools and colleges are likely to be shut in the affected areas. However, Karnataka's Revenue and Disaster Management Department on Wednesday morning said that the rains have reduced in Mangaluru. "Water-logging in the streets has receded significantly. Normalcy is being restored," it said on its official twitter account. Mangaluru and Bantwal taluks were among the worst-hit places on Tuesday, said the NDTV report. Boats had to be used to ferry stranded people, including school children. Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to officials and directed them to ensure all possible assistance in the affected areas. I pray for the safety and wellbeing of all those affected by heavy rains in various parts of Karnataka. Have spoken to officials and asked them to ensure all possible assistance in the affected areas. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) May 29, 2018 Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy took stock of the situation at Dakshina Kannada, a statement from his office said. It further added that Kumaraswamy has directed the deputy commissioner to take assistance from the coast guard and take all necessary precautionary measures "to prevent loss of lives and mitigate the damages". BJP MP from Dakshina Kannada Nalin Kumar Kateel visited the water-logged area to assess the situation. Nalin Kumar Kateel, BJP MP from Dakshina Kannada, visits the affected areas of #Mangalore following pre-monsoon rain in parts of the city #Karnataka pic.twitter.com/mgFldYkMQX ANI (@ANI) May 29, 2018 One flight each from Air India, SpiceJet and Air India Express were diverted from the Mangalore airport on Tuesday due to poor visibility, reported Times Now. However, the Air Traffic Control said that the condition would soon improve. National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said in a tweet that the deputy commissioners in Mangaluru Udupi, and Karwar were alerted on the situation. "Mangaluru battalion NDRF (National Disaster Response Force) team is deployed as a standby support to district administration," the NDMA said. The Home Minister's Office tweeted that Rajnath Singh has reviewed the situation and asked the home secretary to rush additional teams of NDRF teams to Mangaluru, if required. "MHA (Ministry of Home Affairs) is closely monitoring the situation in coastal Karnataka," it said. Southwest monsoon arrived in Kerala on Tuesday. Private weather forecasting agency Skymet Weather predicted that the southwest monsoon would hit Bengaluru in 48 hours from 29 May. On 26 May, the Indian Meteorological Department had issued a warning regarding Cyclone Mekunu for Maharashtra-Goa coast. With inputs from agencies Indian Meteorological Department in its warning issued for 30 and 31 May predicted heavy to very heavy rains over coastal Karnataka and heavy rains over south interior Karnataka Mangaluru/Udupi/Karwar: A scene of chaos enveloped coastal Karnataka as Cyclone Mekunu hit the region on Tuesday evening. Heavy rains accompanied by storm left many people stranded on flooded roads across parts of the state. Mangaluru city witnessed 200 millimetres of rainfall in 36 hours with most of the city's low-lying areas inundated with water levels running as high as one metre. An unprepared administration as well as the residents were jolted by flooding and thunderstorms across the city. The district administration of Dakshina Kannada beamed weather warnings over the last three days, but it failed to declare a holidays for schools. School children started off from their homes on Tuesday, but by mid-morning the heavens opened up and rains continued in several parts until late evening. Thousands of parents rushed to schools despite the city's transport system coming to a standstill, the resulting chaos made it worse for the traffic in the city. The neighbouring Udupi district, however, was quick enough to declare holidays for both Tuesday and Wednesday. While the Uttara Kannada district administration had warned fishermen not to venture in the sea, two fibre fishing boats from Tamil Nadu, Angel-1 and Angel-2, were carrying out fishing activity off Karwars Honnavar coast in the Arabian sea. One of them capsized 12 nautical miles away around 5.30 am on Tuesday. A total of six persons were occupying it. Two crew members, Pushparaj 44, and Arunaraj 25, who jumped into the sea are missing. Others were saved by fishermen on the boat FB Karmada, which was in the vicinity. They have been admitted to a hospital in Honnavar. The Indian Coast Guard has launched a search operation for the missing fishermen, sources said. IMD warns of rough weather until 3 June Indian Meteorological Department in its warning issued for 30 and 31 May predicted heavy to very heavy rains over coastal Karnataka and heavy rains over south interior Karnataka, Kerala, Lakshadweep, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and parts of northeast India. Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Bihar and sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim have been warned of thunderstorms accompanied with gusty winds in next 48 hours. IMD states that rains accompanied by gusty winds are expected to continue in these regions until 3 June. The South West Monsoon has arrived in Kerala three days ahead of schedule, bringing more rains on the Western Coast. At Kottara, traffic between Mangaluru-Mumbai was affected for about four hours on National Highway-66 on Tuesday. The intersection of NH-48 and NH-66 at Mahaveera Circle was cut-off due to flooding, and traffic to Kerala was also obstructed. Traffic police had made alternative arrangements for the movement of vehicles but even flood escape roads have been badly affected by the rainwater. Poor state of infra exposes city corporations' callousness Nayana Rao and her family who live in near the Kodialguthu ward of Mangaluru city had a harrowing time on Tuesday. Their house was flooded with drainage water that flows inside one of the main storm water drains. "This water entered our house and all our furniture, kitchen and other household articles were rendered useless. The family has shifted to a relative's house in a different locality," she said. UT Khader, Congress MLA from Mangaluru city Assembly constituency, attributed the flash floods in Mangaluru to the failure of Mangaluru city corporation. He said, "In many parts of the city, the storm water drains have been blocked due to faulty construction and encroachment. They have not been desilted during the summer." Khader said the city corporation is administered by Congress, "but this is beyond politics, as one person has died and much damage to property has happened." Civic activists complained that the Mangaluru City Corporation and the district administration were callous to let natural storm water drains collect silt and be blocked with municipal waste. In Kottara chowki, where NH-66 enters the city, the civic body has been unable to check the building of unauthorised buildings by unscrupulous builders. Activist Ajoy DSilva squarely blamed the city corporation for forgetting monsoon preparedness in the melee of the Assembly elections. Chief minister HD Kumaraswamy in an early morning teleconference with deputy commissioner of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi has assured relief to coastal areas on a war footing. He said in a press release issued on Wednesday that the National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) team has been rushed to Mangaluru and Udupi with equipment, and will arrive in Mangaluru by afternoon. Deputy Commissioner of Dakshina Kannada Sasikanth Senthil said on Wednesday morning that the NDRF team had started relief work in affected areas and the administration was assessing the losses caused due to rains. One Mumbai-Mangaluru Air India flight got diverted to Thiruvananthapuram in the afternoon. "All other flights took off and landed safely at the Mangaluru International Airport," said airport director Vasamsetti Venkateswara Rao. Several organisations have also engaged their volunteers into relief work. While the regional headquarter of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Sangha Niketan at Mannagudda, has been turned into temporary relief accommodation for affected people, the Popular Front of India is also distributing relief material in affected areas. With inputs from Deepak Kumar Shenvi Authors are Karnataka-based freelance writers and members of 101reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters After continuous protests starting in the month of February and 13 people losing their lives to police firing on 22 May in Thoothukudi, the Tamil Nadu government ordered the permanent closure of the Sterlite plant at Thoothukudi on Monday. It was not just another morning at Thoothukudi (also referred to as Tuticorin). The residents woke up to headlines which read: "TN State Government moves to shut Sterlite, victory for the people" But for 23-year-old Sermaraj and 18-year-old Raja Singh who've been at the Thoothukudi Government Hospital since 22 May, it was time for their first surgery. Three bullets had pierced Sermaraj's left thigh whereas Raja still had deep gashes from the two bullets that had ripped open his right ankle. Both were injured in the police firing which took place outside the Collector's Office on 22 May. The tensed faces of their parents reflected anything but 'victory for the people'. The Tamil Nadu government's move to shut down Vedanta Sterlite's Copper Smelter plant, in addition to celebrations, has raised several questions. The fear that many seem to share is what if 2013 repeats itself? The plant was ordered to be shut down by the Madras High Court for legal and environmental violations in 2010 following which the order was stayed by the Supreme Court. After a gas leak, the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board again ordered for its closure. Eventually, the Supreme Court set aside the 2010 high court's closure order in 2013, with a direction that Vedanta pays a fine of Rs 100 crores to make up for the harm it had caused the environment. After continuous protests starting in the month of February and 13 people losing their lives to police firing on 22 May, the Tamil Nadu government ordered the permanent closure of the Sterlite plant at Thoothukudi on Monday. Both the TNPCBS orders, dated 9 April and 26 May, one rejecting request for renewal of license and other with a direction to cut off electricity at the plant, as well as the Government Order from Tamil Nadu government are bound to be opposed legally by Vedanta. "All these hurried acts by the government make me think that they are doing this only to manage the situation. Everybody has refused to claim their kin's body unless Sterlite is shut. Despite of the actions of the police, people are resilient. O Panneerselvam then hands us a cheque in the morning and his government passes an order in the evening. It is hard for me to believe that this government is doing this out of concern for us, because if there was such concern, I wouldn't be lying here, with a bullet in my leg", says Raja, a 37-year-old auto driver from Muthammal Colony. Santhosh Raj, a resident from Pandrampati, who is in the same ward as Raja echoed his views. "I've no trust in the intentions of this government. Even though this government has passed this order, the central government is always ready to go against our interests. Sterlite CEO Ramnath is saying with so much confidence that they'll resume work soon, what does he mean by that then", Santosh said. "How is one to believe anything? Today they are saying this, I don't know what they'll say tomorrow. Will the government give us back our sister? Instead look what they've done, they've manipulated the FIR", says Sagayarani, sister of Jhansi. Jhansi was killed in the firing which took place at Threspuram. Sagayarani is referring to an FIR that was registered at the Thoothukudi North Police Station. The FIR said that at 3.30 pm, around 500 armed men and women entered the premises of the police quarters on Beach Road and started attacking those present. The complaint mentions that after warnings were issued on a loudspeaker by the DSP, a shooting order was issued by the sub inspector to a police officer. Following this, the police officer fired thrice leading to the death of Jhansi. On the contrary, eyewitnesses mention that police forces entered Theresepuram at 1.30 pm. After lathicharge, an altercation broke out at the junction between Beach Road and East Coast Road, when residents demanded that the police leave the area. Without any warning, the police started shooting at the residents. Jhansi, who was on her way to her daughter's place with the fish that her husband had brought from the sea, was hit by three bullets squarely on her head. The police immediately wrapped her body in a flex banner, put it in a van and drove away. Rosamma, Jhansi's sister was at the spot when it happened but since there were too many people blocking her view, she didn't recognise her sister. She ran back to her house only to be called back by those who had noticed that it was her sister Jhansi. A group of them then rushed to the mortuary where they were told that the only woman who was killed was an old woman and wasn't Jhansi. After an hour of argument, Rosamma and Sagayarani were shown the body of her sister. A slip which was given to them said, "Unknown, 40/F, Bd on 22.05.2018, 3 40 PM". On the contrary, the FIR alleged that the events started unfolding at the Police Quarters only at 3.30 pm whereas Jhansi was shot at almost 200 meters away, inside Therespuram, and much earlier. "This FIR will now ensure that I go to jail from this hospital ward. On one side, the Tamil Nadu government says it is closing Sterlite, on the other these false charges are being foisted on us. It doesn't look like our woes will end," laments Selvam who was also shot at inside Therespuram, at the same junction where Jhansi was killed. Many have been detained from Therespuram since. Naresh and Editson are among those who were arrested from Therespuram on 23 May. Their fears are the same as Selvam's. Both of them were taken to Thoothukudi South Police Station where they were severely beaten. Then they were taken to Vallanadu Shooting Range, instead of being produced in front of a magistrate, where they were subjected to more abuse. A complaint of illegal detentions by the Public Prosecutor before the Chief Judicial Magistrate Bagavathi Ammal led to her directing Vilathikulam Judicial Magistrate Kalimuthuvel to immediately visit Vallanadu Shooting Range and check if the complaint is true. When he reached the range, he found Naresh, Editson and 93 others were illegally detained there. The judge immediately directed the police to either remand them or release them. The police frantically registered the aforementioned FIR after this. "This kind of vindictive behaviour, for opposing a company which was killing people here, tells us whats the government stands for. Interests of corporate giants like Vedanta are protected whereas the people aren't. Governments have come and gone in Tamil Nadu but looks like they were waiting for bodies to role to do something about this. I still don't think we are done though, knowing how powerful Vedanta is. Vedanta has political allies here including the ruling party at the Centre", remarks Grace Bhanu, a transwoman activist and native of Thoothukudi. Selvam, on the other hand, though injured and facing charges believes that no political party from Tamil Nadu will let Sterlite resume work. "They know that people have given their lives for this, they won't dare do it. But I also hope the government recognises that all those they are trying to put in jail were fighting for their lives. They cannot torture us for this", said Selvam. Many have been quick to dub this a win but while that might be the case for now, the FIRs that are piling up indicate that the residents of Thoothukudi have a long haul ahead of them. Overhauling the government's image has been a key focus area of Modi. The micro-site turns on its head the concept of government websites in its basic parameters of presentation, information and engagement and shows how data can be used to tell and sell a story of success. MyGov.in, a micro-site that presents the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government's achievements over 48 months, is creating waves in online space. The reasons gives us a peek into Narendra Modi's style of functioning. Government websites are meant for informing the citizens and carrying out online services but these carried such an ill-repute of inefficiency and dullness that none except the dogged or desperate dared venture its corridors. Navigating the bad form, dreary content, outdated information, missing data or broken links tested the limits of patience. Overhauling the government's image has been a key focus area of Modi. The micro-site turns on its head the concept of government websites in its basic parameters of presentation, information and engagement and shows how data can be used to tell and sell a story of success. The UPA released its annual report cards through the Press Information Bureau, which was the online concept of handing those who wanted to know about the government, a sheaf of papers and then leaving them to their fate. It indicated the government's fatalism that no one would be interested in knowing its progress reports. Modi not only believes that he has a story to tell, he also seeks active engagement from citizens. He reckons they would be interested in knowing exactly what he has done and achieved over 48 months. The micro-site catches this fundamental difference in thinking by focusing on easy navigation (not too many boxes, links and sidebars), sleek interface and stunning info-graphics. Consequently, MyGov.in has less clutter, no dead links or irritating pop-ups. Users have the option of viewing info-tiles in English or Hindi via a drop-down menu that reflects attention to detail. The showstopper, however, is the Performance Dashboard that shows the impact of various Central schemes and initiatives through figures that seemingly update in real time. The prime minister's aim is to tell the citizens in a nutshell what he has done and achieved over a period of four years in the areas of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), Jan Dhan Yojana, Ujjwala Yojana, Atal Pension Yojana, Mudra Yojana, PM Awas Yojana, LED distribution scheme, length of road constructed (in km) under the Gram Sadak Yojana since fiscal 2013-14, etc, with one tile mentioning a 'zero' to denote the number of un-electrified villages. Apart from the visual effect which catches immediate attention, the Performance Dashboard in MyGov.in serves two purposes. One, it is Modi's way of letting the electorate know that he has not wasted his mandate and has used resources judiciously to effect structural reforms. Two, it reveals the prime minister's conviction that media will not convey to people the work that he has done, and therefore he must take it upon himself to share the story. The government's focus areas clearly defined on top in form of Accelerating Growth, Commitment to Social Justice, Development for All, Eliminating Corruption, Harnessing Yuva Shakti, Healthy India, Infrastructure for New India, Putting Farmers First, Speed and Scale of Transformation, The World Sees a New India, and Women Led Development. Clicking on these tabs open a page where blogs by Union ministers are displayed along with relevant infographics. For instance, while 'Eliminating Corruption' leads to 'Use of Technology to Boost Transparency', 'Greater Formalization for a Healthier Economy', etc., 'Putting Farmers First' opens to 'Fertilizer Units to Boost Production', etc. While these are hardly groundbreaking navigation tools, it is a welcome change to see the method being applied in a government website. Some of the minister who have contributed blogs include Maneka Gandhi, Radha Mohan Singh, Harsimrat Kaur Badal, DV Sadananda Gowda, Suresh Prabhu and others. This lends a personal touch and an informality which is further reinforced with video testimonials from beneficiaries of flagship government schemes. In one of the clips, for instance, Karthik Chandrashekar of AIC-Sangam Innovation Foundations talks about Atal Innovation Mission and how it is helping entreprenuers. The download centre has e-books, flyers, images, print ads, and clips that may be shared and downloaded. The focus remains on key achievements in 48 months. The site is pithy, sexy, colorful and takes an unconventional way to sharing statistics. It works on a concept that bombarding the user with too many data at starting point might make it confusing and counterproductive. The user might feel disinterested or overwhelmed. Here, the minimalistic yet sleek design attracts the casual as well as serious users. People who have a short attention span might still feel interested to browse the information since it is presented in an appealing way (and may feel encouraged to explore more) while researchers, journalists, policymakers and other interested citizens may feel relieved at the clutter-free presentation that allows them to dig deep and access data without wasting huge amount of time in navigation. The Special Investigation Team (SIT) investigating the Gauri Lankesh murder case has filed the first charge sheet in the case and is close to getting custody of the second accused. The Special Investigation Team (SIT) investigating the Gauri Lankesh murder case filed the first chargesheet and is close to getting custody of the second accused Praveen, according to several media reports. This development comes following the arrest of four people in connection with a plot to kill KS Bhagwan. According to ANI, the SIT mentioned 131 statements, including that of Forensic Science Laboratory officers and accused KT Naveen and Praveen, in the chargesheet. The four arrested last week for plotting to murder Bhagwan are linked to the radical right-wing outfit Sanathan Sanstha. According to The Indian Express, the accused have been identified as Amol Kale alias Bhaisab from Maharashtra; Amit Degwekar alias Pradeep from Goa; Manohar Edave of Vijayapura in Karnataka; and Sujeet Kumar alias Praveen from Mangalore. The four also are linked to KT Naveen Kumar, a Hindu Yuva Sena activist who was arrested in March in connection with the Gauri Lankesh murder case. Kumar was taken into custody by the SIT for questioning after he was booked by the Crime Branch on 19 February under the Arms Act for illegal possession of 15 bullets of a revolver. In a statement given to police, Naveen confessed to the crime and said he had an accomplice named Praveen. Police officials confirmed to The Hindu that Praveen, who was arrested in Bhagwan's case, is the same individual who allegedly helped Naveen. Quoting sources, The Hindu further reported that the investigating team will seek Praveen's custody on Wednesday. According to The Times of India, the SIT's preliminary chargesheet only mentioned Naveen's role in assisting the killers and did not mention any details about the killers. The SIT is expected to charge Praveen in a supplementary chargesheet after they take him into custody. We will be requesting the court to grant us custody of Praveen for further probe about his involvement in the crime in the coming days, SIT officer MN Anucheth was quoted as saying by Bangalore Mirror. Lankesh, who was the editor of the weekly Lankesh Patrike, was shot dead by unidentified men at her residence in Bengaluru on 5 September. Protests erupted across Karnataka to condemn her killing. The state government set up the SIT to probe the killing. The Karnataka government had announced a Rs 10 lakh reward to anyone providing clues/information that could lead to the capture of her killers. The police on Wednesday detained a woman when she allegedly tried to immolate herself near Chief Minister Vijay Rupani's residence in Gujarat's Rajkot district, an official said. Rajkot: The police on Wednesday detained a woman when she allegedly tried to immolate herself near the chief minister's residence in Gujarat's Rajkot district, an official said. Hetal Makawana, a native of Padadhari town in Rajkot, had a couple of days back threatened to set herself ablaze in front of Rupani's private residence here. She wanted to protest, what she claimed as, the "police inaction" to include the name of a local BJP leader and former MLA in an FIR in connection with an incident of her husband having been allegedly beaten up. Makawana's husband was injured in a clash some days back, a police official said. The woman alleged that he was beaten up at the behest of former Rajkot MLA Ramesh Rupapara, he said. She claimed that despite her repeated request, the police did not include Rupapara's name as an accused in the FIR and threatened to set herself on fire. A senior police official said they had stepped up the security at the chief minister's residence in advance and detained Makawana when she came to immolate herself on Thursday. Rupani's residence is located in the city's posh Prakash society near Nirmala convent school. As India and Indonesia agreed to have a 'shared vision' on maritime co-operation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday that the two countries will double their efforts to make their bilateral trade reach $50 billion by 2025. As India and Indonesia agreed to have a "shared vision" on maritime co-operation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday that the two countries will double their efforts to make their bilateral trade reach $50 billion by 2025. Issuing a joint statement with Indonesian president Widodo in Jakarta, Modi said, "This is my first trip to Indonesia. I would like to thank the Indonesian president for giving me and my delegation such a grand welcome." Following Wednesday's bilateral summit, a number of agreements including in the areas of maritime, defence, trade, and investment were signed between India and Indonesia. Speaking on the issue of terrorism, Modi said, "We are deeply saddened with the killing of innocent civilians in the recent terror attacks in Indonesia. India condemns such attacks and firmly stands with Indonesia during this difficult hour." He said that India and Indonesia face similar threats and should work together to fight terrorism. Modi stressed that his visit to the nation was aimed at strengthening the bilateral ties. "The two nations have geo-strategic location in the Indo-Pacific region. We have considered this during our bilateral talks," he said. Modi arrived in the Indonesian capital on Tuesday on the first leg of his three-nation (Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia) tour to East Asia. "For the development of Indo-Pacific region India and Indonesia have agreed to the same shared vision. India's Act East Policy and the vision of 'SAGAR' (security and growth for all in the region) matches President Jidodo's Maritime Fulcrum Policy," he said. He added that the two nations will double their efforts to take the bilateral trade to $50 billion by 2025. Modi praised the cultural bond between the two countries. "There has been a strong cultural bond between India and Indonesia for many years now. We can learn a lot of things from each other. India-ASEAN partnership is such an important power that can become a guarantee of peace not only in Indo-Pacific region but also beyond it," he said. Modi met Widodo on Wednesday at the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta to hold informal discussion before their delegation-level talks. Modi, who arrived in Jakarta on Tuesday night, was accorded a red carpet welcome on his arrival at the Merdeka Palace, one of the presidential palaces in Indonesia. Modi is also scheduled to interact with the Indian community at the Jakarta Convention Centre and take part in an India-Indonesia CEOs Forum. With inputs from agencies Major Leetul Gogoi had come in the eye of the storm last year during the elections on Srinagar parliamentary seat after had tied a Kashmiri youth, Farooq Ahmad Dar, to the bonnet of a vehicle and paraded him on the streets in Budgam. The Jammu and Kashmir Police on Wednesday told the court of Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) Srinagar that Major Leetul Gogoi faked as a Muslim youth and had also roped in another army soldier, Sameer Malla, to stay with a Kashmiri girl at a hotel in Srinagar. The police also said that Gogoi and Sameer, who is from Khag village of Budgam district, fought with the staff and raised commotion as they were denied the room. In a report which was submitted before the CJM in Srinagar in response to an application filed by human rights activist and chairman of International Forum for Justice and Human Rights (IFJHR), Mohammad Ahsan Untoo against the army Major that he indulged in an "immoral act", the police said that he faked as a youth, Ubaid Arman, on Facebook to become friends with the Kashmiri girl. Major Gogoi and Sameer had even shared their cell phone numbers with the girl and after they talked to her she waited for them at Magam in Kashmir before travelling in a private vehicle with them to the hotel. This correspondent has reviewed the report, which is in Urdu. The report was filed in response to the direction issued by the CJM on 27 May after Untoo filed his application alleging that the police had tried to hush up the case. The application was moved under section 156 (3) of Criminal Procedure Code (CRPC). The CJM kept the date of hearing of the case on 4 June. On 23 May, Gogoi was held with a girl at a Srinagar hotel along with Sameer and was detained at the Khanayar police station. The trio was let off after questioning within hours of the incident. Initial reports had it that the girl was a minor but several conflicting accounts about her age muddied the case. The police have stated before the magistrate that according to the girl's Aadhaar card, she is "above 18 years of age". The police have also disclosed in the report that girl was not knowing that Major Gogoi was faking his identity and came to know that he was an army man only a month back. "As per the already decided programme I moved at 10 am from Magam. I was knowing Gogoi on Facebook where I befriended him. First his name on Facebook was Ubaid Arman and later on, he told me that his name is Gogoi and he is posted in Beerwah. Earlier I was not knowing that he is an army man and later I came to know a month back that he is an army officer, the report said. The police have said that as per the Aadhaar card and school records the girl is above 18 years of age. As per the report, after the hotel staff didnt give them the room as she was a Kashmiri girl, they had a brawl with them following which the police was called up. As per the report, both Sameer and Gogoi were taken to the police station and after that, her statement was also recorded. The report has further noted that the police station Khanyar received the information of the brawl at the hotel. The police also said that Major Gogoi had already booked a room at the hotel through online mode and hotel administration didnt allow him to check in after finding that a Kashmiri girl was accompanying a non-state subject. "All the three were moving to the hotel parking area after which Sameer Malla entered into heated argument with the hotel manager and after a commotion local people also assembled in the hotel following which the administrative staff called up police and Gogoi told that he was working as army Major with 53 RR at Beerwah, while as Sameer Malla is also working with army," the report said. The army Major had come in the eye of the storm last year during the elections on Srinagar parliamentary seat after had tied a Kashmiri youth, Farooq Ahmad Dar, to the bonnet of a vehicle and paraded him on the streets in Budgam and the act drew widespread condemnation. He is already facing a police case for the illegal confinement of Farooq during his duty in the Beerwah area of Central Kashmirs Budgam district, while the personnel of 53 Rashtriya Rifles are also facing a murder case as they shot dead another youth Tanveer Ahmad Wani in October last year. The army has ordered a court of inquiry (CoI) against Major Gogoi after he was caught with the Kashmiri girl at the hotel. The CoI is looking into the lapses of the officer under section 63 of the Army Act 1950, which states that a person who is guilty of any act or omission which is prejudicial to good order and military discipline shall, on conviction by court-martial, be liable to suffer imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years. Earlier top army officials said that Major Gogoi, who had received the Chief of the Army Staff Commendation card last year, violated the army rules by moving out of his area of duty to meet a girl at a Srinagar hotel. Three persons have lost their lives in floods triggered by incessant rainfall in Karnataka's Mangaluru and Udupi. Mangaluru City Corporation launches 24x7 Monsoon Helpline Centre. Locals can contact officials on 0824-2220306 to register the complaints. Auto refresh feeds Heavy rains have caused flooding in low-lying areas of Mangaluru and Udupi in Karnataka. Trees and electric poles were uprooted by heavy winds in the region. Schools, colleges and shops have been shut, and fishermen have warned against going out to sea. The National Disaster Management Agency on Tuesday tweeted that all telecom and mobile service providers in coastal Karnataka have been told to maintain "optimum connectivity in Mangaluru and Udupi in light of heavy rainfall." The NDMA also said that quick response teams have been formed by mobile service providers to restore connectivity immediately in case of disruption. As South-West Monsoon arrived in Kerala on Tuesday, the disaster management department in Karnataka issued a warning saying monsoons are likely to advance to Karnataka coast within 48 hours. As heavy rain pounded Mangaluru, 375 kilometres from Bengaluru, and water started stagnating on the streets and entering buildings, some schoolchildren went home on orange inflatable boats escorted by disaster management volunteers in their bright yellow helmets. Shopkeepers downed their shutters amid the downpour. Many vehicles that tried to wade through the water got stuck; the drivers left them and walked on. Tropical cyclone Mekunu hit coastal parts of Karnataka on Tuesday, flooding Mangaluru and Udupi, reports said. Strong winds uprooted trees and blew light structures off their hinges in several towns and villages in coastal Karnataka. Earlier, the Met office had issued a warning regarding cyclone 'Mekunu' for Maharashtra-Goa coast. It had said that the cyclone will intensify into a cyclonic storm during next 24 hours and into a severe one in subsequent 24 hours. Four trains departed Mangaluru by delay of over four hours due to a landslide near the railway line in city. Kateel Durgaparameshwari temple at Kateel near Mangaluru has been fully engulfed by the swollen Nandini river due to the heavy rains. The temple which used to be busy right from the morning to late evening had only 10 percent visitors on Tuesday. This photo taken at 4 pm on Tuesday shows the river in its full capacity. Ten children were rescued from a school in Kudroli by the fire crew late Tuesday evening. Over 110 houses were flooded in various parts of Mangaluru, including Kottara, Urva, Brahmarakootlu, Ashoknagar and Bondel. Shops in the city central area were also flooded. Congresss MLA from Mangaluru UT Khader has attributed the flash floods to the failure of Mangaluru city corporation. He said, "In many parts of the city, the storm water drains have been blocked due to the faulty construction and encroachment. They have not been desilted during the summer. I know my own party Congress in is power in Mangalore City Council but this is much beyond politics. One person has died and so much damage has been done to the public property." The India Meteorological Department in its forecast for the next three days has sent out a warning for coastal Karnataka, interior Karnataka and Goa till 1 of June. State Disaster Response Force (SDRF), Civil Defence and other teams with sufficient rescue equipment rushed to Mangaluru to provide rescue services in the affected areas due to the torrential rains on Tuesday. Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy, in an early morning teleconference with the deputy commissioners of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi, has assured relief to the coastal areas on a war footing. He has said in a press release issued on Wednesday that the National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) team has been rushed to Mangaluru and Udupi with equipments. The team will arrive in Mangaluru by mid morning on Wednesday. The heavy rains in parts of Karnataka have claimed three lives so far, According to The Hindu , a schoolgirl was washed away in an overflowing drain near Padubidri, while fire personnel retrieved 60-year-old Mohini's body after floods buried her under the debris of a compound wall in Mangaluru. Sheela Nalke died after she was struck by lightning at her home at 3 am in Karkala taluk in Udupi district. Suniel Shetty said that it "breaks my heart to see my hometown going through this ordeal". " All my prayers for my city of love and for its people! Please please share these emergency numbers with as many as you can! The least one can do from such distance," he tweeted. Bollywood celebrities like Shilpa Shetty Kundra, Pooja Hegde, and Suniel Shetty took to Twitter over the news of floods in parts of Karnataka. "Just saw some visuals sent by my cousins who live in Mangalore..Hope the situation gets better. Please stay indoors," Shilpa Shetty said. The National Disaster Relief Force team which was rushed to assist in the rescue operations has reached Mangaluru, reported Bangalore Mirror . The deputy commissioner has directed the engineering staff of the Mangalore City Council to inspect all drains in the city. Regional Passport Ofiice, Bengaluru has allowed passport applicants who could not attend at Passport Seva Kendra in Mangaluru on Tuesday to walk-in anytime. "Applicants at POPSK (Post Office Passport Seva Kendra) Udupi can reschedule their appointments as per their convenience. Such applicants would be attended to on priority," it said on Twitter. According to the revenue and disaster management department, the south west monsoon is likely to set into coastal Karnataka on Wednesday. The Kanara region of Karnataka comprises three coastal districts, namely Dakshina Kannada and Udupi district and Uttara Kannada. Moderate to heavy widespread rainfall is expected in the coastal and Malenadu region. Heavy rain is also expected in isolated places. According to IMD, Delhi and surrounding areas are likely to get respite from heat waves like conditions from Wednesday. However, an official said that monsoon rains are unlikely to arrive in Delhi before 20 June. According to authorities, Panambur in Mangalore has received a massive 334 mm till 8:30 am on Wednesday breaking it's all time record of 330.8 mm recorded in June 1982. The revenue and disaster department of Karnataka said that due to poor network connectivity of BSNL in Udupi district, rescue and relief work was disrupted. Officials, however, said that the connectivity issue will be resolved at the earliest. Record rainfall in the range of 340 mm received in parts of Mangaluru and Udupi district, normal rainfall in the month of May for Mangaluru is 168.6 mm. Kodagu district has received 51.5mm rainfall in the last 24 hours. District administration has initiated a 24X7 helpline (08272-221077) to provide assistance to people affected by rain. Tourists in Kodagu are missing the famous musical fountain at Raja Seat, which was damaged by lightning five days ago, and requires another week for repair, officials said. The National Disaster Relief Force team which was rushed to assist in the rescue operations has reached Mangaluru, reported Bangalore Mirror . The deputy commissioner has directed the engineering staff of the Mangalore City Council to inspect all drains in the city. Passport applicants who could not attend at PSK Mangaluru yesterday due to heavy rains can walk-in anytime. Similarly, applicants at POPSK Udupi can reschedule their appointments as per their convenience. Such applicants would be attended to on priority. @CPVIndia @SushmaSwaraj Regional Passport Ofiice, Bengaluru has allowed passport applicants who could not attend at Passport Seva Kendra in Mangaluru on Tuesday to walk-in anytime. "Applicants at POPSK (Post Office Passport Seva Kendra) Udupi can reschedule their appointments as per their convenience. Such applicants would be attended to on priority," it said on Twitter. Rainfall #alert . South West Monsoon likely to set into Coastal Karnataka today. Moderate to heavy widespread rainfall expected in Coastal and Malnad region and heavy rain expected in isolated places. @KarnatakaVarthe @KarFireDept @PIBBengaluru pic.twitter.com/9gq0UZrf36 According to the revenue and disaster management department, the south west monsoon is likely to set into coastal Karnataka on Wednesday. The Kanara region of Karnataka comprises three coastal districts, namely Dakshina Kannada and Udupi district and Uttara Kannada. Moderate to heavy widespread rainfall is expected in the coastal and Malenadu region. Heavy rain is also expected in isolated places. According to IMD, Delhi and surrounding areas are likely to get respite from heat waves like conditions from Wednesday. However, an official said that monsoon rains are unlikely to arrive in Delhi before 20 June. Panambur in Mangalore has received a massive 334 mm till 8:30 am today breaking it's all time record of 330.8 mm recorded in June 1982! #MangaluruRains #Monsoon2018 According to authorities, Panambur in Mangalore has received a massive 334 mm till 8:30 am on Wednesday breaking it's all time record of 330.8 mm recorded in June 1982. The revenue and disaster department of Karnataka said that due to poor network connectivity of BSNL in Udupi district, rescue and relief work was disrupted. Officials, however, said that the connectivity issue will be resolved at the earliest. Record rainfall in the range of 340 mm received in parts of Mangaluru and Udupi district, normal rainfall in the month of May for Mangaluru is 168.6 mm pic.twitter.com/RFQ9ONqBHI Record rainfall in the range of 340 mm received in parts of Mangaluru and Udupi district, normal rainfall in the month of May for Mangaluru is 168.6 mm. Kodagu district has received 51.5mm rainfall in the last 24 hours. District administration has initiated a 24X7 helpline (08272-221077) to provide assistance to people affected by rain. Tourists in Kodagu are missing the famous musical fountain at Raja Seat, which was damaged by lightning five days ago, and requires another week for repair, officials said. Aftermath of heavy rain that had hit the low-lying areas in the coastal districts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi. Visuals from #Mangalore pic.twitter.com/wfMlmXadH0 Karnataka rains LIVE updates: Three persons have lost their lives in floods triggered by incessant rainfall in Karnataka's Mangaluru and Udupi. The deceased include a school girl who was washed away in overflowing drain near Padubidri in Udupi. Rescue officials say that they have recovered a body of a lady (60) from the debris of compound wall in Mangaluru. One more woman lost her life after she was struck by lightning at her home in the wee hours on Wednesday in Karkala taluka of Udupi. Mangaluru City Corporation launches 24x7 Monsoon Helpline Centre. Locals can contact officials on 0824-2220306 to register the complaints. South west monsoon is likely to set into coastal Karnataka on Wednesday. Congresss MLA from Mangaluru UT Khader has attributed the flash floods to the failure of Mangaluru city corporation. He said, "In many parts of the city, the storm water drains have been blocked due to the faulty construction and encroachment." Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy, in an early morning teleconference with the deputy commissioners of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi, has assured relief to the coastal areas on a war footing. He has said in a press release issued on Wednesday that the National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) team has been rushed to Mangaluru and Udupi with equipments. The India Meteorological Department in its forecast for the next three days has sent out a warning for coastal Karnataka, interior Karnataka and Goa till 1 of June. Tropical cyclone Mekunu hit coastal parts of Karnataka on Tuesday, flooding Mangaluru and Udupi, reports said. Strong winds uprooted trees and blew light structures off their hinges in several towns and villages in coastal Karnataka. Earlier, the Met office had issued a warning regarding cyclone 'Mekunu' for Maharashtra-Goa coast. It had said that the cyclone will intensify into a cyclonic storm during next 24 hours and into a severe one in subsequent 24 hours. Amid heavy downpour in parts of Karnataka, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to officials and directed them to ensure all possible assistance in the affected areas. The heavy rain in coastal Karnataka was due to well-marked low pressure over the south-east Arabian Sea, off the coast of Karnataka and north Kerala, and also due to the onset of monsoon in Kerala, the weather office has said. Heavy downpour lashed the coastal districts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi for the third day today, inundating low-lying areas and flooding roads, disrupting traffic and throwing life out of gear. "I pray for the safety and wellbeing of all those affected by heavy rains in various parts of Karnataka. Have spoken to officials and asked them to ensure all possible assistance in the affected areas," Modi said in a tweet. The Home Ministry said it has reviewed the situation in Mangaluru and is rushing additional teams of National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) to assist the local administration in handling rescue and relief operations. The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) result for the Maharashtra Board HSC Class 12th will be released at 1 pm Auto refresh feeds The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) will declare the Maharashtra Class 12th Result 2018 today (30 May) at 1 pm, confirmed board officials Official website to declare result at 1 pm Step 5 : Download it, and take a print out for further reference. Step 4 : Results will appear on the screen Step 3 : In the new tab, enter the registration number, roll number Students should follow these steps to check scores: Official MSBSHSE website mahresult.nic.in says results to be declared at 1 pm More than 14 lakh students sat for the MSBSHSE HSC exam. The Maharashtra Class 12 exams were conducted at 9,486 colleges and 2,822 centers Over 14 lakh students appeared for this year's MSBSHSE HSC exam Students can also request their Maharashtra HSC result through SMS. To receive results via SMS, type MHHSCSEAT NO and send it to 57766. How to check results through SMS After the result declaration, the revaluation process will begin from tomorrow (31 May) for those who are unsatisfied with their marks. In case a student does not manage to pass, he/she can appear for re-exams which will be held in the month of July. The Maharashtra HSC result 2018 has been declared at the press conference in the state board headquarters in Pune addressed by the State Board chairman Shakuntala Kale Of the total students registered, 5,80,820 students were for Science, 4,79,863 students for Arts, 3,66,756 students for Commerce, and the 57,693 students for the vocational stream Most registered candidates registered in MSBSHSE are from Science stream The pass percentage this year is 88.41 percent, Hindustan Times reported. Of the 14,16,986 students who appeared for the exam, 12,52,817 students passed. Konkan division secured the first position with a pass percentage of 94.85 percent, followed by Pune (89.58 percent), Aurangabad (88.74 percent), and Amravati (88.08 percent). Nashik has the lowest pass percentage of 86.13 percent. Once again with 92.36 percent, girls have outperformed boys whose pass percentage stands at 85.23 percent. The Board conducted the exams at 9 divisions: Konkan, Mumbai, Pune, Aurangabad, Nagpur, Amaravati, Kolhapur, Latur and Nashik. A total of 5,486 candidates have score above 90 percent in Maharashtra, The Indian Express reported. Over 17.51 lakh students had appeared for the SSC examinations. Official website now confirms that results have been declared Results are live on multiple websites | check your results at result.mkcl.org The official website mahresult.nic.in was temporarily down due to heavy traffic, but it is now back up Gawade Amol Dilip has secured the top position in the Maharashtra HSC exam by scoring 642 out of 650 marks, The Indian Express reported. The second position was secured by Amit Kisan, who scored 639 out of 650. The original mark sheets of the Maharashtra Class 12 board students will be distributed on June 12 at 3 pm, India Today reported. All candidates are advised by the board to go their respective schools to collect the marksheets. Original marksheets to be distributed on 12 June Overall performance of candidates in Maharashtra HSC result 2018 Candidates may apply for re-evaluation for one or more papers within five days of receiving photocopy of the paper. A recommendation letter of the school or college is compulsory for the application. For each paper, Rs400 for photocopy and Rs 300 for revaluation is the amount to be paid. The board claims that revaluation result will be declared within 15 days of application. How to apply for revaluation in Maharashtra HSC 12th results 2018 The exams were conducted among the 9 divisions of Konkan, Mumbai, Nagpur, Pune, Aurangabad, Amaravati, Nashik, Kolhapur and Latur. The original mark sheets of the Maharashtra Class 12 board students will be distributed on June 12 at 3 pm, India Today reported. All candidates are advised by the board to go their respective schools to collect the marksheets. Original marksheets to be distributed on 12 June When compared to last year, the pass percentage dipped this year by 1.09 percent Overall performance of candidates in Maharashtra HSC result 2018 The third rank was shared by three students Chavan Dhanashri Eknath, Sahu Ritika Ramnaresh, Aditya Surendrakumar. They scored 637 out of 650 each, according to reports. The only way to guarantee success in your life is to give everything your best shot. Congratulations to all the students who have passed HSC exam; your hard work and efforts have paid off. Good luck to all of you for your future and for your next ambitions. #HSCResult #HSC pic.twitter.com/j0X3BS2pK5 "Congratulations to all the students who have passed HSC exam; your hard work and efforts have paid off. Good luck to all of you for your future and for your next ambitions," he said. Results can be checked, once declared, on any of the following websites: Students can also request their Maharashtra HSC result through SMS. To receive results via SMS, type MHHSCSEAT NO and send it to 57766. How to check results through SMS Candidates may apply for re-evaluation for one or more papers within five days of receiving photocopy of the paper. A recommendation letter of the school or college is compulsory for the application. For each paper, Rs400 for photocopy and Rs 300 for revaluation is the amount to be paid. The board claims that revaluation result will be declared within 15 days of application. How to apply for revaluation in Maharashtra HSC 12th results 2018 The exams were conducted among the 9 divisions of Konkan, Mumbai, Nagpur, Pune, Aurangabad, Amaravati, Nashik, Kolhapur and Latur. MSBSHSE LIVE updates: Gawade Amol Dilip has secured the top position in the Maharashtra HSC exam by scoring 642 out of 650 marks. The second position was secured by Amit Kisan, who scored 639 out of 650. The Maharashtra HSC result 2018 has been declared at the press conference in the state board headquarters in Pune addressed by the State Board chairman Shakuntala Kale. Total percentage for Maharashtra Result 2018 is 88.41 percent. The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) result for the Maharashtra Board HSC Class 12th will be released today (30 May) at 1 pm. The MSBSHSE will put up the Maharashtra HSC Class 12 result on its official website mahresult.nic.in. The result will also be made available on result.mkcl.org, examresults.net, and results.gov.in The examination was conducted between 21 February and 20 March through nine divisional boards, that are primarily located at Mumbai, Pune, Nasik, Aurangabad, Kolhapur, Latur, Nagpur, Amravati and Ratnagiri. Around 14,85,132 students registered to appear for the exams conducted in 9,486 junior colleges and 2,822 centres across the state of Maharashtra, The Times of India reported. Of the total students registered, 5,80,820 students were for Science, 4,79,863 students for Arts, 3,66,756 students for Commerce, and the 57,693 students for the vocational stream, according to The Free Press Journal. In 2017 also, the Maharashtra Board had declared the result for Class 12th exam on 30 May. Steps to check HSC 2018 exam results: - Visit the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE)'s official website mahresult.nic.in - Click on the link which says Maharashtra Board Class 12th Results OR Maharashtra HSC Result 2018 - Enter your roll number and other required details - Download the MSBSHSE Maharashtra HSC Class 12th Results 2018 and take a print out for future reference - Students can also request their Maharashtra Board Result 2018, Maharashtra HSC Result 2018 through SMS. To receive results via SMS, type MHHSCSEAT NO and send it to 57766. A major fire broke out in a rubber factory in New Delhi after a truck caught fire in Malviya Nagar. About 30 fire tenders were sent to douse the blaze. A major fire broke out in a rubber factory in New Delhi on Tuesday after a truck caught fire in the city's Malviya Nagar. About 80 fire tenders have been sent to douse the blaze that was finally put off with the Indian Air Force's help. An ANI video showed Indian Air Force's MI 17 helicopter which was deployed for Bambi bucket operations. A Bambi Bucket is essentially a perfect collapsible bucket utilising a pilot control valve that can deliver a concentrated column of water from the helicopter to the fire. The development of Bambi bucket has been a breakthrough development after feedback from helicopter operators and Forest and Land Management agencies. #WATCH Delhi: Fire which broke out at a godown in Malviya Nagar yesterday has still not been doused, Air Force's MI 17 helicopter deployed for Bambi bucket operations pic.twitter.com/s8m1dXPjim ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 No casualties have been reported in the blaze so far. A fire official told IANS that a call to report the fire was received at 4.57 pm and nearly 30 tenders were initially rushed to the spot. "There have been no reports of any casualties far," he said, adding that the reason for the fire was yet to be ascertained. Atul Garg, chief fire officer of the Delhi fire services, fell unconscious during the firefighting operations, Hindustan Times reported. "This fire was of the highest magnitude so far in this season. The fire started from a truck and spread to a godown of rubber and plastic raw material where the vehicle was parked. The godown is right behind Sant Nirankari Public School and had it occurred in the afternoon, evacuation of children would have been challenging as the area is congested," Garg said. The fire also engulfed parts of a school building and a gymnasium, fire officials said, adding that plastic and raw materials stored at the factory fuelled the blaze. Aam Aadmi Party legislator Somnath Bharti also visited the spot, the report added. Buildings around the godown have been evacuated and the area was cordoned off, NDTV reported. Reaching the spot was difficult for the fire engines as the lanes in the area are very narrow and congested, officials reportedly said. One fire fighter has been injured during the operation. A thick plume of smoke billowing out of the rubber godown could be easily seen from kilometres away in southeast Delhi, reports said. Militants fired from an underbarrel grenade launcher at the residence of NC leader Mohammad Ashraf Bhat in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district. Militants on Tuesday fired from an under barrel grenade launcher at the residence of National Conference leader Mohammad Ashraf Bhat in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district, said news reports. According to ANI, no casualties or injuries were reported so far. On Friday, militants had hurled a grenade towards an Army camp in Kulgam district. No casualties were reported in that incident. The grenade attack targeted the 34 Rashtriya Rifles camp at Nehama in Kulgam district of south Kashmir, a police official had said. On 23 May, ten civilians, including a 12-year-old boy, were injured in a grenade attack carried out by militants in Anantnag district. The militants had hurled the bomb at a security forces patrol party at Goriwan Chowk in the Bijbehara area of south Kashmir. The resulting explosion caused injuries to the civilians, including the boy and a few women. With inputs from PTI Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday addressed the Indian diaspora in Jakarta while on his first-ever official visit to India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday addressed the Indian diaspora in Jakarta on his first official visit. "I felt massive respect for India in Indonesia," said the prime minister as he stressed on strong India-Indonesia ties and highlighted his government's achievements. "I am very proud of the fact that you (the Indian diaspora in Indonesia) have been contributing a lot to Indonesia's development," Modi said. "This is the changed India. People from across the world look at you with pride," he added. "Today, India is one of the most important open economies in the world. The country's foreign exchange reserves increased from $300 billion to $400. In terms of FDI confidence index, India is one of the top two emerging markets. In ease of doing business, India's ranking has increased to rank 100 from 142," Modi said. "In the past 14 years, for the first time, Moody's improved India's credit rating. It was Moody's, not Modi," said the prime minister. "India is the world's largest democracy. And the roots of democracy are deep in Indonesia too. This is the reason why people gave such an ordinary person like me an opportunity to become prime minister. Similarly, people in Indonesia chose Widodo," he said. "If India has a closest neighbour, it is Indonesia," he added. "India and Indonesia have decided to take their strategic ties to a new level. Security-related discussions are increasing between our two nations," he said. Modi also said that his government had been trying to utilise the potential of the huge population in India below 35 years of age. "For our government, corruption-free, citizen-friendly and development-friendly ecosystem is the biggest priority," he said. The prime minister then highlighted his government's achievements during the past four years and also took digs at the previous UPA government. "In India, we have got rid of 1,400 old and archaic laws," he said. "We are focusing on ease of living. We are developing a system in India which is transparent and sensitive. The pace of converting railway lines into broad guages has doubled." "Power transmission lines are being installed at twice the pace at which it was being done earlier. We have put optical fibre in 1,10,000 gram panchayats, as opposed to 59 gram panchayats covered by the past government in 4 years," he said. "New engineering, management and medical colleges are opening up in large numbers. In the last two and a half years, the world's largest start-up ecosystem has been created in India," Modi said. "In the past 4 years, whenever Indians were in trouble because of events abroad, we rescued over 90,000 Indians and brought them back to our country," he said. "The law is the same. The babus are the same. The office is the same. Everything is the same. But it is the government which has changed. And thus, the country is changing," the prime minister added. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday embarked on his five-day, three-nation visit to Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia through which he aims to boost the Act East Policy and strengthen ties with the ASEAN countries. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday embarked on his five-day, three-nation visit to Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia through which he aims to boost the Act East Policy and strengthen ties with the ASEAN countries. Modi is first visiting Indonesia where he will be holding detailed discussions with the Indonesian President Joko Widodo in Jakarta on maritime security, Chinese interference and trade policies on Tuesday. He will then address an Indian gathering in Jakarta at an event scheduled for 4.00 pm local time, as per a Times of India report. "This is my first visit to Indonesia as Prime Minister. I am looking forward to my discussions with President Widodo on 30 May, as also to our joint interaction with the India-Indonesia CEOs Forum. I will also address the Indian community in Indonesia," Modi wrote on Facebook on the eve of his visit. Landed in Jakarta. India and Indonesia are friendly maritime neighbours with deep civilisational links. This visit will further the convergence of our political, economic and strategic interests. pic.twitter.com/5e0rSScAkh Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) May 29, 2018 A report in The Times of India states that the two leaders would attend a CEO business forum organised by the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and the Industry and the Confederation of Indian Industry. Further, Modi will do joint inauguration of a kite exhibition and indulge in a kite flying session at National Monument Monas in the morning following which an official banquet has been planned in the evening by president Widodo. Earlier on Wednesday, Modi paid homage to martyrs of Indonesian independence struggle by laying a wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes' Cemetery in Jakarta. Kalibata Heroes' Cemetery in South Jakarta is a military cemetery in Indonesia. More than 7,000 people who are military casualties and veterans from Indonesian War of Independence are buried at the cemetery which was built in 1953 and opened in November 1954 when the first burial took place. Paid tributes at the iconic Kalibata Heroes Cemetery in Jakarta. pic.twitter.com/TWn3SlcvzH Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) May 30, 2018 According to news reports, Indonesian president Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, wants to promote a plan called the Global Maritime Fulcrum, which includes a commitment to Indo-Pacific sea lanes in order to balance Chinas ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and thus, him hosting the Indian prime minister is crucial to this strategy. Therefore, foreign relations experts believe that a key highlight of the visit could be an agreement that allows India access to the strategic island of Sabang at the northern tip of Sumatra and close to the Malacca Strait. This was also indicated by Indonesias coordinating minister for maritime affairs Luhut Pandjaitan in his recent address in New Delhi. Modi, however, is scheduled to further visit Singapore after a brief stopover in Malaysia where he will congratulate the newly elected Malaysian president, Mahathir Mohamad. With inputs from PTI Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman Wednesday reviewed the security situation at forward posts of the Assam Rifles, along the India-Myanmar border, in Mon district of Nagaland. Kohima: Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman Wednesday reviewed the security situation at forward posts of the Assam Rifles, along the India-Myanmar border, in Mon district of Nagaland. Sitharaman, who arrived in Nagaland on Tuesday on a two-day visit, also interacted with the commanders operating on the ground, a release issued by the PRO, defence said. Accompanied by Lieutenant General Gopal R, the general officer commanding of the army's Spear Corps, she assessed the border management operations at the forward posts, it said. The Spear Corps is headquartered in Rangapahar, Dimapur. The commanders briefed her about the prevalent conditions under which the army units function along the International Border, the release said. The minister, after a comprehensive assessment of the forward posts, expressed "immense satisfaction" over the "high standards of professionalism and dedication" displayed by the units, it said. Sitharaman also met state government functionaries, representatives of other security agencies and local community leaders during her visit to the district, it said. She thanked them for their cooperation in maintaining security in the area, it added. On Tuesday, the defence minister had visited the Spear Corps Zone in Dimapur, where officers briefed her about the counter-terrorist operations. Defence sources said Sitharaman was unable to visit other international border areas in Nagaland owing to inclement weather conditions. R Rajaraman, emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the School of Physical Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and co-chairman of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) has just returned from South Korea. Rajaraman had been invited in capacity as IPFM co-chairman to participate in the attempts being made by United States and South Korea to 'denuclearise' North Korea. R Rajaraman, emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the School of Physical Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and co-chairman of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) has just returned from South Korea. Rajaraman had been invited in capacity as IPFM co-chairman to participate in the attempts being made by United States and South Korea to 'denuclearise' North Korea. Edited excerpts from an exclusive interview follow: Earlier, President Donald Trump had been talking about destroying North Korea. President Kim Jong-un retaliated by calling him a mad dog. Now, both sides are willing to talk. How has this change come? Rajaraman: For a long time during his election campaign, Trump declared he would not talk to Kim until he threw away his weapons. He maintained this position right into his presidency. Kim said equally harsh things about the US president. These exchanges continued for some time. Meanwhile, in mid-2017, Kim exploded what seems to be a thermonuclear or at least a boosted fission weapon. It was estimated to be a 120 kiloton bomb. Earlier, Kim had been exploding bombs of a 20-30-40 ton capacity similar in many ways to what we did in 1998. He had also been improving on his missiles, building them to have a longer and longer range till he had a missile that could cover a 7000 to 8000-kilometre stretch right up to Los Angeles. Of course, to demonstrate the range of his new missiles, he did not fire them across the Pacific towards the United States. That could have started a nuclear war! To show to the world how much distance the missiles could cover, Kim fired vertically: Into the atmosphere. The height to which it went was verified by US missile experts, and from that height they calculated that if the missiles were fired horizontally, they could reach the US mainland. So now, Kim had in his hands, both a missile and bomb. What he does not seem to have (so far) is the ability to attach the bomb to the missile but it is believed that he can develop that in a few months. The US cannot afford to have even a single nuclear armed missile system attacking their mainland. Thus, what Kim has shown is that he has credible minimum deterrence. You cannot get more minimum than this. How did North Korea succeed in making the hydrogen bomb: Something which we have not succeeded in doing. And how much time did it take for him to make it? Rajaraman: Over the years, North Korea seems to have put together an excellent team of weapon and missile scientists. In the initial stages, they received help from the Russians and must also have got some assistance from the Chinese. Kim is also known to have received weapon designs from Pakistan in exchange for missile designs but that happened a dozen years ago. Kim has built himself into a position of strength? Rajaraman: Yes, it was only after he exploded the thermonuclear device that he was ready to start negotiations with the US. It was following this that the bluster from the US towards him was replaced by a willingness to talk. An important player in all this is South Korea, which has also been trying to have a rapprochement with North Korea. They held their olympics in which North Korean athletes took part. They even had a joint team at one of the events! South Korean president Moon Jae-in held two meetings with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) chairman Kim. He is preparing the ground for the possible meeting between Trump and Kim. But now Kim is talking in terms of denuclearising his weapons? Rajaraman: This is a matter of language. Denuclearise can conveniently mean different things. This word is obviously going to be interpreted differently by different people. But the presence of these weapons has forced the US to back off. These weapons have been built by North Korea with enormous difficulty. So it is unlikely that Kim will throw away his entire arsenal. Also, the nation has suffered from sanction after sanction. When did the sanctions start? Rajaraman: The sanctions started in 2003, when North Korea withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As they began to do weapon testing, the European Union, US and United Nations imposed stronger sanctions blocking imports and exports. The Chinese helped North Korea withstand the effect of sanctions but the fact is that Kim has managed to survive. People who have visited Pyongyang report that it is not all gloom and doom. Kim has stabilised the price of essential commodities and that has made a difference. How does South Korea perceive North Korea? Rajaraman: South Korea is facing a nuclear and conventional threat right across the border. Seoul realises that North Korea can march into their country at any time. But at the same time there is an emotional coupling between the countries. Last month, I went to Seoul to attend a joint meeting of two bodies that I belong to: The Asia Pacific Leadership Network and the International Panel on Fissile Materials. Two of the colleagues participating hold important positions in the nuclear and strategic bodies of South Korea, who during our meetings would periodically disappear (presumably summoned by the government for consultations). We had other colleagues in our group from Russia and China who had recently visited North Korea. From these colleagues, I got a fair idea of the mood in both South and North Korea. President Moon has North Korean roots and his efforts to improve relations with North Korea has seen him drawing flak from South Korean hawks. He should be applauded for working hard to bring peace to the region. The North Koreans do not want a Muammar Gaddafi-like repeat... Rajaraman: You are 100 percent correct! Libya is a dirty word in North Korea. Libya surrendered its nuclear programme and some years later, Gadaffi was dead. Countries like DPRK and Pakistan realise that nuclear weapons provide them with a minimum deterrence. For them, the American forces are a threat. Of course, at the same time they (North Koreans) also need sanctions removed. How many nuclear bombs does North Korea have? Some experts claim they have around sixty... Rajaraman: No one knows. Rumours place it between 40 and 60 based on their understanding of how much missile material they have accumulated. How many nuclear tests have they conducted? Rajaraman: I dont know the exact figure but they have been conducting tests from 2010 and have successfully tested weapons of increasing nuclear tonnage. How much have they spent on this programme? Rajaraman: It is difficult to assess how much they have spent but the impact of this has been enormous on their economy and they've had to manage the effects on the populace. They have no press freedom. They have a very strong internal security apparatus. The cost and impact of sanctions are even more than the cost of their weapons programme. How much help have they received from China? Rajaraman: Kim went to meet President Xi Jinping in Beijing twice this year. The two countries share a common border and Kim went by train. Xi assured him of all possible support. But at the same time China is part of the international community and has to go along with international sanctions. So China has been forced to cut down their some of its trade with North Korea. What about Russian support? Rajaraman: Russians have been supporting them from the time of the Korean war. The North Korean process of developing weapon technology has been a gradual affair and the missile scientists of North Korea have received a lot of assistance from Russia. Its seems surprising that North Korea developed a hydrogen bomb while Indias turned out to be a dud... Rajaraman: There has been some controversy on that. Defence Research and Development Organisation's (DRDO) top scientist K Santhanam said it fizzled out but others say it hasn't. There is no reliable referee to decide on this. In any event, at present, we are not doing any more testing. We may be doing computer simulations but this falls short of testing. The North Koreans released a video to show they were no longer testing weapons... Rajaraman: The North Koreans have a testing ground in their mountains. The recently shown videos show they've exploded entrances to these mountains but they could have tunnels in other places. South Korea must be feeling threatened by North Korea's nuclear arsenal... Rajaraman: Yes, but both nations are having several rounds of discussions. What about our own nuclear programme? Rajaraman: We have both the energy programme and the weapons programme. For our weapons programme, those of us outside the government can only estimate how much plutonium is being produced. We are currently producing enough plutonium to make three to four weapons a year at the rate of four to five kilos of plutonium per weapon. How much of this plutonium is being assembled into weapons is something I do not know. The centre has assured the people of Assam that their concerns will be taken into consideration before taking any decision on the amendment to the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016, Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal said on Wednesday. New Delhi: The centre has assured the people of Assam that their concerns will be taken into consideration before taking any decision on the amendment to the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016, Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal said on Wednesday. He told the media that he got this assurance from Union home minister Rajnath Singh during a long meeting on Wednesday, a day after thousands of people participated in a mass hunger strike in Assam to protest against the bill. "There should be no apprehension in the minds of the people of Assam about the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016. The centre has given an assurance that concerns of people of Assam will be allayed before taking any step," Sonowal said. The All Assam Students Union (AASU), supported by at least 28 other organisations including the Asom Gana Parishad, a partner of the BJP-led government in Assam, and the Congress on Tuesday staged a protest in Guwahati warning a massive agitation in case the centre and state went ahead with the passage and implementation of the bill. Protests have become the order of the day in Assam since a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 visited the state in May. The bill aims to grant citizenship to non-Muslim refugees who have fled from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan following persecution. However, in Assam, several indigenous groups view it as a move to legitimise Hindu migration from Bangladesh after 1971. United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) has also threatened to derail the peace accord with the central government over the issue related to the bill by conveying its strong opposition to government interlocutor AB Mathur during a meeting in New Delhi last week. ULFA suspects the bill would reduce the indigenous people in Assam to a minority. Former president Pranab Mukherjee will be addressing the valedictory function of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's (RSS) Sangh Shiksha Varg- a training camp for the volunteers - at the headquarters in Nagpur on 7 June. Former president Pranab Mukherjee will be addressing the valedictory function of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's (RSS) Sangh Shiksha Varg a training camp for the volunteers at the headquarters in Nagpur on 7 June. But his acceptance of this offer to be a part of an RSS event has created a furore considering Mukherjee has been a Congressman all throughout his political career and the party's views are ideologically opposite to that of the RSS. Thus, the Congress party members are rather taken aback by this development. A Congress leader, who requested anonymity, told The Times of India that "Mukherjees very presence at the RSS camp could prove to be bad optics for Congress and the secular camp". "A 'secular' patriarch visiting the RSS headquarters would be the ultimate approval for the body that is still considered 'untouchable' by Congress and whom Rahul Gandhi includes in every attack he launches on Modi," he said. But, according to the The Times Of India report, Congress spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi dubbed Mukherjee's decision as "no indication of his beliefs". "Judge him by what he says and what are his established beliefs in 50 years of his political life", Singhvi was quoted as saying. However, some speculate that Mukherjee will speak to the RSS gathering on the "real sense" of nationalism a discourse that could turn out to be a critique of the exclusivist view associated with the Hindutva camp, the report said. Meanwhile, former railways minister and senior Congress leader CK Jaffer Sharief wrote a letter to Mukherjee asking him to reconsider his call to attend the event. "Congressmen besides secular people are stunned to hear the news and are agitated on the situation and are hopeful that yourself will reconsider the idea. I once again request you to reconsider and avoid visiting Sangh Parivar in the interest of secularism and the country," Shareif wrote in his letter which was also signed by former MP H Hanumanthappa, stated another Times of India report. A few partymen, however, backed Mukherjee, albeit in an indirect manner. "He is an intelligent person. He has been the President of India. He is secular-minded. So there will be no change in his behaviour by going there. He will remain the same, former union minister Sushil Kumar Shinde told The Indian Express. While others chose to keep the ball in Mukherjee's court. "Ask Pranab Mukherjee. The only comment we have is no comment," said Congress spokesperson Tom Vadakkan adding that he believed the RSS and Congress had markedly different ideologies and thus Mukherjee's decision was not in line to that thought, reported NDTV. Echoing his sentiments was Congress veteran M Veerappa Moily who, as per The Indian Express report, said Mukherjee cannot go for the event if he is dedicated to the Congress ideology. However, another senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid urged people to have faith in the "wise" ex-president. Trust him not just for his true allegiance to the idea of India, but also for being sagacious and wiser than us", Khurshid said as per The Indian Express report. Meanwhile, former Congress MP Sandeep Dikshit asked if this invitation to Mukherjee meant that the RSS was accepting his views about them. "Pranab-da has often called the RSS anti-national, unpatriotic, immoral, dubious, fraud and vicious. This means the RSS accepts whatever Pranab Mukherjee has said about them", Dixit said according to the NDTV report. Speaking for the BJP camp, however, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari described Mukherjee's move as a "good start" and condemned "political untouchability"- as per several media reports. The South West monsoon hit Kerala on Tuesday, three days before its scheduled arrival in the coastal state, said the India Meteorological Department (IMD). 'Widespread rainfall occurred over Kerala in the past three-four days. The 14 rainfall monitoring stations for monsoon onset over the state have reported more than 60 percent rainfall from 25 May,' IMD was quoted as saying by various reports. The South West monsoon hit Kerala on Tuesday, three days before its scheduled arrival in the coastal state, said the India Meteorological Department (IMD). "Widespread rainfall occurred over Kerala in the past three-four days. The 14 rainfall monitoring stations for monsoon onset over the state have reported more than 60 percent rainfall from 25 May," IMD was quoted as saying by various reports. Skymet, a private weather forecasting agency also announced the arrival of the early monsoon in Kerala on Twitter. The conditions are favourable for further advance of the monsoon into some parts of central Arabian Sea, remaining parts of Kerala, parts of coastal and south interior Karnataka, parts of east-central and northeast Bay of Bengal, and some parts of northeastern states during the next 48 hours, it said. The onset of monsoon over the southern state of Kerala marks the commencement of the four-month long rainy season in the country. "Today, the southwest monsoon has further advanced into remaining parts of southeast Arabian Sea, ComorinMaldives area, entire Lakshadweep, most parts of Kerala, some parts of Tamil Nadu and some more parts of southwest, central and northeast Bay of Bengal. Thus, the southwest monsoon has set in over Kerala, on 29 May 2018, three days ahead of its normal date," the IMD said. 1 June is the official onset date for arrival of monsoon in the country and it takes more than a month-and-half to cover the entire country. The usual date for the monsoon over Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan, its last post, is 15 July. This is the second consecutive year when the monsoon has made an early arrival. Last year, the annual rainy season commenced on 30 May. Owing to the arrival of monsoon, isolated places over coastal and south interior Karnataka, Kerala, Lakshadweep, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura are expected to receive "heavy to very heavy rain" on Thursday. But there will be no respite from hot weather conditions in parts of north and central India. Heat wave conditions are "very likely" to severely affect parts of west Rajasthan, one or two pockets over east Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh tomorrow. The IMD has also issued an alert of thunderstorm accompanied with squall at isolated places in Uttar Pradesh tomorrow. "Thunderstorm accompanied with gusty winds very likely at isolated places over Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi, Bihar and sub Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim," the weather body said. According to the IMD, if after 10 May, 60 percent of the available 14 stations Minicoy, Amini, Thiruvananthapuram, Punalur, Kollam, Alappuzha, Kottayam, Kochi, Thrissur, Kozhikode, Thalassery, Kannur, Kudlu and Mangalore report 2.5 mm or more rainfall for two consecutive days, the onset of monsoon over Kerala can be declared on the second day. This is one of the main parameters for declaring the arrival of monsoon. Besides this factor, the westerly winds must be up to 15,000 feet above main sea level and outgoing long-wave radiation less than 200 wm-2 (watt per square metre) to declare the arrival of monsoon. All the necessary parameters were met following which the onset of monsoon over Kerala was announced today, Mritunjay Mohapatra, Additional Director General, IMD said. The southwest monsoon is responsible for about 70 percent of the country's annual rainfall and is critical to the economy, that is still largely dependent on agriculture. The IMD has made a forecast of "normal" rainfall this season. Last year, the MeT department recorded a "below-normal rainfall". With inputs from PTI Ten people were killed in West Bengal as twin storms accompanied by rains lashed through the city. Kolkata: Ten people were killed in West Bengal as twin storms accompanied by rains lashed through the city on Tuesday night felling trees, uprooting electric poles and triggering house collapse. Rail, road and air traffic was also disrupted. Mobile and Internet services were hit with the storm snapping overhead wires and damaging mobile towers. Of the ten persons killed, eight died in Kolkata and Howrah districts. One death was reported from Bankura and another from Hooghly following the twin norwesters that had gale speed of up to 98 kilometre. In Kolkata, two people travelling in an auto rickshaw died on Lenin Sarani near the city centre when a tree fell on the vehicle. One person was killed when a house collapsed in the Anandapur area in the eastern part while a pedestrian was killed when a tree fell on his head in Behala on the southern outskirts. Three died in Belur and one in Dumurjola of Howrah district, state police control room officials told IANS. One person died after being struck by lighting in Indus of Bankura district. Electrocution claimed one life in Hooghly district. The metrological office said a norwester, seasonal storm common in this part of the world, with gale speed of 84 kilometre per hour hit the city and other South Bengal districts around 7.42 pm. Another storm struck Kolkata and adjoining districts with a wind speed of upto 98 kilometre soon after at 7.55 pm. The twin storms played havoc with the public transport system, as trams and trains halted on their tracks with the overhead wires snapping. Flight services were affected for 100 minutes at the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International (NSCBI) Airport as planes bound for Bhubaneswar, Delhi and Agartala took off late. Suburban train services of South Eastern Railway and Eastern Railway went haywire as trains were stopped at various stations. In South Eastern Railway's Howrah division, services were disrupted in Howrah-Bardhaman and Howrah-Tarakdewhar sections, badly inconveniencing thousands of passengers. A flyover railing got uprooted and fell on platform numbers 19 and 20 of Howrah station. However, no one was injured. Two mobile towers in Uttarpara and Hindmotor of Hooghy district gave way, throwing vehicular traffic off-gear. In Eastern Railway's Sealdah division, train movement was disrupted in various sections. The Kolkata Metro Railway services were hit when a tee fell between Dum Dum and Noapara stations, as passengers got stuck in the tunnel. Danish Husain went from being in publishing and banking to learning theatre and the art of Dastangoi, as well as setting up the The Hoshruba Repertory When Danish Husain told me he was never really interested in anything while growing up, I was surprised. So much of the worlds narrative about success and being good at something is tied to having overwhelming childhood passions that it is hard to imagine a stellar storyteller who went through life doing only what must be done. My family is full of academics, writers and scholars, he says, My mother was a professor of Persian literature and my father an economist, but I was forever a median student. My report cards always said, 'satisfactory, but can do better'. Looking back, when I started acting, I realise that I received positive affirmation for the first time, he says. Late bloomers may not go through frenzied phases of creativity, but they have maturity, perspective and a stillness that fuels their work like quiet streams filling up a river. Husains tryst with theatre, acting and Qissebaazi is a bit like that. His performances arent jaunty; theres an anchor of gravitas that keeps his stories rooted. They may be about an ancient character whose tales of valour are the stuff of legend, but Husain makes them entertaining and oddly applicable to real life too. Armed with a masters in Economics from Delhi School of Economics, and an MBA from the Faculty of Management Studies, Husain started his career in publishing at Macmillan, before moving to banking in 1997. A corporate job seemed like the most natural thing in the world, he says. With a curious bent of mind, endless love for reading and love for knowledge, he approached work with dedication, but soon grew frustrated. I would have preferred to work at a policy level, I wanted to be Superman, solving problems for the common man, says Husain. And so, his search for fulfillment began. I wasnt good enough at anything to pursue a career with singing, playing an instrument, sport, nothing, he says. Then I remembered how good I was at mimicking my professors, and I thought, why not act? Husain joined Barry Johns acting program, and was later cast in his play, Khamosh! Adalat Jaari Hai. I would do a play or two a year, but it took me another three years to quit the bank and take up acting full-time. With no scope for lengthy formal training in theatre or direction, Husain learned hands-on from some of Indias greatest creative and literary stalwarts like Habib Tanvir, MS Sathyu, Rajinder Nath and Sabina Mehta Jaitly. Tanvir, in particular, has had a profound impact on Husain, and they didnt even meet in a theatre! Habib sahab was a customer when I was in banking, and having recognised him one day, I would always invite him into my cabin for snacks and tea, he says. He remembered me later when I joined theatre and offered unparalleled tutelage. From theatre, Husain graduated to Dastangoi the ancient Urdu storytelling tradition which experienced a wave of revival a few years ago, and for which he received a joint Sangeet Natak Akademi award with Mahmood Farooqui. Then, in 2012, he set up The Hoshruba Repertory, a performance company that, among other things, has introduced the world to Qissebaazi. Derived from Dastangoi, Qissebaazi or the playful telling of stories is different in that it doesnt remain limited to Urdu but has opened up the possibility of integrating storytelling in various Indian languages. The seeds were perhaps sown in Husains mind earlier on, when he was still in publishing and reading regional books translated into English. And that is his lifes work bringing Indias massive repertoire of stories and lore to the mainstream through performance. The idea is to have stories in every language, says Husain. In Qissebaazi, the bilingual performances feature a core language [for the descriptions] and a bridge language [for the plot points] and I was certain that we wouldnt have apologetic translations of a regional tongue. This determination has worked. The linguistic shifts are seamless and simple enough for audiences to understand the performance, even though they may not understand all that is being narrated. The recitals are much more open to movement and interpretation as well, with the actors free to sing, dance or play an instrument, as opposed to Dastangoi, where the dastango is always seated. My journey into theatre began as a self-seeking exercise, but now it is all about the work, says Husain. Essentially I bring stories alive, whether its on stage or in films. The task is a lot more challenging though, when he's the director, but he thrives here too, because its in negotiating with less-than-ideal circumstances that the real creativity emerges. From Saul Bellow and Aldous Huxley, Guy de Maupassant to Milan Kundera, and Faiz Ahmad Faiz to Rahi Masoom Raza, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Ismat Chughtai and Saadat Hasan Manto, the literary influences on Husains works are wide and varied. Im invested in stories of the underdog, he says. Those are the narratives that have stayed with me. For now, a host of productions awaits audiences from Hoshruba. Qissebaazi performances feature artists like Padma Damodaran (Malayalam) who weaves Mohiniattam into storytelling, while Kailash Waghmare (Marathi) sings. By August, the company wants to add Swaroopa Ghosh (Bengali) and Priyanka Sethia (Punjabi and Urdu) to their performers list. Hoshruba, indeed. A day after Lok Sabha MP Baijayant Panda resigned from Biju Janata Dal (BJD) headed by Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, two national parties the Congress and the BJP said their doors are open for him. Bhubaneswar: A day after Lok Sabha MP Baijayant Panda resigned from Biju Janata Dal (BJD) headed by Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, two national parties the Congress and the BJP said their doors are open for him on Tuesday. Amid speculation that Panda may join the BJP, Union tribal affairs minister Jual Oram said, "Panda is a good human being, a good politician and a leader. Unfortunately, the BJD could not recognise Panda's qualities. If he joins the BJP, it will be good for our party." Union petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan had on Monday said any good person who reposed faith in the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah, may join the BJP. Shortly after Panda announced his resignation from the BJD following a year-long acrimonious relationship with the chief minister, Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee (OPCC) was understood to have held a strategic meeting at the state party headquarters in Bhubaneswar, sources said. OPCC president Niranjan Patnaik and other senior leaders deliberated on political situation in the rival BJD after Panda's resignation. "Both Congress and BJP are more than interested in inducting Panda as he will be a major tool to grind Patnaik. Panda and Patnaik were close for decades and, therefore, the industrialist-turned-politician became MP four times, twice each in Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha," said a senior Congress leader. Panda was elected to the Rajya Sabha twice between 2000 to 2009 and later to Lok Sabha from Kendrapara in 2009 and 2014. Panda's family owns Odisha TV, the state's most popular and widely-viewed television channel. The political party which Panda joins, will certainly look to derive immense benefit from the state's number one news channel, the Congress leader pointed out. Earlier in 2018, Patnaik inducted JB Patnaik's son-in-law Soumya Ranjan Patnaik, who heads the state's widely circulated Odia daily as well as the Kanak News channel, into the BJD. He has also inducted education entrepreneur Achyuta Samanta, who runs Asia's biggest tribal school and also owns the Kalinga TV channel. Naveen Patnaik gave both Soumya Ranjan and Samanta Rajya Sabha seats just a few hours after their induction into the BJD. As media, particularly the television channel, is likely to play important role in next year's state elections, the two national parties are keen to take Panda into their fold, at least for getting advantage from his news channel, if not for anything else, political observers say. When natural enemies like Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party come together, it is obvious that their interests are bound to clash sooner than later, but by then it would have served its purpose of defeating the BJP. When numbers forced prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to demit office on his 13th day, he delivered a memorable speech in the Lok Sabha, ending on a trademark wave of his hand and saying that he would lead his party to the president, so they could resign. It was an extraordinary day in the history of the Lok Sabha, marked by impassioned debate, but the most impressive intervention came from Vajpayees immediate predecessor, PV Narasimha Rao. In his role as the leader of the opposition, Rao enumerated the BJPs limitations, punctuating his speech with the wittiest remarks. Turning to Murli Manohar Joshi, for example, he asked, "Joshi-ji, vo aap kya kahte hain, Bharatiya matlab Hindu (Joshi-ji, you say being Indian is equal to being Hindu)". An unsuspecting Joshi bit the bait and responded in affirmation. "So it means the Indian Penal Code should be called the Hindu penal code," he said amid peals of laughter from members. In essence, Raos argument was that the BJP-led government was in a minority because it did not represent India -- the nation was rather represented by the rest, the opposition. This was as much due to the partys ideology of Hindutva, as due to the allied notion of a strong leadership -- in the form of LK Advani, though Vajpayee had a moderate image. A shrewd politician that he was, Rao knew too well that the perception of a strong leader in India engenders unbridled hubris and ultimately promotes alienation. In a way, he was a victim of this syndrome in his five-year regime which saw cunning at its worst. In 1996, Rao, arguably one of the most influential prime ministers of India, was isolated even within his own party. But he was perspicacious enough to caution Vajpayee that the paradigm of strong leadership can take the BJP only up to a point, and it would be easily defeated if its rivals joined hands. Needless to say, two years later in 1998, when the BJP returned to power and formed a stable government, it was thanks to its widespread acceptability backed by a rainbow coalition. Though much has changed in politics since 1996, Raos words are relevant again at this juncture, when a majority of the BJPs rivals literally joined hands in Karnataka exactly a year ahead of the scheduled general elections. It would be rather naive to dismiss as inconsequential the show of strength by the Congress and the regional leaders and in Bengaluru on the day when HD Kumaraswamy took oath as chief minister. If one looks at the spectrum of leaders gathered there, it is clear that the Congress is willing to cede its political space to accommodate regional satraps in order to forge an anti-Modi coalition at the national level. The political alignment in Bengaluru, of course, confirms the BJPs principal position in Indian politics. But is that enough for it to win the 2019 elections? Party president Amit Shah has said they are aiming for a 50 percent vote share next year far higher than what was achieved in 2014 which itself was a best-case scenario. If Shahs dream comes true, the BJP will come to resemble the Communist Party of China (CPC), which it has overtaken in terms of the number of members when it claims to be the largest political party in the world. Then India can also come to resemble China. But can it happen? The answer will, predictably, be in the negative. There have been times in the life of this nation when people become impatient with the slowness of democratic processes, and pine for a strong leader, an authoritarian regime and quick way out of the travails of misgovernance. But not for long. Advani fought the 2009 elections on the single plank of a decisive leader as against an outright weak prime minister (and Manmohan Singh never claimed to be otherwise). The BJP lost. This is not peculiar to India. At historic turns, many nations have exhibited a strong urge for a benevolent dictator who would solve all their problems. After all, as British political scientist Archie Brown has pointed out, have we ever heard for any nation that what it really needs is a weak leader? Brown, in his The Myth of a Strong Leader (2014), writes: "The central misconception, which I set out to expose, is the notion that strong leaders in the conventional sense of leaders who get their way, dominate their colleagues, and concentrate decision-making in their hands, are the most successful and admirable. While some leaders who come into that category emerge more positively than negatively, in general, huge power amassed by an individual leader paves the way for important errors at best and disaster and massive bloodshed at worst." He believes that in a democratic setup, such leaders "can do far less damage, precisely because there are constraints upon their power from outside government. It is, nevertheless, an illusion and one as dangerous as it is widespread that in contemporary democracies the more a leader dominates his or her political party and Cabinet, the greater the leader. A more collegial style of leadership is too often characterized as a weakness, the advantages of a more collective political leadership too commonly overlooked". His conclusion is, "Effective government is necessary everywhere. But process matters." It is a dictum, it seems, Indian masses have learnt. By temperament, the impression of a powerful leader looks an attractive proposition in a fractured polity but soon triggers a counter-reaction at the social level. With the exception of Jawaharlal Nehru, every powerful leader has passed through this ordeal. Take for instance Indira Gandhi whose victory in the Bangladesh war made even her rivals hail her as an avatar of Goddess Durga, and yet she soon lost badly in the face of a united opposition. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, was a strong leader though not by temperament but due to the historic majority. By the fourth year, his halo of invincibility was replaced by utter vulnerability. Again, a united opposition was the recurring theme. For contrast, consider the other model of leadership. Rao and Vajpayee never projected themselves as the leaders of the my way or highway school. They were not reckoned as powerful as Indira, Rajiv or Modi. Numbers too taught them the coalition dharma of adjustment and conciliation. They managed contradictions in a Machiavellian manner. They went on to complete their full terms. Compared to these two leaders, Manmohan Singh, though he served two terms, could never rank himself a leader per se. Since he never countered the impression of being a weak prime minister, he was an antithesis of a strong political personality. In hindsight, then, Modis mighty majority was as much a boon as a bane. It fuelled his take-no-prisoners attitude, and a significantly large section of people still continue to support his no-nonsense style of governance. But, the paradox of power is coming to the fore. Partners are leaving the BJP-led coalition, and rivals are ganging up. The fact is that both are doing so not for some alleged ethical reasons but for the petty reason of their own survival, but that is no solace for the BJP. When natural enemies like Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party come together, it is obvious that their interests are bound to clash sooner than later, but by then it would have served its purpose of defeating the BJP. The internal contradictions of any such platform built solely over the plank of defeating X will play out as they did at the national level in 1979-80 and 1990-91, but that would come after the defeat of X, as witnessed in the Lok Sabha by-elections from Uttar Pradesh earlier this year. One year, as the cliche goes, is a long time in politics, and Modi, as even his rivals acknowledge, is a master of the art of reinventing himself. It is possible that when he faces the electorate again, he would have changed himself to suit a more modest mandate. It is also possible he will come up with some out-of-box idea that will shock his rivals and awe the rest. Then again, one must hedge ones bets. This comment will be published in the forthcoming edition of Governance Now. The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) on Tuesday adopted a new resolution in which it lambasted the NDA government for its 'dictatorial' attitude towards states, as its leaders vowed to unite regional parties to dethrone the 'anti-people' BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Vijayawada: The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) on Tuesday adopted a new resolution in which it lambasted the NDA government for its "dictatorial" attitude towards states, as its leaders vowed to unite regional parties to dethrone the "anti-people" BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The resolution passed at the TDP's three-day annual conclave "Mahanadu", that began on Sunday, alleges that the Centre was weakening the financial condition of states. "The unilateral style of functioning of the Modi government has led to a loss of trust of states in the central government. The states feel that the concept of federalism is only on paper," the resolution reads. The "dictatorial" attitude of the Modi government, its "unilateral and anti-people decisions, misuse of central agencies to suppress political opponents have become a matter of grave concern in the Indian polity", it reads. In March, the TDP pulled out of the NDA government over the Centre's refusal to grant special status to Andhra Pradesh. The party claimed it played a "pivotal role" in forming five out of the six non-Congress governments in Delhi, except the Janata Party government, and that chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu played an important role in the national politics. As the convenor of the United Front, Naidu was responsible for uniting non-Congress parties and made HD Deve Gowda and IK Gujral prime ministers. Thus, he proved it was possible for regional parties to form a government at the Centre, the TDP document says. At the swearing-in ceremony of HD Kumaraswamy as the Karnataka chief minister last week, Naidu shared the stage with Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, BSP supremo Mayawati, SP president Akhilesh Yadav, TMC chief Mamata Banerjee, CPM's Sitaram Yechury among others, sending a clear message of opposition unity to the BJP. "N Chandrababu Naidu was a tall leader in this meet and it was a clear indication that regional political parties are going to be a power to reckon with in the 2019 elections as an alternative to national parties to form a government in Delhi," the TDP resolution reads. In his concluding address at the conclave, Naidu said, "We ended the alliance with the NDA only in the interests of the states". He alleged the BJP was "resorting to conspiracy to destabilize us". "We are not afraid of anyone and are ready to sacrifice everything. We will not stop until Andhra is given special status and the Polavaram project completed," he said. He alleged the Centre had not been releasing funds for Amaravati as it "did not want" a world-class capital city to come up in Andhra. "Then why should we pay taxes to the Centre at all?" He also rubbished criticism that his government was spending all the money at its disposal on developing Amaravati, the proposed ultra-modern capital, at the cost of other developmental works. Ratcheting up his attack on the Centre, he said, "In 2014, the unemployment rate was 3.4 percent and now it is 6.23 percent. Where is the 'sabka sath sabka vikas' that Modi promised to the people?" He also denounced the Congress for "not doing justice to the people of Andhra and Telangana" at the time of the state's bifurcation. "We asked the Congress to do justice to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, but they did not do it. They lost in both the states". He said the TDP will win all 25 Lok Sabha seats in the state in 2019 and bring drastic changes in national politics. "The NDA won't come to power," he announced. State Finance Minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu said the Modi government was taking "dangerous steps" against constitutional values and that it would be "dethroned by united regional parties" in 2019. He also said former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee and BJP veteran L K Advani respected the Constitution, but Modi and party chief Amit Shah were "destroying the democratic system". "We respected Vajpayee and Advani who revered and protected the Constitution. But then came the Modi-Shah duo. They destroyed the entire democratic system". "The Modi government's policies are against secularism," he alleged. "The ruling party uses RSS cadres, who have a fascist mentality. It is also spoiling fiscal and political values." The BJP government would be "dethroned" by an amalgamation of regional parties, he said, but parried a query on who would be the prime ministerial face if a united front comes into being. Preaching against corruption after declaring BS Yeddyurappa, implicated in corruption cases, as the chief minister of Karnataka and supporting people such as "mining mafia" Janardhan Reddy and YS Jaganmohan Reddy looks like a joke by the BJP government, he said. Approaching the NGT on "flimsy" grounds, filing false cases against the Polavaram project and delays in the release of funds by the Centre are examples of collusion between the BJP and the YSRCP, Naidu's party alleged. The "political manipulations" in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra are examples of the BJP's conspiracy to weaken efficient state leaders, the TDP alleged. By using the Finance Commission, the Modi government started "causing losses" to the progressive states. "The Finance Commission is a Constitutional body which independently distributed the resources to states and the Centre as per Schedule 7 of the Constitution. "However, the recent guidelines of the 15th Finance Commission reveal that the terms of reference prescribed by the Centre hit the financial capabilities of the states, the TDP resolution alleges. Reuters Alibaba Group Holding Ltd on 29 May said it has led a consortium of investors to buy about 10 percent of Chinese courier, ZTO Express (Cayman) Inc for $1.38 billion, as part of the e-commerce firms push into offline services. The consortium includes Alibabas majority-owned logistics affiliate Cainiao Smart Logistics Network Ltd, Alibaba and ZTO said in a joint statement without disclosing the identity of other investors. They said they expect the deal to close in June. The investment would be Alibabas third in a Chinese courier after buying a minority stakes in YTO Express Group Co Ltd and Best Inc. The e-commerce firm has been expanding its logistics network at home and abroad as it works to diversify its customer base. As part of that effort, it became majority shareholder in September of Cainiao, which provides logistics support to Alibabas main e-commerce platform, Taobao. ZTO owns 1 percent of Cainiao, which it co-founded with Alibaba and over a dozen other Chinese companies in 2013. ZTOs chairman, Lai Meisong, told Reuters the latest deal would allow ZTO and Alibaba to better share resources and help ZTO cut costs through access to new technologies. He said the pair decided to enter a deal so as to work more closely on operations and build trust between affiliates. ZTO said Alibaba will have a seat on its board. This trust will improve the efficiency of our cooperation, Lai said in a telephone interview. Shanghai-based ZTOs $1.4 billion New York listing was the United States largest listing in 2016 and was the biggest by a Chinese firm since Alibabas $25 billion initial public offering in 2014. ZTO shares closed at a lifetime high of $19.30 on Friday, their most recent day of trading, valuing the firm at $13.7 billion. Earlier this month, ZTO reported a 36 percent on-year rise in first quarter revenue. It said it handled 6.2 billion parcels in 2017, giving it a 15.5 percent market share, from 7.6 percent in 2011. Reuters Ant Financial Services Group, the operator of Chinas biggest online payment platform by market share, Alipay, has closed its latest funding round having raised $10 billion from a clutch of global and local investors, five people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Ants first fundraising targeting global money values the firm at $150 billion, the people said, compared with about $60 billion after its previous fundraising in April 2016. A number of global sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms joined the fundraising as main investors. They include Singapores sovereign fund GIC Pte Ltd and state investor Temasek Holdings (Private) Ltd, as well as US private equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC, the people said. Malaysian sovereign fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd has also joined as a major investor, one of the people said. The funding round also brought in private equity firm Carlyle Group LP and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, which typically invests in early-stage start-ups, three of the people said. The amount and investor line-up are finalised and the transfer of funds is underway, the people said. The funding round includes a separate tranche of around 7 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) in new shares which has not been finalised, two of the people said. The people spoke to Reuters on condition they not be identified as the deal details are not yet public. Ant, controlled by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd founder Jack Ma, declined to comment. Carlyle, Temasek and Warburg declined to comment. Khanazah, GIC and Sequoia Capital did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The capital-raising comes ahead of a widely expected initial public offering (IPO), though Ant has neither publicly set a timetable nor chosen a likely stock exchange. A $150 billion valuation would make Ants IPO one of the biggest ever - comparing to the $104 billion of Facebook Inc six years ago and Alibabas $168 billion in 2014. A fundraising document seen by Reuters showed Ant planned to list both in China and Hong Kong in 2019, and its investors joining the latest fundraising could expect to exit within one to three years. Ant declined to comment on the document. Strong demand from investors looking to position themselves ahead of Ants potential IPO has resulted in a much higher amount than an initial target of up to $5 billion, which Reuters earlier reported. Four-year-old Ant, which was spun off from Alibaba when the group went public in New York, has diversified over the years into credit services, asset management and online banking, besides owning the Alipay payment platform. After becoming dominant in payments in China, the company has also invested in a number of Internet-based startups including Chinese bike-sharing company Ofo, food delivery app operator Ele.me and Indian payment company PayTM. The firm counts Chinas sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corp, state lender China Construction Bank Corp, the countrys National Social Security Fund and big state insurers, among others, as investors from previous funding rounds. tech2 News Staff Marking the return of the Motorola brand is the new Motorola One Power according to a leaked image on Android Headlines. The phone is the first Android One device to have a notch and the design is very Apple-like with a prominent notch visible. Coming to the design, apart from having the notch, which is rather wide, the phone has a metal black finish and vertically aligned dual camera setup at the back. It has thin bezels throughout. The Motorola logo is prominently visible at the rear. The device will be powered by Android One, making it the first Motorola device as part of the Android One program. As it is Moto devices come with almost stock Android along with the special Moto features. The idea to go completely stock will be most welcome. What is unusual is that it is called Motorola One Power and not the usual Moto, that the company has been using as their branding. The company had only recently introduced the Moto G6 and the Moto G6 Play. According to Android Headlines, the parent company Lenovo has gone back and forth between Moto, Motorola and Moto by Lenovo. The device will be available in the US, but we do not know when the device will reach the markets and how it will be priced. There is not much information about the specifications, but the phone could be what was intended to be the Moto X5, the leaked images of which released earlier in 2018. The plans of the Moto X5 were reportedly cancelled, as it sacked 190 people from its Chicago team. This is the first time were hearing of the Motorola One Power, and its pretty clear from images what the phone will look like. PTI NASA scientists have discovered a special kind of neutron star for the first time outside of the Milky Way galaxy and released a stunning image of the stellar body located 200,000 light years from Earth. Neutron stars are the ultra-dense cores of massive stars that collapse and undergo a supernova explosion. The newly identified neutron star, discovered using data from NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, is a rare variety that has both a low magnetic field and no stellar companion. The neutron star is located within the remains of a supernova known as 1E 0102.2-7219 (E0102) in the Small Magellanic Cloud, located 200,000 light years from Earth. A new composite image of E0102 allows astronomers to learn new details about this object that was discovered more than three decades ago. Oxygen-rich supernova remnants like E0102 are important for understanding how massive stars fuse lighter elements into heavier ones before they explode. Seen up to a few thousand years after the original explosion, oxygen-rich remnants contain the debris ejected from the dead stars interior. This debris is observed today hurtling through space after being expelled at millions of miles per hour. Chandra observations of E0102 show that the supernova remnant is dominated by a large ring-shaped structure in X-rays, associated with the blast wave of the supernova. #News: A special kind of neutron star has been discovered for the first time outside of our Milky Way galaxy! This lonely star has no companion star, only an oxygen-rich ring of debris from the supernova explosion that created it about 2 millennia ago: https://t.co/fwjPYlHgYW pic.twitter.com/LRXzinziRZ Chandra Observatory (@chandraxray) May 23, 2018 The new MUSE data revealed a smaller ring of gas that is expanding more slowly than the blast wave. At the center of this ring is a blue point-like source of X-rays. Together, the small ring and point source act like a celestial bulls eye. The combined Chandra and MUSE data suggest that this source is an isolated neutron star, created in the supernova explosion about two millennia ago. The X-ray energy signature, or spectrum, of this source is very similar to that of the neutron stars located at the center of two other famous oxygen-rich supernova remnants: Cassiopeia A (Cas A) and Puppis A. These two neutron stars also do not have companion stars. The lack of evidence for extended radio emission or pulsed X-ray radiation, typically associated with rapidly rotating highly-magnetised neutron stars, indicates that the astronomers have detected the X-radiation from the hot surface of an isolated neutron star with low magnetic fields. About ten such objects have been detected in the Milky Way galaxy, but this is the first one detected outside our galaxy. Future observations of E0102 at X-ray, optical, and radio wavelengths should help astronomers understand how the neutron star ended up in its current position, seemingly offset from the centre of the circular shell of X-ray emission produced by the blast wave of the supernova. tech2 News Staff In not so shocking news, Nokia has confirmed that all of its smartphones (including the Nokia 2.1, 3.1 and 5.1 launched today) will be getting upgraded to Android P. First reported by Android Authority, the news comes from Neil Broadley, Nokias global marketing manager who added that latest version of Android will come to the entire Nokia smartphone range released until now. The update isnt a surprise given that Nokia has chosen to partner with Googles Android One program, one that ensures timely updates along with security patches. Nokia too takes pride in its pure, secure and up-to-date slogan with a guaranteed two-year update period for milestone firmware updates. With the announcement, literally all Nokia smartphone announced under the HMD Global umbrella, will get updated to Android P. As for the devices running Android Go, Nokia states that they too will see a new updates coming from an unnamed OS. This should basically be a watered-down version of Android P like the Android Oreo Go edition that is currently powering the Nokia 1, the Nokia 2 and the recently announced Nokia 2.1. On a related note, HMD Global Chief Product Officer, Juho Sarvikas at todays Nokia launch event also announced that the Nokia 8 will be getting a Pro Camera mode in an update that arrives by the end of this week. Reuters The driver of a Tesla Inc Model S crashed into an unoccupied, parked police vehicle in Laguna Beach, California, on 28 May and the driver told investigators the Tesla was in Autopilot mode at the time, police said. The driver suffered minor injuries, Laguna Beach Sergeant Jim Cota said, who posted photos of the crash scene showing extensive damage to the front end of the Tesla and the rear side of the police vehicle. Autopilot is a semi-autonomous technology that the company says is a form of advanced cruise control. Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesnt make the car impervious to all accidents, the company said in a statement after the accident and could not immediately confirm the drivers report that the vehicle was in Autopilot mode. Several crashes and fire incidents involving Tesla vehicles this year has been a near constant headache for Chief Executive Elon Musk, who boasts that his companys vehicles are among the safest in the industry. Earlier this month, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it was sending a team to investigate the crash of a Tesla vehicle in South Jordan, Utah. The driver was travelling at 60 miles (97 km) per hour when the Model S smashed into a fire truck stopped at a red light, according to police. Police in Utah said data from Tesla showed that the driver enabled Autopilot about 1 minute and 22 seconds before the crash. The report said she took her hands off the steering wheel within two seconds of engaging the system and then did not touch the steering wheel for the next 80 seconds, until the crash happened. NHTSA is also investigating a fatal crash in March that involved a Tesla Model X using Autopilot that struck a highway divider. The agency is also probing the January crash of a Tesla vehicle apparently travelling in Autopilot that struck a parked fire truck. Both of those incidents were also in California. The National Transportation Safety Board is also probing four Tesla crashes that have occurred since last year, including three under review by NHTSA. Teslas Model S owners manual warns some Autopilot functions cannot detect all objects and may not brake/decelerate for stationary vehicles or objects especially when travelling over 50 mph (80 kph) and when a vehicle ahead of the driver moves out of your driving path and a stationary vehicle or object is in front of you. tech2 News Staff A Pune-based civil lawyer wrote a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook for making her realise the importance of health through Apple Watch. According to a report by Gadgets Now, Arati Joglekar, 53, has been practising law for the past 30 years. In 2017 when she was purchasing the iPhone 8 Plus, she was told about the Apple Watch and its features. Considering the nature of her job which is usually stressful, she bought the smartwatch so that she could monitor her health. Her usage was minimal. However, on one such stressful day, the smartwatch came to her rescue. It so happened that one of her associates forgot to get the signature of an official and considering the strict deadline, Joglekar was quite stressed. During the official proceeding, her Watch had been reportedly buzzing, repeatedly. Despite ignoring the alert a number of times that day, she finally checked. On the screen of the Watch, a message flashed that said she must breathe and relax since her heart rate was nearly 136 beats per minute, almost twice the normal heart rate. On realising the critical health situation she rested. She then discussed the anecdote with her family. Realising the usefulness of smartwatch and how life-changing it was, her son decided to write a letter to Tim Cook about the usefulness of the Watch and its health promise. He also said that the Watch had made him appreciate the underlying technology which is helping people monitor their health. To this, Tim Cook responded with, "Im happy your Mum is fine. Thanks for your note and kind words. Best, Tim." AP A young computer hacker who prosecutors say unwittingly worked with a Russian spy agency was sentenced to five years in prison on 29 May for using data stolen in a massive Yahoo data breach to gain access to private emails. The US Judge Vince Chhabria also fined Karim Baratov $250,000 during a sentencing hearing in San Francisco. Baratov was named in a federal indictment in 2017 that charged two Russian spies with orchestrating the 2014 Yahoo breach involving 500 million users. Baratov was charged with using that stolen data passed to him by Russias Federal Security Service to hack dozens of email accounts of journalists, business leaders and others. Prosecutors said Baratov, 23, was an 'international hacker for hire' who did little or no research of his customers. He pleaded guilty in November to nine felony hacking charges. He acknowledged that he began hacking as a teen seven years ago and charged customers $100 a hack to access web-based emails. Baratov, who was born in Kazakhstan but lived in Toronto, Canada, where he was arrested in 2017, charged customers to obtain another persons webmail passwords by tricking them to enter their credentials into a fake password reset page. Prosecutors said in court papers that Baratovs Russian-language website named 'webhacker' advertised services for hacking of email accounts without prepayment. Prosecutors said Russian security service paid Baratov to target dozens of email accounts using information obtained from the Yahoo hack. Prosecutors argued that Russias Federal Security Service targeted Russian journalists, US and Russian government officials, and employees of financial services and other private businesses. Baratov and his attorneys also said his work with the Russia spy agency was unwitting. In court documents, Baratov claimed he could access webmail accounts maintained by Google and Russian providers such as Mail.Ru and Yandex. He would provide customers with a screenshot of the hacked account and promised he could change security questions so they could maintain control of the account. The US Justice Department charged two Russian spies with orchestrating the 2014 security breach at Yahoo to steal data from 500 million users. Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev and Igor Anatolyevich remain at large and prosecutors believe they are living in Russia, which doesnt have an extradition treaty with the United States. Baratov is believed to have collected more than $1.1 million in fees, which he used to buy a house and expensive cars. Deterrence is particularly important in a case like this, the judge said during the hearing. He rejected prosecutors call for a prison sentence of nearly 10 years, noting Baratovs age and clean criminal record prior to his arrest. Baratov, who has been in custody since his arrest, told the judge that his time behind bars has been a very humbling and eye-opening experience. He apologized and promised, to be a better man and obey the law upon his release. The judge said it is likely Baratov will be deported once he is released from prison. Criminal hackers and the countries that sponsor them make a grave mistake when they target American companies and citizens, said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers. We will identify them wherever they are and bring them to justice. Donald Trump said that he will finalize trade sanctions against China even as a US delegation is set to travel to Beijing for talks to resolve the dispute. Washington: US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he is moving to finalise trade sanctions against China even as a US delegation is set to travel to Beijing for talks to resolve the dispute. The White House said the planned sanctions announced in March, largely focused on China's theft of American intellectual property, were still in the works and details would be announced in the coming month. It was yet another apparent change of course for Trump, who veers from harsh threats to promises of compromise and back again on trade and other more sensitive issues. Despite announcing a truce in the trade hostilities less than 10 days ago, after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said threatened tariffs on Chinese goods were "on hold," the White House signaled it was ready to pull the trigger on a broad array of penalties. "From now on, we expect trading relationships to be fair and to be reciprocal," in a statement, which spelled out a list of long-standing US trade grievances," Trump said in a statement. The Chinese Commerce Ministry said the move breached the recent consensus reached between Washington and Beijing. "Whatever measures the United States takes, China has the confidence, capability and experience to defend the interests of Chinese people and the core interests of the country," the ministry said in a statement published by official new agency Xinhua. The US trade sanctions announced in March, including restrictions on Chinese investment, export controls and 25 per cent tariffs on as much as 50 billion US dollars in Chinese tech goods, remain under development, the White House said. The final list of Chinese imports covered by the tariffs list will be announced on 15 June , and imposed shortly thereafter, while the proposed investment restrictions and enhanced export controls will be announced by 30 June, according to the statement. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on an additional 100 billion dollars in Chinese goods as well if Beijing retaliates. The White House said "the United States will continue efforts to protect domestic technology and intellectual property, stop non economic transfers of industrially significant technology and intellectual property to China, and enhance access to the Chinese market." In addition, as part of the ongoing talks "the United States will request that China remove all of its many trade barriers, including non-monetary trade barriers, which make it both difficult and unfair to do business there." The announcement, which offered little new information, comes as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross prepares to travel to Beijing this week for another round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict, which includes a threat of matching sanctions from China on US goods. The White House issued a second statement listing the details of many complaints against China, including dumping of goods into the US market at below market value, high tariffs and overcapacity, likely referring to steel and aluminium, which are subject to another set of harsh US tariffs. In addition to the bilateral talks with Beijing, the US also will continue to pursue the complaints filed in the World Trade Organisation as well as the cases against individual products. By Simon Webb SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazilian President Michel Temer said on Tuesday there was no chance that a nationwide truckers' protest that has paralyzed Latin America's biggest economy will spark a military coup and topple his government. Temer, speaking to a small group of foreign journalists at an investment forum in Sao Paulo, batted down questions about risks of a military intervention. By Simon Webb SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazilian President Michel Temer said on Tuesday there was no chance that a nationwide truckers' protest that has paralyzed Latin America's biggest economy will spark a military coup and topple his government. Temer, speaking to a small group of foreign journalists at an investment forum in Sao Paulo, batted down questions about risks of a military intervention. The nine-day demonstrations by truck drivers against diesel price hikes has emptied roads and left major cities running short on food, gasoline and medical supplies. The nationwide protest has been has been slow to unwind despite a raft of concessions that Temer offered over the weekend. Some striking truckers are calling for a coup, a hotly debated topic on social media, and fringe groups who want the military back in charge have been a constant presence during anti-corruption protests in recent years. "There is zero chance of military intervention," Temer said through a translator. "What I see is a rejection both in the Ministry of Defense and throughout the military forces to any kind of military intervention." But polling shows that Temer is Brazil's least popular president since the country's 1964-85 military junta ended. He also remains under investigation amid allegations of graft. If Brazil's Prosecutor General Raquel Dodge were to decide to charge Temer, it would be up to a congressional vote on whether he would be tried before the Supreme Court. Temer last year fought off two such corruption charges, but with general elections in October and polls consistently demonstrating the public's deep dissatisfaction with political leaders across the board, it is not clear that he retains congressional support to survive any potential new charges. TOUGH STANCE Temer said in a television interview that protests by truck drivers still parked on motorways should be resolved by Wednesday, though his government still has to deliver on its pledge to cut the price of diesel by 0.46 real ($0.12) per liter. A bill approved by the Senate on Tuesday included a tax exemption on diesel inserted by the lower house, but Temer is expected to veto the fuel provision and find a different way to fund the costly concession to truckers. Temer said hefty fines were being levied on distribution firms found to be supporting the strike, but said he hoped tougher action would not be necessary if the truckers moved vehicles off the roads. Earlier on Tuesday, Public Security Minister Raul Jungmann said the government had started taking tougher action against the truckers, threatening to crack down on alleged political agitators contributing to the crisis. The more aggressive stance underscored the government's mounting urgency to end the protest. The highway blockades and fuel shortages have halted industries from automaking to sugarcane crushing, hammering exports of everything from beef and soybeans to coffee and cars. Brazil's CNA farm lobby said producers have lost 6.6 billion reais ($1.77 billion) so far during the truckers protest. CNA said that did not take into account losses for food processors, industries and makers of inputs. Disruption to supplies of animal feed has had a devastating impact on the nation's livestock. Some 70 million chickens had been slaughtered as of Monday because producers cannot feed them, said the poultry and pork processing association ABPA. Some factions within the loosely organized truckers' movement have added to the demands and ignored a call to demobilize by industry group Abcam, which says it represents 600,000 drivers and spearheaded the early protests. Oil industry regulator ANP said fuel distribution had begun to improve in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and the capital Brasilia, but it remained scarce in several regions, including the business hub of Sao Paulo. It will take at least a week for fuel distribution to return to normal, according to ANP. ($1 = 3.7256 Brazilian reais) (Reporting by Simon Webb; additional reporting by Brad Brooks in Sao Paulo, Pedro Fonseca and Rodrigo Viga Gaier in Rio de Janeiro, and Anthony Boadle in Brasilia; editing by Brad Haynes, Susan Thomas and G Crosse) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada will impose targeted sanctions on 14 Venezuelan officials, adding to its previous moves to put pressure on President Nicolas Maduro's government, the foreign ministry said on Wednesday. The sanctions were in response to Venezuela's 'illegitimate and anti-democratic presidential elections,' it said in a statement. OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada will impose targeted sanctions on 14 Venezuelan officials, adding to its previous moves to put pressure on President Nicolas Maduro's government, the foreign ministry said on Wednesday. The sanctions were in response to Venezuela's "illegitimate and anti-democratic presidential elections," it said in a statement. Earlier this month, Maduro won a new six-year term in an election that was denounced by a string of countries as unfair, triggering fresh sanctions from the United States. The new Canadian sanctions include freezing the assets of the officials and prohibiting Canadians from having property or financial dealings with them. "These sanctions send a clear message that the Maduro regime's anti-democratic behaviour has consequences," Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said. Last September, Canada imposed sanctions against 40 Venezuelan senior officials, including Maduro. Critics say Maduro has plunged the nation into its worst-ever economic crisis. Canada is a member of the 12-nation Lima Group, which is trying to address the crisis. (Reporting by Leah Schnurr, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. A lawyer for U.S. President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, on Wednesday accused adult film actress Stormy Daniels' lawyer of leaking Cohen's bank records to the press, calling it a 'drive-by shooting of my client's rights.' The comments by Cohen lawyer Stephen Ryan regarding Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, came during an often-heated hearing before U.S. New York: A lawyer for U.S. President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, on Wednesday accused adult film actress Stormy Daniels' lawyer of leaking Cohen's bank records to the press, calling it a "drive-by shooting of my client's rights." The comments by Cohen lawyer Stephen Ryan regarding Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, came during an often-heated hearing before U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood in Manhattan related to a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors into Cohen's business dealings. Avenatti told Wood he did not release anything improper about Cohen, who has not been charged with a crime. But the judge told Avenatti he would not have free rein in her courtroom "to denigrate Mr. Cohen and, I believe, potentially, deprive him of a fair trial by tainting a jury pool" should criminal charges be brought against Cohen. Leaks could make it harder for Cohen to get a fair trial if he were charged. Legal experts have said he might choose to cooperate with prosecutors as pressure mounts. The investigation stems in part from a referral by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is probing whether Trump's 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia. Trump has repeatedly denied any collusion, and Russia has denied meddling in the U.S. election. At Wednesday's hearing, Wood set a June 15 deadline for Cohen's and Trump's lawyers to identify materials seized in April raids on his home, office and hotel room, which they say prosecutors cannot use by prosecutors because the materials are subject to attorney-client privilege. Wood said a "taint team" of prosecutors not involved in the Cohen probe would make the determinations after that date. Ryan, one of Cohen's lawyers, said in court that Avenatti acted maliciously by releasing his client's bank records and attacking Cohen in dozens of media appearances, to "paint a false narrative" about Cohen and "call attention to himself." Avenatti has released details of payments to Cohen from a company linked to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who the United States sanctioned over suspected meddling in the election. Avenatti's involvement has complicated the Cohen probe. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has said she had a sexual encounter with Trump, and sued Cohen in March to end an agreement under which Cohen paid her $130,000 not to discuss it. Trump has denied having sex with Daniels. Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Avenatti signalled that more disclosures are forthcoming. "We've got a whole host of information that we are going to be releasing relating to Mr. Cohen and relating to Mr. Trump, so they better buckle up," he said. The June 15 deadline to review documents seized from Cohen was a month sooner than Cohen's lawyers had wanted. Todd Harrison, a lawyer for Cohen, said his firm was "moving heaven and Earth" to review documents. He said they have reviewed about 1.3 million of the 3.7 million files turned over. But the judge said taking too long was not an option. "It's important for the court to balance the slow, deliberate needs of those asserting attorney-client privilege with the need for an investigation to go forward," Wood said. (Corrects to explain status of disputed territory in second paragraph) CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will visit Khartoum in October to seal several bilateral deals, Sudan's foreign minister said on Tuesday during a visit to Cairo, at a time of fraught relations between the neighbours. Sudan banned the import of Egyptian farm produce last year over alleged use of pesticides and is in a longstanding dispute over contested territory claimed by Sudan but which Cairo says is Egyptian. (Corrects to explain status of disputed territory in second paragraph) CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will visit Khartoum in October to seal several bilateral deals, Sudan's foreign minister said on Tuesday during a visit to Cairo, at a time of fraught relations between the neighbours. Sudan banned the import of Egyptian farm produce last year over alleged use of pesticides and is in a longstanding dispute over contested territory claimed by Sudan but which Cairo says is Egyptian. For its part, Egypt fears Sudan will support Ethiopia in its bid to quickly fill a reservoir behind the mega-hydroelectric dam it is constructing on the Nile. Cairo is concerned the dam could wreak havoc on its sensitive water supply but Sudan has supported it because of its need for electricity. "(Sisi's) visit will be to partake in the (bilateral) high joint committee and there are a lot of agreements that will be completed," Al-Dirdiri Mohamed said. He did not give a date for the visit or details of agreements that may be signed. (Reporting by Ali Abdelaty; Writing by Eric Knecht; Editing by Mark Heinrich and James Dalgleish) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. (Corrects first name to Vikki, not Vicki, in fifth paragraph.) SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia's scandal-hit former deputy prime minister was widely criticised on Tuesday for agreeing to a paid tell-all television interview about an extramarital affair, threatening further disharmony in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's government. (Corrects first name to Vikki, not Vicki, in fifth paragraph.) SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia's scandal-hit former deputy prime minister was widely criticised on Tuesday for agreeing to a paid tell-all television interview about an extramarital affair, threatening further disharmony in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's government. The move is unusual for an elected official - Barnaby Joyce is now a backbencher in the Liberal-National coalition government - and prompted calls from his own party for a ban on payments for media appearances by serving politicians. The payment, which media said was A$150,000 ($112,950), provoked critical comment on social media and again raised the hackles of Turnbull, who this year lambasted Joyce's "shocking error of judgement over the affair with his media adviser. "It has been very widely criticised," Turnbull told Tasmanian radio station LAFM, speaking of the interview payment. "It is certainly not a course of action I would have encouraged him to take, I will put it that way." Joyce, perhaps best known for once threatening to kill U.S. movie star Johnny Depp's dogs over a quarantine violation, had requested the media respect his privacy when his affair with staff member Vikki Campion was made public. He resigned as leader of the Nationals, the junior coalition partner, in February after weeks of pressure. Joyce and Campion now live together and recently had a child, a son whom Joyce said would be the beneficiary of the interview payment. Joyce added that Campion, as a private citizen, had a right to make money from an already intrusive situation. "In the last fortnight we've had drones over our house, we've had paparazzi waiting for us," Joyce told reporters in Canberra. "We tried just burning this out and that didn't work." As Joyce continues to enjoy influence within the conservative wing of the coalition government, political analysts said Turnbull can ill afford any split, with a federal election less than a year away. "The government cannot be seen to fighting publicly," said Haydon Manning of Flinders University in South Australia. "Disunity is death, as they say in Australian politics." Backbench lawmakers are permitted to accept money for media engagements, but Australian lawmakers have traditionally shunned financial offers. ($1 = 1.3280 Australian dollars) (Reporting by Colin Packham; editing by Jane Wardell and Clarence Fernandez) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. CAIRO (Reuters) - Islamic State claimed responsibility on Wednesday for a knife and shooting attack in the Belgian city of Liege, but provided no evidence for its claim. It said in an online statement a 'soldier of the caliphate' had carried out the attack on Tuesday which killed two policewomen and a bystander. Islamic State regularly claims attacks that are thought to be Islamist-inspired, often without providing any proof the group was involved CAIRO (Reuters) - Islamic State claimed responsibility on Wednesday for a knife and shooting attack in the Belgian city of Liege, but provided no evidence for its claim. It said in an online statement a "soldier of the caliphate" had carried out the attack on Tuesday which killed two policewomen and a bystander. Islamic State regularly claims attacks that are thought to be Islamist-inspired, often without providing any proof the group was involved. (Reporting by Ali Abdelaty, John Davison; Editing by Catherine Evans) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Aidan Lewis TUNIS (Reuters) - A commitment by key Libyan actors to hold elections in December faces multiple obstacles, including the lack of a legal framework for polls and escalating conflict in parts of the country. French President Emmanuel Macron called the agreement reached in Paris on Tuesday a historic step towards reunifying and stabilising Libya, which has been in turmoil since a NATO-backed revolt toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Tripoli Prime Minister Fayez Seraj, eastern commander Khalifa Haftar and the leaders of two rival parliamentary assemblies endorsed - but did not sign - an eight-point statement that set the date for parliamentary and presidential elections on Dec By Aidan Lewis TUNIS (Reuters) - A commitment by key Libyan actors to hold elections in December faces multiple obstacles, including the lack of a legal framework for polls and escalating conflict in parts of the country. French President Emmanuel Macron called the agreement reached in Paris on Tuesday a historic step towards reunifying and stabilising Libya, which has been in turmoil since a NATO-backed revolt toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Tripoli Prime Minister Fayez Seraj, eastern commander Khalifa Haftar and the leaders of two rival parliamentary assemblies endorsed - but did not sign - an eight-point statement that set the date for parliamentary and presidential elections on Dec. 10, with a commitment to establish the constitutional and legal basis by Sept. 16. But the question of how such a basis will be set - whether by a referendum on a constitutional draft, a new election law, or an adaptation of Libya's post-uprising constitutional declaration - was left open. The issue is central because opponents of Haftar, the dominant figure in eastern Libya and a possible candidate for president, want to ensure that presidential and civilian powers over the military are clearly defined before polls are held. Members of the body that drafted the new constitution called on Wednesday for a referendum before the election, but analysts say that would be hard to achieve. Haftar's rivals suspect that, given the chance, he would return the country to authoritarian rule. They also blame him for destroying parts of Benghazi and displacing large numbers of residents in a three-year campaign for control of Libya's second-largest city. Haftar says he is ridding Libya of Islamist extremists and is committed to the electoral process. As the meeting in Paris took place, Haftar's Libyan National Army (LNA) pressed on with a campaign against Islamists and other opponents in the eastern city of Derna, where the United Nations says fighting is having a "devastating" impact. On Wednesday, the LNA said it had taken control of sites in the Saida Khadija neighbourhood inside Derna, after advancing from the outskirts of the city. Conflict has also flared in recent weeks in the southern city of Sabha, on the dividing line between two loose alliances that have supported rival political camps in Tripoli and the east since disputed elections in 2014. There was no mention of the fighting in the Paris statement, though Seraj told reporters he had "appealed for an end to combat in all of Libya - enough blood has been spilt". Analysts say the conflict and the several hundred thousand people displaced by it could skew the outcome of an election. Some Libyans have said the country is too divided to cope with a national vote. Security is another challenge. Suicide attackers targeted the offices of the electoral commission in Tripoli in May, killing at least 12 people. Libya has no national security forces to oversee polls, or effective national institutions that can settle legal challenges. There is no consensus over how to unify the security forces and other divided bodies including the central bank - a further goal set out in the Paris statement. Suspicion is visible on both sides. Some west Libyan armed groups, including from the key military power base of Misrata, see France as too close to their rival Haftar and stated their opposition to the Paris talks before they began. A senior LNA source stressed that Haftar had not put his signature to any deal. "Sitting does not mean agreeing, and no agreement was signed at the Paris meeting," he said. More than 40 eastern members of parliament issued a statement supporting pledges referenced in the Paris declaration to move parliament to Benghazi and to encourage a military unification dialogue in Cairo, a process seen to favour the LNA. "It's very easy to get Libyans to agree to agree to something, but when it comes down to hashing out the details, that's when the squabbles tend to start," said Tarek Megerisi, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. (Additional reporting by Ayman al-Warfalli in Benghazi; Editing by Ulf Laessing and Robin Pomeroy, Larry King) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. (Reuters) - Los Angeles police said on Tuesday that they had launched a criminal investigation into accusations that a gynaecologist at the University of Southern California engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct with students over a 26-year period. (Reuters) - Los Angeles police said on Tuesday that they had launched a criminal investigation into accusations that a gynaecologist at the University of Southern California engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct with students over a 26-year period. Officials said the investigation would have international scope as they seek input from up to 10,000 women who were treated by Dr. George Tyndall at USC's student health clinic. The scandal has prompted more than a dozen lawsuits and forced the resignation of the institution's president. Police so far have the names of 52 women who have said that Tyndall, 71, touched them, spoke to them inappropriately or engaged in other misconduct while examining them as a USC doctor from 1990 to 2016, Deputy Chief Justin Eisenberg said at a news conference in Los Angeles. Police will work closely with the Medical Board of California, which licenses doctors, and will ultimately refer any evidence of criminal wrongdoing to prosecutors, Eisenberg said. Tyndall, who resigned from USC last year, could not be reached by Reuters for comment on Tuesday. In interviews with the Los Angeles Times he has denied any wrongdoing and defended his medical exams. The university has acknowledged failing to properly act on at least eight complaints made against Tyndall between 2000 and 2014. Several former patients have filed civil lawsuits, and one accusation made in a sworn declaration that was made public last week dates back to 1991. Last week, 200 of the university's faculty members called for the resignation of USC President C.L. Max Nikias, and more than 2,200 students, alumni and others at USC signed a similar petition online. He stepped down over the weekend. Tyndall resigned from the university after an internal inquiry found that some of his examination practices were beyond accepted medical standards and that he had harassed patients. Captain William Hayes, who heads the LAPD's Robbery-Homicide division, said so far 39 former patients had agreed to speak with investigators. He said police were seeking input from as many as 10,000 women who were his patients over the years. It was too soon to know if criminal charges would be brought against Tyndall, Hayes said. A hotline set up by USC has received nearly 400 reports from patients, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday. The Chinese government has also voiced "deep concern" over reports that many of Tyndall's alleged victims were students from China. (Reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, California; Editing by Toni Reinhold) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Rodrigo Campos and Jonathan Allen NEW YORK (Reuters) - A senior North Korean official made a rare visit to the United States on Wednesday for talks about a possible summit between the leaders of the two countries but the sides appeared far apart on the central issue of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons. Kim Yong Chol, a close aide of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and vice chairman of the ruling Workers' Party's Central Committee, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy airport on a flight from Beijing By Rodrigo Campos and Jonathan Allen NEW YORK (Reuters) - A senior North Korean official made a rare visit to the United States on Wednesday for talks about a possible summit between the leaders of the two countries but the sides appeared far apart on the central issue of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons. Kim Yong Chol, a close aide of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and vice chairman of the ruling Workers' Party's Central Committee, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy airport on a flight from Beijing. He was later seen entering a hotel in midtown Manhattan. Kim Yong Chol is due to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss whether to go ahead with an unprecedented meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim. The summit, originally planned for June 12 in Singapore, has been cast in doubt as the two countries - which have technically been at war since the 1950s - test each other's diplomatic mettle. Trump last week called off the summit after North Korea expressed anger at comments by U.S. officials. But Trump later said he was reconsidering his position and U.S., North Korean and South Korean officials have gone ahead with summit preparations anyway. The White House said on Wednesday that negotiations at the demilitarized zone along the border between North and South Korea for the summit were going well and that it expects the historic meeting to take place on June 12. A U.S. official said negotiations about the summit's agenda have so far been slow going, and the two fundamental issues, the definition of North Korean denuclearisation and whether both sides would take actions at the same time or separately, remained unsettled. Trump has sworn not to allow North Korea to develop nuclear missiles that could hit the United States and wants North Korea to "denuclearize," or get rid of its nuclear arms. But the leadership in Pyongyang is believed to regard nuclear weapons as crucial to its survival and has rejected unilaterally disarming. (Reporting by Rodrigo Campos and Jonathan Allen in New york; additional reporting by David Brunnstrom and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Writing by Alistair Bell; editing by Grant McCool; Editing by Mary Milliken) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Raquel Castillo MADRID (Reuters) - British businessman Bill Browder, a prominent Kremlin critic, was detained and then released by Spanish police on Wednesday, after a warrant from Russia for his arrest for tax evasion was found to be invalid, police said. The head of investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, Browder led a campaign to expose corruption and punish Russian officials he blames for the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, who he employed as a lawyer. By Raquel Castillo MADRID (Reuters) - British businessman Bill Browder, a prominent Kremlin critic, was detained and then released by Spanish police on Wednesday, after a warrant from Russia for his arrest for tax evasion was found to be invalid, police said. The head of investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, Browder led a campaign to expose corruption and punish Russian officials he blames for the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, who he employed as a lawyer. A Russian court sentenced Browder to nine years in prison in absentia in December after finding him guilty of deliberate bankruptcy and tax evasion. Browder said on his Twitter account that Interpol had advised Spanish police not to honour a Russian Interpol red notice - a request to locate and provisionally arrest someone pending extradition. "This is the sixth time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case," he tweeted, following his release from a Madrid police station. Browder had been held in police custody for the "minimum necessary time" and was released because the warrant issued by Russian authorities was invalid, Spanish police said in a statement on Twitter. The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Browder was in Madrid to give evidence to Jose Grinda, a Spanish prosecutor who spearheads investigations into organised crime, about money from the Magnitsky case that has flowed to Spain, the British businessman said on Twitter. He later posted a tweet and photograph of himself at Madrid's Barajas airport saying he had cleared Spanish immigration without problems and was on his way back to London. Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 shortly after alleging that Russian officials were involved in large-scale tax fraud. His death nearly a year later while awaiting trial caused an international uproar. Browder has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of a personal vendetta over the businessman's efforts to get other countries to impose so-called Magnitsky sanctions against Russian individuals. British foreign minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday he had spoken to Browder and was glad he had been released. "Moscow should concentrate on bringing those responsible for the murder of Magnitsky to justice," Johnson said in a tweet. (Writing by Paul Day; Editing by Sonya Dowsett and John Stonestreet) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. Russia on Wednesday rejected accusations that it was behind the murder of a journalist who was openly opposed to President Vladimir Putin and had been forced to flee the country in 2017 after receiving threats. Moscow: Russia on Wednesday rejected accusations that it was behind the murder of a journalist who was openly opposed to President Vladimir Putin and had been forced to flee the country in 2017 after receiving threats. Ukrainian prime minister Volodymyr Groysman had claimed Russia was responsible for the death of Arkady Babchenko, 41, who was shot multiple times outside his home in Kiev on Tuesday evening and died before he got to the hospital. "I am certain that the Russian totalitarian machine could not accept his honesty and principles. He was a true friend of Ukraine who told the world the truth about Russian aggression," Groysman had said on Facebook. However, Russian Federal Security Service director Alexander Bortnikov told Interfax that the accusations were "stupid" and said that Ukrainian authorities were "delirious and deliberately trying to provoke Moscow". Russia's foreign ministry said in a statement, "We demand that the Ukrainian authorities make every effort to promptly investigate. Bloody crimes and total impunity had become routine for the Kiev regime", while offering condolences to Babchenko's family and friends. A spokesperson from the European union's diplomatic service, European Union External Action (EEAS) said an investigation into Babchenko's death had to be launched so that those responsible could be made accountable. Babchenko was found bleeding at the entrance to his block of flats by his wife and died in an ambulance. He was reportedly shot several times in the back, the BBC reported. Ukrainian lawmaker Anton Herashchenko said the journalist had gone out to buy some bread and that the killer was waiting for him. Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko said they suspected Babchenko was killed because of his "professional activities". Babchenko had grown highly critical of the Russian government in recent years. He criticised Putin's annexation of Crimea and his support for the separatists of southeast Ukraine. He left Russia in February 2017, writing that it was "a country I no longer feel safe in". He moved to Prague and in August, settled in Kiev. Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny described Babchenko's murder as "shocking". Harlem Desir, the media freedom representative at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said he was horrified by Babchenko's death and called on the Ukrainian government to conduct an immediate investigation. Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who had been reported shot and killed in the Ukrainian capital Tuesday, has shown up at a news conference very much alive. Moscow: Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital Wednesday less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Babchenko's death was faked to foil a plot to take his life. Ukrainian police said Tuesday that Babchenko, a strong critic of the Kremlin, was shot multiple times in the back Tuesday and found bleeding there by his wife. Authorities said they suspected he was killed because of his work. Vasyl Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, announced at a news conference Wednesday that the security agency and the police had solved Babchenko's slaying. He then startled everyone there by inviting the 41-year-old reporter into the room. To the applause and gasps of the press, Babchenko took the floor and apologized to the friends and family who mourned for him and were unaware of the plan. "I'm still alive," he said. Before ushering Babchenko into the room, Gritsak said investigators had identified a Ukrainian citizen who had been recruited and paid $40,000 by the Russian security service to organize and carry out the killing. The unidentified Ukrainian man in turn hired an acquaintance who had fought in the separatist war in eastern Ukraine as the gunman. Babchenko, one of Russia's best-known war reporters, fled the country in February 2017 after receiving death threats. He spoke and wrote about leaving the country because of the threats against him and his family.. He said his home address was published online and the threats he received were made by phone, email and social media. Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian lawmaker who also moved to Ukraine, said Wednesday that Babchenko continued being threatened after he settled last fall in Kiev, where he worked as a host for the Crimean Tatar TV station. Babchenko did not take the intimidation too seriously, according to Ponomarev. Moscow's annexation of Crimea and support for separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine were topics on which the journalist was scathingly critical of the Kremlin. By Sonya Dowsett and Isla Binnie MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's centrist Ciudadanos party refuses to support a motion of no-confidence in Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy due this Friday, its leader said on Wednesday, making the votes of smaller parties key in the bid to end the premier's six-year rule. Spanish political parties are taking advantage of Rajoy's weak minority party and a court ruling last week that sentenced dozens of people linked to his conservative People's Party (PP) to decades in prison in a long-running corruption trial. The no-confidence motion, presented by the main opposition Socialists, needs backing from a fragmented parliament including nationalist parties from the Basque and Catalan regions each with their own agenda. By Sonya Dowsett and Isla Binnie MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's centrist Ciudadanos party refuses to support a motion of no-confidence in Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy due this Friday, its leader said on Wednesday, making the votes of smaller parties key in the bid to end the premier's six-year rule. Spanish political parties are taking advantage of Rajoy's weak minority party and a court ruling last week that sentenced dozens of people linked to his conservative People's Party (PP) to decades in prison in a long-running corruption trial. The no-confidence motion, presented by the main opposition Socialists, needs backing from a fragmented parliament including nationalist parties from the Basque and Catalan regions each with their own agenda. Ciudadanos would be open to proposing a second motion of no-confidence with an independent candidate and an eye to calling an early election, Albert Rivera said in an interview with COPE radio station. He said the Socialists had turned down this plan. Rajoy said in parliament on Wednesday he intended to carry out his four-year term without calling an early election. But opposition parties are expected to continue to try to oust him even if Friday's no-confidence vote fails. "Even if no successful motion is passed to oust Rajoy, the risk of early elections before the end of the year has increased significantly," said Antonio Barroso, an analyst at Teneo Intelligence. "If an early election is held before year-end, a centrist, market-friendly and pro-European government would be the most likely result," he added. Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez has put himself forward as the alternative candidate for leader and offered to agree with other parties on a date for fresh elections. So far, leftist party Podemos, which was founded in 2014 and fed off voter frustration with economic inequality and alleged corruption during a biting recession, has pledged its backing. Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, whose party holds 67 seats in parliament, would support the motion of no-confidence, he said in an interview with La Sexta television on Wednesday. Even so, the joint votes with the Socialists fall short of the minimum 176 votes required to unseat Rajoy. "If it fails, as of Friday we will get to work on throwing out the PP," Iglesias added. Rivera dismissed any partnership with Podemos and the regional parties, branding them "separatists and populists". "A strong legitimate government arising from elections will give much more stability to Spain than a 'Frankenstein government' with a parliamentary minority," he said. (Additional reporting by Rodrigo de Miguel; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. US President Donald Trump confirmed that Kim Yong Chol, was on his way for the highest-level meeting aimed at salvaging the historic summit. Seoul: US President Donald Trump confirmed in a tweet that Kim Yong-chol, a former spy chief and trusted adviser to North Koreas leader, was on his way for what would be the highest-level meeting in this weeks flurry of diplomatic activity aimed at salvaging the historic summit. We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea, Trump said in a Twitter post on Tuesday. "Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young-chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you! Kim Yong-chol, vice chairman of the ruling Workers Partys Central Committee and formerly head of a top North Korean military intelligence agency, will meet Mike Pompeo later this week, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said. The United States continues to actively prepare for President Trumps expected summit with leader Kim in Singapore, she said. But she stopped short of saying the meeting had been reinstated after Trump canceled it last week in a letter to Kim, citing open hostility in North Korean statements. This week's talks are aimed at determining whether North Korea is prepared to make sufficient commitments toward getting rid of its nuclear weapons, a US official said, despite Pyongyang's insistence it will not unilaterally denuclearize. Trump thinks ongoing discussions are going very well, Sanders said. She was referring to talks over the weekend between United States and North Korean officials in the demilitarized zone dividing the two Koreas and a White House logistics teams discussions with North Korean counterparts in Singapore. The senior North Korean envoy was expected to arrive in the United States on Wednesday after speaking to Chinese officials in Beijing, South Koreas Yonhap news agency said. The New York talks suggest that planning for the unprecedented summit, initially scheduled for 12 June, is now moving ahead and possibly into a more advanced phase. Kim Yong-chol will be the most senior North Korean official to meet top officials for talks in the United States since Jo Myong-rok, a marshal, met then-President Bill Clinton at the White House in 2000. Kim Yong-chol coordinated the North Korean presidents two meetings with Pompeo in April and May. North Korea has faced years of isolation and economic sanctions over its nuclear and missile programs since it conducted its first nuclear test in 2006. The North had tested missiles believed to be capable of reaching the United States, but Trump has vowed not to let Pyongyang develop one that could deliver a nuclear warhead. By Tuvan Gumrukcu and Ece Toksabay ANKARA (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department on Wednesday denied media reports that a deal had been reached between the United States and Turkey on a three-step plan for withdrawing the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia from Syria's Manbij By Tuvan Gumrukcu and Ece Toksabay ANKARA (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department on Wednesday denied media reports that a deal had been reached between the United States and Turkey on a three-step plan for withdrawing the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia from Syria's Manbij. "We don't have any agreements yet with the government of Turkey," department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement in Washington. "We're continuing to have ongoing conversations regarding Syria and other issues of mutual concern," she said, adding that American and Turkish officials had met in Ankara last week for talks on the issue. Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency said on Wednesday Ankara and Washington had reached a technical agreement on the withdrawal plan, a move Turkey has long sought from the United States. The report comes as differences over Syria policy and Washington's decision in December to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem have strained ties between the NATO allies. Turkey is outraged by U.S. support for the YPG militia, considering them a terrorist organisation. Ankara has threatened to push its offensive in northern Syria's Afrin region further east to Manbij. Manbij is a potential flashpoint. The Syrian government, Kurdish militants, Syrian rebel groups, Turkey, and the United States all have a military presence in northern Syria. Under the terms of the plan to be finalised during a visit by Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu to Washington on June 4, the YPG will withdraw from Manbij 30 days after the deal is signed, Anadolu said, quoting sources who attended meetings at which the decisions were made. Turkish and U.S. military forces will start joint supervision in Manbij 45 days after the agreement is signed and a local administration will be formed 60 days after June 4, Anadolu said. Earlier on Wednesday, Cavusoglu told broadcaster AHaber that a timetable for the Manbij plans could be set during talks with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington, and that it could be implemented before the end of the summer. Cavusoglu was also quoted by media on his return flight from Germany saying that, if finalised, the plan for Manbij could be applied throughout northern Syria. However, a local Manbij official later told Reuters that Cavusoglu's assertions that U.S. and Turkish forces would temporarily control the region were "premature" and lacked credibility. Relations between Ankara and Washington have hit a low-point due to factors such as the sentencing this month in New York of a former Turkish state bank executive to 32 months in prison for taking part in an Iran sanctions-busting scheme, a case Turkey has called a political attack. DEFENCE PROCUREMENT Turkey has also caused unease in Washington with its decision to buy S-400 surface-to-air missiles from Russia and drew criticism over its detention of a U.S. Christian pastor, Andrew Brunson, on terrorism charges. Brunson faces up to 35 years in prison on charges of links to the network Ankara blames for a 2016 coup attempt. The pastor denied the charges in a Turkish court this month. A U.S. Senate committee last week passed its version of a $716 billion defence policy bill, including a measure to prevent Turkey from buying Lockheed Martin F-35 jets, citing Brunson and the Russian missile deal. Cavusoglu, however, said that if the United States blocked Turkey from buying the jets, Ankara would go elsewhere to meet its needs, adding that it was unlikely Washington would be able to back out of the deal. Turkey has plans to buy more than 100 of the F-35 jets and the Pentagon last year awarded Lockheed $3.7 billion in an interim payment for the production of 50 of the aircraft earmarked for non-U.S. customers, including Ankara. (Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton in Washington; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Tom Brown) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Lesley Wroughton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. State Department spokeswoman declined to say whether human rights abuses were on the agenda of meetings with North Korea, despite criticism by successive administrations and a U.S. government report on Tuesday that described Pyongyang as running a system of prison labour camps By Lesley Wroughton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. State Department spokeswoman declined to say whether human rights abuses were on the agenda of meetings with North Korea, despite criticism by successive administrations and a U.S. government report on Tuesday that described Pyongyang as running a system of prison labour camps. "I'm not saying it will be, I'm not saying it won't be. I'm just not going to get ahead of the Secretary's meetings that start this week," spokeswoman Heather Nauert said, referring to a meeting on Thursday in New York between U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and North Korean official, Kim Yong Chol, ahead of a potential summit. Any summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would chiefly focus on Pyongyang's nuclear programs, Nauert said. While the United States has long criticized North Korea for rights abuses, a possible meeting in Singapore on June 12 would be the first opportunity for a sitting U.S. president to directly raise the issue with the North Koreans. The White House was not immediately available to comment on whether North Korea's rights record would be raised. While talks are expected to focus mainly on North Korea's denuclearisation and its security, the United Nations and other groups have urged the United States not to neglect human rights. Human rights abuses in North Korea, including violations of religious freedom, are a "matter of discussion" for the United States, said Sam Brownback, U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, in releasing the U.S. State Department's 2017 International Religious Freedom Report. "You've got a gulag system operating in North Korea, and it's been a terrible situation for ... many years," said Brownback. North Korea has long been designated as a "Country of Particular Concern" in the report. Asked whether he expected the issue to be raised in the talks with Pyongyang, Brownback said: "I think they're raising all of these issues." The report accused North Korea of dealing "harshly" with people who engaged in almost any religious practice, through executions, torture, beatings, and arrests. It said an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 prisoners, some imprisoned for religious reasons, were believed to be held in a political prison camp system in remote areas "under horrific conditions." Three U.S. citizens were freed from North Korean detention two weeks ago, including at least one who spent time in labour camp. 'ETHNIC CLEANSING' The International Religious Freedom Report documented abuses in 200 countries and territories. Brownback also named Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Eritrea and Turkmenistan as countries where suppression of religious life was a "particular concern." And he called on countries to act to end attacks by government forces in Myanmar against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Separately, fighting between the military and ethnic minority Kachin since April has displaced more than 5,000 villagers, according to the United Nations. The Kachin Independence Army (KIA), one of Myanmars most powerful ethnic minority insurgent forces, has regularly clashed with government troops in the mountainous region bordering China and India since 2011, when a 17-year-old ceasefire broke down. The Kachin fighting has been eclipsed in media coverage by the plight of nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees who have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh since last August. "We must do more to help them as they continue to be targeted for their faith," said Brownback. "I believe it is ethnic cleansing of a religious minority that is taking place," Brownback said. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. The tax reform package that passed through Congress and the White House late last year was contentious, with most of the discussion of the measures dividing neatly along party lines. One of the most controversial portions of tax reform was its limitation of itemized deductions on state and local taxes to $10,000, a move that many high-tax states took as being politically motivated. In response, some of those states have looked at a number of possible responses to preserve deductions, arguably in an attempt to circumvent the intent of federal law. Last week, though, the Internal Revenue Service struck back against states looking for ways to work around the new provisions. A notice from the IRS warned that coming regulations from the Treasury Department will clarify deductibility of state and local taxes for federal purposes, and that they might not match up with what rebellious states have in mind. What tax reform did to the state and local tax deduction Under old law, taxes paid to state and local government entities were generally eligible for an unlimited deduction for those who itemize rather than taking the standard deduction. Specifically, there was no limit on the amount of property taxes one could claim as a deduction, and taxpayers could choose either to take the amounts they paid for state and local income taxes or the amount they paid in sales taxes as an additional deduction. Tax reform efforts had initially sought to eliminate the deduction entirely. In a compromise, a provision limiting the total deduction to $10,000 appeased taxpayers in many states with more moderate tax burdens. However, tax rates were still high enough in areas like New York, New Jersey, and California to make the $10,000 limit have a dramatic impact on federal tax burdens for their residents, and state legislators there looked at measures that could potentially come up with alternative rationales to justify federal deductibility. How states responded Specifically, states looked for ways to recharacterize state tax payments that were subject to the limits as unlimited charitable contributions. New York has established a state-run charitable fund that would accept donations, offering a tax credit against their state tax bills. For every $100 taxpayers give, they'd get an $85 tax credit against New York state taxes. A similar proposal in California would give residents a 100% dollar-for-dollar state tax credit for donations to what's called the California Excellence Fund to help pay for government services. New Jersey authorized a broader law that would allow counties, towns, and school districts to come up with their own charitable funds. Under the provision, local government entities could offer tax credits of up to 90% for donations to the funds. The IRS prepares for battle Yet federal authorities aren't happy with the state moves. In a notice [opens PDF] on May 23, the IRS warned that "despite these state efforts to circumvent the new statutory limitation on state and local tax deductions, taxpayers should be mindful that federal law controls the proper characterization of payments for federal income tax purposes. The interesting question is whether future Treasury Department regulations will try to single out these latest moves while letting states that have had similar frameworks continue to use them. In a review of a Missouri law that allowed a 25% state tax credit for donations to shelters for domestic violence victims, the IRS said that the state tax benefit from the donation didn't negate the charitable intent of the gift. Federal officials will be able to argue that there's a big difference in charitable intent in a gift made in exchange for a 25% state tax credit than for a gift with an 85%, 90%, or 100% tax offset, but some tax policymakers aren't as convinced that the distinction is legally valid. Keep your eyes open With some of these charitable options already available, it's important for taxpayers to watch closely how Washington reacts. If you give $100 hoping to get an $85 state tax credit plus a federal deduction worth as much as $37 more, you could end up $15 worse off if the IRS denies the deduction on the federal return. For some, though, the risk will be worth it, given the potential rewards if they win. Kinderdance A Top Childrens Franchise Awards A Franchise In California May 30, 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 Bronze level franchise to Joanna Collins. Ms. Collins will be instructing Kinderdance programs to children in Orange County California. Joanna has been dancing ever since she can remember and graduated with a degree in Dance and Child Psychology from Loyola Marymount University. After graduation, she performed for many years as a professional Dancer in theatre, film, commercials, and television. From there she went on to receive her Masters in Education and Teaching Credential from Pepperdine University. Joanna currently teaches at a Dance Charter School in Los Angeles and thought Kinderdance would be the perfect tool to bring dance and movement to more children in her area. Joanna is excited to join the Kinderdance team and spread the joy of learning through dance to children in Orange County California. We are excited about Joanna joining our franchise family and look forward to seeing her business grow in Orange County says Kinderdance Vice President of Franchise Development, Karen Maltese. Kinderdance, established in 1979 is a worldwide recognized dance, gymnastics, yoga 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 of LA, contact Joanna Collins at 323.364.5768 or visit at www.kinderdancela.com. Contact: Richard Maltese President / CEO Kinderdance International www.kinderdance.com 1-800-554-2334 SOURCE Kinderdance ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus The Lost Cajun Set to Open First Louisiana Restaurant in Slidell May 30, 2018 // Franchising.com // COVINGTON, La. - Having recently moved its corporate headquarters from Colorado to Louisiana, The Lost Cajun, a family-friendly restaurant with a focus on authentic Cajun food and hospitality, is set to open its first Louisiana location this summer. Located at Fremaux Town Center in Slidell, the new restaurant - which offers standard south Louisiana food such as seafood gumbo, jambalaya, fried seafood, po-boys and red beans and rice - will be owned and operated by Keith and Carolyn (Chi Chi) Williams, who eventually plan to open three additional locations in the area. After first being introduced to Raymond Griff Griffin, a Barataria native and founder of The Lost Cajun, nearly 28 years ago, The Williams discovered the Cajun concept through a mutual friend of theirs. A friend of ours read an article about The Lost Cajun and reconnected us with Griff. As the saying goes, the rest is history, said Chi Chi. We are thrilled to be the first to introduce The Lost Cajuns great food and unique atmosphere to Louisiana and look forward to offering this unique dining option to the Slidell community. Originally from St. Bernard Parish, The Williams moved to Slidell shortly after Hurricane Katrina. Keith spent over 35 years in the car business as a general manager and retired in 2016. Chi Chi retired in 2010 from Lockheed Martin after 30 years. They have two daughters, Cher (Scott), and Blair, one son, Joseph, and two grandchildren, Lauren and Peyton. Carolyn is also a volunteer for the Slidell Ladies for Liberty. A group of women (and men) in Slidell dedicated to adopting local soldiers being deployed on active duty around the world sending monthly care packages. I was always a workaholic and retirement just did not agree with me. I researched The Lost Cajun for months and finally visited one of the stores in Houston, Texas, said Keith. After eating the food and experiencing the companys unique and dynamic culture, we decided that we too wanted to become part of The Lost Cajun family. The Lost Cajuns menu offers diners a sampling of traditional Cajun fare, including a variety of gumbos - seafood, chicken and sausage, and vegetarian. Red beans and rice, fried seafood, crawfish etouffee and lobster bisque also top the menu, as does another Cajun staple, jambalaya. And what Cajun restaurant would be complete without beignets for dessert? The Lost Cajun further distinguishes itself with a fantastic down-home atmosphere - a true hole-in-the-wall with wooden tables, unique decorations and an expertly crafted playlist of Zydeco music. The open kitchen concept harks back to the wooden counters in Louisianas gumbo houses; patrons can watch their food being cooked and hear the courtesy and respect commonly associated with Cajun culture. As we continue to expand our presence nationally, its critical to find the right franchise partners who are as passionate about the brand as we are, said Griff. This is why we couldnt be more excited about welcoming Keith and Chi Chi to The Lost Cajun team. We are incredibly pleased with the following and recognition weve garnered so far from our loyal customers and cant wait to reach the same level of acclaim in Louisiana. About The Lost Cajun Founded in 2010 and franchising since 2013, The Lost Cajun is a family-friendly restaurant concept with a focus on authentic Cajun food and hospitality. Today, there are 17 restaurants open and operating in four states, with several others in various stages of development. For more information, visit www.thelostcajun.com. Media Contact: Leah Cotton Franchise Elevator PR (847) 239-8171 lcotton@franchiseelevator.com SOURCE The Lost Cajun ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN! Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2021. President of European Commission attended celebration of 100 years of the First Republic of Georgia - GeorgianJournal Sony two new Bravia 4K android TVs launched in India News oi-Karan Sony is expanding its smart LED TV lineup in India by launching its Bravia KD-85X9000F and KD-65X9000F models the smart LED TVs are priced at Rs 12,99,900 and Rs 3,39,900 respectively. Sony is expanding its smart LED TV lineup in India and launched its Bravia KD-85X9000F and KD-65X9000F models in the country. The company has launched both the models on May 28. The newly launched smart LED TVs are priced at Rs 12,99,900 and Rs 3,39,900 respectively. Both the models are available at all the Sony Center and electronics retailers across the country. The Sony Bravia KD-85X9000F comes with a screen size of 85-inches, while the Bravia KD-65X9000F is limited on 65-inches. The two new models are launched with the addition to the X9000F 4K HDR Android TV series, which was launched earlier this month. The 55-inch Bravia KD-55X9000F is already available in India at a price point of Rs. 2,39,900. The TVs which falls under the Bravia X9000F series - KD-85X9000F, KD-65X9000F, and KD-55X9000F - all the TVs comes with the 4K HDR panels to deliver a premium TV watching experience. All the TV models feature a TRILUMINOS Display which is touted to produce accurate reds, greens, and blues. The Bravia X9000F series is powered by Sony's 4K X-Reality PRO image engine and 4K HDR Processor X1 Extreme. The image engine works with Sony's algorithm of reality creation database to deliver detailed visuals, while the processor enables realistic picture quality. The new TV models run on Android TV version 7.0 with Sony's own interface on top. The Android TV comes with Google Play access, and a future software update will also bring Smart Home Ready to enable communication with other smart devices via Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Tv models come with built-in Chromecast which enables the content streaming directly from a compatible smartphone or tablet. Users can access Netflix and Google Play directly from a dedicated button. Connectivity wise the Sony Bravia X9000F series has Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth v4.1, four HDMI ports, three USB ports, and an Ethernet. The TV models have 16GB of onboard storage and features such as Cinematic S-Force Front Surround, ClearAudio+, DSEE, and DTS Digital Surround. The company has also added a set of Dolby Vision support via a future software update on the Bravia X9000F series which will enhance the cinematic experience. The latest TV series already has HDR compatibility, HDR 10 support, and Hybrid Log-Gamma. There are too many features with these new TV models, but the concerning part is that these are way too expensive for a normal person to purchase. Sony needs to launch some smart TVs in the mid-range segment also because there are many brands which are delivering amazing features in low price point. Source Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications Worldwide sales of smartphones return to growth in Q1, 2018, Samsung leads: Gartner News oi-Priyanka Apple's smartphone unit sales returned to growth in the first quarter of 2018, with an increase of 4 percent year on year. Global sales of smartphones to end users have returned to growth in the first quarter of 2018 with a 1.3 percent increase over the same period in 2017, while South tech giant, Samsung led the market with 20.5 percent share, it was followed by Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi and OPPO respectively, as per the Gartner report. The report said nearly 384 million smartphones were sold in the first quarter of 2018, representing 84 percent of total mobile phones sold. "Demand for premium and high-end smartphones continued to suffer due to marginal incremental benefits during the upgrade," said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner. The firm noted that Xiaomi was the clear winner of the first quarter, achieving a growth of 124 percent year on year. Xiaomi's refreshed portfolio of smartphones and aggressive pricing strategy helped it hold the No. 4 spot in the first quarter of 2018. "This strategy led Xiaomi to achieve 330 percent growth in the Emerging Asia/Pacific region," Gupta added. However, Gartner informed that Samsung's smartphone growth rate will remain under pressure through 2018, with Chinese brand's growing dominance and expansion into Europe and Latin America markets. Samsung is challenged to raise the average selling price (ASP) of its smartphones while facing increasing competition from Chinese brands that are taking more market share. The delayed sales boost for Apple from last quarter materialized. Apple's smartphone unit sales returned to growth in the first quarter of 2018, with an increase of 4 percent year on year. "Even though demand for Apple's iPhone X exceeded that of iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, the vendor struggled to drive significant smartphone replacements, which led to slower-than-expected growth in the first quarter of 2018," Gupta further added. Riversong Jelly Kids GPS tracker hands-on "With its exclusive focus on premium smartphones, Apple needs to significantly raise the overall experience of its next-generation iPhones to trigger replacements and lead to solid growth in the near future," Gupta pointed out. Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications Xiaomi confirms that the Xiaomi Mi A2 will not launch in India News oi-Vivek Xiaomi Mi A2 will not launch in India, confirms Xiaomi spokesperson People at the Xiaomi are probably busy currently, as they are getting ready for its biggest launch event of 2018, where the company is expected to launch the Xiaomi Mi 8, Xiaomi Mi 8 SE, Xiaomi Mi Note 5, and the Xiaomi Mi Band 3. And now, according to an exclusive report from Digit says that the company will not launch the Xiaomi Mi A2 in India. When asked about the Xiaomi Mi A2, the Xiaomi spokesperson said: "There is no phone that exists by that name. But we are going to make more Android One phone." Last year Xiaomi launched the Xiaomi Mi A1 in India, which is the first stock Android smartphone from the company to ditch custom MIUI. The Xiaomi Mi A1 was originally launched in China as the Xiaomi Mi 5X. Going by that, everyone was excited about the launch of the Xiaomi Mi 6X in India with stock Android as the alleged Xiaomi Mi A2. However, as the officials have confirmed, the Mi A2 might not see the light of the day. However, the spokesperson has also said that the company will be launching more Android One devices, which means the Xiaomi 6X could launch in India with a new nomenclature. Ex: the company might call it has Xiaomi Mi A1 second gen or the Xiaomi Mi A1.1 or the Xiaomi Mi A1+ and the possibilities are unlimited. Most smartphone makers will not be transparent about their future products as it might affect the sale of the current smartphones. The company might launch their next Android smartphone with the moniker Mi A2 or they might not. Currently, the company is also gearing up for the launch of the Xiaomi Redmi S2/Y2 (once again there is a confusion in naming) as this smartphone was launched in China as the Redmi S2, but the same might launch in India as the Redmi Y2 (which will be the successor to the Redmi Y1). This will be the most affordable dual camera smartphone from Xiaomi, which will compete against the likes of the Realme 1, Honor 7A and the Honor 7C. Conclusion: If you are waiting for the next Android One smartphone from Xiaomi, then I would suggest you go for any of the smartphones that are currently available in the market, as smartphones get better by the day and even your expectations and desire to get a better device just multiplies. Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications GREENWICH When the 2018 choice for the Greenwich Reads Together program was officially unveiled Wednesday morning, the ceremony called for something special. The title was revealed by assembling pieces of the books cover like a puzzle an appropriate touch for Code Girls, a national bestseller by Liza Mundy about the previously untold story of American women codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington, D.C., and learned the meticulous work of codebreaking, Greenwich Library Director Barbara Ormerod-Glynn said. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. The secrecy surrounding their codebreaking efforts nearly caused their stories to be lost to history, Ormerod-Glynn said as she praised Mundys book for its dazzling research, including interviews with surviving code girls. She brings to life this riveting and vital story about American courage, sacrifice and scientific accomplishment, Ormerod-Glynn said. Greenwich Reads Together is a communitywide experience designed to engage all of the town in exploring a single book through a series of events. Last year, with the help of 20 community organizations as partners, more than 3,900 residents took part in programming around the novel News of the World. First Selectman Peter Tesei, who helped reveal the title Wednesday morning, said the program makes Greenwich special. It is wonderful that Greenwich Library serves as the anchor for all of the organizations that come together to put forth this wonderful program, Tesei said. Truly it is about bringing people together around a common purpose, in this case reading this book and sharing the various experiences, interpretations and projecting to the community what it means to you. Its truly one of the beautiful things about Greenwich that we do. Greenwich Librarys board president Robert Marks said, We are very proud of Greenwich Reads Together in that it brings together the community in a very profound way. A full slate of programs for the fall will be announced in the future. Authors talks with Mundy are already scheduled: on Nov. 7 at Greenwich Librarys Cole Auditorium and then Nov. 8 at Greenwich High School. For middle school readers, an adapted and abridged version of Code Girls will be available in September. Elementary school students will be able to join in by reading the true story of Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code by Laurie Wallmark. This picture book biography explains to young readers the challenges women faced during this time in U.S. history, especially when a girls favorite school subjects were math and physics, Greenwich Librarys head of childrens services Deirdre Sullivan said. Sullivan said this would be an excellent chance to engage students in STEM learning. Educational opportunities are part of the goal for readers of all ages. This program is designed to promote the joy of reading and lifelong learning, which is one of the librarys core goals, Ormerod-Glynn said. The process of choosing a book began when members of the community made 100 suggestions. The list was whittled down to four finalists, which, in a new twist for 2018, were put out for a popular vote. After nearly 1,000 votes were received, Code Girls was the clear winner. It received more than 45 percent of the vote, easily outdistancing the other three books, said Kate Petrov, Greenwich Librarys public relations officer. Copies of the book were available at the event Wednesday morning, and more copies are prominently displayed in the main lobby. Code Girls is available in multiple formats, including large print and e-books. The Friends of Greenwich Library is once again the lead sponsor of Greenwich Reads Together. kborsuk@greenwichtime.com ANSONIA -Growing animosity between two groups of female students at Ansonia high School erupted into a full-fledged brawl outside the cafeteria early Wednesday morning resulting in the arrest of 10 students. More concerning than Wednesdays arrests is this is not the first incident involving these two groups at the high school, according to Police Lt. Patrick Lynch and Mayor David Cassetti. This has been an ongoing problem with these two groups and marks the fourth time since February that we have had to intervene, Lynch said. Police made a total of nine arrests in the three prior incidents, the lieutenant said. School resource officer Michael Barry had attempted to mediate the issues between the groups multiple times prior to Wednesdays incident by bringing together the students and speaking separately to their parents, Lynch said. On Wednesday nine female students, seven of whom are juveniles, police said. All were charged with third-degree assault and breach of peace. The two older female students, Emony Hamilton, 19 and her sister, Nychelle, 18, both of Wakelee Avenue, were charged as adults and released on a promise to appear June 8 in Derby Superior Court. The tenth arrest is a 15-year-old boy who was recording the fight on his cell phone. When a teacher approached him and ordered him to turn off his camera, the boy began cursing and became abusive, police said. As a result, he was charged with second degree breach of peace. All of the juveniles were released to the custody of their parents. Additionally all 10 have been suspended from school. None of the students involved in the fight sustained injuries beyond cuts, scratches and bruises, according to police. The fight broke out as one group was leaving the school cafeteria and the other was waiting in the hall outside at 7:10 a.m. Wednesday. Teachers, staff and Barry immediately interceded. This cant go on, Cassetti said. It cant be tolerated. The majority of our students are in school to learn. The Board of Education needs to put their foot down and permanently expel those students with multiple suspensions. The fight and discipline are expected to be the focus of this months Board of Educations June 13 6 p.m. meeting at the high school. Cassetti said many of the students involved recently moved to Ansonia from Bridgeport, Waterbury and New Haven. We have a quiet, quaint community here and everybody wants to come here, the mayor said. Lynch said that since the 10 arrested students have been suspended there are no plans to assign additional police to the school Thursday. We will be on call, he said. DANBURY The visual arts come alive at the Ives Concert Park this weekend with the Art at Ives: Juried Fine Art & Crafts Show. Presented by Friends of the Ives, the third annual show, part of the Newtown Savings Bank Fine Arts & Family Series, will showcase the work of more than 70 artists from the region and across the nation. The show takes place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at the concert park, 43 Lake Ave. Extension. Ives is the ideal location to host this event with flourishing acres of natural beauty and the perfect palette to showcase extraordinary art, said Phyllis Cortese, executive director of the concert park. The arts and cultural experiences contribute to building a vibrant community and are an essential component of our quality of life in Greater Danbury. All major genres of high-quality, original works will be featured, including painting, drawing, ceramics, digital art/photography, metalwork, fiber arts, mixed media, sculpture, wearable art/jewelry and wood. Also featured will be talented local student artwork. New this year is a wine tasting presented by Max Wine & Spirits in Danbury. "We're trying to reach out more into the community, so we're definitely looking forward to it, said Max owner Rick Eadie. Wine tastings are from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. both days. Eadie will guide participants through a comparative tasting of two whites, two summer-weight reds and two dry roses. Janice Utsogn, a weaver for 30 years and winner in the fiber art category last year, will demonstrate her craft as well as selling table and floor runners, placemats, area rugs and rugs weaved with all-natural alpaca wool made at Six Paca Farm in Connecticut. I like fiber arts and making thing with my hands, Utsogn said. I find it restive and rejuvenating and I like the patterns. Because I work with prints its fun for me to see what will happen as I weave it. Art at Ives is Utsogns favorite show. Its a very positive environment, she said. The venue is very pretty. It kind of has a country feel but youre in Danbury. The show will also feature live jazz, food, hands-on/interactive art demonstrations and a childrens area. Silversmith Betty Barrett of West Newton, Massachusetts, plans to attend the show for the third year. From the beginning, the leaders of the show have worked to make it very high-quality and responsive to both the artists and their customers, Barrett said. Ive come back every year to support the vision thats shaping and creating this show. Joanne Hunter, owner of The Art Spot in Danbury, is a juror. The artwork gets better and better, she said. The public has come to know they will be seeing very exciting work in all price ranges, while the artists are very interested in bringing their art to a new region. Its been wonderful to see it grow. Hunter noted she and her colleagues have a strict jury criteria. We look for one-of-a-kind pieces, no mass production and no reselling of merchandise, she said. It results in a collection of very fine artists with exceptional work to display. It's also fascinating to be able to chat with the artists in person.. Art at Ives Admission: $5.00; Wine Tasting: $15.00 in advance; $20.00 at the door (includes admission into the show). All events are rain or shine. For more information and tickets, visit ivesconcertpark.org or call (203)837-9227. HMD Global unveiled three new devices, upgrading its entry-level and mid-range portfolio. The Nokia 2.1 is the company's first phone with Android Oreo Go Edition, the Nokia 3.1 comes as a follow-up of the most successful HMD smartphone in 2017, while the Nokia 5.1 delivers some premium features on the cheap. The devices are priced between 99 and 189 and should be arriving in the following month or two. And now we have a few videos of the trio to kill some time while we wait. Nokia 2.1 is aimed at developing markets with its trimmed Go Android. Since the apps do not waste memory, the phone with a 4,000 mAh power cell has a massive battery life - HMD promises two days of continuous usage, but well put the statement to the test once the device arrives to the office. The Nokia 3.1 comes with a tall screen and promises a premium experience and quality at an affordable price. It is surprisingly small in hand, especially compared with the Nokia 2.1. Design is key for the Nokia 5.1, and this is what the promo video focuses on. The video gives pretty much the right impression that the Nokia 5.1 looks stunning both in Copper and in Blue. We were at the unveiling yesterday that took place in Moscow, and we shared our first handsn impressions. The invite for the Honor Play unveiling promised a groundbreaking experience, but didnt elaborate. And there were vague mentions of 4D gaming, but again with no further details. Newly surfaced images suggest that at least part of the innovation behind all these promises may be a custom OS by Huawei. Dubbed Kirin OS, it will be based on Linux. When talking about Honor Plays innovation, Huaweis chairman used the metaphor flying in the sky to illustrate the speed of the phone, perhaps due to the custom-tuned OS. This isn't the first time we've heard such rumors, they date back to at least 2015. Then they popped up again in 2016. Back then it seemed like a defensive move in case Google gave Huawei the cold shoulder. Yet, given ZTE's fate, Google might not be Huawei's biggest worry anymore. Now, these images could well be faked, but there are plenty of custom operating systems out there, so it's not unlikely that they are real either. Plus, in China as long as a phone runs WeChat, the underlying OS doesnt matter. And WeChat is on Huawei's global app store. The Play will be unveiled on June 6, so well know for sure next week. Source These are the best offers from our affiliate partners. We may get a commission from qualifying sales. Motorola might be about to add a new line to its portfolio as a photo of handset called One Power just leaked. It has no specs or any supporting info to go with it, but it does give a pretty good idea about the design. The One Power will be the first Motorola phone to feature a notch on its screen and it will have pretty skinny bezels. As the name suggests, the device will also be powered by the Android One platform, following in the footsteps of the Moto X4. Another thing the One Power will share with the X4 is a debut to the US, or at least that's what the source says. As far as the render is concerned, we can clearly see the "Motorola" branding on the display's chin, fairly thin side and upper bezels and a notch housing the usual stuff - earpiece, selfie camera, probably an LED flash as the latest Moto devices all carry that feature. At the back a fingerprint reader and a vertically-stacked dual-camera setup in an iPhone X-like fashion are visible. Unfortunately, nothing else is known about the device, so we don't really know where will it be positioned - will it be a mid-range device or Motorola's top-shelf offering? We can hope that the One Power will see daylight alongside the Moto Z3 Play on June 6, but it's more likely that it's not that far along in its development yet and we'll have to wait a bit longer. Source If the credibility of Samsung Galaxy A9 Star leaks was under question, here are some photos from the Taiwanese wireless authority NCC. Unlike its US counterpart, it publishes a lot of photos of the device. Unlike TENAA, it doesnt give away much in terms of specs. Samsung Galaxy A9 Star (photos by NCC) Still, a photo is worth a thousand words, right? We can see the Infinity Display on the front (6.28 Super AMOLED with 1080p+ resolution, according to rumors). And we can see the dual cameras on the back. Samsung Galaxy A9 Star (photos by NCC) Plus, theres a USB-C port on the bottom (with a classic Samsung Fast Charger in the box) and a 3.5 mm headphone jack (and bundled headphones). And we can see the Bixby button. Samsung Galaxy A9 Star accessories (photos by NCC) PS. Besides China and Taiwan, the Galaxy A9 Star should be available in other countries as well. And theres talk of a Galaxy A9 Lite too. Via Published on 2018/05/30 | Source Added episode 14 captures for the Korean drama "Wok of Love" (2018) Advertisement Directed by Park Seon-ho-I Written by Seo Sook-hyang Network : SBS With Lee Junho, Jang Hyuk, Jung Ryeo-won, Lee Mi-sook, Park Ji-young, Cha Joo-young,... 40 episodes - Mon, Tue 22:00 (2x35min episodes per day) Synopsis "Greasy Romance" tells a story of love, survival with a focus on a star chef who fell from the top chef in the best Chinese restaurant in Korea to a tiny kitchen of a local diner down on its luck. Broadcast starting date in Korea : 2018/05/07 More Published on 2018/05/30 | Source Added episode 3 captures for the Korean drama "Miss Hammurabi" (2018) Advertisement Directed by Kwak Jeong-hwan Written by Moon Yoo-suk Network : jTBC With Go Ara, Kim Myung-soo, Sung Dong-il, Ryu Deok-hwan, Lee Elijah, Lee Tae-sung,... 16 episodes - Mon, Tue 23:00 Synopsis A legal drama centering around judge Im Ba-reun, a top-notch judge who has no interest in success. Rather, he strictly follows what he believes is right. Broadcast starting date in Korea : 2018/05/21 More By Emily Mayer As The Great War raged on in Europe, the United States Government was recruiting more men between the ages of 21 an 31 to go and fight over there. Those listed in Classes 2 and 4 were being required to be drafted. An article on the front page of the May 25, 1918, edition of The Havre Plaindealer said, in part: CLASS TWO AND FOR MEN NOW FACE DRAFT Plan Approved by President to Weed Out Non-Essentials It is estimated by the provost marshal generals office that there are several hundred thousand men in classes 2 and 4 who are not engaged in useful war work. Included in the list are bartenders, gamblers, idlers of various sorts, stock salesmen, brewery and distillery workers and many other classes of workers whose employment is not regarded by the war department has having a tendency to promote the prosecution of the war. It is proposed that the local boards shall call up these men and say to them: We do not like the kind of work you are doing. Get a job that will help win the war or we will put you in the army. If the name refuses to do as instructed within a reasonable time, he would be called again by the board, placed in class 1 and certified for service. This action would be taken on the ground that the drafting of the man in question would not disturb the economic condition of the country Class 3 of the draft would not be disturbed by the proposed action because of the fact that only skilled workers and men employed in necessary war work are listed in class 3. Class 1 of the draft is divided into four groups. Into the first group go those who are physically fit. In the second group go those who have some slight defect which might be remedied in a hospital or by a minor operation. These men are called the remedial group ad there are about 50,000 of them in the United States. In the third group are those who are capable only of limited military service. There are about 200,000 of these men and they are the kind that have a glass eye, a thumb off or bad vision, bad hearing or any kind of a physical defect that would prevent them from being fighting men but which does not totally incapacitate them. These men have not been disposed of yet, but it is proposed to let them do the work of non-combatants which many fighting men are now doing The plan is to use these men immediately. The fourth group is composed of those who are physically incapacitated. They cannot be used in the army nor can they be used in useful war work, so the provost marshal general proposes to dismiss these men from consideration at once. To make the point more succinct, the following article was printed just under the above: RECRUITING PARTY TO VISIT HAVRE. Postmaster Pepin Received Official Notice. On Thursday Postmaster Pepin received the following official notice from Paul H. Lynch at Lewiston, Montana, asking that he give it as much publicity as possible: Recruiting party of U. S. army will be in your city for five days beginning May 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31. Men from 18 to 21 and ones who have become 21 since registration and those from 31 to 41 can enlist at that time. All branches of the army are open for enlistments. In other national war news, Congress was appropriating another $11 billion toward the war effort, American Guns Are Biggest In War. A proposal was being drafted by the Secretary of the Interior to give certain agricultural lands to returning soldiers at the wars end; a proposal by Representative Emerson would heavily punish those contractors defrauding the United States government shall be guilty of profiteering and after conviction, be treated as a traitor to his country and shall be punished by death, and of course a large advertisement at the top center of the page on Official Food Rules. Even students were not immune from the affects of war. An article ran in the Plaindealer about the amount of money Havre students in various public schools had in Liberty bonds and thrift stamps. It was estimated the students had about $10,000 in total savings, with $9,250 in Liberty bonds and the remainder in thrift stamps. In other local war news, we find in the Society column: Red Cross Evening Mrs. L. J. Christler entertained at the rectory on Wednesday evening in honor of Miss Caroline Covey of Auburn, New York. The function took the form of a Red Cross Evening. Knitting, sewing and cards, followed by an a la Hoover luncheon occupied the hours until midnight. The invited guests were: Mesdames F. A. Buttrey, H. E. Loranger, O. L. Whitlock, Melvina J. Sherry, N. E. Gourley, C. B. Koepke, Leslie Shane and the Misses Mary C. MacKenzie, Lucy Patterson, Very MacKenzie and Covey. The receipts of the evening were given to the Red Cross. In the Of Local Interest social pages, we find: E. C. Carruth was called to Helena the first of the week to attend a meeting of the food administrators of Montana, called by Alfred Atkinson of Bozeman. James Holland, Sr., and F. F. Runkle, county director and chairman of the Hill county war savings committee, were Great Falls visitors Sunday, called there to attend a meeting of the directors from other counties in the state. Lieutenant Bob Patterson, who has been enjoying a furlough in this city with his parents, left Sunday for Dallas, Texas, where he is stationed in the aviation camp. His wife will remain in Havre for the present, as Bob expects to leave for France in the near future. Havre Police Department Linda Rose Jordan of Havre, 55, was arrested on a disorderly conduct charge after a Third Street caller reported Tuesday at 7:58 a.m. his ex-girlfriend had broken a back window and was trying to get into his house. Hill County Treasurers Office reported an email fraud Tuesday at 10:27 a.m. Dustie Ann Goodman of Havre, 24, was arrested on a partner or family member assault charge after a 12:29 p.m. Tuesday caller asked to have a woman removed from a Fifth Avenue residence. A McKinley Avenue caller reported Tuesday at 1:30 p.m. that the tires on two vehicles had been slashed sometime the previous night. Matthew James Brix of Havre, 44, was arrested on a charge of possession of drug paraphernalia and Sean Lee Crittendon of Havre, 44, was arrested on a Justice or City court warrant during a vehicle stop on Fifth Street Tuesday at 4:36 p.m. After a caller at a Fifth Avenue business reported a man with a warrant Tuesday at 7:53 p.m., officers pulled over a vehicle, in which the man was a passenger, on 12th Avenue at 7:58 p.m. The man fled and officers pursued but were unable to catch him. The man, Matthew Allen Bell of Havre, 36, was issued a summons on charges of resisting arrest and obstructing a peace officer or other public servant. The driver of the vehicle was arrested during a 9:38 p.m. vehicle stop on 13th Street. Tia Francine Gardipee of Rocky Boy, 21, was arrested on charges of obstructing a peace officer or other public servant, driving with a suspended or revoked drivers license and failing to carry proof of vehicle insurance. Christie M. Stump of Box Elder, 36, was arrested on a Justice or City court warrant after a caller at a Ninth Avenue business requested help from an officer today at 1:17 a.m. Hill County Sheriffs Office Salvador Campos Rivera of Havre, 37, was issued a summons on three counts of violation of a protective order after a complaint was called in at 8:48 a.m. Tuesday. Kenneth Lee Looksbehind of Box Elder, 48, was arrested on a charge of trespass to property after a caller at a U.S. Highway 2 West business called in a complaint Tuesday at 11:20 a.m. Elizabeth Emmamain Barnes of Havre, 34, was arrested on a Justice or City court warrant issued Tuesday at 12:18 p.m. at Hill County Detention Center. Rodney Earl Mielke of Eugene, Washington, 57, was arrested on a Justice or City court warrant at the detention center Tuesday at 6:55 p.m. Deputies provided help after two callers on 17th Street West Tuesday at 7:04 p.m. reported a bloody man walking down the street. Deputies initiated investigation of a disturbance at the detention center today at 4:35 a.m. Havre Fire Department Emergency medical personnel responded to six calls Tuesday and two this morning. Fire crews responded to a Tuesday 2:45 p.m. report of a grass fire on the 400 Block of 12th Avenue. The fire was put out, but no cause could be detected. Fire crews were called at 4 a.m. today to a fire on the 400 Block of Eighth Street where an electrical wire in a wall had overheated and started a stud on fire. Firefighters opened a hole in the wall and extinguished the fire. Minimal damage was caused to the structure. Havre Animal Shelter This morning the shelter held three medium-hair cats and one short-hair cat with sex listed as unknown, one medium-hair female cat, three medium-hair male cats, two female short-hair cats and one male short-hair cat. The shelter also held this morning a 23-week-old male American Staffordshire Terrier, a 4-year-1-month-old female German shepherd-Labrador retriever cross, a 1-year-3-month-old male Labrador retriever-Boston terrier cross, an 18-week-old male Australian shepherd and a 26-week-old female Labrador retriever. Rob Cook, Republican Public Service Commision candidate for District 1, was in Havre Friday to speak to the North Central Pachyderm Club on his positions and goals for the PSC. Cook is a graduate of Montana State University in Bozeman, with a degree in mechanical engineering, and former owner of Intercontinental Truck Body, a heavy manufacturing facility. Cook also is serving his eighth year in Montana's House of Representatives where he serves on the Joint Select Committee on Pensions and on the Appropriations Committee, where he chairs the Subcommittee on Long-Range Planning. Cook faces former Rep. Randy Pinocci of Sun River, Cory McKinney of Great Falls and Mark Wicks, an Inverness farmer and rancher, in the Republican primary. The winner of that election will face Democrat Doug Kaercher of Havre in the general election. In his run for the PSC, Cook said, his goal for the office is "to bring some regulatory stability back to Montana's regulatory climate." He said a stable and predictable regulatory climate helps promote investments within the state. Cook also spoke on the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes Water Compact, which Pinocci has made a major issue in his campaign, attacking Cook for his 2015 vote in the Legislature in favor of the compact. The compact was approved and now is pending action in Congress. Cook said the PSC has nothing to do with the compact. He said two claims are being made about the compact: one, that the CSKT water compact is unconstitutional and, two, that this water compact threatens Montana's right to water. Addressing the first point, Cook said that back in November of 2017 the Montana Supreme Court ruled that the water compact was constitutional. In the state of Montana, the water compact is one of many approved by the state and it has been an active law within the state since 2015, Cook said. He added, that during a drought in the western part of the state in 2016 the strength of the water compact was tested and proved to be beneficial for the communities. "Emotions frequently win elections and it's difficult to stomp out the emotions with the facts. Nobody is satisfied with just the facts," Cook said. Cook said that one of the reasons that the CSKT water compact has been controversial is that it is under The Stevens Treaty, which gives Native Americans the right to fish at their accustomed places off the reservations while under later treaties Native Americans are not entitled to off-reservation rights, Cook said. Water rights themselves are divided into consumptive and non-consumptive rights, Cook said. Consumptive secures municipal and irrigation rights, while non-consumptive is "in stream flow" and secures the health of the fisheries. Non-consumptive water rights are not just regulated by water compacts but also by four federal laws, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Federal Power Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers act, Cook said. Off-reservation rights is the same water that is already regulated by the federal government. Cook said those regulations impact whether the CSKT couldgenerate hydropower with off-reservation-water rights, then the tribes would have to change the off-reservation water from non-consumptive to consumptive. That is nearly impossible, Cook said, because the tribes would have to prove that this action would not injure any other water right holder within the whole basin. Although some fear that this compact is causing people to lose water rights, that is a misconception, Cook said.The water compact secures the water rights, he added. A benefit to the CSKT water compact is that the water right stays with the land, Cook said. Cook said that the actual number of appropriated water on the reservation per irrigated acre is 10 percent of the reservation and rounds up to about 4 feet per acre, not the 40 per acre of the entire reservation that has been cited. Cook added that the CSKT water compact is beneficial for the state, saving the state close to $73 million. Irrigation claims CSKT had east of the divide under the Stevens Treaty, removed by the CSKT water compact, total 27,851 claims, Cook said. Those could have required the state to establish an additional water court and adjudicate these claims, costing millions. The federal money in the water compact also will pay for $1.6 billion worth of construction on the Salish Kootenai irrigation project, Cook said. Cook said that will result in 65,000 acre feet of additional water per year to help balance the in-stream flow and help during the dry years that may come in the future. The water compact secures consistent flow in perpetuity not only for the reservation but for off the reservation as well, he said. Cook also spoke on the PSC's involvement in cooperative electric programs, saying "for electric cooperatives, independent governance and local control must be preserved." "For electric cooperatives, independent governance and local control must persevere," Cook added. "Co-ops function properly because they are locally controlled. The closer you get the governance to the ground the more effective the governance will be." His history in the Legislature and the history of his business highlight his ability to solve problems of any scale, Cook said, but no commissioner can avoid lawsuits brought about by companies that dispute its findings. Cook said claims that a certain commissioner could help the PSC avoid or get out of lawsuits is "ridiculous." First Montana reservation to use program Rocky Boys Indian Reservation has implemented the 24/7 Sobriety Program into its court system, making it the first reservation in the state to implement this program. Chris Wolf Chief, juvenile probation officer with the Chippewa Cree Tribal Courts who helped set the program, said he has been working on this system for months with Montana Highway Patrol Sgt. Lacie L. Wickum, 24/7 Sobriety Coordinator for the state of Montana. It has taken a lot of work to get it to run smoothly since the first discussions in 2016, they both said during an interview Friday. The 24/7 program is a statewide program through the Montana Attorney Generals office with Wickum traveling through the state to help support local governments with the startup and operation of the program. She said she helps train and provide assistance, acting as a liaison between Intoxitrack, the state data management system used, and each test site. Back in 2016, Rocky Boy Reservation met for the first time concerning the 24/7 Sobriety Program, wanting to implement a new tool to aid the court systems as well as help those who are struggling with their sobriety on the reservation, Wolf Chief said. One of the benefits to this program is that the program acts as a jail diversion, giving a new option for those who are charged with a violent crime the option to participate in the program. Since it has been implemented, seven people have become involved in the program. Wolf Chief and Wickum said they have seen great improvements and with the participants believe that the program is successful. The program helps people and holds them accountable, giving them time to develop sober habits, Wickum said. People in the program are required to come in twice a day for testing. If a person tests positive for alcohol or drug use they will be required to sit and wait for additional testing and receive an immediate sanction, usually jail with a second positive. That consequence of going to jail immediately is enough for them to not drink, Wickum said. That accountability is huge and helps people develop, gives them time to develop. We have seen many lives change. The 24/7 program is free for on-reservation residents. This is to promote the options of the program and to encourage those who need it to be available to afford it, Wolf Chief said. Probation officers will require all DUI offenders a minimum of 90 days on the program. He continued that they are discussing creating a DUI court within the reservation as well as bringing in Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Wolf Chief said, adding that not much education about drinking and driving is available for residents of the reservation. Because the program is statewide, participants are given some freedom to travel, after consulting with their probation officers and locating another testing center, Wickum said. Participants can still go to many parts of the state for periods of time, still having to test twice a day in these secondary locations, although these secondary locations will charge $2 a test. Wolf Chief said they have already seen instant results from the program and he is very proud of how it is influencing the Rocky Boy community. He said this is not set up to be punishment, but to help members of the community with their own sobriety and their lives. In the past the 24/7 Sobriety Program has shown to be a benefit in many communities, Wickum said, citing a study done by RAND Corp. in 2015 that showed a 45 percent to 70 percent reduction in DUI recidivism. The program overall has benefits for the individuals and the county as well as the state. It allows participants to interact with their communities and the state saves by not paying the $60 to $100 per day to keep them incarcerated, she said. There isnt any other program like this, that manages everyones information through one site, she said. Besides test results, it houses financial information and history. She said what is unique about the reservation is that Rocky Boys information is not shared with the rest of the state and remains sovereign, although information will be shared with other testing centers if the participants travel. This is done to maintain as much privacy to those who are in the program, while maintaining state compliance. Many other programs confine people to the reservation and prevent participants from traveling, with this program they will be able to talk to their probation officers to organize a trip. Wolf Chief also said it is very difficult to cheat on the test. During the Breathalyzer testing an officer is present during the testing, as well as other testing methods that might be used if the testing officer suspects that it is needed. Wolf Chief added that during the winters or treacherous weather where travel within the reservation may be too dangerous, officers, on a case-by-case basis, may be accommodating to participants in the program, either postponing the test or having an officer come to the participants residence to provide testing. For those who fail, the punishment is meant to be swift and immediate, Wickum said, but not meant to be a harsh sentence. Wolf Chief said the first sanction is 12 hours in jail, the second sanction is 24 hours, the third sanction 72 hours and after that the case goes back to the court for failure to abide by the program. Wickum said that this program may not be meant for everybody, some refuse to stop drinking, and this program is just the newest tool to help those who are struggling. The program is growing, Wickum and Wolf Chief agree and they said they are both hopeful on the long-term impact that this program may have on the Rocky Boy Community. Wolf Chief said Rocky Boy is not special when it comes to people who abuse alcohol, and the program his baby has shown success in the past with other communities.This is just his community taking a new approach to a serious problem, he added. Kelcee Garcia, 7, a second-grader from Lincoln-McKinley Primary School, looks at a stuffed mallard at the Blaine County Wildlife Museum Tuesday. A typical school day for a second-grader means classes, recess, lunch, more class and then a trip back home. Tuesday, however, students from Lincoln-McKinley Primary School changed that pattern with trips to the Blaine County Wildlife Museum and the Blaine County Museum. Around 40 students with various parents and teachers took the trip to Chinook with the classes splitting up, one going to the wildlife museum first and the other going to the county museum, then swapping locations after a lunch break in the park. Throughout the school year, students are taught about the different classe... Havre Daily News staff The Hill County Clerk and Recorders Office is reminding people who are voting absentee in the primary election that ballots must be received at their clerk and recorders office before 8 p.m. Tuesday, June 5. Ballots postmarked June 5 or earlier but received later than 8 that night will not be counted in the election. Voters are advised that at this point they should probably drop off their ballots to their clerk and recorders office rather than mailing them. People can go to My Voter Page at the Montana Secretary of State website at https://app.mt.gov/vot... the dismissal is because of their illness or injury and this is in breach of the general protections provisions of the Fair Work Act or anti-discrimination laws; the dismissal is in breach of the general protections provisions of the Fair Work Act because their absence is a temporary absence from work; and/or the dismissal is in breach of protections contained in workers compensation laws, which apply where an employee is unfit for work following a work-related injury. For example, in NSW an employer must not terminate employment within six months of the date of the injury. She added that a reverse onus of proof applies where there is an alleged breach of the general protections provisions of the Fair Work Act. This means that the employer must prove that, on the balance of probabilities, illness/injury or temporary absence was not a reason for the dismissal. So how can employers mitigate against these risks, before any decision is made to dismiss? - Review the employees terms of employment, including to understand the employees right to paid sick leave and any notification and evidence requirements to take sick leave. - Require the employee to comply with any notification and evidence requirements. - Seek appropriately detailed medical evidence from either the employees treating doctor or an independent medical practitioner. The doctor should be briefed with detailed information about the role that the employee is required to perform, as well as any medical evidence the employer already has. The employer should seek information from the doctor which explains: the nature of the employees condition - the employees short-, medium- and long-term prognosis the effect of the illness or injury on the employees ability to perform the key aspects of their role, including as a consequence of any medication they may be required to take whether the employee may perform that role with adjustments to it. Sutherland said this information is necessary and relevant for an employer to consider whether an employee is able to perform the inherent requirements of their role. A termination of employment where an employee is unable to perform the inherent requirements of their role will not be a breach of the Fair Work Act or anti-discrimination laws. The HR Summit Melbourne will be held at The Mercure from 31 July to 1 August. It is part of the National HR Summit series, which was recently awarded Australias best business event. The event will bring together hundreds of HR professionals in Melbourne to discuss the most crucial and complex people management issues facing the industry. Find out more and book it at http://melbourne.hrsummit.com.au/index.php Indeed, two-thirds (67%) of employees are better at completing tasks when information includes text with images or video than by communications featuring text alone, according to Goodes research commissioned by TechSmith. Moreover, employees absorb information 7% more quickly when they are communicated with using text with static images than when provided only with text. Australian employees were one of the most progressive workforces surveyed, with video communication and collaboration in the workplace being most called for by Australians compared with other countries that participated in the study. The study also found the Australian workforce placed a strong focus on work-based social networks, with 26% of Aussie companies investing in these channels over the last few years, compared with only 16% in the United States. It also found that one in two Australians said they would understand information more efficiently at work if their company increased visual communications However, since ISS was not the direct employer of the 11 exploited cleaners, the FWO used accessorial liability laws to hold ISS lawfully accountable for its part in the workers being underpaid. The 11 cleaners were employed by First Group of Companies Pty Ltd, a now-deregistered company ISS had subcontracted between 2009 and 2014 to provide post-event cleaning services at the MCG. Moreover, First Group of Companies had engaged the cleaners under sham contracts, treating them as independent contractors despite their correct lawful classification as employees. Fair Work Ombudsman Natalie James said the significant penalties handed down should serve as a wake-up call to any head contractors who think they can turn a blind eye to non-compliance by the subcontractors they engage. The Fair Work Ombudsman has been warning businesses for years: you cant turn a blind eye to exploitation of contracted workers in your labour supply chains, said James. Responses so far have been varied, with many respondents reporting no discussion and no impact at their organisations, while others have seen a huge shift. In the case of the former, reasons have also been mixed. For some companies, the movement is simply more evidence that the employer will do little to support employees, with staff members unwilling to voice concerns because they know nothing will be done. One respondent dismissed it as a trend for fad junkies. Many industries have an ingrained gender imbalancein these workplaces, diversity may be a larger issue than sexual harassment. On the more positive end of the spectrum, the news made little impact as teams already enjoyed an inclusive culture or were engaged in ongoing diversity programs. Canadian Fitzpatrick has brought the case to the Scottish government, who rules the fishing watchdog, claiming the workplace was misogynist in its culture. After the alleged incident in which she was bound and gagged, Fitzpatrick claims that one of the bullies told her: This is what you get when you speak out against the boys. Speaking to the BBC, Fitzpatrick's sister in law said: We were horrified. We were sickened. We worry about what this has done to her. She's not giving up and now her family is behind her, and we're not giving up until someone is made accountable for their actions. One of the alleged bullies was contacted for comment by the BBC, whom he told: These are false allegations. I can't remember the event you mention, but if it did happen, it would have been office banter. Manager of historic Jersey herd named to Ag Hall of Fame MILLS RIVER Michael R. "Mike" Corn, who manages the historic Jersey dairy herd that Biltmore Estate owner George Vanderbilt brought to Asheville from New York in the late 19th century, was inducted into the Western North Carolina Agricultural Hall of Fame during the WNC Communities' 28th annual ceremony at the Mountain Horticulture Crops Research & Extension Center. The annual event recognizes stewards of Western North Carolina's agribusiness sector and honors the visionaries and leaders of the agriculture industry. A pioneer in the dairy industry in Western North Carolina, Corn has made significant impacts and has been a major influence in the dairy industry in Western North Carolina. Not only a successful dairy farmer who cares for the historic Biltmore Jersey herd, Mr. Corn has been instrumental in helping others throughout the region by generously providing information, advice and support to small farmers, rural communities, school groups, scout groups, local and out-of-state 4H clubs and FFA teams. A native of Asheville, Corn attended T.C. Roberson High School and Asheville-Buncombe Technical Institute. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, Mike earned a bachelor's degree in Animal Science at N.C. State University and started his career as a herdsman. Since 1984, Mike Corn has managed the historic Biltmore Jersey herd, one of the three longest operating herds in the United States. When the Biltmore dairy was closed and the Jersey herd was sold, a special arrangement was made to house some of the young heifers off the estate at a local dairy. That herd has grown to over 800 head and is now housed at Corn's Small Acres Farm in Mills River. This Biltmore herd is one of the largest Jersey herds in the state and has produced one of the top Jersey sires in the United States during the 1990s. Groups from across the state, nation and world have visited Corns farm bringing attention to WNC agriculture, and dairying in particular. One of the more pioneering and unique parts of his present dairy operation is his feeding program. Mike has partnered with local vegetable growers to feed non-saleable fruits and vegetables, such as tomatoes and squash, to the herd. He also uses by-products of the local breweries and cider production as ration for the herd. This feeding program has drawn local and national notice as being forward thinkingand the animals love it! Corn has also been active in working with youth. He has hosted numerous school groups, scout groups, and in 2017, a bus load of 4Hers from Ohio. FFA teams from high schools all throughout WNC come to his farm to practice their dairy judging skills. He has supplied several of our students with dairy heifers to show at the local livestock fairs in order to gain experience in the show arena, said Sarah Rhymer, agriculture teacher and FFA adviser in Transylvania County. She continued he offers once in a lifetime learning opportunities to students and the community. Corn is active in WNC dairy shows for many years and has developed the Mooternity Ward at the WNC Mountain State Fair, which has become one of its biggest agricultural attractions. This display educates the public about dairy animals and allows visitors to witness the birth of calves. In addition, Corn has been the recipient of many awards and accolades including the 1994 WNC Dairyman of the year, the 2008 Bill Martin Award for Service to Mountain State Fair and the 2018 Marvin E. Senger Distinguished Dairy Farmer Award. He was WNCs first board member of the NC Dairy Producers Association, board member of the NC and United Dairy Herd Improvement Association, founder of the Little Mountaineer Scholarship Fund and Superintendent of Mountain State Fair Dairy Shows. Also inducted this year was William Holbrook. WNC Communities is honored to award stellar leaders in agriculture with a plaque on the prestigious WNC Agricultural Hall of Fame Wall located in the Mountain Horticulture Crops Research & Extension Center in Mills River. Stroupe trial delayed until next year A Superior Court judge on Tuesday denied a request by murder defendant Phillip Michael Stroupe II to move his trial out of Henderson County but granted his attorneys' motion to delay the trial from July until next year. Lawyers for Stroupe argued that excessive pre-trial publicity makes it all but impossible for Stroupe to receive a fair trial locally. District Attorney Greg Newman responded by telling the court that moving the trial is premature and that he believes we can seat an impartial jury in this case. There is no requirement that prospective jurors come to court uninformed about the things taking place in their community, said Mr. Newman. The question is whether they can set aside the things they have read, seen, or heard about the case and base a decision of guilt or innocence on the evidence presented in the trial. Some will be able to do that while others may not. We will not know, however, until we bring in the prospective jurors into court and ask them these questions." The defense lawyers offered results from a telephone poll of 407 Henderson County residents to measure knowledge of the case facts. Only 17 percent of persons polled knew anything about the case. Sixty-one percent knew nothing about the case. In an affidavit in support of his motion to move the trail from Henderson County and delays its start, Public Defender Paul B. Welch III cited "the sheer geographic and durational scope of the criminal offenses alleged ... the volume and intensity of pretrail publicity ... and the unusual dispatch with which the matter has reached a trial calendar." The manhunt for Stroupe and the trail of crime the state alleges covered "seven counties in two states over a period of more than a week at the height of the summer tourism season in western North Carolina," Welch said. "Vitrually every law enforcement agency with territorial jurisdiction in western North Carolina was involved in the manhunt which ultimately resulted in the capture of Mr. Stroupe. At leaast four other individuals have been charged with being accessories after the fact to his alleged crimes and placed in pretrial detention based on evidence of actual guilt which is less than overwhelming." Holding the trial in the District 29B would prejudice Stroupe's right "to be tried by a jury whose verdict is uninfluenced by the local notoriety of his alleged crimes or the intensely prejudicial pretrial publicity about them," Welch argued. Scheduling a trial less than a year after the crimes gives the defense inadequate time to prepare, he added. "Unless these problems are relieved by judicial action, the trial is virtually certain to be unfair, and counsel is likewise virtually certain to be constitutionally ineffective," he said. Judge Robert Bell of Charlotte denied the motion to move the trial but granted a defense motion to delay the trial from July 23 to Jan. 28 or later. Defense lawyers argued for additional time of anywhere from 18-24 months, saying they needed more time to prepare and that the district attorney is moving too fast for a capital murder case. The judge allowed the continuance and directed the district attorney to reschedule the trial for Jan. 28 or later. Newman said he would announce a new trial date in the next few days. The trial of a Dublin beautician accused of unlawfully administering Botox-like treatments has been adjourned until 2019 pending a High Court ruling. Anne Rossi, who runs the Anne Rossi Clinic, at Vernon Avenue, Clontarf, Dublin 3, is being prosecuted by the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA) on 18 counts under the Irish Medicines Board Act. Ms Rossi has pleaded not guilty to all charges. The case relates to a Botox- like product called Dysport, which contains the prescription-only substance Botulinum Toxin A. It was the prosecution case that it was imported into the State without permission and administered to customers by injection at Ms Rossi's clinic, something which must be done by a doctor or pharmacist. Confession Prosecution and defence lawyers are seeking clarification from the High Court about admissibility of evidence of an alleged confession and the analysis of products seized. Yesterday, Judge John Brennan adjourned until February, pending the outcome in the High Court. HPRA inspector Niall McCarthy has told the trial he was granted a search warrant and went to Ms Rossi's home on the Howth Road, Raheny, Dublin, on February 19 last year. Invoices for Dysport were found and she told him there was Dysport at her premises. The Anne Rossi Clinic was also inspected. Dysport was found in a fridge and Ms Rossi was interviewed under caution and made admissions, the trial heard. In cross-examination, Mr McCarthy did not recall telling Ms Rossi "everything would be OK". He said it did not cross his mind that someone should advise her to speak to a solicitor. A garda based in Dublin who passed information to a criminal gang did "incalculable" damage to the force, a court has heard. Garda Jimell Henry (36), of Cairns Hill, Sligo, had contact numbers for 'The Pharmacy' and 'The Child' - two senior members of a Sligo criminal gang, the court heard. At Sligo Circuit Court, Judge Keenan Johnson said that by her actions, she had "let her colleagues and her community down and the resulting damage to the force is incalculable". Judge Johnson told the court that she had "undermined confidence in the gardai" and "betrayed her colleagues" by revealing information accessed via the gardai Pulse system to a criminal element, and this was very serious. Harmful Henry pleaded guilty to three charges of disclosing information obtained during the course of her duty as a garda in Co Dublin, knowing that the disclosure of that information was likely to have a harmful effect, on dates between December 16, 2014, and January 14, 2015. She also pleaded guilty to four charges of disclosing operational details without proper authority between those dates. The defendant further pleaded guilty to two charges of forging prescriptions for medication and two charges of giving false information to obtain prescribed medication from chemists in Sligo between February 3, 2016, and April 20, 2016. Superintendent Jim Delaney told the court that gardai in Sligo were concerned in 2015 and 2016 that sensitive garda information was finding its way to a Sligo criminal gang that was allegedly in a feud with another gang. He said there had been a number of tit-for-tat incidents. He said that Henry, a Ballymun-based officer, had contacted a Sligo garda, pointing out that some sensitive garda information was appearing on social media. A "complex multi-disciplinary" investigation was launched and it was found that Henry herself had made 980 queries in a two-week period and 73pc of those were about Sligo on the Pulse system. Supt Delaney said that Pulse was the most powerful element of An Garda Siochana. Henry was spotted by gardai in a meeting with a well-known criminal in Ballisodare, the court heard. She claimed to gardai that she had met him to fix a hair straightener. Henry contacted her criminal associates by what she termed a "gouger phone", the court was told. She was arrested on January 16, 2015. Supt Delaney agreed under cross-examination from junior defence counsel Keith O'Grady that Henry was compromised by her habitual drug use but that she was a willing participant with one of the gangs. Defence Counsel Kerida Naidoo SC said his client's offending had only been for a period of five months that was relatively small period in her life. "Five months is not the totality of her life," he said. She had pleaded guilty at an early stage, saving a four-week trial. Henry had a considerable drug problem, the court heard, "For most of her 36 years she was law-abiding," Mr Naidoo added. "She got involved in drugs and had a relationship with people who were from the other side of the tracks and it led her to make very poor decisions." Mr Naidoo said the actions of Henry had the potential for great harm to be done, but it was admitted that no person suffered actual harm and that was a very important distinction. Tatters Henry had no previous convictions. She apologised to gardai, her family - in particular her father, who is an ex-officer in Sligo - and the court. Counsel said Henry's case had rightly attracted publicity and her reputation in Sligo was "in tatters". Mr Naidoo said that if the court considered jail it would be a much more dangerous environment for a former garda than any other prisoner. He said the defendant's remorse was genuine and there was no danger of repetition as her job in An Garda Siochana was untenable and that was a significant punishment. The judge said the position a garda held in the Irish society was one of the most important and powerful. Judge Johnson said he would sentence the defendant on June 26. The body of Jastine Valdez was taken to Dublin Airport yesterday for repatriation. Photo: Collins The body of tragic student Jastine Valdez has been returned home to the Philippines, 10 days after her horrific murder. A coffin carrying the body of the 24-year-old, who was abducted and killed on May 19, was pictured leaving Thomas Murphy and Sons funeral home yesterday morning in a black hearse after laying in repose since Friday. She was taken straight to Dublin Airport in a mahogany coffin, followed by her heartbroken parents Teresita and Danilo. Consul for the Philippines Mark Christopher Congdon also accompanied the family, assisting them on the long journey to their hometown of Aritao. A funeral service will be held later this week, it is understood. In a statement on Monday, Mr Congdon said the "spirit of love and compassion" has shone from the Valdez home "like a beacon of light in a dark tunnel of torment". "Jastine will be greatly missed but never forgotten. Always in the hearts of Mum and Dad and the hearts of the Filipino and Irish nations bound together forever in grief in Jastine's name," he added. Jastine was murdered by evil killer Mar k Hennessy. The father-of-two dumped her body in an area of heavy gorse off Puck's Castle Lane in south Dublin. The following day, Hennessy was shot and killed by gardai following an extensive manhunt. Heartbreak A memorial service for Jastine was held at the weekend, where Mr Congdon told those present that Jastine's parents had shown incredible strength in the face of heartbreak. "Tess and Dani understand this horrific pain and have shown incredible strength, understanding and sympathy for their plight while in the midst of the worst calamity imaginable," he said. "Filipino and Irish, hand in hand, in solidarity, compassion and grief. "That spirit has been expressed in many forms, in words and deep regret, in silent tears, in families coming together in a single home to pray for Jastine, Tess and Dani, in attending the many prayer vigils across communities scattered across Ireland." Gardai recently issued an appeal to the public for information - particularly about Jastine's blue shoulder bag, which was purchased in Next. Investigating gardai are also anxious to speak to any passengers who travelled with Jastine on the 185c bus on the night she was abducted. Having lost everything, Jon and Janae Moss now give back abundantly The world is filled with everyday heroes, those quiet souls who go about doing good deeds and changing lives without aspirations of notoriety or fanfare. Jon and Janae Moss are two such heroes. The couple has learned through tough experiences that giving back to their community is important, and they do it vigorously. During this Septembers Day of Caring, Jon Moss and his crew from RBM Building Services took a quarter-acre of land at the Aspire Home that had been overgrown with weeds and cleared them out, put in grow boxes and designed a place of serenity for clients. We put in ... Where to go to see this fall's foliage show in the Tri-State area From its rush to mine gold in a border area captured from India to its frenzied dam-building on rivers flowing to other countries, China has gone into overdrive to appropriate natural resources in Tibet, rich in both water and minerals. The Chinese name for Tibet since the ethnic-Manchu Qing Dynasty Xizang, or Western Treasure Land explains why Chinas major water and mining projects are now concentrated on that plateau. Having depleted its own natural resources through an improvident style of economic growth, China is avariciously draining resources from the Tibetan Plateau. Tibet is a treasure-trove of minerals, including precious metals and rare earths. It is the worlds top lithium producer and has Chinas biggest reserves of 10 different metals. Commercially available satellite pictures show China is engaged in major mining activity right along the militarised frontier with Arunachal Pradesh in an area that fell into Chinese control on August 25-26, 1959, after Peoples Liberation Army troops overran the Assam Rifles outpost at Longju in Lhunze. Located along the McMahon Line, the outpost was part of Indias Subansiri Frontier Division. The attack, in which two Indian soldiers were killed, prompted an exchange of letters between Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Today, Chinas Lhunze gold rush is part of its wider efforts in the Himalayas to extract precious metals, rare earths and other resources. For example, after geological surveys identified rich copper deposits, copper mines have come up in the region where the Brahmaputra makes a U-turn to enter India. Copper mine tailings are beginning to pollute local waters in this sacred region, which personifies Tibets protecting deity, Goddess Dorjee Pagmo (Vajravarahi in Sanskrit), and is known to Tibetans as Pemako (Hidden Lotus Land). In its drive to corner resources, China is unmindful of the environmental desecration of sacred landscapes or the transboundary impacts of its opaquely pursued projects. The cross-border effects of its environment-polluting activities in Tibet were exemplified last autumn when the Siang the Brahmaputras main artery suddenly turned blackish grey as it entered India. By building giant dams in cascades near its borders, China has reengineered transboundary flows of international rivers originating on the Tibetan Plateau, such as the Mekong. But now it is also seeking to reengineer the weather in Tibet so as to induce greater rain in the plateaus arid regions. Most rain in Tibet is concentrated in its water-rich southern and southeastern belts along the international frontiers; the rest of the plateau is dry. According to a Hong Kong newspaper, Chinas geoengineering experiments in Tibet are an extension of its military program to trigger natural disasters such as floods, droughts and tornadoes to weaken an enemy in the event of a war. Such geoengineering opens a new interventionist frontier with unpredictable, trans-Himalayan implications. Given the climate systems global interconnections, experiments in Tibet to bring more rain could help suck in moisture from other regions. That would potentially affect monsoons in India and elsewhere in Asia. Tibet, one of the worlds most biodiverse regions, is unique: It has the rarest medicinal plants, the highest-living primates on Earth, and scores of bird, mammal, amphibian, reptile, fish and plant species not found anywhere else. Through the centuries, the nature-friendly Tibetan way of life helped preserve the plateaus pristine environment. But, under Chinese rule, Tibets demographic transformation, coupled with reckless exploitation of its mineral and water resources, has brought the fragile Himalayan ecosystems under increasing threat. Scientific studies, including by Chinese scholars, point to high rates of loss of genetic variability and extinction of species. Tibet is called the Third Pole because it has the largest perennial ice mass on the planet after the Arctic and Antarctica. But today, human-made environmental changes have resulted in Tibet warming at almost three times the global average. This holds major long-term implications for the triple role Tibet plays as Asias main freshwater repository, largest water supplier and principal rainmaker. International pressure needs to be mounted on Beijing to refrain from activities that are contributing, as one study points out, to a sharp decline of Tibets natural resources and environmental impairment. Asias ecological interests cannot be safeguarded unless China is forced to change course, including by respecting international environmental standards. No country is more affected by Chinas assault on the Himalayan ecosystems than India. Yet Indias silence is conspicuous. India, perennially mired in petty domestic politics, must speak up on Chinas environmental onslaught before it is too late. Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist The views expressed are personal Nguyen Truong Chinh proudly holds up intricately crafted animals, flowers and hearts - secret gifts made from plastic bags by his son on Vietnams death row. The palm-sized creations that his son and other inmates have furtively made and smuggled out of their solitary cells offer a rare glimpse of prison life in Vietnam, believed to be one of the worlds leading executioners. Theyre also an emotional lifeline for desperate parents fighting to free the children they say have been wrongly convicted. Any time we receive the gifts from my son I feel like hes here with me, like hes come back home, Chinh told AFP, clenching his jaw to hold back tears. His 35-year-old son Nguyen Van Chuong, convicted of murdering a police officer a decade ago, is one of a handful of prisoners known to have made the artwork that is officially banned on death row. The families suspect they made the pieces with discarded plastic bags passed on by fellow prisoners, shredded and woven into figurines. They were once smuggled out by prisoners released after serving their terms but relatives stopped receiving them a few years ago, leading Chinh and other parents to fear guards have cracked down on the forbidden prison pastime. Theyre too scared to ask about the practice during brief monthly visits closely monitored by prison staff. But Chinh says the art still drives his decade-long fight to free his son, who he insists was nowhere near the scene of the crime he was convicted of. Nguyen Truong Chinh displaying intricately crafted animals made from plastic bags by his son and death row inmate Nguyen Van Chuong. (AFP) When I see the animals, I know somehow that my son is stable enough to create these things, that he is mentally strong, said Chinh, sitting with a bag full of documents on his sons case. They motivate our fight for justice. Leading executioner Little is known about Vietnams prison system, but in a rare report last year the Ministry of Public Security said 429 people were executed between August 2013 and June 2016. That is an average of 147 per year - putting Vietnam among the worlds top executioners along with China and Iran. Details about prison conditions are scarce and media access heavily restricted. But the law requires death row inmates to be held in solitary confinement and monitored around the clock. Prisoners deemed dangerous have one foot shackled for most of the day, released only for 15 minutes to bathe inside their cell, where they also eat and use the toilet. In many cases, acts of torture, coupled with the denial of medical care, have resulted in deaths in custody that are almost never investigated by the authorities, Andrea Giorgetta from International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) told AFP. The MPS report said 36 death row inmates died behind bars between 2011 and 2016, without saying how. In letters to his family, Chuong said he was tortured in custody: hung upside down and naked with a dirty sock in his mouth and beaten during interrogation. Police electrocuted his genitals and prodded him with needles until he confessed under duress, he wrote. Vietnams foreign ministry rejected allegations of torture as false information in a statement to AFP and said it does not do anything to harm the honour and dignity of inmates. Determined to fight Relatives of the death row artists say their work offers a necessary diversion from constant fear of execution. Prisoners are given little notice before their execution, which since 2010 has been carried out by lethal injection. Before then, inmates were awakened before dawn, given a final meal and a cigarette, tied to a post and shot by five officers, with one final humane shot to the head, according to a 2016 report by the Vietnam Committee on Human Rights. The palm-sized creations that death row inmates have furtively made and smuggled out of their solitary cells offer a rare glimpse of prison life in Vietnam, believed to be one of the world's leading executioners. (AFP) Today locally manufactured drugs are used to kill prisoners, though advocates complained of inhumane deaths after a man reportedly took two hours to die in 2011. Its an unimaginable end for the families who refuse to give up hope their sons will one day be freed. Nguyen Thi Loan has sent more than 1,500 letters to the government proclaiming the innocence of her son Ho Duy Hai, 32, and gave up her land, home and job as a vendor to fight for his release. Im determined to seek justice and fairness for Ho Duy Hai until my last breath, she said of her son who was jailed over the murder of two women in 2008. His scheduled execution was called off at the 11th hour in 2014 by the president, raising hopes his case could be reopened. In his earlier years in prison, Hai sent shrimp, fish and miniature horses as gifts to his lawyers, former teachers and relatives. But she hasnt received one in years and fears jailers have banned the practice. Making those gifts didnt harm anyone. Why wont they let my son do it? she told AFP in tears. Supporters hope to raise awareness about Hais case through his artwork, which was put on display alongside Chuongs pieces earlier this year at an underground show by activist artist Thinh Nguyen. He started collecting the pieces from families years ago after he met them outside government offices calling for their sons release. When I put these animals on show, their stories are known, Thinh said. I look at these and I see a lot of hope. Follow @htlifeandstyle for more The maker of Frances most famous modern public artwork has forced the countrys culture ministry to take down a piece of street art it had put up next to it. Veteran artist Daniel Buren, whose 260 candy-stripy columns at Palais Royal were once themselves condemned as a carbuncle, objected to the temporary work which was meant to be a homage to his own. The ministry confirmed that it had taken down the striped posters put up by Parisian graffiti artist Le Module de Zeer. He had covered the 17th-century colonnade around Burens work with black and white horizontal stripes, which were meant to be in dialogue with Burens vertical ones. But the 80-year-old, who has brought the state to court in the past for not properly looking after his work, said that he had not been informed and demanded they be taken down. Le Module de Zeer, whose real name is Mehdi, has built up a cult following in the French capital, covering a nightclub and a giant disused factory chimney with futuristic doodles. Jean Faucheur, the curator who helped put up Le Module de Zeers work at Palais Royal, said the controversy had been very hurtful for the artist. It is a real pity, its a scandal which could have been avoided, he said. But the French culture ministry said they had no choice but to act after admitting that they had not asked Burens permission. We are the ministry of intellectual property and copyright... and we have to be exemplary, a spokesman told AFP. Go to @htlifesandstyle for more In the third clash over water this month, three people were injured as two groups fought with each other on Tuesday over who will take water first in Madhya Pradeshs Umaria district, about 500 km east of the state capital, police said on Wednesday. An acute water scarcity has forced the administration to introduce rationing in 167 cities with 40% of the states reservoirs going dry. Several regions of Madhya Pradesh, including Bundelkhand, has been facing acute water shortage because of scanty rainfall in last monsoon and an almost dry winter. Twenty nine of the 51 districts of Madhya Pradesh received very less rain in the last monsoon. According to MP Water Resources Department, 40% of the reservoirs have almost dried up and the water in the Narmada is less than half of the normal quantity for this period of the year, thereby impacting the overall drinking water supply. Urban administration department officials said water in at least 50 cities are being supplied once in three days while in 117 cities, it is being supplied once in two days. Tuesdays clash in Indwar village was third such incident in the state this month. According to police Pradeep Soni, a resident of Indwar village was attacked by one Dharmendra Chaturvedi and others from the village with a knife when he tried to take water from a public hand pump. When Sonis wife with her one-year-old son in her arms came to her husbands rescue Chaturvedi allegedly also hit her, injuring her and her son. Chaturvedi had asked me several times not to take water from the hand pump. But due to acute water crisis I wanted to have water from the hand pump but Chaturvedi attacked me, said Soni. On the other hand, Chaturvedi told the police that Soni attacked him when he jumped the queue for taking water from the hand pump. Ajeet Yadav, superintendent of police, Umaria said, Both the parties have registered cases against each other. We are investigating the matter. Earlier this week, supporters of two corporators in Bhopal clashed over where the water tankers should be sent first, police said. On May 2, more than 12 people were injured in a clash between two groups over fetching water from the only functioning hand pump in Dabra town in Gwalior district. Three of the injured were said to be critical. As Paresh Rawal gears up to be seen onscreen as late Sunil Dutt in Rajkumar Hiranis biopic on Sanjay Dutt, Sanju the trailer lands on Wednesday, he is celebrating a major milestone hos 68th birthday. In a career spanning 33 years, the actor has done hundreds of films in various languages. A Member of Parliament now, Paresh has been honoured with the Padma Shri (2014) and also a National Film Award (1994). Through his vast filmography, Paresh has essayed various roles starting out as a villain, he has done films as leads, as supporting characters with all the shades that film industry allows. Heres a look at five pathbreaking roles that define the versatility of Paresh Rawal. Andaz Apna Apna One of the earliest and most endearing works of Paresh, the double role he played in this Aamir Khan-Salman Khan comedy caper is fodder for memes even till date. He played twin brothers, Shyam Bajaj and Ram Bajaj. While one is a millionaire, the other is a goon who is not particularly good at what he does. As the goon, Teja, Paresh won a fan following of his own. His dialogues from the movie continue to be part of everyday conversations of Bollywood crazy fans. Any identity crisis elicits a Teja mai hu mark idhar hai while unrealistic plans are met with Bread ka badshah aur omelette ka raja, Bajaj, humara Bajaj! Hera Pheri As the endearing Babu Bhaiya, he was the heart of this film about three men down on their luck trying to make a quick buck from an opportunity arising out of cross connection. A comedy of errors, it had a special place for the drunk who takes Akshay Kumar and Suniel Shetty as tenants and inevitably becomes a part of a kidnapping. Paresh reprised the role in a sequel too. Atithi Tim Kab Jaoge Paresh essayed the role of a naive, moralistic, Bollywood crazy old man who is not accustomed to the ways of living in a metro city like Mumbai. While his rural style of living and interactions with unwilling hosts Ajay Devgn and Konkona Sensharma are mostly irritating, Pareshs loving attitude is often endearing in the film. He paints the perfect picture of an old, outdated but totally concerned guardian in todays busy set-up of a nuclear family. Tamanna Paresh essayed a touching role with Mahesh Bhatts film where he played a eunuch who raises a young girl only to be later abandoned by her. This film won National Film Award for Best Film on Other Social Issues in 1998. Oh My God Akshay Kumar-starrer Oh My God was the first among many films that debunked superstitions and blind faith that come packaged with religion today. Pareshs character in OMG, Kanji Lalji Mehta is an atheist whose shop is destroyed in an earthquake. When insurance firm dismisses his claim as act of god, Pareshs character drags Gods representatives on earth religious leaders of all hues to court. The movie won the National Film Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay. Aamir Khan-Anushka Sharmas PK was on the same lines. Even Paresh later did a similar movie, Dharam Sankat Mein where he played a Hindi hardliner who discovers that his dad was actually a Muslim. Follow @htshowbiz for more The income tax department has questioned Matix Group chairman Nishant Kanodia in connection with the departments probe into NuPower Renewables, a company promoted by Deepak Kochhar, the husband of ICICI Bank CEO Chanda Kochhar, said people aware of the matter in the agency. Nishant Kanodia is Essar Group patriarch Ravi Ruias son-in-law and owns the Mauritius-based Firstland Holdings Ltd that invested Rs325 crore in NuPower between 2010 and 2012. Earlier this month, the tax department had raided several locations related to companies owned by Kanodia. We are probing this investment that was routed through Mauritius. What is the source of the funds, why did Firstland Holdings exit NuPowrer soon after and whether this has connections with any Essar Group company, said a tax officer who did not wish to be identified. Essar has denied that it has anything to do with Firstlands investments in NuPower and also said that it has not invested in NuPower. After making the investment between 2010 and 2012, Firstland sold its stake in NuPower in 2013 to DH Renewables, another Mauritius-based company. The question is why did Firstland invest 325 crore in NuPower which got it 49% stake in the company only to offload that stake to DH Renewables within a year? said another officer whos part of the agencies probing NuPower. The officer quoted above, who too asked not to be identified, claimed that Firstland exited NuPower without any gains on their investment. While Deepak Kochhar has all along maintained that DH Renewables is an investment vehicle of Accion Diversified Strategies Fund, but the tax department is probing if it is a dummy company acting as a front for some other Indian company that benefited from loans provided by ICICI Bank. The tax department has sent several tax notices to Deepak Kochhar seeking his financial details of investments made by Firstland Holdings and DH Renewables. The department has already questioned Deepak Kochhar and Videocons Venugopal Dhoot. The government has not received any bids so far for its stake in state-run carrier Air India, the civil aviation secretary told TV channels, a day before the formal bidding process closes. The government will not extend the deadline for submissions of interest in Air India, RN Choubey said on Wednesday. The deadline for receiving bids has already been extended once to May 31 from May 14. Last week, Choubey had said l or not to sell Air India if the bid price is found to be inadequate. Prime Minister Narendra Modis government, keen to sell the loss-making, debt-ridden airline, finalised plans in late March to divest a 76% stake and offload about $5.1 billion of its debt. - With input from PTI A written complaint was lodged with police on Wednesday against Rudrapur BJP MLA Raj Kumar Thukral, who allegedly announced a fight against love jihad, conversions and suppression of Hindus. Local resident Munish Kumar filed the complaint against the BJP MLA for allegedly making provocative statements against a particular community, said Vikram Rathore, in-charge of Ramnagar police station. We will investigate the matter following which appropriate action will be taken, the police officer said. Thukral had announced a fight against love jihad, conversions and suppression of Hindus days after a police officer saved a Muslim youth from being attacked by a mob after he was found with a Hindu girl. The Muslim youth met the girl near Garjiya Devi temple at Ramnagar in Nainital district on May 22. Locals caught them and alleged that they were found in a compromising position. The locals later called members of Hindu right-wing organisations who started thrashing the youth. Sub-inspector Gagandeep Singh came to his rescue. Reacting to the incident, Thukral asked: When Hindus dont go into a mosque, when they dont have a right to enter a madrasa, why did they go to Garjiya temple with an intent to disturb Hindu ethos? Munish Kumar, who is co-convener of the Samajwadi Lokmanch, said he filed the complaint as inflammatory statements by an MLA can disturb communal harmony and spark tension in the area. According to the constitution, ours is a secular country. Being an MLA, he should protect the constitution. But by making such inflammatory statements, he is doing the reverse, he said. This is not the first time Thukral has courted controversy. In March, a video allegedly showed him beating up Dalit women. Earlier this month, he was accused of threatening and abusing a toll plaza staffer near Kichha in US Nagar district. Taking suo motu cognizance of the reports about the gravity of raging fires which have affected thousands of hectares of forest land in the state, the Uttarakhand High Court on Wednesday directed the state government to submit a status report within 24 hours. A division bench of Chief Justice KM Joseph and Justice Sharad Kumar Sharma directed the state to submit details pertaining to number of forest fires reported, the kind of damage caused, and what steps the government was taking to prevent them, said advocate MC Pant. Pant said he had on may 22 and 23 mentioned forest fires and the destruction caused by them before the court in the course of the days proceedings citing various newspaper articles published recently. Pant also told the court that in many cases the fires had reached near schools in Almora and Pauri districts. Recognising the seriousness of the situation, the court decided to treat the matter as a PIL and asked the state government to reply by Thursday, Pant said. Chief standing counsel Paresh Tripathi, who represented the state government, told media that the court has given government time till Thursday to file its detailed response. According to the data collected by Forest Survey of India, so far there have been 1,958 incidents of forest fire this season in the state, which have destroyed 4,202 hectares of forest land posing revenue loss of over Rs 81.36 lakh. The forest fire season in state began on February 15. In 2016, forest fires had burnt down over 4,500 hectare of vegetation, with a major portion of damage being recorded in April (2,270 hectare) and May (2,187 hectare) in the state. A day after a Dalit woman from Dehradun allegedly committed suicide in custody of Uttar Pradesh police, a 26-year-old Muslim man with whom she allegedly ran away from home was arrested and booked for abduction and abetment to suicide. The man, identified as Javed from Najibabad in Bijnor district, was arrested from his home town on Tuesday and presented before a local court on Wednesday that sent him to judicial custody for 14 days. The woman, identified as Soni Kumar from Dehraduns Raipur area, went missing from her home on May 25 after which her family lodged a missing complaint in Raipur police station. Later, it was found that she had ran away with Javed with whom she was allegedly in a relationship without knowledge of her family. The couple was traced by Uttar Pradesh police on Monday in Najibabad. Police kept the woman in police barrack with a female constable till arrival of a team from Dehradun police. However, Soni Kumar was found hanging from a ceiling fan inside the police barrack on Tuesday morning in a suspected case of suicide. After the suicide, Javed was booked for abducting her and abetting her to commit suicide under sections of IPC, station house officer, Najibabad, Devendra Singh told HT over phone. He was also booked under sections of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, Singh said, adding that during the interrogation, Javed confessed to have lured Soni to run away with him. Javed, who had no criminal record in Najibabad, told police that he was helped by one of his friends living in Dehradun to run away with Soni. On Wednesday morning, Soni was cremated in Haridwar. Her body was handed over to her father Rakesh Kumar on Tuesday. We want strict action against Javed and justice for our daughter. Police have assured us of action and investigation in the case. We are yet to get the post-mortem examination report, Rakesh Kumar told HT. On Tuesday, Sonis family members along with 150 residents gheraoed Raipur police station and demanded a CBI investigation into the case. They also blocked a nearby road for a couple of hours. Circle officer Dalanwalla Jaya Baluni told HT: In the initial investigations, it was found that Soni was a graduate and used to stay at home in Raipur while Javed used to work in a garage here. They came in contact through a common friend who used live in Sonis neighbourhood. Now, the investigation would be done by Najibabad police as she committed suicide there, said Baluni. A massive blaze that erupted in a rubber factory of a densely-populated south Delhi neighbourhood on Tuesday evening was brought under control on Wednesday after an Indian Air Force (IAF) Mi17V5 chopper was deployed to spray water, officials said. The IAF chopper fitted with a bambi bucket had to carry out sorties, spray hundreds of litres of water to wrestle the blaze under control. Romil Baaniya, deputy commissioner of police (south), said a case under section 285 (negligent conduct with respect to fire or combustible matter) and section 336 (act endangering life or personal safety of others) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) has been filed at Malviya Nagar police station. Along with the police teams, teams of Delhi Disaster Management Authority, Delhi Fire Services and civil defence were also present. At least 70 fire tenders were used to contain the fire, said a fire officer. Chief fire officer of the Delhi fire services, Atul Garg, who fell unconscious during the firefighting operations on Tuesday night said he is stable now. Fire officers said the blaze was of the highest magnitude this season. Plastic and raw material stored at the factory fuelled the fire. Aam Aadmi Party legislator Somnath Bharti also visited the spot on Tuesday. Police and DDMA staff made continuous announcements, asking residents to stay inside their houses. All vehicles were removed as precautionary measure. Thick pile of smoke rises from a warehouse in Delhis Malviya Nagar. (Sanchit Khanna/HT Photo) Speaking to Hindustan Times earlier on Tuesday evening, Garg said the fire was reported at their control room at 4.17pm. The fire started from a truck and spread to a godown of rubber and plastic raw material where the vehicle was parked. The godown is right behind Sant Nirankari Public School and had it occurred in the afternoon, evacuation of children would have been challenging, as the area is congested, Garg said. AAPs Bharti said the incident brings to fore his pending demand of a fire station nearby. On whether the godown was being illegally run, Somnath said it is a matter of investigation. Theres a chemical factory behind the school. We saw the fire around 4.30 pm and one of the residents called the fire department and police. Smoke entered our houses, said Rajni Kapani, who lives right in front of the godown. Veenu Mansharamani, another resident, said such godowns next to a school building are illegal. The area is residential and the fire could have easily engulfed houses. The situation could have been worse, she said. Earlier this year, 17 persons died in a fire at a cracker storage factory in outer Delhis Bawana. Last month in Kohat Enclave, a fire on the ground floor of a building killed a couple and their two minor children.Earlier this month, in west Delhis Adarsh Nagar, two children died in a fire in their building. Nearly two lakh or 12.5 % students scored 90% and above in the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) class 10 Mathematics paper that was leaked on social media along with the class 12 Economics paper. Over 16 lakh students took the rest. The board decided not to conduct a retest for the class 10 Mathematics paper in the interest of students, saying it is largely an internal examination of the school education system. The board, however, did conduct a retest of the class 12 Economics paper. It said the exam is a gateway to higher education and professional exams, which have limited seats. The 2017-18 batch of students are the first batch to attempt the reintroduced CBSE compulsory class 10 exams. The board had replaced the compulsory exams with a Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) system of assessment in 2009 and had made the class 10 exam optional. Students had the option to either attempting the school-based or board-based final exam. Instead of marks, students were given grades. According to data shared by CBSE, 1,99,884 students scored 90 and above marks in the Mathematics paper. In 2017, when students used to get grades, 1,89,890 students had scored A1 grade, which is equivalent to 90 and above. The number of students with 100 marks in Mathematics is 3,131. The highest number of perfect scorers is for Social Sciences, in which 6,469 students secured 100 marks, a CBSE official said. The board exams were marred by controversy this year with incidents of leakage of the class 10 Mathematics paper and the class 12 Economics paper on social media in different parts of the country, including Delhi. The class 12 Economics paper, held after a retest, recorded a pass percentage of 83.40%, a jump of over 3 percentage points from last year. Between 5 and 6 lakh students sat for the class 12 Economics retest. The pass percentage for class 12 Economics paper for this year is 83.4% as against last years 80.24%, a CBSE official said. The official said the number of students scoring 100 marks in the Economics paper this year is 1,659. Number of students with 100 marks Hindi Course A: 244 Mathematics: 3,131 Hindi Course B: 643 Science: 2,244 Social Science: 6,469 English: 684 After putting up a great performance in the Class 12 board exams, Delhi government schools did not inspire the same confidence in the Class 10 Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) exams, with over a 20 percentage point decline in the pass percentage since last year, and the worst performance since 2007. Earlier this week, Delhi government schools had grabbed headlines as over 90% of the government school students who appeared in the CBSE Class 12 examinations passed the exam for the first time in 20 years, marking their best performance in two decades. They also outperformed private schools for the third year in a row, giving the Delhi government added reason to rejoice. In the Class 10 exams though the overall pass percentage of Delhi marginally increased from 78.09% last year to 78.62% this year. The pass percentages of both government schools and private schools have declined. However, both Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) and Kendriya Vidyalayas (KVs) in the Delhi region, both of which fall under the purview of the centre, have posted pass percentages over 97%, and this may have contributed to the overall rise in Delhis pass percentage. Only 69.32% of the government school students who appeared for the exams passed the exam, while 89.45% of the private school students have done so. The last time the board exams were compulsory was in 2009, when 89.44% of government school students in Delhi and 90.71% of the private school students had passed the exam. Saumya Gupta, the director of education, said that they had been expecting this drop. Even private schools had a pass percentage of around 96.67% last year, and their pass percentage has also declined. Our students were not used to the board exam pattern and we were expecting a slight drop. Last year, these kids attempted a class 9 exam with just six months portion. They have never faced an exam where they have to go to a different centre, and are to be tested on the full years syllabus, she said. Delhi education minister Manish Sisodia said when they had conducted a pre-board exam for class 10 students, the pass percentage at the time was only 30%. We had sent show-cause notices to teachers and heads of schools also, asking why the pre-board result was so low... After that, I was not even certain that we would have a 50% pass percentage, but at least we have reached 70%. I would like to congratulate the teachers, he said. Sisodia added that with education policies, including the no detention policy, the foundation of the education system had been weakened and they were working to strengthen it through government campaigns such as the Mission Buniyaad and Chunauti Mission. Gupta also added that the change in the exam pattern from CCE to exam based, may have adversely affected the results. Last year students were being tested for slightly different set of skills, she said. CBSE had replaced the board exams with a Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) eight years ago, and this was the first batch to write the re-introduced compulsory board exams. Class 12 students are used to the pattern, as they attempt an exam with the full years syllabus in Class 11 also, and hence were able to perform better, explained Gupta. Annie Koshi, the principal of the St Marys School said that if done properly, the CCE would have been an excellent method to assess, however, it had been reduced to a series of tests rather than a holistic approach to asses all aspects of a childs education. The question is whether we needed this exam at all. I am of the opinion that it is not necessary to give board exams in class 10... We are still stuck in the colonial mindset of standardised testing. We had tried CCE, but we did not have enough understanding or enough teacher training for it to be effective, said Ameeta Wattal, the principal of Springdales School Pusa Road. Students with learning disabilities are facing difficulty in following Delhi Universitys admission procedure because the hospital listed as the authority to issue the disability certificate by the Delhi government has stopped doing so following new rules being framed earlier this year. According to a Delhi government website, the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences (IHBAS) is suppose to issue these certificates. However, IHBAS said that though they used to issue such certificates in the past, they can no longer do so after new rules under the Rights of Persons with Disability Act, 2016, were notified in January this year. A resident of Saket said that she had been running from pillar to post since April, trying to get a disability certificate for her dyslexic son. His CBSE Class 12 admit card and his CBSE Class 10 marksheet, both mention that he is dyslexic, and we had thought that this would be sufficient. It is only when the admission procedure started, that we realised that we need to get a separate certificate from a government hospital. IHBAS refused to do so, said the mother of a 17-year-old BA programme aspirant, who requested anonymity. According to these guidelines, a psychiatrist has no role in certifying dyslexia. A medical board comprising of a paediatrician and a child psychologist will issue such certifications. As soon as these rules came to our notice, we had written to the competent authorities saying that we will no longer be in a position to issue these certificates, said Dr Nimesh Desai, director of IHBAS. Desai said that he had to turn away around 25-30 such families, who had approached him seeking certifications. Praveen Srivastava, a resident of Ghaziabad, said that he has now approached a government hospital in UP after being turned down by IHBAS. Sources said that other general hospitals had not been authorised to issue such certificates to children not residing in their zones. The commissioner for Persons with Disabilities, TD Dhariyal, seemed to be aware of the issues. Unfortunately, in Delhi, the health department has not designated a centre for such certifications currently. Earlier, I had said that existing hospitals, which have the provisions should issue such certificates. I have also issued a show cause notice, asking the principal secretary of health to respond as to why this has not been done, he said. The principal secretary of health did not respond to calls or text messages. Bipin Tiwari and Anil Aneja, the officers on special duty at the Equal Opportunity Cell of DU, said that this problem has arisen because applicants leave the procurement of such documents for the last minute. We are facing this problem only with students who have learning disabilities, most of whom are dyslexic. We have had around three or four such cases so far. They have woken up at the last minute. There is a proper gazette notification regarding the guidelines. Certifications cant happen in such a short time, said Aneja. The Maharashtra State Board for Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) declared the result of the Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC), or Class 12 board examination on Wednesday, with a total pass percentage of 88.41%. The results were declared at 1 pm, on the Boards official website, mahresult.nic.in. A total of 14,18,645 registered for the exam of which 14,16,986 students appeared and 12, 52,817 students passed, the Class 12 February-March 2018 HSC boards. In the divisional results, Konkan secured the highest pass percentage of 94.85%, followed by Kolhapur with 91%, Pune (89.58%), Aurangabad (88.74%), and Amravati (88.08%). While Mumbai was on 6th position with 87.44%, Nashik had the lowest pass percentage of 86.13%. According to board chairperson, Shakuntala Kale, girls have outshined boys for the third consecutive year securing a pass percentage of 92.36%. Girls secured 7.13% more than 85.23% boys who cleared the exam. Of the total 6,33,090 girls who appeared for the exam, 5,84,692 have passed. This year, 7,83, 896 boys appeared for the exam and 6,68,125 cleared it. The HSC examinations, had begun on February 21 till March 20, were taken by 14,85,000 students, including 834,000 boys and 650,000 girls. As many as 17,85,000 students -- 973,000 boys and 778,000 girls -- appeared for the SSC examinations held between March 1 and March 24. A total of 5374 handicap students appeared in the HSC exams conducted in the month of Feb-March, of which 4932 passed. This year, in order to curb cheating and copying cases, the board had hired more flying squads to conduct surprise checks at the centres, during the HSC exams. As per the new rules, only 25 students were allowed in each exam hall, and the question papers were divided into sets of 25 each, so as to, avoid prior leak of papers. Supervisors, hence did not have to open the bundle of question papers before reaching the halls. This was after, five HSC question papers Marathi, secretarial practice, political science, physics and mathematics/statistics were leaked, last year, through WhatsApp almost half an hour before the examinations. Two such cases were also registered in 2016. The Maharashtra State Board for Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) declared the result of the Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC), or Class 12 board examination on Wednesday. The result is now available on the Boards official website mahresult.nic.in. Here is the direct link to check. The pass percentage this year is 88.41%. Of the 14,16,986 students who appeared for the exam, 12, 52,817 students passed. In the divisional results, Konkan secured the highest pass percentage of 94.85%, followed by Kolhapur with 91%, Pune (89.58%), Aurangabad (88.74%), and Amravati (88.08%). While Mumbai was on 6th position with 87.44%, Nashik had the lowest pass percentage of 86.13%. Girls performed better than boys securing a pass percentage of 92.36%, while 85.23% boys cleared the exam. Of the total 6,33,090 girls who appeared for the exam, 5,84,692 passed. This year, 7,83, 896 boys appeared for the exam and 6,68,125 cleared it. Students can check their results here. Students can also check their results on mahresult.nic.in. The HSC examinations, which began on February 21 and ended on March 20, were taken by 14,85,000 students, including 834,000 boys and 650,000 girls. As many as 17,85,000 students -- 973,000 boys and 778,000 girls -- appeared for the SSC examinations held between March 1 and March 24. This year, the state board hired more flying squads to conduct surprise checks at the centres to curb any form of malpractice during the HSC exams. Only 25 students were allowed in each exam hall, and the question papers were divided into sets of 25 each so that centre supervisors did not have to open the bundles before they reached the hall. The state board also conducted a series of workshops across schools to ensure that no mobile phones are allowed inside exam centres, as most paper leaks take place over WhatsApp. Last year, five HSC question papers Marathi, secretarial practice, political science, physics and mathematics/statistics were leaked through WhatsApp almost half an hour before the examinations. Two such cases were also registered in 2016. The HSC pass percentage stood at 87.14 in 2017. Two years ago, when Anu Kumari, 31, a resident of Delhis Rohini, phoned her father in Sonipat expressing her desire to quit her corporate job to prepare for the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), her father replied, Padhai ke liye mai tumhare decision ke saath hun (Im with your decision if its about gaining education). Back then, little did Anu realise that she was one of the few lucky women to get her familys support for mid-career education. But today, she is proud to be have been ranked second in UPSC 2018, apart from having been chosen as the ambassador of the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign. READ| UPSC results 2017: Anu Kumari from Haryana, mother of a 4-yr-old, gets 2nd rank in 2nd attempt Recently, when Anu was felicitated by the Old Students Association of her alma mater, Hindu College, her successful story stood as a shining example of sheer determination. I had been working in the business planning and administration department of a corporate company for more than eight years. I was drawing a good salary, but I wasnt satisfied with my work and wanted to help people, recalls Anu. My colleagues suggested that I take up work in an NGO, but I felt opportunities were limited there Thats when I thought of UPSC, she adds. However, the struggle had only begun. In 2016, when Anu left her son, Viaan, under her mothers care, he was just two-and-a-half years old. He had turned four when I met him properly in March 2018 the day I appeared for my interview. When I saw my son that day, I was teary-eyed and all I could do was hug him tight, she recalls not having met Viaan properly all this while. The second challenge for Anu was the road back to studies. I had done MBA in finance before getting into the corporate world, and then going back into study mode after all these years was quite a struggle. Herein, my masi (maternal aunt) played a crucial role. I stayed and studied at her place. She was so supportive that when her children used to turn on the television at a high volume or create a ruckus, she would even scold them for disturbing me, she says. READ| Civil services marks may not be sole criteria for cadre allocation However, despite having the support of her parents, winning that of her in-laws was to prove a roadblock, initially. While I received all possible support and encouragement from my parents, it wasnt the same initially with my in-laws, recalls Anu. Her husband cautioned her against giving up a career she had ensconced herself in. And her parents-in-law suggested that she take up a more comfortable career, such as teaching. Perhaps they didnt have the confidence in me initially, but I wasnt one to give in and was able to convince them. Gradually, they, too, started believing in my dream, she adds. Anu was sure that despite just the two attempts she had, due to the age limit, shed be able to crack it. However, she didnt think she would be able to make it to the top 10. She says, Being one among the top 10 was something that only my father and brother believed in. Even after the results were out, I didnt think it was a big deal for me to have accomplished this until the next evening of the result day, when I went to attend a family wedding and a lot of elderly, from villages of Haryana, blessed me for my achievement. One of them placed their hand on my head and said, Aisi teen chori ho jayein to bhi kam hain (Even three daughters like her are not enough). Today, when Anu gets phone calls from women of all age groups, she feels overwhelmed at being seen as a role model. The women who call me have been going through difficult times in their lives some are divorcees, some want to quit their careers but are unable to, and more such struggles. I feel happy that Im able to guide them. My UPSC training is about to begin, and Im all ready for a challenging role ahead, she says. Interact with the author at Twitter/@HennaRakheja The result for the Uttar Pradesh State Entrance Examination (UPSEE) 2018 was released on the official website Upsee.nic.in on Wednesday, May 30. The examination was conducted on April 29 by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University. Around 1,47,000 seats are to be filled through this examination. UPSEE result 2018: login window (upsee.nic.in) UPSEE result 2018: Heres how check Log on to the website: www.upsee.nic.in Click on the UPSEE 2018 result Key in your roll number and date of birth Submit Download your result and take a print out UPSEE result 2018: Heres direct link to check Note: Please check the official website for updates and information. Aditya Singh of Noida bagged the first rank in the Uttar Pradesh State Entrance Examination (UPSEE) 2018 conducted by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh for admission to first year B Tech, management and several other courses. Singh scored 572 marks. Gorakhpur girl Nandini Jalan secured the first rank among girls and overall the eighth rank in the same examination. She scored 536 marks. A total of 1,75,597 candidates were registered in various courses out of which 1,56,452 appeared in the examination and 1,43,551 qualified against 1,47,833 seats. 300 laptops up for grabs To lure admission seekers, there are 300 laptops for those who will enroll in engineering colleges affiliated to AKTU across the state. The first 100 boys, the first 100 girls and first 100 scheduled caste scheduled tribe candidates who will seek admission were entitled to laptop, announced technical education minister, Ashutosh Tandon. Last year, the first 100 girls who took admission in AKTU colleges were given tablets. Number of seats slashed by over 13K To bring about quality, this year the number of seats were reduced by 13,396. Last year, the total number of seats for which SEE was held was 1,61,229. But this the total number of seats were 1,47,833. The qualified percentage is 91.75. Besides, B Tech, other courses for which SEE was held include: B Arch, B Pharm, BCA, B Des BHMCT, BFAD, BFA, MBA, MCA, MCA (Integrated) and second year B.Tech/B Pharm/MCA (lateral entry), according to AKTU vice chancellor, Vinay Kumar Pathak. The offline exam for papers 1, 2, 3 and 4 was conducted on April 29at 158 exam centres across the country and online-exam for papers 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 was conducted on May 5 and 6 at 58 exam centres in the state. Toppers mantra for success Topper Aditya Singh of Noida said he focused on important subjects and regular studies were the key to his success. On whether he would take admission in AKTU or wait for the JEE advance results, the 19-year-old hesitantly said, I will wait for the JEE advance result as the IITs offer better education. If I dont get in, I will consider going to AKTU. Coming from a family of engineers, Singh had a passion for science. A student of Lotus Valley International School, Aditya gave his parents and teachers the credits for good tips and motivation. I had a lot of support, he said, thanking his parents for the stress-free environment at home. As a tip, he said that students should try to relax and indulge in other activities as well. Singh himself, played guitar, piano and enjoyed outdoor games. Nandini Jalan, topper among girls, said, It was completely unexpected. I expected a good score from this exam but getting such a high rank in this exam was something that I did not imagine. Im delighted. Nandini is a resident of Gorakhpur. Her father is a businessman and mother a homemaker. I kept on revising my notes, kept the basics on my figertips and solved past years papers, Said Nandini, who also scored 93.20% in Class 12 exams. Nandini owes her success to her teachers, They always believed in me and gave me the confidence that I could do well. Nandini is now anxiously waiting for the results of JEE-Advanced, and will then decide on her college. This result has surely given me the confidence that I will get a decent rank in JEE too. An avid reader, she also enjoys playing badminton in her free time, It helped me relax during my preparation days. (With inputs from Rishi Kant and Ayushi Mishra) Morgan Freemans lawyer demanded Tuesday that CNN retract a story accusing the 80-year-old movie star of multiple cases of sexual harassment. We presented CNN with objective evidence, including videotapes and on-the-record denials by the claimed victims, that the alleged incident that gave rise to the story never happened, lawyer Robert Schwartz said in a statement. In a letter sent to the television news network, the lawyer accused CNN of malicious intent, falsehoods, sleight-of-hand, an absence of editorial control and journalistic malpractice. Schwartz said in a later statement that we proved to CNN, beyond any doubt, that the whole story was built on fakery. The credibility of the entire CNN attack on Mr Freeman has now been undermined. Sixteen people -- eight of whom say they were victims -- last week described to CNN a range of troubling behaviour by Freeman on production sets or promotional tours. The actor issued a quick apology after the report was published. Anyone who knows me or has worked with me knows I am not someone who would intentionally offend or knowingly make anyone feel uneasy, Freeman said in a statement. I apologize to anyone who felt uncomfortable or disrespected -- that was never my intent. One of the journalists behind the CNN report, Chloe Melas, said her own encounter with Freeman, when she was six-months pregnant, prompted her to produce the piece. Morgan Freeman presents during the 88th Academy Awards ceremony at Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. (NYT) She said that during a press conference for the 2017 movie Going in Style, Freeman looked her up and down and said Boy, I wish I was in there. The article also quoted an unnamed production assistant on the same film who accused Freeman of massaging the small of her back without her consent, and of trying tried to lift her skirt while asking if she was wearing underwear. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal in Hollywood, the veteran actor is already facing the fallout from the accusations, including the possible withdrawal of a Lifetime Achievement Award he was given earlier this year by the Screen Actors Guild. In his letter, Schwartz accused Melas of baiting and prodding a number of so-called witnesses to malign Freeman. In this file photo taken on March 30, 2017 Morgan Freeman arrives to the premiere of the film Going In Style in New York. (AFP) Tyra Martin, one of the television journalists cited in the CNN report, denied she was one of the accusers and said the news network totally misrepresented a video in which she had interviewed Freeman. The report took my remarks out of context, she added. Martin acknowledged having felt ill at ease one time when she stood up and Freeman asked her not to pull her skirt back down after it had ridden up. She said, however, that her interviews with the movie star were always fun for me. Despite his initial apology, Freeman later issued a denial of the claims against him. I am devastated that 80 years of my life is at risk of being undermined, in the blink of an eye, by Thursdays media reports, he said. Follow @htshowbiz for more The Goa Police on Wednesday arrested 11 tourists, who had come to the coastal state from Pune in neighbouring Maharashtra, for allegedly assaulting and molesting two minor siblings at a beach near here. The siblings -- 17-year-old boy and his 16-year-old sister -- were sitting in a shack on Tuesday on the Baga beach, located in North Goa district, while their parents were having food nearby. At that time, a group of 11 visitors from Pune started clicking pictures of the girl, Calangute police stations Jivba Dalvi said, adding that this amounts to outraging her modesty. When the boy objected to the group taking photos of his sister, they allegedly slapped and beat him, he said, quoting a complaint filed by the victims parents. The Calangute police subsequently nabbed all the accused before they could leave the state, he said. Two of the 11 accused were juveniles, aged 15, and they were sent to a state-run protection home, Dalvi said. During the course of investigation, the police recorded statements of the minor siblings in the presence of members of an NGO working for child rights, he said. The mobile phone used to click pictures of the girl was confiscated and will be sent to a forensic laboratory for analysis, he said. Based on a complaint, the police registered a First Information Report (FIR) and arrested the visitors, he said. Offences were registered against all the accused under IPC sections 354 (molestation), 143 (unlawful assembly), 147 (rioting) and 323 (causing hurt), and relevant provisions of the Goa Childrens Act, he added. A 27-year-old Air India pilot was found dead at a Riyadh hotel in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday morning, officials said. Rithwick Tiwari, a first officer with the state-run airline, died reportedly of a heart attack while working out in the hotel gym, according to crew sources. Tiwaris colleague Captain Renu Maulay identified the body after police broke open the door of a small toilet room inside the health club of Hotel Holiday Inn where it was found lying sideways, they said. Indian embassy officials in Riyadh have confirmed the pilots death. He had collapsed in the wash room of the hotel gym on Wednesday morning. He was then taken to a hospital, where doctors declared him dead, counsellor (community welfare) Anil Nautiyal told PTI over the phone. He said the embassy is yet to study the detailed hospital report but it appeared to be a case of heart attack. Nautiyal said embassy officials are in touch with the pilots family. We are in touch with the family but there are a lot of formalities that need to be completed before the mortal remains could be sent back to India, he said. An Air India spokesperson in New Delhi said the airlines manager in Riyadh was coordinating the matter and they are awaiting the nod from the embassy before the body is flown to India. An alleged rapist was beaten up and paraded naked by an irate mob in Mon district of Nagaland on Wednesday before he was rescued by the police. According to reports, the accused Rahul Sen, a salesman in a watch shop, had sexually assaulted the victim, a 12-year-old Naga girl on several occasions in a village about 360 km northeast of the capital Kohima. The matter came to light recently when the victim, a class IV student, complained of ill health and was taken to a hospital. A medical check up confirmed rape. Once the news spread, local residents nabbed the accused and thrashed him. He was paraded naked and tied to an advertisement board from where he was rescued by the police and taken into custody. Police officials were not available for comments. In March 2015, a mob broke into the Dimapur central jail and lynched a rape accused. In this case too, the accused was a non-Naga. Authorities had to impose curfew in Dimapur and police arrested more than 40 people for the lynching. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Actor-turned politician Rajinikanth on Wednesday blamed anti-social elements for the anti-Sterlite protests in Tuticorin last week that resulted in 13 deaths in police firing, and called for a Jayalalithaa-style iron fist policy to crush such people in the interest of Tamil Nadu. Speaking to reporters after meeting those injured in the police firing, he did not favour K Palaniswamis resignation as chief minister over the issue. The attack on the collectors office and setting on fire (Sterlite) quarters was not done by the common people. Some anti-social elements infiltrated... (the protesting locals). It is their handiwork, he said and expressed grief that this noble protest had ended on a bloody note. The actor, who gave away Rs 10,000 relief to each of the 48 injured persons, said pro-Jallikattu protests in Tamil Nadu last year also saw infiltration of anti-social elements. He had earlier announced a relief of Rs two lakh each to the families of the 13 deceased. The government should crush such anti-social elements with an iron fist. On that front I laud Jayalalithaa as she kept such persons under check with an iron fist. They should follow her policy and keep them under check, as otherwise it will result in great danger for Tamil Nadu, he said. He also called for action against those who attacked policemen during the May 22 protest. Thirteen people were killed in police firing on May 22-23 when violence broke out at the protest by locals, demanding closure of Sterlite Industries in this district over pollution issues. On the oppositions demand for resignation of the chief minister, Rajinikanth sought to know how quitting could be a solution. If you demand resignation for everything, what (is the purpose)... I dont want to talk about that, he said. To a question, he said he had no confidence in the state government appointed one-man inquiry commission to probe the violence, under retired Madras High Court judge Aruna Jegadeesan. The actor, who has announced plans to join politics, said constant agitations may not yield solutions and added that one should move courts for redressal of their grievances. Agitations often happen in the state, sometimes for genuine reasons, he said, adding that people should be careful against being incited. Too many protests could dissuade trade and investors from coming to Tamil Nadu, affecting employment opportunities, he said, adding agriculture has already been hit due to water scarcity. The actor cautioned Vedanta Ltd, which runs Sterlite Industries, against moving court over the Tamil Nadu governments closure order of the copper smelter unit, saying they are not humans if they do so. With so many deaths and injuries, they should not even think of doing that, he said, adding, nothing can stand before peoples power. Rajinikanth faulted the police intelligence for its big mistake in failing to detect the presence of anti-social elements in the protests. At the hospital, the actor spoke to the injured and was seen holding hands of some of them. Earlier, speaking to reporters in Chennai ahead of his visit to Tuticorin, Rajinikanth hoped that those injured would have some joy in meeting him as he was a cinema star. He expressed regret that his visit to Tuticorin had come at a very difficult time and added that going there was his goodwill gesture. To a question on the war of words between the AIADMK and the DMK over the May 22 incident, he said there should be no blame game on such matters and the focus should be on moving ahead. Asked for his comments on Prime Minister Narendra Modi not reacting to the incident so far, he said: The media is so powerful. Ask him, ok. The staff at Dhoom Manikpurs electricity substation are accustomed to what they call hot talk. Who can blame people for losing their temper when faced with a power cut at the height of the north Indian summer, reasons Neeraj Sharma, a junior engineer at this remote outpost of Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited (UPPCL). He wont say in female presence how hot the talk can get, but its safe to presume that family members are invoked. In summer months, when the load (on the substation) becomes uncontrollable and interruptions are frequent, its common for people from the villages around here to walk in and threaten our employees, Sharma said. The substation supplies electricity to households and industries across a 21-kilometre radius of this region bordering Delhi. On 20 April, things went beyond hot talk. At 4.30pm, the power operator on duty here, Satveer Singh, an ex-army man who believed in following the rules, cut off power supply to the rural areas as a safety measure because a storm was on its way. He immediately received a call from one Neetu Gujjar from Badhpura village demanding that power be restored. Singh was used to explaining things patiently to the public so thats what he did on that day as well, said Sharma. The days temperature was running high and so were tempers. At 4.50pm, Gujjar charged into Singhs office, brandishing a gun. Neetu said put on the power. My uncle said he will do that after the storm passes over, Sunil Tomar later wrote in his complaint at Badalpurs police station. Neetu started abusing him, my uncle protested, and in response Neetu opened fire at him. Uncle fell down. Uncles colleagues and I tried to restrain Neetu but he fired his way out of the gates, the nephew added. At 5.20pm, Satveer Singh died on his way to a hospital in Ghaziabad. Water war In Wazirpur, too, trouble began with an exchange of swear words. Three lakh people live in this cluster of three slums on Delhis north west periphery and most crimes emerge from overcrowding, said Abhishek Bajpai, the local police Station House Officer. Most fights in these slums break out over water. We hardly get any from the taps. No one knows when the water will come. When it does trickle out of the taps once in a while, it resembles acid: dark and pungent, said Sumit Aggarwal, owner of the slums only grocery store. The only source of water here is a tanker sent by the Delhi Jal Board at 4pm every day. The tanker carries a thousand litres of water. Nearly 250 people fight over it every day in this part of the slum complex.Half go away without a drop, Aggarwal said. The DJB tanker has six outlets for water and the right to plug pipes into those holes rests with those who own pipes and know how to wield the privilege. First they will fill their own containers and then allow a set of people to line up after them, explained Aggarwal, proud owner of a thick plastic pipe that he isnt shy to show off. On most days, Aggarwal is perched in the middle of the melee to maintain order. On March 18, things went out of his control. Two young men from the slum, both of them carrying their pipes, faced off over the right to draw water from the tanker. One overpowered the other with help from other members of his family. The sister of the teenager who was getting thrashed went up to her house and alerted her father, said Aggarwal. Lal Bahadur, 60, a scrap dealer on a rare days leave from work that day, rushed down to the street to save his son. His older son too joined the battle shortly. It was too late, however. My brother was injured but it was my father who suffered the worst blows. He had fallen on the ground and this entire family was upon him, beating him with their hands, their legs and their pipe, said Rohit, the older son. He and his brother managed to pull his father out and carry him to the nearest hospital, but Lal Bahadur was declared brought dead. Twenty days after the man died in the capitals first reported death over a water dispute, his younger son, who was about to begin his training as a bus conductor, quietly succumbed to his injuries. Summer rage More bodies may pile up as the summer advances. On May 11, two people were killed, 60 injured and 3,000 arrested in Aurangabad in communal riots triggered by the crackdown by the municipal corporation on illegal water connections. Whats true of Wazirpur may well apply to India on a broader scale: too many people and a limited supply of the basic human necessities. A study by the Water Resources Institute reveals that 14 of Indias 20 largest thermal utilities shut down at least once due to water shortages between 2013 and 2016, costing the companies $1.4 billion. In late April, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India had become 100% electrified a village is technically electrified if 10% of its households have power connections but according to his governments own data, 31 million households in India remain without electricity. In a country where conflicts need no more cause, poor and unequal access to water and electricity add a violent edge to everyday life through the endless months of summer. Battles are fought at several levels. States wrestle with each other over kilowatts and cusecs of electricity and water. The conflict between Delhi and Haryana over Yamunas water spilled out of courtrooms in February 2016, killing 30 people and injuring over 200, when members of Haryanas Jat community cut off the movement of water to force the central government in Delhi to cede their demand for job quotas. In September 2016, riots broke out in Karnataka after the Supreme Court ordered the state to release 15,000 cusecs of water from its reservoirs to Tamil Nadu to help farmers overcome a drought. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have been locked in a fight over electricity sharing since the latter state was carved out of the former in 2014. After three years of legal wrangles over the terms of sale and purchase, Andhra Pradesh stopped its supply of electricity to Telangana over unpaid dues of Rs 4,440 crore in June 2017. The next day, Telangana snapped the flow from the opposite side claiming a pending bill of Rs1,676. 46 crore. Things get uglier between distribution companies and individual consumers over unpaid bills or active theft of electricity. A large number of consumers see nothing wrong in stealing electricity or refusing to pay bills. Some simply cant access or afford a legitimate connection; others expect governments to provide electricity free of cost. We are talking dues of Rs 1 lakh or 2 lakh; it leads people to extreme steps. Its common to see young people in these villages carrying expensive guns, said Neeraj Sharma of UPPCL who recently came out of his office to find his car vandalised. His substation files a hundred first information reports (FIRs) at the local police station every month. The Noida Power Corporation Limited (NPCL), a private company that supplies electricity to 118 villages around Greater Noida near Delhi, divides them into soft and hard, based on their relative population of migrants and locals. Visits to soft villages can be accomplished with assistance from the companys own bouncers, but a police contingent must accompany them on inspection trips to hard villages. Visitors stream in and out of Subodh Kumar Tyagis office in Greater Noida all day; only some of them are polite. The general manager at NPCL identifies one as a shooter from a village gang who wants him to take back an FIR against a defaulter and another as a political hopeful who wants pending dues pardoned for a string of people who have followed him to his office. These visits usually follow inspections by NPCLs officers who have booked 15,000 cases of electricity theft over the past three years. Five of the companys employees were beaten up last August while they were inspecting homes for electricity theft in Tughlakpur village in Greater Noida. Three ended up in a hospital. Village raids On May 18 , an NPCL team visited a medium village in Greater Noida. Members of the team (junior engineer, assistant, lineman, videographer, bouncers, police constables) know what they are going to find before they get out of their cars and walk down the slip road. Stringy black cables crisscross the village, stealing power from the companys electricity poles. Most of the companys meters are either defunct beca- use of long-pending dues or missing, and most consumers express dismay at being told that electricity doesnt come free. The team also knows how quickly such disappointment turns into anger. Five minutes is all they spend dealing with one household: the team leader confronts the head of the family, his assistant writes out a notice, the line man climbs up the nearest pole and scissors the unauthorised cable, and the videographer captures it all. A line man from the Noida Power Corporation Limited removes unauthorised cables in Greater Noidas Surajpur village, a task that officials say puts them on the receiving end of peoples anger. (Singdha Poonam/HT Photo) In Delhi, the list of problematic pockets grows longer every year. These include Najafgarh, Jaffarpur, Mundka, Badarpur, Yamuna Vihar, Daryaganj, Dallupura etc. In these areas, AT & C (aggregate technical and commercial) losses still range between 25% and 50%, said a BSES spokesperson who didnt want to be named. BSES, Delhis biggest power distribution company, estimates an annual loss of over Rs 600 crore to discoms and consumers from power theft. Most localities in his list lie on Delhis fringes where poverty and crime shadow each other. Few inspection raids to these parts of the capital are uneventful; many end up in mob attacks. An engineer lost his life in one last year. This year has been no different. On February 28, a 20-member BSES team was attacked by a mob in Kamruddin Nagar, a high-theft area, in outer Delhi and a supervisor took a serious blow to his head. The area is full of illegal factories making plastic goods that run on stolen electricity 24/7. Verbal threats and stone pelting are common when you visit the site, said the injured supervisor. On this day, 20 people, their faces covered, surrounded us the moment Delhi Police officers accompanying us left us to eat lunch. We were hit by iron rods. My head started to bleed; it took six stitches at the hospital. Court summons If the companies think their consumers behaviour to be extreme, the consumers feel the companies are being unfair. Sixty-year-old daily-wage worker Mumtaz , a resident of Leprosy Colony in east Delhi Shahdara, does not regret being a part of the mob that thrashed the BSES team that raided her colony in the first week of April. Ill do that again if they dare step foot in that place again!she said. Her daughter, Tarannum, who lives in the same colony, was sent a summon by an electricity-special court in Karkarduma the following week. Mumtaz is currently defending her against BSESs charges of electricity theft. Accused Tarannum was dishonestly extracting the electrical energy of the complainant through the main line. The accused had connected two core black colour aluminium cables to the Pole no NV. The illegal wire was going through the bathroom which was found locked, reads the companys complaint. It also notes that there was no electricity generating device found at site. If that were true, Mumtaz arg- ues, taking out a sheaf of papers from a folder, then what does the court make of the multiple rece- ipts of bills the BSES has charged her daughter over the years acco- rding to the readings of its own meter? She was asked to send her daughter to the next hearing. Mumtaz doesnt know if that would be possible. Her daughter is a hospital watching over her son, who was recently paralysed after he accidentally grabbed one of the multiple naked electrical cables running through the colony. Court hearings are the last things the family needs at this time, she says. First, this government makes your life hell and then the electricity people. As a lawyer defending consumers in disputes over electricity, Navneet Singh spends a lot of time at this court. Its hard work, he says, but not harder than facing hostile consumers as a representative of an electricity distribution company, which is what he did for a living before switching sides. Singh wins only one out of every nine cases he fights and views most as exercises in futility. He offers his latest case as an example. At its centre is an electrical meter that belongs to a Delhi businessman accused by BSES of tampering with the device to minimise his monthly bill. The accused claims he couldnt have fiddled with the meter while keeping its hologrammed seal intact. The lawyer representing BSES brings up the insertion of an external wire into the meter as seen in the video shot by the inspection team. The accused claims the wire was inserted by a repairman from BSES who had come over to fix a minor issue with the meter two weeks before the inspection team appeared at his door. After hours of deliberations over the mechanics of the meter, the court asked the two parties to end the two-year-old case with a compromise. And a compromise was duly struck after the defendant paid the complainant ~30,000 to settle an outstanding bill of Rs 3 lakh. Meanwhile, in other parts of India, the bijli-paani wars are picking up pace. On May 3, two neighbouring families in a village near Indore attacked each other with canes over the order of drawing water from the only functioning hand pump available in the area. The following week, four Dalit children were thrashed by an upper-caste man in a village in Ujjain because they had dared to ask him for drinking water after finding the hand pump in their locality dry. On 28 May, denied drinking water for the seventh consecutive day, the residents of Shimla chased water tankers through the streets. Some of them threatened to lock the gates of the municipal corporation. And so it goes. Rajyavardhan Rathore, who holds charge of the information and broadcasting ministry and the ministry of youth affairs and sports, brushes aside criticism and allegations levelled against the BJP-led NDA government as vague statements that do not stand up to scrutiny. He says the work accomplished by the government in the past four years is proof of promises delivered through speed and a changed work ethic. In an interview to HT, Rathore said the 2019 general elections will be a fight of black versus white. Excerpts: What are the major accomplishments of this government? We have worked on core development areas with a high quality of governance, with an objective of transforming this country. So, there are three aspects: development; better governance: and methods for transforming the country. Our policies have been visionary; our execution of these policies has been factually proven by the number of lives touched. In the last four years, it is the same country, but there has been a different impact globally. It is the same government officers, but the execution of work has been similar to the private sector. The word sarkari had become synonymous for lack of output. The work ethic has changed. Can you point out specifics? We have worked on infrastructure, on womens issues, on involving the youth; we have increased the speed of getting work done. Our standing in global community is very high, we have worked on that; we have worked with farmers. The Opposition has accused the government of failing to find solutions to agrarian crisis. The recent hike in petroleum prices is also being flagged as another failure. Their accusations are vague. We are arguing with someone who humiliated the country by the scams in the Commonwealth Games, who did nothing for modernisation of the armed forces in 10 years. We are comparing with those who never took military action against a neighbouring country that sponsored terrorism in our country. Petrol price? These issues are raised by the Opposition parties, but in states ruled by them, they do not roll back the excise duty and set an example. When the Centre talks of bringing petrol and diesel under Goods and Services Tax (GST), they oppose it. Is the BJP equipped to take on a combined Opposition in 2019? This is the second time the opposition has come together. First time it was during Emergency; now it is for a fight against a good, clean government. The corrupt parties have put aside their ideology and their differences to come together. It will be a black versus white fight in 2019. The BJP is against black money and corruption; just as the numbers of those who filed their income tax returns has gone up in four years, when there is an honest government in place, clean people join in. Is the ministry pursuing regulation of websites? We believe in self-regulation of all mediums and we trust the consumer of news to be able to be able to tell right from wrong. Association for Democratic Reforms, an NGO which monitors political parties in India, released a report on incomes of national parties for 2016-17 last month. The Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) total reported income of Rs 1,034.27 crore was 4.6 times that of the Congresss figure, according to the report. An ADR report released on Wednesday adds another dimension to this asymmetry in incomes of the two major political parties in India. In 2016-17, the BJP got Rs 532.27 crore in donations above Rs 20,000, which is more than 12 times the money Congress got in similar donations. A BJP spokesperson declined to comment. Congress spokesman RPN Singh said his party had questioned the introduction of electoral bonds and maintained that the biggest beneficiary of these bonds will be the ruling party, which will coerce and threaten the people for donations. Everybody knows why BJP gets highest donations. The suit-boot government that has waived off loans worth Rs 1.2 lakh crore of big industrialists will obviously get more donations, he told reporters. ADR collects these statistics from income tax declarations by political parties. Political funding laws in India do not require disclosure of a donors identity for donations below Rs 20,000. Hence, it has been a practice to take declared donations above this amount as a proxy for genuine corporate political funding. These statistics suggest that BJPs ability to garner funds becomes even bigger when it is dealing with big business. The fact that Rs 251.22 crore of the BJPs Rs 532.27 crore worth of donations in this category has come from just one source, Satya Electoral Trust, buttresses this argument. A long-term analysis of these statistics gives another interesting insight. It is expected that the party in power will have a greater income than the one in opposition as it can run patronage networks more effectively. This was the case from 2004-05 to 2012-13, when the Congress always reported greater income than the BJP. The BJP overtook the Congress in 2013-14, which too is understandable given the fact that the BJP was widely seen a party which would win the 2014 general elections. BJPs excess income over the Congress in the next two fiscal years was in keeping with earlier trends during the United Progressive Alliance governments term. By 2016-17, the latest year for which data is available, the income gap between the BJP and the Congress reached an abnormally high level. What is also interesting is the fact that the BJP has mostly been ahead of the Congress in terms of income from corporate donations (those above Rs 20,000) even when it was in the opposition. It trailed the Congress in this category in only two of the 10 years even when the UPA government was in power. Once the BJP captured power in 2014, its lead vis-a-vis the Congress in terms of income of corporate donations has been increasing continuously, which was not the case for the Congress when the UPA was in power. Among big business, the BJP has been the favored child because of its pro-business image. Many business houses were turned off with the Congress social activism and relative inattention to the prototypical market-reform agenda, said Milan Vaishnav, senior fellow and director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He added that the one-sided gap tells you a simple story: privately Indian business may grumble about the Narendra Modi governments economic record, but they fear the alternative even more Days after his remarks that he was at the mercy of Congress and not the people drew flak, Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy on Wednesday described the Grand Old partys president Rahul Gandhi as a punyatma (good soul). Today, even though I dont have the blessings of the people, punyatma Rahul Gandhi placing trust in me has given me power. We have got a good opportunity. I will do it. He will not oppose, I will convince him, Kumaraswamy said. Taking him (Rahul Gandhi) into confidence, I will have to come to a decision, he said, as he tried to pacify farmers during his meeting with farmers organisations regarding farm loan waiver. You (farmers) have a golden opportunity, utilise it, and stand with us. When election comes, vote whomever you want... but utilise this opportunity, he added. This comment from the chief minister comes days after his remarks that he was at the mercy of the Congress and not the people drew flak from different quarters, including the opposition BJP. Going into damage control mode on his mercy remark, Kumaraswamy said he never meant to show disrespect to the people of the state. What I meant was so long as they (Congress) support me, I can continue. So, whatever programmes we have to pursue, I will be at the mercy of Congress, he had said. There is good understanding between him and deputy CM G Parameshwara of the Congress, Kumaraswamy told farmers, adding that the government will be stable. If someone wants to remove (the government), we will not allow it to happen easily. We too understand politics to an extent. We will run this government, he added. Reiterating his governments commitment for the cause of farmers, the CM told the farmers, All your wishes will be fulfilled, but give us time. The development comes at a time when there is still no clarity on cabinet expansion in the state, amid reports about lack of consensus between coalition partners Congress and JD(S) over key portfolio allocation, especially finance. The Shiv Sena on Wednesday dubbed the Election Commission, democracy and elections as mistress of those in power, launching a scathing attack on the poll panel over complaints of the malfunctioning of EVMs and VVPAT machines in bypolls. Unsparing in its criticism of ally BJP, the Sena alleged that the ruling party, which, it said, has an autocratic mindset, has corrupted the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) to serve its own purpose. It warned that peoples loss of faith in the election process was dangerous for democracy. Our country can no longer be called the largest democracy in the world. EVMs have spoilt the democracy. Those in power at present have made democracy their mistress with their autocratic mindset, an editorial in Sena mouthpiece Saamana said. The BJP has corrupted EVMs, and made them into a machinery that can be used for its own purpose. Elections and the Election Commission have become the mistress, it alleged. Referring to complaints of technical snags in EVMs and VVPAT machines in Maharashtras Bhandara-Gondia and Palghar Lok Sabha bypolls, it said while each vote counts and can be a deciding factor, thousands of people got bored waiting in queues and returned without voting after the machines malfunctioned. The present Election Commission and its machinery have become like slaves of the government. Hence, they are not ready to take complaints of distribution of alcohol and money, the autocracy of government and threatening statements, it charged. The publication also mocked EC for blaming the hot weather for malfunctioning of EVMs. The temperature keeps fluctuating. However, we never heard of the prime ministers flight engines having stopped working due to hot weather or computers of the BJPs social media cell malfunctioning due to hostile weather, it quipped and asked why did EVMs stop functioning then? Since the last several years, EVMs were procured from (PSU) BHEL or from the Election Commission of India. This time, the machines were procured from a private company in Surat, the Sena pointed out, adding that this raises doubts. People not trusting the election process is dangerous for democracy, it opined. There is a discontent among people against the BJP, yet the party is winning elections and instances of EVMs malfunctioning only gives an impetus to the belief that there is a setting of EVMs that ensures the party wins, the Marathi daily alleged. There was a time when the BJP opposed these machines. Now, the whole country is opposing it, the BJP is supporting it. The whole world has rejected EVMs, then why is the government supporting it? it sought to know. The EC on Tuesday announced re-poll in 73 polling stations in Uttar Pradeshs Kairana, 49 polling stations in Maharashtras Bhandara-Gondia and one polling station in Nagaland, after the voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines developed snags during the bypolls held on Monday. No re-polling was ordered in the Palghar (ST) Lok Sabha constituency. Indias government is looking for a company to analyse social media posts to help boost nationalism and neutralize any media blitzkrieg by Indias adversaries. In a lengthy tender posted online, Indias Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said it wants a company to provide analytical software and a team of at least 20 professionals to power a real time New Media Command Room. They should monitor Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Internet forums and even email in order to analyse sentiment, identify fake news, disseminate information on behalf of the government and inject news and social media posts with a positive slant for India, the tender said. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modis administration, Indias ministries and cabinet ministers have been active on social media, tweeting new policies and interacting with citizens. But this tender suggests Modis government now wants more powerful social media tools to shape a positive narrative about India and encourage nationalism among its citizens in the lead up to state and national elections. Essentially, the hub will be a mass surveillance tool, said Nikita Sud, an associate professor of international development at Oxford University. Nationalism seems to be equated with agreement with the government of the day, or even with the party in power. There are grave implications here for Indias democracy, and for the fundamental rights to free speech and expression guaranteed by the Indian constitution. A spokesman in the prime ministers office did not immediately respond to a call or text. Calls to a spokesman for the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting were not answered. Fake News India is just the latest Asian country looking more closely at fake news and social media. In the run up to a closely-fought election in Malaysia, the government of former prime minister Najib Razak introduced a fake news law that was used to probe his chief opponent Mahathir Mohamad, who won the election and has reportedly proposed to repeal the law. In Singapore, a parliamentary select committee recently held public hearings over the issue of imposing new restrictions on fake news. In Indias tender, the government seeks the ability to track trends, topics and Twitter hashtags relevant to government activities. But it also seeks the ability to drill down and monitor individual social media accounts, create historical archives of conversations and help shape a positive narrative about India. It suggests the social media tool should use predictive modeling and data mining to make predictions about the future or unknown events, including the impact of headlines in international publications such as the New York Times, the Economist and Time magazine. What would be the global public perception due to such headlines and breaking news, how could the public perception be molded in positive manner for the country, how could nationalistic feelings be inculcated in the masses, it continues. How could the media blitzkrieg of Indias adversaries be predicted and replied/neutralized, how could the social media and internet news/discussions be given a positive slant for India, the document reads. This tender contains a worrying emphasis on isolating and countering individual views, said Saksham Khosla, a research analyst at Carnegie Endowment for International Peaces India office. Will it collect other personal data? The line between surveillance and responsiveness is blurry, and without rigorous privacy safeguards and oversight, the potential for misuse and overreach is high. The government tender is dated April 25, and noted it was accepting bids until May 17. Police in various districts of Gujarat have received a fake letter, purportedly from the Election Commission of India, asking for a discreet inquiry into an EVM scam. Gandhinagar police on Wednesday registered a case of forgery against the unidentified sender. We received the letter on May 25, purportedly from the EC, asking for a discreet inquiry into EVM (Electronic Voting Machine) scam and a confidential report, Gandhinagar superintendent of police Virendra Singh Yadav said. The letter appeared to be fake, and after confirming that with the state election commission, we registered an FIR today, Yadav said. A case under IPC section 465 (forgery) was registered and police were probing who sent the letter, he said. Similar letters were received by police in some other districts too, and the EC has taken note of this, the SP said. The letter received by Gandhinagar police also bore a fake signature of the deputy chief electoral officer of Gujarat. If there is a problem with EVM machine, then under the confidential police inquiry, you should investigate scam of the EVM machine...You should send us effective report of the EVM machine scam within 30 days anyhow...You have to keep this report completely confidential, the letter read. There were no elections scheduled in Gujarat this month. The letter didnt refer to any particular election, the officer said. The Congress partys chief whip in the Lok Sabha, Jyotiraditya Scindia, lashed out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government, which completed four years in office earlier this week, saying the current regime had undone the economic gains of the United Progressive Alliance government. It is not about liberal economy or socialism but liberal economy and socialism, Scindia said. The Congress model for 10 years was India realising its full (economic) potential and the excess revenue being used to create not islands but oceans of development, the Congress leader said in response on a question related to the economic policies of the present government. Scindia was speaking at a panel discussion titled, India at 71: Hits and misses following the release of Congress lawmaker and senior lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvis book of writings Straight Talk. We have had enough Mann ki BaatThere is a need to listen to what the people want, the Guna MP said, taking a dig at the PMs monthly radio address. He said the last session of Parliament had seen disruptions fomented by the government for the first time. Former finance minister P Chidambaram said the Congress, through a series of hits and misses, had managed to turn India into a liberal democracy but this is no longer a liberal economy. Others present in the discussion were DMK lawmaker Kanimozhi and TMC leader Dinesh Trivedi, while HRD minister Prakash Javadekar did not attend the discussion as scheduled. This would have been a very secular panel if Javadekar-ji had attended, Scindia said, when asked by moderator Barkha Dutt about the definition of secularism in the current political context. It is alright for us to agree to disagree, he added. One week after police detained army Major Leetul Gogoi along with a local army man and a young woman in Srinagar, a Hizbul Mujahideen commander has asked Kashmiri women to avoid chatting with soldiers and strangers on social media. In an audio statement on Wednesday, Hizbul Mujahideens Riyaz Naikoo also asked young men to post their experiences on social media if army pushes them for providing information about militants. We have got information that army and policemen are developing relationships with women particularly school girls to prompt them for providing information about militants. Army men are developing contacts with these girls to get them do wrong things, Naikoo alleged in the 10-minute audio clip which has gone viral in Kashmir. Naikoo, 30, one the longest-surviving militants in Hizbul Mujahideen had joined group almost along with Burhan Wani who was killed in 2016. We appeal to our sisters to remain away from army and policemen and avoid chatting with strangers on social media. Nor you should share your secrets with strangers. It will be used to blackmail you, he said. The woman from Budgam who was detained along with Major Gogoi last week told the police that she was not a minor and that she had come in contact with the officer on Facebook and had come to meet him of her own will. Major Gogoi hit the headlines last year after he tied a Kashmiri civilian to the front of his vehicle and claimed that he did so to prevent stone-pelters from targeting his convoy. Naikoo also cautioned parents and teachers against sending their wards to army-sponsored educational tours. I am at a loss to understand how parents allow their daughters to go on tours with army officers like Major Gogoi Army and education are two separate departments and they are not connected to each other even remotely. Army tours are a conspiracy so that they can reach our sisters. Then they lure them to do wrong things and then blackmail them to work as informers for army, the militant commander charged. We will not spare those parents and teachers who allow their children to go on tours which are directly or indirectly connected to army, he warned. Hizb is the largest local militant group in Jammu and Kahsmir. Naikoo also claimed that youth were reaching out to militants with complaints that army was detaining them from streets, calling them to camps and torturing them mentally and physically to become army informers. You should share these things with your village elders and share your experiences on social media in the form of videos, Naikoo advised the youth. He also threatened jail superintendents and prison staff for allegedly torturing militants in jails. We know who is inflicting cruelties on our brothers in jails in Jammu and Kashmir. All those jail superintendents, whether Hindu or Muslim, they are all on our target.... If you do not stop these atrocities we will barge into your homes or capture you on roads, he threatened. In the last round of Lok Sabha bypolls before the 2019 general election, Kairana in Uttar Pradesh, Palghar and Bhandara-Gondia in Maharashtra, and Nagaland will see new members of Parliament elected on Thursday. The bypolls, which saw the entire Opposition closing ranks against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in UP; the BJP and its traditional ally, the Shiv Sena, pitted against each other in Maharashtra; and the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) come back together, is being widely watched for its larger national political message and impact on alliances. Polling for the four Lok Sabha seats and nine assembly constituencies in Bihar (Jokihat), UP (Noorpur), Meghalaya (Ampati), West Bengal (Maheshtala), Uttarakhand (Tharali), Jharkhand (Gomia and Silli), Kerala (Chengannur), and Punjab (Shahkot), were held on May 28. In Maharashtras Palus Kadegaon, the Congress candidate was elected unopposed. The polling was accompanied by widespread charges by the opposition parties about the malfunctioning of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Voter Verification Audit Paper Trial Machines (VVPATs). The Election Commission dismissed the reports as exaggerated, and clarified that 96 ballot units, 84 control units of EVMs and 1202 VVPATs had to be replaced. There were fresh elections at 73 booths in Kairana, 49 booths in Bhandara-Gondia and one booth in Nagaland on Wednesday. All eyes are now on the outcome, especially in UP, where the BJP recently lost the Gorakhpur and Phulpur bypolls. In Kairana, the Ajit Singh-Jayant Chaudhary led Rashtriya Lok Dals (RLD) candidate, Tabassum Hasan, was supported by the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Congress, which did not put up candidates. The BJP candidate is Mriganka Singh, daughter of the former MP, Hukum Singh, whose death caused the bypoll. An RLD leader stationed in Kairana said, We are absolutely confident that we will win this round. The only question is if the margin will be above a lakh. Jats have returned to the party; Muslims have consolidated against BJP and Dalits are backing us. Together, this makes for a winning combination in the seat. In the constituency with approximately 16 lakh voters, estimates suggest there are over five and a half lakh Muslims and over two lakh Jats. The BJP, in turn, is relying on a consolidation of Gujjar, Jat, Kashyap, Saini and a section of Dalit votes. There is also (Hindu-Muslim) polarisation. Let us see, said a UP-based leader of the party. Anil Baluni, the BJPs media cell head and Rajya Sabha MP, said that the BJP was absolutely confident of winning. We are very positive. Bypolls are fought on local issues, but we are confident. Party president, Amit Shah, in recent press interactions, has emphasised, in the context of past bypoll losses, that voters in such elections vote differently, on local issues when they are aware that this will not impact government formation in the state or at the centre. The Congress claimed that BJP has already conceded defeat. The Kairana results havent yet come out and the BJP has already conceded defeat, spokesman RPN Singh said. Experts believe that Kairana will send out a national message. Kairana is really important because it will answer a central question of the politics of our times. The BJP won Kairana with 2.5 lakh votes in 2014; it is adjacent to Muzaffarnagar in a belt known for the communal tensions; and the balance in the constituency broadly rests between Hindu, Jats and Muslims, explained Neelanjan Sircar, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. He added, In this election, we have a Jat party (RLD) putting a Muslim candidate (Hasan) in an overall direct or indirect alliance (with SP-BSP and Congress). If the opposition wins, it shows their ability to overcome the most extreme form of communal polarisation. The BJP will see it as a signal it is in trouble. The Maharashtra outcome will be important too. In Palghar, despite being in government in both at the centre and in the state, the Shiv Sena has put up a candidate against the BJP. This comes in the wake of public acrimony between the two allies. If it wins, it is expected to enhance its bargaining power with the BJP in 2019 in terms of seat sharing, or even open up options for it to contest independently. In Bhandara-Gondia, there is a direct BJP-NCP battle, with the NCP supported by the Congress. The two parties have come together for the first time in a major election; they have had alliances for local polls but fought separately in both the Lok Sabha and the assembly. But if the BJP wins both seats, it will be a big boost to CM Devendra Fadnavis; it will ensure that the BJPs negotiating power with the Shiv Sena increases; and it will force a rethink of strategies in the Congress-NCP camp. India and Indonesia on Wednesday agreed to step up their defence and maritime cooperation, raising the level of their ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership after the meeting in Jakarta between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo. The highlights of the visit included India agreeing to develop the strategically important Indonesian port Sabang in the Indian Ocean, close to the Andamans and the two sides unveiling a vision document for the Indo-Pacific region, the first of its kind between India and a south-east Asian country, and dealing with an area where China is increasing its footprint. The two sides also signed 15 agreements including ones on enhanced defence cooperation, outer space cooperation, railways and health. Prime Minister Modi, in his first visit to Indonesia, which has the worlds highest population of Muslims, spoke about Indias special ties with Indonesia, and the need to find common ground in the two countries strategies and visions for the region. In todays changing scenario in the Indo-Pacific region, we (India and Indonesia) are geostrategically located. Under Indias Act East policy, we have SAGAR -- Security and Growth for All in the Region -- which matches with President Widodos Global Maritime Fulcrum, Modi said. While Modis SAGAR initiative talks of Indias engagement in the Indian Ocean region, Widodos Global Maritime Fulcrum seeks to cash in on Indonesias geographic position to make the south-east Asian nation a fulcrum of Indo-Pacific maritime activity. In their document for the Indo-Pacific region, the two sides reiterated the importance of achieving a free, open, transparent, rules-based, peaceful, prosperous and inclusive Indo-Pacific region, where sovereignty and territorial integrity, international law, in particular UNCLOS, freedom of navigation and overflight, sustainable development and an open, free, fair and mutually beneficial trade and investment system are respected. With a coastline of 7,500 km, India occupies a central position in the Indo-Pacifi c, while Indonesia, as the largest archipelagic State in the world with a coastline of 108,000 kms, is as a key country that connects the Indian and Pacific oceans. Though it is not a claimant, Indonesia has clashed with Beijing over fishing rights around the Natuna Islands and expanded its military presence there. Developing infrastructure and an economic zone at Sabang port which sits on the tip of Sumatra island and at the mouth of the Malacca Strait, one of the busiest global trade routes, was a major outcome of the visit would go a long way in Indias intentions to play a larger role in the Indo-Pacific, analysts said. Asked about Indias investment in Sabang, secretary (east) in the MEA Preeti Saran said New Delhi was interested in helping build infrastructure across south-east Asia. There have been discussions about building infrastructure, its not just seaports, but airports, she said. There would be a lot of interest among Indian companies. Officials said two sides are also proposing to hold an annual summit between their leaders. At present, India has annual summits with only Russia and Japan. India is a strategic defence partner...and we will continue to advance our cooperation in developing infrastructure, including at Sabang Island and the Andaman Islands, Widodo told a news conference. A joint statement issued after the meeting says the two leaders held extensive talks on bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest. The two countries also agreed to combat climate change and ensure protection of environment and natural resources. The two countries agreed to boost the existing naval cooperation including the bilateral Coordinated Patrols initiated in 2002 between the navies of the two countries and commencement of regular bilateral naval exercises. India and Indonesia on Wednesday underlined the importance of a free, open, transparent, rules-based and peaceful Indo-Pacific region, amidst China flexing its military muscles in the strategic East and South China Seas. Noting that both India and Indonesia are maritime neighbours and sea faring nations, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo issued the Shared Vision of the two countries on Maritime Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. The document, the first with any ASEAN country, outlines areas of maritime cooperation and envisages security architecture in the Indo-Pacific region, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said. The document reiterated the importance of achieving a free, open, transparent, rules-based, peaceful, prosperous and inclusive Indo-Pacific region, where sovereignty and territorial integrity, international law, in particular UNCLOS, freedom of navigation and overflight, sustainable development and an open, free, fair and mutually beneficial trade and investment system are respected. The release of the document comes at a time when China is engaged in hotly contested territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas. Beijing has built up and militarised many of the islands and reefs it controls in the region. China claims sovereignty over all of the South China Sea. But Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei and Taiwan have counter claims. In the East China Sea, Beijing has territorial disputes with Japan. The South China Sea and the East China Sea are stated to be rich in minerals, oil and other natural resources. They are also vital to global trade. Prime Minister Modi and President Widodo said they were keen to strengthen bilateral maritime cooperation for promotion of peace, stability and bringing in robust economic growth and prosperity to the Indo-Pacific region. Noting that with a coastline of 7,500 kms, India occupies a central position in the Indo-Pacific, while Indonesia as the largest archipelagic State in the world, with a coastline of 108,000 kms, is a fulcrum that connects the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. The two oceans represent a combined maritime region which is important for global maritime trade and commerce, the document said. It highlighted the importance to adhering to the rights and obligations under the international law including the Charter of the United Nations, the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS) and the 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC). The two countries acknowledged the need to maintain maritime safety and security for peace, stability and sustainable economic growth and development in the maritime waters of the Indo-Pacific region as enshrined by UNCLOS and relevant international laws. It noted that free and open seas, as regulated by UNCLOS, are essential for peace, stability and prosperity of the region and the international community. The document also highlighted the importance to address the emerging maritime security issues facing the Indo-Pacific region including the smuggling of people, arms, drugs and money; illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing; and the movement of terrorists. It recognised the importance of the blue economy as a driver of inclusive and sustainable economic growth and development in the region. The document said both sides have agreed to encourage greater flow of goods, services, investment and technology between the two countries and the region to further develop their economies sustainably. The two countries also agreed to combat climate change and ensure protection of environment and natural resources. They also agreed to combat marine plastic debris through bilateral and regional cooperation. India and Indonesia have decided to expand cooperation in disaster risk management, especially aid to victims of disasters. The two countries agreed to boost the existing naval cooperation including the bilateral Coordinated Patrols initiated in 2002 between the Navies of the two countries and commencement of regular bilateral naval exercises. They concurred to build on the existing maritime boundary agreements and reaffirming support to the technical meetings for expeditious negotiations for a mutually acceptable solution on the delimitation of maritime boundaries between the two countries based on the principles of international law, including UNCLOS. India and Indonesia elevated their bilateral ties to that of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnerhsip and issued a shared vision for maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region following a bilateral summit between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo here on Wednesday. The two sides also signed 15 agreements, including on defence and economic cooperation. Reflecting Indias growing ties with Southeast Asia under New Delhis Act East Policy, the two sides issued a joint statement on Establishing Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Between Indonesia and India which said that Modi and Widodo held extensive talks on bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest, and provided strategic directions that would further enhance the solid and expanding relations between the two countries. To enhance the two countries strategic partnership, the leaders agreed to hold annual summit meetings, including on the margins of multilateral events, the statement said. They also stressed the importance of continuing regular bilateral consultations through the robust architecture of dialogue in place, including the ministerial and working group mechanisms. According to the statement, both leaders reaffirmed that teir countries, as strategic partners and maritime neighbours, must work to further strengthen and broaden the already robust defence cooperation. The leaders reaffirmed their commitment in the field of defence, with the signing of the Defence Cooperation Agreement between the two countries, it stated, adding that the this will further strengthen and renew the existing cooperation for mutual benefit of the two countries and the region. Modi and Widodo also agreed to further enhance mutual trust through regular meetings and staff talks between armies, navies and air forces of the two countries. In the area of defence industry, they took note on the progress made through the joint production of military equipment and identified cooperation in defence industry and technology as areas of great potential. In terms of economic cooperation, the two sides sides agreed to work intensively for the early conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and reiterated that it needs to be comprehensive, fair and balanced with benefit to all member states. RCEP is a proposed free trade agreement between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) regional bloc and the six states with which Asean has existing free trade agreements - Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. The Asean comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. President Joko Widodo welcomed the increase in Indian investments in Indonesia and appreciated their contribution to the Indonesian economy, the statement said. Prime Minister Modi also welcomed Indonesian companies participation through the Make in India initiative and invited Indonesian business to avail of the opportunities presented. The joint statement said that as maritime neighbours, the two countries underlined the importance of stronger connectivity, particularly on sea links, in order to facilitate economic cooperation and people-to-people contact. Modi and Widodo welcomed the plan to build connectivity between Andaman Nicobar in India and Aceh in Indonesia to unleash the economic potentials of both areas. Furthermore, the two sides looked forward to the expeditious conclusion of the Asean-India Maritime Transport Cooperation Agreement, the statement said. The two leaders also reiterated their strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations including cross-border terrorism and terror-related incidents in Indonesia and India and affirmed that perpetrators of these henious acts must be brought to justice. In a manifestation of the growing geostrategic importance of the Indo-Pacific region, the two sides issued a separate statement on Shared Vision of Indo-Indonesia Martime Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. In todays changing scenario in the Indo-Pacific region, we (India and Indonesia) are geostrategically located, Modi said in a joint address to the media with Indonesian President Joko Widodo following a bilateral summit here. Under Indias Act East Policy, we have SAGAR - Security and Growth for All in the Region - that matches with President Widodos Global Maritime Fulcrum, he said. While Modis SAGAR initiative underscores Indias engagement in the Indian Ocean region, Jokowis Global Maritime Fulcrum seeks to capitalise on Indonesias geographic position to make the southeast Asian nation a fulcrum of Indo-Pacific maritime activity. India is also part of a recently revived quad, including the US, Japan and Australia, that seeks to work for peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region. According to the statement on maritime cooperation, both sides recognised that with a coastline of 7,500 km, with more than 1,380 islands and more than two million sq. km of Exclusive Economic Zone, India occupies a central position in the Indo-Pacific, while Indonesia as the largest archipelagic state in the world, with a coastline of 108,000 km, with 17,504 islands and features and a total of maritime area of 6,400,000 sq. km including Exclusive Economic Zone, is a fulcrum that connects the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. The two oceans represent a combined maritime region which is important for global maritime trade and commerce, it stated. It also called for adhering to the rights and obligations under the international law including the Charter of the United Nations, the UN Convention on the Law of Sea (Unclos) and the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC). Modi arrived here on Tuesday on the first leg of his five-day three-nation tour of southeast Asia that will also see him visiting Malaysia and Singapore. This is his first visit to Indonesia as Prime Minister. The Centre on Thursday sought the United Kingdoms help in securing an early extradition of liquor baron Vijay Mallya and former IPL chairman Lalit Modi and in locating fugitive businessman Nirav Modi during the third Indo-UK home affairs dialogue, a home ministry official said. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has also asked the UK not to allow British territory to be used for anti-India activities by Kashmiri and Khalistani separatists. A detailed exchange of views took place between the two sides on Indian fugitives and economic offenders residing in the UK. The Indian delegation impressed upon the UK authorities the need to expedite the process of extradition, a statement issued by the MHA said. While the Indian delegation was led by Union home secretary Rajiv Gauba, the UK team was headed by UK second permanent secretary Patsy Wilkinson. The dialogue covered a wide range of issues, including cyber security, women safety and organised crime said the statement. A special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court here on Wednesday held five persons, including former Border Security Force deputy inspector general and an ex-deputy superintendent of police, guilty of rape and acquitted two others in the 12-year-old Jammu and Kashmir sex scandal. The quantum of sentence in the oldest case at the UT district courts will be pronounced on June 4. Those convicted are then BSF DIG KS Padhi, former DSP Mohammad Ashraf Mir, and three J&K residents Shabbir Ahmed Laway, Shabbir Ahmed Langhoo and Masud Ahmed. The accused broke down inside the court as soon as the judge pronounced the verdict. Mehraj-ud-din Malik and Anil Sethi, a former additional advocate general of Jammu and Kashmir, were acquitted as court gave them benefit of doubt as the prosecution failed to prove charges after the victim refused to identify them in court. 2006 racket April 2006: Case comes to light after a sex CD surfaces May: J&K transfers case to CBI Aug: SC starts monitoring probe after a plea is filed Sept: Supreme Court transfers case to Chandigarh April 2007: Examination of witnesses begins May 30, 2018: Five held guilty, two acquitted The scandal surfaced in the heart of Srinagar in 2006 after a pornographic CD involving a 15-year-old was handed over to the police, bringing to light a flesh trade racket and implicating a host of VVIPs in the state. Members of an NGO Samaj Sudhar had a complaint with the police after they got hold of video clippings. The police questioned the two girls and the alleged kingpin, Sabeena. After grilling them, they discovered the names of 56 people allegedly involved in the racket. Sabeena and her husband, Abdul Hamid Bullah, who were running a brothel, were subsequently booked. The couple, however, died of natural causes during the pendency of the case. The case was transferred to the CBI in May 2006 after names of ministers, MLAs and other influential men emerged in the case The CBI had named four victims in the case, three of whom turned hostile during the trial. The remaining one was kept in protective custody due to sensitive nature of the case. During probe, various hoteliers and guesthouse owners besides cops were also booked for criminal conspiracy. A supplementary challan was filed against them but most of the accused were acquitted for want of evidence. The last to be acquitted was Muhammad Yusuf Mir, former SP. Others who were acquitted include Mohammad Iqbal Khandey, former chief secretary; Raman Mattu, former minister; Absar Ahmed Dar, a cop; Hilal Shah and Ghulam Ahmed Mir, both Congress leaders Must read | HT Explainer: A long haul for a case that shook Jammu and Kashmir The central government has once again made the rape law tougher, both for the rapist and the police, providing the death sentence for the rapist when the victim is less than 12 years old. It has also reduced the investigation period for the police from three to two months except in certain cases. Many amendments have been made earlier in the law relating to sexual offences since 1983. A special legislation, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (Pocso Act), was enacted in November 2012 to protect children from sexual offences. Here is a reality check which shows how far we have travelled through these amendments. The law requires that a first information report (FIR) on a rape case must be recorded by a woman officer so that the survivor could connect emotionally and recount her ordeal without fear. However, National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data reveals that the representation of women in the police has not increased proportionately to fulfil this mandate. The percentage of female police officers has increased just marginally from 6.85% in 2012 to 7.10% in 2016. The regional variation is even more alarming. Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu constitute about 30% of total women force; Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh have less than 5% each. The number of woman officers, in the same period, has increased from 10,455 to 11,367 against over 15,000 police stations. Thus, on average, there is not even single woman officer in each police station despite the fact that most of the states have 30% horizontal reservation for them. In the absence of institutional support, it is extremely difficult to implement the amendments. Records show that the mandate of recording a statement at a place of the victims convenience is also on paper. Under the POCSO Act, the prosecution has to prove that the child is under the age of 18 years. Unfortunately, the jurisprudence of determining age has not been applied consistently in our country. Watch and share the video to become part of the conversation against child rape. Earlier, the Supreme Court, in several judgments, held that the police has to collect primary evidence i.e., the birth certificate, and only in its absence should it collect the school certificate or get a medical ossification test conducted to determine the age of the victim. Also, the person responsible for getting the birth registered must be examined to vouch for its truthfulness. After the enactment of the Juvenile Justice Act, which clearly lays down the parameters for determining the age of a juvenile delinquent, and gives priority to the school certificate over the birth certificate, the Supreme Court in Jarnail Singh vs Haryana (2013) held that if parameters can be laid down for determining the age of the accused, the same parameters could be applied for determining the age of the victim as well. As the law has not been amended to give effect to the apex courts directives, it is not being followed uniformly across the country. Further, since the provisions of the Registration of Births and Deaths Act of 1969 are not coercive but merely persuasive, its enforcement still remains poor in rural areas. Investigating officers collect various documents, and without reaching a logical conclusion about the actual age, put them up before the court for evaluation. This leaves sufficient scope in the hands of defence lawyers to distort facts and question the recorded birth date. The standard ossification test to determine age only provides a range, which again, not being a perfect science, is challenged and disregarded by defence lawyers. Therefore, quite often, the prosecution fails to establish the minor status of the survivor. The legislative benefit of non- admissibility of consent of a minor does not flow to the prosecution. Timely medical examination of the survivor is very crucial in rape cases as it can conclusively establish the crime with the assistance of DNA profile matching. If a case is reported after delay and stained clothes are not preserved, except for the noticeable faded injuries and marks of resistance, nothing much can be established in court. Besides, rural public health centres do not have sufficient woman doctors, and taking the survivor to several places becomes a daunting task. The medical examination is still not done scientifically. Despite the Supreme Courts orders and the Union health ministrys directives, the two-finger test is still in use. Medical reports are still seen extensively that say a woman is habitual of intercourse, and no definitive opinion can be given about the rape. Doctors obviously, and hopefully, would know that the word rape is a legal proposition and not a medical diagnosis. Also DNA labs are not yet available in all states and many cases are decided in the absence of a Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) report. Another feature added in the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) says that the police officer shall get the statement of a victim recorded by a judicial magistrate. A similar provision exists in the Pocso Act. However, it has been observed that judicial magistrates are generally not called for a cross-examination by trial courts. In such scenarios, these statements get reduced to the ones recorded by the police and do not help the prosecution. Similarly, the burden of proof, even if necessary conditions are fulfilled, is not shifted to the accused at any stage. Several judgments still record that the prosecution failed to establish its case beyond reasonable doubt. The provisions in the law that the court shall presume do not get their due during trials. Its high time that the long-pending recommendation of various commissions, and the Supreme Court, to separate investigation from law and order, are honoured by state governments. The DNA facilities and mobile FSL units must be enhanced. Doctors must adhere to the governments guidelines and respect womens right to privacy. The Investigation Units of Crime Against Women, a recent initiative of the central government to improve investigation and supervision of sexual assault cases, must be made functional. Though the SC has recently asked director generals of police to constitute a task force that would oversee Pocso cases, the witness protection scheme is yet to be fully put in place. The police can meet the new two-month deadline of completing investigation only if all multi-jurisdictional agencies join hands for a common cause. The police, however, must keep its home in order and do its bit without waiting for others to take the lead. Allegations of the police being indifferent and insensitive are not uncommon. A 19-year old victim of gangrape was turned away by three different police stations in Bhopal last year on the question of which station had jurisdiction over the case. Similarly, the report of a minor girl was not heeded by Unnao police due to political reasons until her father died in police custody. These are only some of the indicative examples highlighted by the media. The Supreme Courts latest assertion in the Lalita Kumari case (2013) to mandatorily register a cognizable offence, perhaps has not permeated the conscience of the lower rungs of the police. Therefore, in addition to taking appropriate action against the erring police officers, a series of refresher training courses need to be organised to sensitise the police about their responsibility. The police cannot forget that the registration and detection of crime is one of its core functions without which its credibility shall always remain at stake. A minor victim of rape is also a child in need of care and protection under the Juvenile Justice Act, particularly if the offence has been committed by a relative and she is not safe at home. However, if the child is rescued at odd hours or on holidays, child welfare committee members may not be available and the police cannot send her to an observation home. A rape victim needs societal and institutional care that go beyond the letter of law. Society needs to recognise this. The author is a senior IPS officer in Chhattisgarh. The views expressed are personal. This is the third part of our series, Lets Talk About Child Rape, which focuses sharply on the rising incidents of sexual violence against minors. You can read part one and two here. With businessman Vijay Mallya in mind, India will seek faster extradition processes between India and the UK at their bilateral home affairs dialogue on Wednesday, officials familiar with the development said. For its part, the British side is pushing for early implementation of a pact on return of illegal immigrants. The British delegation will be led by Patsy Wilkinson, second permanent secretary in the UK home office, and Indian side by home secretary Rajiv Gauba. Speeding up the extradition process is among the agenda. We would rather not focus much on the cases that are under the consideration of courts, but there is a lot we need to streamline in terms of extradition process and cooperation under mutual legal assistance, one of the officials said on condition of anonymity . Including the case of Mallya, who flew to the UK from India in March 2016 as lenders to his defunct Kingfisher Airlines closed in on him to recover around Rs 9,000 crore of loans, 16 extradition requests by India are pending with the UK government. In the past, one fugitive, Samirbhai Vinubhai Patel ,was extradited from the UK on 18 October 2016. Patel was wanted in connection with the Gujarat riots of 2002. That is the only extradition of an Indian national from the UK. The extradition treaty between the two countries was signed in September 1992 and it came into force after the Instruments of Ratification were exchanged on 15 November 1993. The India-UK home affairs dialogue was instituted during British Prime Minister Theresa Mays visit to India in November 2016. The two sides discuss issues such as counter-terrorism, law enforcement as well as visa issues at this forum. The UK is also keen that India comes on board a bilateral agreement on returning illegal immigrants; the pact could not be signed when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited London in April because of a range of concerns; they ranged from fears of mass deportation to possible security breaches. According to British authorities, the largest group of illegal migrants in the UK is from India, numbering between 75,000 and 100,000. British officials have been telling India signing the pact would streamline the migration process. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday announced a 30-day free visa for Indonesian citizens and invited the diaspora to travel to their country of origin to experience the New India. Addressing a gathering of Indian diaspora at the Jakarta Convention Centre in the Indonesian capital, Modi said, Not only do the names of our nations rhyme, but there is also a distinct rhythm in India-Indonesia friendship. We will grant free-of-cost visa for Indonesian citizens for travel of up to 30 days, Modi said, amid applause. Many of you may never have been to India. I invite you all to come to India for the Kumbh Mela in Prayag next year, Modi told the gathering. Taking a dig at the previous governments, Modi said his first priority as a government was to make the country corruption free, citizen-centric and development friendly. Our government, has been making India ready according to the need and expectations of the 21st century, he said. We have gone a step ahead in Ease of Doing Business. Our focus is Ease of Living. Our processes are transparent and sensitive, Modi said. We have to make a New India. We have to start working to realise the dream of New India by 2022, when India will celebrate 75 years of her independence, Modi added. In the last two-and-a-half years, more than 9,000 start-ups have been registered in India, he said, adding that the worlds second largest start-up ecosystem is built in India. And my friends living in Indonesia, these are happening, laws are the same, officers are the same, offices are the same, tables and chairs are the same, only the government has changed and the country is changing, Modi said. If the policy is clear and intension pure, then development has to happen which we have shown, he asserted. PM Modi, who arrived in Jakarta on Tuesday night on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, earlier met President Joko Widodo at the Merdeka Palace. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday strongly condemned the recent terror strikes on three churches in Indonesia and said India stands resolutely with Jakarta in its fight against terrorism. Friends, I am in grief over the deaths of innocent civilians of Indonesia in the recent terror attacks. India strongly condemns such attacks and stands with Indonesia in its fight against terrorism, Modi said in a press statement after his talks with President Joko Widodo. Six suicide bombers targeted three churches during services in Surabaya, the countrys second-largest city early this month. At least seven people were killed and more than 40 others injured in the coordinated attacks. The bombings were the worst attacks on churches in the last 18 years. Such tragic incidents give a message that it is the need of the hour to strengthen the efforts being taken on the global level to combat terrorism, Modi said. Indonesia, the worlds most populous Muslim-majority nation, has struggled with Islamist terrorism and violence against its Christian minority in the past two decades. Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Jakarta on Tuesday on the first leg of his three-nation tour to East Asia to cement the political, economic and strategic interest of the two friendly maritime neighbours. Modi, who is on his first official visit to Indonesia, met President Joko Widodo on Wednesday and discussed bilateral cooperation in a broad range of areas, including maritime, trade and investment. The two leaders would attend some events, including a CEO Business Forum organised by the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and the Industry, and the Confederation of Indian Industry. Here are the live updates: 3:43pm: We are making arrangements of free of cost visa for Indonesian citizens for travel of up to 30 days: PM Modi in Jakarta. Many of you may never have been to India. I invite you all to come to India for the Kumbh in Prayag next year, says PM Modi. 3:40pm: We have gone a step ahead of Ease of Doing Business. Our focus is Ease of Living. Our processes are transparent and sensitive, says PM Modi. Not only do the names of our nations rhyme but also there is a distinct rhythm in the India-Indonesia friendship, PM adds. Both India and Indonesia have a sensitive outlook when it comes to helping those in need. We do not see the colour of anyones passport, we help our fellow humans who require any assistance. 3.30pm: Our first priority as a government is to make the country corruption free, citizen-centric and development friendly: PM Modi to Indian community in Jakarta. 3.22pm: Earlier today, President Joko Widodo and I inaugurated a series of kite exhibits which included themes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata: PM Modi. 3.20pm: Both India and Indonesia are proud of their democratic ethos & their diversity. In 2014 people of India voted for a Government headed by a person belonging to a poor background. Similarly, the people of Indonesia elected President Joko Widodo whose background is also humble: PM Modi 3.15pm: You are equally committed to your roots in India as you are to Indonesia, many of you are Indonesians but India is there in your hearts: PM Modi addressing Indian community in Jakarta. 12:10pm: After joint press meet, PM Modi and Indonesian President visited a kite exhibition and Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta. Indonesia: PM Narendra Modi at Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta pic.twitter.com/vGrKFzFG9l ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 11.55 am: 15 MoUs were signed between Indian and Indonesia including in the fields of defence, scientific and technological cooperation, railways and health. 10.57 am: For the development of Indo-Pacific region we (India - Indonesia) have agreed to the same shared vision. Indias Act East Policy and the vision of SAGAR (Security and Growth for all in the Region) matches President Widodos Maritime Fulcrum Policy, PM Modi said in Jakarta. 10.52 am: India-ASEAN partnership is such an important power that can become a guarantee of peace not only in Indo-Pacific region but also beyond it, PM Modi said. 10.46 am: India stands resolutely with Indonesia in the fight against terror, we condemn the recent terror attacks in Indonesia in which many innocent people lost their lives, says Modi 10.45 am: This is my first trip to Indonesia. I would like to thank the Indonesian President for giving me and my delegation such a grand welcome, says Modi 10:40am: PM Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo beging a joint press meet in Indonesia. 10:08am: Delegation-level talks between India and Indonesia underway, reports news agency ANI. Jakarta: PM Narendra Modi at Merdeka Palace,Indonesian President Joko Widodo also present pic.twitter.com/dBlQICe2bj ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2018 8:55am: PM Modi arrives at Merdeka Palace, is welcomed by Indonesian President Joko Widodo 8:15am: PM Narendra Modi pays tribute at Kalibata National Heroes Cemetery in Jakarta 8:10am: PM Modi was accorded a ceremonial welcome on his arrival in Jakarta. This is my first visit to Indonesia as Prime Minister. I am looking forward to my discussions with President Widodo on 30 May, as also to our joint interaction with the India-Indonesia CEOs Forum. I will also address the Indian community in Indonesia, Modi said on the eve of his visit. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) considered holding a joint trial of three bomb blast cases dating back to 2007 on the premise that it could have better prosecuted the suspects, but the idea was dropped in January 2014 because of an adverse legal opinion and other factors, current and former officials familiar with the matter said. The three cases relate to the explosions that took place in February 2007 on the Samjhauta Express near Panipat in Haryana while on its way from Delhi to Lahore, in May 2007 at the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad and October 2007 at the Dargah Ajmer Sharif in Ajmer, Rajasthan. An opinion was sought from the law ministry through Union home ministry in June, 2013 in this regard as the agency wanted to move the Supreme Court for clubbing the trial in the three cases, a home ministry official familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity. Legal opinion was against a joint trial. Separate trials have led to a situation where an accused, Devendra Gupta, was convicted in one case (the Ajmer blast) but acquitted in another (Mecca Masjid blast). In another curious twist, the NIA ended up trying a person as a suspect in two cases and presented him as a witness in one He has been acquitted in both cases in which he was a suspect. A common trial may have averted such contradictions, NIA officials said. Last month, a special court of the NIA in Hyderabad acquitted all the five charge-sheeted in the Mecca Masjid bomb blast case for want of concrete evidence after some of the witnesses turned hostile. On Tuesday, amidst news reports that the NIA would not appeal the acquittal, an NIA official said on condition of anonymity that no decision had been taken and that the agency was still in the process of seeking and considering legal opinion. The five acquitted were Nabakumar Sarkar alias Swamy Aseemananda of Gujarat, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) functionary Devendra Gupta of Rajasthan; property dealer-cum-RSS activist Lokesh Sharma of Madhya Pradesh, Bharat Mohanlal Rateshwar alias Bharat Bhai of Gujarat; and Rajender Chowdary of Madhya Pradesh, a farmer. A Jaipur court in March last year found RSS members Sunil Joshi and Devendra Gupta guilty of planning the blasts in Ajmer one of the two bombs didnt go off and Bhavesh Bhai Patel of planting the explosive. The court acquitted Aseemanand and six others, giving them the benefit of doubt. Aseemanand is still facing trial and is currently out on bail in the Samjhauta Experss blast case. All the three cases were tied with the confessional statement of Swami Aseemanand and he was listed as prime accused in them and the incidents took place within a span of one year, added the home ministry official cited above. Section 219 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) states that when a person is accused of multiple offences of the same kind committed within 12 months, he or she may be charged and tried in a single trial. But the section makes it clear that only three offences can be clubbed in a joint trial. As per our understanding, the agency was required to seek sanction of the Supreme Court to hold trial in these three cases as the offences had taken place in different states. Here the trial was not only to be clubbed, but required shifting from one state to another, therefore an opinion was sought from the law ministry in this regard, said a former NIA official with the direct knowledge of the matter. These three offences were committed under same conspiracy by almost same set of accused within a span of one year. They were fit for a joint trial, added the former official. Records show that at least six suspects, Ramchandra Kalsangra, Sandeep Dange, Ramesh Venkat Mahalkar alias Amit Hakla (all three absconding), Lokesh Sharma, Sunil Joshi (dead) and Swami Aseemanand, were common to all three cases. Three suspects, Rajendar Chaoudhary, Deevender Gupta and Bharat Mohanlal Rateswar, were being tried in two of these three cases. In January, 2014, when the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was still in power,the NIA received legal opinion against a joint trial, which prompted he agency drop the move. NIA was told that it was not feasible to hold a joint trial in these cases, said the home ministry official cited above. Another former NIA official and a second NIA official associated with the investigation of these cases said on condition of anonymity that besides the adverse legal opinion, there were other reasons as well that made the then government wary of a joint trial, noting that the blasts had taken place in three different locations. A joint trial would also have made it difficult for the suspects to get bail, they said. Separate trials led to many peculiar situations. For instance, one of the witnesses in the Samjhauta Express blast case (Bharat Mohanlal Rateswar) was later named a suspect in the other two cases. What can you expect from such a witness? Was he going to support the prosecution? That could doom your trial from day one, said the second former NIA official. Rateswars lawyer JP Sharma confirmed that his client was an NIA witness in the Samjhauta Express blast case and had turned hostile. My client had recorded a statement before magistrate under section 164 of the CrPC (criminal procedure code) and he was a witness of the NIA in the Samjhauta case, Sharma said. Then an application was moved on behalf of my client in the case under section 306 of the CrPC wherein the court can grant a pardon to a person for making full and true disclosure. But later Rateswar withdrew the application as his statement was taken under duress. Afterwards, my client was made an accused in the Mecca Masjid and Ajmer cases as well. He has been acquitted in both the cases now, said Sharma. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday met with Indonesian President Joko Widodo at the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta and held informal discussion before their delegation-level talks. Prime Minister Modi, who arrived here Tuesday night on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, was accorded a red carpet welcome on his arrival at the Merdeka palace, one of the presidential palaces in Indonesia. Before the tete-e-tete between the two leaders, President Widodo welcomed Prime Minister Modi at the palace. Relationship that evokes a feeling of warmth and kinship. A red carpet welcome and a guard of honour extended to PM @narendramodi on his arrival at Istana Merdeka ahead of his talks with President @jokowi, external affairs ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. Modi and Widodo will discuss bilateral cooperation in a broad range of areas, including maritime, trade and investment. The two leaders would also attend some events, including a CEO Business Forum organised by the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and the Industry, and the Confederation of Indian Industry. Earlier, Prime Minister Modi laid a wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes Cemetery here. Paid tributes at the iconic Kalibata Heroes Cemetery in Jakarta, Modi tweeted in both Indonesian and English along with his pictures. Kalibata Heroes Cemetery in South Jakarta is a military cemetery in Indonesia. It was built in 1953 and opened in November 1954 when the first burial took place. Lest we forget...Paying homage to martyrs of Indonesian independence struggle! PM @narendramodi laying wreath at the Kalibata National Heroes Cemetery and signing the Visitors Book, Kumar tweeted. More than 7,000 people who are military casualties and veterans from Indonesian War of Independence are buried at the cemetery. Modi arrived in the Indonesian capital yesterday on the first leg of his three-nation tour to East Asia to cement the political, economic and strategic interest of the two friendly maritime neighbours. Former president Pranab Mukherjee accepting an invite from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to be the chief guest at a function at its headquarters on June 7 has snowballed into a controversy with senior Congress leaders urging him to reconsider his decision in the interest of secularism. While the Congress avoided a comment on the issue, party leader and former union minister CK Jaffer Sharief said, His decision to go to RSS is surprising and shocking. Being a Congress man life-long, going to RSS suddenly like this...he cant ignore his background. He didnt take anyone into confidence, hes suddenly going, ANI reported. Sharief, in a letter to Mukherjee, asked if the RSS accepted what the former president said as a minister and Congress leader about the Sangh being the worst outfit which was communal, anti-national and unpatriotic. Another Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala also wrote to Mukherjee requesting him to refrain from attending the event . The communal outfit has been trying to divide the country on religious lines and to run the incumbent government by remote control. Its vision of creating a Hindu Rashtra comprising only one section of population is in sharp contrast with the Congress ideology of secularism and democracy, he said in the letter. Chennithala said the RSS has weakened all democratic intuitions of the country by instigating the venom of communalism. As a person who has served as the first citizen of our country and greatest ambassador of secularism I request you to reconsider your decision to attend the RSS meet on June 7, he said. The RSS praised the 82-year-old leader for accepting the invite saying, This isnt surprising for those who know and understand the Sangh, because RSS has always invited prominent people of the society in its programmes. This time, we invited Dr Pranab Mukherjee and its his greatness that he has accepted our invitation, read a statement from the RSS. The former president will address the Third Year Sangha Shiksha Varga (SSV), which is held at the RSS headquarters annually in Nagpur. Sharief expressed surprise over the move and said he like other secular people was stunned to hear about his attending the RSS function. I personally think that a person of your stature, being secular and in politics for decades, having served in various capacity including the highest position of Rashtrapati, visiting Sangh Parivar at this point in time before Parliament elections is not proper. Congressmen besides secular people are stunned to hear the news and are agitated on the situation and are hopeful that yourself will reconsider the idea. I once again request you to reconsider and avoid visiting Sangh Parivar in the interest of secularism and the country, Shareif said in his letter which was also signed by former MP H Hanumanthappa. Incidentally, Sharief has backed RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat for the President post, saying nobody should doubt his patriotism just because he was from one school of thought. I personally believe nobody should find fault with Mohan Bhagwats name being considered as a choice for the presidentship of our country, Sharief had said in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April 2017. The 83-year-old leader had exhorted all minorities, including Muslims, not to have any fear or crisis of confidence in Bhagwats name being considered for the post. No comments, was Congress spokesperson Tom Vadakkans response when asked about Mukherjee visiting the RSS headquarters. He said since the event is yet to happen he would not comment on it and the Congress will formulate its thoughts once the event takes place. The event has not happened. I have come to know about it from media reports and am collecting further details. At present I have no comments to offer till the event takes place, he told reporters at the AICC office. Former MP and Delhi Congress leader Sandeep Dikshit said as a Congress leader and minister, Mukherjee has spoken about the RSS and the BJP many times on various issues and dubbed it as bad and worst outfit, which is communal and anti-national. Pranab Mukherjee used to say that the RSS is the worst organisation in the country. Its leaders have no morals and RSS is corrupt and spreads lies. He (Mukherjee) has also said that the RSS is anti-national, unpatriotic and communal. If the RSS has invited a person with such views, does this mean that the RSS admits that his (Pranabs) views about the organisation were correct, Dikshit asked. Dikshit is the son of former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit. Union minister Nitin Gadkari said that there was nothing wrong in inviting Congress leader and former president Pranab Mukherjee for a programme organised by the Rashtriya Swayansevak Sangh. He said certain figures and organisations are beyond politics and Mukherjee sharing RSS dais should not be looked at as politics. It should be taken in a broader perspective and should not be looked with the spectacles of political untouchability. Why should eyebrows be raised if Mukherjee accepts the invite for an RSS event. RSS is not Pakistans ISI, it is an organisation of nationalists, he said. Mukherjee served as the president of India from 2012 to 2017. He also held several cabinet posts ranging from finance minister to external affairs minister in a political career that spanned nearly six decades. Besides Mahatma Gandhi, former president Zakir Husain, activist Jayaprakash Narayan and commander-in-chief of the Indian Army, Kodandera M Cariappa have been guests at various RSS events. (with agency inputs) Former President Pranab Mukherjee decided to attend an RSS event in Nagpur after Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat personally invited him, his associates maintained. When Mukherjee was President, he twice invited Bhagwat, and the RSS chief accepted both times; this time, he possibly felt that the gesture should be reciprocated, one of his associates said, asking not to be identified. Apart from Bhagwat meeting Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan, two senior RSS functionaries from Nagpur went all the way to Miriti in West Bengals Birbhum district to celebrate Durga puja with him in 2016, added another associate on condition of anonymity. A person familiar with Mukherjees plans maintained that the critics should wait and listen to Mukherjees speech on June 7. He is likely to send a strong message of peace, brotherhood and harmony from the platform of the RSS. His message will definitely show Mukherjees mettle, the person said, asking not to be identified. Most political parties, be it the Congress or the CPI(M), have maintained a silence on the issue, dubbing it as a personal choice of the former President, who is now, by all counts, a private citizen. But that didnt stop several Opposition MPs from either slamming his move or appealing Mukherjee to reconsider his decision. Former finance minister P Chidambaram said on Wednesday that he would have never accepted such an invitation and urged Mukherjee to talk about the flaws in the RSS ideology in Nagpur. He has achieved tremendous fame, power and positions in politics. The only substantial thing for him to achieve is Bharat Ratna, quipped an Opposition leader. Another senior leader, referring to the recent elections in Malaysia in which 92 year-old Mahathir Bin Mohammad reclaimed power, said, Mahathir has reinvigorated many Indian political lives. At least three senior Congress leaders Jairam Ramesh, Ramesh Chennithala and CK Jaffer Sharief wrote to Mukherjee asking him to reconsider his decision. I find his decision shocking. It goes against all that he has stood for, talked about and all that he has told us, said Ramesh. Sharief dubbed Mukherjees decision surprising and shocking. Chennithala reminded Mukherjee that the communal outfit has been trying to divide the country on religious lines and to run the incumbent government by remote control. The CPI(M), however, maintained that it was Mukherjees personal choice. He is a private citizen and can go anywhere, said CPI(M) politburo member, Md. Salim. Emphasising that the Vishaka Guidelines were to be taken seriously, the Delhi high court on Wednesday directed Air France to inquire afresh into allegations of repeated sexual harassment made by an Indian employee against a Frenchman and senior executive at the airline. A bench of justice S Ravindra Bhat and justice AK Chawla said the Internal Complaints Committee constituted by Air France on the complaints made by the woman working at its Gurgaon office, and the panels resultant proceedings were invalid, and set them aside. The courts ruling came on an appeal by the woman, who alleged sexual harassment by Stanislas Brun, who was marketing manager, cargo (India, Nepal and Bhutan) in 2013. His LinkedIn profile lists his job as managing director, Middle East, Gulf & Indian Subcontinent, Air France-KLM Cargo and Martinair Cargo The court invoked the Vishakha Guidelines, which laid down the procedural steps for use in cases of sexual harassment. This court wishes to emphasize here that the Vishaka Guidelines are to be taken seriously. The march of our society to... sensitivity to the issue of sexual harassment and its baneful effects, flagged in Vishaka (supra), culminated in the path-breaking Workplace Harassment Prohibition Act over 17 years later, the bench said. It noted that decision makers, Parliament, courts and employers are to be vigilant in ensuring that effective policies are swiftly and impartially enforced to ensure justice and see that no one is subjected to unwelcome and unacceptable behaviour at the workplace. The complainant alleged hat she had been victimised for complaining against the sexual harassment and forced to resign by three persons in the airline on September 23, 2017. She claimed that she had been threatened with immediate termination of employment and told that she wouldnt be getting any letter or documentation of her service and provident fund from the company. Amid checks to control the entry of illegal immigrants into Manipur without valid documents, police on Wednesday said officials stationed at Mao gate in Senapati district arrested a Rohingya family. The arrested have been identified as Mohammad Abdullah, 24, and Bibi Ayesha, 23, along with their eight-month-old son Mohammad Abdul Ahdani. The arrest was made when they tried to enter the state on Monday, said officer incharge of Mao police station, Pungam Keishing. They will be produced before the court of chief judicial magistrate, Senapati district, for further action. Mao gate, located about 110km north of Imphal along the Manipur-Nagaland border, is one of the three main entry gates of Manipur. The other two are Moreh in Tengnoupal district bordering Myanmar and Jiribam in Jiribam district bordering Assams Cachar district. The family from Myanmar had with it a certificate issued and signed by one Ragini, the chief of mission of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The certificate was reportedly issued on January 23, 2018, and was valid up to July 22. According to the police, the family said they came to Manipur to visit one of their sisters who had been living in the state for over seven years. They reportedly left their home in Myanmar for Bangladesh after the refugee crisis started in September 2017 and stayed in Hyderabad and then Kolkata. On April 10, 2018, the state police had arrested a Rohingya couple from Myanmar. After the arrest of eight Rohingya immigrants in Imphal area on May 21, the police, under the directive of chief minister N Biren Singh, decided to keep a check on illegal entry of the immigrants. With the latest incident, police have arrested more than two dozen immigrants so far since the refugee crisis broke out in Myanmar last year. DoubleDragon Properties Corp. reduced the value of its planned share sale to P6 billion after lowering the offering price to between P30 and P40 apiece. DoubleDragon adjusted the offering price after the share price recently dropped because of the current volatility in the equities market. The company initially planned to raise as much as P7.5 billion from the sale of 150 million common shares at an offering price of P50 apiece when it filed a registration statement with the corporate regulators in March. The Philippine Stock Exchange recently approved DoubleDragons share sale plan. The company set the offering period from June 4 to 8 and the listing date on June 18. DoubleDragon plans to sell up to 108 million shares to foreign investors and 20 percent to domestic buyers. The company has tapped Credit Suisse (Singapore) Ltd., Maybank Eng Securities Pte Ltd., and UBS as international book runners and lead managers and BPI Capital Corp. and Maybank ATR Kim Eng Capital Partners Inc. as domestic lead underwriters.DoubleDragon plans to use the net proceeds from the offering to finance the companys industrial leasing and hospitality business. It is set to add 200,000 square meters of leasable space to its portfolio by 2020. DoubleDragon also plans to spend for land acquisition to fuel growth of the business beyond 2020 and for general corporate purposes. DoubleDragon earlier said the planned share sale would result in an increase of the companys total equity, which the company believes would strengthen its financial position. The share sale is also expected to boost the companys chances of becoming one of the blue-chip stocks in the bellwether Philippine Stock Exchange Index in the near term. The company earlier increased its 2020 leasable portfolio target 1.2 million sq. m. comprising of 700,000 sq. m. from 100 CityMalls, 300,000 sq. m. from its Metro Manila office projects, 100,000 sq. m. from the planned 5,000 hotel rooms of Hotel 101 and Jinjiang Inn Philippines, and another 100,000 sq. m. from its latest industrial leasing. DoubleDragon increased its 2020 net income target to P5.5 billion from P4.8 billion. The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to grant interim bail to a former principal of BRD medical college and hospital in Uttar Pradeshs Gorakhpur where scores of children had died last year, allegedly due to shortage of oxygen supply. Dr Rajeev Kumar Mishra told the top court that he has been in jail for more than 10 months and the children had died due to Japanese Encephalitis and not for shortage of oxygen. A bench of Justices L Nageswara Rao and MM Shantanagoudar issued notice to the Uttar Pradesh government on Mishras plea and listed the matter for June 6. More than 60 children, mostly infants, had died at the government-run Baba Raghav Das Medical College in Gorakhpur within a week in August 2017. There were allegations that the deaths occurred due to disruption in oxygen supply over unpaid bills to the vendor. Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for Mishra, said he was arrested on August 29, 2017, and has remained in jail for over 10 months. Chargesheet has been filed in the case. The co-accused in the case, including Dr Kafeel Khan, who was the head of the encephalitis ward, and oxygen supplier Manish Bhandari, have already got bail. Mishra should be granted at least interim bail till the petition is disposed of, Rohatgi said. When the bench asked him what charges were filed against his client, Rohatgi said it has been alleged that Mishra had not cleared the bills for supply of oxygen, due to which the gas supply to the hospital was cut. To this, the bench said, Then what do you expect, that you will not clear the bills and the vendor will keep supplying the gas. Rohatgi said, Oxygen gas was not the issue, as the children had died due to Japanese Encephalitis. He said at least interim bail should be granted till the petition is disposed of as over 10 months have gone by. The bench, however, refused the plea and sought response from the state government. Mishra had approached the apex court challenging the Allahabad high courts order dated April 30, by which it had denied bail to him. He has been booked for criminal negligence and offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act. The state government had told the HC that due to Mishras alleged role, the oxygen supply got halted in the hospital as he had stopped payments to the supplier to allegedly force the company to pay him kickbacks. On April 9, the top court had granted bail to the proprietor of a firm which supplied oxygen to the hospital saying he had spent seven months in jail for an offence which entailed maximum punishment of three years imprisonment. Lashing out at the Centre for not doing much to fill vacancies in the higher judiciary and its refusal to accept recommendations of the Supreme Court collegium on appointments, former finance minister and senior lawyer P Chidambaram said on Wednesday that the judiciary was to blame in the case of Uttarakhand Chief Justice KM Joseph not being elevated to the top court for not pursuing its recommendation. His party colleague and Rajya Sabha lawmaker Abhishek Manu Singhvi said the court should issue contempt notices if the government does not abide by its recommendations. In case of Justice Joseph, at the moment, the blame lies with the judiciary. Because, you decide to reiterate (the recommendation for his elevation) but then dont, Chidambaram said. He was speaking at a panel discussion titled, India at 71: Hits and misses following the release of Singhvis book of writings Straight Talk. The book was released by Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu and former prime minister Manmohan Singh. This was followed by a panel discussion between Chidambaram, Singhvi, Congress leader and MP Jyotiraditya Scindia, DMK MP Kanimozhi, and Trinamool Congress MP Dinesh Trivedi, moderated by journalist Barkha Dutt. Justice Josephs name was recommended in January by the SC collegium a body of top five judges of the country headed by the Chief Justice of India for appointment as a judge of the top court along with that of (now) Justice Indu Malhotra from the bar. While Justice Malhotra was appointed on April 26, Justice Josephs name was sent back by the government, asking the collegium to reconsider it. The collegium in its resolution dated May 16 said it had unanimously resolved in principle to reiterate the recommendation. However, it stopped short of sending the name back to the law ministry and kept the resolution pending for a later date. There is a fear that candidates are being profiled. Because of that, they dont offer themselves (for judges posts), Chidambaram alleged. Asked to elaborate, the former FM said the government while considering the collegiums recommendations was looking at aspects beyond a candidates legal capacity. Singhvi said the courts judgments on the matter of reiteration of a recommendation are clear. A reiteration cannot be sent back, he said. If a reiteration is violated, you can issue a contempt noticeNot to the (law) minister but the secretary of the department (of justice), Singhvi, a top lawyer and former chairperson of the parliamentary committee on law and justice, said. The government had earlier this year, refused to appoint a candidate from the lower judiciary to the Karnataka high court despite reiteration by the collegium. Naidu had earlier in his speech quoted Singhvi on judicial overreach from the book. Judicial activism, in the sense of excessive judicial interference in the working of a democratic polity, is a basic and undeniable truth in India. Judicial overreach is a living reality, making lament formal and protest ornamental. From the monkey to the dog menace, from corruption to cleaning up cities and rivers, from the comic to the divine and from the useful to the banal, India has all varieties of Judicial activism on offer, Naidu said, reading from the book. Former PM Singh praised Singhvi as a valued colleague and said the book was a must-read for students of policy and governance. The Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the murder of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh on Wednesday filed its first charge sheet in the sensational case, naming alleged gunrunner and Hindutva activist T Naveen Kumar as an accused. The 650-page charge sheet filed before the First Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate details the role of Naveen Kumar alone as an accomplice in the murder, which had triggered a nationwide outrage. Naveen Kumar has been charged under section 302 (murder), 120 B (criminal conspiracy), 118 (concealing a conspiracy) and 114 (abetment to the crime) of the IPC, and also under provisions of the Arms Act, SIT sources told PTI. The charge sheet contains the statement of about 131 witnesses, the sources said. The SIT has submitted that it would submit more documents relating to the case in future. Lankesh, 55, known for her left leaning and strong anti-Hindutva views, was shot dead in front of her house here on September five last year. Naveen Kumar was arrested for alleged illegal possession of firearm and ammunition on February 18. During the probe, the SIT claimed, it had found evidence of his involvement in the killing of Lankesh, and also arrested him in that case. The Arms Act case against Naveen Kumar would be heard by a city court on Thursday. Naveen Kumar, hailing from Maddur in Mandya district, was arrested with a firearm and bullets when he was waiting for a client at Majestic bus stand in Bengaluru. Sources claimed he had not only supplied firearms to the assassins of Lankesh but also conducted a recce of the area around her residence and provided them vital inputs about her. He is also suspected to have ferried the prime accused to a place close to Lankeshs house. Police said Naveen Kumar had named a man from Shivamogga Praveen Kumar, arrested by the city police in connection with an illegal arms case in May, in the Gauri Lankesh murder case. The sources said the SIT has taken into custody four more people suspected of involvement in Lankeshs killing. They have been identified as Manohar Edve (30), Sujith Kumar alias Praveen (37), Amol Kale alias Bhaisab (40) and Amit Degwekar alias Pradeep. While Edve and Praveen are from Karnataka, Kale and Degvekar are from Maharashtra and Goa respectively. They were arrested for hatching a plan to kill Kannada writer KS Bhagawan, known for his anti-Hindutva stance, the sources said. Their involvement in Gauri Lankesh case is very much likely. Thats why we have taken them into custody and are interrogating them closely, said a source in the SIT. More than two months after it abruptly stopped supplying electricity to Haryana citing financial crunch, the Adani Power Limited (APL) has restored the power supply to the state from its power project at Mundra in Gujarat. The restoration would come as a relief to the state during the summer. The supply was restored after the state government made a payment of Rs 485 crore to APL on account of reimbursement of expenditure for installation and operation of flue gas de-sulfurisation (FGD) plant at its Mundra power plant on the orders of the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC). Interestingly, the power utilities have also recovered more than Rs 500 crore from APL which were excessively claimed by the APL. The Haryana government had entered into a contract for 1,424 megawatt (MW) power from APL in 2007 from its power project at Mundra in Gujarat. APLs bid was based on blend of domestic and imported coal in the ratio of 70:30. Power from APL was contracted at a levelised tariff of Rs 2.94 per unit for 25 years at state periphery through its dedicated network. Power utility officials said the present APL tariff is Rs 3.19 per unit (total cost), which is lower than the tariff of any power generating stations in Haryana. We will now be getting around 950 MW from APL, said a power official. Why supply was stopped? The APL, which in 2014 also had stopped power supply to Haryana, had cited rising accumulated losses this time for its inability to run the Mundra power units, Haryana Power officials said. The APL was looking for payment of compensation from the state government on account of FGD plant installation. Since there was an order of the central regulator, the power utilities got an inspection done and also took legal opinion from the advocate general before making the payment of Rs 485 crore, officials said. Adani group chairman Gautam Adani did not respond to a query on the stoppage of power, posed on his Twitter account on April 25. An email sent to APL too didnt elicit a response. APL and Haryana APL had earlier sought an increase in the power tariff due to change in Indonesian regulations on coal, invoking provisions of force majeure (unforeseeable circumstances that prevent someone from fulfilling a contract) and change in law. The central regulator though held that force majeure and change in law were not applicable in the case, but in a February 2014 order allowed APL a compensatory tariff of 61 paise to mitigate hardship on account of increase in imported coal prices in addition to allowing arrear payment with effect from date of operation. Haryana power distribution companies had filed an appeal in the appellate tribunal (APTEL) against the CERC orders, along with a stay application on recovery of compensatory tariff, but APTEL declined. It decided that arrears for 2012-2013 may not be paid till final decision but directed the payment of dues thereafter regularly as per the CERC order. The distribution companies then filed an application in the Supreme Court which granted a stay in Haryanas favour on August 25, 2014 and ordered APTEL to decide the matter expeditiously. The APTEL, in its April 7, 2016 order, said: We hold that promulgation of Indonesian regulation has resulted in a force majeure impacting the projects of Adani Power and CGPL adversely. The generators would, therefore, be entitled to relief only as available under the power purchase agreements (PPAs). SC to Haryanas rescue Setting aside the orders of the APTEL, the Supreme Court disallowed APL to charge compensatory tariff from consumers. This being the case, we are of the view that though change in Indonesian law would not qualify as a change in law under the guidelines read with the PPA, change in Indian law certainly would, said the apex court. There is a sense of unease within the Janta Dal (United) and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is disturbed with the way things have unfolded in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) after his party allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in July last year, two JD(U) leaders said. JD(U) intensified its demand for a special category status for Bihar earlier this month. Kumar questioned the success of the November 2016 demonetisation decision that he had backed earlier last weekend. And on Tuesday, he put out a two-page statement asking the Finance Commission to look into the differentiated needs of Bihar and backward states with a special perspective. These moves have triggered speculation that Kumar is preparing for another U-turn after stitching up a surprise alliance with the BJP last year, parting ways with Lalu Prasads Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress But while ruling out a break,the first JD(U) leader said real differences have cropped up in the alliance with the BJP. What did the BJP not get in an alliance with JD(U)? What did we get in return? he asked. A BJP which lost in the Bihar elections today holds key portfolios, including the post of deputy chief minister, in Bihar government. The BJP has not reciprocated. The leader said Kumars problem is that the BJP remains cold to his concerns on political, administrative and governance issues. On the issue of governance, he stressed, there is no coordination and major economic decisions having serious ramification, such as the sale of Air India, are being taken without proper consultations.Efforts to resolve administrative issues, such as the demand for special category status for Bihar, are not making headway. And, on issue of politics, the BJP is not willing to cede space to Kumar outside Bihar. We want to remain part of the NDA. We do not want to join ranks with any anti-BJP front. But we will not compromise on the issue of self-respect, JD(U) general secretary KC Tyagi said, adding that several parties, such as the Congress and the Left Front have kept channels of communication open with us. The second JD(U) leader said the distribution of seats for the Lok Sabha election is an issue that the party was concerned about. When JD(U)-BJP were in alliance before Kumar broke ranks in 2013, they shared 40 Lok Sabha seats in a 25:15 ratio. Now the BJP has two more allies in the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) of Ram Vilas Paswan and Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) of Upendra Kushwaha. The JD(U) fielded 38 candidates in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, and won 2. The BJP won 22 out of 30 seats, the LJP 6 out of 7 and the RLSP 3 out of 4. The NDA won 31 out of 40 seats without Nitish Kumar. There is little room for him, if he is looking at pre-2014 seat sharing formula, a senior BJP leader said. BJP insiders dismiss Kumars emphasis on special status and demonetization as a muscle-flexing exercise to extract a bigger share of seats. The first JD(U) leader said, We are reconciled to the fact that we will not get 25 seats in the alliance. But this whole myth that Kumar has lost his support base and is at the mercy of the BJP is bunkum. Our seat share has to be honourable. He pointed to that fact that BJP-led NDA had a lead in 173 assembly seats in 2014, which came down to 60 assembly segments when Kumar forged an alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal in 2015. This proves his worth, he said. The second JD(U) leader hinted that there was a broad understanding which had to be adhered to. Why do you think?Nitish and (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi would not have spoken about this before the coalition decision? At a press conference on the fourth anniversary of the Modi government, BJP president Amit Shah touted Kumars return to the NDA as an indication of the growing size of the alliance. We will contest election together, Shah told this newspaper during the campaign in Karnataka. But, the JD(U) has its own plans. Tyagi said the party was planning a campaign over special category status for Bihar and will soon announce schedule for a big gathering in the national capital Saibal Gupta, director of the Patna-based Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI), said given that the 2019 general election is just a year away and the next assembly polls are not very far, any political party would want to build its leverage. Irrespective of which political party comes to power next time, they will need a special category status for Bihar to push growth. Public investment has its limitation and the state can grow only when private investment comes, which is not possible in this case without a special status, he said. Minister of state in the Prime Ministers Office Jitendra Singh on Wednesday made light of Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidus claims on central assistance to the state, remarking that all what he said was not the gospel truth. The Prime Ministers Office never intervened nor directed reversal of central funds (of Rs 350 crore) granted for backward districts development. Is there anything in writing to prove this? What all the CM says is not the gospel truth, the MoS said. He was referring to Naidus repeated claims that the backward districts development grant was taken back by the Centre after crediting it in the states account. The MoS interacted with mediapersons in Amaravati on Wednesday afternoon as part of his visit to highlight the achievements of the Narendra Modi government in the last four years. He also condemned the TDP presidents criticism of BJP chief Amit Shah over submission of utilisation certificates (for central grants). As the head of a political party, cant he (Shah) make a political statement? Singh asked, adding that domestic (political) compulsions led to TDPs exit from NDA. For three years and nine months, they were very comfortable (with the Centre), but suddenly there seemed to be a new enlightenment. The TDP wanted to walkout only because of political factors. The BJP never prompted it, he said, adding that Andhra Pradesh is still on the Centres priority. He said the Centre had never said it would not support the building of the new capital city of Andhra Pradesh. We were ready to go about (the process), but the TDP only preferred to go out, he observed. On the demand for according special category status to Andhra Pradesh, Singh said except the nomenclature, the Centre was ready to extend all benefits in the form of a special economic package. But politically, it suited others (TDP) not to accept the special package.So they started making a row. Had there been a spirit of mutual cooperation, this situation would not have arisen. But the TDP weighed only political considerations, he said. Heartbroken over not being able to marry his lover, a Pakistani man decided to walk up to the Indian border hoping a BSF bullet would kill him. Instead, Mohammad Asif (32) landed behind bars. He was caught by 118 Battalion of the Border Security Force on Monday near the Mabboke border post and handed over to the Mamdot police, BSF officials said here on Wednesday. Asif told the security forces that he walked towards the Indian border hoping that a bullet from the BSF jawans would pierce his heart and end his trauma. He said he wanted to hang himself but changed the plan as that would not have been the right thing to do during the holy month of Ramzan. A resident of Jalloke village in Pakistans Kasur district, Asif was in love with the sister-in-law of his eldest brother Atik-ur-Rehman. Asif decided to end his life after twice being denied permission to marry her. His family and that of the woman disapproved of their relationship, according to his account. He said both were in love and wanted to get married. But the woman was forced to marry someone else. Sometime back, she got divorced. Again, Asif pleaded with his family to let him marry her, but they refused. Asif comes from a well-off family that owns around 25 acres of land and he has cleared his senior secondary exams, station house officer of Mamdot police station, Rashpal Singh, said. He has been booked under the Indian Passport Act and the Foreigners Act. Friends and family members of Rajesh Sahani, the UP police officer who shot himself dead in Lucknow on Tuesday, refuse to believe that he could have committed suicide and want Central Bureau of Investigation to probe. While Rajeshs septuagenarian parents Prem Sagar Sahani and Kanta Sahani had left Patna for Lucknow Tuesday evening itself, his cousin Manoj Kumar Sahni and wife Lovely Sahni who live next door, were in a state of shock and disbelief. Rajesh also left behind an elder sister. There should be a thorough inquiry, preferably by the CBI, into Rajeshs death. He was bold and would never ever commit suicide, said Manoj, an automobile dealer. Rajesh who was with the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for around two years before joining Uttar Pradeshs Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) in July 2014, visited Bihar twice on assignments as a police officer, recollected Manoj. He was part of NIA team that probed the multiple blasts at Bodh Gaya in July 2013 and the October 2013 bomb blasts at Patnas Gandhi Maidan. He used to talk less, may be because of the nature of his job. He would not share with us any official information, said Manoj. Rajeshs classmates from St Xaviers High School, Patna, described him as a courageous, honest, bold and a jovial person with an independent mind. They, too, believe that Rajesh wasnt the kind of man who would take his own life. A 1984 batch student from Xaviers, Rajesh was on leave for the past five days. He was scheduled to travel to Mumbai on May 31 for the admission of his daughter Shreya who was to join the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai for her masters programme beginning June 4. He was to return to Lucknow on June 5, said his school friend Neeraj Goel, head of marketing in a German company, based at Mumbai. I cant believe he committed suicide. We had been talking over the last one week, fixing his travel plans to Mumbai. He was supposed to come and stay with me in Mumbai and we had plans to drive to nearby Lonavala or Khandala over the weekend, said Goel. Rajesh was thinking of a family vacation in Ladakh or Cochin later this year. He wanted my family and me to join him. There was not even 0.01% inkling that this would happen. The guy was strong and happy, added Goel. Animesh Kumar, an engineer with a cellular phone manufacturer in Gurgaon, described Rajesh as a very balanced person who would never commit suicide. Rajesh was the brightest student and one of the best in our class. He stayed with me for a few days after I called him over to Delhi while he was preparing for civil services after college in the 1990s I simply cannot believe this is a suicide, said Kumar. Rajesh joined Zee TV for a year or so before he cracked the UP provincial services. His language skill set, both in English and Hindi, was very good. He valued my suggestion before taking a conscious decision to join the police, he added. His friends said Rajesh was very close to his wife Shalini Sahni who is a painter. Theirs was a love marriage and they were a close-knit family, they recollected. Lokesh Sharma, another schoolmate in Jharkhand, described Rajesh as a straight forward person with an independent mind. After completing his matriculation from St Xaviers, Rajesh did his intermediate and graduation from Patna College, where he was decorated with the Chhatra Ratna. Today, the jewel is no more a fact his family and friends find hard to come to terms with. The Jammu and Kashmir Police on Wednesday informed a local court that the woman who was detained along with Major Leetul Gogoi last week is 19 years old and had gone with the officer of her own volition. Police also informed the court that neither the woman nor the hotel owner lodged any formal complaint against Major Gogoi. In a report submitted by Station House Officer, Khanyar in the court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) Srinagar, the police said that woman in her statement recorded before a magistrate said that she had gone with the Army Major on her own choice and there was no pressure on her. On Saturday, the CJM had sought the status report of the investigation of the hotel fracas involving Major Gogoi on the petition of human rights activist, Ahsan Untoo. The woman was initially suspected to be a minor. While informing the court that the woman is 19 years old, the police also attached the school records of the teenager with the report mentioning her age. Police conveyed the court that the woman told the magistrate that she befriended the army officer on Facebook and a month ago she came to know that he (Gogoi) was in the army. She had also told the magistrate that she spoke to Sameer Malla and Major Gogoi over the phone and met them at Magam on the day police detained them after they got into an altercation at the hotel. Police in its report said that woman told the magistrate that she decided to travel with the officer of her own volition. The police report said the woman was handed over to her maternal uncle and Major Gogoi and Sameer Malla were handed over to their unit. Last week Army chief General Bipin Rawat had promised exemplary punishment for Major Gogoi if he was found guilty of violating rules. The army has already ordered a court of inquiry against the officer. Major Gogoi hit the headlines last year during bye-election for the Srinagar Lok Sabha seat after he tied a Kashmiri civilian to the front of his vehicle and claimed that he did so to prevent stone-pelters from targeting his convoy. The incident led to a human rights controversy. General Rawat had awarded Gogoi a commendation card for his sustained efforts on counter-insurgency operations. The Rajasthan government on Wednesday provided a written guarantee to the apex bank to secure Rs, 5000-crore loan that it needs to fulfill its promise of providing a one-time loan waiver to farmers. This comes a day before chief minister Vasundhara Raje inaugurates the first camp to distribute loan waiver certificates worth Rs 250 crore among 33,000 farmers in Banswara. Abhay Kumar, principal secretary in the cooperative department, confirmed that government has agreed to provide guarantee to the apex bank for the loan. The bank was unwilling to issue the credit unless the government gave it in writing that it would repay the loan. Kumar held day long meetings with officials from the apex bank, the finance department and the chief secretary to work out the modalities of the payment. The National Cooperative Development Corporation has sanctioned Rs 5000 crore to the Rajasthan State Cooperative Bank. The money has to be repaid in two installments within 270 days extendable by 90 days. If the government doesnt repay within one year, it would be penalized by 2.5% on the principal and an additional 1% interest. Additional chief secretary Mukesh Sharma said the government would repay Rs 2000 crore this year and another Rs 2000 crore in 2019 by taking a fresh loan. The government will also pay the interest amount, he added. Raje had announced a one-time crop loan wavier of up to Rs 50,000 for small and marginal farmer. Her government promised to bear a burden of Rs 8,000 crore but had budgeted only Rs 2,000 crore for the waiver. It had been knocking the doors of the banks seeking a loan of Rs 6,000 crore The government will issue loan waiver certificates to eligible farmers through camps, which will be held from June 7 to July 15. The first camp will be held in Banswara. Raje, who has already reached the district, would issue the first certificates. Meanwhile, addressing a Jan Sanwad programme in Gadi assembly constituency of Banswara, Raje claimed that her government was the first in the country to launch ambitious health schemes for the benefit of poor tribal people. Poor tribal people are being benefitted from free of cost advanced health services in private hospitals. BJP government has started such health schemes in the state for its people, Raje said. She claimed that unprecedented works in various sectors, including health, education, road, water conservation and power supply have been conducted in tribal areas during her governments tenure. Raje said in just over four years, her government spent Rs 6,500 crore to carry out development works in Vagad area and another Rs 1100 crore in Gadi. The previous Congress government had spent only Rs 475 crore in both these areas, she claimed. Raje also claimed that her government made Gramin Gaurav Path in 44 gram panchayats and upgraded 42 secondary schools to senior secondary schools. The CM said her government was spending Rs 1800 crore on free health services of which Rs 1300 crore was earmarked for Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana and Rs 500 crore for free medicines. She announced Rs 1 crore for tackling drinking water shortage in six villages connected with Baloda drinking water project. She also distributed two-wheelers among meritorious students and certificates to beneficiaries of other welfare schemes. District in-charge minister Sushil Katara, MP Man Shankar Ninama, MLA Jeetmal Khant and officers of various departments were present on this occasion. San Miguel Brewery Inc., a joint venture of San Miguel Corp. and Kirin Holdings Company Ltd. of Japan, revived plans to put up a brewery in the United States, according to its top executive. SMB chairman Ramon Ang told reporters the company was preparing for the licensing and permitting of the US brewery. Ang announced in May 2017 plans to build a $150-million brewery in Los Angles. Were in the moment, at the final stage of checking the licenses and taxes, Ang said. When you put up a brewery, you want to know the taxes. Are there incentives, transfer taxes, distribution taxes, what are the taxes. We need to understand all of that before we jump to put up a brewery, he said. Ang said the company was hoping to get the final on the viability of the US investment within the year. We have a strong export market in the US. Its better to for us to put up a plant there to save on the freight and hauling, Ang said. At least 50 percent of the factory capacity will be coming from our export volume, he said. He said putting up a brewery in the US would cost $100 million. Ang said last year the planned first SMB facility in the US would have a capacity to produce 2 million hectoliters (200 million liters) and would be situated in a 10-hectare property.The reason why we are going to build a brewery in the US is because the volume of exports today in America can now warrant us to put up the brewery to support that volume, Ang said. Ang said SMB was also pursuing an aggressive capacity expansion program domestically. We are looking at certain locationsto save on logistics. These are cost-cutting measures. Were trying to cut cost so you can spend the money you save on advertising, marketing, he said. The company recently broke ground for a new brewery in Tagoloan, Misamis Oriental, the sixth in the country, while construction of more breweries in key locations across the country were being planned. SMB expects the capacity expansion programs and company-wide productivity initiatives to redound to higher margins and profitability, he said. We are looking at Asean expansion. We are looking at options, Ang said. SMB also has plants and facilities in Thailand, Indonesia, China, Hong Kong and Vietnam. The international plants have a combined capacity of 7.81 million hectoliters. SMB posted a net income of P5.67 billion in the first three months, up 26 percent from P4.5 billion a year earlier. Electronic Nicotine Delivery System (ENDS), popularly known as e-cigarettes, is being promoted as a lifestyle product among the youth and it is being popularised as a safe product but experts say that tests have detected the presence of toxic chemicals in it. Addressing a media sensitisation workshop on Tobacco Free Rajasthan campaign on Tuesday organised by an NGO Vaagdhara in Jaipur, Dr Rakesh Gupta, consultant, tobacco cessation at a private hospital said e-cigarette has got into the Indian market in the last four years and around 50% of the Indian e-cigarette market is online. He said China is the biggest supplier. Dr Gupta said nicotine is addiction forming and poisonous to human beings. Use of nicotine may lead to heart disease, respiratory disease etc. He said six states Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Mizoram and Maharashtra have already banned e-cigarettes under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940 and Food Safety and Standards (Prohibition and Restriction on Sales) regulation, 2011. In Rajasthan, the state government is making efforts to ban it and hopefully, it will succeed, he said. Dr Gupta also stated that e-cigarettes that are being promoted as an alternative to quit smoking but the users will further move to active smoking. Along with those who want to quit tobacco might shift to e-cigarette, which affects the quitting rate and those who have quit tobacco may shift to e-cigarette. Looking at these reasons, e-cigarette should be banned, he added. He also stated that 6,500 youths below 18 years daily start using tobacco in India, while death rate due to tobacco-related diseases is 3,500 per day. The campaign manager Priyanka Lodha said that in March this year, two surveys were conducted in Kota and Jaipur respectively to find the availability of e-cigarettes. In Kota, a survey was conducted among 687 tobacco vendors of which 18% were selling e-cigarettes and in Jaipur out of 450 tobacco vendors, the availability of this product was 8 %. She appealed to the government to make strict laws to stop online sale of e-cigarettes. Govind Pareek, joint director, department of information and public relations, the government of Rajasthan said youth are lured by new things and e-cigarette is one among them. Awareness about the harmful effects of this product should be spread so that youth are not lured towards it and save themselves from getting caught in the tentacles of tobacco. He said additional chief secretary medical and health Veenu Gupta on Friday issuing an order has formed a committee of five members to give expert information about the ill-effects of this electronic cigarette on health. This committee will submit its report on June 15. BJP MLA from Nohar and brand ambassador of the campaign Abhishek Matoria said: I personally will take up this matter with the government so that it is banned in the state. Vaagdhara secretary Jayesh Joshi said directorate of local bodies should soon make licence compulsory for selling tobacco, which will reduce the availability. Repolling at 73 booths in Kairana Lok Sabha constituency passed off peacefully on Wednesday with an estimated voter turn out of 61 per cent, the state election office said in Lucknow. The Election Commission on Tuesday ordered repolling at these polling stations in view of technical snags in EVM-VVPAT machines during the bye-election on Monday. Around 80,000 voters were eligible to cast their votes at the booths where the repolling was held on Wednesday. Opposition Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal as well as the ruling BJP had complained of electronic voting machines (EVM) malfunctioning at these booths. The repoll began at 7 am and ended at 5 pm in 23 polling stations at Nakur, 44 in Gangoh and one station at Thana Bhawan in Saharanpur and five in Shamli. On Monday, 54% polling was recorded in Kairana seat, which fell vacant following the death of BJP MP Hukum Singh, whose daughter Mriganka Singh is the saffron party candidate in the bypoll. Mriganka Singh is contesting against Rashtriya Lok Dals Tabassum Hasan, who is also supported by the Congress, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party. Counting of votes will take place on Thursday. Its hard to walk through a fine restaurant these days without jumping out of the way of a rolling cart. Dining rooms across the country have taken to presenting food to guests as if servers had magnets attached to their jackets pulling them to tables. Now, theres a lot to love about tableside service. At its best, it celebrates a glorious era of dining out, with the ceremony of seeing an expert fillet a Dover sole in the time it takes most people to get a grip on their knife, or watching a baked Alaska ignite in high, blue-yellow flames. And yet, as with all the best experiences, there can be too much of a good thing. Restaurants are getting more expensive and dressed up, and with that comes an expectation of a more indulgent level of service. Plus, shared photos and videos of dramatic flourishes such as a burning dessert can be great for a restaurants reputation on social media. As a result, carts are spinning through dining rooms, fast and furious. At some places they rack up so much mileage, the wheels need frequent replacement. Greek Salad is prepared tableside at Baltaire. (Baltaire/Facebook) If you want an example of a good tableside experience, watch the waiters at Carbone from the Major Food Group in New York mix their Caesar alla ZZ. Wearing Zac Posen tuxedos, the servers make a fresh dressing with anchovies and egg, tossing chopped romaine and garlic bread croutons while telling 100-year-old jokes. It feels like a scene from a movie. At the Grill, Carbones big brother Midtown restaurant, tableside service casts an even larger, cart-size footprint. Pasta a la presse manifests in front of guests as roasted vegetables and poultry pieces are juiced through a gleaming old-school duck press, then tossed with a nest of egg noodles and served; its one of the Grills most popular dishes. Theres also a trolley dedicated solely to carving prime rib for customers. But it requires a certain level of skill to cut thick slices of pepper-crusted beef in front of an audience, and even more to execute a tender wild mushroom omelet and slide it onto a plate before a table of guests. Hiring and training those skilled servers costs moneyperhaps all the extra eggs that get cracked in practice are why the price of a Grill omelet has gone up 52 percent, from $24 to $38, according to Eater. James Beard-winning Houston chef Chris Shepherd is an unabashed fan of tableside service. He applauds the pyrotechnic flambeed desserts at Brennans in New Orleans and slices strip steak in front of guests at his seasonally changing restaurant One Fifth Romance Languages. But hes decided that lines have to be drawn. We talked about doing an omelet tableside, Shepherd says. I decided that it didnt make sense. Can my staff cook eggs perfectly every time? I cannot make that guarantee. Its like a showif youre going to be onstage, you have to do it right. And if it isnt right, you cant say, Ill be back in a few minutes. Shepherd has an additional list of donts for tableside service. Tuna tartare made tableside is just the wrong thing to do, he says. Tuna is a valuable ingredient, and it requires precise seasoning. Flavorings like lime and chiles, their intensity varies. I want to check the tartare thats going out to guests to make sure its correct. If you have someone doing it for show at the table, who knows how its going to taste each time? (At the Bourbon Steak chain, which has branches from Southern California to Washington, D.C., perfectly fine raw tuna chunks are tossed with flavorings in the dining room for no good reason. Likewise, lobster pot pie crusts are cracked open at the table for photo ops; restaurants used to trust customers to do it themselves.) The chef is OK with tableside guacamole: Its a Texas thing. And its easy to adjust seasonings. The New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells is not. I dont like it, he says. But Wells allows that he, too, is a fan of flambe: Doesnt matter what it is. Go ahead and set it on fire, and Ill be happy. Still, he rages against another dish thats become a dining room fixture. I hate tableside beef tartare, Wells says. It might have tradition behind it, but, like the tuna version, flavors can be haphazard when its made at the table. Theres also the pleasure of being able to mix in add-ins yourself, to taste. The last place he had tartare is the restaurant with the most extreme version of tableside service: Nusr-Et steakhouse, aka Salt Bae. Almost every dish there has some jazz hands, notes Wells. Besides the tartare mixing and the expressive salt-sprinkling over steak by the famous black-gloved chef, theres also beef sushi thats lit up with a blowtorch while guests watch, phones recording. Wells has one more ultimatum: Do not mix my Caesar at the table unless you put an egg in there. Caesar salad originated at the table, with a last-minute mix to emulsify the just-added coddled egg yolk into the dressing. (Wells did not weigh in on the Caesar served at the new Jack Rose restaurant in New Orleans; its made with salt-rubbed kale, raw cauliflower, roasted garlic, and white balsamic vinegar. But it does include a raw egg yolk.) As for a simple salad like Greek, theres literally no reason to toss it tableside. Yet thats how they serve it at Baltaire steakhouse in Los Angeles. While there are no raw eggs in it, the Greek salad does come with other risks. An Open Table review noted that a server spilled the dressing over a diners back (an underreported hazard of tableside dining). Baltaire does have a Caesar saladits made with an olive oil dressing and isnt served tableside. Since it opened, Chicagos Maple & Ash steakhouse has specialized in offering unconventional options for the table, some perhaps more reminiscent of a nightclub than a restaurant: for instance, the presentation of caviar bumps with glasses of sparkling wine as a back. The James Beard-winning former wine director there, Belinda Chang, recalls a misguided effort to prepare miniature welcome cocktails for guests. The chef insisted that we shake the drinks tableside. In the beginning we used real ice. But that became impractical, she says, and we started using fake plastic cubes to create the correct sound. But the drinks came out warm. Its the opposite of what you are looking for with tableside service. Follow @htlifeandstyle for more Of all of Indias states, there is no doubt that the best food is in Kerala. This has always been my position and after visiting Cochin last week, I have no reason to deviate from it. I ate all over the city (but youll have to wait for Brunch in a couple of weeks to get the details of those meals) and the chefs at the new Grand Hyatt served me perfect breakfasts day after day: everything from fluffy idlis to delicious egg roast (made with little quails eggs) and appams. And yet, the Gujarati in me could not be suppressed. We were passing the Gujarati area of Fort Cochin when our guide pointed out Shantilal Mithaiwala, a local institution and --- more importantly a mithai and farsan shop run by Gujaratis. Naturally, I went inside, tried the boondi ka laddoo (delicious) and settled on the paapri ganthia, a besan snack much favoured by my people. (There has been some controversy on Instagram about the picture I posted. Were these really ganthias? Thats what the sceptics wanted to know. Yes they were. Gaanthia is a generic term for two or three kinds of snack and both me and the guys at the shop called them gaanthias.) Then, I tried the jalebis and decided to go the whole hog and bought half a kilo of them. The next morning, the good people at the Grand Hyatt kitchen were bemused to be told that I needed no breakfast from their chefs. But could they heat my jalebis and serve them with the gaanthia please? An unusual request, but fulfilled nonetheless. (Shutterstock) Hotels are used to strange requests so nobody said anything. And as I had bought so many gaanthias, I was able to introduce my Punjabi wife to the delights of Gujarati snacks (she loved them) and that afternoon we watched the Karnataka Confidence Vote which was essentially a Gujarat vs Karnataka contest on TV while gorging on gaanthias. And though Gujarat lost the vote, we didnt mind; all I could focus on were the gaanthias! Afterwards, when I posted the photos on social media, the criticisms and the expressions of astonishment began to pour in. Shabhana Azmi asked me on Twitter, why I went all the way to Kerala to eat gaanthias. And others suggested --- probably fairly --- that I had to be a bit of an idiot to go as far as Cochin to eat Gujarati snacks. But what to do? We Gujaratis are like this only. Look at any party of touring Gujaratis. Unless they are the super-sophisticated types, they will have packed Khakras, theplas, garlic chutney, mango pickle and perhaps even some khaari poori. No matter where they go, no matter how bad the food is, Gujaratis will never go hungry. Because there is always a thepla-gaanthia stash hidden away somewhere in their baggage. The two communities that are the greatest Indian travellers are Bengalis and Gujaratis. Bengalis eat anything so they can eat pretty much all the food that is served up to them. Gujaratis tend to be fussier. Not only are most of us vegetarians, we also like our own cuisine. Then there are the Gujarati Jains who will not eat onions or garlic making it virtually impossible for them to find much to eat when they travel. I suspect that the Indian package tour industry only took off in the late 1970s when travel agents started sending groups of Gujaratis abroad. The great attraction for the travellers was not the thrill of going with friends or having a guide to explain the wondrous sights to them. It was that canny travel agents began sending a maharaj along with each group. So no matter where the travelling Gujaratis were --- Hong Kong, Los Angeles or Paris --- they would settle down to a meal of dal-bhaat-rotli-shaak every day. But dont knock it. When we are travelling, all Indians discover the pleasures of Gujarati food. In the 1990s I travelled to the Caribbean with Amitabh Bachchan and a group of movie stars who were touring the islands performing live shows. Though the troupe had all the biggies from that eraSridevi, Anil Kapoor, Anupam Kher and so many others - the stars of the group were the Kalyanji-Anandji contingent. This was not just because Anandjibhai and his musicians were very good. It was also because their group included ladies who made fresh Gujarati food every day; yes, dal, bhaat, rotli, shaak. Amitabh is a vegetarian so he gravitated towards their food naturally. But so did everyone else in the troupe. Gaanthia is a quintessential Gujarati snack, made from chickpea flour. To some extent all communities are as particular about their food. So are people of all nationalities. The Japanese, for instance, are notorious for refusing to travel to places where there are no Japanese restaurants. In the 1980s and the 1990s, they all flocked to Hawaii and to Bangkok because Japanese food was readily available. The Indian government was told by the Japanese authorities that not only would no Japanese tourists come to India but even businessmen and technical experts would stay away unless they could guarantee them Japanese food. And so, in the late 1980s, ITDC was made to open a Japanese restaurant at Delhis Ashoka Hotel for Japanese visitors. Much later, at the beginning of this century, the Metropolitan Hotel tied up with Japans Nikko group to open Sakura, probably the first authentic, high quality Japanese restaurant in India. It was packed out day after day with Japanese businessmen. A few years later, ITC, which had found little success with Japanese food at its Pan-Asians, opened the excellent and authentic Edo in Bangalore and flourished on the basis of Japanese custom. (But if you want non-fancy, every day Japanese food then Matsuri at the Chancery Hotel in Bangalore is the place to go to.) For Indians travelling abroad, the situation is complicated by the huge variety of inauthentic Indian food available abroad. We get Indian food and yet we dont. When I was a student in England, I was appalled by the food at the Bangladeshi curry houses that constituted the vast majority of Indian restaurants and the authentic places (Shezan, Gaylord, etc.) were all too expensive. Finally, I discovered the Diwana Bhelpuri House and other such modest places run by Gujaratis (from East Africa, mainly) for other Gujaratis. Even now, authentic Indian food is hard to come by in England (hard as this may be to believe) unless the restaurant is run by Indians and aims higher than the curry house market. I have stayed at four or more London hotels where they have put Indian food on the room service menu in the hope of pleasing Indian high-rollers. Without exception, it has been revolting and entirely inauthentic. (The only exception is the obvious one: the Taj-run St. James Court where the room service Indian food is terrific.) I often wonder if other communities miss their own food as much as Gujaratis do. Every North Indian I know will admit that unless he has something that tastes authentically Indian, he goes off the rails within a week or so. In most cases, it is dal (for some reason!) that seems to satisfy the Indian food craving. For South Indians, it is curd that they miss the most. (Packaged Western-style yoghurt does not seem to do the trick.) For Bengalis it is rice. And for most Indians from every part of the country, even the hardcore non-vegetarians, the food they seem to miss the most is home-style vegetarian. Bhel, says Vir Sanghvi, is probably the greatest Gujarati dish ever invented. (Shutterstock) I am a little unusual in that respect. Unlike the average Gujarati, I dont really miss dal-bhaat-rotli-shaak. The food that really gets me excited is chaat. Left to myself, I could eat chaat at every meal. The only times I feel like Indian food when I am travelling is when I crave a dahi-batala-puri or a bhel. For many years, whenever I stayed in that part of London, the Masala Zone on Marshal Street was my canteen. All of the food there was very good. But I stuck to the chaat. Why do you suppose that is? I guess it boils down, once again, to being a Gujarati. Some of us miss dhoklas and dahi-wadi (khandvi). But I like bhelpuri, possibly the greatest Gujarati dish ever invented. And I crave the flavours of Gujarati-style Mumbai chaat. When I am in Mumbai, and I have time to myself, its not the fancy Japanese/Chinese/Italian restaurants I will go to. Youll find me at Soam in Babulnath, eating the food of my people and forgetting about Michelin star chefs as I wolf down the bhel! From gaanthia to Bhel, it is the food of my people that keeps reminding me of who I am. For the past 10 years, a pond at 122-year-old Jakhmata Devi temple in Juhu has been a sanctuary for 65 red-eared slider turtles. Native to southern United States and Mexico, the turtles have flourished and grown in numbers ever since 40 of them were released into the 10x12 feet pond located on the premises of the half-acre temple plot near International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) temple. They have grown, multiplied and the numbers are now more than 65, said Manorama Rane, 86, Juhu village resident, caretaker of the temple premises. She is the granddaughter of Raghunath Rane, who built the temple in 1896 after he found an idol of Sitala Devi at the site. Five generations of the Ranes have been looking after the temple. As per International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), red-eared sliders are among the commonly traded turtles in the world. According to Manorama, her grandfather had planned to create a well to provide water for temple but ended up excavating an impression of Brahmas lotus foot, which prompted him to name the pond Brahmakunda after its completion. The pond is also home to fish, including catfish (magur). However, water level in the pond is precariously low, said Rane. While the water level has deteriorated significantly since its construction, it has never dried up in more than 100 years, she said, adding the temple is the oldest in the area which was once forested. We do not feed the turtles or the fish. They fend for themselves. It is better that way. The temple remains open to public from 9am to 11am and 4pm to 6pm every day. The private plot, however, is under stress from outsiders as there is four-foot boundary wall around the temple and barbed wires fence at one end. Passers-by dump garbage and throw food into the pond for turtles, despite telling them not to. People have even brought turtles and tortoises to the spot and left them here. However, none of the other species have survived. We buried the dead turtles in a corner of the temple premises, said Rane. On several occasions, some of the turtles have been stolen from the area, she said. I have filed complaints with the forest department and the local police, but nobody seems to care because there are many, she said . Apart from Rane, three of her friends Kavita Raut, Meena Juhar, and Geeta Kubal, all senior citizens, help her protect the temple premises. At 86, she (Manorama) has tried everything she could to protect the temple. We help her keep the premises clean, said Raut. The number of devotees visiting this temple increase significantly during Navratri. At this time, she needs help to ensure people do not steal the turtles or disturb their habitat. We help her protect them, said Kubal. Forest department is unaware of the exotic turtles in Juhu. This is the first time we are being informed about these turtles. We will depute a team to visit the site, said Santosh Kank, range forest officer, Mumbai. Banking services in Maharashtra were crippled as nearly 60,000 employees from various banks went on a two-day nationwide strike on Wednesday, protesting the meagre 2% wage hike offered by the Indian Banks Association (IBA). Nearly 10 lakh employees working in various branches of 21 public sector banks, 13 old generation private sector banks, six foreign banks and 56 regional rural banks across the country went on strike following IBAs nominal wage revision. Bank employees are on strike to demand an adequate wage revision to all employees and officers, Devidas Tuljapurkar, Maharashtra convenor of United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU), said. Around 60,000 bank employees and officers in Maharashtra, including 25,000 bank employees and officers in Mumbai, are on strike, he claimed, adding that nearly 12,000 branches across the state are shut. Protesting bank employees participate in a rally at Azad Maidan in south Mumbai on Wednesday. (Kunal Patil/HT Photo) Bank employees have implemented the governments flagship programmes, such as Jan Dhan Yojna, demonetisation, Mudra scheme, Atal Pension Yojana, in the pfew years. Our workload has increased substantially, and we need appropriate compensation for it, Tuljapurkar said. Protesting bank employees have also organised a rally in south Mumbais Fort area. Bank unions decided to go on strike after several rounds of talks between banks and unions made no headway. At the wage negotiation meeting held on May 5, IBA proposed a 2% hike in the wage bill cost as on March 31, 2017. It also maintained that negotiations on officers demands would be limited up to scale 3 officers only. UFBU, an umbrella body of nine bank unions, objects to the proposed 2% hike as against 15% given the last time, CH Venkatachalam, general secretary of All India Bank Employees Association, said. The results of bypolls in Palghar and Bhandara-Gondiya Lok Sabha constituencies that will be announced on Thursday are likely to have a major impact on political equations in the state. The bypolls were necessitated after the death of sitting MP Chintaman Wanga in Palghar and resignation of MP Nana Patole in Bhandara-Gondiya. While in Palghar, the fight is multi-cornered, with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Shiv Sena and local outfit Bahujan Vikas Aghadi in the fray, the Bhandara-Gondiya bypoll is a direct fight between the BJP and NCP. Both the seats were held by the BJP and losing even one could be seen as a setback for the party, while winning any seat may give a boost to the Congress and NCP. The Palghar battle became a matter of prestige for the BJP as its ally Shiv Sena challenged it by fielding the late Wangas son Shrinivas. Vidarbha is BJPs stronghold and losing a Lok Sabha seat barely a year before the 2019 polls would mean bad news for the party. There are speculations that the Sena may pull out of the government if it wins the Palghar seat. However, Sena functionaries close to Uddhav Thackeray denied it. I dont think we would resort to this step immediately if we win, but the relations between the two parties would not be the same again. If it is won by any of the two parties, the rift will widen further, said a key Sena minister. It is true that it was a tough fight in Palghar, but we will win it by a significant margin. The BVA and CPM candidates are likely to eat into the vote-share of the Sena and Congress respectively, and it will be in our favour. We will win long Bhandara-Gondiya comfortably, said a top BJP leader. The Bhandara-Gondiya contest is also significant for the Congress and NCP, who have come together after parting ways in the 2014 Assembly elections. If the NCP wins the seat, it will be a boost for them, but if it loses, there will be bitterness between the two parties as Congress leaders suspect the NCP did not fight it seriously. Meanwhile, after the unprecedented failure of the electronic voting machines (EVMs) and voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPATs) on Monday, the Election Commission of India (ECI) ordered re-polls in 49 booths in the Lok Sabha constituency. The goof-up in the bypolls resulted in the transfer of Gondiya collector Abhimanyu Kale, holding him responsible for dereliction of duty. As 411 EVMS and VVPATs malfunctioned in Bhandara, the ECI announced re-polls in booths where the process was disrupted for more than two hours. The re-polling was held in 49 booths in Sakoli, Bhandara, Gondia, Arjuni and Moregaon in the constituency. To ensure hassle-free polls, we dispatched 200 VVPATs from Sangli, where the Congress candidate in the Assembly bypolls was declared unopposed winner, and another 300 from Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The VVPATs from Sangli did not reach in time, but machines from the neighbouring states were used. This time, no EVMs or VVPATs malfunctioned. At a couple of polling stations, the battery had to be replaced, and that was done within minutes, said an ECI official, requesting anonymity. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Acting on the orders of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Maharashtra government on Wednesday dissolved the board of directors of Solapur District Central Co-operative Bank and appointed Avinash Deshmukh, the district deputy registrar, as its administrator. The bank was under the control of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), as most of its directors are party members. Former Solapur NCP MLA Rajan Patil is the chairman of the bank. In its order, the RBI had asked the state to take action against the board over financial irregularities by the bank, the officials said. Deshmukh said, I have taken charge as the administrator of the bank, following orders from state cooperation commissioner Vijay Khade, issued on Tuesday. Taking note of complaints of financial irregularities, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) in 2016-17 conducted an inspection of the bank and submitted its report to the RBI. According to a senior official from the state cooperation department, Nabard found many financial irregularities, mainly related to loans that were disbursed without mortgaging assets. It was found that the bank gave loans more than the permissible limits, affecting its financial health. The non-performing asset (NPA) of the bank rose every year. This year, NPA of the bank rose to 342 crore, said a senior official. While 650 crore was disbursed as loan to various individuals and others, the performance of the bank was below expectation in terms of recovery, compelling RBI to take action, he said. The matter was challenged in the Bombay high court (HC). Based on courts orders, then Solapur district deputy registrar BT Lavand conducted a probe for the state. The primary findings of the report werent different from that of Nabard, the officer said. As part of a major reshuffle and promotion, the state government has created a new post, additional director general of police (ADGP), economic offences wing (EOW), and appointed senior IPS officer Prabhat Kumar as its first ADGP. Sandeep Bisnoi, ADGP (SRPF) has been transferred as ADGP (establishment) Maharashtra police, while Dhanajay Kamlakar, ADGP (coastal security) has been transferred to the post of ADGP of planning and coordination of Maharashtra police. Sanjay Saxena, joint commissioner of police, crime in Mumbai, has been promoted and transferred as the ADGP of training and special ops. Dr Archana Tyagi, joint commissioner of police, administration in Mumbai police, has been promoted as the ADGP of SRPF. Ashutosh Dumbre, joint commissioner of police, EOW, Mumbai, has been shifted as the joint commissioner of crime (Mumbai city), while Vinay Choubey, who was the inspector general of Nashik range, has replaced Dumbre. KMM Prasanna, additional commissioner of police of the Mumbai crime branch, has been promoted and transferred as the inspector general of Nagpur range. Cheering Dorge, additional commissioner of police (west region), has been promoted and transferred as the inspector general (IG) of police, Nashik range, while his wife Ashwini Dorge, who was the additional commissioner of police, armed police headquarters, Naigaon, has been promoted and transferred as the director of Maharashtra police academy in Nashik. Suhas Warke, inspector general (IG), who was posted in ATS, has been promoted and transferred as special inspector general of Nanded, while Yashasvi Yadav who was the Aurangabad police commissioner and was sent on compulsory leave by the state government, is special IG of coastal security and VIP security, Mumbai. RD Shinde, who was posted as the additional commissioner of police protection and special security Mumbai, has been promoted and transferred as director, SID Pune. Santosh Rastogi has been transferred to the administration department. If you want a definition for jet-set, here it is: no sooner had she touched down in India early this week was international fashionista and philanthropist Natasha Poonawalla already on her speed dial, making calls to invite friends for what is said to be the mother of all parties at her Mumbai mansion in SoBo, for newlyweds Sonam Kapoor and Anand Ahuja this weekend. As is known, Poonawalla could not attend their wedding celebrations as she was in the USA to attend the Met Ball, where her appearance on the red carpet in a bespoke couture Dolce and Gabbana gown is said to have put many a star in the shade, says a source. So, she decided to host a party to continue the celebrations. The Poonawalla mansion, recently refurbished under her instruction, houses a staggering collection of European and Indian masters, including Van Goghs and Picassos, and rarely throws open its doors for a party on this scale, its residents preferring to host smaller, more intimate groups. The last one had been in honour of Tina Brown and her Women In The World Series. Whats making this one a big-ticket affair is that not only is all of Bollywood expected to roll up in the stipulated dress code of Glamorous, but that the invitation has been issued in the glam hostess name alone. Husband Aadar is traveling on work, but even so, it is a nice nod in the direction of female empowerment, said the source. Hope more of Mumbais divas have the confidence to follow suit. SEPARATED AT BIRTH? (Left) Anil Dharker and (right) Margaret Atwood. Anil Dharker: Erstwhile Indian editor, one-time TV critic and host, popular columnist and founder and director of LitLive, a festival that celebrates authors and books, held in November every year, and which holds literary events throughout the year in different locations in Mumbai. Margaret Atwood: Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic, essayist, inventor, teacher and environmental activist who has published 17 books of poetry, 16 novels, 10 books of non-fiction, eight collections of short fiction, eight childrens books, and one graphic novel, as well as a number of small press editions in poetry and fiction. WTS WTM What They Say: He told Theresa May that UK courts asking about the condition of Indian jails in Vijay Mallyas case is not right, as these are the same prisons where they had jailed our leaders like Gandhi and Nehru. Sushma Swaraj to the media recently on what PM Modi said What They Mean: And he meant the exact same prisons which the British had built over a century ago! So much for development. A TOUCH OF BRIGHTNESS (LtoR) TV star Tara Sharma and her father late Partap Sharma. In these days of gloom and doom, a touch of brightness: word comes in that the path-breaking play, A Touch of Brightness, written in 1965 by the late thespian, voice-over artist, author and alpha-male Partap Sharma, will be the opening reading at a festival celebrating South Asian Playwrights at the Royal Court Theatre in London this evening. As might be recalled, the play, set in Mumbais red light district, had become a cause celebre when it was banned by regressive forces, and legal luminaries like Soli Sorabjee and Iqbal Chagla had argued eloquently for its freedom of expression. The original cast had featured Zohra Sehgal and Roshan Sheth amongst others, and the radio version produced soon after had no less than Dame Judi Dench as its protagonist along with music by Ravi Shankar! Wish Dad was here to hear of this honor, said Sharmas daughter, the actress and TV star Tara Sharma who along with husband, ad filmmaker Roopak Saluja and her mother Sue, will be present for the occasion. But, I truly believe legacies such as this, and love and family, keep him alive and present with us, she added. Indeed. The Philippines is set to import oil from Russia next month to boost the countrys fuel reserves, Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi said in a radio interview Wednesday. Cusi pushed for oil stockpiling to secure the countrys oil requirements amid global uncertainties. He said state-owned PNOC Exploration Corp. would likely start importing oil from Russia by end of June. We will feel that towards the end of June because there is shipment time...This is a result of shortage of supply experienced globally, Cusi said. So we just want to be assured that our country will have sufficient supply, he said. Cusi said the decision to import oil from other countries came about after the visit of President Rodrigo Duterte to the Middle East and Russia. So during those visits, we talked about the need to put up a strategic reserve for the country So we are pursuing this now , so that we can import and we can set up this reserve, he said. Cusi said the oil companies had an inventory of around 15 days for finished products and 30 days for crude products.We want to have a higher inventory so we have a safety measure. So we asked PNOC-EC to importand we can sell that to a third party in the industry, the energy chief said. Cusi said the Philippines was eyeing an initial shipment of 200,000 metric tons per month. First, we are looking at our storage capacity, its location, he said. He said the oil importation from Russia was now under negotiation. Cusi said the plan was to give special discounts to buyers of fuel imported by PNOC EC. Cusi said he also asked the oil companies to avoid implementing a price increase this week and treat it as a sort of a discount. I think some oil companies are doing it, but not all. Again, its a free market, he said. The Sakinaka police have arrested a man for allegedly abusing and threatening an on-duty traffic police constable on Monday morning on Saki Vihar road in Andheri (east). The constable had reportedly asked the accused to move his motorcycle to the side of the road since it was creating a traffic jam. According to the police, the incident took place at around 10am when the arrested accused Anupras More, 31, a resident of Malwani, Malad was riding his bike from Khairani road towards Saki Vihar road. He stopped his vehicle on the Saki Vihar road for some reason and had blocked the ongoing traffic which caused an inconvenience to other motorists as a result. The complainant, Manoj Parit, 40, the traffic police constable from the Sakinaka traffic police division was posted at the spot. Parit went up More and asked him to move his bike ahead or to the back so that other vehicles could move ahead. More kicked up an argument with the constable and abused him repeatedly. Parit then called the emergency number 100 but the line was busy so he called up the Sakinaka police who rushed to the spot. More was caught and taken to the police station. The accused was denied bail on Tuesday and has been sent to the Arthur Road jail. He will have to stay there till he is granted bail, a police official from Sakinaka police station said. The city may soon face a shortage of vegetables and milk as some farmers outfits have announced a ten-day, countrywide strike from Friday, protesting against various policies of the government. But significantly, major farmers outfits from the state have not confirmed their participation in it. The Rashtriya Kisan Mahasangh (RKM), which has called for the strike, plans to spread the agitation across 130 cities in India. Our farmers are in bad shape and we have no other option than to go on a strike. Last year, we believed in the state government and withdrew our agitation, and then realized that we were cheated, said Sandeep Gidde Patil, core committee member, RKM. Their list of demands includes a total loan waiver, implementation of the Swaminathan Commissions recommendations for the agriculture sector, free power supply for pumps and backing ethanol as an alternative fuel. However there appears to be disunity among farmers outfits on the subject of this agitation. The Sukanu Samiti an outfit of 30 farmers groups that launched an agitation against the Maharashtra government last year and got it to announce a loan waiver last year said they will not participate in this strike led by the RKM. The RKM does not have any base in the state and even the farmers are unaware of any such strike, said Vishwas Utgi, core committee member, Sukanu Samiti. Our agitation will start from June 12 and we will gherao the Mantralaya also. Even the Member of Parliament and farmer leader Raju Shettis Swabhimaan Shetkari Sanghatana (SSS) said it would not join in with the RKMs strike. If they all do decide to join hands in the end, it could be a repeat of the 2017 farmers agitation when Mumbai faced an unprecedented shortage of vegetables and milk. In the last few years, farmers across the state have been facing host of issues leading to a spate of suicides. In addition, they have been saying that the loan waiver scheme has hardly been beneficial to them. To avoid the prospect of violence against doctors at public hospitals, BMC has said that only those holding the post of lecturers or higher ranks, and not resident doctors, can break news about a patients death to relatives. The decision was taken on Monday at a meeting held by public health officials at Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital, Sion. A resident doctor is already overburdened. We cant expect a resident doctor to break this news to relatives, said Idzes Kundan, additional municipal commissioner, BMC. There has to be division of responsibility. Over the last three years, there have been several incidents of resident doctors being assaulted by patients relatives, accusing them of negligence. Last week, two resident doctors at Sir JJ Hospital were beaten by relatives after a patients death. The system is allowing doctors to hold a private practice but that doesnt mean their attention should be away from the public hospital, Kundan said. The BMC will soon issue a circular to all the deans with these directions. The study had also highlighted that tertiary care hospitals are overburdened however facilities at peripheral hospitals are largely underutilised. Patients with minor illness also end up coming to the casualty at tertiary health centres, because of which sufficient time cannot be given to patients who actually need emergency service, the finding said.There is a need for better communication between doctors and relatives, the findings of the study highlighted At the meeting, health officials also decided that medicines for patients with non- communicable diseases (NCD) should be prescribed for a period of one month. At present the prescription is only for a period of 14 days, said Dr Avinash Supe, dean, KEM hospital, Parel. Treatment for NCDs last for a long time. With this move patients wont have to keep coming fortnightly, Dr Supe added. Doctors at the meeting said there is a need to screen patients. There needs to be a centre within the hospital to screen patients, so emergency patients are taken up first, Kundan added. It was not a big deal. We trained for it and climbed it. I was not scared at all, said Umakant Madavi, 19, a tribal student from Chandrapur district, Maharashtra, who was among five teenagers addressing a press conference on Wednesday, on their way home from summiting Mount Everest. They made a typically teen group at the podium -- Madavi, Manisha Dhurve, Kavidas Katmode, Pramesh Ale and Vikas Soyam -- shy, giggling, a bit daunted by the crowd of reporters and cameramen they were addressing. The stories they told were incredible. The climb was difficult and we had to pass many dead bodies of other climbers on our way. The first body scared me, but then we got used to it, said Katmode, 18. To Dhurve, 18, the journey down was more unnerving that the climb up. It felt like there was a sky above me and under me too! she said. The group started their journey from Mumbai on April 11. Katmode and Madavi were the first to conquer the peak, in the wee hours of May 16. Ale and Dhurve reached the peak reached the peak that afternoon, and Soyam, the afternoon of the following day. His delay was because he had helped fellow climber Aakash Madavi to return from the advanced base camp after the latter fell ill. The youngsters Everest mission was part of Mission Shaurya, an initiative of the Tribal Development Department of the Maharashtra government. Its aim was to help tribal students of government ashram schools to realise their highest potential. The conquering five are from Ashram schools of Dewada and Jeevti in Chandrapur. Shekhar Babu, the expedition leader, who climbed the peak in 2007, explained how the kids trained in Ladakh in January so that they would be acclimatised to the strong winds as well as lowered oxygen levels. We also told them to be prepared to fail because not everyone can make it on the first try. But they were so brave about it all, he says. It is a high-risk expedition and we are grateful to the parents of for trusting us with their kids, added Manisha Verma, principal secretary of Tribal Development Department. The government promises to take care of their further education. We want them to shine in life. The kids, meanwhile, were still giddy with pride. As Dhurve said, When I placed the Indian national flag at the highest peak in the world, I felt like the happiest person in the world. In a complicated surgery that was performed recently, Mumbai surgeons removed a six-cm-long denture from the food pipe of a Sakinaka resident. Abdul Gani, 60, accidentally swallowed his denture while drinking water but did not realise it. After he struggled to eat, and even breathe, Gani visited a local physician who suggested an X-ray. The doctor wasnt aware that the denture with one tooth and two canines sides was made of plastic, which the X-ray failed to detect, said Gani. As the chest and upper abdominal pain persisted, Gani took a second opinion from another doctor in Ghatkopar. This time, the doctors spotted the denture after performing endoscopy on Gani. However, they could not extract it owing to its critical location. Gani was shifted to Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital, Sion, where two more attempts were made to extract the denture using endoscopic procedures, but to no avail. Two days after the incident, he was shifted to Zen Multispecialty Hospital, Chembur. Due to its massive size, horseshoe like structure and location, it was impossible to get a firm grip on the object. Every attempt to enter the oesophagus would push the object further, making it difficult to extract without opening the food pipe through a surgery, Dr Roy Patankar, hospital director and gastroenterologist, said. After their attempts to remove the denture using endoscopic procedures failed, doctors decided perform surgery on Gani to extract the denture. Gani underwent an oesophagotomy, during which the surgeons cut open the food pipe, removed denture and sutured it successfully without any untoward medical emergency. While Gani remained on liquids for over three days, a special dye test was performed to check the status of the food pipe to allow him consumption of solid food. Last week, after two months of surgery, we performed the final endoscopy to check the status of his oesophagus and its completely healed. The most prolific part being throughout this period, the patient observed Ramzan and continued with fasting which has said he hasnt missed in past two decades, Dr Patankar added. Citing the incident, gastroenterologists have warned senior citizens to ensure they dont have loose dentures, since swallowing the object has proved to be fatal in 20-30% of cases. For the past six months, the disappearance of two tigers from Sariska tiger reserve in Rajasthan has led to a war of words between the Rajasthan Forest Department (FD) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII). Both the agencies are responsible for the success of the tiger translocation aimed at repopulating Sariska with the animal. Both institutes have locked horns over the vanishing of a tiger named ST5 for the last three months. The FD of Rajasthan puts the blame on the scientists at WII for not informing the department about the tigers disappearance in time for them to take the necessary action. The Wildlife Institute argues that a daily report on the tigers movement is sent to the DFO office everyday so there is no way the department could have been ignorant of the tigers status. The devil lies, of course, in the detail of accusations flying back and forth. Since Feb 7, 2018, contact with a female tiger, ST5, brought in from Ranthambore to repopulate Sariska, was lost and no radio signals were received since then. On March 28, 2018, however, intermittent signals were received from her collar for a very brief time. On April 20, 2018, a panicked Forest Department sent out an SOS to Wildlife Institute of India urging them to clarify the situation on the ground. In fact, the FD maintains that a series of letters and phone calls were made to WII between March and April to get clarity on the tigers situation. Was it dead or alive? Was there a signal from ST5 or not? The letter sent by Dr GS Bhardwaj, Field Director, Sariska, urges WII to explain the intermittent signals. One plausible explanation offered by the WII scientists was that the radio signals that were thought to be from ST5 were actually from another tiger, ST13. The letter further says, due to this we have been delayed in registering FIR under Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, and proceeding with our investigation to conclude about the missing ST5 tigress. The Wildlife Institute, in the meantime, is preparing a detailed rebuttal to the Forest Departments allegations, especially because the issue had now been raised in the media and has caused much embarrassment. Earlier this month, it released the document titled, Report to validate signal placed on ST5 female tiger in Sariska Tiger Reserve, to clarify that the institute was being unnecessarily blamed. The report states that due diligence was observed by the WII teams in both Sariska and in Dehradun to address the issue. The report clarifies that on closer examination it was found that the intermittent signals were in fact from ST5 and not ST13. In the same report, SP Goyal, the head of WII, absolves himself from any blame stating that law enforcement is the job of the Forest Department and not of a scientific institution. The trail of letters highlights the ongoing acrimony between the two agencies; however, it doesnt help fix any responsibility. Sadly, the incident has a precedent. Earlier this year, tiger ST11 was confirmed dead due to asphyxiation from a snare, prompting the Rajasthan government to set up an investigation. Their April report doesnt mince words when it says, if amends are not made then the debacle of losing all tigers of Sariska Tiger Reserve may well be repeated. The tiger reserve needs to fix management issues like acute shortage of staff. It needs to create an intelligence network to prevent poaching and rampant illegal grazing within the tiger reserve, and curtail the volume of pilgrim traffic that visits the temple within the park. The death of an individual animal may not affect the survival of an entire species. But in a landscape that had lost all its tigers in 2005, every animal is precious. A sulking WII for its part has pulled now out of the Park, leaving a helpless forest department to monitor the 14 radio-collared tigers on their own. Until the recommendations of the Standing Committee are implemented, any effort at rewilding Sariska is like putting sand through a sieve. The FD and WII need to sit together and sort out their differences at least for the sake of the tigers. Bahar Dutt is an environment journalist currently working on a book, Restoring Nature, for Oxford University Press The views expressed are personal With some Sikh separatist outfits announcing to observe a complete shutdown during the 34th anniversary of Operation Bluestar on June 6 and hold marches in the city a day before, three companies of paramilitary forces have arrived here to ensure law and order. Besides, nearly 3,200 cops, including 1,200 of Amritsar police, will be deployed. Additional deputy commissioner of police (ADCP headquarters and security) Charanjit Singh said, We had requisitioned three companies of paramilitary forces, including two of rapid action force (RAF) and one of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP). Also, quick reaction teams and patrolling parties of the Amritsar police are already working to maintain law and order. Till June 1, we are likely to get all the required forces, which will be deployed at various points of the city, said the ADCP. As per information, four teams of the Indian Reserve Battalion (IRB) have also arrived in the city. The security personnel will guard the Golden Temple and its surrounding areas such as the Bhandari Bridge and Hall Gate. In 2014, a clash took place between the radicals and the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) task force, in which several people were injured. The security is beefed up for the anniversary every year since. Many Sikh outfits have announced to hold a genocide remembrance march ahead of the anniversary and due to which the Amritsar police are on their toes. Sikh hardliner groups like the Dal Khalsa, Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) led by Simranjit Singh Mann, and the All India Sikh Student Federation led by Karnail Singh Peer Mohammad have announced to hold marches across the city ahead of the anniversary. SAD (A) general secretary Jarnail Singh Sakhira said, We are holding a march from Gurudwara Santokhsar to the Akal Takht, the highest temporal seat of the Sikhs, on June 5. Dal Khalsa spokesperson Kanwar Pal Singh said, We have resolved to undertake a genocide remembrance march from Gurdwara Ranjit Avenue to the Akal Takht where Ardas would be performed in memory of the victims of Operation Bluestar on June 5 and a complete shutdown in the city the next day. The SGPC task force is also gearing up to tackle any kind of situation. SGPC president Gobind Singh Longowal has been calling meetings to increase security inside and outside the Golden Temple. Longowal also sought cooperation from various Sikh outfits in ensuring the maryada in the shrine while observing the anniversary. Following Rajinikanths comments on the Cauvery row in which he asked Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy to release to Tamil Nadu its share of Cauvery water, as mandated by the Supreme Court, the Karnataka Film Chambers of Commerce or KFCC on Tuesday decided not to allow screening of his movie Kaala, due for release on June 7. Following their stand, the Karnataka distributor for Kaala, Saurav Sharma, has also backed off. Saurav told IBTimes, We held discussions with the film chamber. The chamber has asked all its members to not release the film in the state. We have voluntarily decided not to release the film considering the sentiments of the people in the state. From what we see, it doesnt look like this issue is going to be resolved before the movie releases. According to a report in TOI, Kannada Chaluvali Vatal Paksha president Vatal Nagaraj said, We will not allow release of any old or new films of Rajinikanth and Kamal Hassan until they apologise and withdraw their remarks, which are against our interests in the sharing of the Cauvery water with Tamil Nadu and other states. The president of KFCC , Sa Ra Govindu, also backed his statement and said that even though the distributors and exhibitors would have invested a lot in buying the rights of the film months before its release, the body is happy that they have taken the decision not to screen the film in the largest public interest and to maintain peace in the state, and added, We will not be responsible for any damage caused to theatres and cinema halls if they want to screen Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan films. He also added that they were not against actor Rajinikanth himself, but welcomed the move by the distributors to not release the film to maintain peace in the state. Meanwhile, Rajinikanth said the issue will be solved amicably. The Karnataka chamber is part of the South Indian Film Chamber (of Commerce). Definitely they will intervene and solve it amicably, the actor said. Follow @htshowbiz for more ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop Rajinikanth will be back on the big screen after a hiatus of nearly two years after his last release, 2016s Kabali. Directed by Pa Ranjith, his latest, Kaala, is primarily a Tamil film but will be released in Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi as well. To ensure that it has pan-India appeal, the makers roped in a host of Bollywood stars such as Nana Patekar, Pankaj Tripathi and Huma Qureshi. Days before its release on June 7, Huma Qureshi opened up about her experience working in the film and more importantly, the lasting influence Rajinikanth had on her. Speaking to Mid Day, she said that Rajinikanth is a kindhearted and disciplined human being. Huma said once she met Rajinikanth, there was no question of being intimidated by him. (Twitter) He is such a simple human being! He doesnt take stardom seriously, is disciplined and kindhearted. He made me so comfortable around him. He is a spiritual man, and has a calming effect on everyone around him. Once you meet him, there is no question of being intimidated by him. I cant begin to quantify what Ive learnt from him. Its an experience that will reflect in my work long after the movie is out, Mid Day quoted her as saying. Huma plays a character called Zarina in the film, whom the audience will see age from 20 to 50. Explaining how it was a totally new experience for her, she said she took it up as a challenge and followed her director Pa Ranjiths instructions. The beauty of my character, Zareena, is that its layered and nuanced. I have never done anything like this before. Shooting in Dharavi - the films setting - was also quite an experience for Huma. She explained how her life in Bandra (an upscale neighbourhood of Mumbai) was so different from Dharavi, one of Asias biggest slums, also in Mumbai. The parallel worlds were, understandably, a revelation for her as she was shooting in a slum for the first time in her life. The only joy we get as actors is to play living breathing characters .. so blessed to have had the opportunity to play #Zareena Thank you @beemji for this and the one&only @rajinikanth #Kaala coming to theatre near you June 7th #KaalaInHindi @wunderbarfilms @LycaProductions pic.twitter.com/erUYcm2Ck5 Huma Qureshi (@humasqureshi) May 24, 2018 Shooting there last year during Ramzan, she was witness to its crazy chaos, and its throbbing energy. She explained how it was a complex place, where different cultures converged with people from different backgrounds living together. She also noticed how there were specific Tamil theatres and how some signboards were in specific South Indian languages. Kaala, which will see Rajinikanth in a role of a slum lord-turned-gangster, faced its first major hurdle after the Karnataka Film Chambers Of Commerce said it would not allow the release of the film in the state. They are angry with Rajinikanths statement on the Cauvery dispute, in which he asked for the implementation of the Supreme Court ruling. A three-judge bench led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra in February this year had declared that Karnataka would be required to release 177.25 tmcft (thousand million cubic feet) of water to Tamil Nadu. The earlier requirement, under a February 2007 award by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT), was 192 tmcft. The Supreme Courts February 16 order reduced the quantity of water Karnataka was asked to supply to Tamil Nadu by 14.75 tmc and was largely seen as fair. Karnataka, which suffered a severe drought in 2017, isnt keen on it while Tamil Nadu wants the order to be implemented. Both states have sparred over sharing the rivers water for almost a century. The actor has a great fan following in Karnataka, especially Bengaluru and Kolar, where there is a sizable Tamil population. (With PTI inputs) Follow @htshowbiz for more ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop North Korea is unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons stockpile any time soon but could offer to allow the launch of a western hamburger franchise in Pyongyang instead as a goodwill gesture, NBC News cited a new CIA intelligence assessment as stating on Tuesday. The assessment, however, did not name the brand likely to get North Korean leader Kim Jong-uns nod. His other options could include American investments, especially in infrastructure. A hamburger franchise will be an easy give. And, as the NBC News report reminded its viewers, US President Donald Trump had expressed his desire in 2016 to talk peace with the North Korean leader while eating a hamburger on a conference table. And the world is aware of Trumps love of burgers two at a time, pushed down by a chocolate shake for dinner, while campaigning. According to the news report, the CIA analysis further says Kim might have wanted to have an establishment up and running by the time of the talks to ensure a steady supply of burgers to the delegations involved. But there would be no shortage of the delicacy in Singapore if the southeast Asian nation does get to host the summit. The US state department and intelligence agencies across the world are known to put together such assessments ahead of major diplomatic negotiations to explore and anticipate options likely to be touted by the other side. The intelligence assessment that Kim may not end the countrys nuclear programme is largely in accord with the assessment of North Korean watchers, who have cautioned against having high expectations. Everybody knows they are not going to denuclearise, an official who had read the analysis told NBC News. The report was circulated earlier this month, said an intelligence official. It was not clear when the assessment was put together and if it had traversed through the desk of CIA director Mike Pompeo, who took over his present job at the state department in the last week of April. He is the only Trump cabinet member to have met Chairman Kim, and twice at that. But denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula which essentially means getting rid of North Korean nukes is a key demand for President Trump. However, he has indicated willingness to consider a phased dismantling in recent days. A Stanford University study has said it could take 15 years to dismantle North Koreas nuclear weapons programme. Were talking about dozens of sites, hundreds of buildings and thousands of people, lead author Siegfried S Hecker told The New York Times. He said the key to dismantling the sprawling atomic complex, begun six decades ago, is to establish a different relationship with North Korea where its security rests on something other than nuclear weapons. The North Korean leader has let it be known through multiple interlocutors that he is prepared to discuss denuclearisation. But there is a wide gap between the way that term is understood in Pyongyang and Washington DC, as reflected in the angry exchange over the US suggestion of the Libyan model. Libya had agreed to complete denuclearisation in December 2003. SM senior vice president for marketing Millie Dizon (right) with Tonichi Nocom Sandy Prieto Romualdez and Tessa Prieto-Valdes Jollibees William Tan-Untiong with SMs SAVP for mall-based units Froilan Manotok McDonalds Kenneth Yang and wife Cindy SM chairman for Executive Committee Hans T. Sy (right) and SM chief operating officer Steven Tan (left) welcome Vicki Belo and Hayden Kho during the SMs 60th Anniversary. Mrs. Felicidad T. Sy and Mara Coson SM chairman for Executive Committee Hans T. Sy (left), SM Markets vice chair Herbert T. Sy (2nd from left), SM Investments vice chair Teresita Sy-Coson (3rd from left), and SM Hotels and Conventions Corp. president Elizabeth T. Sy (right) during the ceremonial toast at the launch of SMs 60th anniversary celebration at the SM Mall of Asia. Filipinos favorite shopping mall SM celebrates its 60th Anniversary with a series of exciting themed attractions, fun experiences, and interactive activities for its customers in SM malls nationwide from May to October.The celebrations kicked off last week with the lighting of the iconic Mall of Asia globe which was attended by SM executives, businessmen, celebrities, and other personalities.The SM story began in 1958 when founder Henry Sy, Sr. opened the first Shoemart store in downtown Manila, introducing exciting new merchandising and retailing concepts. At that time, Sy, who has been honored as the Father of Philippine Retail by the Philippine Retailers Association, thought that if he could sell a pair of shoes to every Filipino, he could be a successful man.In the 1960s, Shoemart expanded its shoe store chain and became one of the pioneers in the new urban centers in Makati and Cubao.In the 70s, Shoemart evolved into a department store, becoming SM, which has been synonymous with the one-stop shopping experience. SM positioned itself for growth in the 1980s, expanding its department store chain and venturing into the supermarket and appliance business.The year 1985 saw the opening of the first SM shopping center, SM City North Edsa. It was a time of a major political and economic crisis, but the mall was an instant success, paving way for the so-called malling phenomenon in the Philippines. Malls became part of the Filipino lifestyle, places where families and friends could shop together, dine together, and have fun together.Today, SM has close to a thousand retail stores, 70 malls in the Philippines, and seven malls in China. Through its property arm, SM Prime Holdings, it has also become a leading developer of residential condominiums in Metro Manila. Through SM Hotels and Conventions, the company now owns and operates world-class hotels, a state-of-the-art arena, convention and exhibition centers, and premier beach and mountain resorts.SMs main bank, BDO is the countrys largest bank in terms of resources, deposits, and loans. Through SM Foundation, SM reaches out to communities with its educational, health, and livelihood training programs aimed at making farmers self-sufficient. Gunmen armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers stormed the heavily fortified headquarters of the Afghan interior ministry on Wednesday, battling security forces for more than two hours in the latest attack on the capital Kabul. A car bomb was detonated at the entrance of the ministry to launch the attack and then several gunmen managed to get inside the compound, said a senior police official. Najib Danish, the ministry spokesman, confirmed the attack was carried out by a group of 10 militants and at least one policeman was killed and five were wounded. A senior ministry official said one attacker blew himself up inside the compound and another was resisting from a watchtower as a plume of dust and smoke rose over the sprawling site. Officials inside the ministry said the attackers could not breach key buildings as they are located far from the main entrance and there is a wide flat space inside the compound, helping Afghan forces to subdue the attack quickly. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, the latest in a series in Kabul this year that has killed and wounded hundreds of people, despite repeated official pledges to improve security in the capital. Last month, two explosions in Kabul killed at least 26 people, including nine journalists who had arrived to report on an initial blast and were targeted by a suicide bomber which was claimed by the Islamic State fighters. A week before that, 60 people were killed and more than 100 wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a voter registration centre in the city. Islamic State has claimed many attacks in Kabul but Afgahn security officials doubt the claims and say many of the attacks are much more likely to be the work of the Haqqani network, a group affiliated with the Taliban which has proven expertise in mounting urban attacks. The attacks underline a worsening security situation ahead of parliamentary and district council elections scheduled for Oct. 20. The Taliban have threatened to attack voter registration centres. Security in and around Kabul has been on high alert in recent days with more checkpoints and patrols as the government warned of complex attacks by the Taliban on the government or foreign installations in coming weeks. Provincial cities have also been hit as the Taliban, seeking to reimpose hardline Islamic rule, have stepped up fighting across the country since they announced the beginning of their annual spring offensive in April. Lava crossed a key highway in the mostly rural district of the Big Island where Kilauea volcano was erupting, local authorities in Hawaii said Tuesday. Highway 132 connects the commercial center of Pahoa with smaller towns and farms in the area. Hawaii County said lava destroyed the local electric utilitys equipment on the highway, which knocked out power to Vacationland and Kapoho Beach Lots neighborhoods toward the coast. Hawaii Electric Light Co. said it was evaluating how to provide power to these communities once the eruption is over but it wont be able to finalize a plan until the area is stable. The eruption has so far destroyed more than 400 of its utility poles, the company said. The destruction came after rivers of lava flowed toward the ocean over the weekend, forcing officials to knock on doors and urge residents holding out in two evacuated neighbourhoods to flee right away. Molten rock trapped at least one person who was rescued by authorities. The Kilauea volcano has been unleashing danger on the remote, rural southeastern side of the island for nearly a month, displacing thousands of residents, destroying 37 houses and forcing businesses to shut down. Lava was shooting up from cracks in the ground and blowing strands of volcanic glass. Explosions at the summit were sending small bursts of volcanic ash as high as 15,000 feet (4,570 meters). Wind was carrying volcanic glass, gases, pollution and ash particles to other parts of the island. Authorities on Tuesday advised residents to minimize exposure to avoid irritation to skin and eyes and breathing problems. A new fissure has opened, bringing the total number of cracks spouting lava to 24 since the volcano began erupting on May 3, Hawaii County Civil Defense said. Lava also has covered two wells at a geothermal plant. County officials said the plugged wells were stable and being monitored, and no dangerous gases have been released, such as hydrogen sulfide a colourless, flammable gas that can be emitted by volcanoes or when organic matter and waste break down. Ormat Technologies, a Nevada company that owns the Puna Geothermal Venture plant, said it could not assess the extent of the damage to the wells. The facility produces roughly one-quarter of the Big Islands daily energy supply. After weeks of scientific updates on the volcano, the U.S. Geological Survey took a lighter tone as it responded to a question on Twitter about whether it would be safe to roast marshmallows over volcanic vents. Were going to have to say no, thats not safe, the agencys volcanos account replied Monday, saying if the vent was belching volcanic gases, such as sulfur dioxide or hydrogen sulfide, the roasted marshmallows would taste bad. The gases generally smell like rotten eggs. Hawaiis Volcanoes National Park has been closed for 19 days and has no water due to damaged utility lines, said Jessica Ferracane, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service. Nearly 1,000 professionals from India and elsewhere got a reprieve when the UK government agreed on Tuesday to review their applications for indefinite stay, which were earlier refused using a rule meant for terrorists and criminals. The government also put on hold any deportations. The decision to review and put on hold applications that would have been turned down was communicated by home secretary Sajid Javid to Yvette Cooper, chair of the home affairs committee of Parliament, sending a wave of relief among many. The issue has affected a large number of Indian professionals such as solicitors, doctors, chemists and teachers, and their families, who have demonstrated outside Parliament three times since January. Some of them have initiated legal action. Although Rule 322(5) of the Immigration Act deals with criminals and those considered a threat to national security, it was invoked when applications for indefinite stay by Indian and other professionals showed errors in their income and tax declarations, or if they corrected returns. Javid, who appeared before the committee earlier this month, wrote to Cooper: I have asked the immigration minister to conduct a review of the cohort of cases who arrived under the Tier 1 General route and were refused due to discrepancies with their HMRC (tax) records. I can confirm that all applications potentially falling for refusal under the character and conduct provisions of paragraph 322(5) in the Tier 1 (General) ILR and 10-year Long Residency routes, where the applicant had previously been in the Tier 1 (General) route, have been put on hold pending the findings of the current review. As part of the review, Javid said the Home Office was also checking individual case records to identify any applicants who were removed from the UK after having been refused permanent stay under paragraph 322(5). We have identified 19 individuals who were refused indefinite leave to remain and subsequently made voluntary departures from the UK. One has since been issued with a visa to return to the UK, having applied under a different provision of the immigration rules, he wrote. Income discrepancies in applications to the Home Office and to the income tax authorities were construed as examples of dishonest conduct, and applications for indefinite stay by professionals under the Tier 1 (General) category were refused. Many were asked to leave Britain or face deportations. Aditi Bhardwaj, one of the co-organisers of a campaign on this issue, welcomed the development and said: We have not heard officially but were awaiting a response after we asked the select committee to raise a few questions for us. We will stage another protest on June 5. Other pressure groups are supporting us to stop the Home Office using this rule for applications from highly skilled professionals. I am happy things are taking this turn. I hope to see these migrants getting justice after at least two years. Commenting on Javids letter, Cooper said: Weve heard of a series of cases of highly skilled workers, employed in our public services and senior jobs legally for many years, now being told to leave apparently due to minor tax errors. So it is welcome that the home secretary is now reviewing all those cases and putting decisions on hold. Nepal Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli on Wednesday warned his new ministers that they will be sacked if they fail to learn how to operate a laptop within six months. Oli, who took charge as Nepals prime minister in February for the second time, said the Prime Ministers Office will be made paperless within six months. Speaking during the 12th general convention of Nepal National Teachers Organisation here, he said that anyone at the Council of Ministers who does not know how to operate a laptop will be sacked, the Kathmandu Post reported. I have already said in the Council of Ministers meeting that we will make the office paperless within six months and the meetings programmes and agenda will be discussed using laptops, said Oli. He said that the ministers can take help from their assistants in operating the laptops for six months. We will bid farewell to any ministers failing to operate laptops on their own after six months, he said, adding that the sacked ministers will be given the laptops so that they can learn to operate until their next tenure. Oli further said the government aims to take strides in making Nepal an information technology friendly country within the time period. Malaysias prime minister said on Wednesday his government planned to develop some offshore rocks which were the subject of a territorial dispute with Singapore, days after he cancelled a big rail project with his southern neighbour. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) awarded the outcrop, known as Middle Rocks, near the opening of the Straits of Singapore, to Malaysia in 2008. At the same time, the Netherlands-based court ruled the nearby Pedra Branca island belonged to Singapore. Malaysia sought a review of that ruling last year, in the hope of restaking its claim to Pedra Branca. Singapore opposed Malaysias bid to review the ruling and the Singapore foreign ministry said on Wednesday the ICJ had informed it Malaysia had withdrawn that request. Malaysias newly elected prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, told a news conference that Malaysia had already been building structures on Middle Rocks. It is our intention to enlarge Middle Rocks so we can form a small island for us, he said. Mahathir declined to elaborate saying the plan had not been finalised. The Singapore government did not immediately have a comment on the Malaysian plan to build on the rocks. While Singapore has not been seeking to revive any claim to Middle Rocks, it is likely to keep a close eye on Malaysias plan to develop the outcrop at the opening of one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Malaysian state news agency Bernama reported last year the opening of a maritime base called Abu Bakar on Middle Rocks. The base comprises a jetty linking two main rocks - some 320 metres apart - a lighthouse and a helipad, a video posted on Facebook by the Sultan of the Malaysian state of Johor shows. Mahathir has already made a major decision affecting relations with Singapore, cancelling a project to build a high-speed rail link between Malaysias capital, Kuala Lumpur, and the city state. Singapores trade ministry said in Monday that they had not received any official communication from Malaysia on the decision. Singapore was once part of Malaysia but they separated acrimoniously in 1965, clouding diplomatic and economic dealings for years. Some of the frostiest years were during Mahathirs previous tenure as prime minister between 1981 and 2003. US secretary of state Mike Pompeo was set to hold talks with visiting North Korean official Kim Yong Chol on Wednesday to prepare for the upcoming Singapore summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. The US state department said Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol were to meet in New York on Wednesday and Thursday, bringing forward their Friday meeting. Trump is expected to meet Kim in Singapore on June 12 as had been decided earlier, reversing the US presidents sudden cancellation of talks last week due to anger and hostility from Pyongyang. Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol will discuss preparations for (the) expected summit, the state department said. Kim Yong Chol is vice chairman of North Koreas central committee and is considered the right-hand man of Kim Jong Un. He is also a former spy chief who has been accused by Seoul of masterminding the sinking of a South Korean warship in 2010. The US has linked him to the 2014 cyber-hacking of Sony Pictures. He has met Pompeo twice, during the latters visits to Pyongyang. US and North Korean officials are also meeting in Singapore to discuss logistics of the Trump-Kim meet, as well as at the Demilitarised Zone on the Korean peninsula to work on a joint communique to be issued at the summit. These meetings takes place amidst intense discussions about possible outcomes of the summit, including denuclearisation a key US demand pushed aggressively by Trump. However, he has indicated willingness to consider a phased dismantling in recent days. On Tuesday, NBC News, quoting a CIA assessment, reported that North Korea is unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons stockpile any time soon but could offer to allow the launch of a western hamburger franchise in Pyongyang as a goodwill gesture. The report did not name the brand likely to get Kim Jong Uns nod. His other options could include American investments, especially in infrastructure. A hamburger franchise will be an easy give. And, as NBC reminded its viewers, US President Donald Trump had expressed his desire in 2016 to talk peace with the North Korean leader while eating a hamburger on a conference table. And the world is aware of Trumps love of burgers two at a time, pushed down by a chocolate shake for dinner, while campaigning. According to the report, the CIA further says Kim might have wanted to have an establishment up and running by the time of the talks to ensure a steady supply of burgers to the delegations involved. But there would be no shortage of the delicacy in Singapore if the city-state does get to host the summit. The intelligence assessment that Kim may not end the countrys nuclear programme is largely in accord with the assessment of North Korean watchers, who have cautioned against having high expectations. Everybody knows they are not going to denuclearise, an official who had read the analysis told NBC News. The report was circulated earlier this month, said an intelligence official. A Stanford University study has said it could take 15 years to dismantle North Koreas nuclear weapons programme. Were talking about dozens of sites, hundreds of buildings and thousands of people, lead author Siegfried S Hecker told The New York Times. He said the key to dismantling the sprawling atomic complex, begun six decades ago, is to establish a different relationship with North Korea where its security rests on something other than nuclear weapons. Weeks after seven Indians were kidnapped in Afghanistan, the countrys National Security Advisor Haneef Atmar on Wednesday assured a high-level delegation from New Delhi that Afghan authorities will work hard to ensure the security of all Indian citizens. Atmar gave the assurance during a meeting with the delegation led by deputy national security advisor Rajinder Khanna. The seven Indians, all engineers working on a power project, were kidnapped in northern Baghlan province on May 6. Without making any reference to the abducted Indians, Atmar tweeted: We assure you that we will work hard to ensure the security of Indian citizen in Afghanistan. He added that the two sides will elevate and expand security cooperation. The two sides discussed the situation in Afghanistan, Atmars office told the Afghan media. During the meeting, Atmar made a presentation on the general security situation in the country. India not only believes but also acts on the principle of an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned effort for peace and security, Khanna was quoted as saying by Qadir Shah, the spokesman for the Afghan National Security Council. Khanna also said India would stand firm with Afghanistan to fight terrorism and contribute to bringing peace in Afghanistan and in the region. India has played a key role in Afghanistans reconstruction since the fall of the Taliban regime and has invested more than $2 billion in various projects. The Indian teams visit came two days after Atmar and an Afghan delegation travelled to Pakistan for talks. The Afghan side met Pakistan Army chief Gen Qamar Bajwa and foreign secretary Tehmina Janjua. During the talks, Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed to form several joint working committees to put bilateral relations back on track. The two sides also discussed trade and transit from Central Asia to Pakistans Gwadar port, a key part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Afghan officials have said the two countries agreed to take specific steps to speed up the implementation of an action plan for peace and for reducing threats. They also agreed to resume peace negotiations. Bajwa is expected to visit Kabul in the next few days at the invitation of President Ashraf Ghani. Afghan officials have constantly accused Pakistan of providing sanctuaries to Taliban leaders to operate against Afghanistan. The world was made a little less joyful with the passing of Susan Berkowitz in her home, on The Makabayan Bloc in the House of Representatives on Wednesday asked Congress to confer Filipino citizenship on Australian missionary Patricia Fox. In filing House Bill 7806, The group led by Bayan Muna Party-list Rep. Carlos Zarate sought to grant Filipino citizenship to Fox to recognize and acknowledge her sacrifices in almost three decades of her selfless service to the Filipino people. For 27 years, Sister Pat lived with and served the farmers, indigenous peoples and other marginalized people in the communities. By living with the poor and oppressed, Sr. Pat has come to understand, experience and embrace the culture and the struggle of the poor Filipino majority, HB 7806 says. Not only did she speak their language, Sister Pat was accepted by the Filipino communities and was treated as one of their own because she lives and struggles with them. Fox on Wednesday said she was honored by the proposal by several legislators to grant her Filipino citizenship. She said such act from some members of the House of Representatives showed she was welcome in the Philippines.Actually, I feel very privileged that they would consider filing a bill that would make me a citizen because that makes me feel very accepted, Fox said in a forum in Quezon City. And that has been how I always felt here, very accepted. I am very honored that they would even propose such a thing. The Bureau of Immigration has ordered Fox s deportation following her alleged participation in partisan political activities. Fox appealed the order but the bureau denied her appeal. As far as members of the Makabayan Bloc are concerned, the government should instead recognize and acknowledge her sacrifices in almost three decades of her selfless service to the Filipino people... instead of prosecuting and deporting Sister Pat through false charges. Granting Filipino Citizenship to Sister Patricia Ann Fox would be much more than a fitting recognition of her selfless service to the poor and oppressed Filipinos. It is a response to the call of many farmers, fisher folks and indigenous people whose lives were touched and helped by Sister Pat. WashintonA senior figure in the North Korean regime was en route to the US on Wednesday, and Russias top diplomat was preparing to visit Pyongyang as diplomatic preparations for a historic nuclear summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un gathered pace. General Kim Yong Chol, right-hand man to the North Korean leader, will meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York, officials said. Trump confirmed the general was on his way in a tweet and boasted that Washington would have a great team for the talks aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff. The US president still hopes the summit will take place on June 12 in Singapore. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young (sic) Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you! Trump wrote. Moscow said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would travel to North Korea on Thursday to discuss Pyongyangs nuclear program. Last month the Norths foreign minister Ri Yong Ho held rare talks with Lavrov in Moscow, part of a quickening effort to improve strained ties with global powers.Russia was a member of six-nation talks held between 2003-8 aimed at persuading the North to scrap its nuclear program. Japan is also keenly watching summit preparations. Trump will meet its Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington on June 7, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said. Since the presidents May 24 letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans have been engaging, she said. The United States continues to actively prepare for President Trumps expected summit with leader Kim in Singapore. Kim Yong Chol was at Beijing airport Wednesday for his flight to New York. He used the restricted VIP entrance, according to AFP journalists. Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2018 3:33 pm Missouri students will soon have expanded access to the courses they need to further their education. During the last week of the legislative session, the Missouri General Assembly gave final approval to legislation (SB 603) handled by state Rep. Bryan Spencer and sponsored by Sen. Bob Onder that would create the Missouri Course Access Program to expand the states virtual school offerings to all K-12 students. The passage of the bill marks the culmination of six years of work by Spencer, who has filed the legislation each year and sponsored HB 1408 during the 2018 legislative session. I want to thank my colleagues for supporting this much-needed change that will provide a broader spectrum of educational opportunities to young people around the state, said Spencer, R-Wentzville. This is truly a great day for our state as we make our system of education more equitable and more accessible, and we give our young people access to the tools they need to succeed in their educational pursuits. SB 603 will expand the existing Missouri Virtual Instruction Program (MOVIP), which was established in 2007 to offer online courses to public, private, and home school students. The program allows students to take advanced courses that are not currently offered by their local school districts. Because of diminished funding, the existing program has limited free tuition to students who are unable to attend traditional schools because of health issues. As a result, many students in districts without certain high-level math, science and advanced placement courses are not able to enroll in these courses online. Spencer said his legislation will change the program so that it does not rely on a direct appropriation, but will instead redirect a portion of the per-pupil funding provided by the state. It will also allow home school and charter school students to access and pay for individual courses as needed. Students will be eligible if they have attended the school for at least one semester, and the course is not available in the school district. The bill requires the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to review the online courses to ensure they meet state standards. The bill now requires the governors signature to become law. Appointment 30 May 2018 To support recent portfolio growth, Atlanta-based Hotel Equities (HE) appointed two new regional directors of sales (RDOS), Polly Ann Elliott and Kristen Vasquez. Both new regional team members will report to Drew Salapka, Hotel Equities' Sr. Vice President of Revenue Generation. The additions further expand the firm's regional sales and marketing team supporting a portfolio of 100+ hotels throughout the United States and Canada. RDOS Polly Ann Elliott brings a vast amount of experience in sales, leadership and training to a portfolio of hotels where she has oversight of sales and marketing strategies in the firm's east region. She joined Hotel Equities in 2017 as the Area Director of Sales for a portfolio of hotels in Charleston, South Carolina where she successfully maximized revenues and increased group bookings for all assets. Appointment 30 May 2018 To support recent portfolio growth, Atlanta-based Hotel Equities (HE) appointed two new regional directors of sales (RDOS), Polly Ann Elliott and Kristen Vasquez. Both new regional team members will report to Drew Salapka, Hotel Equities' Sr. Vice President of Revenue Generation. The additions further expand the firm's regional sales and marketing team supporting a portfolio of 100+ hotels throughout the United States and Canada. Preparing for further growth in the Texas market, RDOS Kristen Vasquez is strategically positioned in Houston to oversee a portfolio of hotels in the firm's central region. She joins HE with 10+ years of above-property sales experience and has knowledge of more than twenty brands within Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt hotels. Touting the new RDOS as a people person with a creative approach to challenges, Drew said, "Kristen strengthens her on-property sales teams by easily identifying needs and developing strategies to increase efficiency and generate revenue. With a proven track record of success, she has received many accolades for her hard work over the years and we are thrilled to have her continue that success on the HE team." Supplier News 29 May 2018 San Francisco, Calif. -- Revinate, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company that allows hoteliers to transform guest data into revenue, today announced that it has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its sole cloud provider. Through this collaboration, Revinate will migrate all data and infrastructure to the cloud. Leveraging AWS's industry-leading services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Revinate will scale to serve more and more hotels, all in a highly secure way. For nine years running, Revinate has been at the forefront of hospitality technology innovation. Revinate's products, Revinate Marketing and Revinate Guest Feedback, will leverage AWS to drive optimal performance for hoteliers and increase scalability for Revinate's global operations. "Working with AWS, and making AWS our cloud provider, aligns extremely well with our overall product and technology vision," said Dan Hang, Chief Product Officer at Revinate. "We wanted to select a provider who could enable Revinate to grow into the future. AWS provides us with highly scalable, secure infrastructure and tools, allowing us to focus on continuing our development of powerful yet easy-to-use software for hoteliers. In short, our collaboration with AWS will allow us to innovate at an even faster pace on the products and features that matter most to our customers." Supplier News 30 May 2018 Raleigh, NC, May 30, 2018 Broadvine, a leader in Business Intelligence and Analytics software for the hospitality industry, announced the launch of Broadvine University today. Broadvine University (BVU) is an online, persona-based learning management system designed to introduce Broadvine to both property and corporate level users. "At the property level, BVU will often be a user's first interaction with Broadvine. BVU curricula explains how each module works, educates team members on the Broadvine tools they will soon be using and enables them to leverage the full value of our solution," said Lex Raleigh, VP of Customer Success at Broadvine. "Corporate-level curricula focuses on training for implementation team members and corporate users who will be managing Broadvine modules." Following the setup and implementation of the Broadvine application, General Managers and their teams are invited to enroll in Broadvine University. Users complete customized, multi-media training coursework at their own pace. Progress and course completion are tracked for each user allowing for reminders when training is incomplete and recognition upon course completion. As enrollment grows, Broadvine plans to offer instructor lead training on topics such as effective budgeting and forecasting. "Broadvine University is a powerful education tool companies can use to inform and train their teams on the use of our tools and modules," said Shawn Barber, Broadvine CEO. "Designed as a repository of multi-media training resources, BVU allows us to customize course materials based on the modules purchased and each user's role. Our commitment to investing in new training materials will further empower our customers to quickly identify and act on performance optimization opportunities across their portfolio." For more information, see Introducing Broadvine University. Ariana Grande's break-up with Mac Miller shocked many earlier this month as the pair did not reveal any signs of their relationship crumbling. With Ariana since noting that her pairing with Mac Miller was "toxic," the Pittsburgh rapper got into some trouble after crashing his car during a DUI incident. Fans were quick to speculate that Mac was on a downward spiral and, although he remained quiet for most of the month, the rapper resurfaced with three new songs this morning to surprise his supporters. As Ariana moves on from her ex, she is reportedly already cuddling up to a new man in comedian Pete Davidson and the two were finally pictured together for the first time last night. While Pete and Ariana's relationship has been discussed at large over the course of the last two weeks, the two still had not been pictured together. Aside from Pete's tattooed arm making an appearance in his rumored girlfriend's Instagram story, there was little evidence to support the speculation of their relationship status. Finally, Ariana and Pete posed in a photo together last night at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles, hanging alongside fellow funnyman Chris D'Elia. The SNL cast member performed on stage last night and Ariana came out to support, much like Pete did during one of her performances of "No Tears Left To Cry" this month. As the two continue to move forward together, Ariana seems to be happy with her new romantic interest. Check out the photo below. In a surprising turn of events, apparently Kim Kardashian's word proves valuable to the President of the United States. As of late, the reality star has used her platform for activist purposes and, while her tweets sometimes get lost in the advertisement spam for her numerous beauty and fragrance ventures, Kim has been speaking up on Alice Johnson's troubling situation. Earlier this month, we reported that Kardashian was working with Trump's family to free the 62-year-old woman, who is currently locked up for life on drug charges. While she was banking on Ivanka Trump's involvement, the big boss has reportedly gotten involved to meet with his biggest fan's wife later today. Vanity Fair has reported that Kim Kardashian will be headed to the White House today to discuss prison reform with President Donald Trump and Jared Kushner and, while Kanye West's public display of love for the President may have had nothing to do with the meeting, it could have potentially swayed Trump into accepting it. With her support of Alice Johnson dating back to November of last year, Kim is expected to ask the President to pardon her of her life sentence. Johnson is a great-grandmother, who has been in prison for 21 years now. According to the magazine, Kardashian is taking the discussion incredibly seriously. The star is not bringing along her camera crew or any of her sisters as she plans to use legal arguments to free Alice Johnson. Paris Jackson attended the runway presentation for the Dior Resort 2019 collection, which was inspired by the Mexican tradition of Escaramuza, an equestrian sport. However, it was her swift exit from the proceedings that caught the attention of the press. A source for The Hollywood Reporter notes how "Paris Jackson arrived in a patchwork dress and red velvet sandals, but pulled a Kristen Stewart-in-Cannes move and removed her high heels before entering the show space barefoot. The vocal animal rights activist then stood up and left as soon as the horses entered the arena, appearing to be upset by the large crowd and loud music." Jackson addressed why she left the presentation, citing conflicting views with how animals were presented and treated during the runway extravaganza. Taking to Twitter, she argued "i did not storm out of the show. i quietly got up and walked out trying my hardest to not cause a scene, because i do not support animals being branded and whipped. not trying to become enemies in the fashion world in any way, but i will always be myself." Jackson has always been outspoken over social media, routinely calling out individuals for lightening/darkening her skin tone in photos, while addressing any other negative press she may be involved in. Exxon Mobil's chairman and chief executive steadfastly argued the nation's largest energy company can continue to grow its global oil and gas operations while reducing carbon emissions and helping to combat climate change. CEO Darren Woods led Exxon Mobil's annual meeting Wednesday in Dallas for the first time since shareholders approved a resolution last year asking for an explanation of the impact of climate change on the company's business. Exxon Mobil released an energy and carbon report earlier this year that contended the globe's environmental goals still allow the company to produce energy from its oil and gas reserves. "We've always adapted to society's changing needs and evolving technologies," Woods said, noting that the company started out making kerosene for lamps. "We're also committed to being part of the solution to climate change" By 2040, oil and natural gas will still meet about 55 percent of world's energy needs, Woods said. That equates to the equivalent of about about 200 million barrels a day worldwide, up from about 160 barrels now. All energy sources will rise, including wind and solar, except for coal, he said. He emphasized that Exxon Mobil supports the Paris climate accord, including the goals to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the year 2100. Recent studies have shown the world is not on track to achieve those goals. However, environmentalists have viewed Exxon Mobil skeptically because of allegations - which Exxon Mobil denies - that the company's research found a link between fossil fuels and global warming decades ago, but it withheld the evidence. RELATED: Exxon Mobil commits to methane emission reductions Last week though, Exxon Mobil said it is commiting to new targets to reduce its methane emissions by 15 percent worldwide by 2020. Exxon said its goals include reducing its natural gas flaring - the burning off of excess gas and its components - by 25 percent during the same timeframe. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is released into the atmosphere during oil and gas production, as well as from pipeline leaks. Cutting methane emissions could be critical to the energy sector, which is betting big on cleaner-burning natural gas as a more climate friendly fuel. Exxon Mobil is working to reduce emissions from its refineries, invest in more biofuels and develop more environmentally friendly plastics, Woods said. He touted Exxon Mobil's oil and gas growth in areas like West Texas' booming Permian, Papa New Guinea, Guyana, Mozambique and Brazil, as well as refining in petrochemical growth from the Houston area to Singapore. As for the meeting, Exxon Mobil investors rejected shareholder proposals for a separate chairman and CEO, for board diversity standards, and for greater corporate lobbying disclosures. Ricky Brooks, a labor union representative who works at Exxon's Baytown refinery, said lobbying sources like the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, which has received funding from Exxon, pushes for weaker worker safety and health standards. "Our reputation could be at stake," Brooks said, including the safety of his coworkers. Woods argued that Baytown is one of the safest complexes and that Exxon Mobil fully embraces accountability and already follows all of the necessary legal lobbying disclosures. He said Exxon Mobil is improving its safety record and he said negotiations are ongoing with Australian labor union workers, some on whom protested outside the meeting regarding wage and benefits cuts and more. There also was some grousing Wednesday about Exxon's stock performance, which has been relatively flat for roughly a decade. Many investors and energy analysts have complained of late about Exxon's lack of progress on growing its oil and gas production volumes worldwide. Hunter Martin, of Houston, expressed similar concerns that he said he and his wife share as longtime shareholders. "Wall Street is virtually negative about today's performance and it's embarrassing to me," Martin said. "We love this company. I do not mean to be impolite or cranky." Woods acknowledged the concerns and emphasized that Exxon Mobil has strong growth plans now for everything from oil and gas production to fuel refining to plastics manufacturing on a global basis. "We're very focused and working on it," Woods said of the stock price, which closed Tuesday at $78.42 a share and jumped Wednesday morning by nearly 4 percent. Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2018 3:03 pm Missouri Department of Conservation Considering that snakes have been shrouded in misunderstanding for centuries, it seems fitting that one of historys most famous snakebites probably never happened. Thanks largely to the popularity of Shakespeares famous tragedy Antony and Cleopatra, the story of Cleopatras death from the bite of an asp has achieved lasting fame. However, details historians recorded about her death indicate this renowned ruler probably succumbed from something other than the bite of a snake. People wont find any asps in Missouris outdoors, but they may come across one of the 49 species and sub-species of snakes that reside in the state. A large number of humans have developed feelings toward snakes that are somewhere between annoyance and extreme fear. Consequently, many people feel the only good snake is a dead one. That viewpoint is unfortunate because underneath this frightful image is an animal that performs valuable pest-control services for humans and, with the exception of a few species, is relatively harmless. More on that in a minute but first lets get back to the burning question: Did Cleopatra die of a snakebite? Cleopatra death-by-snake story came from the Romans, who also recorded that the Egyptian monarch experienced a quiet and pain-free death. And with those words, the argument against a snakebite fatality begins. Thats because those words dont describe what happens when a human gets bitten by an asp a venomous snake also known as an Egyptian cobra. If left untreated, a person bitten by an asp may suffer muscle pain, headache, dizziness, breathing problems, diarrhea, vomiting and possible blindness. The debilitation of the human system by the venom takes hours, sometimes days. Its also important to note that many venomous snake bites although they cause severe physical damage arent always fatal. Present-day historians theorize Cleopatra probably committed suicide either by pricking her skin with a toxin-soaked implement (needle, thorn, etc.) or by drinking poison. Its interesting one of the earliest chroniclers of Cleopatras suicide the Greek historian Strabo was also one of the first to doubt the snakebite story. However, the snakebite story continued down through the ages, then gained widespread popularity, thanks to Shakespeare, and a legend was born. Moving from ancient Egypt to modern Missouri brings us to the variety of snakes that reside in the state. Snakes are reptiles, which means theyre in the animal group that includes lizards and turtles. Snakes move forward by either moving their body side to side or by literally walking on their ribs. All snakes can swim and any one of a number of species may be found near water because of the abundance of prey that frequents ponds and streams. One of the best-known features of a snake is its tongue. A snakes tongue may look sinister, but its actually harmless and very functional for the snake. Snakes (and lizards) use their tongues to pick up odors that are transferred to sense organs on the roofs of their mouths. Missouri has five venomous snake species the copperhead, cottonmouth, timber rattlesnake, western pygmy rattlesnake and the prairie massasauga rattlesnake. The prairie massasauga is the least common of these; its only found in a few counties in northern Missouri and is one of the states endangered species. Missouris venomous snakes should definitely be given their distance and it should also be remembered that, although non-venomous snakes dont have toxins, they still bite and those bites can definitely hurt. However, it should equally be remembered that snakes can be beneficial to humans by preying on rodents, insects and other things that can be problematic for people. Nevertheless, few people like to have a snake in or near their home. Snakes, like other wild animals, should be observed and admired from a distance, When a snake moves under the deck of your house or into your enclosed porch, it doesnt matter what species it is that snake has to go. Just remember that there are often non-lethal means of dealing with snake problems. The best way to keep snakes away is to eliminate what theyre looking for food and shelter. By sealing cracks and holes in the foundation of your house and getting rid of piles of boards, old fence posts or other scrap material, youre getting rid of settings that attract snakes and animals they prey on. If you do find a harmless snake, sometimes its possible to safely capture it and relocate it to an isolated and safe habitat thats well away from your home. Information about Missouri snakes can be found at your nearest Missouri Department of Conservation office or at mdc.mo.gov. Francis Skalicky is the media specialist for the Missouri Department of Conservations Southwest Region. For more information about conservation issues, call 417-895-6880. KHOU reporter and fill-in anchor, Grace White took to Twitter to share some exciting news: She is expecting her second child. White made the announcement by sharing a photo of her son wearing a "big brother" shirt standing excitedly near a tray of freshly baked cookies, where chocolate chips spelling out "Baby #2." TEXAS TRENDS: The most popular baby names in Texas the year you were born The post read, "Mom says there's a bun in the oven, but all I see are cookies! Thrilled to share we're pregnant & expecting baby number 2 to arrive in December." Now Playing: 10 Most Popular Baby Names of 2017 The U.S. Social Security Administration has revealed the top 10 most popular names for boys and girls born in America last year. 10. Jacob& Abigail 9. Oliver& Evelyn 8. Elijah &Amelia 7. Mason &Charlotte 6. Benjamin &Mia 5. Logan &Sophia 4. James &Isabella 3. William &Ava 2. Noah &Olivia 1. Liam &Emma Video: Wibbitz People on social media have been wishing White the best and many congratulations. In 2017, the KHOU staff experienced a "baby boom" with nearly a dozen staff members welcoming new babies into their families. Though White wasn't a part of the boom that year, maybe she'll be the first in a 2018 KHOU baby boom? Only time will tell. Take a look through the gallery above to see how some of the parents from the 2017 baby boom are doing one year later. Daniela Sternitzky-Di Napoli is a digital producer at Chron.com. You can read more of her stories here and follow her on twitter at @Dani_DiNapoli. You can find her bartending almost every Wednesday night at 14 Pews, her daughter's nonprofit arts collective in the Heights. She's 85, now. Maybe she'll tell you a story or two, but likely not. After all, it was never about her and always about the person sitting directly across from her. That's how Marilyn Thibodeaux prefers it. What makes a good bartender? Speed? The strength to shake a Ramos Gin Fizz to completion? Knowing when to pour, when not to? What makes a good listener? Compassion? The intuition needed to stand quietly, listening, asking thoughtful questions. That can only be a gift. THE INTUITION came from her father, a ship captain who, while one night directing his crew to abandon ship, fearlessly stayed behind, basting warm water on the boiler that threatened to blow. Born smack dab in the middle of nine children on a Catholic Indian reservation, during the worst year of the Great Depression, Marilyn often felt like an only child. Like her father, and his father, a fur trader, she was drawn to the sea, to experiences only the size of the world could give her. So, at 19, armed with eagerness and the combination of Scottish and Native American blood in her veins, she set out. She traveled all over Europe on her moped, even being detained in Germany at the site of a wall being built that would, many years later, be torn down. Working in Paris for a time, she was hospitalized for anorexia and temporary blindness a state she had worked herself into by tirelessly laboring as an office manager. In the hospital, she would notice only the perfume of the funeral bouquet sent from a jealous co-worker she had beaten out for the job. GRAY MATTERS: My mother the optimist She had always been drawn to musicians and them to her. Among Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., and Chet Baker, there was Marilyn. One in particular she loved. Though she steered clear of marriage, an interesting sentiment at the time, Millard Thomas, an African-American jazz guitarist, agreed to give Marilyn the only thing she really craved a child. That child, a daughter, Cressandra Thibodeaux, executive director of 14 Pews, remembers her mother providing shelter to abused and broken women, even when they would return home to find their belongings robbed. And Marilyn was burned more times than she could count. But for her there was no counting, no score, no self-aggrandizement. It was simple, really. Someone had always asked her for help, and she had always said yes. FRAYED SHOELACES curling up to form little flowers. She remembers. She squinted closely at the newsprint as though it would help magnify the tiniest clue she didn't want to find. The detail of the shoelaces would be overlooked by Chicago police and anyone for that matter but Marilyn knew instantly who the shoe belonged to. The realization shot through her body as she recalled the small, quirky trait of Teresa, whom she had sheltered just months ago. Teresa wasn't a sex worker, really, because she never accepted money. Marilyn had let her borrow her clothes for a night out with Frank Sinatra or whomever. It never mattered who. Marilyn blinked again at the black-and-white depiction of a shoe bent over a steel dumpster, the only thing the police report found identifiable on Jane Doe. Thousands of miles away, and she could still feel the bitter Chicago wind whipping at her cheeks, cat-tailed sharp with certainty. GRAY MATTERS: In 1974, two Dickinson girls went missing. Why didn't police investigate? The investigation wouldn't last long, and Marilyn wouldn't be calling the authorities from California to provide the clue that had jarred her memory so forcefully then, that even now, at 85, the recollection conjures a blank look of disbelief. No. The police didn't care about another sex worker in a dumpster. Nobody had ever cared about that woman, nobody except Mother Marilyn, as the 19-year-old was known on the streets of Chicago. Kate McLean ZOOMING UP and braking abruptly to park in front of 800 Aurora in the Heights, she greets the fellow sent to assemble the projector for the films. "Hello, dear heart." Mismatched pillows fashion the movie-ready pews at her daughter's space. As the lights dim and the haunting lullaby of "Rosemary's Baby" begins, Marilyn shuffles down the aisle to put a single chocolate chip cookie in my hand, her very own recipe, she claimed "that," she adds, "I sold to Kroger." Tonight, a classic horror film presentation by Frank J. Dello Stritto the last week of a four-part series on the theme of women in classic horror films who were more than just screaming victims. The cabin-like church turned eclectic art space welcomes, but it's eclipsed by Marilyn's twinkling smile. "Would you like a red wine," she asks, leaning in, "or a white wine?" Kate McLean is a freelance journalist in Houston. She previously held the executive chef position at Tony's restaurant for three and a half years. Get the Gray Matters newsletter. Hello, dear heart. On Friday, May 18, my students were watching "Romeo and Juliet" in class. I love to watch my students swoon over Romeo's jawline while simultaneously judging the impulsivity of these two teenagers in love. Immediately after I had strategically fast-forwarded over the one sex scene in the movie, I picked up my phone to check the time. In the group text for the eighth-grade teachers, I saw the following message: "Heads up, incase students ask: there has been a shooting at Santa FE HS 30 miles from Houston, suspect apprehended but multiple fatalities." I put down my phone and went back to watching the movie. In my head, I said a quick prayer of peace for the friends and families of those lost. Then I simply went back to being a teacher. I gave a tardy. I asked a kid to fix his uniform. I reminded a student that she should not spread rumors about her friend. Ultimately, the shooting in Santa Fe changed almost nothing about my day. The following morning, I was bagging food at a local food pantry, and the man next to me asked what it was like to be a teacher when the news of the Santa Fe shooting broke out. I told him that, sadly, it was the same as being a teacher any other day. It has become the norm, not the exception, that students are killed in their classrooms. My students and I are wholly unsurprised when we hear that an individual used a legally attained weapon to strategically and intentionally take the lives of a group of school children. DARK PRECEDENT: Santa Fe shooting echoes memories of Columbine Before the shooting in Santa Fe, it seemed as though many Texans cared more about their right to bear arms than the right of their neighbor's child to attend school in peace. However, following a shooting closer to home, an ever-so-slight change in the conversation can be perceived. Individuals and politicians who previously were devout supporters of the Second Amendment are now considering ways we can stop this senseless loss of life. Even Gov. Greg Abbott is speaking differently after Santa Fe. Throughout his time as an elected official, Abbott has maintained a staunch support of the Second Amendment and holds an "A" rating from the NRA. However, after the shooting, Abbott was reported to have said, "It's time in Texas that we take action to step up and make sure this tragedy is never repeated ever again in the history of the state of Texas." Marie D. De Jesus/Houston Chronicle Where was this mentality when the students were dying in pools of blood in their hallways and classrooms outside of Texas? Why are Texans slow to love the students and teachers in Parkland? In Newtown? In Columbine? In one of the countless other school shootings that don't even come to mind because we, as Americans, are inundated with adolescent death. Ultimately, it might boil down to the same reason why Texans are more willing to donate money to the church down the road than they are to Flint, Mich., or Puerto Rico. We take care of our own. Saint Mother Theresa of Calcutta once said, "The problem with our world is that we draw the circle of family too small." We see our neighbors and our friends as our family and our domain. So we protect them and fight for them. But the further removed an individual becomes from us, the less we fight for them and protect them. This idea is only enforced when our president defends his comments calling other human beings "animals." All Americans will never see eye-to-eye regarding the Second Amendment or gun legislation. However, Americans can work to draw their circle of family a little larger. Imagine how much more love and peace could be present if we take the time to see the dignity in each and every human life. CHILLING ACCOUNT: At Santa Fe High School, my daughter phoned: 'I'm hiding in a closet. I love you, Mom.' A few months ago, I stopped for gas on my way to New Orleans. I took a wrong turn and ended up getting gas in a part of town where I did not feel safe. It was early in the morning, and I found myself being exceptionally aware of my surroundings. I noticed that there was an older man sitting on a median at the corner. He was unshaven and rocked front to back while hugging his knees. My mind remained focused on him while I continued to scan my surroundings. Just before the gas pump ticked to a stop, a four-door red sedan stopped quickly at the pull-through next to the median. The hazards came on and a 20- or 30-something man with brown hair got out of his car. He had on baggy sweat pants, an old t-shirt and slides. He did not look as though he had planned on running into anyone at this hour of the morning. He walked over to the older man rocking on the median. They were just far enough away that I could not hear their exchange. But I watched the young man introduce himself, point to the Jack in the Box across the street and slowly help the man to his feet. They then walked arm and arm into the restaurant. Scott Olson/Getty Images This scene has been playing over and over again in my head the past few months. If I am being honest, I know that I would have driven away from that man without helping him, even if the man in the red sedan had not stopped to help. I would have convinced myself that I help the needy around me in other ways. But imagine if I had drawn my circle of family to include this man. How could I have possibly helped? I can't lead every homeless man or woman I pass into a restaurant. But maybe I can donate a little more time, talent and treasure. And maybe I can keep a case of waters in my back seat that I can give out to those in need. Maybe my fellow Texans can do the same. Maybe, while we mourn the deaths of the students and teachers senselessly lost in Santa Fe, we can open our hearts to feel the magnitude of loss felt by countless friends and families all around our country. And maybe, while we do that, we can work to make sure it never happens again. Sarah Monsen is a writer and teacher living in Houston. Draw your circle a little larger, and get the Gray Matters newsletter. The Montgomery County Sheriffs Office arrested a Houston man after one person was shot and another injured during a large party in the Porter area on Saturday. Carlos Gadiel Castillo, 30, faces two charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and police say he allegedly shot a male, a hit female in the face and fled the scene. MCSO was dispatched to the 19100 block of Jonathan Dalton Ct. when deputies were advised that a large party was being held at the address with a live band performing. They were also advised that one person had reportedly been shot and that the suspect fled in a silver Pontiac sedan. NEW: Memorial Day busy for first responders with lake rescue, fatal motorcycle crash Now Playing: Texas News & Crime Video: Houston Chronicle When deputies arrived, they found a 21-year-old male in the backyard who had been shot in the abdomen and leg from a small caliber firearm, MCSO Lt. Scott Spencer said. During the investigation, deputies also learned that a 25-year-old Hispanic female was also allegedly assaulted by Castillo. The female victim received a laceration to her face. Both victims were transported from the scene are expected to survive their injuries. During the course of their investigation, deputies learned the female was Castillos girlfriend and he had become agitated when he observed the female and male sitting in a car outside of the party, law enforcement stated. HEARTBREAKING: Conroe man found dead after Silver Alert Castillo allegedly struck the female victim numerous times and then produced a handgun from his waistband, and shot the male victim while he was standing near the vehicle, Spencer said in a release about the incident. After both victims ran, Castillo got into his vehicle and fled the scene. MCSO detectives tracked Castillo to his residence near the Acres Homes area where he was interviewed about the incident and detained. He was transported to the Montgomery County Jail where he remains held on a $100,000 bond. jennifer.summer@hcnonline.com A software sensor with a knack for detecting intrusions like those from Russian hackers is being embraced by states determined to protect their election systems, though cybersecurity experts warn of the tool's limits. The Department of Homeland Security is working with a growing number of state election officials to install "Albert sensors," which detect traffic coming into and out of a computer network. The system can't block a suspected attack, but it funnels suspicious information to a federal-state information-sharing center near Albany, New York, that's intended to help identify malign behavior and alert states quickly. "Every sensor we're able to add is another in what was previously a dark spot" that federal authorities "couldn't see into," said Brian Calkin, vice president of operations for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the Homeland Security-funded group that created the sensor in 2010 and upgraded it in 2014. The sensors -- modeled after a system used to protect federal government networks that's named after scientist Albert Einstein -- are now installed in 29 states, according to a Homeland Security official. But experts caution that they're not deployed to most of the 9,000 local jurisdictions where votes are actually cast, and sophisticated hackers can sneak past the sensors undetected. With congressional primaries already underway, and elections planned next month in almost two dozen states including California, New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Iowa, administration critics say not enough has been done to harden the U.S. election infrastructure against attacks like those seen in 2016. Intelligence agencies have warned Russia is likely to try to interfere in U.S. elections again this year. The Trump administration has sought to assure lawmakers that it's working with states to beef up election security, and Homeland Security leaders officials often tout the Albert sensor as a sign of how they're buttressing states. The sensors helped the federal government conclude that Russia targeted voter registration databases in 21 states in 2016, yet not all states had the devices then, Jeanette Manfra, Homeland Security assistant secretary, said. "We can assume that the majority of states were probably a target," Manfra told the Senate Homeland Security Committee April 24. But with more states now placing the sensors on their systems, "we are increasing our visibility," she said. While cybersecurity analysts say that's a good first step, a former DHS official familiar with the department's cybersecurity programs said the department has failed to pitch the sensors to county clerks, leaving gaps in monitoring voter rolls and voting machines. To say that an Albert sensor "is the panacea, it's the silver bullet, is completely misleading -- it's a misunderstanding of the reality of the situation," said Bob Stasio, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project and former chief of operations at the National Security Agency's Cyber Operations Center. States decide where they want to affix the sensors. Some use them to monitor the secretary of state's office computer network, while others use them as sentinels for their voter registration database. One key advantage for cash-strapped states: The system is provided for free. The device mines "signatures" that could point to malicious actors, such as internet protocol addresses associated with Russian hackers. But it's only as good as the signatures that officials feed into the sensor, so that it knows what to look out for. A second former DHS official said that unless intelligence agencies flag specific signatures to Homeland Security, the sensors won't be very useful to states. There are other limitations. The second former official called the technology antiquated -- the equivalent of a five-foot chain-link fence -- because it doesn't incorporate newer methods such as encryption to protect material in a network. The Albert sensor acts like the guard at the entrance of a movie complex, according to Stasio. The guard stands at the door keeping an eye out for someone with a gun in the crowd -- just as the sensor looks for a hacker in network traffic. If someone sneaks in a gun under a coat undetected, there needs to be another guard -- or sensor -- in each theater, representing what cyber analysts call the "endpoint" for network traffic. Intruders like the Russians who meddled in the 2016 election represent "very advanced threats -- they're going to be able to understand how to get past that first gate-guard that guards the main door," Stasio said. Hackers also can slip through if they get a hold of stolen passwords from election officials' systems. "Adversaries are able to masquerade their activity as something that's somewhat normal because they're getting legitimate credentials for state election officials," according to Beau Woods, cyber safety innovation fellow with the Atlantic Council in Washington. Still, many states see Albert sensors as valuable tools. Texas deployed a sensor on its voter registration database in January, ahead of its May primaries. Vermont, which holds primaries in August, started using the device a month ago. Maryland's State Board of Elections said it has requested an Albert sensor for its online voter registration database and online ballot delivery systems, which are hosted by an outside company. The state has primaries in June. Although the sensors are free for states and some large counties, smaller localities have to pay fees of $600 to $1,500 a month, according to the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center. The Florida Department of State has an Albert sensor monitoring its network in advance of its August primaries. Now it's also providing county election supervisors with $1.9 million in grants -- from federal funding -- to buy the Albert devices, department spokeswoman Sarah Revell said. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate said that earlier this year he added an Albert sensor to his office's computer network, which is separate from the state network. He'd like to get them to counties so that they're "equally protected," he said. Iowa's primaries are June 5. "We know in Iowa, thousands a day try to get into the government systems," Pate said. Albert sensors went live in Franklin County, home to Ohio's capital of Columbus, just days before the state's May 8 primary. As a large county with almost 860,000 registered voters, it didn't have to pay, county elections board spokesman Aaron Sellers said. "We are a bellwether state -- it seems every two to four years we're always in the crosshairs," Sellers said. "If there's ways we can reassure" voters "without getting into the gory details of what we're doing, it puts them more at ease." WASHINGTON By the time Attorney General Jeff Sessions arrived at President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort for dinner one Saturday evening in March 2017, he had been receiving the presidential silent treatment for two days. Sessions had flown to Florida because Trump was refusing to take his calls about a pressing decision on his travel ban. When they met, Trump was ready to talk but not about the travel ban. His grievance was with Sessions: The president objected to his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Trump, who had told aides that he needed a loyalist overseeing the inquiry, berated Sessions and told him he should reverse his decision, an unusual and potentially inappropriate request. Sessions refused. The confrontation, which has not been previously reported, is being investigated by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, as are the presidents public and private attacks on Sessions and efforts to get him to resign. Trump dwelled on the recusal for months, according to confidants and current and former administration officials who described his behavior toward the attorney general. The special counsels interest demonstrates Sessions overlooked role as a key witness in the investigation into whether Trump tried to obstruct the inquiry itself. It also suggests that the obstruction investigation is broader than it is widely understood to be encompassing not only the presidents interactions with and firing of the former FBI director, James Comey, but also his relationship with Sessions. Now Playing: According to the Washington Post, special counsel Robert Mueller's team has been probing President Trump's apparent efforts to oust Jeff Sessions. Video: GeoBeats Investigators have pressed current and former White House officials about Trumps treatment of Sessions and whether they believe the president was trying to impede the Russia investigation by pressuring him. The attorney general was also interviewed at length by Muellers investigators in January. And of the four dozen or so questions Mueller wants to ask Trump, eight relate to Sessions. Among them: What efforts did you make to try to get him to reverse his recusal? The presidents lead lawyer in the case, Rudy Giuliani, said that if Trump agreed to answer the special counsels questions an interview is the subject of continuing negotiations he should not be forced to discuss his private deliberations with senior administration officials. Talking about the attorney general, Giuliani argued, would set a bad precedent for future presidents. Giuliani said he had not discussed Sessions recusal with Trump but said that a request that Sessions reassert control over the Russia investigation would be within the bounds of the presidents authority. 'Unrecuse doesnt say, Bury the investigation. It says on the face of it: Take responsibility for it and handle it correctly, Giuliani said Tuesday evening. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. To the president, no decision has proved more devastating during his time in office than Sessions recusal. In Trumps view, Sessions, who had been one of his closest political allies and earliest prominent supporters in Washington, never would have appointed a special counsel, as the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, did last May after the president abruptly fired Comey. Before the recusal, the president and his attorney general were friends, often sharing meals and talking on the phone. Today, they rarely speak outside of Cabinet meetings, current and former White House officials and others briefed on their relationship said. They even flew separately in March from Washington to the same event in New Hampshire. Trump complains to friends about how much he would like to get rid of Sessions but has demurred under pressure from Senate Republicans who have indicated they would not confirm a new attorney general. Because of his recusal, Sessions has been mostly absent from the presidents ire toward the investigation and the Justice Department. He has enforced Trumps agenda more successfully than perhaps any Cabinet member, imposing conservative policies on immigration and violent crime that are popular with Trumps core supporters. Pressure on Sessions to step aside from the Russia investigation began building almost as soon as he took office, culminating in a Washington Post report on March 1 that he had not been forthcoming during his Senate confirmation hearing about his contacts with Russian officials during the campaign. Career lawyers at the Justice Department had advised Sessions to step aside, citing ethics guidelines about impartiality and his role as a prominent supporter of the Trump campaign. Trump immediately recognized the potential effect of a recusal. He had his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, lobby Sessions to retain oversight of the inquiry. To Justice Department officials close to Sessions, the request by the president made through McGahn was inappropriate, particularly because it was clear to them that Sessions had to step aside. After Sessions told McGahn that he would follow the Justice Department lawyers advice to recuse himself from all matters related to the election, McGahn backed down. Sessions recused himself on March 2. When Trump learned of the recusal, he asked advisers whether the decision could be reversed, according to people briefed on the matter. Told no, Trump argued that Eric Holder, President Barack Obamas first attorney general, would never have recused himself from a case that threatened to tarnish Obama. The president said he expected the same loyalty from Sessions. Some people close to the president have said privately that they believed the recusal was overly broad and done too hastily in the middle of public scrutiny over Sessions congressional testimony. The day after the recusal, as the president prepared to travel to Florida, Trump was seen through the windows of the Oval Office by news cameras, gesticulating angrily as he argued with top advisers who had gathered to determine how to go forward with the travel ban, which had been blocked by a federal judge. Justice Department officials had concluded the policy must be withdrawn and revised, a move that Trump was resisting because he thought it was watered down. But, preoccupied with Sessions decision and determined to find a way forward, he spent the first 10 minutes of the meeting venting about it, a former White House official said. The meeting ended without a resolution about the travel ban. And after Trump flew to Florida, his advisers decided that the only way to get the presidents signoff to revise the immigration order a time-sensitive matter because of pending litigation would be to dispatch the attorney general to Trumps Palm Beach, Florida, retreat, to implore him in person, the current and former administration officials said. It was at Mar-a-Lago the next evening that Trump brought up the Russia investigation with Sessions and asked him to change his mind about stepping aside, the people said. Prosecutors rarely go back on recusals. Legal experts said that occasionally, prosecutors who handed off a case to colleagues over concerns about a possible financial conflict of interest would take the decision back after confirming none existed. But the experts said they could think of no instance in which a prosecutor stepped aside from a case in circumstances similar to Sessions. Justice Department guidelines on recusal are in place to prevent the sort of political meddling the president tried to engage in, they said. Its yet more behavior that tramples on the line between law and politics, said Samuel W. Buell, a law professor at Duke University and former federal prosecutor. As the months wore on, Trump returned again and again to the recusal. In July, he told The New York Times that he never would have nominated Sessions if he had known that Sessions would not oversee the Russia investigation. Two days later, a Washington Post report about Sessions campaign discussions with Russias ambassador sent Trump into another rage. Aboard Marine One that Saturday, the president told his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to get Sessions to resign by the end of the weekend, according to a person briefed on the conversation. Unnerved and convinced the president wanted to install a new attorney general who could oversee the Russia investigation, Priebus called Sessions chief of staff at the time, Jody Hunt, who said that the president would have to ask Sessions himself to resign. Unsure how to proceed, Priebus simply waited out the president, who never called Sessions but did attack him that week on Twitter. Days later, Priebus was out as chief of staff. The special counsel has told the presidents lawyers that he wants to ask Trump about those discussions with Priebus and why he publicly criticized Sessions. Trump brought up the recusal again with associates later last year, expressing a desire for Sessions to reassert control over an investigation that has since resulted in the indictment of his former campaign chairman and guilty pleas by two other campaign aides and his former national security adviser. This article originally appeared in The New York Times With the Santa Fe High School shooting fresh in their minds, members of the Houston area's education, law enforcement and faith communities on Tuesday outlined efforts for ensuring a safe final week of the school year. As part of Project Safe Start, a grassroots coalition of the three groups started in 1990, local leaders said there will be an increased police and clergy presence this week in Aldine, Houston and Spring ISDs. The group focuses on the final week of school because it's a time when students tend to engage in more bad behavior, looking to settle scores or pull pranks ahead of the summer break. "This is something that's been going on for many, many years," Houston Police Assistant Chief Sheryl Victorian said. "It's just the time of year where kids are ready to start their summer vacation, they're a little antsy. There could be internal conflict or external conflict, and we want to make sure we minimize that." In recent years, Project Safe Start leaders have reported no significant violent incidents leading up to the end of school. But law enforcement officials remain on heightened alert following the May 18 shooting in Santa Fe, where eight children and two adults were killed by a high school student who opened fire on campus, police said. Victorian said Houston police will have a more visible presence patrolling near schools, while Houston ISD police will continue efforts to identify and stop potential threats. Houston ISD Police Chief Paul Cordova said his department has investigated about 100 threats, many of them made on social media, since the February shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 people dead. "It's been rough since Parkland with youngsters thinking it's a joke to make threats," Cordova said. RELATED: On heightened alert, districts report several threats following Santa Fe A few dozen local clergy, who have been the driving force behind Project Safe Start, echoed calls for responsible behavior by students and attentive supervision by parents ahead of the school year's end. Aldine and Spring ISDs let out on Thursday, while Houston ISD wraps up on Friday. As part of the effort, dozens of local religious leaders will be patrolling middle and high schools throughout the three districts, looking to provide a positive presence for students. "We couldn't come to this without the burden and the concerns of the Santa Fe situation, and also some of the other concerns that are happening within school districts," said the Rev. F.N. Williams II, a Project Safe Start leader. "I think it's important for us to reclaim, as others have said, not just our communities, but remember, we must reclaim our communities with faith." Several districts throughout Greater Houston have pledged to add law enforcement officers to campuses following the Santa Fe shooting, with some contemplating whether to keep elevated officer levels through the 2018-19 school year. HoustonChronicle.com: Governor pushes for more counselors; districts miss staff targets Cordova said HISD expects to maintain its current number of on-campus officers next year, despite an expected $3 million cut to the police department's budget. School officials expect to find the savings through attrition, reduction in administrative staff and less spending on equipment and supplies, among other areas. The district faces a projected $100-million-plus budget shortfall as it finishes crafting its 2018-19 budget. Many districts have reported receiving threats or students bringing weapons to schools since the Santa Fe massacre, though it's unclear whether the number of incidents has been elevated in the shooting aftermath. Jacob Carpenter is an education writer at the Houston Chronicle. He can be reached at jacob.carpenter@chron.com. Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect Aldine ISD's last day of school is Thursday. The family of a man who crashed his motorcycle along the Gulf Freeway in February and later died is claiming a popular Texas restaurant chain over-served him before the crash, a new lawsuit alleges. They're asking for more than $1 million. The lawsuit claims Marvin Drake III was at a Bombshells restaurant on the Gulf Freeway near Fuqua Street late Feb. 16 when a female server continued to serve him alcoholic beverages even as he was already intoxicated, the family's attorneys say. SENTENCE: Magnolia man gets probation for pretending to be a cop Now Playing: Latest Local And State News Video: Houston Chronicle Around 2:30 a.m., Drake left the restaurant on his Suzuki Hayabusa and rode south on the Gulf Freeway at speeds reaching 150 mph, according to Houston police and the lawsuit. Moments later, Drake crashed into the back of a Chevrolet HHR along the Gulf Freeway near El Dorado Boulevard. He died at the scene. The lawsuit claims the server, who is listed as Jane Doe, and the restaurant "breached their duty and violated Texas law" by continuing to serve Drake. The lawsuit claims Drake was intoxicated at the time of the crash. The driver of the HHR was questioned by police on scene and released uninjured. An employee at the restaurant declined to comment, and an attorney for the restaurant could not be reached. Jay R. Jordan is a breaking news reporter at Chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JayRJordan. Vijay Mhay, a Punjabi-American, is used to getting different looks when he enters stores and restaurants. But when I start talking, they know that, OK, he doesnt have an accent, hes educated, he knows what hes talking about, they get more calm, said Mhay. But I still get looks. A Starbucks store manager in Philadelphia drew national attention to the kinds of racial prejudices minorities are subjected to on a daily basis after calling the police on two African-American men who were waiting for a friend. One of the men was denied access to the stores restroom because they hadnt ordered anything. The pair was then arrested. Mhay was one of millions of customers who couldnt get their caffeine fix Tuesday afternoon. The Seattle-based company closed 8,000 stores for several hours to train more than 175,000 employees about racial bias and discrimination. The move was part of the companys aggressive apology campaign to stem public outrage over the April incident. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson publicly apologized within days of the incident and the company quickly settled with Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, the two men arrested in Philadelphia, for an undisclosed sum. The company also offered to cover all of their costs for college. Within days, Executive Chairman Howard Schultz confirmed that the store manager who made the call was no longer with the company. The chain has since adopted a policy allowing anyone to use their restrooms, even if they dont purchase anything. The incident has prompted us to reflect more deeply on all forms of bias, the role of our stores in communities and our responsibility to ensure that nothing like this happens again at Starbucks, Schulz wrote in an open letter published on the companys website Tuesday. The reflection has led to a long-term commitment to reform systemwide policies, while elevating inclusion and equity in all we do. Starbucks decision to close thousands of stores so employees could attend the afternoon training has drawn a mix of praise and skepticism. You cant just close your stores for one day of training, even though I applaud the step, said Trish DeBerry, president and CEO of The DeBerry Group, a marketing and public relations firm based in San Antonio. It will be how its implemented and ingrained into the Starbucks culture every day after that because that is what customers have come to expect from the brand. DeBerry added, You have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Locked out of caffeine In Houston, would-be coffee buyers flocked to various Starbucks storefronts, only to be turned away. Few exited their cars, instead reading the signs on the storefronts door and driving away visibly annoyed. The handful of people who did approach the stores were generally receptive to the chains temporary closure. One man, who asked not to be named, had arrived at at an outlet on Post Oak Boulevard to briefly use the internet. He said he was fine with being denied entry so long as it helped put an end to isms like racism. Brian Thompson, a 38-year-old construction worker, was like others unaware that the chain was briefly closed. Hed heard about the controversy a while ago, and thought it was good that the company was trying to right its wrong. But he hadnt really thought much about it since. I just try to look past those things, he said. The Seattle chain was able to contain some of the negative fallout by quickly meeting with and settling potential litigation with Nelson and Robinson, said Beau Phillips, a crisis communications specialists with Reset Public Affairs in Washington. Americans are really good at spotting a phony, Phillips said. If a company comes out and apologizes and doesnt mean it or doesnt do enough, people are really good about seeing through it and expressing their displeasure. But some of the steps, like the new bathroom policy and the racial bias training and adopting the new bathroom policy, feels like theyve gone too far, Phillips said. The company had to backpedal some on its bathroom policy after customers complained that stores could attract homeless people and drug use. An important step NAACP Chairman Leon Russell lauded Starbucks move as an important step in recognizing unconscious racial bias and said other employers ought to consider similar moves, considering that people of color encounter bias on a regular basis. It can be the fact that maybe Im standing at a hotel counter and I might have on a suit and tie and its assumed that I work there or Im a driver for somebody or something like that, Russell said in a phone interview Tuesday. I think, in one way or another, a lot of people feel that kind of discrimination every day. Tyler Wright, a 24-year-old psychology graduate from St. Marys University, was trying to apply for a job at the chains downtown San Antonio location on Houston Street when she found the store closed. Wright, who is black, said she hasnt experienced discrimination at the chain and doesnt experience racial bias often at retailers and restaurants. When she was a teenager, Wright said an employee wrongfully accused her of stealing groceries from a retailer on the East Side. But Wright said she isnt sure whether that incident was motivated by racism, noting she was carrying a large bag at the time. It couldve been racial bias but it hasnt happened here so I cant make that generalization of every Starbucks, Wright said of the Philadelphia incident. I like Starbucks. Robert Downen contributed to this report. jfechter@express-news.net twitter.com/jfreports Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2018 3:48 pm Nicole Chittim, daughter of Lealand and Annamaria Chittim, Shrewsbury, Mass., granddaughter of Bill and Sharen Chittim, Marshfield, and Nicola and Sandra Ciamarra, Stoneham, Mass., graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI, Worcester, Mass.) on May 12, with a Bachelor of Science degree in biomedical engineering, graduating with high distinction. During her time at WPI. she traveled to Russia for seven weeks to complete her junior year project, which focused on decreasing the energy consumption of Astrakhan State Univeristy. For her senior year project, she worked with a group of students to create a tumor model out of silk that was able to be dynamically cultured with endothelial cells, which allowed for a more accurate in vitro tumor model. Chittim plans to attend ETH Zurich in Switzerland, where she will complete a Master of Science program in molecular bioengineering. ETH Zurich has been ranked as the best university in Switzerland and is also ranked as the third best university in the world for biomedical engineering. More than a decade after a sexual assault scandal rocked the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the agency is still a boys club plagued by sexual harassment and a culture that makes it difficult for women to get promoted despite efforts to bring them into the ranks, according to more than a dozen current and former employees. Three of the 10 highest-paid employees in the prison system and about 25 percent of wardens are women, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of 2017 state data. But female officers also have to contend with harassment from coworkers, masturbating inmates and fear of retaliation if they complain, according to lawsuits, state records and interviews. ANOTHER PATH: Program makes ministers out of inmates You think its the inmates you have to worry about, said one former employee, who asked not to be identified, but its actually the people you work with. Some women told the Chronicle of enduring lewd comments or inappropriate contact from co-workers. One female employee said she and other women guards picked jobs working around inmates to avoid having contact with the men who supervised them. The latest allegations come amid the rise of the #MeToo movement, which has focused a national spotlight on allegations of sexual abuse and harassment. And they follow a $250,000 settlement reached by the department last year in a lawsuit accusing a male lieutenant of raping an officer he supervised a claim reminiscent of former assistant director Sammy Buentello, who retired in 2004 amid criminal charges and a high-dollar lawsuit by multiple women accusing him of sexual harassment and assault. TDCJ officials, however, say that sort of workplace environment is a thing of the past. Any days of a male-dominated culture are long gone, said Lorie Davis, director of TDCJs Institutional Division and the highest-ranking woman in the agency. We have a lot of women that move up through the ranks. A culture of indifference The numbers reinforce that Texas prisons are still a hard place to be a woman. More than 44 percent of TDCJ employees are female, but those numbers include administrative assistants, librarians, attorneys and the high-ranking officials overseeing it all. Even fewer guards just 38 percent of the more than 22,000 corrections officers are women. Higher ranks are even more male-dominated. About 27 percent of sergeants are women. Moving up, about 25 percent of captains, 26 percent of lieutenants, and just 21 percent of majors and assistant wardens are women. You just have a culture of indifference, the good-old-boy system as they call it, said Lance Lowry, a Huntsville corrections officer and former union president. And the numbers clearly reflect that. If 38 percent of the officers are female, 38 percent of the sergeants should be, too. FRESH LOOK AT ISSUES: New inspector general takes the helm in June The disparity in promotions corresponds to a disparity in the average pay, with women earning about $2,700 a year less than men throughout the department, according to 2017 data. Prison spokesman Jeremy Desel said its not clear why more women arent in the upper ranks, but stressed that supervisors are selected through a competitive interview process. It would be difficult to pinpoint a specific (reason) why the numbers are what they are, Desel said. It is important to note that corrections officers are not the only employees in TDCJ. Other positions such as parole officers, administrative assistants and accountants are disproportionately female. Food service managers, guards who work in the kitchens, are more than 50 percent female even at the highest rank. History of allegations Working inside mens prisons hasnt always been an option for women in Texas. But a series of lawsuits ending with a 1988 consent decree opened up all prison jobs to women. In short order, women started working their way up the ranks. Around 1990, Janie Cockrell became the first female warden in a mens prison, and in the years that followed more women began taking on leadership roles, according to a Houston Press account in the mid-1990s. But at the same time, some found themselves subject to sexual harassment and more. The most serious accusations came to the fore in 2004, when Buentello left the department amid criminal charges stemming from claims hed tried to rape one co-worker, groped another while she was in the hospital, pulled his penis out while hugging another, and touched, bullied or exposed himself to several others in a pattern of abuse that had gone unchecked for years. Buentello retired early and received probation on the criminal charges. The prison system paid out at least $600,000 for the lawsuits. Workers today say such behavior is not entirely a thing of the past. One officer at a unit north of Huntsville described sexual harassment as a routine occurrence. Its like an everyday thing, she said. Some women recounted forcible kissing, unwanted touching and being relegated to cleaning offices even as ranking officers. Theres a supervisor every day that talks about going to the Holiday Inn, said another officer. But were in corrections so I just laugh it off. In November 2016, according to state documents obtained by the Chronicle, a female employee at the Telford Unit in East Texas filed a complaint alleging that an assistant warden had routinely harassed her, pretending to masturbate in his office, simulating intercourse with his desk, and sending her a picture of his penis. There were no witnesses and the assistant warden denied many of the claims, records show. He said the lewd text was intended for his wife but an internal investigation found him guilty of misconduct and he is no longer employed with the agency. In Spring 2017, a corrections officer at the Michael Unit in East Texas was fired following an incident in which he allegedly suggested a female coworker should have anal sex, then bent her forward on a desk and bit her neck. That wasnt the first complaint against the officer, though he brushed it off as joking and said he was baffled by the allegations, according to the documents. An investigator concluded the behavior was not sexual harassment but said it did rise to the level of discourteous conduct of a sexual nature, according to state records. A few months later, a female officer at the Telford Unit in East Texas won a $250,000 settlement in a lawsuit that accused a lieutenant of allegedly pulling down her pants and raping her against a staircase, according to her lawyer, Louise Tausch. The lieutenant was fired 13 months later, according to court records. He was never indicted, Tausch said. We won the lawsuit, said the former guard, who asked not to be named. I still feel defeated because what happened to me is still going on and the guy who did it to me is still free. Glass ceilings are gone Not all the women who spoke to the Chronicle experienced a pattern of misconduct. Some suggested theyd been insulated by their age, placement at a womens unit, or by being married to men in the agency. Michelle Lyons, a former prison spokeswoman who recently published a book highly critical of the agency, recounted occasional lewd comments but described them as isolated incidents. Davis said such behavior is a thing of the past. I havent experienced sexual harassment as a female in our agency in years, she said. Years and years, not since I was a corrections officer literally 30 years ago. Its also easier to move up than it once was, she said. Whatever glass ceilings once existed are gone, Davis said. After starting as an officer, she moved up the career ladder to sergeant, lieutenant, warden and region director, with some other steps in between. Now, Davis said, she takes seriously the role of playing mentor to younger women in the department. I believe that Im a testament to a womans ability to promote in our agency, she said. Officials stressed that the department is committed to making sure workers are treated fairly and respectfully. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice employs more than 37,000 individuals and is the largest state agency, Desel said. TDCJ has a strong employee grievance and EEO policy in place and has zero tolerance for retaliation and sexual harassment. Code of silence From 2007 to 2017, there were more than 3,500 sexual harassment and gender discrimination complaints filed within the department. But many incidents may go unreported, according to current and former employees. It is in many cases a male-dominated culture and you go into it knowing that, so you go in more reluctant to report things, said Lyons, the former spokeswoman. You dont want to be seen as the weaker sex and you feel to a certain extent that you have to be tougher. You want to show that you can joke around with the boys. Lyons resigned from the department in 2012 amid charges that shed fudged her time cards, but she later went on to win a $63,000 settlement from the department after filing a lawsuit saying shed been unfairly targeted because of her gender. Other women cited similar fears of retaliation. Everybody had to be careful, said the former Telford officer who sued over rape. They were aware of that and the very few women that did speak out, they didnt have a job very long. Her concerns echoed what women said nearly 15 years earlier in the aftermath of the Buentello case. There is a code of silence, and women who come forward face retaliation for breaking that code, Kathleen Day, a Corpus Christi lawyer who handled the lawsuits against the disgraced officer, told the Chronicle in 2004. They get the message that if you file a complaint, you will be punished. Even today, a pending lawsuit alleges retaliation. Last November, former prison gang expert Maryanne Denner filed a federal suit accusing prison officials of providing inaccurate information to prospective employers checking into her work history. The motivation, she said, stemmed from a sexual harassment suit filed against the agency a decade earlier. Denner won $120,000 in the sexual harassment case. Her new case accusing the department of retaliation is scheduled to go to trial next year. She hasnt worked at TDCJ since 2003 but said shes confident its not much different today. Its a good old boy system and it always has been and its never, ever going to change, she said. I still get phone calls, emails, text messages from people saying, I was wrongfully terminated because Im a woman. Zero tolerance policy Officials stressed that the departments culture is not what it once was. Aside from guidance from higher-ranking employees, the agency supports its staff through an Employee Assistance Program, a hotline for free counseling. Tanisha Woods, a union chapter president and Gatesville sergeant, said theres less harassment at womens units, and that the department has made good efforts to thwart it. As far as sexual harassment, she said, I feel like we do a good job with the training. The department partners with local workforce development boards to recruit more women, and employees have mandatory discrimination training twice a year. As leaders weve developed a culture where thats not tolerated, Davis said. Weve developed a zero tolerance policy for that. Alejandra Matos and Matt Dempsey contributed to this report. keri.blakinger@chron.com twitter.com/keribla President Donald Trumps administration doubled down Tuesday on its new policy of prosecuting immigrant parents and separating their children, saying it is jailing those who break the law by crossing the border without permission and placing their children in federal foster care as required. Senior White House officials also sought to push the blame for what they called a crisis at the border to Democrats, saying they would not support undoing federal laws that the administration has said encouraged families, many of them Central American asylum seekers, to come here. If we had those fixes in federal law, the migration crisis from Central America would largely be solved in a very short time, said Stephen Miller, the presidents top adviser on immigration policy. Families would be able to be kept together and sent home safely and expeditiously. Trump said this weekend that Democrats must end a horrible law separating families. In fact, it is his own administrations zero tolerance strategy on prosecutions that has caused hundreds of children to be removed from their parents and placed in temporary government care. ORDEAL: Immigrant families separated at border struggle to find each other The White Houses mounting defense of the practice came as outrage over the treatment of immigrant children in government custody reached a fevered pitch, fueled by a viral, though inaccurate, weekend campaign on social media. Featuring the hash tag #Wherearethechildren, it largely focused on the governments own admission last month that it had lost track of nearly 1,500 children who crossed the border alone and were released to adult sponsors, usually relatives. U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat, joined calls for rallies this week, saying he could not imagine anyone taking his small children from him. Though the issue touched the emotions of many, part of the fury confused two different, but related, issues involving the fate of children in government custody. Senior Health and Human Services officials testified last month that of a sample of children it released to sponsors last year, 14 percent could not be reached after the agency followed up with them once by phone a month later. Advocates for children agree it is likely many of those adults chose simply not to respond, particularly if they are here illegally too. Theres no reason to believe that anything has happened to the kids, said Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary at HHSs Administration for Children and Families Tuesday. That characterization that the kids are missing is incorrect. That issue is vastly different from children who are separated from their parents at the border, placed in government custody, then struggle to find each other among the three different federal agencies in charge of their care. Advocates say no systematic policies exist to ensure families keep track of each other after parents are prosecuted. Reunification after these kinds of separations are very difficult, said Michelle Brane, executive director of the migrant rights program at the Womens Refugee Commission, a national advocacy group. Even finding each other after separation is exceedingly difficult. In a briefing with reporters Tuesday, White House officials argued that it is the Democrats resistance to changing a series of court rulings and laws that prevented them from detaining families together until they are deported and requires the new hard-line approach that has been widely denounced. In particular, they blame a 2008 bipartisan law intended to protect children from human trafficking and a 20-year-old federal settlement related to childrens rights in detention. A California judge has ruled the latter means the administration cannot detain children for more than a couple of weeks, so the government was forced to free many families together to pursue their immigration cases. Trump derided this practice during the 2016 presidential campaign as catch and release, because critics say many families simply disappeared and remain in the country illegally. Though overall border crossings are at their lowest in decades, nearly 14,000 families and children were detained in April, rising to levels last seen during Obamas administration. They make up the fastest-growing demographic at the border, up to 40 percent of all apprehensions from just 10 percent five years ago. The surge in illegal border crossings and the threat that puts to Americans safety and childrens safety obviously required zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry, Miller said Tuesday. A nation cannot have a principle that there will be no civil or criminal immigration enforcement for somebody traveling with a child. HOUSING: Administration looks to military bases in Texas to house immigrant children Justice Department spokesman Devin O Malley said the administration is simply enforcing current law by prosecuting everyone who crosses the border illegally, including parents with children. They will not be given a free pass, he said. It is unprecedented not to pursue prosecution of federal law because someone has a child. Previously such parents were not usually charged with the crime, which is a misdemeanor for first offenders with a typical sentence of a few days or weeks. Instead parents and children were kept together in the family residential centers or released to fight their immigration cases. Illegal entry charges swamp federal dockets at the border, making up 80 percent of cases in the Southern and Western Districts of Texas, and most U. S. Attorneys prioritized more serious offenders. Under the administrations zero tolerance policy announced last month, parents now are imprisoned and enter the custody of the Justice Department, from where they are transferred to Homeland Securitys immigrant detention centers and often quickly deported. Their children, who cannot be incarcerated, are placed in federal shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Advocates say that once minors are deemed unaccompanied, they require certain legal and privacy protections and have their own potential asylum cases. They land in federal shelters across the country often with little information on their parents. In one case, a Guatemalan father was separated from his 18-month-old toddler last summer and deported without him three months later. They were only reunified in December. In another, a woman seeking asylum was prosecuted last fall, served several days in prison, and has been detained in an immigrant detention center for eight months while her child is in a federal shelter. She is a lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that seeks to end the practice of family separation. Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney leading the case, said the practice is not confined to parents who are prosecuted for illegal entry but that it has happened to asylum seekers at official ports-of-entry. Another plaintiff in the suit, a woman from Congo, asked for asylum in San Diego last year. She was held in an immigration facility and her 7-year-old daughter sent to a shelter for migrant children in Chicago. They were reunited in March after the ACLU intervened. Deliberately separating children from parents to sow fear in parents as a deterrence is unprecedented and beyond cruel, said Ur Jaddou, director of DHS Watch at the immigrant-advocacy group Americas Voice. There are no loopholes nor statutory requirements that children be ripped from their parents arms as a matter of routine practice. lomi.kriel@chron.com A Texas icon has died at the age of 87. James Cavender, founder of the Cavender's western wear store, died on Tuesday. "Countless stories of James R. Cavender have been filling our inboxes since this morning. Stories of his humility, hard work and integrity: 'his handshake was better than any legal document,' as one put it best," Cavender's said of its founder in a Facebook post on Tuesday. R.I.P.: Second NASA astronaut dies over Memorial Day weekend Cavender was born on March 22, 1931. The Texas entrepreneur opened his first store called the Dairy Hart in Pittsburg, Texas in 1957, according to the company's website. Eight years later, Cavender opened his first clothing store. More than 40 years later, Cavender's expanded to more than 50 stores spanning Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and other western and southern states. "From deep-rooted relationships, to moments in passing, to some employees who never met him, he made an impact on every soul who had the pleasure," the post reads. "Never one for the spotlight, no - hard work was always his motivation and end goal. His work ethic is seeped into the heart of Cavender's as a company and a family." The Facebook page RattayCavenders also shared their condolences on the passing of the Texas business man. "We are all deeply saddened by his passing and we ask that you keep the entire Cavender's family in your thoughts and prayers," the post reads. "It is a privilege to be a part of the Cavender's family business and we will all strive to emulate what James built this company believing." Get instant Houston breaking news alerts sent directly to your phone by texting CHRON to 77453. Will Axford covers the news of Texas for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. Follow him on Twitter. Faced with tens of thousands of children crossing the border alone in 2014, in what President Barack Obama deemed a humanitarian situation, the government temporarily housed them on three military bases, including one in San Antonio. Now President Donald Trumps administration is considering doing so again, eyeing several in Texas. But this time the need is fueled largely by the White Houses own controversial new policy to criminally prosecute parents illegally entering the country and taking away their children. The government is rendering kids, who come with parents, unaccompanied, said Jennifer Podkul, director of policy at the advocacy group Kids in Need of Defense. They have manufactured a crisis. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last week the governments goal is to prosecute anyone crossing the border illegally, an enormous undertaking in a federal court system already swamped by such offenses. He said he would send more U.S. attorneys and judges to aid the effort. We are not going to let this country be invaded, he said. If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law. During the Obama administration, undocumented parents who crossed the border with children were typically detained with their children, processed and then released with instructions to appear at a future date at an immigration proceeding, during which most made claims for political asylum. They were not criminally charged with crossing the border. Trump derided this practice during the 2016 presidential campaign as catch and release because many undocumented immigrants, he said, simply disappeared and remained in the country illegally. He vowed to stop that practice. The ramped-up prosecutions will force thousands more underaged children into government custody. With their parents in federal prison, minors are considered unaccompanied and transferred to protective care under the Department of Health and Human Services, which keeps them until they can be placed with an adult relative or transitioned to more permanent foster care. Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman with the agencys Administration for Children and Families, said its shelters have enough bed space for 10,846 children. Those shelters currently house adults and children and are at 90 percent capacity. He said in a statement that its program requires routinely evaluating the needs and capacity of an existing network of approximately 100 shelters in 14 states. Additional properties with existing infrastructure are routinely being identified. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed one possibility is Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo. Dyess AFB near Abilene and the U.S Armys Fort Bliss in El Paso have also been floated as options, according to the Washington Post. Oscar Balladares, a spokesman for Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, which housed migrant children in 2014, said it has no vacancies right now. The base has a large stock of dormitories built in the 1960s, but they are either being used or under renovation. Though overall border crossings are at their lowest in decades, nearly 14,000 families and children, many of them seeking asylum from Central America, were detained in April, reaching levels last seen during Obamas administration. At the height of that child immigration crisis, about 10,600 unaccompanied children and 16,300 families arrived in June 2014 alone. Bases in Oklahoma, Texas and California were used to house nearly 6,800 unaccompanied children over a period of several months, Wolfe said. Podkul, from Kids in Need of Defense, said the government sent older children to the bases who they knew could quickly be placed with an adult sponsor, usually a relative already in the United States, which applies to the vast majority of children coming here alone. Most of them are being sent to the U.S. to be reunited with a family member. It was an emergency facility, she said. They didnt hold kids for longer than a few weeks because of licensing issues. Now, children will be separated from their parents, which could make it more difficult to place them with relatives, she said, meaning longer stays at bases not licensed for child care. The person who would be the most likely sponsor is now sitting in U.S. marshal custody because of criminal prosecution, Podkul said. She said the agency in charge of children, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, last month entered into a tentative written agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to share information about relatives or other sponsors in the U.S. who agree to take in the children. In the past, that information was not used for enforcement purposes. The government is dumping all these kids into (federal care) who shouldnt be there in the first place and scaring sponsors from coming forward, she said. Federal officials have struggled for several years to manage the increase of Central American families, the fastest-growing demographic at the southern border. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told senators in testimony this week that families with children and unaccompanied minors made up just 10 percent of apprehensions five years ago, Today, they account for 40 percent of those detained by border agents, she said. A decades-old federal court settlement prevents the prolonged detention of children. Until Trumps new policy was announced, most parents with no serious records who were caught crossing illegally with their children were not charged with the crime, which is a misdemeanor for first-time violators. The sheer number of offenders meant prosecutors typically prioritized immigrants with more serious criminal histories. Families were instead kept in residential detention centers and either deported together or released to fight their immigration cases. But critics complain many families dont show up at court hearings if they are freed. Soon after taking office, Trump threatened to separate parents and children at the border, sending the number coming here plummeting. Frustrated by their rising arrivals last summer, however, the administration began ramping up the prosecutions of parents, forcing the removal of their children and allowing adults to be detained until they are deported. Nielsen has argued Americans who commit crimes are also taken from their children. Thats no different than what we do every day in every part of the United States when an adult of a family commits a crime, she said last week. You will be incarcerated by police and thereby separated from your family. Advocates say immigrant parents are not reunited with their children after their criminal sentence, which is usually just a few days or weeks. Instead they are placed in civil detention centers and sometimes even quickly deported without their children. Reunification after these kinds of separations are very difficult, said Michelle Brane, executive director of the migrant rights program at the Womens Refugee Commission, a national advocacy group. Even finding each other after separation is exceedingly difficult. It involves coordination between the departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services, which Brane said do not systematically track such separations or coordinate with each other. Supporters argue that prosecuting parents prevents others from bringing their children on the dangerous journey north. Part of it is to provide a message of deterrence also to people who are attempting to enter the country illegally and exploit this gap in our immigration laws, said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican. If you simply catch people and let them go and they succeed in melting into the great American landscape, then theyve basically gamed the system. He said temporarily housing such children on military bases made sense. I would assume they would use federal property where they could house people in a humane and appropriate sort of way, and so a military base would seem to fit that description, he said. Kevin Diaz and Sig Christenson contributed to this report. WASHINGTON President Donald Trump pressed Congress on Friday to deliver federal prison reform legislation modeled on innovations to reduce recidivism that were pioneered in Texas. "Get a bill to my desk and I will sign it," he said. In a showy White House conference moderated by journalist-activist Van Jones and Brooke Rollins, president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Trump said "America is a nation that believes in the power of redemption." He preceded his remarks with a tribute to the victims of Friday's school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, calling it "a very sad day." The conference came a week after White House adviser Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, had been scheduled to tour Seagoville Federal Correctional Institution outside Dallas with Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the Republican author of a bipartisan legislation to help inmates reenter society. Kushner had to cancel the trip due to a scheduling change, but he took part in Friday's conference as the administration's face on prison reform, linking it to the president's vow to help the nation's forgotten and disenfranchised. "There's nobody more forgotten or underrepresented than people in prison," Kushner said. The White House event was intended to boost the First Step Act, bipartisan legislation Cornyn has pushed as a successor to reforms in Texas over the past two decades. It would provide partial or early release to halfway houses or community supervision programs if prisoners complete job, education and drug treatment programs in prison. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, now U.S. Energy Secretary, said similar reforms in Texas led to the closing of eight state prisons and billions of dollars in savings, while crime rates dropped. "What we were doing in Texas, we were putting young people in prison for really long periods of time," Perry recalled of the tough-on-crime mandatory sentencing policies of the 1990s. "The result was we were ruining a lot of lives, lives we didn't have to ruin." Although prison reform legislation enjoys broad consensus in Congress, it has become bogged down in debate over calls to add sentencing reform measures that would reverse policies mandating long prison sentences even for some for non-violent crimes. Kushner, however, said the White House would prefer to pass prison reform legislation immediately, without tying it to sentencing reform. "Right now that's an issue that still needs debate," Kushner said. "We're not here to have a debate. We're here to do." The conference was timed to the release of a report by the White House Council of Economic Advisors finding that programs that address prisoners' mental health and substance abuse problems can reduce crime and lessen long-term incarceration costs. "There is no substitute for personal accountability and there is no tolerance for those who take advantage of society's generosity to prey upon the innocent," Trump said. "But if we want more prisoners to take charge of their own lives, then we should work to give them the tools to stand on their own two feet." Said Rollins: "We are a country of second chances." When Air Force One touches down in Houston on Thursday as part of a Texas two-step that will include a stop in Dallas later, President Donald Trump will be making his fifth visit to Texas since he was elected. The president will attend a fundraising luncheon in Houston for the National Republican Senatorial Committee before appearing at another Republican fundraising event in Dallas. One of the last surviving men to walk on the moon has left this world for the last time. Al Bean, the fourth man to set foot on the moon and a resident of Americas first space station, made a second career out of an interesting hobby. He became the only artist who ever painted pictures based upon his experiences and personal observations of another world. Beans passing over the Memorial Day weekend -- a day before that of another astronaut, Don Peterson -- reminds us that only four of the dozen men whove set foot on the moon still walk among us on Earth. It also reminds us how dramatically Americas approach to space exploration has changed. Instead of giving us astronaut heroes like Bean, our governments space policy now promotes eccentric tycoons like Elon Musk. OPINION: NASA's golden age? We're in it Musk is best known for leading both Tesla, an electric car company, and SpaceX, a company that sells transportation to low-Earth orbit on its line of Falcon rockets. But hes picked up a bewildering array of side gigs, everything from initiatives on artificial intelligence to brain-computer interfaces to his own line of flamethrowers. He also recently announced hes building a cyborg dragon. Musk is certainly entertaining. But his activities seem a bit less comical when one considers the immense responsibilities the people of the United States have entrusted to him through government subsidies and federal contracts. And unlike Al Beans artistic pursuits, Musks second career is underwritten with taxpayer dollars an estimated $4.9 billion according to the Los Angeles Times. Musk is at the leading edge of a trend in national space policy emphasizing the private sector. The thinking goes that NASA, long starved of sufficient resources to conduct manned exploration of space, ought to yield a bit to entrepreneurs like Musk. SpaceX and similar companies will take over activities in low-Earth orbit so NASA can focus on truly aspirational missions, such as a mission to Mars. EDITORIAL: Trump's NASA promises lack the necessary funding It is a model that these pages have supported in the past in hope that, with the private sector taking over routine missions, NASA would be free to explore deeper into space. SpaceX has indeed done amazing things, and it has generally performed well. Its reusable boosters are a genuine innovation, and the companys plan to launch rockets from Brownsville is an exciting prospect for Texas. But time has started to show us the limits of this approach. The highest expectations of the turn to commercial space exploration do not appear to be coming to pass, and it has not been a boon for Houston. NASA appears just as starved of resources as before, despite the omnipresent talk among politicians of returning America to the moon and beyond. Its just that now, some of the funding goes to SpaceX and to Musk. That money may well help Musk build a thriving business that helps humanity in other ways, but the space agency itself is still stuck in low gear. Musk would like to help solve that problem, representatives of SpaceX recently told Congress, by securing more public money for the company to fund missions beyond Earth and canceling NASAs future rocket platform. In other words, SpaceX has made clear that its plan is to supplant NASA, not aid it. MORE: Trump needs to commit to NASA Its a plan that Texas own politicians, like Senator Ted Cruz, seem to support he convened the hearing at which SpaceX made its pitch. There are arguments to be made for and against the proposition that NASAs core responsibilities should be privatized, but Houstons interest is clear. For more than 50 years, the Johnson Space Center has been the citys guarantor of glory, one of its greatest assets. When it arrived, Houston was reborn. The Colt .45s became the Astros and the city stepped into the future. Now the Astrodome is a shell, the generation of astronauts who walked on the moon is dying, and the memories of the Apollo program are fading. Were at an inflection point. The nation can preserve the idea of a peoples space program, piloted by men and women like Bean, with Houston at its center. Or it can relinquish the nations space heritage to billionaires like Musk. For the past 34 years, Ive carried a gun as part of my work to defend the U.S. Constitution. My deep respect for the rights we all share has been shaped during more than 25 years in the Texas Department of Public Safety, including serving as chief of the Texas Rangers, and now as president of my own private security firm. Despite having risked my life defending our constitutional rights including the right to legally possess firearms - I now stand convinced that we must change our countrys gun laws for the good of us all: We, the people. OPINION: The least Texans can do is vote for safer schools This is not a position I take lightly. My father was a Marine and a supervisor with the Texas Department of Corrections who carried a gun. I spent countless days as a kid in South Texas hunting with my rancher uncles, who still openly carry weapons to protect themselves and their property. My brother recently retired after a long, proud career as a police officer. My son is a Marine veteran who defended our country in Iraq. Hes now a Texas Ranger and carries a gun every day to protect fellow Texans. I know the important role legal firearms play in our society, but Ive also been there for scenes like we all saw following the recent killings at Santa Fe High School. EDITORIAL: We the (gun) people I was at the scene during the shootout and fire in Waco that killed nearly 80 people. I was in Fort Davis for the Republic of Texas standoff, which ended with their surrender and the death of one of their followers. We found enough bombs and ammunition to support an army. I was in Atascosa County nearly 20 years ago when three officers were murdered and two others were shot by a man who had several high-powered rifles. He killed himself as we were closing in. I have seen with my own eyes the destruction caused by dangerous, man-killing weapons, including guns with high-capacity magazines. Who can reasonably argue that someone needs a magazine that holds 30 rounds of ammunition for hunting deer? Our laws reasonably agree that you are free to own a pistol to protect your home, and a rifle and shotgun to hunt. Im saying we need changes to the law that would prevent unqualified people from having access to military-grade weapons designed for killing multiple adversaries in combat. If you want to possess a more dangerous weapon, a man-killing weapon, then we should demand that you have a proper license. Such a license may include requirements for training, drug testing and continuing education. MORE: Now, a school shooting has happened here RELATED: Ted Cruz wouldn't talk to kids in March, but he was willing to mourn them in May If you do something adverse to the safety of others, like being chronically intoxicated or committing domestic violence, then you should lose your license because we, the people, cannot trust you. We must prevent these weapons from ending up in the hands of people who are bent on taking lives. Events like Santa Fe and last years church shooting in Sutherland Springs are devastating to the surviving families, their communities and society in general. No one should have to go through that. Since last year, Texas has seen four mass killings that claimed 49 lives and injured more than 40 others. It is heartbreaking and chilling how routine these tragedies have become despite our shared outrage. That is why now is the time for us to stand up and reclaim our rights and privileges as guaranteed by the Constitution. My decision to support stricter standards for gun possession is not publicly shared by many people who I know and love. A lot of those who agree with me are afraid to say so for various reasons. Regardless, I can no longer endorse the status quo, which makes access to a dangerous weapon easier than applying for a drivers license. Through the years, our country has matured and evolved in many ways. That includes changes to our laws that have been demanded by we, the people, by clarifying ambiguity, conforming to present truths, and following what we know to be right. When the law no longer protects our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, decency demands that we responsibly challenge the status quo by making much-needed changes. Leal is the former chief of the Texas Rangers and current president of PPI Security in Houston. Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2018 3:16 pm Near the start of his service this past Sunday Holy Trinity Sunday in the liturgical calendar the Rev. Edwin Lehmann of Peace Evangelical Lutheran Church invited the children to come forward for a message. He asked if any of them had ever felt insignificant, and explained that polysyllabic word to them. Some small heads nodded. The pastor held up an unlit match and told them the surprising truth that even a little match in a dark room can actually give off quite a bit of light. You can be a big influence by just being a little match in the world, he explained. It was a timely message for a congregation that will celebrate its 25th anniversary 2-3:15 p.m. this Sunday with an open house to explain the history and symbolism of its building. A 4 p.m. praise and thanksgiving worship service will follow, and the day will wrap up with a barbecue supper. Peace is a church that is very conscious both of where it came from and of how it intends to move forward. Twenty-five years ago, some members of a Marshfield Missouri Synod church became desirous for a different worship experience than they were experiencing. They felt drawn to a more conservative interpretation of their faith than they were hearing from their pulpit, and they contemplated a split. About that time the Rev. Lehmann was preaching at a Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod church in Springfield. Some of the restless Marshfield parishioners traveled to hear the Rev. Lehmann preach, and a few joined that congregation, Zion Evangelical Lutheran, which the Rev. Lehmann still serves today. WELS theology seemed to fit the bill for the Marshfield faithful. I got this telephone call from one of the members here, and boy did he quiz me on things, Lehmann recalled with a smile. Ultimately, the pastor felt called to serve both congregations, and every Sunday he begins his day preaching in Springfield before traveling to Marshfield like an old-time circuit rider to preach at the local church. The Rev. Lehmann has been with Peace Evangelical Lutheran Church since its inception in 1993. One of the first things that becomes apparent when entering Peace is the diversity in ages of parishioners. This past Sunday, there was a tiny newborn in the crowd, along with a raft of youngsters. Some older parishioners explained that they had been attending since the congregation got its start. One of these, Joan Kennemer, explained that she has been a lifelong Lutheran. Its the way I was raised, she said simply. While she acknowledged that the church is in an attractive building, Kennemer clearly sees the church as being composed of its people. To me, its a beautiful building, but its got a real purpose, she said. Kennemer said that she attended church in the present building when it housed St. Pauls Evangelical Lutheran Church, before Peace was ever conceived. The building isa marvel of Lutheran design. High Teutonic ceiling beams are meant to recall the hull of a ship, as member Jack Callaway explained. Peering up into the ceiling over the churchs nave (a word for the main part of a church, and one that is from the Latin and means ship) can be a transformative experience. Callaway compared it to being in Noahs ark, stating, Youre safe here, in Gods hands. Callaway pointed out some other symbolism in the sanctuary. The doors to the room depict two crosses, one on top representing Christs cross and one on the bottom representing the cross we carry through life. He noted that upon opening the doors to the room, a narrow center aisle leads straight to the cross. This is representative of the narrow way a Christian must walk through the world. Callaway showed off the six-sided light fixtures, representing the six days of creation before God rested, and he also pointed out the eight-sided baptismal font, representing the eight souls saved on Noahs ark. There is a lot of architectural beauty to take in at Peace, but which church is in session, members well, at least the adult ones seemed fully focused on the beauty of the message. During last Sundays service, a young boy lay sleeping across his mothers lap. A girl stood patiently while a woman fixed her braid. An usher passed a piece of candy across the aisle to the girl and earned a broad smile in return. Meanwhile, up front, Lehmann was on fire with his Holy Trinity Sunday message. The today and tomorrow that Jesus gives me is not to be an empty one, Lehmann said. I am to fill them with the witness about my savior. Thats what witnesses do. They simply tell others what they have seen and heard. Lehmann continued, I let my light shine to the world in whatever I do, pointing to the gospel of our salvation. For the small but dedicated congregation of Peace Evangelical Lutheran Church, a light has been shining for 25 years and counting. Members invite the public to bask in the glow with them as they celebrate this coming Sunday. Facebook ads purchased by Russia during the 2016 campaign, and released by Congress this month, reveal a clear intent to create havoc in the U.S. and should make Americans both wary and embarrassed. They also sent a clear message to Americans compliments of Russian President Vladimir Putin: You mess with me, I'll mess with you. We've allowed ourselves to be vulnerable to such an exploitation of social media by failing to control our easily manipulated passions and by our own gullibility. And Donald Trump's constant slamming of the legitimate media and his base's eagerness to embrace the message have surely served Putin and his operatives well. RELATED: Russia's Facebook ads show how Internet microtargeting can be weaponized Getting inside America's head wasn't so much genius as it was easy. The Russian model was basically Trump's: Listen to what people are worried about, then throw fire at it. If immigration boiled your blood, you might have seen a Facebook ad featuring a "No Invaders Allowed" sign. Or, if racism wasn't far from your heart, you might have seen a flag-draped coffin with the words, "Another gruesome attack on police by a [Black Lives Matter] movement activist." If you believed that a Hillary Clinton victory would lead to a godless society, you might have seen an ad depicting Jesus arm-wrestling Satan: "If I win Clinton Wins!; Jesus: Not if I can help it!" Without leaving his chair, Putin could penetrate American psyches, reinforce biases and excite tempers in sufficient numbers to create a zeitgeist - or, preferably, a mob. He doubtless savored the taste of such power. OPINION: Is it time to start regulating social media? While true that Putin strenuously dislikes Clinton, it's not clear whether he cared about Trump one way or the other. A Russian conspiracy? Sure, but it looks increasingly likely that, except for some amateur-hour attempts by Trump's people to get dirt on Clinton, the conspiracy was mostly among Russians. And it seems apparent in retrospect that when hackers broke into Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee email accounts and subsequently dripped their contents, Putin was letting Clinton know what he could do. That if she were to be elected, she'd best take him into account. Meanwhile, the Sturm und Drang of Americans against Russia has a reflexive feel to it. "Hating Russia is like riding a bicycle," laughs Nina Khrushcheva, great-granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and international affairs professor at the New School in New York. She has argued since Trump's election that Russia was trying to reveal America's weakness, as well as demonstrate how easily Putin could exert his power without having to leverage anything. Like his American counterpart, Putin isn't really that complicated. A little experience with psychoanalysis helps some, but history helps a lot. MORE: How we got played by the Russians on Facebook Don't stop me if you've heard this before, but a story told to me by President George W. Bush bears repeating. Putin had invited Bush to Russia following his own visit to Crawford, where the two spun around the ranch in W's truck. I have a photo of the two seated side-by-side, grinning like school boys skipping school. Putin had noticed the Bush family's Scottish terrier and wanted to show the American president his own dog. As Bush recounted, a gigantic beast (a Labrador) came galloping toward him and began circling him. After a few laps, Putin smiled and said, "Bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, meaner than Barney." Bush understood this moment and let it guide him in his dealings with the Russian president. He grasped that Putin hungered for respect, that he desired to be recognized as a power equal to, if not greater than, Bush. Though Bush granted Putin respect-with-distrust, his successor did not. President Barack Obama's dismissiveness toward Putin, combined with Clinton's condemnation of Russian elections as secretary of state, likely gave Putin the impetus to fight back in his own way. From Khrushcheva's perspective, Putin doesn't think he's done anything wrong. As for everyday Russians, they find this all rather amusing. Khrushcheva notes that her former countrymen either love or hate America, with little light in between. Overwhelmingly, however, they fail to see the why Americans persistently bask in their storied exceptionalism. Many countries have seen us lie and interfere with their affairs. They've seen us invade nations and install military bases. Our ebullient pride in the supremacy of our goodness can be viewed by others as boastful hubris. At the end of the day, everybody wants respect, none more, apparently, than dictators and unduly elected presidents like Putin. Warily, we observe that they'll do most anything to get it. Parker's email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com. President Trump said something recently in an interview that most Americans should be able to agree on: We should change the way we elect the president. He told Fox & Friends that he would rather have a popular election for president than use the current system, which, in most cases, awards all of a states electoral votes to whomever wins the popular vote of the state, even if only by a small margin. As the president rightly recognized, if we eliminated swing states and safe states and just counted every vote equally, then wed have a totally different campaign than we do now. That last point is crucial to understand. As the presidents comments highlight, those who campaign to lead our nation every four years do not actually run national campaigns. Instead, presidential candidates focus on energizing voters in only a few swing states, because votes in those states actually impact the election but votes in safe red or blue states dont. Thats why 99 percent of campaign spending in the last election was in only 14 states. If you live in the other 36, you can watch the campaign on the news and follow along online, but dont expect the campaigns to speak to your interests or try to persuade you or get you to the polls. To them, your actual vote hardly matters at all. JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images Apple Inc. is updating the software for its HomePod speaker with key audio features and said the device will go on sale in Canada, France, and Germany on June 18. The Cupertino, California-based technology giant said on Monday that the software update will support both multi-room audio and stereo audio playback, two features originally announced about a year ago. Multi-room audio lets HomePods synchronize music playback in different rooms, while the other feature allows users to pair two HomePods next to each other to create stereo sound. Analysts are pouring cold water on a report that Apple Inc. plans to use next-generation, OLED screens for all of its new iPhone models next year. The article in South Koreas Electronic Times, if true, would be negative for major manufacturers like Japan Display Inc. and Sharp Corp., which build LCDs that are used in many phones, but a positive for OLED technology makers like Universal Display Corp. Japan Display shares fell as much as 21 percent, the biggest intraday drop since its 2014 market debut. Sharp declined as much as 4.3 percent. Universal Display shares surged as much as 18 percent. Representatives for Apple, JDI and Sharp declined to comment. Apple upgrades HomePod speaker with stereo, multi-room audio Currently, in the smartphone market, there are two primary types of screens: Liquid Crystal Display, or LCD, and Organic Light Emitting Diode panels, or OLED. The iPhone 8 and older models use LCD screens, while the iPhone X uses an OLED screen. LCD screens are cheaper to build, while OLED screens reproduce colors much more accurately, but are difficult to produce. There are several reasons why Apples switch to all-OLED phones is unlikely. JPMorgan analyst Jay Kwon said its too early for Apple to make such a decision and the OLED screens would make the devices more expensive, defeating the purpose of a cheaper LCD model due out later this year. Using only organic light-emitting diode screens for iPhones would also be challenging, given the sheer volume that Apple sells: 216 million devices in 2017. Samsung Display Co., part of Samsung Electronics Co., is the sole supplier of OLED screens for high-end Apple phones, but the manufacturer also uses them for its own smartphones, limiting supplies. Other OLED screen makers, like LG Display Co., havent shown the ability to churn out Samsung-like capacities. While Apple has embraced OLED, most analysts said they dont see the switch happening in 2019. It is unlikely that Apple will be releasing three OLED models next year, said Jeff Pu, an analyst at Taipei-based Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting. The other major OLED supplier, LG Display, has struggled to move into mass production and isnt likely to boost OLED production for Apple in 2019 from 5 million to 10 million units expected this year, he said. Still, LG Display shares rose as much as 5.9 percent on the Electronic Times report, the biggest intraday gain in four months. Samsung was down 1.5 percent. A representative for Samsung Display declined to comment. Lawsuit targets Apple MacBook, MacBook Pro keyboards more techburger Get more tasty tech news at TechBurger. And follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to the Chronicle for regular access to TechBurger stories and to be able to comment. See More Collapse One of three new iPhones models last year featured an OLED screen. Apple is on track to use OLED in two of three new models later this year, Bloomberg News has reported. The Electronic Times report suggests a third OLED model next year, but the purpose of such a variant is unclear. Ultimately, the plan is for Apple to go full OLED on its iPhones as far as I know but whether thats going to happen at this point is a question mark, said Jerry Kang, a senior principal analyst at IHS Markit based in Bundang, South Korea. Apple hasnt been able to expand on its iPhone X production because of market demand and price issues. Indeed, the cost of OLED technology has been a major concern. Sales of the iPhone X with an OLED screen were crimped by its starting price of $999. Moving to all OLED screens next year would make it difficult to keep iPhones affordable for mass market consumers. Organic light-emitting diode screens have been embraced as the future of smartphones because theyre crisper and use less power than their liquid-crystal predecessors. They cost more, and can also be problematic. Users of Googles Pixel smartphone have complained of inaccurate color reproduction and burn-in, where images remain after the screen is turned off. Apple warns on its website that burn-in and slight color changes are "characteristic" of OLED panels. Arthur Liao, an analyst at Taipei-based Fubon Securities, wrote in a note that he has not heard anything about Apple switching to all OLED models next year from the supply chain in Taiwan. Apple is also working on its own technology for displays, people with knowledge of the plans have said. Called MicroLED, the screens use different light-emitting compounds than the current OLED displays and promise to make future gadgets slimmer, brighter and less power-hungry. --With assistance from Mark Gurman. 2018 Bloomberg L.P. Get more tasty tech news at TechBurger. And follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to the Chronicle for regular access to TechBurger stories and to be able to comment. Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2018 3:50 pm Central Bank of the Ozarks, 1159 Spur Drive, Marshfield, will host a Community Appreciation Lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Friday, June 8. Bank officials describe the lunch as a way of saying thanks to customers and friends. Those who attend are invited to register for prizes to be given away during the event. Speaking to CNN on Tuesday, Starbuck chairman Howard Schultz commented: "We realize that four hours of training is not going to solve racial inequity in America. We need to have the conversation. We need to start." In a statement issued earlier this year, the coffee giant expressed their commitment to training staff adding that the closure would focus on education geared toward preventing discrimination in their stores. Continuing staff education is an integral part of an inclusive HR strategy. Helping employees understand the company culture and integrate into the organization will not only help with retention but also with employer brand. We spoke to Rob Catalano, co-founder of WorkTango, who suggested aligning workers to your company culture as a way of engaging your staff base. People need to understand the vision and the mission of an organization as well as the purpose, explained Catalano. Is everyone aligned to what success looks like? Its so much easier to get the end goal, and navigate the journey, when people are aligned. Illegal fishing destroying Ghana's fisheries sector May 28,2018 | Source: Modern Ghana Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing in Ghana is not only a serious threat to the ecology of the oceans, but also denies the country much needed tax revenues which can be used to stimulate economic growth and delivery of poverty alleviation projects. According to an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study titled Better Policing for Development 2014 Policy Coherence and Illicit Financial Flows, the fisheries sector is of strategic importance to many countries but remains vulnerable to a wide range of tax crimes and other transgressions including money laundering, corruption, drugs and arms smuggling. In Ghana, more than 10 percent of the countrys 28 million population are said to be engaged in the fisheries sector the greater part of the people dependent on fisheries are artisanal fisher-folks and fishmongers, according to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. But despite this huge number of people employed by the fisheries sector, the industrys contribution to the countrys GDP for more than a decade has been nothing but disappointing. The sector, according to Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) contributed 2.5 and 2.3 percent to GDP in 2009 and 2010 respectively. It however tumbled to 1.7 % of GDP in 2011 and has since never recorded any figure above that. Currently, its contribution to GDP is at a paltry 1.2 percent from the 1.1 percent recorded in 2016, clearly reflecting a sector that is in terrible distress. While several reasons can be attributed to this poor sector performance, there seems to exist an illegitimate business that mostly takes place on the high seas between large foreign fishing vessels and local fishermen that renders the country poorer via unpaid taxes and appropriate fees to government agencies. At the centre of the sectors poor performance is a practice called Saiko, which is a form of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing conducted by local fishers who go out in canoes to meet foreign vessels and transport boxes of frozen fish to buyers who mostly wait on shore. The business of Saiko Saiko is a Japanese word to refer to something which has no use. It came about when Japanese fishermen whose nets first caught fish other than what they were licenced for referred to the unplanned catch as Saiko. According to Godfrey Tsibu, Deputy Director of the Fisheries Commission, fishing vessels are licenced according to the sort of fish they intend to catch. But occasionally these vessels catch different types of fish which the law requires must be discharged back into the ocean unharmed. As such catches originally did not have commercial value to these vessels, they initially started giving them out to local fishermen who wanted them free of charge but as demands of the fishermen grew, they started selling the unwanted fish. Fisheries economist with the United Nations University and University of Ghana, Prof. Wisdom Akpalu, said as the demand of local fishermen increased, some of the vessels made it a business wherein they would consistently deliberately catch these fish, freeze them and later sell to local fishermen on the high seas which is illegal in itself and by extension denies the country taxes it would have made on those sales had the transactions been supervised by tax authorities. The saiko catch are mainly juvenile small pelagic, such as sardines, chub mackerel and other juvenile demersal fish as well, as it is seen to be an assured means of harvest in the face of declining catches. The Fisheries Act, 2002, for the purpose of yielding the right taxes among other things for the state, prescribed that fishing vessels must submit a record of their catch on failure of which the fishing vessel will have its licence either cancelled or refused renewal or suspended. Transshipment Transshipment is an illegal transaction wherein large foreign fishing vessels sell fish or cargoes to Ghanaian vessels, boats and canoes at sea, and in this way avoid berthing at the authorised ports and thus evade payment of taxes to government. The OECD 2014 reports states that this sector is vulnerable to financial crimes including in particular the use of offshore companies and flags of convenience to hide beneficial ownership of fishing vessels; and there is frequently a lack of effective cooperation between agencies responsible for regulatory fisheries policy, administrating taxes and law enforcement. The Deputy Director of the Fisheries Commission, Godfrey Tsibu, recounted how this practice of transhipment or Saiko conspires to deny the country millions of dollars in tax revenue. Although it is not clear how much the country loses each year due to transhipment, nevertheless the data from GSS on the fisheries contribution to the economy could tell the impact of this illegal practice. The fishing subsector since 2006 has contributed less than 3 percent to the countrys economy, according to (GSS) data. The complexity of payments, according to the OECD report, adds to difficulty in carrying out audits and investigations in this area. Cephas Asare, in his article titled Illegal Unreported Unregulated (IUU) Fishing: The Saiko Story, written last year, stated that the global losses due to IUU fishing alone are estimated to be as high as $23.5billion per year with West African waters including Ghana deemed to have the highest levels of IUU fishing in the world, representing up to 37 percent of the regions catch. The impact of such illegal practice on government revenue is backed by a report prepared by Greenpeace, a US-based environmental NGO, which stated in a report published in 2017 that the practice threatens the livelihoods of millions of people who rely on healthy fisheries, and cheats governments of billions of dollars in revenue. According to a recent study by Frontiers in Marine Science, the West Africa region (coastal countries) loses an estimated $2.3billion annually to illegal fishing. The problem has become so severe that it is threatening food security in the region, the environmental group said in its report. Fish stocks are not restricted to national boundaries, and that is why the solutions to end the overfishing of West Africas waters can only come from joint efforts between the countries of the region, Ahmed Diame, Greenpeaces Africa Oceans campaigner, said in a statement. Both international and regional vessels are guilty of contravening existing regulations, Greenpeace found during a ten-week surveillance voyage from February to May, 2016. It documented a number of illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing practices off the coast of West Africa. After boarding 37 fishing vessels, the group found evidence of infractions which were carried out by vessels with Chinese, Italian, Korean, Comoros, and Senegalese flags. Theme(s): Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods. EU delegates informed about Thai fisheries sector efforts May 27,2018 | Source: The Nation Delegates from the European parliament were given a presentation on effective law enforcement and the impressive progress on labour rights protection in Thailands fisheries sector, as evidence of the Thai governments true intention to achieve sustainability in the regions fisheries sector. Deputy Prime Minister General Chatchai Sarikulya on Thursday received representatives of European Parliaments Commission on Fisheries, Gabriel Mato and Kala Garcia, at Government House. As both EU parliamentarians have played a major role in pushing for an end to illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing globally, Chatchai assured them of the Thai governments determination to reform the countrys fisheries industry. He revealed that Thai authorities have been enforcing the law swiftly and profoundly with success in the suppression of crimes and law violations in the fisheries sector. A total of 4,427 cases were taken to court, with 88 per cent of them, or 3,883 cases, already ruled on by the courts. According to the authorities, 2,982 cases breached fishing vessel regulations, 1,280 cases involved illegal fishing activities, 77 cases were violations of the labour protection law in the seafood industry, and 88 were human trafficking cases. Chatchai also informed the delegates that since October 2017, the owners of fishing vessels must declare to the Port In Port Out Centre in their locality that they had already complied with all aspects of legal requirements before going out to sea. Regarding legislation reform on human trafficking and forced labour, and improving the quality of life of fisheries workers, Chatchai revealed that the Thai government had set a time frame to ratify the International Labour Standards on Seafarers of the 188th Convention of International Labour Organisation, |as well as enforcement of the forced |labour suppression law by September next year. I have confirmed that all actions are not just aimed at getting the EU to revoke the yellow card to Thailand. Thailand is looking at sustainable fishing, he said. The EU will be our key ally to work towards the Asean Common Fisheries Policy and set up the Asean IUU Task Force within next year. 2017 by THE NATION Theme(s): Communities and Organisations. Mixed response to new North Sea fishing rules by Martin Banks May 29,2018 | Source: The Parliament MEPs have given a mixed response to a new EU multiannual plan designed to prevent overfishing in the North Sea. In a vote on Tuesday at the monthly plenary in Strasbourg, members voted on the trialogue outcome on the multiannual management plan for the North Sea. While the common fisheries policy (CFP) sets an upper limit to fishing intensity (known as F-MSY), the North Sea plan allows fishing at higher levels than allowed under the basic regulation. The North Sea plan, which was passed by a large majority in Parliament, is expected to come into force this summer. It sets limits on fishing quotas to avoid them exceeding levels regarded as sustainable by the latest scientific research. The plan under the new CFP - approved by 520 votes to 131, with nine abstentions - will regulate the management of fishing for demersal species - those living near the bottom of the sea - which account for 70 per cent of catches in the North Sea. A Parliament source said, The complexity of North Sea mixed fisheries makes it impossible to target and catch only one species and the plan is tailored to reflect this, partly by covering different stocks. The long-term sustainable exploitation of these stocks should guarantee the security of fishing stocks and the livelihoods of fishing communities. The new rules will set the ranges (minimum-maximum) within which EU ministers can set the yearly total allowable catches (TACs) and quotas; allow new scientific evidence to be quickly taken on board when fixing quotas; suspend and/or reduce fishing for one particular stock when scientific advice indicates a stock is in danger, and base all measures on the best available scientific advice. MEPs added a new article stating that where stocks of common interest are also exploited by third countries, the Union shall engage with those third countries with a view to ensuring that these stocks are managed in a sustainable manner. Reaction to the vote from MEPs, though, was mixed. It was welcomed by Ulrike Rodust, Parliaments rapporteur on the file, who said, It was important to establish a basis for managing the North Sea fisheries, given the Brexit negotiations. This basis was possible only through compromises - both between the political groups within this House and between the Parliament and the Council. Regarding relations with third countries, the plan now stipulates that in agreements on stocks of common interest, CFP rules should take precedence. This already applies to stocks shared with Norway, but will soon apply to those shared with the UK, too. ECR group deputy Nosheena Mobarik was also enthusiastic, saying the plan provided greater certainty for fishermen, and adding, The North Sea is one of our key fishing grounds and we must protect it from overexploitation if we are to safeguard the futures of our fishermen and coastal communities. The North Sea Plan helps achieve that. Scientists estimate that if properly managed an additional 1.45 million tonnes of fish could be taken from the North Sea on a sustainable basis within a decade, showing that conservation and economic prosperity can, and must, go hand-in-hand. Consumers increasingly want to know that the fish they buy is from sustainable sources. These measures will reassure them. The main commercial species in the North Sea include cod, sole, haddock, whiting, plaice, saithe and prawns. In 2015 landings were worth more than 200m. However, the decision was condemned by the Greens/EFA group, which said the Commission and the Council used a dubious interpretation of the limits. The group said this will result in fishing in excess of sustainable levels, and at odds with the provisions of the CFP. Greens/EFA group fishing policy spokesperson Linnea Engstrom said, This is a complete abdication of responsibility. The CFP sets out much-needed limits on fishing intensity. But as long as the Council and Commission treat these ceilings as a negotiable extra, they will be meaningless. We will continue to push for sensible limits for fishing. Ultimately, it is only restraint that can safeguard fish stocks and secure the economic future of the communities dependent upon them. On Wednesday, the Parliament will also vote on a report from Engstrom, setting out proposals for controls to EU fish imports. The report calls for all imported products to comply with EU conservation and management standards and for much greater focus on the social, economic and environmental impact of fishing in free trade agreements. Ahead of the vote Engstrom said, We have set out a number of concrete steps that the EU can take to raise the standards that imported fish must meet, thereby helping to raise standards globally, give consumers greater confidence and guarantee a fair deal for the EU fishing industry. The sheer volume of fish imported into the EU gives it tremendous clout and we must use this market power to drive up standards across the globe. Dods Group plc 2017 Theme(s): Fisheries Development and Aquaculture. Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2018 3:10 pm When Virginia Alice Cottey greeted her first students at her new school in 1884, she expressed her idea of what kind of education she intended for them to receive at her school. She described her school as follows: A school for the education and training of girls demands vastly more than that which is contained in the ordinary curriculum. The moral, religious and domestic elements are all necessary for a symmetrical development. Among her immediate concerns and one that would remain with her for many decades was raising enough money to keep the school afloat. Her brother, Lewis, was now a state senator from Knox County, and he helped he when he could, but she had to rely a great deal on the businessmen and residents of Nevada. By 1886, there were a total of 145 students enrolled in Cottey College. As school opened for 1888, Alice had collected $4,000 in tuition fees and expanded the catalogue. The following year, she added on to her original building for the cost of $7,500. Then, in 1896, the single gold standard created a national financial crisis in the U.S. Alice suddenly found herself and her school in its own financial crisis. She called the faculty together and explained that she did not have enough funds to continue to pay all of each faculty members salary. She said that if they would stick with her, she could pay a partial salary and promised that she would make it up to them. Each and every faculty member offered to remain at their jobs and take whatever she could afford to pay them until finances improved. While Alice managed to get her college through that difficult year, she had a great personal loss when her husband, Samuel Stockard, died at the age of 58. A small blurb from the Springfield Leader and Press said that he had formerly been in the mercantile business in Springfield and had a shoe store there for several years before moving to Nevada where he married Miss Cottey of Cottey College. Alice, at the age of 48, was a widow. John Stockard, Alices oldest stepson, was 20 at the time and was a teacher at Cottey. He was well thought-of by the students, and he organized two extremely popular literary societies at Cottey. As the financial crisis eased, Alice was able to pay her teachers their full salary and was even able to add an auditorium to the campus. A celebrity came to Nevada in 1901 to speak at Lake Park Springs. It was Congressman and perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. All the faculty and students of Cottey attended and Alice got to meet Bryan. A couple of the girls presented him with flowers and he visited the college that evening to thank all the students. The college expanded again in 1903 with the construction of a dormitory hall. In 1907, Alice, who was now approaching 60, began to give serious considerations to who would take over for her when she could no longer handle running the day-to-day operations of her college. So, she made arrangements to transfer the school property and its assets to a corporation set up by the city of Nevada, and a board of trustees would handle the finances of the college. Alice would remain as president and operations manager as long as she was capable. Continuing her leadership of the college in 1908, another dormitory, Stockard Hall, was built at Cottey. In addition, Alice and the presidents from six other womens colleges in Missouri formed the first Association of College Presidents in the nation. Their primary goal was to standardize the educational requirements at their colleges. January 1909 found Alice leading a womens group in protest against the licensing of a saloon in Nevada. In October of that year, Cottey College celebrated its 25th anniversary. Some 500 people marched from the college to the Nevada town square and back. Included were faculty, students, various ministers and visiting college presidents. Following the march, there was an alumni rally in the colleges auditorium, then a banquet in the dining room. Included in the festivities, of course, was a solicitation for contributions to an endowment fund for the school. A total of $1,500 was raised that evening. The big news for 1910 was the coming of Halleys Comet. Students were given permission to stay up after curfew to view the comet all except for two who were punished for passing notes to boys. They not only could not stay up to watch the comet, they were not allowed to participate in any social activities for the remainder of the year or attend commencement. In 1913, the college was accredited by the University of Missouri. A highlight for the school in 1914 was the first-ever social event at the college to which young men were invited. Professor Rose Cottey, who was probably Alices niece, was the chaperone. In addition to Rose Cottey and John Stockard, Alices stepdaughter, Katie (Stockard) Milam, was also a professor at the college. On Aug. 25, 1916, Katie collapsed while teaching music and died shortly thereafter. Katie, who was 36, left three young children. Before she expired, she asked Alice to take care of them, so Alice did so. Just five months later, on Jan. 15, 1917, Professor Rose Cottey fainted while sitting at her desk in the study hall and died in the hospital the next morning. She had taught at Cottey College for 27 years. In 1918, the massive flu epidemic that claimed so many lives worldwide hit the campus, and within a week, there were 145 ill students. A makeshift hospital was set up in the Main Hall, and miraculously, everyone survived. Afterward, they held a celebration in the gymnasium. Next week: The demise of Alice Cottey, but the college continues. Contributed photos Clockwise from top left: Alice Cottey, wearing her pincer-type spectacles with a neck strap attached to them. An engraving of the Cottey College campus. An 1898 ad for the college from the Springfield Leader and Press newspaper. Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2018 3:26 pm The Cherokee Trail of Tears seems long ago and far away but it wasnt. In the span of travel on a road that existed in some form from prehistory to the present day, 1837-38 was practically yesterday. And as for far away, it turns out that the trail came right through Marshfield. No one knows more about how the route of the Trail of Tears winds through Webster County than Mark Spangler, curator of the Route 66 Museum at the Lebanon-Laclede County Library. And Spangler presented some of his findings at the May 22 meeting of the Webster County Historical Society. What Spangler has been doing, with the support of the Missouri Humanities Council, is to trace the Cherokee Trail of Tears through the region by comparing contemporary accounts of the trail (including the journals and receipts of the white conductors of the mass removal effort) with topographical maps and with current geographical features. Spangler is getting ever closer to tracing the trail with some exactitude, and he knows how it transected Webster County and even what would become the city of Marshfield. Im 99 percent certain the road the Cherokee were on clips through the corner of Hidden Waters Park, based on map evidence of where the road is, Spangler explained in an interview. In a visit to the park, the man who has spent many months tromping through woods and farm fields in search of traces of the route was able to point out a swale that indicated the presence of an early road. And the notion that columns of travelers would avail themselves of a spring is something of a no-brainer. Spangler is on a mission to uncover as much as he can about how the Trail of Tears passed through this area, but he is also on a mission to educate people about a tragic part of our national story. It all starts, according to Spangler, with a road. They got here by a road that began in prehistory, Spangler said. Over thousands of years, prehistoric people developed a network of footpaths. They figured out the best ways to travel this country. The same trails were used by more recent Native people, and when Europeans arrived, they, too, used those ancient routes routes that found ways over and around water barriers, and that knew the best way to get over high terrain. You use the infrastructure thats there, Spangler said. One of these prehistoric routes became a road known as the Osage Trace and later the Kickapoo Trace. As more European settlers moved westward, it became known as the Springfield-St. Louis Road, which formed the basis of the later Route 66 and even, in places, Interstate 44. When the road was just a dirt track through unsettled country, it was a difficult one to travel, according to Spangler. Water was always a problem, he said. It crossed river after river after river. While travelers could pay to cross the Mississippi River by ferry, it was a little harder to make ones way knee-deep in muck. Spanglers focus is a precise one: It is, specifically, the Cherokee Trail of Tears, which, on order of President Andrew Jackson, forcibly removed Cherokees from their homes in the woods of Tennessee and marched them across the country to relocate on the Oklahoma tallgrass prairie. Other Indian groups were also forcibly relocated by other roads and water routes, but Spanglers research is on the tragedy particular to the Cherokee people. Spangler explained that Cherokee people were rounded up, generally without warning, by military troops. Some 16,000 Cherokee were moved westward in groups of about 1,000 each. White conductors, sometimes military people and sometimes hired leaders, were in charge of getting the Cherokee from one place to another. Some of the conductors kept journals of their travels, and some also kept receipt books that provided a record of which farmers they paid for grain for their horses as well as other provisions. Spangler noted that it was impractical to take along grain, so these regular purchases are extremely useful in pinpointing where the trail passed. Spangler has a hope, albeit a dim one, that more primary documents might emerge. We have not found a single diary where a local resident made note of this, he said. It would have been a notable event, a group of a thousand Cherokee passing through an area that wasnt even platted until more than twenty years later. Spangler wants to enlist the help of established Webster and Laclede County families who may have bundled letters or diaries tucked away in a family chest somewhere. He doubts such documentation will emerge; paper doesnt always survive through generations unless very special care is taken. Additionally, half of the people in this area were illiterate in the early 19th century when the Trail passed through. They took note of it, they talked about it, but they could not record it, he said. If journals ever existed, theyre nowhere to be found today. Although the captive travelers would have presented a rare spectacle to locals, Spangler is quick to point out that they would in no way have resembled the famous sculpture by James Earle Fraser called The End of the Trail, which depicts a loincloth-clad Native man bareback on a horse and slumped forward, stone-tipped spear in hand. The Cherokee travelers would have been dressed somewhat like the settlers they passed, and probably better. Many of them were established business people before they were relocated. A large number shared a religion with the Missouri homesteaders. Some owned grand plantations before their removal a far cry from the hard-scrapple farms they passed on their way to Oklahoma. And despite their captive state, they carried firearms, which they used to feed themselves, perhaps wiping out a sizable portion of the squirrel population along the Trail route. You wouldnt have found a stone spear point in the entire group, Spangler said. Spangler expressed concern that a lot of people arent well informed about the Trail of Tears. Theres a story thats not being told in this area, and theres a need there to tell it, he said. He even envisions an opportunity to welcome visitors to the area with a memorial or a historic site to those who were forcibly removed from their homes via the land we now occupy. He can imagine a visitors center near Hidden Waters Park to draw interstate travelers off the highway and into Marshfield to see a place where Cherokee certainly passed. Right now he is working on the documentation, and he has hopes that the National Park Service might be willing to provide markers and signage. For now, though, Spangler is focused on exploration and documentation of his finds. I have been working on this for a full year now, he said. Ive been on the ground, in the woods, stomping over fences. Youve got to develop an intimate knowledge, a picture in your mind, to really get it. Hes currently pursuing a lead on a possible Cherokee grave site, used to bury those who perished on the route. The Cherokee cared for their people, Spangler said; despite stories to the contrary, they made sure not to leave any of their people behind, and in cases of death, bodies were carried along in wagons until a respectful burial could occur. It seems likely that these sites are in close proximity to settlers grave sites, but not intermingled, Spangler said. Spangler said that two other areas in Marshfield show traces of the old Springfield-St. Louis Road that the Trail of Tears followed. One is a vacant lot west of Webster Elementary, where there is a visible road swale, and the other is an area near the intersection of West Washington Street and Hubble Drive. There, an experienced eye can see a double row of big trees that Spangler said are too young to have been in existence in 1837, but nevertheless once flanked a road that is long gone. If you were out looking for a roadway on that space, you would never see it, he said. Its very subtle. If anyone has nineteenth-century letters or diaries that may be pertinent to Spanglers Trail of Tears study, he may be reached at the Route 66 Museum at the Lebanon-Laclede County Library, located at 915 S. Jefferson Ave. in that city. Photo: Historian Mark Spangler stands upon a swale that is a subtle trace of the old Springfield-St. Louis Road, the route of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, at Hidden Waters Park Imperial Valley News Center Vice President Pence at S.204, Right to Try Bill Signing Washington, DC - Vice President Pence at S.204, Right to Try Bill Signing: THE VICE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. To Secretary Azar, to FDA Commissioner Gottlieb, to distinguished members of Congress who are with us today from the House and the Senate, to our honored guests, and to courageous families - courageous families who have traveled from near and far, it is deeply humbling to join you here today as President Trump takes historic action to enshrine into American law the Right to Try. (Applause.) Today, President Trump will deliver on a promise that he made to the American people, now more than two years ago. On the campaign trail, our President made it clear that this would be the administration that would open new pathways to treatments for families struggling with serious illness. Four months ago, the President stood before the Congress of the United States and he said, and I quote, Patients with terminal conditions should be given access to experimental treatments that could potentially save lives. And in a few moments, President Trump will sign this policy into law and give new hope to vulnerable families all across America. (Applause.) There are several people to thank before I introduce the President. First and foremost, I want to thank the members of Congress who are here today; members of the Senate and the House of Representatives who work tirelessly and on a bipartisan basis to advance this legislation. This is how Congress should work to advance the interests of the American people. (Applause.) I also want to thank these remarkable families, some of whom are on the stage and others who are sitting and others who are looking on across the country. These remarkable families who stepped up in a time of great hardship and pain and struggle in their lives to make America a better place for other families. They fought to improve the access to the American people, to life-saving medicines and care. And to these families I say, thank you for what youve done for the American people. (Applause.) Three years ago, I met a young boy from Indiana who is one of my heroes. And Jordan McLinn and his mom, Laura, helped us advance Right to Try in the Hoosier State. And I can tell you, from even before Inauguration Day came, Jordan found us and was a champion for Right to Try on the national level. Another family we met along the way in Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, an 11-year-old boy named Zack, who Im told is with us here today. He told me about his dad. Zack stood up at a Trump rally, and he bravely walked to the microphone and he asked me if President Trump was elected, if wed get Right to Try to help his dad and to help a friend, both of whom are struggling with ALS. And I told him then that President Trump would get it done. And, Zack, President Trump got it done today. (Applause.) And finally, I just want to thank a President who keeps his word to the American people every day. A President who cares deeply about the families of this country, especially vulnerable families families that are struggling economically, and families that are struggling with serious illness. I can tell you, every day of this administration, President Trump has fought to advance the interests of American families. And today, he keeps a promise that he made. And its a promise he made from his heart, as youll hear in just a few moments. You know, not long ago, I met a little boy named Levi Delimpo - struggling, as many of the families here are struggling. And his mother told me that they have a verse that they cling to. Its a verse from the book of Jeremiah that says, I know the plans I have for you; plans to prosper you, and not to harm you; plans to give you a hope, and a future. Its a verse about faith. Its a verse about hope. And to these members of Congress, to these courageous families, to a President who keeps his promise, let me say with a prayer on my lips: Thank you for giving a hope and a future to these and other American families. With that, it is my high honor and distinct privilege to introduce to you the President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump. Governor Brown Announces Appointments Sacramento, California - Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today announced the following appointments: Michael Jani, 65, of Santa Cruz, has been appointed to the California State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. Jani has been senior forestry advisor at the Mendocino Redwood Company and the Humboldt Redwood Company since 2012, where he was chief forester from 2008 to 2012. He was president at the Mendocino Redwood Company from 2008 to 2012, where he was chief forester from 2000 to 2012. Jani was chief forester at the Big Creek Lumber Company from 1975 to 1999. This position requires Senate confirmation and the compensation is $100 per diem. Jani is a Republican. Clifford Allen, 51, of Fresno, has been appointed to the California State Board of Fire Services. Allen has been battalion chief at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection since 2014, where he has served in several positions since 1985. He is president of CAL FIRE Local 2881. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation. Allen is a Republican. Brian Rice, 57, of Sacramento, has been appointed to the California State Board of Fire Services. Rice held several positions at the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire Protection District from 1985 to 2011, including deputy chief of operations, assistant chief and battalion chief. He was president of the Sacramento Area Firefighters Local 522 from 2002 to 2008 and from 2012 to 2018. Rice is president of the California Professional Firefighters. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation. Rice is a Democrat. Brenda Bruner, 58, of Oakland, has been appointed to the State 9-1-1 Advisory Board. Bruner has been manager of the Emergency Services Dispatch Unit at the Alameda County Sheriffs Office since 2012, where she was supervisor from 2006 to 2012 and dispatcher from 1987 to 2006. She was a communications officer at the University of California Police Department, Berkeley from 1985 to 1987. Bruner is a member of the National Emergency Number Association and a member and immediate past president of the Northern California Chapter of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation. Bruner is a Democrat. Troy Taira, 58, of Alameda, has been appointed to the Board of Parole Hearings, where he was a commissioner from 2016 to 2017. Taira has been an administrative law judge at the California Public Utilities Commission since 2018. Taira served as special assistant inspector general at the California Office of the Inspector General from 2013 to 2015 and administrative law judge at the California Office of Administrative Hearings from 2012 to 2013 and from 2009 to 2011. He served as a prosecutor and staff counsel for the U.S. Coast Guard from 1992 to 2009. Taira served as a defense attorney in the Fresno County Public Defenders Office from 1991 to 1992. He served in the U.S. Navy Reserve from 1988 to 1992. Taira earned a Juris Doctor degree from the University of California, Davis School of Law. This position requires Senate confirmation and the compensation is $147,778. Taira is a Democrat. Timothy Sheldon Jr., 41, of Bakersfield, has been appointed an alternate to the Commission on Correctional Peace Officer Standards and Training. Sheldon has been a correctional lieutenant at Kern Valley State Prison since 2013, where he has served in several positions since 2006, including correctional sergeant and correctional officer. He was a correctional officer at California State Prison, Corcoran from 2000 to 2006. He is supervisory vice president of the Kern Valley State Prison chapter of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation. Sheldon is a Republican. Lets Make Alaska Home of the Next Big Idea Anchorage, Alaska - During the next few days, the University of Alaska will host a unique event that brings dozens of the worlds best and brightest scientists to Fairbanks. Known as National Lab Day, this forum will provide an incredible opportunity for Alaskans to form new partnerships with the individuals who run our nations premier research institutions. If national parks were Americas best idea, National Labs were our smartest. From their founding more than 70 years ago, the laboratories now affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) have been engines of remarkable scientific achievement. Breakthroughs in renewable energy, the worldwide web, satellite technologies, and safe drinking water are just a few of the many innovations to emerge from the likes of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge, and Sandia over the years. Today, the highly educated scientists at DOEs 17 National Laboratories located across the country are searching for solutions to our most complex energy and environmental challenges. Once a year, the leaders of these labs hit the road together to discuss their work and find new collaborators. This year, Alaska is the lucky beneficiary. And in many ways, its a perfect match. Alaska can be a significant asset to the labs, particularly in light of the states nearly unlimited resource potential. The methane hydrates beneath the North Slope could be the next shale gas. Advanced micro-reactors could provide cheap, reliable power to remote villages and military bases. Countless rivers, lakes, and miles of coastline make Alaska a perfect test site for hydropower and marine hydrokinetic projects. The state is also home to a vast mineral base that can be responsibly developed to provide raw materials needed for those technologies and more. The National Labs will find willing and creative partners all across Alaska. Over 200 remote communities and villages rely on diesel generators for local power and heating, but high fuel costs eat up household budgets and depress local economies. Alaskans also face receding sea ice, melting permafrost, and other environmental changes that threaten both ways of life and critical infrastructure. These challenges are driving real-world innovation, whether through energy storage, wind, hydropower, biomass, or non-traditional renewables on the microgrid scale. Working with the labs will kick these efforts into overdrive, and help Alaskans commercialize innovative technologies that can be used here and around the world. To learn more about those challenges and opportunities, earlier this month we traveled together in Alaska. The resourcefulness and ingenuity of Alaskans was clear to see, from the oil pumps at Prudhoe Bay to the energy flywheel in Kodiak. Whats more, we saw that by working together, we can create a brighter future for all Alaskans, and all Americans. While there are no National Laboratories in Alaska, the state itself is a living laboratory. Thats evidenced by the more than 70 communities that are integrating renewables into their power generation. Alaskas hybrid systems now comprise about 12 percent of the worlds renewable-powered microgrids. The Department of Energy last year recognized the state as a global leader, awarding a large grant to a consortium that includes Cordova to continue this pioneering work. The seeds of lasting partnership are already in place. The University of Alaska Fairbanks received a grant last year through the ARPA-E program to study how sugar kelp farms could produce biomass and biofuels. UAF has also forged ahead on unmanned aerial vehicles through its Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration, which holds great promise for monitoring pipelines and wildlife in the harsh Arctic environment. National Lab Day is an opportunity to further those partnerships, while building new ones that will bring additional benefits to Alaska long into the future. The conference begins tonight with two public events on the UAF campusa walking tour of 11 scientific research facilities, followed by a series of TED-style talks on energy and related challenges. The event continues tomorrow and Thursday at UAFs Engineering Learning and Innovation Facility with plenary sessions focused on the basics of National Labs and what it takes for collaboration to succeed. And it wraps up on Thursday, with panel discussions on everything from natural hazards to our changing Arctic. If you go, youre guaranteed to meet some brilliant people. Youll learn that Alaska is a living laboratory. That it is the best place in the world to prove a concept. And, thanks to events like this one, it may very well be home to the next big idea. U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski serves as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Rick Perry is Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy. This op-ed appeared in the Anchorage Daily News on May 29, 2018. Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2018 4:07 pm To the editor: As mayor, and as a Marshfield citizen, I would like to welcome Karen Craigo to her new role as the editor of The Marshfield Mail. I spoke with Karen by phone a few days ago and have every confidence that her tenure will be a continuation of the great relationship that already exists between the Marshfield Mail and our community. Karen has certainly stepped into a large pair of shoes, coming in on the heels of our retiring editor, Scott Kerber. No worries, though; Karen seems like a person who is up to the task, and has a genuine desire to get to know our community and maintain the Mails high level of integrity with community-minded, objective, and truthful reporting. I am both hopeful and confident that the shoes will be a great fit. Of course, this in no way diminishes the great work done by Scott Kerber; rather it speaks of the high level of professionalism, and close community ties and partnerships that Scott has worked to build, which should make the transition a little more pleasant for Karen and the Mail staff. Also, as mayor, and on a personal note, I am very grateful for the way Scott has approached his leadership role at The Marshfield Mail. The community of Marshfield is being recognized far and wide as a model city due to the efforts of the many community-minded citizens, business leaders, civic organizations, and government staff and officials. Scott, and others like him, continue to contribute countless hours and resources to our success, and Scott has blazed a trail that, in my opinion, all community newspapers should take notice of regarding the way a newspaper can fulfill its responsibility as a public trust and to accuracy and fairness, and still be a cherished community builder. I wish Scott the very best in his supposed retirement. I say "supposed" because I know him too well to think that he wont still be very active in our community. Still, I will miss him as the editor of The Marshfield Mail. At the same time, I am looking forward to a great continuing relationship with the Mail under Karens leadership, and welcome her and her family to our community. In closing, I say to Scott, and to Karen in advance, Thank you for being community builders, and for helping Marshfield in our endeavor to work together to provide this generation, and future generations, a great place to live. Robert Williams Mayor of Marshfield Challenge of Returning Families of Foreign Terrorist Fighters: Workshop Held in Madrid, Spain Washington, DC - The United States and the Kingdom of the Netherlands, under the auspices of the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), held the third and final regionally-focused workshop of the Initiative on Addressing the Challenge of Returning Families of Foreign Terrorist Fighters in Madrid, Spain on May 28-29, 2018. The yearlong Initiative brought together national and local governments, international organizations, health and social community support entities, and family support organizations over a series of three regional workshops. The first workshop was held in Tunis, Tunisia on February 8-9, 2018 and the second took place in Bali, Indonesia on May 7-8. Each workshop solicited input from regional organizations, national governments, and expert practitioners to ensure the resulting good practices document is as universally applicable as possible. Participants in the Madrid workshop discussed the threat of returning families of FTFs in Europe and shared case studies and best practices through a roundtable discussion series. The sessions in Madrid were dedicated to reviewing the draft good practices document. The Families Initiative is one of the many efforts the GCTF is working on to address the problems posed by returning foreign terrorist fighters and the family members who accompany them. Addressing the challenge can be difficult, as some may have engaged in terrorism in Syria and Iraq, while some may themselves be victims of ISIS. The good practices document will be put forward for endorsement at the 2018 GCTF Ministerial Meeting in September 2018. It is intended to provide a basis for international engagement, assistance, and training to address this challenge. Georgian Territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia Washington, DC - The United States strongly condemns the Syrian regimes intention to establish diplomatic relations with the Russian-occupied Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. These regions are part of Georgia. The United States position on Abkhazia and South Ossetia is unwavering. We fully support Georgias sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, and call on all states to be mindful of their obligations under the UN Charter and do the same. And once again, the United States urges Russia to withdraw its forces to pre-war positions per the 2008 ceasefire agreement. Anita Hill knows a thing or two about bravery. The Brandeis law professor, who is best known for testifying before a Senate panel against Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991, told the graduates of Wesleyan to find their heroes, draw inspiration from them, and honor their bravery as often as they can during her commencement speech on Sunday. Hill idolizes Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad conductor and political activist, and explained that while she could never be as fearless as Tubman, she never stopped trying. "In 1991, I did my best to honor her and the bravery of so many women who came before me when I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I have tried to do so every day since then," Hill told graduates. "To remember what it means to be fearless and to recognize that courage is not something that is measured in one deed, one act--even if it is before the Senate--but it is measured in how we live our lives." Hill told the Senate panel 27 years ago that Thomas sexually harassed her when she was his assistant working in the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. Her testimony kicked off the "he-said, she-said" debate and brought attention to sexual harassment claims, which came alive again in the recent #MeToo movement. Hill was tapped to speak at Wesleyan after author and alumnus Daniel Handler backed away from his invitation to headline the commencement amid allegations of sexual misconduct. Hill didn't address this. Instead, she celebrated the graduates who fought against sexual violence and called them her new heroes. She also highlighted the work of an on-campus group called SEMI (Students for Ending Mass Incarceration); the school's #sanctuarycampus movement to make campuses safe for everyone; and Wesleyan's efforts to get Ben & Jerry's on to the "Milk with Dignity" program. That campaign calls on major food companies to take responsibility for farm-workers' rights. Hill explained that while women across the country are sharing the truth about sexual assault and harassment--and demanding action--they're often met with intense backlash. But she encourages these women to continue to speak out, as it can be self-liberating and inspiring to others. Rachel Katz used experience from several diverse industries to fuel her success as a jewelry designer. I had the chance to speak with her about what makes Rachel Katz Jewelry so special. LM: Let's start with a snapshot of you and the company. RK: I am originally from Cleveland (Go Cavs!), studied Business and Finance at Boston University, worked for dot-com startups, then decided to move to LA in search of my next adventure. I worked in Hollywood for a prominent producer and a big talent agent, but I realized that was not the career that fulfilled me, so I went back to my finance roots and switched to commercial real estate. Then I began designing and producing jewelry. It happened organically and I now design a line of modern, architecturally-inspired fine jewelry. I manufacture exclusively in Los Angeles, using 14K gold, hand-set diamonds, and colored sapphires. My largest points of distribution are direct-to-consumer (via private showings and company website rachelkatzjewelry.com), online retail (including Goop), and high-end boutiques around the country. Since my brand's inception in 2014, it has quickly resonated with women around the world, cultivating a strong celebrity following including Jennifer Lawrence, Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Gigi Hadid, and others. We've also enjoyed press coverage in Vogue.com, InStyle, Shape Magazine, and more. LM: Tell me how you came to start this company, and what was your inspiration? RK: I've always been drawn to forging new ground and building something from the ground up. When I worked for dot-com startups, we were literally creating something from nothing. And even when I worked in commercial real estate, it required generating and managing my own business. I had to cut my teeth in other fields until I could fully actualize my abilities and apply them to something I'm truly passionate about. My jewelry line began unexpectedly. I had a necklace of my mom's from the 70s that people would always ask about, and a friend urged me to reproduce. I finally met with a fabricator to help me, and then started designing other pieces around it--and things took off from there! Jewelry has always been a passion of mine, but I didn't want to wear someone else's designs. Since childhood, I've been drawn to numbers, mathematics, symmetry, and art--my collection is strongly influenced by the structure and geometry of mid-century architecture. But I also love the freeform hedonism of the 1970s. My aim is to translate these qualities into my designs and come up with pieces that are sophisticated, artistic, and timeless, yet wearable for everyday accessorizing. I am very fortunate that this is resonating with other women around the world. I realized that jewelry and entrepreneurship are my true calling. All of my past experience contributed to making the transition graceful: friends from my dot-com days offered to build my website (rachelkatzjewelry.com), one is a photographer, another a graphic designer, etc. My aesthetic has evolved, and I am focused on building a strong and lasting brand. It's amazing to look back and see how I fell into doing something I love. LM: What is your favorite part about starting this company? RK: Having my own company empowers me. It challenges me to really tap into my potential, to exercise my creativity in both design and business. And it shoves me outside my comfort zone! LM: If you could describe your line in three words, what would you say and why? RK: Powerful, timeless, and sophisticated. At the core of my company's vision is strength: my signature styles are assertive and clean, designed to enhance the personal power and beauty of the women who wear my pieces. LM: Was there a moment when you thought, "Wow, I've really made it"? RK: There was a weekend pretty early on when Jennifer Lopez, Emma Stone, and Taylor Swift all wore my pieces within 36 hours. That was pretty surreal. But honestly, what makes me feel that I've made it is when I connect with someone who really loves my jewelry. Having clients who are excited and passionate about the line really fulfills me. LM: Talk a little bit about why you think your line has been so successful? RK: A large part of it is the quality of the design and fabrication. I manufacture to a very high standard, so all of my pieces are heirloom-quality. The designs are built around the universal language of strong geometric shapes, so the jewelry is very versatile as well. Another huge factor is persistence. I've had to learn to consistently go outside of my comfort zone, not to be shy about asking for help, and to always find a way to move forward. LM: How can emerging brands in the space be successful? RK: I knew nothing about the jewelry business when I first started, so I had to figure it out step by step. I've learned to humble myself, to reach out and learn from other people, and to have patience. My advice to others would be don't be afraid to take risks; trust the process and don't overthink things. Not only will you learn from the experience, but I have found if you take the leap, the parachute appears. Years ago, Matt Mullenweg used to listen to other founders fret about the tight talent market in San Francisco and feel an urge to climb to the nearest rooftop and shout about the solution he was experimenting with: building a team that's 100 percent remote, in order to snatch up the best hires from anywhere in the world. Today, Mullenweg's company, Automattic, a major open-source contributor to WordPress, has grown to 700 employees working in 62 countries--with zero square feet of HQ space. "It's a bittersweet victory," the founder and CEO jokes. "I'm happy everyone knows about this recruiting secret, but it also means more of that global talent is connecting to other companies." Inc. sat down for a roundtable discussion with six CEOs who have figured out how to set up and get the best out of a remote workforce: Joel Gascoigne CEO of Buffer, social media management CEO of Buffer, social media management Jason Fried CEO of Basecamp, project management software CEO of Basecamp, project management software Jesse Mecham CEO of You Need a Budget, personal finance software CEO of You Need a Budget, personal finance software Jake Goldman President of 10up, digital strategy and web design President of 10up, digital strategy and web design Brandon Griggs CEO of Knack, data management CEO of Knack, data management Matt Mullenweg CEO of Automattic, publishing platform Let's jump right into the money stuff. What expenses are unique to distributed teams? Joel Gascoigne: You're paying more for travel. One of our biggest expenses is our annual retreat and getting dozens of employees to Sydney, Thailand, Iceland, for a week. It costs up to $400,000. But that balances out against what we'd be paying for an office, especially in a big city. I think it still works out to be less expensive. Matt Mullenweg: Teams host in-person meet-ups once or twice a year from locations all around the world. We also have a $250 monthly co-working stipend if people want to work from a co-working space or a coffee shop--whatever's most productive. How do you figure out how much to pay, when one person lives in Tulsa and the next lives in Tulum? Jason Fried: Everyone's salaries used to be Chicago rates, because we have more people in Chicago than anywhere else. Then last year we switched to San Francisco rates, because we decided to match our salaries to the best in the business. We don't have a single employee who lives in San Francisco, but we don't want someone ever to leave just because they could get more money in a different ZIP code. Jake Goldman: We have a general range for each position, but it's intentionally broad, because we don't think we should have to pay someone living in a really remote position the same amount as someone living in Manhattan. We may have to pay more for their travel to events or client onsites. There are costs you might not think about, and that does influence the compensation package for us. Speaking of time zones--isn't that a giant hassle? Goldman: If someone's more far-flung, we'll talk to them about time shifting--at least for six months, while they're getting oriented. But in general there's the expectation that everyone's available, accessible, and responsive during core business hours of roughly 9 to 5 your time zone. Fried: We make sure there are at least three or four hours of overlap with other people on your team. If you're a brand-new designer and 12 hours apart from the rest of your team, that's not going to work. But most of our teams are in three or four time zones, so team members are six hours apart. What we don't want is anyone working the night shift, because that doesn't feel sustainable. How do you sniff out red flags that someone will be miserable working remotely? Jesse Mecham: We did have one misfire. We hired someone who thought she could do it, and it turned out she missed the energy from an office situation. So we've learned you have to be really upfront. If someone hasn't worked remotely before, ask if they derive energy from people, and make sure they have a plan to get out and get that energy. It's pretty easy to solve, but they have to go into the role with eyes wide open. Goldman: We place immense value on the interviews. If someone's connection is choppy or there is a ton of background noise or they're just really slow to respond to emails and messages during the process, that's a good signal they don't know how to make remote work well. Also, during the interview, I'll say something to the effect of, "Some people think remote means less work. Let's disabuse ourselves of that notion right now. You will be judged by your output, and I don't want to have a hard conversation in three months." Brandon Griggs: Written questionnaires and face-to-face hangouts are perfect for validating remote communication skills. Even if a candidate was my next-door neighbor, I'd still insist on both. How do you get new hires integrated into the team from a distance? Fried: In some ways, remote elevates the work over culture fit, because the work speaks for itself. You can't charm your way past bad work. But there is a risk that people will not like one another because they misread some interaction or just had a bad interaction and never had the chance to go to lunch and get over it. Things can fester a bit--that's a bigger risk. So it's important to see one another as humans. Those meet-ups matter. Another thing we do is something called a 5x12. Every month, one person picks five people from different departments--some new, some old--who get five minutes of advanced warning, and are told to get on a Google Hangout for an hour. There's no agenda, except we can't talk about work. We talk about our lives, our kids, whatever. People get this really rich, fun experience, and then it's transcribed and shared with the whole team. That helps bridge the gap between those in-person meet-ups. Sounds like video chat is a no-brainer. Gascoigne: We have a general commitment to do everything via video. With video, you just get a lot more from people's facial expressions. You can tell in a micro-second when someone's confused. We used Google Hangouts for a long time, but now we use Zoom. Mullenweg: We like Zoom a lot. The other thing that's a lifeblood for us is P2, this set of internal blogs that we use instead of email. Slack and P2 are common across all teams. Other than that, if one team wants to use Trello and another wants to build its own bug tracker, they can do whatever they want. It just has to have an interface for the rest of the company to either read it or submit things to it. What if I already have a local office but want to start recruiting for remote workers--any words of wisdom? Goldman: I do think you have to pick whether you want the team co-located or remote. We started remote and then opened a physical office in Portland for 10 percent of the team, and it was really clunky. Tacking on a few co-located workers is as awkward as tacking on a few remote workers. If you want to optimize your team, you need to pick one. A great example of what I saw in a store just last week was a customer that had come in, over the threshold, and was using language that was making some other customers uncomfortable. So our barista walked out from behind the counter and went up to this customer and said: "You are in our store every day, and we love that this is your third place, but from one human to another human, the language that you are using is making other customers uncomfortable. So either you have to change your behavior and stay and be a part of our third place or I'm going to have to ask you to leave, and you can come back at a later time, when you feel like you can be a part of our third place. And in fact, if you want to go have a seat, I'll bring you over a cup of water, just to make sure that it's a great rest of your day." Katz's Deli, in New York City's Lower East Side, hasn't changed its pastrami recipe in 130 years. But the deli is willing to change the way it does business. On Tuesday, Katz's announced that it will launch a subscription food service next month. Jake Dell, the 31-year-old fifth-generation owner of the iconic Jewish deli, tells Bloomberg that he's been wanting to launch Katz's subscription service for years. He says he especially wants to cater to "our regulars who've moved away but want to recreate that classic Katz experience at home." The monthly subscription box, which costs $150 a month or $1,500 for a full year, contains enough food to feed four to six people. The first package in June includes one whole pastrami weighing between four and five pounds, a pound of sliced "juicy" pastrami, a full loaf of rye bread, pickles, a pound of mustard, and a Katz's t-shirt. In July, the Griller Package will feature more than 40 frankfurters and knockwurst, two knoblewurst, knishes, and sauerkraut. The September High Holidays Package will include two pounds of sliced brisket, potato kugel, matzoh ball soup, latkes and a chocolate babka. Another part of Katz's new online business is its "Big Ticket Items" program, which range from $995 to $9,995. The Platinum package includes over 100 pounds of pastrami, which could feed up to 150 people, and comes with t-shirts and even an expert pastrami slicer who will fly to your party from New York. Katz's is no stranger to shipping meat all over the world. It started its "Send A Salami to Your Boy in the Army" program during World War II, and that program continues to today. In an earlier interview with Inc. this year, Dell said he wanted to use online sales to bring Katz's iconic New York food all overt he U.S. and eventually the world. Dell says the deli makes about 15,000 pounds of pastrami a week. Even though he sells a sandwich for $21.45, margins are thin. Dell explained they make it up in volume and shipping costs. Last summer, Katz's opened a satellite location in downtown Brooklyn, which marked the deli's first expansion. The subscription service might sound silly at first, but Dell says the experience of getting Katz's meats delivered to your door will be moving. Dir Francois Ozon, 110 mins, starring: Marine Vacth, Jeremie Renier, Jacqueline Bisset, Myriam Boyer, Dominique Reymond, Fanny Sage Prolific French director Francois Ozon moves into Hitchcock and Brian De Palma territory with a bit of David Cronenbergs Dead Ringers thrown in for good measure in this wildly overcooked erotic thriller/psycho-drama. Marine Vacth plays the confused heroine, Chloe, a 25-year-old former model. She is subject to strange stomach pains and is in a very nervous state. Her rugged psychiatrist Paul Mayer (Jeremie Renier) suddenly announces during one of their sessions together that he has feelings for her which make it impossible for him to continue with her as his patient. She becomes his lover instead and promptly moves in with him. At this point, the film spirals off into the realm of the improbable. Paul has a twin brother who is as cruel and sadistic as he is kind and tender. Chloe begins a relationship with him as well and seems to take pleasure in his abusive treatment of her. The film is based on Lives Of The Twins, a novel by American writer Joyce Carol Oates but Ozon has customised the material and made it very Gallic indeed. It quickly becomes apparent that the film is intended as fantasy and that the director is not interested in plausibility or psychological realism. Non-sequiturs abound. Chloe may be an affluent ex-model but she still takes a job as a security guard/watchwoman at a modernist art gallery. (The works on display all seem linked to her anxieties and nightmares.) Ozon throws in huge close-ups of her eyes. The sex scenes evoke memories of softcore thrillers from the 1980s from directors like Paul Verhoeven and Adrian Lyne. For all its many (surely intentional) absurdities, the film is dealing with raw and primal emotions. Chloe is a very complex figure, tormented by events deep in her past. Reniers dual role is similar to that played by Roger Moore in Basil Deardens 1970 British thriller, The Man Who Haunted Himself. There are two of him, each the polar opposite of the other. Chloe is drawn to both of them. You can see the brothers as projections of her fears and fantasies as her grasp on reality becomes ever more attenuated. LAmant Double (Double Lover) surely isnt intended to be taken entirely seriously. Its approach to psychoanalysis is straight from the 1950s Hollywood playbook. The treatment of the double is also highly stylised. Ozon is trying to provoke and tantalise us. He throws in lots of high-minded medical jargon about the secret language of twins and takes every opportunity he can to include melodramatic plot twists. This is a playful and stylish pastiche of the Fatal Attraction-style potboiler. Ozon is an effective enough filmmaker to send up conventions of such films even as he seems to endorse them. LAmant Double hits UK cinemas on 1 June. At the age of 15, Jeff Goldblum started playing jazz in cocktail lounges in Pittsburgh. 50 years later, he has signed to iconic label Decca Records. The beloved actor is expected to release a debut album soon, which will mark the first time his music has been professionally recorded. In-between his major film roles over the past few decades, Goldblum has played with his jazz band, The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, at venues in Los Angeles and New York City, and hosts a weekly jazz variety night in the former's Rockwell Table and Stage. It was his piano accompaniment to soul-jazz star Gregor Porter on the BBC's Graham Norton Show that caught the attention of Decca executives however, who immediately travelled to LA to meet with him. Im so happy to be in cahoots with the wonderful people at Decca, one of the coolest and most prestigious labels of all time. Goldblum commented. The Grand Budapest Hotel actor grew up listening to jazz at home, and it quickly became his hobby once he began learning classical piano. As far as I can tell, everyone loves Jeff Goldblum," Tom Lewis, Director of A&R for Decca, said. "Its like a universal truth. Jeff Goldblum talks Independence Day Resurgence, wedgies and being gangly "We are delighted to welcome him to Decca. Hes a fantastic jazz pianist, a great band leader and just about the loveliest man in the world. His love of jazz is infectious and whenever he plays he makes you feel very happy. "If we can take Jeffs music into peoples homes then we will be helping, in our own small way, to make the world a happier place The longstanding beef between hip hop artists Drake and Pusha T has escalated further after the Daytona rapper dropped a new diss track - "The Story of Adidon" in response to Drake's searing "Duppy Freestyle". "Duppy Freestyle" was a response to Pusha's track "Infrared" from his new, Kanye West-produced album Daytona, which featured jabs about Pusha's career and an invoice for $100,000 from Drake for "promotional assistance and career reviving". With "The Story of Adidon", Pusha escalates the feud into something of a celebrity scandal, where the cover art shows a photo of Drake in blackface - which Pusha insists is real - and accompanies a jab about Drake "always afraid he wasn't black enough". Loading.... The image reportedly dates back to a photo shoot from 2008 for a forgotten art project, taken by photographer David Leyes. The image has since been removed from Leyes' website. "Please stop referring to this picture as 'artwork'," Pusha added on Twitter. "I'm not an internet baby, I don't edit images... this is a REAL picture... these are his truths, see for yourself." But that's not the only dirty laundry Pusha airs out in the track. He also alleges that Drake conceived a child with former adult film star Sophie Brussaux, whom Pusha mentions by name. The rumour has been circulated for months, and is now seemingly confirmed, with Pusha accusing Drake of being a "deadbeat mothaf**ka" and linking his apparent bad parenting to Drake's own parents. A photo shared on former adult film star Sophie Brussaux's Instagram account - since made private. Pusha T has alleged that Drake fathered a child with her. (Sophie B/Instagram) Pusha even goes so far as to mock Drake's longtime producer Noah "40" Shebib, who suffers from multiple sclerosis. Over Jay-Z's "The Story of O.J" he raps: "Since you name-dropped my fiancee Let 'em know who you chose as your Beyonce Sophie knows better, ask your baby mother Cleaned her up for IG, but the stench is on her A baby's involved, it's deeper than rap We talkin' character, let me keep with the facts You are hiding a child, let that boy come home Deadbeat mothaf**ka playn' border patrol, ooh Adonis is your son And he deserves more than an Adidas press run, that's real Love that baby, respect that girl Forget she's a pornstar, let her be your world (yuugh)" Enjoy unlimited access to 70 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up On Instagram Pusha said: "Virginia Williams shan't ever be mentioned in song by ANYONE aside from me." Brussaux was first linked to Drake when she was seen out with him in early 2017, according to Vulture. They were spotted having dinner in Amsterdam in January, then in May she told TMZ that Drake had allegedly texted her asking her to get an abortion. At the time, a representative for Drake said: "If it is in fact Drake's child, which he does not believe, he would do the right thing by the child." They also claimed Brussaux had sex with another rapper around the same time as Drake, and that the other rapper had "all but acknowledged" the child was his. Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Show all 12 1 /12 Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Adele Estimated wealth: 140m. Annual change: Up 15m Getty Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Ed Sheeran Estimated wealth: 80m. Annual change: Up 28m Getty Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Harry Styles Estimated wealth: 50m. Annual change: Up 10m Helene Marie Pambrun Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Niall Horan Estimated wealth: 46m. Annual change: Up 6m Rex Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Liam Payne Estimated wealth: 42m. Annual change: Up 2m Rex Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Louis Tomlinson Estimated wealth: 42m. Annual change: Up 2m Getty Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Little Mix Estimated wealth: 40m. Annual change: Up 16m Rex Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Zayn Malik Estimated wealth: 35m. Annual change: No change Getty Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Sam Smith Estimated wealth: 24m. Annual change: Up 4m Getty Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Jessie J Estimated wealth: 18m. Annual change: Up 1m Getty Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Winston Marshall Estimated wealth: 16m. Annual change: Up 1m Getty Richest musicians under 30 in UK and Ireland Rita Ora Estimated wealth: 16m. Annual change: New Entry Getty Brussaux reportedly gave birth to a son on 24 October last year - nine months after the dinner. Her Instagram account, which features a photo where she is heavily pregnant, and another with her baby after giving birth, was made private after the release of Pusha's track. Shebib responded to the diss by pointing out that 31 May is World MS Day. Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2018 3:49 pm Celebrating 68 years of marriage are Howard and Bonnie (Caffey) Peters of Springfield, Missouri. The family will host a reception 1:30-3:30 p.m. Saturday, June 9, at the Good Shepherd Community Care and Rehab, 200 W. 12th Street, Lockwood, in the activities room. The couple were joined in marriage June 8, 1950, in Lebanon. They have two children: Kenneth Peters and his wife, Jane, and Nancy Baker and her husband, Travis; three granddaughters; eight great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandson, due to arrive later this year. All are invited to join in the celebration of their special day. Congratulation cards may be mailed to the above address. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has finally addressed allegations that Facebook consistently copies the messaging apps most popular features, saying that the social media giant will never be able to copy his firms values. Speaking at a conference in California on Tuesday, 29 May, Mr Spiegel referred to the data scandal surrounding Facebook, in which personal information of 87 million users was shared with third parties for the purpose of political profiling. We would really appreciate it if they copied our data protection practices also, Mr Spiegel said at the Code Conference. Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty The jibe was followed up with a reference to the fact Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was set to appear on stage straight after Mr Spiegel. He said: "Maybe that's what Sheryl is announcing after." Protecting users' privacy is fundamental to Snapchat's "DNA", Mr Spiegel said, adding: "Our values are hard to copy." Mr Spiegel said: "It's taken seven years for people in the technology industry to look at what we've done, getting rid of personal information rather than storing it, hoarding it foreverm and saying: 'Hey, that actually makes sense.'" Recommended Papua New Guinea to ban Facebook for a month Facebook has appropriated several Snapchat features, including self-destructing messages, Stories, augmented reality lenses and Quick Updates. Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, believes this trend is likely to continue until Facebook has complete market dominance. Facebook is a Burmese python consuming a cow, Professor Galloway said in his 2017 book The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, referring to Snapchat as the cow in the analogy. While the cow goes in, the snake takes its shape. After digesting, it returns to its normal shape, but bigger. The wife of Mr Spiegel, supermodel Miranda Kerr, has previously said that she is "appalled" by how Facebook has launched several of the same features as Snapchat. Evan Spiegel with Miranda Kerr (AFP/Getty Images) Last year, Ms Kerr said: "I cannot stand Facebook... Can they not be innovative? Do they have to steal all of my partner's ideas?... It's a disgrace. How do they sleep at night?" Mr Spiegel said at Tuesday's conference that he was ultimately flattered by Facebooks decision to borrow key features from Snapchats platform. If you design something that is so simple and so elegant, that the only thing other people can do is copy it exactly that as a designer is really the most fantastic thing in the world, Mr Spiegel said. The idea that an individual who wears glasses is automatically perceived as being clever is a common trope thats frequently embedded in popular culture. However, according to a recent study, there may actually be a positive correlation between poor eyesight and higher levels of intelligence. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh carried out an extensive study in order to explore how an individuals hereditary traits may impact their cognitive function. Recommended How certain foods can help boost intelligence and improve mood The team analysed data from 300,486 individuals aged between 16 and 102 that had been collated by the UK Biobank and the Charge and Cogent consortia. They were able to identify 148 independent genetic loci that were associated with cognitive ability and assess whether various attributes, such as eyesight, high blood pressure and life expectancy, impacted intelligence. The participants who wore glasses were approximately 30 per cent more likely to be intelligent, the study reported in the journal Nature Communications. Furthermore, greater cognitive function was also linked with several healthy attributes such as longevity, a decreased risk of lung cancer and better cardiovascular and mental health. Human intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since' Show all 5 1 /5 Human intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since' Human intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since' humanbrain.jpg Richard Gardner/Rex Features Human intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since' pg14-descent-3-Alamy.jpg Hunter-gatherer man The human brain and its immense capacity for knowledge evolved during this long period of prehistory when we battled against the elements Alamy Human intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since' pg14-descent-4-Alamy.jpg Athenian man The invention of agriculture less than 10,000 years ago and the subsequent rise of cities such as Athens relaxed the intensive natural selection of our intelligence genes Unknown Human intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since' pg14-descent-1-Alamy.jpg iPad man The fruits of science and technology enabled humans to rise above the constraints of nature and cushioned our fragile intellect from genetic mutations Alamy Human intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since' pg14-descent-2-Alamy.jpg Couch-potato man As genetic mutations increase over future generations, are we doomed to watching soap-opera repeats without knowing how to use the TV remote control? Alamy Dr Gail Davies, genetic statistician at the University of Edinburgh and leader of the analysis, believes her teams research could prove even more instrumental in future. This study, the largest genetic study of cognitive function, has identified many genetic differences that contribute to the heritability of thinking skills, Dr Davies said. The discovery of shared genetic effects on health outcomes and brain structure provides a foundation for exploring the mechanisms by which these differences influence thinking skills throughout a lifetime. Recommended Scientists make tiny 3D glasses for insects to understand how they see Research into the connection between genetics and intelligence has come a long way in recent years, as lead researcher Professor Ian Deary explained. Less than a decade ago we were searching for genes related to intelligence with about 3,000 participants, and we found almost nothing, he said. Now with 100 times that number of participants, and with more than 200 scientists working together, we have discovered almost 150 genetic regions that are related to how clever people are. Professor Deary stated that the team need to analyse the results in further detail in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how cognitive function declines in old age. The governments digital minister has warned concertgoers not to use ticket reseller Viagogo, as Trading Standards launches an investigation into the company. Digital minister Margot James told BBC Radio 5 Live that fans looking to buy tickets from a secondary site should not choose Viagogo, one of four major ticket reselling firms in the UK, because they are the worst. Meanwhile, National Trading Standards said on Wednesday that it had been in contact with the Advertising Standards Authority in relation to Viagogo. As such we have now launched an investigation into Viagogo, which will look at all legal options to bring them into compliance with the law, a spokesperson for Trading Standards said. Recommended Advertising regulator cracks down on secondary ticketing websites Viagogo has previously been censured by the Advertising Standards Authority for failing to make clear upfront all fees that can be calculated in advance when making price claims, putting it in breach of the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising and Direct & Promotional Marketing, known as the CAP Code. The ASA said it had received complaints about how prices were presented on the Viagogo website, with quoted costs not making clear to consumers that they would be expected to pay additional fees and charges when ordering tickets. The ASA said it contacted Viagogo in March requesting that the company make changes to its website, and the firm said it would make the necessary amendments. However, the ASA added, as of Wednesday, Viagogos website continues to include pricing information that is in breach of the CAP Code and the ASAs ruling. As a result, Viagogo has been placed in the non-compliant advertisers section of the ASAs website. Viagogo has been contacted for comment. The company was not the only firm implicated in the ASAs crackdown earlier this year: StubHub, Seatwave and GetMeIn were also accused of misleading customers about fees and charges when booking tickets. Teachers lose more than a million hours every year teaching children basic hygiene and how to use the toilet, study suggests. A fifth of early years teachers spend up to 30 minutes a week cleaning up youngsters after they have been to the toilet, a report by health and hygiene company Essity has found. This equates to more than a million hours of lost teaching time over the course of an academic year and it costs the education system 11m based on teachers' average salaries. The report based on interviews carried out by YouGov with more than 400 primary school teachers and 500 parents and children suggest hygiene issues are impacting on education. More than half (53 per cent) of teachers are concerned that children not being toilet trained and having an accident in class means time is taken away from others in class. And 46 per cent of children admitted struggling to concentrate due to avoiding the toilet when they need to go. The study found that 44 per cent of children avoid using the toilet at school at some point every week, while 11 per cent do so every day. It found 4.7 million children actively avoid defecating at school. One in 10 primary school teachers said they have seen children not eating or drinking in a bid to avoid using school toilets. The risks of children not going to the toilet when they need to include dehydration, bladder infections and potential bowel and continence problems in later life, the report's authors said. A quarter of primary school teachers and children described the hygiene levels in school toilets as poor or very poor, with a fifth reporting that no checks are made on them during the day James Bowen, director of NAHT Edge union, said: We are concerned about the increasing number of school leaders who are telling us that children are arriving in school unable to use the toilet independently. Whilst there will always be a small number of children who have specific problems and need additional support, this appears to be a growing problem. He added: It is worrying to see the number of children who report avoiding the use of school toilets. There can be lots of reasons young children aren't confident using the toilet at school, but one deterrent can certainly be the hygiene and condition of the facilities. With school budgets under enormous pressure, the reality is that most are finding it increasingly difficult to repair and upgrade such essential facilities. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 5 October 2021 Members of Insulate Britain outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, before a hearing over the injunction banning the environmental activists from blocking the M25 PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2021 A delegate passes a street cleaner on the second day of the annual Conservative Party Conference being held at the Manchester Central convention centre AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2021 Margaret Thatcher-themed mugs for sale at the annual Conservative Party conference in Manchester EPA UK news in pictures 2 October 2021 A couple make their way through a flooded underpass in Bristol as a yellow weather warning for rain and wind is issued for parts of the UK Tom Wren/SWNS UK news in pictures 1 October 2021 A driver talks to members of the media after passing his HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) driving test at National Driving Centre in Croydon, south London AFP via Getty Images 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 Essity will be working with teachers, local authorities and health professionals through its School Hygiene Essentials Initiative to improve toilet hygiene. Kevin Starr, managing director at Essity, said: Schools and local authorities are trying to do their best with limited budgets and resources. Spending more money isn't an option and we don't believe it's the answer either. Our aim in highlighting these issues is to open up a dialogue with schools, parents, health experts and local authorities and work with them, using the collective expertise and experience to identify simple and easily implementable solutions to tackle the issues, with little or no cost to schools. By doing this, we aim to improve health and well-being, reduce absenteeism and increase self-esteem and confidence of children in the UK. Additional Reporting by PA An NHS doctors career is in jeopardy because the Home Office has rejected his application for a visa four times after telling him to leave the country and reapply for a work permit following the breakup of his marriage. Dr Nnaemeka Chidumije has worked in the NHS in Newcastle since 2014 and was training to be a surgeon when he was told he would have to leave the country because his spousal visa had been curtailed. He was advised he would have to go to Nigeria and reapply there for a tier two skilled migrant visa as a new entrant, although he had lived and worked in the UK since 2013. Although he meets the salary and employment requirements that have historically been required for a skilled visa, this threshold has increased and monthly caps on visas have meant he has been rejected each month. As a result he has been unable to complete his final work rotation, as a colorectal surgical registrar in Gateshead, or apply for the next stage of his surgical training. Health Education England (HEE), his employer, can apply for his visa sponsorship in June and July but that was the point his initial training programme was due to finish and after that his position could be in jeopardy. I call Newcastle home, I was married but unfortunately the marriage has broken down which is why Im in this situation (Dr Chidumije) I was anticipating, if things went well, I would just have a gap of two or three weeks but it has dragged on for months. If I dont get sponsorship by July, they cant do anything about it, Dr Chidumije told The Independent over the phone. Nobody knows whats going to happen, I was supposed to be applying for surgical training [speciality training level three] but because my visa was curtailed I wasnt able to attend my interviews. Recommended Majority believe Windrush scandal highlighted deeper immigration woes This comes as the government is embroiled in a row over its immigration policies, following the resignation of the then Home Secretary Amber Rudd amid the departments scandalous deportation of Windrush generation Britons. The situation also follows revelations that hundreds of qualified doctors who have been offered jobs at NHS trusts have been unable to start work because of new immigration rules, however these doctors had not previously been working in the NHS. HEE has informed Dr Chidumije that it had not had these issues with doctors visa sponsorship until this year, and Health and Social Care Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said he backs a special visa for NHS staff. Ive been settled in Newcastle since 2013, Dr Chidumije said. I call Newcastle home, I was married but unfortunately the marriage has broken down which is why Im in this situation as the change of the visa has to be done outside the country. For first-time applicants outside the country, thats where this cap applies. The Home Office says it has not changed its cap rules for Tier Two visas but acknowledges they have become more competitive since November last year. The threshold for a tier two visa used to be around 21 points roughly a salary of 30,000 or more but has been more than double that in the first months of 2018, Dr Chidumije said. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 12 October 2021 The aerial climate installation by Swiss artivist Dan Acher 'We Are Watching' is unveiled at Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2021 A young girl is helped by a Border Force officer as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, following a small boat incident in the Channel. PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2021 People walk past a life-size sculpture of British singer John Lennon entitled "Imagine", by sculptor Lawrence Holofcener, displayed to mark what would have been the 81st birthday for the former member of the Beatles in Carnaby Street Reuters UK news in pictures 8 October 2021 WW II veteran, 96-year-old Lorna Cockayne, who served in the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS), popularly and officially known as the Wrens, as a Bletchley Park codebreaker, poses for a photograph with the Legion d'honneur after receiving it during a ceremony at the Pear at Parley in Ferndown, Bournemouth PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2021 British comedian Jo Brand poses with cut-out silhouettes representing women outside the Metropolitan Police headquarters New Scotland Yard, to highlight violence against women by male police officers or former police officers AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 6 October 2021 A protester, wearing a mask of Johnson, holds a sign reading Question it all on the final day of the Tory conference Getty UK news in pictures 5 October 2021 Members of Insulate Britain outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, before a hearing over the injunction banning the environmental activists from blocking the M25 PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2021 A delegate passes a street cleaner on the second day of the annual Conservative Party Conference being held at the Manchester Central convention centre AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2021 Margaret Thatcher-themed mugs for sale at the annual Conservative Party conference in Manchester EPA UK news in pictures 2 October 2021 A couple make their way through a flooded underpass in Bristol as a yellow weather warning for rain and wind is issued for parts of the UK Tom Wren/SWNS UK news in pictures 1 October 2021 A driver talks to members of the media after passing his HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) driving test at National Driving Centre in Croydon, south London AFP via Getty Images 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 His colleagues from the training programme in the North East have written to Gateshead MP Ian Mearns to condemn the waste of Dr Chidumijes talents in an understaffed NHS. Our immigration policy has failed to recognise the contribution of this exceptional individual to the NHS and his potential to greatly benefit this country in the future, they write. A separate letter from The Doctors Association UK, which has been supporting his appeal, has been sent to Prime Minister Theresa May calling for her intervention. A Home Office spokesperson said: "The Government fully recognises the contribution that international professionals make to the UK and to our health service. However, it is important that our immigration system works in the national interest, ensuring that employers look first to the UK resident labour market before recruiting from overseas. "When demand exceeds the monthly available allocation of Tier Two places, priority is given to applicants filling a shortage or PhD-level occupations." It estimates a third of all all Tier Two visas go to the NHS. Two ships, two missions, two follies, two groundings, two sinkings and two frightful disasters. One was so long ago that engraving had to do the job of photography; the other was recent enough that some people alive today will have heard about it from their parents. In one, a foreign ship came to grief in British waters; in the other, a British vessel went down in foreign waters, and down she stayed. First to Texel, safe haven, population 13,500: the largest of the West Frisian Islands off the coast of the Netherlands in the Wadden Sea. Today it is a magnet for Dutch cyclists, walkers, swimmers and riders (the latter an important reminder that Texel is the only known place where an entire navy was defeated by men on horseback, which is another tale altogether). In June 1743, a 700 ton vessel, VOC Hollandia, set sail on her maiden voyage bound for Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, now known as Jakarta. In any study of trade between Europe and Asia throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch East India Company is pivotal, shipping everything from nutmegs and cinnamon to coffee and tobacco, porcelain to rubber. And that is what VOC stands for: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie. Yet on this prestigious occasion, Hollandia, being of brand new and bold design, an impressive 42 metres in length, was carrying a particularly special cargo: not only many VIP passengers but also 130,000 coins. Most were pillar-dollars, cut to represent smaller denominations, but among the haul were also highly valuable Mexican and Guatemalan silver coins. Hollandias captain must have been nervous therefore, as he headed for Brittany through rough seas. Perhaps he was aware too that just 36 years before, in 1707, at least 1,550 men had perished in the same waters, haplessly drifting towards the Scillies aboard four Royal Navy warships: the Firebrand, the Romney, the Association and the Eagle. (Indeed, square mile for square mile, the treacherous Scillies are probably responsible for more of the worlds estimated 159,000 shipwrecks than anywhere else.) Remember, these were the days before the invention of reliable navigation instruments; still before the erection of most lighthouses. Texel is now a popular tourist venue (Sara Winter / Shutterstock) Sure enough, like those earlier ships, the Hollandia was blown off course, scarcely six weeks after setting sail, on a blustery 13 July. And it too came to grief off the Isles of Scilly, striking the notorious Gunner Rock, going down just off Annet, an uninhabited nature reserve just 54 acres in size, 20 miles from the Cornish coast. Nobody lived to tell the tale. Miraculously, in 1971 a London attorney called Rex Cowan discovered the Hollandias wreck, along with its bronze cannons and some of its treasure. Unusually, he was using a proton magnetometer, allowing him to test the Earths field of magnetic resonance, which in the process reveals every slight variation across that field including ferrous objects embedded in land or sea. However, it is now time to turn to the anniversary of a sinking far further away and to consider the watery grave awaiting an equally emblematic vessel. This was a calamity that was far more preventable. Many boats have come a cropper in the waters around the Scilly Isles (iStock) State of the art flagship and battleship, the HMS Victoria named in named in honour of the Queens impending Golden Jubilee in 1886 was launched at a cost of 845 from Elswick on the Tyne. When she headed for the Mediterranean in June 1893 for training exercises, she had already endured one major mishap a grounding at Platea, off the Greek coast, with Captain Maurice Archibald Bourke having permitted members of his crew to misplace the buoys that might have saved him from some very shallow waters. On that first cataclysmic day, 29 January 1892, no full tide indeed nothing at all would get the extraordinarily long (100 metres), extraordinarily heavy (11,200 tons) Victoria afloat again. Jettisoning 483 tons of coal, and calling for a tow from three other Royal Navy frigates, somehow the Victoria its bottom damaged, three of its compartments seriously damaged resumed its voyage on 4 February, limping into the new Hamilton Dock, Malta, for repairs. Bourke, despite being severely censured, retained his command. HMS Victoria in dock, prior to completion At the dawn of a second catastrophic day, 22 June 1893, Bourke and his contemporaries, among them Captain Jenkins on the Collingwood and Captain Markham on the Camperdown, were lined up like tin soldiers ready for an experimental manoeuvre a very tight one at that. It was their misfortune to be in the hands of Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon, Commander of the British Mediterranean fleet: an obstinate, overbearing man with some very peculiar traits and strategies. Tryon was deliberately taciturn and unapproachable the better, he thought, to assert the superiority of his rank. The better too to outdo inferior French and Italian navies also cruising the vital Mediterranean; and the better to force his officers to think on their feet. Inexplicably and at a time when signalling remained primitive, based as it was on a mixture of flags, semaphores and lamps Tryon wanted the two columns of his fleet to turn, uniformly, a full 180 degrees, first towards each other then (so the theory went) retracing their prior course. His 11 Captains with Tryon himself menacingly aboard the Victoria were to do this whilst positioned a mere 1,100 or 1,200 metres from each other, even though a gap of 1,800-2,200 metres might have been considered a safe bare minimum. Markham hesitated. Surely Tryon had confused radii for diameters? Surely he had issued the sort of order likely to be revoked any minute? Perhaps Tryon really intended the convoy to turn 60 degrees to port, then 60 degrees to starboard, before resuming its original course? Tryon however, was getting impatient. Fearing humiliation his colleagues also hesitant to defy their esteemed commander Markham aboard the Camperdown conceded, swinging towards the fated Victoria, despite believing he cannot avoid hitting her. Even so, the Victoria built before the installation of automatic bulkhead doors has many proven stabilisers. Perhaps Bourke is a more gifted captain than he has previously demonstrated? At the last, both lead vessels went straight into reverse thrust. But it was all too late. Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon was a difficult man insofar as his junior colleagues were concerned The toughened steel ram of the Camperdown tore 9 feet into the side of the Victoria, a full 12 feet below its waterline. After two minutes the two vessels disengage; but the Victoria lists, her many gun hatches and portholes taking in floods of swirling water. Three minutes later, her bow dips but an unrelenting Tryon demands any rescue boats return to their respective ships. Now he commands the leaking Victoria to head straight for the shores of Tripoli, five miles distant. After all, the Victorias engines are still running, many men below deck unharmed. Maybe Tryon trusts that the watertight doors are still closed, so trapping many hands not already flushed into the ocean. Rapidly though, certainly by collision plus eight minutes, the whole of the Victorias bow is submerged, its stern far out of true, propellers turning in open air. At last, but way too late, Tryon yells: Abandon ship! Everyone for himself! Five minutes on, the top deck goes under. Loosened boilers explode. Everything remotely portable bounces into the already hazardous surrounding ocean. Two men on board refuse to jump ship: Reverend SD Morris, the chaplain on duty in the sick bay, who folds his arms across his chest, closes his eyes and says a final prayer; and Tryon himself, in time honoured tradition, going down on his watch, muttering: this is entirely my doing, entirely my fault. HMS Victoria disappears beneath the Mediterraneans surface (Alamy) Bourke fitter and quicker than his superior does, with great difficulty, make his escape. A distinguished fellow-escapee is the fevered John Jellicoe, one day himself to be promoted to commander-in-chief of the British Grand Fleet and dispatched to confront a detachment of the German navy off Jutland. Staff Commander Thomas Hawkins-Smith, one of Tryons most vocal critics, also survives by clinging on to rigging. In total, 358 of Victorias complement perished, coincidentally the same number as those believed to have been saved. Six bodies only were taken ashore, along with 173 men injured during the tumult. Jenkins on the Collingwood unarguably rescued more people than any other captain on duty mainly due to his not recalling his lifeboats. The stricken Camperdown, despite taking 90 minutes to effect partial water resistance, partial stability, somehow managed to keep going, battered, but without loss of life. Back in England, reliable news was scarce. Only Markhams telegram listing 22 surviving officers was to hand and so thousands of anxious friends and relatives milled round the Admiralty. Anger and sorrow rapidly give way to philanthropy. Within three weeks, a remarkable distress fund of 50,000 was raised for Victoria widows and orphans the equivalent of more than 5m today. John Jellicoe survived HMS Victorias sinking and went on to become Commander-in-Chief of the British Grand Fleet Debates raged about whether there should be a public inquiry into the disaster; some argued that would hand too many secrets of British seamanship to her enemies. A court martial was opened Bourkes second with reporters allowed to witness some of the proceedings. Bourke requested that any captain sistering the Victoria was exempted as a judge. In the dock, Bourke kept referring to navy ships as if they were on a highway, obeying rules of the road. But the very concept of obedience troubled the chief investigator, Sir Michael Culme-Seymour a safe pair of hands throughout his deliberations. It appeared to be common ground that Markham on the Camperdown should have followed his first instinct and aborted the manoeuvre. But then, had there not been a collision, Markham would have been hauled over the coals for insubordination.Tryon actually gave his orders in person; ignoring them was extremely difficult, however foolish and foolhardy they were. HMS Camperdown was commissioned at Portsmouth in 1889 Culme-Seymour himself had to walk a tightrope: avoiding any hint at a precedent for altering (let alone ignoring) instructions from above. Tryons mental health was queried. Perhaps he was suffering from a brain disease, dementia, when he sent the Victoria to its doom? In the end, Bourke came out best, his reputation undiminished. Markham, meanwhile, was censured almost as much as his flag captain, Charles Johnstone. Both could have acted differently at different stages in the unfolding catastrophe. Markham was stripped of his command, his pay halved, and relegated to minor duties. He died early, aged 65, in 1906. Crucially, Tryons philosophy of seamanship was abandoned, history not permitted to be kind to his memory. Of the engaged fleet formation only a repaired Camperdown was still being tossed by high seas in 1898. Like the Hollandia, the Victorias wreckage lay undiscovered for a long time. Not until 111 years and two months later, on 22 August 2004, was the ship found, by Austrian-Lebanese diver Christian Francis, assisted by British explorer Mark Ellyatt. It was positioned almost vertically, 140 metres below their search vessel. They concluded that a full 30 metres of the Victorias bow had buried itself in the seabed. Our fascination with the ocean is ceaseless (PA) Three intriguing footnotes to the sinking of the Victoria continue to tantalise. First, it has long been the legend that, at the very moment of inevitable collision between the Victoria and the Camperdown, Mrs Tryon was hosting a party in her London mansion, when Commander Tryon himself, but ghostlike, descended the staircase to join festivities. Second, one of Tryons hobbies was collecting memorabilia connected to his hero, Horatio Nelson. In 2012, Ellyat temporarily retrieved Nelsons sword from Tryons cabin but, unsure what to do with this precious artefact, he hid the discovery in a different part of the wreck where it abides till this day. Third, is the very title Victoria fated? After all, it was the MV Princess Victoria, a British Railways roll-on, roll-off ferry that sank on its passage from Larne to Stranraer, on 31 January 1953, costing 133 lives (at the start of the weekend of the great Lincolnshire floods, which left many people drowned across East Anglia and the Low Countries). And barely six weeks after that terrible storm, a reordered SS Victoria also sank, this time striking rocks just as the Hollandia did. Why, though, recognise the anniversary of any ships demise when there are no living survivors and nothing to add to any inquest? Well, the lure of the sea still captivates and enchants even the most landlocked of the general population. Despite all its dangers because of all its dangers the sea is where many of us are most alive. Three men who ran a dark web drugs business face jail after admitting posting deadly fentanyl around the world. Jake Levene, 22, Lee Childs, 45, and Mandy Christopher Lowther, 21, ran their UKBargins [sic] page during a spike in global deaths caused by the deadly opioid. As well as fentanyl, which is estimated to be up to 50 times stronger than heroin, the gang offered buyers its even more potent analogue carfentanyl. Both drugs have been linked to at least 125 deaths in the UK in under 18 months. Lowther was put into a coma by exposure to the drug earlier last year, but recovered to continue the lucrative online trade with his conspirators. They made almost 165,000 in just five months from December 2016 by mixing the drugs with bulking agents and sending them to customers in the UK, US, Germany, Norway, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Canada, France, Singapore, Holland and Spain. The UKBargins gang sold 2,853 items to 443 people worldwide, including 172 in Britain, during the period. Six of their customers are known to have died from fentanyl-related deaths, although investigators said they could not be certain that the fatal dose in each case had been supplied by Levene, Childs and Lowther. Jake Levene, of Turner Close, Wakefield, controlled the drug packaging premises (NCA) The trio ran their operation from an industrial unit in Morley, Leeds, where police later uncovered fentanyl, containers of chemicals, funnels, mixing bowls, scales and other equipment. Officers also discovered 677g of pure carfentanyl, which equates to millions of lethal doses. The National Crime Agency (NCA) said Levene, of Turner Close in Wakefield, controlled the unit with Lowther, of Cottingley Springs in Morley, while Childs, of Bedale Court in Morley, was responsible for packaging and posting the drugs to customers. He was captured on CCTV sending hundreds of drug packages from a local post office. Levene and Childs previously admitted exporting and supplying class A drugs and Lowther admitted the same charges on Tuesday at Leeds Crown Court. All three defendants will return to the same court for sentencing on 7 September. The trio were arrested in April 2017 after NCA officers and West Yorkshire Police raided their drugs facility, finding heavy duty gloves and two respirator masks. The protective equipment was worn by the men to protect themselves while mixing and packaging the drugs, but Lowther was put in a coma by exposure to fentanyl in February 2017. He was admitted to intensive care in Leeds and diagnosed with a hypoxic brain injury, but recovered and continued drug dealing. A laptop in the unit showed the UKBargins site within AlphaBay dark web market, which was shut down in an international operation involving the NCA last July. Mandy Lowther, of Cottingley Springs, Morley, Leeds, controlled the drug packaging facility (NCA) AlphaBay was known for selling drugs, weapons and illegal goods and services to buyers using the anonymous Tor network in an attempt to disguise their identity and location. Their website ran the message: Welcome to UKBargins. Our products & their purity: Carfentanil 99%. Butyr-Fenanyl 98%. Furanyl-Fentanyl 98%. 4-Fluroisobutyrfentanyl 98%. U-47700 99%. We also have a Fentanyl HCL /// Manitol Mix & Furanyl-Fentany/// Mannitol Mix. I WILL NOT GIVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT FENTANYL OR ITS ANALOGUES AS THE CUSTOMER SHOULD ALREADY OF RESERACHED THESE CHEMICALS BEFORE EVEN CONTEMPLATING USING THEM AS THEY ARE EXTREMELY DANGEROUS & LETHAL IN THE WRONG HANDS. Among the evidence against the dealers was a to-do list in Levenes car which reminded him to find new CF supplier, while text messages showed him and Lowther arguing about the workload of packaging up drugs. Greg McKenna, regional head of investigations at the NCA, said: This operation has resulted in the closure of an organised crime group sending horrifically dangerous drugs across the world, and the jailing of the men behind it. They knew exactly how lethal the drugs were but continued to sell them. We have taken out a main supplier but the threat from synthetic opioids remains and we will continue to respond to this UK-wide threat with our law enforcement partners. Detective Superintendent Pat Twiggs, of West Yorkshire Police, said the force was working with partners to prevent further harm to drug users. 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 That work coupled with a variety of law enforcement activity has greatly reduced the fatalities we are seeing linked to these drugs, he added. But the problem is still very real and we need the community to come forward with information to help us. If we know about it we will take action. Authorities have been intensifying operations against the fentanyl trade in the wake of a series of global deaths among users either taking the drug deliberately, or unwittingly after it is mixed with heroin. In February, Newport-based dark web dealer Kyle Enos was jailed for eight years for supplying fentanyl and last year two men were for conspiring to import the class A drugs. Earlier this month, the Global Drug Survey revealed that the UK is among the world's biggest buyers of drugs on the dark web, where illicit trade continues to grow. As little as 0.002g of fentanyl, which has a legitimate medical use as a painkiller, is fatal and it has a number of analogues with varying potency. Carfentanyl can be lethal in a dosage of 0.00002g, the equivalent of a few grains within a typical heroin deal, and is not intended for human use. Illicit supply from Chinese manufacturers and distributors constitutes a prime source for both synthetic opioids and the precursor chemicals used to manufacture them, although blending is difficult and dangerous. Most fentanyl-related deaths in the UK occurred before mid-2017 and were concentrated in Yorkshire and the Humber, but 31 police forces have reported fatalities. Remarkable unpublished evidence has revealed that in the final year of the First World War Britain attempted to kill Germanys leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II. The secret mission failed but only just. The evidence largely unpublished documentation in the RAF Museums archives and documents in a private archive in France show that exactly 100 years ago this Saturday, a squadron of 12 bombers took off from an airfield near Boulogne to bomb a French chateau which, intelligence work had revealed, was being used by the Kaiser as his secret Western Front operational residence. The full story partly revealed in a new book just published started in late March 1918 when the German army launched the first of a series of major new offensives against the Allies. The massive attacks were initially successful but nevertheless some German soldiers were captured by the Allies. Some of these German PoWs were interrogated by French Intelligence and one of them revealed to his interrogators that the Kaiser had just taken up residence at a chateau immediately outside a small French village called Trelon, three miles from the Belgian frontier. By coincidence, one of the intelligence sections interpreters on the staff of the famous French general, Philippe Petain, was the owner of that chateau. In mid April 1918 he was given the job of interrogating the German prisoner-of-war in more detail and, by using local knowledge, to check the veracity of the revelation. This interrogator (a French officer named Frederic de Merode) and his commanding officer then went to tell Petain what they had discovered. At some stage probably in May and presumably in conjunction with the British an "in principle" decision was taken to bomb the chateau. Indeed, De Merode (the chateau owner) was asked by the French military to give them permission to bomb the building. Patriotically, he agreed. German sources reveal that the Kaiser stayed there on at least three occasions from 21 March to 2 April; from 5 April to 15 April; from mid May to 1 June and possibly from around 26 April to around 1 May. A dozen RAF De Havilland-4 bombers dropped bombs on the Kaisers secret Western Front residence (Detroit Public Library) It may well be that British intelligence wanted to learn further details before any final political or military green light could be given to try to kill the Kaiser. After all, they would probably only get one opportunity. If it failed, he would nevertheless realise that the Allies knew exactly where he was living and he would therefore promptly change his Western Front operational residence. British intelligence officers in Amsterdam in neutral Holland had frequent contact with an underground espionage network in German-occupied Belgium and northern France called La Dame Blanche (The White Lady). It is known that the LDB had agents in the Trelon area so it is likely that further information on the Kaisers movements was passed on (via Amsterdam) to British intelligence HQ in London. However, there was always a time delay so information was always slightly out of date. At the same time that the Allies discovered the precise location of the Kaiser (and more importantly realised that he was within bombing range), the German Spring offensive was giving British and French forces a terrible battering. The Germans were succeeding in pushing the Allies back more than 40 miles. Whats more, in late May, at the battle of Chemin des Dames, the Germans captured 45,000 Allied troops and 400 field guns. For the Allies, it was a catastrophe. At that stage, even in late Spring, 1918, they must have feared that the Germans might even win the war. Chateau owner Frederic de Merode gave permission for the building to be bombed (Les Meloures) So, it was in those dire circumstances that the French and the British appear to have finally decided to try to kill the German emperor. Having taken off from Ruisseauville Airfield (near Boulogne-sur-Mer) at 4.50am on Sunday 2 June, 12 RAF De Havilland-4 bombers reached the Kaisers secret Western Front residence at Trelon at 5:25am. They dropped up to a dozen 50kg bombs and up to 24 11kg ones. However, unbeknown to British Intelligence, the same German military successes that had probably triggered the bid to kill Kaiser Wilhelm, had also led him to leave the chateau to congratulate his generals at the front. As a result, he had left his Western Front operational residence 19 hours before the RAF struck. Whats more, the British aircraft chose to attack at an altitude of only 500 feet and to do so in single file. As a result the smoke from the initial few bombs billowed skywards and prevented many of the succeeding pilots from seeing their target. No longer unknown: Stories behind portraits of First World War soldiers are revealed Show all 4 1 /4 No longer unknown: Stories behind portraits of First World War soldiers are revealed No longer unknown: Stories behind portraits of First World War soldiers are revealed 435898.bin No longer unknown: Stories behind portraits of First World War soldiers are revealed 435899.bin No longer unknown: Stories behind portraits of First World War soldiers are revealed 435900.bin GETTY IMAGES No longer unknown: Stories behind portraits of First World War soldiers are revealed 435901.bin The chateau itself therefore remained largely unscathed although the Imperial cars parked in front of the building were destroyed, their petrol filled tanks and rubber tyres no doubt contributing to the, in this case quite literal, fog of war. However, as the bombing raid unfolded, one of the emperors Imperial trains was heading at high speed along the private railway line that led to the chateaus private station. The British aircraft succeeded in pumping 800 rounds of machine gun fire into its five carriages. Its likely that a number of people on that train were killed and injured. But the Kaiser was relatively safe and sound 25 miles away. But ironically he was not in a good mood. For by the time he had reached the front, the German advance had finally been repulsed. Covered in dust, he confided to his aides just how disappointed and downcast he felt. Bizarrely, it seems that even four days after the RAF attempt to kill him, nobody had informed him or his aides about the raid on his secret Western Front residence. Indeed, the diary of a senior adviser, records a discussion in which they reflected on how dangerous it was where they were (by the side of a large ammunition store) and how it would be better to return to the safety of the chateau. In the end, however, they just moved a few miles away. Its almost certain that the Kaiser must have learned about the raid shortly after that move for a senior aides diary indicates that he never again returned to the chateau at Trelon. Now that the Allies knew he had been staying there, it had obviously become a potentially very dangerous place for him to base himself. The attack has remained largely unknown since it took place exactly 100 years ago. The British and the French obviously did not want to tell the world about a failed mission and, of course, the Germans did not want to advertise the fact that their emperor was still alive due only to good luck. Giant scrap metal soldier built to commemorate those who died in the First World War Knowledge of some aspects of the attack lived on in and around the village of Trelon and in the memories of the descendants of some of those pilots and others involved. But it does not feature in any major published works on First World War history or on the early days of the RAF. The author of the book, The Kaisers Dawn, due for release this weekend, found out about the secret raid from the grandson of one of the RAF pilots. As president of the Guild of Battlefield Guides, I was leading a tour of the Western Front and became aware of some unpublished First World War RAF documents. I was astonished. I had stumbled across an historically important treasure trove that revealed secrets which have been largely hidden for a hundred years, said writer, military historian John Hughes-Wilson, a retired colonel in British Intelligence. But there are still three major mysteries surrounding the attack. Trying to assassinate your enemys head of state, especially a royal one who was the British kings first cousin, was to put it mildly, a very serious, sensitive and potentially controversial matter. So who was it in Britain who actually authorised the attack? Its very likely that the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, would have had to authorise the mission, especially as it involved the RAF. But there is no proof that he did so, or even that he knew about it beforehand. Deliberately trying to kill an enemy head of state was a very rare event in history it is not the sort of thing civilised governments were supposed to do. After all, it was an accusation of state complicity in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand not even of a head of state that had triggered the war in the first place. Certainly there is no evidence that Britain ever tried to assassinate a major enemys head of state in the many wars of the 18th century, in the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century or even in the Second World War. Indeed, the only British plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler was, in the end, vetoed by Britains prime minister, Winston Churchill. The raid on Trelon in 1918 is therefore potentially unique and an aberration from normal political and military convention. The second mystery is the timing of the raid. Was it triggered by German military success in March, April and May 1918. Was it therefore an act of Allied desperation? Or had it, in principle, been envisaged long before only to be carried out when appropriate intelligence information came to light? But the third mystery is a more mundane tactical one but in a sense equally interesting. Why did the RAF attack in single file, when they might have been expected to realise that smoke would risk compromising a low level single file approach? Recommended This simple summerhouse near Berlin hides the most incredible story The chateau still stands and is today a popular local tourist attraction. Remarkably, many of the key documents relating to the secret raid including RAF pilots logbooks, a hand-drawn map of the target area and the original French Intelligence report have survived unpublished in British and French archives. This is a sensational revelation and one can only wonder how world opinion would have reacted if the raid had been successful. In Germany it might well have turned the increasingly unpopular Kaiser into a martyred war hero and so perhaps even have saved the monarchy from collapse less than six months later, providing the defeated nation with an element of stability in an otherwise revolutionary situation full of future menace, said the worlds leading expert on Kaiser Wilhelm II, Professor John Rohl of the University of Sussex. John Watts, the grandson of one of the RAF airmen involved in the raid, believes that much more information on the raid must still exist in as yet un-studied files in archives in Britain, France and possibly Germany. My grandfathers role was always part of family folklore. The remarkable new details now emerging from sources in northern France and RAF files is at last beginning to reveal what really happened, said Mr Watts, a West Midlands military history enthusiast. The Kaisers Dawn: the untold story of Britains secret mission to murder the Kaiser in 1918 by John Hughes-Wilson (Unicorn Publishing) The inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire has been halted after a woman collapsed on the final day of tributes to the 72 victims of the fire. The woman was moaning as she was helped by officials in the main conference room at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel in London, where commemorative hearings are being held. Paramedics also ran in to help. All men were then asked to leave the room to give her privacy. Proceedings were paused for around half an hour, and second counsel to the inquiry Bernard Richmond QC told attendees the woman had been taken into a side room. The woman, believed to be a relative of the Choucair family, collapsed as Nabil Choucair paid tribute to six members of his family who died in the fire. Mr Choucair lost his mother, Sirria, 60, his sister Nadia, 33, her husband Bassem, 40, and their children Mierna, 13, Fatima, 11, and Zainab, three, in the fire in west London on the night of 14 June. His sister's flat was on the 22nd floor of the tower block. Survivors have this week told the inquiry of their anger at the fire brigades advice to stay inside, which discouraged many families from fleeing the flames and smoke. The first two weeks of the inquiry, led by retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick, were given over to hearing tributes from relatives to those who died. Next, the hearing will examine the circumstances leading up to and surrounding the fire. A disabled woman who lived on the 18th floor of Grenfell Tower was deprived of her human right to escape, her daughter has told an inquiry into the fire which killed her. Tributes were paid to Sakineh Afrasiabi, 65, on Wednesday, which was the final day of commemorative hearings to the 72 victims of the blaze Grief overcame one bereaved woman who collapsed in the afternoon and the inquiry was stopped briefly while she received medical attention. Earlier, Ms Afrasiabis daughter, Nazanin Aghlani, had told the inquiry the housing department at Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) was partly to blame for her mothers death. She said the council agreed in 2003 the vulnerable, physically disabled and partially sighted pensioner should not live in a high-rise building. Despite the requests of her family, it later placed her near the top of 24-storey block and threatened to remove her from the council housing list if she refused the offer, the inquiry heard. The RBKC housing department formally recognised and stated that due to my mums disability and deteriorating health she should not be housed in a lifted property above the fourth floor, Ms Aghlani said. I emphasise that was in 2003. Fourth floor, because that was her human right to escape, the right every single person should have. After being refused many suitable properties, after 16 years of waiting, she was rehoused in 2016 into flat 151 on the 18th floor of Grenfell Tower. By this point, my mum was partially sighted and could only get around with the aid of a tri-walker. She added: The move to Grenfell was out of desperation and pressure from the council. She was to take Grenfell Tower or to be suspended from the allocations for one year. She was very upset by the new place, she hated it . Ms Afrasiabi died alongside her sister Fatemah Afrasiabi, 59, who was visiting from Iran when the tower block was consumed by fire. But Fatemahs grieving husband was forced to issue a statement via his son Mohammed Samimi after his visa application was rejected. The Home Offices refusal to let him into the country also means he has been unable to visit his wifes grave, Mr Samimi said. I wanted to take this opportunity to remember my father, who could not come to the UK, he told the inquiry. His visa application was refused, and he says that I am spending my days and nights by the thought of my children and I want to be able to visit my wifes grave. The Independent reported last week that bereaved family members who were set to be core participants of the inquiry were still awaiting permission to enter the UK. They included Karim Khalloufi, whose elder sister Khadija Khalloufi died in the fire. He had hoped to read out a pen portrait tribute to her on Wednesday but was unable to attend following delays to his visa application. Mr Khalloufi waited months to hear back from immigration officials after applying in December for a visa, which was eventually granted last week shortly after The Independent approached the Home Office. He did finally obtain a visa to travel, however then there were related difficulties in securing support with accommodation and related problems, said his solicitor Balvinder Gill. He is very, very upset that he cannot be here. He prepared the pen portrait, he wanted to present it on behalf of his sister. There is no other family here in the UK who could read it out on his behalf. Khadija Khalloufi, 52, died in Grenfell Tower (Met Police) In a statement read out by the lawyer, Mr Khalloufi said: Today it is nearly five months since I and my mother applied for a visa to the UK. We had been led to believe that we could be in London for the inquiry, but now does not seem to be the case. No one seems to care about our history or relationship to this case, or to care about our pain, our heartache or our desire for answers. I am now at a loss as to what I can do to defend my familys rights in this case and to represent my sister, who seems to have no representation. Mr Khalloufi said his older sister was like a mother to him and his siblings and left a void in their home when she moved from Morocco to London. She lived with her husband of 27 years, Sabah Abdullah, on Grenfells 17thfloor and loved cooking and sharing food with her neighbours and friends. The morning after the fire, Mr Khalloufi called calling his sister repeatedly, trying my hardest to get through but to no avail, he said. A friend in the UK told him her husband had been found alive, which raised his hopes that his sister had also survived the blaze. But the next day her body recovered. She was there for us whenever we needed her but none of us could help her escape the fire on 14 June, 2017, Mr Khalloufi said. You cannot imagine the helplessness and pain when you are far away and no one is telling you what happened and why. In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Show all 51 1 /51 In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Police have released images from inside the tower where at least 58 people have died Metropolitan Police In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A still from a video shared by polices what appears to be a stationary bicycle sitting among the ashes In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A still from a video shared by police shows the remnants of a burnt-out bathroom In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Picture showing the lifts on an unknown floor Metropolitan Police In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Emergency crews outside the front entrance to the tower Metropolitan Police In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Fire crews inspecting flats in the burnt out tower London Metropolitan Police In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Grenfell Tower is seen in the distance PA In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A drone flies near the scene of the fire which destroyed the Grenfell Tower block REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire 'Theresa May Stay Away' message written on the messages of support at Latymer Community Church for those affected by the fire Ray Tang/REX In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire An aerial view of the area surrounding Grenfall tower Getty In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Donated shoes sit in the Westway Sports Centre near to the site of the Grenfell Tower fire Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Messages of support for those affected by the massive fire in Grenfell Tower are displayed on a well near the tower in London AP In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A local resident stands on her balcony by the gutted Grenfell Tower in Latimer Road Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Messages of condolence are left at a relief centre close to the scene of the fire that broke out at Grenfell Tower, EPA In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A police officer stands by a security cordon outside Latimer Road station Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Firemen examine the scorched facade of the Grenfell Tower in London on a huge ladder AP In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A search dog is led through the rubble of the Grenfell Tower in London as firefighting continue to damp-down the deadly fire AP In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn comforts a local resident (name not given) at St Clement's Church in west London where volunteers have provided shelter and support for people affected by the fire at Grenfell Tower David Mirzoeff/PA In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn hugs councillor Mushtaq Lasharie as he arrives at St Clement's Church in Latimer Road, where volunteers have provided shelter and support for people affected by the fire at Grenfell Tower Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn meeting staff and volunteers at St Clementis Church in Latimer Road David Mirzoeff/PA In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Firefighters with a dog walk around the base of the Grenfell Tower REUTERS/Peter Nicholls In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Emotions run high as people attend a candle lit vigil outside Notting Hill Methodist Church near the 24 storey residential Grenfell Tower block in Latimer Road, West London Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Debris hangs from the blackened exterior of Grenfell Tower Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A woman speaks to Mayor of London Sadiq Khan outside Notting Hill Methodist Church near Grenfell Tower in west London after a fire engulfed the 24-storey building Yui Mok/PA Wire In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A woman holds a missing person posters near the Grenfell Tower block REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Sadiq Khan speaking with a resident James Gourley/REX In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Ken Livingstone walks near the scene of the Grenfell Tower fire Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Mayor of London Sadiq Khan is confronted by Kai Ramos, 7, near Grenfell Tower in west London after a fire engulfed the 24-storey building Yui Mok/PA Wire In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Mayor of London Sadiq Khan speaks to a woman outside Notting Hill Methodist Church near Grenfell Tower Yui Mok/PA Wire In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Volunteers distribute aid near Grenfell Tower Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Family and friends of missing Jessica Urbano, 12, wearing photographs of Jessica pinned to their t-shirts gather near Grenfell Tower EPA In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Family and friends of missing Jessica Urbano, 12, wearing photographs of Jessica pinned to their t-shirts gather near Grenfell Tower EPA In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Family and friends of missing Jessica Urbano, 12, wearing photographs of Jessica pinned to their t-shirts gather near Grenfell Tower EPA In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire People attend a vigil at Notting Hill Methodist Church near Grenfell Tower Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire People gather to observe a vigil outside St Clement's Church following the blaze at Grenfell Tower Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire People light candles as they observe a vigil outside St Clement's Church following the blaze at Grenfell Tower Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire People attend a vigil at Notting Hill Methodist Church near Grenfell Tower Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A man distributes food from the back of a van near the scene of the fire which destroyed the Grenfell Tower block REUTERS/Paul Hackett In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A firefighter is cheered near the scene of the fire which destroyed the Grenfell Tower block REUTERS/Paul Hackett In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A T-shirt with a written message from the London Fire Brigade hangs from a fence near The Grenfell Tower block REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A young girl on her way to lay flowers near Grenfell Tower Getty Images In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire The remains of residential tower block Grenfell Tower are seen from Dixon House a nearby tower block Getty In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Volunteers prepare supplies for people affected by the Grenfell Tower block which was destroyed in a fire REUTERS/Neil Hall In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Volunteers move a car to make space for a lorry picking up supplies for people affected by the Grenfell Tower block REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire People distribute boxes of food near the scene of the fire which destroyed the Grenfell Tower bloc REUTERS/Paul Hackett In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A woman touches a missing poster for 12-year-old Jessica Urbano on a tribute wall after laying flowers on the side of Latymer Community Church next to the fire-gutted Grenfell Tower AP In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire A man looks at messages written on a wall near the scene of the fire which destroyed the Grenfell Tower block REUTERS/Paul Hackett In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Candles and messages of condolence near where the fire broke out at Grenfell Tower EPA In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Police carry a stretcher towards Grenfell Tower Rick Findler/PA Wire In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Emergency services at Grenfell Tower Rick Findler/PA Wire In Pictures: Grenfell Tower after the fire Police carry out a body from Grenfell Tower in west London after a fire engulfed the 24-storey building Rick Findler/PA Wire The inquiry also heard on Wednesday from the family of a hero grandfather who sheltered six people in his top-floor flat as flames tore through the tower. Raymond Moses Bernard gave refuge to families trying to escape the inferno as it consumed the block. The 63-year-old electrician, who worked at historic sites including the Westminster Parliamentary estate and Buckingham Palace, died along with his dog Marley. My beloved Ray was my modern-day Moses, my hero, said his sister Bernadette Bernard. Ray always had a smile on his face. He knew how to love without expecting anything in return. Mr Bernard had lived in Grenfell Tower for more than 30 years after moving to London from Trinidad in 1969. On that fateful night, seven individuals were located in Rays flat, his sister said. As there was no way down to escape, the only alternative was to head towards the top floor.There they met Ray and took refuge in his flat. Raymond Bernard sheltered neighhours in his flat (PA) His neighbours bodies were found on Mr Bernards bed, while he was on the floor. This shows the respect he gave to those who lost their lives that night and we know that he would have given comfort to each of them before they took their last breaths and departed this world, his sister told the inquiry. Ray being a man and the strongest he was probably the last to die. He would have been so alone. We know from the details shared by the coroner that Ray was a hero on that tragic night. The inquiry also heard from the father of Farah Hamdan, 31, who died in Grenfell Tower along with her husband Omar Belkadi, 32, and daughters Malak Belkadi, eight, and Leena Belkadi, aged six months. Ms Hamdan was found dead with her baby in her arms between the 19th and 20th floors, where her family lived. Hamdan El Alami, speaking through an interpreter, broke down as he described seeing his daughters family for the last time. I did not know that that night was the night when they will die, he said. Death has separated us, and they left me torn into pieces. Omar Belkadi and Farah Hamdan died alongside their daughters (PA) The husband of Isra Ibrahim, 33, who died on the 23rd floor of the tower, also delivered a tribute on Wednesday. Said Essaouini said his wife had probably stayed behind to help her mother and brother, who also died. I believe she could have escaped the fire if she wanted to but she didnt want to leave her mother, he said, adding he had visited her grave for two hours each week. I will never find no-one like her, never ever, ever a woman like Isra again, said Mr Essaouini. I am ripped up to pieces. I feel like I lost my world. At the close of the final day, second counsel to the inquiry, Bernard Richmond QC, read each of the victims names aloud before asking those present to observe a 72-second silence. Mr Richmond told the room the commemorative hearing was about recognising that their lives are not defined by the manner of their death, however terrible. He continued: They were each unique and special with their own individual history, be it long or short, people who loved their lives and those with whom they lived it, people with hopes, dreams, problems, likes, dislikes, friends and maybe enemies. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan was among those in the audience, following criticism that politicians had been largely absent from the inquiry. The tributes took place at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel in South Kensington ahead of formal evidence hearings set to take place in Holborn on Monday. Croatias Supreme Court has turned down a request by Tunisian authorities to extradite a Bosnian suspected in the killing of Mohamed Zaouari described by the Palestinian movement of Hamas as one of its drone experts. Zaouari was killed in November in the Tunisian second city of Sfax in front of his house. He was gunned down with several bullets behind the wheel of his car. Tunisian authorities claimed the murder bore the hallmarks of foreign involvement. They later identified two Bosnians: Alen Camdzic, 46, and Elvir Sarac. Tuesday, Croatias top court refused to nod to Tunisian authorities request for the extradition of Camdzic. The Supreme court accepted the appeal of the suspect and rejected the request for extradition from the Republic of Tunisia, the court said in a statement. Camdzic, according to the court, was arrested in March and held in custody pending the court decision. Tunisia is looking to the Justice Minister who has the last say, The New Arab reports. Sarac has been freed after being briefly detained in Sarajevo early this week, reports say. His extradition has also been turned down. Soon after Zaouaris killing, Hamas accused Israel for masterminding the operation. The Islamist movement pointed out that the Tunisian expert had been working for the resistance for a decade and was drone expert. Tunisian authorities stopped short to accuse Israel, which has carried out assassinations of several members of Hamas movement in Gaza strip or abroad. Britain could produce a new set of coins to commemorate Britain leaving the European Union, a treasury minister has hinted. A number of Tory MPs have written to the Treasury, calling on the department to forge a new set of coins marking Brexit. Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury Robert Jenrick replied to the idea saying he can see the argument for the suggestion, when approached by the Sun newspaper. A Treasury spokesperson confirmed Mr Jenrick's comments, "namely that there could be an argument for the coins." As recommendations on themes of coins are made by the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, who are independent of the Treasury, the suggestion has been passed to them. The Brexit coins would come two decades after the Royal Mint produced a special 50 pence coin to mark the 25th anniversary of Britain joining the European Economic Community. For the coins to be produced, the Royal Mint Advisory Committee would have to come up with a design which would then require Phillip Hammond, the chancellor, to approve. The design would then be sent to Buckingham Palace for the Queen to give her royal consent. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 12 October 2021 The aerial climate installation by Swiss artivist Dan Acher 'We Are Watching' is unveiled at Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2021 A young girl is helped by a Border Force officer as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, following a small boat incident in the Channel. PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2021 People walk past a life-size sculpture of British singer John Lennon entitled "Imagine", by sculptor Lawrence Holofcener, displayed to mark what would have been the 81st birthday for the former member of the Beatles in Carnaby Street Reuters UK news in pictures 8 October 2021 WW II veteran, 96-year-old Lorna Cockayne, who served in the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS), popularly and officially known as the Wrens, as a Bletchley Park codebreaker, poses for a photograph with the Legion d'honneur after receiving it during a ceremony at the Pear at Parley in Ferndown, Bournemouth PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2021 British comedian Jo Brand poses with cut-out silhouettes representing women outside the Metropolitan Police headquarters New Scotland Yard, to highlight violence against women by male police officers or former police officers AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 6 October 2021 A protester, wearing a mask of Johnson, holds a sign reading Question it all on the final day of the Tory conference Getty UK news in pictures 5 October 2021 Members of Insulate Britain outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, before a hearing over the injunction banning the environmental activists from blocking the M25 PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2021 A delegate passes a street cleaner on the second day of the annual Conservative Party Conference being held at the Manchester Central convention centre AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2021 Margaret Thatcher-themed mugs for sale at the annual Conservative Party conference in Manchester EPA UK news in pictures 2 October 2021 A couple make their way through a flooded underpass in Bristol as a yellow weather warning for rain and wind is issued for parts of the UK Tom Wren/SWNS UK news in pictures 1 October 2021 A driver talks to members of the media after passing his HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) driving test at National Driving Centre in Croydon, south London AFP via Getty Images 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 Any decision by the Royal Mint to produce designs would be a stark contrast to the Royal Mail after it refused to make a series of stamps to mark Brexit. The Royal Mail said it had no plans to commemorate the moment as it was not an important anniversary. British voters took the benefits of EU citizenship for granted when they backed Brexit, the prime minister of Luxembourg has said. In a speech at the European Parliament Xavier Bettel said the fact so many UK citizens were adopting EU citizenship to keep the benefits of membership was proof of the huge benefits of the union to its members. The outspoken national leader also slammed populists in the UK and Italy for misunderstanding the concept of sovereignty, which he claimed was in fact best protected by a united Europe. Recommended Government hikes fees to renounce UK citizenship after Brexit surge Many of the 1.3 million British people living abroad in other EU countries have sought foreign citizenship since the EU referendum in a bid to head off the uncertainty caused by the decision to leave the bloc, with a 165 per cent increase recorded in the year of the referendum alone, according to Eurostat. Populist forces are calling for sole national sovereignty to ensure the wellbeing of Europe. But its the European Union that protects more than ever our sovereignty in a globalised world, Mr Bettel said in his address to the parliaments plenary session in Strasbourg. The European Union provides added value to European citizens, in countless instances improving their daily lives. However, one of the greatest challenges the union faces today is the fact that these advantages resulting from a countrys membership of the union are simply taken for granted. It is therefore not a coincidence that so many UK citizens living in my country have been applying for Luxembourg citizenship since the Brexit referendum. Many others are apparently doing the same in other member states. These applications for citizenship by British citizens are proof of the huge added value of the public goods and services created by the European Union which these citizens dont want to abandon: most obviously the four freedoms. Mr Bettel said the EU did not want to punish Britain but that the country could not have the advantages without the constraints. We must have common rules and we must say to UK you can't have one without the other. But the countrys PM warned against turning on voters themselves, adding: Brexit is really a blow for all of us and same goes to Italy. To then condemn voters, to criticise voters before theyve made a mistake would be a second mistake. The British people have chosen Brexit and Im sorry about that but I have to respect it. Brexit so far: in pictures Show all 53 1 /53 Brexit so far: in pictures Brexit so far: in pictures Brexit campaign Boris Johnson led the VoteLeave campaign PA Brexit so far: in pictures Brexit campaign Boris Johnson MP, Labour MP Gisela Stuart and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell address the people of Stafford in Market Square during the Vote Leave Brexit Battle Bus tour on 17 May 2016. Their lead line on the tour was: We send the EU 350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead. Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Voting day A man shelters from the rain as he arrives at a polling station in London on 23 June 2016. Millions of Britons voted in the referendum on whether to stay in or leave the European Union AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Referendum results Leader of Ukip, Nigel Farage, reacts at the Leave EU referendum party at Millbank Tower in central London as results indicated that it was likely the UK would leave the European Union AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Protesting the result A young couple painted as EU flags and a man with a sign reading Im not leaving protest outside Downing Street against the voters decision to leave the EU on 24 June 2016 Getty Brexit so far: in pictures David Cameron resigns British Prime Minister David Cameron resigns on the steps of 10 Downing Street on 24 June 2016 after the results of the EU referendum were declared and the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Theresa May Becomes the new Conservative Party leader Theresa May receives a kiss from her husband Philip, after becoming the new Conservative Party leader on 11 July 2016. May became Prime Minister two days later and although she voted to remain in the referendum was keen to lead Britains Brexit talks after her only rival in the race to succeed David Cameron pulled out unexpectedly. May was left as the only contender standing after the withdrawal from the leadership race of Andrea Leadsom, who faced criticism for suggesting she was more qualified to be prime minister because she had children AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Lancaster House keynote speech on Brexit British Prime Minister Theresa May delivers her keynote speech on Brexit at Lancaster House in London on 17 January 2017. Where she spoke about her offer to introduce a transition period after the UK formally leaves the European Union in March 2019. Despite repeating the pro-Brexit mantra of no deal is better than a bad deal, the Prime Minister claimed she wanted a tone of trust between the negotiators and said Britain was leaving the EU but not Europe. She said there should be a clear double lock needed for the transitional period to make sure businesses had time to prepare for changes to their trading relationships with the EU Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Triggering of Article 50 British Prime Minister Theresa May in the cabinet, sitting below a painting of Britain's first Prime Minister Robert Walpole, signs the official letter to European Council President Donald Tusk invoking Article 50 and the United Kingdom's intention to leave the EU on 29 March 2017 Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Gibraltar nonsense Tensions have risen over Brexit negotiations for the Rock of Gibraltar. The European Council has said Gibraltar would be included in a trade deal between London and Brussels only with the agreement of Spain. While former Conservative leader Michael Howard claimed that Theresa May would be prepared to go to war to protect the territory. Spain's foreign minister stepped in only to assert that there was no need for the dispute Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Shock snap election Soon after triggering Article 50, Theresa May called on 18 April 2017 for a snap general election. The election would be on 8 June and it came as a shock move to many, with her reasoning to try to bolster her position before tough talks on leaving the EU AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Dissolution of Parliament for General Election Campaign Prime Minister Theresa May makes a statement in Downing Street after returning from Buckingham Palace on 3 May 2017. The Prime Minister visited the Queen to ask for the dissolution of Parliament signalling the official start to the general election campaign Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Conservatives lose parliamentary majority An arrangement of British daily newspapers showing front page stories about the exit poll results of the snap general election. British Prime Minister Theresa May faced pressure to resign on 9 June 2017 after losing her parliamentary majority, plunging the country into uncertainty as Brexit talks loomed. The pound fell sharply amid fears the Conservative leader would be unable to form a government AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Labour gains Britains opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn gives a tumbs up as he arrives at Labour headquarters in central London on 9 June 2017 after the snap general election results showed a hung parliament with Labour gains and the Conservatives losing their majority AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Brexit negotiations begin Brexit Minister David Davis and European Commission member in charge of Brexit negotiations Michel Barnier address a press conference at the end of the first day of Brexit negotiations in Brussels on 19 June 2017 AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures May speaks in Florence British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks on 22 September 2017, in Florence. May sought to unlock Brexit talks after Brussels demanded more clarity on the crunch issues of budget payments and EU citizens' rights AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures EU council summit insufficient progress German Chancellor Angela Merkel joins other EU leaders for a breakfast meeting during an EU summit in Brussels on 20 October 2017. The EU spoke about Brexit and announced that insufficient progress had been made AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures DUP derails settlement on the withdrawal part of Brexit DUP Deputy Leader Nigel Dodds walks off after speaking to members of the media as a protester holding flags shouts after him outside the Houses of Parliament on 5 December 2017. British Prime Minister Theresa May was forced to pull out of a deal with Brussels after the DUP said it would not accept terms which see Northern Ireland treated differently from the rest of the UK Getty Brexit so far: in pictures May suffers defeat over EU (Withdrawal) Bill Theresa May suffers defeat in parliament over EU (Withdrawal) Bill on 13 December 2017. The Government was defeated by Conservative rebels and Labour MPs in a vote on its key piece of Brexit legislation. MPs amended the EU (Withdrawal) Bill against Theresa May's will, guaranteeing Parliament a meaningful vote on any Brexit deal she agrees with Brussels. Ms May's whips applied pressure on Conservative rebels who remained defiant in the Commons throughout the day and in the end the Government was defeated by 309 votes to 305 Brexit so far: in pictures EU council summit sufficient progress Britain's Prime minister Theresa May arrives to attend the first day of a European union summit in Brussels on 14 December 2017. European leaders discussed Brexit and announced there was finally sufficient progress at the end of the two days AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures The game moves to transition Brexit Secretary David Davis gives evidence on developments in European Union divorce talks to the Commons Exiting the EU Committee in Portcullis House, London, on 24 January 2018 PA Brexit so far: in pictures Trade deal is what May wants French President Emmanuel Macron gestures to Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May after they hold a press conference at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, on 18 January 2018. May and Macron agreed a new border security deal, through which the UK will pay more to France to stop migrants trying to reach British shores on 18 January 2018 AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Transition period agreed The UK and EU agree terms for Brexit transition period on 19 March, 2018 Reuters Brexit so far: in pictures No agreement on Irish border The EU and UK however failed to reach an agreement on the Irish border during the successful talks on other Brexit issues AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures EU attacks Mays fantasy strategy For months after the March deal is struck there is little significant progress in talks. One senior EU official tears into Britains fantasy negotiating strategy and accuses Theresa May of not even having a position on a variety of important issue Getty Brexit so far: in pictures UK releases Ireland plan Britain releases a new customs plan to solve the Northern Ireland border but Michel Barnier says it leaves unanswered questions and would not prevent a hard border EbS Brexit so far: in pictures Chequers plan agreed The cabinet agrees on a plan known as the "Chequers deal" on July 6 2018. The plan seeks regulatory alignment on goods and food, divergence on services, freedom from the European Courts of Justice and an end to free movement. Many were surprised that the hard Brexiteers of the cabinet would agree to this plan PA Brexit so far: in pictures Chequers plan sparks resignations Brexit Secretary David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and numerous ministers resign in the days following the Chequers agreement Reuters Brexit so far: in pictures Davis out, Raab in On 9 July, Dominic Raab replaces David Davis as Brexit Secretary. Raab is a keen Brexiteer and was a housing minister before taking over from Davis Reuters Brexit so far: in pictures Barnier's "deal like no other" EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier claims on August 29 2018 that they are prepared to offer Britain a trade deal like no other, though he stressed that they will not divide or change the single market to accommodate Britain AP Brexit so far: in pictures "My deal or no deal" In an interview on Panorama on September 17, the Prime Minister insists that any Brexit deal will be offered to the EU on her terms. She asserts this amongst continued attacks on her approach to Brexit by Boris Johnson and the European Research Group, headed by Jacob Rees Mogg BBC/Jeff Overs Brexit so far: in pictures EU leaders reject Chequers Quite the blow was dealt to the Prime Minister at a EU leaders summit in Salzburg on September 20. European Council President Donald Tusk stated that the Chequers deal "will not work" Reuters Brexit so far: in pictures May demands respect Following the rejection of her Chequers plan the day before, the Prime Minister voiced her anger that the EU had dismissed it without offering an alternative. She stated that throughout this process, I have treated the EU with nothing but respect. The UK expects the same. A good relationship at the end of this process depends on it." Getty Brexit so far: in pictures People's Vote march As the People's Vote campaign and The Independent's Final Say campaign gain traction, 700,000 people turn out in London to demand a final say on the UK's Brexit deal on October 20 2018 PA Brexit so far: in pictures More resignations As the Prime Minister settles on a Brexit deal, Brexit secretary Dominic Raab resigns along with Work and Pensions secretary Esther McVey and many other ministers Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Final Say petitions delivered to Downing Street People's Vote supporting MPs Chukka Umunna, Justine Greening and Caroline Lucas and The Independent editor Christian Broughton deliver over a million signatures in favour of a People's Vote to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street on December 3 2018 PA Brexit so far: in pictures May delays vote On December 10, the Prime Minister delayed the vote on her Brexit deal as it was near certain not to pass through the Commons due to Tory rebels and lack of DUP support AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures No confidence motion Tory MPs triggered a confidence vote in the Prime Minister on December 12. She won by 200 votes to 117 Reuters Brexit so far: in pictures Commons rejects the deal Following the delay, the Prime Minister's deal was rejected in the Commons by a historic 230 votes AFP Brexit so far: in pictures Corbyn tables a no confidence motion Following the rejection of the Prime Minister's deal, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn tabled a motion of no confidence in the government, which the government won by a margin of 19 AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Plan B The Prime Minister won the support of the commons to return to Brussels to renegotiate the backstop on January 29. In the same sitting, MPs also voted against a no-deal Brexit in a non-legally binding motion PA Brexit so far: in pictures EU council president savages Brexit campaigners who failed to plan for departure: Special place in hell There is a special place in hell for pro-Brexit campaigners who demanded Britain leave the EU without explaining how it should happen, Donald Tusk has said. The European Council president launched the scathing attack as he accused anti-EU campaigners of pushing for Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely. Mr Tusk also dismissed suggestions that the EU could reopen negotiations over the controversial Northern Ireland backstop, dealing a blow to Theresa Mays hopes of securing fresh concessions as she tries to get her exit deal through parliament. Speaking in Brussels alongside Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Mr Tusk said: Ive been wondering what a special place in hell looks like for people who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely. He also tweeted the accusation moments later Getty Brexit so far: in pictures EU and UK announce talks to restart after Theresa May visits Brussels Both have agreed to restart Brexit talks to find a way through the deadlock in Westminster, following a visit by Theresa May to Brussels. In a joint statement the British government and European Commission said Ms May had had a robust but constructive meeting with president Jean-Claude Juncker, and that the pair would meet again before the end of the month. But the EU again refused to reopen the withdrawal agreement and its controversial backstop with any negotiations expected to focus on the future relationship between the UK and EU instead Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Brexit strategy lost MPs voted down May's Brext plans, with a majority of 45. The prime minister did not appear in parliament to see another defeat PA Brexit so far: in pictures Labour and Conservative MPs resign and create the Independent Group Back row of Chris Leslie, Gavin Shuker, Chuka Umunna and Mike Gapes, middle row of Angela Smith, Luciana Berger and Ann Coffey and front row of Sarah Wollaston, Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Joan Ryan PA Brexit so far: in pictures Non-biding votes on amendments to Brexit motion On February 27 he house held a series of votes, unanimously calling for the UK and EU to guarantee citizens rights in a no-deal scenario AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Attorney General publishes legal advice A hammer blow for May as Geoffrey Cox said her renegotiated deal can still leave UK in backstop against its will. Mr Cox did say the prime ministers efforts had reduced the risk of the UK being trapped in the backstop indefinitely. MPs went on to vote against her deal by 391 to 242 UK Parliament/PA Brexit so far: in pictures No-deal off the table MPs rejected a no-deal Brexit by 43 votes on March 13, with cabinet ministers rebelling in another humiliating defeat for Theresa May. A day later they voted in favour of the prime minister seeking an extension to Article 50 AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures House speaker bans May from third Commons vote on same Brexit deal John Bercow sensationally told Theresa May he would stop her making another attempt to pass her Brexit deal unless she has secured changes. The Speaker said a further meaningful vote would be ruled out of order if the motion was the same or substantially the same under an ancient convention to stop the government bullying parliament on issues MPs have rejected Parliament Live Brexit so far: in pictures May writes to Tusk The prime minister wrote to Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, to ask for a three-month extension to give her more time to try to get her deal through parliament. However the European Commission advises the EU27 should offer a short extension to May 23 or a longer one meaning the UK would participate in European elections 10 Downing Street/AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures European Council summit Theresa Mays request to extend triggering Article 50 until the end of June was rejected by the EU, and instead offered a shorter time frame. She accepted the offer of a delay until May 22 if her withdrawal deal is approved by Parliament. If MPs rejected it for a third time, the EU said Britain must propose a new plan by April 12. Ms May said she will not support a long delay because it would mean Britain participating in elections for the European Parliament Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Brussels confirms preparations for a no-deal Brexit are completed They warned that it is increasingly likely the UK will crash out. In a statement the European Commission (EC) said preparedness and contingency work, which the EC has been conducting since December 2017, was now finished. The announcement came days after EU leaders agreed to a request by Theresa May to extend the UKs Brexit date AFP Brexit so far: in pictures May resigns Reuters Early proposals backed by the European parliament to give UK citizens the ability to opt-in to citizenship of the bloc after Britain had left appear to have died a death as Brexit negotiations become increasingly acrimonious. A senior EU official last week accused Britain of adopting a "fantasy" negotiating strategy which tried to keep all the benefits of EU membership but without any of the obligations. UK government sources hit back, accusing the European Commission trying to "insult" the UK; Downing Street also decried the negative briefing. The Independent reported at the weekend that the British government had quietly hiked fees for UK citizens to renounce their nationality, with a family of three now forced to pay more than 1,000 to the Home Office on top of any other fees they might need to pay to their new country. Brexit has been compared to the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s by a leading supporter of the Remain campaign. Lord Malloch-Brown, the former foreign office minister who heads the Best for Britain group, made the comments after billionaire George Soros announced a campaign for a second Brexit referendum. Mr Soros, who is reported to have given about 500,000 to the group set up by anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller last year, said action was needed as withdrawal from the European Union was immensely damaging for the UK. EU minister says little progress has been made on Brexit since March Lord Malloch-Brown said Britain needed to stay close to the EU because appeasement, which was a 1930s government policy of pursuing agreement with Nazi Germany in the hope of avoiding war, showed how badly things could go wrong when the UK tried to isolate itself from the continent. He told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: Britains history as an island nation adjacent to mainland Europe is when we try to, sort of, pull away from Europes problems and close ourselves off to them; they have a horrible habit of infecting us anyway. Appeasement in the 1930s, you name it. For centuries Britain has ignored events on continental Europe at its peril. He said Mr Soross reputation as the man who broke the Bank of England in 1992, when the financier bet against sterling on the money markets, was an unrelated issue to the anti-Brexit campaign. He broke the Bank of England as a financier because the British pound was overextended. It wasnt credible. He broke the pound, not the Bank of England, I should say. He is someone who has devoted decades to an extraordinary global philanthropy which has fought for democracy and open values. Best for Britain, which campaigns to keep the UK open to EU membership, is expected to publish its manifesto calling for a second referendum on 8 June. The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Show all 8 1 /8 The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Post-Brexit immigration workers sorting radishes on a production line at a farm in Norfolk. One possible post-Brexit immigration scheme could struggle to channel workers towards less attractive roles - while another may heighten the risk of labour exploitation, a new report warns. PA The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Customs union A key point in the negotiations remains Britain's access to, or withdrawal from, the EU customs union. Since the referendum there has been hot debate over the meaning of Brexit: would it entail a full withdrawal from the existing agreement, known as hard Brexit, or the soft version in which we would remain part of a common customs area for most goods, as Turkey does? No 10 has so far insisted that Brexit means Brexit and that Britain will be leaving the customs union, but may be inclined to change its position once the potential risks to the UKs economic outlook become clearer. Alamy The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Northern Ireland-Irish border Though progress was made last year, there has still been no solid agreement on whether there should be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. To ensure borderless travel on the island, the countries must be in regulatory alignment and therefore adhere to the same rules as the customs union. In December, the Conservative Partys coalition partners, the DUP, refused a draft agreement that would place the UK/EU border in the Irish Sea due to its potential to undermine the union. May has promised that would not be the case and has suggested that a specific solution would need to be found. Getty The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Transition period Despite protests from a small number of Conservative MPs, the Government and the EU are largely in agreement that a transitional period is needed after Brexit. The talks, however, have reached an impasse. Though May has agreed that the UK will continue to contribute to the EU budget until 2021, the PM wants to be able to select which laws made during this time the UK will have to adhere to. Chief negotiator Michel Barnier has said the UK must adopt all of the laws passed during the transition, without any input from British ministers or MEPs. EPA The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Rights of EU citizens living the UK The Prime Minister has promised EU citizens already living in the UK the right to live and work here after Brexit, but the rights of those who arrive after Brexit day remains unclear. May insists that those who arrive during the transition period should not be allowed to stay, whereas the EU believe the cut-off point should be later. Getty The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Future trade agreement (with the EU) Despite this being a key issue in negotiations, the Government has yet to lay out exactly what it wants from a trade deal with the EU. Infighting within the Cabinet has prevented a solid position from being reached, with some MPs content that "no deal is better than a bad deal" while others rally behind single market access. The EU has already confirmed that access to the single market would be impossible without the UK remaining in the customs union. Getty The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Future trade agreements (internationally) The Government has already begun trying to woo foreign leaders into prospective trade agreements, with various high profile state visits to China, India and Canada for May, and the now infamous invitation to US President Donald Trump to visit London. However the UK cannot make trade agreements with another country while it is still a member of the EU, and the potential loss of trade with the world's major powers is a source of anxiety for the PM. The EU has said the UK cannot secure trade deals during the transition period. EPA The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Financial services Banks in the UK will be hit hard regardless of the Brexit outcome. The EU has refused to give British banks passporting rights to trade within the EU, dashing hopes of a special City deal. However according to new reports Germany has suggested allowing trade on the condition that the UK continues paying into the EU budget even after the transition period. Getty Announcing the campaign in Paris, Mr Soros, 87, said: Brexit is an immensely damaging process, harmful to both sides. Divorce will be a long process, probably taking more than five years. Five years is an eternity in politics, especially in revolutionary times like the present. Ultimately, its up to the British people to decide what they want to do. It would be better, however, if they came to a decision sooner rather than later. Thats the goal of an initiative called the Best for Britain, which I support. Best for Britain fought for, and helped to win, a meaningful parliamentary vote which includes the option of not leaving at all. This would be good for Britain but would also render Europe a great service by rescinding Brexit and not creating a hard-to-fill hole in the European budget. But the British public must express its support by a convincing margin in order to be taken seriously by Europe. Thats what Best for Britain is aiming for by engaging the electorate. It will publish its manifesto in the next few days. He said he feared the EU could be heading towards another major financial crisis triggered by austerity and populist political parties intent on tearing the bloc apart. The EU is in an existential crisis. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, he said. However, Mr Soros said he was convinced it was the ideal time for the EU to reform itself and prepare the ground for the UK staying inside the bloc. The appeasement policy didnt end well (Hulton Archive/Getty) (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) The economic case for remaining a member of the EU is strong, but it will take time for it to sink in, he added. During that time the EU needs to transform itself into an association that countries like Britain would want to join, in order to strengthen the political case. Such a Europe would differ from the current arrangements in two key respects. First, it would clearly distinguish between the European Union and the eurozone. Second, it would recognise that the euro has many unresolved problems and they must not be allowed to destroy the European Union. Theresa May is committed to leaving the EUs single market and customs union after Brexit, which will officially take place on 29 March next year. However, a transition period is currently set to last until 31 December 2020. Additional reporting by Press Association Caroline Lucas has announced she will step down as one of the leaders of the Green Party in the autumn to make way for fresh talent. The Brighton Pavilion MP the Greens first and only representative in the Commons has been co-leader with Jonathan Bartley since 2016 but she has decided not to run again, as leaders serve a two-year term under party rules. Ms Lucas, a former MEP, said she believed new candidates will step up to the challenge that our increasingly febrile times present and expressed pride in the performance of the Greens in response to the challenge from Jeremy Corbyns Labour party. I wont be seeking nominations to be a candidate in this years leadership election, when the process starts on Friday, but instead will be focusing even more on work in parliament and in my Brighton constituency, Ms Lucas wrote in The Guardian. I believe that Jonathan and I have shown the power of working together, since we became joint Green Party leaders in September 2016, and its now time for me to show the power of letting go. The Green Partys vote share fell 2 per cent during last years snap general election, as Mr Corbyn shifted Labour to the left, seizing ground usually held by the Greens. However the party made gains in local elections, boosting their council seats by eight to a total of 39. Ms Lucas acknowledged it was difficult for smaller parties to swim against the political tide but said the Greens had become a leading force in progressive politics. She added: We have not been eclipsed by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn but instead have used these unique circumstances to push for even more radical change, and to put our boldest policies yet before the public. Ms Lucas became the Greens first leader in 2008 and again in 2010, as the party was formerly run collectively. She was succeeded by Natalie Bennett in 2012, before running on a joint ticket with co-leader Mr Bartley in 2016. Mr Bartley, a councillor in London, has not announced whether he will stand for re-election. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures 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 UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters Nominations for the leadership will open on Friday and the new leadership team will be announced in September. The Muslim Council of Britain has written to the Conservative Party calling for an urgent inquiry following a number of allegations of Islamophobia, The Independent can reveal. The organisation, which represents more than 500 mosques, schools and associations in Britain, has urged James Cleverly, the Tory deputy chairman, to conduct a full audit to tackle the more than weekly occurrences of Islamophobia from candidates and representatives of the party. Mr Cleverly has launched a code of conduct for MPs and local election candidates, which requires members to encourage and foster respect and tolerance. The letter highlights the lack of action regarding Bob Blackman, the MP for Harrow East, who was accused of endorsing Islamophobia after he posted an anti-Muslim article on Facebook. The post included a link to a story headlined Muslim Somali sex gang say raping white British children part of their culture which was published on the website Hardcore News USA, which often features Islamophobic stories. Mr Blackman, who also retweeted Tommy Robinson in error and invited controversial Hindu nationalist Tapan Ghosh, who praised the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar, to an event in Parliament, apologised for the post saying he regretted any upset caused. The need for a formal inquiry into Islamophobia in the party was described by former Tory cabinet minister Sayeeda Warsi as being long overdue. I have raised my concerns about Islamophobic comments and campaigning for more than two years and have done so formally and informally including a letter to the Prime Minister, Baroness Warsi told The Independent. The party has been aware of the issue at the highest level and has failed to take the issue seriously and at times even denied its very existence. A formal inquiry is now long overdue and I hope my party send a very clear message by establishing this inquiry that bigotry will not be tolerated in a modern Conservative party. In recent months there have been a number of Islamophobia-related incidents within the party and several councillors and prospective candidates have either been suspended or forced to stand down. On 5 April Mike Payne, a Conservative councillor in Calderdale, was suspended after he shared an article which called Muslims parasites who live off the state and breed like rabbits. Mr Payne defended himself, saying: The article refers to the impact of uncontrolled immigration in France. My family is half-French and this is a specific problem. Less than two weeks later Alexander van Terheyden, a council candidate in Hackney, was also suspended after he called Islam a violent political ideology comparable to fascism and communism on social media. In response to allegations of Islamophobia, Mr Van Terheyden said: Ive stated Islam is a violent political ideology. Note the word political and not religious. Note I do not refer to Muslims, I refer to the political ideology. My views have always been public. If you mean the fact that Im happy to voice my discontent for communism, fascism, Islam and other extreme political ideologies there is no secret to this. Three days later a Conservative council candidate in Watford, Darren Harrison, was suspended for allegedly supporting white supremacists. Mr Harrison apparently attended events held by nationalist anti-Islam group Generation Identity. He denied being a supporter of the group and said: I do not support their views, but support their right to have their views, as I do anyone else, as long as it does not promote violence which to my knowledge, it does not. On 24 April Phillipa Auton stepped down as the council candidate in Hounslow after she responded to a story about the 2016 Berlin attacks by tweeting: Revoke Muslim immigration, repatriate and secure European borders, keep Europe safe. She stood by her comments and said she supports free speech. You are limited to the number of characters you use in a tweet. I am against illegal immigration and I support having closed borders, she said. The next day the Conservative mayor of Wokingham, Peter Lucey, also stood down after a number of social media posts about Islam and the English Defence League. Mr Lucey said: Some past social media posts came to light and those are not appropriate for the town mayor. I resigned for that reason, and I fully apologise to everyone involved. I would like to apologise to the people of Wokingham and to my party, and I resign from all of them. On 27 April, Nick Sundin, a Tory council candidate in Newcastle, was suspended after he tweeted the Prophet Mohammed was a f****** paedophile. He did not respond directly to allegations of Islamophobia but did delete his Twitter account. Less than a week later, Karen Sunderland, a council candidate in Lewisham, was suspended after old tweets emerged where she called Islam the new Nazism. After the story emerged Ms Sunderlands Twitter account was deleted. 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 On 1 May David Boston, a council candidate in Enfield, posted a picture of bacon hanging on a door handle as a way to protect your house from terrorism he was suspended by the party pending an investigation. Three weeks later Stephen Goldsack, a Scottish Conservative councillor in North Lanarkshire was expelled from the party after it was uncovered that he had formerly been the Scottish security adviser for the BNP. He allegedly rejected an application for a mosque, saying it would be okay if it was a church. Harun Khan, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said the number of examples of alleged Islamophobia within the party was a serious concern. He said: The Conservative Party prides itself in being against any form of bigotry and racism yet there are serious concerns that its best values are being disfigured by Islamophobic views. We look forward to the party taking forward our suggestion of an inquiry into Islamophobia and we are happy to help support in any capacity we can. When asked by The Independent if investigations into Islamophobia were still underway and what steps were being taken to tackle the issue, a Conservative Party spokesperson said: We do not comment on ongoing investigations. TV presenter Richard Madeley abruptly stopped a live interview with the defence secretary after the minister avoided answering his question four times. The ITV Good Morning Britain guest host asked Gavin Williamson whether he regretted telling Russia to go away and shut up after Moscow denied carrying out a nerve agent attack in Salisbury. But the defence secretary responded by paying tribute to health workers who treated Sergei and Yulia Skripal and talking about the international response to the chemical attack. Mr Madeley repeatedly interrupted him to demand an answer, before finally stopping the interview. The exchange began by the presenter saying: You told Russia to shut up and go away. Do you regret that now? Do you think it was a bit too informal? Mr Williamson responded: Id like to pay tribute to the health service personnel who did an amazing job... Mr Madeley then pressed the defence secretary several times for an answer and Mr Williamson failed to address it. The conversation culminated with the TV presenter dubbing Mr Williamsons address to Russia Trump-esque. Mr Madeley said: Please dont tell me what happened, because we know what happened. Do you regret using that language? That is the question. The minister responded: What was right was actually that we came together with our allies and made it absolutely clear to Russia that they couldnt act in that... The host said: Right, youre not going to answer, are you? OK. All right, interview terminated because you wont answer the question. It would be helpful if you answered a straight question with a straight answer. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 10 October 2021 A young girl is helped by a Border Force officer as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, following a small boat incident in the Channel. PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2021 People walk past a life-size sculpture of British singer John Lennon entitled "Imagine", by sculptor Lawrence Holofcener, displayed to mark what would have been the 81st birthday for the former member of the Beatles in Carnaby Street Reuters UK news in pictures 8 October 2021 WW II veteran, 96-year-old Lorna Cockayne, who served in the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS), popularly and officially known as the Wrens, as a Bletchley Park codebreaker, poses for a photograph with the Legion d'honneur after receiving it during a ceremony at the Pear at Parley in Ferndown, Bournemouth PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2021 British comedian Jo Brand poses with cut-out silhouettes representing women outside the Metropolitan Police headquarters New Scotland Yard, to highlight violence against women by male police officers or former police officers AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 6 October 2021 A protester, wearing a mask of Johnson, holds a sign reading Question it all on the final day of the Tory conference Getty UK news in pictures 5 October 2021 Members of Insulate Britain outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, before a hearing over the injunction banning the environmental activists from blocking the M25 PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2021 A delegate passes a street cleaner on the second day of the annual Conservative Party Conference being held at the Manchester Central convention centre AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2021 Margaret Thatcher-themed mugs for sale at the annual Conservative Party conference in Manchester EPA UK news in pictures 2 October 2021 A couple make their way through a flooded underpass in Bristol as a yellow weather warning for rain and wind is issued for parts of the UK Tom Wren/SWNS UK news in pictures 1 October 2021 A driver talks to members of the media after passing his HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) driving test at National Driving Centre in Croydon, south London AFP via Getty Images 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 After terminating the interview, Mr Madeley said: What are they like? What are these politicians like, when you give them a straight question? It would have been so easy to say, No, I dont, I think it was an appropriate expression, or to say, Yes, probably, on reflection, I should have perhaps been a little more formal. Mr Williamson was speaking from West Midlands Safari Park in Worcestershire, where he was meeting military personnel preparing to go to Malawi to train park rangers to protect elephants and rhinos from poachers. PA contributed to this report A big game hunter was reportedly gored to death by a wild buffalo moments after he had killed another member of its herd. Professional hunter Claude Kleynhans had been leading a group on an expedition along the banks of South Africa's Levubu River in the northern province of Limpopo. The 54-year-old and his party had shot and killed a buffalo and were preparing to load it into their vehicle when they were blindsided by another member of the herd, the Bosveld Review reported. Another guide ran back to the hunting lodge to seek help, but the animals horn reportedly pierced Mr Kleynhans femoral artery killing him almost instantly. They were working on the bushes to open the animal and did not see the other buffalo, Karen Kuhne Kleynhans, the hunters sister-in-law, told Afrikaans-language news site Maroela Media. The buffalo struck him and pronged him with its horn in his groin. Ms Kuhne Kleynhans added that the buffalo had been her brother-in-laws favourite animal. He loved what he did, she said. He died doing what he loved. African buffalo can weigh as much as 1,000kg (157 stone) and some have estimated that they kill up to 200 people each year. Mr Kleynhans grew up in the small town of Modjadjiskloof and served as a police officer before becoming a professional hunter. He founded his business, Guwela Safaris, in 1987, offering hunting, fishing and photography tours of Kruger National Park and the adjoining game reserve. The firms brochure states Mr Kleynhans was reputable and honest and one of the best experienced guides in the industry. 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 added he was respected internationally for his above average hunting ethics and professionalism. In January, a trophy hunter was shot dead as he stalked a lion he was aiming to kill in South Africas North West province. Pero Jelenic, a 75-year-old hotelier from Croatia, had already killed one big cat on a reserve when he was hit by gunfire. Investigators were treating the case as culpable homicide, but said it had not been clear who had fired the shot that killed Mr Jelenic. A service dog has given birth to eight puppies in the middle of a busy airport just before her owners flight was scheduled to take off. The births were unexpected, and were delivered at the Tampa International Airport with the help of Tampa Fire Rescues medical team. The mother, two-year-old Eleanor Ellie Rigby, is a trained dog to assist people with disabilities, including potentially acting as a guide dog for a blind owner, or to help a hearing-impaired owner. US service dogs are also used to help individuals with mental health disorders, or to help with seizure alerts. It is not clear which of these roles Ellie might provide for her owner. An airport spokesperson told local media that Ellies owners a woman and her daughter had tickets to board a flight to Philadelphia when Ellie went into labour. The family reportedly knew that the dog was pregnant, but did not realise that she was going to be giving birth anytime soon. More than 80 puppies seized by police investigating dog trafficking after being found in shocking conditions Show all 2 1 /2 More than 80 puppies seized by police investigating dog trafficking after being found in shocking conditions More than 80 puppies seized by police investigating dog trafficking after being found in shocking conditions article_e84c8e3799007aa4_13.jpg More than 80 puppies seized by police investigating dog trafficking after being found in shocking conditions 84660498.jpg Getty Images The father of the puppies seven boys and one girl was also in the terminal with the travellers. Airport officials later posted a playful comment on Twitter alongside a photo of Ellie: Ruff day for this mama at Gate F80! it read. Instead of flying back, the dog owners now plan on driving the entire 1,000 miles from Tampa to Philadelphia with the 10 dogs, according to The Miami Herald. Disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein will not testify before a grand jury determining whether or not to indict him on charges of sexual assault and other crimes, his lawyers have said. Lawyers for Mr Weinstein said their client only learned the names of his accusers and the specific charges against him when he turned himself in to police on Friday. With a deadline set for Wednesday afternoon to testify, the lawyers said Mr Weinstein would not have enough time to prepare. After being unfairly denied access to critical information about this case that was needed to defend him before the grand jury, Mr Weinsteins attorneys decided that there was not sufficient time to properly prepare Mr Weinstein, said Benjamin Brafman, the producer's lead criminal lawyer, in a statement on Wednesday morning. He added the the defence's request for more time had been denied. Mr Weinstein faces charges of first-degree rape and other sex crimes in cases involving two women in New York. Dozens of other women have accused him of everything from sexual harassment to assault, and he is under criminal investigation in both Los Angeles and the UK. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and denied all allegations of sexual assault. Mr Brafman claimed on Wednesday that an indictment was "inevitable" in the New York case, due to the "unfair political pressure being placed on [Manhattan District Attorney] Cy Vance to secure a conviction". The allegations against Mr Weinstein have received extensive media coverage, after a New York Times expose detailed years of his alleged abuse of employees and aspiring actresses. The 66-year-old has since been kicked out of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which votes on the Oscars, and removed from the Producers Guild of America. His next court appearance is scheduled for 30 July. A security camera perched above the blacktop parking lot caught sight of him, a figure in a dark shirt and light pants lumbering along the side of Little Caesars restaurant, four blocks from the Intercoastal Waterway in Holly Hill, Florida, north of Daytona Beach. The pizza place was closed for the night, the parking lot empty. The camera footage showed the man walking the length of the building, a 2-inch by 4-inch board in his right hand. When he stepped into the glare of a streetlight, the camera caught his face: he was wearing a demonic mask, the mouth smeared in blood-red paint. Police would later describe it as a clown mask. But an internet search of similar looking masks suggested something closer to a vampire. Inside the Little Caesars, 28-year-old Heriberto Feliciano was locking the store up for the night, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported. Camera footage from inside the restaurant, released by Orlandos News 6, showed Mr Feliciano push open the Little Caeserss glass door, step out into the parking lot, and look to his right as the masked-man began attacking him with the board. This is unusual for the city of Holly Hill and we take this very seriously, Holly Hill Police Chief Stephen Aldrich told News 6. It was an ambush type of an attack and it does appear that [Mr Feliciano] was defending himself. The attack would prove deadly. According to a police report cited by the News-Journal, Mr Feliciano was hit with the wooden board until it broke. The masked attacker then attempted to stab him with a pair of scissors. Mr Feliciano, a conceal carry permit holder, was able to pull his gun on his attacker, firing four to five times into the masked man. Holly Hill police quickly responded to the scene, arriving at the Little Caesars around 11.50pm on Saturday night. The suspect who has not yet been officially identified was found unresponsive in the middle of the parking lot suffering from gunshot wounds. The scissors and clown mask were scattered on the ground nearby. The suspect was taken to a hospital, where he later died from his injuries, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported. Im glad that he was able to defend himself and that hes okay, Mr Aldrich told ABC 9. Its just unfortunate that this whole episode occurred. Mr Feliciano reportedly suffered injuries to his face and shoulders and was treated at a hospital. His father told ABC 9 Mr Feliciano is deeply affected by the attack and has had trouble sleeping. The victim is scheduled to meet with investigators on Tuesday. Washington Post Prime Minister Saad Hariri flew to Riyadh a day after French President Emmanuel Macron indicated that he played a critical role for his release after he was allegedly kept hostage in November. The Tuesday trip is the second by the Sunni Lebanese political figure since November. He had visited Riyadh early February. In November, Hariri tendered his resignation in address on a Saudi television. He spent nearly two weeks in the Saudi capital leading politicians in Lebanon and in the west to believe that he was abducted. The re-appointed Prime Minister dismissed the abduction reports after he came back home following a mediation by French President Emmanuel Macron. He rescinded his resignation. Monday the French leader confirmed Hariri was indeed held and that Paris played a crucial role in defusing the political crisis that ensued his resignation. I remind you that a Prime Minister was held in Saudi Arabia for several weeks, he said in an interview with broadcaster BFM TV. Riyadh swiftly brushed off Macrons comments, accused Iran and its Lebanon proxy Hezbollah for tilting the region towards instability. All the evidence confirms that what is pulling Lebanon and the region towards instability is Iran and its tools like the Hezbollah terrorist militia, Saudi foreign ministry said in a statement. Hariri has been tasked by President Michel Aoun to name a new cabinet following early May elections. The son of former Premier Rafik lost the elections dominated by Hezbollah and its allies. He retained the position thanks to the countrys power sharing agreement. Per the agreement, the Prime Minister position goes to a Sunni, the position of President to Christians and the Shia hold the position of Parliament Speaker. Just a day after Roseanne Barrs ABC show Roseanne was cancelled over a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, the former television star has tweeted a defence of herself saying she is not a racist. Barr had said just after her shows cancellation that she was leaving Twitter, but stayed on tweeting and retweeting accounts defending her and asserting she is not racist. Im not a racist, I never was & never will be. One stupid joke in a lifetime of fighting 4 civil rights 4 all minorities, against networks, studios, at the expense of my nervous system/family/wealth will NEVER b taken from me, Barr wrote in a tweet Wednesday afternoon. Recommended Maker of Ambien responds after Roseanne blames drug for racist tweet The tweet was followed by another saying that the support she has seen on Twitter has made her feel like fighting back. I will examine all of my options carefully and get back to U, the tweet finished. Barrs television program was cancelled after a tweet in which she compared former adviser to President Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, to a mix between the Muslim brotherhood and planet of the apes. Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = [Valerie Jarrett], that tweet read. 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 Ms Jarrett was born in Iran to African American parents. Barrs tweet about Ms Jarrett isnt the first time shes waded into racist territory with her Twitter account, and it is not even the first time she has targeted a black member of Mr Obamas administration, either. In 2013, for instance, Barr tweeted a racist sentiment about former National Security Adviser Susan Rice. Susan Rice is a man with big swinging ape balls, Barr wrote in that tweet. Barr has been a vocal supporter of Mr Trump, and has expressed a belief that the government is operating a mind control experiment specifically, a 1960s CIA experiment known as MK Ultra on Hollywood actors, producers and filmmakers to make them dislike and distrustful of Mr Trump. I wish they could hear [Mr Trumps message] theyre not hearing now because theyre under heavy MK Ultra mind control if youve heard of any mind control, MK Ultra being the most successful when you know how code words work, the actual power of words, Barr said during an appearance on a podcast in 2017. She has also spoken about American mind control on Russia Today. Barr has claimed that her racist tweet about Ms Jarrett were a side affect of having taken the insomnia drug Ambien. After making the claim, the maker of that drug company that makes Ambient said that, Racism is not a side effect of our drug. The detention and release of anti-corruption campaigner Bill Browder in Spain has again cast an unfavourable spotlight on Russia. Police in Madrid picked up Mr Browder on a warrant issued by Russia before setting him free on the advice of Interpol's secretary general Jurgen Stock in Lyon, France. The former investment fund boss, born in Chicago but of British nationality, believes he was detained by order of the Kremlin on false tax evasion accusations as revenge for his work with US Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act. Recommended Putin critic Browder detained in Spain after Russian arrest warrant But what is that law and how does it relate to President Vladimir Putin? The Russia and Modova Jackson-Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnistsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 takes its shortened name from Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered a tangled web of tax fraud in 2008 involving 23 companies and $230m linked to high-ranking officials in the Russian government. Mr Magnitsky was investigated, arrested and died in prison in 2009 in mysterious circumstances. Mr Browder whom Mr Magnitsky worked for while the former was head of Hermitage Capital Management, at one time the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia believes his friend died as a result of torture and has become an outspoken critic of the Putin administration ever since. The legislation was signed into law by President Barack Obama in December 2012 and bars Russian officials suspected of human rights abuses from entering the US, allows for their assets held in US banks to be frozen and prohibits future trading with American financial houses. Initially, 18 Russian businessmen were hit by the ban, a total now risen to 44 following an expansion of the act in 2016. Moscow retaliated by blocking the adoption of Russian children by US parents, posthumously finding Sergei Magnitsky guilty of the crimes against the state and imposing sanctions on Mr Browder. Vladimir Putin's government thereafter continued to pursue Mr Browder, appealing to Interpol to have him arrested on three separate occasions between 2012 and 2015 until the Council of Europe intervened to accuse it of "abusing" the system. World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty The Magnitsky Act returned to the news again in 2017 when it emerged that lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who controversially met with President Donald Trump's son Donald Trump Jr and son-in-law Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in New York on 9 June 2016 to discuss information she claimed she had to the detriment of rival presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had been long involved in work to see the act repealed. Ms Veselnitskaya also represents wealthy businessman Denis Katsyv, fined by the US Justice Department in 2017 over money laundering allegations, who is also committed to seeing the Magnistsky Act overturned. Lawyers for Donald Trumps longtime personal attorney and an adult film star suing the president have both accused each other of leaking damaging information in an increasingly ugly legal battle over a 2016 nondisclosure agreement. The two lawyers faced off in a court hearing over materials seized from Mr Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen, in FBI raids last month. Michael Avenatti, the California-based attorney for adult film actress Stormy Daniels, was arguing for the right to participate in the New York court case. In increasingly tense exchanges, Mr Cohens attorney accused Mr Avenatti of conducting a drive by shooting of [his] clients rights, while Mr Avenatti accused Mr Cohen of leaking secret recordings he compared to the Nixon tapes. Mr Avenatti eventually elected to drop his motion rather than stop his publicity tour," as Judge Kimba Wood called his numerous interviews on the case. The motion was dropped without prejudice, meaning Mr Avenatti could pick it up later. But Ms Wood also gave Mr Cohen a tough deadline under which to review the documents seized by the FBI for attorney-client privilege. Mr Cohens attorney, Stephen Ryan, claimed attorneys were sleeping on couches to review the 3.7m files in time. The documents were seized as part of a federal investigation into Mr Cohens business practices. The attorney has not been charged. Stormy Daniels' attorney predicts Michael Cohen to be charged Mr Avenatti is representing Ms Daniels in her suit against Mr Cohen and Mr Trump, in an attempt to invalidate a nondisclosure agreement she says was meant to keep her silent about her affair with the president. Mr Trump has denied the affair occurred. In court on Wednesday, Mr Ryan accused Mr Avenatti of leaking his clients private bank records to the press. Mr Avenatti published documents earlier this month showing Mr Cohen had been paid by companies such as AT&T and Novartis for consulting work after Mr Trumps election. The documents appeared to be "suspicious activity reports sent to Mr Cohens bank, which Mr Ryan said were only accessible through his clients private records. "I've never seen an attorney conduct himself the way Mr Avenatti conducted himself," Mr Ryan said, according to CNBC. "What Mr Avenatti did in releasing those records was entirely improper. Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump acknowledges the audience after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania (L) and daughter Tiffany watch during inauguration ceremonies swearing in Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West Front of the US capital in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jim Bourg: "This photo was shot with one of two remote cameras. The cameras were monitored and triggered remotely and the pictures were transmitted to clients worldwide within minutes of being taken." Reuters/Jim Bourg Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Obama farewell address - 10 January 2017 US President Barack Obama wipes away tears as he delivers his farewell address in Chicago on 10 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "In his final days in office, Obama made a visit home to Chicago. As he spoke from the stage to his wife and daughter in the audience, he became emotional when he talked about what they had sacrificed during his time in office. I turned from photographing the Obama women embracing to find him onstage wiping away tears." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (left) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009. Reuters/ Lucas Jackson/Stelios Varias Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Liberty Ball - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Liberty Ball in honour of his inauguration in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "What I see when I look at this picture is the end of a very long day, not to mention weeks and months of preparation by many photographers, editors and network experts and the beginning of everything since." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception - 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump greets Director of the FBI James Comey as Director of the Secret Service Joseph Clancy (L), watches during the Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on 22 January, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "I have covered the White House for 16 years and normally either the President or the pool is in position when an event starts. In this case the President was not where anyone expected him to be. In fact, he was almost blocking the door when the pool came in. We had to scramble to find a position without bumping him or the furniture as he greeted and thanked members of law enforcement for their security efforts during the inauguration. Luckily, he greeted FBI Director James Comey a few seconds after the pool had made its way into the room." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Private phone calls to world leaders - 28 January 2017 US President Donald Trump, is joined by his staff, as he speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on 28 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Very early in the Trump administration, weekends were as busy as weekdays. On Trump's second Saturday the official schedule said he would be making private phone calls to a number of world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin. I arrived early and, before sitting down at my desk walked up to Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office. He, too, was just taking his coat off. I gingerly made the suggestion that previous administrations had sometimes allowed photos of such phone calls through the Oval Office windows on the colonnade. To my mild shock, he didn't even think about it twice. "We'll do it!" he said. In truth, I really only expected the Putin call, but we were outside the windows multiple times throughout the day as the calls went on." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway - 27 February 2017 Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (L) attends as US President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office on 27 February, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "We're often asked how much access we have to the Trump administration, and the answer is we have an awful lot. President Trump himself is very comfortable in the spotlight, and his aides are similarly unfazed by cameras. In this instance, senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was so comfortable in our presence she seemed not to consider the optics of kneeling on a Oval Office sofa to take pictures with her phone." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Angela Merkel heads to Washington - 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on 17 March, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Chancellor Merkel made one of the earliest important visits of any US allies to meet Trump in his first months in office. When world leaders give joint news conferences they don't always tend to give each other their full attention - but Merkel watched Trump intently at several key moments, and here seemed particularly rapt." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump welcomes truckers to the White House - 23 March 2017 President Trump reacts as he sits on a truck while he welcomes truckers and CEOs to attend a meeting regarding healthcare at the White House on 23 March, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "The White House organised a listening session with truckers and CEO's of major American companies, regarding healthcare reform. An 18-wheeler tow truck was parked on the South Lawn of the White House and as Trump welcomed the truckers someone invited the him to come and sit in the driver's seat. Trump jumped into the cab and started yelling and pretending to drive - creating one of the most memorable pictures of the year. A lesson learned, always be prepared for the unexpected." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 6 April 2017 US President Donald Trump talks to journalists members of the travel pool on board the Air Force One during his trip to Palm Beach, Florida on 6 April, 2017. Carlos Barria: "During the many trips to President Trump's residence in Florida it is usual to see the president coming to the back of the plane to chat with journalists. During one of the trips to the so called 'Winter White House', Trump had a long talk with reporters while the Air Force One entertainment system was playing one of the latest Star Wars movies. As I was listening to Trump talk I was also looking at the movie waiting for a part of the movie to frame the mood of the day. Of the many scenes, I choose the one with Darth Vader." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office of the White House on 27 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "A day before President Trump's hundred days in office I was part of the team that interviewed the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. I was only allowed to photograph Trump during the last five minutes of the interview. The time was very tight so I had to move fast as I had pictures in mind that I wanted to shoot. I walked into the Oval Office and saw that the President had printed maps of the country showing areas in red where he won. I raised my hands holding my camera as high as possible to get the best view of the scene using a 16mm wide angle lens." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump reacts as he arrives at Harrisburg international airport, before attending a rally marking his first 100 days in office in Pennsylvania on 29 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to celebrate his hundred days in office with a victory rally. He was in friendly territory as he won with a big difference over his opponent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, during the November elections. As usual when the commander-in-chief arrives local residents gather to greet him. This time a small group of military personnel attended the arrival. Surrounded by secret service agents Trump walked from the Air Force One and raised his hand in a sign of victory as the crowd cheered him on." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 2 May 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch as US President Donald Trump presents the U.S. Air Force Academy football team with the Commander-in-Chief trophy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on 2 May, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "Covering the White House does not just mean covering the President. White House staffers are an important part of the story and their relationship with the President and each other is an indicator of how things are going in the West Wing. The tendency is to focus exclusively on the President once an event starts but I always try to look around to see how people are reacting as things unfold." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Secret Service - 4 May 2017 Secret Service agents use a presidential limousine as cover from spraying water as US President Donald Trump lands via Marine One helicopter in New York on 4 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "The best part of any trip to New York City with the sitting US President is the helicopter ride into Manhattan. The ride out at night can be stunning. Here, Secret Service agents protect themselves from the spray from the East River as Trump lands on the helipad." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures NATO Summit - 25 May 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wait the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron (unseen) before a lunch ahead of a NATO Summit in Brussels on 25 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "One of the best parts of travelling overseas for White House coverage is the chance to see the U.S. president in different environments and (literally) a different light. Here, Trump and his wife came out of the shadows to greet France's President Macron." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump meets Putin at G20 summit - 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "On July 7, I witnessed one of the most important meetings of President Trump's first year in office. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Germany. The world's eyes were on these two leaders after speculation about Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. We entered the room for less than two minutes, where I took dozens of pictures. But there was this very interesting moment when Trump extended his hand to Putin for a handshake. Putin paused for a second and looked at Trump's hand. That was the picture that I was looking for, a little moment that seemed to say a lot." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures First lady - 8 July 2017 First lady Melania Trump chats with US President Donald Trump during their return from Germany at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on 8 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "After President Trump's trip to Germany he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. First Lady Melania Trump said goodbye to Trump as she was heading off in a different direction that day. While chatting a breeze blew Melania's hair up in the air." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Made in America product showcase - 17 July 2017 Vice President Mike Pence laughs as President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat as they attend a Made in America product showcase event at the White House on 17 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "This summer the White House organized an event to showcase 'Made in America' products. All kinds of exhibitors brought their products as the President and Vice President toured the event. One of the companies was Marucci Sport, a manufacturer of baseball bats based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As Trump approached a table full of baseball bats, photographers at the event, including me, rushed to get a good angle hoping that he would pick up a bat. As we predicted, he did. He took one and joked around as though he was hitting something hard. The only thing closer to him right there, was the media." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 25 July 2017 Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says hello to reporters as he and White House advisors including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci accompany President Trump for an event celebrating veterans at AMVETS Post 44 in Ohio, July 25, 2017. Jonathan Ernst: "The most visible person in any White House is naturally the President, followed by the press secretary. But there are also the staff who support them. For those of us covering the Trump administration, there seem to be more compelling figures in the West Wing than ever before. It's crucial to know who's who and why they're important. When I raised my camera and back-pedalled ahead of the group to take this image Lewandowski gave me a hello. I liked the photo, but had no idea it would go a little bit viral, especially since Scaramucci, who was the biggest mover and shaker that week, was hidden back in the pack. But I guess the image catches a glimpse of what it's like to be a West Wing staffer on the road." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Campaign rally - 3 August 2017 US President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in West Virginia on 3 August, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Huntington for one of his usual campaign rallies. While members of his family spoke to the crowd he was waiting under a black curtain to be introduced. Suddenly he walked onto the stage, one of the first frames that I took was of his hand. I set my exposure for the light on the stage hoping to create this dark background and it worked." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Staring into the solar eclipse - 21 August 2017 Without his protective glasses on, US President Donald Trump looks up towards the solar eclipse while viewing with his wife Melania and son Barron at the White House on 21 August, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "On a day when everyone, and I mean everyone, was told not to look at the eclipse without protective glasses, Trump, President of the United States, couldn't help himself." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Harvey - 2 September 2017 US President Donald Trump poses for a photo as he and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers hand out meals during a visit with flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey at a relief centre in Houston, Texas on 2 September, 2017. Photohrapher Kevin Lamarque: "Trump, eager to deliver the image of a hands-on response to Hurricane Harvey, made this visit to a relief centre and obliged this woman with a selfie as Melania continued to work." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House - 15 September 2017 Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House on 15 September. Frank, who wrote a letter to Trump offering to mow the lawn, was invited to work for a day at the White House along the National Park Service staff. Frank was so focused on his task that he did not notice the President arrive to surprise him. He took his father jumping in to grab his attention and point Trump out. Photographer Carlos Barria said: The image of Trump shouting at a kid who is mowing his lawn might have many interpretations in today's politically polarized United States. But for me it was just a kid who loved what he was doing, to the point he almost appeared to ignore the President." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Take a knee - 27 September 2017 A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes him after an event at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., September 27, 2017. In September, soon after Trump had made comments condemning NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, he made a day trip to a rally in Indianapolis. Jonathan Ernst managed to capture a man on one knee with a tri-folded flag and was able to use a portion of the sign on the building he was kneeling in front of to track the man down and tell his story in full. US Army veteran Marvin Boatright wanted to send a message against social injustice. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Maria - 3 October 2017 President Donald Trump throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by Hurricane Maria as he visits Calgary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 3 October, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "During an afternoon visit to Puerto Rico for President Trump to survey damage from Hurricane Maria and greet some of its victims, Trump made a stop at a church where food and supplies were being distributed. Among the items were paper towels and Trump, apparently caught up in the moment, decided to distribute some of the rolls." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Jared Kushner - 1 November 2017 White House Senior adviser Jared Kushner sits behind President Trump during a cabinet meeting in Washington on 1 November, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "The role of Jared Kushner has gone through a series of changes. He began front and centre as a high profile adviser, but as time has passed and issues surrounding him have surfaced, he has become more of a background figure." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump in China - 9 November 2017 Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 9 November, 2017. Photographer Damir Sagolj: "It's one of those "how to make a better or at least different shot when two presidents shake hands several times a day, several days in row". If I'm not mistaken in calculation, presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shook their hands at least six times in events I covered during Trump's recent visit to China. I would imagine there were some more handshakes I haven't seen but other photographers did. And they all look similar - two big men, smiling and heartily greeting each other until everyone gets their shot. But then there is always something that can make it special - in this case the background made of US and Chinese flags. The first time it didn't work for me. The second time I positioned myself lower and centrally, and used the longest lens I have to capture only hands reaching for a handshake." Reuters/Damir Sagolj Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 10 November 2017 US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart for Vietnam from Beijing Airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "There is a Reuters photographer in the tight pool covering the US president for every appearance he makes 365 days a year. This was just one of 32 images of mine that were transmitted on the Reuters wire of President Trump visiting China and Vietnam that day. You never know when a sudden interaction, a gust of wind or a unique facial expression will lead to a striking image that grabs peoples' attention." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures ASEAN handshake - 13 November 2017 Donald Trump registers his surprise as he realises other leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are crossing their arms for the traditional "ASEAN handshake" as he participates in the opening ceremony of the summit in Manila on 13 November, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Having covered a few ASEAN summits, I knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. Not everyone in the room knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. A lot was written about this unscripted moment, and what deeper meaning it might have. The simple truth is that sometimes in life there are unscripted moments." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst But Mr Avenatti shot back, accusing Mr Ryan of leaking tapes of private conversations between Ms Daniels and her former lawyer, Keith Davidson. Mr Avenatti said he had been contacted by a reporter enquiring about the conversations, which he said concerned the 2016 nondisclosure agreement. Mr Ryan appeared to acknowledge the existence of the tapes, but said they were kept "under lock and key, according to CNN. Mr Avenatti seized on the apparent admission, telling reporters: "It is clear from today's proceedings that Mr Cohen and his attorneys are hell-bent on continuing to hide the truth from the American people." As a result of our efforts there was a shocking admission in court today namely that just like the Nixon tapes years ago, we now have what I will refer to as the 'Trump Tapes, he added. Mr Avenatti eventually backed down after Ms Kimba ordered him to drop his motion or "stop [his] publicity tour. The lawyer has made 170 media appearances in recent months behaviour Ms Kimba called inimitable to giving Mr Cohen eventually a fair trial. The judge also ordered Mr Cohens team to complete their review of the seized documents by 15 June. Any remaining documents, she said, would be reviewed by a team of government lawyers known as a taint team. Donald Trump has said that he wishes he picked a different Attorney General than Jeff Sessions, who the president faults for recusing himself from a Justice Department investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. The president lashed out amid reports that he had tried to reverse Mr Sessions' decision to recuse himself last year. He quoted Republican Representative Trey Gowdy's defence of his actions in a Wednesday-morning tweet. "If I were the President and I picked someone to be the countrys chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, oh by the way Im not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated too," the president quoted Mr Gowdy as saying. "...There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else! "And I wish I did!" Mr Trump added. The president has repeatedly expressed his displeasure with Mr Sessions' decision to recuse himself, which the attorney general did last year after it was revealed he had made undisclosed contact with the Russian ambassador to the US. Mr Trump previously called the decision "extremely unfair," and said he would not have nominated Mr Sessions had he known what he would do. 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 But a recent report from the New York Times claims Mr Trump further, asking Mr Sessions to reverse his decision in a private meeting last March. The president reportedly told aides he needed a loyalist overseeing the Justice Department inquiry. Mr Sessions refused. Mr Gowdy defended the president's reported actions in an appearance on CBS This Morning on Wednesday, saying Mr Trump was simply expressing his frustration with Mr Sessions' lack of transparency around the rescusal. "That's how I read that, as: 'Senator Sessions, why didn't you tell me before I picked you?'" Mr Gowdy said of the report. Donald Trump on Jeff Sessions: 'Everything I've done is 100% proper' Special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the Justice Department probe, is reportedly investigating the incident. Mr Trump has grown increasingly critical of the Mr Mueller and his team in recent weeks, accusing them of "meddling" in the upcoming midterm elections and claiming the FBI planted a "spy" in his campaign. Neither allegation has been proven. Mr Gowdy said he believed the FBI acted appropriately when sending an informant to speak with members of the Trump campaign. Mr Sessions recused himself from overseeing the investigation last March, after it was revealed that he did not disclose his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during his Senate confirmation hearing. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein took over the probe from Mr Sessions, and appointed Mr Mueller as special counsel several months later. Mr Trump has previously threatened Mr Rosenstein as well, tweeting that he may have to "use the powers granted to the Presidency and get involved" in a dispute over the Justice Department's refusal to hand over certain unredacted documents to Congress. Mr Sessions has reportedly said he will resign if Mr Rosenstein is fired. A man from Indias Dalit (formerly untouchable) community has died after he was kidnapped by members of his new brides family, police say, in what is believed to be a rare case of a so-called honour killing among the countrys Christian community. The death of 23-year-old Kevin P Joseph has rocked the southern state of Kerala, seen as among the most progressive in India, where Christians represent almost 20 per cent of the 34 million-strong population. Mr Josephs body was found in a canal on Monday, three days after his wedding to 21-year-old Neenu Chacko, whose affluent family of Saint Thomas Christians disapproved of the marriage. Initial post mortem results, released on Wednesday amid a cloud of political accusations, showed Mr Joseph had suffered 15 separate injuries to the body before his ultimate death by drowning. According to Mr Josephs family, Ms Chackos parents had tried to prevent the marriage from taking place, alerting police in the city of Kottayam on the day of the wedding and claiming the bride had been abducted. When officers spoke to the couple, Ms Chacko said she wished to live with Mr Joseph and that, as she was 21, she was free to do as she pleased. Police told reporters Mr Joseph and one of his cousins were kidnapped in the early hours of Sunday morning. Ms Chacko says she and some neighbours alerted police almost immediately, but that officers claimed they were too busy preparing for a visit by the states chief minister to investigate. Mr Josephs body, already in a deteriorated state, was found 15 hours later, while his cousin escaped alive, Mr Josephs father told The News Minute. Asked why the brides family disapproved of Mr Joseph, a family member said: We did not know about the relationship. But now we understand that Neenus parents were rich. Moreover, Kevin is a Dalit Christian. They may not have liked him because of these two reasons. Honour killings are rarer among Indias Christians than among Hindus, said Manjula Pradeep, a lawyer and former director of the Navsarjan Trust, one of the countrys biggest Dalit rights organisations. Kevins case proves that the caste system is still very much prevalent and discrimination and violence based on caste will continue despite constitutional measures, she told The Independent. On Monday evening and Tuesday, protests organised by various political groups in Kerala descended on the Kottayam police station and the medical facility where the autopsy was being carried out, accusing local officers of failing to act quickly enough. According to the New Indian Express, there were clashes outside the Government Medical College hospital as activists from the opposition Congress party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPM tried to take ownership of Mr Josephs remains. The Hindu reported that some of the suspected kidnappers had links to the CPMs youth wing, the Democratic Youth Federation of India. World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty Police have now arrested Ms Chackos father and brother, and the CPM-led government has moved to quell protests by suspending the head of the local police station and transferring out the city police chief, VM Mohammed Rafik. "Had the police acted in time, a life could have been saved and criminals could have been arrested promptly," said Lathika Subhash, leader of the Congress partys women's wing, UCA News reported. Former chief minister A K Antony said Kerala could not remain silent over an apparent honour killing, and said the polices handling of the case could not be justified. The government and CM (Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan) has to take the responsibility for this, he said. Mr Josephs alleged honour killing represents the second such incident in as many months in Kerala, after police said a 23-year-old Hindu woman named Athira was stabbed to death by her father for trying to marry a man from what he perceived to be a lower caste. The New Indian Express wrote that the two incidents together threaten to rob Kerala of its progressive roots. Firstpost said the southern state must now reckon with the sort of killings that Keralites believed was mostly a north Indian phenomenon. Honour killings happen to ensure that the caste system remains intact and no one crosses the rigid boundaries it creates, said Ms Pradeep. Despite generations of Indians growing up in a country with strict political and legal protections for Dalits, she said, these killings show Indian societys psyche and mindset has not really changed much. Russia's foreign minister is to visit North Korea to hold talks with his counterpart about the situation on the Korean peninsula, the Kremlin says. Sergei Lavrov's visit on Thursday comes ahead of a planned summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un on North Korean denuclearisation next month. The foreign ministry said in a statement Wednesday that Mr Lavrov would hold talks with North Korea's foreign policy chief to discuss bilateral issues as well as the overall issues surrounding the Korean Peninsula. The move comes amid expected talks this week between a top North Korea official and US secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Mr Trump tweeted on Tuesday he had a "great team" working on the summit and confirmed that Kim Yong-chol, vice chairman of the North Korean ruling party's central committee, was headed to New York. Teams of US officials have also arrived at the Korean demilitarized zone and in Singapore to prepare for the meeting, initially scheduled for 12 June. The on-again, off-again drama has been cast by US officials as in keeping with Mr Trump's deal-making style, and reflective of the two leaders testing each other. Donald Trump says North Korea summit 'could still happen' After the North's combative statements, there was debate inside the Trump administration about whether it marked a real turn to belligerence or a feint to see how far Mr Kim could push the US in the lead-up to the talks. Mr Trump had mused that Mr Kim's "attitude" had changed after the North Korean's surprise visit to China two weeks ago, suggesting China was pushing Mr Kim away from the table. Mr Trump's letter last week, in which he initially cancelled the meeting, was designed to pressure the North on the international stage for appearing to have cold feet, aides said. White House officials maintain that Mr Trump was hopeful the North was merely negotiating, but that he was prepared for the letter to mark the end of the two-month flirtation. Instead, the officials said, it brought both sides to the table with increasing seriousness, as they work through myriad logistical and policy decisions to keep 12 June a viable option for the summit. North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border Show all 20 1 /20 North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border People have their picture taken with North Korea in the background, in Tumen, China. In the Chinese city of Dandong, signs of neighbouring North Korea are pervasive. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border A North Korean woman is photographed from the Chinese side of the Yalu River near the town of Changbai, China as she walks between houses in the North Korean town of Hyesan. A week-long road trip along China's side of its border with North Korea revealed stark contrasts between China's bright towns and North Korea's dark villages. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border North Korean souvenirs are displayed for sale on the banks of the Yalu River in Dandong in Liaoning province, China. In the Chinese city of Dandong, signs of neighbouring North Korea are pervasive. Reuters North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border A large screen, which faces North Korea, broadcasts propaganda videos on an island on the Yalu River between North Korea and China, in the town of Linjiang in Jilin province, China. A week-long road trip along China's side of its border with North Korea revealed stark contrasts between China's bright towns and North Korea's dark villages. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border A piece of clothing is used to make a gap in barbed wire near the closed bridge over the Yalu River on the Chinese side of the border with North Korea between towns of Ji'an and Linjiang, China. A week-long road trip along China's side of its border with North Korea showed places where it is porous. Reuters North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border A tourist uses binoculars to look across to North Korea from a tower built on the Chinese side of the border between Russia (L), China (C) and North Korea (R) near the town of Hunchun in China. Reuters North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border North Koreans are photographed from the Chinese side of the border as they stand next to the freezing Yalu River near the town of Linjiang, China. On a road trip along China's side of its border with North Korea, reporters found a group of North Koreans diving in the Yalu river who the Chinese locals said were searching for gold. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border Women participate in a group dance exercise close to the Yalu River which runs between China and North Korea, in the town of Linjiang in Jilin province, China. A week-long road trip along China's side of its border with North Korea revealed stark contrasts between China's bright towns and North Korea's dark villages. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border A sign reading, "Take the initiative to preserve order along the border," stands in a field at the border between China and North Korea just outside Dandong, Liaoning province, China. Reuters North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border A couple prepare for a wedding photography session on a boat which takes tourists on sightseeing tours from the Chinese side of the Yalu River, close to the shores of North Korea, near Dandong, Liaoning province, China. In the Chinese city of Dandong, signs of neighbouring North Korea are pervasive. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border Tourists travel on a boat taking them from the Chinese side of the Yalu River for sightseeing close to the shores of North Korea, near Dandong, Liaoning province, China. In the Chinese city of Dandong, signs of neighbouring North Korea are pervasive. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border North Koreans are photographed from the Chinese side of the border as they stand next to the freezing Yalu River near the town of Linjiang, China. On a road trip along China's side of its border with North Korea, reporters found a group of North Koreans diving in the Yalu river who the Chinese locals said were searching for gold. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border Women walk across a bridge from an island on the Yalu River, dividing North Korea and China, in the town of Linjiang in Jilin province, China. A week-long road trip along China's side of its border with North Korea revealed stark contrasts between China's bright towns and North Korea's dark villages. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border A North Korean soldier and locals are photographed from the Chinese side of the border north of Dandong, China as they stand on the banks of the Yalu River, north of Sinuiju, North Korea. A week-long road trip along China's side of its border with North Korea revealed stark contrasts between China's bright towns and North Korea's dark villages. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border North Korean girls are photographed from the Chinese side of the border as they collect water from the frozen Yalu River near Linjiang, China. A week-long road trip along China's side of its border with North Korea revealed stark contrasts between China's bright towns and North Korea's dark villages. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border A man looks through binoculars towards North Korea on the Broken Bridge over the Yalu River that connects the North Korean town of Sinuiju and Dandong in Liaoning Province, China. In the Chinese city of Dandong, signs of neighbouring North Korea are pervasive. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border North Koreans are photographed from the Chinese side of the border as they stand next to the freezing Yalu River near the town of Linjiang, China. On a road trip along China's side of its border with North Korea, reporters found a group of North Koreans diving in the Yalu river who the Chinese locals said were searching for gold. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border North Korean fishermen are seen as a Chinese flag flutters from the Broken Bridge as the sun sets over the Yalu River between the North Korean town of Sinuiju and Dandong in Liaoning Province, China. In the Chinese city of Dandong, signs of neighbouring North Korea are pervasive. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border North Koreans are photographed from the Chinese side of the border as they stand in the freezing Yalu River near the town of Linjiang, China. On a road trip along China's side of its border with North Korea, reporters found a group of North Koreans diving in the Yalu river who the Chinese locals said were searching for gold. REUTERS North Korea: A road trip on the edge of the Chinese border Women, photographed from the Chinese side of the border, are seen through binoculars fixed on a building on the Chinese side of the border for sightseers to look across to North Korea, as they cross the bridge from Namyang in North Korea towards the town of Tumen in China, Reuters The flurry of diplomatic activity intensified with Kim Yong Chol's appearance at a Beijing airport on Wednesday. South Korea-based Yonhap News cited diplomatic sources as saying the official was on an Air China flight that departed in the afternoon. He will be the highest-level North Korean official to travel to the United States since 2000, when late National Defense Commission first vice chairman Jo Myong-rok visited Washington, South Korea's Unification Ministry said. Mr Pompeo has travelled to Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, twice in recent weeks for meetings with Kim Jong-un, and has said there is a "shared understanding" between the two sides about what they hope to achieve. Meanwhile, a team of American diplomats is holding preparatory discussions with North Korean officials at the DMZ. The group first met with its counterparts on Sunday, and was seen leaving a Seoul hotel on Tuesday, but it was unclear whether they went to Panmunjom, a village that straddles the border inside the DMZ. The US officials are led by Sung Kim, the US ambassador to the Philippines, who was formerly the US ambassador to Seoul and a top negotiator with North Korea in past nuclear talks. It includes senior officials with the National Security Council and the Pentagon. The White House emphasised that it has remained in close contact with South Korean and Japanese officials as preparations for the talks continue. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Mr Trump will host Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe of Japan on 7 June to coordinate their thinking ahead of the summit. Mr Trump hosted South Korean president Moon Jae-in last week. Mr Moon, who has lobbied hard for nuclear negotiations between Mr Trump and Kim Jong-un, held a surprise meeting with the North Korean leader Saturday in an effort to keep the summit alive. South Korean media also reported that a North Korean delegation arrived in Singapore on Monday night, where other US officials, led by White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, are preparing for the summit. Additional reporting by AP. Russian dissident journalist Arkady Babchenko, who was reported killed in Ukraine, has shown up alive at a news conference about his own death. Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), told reporters the agency faked Mr Babchenko's death to catch those who are trying to kill him. According to Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian MP with close links to the police and security services, the "brilliant special operation" was a success and led to "the killer" and the "organiser of the murder" being detained. Kiev and national police had said Mr Babchenko, a strong critic of the Kremlin, was shot multiple times in the back at his apartment building and was found in a pool of blood by his wife. Mr Babchenko showed up at the news conference on Wednesday and thanked everyone who was mourning his death. With tears in his eyes, the journalist said he had done his work, and was still alive". To friends and family, apologies for putting you through this," he said. "Ive buried my friends I know the feeling of revulsion. Apologies to my wife. Olga dear, sorry. There was no other way." Thanking the SBU, Mr Babchenko said the two-month operation had been staged to foil a plot by the Kremlin to kill him. "The most important is that they saved my life and stopped a bigger terrorist attack," he added, without elaborating. The SBU said it had received information about the plot and had managed to prevent it. Russia's foreign ministry said it was happy Mr Babchenko was still alive, but accused Ukraine of using his story as propaganda. Konstantin Kosachev, the Russian parliament's foreign affairs spokesman, compared Ukraine's allegations to Britain's claims that Moscow was behind the nerve gas poisonings of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. "The logic is the same to defame Russia," Mr Kosachev said. Mr Babchenko, 41, is one of Russia's best-known war reporters. He spoke about leaving the country last year because of repeated threats against himself and his family. 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 was initially claimed that Mr Babchenko had died in an ambulance on his way to hospital on Tuesday evening. Mr Gerashchenko said the journalist left his apartment to buy provisions and was attacked on his return. "When Arkady opened the door of his flat, the killer cowardly shot him in the back, firing several shots," the politician wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. Recommended Russian journalist and Kremlin critic killed in Kiev A lawyer by education, Mr Babchenko is a two-time veteran of the Chechen conflict, travelling first as a conscript, and later as a contract soldier. Mr Babchenko fled Russia for the Czech Republic in February 2017, before eventually settling in Ukraine. There is an informed opinion that it would be a good idea for me to live outside our god-protected Motherland for a while, he wrote at the time of his emigration. His critical reporting of the wars in Ukraine and Syria have made him a target. Russian state TV was particularly forthright in criticising a blog post written by the journalist about the crash of a military aircraft bound for Syria. Mr Babchenko has expressed indifference for the deaths of military representatives and reminded readers of Russian excesses in Aleppo. Additional reporting by agencies. Arkady Babchenko has no doubt walked into a number of press conferences in his journalism career, but few would have been like this. He was being presented by Ukrainian authorities, alive and well, a day after he had been reportedly assassinated outside his home. The head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Vasyl Gritsak said that the Russian Mr Babchenko a staunch critic of the Kremlin had agreed to take part in a ruse to lure contract killers to arrest. The operation had helped prevent both Mr Babchenkos own death and a wider, unspecified terrorist attack, Mr Gritsak claimed. Im still alive, Mr Babchenko told a startled room. Im sorry you had to go through this but there was no other way. It had been widely reported that Mr Babchenko was assassinated on Tuesday evening, shot three times in the back outside his front door as he apparently left the apartment to buy bread. His wife was said to have found him in a pool of blood and he died in an ambulance on the way to hospital. Prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, who appeared alongside Mr Babchenko, said it had been necessary to fake the journalists death so that the organisers of the plot believed they had succeeded. Ukrainian authorities claimed their operation had helped foil a plot to kill 30 people in Ukraine, including Mr Babchenko. They declined to say who the other 29 people were. According to their claims, Russia had paid a Ukrainian citizen $40,000 (30,100) to organise the first assassination. That man is now supposedly under arrest. The news of the apparent killing sparked theories about whether it was his work that caused it, and there was a swift war of words between Ukraine and Russia. A number of prominent Russian journalists critical of President Vladimir Putins polices have been killed in recent years. Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko speaking at a conference in March about Putin's 'brainwashing tactics' When he was presented to journalists, Mr Babchenkos reappearance elicited gasps, then cheers and applause from those gathered. For some friends, news of the journalists non-death was met with immediate relief, and a desire to punch his face in. For his wife, with it seemingly unclear whether she knew about the sting in advance or not, a similar reaction may have followed. Sorry, Olga dear, was all that the tearful journalist could offer her on his reappearance from the dead. World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty But marriage is not the only thing on the line. The credibility of Ukraine is under question too. This was, after all, a country that had claimed to be somehow more truthful than its eastern neighbour. There may well be serious evidence to come out of this as-yet-unclear special operation. But the fake story has other, rather more obvious consequences. First, journalists will no longer accept Ukrainian official statements on face value. This is good practice anyway, given the increasingly creative endeavours emerging from the government in Kiev. Second, news of threats to journalists will now be doubted at every turn. As foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum tweeted: Thanks, Ukrainian security services. Thats really helpful to all who care about journalists safety. An activist hangs portraits of Mr Babchenko to the fence of Russian embassy in Kiev (AFP/Getty) Third, the Kremlin has a new get-out-of-jail-free card: Ukraine is now a storyteller; nothing that comes out of Ukraine is really how it seems; everything Ukraine says is to show Russia in a bad light. Russia has been accused by the US of using disinformation campaigns to try and affect the 2016 presidential election and in such a climate there is no doubt Moscow will use the staged killing to undermine news out of Kiev. Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin has chosen to take a rare high road. The Kremlins official spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declined to comment, letting the incident speak for itself. The usually excitable foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said she was pleased Mr Babchenko was alive if only it was always such good news. Ukraine had used Babchenko for propaganda purposes, she added. Earlier on Wednesday, before Mr Babchenkos ressurection, the Kremlin had described the Ukrainian allegation that it was behind his murder as an anti-Russian smear and demanded that Ukraine conduct a genuine investigation into the killing. Mr Peskov described the allegations as the height of cynicism and said he hoped other countries would lean on Kiev to do more to protect journalists. After the press conference the Russian Foreign Ministry called the staged killing a provocation with other officials labelling it propaganda. We dont know what alternatives, if any, Mr Babchenko was offered to the special operation. His critical writing also left few doubts as to his views on the Kremlin. But in agreeing to take part in a police operation, he also put the credibility of an entire profession at stake. Its crossing a line big time, author Andrei Soldatov said on Twitter. Babchenko is a journalist, not a policeman, for Christ sake, and part of our job is trust, whatever Trump & Putin say about fake news. Katya Sergatskova, founder of Zaborona, a new media platform in Ukraine, suggested the incident had shown the countrys security service to be out of its depth. They thought they were showing off, but they have no idea how awful this looks on the international arena. A British businessman and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin who was detained by Spanish police at Russias request has been released. Bill Browder, a London-based hedge fund manager who has fought a long battle with Moscow, said on Twitter he was arrested in Madrid on Wednesday morning. In the back of the Spanish police car going to the station on the Russian arrest warrant, he wrote. They wont tell me which station. Police later said the financier had been released as his Interpol arrest warrant had expired. Mr Browder claimed he was freed after Interpol headquarters advised Spanish authorities not to honour Russias request. Mr Browder was sentenced to nine years in prison by a Russia court last year, on fraud and tax evasion charges. Interpol refused to enforce a similar arrest warrant in 2013 against the businessman, judging it to be political in nature. In March, Mr Browder told MPs he believed the Russians would like more than anything to arrest him and get me back to Russia and then kill me in the control of their own system. The businessman has been one of Russias most high-profile public enemies for many years, once being labelled a serial killer by Mr Putin himself. Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko speaking at a conference in March about Putin's 'brainwashing tactics' Mr Browder is credited with playing a key role in the creation of the Magnitsky Act a range of sanctions imposed by the US in 2012 on top Russian officials accused of corruption. The sanctions were named in honour of Mr Browders Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered a 174m fraud believed to have involved Russian officials against Mr Browders investment firm, Hermitage Capital Management. Mr Magnitsky was imprisoned on what were widely considered to be false charges and died in jail amid claims he was tortured. A Home Office minister called it an atrocious murder. 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 Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliaments chief Brexit co-ordinator, tweeted on Wednesday morning: Worrying that autocratic Russia can get democratic Spain to go after someone fighting to expose Putins crimes and those responsible for Magnitskys murder. Bill Browders rights must be protected, he added in a tweet messaged to Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister . After his release, Mr Browder said: Ironically, the reason Im in Madrid is to give evidence to senior Spanish anti-Russian mafia prosecutor Jose Grinda about the huge amount of money from the Magnitsky case that flowed to Spain. Now that Im released my mission carries on. Meeting with Prosector Grinda now. Boris Johnson, Britains foreign secretary, said he had spoken to Mr Browder and was very glad he had been released. Moscow should concentrate on bringing those responsible for the murder of Magnitsky to justice, he added. Bob Seely, a Conservative MP who sits on the foreign affairs committee, said: After repeated attempts to use the law against Bill Browder, we should be concerned. Bill Browder is a political enemy of the Kremlin, not a criminal enemy. President Putin seeks his arrest because of Browders work in implementing the Magnitsky Acts in many states throughout the world, following the imprisonment, murder and trial after death of anti-corruption lawyer Mr Sergei Magnitksy. The Kremlins attempts to go after its critics does not seem to have been diminished by the Skripal poisoning case in Britain. If anything, Moscow seems to be upping the ante. We have the World Cup in barely two weeks. You would have thought that the Russian state would wish to avoid controversy. The willingness of the Kremlin to antagonise and challenge whether it is poisoning in the UK or the use of the law in Spain seems to be undiminished. Speaking to the digital, culture, media and sport committee in March, Mr Browder said the Russian state had branded him a spy and a tax cheat and accused him of stealing 4.5bn from the IMF. I have been threatened on a number of occasions with death, he told the MPs looking into the issue of so-called fake news. Russia has tried to extradite Mr Browder from the UK several times, and he was once detained at Geneva airport, on a request from Moscow. Who is Bill Browder? An American-born, British businessman, who describes himself, not entirely unfairly, as Putins number one enemy. Mr Browder was running an investment fund in Russia in the late nineties and early 2000s, which he says uncovered corruption in various Russian state backed commodities companies. After Browder left Russia in 2005 his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was tortured and died in Russian police custody in 2009. Browder has since dedicated his life to fighting corruption among Vladimir Putin and his inner circle. The allegations made by Magnitsky concern the extraordinary web of corruption that created Russias oligarch class, when huge state assets in oil and gas were sold off for tiny fractions of their overall worth then sold back to the Russian state in the following decades for billions. Recommended Putin critic Browder detained in Spain after Russian arrest warrant Why was he arrested? Browder has been refused entry to Russia since 2005, and described as a threat to national security. Russian authorities have even accused him of being responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky himself. He was detained briefly via a request from Interpol on Wednesday morning, but Spanish police have since been instructed by Interpol not to honour the arrest warrant put out on Mr Browder by Russia Why does Russia consider him such a threat? For many years, Mr Browder and others have been lobbying Western countries like the US and the UK to bring in what he calls a Magnitsky Act. The US did so under Obama, and the UK following suit although so far to a lesser extent. Mr Browders firmly held view is that western countries have huge power and leverage in stamping out corruption by Putin and his cronies by seizing wealth assets that they keep in western banks, and especially London property. He also claims Putin has a personal fortune of tens, and possibly hundreds of billions of dollars kept abroad in the name of willing acolytes, and that the US Magnitsky Act has the remove it all from him. It is for this reason he says Putin is so concerned by his actions. How come he's British? He was born in the US. His father Felix Browder even won various national medals for mathematics. He says he renounced his US citizenship as a consequence of his family having been viciously persecuted in the 1950s, in the McCarthy era. But it also meant he did not have to pay US tax on his substantial foreign earnings while he ran his investment firm in Russia. He has described his life now as one of living in fear. In the wake of the Salisbury poisonings, Browder told The Independent the poisonings would have been carried out on Putins instructions, and done to warn his potential opponents that nowhere is safe. He says he does not employ bodyguards, and he said it would make him less safe not moreso. Winner of May 12 election Muqtada al-Sadr headed to neighboring Kuwait Tuesday as part of plan to develop Iraqs ties with regional neighbors as he seeks to end US and Iranian influence in Iraq. Al-Sadr this month was tussled at the helm of the country after his bloc Sairoon stunned analysts by winning 54 seats in parliament beating Iran and US favorites in polls boycotted by many Iraqis. The vibrant Shia Cleric dismissed plans to play the role of Prime Minister. Al-Sadrs visit to Kuwait, according to his office, is meant to improve relations between the two countries. The Shia leader, in his campaign promises, pledged to scale down Iran and US interference in Iraqi politics. He opposes the presence of American troops (around 5,000) on Iraqi soil. Despite being Shia, al-Sadr has been very vocal against Tehrans meddling into Iraqi internal affairs. The Islamic Republic backed the Iraqi army in the defeat of the Islamic State group in December. The famous cleric has repeatedly blamed Iran and the US of influencing the formation of a new cabinet in the wake of the elections. Al-Sadr since last year embarked on a regional ties building trail. He travelled to Saudi Arabia and met with Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman. Ties between the two countries had been cut off for over two decades. Iraq under the last Sunni ruler Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991. Ties between the two countries resumed in recent years with Bagdad agreeing to pay war reparations. Iraq has been instructed to pay remaining $47.8 billion by 2021. Hungarys government is looking to pass a law that would make it a criminal offence to offer food to refugees, a senior politician has said. If approved in its current form criminal penalties could be imposed on groups accused of supporting or financing illegal immigration. As a result those offering food or legal advice or printing leaflets with information for asylum seekers, could be guilty of an offence. State secretary Csaba Domotor said that the government wanted parliament to pass the law as soon as possible. The country's right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, who was recently elected for a third term, is also looking to get the constitution amended to stop EU countries from moving asylumseekers to Hungary in defiance of European Union (EU) migration policy. Mr Orban has publicly opposed an EU scheme which would see 160,000 refugees from Syria and Eritrea relocated to Hungary from Italy and Greece, where migrant camps are overcrowded. In power since 2010, Mr Orban has campaigned on a platform of fierce hostility to immigration for years - policies that have put him at odds with the EU, which funds Hungary with billions of euros every year. The legislation is part of the government's campaign against George Soros, a Hungarian-born US financier known for funding liberal causes. 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 Soros was vilified in Mr Orban's election campaign, which took a strong anti-immigration stance, popular with voters in rural Hungary. He has accused Mr Soros and the NGOs funded by him of a plot to undermine Hungary's Christian culture by flooding it with immigrants, an allegation which Mr Soros has repeatedly denied. Mr Orban risks triggering a crisis in his Fidesz party's relationship with the EU's centre-right parties over laws they charge infringe civil liberties, an ally of Germany' chancellor warned. Agencies contributed to this report Italy could still get a populist coalition government despite a move last week by the countrys president to block its formation. Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, indicated on Wednesday that he was willing to compromise on his choice of finance minister previously the main roadblock to agreeing an administration. Though the Five Star Movement and their far-right would-be coalition partners the League have agreed a broad programme for government, Italys president refused to sign off Five Star pick Paola Savona, a Eurosceptic economist, for the key role. Mr Savona has previously described the eurozone as a German cage for Italy, but the countrys president said because neither party had addressed exit from the single currency in their manifesto the policy could not be brought in by stealth now. Speaking on Wednesday Mr Di Maio, however, insisted that his pick for prime minster, lawyer Giuseppe Conte, should remain in place. He said he would otherwise back snap elections. There are two paths ahead. Either we launch the Conte government with a reasonable solution or we vote right away, he said. Italy's economic crisis explained Markets calmed on the news that the Five Star leader had met informally with the president Sergio Mattarella and the presidents favoured pick for prime minister, Carlo Cottarelli. Mr Cottarelli is a former IMF economist and has been nicknamed Mr Scissors because of his propensity to cut public spending, which would put him at odds with the populists government commitment to scrap austerity measures. The possibility of a populist eurosceptic government in one of the EUs founding states has worried Brussels. The government has pledged to end austerity and also to deport migrants, according to a joint programme drawn up by the two parties. It would have only a narrow majority. Italys presidency, which is indirectly elected by an electoral college, is mostly a ceremonial office. But the president has a role in signing off the formation of governments, as well as other limited powers. There are two paths ahead. Either we launch the Conte government with a reasonable solution or we vote right away Luigi di Maio, Five Star Movement leader League leader Matteo Salvini has said he favours fresh elections instead of further negotiations. Mr Salvini said he was not at the market for a new deal. Di Maio is open [to a deal]? We are not in the market. Lets go vote right away. We have tried to form a government but it is never good enough for Mattarella [the president], so then you give up. The president should explain how we get out of this impasse, Mr Salvini said. World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty The far-right leaders attitude is likely to be influenced by the fact his party has surged in the polls since the March elections up from 17.4 per cent then to 25.4 per cent now, according to an Ipsos survey. The party appears to have gained at the expense of other right-wing parties, including Forza Italia, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconis old outfit. The centre-left Democratic party are stable on around 18 per cent, a record low, while Five Star is stable on around 33 per cent, a record high. One man has been killed and two other people injured following a knife attack on a train in northern Germany, police say. Federal police said the incident took place in the city of Flensburg at around 7pm local time on Wednesday evening on a train that had reportedly travelled from Cologne. A statement released by the force did not disclose a detailed version of events, but revealed on of the injured was a 22-year-old female police officer. However, police did say the officer had fired her pistol during the incident, suggesting she may have killed the man. 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 German tabloid Bild reported that following a dispute, one man attacked another man with a knife and then a police officer who was called to intervene. The German news agency DPA reported the Flensburg main train station had been evacuated and service to the city had been interrupted temporarily. Authorities have yet to announce whether or not the incident is being treated as terror-related. On 19 December 2016, a lorry was driven into a crowd at a Christmas market in central Berlin causing 12 deaths and a number of injuries. It followed a suicide bombing in Ansbach on 24 July 2016 which injured 15 people. The Foreign Office warns: Terrorists are very likely to try to carry out attacks in Germany. Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in public places visited by foreigners. The German government has announced that increased security has been put in place as a precaution at public buildings, major events, transport hubs and large public gatherings. Additional reporting by AP A gunman who shot dead three people in the Belgian city of Liege on Tuesday had killed a fourth victim hours earlier, the countrys interior minister has said. Jan Jambon told broadcaster RTL that Benjamin Herman committed a murder the night before he stabbed two police officers from behind, took their firearms, and shot them and a bystander. The attacker then ran into a nearby school and took a woman hostage before he was killed during a rescue operation mounted by special forces. Mr Jambon said the hostage, believed to be a cleaner, may have prevented more deaths by talking the gunman around. She was very courageous and perhaps, but this we will have to verify, she helped avoid more victims in the school, said Mr Jambon, who visited the woman in hospital, where she was being treated for shock. Herman, a prisoner on 48-hour leave, bludgeoned to death a former cellmate with a blunt object at his home on Monday evening before hunting police officers the next morning, the minister said. Belgian authorities have launched a terror investigation and are also probing why Herman was allowed temporary leave from prison. The 36-year-old had a lengthy criminal record including theft, assault and drug charge convictions, and had been flagged in three reports on radicalism. Belgium did not raise its terror threat level following the attacks, described by Mr Jambon as an isolated case. He wasnt part of a network, he did not receive instructions from anyone else, so there is no need to raise the terror threat alert level, the minister said, adding investigators had no precise information that any other attacks were likely. Police at the scene of the shootings in Liege (EPA) Tuesdays killings took place outside a cafe on Boulevard dAvroy, a major commercial artery in Belgiums third largest city. Herman stabbed two female police officers on routine traffic duties before taking their guns, shooting them dead, and turning a firearm on a 22-year-old man who was sat in a parked car nearby. Four other police officers were also injured in the attack, one seriously, during an exchange of gunfire with Herman as they launched a rescue operation at the school He came out firing at police, wounding a number of them, notably in the legs. He was shot dead, said Liege prosecutor's spokesman Philippe Dulieu. Police chief Christian Beaupere said the goal of the attacker was to target the police. He identified the murdered officers as Lucile Garcia, 45, and Soraya Belkacemi, 53. He said Belkacemi was the mother of 13-year-old twin daughters whose father, also police officer, had previously died. Amid questions about how the two officers could have been disarmed by Herman, Mr Jambon praised police as having done an extraordinary job. They reacted well. All the systems, all the procedures worked. But if you are attacked from behind, as was the case with the two officers, you cant do anything, he said. World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty Justice minister Koen Geens said Herman was a repeat offender who had been in prison since 2003 and was due for permanent release in two years. Asked about reports that the attacker was radicalised in prison, he said it was not a clear-cut case. He certainly was not someone who could clearly be qualified as radicalised, the minister added. Otherwise he would have been known as such by all services. Belgiums deputy prime minister Alexander de Croo questioned why Herman had been granted temporary release from jail. He said: Everyone in Belgium is asking the same question: how is it possible that someone convicted for such serious acts was allowed to leave prisons? Police have cleared the largest illegal refugee camp in Paris that has become a focal point in Frances immigration debate. The evacuation of more than 1,000 migrants came a day after President Emmanuel Macron awarded honorary citizenship and a job to a Malian immigrant who climbed the outside of a building to save a boy dangling from a balcony. Mamoudou Gassama, who scaled four floors to pluck the child from danger, was given a medal for courage and has been nicknamed Spider-Man. In the French government's latest attempt to deal with the illegal migrant influx, riot police helped to clear the Millenaire camp in northeastern Paris of many of its 1,600 inhabitants. Days earlier, homeless charities warned a tragedy could happen following a stabbing and two drownings at the tent camp, which was beside a canal used by joggers and cyclists. The migrants, mostly from Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea, were put on buses and taken to temporary housing and gymnasiums in the Paris region. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said 1,000 migrants had been moved. They were moved for general welfare and security reasons, French interior minister Gerard Collomb said. "Police services will be fully committed to preventing such camps being built again," Mr Collomb said. The evacuation was the 34th since June 2015, he said. A spokesman for the greater Ile-de-France region said similar operations at smaller camps around Paris would take place as soon as possible. Europe has faced a refugee and migrant crisis since 2015, after years of conflict in the Middle East, with more than a million people from Africa and the Middle East arriving on the continent. In France, much of the migrant influx ended up in the northern port of Calais, where a giant slum was cleared in late 2016. Most of the rest have gathered in Paris and the southeast near the Franco-Italian border. Officials and NGOs say 2,700 illegal migrants live in the Paris area. They said the migrants would be allowed to file asylum requests. An NGO worker said: "A lot of these migrants believe they will end up being welcomed here, in France. We try to inform them on the realities they face, because if they have left their fingerprints in another country, they will be expelled." Under European law, asylum-seekers must remain in the first European country they enter. They often have to register with their fingerprints when they arrive. Mr Macron's government has said it wants to be both firm and fair on immigration. But it has taken a tougher stance lately, with parliament approving a bill that tightens asylum rules. Agencies contributed to this report More than half of the worlds children are being robbed of their childhoods as a result of conflict, poverty and gender based violence, a new report from charity Save the Children has found. Around 1.2 billion children live under the bread line and almost 153 million children live in areas affected by what researchers identified as the three main threats affecting childrens wellbeing: poverty combined with violence and high levels of discrimination against girls. This report is in its second year, and this year we were able to look at factors which threaten childhood through specific lenses, said spokesperson Bhanu Bhatnagar. Recommended UK child poverty hits highest level since 2008 financial crisis This data is extensive and will really help paint a picture of where work needs to be done to protect children worldwide. The research, released ahead of International Childrens Day on Friday 1 June, uses indicators of poor health, malnutrition, lack of education, child labour, marriage, early pregnancy and violence to rank 175 countries according to where childhood is most and least threatened. The report, titled The Many Faces of Exclusion, found that the top three countries where childhood is protected are Singapore, Slovenia and Norway. Despite their wealth, the US (36th), Russia (37th) and China (40th) all trailed behind Western European countries in the new index. The bottom 10 countries were all in Africa: Niger, Mali, the Central African Republic, Chad, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Guinea, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite the immediate threat to life and limb from violence in war zones, the report found malnutrition and disease coupled with inadequate access to healthcare killed 20 times as many children as violence related to conflict. Nour, 12, stands with his 10-year-old brother Mahmoud (not their real names) in the yard outside their one-room house in West Mosul, Iraq, on 16 April 2018. As the eldest, Nour feels responsible for his siblings since his father died last year (Sam Tarling/Save The Children) And when the fighting ends, it can have long-lasting effects. In Mosul, the city which formed the capital of the Iraqi half of Isis caliphate until the militants were defeated last year, many children are struggling with trauma as well as crippling poverty in a town where rebuilding will take years. Twelve-year-old Nour, whose name has been changed, was forced to care for his father who was dying of kidney failure during the gruelling US-backed Iraqi coalition offensive to retake the city. He was forced to venture out into Mosuls dangerous streets to sell crisps to feed his family and buy his fathers medication. He learnt to administer his fathers injections himself, but eventually he died in agony in the boys arms. Nour now sees himself as the head of the household, responsible for his younger siblings. The boy is unfortunately not the only Iraqi child forced to take on adult roles. The country placed 125th on the Save the Children index, in large part due to the fighting with Isis, which displaced 14 per cent of the population and has interrupted the schooling of almost a quarter of Iraqi children. Six-year-old Thani (not her real name) sits with her father in their home in West Mosul on 16 April 2018. The little girl watched her mother die after a mortar shell hit their home last year (Sam Tarling/Save The Children) Both living under Isis and during the coalition offensive, these children have experienced things no child should have to. They have extreme emotional as well as physical scars, said Save the Childrens Mr Bhatnagar, who recently returned from a field trip to Mosul. We have to act now to save this generation of Iraqi children. The charity is calling on governments to ensure no child is robbed of their health, education or a future stunted by mental distress, early marriage or forced labour. Over time I have seen how our caseworkers build relationships with displaced and traumatised children and their families, Mr Bhatnagar added. The pain and the grief can be overcome. This work is vital if these children are to get some of their childhoods back, enjoy school and play again and become mentally fit members of society." The Israel-Gaza border is quiet again after the most significant round of hostilities between Hamas and Israel in four years. A de facto ceasefire came into effect on Wednesday after Hamas said a truce had been brokered by Egypt following the biggest attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip since the 2014 war. The understanding to end the violence, which began on Tuesday, did not go beyond a restoration of calm by both sides, a Palestinian official said. Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Show all 37 1 /37 Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Palestinian mourners carry the dead body of Mukhtar Ebu Hamas, 25, killed by Israeli forces in Gaza on 14 May Getty Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A Palestinian woman flashes a victory sign during a protest near the border fence AFP/Getty Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Israeli soldiers guard on top of a watch tower along the Israel-Gaza border AP Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Palestinian demonstrators react to fired tear gas Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Palestinian demonstrators run for cover Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures US President's daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Senior White House Advisor Jared Kushner arrive for the controversial inauguration of the US embassy in Jerusalem. The United States moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem after months of global outcry, Palestinian anger and exuberant praise from Israelis over President Donald Trump's decision tossing aside decades of precedent. AFP/Getty Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Palestinians carry a demonstrator injured during clashes AFP/Getty Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman speaks during the dedication ceremony of the new US embassy in Jerusalem Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A Palestinian man walks in the smoke billowing from burning tyres AFP/Getty Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waves as he arrives ahead of the dedication ceremony of the new US embassy in Jerusalem. Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Palestinian protesters lying on the floor during clashes Rex Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Palestinian protesters burn tires AP Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sara, Senior White House Advisor Jared Kushner, US President's daughter Ivanka Trump, US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and US ambassador to Israel David Friedman attend the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem. AFP/Getty Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A Palestinian man assists a wounded protestor AFP/Getty Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A Palestinian man holding his national flag walks in the smoke billowing from burning tyres AFP/Getty Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Ivanka Trump unveil an inauguration plaque during the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem AFP/Getty Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Palestinians carry a protester injured AFP/Getty Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Ivanka Trump and US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin stand next to the dedication plaque at the US embassy in Jerusalem Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A Palestinian demonstrator uses a sling to hurl stones at Israeli troops during a protest against U.S. embassy Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A female Palestinian demonstrator stands amidst smoke Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Ivanka Trump attends the opening ceremony of the new US embassy in Jerusalem AP Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Palestinian medics and protesters evacuate a wounded protester AP Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures An Israeli soldier aims his weapon at Palestinian demonstrators Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Gazans carry an injured protestor Rex Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Protestors gather to demonstrate Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures An Israeli soldier fires tear gas at demonstrators Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A Palestinian demonstrator poses with a slingshot Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Protestors carry tires Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A demonstrator kicks a burning tire Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Palestinians congregate prior to their demonstration against the US moving their embassy to Jerusalem Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Female Palestinian demonstrators react to tear gas fired by Israeli troops Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A Palestinian demonstrator reacts Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A Palestinian man throws leaflets dropped by the Israeli military during a protest against the US embassy move to Jerusalem and ahead of the 70th anniversary of Nakba, at the Israel-Gaza border, east of Gaza City Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A boy holds a Palestinian flag as he stands amidst smoke Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A Palestinian demonstrator tries to put out a fire caused by objects dropped from Israeli drones during a protest against the US embassy move to Jerusalem and ahead of the 70th anniversary of Nakba, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip Reuters Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures A Palestinian demonstrator with a slingshot REUTERS Gazans protest as US embassy moves to Jerusalem in pictures Protesters look up at falling tear gas cannisters dropped by an Israeli drone AFP/Getty Israel did not formally acknowledge any ceasefire with the militant Hamas and smaller organisation Islamic Jihad, and both sides warned the other that any further military escalation would give rise to a new round of fighting. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday afternoon that Israel had delivered on its promise to deal with the Hamas provocation with force, saying the Israel Defence Force (IDF) had dealt the Gaza militants the harshest blow in years. Tuesdays barrage of at least 25 mortars and rocket fire from the Gaza Strip hit communities in southern Israel during the morning rush hour. Significant damage was caused to a nursery school shortly before it was due to open. Israel responded with tank and air strikes on more than 50 military targets in the coastal enclave, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad jointly claimed responsibility for the initial attack on Tuesday evening. Three Israeli soldiers were lightly injured by debris, the IDF said. There has been no confirmation of damage, injuries or deaths in Gaza. While mortars and missiles continued to fall on either side of the border until the early hours of Wednesday, both Hamas and Israel seemed to be wary of sparking a wider conflict: Hamas did not use its long-range arsenal, and IDF targets in Gaza were seemingly evacuated ahead of time. According to Hamas, the strikes were retaliation for the deaths of at least 116 Palestinians shot by Israeli soldiers in protests at the border over Gazas escalating humanitarian crisis and the USs embassy move to Jerusalem. Israeli drones fire tear gas as clashes erupt at Gaza-Israel border protests Israel says the 11-year-old blockade on the Gaza Strip put in place after Hamas seized control of the area in 2007 is a necessary security measure. Critics, however, say the blockade amounts to collective punishment for Gazas two million residents, most of whom are coping with a collapsed economy, inadequate healthcare, a lack of drinking water and lengthy electricity blackouts. News agencies contributed to this report A photo of a state-of-the-art Israeli F-35 stealth fighter jet flying over the Lebanese capital of Beirut in broad daylight has sparked criticism over the blatant flaunting of Israeli power. General Mouawad Tannous, a former Lebanese military intelligence officer and former defence attache with the Lebanese embassy in Washington DC, said he thought the release of the photo was part of a game of psychological warfare. This is Israel playing a psychological side of the war, he told The Independent. Israel is flaunting its power, and showing to all its high military superiority. Syrian military video shows air defences trying to intercept Israeli missiles Israeli military planes frequently enter Lebanese airspace in order to carry out bombings of Hezbollah and Iranian targets in neighbouring Syria. Last month, the Lebanese government filed a new complaint with the United Nations Security Council over Israel's illegal use of its airspace. The two countries have technically been at war since Israels creation in 1948. The photo was first shown by Israel Air Force commander Major General Amikam Norkin at an international security conference in Herzliva last week. According to Gen Tannous, Maj Gen Norkin has taken heat for revealing the F-35 in such a clear photo, showing four radars, with two reflectors on each side meaning it was not flying in stealth mode. Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Missiles rise into the sky as Israeli missiles hit air defense position and other military bases, in Damascus Syrian Central Military Media, via AP Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Missile fire is seen from Damascus Reuters Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures An Israeli flag is seen placed on Mount Bental in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights. Israel's army said today it had carried out widespread raids against Iranian targets in Syria overnight after rocket fire towards its forces it blamed on Iran, marking a sharp escalation between the two enemies. Israel carried out the raids after it said around 20 rockets, either Fajr or Grad type, were fired from Syria at its forces in the occupied Golan Heights at around midnight. AFP/Getty Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures The Israeli military on Thursday said it attacked "dozens" of Iranian targets in neighboring Syria in response to an Iranian rocket barrage on Israeli positions in the Golan Heights AP Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Israeli artillery deployed missiles toward Syrian military targets, on the Golan Heights EPA Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Missile fire is seen over Daraa Reuters Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Air defence systems intercepting Israeli missiles over Syrian airspace AFP/SANA Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Israeli soldiers walk among armored vehicles in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights Reuters Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Syrian air defense missiles are seen in the sky over the capital Damascus EPA Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Air defence systems intercepting Israeli missiles over Syrian airspace. Israeli missile strikes fired at Syria hit military bases, as well as an arms depot and military radar. AFP/SANA It is not clear when the photograph was taken. Israel became the first country to procure the US Lockheed Martin $125 million (94m) next generation fighter jet in 2016, and has so far received nine of 50 ordered planes. Israel said the jets became operational in December 2017. At least one of the single-seater planes was used in recent air strikes inside Syria that targeted Iranian military operations after Iranian forces reportedly fired on Israeli soldiers in the occupied Golan Heights. We are flying the F-35 all over the Middle East and have already attacked twice on two different fronts, the Maj Gen told 20 assorted commanders of foreign air forces at the meeting. You know that we just won the Eurovision with the song 'Toy.' Well, the F-35 is not a toy, he said. The photos publication, at a time of soaring tensions between Israel, Iran and the Iranian-allied Lebanese group Hezbollah, has been criticised as hubristic. Around 100 Israeli airstrikes in Syrian territory in the last few years have aimed to prevent weapons smuggling to Lebanon's Hezbollah, which also fights alongside Syrian President Bashar al-Assads troops in the complex Syrian war. Hezbollah, like Iran, is committed to the destruction of the Jewish state. As President Assad has slowly regained control of the country, tensions between Iran and Israel have ratcheted up, with Israeli officials warning they will not accept a permanent Iranian military presence in Syria. The Golan Heights confrontation earlier this month in which at least 23 Iranian nationals died marked the most significant Israeli operation inside Syria to date, as well as the most severe military skirmish between the two enemies ever While some Israeli newspapers and other media outlets picked up on the picture of the F-35 in action before even the US military has used it as a show of military strength, columnist Amos Harel of left-leaning newspaper Haaretz was critical of the Israel Air Forces handling of the incident. There is certainly a deterrent value to the sight of the plane above Beirut, he wrote on Monday. Strike on Syrian army base kills 18 people But it still comes off like inordinate swagger, and perhaps also an attempt to rehabilitate the IAFs image following the downing of an F-16 during the previous escalation of hostilities with Iran and Syria, in February. According to manufacturers Lockheed Martin the F-35 Lightning II is a versatile fighter with a very low radar signature, allowing it to avoid advanced missile defence systems, engage enemy aircraft before they see it and operate undetected in enemy territory. It also shares unprecedented, instantaneous amounts of data with operational commanders on the ground, allowing pilots to anticipate attacks and jam enemy radars. However, the F-35 development programme scheduled to run until 2070 - has been strongly criticised for spiralling costs and concerns over the jets maintenance diagnostic systems and landing gears. Turkey is supposed to get its first delivery of an expected 100 F-35s later this year, but both the US senate and Israeli officials are seeking to freeze the sale. Top officials from the US and North Korea are to hold a "day full of meetings" in New York on Thursday as both sides race to get plans for a leaders' summit in Singapore back on track. US secretary of state Mike Pompeo hosted dinner on Wednesday night with General Kim Yong Chol, one of Kim Jong-un's closest aides and the most senior North Korean official to visit the US in 20 years. Pictures released from the dinner showed them sat in an apartment not far from the UN headquarters. Afterwards, Mr Pompeo tweeted: "Good working dinner with Kim Yong Chol in New York tonight. Steak, corn, and cheese on the menu." Mr Pompeo has himself travelled to Pyongyang twice in recent weeks for meetings with Kim Jong-un, and has said there is a "shared understanding" between the two sides about what they hope to achieve in talks. The White House has said it expects a historic summit between President Donald Trump and the North Korean leader to take place as planned. Were continuing to prepare for the meeting between the president and the North Korean leader, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. The summit still hangs in the balance, with Mr Trump having issued a letter last week pulling out of the summit before the latest flurry of diplomacy aimed at salvaging the talks. We are preparing and expect that to take place on June 12, and we will be ready if it does on June 12, and if not, then we will be ready if it takes place on July 12, Ms Sanders said. After Mr Trump abruptly called off the summit last week and lambasted North Korea for displaying tremendous anger and open hostility towards the US, the White House has been striving to reinstate the meeting, including by dispatching an array of officials to Asia. A delegation of US diplomatic officials travelled to meet with North Korean counterparts in the demilitarised zone separating the north from South Korea, and a team headed to Singapore to meet with North Korean officials and continue laying the groundwork for a potential meeting there. Escape from North Korea Show all 16 1 /16 Escape from North Korea Escape from North Korea Jeong Min-woo A hat belonging to Jeong Min-woo in Seoul. Min-woo is from Hyesan, on the border with China. He was a commissioned officer in the Korean People's Army, and left in his uniform. South Korean intelligence confiscated it, but he persuaded his North Korean military contacts to send him a new one. Reuters Escape from North Korea Jeong Min-woo Jeong Min-woo, 29, poses for a photograph in Seoul Reuters Escape from North Korea Kang Kang, 28, who wanted to be identified only by her surname, poses for a photograph in Seoul. The parents of Kang sent out a coat across the Chinese border after she reached the South in 2010. "I didn't ask my mother to send me this coat," said Kang. "But she knew I feel the cold easily and sent it to me. She sent some honey too, but it went missing on the way. The coat is made of dog fur. I don't know what kind of dog. In 2010, it cost about 700,000 North Korean won ($88 at the unofficial rate). It was really expensive. A North Korean friend went to China to pick it up for me. I liked this coat when I got it. I thought my mother must've spent quite a lot of money on it. Reuters Escape from North Korea Kang The dog fur coat belonging to Kang, "My father was a party officer. Our family had a car and we lived in a special apartment. Ordinary people couldn't afford to wear this kind of coat, not even soldiers. Commissioned officers could afford them. Border guards would wear them. It wasn't easy to buy this kind of coat, but as time went on, fake ones began to appear. The state often clamped down on this item. It's technically military supplies so the state monitored people who altered the design of the coat. I know just from looking at this coat that it's a counterfeit one, not the official version. The counterfeit ones look quite different from the original ones. Military officials preferred the fakes to the original because the design looked much better. The children of rich families would wear them. I look too chubby in this, so don't wear it here. I thought I could probably wear it if I altered it." Reuters Escape from North Korea Lee Oui-ryuk Lee Oui-ryuk is from Onsong, near the border with China. He defected in 2010, and brought his ID card with him. "I brought my ID with me when I left North Korea. Juche 95.11.7 (the date in the North Korean calendar, which equates to Nov. 7, 2006) is the date I was issued with my ID. It says here my blood type is "A", but I'm actually an "O." For the 23 years I lived in North Korea, I thought my blood type was "A." They wrote down my blood type without even doing a test. They just wrote whatever they wanted to. I was caught trying to defect to South Korea around Kim Jong Il's birthday. They strengthen border security just before and after that date." Reuters Escape from North Korea Lee Oui-ryuk "The bottom of the lamp is dark," as the saying goes, and I thought I'd be able to cross right under their noses. The soldiers shot at me as I tried to run away from the Tumen River. I managed to get away and hid, but someone reported me and I was caught. That's when I was taken to the bowibu (North Korean secret police) for three months of interrogation. The state ruled that I had tried to defect to South Korea, and I was sent to a camp for political prisoners. I escaped when they were transferring me to the camp. I hid and managed to make it to my big sister's house - that's when I grabbed these photos. I couldn't go home easily, so decided I had to hide in the mountains or somewhere remote. I needed my ID to move around without getting caught. and I took these 12 photos with me in case I wanted to look back and reminisce. I wrote on the back of them so as not to forget." Reuters Escape from North Korea Ji Sung-ho Ji Sung-ho, 35, from Hoeryong, near the border with China. He left North Korea in 2006 with a pair of wooden crutches. "I lived as a child beggar in North Korea. I was stealing coals from a train when I fell off and lost my leg and my hand. I had to bring the crutches with me. If I didn't have them, I wouldn't have made it here. The state doesn't help you in North Korea, and people who need crutches make their own. Mine are therefore not factory-made, so they're not perfect and break easily. I had several pairs of crutches but they all broke, and this was the last pair. I used these crutches for 10 years, until I was 25, when I arrived in South Korea. I would steal coal from moving trains and fall off, destroying my crutches. Or I would get beaten up by the police and they'd take and then break my crutches. When they broke, I would make new ones. When I had new ones, I could go back outside." Reuters Escape from North Korea Ji Sung-ho "When I first arrived in South Korea I thought about throwing them out. South Korea's intelligence agency gave me a prosthetic leg. My friends said I should throw the crutches out and not think about North Korea. They said I should show Kim Jong Il I was living a new life in South Korea and throw out everything I had from the North. Some asked if I got upset when I saw my crutches. But I couldn't just throw them out. To make my crutches, my friends had given me some wood that they had bought, and someone I knew in North Korea who had carpentry skills had made them. It was my father who added the final touches. There is a lot of love from my North Korean friends and family in these crutches. So I didn't throw them out. The South Korean government gave me some new crutches because the wood from my North Korean ones is hard and painful. But I still keep them, so as not to forget those memories." REUTERS Escape from North Korea Kim Ryen Hui Kim Ryen Hui, 48, is from Pyongyang. She says she never wanted to defect. In 2011, she says, a broker helped her go to China for treatment on her liver. But the broker tricked her, she said, and she ended up in South Korea. She is campaigning to return, which Seoul says would be against the law. "I miss my parents even more than I miss my daughter. They're everything to me. For the first few years, I couldn't even breathe properly when I thought of them. My little brother lives with them in Pyongyang now. My mother can't see out of one eye. The thing I fear the most is finding out they've passed away before I have the chance to go back. Reuters Escape from North Korea Kim Ryen Hui "My daughter and I have been writing letters and sending photos to each other. My cousin lives in China, so she's been sending them on. My daughter's name is Ri Ryon Gum. She was born on February 15, 1993. I don't want her to live out her life with me here. When she was young, she did taekwondo. She wanted to get involved in espionage operations against South Korea. She was so fearless. That's why she was doing taekwondo - to get involved in anti-South espionage. So I was really surprised to hear she became a chef. In a video of her I received, she explained why. She said that after I had left, she moved in with her father in Pyongyang and had been cooking for him. She said she decided to become a chef so she could fulfill my role at home. I was sad when I heard that." Reuters Escape from North Korea Lee Min-bok Lee Min-bok, 60, was a researcher at North Korea's Academy of Agricultural Science. He first tried to defect, unsuccessfully, in 1990. He eventually left North Korea in June 1991 and came to South Korea in 1995. His family sent him these diaries. "I have a bit of an academic side. According to Kim Il Sung's teachings, people are supposed to keep diaries. Everyone in North Korea should strictly follow Kim Il Sung's teachings, so I did as I was supposed to and kept a diary. Even though Kim Il Sung is a villain here, in North Korea he's above everything. We learned that he studied well and gave our lives purpose. I lived according to those teachings. I wrote these out of loyalty to the Leader. That was our ideology, and I lived my life in strict adherence to it. No one could think differently." Reuters Escape from North Korea Lee Min-bok "I got hold of these diaries 10 years after I arrived in South Korea. I had been sending money to my family in the North and they sent them to me. I didn't write any complaints in diaries. I would've been in big trouble if I did. My diaries are a record of my history in North Korea. I am thinking about turning these diaries into a book. I'd like to publish a book about how to change North Koreans' thinking when unification happens. These diaries show how North Koreans think and how their minds are constructed. People need to make these into a textbook, because they need proof. Talking is not as effective." Reuters Escape from North Korea Song Byeok Song Byeok was a propaganda artist. His father drowned trying to cross the Tumen river, in 2000. When the artist finally left North Korea in 2001, he brought photos of his family with him. "We left that August to find food," Byeok recalled, describing the first attempt. "We were from a town further inland, and we weren't sure where the river was high and where it was low. I didn't know at the time but the river was swollen because of the rainy season. I thought we had to cross it anyway. All I could think about was getting to China to buy food. I took off my clothes and tied them into a rope to strap us together. I told my father not to let go. As we approached the middle of the river, the strap felt lighter. I looked back and saw my father drifting away. I was devastated." Reuters Escape from North Korea Song Byeok "He was going under the water and couldn't get out. I rushed up to the (North Korean) border guards and asked them to save him but they just said why did I come out, why didn't I die too. They handcuffed me and took me away. It was Aug. 28. I was tortured by the "bowibu" (North Korean secret police) in Hoeryong, then jailed for four months in Chongjin prison camp. But after I was released from the camp I felt like I needed to survive and carry on living. Right before I tried to defect again, I went back home and grabbed my family photos. Even if I died trying, I thought, at least I would have this picture with me. I never found my father. After I came to South Korea, I went back to China in 2004 and held a memorial service for him by the river. My heart still aches." Reuters Escape from North Korea Baek Hwa-sung Baek Hwa-sung, 33, left Sinuiju, on the border with China, in 2003 and resettled in South Korea in 2008. He kept a diary as he defected. "In 2004, I started to write down all my thoughts in a diary. I didn't know if I'd get caught. I just wanted to let it be known where I was from, and where I wanted to go. After I left the North, I became very depressed, hiding in the mountains alone for a while. The people who were watching over me told me not to come down to the village and left me by myself in a mountain shelter. Alone, with no one to engage with or talk to, I felt like I would go insane. So I wanted to leave something behind in case I died there or got caught - that's why I started to write. Reuters Escape from North Korea Baek Hwa-sung "Alone in the mountains, I desperately sought something to talk to. That was my diary. My diaries are proof of my life's journey. I read them when I want to remember home. I can't return home, and I already have no memories of my hometown. But when I go through my diaries, there are notes which detail the vivid memories of that time. Sometimes I might forget my father's birthday, but when I go back to my diary, his birthday and my mother's birthday are there. My diaries are a record of my life. They prove I'm alive." Reuters One of those meetings in Singapore was said to have taken place on Wednesday, aimed at dealing with the logistics. In announcing the various diplomatic moves, the White House said earlier this week that North Korea had been engaging since Mr Trumps open letter cancelling the meeting. So far the readout from these meetings has been positive, Ms Sanders told reporters. Top North Korea official arrives in Beijing ahead of Trump-Kim summit in Singapore In another sign of cascading diplomatic activity, Russia announced that its foreign minister Sergei Lavrov planned to visit North Korea on Thursday to meet with the countrys foreign policy chief, Ri Yong-ho. Much rides on the outcome of the negotiations. After months of North Korean weapons tests and belligerent statements spiked fears of renewed conflict on the Korean peninsula, Pyongyangs shift to diplomacy this winter afforded the Trump administration a chance to push North Korea to dismantle its nuclear programme long regarded as one of the worlds leading threats. Americas outgoing head of Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Harris, underscored the peril in a speech marking his departure. North Korea remains our most imminent threat. And a nuclear-capable North Korea with missiles that can reach the United States is unacceptable, Adm Harris said in Hawaii. However, it is clear that work still needs to be done. South Koreas Yonhap news agency quoted Seouls Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon as saying in a speech on Wednesday that the differences between North Korea and the United States on the denuclearisation issue remained quite significant and it would not be easy to narrow the gap. But, Mr Cho said that engagement between the countries as seen recently suggested that the chances are high that common ground can be found. All along, the Trump administration has said it would be willing to walk away from a pact that falls short of total, verifiable denuclearisation. Officials have paired diplomatic efforts with a maximum pressure campaign of comprehensive sanctions intended to stifle North Koreas economy and force the country to negotiate. While Pyongyang initially committed to total denuclearisation and said it would not demand the withdrawal of US troops whose presence on the Korean Peninsula has long angered North Korea, the regime hardened its stance as planned talks drew nearer. In a statement earlier this month, Pyongyang threatened to walk away if pressured to unilaterally abandon its nuclear programme. A follow-up statement blasted vice president Mike Pence as a political dummy, drawing Mr Trumps ire. Once the talks were called off, Pyongyang released a statement that criticised the decision but praised Mr Trumps willingness to negotiate and signalled a continued desire to meet. For a fourth day, airline passengers face widespread disruption on flights to and from the UK. Thousands of travellers will be grounded by a combination of Tuesdays disruption, continuing unfavourable weather and a general strike in Greece. Dozens of flights to Greece have been cancelled due to industrial action. Greek airports will be no-fly zones between 10am and 1pm local time. Recommended Thunderstorms cause disruptions for thousands of air passengers Air-traffic controllers are stopping work as part of a general strike called by the Greek civil servants trade union. Round-trips from Gatwick to Athens, Corfu, Preveza, Rhodes, Thessaloniki and Zakinthos have been cancelled by easyJet, which has also grounded services from Bristol to Corfu and Manchester to Thessaloniki. Anyone reaching Greece will find surface transport severely disrupted, with no rail or Metro services from Athens airport into the city. Ferries are likely to stay in port because of a 24-hour strike by members of the Pan-Hellenic Seamens Federation. The national rail network has also been shut down. Here in the UK, Eurocontrol is warning: All London airports are affected by low visibility. British Airways has cancelled a further 20 flights, mostly to and from Heathrow, mainly to destinations including Berlin, Copenhagen and Milan. Heathrow Airport was busy after midnight with delayed flights taking off and landing, including one BA arrival from Madrid touching down after 1am just three-and-a-half hours before the first overnight arrivals from Hong Kong and Singapore. Eurowings has cancelled flights from Heathrow to Dusseldorf and Hamburg. Passengers on easyJet due to arrive at Gatwick from Amsterdam in mid-evening touched down five hours late in the early hours of Wednesday morning, while a TUI flight from Antalya arrived six hours late at 5am. Sue Davidson tweeted from East Sussex: We had a couple of Gatwick arrivals at 1am flying in over Sussex, plus a quite extraordinary bit of circling over Eastbourne. On Wednesday, easyJet has cancelled flights from Gatwick to Amsterdam and Inverness. At Luton, Wizz Airs flight from Chisinau in Moldova is expected to arrive at lunchtime, 14 hours behind schedule. From Stansted, easyJet cancelled a flight to Naples and back, saying: This is due to a high volume of disruption we experienced yesterday. Ryanair grounded a departure to Bremen. London City Airport is warning: Due to the adverse weather conditions, your journey may be affected. Multiple flights from Amsterdam to the Docklands airport on KLM and British Airways have been cancelled, while BA has cancelled an arrival from Edinburgh. Amsterdam flights to and from Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds Bradford, Newcastle and Norwich have been cancelled because of poor weather at the Dutch airport. In the UK, train services on the West Coast main line in Staffordshire are being severely disrupted as a result of cable theft. Tanzanias government has won a court case about online content regulations against bloggers and activists in the East African nation, local media reported. The regulation, dubbed the Electronic and Postal Communications Regulations 2018, is set to give the government of Tanzania unregulated powers to police the web. As part of the new regulation, the government will certify all bloggers in the country and charge them an annual fee of $930 before they start any operations online. The new rules also require bloggers to furnish details of shareholders, share capital, citizenship of owners, staff qualification and training programs, as well as a tax clearance certificate, to obtain an operating license. Internet rights activists argue the new laws restrict freedoms. Earlier this month, six human rights watchdogs, media organizations and bloggers successfully applied for a temporary court injunction against the rules. However, the injunction was overturned at an appeal hearing on Tuesday. Note that its not just bloggers that are affected by the provisions, but online radio stations, online streaming platforms, online forums, social media users and internet cafes as well. Additionally, internet cafes are required to install surveillance cameras. Breaking these stipulations permits the regulatory authorities to revoke licenses. Bloggers convicted of defying the new rules could be fined at least 5 million shillings ($2,200) or imprisoned for a minimum 12 months, or both. Singapore Airlines is taking back the prize as the longest flight in the world. From 11 October it is resuming the route from Singapore to New Yorks Newark airport, a great circle distance of 9,529 miles scheduled to take 18 hours 25 minutes from Singapore and 20 minutes longer from New York. In terms of distance, flight SQ22 will beat the present record-holder, Qatar Airways, by 500 miles and will cross 12 time zones. This guide is based partly on everything I learned on board the inaugural trip of the UKs longest flight, from Heathrow to Perth, in March. What is the aircraft? An Airbus A350-900ULR (which stands for Ultra Long Range). It will carry around 120 tonnes of fuel, and burn through about 90 per cent of it along the way. How much time does it save? Compared with the current SQ26 flight from Singapore via Frankfurt to New York JFK, at least five hours. In comparison with the swiftest journey between the two cities involving a change of planes (on Eva Air via Taipei), the time saving will be only two hours. Which way does it go? That depends on predicted winds and other factors such as the availability of diversion airports. The most direct track goes almost due north from Singapore, crossing the Gulf of Thailand and Cambodia, clipping Thailand and flying over Laos before bisecting China, Mongolia and Russia. It then crosses the Arctic very close to the North Pole and brushes the north-west corner of Greenland before flying over Baffin Island, the province of Quebec from north to south and passing midway between Ottawa and Montreal before flying over New York State and landing at the New Jersey airport. In practice, it is likely to stay further away from the North Pole, keeping closer to Alaska or Scandinavia depending on wind direction. Time management For people who can sleep throughout a flight, the departure and arrival times look pretty civilised: leaving Singapore at 11.35pm, arriving in New York at 6am the next morning. If the flight takes the Alaskan option, then you will cross the international date line; with a Scandinavian track, you will not, but the arrival time should be the same either way. But what is a very long night going from Singapore to New York becomes an extremely protracted day in the opposite direction: leaving at 10.45am and arriving at 5.30pm next day, whether or not you cross the date line. Seating Most of the footprint of the aircraft cabin will be taken up with 67 business class seats. They feature the Lazy Z, a cradling position that ensures your weight is centred and balanced when youre sitting down, and of course are fully flat and extend to 6ft 6in. The remaining one-third or so will be premium economy a total of 94 seats. They are in a 2-4-2 configuration, with a seat pitch of 38 inches. There is no first or economy class. How much does it cost? Test bookings made for journeys beginning in Singapore in October by The Independent show a premium economy fare of S$3,320 (1,864) return, around 24 per cent more than the one-stop via Frankfurt; and S$7,619 (4,277) return in business class, an uplift of nine per cent. These fares, which are fully flexible, are significantly lower than comparable prices on British Airways and Virgin Atlantic from Heathrow to New York a journey around 6,000 miles shorter. Luggage The checked allowance in premium economy is a generous 46kg per person, comprising two 23kg bags surprising considering the amount of fuel burned flying passengers possessions. If any route deserved a hand-baggage only allowance, it is this one. Hand luggage is supposed to be restricted to a single piece weighing no more than 7kg, but past experience suggests that it will not be too strictly enforced. In addition you can take one of the following: handbag, camera bag, overcoat, umbrella, laptop, walking stick or a small amount of duty-free goods. Pre-flight Take a dip in the rooftop swimming pool in Singapore Airports Terminal 1. At S$17, it costs less than 10, and includes the use of a jacuzzi ideal for soothing away the strains of getting to the airport. Towel yourself dry and board the flight. Headphones The best way to cope with an ultra-long-journey is to retreat into your world while flying around the globe. I tested three pairs: Bose Quietcomfort 35 II, Sonys WH-1000XM2 and Marley headphones (as in Bob). The last, funky though they may be, were not noise-cancelling. When even No Woman, No Cry at full blast is spoiled by the drone of jet engines and the crying of babies, they cannot be recommended for a plane environment. If you have got through life without noise-cancelling headphones, may I recommend a pair for a long journey? They work by injecting a phase-reversed mirror image of the background din, which nullifies the noise. At the flick of a switch you can turn the world off. Sony and Bose were very close in performance, but Sony had even better bass response and also won on comfort. Inflight entertainment If this months selection is anything to go by, you can watch Simon Reeve in Russia while flying over Siberia, go to sleep with the Graham Norton Show and enjoy the Great British Bake Off over breakfast. Top Gear and Dragons Den are also available. In the audio department, Both Sides of the Sky is the appropriate Jimi Hendrix selection. Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye are also standing by. But for something a tad more modern, Taylor Swift: The Singles is about your lot. Connectivity While Qantas is an internet-free zone all the way from London to Australia, on Singapore Airlines paid access to the world wide web is available. Business class passengers get one complimentary wifi session per flight sector amounting to just 30MB. You get more than that on the Gatwick Express. But you can buy as much access as you like, subject to availability (it could be tricky in extreme northern latitudes). Singapore Airlines has announced plans to launch the worlds longest commercial flight from 11 October, a non-stop service from Singapore to just outside New York, which will take nearly 19 hours. The proposed route from Singapore to Newark, New Jersey, will fly approximately 16,700km and overtake the worlds longest existing flight, Qatar Airlines' Doha to Auckland route, which covers 14,500km. The service will only offer premium seating, with 67 business class and 94 premium economy class seats available for purchase. When the full service begins on 18 October, it will operate daily. Recommended 10 things to do in Singapore Singapore Airlines had previously offered this epic route between Singapore and Newark until 2013, when high fuel costs made the use of four-engine Airbus A340-500 jets unfeasible financially. Since then, the airline has flown to New Yorks JFK airport via Frankfurt. Singapore Airlines is Airbus first and only customer for the A350-900ULR jet an ultra-long range version of the fuel-efficient twin-engine A350 model. This advanced aircraft includes higher ceilings, larger windows, an extra wide body and lighting designed to minimise jetlag. Qantas is reported to be contemplating the purchase of this jet to offer a non-stop flight from Sydney to London from 2022. The proposed route surpasses Singapore Airlines new flight, at a whopping 17,000km. Singapore Airlines also announced plans to introduce similar non-stop flights from Singapore to Los Angeles with the A350-900ULR at a later time. EU officials in Brussels have a habit of telling us Brits that we dont get it: Brexit is not the biggest show in town. After all, the EU has more important things to worry about migration; illiberal nationalists in Hungary and Poland; eurozone reforms; Donald Trump and everyone desperately wants to move on from Brexit. They certainly have something much bigger to worry about now: the political turmoil in Italy could easily turn into an existential crisis for the euro and the EU. Sergio Mattarella, the Italian president, blocked the appointment as finance minister of Paolo Savona, a Eurosceptic who wants Italy to leave the euro. As a result, a coalition between the two populist parties who topped the poll in Marchs election the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the Eurosceptic far-right League is on hold and a technocrat, Carlo Cottarelli, has been asked to head Italys 66th government since the Second World War (yes, an average of almost one a year). The president probably felt he was damned if he did and damned if he didnt veto Savona. He might have averted an immediate crisis. But he might have walked into a trap laid by Matteo Salvini, the Leagues leader, who then refused to nominate a compromise candidate for finance minister, probably in the hope that the ensuing chaos would force another election. Although there is speculation today about fresh talks on a populist coalition, an election could come as early as July and in effect become a referendum on the euro and the EU. With the two populist parties rising in the opinion polls, no wonder the EU is fretting about Italy, a founder member which will be its third largest economy when the UK departs. Inevitably, Eurosceptics in Britain have seized on the Italian presidents move as another wicked plot by Brussels to deny the democratic will of the people. They spy such plots round every corner. Usually they dont exist, but the EU has not helped itself on this occasion. Gunther Oettinger, its budget commissioner, warned: The markets will teach the Italians to vote for the right thing. Although he later apologised, the damage was done, and will surely be exploited in the next Italian election. Events in Italy could have a knock-on effect on the Brexit negotiations. Although EU figures admitted the bloc needed to learn lessons after the UKs 2016 referendum, the instinct of some will be to punish the UK even harder to keep their cherished project intact. British officials sense that mindset in the EUs attempt to freeze the UK out of its Galileo satellite navigation system and future EU defence contracts because it will be merely a third country like any other. Hopefully, wiser heads will prevail: the EU, like the UK, needs a good exit agreement and trade deal. George Soros donates to anti-brexit campaign Five Star has pledged that, as part of the next Italian government, it would stop the EUs punishment of the UK since Brexit is also about respect for democracy. But Theresa May cannot rely on such promises. She would be wise to distance herself from the Italian populists; it would not serve Britains interests for Brussels to view Brexit as part of a plan to destroy the EU. In any case, Five Star may benefit less from another election than League, which might revive its right-wing alliance with Forza Italia, whose leader Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister and a relative moderate these days, is free to stand for public office after a ban for tax fraud was lifted. To survive and prosper, the EU will need to forget the federalists dreams of ever closer union and become a more flexible, multitrack club. Although the UK won an opt-out from the single currency, it was not enough when migration also a driver of the populists advance in Italy came to the fore. Arguably, if David Cameron had secured something on free movement, Brexit might not have happened. As George Soros, the financier and backer of the anti-Brexit Best for Britain group, put it yesterday: The EU needs to reinvent itself. Brexiteers are enjoying the turmoil in Italy. They cant wait to dance on the euros grave, hoping its demise might lead to the EUs collapse. We have heard this tune before. Remember the Greek crisis? The last time I checked, Greece was still in the eurozone. As May has acknowledged, it is in the UKs economic interests for the EU to succeed. Whatever Brexits final shape, the EU will remain our biggest trading partner for years, perhaps forever. The wobble over Italy on financial markets around the world is a reminder of how economies are interdependent. The Eurosceptics should be careful what they wish for. For all its faults, the EU project is more resilient than its detractors admit. Young Tim Brennan from Dungarvan , Co Kilkenny seen here with his dog bringing the130 cows in for the milking. Photo: Roger Jones. EU and its member states should work harder to ease young farmers access to credit, land, advisory services and training, the European Parliament said on Tuesday. MEPs approved the draft resolution, which looks into efficiency of current Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) tools for young farmers, by 472 votes in favour to 34 against, with 136 abstentions. Reinforced and better-targeted CAP aid MEPs welcomed the increase of top-ups for young farmers from 25pc to 50pc of the basic payment entitlement, introduced in the so-called Omnibus regulation, but insist on further reinforcement of the young farmers aid scheme. They propose to extend the period in which a farm can benefit from this aid, increase the overall envelope for it beyond 2pc of national direct payments budgets, but at the same time make procedures linked to obtaining CAP funds simpler, less bureaucratic and thus easier to get familiar with for new entrants. They also want the CAP aid for young farmers to be: targeted to their specific needs, including their economic and social needs and varied in accordance to their age and their level of training. Easier access to finance To facilitate young farmers access to finance, MEPs want: EU-wide equal access for young farmers to loans with appropriate support and lending facilities, qualified and independent advisory services to help farmers apply for credit and subsidised interest rates on loans for new entrants and interest-free loans for the investments of young farmers. Easier access to land MEPs want to look into circumstances across the EU that limit access to land for new farmers. To avoid situations when some farmers remain active just to continue benefiting from subsidies, even with minimum level of agricultural activities, blocking thus access to land for new entrants, they recommend increasing activity levels, counting real working time spent farming, considering new farming models and innovative practices applied, and targeting support towards particular achievements, such as environmental or social goods. Member states should take measures to tackle farmland speculations, facilitate land mobility and give new entrants and young farmers priority access to farmland, MEPs say. They also suggest developing national land banks and maps of unused and available land for young farmers. Better training and international mobility to spur innovation Young and new farmers should be given bigger support to introduce innovative practices and processes, such as precision agriculture and conservation systems, MEPs say. They advocate a result-driven approach focused on the development of innovations and better source management, and they want the Commission to step-up research into sustainable farming practices with low environmental impact. MEPs also call on the Commission and member states to come up with more and modernised training opportunities for young farmers and to better incentivise international mobility, through for instance an Erasmus-type programme of vocational training for young farmers that would improve their skills in the area of new technologies and new business models. The Ulster Farmers Union (UFU) and Meat Industry Ireland (MII) have expressed serious concern at the possibility of a total ban on live exports from the UK. Such a move, if accepted, would shut down live exports to and from Northern Ireland. UK environment secretary, Michael Gove, launched a consultation into a ban on the live export of animals for slaughter after Brexit and called on industry experts and campaigners to submit evidence. The impact of such a move for farmers and processors on either side of the Border could be seriously damaging, the MII and UFU have claimed. MII pointed out that on average 370,000 sheep and lambs from Northern Ireland are processed in the South each year, around 13pc of the Republic's total kill, while 450,000 Southern pigs are slaughtered in the North. "Clearly, a curtailment of the movement of sheep from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland would have serious implications in terms of the efficiency of processing plant operations in the South," Cormac Healy of MII said. He claimed that processors' ability to service export business would be impacted and this could have job loss implications. Similarly, Mr Healy insisted that any restrictions on the export of live pigs to the North could be hugely disruptive to the sector and could create havoc. "If these exports stop suddenly there would be major issue in slaughtering, processing and marketing these pigs from Republic of Ireland plants in the short-term," he said. "This would lead to significant on-farm issues with back-up of pigs and associated welfare issues. "Planned Investment would be needed in southern plants to ensure the necessary chills, cutting plant and storage capacity is there." UFU president, Barclay Bell said the overwhelming view from northern farmers was that introducing more controls would be extremely damaging for the cattle and sheep sector in Northern Ireland. Free trade Over 50,000 cattle and 500,000 sheep are exported live from Northern Ireland each year for further production or slaughter in other regions of the UK and to EU member states such as the Republic of Ireland and Spain. "The fact that the vast majority of animals exported go to the Republic of Ireland and Spain demonstrates how reliant Northern Ireland is on competitive and uninterrupted free trade with EU member states," Mr Bell said. "As long as these animals are being moved in accordance with regulations based on sound science, it is our view that this trade must continue. This is essential to ensure that there is fair competition for livestock and so that livestock farmers can get the best return for their animals." With the silage season almost in full swing, the state's dairy farmer organisation has appealed for all rural road users to be aware and concentrate over the next six weeks or so. Shane O'Loughlin, Chairperson of Wicklow ICMSA has appealed to all road users to exercise caution during this time. "Over that period there will be a very significant increase in the number of tractors and other farm machines on rural roads and it was incumbent on all roads users - whether farmers, contractors, car users, cyclists or pedestrians - to take additional precautions to ensure that silage can be harvested safely and without any accidents on roads," he said. Mr O'Loughlin noted that agricultural machinery has got bigger over the years and particularly on narrow rural roads, it is critical that all road users take extra care and 'expect the unexpected' over the next six weeks. Meanwhile a since May 20, 2018, fast tractors must undergo periodic tests and must display certificates of roadworthiness (CRWs). A fast tractor is defined as a wheeled tractor in category T with a maximum design speed exceeding 40 km/h. The Road Safety Authority has said if you use a fast tractor and you are unsure of its maximum design speed, you should consult its vehicle manufacturer or an authorised Irish tractor distributor. Exemptions A fast tractor will not have to undergo a commercial vehicle test if it is used: for the purposes of agricultural, horticultural, forestry, farming or fishery activity solely within the State and mainly on the land where such activity takes place, including agricultural roads, forestry roads or agricultural fields exclusively on a small island. This exclusion from the requirement for compulsory testing will apply to all of the islands off the Irish coast. However, the RSA has warned that it is important to note that an exemption from undergoing a commercial vehicle test is not an exemption from the requirement to ensure your vehicle is in a roadworthy condition when it is used on a public road. New vehicles will be required to be tested after four years and every second year after that. They will be subject to the same test fees that apply to HGVs based on the gross vehicle weight for their design. A Dublin man was arrested after attempting to steal a tractor from a farm in Rathnew. Gardai were alerted and intercepted the suspect as he tried to drive the tractor out of a field at around 8.50 a.m. on Sunday, May 27. The man was arrested and brought to Wicklow Garda Station for questioning. The tractor was recovered and there were no signs of any damage to the vehicle. A file is currently being prepared for the DPP. It comes as a new analysis conducted by PhoneWatch shows the burglary rate increased by more than the national average in no less than 18 counties. Ireland experienced a modest rise in the rate of burglaries in 2017 with a 3pc increase according to figures released by the CSO and An Garda Siochana. While statistics released recently by the Gardai indicate the rate may be continuing to decline in 2018, the Phonewatch analysis shows there are significant regional variations. In total, there were 19,092 burglaries in Ireland last year. The PhoneWatch Burglary Report shows burglaries fell in five counties, however the burglary rate increased by more than the national average in no less than 18 counties, with a worrying 8 counties showing increases in excess of 30pc. The commuter belt was particularly badly hit, the highest increase in the country recorded in Westmeath (44pc), while there were also significant increases in Kildare, Wicklow and Meath. Funding cuts to farming schemes such as GLAS and LEADER could be double the level of reductions imposed on the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), it has emerged. The EU Agriculture Commissioner, Phil Hogan, has insisted that cuts to the BPS provided under Pillar I of CAP will be limited to around 4pc. However, this move could necessitate a 9pc lowering of Pillar II, which funds rural development. The revelations come as Commissioner Hogan prepares to announce his full CAP reform proposals on Friday. An EU source told the Farming Independent that the proposals are likely to contain a "fair amount of constructive ambiguity". And where the axe finally falls will be tied up in what happens to the wider 2021-27 EU budget, which is unlikely to be agreed before the end of this Commission's term in office in 2019. A 5pc reduction in the CAP was proposed earlier this month by EU Budget Commissioner Gunther Oettinger. A decrease of this magnitude to the Irish CAP envelope of 1.5bn equates to around 75m. However, changes to the co-financing rules due to be unveiled in the proposal mean the Department of Finance could help to make up the shortfall from the EU budget with national funding. Ireland's CAP payments currently comprise 1.2bn under the BPS and a further 300m in Pillar II funds. With Commissioner Hogan insisting that the reduction to the BPS will be restricted to 4pc, this means that just 48-50m of the 75m in cuts will be clawed back from Pillar I. This leaves 25-27m to be taken out of the overall Pillar II budget. This equates to a decrease of between 8pc and 9pc. The proposed level of cuts to Pillar II, which funds programmes such as LEADER, GLAS, TAMS and the Beef Data and Genomic Programme (BDGP), has provoked anger among those most directly affected. "It is totally hypocritical on the part of the EU to talk on the one hand of the next CAP regime prioritising environmental protection and climate change mitigation, while at the same time cutting funding for environmental schemes such as GLAS," an INHFA spokesman said. Supports The INHFA said the Government must commit to increasing national funding to CAP Pillar II schemes to offset reduced Brussels supports. This view was backed by MEP Marian Harkin. She said the level of national co-financing for Pillar II schemes had been progressively reduced from 2009, and this process would have to be reversed in a scenario where direct supports from Brussels were being cut. Much of the package to be announced by Commissioner Hogan on Friday has been well flagged over the last few weeks. It is likely to include a limit on direct payments from CAP of 60,000 per applicant - although the effectiveness of this measure has been questioned - and the front-loading of payments. This would ensure increased payments to smaller farmers by paying a higher rate per hectare on the first 10 hectares or so. Controversially from an Irish perspective, the Commission proposals are also expected to include limiting entitlements for part-time farmers. However, it is unclear how this will be achieved. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is set to visit Sudan in October to seal several bilateral deals amid diplomatic tensions. The visit comes a year after Khartoum banned the import of Egyptian farm produce over alleged use of pesticides. The two neighbors also have a long-standing dispute over a territory in Egypts south that Khartoum says is Sudanese. The Halaib Triangle is an area of land of just under 20,500 square kilometers on the Egyptian-Sudanese border, which both countries have claimed theirs since Sudan gained independence. In 2016, Cairo signed a controversial agreement with Riyadh to hand over two strategically important Red Sea islandsTiran and Sanafirto Saudi Arabia. Also, Sisis visit to Sudan comes at a time Egypt seeks support from Sudan over Ethiopias bid to quickly fill a reservoir behind the mega-hydroelectric dam it is constructing on the Nile. Egypt worries about the structures impact on the rivers water levels and potential harm to agriculture and industry. According to Sudans foreign minister Al-Dirdiri Mohamed, Sisi will partake in the proceedings of a high joint committee. He is expected to ink a series of agreements. Al-Dirdiri Mohamed did not give a date for the visit or details of agreements that will be signed. Noreen O'Mahony with Lucy, Fiona and Sheila Ahern and Jaimee Mangan at Clonakilty point to point races. Picture Denis Boyle Every year produces new challenges and sometimes opportunities for tillage farmers. Our wet and cold winter, starting last August and continuing through to early May, resulted in very difficult sowing conditions. On the plus side, the low temperatures gave very slow disease pressure, resulting in what I consider to be some of the cleanest winter barley crops I have ever seen when it came to the final fungicide. Winter wheat, now due its flag leaf spray, is generally remarkably clean. We have very low levels of our normal problem diseases in winter barley -rhyncosporium, mildew and rusts - but we have an increased incidence of leaf blotch caused by Stagonospora nodorum (formerly Septoria nodorum). This was normally regarded as being of minor interest in barley but this year I have seen up to three and four lesions per leaf. The lesions are eye-shaped and contain pale brown pycnidia which are difficult to see, even with the use of a lens with its own light source. The blotching can be confused for net blotch which has a rectangular rather than an eye-shaped symptom and also has a network of darker lines within the lesion. Ramularia is also similar in appearance but has rectangular lesions without the netting. Loose smut is evident in a number of winter barley crops. Such crops and crops of barley in adjoining lands should not be kept for 'home saved' seed. The economics of 'home saved' seed is questionable but if you are considering doing so you should select the area now, making sure that it is weed-free, disease-free and stress-free; inspect it frequently between now and harvest. Reject it if it is not up to the standard - as you would expect a Department official to do if it was seed for certification. Most of our spring crops will have been sprayed by now with an aphicide to prevent transmission of Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus (BYDV). There may have been justification for some of that spraying this year and in the past but there is no doubt that some and perhaps a lot of that spraying was unnecessary. Every year I debate the need for spraying and only recommend aphicides where I consider risk is particularly high. This applies to late sowing combined with sheltered fields/ patchy crops/ presence of aphids and a forecast for little/no rain during the normal spraying period, the three- to five-leaf stage. There are many fields where no aphicide has been sprayed and where there have been no visible losses from BYDV. Spraying does kill our natural predators - ladybirds, beetles etc - and leaves crops very exposed to BYDV infection now that resistance by aphids to aphicides is evident and increasing. Blanket recommendations are not the answer. We need research to see how BYDV can be managed and perhaps put the pressure back on plant breeders for varietal resistance, on the advisor for a science-based in field assessment. We also need to look at the impact of spraying on non-target (and perhaps beneficial) organisms. Every farmer and advisor is required to implement Integrated Pest Management, a combination of pesticides and non-pesticide techniques. It is up to research to give us the tools to do so. The development of disease resistance to pesticides is an ongoing problem. Throughout Europe and in the UK there is a new strain of potato blight (Dark Green 37) which is resistant to fluazinam (Shirlan, Volley, Tizca). While it has not been identified in Ireland, the fact that blight monitoring in the UK found 3pc of blight sprouts had the infection in 2016 and 24pc in '17, is a cause for real concern. The loss of fluazinam would have major implications for blight control as it would put increased pressure on other fungicides. The resistance strategy must consist of a combination of cultural and fungicide usage. European research has shown that oospores from infected crops can survive for up to four years. Therefore all crops planted within four years of the previous potato crop are most at risk. The key cultural controls recommended are: Maintain longer rotations - no more than one potato crop in five years Control volunteers in other crops Prevent foliage growth on outgrade piles Locate crops away from volunteers or outgrade piles Use varieties with good blight resistance Source good quality seed Ensure that fungicides are selected and rotated based on mode of action - similar to cereals, potato fungicides have different active ingredients with similar modes of action. Include mancozeb or chlorothalonil in every tank mix. PJ Phelan is a tillage advisor based in Tipperary and is a member of the ACA and ITCA Ryanair, headed by Michael OLeary, recognised trade unions for the first time in its 32-year history in December The union representing Ryanair pilots in Britain, the airline's largest market, has threatened possible strike action unless the company implements a transparent system to manage promotions and transfers, according to a letter seen by Reuters. Ryanair recognised trade unions for the first time in its 32-year history in December, but has since then struggled to reach agreement on the terms of the recognition with some unions. It faces several threats of strike action, but has so far avoided a major stoppage. In the letter to Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary, the British Airline Pilots' Association (BALPA) union demanded a seniority system to "provide transparency and fairness to decisions made by management which have a very large impact on the lives of our members and their families". In particular, the union said it wanted transparent systems for involuntary base transfers, command upgrades and the allocation of annual leave and promotion. "If it is not possible to immediately negotiate the introduction of such a Seniority Agreement, it is our intention to escalate this matter as a matter of urgency, to seek sanction for industrial action up to and including strike action should that be necessary," the letter said, setting a deadline of yesterday for positive response. Ryanair's Irish union, IALPA, two weeks ago threatened possible strike action unless the airline agreed to new working practices. BALPA national officer Terry Brandon told the Irish Independent that the union has now agreed a meeting with the airline next month where the issue will be on the agenda. A spokesman for Ryanair said the airline did not comment on negotiations with its staff. (Additional reporting by Reuters) Failte Ireland, Ireland's National Tourism Development Authority, has warned that the country needs to continue to be seen as offering an excellent value-for-money experience. On the back of increasing visitor numbers to Ireland in the first four months of 2018, Paul Kelly, chief executive of Failte Ireland, said that its research is picking up a softening in Ireland's value-for-money ratings. Should this trend continue Ireland will be seen as an expensive destination for tourists, and the work of recent years by the sector will be undone. "It could take us years to reverse that perception," Mr Kelly said. Mr Kelly also used the publication of visitor numbers from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) to call for increased investment from both the public and private sector in all areas of tourism, from accommodation to visitor attractions and infrastructure, in order to build the country's tourism capacity. Overall, Ireland welcomed 2.8 million visitors in the first four months of 2018, a 7.3pc increase on the same period in 2017. The increase in visitor numbers was driven by North America, with visitors from this market up 13.6pc year-on-year in the four-month period, according to figures from the CSO. The CSO also recorded a strong improvement in visitor numbers from mainland Europe to Ireland during the four-month period. Overall, visits from mainland Europe increased 12.3pc to 1,031,200 during the period. Despite concerns around Brexit and the fall in value of sterling against the euro, visitor numbers from Britain also increased, up 1.1pc to 1,121,000 in the four-month period. However, Tourism Ireland said that the increase in visitor numbers from Britain to Ireland did not represent a turnaround in the long-term trend. "The impact of Brexit on outbound travel from Britain... remains a concern," Niall Gibbons, chief executive of Tourism Ireland, said. Describing the increase in visitor numbers from mainland Europe to Ireland as "excellent", Mr Gibbons said that Germany and Italy had been "particularly strong" - with visitor numbers from the two countries to Ireland up 24.3pc and 21.9pc respectively during the four-month period. "Tourism Ireland has prioritised mainland Europe and North America as markets which offer a strong return on investment, in terms of holiday visitors and expenditure," Mr Gibbons said. Commenting on the figures, Minister for Tourism Shane Ross said that the continued growth in visitor numbers reflects the on-going efforts of the tourism agencies, in collaboration with the tourism sector, to market Ireland at a range of markets with the highest revenue growth potential. During the period, visitors from the rest of the world to Ireland increased by just under 3pc to 158,100. Here, Asia is seen as having major potential for Irish tourism, and Tourism Ireland recently led a sales mission to China accompanied by 29 tour operators from the island of Ireland. "China has huge potential as an emerging travel market for Ireland and one that Tourism Ireland is committed to growing over the coming years," Minister Ross said. On the reverse, the number of overseas trips made by Irish residents during April decreased by 2.8pc to 658,400. Inclusion in academia is going to be a key focus as Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Foundation (IMF) visits Dublin City University. The IMF boss will be discussing innovation across Ireland's education landscape, with inclusivity and diversity particular key topics. A tour of Madame Lagarde of DCU Alpha, the universitys commercial innovation campus, will be first on the agenda on Tuesday, June 26. DCU Alpha is playing a crucial role in digital innovation in Ireland, and on the global stage. Madame Lagarde will then join the President of Dublin City University, Prof Brian MacCraith, for an in-depth conversation at an event in The Helix. Followed by a Town Hall Q&A, the discussion will focus on Irelands education landscape and the areas of innovation, inclusion and diversity. Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Dublin City University, Sandra Healy spoke about inclusion at an interactive event at Indeed's Dublin office earlier this year. "Organisations start with diversity. Data and trends are examined, and benchmarks are set. But as organisations mature in their diversity planning, they focus on inclusion. Organisations need to create a culture where people want to stay," she said. Kainos, which provides digital services and platforms, acts as a partner for Workday software. Stock picture BELFAST IT company Kainos has said it will announce a move to new headquarters over the next few weeks as it reported a 16pc jump in sales to hit 96.7m (111m) in its eighth year of growth. In preliminary results for the year ending March 2018, the firm - one of just three listed companies in Northern Ireland - said adjusted pre-tax profits were up 7pc to 15.3m. New offices in southern Europe are also on the cards for the firm, which employs around 1,170. Chief executive Brendan Mooney said the business is also looking for a new headquarters in Belfast after outgrowing its current offices. Kainos, which provides digital services and platforms, acts as a partner for Workday software. It said performance was in line with market expectations. The results showed growth in international markets after the company opened new offices in Frankfurt, Copenhagen and Amsterdam. It now has 11 offices - also including Atlanta in the US. International contracts account for 21pc of revenue. Mr Mooney said the business is still looking at new markets. "That trend will continue as we look to develop those markets. Home markets are key but we want to see both grow as we grow the company. "You should expect us to be in southern Europe in around 18 months - somewhere warm and sunny rather than the chilly Nordic countries. Workday is sold in France, Spain and Italy. We haven't made the final decision but somewhere in that region would be logical." Governments and the commercial sector account for 56pc and 30pc of revenue respectively. Healthcare revenue dropped to 14pc of sales, from 17pc a year earlier. Mr Mooney said a crisis in NHS funding meant new IT systems were no longer a priority. "If customers aren't buying then we can't sell to them," he said. Plans by developer Johnny Ronan for 325 new homes and an 190-unit aparthotel in Dublin's docklands will bring substantial economic and social benefits to the docklands and the wider city. That's according to planning consultant John Spain & Associates, which has also told the City Council that the development will secure the regeneration of a site in the north docklands. Mr Spain has lodged the submission on behalf of Spencer Place Development Company, which is headed by Mr Ronan, pictured. However, one resident living close to the proposed development site has implored the council to take locals' views into account when evaluating the application. Christopher Flynn, who lives on Mayor Street, has told the council he has made the request "because I know we did not fit into the master plan, but we are the ones most affected". "We are a row of six two-storey houses in a terrace that has been here for over 150 years. We look like we are going to be surrounded by high buildings all round in the near future. "I hope these developments enhance the area and the community as a whole, but please take into account the existing residents' living standards and quality of life." In his submission, Mr Spain said the proposal would contribute to delivering a new street - New Street - connecting Sheriff Street to Mayor Street. On the impact of sunlight/daylight on surrounding properties, the report submitted by Mr Spain states that the proposed development will not significantly impact surrounding properties Mr Spain states that the proposed development will contribute significantly to providing a residential population base in the area, continuing the wider area's economic revival. Dixons Carphone Warehouse said that it was taking early action to reduce challenges facing it Dixons Carphone Warehouse has confirmed that none of its 80-plus stores in the Republic of Ireland will be impacted by planned closures announced by the company. Yesterday shares in Dixons were down over 18pc in afternoon trading on the London Stock Exchange after the company said that it expected its gross margins for 2018-19 to be down. The company said that it was taking "early action" to reduce the challenges facing it, including closing 92 standalone shops this year. In addition, Dixons said that it was going to correct its recent underinvestment with an expected 30m (34.5m) cost investment in these areas across Ireland and the UK. While full-year revenue at the group was up 3pc year-on-year in the 16 weeks to April 28, Dixons has been hit by a decline in its post-pay market and customers holding on to older mobile devices for longer. In addition, the company said that it was experiencing a further contraction in its electricals market in the UK. New boss Alex Baldock, who replaced the long-standing Seb James earlier this year, said: "Right now, with our international business in good shape, we're focusing early action on the UK. In electricals, we're focused on gross margin recovery. In mobile, we're stabilising our performance through improvements to our proposition and network agreements." In both markets Mr Baldock said that the company would work hard to improve its cost efficiency. "We won't tolerate our current performance in mobile, or as a group. We know we can do a lot better," he said. The company said that full year pre-tax profit is expected to come in at 382m (438m), down from 501m (575m) in 2017. Next year the figure will fall to 300m (344m), the firm added. Last-year accounts for the Irish arm of Dixons show that it returned to profit, recording pre-tax profits of 6.36m after an exceptional gain. The return to profit was on the back of revenue increasing 2pc to 158.39m. The Irish profit last year was also positively impacted by rationalisation costs associated with the Dixons and Carphone Warehouse merger. News of Dixons' planned store closures comes on the back of an announcement from Mothercare UK earlier this year in which it said it will close over a third of its stores in Britain. Mothercare Ireland confirmed that Irish stores will not be impacted by the UK closures, as Mothercare Ireland is a completely separate company. (PA) Teacher Yvonne Mason corrected the grammar on a letter she received from the White House. PIC: Yvonne Mason/Facebook A teacher who received a letter from President Trump which was littered with grammatical errors sent it back with corrections. Yvonne Mason, a teacher in Atlanta, Georgia, took a photo of the letter she received from Trump regarding school safety and gun violence, and shared her edits on Facebook. "Have y'all tried grammar and style check?" she wrote at the top of the letter which can be seen to be covered in yellow highlighter and her handwritten corrections in purple pen. The Greenville News reports that Ms Mason is a "former Mauldin High School teacher" and points out that she realises the letter was probably written by a staff member and not President Trump himself, even though it bears his signature. She received the letter in response to a letter she had written to the President about the recent Parkland, Florida school shooting. Her Facebook post has been shared almost 4,000 times. South Africas parliament on Tuesday approved a national minimum wage bill by an overwhelming majority to alleviate inequality and stabilize labor in Africas most industrialized nation. President Ramaphosa has been pushing a minimum wage of $1.62 per hour, a policy that was scheduled to be implemented on May 1, but was delayed in parliament. On Tuesday, MPs also passed the Basic Conditions of Employment Amendment Bill and Labor Relations Amendment Bill. The bills will now be sent to the National Council of Provinces before being signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa. During the debate, the main opposition party, Democratic Alliance, said the national minimum wage of $1.62per-hour would hurt the economy and lead to major job losses. The Economic Freedom Fighters led by Julius Malema, however said the amount was too low. South Africa is known for its rampant unemployment, currently at 26.7 percent according to Statistics South Africa. The country is one of the most unequal societies in the world. According to the World Bank, the poorest 20 percent of South Africans consume less than 3 percent of the countrys total expenditure. Meanwhile, the wealthiest 20 percent account for 65 percent. South Africas economy expected to grow at 1.9% in 2018, according to the OECD. The OECD, last month revised the expected GDP growth rate upward to 1.9% in 2018, and 2.1% in 2019. The film producer was charged last Friday on two counts of rape and one of a criminal sexual act for alleged incidents involving two separate women (Steven Hirsch/AP) Harvey Weinstein has been indicted on rape and criminal sex act charges. The film producer was brought another step closer to accountability by the indictment, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr said as he made the announcement. It comes hours after a statement issued through a spokesman said Weinstein would not testify before the grand jury over sex charges on the advice of his lawyers. The film producer was charged last Friday on two counts of rape and one of a criminal sexual act for alleged incidents involving two separate women. Weinstein was due to face the grand jury the panel convened by the Manhattan District Attorney. They say the former movie mogul did not have enough time to prepare to testify, and that he only learned on Friday of the identities of the two women relating to the charges. A statement from the Manhattan DA announcing the grand jury indictment said: A grand jury has voted to indict Harvey Weinstein on charges of rape in the first and third Degrees, and Criminal Sexual Act in the first degree. This indictment brings the defendant another step closer to accountability for the crimes of violence with which he is now charged. Our office will try this case not in the press, but in the courtroom where it belongs. The defendants recent assault on the integrity of the survivors and the legal process is predictable. We are confident that when the jury hears the evidence, it will reject these attacks out of hand. Expand Close Harvey Weinstein was arraigned on rape and other charges (Bebeto Matthews/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Harvey Weinstein was arraigned on rape and other charges (Bebeto Matthews/AP) Video of the Day A statement issued on behalf of Weinsteins lawyer Benjamin Brafman said: After being unfairly denied access to critical information about this case that was needed to defend him before the grand jury, Mr Weinsteins attorneys decided there was not sufficient time to properly prepare Mr Weinstein. The identities of the accusers and the specific charges were provided to Mr Weinstein last Friday on the eve of the Memorial Day weekend and a deadline for his appearance set for Wednesday, 2pm. Our request for a postponement of his appearance before the grand jury was denied. Accordingly, Mr Brafman will inform the District Attorney today that Mr Weinstein intends to follow the advice of his attorneys and not testify before the grand jury. The statement continued: Not having access to these materials is particularly troubling in this case, where one of the unsupported allegations is more than 14 years old and the rape allegation involves a woman with whom Mr Weinstein shared a 10-year consensual sexual relationship that continued for years after the alleged incident in 2013. Finally, Mr Weinsteins attorneys noted that regardless of how compelling Mr Weinsteins personal testimony might be, an indictment was inevitable due to the unfair political pressure being placed on Cy Vance to secure a conviction of Mr Weinstein. Weinstein, 66, was in court on Friday in New York in his first public appearance since facing numerous allegations of sexual misconduct. He posted a one million dollar (751,060) cash bail and agreed to wear an electronic monitor which tracks his movements 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He also surrendered his passport and agreed to stay within the states of New York and Connecticut. Weinstein, who has repeatedly denied allegations of non-consensual sex, intends to plead not guilty to the charges, Mr Brafman said outside court. In a statement responding to the indictment, MR Brafman said: The announcement of Mr. Weinsteins indictment, does not come as a surprise. Indeed, it was predicted by me this morning in an earlier statement we issued. We also note of course that the indictment merely mirrors the same charges in the criminal court Complaint and does not add anything to the case we did not already know. We asked the District Attorney for more time so that Mr Weinsteins attorneys could gather the material needed to properly prepare him for his grand jury testimony but that request was denied. We remind everyone that an indictment is merely a formal accusation. Mr Weinstein intends to enter a plea of Not Guilty and vigorously defend against these unsupported allegations that he strongly denies. We will soon formally move to dismiss the indictment and if this case actually proceeds to trial, we expect Mr Weinstein to be acquitted. Pusha T has released a new song in which he attacks fellow rapper Drake (Yui Mok/PA) Pusha-T has has pulled no punches in his latest attack on Drake. The feud between the rappers was reignited last week with the release of Pusha-Ts latest album, Daytona, in which he referenced allegations Drake used a ghost writer to pen some of his lyrics. Drake immediately hit back with the song Duppy Freestyle, mentioning his rivals engagement to Virginia Williams. Expand Close Pusha-T has released a new song in which he fires back at his fellow rapper, Drake (Ian West/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Pusha-T has released a new song in which he fires back at his fellow rapper, Drake (Ian West/PA) This appears to have angered New York-born Pusha-T, who has made things personal on The Story Of Adidon. In the song, released on Tuesday, Pusha-T mentions Drakes father, Dennis Graham, rapping: You mention wedding ring like its a bad thing / Your father walked away at five, hell of a dad thing. He then went on to reference rumours Drake fathered a child with Sophie Brussaux, saying: Adonis is your son / And he deserves more than an Adidas press run, thats real / Love that baby, respect that girl / Forget shes a pornstar, let her be your world. The songs artwork, which Push-T uploaded to Instagram, appears to show Drake wearing black face paint. Pusha-T captioned the post: Virginia Williams shant ever be mentioned in song by ANYONE aside from me #SurgicalSummer The Story Of Adidon live in my stories Video of the Day Before releasing the song, Pusha-T said he was ready for a response to Duppy Freestyle. He told Vulture: Im ready for everything that comes with it. Everything. And we gonna deal in truths. If thats what we gonna do, and thats what we really, really, wanna deal in, lets deal in real truths. Because, I feel like I was questioned. My truth was questioned, and Im gonna deal in truths all summer long. If everybody wanna deal in that, then I have no problem with that, I think its great. Think the world needs truth. GMB host Richard Madeley (left) said he was not sorry he cut short an interview after Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson (right) dodged a question four times (Victoria Jones, Dominic Lipinski/PA) Richard Madeley has defended his decision to cut off Gavin Williamson part-way through a live interview, saying it was probably the most popular thing I have ever done on television. The ITV Good Morning Britain guest presenter said he was not sorry he terminated Tuesdays interview after the Defence Secretary dodged a question four times. Video of the exchange, in which Mr Madeley asked the minister whether he regretted telling Russia to go away and shut up after Moscow denied responsibility for the Salisbury poison attack, subsequently went viral. The former This Morning Host told BBC Radio 4s PM that Mr Williamson had been embarrassed about the Salisbury comment because it made him sound like a pre-adolescent school child. Mr Madeley added: He didnt want to answer that question because it was embarrassing for him on a personal level, well tough. I realised he was never going to answer the question. That was insulting not to the programme or to me, I couldnt give a damn, but it was very insulting to the viewers. So I excommunicated him and Im not sorry I did it. Mr Williamson was speaking from West Midlands Safari Park in Worcestershire, where he was meeting military personnel preparing to go to Malawi to train park rangers to protect elephants and rhinos from poachers. Id say its probably the most popular thing I have ever done on televisionRichard Madeley Video of the Day The Defence Secretary had responded to the GMB hosts question by paying tribute to health workers who treated Sergei and Yulia Skripal and highlighting the support offered to the UK by the international community. But Madeley, who described Mr Williamsons earlier comment as Trump-esque, repeatedly interrupted him to demand an answer, before finally pulling the plug, saying: All right, interview terminated because you wont answer the question. It would be helpful if you answered a straight question with a straight answer. Mr Madeley told PM on Wednesday the feedback he had received about the interview had been 95% positive. He added: In fact Id say its probably the most popular thing I have ever done on television. It was a snap decision, we didnt go into that interview with any concept, I dont think any broadcaster or interviewer has ever actually kicked a serving Cabinet minister off air. I dont think it has happened before and it certainly wasnt my gameplan. Clare Daly has been among TDs at the forefront of changing Ireland's abortion laws since her election to the Dail in 2011. Yesterday, in her first address since Saturday's monumental referendum result, she choked with emotion when she described it as "an enormous weight being lifted". For her passion both yesterday and for the last several years - when her campaigning for change has been relentless - she received a round of applause from her fellow TDs. It erupted when Ms Daly said the results of the poll meant a "ball and chain that dogged us all our adult life being finally gone". Ms Daly has a history of demanding and compelling the Dail to be more compassionate, to afford people more dignity. She said she was "shocked" that nobody else in the Dail had ever raised the issue of the plight of refugees, including Ireland's own lacklustre support for bringing refugees to Irish shores. Back in 2012, alongside Wexford TD Mick Wallace and Dublin South Central TD Joan Collins, Ms Daly first introduced legislation to soften access to terminations, to make it legal for a woman to access an abortion when her life is in "real and substantial" danger. She introduced several bills along the way, aimed also at dealing with access to termination for women who had received diagnoses of fatal foetal abnormalities, but were being forced to travel to the UK. The record shows that each successive bill received very little support among TDs. Government members were ordered to vote against her bills, being told the Attorney General's advice was that none was compatible with the Eighth Amendment. "When Deputies Mick Wallace, Joan Collins and I introduced our legislation in 2012, only 20 deputies voted with us," she said in the Dail yesterday. At that time, it took four women to go public on 'The Late Late Show', making it the first time people in Ireland openly identified themselves as having travelled for terminations, she said. They later founded Terminations for Medical Reasons (TFMR), a group that featured prominently throughout the campaign to repeal the Eighth. "Is it not appalling that they and their colleagues had to lay bare their most appalling pain and tragedy in order to turn that into a social movement which changed history? They should not have had to do that," she said. Not for the first time did Ms Daly allow her emotions to surface while speaking in the Dail. Yesterday she aimed to put a halt to the rewriting of history as it may have evolved over the last few days. She reminded us that it was not politicians who took the lead. "This has been a pitch battle pushing a boulder up a hill for decades and nobody in here was involved in pushing it," she said. When women and families who had suffered from being forced out of Ireland were left in the lurch by the political system during those votes they walked out of Dail Eireann with their "hearts broken", said Ms Daly. "When we assembled here and Deputy Wallace moved the legislation on fatal foetal abnormalities, those women were in the gallery. Afterwards, their hearts were broken that the House had voted against them again. There were people who travelled that day and there is probably someone who is travelling today also. "We should not have compounded their pain but the fact that they stepped forward was huge." While she acknowledged the role of the Taoiseach in introducing a referendum, she said: "We should remember the time before the glory days when it was the Well Woman Centre, the Irish Family Planning Association and the Abortion Support Network in the UK which took in our women and girls and paid for their fares." She added: "If I had to name one person more than anyone else, it was Ailbhe Smyth, a 'giant' of the movement, who stood there when there was no glory to be had." The body of Jastine Valdez at Dublin Airport yesterday morning on the way to her native Philippines. Picture: Collins The body of Jastine Valdez is making the long journey home to the Philippines almost two weeks after her brutal murder. The remains of the 24-year-old, who was abducted and killed on May 19, was pictured leaving Thomas Murphy & Sons funeral home yesterday morning in a black hearse. Having lain in repose since last Friday, she was taken to Dublin Airport in a mahogany coffin, followed by her heartbroken parents Teresita and Danilo. Consul to the Philippines Mark Christopher Congdon also accompanied the family, assisting them on their journey to their home town of Aritao. A funeral service is expected to be held for Jastine later this week. In a statement on Monday, Mr Congdon said the "spirit of love and compassion" has shone from the Valdez home "like a beacon of light in a dark tunnel of torment". He said: "Jastine will be greatly missed but never forgotten. Always in the hearts of mum and dad and the hearts of the Filipino and Irish nations, bound together forever in grief in Jastine's name." A NURSE who checked on a barrister shortly before he was discovered in a critical condition described his demeanor as relaxed. The nurse was on night duty at St John of Gods Hospital in Dublin on May 24 2016. She was caring for 48 year old crime barrister Colm OBriain from Sandymount, Dublin 4. Mr OBriain had been admitted earlier that day after becoming acutely stressed over a work issue that he feared would affect his future. Previously, the inquest at Dublin Coroners Court heard that Mr OBriain became a different person after losing a case around ten days before he died. The inquest heard from registrar Dr Emma Adams who said she did not alert consultant staff during the course of her assessment of Mr OBriain that evening. There was no reason to as there was no change since (his) presentation (earlier that day), she told Dublin Coroners Court. The night nurse on duty said Mr OBriain appeared calm that evening and was communicating in a relaxed manner. He spent time in the smoking area and in the communal area with other hospital clients. He had opted to take a sleeping pill dispensed by nursing staff at the medical station. At around 11.30pm that night, the nurse knocked on his door and entered his room. I observed Mr OBriain in bed reading a book. I entered and asked if he was okay. He made a hand gesture with eye contact. He appeared in a calm and relaxed manner, the nurse said. She left and closed the door. Read More Forty minutes later Mr OBriain was found in a collapsed state by another nurse conducting observational checks. She called to colleagues at the nurses station approximately 20 feet away for help. Staff began chest compressions and emergency services were called. Emergency services arrived at 12.20pm and Mr OBriain was transferred to St Vincents Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 1.21am on May 25 2016. The inquest previously heard that Mr OBriain told doctors that hed make a mistake at work and was fearful his client would take legal action against him. He was fearful about the outcome this may have on his professional and financial situation and on his family. The inquest was adjourned after two days of evidence and is due to continue on June 22. If you have been affected by this article, you can phone the Samaritans on 116123, or email jo@samaritans.ie The jury in the fraud conspiracy trial of former Anglo Irish Bank CEO David Drumm has been sent home for the night after an hour-and-a-quarter of deliberations. An enlarged jury had sat throughout the 81-day trial due to its length, with two "spares" in case of drop-outs. However, only 12 can consider a verdict and they were selected randomly by ballot, with two excluded. Mr Drumm (51) is pleading not guilty to conspiring to defraud by dishonestly creating the impression that Anglo's customer deposits were 7.2bn larger than they really were in September 2008. He also denies false accounting. The jury asked to hear the recording of a phone call between Mr Drumm and John Bowe on September 19, 2008. In the call, replayed in court, Mr Drumm referred to "f**king Freddie f**king Fly down there, the Financial Regulator" and spoke about looking for money from the Central Bank. "We need the f**king loan because we are running out of money," he said. "If they don't give it to us on Monday they have a bank collapse." Ranger Michael Maguire from Cork, who was shot dead during live-fire training A SOLDIER has described hearing the crack of gunfire and a round whizzing past his head moments before another soldier was shot dead during a training exercise. Lance Corporal Matthew Linacre told a court martial that other soldiers nearby said "f*** that was close" before realising that Irish Ranger Michael Maguire had been fatally shot in the head. The soldiers, who were members of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, were taking part in an exercise at the Castlemartin Training Area in Pembrokeshire in May 2012. Rgr Maguire, 21, from County Cork, Ireland, was shot in the forehead by a round fired from a GPMG machine gun. Cpl Linacre said he and other soldiers, including Rgr Maguire, were in a rest area getting their kit together to leave when he heard a shot ring out. "There was a distinctive crack and round going past my head," he told the court. "They were commenting on how close it was. A few were like 'f*** that was close'." He told the court another nearby soldier said: "F*** he's been shot in the head." Cpl Linacre said he turned around and saw the soldier lying on the floor with a wound to his head, while others shouted: "Man down." "More rounds came over. Sgt Pankhurst said to take cover behind the vehicles," Cpl Linacre said. "Once I ran over to the lorry I turned around and saw two corporals treating Rgr Maguire." Read More Cpl Linacre said that at the time of the incident he and Rgr Maguire were not wearing their helmets or body armour. Two officers and a sergeant are facing court martial in Bulford, Wiltshire, in connection with the soldier's death. Captain Jonathan Price, 32, now of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish, is accused of the manslaughter by gross negligence of Rgr Maguire through his failure to set up and supervise a safe exercise. The prosecution allege he failed to attend a recce of the range when preparing a Range Action Safety Plan (Rasp), that he placed targets too close together and he failed to "deconflict" the two exercises. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Bell, 45, and Warrant Officer Stuart Pankhurst, 40, are both accused of negligently performing a duty. Lt Col Bell, the senior planning officer, is accused of failing to review or counter-sign the Rasp produced by Capt Price and failing to supervise or support him. Staff Sgt Pankhurst, who was supervising the exercise involving Rgr Maguire in area 10A, is accused of failing to "express any caution or concern" despite having attended the recce and having knowledge of the extent of the adjacent shooting in area 10B. All three defendants deny the charges and the trial before a board of seven senior officers continues. A Garda did "incalculable" damage to the force after giving information to a gang involved in a feud with other criminals, a judge warned. Judge Keenan Johnson told disgraced garda Jimell Henry that she had let down her family, her colleagues and her community. Henry (36), from Cairns Hill, Co Sligo, admitted accessing the Garda Pulse system from her base in Dublin to give information to a criminal gang. Her telephone had contact numbers for 'The Pharmacy' and 'The Child' - two senior members of a Sligo criminal gang, the court heard. It is the first prosecution of its kind in the State and she will be sentenced next month at Sligo Circuit Court. Superintendent Jim Delaney told the court that gardai in Sligo were concerned in 2015 and 2016 that sensitive Garda information was finding its way to a gang. He said there had been a number of tit-for-tat incidents. Queries A "complex multi-disciplinary" investigation was launched and it was found that Henry, who was based in Co Dublin, had made 980 queries in a two-week period and 73pc of those were about Sligo on the Pulse system. Supt Delaney said Pulse was the most powerful element of An Garda Siochana. Henry was spotted by gardai in a meeting with a well-known criminal in Ballisodare, the court heard. Henry told gardai she had met him to fix a hair straightener. She contacted her criminal associates by what she termed a "gouger phone", the court was told. Henry was arrested on January 16, 2015. Supt Delaney agreed under cross-examination from junior defence counsel Keith O'Grady that Henry was compromised by habitual drug use. "For most of her 36 years, she was law-abiding," defence counsel Kerida Naidoo SC said. "She got involved in drugs and had a relationship with people who were from the other side of the tracks and it led her to make very poor decisions." Henry had no previous convictions, and apologised to the gardai, the court, her family and her father, who is an ex-officer in Sligo. Counsel said Henry's case had rightly attracted publicity and her reputation in Sligo was "in tatters". Untenable He said the defendant's remorse was genuine and there was no danger of repetition as her job in An Garda Siochana was untenable and that was a significant punishment. Henry had pleaded guilty to three charges of disclosing information obtained during the course of her duty as a garda in Co Dublin knowing that the disclosure of that information was likely to have a harmful effect on dates between December 16, 2014 and January 14, 2015. She pleaded guilty to four charges of disclosing operational details without proper authority on dates between December 16, 2014, and January 15, 2015. The defendant also pleaded guilty to two charges of forging prescriptions for medication and two charges of giving false information to obtain prescribed medication from chemists in Sligo in a period from February 3, 2016, and April 20, 2016. The judge said that by her actions she had "let her colleagues and her community down and the resulting damage to the force is incalculable". RALLIES have taken place nationwide as women call for the Government to implement supports for the women affected by the CervicalCheck scandal without delay. The Standing4Women rally outside Leinster House heard from Emma Mhic Mhathuna, whose case was mentioned briefly in the High Court today. Ms Mhic Mhathuna called on the Government to intervene in her ongoing case by directing the HSE to accept responsibility so she can return home and have fun with her children. This is a chance for the Irish Government to stand in in front of us - Braveheart style - and say no more to the daughters of Ireland. If you hurt one of them you hurt one of us, she said. People dont realise that when you are dying you are the strongest youve ever been because youre fighting for survival, she said. Im actually not going to die because I will not die leaving this country in unsafe hands, an emotional Ms Mhic Mhathuna told those gathered. Carol Murray, who believes she is one of the 209 women affected, also addressed the rally. Ms Murray, from Middleton Co Cork, said she was notified on May 10 that her first smear in June 2010 was read incorrectly and she was not escalated as she should have been. She was told to return in six months for another smear and she did. At that time she was told again to return in six months but was diagnosed with cancer in the interim. I should have been called up to the hospital within a week or two of my first smear and instead I was waiting 12 months, she told a rally outside the Dail. In that time I was diagnosed with cervical cancer... I was only 26 years old when I was diagnosed. It was the scariest thing Ive ever gone through, Ill never forget the first day I was told, she said. Expand Close Emma Mhic Mhathuna pictured during the Cervical Check Scandal protest at the Dail. Photo: Steve Humphreys / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Emma Mhic Mhathuna pictured during the Cervical Check Scandal protest at the Dail. Photo: Steve Humphreys The young mother who has two sons, aged 11 and 8, is no longer able to have children, which has left a massive void. I am so lucky to have my two boys but its still not fair that the choice was taken away from me. Standing here today I count myself lucky that I can stand here and speak there are way too many women who cant, she said. Every day I do suffer both physically and mentally. I could have a sore throat, I think its there or a sore back I think I have a tumour there. Its mostly a lack of trust in the healthcare system. Expand Close Mother-of-five Emma Mhic Mhathuna Photo: Don MacMonagle / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Mother-of-five Emma Mhic Mhathuna Photo: Don MacMonagle The rally heard from a number of contributors who called on the Government to introduce mandatory disclosure for doctors as soon as possible. The promised package of supports for women affected by the CervicalCheck controversy also needs to be rolled out as quickly as possible, the demonstration heard. Japanese Sake and Georgian Wine tasting event in wine shop/bar 8000 Vintages On May 23 at wine shop/bar 8000 vintages was hosted Japanese sake and Georgian wine tasting event.Evening was attended by Ambassador of Japan HE Tadaharu Uehara and Japanese and Georgian guests.Event was hosted by sommelier Mr. Zaza Grigalashvili.National appetizers were served with Japanese sake and Georgian wine.The event was organized by the Embassy of Japan in Georgia and Wine shop/bar 8000 vintages and the Embassy would like to thank 8000 vintages for the cooperation.Embassy of Japan in Georgia will hold such events in the future enhancing knowledge of Japanese traditional sake. THE jury in the fraud conspiracy trial of former Anglo Irish Bank CEO David Drumm has been sent home for the night after a second days deliberations. Judge Karen OConnor sent the jurors home as they continue to consider verdicts on the charges. They have now been deliberating for more than three hours since they retired yesterday, and will resume tomorrow afternoon. Mr Drumm (51) is pleading not guilty to conspiring to defraud by dishonestly creating the impression that Anglo's customer deposits were 7.2bn larger than they really were in September 2008. He is alleged to have conspired with Anglos former Finance Director Willie McAteer and head of Capital Markets John Bowe, as well as Irish Life and Permanents then-CEO, Denis Casey, and others. The Dublin Circuit Criminal Court case centres on a series of interbank deposits which circulated between Anglo and Irish Life and Permanent during the financial crisis. The transfers were routed through Irish Life Assurance (ILA), returning to Anglo where they were then treated as customer deposits, which are a better indicator of a banks health. Mr Drumm also denies false accounting, by providing misleading information to the market. At just after 4pm today, the jury told Judge OConnor they wished to finish deliberations for the day. The judge told them to return tomorrow. Earlier, the forewoman asked Judge OConnor if it would be possible to hear audio recordings in the jury room when needed. The judge said this was not possible and any recordings the jury wished to hear would have to be played back in the courtroom. The remaining three women and nine men have been given transcripts of the 2008 phone calls heard during the trial, but yesterday asked to have the audio of one call - between Mr Drumm and Mr Bowe - replayed. When they retired to begin deliberations yesterday afternoon, after Judge OConnor told them they must consider each charge separately and their verdicts must be unanimous. An enlarged jury had sat throughout the 81-day trial due to its length, with two spares in case of drop-outs. However, only 12 can consider a verdict and they were selected randomly, with two sent home. A Dublin youth who viciously assaulted a teenager whose friend owed him 50 for pills has been sentenced to 21 months in prison. Thomas Merrigan (22) of Dunedin Park, Monkstown, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to two counts of assault causing harm in Sallynoggin on April 24, 2015. The court heard that Merrigan was intoxicated and out of it when he confronted a 16-year-old school girl who owed him 50 for ecstasy pills. Merrigan cut off a large chunk of the girl's hair and a short time later, punched her 16-year-old male friend repeatedly in the head, knocking him unconscious. The boy suffered two seizures and spent five days in the acute care unit of a Dublin hospital. Maurice Coffey BL, prosecuting, said neither victim wished to be named. Their victim impact reports were read in silence by Judge Martin Nolan, who noted that the male victim continued to suffer as a result of the attack. The court heard that when gardai searched Merrigan's house the day after the assaults to retrieve clothing, they discovered a substantial quantity of herbal cannabis and plastic bags for bagging drugs. Merrigan further pleaded guilty to possessing 1,274 worth of cannabis for sale or supply at his home on April 25, 2015. Judge Nolan sentenced Merrigan to a combined sentence of 21 months for both the assaults and the drugs offence. The judge described the second assault as vicious and at the middle to high range of seriousness. Garda Eoin McGrath told the court that the 16-year-old girl had left school on the day in question and was talking on the phone when she heard a voice saying where is my money? She turned around and saw Merrigan, to whom she owed 50 for the illegal tablets. The girl told gardai later that Merrigan then started walking beside her and that she felt he was a bit drunk or off his head. Merrigan grabbed her by the bun of her hair and she could feel his grip getting looser as he cut a large bit of her hair off, although she couldn't see the cutting implement he used. The girl went home and a short time later, Merrigan passed one of the girl's friends who was sharing a bicycle with another friend. Merrigan jerked the handlebars to try and dislodge the two boys and the second victim jumped off the bike, whereupon Merrigan lunged at him and punched him five times forcefully in the head. The boy felt weak, shaky and really sick but made his way back to his father's house, helped by gardai who met him on the way. The boy had a seizure in his father's house and an ambulance brought him to hospital where he suffered a second seizure. He spent five days the acute medical unit of St Vincent's Hospital. Gda McGrath said the male victim knew Merrigan to see, but that there was no motivation for the attack other than Merrigan saw the victim in the company of the female victim. Merrigan has one previous conviction for violent disorder for which he received a suspended sentence. Seoirse O Dunlaing BL, defending, said Merrigan was remorseful and had written a letter to court describing his own actions as disgraceful. He said Merrigan had had issues with alcohol and drugs since an early age but had engaged with treatment services and had received positive reports from Probation Services. Former Garda Commissioner Noirin OSullivan has said she never told a journalist that penalty points whistleblower Maurice McCabe abused a girl when she was a child. Ms OSullivan told the Disclosures Tribunal she never discussed Sgt McCabe or allegations made by the now adult complainant, known as Ms D, with journalist Debbie McCann of the Irish Mail on Sunday. The tribunal has previously heard Ms McCann is the daughter of a former senior garda, John McCann, who Ms OSullivan knew. Ms OSullivan was responding to questions from Fionan O Muircheartaigh BL, counsel for Alison OReilly, a journalist at the Irish Daily Mail. The tribunal has heard Ms OReilly made a statement to the tribunal in which she alleged she was told by Ms McCann between 2013 and 2014 that then Garda press officer Supt Dave Taylor and Ms OSullivan had told her Sgt McCabe abused a girl when she was a child. She alleges Ms McCann told her the abuse was covered up because Sgt McCabe was a Garda and the case was never given a Pulse number. Responding to Mr O Muircheartaigh, Ms OSullivan denied that she had ever discussed Sgt McCabe with Ms McCann. According to Ms OReillys statement, Ms McCann said Ms OSullivan gave her an off the record interview as she did not want to be seen to be doing an interview with a journalist she knew in the first few weeks of the job as acting commissioner, as she then was. However, Ms OSullivan said she only met Ms McCann for the first time at a book launch in mid-November 2014. Prior to that, in 2012 and 2013, there had been a number of interview requests from Ms McCann, submitted via the Garda Press Office, but no interview occurred. Ms OSullivan said that at a later stage she did respond over the phone to written questions which had been submitted by Ms McCann for an article. Mr O Muircheartaigh said that according to Ms OReillys statement, Ms McCann referred to Sgt McCabe as a paedophile. Ms OReilly says she confronted her colleague in Herbert Park in Dublin and asked her how she knew the story was true. She said Ms McCann told her the story was coming from the top. Ms OReilly said she asked if this was a reference to your pal Noirin and that Ms McCann replied that it was. Ms OSullivan said she would not classify herself as Ms McCann's pal. She reiterated that she had never spoken to Ms McCann in relation to Sgt McCabe or Ms D. Sgt McCabe was the subject of a Garda investigation after Ms D made allegations in 2006 that she had been sexually assaulted by him as a child years earlier. He was cleared the following year when the Director of Public Prosecutions found the events described would not constitute a crime. The tribunal is investigating claims by Supt Taylor that he was ordered by then commissioner Martin Callinan in 2013 to negatively brief journalists about the Ms D allegation, and that this was done with the knowledge of Mr Callinans then deputy, Ms OSullivan. Mr Callinan has denied giving any such order and Ms OSullivan has denied all knowledge of a smear campaign. Responding to questions from tribunal counsel Kathleen Leader BL, Ms OSullivan said she was never briefed by Supt Taylor that Ms McCann and another journalist, Eavan Murray of the Irish Sun, had visited Ms Ds home in late February 2014. That absolutely never happened. I didnt know anything about Ms McCann or Ms Murray interviewing Ms D, she said. Ms OSullivan said she only found out about this at the beginning of the tribunal proceedings. The tribunal has heard that Ms D did not do an interview with either journalist. However, she did do an interview in March 2014 with Irish Independent crime journalist Paul Williams. Supt Taylor has claimed Mr Williams phoned him on March 8, 2014, telling him he was at the Ms D household and had interviewed the family. He also claims he texted Ms OSullivan to inform her of this and that she called him back to discuss the matter. Under questioning for Conor Dignam SC, counsel for An Garda Siochana, Ms OSullivan agreed that phone records did not show the sequence of contacts alleged by Supt Taylor. Mr Dignam said Mr Williams evidence was that he did not contact Supt Taylor that day, but rang him a few days later to fact check a number of matters. Ms OSullivan agreed that phone records for March 10 and 11 also indicated the sequence of contacts alleged by Supt Taylor was not borne out by phone records on those dates either. Asked about phone contacts with Mr Williams in February, March and April of that year, Ms OSullivan said none of these were about Sgt McCabe. She said a number of issues, including a controversy over the alleged bugging of the Garda Ombudsmans office, were prominent in the media at the time. Asked about a text she sent Mr Williams on April 12, 2014, the day his interview with Ms D was published, Ms OSullivan said it was possible this related to a review of the journalists security arrangements. Ms Leader pointed out that Ms OSullivan had put forward no explanation for the contacts in her initial statement to the tribunal. In that statement she said she could not recall. Ms OSullivan said that subsequent to making the statement she made inquiries as there was something in her mind about the period, and this confirmed there was a review of security arrangements for a number of individuals taking place around that time. She said she could not definitively say what the text on April 12 related to, but that the security arrangements would have been an ongoing issue. Ms OSullivan insisted she had not discussed Sgt McCabe with Mr Williams. I would have absolute respect for Mr Williams as a journalist, but we would have had professional boundaries, she said. It is not something I would have discussed with anyone. Former Sunday Independent editor Anne Harris told the tribunal that the newspaper published a story by journalist Philip Ryan on May 5, 2013. This story was to the effect that some of the people who had penalty points quashed had gone on to be involved in fatal accidents. Ms Harris said at the next news conference, where journalists generally pitch stories and discuss story ideas, a freelance journalist told her she didnt know the whole story about Sgt McCabe. She said the gist of what the journalist told her was that a colleague of Sgt McCabe had been driving along with his daughter when the girl saw Sgt McCabe and said: Daddy, Daddy. Thats the man. The story relayed to her was that something had happened in 2006, but she said the inference was vague. That was the first I heard of it, said Ms Harris. She said she decided to find out if there was anything in what the journalist was saying and that she used her own sources. Ms Harris said she discovered that the DPP had looked into it and found it was groundless. She said this story was raised with her by the journalist on a second occasion, but she shut it down. Ms Harris said she didnt think the purpose was to have a story published, but was intended as a chilling thing. A REPORT by a German radicalisation expert will be studied by the prosecution before the sentencing of a young man who admitted providing funding from Ireland for the Islamic State terrorist organisation. Hassan Bal (26) will be sentenced before Waterford Circuit Criminal Court on June 28 as Judge Eugene O'Kelly was assured a special report being sought by the defence will be shared with the prosecution. Judge O'Kelly was told that an expert report on Mr Bal, sought by the defence and consented to by the State, is not yet finalised. However, it will be completed shortly and will immediately be shared by the defence with the State. Mr Bal, who had an address at OConnell Street in Waterford city, appeared in court wearing a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. He did not speak during the hearing. Mr Bal has been in custody since he was arrested by Gardai at his rented Waterford home in April 2017. He pleaded guilty last January to two counts relating to the funding and attempted funding of Islamic State. Judge OKelly was told by Noel Whelan BL, for the State, that sentencing in the matter would take half a day. "The defence will share their expert report when it is received," Mr Whelan said. "That will be well before then (June 28)." Judge O'Kelly was assured the report by a deradicalisation expert would be completed and submitted in good time for sentencing to be dealt with on June 28. A European expert on radicalisation and de-radicalisation, Dr Daniel Koelher of the German Institute of Radicalisation and De-Radicalisation Studies (GIRDS), is currently conducting a special report on Mr Bal. Previously, defence counsel Giollaiosa O'Lideadha SC asked that Mr Koelher be given access to all interviews with Mr Bal and any associated documents including the Book of Evidence. This will allow him provide a report on why Mr Bal became associated with such activities. The expert will also offer his opinion on whether Mr Bal has been de-radicalised and whether he does not appear to support terrorist organisations like Islamic State any more. He has made it clear he would be providing an expert opinion to the court and is very well aware of his obligations as an expert witness to be fair and clear and to report on the basis of his primary obligations to the court, Mr O'Giollaiosa said. Mr O Lideadha stressed that his client was very well aware that the court would have access to Mr Koelhers report irrespective of what the conclusions are. Conor Roberts BL, for Mr Bal, confirmed today the adjournment for a sentencing date in June was by consent. Judge O'Kelly remanded Mr Bal in ongoing custody until June 28. The accused was born in England. However, he moved to Ireland with his family when he was 12 years old. He was initially based in Wexford before he relocated to Waterford in 2007. Mr Bal holds an Irish passport. At the time of his detention last year, he was training to work as an electrician. Mr Bal is married and a previous court hearing was told his wife was expecting their first child. His wife was similarly born in England. Mr Bal last January admitted unlawfully providing funds, to the amount of 400, using an An Post/Western Union money transfer, in Waterford on October 2 2015 to a Stevo Maksimovic in the city of Brako in Bosnia-Herzegovina, knowing or intending that the funds would be used in whole or in part for the benefit or purposes of the terrorist group known as Islamic State or 'Daesh'. Mr Bal also pleaded guilty to unlawfully and wilfully attempting to collect or receive cash from a person known to him as Omar Abu Aziz, by means of telephonic communications and an intermediary at an address at 2 Geron Way, London NW2 6GJ, knowing or suspecting that the funds would be used in whole or in part for the benefit or purposes of Islamic State. The second offence involves a date of October 23 2015. The two charges were brought contrary to section 13 (3)(a) and section 13 (4) of the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Act of 2005. Mr O Lideadha said it was a very unusual case." An 85-year-old man killed in a two-car collision had a heart attack moments before the tragic accident, gardai believe. Gardai in Kilmainham are appealing for witnesses following the collision, which occurred yesterday morning on Conyngham Road, Dublin 8. The elderly male, who was the driver of the car, had two passengers on board at the time of the crash. He was removed by ambulance to St James's Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. A source told Independent.ie that the man suddenly collapsed at the wheel by the junction at Islandbridge Gate, Phoenix Park. "We won't know exactly what the cause of death is until after the post-mortem, but it looks like he had a heart attack right before the collision." The driver of the second car was also sent to hospital, suffering a broken collar bone. The scene was examined by local scenes of crime members and the coroner has been notified. A post-mortem examination will be carried out and the results will determine the course of the Garda investigation. Witnesses Investigating gardai are appealing for witnesses to contact them. Anyone with information is asked to contact Kilmainham garda station on 01 6669700. There has been a spate of serious and fatal collisions on Irish roads in recent days. In a separate incident, gardai are renewing an appeal for witnesses following a horrific collision in Co Wexford, in which a 19-year-old died. The incident that occurred on the N11 in Enniscorthy involved three cars at about 12 noon on May 22. The teenager who died was a front-seat passenger. The driver of the car suffered serious injuries and remains in hospital. The driver of the second vehicle, a green 4x4, was also removed to hospital with minor injuries. One of the passengers in the third vehicle suffered minor injuries. The scene was examined by a local forensic collision investigators and investigations are ongoing. Investigators are appealing to any motorist in the area at the time of the collision who may have dash-cam footage to make it available to them. Anyone with information is asked to contact Enniscorthy garda station on 053-9242580 or the Garda Confidential Line 1800 666 111. Cocaine worth 140,000 and heroin worth 900,000 were seized Photo: An Garda Siochana Drugs worth over 1,000,000 and a semi-automatic shotgun have been seized by gardai following an intelligence led operation in Dublin. The shotgun was seized after gardai witnessed it being handed over between two vehicles in the Finglas area on Monday. Both cars were stopped and the firearm was recovered. A man (31) and a woman (53) have been arrested and are currently being detained for questioning. Gardai discovered cocaine worth 140,000 and heroin worth an estimated 900,000 during follow up searches. A sum of cash was also seized. Investigations are continuing. The role of religion in education is set to be the next battleground in moves to separate Church and State. Just days after the landslide referendum where voters brushed aside the Catholic Church's opposition to abortion, the Government resumed efforts in the Dail to remove the 'baptism barrier' for school admissions. The timing is coincidental but comes amid a growing backlash against the Church. Meanwhile, the Labour Party has called for a Citizens' Assembly - similar to the one that considered Ireland's abortion laws - to examine the issue of religious patronage of schools. The Education (Admissions to Schools) Bill 2016 is in report and final stages in the Dail and last night Education Minister Richard Bruton tabled a series of amendments designed to end the baptism barrier. Mr Bruton told the Dail that it is "unfair" that preference is currently given by publicly funded religious schools to children of their own denomination over children of a different religion or none who live closer. He also said it's unfair "parents should feel obliged to baptise their child simply to get admission to their local school". The Government proposals would mean Catholic schools which are oversubscribed will no longer be able to favour prospective pupils on the grounds of their religious adherence. There is an exemption for schools of minority faiths. People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett argued Mr Bruton's proposals didn't go far enough and there was a need to "completely separate Church and State". He said any form of religious discrimination either in admission to schools or "a religious bias" being "imposed" on children who don't share the faith of the patron of the school they attend was "not acceptable in 21st century Ireland". Mr Boyd Barrett referenced what he called the "astounding" abortion referendum result and said: "If evidence and support for the idea that the people of this country want a different type of society was required we certainly got it at the weekend." He claimed the result was about "much more" than a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. Earlier, Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin told the Dail there is a demand for non-denominational schools and he asked Taoiseach Leo Varadkar if the Government will convene a Citizens' Assembly to examine the issue of school patronage. Mr Varadkar said he would consider the proposal. He said the Government believes in diversity in education and this should include the Catholic Church and other religions. The Taoiseach said: "There is room in our education system for different forms of patronage, including the Church of Ireland, the Catholic Church, other religions, Educate Together and Gaelscoileanna." A GARDA traffic superintendent who was arrested by gardai on suspicion of drink-driving has been put off the road for four years. James Fitzgerald (54), of Newgrove, Kilreekil, Co Galway, had only just taken up the full-time post for the western region when he was pulled over on the night of March 29 last. He has since retired from the Garda and, speaking after yesterday's hearing at Loughrea District Court, described the events surrounding his arrest as "disappointing" but said that he had been under a lot of stress for the previous two-and-a-half years. Mr Fitzgerald faced four charges when he appeared in front of Judge David Anderson yesterday. These were two dangerous driving offences, failure to supply a breath specimen and being under the influence of an intoxicant to such an extent that he was incapable of having control of his car. His solicitor, Tom Kelly, said his client was pleading guilty to one of the dangerous driving charges and also to the failure to provide a specimen of his breath. State solicitor for East Galway, Tom McLoughlin, said the plea was acceptable to the Director of Public Prosecutions. Garda Michael McGrath said that he had received a report that a man was driving a car in the direction of Loughrea and the car had swerved to the incorrect side of the road, before swerving back to its correct side and continuing on its way. Garda McGrath told the court he travelled in the patrol car and observed the car described in the complaint and stopped it at Cosmona, near Loughrea. Arrested Speaking to the driver, he formed the opinion that he had committed an offence and told him he was arresting him. He told the court that Mr Fitzgerald had no previous convictions. Cross-examined by Mr Kelly, Garda McGrath said Mr Fitzgerald had co-operated fully. When it was put to him that his client had made four attempts to blow [into the intoxyliser] and subsequently tendered two further efforts, Garda McGrath replied: "I can't be sure." Mr Kelly said that his client had been under doctor's care for the previous two-and-a-half years. He had gone to work on the day in question, feeling unwell. He had stopped at a garage in Craughwell and had a coffee, but that did not help. In respect of the charge of failing to supply a specimen of his breath, he had done everything he could to comply. Regarding the dangerous driving charge at Roo, Craughwell, his state of health had clearly not helped that. Mr Kelly told Judge Anderson that in January 2005 an anonymous letter had been written about Mr Fitzgerald and sent to his superiors. But he was not made aware of it for two months. He had been transferred to Dublin and subsequently found out that the local parish priest was involved in the matter, along with three locals. The information [in the letter] was totally inaccurate. Because of all these matters he became very ill and was under great stress. Eventually, his superiors realised he was innocent, said Mr Kelly. Elated He was offered the job of district superintendent in Galway and was elated. While he took the job, Mr Kelly believed that he had accepted it before he was ready. Mr Fitzgerald was a married man with a young family who had given 34 years' service to the Garda Siochana. He had a distinguished career, had been superintendent in Nenagh for eight years and successfully headed many criminal investigations. "In my opinion, he came back to work too soon," said Mr Kelly. His client had also had a lot of media attention. Judge Anderson said he was puzzled by the fact that the garda had given evidence that he had formed the opinion that that the defendant was drunk. He wanted to know if Mr Kelly was contesting that. Mr Kelly pointed out that the charge in respect of that had been withdrawn. Judge Anderson pressed him further. "Am I to understand there is no admission of alcohol?" Mr Kelly: "I'm not saying that at all. Mr Fitzgerald accepts he must take full responsibility". Judge Anderson imposed fines totalling 750 and banned him from driving for four years. Judge Anderson agreed to defer implementation of the disqualification until March. Mr Fitzgerald,said afterwards that he and his family had endured a very difficult time. "Not just today, but for the last two-and-a-half years and not just for me, but for my wife and family," he said. Afterwards he told reporters he was not prepared to say whether he had been drinking on the day of his arrest. Resolutions in the US Congress and Russian Occupation of Georgia By Levan Khutsishvili On May 24, 2018, the US Congressman's David Perdue (Republic of Georgia), Ben Cardin (Democrat-Maryland) and Johnny Isakson (Republican-Georgia State) initiated a resolution in the US Congress To support Georgia. The resolution is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Georgia's independence and emphasizes the strong support of the US to Georgian people.According to the Foreign Ministry, the resolution emphasizes US-Georgia strategic partnership and alliance. The resolution supports further strengthening of partnership between the US and Georgia in the field of defense and security, as well as the development of trade and commercial relations between the two countries.In the statement released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, it is said that the US Congress reiterates strong support to Georgia's NATO membership and emphasizes Georgia's great contribution to Euro-Atlantic security. Georgia is referred as a leader in the democratic development of the region, in strengthening the parliament's role. Reforms of the Government of Georgia in terms of the rule of law, media transparency and freedom, accountability of the government, and strengthening judicial independence are recognized and supported by the US.The US Congress expresses strong support to Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity within internationally recognized borders. The resolution supports independent, united Georgia and peaceful future of the region.At the same time, the US Congress condemns the illegal occupation of Georgia's territories - Abkhazia and Tskhinvali regions by the Russian Federation and underscores the negative consequences of strengthening the occupation line with barbed wire fences. The Senate notes that after ten years of Russian military intervention in 2008, the Russian Federation still does not fulfill ceasefire agreement signed on August 12, 2008 and restricts hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons and refugees to return to their homes.The resolution emphasizes the hard situation of human rights and humanitarian relief in the occupied regions of Georgia and condemns the facts of the murder of Georgian citizens Archil Tatunashvili, Giga Otkhozria and David Basharuli.The US Congress stresses on the necessity of implementing the ceasefire agreement and underlines the necessity of the Russian Federation's armed forces withdrawal from the post-war stages and the importance of international security mechanisms in the occupied regions.The resolution also emphasizes the need for safe and dignified return of internally displaced persons and refugees to their homes.The Minister of Foreign Affairs Mikheil Janelidze said Georgia received an unbelievable support from international society and especially underlined the resolution initiated in the US congress, as a confirmation of strong bi-partial support of the Congress:I want to thank Congressmens and Congress for expressed support. This is a project that I'm sure will be supported by other congressmens and this will be another confirmation of the US Congressional support to Georgia," said Mikheil Janelidze.In last two years, the number of submitted and approved resolutions and legislative documents in the US legislative and executive circles that supports Georgia is raised. In 2017, the United States lawmakers have developed and adopted 6 important legislative acts and resolutions that are emphasizing the importance of protecting Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity and taking appropriate measures, including sanctions.For example, the draft law approved by the US House of Representatives on July 25, H.R. 3364 (Countering America's Adversaries through Sanctions Act), denounces Russias aggression in Eurasian countries, including aggressive actions in Georgia and Ukraine, rejection of international law and international obligations, illegal occupation of regions of Georgia - Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Draft law emphasizes the importance of withdrawal of Russian armed forces from Abkhazia and Tskhinvali regions, access to humanitarian aid in the occupied regions of Georgia and access to the occupied territories by the EU Monitoring Mission.The similar content had the resolution approved by the US House of Representatives in September 2016 (H.Res.660).And besides the many other resolutions and draft laws that support sovereignty of Georgia and states from Russia to implement ceasefires agreement, the situation is getting worse.The Russian occupation is claiming more and more Georgian land and lives of Georgian citizens. Georgian government always highlights with pride that the US Congress supports Georgia however invisible the results of these resolutions are. Vicky and Jim Phelan from Annacotty, Co Limerick, with their solicitor Cian OCarroll (right). Photo: Collins Courts CervicalCheck has been accused of continuing to stall in releasing the medical records of women at the centre of the cancer scandal. The charge is made in a strongly worded letter to the screening service from Cian O'Carroll, solicitor for Vicky Phelan, the mother of two from Co Limerick whose High Court case uncovered the scandal. The women who are taking a case against CervicalCheck developed cervical cancer after getting an incorrect smear test result. They are among 209 women who developed cervical cancer after a mistake was made in reading their test. The letter states that the women have been urgently seeking the records for three weeks and it is clear "they are required on an urgent basis". CervicalCheck said on May 14 the records would be made available but they have not been released. "We expressed disappointment that an entire working week had passed without further information from your organisation," said the letter. "We emphasised again that these cases were extremely urgent and that we needed to see progress from CervicalCheck in these matters. "We also pointed out how assurances had been given in both public and private forums that patients are being facilitated with the release of their files from CervicalCheck but this was simply not the case and the failure to release records needed to be remedied as a matter of urgency." CervicalCheck said the patient records required legal review and that they had to be signed off on and handed over last Monday. "The files were not however received as promised on Monday - save for one urgent file in which the issuing of proceedings was already unnecessarily delayed." He said the only records transferred so far are those relating to the three terminally ill women where proceedings have issued. He also warned that neither CervicalCheck lawyers nor any other members of staff has any right to review or fillet any part the women's medical records prior to release of these documents. The letter also pointed to the failure to give some of the women a copy of the review carried out by CervicalCheck confirming they received a wrong smear test result. The CervicalCheck response was "unacceptable", he warned. A spokeswoman for CervicalCheck told the Irish Independent that the HSE was committed to putting a protocol in place to allow for the immediate release of medical records and slides as requested. "That protocol was put in place and a small team was established to support and deal with the requests from women and their legal representatives." Since that time the HSE has also prioritised those requests for women with urgent court case deadlines pending. "In addition, despite the huge increase in demand for medical records and materials since the CervicalCheck crisis emerged, the HSE is dealing with all these requests within the agreed timeframe. "The HSE remains focused on supporting the women involved." Meanwhile, the case of Emma Mhic Mhathuna, the mother of five who has terminal cervical cancer is to come before the court again today. A series of protests will be held around the country by concerned women this evening arising out of the scandal. They are demanding open disclosure. Fr Patrick McCafferty: You cannot be a Catholic and be in favour of abortion A leading priest said that Catholics who do not wish to abide by the Church's teaching on abortion can "get married in City Hall" rather than being "hypocritical and dishonest by using the Church for a day". Fr Patrick McCafferty said it was "dishonest to have a wedding in a church if you don't respect or regard what the faith is about". He added: "If you don't support the Church's teaching on a fundamental issue, why be hypocritical and dishonest by using the Church for a day? It's a total fiasco." Writing in today's 'Belfast Telegraph', Fr McCafferty, of Corpus Christi parish in the city, stated that "you cannot be a Catholic and be in favour of abortion" and urged people who do not agree with the Church's teachings to "have marriages solemnised in a civil setting". His comments came after an Armagh priest questioned whether a couple who advocated for abortion in Ireland could marry in the Catholic Church. Fr Damien Quigley told the couple that their "promotion or advocacy" could also lead to him not being able to officiate at their ceremony. According to BBC Radio Ulster's 'Nolan Show', Fr Quigley wrote to the couple via private message, saying: "Just a heads-up, that as the priest you've asked to celebrate your wedding for you, you and I would need to have a conversation about any promotion you may do to advocate for abortion in Ireland. "Such promotion or advocacy would impact on the appropriateness of me celebrating your wedding or possibly the wedding taking place in a Catholic church. "I'm sure we can have a good chat over a coffee sometime." Fr Quigley, of the parish of Middle Killeavy, Newry, maintains an active presence on social media. The day after the referendum result he shared an "approximate version" of his introduction to that morning's Mass, which stated that "the majority of our brothers and sisters in the Republic of Ireland have voted to follow a tragic path". He added that "as Catholics, we must not fall back, we must not retreat from defending life". But former senator Mairia Cahill, who had a medical termination in her 20s and publicly campaigned for the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, called Fr Quigley's message to the young couple "petty" and said that it showed the Church was "out of touch" with many Catholics. Ms Cahill said: "Hundreds, if not thousands, of Catholics have had abortions and continued to practise their faith - if the Church believes otherwise it is extremely naive." Patrick Tyrell, 3, left, from Finglas and Nikodem Gajdosz, from Santry play in the sand at Portmarnock strand. Picture credit; Damien Eagers Ireland sweltered on the hottest day of the year as fire crews battled gorse fires just dont call it a heatwave. The mercury spiked at 26.3C at Shannon Airport and 26.1C at Met Eireanns weather stations in Newport, Co Mayo, and reached 25.8 degrees at Shannon Airport. Normal temperatures for the end of May are in the high teens, and the good news is that they will remain above average for some time. Today is set to be warm and mostly dry with top temperatures of 22-25C. But as forecaster Pat Clarke pointed out, it wasnt wall to wall sunshine everywhere. It varied a lot, it was just 16C in Malin Head, that was because of the wind blowing in from the sea, he said. Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Seven year old Lottie Lenihan from Yorkshire brings her fourteen month old cousin, Ronan Dries for a paddle along Burrow beach in Sutton. Picture Credit:Frank Mc Grath 29/5/18 A gentleman walks on his hands along Burrow beach in Sutton. Picture Credit:Frank Mc Grath 29/5/18 Four year old Ave Marie Devlin from Airfield, Darndale pictured with a kite on Dollymount strand . Picture Credit:Frank Mc Grath 29/5/18 29/5/18 Local teenagers enjoying the good weather by diving into the Grand Canal Dock in Dublin. Picture:Arthur Carron Soaking up th sun at Howth Pier during the sunny weather was from left, Chelsie Crowe and her sister Dana Crowe along with Lauren Mills all from Coolock. Pic Steve Humphreys Jesse Rickard from Howth takes his nine month old grandson Finn for a stroll in the sun along Burrow beach in Sutton. Picture Credit:Frank Mc Grath 29/5/18 Joy of life, joy of summer! Emmie Sue McGrath (6) was on a high along with the temperatures as she cooled down with an ice cream in Cavan on Tuesday afternoon. Photo: Lorraine Teevan Catching some rays and hopefully some fish too! Twins Adrian & Arrabella Van Den Berg (5) enjoy the beautiful sunshine at Annagh Lake, Cavan on Tuesday afternoon. Photo: Lorraine Teevan Exercising body and mind! Dedicated Leaving Cert students Nicole McDonald, Cait McGovern and Shauna Delaney combine studying and sunshine at Con Smith Park, Cavan as they prepare for their exams which start next Wednesday. Photo: Lorraine Teevan Its a Scorcher at the mercury rises to 26 degrees in the west those people lucky enough not to be at work or school flock to the beaches top cool off. PIc shows Mum Trish Ward with her daughtres (left) Lisa & Emily (right) from Dublin cooling off at oldhead beach in Mayo Pic Paul Mealey Its a Scorcher at the mercury rises to 26 degrees in the west those people lucky enough not to be at work or school flock to the beaches top cool off. PIc shows All at sea as people make the most of the weather sailing & jet skiing Mayo Pic Paul Mealey Darcie Slattery, 4, right and her sister Taylor Lee, 7 from Rialto enjoy the sunshine in the phoenix park. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 29/5/2018 Abigail Bukauskaite, 14 months, from finglas an ice-cream in the phoenix park. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 29/5/2018 / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Seven year old Lottie Lenihan from Yorkshire brings her fourteen month old cousin, Ronan Dries for a paddle along Burrow beach in Sutton. Picture Credit:Frank Mc Grath 29/5/18 And while the sun-starved Irish public are often keen to label any spell of good weather a heatwave, for meteorologists that just doesnt pass muster. A heatwave is officially five consecutive days when temperatures are five degrees above normal. Sadly, while yesterday reached that all important five-degree threshold, its not going to continue for the coming days. For it to be a heatwave, we would need five days of temperatures reaching 25C every day, so no, its not a heatwave, said Mr Clarke. Tomorrow, Friday and Saturday look like they will be very showery with temperatures in the low 20s. However, early signs are there will be good temperatures warm and sunny spells over the coming bank holiday weekend. Meanwhile, fire crews in Co Clare spent much of yesterday battling a major gorse blaze. The alarm was raised shortly before 10am and, at its height, the fire involved at least 60 acres of land in an area known as the Hand, between Miltown Malbay and Ennis. Adrian Kelly, chief fire officer based in Ennis, told the Irish Independent that an orange fire warning issued by the Department of Agriculture last week is still in place. The conditions have been very dry over the last few days and the temperatures are very high. The undergrowth is tinder dry. Our advice is not to carry out any burning, controlled or uncontrolled, during this hot weather, he added. Motorists are also being urged not to leave their pets alone in cars during the hot spell as, even with a window left open, temperatures can still reach dangerous levels. The fine weather has also sparked a run on barbecues and ice-cream. Damien Dwyer, commercial director with Woodies, said sales of gas barbecues had doubled in the hot weather and shops were gearing up for their busiest weekend of the year for plant-buying. Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan has given his backing - in principle - to providing the garda force with body cameras. The Garda Representative Association has unanimously called for the introduction of the body cameras, which they say would lead to better evidence in court, provide protection for them and reduce the number of assaults and complaints against its members. After addressing the association's annual conference in Wexford this morning, Mr Flanagan said he was very anxious to ensure that the high level of trust and confidence that the Irish people had in the gardai continued. He said he had recently worn a body camera and believed it would add considerably towards protecting gardai while carrying out their duties while it would also be important in the gathering of evidence. Mr Flanagan said that as minister for justice he was providing an unprecedented 1.6bn in funding for the force and he aimed to ensure that the force had the level of resources available that met the needs of modern policing. He understood that the issues surrounding the introduction of body cameras was under consideration. But he said he was in favour of them in principle. The chief administration officer of the Garda, Mr Joe Nugent said a large number of issues had to be reviewed before a decision could be made. There was a perception that it was simply a matter of attaching the camera to the uniform but it might be necessary to seek a change in legislation to allow its introduction. Mr Nugent said they had to consider issues such as how long and in what circumstances the camera should be switched on, how the footage from them was used and privacy regulations. He said they had not yet reached the stage where they would examine the costs involved or the savings made through their usage. Brian and Bernadette Fox, the brother and widow of Dessie Fox, left, lay a wreath at the scene of his murder at Healys Bridge near Prosperous, Co Kildare A man arrested over the unsolved murder of Dessie Fox 28 years ago is also a chief suspect in one of the country's most gruesome killings. Detectives are continuing to question two men, aged 50 and 61, who were arrested yesterday morning in relation to the murder of the bookmaker. One of the leading players in the betting ring, Mr Fox was shot dead in an ambush near Prosperous as he was driving across north Kildare to the Curragh races on September 30, 1990. Gardai believe rogue Provisional IRA terrorists were responsible for the murder. The two suspects were being held last night at Naas and Leixlip garda stations. The Irish Independent can reveal that one of the men arrested is also the chief suspect in a horrific murder carried out in the east of the country. The killing - the details of which cannot be disclosed for legal reasons - was carried out in 2016 and led to a significant Garda investigation. This individual was previously quizzed in relation to this murder. Yesterday morning, he was arrested over the Fox murder at a west Dublin prison, and brought to Leixlip garda station for questioning. A 61-year-old man currently being quizzed by detectives is believed to have organised the ambush and murder of Mr Fox. This individual was only recently released from jail and has been convicted of IRA membership, as well as firearms offences dating back to the 1980s. It is understood that this man has lived in the capital for some years, but is originally from Northern Ireland. The arrests were the culmination of inquiries over the past few years and the gathering of information and intelligence to build up a picture of those believed to be involved. Both men are well known to gardai and have been linked in the past to republican-related terrorism. Neither had been arrested previously in connection with the Fox murder. Both men can be detained for a period of up to three days. Gardai have described the most recent arrests in the investigation as significant. They bring the total number of arrests up to 19, with the other 17 taking place in the early stages of the investigation. A total of 500 statements have been taken and more than 1,500 people interviewed. The breakthrough came following inquiries by gardai in the Kildare division, supported by detectives from the force's cold-case unit, known as the serious crime review team. Mr Fox, who was from Dungannon, Co Tyrone, was ambushed and robbed by a gang at Healy's Bridge, near Prosperous, Co Kildare, where his car was forced to stop. The 47-year-old was shot in the thigh but the bullet severed an artery and he bled to death at the scene. "Investigating gardai continue to appeal for information in this case and believe that a number of people have yet to come forward who may now be in a position to assist in bringing those responsible to justice," a spokesman said yesterday. Lorna O'Mahony, Mr Fox's daughter, who was 15 at the time of the murder, has said the lives of her mother and sisters had been shattered by his death. "We lost so much that day, and so did my dad. He has missed seeing us grow up, start jobs, get married, and have our own children, his grandchildren. We believe there are people out there who know what happened to my dad," she said. Sporadic appeals to the public for help were made over the years and the file remained open as officers from Kildare continued to build up a case. The gang chose Healy's Bridge, near Prosperous in Kildare, to ambush Mr Fox as he drove to the Curragh with 20,000 in a bag to fund his activities in the betting ring. The gang forced his car to a halt and as he tried to reverse one of them fired a shot from a handgun into the passenger door of his car and he was left to die at the scene as the killers made their getaway. Commissioner Donall O Cualain said the arrests showed the determination of gardai to keep inquiries alive after more than 27 years. He said: "We've got a very experienced and well-equipped serious crime review team who look at these cases and assist local investigators in the context of developments, including help from members of the community who may remember something, recall something or maybe have a change of mind in relation to co-operating with gardai." Anyone with information is asked to contact Naas garda station at 045 884300, or the confidential phone line 1800 666111. THE remains of Jastine Valdez have arrived back in The Philippines ahead of her funeral. The 24-year-old student's heartbroken parents Teresita and Danilo Valdez arrived with the Consul to the Philippines for Ireland, Mark Christopher Congdon, at Clark Airport this evening. Ms Valdez was murdered by Mark Hennessy after he kidnapped her from near her home in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow on May 19. Gardai found him at the Cherrywood Business Park on May 20 and he was shot dead, Jastine's remains were discovered last Monday, May 21, following an extensive search. Mr and Mrs Valdez were greeted at the airport - which is north of the capital, Manila - by officials from the Filipino Department of Foreign Affairs. They will now continue on Jastine's final journey towards Aritao, where her funeral is due to take place this week. Expand Close (R) Mark Christopher Congdon, at Clark Airport this evening with officials from the Filipino Department of Foreign Affairs / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp (R) Mark Christopher Congdon, at Clark Airport this evening with officials from the Filipino Department of Foreign Affairs Consul Condon said that her parents are grateful to those who helped with Jastine's repatriations. He said in a statement: "Consul Congdon expressed their (her parents') gratitude to the Philippine Government for their assistance in bringing their only daughter home. "Valdezs remains are now on their way to her hometown in Aritao, Nueva Vizcaya, by official police escort together with DFA Officials from Manila and Honorary Consul Congdon where she will be laid to rest." In a statement on Monday, Mr Congdon said the "spirit of love and compassion" has shone from the Valdez home "like a beacon of light in a dark tunnel of torment". He said: "Jastine will be greatly missed but never forgotten. Always in the hearts of mum and dad and the hearts of the Filipino and Irish nations, bound together forever in grief in Jastine's name." LATE night bus services across rural Ireland will only run up to 11pm at weekends, which could limit demand. The Dail Transport Committee heard that 50 new late-night services across rural Ireland will begin operating from the end of next month on a six-month trial basis between 6pm and 11pm. But no applications for funding were made by five local link offices, which will operate the schemes. Transport Minister Shane Ross said the National Transport Authority (NTA) was in discussions with offices in Galway, Sligo/Leitrim/Roscommon, Mayo, Clare and Limerick to see if routes could be identified. He also said the pilot would cost 450,000 to administer, and the pilot would be assessed on the basis of how it addressed rural isolation. He would ask the NTA to consider, during its assessment of the pilot scheme, whether it should be extended beyond 11pm to account for closing hours. Im grateful for the general welcome which this has received. Were very enthusiastic that it should be given a good chance. It is not a final scheme. It is something which has to be built on. But at the moment, the general welcome from rural Ireland is something I find extremely gratifying, he said. If there are gaps, Im sure the NTA will be more than happy to fill them. This is not a commercial operation. The main metric I would urge the NTA to use is to reduce problems in rural Ireland of connectivity and to improve the quality of peoples lives. Thats the most important thing. Society must connect up. In all, 50 new services across 19 counties will be introduced which include extensions to 20 existing public transport services, and another 30 demand responsive services. In some cases, these demand responsive services will call to peoples doors, and the buses will not just facilitate trips to the pub. In all, 188 new trips per week will be added to network of rural transport services. Solidarity-People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett said he is concerned he could be one of the cases where people had their births illegally registered between 1946 and 1969 because he was adopted from St Patricks Guild in Dublin. He told the Dail today that he has personal questions about his own history following the revelation that Tusla had uncovered 126 cases of illegal adoption there. Mr Boyd Barrett was adopted at St Patricks Guild in the 1960s and has since met his birth mother. However, he said yesterdays revelations have left him with more questions about the circumstances of his adoption. I will have to check this out, he said of his personal circumstances. What we are seeing here is another exposing of the toxic relationship between church and State in this county and the hardship it has imposed and continues to impose on significant numbers of people. I was particularly struck by this because I was adopted via the St Patricks Guild in the years affected. I dont know if I am one of the cases involved. Read More Thousands more have very serious questions or are living in ignorance of their true heritage. Childrens Minister Katherine Zappone yesterday revealed Tusla had discovered 126 cases where people had their births illegally registered at St Patricks Guild in Dublin. A scoping exercise has been launched of the States adoption records as an attempt to uncover how many illegal adoptions took place in similar institutions. Up to 150,000 files will have to be examined to see if the same practice was taking place at other adoption agencies at the time. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar apologised in the Dail today to the victims of illegal birth registrations and conceded the 126 cases revealed yesterday may only be the tip of the iceberg. We are opening another difficult chapter in our history from a time when Ireland was a very different place, Mr Varadkar told the Dail. I know numerous people say we have left one dark tunnel of the past on Saturday and entered in to another one. I dont think that is the case. It may be harder to find records in other instances but we have to try our best. People have the right to this information and to their identities. If it is a mammoth task and if it is only the tip of the iceberg, then so be it. Zoe Whitford from Aubrey Grove, Shankill, Co Dublin died on February 13 2018. A three-year-old girl who died in an incident at her home suffered a reduced supply of oxygen to the brain. Zoe Whitford from Aubrey Grove, Shankill, Co Dublin died on February 13 2018. Emergency services had been called to the child's family home three days previously on Saturday February 10 2018. At the opening of an inquest into his daughters death at Dublin Coroners Court, William Whitford said in his deposition that he formally identified the childs body following her death at Our Lady's Children's Hospital in Crumlin. Garda Padraig Nagle of Cabinteely Garda Station said he met Mr Whitford at the hospital shortly before 4pm on February 13. The formal identification was conducted at 4.05pm. A post-mortem examination was conducted jointly by State Pathologist Professor Marie Cassidy and Pathologist at Crumlin Hospital Dr Maureen OSullivan. The cause of death was recorded as cerebral hypoxia. Cerebral hypoxia involves a reduced supply of oxygen to the brain. Expand Close The late Zoe Whitford. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The late Zoe Whitford. Detective Inspector Martin Creighton of Dun Laoghaire Garda Station sought an adjournment of the inquest for six month to allow for investigations to continue. There is a criminal investigation ongoing, the file is at a very advanced stage, DI Creighton told the coroner. Adjourning the inquest for further mention to Dec 12 2018, Coroner Dr Myra Cullinane offered her sympathies to the family. My condolences to you and the rest of your family on your tragic loss in these circumstances, Dr Cullinane said. While most adults are just getting to grips with podcasts, one 7-year-old girl is about to launch her own. Cadhla McAnally from Portmarnock has the distinction of having her own Dublin Fringe Theatre podcast, an initiative of the Young Radials: Fringe for Kids programme. Created alongside her actor father Aonghus Og McAnally, the podcast, entitled Cobras' Quest, is described as an "epic audio adventure for under 12s". Suffice to say that even with dad at the mixing desk, Cadhla is more technologically savvy than many. "She's just of that generation where they grew up in a world where everyone has an iPhone," explains Aonghus Og. "She doesn't have a phone or iPad, but she can handle herself with all that stuff. My Mum was babysitting and Cadhla was able to access videos of Elmo for her baby sister on YouTube through the PlayStation." With great savvy comes great responsibility. "She knows we will be there supervising," says Aonghus Og. "She's very honest and responsible and occasionally tries to push her luck, but if anything pops up online that she knows she shouldn't watch, she will tell us." Significantly, Aonghus Og uses technology to admirable effect with Cadhla, helping her to primarily engender creativity and imagination. "We have a Lego app on the tablet and she likes to make stop-motion animation films," he explains. "They end up online, but the good thing is that you can just email the link to people and no one finds the link, which is particularly good if other children are involved." There isn't too much in the way of bargaining for screen time as Cadhla is a real bookworm. "We've only had to tell her she's had enough screen time once or twice," says her dad. "It really helps if you're not glued to the phone yourself as a parent. It's not a massively strict house but I like the act of sitting down to a meal." Over in Rathgar, meanwhile, technology is central to the lives of Rhona Gouldson and her husband, Archie Chen. The pair run the Piano Academy of Ireland and use technology to enhance band practice, sight-reading, ear training and reading sheet music. Their children Solomon (10) and Sheba (8) both got tablets last Christmas. "They have parental settings for kids," explains Archie. "It's not foolproof, but it does the job, once you keep an eye on them." Archie himself grew up in Washington surrounded by computers, and is a big believer in raising his children to be similarly tech-savvy. "The kids are quite advanced and Solomon has expressed an interest [in coding]," reveals Archie. The youngsters earn their non-educational screen time once they do chores. "They know they have their bits to do around the house, and their reading and piano practice," reveals Rhona. "We know the screens are addictive and that if we were to leave them in front of the screen, they wouldn't get off them. We give them 30-minute increments. "Solomon has a little more of an addictive personality and we have discussed whether we should ban screen time altogether, but my view is that if you deprive them, there will be resentment. "All their friends have tablets and this is what they talk about at school. We have very strict rules around it: they're not allowed to install their own apps and we keep monitoring the screens, either ourselves or the childminder." "I think kids need to have experiences of the online world and the real world, but I try to tell them you can't live inside the computer," adds Archie. Rhona and Archie created Facebook pages for their children, mainly to build memories of events and to store photos. They will be unlocked for them in their mid-teens. "Sheba asks to see her baby pictures and I'll get up Facebook and show her, but I don't think she understands the significance of Facebook too much. She is very sensible with her technology: she has a little app for photos and make-up, but I think it's very innocent and fun. That's how it is for now: who knows what challenges lie ahead." There's no doubt that introducing children to technology at an early age has its benefits. In a world in which digital skills are a prerequisite for most jobs, keeping tabs on technological developments probably isn't just smart, but necessary. And many Irish parents are keen for their children to stay ahead of the curve. According to an EU Kids Online survey done in 2014, over 50pc of six- to eight-year-olds have access to the internet. The research states that parents supervise this activity around 20pc of the time. And left unsupervised, no one can deny the risks of exposing youngsters to screen time. According to research led by DIT researcher Brian O'Neill, Irish kids are handling the internet well. The study examined 11- to 16-year-olds and asked the young people if they experienced any problems associated with overuse of the internet such as not sleeping or eating, not finishing school work or a lack of socialising. Across Europe, the research found that just 1pc of children are at risk due to unhealthy levels of excessive internet use. Irish children reported being online at least once a day for an average of 61 minutes. Some 41pc of these responded positively to at least one of the items related to excessive internet use in the survey. Alex Cooney, CEO of Cyber Safe Ireland, observes that most of the children she talks to through the organisation have a smartphone or tablet, or at least good access to one. "There is fierce pressure from kids to get technology," she says. "I heard from one school principal that a child in First Class had been allowed to play Grand Theft Auto online. It's an extreme example, but we've noticed that when kids get their Communion money, the big thing now is to get a tablet. "Parents use technology for lots of different reasons with kids: putting on Peppa Pig is a great distraction when you're trying to get dinner on. I've done it myself and know a lot of parents who have. But as children get more developed, and they start to understand how Google and YouTube work, the ability to explore and to find the wrong thing is greater." Cooney advises that parents adopt a more mindful approach to allowing their children access to screens. "Devices are handed over without too much thinking behind it," she says. "Ensure there are ground rules. Say 'this is the deal - you get a half an hour each day, I get to check your friends lists when I want and we look at the screens together'." The Government is set to harmonise its laws with a European directive on data protection and are likely to set the digital 'age of consent' at 13 (where parental consent will be required up to the age of 13). "One form of cyber bullying is exclusion," says Cooney. "If you have eight girls in a WhatsApp group and the ninth friend isn't in there, it's another subtle type of bullying. No parent wants their child to go through that." Irish kids online: the facts Snapchat and Instagram were the most popular instant-messaging and social-media apps along with YouTube. 72pc of Irish children use the internet daily in their homes and this uptake increases with age - a recent national survey reported rates of domestic access increasing from 53pc with nine to 10 year olds to 92pc of young adolescents. 19pc of the children surveyed spent in excess of four hours online a day. 28pc of 2,321 children surveyed were in online contact with a stranger either occasionally or every day. 64pc of teachers surveyed reported they do not feel sufficiently resourced to effectively deliver educational messages on internet safety, notwithstanding the fact that 84pc of teachers address internet safety in the curriculum. In 82pc of sessions that CyberSafe Ireland did with children, at least one child in the class was playing games with a PEGI rating of 18. Source: CyberSafe Ireland Annual Report 2016 When I was 19 I sent all my family an email. The subject was 'Muff Liquor Company'. I said I was going to make vodka. I studied law after school and I hated it. I went to London to work in property. I started off in lettings and then I became a director in the UK for an Australian company. My business partner, Tom Russell from Manchester, was willing to take a chance so I left my job and my apartment and moved back to Greencastle in Co Donegal, where I'm from, to concentrate on the business. That was last December. People think I just woke up one day with this idea but this has been something I've been thinking of for a long time. I wanted to set up a distilled spirits company and specifically producing a potato-based spirit. My grandfather Philip McClenaghan was a well-known potato farmer in Greencastle. One of his many hobbies was to make a poitin with potatoes, so the idea of making a potato-based spirit, inspired by my grandfather and that could originate from Ireland just stuck with me. Expand Close Laura Bonner and business partner Tom Russell / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Laura Bonner and business partner Tom Russell Tom loved the idea and identified with the opportunity in the craft liquor market, so we took the plunge. It's not been easy, but it's been so fulfilling to create something from scratch, with family heritage at its heart. Once the money was in place it was really easy, because everything about it is real. We went for gin first because it had become so popular. Last month we went to the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America expo in Las Vegas and we won Spirit of the Year. That was a game-changer for us. We were only 13 weeks old at the time. We weren't even there for the awards ceremony as we'd left before the end and they said 'Come back, you've won Spirit of the Year'. We had spoken to a lot of distilling companies and we thought 'let's build our brand first'. We now lease a still in west Cork and we get the gin made there with our own recipe. We import the potato spirit base and then it's fermented with four types of Irish potatoes. Our main ingredients are mandarin, lemon, rosemary and elderflower and one 'secret' ingredient, which we have since disclosed as champagne essence. We put all the ingredients into the still and we try to keep everything as natural as possible. The result of this is a fresh and vibrant gin that carries sweet notes and is quite smooth to drink. The smoothness is the direct result of the potato base and is something that differentiates us from sharper-tasting distilled gins on the market at present. Also, because we are using a potato base rather than a grain base, the benefit is that our gin is wheat-free and gluten-free, which is something that was important to us from the beginning of this process. Our gin is completely different. Every gin has juniper in it but ours is not juniper-led. We've enough in it to make it a gin but ours is very smooth because of the potatoes. The brand is visually very much inspired by the past. My grandfather kept journals of recipes for his poitin, food, and plans for things he would build around the farm. This old journal style is the basis of our brand and a lot of our visuals, and will be the main theme running through our physical and digital marketing. These were the ideas Granda McClenaghan passed down through my family and it's something I want to make sure is at the centre of everything we do. That is the reason an illustration of him adorns the back of the bottle and I couldn't be prouder to have him as a representation of the ideas and values of this company. With his name on the bottle, I wanted to make sure my family was proud of it. There were originally 36 first cousins - now there's 160 of us. We're all really close, we're a tribe. My grandfather was one of nine. He was full of divilment. I always told him what I was going to do and I used to ask him how he made the poitin. Eventually he said 'fine' and he asked me to cut up some potatoes and steam them. Basically I just made him his dinner. I used to go off up the hills with him when he was cutting turf. I wasn't good in school - I was told I was a social butterfly and would amount to nothing. I wasn't school-oriented whatsoever. I had no idea this was going to take off the way it did. We sold our first pallet before we even launched. The name The Muff Liquor Company is something we believe makes us stand out from the completion. It is a bit cheeky but we want to be remembered as a good product that stands out in bars. I'm splitting myself all over the place at the minute but the idea is to build a distillery in the border village of Muff in Donegal. We have drawings of what we'd like it to look like. It all depends on Brexit. Are we going to have a hard border? Our vodka is ready and we are creating a Muff rum at the moment. I'd like to have a range of tonic waters. It's totally all-consuming at the minute and I cry from the stress of it some days. My grandfather would be over the moon that he's on the back of the bottle. I'm like him - I just never give up. I'm stubborn when I really believe in something. The Muff Liquour Company will have a pop-up bar at Bloom in the Park, which runs from May 31 to June 4. In conversation with Kathy Donaghy Yes, it was the celebration of a major new outlet. And yes, it was about cars and all that goes with buying and selling them. Normally, the opening of a 20,000sq ft luxurious showroom - as was the case recently at Spirit Jaguar Land Rover at Sandyford, Dublin - would merit near-total concentration on the flagship facility itself. Yet it was people who dominated the evening. Not just the hundreds who attended to celebrate the official opening. Not just the personalities and Jaguar Land Rover 'ambassadors'. Wonderful and all as they were, the real story to emerge was of a national nature. It was about the fabulous resource of highly-skilled, educated people who can help transform automotive futures. No less a figure than Jaguar Land Rover chief executive officer Prof Ralf Speth was the one to tell us how special and dedicated a pool of talent we have. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to shine a light on the gifts we have. I spoke to him before the event and was struck by how impressed he was with what he'd seen at the company's Shannon-based autonomous car project. He hoped it would become a world leader in its field within five years. The 150-job software engineering centre will develop advanced automated driving and electrification technologies for the brand. Prof Speth believes it could "create something very special" because of the level of skill and passion of the workforce. He had visited the site earlier. As one who takes a lot of what some motoring executives say with a pinch of salt, I have to say it was obvious this was different. He was genuinely highlighting something we, as a nation, might overlook. From listening to him and to many others over the past while, it is clear we have the people to take advantage of the demand and need for the technology that will power the electric/autonomous-driving eras. The seismic shift in power trains, and the technology needed to accompany it, surely provides one of the great opportunities for so many young people here. The Shannon facility will develop technologies to support electrification and self-driving elements on future Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles. There is every of hope that such a venture could be replicated by others. The first electric Jaguar - the I-PACE - was the centre of much attention at the event. Due here by early autumn, it will cost from 84,085. I drove it in Portugal last week and will be reporting on it in full in next week's Motors. One of the elements the new Sandyford facility has, apart from more space to display cars and more parking spaces, is the inclusion of electric vehicle charging points. It's another sign of changing, challenging and (as Prof Speth believes) immensely promising times ahead. Now there's a bullet-proof Skoda. The car maker has come up with a bullet and blast-resistant version of the Superb estate, following a joint venture project between it and a UK-based converter. After three years' work, the finished model is, Skoda says, "virtually indistinguishable" from the standard production car. Meanwhile... Thank you so much to so many people who offered and came up with suggestions and solutions to passengers being caught short when stuck in gridlock. It appears there are receptacles on the market for just such an eventuality. I'm sure if you'll find them if you Google them. No harm to have one on board, considering the frequency of gridlock, especially on the M50 these days. I get the feeling when travelling on it that we are never more than a small accident from a major tailback. It seems to be at near-full capacity most of the time and unable to cope with any extra strain. Again, thanks for the responses. Toyota has retained its title as the world's most valuable car brand, according to a new study, for the sixth year in a row. Some achievement. According to the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands study, which has just been released by market researcher Kantar Millward Brown, the Japanese car-maker has hit number one in 11 of the 13 years the study has been undertaken. The analysis also shows how Mercedes passed BMW to finish in the number two slot for the first time in the yearly rankings. The figures show that the brand value of Toyota increased by 5pc (to nearly $30bn) due to strong demand for its SUVs in Europe and the US. Consistent reliability was also a key factor, the report says. Meantime Tesla has increased in value to $9.42bn, putting it in eighth place. The value league goes as follows (in billions of dollars): Toyota $29.99bn, Mercedes $25.68, BMW $25.62, Ford $12.74, Honda $12.70, Nissan $11.43, Audi $9.63, Tesla $9.42, Suzuki $6.38, Volkswagen $5.99. Best of luck to the Charles Hurst group, which has opened a new 8m luxury Jaguar Land Rover base in Belfast this week. The north's largest car retailer's new showroom is part of an 8m investment designed, the group says, to create a luxury showcase destination for iconic car brands. The development adds 20 jobs to a 100-strong team at its new location at the former Diageo HQ on Boucher Road. The 40,000 sq ft showroom has metallic cladding and frameless glazing. Part of Lookers plc, the Charles Hurst Group sells 20 brands across seven sites. Subaru is introducing a revamped 2018 2.5-litre Outback Lineartronic (pictured) for the 182-plate change. There is an upgrade in technology and trim for the rugged crossover estate. Ryanair has increased its Priority Boarding fees to as high as 7 per flight, depending on the route and how the add-on is booked. The airline's latest changes see the standard Priority Boarding fee change from 5 per flight to "from 5/6 to 6/7 depending on the route selected and if paying at the time of booking or adding to a booking." The new maximum fee is 7, it says. The change, which was not publicly announced, is the latest of several tweaks to Ryanair's optional fees and T&Cs in recent months. They include: Cutting its free check-in window to 48 hours Doubling the price of standard seat selection from 2 to 4 Raising the lead-in cost of extra legroom seats from 11 to 15 per flight, and front seats (Rows 2-5) to 13.01 Changing Priority Boarding to a standalone product no longer included when passengers pay to reserve certain seats The changes follow a substantial overhaul of Ryanair's baggage policy. Expand Close Kenny Jacobs of Ryanair / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Kenny Jacobs of Ryanair Since January 15 last, 'non-Priority' customers have been required to check larger, 10kg carry-on bags into the hold, without charge. Customers who pay the 5-7 Priority Boarding fee (including Plus, Flexi Plus & Family Plus) may bring two carry-on bags onto the aircraft. In January, the airline's Chief Marketing Officer, Kenny Jacobs, told Independent.ie Travel that Ryanair had "no plans" to amend its Priority Boarding fee. However, he did not guarantee that it would remain the same. Like all businesses, our optional fees can change, unlike our fares which keep coming down," Ryanair said in a statement. "Priority boarding, which allows customers to bring two pieces of hand luggage on board with them and board the plane first, costs 5/6 (depending on the route) at the time of booking and 6/7 (depending on the route) when added to a booking, it added. The airline did not provide details of routes with the higher Priority Boarding fee, though airlines typically raise such fees on longer flights. Despite the changes, customers continue to fly with Ryanair in record numbers. Last year, the airline reported a 10pc increase in full-year profit to 1.45 billion, with its average fare falling 3pc to 39.40. Read more: Kim Kardashian, center, arrives with her attorney Shawn Chapman Holley at the White House (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) Kim Kardashian West has been pictured at the White House ahead of talks with Donald Trump over prison reform. The reality TV star was pictured wearing a smart black pant suit with lime green shoes as she arrived in Washington DC on Wednesday. The surprise meeting was first reported by Vanity Fair magazine, who said she was due to speak to President Trump and his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner. The talks will involve prison reform and Alice Marie Johnson, a grandmother who is in prison for a first-time non-violent drug offence. Kardashian West is thought to have been involved in private discussions with Mr Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump for several months. It is believed the Keeping Up With The Kardashians star will be joined by her lawyer and the meeting will take place in the Oval Office. Happy Birthday Alice Marie Johnson. Today is for you Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) May 30, 2018 Following the initial reports, Kardashian West tweeted: Happy Birthday Alice Marie Johnson. Today is for you. The reality TV star included an emoji symbolising praying hands, and a star, in her post. Video of the Day Johnson is currently serving a life sentence in prison without parole after being convicted of drug-related charges in 1997. An online petition to grant clemency to Johnson, started by her daughter, currently has more than 250,000 signatures. Serena Williams wore a black superhero catsuit on her Grand Slam return following the birth of her daughter and dedicated the victory to mothers who had a tough recovery from pregnancy. The star, 36, beat Kristyna Pliskova 7-6 (7-4) 6-4 at the French Open in her first Grand Slam appearance since welcoming Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr in September. Following the victory, Williams who is married to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian posted a message of support to mothers who had experienced difficulty giving birth. Catsuit anyone? For all the moms out there who had a tough recovery from pregnancyhere you go. If I can do it, so can you. Love you all!! pic.twitter.com/xXb3BKDGNF Serena Williams (@serenawilliams) May 29, 2018 She said: Catsuit anyone? For all the moms out there who had a tough recovery from pregnancyhere you go. If I can do it, so can you. Love you all!! In February, Williams revealed she nearly died after giving birth and following her victory on Tuesday she said the eye-catching black catsuit she wore on court was for practical as well as stylistic reasons. The costume which included a pink belt helped her cope with the issue of blood clots, which nearly proved fatal in childbirth. Speaking about the outfit, Williams said: I feel like a warrior in it, like a warrior princess, kind of. Im always living in a fantasy world. I always wanted to be a superhero, and its kind of my way of being a superhero. I feel like a super-hero when I wear it. After her victory, Williams husband tweeted his support. Video of the Day A zoo in Canada is appealing for information after three of its animals were stolen. JC the black and white ruffed lemur, Stanley the tortoise and Agnes the baby gibbon were taken from Elmvale Jungle Zoo between 10pm on May 28 and 6:30am on May 29. Asking for your help! Any information please contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or the Huronia West Detachment OPP at 1-888-310-1122. Photos will be posted of our animals that were taken. Please share this post! Posted by Elmvale Jungle Zoo on Tuesday, May 29, 2018 In an emotional video posted to the Zoos Facebook page, a member of the zoos staff appeals for information. The gibbon needs to be with her cousin Gracie, they have to be together, she says. We need JC and the tortoise back with our family. The Ontario Provincial Police said they found two holes cut in the chain link fence surrounding the zoo. The holes were near to a road and they are asking people who may have seen anything to come forward. JC our black and white ruffed lemur, Stanley the tortoise and Agnes our baby Gibbon. Any information please contact... Posted by Elmvale Jungle Zoo on Tuesday, May 29, 2018 The Zoo is offering a reward for information leading to the return of the animals. Belgian police guard the scene of a shooting in Liege (Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP) A man who shot dead two police officers and a bystander in Liege had already killed another person the day before the attack, Belgiums interior minister has said. Jan Jambon told broadcaster RTL that the gunman, identified as Benjamin Herman, also committed a murder the night before. Mr Jambon confirmed that the person was a former inmate who did prison time with Herman. Expand Close Liege police officers Soraya Belkacemi, left, and Lucille Garcia (Liege Police Department via AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Liege police officers Soraya Belkacemi, left, and Lucille Garcia (Liege Police Department via AP) Herman is alleged to have killed the man on Monday evening by hitting him over the head with a blunt object. He was killed in a shootout with police on Tuesday after stabbing two female police officers, stealing their handguns and shooting them. He also shot dead a man sitting in a nearby car. A woman cries as she walks by police officers during a moment of silence for shooting victims near the City Hall in Liege, Belgium (AP) The man who killed four people in the Belgian city of Liege this week carried out an act of terrorist murder and may have intended to cause more carnage, prosecutors said. Authorities are trying to establish whether Benjamin Herman, an inmate on a two-day release from prison, acted alone. Herman attacked two female police officers from behind with a knife, stabbing them repeatedly, before stealing their handguns and shooting them as they lay on the ground. Crossing the road, he fired several shots at a 22-year old man who was a passenger in a car, killing him. Herman then took a cleaning woman hostage at a nearby school. When police closed in, he ran out onto the pavement, firing more shots, before police fatally shot him. Four officers were wounded. He cried: Allahu akbar, the Arabic phrase for God is great, several times during Tuesdays rampage, prosecutors said. Officials later confirmed that Herman had also killed another person on Monday. The police officers have been identified as Soraya Belkacemi, 44, and Lucile Garcia, 54. The passenger in the car was named as Cyril Vangriecken, 22, who was preparing to become a primary school teacher. Expand Close Belgian police guard the scene of a shooting in Liege (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Belgian police guard the scene of a shooting in Liege (AP) Belgian federal magistrate Wenke Roggen said the attack was considered terrorist murder and attempted terrorist murder. She said it is being treated as terrorism given the way Herman acted, which she says resembled Islamic State calls to attack police with knives and steal their weapons. Added to this was the fact that he yelled Allahu Akbar and was in contact with radicalised people. The attack started outside a Liege cafe and Ms Roggen said the attacker went in and out of it a few times after shooting the officers, but people inside had fled or hidden, thanks to the quick thinking of the owner. Prosecutors said Herman has had several run-ins with police since he was a minor. He has been sentenced on assault, drug and insubordination charges. He left prison early on Monday on furlough and should have returned on Tuesday evening. Interior minister Jan Jambon told broadcaster RTL Herman also committed a murder the night before. Expand Close A memorial at the scene of the attacks in Liege (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A memorial at the scene of the attacks in Liege (AP) Mr Jambon said the fourth victim, named in reports as Michael Wilmet, was a former inmate who did prison time with Herman. Herman is alleged to have killed the man on Monday evening by hitting him over the head with a blunt object. He added that the woman he took hostage, Imaankaf Darifa, may have talked the shooter down and helped to avoid more deaths inside the school. The minister, Prime Minister Charles Michel and Belgiums King Philippe visited the woman in hospital, where she was being treated for shock. She was very courageous and perhaps, but this we will have to verify, she helped avoid more victims in the school, Mr Jambon said. Ms Darifa told the Associated Press she tried to keep the gunman away from the children at the school. She said: I told him: you are in a school here, you cannot come in a school, it is not right what you are doing. The hostage added that when police ignored her request at the behest of Herman to leave, he threw his identity card out. Then, Ms Darifa said, he walked out, and I left. Then there was the guns and they killed him. Artificial intelligence is better than doctors at diagnosing some cancers, research has shown. The international study involved machines that were trained to detect signs of skin cancer before being tested against dermatologists. The computer network was taught by being shown 100,000 images of malignant melanomas and benign moles marked with a diagnosis. It was then pitted against senior doctors to diagnose 100 of the most difficult lesions. The machines correctly diagnosed the malignant cases in 95pc of cases - significantly more than the 87pc accuracy achieved by dermatologists, the study found. The artificial intelligence also misdiagnosed fewer benign moles as malignant melanoma, meaning fewer patients would be forced to endure needless surgery. Researchers from Germany, the United States and France used a form of artificial intelligence known as a deep-learning convolutional neural network (CNN). This is an artificial neural network inspired by the biological processes at work when nerve cells in the brain are connected and respond to what the eye sees.The CNN learns from images that it "sees" and teaches itself to improve its performance in a process called machine learning. Professor Holger Haenssle, the study's lead author, from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, said: "The CNN works like the brain of a child. To train it, we showed the CNN more than 100,000 images of malignant and benign skin cancers and moles and indicated the diagnosis for each image. "With each training image, the CNN improved its ability to differentiate between benign and malignant lesions." Once the machines had been trained, they were tested against 58 dermatologists from 17 countries across the world. More than half the specialists had at least five years' experience. The dermatologists were asked to first make a diagnosis of malignant melanoma or benign mole just from the dermoscopic images, and to decide if surgery was required. Four weeks later they were given the same tests, this time with clinical information about the patient, including their age, sex and position of the lesion. When doctors were given only the images, they accurately detected 86.6pc of melanomas, rising to 88.9pc when they also had information about the patient. The artificial intelligence made a correct assessment in 95pc of cases based on images. "The CNN missed fewer melanomas, meaning it had a higher sensitivity than the dermatologists," said Prof Haenssle. "And it misdiagnosed fewer benign moles as malignant melanoma, which means it had a higher specificity. This would result in less unnecessary surgery." The computer was more accurate even when compared with the most experienced doctors, the study, published in the 'Annals of Oncology', found. "These findings show that deep-learning convolutional neural networks are capable of out-performing dermatologists, including extensively trained experts, in the task of detecting melanomas," Prof Haenssle said. Researchers said such technology could be used to screen for skin cancer, meaning cases could be diagnosed far earlier. But they said the technology was likely to be used in conjunction with skilled doctors, rather than replacing them. The Irish Cancer Society says about 12,000 people in Ireland each year are diagnosed with skin cancer, both melanoma and non-melanoma. About 1,000 of these are malignant melanomas. Daily Telegraph, London Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021] A police officer at the scene of the shooting in Liege. Photos: Reuters A gunman shot dead two police officers and a passer-by in a suspected terror attack yesterday morning in the centre of the Belgian city of Liege. He was later killed in a shoot-out after taking a cleaning lady hostage outside a school. Expand Close A man is consoled at the scene of the shooting in Liege, Belgium. Photo: Reuters/Francois Lenoir / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A man is consoled at the scene of the shooting in Liege, Belgium. Photo: Reuters/Francois Lenoir The shooter (36) was named locally as Benjamin Herman, from Rochefort, a city about an hour from Liege. He was well-known to police after a string of crimes including robbery, assault and drug-dealing. Local media reported that Herman was temporarily released from prison for several hours on Monday night for "family leave" to prepare his reintegration into society, despite a prison service assessment that he was very violent. Belgium's federal prosecutor's office has opened an investigation into whether the attack was terror-related. Expand Close Police near the body of the attacker. Photo: Reuters / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Police near the body of the attacker. Photo: Reuters Herman was not on the government's list of suspected potential terrorists, according to local media, but had been in touch with radicalised prisoners during his several stints in jail. There were reports he shouted "Allahu Akbar" before murdering the two female officers and a 22-year-old man but those claims have not been confirmed by the Belgian authorities. The Liege prosecutor's office said the gunman had "hunted down" the two police officers, who were checking parking meters, before attacking them from behind with a knife. After stabbing them multiple times, Herman took the officers' guns and shot them both dead. He opened fire on the man, who was in a car, before taking a cleaning woman hostage in the entrance to a nearby school. Two other police officers were injured in the legs in the ensuing shoot-out at the school gate before Herman was "neutralised" by elite officers. The cleaner was reported to be "safe and healthy". Pupils at the school were evacuated and have been offered counselling. Belgian media reported that Herman could have also killed hours before the shooting, linking him to a murder in On, Luxembourg. The body of a man shot in the head was found after a jewellery robbery in Rochefort earlier that evening. Images on social media showed people fleeing for safety on Liege's central boulevard, with shots and sirens being heard in the background. One video showed two police in body armour moving into position. Shots were heard at 9.30am local time. The gunman was confirmed dead around 30 minutes later. Charles Michel, the prime minister of Belgium, condemned the "blind and cowardly violence" in Liege and offered his support for the victims and their families. Mr Michel and Belgium's King Philippe visited the city yesterday. A minute's silence will be held tomorrow and flags flown at half-mast at Liege's town hall, where a book of condolences has been opened. French President Emmanuel Macron expressed the "solidarity of the French people with the Belgian people" after hosting an international peace conference on Libya. Belgium's anti-terrorist crisis centre was monitoring the situation, interior minister Jan Jambon said on Twitter. The country's terror threat level remains on two, which represents an "unlikely" terror threat. Liege, an industrial city close to the German border in the French-speaking Wallonia region, was also the scene of a shooting in 2011, when a gunman killed four people and wounded over 100 before turning the gun on himself. Belgium has been on high alert since a Brussels-based Isil cell was involved in attacks on Paris in 2015 that killed 130 people and Brussels in 2016 in which 32 died. Daily Telegraph, London Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021] An ambulance car is seen on the scene of a shooting in Liege, Belgium. Photo: REUTERS/Francois Lenoir A man who shot dead two police officers and a bystander in Liege had already killed another person the day before the attack, Belgium's interior minister has said. Jan Jambon told broadcaster RTL that the gunman, identified as Benjamin Herman, "also committed a murder the night before". Mr Jambon confirmed that the person was a former inmate who did prison time with Herman. Herman is alleged to have killed the man on Monday evening by hitting him over the head with a blunt object. He was killed in a shootout with police on Tuesday after stabbing two female police officers, stealing their handguns and shooting them. He also shot dead a man sitting in a nearby car. Prosecutors revealed yesterday they are treating the incident as a terrorist attack. La Libre Belgique newspaper quoted a police source as saying the gunman shouted "Allahu Akbar" -- God is greatest in Arabic. A drunk "foul-mouthed" passenger on a flight from Las Vegas to Gatwick has been fined 1,000 (1,142) after urinating in his seat. Irishman Shane OGrady (30) was arrested last Wednesday on a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 flight after being "persistently disruptive and intoxicated" on the 10-hour journey. OGrady began to harass flight crew after being refused more alcohol. Staff then turned on seatbelt signs in an effort to diffuse the situation, but passengers were still allowed to use the bathroom. The disruptive passenger then demanded the seat-belt signs be turned back on. Even though the staff agreed, OGrady then urinated in his seat. Flight staff then had to give O'Grady a sleep suit - typically something reserved for first class passengers - to change into. Upon landing in Gatwick, police boarded the plane and escorted OGrady off the flight where he was subsequently arrested. The Waterford native was remanded in custody to appear at Crawley Magistrates Court the following day where he was charged for being intoxicated on board an aircraft. Sergeant Darren Taylor of the Gatwick Prevention Team said: "While the vast majority of passengers are well-behaved, and travel through the airport and arrive at their destination without a problem, there is a very small minority who ruin it for themselves and for others. "You could be refused carriage or sent on the next plane home if you are considered to be drunk, disorderly or disruptive. Its as simple as that. "However we are not out there with the intention to arrest people or ruin their holiday; we want all passengers to travel through Gatwick safely and with minimal fuss. By making our stance clear from the outset, the onus is on them to behave themselves." OGrady pleaded guilty to the charges and was fined 1,000 as well as 85 costs and a 100 victim surcharge. A Virgin Atlantic spokesperson said: "The safety and wellbeing of our customers and crew is our top priority, and we wont tolerate any behaviour that compromises this. "We always want our customers to have the best experiences when they fly with us, and our cabin crew are highly trained to deal with any individuals that may impact that experience for others." Ukrainian police officers guard in the entrance to a house where Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was "fatally shot" Photo: REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who was reported murdered, attends a news briefing by the Ukrainian state security service in Kiev REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko has turned up at a news conference in the Ukrainian capital less than 24 hours after police reported he had been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment building. The country's security services said Mr Babchenko's death was faked in order to foil a plot to take his life. Ukrainian police said Mr Babchenko, a strong critic of the Kremlin, was shot multiple times in the back on Tuesday and found bleeding there by his wife. Authorities said they suspected he was killed because of his work. Vasyl Gritsak, the head of the Ukrainian Security Service, announced at a news conference that the security agency and the police had solved Mr Babchenko's killing. He then startled everyone present by inviting the 41-year-old reporter into the room. To the applause and gasps of the press, Mr Babchenko took the floor and apologised to the friends and family who mourned for him who were unaware of the plan. "I'm still alive," he said. Before ushering Mr Babchenko into the room, Mr Gritsak said investigators had identified a Ukrainian citizen who had been recruited and paid $40,000 (34,000) by Russian security services to organise and carry out the killing. The unidentified Ukrainian man in turn hired an acquaintance who had fought in the separatist war in eastern Ukraine as the gunman. Mr Babchenko, one of Russia's best-known war reporters, fled the country in February 2017 after receiving death threats. He said he had left the country because threats had been made against him and his family. He said his home address was published online and the threats he received were made by phone, email and social media. Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian lawmaker who also moved to Ukraine, said Mr Babchenko continued to be threatened after he settled last year in Kiev, where he worked as a host for the Crimean Tatar TV station. Mr Babchenko did not take the intimidation too seriously, according to Ponomarev. Moscow's annexation of Crimea and support for separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine were topics on which the journalist was scathingly critical of the Kremlin. Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belarus V.Makei meets the Members of the British Parliament 30-05-2018 On May 30, 2018 the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, Vladimir Makei, met group of the UK parliamentarians, headed by the leader of the Parliamentary Delegation to Belarus, John Whittingdale. During the meeting, the sides noted a substantial progress in bilateral cooperation between the UK and Belarus in 2017-2018. Numerous issues of bilateral and multilateral agenda were discussed with special attention to the subject of trade and commerce, which have gained pace in bilateral cooperation recently. print version Tensions have soared in recent weeks in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir (Dar Yasin/AP) Pakistan and India have agreed to stop trading artillery fire in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir after months of routine skirmishes that have killed dozens of soldiers and civilians. Pakistans military said local generals reached the understanding using a special hotline set up to defuse tensions in Kashmir, which is split between Indian and Pakistani zones of control. The nuclear-armed powers both claim Kashmir in its entirety, and the territorial dispute has ignited two wars between Pakistan and India since they gained independence in 1947. Both sides agreed to undertake sincere measures to improve the existing situation, ensuring peace and avoidance of hardships to the civilians along the borders, the Pakistani military said in a statement. Expand Close An Indian man inspects the damage after his home was gutted by firing allegedly from the Pakistan side of the border (Channi Anand/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp An Indian man inspects the damage after his home was gutted by firing allegedly from the Pakistan side of the border (Channi Anand/AP) It said that if future violence occurs in the disputed region, restraint will be exercised and the matter will be resolved through utilisation of existing mechanisms of hotline contacts and border flag meetings at local commanders level. The Indian army confirmed the agreement, saying both sides had pledged to undertake sincere measures to improve the existing situation to ensure peace and avoidance of hardships to the civilians along the borders. The two sides also agreed to fully implement a 2003 ceasefire that has been repeatedly violated. Tensions have soared in recent weeks as both sides have launched artillery assaults across the Line of Control dividing the region. Expand Close Smoke rises from a mortar shell allegedly fired by Pakistani troops (Channi Anand/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Smoke rises from a mortar shell allegedly fired by Pakistani troops (Channi Anand/AP) Each side has accused the other of starting the hostilities in violation of the 2003 accord. On the Indian side, the fighting has driven people from villages along the border, and government buildings have been converted into temporary shelters. Houses have been damaged and dozens of schools in villages along the frontier have been closed, with authorities advising residents to stay indoors. The shelling has cast a pall over the holy month of Ramadan in the mostly Muslim region. The shelling typically flares up in the pre-dawn hours, when families are having a meal known as suhoor ahead of the daytime fast. India says 25 civilians and 18 soldiers have been killed this year in more than 800 ceasefire violations initiated by Pakistan. Pakistan accuses Indian forces of more than 1,050 ceasefire violations this year, resulting in the deaths of 28 civilians and injuries to 117 others. On Wednesday, Pakistani officials said villagers who fled to safer locations following recent skirmishes have been urged to return to their homes. Security personnel arrive at the site of an attack in the Afghan Interior Ministry in Kabul (AP) A suicide bomber struck outside the Afghan interior ministry, allowing gunmen to pass through an outer gate where they traded fire with security forces before they were eventually killed, officials said. General Daud Amin, the Kabul police chief, said seven attackers were killed and clean-up operations are under way. Interior ministry spokesman Najib Danish said one policeman was killed and five were wounded. It appeared to be a rare victory for Afghan security forces, who have struggled to secure the capital in recent months. The Taliban and a local Islamic State affiliate have carried out a wave of attacks, mainly targeting security forces and the countrys Shia minority, killing hundreds of people. Both groups have also expanded their footprint in the countryside. Expand Close The incident marked a rare victory for Afghan security forces (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The incident marked a rare victory for Afghan security forces (AP) Elsewhere in Afghanistan, Taliban suicide bombers attacked a police station in the eastern Logar province, killing at least three police. Among the dead were the commander of the police station and the deputy director of traffic police for the provincial capital, Puli Alim, said Khalid Safi, a spokesman for the provincial governor. Another four police and eight civilians, including two children, were wounded in the attack early on Wednesday, said Shah Poor Ahmadzai, spokesman for the provincial police chief. He said the attackers set off a suicide car bomb at the entrance to the station before three suicide bombers tried to enter. All three were shot and killed by security forces within minutes of the initial attack, he said, adding that a number of nearby homes were damaged. The Taliban claimed the attack. Former North Korea spy chief and senior official Kim Yong-chol is heading to the US after stopping over in Beijing, presumably for talks with US officials regarding a possible summit between Kim Jong-un and President Donald Trump, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency said yesterday. Kim Yong-chol, one of the most influential North Koreans outside the Kim dynasty, has been closely involved in talks with South Korea. His visit to the US would further indicate preparations for the historic summit, initially planned for June 12, are moving ahead. The trip, if confirmed, would come just days after President Trump cancelled the one-on-one meeting with Kim Jong-un, citing North Korea's "hostility". But after a conciliatory response from Pyongyang on Friday and an impromptu meeting on Saturday between the North Korean leader and Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, in which Kim Jong-un expressed his commitment to progress on denuclearisation, the talks now seem to be on again. Mr Trump has since said he has reconsidered, and that officials from both countries are meeting to work out details. As part of ongoing efforts to find common ground, the US has also reportedly decided to defer the launch of another round of severe sanctions against Pyongyang. Kim Yong-chol is due to fly to New York today after speaking to officials in Beijing, Yonhap reported, citing diplomatic sources. He would be the most high-profile North Korean official to visit the US since 2000. Kim Chang-son, another top aide to the North Korean leader, arrived in Singapore yesterday for meetings with a delegation of senior White House officials, including Joe Hagin, deputy chief of staff for operations, reported Japan's NHK. When Kim Chang-son, known as Kim Jong-un's "butler", was asked at Beijing airport if he was flying to Singapore for talks with the US, he said he was "going there to play", according to footage from Nippon Television Network. However, officials from both sides are believed to be engaging in the intense logistics of arranging the first ever summit between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader. Separately, a US team led by veteran negotiator and former ambassador to South Korea, Sung Kim, has been meeting with North Korean officials in the demilitarised zone dividing the Korean peninsula to discuss the summit agenda and the wording of a possible communique. Moon Jae-in, who has lobbied hard for nuclear negotiations between Mr Trump and Kim Jong-un, has battled to keep the summit alive. Despite Kim Jong-un's apparent eagerness for a summit with Mr Trump, there are lingering doubts over whether he would ever agree to fully relinquish his nuclear weapons when he may see them as his only guarantee of survival. Mr Moon has insisted Kim Jong-un can be persuaded to abandon his nuclear facilities, materials and bombs in a verifiable and irreversible way in exchange for credible security and economic guarantees. But US and North Korean officials are racing to bridge a gulf between the two sides over the definition of denuclearisation before the two leaders meet. At Kim Jong-un's conciliatory first meeting with Moon Jae-in at the Demilitarized Zone that separates North Korea and South Korea on April 27, they agreed to seek the "complete denuclearisation" of the Korean peninsula, but used vague wording that did not clearly define it. Since then, North Korea has rebuffed US demands for it to unilaterally abandon its nuclear weapons programme, which it views as a deterrent against perceived aggression by the US, which keeps 28,500 troops based in South Korea. Washington, meanwhile, is trying to determine whether Pyongyang is willing to agree on sufficient steps that would allow the two sides to proceed with the summit. Before cancelling the event, Mr Trump had indicated that he may be open to a more phased approach. 'The New York Times' reported on Monday that Siegfried Hecker, a leading federal adviser who has repeatedly visited the North's sprawling atomic complex, has warned that the disarmament process could take up to 15 years. Daily Telegraph Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021] French police have cleared out around 1,000 people from the largest makeshift migrant camp in Paris, which had become a focal point in the countys immigration debate. The mainly African migrants were moved out of their tent camp along a canal used by joggers and cyclists on the capitals north-east edge, before being put in buses and taken to gymnasiums in the region as bulldozers ripped out the tents. Several hundred migrants apparently fled before the evacuation. Expand Close A bulldozer clears a migrant makeshift camp in Paris (Thibault Camus/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A bulldozer clears a migrant makeshift camp in Paris (Thibault Camus/AP) Two migrants drowned this month in canals along encampments and others have been injured amid rising tensions in the filthy, crowded camps, adding pressure on authorities to act. The evacuation was delayed for months amid bickering over what to do with the migrants. The encampment held at least 1,400 migrants, local officials have said, but 1,016 were evacuated. Two other makeshift camps in Paris holding some 1,000 migrants are expected to be cleared next week. Police have cleared out around 28,000 migrants from Paris camps in the past three years, but the arrivals continue. President Emmanuel Macron wants a tough response to migrants arriving in France. Two days ago, he nevertheless opened the way to citizenship and a job for a Malian migrant who scaled a building and saved a young child dangling from a balcony in what Mr Macron called an exceptional act. A video of Mamoudou Gassamas feat went viral, gaining him the nickname Spiderman. The camps have been at the heart of a political debate between French interior minister Gerard Collomb and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo over how to handle migrants. The mayor and dozens of associations pressed for the migrants to be sheltered once dislodged from their encampments, as in the past. Ms Hidalgo, who has paid weekly visits to the encampment, said she was pleased that the migrants were being taken to shelters, but added: I think we could have done without the four-month wait. Expand Close Migrants line up in a makeshift camp during its evacuation in Paris (Thibault Camus/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Migrants line up in a makeshift camp during its evacuation in Paris (Thibault Camus/AP) City Hall has spent 30 million euro (26.2 million) since 2015 helping refugees, bolstering state aid, as well as 80 million euro (70 million) each year on isolated minors. This is an issue of dignity, said Pierre Henry, head of an aid group, France Terre DAsile. Street camps should not exist in our country. Premier-designate Carlo Cottarelli, centre, gets in a car as he leaves his hotel in Rome (Angelo Carconi/ANSA via AP) Italys premier-designate Carlo Cottarelli has returned to the presidential palace for informal consultations amid continued market turmoil and uncertainty about the prospects of his proposed government. Milans stock index opened slightly higher on Wednesday after Asian markets slid on investor concern that a new election could become a referendum on whether Italy will stick with the euro currency. The uncertainty rose after President Sergio Mattarellas designation of Mr Cottarelli, a former IMF official, to head a politically neutral government failed to calm markets. Expand Close Italian president Sergio Mattarella (Fabio Frustaci/ANSA via AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Italian president Sergio Mattarella (Fabio Frustaci/ANSA via AP) The appointment also riled populists, whose attempts to form a government were quashed by Mr Mattarella over their designation of a Eurosceptic economy minister. Mr Cottarelli returned for informal discussions on Wednesday with Mr Mattarella after asking for more time to come up with a list of cabinet ministers, and left without comment. Telford is cashing in on demand for homes (Andrew Matthews/PA) London-focused housebuilder Telford Homes is celebrating record annual revenues and soaring profit on the back of continued demand in the capital. Telford said pre-tax profit was up 35% to 46 million in the year to March 31, while revenue rose from 291.9 million to 316.2 million. The group added that it is well placed to top 50 million in pre-tax profit next year, which would represent a 100% increase over four years. Telford described the London market as robust with strong demand from build-to-rent investors, individual purchasers, owner-occupiers and housing associations. The housebuilder also attributed its success to the under-supplied housing market in London, and its decision to sell homes at relatively affordable price points. The developer, which has a pipeline of more than 4,000 units, has been shifting its focus to the rental sector, arguing there is significant support for build-to-rent developments from politicians and investors. Telford added it is seeing growing investment from China due to the continued international attraction of London, despite Brexit. Boss Jon Di-Stefano said: Telford Homes continues to perform well and I am delighted to report such a strong set of results which again have produced record levels of revenue and profit. As we increase the scale of the business, our growth is underpinned by the under supply of new homes in London and robust demand at more affordable price points, particularly for rental housing. Our substantial development pipeline and increasing expertise in the burgeoning build-to-rent sector provide us with confidence for the future. Kim Yong Chol, accompanied by North Korean Ambassador to China Ji Jae Ryong, second from left, arrives at Beijing Capital International Airport (AP) A top North Korean official is heading to New York for talks aimed at salvaging a summit between Kim Jong Un and US president Donald Trump on the future of Pyongyangs nuclear programme. Kim Yong Chol was spotted at Beijings airport just after noon ahead of the Norths highest-level mission to America in 18 years. South Koreas Yonhap news agency cited diplomatic sources as saying that Mr Kim was on an Air China flight to New York which departed on Wednesday afternoon. Yonhap said Mr Kim, who had arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, was travelling with five other North Korean officials. Expand Close Kim Yong Chol is one of Kim Jong Uns most trusted aides (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Kim Yong Chol is one of Kim Jong Uns most trusted aides (AP) Mr Kim, one of North Korean leader Kim Jong Uns most trusted aides, is a former military intelligence chief and now a vice chairman of the ruling partys central committee. North Koreas mission to the United Nations in New York is its sole diplomatic presence in the United States. That suggests Mr Kim might have chosen to first go to New York because it would make it easier for him to communicate with officials in Pyongyang, North Koreas capital. North Korea and the United States are still technically at war and have no diplomatic ties because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. Mr Trump confirmed that Mr Kim was to hold talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Expand Close Mr Kim is heading for New York (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Mr Kim is heading for New York (AP) But it was not immediately known what else he would do in the United States. South Korean media speculated that he was carrying a personal letter from Kim Jong Un and may push to travel to Washington to meet with Mr Trump. Mr Pompeo has travelled to Pyongyang twice in recent weeks for meetings with Kim Jong Un, and has said there is a shared understanding between the two sides about what they hope to achieve in talks. South Korean media speculated that Mr Pompeo could make a third trip to Pyongyang after Kim Yong Chols US trip. Mr Trump and Kim Jong Un were set to hold their summit June 12 in Singapore, but Mr Trump announced last week that he was pulling out of the meeting. Since then, he has suggested the summit could be back on, and Kim Yong Chols trip to the US seems to imply that preparations for a meeting could be in the final stages. Kim Yong Chols trip comes amid two sets of other pre-summit talks between Washington and Pyongyang. A team of US officials led by former US nuclear negotiator Sung Kim began talks with North Korean officials at the Korean border village of Panmunjom on Sunday to set the agenda for the summit. A North Korean delegation led by another of Kim Jong Uns trusted aides, Kim Chang Son, flew to Singapore on Monday night for talks with US officials to discuss logistical issues for the summit. Kim Yong Chol would be the highest-level North Korean official to travel to the United States since 2000, when Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok visited Washington and met then-president Bill Clinton amid warming ties between the wartime foes. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made a historic reciprocal visit to Pyongyang later in 2000 in a bid to arrange a North Korea visit by Mr Clinton. Ties turned sour again after George W Bush took office in early 2001 with a tough policy on the North. For picture posts from 2010 and earlier, see the Earlier Picture Posts Page Kim Yong Chol, right, walks into a hotel in New York on Wednesday (Seth Wenig/AP) A senior North Korean official has arrived in New York as President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un sought to salvage prospects for a high-stakes nuclear summit. Kim Yong Chol, the former military intelligence chief and one of the North Korean leaders closest aides, landed mid-afternoon on an Air China flight from Beijing in the highest-level official visit to the United States in 18 years. Associated Press journalists saw the plane taxi down the tarmac before the Norths delegation disembarked at JFK International Airport. During his unusual visit to the US, Mr Kim planned to meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was travelling up from Washington. US officials said their talks will be aimed at determining whether a meeting between Mr Trump and Kim Jong Un, originally scheduled for June 12 but later cancelled by the US president, can be restored. The talks come as preparations for the highly anticipated summit in Singapore were barrelling forward both in the US and in Asia, despite lingering uncertainty about whether it will really occur and when. North Koreas flurry of diplomatic activity following a torrid run in nuclear weapons and missile tests in 2017 suggests Kim Jong Un is eager for sanctions relief to build his economy, and the international legitimacy the summit with Mr Trump would provide. But there are lingering doubts on whether Mr Kim will ever fully relinquish his nuclear arsenal, which he may see as his only guarantee of survival in a region surrounded by enemies. Mr Trump announced that Kim Yong Chol was coming to New York for talks with Mr Pompeo in a tweet on Tuesday in which he said he had a great team working on the summit. That was a shift from last week, when Mr Trump announced in an open letter to Kim Jong Un he had decided to terminate the summit following a provocative statement from the North. Mr Pompeo, Mr Trumps former CIA chief, travelled to Pyongyang twice in recent weeks for meetings with Kim Jong Un, and said there is a shared understanding between the two sides about what they hope to achieve in talks. South Korean media speculated Mr Pompeo could make a third trip to Pyongyang and Kim Yong Chol was carrying a personal letter from Kim Jong Un, and might push to travel to Washington to meet Mr Trump. North Koreas mission to the United Nations in New York is its sole diplomatic presence in the United States. That suggests Mr Kim might has chosen to first go to New York because it would make it easier for him to communicate with officials in Pyongyang, North Koreas capital. North Korea and the United States are still technically at war and have no diplomatic ties because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. Mr Trump views a summit as a legacy-defining opportunity to make the nuclear deal that has evaded others, but he pledged to walk away from the meeting if he believed the North was not serious about discussing dismantling its nuclear program. After the Norths combative statements, there was debate inside the Trump administration about whether it marked a real turn to belligerence or a feint to see how far Kim Jong Un could push the US in the lead-up to the talks. Expand Close US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, left, met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on May 9 (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, left, met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on May 9 (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP) Mr Trump had mused Mr Kims attitude had changed after the North Korean leaders surprise visit to China two weeks ago, suggesting China was pushing him away from the table. The US presidents letter, the aides said, was designed to pressure the North on the international stage for appearing to have cold feet. White House officials maintain Mr Trump was hopeful the North was merely negotiating but that he was prepared for the letter to mark the end of the two-month flirtation. Instead, the officials said, it brought both sides to the table with increasing seriousness, as they work through myriad logistical and policy decisions to keep June 12 a viable option for the summit. Kim Yong Chol is a vice chairman of the North Korean ruling partys central committee. The last official of his stature to visit the United States was Jo Myong Rok, the late first vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, who visited Washington in 2000, South Koreas Unification Ministry said. The White House emphasised it has remained in close contact with South Korean and Japanese officials as preparations for the talks continue. Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Mr Trump will host Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on June 7 to coordinate their thinking ahead of the summit. Mr Trump also hosted South Korean President Moon Jae-in last week. Mr Moon, who has lobbied hard for nuclear negotiations between Mr Trump and Kim Jong Un, held a surprise meeting with the North Korean leader on Saturday in an effort to keep the summit alive. The third edition of Tax, Accounting and Audit in India is updated for 2017, and provides an overview of the f... New York, May 30 (IBNS): United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres arrived in Mali on Tuesday, to honour the service and sacrifice of peacekeepers around the world, and mark the official International Day of UN Peacekeepers. The north-west African country is the most dangerous place in the world to be a UN blue helmet, and last year, 21 troops serving with the UN Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) lost their lives, together with seven civilians. Dear peacekeepers, you have demonstrated that you are capable of all forms of sacrifice. For many of your colleagues, this has meant the supreme sacrifice of giving their lives, to protect the lives of Malian civilians, Guterres said at the ceremony. I want to thank you very much for this effort, these sacrifices, to pay tribute to you, and to say how proud I am to work with you.UN News has a team in Mali to cover the special visit, and shortly after arriving in the capital, Bamako, the Secretary-General attended a poignant ceremony at MINUSMAs base in the capital, to pay tribute to fallen peacekeepers. He laid a wreath at the memorial inside the camp, engraved with the names of those killed in the service of peace. As peacekeepers, you are the foremost symbol of the United Nations itself, he added. The Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Mali, and Head of MINUSMA, Mahamat Saleh Annadif, said that honouring the fallen warms the hearts of their comrades and encourages us to continue to defend even more resolutely the values of the United Nations. Medals for two peacekeepers Guterres also awarded medals to two peacekeepers serving with the mission, for their outstanding service: Commander Olufunmilayo Ajibike Amodu, from Nigeria, and Major Mohammad Badrul Ahsan Khan, from Bangladesh, a military staff officer based at Force headquarters. The medal is very important. It symbolizes what it is to be a peacekeeper at MINUSMA, said Commander Amodu, in an interview for UN News. Receiving it from the Secretary-General is a very unique privilege. The terrorists are not relenting in what they are doing. And obviously, we are not backing out in what we have come to do, she added, pointing to the worrying security situation in Mali, particularly in central and northern areas where most of the continuing violence between different armed groups and government forces is taking place. Troops with the mission have increasingly become the target of attacks. For those interested in serving as blue helmets, Commander Amodu had this message: The UN is all about peace. And when there is peace, there is development. When there is peace, there is promotion of technology. When there is peace, every other thing works the way it should work. And for any person who would want to join MINUSMA, you should have in the back of your mind that when you are coming, it is to support the peace process. Major Khan told UN News here on the ground in Bamako that it was a matter of pride and honor to receive the medal. In this world, we have to be all together. So, for better living, we have to ensure the peace. There is no better alternative to supporting each other, he said, adding that MINUSMA is a unique opportunity to serve. Regional visit on Wednesday Guterres is being accompanied on his two-day visit to Mali by Under Secretary-General for Field Support, Atul Khare, the head of UN Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, and the Executive Director of UNICEF, Henrietta Fore. The UN chief was greeted at the airport by Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, who he was scheduled to meet later in the day. During his visit, Guterres will also meet other Malian officials, as well as United Nations staff working in the country. On Wednesday, the Secretary-General is expected to visit the regions and to meet with local authorities and UN staff, as well as women, youth and religious representatives. MINUSMA/Olivier Salgado After a gap of 10 years, hit onscreen pair of the 1990s, Sanjay Dutt and Manisha Koirala will reunite for Sanjay Dutts Productions's next, Hindi remake of the Telugu hit film Prasthanam. Prasthanam didn't just create a lot of waves in the Telugu industry but it also ended up becoming a super-hit and gained several awards. According to reports, the film will be an intense and thrilling family drama that will star Sanjay Dutt in one of the most pivotal roles and Manisha Koirala will be seen as his wife in the film. Just to jog your memory a little, Sanjay Dutt and Manisha Koirala were roped in together for the first time in 1992 for the film Yalgaar and went on to working together in films like 1997's Sanam, 1999's Kartoos and Achanak, 2000's Baaghi and Khauff, and were last seen together in 2008's Mehbooba. Director Deva Katta spoke to media about the project and said, "Each character in Prasthanam has a very strong role to play for which we needed actors with great caliber. When the team came up with the idea to cast Manisha Koirala to play the onscreen wife of Sanjay Dutt, it was a perfect match in my mind. I am looking forward to directing them both especially since they are coming back together after 10 years." Produced by Sanjay Dutts Productions, Prasthanam is will go on the floors in 1 June and will be extensively shot in Lucknow. The film will also star Ali Fazal and Amyra Dastu. Shimla, as we know, is going through a phase where there is an acute shortage of water and people are facing a lot of troubles. Water is the most important resource for human survival and it has been seven days that people in Shimla are living without it. Shima has a water supply from five major water sources - Gumma, Giri, Ashwini Khan, Churta and Seog. The overall installed capacity is 65 million litres per day (MLD) and the demand is of around 45 MLD. Despite the higher capacity, the city only gets up to 35 MLD as average throughout the year. On an average, 15,000-20,000 tourists visit Shimla every day during the peak tourist season. The resident population of the city is 2.2 lakh, while tourist arrivals over the weekend reach 25,000-30,000. This increasing number is adding to crisis in the city. While you are leaving your taps open, here are a few points about Shimla water crises you need to know. 1. Himachal Pradesh High Court on Tuesday ordered all construction activity to be stopped in Shimla for a week as the city struggles with a shortage of water. 2. Hotels and tour operators are facing cancellations of rooms as the acute water crisis has entered the second week. 3. High Court also directed the Municipal Commissioner to stop the supply of water through tankers to individuals, more so in VIP areas housing judges, ministers, MLAs, bureaucrats, police officers, or commercial establishments. PTI #ShimlaWaterCrisis: Today evening, a large number of people gathered near Secretariate in Chotta Shimla & blocked the traffic on #Shimla-#Sanjauli road. #WaterScarcity has hit so hard that #ShimlaCity has turned the town into a sort of battlezone. #SmartCity #HimachalPradesh pic.twitter.com/VCA9iGBppg Himachal Watcher (@HimachalW) May 29, 2018 4. The court also banned car washing in Shimla town during the week. PTI 5. Deputy Commissioner of Shimla Amit Kashyap has decided to postpone Shimla summer festival an annual cultural event for the tourists and locals. PTI 6. With the increase in a shortage of water, locals came down on the streets and protested, raised slogans in front of the Chief Minister's residence. Himachal Pradesh: Locals hold protest and block the road outside Secretariat, in Shimla, over the issue of acute water shortage in the city. pic.twitter.com/onPyiy3uXX ANI (@ANI) May 29, 2018 Also read: Locals, Visitors Suffer As Shimla Runs Out Of Water During Peak Tourist Season 7. As the population of Shimla swells by between 90,000 and one lakh during the peak tourist season in summer, residents of Shimla have taken to social media to appeal to tourists to not visit the city. The requirement of water increases to 45 million litres a day (MLD) during this season. Here are some tweets where residents are requesting not to visit the capital of Himachal Pradesh, Request all the travellers, friends not to make plans to visit #Shimla, as right now it is facing a severe water crisis. Many hotels, restaurants and public toilets have been closed. #ShimlaWaterCrisis (@imamitverma) May 28, 2018 If people are thinking that we shimlaties are being selfish n asking tourists not to come then plzz try to understand our plight..we live here..we work here..we need water for our daily chores..we are not holidaying here.we are passing through the worst phase..#ShimlaWaterCrisis Currently, each zone of the town gets piped water only after a gap of several days. Well, it is certainly a wring for us all and how is the time we all start thinking about water conservation, for real! The Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh has made another breakthrough in the case after arresting a second accused, Praveen alias Suchith Kumar. According to the SIT, Praveen, a native of Mangaluru was arrested earlier in connection with an Arms Act. BCCL Naveen Kumar, the first accused arrested in the case, had revealed Praveens alleged involvement in the murder. Praveen was reportedly taken into SIT custody, around two weeks ago. According to the investigators, Praveen's association with any organisations linked to the murder is still unclear. Meanwhile, the SIT on Wednesday submitted the chargesheet in the case, naming Naveen Kumar as the key accused. According to the 661-page chargesheet, Praveen conducted recce of Gauri's house and also shared details with shooters.' BCCL It is established that Praveen, along with Naveen, had done reconnaissance near Gauri Lankeshs house in Rajarajeshwari Nagar several times and had shared details with the shooters about entry and exit routes," the chargesheet states. Lankesh, an activist and Hindutva critic was shot dead by bike-borne gunmen outside her Bengaluru house on September 5, 2017. BCCL Investigators said Praveen was also involved in an attempted murder of writer K S Bhagwan in Mysuru in January 2018. Three others who are also linked to Sanatan Sanstha were arrested last week in connection with the murder plot. BCCL The murder plot came to light following the arrest of Hindu Yuva Sena leader K T Naveen Kumar for possession of illegal arms during the Lankesh murder probe. The group, including Naveen Kumar, were allegedly surveying Bhagwans home to carry out a murder, just like the case of Lankesh. In a significant breakthrough after months of cross-border hostilities and firing duels, India and Pakistan on Tuesday agreed to restore peace along the Line of Control (LoC) and International Border (IB) in Jammu and Kashmir by agreeing to honour the ceasefire pact of November 2003. Indian director-general of military operations Lt General Anil Chauhan and his Pakistani counterpart Major General Sahir Shamshad Mirza decided to fully implement the 2003 ceasefire understanding in letter and spirit after the latter sought a special hotline talk at 6pm on Tuesday. Importantly, the two DGsMO agreed that any issue will be sought to be resolved through the hotline and border flag meetings. bccl/representational image Moreover, the acceptance of the ceasefire does not mean the Indian Army will slacken its robust counter-infiltration measures along the borders, said sources. The development comes after ceasefire violations (CFVs) in just the first five months of 2018 broke all annual records since 2003, with the two armies regularly using light artillery guns, anti-tank guided missiles and heavy mortars to target each other and civilians getting caught in the middle. With the ceasefire observed more in breach, the bid to revert to it caught observers by surprise, but follows moves to build confidence over issues like release of Indian and Pakistani fishermen held by either side. ap/representational image The utility of Indias decision to retaliate heavily to Pakistan fire has been debated but if the ceasefire proves durable it will be seen as a move that has delivered some results. The number of CFVs already stands close to 1,300 this year, with 908 of them being recorded along the 778-km LoC and the rest along the 198-km IB. India has lost 36 soldiers and civilians in them, with another 120 being injured, while the number of casualties on the Pakistani side is estimated to be much more. The number of CFVs recorded in 2016 was 449, but there was a surge in them after Indian Special Forces conducted surgical strikes against terror launch pads in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir in September that year. ap/representational image The CFVs jumped to 971 in 2017, with the action-reaction cycle escalating further this year. Top Hizbul leader Burhan Wanis death in July 2016 also triggered massive protests, supported by Pakistan, and led to a spike in infiltration bids. Tuesdays pact will come as a major relief for civilians living in border hamlets, thousands of whom have been displaced due to the fierce cross-border firings. It also comes soon after the government declared a unilateral suspension of counter-insurgency operations in J&K during Ramzan. The Indian Army DGMO agreed with the proposal to undertake sincere measures to improve the existing situation to ensure peace and avoidance of hardships to the civilians along the borders, said an official statement. ap/representational image Both the DGsMO agreed to ensure that henceforth the ceasefire will not be violated by both sides. It was also mutually agreed that in case of any issue, restraint will be exercised and the matter will be resolved through utilization of existing mechanisms of hotline contacts and border flag meetings at local commanders level, it added. A senior officer, in turn, said the Armys three-tier counter-infiltration grid to detect and tackle infiltrators will continue as before. We will not lower our guard. With the ceasefire, the Pak Army will find it difficult to give covering or distracting fire to infiltrators as has been its policy for long, he said. The 2003 ceasefire initially held for some years as a major confidence-building measure, with the two armies maintaining restraint and holding regular flag meetings. ap/representational image Even then, India had not agreed to formalize the ceasefire understanding into a written agreement with clearly defined modalities and standard operating procedures in order to keep its options open because of Pakistans continuing support to cross-border terrorism. But the ceasefire pact had begun to fray in recent years with the Indian Army stressing the Pakistan Army-ISI combine had used the interregnum to bolster its anti-India terror machinery and push as many infiltrators as possible into India. Since last year, Indian Army had taken to pro-active dominance of the LoC by conducting pre-emptive and targeted fire assaults against Pak Army forward posts that actively abetted infiltration, as also tactical operations along the border. Several Pak Army posts in areas like Balnoi, Mendhar, Kalal, Keran, Doda, Sarla, Laleali and Banwat were destroyed in the process, as reported by TOI earlier. As medical experts battle to contain the Nipah Virus outbreak in Kerala, there are fears of the deadly infection spreading to other parts of the country. In the latest incident, a soldier posted at Fort William in Kolkata died on Monday of suspected Nipah virus. Read More Here are the top news of the day: 2. Passenger's Dead Body Goes Unnoticed For 72 Hours In A 1500 Km Train Journey His wife raised a complaint with the GRP after he did not get down at Agra, and yet no one bothered to check the toilet. Sanjays body lay in the toilet unnoticed and returned from Kota, passed through the same stations such as Agra and Kanpur and travelled another 1,100 kilometres to Patna. Read More 3. Scary Stats! 15 People Die Everyday On Railway Tracks Across India In four years, 15 persons were killed on railway tracks across the country every day, according to a reply to an RTI query from the Railway Board. Between 2014 and the end of March 2018, a total of 23,013 passengers were killed while trespassing railway tracks, alighting from running trains or falling off trains while standing close to the door. Read More 4. Father Of Honour Killing Victim Ankit Saxena Organises Iftar To Spread The Message Of Love For Yashpal Saxena, the past few months have been tough. In February this year, he lost his only son Ankit Saxena, who was murdered by the family of his girlfriend, who was a Muslim. Read More 5. Cuttack Tea Seller Who Had To Give Up Education Midway Is Funding Studies Of 75 Underprivileged Kids Being poor is no excuse for why you couldn't create a difference. This was explained by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his recent monthly radio programme Mann Ki Baat. PM Modi praised a tea seller from Cuttack who is the force behind educating 70-75 children from the slums of Odisha's capital city. Read More 6. Man Undergoes 25 Surgeries After Laptop Explodes Near His Face Five months in hospital, partial paralysis and 25 surgeries is the price Nishant Kedia had to pay for something as seemingly innocuous as leaving his laptop on charging mode while he slept. It so happened that the gadget exploded near his face and left him with life-threatening burns. Read More It's been just over six months since Amazon launched its Echo smart speakers and introduced its Voice AI Alexa to India. To say Alexa is one of the most interesting things to grace the world of computing would be a gross understatement. If anything, Alexa represents a fresh new wave of voice-driven computing experiences that are making human-machine interactions more simple, enriching and intimate. ALSO READ: Far From Perfect, Here's Why Amazon Echo Plus & Alexa Was My Most Memorable Tech Of 2017 However, you don't have to be a genius to realize that Amazon can't just bottle up Alexa inside Echo speakers. For Alexa Voice AI to flourish, for her to reach the masses, she needs to be available on every other product -- more importantly, devices not manufactured by Amazon. How will Amazon increase the reach of Alexa? We spoke to Adam Berns, Director of Business Development, Alexa Voice Service - Amazon, to understand just that. Edited excerpts from our interview below. Alexa Voice Service is... "There's really three parts to Alexa overall," Adam starts to explain. "The first part is our first-party products like the Amazon Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Dot. But the second and third part is where third-party scale comes in." Adam then went on to explain how Alexa Voice Service or AVS is what comes into play where Alexa gets leveraged into non-Amazon devices. Where a Sonos or Bose wireless speaker wants to implement and integrate Alexa into their product to give customers a whole new way of interacting with the device, for instance -- which is the second part of the scale strategy. The third and final part consists of Alexa Skills Kit, which lets you extend the platform -- much like an app store currently does -- and invite developers to take the Alexa experience and apply it to different scenarios. "So literally," Adam explains AVS further, "it's a set of APIs where you could take a product like a wireless speaker or a computer or a car and then basically add the Alexa functionality to that product. And we have a royalty free license, where basically anybody can sign up and then build a product or an app that would have AVS functionality in it." The range of devices for AVS In 2016, there were 10 AVS devices available to customers. Today, Amazon claims to be approaching 100 Alexa-enabled devices from companies like Sonos, Anker, HP and Garmin. In all, over 12,000 devices that can be controlled with Alexa, from more than 2,000 unique brands. "The type of AVS devices are pretty broad," Adam said in response to my question on different types of Alexa-enabled devices, before continuing. "So you can think of set-top-boxes we have deals like with Dish. In the automotive sector, we've done GM, Ford, VW, BMW, Jaguar, Fiat have announced they would be adding AVS into the head unit of the car itself. Then in computing, we've announced HP, in mobile there's Huawei, Motorola, HTC. On the wireless speakers front we have Sonos, Bose, Polk, Denon, Jabra, JBL." It's a pretty broad range, Adam mentions, and because it's so new the AVS team is constantly learning. "I'll take the example of smart home," says Adam. "We're trying to build a smart home, we knew a bunch about how we wanted to implement a smart home solution powered by Alexa. But we also knew there was a bunch of stuff we didn't know. So we partnered with one or two lighthouse companies, like Philips for the Hue lights -- which are also sold in India. And together, we developed and defined aspects of the smart home domain that gave them early access into our technology, but it also helped them drive our roadmap. And on the way, we learned a ton. We weren't lighting specialists, but we were able to partner with them and learn. It's a similar journey with wireless speaker manufacturers and other device OEMs." Why are device manufacturers integrating AVS "I think the value proposition is really easy," Adam highlights, as our conversation continues, "and it divides into three parts." The first part is simply giving a product that is hard to differentiate on its own a unique feature through Alexa voice integration. Adam explains this with the example of a router -- every router is kind of the same, has the same functionality, but now they add voice to it. Not only does that make routers suddenly very cool, it also makes them less complicated, less technical and more human. Imagine having the ability to just speak with your router and configure it easily? It's a no brainer, even I must concede that. Adam then goes on to say, "The second value we deliver is that voice is just a must have. Like, if you're making a wireless speaker today, being able to voice control it, it's a must have. And the third is Alexa voice integration is a nice feature to have." Adam explains the third point with the example of a PC, where its core function is productivity or browsing, but with voice integration it gives them another way of interfacing with the PC. "It adds functionality to a product that already has strengths on its own." Controlling the Alexa experience and protecting user data No conversation around Alexa or an Alexa-enabled device is complete without appropriate safeguards. How does Amazon ensure Alexa isn't misused on third-party devices? Adam explains, "If you're building a product that's going to interface with any of the music services, because the call will be through us, we want to make sure, obviously, that the rights holder are paid, and that that interaction is legal. And it's done in the right way. So we, if you have music playback, you have to go through our music certification. And then let's have agreements with each of the music services, Deezer, Spotify, and Amazon Prime Music. "Then there's a set of requirements around customer privacy data notification. So for example, you have to be able to turn on the device physically, where the mics have to be pressed to turn them on or off, with a red light indicating that shows there is no power going to the mic. So there's things like that we write them into our agreement. And then in our agreement, we reserve the right to basically pull you off the service, pull your set of ideas off the service, if ever we detect that someone's violating the terms." Alexa getting out of the home, becoming more public As I converse with Adam, and start connecting the dots around Alexa Voice Service, I start noticing a problem. Because Alexa needs to be experienced to be believed, Amazon will never be able to achieve scale if people don't get to experience Alexa -- before they actually buy a device. Adam agrees. Enter Alexa for Business. Adam explains, "Alexa initially was designed to be a consumer product that was tied to your Amazon account. So it was very personal. And the idea is to be in your kitchen or in your living room, it wouldn't move. And we realized that we needed to go way beyond that. Alexa for Business allows you to fleet enable anonymous devices." So you can take Alexa devices and we put them in every hotel room, for instance, where you can control your window blinds, ask for the concierge and set a restaurant reservation do all of that from your Alexa-enabled device. That's one way of people getting to experience Alexa without really having to necessarily buy it, Adam mentions. "Then we've had people who want to build kiosks for smart cities using Alexa. I think you'll see that coming up, we'll do more and more on the Alexa for Business side. And you'll see more sort of not only an enterprise focus, but what I would say is a generic device focus. Like it's not just your Echo tied to you, but it's going to be an Echo that can be used by multiple people." Alexa and the future of voice computing As we approach the end of our conversation, I ask Adam about how Alexa, or voice-based computing in general, is evolving the way humans interact with machines. While there's no doubt the intuitiveness of voice interactions, because it's still early days the scope of such interactions is limited. It's frustrating at times, too, as you learn the ropes of talking to a device rather than touch or type on it. Adam tells me Amazon's take on this. "Our vision for voice is that it becomes an actual human interaction." And he explains this by taking me back to the early days of the World Wide Web where you did true Boolean searches, where search engines needed a certain syntax and operators to get results. "You had to know how to do a search to get any response, right? If you didn't, you were screwed. But today you can pretty much go into your browser and type whatever and it will auto correct, guess your query and give you the desired result. The idea of being able to say Alexa, tell thermostat set temperature to 20 degrees start now -- we don't believe that's the way. With voice, we think you're just going to say Alexa make it warmer. Or colder. Because that's how a human conversation would be." As our interview ended, I couldn't help but think about the potential of Alexa-driven experiences or voice-based computing taking off in a country like India, which has the world's largest population of illiterate people. They won't have to worry about typing on a keyboard, because they unfortunately can't -- instead natural voice-based digital interactions would help them cross the digital divide and open a world of possibilities. On May 26, a video posted to Twitter showed a child dangling off the side of a building in Paris, four storeys off the ground. But this wasnt some morbid capture of a suicide attempt or death. It instead turned into a heroic rescue by an immigrant, now known as Frances Spiderman. Mamoudou Gassama, a 22-year-old Mali immigrant, scaled four storeys in 30 seconds to rescue the child. And while hes received the credit and praise hes earned, police have been investigating just why the kid was hanging off a balcony railing in the first place. The four-year-old was alone at home at the time of the incident, his dad having stepped out on a grocery run. His mother was out of town at the time, and was informed of the incident later. But its the dad here who really managed to mess up. Ce jeune est un veritable heros !! Un acte heroique ! pic.twitter.com/VYr01BCUdI Billal RIGHI (@BillalRighi) May 26, 2018 He took a long time to return home because he had decided to play the smartphone game Pokemon Go when he left the store, French prosecutor Francois Mollins told ABC News. He is devastated because he realizes what he did, and the tragic consequences that it could have led to. Thats right, the kids dad was too busy trying to snatch up virtual pets to take care of his very real child at home. He might pay the price for his negligence now, as the father is facing charges of criminal negligence. Its still unclear which way the court will go, but hes already been arrested and released pending trial. If found guilty at the hearing in September, he could face up to two years in prison. Switch the Market flag Open the menu and switch the Market flag for targeted data from your country of choice. for targeted data from your country of choice. For a policy that imposes a dollar limit on the amount of coverage provided for additional living expenses, the legislation also instructs insurers to grant an extension of that coverage for up to 12 additional months (for a total of 36 months) if the policyholder acted in good faith but suffered delays beyond their control. If a policyholder suffers a loss relating to a declared state of emergency, insurers will have to combine the policy limits for primary dwelling and other structures, and contents, and use the combined amount as specified. The bill, authored by Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, passed with a vote of 24-11 in favor, and now heads to the state Assembly. According to the Press Democrat, Dodd had to make some concessions to address industry opposition. He narrowed his measure so that insurance payments would apply to actual losses accrued, not the maximum amount listed under each line item of a policy. The bill would extend policy renewal protections for survivors retroactively to July 01, 2017. This means survivors of the string of wildfires that hit California last year stand to benefit. Residents who have lost everything are struggling to recover and rebuild their homes and lives. This bill will provide much-needed protections and improve chances for recovery, California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said. Related stories: Californian wineries threatened by rising temperatures and longer wildfire season California insurance agents arrested for alleged commission scam How dare you justify that with all these millions that youre taking ... [workers have] no sick days, no vacations, no pensions? New Orleans Workers Group organizer Gavrielle Gemma told the board members, as quoted by Gambit Weekly. Those who crashed the meeting called for the debt retirement of a critically ill restaurant worker who couldnt afford insurance. They also called for the creation of a free healthcare clinic for industry workers, paid for by the citys 13% hotel occupancy tax, the report added. New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation President Mark Romig told the paper he deeply appreciated the presence of the demonstrators, and said hes very open to meeting with them for further discussions. Related stories: Marsh subsidiary enters into strategic alliance with global hospitality advisory firm QBE, Tangram collaborate to create janitorial insurance program Insurance Center of New England (ICNE), a privately owned and independent insurance agency with three offices in Agawam, Gardner and Westford, Mass., has hired Lori A. Slezek as chief financial officer. In this role, Slezek will report directly to ICNE President and CEO William Trudeau and will oversee accounting, human resources, IT and financial planning and analysis, as well as assist with any of the companys future acquisitions. Prior to arriving at ICNE, Slezek was the director of finance and administration at the Governors Prevention Partnership, a private non-profit organization in Wethersfield, Conn. While there, she was in charge of annual budgeting, writing critical policies and procedures, implementing employee motivational programs, streamlining the hiring process and adding employee benefits. In addition to her work with The Partnership, Slezek previously served as director of Administration and Finance for the Mental Health Association of Springfield, Mass. Slezek has served in a variety of financial roles for local insurance carriers and agents as well, including as a statutory financial analyst for Maine Employers Mutual Insurance Company (MEMIC), a workers compensation carrier in Portland, Maine; as chief operations officer for FieldEddy Inc., an independent insurance agency in East Longmeadow, Mass.; and as CFO and vice president of administration for Dowd Insurance Agency, an independent insurance agency in Holyoke, Mass. Source: Insurance Center of New England Topics Massachusetts Insurance broker Aon has appointed Karl Hennessy as chief executive officer of the firms newly created Carrier Solutions group. The newly formed group will support and grow Aons network of managing general agents (MGAs) and managing general underwriters (MGUs). Hennessy will work with carriers as well as brokers and reinsurers around the world to further develop and execute the global strategy for MGAs and MGUs. He brings more than 25 years of global insurance market experience and most recently served as president of Aon Broking. Prior to joining Aon in 2009, he was a partner with Jardine Lloyd Thompson for 16 years. Hennessy will continue to be based in London and will report to Michael OConnor, Aon co-president. In addition, Andy Jenn, currently chief operating officer of Aon Broking, will transition to COO for the Carrier Solutions group. Aon announced in May 2018 that it will retire the business unit brands of Aon Benfield and Aon Risk Solutions, which follows the retirement of the Aon Hewitt business unit brand in 2017. Aon now has five specific global lines: Commercial Risk Solutions, Reinsurance Solutions, Retirement Solutions, Health Solutions and Data & Analytic Services. Topics Carriers Aon Insurance Wholesale Canadas Pan American Silver Corp. said it is cutting back operations at its mine in northern Mexico due to safety concerns, the latest in a series of major businesses that have been frightened off by unsafe conditions in Mexico. Company President Michael Steinmann said employees have had security incidents on roads leading to the mine in a remote part of Chihuahua state, a region plagued by drug cartels. Over the weekend, workers were holed up at the mine, afraid to leave because of threats by armed groups and some employees were evacuated on private planes. With the recent incidents that have occurred along the access roads, we have determined the prudent course of action is to suspend personnel movements to and from the mine until the roads are safe for our employees, Steinmann wrote. The company said ore-stacking and processing at the open-pit mine are still operating. In a statement Monday, Mexicos Business Coordinating Council complained that crime and violence had caused Pan American Silver and two other large companies to close plants. The council said the high levels of violence have become one of the greatest obstacles for economic activity. The council also said that highway robberies of freight transport had doubled in the first quarter of 2018. And on Monday, the national railway regulatory agency said thieves were targeting train shipments, often by prying up pieces of track or blocking the rails. Crime is resulting in the loss of jobs in Mexico, and a deteriorating perspective for global investment in Mexico, the business council wrote. Last week, one of Mexicos largest food products companies, Lala, announced that it had suspended operations at a distribution center in Ciudad Mante, in the northern border state of Tamaulipas, for security reasons since May 3. Violence in Ciudad Mante has been blamed on fighting between factions of the Zetas known as the Northeast cartel and the Old School Zetas. State prosecutor Irving Barrios said his office was investigating complaints from Lala and another company, Sello Rojo, about extortion attempts. In April, Mexicos largest Coca-Cola bottler said it had indefinitely suspended operations in the city of Ciudad Altamirano, in southern Guerrero state, due to violence. Coca-Cola FEMSA said it was closing the distribution plant in Guerrero state because in January employees there began receiving constant threats and attacks by organized crime, a phrase that usually refers to drug cartels. It also cited a recent unjustified attack on one of its employees, but did not specify what happened. FEMSA complained of a lack of rule of law and the prevalence of impunity in the area around Ciudad Altamirano. The area near Guerreros border with Michoacan state has long been dominated by drug gangs, most recently by the Knights Templar and La Familia cartels. The cartels frequently extort protection payments from smaller, family-owned businesses, but large multinational companies have sometimes been targeted as well. In 2012, the Knights Templar cartel in Michoacan burned five warehouses and dozens of vehicles owned by the Sabritas snack company, a Mexican subsidiary of PepsiCo. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Mexico Rob Kepperling will step into the role of Illinois branch manager for Pennsylvania-based Erie Insurance on June 7, the company announced. Kepperling began his career with Erie Insurance in 2004 in the Claims division. In 2011, he moved into a sales role as a senior district sales manager for Tennessee. In 2014, he held an integral role helping Erie open for business in the state of Kentucky. Kepperling has earned several insurance designations including his associate in claims, associate in insurance services, certified insurance counselor and certified professional insurance agent. Source: Erie Insurance Topics Illinois In May 2016, Lewis Christman was flying from Chicago to Rome when he suffered a bout of acute pancreatitis. He curled into a fetal position on the floor. He spent the next seven hours in agony while the plane flew on. The next three months, he spent in hospitals. This month, Christman sued, accusing United Continental Holdings Inc. of ignoring a recommendation from a doctor on board to divert the flight and failing to contact medical consultants on the ground. It was another round of bad publicity for United and one that draws scrutiny to how U.S. air carriers treat passengers in distress and the pressure to keep flights in the air. Obviously, there is a significant cost to landing the plane, said David Axelrod, Christmans lawyer. Were looking for all the information about this incident, where my poor client is doubled over in pain and hes vomiting and theyre not landing this plane. A medical emergency sets in motion a high-altitude calculation with human lives in the balance. While pilots are the ultimate decision-makers, airlines have earth-bound medical consultants that help bypass on-board volunteers reducing expensive emergency landings, but with the potential of providing expert decisions in real time. Washing Hands Christmans suit seeks information about the incident from Phoenix-based MedAire Inc., which provides in-flight medical advice to more than 100 airlines. Company spokeswoman Mandy Eddington declined to comment on the lawsuit or any relationship with United. Paulo Alves, MedAires global medical director of aviation health, said in an interview before the suit was filed that his company provides help from doctors with extensive experience. Just 1.6 percent of flights in which MedAire is called are diverted. He said airlines see the value in bypassing medicos who happen to be aboard. If the model was not financially interesting for them, then they wouldnt hire us, Alves said. Doctors, they tend to recommend diversions more than we do, because of course they dont want to assume the long-term responsibility. A medical emergency occurs once every 604 flights and 7.3 percent led to diversions, according to a 2013 New England Journal of Medicine study. It also found that 0.3 percent of emergencies on planes end in deaths. Accounting Aloft Its fairly expensive to divert an aircraft, and so a captain has to take into account a whole host of issues, said Jose Nable, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital and co-author of a 2017 paper on in-flight emergencies. Perry Flint, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association airline trade group, said his organization estimates that a diversion can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $200,000. Erin Benson Scharra, a United Airlines spokeswoman said the company is investigating Christmans claims, but declined to speak further about medical diversions or consultants it employs. Companies like MedAire, housed in the emergency unit of the Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix, play a key role in diversion decisions. STAT-MD Inc., which offers a similar service and uses doctors from the University of Pittsburgh, works with around 20 national and international air carriers. It says it reduces landings that would otherwise be recommended by nervous and out-of-their-element doctors in the sky. Theyre going to revert to divert, said T.J. Doyle, the medical director for STAT-MD. The medical volunteer should be a data-gatherer and a procedure-doer. They should not be a decision-maker. Special Snacks The emergencies encountered by medical professionals on flights vary in severity. Internal medicine doctor Gina Jabbour of New York revived an elderly woman who fainted after using the bathroom. The flight continued on schedule and Jabbour was rewarded by a flight attendant with secret cookies. Scott Schoifet, an orthopedic surgeon, was dozing on a flight from Japan to New York in 2006 when he was awakened to help a fellow passenger with chest pain. Flight attendants asked Schoifet whether it was safe to continue flying. It was stressful first because theyre looking at me like, What do you want to do? Schoifet said. I cant make this decision. Theres 350 people on the plane. He checked in with the woman for the rest of the flight until she disembarked at a stop in Detroit, and then the plane continued on. High-Level Help This month, a Delta Air Lines Inc. passenger passed out before takeoff at Fort Lauderdales airport. The person was treated by none other than U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who was traveling from Florida to Mississippi for a discussion on the opioid epidemic. The plane was still on the tarmac, and Adams helped evaluate the traveler, who ended up going to the hospital. Medical emergencies on planes set in motion a chain reaction. Elise May, the manager of inflight safety and regulatory compliance for Southwest Airlines Co., said flight attendants first protect themselves. Then they page for a medical professional on board. Southwests flight attendants are trained in basic care, and are equipped with iPads that have manuals and headsets to contact ground-based consultants. The decision on whether to divert is ultimately made by the pilot and dispatcher, but it is dependent a lot on our medical consultant and what they feel is the danger of the situation, May said. Theres all sorts of things to take into consideration. Doctors are protected by a federal law that protects air carriers and individuals from liability while providing assistance in the air. But the Hippocratic oath remains their lodestar. Ethically, I feel like there is this responsibility for me to intervene, said Meera Shah, a New York doctor who helped revive a woman passed out on a plane this year. What if I wasnt there? I always think about that. Copyright 2021 Bloomberg. Topics New York Aviation The small business market is big. The U.S. small commercial market represents about one-third of the total commercial lines market and generates between $99 billion and $103 billion in direct written premium, according to a 2016 McKinsey & Co. report. It could be a much bigger market as more businesses are being started. Since 1994, the United States has had an average of 400,000 business startups a year. Business startup activity was up again in 2016, continuing a three-year ascension and reaching pre-recession levels, according to the 2017 Kauffman Index of Startup Activity, from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The number of startup firms firms one year old or newer rose to 415,226 in the year ended March 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2015, new startup firms created 2.5 million jobs. A three-year upward trend in new business formation is a promising sign for the economy, said Victor Hwang, vice president of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation. Recent research demonstrates that more startups lead to higher productivity, wage growth and quality of life. Growing startups not only support individual entrepreneurs but lift surrounding communities. All of this small business activity presents opportunities for insurance agents and carriers because there is an insurance gap. Many small businesses have been caught without flood or business interruption insurance and many more report that they are not buying cyber insurance. But the gap is much bigger than that. The McKinsey report found that almost 40 percent of U.S. sole proprietorships dont carry any commercial coverage. Digital small business insurer Next Insurance surveyed 30,000 small businesses and learned that 44 percent that have been in business for at least a year have never had insurance. The market is also very competitive. Again, according to McKinsey, the U.S. small commercial segment is divided among many carriers, with the largest accounting for only 6 percent of total premiums. Market share is particularly fragmented at the smaller end of the market (businesses with one to 29 employees). However, the largest carriers are moving quickly to secure their positions. In the past six years, the market share of large carriers with more than $2.5 billion in direct written premiums for U.S. small commercial has increased by 12 percentage points, suggesting that scale is an important driver of growth, McKinsey said. Large carriers now represent 51 percent of premiums in the group of small businesses with 1 to 29 full-time employees. Competition is coming from online providers. For every incumbent insurer committing to agents and the small business market like Travelers, Chubb, CNA and The Hartford, there is also at least one investing in or partnering with online platforms that bypass agents and brokers. In addition, there is a growing number of tech-oriented online brokers focused on small commercial lines including Embroker, Next, Bunker and CoverWallet to name a few. Carrier positions vary within the small business segment because small business accounts range widely in size and scope, says Craig Welsh, distribution leader at Westfield Insurance Co., an Ohio-based independent agency property/casualty carrier, ranked No. 13 on Insurance Journals Super Regional P/C Insurers list developed by Demotech. When you look at market size, small business is really the largest segment of commercial entities, mostly state-by-state, and overall, so theres huge potential, Welsh said. Its also an industry thats fairly fragmented. When you look at market share by carrier, theres no single carrier, or I should say group of carriers that tend to dominate the market. Thats because a lot of it is still handled through local agents. Welsh sees plenty of opportunity for agents and their carrier partners in small business given the evolving definition of a small business account, a better economy, and the fragmentation of the insurance market serving small business. Steve Tombarelli, vice president of SIAAs Business Insurance Advantage, sees opportunity for agents in the many new small businesses being opened. SIAAs insurance carriers are loving small business opportunity, too. Its an area they want to grow and expand, says Tombarelli. They all want to grow small commercial business. The Hartford, which recently bought the small business accounts of Foremost, has been committed to the market for a long time. It is a critical business for us, says Matt Kirk, head of sales and distribution for small commercial at The Hartford. Its very important that we support our agency partners in this space. Kirk says that from an agency perspective small business is an area with real opportunity. When you look at the economic data, and who drives a local economy, small businesses tend to be the ones hiring and buying equipment, he said. Plus, small businesses sometimes turn into large businesses. Its a great space but its very important from an agents perspective to ensure that their carriers bring product and capabilities that are going to be responsive to their agency and the small business owners. So how can agents best capitalize on this opportunity? Five Strategies for Small Business Success Insurance Journals discussions with agents and carriers unearthed strategies for succeeding in the small commercial lines segment today: rearrange and redefine; utilize service centers; specialize; upgrade technology and stay committed. Here are five strategies to agents to consider: 1. Rearrange and Redefine McKinseys definition of small business includes businesses with up to 100 employees and $100,000 in annual premiums. But not everyone follows that formula. Both agencies and carriers tend to define small business a little bit differently and theres some interesting aspects to that, according to Westfields Welsh. For a long time, small business implied smaller premiums, and oftentimes I think in our industry small premiums mean small service. However, small business can be larger premium accounts, too. Minneapolis, Minn.-based Hays Companies has managed to grow its small business book by reorganizing its overall book to create a dedicated small business unit. Erin Keys, Hays Companies Premier Programs practice leader, says the process began last year, and so far, it has improved the agencys profitability as well as its relationships with key carrier partners. Its very transactional business, said Keys, noting that the agency understood it needed a better way to handle the many accounts it had on the books for small business. Prior to the transition, Hays had about 14 marketers on the property/casualty team, and everyone was handling a book that included both small to large national accounts even though small business is handled a little differently. We wanted to get the proper procedures in place to handle small business and just keep everything together, get organized, she said. Daily, transactional processing is now handled under the Premier Programs department. Keys says it helps to quickly turn around certificates of insurance and other endorsements, as well as answer any underwriting questions. They could immediately get ahold of someone to help in that front. Producers and account servicers still interact with the clients to some extent, but the regular transactions are now concentrated within the new unit. To make the change, Hays looked at its overall book of business and pulled out those accounts with $10,000 in revenue or less. Then we looked at how many different carriers we were using and who was receiving the bulk of the business, Keys said. We vetted each carrier, starting at the zero to $2,500 (range) in revenue. Keys said that process made it clear that the agency could get by with fewer carriers to successfully run its small business and programs. We went from utilizing about 35 carriers and excess and surplus lines brokers to consolidating to just three. We are now up to about five, she said. Keys says there are still a few outlier partners in small business, but now the agency tends to push the bulk of the business to its five partner carriers. Its been great, she said. Theyre all national providers, with strong Hays relationships on the small business side as well as the middle market, large/national account side. The move has helped profitability all-around, including growth in contingency income as well as improved loss ratios. Carriers welcomed the change, Keys said. We said to them, Heres what our book looks like. We need to partner with you guys, and we need you to think a little bit outside the box, and not just write your typical, four-walls, in-office exposure. We might need you to help us on an account with a little meat on it.' Keys has seen additional benefits of the move. The agencys carriers have been writing some accounts they may not have written without the consolidation. Hays is now well-positioned as more big name carriers are making the move to build their small business books. New carriers to small business, such as Chubb and Liberty Mutual, as well as traditional legacy small business carriers, like The Hartford and Travelers, are investing in online rating systems and expanding appetite, she said. Keys advises other agencies to find the right partner that has a large breath of appetite and is willing to think outside the box. Then consolidate your book, she said. Its been successful for us, on the front-end and on the back-end. Redefining the small business segment has worked for others as well. Herman S. Peery, senior vice president, at Insurance Office of America Inc. (IOA) based in Longwood, Fla., has selected a different way to refer to its small business. Small business is a very broad term, Peery said. In fact, weve eliminated the term small in our definition of the clientele that would be identified for this group. We refer to them as select because it is a select group of clients that would fit into this category. Rather than size of revenue, number of employees or even size of premium, IOA uses other criteria to define its select business. We look at it as a service need, he says. Once the account has secured coverage, and marketing is complete, select clients operate autonomously until the next renewal cycle comes up. We would consider that a candidate for our select division. Deseriee Wanson, IOAs director of commercial sales and development, says select accounts range anywhere from $500 in premium all the way up to several hundred thousand dollars in premium. We have a team here locally of 23 employees that are set up to support and provide a frictionless delivery of the policies to our clients, while maintaining our core coverages, and the high service levels that IOA as an organization displays to our clients, she said. 2. Utilize Service Centers Agencies have also found success in the small premium segment by utilizing insurance carrier service centers. Lou Mitchell, chief operating officer, at Sihle Insurance Group, an independent agency based in Altamonte Springs, Fla., says that over the past five years, Sihle has grown its small business book about 10 percent to 15 percent per year. According to Mitchell, the growth has been purely organic due more small companies starting up in Florida. As a general rule, Sihle defines small business accounts as any account less than $15,000 in premium. If an account is on the smaller end of that, say less than $2,500 in premium, Sihle requires that the business go to a carrier service center. Typically, small commercial would generate 15 percent commission, but using a carrier service center costs the agency one to two percentage points of commission. In Mitchells view, the cut in commission is well worth the cost to the agency. That eliminates us handling the $500, $600, or $1,000 policies that would put us in the red as soon as we do a certificate of insurance, he figures. The service center handles all servicing needs and renewal activity. Plus, the carrier then assumes any errors and omissions exposure for that account, he said. If that carrier decides they no longer want to write that type of business then they would give us proper notice at the agency level that its going to be non-renewed for whatever reason and then we get involved again and find another carrier to place it with, he said. Sihle remains the agent of record. Mitchell admits some carriers are much better at service centers than others. But I think the overall key is that when a client is first written it has to go to the service center then. Its very difficult to write a client and give it the personal service that we deliver to our clients from an agency standpoint and then the next year say, Oh, well, youre going to a service center,' he said. The ones who do it best offer extended hours, can handle changes efficiently, and have the know-how to determine how changes will affect policies of the client, added SIAAs Tombarelli. Mitchell maintains that service centers are one reason Sihle has increased its small business book. Because of the volumes that we write we have with some carriers assign people and direct lines that all of our clients call to, he said. We even have one service center that answers the phone as Sihle Insurance and they have Sihle Insurance stationary and business cards. People have no idea that theyre actually being serviced by a carrier service center. Mitchell particularly likes Westfields approach. Ive dealt with tons of them but theyre by far the most unique in the way theyre set up and how they execute day to day business, he said. Sihle doesnt discriminate on the type of small business account, which has helped the agency grow its small business, too, Mitchell says. We dont market the size as much as we market the general community itself, he said. We dont turn people away and we very seldom ever refer to somebody else. Thats why we use the service centers on the mini-accounts as we call them, so we dont have to turn somebody away. 3. Specialize SIAAs Tombarelli says one of the most important things about succeeding in small business is to have a diverse book. We encourage agents to have a diverse book, he said. Each year, different segments of the economy go well or slow down. For instance, when the economy is strong, construction thrives and when the economy is weak, construction is one of the first industries to have cuts. Connecticut, home state to Smith Brothers Insurance in Glastonbury, lags behind the nation in job creation and drumming up new small business accounts has taken a bit more planning, according to Jared Carillo, director of foundation accounts at Smith Brothers, a core agency partner for BroadStreet Partners Inc. Connecticut is a challenging place to be attractive to bring new people in the door, Carillo said. In our world, where were growing is really by seeking out those clients that require the services of an advisor. To a degree, we are profiling those business that rely more heavily on the advice that we give them businesses with a little bit more complexity than just vanilla. Smith Brothers defines small business clients as those generating commission income of $5,000 or less. Carillo estimates that roughly 90 percent of new small commercial business is organic, new business. Most is being generated strictly through word of mouth via referrals, he said. Carillo says that while a lot of new business stems from typical general insurance in the small commercial space, the agency has found some areas where specialization has helped drive growth. We have three different spaces in our agency that we specialize in for small commercial lawyers, trucking and transportation exposed risks, and jewelers, he said. For Smith Brothers, the ideal small business client is one that will really listen and understand the risks that they face, as well as the valued advice of an independent agent. Thats the level of client that we desire and seek, he said. According to the Connecticut agent, success in this market comes with being deliberate in profiling the type of client that the agency wants to interact with, as well as having a variety of specialties. Its not just the size of the revenue, he said. Carillo says that its pretty easy to start throwing more money at advertising, go door to door, distributing pamphlets to get any client. But we are finding the best success by getting solicitations and networking within our current satisfied group of clients. 4. Upgrade Technology Both carriers and agencies believe it is important to stay on the cutting edge of technology to make it in the small business market. As we move into the future in small business, a real key component to being successful is to stay on the forefront of the technology thats available to us to deliver both product and service to our small business customer, says Chris Rooker, managing director of commercial property/casualty at Higginbotham, headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. Rooker believes the industry lags at times in its delivery mechanisms for small commercial policies, which is a threat to agents. Were going to have to be able to utilize the technology thats becoming available both in our agencies and as we interact with our customers, and partner insurance carriers. In his view, the industry isnt quite there. Today, most people like to do business on their iPhone, he says. But most small businesses right now, from an insurance perspective cant do their business off their iPhone. Rooker says that needs to change. I think if an agent is going be successful five years from now, or maybe less, theyre going to have to develop the technologies that allow these small business owners to access their insurance policies their auto ID cards, their certificates of insurance, and other service related matters in an easy fashion, he said. Some small business carriers and agency management systems provide some sort of mobile technology to meet customer needs, but most do not, according to Rooker. Theres a true gap in the ability to service customers via an iPhone or mobile device, he said. 5. Stay Committed Whatever agencies do when it comes to being successful in small business they must be committed to the market, says Andy Wood, Insureons executive vice president of retail operations. Headquartered in Chicago, Insureon provides online capabilities that connect small business owners with insurance providers. Insureon has made small business its only business by delivering fast, online insurance to micro-small businesses, or those typically with less than 10 employees. Most agencies cannot invest in the type of technology it takes to write more than 200,000 micro-small business customers, like Insureon, but Wood says independent agents can still find success. Youve got to be committed to it, he said. Its not something you can just jump into and jump out of. Insureon is a high-volume agency that emphasizes efficiency. For us, that translates into imagining a funnel when somebody comes to our website and being able to drive them through the application process very quickly without a lot of people falling off, having processes in place to pick up those people who have dropped off to save them. Then once you get them in through the application process, get them quotes quickly and then bind quickly, he said. Youre not wasting lot of energy. Youre not wasting a lot of space. Obviously, there is money to be made, if you can do it efficiently and effectively. Woods says some agencies struggle in small commercial because they dont have the economic mindset to invest in small business. By necessity, they will jump to where the opportunities are, so they work on some health. They might work on some personal lines. They might run across a small commercial account here and there, he said. But if you really want to be successful at it, youve got to have resources that are dedicated to it, and youve got to have a very well-defined, clearly articulated marketing plan on how youre going to go after that small commercial space. Economics drive success in small business. Youve got to be super-efficient and super-effective, he said. Topics Carriers Agencies Trends USA Commercial Lines InsurTech Business Insurance Tech Property Casualty Market Connecticut Startups Small Business Note: This story originally appeared in The Texas Tribune. Less than two weeks after 10 people were killed in a southeast Texas school shooting, Gov. Greg Abbott laid out a 40-page, 40-strategy plan for preventing future school shootings, and left the door open to calling lawmakers back to Austin to pass some of those priorities. If there is consensus on some laws that could be passed, I am open to calling [a special session], Abbott said. A special session would be a dramatic move during an election year in which he, all top state officials and a majority of lawmakers are seeking new terms. Its even more rare given how emotionally charged and politically divisive issues of school safety and gun control are. Some lawmakers have demanded that Abbott, who has the sole authority to call and set agendas for special sessions, take such action. Most Texans responding to a poll taken before the Santa Fe shooting said they support stricter gun control laws. Much of the plan Abbott laid out Wednesday would require approval from the Texas Legislature, which will not reconvene until January 2019 unless Abbott intervenes. Suspected shooter Dimitrios Pagourtzis, a 17-year-old junior at the high school, has been in custody in Galveston County since the attack at Santa Fe High School. Abbotts announcement, made at the Dallas school districts headquarters Wednesday, came one day after Santa Fe students returned to class for the first time following the deadly shootings. Thirteen people were also injured in the attack. At the heart of the governors proposal is an expansion of the existing School Marshal Program, one of two existing systems for arming school personnel. More than 170 school districts of the 1,000-plus in Texas already have some type of system for arming educators and other staff. Santa Fe ISD, in fact, had already approved the plan, but had not yet implemented it. Abbott said he would not propose requiring schools to join that program, but that the state should pay for the training associated with it. When an active shooter situation arises, the difference between life and death can be a matter of seconds, Abbott said. Trained security personnel can make all the difference. Abbott also raised narrow, gun-related proposals, including the tightening of Texas safe gun storage and laws. Current Texas law holds parents accountable when their minor children under the age of 17 access their loaded weapons. Because Pagourtzis was 17, his family wont be liable under that law, though they are being sued under other, more general liability statutes. Abbott proposed raising that age to include 17-year-olds, a measure that would bring Texas in line with dozens of other states that have stricter child-access prevention laws. And he proposed expanding a mental health screening program already operated through Texas Tech University. He said he hopes to eventually make that program currently operational in 10 school districts a statewide system, and said he recommends Texas fund it with $20 million. The Telemedicine Wellness, Intervention, Triage, and Referral Project at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, which aims to identify junior high and high school students at risk of committing school violence and intervene before tragedy occurs, has already had 25 students removed from school, 44 placed in alternative schools and 38 sent to a hospital. Abbott had praised that program just hours after the shooting, tweeting that we want to use it across the state. This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/30/texas-gov-greg-abbott-santa-fe-shooting-school-safety-plan-gun-laws/. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans and engages with them about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. Topics Texas Legislation Education A South Carolina judge declared a mistrial in a case against Johnson & Johnson alleging that exposure to asbestos in its Johnsons Baby Powder caused a womans fatal cancer. Jurors in Darlington County state court were unable to reach a unanimous decision on Friday in the case brought by the husband of Bertila Boyd-Bostic, according to Judge Jean Toal. The judge said she didnt know when a retrial would take place. Boyd-Bostic, 30, and her husband ran a three-person law firm in Columbia, South Carolina. The woman died of mesothelioma, a cancer linked to asbestos exposure. Her husband alleged it was caused by trace amounts of the mineral in baby powder she used regularly. We continue to believe that the daily use of talcum powder on Bertila from birth led to her death, lawyers for Boyd-Bostic at Motley Rice LLC said in a statement. She ultimately wanted to share her story with others through her suit, they said. We look forward to retrying this case at the earliest opportunity. J&J denies that its baby powder contains carcinogens. The company faces a growing number of claims from people alleging they developed cancer as a result of exposure to trace amounts of asbestos in the product. More than 9,000 plaintiffs have made such claims, primarily connecting talc to ovarian cancer, according to a May securities filing for the company. J&J didnt break out the number of ovarian cancer cases versus the number of mesothelioma cases allegedly tied to talc. A California jury hit J&J this week with a $25.7 million verdict tied to a 68-year-old womans claim her cancer was caused by baby powder use. Juries in state court in St. Louis in 2016 and 2017 found J&J liable in four separate trials on womens claims their baby powder use caused them to develop ovarian cancer. The first, for $72 million, was erased on appeal on jurisdictional grounds. The others are on appeal. J&J also won reversal of a $417 million ovarian cancer verdict in California awarded in 2017. Were disappointed the jury did not reach a unanimous verdict for Johnson & Johnson, Carol Goodrich, a spokeswoman for the company, said in an emailed statement. The talc in Johnsons Baby Powder does not contain asbestos which is supported by more than 50 years of independent, non-litigation driven scientific evaluations. The case is Bostic v. 3M Co., 17-CP-16-0400, Court of Common Pleas for the County of Darlington, South Carolina. Copyright 2021 Bloomberg. Topics Lawsuits South Carolina Two survivors of deadly Tennessee wildfires that began in Great Smoky Mountains National Park have sued the federal government, claiming they lost loved ones and a home because of the negligence of park workers. The lawsuit in Knoxville was filed May 23 by the two victims of the November 2016 Gatlinburg area fire: Michael Reed, whose wife and two daughters died, and James England, whose home burned down. They seek a combined $14.8 million in damages. They blame their losses on claims that federal parks employees violated established fire-management policies, failed to prioritize the safety of citizens and property, and failed to notify and warn of threats posed by the fire. The Park Service declined to comment. The lawsuit claims that park senior leaders decided to contain, and not extinguish, the fire in the park despite extreme drought conditions. The plan to keep the fire within a 410-acre (165-hectare) area was a debacle of historic proportions, the lawsuit adds, arguing the decision not to put out the fire was taken because steep, rocky terrain posed a safety risk to firefighters. These failures notably included their blatant disregard of mandatory requirements to monitor the Chimney Tops 2 Fire for five consecutive days and their failure to notify or warn local governments, park neighbors, local residents and visitors of the absolute and imminent danger the fire posed to them, the lawsuit states. Hurricane-force winds blew embers from the park into Gatlinburg and downed power lines, sparking more fires. Fourteen people died and about 2,500 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Spokeswoman Dana Soehn said the Park Service doesnt comment on active litigation. Park officials found the fire on a Wednesday, but left it unmonitored and unattended in the overnight hours of five consecutive nights to discover the blaze had grown from less than an acre to between 250 and 500 acres (100-200 hectares), according to the lawsuit. National Guard helicopters and air-tankers werent used for the first four days because park fire management officer Greg Salansky concluded the fire wasnt big enough to warrant that expense, and had concerns about polluting the environment and drinking water supply downstream, the lawsuit says. On that Monday, a Gatlinburg Fire Department captain called the park to ask about thick smoke pouring into the city, according to the lawsuit. It said Salansky advised him that everything was under control and no help was needed, even as the fire sped toward Gatlinburg, the lawsuit says. Authorities have said two juveniles started the fire in a remote section of the park. The blaze left the park five days later. Local prosecutors dropped charges against the boys in June because other fires from downed power lines contributed to the inferno in Gatlinburg. A previous outside review ordered by the city of Gatlinburg and Sevier County found that reliance on limited information from the National Weather Service and park officials meant that the predicted speed and severity of the impending firestorm was inaccurate. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Lawsuits Catastrophe Natural Disasters Wildfire Tennessee North Carolinas governor is urging his states residents to exercise caution as rains from a subtropical depression spread into his and other Southern states, noting the deaths of two broadcast journalists killed by a falling tree as they reported on the severe weather associated with Alberto. The television news anchor and a photojournalist colleague were killed Monday in North Carolina while covering the very fringes of the large system whose core made landfall hundreds of miles (kilometers) away on the northern Gulf Coast. Authorities said a tree became uprooted from rain-soaked soil and toppled on the news teams SUV, killing the two instantly. Two journalists working to keep the public informed about this storm have tragically lost their lives, and we mourn with their families, friends and colleagues, Cooper said in a statement. North Carolina needs to take Alberto seriously. I urge everyone to keep a close eye on forecasts, warnings and road conditions, especially in western North Carolina where even heavier rain is predicted. The dead were identified as working for a station based in Greenville, South Carolina. WYFF-TV Anchor Mike McCormick and photojournalist Aaron Smeltzer both had worked in the Greenville market for more than a decade, anchor Carol Goldsmith said on air, breaking the news of their deaths Monday. Mike and Aaron were beloved members of our team our family, Goldsmith said. The men were driving on U.S. Highway 176 near Tryon when the large tree fell on their vehicle, North Carolina Highway Patrol Master Trooper Murico Stephens said. McCormick and Smeltzer had just interviewed Tryon Fire Chief Geoffrey Tennant. They told Tennant to be careful with Albertos remnants expected to bring more heavy rains and mudslides to North Carolina. He told them to be careful too. Ten minutes later we get the call and it was them, Tennant said at a news conference, his voice cracking. A woman died in a mudslide on May 19 not far from the area and officials in one especially hard-hit county were asking people living in vulnerable areas to voluntary leave before the weather got worse. Neither Stephens nor Tennant directly blamed the up to 2 inches (5 centimeters) of rain that fell Monday for the deaths. The fire chief said the roots of a large tree were loosened in ground saturated by a week of rain. The TV vehicle engines was still running and the transmission was in drive when crews found it. The men died instantly, said Tennant. McCormick was a weekend anchor for the Greenville station and covered Spartanburg and surrounding areas. He came to the station in April 2007. Smeltzer worked in Greenville for more than a decade, coming to WYFF-TV from a different station in the market. He touted on his Twitter biography of winning four Emmys. WHNS-TV reporter Derek Dellinger competed with McCormick and Smeltzer, but also considered them friends. He called Smeltzer a perfectionist and McCormick a hard worker and a nice guy. Despite being the competition, I had interactions with (McCormick) both in and out of work, and we would talk about work issues, talk about life everything, Dellinger said, calling him a good guy with a warm heart. Weather forecasters say the threat of flooding continues in western North Carolina and for part of the states coastline. The National Weather Service had a flood watch in effect through Wednesday morning for the western part of the state because of moisture from subtropical storm Alberto. Forecasters say heavy rain will continue in western North Carolina where there has been heavy rain for two weeks. The weather service said up to 5 inches (13 centimeters) of rain is possible. A flash flood watch was also in effect along the southeast coast. The weather service said another 2 inches (5 centimeters) of rain was possible in the Wilmington area. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics North Carolina Alliant Insurance Services Inc. has named David Harper senior vice president within its Healthcare Group. He will be based in Orange County, Calif. and design customized insurance and risk management solutions for clients throughout the Western Region. Harper was previously regional director with Beecher Carlson. He was president and founder of DW Harper Group Inc. before that. Newport Beach, Calif.-based Alliant provides property/casualty, workers compensation, employee benefits, surety, and financial products and services. Topics California What Is Basel III? Basel III is a 2009 international regulatory accord that introduced a set of reforms designed to mitigate risk within the international banking sector, by requiring banks to maintain proper leverage ratios and keep certain levels of reserve capital on hand. Basel III was rolled out by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervisionthen a consortium of central banks from 28 countries, shortly after the credit crisis of 2008. Although the voluntary implementation deadline for the new rules was originally 2015, the date has been repeatedly pushed back and currently stands at January 1, 2022. Key Takeaways Basel III is an international regulatory accord that introduced a set of reforms designed to improve the regulation, supervision, and risk management within the banking sector. Basel III is an iterative step in the ongoing effort to enhance the banking regulatory framework. A consortium of central banks from 28 countries published Basil III in 2009, largely in response to the credit crisis resulting from the 2008 economic recession. 1:22 Basel III Understanding Basel III Basel III, which is alternatively referred to as the Third Basel Accord or Basel Standards, is part of the continuing effort to enhance the international banking regulatory framework. It specifically builds on the Basel I and Basel II documents in a campaign to improve the banking sector's ability to deal with financial stress, improve risk management, and promote transparency. On a more granular level, Basel III seeks to strengthen the resilience of individual banks in order to reduce the risk of system-wide shocks and prevent future economic meltdowns. Minimum Capital Requirements by Tiers Banks have two main silos of capital that are qualitatively different from one another. Tier 1 refers to a bank's core capital, equity, and the disclosed reserves that appear on the bank's financial statements. In the event that a bank experiences significant losses, Tier 1 capital provides a cushion that allows it to weather stress and maintain a continuity of operations. By contrast, Tier 2 refers to a bank's supplementary capital, such as undisclosed reserves and unsecured subordinated debt instruments that must have an original maturity of at least five years. Since the rollout of Basel III, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has expanded its membership to 45 members. A bank's total capital is calculated by adding both tiers together. Under Basel III, the minimum total capital ratio is 12.9%, whereby the minimum Tier 1 capital ratio is 10.5% of its total risk-weighted assets (RWA), while the minimum Tier 2 capital ratio is 2% of the RWA. Countercyclical Measures Basel III introduced new requirements with respect to regulatory capital with which large banks can endure cyclical changes on their balance sheets. During periods of credit expansion, banks must set aside additional capital. During times of credit contraction, capital requirements can be relaxed. The new guidelines also introduced the bucketing method, in which banks are grouped according to their size, complexity, and importance to the overall economy. Systematically important banks are subject to higher capital requirements. Leverage and Liquidity Measures Basel III likewise introduced leverage and liquidity requirements aimed at safeguarding against excessive borrowing, while ensuring that banks have sufficient liquidity during periods of financial stress. In particular, the leverage ratio, computed as Tier 1 capital divided by the total of on and off-balance assets minus intangible assets, was capped at 3%. Definition of Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) The Car Allowance Rebate System was a U.S. government program that allowed people to trade in used vehicles that did not meet government-specified fuel economy standards. Under President Barack Obamas administration, people trading in old cars could qualify for a discount of either $3,500 or $4,500 off the purchase or five-plus-year lease of a newer, more fuel efficient vehicle. The program began on July 1, 2009, and ended shortly thereafter because it became so popular that funds quickly ran out. Understanding Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) Commonly known as "Cash for Clunkers," the Car Allowance Rebate Systems stated purposes were to reduce air pollution, to stimulate consumer spending and to prop up struggling U.S. auto manufacturers (though the program did allow the purchase of foreign vehicles). Ultimately, consumers traded in as estimated 680,000 vehicles. Car dealers were required to crush or shred the trade-in vehicles. The Car Allowance Rebate System was initially a $1 billion program. Due to its popularity, Congress quickly allocated an additional $2 billion, bringing the total to $3 billion. (CARS) Legislative History Economist Alan Blinder helped popularize the idea of a scrappage program, and the moniker "cash for clunkers", with his July 2008 op-ed piece in the New York Times. Blinder argued that a cash-for-clunkers program would have a tripartite purpose of helping the environment, stimulating the economy, and reducing economic inequality. The House approved the creation of a cash-for-clunkers program with the 298 to 119 passage of the CARS Act. In the Senate, the cash-for-clunkers legislation was inserted into a larger war supplemental funding bill. In response to the U.S. Department of Transportation estimate that the $1 billion appropriated for the system was almost exhausted by July 30, 2009, due to very high demand, Congress approved an additional $2 billion for the program with the explicit support of the Obama Administration. CARS Eligibility Requirements The following criteria was put in place to qualify for the Car Allowance Rebate System program: What Is a Contingent Order? A contingent order is an order that is linked to, and requires, the execution of another event. The contingent order becomes live, or is executed, when the event occurs. An example is a stop loss order. The stop loss to sell is contingent upon a security first being bought. A contingent order is a type of conditional order. Key Takeaways A contingent order is one that relies on a specific event to occur before it can be made active. Orders can be contingent on each other, such as when two or more orders need to be executed at the same time. Orders can be contingent on another order or event, such as when a stop loss is automatically sent out once a trade has been entered. Understanding the Contingent Order Continent orders are contingent on something else happening before the contingent order is processed. A contingent order can be: An order involving the simultaneous execution of two or more transactions. An order where the execution depends upon the execution of another order. An order where the execution depends on specific criteria, such as price, volume, time, or other factors being met. In a simultaneous transaction, the orders are contingent on each other, as all the orders need to be processed at the same time. If they can't be processed at the same time, the orders remain pending until they can be executed at the same time. A contingent order could also be based on another order or event. For example, a trader may make an options buy order contingent on being filled on a stock buy order. Only once they own the stock should the options order be executed. The trader could also request the orders are executed simultaneously. Criteria an order is contingent upon could also include volume, price, time, or a host of other fundamental or technical tools. For example, an order may be contingent upon a security reaching a certain price, having a certain amount of volume, and achieving both of these within certain hours of the day. Contingent Order Uses Contingent orders are useful because they allow a trader to implement a strategy, or multiple positions, once the initial event occurs. If a trader had to post each transaction in sequential order, it may leave them vulnerable to losses or changes in price. For example, assume a trader wants to buy a stock at $50, but they also want to place a stop loss at $49.85, and a sell order (target) at $50.30 as soon they own the stock. This is called a bracketed order. They could do this manually, but if the stock price moves very quickly they may not get their orders out in time. If the stop loss and target are sent out contingent on the buy order being filled, the trader knows that whether the stock moves up or down they have orders out to capture profit and control risk. Also, there is another problem with doing it manually. If you buy a stock and try to place a sell order above the price and below the price (target and stop loss), the software probably won't let you do it. This is because the trading platform thinks you are trying to sell twice. But, if the stop loss and target are contingent upon the initial position, it knows that if the stop loss or target is reached, that order closes the position and the other order can be canceled because the initial position no longer exists. The software knows you are not trying to sell twice, and so it will let you put out both orders at the same time. One of the contingent orders will be canceled if the other contingent order is filled, in this case. Most brokers offer contingent order functionality. This may come through various order types, such as basket orders, multi-leg option orders, or bracket orders. The trader inputs what they want to happen first, and then sets the parameters for the contingent order(s). On a bracket order (which creates contingent orders) that would mean placing the initial order. Then the stop loss and target are set. The stop loss and target orders are only deployed if the initial order is executed. Contingent Order Example in the Options Market Contingent orders are commonly used in the options market, since some options trades have multiple legs. For example, a buy-write strategy involves the simultaneous purchase of a long stock position and the writing of a call option against that position. A trader may place a buy order for the long stock position that's contingent on the call option being written at a certain price, or vice versa. Without a contingent order, traders would have to execute two separate transactions. If the price changed between the two orders, the trader could experience a moment of elevated risk or potentially a worse (or better) price than expected on one of the transactions. The contingent order makes sure that the position is opened exactly as the trader expects. What Was Form 8891: U.S. Information Return for Beneficiaries of Certain Canadian Registered Retirement Plans? Form 8891: U.S. Information Return for Beneficiaries of Certain Canadian Registered Retirement Plans was an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) form completed by U.S. citizens or residents who participated in registered Canadian retirement savings plans or income funds. It was used to elect to defer U.S. income tax on these plans. The IRS discontinued Form 8891 as of the tax year 2015. Key Takeaways Form 8891 was filed by U.S. citizens or residents who participated in Canadian registered retirement savings plans or registered retirement income funds. Form 8891 was necessary to defer paying U.S. income tax on these retirement vehicles' earnings. The form was discontinued as of the tax year 2015. Understanding Form 8891 Form 8891: U.S. Information Return for Beneficiaries of Certain Canadian Registered Retirement Plans applied primarily to registered retirement savings plans (RRSPs) or registered retirement income funds (RRIFs). A registered retirement savings plan is a savings and investment vehicle for employees and the self-employed in Canada, similar to the U.S. 401(k) plan. Pretax money is placed into an RRSP and grows tax-free until withdrawal, at which time it is taxed at the account holder's marginal rate. A registered retirement income fund is similar to an annuity contract that pays out income to a beneficiary or a number of beneficiaries. To fund their retirement years, RRSP holders often roll over their RRSPs into an RRIF. Form 8891 was used to report any contributions made and distributions received from these plans, along with earnings accrued within the plan (even if they weren't distributed.) Who Filed Form 8891? Form 8891 was filed by any U.S. citizen or resident who contributed to and/or received benefits from an RRSP or RRIF. The form was completed for any year the taxpayer received a distribution from the plan. A separate form was required for each plan. The completed form was submitted to the IRS along with Form 1040, even if a joint return was filed. The taxpayer was required to fill out his or her personal information including name, address, and Social Security number. The form also required the name and address of the plan custodian (the financial institution or firm where the account was held) and the account number, as well as the type of plan. The remainder of the form required information regarding the distributions and interest income, which was then entered on Form 1040. Why Was Form 8891 Discontinued? The IRS announced the elimination of Form 8891 on Oct. 7, 2014. The change related to a longstanding U.S.-Canada tax treaty provision that enables U.S. citizens and resident aliens to defer tax on income accruing in their RRSP or RRIF. Otherwise, U.S. tax is due each year on this income, even if it is not distributed. But to qualify for the deferral, taxpayers had to attach Form 8891 to their return and choose this tax treaty benefit, something many eligible taxpayers failed to do. The agency also found many individuals neglected to properly prepare Form 8891 each year and report details about each of their RRSPs or RRIFs, including contributions made, income earned, distributions received, and the year-end balance. As a result, if the forms were not properly filled out or filed with the annual U.S. income tax return, income earned in their RRSP or RRIF could have been taxablewhether or not the individual actually withdrew the funds. Under the old system, a primary way to correct the omission of not filing Form 8891 and retroactively obtain the treaty benefit was to request a private letter ruling from the IRS, a costly and often time-consuming process. So, "to simplify procedures for U.S. taxpayers," the IRS discontinued Form 8891. They were no longer required to file it, for any tax year, past or present. In addition, the IRS provided retroactive relief to eligible taxpayers who failed to properly file the appropriate forms in the past. As a result of the change, many U.S.-dwelling taxpayers with RRSPs or RRIFs automatically qualify for tax deferrals similar to those in other retirement vehicles, such as individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and 401(k) plans. Most U.S.-dwelling individuals are eligible for deferral as long as they properly file U.S. income tax returns. What Is the KOF Economic Barometer? The KOF Economic Barometer is a composite indicator that provides a reliable reading on the direction of GDP growth for the Swiss economy compared with the same quarter a year earlier. The KOF Economic Barometer is based on a multi-sectoral design with three modules: core GDP, construction, and banking. The barometer has a complex structure because it bundles over 500 individual indicators in several steps. It is published monthly by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute. Key Takeaways The KOF Economic Barometer is a composite leading indicator of Swiss GDP growth. The current version of the Barometer is constructed of an aggregate of over 200 economic variables related to the Swiss economy. Investors and financial traders use the KO Economic Barometer to inform decisions regarding Swiss investments. Understanding the KOF Economic Barometer The concept of the barometer is to indicate the status of the Swiss business cycle, as captured by a reference series that reflects the Swiss GDP monthly growth rate, as early as possible. Movements in the KOF Economic Barometer on average lead movements in the reference series by one month. The KOF Economic Barometer demonstrates leading indicator properties with respect to both the synthetic reference time series and with actual quarterly growth rates of Swiss GDP. Although the KOF Institute cautions that no conclusions can be drawn about the level of the GDP growth rate on the basis of the KOF Economic Barometer, the barometer is closely followed by participants in the financial markets. Barometer readings that are higher than expected may have the effect of strengthening the Swiss franc, while lower than anticipated readings may weaken the Swiss franc. The calculation of the KOF Economic Barometer comprises two main stages. First the variables are selected, and then these variables are combined into one leading indicator. The first step consists of identifying variables that have theoretically valid relationships to the Swiss economy and empirically established leading relationship with the reference series based on monthly Swiss GDP growth (interpolated from quarterly data). The present pool of possible factors consists of more than 500 variables, the particular mix of which changes from year to year based on a standardized set of statistical criteria. The second step is the aggregation of the selected variables into a composite indicator by principal component analysis. The KOF Economic Barometer is generated by extracting the first principle component of the selected panel of variables to capture the co-movement in the data, which should reflect the Swiss business cycle. History of the KOF Economic Barometer The KOF Swiss Economic Institute has published the KOF Economic Barometer since the 1970s. The methodology was changed in 1998 and in 2006. The most recent revisions were made in 2014. In older versions of the KOF Economic Barometer six to 25 variables were included, based on data from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. In the current version, adopted in 2014, over 200 variables enter the second stage. The large number of component variables allows for a stable and robust final indicator. The latest version of the Barometer is also intended to be more transparent and less prone to frequent revision than past versions. What Is a Matching Contribution? A matching contribution is a type of contribution an employer chooses to make to their employee's employer-sponsored retirement plan. The contribution is based on elective deferral contributions that the employee makes. Key Takeaways Matching contributions are based on elective deferral contributions. An employer might match a certain amount of an employee's contributions. It can take years for a vesting period to begin. How a Matching Contribution Works Generally, the employer's contribution may match the employee's elective deferral contribution up to a certain dollar amount or percentage of compensation. For example, an employer might match 50% of an employees contribution. It often takes several years or a vesting period for this benefit to begin. When an employee is vested, then they legally own the money their employer has contributed to their 401(k) or other retirement accounts. If an employee leaves the company, they will lose the right to claim any matching contribution funds in which they are not yet fully vested. Vesting also has strong ties to employee retention. Stock bonuses, for example, can entice valued employees to remain with the company for several years, particularly if the company is promising and might be acquired or go public in the coming year(s), which would mean the employees stock would multiply in value. In some cases, vesting is immediate. For example, employees are 100% vested in SEP and SIMPLE employer contributions. With regards to a 401(k), a cliff vesting or graded vesting schedule may escalate toward a full matched contribution. Employers should make the vesting schedule available to employees along with information about the 401(k) plan. Matching Contribution and Retirement Savings With or without an employers matched contributions, individuals have several options when saving for retirement. As noted above, they can contribute to their own individual retirement account (IRA) or Roth IRA, along with a companys 401(k) plan. For smaller companies, SEP and SIMPLE plans could be more effective. The most common form of a matched contribution occurs in a 401(k) plan, however. Notably, 401(k)s are qualified employer-sponsored retirement plans that employees contribute to on a post-tax and/or pretax basis. Employers may make matching or non-elective contributions to the plan on behalf of eligible employees and may add an additional profit-sharing feature. Earnings in a 401(k) plan accrue on a tax-deferred basis. This means that within a given year, an employee will not have to pay taxes on these funds; however, when they withdraw the amount at 59, the eligible retirement age, they pay ordinary income tax if the initial contribution is pre-tax. If the employee withdraws funds prior to 59 for a non-qualified reason, they could incur a 10% penalty. Individuals must also take required minimum distributions (RMDs) before they reach a certain age, generally 72. Because of compounding, the longer these funds stay in retirement accounts, the more valuable they become. This is very important for individuals saving for retirement and a time at which they might not have steady income; however, the U.S. economy also needs to keep enough of these funds in circulation. If the plan allowsand the employee is still employed after they reach age 72the RMD can be delayed until April 1 following the year the employee retires. What Is a Nondiscrimination Rule? A nondiscrimination rule is a clause found in qualified retirement plans stating that all employees of a company must be eligible for the same benefits, no matter their position within the company. The rule keeps plans from being discriminatory toward highly compensated employees and company executives. Nondiscrimination rules are required for a plan to be considered qualified under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). Key Takeaways A nondiscrimination rule is an ERISA-required clause of qualified retirement plans that mandate all eligible employees receive the same benefits. These rules mean that everybody from the CEO to the janitor, assuming both are eligible for a 401(k) plan, receive the same investment options, employer match, and tax breaks. A nonqualified retirement plan, which does not fall under ERISA guidelines or have tax benefits recognized by the IRS, may be discriminatory or selective in nature. Understanding Nondiscrimination Rules Nondiscrimination rules must be kept up even when retirement plans such as 401(k)s are amended or transferred to another trustee, according to ERISA guidelines. A company may offer nonqualified plans, meaning that contributions are not tax-deductible, that are discriminatory or selective in nature, in addition to standard qualified plans. An investment policy statement is recommended to serve as a guideline for investment decisions to be made. The statement may include comments on risk tolerance, investment philosophy, time horizons, asset classes, and expectations regarding rates of return. ERISA has requirements for vesting options as well. Plan benefits may require a vesting period before employees earn the right to the benefit if they leave the company. ERISA regulations limit the length of such a vesting period to a reasonable schedule. IRAs Not Subject Not all employer plans are subject to ERISA. For example, government retirement plans are exempt from ERISA. IRAs are not subject to ERISA because an individual retirement account (IRA) is not considered an employer plan. Also, nonqualified plans, which do not qualify for tax-deductible contributions, are not subject to ERISA. For small businesses, a Simplified Employee Pension plan is basically an IRA set up by an employer so that it can contribute to employee retirement savings. Typically, these plans are not subject to ERISA regulations. ERISA History ERISA was enacted in 1974 to protect the rights of employees under retirement plans offered by their employers. In particular, this set of laws was put into place to address irregularities in the administration of certain large pension plans. In addition to its nondiscrimination rules stipulating that all plan participants must be treated equally, ERISA safeguards retirement funds from employer mismanagement. The plan's trustee must manage plan assets and make decisions in the best interests of the plan participants. The trustee cannot sell assets to the plan or earn commissions from plan investments. Also, plan assets must be kept separate from company assets. As for investment options, fiduciaries for the plan must follow the Prudent Investor Rule. What Is Currency? Currency is a medium of exchange for goods and services. In short, it's money, in the form of paper or coins, usually issued by a government and generally accepted at its face value as a method of payment. Currency is the primary medium of exchange in the modern world, having long ago replaced bartering as a means of trading goods and services. In the 21st century, a new form of currency has entered the vocabulary, the virtual currency. Virtual currencies such as bitcoins have no physical existence or government backing and are traded and stored in electronic form. Understanding Currency Currency in some form has been in use for at least 3,000 years. Money, usually in the form of coins, proved to be crucial to facilitating trade across continents. Key Takeaways Currency is a generally accepted form of payment, usually issued by a government and circulated within its jurisdiction. The value of any currency fluctuates constantly in relation to other currencies. The currency exchange market exists as a means of profiting from those fluctuations. Many countries accept the U.S. dollar for payment, while others peg their currency value directly to the U.S. dollar. A key characteristic of modern money is that it is uniformly worthless in itself. That is, bills are pieces of paper rather than coins made of gold, silver, or bronze. The concept of using paper as a currency may have been developed in China as early as 1000 BC, but the acceptance of a piece of paper in return for something of real value took a long time to catch on. Modern currencies are issued on paper in various denominations, with fractional issues in the form of coins. About National Currencies According to WorldAtlas.com, 180 national currencies recognized by the United Nations are currently in circulation. Another 66 countries either use the U.S. dollar or peg their currencies directly to the dollar. Most countries issue their own currencies. For example, Switzerland's official currency is the Swiss franc, and Japan's is the yen. An exception is the euro, which has been adopted by most countries that are members of the European Union. 180 The number of official currencies recognized by the United Nations. Some countries accept the U.S. dollar as legal tender in addition to their own currencies. Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Ecuador all accept U.S. dollars. For some time after the founding of the U.S. Mint in 1792, Americans continued to use Spanish coins because they were heavier and presumably felt more valuable. There are also branded currencies, like airline and credit card points and Disney Dollars. These are issued by companies and are used only to pay for the products and services to which they are tied. Currency Trading The exchange rate is the current value of any currency in exchange for another currency. This rate fluctuates constantly in response to economic and political events. Those fluctuations create the market for currency trading. The foreign exchange market where these trades are conducted is one of the world's largest markets in sheer volume. All trades are in large volumes, with a standard minimum lot of 100,000. Most currency traders are professionals investing for themselves or for institutional clients including banks and large corporations. The foreign exchange market has no physical address. Trading is entirely electronic and goes on 24 hours a day to accommodate traders in every time zone. Currency Exchange For the rest of us, currency trading is mostly done at an airport kiosk or a bank while traveling. Consumer advocates say that travelers get the best value by exchanging cash at a bank or at an in-network ATM. Other options may have higher fees and poor exchange rates. What Is a Target-Benefit Plan? A target-benefit plan is one that is similar to a defined benefit (DB) plan in which contributions are based on projected retirement benefits. However, unlike a defined benefit plan, the distributions that participants in a target-benefit plan receive at retirement are based on the performance of the investments and are, therefore, not guaranteed. Note that a target benefit plan is not the same as a target-date fund, which may be found in defined contribution (DC) retirement accounts like 401(k) plans. Key Takeaways A target-benefit plan offers contributions that are based on projected retirement benefits. It is similar to a defined benefit plan, yet, unlike a defined benefit plan, the retirement distributions are paid to participants in a target-benefit plan are not guaranteed. The market impacts a target-benefit plan. Monthly benefits in target-benefit plans can increase when the market performs well, but decrease following market downturns. Target-benefit plans do offer more certainty than defined-contribution plans or 401(k)s. How a Target-Benefit Plan Works Target-benefit plans have some attributes of pension plans in that they offer a monthly benefit to the participants or employees. However, a target-benefit plan shifts the risk of whether there are enough funds in the plan to the employees, whereas in a pension plan, the risk is solely on the employer to provide the benefits. A target-benefit plan provides employees with an estimated target of the monthly benefit, but that target can change over time, depending on the investment returns. In other words, there's no guarantee that the monthly benefit will be there in retirement, nor is there a guarantee of the monthly amount. The target benefit plan also bears some similarity to a money purchase plan in that contributions are mandatory. In a money purchase plan, an employee or employer makes annual contributions according to the percentage that the plan requires. For example, a plan that requires a contribution of 5% means the employer contributes 5% of each eligible employees pay to his or her separate account annually. Contributions must be made whether or not the business makes a profit. Defined-Contribution Plans A target-benefit plan does share some similarities to a defined-contribution (DC) plan, such as a 401(k). Defined contribution plans are those retirement plans in which employees contribute a fixed amount or a percentage of their paychecks each cycle. An employer will often match an employees regular contribution to a DC plan. In both a DC plan and target-benefit plan, the funds are invested to generate returns so that there will be enough money in retirement for the employees. Also, similar to a 401(k), employees bear the risk that there might not be enough money in the fund. However, the benefit paid to the employee under a target benefit planalthough not guaranteedcan be more certain than the benefits under a defined contribution plan. A target-benefit plan provides employees with an estimated target of the monthly benefit. Still, there's no guarantee that the monthly benefit will be there in retirement, nor is there a guarantee of the monthly amount. Target-Benefit Plans vs. Defined-Benefit Plans There are drawbacks to both DB and DC plans. While defined-benefit plans require employers to take larger risks, defined-contribution plans shift the burden of these risks onto the individual workers and retirees. Both have had mixed results. Defined benefit plans are slightly wider in scope than target-benefit plans. In a defined benefit pension plan, a participant receives a fixed benefit in retirement based upon compensation, age, and years of service with a particular employer. DB plans are guaranteed by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), a federal government agency while target-benefit plans are not guaranteed. Cash Balance Plan There are other variations of defined benefit plans that include a cash balance. In a cash balance plan, an employer credits a participant's account with a set percentage of his or her yearly compensation plus interest. The company solely bears all ownership of profits and losses in the portfolio. 412(i) Plan In a tax-qualified 412(i) plan, designed for small businesses, any amount that the owner contributes to the plan becomes available immediately as a tax deduction to the company. The investments that can fund this type of plan are guaranteed annuities or a combination of annuities and life insurance. The funds in a 412(i) plan are guaranteed by an insurance company. The asset or investment values, as well as the monthly benefits in target-benefit plans, are a moving target. In other words, the benefits are reduced following market downturns and increased when the market performs well. However, target-benefit plans can offer more certainty than defined-contribution plans. Target-benefit plans have arisen in many places outside of the U.S., including the U.K. and the Netherlands. IRELAND: Finally there will be a sample audit of all adoption records held by the State IRELAND: Women will be able to access abortions here from January, the Taoiseach has said. IRELAND: A man who dipped his toe in the adventure boat business after beating cancer hopes to create waves with his new Cork Harbour tour-boat venture linking the city to Cobh. WORLD: Italys political turmoil has stoked fears of instability in the euro bloc, causing stocks to fall in Asia on Wednesday after turbulent sessions in the US and Europe. BUSINESS: British manufacturers have turned up the pressure on the government to abandon one of its post-Brexit customs proposals, slamming the idea of a technology-based plan for border checks as naive and a waste of money. SPORT: Munster legend Paul OConnell wants the province to develop a production system to develop talent from grassroots and schools level and not rely on short term fixes. SPORT: Cork City boss John Caulfield has expressed his shock at the serious assault which left Waterford boss Alan Reynolds in hospital. ... SOME DISTRACTION FEATURE: Geraldine Walsh was never shy as a child, rather an introvert. That has its pros and cons as its followed her into parenthood. FEATURE: Expectations of boys are outdated, restrictive, and inaccurate, writes mother of seven, Jen Hogan. SHOWBIZ: Roseanne Barr has returned to Twitter to apologise to Valerie Jarrett for a tweet comparing her to an ape and to her colleagues who lost their jobs following the cancellation of her sitcom. Digital Desk Josh Eidelson A proposed US class action lawsuit alleging Facebooks ad placement tools facilitate discrimination against older job-seekers has been expanded to identify additional companies, further widening the latest front in claims that candidates are being filtered out by gender, geography, race and age. When Facebooks own algorithm disproportionately directs ads to younger workers at the exclusion of older workers, Facebook and the advertisers who are using Facebook as an agent to send their advertisements are engaging in disparate treatment, a communications union alleged in the amended complaint citing a legal test for employment discrimination filed yesterday in a San Francisco federal court. The union added claims under Californias fair employment and unfair competition statutes to the lawsuit, which was initially filed in December. The Communications Workers of America is suing on behalf of union members and other jobseekers who allegedly missed out on employment opportunities because companies used Facebooks ad tools to target people of other ages. The original filing named defendants are Amazon.com, Cox Media, Cox Communications and T-Mobile, as well as what the union estimates to be hundreds of employers and employment agencies who used Facebooks tools to filter out older job hunters when seeking to fill positions. The amended filing adds Ikea, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and the University of Maryland Medical System to its list of companies who allegedly used Facebooks tools to filter by age. Those three entities, as well as Facebook, arent named defendants in the lawsuit. The union alleged in its amended lawsuit that Facebook also uses age-filtering in ads intended to find its own new employees. In January, the union filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint about the alleged practice, according to a copy obtained by Bloomberg News. The Communications Workers of America says it has filed similar claims against dozens of companies, and that the agency has asked those employers, and Facebook, to respond to the allegations. In a December statement, Facebook vice president of advertisements Rob Goldman said Facebook tailors our employment ads by audience and we completely reject the allegation that these advertisements are discriminatory. Regarding other companies, he said the company helps educate advertisers about their legal responsibilities and requires them to certify that they are complying with the law. Bloomberg By Olivia Kelleher The teenage son of Julie Dingivan, who was one of the women identified by the HSE as having died after being mistakenly given the all clear for cancer, has spoken of his beautiful heart of gold mum. Julie, who was originally from Mahon in Cork, died of cervical cancer at the age of 36 in Marymount Hospice in Cork in April 2017. The resident of Fermoy was diagnosed in 2013. The HSE recently indicated to her husband Paul that a clear smear test his wife received in 2009 was found to be inaccurate following a review in September 2016. However, Julie was never told. Her son Craig (19) was among the attendees at the Standing 4 Women rally at Cork City Hall yesterday evening. Speaking after the rally Craig said he didnt know what to do with the anger he felt at the loss of his one-of-a-kind mother. I try my best to take it day by day to make her proud. I dont know how to deal with (the anger). I have so much anger in me I dont know where to guide it." She was 36-years-of-age. She was a beautiful person. She would do anything for anybody. She loved to laugh. She was always great for messing around. Craig said he was pleased with the turnout at the Cork rally and grateful for the dedication of the women who had gathered in such large numbers. He emphasised that he wanted accountability in relation to the death of his mother. I want someone to be put to blame. I want them to face the consequences. We were absolutely destroyed by it. All of this (the revelations) feels like starting over again. Craig did his Leaving Cert a few weeks after his mother passed away. He said naturally he wasnt in his right mind during the exams. He stresses that grief isnt linear and that he goes upwards and downwards on any given day. Yesterday was a bad day. Some days are a lot harder than others. It is really all about making her proud. Julie is survived by her husband Paul, their daughter Ali, her son Craig and her stepdaughter Jasmine. Mr Dingivan was in attendance at the rally yesterday with his family members. He spoke publicly after he received details about his wifes case. Member of the family held banners with the words We will be your Voice. Hear us Roar. Julie 8/4/17. Meanwhile, about 250 people attended the Standing 4 Women rally. One of the organisers, Michelle Shahid, from Douglas in Cork said that the narrative cannot be allowed to move on with the changing of the news cycle. The Standing 4 Women rally at City Hall, Cork today. Picture: Jim Coughlan. A lot of us are mothers. You dont want to find yourself in that situation. We are trying to keep it in the public because we dont want it forgotten about. A mother or wife is the centre of a house. You think you have the test done and you are grand. You should be able to trust the health system. Vivienne Farrell from Cobh, Co Cork said she decided to turn up for the rally because she was horrified by the injustice of it all. Somebody needs to fight for these women. If we dont get out and fight for ourselves nobody else is going to do it for us. The crowds held banners with messages such as Fighters who Never Stood a Chance and We Stand Together. They also wore red for the occasion. The organisers called for mandatory disclosure and said the persons impacted by the situation needed multidisciplinary support and access to medical cards. The Lord Mayor of Cork, Cllr Tony Fitzgerald, mingled with the crowd prior to the rally. Poignantly Vicky Phelan, who sued the HSE and the lab for missing her cancer in a 2011 smear test, was unable to attend a Standing 4 Women rally in Limerick as she was waiting for an infusion at St Vincents Hospital. Her family members attended the rally and she tweeted messages of support from hospital. By Ruaidhri Giblin A man with 38 previous convictions for burglary, who told gardai he used the DART and LUAS to case homes in Dublin he would later break into, has had his 14-week jail term increased to two years and three months by the Court of Appeal. Joseph Shannon (46) with an address on Manor Street, Dublin 7, had pleaded guilty to eight burglaries in the capital on a series of dates between April and August 2014. He was given a three-year sentence, with all but 14 weeks spent on remand suspended, at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court by Judge Petria McDonnell on April 11, 2016. Judge McDonnell effectively suspended Shannon's sentence, with credit for time spent on remand, due to his efforts to rehabilitate and become drug free. The Director of Public Prosecutions successfully sought a review of Shannons sentence on grounds that it was unduly lenient and he was accordingly resentenced in the Court of Appeal to three years imprisonment with the final nine months suspended on Wednesday. After the DPP appealed his sentence, Shannon subsequently "relapsed" and was arrested for having committed "yet another similar type burglary". Giving judgment in the three-judge court, Mr Justice John Edwards detailed the eight burglaries on three bills of indictment Shannon pleaded guilty to in the Circuit Court. In Glasnevins Dalcassian Downs in Dublin, Shannon confronted a woman while she was in bed but not asleep after entering through the bathroom window of her home. He searched her room and handbag for cash and items of value before approaching her again, this time pushing her and taking a purse which contained keys, credits cards, cash and a second mobile phone. In Drumahill, Kilmacud Road, in Dublin, a 69-year-old man found Shannon in his sitting room who proferred a preposterous excuse for being there. The homeowner took Shannon by the elbow and marched him off the premises. He later discovered that his car keys were missing which were never recovered. On July 10, 2014, Shannon burgled a house in Drummartin Park, in Goatstown. He also committed a series of burglaries - one on June 12, another on June 24 and three on August 31, 2014 - in locations including Sandyford, Stillorgan and Shankill in Dublin. Gardai found a number of items near one of the burgled homes including a quantity of prescription drugs in a container bearing the name Joseph Shannon. Shannon admitted that his modus operandi was to use both the DART and LUAS to case suitable premises before returning later to commit the actual burglaries. The Circuit Court heard he was a chronic drug addict whose life was in complete chaos. Gardai described him as an old-school type offender in that he was not violent, antagonistic or hostile. He tended to co-operate fully whenever he was caught and to apologise while blaming his offending on his addiction. He had 74 previous convictions including 38 for burglary, three for robbery, 12 for theft, two for false imprisonment and one for unlawful seizure of a vehicle, among others. Little was known about his family circumstances save that he has a number of children, now in their 20s, some of whom are doing extremely well having achieved impressive third level qualifications, Mr Justice Edwards said. The Circuit Court received a positive probation report and a letter from Merchants Quay Ireland Homeless and Drugs Services which confirmed his attendance in their programme and that he had been putting great effort into becoming drug-free. Mr Justice Edwards said Shannons progress towards rehabilitation was impressive and deserved to be rewarded. However, the Court of Appeal was told that while progress was maintained for some months after the balance of his sentence was suspended in the Circuit Court, he unfortunately relapsed yet again and was arrested and pleaded guilty to yet another similar type of burglary. Mr Justice Edwards said the court, at an earlier hearing, had been minded to deal with the matter non-custodially but we no longer consider that we are in a position to do so because Shannon had regrettably relapsed again. He said Shannon had not taken the numerous chances he had been given and a period in custody was now required. Mr Justice Edwards, who sat with President of the Court of Appeal Mr Justice George Birmingham and Mr Justice Alan Mahon, resentenced Shannon to three years imprisonment on each count to run concurrently with the final nine months of each suspended. The sentences were backdated to reflect the 14 weeks spent on remand. Shannon was required to enter into a good behaviour bond and he undertook to be so bound. By Tom Tuite A psychic turned financier is facing trial accused of fraud and money-laundering offences. Trial on indictment is on the cards for astrologer and tarot reader, Simon Gold, 53, with an address at Cartontroy, Athlone, Co. Westmeath. Mr Gold is best known for his firm Astrology Ireland and has billed himself as Irelands Leading 7th Generation Psychic Astrologer & Tarot Master. Mr Gold was refused bail after he appeared at Dublin District Court. He was charged with money laundering by allegedly possessing 800,000 in proceeds of criminal conduct at a bank in Dublin on Oct. 19, 2012. He was also charged with deception, that between Feb. 18 and March 9, 2011, he induced a named man to transfer 28,000 to an account of a named financial consultancy firm. He has three other counts of deception with charges that on other dates in 2011 he induced three other people to transfer stg30,000, stg10,000 and another sum of stg10,000 to the account of the same financial consultancy firm. The businessman was also charged with having false instruments: one blank bank draft and six other bank drafts with various sums, totalling 55m, payable to three individuals and a named financial advice business. He is charged that he had these drafts in his custody in Delvin, Co. Westmeath on Oct. 22, 2012. He also had another charge of having another false instrument on a date in 2014 at a location in Co. Leitrim: four sheets allegedly containing 360 removable holograms purporting to be AIB holograms. He was accompanied to court by his solicitor Brian Keenan and applied for bail, however, the application was met by a Garda objection which cited the seriousness of the case. The 53-year-old has not yet entered a plea to the charges and the Director of Public Prosecutions has directed that he is to face trial on indictment. This means his case will be sent forward to the Circuit Court, which has tougher sentencing powers, once the prosecution has completed preparing a book of evidence. Judge Miriam Walsh refused bail and remanded him in custody. Mr Gold, also known as Niall O'Donoghue, will face his next hearing at Cloverhill District Court on May 31, 2018. A decision on whether legal aid will be granted to him has been deferred. Geraldine Walsh was never shy as a child, rather an introvert. That has its pros and cons as its followed her into parenthood. When I was in school a teacher remarked to my mother, Geraldine is very shy. She never puts her hand up in class. My mother was not impressed. Having never liked the term shy, since it tends to come across as a negative trait, she retaliated with, My daughter is not shy. She is quiet, reserved, and listening. She is taking everything in, watching and learning. As a child, I was quite happy to let my more extroverted friends take the limelight. But I was not shy. My desire to stand with my back against the wall and let the world rotate around me never left. I was an introvert at school, when I joined the workforce and now as a mother. I dont see this reserved side of my nature as a failing, a flaw, or something that needs to be fixed. Anymore, at least. There was a time when I wished I was more outgoing and energetic but its simply not me. As an introvert I am quite eager to linger in my own company, stay among the quiet, and avoid the bedlam that life can bring. I like a quiet house and my own company which is preferable to a crowded room with tedious small talk. Dr Malie Coyne, clinical psychologist and a lecturer at NUI Galway, explains: An introvert is more likely to focus on their internal world and to enjoy spending time in their own company, which can have an impact on their career choice, relationships, and overall lifestyle. An extrovert, on the other hand, pays more attention to whats going on around them than what is going on in their heads, and often gain energy from others. Everyone has a bit of both but most of us lean towards one or the other. There are common misconceptions about introverts. They may be perceived as people who arent interested in others, who dont like people, or have no strong opinions to share. This is absolutely untrue. Being an introvert does not mean I get easily nervous at social occasions, but I will admit avoiding certain situations is easier. It doesnt mean I cant converse well but Id happily text repeatedly rather than call. I dont lack confidence. If needs be, I will put myself out there. It means that often my preference is solitude, quiet, and calm. It means my mind may need incredible re-charging after volunteering for a cake sale or organising a playdate. Finding that calm since becoming a mum has been somewhat difficult and has led to mentally exhausting days. As a work-from-home mother, with a four- and one-year-old following me almost every second of the day, I find my introverted side has been a blessing and a curse. Being a parent does not always work with being an introvert. Parenting is exhausting. Its loud, its bright, its almost suffocating. Add being an introvert and it pushes the boundaries a little bit further. Like all parents, I crave a meagre 10-minute break from the chaos, noise, disorder, and the constant feel of tiny hands on me. I beg the baby to nap that little bit longer so I can clear my head. Im almost desperate for her to be old enough to play alongside her big sister so I no longer have to get on the floor and explore their imagination as well as mine. The days can be far too long and sometimes the painful need for alone time can only be found in the bathroom, if the door is locked. Finding that me time has been essential to recharge my batteries and calm my exhausted and overwhelmed mind. Despite needing to escape, I have noticed how my reserved and quiet side has helped me as a mum. As my mother recognised in me as a child, my listening skills are one of my best qualities. Now that our four-year-old is expressing herself, Im hearing and understanding her more than Id have imagined. She is beginning to understand her emotions. By listening to her I can help her process those feelings as best she can. Many introverts tend to analyse, sometimes overthink, everything. As an individual, this is exhausting. As a parent, this is a good thing. It helps me stay in tune with my children and protect them from dangers they fail to see. My kids may see me enjoying alone time over the years. Im hoping this aspect of my life will show them how to value their own company and time as they gain independence. Looking after the introverted side of me has made me realise I need to look after myself fully in order to look after my kids. By taking those short breaks from the calamity of a house with kids, I can recharge my batteries and dive back in to be the mother they need me to be. I once thought I should attempt to overcome my desire to be alone, silent, and isolated but in hindsight, there is nothing wrong with being an introverted parent. Or an extroverted one, for that matter. Besides, at the end of a long day, when the kids are asleep, and the sofa is all yours, no one can deny any of us that small bit of quiet, alone time. To find out your individual tendency, you can take the free Extroversion Introversion Test on psychologytoday.com/intl/tests/personality/extroversion-introversion-test By Ellie OByrne In 2010, Aileen Farnan woke up on St Stephens Day unable to speak. Initially sent home by her doctor, she returned 24 hours later, having lost the use of the limbs on the right-hand side of her body, and was sent straight to hospital. She had suffered a stroke. Now, eight years on and recounting her tale in her home in Crosshaven, and part of the Crawford art colleges latest crop of graduates, she still sometimes struggles with words when shes tired. Stroke, a condition that damages areas of the brain, will affect one in six of us within our lifetimes, but when it affects the areas of the brain that deal with language, the affects can be particularly odd and unpredictable. I could say words like helicopter, but I couldnt remember the word for chair, says Farnan. Farnan has kept what she calls her wicked sense of humour intact throughout her eight-year gradual rehabilitation. For a week after the accident, all I could say was f**k, she says, eyes twinkling. Some people can recite the rosary; I could say f**k. I wonder if thats a reflection of character? A rehabilitation boot-camp followed her initial hospital stay; most stroke victims will make the largest part of their recovery within a year. Farnan was 47 when she had her stroke and had recently left her job working for a shipping company. While in recovery, she realised that not only would it not be possible for her to return to a career in logistics, but also that she didnt want to. The stroke made me aware of the fragility of life and the world in which we live, she says. I had always wanted to be an artist. She sat a FETAC in Access to Design at Corks Colaiste Stiofain Naofa and applied for a place on the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Contemporary Applied Art in Ceramics, Glass and Textiles course at Corks CIT Crawford College of Art and Design. As a student with a disability, Farnan was granted additional supports to help her through her Crawford course, including an assistant to take notes in lectures and, vital for the recent work shes been producing, a personal assistant. She was the only student availing of these services in her year-group. There werent any other people in my situation in the Crawford apart from me, she says. I think they didnt know what to do with me at first, and that it was a learning experience for them as much as for me, but the support was fantastic. Farnans discovery of art has been hugely positive, but it doesnt cancel out the enormous battle she continues to face on a daily basis. Its the silver lining, she says. But the cloud is still a large one. How has she come to terms with her new limitations? I still have trouble with it, she says. Stroke sufferers often experience changes in temperament and, for Farnan, this means that she cries more readily than she used to. I didnt cry at all for 20 years, and now look, she says, having battled to control her emotions while talking about the frustrations of living with her disability. If Farnans stroke has made her more conscious of the fragility of life, this is very much reflected in her recent work, which is also inspired by her lifelong connection to the sea. Aileen Farnan, CAA The subject of my work is the interpretation of memories. Using the beach and patterns left behind by the sea and ourselves, I make molds from impressions of these patterns over which I fire glass, resulting in 'emotional maps' Facebook: Different Strokes pic.twitter.com/JHbN8JDmlU SeeSaw (@CCADSeeSaw) May 22, 2018 Working with her assistant, she created moulds of patterns found on the beach, and has fired delicate glass impressions of these. They are arranged as sculptures, and Farnan then projects light through some of them to form an installation. The result is ethereal and aquarium-like, and monochrome; she works with a single type of high-quality, green-tinged drawn glass that adds to the underwater effect. I experimented with coloured glass but it wasnt subtle enough, she says. It was a painstaking process of trial and error, made more arduous by the motility problems she still has on her right-hand side. My motor function in my hand is weak and my dexterity isnt good, she says. I can use it, but I cant do fine detail. Her work may be fragile, and life may be too, but surely shes found the depths of her own endurance in her journey? She smiles. Yes, she says, simply. I have. CIT Crawford Colleges Department of Fine Art and Applied Arts 2018 degree show, SEESAW, opens from 6pm on Friday, June 1, and runs until June 9 The director of Book Club had to fight to cast his four actresses, the youngest of whom is 65, writes Laura Harding. Hollywood isnt always kind to women of a certain age, but especially not to women north of retirement age. They can be reduced to sickly or silly or just downright excluded from the narrative altogether. So its something of a miracle to see a film top-lined by four female stars with a combined age of 289. Book Club brings together the talents of Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen, all Oscar winners or nominees, for a tale about four friends who read Fifty Shades of Grey in their monthly gathering. Its the kind of story about female friendships, of wine-drinking confidantes not to mention sexual shenanigans that is normally left to women half their age (think Sex and the City, Bridesmaids, and Girls Trip). Older women are the fastest growing demographic in the world, says Fonda, 80. Its very smart to make movies that would appeal to us and its also important because it shows that just because youre old, it doesnt mean that you have to stop living in the full sense of the word. Steenburgen, 65, agrees. Its kind of a miracle actually that it ever occurred because Hollywood does ask you in some ways to rather disappear as you get older. That is a shame because people should be able to enjoy life and be reflected in movies and television and scripts as long as they are alive, so its quietly subversive and revolutionary that it occurred at all. Proof of this miracle lies in the fact the films director, Bill Holderman, had to fight to cast his leading ladies. The studio wanted younger women to play the roles, says Bergen, 72. Bill said, No, the whole point is that they are older women and the challenges that women this age face. Fonda is matter-of-fact about the situation. Its an industry that is very much driven by youth and beauty. Ageism is alive and well. I think that is beginning to change though I am not only in this movie but Im in a very big hit series called Grace and Frankie [with Lily Tomlin], also about older women, so it feels very good. Now these actresses hope the films racy themes demonstrate that older women have an appetite for more than just soft foods. They will realise they are making a big mistake if they assume that we close up shop down there, just because we are older, says Fonda, a twinkle in her eye. If everybody can agree on an age that they want to totally give it up then I guess we could reflect that in a movie, adds Steenburgen. But since that is such a dumb idea then maybe its fine to see people having fun at our age. Keaton, 72, concedes that it is still tough for older women in Hollywood, and that she is among the rare few who still have a vibrant career. Its always tough for older people, she says. They are used less frequently in every field, its not just in the performing arts, so we are fortunate. Steenburgen looks despondent. We have so many friends that never work that should work, all of us do. It was a privilege to do this but its hard not to want it to open up things for our sisters that are our age. Which brings us on to the subject of the Times Up movement, which aims to open up the industry for the whole sisterhood, young and old alike. For Keaton, it all comes down to two words. Equal pay. I think that is the central theme for me. You are paid the same as all the men and for what youre worth and your value. That is fair and with that, I think, comes other things that come along with it. Steenburgen nods vigorously. In the business world, when women are paid comparably to men its quite obvious these things arent so prevalent. Fonda, who has been an activist since her Hanoi Jane days as one of the most prominent public faces in the anti-Vietnam War movement, is sure todays movement will create lasting change. I think it had an impact on the verdict around Bill Cosby. The Me Too movement has grown into becoming the Times Up movement. We are making structural changes, policy changes, and joining forces with women in other sectors janitors, domestic workers, farm workers, office workers to create safe and equal working spaces. It doesnt have to grab attention, we just have to change things. It can be quiet, behind the scenes, but women are speaking up now about the need to have equal pay and to have diversity in all aspects of all industries. When we are respected and when that respect is reflected in our salaries, there is much less sexual violence and sexual harassment. It has already created the change, says Bergen. It almost overnight changed behaviour, because people are terrified. People have to work at it being a lasting change, because that behaviour will always resurface, but I think as long as people insist on it remaining, it will stay. Book Club is released on Friday Garda Representative Association (GRA) delegates heard the State would have to deploy that number along the border for security reasons if Brexit talks result in a hard customs border. GRA central executive committee member Garda James Morrisroe, who is based in the Cavan/Monaghan Garda division, said 1,000 was a conservative figure for policing the 500km border, which has 208 crossings. He said Garda resources are already stretched along the border from Inishowen, Co Donegal, to Dundalk, Co Louth. Since the Good Friday Agreement, a number of Garda stations have closed along the border. Also, a number of gardai who knew the areas like the back of their hands have retired and this has led to a loss of local knowledge, he said. Garda Morrisroe said that gardai were drafted into border duty in 2001 to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth disease into the Republic. That was a solution to a temporary problem, he said. Brexit will be permanent. Is there any contingency plan? Acting commissioner Donall O Cualain said the Garda authorities are looking into all possible outcomes and whatever might land as a result of Brexit negotiations. He said work is ongoing on the issue, but added that he had no estimate yet on what number of gardai would have to be posted to the border if it is to become a hard border. The reality is that until we see what picture emerges we cant plan in any great detail, he said. Mr O Cualain pointed out that the Government had committed to increasing the size of the force to 15,000, which would be the biggest strength in its history. The acting commissioner added that further armed support units were being trained and soon there will be 24-hour armed cover nationwide. Meanwhile, the forces chief administration officer, Joe Nugent, pointed out that legislative change may be required to provide body cameras to frontline gardai, which is being called for by the GRA. He said: How we store information, access it, and use it is something that would have to be looked at. There is an amount of work that is required in that area. Mr Nugent said the GDPR legislation introduced across the EU last Friday would have implications if body cameras are introduced. He said another consideration is whether such cameras would be left rolling, or would they be turned on only at certain times. Mr Nugent pointed out that some countries have a system whereby the cameras are constantly rolling while others have opted for just turning them on at certain times. New sets of Garda uniforms were unveiled at the conference. One is for UN service, another for armed gardai, and a third for ordinary gardai. They will be piloted in July for three months at three garda stations in Dublin, Limerick, and Wexford. Ocean Escapes co-founder, Andrew ORiordan, 30, said he hopes the new business which sets sail tomorrow, and which offers a return rail-link option, will encourage more people to experience the beauty of one of the worlds great harbours: We are an island nation and we have the second largest natural harbour in the world here in Cork, yet about 90% of the people we bring out on our boats have never been out on the water before. Ive been driving boats since I was eight. I love going out on the water, getting out and having fun, and I hope to share that with our customers. In 2011, a year after he got married, Andrew was diagnosed with stage three high-grade non-Hodgkins lymphoma and embarked on an intensive six-month regime of intensive chemotherapy. When he began to feel well enough in 2016, he decided to do something he loved. He co-founded Ocean Escapes and bought his first rib, Saoirse, to take people on high-speed adventure trips around the harbour. When he got confirmation several months later that he was in full remission, he bought a second rib, Slainte. Both ribs are now working flat out, taking up to 1,000 customers a month on sea safaris around Cork Harbour. But Andrew felt there was a gap in the market for larger tours: It has been tried a few times before but just never caught on it was the right idea but just launched at the wrong time, or with the wrong boat. With backing from Cool Running Events, the team behind Cork on Ice and The Nightmare Realm, and businessman Daniel ODonoghue, who will operate as Ocean Escapes marine engineer and technician, Ocean Escapes is investing 500,000 in the new venture. They have secured the 72-seater Cailin Oir, the former Cape Clear ferry, on a lease-to-buy option, and following several weeks of trials, it begins its new life tomorrow, sailing from the Port of Cork marina at 11.30am and 4pm and from Cobh at 9am, 2pm, and 6pm, seven days a week until September 2. Highlights of her 90-minute tour will include Blackrock Castle, Haulbowline Naval Base, Spike Island, Roches Point Lighthouse, and Camden Fort Meagher, with onboard guides explaining the harbours maritime history. Prices start from 16, with the boat and rail option priced at 25. Family deals are available. The head of Visit Cork, Seamus Heaney, said services like this will open up new markets and help retain tourists and cruise passengers in Cork when they arrive at the Cobh cruise terminal. Cork Business Association CEO, Lawrence Owens, also welcomed the service, saying there has been a huge demand from the business community for a tourism offering that connects the city with Cobh, to tap into the huge potential that the cruise market offers. About 100,000 cruise ship passengers and 40,000 crew arrive in Cobh annually. Figures show the passengers spend an average of 73 a day while on shore. Meanwhile, Failte Ireland has announced 300,000 in funding for St Marys Collegiate Church, the Old Cork Waterworks, Fota House, and Cork Public Museum from its new Storytelling Interpretation Grants Scheme. It is expected to lead to new resources at the visitor attractions, including video and interactive technology. A roadmap for the legislation to repeal the Eighth Amendment was discussed by Cabinet yesterday after the decisive 66.4% yes vote last Friday. Activists and the parents of Savita Halappanavar, who died after being denied a termination, have called for the legislation to be given her name. Her father, Andanappa Yalagi, said recently: We have one last request, that the new law, that it is called Savitas law. It should be named for her. A Government spokesman said the idea of the legislation being called Savitas Law could be considered. It was likely to be called that colloquially, he said. Some ministers have agreed with the law to regulate the termination of pregnancy being called Savitas Law, including Employment Minister Regina Doherty. Health Minister Simon Harris told colleagues yesterday that the legislation would be published in a number of weeks and introduced in the Dail before the end of July. While there have been calls to repeal some restrictions or laws, such as the right for doctors to share files with hospitals in other countries where a termination is sought, ministers have been informed that this could complicate or delay the overall legislation. A spokesman for the Taoiseach also sought to address concerns about costs for women seeking abortion when measures are introduced. He said terminations would be available to those who need them and also said the number of medical cards granted in Ireland was increasing. Mr Harris told his colleagues he would meet Opposition figures today to discuss aspects of the abortion legislation and whether elements can be fast-tracked or brought forward. The Government also wants to prepare the ground for the parallel process of preparing clinical guidelines for abortion as well as regulating medicine for terminations. This will begin in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the Government has been warned about the risks of the housing crisis for Irelands competitiveness, as well as the high cost of living impacting on the countrys ability to attract business here. The report for Business Minister Heather Humphreys was carried out by the National Competitiveness Council. But it also notes Ireland still has healthy competitive costs for electricity and some services for businesses. Elsewhere, the Government agreed yesterday to extend the Magdalene restorative justice scheme to other institutions, a move which will add an estimated 52 people to it. The move follows a recommendation by the Ombudsman concerning women left out, many of whom were unable to provide proof that they had to work in Magdalene laundry facilities. Some of the women now included in the compensation scheme were admitted to a training centre or an industrial school in the same building, attached to or located on the grounds of the laundry. The Department of Justice said that, further to consultation with the Ombudsman, women will receive payment for the period of residency in the adjoining institution, as well as for the work in the laundry itself. Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan has also agreed to take further expressions of interest from women who might be eligible for benefits under the scheme. The minister, separately, is also examining proposals from Fianna Fail for maternity leave for TDs. The measures are seeking 18 weeks maternity leave but there are issues which must be legally examined, said the department, as TDs are office holders once elected and not employees of the Oireachtas. Ms OSullivan was addressing the Charleton Tribunal, which is examining allegations by former Garda press officer Supt David Taylor that he was directed to brief the media negatively on Sgt McCabe by former commissioner Martin Callinan, and that Ms OSullivan was aware of this. Both former commissioners deny this. The tribunal is also looking at whether Ms OSullivan influenced or attempted to influence RTE broadcasts on May 9, 2016. Ms OSullivan said she first became aware of Sgt McCabe in 2008 when she received a briefing document on him during her time as assistant commissioner in charge of human resources. She said that after leaving the post, she never heard anything more about the Miss D allegation in which the DPP directed no prosecution following a Garda investigation. Ms OSullivan said she became aware at some point that complaints about the penalty points system were coming from Sgt McCabe but she could not say when she learned it was Sgt McCabe. I do not recall the Miss D allegation being mentioned at any time during that period of time, the former commissioner said. She said the appointment of Supt Dave Taylor as press officer came as a surprise because his background was in the liaison protection section. But she said it was Mr Callinans decision. Ms OSullivan said Mr Callinan was concerned at a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) inquiry into penalty points in January 2014, as it was unprecedented that sensitive public information could be put in the public domain. The tribunal heard that notes taken at pre-PAC Garda meetings referred to 2006 first incident and Start McCabe 2006. Tribunal chairman Mr Justice Peter Charleton said this must have been a reference to the Miss D allegation made against Sgt McCabe. Ms OSullivan said she had no recollection of these matters being discussed in my presence at meetings, and that she might have stepped out of the room when they were discussed. She said that, when Mr Callinan used the word disgusting in relation to whistleblowers at the PAC hearing, she passed a note to him saying he should withdraw/clarify. The palpable feeling in the room was that it was taken out of context of what was meant by it, she said. Ms OSullivan said she had no knowledge of alleged comments made by Mr Callinan to TDs John Deasy and John McGuinness or to Comptroller and Auditor General Seamus McCarthy on the day of the PAC meeting. She said she was unaware of a car park meeting the following day between Mr Callinan and Mr McGuinness until Mr McGuinness spoke publicly about it. Ms OSullivan said she did not give any journalist information about the Miss D investigation. The former commissioner told the tribunal she did not recall seeing correspondence from assistant commissioner Kieran Kenny about a Tusla notification regarding Sgt McCabe in May 2014. The tribunal has previously heard how the notification wrongly included details of a serious assault from an unrelated case not involving Sgt McCabe or Miss D. Ms OSullivan said she accepted that Supt Frank Walsh gave evidence that he brought the correspondence to her attention, but said she had no recollection of seeing or reading this file. She said that a reply written by Supt Walsh saying that the content of the Tusla report had been noted by the commissioner was actually a pro forma response, almost a template, and that Supt Walsh would have written that it was seen and noted if she had personally read the correspondence. A study undertaken by Finian Fallon, Dean of Psychology at City Colleges in Dublin, showed in many cases that frontline gardai are suffering mental health issues due to the stresses of the job. Dr Fallon revealed the results of a Well-being Survey he conducted on behalf of the Garda Representative Association (GRA) at their annual conference in Wexford yesterday. He said the supports for gardai suffering from PTSD were inadequate gardai have a handful of counsellors who are overworked and supposed to provide a 24/7 service. Dr Fallon said he had rung the service himself and had been told there was nobody available to deal with him. He said he had discovered some of the counsellors were not trained to deal with PTSD, which he found shocking. Dr Fallon said the rate of PTSD was comparable with other police forces, but many other European countries were far better at treating their officers. The psychologist said he was shocked at the level of suicides and this was indicative of PTSD. He said it was very important that gardai suffering from PTSD got quick access to professional help, especially as such stresses could result in them taking their own lives. We know from both the testimonies we have received from members and also from international studies that these issues have a huge impact on performance of gardai, Dr Fallon said. It also has an impact on their lives in terms of their health and also their interpersonal relationships, their marriages and things like that. Dr Fallon surveyed 2,204 members of the force, of which 68% were male and 32% female. They cited a number of reasons for stress, including feeling frustrated by the amount of paperwork involved with the job, not having the right equipment to do the job properly, and the belief that senior officers do not appreciate the daily challenges they face. Several respondents said they had witnessed nepotism in appointments. Others said having to work unsocial hours impacted on family and friends and they always felt tired due to the hours they worked. Many claimed they had insufficient training on the technical skills required to do the job and their overall remuneration package was inadequate. Feeling undervalued and having too many work demands to be effective in the role were also mentioned. Given the prevailing institutional context of the organisation, for frontline GRA members at least, it appears that An Garda Siochana is a cauldron for adversity in relation to trauma and wellbeing, said Dr Fallon. GRA president Ciaran ONeill told acting Garda Commissioner Donall O Cualain that independent clinical psychologist, Dr Eddie Murphy, has rated the Garda Welfare Service (counsellors) as five out of ten. This is just not good enough, said Garda ONeill. Seven of our colleagues took their own lives in the past 12 months and it is all our responsibilities to ensure that there are no more. Its time for us all to recognise that its OK not to be OK. Our welfare officers do not have the full supports they need to provide a proper service. The announcement by childrens minister Katherine Zappone that 126 cases of illegal birth registrations have been found in the records of the St Patricks Guild adoption agency should surprise no one. The involvement of this agency in such practices has been known for years. However, the fact that Ms Zappone has announced a sampling exercise to see if an audit of all adoption records held by the State is needed to ascertain the scale of the illegal adoptions scandal is welcome. Its also a complete U-turn by her department who for years have said such an audit would be a wasted exercise. Ms Zappone deserves credit for finally committing to such a process. None of her predecessors had the courage to do so. However, the irony of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs (DCYA) announcing a sampling exercise of these records should not be lost on anyone. It has spent years telling this newspaper that such an audit was of limited benefit as looking at the records would yield little useful information. Ms Zappones own words yesterday show the folly of such responses. Adoption campaigners have called for a full audit of records for years. All of these calls fell on deaf ears. You can go back two decades to find St Patricks Guild hitting the headlines but lets start a little closer to the present. None of what Ms Zappone said yesterday should shock anyone. It was already known St Patricks Guild had large scale evidence of illegal registrations in its records, and the issue of illegal registrations has been on the radar of successive governments for many years. In April 2015, the Irish Examinerrevealed that an Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI) delegation told the DCYA in June 2013 that there were at least 120 [confirmed] cases of illegal registrations. It specifically named St Patricks Guild in Dublin as being aware of several hundred illegal registrations, stating that the agency are not seeking the people involved but were, rather, waiting for people to contact them. The agency held 13,500 adoption files and those have been in the possession of Tusla since 2016. Tusla paid the agency 30,000 to support the storage of the files while the transfer was being negotiated and to assist the agency with its closure. The AAI delegation also named a well-known former private nursing home St Ritas in Dublin where women went to give birth to their children before having to place them for adoption, as a huge source of illegal registrations. However, the AAI went further, stating its belief that this could well be the tip of the iceberg and that there may be thousands more. In short, the regulatory body for adoption in this country was admitting there may be thousands of Irish adults with no idea that their birth certs are fraudulent and that the people they believe to be their natural parents are, in fact, their adoptive parents. Of note from the record of the meeting was an acknowledgement that none of these people had been informed of the circumstances of their births. Five years on, it would appear they continue to be in the dark about the fact they are adopted. And this refers to just one adoption agency. St Patricks Guild was by no means alone in these practices. In 2015, AAI chief executive Patricia Carey said that the may be thousands comment made at the June 2013 meeting was a throwaway remark and was not based on verifiable facts. However, the fact that the department had called for a meeting on the subject and that an AAI delegation was willing to speculate at all on such a large number, indicates the issue was firmly on the radar of the adoption regulator and the DCYA at least five years ago. More than that, it also had concrete information that St Patricks Guild had knowledge of several hundred cases of illegal registrations. However, no audit or investigation was announced. In fact, nothing happened. It seems the revelations made little or no impact at the time. Just five months after the meeting, then childrens minister Frances Fitzgerald told the Dail she had no plans to initiate an audit of all [adoption] files. She also claimed that all adoptions which the Irish State has been involved in since 1952 have been in line with this [Adoption Act 1952] and subsequent adoption legislation. This claim was repeated on two separate occasions by her successor, Charlie Flanagan. Both made the claim despite the fact that no State agency ever examined all the records. When the Irish Examiner published this information in 2015, it asked the DCYA did it not think that the AAIs belief that thousands of people in the country had their identities falsely registered a criminal offence warranted investigation? The department declined to respond to the specific questions asked, but said a full audit of adoption records would be of very limited benefit. It is important to note that the only way information generally becomes available is when someone with knowledge about the event comes forward There is little, if any, supporting information in relation to these arrangements... Accordingly, an audit of all adoption records would be of very limited benefit in establishing the number of illegal registrations that took place. However, the AAI clearly disagreed. The 120 cases mentioned by the AAI in the June 2013 meeting refer to a 2010 audit it carried out of its records on foot of a story by this newspaper on the case of Tressa Reeves, whose son was illegally adopted and falsely registered as the natural child of the adoptive parents without her consent. This was facilitated by St Patricks Guild, which allowed the couple to take the child without a formal adoption order being made. The audit uncovered approximately 99 cases, while a further 20 were identified in the following years. In a report prepared for the department in June 2011, the AAI said it considered carrying out a more comprehensive audit of the cases it uncovered, but because of the transfer of senior personnel and the pressure on resources of the imminent establishment of the Adoption Authority no further action was taken. So clearly, the AAI felt the number of cases it uncovered in its own files warranted further investigation and a more comprehensive audit. The statement by the department that there is little, if any, supporting information in relation to these arrangements was also contradicted by a record obtained by this reporter of a meeting between two nuns from St Patricks Guild and representatives from Tusla, the Child And Family Agency, which states that the agencys records contained some illegal registrations and, crucially, that full details are available on the majority of cases. In response, the DCYA said the record of the meeting had been interpreted incorrectly. The Irish Examiner also asked if the department had any plans to inform those victims of illegal birth registrations from St Patricks Guild of the true circumstances of their births. In response, the DCYA said any consideration of an investigation into the issue of illegal registrations of births would have to be cognisant of the impact the receipt of such information could have on the persons who were the subject of the illegal registration and were never aware of this fact. The wider impact on families that may have sought to surround the identity of a child in secrecy must also be considered, said a statement. It concluded by saying that the benefits of any audit of adoption records are questionable. Three years on, it seems that opinion has changed. They will now tell the people affected by these illegal acts. They will now begin a sample audit of records. It is not before time. Childrens Minister Katherine Zappone revealed that Tusla had identified 126 cases where people had their births illegally registered between 1946 and 1969. The cases were identified during an analysis of some 13,500 adoption records that were transferred to Tusla by the former adoption society, St Patricks Guild. Illegal birth registrations occur where a child is placed with a couple or individual that are not the parents or parent, but the birth is then registered as if the child had been born to that couple or individual. Following an initial examination, Tusla identified the illegal registrations because there was a marker specifying adopted from birth on the individual file. Having cross-checked the records with those of the Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI) and the General Register Office (GRO), Tusla identified 126 incorrect registrations as follows: Nine people who have had no contact with St Patricks Guild and may be entirely unaware of the true circumstances of their birth; 14 people where a relative had contact with St Patricks Guild, but where it is not clear whether the person affected are aware of the incorrect registration; 31 people who have had previous contact with St Patricks Guild and who may or may not be aware of the incorrect registration; Two people who, though later adopted legally, were the subject of an illegal registration initially; In the case of a further 16 people, Tusla found insufficient evidence to determine whether an illegal registration had taken place. Of the 126 cases, it was confirmed 20 children were placed outside of Ireland. Seven went to the North, 11 to Britain, and one to the US. Tusla is expected to publish details soon of how they will contact people. It has notified the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes, and transferred relevant records to it. Gardai were first contacted in February about the cases and on their request, 10 sample files were sent on. The Irish Examiner revealed in 2015 that an AAI delegation told representatives of the Department of Children and the GRO in June 2013 that St Patricks Guild was aware of several hundred cases of illegal birth registrations. At that time, the department said an audit of adoption records would yield little useful information, as there would be little, if any, supporting information in relation to these arrangements on the files. However, Ms Zappone yesterday committed to a sampling exercise of the approximately 150,000 adoption records held by the State to ascertain if a full audit is required. This will be carried out in the first instance by Tusla and the AAI and will be overseen and quality-assured by an independent reviewer, Marion Reynolds, a former deputy director of Social Services in the North. Ms Zappone said more victims of illegal registrations may be identified. I have tried to put myself in the shoes of those who are going to be given this news, she said. Quite frankly, it is impossible. Our identity goes to the heart of who we are. For people who are in middle age or older, to be told at this stage in their lives that their parents are not their birth parents and that their births were deliberately falsely registered, this will be nothing short of traumatic for them and those around them. It is hard to estimate the true extent of incorrect registrations of birth because this practice was concealed. AAI chairman Geoffrey Shannon said it was crucial the scale of illegal registrations was comprehensively addressed. The sampling exercise its an exercise that will determine the scale and the extent of any illegal registration process, that involves a process that will be overseen by an independent person which will ensure transparency and public confidence in that system, he said. Its very difficult at this stage to determine whether the practice was systemic practice or it was confined to an agency, but I think a robust process has been put in place to determine that issue. Burma Armed Group Leader Blames Panglong Delay on Military's Demands New Mon State Party Vice Chairman Nai Hong Sar addresses a meeting in Mon State on April 26. / Oak Sar Tpr / Facebook YANGON A precise date for the third session of the 21st Century Panglong Union Peace Conference still has yet to be fixed due to persistent disagreements between Myanmars military and ethnic armed groups, according to a leader of one group. The third session was tentatively scheduled for May after multiple delays. Nai Hong Sar, vice chairman of the New Mon State Party, said the military wants the armed groups to promise in advance not to secede, but the armed groups see no need to make such a pledge if the military agrees to a federal system. He said armed groups met with military and government representatives in Naypyitaw on May 18 for preliminary talks. They told us at the meeting that we cannot secede from the Union, said Nai Hong Sar, who attended the talks. He said the armed groups came away from the meeting with the impression that the military was still determined to defeat them in battle and had no interest in accommodating them in a federal system. If our ethnic groups get real federalism, with self-determination and equal rights, none of us would talk about seceding from the Union, Nai Hong Sar said. Otherwise, he said, the armed groups believe they need to retain the option to secede in case the military continues to attack them and abuse their people. But if the armed groups did not agree to give up the option, he added, the military said at the meeting that it would not accept self-determination for ethnic groups in their regions or a state Constitution for each state. Nai Hong Sar said the military also brought up the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of armed groups and security sector reform at the May 17 talks. This is just their wish. But the ethnic groups cannot trust the current military because it is not based on democratic standards, he said. Myanmars military does not take orders from a civilian government and in addition to the Defense Ministry runs the Ministry of Border Affairs and the Ministry of Home Affairs, which controls the police. Our ethnic groups do not have equal rights yet. Our ethnic rights have not been granted yet. So we cannot destroy our armies, Nai Hong Sar said. The armed groups met among themselves in Chiang Mai, Thailand, on Sunday and Monday and decided to seek more preliminary talks with the military and government to try to resolve the impasse. The Union Peace Conference is supposed to be held once every six months, but the last session was in May 2017. At a press conference in Naypyitaw on Tuesday, Defense Ministry Permanent Secretary Brigadier-General Aung Kyaw Hoe blamed the delay of the third session on the armed groups. Burma Survivors Mark 15th Anniversary of Depayin Massacre Ma Thandar Soe, a survivor of the Depayin Massacre, recalls her memories of the deadly 2003 attack on a National League for Democracy convoy at a ceremony commemorating the 15th anniversary of the event in Kyi Village, Depayin Township, Sagaing Division, on Wednesday. / courtesy of Ma Thandar Soe MANDALAY Survivors marked the 15th anniversary of the Depayin Massacre on Wednesday with a ceremony in Sagaing Divisions Depayin Township to remember the scores of National League for Democracy members and supporters killed in the deadly ambush. About 100 locals and survivors gathered at the monastery in Kyi village, where they offered donations to Buddhist monks and laid wreaths at the site of the 2003 massacre. On May 30, 2003, a convoy transporting a group National League for Democracy officials and supporters, including party leader and current State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was attacked by a group of thugs who killed at least 70 people. Many more NLD members and supporters were seriously injured during the attack, with some later being jailed for many years, their families threatened and their businesses forced to close. We hold this ceremony to ensure that the past is not forgotten and the people who died and were hurt during the massacre are remembered, said U Ko Lay, a vice president of Mandalay District NLD office and an organizer of the ceremony. During the commemoration ceremony on Wednesday, survivors recalled their memories of the bloodbath. We remind the public of how we were attacked. But we do not recall these vicious memories in order to seek vengeance, said Ma Thandar Soe, a member of the youth wing from Mandalay District which was responsible for Daw Aung San Suu Kyis security on the day. Ma Thandar Soe was among the injured during the Depayin massacre, but managed to escape from the scene. The military regime of the time and the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA)the military-backed organization that later transformed into the Union Solidary and Development Party (USDP)has often been implicated in the massacre, though no legal action has been taken so far. State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly said that for the sake of stability and national reconciliation, she will not seek vengeance for the incident, of which she was the main target. We believe in our leader and will follow her example; we will not seek vengeance either, Ma Thandar Soe said. However, we are the ones whose lives were destroyed, so we want the perpetrators to face justice if the opportunity arises, she said. While many politicians have accepted Daw Aung San Suu Kyis view, there are many others who believe the truth about the incident must be revealed. There is one step that is necessary before we can forgive and forget. It is to reveal the truth. In the case of the Depayin massacre, the victims can forgive the culprits, but they will not be able to forget how theyve suffered, said lawyer U Thein Than Oo, who was a political prisoner under the military regime. The lawyer said that when it came to acts of violence in Myanmar, finding the truth and delivering justice often take a back seat, as perpetrators take advantage of the moral goodness of the Burmese people and their forgiving and sympathetic nature. If avoiding vengeance really is good for the reconciliation and stability of the country, then we will follow her [Daw Aung San Suu Kyi] example. But if not, then legal action must be taken against the culprits, he said. It would be wonderful if the perpetrators confessed; if we had a truth commission which could both uncover the truth and hold the perpetrators accountable, not only for the Depayin massacre but for all brutal incidents in the past. This would be great for everyone and there would be no need to take vengeance, he said. News Rural Poor Squeezed by Land Concessions in Mekong Region: Report Women plant rice in a paddy field in Kompong Chhnang Province, Cambodia, on Aug. 6, 2016. / Reuters BANGKOK Companies acquired concessions amounting to the size of a small European country, while rural residents of Southeast Asias Mekong region saw their landholdings shrink or disappear over the past two decades, according to researchers. More than 5.1 million hectares of land an area larger than Slovakia were granted for mining and agricultural concessions in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, according to a report by the non-profit Mekong Region Land Governance (MRLG). At the same time, forest areas have declined, said the report, released on Monday by MRLG, which is based in Laos capital, Vientiane, and promotes better land use policies. While agricultural output and exports are growing in the Mekong as a result of the concessions, the benefits have not reached smallholders and indigenous people, said Micah Ingalls at the Center for Development and Environment in Vientiane. They are being undermined by policies that fail to ensure their rights or enable them to benefit, said Ingalls, an author of the report. Across the five countries that host the Mekong River watershed, governments have lured large-scale investments in land thought to be under-utilized to generate jobs and incomes. The concessions have changed traditional cropping, with 80 percent of all agricultural land now given over to six export-focused crops: rice, cassava, maize, sugarcane, rubber and oil palm. Meanwhile, the average landholding per rural household has declined over the last 10 years, while some have been pushed from their land entirely, according to the report. Revenues generated by the concessions have been less than anticipated, and the social and environmental costs have largely been borne by the rural poor, Ingalls said. While governments have formulated policies for land titles and land-use certificates, there is a gap between policy and practice, he said. Ingalls explained that such policies often fail to provide ownership rights to people who have been using land, and they ignore groups who have traditionally lived in areas granted as concessions. Indigenous people, forest dwellers and other ethnic minorities have very little protection, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Land concessions in Cambodia have displaced more than 770,000 people since 2000, human rights lawyers say. Following protests and pressure from rights groups, Cambodia and Laos both announced moratoriums on new land concessions in 2012. Other governments have improved environmental and social impact assessments, but rural communities are largely excluded from the processes, said Jean-Christophe Diepart, a co-author of the report. The Mekong is in the midst of substantial, far-reaching transformations with regard to land. Robust, inclusive and accountable decision-making are urgently needed, he said. News Tatmadaw Will Cease Operations in Kachin on Govts Order: Defense Secretary Brig-Gen Aung Kyaw Hoe at a press conference on May 29. / Htet Naing Zaw / The Irrawaddy NAYPYITAW The Tatmadaw is ready to obey if President U Win Myint orders a stop to military operations in Kachin State in line with the law, said permanent secretary of the Defense Ministry Brigadier-General Aung Kyaw Hoe. The Brig-Gen said so in response to The Irrawaddys question during a press conference of the Defense Ministry on Tuesday in Naypyitaw. The Irrawaddy said the Tatmadaw, or Myanmar Army, stopped military operations in Kachin State under President U Thein Seins order and asked if it would do the same if the current President U Win Myint ordered it to do so. The Tatmadaw is under the leadership of the state. The President is the head of the country. If he gives an executive order, we are ready to obey. There is no reason we wont obey it, said the Brig-Gen. He blamed ethnic armed organizations for the ongoing clashes, saying that fighting continues because those groups attack Tatmadaw commands and headquarters. They extort money on the Union Highway. They commit killings and attacks, and conduct mine attacks and other destructive acts. These activities pose great danger to the administrative mechanism of the government and we, therefore, have to respond, said Brig-Gen Aung Kyaw Hoe. The Irrawaddy phoned the spokesperson of the Presidents Office for comment but was told he was busy and was unable to respond. U Lin Lin Oo, a Lower House lawmaker representing Kachin States Tanai Township where clashes are ongoing, said that it takes two to stop the armed clashes. As the government has to take responsibility for the consequences of the clashes, it will be difficult for it to continue dialogue with ethnic armed groups if the fighting does not cease. It is not a good idea to solve problems with military means. The government should mediate in clashes. Otherwise, there will be serious problems such as internally displaced persons, which will fall on the government, said U Lin Lin Oo, a National League for Democracy lawmaker. Anti-war protests in Yangon in the second week of May ended with a crackdown on protesters, some of who were detained under the Peaceful Assembly and Procession Law. The country is now led by a democratic government and has a Parliament, and ethnic armed groups can now make their demands democratically without bearing arms, said Brig-Gen Aung Kyaw Hoe. They dont want to relinquish the power that they have gained from bearing arms. Peace will never be achieved if they cling to arms. I would say that peace can be achieved only through the path of the NCA [Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement], he added. Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko. Wednesday, May 30th, 2018 (10:40 am) - Score 2,118 The Scottish Governments Rural Economy Secretary, Fergus Ewing, has pledged to quit if he fails to deliver on the new 600m R100 project, which aspires to make superfast broadband (30Mbps+) ISP networks available to every single premise in Scotland by the end of 2021 (here and here); March 2022 as a financial year. The existing 428m Digital Scotland (DSSB) project with BT (Openreach) has already helped to make 30Mbps+ capable networks available to around 93% of premises across the country (here), which has helped an additional 890,000 premises to gain access to faster connectivity. Meanwhile the new R100 programme is expected to follow-on from this programme and begin deployment in 2019. Several suppliers including BT, Gigaclear, Axione and SSE Enterprise Telecoms are known to be bidding on the new contract, although at present this only states that there will be 178,948 premises eligible for intervention across three regional lots. But previous reports have predicted that around 280,000 premises could be left without access to superfast broadband by total completion of the existing DSSB project (still deploying through 2018). Suffice to say that Fergus Ewing, who was speaking to the Scottish Land & Estates conference (Herald Scotland), might have just talked himself into a difficult corner. Fergus Ewing MSP said: If I dont deliver this by 2021, I think it will be time for Fergus Ewing to depart and do something else, and leave the job to somebody else. But I can assure you, were on the case. Fergus also used the opportunity to take a quick snipe at the UK Governments stingy financial contribution to Scotlands broadband programme, which has tended to come via the wider Broadband Delivery UK scheme (BDUK committed just over 100m to the original contract and only 20.99m for the current procurement). At present we still dont know precisely what will be achieved by R100 and the answer to that depends upon the chosen supplier(s), as well as what sort of technology mix may be used. However the proposed completion timescale of 2021/22 is incredibly tight and to reach those in the final 1% within the allotted time may encourage adoption of an inferior quick-fix solution, such as Satellite. Meanwhile theres still the potential for some conflict between Scotlands R100 programme and the UK governments proposed minimum download speed of 10Mbps via their legally binding Universal Service Obligation (USO), which isnt due to be introduced until 2020 and even then it will only be available on request. Engineering communications and sound solutions provider Jabra is set to expand its New Zealand operations, with the appointment of Chris Clark as business development manager for the country. Based in Auckland, Jabra says Clark will be responsible for growing the companys market presence in New Zealand, including driving opportunities with distribution partners and its reseller base to further enhance customer success across the country. Clark brings 10 years experience in Unified Communications and telecommunications to his new role, having previously worked at Cyclone Computer, CommArc, Spark New Zealand and VoicePro. His main responsibility at Jabra will be to manage and grow Jabras channel partner community. I am excited to join the Jabra team at such a pivotal time for UC, Clark said. I have a huge passion for the industry and for building lasting relationships with channel partners to support our end-customers. With extensive experience in UC/ telecommunications in New Zealand, I am looking forward to engaging with businesses here on behalf of Jabra. Jabra's ANZ managing director David Piggott said, We see the New Zealand market as a great growth opportunity for Jabra and Chris brings a wealth of experience in contact centre and Unified Communication solutions. We now have Chris in Auckland, and Brent Mitchell in Wellington giving us great national coverage. Jabra is the only headset vendor that is directly invested in the New Zealand market and we will continue to invest in our partner community to help them generate and close business. Were extremely dedicated to supporting and growing our New Zealand channel partner community. Despite having launched a digital news initiative in Europe to "combat misinformation and disinformation, Google is one of six companies to sign up with London's Evening Standard newspaper for a 3 million (A$5.26 million) deal that promises money-cant-buy positive news and favourable comment coverage. The activist group openDemocracyUK said among the other companies that had joined what is known as the London 2020 deal, was being run by the paper's editor, former British chancellor George Osborne. Google's DNI has a budget of 150 million over three years and the company has said that it aims to "combat misinformation and disinformation and help consumers distinguish fact from fiction online. This is not the first time that Google has been outed as being involved in a project where it pays to get positive coverage. As iTWire reported in July 2017, Google has paid academics to write papers that could help influence public opinion and policy, with money going to professors at universities ranging from Harvard to the University of California at Berkeley. openDemocracyUK said big firms, most of them multinationals, have been given detailed sales presentations about the type of coverage their money would buy in the Standard which sells about 900,000 copies and has more circulation in the two-mile radius of Westminster than The Times does nationally. The London 2020 campaign, due to start on 5 June, will be branded and have native and advertorial pages. However, the firms that have signed up will get content that will seem to be independently written editorial material. Among the other companies which has signed up is transport app giant Uber which is soon to appeal a ban on its licence to operate in London. openDemocracyUK said that Starbucks had declined to join, with an unnamed senior executive saying: "Buying positive news coverage is PR death something you might do in Saudi Arabia, but not here. "This wasnt right for us. We do engage in advertorial [a hybrid mix of advertising and editorial] but thats just marketing. We dont need to buy our reputation. Uber's involvement is controversial as the world's biggest fund manager BlackRock has an investment worth 500 million in the company - and also pays Osborne 650,000 a year for operating as an adviser one day of the week. London 2020 comprises six themed projects which will run for two years: politicised initiatives on clean air, plastic pollution, schools and workplace tech and a project designed to address Londons housing crisis. The six 2020 partners will head projects that will be sold to Standard readers as improving London for the benefit of all". Uber will get the branded lead act in the clean air project, while Google will get portions of the schools and work tech projects. The campaigns will end shortly before the mayoral elections in London in 2020. Google has been contacted for comment. Medibank has launched a WeChat channel in a move which it says is designed to better connect with the growing Australian-Chinese population. A multi-functional Chinese messaging app claiming over a billion global monthly active users, the WeChat platform joins Medibanks traditional channels as a way to discuss health insurance products with customers. In particular, the channel is used to connect with overseas students and visitors who may need insurance. Medibank says customers can use WeChat to find their closest store, and to see who in the store can speak either Mandarin or Cantonese. The Medibank WeChat channel also features health-related content from Medibanks Live Better program that users can view on the companys feed and share with their friends and they can read a number of articles on various topics such as how to cure home sickness, or how to be safe at the beach. According to Medibank, the channel is gaining popularity with customers and there has been a 60% increase in the number of followers in the first two months of this year. Medibank says almost 40 Mandarin or Cantonese fluent employees are engaged in the channel across 28 Medibank retail stores and growing with customers able to contact them directly to discuss their health insurance needs And Medibank says its employees have been receiving more questions from customers, and not just those looking to take out insurance, with customers using the channel to ask questions like: how to find a members choice provider, what can be claimed at hospital and even how to sign parents up for visitors' insurance. Medibank says it joins a growing number of businesses that are looking to better connect with the growing Chinese population in Australia. The health fund cites statistics from the Department of Home Affairs, showing that Chinese nationals accounted for the largest portion of approved student visas in the second half of 2017, with 40,925 visas or 24.4%. China had the largest number of lodged visitor applications with 941,088 lodgements in 2016-2017 as well, and Medibank says KPMG and the University of Sydney are also predicting an increase in Chinese investment in the Australian healthcare sector in particular. Medibank senior customer consultant Jason Huang says the WeChat channel is a great way to serve and shows respect to Chinese customers, particularly those who are new to Australia. Huang, who has been working at Medibank since 2015, after moving to Australia from the Hubei province in Central China in 2010, also translates content into Mandarin and Cantonese for articles on WeChat. Our new WeChat channel means that we can be better at supporting the Chinese community here in Australia, and particularly those who are new to the country, he said. Since 2015 Huang has worked in both the Glen Waverly and Box Hill Medibank stores in Victoria and says that WeChat is great for many of his customers who have migrated from China and dont know the language and the health system. Thorough cybersecurity takes more than tech: Thats the thinking at Facebook, where Chief Global Security Officer Nick Lovrien deploys physical security to protect data. Yes, canine units and human guards stereotypically keep people safe, but when properly integrated, physical security protects information as well. Acting as a final layer to a perimeter defense, Facebooks global security data centers team guards intellectual property. Its an integrated approach where even the companys office buildings are designed to put physical protection between servers and the public. Everything we should do is based on ruthless prioritization, Lovrien says. Move fast and build things. To speed development, the company has an open office floorplan. Nobody has an office at Facebook, he explains Mark, Sheryl, CEO, COO, nobody. Lovrien admits a workplace where so many guests come in or out is obviously a different approach to creating that safe and secure environment, but the risk level that that has technically is offset by the collaboration and the output and the impact that we feel it enables. In other words, the business needs open offices, so security has to deal with it. For starters, within that open environment, every location has secured spaces areas Lovrien describes as shared areas beyond access control points. This, of course, includes the data centers. When I started over five years ago, Lovrien explains, we had one data center and it was one building. Today we have about 20 data centers and each of those data centers is growing to about 20 buildings per data center. The centers host photos, Facebook Live feeds, other video, and similar files. The company uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support the retail side, but the data centers, Lovrien says, are internal server farms: Miles of servers everywhere that's storing all of your pictures [and] videos. A buddy system to keep an eye on guests To keep guests from walking right in and stealing the goods, Facebook uses a buddy system. If someones in the office to see you, stick with them. If any employee sees someone wandering without a pal, she messages a company safety bot, which can handle more than 2 million conversations at a time. Facebooks global security services department mans each locations reception desk to approve arriving guests. Lovrien says a surveillance team then utiliz[es] identity management through cameras and other things to track visitor movement. To keep the camera system in shape, he adds, Facebooks global security systems and technology group is always monitoring the health of our systems and making sure that we are proactive before a camera goes down that we are ripping and replacing it or on asset control. The lobby as the perimeter We really treat our lobbies as our perimeters. You'll see an obvious two-point authentication as you walk in. You've got the anti-tailgating and the active control, which will be consistent from office to office, he explains. (Tailgating, in the world of physical security, is when an employee inadvertently lets a non-employee in, usually through trying to be nice like holding the door open for the person behind you.) Countersurveillance officers walk the buildings in plainclothes, Lovrien says, so people don't feel like they have a bunch of security officers running around. At Menlo Park Facebooks California headquarters a bicycle unit, mobile team, and canine patrol police the grounds as well. Large cities a bigger challenge for physical security Protection for Menlo Park is easier than for New York, Singapore, and offices in larger cities where sales and marketing teams work. Menlo Park, Lovrien explains, is actually the same size as the Empire State Building were you to lay the skyscraper on its side. Facebook owns the property around the office, some of which will be used in upcoming facilities expansion. This extra space enables security to patrol the area near Facebooks headquarters for suspicious situations. In larger cities, Facebooks offices arent the only thing around for miles. We have to be very centrally located, he explains, and their buildings are just part of the crowd. The New York office, for example, is at East 43rd Street and Madison Avenue less than a block from Grand Central. The Singapore office is at street level. Its impossible to control and police activity around them. This creates a challenge, Lovrien admits, but also enables us to think differently and outside the box. In London, this means architectural design that makes use of stairwells. Coupled with knocked out ceilings, stairs connect the office for that open feel but act as physical barriers that slow intruders down. Granted, visitor tracking and architectural design usually arent cybersecuritys building blocks. Even if global security is less 128-Bit, more nightstick, that doesnt mean Lovriens team avoids infosec. Physical securitys raison detre, Lovrien says, is protecting our assets to ensure Facebook's physical and electronic assets are safe and secure from buildings to servers and prototypes to ideas. When threats surface, he adds, We don't say, Is that an IT issue or that is a facilities issue? We take it, we provide white glove services, and we solve it. I always tell people our organization is an intel-based organization, he continues, explaining how, in part, integrating with cybersecurity is how you make your program not just a cost center but giving back to the business. We try to identify the threat and mitigate it before it's ever realized. Corporate buy-in, he adds, solidifies this team effort: One of the great things about having Mark [Zuckerberg as CEO] is that he sees and understands the value of the global security program. He understands the holistic approach that we're taking to protect him and all of our employees. If Mark Zuckerberg sees the link between physical and cyber protection, cant we all? More Information Old Fort Baptist Church Please be advised that if your regular polling location is Old Fort Baptist Church, you will vote at Dorchester Presbyterian Church located at 10290 Dorchester Road. This temporary change is in effect for the following elections only: Statewide Primary June 12 Statewide Primary Runoff (If Necessary) June 26 You will return to your regular polling location, Old Fort Baptist Church, for the statewide general election on Nov. 6. Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church of Summerville The polling location for residents of the below neighborhoods has been permanently changed from Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church of Summerville to Grace Lutheran located at 1600 Old Trolley Road, beginning June 12: Irongate Wellington Place Evergreen Reddit Email 267 Shares New York ( Tomdispatch.com) For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida. But thats a story for later. For now, lets focus on a 2017 executive order issued by President Trump, part of his second attempt at a travel ban directed primarily at citizens of Muslim-majority nations. It begins: It is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks. That sentence would be repeated in a January report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. Meant to strengthen the presidents case for the travel ban, it was panned for its methodological flaws, pilloried for its inaccuracies, and would even spur a lawsuit by the civil rights organization, Muslim Advocates, and the watchdog group, Democracy Forward Foundation. In their complaint, those groups contend that the report was biased, misleading, and incomplete and manipulates information to support its anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim conclusions. To bolster the presidents arguments for restricting the entry of foreigners into the United States, the DOJ/DHS analysis contained a collection of case summaries. Examples included: the Sudanese national who, in 2016, pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS; the Uzbek who posted a threat on an Uzbek-language website to kill President Obama in an act of martyrdom on behalf of ISIS; the Syrian who, in a plea agreement, admitted that he knew a member of ISIS and that while in Syria he participated in a battle against the Syrian regime, including shooting at others, in coordination with Al Nusrah, an al-Qaeda offshoot. Such cases cited in the report, hardly spectacular terror incidents, were evidently calculated to sow fears by offering a list of convicted suspects with Muslim-sounding names. But the authors of the report simply looked in the wrong places. They could have found startling summaries of truly audacious attacks against the homeland in a collection of U.S. military documents from 2016 obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information Act. Those files detail a plethora of shocking acts of terrorism across the United States including mass poisonings, the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and that Peoples Armed Liberation (PAL) attack on U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) headquarters in Tampa, Florida, [by] a drone-launched missile. Thats right! A drone-launched missile attack! On CENTCOMs Florida headquarters! By a terrorist group known as PAL! Wondering how you missed the resulting 24/7 media bonanza, the screaming front page headlines in the New York Times, the hysterics on Fox & Friends, the presidents hurricane of tweets? Well, theres a simple explanation. That attack doesnt actually happen until May 2020. Or so says the summary of the 33rd annual Joint Land, Air, and Sea Strategic Special Program (JLASS-SP), an elaborate war game carried out in 2016 by students and faculty from the U.S. militarys war colleges, the training grounds for its future generals and admirals. h/t Wikimedia: AV-8B Flying over Macdill AFB PALing Around with Terrorists The 2016 edition of JLASS-SP was played out remotely for weeks before culminating in a five-day on-site exercise at the Air Force Wargaming Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. It involved 148 students from the Air Forces Air War College, the Army War College, the Marine Corps War College, the Naval War College, the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, the National War College, and the National Defense Universitys Information Resources Management College. Those up-and-coming officers some of whom will likely play significant roles in running Americas actual wars in the 2020s confronted a future in which, as the script for the war game put it, lingering jealousy and distrust of American power and national interests have made it politically and culturally difficult for the United States to act unilaterally. Heres the scene as set in JLASS-SP: while the U.S. is still economically and militarily powerful into the next decade, anxieties abound about increasing constraints on the countrys ability to control, dictate, and dominate world affairs. Even in the military realm advances by others in science and technology, expanded adoption of irregular warfare tactics by both state and non-state actors, proliferation of nuclear weapons and long-range precision weapons, and growing use of cyber warfare attacks have increasingly constricted U.S. freedom of action, reads the war games summary. While the materials used are not intended to be an actual prediction of events, they are explicitly meant to reflect a plausible depiction of major trends and influences in the world regions. Indeed, whats striking about the exercise is how though scripted before the election of Donald Trump it anticipated many of the fears articulated in the presidents December 2017 National Security Strategy. That document, for instance, bemoans the potential dangers not only of regional powers like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, but also of transnational threats from jihadist terrorists and transnational criminal organizations, undocumented immigrants, drug traffickers, and criminal cartels [which] exploit porous borders and threaten U.S. security and public safety. The JLASS-SP scenario also prefigured themes from that 2018 DOJ/DHS report supporting the travel ban in the way it stoked fears of, above all, a major foreign-born especially Muslim terror threat in the United States. A 2017 Government Accountability Office report would, however, conclude that, of the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, far right-wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27 percent). Two years after the war game was conducted, in a time of almost metronomic domestic mass killings, President Trump continues to spotlight the supposedly singular danger posed by inadequately vetted people in the U.S., although stovetops and ovens, hot air balloons, and burning pajamas are far more deadly to Americans. Indeed, since 9/11, terrorism has been a distinctly low-level risk to the American public at least when compared to heart disease, cancer, car crashes, fires, or heat waves but has had an outsized effect on the perceptions and actions of the government, not to mention its visions of tomorrow. Tomorrows Terror Today An examination of the threats from international and domestic terror groups, as imagined in JLASS-SP, offers unique clues to the Pentagons fears for the future. Increasingly, reads the war games summary, transnational organizations, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and violent extremist organizations challenge the traditional notions of boundaries and sovereignty. That drone-launching terror group, PAL, for instance, is neither Islamist nor a right-wing terror group, but an organization supposedly formed in 2017 in hopes of defeating globalism and capitalism throughout the world by rallying the proletariat to orchestrate the overthrow of capitalist governments and global conglomerates. Its ideology, an amalgam of increasingly stale leftist social movements, belies its progressive ranks, a rainbow coalition consisting of most of the globes ethnicities and cultures, all of whom seem to be cyber-sophisticates skilled in fundraising, recruiting, as well as marketing their particular brand of radicalism. As of 2020, the audacious drone strike on CENTCOMs headquarters was PALs only terror attack in the tangible world. The rest of its actions have taken place in the digital realm, where the group is known for launching cyber-assaults and siphoning off funds from large global corporations, banks, and capitalist governments around the world. Even though PAL went from a gleam in the eye of its founder, the Bond-villain-esquely named Otto Cyre, to terrorist power-player in just a few short years, the pace of its operations didnt please its hardest core members who, the war game scenario says, broke away in late 2020 to form yet another organization devoted to even more rapidly eroding confidence in governmental and institutional bodies by staging events that demonstrate the impotency of the establishment. That splinter group, United Patriots Against International Government (UPAIGO) in this war game all terror groups have Pentagon-style acronyms concentrates on spectacular but deniable actions, a scattershot campaign of often botched but sometimes lethal efforts that include: * November 2021: a cyber-attack on the Angarsk Refinery in the Russian Federation, which resulted in a two-week shutdown causing a sharp rise in the price of oil and gas just prior to the 2021-2022 winter heating season. * April 2022: a failed attempt to assassinate, by IED, the chief of U.S. Pacific Command. Two members of the commanders security detail and the commands political advisor were killed in the attack while others, including civilians, were injured. * January 2022: a failed plot to detonate a dirty [radioactive] bomb, employing medical waste and homemade explosives, at Philadelphia International Airport. * 2023 fire season: as fires raged in the western United States, UPAIGO established relief efforts designed to compete with the U.S. governments response, in order to undermine confidence in government agencies. * June 2024: an attack, in coordination with members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), on a U.S. flagged air carrier transporting U.S. military personnel at Shannon Airport in Ireland. Militants fired two surface-to-air missiles at the aircraft, which was damaged but managed to land successfully. PAL and UPAIGO are, however, hardly the only terror threats facing the United States in the 2020s, according to JLASS-SP 2016. PALs fellow travelers, for example, include the fictional versions of the real Irish National Liberation Army and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Theres also the Environmentalists Against Capitalists Organization, or EACO, a lethal environmental anti-capitalist terrorist group with global connections. Formed in 2010 (though not in our actual world), EACO, according to the war gamers, evolved into an increasingly violent organization in the 2020s, carrying out not just cyberattacks on corporations but also a full-scale bombing campaign targeting executive board meetings of large corporations, particularly in industries such as oil, coal, natural gas, and logging. The group even took to planting IEDs on logging roads and employing tainted food as a weapon. By 2025, EACO was implicated in more than 400 criminal acts in the U.S. resulting in 126 deaths and $862 million in damages. Then theres Anonymous. In the Pentagons fictional war-game, this real-world hacktivist group is characterized as a loose organization of malicious black-hat hackers that employs its digital prowess to distribute bomb-making instructions, and conduct targeting for options other than planes, trains, and automobiles. In the past created by the militarys imagineers, Anonymous was declared a terrorist organization after it conducted an August 2015 digital attack on Louisianas power grid with something akin to the Stuxnet worm that damaged nuclear centrifuges in Iran. That cyber-assault was meant to protest the states restrictions on online gambling an affront, according to the fictional Anonymous, to Internet freedom. (In the real world, Louisiana lawmakers actually just deep-sixed online gambling without an apparent terrorist response.) Taking down that power grid resulted in the death of 15 elderly patients trapped in a facility denied air conditioning as a result of the power outage. Also included among domestic terror groups is Mara Salvatrucha 13 or MS-13, the Los Angeles street gang, born of the American-fueled Central American civil wars of the 1980s, that was transplanted to El Salvador and has since returned to the United States. This violent American export the product of deportations in the 1990s has paradoxically become a key justification for President Trumps crackdown on immigration. MS-13 recruits through our broken immigration system, violating our borders. And it just comes right through whenever they want to come through, they come through, said Trump earlier this year during a White House roundtable focused on the gang. Weve really never seen anything quite like this the level of ferocity, the level of violence, and the reforms we need from Congress to defeat it. In the real world, the U.S. branch of MS-13 operates in loose local cliques under a franchised name, dabbling in small-time drug dealing, gun-running, prostitution, and extortion (primarily of recent immigrants). Many of its crimes are committed against its own affiliates or members of other gangs. The president nonetheless baselessly claimed that MS-13 has literally taken over towns and cities of the United States. He also continues to portray the gang, which reportedly makes up less than 1% of the estimated 1.4 million gang members in the U.S., as a sophisticated international cartel. And thats precisely how MS-13 was also portrayed in the fantasy world of JLASS-SP. In that war game, Mara Salvatrucha has developed the resources to wage full-scale insurgent campaigns in Central America and the capability to cause serious disruption in the United States and Canada, while rumors swirl of contacts between its members and foreign militants. If cooperation between foreign terrorist groups and MS-13 ever blossomed, the potential for terrorist attacks within the borders of the United States would increase significantly, the war game scenario warns. President Trump has been accused of conflating members of MS-13 with undocumented immigrants (and referring to both groups as animals). Regardless, theres no question that he kicked off his presidential run in 2015 by disparaging Mexicans. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people, he infamously declared. The JLASS-SP documents reverse Trumps formula by first noting that most illegal immigrants crossing into the United States are just trying to make a better life for themselves, only to suggest that the U.S.-Mexican border also serves as an infiltration point for terrorists. Unlike in the real world, where such fears circulate primarily as a conspiracy theory, in the Pentagons future fantasy there is substantial evidence that terrorists from the Middle East and North Africa transit the Mexican-U.S. border. Worse yet, radical Islamists even camouflage themselves as Hispanics to cross the border. The militarys fantasists point to a flood of name changes from Arabic to Hispanic and the reported linking of drug cartels along the Texas border with Middle East and North Africa terrorism. That represents a Trumpian-style nightmare-cum-fantasy even the president hasnt yet dreamed up a Hispanic-surnamed, cartel-supported group of Islamist terrorists. But by the 2020s, according to the Pentagons futurists, such worries are well-founded. And this will occur at the same time that Mexican and South American drug gangs have grown so rich and powerful they can regularly buy protection from U.S. government officials. Popular opinion in the United States is beginning to believe the Narco-corruption is affecting the rule of law north of the border, according to their scenario, with the cartels spending $20 billion in 2022 alone to buy off U.S. officials or get candidates of their choice elected. That same year, allegations of election tampering in mayoral races across the American South come to light and the number of corruption convictions of U.S. Border Patrol agents and law enforcement officials skyrockets. Perhaps most shocking is the discovery of a vast irrigated grow site (evidently a massive marijuana farm) tended by a dozen Mexican farmers armed with AK-47s in wait for it! remote areas of Illinois. Mexican farmers, El Salvadoran gang members, Islamists masquerading as Hispanics, eco-terrorists, and anti-globalization militants arent the only threats foreseen by the militarys futurists. Much-ballyhooed reports of the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, like the much-hyped defeat of its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, turn out to be premature. In the 2020s, the re-re-branded group, now known as the Global Islamic Caliphate, or GIC, draws support from Sunni-majority regions in Syria and Iraq; refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey; and internally displaced persons in Syria and Iraq, while continuing to launch attacks in the region. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has grown in reach, size, and might. By 2021, the group has 38,000 members spread across Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger with bases reportedly located in Western Sahara. On May 23, 2023, AQIM carries out the most lethal terror attack in the U.S. since 9/11, detonating massive truck-bombs at both the New York and New Jersey ends of the Lincoln Tunnel, killing 435 people and injuring another 618. The bombing prompts President McGraw you remember him, Karl Maxwell McGraw, the independent Arizona senator who rode his populist America on the Move campaign to victory in the 2020 election to invade Mauritania and become mired in yet another American forever war that shows every indication of grinding on into the 2030s, if not beyond. The Age of Terrorism In the real world, the lifetime odds of an American dying from walking are one in 672. The chance of being killed by a foreign terrorist? One in 45,808. By an illegal immigrant terrorist? One in 138 million. And the odds of being killed by a chain migration immigrant sometime this year? One in 1.2 billion! In other words, you have a far greater chance of being killed by a dog, a shark, lightning, or the government via legal execution. This is not to say terrorism isnt a major threat to others around the world or that terror groups are not proliferating. Since 9/11, the number of terrorist organizations recognized by the U.S. State Department and battled by the Pentagon from Africa to the Middle East to Asia has grown markedly. States are the principal actors on the global stage, but non-state actors also threaten the security environment with increasingly sophisticated capabilities, reads an unclassified synopsis of the Pentagons 2018 National Defense Strategy. Terrorists, trans-national criminal organizations, cyber hackers and other malicious non-state actors have transformed global affairs with increased capabilities of mass disruption. In the fictional future of the Pentagons JLASS-SP 2016, this menace only expands to include various hybrid threats and new homegrown groups with increasing capabilities for death and destruction. While it may be the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks, as President Trumps 2017 executive order declares, the Pentagon envisions a future in which such policies are increasingly ineffective. In their dystopian war-game future, more than two decades of fighting them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America (as former President George W. Bush put it in 2007) proves unequivocally futile. In this sense, the Pentagons fantasies bear an eerie resemblance to the actual present. In the dystopian scenario used by the Pentagon to train its future leaders, todays forever wars have proven ineffective and future threats are to be met with new, similarly ineffective, forever wars. In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Trump declared that were living in the age of terrorism. His solution: wielding unmatched power, loosening the rules of engagement, and establishing an unfettered ability to detain, question, and annihilate terrorists. All of these tactics have, however, been part of the Pentagons playbook since 2001 and, according to the militarys best guess at the future, will lead to an increase in terror groups and terror attacks while terror networks and terrorist ideologies will grow in strength, resilience, and appeal. Almost two decades in, it seems were still only in the opening days of the age of terrorism and, if the Pentagons war-gamers are to be believed, far worse is yet to come. Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com. Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Tom Engelhardts A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoys In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dowers The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffers dystopian novel Splinterlands, and Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead. Copyright 2018 Nick Turse Via Tomdispatch.com TSX: ELD NYSE: EGO VANCOUVER, May 29, 2018 /CNW/ - Eldorado Gold Corporation ("Eldorado" or "the Company") today provides an update on the permitting status for the following capital projects. Tocantinzinho, Brazil The mining concession, which permits mining and commercial production at the Tocantinzinho project, was issued on May 18, 2018 by the federal branch of the Brazilian Ministry of Mines. This permit, in addition to the Environmental Construction Licenses, issued by the Environmental Agency of the State of Para, completes the permits required for project construction. The project plan is currently undergoing an optimization phase to improve capital costs and the economics of the project. Eldorado's Board of Directors will assess next steps for the project after completion of this work. Ksladag, Turkey Eldorado's wholly owned subsidiary, Tuprag Metal Madencilik Sanayive Ticaret A.S., has received confirmation from the Turkish Ministry of Environment and Urbanization ("MoE"), that the proposed construction of the mill at the Kisladag site is permissible under the existing Kisladag Environmental Impact Assessment ("EIA"), approved by the MoE in 2014. Eldorado does not expect to make any material amendments to the existing EIA as the mill site falls within the EIA approved project boundaries and meets other existing EIA requirements. The installation and construction of the Kisladag mill remains subject to further routine permitting, which will be submitted to the relevant Ministries for approval following detailed design work. As referenced in Eldorado's press release dated March 21, 2018, the feasibility study for the Kisladag mill is expected to be completed later this year, with a final investment decision by the Eldorado Board of Directors expected shortly thereafter. Lamaque, Canada As disclosed in the Company's First Quarter results release dated April 26, 2018, the mining lease for the Triangle deposit was received in early 2018. This key permit enables production from the Triangle deposit, currently expected in early 2019. Underground development continues ahead of schedule while refurbishment of the Sigma mill is ongoing. The Company continues to progress infill drilling and extension drilling with the goal of converting resource to increase the Proven and Probable reserves as well as growing resources at Triangle and other known mineralized zones and new targets. Kassandra Mines (Skouries, Olympias and Stratoni), Greece Eldorado continues to discuss the need to approve outstanding permits for the development of its Kassandra assets with the government of Greece. The Company remains committed to developing its Kassandra assets, including Skouries, in accordance with its contractual and other legal obligations, which Greek court rulings have consistently supported. Eldorado's compliance with its legal obligations was confirmed by the recent positive arbitration decision (disclosed on April 4, 2018), which found the Company not in breach of the provisions of its Transfer Contract with the Greek State. The transition of the Skouries site to care and maintenance is expected to be complete by the end of Q2 2018. Ongoing care and maintenance costs are estimated to be $3-5 million per year for 2019 and beyond. About Eldorado Gold Eldorado is a gold and base metals producer with mining, development and exploration operations in Turkey, Greece, Romania, Serbia, Canada and Brazil. The Company has a highly skilled and dedicated workforce, safe and responsible operations, a portfolio of high-quality assets, and long-term partnerships with local communities. Eldorado's common shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: ELD) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: EGO). Cautionary Note about Forward-looking Statements and Information Certain of the statements made and information provided in this press release are forward-looking statements or information within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. Often, these forward-looking statements and forward-looking information can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "continue", "projected", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", or "believes" or the negatives thereof or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements or information contained in this release include, but are not limited to, statements or information with respect to: our expectation as to completion dates, investment decisions, production dates and costs and our strategy, plans and goals, including our proposed exploration, review, development, construction, permitting and operating plans and priorities, related timelines and schedules. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information by their nature are based on assumptions and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or information. We have made certain assumptions about the forward-looking statements and information, including assumptions about the geopolitical, economic, permitting and legal climate that we operate in; the future price of gold and other commodities; exchange rates; anticipated costs and expenses; production, mineral reserves and resources and metallurgical recoveries, the impact of acquisitions, dispositions, suspensions or delays on our business and the ability to achieve our goals. In particular, except where otherwise stated, we have assumed a continuation of existing business operations on substantially the same basis as exists at the time of this release. Even though our management believes that the assumptions made and the expectations represented by such statements or information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that the forward-looking statement or information will prove to be accurate. Many assumptions may be difficult to predict and are beyond our control. Furthermore, should one or more of the risks, uncertainties or other factors materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements or information. These risks, uncertainties and other factors include, among others, the following: geopolitical and economic climate (global and local), risks related to mineral tenure and permits; gold and other commodity price volatility; recoveries of gold and other metals; results of test work; revised guidance; risks regarding potential and pending litigation and arbitration proceedings relating to the Company's, business, properties and operations; expected impact on reserves and the carrying value; the updating of the reserve and resource models and life of mine plans; mining operational and development risk; foreign country operational risks; risks of sovereign investment; regulatory risks and liabilities including, regulatory environment and restrictions, and environmental regulatory restrictions and liability; discrepancies between actual and estimated production, mineral reserves and resources and metallurgical testing and recoveries; risks related to the impact of the sale of our Chinese assets and the acquisition and integration of Integra on the Company's operations; additional funding requirements; currency fluctuations; community and non-governmental organization actions; speculative nature of gold exploration; dilution; share price volatility; competition; loss of key employees; and defective title to mineral claims or properties, as well as those risk factors discussed in the sections titled "Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk factors in our business" in the Company's most recent Annual Information Form & Form 40-F. The reader is directed to carefully review the detailed risk discussion in our most recent Annual Information Form filed on SEDAR under our Company name, which discussion is incorporated by reference in this release, for a fuller understanding of the risks and uncertainties that affect the Company's business and operations. Forward-looking statements and information is designed to help you understand management's current views of our near and longer term prospects, and it may not be appropriate for other purposes. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements or information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements or information contained herein. Except as required by law, we do not expect to update forward-looking statements and information continually as conditions change and you are referred to the full discussion of the Company's business contained in the Company's reports filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada and the U.S. Except as otherwise noted, scientific and technical information contained in this press release was reviewed and approved by Paul Skayman, FAusIMM, Chief Operating Officer for Eldorado Gold Corporation, and a "qualified person" under NI 43-101. Mineral resources which are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. With respect to "indicated mineral resource" and "inferred mineral resource", there is a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and a great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of a "measured mineral resource", "indicated mineral resource" or "inferred mineral resource" will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Cautionary Note to US Investors Concerning Estimates of Measured, Indicated and Inferred Resources The terms "mineral resource", "measured mineral resource", "indicated mineral resource", "inferred mineral resource" used herein are Canadian mining terms used in accordance with NI 43-101 under the guidelines set out in the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and Petroleum (the "CIM") Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves, adopted by the CIM Council, as may be amended from time to time. These definitions differ from the definitions in the United States Securities & Exchange Commission ("SEC") Industry Guide 7. In the United States, a mineral reserve is defined as a part of a mineral deposit which could be economically and legally extracted or produced at the time the mineral reserve determination is made. While the terms "mineral resource", "measured mineral resource," "indicated mineral resource", and "inferred mineral resource" are recognized and required by Canadian regulations, they are not defined terms under standards in the United States and normally are not permitted to be used in reports and registration statements filed with the SEC. As such, information contained herein concerning descriptions of mineralization and resources under Canadian standards may not be comparable to similar information made public by U.S. companies in SEC filings. Accordingly, information herein containing descriptions of our mineral deposits may not be comparable to similar information made public by US companies subject to the reporting and disclosure requirements under US federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder. May 30, 2018 / TheNewswire / Vancouver, Canada - Guyana Goldstrike Inc. (the "Company" or "Guyana Goldstrike") (TSXV: GYA, OTC: GYNAF, FSE:1ZT) is pleased to report that the Company's geological team has completed trenching, mapping and sampling at the Paunch area on its Marudi Gold Project ("Marudi" or the "Property") located in the Guiana Gold Belt, Guyana, South America. Locke Goldsmith P Eng. P Geo., VP Exploration states "These results are very encouraging as they confirm the presence of gold in the new discovery area. This is the first of nine areas of interest that we plan to trench over the coming months in preparation for a phase one drill program. The results obtained from trenches A and L with peak gold values of 7.45 and 5.98 g/t Au are located further south and are closer to the ridge top than the other lower values." Mr. Goldsmith continues, "This is suggestive that the gold dispersion is down slope due to transportation and originates from a nearby, yet undiscovered bedrock source." Mineralization Selected fire assay intervals from Paunch trenches A, B, C, and L are summarized in Table 1 below. Trenches A and L with peak gold values of 7.45 and 5.98 g/t Au over 2.0 m horizontal lengths respectively are located farther south and closer to the ridge top than a peak gold value in trench B of 1.86 g/t Au across 2.0 m horizontal. Gold dispersion down slope is suggested. Sampling Sampling of 166.2 m of trenching was completed with 106 horizontal chip-channel sample intervals taken along the base of trench walls. Two samples were collected from each sample interval. One sample was shipped to Actlabs in Georgetown for fire assay of gold and a second sample was panned by the Company to examine and determine if free gold was present in the heavy mineral concentrate. Table 1. Paunch trenches A, B, C, (as previously reported: news release dated May 15, 2018) and L, with selected assay and gold count intervals. Total length From To Length Average depth Assay m m m m m g/t Au Trench A 38.8 18.1 19.1 1 7 0.504 25.3 32.8 7.5 *NR 2.16 Includes 30.8 32.8 2 *NR 7.45 Trench B 61.2 13.7 15.7 2 1.5 1.64 30.6 31.2 0.6 0.58 35.2 45.2 10 2.8 0.38 Includes 35.2 37.2 2 3.7 1.86 Trench C 15 0 2 2 2.5 0.64 10 15 5 3.9 0.64 Includes 10 12 2 4.3 1.06 14 15 1 2.8 0.61 Trench L 18.3 0 2 2 6 5.98 13.3 15.3 2 3.3 0.60 Total 133.3 All samples collected during this program were delivered to Activation Laboratories Ltd. (Actlabs) located in Georgetown, Guyana for gold content by Fire Assay (FA). Actlabs is an independent commercial analytical facility and is ISO 17025 accredited and certified to 9001: 2008. With 25+ years' experience, with full analytical laboratories that perform high quality analysis to many industries around the world. Table 2. Summary of Paunch analyses Minus 80-mesh fraction Plus 80-mesh fraction Duplicates Total number of analyses 106 55 5 166 Panning A second sample was panned in camp to determine if free gold was present in the heavy mineral concentrate. If present, a visual count of gold points and an estimate of the amount of gold dust were recorded. A gold point is a piece that is noticeable as slightly larger than dust. Very fine gold dust particles may be counted in the range of 1 to 10 but greater amounts must be estimated because the eye does not distinguish between individual specks in a finely divided, closely packed concentration. Gold, when observed in a pan concentrate at the time of trench sampling, is an indication that trench extensions and additional trenches may be advisable. The trend of greater or lesser amounts of gold over distance may suggest a vector towards a bedrock source. Counts of gold in pan concentrates are compared as a check with results from fire assays. Paunch trenches predominantly contained gold dust from pan concentrates in appreciable quantities (100+) and an absence of wire or angular gold suggesting that transport has occurred and has originated from a nearby bedrock source. Geology In the Paunch trenches saprolite is developed on silty metasediments. Strike of bedding varies between 264?- 282? and dip varies between 73?-80? S. Where present, discontinuous and fractured 0.5 to 3 cm-wide quartz veinlets strike subparallel to bedding and dip 45?- 59? S. Sampling and assaying Actlabs crushed, pulverized, and sized each sample on an 80-mesh screen. A sufficient fraction of all 106 samples for a 30-gram fire assay charge passed the 80-mesh screen. The coarse fraction remaining on the 80-mesh screen was sufficient for a 30-gram fire assay charge from 55 of the 106 samples; assays of the two fractions were totaled for presentation on trench assay plans. The map below contains the locations of trenching performed on the Paunch area Paunch Area, Transported Metachert and Quartzite Paunch Area, Trench L Paunch trenches A, B, C, L, selected assay and gold count intervals Quality assurance / Quality control (QA/QC) Actlabs is an ISO 9001:2008 qualified assayer that performs and makes available internal assaying controls. Certified blanks and standards are systematically used as part of Guyana Goldstrike's QA/QC program with one blank and standard inserted at every 20 sample intervals at Paunch. Property Geology Gold mineralization at Marudi is regarded as being related to iron-formation-hosted gold ("IFG") deposits that occur in other cratonic greenstone belts around the world. These deposits can be remarkably long-lived with sizeable gold production. They have a strong association between gold and iron sulfide minerals, the presence of gold bearing quartz veins and structures, the occurrence of deposits in structurally complex terranes, and the absence of lead and zinc enrichment. Examples of some existing IFG deposits are: the Homestake Mine, Lupin Mine, and Musselwhite Mine. The Homestake Mine is located in South Dakota USA and was the largest and deepest gold mine in North America. It has reported production of 43.9 million ounces of gold (source: Click Here and was in production from 1878-2001. The Lupin Mine located in Nunavut, Canada, no longer in production, produced approximately 3 million ounces of gold (source: Click Here). The Mussellwhite Mine has estimated reserves of 2.29 million ounces of gold (source: Click Here) and is owned and operated by Goldcorp and will be in production until 2020. About the Marudi Gold Project The Company is developing the Marudi Gold Project located in Guyana, South America, the project is unique in that it has a mining license in good standing, all-season road access, infrastructure in place, with an established mining camp serviced by employees, service buildings, and a full-time mining manager. The Property has three known gold bearing areas, specifically the alluvial areas, the saprolite, and the underlying hard-rock. There has been 42,000 metres of historic diamond drilling (141 holes) completed on the Project by prior operators. The Company has recently completed a mineral resource estimate on the Mazoa Hill zone containing 259,100 indicated gold ounces within 4,428,000 tonnes grading 1.8 grams/tonne (g/t) and 86,200 inferred gold ounces within 1,653,000 tonnes grading 1.60 grams/tonne (g/t). There exists excellent exploration upside through the development of previously identified mineralized bedrock targets on the Project. For information concerning the mineral resource estimate and the Project, readers are encouraged to review "Technical Report: Marudi Property Mazoa Hill Mineral Resource Estimate", a technical report prepared for the Company by Global Mineral Resource Services and is available at Click Here and under the Company's profile on SEDAR www.sedar.com. About Guyana The Republic of Guyana is located in South America between Venezuela and Suriname. The country is English speaking and under British Common Law with a democratically-elected government. It has an established mining act and a rich history of gold production. In 2016, 690,000 ounces of gold was produced by operators mining in the country. The Fraser Institute's 2016 Annual Survey of Mining listed Guyana as the third best mining jurisdiction with regards to investment attractiveness in the Latin America and Caribbean Basin sub-group. The Guiana Shield is the geographic gold-hosting region, and is world-recognized as a premier gold region that is highly prospective, under-explored and has geological continuity with West Africa.* In 2016, two mines in Guyana declared the commencement of commercial production: the Aurora deposit (Guyana Goldfields) and the Karouni deposit (Troy Resources). * Independent Technical and Environmental Review Karouni Gold Project - Guyana, Behre Dolbear Australia Pty Ltd, April 29, 2016 www.guyanagoldstrike.com Qualified Person Locke Goldsmith, M.Sc., P. Eng, P. Geo, Chief Geologist and Exploration Manager for the Company, is a Qualified Person in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Mr. Goldsmith has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical content of this news release. On behalf of the Board of Directors of GUYANA GOLDSTRIKE INC. Peter Berdusco President and Chief Executive Officer Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release 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 future prices of commodities, accuracy of mineral or resource exploration activity, reserves or resources, regulatory or government requirements or approvals, the reliability of third party information, continued access to mineral properties or infrastructure, fluctuations in the market for gold, changes in exploration costs and government regulation in Guyana, status of artisanal mining activities and associated rights, and 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. Vancouver, BC / TheNewswire / May 30, 2018 - Miramont Resources Corp. (CSE: MONT, OTCQB: MRRMF, FR: 6MR) ("Miramont" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has identified a new copper-rich target at its 100% controlled Cerro Hermoso project in southern Peru. The samples were collected from a "dike swarm" which has cut overlying volcanic rocks. All 55 samples the Company collected from this new target contain significant copper with 44 reporting over 1000 ppm Cu and the highest, 10,750 ppm Cu (1.08%). Silver is also elevated with 14 samples containing greater than 15 ppm Ag with the highest being 130 ppm Ag (4.2 ounces per tonne). The target covers an area of 300 by 600 meters adjacent to the southeastern boundary of the diatreme that dominates the Cerro Hermoso project. The Company also reports that 29 samples were collected in the Carbonate Replacement Zone. Sixteen of 29 samples contained greater than 1000 ppm Cu including 74,840 ppm, 60,480 ppm and 50,860 ppm (7.5%, 6.0% and 5.1% Cu respectively). Additionally, 12 of the 29 samples contained greater than 15 ppm Ag including 575 ppm, 401ppm and 260 ppm (18.8, 13.1 and 8.5 ounces/tonne respectively). This provides further support for the potential to discover high-grade carbonate replacement mineralization below surface. Quinton Hennigh, Miramont's Chairman commented, "Cerro Hermoso presents a target-rich intrusive and eruptive center. Not only do we see potential for a large volume of mineralized breccia within the diatreme complex, we are compelled by potential for replacement style precious- and base-metal mineralization within limestone encircling the diatreme and beneath volcanic cover. Such a system is seen at the nearby San Gabriel deposit. Our team's recent discoveries of stockwork mineralization and breccia dikes containing mineralized intrusive clasts add yet another intriguing target to this picture, a possible mineralized intrusion at depth. Cerro Hermoso keeps delivering better and better indications it is host to a large mineralized center. We look forward to commencing our first phase of drilling in the coming weeks." New Copper - Rich Target Samples from the copper - rich target were taken from a swarm of breccia dikes comprised predominantly of clasts, or rock fragments, of two phases of mineralized coarse-grained, intermediate-composition igneous rocks. Other clasts include limestone and andesitic volcanic rocks. All rock types contain metal. Mineralized clasts contain variable amounts of native copper, chalcopyrite, chalcocite and copper-oxides. Magnetite is also abundant and closely associated with copper mineralization. Dikes are generally up to a few meters wide. Miramont believes this newly discovered dike swarm provides strong evidence of a buried polyphase, mineralized intrusive center containing significant copper and silver mineralization at depth. Its relationship to the recently discovered stockwork mineralized intrusive center on the opposite side of the diatreme (see the Company's news release dated Jan. 10, 2018 further details) provides further evidence that the Cerro Hermoso project is underlain by a complex, expansive mineralizing, intrusive center that presents multiple high quality drill targets. Photos accompanying this news release can be found on the Company's website. Miramont will soon mobilize a diamond core drill to Cerro Hermoso to begin testing its three priority targets. Miramont anticipates drilling this newly discovered zone upon completion of geophysical surveys designed to help refine drill targets and upon amending current drill permits to encompass this new area. Up to 5000 meters of drilling are planned as a first phase program at Cerro Hermoso. The samples reported were largely select samples of mineralized clasts and veins. They were not taken systematically but are considered highly anomalous and indicate a range of potential mineralization. National Instrument 43-101 Disclosure The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Mr. William Pincus, CPG, President and CEO of Miramont and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. About Miramont Resources Corp. Miramont is a Canadian based exploration company with a focus on acquiring and developing mineral prospects within world-class belts of South America. Miramont's two key projects are Cerro Hermoso and Lukkacha, both located in southern Peru. Cerro Hermoso is a diatreme-hosted copper dominant polymetallic prospect. Lukkacha is a classic copper-porphyry prospect. On behalf of the Board of Directors, MIRAMONT RESOURCES CORP. "William Pincus" William Pincus, President and CEO For more information, please contact the Company at: Telephone: (604) 398-4493 www.miramontresources.com Breccia dike cutting volcanic flow units. Note angular to rounded clasts of coarse grained intrusive fragments. Igneous clast from dike containing abundant copper oxide (blue material) and native copper. The "nail test" is a common field tool to identify copper. Reader Advisory This release includes certain statements and information that may constitute forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements in this news release, other than statements of historical facts, including statements regarding future estimates, plans, objectives, assumptions or expectations of future performance, are forward-looking statements and contain forward-looking information. Generally, forward- looking statements and information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "intends" or "anticipates", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "should", "would" or "occur". Forward-looking statements are based on certain material assumptions and analysis made by the Company and the opinions and estimates of management as of the date of this news release. These 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 the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information. Although management of the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward- looking statements and forward-looking information. Readers are cautioned that reliance on such information may not be appropriate for other purposes. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement, forward-looking information or financial outlook that are incorporated by reference herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. We seek safe harbor. Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - May 29, 2018) - New Energy Metals Corp. (TSXV: ENRG) ("New Energy Metals" or the "Company") announces that it has entered into an option agreement (the "Cobalt Agreement") to acquire a 100% interest in a sixth cobalt exploration project (the "Project") located within Chile's past-producing San Juan cobalt district. New Energy Metal's President and Chief Executive Officer, Grant Ewing, said "The new cobalt project adds to our growing land position in Chile's past producing San Juan (Cobaltera) district. We view the potential for the discovery of primary cobalt projects in the district as high based on historical records, and the fact that only very limited exploration has been conducted in the district since cobalt production ceased in the mid 1940's." Cobalt Projects Highlights The past producing San Juan cobalt district in Chile is currently active due to strong interest in the cobalt market. New Energy Metals has been aggressive with its acquisition strategy to obtain a strategic property position in the district. The Company now has option agreements on six cobalt projects in the San Juan cobalt district (refer to news releases dated April 4th and 11th, 2018). All the Projects were acquired based on a review of available regional and district-scale datasets in the San Juan cobalt district and selected based on geological characteristics, abundance of historic workings, evidence of mineralization, and proximity to past production. Indications of historic workings exist on the Projects, which occur on the same regional trend and near the past producing Cobaltera mine. Access is via secondary roads approximately 25km south of the port of Huasco, Chile. Infrastructure is good, and the district is approximately 10km from tidewater. The Company has commenced an exploration field program comprised of compilation of historical data, regional mapping and prospecting, and sampling to identify priority areas for detailed follow up work. About San Juan Cobalt District In November 2017, Chile's Corporation for the Promotion of Production ("CORFO") and the Chilean National Service of Geology and Mining (SERNAGEOMIN) published a report that reviewed the cobalt mineral resources in Chile. Meaningful primary cobalt production has historically been developed in two districts in Chile, one of which is the San Juan cobalt district in the Atacama Region. The San Juan cobalt district includes several historical producing mines, which produced cobalt (and copper) for several decades at the turn of the 20th century. The past-producing Cobaltera Mine was the last to close in the mid-1940's at the end of the Second World War. At the peak of production there were three processing plants in the area and several small-scale operations. Cobalt production and smelting in the district started in 1885 but no statistics are available prior to 1903. From 1903 to 1944 the district produced approximately 300,000 tonnes of cobalt ore grading up to 4% cobalt (plus copper) ("El Cobalto en Chile, Caja Credito Minero", H. Hornkohl,1944). Mineralization in the district occurs in high-grade veins and mantos, with average cobalt grades reportedly up to 1.6% cobalt for primary mineralization, and up to 6.4% cobalt in the enriched secondary oxidized zones. Vein thickness varies greatly from 0.5m to 20m. Shafts over 100m in depth exist on some of the vein structures. The cobalt mineralization is associated with copper mineralization and is noted to be structurally controlled and closely associated with the large regional northeast trending Atacama fault system. In the oxidized zone (up to 40m thick) cobalt occurs as erythrite, a cobalt arsenate. In the deeper primary zone the mineral cobaltite, a cobalt sulfo-arsenide mineral, is the main cobalt mineral. Summary of Cobalt Agreement Under the terms of the Cobalt Agreement, the Company can earn a 100% interest in the Victoria project through the following cash and share payments: Date US$ Cash Shares On signing: US$300,000 300,000 shares September 2018 US$400,000 400,000 shares March 2019 US$400,000 400,000 shares March 2020 US$500,000 500,000 shares March 2021 US$500,000 500,000 shares March 2022 US$500,000 500,000 shares Total US$2.6M 2.6M shares The project is not subject to underlying royalties. During the option period, the Company will be responsible for maintaining the concessions comprising the project in good standing. There are no work commitments and all work carried out on the projects will be at the sole discretion of the Company. The Cobalt Agreement is subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. About the Company New Energy Metals' principal project is the Cristal copper project located in northern Chile. The Company has also acquired several prospective cobalt projects in Chile's past producing San Juan cobalt district. The recent name change to "New Energy Metals Corp." reflects the Company's corporate strategy of exploration and development of energy metals in Chile. Qualified Person Mr. Grant Ewing, P.Geo., is a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Ewing and has reviewed the scientific and technical information that forms the basis of this news release and has approved the disclosure herein. Mr. Ewing is not independent of the Company. On behalf of New Energy Metals Corp. Grant Ewing, President & CEO T: 604.484.1232 E: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. W: www.newenergymetals.ca 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 No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. This News Release includes certain "forward-looking statements". Other than statements of historical fact, all statements included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding future plans and objectives of New Energy Metals Corp., are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from New Energy Metal's expectations are the risks detailed herein and from time to time in the filings made by New Energy Metals Corp. with securities regulators. Those filings can be found on the Internet at http://www.sedar.com. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - May 30, 2018) - New Energy Metals Corp. (TSXV: ENRG) ("New Energy Metals" or the "Company") announces that it has entered into an option agreement (the "Lithium Agreement") to acquire a 100% interest in a lithium project (the "Atacama Lithium Project") located in the Atacama salar district in northern Chile. New Energy Metal's President and Chief Executive Officer, Grant Ewing, said "We are excited with the opportunity to acquire a project in a region recognized as having the world's highest grade and largest producing lithium brine salt flat. This opportunity is viewed as a strategic acquisition by the Company as it believes that potential value creation opportunities could arise in the future as a result of the transaction." Atacama Lithium Project Highlights The Atacama Lithium Project is located in the Salar de Atacama district, recognized as one of the highest grade and largest producing lithium brine regions. The Atacama Salar hosts a significant portion of the world's known lithium reserves and produces approximately one third of global lithium output from two production facilities operated by Sociedad Quimica y Minera ("SQM") and Rockwood Lithium (Albemarle). The favourable characteristics of the salar, including: high grade lithium and potassium, high evaporation rate, and low rainfall make Atacama's lithium production highly efficient versus other producing regions (source: U.S. Geological Survey). Current production occurs in the southern portion of the Salar. The Company's Atacama Lithium Project concessions cover an area of approximately 66,000 hectares and are located in the southeastern part of the district (see Figure 1). The proximity of the Atacama Lithium Project to existing production indicates the exploration potential for the discovery of brines in the eastern and southern areas of the district, underlying portions of the Company's Atacama Lithium Project. Summary of Lithium Agreement Under the terms of the Lithium Agreement, the Company can earn a 100% interest in the Atacama Lithium Project through the following cash and share payments: Atacama Lithium Project Date Amount (US$) Shares On Signing US$550,000 550,000 shares January 2019 US$1,600,000 1.6M shares January 2020 US$2,000,000 2M shares January 2021 US$2,200,000 2.2M shares January 2022 US$3,000,000 3M shares Total US$9,350,000 9,350,000 shares The Atacama Lithium Project is not subject to underlying royalties. During the option period, the Company will be responsible for maintaining the concessions comprising the project in good standing. There are no work commitments and all work carried out on the project will be at the sole discretion of the Company. The Lithium Agreement is subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. About The Company New Energy Metal's principal project is the Cristal copper project located in northern Chile. The Company has entered into agreements to acquire several prospective cobalt projects in Chile's past producing San Juan cobalt district, and a lithium project in Chile's prolific Atacama salar district. The recent name change to "New Energy Metals Corp." reflects the Company's corporate strategy of exploration and development of energy metals in Chile. Qualified Person Mr. Grant Ewing, P.Geo., is a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Ewing and has reviewed the scientific and technical information that forms the basis of this news release and has approved the disclosure herein. Mr. Ewing is not independent of the Company. On behalf of New Energy Metals Corp. Grant Ewing, President & CEO T: 604.484.1232 E: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. W: www.newenergymetals.ca 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 No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. This News Release includes certain "forward-looking statements". Other than statements of historical fact, all statements included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding future plans and objectives of New Energy Metals Corp., are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from New Energy Metal's expectations are the risks detailed herein and from time to time in the filings made by New Energy Metals Corp. with securities regulators. Those filings can be found on the Internet at http://www.sedar.com. TORONTO, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Steppe Gold Limited (TSX:STGO) (the Company or Steppe Gold) is very pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Lewis Marks to the Companys Board as a Director. Mr. Marks has lived and worked in Asia for 37 years with a residence and business operations in Mongolia for most of the last 18 years. Mr. Marks currently serves as a Director of CWT Mongolia, importing diesel into Mongolia from Russia; is a shareholder of Bayandari LLC, a Mongolian agriculture company focused on wheat production from approximately 24,000 hectares outside of Ulaanbaatar; and is a Director of Tsast Impex LLC, the second largest construction company in Mongolia. Mr. Marks also serves as Member of the Board of Directors of the LIM Japan Fund, a role hes had since 2002. From 1980 to 1993 he was with Marc Rich & Co. AG (purchased by Glencore International AG in 1993) and remained with Glencore International AG from 1993 to 2000, where part of his responsibilities included selling Mongolian copper into China. Prior to that, from 1997 until 1980, he practiced law at Yanagida & Nomura in Tokyo, Japan (formerly Yanagida & Sakuragi). Mr. Marks earned his Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and his Juris Doctor from the School of Law, State University of New York at Buffalo. The Company is fortunate to be able to add someone of Mr. Marks' experience and expertise and it is expected that Mr. Marks will be of great assistance in the successful development of the Companys ATO project. On behalf of the Board Matthew Wood Chairman, President and CEO Steppe Gold Limited ABOUT STEPPE GOLD Steppe Gold is a precious metals exploration and development company with an aggressive growth strategy to build Steppe into the premier precious metals company in Mongolia. The Company owns the advanced staged Altan Tsaagan Ovoo (ATO) gold project, where first gold production is targeted for late 2018, and the exciting Uudam Khundii (UK) gold exploration project. Mongolia is open for business, pro mining development and one of the last great frontiers where giant mineral deposits can be found and developed. CONTACT INFORMATION THE COMPANYS HEAD OFFICE: Shangri-La office, Suite 1201, Olympic street 19A, Sukhbaatar District 1, Ulaanbaatar 14241, Mongolia Tel: +976 7732 1914 TORONTO OFFICE: 90 Adelaide Street. W, Suite 400 Toronto, ON M5H 3V9, Canada Tel: +1 647 697 0577 TRANSFER AGENT: Lori Winchester Senior Relationship Manager, Client Management Phone: +1 416 607-7898 Cell: +1 416 671-4558 Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. TORONTO, May 30, 2018 /CNW/ - Continental Gold Inc. (TSX:CNL; OTCQX:CGOOF) ("Continental" or the "Company") is pleased to provide a construction update for its Buritica project in northwestern Antioquia, Colombia. Construction completion and first gold pour remain on schedule for H1 2020, with commercial production ramp-up anticipated approximately six months after first gold pour. The Buritica project is 30% complete with approximately 50% of total project cost committed to date. Initial concrete has been placed for the mill grinding area, and rebar is nearly complete for the main foundation pour, which includes the SAG mill pedestal. Concrete placement has begun for the leach tank foundations. Mill and surface infrastructure detail engineering and procurement are moving forward on schedule and are more than 80% complete as of April 30, 2018. Equipment and materials are arriving on schedule, with modular mine rescue and main gate buildings expected to arrive in June. Major earthworks are planned for completion in Q4 2018 and will coincide with the start of major infrastructure installation. Underground development continues slightly ahead of schedule and is more than 16% complete. As of May 25, 2018, 3,041 metres of underground development has been completed with monthly advance rates increasing since the beginning of 2018. Crews are advancing daily at the Yaragua ramp, the Veta Sur ramp and the Higabra tunnel; upper and lower elevation connection drifts between the Yaragua and Veta Sur ramps are well underway. "Moving forward in these key areas is a very exciting time for us as we advance the Buritica project," commented Donald Gray, Chief Operating Officer. "We are pulling together all the hard work of the past few years by Continental's outstanding team. As we move forward with our commitment to build Colombia's largest modern underground gold mine, we are grateful for the continuing support of not only the various government agencies we work with, but also our local communities." About Continental Gold Continental Gold Inc. is an advanced-stage exploration and development company with an extensive portfolio of 100%-owned gold projects in Colombia. Formed in April 2007, the Company led by an international management team with a successful track record of discovering and developing large high-grade gold deposits in Latin America is focused on advancing its fully-permitted high-grade Buritica gold project to production with first gold pour on track for the first half of 2020. For information on the Buritica project, please refer to the technical report, prepared in accordance with NI 43101, entitled "Buritica Project NI 43101 Technical Report Feasibility Study, Antioquia, Colombia" and dated March 29, 2016 with an effective date of February 24, 2016, led by independent consultants JDS Energy & Mining Inc. The technical report is available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com, on the OTCQX at www.otcmarkets.com and on the Company website at www.continentalgold.com. Additional details on Continental Gold's suite of gold exploration properties are also available at www.continentalgold.com. Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains or refers to forwardlooking information under Canadian securities legislation, including statements regarding the development and construction of the Buritica project, completion of various construction and development activities, expected delivery of underground mining development and drilling equipment, ramp-up of underground development activities, timing of production start-up, advancing the Buritica project and future plans and objectives of the Company, and is based on current expectations that involve a number of significant business risks and uncertainties. Forwardlooking statements are subject to other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expected results. Readers should not place undue reliance on forwardlooking statements. Specific reference is made to the most recent Annual Information Form on file with Canadian provincial securities regulatory authorities for a discussion of some of the factors underlying forwardlooking statements. All the forwardlooking statements made in this news release are qualified by these cautionary statements, and are made as of the date hereof. The Company assumes no responsibility to update them or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances other than as required by law. Photo 1: Site Development Photo 2: Mill Area Foundation Photo 3: Mill Area Foundation Rebar Placement Photo 4: Tailing Filtration Upper and Lower Platforms TORONTO, May 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kerr Mines Inc. (TSX:KER) (OTC:KERMF) (FRA:7AZ1) (Kerr or the Company) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. David Thomas as Vice President of Projects and Copperstone Mine General Manager. This key addition to the Kerr Mines executive management team is central to the Companys core strategy of moving into production in 2019. Mr. Thomas is an Engineer with over 30 years experience in the mining industry, specifically in constructing and moving mines into production. He has held key roles in constructing mines such as the Kupol Mine for Bema Gold (now Kinross Gold), Fort Knox and Kubaka mines for Kinross Gold, Kensington and Palmarejo mines for Coeur Mining, Hope Bay for Newmont and Pogo and Red Dog for Cominco (now Teck Resources). In addition, on May 22 the Company also released and filed its NI 43-101 technical report which can be found on SEDAR and Kerr Mines Investor Information web-page. On the heels of the successful 2017 Exploration Program and the positive results of the 2018 Preliminary Feasibility Study, the addition of David to the team provides a catalyst towards the goal of full gold production by the end of 2019, said Martin Kostuik, President Kerr Mines. Davids accomplishments in the areas of engineering, procurement and construction management in the mining industry are second to none. David also brings an array of experience to compliment his capital project skills including permitting, financing, mine operations and business development. Please see SEDAR and http://kerrmines.com/investors/ for recent filing of Q3 Financial Statements and MD&A for the three and nine months ended March 31, 2018. About Kerr Mines Inc. Kerr Mines is a North American gold development and exploration company currently advancing the 100% owned, fully permitted past-producing Copperstone Mine project to production. Copperstone is a high-grade gold project located along a detachment fault mineral belt in mining-friendly Arizona. The project demonstrates significant upside exploration potential within a 4,775 hectare (11,800 acres) land package that includes a production history of over 500,000 ounces of gold. PDF Version of 43-101 technical report available: Click Here For further information contact: Claudio Ciavarella Chief Executive Officer This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 416-855-9305 Cautionary Note Regarding Forward Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements, including current expectations on the timing of the commencement of production and the rate of production, if commenced. These forward-looking statements entail various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected in these forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on current expectations, are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks, and actual results may differ materially from those contained in such statements. These uncertainties and risks include, but are not limited to, the strength of the Canadian economy; the price of gold; operational, funding, and liquidity risks; the degree to which mineral resource estimates are reflective of actual mineral resources; and the degree to which factors which would make a mineral deposit commercially viable are present; the risks and hazards associated with underground operations. Risks and uncertainties about Kerr Mines business are more fully discussed in the Company's disclosure materials, including its annual information form and MD&A, filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada and available at www.sedar.com and readers are urged to read these materials. Kerr Mines assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from such statements unless required by law. Neither TSX nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release and no stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. Turkey on Friday said Israel would only harm itself if it recognised the Armenian genocide because to do so would undermine the special status of the Holocaust. We think that Israel putting the events of 1915 on the same level as the Holocaust is harming itself first and foremost, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy told reporters in Ankara. He was reacting after Israeli lawmakers on Wednesday approved plans to hold a plenary debate on recognising the Armenian genocide. No date has been fixed for the debate. Armenians have long sought international recognition for the 1915-1917 killings in the Ottoman era as genocide, which they say left some 1.5 million of their people dead. Turkey the Ottoman Empires successor state strongly rejects that the massacres, imprisonment and forced deportation of Armenians from 1915 amounted to a genocide. The events of 1915 are not a political issue but historical and legal, Aksoy said, without commenting further. Some six million Jews were killed in the Nazi death camps during World War II. Relations between Turkey and Israel have been tense in recent years and got worse after Israeli troops shot dead scores of Palestinians on the Gaza border and Washington moved its embassy to Jerusalem despite international criticism. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week compared Israels actions against the Palestinians in Gaza to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Ballyhale Shamrocks in Kilkenny one of Irelands most successful hurling clubs is at risk of being destroyed by flood relief measures proposed by the Office of Public Works. At an estimated cost of 430,000 the works will see the Little Arrigle River in the village being diverted right through the clubs GAA grounds. The diversion of flow will go primarily through the pitch closer to the village and will also cut through the walkway and along by the dressing rooms. The hurling club was founded in 1972 and has been at the site in Ballyhale village since 1990. It is home to Kilkenny hurling legends Michael and Colin Fennelly, TJ Reid and Henry Shefflin. The measures for the area which will protect 25 properties when completed - are part of Flood Risk Management Plans for Kilkenny under the Catchment Flood Risk Assessment Management (CFRAM) Programme. From the plans and map published by the OPW (pictured in this week's Kilkenny People), Cllr David Kennedy said the works appear to start across from the national school with some hard defences being put in place there. He added that the diversion of the river then starts at the back of the church running all along the back of the old Kilkenny Living Building and then through to Ballyhale Shamrocks front hurling field. It then heads north towards Knocktopher where it will meet up at the old creamery. Cllr Kennedy has said the OPW will have to go back to the drawing board when it comes to the proposed flood relief works that are planned for Ballyhale. He noted that these plans do have to be brought before the Council in the coming weeks and they also have to be put out for consultation where members of the public can have their say on the matter. In most small rural villages the local GAA fields are the heartbeat of the community and I will be campaigning vigorously against these plans going ahead," Cllr Kennedy added. In a statement, a Director of Services at Kilkenny County Council, Tim Butler, said: Flood relief schemes are considered appropriate in Kilkenny for Graignamanagh, Thomastown, Inistioge, Freshford, Ballyhale and Piltown. During the process of preparing the plans a number of observations were made to the OPW including observations made by Kilkenny County Council in relation to the proposal for Ballyhale as detailed: With regard to flood flow diversion route in Ballyhale is through the Ballyhale Shamrocks GAA club. In considering the observation it has been set out by the OPW that the flood management plans in all cases are outline design only and subject to further consultation and detailed design at which stage concerns expressed in the submission can be addressed. For more on this story and to read the club's reaction to the flood relief proposals, pick up this week's Kilkenny People. The final countdown is on - the Cat Laughs comedy festival will take over the Marble City from tomorrow (Thursday). With just one day to go, tickets are selling fast, with comedy fans from all over the country travelling to Kilkenny for the Bank Holiday weekend. Like that tin of Roses that comes to every house at Christmas there is something for everyone this year (even the people who like the coffee sweets!) with a great line-up including Reginald D Hunter, Adam Hills, Jason Byrne, James Acaster, Jason Manford Aisling Bea, David ODoherty and many more. Here are our top five shows to check out over the weekend: Thursday The Cat Laughs Opening Gala - Hotel Kilkenny, 7pm Open the festival weekend in style at The Cat Laughs Opening Gala with a veritable smorgasbord of the best in Irish and international comedy! Featuring comedian, Flaneur and 1990 East Leinster under-14 triple jump bronze medalist David ODoherty - one of the best-loved performers in the British comedy scene, Reginald D Hunter, Irelands fastest rising comedy star Joanne McNally, Abandoman, Lords Of Strut, Maeve Higgins, Alison Spittle and MC Karl Spain. Theres a comedy style for everyone at this years opening show. With each comedian given 10 minutes to wow, this is a rollercoaster ride with a lot of laughs. FRIDAY Neil Delamere, Jason Manford, Abandoman, Lords of Strut, MC Karl Spain - Langtons Ballroom, 7pm Who ever said you can have too much of a good thing? Five of comedys hottest stars in one venue, and for a truly bargainous price. Dont mind if we do! Saturday Adam Hills, Reginald D Hunter, Zoe Lyons, MC Joanne McNally - Langtons Ballroom, 5pm Four comics, one ticket, now thats something to give you paws for thought! Treat yourself to an hour of classic comedy. Its the purr-fect chance to get up close and personal with some of the finest talent Cat Laughs 2018 has to offer The Bear Pack - The Village Inn, 10pm The Bear Pack is Sydneys Steen Raskopoulos and Carlo Ritchie. The duo work together to deliver 60 minutes of improvised storytelling, drawing on their experience working on shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway? and The Checkout. The audience has no idea what thrilling and hilarious twisted tale theyre in for, but are guaranteed to be left in awe of the quick-witted and creative minds of these improvised comedy masterminds. The Bear Pack take audience suggestions to fuel the LOLs, meaning no two nights are the same, so make sure you get to witness the fun during this special show at Kilkenny Cat Laughs. Masters of their craft and will have you in stitches - The Music Sunday David ODoherty, James Acaster, Jarlath Regan, MCBarry Murphy - Langtons Ballroom, 5pm Take four acclaimed comics (some salty, some sweet!) and a compere extraordinaire, mix them all together with a room full of raucous comedy fans and simmer now thats a spicy meatball! Best of all, you can treat yourself to this feast of comedy for practically the price of an amuse-bouche! The Kilkenny Cat Laughs comedy festival runs from May 31 to June 4. Tickets on sale now from thecatlaughs.com. You can also keep up with merriment by checking out the shenanigans on social media and log on to Facebook (kilkennycatlaughs), Twitter (@catlaughscomedy) and Instragram (thecatlaughs) Kirk Hope of BusinessNZ writes: First, provisions of the bill will legislate to compel businesses to collectively bargain. But the basis of bargaining in New Zealand and international law is that it is voluntary. Making it compulsory to bargain is a breach of ILO conventions ratified by the last Labour Government. But it will make Labours union donors very powerful. Second, under the proposed legislation, union officials will have much greater access to workplaces to recruit members. I dont have any problem with access to workplaces to discuss union business, and even to recruit. But I do have a problem with the unfettered access this legislation provides. Union officials wont have to seek permission to enter the workplace, nor will they have to give notice of their visit. For context, even labour inspectors have to provide notice when they want to arrive for a labour inspection. So union officials will have greater powers than the Government itself. Amazing what they get in return for their donations. Federated Farmers in their submissions noted that this would mean in the case of farmers where their home is often their office that union officials could access their home without permission. I doubt this would seem reasonable to most New Zealanders So much for your home is your castle. Third, if a union recruits two members from a workplace then, as noted above, the union can then compel a business to collectively bargain, even if the rest of the people in that workplace are not union members. So say two of your 300 staff join a union. They can compel the employer into a collective contract that all new staff will automatically be joined to. If you are a working parent who needs to leave work at 3pm to pick up the kids, and the collective agreement says your hours of work must be 9-5, and if you havent opted out, you will need to negotiate with both the union and your employer to be able to pick up your kids. This is onerous and unnecessary. Great need to ask the union for permission to change your hours. Fourth, the legislation would compel employers to provide personal information about a new employee to a union. Given the recent furore around Facebooks use of personal information for marketing purposes, I doubt if many would see it as fair and reasonable for legislation to compel your employer to provide your information to any third party, no matter who they are. Wheres the Privacy Commissioner when we need him! UPDATE: The Commissioner did submit on this issue. Share this: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn More Reddit Pinterest Print Tumblr Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha, left, and Defense Minister Song Young-moo talk to each other while walking toward a Cheong Wa Dae room, Tuesday, to join in a Cabinet meeting chaired by President Moon Jae-in. / Yonhap By Lee Min-hyung Joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States are likely to become a key topic at the denuclearization talks between the U.S. and North Korea. The Rodong Sinmun, the North's mouthpiece newspaper, published an op-ed article claiming the drills as a major source of security concern in Northeast Asia. "It is an international practice for two negotiating sides to refrain from any military activities," the article said. "When the U.S. deploys strategic nuclear weapons during the joint military exercises with South Korea, all the ongoing dialogue momentum will return to the original state." Seoul-Washington military exercises have for years drawn a strong backlash from North Korea. But as the country has rarely shown any peace gestures to Seoul and Washington until recently, no negotiations have been possible over the drills. With the first-ever summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un approaching, the North is raising its voice against the drills. In particular, Pyongyang has in recent months reacted to a series of joint drills by Seoul and Washington. The regime claimed Tuesday that they were harming the ongoing dialogue on the Korean Peninsula, saying they may take the escalating peace momentum back to square one. The regime last week threatened to cancel a planned summit between Trump and Kim, expressing anger over the Max Thunder joint air force exercises. As the drills ended their two-week run last week, the regime ramped up criticism of the Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercises between Seoul and Washington, annually held sometime around August. "South Korea is making a fuss that it does not have plans to downsize UFG drills in August," the propaganda newspaper said. It said the exercises are the root cause of breaking up peace and stability on the peninsula, urging their suspension in line with the ongoing dialogue momentum. But South Korea and the U.S. said they do not have any plans to scale down or cancel any scheduled exercises. Ministry of National Defense spokeswoman Choi Hyun-soo said Tuesday: "Seoul and Washington have yet to discuss any detailed plans over whether to scale down upcoming joint military drills." But she said Seoul and Washington will proceed with them as planned. None of those interventions caused the collapse of the entire proposed cabinet, however, because in each case the parties put forward an alternative -- even if the disputed nominee was simply shifted to a different portfolio. Yet according to Mattarella, the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League proved "unwilling to opt for any other solution". India is one of the largest contributors to the United Nations Peace Keeping missions. It has provided 2,00,000 troops in almost 50 UN peacekeeping missions in last seven decades. The country is sending its soldiers in peacekeeping missions since 1950. Currently, India soldiers are serving in 13 missions out of 16. Last month, during his address at the inauguration of Defence Expo 2018 even Prime Minister Narendra Modi appreciated Indias efforts for Indian Defence Forces contribution in UN peacekeeping missions. India has also lost the highest number of its peacekeepers in various UN peacekeeping operations in the last 70 years. A total of 163 military, police and civilian personnel from India has lost their lives in the various UN missions. According to the UN, 3,737 peacekeepers had lost their lives so far. India is currently the third largest contributor of military and police personnel to UN peacekeeping, with 6,693 now deployed in Abyei, Cyprus, Congo, Haiti, Lebanon, the Middle East, South Sudan and Western Sahara. A total of 96,000 uniformed personnel from 124 countries are part of the UN missions. In addition to this, more than 15,000 international and national civilian staff and nearly 1,600 UN Volunteers are also part of the missions. However, the UN owes India USD 92 million for troops, formed police units and contingent-owned equipment as at April 30, 2018. The International Day of UN Peacekeepers is celebrated world over on May 29 to honour the fallen peacekeepers and to pay tribute to those who served or are still serving in UN peacekeeping missions. Captain Gurbachan Singh was the only UN peacekeeper to be awarded the highest Gallantry Award Param Veer Chakra (posthumously) by India Captain Salaria was martyred in the Congo crisis on 5 December 1961. India is also considering to double the number of women peacekeepers in UN missions by 2019. Till now India has provided 11 force commanders, five deputy commanders and three military advisers in the missions. Kiran Bedi, the first woman IPS was one of the two police advisers deployed by India at the UN headquarters. Indias Major contributions in the UN Peacekeeping Missions: 1) Korean War: The war was fought between November 1950 and July 1954. 60th Indian Field Ambulance, a parachute-trained medical unit comprising 17 officers, nine junior commissioned officers (JCO) and 300 jawans were deployed in the Korean War. Apart from the unit's primary role, an ADS and a surgical team comprising seven officers and five other ranks participated in Operation Tomahawk, and airborne operation by the 187 Airborne Regimental Combat Team on 21 March 1951. The unit was awarded the President's Trophy on 10 March 1955 by the then president of India Dr Rajendra Prasad. 2) Indo-China: The conflict took place between 1954 and 1970. An infantry battalion and supporting staff was deployed during the crisis in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The main task of the battalion was to monitor ceasefire and repatriation of prisoners of war. As many as 970 officers, 140 JCOs, and 6,157 jawans were part of this mission. 3) Middle East: India was part of the United Nations Emergency Force in the Middle East between 1956-1967. This was for the first time, armed troops were deployed in UN peacekeeping mission by India. In 11 years, 393 officers, 409 JCOs and 12,383 jawans were deployed in the operations. 4) Congo (UNOC): Two infantry brigades composed of 467 officers, 401 JCOs and 11354 jawans participated in the mission between 1960 and 1964. Six Canberra Bomber aircrafts of the Indian Airforce were also deployed. A total of 39 Indian soldiers laid down their lives in the mission. It is in this mission that Capt GS Salaria was awarded posthumously the Paramvir Chakra for action in Katanga, Southern Congo. 5) Cambodia (UNTAC): A total of 1373 peacekeepers from all ranks of the Indian Army participated in this mission between 1992 and 1993 to supervise ceasefire, disarm combatants, repatriate refugees and conduct free and fair elections. United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia was set up to accomplish the mission. 6) Mozambique (ONUMOZ): Two Engineer companies, HQ Company, Logistics Company, staff officers and military observers were provided by the Indian Army for this mission between 1992 and 1994. In all 1083 peacekeepers from all ranks participated. 7) Somalia (UNITAF & UNOSOM II): The Indian Navy and the Indian Army actively participated in the operation from 1993-1994. 5,000 personnel of the Indian army and four naval warships were deployed in the mission. 8) Rwanda (UNAMIR): India provided an Infantry Battalion group, a Signal Company, and Engineer Company, staff officers and Military Observers for this mission between 1994 and 1996. A total of 956 personnel from all ranks took part. Brigadier Shiva Kumar of the Indian Army (Acting) was the third and final Force Commander of UN troops serving in Rwanda from December 1995-March 1996. Currently, Indian Troops are also serving in many UN Peacekeeping operations. 1) Lebanon (UNIFIL) (Since Dec 1998): One infantry battalion group, Level II Hospital comprising 650 peacekeepers from all ranks and 23 staff officers till date, have been deployed. The current situation in the Mission volatile because of the crisis in Syria. 2) Ivory Coast (UNOCI ) (Since April 2004): Two infantry battalion groups, sector HQ, an engineer company, a signal company, Level-II Hospital and a large number of military observers and staff officers have been by India for this mission. 3) Congo (MONUSCO) (Since January 2005): India has contributed an extended Chapter VII mandate with Augmented Infantry Brigade Group (four infantry battalions with level III Hospital), army aviation contingent with utility helicopters, along with a large number of military observers for this mission. Two Formed Police Units have also been deployed in the mission since 2009. 4) Sudan (UNMIS) (Since April 2005): Two infantry battalion groups, sector HQ, an Engineer company, signal company, Level-II Hospital and a large number of military observers and staff officers are part of this mission. 5) Golan Heights (UNDOF) (Since February 2006): A Logistics battalion with 190 personnel have been deployed to look after the logistics security of UNDOF. Maj.Gen. I.S. Singha is the Force Commander since July 2012. 6) Liberia (NMIL): Both male and female Indian Formed Police Units are deployed in Liberia. Since April 2007. (With inputs from PTI) (The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 30, 2018 05:07 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com). Kabul, May 30: At least 10 people were killed and dozens injured in two separate attacks in Afghanistan's Kandahar and Logar provinces on Wednesday, police said. According to a police official, seven people including three police officers were killed and 12 others injured in an attack carried out by four Taliban insurgents at a police station in Afghanistan's eastern Logar province. The attack began early on Wednesday when a rebel detonated a mini-truck full of explosives against the rear wall of a police station in Pul-e-Alam, the regional capital, while three other attackers followed him, Efe quoted Logar Police spokesperson Shapoor Ahmadzai as saying. "Following the blast, three attackers armed with weapons entered the police station. But our policemen were quick to handle the situation and respond to the attack," said Ahmadzai, adding that all the insurgents were killed by the police a "few minutes" after the attack started. Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid claimed the attack in a statement on his official account on Telegram, claiming that "tens of policemen," including the district police chief, were killed and injured. In another attack, at least three civilians were killed and 11 others injured in a blast that rocked Afghanistan's Kandahar city, Xinhua reported. The blast happened in a market in Police District 5 in the morning, killing three people on the spot and injuring 11 others, all civilians, provincial government spokesman Daud Ahmadi said. He said investigation had been initiated into the incident. (The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 30, 2018 02:33 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com). May 30, 2018, 6:44am ET BMW calls convertible SUV "a really interesting topic" Could the X2 lose its lid? Nissan never expected the Murano CrossCabriolet would leave such a lasting legacy. Land Rover jumped into the convertible crossover segment with the Range Rover Evoque Cabriolet and Volkswagen promised to follow with a roof-less T-Roc. Now, BMW has indicated it could enter the segment sooner or later. "It's a really interesting topic," Ralph Mahler, BMW's direct of product planning, told Digital Trends when asked for his thoughts on a top-less crossover. "All these kinds of questions we have asked ourselves in the past. Whether or not there is a possibility, whether or not there is a market. You see the lineup at the moment. We don't have one but nevertheless I think it's still an interesting question," he added. While that's not a confirmation BMW will enter the segment, it's not a flat-out denial, either. Mahler stopped short of pointing to the crossover or SUV that makes the most sense as a convertible. The Munich-based brand has plenty to choose from; its line-up includes the X1, X2, X3, X4, X5, X6, and, soon enough, the X7. By process of elimination, we'd single out the X2 (pictured) as the likeliest candidate for a convertible conversion. For starters, it competes in the same segment as the Evoque. It's also aimed at a relatively young target audience, one likely to adopt -- and even embrace -- the idea of a high-riding cabriolet. Are we right? Time will tell. BMW could move into the segment by the end of the decade if it decides to give the project the proverbial green light. May 30, 2018, 10:15am ET Tesla Model S crashes into police car; driver blames Autopilot Police say the accident happened in an area where a Tesla collided with a semi truck last year. A Tesla Model S has been involved in another alleged Autopilot accident, smashing into the back of a parked police SUV in Laguna Beach, California. The police car was empty at the time but the Tesla driver suffered minor injuries, according to a San Diego Union-Tribune report. "The police car is totaled," said Laguna Police Sgt. Jim Cota. "Why do these vehicles keep doing that? We're just lucky that people aren't getting injured." This morning a Tesla sedan driving outbound Laguna Canyon Road in "autopilot collides with a parked @LagunaBeachPD unit. Officer was not in the unit at the time of the crash and minor injuries were sustained to the Tesla driver. #lagunabeach #police #tesla pic.twitter.com/7sAs8VgVQ3 Laguna Beach PD PIO (@LBPD_PIO_45) May 29, 2018 Tesla has repeatedly warned drivers to pay attention to the road and keep their hands on the wheel when Autopilot is engaged. "Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn't make the car impervious to all accidents, and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings," the company said in a statement. The provision of tasers and body cameras to rank and file gardai is a matter for garda managment according to the Minister for Justice and Laois TD, Charlie Flanagan. In a speech to the 2018 Annual Delegate Conference of Garda Representative Association in Wexford, Minister Flanagan responded to renewed calls for equipment to restrain people. "It goes without saying that good policing requires not only the right number of Garda members in operational roles but also the right training and the right equipment. I have heard your concerns in these areas. I know you have spoken about a need for body cameras, tasers, better training and better support. "What I can say in response is that, as Minister, my job is not to address these concerns directly or operationally - that is the job of the Commissioner and his team - but rather, to do everything I can to enable the Commissioner and that team to do that job, to be a provider of the resources required, to respond to requests whether they are for resources, support or policy and to do that willingly and swiftly I want you to know that I do, and that I will continue to do so. He returned to the issue at the end of his speech where he indicated that tasers must be given careful consideration before being maide more widely available. "In 2007 the Garda Inspectorate supported the Commissioners proposal to provide Tasers to the Emergency Response Units and stated that any extension of deployment of these devices to personnel other than the ERU should be the subject of careful consideration. Regarding body worn cameras a working group is currently exploring options for their use. "So I do believe your concerns are being heard and I do believe real progress is being made," said the Fine Gael TD. Minster Flanagan also told the assocation that the new Commissioner, who will be in place by autumn, will lead and implement a major strategic reform agenda. ..... Speech by the Minister for Justice and Equality Charlie Flanagan TD at 2018 Annual Delegate Conference of Garda Representative Association Clayton Whites Hotel, Abbey Street, Wexford Wednesday 30th May 2018 President, distinguished delegates and guests, I am delighted to be invited to address your annual conference. Its my first opportunity to do so as Minister. I hope it wont be the last for many reasons but chiefly because no one can have too many opportunities to acknowledge the work that you do and the role that you fill. Throughout my life in politics, and especially as Minister for Justice and Equality, I have been fully aware of the great challenges that Garda members face every day, and the very real risks that you take on our behalf. As the backbone of An Garda Siochana, you are the ones who are out every day in the community. You are the ones in whom the public have consistently expressed confidence; you are the ones who are shown respect and trust as you operate in a police service rooted in the communities you serve. But while this is a tremendously privileged and valuable position to be in it is not one which comes without challenges. I know that this is not an easy time for An Garda Siochana the public gaze has been on you, there is significant reform underway, and there are the various issues which you raised at Conference over the last two days. It goes without saying that good policing requires not only the right number of Garda members in operational roles but also the right training and the right equipment. I have heard your concerns in these areas. I know you have spoken about a need for body cameras, tasers, better training and better support. What I can say in response is that, as Minister, my job is not to address these concerns directly or operationally that is the job of the Commissioner and his team but rather, to do everything I can to enable the Commissioner and that team to do that job, to be a provider of the resources required, to respond to requests whether they are for resources, support or policy and to do that willingly and swiftly I want you to know that I do, and that I will continue to do so. Another reason of course that this is not an easy time for An Garda Siochana is that there is significant reform underway. Reform can be difficult. But please be assured this reform is grounded in a clear rationale and I firmly believe its implementation is not just in the best interests of the public you serve but also in the best interests of An Garda Siochana itself and of each and every individual who serves in it. Everyone involved, I believe, can come together, to deliver a service which is modern, efficient, effective and fit for purpose. An element already delivered is the Policing Authority. Its establishment is probably one of the most significant Policing reforms delivered since the foundation of the State. As in all democratic countries, it provides independent oversight of policing. And given its mission is to drive excellent policing, I welcome its publication of the Policing Priorities and a Policing Plan for 2018. I also acknowledge its role in the development of the new Code of Ethics which is being embedded within An Garda Siochana and which will ensure societys continued confidence in your work. Alongside the ongoing Reform programme, we also of course have the Commission on the Future of Policing conducting a root and branch review of policing in Ireland. I would like to thank you in the GRA for your positive engagement with the Commission during its extensive stakeholder engagement. And I look forward to an ambitious report in September which I expect will map out an ambitious future for An Garda Siochana for the coming decades. I know you have a desire to see that ambitious future. The Garda Cultural Audit, reflecting the views of over 6,500 Garda personnel, demonstrates a significant appetite for real and lasting change. I welcome the positives in the report - in particular your pride in your role in protecting and supporting our communities and the esprit de corps. Of course the Audit also highlights challenges. in areas such as speaking up; supervision; promotions; leadership and resourcing. But I believe these are being addressed and as they are, I believe it is important for each and every member to grasp the opportunity to help shape lasting cultural reform in An Garda Siochana. I hope you will all get, and take, the opportunity to do that. I also want to acknowledge how change is being embraced within the GRA itself. The strategic and operational review of your internal procedures was a clear indication of the underlying strength and unity of your organisation. Events of recent years have highlighted the need to take a fresh look at how industrial relations are dealt with in An Garda Siochana and I welcome your engagement with the Working Group which is examining the internal industrial relations structures and bringing forward legislation to facilitate access to the WRC and Labour Court. Each one of you joined An Garda Siochana because you wanted to protect the public and fight crime. Today fighting crime often involves fighting gangs. Gangland crime is a serious issue but significant progress has been made. I do not underestimate the scale of this issue, as gangland criminals are adept at exploiting technology and people, but be reassured that they are being confronted by an ever more sophisticated and well-resourced Garda police service which is supported by dedicated and highly trained Armed Support Units. As you know there have been significant successes in targeting the drugs trade which fuels the activities of organised criminals. I am committed to ensuring that An Garda Siochana has the resources necessary to tackle all forms of criminality including the resourcing of large-scale and targeted policing operations such as Operations Thor and Hybrid amongst others, all of which have yielded impressive results. Your service has delivered impressive results elsewhere too examples include the Divisional Protective Services Units which have been established to tackle special crime types such as domestic and sexual abuse and ensuring those possessing and distributing child exploitation material continue to be targeted. These issues are particularly poignant given what has happened in recent days. The brutal murder of a young teenager and the abduction and murder of a young woman who had recently arrived to our shores were horrific. I would like to commend the Gardai who were involved in both these cases for their dedication and professionalism while also sensitively handling what can only be described as harrowing cases. Of course, whenever we speak of crime, it is important to have accurate data. I cant stress this enough as accurate crime statistics facilitates the changing and targeting of response necessary for the nature of crimes committed today. My concerns relating to the publication of crime statistics are well known and I therefore welcome the return of official crime statistics by the CSO, albeit under reservation. I look forward to the outcome of the current review into homicide statistics which will ensure that the issues in relation to these statistics are resolved immediately. And I am pleased to note, contrary to recent media reports which were not based on CSO or Garda data, that while in 2017 a slight increase of 3% in burglary offences was recorded it must be balanced by a decrease of 30% in 2016. This Government is committed to ensuring a strong and visible police presence to maintain and strengthen community engagement, provide reassurance to citizens and deter crime. Since 2014, some 1800 new members have attested and by the end of this year it is expected Garda numbers will have increased to over 14,000 for the first time since 2011. I recognise of course that as Garda numbers increase there is a requirement for more supervision. New members must receive the support they need. I am therefore engaged with my colleague, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, for an increase in the numbers at supervisory ranks. I recognise too the need for ongoing training and Continuous Professional Development for those already in the ranks and so I am pleased to see in the Modernisation and Renewal Programme that all personnel are kept up-to-date on relevant policies and changes in the law. When I speak of all personnel, I am of course speaking now, of more broad cohorts. And as we move towards a more integrated Garda workforce, I believe the civilianisation programme represents a positive change. The goal is that by 2021 An Garda Siochana will have 4,000 civilians or 20% of total headcount, which aligns with international norms. This will ensure that sworn members of all ranks are reassigned to operational policing. The best modern police services are those where police professionals and civilians work together and their respective skills and expertise are equally recognised. I hope you will all warmly welcome a service in which civilians provide support in areas such as HR, IT, Finance and the Technical Bureau, and also one in which it is envisaged that there will be 2000 reserves to provide an additional support on the frontline. Over the course of the 2 days of your conference you have highlighted the need to have the correct equipment, and other resources such as technology, vehicles and accommodation. I would like to take this opportunity to reassure you all that both I and the Government are aware of this and have made available significant funding for An Garda Siochana in recent years. For example between 2016 and 2021, 342 million will have been invested in technology including computer aided dispatch facilities, and the development of a roster and duty management system and the latest cutting-edge technologies for eVetting, anti-money laundering, and automated number plate recognition systems. Between 2013 and 2017 44 million was invested in the Garda fleet, with 2000 new vehicles coming on stream up to 2021 and a further 30 million to ensure the fleet remains modern, effective and fit for purpose. The Building and Refurbishment Programme is delivering new Garda stations and refurbishment work in others with a focus on facilities for victims of crime, and the upgrade of Custody Management Facilities. In addition, 100 million has been invested in 3 new Divisional Regional headquarters in Kevin St. Dublin, Galway and Wexford and I look forward to formally opening both Wexford and Kevin Street soon. As I stated earlier, the deployment of Tasers to all frontline staff is a matter for the Commissioner. In 2007 the Garda Inspectorate supported the Commissioners proposal to provide Tasers to the Emergency Response Units and stated that any extension of deployment of these devices to personnel other than the ERU should be the subject of careful consideration. Regarding body worn cameras a working group is currently exploring options for their use. So I do believe your concerns are being heard and I do believe real progress is being made. Finally, looking to your leadership, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the commitment, dedication and service of Acting Commissioner Donall OCualain. The process of selecting a new Commissioner is, as Im sure you know, well underway and for the first time, it is being overseen by the Policing Authority. At a time of significant growth and reform the role of Commissioner will be extremely challenging, which is why the government decided the competition would be open and international with the successful candidate tested against the strongest field possible. The new Commissioner, who will be in place by autumn, will lead and implement a major strategic reform agenda while simultaneously ensuring the security of the State and the safety of its citizens. Of course the Commissioner will be doing that through all of you, and your efforts, so can I close just by reiterating my appreciation for the work that you do. An Garda Siochana is on the cusp of major change which will redefine it as an organisation. How you, as members, embrace these changes will in large part dictate the future nature and shape of the police service of this State. I have no doubt that you will rise to meet the challenge. I look forward to meeting some of you here later and to working with all of you over the coming year, and I thank you again sincerely for the invitation to address you today. Please allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content. Kindly add us to your ad blocker whitelist. If you want further access to Ireland's best local journalism, consider subscribing to our ePaper and/or free daily Newsletter . Support our mission and join our community now. A Portarlington woman has been granted an appeal against a conviction for drink driving as the circuit court has ruled her rights were breached as her examination by a doctor at the garda station did not take place in private. Sherley Lawlor (57), 44 Kilnacourt Woods, Portarlington, was convicted in Portlaoise District Court of drink driving, on April 29, 2017, at Kilnacourt Woods, Portarlington. During her appeal against this conviction, Garda Paul Kelly give evidence to Portlaoise Circuit Court, along with State solicitor, Mr Donal Dunne, that on April 29, 2017, the gardai received a report of a car driving erratically at Kilnacourt Woods. When the gardai arrived they observed the appellant sitting in her vehicle in the estate. Garda Kelly said the bonnet of the vehicle was still warm and when he spoke to the appellant he got a smell of alcohol. The appellant was unsteady on her feet so the garda formed the opinion she had consumed alcohol. Garda Kelly gave evidence that the appellant was brought to the garda station where she provided a specimen indicating 73mg of alcohol per 100ml of breath. Garda Kelly gave evidence that when he charged the accused, she replied: I drove to the petrol station and back as I was attempting to drive myself to A&E after being assaulted and I realised it was not a good idea to drive so I drove home. Defence, barrister Ms Louise Troy said her client was very distraught on the night as she had been assaulted earlier, to which Garda Kelly confirmed the appellant did say she had a dispute with the neighbours that day. The garda said he thought she was advised to go to hospital after her release from garda custody and he was not sure if any complaint of assault was followed up by his colleagues. He said that while in custody, she indicated an injury to her wrist. He said he did not recall her having cuts to her face. Garda Paul Dooley, the driver of the patrol car on the night, said on the night the appellant complained of a sore wrist and she had a wrist support on. He said he was aware of other incidents, but did not have dates of these to hand. Garda Paul Scanlon gave evidence that while in custody, the appellant requested a doctor as she claimed to have chest pains. The garda said she also had a cut to her face and a bruised wrist. Garda Scanlon said that the observation period on the appellant before she provided the breath specimen began at 1.35am. Garda Scanlon confirmed that the doctor examined the appellant during this period of observation. When the doctor came he advised the appellant to seek medical treatment after her release. Judge Keenan Johnson remarked that it seemed unusual for someone to be examined by a doctor not in a private setting. Ms Troy said that the observation period was not carried out in accordance with the regulations, as the appellant had been examined by the doctor during that period. Mr Dunne, for the State, said that the gardai had followed the requirements they were meant to and the medical examination of the appellant could just have been cursory. Ms Troy countered that the 20 minutes observation period should be treated as separate and discrete from the medical examination. She said that the lawfulness of the process had to be called into question. Judge Johnson said that a person in custody has the right to be examined in private and this had been a breach of fundamental rights. He said there was no indication what the medical examination was and the court could not speculate. Judge Johnson ruled that the court had a reasonable doubt over the validity of the observation period and he allowed the appeal. Brian Stanley TD has demanded that the HSE explain why the number of home help hours provided in Laois and Offaly were cut by an astonishing 14,558 hours in 2017 compared to 2016, when there is clearly increasing demand for home help in the region. Deputy Stanley said: In answer to a parliamentary question the HSE stated that home help Hours in Laois and Offaly for 2016 were 316,097 and in 2017 that was cut to 301,539 - that is 14,558 less home help hours in this region - this is utterly shameful. Despite previous government statements that extra hours would be provided and that they have budgeted for more hours. This is completely unacceptable and I would like the HSE to explain why this is the case, he continued. It is clear that from calls I receive from families looking for home help for their loved ones that the demand has not reduced. Deputy Stanley said that the HSE previously confirmed that 323 elderly people were approved for home help in 2017 in Laois, but 190 of those people were still waiting to be provided with hours. When people can avail of the home care/home help packages that are available from the HSE, it is a very good service. With the change of demographics and with the number of elderly people due to increase dramatically in the coming years, we need to put the structures and supports in place to cope with the increase demand, he said. Deputy Stanley said that Sinn Feins budget proposal in 2018 put in costed proposals to expand the services and provide extra home help hours and home care packages. Im calling on the Minister to revisit this area and make better use of the finances available, he said. Home Help is an essential service for the sick and elderly especially in rural Ireland where people may not have anyone else calling to see them from one end of the week to the other. It is an increase in home help hours that is needed not a reduction and I would like the HSE and Government to explain what is going on here, Deputy Stanley concluded. The local authority in Laois has likened itself to the MI5 spy agency, in its hunt to track down and fine illegal dumpers. The council has three litter wardens bolstered by a litter waste team of four people, and new technology including cameras and drones is being added to to combat dumping. Senior Engineer Orla Barrett in the Environment section, said at the May council meeting that we are like M15. We can track you down and we will fine you, she said. One bogus waste contractor has been caught and fined 2,500 she said. Another dumper in Portarlington opted to clear waste they dumped rather than face the 'name and shame' of a public court. They would have spent about 10,000 to clean up their mess Ms Barrett estimated. She said the public are on board in the battle. The public is really helping us now where they didn't before and we encourage that, Ms Barrett said. She urged the public not to leave boxes or bags at bring banks as this incurs a 150 fine, with cameras often posted at the bottle banks to catch offenders. She also reminded the public that it is free to leave old electrical items in Kyletalesha landfill. "To see dumped fridges is shocking," the engineer said. The council is using hidden wildlife cameras on a rota around Laois at litter blackspots to record dumpers in action. Aerial drones are also being used, with more equipment being bought this year. From January to April this year, 76 tonnes of illegally dumped waste were cleaned by the council across Laois. Another 48 tonnes were collected during Clean-Up Laois week in April, with 150 community groups out helping to bag up litter and waste thrown in the countryside. A Litter Management Plan for 2018 to 2020 was approved by councillors at the meeting on Monday May 28. New Waste Management Bye-laws 2018 were also approved, with penalties for homeowners who are not using bin companies, or not segregating and binning their waste properly. There is a fixed payment notice of 75 for any person breaking the laws. If that goes unpaid after 21 days, they face prosecution, and a fine of no more than 2,500. If the offender continues to break the bye-laws, they can be fined 500 per day. The new laws will apply to both household and commercial waste. They include laws against putting recyclables into residential waste bins. Read more about the new Waste Management bye-laws for Laois here. More than 100 people are on A&E trollies or somewhere in wards at hospitals under the supervision of the HSE's Dublin Midlands Hospital Group (DMHG) according to the latest figures from nurses. The overcrowding situation has forced managment at one of the hospitals to activate its escalation policy for the third day running. The DMHG includes hospitals in Dublin, Kildare, Laois and Offaly. Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation trolley watch figures for Wednesday, May 30 reveal that there are 101 patients spread across the hospitals. Portlaoise has 10, Tullamore has 27, Tallaght has 28, Naas has 29. St James' is the biggest hospital in the group and country - it has seven patients on trollies. Managment has been forced to activate its escalation policy several times in recent weeks. This week it has been forced to do so for the third day running. The DMHG said the Midland Regional Hospital Tullamore is experiencing high levels of attendances with many patients requiring admission today Wednesday 30th May. "In order to assist us we are requesting that patients in the first instance, consider using their GP out of hours for medical assessment, where possible The hospital regrets that any patient should experience delays in accessing In patient beds," said the statment. Nationally, there are 446 people on trollies or beds waiting for admission. Cork University Hospital is the worst hit with 51 patients waiting. Anyone on a trolley or accomodated temporarily in some other part of a hospital has been deemed ill enough to require hospital care. Most patients who attend A&E are discharged. Laois Hospice Foundation is asking everyone in the county and surrounding areas to support Hospice Sunflower Day next Friday June 9. The public are being asked to either buy a sunflower or volunteer an hour of their time to help sell sunflowers in their local areas. Hospice Sunflower Day is a major source of income for Laois Hospice, a totally voluntary organisation which provides professional palliative care to individuals and support to their families, in Laois and surrounding areas. Seamus ODonoghue is Chairman of Laois Hospice Foundation. We in Laois Hospice are reliant on our community to help maintain and expand hospice services in Laois. The numbers seeking hospice care are increasing and we are determined to be there for as many people as possible and with your support, we can ensure that they are not affected by any government cutbacks," he said. Volunteers are essential to the day's success. "The hospice movement in Ireland has been built on the back of volunteers. Hospice Sunflower Days provide essential funding to these services. The success of these fundraising days depends on volunteers taking time out of their busy schedule to sell Sunflowers in the local areas," Mr O'Donoghue said. "By supporting Sunflower Day you will play a vital role in efforts to bring comfort and dignity to people who need hospice care," he said. To volunteer an hour on Friday 8th June for Sunflower Day, contact Mary Delaney, Secretary Laois Hospice Foundation at 086 8157280. Naas twinning members Orla OConnell and Tim Mulvihill were both recently awarded an 'Urkunde' by the City of Dillingen an der Donau in Germany for their work in building the relationship between the two towns. The award is an official recognition of efforts made by both Orla and Tim and was presented at a ceremony in the Bavarian town by Mayor of Dillingen, Frank Kunz, marking 20 years of twinning between Naas and Dillingen. As a teacher in St Marys, Naas, Orla was involved in the very first exchanges 30 years ago. It took 10 years before the twinning agreement was officially signed by then Mayor of Naas, Ms Mary French in 1998. Since then the relationship has grown from strength to strength. Tim Mulvihill was also acknowledged with the same civic honour for the role he has played in developing the partnership. Over the years, approximately 250 students have traded places and 100 Irish adults have visited Dillingen. German visitors are a common sight in Naas during the summer and especially at the Easter Parade. Most recently, a delegation from Naas attended the WIR Business Expo in Dillingen which was supported by INTO Kildare and Tourism Ireland. Chairman of Naas Twinning, Tim Casey congratulated Orla and Tim on their awards saying; Orla and Tim are the epitome of twinning. They have worked quietly and diligently behind the scenes for years ensuring that our two communities can share so many rich experiences together." Naas Mayor, Rob Power added "We're delighted to see their efforts acknowledged and to see first-hand the positive impact that twinning has had on families and friendships on both sides. Orla and Tim have certainly done their town proud. SEE ALSO: Kildare TD says future of Dunnes Stores at Naas Superquinn site not in doubt The HSE has published an incident investigation report on failures in care provided to Mary Conroy while under the care of maternity services at Portlaoise hospital for the delivery of her daughter Roisin in November 2001. Hundreds of South Kildare patients attend the maternity services at Portlaoise every year. This report is being published at the request of, and with the prior consent of the Mary and Kevin Conroy from Portlaoise whose daughter has dyskinetic cerebral palsy as a result of a brain injury suffered at the hospital during birth. The family battled the HSE in the courts from the time of her birth until reaching a settlement of 2.6 million in 2013. A further 9 million was awarded in 2015. They took an action against the health authority and consultant obstetrician Dr John Corristine. While cognitively perfect, Roisin is unable to speak or make voluntary movements. Her parents have given up work to care for their daughter who is the eldest of three children. The detailed 165 page investigation report higlights two key failings. It says there was a "failure to perform competently during a high risk labour regarding the assessment and monitoring of Baby Roisin and recognition of fetal distress". It says this placed Mrs Conroy and Baby Roisin in a position of "unnecessary risk". The report also says there was a failure to demonstrate "proper dedication, thoroughness, professional duty and responsibility as set out in professional regulatory guidelines. It finds that this resulted in a "serious absence of the required level of professional communication expected during a high risk labour and Baby Roisin being catastrophically injured at birth". The report says the family highlighted a clear absence of communication between staff and the family during and after labour which the Investigation Team consider to be extremely concerning. The family stated at a meeting with the Investigation Team on the 22nd November 2017 that; "Had we only been told the truth on the morning of the 15th November, and not given untruths and misleading information, we could have accepted that people genuinely make mistakes or get it wrong sometimes. "Incidents happen, sometimes with serious consequences. We were hold by Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist A that nothing could have been done, no signs that anything was wrong, that there is no way of detecting these things and we were just unlucky, the trace was perfect. "Believing what we were told by Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist A that we were just unlucky we tried to do our best for Roisin, meaning we were unable to access the appropriate care for our daughter. "It was 9 years later when we found out what really happened and a further 3 years later (12 years in total) before we were able to get the right support for Roisin. "We realised that there is really no avenue for individuals to be held to account, particularly if they retire, this investigation is our only recourse now, to find out why everything happened because we did not find out during the legal proceedings. All the untruths and misleading information provided to us over a 12 year period ultimately resulted in Roisin being denied the therapies she needed to improve her quality of life and life expectancy," he said. In its statement on publish the report HSE said acknowledged that there were significant failings in the care provided to Mrs Conroy and has apologised for these failings and for the consequent suffering and distress caused to Roisin and her parents. Mr Trevor O Callaghan, Chief Executive of the Dublin Midland Hospital Group reiterated this apology to the Conroy family and acknowledged that neither this apology nor the publication of this report can negate the suffering and distress experienced by Roisin and her family. I would like to sincerely thank Mr and Mrs Conroy for working with the investigation team to complete this review and acknowledge the lengthy and difficult process it has been for them. The Hospitals failure for several years to acknowledge or address the deficiencies in care identified in this report was unacceptable and not what is expected from our services. Lessons have been learned, changes have been implemented and we are committed to providing the highest standards of care to all patients. This report and its recommendations will be shared with all maternity services through the Women & Infants Programme and other relevant agencies to inform best practice, he said. The HSE said that to date some of the key changes in Portlaoise Hospital maternity services include: new management and governance arrangements; significant investment in staff recruitment and training including the appointment of additional midwifery and specialist nursing staff, and the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the HSE, on behalf of Portlaoise Hospital, and the Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital, including the appointment of a Clinical Director to improve clinical integration and collaboration across maternity services within the Hospital Group. The HSE said these changes would continue to enhance clinical services and quality and safety structures at the Hospital and contribute to the on-going integration between the two sites. The investigation was commissioned in 2016 and carried out by: Ms Deirdre OKeeffe, Quality Improvement Division, Health Service Executive (Investigation Chairperson); Ms Susan Temple, Quality and Safety Manager, Dublin Midland Hospital Group, Health Service Executive; Dr Francois Gardeil, Consultant Obstetrician and Obstetrician, Wexford General Hospital, Ireland East Hospital Group, Health Service Executive. Three Kildare 80 were honoured for their pomotion of the Irish language at a special presentation last week. Scoil Foghlaim le Cheile, Gaelcholaiste Chill Dara and Pobalscoil Chill Droichid received their Gaelbhratach flag. Over 700 pupils, from both primary and secondary schools, gathered in the Pavilion at Leopardstown racecourse in Dublin to attend the Gaelbhratach presentation on Tuesday 22 May. The Gaelbhratach scheme, funded by Foras na Gaeilge, and organised by Gael Linn, with the support of Conradh na Gaeilge and Glor na nGael, recognises the promotion of the Irish language in both secondary and primary schools around the country. SEE ALSO: Naas duo honoured by German city for services to twinning There was a fantastic atmosphere at the event and the delight of the students, and indeed their teachers, in being recognised for their work was palpable. Adding to their enjoyment was the performance of the group Seo Linn who had the students dancing and singing along to their many hits as Gaeilge throughout the event. Acting as MCs, TV stars Micheal O Ciaraidh and Grainne Bleasdale made sure the event ran smoothly with their light-hearted approach! Gaelcholaiste Chill Dara students Tara Ni Reachtain and Rian O hAilin proudly accepted the flag on behalf of their school The two Gael Linn officials in charge of the Gaelbhratach scheme, Andrea Ni Fhaolain and Mairead Ni Thiomanaigh were very proud of all the schools and what they had achieved during the year. They explained that it takes a lot of hard work for a school to be awarded the Gaelbhratach, that they have many targets to reach and that all of this work must be verified through various means, including postings on the Gaelbhratach blog and keeping a journal which is forwarded to Gael Linn at the end of the year. The Gaelbhratach scheme, initiated in 2013, has gone from strength to strength. In fact, there is a long waiting list of schools throughout the country wishing to be accepted into the scheme. Sean O Coinn, CEO of Foras na Gaeilge and Antoine O Coileain, CEO of Gael Linn also spoke at the event and thanked the teachers for their support for the scheme within their schools. They also commended the co-operation of the three organisations involved in running the scheme, who are all funded by Foras na Gaeilge and have the same goals as regards the promotion of our language. Pobalscoil Chill Droichid students Eilis Pluymers, Emily Azzali and Daniel Herron proudly accepted the flag on behalf of their school Rory OConnell from Annaduff NS was yesterday named as the winner of the Connacht Provincial Spelling Bee 2018. The much-anticipated final took place in the G Hotel in Galway yesterday and Rory came out on top, taking first place against four talented young Bees with the word, Capitulate. Rory will now move forward to compete in the All-Ireland Eason Spelling Bee final in the Helix in Dublin on Thursday, June 14. The 12-year-old gained victory over his rivals from schools in Galway, Mayo, Roscommon and Sligo. Speaking about his win, the sixth class student said, I love reading the Harry Potter series and Im delighted to have won I cant wait for the final in June. The Eason Spelling Bee encourages children throughout the country to practice their spelling, to read more and strives to instill greater confidence when it comes to literacy and spelling, from a young age. Brendan Corbett, Group Head of Marketing at Eason, said; We are thrilled to see the continued success of the Eason Spelling Bee over the past eight years. The children and their schools should be extremely proud to represent their counties in this hugely talented competition. It is remarkable to see the level of exceptional spelling from individuals across the country and the continued support from teachers and schools who contribute to this exciting competition every year. Today FMs Alison Curtis commented, The standard of spellers is really amazing and it is brilliant to see how dedicated each participant is to this competition. This initiative is both a great day out for the schools but it is also hugely important to developing reading and literacy skills among children. Each year the competition begins with registered schools hosting their own in-school Bee competitions, to find their 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 winning school will receive a collection of books for their library to the value of 7,500. The Spelling Bee winner will be awarded books worth 500 and the prestigious title of the 2018 Eason Spelling Bee champion. Keep up-to-date with all the 2018 Spelling Bee news on www.easons.com/spellingbee. Read Also: The sun is shining but some people are thinking about Christmas On the same year as Dermot Earley Senior would have turned 70 years of age, nearly 400 people gathered together in Croke Park on Saturday, May 26, to celebrate his great legacy. The Dermot Earley Youth Leadership Initiative, delivered in partnership with Foroige and NUIG, seeks to empower GAA members aged 15 to 18 years-old to make a positive difference in their club, county, and communities through values-based leadership. 166 young men and women from clubs across nine counties (Mayo, Roscommon, Galway, Kildare, Offaly, Dublin, Antrim, Donegal and Monaghan) received a certificate from Uachtaran Cuman Luthchleas Geal, John Horan, to mark their completion of modules one and two of the progamme. Of these 82 are scheduled to complete module three, graduating from NUIG with a Level 6 Certificate in Youth Leadership and Community Action in October. Five young leaders shared their experiences of the programme, which was designed by youth organisation Foroige, with the assembled family and friends: Cera Kenny (Celbridge GAA Club, Kildare), Ciaran Harkin (Annaghdown GAA Club, Galway), Cormac Henry (Mayo Gaels GAA Club, Mayo), John Higgins (St. Brigids, GAA Club, Antrim) and Molly Dempsey (Cuala GAA Club, Dublin). They recalled how the programme has transformed them from shy, quiet, teenagers to people who now possess the skills and confidence to take on responsibilities within their local GAA club and community. They spoke on how they have learnt leadership and life skills such as communication, goal setting, self-awareness and reflection; how they have the wherewithal to break down challenges when they arise, building resilience in the process. Most of all they highlighted the connections and friendships they have made along the way. Helping to guide their nine-month journey through this exploration of leadership were a troupe of facilitators volunteers from within the GAA and Foroige, each of whom completed a four-day Diploma in Training and Education delivered by NUIG and Foroige. On the day all tutors were recognised for their time and commitment to the programme and provided with certificate from NUIGs Registrar Pol ODochartaigh. The Earley family were represented on the day by Dermots wife, Mary, and their children, Dermot Jr, Anne-Marie, Noelle and Paula, including some of the extended Earley family. Dermot Jr, a former Kildare inter-county All Star, said My father was passionate about enabling young people to achieve their full potential. On behalf of the Earley family we are delighted to give our support to this initiative and look forward to the positive influence these young leaders will have on their GAA clubs, their communities and beyond. An Uachtaran CLG, John Horan, said The Association and the Irish nation are built on the shoulders of our great leaders of the past, such as Dermot Earley senior. The GAAs future and the communities we serve will be built on the leadership of these young men and women. I want to acknowledge the NUIGs contribution in providing a tangible academic recognition for the work the facilitators and the participants are putting into this exciting programme and Foroige for their exceptional programme content and support. David OReilly, Chairperson of the National Council of Foroige said "Foroige is delighted and honoured to join with the GAA and NUI Galway to roll out the Dermot Earley Youth Leadership Initiative. Dermot Earley epitomised the values of true leadership on and off the field and we hope it inspires participants to take a leading role in the GAA and their community. We are proud to be associated with the legacy of Dermot Earley in such a meaningful way." Stacey Cahill, GAA National Co-ordinator said I want to thank our troupe of tutors, from the GAA and Foroige, for giving so freely of their time as volunteers and making this programme come to life for members from 200 clubs across nine counties. Since its inception we have equipped over 400 young people across the country with essential leadership skills to enable them to reach their full potential. For more information on the Dermot Earley Youth Leadership Initiative please contact Stacey Cahill on stacey.cahill@gaa.ie or 01 8192387. The sun is expected to shine and temperatures go through the roof as Drumcoura and Ballinamore prepare for the decendance of Country Music fans to Cowboys and heroes this weekend. Cowboys and Heroes 2018 will have the best in Irish Country with Derek Ryan, Mike Denver, Patrick Feeney, Jimmy Buckley, Johnny Brady, Lisa McHugh, Robert Mizzell, Cliona Hagan, Ciaran Rosney, Marty Mone, Owen Mac, Paul Kelly Music, Billy Mack, Ailish McBride, Aoife McDonagh and many more. The festival will also have returning favourites American Car Show, Western Horse Show, Country Star Competition, Jive Competition, Gun Slingers and a new charity day where all proceeds go to Make a Wish Ireland. By all accounts the entire Ballinamore area is booked out with festival goers and even more will be camping out at the venue. The festival fever has trickled into Ballinamore and the town will be hoping to benefit from the American Country event. Buses will be running from the town to Drumcoura all weekend and locals are just as excited for the jam packed weekend as the visitors are. Weekend tickets are nearly sold out but the remaining few are on www.cowboysandheroes.ie or tickets.ie. If you miss them, day tickets are available on the gate for just 30. All the family will be able to attend the much talked about festival on Bank Holiday Monday. Children will love the amusements, tractor run and kids line dancing and wishes workshop and arts. Kids go free on the day and adults can pay what they want to Make a Wish Foundation. Failte Ireland has today announced the first three visitor attractions to be awarded major funding through its Grants Scheme for Large Tourism Projects 2020, which is intended to help deliver world-class tourist experiences, boost overseas visitor growth and create jobs. Among those projects to benefit from the funding is Sligo Pontoon Jetty. The VAULTS.LIVE in Dublin, Kilkennys Butler Gallery and Sligo Pontoon Jetty are the first of 24 shortlisted projects to be awarded Delivery Grants under the scheme for implementation of their projects. The scheme provides investment to develop new, or boost existing, tourism experiences and attractions across Ireland. The Failte Ireland grant of 200,000 will see the construction of a 27m floating pontoon alongside landscaping, signage, a new shelter area, seating and information points at the Sligo Pontoon. Located on the Garvogue River and within walking distance of Sligo City Centre, it will provide opportunities for existing and new tourism businesses to create and expand their products and services. The development of the pontoon through this funding will also support access to Lough Gill for sport, recreation and tourism opportunities, including WB Yeats themed visitor experiences given its association with the famous poem Lake Isle of Innisfree. Minister of State for Tourism and Sport, Brendan Griffin T.D. visited Evans Almshouse in Kilkenny today, which will become the new home to the Butler Gallery through this grant. Welcoming the funding, he said, Im delighted that awards are now being made under this scheme, which will help to boost visitors to the countrys regions, create jobs and growth, and help to develop local areas. This kind of investment is absolutely critical in ensuring that Irelands tourist attractions are world-class and that the industry is strong and sustainable into the future. "I know that the funding announced today will be a major boost to VAULTS.LIVE, the Butler Gallery and Sligo Pontoon Jetty, and I look forward to further investment in other projects around the country through the scheme. Speaking today, Paul Kelly, Failte Irelands Chief Executive Officer emphasised, We believe that sustainable growth in tourism will depend on greater regionality and seasonality. Investment in tourism projects like these forms one strand of Failte Irelands approach to achieving this. At the heart of successful tourism is the visitor experience and were committed to building great experiences for visitors to enjoy around the country and throughout the year. Welcoming the news for Sligo, Joe Corcoran, Project Co-ordinator at Sligo Tourist Development Association, said, The provision of daily sailings from the new berthing facility on the Garavogue river will open up Lough Gill to many Wild Atlantic Way tourists, experiencing this much loved Yeats location, which is steeped in a rich history of folklore and stunning scenery." Capital investment is a key driver for tourism growth and the creation of jobs in the sector. It is also vital in successfully and consistently delivering world-class visitor experiences, ensuring that Irelands tourism industry is strong and competitive into the future. Through its range of capital investment programmes, Failte Ireland works with visitor sites and attractions across every region to ensure the whole country has a strong tourism offering all year round. Read Also: Talks over disused Courthouse in Ballinamore HASAN Ali Gori, Mount Trenchard Hostel, Foynes, was fined 400 and disqualified from driving for two years when he was convicted at Newcastle West court of driving without insurance at N69, Foynes, last August 2. Detective Garda Joseph OSullivan said he had observed the defendant driving the car in the car park. There is a road into Mt Trenchard off the N69. I was there on an unrelated matter. What drew my attention was the speed he drove at, the detective said. The car was seized. Hasan Ali Gori told the court the car was parked in the car park and had been driven there by the person from whom he bought it. It is not a road, he said, explaining that there are gates at the front and back and the car park was in a private part. In cross-examination, Inspector Alan Cullen put it to him: You told Detective OSullivan you had driven from Foynes to Mt Trenchard. I gave him the key, the defendant replied. The key had been in his pocket, he said. He saw the car being driven, the inspector said. He is taking my car because I am not Irish, the defendant replied. I did not drive the car. The car was in the compound. Inspector Cullen agreed there were gates to Mt Trenchard but they are open and there is no barrier to anyone entering. There is an implied permission to enter and members of the public have access by right, he said. Barrister Liam Carroll said his client was an asylum seeker until very recently and is now seeking work as a mechanic and will require his licence. Judge Marian OLeary convicted Hasan Ali Gori but allowed recognizance with leave to appeal. THE LIMERICK and Clare Education and Training Board has excluded the embattled contractor Sammon from the tender process for the new Colaiste Chiarain building, after it went into examinership last month. The Sammon Group was on course to win the tender to build the 20m Croom school, but the major construction company slipped into financial difficulty as a result of the collapse of Carillion in the UK. Minister for Education and Skills, Richard Bruton, confirmed that Sammon did not withdraw itself from the tender competition. But the LCETB has now excluded the contractor, he said. The response came after a Parliamentary Question by Limerick County TD, Niall Collins (FF), in which he asked if the contractor had withdrawn. The contractor in question has not withdrawn from the tender competition for the project to which the deputy refers, said Minister Richard Bruton. However, the local education and training board, to whom the project has been devolved for delivery, has excluded the contractor from the competition and has now moved on to evaluating the tender from the next lowest bidder, he confirmed. The long-awaited school building, which will replace Colaiste Chiarains current structure, faced its latest setback when the contractor went into examinership. And because the company was technically still trading, the LCETB had their hands tied, when it came to removing them from the tender process. But the news came before Sammon had officially been awarded the tender, and now the LCETB have proceeded to examine the next lowest tender. Sammon Group was forced into examinership following the collapse of the major UK building company Carillion. Sammon was owed very significant funds, running into the millions, by British Carillion, with which it had a Public Private Partnership. The High Court has appointed Grant Thornton as interim examiner to Sammon in April. It was hoped that work would have begun on the site at Skagh, Croom, by now, but the process has been delayed by several weeks, at the very least. In April, Niall Collins said that if refugees had to attend a centre that was in the state of disrepair that Colaiste Chiarain Croom is in, thered be a public outcry. He added that its just completely unacceptable in this day and age that a school has to exist in such conditions. What really bugs people now is the pace of progress, which has been painstaking. This is just yet another setback. What could possibly go wrong is going wrong, at every step of the process, he added, pledging to keep pressure on the Department of Education until the project comes to fruition. A GROUP of women have taken to Limerick city centre to hold a demonstration in solidarity with the hundreds affected by the CervicalCheck scandal. This follows Vicky Phelans 2.5m High Court settlement with a US laboratory last month, exposing the scandal in which 209 women were not informed of smear test reviews. The Standing 4 Women protest kicked off at Thomas Street at around 5pm this Wednesday. Thank you to some of my #Standing4Women Limerick friends @ideosullivan @MMFitzp for your support today pic.twitter.com/NokC5I0GGV Vicky Phelan (@PhelanVicky) May 30, 2018 Mary Cahillane Vallely, of Standing 4 Women Limerick, said they are demanding a total overhaul of the HSE from the top-down. Total accountability and transparency. No more cover ups. No more deaths. No more outsourcing or privatisation. No more outsourcing of womens health issues to the cheapest bidder. Put health before profit. It took the bravery of Vicky Phelan who stood up to the whole establishment to expose the cover ups and the corruption in the HSE. We stand in solidarity with her and all, she said. May 3, 2021, 12 AM Cherrystone Auctions of New York City is offering Chinas rare 1922 2-on-3 blue green Junk stamp with red surcharge inverted (Scott 247a) in its June 12-13 sale. By Michael Baadke A stamp known as one of Chinas four treasures of the Republic will be offered during the June 12-13 auction of United States and worldwide stamps and postal history by Cherrystone Philatelic Auctioneers of New York City. Fewer than 20 examples are known of the 1922 2-on-3 blue green Junk stamp with the red surcharge inverted (Scott 247a), and this example is described by Cherrystone as well centered and displaying a deep bright color, very fine and fresh with original customary flat and dried gum, apparently n.h. [never hinged], with 2009 Pascal Scheller certificate. A full selection of U.S. classic and modern issues also includes rare unused inverts. An example of the 1901 4 deep red brown and black Pan-American Exposition stamp with center inverted (Scott 296a) is described as nicely centered, without the Specimen handstamp. A single stamp of the famous CIA invert, the 1979 $1 Rush Lamp and Candle Holder stamp with the intaglio brown inverted (Scott 1610c), is also available in this auction. And another modern invert, the 1992 29 Stock Exchange Bicentennial issue with black inverted (2630c), is offered as a margin block of four with additional inverted vignettes in the margin. Connect with Linns Stamp News: Sign up for our newsletter Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter The worldwide selection includes a collection of Israel formed by Robert J. Cohen, Guatemala and Mexico Civil War issues from the Robert T. Lee collection, and much more. Auction details are available online, or contact Cherrystone Auctions, 119 W. 57th St., Suite 316, New York, NY 10019. Hundreds of ancient stolen tablets, seized from the company Hobby Lobby and returned to Iraq, provide clues about what a lost 4,000-year-old city called Irisagrig was like. Billionaire and Hobby Lobby owner Steve Green started collecting artifacts in 2009 and soon amassed a collection 40,000 strong, which he used to fill the newly created Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. However, some of those artifacts had been smuggled illegally into the U.S., and last summer, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized thousands of looted items from his collection. Those artifacts were recently returned to Iraq. They include about 450 tablets holding cuneiform text, many of which describe Irisagrig. "The new texts from Irisagrig cast some fascinating light on what is, indeed, quite literally a 'lost city,'" said Eckart Frahm, a professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at Yale University. ICE asked Frahm to assess the content and origins of the seized tablets in the fall of 2016. [In Photos: Ancient City Discovered in Iraq] "I had only about two and a half days to study them in the warehouse where they were temporarily stored, in fairly poor lighting conditions," Frahm told Live Science in an email. "Each individual tablet was wrapped, and it took a considerable amount of time to unwrap and number them, and then rewrap them again." Many of the tablets are fragile, "with salt incrustations covering large parts of their surfaces," Frahm said. "It seems likely that these tablets all come from the same archive, which must have fallen prey to destruction at some point in time, with the tablets falling on the ground with one side exposed [possibly] to water and the other protected." In the end, Frahm was able to review about 250 of the cuneiform tablets. And he did find that many came from the lost city. One of the looted tablets from Irisagrig records rations that female weavers working for the government received in the year 2037 B.C. (Image credit: Eckart Frahm) "Among the most exciting tablets from the lot inspected by me is a large document that records allocations of sustenance plots to royal dependents, and another that records food distributed to the 'dogs of the palace,' who were apparently well fed," Frahm said. Some of the tablets "record food allocations for royal envoys and other officials, and specify their missions, which include inspecting work on a canal, improving the 'royal road,'" Frahm added. The lost city The tablets seized from Hobby Lobby are far from the only tablets from Irisagrig that have appeared on the antiquities market in the past two decades. Live Science combed through the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative's(CDLI) database, the Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts and numerous journal articles, and found tablets from Irisagrig that are now in collections in Texas, California, Illinois, New York, Australia, Japan, Canada, Israel, Lebanon, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany and France, among other places. "In my view, it is certain that all tablets identified by scholars as coming from ancient Irisagrig have been looted," said Manuel Molina, a research professor with the Spanish National Research Council who has conducted research into Irisagrig. "The reason is simply because the only ones who know the location of Irisagrig are the looters of the site, who found it around 2003." A few of those tablets provide geographical information that helps narrow down the location of Irisagrig, Molina wrote in a paper published in the book "From the 21st Century BC to the 21st Century AD: Proceedings of the International Conference on Neo-Sumerian Studies Held in Madrid 22-24 July 2010" (Eisenbrauns, 2013). Molina has narrowed down the likely location to an area in southern Iraq near the modern-day town of Afak. One of the most promising candidates within this area is a "tell" (a mound formed by the debris left by its ancient inhabitants) called "site 1056" that has never been excavated by archaeologists, Molina wrote in the book. Satellite images show that the tell was heavily looted between 2003 and 2009, Molina wrote. [25 Strangest Sights on Google Earth] This satellite image, shot on March 10, 2018, also shows site 1056. Although looting eased off after 2009, holes left by looters can still be seen. (Image credit: DigitalGlobe) New imagery of the site provided by DigitalGlobe suggests the looting has decreased since 2009, according to Molina, who compared the new images with his images from earlier. But even with the new imagery, archaeologists can't be sure site 1056 is Irisagrig, said Molina, who noted that there are other possible candidates for the lost city. On-the-ground archaeological work is needed to come to any conclusions, he said. Provenance hunt Live Science contacted several of the identified owners (some remain anonymous) of the tablets mentioned in the databases in hopes of tracking down the looters to discover the location of the city and the motivations behind the looting. Ultimately, attempts to find the looters were unsuccessful. Only a few of the owners responded. For instance, Jim Falk, a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, pointed to his website that indicates he got his tablet from Artemis Gallery in September 2015. Before that, it was held by Harlan J. Berk Ltd., which did not respond to requests for comment. Bron Lipkin, a retired doctor and collector who owns the company Collector Antiquities, hasn't ever owned an Irisagrig tablet. But some of the owners contacted him to ask for help in deciphering the texts. "After all this time, I don't have any easy way of working out which collector had which tablet," Lipkin said, adding that he recalls some individuals had bought the tablets on eBay and that three tablets came from an Australian dealer. Documents from the U.S. Department of Justice said the artifacts returned to Iraq were sold to Hobby Lobby from three unnamed Israeli antiquities dealers. Live Science also found that one of the largest known private collections of tablets from Irisagrig (containing more than 100 tablets) belongs to Jawad Adra, a businessman in Lebanon. He did not respond to requests for comment. Return controversy There's been a debate about whether the cuneiform tablets should be returned to Iraq before they have been studied and described in scientific journals. David Owen, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Cornell University who has published descriptions of hundreds of tablets from Irisagrig, has called for them to remain in the United States for study. "Once they enter the bowels of the Iraq Museum, it is unlikely scholars will ever have access to them, nor are there any Iraqi scholars capable of publishing them given the many thousands of unpublished texts already in storage in the museum for generations and mostly inaccessible to scholars," Owen told Live Science. Frahm said that, while "it would have been helpful if the tablets could have been more properly documented before being sent on another trans-Atlantic journey," and that conservation work is urgently needed on the tablets, he thinks Iraqi scholars will be able to get the job done. "I have faith in my Iraqi colleagues, who are aware of their responsibility not only to safeguard, but also to publish, the archaeological and epigraphic heritage of their country, and who have shown in recent years a laudable willingness to collaborate with scholars from other countries in an effort to do so in the best possible way," Frahm said. Owen, on the other hand, is not at all confident that these tablets will be published after they return to Iraq. "Who knows what new data the tablets sent to Iraq contain," he told Live Science. "But we'll never see this new evidence now thanks to the stupidity of our government." Owen Jarus can be reached at owenjarus@gmail.com. Originally published on Live Science. The idea that self-driving cars will be much safer than human drivers has been taking a hit lately with a string of autopilot crashes, the latest incident in California this week. A Tesla Sedan crashed into an empty, parked police car in Laguna Beach on Tuesday (May 29) while running on semi-autonomous autopilot. The driver who was behind the wheel experienced minor injuries, according to the Associated Press. Sergeant Jim Cota of the Laguna Beach Police Department said the car was totaled, so he was thankful no one was in it, according to the Los Angeles Times. Cota added that a year ago, in the same area, there was a similar instance of a Tesla crashing into a semi-truck. [The World's Fastest Vehicles] This follows a trail of other autopilot crashes including one in Utah of a driver looking at her phone while riding in a Tesla on autopilot, a fatal accident in California of a Tesla Model X crashing into a barrier in March, and another fatal Tesla crash in Florida in 2016 the first known Tesla autopilot crash, according to the Los Angeles Times . According to the Times, Tesla has warned drivers that they need to stay alert and keep their hands on the wheel when on autopilot mode. They also make drivers accept a dialogue box that says this mode is only designed for use on highways with a "center divider and clear lane markings," a Tesla spokesperson told the Times. But it's not only Tesla's autopilot that has been causing trouble lately. Last March, an Uber self-driving car killed a pedestrian in Arizona as she was crossing the street. According to a preliminary report released by the National Transportation Safety Board last week, the Uber system detected the woman 6 seconds before hitting her, first identifying her as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and finally as a bicycle (she was walking a bike across the street). Then, 1.3 seconds before the crash, the autopilot system recognized that an emergency brake would be necessary to avoid a crash; the way the autonomous Uber system was set up, it didn't allow for such emergency braking maneuvers and expected the driver to take control, yet didn't issue any warnings. The seeming spate of accidents may make self-driving cars seem like menaces. Granted, the sample size for autonomous vehicle accidents is much smaller than human-caused vehicles crashes those are so common that most are not reported in the news. In 2016, 37,461 people died because of traffic-related accidents in the United States, according to the New York Times. Most researchers tend to think self-driving cars will still be safer, but that they are in their experimental stages, according to the NY Times. Originally published on Live Science. About 240 million years ago, Megachirella wachtleri trod the vegetation in what is now the Dolomites region of northern Italy. HBO's "Game of Thrones" features a "Mother of Dragons," but a fossil that's hundreds of millions of years old was recently identified as the "mother of all lizards" (and snakes, too). This ancient lizard was the direct ancestor of approximately 10,000 species alive today that have inhabited the planet for more than 240 million years. Paleontologists initially described the tiny reptile, Megachirella wachtleri, in 2003. But recent scans revealed features in the fossil that were hidden, enabling scientists to identify Megachirella as the oldest known ancestor in the squamate lineage the reptile group that includes lizards and snakes. Megachirella, which predates the fossils previously thought to belong to the earliest squamates by around 75 million years, bridged the gap between the oldest known squamates and the estimated origins of this reptile group derived from molecular data, researchers reported in a new study. [In Photos: Amber Preserves Cretaceous Lizards] The Megachirella fossil was found in the Alps in northern Italy. It was estimated it to be about 240 million years old and scientists thought it belonged to a lepidosaur, a type of primitive reptile. But certain lizard-like features hinted that the fossil might provide valuable and unique clues about squamates, lead study author Tiago Simoes, a doctoral candidate in biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, told Live Science in an email. "It deserved further attention especially in the form of CT [computed tomography] scanning to provide greater anatomical details and an improved data set, to understand its placement in the evolutionary tree of reptiles," Simoes said. Scientists found a preserved specimen of Megachirella wachtleri in northern Italy and described it in 2003. (Image credit: MUSE Science Museum) The researchers used CT scans to build 3D computer models of the fossil reptile, and found a number of features linking Megachirella to squamates. Two of those features were unique to the squamate group: a part of the braincase and a collarbone structure. Together, those elements identified Megachirella as "the first unequivocal squamate from the Triassic," according to the study published online today (May 30) in the journal Nature. Molecular and skeletal clues also indicated that geckoes, rather than iguanians (which includes iguanas, anoles and chameleons), made up the earliest squamate group to arise, the researchers reported. Their evidence provided a critical and "really satisfying" missing piece of an evolutionary puzzle, by providing fossil evidence to support what molecular data suggests about squamate origins, Chris Raxworthy, curator-in-charge of the Department of Herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, told Live Science. "Scientists always love it when we see different types of data coming up with the same answer," said Raxworthy, who was not involved in the study. However, a large gap persists in the fossil record between Megachirella, which lived 240 million years ago, and other fossil squamates that appeared no earlier than 168 million years ago. This leaves much to be unraveled about the diversity of these ancient snakes and lizards and what they may have looked like, Simoes said. "What we are discovering is the tip of the iceberg, and much further work needs to be done to understand the early evolution of squamates," he said. Original article on Live Science. Four state police officers in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico have been arrested on kidnapping charges, authorities said. The Tamaulipas attorney general's office identified them as Gerardo, Abner, Natividad and Leonardo Daniel. Each was charged with aggravated kidnapping. Washington A Niskayuna native secured a spot in the next round of a national spelling bee Tuesday. Ryana Sarcar, a 14-year-old who attends Van Antwerp Middle School in Schenectady, competed in the preliminary round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee Tuesday afternoon. Sarcar correctly spelled "greave," which is a piece of armor used to protect the shin, to advance to Wednesday's round. The spelling bee, an annual competition that airs on ESPN through Thursday evening, attracts more than 500 young spellers from every state for an advanced spelling competition. Sarcar said she prepared for the bee almost entirely on her own by studying with online quizzes and books. When the judge asked her to spell "greave," she said she was relieved because she'd already reviewed it before stepping on stage. "I like words and I've liked the idea of the spelling bee since I was young and I watched it on TV," she said. Sarcar is one of 25 contestants from New York. Other contestants traveled to Maryland for the competition from towns across the state, including Cooperstown, Shortsville and New York City. Sarah.roach@chron.com Albany Good fences make good neighbors, Robert Frost famously wrote in "Mending Wall." The line is frequently quoted but often misunderstood. Frost's poem is really about the moral complexity of fences and walls, and how they are so often ineffective at their given task. "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out," Frost wrote. I thought of the poem after reading about a proposal for a border fence, one that would, supposedly, deter the unwanted from seeking a new home by crossing into a foreign country. The operative word is supposedly. A big, beautiful Trumpian wall along the Mexican border? No, ma'am. This fence, recently proposed by the leader of a Quebec political party, would straddle the New York border near Plattsburgh and (supposedly) block the torrent of refugees who have been using rural Roxham Road as a path to asylum in Canada. "We have several good fences builders in Quebec, so we're spoiled for choice," said Jean-Francois Lisee, leader of the Parti Quebecois. More Information Contact columnist Chris Churchill at 518-454-5442 or email cchurchill@timesunion.com See More Collapse Who would pay this fence? "The Mexicans," Lisee joked. Given that the political climate in Canada is gentler than that of its southern neighbor, the politician's idea was greeted by ridicule, not enthusiasm. Lisee quickly backtracked. Maybe a hedge would do the trick, he said. (Seriously.) Or a strongly worded sign. Regardless, Lisee's suggestion speaks to the concern in Quebec about what's coming this summer along Roxham Road and to the rising tension over what some describe as a refugee crisis. With a provincial election coming in October, the arrivals are sure to be a political issue. Last year, 19,000 migrants exited at Roxham Road, an illegal border crossing. This year's pace is three times higher. To see Roxham Road is to understand how remarkable the numbers are. The roadway is a narrow, sparsely populated dead-end in Champlain, population 5,000. Taxis and cars arrive at all hours, unloading migrants from around the country and world who are immediately arrested when they walk the narrow footpath that leads across the border. The migrants are taking advantage of a legal loophole. If they went to a legal border crossing, like the one on Interstate 87 a few miles away, they would be turned back. By getting arrested, they are able to apply for political asylum. Why they come to Roxham Road, instead of one of thousands of other roads, isn't entirely clear. Word of the road as an agreeable place to cross has spread online, and the Canadian government has built tents and other infrastructure that make it more agreeable. When I visited last summer, many of the migrants were Haitian, but significant numbers were of Latin American or Syrian descent. Many were in here legally and had built lives in the U.S., but were concerned that President Donald Trump's immigration rhetoric would lead to policies preventing their continued stay. "I came here for protection, but I'm not protected," said Sam Addey, a native of war-ravaged Syria who had been working in Manhattan restaurants. Who arrives at Roxham Road shifts based on distant world events. Today, most are Nigerians who, fleeing Boko Haram terrorism, enter the U.S. on tourist visas. Canada has pressed for tougher screening of Nigerian visitors, but the U.S. government has not made changes. Ironic, no? I mean, Trump has castigated Mexico for failing to quell illegal migration at the southern border, but his administration cares not a whit about the problem on the northern border. If some Canadians feel pressed to build a good fence, it's because the U.S. is a bad neighbor. "There's a certain percentage of the population here that's reacting in a negative way and saying we need to seal up the border," said Paul Clarke, executive director of Action Refugies Montreal, which aids asylum seekers. The concerns are similar to those heard in the U.S. Some immigration critics worry that migrants will change Quebec's culture, Clarke said. Many more worry about the financial costs of immigration. The Canadian government, meanwhile, is sending mixed messages. On one hand, it has all but told Haitians and Nigerians not to come, because the odds of winning asylum are long. Yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has tweeted his welcome #WelcometoCanada to those fleeing the most desperate parts of the world. And ultimately, it is desperation that is leading so many to arrive at Roxham Road. "People don't just leave their homes, fly around the world and cross the border at a little road for no good reason," said Wendy Ayotte, who lives near the crossing in Quebec and is part of a local volunteer group that assists the migrants. She's right, of course, and that means a good fence is unlikely to deter them. cchurchill@timesunion.com 518-454-5442 @chris_churchill This September would have marked 29 years since Stephen and Ann Perkins were married at Trinity Episcopal Church in downtown Galveston, surrounded by friends and family celebrating their union. A mass shooting on May 18, and the fatal, heroic actions of his wife, brought Steve Perkins back to the same church on a sweltering Wednesday morning to honor a life that was taken too soon. Friends and family of Glenda Ann Perkins filled the church's pews, some wearing pins with Santa Fe High's colors green, white and yellow to remember Perkins at a funeral in her hometown. She was one of 10 people who were killed when a lone gunman opened fire on students and teachers; her funeral service was the last for the shooting victims. A 17-year-old student has been charged with capital murder in the massacre. A beloved permanent substitute teacher at Santa Fe High School as well as a mother and grandmother, the 64-year-old Perkins was gunned down while ushering students in her gym class that morning to safety. One student credited Perkins with saving her life during the shooting rampage. Gale Devona, a close friend of Ann Perkins, described her as "a person that gave the ultimate sacrifice." "She didn't run away, she faced the devil and saved lives," Devona said. The only child of Raymond Earl Brown and Lena Mae Lanigan, Perkins was born and raised in Galveston. She graduated from Ball High School and attended the University of Houston. Ann and Steve Perkins made their home in nearby Santa Fe, where they raised two daughters, Kimberly and Ashley, and one son, Ballinger Jonathan, or "B.J." Perkins is also survived by her mother and two grandchildren. As dozens of mourners arrived at the funeral service, the somber tones of an organ echoed solemnly throughout the church, bouncing off of the wooden vaulted ceilings. Bags were checked at the door of the place of worship, a clear reaction to the epidemic of mass shootings in Texas and nationwide. First responders, including members of the Galveston County Sheriff's Office, Galveston County constables, and the Santa Fe ISD Police Department sat in the back pews in full uniform. Some wore bulletproof vests. Hymns were sung with aplomb and grace, psalms and scripture read, and then three speakers, including Steve Perkins, eulogized Perkins as a warm, humorous, passionate presence, quick with a quip and brimming with an infectious, adventurous spirit. Peter Kinser, a fine arts teacher at Santa Fe High School, was the first to the lectern recalling Perkins' generosity in making herself available as a substitute teacher well in advance to any teachers at the high school that needed or were planning a day off. "I was her favorite teacher," Kinser said, eliciting laughter from the audience. "She gave me first choices for days off." Steve Perkins followed, keeping his composure as he thanked the family of Shelby and Tabitha Sosa, twin girls who are freshmen at Santa Fe High School, for sitting with his family and recounting Ann Perkins' last moments. Shelby Sosa told Britain's Daily Mail newspaper that Ann Perkins was solely responsible for saving her life. Sosa said that the substitute teacher shoved her through the doors of the hallway where the gunman exchanged fire with police officers right before Perkins herself was felled by a gunshot. "I'll never forget her, she saved my life," Sosa told the Daily Mail. "If it wasn't for Ms. Perkins I wouldn't be here today." Steve Perkins praised the Sosas for raising "two wonderful daughters." "Please know that it was immensely comforting to me and my family to hear the details of the day that Ann put others before herself," Perkins said. "I have no words that can express my family's gratitude." Steve Perkins recalled Ann's fondness for her hometown of Galveston and her affection for all things ocean-related. She cherished time spent with family sailing around the Caribbean and any time spent on a beach. Steve even recalled a card he had found of Ann's from her childhood with a silly ocean-themed pun written on it. "She wrote on a card, 'How do you cut the ocean in half? The answer is, 'With a sea saw,'" Steve Perkins said to laughter. In addition to being a permanent substitute teacher, Perkins was a member of Trinity Episcopal and Grace Episcopal churches, both located in Galveston. She was active in the Tutu Live Krewe-Mardi Gras, an all-female marching krewe that participated in the city's popular Mardi Gras celebration. "It is with the heaviest of hearts that we report the loss of Krewe member Ann Perkins due to the senseless school shooting at Santa Fe High School today," the group wrote in a Facebook remembrance. "Many posts online indicate she was the favorite teacher of countless students." Devona met Ann Perkins three weeks after Perkins' daughter Ashley was born. A coworker had referred Perkins to Devona's daycare service. Devona remembered her friend as an adventurous ringleader, even putting together a club of friends called the Red Hat Society so that they could spend more time together. "I'll never forget the time she called me one weekend and said, 'Let's go down to the San Marcos [River]. Kim [Perkins' other daughter] is coming down and we're just gonna go float on the river for the day and then come back home.' Well we did that, and we did many crazy things like this," Devona recalled. After the service, Ann Perkins' casket was carried up the church aisle by six pallbearers. Friends and family lined both sides of the steps and watched as the casket was gently placed in a hearse. She was laid to rest at Forest Park East cemetery in Webster. "Twenty-nine years ago, Ann and I started our life together at this very church, Trinity Episcopal," Steve Perkins, his voice trembling, said in closing his eulogy. "Ann, I love you, we love you, and we'll all miss you until we meet again." The family has asked that those who would like to honor Ann Perkins contribute to the Galveston Historical Foundation at www.Galvestonhistory.org Nick Powell covers Galveston County for the Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter and send him tips at nick.powell@chron.com An upcoming event at TAMIU boasting the question, "Can Homosexuals (LGBTQ) change?" is at the forefront of a great deal of criticism. A local church, Iglesia Cristiana Misericordia, will host the function June 5 regarding homosexuality that promises "with God's love and power you can change." Students and community members were concerned by the circulation of the advertisement and were prompted to believe the university was aligned with the event organizers' beliefs. TAMIU issued a statement in which President Pablo Arenaz offered clarification on the university's position. READ ALSO: Instagram captures TAMIU's happy graduation day "As a State agency, Texas A&M International University rents facilities when available to all groups, including outside or third-party organizations, regardless of their viewpoint. When it does so, this should never be interpreted as an endorsement or as in any way supportive of these groups, or their messages," the statement reads. Arenaz added that "while this event is not consistent with the university's shared values, international mission or enduring commitment to diversity and inclusion, these groups may present their perspective, which may or may not be shared by others." Amid the wave of social media posts expressing disappointment, many turned to the university's LGBTQ organization, Campus Ally Network. Chema Villarreal, co-founder of the organization, said he and several members are going to take advantage of the event and use it as an opportunity to begin a conversation. The exchange of thoughts can hopefully create some sort of foundation where change can spring forth, Villarreal said. "A lot of people think we're siding with them," Villarreal said. "If we don't go to the event then nothing changes. As an organization we will be asking them those questions that may be difficult for them to answer or vice versa. Once we have communication, there's more opportunity of understanding and change can happen." While the event runs its course inside the Student Center Auditorium room, a counter-event will be held outside. Judith Mendoza said she created "Born this Way" to provide a space for love and acceptance. Mendoza said she was upset about the advertisement because it touted one option: to change. The worst thing to do is offer one solution, Mendoza said. RELATED: LGBTQ activists fight 'gay panic defense' used in Texas case On the same token, Mendoza said she believes everyone has their own beliefs and doesn't want to take that away. Instead, she said she hopes the "Born this Way" event will give people various ways in which they can express themselves and share their personal experiences. She said she hopes for a pure event of love and pride; for people to be happy with who they are and to know there is a way to be comfortable in your own skin. "I like to offer a different path and that's one of self-acceptance and self-love. If people find themselves struggling, self-acceptance is one of the best ways to go," Mendoza said. "Born This Way" is scheduled for 6 p.m. June 5 outside of the TAMIU Student Center. LMT web producer JeriLynn Thorpe contributed to this report. UPDATE: This story has been updated to include the name of the church that it hosting the event at TAMIU. On May 20, Cameroon's national day, citizens in the capital of Yaounde marched in parades, and President Paul Biya congratulated armed forces on their commitment to peace and safety. At the same time, in the country's unstable Anglophone regions, separatists kidnapped a mayor, killed two police officers and intimidated people who tried to celebrate the holiday. Such incidents have human-rights activists worried that Cameroon could soon be the site of Africa's next civil war. "We are gradually, gradually getting there," said Agbor Nkongho, an Anglophone human rights lawyer and director of the Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa. "I'm not seeing the willingness of the government to try to find and address the issue in a way that we will not get there." Since late 2016, Cameroon has faced an increasingly violent uprising in the bilingual country's minority Anglophone regions, where English speakers say they have been marginalized by the French-speaking majority for decades. When peaceful protests started 18 months ago, government forces opened fire on protesters and looted and burned down villages. Now an armed separatist movement is gaining traction, kidnapping government officials and killing gendarmes. Some observers believe the situation has already reached a point where it could be considered a civil war. "If you look at what is going on now, you can call it a civil war," said John Mukum Mbaku, a professor at Weber State University in Utah and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. "The government is shooting down defenseless villagers and many have decided to defend themselves and are fighting back." At the end of World War I, the League of Nations divided the German colony of Kamerun between France and Britain. The French-controlled territory won independence in 1960, and the British territories that now make up the southwest and northwest regions of the country joined the next year. On paper, Cameroon is now the only country in the world other than Canada where both French and English are official languages. But only one-fifth of the country's 22 million people are Anglophone. Biya, who has ruled for 35 years, is Francophone, as are most of the country's elites. "The fact of the matter is if you don't speak French, you cannot survive in the country," Mbaku said. Anglophones say they are being forced to assimilate into Francophone culture, and their frustrations reached a boiling point in 2016. A protest movement was launched with teachers and lawyers at the forefront, attacking the "Francophonization" of their home towns. A particular complaint was the growing number of non-English-speaking teachers being sent to Anglophone areas. "It's not just about language," Nkongho said. "It's a culture, it's a way of life, it's the way they've been raised." The Cameroonian military responded to the protests with brute force. Videos emerged of the security forces kicking university students and dragging them through mud. They also opened fire on protesters, killing some of them. As the movement gained momentum and evidence of police brutality circulated on social media, the government cut the Internet in Anglophone regions. Julie Owono, the executive director of Internet Without Borders, said that the months-long shutdown "convinced people that, indeed, Anglophones are treated differently." Support for armed separatists, who want to establish a new Anglophone nation called Ambazonia, started to grow. "You talk to people who were very moderate but they are now supporting the separatist movement," Nkongho said. Last week, he said, civilians counted around 40 dead bodies in Anglophone regions of the country - at least 27 of which were allegedly killed in a standoff with government forces. That made for one of the bloodiest weeks since the unrest began 18 months ago. Col. Didier Badjeck, a Cameroon Army spokesman, said government troops engaged in a firefight with separatists and that "several terrorists were neutralized." A recent count by the International Crisis Group said at least 120 civilians and 43 security forces have been killed since the conflict began. Some 20,000 people have fled to Nigeria as refugees, and another 160,000 people are now displaced within Cameroon, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. A presidential election looms in October, with Biya expected to run again. Akere Muna, an Anglophone presidential candidate and prominent lawyer, hopes that better governance could keep the country unified. But he said the government has only ignited tensions and dismissed Anglophone calls for more autonomy. Muna said he recently visited an Anglophone village that is normally home to 6,000 people. Only a handful of people were left, he said. "If [Biya] gets reelected, the country will become ungovernable," Muna said. "By the day it's getting worse." Dick Tuck, an impish Democratic Party operative whose practical jokes and pranks helped define modern election combat and who was the political hobgoblin of Richard M. Nixon for decades, died May 28 at an assisted-living center in Tucson, Arizona. He was 94. A friend, Randi Dorman, confirmed the death but said she did not know the immediate cause. Tuck made his name tweaking national Republican candidates, but also directed more than half a dozen successful state and local races for Democrats. He managed the 1967 campaign of the first African American to be elected mayor of a major U.S. city, Richard G. Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, and was an advance man for presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy during the 1968 primary campaign. Mostly, Tuck was remembered for his singular ability to hector and haunt Nixon, a Republican whose earliest political tactics included questioning his opponents' loyalty to the United States. Their paths first crossed in 1950, when then-Rep. Nixon, R-Calif., was running for an open Senate seat against a liberal Democratic opponent, Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon tried to smear Douglas as a communist sympathizer. At the time, Tuck was a World War II veteran studying political science on the G.I. Bill at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He also was working part time for the Douglas campaign. One of Tuck's teachers unwittingly asked Tuck to work as an advance man for Nixon's upcoming campaign visit to the campus. Tuck called him "an absent-minded professor who knew I was in politics and forgot the rest." Hardly believing his luck, Tuck arranged for the unsuspecting GOP candidate to speak in one of the largest auditoriums available at a time when he knew few people would be on campus. He introduced Nixon to the sparse audience with a long-winded speech, then called Nixon to the microphone, saying the candidate would speak about a topic "all Californians care about, the International Monetary Fund." A flustered Nixon delivered a disjointed speech. As he stepped down from the podium, Nixon demanded the name of the young man who organized the dismal event. "Dick Tuck, you've done your last advance," Nixon snapped. It would not be the last clash between the two men. In 1956, as Nixon awaited his party's celebratory renomination as vice president, Tuck arranged for the garbage trucks servicing the Republican nominating convention in San Francisco to drive by the Cow Palace convention center bearing large signs reading "Dump Nixon." The morning after Vice President Nixon debated then-Sen. John F. Kennedy, D-Mass., in the 1960 presidential campaign, Tuck put a Nixon button on an elderly woman who walked up to the candidate as cameras rolled. While offering a hug, she exclaimed, "Don't worry, son. He beat you last night but you'll do better next time." Nixon lost the race. Tuck's best-remembered prank took place during Nixon's visit to the Chinatown section of Los Angeles during his 1962 bid for California governor. Tuck was working for the Democratic incumbent, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Sr. At the time, Nixon faced questions about a $205,000 loan his brother, Donald, had received from Howard Hughes, the billionaire industrialist and defense contractor. Tuck distributed signs to the crowd that said "Welcome Nixon!" over a row of Mandarin characters. Nixon smiled broadly at first as he looked over the sign-waving crowd. But when he was told that the Chinese script on the signs read, "What about the Hughes loan?" Nixon grabbed one of the placards and tore it up as the TV cameras rolled. Tuck was delighted. "Exposing the real Nixon was always my goal," he said later, taking pleasure in exposing the candidate's temper. "The message was simple: Do you want a guy like this running your state or nation?" Tuck's tactics were later mimicked, admired - and distorted - by political operatives from both parties, including Watergate conspirators who eventually went to jail. Subsequent generations of Republicans credited Tuck with providing vital lessons. "Tuck was a genius," said Gary Maloney, a GOP research consultant who worked on Reagan and Bush campaigns under political operative Lee Atwater, a fan of Tuck. "He showed a wicked sense of humor at a time when Republicans were generally dour and white-bread. I think we acquired humor in part because of Tuck's example." Maloney and others said that Tuck led campaign strategists to hone skills in research, track the words of opposition candidates, and look for opportunities for political theater that could sway votes. For example, Republican operatives in 1997 organized what appeared to be a demonstration at the U.S. Supreme Court as justices deliberated whether to consider a sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton. Half a dozen GOP activists wearing raincoats waved picket signs reading "flashers for Clinton." When they opened their raincoats, they revealed "friend of the court briefs." During the Watergate scandal, Tuck was cited by Nixon and his advisers as an inspiration - and an excuse. Nixon's White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, said the president's 1972 reelection campaign had hired Donald Segretti's much-criticized "dirty tricks" team to adopt "a Dick Tuck sensibility" to counter attacks from Democrats. On the White House tapes preserved at the National Archives, Nixon can be heard complaining to Haldeman about public criticism of tactics employed by Segretti, whose tricks included forging campaign correspondence alleging sexual affairs and other misdeeds by leading Democrats. Nearly a decade after his resignation, Nixon remained bitter about Tuck and what he saw as a double standard applied by the press to Democratic and Republican political tricks. In a 1983 interview, the former president spoke ruefully of Tuck and the acclaim he received. "The media being, shall we say, not particularly in my corner, just called that fun and games," Nixon said. "And then when Segretti, our so-called 'dirty tricks man,' whom I frankly had never had the opportunity of even meeting - when he tried to practice some of these things on our Democratic opponents, they became high crimes and misdemeanors." To Tuck, his satirical missives were not nearly so complicated. "I've made a lot of candidates look foolish," he once said, "usually with a lot of help from the candidates themselves." Richard Gregory Tuck was born in Hayden, Arizona, on Jan. 25, 1924, and was one of four sons of a copper company executive. He enlisted in the Navy at 18, not long after the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941, and served in a bomb-disposal unit. Tuck's first marriage, to Faith Eversfield, ended in divorce. He was married to Joyce Daly from 1989 until her death in 1995. Survivors include a son from his first marriage, Gregory Tuck, who lives in Australia. Short of stature, with an owl-like face, Tuck was described by some as having the look, and often the demeanor, of a leprechaun. His wit, perpetually rumpled suits and sense of fun - not to mention his habit of holding press conferences in bars - drew journalists to his side. Hunter S. Thompson, the irreverent "gonzo" journalist for Rolling Stone and other publications, became a close friend. For years, they lived near each other in Colorado, and Thompson quoted Tuck in books such as "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." Tuck liked politicians and their strategists and he looked forward to political conventions, attending nearly every one of both political parties through 1992. At the quadrennial conventions, he often published an informal newspaper called the Reliable Source, which he once tried to introduce as a satirical weekly in Washington. As the decades passed, Tuck told reporters that the lighthearted fun he had known in the 1950s and 1960s had ebbed out of politics. He blamed it in part on the domination of professional advertising with its hard-nosed and polarizing messages that, he said, ushered in an era of distrust. There was a time, he mused decades later, when he could sneak onto Nixon's 1960 campaign plane with a personal press pass and a tape recorder. "It was a simpler world then," he once wrote, "and nobody suspected a guy carrying a bowling bag." Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens announced Tuesday that he will resign amid explosive personal and political scandals that marred his once-promising career in public office and threatened to drag down the Republican Party in the midterm elections. In a brief and defiant statement at the governor's office, Greitens said his resignation would be effective on Friday at 5 p.m. "I am not perfect, but I have not broken any laws," he said. Under state law, Lt. Gov. Mike Parson, also a Republican, will take over as governor and serve out the remainder of the term. He would face voters in the 2020 election if he decided to seek a full term. Missouri Republicans looked to quickly turn the page on an embarrassing saga that loomed over their campaign efforts ahead of the November midterms. The U.S. Senate race in Missouri is a key contest in the fight for the Senate majority. Democrats have been seeking to use Greitens' troubles to undermine the Republican front-runner for Senate, state Attorney General Josh Hawley. They signaled Tuesday that they would not let up, even after Greitens steps aside. Greitens has faced allegations that he initiated unwanted sexual contact with a woman who worked as his hairdresser and improperly used a charity donor list. State lawmakers called a special session this month to consider impeaching Greitens. Last month, Greitens was charged with two felony counts of computer tampering stemming from allegations that he used a veterans charity donor list to raise money for his 2016 campaign for governor without the permission of the group, which he founded. For months, Republicans and Democrats have called on Greitens to step down. But he defied their calls and cast himself as the target of an unjust political attack. In stepping down Tuesday, he presented himself as a victim, despite criticism he has received from across the political spectrum. "This ordeal has been designed to cause an incredible amount of strain on my family; millions of dollars of mounting legal bills, endless personal attacks designed to cause maximum damage to family and friends," Greitens said in his statement. After state lawmakers released a report alleging the unwanted sexual contact, Greitens said that he was the target of a "witch hunt," using the same language President Donald Trump has used to describe a Justice Department probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The lawmakers launched their inquiry after allegations that Greitens had photographed the woman naked without her consent. A St. Louis prosecutor brought a felony invasion-of-privacy charge against him. The case was later dismissed, but a special prosecutor was brought in to examine the matter. Greitens has admitted that he had an extramarital affair. But he has long asserted that he committed no crimes. In a statement after his announcement, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, who brought the charges against him, said she has "been in contact" with the governor's legal team over the past few days and "reached a fair and just resolution of the pending charges." She added: "We will provide more information tomorrow." Elected to his first term in 2016, the 44-year-old Greitens was once seen as a rising star in the Republican Party who might one day run for national office. He had the kind of sterling credentials that make political operatives giddy: He is a former Navy SEAL who once worked with Mother Teresa. But his relationship with Republicans in the state legislature was rocky. And the personal and political scandals have overshadowed everything else he has tried to do this year. They have also hung like a dark cloud over the Senate race, in which Republicans are trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. Party leaders have rallied around Hawley, who distanced himself from Greitens and initiated his own investigation into Greitens' former charity. With about five months until the election, they are hoping to turn the page. "Governor Greitens has done the right thing today. I wish incoming Governor Mike Parson well, and stand ready to assist him in his transition. This Office's work for the people of Missouri goes forward," Hawley said in a tweet. "The governor made the best decision for his family and the state. I look forward to Gov. Parson's leadership and will do everything I can to be helpful," said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. But a spokesman for Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic group allied with McCaskill, quickly took a shot at Hawley, arguing that he was slow to investigate Greitens And Democrats in the state sought to ensure that voters do not quickly forget the soon-to-be former governor. "Missouri Democrats will continue to work to undo the damage done by Eric Greitens and his Republican cronies," said Missouri Democratic Party Chairman Stephen Webber. RICHMOND, Va. -- The Virginia Senate appears to have enough votes to break through years of GOP intransigence and expand Medicaid to 400,000 low-income residents as part of a budget vote planned for Wednesday. Supporters consider expansion a moral and economic no-brainer, since the federal government is offering to pay 90 percent of the cost. Opponents, fearful that Washington will renege on the funding and stick Virginia with the whole $2 billion-a-year tab, call it financially irresponsible. After wrestling with that question for the past four years, the Virginia House of Delegates passed a spending plan in February with expansion. And supporters say they have the votes they need to do the same when the full Senate meets Wednesday. But first, Senate Majority Leader Thomas Norment made an unsuccessful last-ditch effort Tuesday to try to block Medicaid expansion for yet another year. Norment, R-James City, co-chairs the Senate Finance Committee, which had to vote Tuesday to send a budget bill to the full Senate for consideration. The committee, which is controlled by Republicans who are opposed to Medicaid expansion, cast votes on two different budget plans Tuesday. The first, which would have expanded Medicaid, was rejected. The second budget, which did not include Medicaid, was approved. Norment, a steadfast opponent, knew that if the budget without Medicaid expansion moved to the Senate floor, supporters could offer a Medicaid amendment that would win enough votes for passage. All 19 Democrats and two Republicans - Sen. Emmett Hanger, Augusta, and Sen. Frank Wagner, Virginia Beach - are expected to vote for it. So Norment, regarded as a master parliamentarian, did a curious thing. He asked for a repeat vote on the first budget - the one with Medicaid expansion. Sen. Richard Saslaw, D-Fairfax County, was suspicious. There are rules against reviving measures that have already been defeated twice. It seemed that Norment was trying to get the committee to reject the budget with Medicaid expansion a second time, so that it could not be brought to the full Senate. "If you defeat these again," Saslaw said, "we're not going to run into a situation where it was twice rejected and, therefore, can't be considered on the floor?" Norment wasn't saying. Norment and Hanger are co-chairmen of the Finance Committee who take turns presiding over meetings. On Tuesday, Hanger happened to be wielding the gavel, and he seemed momentarily flummoxed by Norment's move. "I'm thinking about this in terms of the parliamentary maneuver," Hanger said. And then he acted. "Senator Norment, I rule your attempt out of order," Hanger said. "Meeting's adjourned." Hanger brought down the gavel, and it was all over. Norment, who looked stunned, left the meeting room. "I knew exactly where he was headed," said Saslaw, a veteran legislator. "I didn't just arrive here from Mars." Under the Affordable Care Act championed by President Barack Obama, Washington allowed states to open their Medicaid rolls to people making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, which is $16,643 for an individual. The federal government pledged to pay at least 90 percent of the cost, which in Virginia would amount to about $2 billion a year. Thirty-one states, including Maryland, and the District accepted the offer. But Virginia, which has one of the nation's most frugal Medicaid programs, refused. Republicans controlling the House and the Senate said they feared that the federal government would withdraw its support and leave the state picking up the cost. In a surprising about-face, the House supported expansion this year after Republicans nearly lost control of the chamber after the November elections. But the Senate, which did not face voters last year, remained opposed during the 60-day regular session that concluded March 10. The impasse prevented the legislature from passing a budget plan, so Gov. Ralph Northam, D, called it into a special budget session. And in recent weeks, opposition in the Senate has weakened. Hanger has supported expansion for years but initially objected to some of the specifics of the House plan. He has since worked out a compromise with House Appropriations Committee Chairman Chris Jones, R-Suffolk. Wagner also came out in favor of expansion - enough support in the full Senate to approve Medicaid expansion by a 21-to-19 tally. It was another horrific murder of a Russian journalist that reverberated around the world, a man pictured lying dead in a pool of blood. Arkady Babchenko was shot dead at his home in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, after returning from buying bread, local police said late Tuesday. The world's media, including Bloomberg News, reported the killing on Wednesday with details of previous assassinations and archive footage of the 41-year-old reporter who had been critical of the Kremlin. The news sparked condemnation from the international community and Russia protested being blamed. Then, at about 5:20 p.m., Babchenko reappeared in Kiev. To the amazement and applause of the assembled journalists at the headquarters of the State Security Service, or SBU, Ukrainian authorities said they had staged his murder. And even his wife wasn't in on it. "Of course now, I would have to express my deep condolences to the family of Arkady Babchenko," said Vasyl Hrytsak, head of the SBU. "But I will not do it. I will congratulate his family and all of us and Arkady Babchenko on his birthday." The bizarre sequence of events is unlikely to help ties between Ukraine and Russia. The post-Soviet allies fell out in 2014 and a military conflict on their border continues to claim lives. Ukrainian authorities said the goal of the staged murder was to catch the people who'd actually been planning to kill Babchenko. Hrytsak said Russia had sought to pay $40,000 for his death and that those behind the real assassination plot had been apprehended. He didn't give any more details. Russia's Foreign Ministry, which had earlier denied any involvement in Babchenko's death, said it was pleased to hear that he was actually alive, accusing Ukraine of "propaganda." Babchenko is a well-known war correspondent in Russia. He traveled to the conflict in Ukraine and criticized the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines passenger flight MH17, which killed 298 people. Investigators from Australia and the Netherlands last week blamed Russia for the tragedy. Having been called unpatriotic over a piece last year on Russia's intervention in Syria, Babchenko complained of an atmosphere of hate toward his work. Prominent Russians to have been murdered in Kiev include journalist Pavel Sheremet, who was killed in a car bomb in 2016, and ex-Russian lawmaker Denis Voronenkov, who was shot dead in 2017. On Tuesday night, shortly after 9 p.m., a family friend in a Facebook post relayed news of the assassination. Babchenko's wife, he wrote, had called to say that the journalist had been shot in their home and was taken to the hospital. It later emerged from police that he died in the ambulance. A photo of the dead man was posted on Facebook by Anton Herashchenko, a lawmaker and an adviser to the Interior Minister. After Babchenko was reported killed, many reporters spent the night near his apartment. News organizations went into overdrive. The editor-in-chief of Ukraine's most popular weekly magazine, Vitalii Sych, on Wednesday said the murder was his cover story ready to be sent to the printers. "It's all very weird," he said. For others, it was harrowing. At the news conference in Kiev, Babchenko had an important apology to make. "I want to apologize that all of you had to go through that -- I was at funerals of my friends and colleagues, so I know this nauseating feeling, but it was the only way out," he said. "Separately, I wanted to apologize to my wife for the hell she went through during these two days." Mitt Romney let it slide when his Republican primary opponent ripped him as a flip-flopping "Boston businessman" who "has seen fit to relocate here" during a Utah Senate debate on Tuesday night. He didn't get worked up as the young state representative, Mike Kennedy, attacked him for signing an assault weapons ban as governor of Massachusetts and imposing an individual mandate that forced people to buy health insurance, a.k.a. Romneycare. But the onetime standard-bearer of the GOP would not let it go when his opponent mentioned that Romney called Donald Trump a "phony" and a "fraud" in 2016 and recently attacked Robert Jeffress, an ally of the president, as a "religious bigot." It came toward the end of an hour-long debate at Brigham Young University in Provo. Moderator David Magleby said there wasn't enough time for the front-runner to respond. Romney protested. So Magleby, a professor at the school, said he could take 20 seconds. "No, no, no, no," Romney complained. "I get longer!" The 71-year-old touted "relationships" he has with the Trump White House that he says will help him offset the clout being lost by the Beehive State with the retirement of Orrin Hatch, who has served in the Senate for 41 years. "First of all, I've known the president for a long, long time and the president has endorsed me in this campaign - which shows he respects people who call 'em like they see 'em," Romney said in a 55-second answer. "I'm not sure with President Trump, you see things the right way," said Kennedy, a practicing physician. "I do know some good doctors if you'd like a referral to get your vision checked because I think President Trump has been outstanding. He is one of the presidents that we have that actually keeps his promises . . . and I'm proud to stand with the president and not deride him publicly." Kennedy recently phoned Jeffress, a Southern Baptist pastor, to apologize on behalf of the people of Utah after Romney said he should not have been invited to speak at the opening of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Romney noted that Jeffress has said Mormonism is a cult, that it's a heresy from the pit of hell, and that Joseph Smith - the founder of their church - is a servant of Satan. "The idea that this person would be chosen by the State Department to represent our nation at the opening of an embassy is simply wrong and for Rep. Kennedy to call him and apologize to him is absolutely inexplicable," Romney said. "When people express bigotry, they ought to be called out for it." The exchange encapsulated the balancing act that defines Romney's comeback bid and illustrated the degree to which Trump has taken over the Republican Party. Note that Romney chalked up Jeffress's invitation to "the State Department," not the Trump administration - to distance the decision from the president. Just two years ago, Romney was not just willing but eager to "call out" Trump for what he said at the time were bigoted comments. Now, like most Republicans, he embraces the president's policies and tries to downplay everything else. That tension was ever present during the debate, but it was especially apparent on the topics of trade and immigration. Kennedy, who got elected to the state House in 2012, won the support of slightly more delegates than Romney at last month's Utah GOP state convention - 50.9 percent to 49.1 percent. That was close enough to force a two-way primary. He admitted to local reporters after the debate this week that he wrote in Ted Cruz's name on his 2016 ballot, but that certainly didn't prevent him from going after Romney as insufficiently Trumpian. Romney is heavily favored to win the June 26 GOP primary and the general election. Perhaps Mitt's calculus will change again once he takes office, but for now he's very carefully threading the needle. During the only debate before the primary, he praised Trump for taking a hard line on China and for threatening to raise tariffs on auto imports from Mexico in renegotiating NAFTA. The unabashed free trader expressed wishful thinking when he insisted both that Trump still might decide he wants to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership and declared that no one thinks "trade wars" are good. "I'm happy to stand with the president whenever I feel that he's doing something that's right for the country, and I think it's appropriate that the president is looking at trade deals," Romney said. On immigration, Romney positioned himself as simpatico with Trump. "Putting a wall up is the right thing to do," he said. He called for "reforming" the legal immigration system to get rid of so-called "chain migration" and the visa "lottery" program. He said "Dreamers" ought to be given legal status to protect them from deportation but not "a special pathway to citizenship." "That's the president's view, at least as expressed in January," Romney said. "It's something I support." Kennedy attacked Romney for talking about "self-deportation" during a 2012 debate. "I thought I remembered in the presidential campaign something about self-deportation. But that's fine. I guess that opinion has changed as well," he said. Romney replied he was advocating for E-Verify systems that make it harder for undocumented immigrants to get jobs in the U.S. If they cannot find work, he said they voluntarily return home before ICE needs to take them forcibly. "If you will, self-deciders," Romney said, coining a new term. But Romney also telegraphed flexibility by saying he'll work with both sides to come up with a compromise. "I'm not going to stand by and let nothing happen," he said. "I ran for president in 2008. This was an issue then. It's unbelievable that in this country we cannot resolve this." -- 2016 Romney would not recognize this 2018 Republican Romney. Not only did he call Trump a phony and a fraud, he raised concerns about Trump's sexual exploits, his three marriages and his taunts toward the disabled, Mexican immigrants and female journalists. "His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University," Romney said in a March 2016 speech in Salt Lake City, urging Republicans to unite to stop Trump's inexorable march to the nomination. "He's playing members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat." Trump replied that Romney was a "choke artist" and "failed candidate" who was desperate for his endorsement in 2012. "You can see how loyal he is," Trump said. "He was begging for my endorsement. I could've said, 'Mitt, drop to your knees,' and he would've dropped to his knees." In turn, Romney tweeted that afternoon "If Trump had said 4 years ago the things he says today about the KKK, Muslims, Mexicans, disabled, I would NOT have accepted his endorsement" But, after he launched his campaign this February, Romney was pleased to welcome Trump's support: Trump tweeted ".@MittRomney has announced he is running for the Senate from the wonderful State of Utah. He will make a great Senator and worthy successor to @OrrinHatch, and has my full support and endorsement!" Romney tweeted "Thank you Mr. President for the support. I hope that over the course of the campaign I also earn the support and endorsement of the people of Utah." Pressed by an NBC reporter on Monday night, Romney said he would not point to the president as a role model for his grandchildren "on the basis of his personal style." "He has departed in some cases from the truth and has attacked in a way that I think is not entirely appropriate," Romney told Garrett Haake, carefully watching his words. He added in the very next sentence, "I think that his policies have been by and large a good deal better than I might have expected." To be sure, Romney has often shifted his political positions to more closely align with whichever electorate he's trying to win over. He took very different positions running in a blue state for Senate in 1994 and governor in 2002 than he did in 2008, when he ran as the conservative alternative to John McCain for the GOP nomination, or 2012, when he staked out the establishment lane. In the debate, Romney repeatedly referred to Utah as "our state" and noted that he's visited all 29 counties over the past few months. (He made the state his primary residence five years ago.) Asked about signing an assault weapons ban, Romney described it as "a solution that worked for that state in that circumstance. . . . and I was happy to support that." --- With Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve. A novel virus, moderately contagious and moderately lethal, has surfaced and is spreading rapidly around the globe. Outbreaks first appear in Frankfurt, Germany and Caracas, Venezuela. The virus is transmitted person-to-person, primarily by coughing. There are no effective antivirals or vaccines. American troops stationed abroad are infected. Now the first case to reach the United States had been identified on a small college campus in Massachusetts. So began a recent daylong exercise hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The simulation mixed details of past disasters with fictional elements to force government officials and experts to make the kinds of key decisions they could face in a real pandemic. It was a tense day. The exercise was inspired in part by the troubled response to the Ebola epidemic of 2014, and everyone involved was acutely aware of the very real and ongoing Ebola outbreak spreading in Congo. In the simulation, a bipartisan group of current and former high-ranking U.S. government officials played a team of presidential advisers faced with a host of real-world policy, political and ethical dilemmas. The actors included former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who played the Senate majority leader, and Rep. Susan Brooks, R-Ind., who played herself. They had to react as the outbreak unfolded according to a script provided by Johns Hopkins, with no advance knowledge about how the mock disaster would play out. They faced difficult questions throughout the exercise: Should the United States impose a travel ban on flights from Germany and Venezuela? If not, they faced the problem of explaining that decision to the American public and Congress in the face of political pressure to act. Should the United States send troops to Jordan, where a major outbreak has occurred and the key Middle East ally is requesting assistance? Once a vaccine is developed, who should get it first? Should priority go to officials, to ensure continuity of government, or to children and pregnant women? Or should there be a lottery? There were no easy answers. That was the point of the day-long exercise, held in a darkened hotel ballroom before a rapt invitation-only audience of about 150 people and livestreamed on Facebook. There were experts from academia and think tanks, and officials from across the U.S. government, including the White House, defense and intelligence communities, health and security agencies and Congress. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins center, said the purpose of the exercise was to "provide experiential learning" for new decision-makers in the Trump administration. But many of the hard issues have remained unresolved for several administrations. "There are a lot of moving pieces in the world of pandemic preparedness at the moment," he said. Chief among those issues, he said, are questions about the extent of U.S. support for global health issues and the role of the national security community. Even though many players in the scenario had decades of experience in health security and national and global policy and law, "there were still so many unanswered questions and capability gaps," said Beth Cameron, formerly senior director for global health security and biodefense at the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. Cameron, who was in the audience, is vice president for global biological policy at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. If the fictional outbreak, or one even less deadly, emerged tomorrow, she said, "we would be facing the scenario with a new Cabinet untested by a major outbreak." Unlike Ebola, which spreads through direct contact and bodily fluids, the "Clade X" virus in the Johns Hopkins simulation was a flu-like respiratory virus, which would spread far more easily from person to person through coughing and sneezing. That's how the 1918 influenza pandemic spread. It killed more than 50 million people and is the deadliest pandemic in history. (If you ask infectious disease experts what they fear most, without fail they answer: "pandemic influenza.") The fictional outbreak kept getting worse. It had a 10 percent fatality rate, about the same as the SARS virus that traveled around the world in 2002-2003. Because the virus in the drill was new, no one had previous immunity to it, and it spread quickly in large cities. As it killed more than 100 million people globally, health-care systems collapsed, panic spread, the U.S. stock market crashed, and the president, members of Congress and the Supreme Court were incapacitated. "We didn't want to have a Disney ending," Inglesby said. "We wanted to have a plausible scenario. We did know it would be jarring." Over the course of the day, the 10 experts played the roles of U.S. officials in a series of simulated National Security Council-convened meetings. They acted the parts of a national security adviser, the secretaries of health and human services, state, homeland security and defense, attorney general and the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were also two members of Congress. Inglesby played the national security adviser. The advisers were asked to give recommendations to a fictional president (who remained offstage). They received briefings and news reports as the exercise progressed. Their consensus advice was repeatedly ignored and overridden by the president for short-term political reasons. In real life, NSC meetings would not include members of Congress. But the political leaders consistently highlighted the political pressures and the need to communicate tough policy decisions effectively, in the judgment of health security experts who watched the exercise. The fictional outbreak was revealed to be a virus engineered in a Swiss lab by a terrorist group. In another grabbed-from-the-headlines twist, the terrorists had inserted deadly genes from the Nipah virus, a rare brain-damaging virus. In real life, a Nipah outbreak in southern India has killed at least 13 people this month. In the exercise, schools closed, the demand for surgical masks and respirators far exceeded supply, and hospitals in the United States were quickly overwhelmed - just as many were by a bad flu season this year. When the players were informed that the virus has spread to Bethesda, Maryland, part of the terrorists' plan to sabotage the National Institutes of Health, there was an audible groan from the audience. There was universal agreement among the players on the need for a single senior official to coordinate federal agencies' responses and weigh the sometimes competing interests of health security, politics and foreign policy. The person needed to be above the agencies and have the ear of the president. As panic spread and riots took place, Brooks, the Indiana congresswoman, said: "We have to have someone working on this day in and day out.... I have advocacy groups lining up and coming in one after another. They want vaccines to be prioritized.... They do not understand what's going on." The Johns Hopkins pandemic exercise, as some of the audience members noted, took place one week after the top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic left the administration and the global health security team he oversaw was disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton. By the end of the exercise, failure to develop a vaccine within 20 months had led to 150 million deaths globally, or about 2 percent of the world's population. Players underscored the need for the United States to "go from bug to drug faster," said Jim Talen, a former Republican senator from Missouri who played the defense secretary. Added Tara O'Toole, a former top Homeland Security Department official who played the homeland security secretary: "We are in an age of epidemics, but we aren't treating them like the national security issues that they are." One aspect that deserved more attention, participants and experts said, was the need for officials to be proactive on social media to counter misinformation. "With social media and 24-hour cable and an environment in which experts and the value of science is increasingly questioned, we just can't assume in a crisis that we can get up and talk to the American people," said Margaret Hamburg, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who played the health and human services secretary. Otherwise, she said, "it's an environment where one thing that goes out in the media can suddenly mushroom, and before you know it, everything you're doing in the most scientific way can be derailed." --- https://wapo.st/2kAYhCa BRUSSELS - A man killed two police officers and a bystander on Tuesday in the Belgian city of Liege before he was fatally shot in what prosecutors are investigating as a terrorist attack, a prosecutor said. The attacker, who was not immediately named by Belgian authorities, had been in prison since 2003 and was allowed out on Monday on a two-day leave, Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens said. The furlough put Belgian officials on the defensive about whether they should have been able to predict that he was a security risk. The incident unfolded at midmorning in the center of Liege, the third-largest city in Belgium, when the man came up behind two female police officers and attacked them with a knife, then grabbed one of their handguns and shot both dead, prosecutor Philippe Dulieu said. Then the attacker shot a 22-year-old man who was sitting in the passenger seat of a nearby parked car. The assailant then walked into a school, where he took a woman hostage and forced a standoff with police during which students were evacuated. The man was subsequently killed in a gun battle with police officers who rushed to the scene, Dulieu said. "An investigation into the incident was opened over a presumed terrorist offense," Dulieu said. Geens said the prisoner had been allowed 13 previous two-day prison leaves as a way to prepare him for his eventual release in 2020, and that none had gone badly. He said authorities were trying to determine whether the man became radicalized while in prison. European counterterrorism officials have struggled with how to prevent the spread of terrorist ideology in their prisons, where common criminals with no previous record of radicalism sometimes pick up extremist views. Citing anonymous security officials, Belgian media reported that the attacker was a 36-year-old man with a history of small-time theft and drug violations. The problem of radicalization has grown increasingly difficult in recent years as European citizens who fought for the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq return to Europe, often immediately facing stints in prison. Geens said authorities were still trying to determine the motivation for the attack. "It is not a clear-cut case. On the contrary," Geens said. "It is certainly not someone who is obviously eligible to be qualified as radicalized." Still, Belgian prosecutors typically do not treat cases as terrorism investigations unless they have strong suspicions that they need to call in the additional resources, a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly. "It was clear the objective of the killer was to attack the police," the Liege police chief, Christian Beaupere, told reporters. He identified the police victims as Soraya Belkacemi, 53, and Lucile Garcia, 45. The third victim, Cyril Vangriecken, was about to start a career as a teacher, local media reported. The attack unsettled Belgium, which is still nervous about terrorism after a Brussels-based Islamic State ring was involved in attacks in Paris in November 2015 and Brussels in March 2016 that killed a total of 162 people. But the Belgian agency charged with setting the national alert level did not immediately raise its threat assessment, suggesting it did not believe there was a broader risk of attacks. Belgian King Philippe and Prime Minister Charles Michel visited the scene hours after the attack. Michel said it was too early to determine the cause of the violence. On Twitter, the Belgian leader called the attack "cowardly and blind." WASHINGTON - Police generally need a warrant to enter private property to inspect what they believe to be a stolen vehicle, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, even if it is a distinctive motorcycle at the end of a driveway. The court ruled 8 to 1 that even though there is precedent for police to search a vehicle without a warrant, that does not trump other decisions that say a home and its surrounding areas - curtilage, the court calls it - enjoy the ultimate protection from government intrusion. To allow police to use the automobile exception to forgo getting a warrant would "render hollow the core Fourth Amendment protection the Constitution extends to the house and its curtilage," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority. The court was considering the case of Ryan Collins of Charlottesville, Virginia. The driver of a distinctive orange-and-black motorcycle had led Albemarle County, Virginia, police officers on two chases. The department came to believe the motorcycle was stolen and in the possession of Collins. His Facebook profile showed such a motorcycle parked at the top of a driveway at a house where he stayed several nights per week. Officer David Rhodes went to the address, where he observed from the street what appeared to be a motorcycle at the end of the driveway, covered by a tarp. He walked up, determined that it was the motorcycle in question and waited for Collins to return to the house. Collins said that the vehicle was his and that he had bought it without a title. He was arrested and indicted on a charge of receiving stolen property. Collins tried to suppress the evidence against him, saying it was improperly obtained by the warrantless search. Eventually, the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed his conviction, saying that the search was proper because of precedent allowing greater leeway for police with probable cause to search vehicles. But Sotomayor wrote: "Nothing in our case law . . . suggests that the automobile exception gives an officer the right to enter a home or its curtilage to access a vehicle without a warrant." The fact that the cycle was visible from the street doesn't change the rule, she wrote. Imagine a motorcycle parked in a living room visible through a window to a passerby and police, she said. "Can the officer, acting without a warrant, enter the house to search the motorcycle and confirm whether it is the right one? Surely not." Justice Samuel Alito was the lone dissenter, saying the police officer's action was "entirely reasonable." "If the motorcycle had been parked at the curb, instead of in the driveway, it is undisputed that Rhodes could have searched it without obtaining a warrant,' Alito wrote. He conjured a Charles Dickens character from "Oliver Twist": "An ordinary person of common sense would react to the Court's decision the way Mr. Bumble famously responded when told about a legal rule that did not comport with the reality of everyday life. If that is the law, he exclaimed, 'the law is a ass - a idiot.' " Sotomayor rejected Virginia's proposed rule that it would make a difference whether the object is visible from the street. That would be unfair, she wrote, favoring those who could afford fully enclosed garages over those who had carports. She cited a Supreme Court decision from 1982: "The most frail cottage in the kingdom is absolutely entitled to the same guarantees of privacy as the most majestic mansion." The case is Collins v. Virginia. WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused prosecutors working on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election of planning to meddle in this year's midterm elections, escalating his attack on the probe while offering no evidence to back up his assertion. In several morning tweets, Trump attempted to cast himself as the victim of a partisan assault, part of a pattern of political deflection in recent days where the president has made false or exaggerated statements in defending his policies or attacking his perceived enemies. Over the weekend, Trump blamed Democrats for his policy of separating migrant families at the border, falsely said that the New York Times made up a source for a story on negotiations between the United States and North Korea, and continued to claim that the FBI's use of a source to interact with members of his 2016 election team was an attempt to spy on the campaign. Trump's unsupported assertion that prosecutors working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller will affect the midterm elections to help Democrats was his latest effort to discredit the investigation, which is looking into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible coordination between Moscow and Trump's campaign. Republicans risk losing control of the House and possibly the Senate in this year's midterms as Democrats continue to feel emboldened by Trump's unpopularity. "The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the midterm elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls," Trump wrote on Twitter, adding: "There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats!" The probe, which recently marked its first anniversary, is headed by Mueller, a longtime Republican, and overseen by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Republican and a Trump appointee. But publicly available voter-registration information shows that 13 of the 17 members of Mueller's team have previously registered as Democrats, while four had no affiliation or their affiliation could not be found. Justice Department policies prohibit discrimination in hiring for career positions on the basis of politics. In a second tweet Tuesday, Trump said the special counsel's team should instead be investigating the campaign of his Democratic opponent in the 2016 election, whom he described as "totally Crooked Hillary Clinton." "Why aren't the 13 Angry and heavily conflicted Democrats investigating the totally Crooked Campaign of totally Crooked Hillary Clinton," Trump wrote. "It's a Rigged Witch Hunt, that's why! Ask them if they enjoyed her after election celebration!" During the campaign, Trump claimed she should have been prosecuted harshly for lax security in her government email practices when she was secretary of state. His campaign rallies frequently began with chants of "lock her up." Trump is now claiming that the FBI went easy on Clinton and that some people involved in making that decision are working against him in the Mueller probe. When polls suggested that he would lose to Clinton in 2016, Trump cast doubt on the validity of the election process and said at one point that he might not respect the outcome unless he won. In another tweet Tuesday, Trump suggested that the Russia probe was taking away some of his focus on other issues confronting the country, including trade deals and the effort to denuclearize North Korea. "Sorry, I've got to start focusing my energy on North Korea Nuclear, bad Trade Deals, VA Choice, the Economy, rebuilding the Military, and so much more, and not on the Rigged Russia Witch Hunt that should be investigating Clinton/Russia/FBI/Justice/Obama/Comey/Lynch etc." the president wrote. Trump has at some point attacked each person or organization on his slashmarked list. In the case of the FBI and Justice Department, that has meant assailing the credibility of elements of the federal government that are part of the Mueller effort. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked Tuesday whether Trump is trying to discredit the Mueller probe by calling it a "witch hunt." "I think the president is stating a fact," Sanders replied. "It is a witch hunt," she told reporters traveling with Trump to a campaign rally in Nashville. "He knows exactly what he did and what he didn't do, and he's been very clear from day one that there was no collusion." U.S. intelligence agencies have said they have high confidence that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election to hurt Clinton. By default, that effort would have helped Trump, but Mueller is looking into whether Trump associates played a more an active role. Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is among 19 individuals and entities indicted by Mueller. Some of Mueller's actions remain under seal. Russia denies it interfered in the election. Among those pushing back against Trump's assertions Tuesday was Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who noted the growing list of indictments and guilty pleas in the Mueller probe. "Mueller's work is that of a career prosecutor and law enforcement officer who is squarely focused on getting to bottom of Russia's meddling in our elections and any possible collusion with your campaign and a hostile foreign government," Schumer wrote in a tweet directed at Trump. Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said Tuesday that the president is attacking the Mueller probe because the tactic is working. "As an effective politician, you're not going to do something that you don't think is working," Giuliani said. Trump has taken to calling the FBI's interactions with an informant during the 2016 campaign "spygate" and has suggested without evidence that the FBI planted a mole in his campaign. "Spygate - that's the reason - he's not just ratcheted it up for no reason," Giuliani said. "He believes it is working, and he is genuinely upset about it." From what is known about the FBI effort, it arose from concerns about Russian hacking of Democrats in summer 2016. There is no evidence that the informant, former University of Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, was inserted into the campaign, but he did seek out and meet several Trump campaign advisers. Trump will not agree to an interview with the special counsel until prosecutors allow the president's legal team to review documents related to the FBI's use of the informant, Giuliani said Tuesday. "We need all the documents before we can decide whether we are going to do an interview," Giuliani said in an interview with The Washington Post, using Trump's term "spygate" to refer to the FBI actions, which former officials have said were well within bounds. Giuliani has previously said that Trump has done nothing improper and is eager to talk to Mueller. On Tuesday, though, he said he does not want to make a call on whether Trump will sit down for an interview "until they decide whether they are going to give us the documents or not." Under pressure from the White House and congressional Republicans, the Justice Department last week held an unusual pair of briefings for lawmakers on the FBI's use of the informant. Giuliani said Tuesday that Mueller's attempts to interview Trump indicated that his probe of possible coordination between Russia and the campaign are nearing its end. "I don't think they would have asked to interview him until they are pretty much finished with everything," Giuliani said. "They're only going to get one shot at him. They know that. You look pretty amateurish if you interview him and you don't have all the facts gathered." The National Park Service has reached an agreement with a nonprofit veterans' organization to take custody of cremated remains left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and bury them with honors in a private in-ground vault in Virginia. The Missing in America Project will take possession of the 80 sets of cremains that have been left at the memorial over the years, as well as any future cremains that are left, the Park Service said in a statement. They will be inurned with full military honors at an in-ground vault at a private cemetery in Manassas, Virginia, the statement said. The purpose of the MIA Project is to locate, identify and inter with dignity unclaimed cremated remains of American veterans, according to the organization's website. Leaving mementos at the memorial's Wall has been a tradition since the polished stone landmark bearing the names of the 58,000 Vietnam War dead was dedicated in 1982. Hundreds of thousands of letters, photographs, jungle boots, stuffed animals, sculptures, dog tags, college rings, a motorcycle, cigars, a piece of a helicopter rotor blade and human remains have been left. The artifacts are gathered and stored in the Park Service's large Museum Resource Center in suburban Maryland. Human remains have also been left, sometimes at the behest of the deceased or a family member. The cremains - some in containers, some scattered - have been left since 1990, officials said. Four were left there over the Memorial Day weekend. In the fall, the Park Service placed signs at the Wall asking people not to leave human remains. "We're not really equipped," Laura Anderson, curator for the Mall and Memorial Parks, said in January. "I imagine it's a big decision - what do you do with your loved one - especially if somebody is asking to be left here. You want to honor those wishes. But we're not allowed to accept them." The human cremains were kept in a locked metal cabinet with the windows papered over at the resource center. No date for the transfer or burial has been set, the Park Service said. Brigitte Corbin, of the Missing in America Project, said the remains will be kept in their original containers and placed together in a vacant, spacious underground vault that has been donated by the cemetery. She declined, for now, to identify the cemetery. She said any relatives or friends who don't approve of the move can contact her and pick up the remains. Mike Litterst, a Park Service spokesman said: "It's a decades old problem that we're very pleased to have a solution for." A Longford woman who walked out of a local supermarket with a trolley load of groceries and other items totalling more than 750 has been told to return to court next month with compensation. Winnie Keenan (22), 5 Palace Crescent, Ardnacassa, Longford pleaded guilty to stealing 756.66 worth of meat, toys and groceries from Aldi, Athlone Road, Longford on December 11 2017. Inspector Blaithin Moran said on the day of the incident, Sgt Declan McGlynn received a call to attend the store where he met with staff who informed him of an alleged theft had taken place. She said the incident took place earlier that same day when two women had been seen filling a trolley with meat, groceries and other items before leaving without paying. CCTV footage taken from the scene was also analysed resulting in their identification. She said Ms Keenan was later arrested, together with a co accused who had since appeared and been convicted before the court. Her solicitor insisted Ms Keenan had been out shopping with her sister in law and was not directly responsible for the theft even though the role she played might have given the impression the incident was a joint venture. Ms Keenan, who until that point had stayed silent, suddenly spoke up in an attempt to profess her innocence. I was there, thats why I got charged, she said. I didnt go out with no trolley. I wouldnt have gone in with her (co-accused) because you gave me a warning, Ms Keenan told Judge Hughes. I didnt know she was going to do this. During his cross examination of the defendant, it was made clear that Ms Keenan had recently undertook a stint of three days in prison, two days short of a sentence Judge Hughes had imposed at the time. It was a revelation that triggered a less than empathetic reply from the Mayo native. Are the Irish Prison Service back to their old tricks again? Judge Hughes sarcastically remarked. The case was, as a result, adjourned until June 26 for the payment of 350 in compensation. It's set to be another scorcher today with temperatures set to get up as high as 26 degrees. According to Met Eireann, early mist and fog patches will clear most places this morning, allowing warm sunny intervals to develop. While many areas will remain dry, some heavy showers will occur this afternoon, these most likely in west Connacht and Munster, where there is the risk of isolated thunderstorms. Humid, with top temperatures of 21 to 26 degrees Celsius generally, highest in the west and south, but a few degrees cooler in the coastal fringes. Winds mostly light to moderate east to northeast or variable, with sea breezes developing. Some warm sunshine likely through this evening, with any showers dying away. Dry tonight with clear spells, but with patches of mist and low cloud returning. Mild, with lows of 10 to 14 degrees in slack easterly or variable breezes. Wednesday will be a warm and mostly dry day with a mix of cloud and sunshine once early mist and fog patches lift. There is a slight risk of isolated showers, mainly over southern counties through the afternoon and evening. Top temperatures 20 to 24 degrees in light easterly or variable breezes. Also read: Longford firms hoping to 'Bloom' at annual gardening festival Irish Waters business customers in Co Longford will receive new meters which have in-built drive-by technology to allow for faster and more frequent meter readings. This will result in fewer estimated bills being issued to customers and will also provide data to Irish Water which will assist in identifying potential leaks at a business premises. The Regional Meter Replacement Programme was launched late last year and is currently ongoing in Donegal, Limerick, Sligo, Roscommon, Galway, Leitrim, Cavan, Monaghan, Offaly, Wicklow and Kilkenny. Also read: Irish Water has completed work on Ballymahon Water Mains replacement project Business customers who will be receiving a replacement meter in Co Longford have already been notified by letter. Irish Water would like to stress that there is no charge to customers for the installation of the new meters which should ultimately provide them with a more accurate bill for their water usage and a means of detecting water leaks on their properties. Water supply to businesses will be temporarily shut-off for approximately 15 minutes while the water meter is being replaced, however Irish Water will endeavour to keep the length of this water outage to a minimum. Businesses will receive a reminder notification at least two days before the work is scheduled to begin and the project team will speak to the customer directly before interrupting supply. If you have any further queries you can contact Irish Water on 1850 778 778 or email business@water.ie Also read: Longford councillor warns ATM users to exercise vigilance Local News, Crime By Long Island News & PR Published: May 30 2018 Dean S. Mustaphalli Owner And Operator of Mustaphalli Capital Partners Fund, LP Arraigned On 99-Count Indictment Charging Securities Fraud, Grand Larceny, Forgery, and Scheme to Defraud. New York, NY - May 30, 2018 - Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood today announced a 99-count criminal indictment charging Queens investment advisor Dean S. Mustaphalli the owner and operator of Mustaphalli Capital Partners Fund, LP with operating a multi-million dollar securities fraud scheme. Mustaphalli allegedly engaged in a scheme to defraud investors many of whom were elderly and at or near retirement out of their savings by investing them in his hedge fund without their knowledge or consent. During the relevant time period, Mustaphallis hedge fund collapsed, losing 92% of its value. The Attorney Generals indictment, unsealed in Queens County Supreme Court, charges Mustaphalli with Grand Larceny, Forgery, and Securities Fraud violations under the Martin Act, among other charges. If convicted, Mustaphalli faces up to 10 to 20 years in prison. According to the Attorney Generals criminal indictment , Mustaphallis scheme brought in more than $5 million from 22 victims between June 2014 and March 2017 alone including many southeast Queens residents, including a number who live in Rochdale Village, a Mitchell-Lama affordable housing complex. A separate civil lawsuit filed by the Attorney Generals office in June 2017 alleges that Mustaphalli fraudulently solicited an additional $7 million from prior investors between 2012 and 2014. In total, Mustaphalli allegedly fraudulently solicited his former clients to invest over $12 million and lost over $11 million of their hard-earned money. New Yorkers should be able to trust the people they turn to for investment advice, Attorney General Underwood said. Yet, as we allege, Dean Mustaphalli deceived the clients that trusted him looting and squandering millions from senior New Yorkers who relied on those savings. Our office will continue to crack down on unscrupulous financial advisors who scam and swindle New Yorkers out of their hard-earned money. In June 2017, after a years-long investigation, the Attorney Generals Investor Protection Bureau filed a civil complaint in New York County. In February 2017, the Attorney Generals Criminal Enforcement and Financial Crimes Bureau commenced a criminal investigation into Mustaphallis conduct, resulting in the 99-count criminal indictment. As set forth in court documents and according to statements made by prosecutors at arraignment, Mustaphallis scheme allegedly targeted elderly New Yorkers who had been his investment advisory clients for many years before he opened his own hedge fund, and who had very little prior investment experience. As their investment advisor, Mustaphalli knew that these investors had relatively conservative investment objectives. Nevertheless, beginning in 2010, Mustaphalli allegedly moved his clients assets to a platform that would conceal his risky trading activity. Without explanation, and simply saying that the fund would be better for clients, Mustaphalli allegedly diverted his clients relatively safe investment portfolios to a hedge fund run solely by Mustaphalli. As further set forth in the civil complaint, Mustaphalli allegedly targeted his first wave of investors beginning in 2012, moving $7.1 million into his hedge fund, Mustaphalli Capital Partners Fund, LP (MCPF). Mustaphalli then allegedly engaged in a series of high-risk investment strategies, and by the end of that year, MCPF lost 92% of its value. In one instance, Mustaphalli allegedly bet $2.5 million on the volatility of the price of Mastercard stock, which lost his clients over $2 million in a single trade. By 2014, only $200,000 was left in the fund. As set forth in the criminal indictment and according to statements made by prosecutors at arraignment, after losing almost $7 million of investor monies, Mustaphalli then allegedly brought 22 new clients into his hedge fund by 2015, collecting $5 million in additional investor funds or monies. Once again, Mustaphalli allegedly targeted mostly elderly individuals who had been his clients for many years and trusted him. To effect these transfers, Mustaphalli allegedly forged account opening documents and submitted fake email addresses for his clients, many of whom did not even know how to operate a computer. According to court filings and statements made by prosecutors, Mustaphallis clients allegedly had no idea that their retirement monies were being transferred into an extremely high-risk investment, much less to a hedge fund. To further his scheme, the defendant allegedly provided his clients with only the signature pages of fund documents, and forged his clients initials next to the portion of the documents entitled Accredited Investor Status, which falsely stated the investors net worth was over $1 million dollars. In fact, almost none of the defendants clients had a net worth of over $1 million dollars; indeed, a few investors live in Rochdale Village, a Mitchell-Lama Cooperative located in Queens, which sets aside affordable housing for moderate and middle-income residents. Notably, it is a requirement that hedge fund investors meet the definition of an accredited investor, which is a person whose net worth exceeds $1 million. By December 2015, MCPF had lost approximately 80% of its value, again because Mustaphalli allegedly engaged in extremely high-risk and unauthorized trading strategies, including speculative options trading. According to prosecutors, most of the 22 investors named in the indictment allegedly lost all or most of their retirement savings, with losses totaling over $4 million. Mustaphalli allegedly sought to deflect blame for the losses by telling investors that the losses were due to oil, bad markets, and the election. Mustaphalli allegedly promised one investor, if Hillary wins, youll get your money back, and told another that Brexit was to blame for the Funds losses. In the aftermath of these devastating losses, Mustaphalli allegedly used shell companies that he created to divert $100,000 of the remaining fund balance to himself, leaving investors with at best 20 percent of their original investment. The Attorney Generals 99-count criminal indictment, unsealed late yesterday in Queens Supreme Court, charges the defendant with: 18 counts of Grand Larceny in the Second Degree (a Class C felony); one count of Grand Larceny in the Third Degree (a Class D felony); 12 counts of Forgery in the Second Degree (a Class D felony); 23 counts of Criminal Possession of a Forged Instrument in the Second Degree (a Class D felony); 22 counts of Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree (a Class E felony); 21 counts of securities fraud under the Martin Act (a Class E felony); and two counts of Scheme to Defraud in the First Degree (a Class E felony). Mustaphalli was arraigned yesterday in Queens County Supreme Court before the Honorable Judge Wong. Bail was set in the amount of $2 million cash or bond, and the defendant was ordered to surrender any travel documents. The charges are merely accusations and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. The Attorney General thanks the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and, in particular, its Criminal Prosecution Assistance Group for their valuable assistance on this case. The Attorney Generals criminal investigation was conducted by Investigator Brian Metz, under the supervision of Supervising Investigator Michael Leahy and Deputy Chief John McManus. Forensic accounting was performed by Forensic Auditors Alex Ozechowski and Marcos Perez. The Investigations Bureau is led by Chief Dominick Zarrella. The Forensic Audit Section is led by Chief Auditor Edward J. Keegan. The criminal case is being handled by Assistant Attorneys General Maureen Grodidier, Kristen Bitetto, and Kenneth Haim of the Criminal Enforcement and Financial Crimes Bureau, with the assistance of Legal Analyst Rebecca Jacobson and Supervising Legal Analyst Paul Strocko. The Criminal Enforcement and Financial Crimes Bureau is led by Bureau Chief Stephanie Swenton and Deputy Bureau Chief Joseph G. DArrigo. The Criminal Division is led by Margaret Garnett, Executive Deputy Attorney General for Criminal Justice. Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Seasonal & Current Events By Long Island News & PR Published: May 30 2018 Supervisor Lupinacci: "It is our sacred duty to honor those who defend the great United States of America." Huntington, NY - May 30, 2018 - On Sunday May 27, The On Sunday May 27, The Town of Huntington held its Memorial Day Wreath Ceremony at Town Hall. Town, County and State Officials were joined by service men and women, veterans, community leaders, and a large number of residents in the Board Meeting Room attending the service, held indoors due to rain. Supervisor Chad A. Lupinacci spoke about the importance of remembering the service men and women who died answering our nations call, to honor the memory of the brave sacrifice our service men and women made, we gather here today and say, thank you. We remember you. We are grateful to you. It is our sacred duty to honor those who defend the great United States of America. Today and always, we must stand united in supporting our nation and the Constitution that guarantees our freedoms. Our fallen heroes deserve no less, said Supervisor Lupinacci. Thank a veteran today as we honor his or her fallen comrades. Remember our Gold Star Mothers, whose son or daughter made the ultimate sacrifice. Above all, never take our freedoms for granted. On Memorial Day, we recognize with deep appreciation and solemn reverence those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve all we hold dear. The monuments in our Veterans Plaza contain special notations for those who gave their lives in defense of our country: 39 who died in World War I, 138 in World War II, 10 who were killed in Korea and 49 who perished during the Vietnam War. There are others, not on the monuments because their deaths are more recent. As we solemnly mark this Memorial Day, with ceremonies such as this one and with parades tomorrow, think about all of those who perished in the line of duty. And as we do that, remember the words of that great World War II general, George S. Patton: It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God such men lived. Because of them, we are able to be here today, said Councilwoman Joan Cergol. County Executive Steve Bellone also addressed the crowd with an emotional tribute to our fallen heroes. Members of the Church of Saint Patricks Youth Choir and Adult Chorale performed patriotic songs throughout the event. A moment of silence was held to honor members of the New York Air National Guard 106th Rescue Wing who perished in a helicopter crash in Iraq earlier this year, including Master Sgt. Christopher Raguso of Commack. Hair Transplant Market Analyzes and Track Competitive Developments Such as Joint Ventures, Strategic Alliances, Mergers and Acquisitions, New Product Developments, Research and Developments in the Global Hair Transplant Industry. Hair transplant is a surgical procedure that is used to move hair and hair follicles from an individuals body called as donor site to a bald location on the body. The removed hair from one part of the body are implanted into tiny holes of the scalp. This procedure is ideally performed with the help of a scalpel or a punch graft instrument. With the help of hair transplant, it is possible for an individual to obtain the desired looks as well confidence. FREE | Request Sample Copy is Available at http://www.theinsightpartners.com/sample/TIPHE100001111 In our study, we have segmented the hair transplant market by procedure, site of implant and therapy. Based on procedure, global hair transplant market is segmented as surgical and non-surgical. The surgical procedure segment is further categorized as, follicular unit strip surgery (FUS), follicular unit extraction (FUE) and other on the surgical procedures. Based site of implant, the market is segmented as, scalp, facial, chest, and others. The facial segment is further classified as, eyebrow, beard and eyelash. Based on therapy, the global hair transplant market is segmented as, platelet rich plasma (PRP), laser cap and revage 670 laser. Geographically, the market for hair transplant is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South and Central America (S&CAM). The hair transplant market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 23.6% during the forecast period from 2018 to 2025. The market for hair transplant is estimated to reach US$ 28,627.6 Mn in 2025. The market is witnessing a potential growth rate during the previous years and is expected to witness similar trend in the coming years. Additionally, major players in the market are engaged in research and development activities. These players have been upgrading their product portfolio by applying for approvals as well as launching new products. For instance, in March, 2018, HairMax, Inc., received ANVISA approval for its laser device. This approval helped the company to offer treatment for heredity hair loss in Brazil. Inquire about this Report at http://www.theinsightpartners.com/inquiry/TIPHE100001111 The market for hair transplant is well established in North America region, especially in the US and Canada. The market is expected to witness growth at a rapid rate in Middle East & Africa (MEA) during the forecast period. Turkey is one of the most popular destinations in MEA region with affordable price ranges and skillful doctors for hair transplantation. The hair restoration industry has grown at a higher pace in the past decade in the country. Cheap hair transplant surgery is one of the major factor that bring visitors to Turkey. The major players operating in the market of hair transplant market include Cole Instruments Inc., CAPILLUS, LaserCap Company, Apira Science, Harris FUE Instruments, HairMax Inc., THERADOME, FueInstrument, Shaanxi Xingmao Industry Co., Ltd, and Restoration Robotics, Inc. among others. Complete Report is Available at http://www.theinsightpartners.com/reports/hair-transplant-market About Us: The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Automotive and Defense. Contact Us: Call: +1-646-491-9876 Email: sales@theinsightpartners.com The Pen Needles Market report explores and analyses the essential factors of market depending on present industry situations, market needs, business strategies and the growth condition. This report isolates the Pen Needles Market capacity, production, market share, price, revenue, cost, growth rate etc. The report provides Point to Point information of the market on a Global scale supported by the previous and present size market forecast situation within the form of graphs, charts, figures and tables. Get Sample Copy for more Professional and Technical insights at http://bit.ly/2ITOBkt The report also includes the profiles of key pen needles manufacturing companies along with their SWOT analysis and market strategies. In addition, the report focuses on leading industry players with information such as company profiles, products and services offered, financial information of last 3 years, key development in past five years. Some of the key players influencing the market are Novo Nordisk A/S, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Ypsomed Holding AG, Owen Mumford, Ltd., HTL-Strefa S.A., B. Braun Melsungen, Ultimed, Inc. (LDI, Ltd.), Terumo Corporation, Allison Medical, Inc., and Artsana S.P.A. among others. The Global Pen Needles Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the pen needles industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global pen needles market with detailed market segmentation by type, therapy, length, and geography. The global pen needles market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the leading market players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market. The report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global pen needles market based on type, therapy, and length. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall pen needles 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 counties globally along with current trend and opportunities prevailing in the region. Order a copy of Pen Needles Market to 2025 Global Analysis and Forecasts research study at http://bit.ly/2L5TOlX Increasing prevalence of diabetes, technological advancements in safety pen needles, rising adoption of insulin pens, and decreasing re-usage rate of pen needles are likely to aid the growth of market during the forecast period. Regulations limiting the re-use of insulin pens and pen needles in the US and Europe are expected to add new opportunities for this market in the coming years. Pen Needles are the attachments to the insulin pen injectors and are used for insulin delivery. These needles are manufactured for one time use and need to be disposed after every use. These devices are available in various lengths and gauge sizes for different patient requirements. Insulin pens are most commonly used devices for insulin delivery with high adoption rates in the developed regions. Make an Inquiry Prior To Purchase this research study at http://bit.ly/2LEzuct 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. 10 North America Pen Needles Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025 Country Analysis 10.1 North America Pen Needles Market Overview 10.2 North America Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis (US$ Mn) 10.3 North America Pen Needles Market Volume Forecasts and Analysis (000 units) 10.4 North America Market Forecasts and Analysis By Type 10.5 North America Market Forecasts and Analysis By Therapy 10.6 North America Market Forecasts and Analysis By Length 10.7 North America Market Forecasts and Analysis By Countries 10.8 US Market Overview 10.8.1 US Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (US$ Mn) 10.8.2 US Pen Needles Market Volume Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (000 units) 10.8.3 US Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Therapy (US$ Mn) 10.8.4 US Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Length (US$ Mn) 10.9 Canada Market Overview 10.9.1 Canada Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (US$ Mn) 10.9.2 Canada Pen Needles Market Volume Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (000 units) 10.9.3 Canada Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Therapy (US$ Mn) 10.9.4 Canada Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Length (US$ Mn) 10.10 Mexico Market Overview 10.10.1Mexico Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (US$ Mn) 10.10.2Mexico Pen Needles Market Volume Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (000 units) 10.10.3Mexico Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Therapy (US$ Mn) 10.10.4Mexico Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Length (US$ Mn) 11 Europe Pen Needles Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025 Country Analysis 11.1 Europe Pen Needles Market Overview 11.2 Europe Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis (US$ Mn) 11.3 Europe Pen Needles Market Volume Forecasts and Analysis (000 units) 11.4 Europe Market Forecasts and Analysis By Type 11.5 Europe Market Forecasts and Analysis By Therapy 11.6 Europe Market Forecasts and Analysis By Length 11.7 Europe Market Forecasts and Analysis By Countries 11.8 UK Market Overview 11.8.1 UK Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (US$ Mn) 11.8.2 UK Pen Needles Market Volume Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (000 units) 11.8.3 UK Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Therapy (US$ Mn) 11.8.4 UK Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Length (US$ Mn) 11.9 Germany Market Overview 11.9.1 Germany Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (US$ Mn) 11.9.2 Germany Pen Needles Market Volume Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (000 units) 11.9.3 Germany Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Therapy (US$ Mn) 11.9.4 Germany Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Length (US$ Mn) 11.10 France Market Overview 11.10.1France Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (US$ Mn) 11.10.2France Pen Needles Market Volume Forecasts and Analysis-By Type (000 units) 11.10.3France Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Therapy (US$ Mn) 11.10.4France Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis-By Length (US$ Mn) 7 Pen Needles Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025 Type (US$ Mn) 7.1 Overview 7.2 Type Market Forecasts and Analysis 7.3 Standard Pen Needles Market 7.3.1 Overview 7.3.2 Standard Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis (US$ Mn) 7.3.3 Standard Pen Needles Market Volume Forecasts and Analysis (000 units) 7.4 Safety Pen Needles Market 7.4.1 Overview 7.4.2 Safety Pen Needles Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis (US$ Mn) 7.4.3 Safety Pen Needles Market Volume Forecasts and Analysis (000 units) 8 Pen Needles Market Revenue and Forecasts to 2025 Therapy (US$ Mn) 8.1 Overview 8.2 Therapy Market Forecasts and Analysis 8.3 Insulin Therapy Market 8.3.1 Overview 8.3.2 Insulin Therapy Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis (US$ Mn) 8.4 GLP-1 Therapy Market 8.4.1 Overview 8.4.2 GLP-1 Therapy Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis (US$ Mn) 8.5 Growth Hormone Therapy Market 8.5.1 Overview 8.5.2 Growth Hormone Therapy Market Revenue Forecasts and Analysis (US$ Mn) About Us: The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Automotive and Defense. Contact Us: Call: +1-646-491-9876 Email: sales@theinsightpartners.com by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, May 30, 2018 For any company, its seldom a good sign when an entire country bans your business. Albeit on a temporary basis, thats the suck sandwich Papua New Guinea just served to Facebook. Economically and politically, the Independent State of Papua New Guinea is not quite a major force. (With around 8 million citizens, the country has a population comparable to that of Long Island.) But its modest stature did not stop every news outlet from New York to Papua New Guinea from picking up the story on Monday. In part, thats because much of the world now shares many of the concerns expressed by Sam Basil, Papua New Guineas Communication Minister. With the one-month ban, the plan is to identify users that hide behind fake accounts, users that upload pornographic images [and] users that post false and misleading information on Facebook, Basil tells the Papua New Guinea Post Courier. advertisement advertisement Some of those same concerns recently prompted U.S. lawmakers to subject& lt; /a> Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg to two days of tough (but ultimately toothless) questioning. Its those same concerns that inspired European regulations to enact a comprehensive data law known as the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. And, its those concerns that just moved& amp; nbsp;a coalition of left-leaning organizations to begin lobbying the U.S. government to break up Facebook. Again, while Papua New Guinea might not have the economic and political clout of those groups and institutions, its strength lies in the boldness of its action. With that strength in hand, its next moves could have significant implications for Facebook. The world is now waiting to see what insights the investigation yields. According to Basil, one possible outcome of the experiment could be to create a government-run social network solely for the Papuan people. Such an extreme measure is unlikely to receive much support in the United States, but its mention doesnt bode well for Facebooks international fortunes. by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, May 29, 2018 A federal appellate court has granted Facebook's "emergency" request to immediately halt trial proceedings over whether the company violated an Illinois biometrics privacy law. In an order issued late Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to decide whether the case should proceed as a class-action. The order stayed all proceedings underway in front of U.S. District Court Judge James Donato in the Northern District of California. The decision marks the latest twist in a lawsuit dating to 2015, when several Illinois residents sued the company for allegedly violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act by collecting "faceprints." That law, passed 10 years ago, requires companies to obtain written releases from people before collecting face geometry and other biometric data. advertisement advertisement Donato ruled in April that the case could proceed as a class-action on behalf of all Facebook users in Illinois who had their faceprints stored by the company since 2011. Earlier this month, Facebook asked the 9th Circuit to review Donato's decision to allow the case to proceed as a class-action. Late last week, Facebook filed an emergency motion asking the 9th Circuit to immediately stay the order requiring the company to use its platform to notify Illinois users about the proceedings. "Unless this Court intervenes immediately, tens of millions of Facebook users will receive class notice," Facebook said in its motion. "If the Court does not grant a stay by May 30, over 20 million people will receive class notice that may need to be retracted or modified substantially," the company wrote. On Tuesday, hours before the appellate court issued the stay, Donato rejected Facebook's request to halt the proceedings to stay the proceedings. "The case is ripe for trial, and Facebooks last-minute request to derail that is denied," Donato wrote in his order, which was effectively reversed by the 9th Circuit. Earlier in the proceedings, Donato ruled against Facebook on several other key issues, including whether the Illinois law applies to the company's facial recognition technology. Facebook had argued that the Illinois law only covers faceprints derived from in-person scans. Donato rejected that interpretation, calling it "antithetical" to the law's "broad purpose of protecting privacy in the face of emerging biometric technology." Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, May 30, 2018 8 AM A fizzy lemon-flavored alcoholic drink marks Coca-Colas foray into selling alcohol. At a sampling event in Fukuoka, hundreds of people lined up for a taste, including some who didnt expect to find the U.S. company experimenting with Japanese-style booze. Hiroshi Tsukano, 59, a financial planner, thought one of Coca-Colas competitors was relaunching an old favorite. Im a bit surprised that this is a Coca-Cola brand, he said. Read the whole story at Wall Street Journal by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, May 30, 2018 The EU's General Data Protection Regulation could "force big changes in the way US and European companies do business," Commerce Department Secretary Wilbur Ross says. "As currently envisioned, GDPRs implementation could significantly interrupt transatlantic co-operation and create unnecessary barriers to trade, not only for the US, but for everyone outside the EU," Ross writes in the Financial Times. The GDPR -- which took effect in Europe last week -- aims to give consumers more control over data that is collected about them, including data used for targeted ads. Among other provisions, the regulations bar companies from processing consumers' data without their explicit consent. The new privacy rules also give people the right to know who can access their data, and to revoke their consent at any time. advertisement advertisement Ross says in his op-ed that the White House supports the GDPR's goal of protecting personal online data while continuing to enable transatlantic data exchange. But he adds that complying with the rules "will exact a significant cost, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises and consumers who rely on digital services and may lose access and choice as a result of the guidelines." He also says the rules have created "serious, unclear legal obligations" for companies and government agencies. "We do not have a clear understanding of what is required to comply," he writes. "That could disrupt transatlantic co-operation on financial regulation, medical research, emergency management co-ordination, and important commerce." In addition, he says the new privacy rules could pose a public safety risk by preventing law enforcement authorities from discovering the identities of people who operate websites "that propagate terrorist information, sponsor malicious botnets or steal IP addresses." A recently published review finds a significant link between hay fever and a raised risk of anxiety and depression in adolescents. They also appear to be more impulsive and have less resistance to stress. Share on Pinterest Hay fever is more than just an itch. Allergies, such as hay fever, affect an estimated 50 million people in the United States. Although they are often considered fairly minor ailments, they can significantly impact the lives of those who live with them. Roughly 1030 percent of the global population have hay fever, which is also called allergic rhinitis. And, in 2010, 11.1 million doctors visits ended in a diagnosis of allergic rhinitis. The most common symptoms, as many people will know first-hand, include a runny nose, itchy and watery eyes, sneezes and coughs, and fatigue. Although incredibly uncomfortable, a recent review digs a little deeper, finding links between hay fever and certain psychological issues in adolescents. This age group was of particular interest to the authors because they are a distinct and sometimes forgotten demographic; we should not assume that adolescents are either big children or small adults, they write. We include products we think are useful for our readers. If you buy through links on this page, we may earn a small commission. Heres our process. Learn about the causes and treatments of pimples on the legs here. Still, pimples on the legs are often not a major or long-lasting problem. In most cases, the causes are not of significant concern. A person who develops a pimple on the leg can often treat it at home, using over-the-counter (OTC) medications and other home remedies. Pimples often appear as one or more red or white, potentially itchy or painful, bumps on the skin. In some cases, they form a pink-red rash on the adjacent skin or produce pus . They may also make a person feel uncomfortable, exposing their legs in front of others. Pimples or a pimple-like rash can develop on any part of the body, including on the legs. Common causes of small bumps or pimples on the legs include: Folliculitis Share on Pinterest Folliculitis, an inflammation of the hair follicles, is a common cause of pimples on the legs. Folliculitis is inflammation of the hair follicles. This can be from a bacterial or fungal infection that makes the hair follicles become inflamed or blocked. Symptoms of folliculitis are red bumps that may appear as a rash. The most common causes that pose a risk of developing folliculitis include: tight clothing heat and sweat shaving Almost anyone can develop folliculitis. However, some people may be more at risk of developing folliculitis than others. These risk factors include: being overweight frequent use of public or private hot tubs eczema injuries to the skin underlying health conditions that reduce the bodys ability to fight infection In most cases, folliculitis will clear on its own and does not pose a major threat. However, if it does not clear up, it could progress into a more serious infection or cause boils to form. Boils are large, pus-filled bumps that are commonly caused by Staphylococcus bacterial infection. If any skin infection becomes worse, a person should seek medical attention, as soon as possible. Keratosis pilaris Keratosis pilaris is another common skin condition that causes small, red bumps to appear on the skin. Similarly to folliculitis, keratosis pilaris may itch, feel dry, or feel rough to touch. The American Academy of Dermatology report that approximately 40 percent of all adults and up to 5080 percent of teens experience keratosis pilaris. Keratosis pilaris occurs when a protein called keratin and dead skin clog the skins pores. Keratin is found in the nails, hair, and skin. While anyone could develop it, keratosis pilaris is more likely to occur in people with eczema or dry skin. While keratosis pilaris is a harmless condition, some people may want to speak to their doctor about treatment. In some cases, doctors may recommend moisturizing ointments or creams to help alleviate the symptoms. Hives Share on Pinterest Insect bites can trigger hives. Hives are described as itchy red or skin-toned welts that are slightly raised above the rest of the skin. When pressed in the center, they turn white. Hives can appear on the legs and nearly anywhere else on the body. Some people may mistake hives for a pimple on their leg due to their similar appearance. According to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, approximately 20 percent of people will develop hives at some point in their lifetime. Hives can occur at any age but tend to be associated with underlying conditions, such as: viral hepatitis colds autoimmune disease bacterial infections, including Strep throat infectious mononucleosis Also, there are several potential triggers that can cause hives. These may include: insect bites reaction to medications pollen plants foods cold/heat latex Hives are often not a serious cause for concern unless other symptoms occur with them. One of the most common causes is insect bites, which are often itchy but not serious. Eczema Eczema, which is also called atopic dermatitis, is a common skin condition where itchy patches appear along with red bumps. These patches may form pimple-like blisters that ooze a clear liquid, or they could be dry and scaly. A person with eczema tends to go through periods where rashes appear, often referred to as flares. Between flares, the skin may return to normal. There are many potential triggers of eczema flares. These can include: contact with certain fabrics, such as wool various cleaning products perfumes or cosmetics heat and sweat soaps detergents stress Researchers are still not sure of the causes of eczema. However, they have started to take note of certain patterns in eczemas occurrences. Some observations include: It is more common in cities with higher pollution levels and cooler temperatures. A child born to an older woman is more likely to develop eczema. Eczema tends to run in families. Females are slightly more likely to get eczema than males. There appears to be a connection between eczema and the person or their family having seasonal allergies. The American Academy of Dermatology suggest that approximately 90 percent of eczema cases are diagnosed before a childs fifth birthday, and the condition is far less likely to start when a person is an adult. However, an adult has about a 50 percent chance of still showing some symptoms as they age if they had eczema as a child. Advertisement Co-authors Shin Kim, MPH, Nicholas Deputy, Ph.D, MPH, and Cheryl Robbins, Ph.D, MS, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA discuss the risks associated with pre-existing and gestational diabetes and highlight four main preventive activities in the article entitled "Diabetes During Pregnancy: Surveillance, Preconception Care, and Postpartum Care." These include improved surveillance of pregnant women for diabetes, preconception care for women with pre-existing diabetes, postpartum screening for women with gestational diabetes, and programs designed to prevent the progression of gestational diabetes to type 2 diabetes post-pregnancy."A greater awareness of the risks of diabetes during and after pregnancy and more widespread efforts to identify pregnant women with pre-existing or gestational diabetes may help mitigate some of the risks, particularly through improved glucose control and the opportunity to introduce screening and lifestyle interventions as part of postpartum care," says Susan G. Kornstein, MD, Editor-in-Chief of, Executive Director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Institute for Women's Health, Richmond, VA, and President of the Academy of Women's Health.Source: Eurekalert The recorded final conversations between the MH370 pilot and air traffic control have finally been put out in public domain. The deceased pilot of the ill-fated Malaysian Airlines aircraft MH370 has long been accused by experts and public alike for being mentally unstable and killing all 239 people on board. It was recently revealed by a panel of experts, that it was almost a certainty that the pilot committed murder by drowning the aircraft somewhere in the Indian Ocean before hovering above his home country after takeoff. Although, what really transpired during the flight will always remain a mystery as the search for debris has been halted. Twitter These are the final conversations between the pilot and air traffic control, which lasted over a span of almost an hour before the aircraft went missing. 12:25:53 (MAS 370) Delivery MAS 370, good morning. 12:26:02 (ATC) MAS 370 standby and Malaysia Six is cleared to Frankfurt via AGOSA Alpha Departure six thousand feet squawk two one zero six. 12:26:19 (ATC) ... MAS 370 request level. 12:26:21 (MAS 370) MAS 370, we are ready. Requesting flight level three five zero to Beijing. 12:26:39 (ATC) MAS 370 is cleared to Beijing via PIBOS A departure six thousand feet squawk two one five seven. 12:26:45 (MAS 370) Beijing PIBOS A six thousand squawk two one five seven, MAS 370. Thank you. 12:26:53 (ATC) MAS 370, welcome over to ground. 12:26:55 (MAS 370) Good day. 12:27:27 (MAS 370) Ground MAS 370 good morning, Charlie one requesting push and start. 12:27:34 (ATC) MAS 370 Lumpur Ground, morning, push back and start approved runway 32 right exit via Sierra four. 12:27:40 (MAS 370) Push back and start approved 32 right exit via Sierra four POB 239 Mike Romeo Oscar. 12:27:45 (ATC) Copied. 12:32:13 (MAS 370) MAS 377 request taxi. 12:32:26 (ATC) MAS 37..... (garbled) ... standard route. Hold short Bravo. 12:32:30 (MAS 370) Ground, MAS 370. You are unreadable. Say again. 12:32:38 (ATC) MAS 370 taxi to holding point Alfa 11 Runway 32 right via standard route. Hold short of Bravo. 12:32:42 (MAS 370) Alfa 11 standard route, hold short Bravo MAS 370. 12:35:53 (ATC) MAS 370 Tower. 12:36:19 (ATC) (garbled) ... Tower ... (garbled) (MAS 370) 1188 MAS 370, thank you. 12:36:30 (MAS 370) Tower MAS 370, morning. 12:36:38 (ATC) MAS 370, good morning. Lumpur Tower. Holding point... (garbled)... 10 32 Right. 12:36:50 (MAS 370) Alfa 10 MAS 370. 12:38:43 (ATC) 370 line up 32 Right Alfa 10. (MAS 370) Line up 32 Right Alfa 10 MAS370. 12:40:38 (ATC) 370 32 Right, cleared for take-off. Good night. (MAS 370) 32 Right, cleared for take-off MAS 370. Thank you. Bye. After this, the plane took off at 12:41 am, and shifted from ground ATC to outbound radar control by 12:46 am. 12:42:05 (MAS 370) Departure Malaysian three seven zero. 12:42:10 (ATC) Malaysian three seven zero selamat pagi [good morning] identified. Climb flight level one eight zero cancel SID turn right direct to IGARI. 12:42:48 (MAS 370) OK level one eight zero direct IGARI Malaysian one err three seven zero 12:42:52 (ATC) Malaysian three seven zero contact Lumpur Radar one three two six. Good night. (MAS 370) Night one three two six. Malaysian three seven zero. 12:46:51 (MAS 370) Lumpur Control, Malaysian three seven zero. 12:46:51 (ATC) Malaysian three seven zero, Lumpur Radar, good morning. Climb flight level two five zero. 12:46:54 (MAS 370) Morning, level two five zero, Malaysian three seven zero. 12:50:06 (ATC) Malaysian three seven zero, climb flight level three five zero. 12:50:09 (MAS 370) Flight level three five zero, Malaysian three seven zero. 01:01:14 (MAS 370) Malaysian three seven zero, maintaining level three five zero. 01:01:19 (ATC) Malaysian three seven zero. 01:07:55 (MAS 370) Malaysian... three seven zero maintaining level three five zero. 01:08:00 (ATC) Malaysian three seven zero. 01:19:24 (ATC) Malaysian three seven zero contact Ho Chi Minh 120 decimal nine. Good night. 01:19:29 (MAS 370) Good night, Malaysian three seven zero. Twitter While these conversations hide the true mental state of the pilot, what it shows is that he expertly hid whatever his motives were before disappearing altogether. Although Malaysia's new Prime Minister Mahathir has promised to reopen the search for the aircraft if any new evidence comes to light, this case will go down as one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of our times. A recent charity gala organised in Ontario, Canada took a very interesting and a fun turn after two political leaders got into an epic Bhangra dance-off! Canadian MP Navdeep Bains and Jagmeet Singh danced away to Punjabi tracks to ensure that the event raised the minimum required amount of funds. Things just got interesting. @NavdeepSBains and @theJagmeetSingh will have a dance off if people donate 50k! We're at 40k! Video to come! @SevaFoodBank @NDP @liberal_party sarbjit kaur (@sarbjitkaur1) May 26, 2018 We raised over 50k! The dance off between @NavdeepSBains and @theJagmeetSingh is the best thing I've seen at any gala! Non partisan support for @SevaFoodBank that serves all! #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/1lwYYPOPeh sarbjit kaur (@sarbjitkaur1) May 26, 2018 The generosity of the Canadian #sikh community knows no bounds. Here's Minister @NavdeepSBains dancing his heart out for a great cause. @SevaFoodBank serves all - no matter your race, religion, background. #cdnpoli #community pic.twitter.com/agYvIvYizp sarbjit kaur (@sarbjitkaur1) May 26, 2018 The fundraiser was organised to raise money for the Food Seva Bank, an initiative run by the Sikhs Serving Canada, a non-profit organisation meant to serve food to low-income families. Jagmeet Singh is one of the most powerful and influential political leaders in the country and is even touted as the next PM candidate. Twitter It seems like a great and a fun initiative to raise awareness and funds for a good, charitable cause. This also serves as a great example for leaders across the world, highlighting the importance of personal participation, when it comes to working for the country you serve. Samsung showcased their latest 4K LED theatre screens at Cinemacon last month and we will finally see them coming to India later this year. The screens are now called Onyx and will be capable of showing pure black picture quality. The biggest size of the screen will stand at 34-feet tall and will have a resolution of 4096X2160. The new technology is said to have clearer, crisper and richer picture quality than what we see at movie theatres today. The screens will be able to display images of 4K, 2K, HDR and 3D quality. Samsung Commenting on the launch Mr Puneet Sethi, Vice President, Consumer Electronics Enterprise Business, Samsung India said, Witnessing the growing demand for advanced theatre technology from movie experts and consumer alike, Samsung planned to make a radical shift from the theatre projection systems to the LED screen in India. We are introducing a game-changing technology which would showcase the work of our directors as intended and at optimal quality. In addition, it will also offer our movie-goers a new level of viewing environment, immersive in every aspect. Samsung These screens are essentially a giant 4K UHD TV without any bezels and do not rely on inferior projection technology. The screens will also be coupled with a custom JBL sound system that will deliver the ultimate audio experience that will compliment the screen. These screens also work like a charm with ambient lighting which means it doesn't obstruct the viewing experience that you may face while watching a movie in a traditional theatre. These screens can also be used for other purposes such as e-sports events and music concerts. Samsung As a moviegoer, you can expect movie tickets to be slightly more expensive than traditional theatres. You can expect these tickets to cost similar to what you would pay for an IMAX screening. Samsung has not detailed exactly as to how much it will cost an exhibitor to implement the new technology. However, Samsung estimates it at somewhere between $500,000 and $800,000. Samsung Samsung said it is currently working with every major Indian exhibitor and we shall see an Onyx theatre in India very soon. The company has already installed Onyx theatres in South Korea, U.S., Switzerland and plans to have 30 installed worldwide by the end of 2018. Thank you very much for the invitation, and particularly because our meeting is taking place in this building. I see the weather outside and I think: Did I perhaps invite the German Minister of Foreign Affairs to Athens? But Im not sure we will have such nice weather in Athens when you come to visit us. It really is beautiful here. We are pleased that our relationship with Germany has evolved so positively; that our old, shared values continue to develop our mutual relations. We believe that, together with Germany, we can shape a future for Europe we as a much smaller country, naturally, with a very long history. We feel that, now more than ever, Europe needs to have a vision, that one must take a longer, more strategic view, not just doing ones job every day, but placing this day-to-day work within a framework for the future of the EU. That is why I am very pleased to be with a colleague who has a vision for and thoughts on the future of Europe. We have much in common, and I am really pleased to see your Diplomatic Academy, which our young diplomats visited. They gained very positive experiences, and as you admitted they were excellent, which pleased me very much as a university professor. We and Germany, or Germany and we, ascertained how much the EU collaborated on the nuclear agreement. We believe it is an endeavour that ensures peace and security in the world, and especially in our region, Southeast Europe. Yesterday, too, during the meeting of the EUs Foreign Affairs Council, we underscored that we fully support all of these initiatives, and especially this initiative. We are concerned at the developments with regard to the future of transatlantic relations. We favour remaining firm in our principles, our values, and our ideas regarding the future cooperation with the emerging countries of the Near and Middle East. At the same time, we do not want there to be a rift in our relations with the U.S. We want these relations to be as they were, regardless of who is governing the country and regardless of what differences there will be with Europe. We also discussed the developments in Southeast Europe. We briefed the German Minister of Foreign Affairs on our negotiations with our friends in Skopje. Germany has always been helpful to the creation of a good atmosphere in our region. I know that Germany has a great interest in the stability of this region. Our policy on Southeast Europe is to guide it to a secure future, to safeguard its transatlantic orientation. And as I said yesterday in Brussels, following our talks in New York and, on Sunday, in Brussels, both Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Nikola Dimitrov and I, did our jobs. Yesterday, today and perhaps tomorrow, the work of the teams elaborating the technical details and legal issues is continuing, and then this work will be forwarded to the two Prime Ministers so that, as is our hope, they can reach a comprehensive agreement. We also discussed how we can step up our cooperation as Ministries of Foreign Affairs. Thank you very much for the invitation and hospitality. JOURNALIST: A question for the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs: You just said the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Greece and fYROM have completed their work and that now it is the Prime Ministers turn. What do you think are the prospects of a solution being found by the June EU Council or the NATO meeting in July? A second question: Did you brief your counterpart on the situation of the two Greek officers who are being held under arrest in Turkey? N. KOTZIAS: I have to repeat myself in order to be absolutely clear. The Ministers of Foreign Affairs have completed their work. As of yesterday, a team of experts from Skopje, Athens and the UN is meeting at our Ministry in Athens. This team is considering the legal and technical side of the preparatory text and making final corrections. When we, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, have checked this work, our work, it will then be sent to the Prime Ministers. Second, I want to make something clear: this agreement with our good friends and neighbours to the north did not come about because they want to join NATO and the EU. Naturally, they do want to join, and we support them. It came about mainly because it is in our and their national interest for there to be security and stability in our region, just as it is in the interest of the Europeans and the European Union. It is not just a matter of their joining NATO, etc. It is not a solution that serves a specific purpose. Naturally, it will also serve this purpose, but it is an agreement that should have been reached decades ago. And further back and I am speaking as a Minister of Foreign Affairs in the fourth year of his term before our leftist government, there was a lot of potential to reach a solution, and it would have been much easier, because difficulties accrue over time. And I state and I will state this clearly before the Hellenic Parliament: if we resolve the problem after so many years of difficulties, I dont understand why it was not resolved earlier by both sides. Both sides bear responsibility. I dont want to make accusations. I just want to underscore that the resolution of this problem is in our interest, in their interest, in everyones interest, including Germanys. We didnt talk about the matter of the officers today. We have discussed it frequently with the German side, and I think we will discuss the issue again during the luncheon. The case of the two officers shows that Turkey has a different political culture from Greece. As you know, we recently arrested Turkish citizens who crossed the border illegally. They were tried immediately, taken to court the next day, found guilty of breaking the law, and sent back to Turkey the same day. For three months now, our officers have been imprisoned, without a trial and without being returned to us. It is a tradition on our borders: soldiers and officers often get disoriented and wander ten meters over the other side. Turkey and Greece are both members of NATO. This means that we are allies, partners, and not enemies, and that is why this authoritarianism and this violation of international customs and the traditional relations we have on our borders is not something we can accept or something we can show understanding for. I believe it is a characteristic problem of political culture. JOURNALIST: I just have one question for both Ministers. You talked in depth about the crisis in forming a government in Italy. Do you believe that this crisis will have repercussions throughout Europe? What will these repercussions be for the upcoming EU reforms or for the euro? Do you think there will be negative repercussions? N. KOTZIAS: As you know, we share a common political history with Italy that goes back some 2,300 years, and that is why it is said that Greeks and Italians are una faccia, una razza. We have a lot in common, and one of the things we have in common is a large debt. It is not something we are proud of, but it exists. And theirs is much larger; eight times larger than ours. In any case, we want a stable, democratic, pro-European Italy. We are concerned about the risk of instability and possible repercussions for their fiscal situation and the extent to which this might cause additional problems for us. And I must say that, decades ago, Italy was the most pro-European country in Europe, in the European Community, in the European Union, and a lot of momentum and ideas came from Italy. And unfortunately, in recent years in spite of an exceptional Prime Minister who is a person friend of mine, Paolo Gentiloni it has no longer been the country that produced great pro-European ideas. I remind you and you are aware of this that from the most conservative forces in Italy to the communists, everyone was pro-European. Regarding the future of Europe, Italy was and I hope it remains a great pro-European force and pioneer of further European integration. Otherwise, we will miss that Italy very much. HURON COUNTY -- For the past several years, the Huron County Republican Party has offered a $500 scholarship to any graduating senior living in Huron County that has been accepted into an institution of higher learning for the coming fall of the calendar year. Paul Mitchell, Congressman from our 10th Congressional District of Michigan, helped increase the scholarship to $1,000 from his personal funds. Mitchell has been in office for less than two years, but already has made several trips to Huron County in support of local farmers, business owners, educators, women's groups, health care providers, members of law enforcement, and now our future student leaders. SEBEWAING -- After a year-long process of looking at strengths and weaknesses and a two-day validation visit from area Lutheran school administration, Christ the King Lutheran School was recommended for full accreditation by the National Lutheran School Accreditation Committee in St. Louis, Missouri. Accreditation is the method schools use to print out a plan for continuing success. The National Office for Lutheran Schools developed a tool for National Lutheran School Accreditation. MARLETTE -- Marlette Regional Hospital recently welcomed the board certified family nurse practitioner, Margaret Marth, to its medical staff. Marth joined Dr. Daniel Kulick, physician assistant Kimberly Verellen, and the staff of Family HealthCare of Brown City. Marth received her bachelor of science in nursing from Wayne State University of Detroit, and received her advanced nurse practitioner certification from Maryville University of St. Louis, Missouri. Marth has been in the healthcare field for nearly 30 years. She began her career working as a paramedic, then transitioned to a medical assistant, phlebotomist, nurse tech, registered nurse and, most recently, a family nurse practitioner. Marth provides primary care medical services to patients of all ages. Her services include, but are not limited to, allergy injections, blood draws for testing, men's and women's health care, immunizations, minor surgical procedures, well child care, preventive acute and chronic care, sports, school, employment and insurance physical exams, and routine office laboratory testing. New patients are currently being accepted at Family HealthCare of Brown City with same-day appointments available. For more information or to schedule an appointment, call 810-346-2751. HURON COUNTY For young area professionals looking at getting into a growing sector, the insurance industry deserves a look. Insurance Alliance of Michigan (IAM) recently released data showing the impact the insurance industry is having on Huron Countys economy, and how job growth in the industry signals a potential future for those interested in an insurance career. In 2016, the insurance industry employed more than 107 people in Huron County, a 10 percent increase from previous years, and pumped $4 million into the countys economy, said Pete Kuhnmuench, executive director of the IAM. This data shows the insurance industry continues to be a consistent, reliable employer in Huron County and across the state of Michigan. According to IAM, nearly 40 percent of the industrys workforce is expected to retire in the next 10 years. Michigans insurance industry needs young professionals to fill the gap. To address this challenge, IAM is a member of the Insuring MI Future, a coalition to attract young talent to careers in the insurance industry. IAM is proud to support the future of the insurance industry through the Insuring MI Future program, which works to close Michigans talent gap by connecting high school students with rewarding careers, Kuhnmuench said. Insuring MI Future sponsors high school insurance programs that are held in partnership with insurance industry members, including Farm Bureau Insurance, AF Group, Pioneer State Mutual, MEEMIC and Frankenmuth Mutual Insurance Company. The programs provide high school juniors and seniors with nine to 12 free college credits, the opportunity to receive an industry designation, job shadows and internships. The college credit is provided through Olivet College, Ferris State University and Northwood University. Statewide, there are 90 insurance companies headquartered in Michigan, the 12th largest concentration of insurance companies in the United States, according to IAM. Thousands of other companies are licensed to provide insurance in this state even though they are headquartered in other states. There are also thousands of agents located throughout the Michigan who provide insurance products to policyholders. NEW LONDON Gotta hand it to eastern Connecticut: theyve always got a new festival ready for most every occasion. Next weekend, just in time to usher in summer, its the 2nd Annual New London Blues and Brews Fest on June 2 and 3. Billed as a blues-infused downtown New London experience, this years festival will be headlined by Madison resident Beehive Queen Christine Ohlman and the great Dallas-based bluesman Lucky Peterson. It will feature bands playing both Saturday and Sunday in the new amphitheater in New Londons Hygienic Art Park, https://www.hygienic.org/ with additional performances at Daddy Jacks and other New London watering holes along Bank Street. The Hygienic Art Park lineup is: Saturday: The Chris Leigh Band, Ryan Hartt and The Blue Hearts, Chris Mackay and The Tone Shifters, Ramblin Dan Stevens and the Firey Band and Lucky Peterson Sunday: Franklin Brothers, Paul Gabriel Blues Band and Christine Ohlman & Rebel Montez. Hygienic Art Park performances run from 2 to 10:30 p.m. Saturday and 2:30to 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Daddy Jacks will feature Hip Joint on Friday from 8:30 to 11:30 p.m. and The Sidewinders on Saturday from 8 p.m. to midnight. According to Sara Connolly, secretary of the Hygienic board of directors, the festival was the brainchild of Daddy Jacks owner Jack Chaplin, whom she described as a huge blues fan. The festival also benefits from the expertise of String Theory owner, musician and Mystic Blues Festival co-founder Chris Leigh, with other organizers including Connolly and Hygienic director Sara McKay. The goal, Connolly said, is to eventually have enough venues participating to have music all along Bank Street with kind of a New Orleans feel as you stroll from one to the other. This will be the very first event in the new Hygienic Art Park amphitheater, she said. Tickets for the festival are available in advance at https://www.hygienic.org/ for $20 for either Saturday or Sunday or $30 for a weekend pass. Theyll be available on Saturday or Sunday at both the Hygienic Arts Park and Daddy Jacks for $25 for a day pass or $40 for a weekend pass. All performances as well as Brew Deals are available to those who purchase tickets at any of the participating venues or online. Guest are encouraged to wear comfortable shoes for walking and dancing and bring a healthy appetite for local eats and brews. The weekend pass will include a special local-brew tasting featuring several local breweries. The festival is presented by Daddy Jacks and Hygienic Art and sponsored by The Day, Safe Harbor Beer, String Theory School of Music, Sound Waves, Mystic Bridge IPA and Spindrift Guitars. MIDDLETOWN It began with drums and chants of Smart cities are arts cities, a man who could have been a model for Grant Woods American Gothic holding a pitchfork crowned with two America flags and, towering above all else, a woman standing 18 feet tall on stilts. It ended with a Common Council majority reversing itself and upholding Mayor Daniel T. Drews veto of several proposed reductions in the city budget that supporters said would have adversely affected both the arts community and the citys environmental efforts. The prolonged discussion Tuesday night also appeared to open a door to efforts to improve communication about the city budget while revising the budget-making process so it would become more open and transparent. Beginning more or less at 6 p.m., more than 75 members or supporters of the citys arts community the arts council, the Oddfellows Playhouse, Circus Camp, the Arts Academy began gathering in the parking lot behind Town Hall. They hoped to convince the council to uphold Drews veto of proposed budget reductions that were adopted on May 14. The council had adopted proposals to reduce funding for the arts and culture coordinator, an environmental specialist for the planning department, a library assistant, as well as allocations affecting the police, including software maintenance, vehicle modems, and funding for washing police cruisers. Councilors said the reductions were necessary, given the continuing uncertainty involving the state budget deficit and the likelihood of more severe contractions in state funding next year. But critics said the cuts to the arts coordinator in particular could tarnish Middletowns growing reputation an incubator for the arts and could cripple early arts education for young children. It was against that background that arts advocates filed into the council chamber including the woman on stilts. Planning & Zoning Commission Chairman Stephen DeVoto was admitted, but police would not allow him to bring in his pitchfork, flags or no flags. Two councilors were missing: Majority leader Thomas J. Serra and Councilor Eugene Nocera. Nocera was attending a memorial service for his brother who died last week. Serra was ill and under doctors orders to limit his activities, Council Gerald E. Daley reported to the meeting. Daley started the discussion by making a motion to override the mayors veto. In doing so, he took to task the person(s) who put out a flier that attacked Serra with what Daley said was mixture of lies and insults. Minority leader Sebastian Giuliano said the councils action on May 14 did not eliminate the arts advisor or the environmental specialists, but instead reduced funding for the positions. He said the city budget takes up 135 pages, adding the council routinely has to fill holes and fix things that may have been overlooked as the council sought to adopt the budget. This is not going to bring down the Apocalypse, Giuliano said, adding the council acted in good faith. Funding for the two positions was reduced to $1, which would allow the council to reallocate funds into those accounts as early as the first business day of the new fiscal year, July 2, Giuliano said. It was then the turn of residents to speak. And over the next nearly two hours, nearly 30 residents spoke, including the woman on stilts, Jasmine Peck, a performer from the Circus Camp, whose presence created a problem of sorts for the TV camera that records the council meetings. The camera had to be adjusted to showed Pecks face while she had to be handed a microphone so her remarks could also be recorded Some spoke of the city breaking faith with residents who had worked to create a vibrant arts community. Still others said the absence of environmental planner would harm efforts to recapture the riverfront and improve brownfields so they could be restored to the tax rolls. Its the taxpayers who will pay more if the environmental specialist position is not restored to full funding, resident John Paul warned. Dick Wheeler, the executive director of the Oddfellows Playhouse and co-founder of the Art Farm, said residents and the city had worked for 40 years to build up the citys reputation as a thriving center for the arts., Wheeler called for restoring a full-time arts director who would have a seat at the table and could serve as an advocate for the arts community. Arts dont waste money, the arts generate money for the city, Wheeler said. Speaking with an edge in his voice, Jeff Hush, a member of the Clean Energy Task Force, said, If you leave out arts, you shoot yourself in the foot. And if you cut out the ability of people to speak, you will lose our democracy, he added. Arts provide an outlet for people to speak their minds, artist Christina Duffy said. A 17-year-old woman spoke of how the circus and the art farm raised her and shaped her when here parents couldnt. A city can only have one reputation, and Middletowns commitment to the arts has put the city on the cusp of being great, John Laffin said. Melissa Schilke warned of the other side of that coin. She said Colorado once slashed its arts and tourism budget. It took the state four years to recover from the loss of those cuts. Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt, Marcella Trowbridge said, quoting from Shakespeare. Please be bold and be resolute, she implored the council. When it came time for them to respond, councilors from both parties sought to out-do one another both in pledging their commitment to the arts and complimenting the residents for their thoughts and their demeanor. Even the councilors who voted for the reduction support the arts, Deputy Majority Leader Mary Bartolotta said. As he pledged his support for upholding the mayors veto, Councilor Philip J. Pessina called on the council to look at the charter and the way we do business in the community. He said the council must commit to making the budget process more open to residents, adding, Im very interested in hearing what the public has to say. It was left to Corporation Counsel Daniel Tyan to comment, This is the democracy that Middletown is known for. And then the council voted 7-3 to uphold Drews veto. Reporter Jeff Mill covers East Hampton, Cromwell and Portland for the Middletown Press. Contact him at jeff.mill@hearstmediact.com. A mommy-and-me photo Ivanka Trump tweeted over the weekend has been called "tone-deaf" after recent reports of migrant families being separated at the U.S.-Mexican border. On Sunday Trump shared a photo of herself and her son, Theodore, smiling and looking into one another's eyes with the caption, "My [emoticon heart]! #SundayMorning." Some found the post insensitive in light of the emergence of multiple reports detailing U.S. border agents separating children from parents who have illegally crossed the border and placing them in protective custody as their family members await possible legal repercussions. A report released last week by the American Civil Liberties Union claimed border agents abused and neglected scores of unaccompanied minors under the Obama Administration between 2009 and 2014. In April the New York Times and Associated Press reported authorities had lost contact with nearly 1,500 migrant children who had been placed with U.S. sponsor families. The government bears no legal responsibility for the children, a senior official told a Senate committee. The hashtag #WhereAreTheChildren began trending last week, and continued to trend Sunday when Ivanka Trump shared the photo with her son, a move deemed callous by many on Twitter. "Your timing in posting this picture is outrageous," tweeted @barbjcarp. "Thank you @Ivanka for reminding us that 'you get to be a mom.' I pray for the missing children," wrote @DarlenyCepin. Ivanka Trump has yet to respond to the backlash. Earlier in the week, she called for a national paid family leave policy for the workplace. "We need a national #PaidLeave policy to ensure #FamilyBenefits for all in our country!" the tweet said. HAMDEN On the countrys day of remembrance, a local World War II veteran was honored during a special Memorial Day ceremony. Following the towns 82nd Memorial Day Parade Monday, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., presented 101-year-old Hamden resident Fred Baselice with three long awaited medals in recognition of his service while stationed in France in 1944 just after the invasion of Normandy. Memorial day is when we remember those that did not come back, that lost their lives standing up for all of us and all of our values, Murphy said. Today is at its heart a very solemn day. I am in awe of those that serve. Im here to provide recognition that is long overdue to one of Hamdens best. Freds story is at the same time unique and also familiar. You will recognize his story in thousands of other people who came back to Hamden, came back to Greater New Haven after fighting in World War II and made great lives for themselves. Baselice was honored with the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three Bronze Service Stars, the World War II Victory Medal and the Army of Occupation Medal with Germany Clasp. He was also presented with a certificate of recognition from the U.S. Congress for his service. I think if I had to do it over again, I would gladly do it all over again, he said. I give all my support to the veterans. What they did, those that came back and those that didnt come back were all one family and appreciated everything everybody did...For my buddies who gave up their lives, Id go back to try to correct everything that wasnt right. Baselice grew up in The Bronx, New York, and at only 6 years old, went to work picking up scrap metal with a horse drawn cart to help support his family. He said he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1938 because he enjoyed everything (the country) did for me and my family and I wanted to give back whatever I could. He was originally stationed in the Pacific Northwest as a medic, but was sent to France shortly after the D-Day invasion in 1944, when about 156,000 American, British and Canadian forces landed on beaches along a stretch of the heavily fortified coast in the Normandy Region of France. He served in some of the most dangerous combat of World War II saving lives, going out into the battlefield to identify the wounded, Murphy said. I remember the ones that got killed before me, Baselice said. When the bombings came in, you could see the bodies going up into the air and coming to the ground. It was like they dug their own grave. During his service he was hit with shrapnel and spend 10 days in a field hospital. Baselice said he still doesnt remember where the hospital was and what was going on while he was there. This is an American story, Murphy said. Fred faced hardship, went to protect his nation overseas, was injured, then went back again to protect his nation and when he came back to the U.S. he did great things to make sure this country lifted up others who had served when they returned. After the war when Baselice returned to the U.S., he married and settled in West Haven with his wife, where Murphy said he helped establish the West Haven VA. Baselice went to work for the U.S. Post Office and has been a member of the American Legion for 60 years. I didnt mind waiting so long for the medal, Baselice said. I was more interested in raising a family and having three great children and I appreciate the life I lived and I didnt expect to be 101 years old. I appreciate everybodys thinking of us... I appreciate it but there are a lot of soldiers out there that should get their medals too. Murphy said it is not surprising is that it took so long to get these medals to Fred, because like so many that had served this country, they didnt do it for the medals. They didnt do it for the recognition or for the certificates. They did it because it was the right thing to do for their country. I know that there are, frankly, thousands of others who served in either World War II or Korea or Vietnam that have not received their medals because thats not why they did it. Only 558,000 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II were alive in 2017, according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs statistics. I cannot even imagine trying to express in words what I feel for people who laid down their lives, their families and to everyone that served, so I would like you to say thank you, Mayor Curt B. Leng said during the ceremony. mdignan@hearstmediact.com Society hosting walking tour featuring churches EAST HAMPTON The Chatham Historical Society is organizing a walking tour of the three churches in the Village of East Hampton on Sunday, June 3 at 1 p.m. as part of its Explore East Hampton monthly series of walks. Come for a walk back in time and learn about history of three historic village churches. The walk is sponsored by the East Hampton Parks and Recreation Dept. Chatham Historical Society (CHS) member Marty Podskoch will lead the walk that will begin at the CHS Museum Complex at 6 Bevin Boulevard. Parking is available by the museum or behind the Center School. The tour will first go to the Congregational Church on Main St. and learn its history and include a walk through its facilities. The group will then walk to the Bethlehem Lutheran Church on East High St. The final stop on the tour will be St. Patricks Catholic Church on West High St. The tour will then return to the CHS Museum that will be open to explore. Those that are unable to walk can still participate by traveling by car. The Walking Tour offers a wonderful and unique opportunity for new residents to learn about the history of the churches. Adults and children are welcome to join in what promises to be an afternoon of making local history come alive. The tour will take approximately 2 hours. Heavy rain will cancel the walk. For further information about upcoming walks or the Chatham Historical Society, visit https:www.chathamhistoricalct.org/ or contact Marty Podskoch, coordinator of the Explore East Hampton walks at 860-267-2442, podskoch@comcast.net, Also visit http://www.easthamptonrec.com/info/activities/program_details.aspx?ProgramID=27025 East Hampton town-wide tag sale announced EAST HAMPTON East Hamptons Town Wide Tag Sale will be held on June 16, with a rain date of June 23. Applications can be picked up at the Town Clerks office, the Library, Pauls and Sandys, or call 860-267-4732. A donation of $15 must be received by June 6 to be included on over 300 maps to be given out free to shoppers. If you prefer to set up on the East Hampton Historical Societys lawn, at 6 Bevin Blvd. indicate on the application. This event is a fundraiser for the Chatham Historical Society of East Hampton and usually draws between 60 and 70 sellers. Volunteers will deliver a CHS sign to you. Annual Evening of the Arts at RHAM To honor all of the creative endeavors of its multi-talented students, the music and fine art departments at RHAM High School will hold its annual Evening of the Arts event Wednesday, June 6, from 5 to 9 p.m. The school is celebrating the visual and performing arts with a juried art show, performing ensembles, soloists, poetry readings, live screen printing and photo booth, including a catered dinner from Gina Maries. Dinner tickets at $20 per person are being sold only in advance using the order form on the school website, due by May 14. General admission tickets to view the art show and watch performances only will be sold at the door for $5. There is no charge for general admission for young children, students and seniors. Our Evening of the Arts will begin at 5 p.m. with guests being invited to peruse artwork and vote for their favorites in our Peoples Choice Award category as well as purchase t-shirts designed and made by students. Guests can try out the photo booth or live screen printing in the atrium to make their own commemorative prints. At 5:45, guests who have ordered dinner tickets in advance will enjoy a buffet style catered dinner from Gina Maries. Guests will be treated to cabaret style solo and ensemble performances on our small stage, as well as poetry readings from creative writing students. At 7:30, all guests will be invited to the auditorium for the large ensemble performances. Visual art show juried awards, generously donated by Blicks Art Materials and Jerrys Artarama, will be presented during intermission in the auditorium. Dessert and coffee will also be served at this time at the concession stand. Art, music, poetry, and activities all created and/or performed by RHAMs students. Contact Beverley Fisher at beverley.fisher@rhamschools.org or Nicholas Kokus at nicholas.kokus@rhamschools.org with questions, or call 860-228-9474 Society holding annual childrens program HADDAM The Haddam Historical Society will hold its 13th annual summer program, A Week in the Life of an Early American Child, offered for girls and boys ages 8-12. This year the program will take place Tuesday, June 26 Friday, June 29. Students will travel back in time to the year 1830 and spend the week with Mrs. Thankful Arnold and her family. All activities take place at the Thankful Arnold House Museum in Haddam, and they include caring for farm animals; carding, spinning and felting wool; creating a mini floorcloth; making butter; baking; playing with Colonial toys and games, and even dancing! The fee is $139 for the four days with all materials and snacks included. The first three days are half-day sessions (9 a.m. to noon). Friday June 29 will be a full-day session (9 am to 3 pm). For more information and registration, go to www.haddamhistory.org. For questions, contact Sarah Neal, education coordinator, The Haddam Historical Society, at education@haddamhistory.org or call 860-345-2400. Relay for Life team announces meetings HIGGANUM The American Cancer Society Relay for Life of HK Pull for Hope and walk on June 23 at HK High School, with a new Fire Truck Pull in conjunction with the Relay For Life event. In addition to traditional Relay For Life teams, the committee is looking for teams of 12 to sign up and raise $1200 per team to pull a fire truck during the Relay event. Teams will compete to see who can pull the truck the fastest and earn bragging rights and a trophy. Register for a fire truck pull team or walking team at RelayForLife.org/HKCT Monthly Team Captain and committee meetings will be at St. James Church Parish Hall, 501 Killingworth Road, Higganum, from 6:30-8 p.m. on May 30, and bank night on June 13. Those interested in volunteering or who would like more information can contact Cate Reid from the American Cancer Society at Catherine.reid@cancer.org or Ed Yantosh at rflofhk@gmail.com, or learn more at RelayForLife.org/HKCT. In recognition of efforts to form and nurture relationships with a wide array of nations in the region, the Pentagon is renaming its oldest and largest combatant command, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Wednesday. U.S. Pacific Command will be called U.S. Indo-Pacific Command moving forward, he said. Speaking at the Pearl Harbor Memorial in Hawaii as Adm. Phil Davidson replaced Adm. Harry Harris as head of the command, Mattis spoke of the commitment of the United States not only to the larger nations of the Western Pacific, but also to the nations bordering the Indian Ocean. "Our 2018 National Defense Strategy is the first of its kind in a decade, and it acknowledges ... America's resolve and lasting commitment to the Indo-Pacific," Mattis said. " ... America continues to invest vigorously in Indo-Pacific stability, bolstering the free and open rules-based international order that has enabled this region to grow and to thrive for over 70 years." Mattis made repeated references to respecting the sovereignty of individual nations, a key contention in the region amid Chinese land grabs and contested territorial claims. Military Times first reported earlier this month that the Pentagon was considering renaming PACOM. A Pentagon spokesman, Army Col. Rob Manning, confirmed the change was under consideration, adding that the scope of the region and responsibilities of its commander would not change even if the name did. Evidence of the Pentagon's efforts to engage with other nations in the region can be seen in military exercises and other partnered engagement. On May 23, representatives from the Indian Army, among other international militaries, participated in the Pacific Amphibious Leaders Symposium, hosted by Marine Corps Forces Pacific. In January, representatives of the Indian Navy traveled to Pearl Harbor to meet with U.S. 7th Fleet leadership for an annual executive steering group forum. "Relationships with our Indian Ocean and Pacific allies and partners have proven critical in maintaining regional stability," Mattis said Wednesday. "We stand by our partners and support their sovereign decisions, because all nations large and small are essential to the region to sustain stability in ocean areas critical to maintaining peace." Mattis credited Harris, who has led PACOM since May 2015, for steering "a steady ship amid often-shifting ocean currents." "You have demonstrated that the United States takes no relationship for granted," Mattis said. Davidson, who most recently commanded U.S. Fleet Forces Command, has previous experience in the Pacific, having served multiple tours with the U.S. Pacific Fleet Staff during his 36-year career, according to his official biography. -- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck. South Korea warned Wednesday against expecting North Korea to agree to get rid of its nuclear weapons quickly in the planned peace summit with President Donald Trump. "There will be many challenges that need to be overcome" before North Korea's Kim Jong-un would commit to the U.S. demand for "complete, verifiable and irreversible" denuclearization, said Cho Myoung-gyon, Seoul's unification minister. "I can say that we have just entered the gate of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," said Cho, a top adviser to President Moon Jae-in who has been engaged with North Korean officials in talks at Panmunjom truce village in the Demilitarized Zone. Cho made the remarks in an address to a visiting European delegation, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency. "I can say that the differences in stances between North Korea and the U.S. remain quite significant," Cho said. "It will not be easy to narrow the gap and find common ground but I think it would not be impossible." As unification minister, Cho has also been involved in talks with the North on the possibility of replacing the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953 with a peace treaty. A recent CIA assessment appeared to back up Cho in stating that it was highly unlikely the North would agree to complete denuclearization anytime soon, NBC News reported. In addition, a top nuclear arms expert predicted that North Korea's extensive nuclear weapons systems and facilities could take as long as 15 years to dismantle. The analysis by Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the government's Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico who has toured the North's nuclear facilities four times, was first reported by The New York Times. The White House is continuing to press ahead on three fronts with preparations for the proposed summit with Kim in Singapore on June 12. North Korea's Kim Yong-chol, the top intelligence adviser to Kim Jong-un, was headed to the U.S. on Wednesday for meetings in New York with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In Panmunjom, Sung Kim, the former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, was meeting with North Korean officials on denuclearization terms. In Singapore, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin was meeting with a North Korean team to work out the logistics of the summit. The on-again, off-again nature of the talks has increased pressure on the diplomats. Last week, Trump said he was canceling the summit in response to threats from the North, but planning for the summit resumed after conciliatory gestures from the North following a letter from Trump. In a Tweet on Tuesday, Trump wrote, "We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Yong Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!" -- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com. The suspected Taliban fighters who attacked the Afghan interior ministry Wednesday were wearing old U.S. Army Universal Camouflage Pattern Uniforms and driving a captured Humvee, a tactic the enemy has used in the past, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan said today. "Eight terrorists in a captured Humvee attempted to penetrate the Minister of Interior headquarters in downtown Kabul," Army Gen. John Nicholson, Operation Resolute Support mission commander, told reporters at the Pentagon. The attackers were attempting to drive through a checkpoint into the government complex when they were stopped by Afghan security, he said. "They were wearing old-style Army uniforms," Nicholson said. "The good news is that the guards at the gate, the Afghan guards, immediately recognized these as old uniforms, called on them to exit the vehicle so they could be checked out and, at that point, the fighting started." Nicholson said he was told one of the attackers "detonated his suicide vest and actually killed himself and some of his colleagues as they were conducting the attack." "They never gained entrance to the MOI headquarters," he said. The Afghan special police reaction unit on "alert status inside the city quickly reacted and killed all these terrorists before they could gain entrance to the MOI," Nicholson said. Seven of the eight enemy fighters were killed in the attempted attack; one was taken prisoner, Nicholson said. "Sadly, one of our Afghan comrades was killed and a few more were wounded, but the attack failed," he said. U.S. and coalition forces believe the Taliban's Haqqani Network launched the attack, Nicholson said, adding that it tracks with its previous tactics. Enemy forces have used captured uniforms in the past in an attempt to fool security, but "frankly it has been well over a year" since that has occurred, he said. "Obviously, it's a concern if the enemy is wearing old uniforms. It might cause a hesitation or a delay ... but again I point to the alertness and the quick reaction of the Afghan security forces on the scene," Nicholson said. "They did exactly what they were supposed to do." -- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com. It's not unusual that the Pentagon's newest F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft is already showing signs of aging after only a decade of service, the Air Force's head of training said last week. Lt. Gen Steven Kwast, head of Air Education and Training Command, said because of how complex the entire F-35 aircraft system is, setbacks are natural even as pilots begin training on the platform. "When you take a look at the history of every program we've ever had, whether it was the B-1 or the F-16 [Fighting Falcon] or the F-15 [Eagle], when you rewind the tapes, every single one of them suffered from these same growing pains," Kwast said during a breakfast in Washington, D.C. on May 24. "It's just natural for a system that complex, that capable, that not everything is perfect," he said, adding that's the same for a brand new-aircraft like the F-35. Related content: Earlier this month, Military.com reported that some of the older-generation F-35As at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, were in bad shape, posing hindrances to training because of older software configurations, among other problems. The commander of the 33rd Fighter Wing, the leading training wing for F-35A student pilots, said it's one of his many concerns with training students on some of the oldest Block 2B planes. "Everybody's aware that that fleet is on life support right now, and they need to kind of crank up the machine a little bit if they plan on extending the utility of this fleet another five or 10 years," said Col. Paul Moga, who also oversees the maintenance training units at Eglin. The fifth-generation stealth plane arrived at Eglin in 2011 and made the 33rd Fighter Wing the first U.S. F-35 training unit. The first class of student pilots started training in 2013. The fleet at Eglin has only just now begun catching up with needed integration upgrades, Moga said. Even after seven years of hosting the F-35 at Eglin and declaring F-35A initial operational capability in 2016, Kwast said the Air Force is still at "the very early stages of this F-35 becoming a perfectly mature weapons system" overall. Kwast also noted he would like to see a common combat configuration for fifth-generation aircraft like the F-35 and the F-22 Raptor for students in the pipeline. "It all comes down to the money, and we would like them all to be to the same standard. And that is whatever is on the frontline of the combat edge is also the environment that any trainer is a part of so there's no negative learning," Kwast said, echoing Moga. "That's the nirvana," he continued. But "the amount of money and time that it takes to build out and code it's disconnected. The training aircraft are not the same load necessarily as the frontline aircraft." Kwast said leveraging programs like Pilot Training Next, or the Air Force's push to use more technology and artificial intelligence for its next set of flyers, helps to fill that gap. But the service is still carving out how to best deal with its F-35 woes as a program overall, the general said. "You learn as you go, you evolve as you go, and get better as you go, so we're used to a very mature F-16 [or] F-15 fleet, for example, where we've worked out all those kinks," Kwast said. "Yes we still stumble on kinks like the longeron in the F-15 for example, but generally speaking we've ironed out the kinks," he added, referring to structural problems in the legacy fleet. "Historically this is not unexpected," Kwast said. Kwast compared the F-35 "growing pains" to the B-1 Lancer in that President Jimmy Carter stifled through the program which ended up becoming "a national crisis." Carter at the time cancelled the first iteration B-1A bomber program in favor of shifting priorities to intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well as the air launched cruise missile program. The Reagan administration restored the bomber initiative, known to become the B-1B, in 1981. "And now the B-1, even though its big, it is incredibly capable," Kwast said of its current multirole mission. -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @oriana0214. Muhajer says one of the battles he saw was the 2011 shootdown of Extortion 17, the deadliest single moment of the 20-year war... Robert Wilkie, President Donald Trump's choice for VA secretary, has already given the Senate a primer on his views on health care for troops and veterans, citing his experience as the son of a thrice-wounded Vietnam veteran and referencing his work managing personnel matters for the Pentagon. He was tapped for the position after Trump's previous nominee, Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, the White House physician, withdrew amid allegations of drinking on the job and other improper conduct. Wilkie was acting VA secretary until Wednesday when the White House said he was stepping down from the post to get around a section of the U.S. Code barring an acting secretary from taking the permanent job. Wilkie has maintained a relatively low profile amid the chaos. But his statements to lawmakers at a confirmation hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee last November offer clues to his background and priorities. "I have been privileged to see this military life from many angles: as a dependent, as the son of a gravely wounded combat soldier, as an officer with a family in the military health care system, and as a senior leader in the White House and the Pentagon," he told the committee. Wilkie made the remarks in testimony and in written responses to questions at his confirmation hearing as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' pick to become the Pentagon's under secretary for personnel and readiness. In that post, he had charge of the Pentagon's sprawling Defense Health Agency until he was moved to the Department of Veterans Affairs in March as acting secretary amid turmoil over the angry departure of VA Secretary Dr. David Shulkin. Wilkie's most recent job on Capitol Hill was as a top aide to Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina. In backing his nomination as under secretary, Tillis described Wilkie as a wonky workaholic devoted to the military's mission. "He has a grasp of history that is unparalleled," Tillis said. "We play a game in my office called 'Stump Robert.' We haven't figured out how to do it yet. "We also call him 'Forrest Gump,' " the senator said, a possible reference to Wilkie's ability to exceed expectations. "There is not a single story he can't put in context with some experience he had in his working career or dating back to the Roman times," Tillis said, prompting laughter from the committee. When Wilkie was nominated for the VA post, Tillis said, "Robert is one of the most honorable and decent human beings I've ever worked with, and anyone who knows him has seen his drive to serve his country and his passion for honoring our nation's veterans and service members, qualities that will be tremendous assets at the VA." Wilkie, a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, formerly served as an intelligence officer in the Navy. The 55-year-old lawyer received his bachelor's degree from Wake Forest University in North Carolina and a law degree from Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans. He received Master of Laws in International and Comparative Law from Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. In both his oral and written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Wilkie referred to his father, retired Army Lt. Col. Robert Leon Wilkie Sr., who died last year. His father's awards included three Purple Hearts, four awards of the Bronze Star (one with Combat "V" device), four awards of the Air Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the senior Parachutist Badge and the Ranger tab. Wilkie also expressed views on accountability for personnel working in the military health system and options for private care that put him in line with the Trump administration's plans for the VA Mission Act, which passed the Senate last week. In addition, Wilkie said the military's health system is too reliant on paper records. Earlier this month, as acting secretary, he awarded a 10-year, $10 billion contract to Cerner Corp. of Kansas City, Missouri, for electronic health records at the VA. "For our families, the military health system has been slow to keep up with modern medical advances for conditions like autism and other behavioral disorders," Wilkie told the committee. He also said he is determined to bring down the veteran suicide rate, which was Shulkin's top priority at the VA. "We still have military families making their medical appointments on paper. And P&R [Personnel and Readiness], in accord with the direction of this committee, is consolidating our multiple military health care systems into one streamlined and efficient military health care administration," he said. That effort appears to track with the VA Mission Act, which aims to consolidate seven community and private-care options under the existing Veterans Choice program at the VA into one program. When asked for his opinion on the greatest threat to the sustainment of the military health system, Wilkie said it is "the inability to transform the military health system into a much leaner and more efficient organization that still meets the warfighters' and beneficiaries' needs." He added that he is looking for "increased efficiencies that result in substantially enhanced care for service members and their families, as well as the more effective allocation of resources." "I believe we need to look at all options to managing the cost of DoD health care," including more reliance on the private sector, Wilkie told the committee. "The potential for greater efficiency and effectiveness is substantial," he said. "It also includes looking at how the department buys health care from the civilian sector to emphasize outcomes and promoting healthy lifestyles among our beneficiaries to reduce the demand for health services." As opposed to Shulkin, who was the only Obama administration holdover in Trump's Cabinet, Wilkie was a long-time Republican aide on Capitol Hill and at the White House. He briefly came under scrutiny at the Republican National Convention that nominated Trump in 2016 over allegations that he worked with two other Republican aides to keep a mention of Russian aggression against Ukraine out of the Republican platform The allegations were never proven, and there has been no evidence that Wilkie has been targeted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. "I come from a family with military service going back over 175 years," Wilkie told the Senate Armed Services Committee last November, adding that he was raised at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As a young aide, Wilkie said he learned from Sen. Jesse Helms, R-North Carolina, a bedrock conservative known as "Senator 'No,' " that "to truly represent North Carolina, one must understand Highway 24," which runs between the Marine base at Camp Lejeune and the Army's Fort Bragg. "That is the road that connects 45 percent of the entire Marine Corps in the eastern part of our state to the place [Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island] calls the 'hub of the universe' -- Fort Bragg," he said. Wilkie previously served in the Pentagon as assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs in former President George W. Bush's administration. He began serving as under secretary for personnel and readiness last Nov. 30. Wilkie's nomination to head the government's second-largest department after the Pentagon drew accolades in his home state. "Robert truly has a heart for veterans," his friend, Rep. Richard Hudson, R-North Carolina, whose district includes Fayetteville next to Fort Bragg, told the Fayetteville Observer. "That, coupled with his deep understanding of what management and policy changes need to be made to clean up the VA, is what we need to keep our promises to veterans." -- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com. In another top-level shuffle at the VA, the White House announced Wednesday that acting VA Secretary Robert Wilkie was being replaced in the post to get around a potential roadblock to his nomination to become permanent VA Secretary. Peter O'Rourke, the VA's chief of staff who himself has moved to different positions in the ongoing leadership reorganization, was named as acting Secretary pending Wilkie's Senate confirmation hearing. The one-line White House announcement from the office of the press secretary said that O'Rourke was designated as acting secretary effective Tuesday. Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Georgia, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee that will preside at Wilkie's confirmation hearing, said at a Senate news conference last week that that there was a potential legal problem with the nomination. A section of the U.S. Code bars an acting secretary from taking the job permanently. Isakson said that in the past there have been cases of acting secretaries who stepped down from the post until they were confirmed, and also cases in which acting secretaries remained on the job and still were confirmed. Historically, "it's been done both ways," said Isakson. He said the committee would begin deliberations on Wilkie's nomination after Congress returns from the Memorial Day recess. The issue of an acting secretary taking the top job was first raised by the VoteVets advocacy group. "It is abundantly clear that Robert Wilkie cannot be nominated to be VA secretary while serving as acting secretary," Will Fischer, director of Government Relations at VoteVets, said in a statement. In naming O'Rourke to the acting post, the White House for the second time bypassed VA Deputy Secretary Thomas Bowman, who was formerly staff director for Isakson's committee. The 71-year-old Bowman, a retired Marine colonel, has announced that he will retire on June 15, the VA said in a statement. The VA said that Jacquelyn Hayes-Byrd would serve temporarily as acting chief of staff while O'Rourke serves as acting secretary. Hayes-Byrd had been VA deputy chief of staff. Before becoming chief of staff, O'Rourke, an Air Force veteran, had been executive director of VA's Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection. O'Rourke last year replaced Vivieca Wright Simpson, who was chief of staff to former VA Secretary David Shulkin. She resigned amid a scandal over Shulkin's travel expenses in which he charged the government for his wife's airfare on a trip to Europe. President Donald Trump fired Shulkin in March and named Wilkie as acting secretary. Wilkie had been serving as the Pentagon's undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness. -- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com. The U.S. Air Force has published its solicitation to defense companies to re-wing more than 100 A-10 Thunderbolt II close-air support mission aircraft. The proposal, released May 25, calls for 112 wing sets and 15 additional kits over a five-year ordering period as part of the service's A-10 Thunderbolt Advanced-Wing Continuation Kit or "ATTACK." According to the request for proposal, the contract includes a five-year ordering period that begins with the contract award, followed by two optional one-year ordering periods. A four-year delivery period will follow the conclusion of the ordering periods. The Air Force is asking defense companies to respond by Aug. 23, the solicitation said. Estimated total costs have not been determined. Related content: The contract award is expected in fiscal 2019, the documents said. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, commander of Air Force Materiel Command, recently told reporters she knew of at least two companies interested in the endeavor prior to the draft RFP release. The service in February released a draft RFP to help defense companies submit ideas on how best to develop new wings for the remaining portion of the A-10 fleet. "I understand there is some potential for some increase in coming editions [of the budgets], so I think there's an interest there," she said during a breakfast in Washington, D.C., on May 15. "I think the jury will be out though in terms of the price I can get," Pawlikowski added. "That will be a function of what folks think will be our long-term buy of those as we go forward." The Air Force in January said it was searching for a new company to rebuild wings on the A-10 after ending an arrangement with Boeing Co. Of the 281 A-10s currently in the inventory, 173 have already been outfitted or are in the process of being outfitted with new wings (though one of the newly re-winged planes was destroyed in a crash), according to Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek. That leaves 108 aircraft remaining in the inventory still slated to receive the upgrades, she told Military.com at the time. The fiscal 2018 budget approved by President Donald Trump in March includes $103 million for the service to re-wing a portion of its fleet. The fiscal 2019 budget, now working its way through Congress, requests an additional $79 million for the effort. Air Force officials have said the service can commit to maintaining wings for six of its nine A-10 combat squadrons through roughly 2030. Just how many it will actually restructure is unknown. During a House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land subcommittee hearing last month, Lt. Gen. Jerry D. Harris, the service's deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and requirements, said as a platform, the A-10, beloved among ground troops and attack pilots alike, will remain until about 2030. But the number of A-10s that will keep flying as a result of new wings will likely be reduced. "We are not confident we are flying all of the airplanes we currently possess through 2025," Harris said in response to Rep. Martha McSally, a Republican from Arizona and former Air Force A-10 pilot. "We're not going to make a further commitment [on additional wingsets] until we know where we're going with both the A-10 and the F-35," he said, referring to the further Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E) testing between the two aircraft. A "fly-off" between the two, part of the IOT&E testing, is expected in the near future. -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214. U.S. military nutrition experts hope to start testing a new assault ration, known as the Close Combat Assault Ration, that is drastically lighter than existing field rations by 2020. Ten years ago, the Defense Department's Combat Feeding Directorate began fielding the First Strike Ration, which was designed to give combat troops the equivalent of three Meals, Ready to Eat a day in a compact, lightweight package. At about two pounds, the FSR is about half the weight and size of three MREs. Prototypes of the Close Combat Assault Ration weigh about as much as one MRE and take up about 75 percent less room as an equivalent number of individual meals inside a pack, according to Jeremy Whitsitt, deputy director of the CFD. "It's designed for those guys like Army Rangers, special ops guys, light infantry -- guys that would potentially be in a mission scenario that would require them to carry multiple days of food, ammunition, water, other supplies, without the potential of being resupplied," he told Military.com. The idea of having a combat ration tailored to the needs of ground troops has been bounced around before. In 2016, Brig. Gen. Joseph Shrader, commander of Marine Corps Systems Command, told industry professionals at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, that he was interested in developing an MRE specially designed for Marine grunts, who need the most nutrition at the lightest weight possible. While the CCAR is still in prototype stage, it weighs about 1.5 pounds, Whitsitt said, explaining a process of vacuum microwave drying that shrinks the food by about 50 percent. A sample CCAR menu contains a tart cherry nut bar, cheddar cheese bar, mocha dessert bar, vacuum-dried strawberries, trail mix of nuts and fruit, Korean barbeque stir fry packet, spinach quiche packet with four small quiches, French toast packet, and a banana that was vacuum microwave dried to about one-third of its original size, according to a recent Army press release. The goal is to begin testing the CCAR in 2020 and fielding it to replace the FSR in 2023, Whitsitt said, adding that the CCAR will not replace the MRE, which will remain the primary field ration. On a five-day mission, rather than "field-stripping 15 MREs and taking things that are easy to carry, they can take five of these Close Combat Assault Rations and still get 3,000 calories a day but have more room in their pack for more ammunition, more medical supplies, more water -- things that will keep them in the fight longer," he said. -- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com. One of the ways the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) helps make sure it is keeping customers happy is the Exchange Retiree Advisory Council (ERAC). As of this spring, the ERAC got its first-ever member whose primary mission is to represent military families -- not just retired service members. The National Military Family Association (NMFA) officially joined the council after years of a "long-standing relationship," said Chris Ward, an AAFES spokesman. Other members of the council, of course, also advocate for families. The Military Officers Association of America (MOAA) and the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) both have stellar family sections. But NMFA is laser-focused on family issues. NMFA officials said they are excited to have a seat at the table where they can work closely with AAFES to get issues in front of those officials in a new way. "NMFA has had a long relationship with AAFES, but we've also long felt that the voice of the currently serving family was not present the way it needed to be in AAFES's discussions with groups representing other segments of its patron base as the only headquarters level discussions were through the Retiree Council," Joyce Raezer, NMFA's director told me in an email. "We are honored by the invitation to join the council and to bring the concerns of our currently serving families to these discussions and also to obtain information through these discussions we can take back to our families." Military exchanges and commissaries are open for in-person, on-base shopping only for retirees, active-duty families, Guard and reservists and their families, Medal of Honor recipients, and veterans with 100 percent service-connected disability ratings. A new program started last year allows online exchange shopping for all honorably discharged veterans. The current ERAC format was rolled out in 2010. Prior to NMFA joining the board, the last addition was the Air Force Sergeants Association, which joined in 2012, Ward said. -- Amy Bushatz can be reached at amy.bushatz@military.com. Commodity List Mineral List Rock Types Recorded Note: this is a very new system on mindat.org and data is currently VERY limited. Please bear with us while we work towards adding this information! Select Rock List Type Alphabetical List Tree Diagram Regional Geology The Radio Gold Mine is 8 kilometres north of Bullfinch, bordering the west side of the Mount Jackson Road.The northern section contains deep trenches, costeans, alluvial workings and possibly shafts. Directly south-west is two small old water filled open pits, with apparently underground workings. Directly east is a large tank, remnants of former processing plants and a large tailings area. Extending south-west are alluvial workings and to the south another tailings area.There was a wealth of information found about the mine, which has been selectively chosen here due to space limitations. The Radio, Radio Deeps, and Radio North were historically neighbouring mines, but in modern times have been lumped together under one tenement as the Radio Mine.During the 1920's and 1930's, the Radio Mine was considered to be the richest privately owned two man mine in Australia. It was discovered by Alex Barr and Jack Hughes in 1914. Barr and Hughes had spent 12 months in the area previously discovering very little. A five head battery was erected soon after the discovery.Alex remained as half owner and mine manager until at least the end of World War Two. Barr was a quietly spoken, stern looking man, with a talent for rifle shooting. Clements was President of the local shooting club.Jack Hughes was initially the other owner until he died. Jack Clements had migrated to Australia from England in 1910. Bespeckled Clements was in a bar in Southern Cross, when he met Hughes who looked poorly. Clements said ' You need a drink to pull yourself together' (Mindat may not necessarily agree with this health advice!). Hughes stated he had no money so Clements paid for the alcohol, and they became close friends. Hughes later became ill, and Clements looked after him in his Fremantle home, until Hughes died in his arms. Hughes left half the mine to Clements. It is thought Barr and Clements earned a total of 220 000 pounds from the mine in early 20th Century figures.Samuel Lang owned the neighbouring Radio Deeps Mine which accessed the Golden Harp Lode, a parallel lode to the Radio Mine, via a shaft. While not as rich as the Radio Mine, he earned a not too shabby 80 000 pounds from the mine over the years. He took the lease within a year of the Radio Mine being active, and mined continuously also until at least the end of World War Two.Limited information was found on Radio North which was not as rich, and worked by prospectors in the 1920's and 1930's. The earliest source states the mine was owned by E. Contessi in 1921. He erected a battery removed from the Corinthian Mine. E.B. Newman went into partnership but they fell out over crushing arrangements. The matter ended in the Warden's Court, and Contessi left to farm in 1923.Geology-wise modern sources state that gold is found in ultramafic schist, mafic amphibolite and jaspilite, near the contact with banded gneiss and pegmatites. Gold is concentrated in quartz reefs emplaced within north north-east trending fissures. 1991 exploration stated there was narrow but high grade veins remaining.Another source states it 'appears' to be a series of stacked gold bearing quartz veins, within a low angle thrust system, structurally controlled by quartz vein arrays, related to reverse faults, and linking structures.E. Broughton-Jensen gave a detailed geology report on the mine in 1925. He states a north north-east trending granite intrusion has produced a crushed zone in which the lode occurs. The lodes form 3 series: the Hanging Wall, Middle and Footwall lodes. Some sources states the lodes are narrow, but pinch and swell along the strike and also vertically. They tend to narrow to the south. Gold is found in the upper levels in schist, but lower in the 3 quartz shoots. The middle shoot was unusually rich. The gold is primary, with no indication of enrichment.Most mining has not progressed further than 100 metres below the surface, and strikes for 150 metres along the lode. In total the mine has produced 57 333 tonnes of ore at 38.5 g/t Au which is extremely high, yielding 71 050 ounces. Active production ceased in 1974. Mineralisation is thought to continue beyond the boundaries of the historic workings. The processing plant was sold and largely removed in 1988.Several eastern states companies took out brief options over the mines at various times from 1914 to 1940, but for a number of reasons the owners took back control fairly quickly. In 1954, Uranium Oxide NL and Austral Mining Co took out a 12 month option over the Radio Mine.Surveys and Mining Ltd re-opened the mine in 1969, and erected a processing plant capable of 200 tonnes of ore per day. The mine was operated by its subsidiary, Western Australian Gold Development NL. Several companies have explored the mine to a limited degree in modern times. Gilt Edge Mining/Alliance Group Pty Ltd 1980's, Carn Brae NL/Golden Valley Mines NL 1991, Gryphon Minerals Ltd 2008, Southern Cross Goldfields 2011, Talga 2011, Renaissance Minerals Ltd 2014,4 valid minerals. 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 mafic extrusive rocks 74255 Age: Archean (2500 - 4000 Ma) Description: Metabasalt, high-Mg basalt, tholeiitic basalt, carbonated basalt, agglomerate, mafic schist, dolerite, amphibolite; porphyritic basalt and dolerite; komatiitic basalt; mafic pyroclastics; minor mafic schist with granite intercalations Comments: igneous mafic volcanic; synthesis of multiple published descriptions Lithology: Igneous mafic volcanic Reference: Raymond, O.L., Liu, S., Gallagher, R., Zhang, W., Highet, L.M. Surface Geology of Australia 1:1 million scale dataset 2012 edition. Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia). [5] Archean crystalline metamorphic rocks Age: Archean (2500 - 3200 Ma) Comments: Yilgarn Craton Lithology: Gneiss Reference: Chorlton, L.B. Generalized geology of the world: bedrock domains and major faults in GIS format: a small-scale world geology map with an extended geological attribute database. doi: 10.4095/223767. Geological Survey of Canada, Open File 5529. [154] 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 Sort by Year (asc) | by Year (desc) | by Author (A-Z) | by Author (Z-A) Southern Cross Goldfields Ltd (2011), ASX Announcement: Marda Gold Project: SXG Farm-In at Radio Gold Mine, 05/08/2011 Renaissance Minerals Limited (2014), Quarterly Report for the Period Ending 31 March 2014, 24/04/2014 Department of the Environment and Conservation (2011), Works Approval 4888/2011/1 Radio Gold Mining Tenements M77/633, State Government of Western Australia, 31/03/2011 Gilt Edge Mining/Alliance Group Pty Ltd (1988), Major Auction: Radio Plant Sale: Gold Mining Processing Plant, Earthmoving Equipment, Buildings: On Site, Radio Mill Mine Site Bullfinch W.A.: Wednesday August 12 11:00am, Under Instructions From Gilt Edge Mining/Alliance Group Pty Ltd (catalog), Alliance Group, 1988 Mock, C., Elliott, B.G., Ewers, G.R., Lorenz, R.P (1987), Gold Deposits of Western Australia, BMR Datafile (MINDEP), Department of Primary Industries and Energy/Bureau of Mineral Resources Geology and Geophysics, Federal Government of Australia, 1987 Gryphon Minerals Limited (2008), Quarterly Report for the Period Ending 30 September 2008, 30/09/2008 The Age newspaper (Melbourne) (1969), New Gold Mine, 21/11/1969 Renaissance Minerals Limited (2010), Prospectus, April 2010 (Independent Geologist's Report, Bishop Exploration Pty Ltd, 12/04/2010) News newspaper (Adelaide) (1954), Radio Mine Option Terms, 17/12/1954 The Southern Cross Times newspaper (1930), Bullfinch Rifle Club, 16/08/1930 The Register newspaper (Adelaide) (1925), Report on the Radio Gold Mine W.A. by E. Broughton Jensen A.S.A.S.M. M.A.I.M.M., 03/10/1925 Western Argus newspaper (Kalgoorlie) (1933), Manxman. The Radio G.M., 28/11/1933 Sunday Times newspaper (Perth) (1940), Ton of Gold From Radio Mine for Two Owners. Barr and Clements Tell of Rich Yilgarn Producer, 09/06/1940 The Southern Cross Times newspaper (1924), Radio Deeps Work on the Green Harp Lode, 11/10/1924 The Southern Cross Times newspaper (1931), Mining. Important Developments at Manxman. Rich Ore in North Radio, 12/09/1931 External Links Commodity List Mineral List Regional Geology The Reynold's Find Gold Mine is about 10 kilometres north-east of Bullfinch, and 500 metres east of the Withers Find North Road. The historic workings are located in the middle of a bare wheat paddock. They extend 50 metres east-west with costeans and trenches cut north-south across the reef. Outlying workings are likely to have been destroyed from farming. It is on private property and there is no public access.The deposit is named after M.H. Reynold, who owned the farm, and discovered the deposit in 1932. Modern exploration states it is chloritic quartz veining over a 240 metres strike length.Shortly after discovery three shafts were sunk to 25 feet over a 60 foot distance, and a trial crushing sent to Coolgardie of 43 tonnes yielding 50 ounces of gold at 16 dwt. Reynold is in partnership with W.J.Heydon, although a Knowles (surname) is also mentioned in 1932.The Mine's Inspector visited the site in 1932, and dismisses it as unimportant and lacking permanency. Intermittent mining continues during the 1930's. In the late 1930's, the mine is named Golden Promise, still owned by Heydon and Reynold, with Con Krug as mine manager.2 valid minerals. 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 colluvium 38491 Age: Pleistocene (0 - 2.588 Ma) Description: Colluvium and/or residual deposits, sheetwash, talus, scree; boulder, gravel, sand; may include minor alluvial or sand plain deposits, local calcrete and reworked laterite Comments: regolith; synthesis of multiple published descriptions Lithology: Regolith Reference: Raymond, O.L., Liu, S., Gallagher, R., Zhang, W., Highet, L.M. Surface Geology of Australia 1:1 million scale dataset 2012 edition. Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia). [5] Archean crystalline metamorphic rocks Age: Archean (2500 - 3200 Ma) Comments: Yilgarn Craton Lithology: Gneiss Reference: Chorlton, L.B. Generalized geology of the world: bedrock domains and major faults in GIS format: a small-scale world geology map with an extended geological attribute database. doi: 10.4095/223767. Geological Survey of Canada, Open File 5529. [154] 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 How to use the mindat.org media viewer Click/touch this help panel to close it. Welcome to the mindat.org media viewer. 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Summary of all keyboard shortcuts Reds second baseman Scooter Gennett discussed his future with the ballclub after last nights game, as MLB.coms Mark Sheldon reports. While a mid-season trade seems possible, Gennett says hed like nothing more than to play [in Cincinnati] long-term. Gennetts comments are most notable, perhaps, for his discussion of one potential alternative to a trade scenario. The veteran infielder says that his agent made an offseason attempt at starting extension talks with the organization. That effort fizzled, however, when the team shot it down. A native of the area and childhood Reds fan, Gennett seemingly suggests hed still be amenable to discussing a new deal. The balls in their court, he tells Sheldon. I think its really up to Mr. Castellini [owner Bob Castellini] and the front office about where we go from here. I love the team and Id love to be here. It seems there isnt any lingering negativity following the unsuccessful offseason contract negotiation efforts. Apart from the differing viewpoints on a long-term deal, the sides failed to settle on an arbitration number. Gennett ultimately prevailed in a hearing, taking down a $5.7MM salary rather than the $5.1MM that the team defended. Gennett is eligible for arbitration one final time after the present campaign. Its certainly possible the Reds could decide to keep him and simply tender him a contract for 2019, though its still hard to see the organization as a likely contender next year. Holding Gennett without extending him would mean giving up a chance at achieving future value through a trade or a new contract. Its not a straightforward decision, particularly with Eugenio Suarez locked in at third and top prospect Nick Senzel at or near MLB readiness and in need of a position. It seems at least plausible to think, then, that Gennett will be shopped at the deadline if the club does not view him as a long-term piece that they can extend at an appealing price tag. With a strong offensive track record dating back to the start of the 2017 season, Gennett has certainly earned consideration as a trade target for contending teams. Indeed, we fully examined his potential trade candidacy just yesterday, noting the excellent output at the plate along with some lingering concerns as to its sustainability. Kenya is a thieving nation that much we know. And as Kenyans continued to follow keenly the NYS scandal case, another heist took place on Twitter that caught the attention of internet users. The robbery without violence happened when a Twitter user shared an unused Sh250 airtime Safaricom voucher with the intention of engaging other users is a guessing game. The Kenyan on Twitter, Evans Bett, shared a photo of the top-up voucher whose last two digits were unscratched. He then asked his followers to guess the digits and win the airtime. But as some users struggled to guess the numbers, a quick-thinking user provided Safaricom with the scratch cards serial number and received the airtime. Heres how KOT reacted: Theres that one student who will always think outside the box pic.twitter.com/bvMRnE248o Nyandaruas Finest (@IamSamiSamuel) May 28, 2018 How did he even get the first few digits of the serial no fedupkenyan (@iam_kanj) May 29, 2018 Did he invent some lens to see the first 3 Nos in the serial number?? Fredrick Mwenda (@mwesh_freddie) May 28, 2018 All KES 250 airtime serial number starts with 401 DAVID (@_iDavie) May 28, 2018 david deserve head of state of commendation & 50M of nys should be deposited in his account FELO CHALI MTRUE (@FelixKMuriithi) May 28, 2018 watu huku nje wako serious ?? chamu.?? (@alvin_xdd) May 28, 2018 eyyyy. This is a genius ???? Janet Machuka?? (@janetmachuka_) May 29, 2018 Wewe @_iDavie ni mwizi, sio kwa jicho hilo! 4017.?? Ramadhan J. Ntambara (@TambaraRamadhan) May 29, 2018 The boychild should be given a tender of supplying NYS with air ??? (@OkeyoSeith) May 29, 2018 Hustle is real? Lil brio (@Brio_Izme) May 29, 2018 He is smart like NYS scandals Hani (@BatranAbdi) May 29, 2018 Kenneth Maisonville of South Haven escapes his burning car after it caught fire during a test session on May 23, 2018, at Gingerman Raceway (photo courtesy of Simon Chen, Instagram @cx_simon) Memorial Day Weekend brought plenty of excitement to tracks across Michigan, and with the events coming up, this weekend should be equally compelling. MLive takes a look back -and ahead - in today's auto racing package. If you have items to report from the world of racing, please contact us with information at skaminsk@mlive.com. Kenneth Maisonville, who is pictured above, was uninjured when his car burst into flames at Gingerman Raceway on May 23, 2018. Please click here for his reaction. Don't Edit Brian Bergakker celebrates his victory in Saturday's 7th annual Joy Fair Memorial Outlaw Late Model race at Flat Rock Speedway. (Photo courtesy of Rand Thompson) Honor Roll: Brian Bergakker Bergakker, of Lowell, won Saturday night's 7th annual Joy Fair Memorial Outlaw Late Model 100 at Flat Rock Speedway. Bergakker started 11th in the field and worked his way through the pack before overtaking Jimmy Thiel for the lead with 15 laps to go. The race is held each year in honor of the late Fair, who won more feature races than any driver in track history. Don't Edit Dustin Daggett took top honors Friday night at Tri-City Motor Speedway in Great Lakes Super Sprints action on May 25, 2018 (photo courtesy of Steve Marsh) Honor Roll: Dustin Daggett Daggett, of Portland, won Friday night's Great Lakes Super Sprints feature race, then did the same Sunday at Crystal Motor Speedway. Daggett's hopes for a Memorial Day Weekend Triple Crown sweep were dashed by Mother Nature because rain washed out Saturday's program at Merritt Speedway. Don't Edit Jeff Ganus cleaned up Friday night at Kalamazoo Speedway, taking home a pair of checkered flags (Photo courtesy of Barbara Fisher) Honor Roll: Jeff Ganus Ganus, of Constantine, went 2-for-2 Friday night at Kalamazoo Speeway. He won the completion of the Intimidator 100 Outlaw Late Model race, which was called after 22 laps on April 27 due to rain. Ganus then returned to win the Lane Automotive 75. Don't Edit Alex Hagon celebrates with his team after winning this weekend at Whittemore Speedway (courtesy photo) Honor Roll: Alex Hagon Hagon, a Late Model racer from Swartz Creek, set fast time at Whittemore Speedway, then went out and won the feature race in his first trip to the track. Hagon, who is in his third season of racing Late Models, was runner-up in the point standings at his home track, Owosso Speedway, a year ago, and he won two races. Don't Edit Don't Edit Dave Lanning of Coldwater drove his dragster to victory and collected $125,000 this weekend at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park in Martin (photo courtesy of BME Photography) Honor Roll: Dave Lanning Lanning, of Coldwater, hit the jackpot in his dragster this weekend at U.S 131 Motorsports Park's SFG Promotions Midwest Bracket Nationals. Lanning won $125,000 after beating Kevin Pollard in Saturday night's finals. Don't Edit Dave Lanning of Coldwater (MLive File Photo) Don't Edit Dona Marcoullier got the job done this weekend at Merritt Speedway when the Lake City-based dirt track opened its 50th season (Photo courtesy of Randy Ellen) Honor Roll: Dona Marcoullier Marcoulllier, of Houghton Lake, helped Merritt Speedway open its 2018 season by winning Saturday's UMP DIRTcar Late Model feature race and the $2,000-to-win cash prize. Marcoullier's victory came after he won at Tri-City Motor Speedway on May 18. He is the two-time defending American Ethanol Late Model Tour champion. Don't Edit Lonnie Saumier recorded a victory at Birch Run Speedway earlier this season (photo courtesy of Dennis Freeman) Honor Roll: Lonnie Saumier Jr. Saumier, of Davison, has won all five of the Pure Stock feature races he has entered this season spread out over three different tracks. In fact, he is leading the standings at Whittemore Speedway, Birch Run Speedway and Owosso Speedway. Don't Edit Eric Spangler (27) battles David Mielke in American Ethanol Late Model Tour action at Thunderbird Raceway on May 26, 2018 (photo courtesy of Heidi Morell of Dirt XTC Images) Honor Roll: Eric Spangler Spangler, of Lake City, took home $4,000 after winning Saturday night's American Ethanol Late Model Tour Allstar Performance 40 at Thunderbird Raceway in Muskegon. Spangler was running second to David Mielke before a caution waved just prior to the halfway point. Spangler, who won this race last year, was able to grab the lead on the restart and drive away. Don't Edit Don't Edit Brandon Thirlby poses in Victory Lane at I-96 Speedway on May 25, 2018 (photo courtesy of Becky Herrington Photography) Honor Roll: Brandon Thirlby Thirlby, of Traverse City, won Friday night's American Ethanol Late Model Tour YellowHouse.com 40 at I-96 Speedway in Lake Odessa. Thirlby led the final nine laps to grab the checkered flag and earn $4,000. He also set the track record at Thunderbird Raceway in Muskegon on Saturday night, ripping off a lap of 12.504 seconds in qualifying. Don't Edit Chris Koslek pulls into Victory Lane at Berlin Raceway after a win in 2017 (photo courtesy of Eli Kaminski) Did you know? Chris Koslek of Grand Rapids races a Super Late Model, and a year ago, he was one of Berlin Raceway's top drivers. He opened the season with three consecutive second-place finishes. That's not all Koslek races, though Koslek has purchased a new dragster, and he is dividing up his time this season turning left and going straight. He competed last weekend at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park's Midwest Bracket Nationals. Don't Edit Indianapolis 500 champion Will Power, of Australia, poses with the Borg-Warner Trophy during the traditional winners photo session on the start/finish line at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Monday, May 28, 2018, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) Up next: Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix The IndyCar Series, fresh off Sunday's Indianapolis 500, returns to Belle Isle for the annual Detroit Grand Prix. It's the only doubleheader weekend on the 2018 IndyCar schedule, with the green flag waving at 3:30 p.m. both Saturday and Sunday. ABC will provide television coverage. Don't Edit Donny Schatz and the World of Outlaws are set to invade the I-96 Speedway in Lake Odessa Friday night. Schatz leads the point standings. (Photo courtesy of Paul Arch) Up next: World of Outlaws at I-96 Speedway The World of Outlaws will make one Michigan appearance this season, and it's coming Friday when I-96 Speedway in Lake Odessa hosts the Rumble in Michigan. Action will begin at 7:30 p.m. Don't Edit ay Cox and his Pumpkin Pro Nitrous Camaro SS will be one to watch this weekend at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park in Martin (Photo courtesy of U.S. 131 Motorsports Park). Up Next: PDRA returns to U.S. 131 Motorsports Park The Professional Drag Racers Association returns to Martin Dragway after a one-year hiatus. Pro Mods, Extreme Pro Stocks, Pro Extreme Motor Cycles, Top Dragsters and Sportsman cars will highlight the two-day program that runs Friday and Saturday. Pro Mod qualifying runs are Friday at 12:15 p.m., 4:15 p.m. and 8:15 p.m., with eliminations beginning Saturday at 2 p.m. Don't Edit Don't Edit Up next: ICAR comes to Auto City Auto City Speedway will be hosting the traveling ICAR Allstar Modified Tour Saturday at 7 p.m. The Wind Blower 50 is one of two ICAR races Auto City will host this season. The circuit will return for the July 14 Wind Pusher 70. Don't Edit Up next: Midwest Compacts hit the dirt at Thunderbird The Midwest Compact Touring Series presented by Rev-X Oil will compete Saturday night at Thunderbird Raceway in Muskegon. The 50-lap feature race will mark the circuit's lone dirt event on the 2018 schedule. Don't Edit Johnny VanDoorn (71), Nate Walton (66) and Terry Senneker Jr. battle during Super Late Model action at Berlin Raceway on May 26, 2018 (Photo courtesy of Tom DeVette) Berlin Raceway results Super Late Models 1: Johnny VanDoorn Super Late Models 2: Terry Senneker Jr. Modifieds 1: Josh Frye Modifieds 2: Chad Clark Sportsman 1: Gerry Shepard Sportsman 2: Brian Thome 4 Cylinders 1: Justin Roelofs 4 Cylinders 2: Corey Holtzlander Mini-Wedges 6-9: Eddie Beight Mini-Wedges 10-14: Brayden Cook Don't Edit Corrigan Oil Speedway results Outlaws: William Larner Bandolero Junior Bandits: Logan Long Bandolero Senior Bandits: Mason Surgener Pony Stocks: Randy Kretzinger Jr. School Bus Figure 8s: Chris Taylor Flagpole: T.J. Hurrel, Wayne Parkhurst II Trailer Figure 8s: Wayne Parkhurst II Don't Edit Josh Borton parked his Late Model in Victory Lane this weekend at Crystal Motor Speedway (photo courtesy of Christine Hale) Crystal Motor Speedway results Great Lakes Super Sprints: Dustin Daggett MORA Mini Outlaw Sprints: Dave Roush Late Models: Josh Borton IMCA Modifieds: Austin Wonch Flinn Stocks: Kolby Rohn Street Stocks: Tim DeGroft Jr. Pro Trucks: Kenny Dittenber Mini-Wedges 6-9: Zayden Buskirk Mini-Wedges 10-14: Aby Brown Don't Edit Don't Edit Steve Needles (18), Brandon Lyons (50) and Craig Everage (101) battle three-wide during Saturday's 7th annual Joy Fair Memorial Outlaw Late Model race at Flat Rock Speedway. (Photo courtesy of Rand Thompson) Flat Rock Speedway results Joy Fair Memorial 100: Brian Bergakker DTS Street Stock A: Grant Hedges DTS Street Stock B: Anthony Camilli Don't Edit Drivers compete at Galesburg Speedway (Photo courtesy of RW Motorsports Marketing) Galesburg Speedway results Late Model Sportsman: Justin Dinzik Street Stock A: Kyle Santora Outlaw FWD: Duane Green Burg Stock A: Gary Wade Burg Stock B: Danielle Osborne Don't Edit Teams work on their cars Friday night at Hartford Speedway (photo courtesy of Dirt Road Photography) Hartford Motor Speedway Modifieds: Zeke McKenzie Cyber Stocks: Andrew Mayer Stock Cars: Tyler Spaulding Don't Edit Brandon Thirlby won Friday night's American Ethanol Late Model Tour feature and $4,000 (photo courtesy of Becky Herrington Photography) I-96 Speedway results American Ethanol Late Model Tour: Brandon Thirlby Pro Stocks/Trucks: Dan Hubbell Street Stocks: Nate Triick 4 Cylinders: Ryan Hamm Mini-Wedges 1: Zayden Buskirk Mini-Wedges 2: Andrew Bogart Don't Edit Jeff Ganus prepares for Friday night's action at Kalamazoo Speedway on May 25, 2018. Ganus won a pair of feature races (photo courtesy of Kevin Barthel) Kalamazoo Speedway results Outlaw Late Models Lane Automotive 75: Jeff Ganus Outlaw Late Models Intimidator 100: Jeff Ganus Street Stocks: Shane Miller Outlaw FWD A: Pete Doxey Outlaw FWD B: Jeremy Young Zoo Stocks A: Ed Clawson Zoo Stocks B: Austin Holbert Zoo Stocks C: Davey Emery Don't Edit Don't Edit David Mielke earned $1,500 for taking top honors in this weekend's UMP DIRTcar Modified feature race (photo courtesy of Randy Ellen) Merritt Speedway results UMP DIRTcar Late Models: Dona Marcoullier UMP DIRTcar Modifieds: David Mielke Pro Stocks: Rob Westergard B-Modifieds: Scott Payton Factory Stocks: Rick Spencer Lightning Sprints: Johnny Roberts 4 Cylinders: Willard VanHaitsma Mini-Wedges Unrestricted: Clay Lachika Mini-Wedges Restricted: Pierson DeShano Don't Edit Greg Gokey was the big winner this weekend at Winston Speedway in Late Model action (photo courtesy of ust Shoot Me Photography by Katie) Winston Speedway Late Models: Greg Gokey Stock Cars: Kendall Marlink 4 Cylinders: Derrick Stahl Enduro: Tim Stafford Don't Edit Tom Whitaker drove his Chevrolet Camaro to victory in Saturday's action at Northern Michigan Dragway (photo courtesy of Rebecca Ledford) Northern Michigan Dragway results 4th Annual Bonfire Salute weekend results Friday Night Street Night Money Class $500 Win Ben Wenzel Jr, Hemlock, Chevy Cavalier R-Up James Persinger, Freesoil, Cadillac Fleetwood Semis Dale Loeks, McBain & Dan Snyder, Houghton Lake Full Tree Trophy Class Win Melvin Cebula, Bear Lake, Ford Mustang R-Up Bob Bushen, Whitehall, Chevy Chevelle Semis LeeAnna Pierce, Cedar Springs & Caleb Kars, McBain Pro Tree Trophy Class Win Cody Newman, Sault Ste. Marie, ONT, Ford Mustang R-Up Steve Anderson, Tustin, Chevy Chevelle Semi Brant Tallquist, Rothbury Saturday Night Bonfire Salute Pro-Systems Carburetors BRACKET I: Win Tom Whitaker, Muskegon, Chevy Camaro R-Up Brad Harris, Mesick, Dragster Semi Steve Tennant, Muskegon, Ford Mustang Absolute Auto Repair BRACKET II: Win Dale Mardlin, Bear Lake, Ford Falcon R-Up Bob Bushen, Whitehall, Chevy Chevelle Semis Joe Knockeart, Armada & Kyle Kidder, Thompsonville RET Racing Engine Technologies PRO TROPHY: Win Donald Heinzer, Grand Rapids, MN, Chevy Camaro R-Up Dustin James Cesaro, East Jordan, Chevy S-10 Semi Rob Vandewater, Cadillac Hlavka Heating & Cooling STREET TROPHY: Win Jimmy Thomason, Bear Lake, Chevy S-10 R-Up Scott Swander, Benzonia, Dodge Challenger Semis Ron Carpenter, Mancelona & Rodney Adams, Roscommon Woodstar Forestry ADVANCED JUNIORS: Win Leah Helsel, Manton R-Up Patrick Boris, East Jordan Semis Cody Marlatt, Bailey & Trentyn Corley, Fremont Kaleva Meats MINI JUNIORS: Win Toby Helsel, Manton R-Up Jesse Persinger, Freesoil Semi Lexie Sanford, Ludington Sunday Night Bonfire Salute Grand Rapids Machine Repair TOP DOORSLAMMER: Win Sean Nagy, Houghton Lake, Ford Mustang R-Up Tim Heiges. Traverse City, Chevy Beretta Semi Michael Higgins, Traverse City Pro-Systems Carburetors BRACKET I: Win Gary Hlavka, Kingsley, Dragster R-Up Bud Roof, East Jordan, Dragster Semi Tom Clark, Traverse City, Dragster Absolute Auto Repair & Tire BRACKET II: Win Gary Wood, Manistee, AMC Spirit R-Up Scott Healy, Indian River, Chevy Blazer Semi Jim Evans, Benzonia RET Racing Engine Technologies PRO TROPHY: Win Donald Heinzer, Grand Rapids, MN, Chevy Camaro R-Up David Evans, Benzonia, Chevy Monte Carlo Semi Bob Wilson, Copemish Hlavka Heating & Cooling STREET TROPHY: Win Steven Savich, Fountain, Olds Cutlass R-Up Emily Fluette, Interlochen, Chevy Monte Carlo Semis Dylan Ems, Reed City & Rodney Adams, Roscommon Woodstar Forestry ADVANCED JUNIORS: Win Patrick Boris, East Jordan R-Up Leah Helsel, Manton Semis Cody Marlatt, Bailey & John Root, Manton Kaleva Meats MINI JUNIORS: Win Lexie Sanford, Ludington R-Up Hannah Moore, Cadillac Semi Shania Root, Manton Don't Edit Veteran driver Myron DeYoung won this weekend's B-Mod feature race at Mt. Pleasant Speedway (Photo courtesy of Jessica Ryan) Mt. Pleasant Speedway results B-Mods: Myron DeYoung 4 Cylinders: Ashley VanAuken Hobby Stocks: Dustin Weber Don't Edit Kendall Morrison won this weekend's Pro Stock feature race at Tri-City Motor Speedway (photo courtesy of Steve Marsh) Tri-City Motor Speedway results Great Lakes Super Sprints: Dustin Daggett IMCA Modifieds: Nate Jones Pro Stocks: Kendall Morrison Street Stocks: Jake Thompson Bomber Stocks: Josh Charbonneau Mini-Wedges 6-9: Pierson DeShano Mini-Wedges 10-14: Caden Anderson Don't Edit Don't Edit Darrell Ciaravino of Milan stands in front of his 1970 Maverick after winning the Street Class Saturday, May 26, 2018, at Mid-Michigan Motorplex (photo courtesy of Jared Ledford) Mid-Michigan Motorplex results Memorial Day Weekend Marathon Saturday winners Top: Jason Hemerline Modified: Mark Martinus Street: Darrell Ciaravino 7-9 years old: Megan Kassin 10-12 years old: Madison Modowski Advanced Junior Dragsters: Trey Goodson 2nd Chance Juniors: Corbin Dittenber Sunday results Quick 8 Doors: Nick Serra Top: Brian Peterson Modified: Ron Hagar 7-9 years old: Alex Bauman 10-12 years old: Madison Miodowski Advanced Junior Dragsters: Samuel Peterson 2nd Chance Juniors: Jake Foster Monday results Top: Mark Hancock Modified: Stan Jones Street: Herb Bock Jr. 7-9 years old: Austin Perrone 10-12 years old: Conner Jensen Advanced Junior Dragsters: Trinity Morris 2nd Chance Juniors: Hunter Scholten Don't Edit 4 Cylinder driver Buddy Gray was among this weekend's winners at Springport (Photo courtesy of Jason Partanen) Springport Mid-Michigan Speedway Spring Championships Street Stocks A: Jerry Pierman Stock Cars 1: Dennis Mudd Stock Cars 2: Tyler McGhan Sport Mods: John Trudell 4 Cylinder Modified: Buddy Gray Don't Edit Drivers battle at Thunderbird Raceway on May 26, 2018 (photo courtesy of Heidi Morell of Dirt XTC Images) Thunderbird Raceway results American Ethanol Late Model Tour: Eric Spangler Modifieds: Gary Vandermark Factory Stocks: Robbie Sternberg Cyber Stocks: Ryan Hamm Warriors: Mike Goodwin Jr. Don't Edit Whittemore Speedway Pro Late Models: Alex Hagon Super Stocks: Jesse Collinge Lead Sled: Lonnie Saumier FWD: Mark Williamson Following the arrest and subsequent arraignment of NYS scandal suspects in Court yesterday, Kenyans are keenly following the case with hopes of seeing the culprits jailed and most importantly, stolen monies recovered. One of the more popular persons of interest in the case is the scandals poster girl Ms Ann Wambere Wanjiku Ngirita, who supplied nothing to the National Youth Service and earned a handsome Sh59 Million. She was arrested on Monday together with three members of her family at their home in Lake View Estate in Naivasha and transferred to Nairobi. And as she gears to stand trial, Kenyans have already started envisioning the appropriate punitive measures the Court should take against her. In fact, one online user went a step further and calculated just how long Ms Ngirita should be jailed or fined for pocketing Sh59 million unlawfully. Using the Principle of Proportionality, the user did the calculations based on facts of a recent case in which a former Huduma clerk was fined Sh500,000 for receiving a Sh2500 bribe. Justina Syonzua Malela was last week Thursday found guilty and fined the amount or serve two years in jail. Based on that, here is the hypothetical fine or jail term Ms Ann Ngirita should face. This questions should be added into the curriculum instead of asking if Jane had three mangoes. pandora (@sash_wainaina) May 29, 2018 Sir, is there another formula with which she pays fine and still go to jail? Makena_cibora (@kendi_kinyua) May 29, 2018 Spot on!!! Stephen Ooko Odim (@StephenOdim) May 29, 2018 ????? aki those years though Alice Mugambi (@Alicenmugambi) May 29, 2018 Hahaha, Crazy mathematics KADIMO OMONDI NDII (@omondikevinokel) May 29, 2018 This should be signed into law and implemented pic.twitter.com/MnAd8aGWai (@Kin_Kenny) May 29, 2018 The Raila-led Orange Democratic Movement(ODM) has come out guns blazing in response to Moses Wetangulas recent attack on the opposition leader. The Bungoma County Senator dared Raila to presidential contest in 2022 as he threatened to expose him. He was responding to Odingas remarks that the merger between Ford Kenya and Mudavadis ANC was an alliance based on tribal lines. If Raila continues telling lies about us we will tell Kenyans the truth about him, Wetangula warned. For Raila, it is never tribal when Luo Nyanza stands behind him but when other communities support their leaders it is tribal, added Weta. The amusing thing is how Raila has sunk so low to engage in such cheap politics. You can actually see he is the only one defending the handshake which was between him and Uhuru (President Kenyatta). Wetangula added that Raila does not respect NASA colleagues and his days in politics are numbered. Through his actions, it is true he is heading into political oblivion, he said. Responding to Wetangulas remarks, ODM released a statement on Tuesday afternoon describing him as a coward and loser attacking Raila just to stay afloat politically. According to ODM, Wetangula challenging Raila to a presidential contest is ridiculouas and laughable. Read the full statement below. ********************************************************** ATTACKS ON H.E. RAILA ODINGA BY SEN. WETANGULA: We have read with interest sentiments appearing in section of the media today attributed to Bungoma Senator Moses Wetangula in which he attacks H.E. Raila Odinga over alleged attack by the Nasa leader on ANC and Ford Kenya parties. The statement by Mr. Wetangula purporting to be challenging Hon. Odinga to a presidential contest is ridiculous and laughable. We may not know who will be on the ballot in 2022, but we are sure that in usual form, Wetangula will certainly not be one of those on the ballot. It is the kind of statement expected from cowards and losers, which Wetangula certainly is. Mr. Wetangulas statement is in the familiar and tired mode of sinking politicians attacking Mr Odinga as their only way to stay politically afloat. And we have no doubt that Wetangula is a sinking politician. The entire Luhya nation knows that Wetangula is a non-issue, even in his own county of Bungoma especially after the cowardice he exhibited on the 30th of January 2018. All Kenyans know that it took Mr. Odingas support for Wetangula to win the Bungoma Senate seat in 2013 and 2017. In fact, Wetangula was, and remains a non-issue in Western without Mr. Odingas backing. His current situation where he is never heard unless he attacks Mr. Odinga attests to this fact. It is strange that in the middle of deepening economic crises for the people of Western Kenya, including the collapse of Nzoia and Mumias Sugar Companies, Mudete Tea Factory, Panpaper and others that were the economic mainstay for the people of western and massive scams involving key government operatives who have stolen from farmers, including those in Trans Nzoia through the National Cereals and Produce Board, the youth through the NYS and from Kenyans through the KPLC, Mr Wetangula has remained quiet and finds his voice only against Mr. Odinga. It confirms that he is one of the self-styled principals of NASA who only survived by hanging onto Mr. Odingas coat. Without Mr. Odinga, Wetangula is lost. His position as so-called principal means nothing both to himself, the Luhya nation and the Republic of Kenya. We remind Senator Wetangula that he is where he is because at some stage, he began to entertain a false notion that he was his own man and began biting the hand that fed him. The more he continues to bite, the more he will sink. In the meantime, Wetangula needs to know that under his leadership Ford Kenya has become a diminished good in Western Kenya. The Luhya nation is solidly behind Mr. Odinga by choice and Mr Odinga does not need brokers to reach the Luyha nation. Mr. Odinga has long built a relationship with the Mulembe Nation for his principled stand on issues of importance to the nation and not by being windy on what matters. Until Mr. Wetangula gets into that league, he will remain inconsequential in Luhyaland and in the Republic of Kenya. As the new leadership of the Community we reiterate our call for the Luhyia Nation to seek unity of purpose that will see us solve our long standing challenges like poverty and education and shun brokers who want to herd us into one tribal Boma so that they can auction us to the highest bidder. Signed Senator Cleophas Malala .Hon. Godfrey Osotsi SG ANC Hon. Edwin Sifuna SG ODM A five-storey building under construction came tumbling down in Ruaka, Kiambu County, on Monday night. The collapse occurred near Ndenderu area, off Limuru Road shortly before midnight. A statement by Kenya Red Cross indicated that one person was trapped in the rubble but was rescued and rushed to Kenyatta National Hospital for treatment. The collapse caused a power blackout in the area as residents urged Kenya Power officials to urgently dispatch disaster response teams. Send your engineers at Gacharage, Ruaka Jamuka Drive urgently. A house under construction has collapsed and part of the collapsed building is leaning on the main line. No power around the area, one Richard Gitau said on Twitter. This is not the first time that such an incident has occurred in Ruaka. Earlier in March, a four-storey building collapsed in the area. The latest collapse comes one week after a five-storey building under construction collapsed in Juja, Kiambu County, following heavy rains. Opposition Chief Raila Odinga on Tuesday visited ailing business tycoon Chris Kirubi at his home. Odinga was accompanied by his legal adviser Paul Mwangi in the visit to Kirubis posh home in Loresho. The visit comes after Chris Kirubi returned home in March after a six-month stay in the United States where he reportedly received specialized treatment for an undisclosed condition. Through a communication on his official Twitter account, Raila shared pictures of their meet up. He said the businessman was in high spirits. This morning I visited CKirubi who has recently returned from overseas where he had gone for medical treatment. It was great to see him in high spirits and we wish him all the best as he continues with his recovery, wrote Odinga. The two are said to have talked about the current state of affairs in the country. Kirubi reportedly lauded the Building Bridges Initiative by Raila Odinga and President Kenyatta, saying it will make a peaceful environment for investors. Kirubi, who is the single-largest shareholder of the Nairobi Securities Exchange traded Centum Investments with a 28.64 per cent stake, also took Raila on a tour of his upcoming construction project. The photos and some reactions from Kenyans. currently we are fighting corruption your sillent about it.we will only listen to that after recovery of nys,ncpb,kpc,kplc money is fully recovered CHIRCHIR HILLARY (@chillary40) May 29, 2018 Shame that the elite/corruptgo overseas for treatment and baba @RailaOdinga proudly tweets about it,but such tweets are a https://t.co/tz8jTCcjgI hospitals in Kenya!#NYSscandal Mebz (@meshinski85) May 29, 2018 For sure there are some things that money cant buywish him well on his medication. Nduva Peter Muendo (@muesh82sadart) May 29, 2018 The rabbit that is going to be unleashed in 2022, Ruto needs to brace himself. Hii Dawa baba anapika Ni Ile Kali. Kalvooo (@calvinTheODG) May 29, 2018 When are you meeting Kamlesh Patni, Ms Kabura, Ann WAIGURU and Vimal Shah? Make friends babamake friendsits time! Steve M (@McCinde) May 29, 2018 Tell him Uchumi and Kenatco are in their respective death beds. Mwarabu Fighter (@desmondkenya) May 29, 2018 Of late I see you with people who fry us dry its OK. kungz (@Martinw55991922) May 29, 2018 Baba you lost focus after the handshake Nicholas (@therealgakio) May 29, 2018 Radio personality and actress Jacquey Nyaminde, who is most notable for the role of Wilbroda in Papa Shirandula, has opened up about the blood-curdling moment she thought her son had been infected with HIV. Nyamindes son, Xolani Amin Okello, was just eight months old when his nanny, who was HIV positive, breastfed him. Narrating the incident to Parents magazine, Nyaminde revealed that she had traveled to Mombasa when it happened. When my son was around 8 months old, I had to travel to Mombasa on a work assignment and so I left him under the care of a nanny whom I had trusted so much. While in Mombasa, I received an anonymous call from a person who informed me that my househelp breastfed my son whenever he cried, Wilbroda recounted. At first, Nyaminde was not aware that the nanny was HIV positive. She went on, I took the first flight back to Nairobi. I had to verify the information from my neighbours and in the process, I was informed that my nanny not only breastfeeds my son but was also living with HIV. Panicked and gripped with fear for the worst, Ms Nyaminde rushed Okello to hospital in the middle of the night. I didnt sleep that night and had to rush to the hospital around midnight to have my son tested. Luckily he was fine, said Nyaminde. She added that she fired the nanny the next day. To cut the long story short I fired the nanny the following day. It took immense self-control to restrain myself from harming her. IMA Ponzi scheme case: A multi-crore scheme run by Karnataka-based I-Monetary Advisory (IMA) and its group entities allegedly duped lakhs of people by promising higher returns using Islamic ways of investment. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is currently investigating the case and has filed at least three FIRs. (File image of the CBI headquarters) The CBI on Wednesday registered a case against Sanjay Gupta, owner and promoter of OPG Securities Pvt Limited, Aman Kakrady (brother-in-law of Sanjay), Ajay Narottam Shah (who facilitated Gupta by developing and providing Algo software Chankaya) and against some officials of SEBI and National Stock Exchange whose names are unknown. CBI has registered cases under criminal conspiracy, PoC Act and section 66 of IT Act. The moves follows the agency's searches at about eight places in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi. OPG Securities is the centre of the co-location controversy on the NSE, in which some brokers who had availed of the server co-location facility, got preferential access to the exchanges trading system. These brokers had somehow managed to connect to the exchanges back-up server, and hence could access the price feed faster, giving them an advantage over other brokers. Modus Operandi Sanjay Gupta allegedly abused the server architecture of NSE in connivance with officials of NSE. Officials of NSE provided unfair access to OPG Securities to their server using co-location facilities during 2010-12. Between 2010 and 2012, Gupta was the first to login. After the introduction of Load Balancer in NSE server after 2012, servers of all other brokers were connected to the primary server of NSE. However, Sanjay connived with NSE officials and was able to get access to the backup server. It helped OPG Securities get faster access to market feed ahead of other brokers. Also read - NSE algo case: After bourses top brass, brokers come under SEBI lens A complaint was filed with SEBI. However, Gupta managed to get a favourable report from SEBI. The complaint was about abuse of the tick-by-tick architecture of NSE server. Gupta reportedly bribed some SEBI officials to get a favourable order. He allegedly directed employees to delete some important mails texts and logs, with an intention to destroy electronic evidence. It was also alleged that Ajay Shah, who had collected the NSE trade data in 2005-06 under the pretext of research activities, developed the software that was sold to select brokers, including OPG Securities. He along with Aman, were illegally trading in Dubai, Ghana, Singapore, Hong Kong and China through OPG. What the CBI FIR states According to CBIs FIR, NSE allegedly passed the information regarding the time NSE exchange servers were switched giving speed advantage to OPG Securities over other brokers. Co-location setup of servers gives a 10:1 approx speed advantage in comparison to other brokers. Further till 2014, information was disseminated by exchange server to the brokers attached with co-location facility through tick by tick based system architecture, the FIR stated. The FIR pinned the blame on Sanjay Gupta alleging that he dishonestly and fraudulently managed the data centre staff of NSE who started to let OPG Security Pvt Ltd connect to the backup servers especially. OPG had got far better and fast access to the market feed in comparison to other brokers. The favour shown by unknown officials of NSE to OPG Securities by providing market feed first in comparison to other brokers resulted in wrongful gain to OPG and wrongful loss to other brokers or investors, it said The FIR further stated that Gupta influenced SEBI officials by bribing them. The bribe amount was paid to unknown officials of NSE and SEBI by accused persons which shows criminal misconduct on part of NSE and SEBI by accused persons which shows criminal misconduct on part of unknown public servants for showing undue favour to OPG Securities Pvt Ltd, it said. Bengaluru: Bank employees shout slogans as they hold a demonstration as part of their two-day nationwide strike to press for wage revision, in Bengaluru on Wednesday, May 30, 2018. (PTI Photo/Shailendra Bhojak) (PTI5_30_2018_000056B) Banking services at public sector banks across India have been interrupted today, the Wednesday, and will continue to be so tomorrow, the 31st, as public sector bank employees have started their two-day nationwide strike against the meagre 2% salary hike offered by Indian Banks Association. However, operations in private banks, such as ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, were almost normal, barring few activities including cheque clearance. This has been in keeping with the warning issued last week United Forum of Banking Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of nine unions, including All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC), All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA) and National Organisation of Bank Workers (NOBW) - had called for the strike to protest against the meagre wage hike offered by the IBA earlier this month. Considering its the end of the month, the bank strike is likely to affect salary withdrawals. Some ATMs are also likely to take a hit. Besides, deposits in bank branches, renewal of fixed deposits, government treasury operation, money-market operations are also likely to be impacted by the bank strike. Withdrawal and cash-deposits at public sector banks will be affected. As several rounds of talks between banks and employee unions did not make any headway, including those called by the Chief Labour Commissioner, the United Forum of Banking Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of nine bank unions, has gone on strike against the proposed wage hike of 2% as against 15% given last time, said C.H. Venkatachalam, general secretary of All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA). Additional CLC Rajan Verma had held a conciliatory meeting between the United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU), finance ministry officials and the Indian Banks' Association (IBA) in an effort to avert the strike. At the May 5th meeting, UFBU leaders quoted figures to prove how operating profit has doubled, staff expenses have reduced, business has more than doubled. CLC said that officers and employees have to be paid for hard work and not based on profit. IBA was not ready to come out with a new offer but assured to continue the negotiations. "The CLC tried his best to sort out the strike-related issues but there is no positive development. Though the bankers, through the IBA, said they are willing to reconsider the proposed wage hike, there was no concrete proposal. Hence, the strike stands," All India Bank Employees' Association General Secretary C H Venkatachalam told Business Standard. All India Bank Officers Confederation (AIBOC) general secretary D T Franco said the UFBU leaders conveyed their grievance, including that there is inordinate delay, an offer of 2 per cent was not in good taste and the practice of wage negotiation for officers up to Scale VII -- which has been the practice -- has to continue. It is kind of an insult to the employees of public sector banks...to be offered this kind of meagre hike. We had no other option but to go on strike, forgoing two days salary, said Ravinder Gupta, joint general secretary, All India Bank Officers Confederation (AIBOC). He spoke of bank officers feeling hard done by. Attributing the success of all government schemes like Mudra, Jan Dhan Yojana and demonetisation to public sector bankers, he went on to say that the reward of just 2% hike, Gupta said, was gross injustice to bankers who have worked very hard for nation-building. In comparison, in the last wage settlement, for the period November 2012 to October 2017, IBA had given a wage hike of 15 per cent. The UFBU is now demanding an expeditious and early wage revision settlement, an adequate increase in salary, and improvement in other service conditions and wage revision settlement to include all officers up to scale VII, which will include divisional managers to general managers. IBA has currently decided to restrict wage negotiations to scale-III officers or up till the senior manager-level. As per the minutes of the meeting, IBA officials had stated that in view of the huge non-performing assets that banks are grappling with, the wage hike had to be capped at 2 per cent. According to a recent CARE Ratings report, NPAs of the 26 banks that have declared Q4 results so far show a 15% jump over December quarter at Rs 7.31 lakh crore. But UFBU convener Devidas Tuljapurkar later pointed out that "It is only because of provisions towards NPA that banks have booked losses, and for this, bank employees are not responsible". Echoing Ravinder Gupta, he too added that bank employees have worked tirelessly for implementation of government initiatives such as Jan-Dhan, demonetisation, Mudra and Atal Pension Yojana, among others, in the past two-three years, which he claimed, has resulted in a huge increase in their workloads. In light of this, Additional CLC Verma had advised the bank management to offer a fresh wage hike, adding that "as in the past, wage settlements, the officers from scale-IV to scale-VII were also covered so this time also they may be a part of the wage negotiations because excluding them may cause a fresh controversy which may not be conducive for amicable industrial relations". As per the minutes of the conciliation proceedings, the IBA officials had said that they were ready to negotiate further but having already waited nearly a month, the bank unions have apparently lost patience. Nearly 10 lakh bank employees are participating in the nationwide strike as part of our democratic right by forgoing our salary, said Venkatachalam and hoped that good sense prevails. There are about 85,000 branches of 21 public sector banks across India, accounting for 70% of all banking operations in the country. Big public sector banks such as the State Bank of India, the Punjab National Bank, etc. have already cautioned their customers that they will experience inconvenience over these two days. With AIBEA president Rajen Nagar reportedly announcing that ATM security guards will be among the participants in the strike, some ATMs may remain shut over the next two days. So even if your salary gets credited at the end of the month which lets face it, doesnt always happen you may not be able to withdraw it till Friday. However, the functioning of private banks like ICICI, HDFC, Axis and Kotak Mahindra is expected to be normal except for delays in cheque clearance. According to National Organisation of Bank Worker's (NOBW) vice president Ashwini Rana said 10 lakh bank employees and officers of the 21 public sector banks, old generation private banks and foreign banks will join the 2 days. "All India State Bank Officers' Federation and All India State Bank of India Staff Federation are members of UFBU. Thus, it is likely that our bank will also be impacted to some extent by the said strike calls," SBI had said in a regulatory filing. There are as many as 21 public sector banks which control 75 percent of the total business in the country. Data has indeed become the new oil for big businesses and SMEs alike as a majority of these organisations rely on data analytics to perform simple and sophisticated tasks. India has been the worlds favourite destination for IT outsourcing and the country's analytics exports to major economies such as the United States (US), the United Kingdom and Australia are growing by leaps and bounds. Owing to the country's success in examining information for businesses, the United States pays over $11 billion to India for data analytics every year, according to Analytics Industry Study-2017 by Analytics India Magazine & Analytixlabs. Source: Statista. The United States accounts for Indias highest revenue at 60 percent of the whole data analytics industry in India, followed by other major economies such as the United Kingdom ($170 million) and Australia ($109 million). Domestic accounts bring in about $85 million for the data analytics firms in India, that is, just 0.75 percent of the total revenue that such firms earn from the US. India ranks among the top 10 destinations for analytics with over 600 analytics firms. While more than 50 percent of them are startups, Indian data analytics market is estimated to grow even further due to increase in efficiency of tools and products specialising in data processing. India's overall revenue generated by these companies stood at an estimated $2.03 billion annually and with a 23.8 percent of compounded annual growth rate (CAGR). Why is data analytics important? In the current times, data is probably worth more than money as big data analytics can help organisations harness their data and use it to identify new opportunities. Data analytics may lead to smarter business moves, more efficient operations, higher profits and happier customers. Big data technologies can bring significant cost advantages to companies and help them identify more efficient ways of doing business, International Institute for Analytics (IIA) Director of Research Thomas H Davenport and Jill Dyche stated in their report on Big Data in Big Companies. Davenport and Dyche added that on the basis of these analysis businesses are able to analyse information immediately and make decisions based on what they have learned. It also helps them gauge customer needs and satisfaction, which gives them the power to provide customers what they want. Ultimately, this helps businesses expand their user base. Data analytics market is here to stay Apart from the benefits that organisations get from using data analytics, the market has been booming due to the increased availability of accessible and cheap data centres delivered by cloud vendors. This has led to a decline in the costs of upfront investment for small businesses, thereby reducing the market entry barrier. "...businesses have started showing a greater interest in getting analytics platform off the ground to reap the desired outcome. Most small and mid-size enterprises are now viewing big data more as a strategic initiative and a central IT function," the report said. Data analytics cater to various sectors including Finance and Banking, which continues to be the largest sector being served by analytics in India. It accounts for an overall revenue of 37 percent or $756 million in revenues. Source: analyticsindiamag.com Marketing and advertising come at the second spot at 26 percent, followed by e-commerce sector at 15 percent of analytics revenues in India. Use of data analytics in these sectors has been on the rise with Pharma and Healthcare reporting the biggest jump (34 percent) in analytics revenues to $137 million from $103 million. The increase in demand for analytics in these sectors hint at the growing market that is currently estimated to be $2.03 billion annually in revenues. Analytics, data science and big data industry in India is expected to almost double by 2020, according to the report. People wait to enter a bank in Mumbai, India, November 15, 2016. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui - RTX2TSDY Moneycontrol News A nationwide two-day strike by employees protesting nominal wage hike has interrupted banking services across the country. ATMs are expected go out of cash later in the day and things may just get tougher as bank branches have stopped servicing withdrawals and cash deposits. About 10 lakh employees from over 80,000 branches of 21 public sector banks have gone on the two-day strike beginning Wednesday. Employees from about seven foreign, and nine private sector banks are also part of the protest. Government banks alone account for over 70 percent of the total banking business. The strike is in protest of the marginal two-percent wage hike given to bank employees, who have demanded revision similar the approximately 15 percent raise doled out last time. The demand has also got the support of the top management of banks. Given the backing of digital transactions and many of our customers having adapted to it, the strike has been relatively less stressful. But the ATMs may soon dry up as we cannot supply the cash from our branches, said a bank executive of a small public sector bank. Services such as cash deposits, withdrawals at branches as well as ATMs, and clearing of cheques are likely to be impacted. With the protests happening at the end of the month, there are also fears of salary withdrawals getting affected. Most of the banks, including State Bank of India (SBI), Punjab National Bank (PNB) and Bank of Baroda (BoB), have already informed their customers that functioning of branches and offices will be impacted if the strike takes off. However, the functioning of private banks like ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank is expected to be normal except for delays in cheque clearance. The disagreement The United Forum of Bank Unions (UBFU), the umbrella body of various bank nine unions, is leading the strike. The gross profit of the banking system is Rs 1.58 lakh crore, out of that 70 percent is towards bad loan provisions. I am concerned with operating profit and we work hard for it. You cannot deny me that right," said S Nagarajan, General Secretary, All India Bank Officers Association (AIBOA). "We also asked the IBA (Indian Banks' Association) not to delink the wage negotiations for bank officers in the Scales 4-7. The IBA did not do anything, he added. Apart from the demand for an early wage review settlement, the UBFU has also asked for the inclusion of all officers up to scale VII in the review. Wage revisions are usually done after discussions between the unions and the IBA. The two then release a joint note, which is an agreement signed between the IBA and the officers' associations. Since 1979, the agreement has covered officers between scale 1-7. Suddenly, six banks (SBI, BoB, PNB, Union Bank of India, Oriental Bank of Commerce and Indian Bank) have negotiated to give the wage revision to officers up to Scale 4 only, that is not democratic Even the Chief Labour Commissioner has backed us, Nagarajan said, adding that among 19 banks, a majority should prevail and not the mandate of six banks. In the last wage revision in 2012, which was for the period between November 1, 2012, and October 31, 2017, bank employees got a 15 percent wage hike. In the May 5 meeting with the unions, the IBA proposed a two percent hike in the wages for the bank employees owing to the growing pain in almost all the banks balance sheets. The revised wage revisions are due from November 2017. "The 2 percent of wage increase offered is not at all acceptable to the unions/federations, considering the rise in cost of livingWe had requested the IBA to come up with a better offer than the mere two per cent hike offer made earlier," said C H Venkatachalam, General Secretary of All India Bank Employees Association. The IBA could meet the unions on June 12 to restart wage negotiations. But this is yet to be confirmed. Backing from senior management Most banks including SBI and Bank of Baroda have made a provision (capital set aside for potential outlay) towards the wage revision to the extent of 7-10 percent. A CEO and managing director of a mid-sized bank said, I do feel the wage hike is less, maybe a 7-10 percent should be reasonableLast revision was at 15 percent and given the rise in the cost of living, I think the IBA should talk it out and try to commensurate or be close the past hike, it is only logical enough to give them a better pay. irda est 600x450_31095785 Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) has revoked a prior order that had suspended the corporate agent licence of R K Live Well Assurance. IRDAI had given this suspension order in October 2017. This, the regulator said, was on the basis of violations of the norms under the Registration of Corporate Agents Regulations, 2015. It further said the company had failed to disclose proceedings initiated against them by another government body within a stipulated time. It pertains to a case in the Registrar of Companies (ROC), NCT of Delhi and Haryana which struck off the name of the company from ROC. This was due to non-filing of the returns to ROC. When IRDAI came to know of this, it suspended RK Live Well Assurances certification of registration without notice. As per Regulation 14 (jii) of the Corporate Agent Regulations, an agent has to inform IRDAI in writing immediately if there is any material change in the information submitted. The ROC had struck off the name of the company, which is a material change. Non-disclosure of this was considered a violation and therefore their licence was suspended. Section 22 (3) of the Corporate Agents Regulations 2015 has said a corporate agent has to disclose to IRDAI any proceedings initiated against them by other regulatory or government bodies within a reasonable time but not later than 30 days from the initiation of such proceedings. IRDAI said this was also a factor in ordering the suspension. However, RK Live Well Assurance had informed IRDAI in February 2018 that the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has reinstated the name of the company. Further, the NCLT Delhi bench had also asked the company to pay Rs 25,000 to Prime Ministers Relief Fund and restored the name of the company in the Registrar of Companies (ROC). Following this, IRDAI has said the company is no longer in violation of the regulations. Therefore, the suspension order was revoked. Regular updates: Make it a practise to regularly update your resume even if not actively looking for a job. This means that if the opportunity presents itself, you will not waste time hesitating or delaying to make updates on the spot. (Image: Reuters) A Delhi-based corporate lawyer was baffled when a human resource (HR) official of his organisation sent him an email asking him to fill up a consent form to access his credit score. Being employed with the firm for three years, he was confused as to why they wanted to verify the information again. The reason was, he was being promoted to a senior management role. His credit score had in fact dropped in the past one year because he missed a few credit card bill payments and he was questioned on this. Further, the law firm also asked him to keep a track of his financial dues at a time when his employer was defending high-profile cases of debt-laden firms. Re-screening or the process of conducting a background verification again in the duration of employment is slowly becoming the norm. This means that even after a candidate has been screened at the time of joining a new company, their credentials are checked once again. So next time you miss bill payments or jump a signal, beware. Your company may seek clarifications on these specific actions. Background verification is now slowly becoming a dynamic process. It is not just restricted to the time when a candidate is being recruited. The companies only verify data and seek clarifications where there have been discrepancies. However, it is not a threat to your job and only if there is a serious criminal case filed against them will it impact employment. Steve Girdler, Managing Director of EMEA and APAC at background verification firm HireRight, said companies primarily look at data on criminal cases filed in the time period after he/she has joined the company. According to a report by HireRight, India has been early adopter of rescreening. This, it said, ensures that changes in employee circumstances were being accounted for as they moved through their career. For example, this could be to cover the requirements of a new role with increased responsibility or having records up to date such as criminal convictions and professional licenses. The report also said only 44 percent (down from 57 percent in 2017) companies do not rescreen post hire, the rest conduct the screening process again. Background verification firms Moneycontrol spoke to said primarily completion of key certifications (like CFA), validity of professional certifications as well as court cases are checked by companies. Information technology firms as well as banking and financial services firms are the most active in rescreening employees. Multinational corporations who do this in other markets are also following it in India. When it comes to rescreening, changes in the global head offices could also have repercussions in the Indian market. For instance, a speeding ticket could be considered a minor traffic offence in one company. However, a firm in the automotive sector could consider that as a major issue if it happens on a regular basis. You will not be sacked based on the findings of the rescreening process. This is just basic hygiene which companies are looking at to ensure that records and information about employees is up to date, said a senior official with a mid-size employee screening firm. If it is a high-profile court case, the employee does get the information. However, when it comes to other issues like sexual harassment charges filed in a previous establishment. The person quoted above cited an instance of an IT engineer who was found to be in an alleged sexual harassment matter in his previous company and this hadnt been disclosed in the past. Though he was asked to go on leave till the matter was resolved, he finally quit. Among employees, the highest quantum of rescreening is done for those who are either promoted or changing roles. Also, now that contingent and contract workforce is on the rise, rescreening is being made a part of the verification process. Credit rating agency Moody's on Wednesday cut its forecast for India's GDP growth in 2018 to 7.3 percent from 7.5 percent earlier. The government will release GDP data for the quarter ended March on Thursday at 05:30 pm. Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg on Monday said it was expected that annual growth was between 7.3 and 7.5 percent in the March quarter. India's GDP grew by 7.2 percent in the third quarter, which helped the country reclaim the title of fastest growing economy from China. China grew 6.8 percent in the quarter, the data showed. India's economy probably gained a little momentum in the first three months of 2018 which should ensure that it remains the worlds fastest-growing major economy, a Reuters poll found. Gross domestic product expanded an annual 7.3 percent in the first three months of 2018, the May 24-29 poll of 55 economists predicted, a touch faster than the 7.2 percent achieved in the last three months of 2017 and well above Chinas pace of 6.8 percent for the quarter ending in March. Forecasts ranged from 6.9 to 7.7 percent. If the poll is right, January-March would have the fastest expansion since before the governments surprise decision in November 2016 to scrap high-value currency notes and a botched implementation of a goods and services tax (GST) in July last year stalled growth. GDP growth for the March quarter and FY18 is likely to spring a positive surprise. "We expect GDP growth for Q4FY18 would be around 7.6 percent and subsequently the FY18 growth would be at 6.7 percent," Soumya Kanti Ghosh, Group Chief Economic Adviser, SBI, said in a note. "We expect 9 percent growth in manufacturing GVA in Q4 due to smart growth in corporate GVA as both of these are strongly positively correlated," he said. Corporate GVA, which has decelerated since the December quarter of FY17, rebounded in the September quarter of FY18 and exhibited positive growth of 16.1 percent in the March quarter this year. The agriculture sector will post a growth rate in excess of CSO projections, with better food grain production estimates. The service sector will continue to grow at over 8 percent. (With inputs from Reuters) Benchmark indices ended the session mildly lower after volatility on Wednesday, as political turmoil in Italy and Moody's GDP growth forecast cut weighed on market sentiment. Investors also closely monitor the movement in the rupee and crude oil prices, both of which are range-bound after recent sharp moves. The 30-share BSE Sensex fell more than 200 points intraday but managed to recoup losses in last hour of trade to close slightly lower, down 43.13 points to 34,906.11. The 50-share NSE Nifty managed to hold 10,600 levels, falling 18.90 points to 10,614.40 ahead of expiry of May futures & options contracts on Thursday. Jayant Manglik, President, Religare Broking believes that the upward movement of crude oil prices could increasingly face challenges on the back of continued rise in US oil production and the recent measures by Saudi Arabia and Russia to counter potential shortfalls in oil supply. This will put a reign on the depreciating rupee also, he said. The Indian rupee recovered sharply, rising 43 paise to 67.43 against the US dollar due to sustained bouts of dollar-selling from banks and exporters. Mangalik said with corporate earnings witnessing traction, as evident from the March quarter earnings season, the current market valuation multiples should broadly sustain. Globally investors worried over Eurozone break-up risk due to political turmoil in Italy. Asian markets closed lower, tracking the overnight correction in US and European markets. China's Shanghai Composite, Japan's Nikkei, Hong Kong's Hang Seng and South Korea's Kospi ended down 1-2.5 percent. European markets were mixed, with the Germany's DAX rising half a percent while France's CAC fell half a percent. "Italys political paroxysms have sent jitters across most asset classes including equity, bonds, currencies as well as commodities, Gaurang Somaiya, Analyst - Currencies, Motilal Oswal Commodities told Moneycontrol. This uncertainty has caused fears amongst market participants raised and questions that Will Italy stay in the Euro bloc? Stocks across the globe fell following fear that escalating crisis in Italy could deepen further," he said. Brent crude oil futures gained half a percent at $75.78 a barrel amid worries over rising output from Saudi Arabia and Russia. Meanwhile, rating agency Moody's reduced its India 2018 growth forecast to 7.3 percent from 7.5 percent but retained 2019 GDP growth estimates at 7.5 percent. "India's transition to new GST regime could weigh on growth in the next few quarters." Mahindra & Mahindra was the biggest gainer among Nifty50 stocks, rising 3 percent as brokerage houses upped target prices after strong Q4 earnings. Credit Suisse has maintained Outperform rating on the stock with increased target price to Rs 1,030 (from Rs 970) as the stock traded at attractive valuation of less than 13x core FY20 EPS. Coal India gained 2 percent and Power Grid was up over a percent after March quarter earnings while ONGC ended down 0.88 percent and SAIL gained 1.5 percent ahead of Q4 earnings later in the day. ICICI Bank was the biggest contributor to Nifty's losses, falling 1.7 percent. In the ICICI Bank-Videocon loan case, the bank has called for an independent enquiry to examine the merit of the complaint against its CEO Chanda Kochhar on alleged conflict of interest while giving loans to the corporate group. HDFC, L&T, ITC, Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors, IOC, HPCL and Axis Bank were down up to 2.6 percent while HDFC Bank, Bajaj Finance, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, SBI, Bajaj Finserv and Tech Mahindra gained up to 2 percent. Satin Creditcare rallied 10 percent after the company posted consolidated profit at Rs 44 crore for March quarter against loss of Rs 43 crore in year-ago period while Nava Bharat Ventures surged 17 percent as consolidated profit in Q4 jumped nearly 8-fold to Rs 173.5 crore QoQ. Borosil Glass Works gained nearly 6 percent as profit in Q4 grew by 66 percent YoY to Rs 14.8 crore while Alkem Labs fell 3 percent after profit dropped 51.6 percent YoY to Rs 66.3 crore. The S&P BSE Sensex closed flat after witnessing a volatile day of trade on Wednesday which was largely weighed down by concerns over Italys political crisis and renewed trade war fears which pushed stock markets across the globe lower. The S&P BSE Sensex closed 43 points lower at 34,906.11 ahead of May F&O expiry on Thursday while the Nifty50 managed to hold above 10,600 to close at 10,614, down 18.95 points. The possibility of fresh general election and Eurosceptic political parties strengthening their vote share has raised concerns about stability in the Eurozone. Italy is Eurozones third-largest economy and has been weak for several years. The countrys debt currently stands at 130 percent of its economic output. The recent developments have led to nervousness in the European and global markets. Italys political paroxysms have sent jitters across most asset classes including equity, bonds, currencies as well as commodities, Gaurang Somaiya, Analyst - Currencies, Motilal Oswal Commodities told Moneycontrol. This uncertainty has caused fears amongst market participants raised and questions that Will Italy stay in the Euro bloc? Stocks across the globe fell following fear that escalating crisis in Italy could deepen further, he said. On the sectoral front, the S&P BSE Power index rose 0.2 percent, followed by the S&P BSE Metal index which gained 0.15 percent, and the S&P BSE Banking index rose 0.1 percent. On the losing front, the S&P BSE Healthcare index which dropped 0.7 percent, followed by the S&P BSE Infrastructure index dropped 0.71 percent, and the S&P BSE Capital Goods index was down 0.68 percent. The S&P BSE Midcap index rose marginally by 0.03 percent, and the S&P BSE Smallcap index slipped 0.19 percent. Top Sensex gainers include names like M&M (up 3.08 percent), Coal India (up 2.3 percent), Kotak Mahindra Bank (up 1.4 percent), and Yes Bank (up 1.3 percent). Top Sensex losers include names like Tata Motors DVR (down 2 percent), followed by Tata Motors (down 1.9 percent), ICICI Bank (down 1.8 percent), and Bajaj Auto (down 1.1 percent). Stocks in news: Manpasand Beverages continued its sharp downfall for the third consecutive day as investors could have chosen to be cautious of its auditors abrupt exit ahead of Board meeting. The stock was locked in a lower circuit of 10 percent. Fortis Healthcare informed exchanges that the board meeting scheduled today to consider and approve the audited financial results for the quarter and financial year ended March 31, 2018 stands deferred to June 11, 2018. The stock closed 1.1 percent higher. Coal Indias shares gained 2.3 percent as brokerages remain upbeat on better price hike realisations. Brokerage house Nomura has maintained its neutral call on the stock with a target of Rs 332 apiece. It observed that the company had a strong March quarter as price hikes in January materialized. Its realisation on fuel supply agreement front surprised and has driven the sizeable earnings beat. In fact, the revenue was 9 percent above consensus estimates. CRISIL stock price rose 13.7 percent after 6.33 lakh equity shares (representing 0.9 percent of total equity) exchanged hands on the National Stock Exchange at Rs 1851.05 per share. Borosil Glass Works share price rallied 5.6 percent after March quarter profit shot up 66 percent year-on-year to Rs 14.8 crore and revenue grew by 16.3 percent to Rs 87.5 crore. M&M rose 3 percent after global brokerage firms such as CLSA, Credit Suisse, and Jefferies maintains their rating but raised their respective target price for M&M Ltd post Q4 results. The most aggressive target of Rs 1075 for M&M was given by CLSA which translates into a gain of 23 percent from Tuesdays closing price of Rs 868.80. In other news/Global Update: Prices of petrol and diesel have been cut by 1 paise and not 59 paise as mentioned earlier. Indian Oil (IOC) had published the wrong prices of the commodity earlier today. The credit rating agency Moody's on Wednesday slashed India's GDP growth forecast for 2018 from 7.5 percent to 7.3 percent. The government will announce GDP data for the quarter ended March on Thursday at 05:30 PM. The Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg said on Monday it was expected that annual growth was between 7.3 and 7.5 percent in the March quarter. Globally investors worried over Eurozone break-up risk due to political turmoil in Italy. Asian markets closed lower, tracking the overnight correction in US and European markets. China's Shanghai Composite, Japan's Nikkei, Hong Kong's Hang Seng and South Korea's Kospi ended down 1-2.5 percent. European markets were mixed, with the Germany's DAX rising half a percent while France's CAC fell half a percent. Brent crude oil futures gained half a percent at $75.78 a barrel amid worries over rising output from Saudi Arabia and Russia. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More We had initiated the coverage on Minda Corporation (Minda), a well-diversified auto-component manufacturer. It posted an excellent set of numbers for Q4 FY18, led by topline and operating performance. With marquee clients in its kitty, no client concentration, focus on research to develop technologically advanced products and turnaround at Minda Furukawa, the company beckons investor attention. In the quarter gone by, net revenue from operations grew 40 percent year-on-year (YoY) on the back of growth accruing across major business segments. On the profitability front, the company posted a 390 bps YoY expansion in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) margin and 113 percent YoY growth in EBITDA. Margin expansion was driven by operating leverage, led by favourable product mix and reduction in employee and other operating costs. Profit-after-tax (PAT) grew 137.4 percent YoY with PAT margin expanding 220bps YoY. On a full-year basis, the company posted a 25.9 percent increase in net revenue. EBITDA grew 44.6 percent, with margin expanded 130bps. PAT grew 38.8 percent. We continue to maintain our positive view on the company due to: Minda has a well-diversified product portfolio with a presence across a variety of segments in the automobile industry. The group has about 30 customers in more than 20 countries. The management wants to capitalise on its global footprint and has many initiatives underway to increase its focus on exports. The company generated export revenue of Rs 275 crore in FY18 compared to Rs 170 crore YoY. The management maintains its FY20 export revenue target of Rs 500 crore. For Q4 FY18, Minda received Rs 1,361 crore in orders (lifetime value) across domestic and export businesses. Of which, Rs 564 crore relates to safety, security and restraint system and Rs 607 crore to driver information and telematics. For FY18, the company received an order worth Rs 4,221 crore (life-time value). These orders will be executed over the next four to six years. The company has been focusing and investing a lot on R&D. The management sees higher demand for electronics and advanced products. To develop technologically advanced products, it has established a technical centre - Spark Minda Technical Centre (SMIT) - in Pune. Recently, Minda acquired EI Labs for an enterprise value of Rs 6.5 crore, underscoring its focus on R&D and electric vehicle (EV). In the second quarter, EI Labs bagged a prestigious order from Energy Efficiency Services (EESL) to supply mobility components for EVs. The company recently raised Rs 310 crore through a qualified institutional placement (QIP). One of the issue objectives was to raise capital to fund its acquisition plans. The company may also use the amount raised to pare down some of its debt, manage its working capital and other general purposes. The management has significant expansion plans. It started a greenfield plant at Mexico in April last year to supply plastic interiors to the Volkswagen Group. It has also set up a third die casting plant in Pune, which will start generating revenues from this fiscal. Minda has an existing production capacity of 4,600 million tonne per annum and is targeting to raise the same to 9,600 mtpa by FY20. The company is in the process of setting up a production line for new product control cables at Pant Nagar and has already bagged its first order from a global two-wheeler manufacturer in India. The management has been focusing on turning around Minda Furukawa, which has been non-profitable. It has chalked out plans for the same. Its efforts are bearing fruit as the company has turned EBITDA positive in FY18. PAT, however, turned negative due to exceptional items. Valuation In terms of valuation, the company is trading at 21.4 and 18.6 times FY18 and FY19 projected earnings, respectively. After initiating coverage, the stock has run up around 32 percent in eight months. From a longer-term perspective, we are comfortable with the valuation and advise investors to accumulate the stock. Follow @NitinAgrawal65 Theres been a lot of chatter about GDPR, a new law that is being implemented by the European Union around privacy of data. GDPR is what led to a great number of emails flooding your and my email inboxes about updated privacy policies. As one email I received said, We aim to be fair, open and honest about who we are and what we are going to do with the personal data we collect. Lets face it. We never believed such declarations anyway. The existence of Cambridge Analytica is proof that data privacy is a myth. Even so, the EU is, ostensibly, making a valiant attempt at privacy. So what on earth is GDPR and why are all these newsletters flipping out about it? Thats what we will find out on todays deep dive. My name is Rakesh, and youre listening to Moneycontrol. The European Union has implemented a new law with the intent of protecting data privacy. It's called the General Data Protection Regulation, now famous as GDPR. This Friday, it comes into effect in 28 EU countries. Back in 2012, the European Commission charted out plans for data protection reform across the Union in order to make Europe 'fit for the digital age'. One of the major components of the reforms is the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation. In April 2016, agreement was reached on what that involved and GDPR was adopted by the EU as a law. This new law applies to organisations in all member-states and has implications for businesses and individuals across Europe, and beyond. GDPR changes the rules for companies that collect, store or process large amounts of information on residents of the EU. It demands more openness about what data these companies possess and whom they share it with. Hello Facebook. I think they mean you. The GDPR came up several times during Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before the US Congress this April the one that went viral on WhatsApp and other social media - and it was a major focus this week when members of the European Parliament questioned Zuckerberg in Brussels. EU officials said they weren't satisfied with the Facebook CEO's answers to questions about the GDPR. "I think the GDPR in general is going to be a very positive step for the internet," Zuckerberg told American lawmakers, discussing Facebook's plans to tighten data policies, protect users from further leaks and become more transparent about who's advertising on the site. Any company with a digital presence in the EU will have to comply with the law or face steep penalties. EU here still includes the UK because the Brexit drama hasnt played out in full yet. Its not just Facebook or other big names that will be affected. Health care providers, insurers, banks and any other company dealing in sensitive personal data will also be on the hook. That explains the flood of updated privacy policies in your email inbox. A company being based in the US or anywhere else wont save it from the hefty penalties that the EU has promised to impose if EU citizen data is toyed with. As CNET noted, GDPR will have a significant impact on our online footprints and how the apps and services we use protect or exploit them. At the core, GDPR is a new set of rules designed to give EU citizens more control over their personal data. It requires all firms dealing with personal data to be open and transparent about what they will do with it, and to take the users permission before they share it. The law also requires firms to seek user consent through an explicit opt-in, or a signature on a consent form. Meaning you can now say goodbye to check-boxes that are ticked by default. Not just that, once the data is shared, consumers also have the right to object to specific uses of their personal data and can demand a playback or deletion of their past records at any time. Firms that lose data to a hacking or data breaches can no longer hide it. They are required need to notify customers within 72 hours of the breach. This will be a big change from existing business practices regarding data management, and the general conduct of companies with regard to user data. For example, during the Equifax data breach in 2017 that exposed the personal information of nearly 148 million people in the US and beyond, the company spent weeks stopping the attack and then planning how to deal with the damage before informing the public. Data breaches are inevitable from time-to-time, as the history of the internet demonstrates. Information is lost, stolen or otherwise released into the hands of people who are never intended to see it. Some of these people can have malicious intent. And that is where data security comes in. Under the terms of GDPR, organisations have to ensure that personal data is protected from misuse and exploitation - or face penalties for not doing so. If someone in the EU wants a company to delete his or her data, send copies of the data, or correct an error in the data, companies have to comply. GDPR goes even further. EU residents can now object to specific ways companies are using their data, saying that they don't mind if a company keeps the data as long as it stops using the info for a particular purpose. Okay, so breaking down who is covered under GDPR, and how much misdemeanors can cost a company playing truant with EU citizen data - There are three aspects that make GDPR provisions far more stringent, if not all-encompassing, than any other existing data privacy law. One, it applies not just to companies based in the EU, but to all businesses that sell goods or even services, or even monitor the behaviour of EU residents. Thats a pretty wide net. Two, GDPR affects not just the organisations collecting or mining the data but also all of those that process the data on their behalf. Third, playing hookey with GDPR can hurt companies a fair bit - the new law levies a fine of 20 million or 4 percent of the errant companys global sales, whichever is higher, for serious violations. Within just days of its implementation, GDPR had already made its presence felt. It has led to the shutdown of a couple of US news websites and prompted billion-dollar lawsuits against Google and Facebook by an Austrian privacy activist. Talk about impact. Businesses in India, too, will come under GDPR, if they have are looking at operating in Europe, that is. Several businesses operating out of India now have the ability to target customers globally. If an entity, while offering its goods or services, targets customers in the EU, and collects & processes personal data of such persons, then that entity has to comply with the rules and processes set out in GDPR. The impact of GDPR on Indian individuals is an outcome of the approach adopted by businesses around the world. In their efforts to update privacy policies in compliance with the sweeping changes wrought by GDPR, businesses around the world, including India, have decided not to limit these changes to their users located in EU alone. Most, if not all, businesses are making these safeguards available globally, rather than adopting country-specific policies. This has resulted in Indian nationals enjoying safeguards and control of their personal data that were not previously available to them under Indian data privacy laws. India has, at best, sketchy privacy laws contained in the archaic Information Technology Act 2000, and an expert committee is working on a new set of laws. Its anybodys guess how safe user data is in India. One important point to note is that GDPR privileges in India are only available to Indian nationals under contract. Indian citizens will not be able to seek protection under GDPR. The Economic Times notes that any claim of data breach will necessarily be under contract and, to the extent available, under Indian data privacy laws. The manner in which businesses around the world and in India have chosen to comply with GDPR has resulted in an unexpected benefit for Indian nationals. There are two different types of data-handlers the new legislation applies to: 'processors' and 'controllers'. A controller is "person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of processing of personal data", while the processor is defined as a "person, public authority, agency or other body which processes personal data on behalf of the controller". The UK's Information Commissioners Office, which is the authority responsible for registering data controllers, taking action on data protection and handling concerns and mishandling data, says "You will have significantly more legal liability if you are responsible for a breach. These obligations for processors are a new requirement under the GDPR." What this means is, GDPR ultimately places legal obligations on a processor to maintain records of personal data and how that is processed. This provides a much higher level of legal liability if the organisations data security measures are breached. Controllers will be forced to ensure that all contracts with processors are in compliance with GDPR. Lets look at what this data is, that the GDPR makes nearly sacrosanct. The types of data considered personal under the existing legislation include name, address, and photos. GDPR has expanded the definition of personal data so that something like an IP address can be considered personal data. It also protects information that can show a person's activity both online and in the real world. Besides, IP addresses, that includes location information, cookies and other data that lets companies track users as they browse the internet. It includes sensitive personal data - genetic data, biometrics which could be processed to uniquely identify an individual etc, racial or ethnic data, sexual orientation, political opinions etc. Yes, we live in times when expressing controversial political opinions online can even get you arrested. What does GDPR mean for businesses? It establishes one law across the European continent and a single set of rules which apply to companies doing business within EU member states. The European Commission claims that by having a single supervisor authority for the entire EU, it will make it simpler and cheaper for businesses to operate within the region. The Commission claims that GDPR will save 2.3 billion per year across Europe. "By unifying Europe's rules on data protection, lawmakers are creating a business opportunity and encouraging innovation," the Commission says. They say regulation will guarantee that data protection safeguards are built into products and services from the earliest stage of development, providing 'data protection by design' in new products and technologies. Businesses will be encouraged to adopt techniques like 'pseudonymization' in order to benefit from the collection and analysis of personal data, while the privacy of their customers is kept safe at the same time. For individuals, its a mixed bag. The number of data breaches and hacks over the years means that, for many of us, data whether it is an email address, a password, social security number, health records, dating preferences has been exposed on the internet. One of the primary changes GDPR will ring in, is providing consumers with a right to know when their data has been hacked. Organisations will be required to notify the appropriate national bodies as soon as possible in order to ensure EU citizens can take appropriate measures to prevent their data from being abused. Consumers are also assured of easier access to their personal data, in terms of how it is processed. Businesses have been instructed that they need to detail how they use customer information in a clear and understandable way. One of the most interesting aspects of GDPR is the Right To Be Forgotten. Also known as the right to data deletion, once the original purpose or use of the customer data has been realized, customers have the right to request that companies totally erase their personal data. What happens if there is a breach of data anyway? Once GDPR comes into force this Friday, it will introduce a duty for all organisations to report certain types of data breaches which involve unauthorised access to or loss of personal data to the relevant supervisory authority. In some cases, organisations must also inform individuals affected by the breach. They are obliged to report breaches that are likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals and lead to discrimination, damage to reputation, financial loss, loss of confidentiality, or any other economic or social disadvantage. What that officialese means is, should the name, address, data of birth, health records, bank details, or any private or personal data about customers be breached, the organisation that has been breached is obliged to inform those affected, as well as the relevant regulatory body, so that everything possible can be done to contain the damage. And this is where GDPR puts the onus on businesses. The communication about a breach will need to be done via a breach notification, which must be delivered directly to the victims. This information may not be communicated only in a press release, on social media, or on a companys website. It must be a one-to-one correspondence with those affected. It is also made mandatory for the affected business to describe the possible consequences of the data loss for example, theft of money, or identity fraud as well as a description of the measures which are being taken to deal with the crime, and any counter measure to deal with negative impacts which might be faced by the victims of the breach. The contact details of the data protection officer, or main point of contact dealing with the breach, will also need to be provided. There was some immediate fallout of GDPR for European internet users. Those that visited American news websites like The LA Times, The Chicago Times and The Baltimore Sun on May 25th found that they weren't able to access the websites, with the publishers pointing to GDPR as the reason. The LA Times had a statement for European users that said, "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and are commited to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings in the EU market. This leads directly to the question, what were these newspapers and news outlets even doing with user data that they didnt want to risk GDPR penalties? And what consent did they have? Many large online services and social-media companies are updating privacy policies and terms of service to prepare for the long arm of the new law. Facebook's response will be probably the most scrutinized by European regulators, given the Cambridge Analytica scandal as well as multiple previous concerns about the company's approach to data collection. Austrian privacy advocates filed complaints on Friday, the first day the GDPR went into effect, against Google and Facebook, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp. The hilarious turnaround of Facebook being watched all the time for what it does. Fun times we live in, no? GDPR is a major reform in online privacy laws designed to reflect the world we're living in today. It brings laws and obligations across a vast swathe of Europe that are in tune with the hyper-connected age we live in. So whats the big deal about GDPR? Fundamentally, almost every aspect of our lives revolves around data. Social media, banks, shopping, even governments -- almost every service we use involves the collection and analysis of your and my personal data. Names, addresses, credit card information and more - all of these are collected, analysed and, perhaps most importantly, stored by organisations. Ultimately, GDPR is an aggressive move by authorities in the face of data abuse, and it puts all the power in the hands of the citizen when it comes to their data. Expets recommend that we view it as a positive force that safeguards consumer data rights in an increasingly accessible but volatile world. And, just as it protects the consumer, it also protects organisations from overstepping their boundaries. Hear that Facebook? Boundaries. Representataive Image Reliance Infratel has reached an agreement with its minority shareholder HSBC Daisy Investments (Mauritius) to settle a dispute over non-payment of dues, paving the way for sale of the firm's telecom tower business to clear bank loans. Following the development, the Anil Ambani led firm today withdrew its petition from the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) seeking permission to sell its tower and fibre assets. The move will allow debt ridden Reliance Communications to proceed with asset monetisation by selling tower and fibre assets of Reliance Infratel Ltd (RITL). During the proceedings of NCLAT, the counsel appearing for the RCom subsidiary informed the appellate tribunal that it has reached a settlement with HSBC Daisy Investments (Mauritius), which holds 4.26 per cent share holding in the company. "Parties have reached settlement. The moment company exits IBC process, they would sign the terms of consent," the RITL counsel said. Following this, a NCLAT bench headed by Chairman Justice S J Mukhopadhaya allowed the company to withdraw its plea. "In view of consent terms, parties are allowed to withdraw their appeal. Both appeals are accordingly disposed of," the bench said. The RCom group firm's petition was also backed by state-owned lender SBI at NCLAT. The Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal had stayed the sale of tower and fibre assets of the company, a move which was challenged by RITL before NCLAT. The sale of these businesses forms an important part of the overall Rs 25,000 crore asset monetisation blueprint of the troubled company. In December 2017, Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio had struck a mega deal to acquire mobile business assets including spectrum, towers and optical fibre network of RCom, owned by his younger brother Anil. May 30, 2018 / 10:19 AM IST BHEL | Company reported loss at Rs 893.1 crore in Q1FY21 against loss Rs 218.9 crore, revenue fell to Rs 1,990.9 crore versus Rs 4,532.5 crore YoY. (Image: Reuters) live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Shares of Bharat Heavy Electricals (BHEL) gained nearly 2 percent intraday Wednesday as company has reported more than double growth in March quarter profit at Rs 457.2 crore, driven by strong operational income. Profit in the same quarter last fiscal stood at Rs 215.5 crore, the company said in its filing. Revenue from operations during the quarter grew by 3.7 percent to Rs 10,144 crore compared to Rs 9,779.5 crore in corresponding period last year. BHEL said the outstanding orderbook stood at Rs 1.18 lakh crore at the end of March 2018, the highest in last five years. The state-run company has booked orders worth Rs 40,932 crore in FY18, which grew by 74 percent compared to FY17. The company board recommended final dividend at 51 percent (Rs 1.02 per share) for FY 2017-18. The board also approved, subject to approval of Department of Heavy Industry, Government of India, the transfer of BHEL's 51% stake in BHEL Electrical Machines to Government of Kerala. BHEL Electrical Machines is a subsidiary of BHEL and a joint venture between BHEL (51% stake) and Government of Kerala. Brokerage: Deutsche Bank | Rating: Buy | Target: Rs 130 Deutsche Bank has maintained buy rating on BHEL and raised target to Rs 130 from Rs 124 per share. The company's order inflows were the highest in Q4 and expect strong order to continue from power segment. It has reiterated company as a preferred midcap industrials pick. Brokerage: CLSA | Rating: Sell | Target: Rs 79 CLSA has maintained sell rating on BHEL and reduce target price to Rs 79 from Rs 89 per share. The inflows are unsustainable & rise in provisions hurt profit. The Q4 PAT was impacted by rise in employee costs & one-off higher tax rate. CLSA has cut FY19/20 EPS by 10%. The strong order inflow supported by chunky orders; meanwhile conversion concern remains. The wage negotiation haunt continues & provisions on receivables add to the bleed, it added At 10:12 hrs Bharat Heavy Electricals was quoting at Rs 84.45, up Rs 0.85, or 1.02 percent on the BSE. Posted by Rakesh Patil live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Motilal Oswal For the third consecutive quarter, all consumer companies under the coverage of Motilal Oswal which have a rural reach of over 30 percent have stated that rural growth has outpaced urban growth. Rural demand had been the fulcrum of the strong volumes witnessed by the sector in the years leading up to FY14 but had slowed down in FY15 and FY16 because of drought, and in FY17 because the impact of demonetization had negated the potential positive benefits of a normal monsoon. While urban volume growth has remained fairly resilient at mid-single-digit levels, rural growth, which was growing at the 1.5-2x urban growth in the years leading up to FY14, declined to flat and even negative levels in the years that followed. Factors which are fuelling rural growth are normal monsoon in FY18, low base effect, increase in MSP in FY18, an increase in rural allocation in recent budgets. Initial reports by both Skymet and IMD indicate that the monsoon is likely to be normal in FY19. Unlike the preceding two years, there will (hopefully) be no disturbances like demonetization/GST implementation, impacting purchasing power or product availability. Likely spate of new launches in FY19, as demand trajectory is improving. Distribution expansion by most companies over the past 3-4 years will start bearing fruit. Motilal Oswal has a buy rating on all four stocks that have a high rural exposure which include names like Hindustan Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Dabur India and Emami. Hindustan Unilever, Emami and Britannia Industries remain top rural picks from a medium-term perspective. Hindustan Unilever: its rapidly improving adaptability to market requirements, its recognition of Naturals as a key subsegment across categories, continuing strong trend towards premiumisation; extensive plans to employ technology, and renewed emphasis on margin growth through ZBB and other cost-saving efforts. Allied with best-of-breed RoE, Hindustan Unilever remains sole buy in the large-cap FMCG universe. Five key trends are particularly relevant for Hindustan Unilever, resulting in an elevation in its earnings growth trajectory compared to the past: Emami: healthy growth likely in existing product categories where it has a dominant market share, best-of-breed R&D spend and A&P spend, resulting from innovative products as well as ability to back up innovation with strong marketing, and much-needed efforts on improving direct distribution reach. Motilal Oswal believes Emami remains a credible long-term play due to: At 29.4 times its estimated earnings per share for FY20, Emami is inexpensive relative to peers, particularly given the healthy long-term earnings growth opportunity and mid-30s return ratios. Britannia Industries: its remarkable efforts in distribution ramp up- both in direct and total reach over the past four years, and its success in its new strategy of Low Unit Packs of its premium products as well as 'Tiger' Creams have resulted in tremendous growth in the hinterland states in recent years with FY18 being particularly strong. While Britannia is currently an urban company because rural is only around 20 percent of sales, a combination of: The management is targeting 33 percent of sales from rural. Rapidly expanding distribution, continuing investments in R&D and significant expansion of its own manufacturing indicate the immense confidence that management has on the growth prospects. Colgate Palmolive India: its impressive execution after a delay in the herbal portfolio launch the two products launched have seen a good response, and more products will be rolled out under the Vedshakti umbrella, and its high rural market share of 60 percent, which makes it a promising play on rural recovery. Patanjali had severely impacted business initially, but the threat is perceptibly reducing. Motilal Oswal is optimistic on Colgate Palmolives earnings prospects, given: Even on FY18 EPS, Colgate Palmolive trades at 10 percent discount to our ex-cigarette and alcohol consumer peer valuations. With return ratios superior to peers barring Hindustan Unilever, such discounts are unwarranted. Dabur India: The much-vaunted earnings revival in the sector appears poised to come through, and rural-dependent plays are likely to be at the vanguard in FY19. Dabur has addressed the market share loss issue in its two key categories of Juices and Honey, while Oral Care continues to do very well. With an expected EPS CAGR of 16 percent going forward (v/s less than 12 percent CAGR over FY14-17), Motilal Oswal values the stock at 42x March 2020E EPS (10 percent premium to three-year average) and derive a target price of Rs 435. Relative to other three rural plays, DABUR has a much more diversified product portfolio and is not dominant in many of them. Weaker competitive advantage, therefore, results in some risks to earnings projections. RoE is also weaker than the peers mentioned above. The article is extracted from Motilal Oswals report on the consumer sector. The views and investment tips expressed by investment expert on Moneycontrol.com are Motilal Oswals own and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Shares of Fortis Healthcare gained over 4 percent intraday and is currently trading a little over a percent higher. The stock touched an intraday high of Rs 150.00 and an intraday low of Rs 143.00. The board of Fortis Healthcare on Tuesday mutually terminated Munjal-Burman's offer and decided to call for fresh bids for sale of the company. The board invited interested parties to submit fresh expression of interest (EOI) by May 31. Based on the EOI submitted, the Board will shortlist the bidders on June 1. The board also decided to invite original three bidders, namely Munjal-Burman Consortium, TPG-Manipal Consortium, and IHH Healthcare to participate in the process. Bidders will then be provided 10 days for financial and legal due diligence and an opportunity to interact with the management and advisors who have conducted vendor due diligence. As part of the due diligence, Fortis will give access to data room comprising information related finances, litigation and update on pending investigation. The stock has lost around 4 percent in the past one month, while its three-day gain is a little over half a percent. At 12:08 hrs Fortis Healthcare was quoting at Rs 145.80, up Rs 1.95, or 1.36 percent, on the BSE. Reliance Communications | In the last four months, the stock price has risen 487 percent to Rs 3.93 per share from Rs 0.67 per share on March 27, 2020. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Shares of Reliance Communications continued its uptrend from Tuesday as shares soared up to 15 percent, before marginally cutting those gains to around 12 percent. Investors continued to be betting on the companys settlement plan for Reliance Infratel. On Tuesday, the company told exchanges that Reliance Infratel, its subsidiary, informed National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) that an amicable settlement has been arrived at between it and minority investors holding 4.26% equity in the Company, and consent terms will be filed shortly. RCom offered an upfront payment of Rs 500 crore to its operational creditor Ericsson, which has got an insolvency order against the Anil Ambani group firm. During the proceedings of the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal ( NCLAT), senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for RCom, suggested an upfront payment. To this, the NCLAT bench headed by Chairman Justice S J Mukhopadhaya suggested settlement between parties. "You know the fate of operational creditors (In corporate resolution process). You may not even 5 percent. If you want we would give you time for settlement," the bench said. Ericsson had total dues of Rs 978, which have now increased to Rs 1,600 crore, counsel appearing for Ericsson informed. The stock has gained 17 percent in the past one month, while its three-day gain stood at 25 percent. At 12:29 hrs Reliance Communications was quoting at Rs 17.80, up Rs 1.85, or 11.60 percent, on the BSE. (With inputs from PTI) Aditya Birla Fashion | The company will acquire 51 percent stake in Sabyasachi for Rs 398 crore. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More V-Mart is a medium-sized hypermarket value retailer that caters primarily to aspirational customers in tier-1, tier-2 and tier-3 cities of India. The company sells apparel, general merchandise and groceries through its 171 outlets (total retail area of 14.4 lakh square feet) across northern, north-western and eastern India. Growing share of private labels, volume-led revenue growth, rationalisation of costs, an upgrade of technological infrastructure, and network augmentation will pave the path ahead for V-Mart. However, most of these positives seem to be factored into the price of the stock, thus limiting its potential returns in the near term. Performance review V-Mart fired on all cylinders in the quarter and year ended March 2018. The company registered healthy year-on-year same-store sales growth of 9 percent and 7 percent, respectively, for the quarter and the year. Addition of 30 outlets during the year, strong marketing initiatives, and refurbishment of stores were some of the other factors that contributed to the growth in top line. Steps to manage costs (on fronts such as merchandising, technology, procurement and distribution), limited promotional expenses, higher proportion of full-priced sales (on account of lower discount rates and days), and reduction in clothing shrinkage led to an expansion of margins. Shrinkage refers to inventory unsold and written off due to defective quality, sales returns, or stocks sold at heavy discounts at the end of a season. Clothing inventory cannot be carried forward to the next financial year, given the change in seasons and fashion trends. What lies ahead? Margin guidance V-Marts own brands, which accounted for roughly half its sales in FY18, will be a priority area because of their high-margin nature. The companys strategy to maintain average selling prices underscores its inclination to keep its EBITDA margin range-bound (10-11 percent) by passing on price benefits to buyers. Tier-4 focus To capitalise on the growth of organised retail in previously-underserved geographies of India, V-Mart will expand its operations in tier-4 areas, particularly in north-eastern India. Owing to a high degree of price sensitivity in such regions, revenue growth will be volume-driven. Store additions To expand its retail footprint in existing geographies, V-Marts management aims to grow its retail area by 15-17 percent in FY19. Besides targeting same-store sales growth of 8-10 percent, the company can leverage its in-house capabilities to offset the corresponding increase in staff costs and fixed overheads. Working capital Considering the companys robust cash flows, the emphasis during the current fiscal year will be on buying goods from suppliers at a lower cost in exchange for earlier clearance of dues. Furthermore, practices aimed at optimising inventory practices using consumer analytics and just-in-time buying should help improve margins in the long-run. Shrinkage Periodic stock audits and adoption of requisite information systems should help V-Mart keep a close track of garment shrinkage. The company only recently automated its packing and wrapping processes to reduce losses during the course of transit. Such cost savings should lead to improved gross margins. Key risks Around half of V-Marts annual revenue comes from tier-3 towns, while tier-4 towns account for approximately 10 percent. In tier-3 towns, the company faces stiff competition from unorganised players. Disruptions in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which jointly make up for over 60 percent of the companys total store count, could impact its financials as well. Is V-Mart investment-worthy? Consistency in quarterly results and superior execution capabilities have resulted in V-Marts re-rating. Apart from the moats stated above, gradual discontinuation of low-margin grocery outlets, coupled with the ability of its new stores to break even quickly, will be decisive in driving the company's earnings growth in the upcoming fiscals. The stock currently trades at a pretty demanding valuation of 38 times the companys estimated earnings for FY20 estimated earnings. Nonetheless, we believe it still remains a long-term bet, considering the way consumption is on the rise in the Indian hinterland. Investors are, therefore, advised to buy the stock on any sign of weakness. Follow @krishnakarwa152 India and Indonesia today agreed to upgrade their ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership as the two countries signed 15 agreements including one on defence cooperation after extensive talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Joko Widodo here. Prime Minister Modi, who arrived here last night on his first-ever official visit to Indonesia, was accorded a red carpet welcome on his arrival at the Merdeka palace, one of the presidential palaces in Indonesia. The two leaders had a tete-e-tete before the delegation-level talks. In a joint press statement after the talks, Modi said India and Indonesia have agreed to upgrade their ties to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. During the meeting, the two leaders highlighted potential areas of cooperation in marine, economy, and socio-culture as well as discussed regional and global issues. Modi said that India's Act East Policy and the vision of SAGAR (Security and Growth for all in the Region) matches President Widodo's Maritime Fulcrum Policy. He also said that India and Indonesia will double their efforts to take bilateral trade to USD 50 billion by 2025. Recalling the visit of ASEAN leaders in January to attend the Republic Day parade, Modi said India-ASEAN partnership can become a guarantee of peace not only in Indo-Pacific region but also beyond it. He strongly condemned the recent terror strikes on three churches in Indonesia's second-largest city Surabaya, and said India stands resolutely with Jakarta in the fight against terror. The two countries signed 15 agreements including on the cooperation in the field of defence, space, science and technology, railways and health. India Economy India will endeavour to have a "balanced" RECP trade agreement as it would cover 40 per cent of the global GDP and over 42 per cent of the world's population, a top government official said today. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), negotiations for which started in November 2012, aims to cover goods, services, investments, economic and technical cooperation, competition and intellectual property rights. The RCEP bloc comprises 10 Asean members (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Laos and Vietnam) and their six FTA partners - India, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. "This is perhaps the most ambitious agreement we are doing. It encompasses about 40 per cent of global GDP and over 42 per cent of the world's population. So it's a huge significant bloc. It is not an easy one. There will be ramifications, nevertheless it is important because of our geographical connect and our natural complementarities," Commerce Secretary Rita Teaotia said. She was addressing a seminar in PHD Chamber of free trade agreements. She said that RCEP is a very active agreement and it is part of India's Act East policy. There are risks in this because India has huge adverse balance of trade with China, Japan, South Korea and Asean, she said adding, "We have to be mindful of the fact that it has to be a balanced agreement." So far, 22 rounds of negotiations have concluded besides five minister-level meets. Further, the secretary said that services sector is an important component of the pact. "...With Asean, we have negative balances of services and goods trade. So it is not like that by negotiating services, there is some great lollipop which will fall into the lap of India. No, it would not happen," Teaotia said. India's trade deficit with China stood at USD 63.12 billion in 2017-18. India wants certain deviations for such countries. Under deviations, India may propose a longer duration for either reduction or elimination of import duties for such countries. India already has a free trade pact with Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), Japan and South Korea. It is also negotiating a similar agreement with Australia and New Zealand but has no such plans for China. Ravi Shankar Prasad India is "open and flexible" on negotiating terms with Apple Inc for making iPhones in the country, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said, asserting that the tech titan "will not be a loser" if it opts to do so in Asia's third-biggest economy. In an interview to PTI, the IT minister said: "We are in the process of serious engagement with Apple. Let us await their response. I can only tell you, Apple will not be a loser in India (because of the opportunities it presents)... but let us wait for the formal proposal." He exuded confidence that India offers a massive domestic market and export potential for smartphone companies. He asserted however that incentives cannot be doled out to one player, to the detriment of another. "Naturally, incentive cannot be in a manner that dislocates the current players. But we are open and flexible in case of Apple, what they bring to the table," Prasad said. India is not just a large consumer market but can also serve as a strong export hub for global mobile phone makers like Apple, he said, adding that the government is engaged in discussions with the US-based firm on the issue. Apple did not respond to an email seeking comments. Smartphone makers are looking to boost business in India - a country of 1.3 billion people - as sales in other large markets like the US and China stagnate. India is the second largest market globally after China in overall mobile subscriber base, and had 1.18 billion users at the end of March 2018. The explosion in mobile usage has been fuelled by low tariffs, liberal data allowances and intense competition. Apple does not make devices itself and partners with contract manufacturers to handle the capital-intensive demands of building factories and hiring staff. All Apple devices available in India are imported, except for the iPhone SE that is assembled by Wistron in the country. Asked if Apple will be given special incentives to expand local manufacturing, Prasad said: "That is a matter of negotiation". Prasad said the government is also working on finalising the new electronics policy, with a sub-segment on export-oriented initiatives. "The idea is to make India a big hub of electronics manufacturing to serve domestic as well as outside markets," Prasad said. In January, senior officials of the iPhone maker had met Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu. Apple has sought concessions including duty exemption on manufacturing and repair units, components, capital equipment and consumables for smartphone manufacturing as well as service/repair for a period of 15 years. It also wanted reduction in customs duties on completely-knocked-down and semi-knocked-down units of devices that are to be assembled in the country. Apple is extremely bullish on India and plans to launch all its initiatives, including retail, its chief executive Tim Cook had said earlier this month. While he acknowledged that Apple has an "extremely low" overall market share in India, Cook said the company is "putting a lot of energy" in the country. Former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has decided to give the event a skip. Naidu also declined invitation to Jagan Mohan Reddy's swearing-in ceremony. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu says his Telugu Desam Party will play a pivotal role in 2019 when regional parties band together to form government at the Centre but has ruled himself out of the prime ministerial race. The TDP chief, who sidestepped a question on whether the parties would take the support of the Congress should the need arise, was also scathing in his criticism of the BJP during an interaction with journalists late last night. Describing the BJP as a "back door party" that wanted to enter south India through unscrupulous means, Naidu said it should have helped Andhra Pradesh to gain access to the region. "The BJP is only a back door party. It has a remote with which it controls its puppets," Naidu told a group of reporters at the conclusion of Mahanadu, the annual conclave of the TDP. He was responding to a question on whether the BJP had become the TDP's primary rival. "The BJP declared that Karnataka is the gateway to South India. It is a bad statement. Now you want to enter through the back door. They should have realized it... They should have supported Andhra Pradesh," Naidu said. The TDP chief who formally quit the BJP-led NDA earlier this year over special category to the state said his party would play a decisive role in the formation of a government in New Delhi in 2019 but he himself had no prime ministerial ambitions. "I do not have any prime ministerial ambitions. This post was offered to me twice in the past," he said, referring to 1996 when H D Deve Gowda became prime minister and 1997 when I K Gujral took the chair. "I just want to develop Andhra," Naidu asserted. Suggesting that he would keep his cards close to his chest till the Lok Sabha elections, he said when asked if regional parties would seek the support of the Congress should the need arise, "All these things are a matter of time. Right now, I do not want to create any confusion." About BJP chief Amit Shah alleging that the Andhra government had furnished "false" utilization certificates for the funds the Centre had sanctioned for Amravati, the proposed ultra-modern capital of the state, Naidu said, "Shah is just the president of a party. In what capacity is he questioning us? "The central minister concerned can visit Amravati to review the work. The prime minister can come and see what we are doing," the TDP chief added. Naidu also asked why Andhra Pradesh should pay taxes to the Centre, which had reneged on its promises of according special category status to Andhra Pradesh, giving full support for the Polavaram irrigation project and the choice of the state's capital. During the bifurcation of the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, the BJP demanded a special status for the state and the Congress agreed, he said. "The entire House accepted it. Why are you denying it now?" he asked "We struggled for 60 years to put Hyderabad on the world map and all of a sudden, they asked us to go... We came here debt-ridden, without assets and money. Is it not the Centre's responsibility to give us a fair deal?" According to Naidu, the BJP government had promised a special package for backward districts of Andhra Pradesh on the lines of the Bundelkhand region. But the saffron party cheated the people. "The BJP government credited Rs 50 crore each for seven backward districts of AP and after some time it debited the amount, saying the Prime Minister's Office did not approve it. This is their cooperative federalism," Naidu said. "Whatever the Centre is doing against us is making me stronger in Andhra Pradesh," he said. Asked about the resettlement of those affected by the Polavaram project, the chief minister said, "The rehabilitation work has been completed to a certain extent. As and when the Centre gives the money, we will complete the remaining work." "The Central government will have to give the money. It is our right and is mentioned in the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act. They cannot go against it. If they do all these things... Why should we pay taxes to the Centre? Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not doing us any favours," he said. N Chandrababu Naidu The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) today adopted a new resolution in which it lambasted the NDA government for its "dictatorial" attitude towards states, as its leaders vowed to unite regional parties to dethrone the "anti-people" BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The resolution passed at the TDP's three-day annual conclave "Mahanadu", that began here on Sunday, alleges that the Centre was weakening the financial condition of states. "The unilateral style of functioning of the Modi government has led to a loss of trust of states in the central government. The states feel that the concept of federalism is only on paper," the resolution reads. The "dictatorial" attitude of the Modi government, its "unilateral and anti-people decisions, misuse of central agencies to suppress political opponents have become a matter of grave concern in the Indian polity", it reads. In March, the TDP pulled out of the NDA government over the Centre's refusal to grant special status to Andhra Pradesh. The party claimed it played a "pivotal role" in forming five out of the six non-Congress governments in Delhi, except the Janata Party government, and that Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu played an important role in the national politics. As the convenor of the United Front, Naidu was responsible for uniting non-Congress parties and made HD Deve Gowda and I K Gujral prime ministers. Thus, he proved it was possible for regional parties to form a government at the Centre, the TDP document says. At the swearing-in ceremony of H D Kumaraswamy as the Karnataka CM last week, Naidu shared the stage with Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, BSP supremo Mayawati, SP president Akhilesh Yadav, TMC chief Mamata Banerjee, CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechury among others, sending a clear message of opposition unity to the BJP. "N Chandrababu Naidu was a tall leader in this meet and it was a clear indication that regional political parties are going to be a power to reckon with in the 2019 elections as an alternative to national parties to form a government in Delhi," the TDP resolution reads. In his concluding address at the conclave, Naidu said, "We ended the alliance with the NDA only in the interests of the states" He alleged the BJP was "resorting to conspiracy to destabilize us". "We are not afraid of anyone and are ready to sacrifice everything. We will not stop until Andhra is given special status and the Polavaram project completed," he said. He alleged the Centre had not been releasing funds for Amaravati as it "did not want" a world-class capital city to come up in Andhra. "Then why should we pay taxes to the Centre at all?" He also rubbished criticism that his government was spending all the money at its disposal on developing Amaravati, the proposed ultra-modern capital, at the cost of other developmental works. Ratcheting up his attack on the Centre, he said, "In 2014, the unemployment rate was 3.4 per cent and now it is 6.23 per cent. Where is the 'sabka sath sabka vikas' that Modi promised to the people?" He also denounced the Congress for "not doing justice to the people of Andhra and Telangana" at the time of the state's bifurcation. "We asked the Congress to do justice to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, but they did not do it. They lost in both the states." He said the TDP will win all 25 LS seats in the state in 2019 and bring drastic changes in national politics. "The NDA won't come to power," he announced. State Finance Minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu said the Modi government was taking "dangerous steps" against constitutional values and that it would be "dethroned by united regional parties" in 2019. He also said former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee and BJP veteran L K Advani respected the Constitution, but Modi and party chief Amit Shah were "destroying the democratic system". "We respected Vajpayee and Advani who revered and protected the Constitution. But then came the Modi-Shah duo. They destroyed the entire democratic system." "The Modi government's policies are against secularism," he alleged. "The ruling party uses RSS cadres, who have a fascist mentality. It is also spoiling fiscal and political values." The BJP government would be "dethroned" by an amalgamation of regional parties, he said, but parried a query on who would be the prime ministerial face if a united front comes into being. Preaching against corruption after declaring BS Yeddyurappa, implicated in corruption cases, as the chief minister of Karnataka and supporting people such as "mining mafia" Janardhan Reddy and Y S Jaganmohan Reddy looks like a joke by the BJP government, he said. Approaching the NGT on "flimsy" grounds, filing false cases against the Polavaram project and delays in the release of funds by the Centre are examples of collusion between the BJP and the YSRCP, Naidu's party alleged. The "political manipulations" in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra are examples of the BJP's conspiracy to weaken efficient state leaders, the TDP alleged. By using the Finance Commission, the Modi government started "causing losses" to the progressive states. "The Finance Commission is a Constitutional body which independently distributed the resources to states and the Centre as per Schedule 7 of the Constitution. "However, the recent guidelines of the 15th Finance Commission reveal that the terms of reference prescribed by the Centre hit the financial capabilities of the states, the TDP resolution alleges. 23:56 Appellate tribunal NCLAT today stayed bankruptcy proceedings against Reliance Communications after the debt-laden telecom operator agreed to pay Rs 550 crore to Ericsson to settle a payment dispute. The order of the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal clears the way for Anil Ambani-led RCom to sell its telecom towers, spectrum and fibre assets to Reliance Jio. Run by richest Indian and Anil's elder brother, Mukesh, Jio is buying RCom for about Rs 18,000 crore to clear some of the Rs 45,733 crore debt it owes to banks. A two-member bench headed by NCLAT Chairman Justice S J Mukhopadhaya directed RCom and its subsidiares -- Reliance Infratel and Reliance Telecom -- to pay Rs 550 crore to Ericsson India in 120 days, failing which it will direct insolvency proceedings against the company. The countdown would start from June 1. "Impugned order of May 15, 2018 and May 18, 2018 passed by NCLT Mumbai in ... are stayed," the tribunal said. The NCLAT also directed the chairman/managing director of RCom to file an undertaking regarding payment of the amount. It further said: "The corporate debtor and financial creditors are given liberty to sell assets and deposit the sale proceeds in banks' account. The sale will be subject to final decision of the tribunal." The appellate tribunal also directed the Resolution Professional appointed by the Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) to allow RCom to take over day-to-day functioning. "Resolution Professional will allow the Corporate Debtor (RCom) management to takeover day to day functioning," the court said. Meanwhile, in a statement, RCom said its management has been reinstated by NCLAT's order. "RCom's management and board of directors have been reinstated vide this order," RCom spokesperson said. It further said the company expects to complete the sale of its assets within the next few weeks. "RCom expects to now complete the sale of its assets within the next few weeks, having removed legal hurdles of cases by minority investors of RITL, and Ericsson, thereby achieving an overall debt reduction of approximately Rs 25,000 crore from the first phase of its asset monetisation programme," he added. RCom will get a majority of the proceeds from Reliance Jio from sale of telecom assets, it will receive around Rs 1,000 crore from sale of real estate in Delhi and Chennai to Brookfield. On May 15, the Mumbai bench of NCLT had admitted Ericsson's petition for beginning of insolvency proceedings against RCom. Ericsson India had moved NCLT recovering its about Rs 1,100 crore dues by auctioning RCom. RCom lenders too had opposed the NCLT order as they see in Jio best option to recover their dues. RCom had yesterday reached a settlement with HSBC Daisy Investments, a minority shareholder in Reliance Infratel. Ericsson, which had signed a seven-year deal in 2014 to operate and manage RCom's nationwide telecom network, had alleged that it had not been paid the dues. -- PTI To protect the sanctity of its brand name, Google has trademarked each letter of their company name. They have also bought the most common misspellings of Google, for example, gooogle.com, gogle.com, googlr.com etc. Google is launching its augmented reality (AR) platform ARCore for AR apps in China. The tech giant has already entered into a partnership with Chinese device maker Xiaomi for this purpose and is working towards adding more partners in the country. Starting today, #ARCore apps are available on Mix 2S devices from the Xiaomi App Store in China. More partners coming soon https://t.co/16QoOTgqve pic.twitter.com/lT4TYXrzwF Google AR & VR (@GoogleARVR) May 28, 2018 The news was confirmed by the company in its tweet. In addition to Xiaomi, Google has confirmed it has Samsung and Huawei as additional partners. Interestingly, China has banned all Google Play services in the country and users who want to download any AR app will have to do so from one of the many Android app stores operational in the country. However, ARCore was allowed in the country essentially because it does not require the device to be connected to any cloud services, as a result of which the countrys internet regulators will have zero power over Apparently, Googles move is viewed as part of a larger effort to re-enter China, where its services are completely banned. Additionally, the company had entered into a partnership with Tencent and has reportedly agreed to invest in a number of Chinese startups. The ARCore strategy for China, while subtle, is part of a sustained push to grow Googles presence in China. While that hasnt meant reviving the Google Play Store despite plenty of speculation in the media Google has ramped up in other areas, Techcrunch observed in a report. Other initiatives from Google include acquisition of a chunk of Taiwanese giant HTC and opening an AI-lab in Shenzhen, also known as the Silicon Valley of hardware. Lastly, Google will also be playing host to Demo day programmes for startups in Asia, with an event scheduled to take place in Shanghai, China. A former CEO of low-cost carrier AirAsia had allegedly paid $5 million as a bribe to a former UPA minister, reports suggest. Moneycontrol couldnt independently verify the claims made in the reports. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) booked AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes and other top company officials on May 29 for alleged violation of norms in getting international flying licenses. According to a CNN-News18 report, the alleged bribe was paid to alter rule 5/20 to ensure AirAsia (India) gets overseas flying rights. The CBI filed the case against top officials at AirAsia (India) and AirAsia Berhad for alleged criminal conspiracy and colluding with the UPA government to procure international flying rights in 2014. The alleged conspiracy is believed to have been hatched just ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The case was filed following the revelation of emails exchanged between AirAsias senior employees and Tata Group, Economic Times reported. One of the emails with the CBI is from Managing Trustee of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, Venkataramanan Ramachandran, wherein he is given personal assurances from then civil aviation minister Ajit Singh, the report claimed. The mail from Ramachandran to AirAsia executive Tharumalingam Kanagalingam -- both have been named in the CBI FIR -- reads: Met Mr. Ajit Singh a short while ago. He said approvals should come soon and that our planning should be on the basis of the 5/20 rule getting scrapped. AirAsia Berhad and Tata Sons own 49 percent each in AirAsia (India), while Ramachandran holds 1.5 percent stake and former TCS CEO S Ramadorai holds 0.5 percent. The CBI alleged in the FIR that the airline had paid bribes to a minister to ensure that rule 5/20 is amended or scrapped. The rule prohibits an airline with less than five years experience and 20 aircraft on international routes. Overall, nine people have been booked by the CBI along with unnamed government officials and senior staff of the then civil aviation ministry. However, AirAsia (India) director, Shuva Mandal, responded over the charges with the following statement, AirAsia India Limited (AAIL) refutes any wrongdoing and is cooperating with all regulators and agencies to present the correct facts. In November 2016, AAIL had initiated criminal charges against its ex-CEO and had also commenced civil proceedings in Bengaluru for such irregularities. We hope to bring early resolution to all such issues. The hunt for the missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 flight has ended after four years, with the privately-funded search being called off. Ocean Infinity, which began a search for the flight's wreckage in January this year, said it is discontinuing the search. The Malaysian government said it has no plans to continue the hunt for the missing aircraft. The flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing went missing on March 8, 2014. It had 239 people on board, 12 of which were crew members. The Boeing-77 aircraft most likely crashed in the Indian Ocean. Initial search operations had focused on the South China Sea. Australia, China and Malaysia have all conducted searches for the missing aircraft at various points in time. Ocean Infinity would have made USD 70 million if it had been successful in locating the wreckage. Family members of those who had gone missing with the aircraft have asked the Malaysian government to continue the search, according to a report by The Guardian. "People might think: 'Why are these people still harping on about this, its been four years.' It's important for people to remember that MH370 is not history," Grace Nathan, whose mother was on the flight, told The Guardian. Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke has said that a full report of the investigation will be published later. He, however, did not specify a date. When did the flight disappear? The Boeing-777 plane disappeared on March 8, 2014. It lost contact with air traffic control about 40 minutes after it took off. Evidence suggests that the aircraft was deliberately diverted south towards the Indian Ocean. Its original route would have taken it north-eastward. Who was on the flight? The passengers on board the MH370 included 152 Chinese nationals, 38 Malaysian nationals, and passengers from India, Australia, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iran, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine and the US. There were 12 crew members on board as well. Malaysian authorities have confirmed that the last words spoken by either the pilot or the co-pilot were "Good night Malaysian three seven zero". The search Extensive searches conducted in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean have not been conclusive. Australia, China and Malaysia have all conducted searches for the missing plane. The Australia-led search had used underwater drones and sonar equipment. A part of the aircraft's wing was found on Reunion, an island to the east of Madagascar, in 2015. French authorities confirmed that it was from the missing aircraft. Official efforts by the three countries were discontinued last year. Ocean Infinity began its own search for the MH370 on January 21 this year, using a deep-sea vessel to conduct the underwater search. It had extended the search beyond the 25,000 square km previously investigated, and beyond the original deadline of 90 days. French President Emmanuel Macron (L) meets with Mamoudou Gassama, 22, from Mali, at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, May 28, 2018. Mamoudou Gassama living illegally in France is being honored by Macron for scaling an apartment building over the weekend to save a 4-year-old child dangling from a fifth-floor balcony. Thibault Camus/Pool via Reuters - RC1CBB2EE560 The father of the four-year-old child who was rescued by an immigrant in France was apparently playing Pokemon Go when the incident was playing out. In an interview with CNN affiliate BFM TV Monday, the French prosecutor Francois Molins said that the father was out shopping leaving the child at home. However, he started to play the popular smartphone game while returning and got delayed in reaching home. The mother of the child lives in Reunion Island, a French-administered territory in the Indian Ocean. The father looks after the child in Paris. Now, the father faces up to two years in jail for abandoning his parental responsibilities. He was arrested by the police and later released. Currently, he is pending trial which is scheduled for September. He is said to be devastated by the consequences of his actions. Mamoudou Gassama, the 22-year-old Malian immigrant in France, became the darling of social media after a video of him climbing the four storeys amid cheers from the crowd present on the spot went viral. Gassama, who came to Paris a few months back dreaming to build a life there, has been named an honorary French citizen after meeting Frances president Emmanuel Macron. Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo praised Gassama on Twitter for his act of bravery and phoned him personally for his deed. Macron also announced on Instagram , Paris fire brigade would be keen to welcome him to their ranks. Reportedly, he has taken a 10-month internship with the Paris fire and rescue service. Kim Jong Un, leader of North Korea A top North Korean official boarded a flight in Beijing on Wednesday bound for New York to hold talks with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to reports. Kim Yong Chol, a former spy chief and trusted adviser to North Korea's leader, was on his way for what would be the highest-level meeting in this week's flurry of diplomatic activity aimed at salvaging the historic summit, US President Donald Trump confirmed in a tweet on Tuesday. The former spy chief is a trusted aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, playing a pivotal role in preparations for an historic summit between Kim and Trump. The White House has however stopped short of saying the proposed summit in June between Trump and Kim had been reinstated. On May 24, President Trump had cancelled the summit with Kim blaming "tremendous anger and open hostility" from North Korea. While he had said that the meeting could still happen, he warned the North against committing "foolish" acts. Pyongyang said that is was an "unexpected" decision and that it was "extremely regrettable". In a statement released by its central news agency, Vice-Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan was quoted as saying that the country held Trump's efforts to hold a summit "in high regards". Taking exception to the military exercises between South Korea and the US, North Korea had cancelled a high-level meeting with the South earlier this month and had also threatened to scrap the summit with US. The Singapore summit In spite of threats from both sides about cancelling the summit, representatives from the two countries have been meeting to finalise the details of the summit. It would be for the first time that a sitting US President would meet the leader of North Korea since the end of the Korean War. The meeting is expected to discuss ways of denuclearising the Korean peninsula, based on the historic North-South Korea summit that happened in April. The two countries have announced that the summit would happen in Singapore on June 12. However, venue details and itinerary has not been announced yet. Some media reports have suggested Shangri-La Hotel to be the likely venue while others suggest it could be held at The Istana the official residence and office of the President of Singapore. According to a report by the BBC, South Korean President Moon Jae-in could also attend the summit. (With inputs from Reuters) North Korean leader Kim Jong Un talks during a meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the Peace House. (Reuters) A senior North Korean official arrived at Beijing's international airport today to board a flight to the United States for high-level talks ahead of a planned summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. General Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the central committee of the Workers' Party and right-hand man to Kim, was driven to the restricted VIP entrance of the airport, according to AFP journalists, a day after he flew into the Chinese capital from North Korea. Turns out Henneberry scratched an industry-wide itch with LenderSpotlight, which has become an invaluable broker tool because of B-20 guidelines. Henneberry essentially created a cheat sheet of lenders and knew he was onto something after receiving feedback from his own agents. On the heels of the mortgage rule changes, we realized reading a rate sheet was incredibly difficult, so again we scratched our own itch, he said. We built a rudimentary version of LenderSpotlight and gave it to our agents, and they loved it so much because they realized they couldnt do their jobs as effectively without it. LenderSpotlight bought out and subsumed Niche Sheet, which provides vital information about rural properties, maximum acreages, key appraisal contacts for lenders, child tax credit incomes, land policies, and has many more features. Not one to sit still, Henneberry and co-creator Darryll Esch just unveiled STREAM5 Social to help brokers brand better, but without compromising themselves to the competition. Its a cooperative marketing platform that publishes the same articles you read on the Globe and Mail and Financial Post, but the site is branded to you as an individual broker, he said. The only thing a client can see, do or interact with is you and your brand. All the articles are published to a single site, the platform, and every single day we send out a list of the newly published articles to everyone on our service with a link unique to that broker. The broker can put it anywhere they wantthey can email it out to clients, they can put it on their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feedsand when someone clicks on it theyll be directed to read the article but the site will rebrand itself to the broker. Federal judge rules Trumps Twitter account is a public forum UFs Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication discusses the implications of the judges ruling that a Twitter account used for public purposes is a public forum protected by the First Amendment. The president uses his Twitter feed to make official announcements. AP Photo/J. David Ake Clay Calvert, University of Florida A federal judge in New York has ruled that President Donald Trump cannot block people from following or viewing his @realDonaldTrump Twitter account. While the case will likely be appealed and could reach the U.S. Supreme Court, the decision is a resounding victory for the First Amendment right of citizens to speak to and disagree with government officials in the social media era. The judges ruling is not a surprise to me, as director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida. Thats because it is grounded in the well-established principles of protecting political speech and barring government discrimination against people engaged in public discourse based on their viewpoints. Sure enough, the judge found that Trump blocked Twitter followers from his account indisputably [as] a result of viewpoint discrimination. In other words, Trump cannot block people simply because they criticize him or his policies. That issue was never really in question in this case, though. The main debate was whether the presidents personal Twitter account was a public forum governed by the First Amendment. More traditional public forums are physical places owned by the government, such as sidewalks, parks and auditoriums. Peaceful public speech and demonstrations in those venues cannot be stopped based on what is being said without a compelling government interest. Twitter, however, is not a real-world space. And its run by a private company. The judges ruling found, however, that the company has less control over the @realDonaldTrump account than Trump himself and White House social media director Dan Scavino also a public official. Their power includes the ability to block people from seeing the accounts tweets, and from participating in the interactive space associated with the tweets, in the form of replies and comments on Twitters platform. Also key was the fact that the @realDonaldTrump account is used for governmental purposes. Specifically, the judge found that the President presents the @realDonaldTrump account as being a presidential account as opposed to a personal account and, more importantly, uses the account to take actions that can be taken only by the President as President such as announcing the appointments and terminations of government officials. This ruling brings the Supreme Courts longstanding free speech doctrine into the social media era. Clay Calvert, Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication, University of Florida This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Houston's Enterprise Products Partners and London's Navigator Holdings announced Tuesday that construction has begun on their ethylene export terminal at Enterprise's Morgan's Point facility on the Houston Ship Channel. The terminal, a joint venture of the two companies, will have the annual capacity to export approximately 2.2 billion pounds of ethylene, a building block of many plastics. It's expected to being operating late next year. Crude fell for a fifth straight day as the market weighs the prospects of rising production from Saudi Arabia and Russia. Futures fell 1.7 percent in New York to their lowest level in six weeks. Saudi Arabia and Russia last week signaled they may restore some of the output they've curbed since late 2016 as they sought to drain a global glut. Now the market is awaiting a meeting of OPEC and its partners in Vienna set for late June to find out if those limits will remain. "Clearly, the commentary from Russia and Saudi Arabia popped the bubble," said John Kilduff, a partner at Again Capital LLC in New York. "There's some legitimate skepticism about whether or not they'll follow through. There is going to be nervousness right up until next month's meeting." Talk of rising output from the world's top two oil exporters wiped out this month's rally in WTI and nearly erased Brent's, which had been fueled by concerns that supplies from Iran and Venezuela will shrink. Yet, as questions swirl around the June meeting, OPEC and its allied producers concluded that the crude market re-balanced last month. West Texas Intermediate for July delivery dropped $1.15 to settle at $66.73 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Futures' fifth straight session of declines is the longest such stretch since February. There was no settlement Monday for WTI because of the U.S. Memorial Day holiday, and all trades will be booked Tuesday. WTI closed below a key technical level Tuesday, it's 50-day moving average. This tends to be viewed as a bearish signal. Brent futures for July settlement rose 9 cents to end the session at $75.39 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange after earlier falling as much as 1 percent. The global benchmark traded at a $8.66 premium to WTI for delivery the same month. Energy ministers from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait plan to meet on Saturday to discuss OPEC matters, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Oman's Oil Minister Mohammed Al Rumhi may join, they said. "I'm guessing that such a meeting would lead to some sort of practical applications of production increases," said Thomas Finlon, director of Energy Analytics Group LLC in Wellington, Florida. Meanwhile, June's OPEC meeting "is around the corner," he said. Other oil-market news: Gasoline futures fell 1.7 percent to settle at $2.1441 a gallon, the lowest in three weeks. Cushing, Oklahoma crude stockpiles fell 200,000 barrels last week, according to a forecast compiled by Bloomberg.U.S. crude inventories probably decreased 1 million barrels last week, a Bloomberg survey of analysts showed. --With assistance from Tsuyoshi Inajima and Paul Burkhardt. 2018 Bloomberg L.P. Kansas officials have charged two more Schlitterbahn Waterparks employees in the decapitation death of a 10-year-old boy at the New Braunfels companys Kansas City park, bringing the total of indicted employees to five. David Hughes, a maintenance supervisor at the Kansas City park, and John Zalsman, a maintenance worker at the park, pleaded not guilty Wednesday in Wyandotte County Court to charges of obstruction of justice, the Associated Press reported. We have no reason to believe that any employee obstructed justice, Schlitterbahn spokeswoman Winter Prosapio said in an email. John and Dave have decades of experience in maintenance and are respected professionals on our maintenance team. With the help of men and women like John and Dave, we run a safe operation and know that this was a tragic accident. We stand behind our staff and the safety of our park. Hughes and Zalsman are the latest Schlitterbahn employees to face criminal charges in the July 2016 death of Caleb Schwab, who was decapitated while riding the 17-story Verruckt waterslide at the Kansas park. Schlitterbahn Waterparks co-owner Jeffrey Henry, Verruckts lead designer John Schooley and Schlitterbahns construction firm Henry and Sons Construction Co. Inc. were charged in March with second-degree murder, aggravated battery and aggravated endangering of a child. Prosecutors allege that Henry, Schooley and the firm recklessly killed Schwab by fast-tracking Verruckts development, failing to make key repairs and ignoring warnings from staff about the danger the slide posed to riders. An indictment unsealed Wednesday by a Wyandotte County judge accuses the maintenance workers, Hughes and Zalsman, of lying to two Kansas Bureau of Investigation special agents about a brake mat intended to slow rafts on the Verruckt that had fallen off the ride days before the boy was killed. Hughes, Zalsman and another maintenance worker each told agents they hadnt fixed the mat because it hadnt been present on the Verruckt since the rides testing phase. Investigators, though, possessed overwhelming evidence showing the presence of brake mats in the form of videos, photographs, business records and dozens of eyewitness accounts from staff and park patrons, according to the indictment. Authorities also previously charged KC Waterpark Management, which operates the Kansas park, and Tyler Austin Miles, former director of operations at the Kansas park, on involuntary manslaughter, aggravated battery, aggravated endangerment of a child and interfering with law enforcement by concealing evidence. Miles, 29, was also charged with allegedly giving false information to a detective. The charges against Hughes and Zalsman are just the latest in a string of troubles for the amusement park company and its owners. Read about how the Schlitterbahn co-owner was plagued with financial and legal trouble slong before being charged with murder in the boys death on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Joshua Fechter is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFreports Srikar Chamarthi is competing this week at his third and last Scripps National Spelling Bee. The Abell Junior High eighth-grader qualified for the national bee by winning the 31st annual Midland Reporter-Telegram Regional Spelling Bee in February. Chamarthi tied for 172nd place in 2016. Last year, he tied for 23rd place. He is also one of 18 three-year repeaters to make it back this year, according to the National Spelling Bee website. The wait to return to Washington, D.C., was too long, he said on Saturday. Chamarthi hopes to return to the finals, which ESPN will broadcast on Thursday. I was pretty excited for it, Chamarthi said. I feel like I should do good this year. The road to return to the national bee has been a long one, filled with books of words and their origins. Chamarthi usually studies by repeating the words in his head or writing them down if the word is really confusing. It takes a lot of determination and hard work to make it to three national spelling bees. I have spread out study sessions to widen my scope, said Chamarthi, who added nastaliq is his favorite word to spell currently because it is unique. In Washington, D.C., Chamarthi will go up against 519 spellers from across the country; the bee field has been expanded by 200. His family will be in the audience at the spelling bee cheering him on. Gobi Chamarthi, Srikars father, helps him study. Were excited, Gobi Chamarthi said. This year we want him to get into the finals. Chamarthi is experiencing a lot of feelings as he prepares for his third trip to the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Im nervous, yet excited, and yet kinda, not really relieved but surprised its getting over so quickly, he said. Its back to a different set of books when he returns from Washington, D.C. Probably right after I get back, I will start summer reading, Charmarthi said. To Kill a Mockingbird may be required reading, but Charmarthi wants to dive into books from the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard. Chamarthi has big aspirations for his future. His favorite subject is science, and he hopes to one day be a robotics surgeon. He says spelling helps him in this pursuit, because you have to know a lot of medical words. Midland ISD held a conversation on Tuesday about the future of Travis Elementary, and that conversation involves the potential of the first in-district charter. The school in southeast Midland has struggled academically for years. Superintendent Orlando Riddick said the district has an opportunity to dramatically change the school, and on Tuesday he presented that opportunity to interested parents as part of a conversation about ideas to improve the quality of education at Travis. Currently, Travis is a three-time improvement required campus. District officials said it is too early to know if the trend will continue for this school year, but they said it is important to be proactive about the schools future. Riddick told those in attendance that the future could involve turning Travis into MISDs first in-district charter. Midland ISD would partner with Legacy Traditional Schools, a system of charter schools based in Arizona. Riddick said such a move would be innovative and is not what districts in West Texas or around the state traditionally do. He said the district is still in the midst of conversations with Legacy, but there is a possibility Travis could be changed as early as the 2019-20 school year. This would be the third change to a poorly performing elementary school in as many years. This year, the former Crockett Elementary became Franks Elementary with a new student population. Next school year, Sam Houston Elementary will become a collegiate preparatory academy. Like Houston, a weighted lottery will help determine Travis student population. I want you to have first right of refusal, Riddick said, meaning a Travis parent could always choose to send their child elsewhere. A change to Travis would add another school to the roster of MISDs choice campuses. The others are Houston, Bowie Fine Arts, Pease Communications and Technology Academy, Carver Center, Washington STEM Academy and Early College High School at Midland College. Riddick said he wont refer to Travis as a failing school, although that is what the Texas Education Agency improvement required designation means. The superintendent sees the campus as being overlooked by the community and the district, which he said has not provided Travis the funding it has needed. He said funding inequity will no longer be an issue with the districts move to zero-based budgeting at the campus level. Principals will make the case for what they need. The creation of an in-district charter was first mentioned inside Midland ISD circles during the Lone Star Governance training, which preceded Riddicks arrival in Midland. However, Riddick has taken advantage of the opportunities afforded to district leaders by the System of Great Schools theories. He said a change is needed at Travis because there are academic proficiency gaps within the student population. Legacy, if chosen to partner with Midland ISD, will have to be a partner capable of closing those gaps and doing something with Midlands precious resource. They do schools in a thriving and traditional way, said Riddick, who referred to the Legacy strategy as back-to-basics and holistic. Legacy will be developing a students mind, body and soul. Riddick stressed the collaborative nature of what needs to take place. Communicating in English and sometimes in Spanish -- he stressed the need for parental involvement in everything from car drop-offs to crowd control at lunch to field day. He said there is an opportunity for a more active PTA, and that adult influence can impact everything from academic performance, to more time for lunch, to reducing the bullying that takes place on campus. Bullying was identified as an issue at Travis, something Riddick said will never be completely eliminated. When I have high parent involvement, there is usually not a high number of incidents, Riddick said. This is your school. You should be involved with your student, Riddick said. Parent involvement program is created by you guys. ... Do it in partnership with your principal and there is nothing that can stop you from being able to help. How Stacey Abrams black girl magic turned Georgia a bit more blue UFs director of African American Studies discusses Abrams historic bid for governor of Georgia and assesses her chances for a win that would make her the first black female governor of any American state. Abrams savors her victory. AP Photo/John Bazemore Sharon Austin, University of Florida On May 22, 2018, Stacey Abrams, an African-American, 44-year-old former attorney, Georgia General Assembly House minority leader and Yale Law graduate beat former attorney white Georgia state legislator Stacey Evans in the Georgia Democratic gubernatorial primary. While the race was hard-fought, the outcome was lopsided with Abrams winning 423,163 (76.5 percent) votes over Evans 130,234. As a professor of political science and African-American studies, I was very interested in this elections outcome. Although African-Americans and women participate frequently in the political process, few people from these groups win elections especially at the statewide level. Although Georgia is known for infamous, segregationist governors like Lester Maddox, this campaign which pitted a white woman against a black woman was largely absent of overt racial appeals. The campaigns of both women appealed to liberals and moderates. Evans campaign strategy heavily focused on building a coalition among African-Americans, Latinos, women, youth and other progressives by emphasizing issues such as educational and job opportunities, voting rights and an end to crime. Abrams campaign platform was remarkably similar, but she also emphasized the need for LGBTQ rights, energy jobs, veterans rights and small business development. Abrams benefited from the linked fate philosophy among African-Americans that influences them to prefer black candidates because of their interests in advancing their individual and group interests. She also had more experience registering voters than Evans did, after having served as the director of the New Georgia Project that registered thousands of black, Latino and Asian-American Georgia residents who usually dont vote. History in the making? This battle of the two Staceys was historic because two women competed as major contenders in a Georgia gubernatorial primary for the first time in its history. Abrams becomes the first female nominee and the first black nominee of a major party for a Georgia governors race. If she wins in November, her victory will add to the small number of women who have served as state governors, the even smaller number of African-Americans, and she will become the first black female governor of any American state. There have only been four black governors in American history. In 1872, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, a Republican, served as Louisiana governor for 34 days while incumbent governor, Henry Warmoth, faced impeachment. The other African-American governors were Democrats. More than 100 years after Pinchback served, Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder became the first black elected governor of a state in 1989 and served for one term. The others were Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and David Paterson of New York. Nearly half of American states have never had a female governor. Forty-six women are running for governor this year, which is much more than the previous record of 34 female gubernatorial candidates in 1994. Black girl magic So, what does Abrams need to do to win? First, she needs to shore up her support among Democrats by encouraging a high turnout. Early Democratic primary turnout results indicate that the Democratic turnout is higher in this years primary than the primaries of four years ago. In 2014 and 2016, Republican turnout averaged about 61 percent and Democrats about 37 percent in early and absentee votes. This year the Republican turnout rate decreased to 53 percent while Democratic turnout increased to 46 percent. Black voters can make or break Abrams victory. Their numbers have grown steadily over the last few decades. For example, in 1990, 27 percent of the states population was African-American. That percentage grew to 32 percent in 2016. Abrams must find a way to motivate black voters into turning out on Election Day, while also winning as many white and Hispanic votes as possible. This wont be easy. Black turnout has steadily declined in Georgia during the post-Obama years. In 2016, black turnout declined to 59 percent from a high of 66 percent in 2012. During the 2014 midterm elections, only 41 percent of black registered voters participated in the states elections. In particular, Abrams must take advantage of the power of the black female swing vote. Black girl magic is the term used to describe black female beauty, intellect and empowerment. African-American women have emerged as a solid bloc of reliable voters for the Democratic candidates they favor. In 2016, 94 percent of them voted for Hillary Clinton, while 53 percent of white women supported Trump. In the 2017 Alabama U.S. Senate race, the 98 percent black female vote for Doug Jones tipped the scales of the election in his favor and allowed him to defeat Roy Moore. The key question that remains after the euphoria over the historic significance of having a serious black female contender for governor is, What does this mean for Donald Trump? If Georgia elects a black female governor who has the ability to mobilize black, female, progressive, young and other minority voters, will it tip Georgias scales from the red side to the blue side? Sharon Austin, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of African American Studies, University of Florida This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Morgan County JACKSONVILLE POLICE Arrests, Citations Reginald C. Bratton, 23, of 841 S. East St. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 1:21 p.m. Saturday on a retail theft charge. Nicholas A.L. Johnson, 19, of St. Louis was booked into the Morgan County jail at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday on charges of domestic battery, aggravated assault and disorderly conduct. Sharayah R. Decker, 29, of 1207 Grandview Ave. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 10:15 p.m. Sunday on a charge of driving while license is revoked or suspended. Julie A. Damm, 36, of 1010 N. Clay Ave. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 10:10 a.m. Monday on a domestic battery charge. Stacy E. Martin, 33, of 821 S. Main St. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 1:55 p.m. Monday on a domestic battery charge. Devante M. Clark, 22, of 504 E. Lafayette Ave. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 3:58 p.m. Monday on a charge of operating an uninsured motor vehicle. Burglaries, Thefts A chainsaw, leaf blower and weed eater were taken from a residence in the 700 block of West Lafayette Avenue between 6 p.m. Sunday and 6 p.m. Monday, according to a report filed at 6:32 p.m. Monday. Accidents A 10-year-old Jacksonville boy was taken to Passavant Area Hospital with a contusion and abrasions after being hit by a car about 8:20 p.m. Saturday in the 1100 block of Illinois Avenue. His condition was unavailable Tuesday. No citations were issued. South Jacksonville Police Arrests, Citations David W. Montgomery, 37, of 1116 E. Morton Ave. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 7:30 a.m. Sunday on charges of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon and aggravated assault. Michael J.G. Moeller, 30, of 5 Havendale Drive was booked into the Morgan County jail at 3:33 a.m. Monday on a charge of criminal trespass to land. Pike County SHERIFF Arrests, Citations Stephen M. Richards, 35, of Barry was arrested at 5:11 p.m. Monday on charges of disorderly conduct and unlawful restraint. Teresa L. Pruett, 46, of Chambersburg was arrested at 2:46 a.m. Saturday on charges of driving under the influence, illegal transportation of alcohol by a driver, operating an uninsured motor vehicle and having no valid drivers license. August T. Burns, 20, of Barry was arrested at 1:40 p.m. Friday on charges of possession of a weapon by a felon and possession of ammunition by a felon. Travis L. Myers, 34, of Rockport was arrested at 5:30 p.m. Friday on a charge of possession of methamphetamine. Cody M. Lovelace, 28, of Monroe City, Missouri, was arrested at 9:22 a.m. Thursday on a petition to revoke conditional discharge and on a Pike County warrant accusing him of failing to appear in court. Amber P. Allen, 26, of Pittsfield was arrested at 4:38 p.m. May 22 on a charge of endangering the life of a child. Danzell D. Ford, 25, of Phoenix, Arizona, was arrested at 7:15 p.m. May 21 on a Winnebago County warrant accusing him of domestic battery and aggravated domestic battery. Compiled by David C.L. Bauer, Samantha McDaniel-Ogletree and Greg Olson BEARDSTOWN Traffic will be reduced to one lane on the U.S. 67 bridge across the Illinois River beginning Friday. Traffic will be controlled by signals, which will allow for one alternating lane of traffic in each direction, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation. Following a miserable voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in March 1945 aboard the crowded troopship USS William Weigel, I was one of a number of replacement troops making the way through that bomb-shattered city of Le Havre on the western coast of France. Soon after the successful invasion of France in July 1944, the Americans began construction of what were to be temporary military installations, administered by the g9th Infantry Division, which became known as the Cigarette Camps. Hastily constructed following the invasion of France, the various camps were comprised of eight-man tents and crude wooden huts. From all accounts, the crudely constructed installations were miserable from day one. However, by the spring of 1945, the camps had been greatly improved and there was also the fact being on our way to the front, none of us was much concerned with our housing. For security purposes, such installations were named after various brands of American cigarettes. There was also the suggestion that troops on their way to battle would receive small comfort with the brand names of popular cigarettes back home. The names of five of the replacement camps were Old Gold, Philip Morris, Lucky Strike, Chesterfield and Pall Mall. After wars end, these same camps were used by American soldiers either returning to the United States or being sent to fight the Japanese. The transit camps in France varied greatly in the number of replacements they could handle. For example, the largest in terms of capacity were Camp Lucky Strike at 58,000, Camp Old Gold and Philip Morris, both holding 35,000, and finally Camp Twenty Grand, with 20,000 soldiers. And there were smaller installations: Camp Herbert Tareyton, 16,400; Camp Pall Mall (at Etretat), 7,700, and lastly Camp Wings at 2,250 along with Camp Home Run at 2,000. My replacement unit was housed at Camp Etretat, named for the village carrying the same name, located on the coast of France north of Le Harve. Though we were housed in tents at Etretat only a few days, I well remember it being overcast with heavy surf off the ocean. It was the first time I had ever seen a large cargo ship half submerged in the wild windswept English Channel. Only a few days after being stationed at Etretat, I was one of many replacements boarding railway box cars for transit east through France eventually crossing the border into Germany. Fortunately, the train we had been assigned halted each night for housing in regular Army installations. As best I can recall, after four days of travel, we disembarked at a station in a large city and following our evening meal, we were led to a large building formerly occupied by the Germany army. Since it had become dark and there was no electricity, we prepared to sleep on the floor of the building. Looking back, I realize it was April 12, for it was that night we got word over the radio that President Roosevelt had died. This sad report spread like wildfire and all of us were shaken by the news. Most of us could not recall when FDR had not been our president. The following morning, we learned our train travel was over. From here on, large Army trucks would transport us to the unit to which we had been assigned. By late afternoon, the truck Id been riding halted in a small village housing Company A of the 37th Tank Battalion my new home. However, I was very lucky for I soon learned my first sergeant been engaged in farming not far from my hometown, and even more surprising, his family purchased goods from my grandfather who operated a country store in nearby Literberry. More important, within a matter of weeks, the war in Europe came to an end. After completing 18 months in the Army of occupation in Germany, in August 1946, I was transported north to the huge port of Hamburg on my way to New York and discharge from the Army. Looking back over the years, while my basic training was no walk in the park, it prepared me for marvelous service in Germany, and along the way I came upon some of the finest men I have ever known. As a great bonus, the service entitled me to a college education, perhaps unavailable otherwise. All things considered, my service in the Army was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Robert Underbrink is a Jacksonville writer. As Japanas most popular showbiz personality, Takuya Kimura, 45, more commonly known as Kimutaku, has been in the public eye since 1988, when he was chosen to be one of six boys to form the new boy band SMAP, which became a Japanese phenomenon beloved by all ages. After a record 28 years together, SMAP eventually disbanded in 2016, but their popularity as individuals was already cemented with the public, as Kimutaku and his fellow band members had starred in TV dramas, movies, and countless ads over the years, which were all immensely successful. Above everyone else, though, Kimutakuas appeal was always off the charts, as everything he starred in became a massive hit, and his Midas touch appears to extend to his progeny as well, with his 15-year-old daughter now making headlines in Japan following her modeling debut. - Japan Today 'Akufo-Addo is not in support of ... The Japanese government plans to ease restrictions on unskilled foreign nationals seeking to work in Japan, Nikkei learned Tuesday, as the country grapples with a serious labor shortage. The new policy, which will ease Japanese language requirements for overseas workers, will be incorporated into a work permit system and included in draft economic policy guidelines to be finalized by June. The change marks a significant shift in Japan's policy regarding overseas workers. Under current rules, work permits are issued mainly to skilled professionals. The government hopes to attract more than 500,000 overseas workers by 2025 to five industries especially hard hit by a lack of unskilled labor. Japan had 1.27 million registered foreign workers last year, according to health ministry figures. The new work permits will apply to construction, agriculture, lodging, nursing care, shipbuilding and related manufacturing. Applicants will be required to take occupational and Japanese language tests designed for each type of work by industry associations. The draft guidelines, called the Basic Policy on Economic and Fiscal Management and Reform, will call for creating a new class of work permits valid for up to five years. Details are still to be fleshed out. - Nikkei JuiceWell will open a second location in west Houston's CityCentre development in late summer. Wen Kosters-Qin, proprietor of Sustain Juicery at 4061 Bellaire, recently opened JuiceWell in the new Regions Bank building at 3773 Richmond near Greenway Plaza. Offerings include cold-press juices, shots, smoothies, juice cleanses, nut milks, plant-based snacks and acai and pitaya bowls. RELATED: Five questions for Ayesha Curry about her new International Smoke restaurant coming to Houston "The walkable, community-centric design of CityCentre which has become a gathering place for surrounding neighborhoods made it a natural fit for expansion," Kosters-Qin said in an announcement. JuiceWell will occupy 783 square feet at 797 Sorella Court, adjacent to Bowl & Barrel. Other upcoming openings at CityCentre include International Smoke restaurant and Hopdoddy Burger Bar. Developed by Midway, CityCentre encompasses two million square feet of retail, office, residential projects designed with European-style, open-air plazas on 47 acres near Interstate 10 and Beltway 8. Penske Truck Leasing Penske Truck Leasing has opened a 22,658-square-foot location off Interstate 45 and Beltway 8 in north Houston. The company is looking to fill new positions in its rental office and maintenance department at the new facility, its largest in the Houston area. The building, on 9.5 acres at 221 E. Airtex Drive, has 10 truck bays, an automatic wash bay and a three-lane fuel island. It's the largest of Penske's 11 locations in the Houston area. The U.S. shale surge is crashing headlong into a barrage of bottlenecks. From West Texas pipelines to Oklahoma storage centers and Gulf Coast export terminals, the delivery system for American crude is straining to keep up with soaring production. Thats limiting the industrys ability to take full advantage of growing worldwide demand, with U.S. barrels forced to take an almost $9-a-barrel price discount to international crude. Barclays Plc analysts on Tuesday predicted a new shock" for energy markets as a dearth of pipeline capacity near a key Oklahoma storage hub threatens the flow of oil. Pipeline shortages in Texas Permian basin, meanwhile, may not clear until late 2019. The problems undercut hopes American output will stabilize global prices as crude from Venezuela and Iran is increasingly at risk. When youre forced to truck barrels about 500 miles to the Gulf Coast -- yes, thats as inefficient as it sounds -- the price differential blows out to levels seen recently," Raymond James & Associates analysts wrote in a Tuesday note. To account for higher shipping costs, crude sold from Midland, the Permians unofficial capital, now sells for almost $18 a barrel below Gulf Coast prices, according to data tracked by Bloomberg. Permian production is set to be materially above" local refining and transportation capacity for the next 12 to 18 months, the Raymond James analysts, led by Darren Horowitz, said in their note. Port Size Pipelines arent the only problem. The U.S. currently has only one export terminal that can accommodate the 2 million-barrel supertankers preferred by Asian and European customers, and expansions at other ports arent expected to be complete before 2020, according to Sandy Fielden, director of oil research at Chicago-based Morningstar Inc. Exports have only been a major concern for the U.S. oil industry since late 2015, when the government ended a 40-year ban on overseas shipments, and theyve only been economically viable for the last 18 months or so, Fielden said in a note to clients on Tuesday. It wasnt even on the map in 2015," he added. Its been a scramble to get organized." The rising cost of transporting oil from Permian wells in West Texas and New Mexico could slow the breakneck pace of growth until early 2019, analysts at Houston investment bank Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. wrote in another note Tuesday. Natural gas shipments also face constraints, they said. The wall likely hits at a similar time to crude and could prove an equal barrier to growth," the analysts wrote. Enticed by a rebound in global oil prices, U.S. producers set a record this month, pumping 10.7 million barrels of oil a day. American crude exports climbed to a record 2.57 million barrels a day in the second week of May, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Limitations Laid Bare But the surge in output has suddenly laid bare the limitations of a system that evolved over the last few decades to move foreign oil into the U.S., not the other way around. In the Permian, the problems been magnified by a tight labor market for drivers and competition for trucks that are also needed to deliver sand and chemicals for hydraulic fracturing operations, according to the Raymond James analysts. Further down the supply chain, the next bottleneck" looks likely to develop around the crude supply and distribution hub in Cushing, Barclays said. Inventories continue to grow there due to insufficient takeaway capacity," analyst Paul Cheng said in a note to clients. Rising output from the Bakken shale play in North Dakota will add to the pressure in coming months, Cheng said. New Reality Meanwhile, exporters along the Gulf Coast are scrambling to cope with the new reality. The regions key shipping hubs -- Corpus Christi, Houston and Beaumont in Texas, and St. James in Louisiana -- plan to add at least 54 million barrels of storage capacity starting next year, a 25 percent increase, Fielden said in his report. Nine projects will expand docks at 40 separate marine terminals. For now, only the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, or LOOP, can accommodate a fully laden Very Large Crude Carriers, the 2 million-barrel tankers that offer the most efficient shipping to customers. Corpus Christi has announced plans for its first onshore VLCC dock, with another planned near Brownsville, Texas, but neither is scheduled to be finished until 2020 at the earliest, Fielden said. Until then, the ports must use smaller tankers or take the time-consuming process of filling VLCCs offshore. Fielden estimates the Gulf Coast can currently export about 3.8 million barrels a day. Thats well above current levels, but partly because bottlenecks back in the Permian and Cushing are limiting supplies, he said in a telephone interview. In a years time, were going to have a bunch of new pipelines and all of that capacity is heading straight for the export docks," Fielden said. Next years when well see the real potential constraints if we dont build those out." 2018 Bloomberg L.P. Vijay Mhay, a Punjabi-American, is used to getting different looks when he enters stores and restaurants. But when I start talking, they know that, Okay, he doesnt have an accent, hes educated, he knows what hes talking about, they get more calm, said Mhay. But I still get looks. A Starbucks store manager store manager in Philadelphia drew national attention to the kinds of racial prejudices minorities are subjected to on a daily basis after calling the police on two African-American men who were waiting for a friend. One of the men was denied access to the stores restroom because they hadnt ordered anything. The pair were then arrested. Related: Racist flyers from neo-Nazi group found in San Antonio-area neighborhoods Mhay was one of millions of customers who couldnt their caffeine fix Tuesday afternoon. The Seattle-based company closed 8,000 stores for several hours to train more than 175,000 employees about racial bias and discrimination. The move was one of many steps Starbucks part of the companys aggressive apology campaign to stem public outrage over the April incident. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson publicly apologized within days of the incident and the company quickly settled with Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, the two men arrested in Philadelphia, for an undisclosed sum. The company also offered to cover all of their costs for college. Within days, Executive Chairman Howard Schultz confirmed that the store manager who made the call was no longer with the company. The chain has since adopted a policy allowing anyone to use their restrooms, even if they dont purchase anything. The incident has prompted us to reflect more deeply on all forms of bias, the role of our stores in communities and our responsibility to ensure that nothing like this happens again at Starbucks, Schulz wrote in an open letter published on the companys website Tuesday. The reflection has led to a long-term commitment to reform systemwide policies, while elevating inclusion and equity in all we do. Starbucks decision to close thousands of stores so employees could attend the afternoon training has drawn a mix of praise and skepticism. Turn to Wednesdays front page or click here on ExpressNews.com to read more about Starbucks strategy. Joshua Fechter is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFreports Big banks are getting a big reprieve from a post-crisis rule aimed at curbing risky behavior on Wall Street. Federal bank regulators on Wednesday unveiled a sweeping plan to soften the Volcker Rule, opening the door for banks to resume some trading activities restricted as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. The changes would give the largest banks significant freedom to engage in more complicated and possibly riskier activities by allowing Wall Street firms to determine which trading they view as permissible under the rule. The Volcker Rule was put in place to prevent banks from making risky bets with depositors money. It took five agencies three years to write it and has been criticized by Wall Street as too onerous and harmful to the proper functioning of financial markets. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve proposed easing several parts of the rule and four other regulators are expected to soon follow suit, kicking off a public comment period that is expected to last 60 days. The loosening of the Volcker Rule is part of a coordinated effort underway in Washington to relax rules put into place in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Big banks, emboldened by President Donald Trumps deregulatory agenda and a more favorable political climate in Washington, have begun pressing for changes to several post-crisis rules, including the Volcker Rule. Last week, Trump signed into law a bipartisan bill that will free thousands of small and medium-sized banks from the Dodd-Frank law and on May 21 signed a law rescinding a consumer rule aimed at preventing discrimination by auto lenders. The Fed and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency recently proposed easing limits on how much the largest banks can borrow and the Fed also proposed changes to the stress tests that banks must undergo each year to determine whether they can withstand an economic downturn. Mick Mulvaney, Trumps acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has also engaged in a rapid series of regulatory changes since November, including halting new investigations, freezing new hires and preventing the agency from collecting certain data from banks. (END OPTIONAL TRIM.) Regulators said Wednesday that the primary intent of the Volcker Rule will remain intact and that banks will not be allowed to return to the wild days of proprietary trading, when traders made big bets with the banks money and sometimes lost huge sums. But they said the rule needed to be simplified so that banks could more easily comply with it and Washington could adequately enforce it. The proposal will address some of the uncertainty and complexity that now make it difficult for firms to know how best to comply, and for supervisors to know that they are in compliance, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said at a Board of Governors meeting. Our goal is to replace overly complex and inefficient requirements with a more streamlined set of requirements. The Volcker Rule, while not the most significant post-crisis regulation, is arguably the most recognizable. It was included at the behest of former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who argued that Wall Street was recklessly gambling with house money. On Wednesday, Volcker, now the chairman of a nonpartisan think tank called The Volcker Alliance, welcomed efforts to simplify compliance with the rule, but said in a statement that What is critical is that simplification not undermine the core principle at stake that taxpayer-supported banking groups, of any size, not participate in proprietary trading at odds with the basic public and customers interests. He added: I trust the final rule will strongly maintain that position by, as intended, facilitating its practical application. All three sitting Fed governors voted to release the proposal, which will be open to public comment and could change before being finalized. At a brief Fed meeting to discuss the proposal, officials stressed that the changes were merely refinements that stemmed from their experience overseeing Volckers early implementation, including what did and did not work. Bank lawyers said the Fed was clearly trying to insulate itself from criticism that it was giving banks too much leeway by declaring that the changes were based on experience overseeing the rule. For people who are saying youre going too easy on the banks, their rejoinder is we have data saying thats not true, said Douglas Landy, a bank lawyer who helps some of the largest banks comply with Volcker. Its the type of language you might not see in a Fed report before the financial crisis or Dodd-Frank when they werent as aware of the political implications. But the changes would alter how much time the banks have to spend proving they are following the Volcker Rule and give them more leeway to determine which types of trades comply. It would also shift the burden of proof for determining whether a trade qualifies under Volcker away from the bank to the regulators. Right now, banks must prove that each of their trades serves a clear purpose that goes beyond a speculative bet by showing regulators specifically how each trade either meets customer demands or acts as a hedge against specific risks. That had curtailed trading in a variety of assets like derivatives, corporate bonds and other complex products. Under the changes outlined Wednesday, banks will no longer have to offer proof for each specific trade and would instead have to enact strict internal controls and compliance programs to ensure they are meeting the Volcker Rule test. The change would allow banks to more freely engage in hedging, in which they execute trades in an effort to counteract risk in other parts of their businesses. Regulators would also give banks more leeway to determine what levels of trading activity are appropriate for meeting customer demands on each of their trading desks. That would be a shift from the current rule which sets rigid standards that do not differentiate between trading desks that serve different assets, like corporate bonds and derivatives. In a briefing for journalists Wednesday, an agency official said letting banks set their own risk and activity limits would help reduce the difficulties big banks currently face in trying to prove that their various market activities, which can differ greatly from one another, conform to a set of rigid standards. Regulators will also continue to collect trading information from the largest banks, which are subject to strict oversight and monitoring as part of the enhanced supervisory process put into place after the crisis. Fed Gov. Lael Brainard, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said Wednesday that she supported the proposal as long as the chief executives of banks were willing to personally attest to future claims that their institutions were adhering to the restriction on speculative betting. The requirement of CEO attestation is critical for this to work, in my view, Brainard said in prepared remarks. Other changes would group banks into categories according to how much Wall Street trading they do. Banks engaging in the least amount of trading would have the easiest set of requirements to fulfill under the rule, a change that dovetails with Congress recent move to exempt the smallest banks from having to comply with Volcker at all. The changes are already prompting outrage among consumer advocates and other financial watchdogs, who warn it will allow a return to the Wild West days on Wall Street. This proposal is no minor set of technical tweaks to the Volcker Rule, but an attempt to unravel fundamental elements of the response to the 2008 financial crisis, when banks financed their gambling with taxpayer-insured deposits, Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, said in a statement. Downtown San Antonio employees have a new, fresh, health-conscious option to eat at now that Revolucion Coffee + Juice is open on East Houston. Tuesday marked the grab-and-go shop's first day at 300 E. Houston, which formerly housed Moshe's Golden Falafel. The Majestic Theatre wouldn't be the same without the illuminated marquee that greets visitors when the sun goes down. And the Esquire's signature green and red sign invites people into one of the city's oldest and most famous bars. They're just a few of many neon signs that help light up the Alamo City at night. On this date in ... 1918: Potentially adding to the groups of men in the Albany area striking for higher wages, the city's barbers were considering a walkout depending on the outcome of an afternoon meeting at Italian Hall. The current pay for barbers was $15 per week, an amount the group claimed was impossible to exist on. They were asking for a raise to $18 a week. A few master barbers were willing to pay the new salary, but many felt the hair cutters were already sufficiently paid. 1968: Star sapphires, star rubies and emeralds were among synthetic gems donated to the State Museum by the Union Carbide Corporation for the museum's forthcoming exhibit titled "Faces of Gemology." The museum's existing gem collection was of natural stones. Union Carbide produced Linde Star gems, which had the same chemical and physical properties as their natural counterparts and had been on the market since September 1947. 1993: He was honored on a holiday meant for reflection. But the irony of the Chester A. Arthur Memorial Day service was that few people remembered much about the Capital Region resident who became the 21st president. "We think he generally didn't get as much credit as he deserved," said Martin O'Connell, chairman of the event. About 100 people, mostly members of the Capt. Wm. Dale O'Brien Detachment of the Marine Corps League, and Boy Scouts from the Twin Rivers Council, attended the ceremony. Held on a sunny morning at his grave in Albany Rural Cemetery, the service concentrated on typical Memorial Day themes. Have any memories or thoughts about how our history relates to today's events? See http://blog.timesunion.com/history. Nervousness and fear were evident in the voices of the 911 callers, trapped in rising waters in Ellicott City, Maryland, which was devastated over the weekend by major flooding for the second time in two years. One woman at a tea parlor and gift shop asked the dispatcher, "Are we going to die, ma'am?" The dispatcher replied: "I'm going to do my best, so that does not happen." The Howard County (Maryland) Police and Fire departments released a recording of some of the 911 calls they received Sunday from those trapped during flooding in the historic town about 30 miles northeast of Washington. Officials said dispatchers at the county's rescue departments answered 1,122 calls on Sunday in a seven-hour period from 3:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Sgt. Eddison Alexander Hermond, 39, of Severn, Maryland, who was an Air Force veteran and Maryland Army National Guard member, died after he was swept away trying to rescue a woman who had become stranded in her shop along Main Street. He had been with friends at a nearby restaurant, La Palapa Grill & Cantina, where the owner was celebrating his birthday. Hermond's body was found Tuesday. During the roughly 11 minutes of 911 calls that were released, more than six people called to report rising water. Many sounded scared, and some cried. Even in the time of crisis, callers and dispatchers answered each other with the greeting of "Hon." Ellicott City has a population of about 65,000. It was founded in 1772 at the site of a grist mill and sits along the banks of the Tiber and Patapsco rivers. In the 1800s, it became the terminus of one part of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Located in a valley where two creeks converge with a river makes Ellicott City vulnerable to flooding. It has grown over the decades into a popular tourist spot with restaurants, historic venues and trinket shops. One caller told the dispatcher she could see a woman on Main Street "standing on top of her counter screaming," as the water rose. Nearby, she said two kids were stuck on the second floor of a bank building because of water on the first floor. "This is worst than the last one," the caller tells the dispatcher, referring to the summer of 2016, when Ellicott City suffered devastating flooding and two people died. That flood caused more than $20 million in damage, officials said. For many in the town, Sunday was a repeat of that earlier disaster. The desperation was clear as one woman called 911 Sunday from Tea on the Tiber, a tea parlor and gift shop in downtown Ellicott City. She said she and others were on the third floor as the first floor was submerged. The dispatcher told her to stay put and assured her, "I'm trying to get somebody to you as fast as I can." Another caller reported two people were trying to cross Main Street near the Tiber River, and the water is "almost above their head." Then the caller said he could hear and see rescue vehicles coming. One woman called dispatchers crying. She said she was trapped along with eight others on the second floor of her home and had helped to get shopkeepers on the first floor upstairs and inside her home safely. "We have a baby," the caller said. A wedding planner called to report the 250 guests at her event in the Main Street Ballroom had to seek refuge upstairs in the La Palapa restaurant where Hermond, the National Guardsman whose body was found Tuesday, had been with friends. "It has flooded the whole thing," the wedding planner told the dispatcher. "Many people's cars have been washed away." The dispatcher told her to get "everybody to higher ground." Briefly, the wedding planner put the dispatcher on hold and then realized help had arrived outside the door. She turned back to the phone and said, "They're here." --- Audio Link Ellicott City 2018 Flood 911 Recordings from the Howard County, Maryland, government Howard County Police and Howard County Department of Fire and Rescue Services said 911 dispatchers answered 1,122 calls from 3:30-10:30 p.m. on Sunday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLqZST4n0JE&feature=youtu.be FAIRFIELD Children in Connecticut are safer, more secure and healthier than children in all but four other states in the U.S., according to a new report released by Save the Children. The international non-governmental organization released on May 30 its second annual End of Childhood Index which examines the events and conditions that could rob children around the globe of their childhoods. The main takeaway was that there is increasing inequality among children, said Save the Children CEO and President Carolynn Miles. Its a gap thats widening. I think this issue of inequality and the fact that the poorest kids get further and further behind to me is the biggest call to action. AEli Murray Photographywww.eli Researchers from the organization put together a global index which examines conditions like child mortality, malnutrition, school attendance, child work rates, adolescent births, early marriage, military conflicts and exposure to violence comparing 175 countries nationwide. A U.S. Complement used a similar set of criteria, examining five childhood enders, including child mortality, school drop-out rates, food insecurity, child homicide and suicide rates and adolescent birth rates, to compare conditions in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Connecticut was one of only seven states whose rural child poverty rate, 7.8 percent, is lower than its urban child poverty rate, 13.1 percent. The states rural child poverty rate was lowest in the country. Its combined score considering all five enders was fifth lowest in the country, behind only New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. In last years inaugural report, Connecticut ranked sixth lowest. The data shows that the worst ranking regions of the country are concentrated in poor parts of the rural South and Midwest. The southeast U.S. is particularly hard hit by poverty, said Miles. Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma, Mississippi and Louisiana round out the bottom three slots on the list. In 2016, according to the report, 23.5 percent of children in rural parts of the country were living in poverty, while only 18.8 percent of children growing up in urban settings were living in poverty. We really need to treat rural child poverty in the U.S. like its an emergency. Its getting so little attention, Miles said. Save the Children In the global index, the U.S. was ranked 36th, between just behind Belarus and ahead of Russia. According to Save the Children, poverty, conflict and discrimination against girls are putting 1.2 billion children at risk for an early end to childhood. The world is also seeing the highest numbers of displacement ever recorded, with 65 million people forced to leave their homes by the end of 2016. But there were also positive. Of the countries ranked, 95 had higher scores this year than last, an optimistic trend according to Tracy Geoghegan, director of publications and branding at Save the Children and an author of the report. We tend to think we live in these very difficult and disturbing times, and thats certainly true, but its very heartening to see that even some of the poorest countries like four in the bottom 10, have higher scores this year than they did last year, Geoghegan said. Still, there are many alarming aspects to the report, according to lead researcher Nikki Gillette. Adolescent pregnancies worldwide are expected to increase. Despite efforts by Save the Children and other organizations, by 2030, 150 million more girls will marry before their 18th birthday. The total number of children whose growth is stunted as a result of malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to increase. Progress to ensure all children have access to schooling has stalled. And, perhaps most startling, the gap between rich and poor is becoming more pronounced, with poor children bearing the brunt of each of the above issues. There are groups of children excluded and falling farther behind because of that exclusion,Gillette said. justin.papp@scni.com; @justinjpapp1; 203-842-2586 One of Britain's most notorious anti-Muslim campaigners was arrested for disrupting a trial last week and was sentenced that same day to a year in prison, which the judge ordered news media not to report on. The gag order backfired, turning English Defense League founder Tommy Robinson into a sort of free-speech martyr to conservatives such as Donald Trump Jr. and Roseanne Barr before the gag order was lifted Tuesday. Robinson, 35, is "the driving force behind a national movement that seeks to ban Muslim immigration to Britain and advocates tearing down many of the country's mosques," Griffe Witte wrote for The Washington Post. Robinson had been arrested multiple times before last week, for crimes including fraud and assault, according to Leeds Live, and Twitter has permanently banned him for claiming that Islam is murderous. But Robinson has continued to live-stream video rants to hundreds of thousands of viewers. He tends to film outside courthouses, where he often claims Muslims on trial are representative of their religion. It's illegal in Britain to report the details of some trials before they conclude - a long-standing law designed to prevent the news from biasing juries and causing prosecutions to collapse, according to Leeds Live. Robinson was convicted of breaking that law last year, the BBC wrote, when he tried to film defendants outside a trial in Canterbury. His three-month sentence was suspended at the time, but the judge warned him that another offense would send him to prison. Nevertheless, Robinson kept filming. He was arrested and released after trying "to video Muslims" at a trial in early May, the Independent wrote. He showed up with his cameraman again Friday - this time outside a restricted child-sex-abuse trial at Leeds Crown Court, for what he inaccurately announced was the verdict. He chased down several dark-skinned men on their way to the courthouse, apparently convinced that they were rapists: "How are you feeling about your verdict? Got your prison bags there?" Unable to enter the building, Robinson stood outside for an hour and dispensed "facts" on the grooming of children for sex. "Ninety percent of the grooming gang convictions are Muslim males," he told his Facebook Live viewers - 250,000 by the time the stream ended. Several police officers had been standing in the background of the frame. After the video ended, the Independent wrote, the officers arrested him and put him in a police van. "I've done nothing," Robinson protested and asked a small crowd of his fans to call a lawyer. In a short hearing the same afternoon, Leeds Live wrote, a judge watched the video, and Robinson pleaded guilty to contempt of court - forcing him to serve his previous suspended sentence plus another 10 months, or 13 months total. "No one could possibly conclude that it would be anything other than highly prejudicial to the defendants in the trial," the judge said. Reporters watched the hearing, but the judge ordered them not to publish anything about Robinson's arrest until after the sex-assault trial concluded - to avoid prejudicing the same jury with reports of Robinson's interference. Keying off Robinson's previous claims that Muslim prison inmates wanted to kill him, Roseanne Barr called his arrest a "death sentence." Donald Trump Jr. compared it to the cause for the American Revolution, and Mike Cernovich said a compilation of deleted news articles about the arrest was "the most terrifying video you'll see today." U.S. websites ignored the ban. Conservative outlets and alt-right blogs accused the British media of abetting a coverup. Drudge blasted the arrest across its front page, and 500,000 people signed a "Free Tommy" petition. The movement swelled until hundreds marched in London over the weekend. "How can we tell you what you're doing wrong, when we can't even talk about it?" one protester screamed at a police officer. Meanwhile, the Independent and Leeds Live went to court to legally challenge the gag order - in part by arguing that their competitors were already violating it. The newspapers won their challenge Tuesday, the BBC wrote, and everyone is now free to report that Robinson will be serving a 13-month prison sentence for interfering with two trials - one last year and one last week. That has, at least, somewhat complicated his brief stint as a martyr. "This is not some new form of censorship directed at Robinson," BBC correspondent Dominic Casciani wrote. "These are rules that apply to us all, equally. If he is unsure about that, he's now got time on his hands to read a copy of 'Essential Law for Journalists.' " DARIEN Its better to be safe than sorry. By that motto, Darien ranks first in the state and 54th in the nation for safety, according to SafeWise, a professional review and comparison website that provides tips on safety and community resources. According to the data analyzed for the SafeWise 2018 Connecticut rankings, 99.59 percent of the crime in town is property-related burglary, arson, motor vehicle theft and 0.41 percent is violent aggravated assault, murder, rape and robbery. With a population of 21,995, there are 0.05 violent crimes and 11 property crimes per 1,000 people. In previous annual reports, SafeWise combined property and violent crime rates into one statistic to determine rankings, according to SafeWise representative Krystal Rogers. In 2015, 2016 and 2017, Darien was ranked the third, 22nd and 27th safest city in Connecticut, respectively. For 2018, the rankings were based on violent crimes, and property crimes were used as a tie-breaker. We weighed violent crime rate higher starting this year because we felt that threats to personal safety should be weighted higher than property damage when determining the overall safety of a city, Rogers said. According to SafeWise, data for the 2018 rankings was collected from the 2016 FBI crime report statistics and population data. The rankings were derived from the number of reported violent and property crimes in each city. The rate of crimes was then divided per 1,000 people in each respective city. First Selectman Jayme Stevenson shared the news via Twitter on Tuesday. Our residents value a safe and healthy community. There are many things that make Darien a special place to raise a family and operate a business, but public safety is the No. 1 most important community healthy living asset, Stevenson said via phone on Tuesday. Stevenson praised first responders in town. The Darien Police Department, in collaboration with regional and state law enforcement personnel, work tirelessly to keep our community free from crime, Stevenson said. Chief of Police Ray Osborne, who has been in the position for over a year, congratulated his force. I can attest that the men and women of the Darien Police Department work very hard ... to do everything that we can to keep our community safe and secure for the residents, the business owners and the people who visit and pass through our town, Osborne said. humberto.juarez @hearstmediact.com Gubernatorial candidate Valerie Ervin - who took over the top of the ticket two weeks ago after her running mate died of a heart attack - is suing the Maryland State Board of Elections to force officials to reprint ballots ahead of the June 26 Democratic primary. Ervin, a former Montgomery County council member, had been running for lieutenant governor alongside Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz. After Kamenetz died suddenly on May 10, Ervin filed to run for governor and chose Marisol Johnson, a former Baltimore County school board member, as her running mate. The Ervin-Johnson ticket is the first time in Maryland history that two women of color - an African-American and a Latina - are running for the state's highest offices. The Board of Elections has declined to print new ballots reflecting the changes and including the names of both women, saying in a letter to Ervin's attorney that there was not enough time to place an order for the specialized ballot paper. Early voting begins June 14. The board says election judges and volunteers will notify voters at the polls that a vote for Kamenetz-Ervin would count as a vote for Ervin and Johnson, using an asterisk and posted signs to make people aware. But that did not satisfy Ervin. Her attorney, Mariana Cordier, said it also may not comply with the law. In a legal filing Tuesday in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court, Cordier asked a judge to stop the board from distributing the current ballots and force officials to reprint them or attach a sticker to reflect the new candidates. "We believe it's unfair," Cordier said in an interview. "Unfortunately, candidates die or are disqualified, and it's the job of the board to ensure a voter's choice is truly their choice. What's important is not the reprinting but whether the ballot is accurate." Cordier will address the elections board at a meeting Thursday. She said state election law requires a reprint if the ballot does not accurately reflect the list of candidates in the gubernatorial primary. To do otherwise, Cordier said, could lead to voter disenfranchisement. Ervin is one of seven major candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to challenge popular incumbent Gov. Larry Hogan, R, in November. Several of her Democratic rivals have said they, too, think the state should reprint the ballots. Rep. Thomas Garrett's sudden announcement that he's an alcoholic and will not seek reelection has turned the race for Congress in Virginia's conservative 5th District upside down. Neither party seems to know for sure if Garrett's departure will benefit Republicans or Democrats, leaving both parties unsettled in a year when control of the House is at stake. As soon as word spread Monday afternoon, Republicans who hope to replace Garrett as the GOP candidate began jockeying for position, trying to win the support of the 36-member party committee that will pick the nominee. Four candidates publicly offered themselves as candidates; at least two others are seriously considering it. At this early stage there's no telling what the committee is seeking - a party insider or populist outsider, a man or woman, a fundraiser or self-funder. "It does matter who we nominate, but I have faith in our committee that we will pick a very good candidate, and we have a much better than even chance of winning," said Rick Buchanan, president of the Virginia Tea Party and a vice chair of the district committee, who will have a vote. "The sooner we make it, the sooner we start campaigning and raising funds for the candidate. The pressure's on." It's unclear if Democrats will have to shift strategy because of a new opponent. They had already spent 18 months honing their attacks on Garrett. They have protested outside his Charlottesville, Virginia, district office dozens of times, and Charlottesville Indivisible had adopted the slogan "#OneTermTom," which the group emblazoned on a banner and splashed on its website. But as long as the new GOP candidate is a Trump ally, they maintain they won't need to change their plans. The Democratic nominee, journalist and author Leslie Cockburn, is working to drive up Democratic turnout in Charlottesville, Albemarle and in African-American communities around the district. "I think this was always a race that was winnable in a wave year and now is even more flippable under these circumstances," said Tom Perriello, the last Democrat to hold the seat and a 2017 candidate for governor. The seat is one of about 100 around the country targeted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Immediately after Garrett dropped out of the race, the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia changed its rating for the seat from "likely Republican" to the less certain "leans Republican." But it's still an uphill battle for Democrats. Trump won the district by 11 points. In last year's governor's race Ed Gillespie carried it by nine points - the same margin he lost by statewide. And the independent analysts largely based their rating change on the fact that seat will be open. Some say Republicans are more likely to retain the seat without Garrett, whose fundraising lagged significantly behind Cockburn's. "Garrett was not a particularly formidable Republican," said David Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, where the race is also rated "leans Republican." "He appeared to be doing next to nothing to prepare for a tough reelection race." That gives Republicans an opportunity for a fresh start with a new nominee. The four who publicly declared their intentions are: Denver Riggleman, a distillery owner who ran a brief populist campaign for governor last year; Martha Boneta, an activist and the only woman in the race so far; businessman and developer Jim McKelvey; and state Del. Michael Webert, Marshall. Also considering it are two ambitious state senators, Bill Stanley, Franklin, who has strong ties to the party committee, and state Sen. Bryce Reeves, Spotsylvania, who doesn't live in the district but is known statewide after an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor last year. First thing Tuesday morning, conservative radio show host John Fredericks spoke with a parade of hopefuls on the air and commented on the unique circumstances. Instead of radio ads and door knocking, Republicans interested in the seat have to convince a majority of the committee - 19 people - that they should be the nominee, he said. "We're working to make sure we do our job well and by the book. That's all we're focused on right now," said Melvin Adams, chairman of the GOP committee in the 5th District. The committee is still figuring out the rules for voting and when it will take place. On the radio, Virginia GOP Chairman John Whitbeck said he expected the meeting will resemble a "mini-convention" with high stakes as the party embarks on "the fight of our lives to hold on to the House." He reprised Republican attacks on Cockburn, whom he labeled a "huge anti-Semitic disaster" based on a book she co-wrote called "Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship." Cockburn's campaign said the claims are baseless and constitute Republican attempts to distract voters from a photograph of Garrett with Jason Kessler, the organizer of last summer's white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. "They're holding on to this because they have nothing else as they're scrambling to take control of a district that's slipping away from them," campaign manager Louise Bruce said. Democratic activists said they wished Garrett well as he grapples with alcoholism, but relished the chance to win his seat. Larry Stopper, chairman of the Nelson County Democrats and the previous head of the Indivisible group in Nelson, saw his departure as a political windfall. "We're going to run more or less the same campaign regardless of who we run against," he said. "It's an advantage not to run against the incumbent." More Information FreightWeek STL included in formation on a wide variety of topics, including: The future of Hyperloop project discussed Discussion about the Hyperloop One project, which combines two types of technologies that already exist - Maglev trains, which use magnetic levitation to move vehicles, and vacuum tubes, to create a coasting effect that would allow for the movement of people and goods at 700 miles per hour, was a featured topic at FreightWeek. A proposed Missouri route would run between St. Louis and Kansas City along Interstate 70. The Missouri Hyperloop Coalition is a public-private partnership of several civic organizations and the Missouri Department of Transportation. The Coalition has taken the lead in coordinating a major engineering feasibility study of the Hyperloop technology, as well as the proposed route. Missouri is among the top five sites in the world under consideration for the first inter-city route. Andrew Smith, the co-founder of the Missouri Hyperloop Coalition, spoke at the conference about why the Hyperloop technology made sense for our region. "We believe the next big mode of transportation is Hyperloop," Smith said. "We are more than just a nation of city and states, we are a nation of megaregions. Kansas City and St. Louis are strategically located megaregions. Imagine what we can do if we can connect these two megaregions. And that's essentially what Hyperloop is doing. It'll allow you to travel between downtown KC and downtown St. Louis in under 30 minutes." For more information on the project, visit www.hyperloop-one.com. The State of the barge industry Andrew Holthaus, vice president of finance for Heartland Companies, shared key industry updates during the session. He touched on barge earnings, changes sparked by political actions, fleet sizes and the impact of weather on rates and utilization. Attendees also learned that Jeffboat, one of the three manufactures of barges, will close permanently in May 2018. The hour-long discussion on the barge industry also reinforced that while it is making a great impact and moving a lot of volume, people aren't aware of it because it can't be seen. "How many people have sat and waited for a train," stated Ken Eriksen, senior vice-president of Informa Economics IEG, a leading comprehensive agricultural, commodity and transportation market research, analysis and consulting firm. "The average person in St. Louis and Memphis has never been held up by a barge. A train you can see, just like a 26-ton vessel driving down the street in the form of a truck. The barge industry is very efficient, the story is phenomenal, but its hard to relate it to the average audience." To learn more about the state of the barge industry, individuals can access Barge Fleet and Commodity Profile Reports at www.bargefleet.com and the Inland River Record at www.inlandriverrecord.com. Rail safety technology among topics covered Garreth Rempel, CEO and co-founder of Canadian-based TRAINFO, introduced attendees at FreightWeek STL to the latest innovative technologies to predict potential travel delays caused by railroad crossing blockages and advanced information systems to help truck drivers, commuters and emergency responders avoid these delays. "There are 2 million blockages per day in the United States," Rempel said. "That is a number that doesn't necessarily come to mind for many - they don't know how big the problem is, the delays it is causing and the impact. "From an economic standpoint, companies need to be looking at how they invest money and prioritize infrastructure investment spending," he added. "If looking into doing grade separation or prioritizing crossings then really, good accurate information is needed. The ability for people to see the modeled versus measured approach is opening their eyes. They are saying they need to get better information, a stronger business case and a benefit cost analysis, and that this information is important." Rempel also explained that, every three hours, someone is hit by a train in the United States, so from a safety perspective, knowing when a crossing is blocked is a big issue. TRAINFO is getting a lot of interest from public safety officials like EMS, fire departments and paramedics. "We are hearing that they are getting stopped and blocked by trains on a weekly basis and it is causing 3, 4 or 5-minute delays. That amount of delay can mean life or death for cardiac arrest victims, and others, or the difference between a small fire and an entirely engulfed house." WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump gave a shoutout Wednesday to a Democrat he derided just weeks ago as "Sleepin' Joe." Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., one the biggest Republican targets in this year's midterms, was in the front row at a White House signing ceremony for "right-to-try" legislation - a bill that Trump emphasized had languished in Congress under his predecessors. The new law, which Donnelly helped write with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., allows people with life-threatening illnesses to bypass the Food and Drug Administration to obtain experimental medications. "Senator Donnelly, thank you very much," Trump said. "That's really great. Appreciate it. Thank you." Trump's tone was far different earlier this month when he traveled to Elkhart, Indiana, to tout the candidacy of Donnelly's challenger, businessman Mike Braun, days after he claimed the GOP nomination. At a rally in the state, Trump disparagingly labeled Donnelly "Sleepin' Joe" and ticked off other White House priorities the first-term senator had opposed. "Joe Donnelly voted no on tax cuts, no on better health care, and he voted no on canceling job-killing regulations, which may be even more important than those incredible tax cuts," Trump told the crowd. Republican leaders were encouraged by Trump's decision to attack Donnelly. Indiana is one of 10 states Trump won in 2016 where a Democratic senator is facing reelection in November. GOP leaders believe that Trump can be a major midterm asset for the party when he trains his attacks on red-state Democrats like Donnelly. Trump showed a similar flexibility in his rhetoric toward GOP targets last week when he thanked Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., at a signing ceremony for her support of legislation that rolls back banking regulations passed in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Heitkamp is considered one of the most endangered Senate Democrats in November. On Tuesday, news broke that a top North Korean official was headed to New York for an urgent meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had locked in a hastily arranged visit to the White House next week. Teams of U.S. negotiators, meanwhile, were already on the ground in the Korean demilitarized zone and in Singapore to nail down final arrangements with their North Korean counterparts for a possible summit in just two weeks. The flurry of activity surrounding possible talks between President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un appeared to be driven in large part by Trump's fixation on keeping a June 12 date for the meeting - even though the president himself had abruptly called the whole thing offdays earlier. In a series of tweets since then, Trump has suggested the summit will take place as scheduled in Singapore, even though his own advisers had warned last week it might be too late. Trump's latest change of direction was another sign that he has thrown out the conventional Washington playbook for his diplomatic high-wire act. From his impulsive, on-the-spot decision in March to accept Kim's offer to meet, Trump has rushed headlong into an accelerated summit process that has led analysts to warn that he risks moving too quickly and setting himself up for failure. "The pace of this stuff - it's gone from the roller coaster ride of North Korea to the carnival ride 'The Scrambler,' '' said Bruce Klingner, a former U.S. intelligence official who serves as an Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation. "It's dizzying. It throws off your inertia. At least a roller coaster is linear - The Scrambler is all directions at once." The latest sign was the news that Kim Yong Chol, a four-star general who has been at the forefront of North Korea's diplomatic outreach, had landed at Beijing Capital International Airport on Tuesday, according to television footage from the airport. He was initially booked on an Air China flight to Washington but changed it to a Wednesday flight bound for New York, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reported. That would have him arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport shortly after 2 p.m. Wednesday. Kim Yong Chol was directly sanctioned by the Treasury Department for his involvement in North Korea's nuclear program and illicit activities while he served as director of intelligence, so the United States would have had to grant a waiver to allow him to enter the country. He now serves as head of the United Front Department, the arm of the ruling Workers' Party that handles relations with South Korea. He is widely believed to have masterminded a 2010 attack on a South Korean naval corvette, the Cheonan, that killed 46 South Korean sailors. On Tuesday morning, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed that Pompeo would meet Kim Yong Chol in New York amid rumors in Seoul and Washington that the envoy would also meet with Trump. Analysts said such a meeting, while unusual since Kim Yong Chol is not a head of state, would be viewed as a reciprocal gesture from Trump, given that Pompeo has met twice with Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang. "I think it goes to show how fast this is all moving and that all conventions are being broken," said Victor Cha, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who served as a top Asia policy official in the George W. Bush administration. "When you do it this way instead of real, technical negotiations to get to a point of allowing this [summit] meeting - we're doing it backward. So all these things that are supposed to be big, important steps to symbolize success at the end are put up front at the beginning without promises." Trump aides have emphasized that the president believes his personal commitment to the negotiations can help break a cycle of failure over U.S. negotiations to contain the North's nuclear weapons program that extends back nearly three decades. Speaking on "Fox & Friends" on Fox News on Tuesday, Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House adviser, credited Trump's letter last week canceling the summit for creating the "kinetic energy" needed to get the parties talking more seriously. "Ever since then practically, North Korea, South Korea and the United States have been making very positive moves," Conway said. "But let's see what happens, as the president says. If he's satisfied, then it will go forward." In a tweet confirming Pompeo's meeting with Kim Yong Chol, Trump said Tuesday that his administration has "put a great team together for our talks with North Korea. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more." In explaining Trump's decision to formally cancel the meeting last week, a senior administration official told reporters in a background briefing at the White House that a U.S. delegation had waited in Singapore for three days only to be stood up by their North Korean counterpart for a key planning meeting. The official emphasized that the lack of communication from Pyongyang was a key reason it was extremely unlikely that the summit could still happen on June 12, even though Trump left open the door to rescheduling in his letter to Kim Jong Un last week. But Trump promptly undermined the administration official in a tweet over the weekend falsely accusing the New York Times of inventing the official as a source to cast doubt on the June 12 timeline. "WRONG AGAIN!" Trump wrote. Analysts said they believed that planners in Singapore - a highly efficient and technically proficient city-state in Southeast Asia - could still pull off the logistics of the summitwith just two weeks remaining. They questioned, though, whether the United States and North Korea would be able come to general agreement ahead of the summit over the key question of Pyongyang's commitment to a rapid plan to completely dismantle its nuclear program. Sanders told reporters traveling with Trump to a campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee, on Tuesday evening that "denuclearization has to be on the table, and the focus of the meeting," for the summit to be reinstated now. "And the president has to feel like we're making progress on that front. And the only one that will make that determination will be the president," she added. "There's a really big difference between what traditionalists say is necessary and what President Trump seems to think," Klingner said of the summit planning. "But Trump is going in quite a different way. When people say he can't get it all done in time, if you throw out the diplomatic playbook, perhaps it can be done - if Trump just sees himself as the negotiator in chief and, as he said in 'Art of the Deal,' goes with his gut and goes with his instinct." --- Fifield reported from Tokyo. The Post's John Wagner and Anne Gearan in Washington contributed to this report. The number of migrant children held in U.S. government custody without their parents has surged 21 percent in the past month, according to the latest figures, an increase driven by the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" crackdown on families who cross the border illegally. Although the government has not disclosed how many children have been separated from their parents as a result of the new measures, the Department of Health and Human Services said Tuesday that it had 10,773 migrant children in its custody, up from 8,886 on April 29. Under the "zero tolerance" approach rolled out last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, anyone who crosses into the United States illegally will face criminal prosecution. In most cases, that means parents who arrive with children stay in federal jails while their children are sent to HHS shelters. Those shelters are at 95 percent capacity, an HHS official said Tuesday, and the agency is preparing to add potentially thousands of new bed spaces in the coming weeks. HHS also is exploring the possibility of housing children on military bases but views the measure as a "last option," according to the HHS official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the agency's preparations. HHS has about 1,300 reserve beds to accommodate more children, the official said, including several hundred at a government-owned building in Homestead, Florida, adjacent to an Air Force base previously used as a Labor Department training center. In a statement, Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for HHS' Administration for Children and Families, said that the agency has "an existing network of approximately 100 shelters in 14 states" and that "additional temporary housing is only sought as a last resort when current locations are reaching capacity." The latest figures do not distinguish between minors who arrive without a parent and those who are separated from their mothers and fathers after they cross the border. But an official for U.S. Customs and Border Protection testified at a Senate committee hearing last week that 638 adults were referred for prosecution between May 6 and May 19 under the new zero-tolerance effort and that they brought 658 children with them. As the scope of the family-separation measures becomes clearer, President Donald Trump's immigration advisers pushed back Tuesday at false or misleading stories about their policies that circulated widely on social media over the weekend. Many seized on reports that HHS "lost" 1,475 children last year, describing them as "missing." But those reports were based on misleading characterizations of a follow-up phone survey conducted by HHS when it attempted to reach the adult sponsors of migrant children 30 days after releasing them to the sponsors. HHS does not have a formal responsibility to track children once they are released to sponsors. Agency officials say that is the immigration court system's job. And because many adult sponsors, including parents, are living in the country illegally, they may fear contact with federal officials. "In the last fiscal year, in 14 percent of those calls, the family didn't answer the phone," a top HHS official, Steven Wagner, told reporters Tuesday. "But there's no reason to believe that anything has happened to the kids. If you call a friend and they don't answer the phone, you don't assume that they've been kidnapped." Trump officials also gave new details Tuesday about an agreement between HHS and the Department of Homeland Security that immigrant advocates warn could further increase the number of children in federal custody and how long they stay there. The agreement will give Homeland Security more access to the personal information of parents, relatives or other adult sponsors seeking custody of the children. In the past, that information was largely walled off for the purposes of immigration enforcement while the sponsors were vetted by HHS, out of a concern that Homeland Security's involvement could have a "chilling effect" on parents living in the country illegally and discourage them from claiming the kids. But under Trump, senior officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have recommended such measures to deter parents from attempting to send for their children while knowing they can get custody with little fear of deportation. Wendy Young, president of the advocacy group Kids in Need of Defense, said Homeland Security is "injecting a law enforcement approach into this system," one that will strain HHS bed space. Homeland Security officials declined to say Tuesday whether the information will be used to target parents for arrest and deportation, characterizing the new measures as an effort to protect children. "If somebody is unwilling to claim their child from custody because they're concerned about their own immigration status, I think that de facto calls into question whether they're an adequate sponsor and whether we should be releasing a child to that person," Wagner said. "Plus, we have the problem of people fraudulently claiming to be parents when, in fact, they're not," he added, saying the agreement would give the agency better tools to check sponsors' backgrounds and verify their identities. In recent months, the average time children spent at HHS shelters increased from 51 to 56 days, according to the agency's latest statistics. Last year, HHS took custody of more than 40,000 migrant children, and the agency's Office of Refugee Resettlement said it released 93 percent to adult sponsors. In half of those cases, the adult sponsor was one of the child's parents, and another 40 percent were close adult relatives. Jonathan Rath Hoffman, chief spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, described the Trump administration's determination to prosecute parents as a continuation of Obama-era measures. "This policy has not changed from the prior administration," he said. In 2016, more than 20 percent of those who crossed the border illegally faced criminal charges, according to Homeland Security data. During President Barack Obama's second term, the government prosecuted roughly 70,000 cases per year. Trump critics say that claim is specious and obfuscates the current administration's break with standard practice. "What's happened is the exception to the rule is now becoming the rule," said Young, who said prosecutions under Obama were far more selective. "Here they're doing zero-tolerance policy to punish families and send a message to their home countries: Don't do this." "It's so disingenuous to couch this as a continuation" of Obama's policies, Young said. "This is the most aggressive response to Central American migration we've seen to date." Trump has lashed out at Nielsen and other aides because the number of people illegally crossing the Mexican border has spiked, robbing his ability to campaign on promises of improved border security. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly first floated the idea of separating families last year, calling it a tool to discourage migrants from attempting the journey. More recently, he caused an uproar when he appeared to dismiss experts' warnings that separating children from their parents inflicts emotional and psychological damage to the kids, saying they'll "be taken care of - put into foster care or whatever." In a tweet Saturday, Trump portrayed the family-separation measures as a tactic to arm-twist his opponents. "Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there [sic] parents once they cross the Border into the U.S.," he wrote. "Trump called the practice 'horrible,' so if he thinks it's so horrible he ought to end it and not make children pawns as a negotiating tool," said Lee Gelernt, an immigration attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed a class-action lawsuit to force the government to stop separating families at the border. "Little kids are begging and screaming not to be taken from parents, and they're hauled off," Gelernt said. "Parents are telling their older kids, 'Be brave, be brave.' "It's as bad as anything I've seen in 25-plus years of doing this work," he said. Authorities are searching for a man who attempted to pick up a stolen vehicle in north Houston Wednesday morning, police said. Officers were called to a tow yard in the 5900 block of North Freeway, inbound near Rosamond around 1 a.m., said Lt. Larry Crowson of the Houston Police Department. The family of a young boy who was injured in a July 6 shooting incident at Garner State Park that involved Liberty County Pct. 2 Commissioner Greg Arthur says they want the incident to be treated as an act of negligence, not an accident. "I never thought I would be treating a bullet wound on my 4-year-old son," said La Porte resident Autumn Flores, mother of Cash. "My son keeps asking me, 'Why did that man shoot me?' He doesn't understand." Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which is making inquiries into the incident, says the investigation is still ongoing but no laws appear to have been broken. PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Liberty County commissioner comments on accidental shooting "Anyone who is licensed to carry in the state of Texas can carry on state park property. If they have a license for open carry, the firearm must be in a holster," said Tom Harvey, spokesperson for TPWD. "This firearm was being carried lawfully." Arthur and the boy, both on holiday with their respective families, were attending a children's dance at the park when the shooting incident occurred. Arthur, a former sheriff for Liberty County, says he was wearing his concealed handgun when it began to shift around. He claims that while making adjustments, he accidentally hit the trigger, causing his Smith & Wesson handgun to fire downward toward the ground. The bullet grazed Arthur's leg, causing a gash. Cash and a 27-year-old man reportedly were struck by bullet fragments that ricocheted off the concrete floor of the pavilion. Autumn was not with her son at the time of the incident as he had attended the dance with his uncle and aunt, Ryan and Stacy Lenz, and other family members. "Police showed up at the house and could only tell us that he had been hurt. It never once crossed my mind that my child was shot," Autumn said. Accompanied by the officer and another family member, the child's parents made the long 15-mile drive from their rented vacation home to Garner State Park. There they met with other family members who reportedly filled them in on what had occurred. The child's Aunt Stacy said she was standing in the pavilion alongside her husband, Cash and his older sister. "We took the kids to the dance like we do every summer. Some of the other kids were on the dance floor when we heard this loud pop right next to us. It was definitely the sound of gunfire," she said. "Then I saw a man and woman turning around and rushing off." Stacy said she was still trying to assess what happened when she picked up Cash and handed him to her husband. She then began looking for her other children. "I found all the other kids and assessed everybody really quick. It was so fast. I looked everybody in the eyes and realized they were all okay. Cash wasn't crying or anything but at this point, he said, 'Aunt Stacy, I am bleeding,'" she said. "I told my husband, 'Oh, my god, Cash has been shot.'" After the incident, Cash was first taken to a local hospital in Uvalde County before being transferred to a trauma center in San Antonio where he had to undergo surgery. Two bullet fragments were found in the area around his knee, lodging two inches below the surface of the skin in soft tissue, his mother said. After a two-day stay at the hospital, Cash was released into his parents' care. "I thought it was all behind us but then I realized what all we were going to have to do to care for him while his wounds heal. The bullet fragments didn't hit anything major but because there wasn't an exit wound, we had to pack the bullet wound on our 4-year-old," Autumn said. "My husband and I had to hold him down every day so we could pack his wound. Part of his treatment involved taking a Q-tip and pushing it into his wound to perform a debridement. It was painful for him and he just screamed." Autumn said the family has hired an attorney to help them with the aftermath. "I can't even imagine what the medical bills will be. He had two ambulance rides and had a cardiovascular team waiting on him when he arrived in San Antonio," she said. "I want to be sure he has no residual effects from this. I know what I am going through as his mother but he's only 4 and it's hard for him to communicate. I just want him (Arthur) to do what is right." Arthur says he is extremely remorseful for the incident and has already filed a claim on the child's behalf. A bus outfitted with child safety seats used at a Texas detention facility run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has gone viral, causing online fury. "Don't worry everyone, the private prison company running ICE detention facilities has a special prison bus for babies this is fine," the Facebook page Gin and Tacos wrote on Sunday. The post has attracted approximately 3,400 reactions, more than 6,000 shares and nearly 240 comments. TRUMP OUTRAGE: Ivanka Trump criticized for photo of her son Gin and Tacos included a 2016 link to a press release explaining the use of the buses for excursions from the Karnes County Residential Center, which lies approximately 50 miles southeast of San Antonio. "These field trips are part of the contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)," the press release from the GEO Group reads. "Field trips are provided to all children, ages four through seventeen enrolled in educational programs provided by the John H. Wood Charter School, located at the KCRC." The post comes amid online outrage at reports of ICE agents separating children from their parents. A 2014 Associated Press photo of two immigrant children being detained was widely shared on Twitter this past weekend, with people mistaking the photo as being taken during President Donald Trump's term. Trump commented on the error on Tuesday, tweeting, "Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama's term showing children from the Border in steel cages. They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires. Dems must agree to Wall and new Border Protection for good of country... Bipartisan Bill!" ONLINE WATCHING: ICE reported to use Facebook to track undocumented immigrants wanted for deportation While Trump points out the photo was erroneously believed to happen under his presidency, reports of immigrant families being recently separated at the U.S.-Mexico border have been making headlines. HoustonChronicle.com reports Esteban Pastor, 28, was imprisoned in July after being caught crossing the border. His 18-month-old son was taken from him during his arrest. Pastor said he doesn't know where his son is, other than "somewhere in Texas" as U.S. Border Patrol agents have told him. A Harlingen immigration judge ordered the child returned to Guatemala on or before Jan. 2, the day before his second birthday the HoustonChronicle.com article reports. The father was elated to pick him up at the airport. The GEO Group released its press release about the specialized buses for children on April 29, 2016, months before Trump was sworn in as U.S. president. IMMIGRATION NEWS: Friendswood mother in need of medical care to be released from ICE detention According to the GEO Group's press release, the buses are used to transport children to the San Antonio Zoo, theaters, the park and similar places. "To date, the field trips have been a huge success and the frequency and numbers of school aged children being transported offsite for these sanctioned activities is expected to increase in the future," the release reads. As Snopes points out, it's up to the eye of the beholder to decide if the bus is a "prison bus for babies" or a transport vehicle for detained children. Get instant Houston breaking news alerts sent directly to your phone by texting CHRON to 77453. Will Axford covers the news of Texas for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. Follow him on Twitter. BROWNSVILLE A jury found Gustavo Tijerina-Sandoval guilty Wednesday of capital murder and attempted capital murder in the 2014 shooting death of an off-duty border agent. Tijerina-Sandoval, 34, faces a possible death sentence Thursday. He appeared unmoved as 197th state District Judge Migdalia Lopez read the guilty verdict. On Aug. 3, 2014, Javier Vega Jr. was on a Sunday fishing trip in a rural area near Harlingen when Tijerina-Sandoval and another man attempted to rob the Vega family at gunpoint. A veteran of the Marine Corps., Vega Jr. pulled out his weapon and exchanged gunfire. He was shot in the chest and died on the way to the hospital. His wife, two of his sons, as well as his mother and father, who was shot in the back during the firefight, were all witnesses in the trial. During the trial, Vega Jr.s parents recalled the harrowing episode to jurors. Related: Trucker involved in deadly smuggling of dozens of immigrants sentenced to life in prison Prosecutors from the Willacy County district attorneys office brought more than 40 witnesses to the stand over the two week trail. They described Tijerina-Sandoval as a man looking to rob a vulnerable family to pay off a $3,500 debt. Instead they crossed paths with the Vega family, who were armed. Tijerina-Sandoval and Ismael Hernandez-Vallejo were arrested a few hours after the shooting. Tijernia-Sandovals attorney, Nat Perez Jr., waged a prolonged legal battle to have the trial venue changed, only to land in nearby Cameron County. In his closing arguments, Perez suggested that his client had also gone fishing and had returned fire only after being fired upon. But the jury was not convinced. Hernandez-Vallejo will stand trial later this year on the same charges. While Tijerina-Sandoval showed no emotion upon hearing the guilty verdict, Vega Jr.s parents shared tearful embraces with U.S. Border Patrol agents in the courtroom. Read more: FBI finds no evidence of attack in Border Patrol agent's death Though off-duty at the time of his murder, border agents across the Rio Grande Valley rallied to the side of the Vega family. Vega Jr. was remembered by family and friends as a dedicated border agent assigned to Kingsville since 2008. A U.S. Border Patrol committee eventually determined that Vega Jr. died in the line of duty, adding him to the CBP Valor Memorial. The South Texas immigration checkpoint in Sarita, where he was stationed, was later renamed in his honor. anelsen@express-news.net | Twitter: @amnelsen A judge Wednesday granted a defense request for a complete psychological evaluation of convicted child killer Genene Jones to investigate claims she has diminished capacity from a series of strokes and allegations that she said the voices in her head killed the babies. Jones, 67, had worked at hospitals in San Antonio and for a Kerrville pediatrician in the 1980s when she was convicted of killing 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan. The baby died in 1982 from an overdose of muscle relaxers given to her by the nurse. A Williamson County jury sentenced Jones to 99 years in prison in 1984. She also was convicted in Bexar County of injury to a child/serious bodily injury and sentenced to 60 years in prison for giving an overdose in 1982 to 4-week-old Rolando Santos, who survived. Jones served both sentences concurrently and was due to be paroled in March, as per a law designed to reduce prison crowding. Related: Genene Jones blamed 'voices in her head' for baby deaths, lawyer says However, in an effort to prevent Jones release on parole, Jones was indicted on May 25, 2017, on a new murder charge involving the death of 11-month-old Joshua Sawyer on Dec. 12, 1981. Since then, she has been indicted in the overdose deaths of four more Bexar County children. Court records indicate she is to go to trial in the first case in July. Appearing Wednesday before Criminal Magistrate Judge Andrew Carruthers, Jones attorney Cornelius Cox sought to have her competency and sanity evaluated. He said she may not be competent to stand trial because of a series of strokes while incarcerated some 35 years. He also brought up allegations that she hears voices in her head. I feel my ability to have meaningful, detailed conversations with her in relation to the alleged events that occurred more than 30 years ago have been diminished, Cox told the court. She may be incompetent to stand trial. At an April hearing on Coxs motion for speedy trial, prosecutor Jason Goss testified there were witnesses who said that on at least three instances Jones confessed to killing babies that were in her care. Goss also testified that an inmate Jones encountered wrote a letter to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles that stated she was hearing voices in her head. Read more: Convicted child killer enters not guilty plea in new indictments Carruthers granted the motion for evaluations on sanity and competency for Jones in all five cases. Along with Sawyers death, she is accused of killing Richard Ricky Nelson, 8 months, who died July 3, 1981; Patrick Zavala, 4 months, who died Jan. 17, 1982; Rosemary Vega, 2 years old, who died Sept. 16, 1981; and Paul Villarreal, who was 3 months old when he died Sept. 24, 1981, all from overdoses. The prosecution has said they would try each case separately. If convicted, she faces up to life in prison. Elizabeth Zavala is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | ezavala@express-news.net | @elizabeth2863 A San Antonio contractor was arrested Tuesday after police said he accepted money from multiple people, several of them elderly, then failed to complete the services he promised. Skylar Buras, the 31-year-old owner of Buras Construction Inc., was brought into custody on four theft charges. Three of those charges were enhanced because the victims were elderly, according to police spokesperson Doug Greene. Customers began reporting Buras in 2015, Greene said, but police had to establish a pattern before obtaining arrest warrants. RELATED: UTSA-area barber accused of shooting SAPD officer during road rage altercation on NW Side Customers have been waiting for months, and in some cases years, despite paying Buras and his company money up front. "It's very complicated," Buras told reporters as he was taken into custody. "I didn't scam anyone." Miguel Segura, the regional director of the Better Business Bureau in Central Texas, said his 105-county region has had 2,000 complaints against contractors and repairmen in the past three years. Roughly 500 of those complaints originated in San Antonio. "This is not an anomaly," he said of the Buras case. "It's something that unfortunately has been happening and will continue to happen." Segura suggests anyone approached by contractors get at least three quotes and research each company before signing a contract. Greene said more charges may be filed against Buras, as police have identified other potential victims in neighboring cities. Fares Sabawi covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County for mySA.com. Read more of his stories here. | fsabawi@mysa.com | Twitter: @FaresInSA The officer police said was shot six times Tuesday night in the parking lot of a Northwest Side strip club following a road rage incident has been identified. Officer Dezi Rios, an 11-year veteran of the department who worked as an academy instructor, was shot around 9:30 p.m. in the 9400 block of Interstate 10 West, near the AllStars Gentlemen's Club. Though San Antonio police haven't officially released his identity, the department's Pipe and Drum Band, which honors fallen officers, named him in a Facebook post and an officer inside the department confirmed the information and said the family has requested privacy. RELATED: UTSA-area barber accused of shooting SAPD officer during road rage altercation at NW side strip club Police aren't sure when the road rage altercation began, but said both Rios and his alleged shooter, 25-year-old Demontae Walker, pulled from the roadway into the parking lot of the strip club. San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said Walker accused Rios of cutting him off and then opened fire. Rios, who was off duty at the time, ran to his car, retrieved his own weapon and returned fire, McManus said. Walker was struck two or three times and a passenger with Walker was grazed in the head, McManus said. RELATED: BCSO: Man violated protective order, kept assault victim from calling 911 Rios remains at University Hospital, where he recently underwent a successful surgery, according to an officer in the department who requested anonymity. According to a Facebook post from SAPD Careers that profiled Rios, he is a veteran of the U.S. Army who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He left the Army as a 2nd lieutenant and joined the police department in 2006. He is still a captain in the Texas Army National Guard. "My military training and experience have assisted in making me the best officer I ever could have been," Rios is quoted saying in the post. "The perseverance, dedication, and commitment to the community were all skills developed by the military. I am very thankful for the opportunity to serve and the family of police officers around me." Walker is now facing two charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He was booked into the Bexar County Jail around 7 a.m. Wednesday on a $150,000 bond. According to Walker's social media accounts, he was was the owner of Barber Mafia Family and worked as a barber in the UTSA area. Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com Caleb Downs is a crime reporter for mySA.com. Read more of his stories here.| cdowns@mysa.com | Twitter: @calebjdowns SAN ANTONIO - A Bexar County Sheriff's Office detention officer is out of the hospital after he was assaulted by an inmate at the Bexar County Jail Monday night. The officer wasn't named, but the inmate Isacc Navarro, 30, now faces a charge of assault on a public servant, according to an incident report. Navarro was in jail on a charge of felony possession of a firearm, court records state. Bexar County commissioners are expected to approve a $10,000 property tax exemption for seniors recommended by the University Health System board, lightening the burden of rising values for some 124,000 property owners. The hospital district collects property taxes from Bexar County residents, one of many entities including the county itself authorized to do so. Under UHS current rate of 27.6235 cents per $100 valuation, the exemption would reduce the hospital districts annual property tax revenue by an estimated $3.4 million. Officials had expected about a $20 million revenue increase in 2019 due to higher property valuations and new properties. The exemption would take $10,000 off the appraised property value of owners older than 65. Those residents could take the exemption along with a homestead exemption on their primary residence. Commissioners Court controls the countys $1.76 billion budget and must approve the change, which the UHS board of managers voted to recommend on May 22. The commissioners plan to vote on the exemption June 19, according to county officials. Historically, the hospital district has not provided exemptions for property owners older than 65 because those residents typically use UHS resources. But the 2013 expansion of the downtown Robert B. Green campus and 2014 opening of the Sky Tower at University Hospital part of a massive capital improvements project partly motivated the boards recommendation, said UHS spokesman Don Finley. Because of that (community) investment, we are better-positioned for the future and able to give back to the community in this way, Finley said. We know rising property values have caused property owners on a fixed income some distress, and our hope is that this will provide them with a little relief. Property taxes made up just 23 percent of UHS budget in 2017, one of the lowest rates among Texas hospital districts. Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff supports the exemption but wrote in a letter to UHS board chairman James Adams that he views the measure as a good start. Wolff ultimately wants UHS to freeze property tax values for seniors, as the county did in 2005. He estimated in the letter to Adams that eligible property owners have saved $186.4 million from that decision over the last 13 years. If you want to help a senior citizen stay in their house, one of the best things you can do for them is freeze their taxes, Wolff said in an interview. Weve done that (since 2005) and saved property owners a lot of money overall. Other entities need to do that, too, for it to really be meaningful. But plans among Texas Republicans to attempt property tax reform again next legislative session puts UHS ability to receive future tax revenue increases in doubt. Gov. Greg Abbott has proposed a plan to require two-thirds voter approval for annual revenue increases of more than 2.5 percent. To that end, Precinct 2 Commissioner Paul Elizondo said he agreed with Wolffs desire to implement a freeze, but was cautious about providing a full-throated endorsement because of uncertainty at the state level. I dont want to predict the future with the Legislature, Elizondo said. It doesnt look good, let me put it this way. Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert said he supports the exemption, but thought it likely wouldnt be enough for most property owners. He added that while the county has decreased or kept steady its tax rate for years, residents have told him they dont feel the effects because decreases in state education funding have forced school districts to tax more. I agree with (House) Speaker (Joe) Straus that the thing to do to get people meaningful tax relief is to fund schools properly, Calvert said. People are feeling their appraisals increase because of the lack of honesty and transparency about what will bring meaningful relief. Jasper Scherer is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | jscherer@express-news.net | @jaspscherer Bexar County netted 34,000 new jobs and saw a lower unemployment rate than most of Texas last year, but the county has work to do in creating a choice-driven public transit system and spurring workforce development, County Judge Nelson Wolff said Wednesday. Wolff, in his State of the County address to about 500 guests at a North San Antonio Chamber of Commerce luncheon, revealed plans for a county-funded partnership with the chamber in which veterans and their families at the countys transition center will be connected with employers and job training agencies for free. One of the best opportunities lies with the veterans that are transferring out of the military, Wolff said. We want those veterans after theyre discharged to stay in Bexar County. Related: Transit plan would transform San Antonio Service officers at the transition center will begin customizing a plan of action for each military member and their family six months before discharge. Through the partnership, the chamber plans to then identify key industries and specific San Antonio-based companies in need of workforce, then link those companies with the countys military transition program. The mix of skills at local bases, from technical to management, means the program isnt intended to focus on any one industry, said Precinct 3 Commissioner Kevin Wolff, who has spearheaded the effort. Thats one of the reasons why we partnered with the North Chamber, because it encompasses all levels of employers and types of jobs, Kevin Wolff said. We want their help in making sure that we connect with those local employers here in the county. In his October State of the County address, Nelson Wolff focused on the need to recruit new businesses to San Antonio and develop a skilled workforce, with a tone that seemed to urge a call to action. On Wednesday, Wolff outlined several ongoing projects, from University Health Systems Women and Childrens Hospital to the countys magistration, intake and assessment center, both of which are in progress. Related: Pretty soon, VIA just might drive you to the grocery store But he also looked ahead to several new areas, including the countys upcoming legal syringe exchange program and developments at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The city and county should do all we can, Wolff said, to help UTSA President Taylor Eighmy build a national security collaboration center intended to encompass private sector tech firms and cyber agencies at the downtown campus. Wolff also voiced support for the universitys planned school of data science, which almost 5,000 students will attend, he said. Near the beginning of his speech, Wolff also appealed to the state to chip in funding for local highway improvements. The county needs more projects, like ongoing construction to expand Loop 1604, to account for the San Antonio metro areas burgeoning population, and the state is not meeting its obligations to keep our highway system in top shape, Wolff said. He acknowledged to reporters after the speech that theres no reason to believe the state is willing to kick in more money but we still need to try. If they dont, then that means our public transit even has to be better, Wolff said. Building off Mayor Ron Nirenbergs announcement of a new transportation-promoting nonprofit at his State of the City address last month, Wolff touted the Commissioners Courts recent appointment of three new, young members to the VIA board. He also encouraged VIA to re-allocate resources for a micro-transit system, which generally partners with private companies such as Lyft shuttles and on-demand bus services for shorter and more direct trips. We need a consumer and choice-driven public transit system focused on mobility, innovation, frequency, efficiency and decongestion, Wolff said. The current fixed-route bus system must evolve into a truly multi-modal system. Jasper Scherer is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | jscherer@express-news.net | @jaspscherer NASA has officially decided to use the parts of a lunar rover axed last month on other robotic missions to the moon -- one of which could launch as soon as next year. Resource Prospector, a $250 million rover being built to learn more about the availability of water on the moon, was abruptly canceled last month because NASA officials said it no longer suited the agency's exploration campaign. The decision stunned scientists and researchers alike, especially given the recent push by President Donald Trump's administration to return Americans to the moon as a stepping stone for a mission to Mars. NASA immediately launched a review into the decision, at the same time saying all 90 employees working on Resource Prospector would be reassigned to "other opportunities within the agency." The agency has completed its review and determined that the rover's scientific instruments can, in fact, be used on other missions. Those instruments include an ice drill, a system to search for hydrogen below the lunar surface and a tool to quantify water extracted from the moon. "We conducted a thorough science and engineering assessment of Resource Prospector and determined all four instruments are at a high technology readiness level, are appropriate for science on the moon, and will make flights on future" missions, Dennis Andrucyk, deputy associate administrator of the agency's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. NASA is currently searching for commercial partners for the new robotic missions. Officials will award several contracts throughout the next decade. Contract missions are expected to begin as soon as 2019, and a company's first delivery will arrive on the surface no later than Dec. 31, 2021. Resource Prospector was slated to fly in 2022 or 2023 and much of the work on the rover was being done at Houston's Johnson Space Center. The project had been in the works for three years. Since taking office, Trump has made it clear that returning to the moon for the first time since 1972 is a priority for his administration. He revived the defunct National Space Council last year and, later, signed Space Policy Directive-1 urging NASA to return Americans to the moon. Earlier this year, the president released a $19.9 billion NASA budget proposal for the coming fiscal year that tasks NASA with launching the first flight without a crew for Orion -- the spacecraft meant to take humans to Mars -- by 2022, followed by a launch of Americans around the moon in 2023. NASA officials hope to launch the uncrewed flight in December 2019, but that will likely slip to June 2020 in part because of construction delays for the rocket that will carry Orion into space. Centers around the country, including Johnson, already are working diligently to reach these deadlines. Additionally, Trump's proposal would allow the agency to begin working on the foundation of a Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, saying it would "give us a strategic presence in the lunar vicinity that will drive our activity with commercial and international partners and help us further explore the moon and its resources and translate that experience toward human missions to Mars." Alex Stuckey covers NASA and the environment for the Houston Chronicle. You can reach her at alex.stuckey@chron.com or Twitter.com/alexdstuckey. Col. Don Peterson spent 24 years in the Air Force, became a NASA astronaut during the Apollo era and participated in the first spacewalk of the 30-year Space Shuttle program. But after his death Sunday at the age of 84, his family will remember him more for his honesty and gentleness than for his stellar career. "Don would tell you his greatest joy was caring for and spending time with his wife and family," his obituary reads. "Saying 'I love you' came easy and often from him ... He told his grandchildren, 'holding them in his rocking chair was better than floating in space.' His unconditional love for all of them will be treasured always." Peterson was the second astronaut to die over the weekend, both in Texas. The first was Alan Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon, who died Saturday at the age of 86. Originally from Mississippi, Peterson became an astronaut in 1969, just a few months after the first lunar landing in July of that year. Though Peterson never reached the moon, he rocketed out of Earth's atmosphere on Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983, just two years into the 30-year shuttle program. On Tuesday morning, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said on Twitter he was "saddened" by Peterson's death. "Don will always be part of the @NASA family & his legacy as a pioneer in space lives on," Bridenstine wrote. Peterson is known for participating in the shuttle program's first spacewalk, alongside astronaut Story Musgrave, during his 1983 Challenger flight. But flying was always part of Peterson's life, even as a child. "He would later tell his own children that as a young boy he had reoccurring dreams of flying, without the aid of wings or a plane, just soaring above the Earth," the obituary reads. "This dream set him on a quest for knowledge to discover the universe and its secrets." At 17, Peterson boarded a train bound for New York to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which he graduated from in 1955. He became a pilot and later, in 1962, received a master's degree in nuclear engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Ohio-based Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He became an astronaut in 1969, but remained in the Air Force for many years. He retired from NASA in 1984 following his Challenger flight, logging 120 hours in space. Peterson is survived by Brother; Gil Peterson, and his three children. Peterson's wife, Bonnie, died last year at the age of 82. They were married for almost 60 years. A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday at Crowder Funeral Home, located at 111 E. Medical Center Blvd. in Webster. "His family is comforted knowing his childhood dream of flying has been fulfilled in this life and hereafter," his obituary reads. Alex Stuckey covers NASA and the environment for the Houston Chronicle. You can reach her at alex.stuckey@chron.com or Twitter.com/alexdstuckey. Former USA Gymnastics national team coordinator Martha Karolyi will provide a statement and answers to written questions for a June 5 Senate subcommittee hearing on the Larry Nassar sexual abuse investigation, her attorney said Wednesday. Former USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny and former Michigan State president Lou Anna Simon have been subpoenaed to testify next week before the Senate Commerce Committees Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Insurance, USA Today reported. Senior vice president Rhonda Faehn accepted an invitation to testify before the panel, whose members include Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Karolyi was asked to testify, but her attorney, David Berg, said the panel has agreed to accept written material instead. 'MISSPOKE': Martha Karolyi misspoke on Larry Nassar timeline, lawyer says Berg's Houston law firm, Berg & Androphy, recently succeeded Houston attorney Gary Jewell in representing Bela and Martha Karolyi, whose Walker County ranch in the Sam Houston National Forest housed the USA Gymnastics women's national training center from 2000 through 2017. Nassar, a longtime USA Gymnastics team doctor and employee of Michigan State, has pleaded guilty to federal child pornography charges and Michigan state charges of sexual abuse and is serving the equivalent of a life prison sentence. More than 250 current and former gymnasts have accused Nassar of sexually abusing them under the guise of medical care at the Karolyi Ranch and at USA Gymnastics events and competitions around the world. Berg now represents the Karolyis in two lawsuits filed in Walker County. Former national team member Sabrina Vega used USA Gymnastics, the U.S. Olympic Committee, Nassar and the Karolyis, saying she was sexually abused by Nassar at the ranch. In the second lawsuit, the Karolyis sued the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Gymnastics, saying they should not be held responsible for crimes committed by Nassar at the ranch and accusing USA Gymnastics of violating a lease agreement and an agreement to purchase the ranchs gym complex. Houston attorney Philip Hilder is representing USA Gymnastics in both Walker County lawsuits and in a Harris County lawsuit filed by a former Houston gymnast against the federation, the USOC and the International Federation of Gymnastics. After months of pretending to be normal and reasonable on the diplomatic stage, North Koreas mask slipped, and Pyongyang was back recently to threatening a nuclear-to-nuclear showdown that will make the U.S. taste an appalling tragedy it has neither experienced nor even imagined up to now. Why was Kim Jong Uns regime lashing out? It wasnt because it was offended at talk of a Libya model. Its because it was hoping to follow the Iran model sanctions relief upfront and weak inspections and was starting to realize that was not going to happen. When national security adviser John Bolton first raised the Libya model, he was not referring to the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi; he was saying North Korea would have to carry out complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization, or CVID, before the Trump administration lifted its maximum pressure campaign. That is what got the North upset. In a statement this month, North Korea rejected the so-called Libya mode of nuclear abandonment, complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization, total decommissioning of nuclear weapons, missiles and biochemical weapons etc. ... (and) abandoning nuclear weapons first, compensating afterward. The Trump administration, the North Koreans said, is trumpeting as if it would offer economic compensation and benefit in case we abandon nuke. But we have never had any expectation of U.S. support in carrying out our economic construction and will not at all make such a deal in future, too. In other words, Pyongyang rejected the very premise of Trumps proposed deal: security and prosperity on par with South Korea in exchange for complete denuclearization. Vice President Mike Pence reiterated this is the only basis on which Trump would cut a deal. He pointed out that the Clinton administration, even the Bush administration got played in the past. We offered concessions to the North Korean regime in exchange for promises to end their nuclear weapons program only to see them break those promises and abandon them. He added that Kim will only end like Gadhafi if Kim doesnt make a deal. Pences threat could not be what provoked Pyongyangs fit of pique, since he was simply repeating what Trump himself had said a few days earlier when the president warned that Libya showed what will take place if we dont make a deal. In other words, the idea that imprudent talk of a Libyan model somehow disrupted a potential deal is dead wrong. With its bellicose response, North Korea exposed the fact that it has no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons at the negotiating table. This was further underscored by the PR stunt North Korea pulled last week when it unilaterally destroyed its Punggye-ri nuclear test site. This was portrayed as a sign of good faith, but as the Guardian newspaper recently reported, North Koreas main nuclear test site has partially collapsed under the stress of multiple explosions, possibly rendering it unsafe for further testing. Because Pyongyang has no choice but to stop conducting nuclear tests at the site, it tried to take credit for doing what it had to do anyway. The president made the right decision by calling off the summit, which should disabuse Pyongyang of the notion that he is desperate for a deal, though planning for the talks are reportedly still occurring. Now, his conciliatory public letter to Kim should be followed by tough back-channel warnings that the alternative to negotiations is not to continue the status quo. Sanctions will get tighter and military action is possible. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Dan Blumenthal suggests that Trump could also announce a major U.S.-Japanese joint project to develop missile defense capabilities to shoot down missiles at their boost phase (when they are at their warmest in their ascent and easier to track) through space, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other sensors and shooters and also put major Chinese banks on notice that that they could face sanctions for financing of North Korean projects. Trump should make clear to both North Korea and China, absent an agreement, that sanctions will get tighter and military action is possible. And that means the Libya model is indeed on the table. Marc A. Thiessen writes a column for the Washington Post. The on-again, off-again talks between President Donald Trump and North Koreas Kim Jong Un were always fraught with both peril and promise. Peril because the president, unlike previous presidents, agreed to face-to-face talks seemingly on the fly, without fully preparing or appreciating the elevation of stature he had just conferred on Kim without anything given in return. And promise because, had meaningful concessions been wrung, the world would be a safer place. It was a gamble worth taking. And it still is, which is why the fact that a high-ranking North Korean envoy is coming to the United States is a good thing. Trump canceled the talks last week, but this visit means plans for the summit are likely still underway. The president canceled the talks ostensibly because of hostile words by North Korea directed at Vice President Mike Pence and other related matters. This represented the peril that Trump and Kim would eventually return to the harsh militaristic rhetoric that put the world on edge and both nations seemingly closer to trading missiles. The two nations must not ever go there again. Bluster is what weve long expected of North Korea why its harsh words about Pence and other matters arent likely why the talks were initially canceled. But the president has to be the grown-up here. Which means, he must also back off from what he has abundantly demonstrated are his true instincts on this matter our button is bigger. On that score and to his credit, the president left the door open for talks to be rescheduled, and the North Koreans are apparently moving forward on that expectation. The nation and the world should fervently hope the talks do get put on a calendar again, if not one-on-one meetings initially than more substantive talks between the real experts, followed up if these are successful with that face-to-face meeting. That was always the best course. But the status quo cannot be allowed to fester. And, unlike when he canceled the talks, Trump must keep South Korea in the loop. After all, with not just nukes but other missiles and artillery pointed its way, South Korea has the most at stake here. It is good news indeed that the parties are proceeding as if talks will occur good news for the world. I have a new hero! I am so grateful to Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo for speaking out about the out-of-control gun culture that the NRA has brought about and tries so hard to protect. Chief Acevedo offers what to most of us are reasonable ideas that might begin to address the uncontrolled access to guns by people who should not have them: federally mandated background checks required of all gun buyers; consequences for those who try to get around the background check system; strict mental health requirements to notify law enforcement if someone is deemed by a mental health professional to be a potential threat to others; and stricter requirements for storing firearms. I would add consequences for anyone whose gun is used in the commission of a crime, with or without their knowledge. Proponents of gun safety accept the fact that the guns are out there, and they are willing to compromise by asking for crumbs: basically, background checks, storage requirements, and the tricky discussion about red lines in the mental health world. I just got off the phone with a staffer from Lt. Gov. Dan Patricks office, asking only for legislation to close the existing background check loopholes, and you would have thought I was asking for a complete overhaul of Texas culture. Im not, but its clear that any change is going to have to come from voters who are sick of living with the certain knowledge that mass murder will continue to happen over and over, and that there will be no proactive solutions coming from our existing government. Again, thank you, chief, for using your strong voice to advocate for the safety of policemen as well as schoolchildren, churchgoers, shoppers, concert and theater attendees, and basically anyone who wants or needs to step out of their house. Julie Love, Rio Medina The kind of gun Anyone else notice how media coverage of the Santa Fe shooting is much less than the Parkland shooting? Could it be that he used an old-fashioned revolver and shotgun- and not an assault weapon? Several of my friends have noticed it also. D.K. Reynolds, Boerne Schools serve us Re: U.S. public schools do not constitute public good, Opinion, May 20. After teaching for more than 20 years in public schools, 17 of which were in Texas, I will be the first to admit that public schools are not perfect, but the attack on them by Corey DeAngelis in his commentary strained credulity. He immediately showed his bias by using the term government schools repeatedly a term used by Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, and meant to be derogatory. In some instance, he states what should be facts without citing any evidence or sources. Taxpayers in San Antonio spend over $12,000 per child each year is not supported by the latest Public Education Information Management System financial standard reports from the Texas Education Agency. The only school districts in San Antonio that reported spending over $12,000 per child were three charter schools and Fort Sam ISD, which educate many fewer students than do the traditional school districts in Bexar County. DeAngelis is correct about the latest eighth-grade measures of proficiency in math and reading, as reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress a statistic that should be better, but citing one set of data, he does not prove his conclusions. He also goes on to list testing mandates as one of the heavy regulations that are burdening public schools, yet he uses the results of those accountability standards to denigrate public education. He states in another instance, In order to make apples-to-apples comparisons, I use the most rigorous private school choice evidence available on academic outcomes, criminal activity, and taxpayer costs, but he does not give us any idea of exactly where that evidence is found so that the reader can check this for herself. Among the heavy regulations he lists are teacher certification requirements. Do we not want certification standards for teachers? He considers the prohibition of admissions criteria as a burden. Is he really suggesting that public schools should reject some children? Who would these be? The learning or developmentally disabled? Are these the students he means, or is he talking about poor children in general? DeAnglis is promoting a radical change in financing the education of children that would benefit the few, leaving out the many. What he proposes is funding a hodgepodge of educational events through universal educational savings account programs. I presume these would be funded to some extent by the state, as the vast majority of parents, those who currently send their children to public schools, would not be able to self-fund such accounts. The big winners in his scenario would be the operators of private schools and those who promote dubious educational programs with little or no oversight from regulatory agencies. His final statement that the government often runs schools like they run the DMV is a statement unworthy of an essay from a college freshman. The public schools I know are filled primarily with dedicated public servants, who work long hours for very little money or accolades. Ive never had a problem with the DMV either. I notice in his biography that he received his degrees from state-supported schools. In the case of his education, I dont believe the public has received much good. Joann Thompson NEWTOWN A former Newtown man pleaded guilty to a federal wire fraud charge this week for stealing more than $1 million from clients, family and friends and using money meant for the purchase of local properties to buy a home in Michigan. Court documents show an investor thought former attorney Thomas Murtha was using more than $600,000 to purchase investment properties in Newtown and Bethel. But as his schemes were unraveling, Murtha used the money to purchase a house in Michigan and move out of state. Murtha was the operating partner of the now defunct Maher & Murtha Law Firm of Bridgeport. He pleaded guilty this week to one count of wire fraud for stealing more than $1.3 million, in part by failing to provide clients with the proceeds of property sales, court documents state. The government seized the home in Michigan as well as a 2.1-carat diamond ring as part of a guilty plea that Murtha entered into this week in Hartford federal court. The deal calls for Murtha to be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. Court officials claim Murtha stole money from more than 20 people including $516,000 that was to benefit someone with mental health issues. One of Murthas clients claims in a lawsuit that he gave the attorney more than $130,000 to pay a mortgage company as part of a foreclosure-prevention agreement, but Murtha never gave the money to the company. Murtha, according to the suit, never even made an agreement with the company despite telling his client he had done so. The client found out about the problem when marshals arrived at his home in August 2015 with evection papers. The client lost the home and any equity he had in the property, according to the lawsuit, which is one of several pending malpractice suits filed against the former attorney. Things began to fall apart for Murtha in late 2015 when several clients sent grievances to the states disciplinary council, which began suspension proceedings against Murtha in August 2016. Murtha gave up his law license about a month later. The disciplinary council believes (Murtha) poses a substantial threat of irreparable harm to his clients, the council stated in an application filed with the court seeking his suspension from the bar. Murtha took money from clients after property sales but never forwarded the money to his clients, according to court documents. One of those clients was Jevene Wright, a Bridgeport man who agreed to pay his former employer $150,000 after pleading guilty to embezzlement. Wright, the star witness in a Bridgeport murder case, sold his home to pay the money to his employer, but Murtha, his attorney, never gave him the money from the sale, according to court documents. Another former client injured in a car accident claims in a lawsuit filed against Murtha and his former law firm that the attorney failed to file documents in a timely manner, resulting in her inability to seek a $1 million settlement in the case. Murtha was released from custody on $10,000 bond until his sentencing, which is scheduled for Sept. 11. dperrefort@newstimes.com Zimbabwes new airline, Zimbabwe Airways which has been linked to the family of ousted former president Robert Mugabe has hit fresh controversy. This comes as the Daily News has been told that one of the airlines new planes that it recently sourced from Malaysia a Boeing 777 jetliner has already been sent back to the Asian country for repairs before it has made a single commercial flight. This also comes as the government is yet to receive the remaining three wide-bodied aircraft from Malaysia Airlines, which are to be used by the new airline whose ownership has prompted more questions than answers although the government, which initially distanced itself from the secretive carrier, now says it owns it. Well-placed sources said yesterday that the new Boeing 777 jetliner had recently flown back to Malaysia for A checks and other maintenance works. A subsequent visit by a Daily News crew to Robert Mugabe International Airport confirmed that the plane was indeed no longer parked at the airport. According to experts, A-Check maintenance refers to checks that are carried out on an aeroplane every eight to 10 weeks where filters will be changed, key systems (like hydraulics in the control surfaces that steer the aircraft) will be lubricated and a detailed inspection of all the emergency equipment (like inflatable slides) is completed. Transport minister Joram Gumbo, who has been tormented by the Zim Airways deal, could neither deny nor confirm yesterday that the Boeing 777 had been flown back to Malaysia. Ask whoever told you that the plane went for repairs to tell you the extent of the damage. As far as I am concerned, I do not know anything about it, Gumbo said curtly. The sources who spoke to the Daily News said as long as the plane was not flying, it would continue to gobble hundreds of thousands of dollars both in parking fees and maintenance costs. They also revealed that the plane had raked up a bill of more than $100 000 in parking, maintenance fees and crew hire alone in the short time that it had been parked at the airport. The delay in flying the new plane commercially has apparently been partly caused by the fact that Zim Airways has no qualified captains to fly it, and will thus have to fork out even more money to hire expatriate pilots. Unfortunately, if the delay in organising everything continues, the costs of maintaining it will keep ballooning, especially considering the fact that it is not making any money which all raises more questions as to how we have ended up where we are, other aviation sources have said. Firstly, no one wanted those old planes and so they should have cost us much, much less. Secondly, Zim Airways clearly has no capacity to operate those aircraft, as they have no trained pilots and engineers for them. This means that we will need to hire expatriates to fly the planes, and the going rate for a B777 captain is at least $20 000 per month which is unaffordable in this market, where you dont even have the passengers to justify the investment. You require at least three sets of pilots per aircraft, although you can even go up to five if you have 15-hour flights and above, one of the aviation experts told the Daily News on the day the government received the 777 jetliner which was flown by a set of five Malaysian pilots when it landed in Harare. The plane touched down at the Robert Mugabe International Airport on April 11, this year, at a glittering ceremony that was attended by many government officials. It was brought as part one of the opaque deal that will see a total of four wide-bodied planes eventually being sourced from Air Malaysia for Zim Airways. Government is also set to bring in two Embraer jets raising more concerns about the Air Malaysian deal and the governments seeming lack of preparedness for the planes. DailyNews Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News MDC leader Nelson Chamisa and National Peoples Party (NPP) president Joice Mujuru are moving towards joining forces in order to fight President Emmerson Mnangagwas Zanu PF party as a cohesive unit at the forthcoming general elections in July. NPP spokesperson Jefferson Chitando confirmed the talks, saying these have reached an advanced stage. Since the death of (founding MDC president Morgan) Tsvangirai in February, talks between the two parties for a coalition have never stopped and it is our hope that the talks will be concluded as soon as possible because that is the only way we can have Zimbabwe working again, Chitando said. Mujuru has been meeting other leaders of opposition parties lately although I cannot tell you details but it is reality that meetings have been held not only with Chamisa but with other leaders as well. Chitando expressed hope that an announcement would be made soon. Chamisas spokesperson Luke Tamborinyoka referred questions to MDC acting spokesperson Thabitha Khumalo saying he was on study leave. While Khumalo was not immediately available for a comment, Chamisa is on record extending an olive branch to Mujuru and Zapu president Dumiso Dabengwa. Addressing MDC supporters at Pelandaba Stadium in Gwanda last weekend, Chamisa said he was mooting a grand coalition with Mujuru, Dabengwa and other smaller parties in order to dismantle Mnangagwa and Zanu PFs hegemony. The people in this country need to be united. I asked Mujuru and Dabengwa and other small political parties to join me. We need a united front to beat Zanu PF, he said. Analysts are unanimous that a united opposition, fighting with one purpose, could easily bring Zanu PFs rule to an abrupt end, especially at a time when Mnangagwa is facing rebellion in his party over the just-ended primary elections. Several losing Zanu PF Members of Parliament have been threatening to run as independent candidates or vote for the opposition in protest over alleged rigging of the primary polls. Proponents for a grand coalition believe that Mujuru, whose liberation struggle nom de guerre was Teurai Ropa (Spill Blood), and whose husband, Solomon, was the first black post-independence army commander, could provide the much-needed bridge that opposition parties have been missing to ensure the smooth transfer of power if they win elections. DailyNews Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News President Emmerson Mnangagwas call for a Zanu-PF indaba to heal wounds emanating from its just-ended chaotic primary elections is a sign of panic amid fears for another bhora musango scenario reminiscent of the 2008 elections, analysts say. Mnangagwa is desperate to unite winning and losing candidates of the recently conducted primary elections following threats of a protest vote by disgruntled Zanu-PF supporters. The primary elections were marred with allegations of rigging, vote-buying, violence and bribery, leading to the discontentment of those that lost in the internal elections. Most of those that lost have been mulling to run as independent candidates, in a move that will seriously divide the votes against Zanu-PF. Cognisant of this fact, Zanu-PF has called for a two day reconciliation workshop organised through the Hebert Chitepo School of Ideology. However, analysts canvassed by the Daily News yesterday described the move as a fire-fighting exercise that was mooted out a realisation that the situation in the party is potentially explosive. Political analyst Gladys Hlatywayo said the ruling party is in a dilemma and is now seeking to use every means necessary to survive the forthcoming election. The party is now a pale shadow of its former self given the NPF (National Patriotic Front) and (Joice) Mujuru factors. In terms of numbers, these parties will most likely chew into the traditional Zanu-PF base and will have serious ramifications on Zanu-PFs power retention chances. Coupled with the threat of a renewed and energised MDC, it somehow makes sense for Zanu-PF to go for the reconciliation workshop, at least to keep the depleted forces together. I however, doubt if that will be sufficient to legitimately win the next election, Hlatywayo said. The workshop, which is expected to be attended by several party members, will be addressed by President Emmerson Mnangagwa. In a circular issued out to all provincial chairpersons, the Zanu-PF Department for the Commissariat said the workshop will be held at the Zanu-PF Headquarters Main Hall. The Commissariat Department, through the Chitepo School of Ideology, has organised a healing and reconciliation workshop to unite all candidates who participated in the partys primary elections for the Senate and National Assembly. Provincial chairpersons are requested to invite all their respective winning candidates and losing candidates in the said primary elections to attend this very important meeting scheduled to be addressed by His Excellency, the President and First Secretary of Zanu-PF, (Cde) ED Mnangagwa, on Wednesday 30 May, 2018, the circular reads. Another political analyst Maxwell Saungweme said with so many parties emerging ahead of elections, it only made sense for the ruling party to coalesce to avoid cases where the fledgling parties taking advantage to fish from its pond. The electoral battleground has morphed as it is no longer just a choice between Zanu-PF and MDC, Saungweme said. We now have 124 political parties with some three or so strong ones formed out of the fallout in Zanu-PF. NPF and Mujurus NPP are parties that can easily tap from the pool of disgruntled Zanu-PF supports and candidates. I think this process is a realisation of existence a real threat to Zanu-PF election campaign and its rigging mechanism. The party needs to amass some serious numbers of voters in order for rigging to be successful. While setting up such reconciliation process or forum is good and will unite Zanu-PF, it is a sign that there is panic in Zanu-PF house. They like MDC Alliance need every vote, he added. The Zanu-PF primary elections created serious fights within the party, resulting in the party ordering for reruns in at least 11 constituencies across the country. However, other observers say while allegations of electoral fraud by some candidates may give ammunition to Zanu-PF critics, the internal fights are a common phenomenon and do not signify a weakening of the party. Renowned political analyst Piers Pigou said Zanu-PF was desperate to ensure harmony in the party ahead of elections. It is significant that they are having this meeting. Im not aware of them doing this before. It demonstrates how important the leadership feels it is to secure a common vision amongst the partys disparate elements, Pigou said. Others also warned the opposition against reading too much into the current fights and chaos in Zanu-PF pointing out that the party has always thrived on such behaviour since its formation, a half century ago. A University of Zimbabwe War Strategy lecturer who requested anonymity said Zanu-PF has over the years exhibited attributes of chaos and disorderliness, but manages to overcome these when faced with an external enemy. Its a typical baboon type of approach where they unite to fight a common external enemy. But when the external enemy is defeated, they go back to fight each other, he said, adding that Zanu-PF will therefore outlive this chaos and disorder and what is currently happening simply confirms what the party has been for half a century. DailyNews Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News - The PDP national chairman, Uche Secondus, said President Buhari is celebrating his last Democracy Day as president - He said 2019 Democracy Day will mark a transition of power from the APC administration to the PDP - Secondus claimed that Nigerians are tired of the APC administration and are ready to vote it out in 2019 The national chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Uche Secondus, has said that the 2018 Democracy Day celebration is the last President Muhammadu Buhari will observe as the countrys leader. In his Democracy Day message to Nigerians on Tuesday, May 29, Secondus said the country cannot afford him (Buhari) further if our democracy and nation are to survive.. READ ALSO: Breaking: Ex-PDP spokesman and minister defects to APC In a statement signed by Ike Abonyi, his spokesman, Secondus described Buhari as a non-democrat who has put the country in jeopardy. Nigerians are anxiously looking forward to the opportunity to dispense with the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the president, the statement added. Secondus said on a day Nigerians should be celebrating freedom and good governance, they are instead groaning in the avoidable hardship. He said: If democracy must survive in our country we must do away with APC and Nigerians are ready and willing to do just that because they cherish democracy as the best form of government. Going by their poor record of performance in the last 36 months, and the determination of Nigerians to put the country in the right footing, this is the last Democracy Day this president will mark as the president. The next Democracy Day May 29, 2019, which Nigerians and indeed all lovers of democracy are anxiously looking forward to would be the smooth transition from confusion and purposeless governance to real democracy which the PDP is returning to gift to the nation. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app Legit.ng previously reported that Senator Shehu Sani on Tuesday, May 29, listed the achievements and failures of the present administration led by President Buhari. Senator Sanni, representing Kaduna central senatorial district, commended President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration for some of the achievements recorded since assuming power in 2015. In his 2018 Democracy Day message, the senator said Nigeria under the Buhari-led administration has recorded achievements in the areas of fighting corruption among many others. President Buhari's Return Will Teach Nigerians Sense - on Legit.ng TV Source: Legit - President Buhari is keen on Nigerians obtaining their Permanent Voter Card (PVC) ahead of the 2019 general elections - The president enjoined governors to embark on voter education in their various states to ensure citizens get their PVCs - According to him, the voters card is the people's national card State governors were enjoined by President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday, May 29, to embark on voter education exercise to enable Nigerians obtain their PVC to vote for the candidates of their choice in the 2019 general elections. The president gave the charge at the breaking of fast with members of the judiciary led by Justice Okukayode Ariwoola, Justice of the Supreme Court, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja. He said the call had become imperative so as to enable eligible Nigerians obtain their PVC and vote anybody of their choice devoid of religion or ethnicity. READ ALSO: Read the full text of President Buharis 2018 Democracy Day broadcast I decided to put agbada and come back, I tried three times and then the fourth time I eventually made it. Thanks to God and thanks to technology because this permanent voter card and card readers are fantastic. Those who went to their polling booths in their constituency and voted, their votes counted. Before, votes were disregarded and results written and there was nothing you can do before the justices to prove your case. But now with technology it has been made easy. That is why I keep appealing to the governors to embark on voters education, to please tell the people that their voters card is their national card so to speak. Let them vote for anybody they want across ethnicity and religion and impose their decisions on them. I think that is why I am calling on and I am begging the governors to please continue with voters education so that people will take their permanent voters card seriously and make sure that they dont loose it, he said. The president, who attributed his victory at the 2015 polls to technology, urged the members of the judiciary to also help in educating Nigerians on the importance of PVC. His words: I am bothering you with this because you are in a position of influence and you come from a constituency that is recognized and what you say will mean a lot to the people at your constituency. Retired Chief Justice of the Federation, Justice Alfa Belgore, who spoke on behalf of the delegation, observed that the ongoing economic challenges were not peculiar to Nigeria alone and commended the administrations effort to fix it. He said: The economy is down all over Africa so if we have any other problem now, its just a childs play with what is happening in other countries. I pray that this country will continue to develop under you. God will continue to guide you right and the country will be very very strong." PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 news app Meanwhile, Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue state, on Tuesday, May 29, exonerated President Buhari from the herdsmen killings in the state, stressing that those linking the president to attacks were being mischievous. He recalled that the herdsmen crisis predated the present administration assuring that the people of the state would still support the president in the coming 2019 general elections despite the losses and pains they suffered as a result of the herdsmen incursions in the state. Benue elders speak on herdsmen attacks on Legit.ng TV Source: Legit - Senator Ben Murray-Bruce has been asked to give an update on a N212 million allocation for his constituency - The inquiry was made by UdemeNG, a platform designed to hold government and its officials accountable - Also, some other Nigerians joined UdemeNG in the inquiry calling for the application of 'common sense' on the issue The senator representing Bayelsa east constituency has come under fire for keeping mute over alleged non-implementation of N212 million project. The attack on Ben Murray-Bruce followed a tweet by @UdemeNG - a platform designed to hold government accountable on how funds released for developmental projects are spent. The platform had queried the update on the implementation of the N212 million which was allocated for constituency projects in Bayelsa east senatorial district in the 2016 appropriation act. READ ALSO: Uncertainty as court finally gives judgement over ex-governors alleged N1.64bn fraud case on Tuesday, May 30 UdemeNG also revealed that a Freedom of Information request which was sent to Senator Bruce on the update is yet to receive any form of response. An info-graph by UdemeNG showed that the fund allocated included N97 million for the provision of Solar lighting at selected hospitals in Bayelsa east, N105 million for the provision of solar lighting in selected secondary schools and N 10 million for the provision of solar lighting at healthcare centre in Minibio, Bayelsa east. But having ignored the inquiry, some Nigerians took to Twitter to address the senator. Some of those who tweeted said a response that would make "common sense" - adopting the Senator's best line - will be appreciated. READ ALSO: Student arrested for lavishing $1m mistakenly credited to her account (photos) Another said: "Common sense means you must give a response @benmurraybruce you owe the electorate accountability". PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that Nigerians had described as insensitive, a remark made by Senator Bruce over the minimum wage. Nigerians took to Facebook to criticise the Senator for making inquiries on how civil servants earning N18,000 is expected to afford fuel in his tank and food for his family. Many Nigerians reacted negatively to the statement, as they accused the senator for not having sympathy for the masses. Are Nigerians truly tired of President Buhari? - on Legit.ng TV Source: Legit Dino Melaye, the embattled senator representing Kogi west at the National Assembly, on Wednesday, May 30, gave a hint of a defection from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Melaye, who is currently having a running battle with the police, gave the hint of his defection on the floor of the Senate. The hint came after the senator raised a point of order (14) at the sitting where he thanked his colleagues, members of the House of Representatives, his constituents and Nigerians for standing by him during his travails. READ ALSO: Exclusive: I was marked for assassination by Abacha's men but saved by Buhari - Martins Premium Times reports that Melaye then commended the leadership of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for their support as he asked Bukola Saraki to mandate the sergeant-at-arms to create a seat for him at the opposition wing of the chamber. He also announced he would now sit beside former Senate president, David Mark, pending the time a seat would be allocated to him. With this, he was aided by some of his colleagues to his preferred seat. Vanguard reports that Senator Melaye was dressed in white, wore collar on his neck, an indication that he was still in pains. Legit.ng earlier reported that Senate president Bukola Saraki led other Nigerian senators to visit Senator Dino Melaye at the National Hospital, Abuja. Melaye was injured after he attempted to escape from a police van after he was arrested from his home on Tuesday, April 24. Legit.ng also reported that the leadership of the National Assembly on Monday, May 7, reported Inspector-General of Police Ibrahim Idris to President Muhammadu Buhari for his alleged failure to appear before the Senate for the second time over the issue of Senator Dino Melaye. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app Senate president Bukola Saraki and the speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, confirmed this development to State House correspondents after a closed door meeting with the president in the Presidential Villa, Abuja. Saraki said they raised the issue of Senator Melaye to the president because of the refusal of the IGP to honour Senates invitations. President Buhari's Return Will Teach Nigerians Sense | Legit.ng TV Source: Legit.ng By Daniel Avelar and Bianca Ferrari. Avelar is a Brazilian freelance journalist currently studying in the Erasmus Mundus Masters degree in War and Conflict journalism. He is also a member of FFIPP Brazil Educational Network for Human Rights in Palestine/Israel. Ferrari is an Italian freelance journalist currently studying in the Erasmus Mundus Masters degree in Political journalism. Originally published at openDemocracy On a hilltop in northern Galilee, a small church stands alone surrounded by rubbles. It is the last remaining building of the Palestinian village of Iqrit, which was depopulated and destroyed following the foundation of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948. This place means a lot to us, it reminds us of where we come from, says Samer Toume, whose grandparents were among the 600 Christians expelled from Iqrit by the Israel Defense Forces nearly seven decades ago. The story of Iqrit is similar to that of the other 530 villages that were razed to the ground in a process that came to be known to the world as the establishment of Israel and to Palestinians as the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe. The first European Jews landed on the shores of Palestine and established early settlements in the 19th century. In 1948, Zionist forces systematically took over land, expelling people from their homes and relinquishing many to live as refugees in isolated enclaves. The foundations of Israel are rooted in a colonial project that has modernized its face but continues to subject Palestinians to military occupation, land dispossession and unequal rights. Seventy years later, the wounds of the Nakba are still open, as Israel prohibits over five million refugees the right of return while guaranteeing citizenship to anyone who can demonstrate Jewish ancestry. Israel doesnt let Palestinians go back to their lands. In Iqrit, we are only allowed to return as dead people to get buried here, asserts Samer, 28, pointing to a cemetery not far from the church. Other activities such as rebuilding the demolished houses or cultivating crops, remain illegal. Nearly six years ago, however, members of the third generation of displaced inhabitants of Iqrit decided to challenge the rules that keep them apart from their lands and started resurrecting the village. Through a rotating system of shifts, we keep a continuous presence here. During the day, we go to our workplaces in towns in the area and then return to Iqrit, tells Samer, who works in a medical start-up in the city of Haifa. We also hold weekend gatherings and annual summer camps to engage residents from younger and older generations. We want to keep the memory of Iqrit alive. Samers powerful story is a rather exceptional one. Unlike Iqrit, many of the areas depopulated in 1948 were either settled by Jewish migrants or transformed into forests and military zones by the Israeli authorities, effectively covering up the traces of the Nakba. Moreover, being able to visit the village from where ones own ancestors were expelled is, unfortunately, not possible for most Palestinians. Since Samers relatives fled to locations within Israel and were later granted citizenship, he is free to move around. On the other hand, most Palestinian refugees still live in the occupied territories or in other countries in the region, often in camps that were hastily built in the 1950s as temporary accommodations. As such, they cannot cross into Israel without prior permission. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, the forced displacement of Palestinians amounts to ethnic cleansing. The tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story hard to understand and even harder to solve, affirms Pappe in the 2015 book On Palestine, co-written with American scholar Noam Chomsky. Over the course of the past decades, the status of the Palestinian diaspora has only deteriorated, or far worse: it has become institutionalized. The Oslo accords of 93 and 95, while celebrated in the west as the first step toward a two-state solution, did not address the right of return of refugees, thereby condemning them to a limbo of effective statelessness. The treatise partitioned the West Bank into three areas: area A under Palestinian Authority (PA) control, area B under joint Israeli-Palestinian administration, and area C, run by Israel. The accords, which should have paved the way for the creation of a Palestinian state, instead led to increased Israeli presence in the territory through the expansion of Jewish settlements. Scholar Edward Said pointed out that Palestinian leaders had effectively given up the right to self-determination in most of the West Banks territory in exchange for Israels acknowledgement of the PA, and referred to the agreement as an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles. Oslos failure is particularly evident in area C, a scarcely populated district comprising more than 60% of the West Bank and most of the territorys natural resources, where Israel retains exclusive control over law enforcement, planning and construction. Moreover, Israel Defence Forces are in charge of all borders within and around the West Bank. These arrangements, which have been repeatedly condemned as attempts to de facto annex area C, begin to scratch the surface of what the Israeli occupation looks like today. Securitization policies are a double-faced coin: for every measure implemented for the safety of the Jewish citizens of Israel, restrictions are being imposed on the rights to movement and development of Palestinians. The complex system of status-associated rights and obligations has created hierarchies within the Palestinian community. In this apartheid-like structure, individuals are required to obtain different levels of authorization in their everyday lives solely based on where their families migrated to in the Nakba. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are subject to discriminatory practices in education, public services and the legal system. Thats the case of Samer Toume, who lives as a second class citizen in Israel and faces challenges in trying to reconnect with his origins in Iqrit. But even the lives of Palestinians under PA jurisdiction are heavily shaped by the Israeli occupation. Hassan Darwish (name changed to protect his identity), 27, was born prematurely in an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem, but he grew up in the city of Ramallah in area A. The realities of living under a military occupation became all too obvious to Hassan at the age of 12, when he was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers during a clash in the refugee camp where his grandparents live. I was playing with my cousin in the Jalazone camp when Israeli soldiers came in, tells Hassan. There was a big clash, all the kids started running towards it and I ran too. In my mind, we were just playing, throwing stones around. After that, I woke up in prison. Recalling the events brings a note of anger and frustration to Hassans voice. I was 12, you know what that means? I was a child, what could I have done against Israel? Israel, what Israel? I didnt know anything. The loss of personal freedom is a recurring theme in Hassans story, and it permeates all aspects of the Palestinian human experience. High unemployment rates in the West Bank have pushed many Palestinians to seek jobs in Israel or in the settlements, where they are hired as cheap labour, often illegally. Leaving the territory without a license means risking imprisonment and, according to Hassan, permits get denied all the time. We live in a huge prison, he continues. If you, as a human, are working everyday, and you want to go on a trip with your family, or friends or girlfriend, you have nowhere to go. Our seaside is occupied. If you want to travel anywhere you will have to empty your car first, because any tool that could possibly be used to hurt someone, even a nail clipper, could get you arrested or even killed. A friend from Brazil brought me a stone from Jerusalem. It is strange, because it is the city where I was born, but after 27 years I cannot go there and pick it up myself. I showed it to all my friends: they felt happy because we could touch it, and smell it. Even more dire is the situation of Gaza, where residents are treated as enemy combatants and subjected to a land, air, and sea blockade that has shrunk the territorys GPD by up to 50% since 2007, according to the World Bank. On March 30, 2018 Gazan refugees launched a series of weekly demonstrations called the Great March of Return, programmed to end on May 15, the Nakba Day. As thousands have gathered near the border to protest their isolation and symbolically set on a journey back to their land, the Israeli Defense Forces have responded with tear gas and live ammunition, leaving dozens wounded or killed. As Israel continues violating the rights of Palestinians, the international community has repeatedly turned a blind eye. Initiatives in favour of a political solution to the decades-long conflict are often blocked by the US in the United Nations Security Council. According to Eitan Bronstein and Eleonore Merza, founders of the Israeli NGO De-Colonizer, it is also in the interest of Israeli Jews to acknowledge Palestinian narratives. The principal victims of this regime are, of course, the Palestinians, but Israeli Jews have also paid the price of conquest since 1948 by living in constant fear, with no hope of peace, they write on the NGOs website. In other words, we believe an essential key to our future here is deeply rooted in our past. As for his future, Hassan remains hopeful. When I was arrested at 12 years old, I didnt even know what my dreams were. But now, I have been through so much, and all the hardship has made me who I am. I know what my dreams are: to feel that I have a land, not just to live on one. Yves here. America has airbrushed out most of the history of savage violence against early labor leaders, but a reminder of the intensity of the sentiment came via McCarthys success in fanning fears of the Red Menace. Now that Marxism is no longer a dirty word and young voters on the whole are more sympathetic to socialism than capitalism, it should come as no surprise that a radical leftist group features prominently in a recent domestic wargaming exercise. As author Nick Turse points out, the record shows that radical right wing groups have been far more active and violent. Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com. Originally published at TomDispatch For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida. But thats a story for later. For now, lets focus on a 2017 executive order issued by President Trump, part of his second attempt at a travel ban directed primarily at citizens of Muslim-majority nations. It begins: It is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks. That sentence would be repeated in a January report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. Meant to strengthen the presidents case for the travel ban, it was panned for its methodological flaws, pilloried for its inaccuracies, and would even spur a lawsuit by the civil rights organization, Muslim Advocates, and the watchdog group, Democracy Forward Foundation. In their complaint, those groups contend that the report was biased, misleading, and incomplete and manipulates information to support its anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim conclusions. To bolster the presidents arguments for restricting the entry of foreigners into the United States, the DOJ/DHS analysis contained a collection of case summaries. Examples included: the Sudanese national who, in 2016, pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS; the Uzbek who posted a threat on an Uzbek-language website to kill President Obama in an act of martyrdom on behalf of ISIS; the Syrian who, in a plea agreement, admitted that he knew a member of ISIS and that while in Syria he participated in a battle against the Syrian regime, including shooting at others, in coordination with Al Nusrah, an al-Qaeda offshoot. Such cases cited in the report, hardly spectacular terror incidents, were evidently calculated to sow fears by offering a list of convicted suspects with Muslim-sounding names. But the authors of the report simply looked in the wrong places. They could have found startling summaries of truly audacious attacks against the homeland in a collection of U.S. military documents from 2016 obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information Act. Those files detail a plethora of shocking acts of terrorism across the United States including mass poisonings, the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and that Peoples Armed Liberation (PAL) attack on U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) headquarters in Tampa, Florida, [by] a drone-launched missile. Thats right! A drone-launched missile attack! On CENTCOMs Florida headquarters! By a terrorist group known as PAL! Wondering how you missed the resulting 24/7 media bonanza, the screaming front page headlines in the New York Times, the hysterics on Fox & Friends, the presidents hurricane of tweets? Well, theres a simple explanation. That attack doesnt actually happen until May 2020. Or so says the summary of the 33rd annual Joint Land, Air, and Sea Strategic Special Program (JLASS-SP), an elaborate war game carried out in 2016 by students and faculty from the U.S. militarys war colleges, the training grounds for its future generals and admirals. PALing Around with Terrorists The 2016 edition of JLASS-SP was played out remotely for weeks before culminating in a five-day on-site exercise at the Air Force Wargaming Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. It involved 148 students from the Air Forces Air War College, the Army War College, the Marine Corps War College, the Naval War College, the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, the National War College, and the National Defense Universitys Information Resources Management College. Those up-and-coming officers some of whom will likely play significant roles in running Americas actual wars in the 2020s confronted a future in which, as the script for the war game put it, lingering jealousy and distrust of American power and national interests have made it politically and culturally difficult for the United States to act unilaterally. Heres the scene as set in JLASS-SP: while the U.S. is still economically and militarily powerful into the next decade, anxieties abound about increasing constraints on the countrys ability to control, dictate, and dominate world affairs. Even in the military realm advances by others in science and technology, expanded adoption of irregular warfare tactics by both state and non-state actors, proliferation of nuclear weapons and long-range precision weapons, and growing use of cyber warfare attacks have increasingly constricted U.S. freedom of action, reads the war games summary. While the materials used are not intended to be an actual prediction of events, they are explicitly meant to reflect a plausible depiction of major trends and influences in the world regions. Indeed, whats striking about the exercise is how though scripted before the election of Donald Trump it anticipated many of the fears articulated in the presidents December 2017 National Security Strategy. That document, for instance, bemoans the potential dangers not only of regional powers like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, but also of transnational threats from jihadist terrorists and transnational criminal organizations, undocumented immigrants, drug traffickers, and criminal cartels [which] exploit porous borders and threaten U.S. security and public safety. The JLASS-SP scenario also prefigured themes from that 2018 DOJ/DHS report supporting the travel ban in the way it stoked fears of, above all, a major foreign-born especially Muslim terror threat in the United States. A 2017 Government Accountability Office report would, however, conclude that, of the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, far right-wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27 percent). Two years after the war game was conducted, in a time of almost metronomic domestic mass killings, President Trump continues to spotlight the supposedly singular danger posed by inadequately vetted people in the U.S., although stovetops and ovens, hot air balloons, and burning pajamas are far more deadly to Americans. Indeed, since 9/11, terrorism has been a distinctly low-level risk to the American public at least when compared to heart disease, cancer, car crashes, fires, or heat waves but has had an outsized effect on the perceptions and actions of the government, not to mention its visions of tomorrow. Tomorrows Terror Today An examination of the threats from international and domestic terror groups, as imagined in JLASS-SP, offers unique clues to the Pentagons fears for the future. Increasingly, reads the war games summary, transnational organizations, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and violent extremist organizations challenge the traditional notions of boundaries and sovereignty. That drone-launching terror group, PAL, for instance, is neither Islamist nor a right-wing terror group, but an organization supposedly formed in 2017 in hopes of defeating globalism and capitalism throughout the world by rallying the proletariat to orchestrate the overthrow of capitalist governments and global conglomerates. Its ideology, an amalgam of increasingly stale leftist social movements, belies its progressive ranks, a rainbow coalition consisting of most of the globes ethnicities and cultures, all of whom seem to be cyber-sophisticates skilled in fundraising, recruiting, as well as marketing their particular brand of radicalism. As of 2020, the audacious drone strike on CENTCOMs headquarters was PALs only terror attack in the tangible world. The rest of its actions have taken place in the digital realm, where the group is known for launching cyber-assaults and siphoning off funds from large global corporations, banks, and capitalist governments around the world. Even though PAL went from a gleam in the eye of its founder, the Bond-villain-esquely named Otto Cyre, to terrorist power-player in just a few short years, the pace of its operations didnt please its hardest core members who, the war game scenario says, broke away in late 2020 to form yet another organization devoted to even more rapidly eroding confidence in governmental and institutional bodies by staging events that demonstrate the impotency of the establishment. That splinter group, United Patriots Against International Government (UPAIGO) in this war game all terror groups have Pentagon-style acronyms concentrates on spectacular but deniable actions, a scattershot campaign of often botched but sometimes lethal efforts that include: * November 2021: a cyber-attack on the Angarsk Refinery in the Russian Federation, which resulted in a two-week shutdown causing a sharp rise in the price of oil and gas just prior to the 2021-2022 winter heating season. * April 2022: a failed attempt to assassinate, by IED, the chief of U.S. Pacific Command. Two members of the commanders security detail and the commands political advisor were killed in the attack while others, including civilians, were injured. * January 2022: a failed plot to detonate a dirty [radioactive] bomb, employing medical waste and homemade explosives, at Philadelphia International Airport. * 2023 fire season: as fires raged in the western United States, UPAIGO established relief efforts designed to compete with the U.S. governments response, in order to undermine confidence in government agencies. * June 2024: an attack, in coordination with members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), on a U.S. flagged air carrier transporting U.S. military personnel at Shannon Airport in Ireland. Militants fired two surface-to-air missiles at the aircraft, which was damaged but managed to land successfully. PAL and UPAIGO are, however, hardly the only terror threats facing the United States in the 2020s, according to JLASS-SP 2016. PALs fellow travelers, for example, include the fictional versions of the real Irish National Liberation Army and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Theres also the Environmentalists Against Capitalists Organization, or EACO, a lethal environmental anti-capitalist terrorist group with global connections. Formed in 2010 (though not in our actual world), EACO, according to the war gamers, evolved into an increasingly violent organization in the 2020s, carrying out not just cyberattacks on corporations but also a full-scale bombing campaign targeting executive board meetings of large corporations, particularly in industries such as oil, coal, natural gas, and logging. The group even took to planting IEDs on logging roads and employing tainted food as a weapon. By 2025, EACO was implicated in more than 400 criminal acts in the U.S. resulting in 126 deaths and $862 million in damages. Then theres Anonymous. In the Pentagons fictional war-game, this real-world hacktivist group is characterized as a loose organization of malicious black-hat hackers that employs its digital prowess to distribute bomb-making instructions, and conduct targeting for options other than planes, trains, and automobiles. In the past created by the militarys imagineers, Anonymous was declared a terrorist organization after it conducted an August 2015 digital attack on Louisianas power grid with something akin to the Stuxnet worm that damaged nuclear centrifuges in Iran. That cyber-assault was meant to protest the states restrictions on online gambling an affront, according to the fictional Anonymous, to Internet freedom. (In the real world, Louisiana lawmakers actually just deep-sixed online gambling without an apparent terrorist response.) Taking down that power grid resulted in the death of 15 elderly patients trapped in a facility denied air conditioning as a result of the power outage. Also included among domestic terror groups is Mara Salvatrucha 13 or MS-13, the Los Angeles street gang, born of the American-fueled Central American civil wars of the 1980s, that was transplanted to El Salvador and has since returned to the United States. This violent American export the product of deportations in the 1990s has paradoxically become a key justification for President Trumps crackdown on immigration. MS-13 recruits through our broken immigration system, violating our borders. And it just comes right through whenever they want to come through, they come through, said Trump earlier this year during a White House roundtable focused on the gang. Weve really never seen anything quite like this the level of ferocity, the level of violence, and the reforms we need from Congress to defeat it. In the real world, the U.S. branch of MS-13 operates in loose local cliques under a franchised name, dabbling in small-time drug dealing, gun-running, prostitution, and extortion (primarily of recent immigrants). Many of its crimes are committed against its own affiliates or members of other gangs. The president nonetheless baselessly claimed that MS-13 has literally taken over towns and cities of the United States. He also continues to portray the gang, which reportedly makes up less than 1% of the estimated 1.4 million gang members in the U.S., as a sophisticated international cartel. And thats precisely how MS-13 was also portrayed in the fantasy world of JLASS-SP. In that war game, Mara Salvatrucha has developed the resources to wage full-scale insurgent campaigns in Central America and the capability to cause serious disruption in the United States and Canada, while rumors swirl of contacts between its members and foreign militants. If cooperation between foreign terrorist groups and MS-13 ever blossomed, the potential for terrorist attacks within the borders of the United States would increase significantly, the war game scenario warns. President Trump has been accused of conflating members of MS-13 with undocumented immigrants (and referring to both groups as animals). Regardless, theres no question that he kicked off his presidential run in 2015 by disparaging Mexicans. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people, he infamously declared. The JLASS-SP documents reverse Trumps formula by first noting that most illegal immigrants crossing into the United States are just trying to make a better life for themselves, only to suggest that the U.S.-Mexican border also serves as an infiltration point for terrorists. Unlike in the real world, where such fears circulate primarily as a conspiracy theory, in the Pentagons future fantasy there is substantial evidence that terrorists from the Middle East and North Africa transit the Mexican-U.S. border. Worse yet, radical Islamists even camouflage themselves as Hispanics to cross the border. The militarys fantasists point to a flood of name changes from Arabic to Hispanic and the reported linking of drug cartels along the Texas border with Middle East and North Africa terrorism. That represents a Trumpian-style nightmare-cum-fantasy even the president hasnt yet dreamed up a Hispanic-surnamed, cartel-supported group of Islamist terrorists. But by the 2020s, according to the Pentagons futurists, such worries are well-founded. And this will occur at the same time that Mexican and South American drug gangs have grown so rich and powerful they can regularly buy protection from U.S. government officials. Popular opinion in the United States is beginning to believe the Narco-corruption is affecting the rule of law north of the border, according to their scenario, with the cartels spending $20 billion in 2022 alone to buy off U.S. officials or get candidates of their choice elected. That same year, allegations of election tampering in mayoral races across the American South come to light and the number of corruption convictions of U.S. Border Patrol agents and law enforcement officials skyrockets. Perhaps most shocking is the discovery of a vast irrigated grow site (evidently a massive marijuana farm) tended by a dozen Mexican farmers armed with AK-47s in wait for it! remote areas of Illinois. Mexican farmers, El Salvadoran gang members, Islamists masquerading as Hispanics, eco-terrorists, and anti-globalization militants arent the only threats foreseen by the militarys futurists. Much-ballyhooed reports of the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, like the much-hyped defeat of its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, turn out to be premature. In the 2020s, the re-re-branded group, now known as the Global Islamic Caliphate, or GIC, draws support from Sunni-majority regions in Syria and Iraq; refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey; and internally displaced persons in Syria and Iraq, while continuing to launch attacks in the region. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has grown in reach, size, and might. By 2021, the group has 38,000 members spread across Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger with bases reportedly located in Western Sahara. On May 23, 2023, AQIM carries out the most lethal terror attack in the U.S. since 9/11, detonating massive truck-bombs at both the New York and New Jersey ends of the Lincoln Tunnel, killing 435 people and injuring another 618. The bombing prompts President McGraw you remember him, Karl Maxwell McGraw, the independent Arizona senator who rode his populist America on the Move campaign to victory in the 2020 election to invade Mauritania and become mired in yet another American forever war that shows every indication of grinding on into the 2030s, if not beyond. The Age of Terrorism In the real world, the lifetime odds of an American dying from walking are one in 672. The chance of being killed by a foreign terrorist? One in 45,808. By an illegal immigrant terrorist? One in 138 million. And the odds of being killed by a chain migration immigrant sometime this year? One in 1.2 billion! In other words, you have a far greater chance of being killed by a dog, a shark, lightning, or the government via legal execution. This is not to say terrorism isnt a major threat to others around the world or that terror groups are not proliferating. Since 9/11, the number of terrorist organizations recognized by the U.S. State Department and battled by the Pentagon from Africa to the Middle East to Asia has grown markedly. States are the principal actors on the global stage, but non-state actors also threaten the security environment with increasingly sophisticated capabilities, reads an unclassified synopsis of the Pentagons 2018 National Defense Strategy. Terrorists, trans-national criminal organizations, cyber hackers and other malicious non-state actors have transformed global affairs with increased capabilities of mass disruption. In the fictional future of the Pentagons JLASS-SP 2016, this menace only expands to include various hybrid threats and new homegrown groups with increasing capabilities for death and destruction. While it may be the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks, as President Trumps 2017 executive order declares, the Pentagon envisions a future in which such policies are increasingly ineffective. In their dystopian war-game future, more than two decades of fighting them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America (as former President George W. Bush put it in 2007) proves unequivocally futile. In this sense, the Pentagons fantasies bear an eerie resemblance to the actual present. In the dystopian scenario used by the Pentagon to train its future leaders, todays forever wars have proven ineffective and future threats are to be met with new, similarly ineffective, forever wars. In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Trump declared that were living in the age of terrorism. His solution: wielding unmatched power, loosening the rules of engagement, and establishing an unfettered ability to detain, question, and annihilate terrorists. All of these tactics have, however, been part of the Pentagons playbook since 2001 and, according to the militarys best guess at the future, will lead to an increase in terror groups and terror attacks while terror networks and terrorist ideologies will grow in strength, resilience, and appeal. Almost two decades in, it seems were still only in the opening days of the age of terrorism and, if the Pentagons war-gamers are to be believed, far worse is yet to come. Mystery of Earths Missing Nitrogen Solved Scientific American (original). Plants repeatedly got rid of their ability to obtain their own nitrogen Ars Technica What One New England Tree Can Tell Us About the Earths Future Zocalo Public Square Global Melting? The Economics of Disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet NBER Liberals to buy Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5B to ensure expansion is built CBC. Gee, I wonder wholl get the contract to operate it. Justin Trudeau wears cute socks tho. Have central banks missed the exit train? World Economic Forum Core Design Principles for a Central Bank Digital Currency Bank Underground Facebooks size no barrier to deals in new areas: executive Reuters. Facebook scooters! Facebook juicers! ABC took a big risk with Roseanne reboot and it just backfired CNN. What passes for a big story these days. NFL admits there was no official vote on national anthem policy, instead informal show of hands NY Daily News. Bad governance no matter where you look. North Korea Twenty years of Indonesian democracyhow many more? New Mandala Africas Hidden Oil Hub Grows After Traders Make Millions Bloomberg. With handy map of oil chokepoints. Syraqistan Italian populist parties rekindle talks to form government FT. Bonds rally. An hour is a long time in Italian politics. Italys Nightmare Has No End In Sight Bloomberg Championed League Verso Completing Europes banking union means breaking the bank-sovereign vicious circle Bruegel Brexit Soros-backed campaign to push for new Brexit vote within a year Guardian. Yves: This is just silly. You cant do a referendum in a year, plus a year is too late. Soros should regain his mental discipline by taking up betting again instead of issuing pronouncements. And if hes talking his book, shame on him. If only Brexit had been run like Irelands referendum Guardian Boost for Jeremy Corbyn as major civil service union throws weight behind Labour Politics Home New Cold War Trump Transition Big Brother Is Watching You Watch A trip to the ER with your phone may mean injury lawyer ads for weeks Ars Technica For Google, all roads lead back to search FT. Great. Maybe theyll spend some money to decrapify it lol. Realignment and Legitimacy Our Famously Free Press Black Injustice Tipping Point Portlands gentrification has its roots in racism High Country News (GF). A tour of Portland, well worth a read. Neoliberal Epidemics It Saves Lives. It Can Save Money. So Why Arent We Spending More on Public Health? NYT. A question that answers itself, once asked. Guillotine Watch Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It The Cut. Thats what they do in the rich culture , is meals, said [11 Howard concierge Neffatari Davis]. Class Warfare Well See It When We Know It: Recognizing Emergent Solidarity Economy Grassroots Economic Organizing (part two). My Answer to Thank You For Your Service The Progressive Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria NEJM. From the survey data, we estimated a mortality rate of 14.3 deaths (95% confidence interval [CI], 9.8 to 18.9) per 1 persons from September 20 through December 31, 2017. This rate yielded a total of 4645 excess deaths during this period (95% CI, 793 to 8498), equivalent to a 62% increase in the mortality rate as compared with the same period in 2016. However, this number is likely to be an underestimate because of survivor bias. The mortality rate remained high through the end of December 2017, and one third of the deaths were attributed to delayed or interrupted health care. The Tower LRB. Grenfell Tower; LRB has devoted its entire issue to this story, rather like The New Yorker did for Hiroshima. Antidote du jour (via): Bonus Antidote (DK): Fennec stole your egg. He doesnt know what to do with it pic.twitter.com/pJdsPNs1Zu (@SawftFox) May 28, 2018 DK: Oligarch has money, doesnt really know what to do with it, but wont give it up. See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here. The NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg will meet the President of Colombia, H.E. Dr. Juan Manuel Santos Calderon on Thursday, 31 May 2018. Media Advisory 16:45 Joint press point by NATO Secretary General and the President Doorstep podium in the Agora (New NATO Headquarters) The press point will be streamed live on the NATO website. Still and video imagery will be available on the NATO website after the event. Access to New NATO HQ Information regarding media access to New NATO HQ can be found here: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/news_154351.htm Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress, @NATODepspox and @jensstoltenberg.) (Natural News) The Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang is a ruthless thought-control police state that arrests, imprisons, abuses, and forcibly medicates religious and political dissidents. Agents of the Chinese government are cleansing Xinjiang of extremist beliefs. Police arrest Christians, Muslims, and other minorities that threaten the communist order. The Uyghur and Kazakh ethnic groups are targeted the most and the abuse of Christians is growing. The innocent are taken to training camps so they can be forcibly medicated until they denounce their previous beliefs and commit their loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. These inhumane places are called political training centers or reformation centers. The Chinese government has a quota to fill. Police must aggressively target and arrest innocent people to satiate the demands of the communist state. The police are instructed to arrest people based on their appearance, whether they are in contact with anyone in neighboring Kazakhstan, or if they are suspected to be involved in religious activities. Sometimes visitors from Kazakhstan are arrested and separated from their families. Once in the reformation center inmates are not allowed to contact their families. Propaganda is routinely used to brainwash the inmates, to strip them of their religious beliefs and cultural heritage. Now the Chinese government is injecting the inmates with unknown substances. The China Aid Association, a Texas-based organization that reports on the abuses of Christians in China, reports that innocent inmates are suffering from memory loss and reproductive health issues because they are being forcibly medicated with unknown substances. Parallels of forced medication and thought control in the U.S. This kind of medical force, used to achieve compliance, is used routinely in the USA. What is the difference between a communist police force in China forcing drugs on minorities and the Child Protective Services (CPS) kidnapping a child because the parents refused to comply with medication orders? In America, children can be forcibly taken from their families if the parents refuse vaccinations or a Ritalin prescription. The child is then forcibly medicated against the parents consent. The family is broken apart, similar to the separation that occurs in Chinas reformation centers. Under SB277 in California, parents looking to enroll their child in a public school must submit their child to the vaccinations deemed necessary by the Pharma controlled government. (Check out MedicalKidnap.com for horror stories related to this topic.) When it comes to public schools, kids are routinely labeled with ADHD and prescribed drugs to force their minds to focus. This practice forces an education experience by abusing a childs natural development. The child, medicated into compliance, is robbed of his ability to think, interact, and move. There are other horrifying parallels occurring in the U.S. that look similar to the thought control police state in China. In 2012, former Marine Brandon Raub was arrested and committed to a psyche ward for writing critically about the events of 9-11 on Facebook. Authorities decided Raub was a threat after receiving complaints about his Facebook posts. Even though Raub owned no firearms and showed no signs of violence, he was arrested against his will for having a different viewpoint about history and the government. In 2003, The U.S. Supreme Court erroneously ruled that the U.S. government, under circumstances, can forcibly administer mind-altering drugs to render criminal defendants competent to stand trial. This ruling gives the government the power to forcibly medicate the incarcerated, if officials can conjure a reason for it. When it comes to controlling information to force political compliance, Facebook is working with the Associated Press and other fact checkers to restrict the fake news that people share on their platform. This algorithmic manipulation of news and information is a brainwashing tactic. Much like the reformation centers in China use propaganda to strip groups of their beliefs and heritage, Facebook controls the information people can access to slowly change their beliefs and ideas. The Facebook user might not be in a physical prison, but they are slowly being indoctrinated in a sort of mental prison, as they physically isolate themselves to their Facebook feed, ingesting what Facebook allows them to read, hear, and see. Sources include: WND.com ChinaAid.org BusinessInsider.com NaturalNews.com CSMonitor.com Censorship.News PBS.org (Natural News) One of the defining moments of Bill Clintons presidency was his impeachment for lying to a federal grand jury regarding his sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. But one of the defining moments of Clintons testimony was when he tried to justify his lie with this statement: It depends on what the meaning of the word is is. It was classic Clinton the Democrat playing the Orwellian word game in an attempt to weasel his way out of taking responsibility for something he so obviously had done. Fast-forward to the present day: Democrats havent changed much. Theyre still playing Orwellian word games in their attempt to slither away like roaches from the light of scrutiny over the Obama administrations very obvious spying operation against the 2016 Trump campaign. Spygate, if you will. As more details of the operation came out last week, lead roach Adam Schiff of California, whom many believe became a serial leaker as a member of the House Intelligence Committee probing the Russian collusion hoax, looked to his pals in the Pravda media to change the wording and narrative of the most massive political scandal in American history. It wasnt Obama spying on the Trump campaign, you see, it was Obama using informants during a very legitimate counterintelligence operation. (Related: CNN busted as co-conspirator in deep state spygate scandal that targeted Trump coordinated leaks and lies with the corrupt FBI.) Following a Gang of Eight briefing on the scandal last week, Schiff emerged to tell every media source he could that there was nothing there. He said in a statement: Todays Gang of Eight briefing was conducted to ensure protection of sources and methods. Nothing we heard today has changed our view that theres no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intelligence agency placed a spy in the Trump campaign, or otherwise failed to follow appropriate procedures and protocols. As noted by Breitbart News, that claim is also the basis for Trump-hating network MCNBC to publish a story with this headline: Trumps nonsensical Spygate conspiracy theory ends with a whimper. But as Melissa Francis of Fox News would report following the meeting, the Justice Department still hasnt provided Congress with requested documents related primarily to assets used by Obamas Deep State to cultivate sources within the Trump campaign as well as what hard intelligence led to the investigation in the first place. Furthermore, as Anders Hagstrom with The Daily Caller writes, everyone with a functioning brain stem already knows who the spy was: They believe it to be longtime Republican operative and former Cambridge University Professor Stefan Halper. Hagstrom calls out The New York Times for suggesting that the FBI used an informant, not a spy as Trump claims, noting that, based on appropriate definitions, the source was clearly the latter, not the former. Halpers actions toward Trump campaign advisors George Papadopoulos and Carter Page are totally disqualifying, but the Times continues pushing the idea that the FBI was working totally above board with no abuse of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts, Hagstrom writes. And lets not forget that Halper was recommended for a position within the Trump administration after he took office, leaving many to speculate that the FBI was continuing to run its spy operation, as the president believes. SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 23, 2018 Conservative talker and columnist Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent, also addressed the Democrat-Pravda media Orwellian word game on his show last week. In poking fun at Democrat-created terms, Bongino noted unequivocally that the person was a spy a spyyyyyy not an undocumented FBI employee or a human confidential informant, its a spy. He noted that Democrats use the same strategy all the time, part of which includes changing the language and changing words in order to make them mean something else. Theyve been busted in the biggest spying scandal in history and theyre dancing around it, Bongino noted. Read more about Democratic corruption at LeftCult.com and Corruption.news. J.D. Heyes is also editor-in-chief of The National Sentinel. Sources included: DailyCaller.com TheNationalSentinel.com Breitbart.com Time travel remains the stuff of science fiction or is it? Scientists say that some form of time travel is already possible in present day. It may be not as dramatic as Hollywood depicts, though. For now, time travel remains a one-way trip. Jumping Forward In Time Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, points out that people already engage in time travel at present, saying that going "back to the future" is already common practice. "It's only a matter of going really, really fast," Sutter explains in an email to Space.com, citing Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. "The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. We've been able to measure this with ultra-precise atomic clocks in jet airplanes, and the precision offered by the GPS system needs to take this into account." As Sutter quips, sci-fi stories always involves huge, complicated machines, but reality only requires a very big rocket. After all, astronauts, who move faster aboard the International Space Station than regular people on Earth, can already be considered as time travelers. When they're on the ISS, they age just very slightly slower than they do on Earth. NASA's Twin Project proves this when Scott Kelly returned home after a year in space and discovered the gap between him and his twin brother Mark grew bigger by a few milliseconds. J. Richard Gott, a physicist at Princeton who authored the book Time Travel in Einstein's Universe, tells Popular Mechanics that it's quite simple theoretically to send people forward in time. "If you want to visit Earth in the year 3000, all you have to do is to get on a spaceship and go 99.995 percent the speed of light," he says. Earth would spin on for a thousand years, but an astronaut making the trip would have their internal clock slowing down due to the speed of their flight. "[Their] clock will be ticking at 1/100th of the rate of the clocks on Earth. [They] are only going to age about 10 years," Gott points out. What About The Past? Of course, the draw of time travel is largely in revisiting the past. Unfortunately for those who want to go back in time, there's no feasible way of achieving this at the moment. There are a handful of theories on how to achieve it such as going faster than light speed or using wormholes as shortcuts to points in space-time. However, other laws of physics make it inconceivable for humans. "But all of these scenarios end up violating other known physics, like requiring negative mass or infinitely long rotating cylinders," Sutter explains, adding that physical laws of the universe always "spoil the fun." For now at least, humanity is bound to this timeline for better or for worse. Hundreds of animal activists forced their way onto a Petaluma egg farm Tuesday to raise awareness to what they call the inhumane treatment of chickens. About 40 activists were arrested, according to Sonoma County sheriff's officials. The activists call it one of their biggest actions in the Bay Area as hundreds of them converged on Sunrise Farms in Petaluma, protesting what they said are cruel conditions. "Were exercising our right to give care to sick and injured animals, dehydrated animals," said Wayne Hsiung of Direct Action Everywhere. NBC Bay Area A Facebook Live video showed the activists pushing their way inside the facility. They got a look at the birds' living conditions and took out about two dozen chickens. "They were sickly, weak, discolored, covered in filth," said Paul Pseklesimer of Direct Action Everywhere. No officials were available to confirm the conditions of the birds. The activists agreed to leave the property with the hope of negotiating an inspection with the owner. But the negotiations broke down. Dozens of sheriffs deputies arrived and geared up for a standoff. "There was understading that [the activists] thought they were going to let 20 people in with video cameras, that was not part of the bargain," Spencer Crum of Sonoma County Sheriff's Department said. Later Tuesday, about 40 activists tried walking back onto the farm, only to be arrested. "They can be our friends," Hsiung said. "That might sound crazy, but chickens can be your friend, and if your friend is hurting, you help them." The owner of Sunrise Farms declined multiple requests for comment. In the activist's Facebook Live video, a man who the activists identified the owner of the farm said "There's absolutely nothing wrong in here" and refused to let the activists enter his private property. A countless amount of jellyfish washed ashore at Pacifica State Beach in San Francisco over the weekend, worrying some locals who were enjoying the long Memorial Day weekend on the sand. "It freaks you out at first. I mean, your hands are hitting them when youre paddling in the water. And you think, 'oh man this is going to sting,' but then you realize they dont," said one surfer Josh Badura. The small, translucent, gelatinous blobs are harmless Moon Jellyfish that wash up to the beach with the current, according to Malilou Seiff of the Marine Science Institute. "Jellyfish are not swimmers. They float with the current. So when you get onshore currents, and onshore winds, they just float ashore," Seiff explained. The Aurelia aurita, the scientific name of the Moon Jellyfish, is one of about 20 species of jellyfish off the coast of California, Seiff said. Moon Jellyfish have a mild sting but they're generally harmless to swimmers. They're identifiable as a clear, flattened disk, with numerous small tentacles around the edge and a pink four-leaf clover design in the middle, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Tanya Schevitz was at Pacifica Beach on Monday and she said she, and her husband who's a surfer, had never seen anything like it. "Generally, its seals, whales, dolphinsand normally you dont see, THIS," Schevitz said. "We were sitting on the beach hanging out, and my husband came up and told us, 'you gotta come down and see this.' And we ran down to the beach and there were just blobs of jellyfish everywhere. The Pacifica State Beach said the public works department has been in touch with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, but there are no plans to clean up the hundreds of mostly dead jellyfish. "It's a natural occurrence. It happens every five to ten years. They all come on the beach and all of the sudden, they're gone," according to a spokesperson for the Pacifica Parks, Beaches & Recreation Department. In 2010, a similar phenomenon occurred at Ocean Beach with thousands of jellyfish stinking up the shore in San Francisco, SFGate reported. While the jellyfish aren't necessarily dangerous, Seiff said she wouldn't recommend beachgoers to touch them as different people may have different reactions. A group of teenagers crashed a stolen vehicle while on the run from police in San Jose Monday night. The incident comes in the midst of growing concern over a spike in juvenile crime in the Bay Area. A 13-year-old was behind the wheel of the stolen car which came to a stop in front of the Bridges Academy Charter School, along with three passengers all 16 years old or younger. "I'd like to say 'yeah its shocking,' but right now its becoming more and more prevalent," said San Jose Police Officer Christan Camarillo, who recognizes the criminal justice system is too lenient on kids. Last year, police arrested an 11-year-old believed to be the getaway driver of a stolen car in a burglary and robbery spree. The District Attorney says juvenile crime increased countywide last year, especially residential burglaries, carjackings and auto thefts. "All our kids need options to prevent them from making bad mistakes," said Mario Maciel, director of San Jose Mayors Gang Prevention Task Force. The Task Force knows its going to have its hands full this summer, with kids looking for things to do. The city is once again hosting a summer jobs program to supplement its summer camp programs in the hopes of keeping kids from ending up in handcuffs. "Its giving kids in our most marginalized communities the ability to stay busy this summer, building a resume, and not a rap sheet," Maciel said. More than half the youth arrested for a violent crime last year, had previously been arrested for other crimes, but serve little-to-no time for those crimes. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf stands by her February decision to tip off her citys immigrant community about an impending ICE raid and says shes ready to take on the Department of Justice if it decides to follow President Trumps request to charge her with obstruction of justice. "Of course Im concerned when the president of the United States asks the attorney general to bring charges against me," Schaaf said. "The fact that it has upset conservative racist people, I dont apologize for that." Schaaf claims the Department of Justice has not contacted her but she has already lawyered up. "I have excellent legal representation and Im very thankful that the firm that is representing is doing it pro bono at no costs to the taxpayers," the mayor said. Last week, the latest attack came from a Republican Congressman from Iowa. Rep. Steve Kings new bill would send officials who warn people about ICE raids to prison for up to five years. "While I have been unapologetic about the decision I made to keep my community safe, I have not let it distract me from doing my job as mayor," Schaaf said. Though the attacks keep coming, Schaaf is only concerned about the reactions from Oakland residents defending her citys sanctuary law while her own legal future remains uncertain. "It really touches my heart every time someone comes up to me and thanks me for making them feel protected and honored," Schaaf said. Parents, students, advocates, educators and local elected officials gathered Tuesday in front of the Alum Rock Unified School District offices in San Jose to support the superintendent whose job status was to be reviewed at a school board meeting Tuesday evening. According to the school board's closed session agenda, an item is listed to consider the possible dismissal of Superintendent Hilaria Bauer. The agenda item was submitted by school board trustee Khanh Tran, publicly called by City Councilwoman Magdalena Carrasco one of the "corrupt three" among the board's five members. The Community for Better Alum Rock Schools coalition alleges that the board majority will not "be held responsible" and named board trustees Tran, Esau Herrera and Dolores Marquez as those who have tried to "dismiss Dr. Bauer as a smoke-screen to the Del Terra controversy." Del Terra Real Estate was the Southern California-based real estate company selected to be in charge of program and construction management for bond measures through the school district in 2013, according to the Community for Better Alum Rock Schools coalition. An initial audit done by the Santa Clara County Office of Education showed evidence of fraud and misappropriation of funds, and the alleged "legally questionable" management of the district bond program is back in the limelight after Assemblymember Ash Kalra and state Sen. Jim Beall requested another audit of the district's funds. The county's November 2016 audit was conducted after an anonymous tip that the district may have been fraudulently billed for construction and program management services. The County Superintendent of Schools at the time, Jon Gundry, submitted a summary of the audit, which found that no citizens' oversight committee was overseeing the projects or expenditures because no reporting of them was done and that board members were personally involved with the bidding and contract management. "The report is very clear that the responsibility for the lack of accountability for Del Terra lies with the governing board," Gundry said. Leaders like Mayor Sam Liccardo feel that Bauer has served as a voice of leadership who sought to distance the school district from the contracts. Liccardo called Del Terra Real Estate a parasite on the school district. Carrasco said community members and leaders will continue to show up to demand accountability and transparency from board trustees so that focus can be brought back to bettering schools. "When we are facing one of the most vicious agendas of the national administration, when we are seeing some of the worst crimes ever perpetrated on our communities, when our families are in fear of being separated ... we are being distracted by these three [board trustees] and talking about whether we will again gather to save the job of Dr. Hilaria Bauer," Carrasco said. The coalition brought a criminal complaint to the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office and the Fair Political Practices Commission in Sacramento the same day Kalra and Beall announced their audit request, they said in their statement. They allege that numerous violations by the board, Del Terra Real Estate and a former Del Terra employee outline clear conflicts of interest in the contracts. The board has a chance to eliminate the contracts for good in the open session of the meeting due to the request of member Andres Quintero. Herrera was present at the news conference Tuesday and would not comment on his thoughts about Bauer's review. He did state that this is not the first time the item has been on a board agenda and it has failed in the past. "This board member has requested this item time and time again and has not succeeded," Herrera said. "I doubt he will succeed tonight." San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera issued administrative subpoenas to Uber and Lyft Tuesday, commanding them to show whether they classify their drivers as employees or independent contractors. The subpoenas also ask for information on wages, paid sick leave and health care expenditures for any drivers viewed as employees. The two ride-booking companies are both based in San Francisco and now operate nationally and, in the case of Uber, worldwide. They have maintained since their founding that their drivers are independent contractors, which would free the companies from obeying laws on minimum wage, sick leave and health care benefits. They say the independent contractor status gives the drivers the benefits of independence and flexibility. Herrera's subpoenas come in the wake of an April 30 California Supreme Court decision that tightened the definition of independent contractors within the state. The court, ruling in the case of drivers for a Southern California package delivery company, said workers must meet all of three criteria in order to be classified as independent contractors. The three requirements are that workers must be "free from the control and direction" of the hiring company; perform work that is "outside the usual course of the hiring entity's business"; and be customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business. While asking for wage information on any drivers listed as employees, the subpoenas also demand documentation from Uber and Lyft on how drivers they classify as independent contractors meet those three standards. "We are not going to turn a blind eye if companies in San Francisco deny workers their pay and benefits," Herrera said in a statement. "We don't know whether these ride-hailing companies are breaking the law until they provide the information we seek in these subpoenas," he said. The subpoenas were issued under Herrera's authority to investigate compliance with San Francisco laws requiring minimum wage, paid sick leave and employer contributions to health care insurance. The city's minimum wage is now $14 per hour and will rise to $15 on July 1. The subpoenas apply to data about Uber and Lyft drivers who began or ended at least one ride in San Francisco between 2015 and the present. Uber spokesman David White said, "We are unable to provide a comment." Lyft spokesman Adrian Durbin said, "Lyft has a long track record of working collaboratively with policymakers, including the San Francisco city attorney, on important issues. "We look forward to helping the City Attorney's Office fully understand Lyft's business model, including our relationship with drivers," Durbin said. Durbin said that in the San Francisco region, the median Lyft driver earnings are more than $25 per hour before expenses, which typically range from $3 to $5 per hour. The state high court's April 30 decision was unanimous and was written by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye. She wrote, "Although in some circumstances classification as an independent contractor may be advantageous to workers as well as to businesses, the risk that workers who should be treated as employees may be improperly misclassified as independent contractors is significant in light of the potentially substantial economic incentives that a business may have in mischaracterizing some workers as independent contractors." As coffee giant Starbucks closes over 8,000 stores for an anti-bias training stemming from the arrest of two black men in Philadelphia last month at one of its stores, at least one independent coffee shop is saying its not enough. Keba Konte, the founder of Oakland-based Red Bay Coffee, traveled to Philadelphia to hold a discussion on Tuesday about the state of black coffee" which was streamed live on a 360 cam from the Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse in Philadelphia via the Facebook page for Essence, a black culture and lifestyle magazine. For an hour, six speakers, which included local African-American business owners one of them wearing a T-shirt that read "Latte Gang" discussed race, diversity and the challenges of running a black business in modern-day America, and urged coffee drinkers to support small independent, black-owned coffee shops. Even before I opened up a brick and mortar business myself, I was very intentional about where I was spending every dollar and the impact of it, Konte said. At one point, the group talked about the incident involving #BBQBetty the Oakland woman who turned into a viral meme for calling the police on a couple of black men grilling along Oaklands Lake Merritt. Founded in 2014, Red Bay is a black-owned and women-led coffee company. It also includes formerly incarcerated members of the community. Konte believes racial bias training by Starbucks is a good first step to starting a conversation about inclusion and diversity in an industry where theres a dearth of African-American representation. But he doesnt think its enough, calling the chains discussion a necessary but ultimately insufficient racial bias training. "Until Starbucks makes some deep structural changes to reverse its legacy of racial bias which is also built into American society they'll continue to have incidents," he told Business Insider. "The only way you can reverse corporate culture is by changing the leadership. That has been my experience." The roundtable kicked off a tour of two other black-owned coffee shops in Philadelphia - Uncle Bobbie's Coffee & Books and Franny Lous Porch. The goal? Shining a spotlight on the larger implications of what happened at Starbucks, promoting the importance of inclusive and fair business models as a way to advance racial justice, and encouraging people in Philadelphia and on social media to support black-owned alternatives to Starbucks, according to a statement on the Red Bay Coffee Shop website. One local black coffee shop owner told the audience that she tries to make her African-American customers comfortable with coffee culture. They need to know that its a place you can just come in and chill, she said. Konte wants to seize this moment sparked by the Starbucks controversy and turn it into an opportunity. He says that following the incident in Philadelphia last month, and the #ReplaceStarbucks movement that came after the backlash, his coffee shop reported a jump in sales, similar to a trend seen in black coffee shops nationwide. Its an opportunity to put us in the center of the conversation, which is where we should be, because we are a mission-driven coffee company, Konte told the SF Chronicle. This is something I can do something about in my industry. It matters giving young black people an opportunity to see themselves in other professions that they might not know, and letting them know that coffee came from Africa. Its your cultural inheritance, he added. A man accused of injuring a 93-year-old woman during a robbery in Concord earlier this month has been charged with two counts of second-degree robbery and elder abuse with great bodily injury, according to the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office. Concord police responded to a report of two women robbed in the 1000 block of Sunvalley Boulevard around 4 p.m. on May 18 and found a 64-year-old woman and a 93-year-old woman at the scene. ConcordPD/Pederson family The older victim had been knocked to the ground when her purse was stolen and had to be transported to a hospital. Otto Halafihi, 29, turned himself in to law enforcement in Stanislaus County last Wednesday after Concord police circulated images from security footage in the area of the robbery. Halafihi was arraigned on three felony charges stemming from that case this morning, but Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office spokesman Scott Alonso could not immediately provide an update on whether a plea was entered in his case. When asked why he committed the purse snatching in Concord that injured a 93-year-old woman, initially, Otto Halafihi says he was hungry and thirsty and needed gas. "I'm very sorry; I wish I could rewind back the days," Halafihi said from jail. "I don't know why I did it, I just wasn't in my right mind state." A day after he turned himself in, Halafihi was arrested by Fremont police on suspicion of robbing a Lowe's Home Improvement store at 43612 Pacific Commons Blvd. around 8:40 p.m. on May 9. Investigators said he walked up to a register, lifted his shirt and took out a handgun, then threatened to shoot employees unless they backed away. He had been carrying two items, and police said he picked them up and left the store before fleeing the area in a white four-door sedan. The Alameda County District Attorney's Office did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether Halafihi has been charged in that crime. Gaining admission to the University of Massachusetts' flagship campus in Amherst is, on average, more difficult for Massachusetts residents than for those who live outside the state, a new report suggests. The Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank which released the study on Tuesday, said it challenges the widely-accepted belief that nonresident applicants are held to more rigorous academic standards than their Massachusetts counterparts. Researchers who examined university records from 2010 to 2016 found that, on average, out-of-state undergraduates admitted to UMass-Amherst had lower high school GPAs and lower SAT scores than in-state students during that period. For nonresidents accepted to the university in 2016, the average GPA was 3.78 and average composite SAT score was 1242, compared to an average GPA of 3.97 and composite SAT of 1265 for accepted in-state students. "The numbers imply that Massachusetts residents are held to a higher standard for admission," the report stated. But such a practice has potential for controversy, the authors concluded, because the university's central mission is to serve the citizens of Massachusetts -- who contribute tax dollars to the school -- and provide an affordable higher education option for qualified residents unable to meet the costs of private colleges and universities. Nonresident students who attend UMass pay significantly higher tuition than in-state students. UMass-Amherst officials responded to NBC10 Boston Monday evening. In a statement, spokesman Ed Blaguszewski says in part, "The universitys enrollment of out-of-state students has increased as state support for UMass has stagnated. Out-of-state enrollment is one way that UMass offsets this decline in funding." The reports recommends that state officials consider placing caps on out-of-state enrollment and that the university conduct an analysis to determine how many of the non-residents it educates remain in Massachusetts after graduating. "If out-of-state graduates stay here in large numbers to expand the economy and fill jobs in areas where labor shortages exist, the university's current policy may yield benefits," said Mary Connaughton, Pioneer's director of government transparency. The report makes clear that academic standards for admission to UMass have been on the rise for all students for more than decade, with a corresponding drop in overall acceptance rates. But the proportion of nonresident students at Amherst has climbed 63 percent since 2004, a higher percentage increase than at the university's three other undergraduate campuses in Boston, Dartmouth and Lowell. UMass-Amherst has set a 25 percent goal for out-of-state undergraduate enrollment, reaching 23 percent in the fall 2017 semester. While many public university systems have made conscious efforts to bolster out-of-state enrollment for a variety of financial, academic and cultural reasons, there has been backlash over the policies in other states. In 2017, the Board of Regents of the University of California approved its first-ever enrollment cap, of 18 percent, on nonresident undergraduates at most campuses, heeding calls from the public to reserve more spots at its campuses for California residents. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill was penalized $1 million in state funds in 2016 for exceeding an 18 percent cap on out-of-state freshmen in two successive years. Authorities say 41 small animals were found dead inside a closed pet store in western Illinois where the electricity had been disconnected. Macomb Police Chief Curt Barker said Tuesday that police received a complaint on Saturday about Macomb Pet Land, where officers faced an overwhelming smell of dead animals and ammonia. The dead animals included rabbits, hamsters, snakes and mice. No dogs or cats died. Barker says 56 animals were found alive and placed in foster care. He says the store's power was shut off May 14 for non-payment of bills. The store's owner faces charges of aggravated cruelty to animals. Baker says she told police she had arranged for someone else to care for the animals. Macomb is about 60 miles (95 kilometers) west of Peoria. What to Know Browder said he was in Spain to share evidence with prosecutors on money laundered in the country by Russian criminal gangs Browder has championed the Magnitsky Act, named after Browder's ex-employee who died in jail after accusing Russian officials of tax fraud Spain's national police said Browder was held until agents confirmed an arrest warrant from Russia in Interpol's system was outdated A prominent critic of the Kremlin says Russia is trying to block his investigation into the murder of a former employee by abusing an Interpol system of warrants that caused him to be briefly detained in Spain on Wednesday. "Vladimir Putin and the Russian government are absolutely infuriated that we are bringing them to justice for the murder of Sergei Magnitsky," U.S.-born and London-based investor William Browder told The Associated Press. The financier has advocated for U.S. sanctions targeting Russian officials over human rights abuses. He was the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, named after Browder's former employee, who died in jail after accusing officials in the country of involvement in a tax fraud scheme. Browder, head of the Hermitage Capital investment fund, said Spanish police took him away Wednesday when he was heading to meet with prosecutors to share evidence on property investments in Spain with funds allegedly linked to Magnitsky's murder. The Spanish police said Browder had remained in police custody "for the minimum necessary time" until the Spanish branch of Interpol "verified that the arrest warrant issued by the Russian authorities for tax evasion was invalid," according to a Spanish-language statement. However, in an email, Interpol said it has never issued a Red Notice for Browder. Red Notice alerts are sent to Interpol member countries to locate and arrest specific people based on a national warrant. As early as July 2013, the international police organization said it erased from its database Russian requests to locate and arrest Browder due to its "predominantly political character." In December, a Moscow court sentenced Browder to nine years in prison in absentia on charges of tax evasion and funneling money overseas. The financier and Ivan Cherkasov, an associate who was sentenced to eight years behind bars, were also ordered to pay 4 billion rubles ($69 million) to the Russian government in damages. The same court convicted Browder of tax evasion in another trial in absentia in 2013. Browder has dismissed the accusations. "They are using everything they can to stop me, and the abuse of the Interpol system is another example of that," Browder told the AP after meeting Spain's top anti-corruption prosecutor, Jose Grinda, following his release from detention. Browder said he had shared with Grinda evidence about how 30 million euros ($35 million) allegedly connected to the 2009 murder of Magnitsky had been laundered through investments in Spanish property. Grinda told AP that Browder is cooperating with the Spanish justice as a plaintiff in the investigation. Spain is among 15 countries following the money trail, the financier said. "We are hoping that eventually prosecutors here seize property, seize accounts and prosecute individuals so that nobody benefits from the murder of Sergei Magnitsky," Browder said. The Magnitsky Act became a sore point between the U.S. and Russia after it was signed into law by former President Barack Obama in 2012. Shortly afterward, President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning American citizens from adopting Russian children, in a move widely viewed as retaliation. Browder himself had reported his detention in Madrid in a series of tweets. He posted a photo of himself outside a police station saying he had been released "after Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised them not to honor the new Russian Interpol Red Notice." He claimed that "this is the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case." In a post later in the evening, he showed a photograph of himself upon returning to London. "No worse for the wear," he wrote. "Getting ready for more Magnitsky sanctions advocacy next week." Fair Trials, a global criminal justice watchdog, said the confusion over Browder's arrest highlighted the serious problems with Interpol's system of global "wanted person" alerts. "Interpol should scrutinize alerts before it puts them out through its international networks," Fair Trials chief executive Jago Russell said in an email Wednesday. "Spain should also exercise sense and discretion before arresting people. The result could have been very different if it weren't for Browder's high profile." British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson welcomed Browder's release, tweeting: "Just spoken to Bill Browder - very glad that he has now been released." "Moscow should concentrate on bringing those responsible for the murder of #Magnitsky to justice," Johnson added. Browder led one of the biggest investment funds in Russia for 10 years before he left the country and was barred re-entry in 2006 on the grounds that he posed a threat to national security. AP reporters Renata Brito, Iain Sullivan, Vladimir Isachenkov and Elaine Ganley contributed to this report. A bear was spotted near Quinnipiac University on Wednesday morning. Police said the bear was near the Harwood Gate at Quinnipiac Universitys main campus in Hamden around 8:15 a.m., then it returned to Sleeping Giant State Park. Black bear sightings have become common in Connecticut and police said more sightings are likely as the population grows and because of recent storm damage to bears natural habitat. Sleeping Giant in Hamden is one of the areas that sustained heavy damage a couple of weeks ago and it remains closed. [[483221351,C]] Police also warn that bears should never be fed, intentionally or accidentally. If you spot a bear, report it to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. [[422347873,C]] Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim said he has collected more than 15,000 signatures and expects a to find himself on the August primary ballot, just below endorsed candidate Ned Lamont. Ganim needs only needs roughly 15,000 signatures of registered Democratic voters in order to secure a spot on the ballot, and it appears Ganim is well on his way. He said his retail politics approach has been successful and adds its been especially successful in the states largest cities like Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport. I mean youre talking to people. Youre asking, will you come and vote for me? Youre on the street, Ganim said. To me, thats just a million miles away from being in some dark hall with these speeches with political leaders. This is about Democracy, and this is about cities, and this is about people who need a voice, who dont have it, and thats what I want to do. Ned Lamont ran away with the Connecticut Democratic Partys endorsement during the partys convention last week, collecting more than 80 percent of delegates. Ganim fell short of the required 15 percent needed to get a spot on the primary ballot. Lamont is not opposed to a primary in principle, but said the process and campaign should not be about personal attacks. I want to debate on the issues. I want to debate how you get this state going again, how you create jobs, how you start bringing young people back, Lamont said during a press conference with the other endorsed statewide office candidates. If its divisive and belittling, thats not good for the party, thats no good for the state. Ganim did not shy away from attacking Lamont, even before the two are officially primary opponents. The other candidate doesnt need donations because hes a multi-millionaire. Im just a regular guy, he said to one person in a supermarket. He also said Lamonts lifestyle and success as a businessman have left him out of touch with working-class Connecticut residents. Listen, I dont care that he has a house that has eight bathrooms, thats his lifestyle, Ganim quipped. I live in the bottom of a three family house in Bridgeport and Im in the neighborhoods every day talking to people who otherwise dont even have anybody listening to them. Lamont said he sees no value in that kind of a primary fight, and vowed not to be drawn to those kinds of debates and arguments. I dont think we need a governor who tries to divide people. I think you need a governor who brings people together. State prosecutors plan to appeal the dismissal of Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel's murder conviction in a 1975 bludgeoning death to the U.S. Supreme Court. State prosecutor James Killen notified the Connecticut Supreme Court of the planned appeal Tuesday. He said the court was wrong earlier this month when it reversed its own 2016 decision and vacated Skakel's murder conviction on the ground that Skakel's trial lawyer failed to call an alibi witness to the stand. Skakel is a nephew of Robert F. Kennedy's widow, Ethel Kennedy. A jury convicted him in 2002 of killing Martha Moxley in a wealthy Greenwich enclave when they were teenagers, and he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. He served 11 years behind bars before being freed on $1.2 million bail in 2013 when a lower court judge overturned his conviction, citing mistakes by trial lawyer Michael Sherman, who has defended his work. Prosecutors appealed the lower court ruling to the state Supreme Court, which reinstated Skakel's conviction in December 2016 in a sharply divided 4-3 ruling in which the majority said Sherman's representation was adequate under the U.S. Constitution. Skakel's new lawyers asked the high court to reconsider, resulting in this month's reversal, which some lawyers and law professors called unusual. The justice who wrote the 2016 majority decision, Peter Zarella, left the court shortly afterward and a new justice, Gregory D'Auria, voted with the majority this month. Skakel's attorneys Roman Martinez of Latham & Watkins LLP, Hubert J. Santos of Law Offices of Hubert J. Santos, and Michael A. Fitzpatrick, Law Offices of Michael A. Fitzpatrick, released a statement which read, in part: "The States attack on the Connecticut Supreme Courts ruling is without merit. That ruling was careful and correct. As the Court recognized, a key alibi witness has now confirmed that Michael was far away from the Moxley home at the time the murder took place. Michaels trial counsel inexplicably failed to investigate that witness, and the jury never heard the witness testify. Michaels conviction was fundamentally unfair, and he has already spent more than 11 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. We will urge the United States Supreme Court to deny further review, and if necessary we will vigorously defend the Connecticut Supreme Courts decision on the merits." Connecticut State Police patrol troopers will begin wearing body cameras this summer. The department has purchased 800 body cameras to equip troopers, in part with help from $895,000 in US Department of Justice grant funding. We believe equipping all of our troopers on patrol with body-worn camera equipment will contribute to our conversations with everyone we encounter, strengthen troopers relationships with their communities, and through the feedback that the cameras provide, support and sustain our steadfast commitment towards continuous improvement, said Commissioner of the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection (DESPP) Dora Schriro in a statement. Troop H-Hartford and Troop I-Bethany will be the first to receive the cameras. DESPP said they hope to have all troopers equipped by spring 2019. The cameras will integrate into dashboard camera equipment already used in patrol vehicles, and will work with existing department infrastructure in terms of software, storage, networking and connectivity needs. A supervising judge has denied a request from Meek Mills legal team to remove the judge who sent the Philadelphia rapper to prison from his ongoing legal case. Mill and his legal team went to court Wednesday to demand that Judge Genece Brinkley be removed from the case. President Judge Leon Tucker told Mill in the hearing that he doesn't have jurisdiction over the matter. The rapper's attorneys maintain that Brinkley is biased and isn't handling his case ethically. She has strongly defended her impartiality as Mill's legal team has alleged she's been waging a vendetta against the rapper. Mill wants another judge to supervise his probation. One of Brinkley's last rulings in the case called for an evidentiary hearing, set for next month, which could determine if a new trial is warranted. Mills lawyers filed an affidavit claiming that in most cases where the district attorney supports a new trial a judge doesn't bother with the extra hearing. The next step for Mill's team is to appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, NBC10's Aundrea Cline-Thomas reported. Brinkley could recuse herself from the case. Mill, whose real name is Robert Rihmeek Williams, was born and grew up in North Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered his release in April after a long battle dating to November when Mill was sentenced to 2 to 4 years in prison for violating his probation. After his release on bail, he has remained a voice for prison and criminal justice reform. The call for Mill getting a new trial is based on Mill's arresting officer being identified on a list of so-called dirty cops in Philadelphia. Police are investigating after a dog was adopted from a Dallas County shelter one day and found dead the next, in what appears to be an egregious act of animal cruelty. The Garland Animal Shelter confirmed to NBC 5 that the Pitbull mix known as "Titan" was adopted last week after being surrendered to the shelter in March. Over the weekend, the dog's body was discovered dumped along Dowdy Ferry Road in Dallas County. Titan had been shot in the head, according to members of the Dallas DogRRR Rescue group. The Dallas Police Department and the SPCA of Texas are investigating the dogs death as an animal cruelty incident, but said there is no information about a suspect available at this time. Police said, this remains an active and open investigation. King Mohammed VI supervised in person at the Casablanca International Airport on Tuesday the airlifting of humanitarian aid destined to the Palestinian people. Besides the deployment of a Royal Armed Forces Field Hospital in Gaza, the humanitarian assistance is made up of blankets, drugs, as well as foodstuffs donated by the Mohammed V Foundation for solidarity. The multidisciplinary field hospital, which will be deployed in the Gaza Strip, will provide care to the Palestinians who have been injured by Israeli forces this month, as well as to the entire population of the area. The aid includes 25 tons of drugs, 5000 blankets and 113 tons of food, mainly foodstuffs consumed in this holy month of Ramadan ((flour, sugar, pasta, rice, lentils, chickpeas, dried beans, vegetable oil, dates and milk powder). This aid will benefit the inhabitants of Gaza as well as the inhabitants of Al Quds and Ramallah. This humanitarian assistance reflects the steadfast and acting solidarity of King Mohammed VI and the Moroccan people towards the Palestinians. In addition to other actions taken by the Kingdom as part of its multidimensional support for the Palestinian people, the humanitarian assistance will alleviate the sufferings of Gazans who are subjected to the Israel-imposed embargo and ongoing Israeli aggression. The assistance will also offer qualitative support to Gazan humanitarian and health institutions, which are crippled by lack of human resources and medical equipment. Over 100 Palestinians were killed and thousands were wounded in the demonstrations staged along the border fence between Gaza and Israel since March 30, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes in 1948 to set up Israel. Israeli forces, which have been firing with live ammunition at the unarmed demonstrators, increased their repression on May 14, when more Palestinians took to the street to protest the transfer of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Al Quds. At least 62 Palestinians were killed that day and hundreds were injured. The aid to Ramallah and Al Quds will be shipped through Jordan, while the field hospital and the assistance destined to Gaza will be dispatched as soon as Egyptian authorities issue the necessary authorizations. The son of an Austin-area jeweler and his college girlfriend have been arrested and charged in a murder-for-hire plot to kill his parents and make off with a multi-million-dollar life insurance payout, police say. On March 2, prominent Austin jeweler Theodore Shaughnessy, of Gallerie Jewelers, was gunned down in his home during an apparent home invasion. Citing court documents, KXAN-TV in Austin reports Shaughnessy heard his dogs bark and grabbed a firearm to check the house. Corey Shaughnessy, the man's wife, said she heard gunshots about a minute later. She said someone then fired at her and she returned fire with her handgun "until she ran out of ammunition" and called police. Theodore Shaughnessey and one of the family's dogs were killed in the attack that investigators said Tuesday was part of a murder-for-hire plot by the couple's only child, 19-year-old Nicolas Patrick Shaughnessy. Arrest warrants were issued late Tuesday afternoon for Nicolas and his 19-year-old girlfriend, Jaclyn Alexa Edison, of College Station. About 90 minutes later, both were in the custody of the Travis County Sheriff's Department. In the months before the shooting, Nicolas Shaughnessy approached multiple people asking if they were willing to be paid to kill someone, investigators allege in an arrest affidavit. He estimated that he'd receive some $8 million from the life insurance policies for his parents, from the sale of their home and sale of the jewelry store. Investigators with the Travis County Sheriff's office say Nicolas and Edison are accused of conspiring together to hire someone to murder both of Shaughnessy's parents, though it remains unclear who fired the shots that killed Theodore Shaughnessy. Travis County Sheriff's spokeswoman Kristen Dark said in a statement to the Associated Press that detectives "are following new leads in the case." She declined to elaborate when later reached by phone. Two days after Theodore Shaughnessy's death, a message was posted on Gallerie Jeweler's Facebook page saying the store was closed until further notice. Late last month, the page was updated to say "Nicolas, Ted's son, will be carrying on his legacy here at Gallerie." Both Nicolas Shaughnessy and Jaclyn Edison are being held in the Travis County Jail on a charge of soliciting to commit capital murder, on cash bonds of $3 million and $1 million, respectively. It's not immediately clear if either have obtained an attorney. Tara Rasheta cherishes the time she spends with her two little girls. "We have a lot going on right now. I'm battling breast cancer," she said. "Nothing is more important to me than my family, my staying healthy, keeping my kids safe." But earlier this year, she questioned just how safe her Dallas home was. "I had been seeing a lot of reporting about the gas explosions here in Dallas and that was alarming! This is our first home we ever owned, so to me, I didn't know a lot about gas safety," she explained. Back in March, NBC 5 introduced viewers like Rasheta to natural gas detectors. "It really stuck with me. So, I bought one right then and there," she said. Rasheta got it the very next day, but she admits it was neglected. It sat in her garage for a good two months, and quite frankly she never thought she'd ever need it. "All of a sudden, I started smelling a stinky smell in our house. I smelled a stinky smell for about a week. I kept thinking, oh I need to take the trash out." said Rasheta. "We have chickens so we literally have eggs almost every day that we're eating." But the odor wouldn't go away. "And then finally I thought, oh my goodness! I have that gas detector sitting in a box in a garage," she said. Rasheta rushed to get the natural gas detector, and when she plugged it in, the alarm went off. She called Atmos Energy's emergency line. "The operator said you need to evacuate the property immediately," she explained. Later that day, she said a technician confirmed that they had a gas leak. She believes it was a close call for their family. "While I'm lighting candles around the house to mask the smell, that was the worst thing that I could have done," she said. It was a $42 purchase she believes saved her home, and more importantly, their lives. Rasheta said she now swears by her natural gas detector, so much so that she purchased a second one for her bedroom. There are several different models available online. We found a natural gas detector online for as low as $18 on Amazon. The one that Rasheta purchased is a dual detector for both gas and carbon monoxide. The dual detectors are highly recommended. Most home insurance policies don't require gas detectors, but plumbing experts tell us they encourage them because in many cases, they can save lives. We reached out to Atmos to see if they'll provide natural gas detectors to residents upon request. Atmos said until further testing is complete, Atmos Energy believes your best line of defense is using any and all your senses to detect a natural gas leak. Smell the distinctive odor that makes natural gas detectable. Natural gas in its original form has no smell or color, thats why gas companies add a rotten egg odor called mercaptan. Listen for a hissing or whistling sound near a gas appliance or a roaring sound near a pipeline. Look for blowing dust, bubbling water or dead vegetation near a gas line. A San Diego man who beat, choked and raped two women in 2016 was sentenced Tuesday to 100 years to life plus 86 years in state prison. Jeremiah Williams, 26, was convicted May 1 on 12 of 13 charges related to the two sex assaults, including two counts of rape. Prosecutors said Williams approached his first victim in August 2016 outside her apartment. The victim, identified in court as Jane Doe 1 was afraid when Williams asked her, "Where's your husband?" as she approached her front door, the prosecutor said. Williams then beat her, forced her into the apartment and dragged her into her bedroom where he raped her. The victim testified that she felt her life was going to end. The next day, Williams sexually assaulted a woman working as a prostitute in a room at a Motel 6 off Alvarado Road in La Mesa. Williams got on the bed and asked Jane Doe 2, "Do you want to know what it feels like to die?" He then choked the victim until "she saw stars," according to testimony in the case. San Diego police identified Williams through physical evidence found at a condo complex on Nobel Drive and investigators launched a manhunt for Williams, who has a criminal background in California and Texas. In November 2016, Williams was arrested in Tolleson, Arizona after officers from Arizona Wanted Violent Offender Task Force received a tip. More than 5,000 pounds of cocaine seized by the United States Coast Guard (USCG) in the waters near Central America were offloaded in San Diego Tuesday. The 5,271 pounds of drugs estimated to be worth more than $78 million were seized during a two-day period in May by Coast Guard crews from Port Angeles, Washington. The cocaine will be turned over to the Drug Enforcement Administration for destruction, USCG said. U.S. Coast Guard - Defense Media The crew also detained six suspected drug smugglers who will have trials in the U.S. Active, the Coast Guard cutter used in the interceptions is a 53-year-old, 210-foot ship homeported in Port Angeles, Washington. The average lifespan of a cutter is 40 years, according to USCG. "Just to keep a 53-year-old ship in prime condition is a feat in and of itself, and [the crew has] done that and much more," the ship's commanding officer, Cmdr. Chris German, said. A major gas leak closed access to two streets in Downtown Riverside Tuesday through Wednesday after a construction crew accidentally ruptured a main. Construction crews ruptured the main at 11:45 p.m. near Market Street and 10th Street, according to Riverside Fire Department Chief DeLaurie. The gas came in contact with a power line shortly after, which resulted in two minor explosions and power outages. Riverside Public Utilities is assisting Riverside firefighters and police in barricading the area while Southern California Gas Company works to repair the break. Officials believe the repair may take several hours. No injuries were reported. A Perris man accused of taking part in an illegal street race in Mead Valley two weeks ago that resulted in the deaths of two young brothers was arrested in the state of Washington, authorities announced Tuesday. Josue Leyvas Gallegos, 30, was taken into custody by U.S. marshals on Friday in Kent, Washington, about 19 miles south of Seattle, while attempting to register a vehicle at a DMV office, according to California Highway Patrol Officer Dan Olivas. Authorities allege a May 15 illegal street race involving Gallegos and a second man, Ricardo Zuniga, resulted in the deaths of Dominick Gonzales, 6, and his 7-year-old brother, Antonio "Tony'' Gonzales. The boys were riding in a Nissan Versa with their older brother when the compact car was struck head-on about 5:40 p.m. on Oakwood Street, east of Brown Street, by a Honda Accord driven by Zuniga, who was allegedly racing with Gallegos, who was driving a 2002 Nissan Altima, according to authorities. The Accord was traveling east in the westbound lanes, Olivas said, and crested a hill before slamming head-on into the Versa. Riverside County Fire Department paramedics reached the location within a few minutes and rushed the children to Riverside University Medical Center in Moreno Valley, where they died less than an hour later. Their brother was treated at a hospital for minor injuries. Family members said Luis Gonzales was taking his younger brothers with him to retrieve their sisters from an after-school program when the collision happened. Zuniga was hospitalized with moderate injuries and has been charged with two counts of murder. He is due back in court on June 27 for a settlement conference. The CHP tracked Gallegos down by working with the U.S. Marshals Service and the Riverside County District Attorney's Office. Two counts each of vehicular manslaughter and fleeing the scene of a crime were filed against Gallegos on Friday. The Altima has not been found. Anyone who has information about the collision, including photographs and cellphone video, is asked to contact the Riverside CHP's Accident Investigation Unit at (951) 637-8000. What to Know 13 lawsuits filed against USC, doctor as students accuse ex-campus gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall of molesting patients USC President C. L. Max Nikias agrees to step down Nikias apologized in writing to women who claim they were abused by Tyndall Police are investigating misconduct allegations made by 52 former patients of a USC gynecologist, with the complaints spanning from 1990 to 2016, roughly his entire tenure at the university, officials said Tuesday. LAPD Capt. William Hayes said 39 of the cases were referred to the department from a USC hotline set up for people to call and report concerns about Dr. George Tyndall. The other cases involve people who contacted police directly, he said. Police said the department is working closely with the District Attorney's Office as they review cases to determine if any of them warrant consideration of criminal charges. Tyndall resigned last year. A Los Angeles Times investigation found that he was the subject of complaints dating back to the 1990s, with patients complaining about sexually charged comments, inappropriate touching of patients and taking photographs of women he was examining. Despite the complaints, Tyndall was allowed to continue working at the USC Student Health Center and continued examining patients. Tyndall was removed from the clinic only after a nurse reported him to the rape crisis center, according to former patients and staffers interviewed by The Times. An internal university investigation last year concluded that his pelvic exams were outside the scope of current medical practice and amounted to sexual harassment of students. In interviews with The Times, the 71-year-old physician defended his medical exams as thorough and appropriate, and said some of his comments to patients were misinterpreted. And in a letter to the newspaper dated May 17 but received Thursday, Tyndall said he had heard of only one patient complaint before March 2016, an allegation that he did not wear gloves during a pelvic exam, which he denies. An Irvine-based law firm that had already filed several suits announced the filing of three more cases Tuesday, including one by a woman who claims she was abused by Tyndall in 1988 while working as a research assistant at USC Medical Center. USC President Max Nikias agreed to step down Friday. John Manly, an attorney for the victims, said in a statement that the resignation is "the first step in a long process of healing for the victims of Dr. Tyndall." "It occurred because students faculty and alumni pressured Board of Trustees to do the right thing," the statement said. "It is our hope that their pressure will continue until the University reforms the culture which has enabled sexual abuse and holds all of the enablers accountable so this will never happen again." In the latest filing, "Jane Doe 11" says she had filed written complaints against Tyndall and submitted them to the school back in 1988, and said she was ignored. "Jane Doe 11" said she had two exams conducted by Tyndall as part of an experimental study. She said he forced her to "strip completely naked with her breasts fully exposed throughout the entire examination, shoving his ungloved fingers into (her) vagina." "I left feeling as though I had been molested and mistreated during my exams," she said in a complaint she alleges was submitted to the university. Police are urging anyone who believes they have been victimized to contact the department's Special Assault Section at (213) 486-6910. What to Know Harvey Weinstein has been indicted on rape and criminal sex act charges in New York City. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. says the indictment brings the former movie mogul "another step closer to accountability." The indictment came hours after Weinstein's lawyers said he'd decided not to testify before the grand jury. Harvey Weinstein was indicted Wednesday on rape and criminal sex act charges, furthering the first criminal case to arise from a slate of sexual misconduct allegations against the former movie mogul. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said the indictment brings Weinstein "another step closer to accountability." The announcement came hours after Weinstein's lawyers said he'd decline to testify before the grand jury because there wasn't enough time to prepare him and "political pressure" made an indictment unavoidable. A statement issued through a Weinstein spokesman said the 66-year-old film producer, who has denied the allegations, learned of the specific charges and the accusers' identities only after turning himself in Friday. With a deadline set for Wednesday afternoon to testify or not, his request for more time was denied, the statement said. "Finally, Mr. Weinstein's attorneys noted that regardless of how compelling Mr. Weinstein's personal testimony might be, an indictment was inevitable due to the unfair political pressure being placed on Cy Vance to secure a conviction of Mr. Weinstein," the statement said, referring to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. Vance said in a statement that the Weinstein camp's "recent assault on the integrity of the survivors and the legal process is predictable." "We are confident that when the jury hears the evidence, it will reject these attacks out of hand," Vance said. Weinstein was charged Friday with rape and criminal sex act charges involving two women in New York, as a grand jury continued hearing evidence in the case; the panel has been at work for weeks. Defendants have the right to testify in a grand jury's secret proceedings but often don't, for various reasons. Weinstein faces rape and criminal sex act charges involving two women in New York. Dozens more women have accused him of sexual misconduct ranging from harassment to assault in various locales. He has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex, and his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said Tuesday that Weinstein was "confident he's going to clear his name" in the New York prosecution. Brafman called the rape allegation "absurd," saying that the accuser and Weinstein had a decade-long, consensual sexual relationship that continued after the alleged 2013 attack. The woman, who hasn't been identified publicly, told investigators Weinstein confined her in a hotel room and raped her. The other accuser in the case, former actress Lucia Evans, has gone public with her account of Weinstein forcing her to perform oral sex at his office in 2004. The Associated Press does not identify alleged victims of sexual assaults unless they come forward publicly. Vance, a Democrat, came under public pressure from women's groups to prosecute Weinstein after declining to do so in 2015, when an Italian model went to police to say Weinstein had groped her during a meeting. Police set up a sting in which the woman recorded herself confronting Weinstein and him apologizing for his conduct. But Vance decided there wasn't enough evidence to bring charges. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, also a Democrat, ordered the state attorney general to investigate how Vance handled that matter. A senior North Korean official and the top U.S. diplomat had dinner in New York on Wednesday as President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un try to salvage prospects for a high-stakes nuclear summit. It's the highest-level official North Korean visit to the United States in 18 years. Kim Yong Chol, the former military intelligence chief and one of the North Korean leader's closest aides, landed midafternoon on an Air China flight from Beijing. Associated Press journalists saw the plane taxi down the tarmac before the North's delegation disembarked at JFK International Airport. During his unusual visit, Kim Yong Chol had dinner for about an hour-and-a-half with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who traveled from Washington to see him. The two planned a "day full of meetings" Thursday, the White House said. Their talks will be aimed at determining whether a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong Un, originally scheduled for June 12 but later canceled by Trump, can be restored, U.S. officials have said. The talks come as preparations for the highly anticipated summit in Singapore were barreling forward on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, despite lingering uncertainty about whether it will really occur, and when. As Kim and Pompeo were meeting in New York, other U.S. teams were meeting with North Korean officials in Singapore and in the heavily fortified Korean Demilitarized Zone. "If it happens, we'll certainly be ready," White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of the Singapore summit. Regarding the date for the meeting, she added, "We're going to continue to shoot for June 12th." North Korea's flurry of diplomatic activity following a torrid run in nuclear weapons and missile tests in 2017 suggests that Kim Jong Un is eager for sanctions relief to build his economy and the international legitimacy the summit with Trump would provide. But there are lingering doubts on whether Kim will ever fully relinquish his nuclear arsenal, which he may see as his only guarantee of survival in a region surrounded by enemies. Trump announced that Kim Yong Chol was coming to New York for talks with Pompeo in a tweet on Tuesday in which he said he had a "great team" working on the summit. That was a shift from last week, when Trump announced in an open letter to Kim Jong Un that he had decided to "terminate" the summit following a provocative statement from the North. Pompeo, Trump's former CIA chief, has traveled to Pyongyang twice in recent weeks for meetings with Kim Jong Un, and has said there is a "shared understanding" between the two sides about what they hope to achieve in talks. South Korean media speculated that Pompeo could make a third trip to Pyongyang and that Kim Yong Chol was carrying a personal letter from Kim Jong Un and might push to travel to Washington to meet with Trump. North Korea's mission to the United Nations in New York is its sole diplomatic presence in the United States. That suggests Kim might have chosen to first go to New York because it would make it easier for him to communicate with officials in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital. North Korea and the United States are still technically at war and have no diplomatic ties because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. Trump views a summit as a legacy-defining opportunity to make the nuclear deal that has evaded others, but he pledged to walk away from the meeting if he believed the North wasn't serious about discussing dismantling its nuclear program. After the North's combative statements, there was debate inside the Trump administration about whether it marked a real turn to belligerence or a feint to see how far Kim Jong Un could push the U.S. in the lead-up to the talks. Trump had mused that Kim's "attitude" had changed after the North Korean leader's surprise visit to China two weeks ago, suggesting China was pushing Kim away from the table. Trump's letter, the aides said, was designed to pressure the North on the international stage for appearing to have cold feet. White House officials maintain that Trump was hopeful the North was merely negotiating but that he was prepared for the letter to mark the end of the two-month flirtation. Instead, the officials said, it brought both sides to the table with increasing seriousness, as they work through myriad logistical and policy decisions to keep June 12 a viable option for the summit. Kim Yong Chol is a vice chairman of the North Korean ruling party's central committee. The last official of his stature to visit the United States was Jo Myong Rok, the late first vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, who visited Washington in 2000, South Korea's Unification Ministry said. The White House emphasized that it has remained in close contact with South Korean and Japanese officials as preparations for the talks continue. Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump will host Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan on June 7 to coordinate their thinking ahead of the summit. Trump hosted South Korean President Moon Jae-in last week. Moon, who has lobbied hard for nuclear negotiations between Trump and Kim Jong Un, held a surprise meeting with the North Korean leader on Saturday in an effort to keep the summit alive. A Coconut Creek Police officer who made a "disparaging" Facebook comment about hoping "some old lady loses control of her car" as Parkland survivors held a "die-in" at Publix has been suspended, the city's police chief announced Tuesday. Brian Valenti, a K-9 officer who has been with the department for 23 years, has been suspended for five days without pay, Chief Butch Arenal said in a statement. The incident began with Friday's demonstration when students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, led by senior David Hogg, staged a "die-in" to protest the supermarket's support for Florida gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam, who is an NRA supporter. Valenti commented on a post about Hogg and the protest on the Coral Springs-Parkland Breaking News Facebook page "Hope some old lady loses control of her car in that lot. Jus saying..." Arenal said Valenti took down the post and expressed remorse. In addition to the suspension, Valenti will be required to attend sensitivity training. "The poor judgment of one employee in one instance should not reflect on our organization as a whole," Arenal's statement read, in part. "As Chief of Police, I sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended by Officer Valentis post." Arenal said he took into account Valenti's "exemplary service record" and "deep regret" in making the post. "If I or any member of the City of Coconut Creek had any reason to believe that Officer Valentis comment was truly a threat against the safety and well-being of another individual, his employment would be terminated," Arenal said. "We pride ourselves on working together with our community to make a difference. While one of our officers clearly missed the mark in this particular situation, rest assured that the Coconut Creek Police Department will work tirelessly to maintain a level of service to our residents and neighbors that not only meets their expectations, but exceeds them." Arenal said Valenti has requested to reach out to organizers of the protest to offer his apology. I respect his apology for that. I obviously wish he that never said something like that because I think police officers are meant to serve their communities and protect them at the same time," Hogg said Tuesday. "I don't think that police officers are supposed to spread hate and violence, the very hate and violence that they're trying to prevent." Rod Skirvin, with the Broward police union, said Valenti is distraught over the incident. "He feels terrible for how this is portraying him but I think at the end of the day we need to look at his body of work," Skirvin said. Morocco and Tunisia signed on Tuesday two agreements destined to foster cooperation between the two North African countries in the field of civil aviation. The accords, sealed during the visit paid by Moroccan foreign minister Nasser Bourita to Tunis, seek to strengthen technical and scientific cooperation ties between the two countries civil aviation authorities in airports management, air navigation services and logistic centers. The agreements show the two countries determination to ensure safe and efficient transportation in line with the global norms & regulations, especially those stipulated by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Moroccan-Tunisian cooperation in this field is based on a partnership program that includes air transport policies & economies, civil aviation laws & regulations, aviation safety & security, air navigation services and environment protection. The partnership program set between the two Maghreb countries also features cooperation in matters of passenger rights, search and rescue operations, civil aviation accident investigations, staff training, airport infrastructure, public-private joint projects During his visit to Tunis, Bourita discussed with his Tunisian peer Khemaies Jhinaoui cooperation prospects in various sectors and latest regional and international developments. During the talks, Bourita voiced Moroccos support for Tunisias candidacy to a non-permanent seat at the UN Security Council in the years 2020-2021, and insisted that political dialogue should not be limited to bilateral issues only, but has to include coordination on regional and international issues. The two officials also reviewed ways to activate the stalled Arab Maghreb Union due to strained political relations between Morocco and Algeria over the Sahara issue and Algiers refusal to open its land border with its neighboring country. According to UK magazine the Economist, the Maghreb, a regional bloc grouping Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania, remains the most separated region on the continent. The Maghreb is also one of the world sub-regions where intra-regional trade is stagnating at 3 pc, one of the worlds lowest, though the member countries of this region have huge complementary economic potentials and share common history. The two sides announced that the second session of the Morocco-Tunisia Economic Forum will be held in early 2019. Two people were hurt when a crane collapsed on multiple homes in Lauderhill Wednesday afternoon, officials said. The incident happened in the 4300 block of Northwest 11th Street. Lauderhill Fire Rescue officials said a man who was inside one of the homes was taken to a nearby hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Relatives said 25-year-old Johncarry Dorilas was in his dining room when the roof collapsed. The crane operator was also injured and was treated at the scene. Officials said they were also checked on the occupants of the homes to make sure no one was trapped inside. Footage showed the massive crane toppled on its side and laying on the roofs of at least two homes. "I just heard a loud thump like a earthquake shaking," neighbor Dwight Webbe said. "I just peeked outside to see what was going on, next thing helicopters and I hear the sirens coming." Officials said a crew contracted by Florida Power & Light was installing new power poles when the collapse happened. At least one roof was badly damaged and the collapse may have knocked down some power lines. More than 50 homes lost power and water in the neighborhood. "At some point during the operation, the crane lost stability. We are still under investigation trying to determine what that cause was. It lost stability and the crane fell towards the houses," said Asst. Chief Jeff Levy of Lauderhill Fire Rescue. "We are aware of a serious incident that happened in Lauderhill earlier today. Unfortunately, a crane operated by a contractor tipped over onto two homes while installing power poles. We are unable to provide any further information on this incident," FPL said in a statement. OSHA officials said they are investigating the collapse. What to Know Officers responded to a call about shots possibly being fired between two vehicles near 38th Street and University Drive around 12:30 a.m. The driver of that car was taken to Broward Health North with gunshot wounds. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has taken over the investigation of the police involved shooting portion of the case. Police are investigating a shooting early Wednesday morning in Coral Springs involving one of their officers that landed one person in the hospital and another in custody. Officers responded to a call about shots possibly being fired between two vehicles near 38th Street and University Drive around 12:30 a.m. when an officer noticed one of the vehicles reportedly involved a white BMW heading eastbound on Sample Road. A second officer spotted the car and followed behind it, according to Sgt. Carla Kmiotek from the Coral Springs PD, with the BMW crashing between Riverside Drive and Northwest 85th Avenue and shots being fired. The driver of that car was taken to Broward Health North with gunshot wounds while the passenger was detained by Coral Springs officers. Police have not released their conditions or identities nor have they said whether the man was shot during the first incident or by the officer whop opened fire. Officials did say that the officer involved is okay and the initial scene may have been drug related, adding that a gun was found near the BMW. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has taken over the investigation of the police-involved shooting portion of the case while officials continue searching for the second car involved in the initial call, which investigators say was a silver Dodge Charger driven by a white male. Sample Road remained closed in both directions between Riverside Drive and NW 85th Avenue for nearly eight hours as the investigation continued, opening just before 9 a.m. A mass amount of culture can be found in Miami, whether its food, language or fashion. That is no different in this years Miami Fashion Week. This year, Colombia is the featured country and will have an exclusive runway show where inspiring native designers will showcase their exclusive collections. Carolina Estefan, Daniella Batlle and Lina Cantillo are three of the featured Colombian designers. Heres a little bit of what you need to know about the Colombian designers before the show: Parsons Paris School of Design graduate Carolina Estefan will make her first appearance at this years Miami Fashion Week. Her experience living in Europe and South America have inspired her to create her own unique aesthetic, using mixed fabrics and versatile pieces establishing contemporary elegance in her womenswear. Be sure to keep your eye out for Estefans brand this upcoming fashion week. Daniella Batlle is one of the newest emerging Colombian fashion designers. Her designs are inspired by a combination of textiles, traditional colors and styles from different regions of Colombia. The Barranquilla native was exposed to beauty and fashion by her mother and grandmother, who encouraged her to design and interpret fashion in her own way. Batlle has been able to participate in the most important fashion events in Colombia including Barranquilla Fashion Week and Bogota Fashion Week. Lina Cantillo is a Colombian designer who studied fashion in Milan, Italy. Throughout her 20 year career, Cantillo has focused on revolutionizing the silhouettes of the contemporary man by taking European influences and tailoring them to the Latin man. She says her greatest source of inspiration comes from life itself. She has opened stores in Bogota, Cartagena and Miami and has participated in international fashion shows in Milan and New York. Nicaraguan designer Shantall Lacayo said she will no longer participate in Miami Fashion Week following criticism over her relationship with the daughter of President Daniel Ortega, whose government is accused of suppressing protesters with deadly force. Lacayo and Ortega's daughter, Camila Ortega Murillo, are involved with the Nicaragua Designs organization, which is subsidized by the Nicaraguan Tourism Institute. Since April, more than 80 people have died in student-led protests against Ortega's regime. Amnesty International on Monday said Ortega's security forces have coordinated with paramilitary groups to violently suppress protesters. As Wednesday's event approached, many on social media lashed out at Miami Fashion Week for allowing Lacayo to participate due to her link to the Ortega Murillo family amid Nicaragua's crisis. As criticism mounted, Lacayo announced she would withdraw. "I have reflected about my participation in the Miami Fashion Week 2018 and the confusions that have been generated around me," Lacayo wrote in an Instagram post. "Due to the situation that my country is living in Nicaragua and before the wave of unfounded speculations, I decided, together with my team, to cancel my participation to which I had been invited to present my 2019 resort collection." A Miami Fashion Week spokesperson confirmed that Lacayo formally withdrew from the event. What to Know Edward Lee was booked Wednesday on several charges that include human trafficking and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. According to a police report, Lee kept communication with his girlfriend while he was behind bars and ordered her to force the teen. Lee allegedly told his girlfriend to keep all the money made by the teen after she reportedly performed sex acts on six different men. A South Florida man is behind bars after police allege he pimped out a teenage girl out of a Hialeah hotel in 2015 all while he was in a Miami-Dade jail on a separate charge. Edward Lee was booked Wednesday on several charges that include human trafficking and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The 42-year-old is being held on no bond. According to a police report, Lee kept communication with his girlfriend while he was behind bars and ordered her to force the 14-year-old victim into prostitution out of the hotel off Okeechobee Road in May of that year instructing her to keep the teen inside the hotel room since she was a runaway. The woman told Lee via telephone she thought the victim looked too young, to which Lee allegedly said to put more make up on the teen while also giving her marijuana as a way to increase her appetite because the victim looked very petite. Lee allegedly told his girlfriend to keep all the money made by the teen after she reportedly performed sex acts on six different men over the next day and bring it to him in jail, threatening both women with physical violence if they didnt obey him. Floridas senior senator visited Little Haiti Wednesday to raise awareness about hurricane season and climate change. Sen. Bill Nelson met with community leaders and environmental activists at the Little Haiti Cultural Center where the group spoke on a variety of topics including how hurricanes and other natural disasters hit low-income communities particularly hard. Several people pressed Nelson to come up with short-term solutions for vulnerable neighborhoods should a hurricane hit this season. He also noted how 75 percent of Floridians live along the coast. "If we dont reverse the heating up of the planet, the seas are going to rise another one to three feet over the course of the next half century," Nelson said. "That is going to have us along the coast all inundated with water." The Democratic senator swiped at Republican leadership, saying President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Rick Scott are wrong in not prioritizing climate change. Scott is running against Nelson for Floridas seat in the U.S. Senate. President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of being an "MS-13 lover" and dismissed a Democratic Senate candidate as a "tool" of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a line of attack likely to become familiar as he boosts Republican congressional candidates ahead of midterm elections. Trump's visit to Nashville, Tennessee, promoted the Senate candidacy of Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who was expected to face former Gov. Phil Bredesen in the race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Bob Corker. Besides headlining a private fundraiser for Blackburn, he used a public rally to urge supporters not to become "complacent" this fall while Democrats were "sticking together" to block his agenda. "We need Marsha in the Senate to continue the amazing progress and work that we've done over the last year and a half," Trump said during the rally. "To keep on winning, you have to vote Republican in November." The Tennessee campaign is among several races expected to determine control of the Senate, where Republicans are defending a narrow two-seat majority. The president criticized Bredesen for being backed by national Democrats. "He's a tool of Chuck Schumer and of course the MS-13 lover Nancy Pelosi," Trump said. Earlier this month, the House Democratic leader criticized Trump's rhetoric and policies on immigrants after he called members of the international gang "animals." Trump added that Bredesen had donated to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016, saying, "Phil Bredesen supported her and he supported her ideas." Trump plans a series of political rallies and events to brand Democrats as obstructionists. He said his supporters can't sit back and relax this fall after working to elect him in 2016. "That's the worst thing that can happen," he said. "In November, we will reverse a trend," Trump added, alluding to recent precedent in which the party holding the White House tends to lose congressional seats. He said of Democrats, "They're bad at everything but they're good at sticking together," and appealed for GOP unity come November. The president held a similar rally in Indiana earlier this month, appearing with Republican businessman Mike Braun and ripping Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly as a "swamp person" who refused to aid the GOP agenda. Trump will also raise money for GOP candidates in Texas on Thursday. Trump is using the campaign appearances to mobilize his core backers by highlighting his accomplishments in office, like improving economic indicators and moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and resurrecting some of his go-to lines from the 2016 campaign. "I don't want to cause a problem, but in the end, Mexico's gonna pay for the wall," Trump said of his signature campaign promise. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto quickly replied to Trump, writing Tuesday on his Twitter account in English, which Pena Nieto seldom does "NO. Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever. Sincerely, Mexico (all of us)." Earlier Tuesday, Trump raised the prospect of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe affecting the November elections and blamed Democrats for "Collusion." On Twitter, he said the "13 Angry Democrats" on Mueller's team "will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls." Mueller is a Republican. Trump has also used his Twitter page to boost California Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, hoping to strengthen the party's chances of securing a spot on the ballot in November. He has also set his sights on Montana, where Democratic Sen. Jon Tester is seeking re-election in a state Trump carried in a landslide. Both states have primaries June 5. Tennessee has a history of electing centrist senators and the race could be complicated by Corker's up-and-down relationship with Trump. Corker once said Trump had turned the White House into an "adult day care center" and the president tweeted that Corker "couldn't get elected dog catcher in Tennessee." Yet Corker was in the Oval Office on Saturday, receiving praise from the president for his help in securing the release of an American imprisoned in Venezuela. The breakthrough happened after Corker held a surprise meeting in Caracas with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Corker also greeted Trump at the Nashville airport Tuesday, joined by Blackburn and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., among other dignitaries. Corker has called Bredesen a friend and said he won't actively campaign against him. Trump offered an early endorsement of Blackburn in April, tweeting that she is "a wonderful woman who has always been there when we have needed her. Great on the Military, Border Security and Crime." Blackburn, who served on Trump's transition team, has embraced the president and called herself a "hardcore, card-carrying Tennessee conservative." Bredesen, who is attempting to become the first Democrat to win a Senate campaign in Tennessee since Al Gore in 1990, has aired TV ads in which he says that he's "not running against Donald Trump" and that he learned long ago to "separate the message from the messenger." Authorities say a third suspect has been arrested in connection with an alleged MS-13 gang killing of a New York teenager found hacked to death with a machete. Nassau County police say 18-year-old Josue Figueroa-Velasquez pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Wednesday on murder charges in the death of 15-year-old Angel Soler, of Long Island. Figueroa-Velasquez is represented by Legal Aid. Soler's remains were found last October in a 27-acre woodland in Nassau County. It was one of three sets of remains of teenagers found in about a 5-mile area over the course of nine days. Authorities say Soler was attacked by a group of people and hacked to death with a machete in July. Two other people also have been charged in Angel's killing. David Sosa-Guevara and Victor Lopez were arrested in November in connection with Soler's murder. Authorities say MS-13, or the Mara Salvatrucha, has thousands of members across the U.S. and has become a target of President Donald Trump. The gang is believed to be behind at least 25 killings on Long Island during the past two years. Police in Nassau and Suffolk counties have arrested hundreds of suspected MS-13 gang members over the past year. What to Know An employee at Great Neck North High School has been diagnosed with meningococcal disease, school officials say Anyone who's had prolonged contact with the unidentified employee has already been identified Casual contact in an office or classroom setting is not usually significant enough to cause concern, officials say An employee at a Long Island high school has been diagnosed with meningococcal disease, a contagious bloodstream infection that could potentially be lethal, authorities say. The employee at Great Neck North High School was diagnosed with the disease, which includes bacterial meningitis, although it's not believed the patient has meningitis. Nassau County Department of Health spokeswoman Mary Ellen Laurain tells Newsday the agency is investigating; officials have interviewed the patient, but her condition and role at the school have not been disclosed. Anyone who's had contact with the patient has already been notified, according to an email from schools superintendent Teresa Prendergast. Casual contact in an office or classroom setting is not usually significant enough to cause concern. Others who have had contact with the patient -- including kissing, sharing food, drinks, beverage containers or eating utensils, exchanging nasal or oral secretions, or any similar exposure like close face-to-face contact for a prolonged period of time -- between May 14 and 16 or May 23 and 25 may be at risk, school officials said. Individuals should seek treatment within 14 days of exposure; symptoms can include high fever, headache, vomiting, stiff neck and rash. Symptoms usually appear within five days of exposure but can manifest between two and 10 days. A man who is making good progress on Operation Fire and Fury. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images When Donald Trump first took office, his national security adviser was a man who believed that the Florida Democratic Party was working to impose Sharia law on the Sunshine State and that Americas southern border was lined with Arabic signs guiding radicalized Muslims into the U.S. Michael Flynns tenure in the Trump administration proved brief, but his penchant for paranoid conspiracy theories did not leave the National Security Council with him: By the time Flynn was ousted, he had already installed staffers who sought to advance the security interests of the United States by, among other things, drafting a memo claiming that Marxists, Islamists, the deep state, globalists, Bankers, and Establishment Republicans were all conspiring to destroy President Trump because he posed an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes. Once H.R. McMaster got settled in the West Wing, he evicted Flynns infowarriors from the building. The Establishment general proceeded to put together a more conventionally hawkish and less flagrantly Islamophobic national security team. But Trump soon grew tired of McMasters dry briefings and insufficient sycophancy, and abruptly replaced him with John Bolton. While less flamboyant in fear and loathing of Muslims than Flynn was, Bolton is one of many fringe neoconservatives whos taken up residence in the alt-right-wing foreign-policy think tanks erected by the Islamophobia industry: Since 2013, Bolton has served as chairman of the Gatestone Institute, an organization that claims Muslims have established hundreds of microstates governed by Islamic Sharia law (a.k.a. no-go zones) throughout France; that Muslim refugees have brought a rape epidemic and exotic diseases with them to Germany; and that the United Kingdom is on the cusp of becoming an Islamist colony. And now, Bolton is remaking the National Security Council in his image. On Tuesday, Trumps latest national security adviser named former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz as his chief of staff. Here are a few things worth knowing about the man who will now play a lead role in coordinating Americas national security policy: Fleitz served as Boltons chief of staff when the latter was undersecretary of State in George W. Bushs administration. In that role, Fleitz fought viciously with analysts at the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency because they refused to let Bolton publicly claim that Cuba was attempting to acquire biological weapons, on the basis of his idiosyncratic interpretation of intelligence reports. In declassified email exchanges, Fleitz derided the State Departments assessment that there was insufficient evidence to claim Cuba was seeking illegal weapons as wimpy. The State Departments top expert on biological weapons, Christian P. Westermann, meanwhile, wrote a colleague that Bolton and Fleitzs personal attacks, harassment and impugning of my integrity were now affecting my work, my health and dedication to public service. Fleitz is a senior vice-president at Frank Gaffneys Center for Security Policy, an Islamophobic think tank that claims the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the highest ranks of the American government and called for a new House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate the Islamist Fifth Columnists that were wielding influence over the Obama administration. The think tanks leadership has also claimed that Saddam Hussein was behind the Oklahoma City bombing; that Obama incorporated the Islamic crescent into the logo of a new missile-defense group; and that Chris Christies decision to appoint a Muslim-American to New Jerseys state judiciary might well qualify as an act of treason. In an interview with Breitbart News Daily last summer, Fleitz warned that there are communities where British Muslims are deliberately not assimilating, are being taught to hate British society, and this is incubating radicalism. Theres actually a parallel system of sharia law courts in the U.K. that operate We may have generations of radical Islamists in the U.K., until the British government wakes up and stops the situation. When the shows host, Joel Pollack, reminded Fleitz that ultra-Orthodox Jews in the U.S. (a group Republicans are supposed to approve of) refuse to assimilate and follow their own internal systems of government, the intelligence expert clarified that he was not concerned about Amish or Jewish communities, but I will tell you that there are enclaves of Muslim communities in Michigan and Minnesota that concern me. In 2011, Fleitz insisted that the consensus conclusion among Americas 16 intelligence agencies about the state of Irans nuclear weapons program was wrong and that Tehran was actually on the brink of testing a nuclear weapon, a claim that has since been exposed as utterly false, unless one accepts a very loose definition of brink (in 2015, before signing the nuclear agreement, Iran had only enriched its uranium to 20 percent purity; weapons-grade uranium requires roughly 90 percent). In March of this year, Fleitz published a book titled, The Coming North Korea Nuclear Nightmare: What Trump Must Do to Reverse Obamas Strategic Patience, an analysis that argued, among other things, that Trumps more aggressive policy initiatives toward Pyongyang appear to be succeeding. When Trump first brought Bolton into the West Wing, some sought hope in the thought that he would serve as the most belligerent voice on a team of rivals. But the hiring of Fleitz combined with the presidents recent moves to withdraw from the Iran deal and open a U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem raise the prospect that this might now be John Boltons foreign-policy team; James Mattis just works on it. The NYPD is reminding all of its officers to maintain strong situational awareness after a terror attack in Belgium targeted police officers there Tuesday. The internal NYPD message states there are no new specific threats to officers, but given the seriousness of the attack in the Belgian city of Liege, officers were told to work with colleagues to constantly monitor for possible safety threats. Two female police officers in Liege were repeatedly stabbed in the back by a terrorist who then took the officers guns and shot them. The suspect then went on to take a hostage at a nearby school before being killed during a shootout with responding police. Belgian police identified the suspect as Benjamin Herman, who was given a two-day furlough as part of a rehabilitation program. Herman, 36, is a drug suspect turned radical Islamist, authorities said. Witnesses said he screamed Allahu Akbar as he attacked the officers. Belgium authorities are calling the incident a terror attack. Officers Sorayay Belacemi and Lucile Garcia were killed. Four other officers were injured during the shootout. The NYPD has seen its own officers targeted in recent years. In October 2014, a hatchet-wielding Zale Thompson attacked a group of rookie NYPD officers as they posed for a photo on a Queens street. The incident was called a terror attack by police. In a separate December 2014 incident, two New York City police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were shot and killed as they sat in their patrol car. In "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," the visual gags can fly as fast and surreal as the dialogue. Case in point: The Uncle Sam-style poster of a glaring, pointing President Trump declaring, "You're a loser!" that popped up in last season's finale. The image, tacked to a police station wall, silently mocked Kimmy after she was unfairly rejected from her dream job as a school crossing guard. But Kimmy isn't only unbreakable she's endlessly resilient amid a swirl of craziness largely out of her control. The unlikely comedy about a young woman's comeback after 15 years of captivity in a cult leader's underground bunker returns to Netflix Wednesday for the first half of its final season. Sure, Kimmy's life got off to a rough start. But she's determined to finish strong. Like the blink-and-you-miss-it Trump poster, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt doesnt always draw as much attention as it deserves: The latest six episodes drop a day after Netflix's much-ballyhooed new season of "Arrested Development." Also like the Trump poster, the shows rapid-fire comedy belies its layers far more so than creators' Tina Fey and Robert Carlock's previous peripatetic hit, "30 Rock." Kimmys bleak past life underground in Indiana trails her, even as she tries to shake it off in her dumpy basement apartment in New York. As embodied by Ellie Kemper, Kimmy is no mere sunny simpleton shes a force of optimism risen from darkness. (As she announced in 2015s Season 1: I still believe that the world is good, that bunnies are nice and snakes are mean that one day Sandra Bullock will find someone that deserves her.) The show excels in molding character from caricature. That goes not only for Kimmy, but for her offbeat support system: flighty actor Titus (Tituss Burgess), who lives a Stephon-like existence; life-hardened landlord Lillian (Carol Kane), who sees conspiracy everywhere; and clueless former socialite Jaclyn (Jane Krakowski), who, like, all the main players, is constantly reinventing herself. You could say the same for Fey and Carlock, who took a bizarre comedic premise and infused it with evolving humor and heart. The new season bring a new job for Kimmy, who now runs the human resources department at a socially inept nerds tech start-up. We last saw her at work, gleefully swimming in a kiddie ball pit. Theres a low bar to joy for Kimmy Schmidt in an uncertain world where her mere presence is a winning proposition, at least for one more season.